Another Indicator That Bush's War on Terror is Bogus

Auditors find Security Upgrades at Several Nuclear Sites Are Lagging

More than six years after 9/11, more than a year outraged American citizens said "no!" to the Bush administration's approval of the Dubai Ports International deal, after billions of dollars have been spent toward securing America from another terrorist attack, our airports are no safer, nor are our railways, bridges, highways, dams, water or food supplies, chemical plants, nor our nuclear power plants. The NY Times reports:

More than a year after Congress told the Energy Department to harden the nation’s nuclear bomb factories and laboratories against terrorist raids, at least 5 of the 11 sites are certain to miss their deadlines, some by many years.

The Energy Department has put off security improvements at some sites that store plutonium because it plans to consolidate the material at central locations, but the Government Accountability Office said in a Senate briefing that that project was also likely to lag. A copy of the briefing materials was provided to The New York Times by a private group, the Project on Government Oversight, which has long been pushing for better security at the weapons sites.

Danielle Brian, the group’s executive director, said that although the deadline set by Congress was tight, if the Energy Department “had taken seriously consolidating and making this an expedited effort, they wouldn’t be having these problems now.”

Robert Alvarez, an adviser to the energy secretary in the Clinton administration, said there was wide agreement that centralizing the fuel was a good idea. But Mr. Alvarez added, “There’s a lot of pushback about moving fissile materials from a site, because then you lose a portion of your budget and prestige.”

The Energy Department declined requests for an interview, but Michael Kilpatrick, a deputy chief at the department’s Office of Health, Safety and Security, said in a statement that the steps under way were “further enhancements and better protection to some of the most secure facilities in the country.”

But Representative Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who has taken a particular interest in nuclear security, said in a statement, “The department seems to think that the terrorist threat to its nuclear facilities is no more serious than a Halloween prank, as evidenced by its failure — more than six years after the 9/11 attacks — to do what it must to keep our stores of nuclear-weapons-grade materials secure.” Mr. Markey said the delay was unsurprising but unacceptable.

One site that will miss its deadline by years is the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, which holds a large stock of weapons-usable uranium. The laboratory plans to dilute the uranium, but that will take until 2015, the auditors found.

Two other sites that will miss their deadlines are operated by the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is responsible for weapons security. The agency was established in 1999 after a number of security breaches in the weapons complex, and in January its director was forced to resign because of other security lapses.

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Energy Department changed its “design basis threat,” the description of the attacking force against which the weapons sites should prepare their defenses. The details of this design basis threat are classified, but the new definition specifies a larger and more capable group of attackers.

To emphasize the importance of the preparations, Congress wrote into law that the Energy Department sites should submit plans on how the department would meet the requirements. Recognizing that much of the department’s work runs far behind schedule, Congress specified that if a delay were necessary, it would have to be approved by the secretary or deputy secretary of energy.

An unclassified version of the Energy Department’s first report to Congress, in July 2006, said that more than $420 million had been spent in the previous three years in an “aggressive” program. Among the changes was giving security officers armored vehicles and large-caliber weapons. That change reduced “the need to hire more security officers to account for the expected attrition that would be a natural result of the increased adversary force.”

The department has rewritten its design basis threat several times. Mr. Kilpatrick said in his statement that all sites now met the 2003 version of the design basis threat and were working toward the current version, set in 2005.

The Energy Department told Congress in 2006 that six sites would meet the 2008 deadline. But the accountability office said that one of those, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, would not make the deadline.

The Energy Department said work at the five other sites would be completed later; those are the Nevada Test Site, the Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington State, the Idaho National Laboratory, the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Y-12, a weapons site in Tennessee.

The G.A.O. said in July that the Idaho National Laboratory would not be done until 2013, four years later than the Energy Department’s estimate.

Americans authorized Congress and this president to spend our fortune shoring up our vulnerabilities to acts of terrorism, only to see the money spent on a war that makes more enemies for us with each passing day. It's hard to believe that the Bush administration has any concerns about terrorism when its chief objective has been to transfer America's wealth to its corporate cronies.
After learning that Bush had been illegally wiretapping prior to 9/11/01 and

Bush's War on Terror: Gross Incompetence or Simply Fraud?

The Washington Post reports:

Undercover congressional investigators posing as West Virginia businessmen obtained a license with almost no scrutiny from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that enabled them to buy enough radioactive material from U.S. suppliers to build a "dirty bomb," a new government report says.

