Abstract
Stopped at the state line
From a quick scan of recent headlines, it might appear that South Carolina and Nevada are the first states to refuse Energy Department shipments of nuclear waste to their states without rational or reasonable plans. But Idaho was first back in 1986, when Idaho Gov. Cecil Andrus returned to the governor's chair after a decade of semi-retirement.
The problem of nuclear waste at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory had dogged him since his first term began in 1970. Now back in office, the problem had yet to be resolved. Energy promised it would eventually move the waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant it was building in Carlsbad, New Mexico. But while the waste piled up in Idaho, New Mexico residents fought to keep it there—out of their state. After returning from a visit to the Carlsbad waste site in 1988, Andrus announced to then-Energy Secretary John Herrington that Idaho was “off limits” to any more nuclear waste generated by federal agencies. The story made it to the front page of the New York Times and the court of public opinion, where Energy lost. Then the issue went to federal court, where it lost again. As a result, Energy was forced to study alternative sites and complete a full environmental impact statement of waste storage at the Idaho lab. And the waste shipments stopped. Perhaps taking their cue from Andrus, other states are trying to “just say no” to the Energy Department and to federal nuclear waste.
July 1996: Crews practice moving waste containers at New Mexico's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
Take Nevada. For years it's been fighting to block the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, where the federal government wants to store 77,000 tons of highly ra-dioactive waste from power plants in other states. (Nevada has no nuclear power plants of its own.)
Up until January 10, only preliminary work had been done at Yucca Mountain to determine if a facility were possible. That didn't stop the state from fighting. It set up a Web site to circulate information about Yucca Mountain, and Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn personally set up the multimillion dollar Nevada Protection Fund to fight what he called “the single greatest threat to the health and safety of the people of Nevada.” The state legislature kicked in the first $4 million.
When Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham announced that he was recommending the site to President Bush, Guinn took off the gloves. Now there was a bona fide federal project he could veto, which he did. Congress has 90 working days to reverse Guinn's April 8 veto with a simple majority; otherwise work would be permanently halted at the site. The House has already voted to override Nevada's veto; the Senate plans to take up the issue within the required period.
In the meantime, Nevada cut off the feds' supply of water at the Yucca Mountain site—in the desert, a sure-fire way to heat things up.
According to the April 10 Las Vegas Review, the temporary permits that had allowed Energy to withdraw 140 million gal-lons of water a year from five Nye County wells were granted specifically for the study. Now that the study period had ended, the feds had no more rights to the water, said the state.
When Energy's demands for permanent access to the water first started working their way through the courts in March, the department claimed it could continue work. It had stockpiled a substantial supply in anticipation of such a coup. But how long would it last? At first, the department said its 1.1 million gallon stash would last for months. But by March 27 it was telling a different story, claiming in court that the water would last only 18 days with normal use. So, Energy started conserving. It also devised plans to purchase potable water from opportunistic locals—at least until the state's Health Division told the vendors that their permits did not allow them to provide water to Yucca Mountain. The battle continues.
Across the country, South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges has his own war with the feds. His beef is over Energy's plans to ship 6 tons of plutonium from the former bomb plant at Rocky Flats, Colorado, to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. Hodges believes his state could become a permanent nuclear “dumping ground.” Not only has Hodges sued to keep the plutonium out, he's pledged to send out state troopers or lie down in the middle of the road to keep the trucks from entering his state.
In Brief
Although the manufacturers of DT-22 steel drums said their containers would probably not survive crash-testing, the Energy Department decided to use them to ship some of the plutonium it plans to truck along U.S. highways from Rocky Flats to South Carolina (Denver Post, May 6). Apparently, Energy unilaterally declared a “national security exemption” so it could use the DT-22s. But after public complaints and suggestions by experts that the “exemption was being incorrectly applied,” the department backed down in mid-May, agreeing to use only certified containers.
As the state of Nevada and concerned citizens raised money to fight the federal government's plan to store nuclear wastes at Yucca Mountain, Jerry's Nugget Casino in North Las Vegas did its part by offering a new drink, the “Yucca Mountain Meltdown,” a $2.50 blend of Curaçao, rum, and pineapple, served in a souvenir cup (Associated Press, April 12). The casino is donating a dollar to the Nevada Anti-Nuclear Waste Task Force for every drink sold.
