DC Bureau

Chevron’s Huge Tax Break Cost City Manager His Job

David Rosenfeld — Sat, 12 May 2012 16:59:15 +0000

Chevron's El Segundo Refinery

In El Segundo, California, a city manager is fired after finding a secret, possibly illegal, backroom deal with Chevron to pay unusually low taxes in this company town.

One morning after a council meeting in December, Doug Willmore, El Segundo’s city manager, walked outside to his car and found a note. It was a warning for him and his family to get out of town.

“Who does something like that?” says Willmore, who had relocated from Salt Lake County, Utah, earlier that year. He says had he known the city had such close ties to Chevron Corporation, he probably would not have taken the job.

Tucked between a waste treatment plant and the largest oil refinery in California, the city of El Segundo just south of Los Angeles International Airport has earned a reputation over the years as a sort of “Mayberry by the Sea.” The town’s picturesque little league fields, antique streetlights and quaint holiday parades all help give it a hometown feel despite its beachfront industrial development.

Doug Willmore, El Segundo’s city manager

El Segundo is also a Chevron town. The international oil giant owns the refinery next door, which receives crude oil through pipelines from tankers off the coast. It produces about 150,000 barrels of fuel each day, fully the largest refinery in California by volume.

Roughly 1,200 people work for Chevron in El Segundo, so just about everyone in this city of 12,000 people has some connection to the company. Even the city’s name, El Segundo, which means the second, refers to Chevron’s – then Standard Oil’s – second refinery in California. It is not uncommon to hear someone around town say, “Chevron built El Segundo.”

“Throughout the years Chevron has been a really good community partner,” says Marie Fellhauer, who won election to city council for the first time in April. “I know that growing up here they sponsored all kinds of things I was involved in and they’ve been great. In terms of a city, though, we’re run on tax dollars.”

How much tax Chevron pays to the city has become a very contentious issue lately. In February, Willmore, the city manager, was fired after discovering a secret, possibly illegal, backroom deal hatched in 1994 that allowed Chevron to pay an unusually low tax for more than 20 years.

During the campaign for three open city council seats, Fellhauer was on the side of increasing the tax, but the question steeply divided this Southern California beach community as well as the council candidates.

Willmore is now suing the city for wrongful termination as a whistle-blower. His attorney, Brad Gage, wants to know why city leaders are reluctant to raise taxes on a multi-billion dollar corporation that pays proportionally less than other businesses..

“This is an oil company that pollutes the environment,” Gage says. “It’s not like this is some environmentally friendly organization that’s going to help better the planet and we want to give some tax credits for that, but it’s the reverse.”

Special Favors

Former mayor of El Segundo, Eric Busch

Last year, then-mayor of El Segundo Eric Busch tasked Willmore with evaluating the city’s tax structure. That analysis found Chevron was paying on average a third of the amount of total taxes to the local government compared to the other eight largest oil refineries in the state.

“Chevron was paying about $4.7 million a year and the average of the other eight largest is $15 million. And that had been going on for more than 20 years,” Willmore says.

So Willmore negotiated with Chevron executives to pay an additional $5 million in annual taxes. At the same time, the city pressured Chevron with the threat of a ballot measure if the deal fell through. That is when Willmore, who had been the city manager for just 10 months, began to face strong opposition both from the city council and the community at large. One particular city council public hearing in December got especially heated.

“It was truly some of the most hostile, hateful, mean-spirited type of comments you would ever see,” Willmore says. “I remember saying at the time it was like I was trying to shut down the corner grocer. It was amazing that here was this corporation that was going to make $30 billion in profit and these people were standing up to try and keep their taxes so abnormally low and keep a policy in place that was so unfair to the rest of the community.”

Civil unrest

Compared to other companies in El Segundo, Chevron generates about $5,000 per acre of property while other businesses contribute about $25,000 per acre. The company’s roughly 1,000-acre refinery occupies close to 30 percent of the city territory yet generates just 10 percent to the city’s general fund, according to Willmore’s analysis.

Willmore then made another discovery. Back in 1994, an auditor hired by the city found that Chevron had $9.5 million in delinquent utility user taxes. But when those findings were brought to light at the time, the council quietly fired the auditor and settled with Chevron for just $200,000. They also inked an agreement to cap the company’s utility taxes at $150,000 per year. Documennts corroborating these events are posted on the El Segundo web site.

