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Obama Goes Nucular
by Paul McGoldrick
George W. Bush made much, frequently, of the need to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of the Iranian government. His pronunciation of “nucular” has grated many teeth over the years but it wasn’t until the 2006 State of the Union message when he talked of alternate energy sources where he promised “safe nucular energy” that we realized that it was the word itself, not just the weapons version, that caused him such difficulty in basic English.
We have been promised many things by the Obama administration, both during candidacy and sworn office. The assured closing of Gitmo is now overdue by three months; health care reform is stuck in a health insurance mode, with no apparent benefits to the majority of the American public – and certainly with no protection from the greedy self-regulated insurance industry; the stimulus bill has created/saved very few jobs, but has enriched the capital markets for steel and concrete; and bailing out Wall Street has resulted in no changes in the way that the financial institutions operate, with no care for small investors, home owners, the elderly, single parent families, or most other individuals.
The truth is that both the mainstream political parties owe their allegiance to the lobbyists – in which both health insurance companies and Wall Street figure prominently – and the financial thieves. Neither can afford to alienate the steady stream of dollars that these leeches take from the American public to line politicians' purses. For that matter, with ex-lobbyists and financial mavens in positions of power in the Obama administration...what else could we expect?
The case of Bernie Madoff, the gray-haired "respectable" member of the New York financial community, should be an eye-opener as to the credibility the market grants its own. Nine years before his sons exposed him (when he had run out of money), Bernie Madoff was declared a crook to the SEC by Harry Markopolos (No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller, 376 pp, published by John Wiley & Sons, March 2, 2010, ISBN 978-0470553732) but the SEC office responsible would not (could not?) take the allegations seriously. Markopolos became so terrified of Madoff’s sleazy connections with such as the Russian mafia that he started to carry a pistol, checked his car daily for explosives, changed his routines regularly, and even thought about killing Madoff.
What made Madoff do it? He was already filthy rich and there has never been a Ponzi scheme that has not come to a sudden end, eventually. Was it just fun, or was he pushed into it by those not so straight individuals? Certainly his willingness – or even anxious desire, for the extra measure of perceived safety? – to go to prison appears to speak multitudes.
While the Obama administration hides behind advisors whose motives have to be highly questionable, we have the additional specter of rapid decisions that lack scientific perspective, or at least decent time consideration. Energy Secretary and Nobel Laureate Steven Chu dismissed the notion of Yucca Mountain being considered as a repository for nuclear waste within a couple of months of taking office. This is hardly a period of time that one might think of as thoughtful to the topic; rather, it is more like that of a man who had already made up his mind before serving.
There is no doubt that many of us have considered that nuclear power generation must be part of the future energy mix for this planet. Yes, there are questions about waste, but we already have that problem. Yes, there are questions about safety, but we are perhaps a little more circumspect in this generation. There is a lot of wishful thinking about wind power, wave energy, and solar conversion, but none of those technologies – as we understand how to build them today – can provide more than just a sliver of our anticipated energy demands.
The first swing of the Obama administration is to guarantee $8 billion in funds for a new nuclear plant in Georgia. This is the only generator to be on a path towards being commissioned since the disaster at Three Mile Island in 1979.
France has built new nuclear plants in recent years, although they have not been without problems; and the UK has positively courted French technology in its own expansion of such power. Meanwhile, France, Japan, and India are working on “generation four” technology that would use lower-grade thorium as the radioactive ingredient.
Companies such as Westinghouse Electric and General Atomics (a division of General Dynamics) claim to have modularized future plant design so as to reduce build time from the twenty-five years previously experienced, down to four or five years from the time the foundation is laid. Gas cooling, instead of light water, will also produce useful external heat that can be employed in industrial applications such as oil refining, desalinization, and fertilizer production. The excess heat could also be used for efficient electric co-generation.
The DOE has been persuaded to guarantee $38.8 million for the development of small nuclear plants, and the US Government is now guaranteeing another $40 million to Westinghouse and General Atomics to develop next-generation plants. The results of that work will sway the DOE, one way or another, in how to proceed further.
There are safety risks inherent with just about all human activity, whether it be crossing the road, flying in airplanes, or even eating food that has been processed in ways we do not understand. It is highly likely that nuclear power will be well down the ladder for danger.
On the other side of the energy coin, it was extremely unfortunate that Obama was persuaded to use the terminology "clean coal" while he was campaigning for the presidency. The coal industry uses the term in a completely different way than do the rest of us: it is a descriptor for them of the cleanliness of the actual extraction process, whereas we common-or-garden people think of it in terms of returning that nasty carbon dioxide back into the ground. The jury is very much out on that possibility...although MIT, for example, has been working on its Carbon Capture and Sequestration Technologies Program to capture, use and store CO2 from stationary sources since 1989. Judging by the number of e-mails I receive daily from parties interested in perpetuating the alleged reality of sequestration, this is a full-time political football in play today and in future. But, just as a side thought...how many miners die or are badly injured in accidents every year? Presumably China holds the record?
My concerns about the Government aiding in nuclear development? General Dynamics does not exactly have a clean bill of health with regard to government contract abuses, and is there any real reason for us to assume that taxpayer money will also not be misused in nuclear plant development by its General Atomics division? Of even larger concern is that George Westinghouse’s great 1886 Westinghouse Electric is no longer a US company, having been bought by Toshiba in 2006. In the interim, the nuclear business was acquired by British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL), now a shell corporation looking after remaining pension obligations and decommissioning works. My late and badly missed colleague, Frank Goodenough, would have nothing to do with the Japanese and resolutely refused to write a single word on their behalf. My paranoia does not extend quite as far (although I have relatives buried in Changi, near the present international airport in Singapore; and others who disappeared in the forced marches to labor camps, such as those for the Burma Railway).
But even without Frank’s degree of paranoia, I still don’t want a foreign entity to be responsible for future power station design that is so controversial for everybody, especially when Toshiba’s Power Systems “Business Domain” appears to have experience only with boiling water reactors (BWRs) and pressurized water reactors (PWRs). Is the US inadvertently funding Japan’s future "nucular" programs, as well as our own?
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