HANFORD JUST KEEPS ON MOVING TO THE RIVER

I PROMISE NOT TO PUBLISH MORE THAN ONE STORY A MONTH ABOUT THE RADIOACTIVE DISASTER LOOMING AT HANFORD, BUT IT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT IGNORED REAL NEWS WE HAVE, EVEN MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE CORRUPTION WHICH APPARENTLY HAS ENGULFED THE FAA. ANOTHER BUSH TRIUMPH. NO DOUBT KEEPING NORMAN MINETTA, A CLINTON HOLDOVER LOVED BY THE AIRLINES CONTRIBUTED. HE WAS BRAINDEAD ON ARRIVAL AND HIS SUCCESSORS APPARENTLY HAVE SIMILAR QUALIFICATIONS.

Nuclear crossroads

WESTERN ROUNDUP - April 28, 2008 by Marty Durlin

Workers at Hanford’s Cold Test Facility use this 1 million-gallon single-shelled storage tank to test equipment that will be used to clean up Hanford’s buried waste tanks. PAUL JOSEPH BROWN/SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER

In Washington state, a 1-million-gallon plume of radioactive waste is seeping from Hanford Nuclear Reserve toward the Columbia River. But in Washington, D.C., Dennis Spurgeon foresees a rosy future for the Department of Energy’s nuclear program.

Last November, Spurgeon, assistant secretary for nuclear energy, assured the congressional Committee on Energy and Natural Resources that the program will "promote a significant, wide-scale use of nuclear energy in a safe and secure manner ... while decreasing the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation and effectively addressing the challenge of nuclear waste disposal."

It’s been three decades since a nuclear power plant has been built in the United States. Now, under the 2005 Energy Policy Act, the Energy Department is working hard to lure new proposals, adding billions in tax breaks and "cost overrun guarantees" and streamlining its licensing process with four ready-to-use designs, early site permits and a combined construction permit and operating license. The 104 nuclear power plants currently in the U.S. generate about 20 percent of the nation’s electricity. Some Energy Department plans call for as many as 50 new nuclear plants by 2020, producing 50,000 megawatts. Twenty-two applications are currently on file with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, including proposals for plants in Utah and Idaho. Nuclear weapon development is ramping up as well, with a budget next year of $6.6 billion.

At $25 billion, the 2009 DOE’s budget request is $5 billion more than 2008. Meanwhile, the cleanup budget has plummeted for the fifth year in a row, dropping $1 billion in just the past three years, according to Jane Hedges, Washington state’s nuclear waste program manager. "We thought that was telling," she says.

The cuts have left many Western sites, including Hanford and the Idaho National Laboratory, facing setbacks in the dangerous and complicated mop-up of this country’s nuclear messes. Washington state has even threatened to sue the DOE for failing to meet the terms of the Hanford cleanup agreement.

Now considered the most contaminated site in the nation, Hanford - established in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project - produced plutonium for nuclear weapons for more than 40 years. The 586-square-mile property in southeastern Washington once hosted nine nuclear reactors, five chemical separation plants and hundreds of support facilities. By 1987, all of the reactors were closed except the Columbia Generating Station, the only commercial nuclear power plant in the Northwest.

The site has more than 170 massive underground steel tanks filled with acids, solvents and heavy metals, including the radioactive elements plutonium, cesium, strontium and uranium. Some 140 of the tanks are single-walled, 40 to 60 years old and "unfit for use." The original agreement called for the tanks to be cleaned out within several decades, says Hedges. But at current funding levels, with an $8 billion cleanup budget shortfall over 10 years, it will take more than a century to empty them.

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On top of the 53 million gallons of tank waste, untold amounts of radioactive and hazardous waste languish in unlined landfills, along with 450 billion gallons of liquid waste in ponds, ditches and drain fields. The site has already contaminated 200 square miles of groundwater.

A state away, failing tanks at the Idaho National Laboratory are leaking radioactive waste generated from nuclear weapons production into the groundwater. Chromium, tritium and other contaminants have already been detected in the Snake River Plain aquifer, sole drinking water source for more than 300,000 residents of eastern Idaho.

Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, fears budget shortfalls will only make things worse, leading to spills of PCBs, uranium, plutonium and hazardous chemicals, and preventing necessary equipment maintenance. Simpson, with about two dozen House colleagues, is part of the Nuclear Cleanup Caucus initiated by Doc Hastings, R-Wash., in the mid-1990s. The bipartisan group and its Senate counterpart are currently stumping for more cleanup money.

Meanwhile, permit changes at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico have postponed shipments from Idaho and added to costs. And one long-planned "solution" to the problem, the proposed Yucca Mountain repository 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is beset with legal, logistic and budgetary challenges. It will not open for at least another decade, if ever.

But nuclear advocates, including some prominent enviros, believe the waste issue is solvable. "It is incorrect to call it waste," writes former Greenpeace activist Patrick Moore, now a nuclear industry spokesman, "because 95 percent of the potential energy is still contained in the used fuel after the first cycle. Now that the United States has removed the ban on recycling used fuel, it will be possible to use that energy and to greatly reduce the amount of waste that needs treatment and disposal."

Reprocessing produces waste that is intensely radioactive, toxic, thermally hot and difficult to contain, counters Susan Gordon, director of the Santa Fe, N.M.-based Alliance for Nuclear Accountability. And, she says, costs keep rising; this year, DOE estimated cleanup costs at $225 billion, $100 billion more than last year. Sites that were to be completed by 2035 are now delayed to 2040 or even decades later, she adds, and some sites where cleanup is in progress (including Sandia and Los Alamos in New Mexico) are also gearing up to produce a new generation of nuclear weapons.

"As a result, cleanup becomes an ever more expensive, never-ending activity," says Gordon. "Despite years of trying to come up with a solution to high-level waste, at huge cost to taxpayers, nothing has been disposed of."

The author is HCN’s online editor.

ALMOST TWINS

http://www.economist.com/media/pdf/FullPollData.pdf)

A poll conducted by the Economist Magazine of American and British opinion on government and politics reveals a very close alignment of views. While I do not pay a lot of attention to polling, one significant difference that shows up in this poll is a difference of attitude toward religion and sex. While most respondents claim to be all right with their their children marrying out of their tradition and ethnicity, there is a substantially larger number of Americans who assert a belief in God and afterlife and a similar plurality of Americans who believe premarital sex wrong. On abortion however, there are no differences, the great majority in both countries supporting its availability in one form or another.
Overall, there are remarkable similarities toward government and politics in both countries -- negative. There is a surprisingly strong support for continuing involvement in Iraq and especially in Afghanistan, although a soft majority are for withdrawing by the end of 2009, which is a lifetime in politics.
Worth a look.

