February 13th, 2012 | Trento's Take | Joseph Trento |  Photo courtesy of Online Ethics Center (OEC) My friend and rocket engineer, Roger Boisjoly, died on January 6. He loved his family, his church and his country.
Every time you get on an elevator, fly on a plane, use the brakes on your car or drive across a bridge, you should think of Roger because you are putting your life in the hands and conscience of an engineer. You trust that engineers have the intestinal fortitude to stand up to bosses who want to take risks or shortcuts to save money or increase profits at the expense of safety.
Roger was that kind of engineer.
Continue reading Roger Boisjoly – The Conscience of Engineering
Highly radioactive snakes, frogs and even a three-legged gator populate the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site. When you pour, for more than 50 years, radioactive material into a 300 square mile area of South Carolina that is a glorified swamp, strange things are going to happen. Now it appears SRS [...]
 January 30 was former U.S. Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham’s last day as the non-executive chairman of Areva Enterprises Inc, the French atomic power firm’s American operation. This marked the end of a very lucrative arrangement for both Abraham and the French government own nuclear company – mostly at U.S. taxpayers’ expense.
It all began in the 1990s when the United States’ response to disposing of 34 metric tons of plutonium from shuttered nuclear weapons programs was a proposed mixed oxide (MOX) fuel fabrication facility at the Savannah River Site (SRS) near Aiken, South Carolina. When Abraham became Energy Secretary in 2001, Areva was a key contractor for the MOX plant. According to his DOE calendars, among his first trips were to France to visit their nuclear officials and operations. Abraham maintained a close relationship with the then head of Areva, Anne Lauvergeon. In turn, not long after he left the Energy Department, Abraham cashed in and went to work for Areva and “Atomic Annie,” as she was known. In 2007, DOE broke ground on the MOX plant.
Continue reading Spencer Abraham Cashes In
January 27th, 2012 | Trento's Take | Joseph Trento |
Newt Gingrich
(Photo credit: Gage Skidmore) On December 13 we posted a 6,400 word story about a FBI probe into Newt Gingrich when he was Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and his second wife, Marianne. It was a serious effort to report on a serious matter. My naïve hope was that my colleagues would follow our course and advance this story by expending more resources and pursuing the leads.
We had success getting a number of key people to go on the record and lay out the story. We got key FBI documents from a second Bureau source so we knew what we had was real. We tried to put a complex story into a coherent and verifiable narrative. We contacted three major news organizations about the story before it ran on our website. We offered each of the organizations contact information for our sources, the FBI documents and other information including taped interviews. All three news organizations said they would do the story – yet none of them did.
Continue reading The Gingrich FBI Investigation
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