Harold Volkmer: “this amendment would strike $8 million from the legislation, from the appropriation, in order to remove the funds for…”

“this amendment would strike $8 million from the legislation, from the appropriation, in order to remove the funds for the conceptual design and for the spallation source conceptual design at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory proposed there for Oak Ridge. After the cancellation of the advanced neutron source, which we canceled out, the Department proposed ANS-lite, the spallation source, to provide work at Oak Ridge for the scientists whom DOE had promised the ANS. It appears to me, when we look at this program, even though there may be some worthwhile end results if the project is carried out, at this time when we have the budgetary restraints that we have, I think we need to review these types of projects before they actually get started and say, now, is this really where we want to put our money and how much is it going to eventually cost and where are we going to get the money from to fully fund it, all the way down the road to carry out this project? I am sure that nobody wants to sit here and start a project and then 2 years from now or 3 years from now when you have gone down that road and spent so much money, find out, hey, it is going to cost too much. That is exactly what ANS is all about, the advanced neutron source. That is what we did. Should we do it again? I say no. I would say that we should not do it again.”