ICYMI: Sen. Cruz Questions Secretary Perry in Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing on Future Potential for Pantex
Discusses production capacity, nuclear development, and new Pantex headquarters
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, today questioned Secretary of Energy Rick Perry at a hearing regarding the Department of Energy’s 2019 budget request for defense programs. There, Sen. Cruz asked about our nation’s production capacity when it comes to nuclear development, and the potential for expansion at the Pantex plant outside of Amarillo, Texas.
Watch Sen. Cruz’s exchange with Secretary Perry in its entirety here. The full transcript is below.
Sen. Cruz: “Mr. Secretary, often, when people talk about the work of the Department of Energy, they think about physicists in laboratories and models being developed on supercomputers. But an important part of it is that we also have to be able to build and produce the things our scientists design. And, for that, we need production capacity, like at the Pantex plant outside of Amarillo, Texas. We used to have huge production capacity in this country, but we have closed much of that down at the end of the Cold War. Now, we have a few places left, and a lot of the buildings in those places are too old, too small to do what we need to have them do. The Nuclear Posture Review that the Department of Defense recently released mentions, ‘developing a National Nuclear Security Administration road map that sizes production capacity to modernization and hedging requirements.’ Could you elaborate a little bit on what that means and what kind of production capacity we need, that we don't have right now?
Secretary Perry: “Senator, I think the issue that you, rightly, focused in on -- it's as much as, in a global sense, looking back over the last 25 years after the end of the Cold War, if you will, the peace dividend that we all appreciated. And then the world has changed since then, and the requirement that -- whether it was in facilities, whether it was in modernization of our weapons, whether it was in keeping a supply chain in place -- is a slight diversion here. It's the same challenge that we've got on our civil nuclear side, is it those got pushed back, on the -- on the back burner. And we're faced now with, on the civil nuclear side, a real challenge, whether it's, you know, keeping our companies engaged in this in a worldwide way, developing the engineers and the technology and the expertise to go forward with. And the same is true in the sense of our weapons program. You visited Pantex before. You visited Senator Graham's facilities out at Savannah River. You know, I mean Oak Ridge has some facilities that are older than I am, and that's -- for a building, that's old. But my point is that this Nuclear Posture Review and this committee needs to be, as I said in my opening remarks, thanked for recognizing that we've got to -- we've got to have the resources to be able to get this country back on track from the standpoint of the life-extension programs, the modernization of the fleet. If we don't, then we put America in a place of jeopardy that I don't think anyone on this committee wants to see us in.”
Sen. Cruz: “Is the department looking at expanding facilities at existing plants like Pantex?”
Secretary Perry: “I don't know whether we're looking at expanding facilities, but we're -- one of the things that is very close to being is a new headquarters building at Pantex. That is going to get them out of some early 1950s buildings that are scattered around and all over that complex, into one facility. I can assure you that your constituents that are getting up in Randall County every day and going to work are really going to like going to work there, because it's a first-class facility, but it's long overdue. So, the facility side of this is a real challenge, and we shouldn't be asking some of the people who are involved in some of the most important work in this country, keeping us safe and deterring those that would do us harm from having to go to work in buildings that, quite frankly, are an embarrassment, in some cases.”
Sen. Cruz: “Thank you, Mr. Secretary.”
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