The investigators obtained the license within 28 days from officials at the NRC, the federal agency that in addition to regulating nuclear power plants oversees radioactive materials used in health care and industry, the report by the Government Accountability Office says. NRC officials approved the request with a minimal background check that included no face-to-face interview or visit to the purported company to ensure it existed and complied with safety rules, the report says.

Using a post-office box at Mail Boxes Etc., a telephone and a fax machine, the undercover investigators from the GAO obtained the license "without ever leaving their desks," the report says.

After counterfeiting copies of the license, the GAO undercover agents ordered portable moisture density gauges, which contain radioactive americium-241 and cesium-137 and are commonly used at construction sites to analyze the properties of soil, water and pavement. The investigators ordered 45 gauges -- enough to build a bomb with enough radioactive material to qualify as a level-3 threat on the International Atomic Energy Agency's scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being the most hazardous.

The GAO investigators never took possession of the radioactive material, in part because they lacked the means to handle it safely. But the report notes that, armed with an arsenal of phony licenses, they could have secured contracts to buy much more than they did -- enabling them to make an even more lethal bomb.

"We altered the license so that it appeared our bogus company could purchase an unrestricted quantity" of radioactive material, the report says. A dirty bomb is designed to use conventional explosives to cause immediate injury to people nearby but also to cause a long-lasting threat by contaminating a wider area with radioactive material.

The GAO undertook the sting operation at the request of Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), the top minority member of the Senate permanent subcommittee on investigations, which since 2003 has been examining security gaps at the NRC and other federal agencies that could leave the country vulnerable to biological or nuclear attack. The report is to be the subject of hearings today before the subcommittee .

The GAO study is the latest of several government reports following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to warn of serious security gaps in NRC licensing procedures. A year ago, undercover GAO officials successfully bought enough radioactive material abroad to make two dirty bombs and smuggled them into the United States at two points, one on the Canadian border and one on the border with Mexico.

"It was as easy to get his material as a DVD at Netflix," Coleman said of the most recent investigation. "If al-Qaeda had set up a phony corporation in the U.S., they could have gathered enough material to make a dirty bomb. The problem is that the NRC is still operating on a pre-9/11 mentality. It boggles my mind that the NRC doesn't readily understand the threat we face."

NRC commissioner Edward McGaffigan Jr. said in an interview yesterday that the agency, while concerned about any security weakness, has had to allocate finite resources to what it thinks are the biggest potential threats to public safety. He said terrorists have looked for relatively simple ways to cause massive death and damage. Devices such as the moisture gauges, he said, pose a relatively low-level risk because they require a vast amount of work to fashion into a dangerous weapon.

"My sole concern, our sole concern, has been the safety of the American people," he said.

After the GAO presented the NRC with the results of its undercover operation, NRC officials on June 1 ordered an immediate, temporary halt in new licenses to handle radiation risks of 3 or lower. The agency lifted the ban two weeks later after modifying its procedures to require either a face-to-face meeting or site visit, McGaffigan said. The NRC already requires site visits before issuing licenses to handle material with risk levels of 1 and 2.

McGaffigan, who is to testify on behalf of the NRC at the hearing, acknowledged that one serious hurdle remains. "We have to fix the problem of people taking our licenses and counterfeiting them," he said.

In a report in 2006 and again this year, the NRC's inspector general criticized NRC officials for failing to detect and understand security flaws in its licensing process.

Coleman and other critics say the NRC essentially has ignored warnings for years and has done too little to remedy problems that would make it easier for someone to make a dirty bomb. Coleman called the NRC's efforts since June 1 "baby steps" that are insufficient and particularly outrageous because the agency has taken so long to act despite having been warned of serious flaws for more than four years.

When GAO investigators briefed Coleman on the results of the most recent operation, they said they focused the sting on West Virginia in part to show how close to the nation's capital a terrorist could build a bomb. Such proximity would reduce the chance of detection during transport to a target, the GAO briefers said, according to Senate staff members who heard the briefing.

In addition, by operating from West Virginia, the GAO undercover investigators were required to deal directly with the NRC. That's because West Virginia is one of more than a dozen states, including Virginia and the District of Columbia, that don't have their own system for issuing licenses for the handling of radioactive material and monitoring those who apply for them.

During the sting operation, an NRC official speaking to one of the phony businessmen on the phone said the agency needed to speak to the man's boss. The GAO agent put him on hold for a minute or two, then picked up the call without disguising his voice but pretending to be his boss, according to people familiar with the GAO investigation. The NRC reviewer accepted the calls at face value.

