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For Immediate Release: March 18, 2004

Contact:

Harald Stavenas Angela Sowa (202) 225-2539 Mike Lewis (Everett) (202) 225-2901

Opening Statement of Chairman Terry Everett
Hearing on the Department of Energy's Fiscal Year 2005 Budget Request for Atomic Energy Defense Activities

The Strategic Forces Subcommittee meets today to receive testimony on the Department of Energy's fiscal year 2005 budget request for Atomic Energy Defense Activities. I want to apologize in advance for these somewhat crowded quarters today - a HASC schedule change required us to shift locations.

I welcome Ambassador Linton Brooks, Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, and the Honorable Jesse H. Roberson, Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management at the Department of Energy. Ambassador Brooks will cover the NNSA budget request for fiscal year 2005. The NNSA request is for just over 9 billion dollars and consists of funding for Weapons Activities, Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation, Naval Reactors and the Office of the Administrator. Assistant Secretary Roberson will provide testimony on the Department of Energy's request for defense environmental management - she will tell us about the progress the Department is making in accelerating the schedule and reducing the cost of clean-up at numerous sites around the country. The Environmental Management budget request is for over $7 billion.

We have a lot of ground to cover today, and I want to allow each of our members as great an opportunity as possible to ask questions, so I will 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, this subcommittee met in closed session to discuss issues associated with nuclear weapons including Advanced Concepts and the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator. This session, in contrast, is open under rule 9 of the Committee. I would ask members for their cooperation in keeping their line of questioning unclassified. Questions of a classified nature should be submitted as written questions for the record following 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 Basis Threat. While we understand that 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 monumental 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 dollars - support this undertaking. The Department's Environmental Management team has undertaken a commendable but daunting challenge to both accelerate site cleanups and reduce costs.

As recently as two years ago, the life cycle cost estimate for cleanup of legacy sites stood at 220 billion dollars, .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 real risk reduction. The current plan calls for completion of all remediation efforts by 2035, at a cost savings of more than 50 billion dollars. I look forward to hearing of your progress across the complex.

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