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Republican posturing on “Rule of Law” and “Balancing the Budget” and Government Waste

September 9, 2017 By Bob Kinsey

The following review of GAO report on  the New Nuclear Bomb Uranium Processing Facility UPF at Oak Ridge reveals that Congress is not concerned about either real costs they are contracting for and whether or not Oak Ridge follows legally mandated processes in accessing that cost or environmental impact.   All the while they claim we cannot afford Medicare for All in their balanced budget mania.    Too bad we cannot get them to see that national defense includes the defense of the health of its citizens and the environment.   It might be supposed if they did that they would pass medicare for all in a second–costs be damned.   Yet they want to be framed as fiscally responsible and have their unregulated military spending without tax increases on the rich or anybody else.   How does that make America Great?   Great Liars?   Great Hypocrites?

 

GAO REPORT ON OAK RIDGE BOMB PLANT PROJECT CONFIRMS CITIZEN CONCERNS:NATIONAL NUCLEAR SECURITY ADMINISTRATION WILL SPEND BILLIONS ON BOMB OPERATIONS, BUT WILL NOT BRING FACILITIES INTO COMPLIANCE WITH SAFETY CODES

 

8 September 2017

 

The Government Accountability Office today released a report reviewing the National Nuclear Security Administration’s troubled Uranium Processing Facility (UPF) Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The GAO found that continued enriched uranium operations in support of nuclear weapons programs at the Y-12 National Security Complex place the public at significant risk and will continue to do so for at least twenty years.

 

Regarding Building 9212, the report states: “All of the various support and storage facilities of Building 9212 contain radioactive and chemical materials in sufficient quantities that an unmitigated release would result in significant consequences. These facilities do not meet current safety requirements for such facilities in that they cannot withstand a seismic event, high wind event, or aircraft crash.” (p.7)

 

The GAO report provides a peek behind the curtain that has shrouded the UPF project in secrecy since 2014. Neither the NNSA, the Department of Energy, nor Senator Lamar Alexander, chair of the Senate subcommittee with oversight of the UPF project, has been willing to provide the public with substantive information about the costs or schedule of the UPF Project beyond vague assurances.

 

Among the implications of the report’s significant findings:

 

  • The NNSA has no idea how much the modernization of enriched uranium operations at the Y12 Nuclear Weapons Complex will cost.

“NNSA Has Not Developed a Complete Scope of Work, Life-Cycle Cost Estimate, and Integrated Master Schedule for Its Overall Uranium Program.” (p.22)

 

  • Existing cost estimates for the UPF Project are certain to exceed the $6.5 billion cap established by the Department of Energy and Senator Lamar Alexander in 2014 when soaring cost estimates brought the UPF under criticism.

“Selected Critical Decision (CD) Milestones and Cost Estimates for New Uranium Processing Facility Subprojects” (Table, p. 22) This table provides unvalidated cost estimates for seven “subprojects” that make up the UPF which magically add up to $6,499,500,000 dollars—exactly $500,000 under Senator Alexander’s cap. They do not include improvements to existing buildings that are also part of the original scope of the UPF (see below). To date, prior to the beginning of construction, costs for the UPF project have exceeded $4 billion.

 

  • Upgrades to operations to be conducted in existing facilities which were originally part of the UPF but are no longer included in the UPF budget will have a total life-cycle cost approaching $1 billion additional dollars.

“According to our analysis of information from NNSA documents and program officials, these program elements may cost nearly $1 billion over the next 2 decades.” (p.28)

 

  • Even with the additional $1 billion in spending, some of the most dangerous of the facilities will not be brought into compliance with existing environmental, safety, or seismic codes.

“According to NNSA program officials, the planned infrastructure repairs and upgrade will address many, but not all, of the safety issues identified by the [Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety] board. For example, NNSA program officials stated they do not expect building 9215, which it expects to be in operations through the late 2030s, to meet all modern safety standards even with planned upgrades.” (p.24)

 

  • While acknowledging that structural deficiencies in Building 9215 place workers and the public at risk, and realizing the need to address these safety deficiencies in 2014,  NNSA has no timetable or schedule for making safety upgrades to the facility.

“NNSA officials said they have not fully developed the long-term scope of work to address safety issues that the board confirmed because much of this work depends on the results of upcoming seismic and structural assessments the agency expects to be conducted in or after fiscal year 2018. According to these officials, the need for these assessments was not apparent until after 2014.” (p.24)

 

“This report confirms the UPF continues to be a pig that is voraciously consuming tax dollars by the billions,” said Ralph Hutchison, coordinator of the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance, a grassroots public interest organization that has been a watchdog of DOE’s Oak Ridge Operations since 1988. “Each year, the NNSA spends hundreds of millions of dollars on lipstick, but it is still a pig.

 

“Perhaps it would be more appropriate to say it is a wild boar, because it is uncontrolled by DOE standards and practices (which require full life-cycle planning of the entire project) and it is terribly dangerous. Both building 9212 and 9215 continue to be used by NNSA even though they fail to meet environmental and safety standards and present a clear and deadly risk to workers and the public.”

