Will the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement-Nuclear Facility be deferred longer than five years, or not built at all? That’s the concern of the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee, who suggested yesterday that the Administration’s modernization plan could be in jeopardy further into the future due to decisions made for Fiscal Year 2013. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) has been one of the most outspoken critics of the Administration’s decision to scale back its modernization plan in FY2013. “The problem is that when you keep moving things to the right all of them don’t get completed,” Sessions said yesterday during a subcommittee hearing on the Administration’s nuclear policies. “If you don’t get started and you don’t do them and Congress comes along and some other problem or something, and the next thing you know a program that is designed to be completed is never completed.”
Facing decreasing budgets, the Administration deferred the CMRR-NF project slated for Los Alamos National Laboratory for up to five years, choosing to meet its plutonium needs through several other options while potentially expanding the scope of the project to include a replacement for the lab’s Plutonium Facility is considered. But Administration officials have adamantly defended the decision, noting that the CMRR-NF project was not cancelled, and only deferred.
Jobs