Hearing of the Strategic Forces Subcom of the House Armed Services Comm on Dept of Energy's Fiscal Year 2005 Budget Request for Atomic Energy Defense

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Federal News Service

HEADLINE: HEARING OF THE STRATEGIC FORCES SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE HOUSE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE
SUBJECT: THE DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY'S FISCAL YEAR 2005 BUDGET REQUEST FOR ATOMIC ENERGY DEFENSE ACTIVITIES

CHAIRED BY: REPRESENTATIVE TERRY EVERETT (R-AL) WITNESSES: AMBASSADOR LINTON BROOKS, ADMINISTRATOR, NATIONAL NUCLEAR SECURITY ADMINISTRATION, DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY; JESSE H. ROBERSON, ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT, DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY

LOCATION: 2116 RAYBURN HOUSE OFFICE BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C.

BODY:

REP. TERRY EVERETT (R-AL): The hearing will come to order. The Strategic Forces Subcommittee meets today to receive testimony on the Department of Energy's Fiscal Year 2005 budget request on Atomic Energy and Defense Activities. I want to apologize in advance for these somewhat crowded quarters today. We had a committee schedule change that required to shift the location. I also apologize for my voice. I seem to have a little sort of bronchitis or something.

Anyway, we welcome Ambassador Linton Brooks, administrator of Nuclear Security Administration, and the Honorable Jessie H. Roberson, assistant secretary for Environmental Management of Department of Energy. Ambassador Brooks will cover the NNSA budget request for Fiscal Year 2005. The NNSA request is for just over $9 billion and consists of funding of weapons activities, Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation, naval reactors and the Office of the Administrator. Assistant Secretary Roberson will also provide testimony on the Department of Energy request for Defense Environmental Management. She will tell us about the progress the department's making in accelerating the schedule reducing the cost of clean up at numerous sites around the country. The Environmental Management budget request is for just over $7 billion.

We have a lot of ground to cover today. We will have votes, unfortunately, about 11:00 that will consist of one 15 minute vote and two 5 minute votes which means we will have to all come back. And but I do want to allow each of our members as great an opportunity as possible to ask questions, so I'll be brief. Likewise, I would ask our witnesses to please be brief with their prepared remarks. The entirety of your written testimony will be entered into the record.

Last week the subcommittee met in closed session to discuss issues associated with nuclear weapons including advanced concepts, RNEP, the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator. This session, in contrast, is open under rule nine of the committee. I would ask the members for their cooperation in keeping the line of questions unclassified. Questions of a classified nature should be submitted as written questions for the record following the appropriate procedures.

Ambassador Brooks, I know you have challenges restoring capabilities within a Defense nuclear complex that was largely built over 50 years ago, continuing to support certification of the nuclear stockpile without testing, and implementing additional security measures to counter the new Design Basic Threat. While we understand the Department of Defense is in the final stages of completing its Strategic Capabilities Assessment to review the future size of the nuclear stockpile, we can expect nuclear weapons to remain a cornerstone of our national security posture for the foreseeable future.

Our science-based approach to stewardship is critical to the difficult technical challenge of verifying the safety and effectiveness of our nuclear arsenal in the absence of testing. As the number and variety of weapons in the stockpile come down, it is more important than ever to maintain confidence in those weapons remaining through our science and engineering campaigns. I look forward to your assessment of where we are with our stockpile today, and where we are headed in the future.

Assistant Secretary Roberson has the wonderful, great task of cleaning up a Cold War legacy of 114 contaminated sites resulting from more than half a century of R&D, production, and testing of nuclear weapons. The magnitude of the problem is apparent when one considers that over 40 percent of the funds requested for atomic energy defense activities, $7.7 billion, supports this undertaking. The department's Environmental Management team has undertaken a commendable but challenging task to both accelerate site cleanups and reduce costs.

