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Thursday, June 26, 2008

Panel Ok's Cuts at LANL

By Michael Coleman And John Fleck
Journal Staff Writer
      
    WASHINGTON — House appropriators voted Wednesday to shut down a billion-dollar plutonium manufacturing program at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
    Rep. Tom Udall voted against the bill, and Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., fiercely criticized the House measure.
    Udall, a New Mexico Democrat who represents the lab and sits on the House Appropriations Committee, issued a lengthy statement explaining his vote, but he refused to take questions from a Journal reporter at the hearing.
    The lab money is included in a $33.3 billion spending bill covering energy, nuclear weapons and water projects.
    The Appropriations Committee agreed that the W88 nuclear warhead, a weapon at the heart of LANL’s plutonium manufacturing program, is an “obsolete” Cold War relic and should be canceled. The warhead is carried on U.S. submarines.
    “Although this legislation contains many good provisions, it does not provide a path to the future for our national laboratories, and I could not support it,” Udall’s statement said. “This bill not only cuts critical programs that are essential to the strength of our labs and the security of our nation, it rescinds funding that LANL and Sandia (National Laboratories) have already been promised and have budgeted for the current fiscal year.”
    Udall’s statement did not directly address W88 pit production at Los Alamos. Sam Simon, Udall’s spokesman in Washington, said: “I don’t have a statement for you on that.”
    The congressman’s vote was under scrutiny Wednesday from anti-nuclear and pro-laboratory advocates because he supported LANL funding cuts last year, saying the lab needed to move away from nuclear weapons and into new scientific endeavors, especially alternative energy, before he tried to restore some of the money.
    Udall is running for the U.S. Senate and faces Rep. Steve Pearce, R-N.M., in the November election for the seat Domenici will vacate in January. Domenici, a Republican and longtime Senate appropriator, has long been viewed as the chief congressional protector of New Mexico’s two national laboratories and their approximately 10,000 employees.
    According to Domenici’s office, the House spending bill could cut $300 million from the Los Alamos National Laboratory budget, costing 2,000 or more jobs .
    The bill would slash $60 million from Sandia National Laboratories’ $953 million nuclear weapons budget, according to Domenici. Los Alamos received $1.4 billion for nuclear weapons work this year.
    “I vehemently disagree with the tack the House has again taken to significantly cut the weapons programs at the national labs, particularly Los Alamos,” Domenici said in a statement late Wednesday. “I believe the cuts outlined in this bill are shortsighted and problematic to our national security and nonproliferation goals.”
    Rep. Pete Visclosky, an Indiana Democrat who heads the House subcommittee that holds the labs’ purse strings, did not comment directly Wednesday on funding for New Mexico’s labs. But he said the Department of Energy, which has jurisdiction over the labs, has “very abysmal project management.”
    “It is the committee’s No. 1 organizational concern at the department,” Visclosky said.
    Democrats, who control the House and Senate, have signaled they want to spend less on developing nuclear weapons and more on cleaning up nuclear waste and preventing the spread of existing weapons around the globe.
    Nuclear weapons opponents cheered the House committee’s decision and criticized Udall for voting against it.
    “If Mr. Udall really wants LANL to change, he has to vote for it when he has the chance, not just express a vague hope that such-and-such will happen in the future,” said Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group. “Udall’s lack of support for today’s bill signals a disconnect between his actions in Congress and the impression he has left with many constituents.”
    Domenici has said he will try to restore money.
    “This bill is worse than the status quo,” Domenici said Wednesday.
    “Pit production is necessary, and I do not know of a single acceptable argument for the United States abandoning its production capacity.
    “No other nation in the world with nuclear capabilities is standing still, which is exactly what this bill would accomplish for us.”
    The W88, according to the committee’s report, is a Cold War warhead designed to have the maximum explosive power in the smallest possible package.
    Designed in the 1980s at Los Alamos, the W88 is believed to have about 30 times the destructive power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in World War II.
    Los Alamos took on the job in the late 1990s to make replacements for W88 pits that are routinely removed from the nuclear arsenal to be tested for defects. After years of preparation, the work culminated with the production of the first stockpile-quality pits last year.
    Critics question why more W88s are needed.
    The spending proposal being considered today also cuts funding for the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Building Replacement (CMRR), a billion-dollar lab for analysis of plutonium samples.
    The lab is a centerpiece of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s future plans to expand plutonium manufacturing at Los Alamos.
    Simon, Udall’s spokesman, said the congressman does not support nixing the CMRR initiative.
    “The lab cannot be left with inadequate facilities,” Simon said in an e-mail. “There are serious cost overruns and concerns about the CMRR project, but simply zeroing out its funding at the lab is not a strategy.”