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ake how would you advise planners on this? It is a tremendous capabiltoity that grew out of our modeling and simulation at the laboratory.

I could go on and on, but it is very exciting and I think it pays back to the country in doing both of these.

MS. TAUSCHER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. THORNBERRY. Let me ask just a couple of quick questions beSi cause we want to get to the plants. Next year, Mr. Chairman, I suggest that we have the plants go first and have the lab folks last. Dr. ROBINSON. That is fair.

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Mr. THORNBERRY. Dr. Robinson, let me mention I think this committee is also concerned about marrying the delivery systems with The the weapons systems. We have some language in this year's bill, if you could get some of your folks to take a look at it, see if maybe we need to toughen it up a little bit because we are also concerned about that.

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On the computer question, I didn't bring the article with me, but somewhere recently I have read the Japanese trumped us on our ASCI program, that they have leaped ahead. Am I-is that true? How far have they jumped ahead? Is there something we can learn from there?

Dr. ANASTASIO. They developed a new computer and it is a computer that is very fast for a very specialized class of problems. In fact, their computer was developed for global climate kinds of activities. And one of the benchmarks that is traditionally used to measure computer speed is over a very narrow kind of particular kind of class of problems. And it does very well at that.

But if you think about the kinds of applications that we have to build a nuclear weapons simulation code, it requires you to have capability or many length scales and time scales and many different types of physics. And to do all those things together in one simulation code would not work very well on that architecture. We would imagine if we ran one of our tools on that computer, probably actually would perform less well than, for instance, the best ASCI computer we have. So it would be slower for the kinds of applications that we have, but it is a very wonderful tool and costs a good bit of money as well.

Mr. THORNBERRY. Let me turn briefly back to the certification issue. I presume that the Foster Panel's recommendation is that we complement the existing technical certifications with additio certifications-that may be not exactly and it wouldn't necess

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process won't be very good if you don't have very capable people doing it.

Mr. THORNBERRY. On test readiness, the suggestion has been made that we ought to go ahead and ask you folks to tell us what you would test. If you were going to have a test this year and had the capability to have it, what is it that you would test? What would you be looking for? It might tell us all some interesting information, and maybe that

Dr. BROWNE. Mr. Thornberry, in the letters the last several years that I have sent in, I actually identified what systems we would do.

Mr. THORNBERRY. And what would you be looking for?

Dr. ANASTASIO. That is also true of Lawrence Livermore.
Dr. ROBINSON. Yes.

Mr. THORNBERRY. Mr. Chairman, that is all I have. Thank you. Mr. WELDON [presiding]. I want to thank my colleague for sitting in. I thank each of you for coming in, for your outstanding testimony and excellent work you are doing on behalf of our country. We look forward to continuing a very positive relationship with you. Dr. Anastasio, you hit a home run your first time. Sitting next to these two guys who have been under some fire in the past, you did very well. Congratulations.

Dr. ANASTASIO. Thank you very much, sir.

Mr. WELDON. We would like to have our third panel come forward now, which includes Mr. Dennis Ruddy, Manager, Pantex Plant, who will go first; Dr. Fred Tarantino, Manager of Nevada Test Site; John Mitchell, Manager, Y-12 Plant; David Douglass, Manager, Kansas City Plant; Robert Pedde, Manager, Savannah River Site. We welcome you all here. Your statements will be made a part of the record.

Mr. WELDON. We will start with Mr. Ruddy.

STATEMENT OF DENNIS R. RUDDY,

MANAGER, PANTEX PLANT

Mr. RUDDY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Members of the panel

Mr. WELDON. Do you second Mr. Thornberry's statement that next year you guys should go ahead of the lab directors?

Mr. RUDDY. Absolutely.

Mr. WELDON. The floor is yours.

Mr. RUDDY. Thank you. It is a pleasure and an honor for me to be here to represent myself, our little corner of the nuclear weapons complex, and the people of Pantex in the panhandle of Texas. Since BWX Technologies Co. (BWXT) assumed operations at the plant a little bit more than a year ago, we have made significant progress, we believe, in fulfilling our site's mission for the national security mission. Pantex is prepared, and is prepared by changing the ways it does business to continue to provide a safe and reliable nuclear weapons stockpile for many years to come. And the preparation involves infrastructure and technology, as well as the preparation, hiring, and retention of people to meet these critical needs. I believe we all recognize the challenge of providing security in our facilities. And this is especially underscored to us as a result

of the events of September 11th. And it is another issue that we have had to deal with, a very significant issue in infrastructure.

