In what could be a sign of things to come, Capitol Hill lawmakers began to question the Obama Administration’s decision to defer construction of the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement-Nuclear Facility that had been planned for Los Alamos National Laboratory, with Sen. Jeff Bingaman quizzing Energy Secretary Steven Chu about the move at a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing yesterday. “For many years now we’ve been told that the replacement nuclear facility was necessary. Now we are told there could be alternatives that the Department wants to pursue,” Bingaman said, asking Chu for a sense of what the alternatives might be.
Chu stressed that the National Nuclear Security Administration’s plutonium strategy had not been finalized. During budget briefings earlier this week, NNSA officials said the agency would use a mix of options to replace the functions of CMRR-NF, potentially using existing facilities at Los Alamos, the Nevada National Security Site and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “We’re looking at some of the things that the CMRR [Nuclear Facility] building would have done,” Chu said. “We are looking to offload some of that to other [sites], for example, to what used to be called the Nevada Test Grounds; they have a new name for that. … We are looking very closely at how we can best fulfill our obligations and needs for our nuclear security.”
Notably, a Government Accountability Office official suggested that the Administration’s reversal on CMRR-NF—and the sudden revelation that there are alternatives to the facility—could harm its credibility and the faith in how it generates requirements for the weapons program. Speaking at the Fourth Annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit, Allison Bawden, an Assistant Director at GAO, noted that the Administration’s budget justification did not indicate that it was accepting the additional risk of not building CMRR-NF only because of budget woes. “What it says is, ‘We have capability within the complex,’ and that’s a very different discussion than what’s been going on previously so yeah, it does raise concerns,” Bawden said.
