The House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee will formally weigh in on the Obama Administration’s FY2013 request for the National Nuclear Security Administration today, matching the Administration’s $7.58 billion request for the agency’s weapons program but cutting $176 million from the request for nonproliferation work, according to a draft of the bill released yesterday. The draft bill only includes top line numbers, but the $2.28 billion the panel is providing for nonproliferation work is believed to reflect cuts to the agency’s Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility and to its request for research and development funding to support USEC’s American Centrifuge Project. The Administration asked Congress for $2.46 billion. The subcommittee earlier this year raised questions about both projects, with ranking member Peter Visclosky (D-Ind.) suggesting that neither program “contributes to securing vulnerable materials.” Subcommittee chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.) also questioned ballooning costs to operate the MOX facility, which have risen according to NNSA’s most recent estimate to $498.7 million a year, up from $184.4 million two years ago.
The decision to provide full funding for the NNSA’s weapons program—but not add more funding, as some Republicans have called for—also appears to reflect the subcommittee’s support for the Administration’s decision to defer work on the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement-Nuclear Facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory for five years and Frelinghuysen’s stance that the nation’s “strategic security could be maintained and even strengthened with constrained resources.”
Partner Content
Jobs