Tomgram: Chip Ward, The Nuclear Myth Melts Down

[TomDispatch Note and Book Recommendation: The world is exploding. TomDispatch can’t cover it all. Still, a comment is in order on our Libyan intervention. As a start, it could be the first intervention that actually escalated before it even began. It went from no-fly-zone to no-fly-no-drive-zone before a U.S. cruise missile was launched or a French jet took off. Within two days, it seemed to be escalating even further into a half-baked, regime-change(ish)-style operation. (As of Wednesday, 162 Tomahawk cruise missiles had already been sent Libya-wards, most of them from American vessels, at more than $1 million a pop.) To make the intervention even stranger, it was initially opposed by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon, and counterterrorism chief John O. Brennan, as well as many conservatives. Instead, the (not very) liberal warhawks of the administration -- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, National Security Council senior aide Samatha Powers, and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice -- were evidently in the lead on this one (along with various neocons in full hue and cry).

As on so many issues, where exactly the president was, other than blowing in the wind, remains unclear. Congress played no significant role -- neither advice nor consent -- in the decision. It now seems almost quaint, if not exceedingly retro, even to suggest that the people’s representatives have anything to do with American war-making. And it goes without saying that the people themselves, who seemed to be deeply unenthusiastic about a Libyan intervention before it happened according to the polls, were in no way consulted. Gates spoke of a “spirited debate” within the administration -- just nowhere else.

Think of this, then, as the “human rights” intervention. So far, it seems to be a remarkably seat-of-the-pants affair, suffused with the usual American faith in the efficacy of military power. As far as I can tell, Washington is relying for success on pure, dumb luck (and the vague possibility that, if the U.S. and allies whack his forces hard enough, Libyan monster Muammar Gaddafi’s officer corps could turn against him or their troops might defect to the rebels). Luck could hold, but what would follow remains bleakly unknown. Look for the no-[fill-in-the-blank]-zones to expand if Gaddafi hangs on, the rebels don’t advance fast enough, and desperation and confusion set in. In the meantime, the learning curve in Washington when it comes to interventions seems nonexistent. For the rest of us, that learning curve might improve if James Peck’s new book Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co-opted Human Rights was to be widely read. It’s a taboo-breaking look at the way in which, from the 1970s to late last night, successive administrations have exploited the human rights movement, turned it to Washington’s ends, and contained any impulses to define human rights ever more broadly. This is, unfortunately, a story decades old but as fresh as the Libyan intervention. I recommend the book strongly. Tom]

With the Fukushima nuclear complex still at the edge, the official response here is so bracingly... well, ho-hum. A top Nuclear Regulatory Commission official has just offered reassurance that nothing at Fukushima warrants “any immediate changes at U.S. nuclear plants.” As if to etch the point in cement, the day before the Japanese earthquake/tsunami, the NRC had issued a 20-year license renewal to the almost 40-year-old Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, the “near twin” of one in Fukushima (but storing staggeringly more “spent fuel” than that complex). The message: we'll keep tabs on those nuclear plants, but really, folks, not to worry, everything’s fine here.

What, I wonder, might it be worth keeping tabs on? Consider California’s Diablo Canyon power plant about 160 miles north of Los Angeles, which operated for a year and a half with some of its emergency systems disabled. Constructed in the neighborhood of the Hosgri and San Andreas Faults (as well as a nearby offshore fault discovered only in 2008), it has been upgraded to withstand a magnitude 7.5 earthquake. (Fukushima was designed to withstand a 7.9 quake.) The only problem, according to the latest research: the San Andreas Fault is capable of producing “a magnitude 8.1 earthquake that could run 340 miles from Monterey County to the Salton Sea” and that newly discovered offshore fault by Diablo Canyon, possibly a 7.7. Hmmm... and in case you think that the Japanese situation is unrepeatable here, the last magnitude 9.0 earthquake happened off the West coast, somewhere in the vicinity of Washington or Oregon, 311 years ago. The odds of another in the next 50 years has been estimated at one in three.

And then there’s my own neck of the woods: 35 miles from the heart of Manhattan Island in New York City is the U.S. nuclear plant most at risk of core damage in the case of an earthquake. That’s the Indian Point nuclear plant, which happens to have been built close to a “geological braid of fault lines” known as the Ramapo Fault. Its odds of experiencing an earthquake powerful enough to cause at least a partial core meltdown are, according to NRC calculations, 10,000 to 1 in any year. And keep in mind that, with almost 20 million people in Metropolitan New York City, the minimalist evacuation plans that exist, should a meltdown occur, are essentially “fantasy documents.” An Onion mock headline caught the spirit of this moment: “Nuclear Energy Activists Insist U.S. Reactors Completely Safe Unless Something Bad Happens.” With that in mind, consider the nuclear industry through the eyes of TomDispatch regular Chip Ward, a Utah environmentalist who has battled it for years. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Ward discusses the endless legacy of nuclear power, click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom

How the “Peaceful Atom” Became a Serial Killer

Nuclear Power Loses its Alibi

By Chip Ward When nuclear reactors blow, the first thing that melts down is the truth. Just as in the Chernobyl catastrophe almost 25 years ago when Soviet authorities denied the extent of radiation and downplayed the dire situation that was spiraling out of control, Japanese authorities spent the first week of the Fukushima crisis issuing conflicting and confusing reports. We were told that radiation levels were up, then down, then up, but nobody aside from those Japanese bureaucrats could verify the levels and few trusted their accuracy. The situation is under control, they told us, but workers are being evacuated. There is no danger of contamination, but stay inside and seal your doors.