 

The Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance, Nuclear Watch New Mexico, and the Natural Resources Defense Council filed suit in federal court in Washington, DC, on July 20, 2017 challenging NNSA’s failure to comply with the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act that requires federal agencies to conduct thorough environmental analyses of major projects and to engage the public in discourse throughout the process.

 

for more information: Ralph Hutchison, 865 776 5050; orep@earthlink.net

—

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Disarmament Quotes

“Everything I did at Kings Bay was a result of my faith and my commitment to challenge the idols whose only purpose is to destroy human life on an unimaginable scale. I went to Kings Bay to use my body to refuse to bow down to these idols. I went to try to bring attention to the idolatry that it is requiring of our nation and its people. I went in a spirit of prayer and repentance. I went in hope that this witness might invite other people to reflect on the obscenity and on the idolatry that it is before God.”

Liz McAlister Kings Bay Protestor 2019

We are prone to self-righteousness if we call ourselves peacemakers, and yet do not perceive how the peace issue cuts through all the economic and social issues that we often try to keep separate. If the race for nuclear arms is encouraged by our fear of losing the affluent ways of life that we have taken for granted, then we must see how our fears and desires have left so many other human beings naked and hungry.

Malsolm Warford "The Church's Role in a Nuclear Age

It is my fervent goal and hope…that we will some day no longer have to rely on nuclear weapons to deter aggression and assure world peace. To that end the United States is now engaged in a serious and sustained effort to negotiate major reductions in levels of offensive nuclear weapons with the ultimate goal of eliminating these weapons from the face of the earth. 

Ronald Reagan, October 20, 1986

Over the past 15 years, the goal of elimination of nuclear weapons has been so much on the back burner that it will take a true political breakthrough and a major intellectual effort to achieve success in this endeavor.

Mikhail Gorbachev, January 31, 2007

A world free of the threat of nuclear weapons is necessarily a world devoid of nuclear weapons…. Nuclear weapons pose an intolerable threat to humanity and our habitat…. Others subscribe to Churchill’s assertion ‘Peace is the sturdy child of terror.’ For me, such a peace is a wretched offspring, a peace that condemns us to live under a dark cloud of perpetual anxiety, a peace that codifies mankind’s most murderous instincts….The beast must be chained, its soul expunged, its lair laid waste.

General Lee Butler Former Commander, Strategic Air Command, April 28, 1996

Through the release of atomic energy, our generation has brought into the world the most revolutionary force since prehistoric man's discovery of fire. This basic force of the universe cannot be fitted into the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms. For there is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world. We scientists recognise our inescapable responsibility to carry to our fellow citizens an understanding of atomic energy and its implication for society. In this lies our only security and our only hope - we believe that an informed citizenry will act for life and not for death. 

Albert Einstein, January 22, 1947

We seek the elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth. 

Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address, January 21, 1985

We endorse setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal ... 

George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger and Sam Nunn, January 4, 2007

There are still thousands of warheads loaded on operational systems and standing on high states of alert on virtually hair-trigger posture. And you have to ask yourself: Why is that? Who is the enemy? What is the threat? 

U.S. General Lee Butler Former Commander in Chief, U.S. Strategic Air Command in 1991-92

Now, understand, this matters to people everywhere. One nuclear weapon exploded in one city -– be it New York or Moscow, Islamabad or Mumbai, Tokyo or Tel Aviv, Paris or Prague –- could kill hundreds of thousands of people. And no matter where it happens, there is no end to what the consequences might be -– for our global safety, our security, our society, our economy, to our ultimate survival. 

Former President Barack Obama, April 5, 2009

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending he sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children...This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron." --spoken to the American Society of Newspaper Editors 1953

Dwight Eisenhower US President 1953-1961

It is my firm belief that the infinite and uncontrollable fury of nuclear weapons should never be held in the hands of any mere mortal ever again, for any reason. 

Mikhail Gorbachev, 1995

So far as I can see, the atomic bomb has deadened the finest feeling that has sustained for ages. There used to be so-called laws of war, which made it tolerable. Now we know the truth. War knows no law except that of might. The atomic bomb brought an empty victory but it resulted for the time being in destroying the soul of Japan. What has happened to the soul of the destroying nation is yet too early to see... 

Mahatma Gandhi from The Essential Gandhi, Louis Fisher, ed.

[T]he use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. . . . [I]n being the first to use it, we . . . adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

5-Star Admiral William D. Leahy Chief of Staff to President's Roosevelt and Truman, leader of Combined US-UK Chiefs of Staff during WWII

Viewing Trinity Test July 16,1945: "Now we are all Sons of Bitches"

Kenneth Bainbridge Deputy Director

Elimination of nuclear weapons, so naive, so simplistic, and so idealistic as to be quixotic? Some may think so. But as human beings, citizens of nations with power to influence events in the world, can we be at peace with ourselves if we strive for less? I think not. 

Robert McNamara Former U.S. Secretary of Defense

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