GOING NUCLEAR - AGAIN

GOING NUCLEAR (again)

by Sandy LeonVest

"The United States...has made it clear that we're quite in favor of [nuclear] proliferation to our friends...Iran under the Shah got our...encouragement for the nuclear activities we're now denouncing. Iraq, where we just went to war to prevent them from getting WMDs, was encouraged and helped in its nuclear program while it was fighting Iran...India, Pakistan have all benefited from US toleration or encouragement. So, we don't have a nonproliferation [policy]. If that's to happen, [US] policy will have to change; and above all, it will have to...move toward disarmament. No American president has had any intention of carrying out the supposedly solemn commitment under Article VI to undertake negotiations toward total elimination of nuclear weapons."

Daniel Ellsberg, May, 2005, on Democracy Now!

THE DEAFENING SILENCE

By now the Bush Administrations' fondness for Big Energy is a matter of very public record, if only because of its own arrogance. Even so, it took the mainstream media awhile to process the news that its Chief Executive and VP were literally conspiring with their Oil Industry friends to make National Energy Policy. Apparently the president's not-so-public pandering to the nuclear industry in an age of terrorism and national insecurity is similarly considered - still more of a sleeper than a scoop. If it were widely understood, the Administration's efforts to resurrect nuclear power would stand at least a chance of sparking a national debate - or better still, an international energy summit. Yet when George W Bush declared in a May, 2006 speech to an audience of nuclear enthusiasts at the Limerick Generating Station that nuclear power is a "perfect example of how we can grow our economy and protect our environment at the same time," it didn't seem to generate any excitement at all, never mind an energy summit. And when Bush visited Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant in Maryland last year touting nuclear energy as a replacement for fossil fuels, the speech made some of the dailies but it didn't exactly set the news cycle - or its pundits - on fire. His assertion that "there is a growing consensus that more nuclear power will lead to a cleaner, safer nation..." and that "it is time for this country to start building nuclear power plants again" got a big rise out of his pro-nuclear audience but barely registered on the media's radar screen. Never mind that the Calvert Cliffs nuclear facility is a likely site for the first new nuclear energy reactor to be built in the US in 30 years. Never mind either that the overwhelming preponderance of scientific research concludes that nuclear storage, safety and security issues in 2006 remain largely unresolved.

Other recent non-headline-making energy news includes a statement by The Alliance to Save Energy (ASE), a bipartisan, nonprofit coalition of business, government, environmental, and consumer leaders. The ASE recently noted that "the president’s overall FY 2007 budget request for energy-efficiency programs at DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy is $517 million, down $111 million (18%) from the FY 2006 appropriation, and $78 million below the administration’s FY 2006 request. This large cut follows a gradual slide from $694 million appropriated for these energy-efficiency programs in FY 2002..."

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY CENSORSHIP

It is little comfort that when it comes to news censorship, the eerie blackouts that characterize the 21st century are an equal opportunity phenomenon from which no one is exempt. The blackouts are a reaction not to the messenger, but to the message.

When only last month (June, 2006), former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who reached near god-like status among the Wall Street crowd during his tenure as Fed Chief, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the nation's "worrisome dependence on oil" makes nuclear power key to national security, he didn't make headlines either. By the next day, even the Information Highway was hard pressed to give up that testimony although a webcast was available on C-SPAN. While the "nineteen new applications [for nuclear power plants]...currently on file with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)" seemed to excite the ex-Fed Chief, his stunning proclamation was apparently not sexy enough for prime time.

In April of this year when twenty-three Senators signed on to a $27 million appropriations request for Fiscal Year 2007 for Department of Energy (DOE) nuclear programs, clean energy advocates might have been interested to learn that among the signatories were ten leading Democrats - including John Kerry and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Other Democratic signatories were Senators Bingaman, Obama, Wyden, Reed, Kohl, Jeffords, Bayh and (Bill) Nelson. Yet there was no televised coverage at all and with few notable exceptions, there was little print coverage either. Thirteen Republicans (Voinovich, Craig, Crapo, Lugar, Bond, Talent, Alexander, Chafee, Warner, Burr, Isakson, DeWine and Smith) also signed the letter sent to the Committee on Appropriations.

The request for the FY 2007 DOE budget seeks the restoration of funding for the University Reactor Fuel Assistance and Support Program to FY 2006 levels in the Energy and Water Appropriations Bill - slated to be cut next year. "The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) recently testified before the Environment and Public Works Committee that they expect to receive at least eleven applications for new plant construction between 2007 and 2009," the request reads. "Given the anticipated growth of nuclear power in this country...we urge you to restore funding for the University Reactor Fuel Assistance and Support Program..."

