Abstract
Fixing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
“The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is the federal agency primarily responsible for establishing and enforcing safety regulations for nuclear power. It does the former well. It does the latter poorly. The Union of Concerned Scientists has monitored nuclear power safety issues since the early 1970s. We have seldom argued that the NRC needed to raise its safety standards. Instead, we have almost always contended the safety bar provided appropriate management of risk, but that one or more nuclear plants was doing the limbo beneath it. Most of our efforts have been directed at getting the NRC to enforce regulations already on the books.”
–david lochbaum
Home/Roundtables
The Expanding Range of Biowarfare Threats
“Increased interest in incapacitating biological and chemical weapons will generate pressures that lead to the use and pro-iferation of such weapons that are deemed “good enough.” In other words, if and when “success” comes in developing these weapons, it may be due more to a redefinition of acceptability than to advances in science and technology. Then, the institutionalization, conventionalization, and marketization of the new chemical weapons (whereby they become more like small arms sold in the global market than like strategic weapons held by a restricted number of states) may well lead to an ever-expanding definition of acceptability, ever-broader range of uses, and a more powerful array of new and improved agents.”
-ALAN PEARSON
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The True Cost of U.S. Defense Spending
“It's increasingly clear that Defense Department leadership and the armed services have moved into a totally unconstrained view of military spending. They refuse to make choices or set priorities, maintaining that they need it all and then some. Nor do they offer strategic justification for such a historically unprecedented level of defense spending. Already for fiscal year 2009, the services have announced that they don't think the $710 billion defense budget they want from Congress is enough–despite the fact that this is more than double the fiscal year 2002 defense budget. The service chiefs have identified for Congress another $28.5 billion worth of programs and fund-ng they would love to be given.”
-GORDON ADAMS
PLUS:
GREG MELLO
While prominent members of the U.S. policy community publicly call for disarmament, Los Alamos National Laboratory continues to quietly pursue the infrastructure necessary to build the next generation of nuclear weapons.
DANIEL M. KAMMEN
California's low-carbon fuel standard demonstrates to the rest of the world how markets can lead the way toward cleaner fuels.
WYN Q. BOWEN and MICHAEL S.GOODMAN
The recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran suggests that the best way to curtail Tehran's nuclear pursuits is to address its political motives.
MALCOLM DAN DO
The key to preventing the misuse of biological research is making scientists aware of the risks, and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences is doing just that.
FIONA SIMPSON
Israeli intelligence supported an attack on a Syrian desert location, but the IAEA would have needed better information to investigate the site's activities.