Who's bold vision is it?
Most of the provisions of GNEP started not in the Department of Energy, but in the corporate suite of the Sandia Corp. Sandia is a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin and runs much of the National Nuclear Security Administration's research infrastructure at two enormous campuses in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif.

According to Sandia Lab News, a company newsletter, the GNEP started with a presentation then Vice President (and now Sandia's president) Tom Hunter made to the Department of Energy in 1996:

"Basically, if you run through the chronology, we have been urging some of the things that came out of GNEP (Global Nuclear Energy Partnership) since 1996," he says. "Our concern as a national security lab has always been that you can't influence nuclear safety, security and proliferation risks at the global level if you're not in the nuclear business [We have to] have an American-based nuclear supply industry that is capable of being a leading supplier across the globe."

"Our role has been invisible leadership," Hunter told the newsletter. The company spent a decade "organizing and articulating the arguments for US leadership from the perspective of … what might happen, domestically and globally, if we don't go forward with nuclear energy." And legislators like Sens. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., Wayne Allard, R-Colo., and Harry Reid, D-Neb., and Rep. Joe Barton. R-Texas, were more than receptive to the message -- executives like Sandia's Hunter got exactly what they wanted.

The dollars at stake are massive, and energy deregulation -- predating Bush -- provided huge windfalls for the industry. In the 1990s staid, highly regulated utility companies gave way to nuclear wildcatters. Layers and layers of Limited Liability Companies with no liquidity shielded parent corporations from litigation, and they began to use America's aging nuclear infrastructure to shake some silver out of the treasury.

One of the schemes -- or scams -- that resulted from deregulation is known as "gold mining." The gold is in the form of billions of dollars in funds -- paid by utility ratepayers -- that were established to clean up nuclear generator sites at the end of their life spans.

Paul Gunter of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service gave the National Catholic Reporter an example of the money to be made in the shakedown: "AmerGen, which bought [GPU Nuclear Corp.'s] Oyster Creek reactor, basically in a garage sale atmosphere, paid $10 million and intends to inherit over $400 million in decommissioning trust funds."

The new owners operate the reactors as long as they can, and when the plants are decommissioned, they clean up the sites on the cheap (which means poorly). Unused funds aren't returned to the ratepayers -- the firms pocket them.

Buried in K Street's 2005 Energy Bill, along with a mountain of production tax credits and loan guarantees, is a rule change that will free up $1.3 billion in decommissioning funds.

But the most important initiative so far has been the development of Yucca Mountain. Waste disposal is the prerequisite for everything -- for building new plants, for upgrading the nuclear arsenal and for implementing the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership.

Lobbying on the project has been hot and heavy since the site was selected in the late 1980s. The location is problematic. According to Public Citizen (PDF):

Yucca Mountain has not proven to be a geologically suitable site to store radioactive waste, which remains deadly for thousands of years. The Yucca Mountain Project would entail tens of thousands of shipments over the nation's roads, rails and rivers, posing innumerable questions about transportation safety in towns and neighborhoods nationwide.

Despite the potential hazards -- Yucca Mountain is perched above a freshwater aquifer in an active earthquake zone -- Public Citizen's report finds that the scientific and safety questions about the project have been "smothered under a mountain of lobbyists," and concludes that "the nuclear industry no doubt anticipates that there is no economic problem, no public health threat, no long-term form of irrational energy policy idiocy that can't be overcome by spending 'what it takes' to influence Congress."

Invisible leadership
Nuclear energy's lobbying arm on Capitol Hill is the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), and it's doled out millions to friendly officials. According to Open Secrets, George W. Bush got more money from the nuclear energy industry in 2000 than any other federal candidate. In the 2002 election cycle, "the nuclear power industry [gave] $8.7 million to federal candidates and committees." Seventy percent went to the GOP.

But the nuclear lobby has to do more than buy off legislators; its real challenge is convincing people that a production process that produces tons of the deadliest substances on earth -- waste that stays dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years -- is safe enough to have in their communities. NIMBY is a tall hurdle to clear.

But they're trying. Industry talking points have become ubiquitous on Capitol Hill and in the media; a legion of industry spokespeople repeat the phrase "clean nuclear energy" like a mantra. "Clean" and "green" are always the words of the day.

As the administration's GNEP moves forward, they've stepped up the PR. In January NEI retained PR giant Hill & Knowlton to handle an $8 million campaign to build "policymaker and decision-maker support for nuclear energy broadly and specifically for the Yucca Mountain project.'" In February, the Wall Street Journal reported that NEI was preparing to launch its "clean air campaign," a "multiyear advertising campaign to build public support for a generation of new plants."

But more disturbing than the industry's traditional public relations efforts is the "silent leadership" it's taken in influencing public opinion. The lobby has been caught paying reporters to present "industry's side of the story" and getting university professors to submit op-eds to local newspapers that were "ginned up, assembly-line style, by a Washington, D.C., public relations firm." The lobby helped develop a new curriculum for high school physics students that was put out by the Department of Energy to promote new nukes. Just this month the lobby set up a big-money faux environmental group to shill for its policies; it's already jumped into the debate with a splash.

A potentially fatal lack of imagination
What makes Bush's grand nuclear strategy all the more preposterous is that since 1950, we've been trying -- with zero success -- to figure out what to do with the nuclear waste we already have.

Jon Lamb, writing in Green Left weekly cited a 1996 National Academy of Sciences estimate that found the cost of reprocessing irradiated fuel from U.S. reactors would easily exceed $100 billion. Again, that just covers our existing waste.

And that's probably a very low figure. In 2000, the estimated cost of cleaning up just one site, the Hanford nuclear reprocessing facility, was $4.3 billion. The contract was awarded to Bechtel and, according to Lamb, six years later the estimated cost is "a massive $50 billion to $60 billion, with completion of works by 2035."

In 1993, the Department of Energy estimated that the cost of cleaning up the environmental damage from its enormous nuclear weapons complex could run as high as one trillion dollars. Nobody really knows how much it would actually cost.

Nuclear energy, despite what its boosters say, isn't cheap. There's a global shortage of uranium, and prices have skyrocketed from around $7 per pound to over $40. In addition to enormous cleanup costs, the capital investment in new plants is high -- too high to get Wall Street to bite. So Joe and Jane Taxpayer will subsidize those capital costs heavily, as they have for years. According to Public Citizen (PDF), the government shelled out $115 billion in direct federal subsidies to the industry between 1947 and 1999. To give you a sense of priorities, federal subsidies for wind and solar energy over the same period totaled just $5.7 billion.

What's more troubling than the fact that corporate interests are driving this "nuclear renaissance" -- the NEI's term -- is that these bankrupt policies appear to be the best our government can come up with. They show us the outer limits of our leaders' imaginations, of their political will to effect real change.

We have real energy problems -- global warming, dwindling petroleum supplies and an unhappy marriage to petro-dictatorships. The grotesque tragedy is that this costly, cavalier, Nixon-era nuclear vision constitutes the most ambitious proposal we've seen to address them so far. Dwight Eisenhower once said, "If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it," and that's just what we're doing.

The good news is that Americans have a good deal of horse sense; despite the "clean nukes" campaigns, polls show that two-thirds of Americans oppose new nuclear power. The idea of using nukes for first strikes, or in anything less than an all-out conflagration, is too nutty to even merit a polling question. And Bush's other grand visions have fizzled out and died. Think about Social Security. And who even remembers our epic journey to mars? As the Congress looks at massive deficits and a president that's trying to borrow a nickel's worth of "political capital" from Fox News broadcasters, the bulk of Bush's "nuclear renaissance" will probably, thankfully, die on the vine.

End