The United States must keep its part of the bargain and move its own nuclear weapons off of hair-trigger alert. (There are 49 Minuteman Missiles on launch on warning alert in Colorado TODAY!)
The USA must clearly state a "no first use" policy on nuclear weapons. It must begin a process of disarming all its nuclear weapons in tandem with the same process being carried forward by all nuclear weapons states including Israel which has the bombs but claims not to. (Read "Weapons of Terror, the report of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission -- 2006") . It must then and only then and only as a participant of a UN effort, monitor and demand that no other state develop nuclear weapons (proliferate). It must admit that Iran or any other country in the world has the right in international law to nuclear power-- but it must also admit that nuclear power is a bad energy solution because it creates fissile material that can be used to make a bomb. It must admit that there is no safe place to store nuclear "waste" because its half life is nearly eternal. It must admit that the process of managing the current waste is so overwhelming that it is clear the world must not make any more--as soon as possible. Any expenditure on our own nuclear weapons complex to "modernize it" must be about accomplishing the policy above. Of course we must pay the bill for the safe management of this waste problem and the health effects of all previous nuclear weapons and power activities and get crackin', as it were. The below is an example of the absolutely nutty ideas the DOE seems able to sell us using our tax money to pay for their PR.“Nuclear energy is a safe, environmentally sensitive, and affordable way to meet the world’s growing need for baseload electricity. By further engaging engineering and design experts in the nuclear industry, we can spur radical development of new nuclear recycling technologies that are more proliferation-resistant and economically attractive,”
So fantastacates Deputy Secretary Clay Sell of the US Department of Energy to justify his offer of $60 Million of yours and my tax money as well as the power of his government stage to shamelessly promote nuclear energy in the face of our fears of climate change disaster. This is the Bushies plan called Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, GNEP.
The DOE is long on advertising expertise and very short on allowing words their normal meanings, or even reflecting realities. Notice the puffery: spur radical development, new recycling technologies, more proliferation-resistant, economically attractive, environmentally sensitive. And blah blah. The facts on the ground—for one instance-- are that the DOE has been willing to engage private industry, in its Bechtel incarnation, to build a vitrification plant at Hanford that was – contracted by DOE with 80% certainty-- to cost around $2.5 Billion of your dollars and is now still unbuilt at up to well over $12 Billion (with 90% certainty) of your dollars. In truth, that example is engaging engineering and design experts in the private sphere alright! But it reveals DOE incapable of discerning future costs and incompetent to trumpet anything as being economically attractive or affordable. And, if one looks at the eternal and deadly pollution problems which they have allowed to accumulate over the past 60 years oozing into our water supplies and dropped from the sky, it is clear they really care little about the actual meaning of the words safe or environmentally sensitive. It merely assures us that the DOE is in the name game in order to keep some nuclear technicians well employed and its friends in the private sector well supplied with our subsidies so they can go on playing with fire. They are dangerously at play in the fields of the Lord—so to speak--just like BP in the Gulf.
Would that they would pour such largess on the renewable energy sector! That would really be safe, economical and environmentally sensitive.
It is immoral, and dangerous to our national security interests and to our national treasury, to continue the chaotic policies of the neocons who undermined our commitments to international solutions and treaties and the rule of law. They also designed their entire energy policy on fossil fuels and nuclear energy that pose irremediable damages to our health and safety.