WANTED: A NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY

Undoubtedly you will have noticed there has not been much talk in recent years about the U.S. being the "sole superpower". The heady days when we illegally bombed Yugoslavia into submission, saving threatened minorities from murder are forgotten. Americans do not want to be reminded of their global burdens as the dollar is racing to the bottom. But we remain the global superpower and the only guarantor of the most remarkable period of economic growth in human history. None of the institutions we helped create are any longer contributing much. The U.N. is corrupt and feeble, the way the Powers want it to be. The World Bank and the I.M.F. have been outrun. There is and will be no consensus on their reform.
How we manage our return to relative equality with other, emerging great powers will largely determine whether we continue to prosper and the world continues to integrate. Obviously we cannot determine the process. It is natural that our power will decline relative to other nations as global wealth continues to grow. If you see this as the U.S. becoming weaker, you will draw one set of conclusions. If you see this as a natural and positive development, then you will draw another set of conclusions. One thing is certain: the arrangements that were established in the 1950s are definitively dead.
China was a third world country when it was established as a Great Power at the insistence of President Roosevelt in 1944. Today it is emerging as a global powerhouse. It is governed by a ruthless dictatorship opposed by a very significant minority of its people. We accept this and we should. We do not have to approve its suppression of Tibet and other minorities but it is in our interest to encourage economic development and hopefully political change in China.
But China is not alone. India, Korea and Pakistan have nuclear weapons. Japan could have them in five minutes. Until recently the vast power of the U.S. trumped most of the regional tensions and rivalries. This is not going to continue. The U.S. has very good relations with Japan and is developing ties with India. Korea is volatile and its northern dictatorship is teetering. Taiwan is struggling to figure out how to live with China without being absorbed. We do not want a war with China, but would we aid Taiwan if it is attacked? It could happen. What will happen if there is serious disorder in China? What if there is a real uprising in Tibet and other parts of Western China? Would the ruling cliques bang the drums of nationalism and attempt to seize Taiwan and Hong Kong? What will the United States do? I do not think we know. We have been locked in place for more than sixty years as the Sole Superpower.
In the last few years the U.S, has begun to change its military relationships with Japan and Korea. We are slowly, too slowly, withdrawing forces from South Korea, Okinawa and other parts of Japan and constructing a new base of operations in Guam. This is a development of great significance. At the same time our national defense strategy continues to be based on the technologies which brought us total victory in WW2. We continue to rely on the carrier groups and flights of planes to project power. The nuclear carriers we use to terrorize third world countries have never been challenged or threatened.
Nuclear carriers groups are huge targets. The Russians could never compete with us. Instead they spent a lot of effort in developing weapons to attack ours. These missile systems have been sold on to the Chinese and the Iranians. I am attaching a piece by Martin Sieff, a defense analyst, which raises significant questions about the vulnerability of carriers which were invented almost a century ago! You may recall that Admiral Rickover, the creator of the nuclear navy, aroused the ire of his bosses when he openly called for scrapping carriers as obsolescent technology -- almost four decades ago. Carriers continue to get bigger.
The article below is the fifth and final piece of a series. Those who are interested, Google Martin Sieff and read the others.
There is no question that the U.S. is the predominant military power. We should continue to be a naval power of the first rank as we were in fact even before we were the United States. Whether we have the correct configuration of naval forces to assure that is an open question.
The navy loves carriers, the Pentagon loves the Navy, and the Congress is their pimp. The development of a new national security doctrine is imperative. This doctrine will identify the forces we require and the weapons systems we need to fund and develop. The Soviet Union has been gone for almost two decades. We have not addressed the consequences of this extraordinary development. The way we have engaged in Iraq is one consequence of our failure to adjust.
I am devoted to being provocative and thoughtful. We know that an overhaul is required. Our governance is deplorable. Some of it is due to this Administration -- Iraq obviously, foreign policy generally -- some of it is deeper, structural, involving tax policy and the concentration of power in Washington and legal bureaucracies that proliferate like May flies. Some of it we may fix, some will be with us like the Roman dole to the very end.
Read the attached piece by Martin Sieff, Google him for the first four which are worth twenty minutes of your time.
Please ask your friends and others to read this if you think its worthy. And share your thoughts, friendly, disagreeable, whatever they are.

Defense Focus: Carrier strategy -- Part 5

Published: April 1, 2008 at 11:08 AM

By MARTIN SIEFF
UPI Senior News Analyst
WASHINGTON, April 1 (UPI) -- Russian and Chinese naval weapons designers know they lack the resources and the technology to match the awesome power of U.S. aircraft carrier battle groups ship for ship and plane for plane. So instead, for decades, they have opted for asymmetrical solutions to the problem of killing U.S. super carriers. And they have come up with some lethal weapons.

Russian military systems designers look to be able to produce large numbers of weapons based on relatively simple designs that are cost-effective and robust on the battlefield. And when confronted with U.S. weapons systems that they cannot match directly like stealth bombers or nuclear-powered super aircraft carriers, they look for asymmetrical solutions that enable them to use their own areas of expertise.

Therefore, although Russia has still to demonstrate it can successfully build and operate a modern, 21st century-era large aircraft carrier, it leads the world in designing and producing relatively cheap missile systems designed to "kill" such carriers at scores, and even hundreds of miles distance. The U.S. arsenal has no weapons to compare with the Russian-built Moskit 3M80 -- NATO designation SS-N-22 Sunburn -- ramjet-powered cruise missile or the new, even more advanced SS-N-27 Sizzler.

These weapons fly two and a half times faster than U.S. ones. American cruise missiles are subsonic, but Russian-made ones can fly at well over Mach 2, or more than twice the speed of sound -- with speeds estimated at 1,500 mph to 1,700 mph at close to ground level.

