Political Quotes

“I rise to enter in a colloquy with the distinguished gentleman from New Jersey, the chairman of the Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee, Mr. Frelinghuysen. Virginia is proud to be home of one of the Department's flagship national labs in nuclear physics, the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, or JLab, located in Newport News, and its primary scientific facility there known as the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility. In fact, the nuclear physics community so values the work at the JLab that they recommended a major upgrade to its accelerator, what's referred to as the 12 GeV project, as its number one priority in their 2007 long-range plan for nuclear physics. That upgrade has received over 70 percent of its construction funding through the tireless efforts of the subcommittee, and work is going to begin there on its commissioning in fiscal year 2014, that is, provided that sufficient funding is included in this appropriations measure. I'm really grateful that the construction funding that is provided in the bill is at the level requested by the administration. However, I am concerned that the proposed reductions for nuclear physics below the budget request could force unilateral cuts in medium energy nuclear physics operations, and that these reductions could delay the start of the commissioning of the 12 GeV project, which is scheduled to start in the first quarter of fiscal year 2014.…”