Michael Coleman reports that U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said Tuesday that the Obama administration will reopen the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad by the end of 2016 and move ahead with plans to transfer diluted plutonium to the nuclear waste site within the next decade.
Moniz, discussing the DOE 2017 budget proposal at the agency headquarters in Washington, said the DOE will scrap an unfinished plutonium recycling project called the MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and instead work toward diluting and shipping the plutonium to WIPP as soon as 2023. Meanwhile, the Obama fiscal year 2017 budget request for Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories in New Mexico remained fairly static from his 2016 request. Although the president proposes a budget to fund the federal government, Congress makes final determinations on spending. Obama has proposed $1.9 billion for Sandia National Laboratories in 2017, up from $1.8 billion he asked Congress to spend on the lab in the current year. The 2017 Sandia request includes about $1.5 billion for weapons activities, which is consistent with current-year spending.
Obama is asking Congress to spend $2.1 billion on Los Alamos in 2017, compared with the $1.9 billion he requested last year. The President 2017 request includes $1.5 billion for weapons work at LANL, almost $90 million more than his 2016 request for the lab. Moniz suggested that big budgets for weapons maintenance are a necessity.
The nuclear security complex has been around for an awfully long time, and consequently we have major infrastructure challenges as we continue with the (nuclear) deterrent without testing, Moniz said. Previous proposals for new underground labs costing $2 billion to produce nuclear weapons triggers at Los Alamos are not addressed in the budget plan. The budget request includes $189 million to continue cleanup of radioactive and hazardous materials at LANL.
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