While Nevada fought the Yucca Mountain waste repository, it was also considering issuing special fund-raising license plates featuring a mushroom cloud (Billings Gazette, April 27). The designer of the plates, Rick Bibbero, said it was Nevadans' broad-mindedness that made the state special: “You wouldn't find California trying to memorialize something like this,” he explained. On June 6, though, the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles nuked the design (Las Vegas Review-Journal, June 7.)
Clonaid, which defines itself as “the largest UFO-related, non-profit organization …working towards the first embassy to welcome people from space,” has never been shy about its desire to create the first human clone. In an April 24 press release, Clonaid declared that it is now ready to clone a new client, “Dracula,” which the organization describes as a man of “noble Germanic descent” who wants to “perpetuate his lineage.”
It turns out that the Australian Ministry of Defence has no more common sense than the U.S. Defense Department when it comes to conducting “training exercises” in or over populated areas. In May, an unsuspecting public in Sydney was treated to what looked like a terrorist attack when a U.S. EC-135E (which resembles a commercial jetliner) was chased to within 1,000 feet by an Australian jet fighter (Pacific Stars and Stripes, May 22). In response to public criticism, as well as protests in the Australian parliament, Graham Bentley, deputy chief of Australia's air force, offered an explanation that seemed to raise more questions than it answered—that the U.S. Air Force had wanted “a photo of where they were for historical purposes, and to record events that take place.”
Hundreds of Finnish women have signed an Internet petition vowing not to have any children for four years if their government goes ahead with a plan to build a fifth nuclear power plant (Reuters, April 5). Finland's population growth rate is already near zero.
Some months ago the editors of this magazine wondered how face-recognition technology—which works by using a numeric code to match a face in a crowd with a database of photos of known miscreants— could possibly identify terrorists whose pictures were unlikely to be on file. It turns out, though, that the technology may not be very good at identifying people whose pictures are in a database (Wired.com, May 16). In a month-long test at Palm Beach International Airport, Visionics “FaceIt” technology was expected to identify 15 employees, periodically picking them out from a database of only 250 photos— but it succeeded only 53 percent of the time. Meanwhile, in six months on the street in Ybor City, a high-traffic nightlife area in Tampa, the technology has failed to identify a single known criminal.
Greenpeace, angered by the nuclear-company sponsorship of France's expected entry in the America's Cup yacht races (nicknamed the “Atomic Warrior” by activists), put a considerable crimp in the French entry's inaugural voyage by running its own boat into the yacht at a marina in Lorient, in northwest France (Reuters, March 19). Greenpeace insisted the collision was an accident; French Greenpeace head Bruno Rebelle explained that his organization “only deal[s] in pacifist and non-violent confrontation.” The accident occurred, he said, because a smaller boat belonging to the French racing team rammed into the Greenpeace boat, sending it crashing into the yacht.
South Carolina filed suit in early May arguing that when Energy cancelled the facility where it was going to process the plutonium, it failed to develop a new plan or to conduct a new environmental impact statement. Energy originally planned to immobilize some of the plutonium in glass—a process called vitrification. Now it claims it will turn all of it into reactor fuel, which, if done at all, would take decades. South Carolina officials, according to the May 8 Augusta Chronicle, worry that the conversion will never be funded and the plutonium will be dumped in their state indefinitely.
April 22: Governor Hodges (left) and the highway patrol plan a drill to block plutonium shipments from entering South Carolina.
Energy claims that any delay will affect the 2006 deadline for the Rocky Flats cleanup, a scenario that has Colorado Sen.
Wayne Allard, a Republican, accusing Hodges of being motivated by politics, not the threat of nuclear disaster. In ads televised throughout South Carolina, Hodges is shown at a practice blockade readying state troopers for a federal nuclear-waste-truck invasion. Energy is calling foul, saying that Hodges paid for the $100,000, 30-second ad out of campaign funds. In the May 7 Las Vegas Sun, a spokesperson for the Energy Department said the shipments are a nonpartisan matter of national security, which should not be politicized.
All Hodges says he needs is a promise from the feds that the plutonium will eventually leave his state. So far, no agreement has been proffered by Energy—and everyone knows how much the Bush administration likes to put things in writing.
Would Gandhi have got the giggles?
