Senators seek to stall Test Site plans

Suzanne Struglinski

Tuesday, Sept. 16, 2003 | 9:37 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- A pending Senate amendment aims to change the administration's plan for nuclear weapons tests and trigger construction at the Nevada Test Site.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Calif., and Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., proposed an amendment Monday to the energy spending bill that would stop funds for several nuclear weapons projects that they feel would start the country toward construction of new nuclear weapons.

The amendment, if approved, would prohibit any spending that would accelerate nuclear test readiness at the Nevada Test Site to anything less than two years.

Nuclear bomb tests in the United States have been banned since 1992, after the last full-scale underground test at the Nevada Test Site on Sept. 23, 1992. The Bush administration though has sought to increase the test readiness time frame to 18 months from the time of notification.

"By seeking to speed up the time to test requirement for the Nevada Test Site, the administration is taking us down a road that may well lead to the resumption of underground nuclear testing, overturning a 10-year moratorium," Feinstein said on the floor Monday.

The amendment also would put a one-year hold on site selection for the Energy Department's Modern Pit Facility, a new construction site for plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons. The Test Site, about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is one of five possible sites for the $4 billion facility. Site selection is set to take place in March 2004 with production stating in 2018.

"By seeking to move forward with the modern pit facility, the administration appears to be seeking to develop a facility that will, in one year, allow the United States to produce a number of plutonium pits that exceeds the entire current arsenal of China."

The House energy spending bill, approved in July, cut $11 million from the department's $23 million request for the pit plant project.

Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., who heads the Senate Committee that wrote the energy spending bill, objected to the amendment saying the bill is not seeking to build new nuclear weapons, but to ensure the exisiting stockpile is usable.

"We should make Nevada modern so if we need it, we use it, not three years after we decide we need a test because we have some idea there is something amiss in some of our weapons which are 35, 40, and 45 years old," Domenici said. "We need to manufacture pits for the weapons we have, not the weapons someone is dreaming we will build. There is nothing in this law that says we will build one additional nuclear weapon."

Feinstein's amendment also eliminates $15 million for study of the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator and $6 million for study for low-yield nuclear weapons.