At the Pantex plant we have been operating in this year's dollars at a budget of about $70 million, and our needs have increased by about 20 percent as a result of the higher posture that we are assuming as a result of September 11th. It has brought home to us the need for us to be able to quickly hire and clear people so that they can perform various functions. I don't think anybody a year ago was anticipating that one of our critical skill needs, although we haven't talked about security people as being critical skills, would be in the area of security. So I think it underscores to us the flexibility that we need at the plants.

In addition, we are looking forward to the needs that we need for infrastructure for capacity and, again, the Nuclear Posture Review has introduced some variables that we hadn't been analyzing in terms of the possibilities of dismantlement. The good news is that there is an awful lot of untapped capability at the Pantex plant. There is untapped capability in terms of that area to provide the people that we need, and we are also taking very aggressive action to look at what it is that we need to do in the area of critical skills in the more traditional sense as we have defined them.

When we took over, we had about 1,100, almost 1,200 positions at the plant that would define as critical skills. And that time more than 200 of those positions were open. By taking the more traditional activities, we were able to drive that number down under 100, and we were pretty comfortable that we would continue to reduce that by the hiring and retention of employees. But the approach that we are all taking is to look at the world a little bit differently.

I wanted to highlight something that we have done recently that has made that picture even better, and that is by reforming and streamlining our organization. And by doing that in our manufacturing department alone, we have eliminated about 33 of those critical skills positions. This is a different approach than just hiring more people, keeping their training up, working on experience. By reexamining and reengineering the way we are doing work at the plant, we are confident that we can continue to meet the needs of the Nation with fewer and fewer people who are in those critical skills positions by redefining roles and responsibilities.

Now, clearly, there is a core of people that we need to do that, but more than a third of our population would be defined into those categories. And one could actually see the more than 550 people in our security force also defined into that position, especially as the competition across the Nation for people who are trained in security at our airports and other key facilities around the country, that that whole market became very much more competitive in the past nine months. So we believe that the NNSA is heading in the right direction.

We thank you, this committee as well as Congress in general, for recognizing the needs that we have had. This is not my first time here, as it is Dr. Anastasio's, but I have come here before and asked for additional support, and I am happy to report that this year for the first time in 5 years we have actually seen a change in direction of our maintenance backlog. We had projected that

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ame level of experimental quality that they were provided durhe active period of underground testing 10 years ago and be

owever, there is a variety of assessments that indicate that the iral effective time has taken its toll and that our capabilities his area are gradually and continually coming under pressure. will soon be necessary to address the training of a new generan of personnel to support potential nuclear testing.

o, in summary, the NTS is a broad-based, user facility that suprts customers nationwide, with our primary mission being to pport the NNSA and national laboratories. That concludes my rearks. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. WELDON. Thank you, Dr. Tarantino.

[The prepared statement of Dr. Tarantino can be found in the ppendix on page 98.]

Mr. WELDON. Mr. Mitchell.

STATEMENT OF JOHN T. MITCHELL,
MANAGER, Y-12 PLANT

Mr. MITCHELL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, the committee members. We thank you again very much for the opportunity to be here today.

At Y-12 we made a great deal of progress over the last year or two but we still face many significant challenges in meeting the long-term needs for the Nation. Y-12 can and will meet the nearterm stockpile needs for the stockpile life extension programs. In order to do that we have had to reactivate many capabilities and processes that have been inactive for more than two decades. In doing so, of course, we are going into a situation where the safety and security standards now are somewhat different than they were before. But we have in place detailed plans that will allow us to do that to support these national needs in the near term.

The issues at Y-12 are our ability to meet the long-term needs to support our aging infrastructure and replace it where necessary, to be able to take that infrastructure and increase the technology in it, and to provide the very long-term needs that we have.

We are in the initial phases of doing much about that. Right now we have a major capital reinvestment program under way at Y-12. We currently have two capital projects under way, one of which is a new, modern, very secure storage facility for highly enriched uranium which will be the largest in the Nation when we are through. We have two others, beryllium manufacturing and highly enriched uranium manufacturing that are in this 5-year planning that we have now in NNSA. So I believe we have the basis for that capitalization program for our manufacturing capabilities.

We have been greatly aided by the facilities infrastructure funding. We have been able to make significant headway in reducing our maintenance backlog and we have also embarked on a program designed to reduce the active footprint of Y-12.

Y-12 is a plant designed in the Manhattan Project time, expanded greatly over time. And the part we actually need for the long term is probably a third or quarter of the footprint we actually have. Yet we still have the landlord expenses of maintaining all the infrastructure and capabilities. So our ability to reduce that foot

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