Bush's Nuclear Madness
If George Bush gets his way, the USA is going nuclear -- and he won't let a little thing like radioactive waste stand in his way

http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/35530/

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted May 2, 2006.

George W. Bush has a vision for a strong, independent nuclear America. He wants nuclear weapons for everyday use -- deterrence is for Democrats -- and he wants to build dozens of new nuclear energy plants across the United States.

He'll also ship thousands of tons of nuclear waste across the country, first to a huge storage facility in Yucca Mountain, Nev. But that will only contain a little more than what we already have sitting around. We'll need nine more Yuccas by the end of the century if Bush's plans go through.

Filling the one we already have means shipping highly radioactive waste through 44 states -- coming within a half mile of 50 million Americans. The most toxic, deadly substances known to humanity would pass through Boston, Baltimore, Newark and Miami.

A 1982 study by Sandia Labs -- the country's premiere nuclear research facility -- found that a containment breech in one plant in Pennsylvania would kill 74,000 people within a year and another 34,000 later from cancer. The 1986 Chernobyl disaster spewed more radiation across Europe than was released in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, took out 486 villages in Belarus and left a region that had been inhabited by 100,000 people a glow-in-the-dark no-man's land.

But don't worry. According to the administration and the deep-pocketed nuclear lobby, it's all perfectly safe. Sure, there's no human invention that's foolproof and, yes, we're talking about making dozens of ripe new targets for terrorists to attack, but hasn't the administration and its corporate partners earned our trust?

Nuclear Renaissance
According to Bush administration spin, the mighty atom is a 21st century panacea for the United States' -- and the world's -- most intractable problems. Nuclear energy will free us from our dependence on those "tyrannical regimes" that sponsor global terror, bail out the planet from global warming and avert a new superpower struggle by giving fast-industrializing behemoths like China and India an endless supply of "renewable" energy. Nuclear weapons that we can deploy freely in small conflicts will lock in our global dominance for the rest of the century. And, of course, all this will create lots and lots of high-paying jobs.

It sounds great on paper. But if you look behind the dramatic shifts in U.S. nuclear policy over the course of Bush's presidency, you find an intense lobbying and public relations campaign by a handful of firms that stand to rake in billions from the construction of new civilian reactors, and by a generation of Cold Warriors that lusts after new, more "usable" nukes for their toy chest.

The administration has offered up a series of initiatives that will reshape decades of nuclear policy, both civilian and military. Bush scrapped the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and undermined the Test Ban Treaty. And it's not just plans for new bombs and new reactors; he's shifted U.S. policy towards countries like India and Pakistan that developed nukes outside the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

And Bush plans to use Yucca Mountain in Nevada as a repository for the world's nuclear waste, not just our own. It's the linchpin of what the administration hopes will become a new economic order -- superseding OPEC with a nuclear cartel that reads "Made in the USA."

At the heart of Bush's atomic dreams is the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) announced in February. Under the plan, we'll dramatically expand nuclear energy production at home, encourage new nuclear generation abroad and import other countries' spent fuel for reprocessing in the United States.

The idea is to limit the two most sensitive parts of the nuclear cycle -- enrichment and disposal -- to a handful of sites in the United States, Russia and perhaps France and Japan. In January Vladimir Putin announced that one piece of the puzzle -- a joint waste initiative between the United States and Russia -- was a done deal.

The GNEP constitutes a sharp break with decades of American nuclear policy, dating back to Jimmy Carter. He banned nuclear fuel reprocessing in 1977, concluding -- along with the American public -- that the costs were too high and the hazards too great.

According to the administration, GNEP will incorporate "new proliferation-resistant technologies to recover more energy and reduce waste" from spent fuel -- there are an estimated 55,000 tons of the stuff sitting around -- which will "reduce the risk of nuclear proliferation worldwide." But while the first moves have begun -- in addition to the deal with Russia, Bush signed a major, possibly illegal, nuclear agreement with India just last month -- those "proliferation-resistant technologies" are still on the drawing board. As Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, told the Christian Science Monitor: "What seems rather fanciful about this project is that the fuel-supply aspect appears contingent on proving some highly advanced technology."

It's a different kind of faith-based initiative; Bush is barreling full-speed ahead with his programs and assuming that we'll invent the technology we need to do it all as we go along.

