I was reading reports of the Clinton-Yeltsin summit last week, thinking about how these two men were putting away the last vestiges of an old order. I used to live in Washington, DC; I was there when the Soviet Union went out of business, when the Warsaw Pact dissolved like a chalk drawing on a rainy sidewalk. I had an acquaintance who worked for a defense contractor. He said, “Now I have to make a living figuring out how to design a better plowshare.”
He need not have worried. As Bill and Boris discovered in Helsinki, just because a cold war ends, that doesn’t mean it goes away. Now I live in the other Washington, the one with the Hanford Reservation, where they built the bombs. A nuclear bomb is a troublesome thing, and not just for the people sitting under one when it drops. Among the many components of a nuclear bomb are plutonium, which is the bomb’s explosive, and tritium, which is the bomb’s trigger. Plutonium decays slowly, with a half-life of 24,000 years. If you have a pound of plutonium today, you will have a half-pound of plutonium in 24,000 years. But we don’t have a pound of plutonium; we’ve got 100 tons. Tritium decays quickly, with a half-life of 12.3 years. A pound of tritium today is a half-pound of tritium in 12 years. So we have a bunch of bombs that will be radioactive for what amounts to forever, but they will no longer qualify as bombs in 25 years.
Let me say one more thing as a preface. The only good thing about the stupidity that was military nuclear warfare and the stupidity that was civilian nuclear power, was that we never mixed the two. Regular listeners can probably hear what’s coming next and they’re correct. When it comes to nuclear material, our government will leave no mistake unmade.
On the civilian side, nuclear power has been hazardous, inefficient and expensive. Nuclear power has been industrial idiocy of such magnitude that they are now looking to the military to bail them out. Ten utilities around the country have expressed interest in producing tritium in civilian reactors to keep our nuclear arsenal primed. After all, where’s the joy in having your finger on the trigger if the trigger doesn’t work?
All the bomb factories that once produced tritium are closed, polluted for a millennia. I think the civilian utilities want into the tritium game so they can foist their facilities off on taxpayers, to clean up the mess when the executives retire to Aruba. Then there’s plutonium. The utilities are lining up to make tritium because we don’t have enough. Many of these same utilities are lining up to burn plutonium as fuel, because we’ve got too much.
To add a sneering insult to this injury, the organizers of this project named it Plutonium Excess Arms Converted to Electricity – or PEACE, for short. Using plutonium to fuel commercial nuclear reactors is more expensive than the nuclear fuel currently in use. The federal government would subsidize the difference in cost – or corporate welfare, for short. Worse yet, the volume of plutonium-contaminated waste coming out of the process would exceed the volume of plutonium going in, so we will give corporations billions of tax dollars to create more plutonium waste than we started out with.
And what is most disturbing is that we will break the line between military and civilian nuclear programs, a line we managed to maintain through 50 years of Cold War. Now the Department of Energy wants to erase that line and put plutonium, the most dangerous weapons material on earth, into the hands of Homer Simpson and his colleagues.
All over the world, terrorists must be laughing. I’m not.
The Cold War Comes Home
I was reading reports of the Clinton-Yeltsin summit last week, thinking about how these two men were putting away the last vestiges of an old order. I used to live in Washington, DC; I was there when the Soviet Union went out of business, when the Warsaw Pact dissolved like a chalk drawing on a rainy sidewalk. I had an acquaintance who worked for a defense contractor. He said, “Now I have to make a living figuring out how to design a better plowshare.”
He need not have worried. As Bill and Boris discovered in Helsinki, just because a cold war ends, that doesn’t mean it goes away. Now I live in the other Washington, the one with the Hanford Reservation, where they built the bombs. A nuclear bomb is a troublesome thing, and not just for the people sitting under one when it drops. Among the many components of a nuclear bomb are plutonium, which is the bomb’s explosive, and tritium, which is the bomb’s trigger. Plutonium decays slowly, with a half-life of 24,000 years. If you have a pound of plutonium today, you will have a half-pound of plutonium in 24,000 years. But we don’t have a pound of plutonium; we’ve got 100 tons. Tritium decays quickly, with a half-life of 12.3 years. A pound of tritium today is a half-pound of tritium in 12 years. So we have a bunch of bombs that will be radioactive for what amounts to forever, but they will no longer qualify as bombs in 25 years.
Let me say one more thing as a preface. The only good thing about the stupidity that was military nuclear warfare and the stupidity that was civilian nuclear power, was that we never mixed the two. Regular listeners can probably hear what’s coming next and they’re correct. When it comes to nuclear material, our government will leave no mistake unmade.
On the civilian side, nuclear power has been hazardous, inefficient and expensive. Nuclear power has been industrial idiocy of such magnitude that they are now looking to the military to bail them out. Ten utilities around the country have expressed interest in producing tritium in civilian reactors to keep our nuclear arsenal primed. After all, where’s the joy in having your finger on the trigger if the trigger doesn’t work?
All the bomb factories that once produced tritium are closed, polluted for a millennia. I think the civilian utilities want into the tritium game so they can foist their facilities off on taxpayers, to clean up the mess when the executives retire to Aruba. Then there’s plutonium. The utilities are lining up to make tritium because we don’t have enough. Many of these same utilities are lining up to burn plutonium as fuel, because we’ve got too much.
To add a sneering insult to this injury, the organizers of this project named it Plutonium Excess Arms Converted to Electricity – or PEACE, for short. Using plutonium to fuel commercial nuclear reactors is more expensive than the nuclear fuel currently in use. The federal government would subsidize the difference in cost – or corporate welfare, for short. Worse yet, the volume of plutonium-contaminated waste coming out of the process would exceed the volume of plutonium going in, so we will give corporations billions of tax dollars to create more plutonium waste than we started out with.
And what is most disturbing is that we will break the line between military and civilian nuclear programs, a line we managed to maintain through 50 years of Cold War. Now the Department of Energy wants to erase that line and put plutonium, the most dangerous weapons material on earth, into the hands of Homer Simpson and his colleagues.
All over the world, terrorists must be laughing. I’m not.