$927 Million Sought for Nuclear Weapons Plants

The Energy Department asked Congress Monday for $927 million in the next fiscal year for a major initiative to refurbish its aging and obsolescent nuclear weapons facilities and to clean up waste sites.

Nearly one-third of this amount, or $304 million, would be earmarked for design and construction of the first reactors the government has built since the 1950s to produce tritium, a perishable form of hydrogen gas used in most nuclear weapons.

The Energy Department wants to build two tritium reactors over the next 10 years, one at the troubled Savannah River weapons plant in South Carolina and the second at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, at a cost of nearly $7 billion.

$1.9 Billion Requested

Overall, the department is asking Congress--in a request that is not likely to be cut and could even be raised by the incoming Bush Administration--for $1.9 billion for environmental, safety and health operations at dozens of laboratories and defense production facilities. By contrast, Congress authorized $1.75 billion in the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30.

The Energy Department’s total budget request is $15.1 billion, of which $9 billion is for defense programs--the design, production and testing of nuclear weapons, development of nuclear submarine reactors and space defense research.

Three Years of Study

Deputy Energy Secretary Joseph Salgado said that the agency’s request for new funds to modernize and clean up weapons plants--and to begin permanently disposing of radioactive and industrial defense wastes--culminated more than three years of study and planning that preceded the current public controversy over their deteriorating condition.

Even before the Soviet nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in 1986, he said, the Energy Department had asked for the advice of the National Academy of Sciences and other independent groups.

The $1.9 billion sought for environmental, health and safety activities within the Energy Department’s defense programs represents an increase of 247% since 1986, Salgado noted. About $315 million is to be set aside for cleaning low-level radioactive wastes and toxic industrial chemicals, up from $54 million since 1986.

In a letter to the White House budget office last month, Energy Secretary John S. Herrington suggested that $900 million for defense plant improvements and cleanup would not be enough to maintain an acceptable level of risk. But in a briefing for reporters Monday, Salgado said that the department is “satisfied” with the $927-million increase.

He emphasized that this effort would mark only the early stages of an environmental cleanup and waste-disposal program that may extend over “20, 30, 40, 50 years.”

Report Still Classified

In a still-classified report sent to the White House last month, the Energy Department estimated that weapons plant modernization and low-level waste disposal would cost $80 billion through the year 2010. Part of the $927 million requested for 1990 is to be spent on reviving the three aging production reactors at Savannah River. The reactors have been shut down for months for safety improvements, threatening an eventual shortage of tritium, which must be replenished periodically in nuclear weapons.