A call to resist the nuclear revival (by former NRC commissioner Victor Gilinsky)

[bananas]

Great article by a former NRC commissioner.

http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/features/a-call-to-resist-the-nuclear-revival

A call to resist the nuclear revival
By Victor Gilinsky | 27 January 2009

Article Highlights

* The international community has forgotten the nuclear age's early warning that occasional inspection is not an adequate safeguard.
* Current efforts to encourage the global spread of nuclear energy are dangerously shortsighted and will result in weapons proliferation.
* International security must be the top priority in global nuclear energy policy, meaning the unbridled promotion of nuclear energy must stop.


When formulating its nuclear energy policy, the new Obama administration will have to face the reality that advances in technology, combined with politics and ideology, have made it much harder to prevent nuclear energy use from contributing to the spread of the Bomb. To avoid a future Hobbesian nuclear jungle, the United States and other world governments will need to agree on tougher nuclear controls.

<snip>

The Bush administration, with Democratic congressional support, drove a truck through all these measures to bolster the NPT. The prime example: The U.S.-India agreement, approved by Congress last October, waived U.S. export restrictions on India, which has fought the NPT regime for 40 years. A related U.S.-sponsored NSG decision gave India a waiver allowing access to the international nuclear trade--and specifically uranium fuel that India lacks-- without submitting to the NPT's inspection requirements. The irony wasn't lost on the Indian government that it had succeeded--without giving up anything in its drive for more bombs--in steamrolling the very criteria that were put in place in response to its initial pursuit of the Bomb. The agreement is in my view a violation of the NPT's Article I prohibition on assisting another state's bomb making.

<snip>

We're now told that the world is entering a nuclear "renaissance" that will lead to much greater global use of nuclear energy. The economics don't favor this--the cost of building new nuclear power plants is going through the roof, at least in the United States. Therefore, nuclear construction would have to be supported by hefty government subsidies. The publicly provided rationale for such subsidies is the need to limit global warming, although it's difficult to imagine installing enough nuclear power plants to make a dent in the problem.

<snip>

In addition to the foregoing narrowing of safety margins between nuclear energy technologies and weapons, there have been unfavorable changes on the weapons side. After a lessening in their importance after the Cold War ended, nuclear weapons are again on the upswing. The news is full of stories about them: North Korea won't give them up; Iran looks as if it wants them; Israel threatens to bomb Iran to stop Tehran from producing them and actually bombs a secret Syrian reactor presumably intended for weapons; the United States wants to station anti-ballistic missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic; in response, Russia tells those countries they could be nuclear targets; Pakistan's instability provokes worries about its nuclear weapons; India seeks a nuclear missile submarine force; the five recognized weapons states (the United States, Russia, Britain, France, and China) want to modernize their nuclear forces; and a just-released report from the Defense Secretary's Task Force on Nuclear Weapons Management says U.S. nuclear forces should stay in Europe because they are "a pillar of NATO unity."

There's a troubling disconnect between this nuclear shadowboxing and any awareness of the devastating possibility of nuclear war. Just because the weapons are supposed to be for deterrence doesn't mean they won't be used. Doesn't anyone remember the nuclear fears of the 1960s? The nuclear world's self-delusions resemble those of the pre-meltdown world of finance, which a former treasury secretary characterized as "too much greed and not enough fear."

<snip>


Author Bio
Victor Gilinsky

A physicist, Gilinsky is an independent consultant, most recently advising Nevada on matters related to the proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain. His expertise spans a broad range of energy issues. From 1975 to 1984, he served on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, having been nominated by President Gerald Ford and renominated by President Jimmy Carter. Earlier in his career he worked at Rand Corporation; he was also an assistant director for policy and program review at the Atomic Energy Commission.

[bananas]

1. Note: this thread was originally posted to the Environment/Energy forum

just in case it gets moved somewhere else.