As a result, two years ago-as recent as two years ago, the lifecycle cost estimate for cleanup of these legacy sites stood at $220 billion, with work at some of our most contaminated sites not reaching completion until 2070. In Fiscal Year 2003 the department embarked on an aggressive reform effort to refocus emphasis from risk management to risk reduction. The current plan calls for completion of all remediation-let me get a drink of water here, excuse me-efforts by 2035, at a cost savings of over $50 billion. I look forward to hearing your progress on this complex.

Let me now recognize my good friend and colleague Mr. Reyes, the ranking member of the subcommittee.

Mr. Reyes.

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REP. EVERETT: Ms. Tauscher.

REP. ELLEN O. TAUSCHER (D-CA): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Let me take a second to compliment you, Mr. Chairman. These meetings always start on time and I appreciate you saving the best for last in your questioning and giving us extra time because these are very weighty issues and it takes a few minutes to get into them.

Assistant Secretary Roberson, it's always good to see you.

MS. ROBERSON: Thank you. Same, it's very nice to see you too.

REP. TAUSCHER: Yeah, and thank you for your continued hard work on those EM issues. Always tough times, it's always good to know that perhaps we might get some money, but you spend it wisely and you have a very, very good record and I appreciate your work at Livermore.

Ambassador, it's always good to see you. I agree with my very good colleague Congressman Thornberry. This is some of the best testimony that I've seen, period, but certainly the best from you. And I really appreciate your clarification on your memo issued a couple of days after the Spratt-Furse ban was (eliminated ?).

And I have a number of issues that I want to talk about. I want to recognize the ever able Dr. Beckner sitting behind you, who's always coming before us. I have a number of constituents in the audience from one of the best labs in the world, the Livermore Lab, but I especially see George Miller. In my office I have a colleague named George Miller who shares accounting with me and we have to-when we say George Miller everybody looks at me and I always have to say, "The scientist, not the congressman." That's not to dispute the abilities of my colleague George Miller.

But certainly the NIF is on my mind. I want to talk briefly about-and get some information from you. I know that we have had slippage in the funding for the NIF and specifically on the issue of cryogenics and diagnostics. And I'm pleased to see that we're up four beams and that we are the largest laser in the world. But getting to 196 is going to take a little longer than I expected and I'm concerned that we are going to not achieve ignition as quickly as we had hoped, and I just want to get a sense from you, Doctor-Ambassador Brooks, where we are on that and what that implies for the Stockpile Stewardship Program, our ability to maintain the credibility of the stockpile, all of the experiments that we know we want to do, and if there are any risks at all that the NIF will not be able to quickly fulfill its mission?

MR. BROOKS: Thank you, ma'am. We believe that we now have a technically acceptable plan that will result in the first ignition experiments in Fiscal Year 2010, which is what had been discussed in the past. Our concern that led to the possibility of slippage was to make sure that we didn't make the best the enemy of the good, because there were some near term stockpile stewardship-I do want to make it clear ignition is very important, but there are things other than ignition in which the only way, short of nuclear testing, to gain knowledge about some of the conditions that exist in nuclear weapons is through NIF.

NIF is 80 percent complete, it's meeting its constant schedule baselines, and I believe that it's exceptionally well managed now, that it's got a very impressive record just as a construction facility in terms of schedule and performance and safety, and I think that we are on track to be able to meet the goal of initial ignition experiments in 2010. And we intend to keep paying a great deal of attention to that because it is the largest single stockpile stewardship project that we have.

REP. TAUSCHER: Thank you. This is the article from today's Washington Post about the security training issues and, you know, I think that perhaps the biggest issue that I have about this is that the optics are just bad. I think everybody is highly sensitized to the issue of the fact that neither plutonium or highly enriched uranium exists in man, excepts for the fact that governments create them. And you can find them in two places that we know of: one is power plants and the other is weapons labs in the complex.