“To me, I looked at that and said, ‘I just don’t think this is legal,’” Willmore says. “You can’t just exempt someone from a voter-approved tax unless you actually go through the proper procedure. It was then that I brought that to the city attorney and the council and I said I want a legal opinion and we need to fix it. Ten days later I was fired.”

Willmore’s case is proceeding, but so far there is no internal investigation within El Segundo and neither is the LA County prosecutor’s office looking into the matter. Brad Gage, Willmore’s attorney, says it does not make sense for the city to act this way.

“To have a city that has the ability to collect a fair amount of taxes which would significantly increase their revenues, why wouldn’t they want to do it and why are certain council members so enamored with Chevron? What’s going on?” Gage asks. “It raises the question to me whether or not there is something being paid improperly. Now we don’t have that evidence yet but it’s certainly something that ought to be examined.”

Longstanding ties

El Segundo Mayor, Carl Jacobson

One man knows more about El Segundo local politics than any other and that’s Carl Jacobson, who has served on the El Segundo city council since 1984 with just one eight-year break. Jacobson was mayor at the time of the 1994 deal and recently became mayor again after winning re-election in April even after the Chevron deal-making was revealed. Jacobson continues to argue against increasing the tax on Chevron but would not respond to repeated attempts for an interview. Neither would a spokesman for Chevron.

This spring, Jacobson largely managed to avoid any in-depth questioning. At a candidate’s forum during the race, he defended his intentions.

“While some may try and question my integrity, I can promise you I have always had the best city’s intentions at heart,” Jacobson said.

Jacobson went on to win re-election in a race for three council seats among a field of eight eager contenders. It is a tough time to govern anywhere in America because of budget cuts and El Segundo is no different. Badly needed infrastructure projects are being put off. Local voters opposed transferring its fire department to county control, a proposal supported by the fire fighter’s union as a way to improve services.

Standard Oil, 1920

In each of the past two years, the city faced a roughly $10 million revenue shortfall, forcing it to make some tough choices. City employees have taken pay cuts, library hours have been reduced and fewer police officers were hired.

More than $110 million in infrastructure repairs were identified that included improving the city’s public swimming pool, re-paving streets and expanding the library so that children are not sitting on the floor for four hours after school. It was for these infrastructure improvements solely that Willmore approached Chevron about increasing its tax burden.

But few people around city hall and the community appear all that willing to take a hard line with the oil giant next door as a means for getting the city back on track. Even though Willmore had reportedly reached a verbal agreement with Chevron to pay an additional $5 million per year in taxes, roughly 10 percent of the city’s annual budget, the city council fired him and reopened negotiations rather than accept the supposed deal.

Fellhauer, the third newly elected council member, believes Chevron should probably pay more, especially because the funds will remain local. Fellhauer says she is waiting for the current negotiations with three of her other council colleagues who were not up for re-election to play out before casting judgment.

“It’s essential that a city occasionally opens up its books and looks at where our money is coming from and how it’s going out,” Fellhauer says. “The fact Chevron is a good neighbor should have no bearing on the city looking at what needs to be adjusted. I’ve sat down with Chevron executives. They aren’t arguing an adjustment needs to be made, it was the way that it was gone about that made them upset.”

El Segundo Planning Session

Current city manager Greg Carpenter says the goal of the ongoing negotiations with Chevron involve coming to a resolution that is fair to the city and reasonable compared to what other Southern California refineries pay in the cities in which they are located.

“The object of any city shouldn’t be to tax as much as you can. It should be about what’s reasonable,” Carpenter says. “El Segundo is a pro-business city. We have been a pro-business, pro-development city throughout much of our history. There is a policy reluctance to tax somebody to the maximum and really try and have an image and a position of being pro business and having that as a way of attracting more businesses to the city and getting more revenues from the diversification of our business base.”

Similar to conservative attitudes nationally, the response from Jacobson and another council colleague elected last month is that they would rather reduce pensions for city employees than increase the tax on Chevron. Outside a polling location during elections last month, resident Noel Salinda said she does not believe the city should charge Chevron anymore in taxes.

“I’ve lived my whole life here and I have relatives that work for Chevron,” Salinda said. “There are others things that need to be looked into. I don’t believe the comparison that was done by the previous city manager was correct.”

