Though two of the nation’s largest nuclear labs are no doubt sad to see their patron Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) depart Congress, the Senator has left behind some legislative sugar to help the medicine go down. The report for the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations bill released June 15 shows that despite the committee’s elimination of funding for the Reliable Replacement Warhead —which would have been developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico—every other LANL project either met the budget request or picked up some extra federal money. One of these is a facility that would manufacture plutonium pits for warheads, which received an additional $25 million above the $100 million request from the administration.  

As a further bonus, Domenici added two earmarks to the bill’s nuclear weapons account: One would provide $500,000 for restoring Manhattan Project sites at LANL for “historic preservation,” and the other directs $1 million to the Arrowhead Center, a four-year-old program at New Mexico State University established “to promote prosperity in New Mexico through economic development” (of the nuclear complex, we can only assume). Both projects have previously received earmarks. 

Domenici sponsored or co-sponsored several other earmarks outside the weapons account: Two earmarks totaling $5 million for solar programs at Sandia National Labs, $7 million for “advanced materials testing” at Los Alamos and $4 million for records archiving at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant outside Carlsbad, New Mexico (all with Jeff Bingaman, D-NM); $5 million for “climate change modeling capacity” at Los Alamos; and $5 million for the Sandia Nanotechnology Engineering Center.

But has LANL earned these treats? Not long after the bill report hit the web, the Government Accountability Office released its own report excoriating LANL for failing to beef up its security. LANL has a troubling history of allowing its high-security nuclear weapons research to leak into the outside world via missing laptops, contractor malfeasance and the like. Congress gives the lab millions each year for security–$46 million in the 2009 Senate bill—but House Energy and Commerce Committee Ranking Member Joe Barton (R-TX) said the report was proof that LANL “was run more like a corner hamburger stand than the crown jewel of the nation’s nuclear weapons program.” 

LANL directors will have to answer these and other concerns at Thursday’s hearing before the House Armed Services Committee on the modernization of America’s nuclear weapons complex.