[Peace-discuss] Obama & the nuclear industry

[C. G. ESTABROOK]

DECEMBER 15, 2011
8
Waste of Shame
The Plot to Oust America’s Nuclear Watchdog
by ANDREW COCKBURN
In what may well be a temporary aberration, the Obama Administration  
appears to be sticking by Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman  
Gregory Jaczko, even though the nuclear industry most definitely wants  
him out.  The current assault on Jaczko has come in the form of a  
“confidential” letter from Jaczko’s four fellow commissioners sent in  
October  to White House Chief of Staff William Daley complaining that  
the NRC Chairman pays scant attention to their views and generally  
runs the Commission as a one man show.  Should the attack succeed, the  
new Chairman will most likely be William Magwood, long a tireless  
promoter of nuclear power as Director of the Department of Energy’s  
(DOE) Office of Nuclear Energy where he promoted the Global Nuclear  
Energy Partnership, a program to restart reprocessing of nuclear waste.

Obama himself has had a long and unpleasing record of engagement with  
the nuclear industry, notably the Exelon Corporation, which has been  
making generous provision to Obama’s campaign chest ever since his  
days in the Illinois Senate, where he performed various useful  
services on the corporation’s behalf.  It should therefore have come  
as no surprise that when a vacancy arose on the NRC board early in his  
administration, Obama nominated Magwood.

The nomination was opposed by over a hundred organizations which  
vainly cited Magwood’s shameful record as a tout for the industry he  
was now supposed to regulate.  Once installed early in 2010, he showed  
every sign of a zealous commitment to advancing the priorities of the  
nuclear power industry.

Back in those happy pre-Fukushima days, the future appeared bright for  
nuclear power . The public obloquy that followed Three Mile Island,  
condemning the industry to years of stagnation, was at last  
dissipating, thanks to artful invocation of the specter of global  
warming and concurrent recasting of nuclear power as a “clean” energy  
source and toast of the environmental movement.

One problem remained: longterm disposal of high level nuclear waste.   
In 1987 it had seemed that this particular issue had been settled with  
the passage in Congress of the “Screw Nevada” bill nominating Yucca  
Mountain, 80 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as the sole suitable site  
that could be considered for the permanent interment of 72,000 tons of  
lethal waste currently stored at reactors around the country.  The  
selection had little scientific validity, given that the site marks  
the juncture of two seismic fault lines and in any case is  
volcanically active and composed of porous rock, through which flows  
drinking water for one of Nevada’s most important farming areas, as  
well as an Indian reservation.  The mountain is also sacred to the  
Western Shoshone people.

Opposing the infamous bill was freshman Senator Harry Reid.  Outraged  
and humiliated by the way that legislators from Washington state and  
Texas, the two other nominees for a waste site, had effectively  
consigned Nevada to be the radioactive trash dump, Reid, a former  
amateur boxer, remarked that “sometimes you have to go round the back  
of the bar” to finish a fight.

In ensuing years, as the construction crews tunneled away into the  
depths of the mountain, Reid took several initiatives to ensure that  
Yucca Mountain never opened for business.  First, he advanced through  
the Democratic leadership to become Majority Leader in 2006.  Second,  
he maneuvered successfully to move Nevada’s Democratic caucuses to  
January, thus rendering them potentially crucial in the nomination  
race.  This had the natural consequence of generating fervent pledges  
from Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton in 2008 that, so long as there  
was breath in their bodies, Yucca Mountain would never hold nuclear  
waste.  Thirdly, Reid recruited as his appropriations director and  
science policy adviser Gregory Jaczko, a former aide to  veteran anti- 
nuke congressman Ed Markey.  Fourth, he induced George W. Bush in  
2005, to nominate Jaczko as a Commissioner to the NRC in exchange for  
dropping Democratic opposition to a number of federal judgeships.   
Following Obama’s presidential victory, Reid demanded and secured  
Jaczko’s appointment as Chairman of the NRC.

Once at the helm, Jaczko moved with commendable dispatch to shut down  
Yucca Mountain once and for all even while fellow commissioners   
echoed the nuclear industry in pushing for a mere suspension of the  
project.  Then came the Fukushima disaster. As the reactor buildings   
exploded and US military radiation monitors in Japan ticked  
remorselessly upwards, the US government began to panic.  “I’ve lived  
through many crises in the decades I’ve been in government,” one  
national security official intimately involved in the Fukushima  
response told me, “but this was the most frightening week of my  
professional life, by far.  We thought we were going to lose half of  
Japan.”

While the Japanese government reacted to the catastrophe with criminal  
quiescence – enjoining evacuation merely from an area within 12 miles  
of the plant – Jaczko took more decisive action, telling Americans  
within 50 miles to move out. This was anathema to the industry, a  
sentiment emphatically  mirrored in the four commissioners’ letter of  
complaint to the White House.  Further initiatives irksome to Magwood  
and the others included a push to enjoin additional safety measures on  
US reactor operators in light of Fukushima.

“He’s not ‘our guy’ by any means, he has voted to re-license plants  
that should probably be shut down” says Kevin Kamps of Beyond  
Nuclear.  “But he does care about safety, in ways that the others do  
not.”

So far at least, the White House, conscious no doubt of Nevada’s  
electoral votes, is backing Jaczko.  But, even while Jaczko confronts  
his assailants, a Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future  
has been chewing on the problem of what to do with the radioactive  
waste filling up pools at reactors around the U.S..  Headed by that  
perennial placeman, former congressman Lee Hamilton, the commissioners  
include Obama’s old pal, Exelon CEO John Rowe, who, as Beyond  
Nuclear’s Kamps points out, “has created more nuclear waste than  
anyone else in America.”

Senator Reid’s work may not yet be done.

ANDREW COCKBURN is the co-producer of the feature documentary on the  
financial catastrophe American Casino.  He is a contributor to  
Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, forthcoming from  
AK Press.
He can be reached at amcockburn at gmail.com


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