FROM TIME TO TIME— especially on Hiroshima Day but on a few other days as well—the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance (OREPA) has held a non-violent protest at the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a facility where at least some components for every bomb in the U.S. nuclear arsenal were produced. (OREPA also holds a “peace vigil” outside the gates of the multibuilding plant complex every Sunday evening.)
During OREPA's periodic protests, a few demonstrators will sometimes step onto plant property. Once they have “crossed the line,” they are quickly arrested and carted off to jail. After paying the traditional $50 fine assessed by the city for trespassing, they have been released.
Until this year. This spring, OREPA appears to have miscalculated about that $50 fine by trumpeting in its newsletter that “the price of acting on your conscience has never been lower.”
That claim (and perhaps the publicity nuclear protests have received due to the participation of perennial protester and actor Martin Sheen, a.k.a. President Bartlet on the smash-hit TV show The West Wing), led Bill Brumley of the National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) office in Oak Ridge to declare that OREPA's non-violent demonstrations were following “a pattern of escalating aggressiveness.”
Some of the demonstrators on April 14.
In response, the NNSA (formerly known as the nuclear weapons complex) decided to escalate the fines, too, ordering that protesters arrested at an April 14 demonstration be charged with federal offenses. And unlike the measly local charge of $50, federal trespassing charges carry a maximum sentence of a year in jail, with fines up to $100,000.
A hearing is scheduled for late June to determine the fate of four April 14 trespassers.
There can certainly be no doubt about their guilt—but at the same time, it would be a shame if the NNSA's Brumley were not required to explain what he means by aggressive non-violence.
Admittedly, OREPA does offer advice, if not instructions, to participating demonstrators. Consider this incendiary suggestion, issued on April 13:
“We will have a float this year for those who are unable to march the mile to the gates [of the plant]. Please contact us and let us know if you will need a ride.”
And how about this bit of pre-planning for mayhem? “Come prepared. Please bring bag lunch, water, and clothes for all weather—it could rain.”
Victor Weisskopf
Victor Weisskopf, a noted Manhattan Project scientist and a founding sponsor of the Bulletin, died in April at age 93.
Born in Vienna in 1908, he studied physics in prewar Europe at the University of Göttingen, and did postgraduate work at Copenhagen, Cambridge, Berlin, and Zurich, where he worked with many of the founding fathers of modern physics, includin Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Niels Bohr, and Wolfgang Pauli. In his early theoretical work he advanced quantum electrodynamics, formulating what was later called the “renormal ization method” of resolving the conflict between theory and observed reality.
After the war Weisskopf became a professor at the Massachusetts Insti tute of Technology. From 1961 to 1965 he also served in Switzerland as the head of CERN—the European Center for Nuclear Research. His postwar work on a model of the phenomenon of nuclear resonance has not been superceded.
Weisskopf actively promoted arms control measures, both in his sponsorship of and his many contributions to the Bulletin and in his writings for other publications on the subject of international nuclear control and disarmament. He participated in the Pugwash conferences beginning with the first meeting in July 1957.
Victor Weisskopf.
On the Bulletin's fortieth anniversary, in an article titled “Looking Back on Los Alamos,” Weisskopf argued that the scientists who developed the bomb had a continuing obligation to work to prevent its possible use:
“Because the bomb exists we have had no war between great powers for 40 years—an unusually long period. But the great powers have found only one way to sustain this state of affairs—to deplo more and ‘better’ bombs, and more efficient means for their delivery. A few useful but half-hearted steps have been made to stabilize this precarious situation, such as the atmospheric test ban and the ABM Treaty. But even these small steps may soon be modified and weakened, instead of being strengthened and enlarged….
“Today [we have] the craziest arms race in history, where each side has more than 50 times what is needed to destroy all of us, knowing full well— and this is the difference from all previous armament races—that any actual use of those weapons means the annihilation of both sides.
“The U.S. government …has tried to placate the fears of the public by proposing some futuristic space technology intended to protect us from annihilation; but it could at best be achieved, if at all, only after several decades of continuing madness and increasing danger. In the meantime the project will escalate the arms race and extend it into space.
“All of this is the outcome of our work, of our brainchild, of our achievements: ‘How well we meant.’ Can we celebrate our successes and remain silent about the consequences?”•
Coming soon in the Bulletin
Don't miss the special November/December issue, which will take a look at the effect of refugee flows and mass migration on international security—today and tomorrow.