[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 146 (Monday, September 8, 2025)]
[Senate]
[Page S6413]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
SA 3807. Mr. MARKEY submitted an amendment intended to be proposed by
him to the bill S. 2296, to authorize appropriations for fiscal year
2026 for military activities of the Department of Defense, for military
construction, and for defense activities of the Department of Energy,
to prescribe military personnel strengths for such fiscal year, and for
other purposes; which was ordered to lie on the table; as follows:
At the end of subtitle B of title XXXI, add the following:
SEC. 3119. LIMITATION ON TRANSFER OF WEAPONS-GRADE PLUTONIUM
TO PRIVATE INDUSTRY.
(a) Limitation.--None of the funds authorized to be
appropriated by this Act or otherwise made available for
fiscal year 2026 for the Departments of Defense or the
Department of Energy may be used for the transfer of
plutonium to private industry.
(b) Report.--The surplus plutonium dilute and dispose
program may not be terminated, until the Secretary of Defense
and the Secretary of Energy jointly submit to the
congressional defense committees a report that includes the
following:
(1) An explanation of how the Trump administration plans to
discourage countries of proliferation concern from extracting
weapons-usable plutonium from civilian fuel if the United
States engages in such extraction.
(2) A justification as to why the Federal Government would
facilitate the development and export of proliferation-prone
reprocessing technologies by private companies, given the
proliferation risks of plutonium.
(3) A justification as to why the Federal Government would
promote a technology that would make nuclear energy of the
United States less economically competitive, given that
plutonium processing is very costly, due to safety and
security concerns, both to extract from nuclear waste and to
fabricate into fuel, which increases the cost of reactor fuel
by 10 times or more.
(4) A full accounting of any weapons plutonium parts that
will be disassembled or transferred, including how much of
the plutonium to be transferred to private industry will come
from intact pits, the types of pits to be used, and what the
impact of such transfer would be on plans to produce new pits
at Los Alamos National Laboratory or to reuse pits in the
future.
(c) Form.--The report required by subsection (b) shall be
submitted in unclassified form but may include a classified
annex.
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