By contrast, the GAO investigators failed to obtain a license in Maryland, which is one of 34 states that under agreement with the NRC conduct their own licensing. Maryland officials told the disguised GAO employees that state inspectors would have to visit their company and perform other checks, which would take at least seven months. At that point, the phony businessmen withdrew their application, the report says.

Is Nuclear Power The Solution To Climate Change?

Ever since Bush and Cheney took over government, they've taken the chains off of the nuclear industry, and put plans for building and certifying new nuclear power plants on fast track. If we ever were to get our hands on the notes from Dick Cheney's energy task force meetings, I'm sure that they would include a cunning public relations strategy just like the one Bush and Cheney created in the days leading up to the vote in Congress to go to war in Iraq. Only instead of the White House Iraq Group, this one is called WHEG (the "White House Energy Group") and is for conning Americans into believing that nuclear is the answer to all of our energy problems. "We'll be able to grow and develop (overpopulate, deforest, asphalt over) every square inch of the planet."

Nuclear energy is not the solution, and every few months I post articles from regional news organizations, about accidents and foul-ups within the industry, that don't get picked up by the national media.

Lately, as the pressure mounts to end Bush's fiasco in Iraq, the PR campaign for nuclear has picked up. 'Big Oil' has been hedging their bets and diversifying for a while now, evolving into 'Big Energy' with a big stake in 'going nuclear.' Like me and others, anti-nuclear activist and write Rebecca Solnit has been preparing for the day when the debate comes out from behind closed doors and onto the public stage in full daylight.

From Orion magazine, Rebecca Solnit writes, "Reasons not to glow . . . On Not Jumping Out of The Frying Pan Into The Eternal Fires":

Chances are good, gentle reader, that you are going to have to sit next to someone in the coming year who will assert that nuclear power is the solution to climate change. What will you tell them? There’s so much to say. You could be sitting next to someone who hasn’t really considered the evidence yet. Or you could be sitting next to scientist and Gaia theorist James Lovelock, a supporter of Environmentalists for Nuclear EnergyTM, which quotes him saying, “We have no time to experiment with visionary energy sources; civilisation is in imminent danger and has to use nuclear-the one safe, available, energy source-now or suffer the pain soon to be inflicted by our outraged planet.

“If you sit next to Lovelock, you might start by mentioning that half the farms in this country had windmills before Marie Curie figured out anything about radiation or Lise Meitner surmised that atoms could be split. Wind power is not visionary in the sense of experimental. Neither is solar, which is already widely used. Nor are nukes safe, and they take far too long to build to be considered readily available. Yet Stewart Brand, of Whole Earth Catalog fame, has jumped on the nuclear bandwagon, and so has Greenpeace founding member turned PR flack Patrick Moore. So you must be prepared.

Of course the first problem is that nuclear power is often nothing more than a way to avoid changing anything. A bicycle is a better answer to a Chevrolet Suburban than a Prius is, and so is a train, or your feet, or staying home, or a mix of all those things. Nuclear power plants, like coal-burning power plants, are about retaining the big infrastructure of centralized power production and, often, the habits of obscene consumption that rely on big power. But this may be too complicated to get into while your proradiation interlocutor suggests that letting a thousand nuclear power plants bloom would solve everything.

Instead, you may be able to derail the conversation by asking whether they’d like to have a nuclear power plant or waste repository in their backyard, which mostly they would rather not, though they’d happily have it in your backyard. This is why the populous regions of the eastern U.S. keep trying to dump their nuclear garbage in the less-populous regions of the West. My friend Chip Ward (from nuclear-waste-threatened Utah) reports, “To make a difference in global climate change, we would have to immediately build as many nuclear power plants as we already have in the U.S. (about 100) and at least as many as 2,000 worldwide.” Chip goes on to say that “Wall Street won’t invest in nuclear power because it is too risky. . . . The partial meltdown at Three Mile Island taught investment bankers how a two-billion-dollar investment can turn into a billion-dollar clean-up in under two hours.” So we, the people, would have to foot the bill.

Nuclear power proponents like to picture a bunch of clean plants humming away like beehives across the landscape. Yet when it comes to the mining of uranium, which mostly takes place on indigenous lands from northern Canada to central Australia, you need to picture fossil-fuel-intensive carbon-emitting vehicles, and lots of them-big disgusting diesel-belching ones. But that’s the least of it. The Navajo are fighting right now to prevent uranium mining from resuming on their land, which was severely contaminated by the postwar uranium boom of the 1940s and 1950s. The miners got lung cancer. The children in the area got birth defects and a 1,500 percent increase in ovarian and testicular cancer. And the slag heaps and contaminated pools that were left behind will be radioactive for millennia.

