A budget bill approved by the Senate on Saturday and headed to President Barack Obama’s desk contains no money for a multi-billion plutonium project at Los Alamos National Laboratory, prompting cheers from nuclear weapons activists.
But the yearlong congressional debate over the future of the Chemistry Metallurgy Research Replacement Facility isn’t over.
Defense authorization bills still pending in the House and Senate would continue development of the CMRR facility at LANL over the objections of the White House. The project has a price of about $6 billion, which is a key reason that the Obama administration and some in Congress want to kill it.
The Senate on Saturday passed a so-called “continuing resolution” to keep the federal government operational for the next six months, giving the deeply divided Congress more time to negotiate a longer-term federal budget deal.
The stopgap measure contained no line item for the CMRR facility – in fact, it didn’t mention the project at all.
The president’s 2013 budget zeroed out funding for CMRR. The continuing resolution, once Obama signs it, will keep the government running until March. Final decisions about CMRR spending in 2013 will be made when Congress enacts full-year spending and defense authorizing legislation...
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