Russia has sold the technology to build the Moskit to China, which manufactures it as the Hai Ying or Sea Eagle HY2. It can carry an almost 500-pound warhead, and it can deliver a tactical nuclear weapon. The threat of the Hai Ying is so great that it has effectively barred operational access to the Taiwan Strait to U.S. aircraft carriers in time of high tension. China has also supplied the Hai Ying to Iran.

It is striking that four-star Adm. William Fox Fallon, who has just resigned as head of U.S. Central Command, has expressed his caution and reluctance about going to war with Iran. Fallon is the U.S. Navy's leading expert, and therefore probably the top authority in the world, about using aircraft carrier-based air power to strike land-based targets. His previous position was running Pacific Command with great distinction, and that theater includes China and Taiwan.

Fallon's caution is clearly based in part on the fact that U.S. carrier battle groups would have to be operated with great discretion and skill to protect them from the threat of Iran's Sunburns.

The threat that the Moskit SS-N-22 Sunburn -- and now its younger more advanced sister, the SS-N-27 Sizzler -- pose to U.S. aircraft carriers is very similar to the one that German battleships' 15-inch, or 381mm, plunging shell-fire fired from long range posed to British battlecruisers in World War II. The Bismarck, as previously noted in this series, sank the legendary and enormous, but only lightly armored, HMS Hood with a single long-range shell that detonated its powder magazine.

Respected analyst David Crane, writing in Defense Review in November 2006, concluded bleakly, "Bottom line, our aircraft carriers are vulnerable against the latest Russian and Chinese torpedo and missile tech, and with the current U.S. naval defense philosophy, that situation isn't likely to change anytime soon."

It is difficult to disagree with this prognosis.

CHINA AND INDIA SHADOW-BOXING IN BURMA

Burmese Squeeze

By TARUN KHANNA
FROM TODAY'S WALL STREET JOURNAL ASIA
April 10, 2008

An excellent piece on the competition between India and China over influence in Burma, India's neighbor, a gateway into SE Asia, a possible route for Persian Gulf oil and gas. For us, a reminder that there are other players in the world besides the U.S. Our failure to react to the destruction of the Soviet Union in any way other than to celebrate our "victory" played a significant role in the events leading up to 9/11, including our abruptly abandoning Pakistan and Afghanistan after spending a decade arming them to the teeth. Clinton's policies you will recall amounted to shooting a few missiles into the moutains. Bush still worse.
We need a new national security doctrine. I am going to post some thoughts on the issues involved in the coming weeks. This article is a warm-up. I will post more.

THE WIND IS FINALLY ARRIVING AT LANGLEY

Could it be that the fiasco of the recent NIE on Iran's nuclear weapons program has ripped the scab off of Langley? McCain has talked about creating a new agency, stripped of the huge analytical apparatus feeding on itself, starved of real intelligence for decades.
I post David Ignatius' column without comment because it is clear, direct and does not need any gloss. Comments anyone?

What's Wrong at the CIA - David Ignatius, Washington Post

53 million gallons in danger of leaking

seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/355924_hanford21.html

The most vulnerable point in the United States is the Hanford Nuclear Reservation situated on the banks of the Columbia River. This remnant of the Manhattan Project has hundreds of buried concrete-encased steel tanks filled with radioactive brews that are often too hot and volatile to even analyze. Billions have been spent and squandered while the government has failed to contain the leakage from these tanks. Palliative measures may have prevented leakage into the river but it can and may happen.
The cleanup of Hanford is my sole measure of the environmental concern of each Administration. They have all failed. CarterReaganClintonBushBush. All Failures. Al Gore did nothing. Hot Air. A single bomb dropped anywhere in the reservation would destroy the Columbia River, radioactivate Oregon, Washington and a good piece of the North Pacific. The cleanup of Hanford requires, yes, you got it, a Manhattan Project. It should be THE environmental concern of the next Administration. It should be an issue in every campaign, but it never is. Why? No politician wants to rock the boat. They are happy to get a few billion to pay off the engineering and construction firms who get the contracts which fail to accomplish what is promised. THIS IS A WORLD CLASS DANGER. IT REQUIRES A CABINET OFFICER ASSIGNED FULLTIME.
For more than twenty years the threat and dangers of Hanford have been acknowledged. A lot of money has been spent, some of the most imminent threats have been relieved. The cleanup date for Hanford has now slipped to 2050. This is my measure of how deeply flawed our governance is.
Every time you hear global warming, think how near is the warming of the Columbia River gorge. Some problems are so large government simply ignores them. We are smug about the falling rate of longevity in Russia, largely due to alcoholism and environmental damages inflicted by the mishandling of their nuclear, chemical and other heavy metal industries. It may be irreversible. We have no reason to be smug. A third of the western United States and Canada are threatened too. We dither and risk disaster, intentionally inflicted or caused by our casual arrogance.
CLEAN UP HANFORD