And I think we are rightfully sensitized that the security of these things not only is an imperative, but that there has to be a sense of peace of mind that the average American has that these facilities are always in people's highest priority. And I think that the optics of this article is bad for us. It makes it look as if we're more concerned about whether somebody may bump their elbow, repelling off something in a training range, than we are actually making sure that the bad guys are deterred by the information that we're ready and we're going to take them down if they even think about it. So the kind of don't even think about it part is a test I think we've failed.

And this leads me to my real question, which is about this issue of the counterintelligence area of NNSA being flipped back up to DOE. As you know, Congressman Thornberry and I jokingly call ourselves the parents of the NNSA, along with a few other people, and we worked very hard to create a semi-autonomous agency dot, dot, dot away from DOE because of failures specifically in security. And not only real ones, but a sense of perception. To flip counterintelligence back up to DOE is very troublesome for me. I want-and I think many of us believe that resident capability in NNSA is a necessity and imperative. Not getting a fax-not getting f-a-x fax, and not getting a phone call, or just being in a food chain of information is good enough.

And I think that I really need to know from you, since everything seems to be working fine with it resident in NNSA, what is the reason to flip it back over to DOE? And how can we assure ourselves that we're not in the stovepipe mentality-going back to the stovepipe mentality that led to the failures of September 11, with people not talking to each other, agencies having information and not disseminating it properly, and people really feeling as if they're empowered with good information that they are able to analyze and digest and collect and archive themselves?

MR. BROOKS: Yes, ma'am. Let me once again give the analogue to intelligence. Good intelligence is crucial to any NNSA administrator, and yet we have come to an acceptable approach where we didn't try to have my intelligence organization and a separate DOE intelligence organization. We used a concept called shared staff. It isn't double-hating because double-hating is illegal, but it is people who provide support to both halves of the organization. That's because it's basically a small budget and a small number of people.

That's proven to be inefficient. We can tell that that's not just our opinion by the looks of the Hamre Commission, which specifically recommended consolidation. I met with Mr. Hamre for whom I have a great deal of respect, to make sure that I fully understood the nuances in his written report and he supported the notion of consolidation in a single office reporting to the secretary. The National Counterintelligence Executive has examined this and supports the notion of consolidation in a single office reporting to the secretary.

And the reason they do is in fact to avoid the risk of stove piping because counterintelligence, more than many things, works across the complex. I have in fact the things that are most at risk, both secrets and material. But if you look at the number of actual cases that get opened, the greatest bulk is not in my organization. And why is that? It's not a question of relative competence, it's a question that the general science labs have much more access and interaction with foreigners and therefore much more opportunity. And we believe that having a common single organization will allow us to recognize both the plain facts about the numbers and the equally plain facts about where the importance is.

The legislation we have proposed to you is quite carefully drawn so that it doesn't do violence-I mean, there are two issues here, frankly. One issue is it's a good idea to consolidate counterintelligence. The other is does this violate the basic principles of a semi-autonomous agency? And I am convinced that it does not. I mean, it doesn't matter right now, to be frank, with Secretary Abraham and Deputy Security McSlarrow, who are so consistently supportive of NNSA. But I've looked at it for a hypothetical future set of people and I think that the legislation has been very careful-that we've proposed to you has been very carefully drawn. So I think it will improve counterintelligence and I don't think it will hurt NNSA autonomy.

REP. TAUSCHER: Well, I'll take a look at it. I just want to take one more second to thank you. I wrote to you on March 8 and you replied on March 17. That's the high watermark for returning an answer. I won't hold you to that deadline, I know it's hard to achieve, but I appreciate you getting back so quickly. And once again thank you for your very hard work, both of you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

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REP. TAUSCHER: I have one more question.

REP. EVERETT: One more question.