The Bush energy plan, which includes a provision for easing the licensing process and more than $1 billion for new construction, got some press at the time it was announced, but that story too faded to black before most Americans had a chance to absorb its potential impact.

LOOK - OVER THERE!

At least partially thanks to the "genius" of Karl Rove, this Administration has always been good at changing the subject, yet since early 2006 when it became apparent even to its supporters that the unholy war in Iraq had become a black hole, Rove's monster public relations machine has been forced to work triple-time.

In recent months the Bush Administrations' public hysteria over Iran's nuclear ambitions has been hogging the media spotlight - some would argue, justifiably. This despite the fact that after more than three years of inspections, the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) found no indication of "undeclared source or special nuclear materials" in Iran. The IAEA further reported finding no indication that any declared source or special nuclear materials had been diverted to military purpose. But while no one can say with certainty what Iran's intentions are, the Administrations' intentions are all too clear. Its obsessive fear mongering over Iran seems entirely reasonable in light of its wholly inept and increasingly transparent non-leadership. The Bush Administrations' history of secrecy, lies and contempt for those it has sworn to serve goes far toward explaining its fixation on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's nuclear ambitions.

Aided and abetted by Congress and a complicit media, George W. Bush and his henchmen have managed to fire up an entire nation - and the international community - with its "Iranian nuclear threat." In so doing, they have constructed a dangerously volatile straw man - one that distracts Americans from the real nuclear threat. That threat is being played out not as we are instructed to believe, in the Middle East, but across the US and in the corridors of power in the nation's capital.

HISTORY 101 - THE REAL THREAT

In 1945, the US launched a massive nuclear attack on the heavily populated cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That low point in American history marked the US as the only country ever to use nuclear weapons against another.

It has been more than six decades since President Harry S. Truman gave the order to drop "Fat Man" and "Little Boy" on the unsuspecting populous of two of Japan's major cities. Truman described the massacre as "a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth." That rain of ruin resulted in the instant incineration of at least 140,000 innocents in Hiroshima and well over 74,000 in Nagasaki. Those numbers do not take into account the thousands who died after 1945 of radiation-related illnesses.

Even so, today nuclear power is universally coveted and its proliferation has become a fact of life in the global community. The disastrous meltdown of Chernobyl seems all but forgotten only two short decades later. China, France, India and a host of other nations are all moving aggressively to build new nuclear power plants. Even Australia, once known for its no-nukes attitude, has decided it needs a "national conversation" about nuclear power.

The IAEA recently announced that it now expects global nuclear capacity to nearly double by 2030. All of this despite reams of data documenting the vulnerability of nuclear power plants to attack, a relentless series of catastrophic and near-catastrophic accidents, billions of wasted dollars, suspicious diseases and deformities in nuclear-infested neighborhoods and major questions regarding nuclear waste disposal and storage. Those same issues that once brought about a shift in public attitudes toward nuclear power - and with that shift a decline in political support - remain today. Yet this time around, the stony wall of silence and secrecy surrounding them seems all but inpenetrable.

The stakes are as high as they get, yet it seems the lesson taken from the nuclear experience has been the wrong one. Some 94 percent of the world's nuclear capacity is still in developed countries but that too is changing thanks in part to the "liberalization" of US trade laws. Of the new plants under construction, 18 are in Asia. India, Pakistan and China all have nuclear power plants and India recently announced that it wants to expand its capacity by a factor of 10 by 2022, and by a factor of 100 by 2052. China wants to expand by a factor of five or six within the next 15 years.

The World Nuclear Association (WNA) reports that the US has 104 reactors currently online, and that in France 59 reactors provide 78 percent of all electricity. There are some 55 reactors in Japan, 31 in Russia, 18 in Canada and 17 in Germany. Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and South Africa have two operating reactors each. And despite Israel's continued denials of any nuclear culpability, that country is widely believed to posses enormous nuclear capacity. More than 16 percent of the world's electricity comes from nuclear and the WNA reports 440 nuclear reactors in use around the world with dozens more being considered or under construction.

It is the 21st century and the window of opportunity, wide open decades ago, now threatens to slam shut. The international community can no longer afford to engage in industry-sponsored "non-debates" like the recent one on global warming that wasted so much valuable time, money and energy. With congressional support, the nuclear genie has been teased out of its bottle by the Bush Administration and its friends in the nuclear industry. In coming months, Americans will again be treated to nuclear "happy talk" about "new, improved versions" of nuclear power, that it is (again) the "safe, clean solution" to world energy shortages and global climate change.

But the genie isn't new or improved. It's the same old genie in a brand new bottle.

Don't buy it.