If these facts haven’t dissuaded this person sitting next to you, try telling him or her that most mined uranium-about 99.28 percent-is fairly low-radiation uranium-238, which is still a highly toxic heavy metal. To make nuclear fuel, the ore must be “enriched,” an energy-intensive process that increases the .72 percent of highly fissionable, highly radioactive U-235 up to 3 to 5 percent. As Chip points out, four dirty-coal-fired plants were operated in Kentucky just to operate two uranium enrichment plants. What’s left over is a huge quantity of U-238, known as depleted uranium, which the U.S. government classifies as low-level nuclear waste, except when it uses the stuff to make armoring and projectiles that are the source of so much contamination in Iraq from our first war there, and our second.

Reprocessing spent nuclear fuel was supposed to be one alternative to lots and lots of mining forever and forever. The biggest experiment in reprocessing was at Sellafield in Britain. In 2005, after decades of contamination and leaks and general spewing of horrible matter into the ocean, air, and land around the reprocessing plant, Sellafield was shut down because a bigger-than-usual leak of fuel dissolved in nitric acid-some tens of thousands of gallons-was discovered. It contained enough plutonium to make about twenty nuclear bombs. Gentle reader, this has always been one of the prime problems of nuclear energy: the same general processes that produce fuel for power can produce it for bombs. In India. Or Pakistan. Or Iran. The waste from nuclear plants is now the subject of much fretting about terrorists obtaining it for dirty bombs-and with a few hundred thousand tons of high-level waste in the form of spent fuel and a whole lot more low-level waste in the U.S. alone, there’s plenty to go around.

By now the facts should be on your side, but do ask how your neighbor feels about nuclear bombs, just to keep things lively.

The truth is, there may not be enough uranium out there to fuel two thousand more nuclear power plants worldwide. Besides, before a nuke plant goes online, a huge amount of fossil fuel must be expended just to build the thing. Still, the biggest stumbling block, where climate change is concerned, is that it takes a decade or more to construct a nuclear plant, even if the permitting process goes smoothly, which it often does not. So a bunch of nuclear power plants that go online in 2017 at the earliest are not even terribly relevant to turning around our carbon emissions in the next decade-which is the time frame we have before it’s too late.

If you’re not, at this point, chasing your poor formerly pronuclear companion down the hallway, mention that every stage of the nuclear fuel cycle is murderously filthy, imparting long-lasting contamination on an epic scale; that a certain degree of radioactive pollution is standard at each of these stages, but the accidents are now so many in number that they have to be factored in as part of the environmental cost; that the plants themselves generate lots of radioactive waste, which we still don’t know what to do with-because the stuff is deadly . . . anywhere . . . and almost forever. And no, tell them, this nuclear colonialism is not an acceptable sacrifice, since it is not one the power consumers themselves are making. It’s a sacrifice they’re imposing on people far away and others not yet born, a debt they’re racking up at the expense of people they will never meet.

Sure, you can say nuclear power is somewhat less carbon-intensive than burning fossil fuels for energy; beating your children to death with a club will prevent them from getting hit by a car. Ravaging the Earth by one irreparable means is not a sensible way to prevent it from being destroyed by another. There are alternatives. We should choose them and use them.

An antinuclear activist in Nevada from 1988 to 2002, Rebecca Solnit just put up a clothesline in the backyard and will get around to installing the solar panels any day now. National Book Critics Circle award-winner Solnit’s most recent book is Storming the Gates of Paradise.

Lately I've been thinking that those of us who see the inevitable danger to life on the planet from nuclear power might want to revolutionize our position by agreeing to the building of new plants on one condition: They must be built inside of the most valuable, desireable, prestigious gated communities in the nation (including St. Michaels, Maryland; Walker's Point in Kennebunkport; Teton Pines, Wyoming; Wall St., N.Y.C.; Crawford, Texas; Bel-Air, California).

No longer should the Cheneys and the Bushes be able to foist the polluting, life and health destroying machinery that is the source of their wealth and power on the rest of us. Let Barbara and Jenna Bush, and Elizabeth and Mary Cheney's children grow up next to the chemical and coal-fired plants that America's poor and middle class children have been living with. If they are so certain about the safety of this technology, they should be the canaries in their own mines.