There's always next year . . .
Leaders of the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability met in Oak Ridge this week for their annual strategizing session.
Susan Gordon, staff director of the Alliance since 1995, said they went over goals and accomplishments for 2008 and began formulating plans for 2009. I asked Gordon if the group achieved its 2008 goals, and she replied with a hint of humor:
"Some of them. Did we get rid of nuclear weapons? No."
Clearly, getting rid of all weapons is a big goal, but Gordon indicated she sees incremental progress there. She pointed to the 120,000 or so people who made comments on the Dept. of Energy plans to transform the nuclear weapons complex, noting that the majority of them called for a new nuclear weapons policy in the United States and compliance with Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
"This was by far the largest number of comments that have ever been received on an EIS," she said.
She said the changing trend is apparent by Congress' refusal to fund the Reliable Replacement Warhead or support other big projects until there's a new strategy for the 21st century.
Gordon said she hopes the Dept. of Energy won't try to release the draft documents on transformation in October, as rumors have it. That would likely require public hearings during the holidays, she said.
"That would be a disaster," she said.
One aspect of transformation that ANA does agree with is tearing down lots of old buildings and shrinking the size of the complex, Gordon said.
She said the ANA leaders had a bus tour Wednesday of the government's Oak Ridge reservation. But she they were not very pleased with the limited information they were given regarding Y-12's life-extension work on warheads.
Although pleased with some of the cleanup activities taking place in Oak Ridge and elsewhere, Gordon said DOE has reneged on some of its commitments made a few years ago during the renegotiated agreements for accelerated cleanup. Extra money that should have been made available for Oak Ridge after cleanups were completed at Mound and Rocky Flats has failed to materialize, she said.
The money being alloted for cleanup projects at the nuclear sites is far inadequate, she said.
Comments
At the Savannah River Site, in South Carolina, "clean up" remains about 70% of the site budget and that should remain the site focus. But new management has come in (Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, a consortium of Fluor, Northrop Grumman and others) and its clear they are looking for new site missions, likely including the dangerous, dirty and expensive reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel. That's a project which does harm to the tax payer and the environment and is a net drain on our energy supplies. Efforts by radicals in Congress for it must be stopped. At SRS, contractors have gotten used to big-government projects and they think such high-cost projects are their right. It's time for true fiscal conservatives to put an end to DOE give-aways at Oak Ridge, SRS and other DOE sites. Ending (or not) such pork barrel projects for DOE will be a real test of the"change" coming to Washington.
Frank Munger will be covering the Dept. of Energy's Oak Ridge facilities and other things nuclear. The blog will include random thoughts and opinions, behind-the-scenes tidbits, and expanded coverage and analysis of Oak Ridge news. 