Rep. Steve Pearce (R-N.M.) earlier this week urged House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers to consider the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management reprogramming request, as well as a planned upcoming request to move $21 million in funding from the National Nuclear Security Administration to the Office of Environmental Management for cleanup of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Pearce noted that more funds are needed in EM to complete shipments of legacy transuranic waste from Los Alamos to the Waste isolation Pilot plant by 2014 in order to meet an agreement with the state of New Mexico. The House committee remains the last hurdle to approval of the EM request, which has cleared three other committees in the House and Senate in the last week. When combined with the planned $21 million reprogramming of NNSA funds that has yet to be submitted, the roughly $40 million total “ensures LANL has the funds needed to complete the project as scheduled,” Pearce said in the May 13 letter.
He requested timely consideration of the reprogramming. “I urge the committee to do everything in its power to assist DOE in providing this cleanup effort with the funds it needs,” Pearce said. “The TRU cleanup at LANL not only will make New Mexico a safer place for the people who live there, but it will help ensure for greater national security and public health nationwide.”