Ernest Moniz
speaker
167 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 13 Jul
Ernest Moniz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Is that right?
Yeah, I think actually very few Americans, frankly, really do understand what the department does.
The department's roots are in the Atomic Energy Commission.
Which inherited the Manhattan Project and therefore carried on with nuclear weapons, started the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program.
It was responsible for harnessing the atom or the nucleus for nuclear power.
So it was from its beginning a nuclear weapons, national security and fundamental science agency.
The next big change really came in the 70s with the oil embargoes.
And that led the presidents, in particular President Carter, to say we need an energy department.
I will ask the Congress for its help in combining many of these agencies in a new energy department.
to bring order out of chaos.
And why don't we use this Atomic Energy Commission thing, which is already doing some energy, and very interesting, with a certain look towards the events today in the Strait of Hormuz, the security issues that were raised by the oil embargo
led to the start of things like solar energy as a security initiative, not as a clean energy initiative.
And finally, the third major event, I would say, which changed the character of the department, was the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union.
In Moscow, the hammer and sickle is lowered for the last time, and an era comes to an end.
That led to things like
the nuclear nonproliferation program starting.
It led to the issue of starting to clean up the Cold War nuclear weapons mess as opposed to adding to it.
And so that's the department today.
It's got major missions in nuclear weapons and nonproliferation, in fundamental science,
in energy and in environmental cleanup.
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