"We must be willing to take constructive criticism, analyze it and responds when appropriate," McSlarrow told House members in the public portion of his testimony to the Energy and Commerce Oversight Subcommittee.

"Too often, we have seen a reflexive dismissal of ideas or suggestions not invented at DOE. That is not how a first-class organization behaves," he said.

Over two years since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Department of Energy has come under increased scrutiny regarding the security at its nuclear facilities.

In response, Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham announced a series of initiatives last Friday aimed at improving defenses against a potential terrorist attack or infiltration of federal nuclear labs and weapons-storage operations.

While terrorism experts generally agree that the risk of such material being stolen from U.S. government facilities is limited, the possibility does exist, as does the larger possibility of an attack on buildings housing potentially deadly nuclear materials.

Although Energy Department nuclear facilities have been on a state of alert since Sept. 11, continuing security lapses at these sites have lead to the new program.

Included in the initiative are plans to enhance the performance of existing Energy Department information systems, protections against cyber attacks, as well as plans to do away with the use of mechanical keys and the ability for department staff to take classified digital information and files on portable media from internal computer systems.

Both the removal of files and loss of secure keys have been particularly problematic issues at the national nuclear labs.

The initiative also includes stepped-up efforts to safeguard the highest classification of nuclear materials by consolidated nuclear materials from multiple sites into key facilities and disposing of unneeded nuclear materials.

That plan has raised red flags from analysts concerned about how the materials will be transferred from facility to facility or disposed of properly as some of the agency's weapons labs, such as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Southern California, are located in highly populated areas.

Facilities like Livermore are also a concern because, while they do not store nuclear weapons, they have materials that could potentially be used to make an effective nuclear device such as a "dirty bomb."

Such facilities are targeted for plans to reducing the amount of top-level nuclear material, but other government officials warned that this does not means the security threat is truly lessened.

"You don't solve the security problem at Livermore, you don't make security easier until you get rid of it all (nuclear material)," the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, Linton Brooks, told the House subcommittee.

The most controversial of the proposals is one only under consideration by the Energy Department -- the federalization of security at nuclear weapons facilities -- which has been contracted out to private firms for 60 years.

The potential move has been applauded by the nation's largest union of private security officers, the Service Employees International Union, which has been particularly critical of the nation's largest supplier of guards to both government weapons facilities and privately owned nuclear plants, Wackenhut.

According to the union, the company has been cited in at least six reports by the Energy Department's inspector general since 2001 for problems at the four federal nuclear facilities the company guards.

Attempts to contact the company for comment proved unsuccessful.

Brooks, who expressed support for the department's overall security initiative, also expressed concern at the rate at which the agency was deploying new security technologies along with the focus on standard barrier security methods.

He noted that the design of most of the nation's nuclear storage facilities and research labs are already good and would slow down the average person, but that such methods do not slow down a "well-trained adversary."

He therefore called for a more effective strategy of focusing on non-traditional ways to breach security, a recommendation that echoes what many security experts say about designing as effective a security system as possible.

However, it remains to be seen if such outside-of-the-box thinking will be a major part of the security overhauls being implemented by the Bush administration.

Members of the House subcommittee as well as other experts testifying before the panel met Spencer's initiative with equal parts praise and circumspection.

Subcommittee Chairman Rep. James Greenwood, R-Pa., said while he welcomed the "impressive" reform plans laid out by Specter last week, he expressed skepticism about whether they would be followed through to fruition given the history of similar proclamations by government officials.

"We have all seen situations where visionary plans are created and then truth is all in the follow through," said Greenwood.

Danielle Brian, executive director of nuclear security at The Project on Government, a government watchdog group, told the committee in her testimony that the group has become "cautiously optimistic" that the Energy Department may be turning the corner on the security issue after years of inaction, a feeling reassured by the Abraham's initiative.

"This is the first time a DOE secretary has recognized and admitted the extent of the change necessary to improve security in the weapons complex," said Brian.

But Robin Nazzaro, director of the Natural Resources and Environment division of the General Accounting Office, told the committee that the department's plans are based on a potential threat calculation that does not take into account the full threat estimates from the U.S. intelligence community.

She noted that the agency is preparing to defend against a significantly smaller group of terrorists than proposed by the intelligence community while focusing on high-level nuclear weapons threat at the expense of lower-level materials found at lab facilities that could be used to make a weapon.

"DOE is only preparing to defend against terrorism in a form that is significantly smaller than the postulated threat," said Nazzaro.

In addition, no official estimates for the cost of the proposals have been made, which makes tracking the potential for congressional funding of the proposed changes difficult at best.

The GAO also recently issued a report, based partly on interviews with personnel at Energy Department facilities, which concluded that some security upgrades ordered at the sites after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks may not be fully in place for another five years, despite deadlines of the end of 2006.

Despite these concerns, Glenn Podonsky, director of the office of security and safety performance at the department and a 20-year veteran of the agency, told the committee that he remains somewhat confident in the ability of the agency to implement the new security initiative because of the effort by Bush administration officials to tackle the agency's problems over the last three years.

"I am guardedly optimistic that the department will be able to carry them through," said Podonsky.

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