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President’s Budget Request Includes Increases for U.S. WMD Defenses, Homeland Security
U.S. President George W. Bush’s $2.77 trillion budget request for fiscal 2007 released yesterday contains an 8-percent increase for homeland security and a 6.9-percent increase in Defense Department spending, the Baltimore Sun reported (see GSN, Feb. 6). Within the Defense Department’s budget is $9.3 billion to develop defenses to nuclear, chemical and biological weapons (Julie Hirschfeld Davis, Baltimore Sun, Feb. 7). Also in the budget request is $250 million for a new initiative to reprocess spent nuclear fuel and an increase in spending on the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump in Nevada, the Associted Press reported. Efforts to reprocess nuclear fuel to alleviate proliferation fears do not indicate waning commitment to the nuclear waste site, according to Energy Department officials. “It is our great desire, and it is in the nation's interest, and it is in the interest of facilitating a nuclear renaissance, which we greatly need, that we get Yucca Mountain licensed and we get it open,” said Deputy Energy Secretary Clay Sell. Sell added that the White House would support legislation to hurry construction of Yucca, which has been plagued by lack of funding, questions about manipulated data and the judicial rejection of federal radiation standards. The budget submitted by the president yesterday asks for $544 million for Yucca, $100 million more than the 2006 funding approved by Congress but less than the $650 million the White House asked for last year. The 2005 and 2004 budgets for the site were $577 million. The $250 million set aside for nuclear reprocessing was the Bush administration’s initial step in trying to deal with nuclear fuel from U.S. commercial power plants. The U.S. plan is to conduct research into “more proliferation resistant” forms of reprocessing that would produce a mixture of plutonium and neptunium instead of only plutonium. The Bush plan is called the Global Nuclear Energy Project and includes strategies to have U.S. companies sell fuel and reactors to developing countries on the condition that the fuel is returned to the United States to be reprocessed. Some lawmakers have expressed concerns over the reprocessing plan. Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said the Bush proposal would “include plans to import nuclear waste from other countries and reprocess it here, which would involve transporting deadly waste across thousands of miles at a time when we have heightened concerns about nuclear proliferation.” “The nuclear industry is desperately peddling reprocessing as a solution for dealing with radioactive waste, but at the end of the day, all roads still lead back to Yucca Mountain,” added Representative Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.) Representative Jim Gibbons (R-Nev.) said that while the proposal is “a step in the right direction, I was disappointed that the misguided plan of geologic burial of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain was still included as necessary to address our nuclear waste problem” (Erica Werner, Associated Press, Feb. 6). The proposed fiscal 2007 budget also includes $216 million for efforts leading to weapons disposal at the Pueblo Chemical Depot in Colorado and the Blue Grass Army Depot in Kentucky, the Associated Press reported. The money is allocated to the Army’s Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternative program, according to AP. Approximately $130 million is included for work at construction at Pueblo, along with research, development and testing on ways to best process weapons. “We have worked long and hard to persuade them of the importance of this project,” said Sen. Wayne Allard (R-Colo.). “The president's commitment of $128.8 million for Pueblo is certainly a significant pledge,” added Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.) (Jennifer Talhelm, Associated Press, Feb. 7).
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