It may be Bush's boldest vision yet, but it's nothing new; like so much we've seen from this administration, Nixon's presidency is the source of inspiration, and his old staff are the agents. In his 1974 State of the Union Address, during the height of the great oil shock, Nixon touted his proposed "Operation Independence," declaring that "1974 must be the year in which we organize a full-scale effort to provide for our energy needs." The plan would have increased the United States' use of nuclear energy in order to break the back of OPEC.

But Nixon's vision of "independence" suffered a meltdown of public opinion and political opposition after the near disaster at Three Mile Island in 1979 -- the most serious accident in the history of American nuclear energy. Since then, the domestic nuclear agenda has been in deep freeze, and the 1986 Chernobyl disaster only strengthened public resolve against restarting it.

On the military side, Bush wants to shrug off decades of constraints and develop a new generation of nukes. Fred Kaplan, writing in Slate, noted some of the overlooked provisions in Bush's 2004 defense budget, including the repeal of a 1992 ban on the research and development of "low-yield" nuclear weapons. Our cash outlay for new nukes, given the United States' military supremacy, is stunning:

[T]he Department of Energy is spending an astonishing $6.5 billion on nuclear weapons and President Bush is requesting $6.8 billion more for next year and a total of $30 billion over the following four years. … Measured in "real dollars" (that is, adjusting for inflation), this year's spending on nuclear activities exceeds by over 50 percent the average annual sum ($4.2 billion) that the United States spent -- again, in real dollars -- throughout the four and a half decades of the Cold War.

The military energy complex
While the administration's civilian initiatives have been launched with great fanfare, Bush's revolutionary nuclear weapons policies have been low-key -- no grand pronouncements, no media rollouts. But the line between military nukes and civilian energy is not a clean one. A network of advocacy groups, lobbyists and corporations link the nuclear community together. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) -- known to be firmly in the pocket of the industry -- is charged with overseeing both sides of the atom.

The military and civilian programs are joined by companies like General Electric, a major defense contractor that builds and services civilian reactors (GE stopped manufacturing nuclear weapons in 1992) and Bechtel, which despite an atrocious safety and environmental record, has a $6 billion contract to develop Yucca Mountain, services two-thirds of the civilian plants in the United States (and more overseas), and is part of a consortium that manages the military's Nevada Test Site, where advanced nuclear weapons tests are conducted. Another key player is defense giant Lockheed-Martin -- also part of the Nevada Test Site Team --which runs Sandia National Labs, where both civilian and military research is conducted. Westinghouse, the world's leading manufacturer of civilian reactors, was the government's third-largest nuclear weapons contractor as recently as 1995. The United States' last full-scale nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge Tenessee is managed by a consortium including Bechtel. It took over the contract from Lockheed-Martin in 2000. Bechtel and Westinghouse are both making a fortune cleaning up nuclear facilities across America, both civilian and military.

The nuclear power industry is snuggled up tight with government -- even more cozily than most. The NRC -- supposedly the public's watchdog -- is financed not with tax dollars but by rate payers, meaning through the companies themselves. All the while, a revolving door between business and government spins like a top. According to the National Catholic Reporter, the NRC has seen its "senior staff regularly moving into the nuclear industry as employees and consultants." A General Accounting Office survey in 2000 showed that more than a quarter of all NRC staffers "are considering leaving the agency within a year." "Everyone in any NRC position who can goes to private industry," said one whistleblower.

That's pretty much true across all of the sectors of nuclear technology. Only weeks after the passage of last year's energy bill -- which showered billions on nuclear power operators in direct subsidies and other giveaways-- eyebrows were raised when NBC reported that a key Senate staffer "who helped steer those billions through" did so "in between stints representing nuclear power companies like Exelon" as a major lobbyist. Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom ridge joined Exelon's board soon after leaving the administration. According to Open Secrets, which tracks campaign contributions, Dick Cheney, who as former defense secretary and CEO of Halliburton is intimately connected with both the military establishment and the energy industry, is "by far, nuclear power's biggest ally." The Cheneys are heavily invested in Lockheed-Martin; Lynn sits on the company's board of directors.

It's just one big, happy nuclear family.

End Part I