REP. TAUSCHER: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Ambassador, if we could talk a little bit-there's a dovetailing about the long awaited stockpile plan, pit facility, aging and the amount of money that was cut last year by Water and the fact that we're looking for-I don't know, $370 million, I guess and build these pits. It seems to me that without the nuclear stockpile plan and understanding exactly how we're going to size the stockpile, it's difficult to project how many pits you're going to --

MR. BROOKS: Yes, ma'am, and that was --

REP. TAUSCHER: -- you can't project how big a facility you need, so we're kind of all lazy Susan-ing ourselves to nowhere. And I think that what we really need to know is when can we expect the stockpile plan, and in the end isn't it really about how many weapons we retire?

MR. BROOKS: It is a little bit, ma'am, but let me make a couple of points. First, the logic you've just set forth, as I understand it, is exactly the logic that your colleagues on Energy and Water used in requesting that we not make any further decisions. In an open session let me just use a little fuzzy math, all right? We're going to build this thing some time around 2020. We stopped producing weapons somewhere in the-you know, 30 years before that so the youngest weapon is going to be 30 years old.

We don't know precisely how frequently we're going to have to redo pits. The technical estimates run from 45 to 60 years. So that means when this facility starts, it's going to have to turn over the entire stockpile somewhere between 15 years and 30 years because you're starting with an old stockpile. Then after that it has to turn it over at a 45 to 60 year rate. The lower level that we are analyzing in the environmental impact statement is 125 pits a year. You multiply 125 by either 15 years or 30 years and you get a number.

Unless you believe-and that number is 3,750 or half of that. Unless you believe that we are certain now that the total U.S. stockpile in 2020 will be less than those numbers, then we're going to need something of the minimum capacity that we're analyzing in the environmental impact statement. So I understand the importance of having a coherent stockpile plan, but it's less closely coupled to the design of the facility than you might think, simply because you're going to have to turn everything over in this compressed time.

That said, the question is when are we going to do what the Congress told us to do by 1 February of this year? And I must tell you I don't know. This is being worked-I mean, this is fundamentally a question of military requirements and therefore not fundamentally a Department of Energy responsibility, although I'm involved, and it's being worked with the seriousness that it deserves, though not perhaps with the speed that you would like.

And so I'm very reluctant to mislead the Congress. We are committed to doing this right, we are committed to submitting it to the Congress at the earliest possible moment. We understand very clearly that there are some things we're not allowed to do until we do that. But I'm very reluctant to give the committee a precise date for a report that is fundamentally the responsibility of another department.

REP. TAUSCHER: Mr. Chairman, could I make a suggestion? I think that the --

REP. EVERETT: Can I stop you? (Laughter.) Please proceed.

REP. TAUSCHER: No. (Laughs.) I think that the issue of aging of the stockpile, which we're learning more about all the time, has a lot to do with eventually the kind of metrics that we'll use to make a decision on not only the stockpile size but the pit facility. I happen to be one that believes we have to test in 18 months, and I'm pleased to see that we have an agreement to make that investment. It is a hedge, as you said earlier, to make sure that we don't open a box of weapons and have that uh-oh moment.

I also believe we need to have resident capability on pits. We have to get this right. And I think that there are many of us on this committee and many of us in Congress that are happy to work with you to get the Energy and Water folks to get the right number, so that we're not slipping ourselves and putting a noose around our neck. So I think perhaps, Mr. Chairman, if we could think about having a classified briefing with Dr. Brooks on this issue, knowing that you don't know the number on the stockpile plan, but giving us the background in a classified setting on exactly the aging issue so we actually have some ability to argue for what we end up-what we may end up having to advocate for.

MR. BROOKS: That's obviously the chairman's call, but we'd be delighted. As you and I have discussed before, I believe we have a better case than we have articulated and we'd welcome the chance to try and articulate it in both a classified and an unclassified forum.

REP. TAUSCHER: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

REP. EVERETT: To answer my colleague's question, yes, we can have that and we will put it on the schedule in addition to some space that this committee needs to take up in closed session also.

REP. TAUSCHER: That would be great, Mr. Chairman, thank you.