Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: mini-nukes

  • The Folly of Yucca Mountain

    Have we lost our senses? The Bush administration is trying to steamroll establishment of Yucca Mountain as the country’s nuclear waste dump, while planning to build more “mini-nukes” and threatening to use our nuclear weapons against a handful of nations and in situations where they were previously off-limits. In this case, not only is Bush threatening to destroy life in the countries named in the Nuclear Posture Review, but he’s willing to sacrifice his own nation in order to kept the nuclear industry afloat.

    Yucca Mountain was not chosen to be the nation’s nuclear repository based on “sound science” as those in the Bush administration would have us believe, but it had been singled out almost 20 years ago based on political vulnerability – the small congressional delegation of Nevada is no match for the nuclear industry lobby and their friends in Congress. The state of Nevada does not even have a nuclear reactor, so why should it be the dump for the rest of the nation’s spent nuclear fuel? In fact, sound science shows us that Yucca Mountain is the one place studied so thoroughly that the Department of Energy (DOE) knows that it will leak. The Nuclear Waste technical Review Board described the DOE’s science at the site as “moderate to weak,” and the General Accounting Office (the independent investigative arm of Congress) found that 293 scientific issues still need to be resolved before the site should even be considered as a waste dump.

    Yucca Mountain is very seismically active, with over 600 earthquakes occurring in the last 25 years, including one that did over a million dollars’ worth of damage to the DOE’s own testing facilities. An even more interesting geological feature of the site is that a line of lava cones extends westward from Yucca Mountain, the youngest of which lies closest to the mountain, suggesting a magma pocket underneath. Global positioning satellites which track the movement of the earth’s crust note that the crust at Yucca is expanding and moving steadily westward. The earliest analyses of the site show that water flows very quickly through the mountain. Recent analysis of abundant crystals in the mountain found they were formed by hot water welling up into the mountain from below. This presents the possibility of a catastrophic explosion caused by steam, chemical interaction or a chain reaction, much like what would happen in a core meltdown of a nuclear reactor.

    Then there are the problems of transportation. The waste must be stored in dry casks and then placed on trains, trucks, and barges to begin their slow, dangerous journey from the nation’s 103 nuclear reactors to Yucca Mountain, at least 6 shipments a day for 30 years or more. The planned routes pass within miles of over 50,000,000 people, passing through large cities such as Chicago, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., and countless smaller cities including Santa Barbara. The potential for a catastrophic accident is enormous, as these slow-moving shipments are basically sitting ducks for any would-be terrorist, not to mention the risk involving road accidents. However, the nuclear industry needs it that way, because as soon as the spent fuel moves off the reactor site, all responsibility shifts to the taxpayer, thanks to the Price-Anderson Act, which limits the industry’s liability in case of an accident even when it occurs on reactor property.

    The shocking proposal to establish Yucca Mountain has been vetoed by Nevada Governor Kenny Guinn, throwing the ball back to Congress to override the veto and create the nation’s first nuclear repository. A bill has already been introduced to establish the repository, and will be voted on within 90 days. These next few months are crucial, so please write a letter to your senators and representative and urge them to vote against this extremely dangerous plan.
    Senator Barbara Boxer
    112 Hart Senate Office Building
    Washington, D.C. 20510-0505
    Tel.: (202) 224-3553
    Fax: (415) 956-6701
    Environment and Public Works

    Senator Dianne Feinstein
    331 Hart Senate Office Building
    Washington, D.C. 20510-0504
    Tel.: (202) 224-3841
    Fax: (202) 228-3954
    Energy and Natural Resources Committee

    Representative Lois Capps
    1118 Longworth House Office Building
    Washington, D.C. 20515-0522
    Tel.: (202) 225-3601
    Fax: (202) 225-5632
    Energy and Commerce Committee

    If your representative is not listed here, please visit www.congress.org for contact info.

    This article was written with the help of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, http://www.nirs.org

  • The Return of the Undead

    On March 9 and 10, the Los Angeles Times published some of the classified portions of the US Nuclear Posture Review presented to Congress on January 8. The two most important revelations from this document were: American plans for the possible use of nuclear weapons against a list of seven potential adversaries in the event of military conflict, and, closely related, proposals for the development of a new class of smaller nuclear weapons that would be “useable” against military targets with minimum civilian “collateral damage”.

    The notion of “useable” nuclear weapons is not recent, but like the Undead in an Anne Rice novel, just keeps resurfacing each generation when everyone thought it discredited. In the ’50’s and ’60’s, it was “battlefield” nuclear weapons. Two problems, their guidance systems were imprecise and they weren’t small enough to avoid getting your own guys.

    Then in the ’70’s there was the so-called “neutron bomb” (actually a mini – H-bomb), which NATO was going to deploy until forced to stop by public opinion (primarily German, this battle put the Green Party there on the map).

    Under Reagan, it was “escalation dominance”, in which “tactical” nukes were part of an overall strategy of strategic nuclear warfighting. Reagan’s confident public pronouncements that the US could “prevail” in a nuclear war gave birth to a massive new peace movement (those were the days when we got 100, 000 marching across the Burrard bridge).

    The point is that the twin notions of first – use and nuclear warfighting have been part of US doctrine since the beginning of the nuclear age (the Pentagon’s own documents now declassified in the National Security Archive prove this beyond any doubt).

    After the Cold War ended, most analysts assumed (especially given such dramatic battle proven advances in “smart” conventional weapons) that Clinton would move away from existing nuclear doctrine and abandon reliance on nuclear weapons. But after the fiasco over policy about gays in the military, and Clinton’s inability to keep his pants zipped, he never again took on the military on any issue and nuclear policy treaded water for eight years.

    Now the old gang is back, every retread from the Reagan, the Ford, and yea, even the Nixon Administration, and they are nuclear True Believers one and all. They’ve been certain that nuclear weapons are an essential political as well as military currency for the US since they were weaned.

    Ominously, this time around the technology will soon catch up with the concept, and, with a bit more testing, real nuclear warfighting will become “feasible” to the sort of people who populate the Bush Administration. So goodbye to the dream of nuclear disarmament, and hello to the ghost of General Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during much of the ’50’s and early’60’s. He once said to a reporter re: the Middle East and Vietnam that the President should “just nuke the gooks and ragheads”, and during the Cuban Missile Crisis he’s on tape as virtually calling Kennedy a coward to his face for not invading Cuba (which we now know would have triggered nuclear use). The Undead have returned to Washington once more, and are clearly in charge again.
    *Michael D. Wallace is Professor of Political Science and Faculty Fellow at the Simons Centre for Peace and Disarmament at the University of British Columbia.