THE AIR FORCE IS BOMBING THE NAVY

Among the several leitmotifs that have disfigured the half-hearted engagement of our people and leadership in debating the Iraq War, which has made it look like crass adventurism, has been the role of private contractors fulfilling formerly military -- sovereign -- roles. To describe this as outsourcing has always troubled me because of the issue of sovereignty. A computer contract is one thing, taking life is entirely different.
The following item is from Strategy Page. Simply put, the Navy has created a private company to do its aerial refueling which delivers the goods at a third the price the Air Force charges. I do not know whether the Air Force treats the Navy as a private client and gouges it (possibly) but the numbers in this article suggest something is terribly amiss in the Pentagon and the Air Force. This comes in the wake of a controversy surrounding the competition to build a new tanker which was delayed for years when Sen. McCain and others disclosed there was material and major corruption between Boeing and the Pentagon in the air tanker program. The old contract was scrapped, a few people went to jail, Boeing got new management and did not win the rebidded contract.
Eisenhower warned us in 1961 and we ignored the warning. We have seen in the mismangement of this war very disturbing evidence of incompetence and corruption. I am sure it is a scintilla of what is out there. Now if we had won in a cakewalk, whatever that could possibly mean, nobody would pay attention. But we have certainly not and this provides us the opportunity for a long overdue review. We can expect nothing from Congress which is the Pentagon's sole domestic client. And whether we stay in Iraq or withdraw rapidly, we still have vast forces overseen by the Pentagon, outdated and obscure national security doctrines, and a foreign policy that looks to the past. We need to explode a half century of covert relationships between Congress, the Pentagon and the Defense Establishment.
We need a comprehensive National Security policy which supports a foreign policy supported by the American people. We need a procurement and manpower policy that supports the doctrines we adopt. I am sure we need to close the Pentagon but that is another discussion. If the profiteering from fuel is applied to food, can you imagine what we are paying so our troops in Iraq have a good selection of ice cream for lunch? The implications of this are mind-boggling.

Privatizing Aerial Refueling

March 20, 2008: Now we have private contractors providing in-flight refueling services. Their biggest customer is the U.S. Navy. That's because the navy has long depended on the U.S. Air Force for most of its aerial refueling needs. But the air force tankers are so heavily used with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that the navy often finds itself at the end of the line and out of luck. The navy has long improvised, using C-130s, S-3s and even F-18s to provide some in-flight refueling capability. But nothing beats the air force KC-135s. So the navy helped (with refueling contracts) establish a private aerial refueling outfit.

Omega Refueling Services, Inc., was established last year, and currently has two Boeing 707s (the civilian airliner version of the KC-135) and one DC-10 operating as aerial tankers. Congress went along with this deal because Omega delivered fuel more cheaply than the air force. Currently, it costs the air force about $17.50 per gallon to deliver fuel in the air. Omega can do this for $7 a gallon. Noting this, Congress ordered the air force to establish a pilot program, to see if this kind of service would work for the air force. The air force is not too enthusiastic about this.

On paper, Omega should work on a large scale. Most of the aerial refueling takes place outside of combat zones. The air force objects because of qualms about being able to order contractor refueling aircraft to a combat zone. That's an official qualm. Unofficial objections have more to do with losing aircraft and people in uniform to private firms. Those numbers are one of the ways you keep score in the Pentagon. Historically, armies and navies have been outsourcing logistical functions for thousands of years, and even some combat functions as well. The air force knows this, but fears that the contractors will demonstrate a cheaper way to run parts of the air force, bringing into doubt the quality of current and past air force leadership. Of course, Omega has another advantage it's military customers don't have, it can provide its services to anyone, and does. Although the navy gets dibs.