House OKs funds to revamp state lab

BOISE – The U.S. House passed a spending bill Tuesday that sets aside money to upgrade buildings at the Idaho National Laboratory for storing bomb-grade uranium stockpiles from federal weapons labs in other states.

The $29.7 billion appropriations bill for federal energy and water programs includes money for several existing and new programs at the eastern Idaho nuclear research compound. The bill passed the House 416-13. The legislation must still be considered by the Senate.

The House bill boosts the budget for the Energy Department’s Office of Security and Performance Enhancement to $356.5 million, more than the $300 million recommended by Bush. An unspecified portion of that increase will be used to design renovations to two concrete bunkers at INL to house surplus plutonium and highly enriched uranium no longer needed for nuclear bomb production.

Hundreds of tons of the so-called “special nuclear materials” are stored at installations around the country. The bill orders the Energy Department to come up with a plan by Sept. 30 to consolidate much of the weapons material in Idaho.

The Bush administration is seeking to cut costs and the threat of terrorist attack by moving the materials from multiple sites near population centers to more remote locations.

Idaho Republican Rep. Mike Simpson is a member of the House appropriations panel that approved the language in the spending bill. He said that because the enriched uranium is not waste and similar materials are already stored at INL, he’s willing to consider using the Idaho lab as a storage site.

“It’s important to keep in mind that Idaho has the experts, the facilities and the security to deal with these materials in a safe and responsible manner,” Simpson said Tuesday. “If the Idaho National Laboratory can play a significant role in helping to secure our nation against nuclear terrorism and save taxpayers billions of dollars in the process, we have a responsibility to sit down with DOE and talk about it.”

Opponents say that although the Idaho lab has been billed as the proving ground for new generations of clean nuclear power, consolidating the material there would put INL into a Cold War-era role of atomic weapons support.

“Just because INL has better security than Los Alamos (National Laboratory in New Mexico) – which isn’t hard – it seems all of the real dangerous programs are turning toward us,” said Jeremy Maxand of the Boise-based Snake River Alliance. “It’s all happening through the appropriations process and there’s no public debate, no hearings, no environmental impact statements.”

Maxand also points to $8.5 million in the bill for INL to plan and build facilities to take over Los Alamos National Laboratory’s production of plutonium-238, which is used in “space batteries” to power orbiting satellites.