DOE Budget Documents Reveals Massive, Unrealistic Funding Request for Plutonium Bomb Plant at SRS
Columbia, South Carolina – New budget-request documents released by the U.S. Department of Energy over the weekend confirm efforts by the U.S. Department of Energy to obtain a massive and unrealistic funding increase for the proposed but unjustified Plutonium Bomb Plant (PBP) at the Savannah River Site.
In the South Carolina table (on page 66/86 of the State Tables), the request for “Savannah River Plutonium Modernization” is $441.9 million and for the Plutonium Bomb Plant , which DOE calls the “Plutonium Processing Facility” in an effort to obscure its nuclear weapons role, the request is $241.9 million. A line-item for “Production Modernization” is $533.7 million and it’s unclear for what activities that large amount of funding is sought.
As part of a “Stockpile Management” account at Los Alamo National Laboratory, the request for “Savannah River Plutonium Modernization” is $685.7 and for “Los Alamos Plutonium Modernization” an amount of $226 million is shown. (See page 48/86, for New Mexico, in “State Tables Preliminary,” linked here and below.) It thus appears that some of the money designated for SRS pit projects would be spent at Los Alamos.
“Given the various project funding accounts at SRS and Los Alamos and DOE’s slight of hand, it’s hard to determine the actual funding for activities associated with planning for the Plutonium Bomb Plant at SRS, but it appears that the funding request has taken a huge and unjustified jump,” said Tom Clements, director of the public interest group Savannah River Site Watch. “It’s clear that DOE is rushing to try and lock in large amounts of funding for the Plutonium Bomb Plant despite lack of need for it and no demonstrated ability to convert the ill-constructed MOX building into a nuclear bomb factory, “ added Clements. “This funding request to fast-track the Plutonium Bomb Plant, if allowed by Congress to move forward, would set the costly and complicated project on a path to failure given DOE’s repeated inability to pull off such complicated, poorly planned projects,” added Clements.