Environmental Challenges

Meanwhile, a new report by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that California oil refineries are some of the dirtiest in the world. On average, California refineries emit 19 to 33 percent more greenhouse gases per barrel of crude oil compared to other gas-producing regions in the United States.

The Chevron refinery in El Segundo recently installed sulfur removal and recovery units to limit air emissions as part of compliance with a 2006 state law, AB 32. The climate change legislation aims to reduce green gas emissions 15 percent by the end of this decade and 80 percent by 2050.

Brad Gage, Willmore’s attorney, believes Chevron should be taxed more than most other businesses because it is such a large polluter.

“One of the things we know that happens is that Chevron doles out a few hundred thousand dollars in perks and benefits that helps with little leagues and stuff but that’s a small pittance of what they actually owe. And if they paid their fair share all of the people that were entitled to perks would still be able to get them. You would have more little league, more parks, more infrastructure. You wouldn’t have concerns about reducing your police and fire protection. Something has to be the reason why a city council would be so in favor of a very large corporation, a huge polluter for the state as well, and then trying to save it so much in taxes.”

Discovery in Willmore’s case is expected to begin soon during which Gage hopes to find some answers.

Trento on Japan Nuclear Efforts

Joseph Trento — Wed, 09 May 2012 15:06:53 +0000

Public Education Center President and DC Bureau Editor Joe Trento was interviewed by James Corbett from Tokyo about the recent National Security News Service investigation of US – Japanese nuclear history. Corbett discussion with Trento came in the wake of the renewal of political platitudes about nuclear arms reduction at the Nuclear Summit in earlier this year in Seoul. NSNS’s painstaking decades–long investigation reveals how the United States broke its own laws to supply Japan with 70 tons of weapons grade plutonium for a secret Japanese nuclear weapons program that has been in action since the 1960s. Trento joined Corbett us to discuss this report and its ramifications.

United States Circumvented Laws To Help Japan Accumulate Tons of Plutonium

Joseph Trento — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 13:53:38 +0000

Monju Nuclear Power Plant

The United States deliberately allowed Japan access to the United States’ most secret nuclear weapons facilities while it transferred tens of billions of dollars worth of American tax paid research that has allowed Japan to amass 70 tons of weapons grade plutonium since the 1980s, a National Security News Service investigation reveals. These activities repeatedly violated U.S. laws regarding controls of sensitive nuclear materials that could be diverted to weapons programs in Japan. The NSNS investigation found that the United States has known about a secret nuclear weapons program in Japan since the 1960s, according to CIA reports.

President Reagan and Vice President Bush

The diversion of U.S. classified technology began during the Reagan administration after it allowed a $10 billion reactor sale to China. Japan protested that sensitive technology was being sold to a potential nuclear adversary. The Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations permitted sensitive technology and nuclear materials to be transferred to Japan despite laws and treaties preventing such transfers. Highly sensitive technology on plutonium separation from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site and Hanford nuclear weapons complex, as well as tens of billions of dollars worth of breeder reactor research was turned over to Japan with almost no safeguards against proliferation. Japanese scientist and technicians were given access to both Hanford and Savannah River as part of the transfer process.

While Japan has refrained from deploying nuclear weapons and remains under an umbrella of U.S. nuclear protection, NSNS has learned that the country has used its electrical utility companies as a cover to allow the country to amass enough nuclear weapons materials to build a nuclear arsenal larger than China, India and Pakistan combined.

This deliberate proliferation by the United States fuels arguments by countries like Iran that the original nuclear powers engage in proliferation despite treaty and internal legal obligations. Russia, France, Great Britain as well as the United States created civilian nuclear power industries around the world from their weapons complexes that amount to government-owned or subsidized industries. Israel, like Japan, has been a major beneficiary and, like Japan, has had nuclear weapons capabilities since the 1960s.

A year ago a natural disaster combined with a man-made tragedy decimated Northern Japan and came close to making Tokyo, a city of 30 million people, uninhabitable. Nuclear tragedies plague Japan’s modern history. It is the only nation in the world attacked with nuclear weapons. In March 2011, after a tsunami swept on shore, hydrogen explosions and the subsequent meltdowns of three reactors at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant spewed radiation across the region. Like the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan will face the aftermath for generations. A twelve-mile area around the site is considered uninhabitable. It is a national sacrifice zone.

The Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami

How Japan ended up in this nuclear nightmare is a subject the National Security News Service has been investigating since 1991. We learned that Japan had a dual use nuclear program. The public program was to develop and provide unlimited energy for the country. But there was also a secret component, an undeclared nuclear weapons program that would allow Japan to amass enough nuclear material and technology to become a major nuclear power on short notice.

That secret effort was hidden in a nuclear power program that by March 11, 2011– the day the earthquake and tsunami overwhelmed the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant – had amassed 70 metric tons of plutonium. Like its use of civilian nuclear power to hide a secret bomb program, Japan used peaceful space exploration as a cover for developing sophisticated nuclear weapons delivery systems.

Political leaders in Japan understood that the only way the Japanese people could be convinced to allow nuclear power into their lives was if a long line of governments and industry hid any military application. For that reason, a succession of Japanese governments colluded on a bomb program disguised as innocent energy and civil space programs. The irony, of course, is that Japan had gone to war in 1941 to secure its energy future only to become the sole nation attacked with nuclear weapons.

Tokyo Electric Power Company

Energy has always been Japan’s Achilles’ heel. Her need for oil in the face of an American embargo triggered Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, and the continued shortage was a recurring theme in her defeat in that war. Only one act could take more credit for Japan’s humiliation – the splitting of the atom that gave birth to the nuclear bomb. Now Japan would turn that same atom to its own purposes — to ensure a stable source of energy well into the next century and, equally important, to ensure that the homeland never again suffered the indignity of defeat.

Japan approached the nuclear problem the same way it tackled the electronics and automobile industries. A core group of companies were each given key tasks with long-term profit potential. Then the government nurtured these companies with whatever financial, technological and regulatory support needed to assure their success. The strategy worked brilliantly to bring Japan from post-war oblivion to economic dominance in a single generation.

The five companies designated for the development of nuclear technologies had to make major strides beyond the conventional light water reactors that had become fixtures in Japan under U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program in the 1950s. Japan would have to do what the Americans and Europeans had failed to do – make an experimental breeder program a commercial success. Their hubris convinced them that they could. The Japanese, after all, were the masters of the industrial process. They had turned out automobiles, televisions and microchips superior to the Americans, with better quality and at less cost. Nuclear accidents are almost always the result of human error: sloppy operators without the proper education or training or who did not install enough redundancies. Such things happen to Americans and Russians, but not to Japanese.

Japanese Prime Minister Eisaku Sato

As China, North Korea, India and Pakistan developed nuclear weapon systems, Japan and her Western allies strengthened their alliances to counter the burgeoning threat. From a secret meeting between U.S. President Lyndon Johnson and Japanese Prime Minister Eisaku Sato in the 1960s and the participation of several subsequent American and Japanese leaders, the secret transfer of nuclear technology was part of an international strategy to fortify Japan against an ever-escalating East Asian arms race. This policy culminated during the Reagan administration in legislation that dramatically changed U.S. policy. The United States ceded virtually all control of U.S.-origin nuclear materials shipped to Japan.

To the detriment of the world and her people, the Japanese government exploited the Japanese public’s well-known abhorrence of nuclear weapons to discourage the media and historians from delving into its nuclear weapons activities. Consequently, until the March 2011 tragedy, the Japanese nuclear industry had largely remained hidden from critical eyes. The less than thorough International Atomic Energy Agency, the world’s proliferation safeguard agency, also turned a blind eye.

In a rare glimpse of a Japanese industry that has remained top secret for so many decades, our investigation raises serious concerns about Japanese and Western nuclear policies and the officials who shaped those policies during and after the Cold War. International corporations and officials sacrificed the safety and security of the public to carry out the deception. Under the guise of a peaceful nuclear power program, they made huge profits.

F-Go: The First Japanese Nuclear Weapons Program

In the early 1940s, with the world locked in the bloodiest conflict in human history, scientists in Germany, Great Britain, the United States and Japan struggled to unlock from the atom a weapon of almost inconceivable power. This race to turn theory into devastating reality formed a secret subtext to the war that destroyed millions of lives using industrial warfare. In the area of theoretical physics, Japan was as advanced as her European and American rivals. She lacked only the raw materials and the sheer industrial excess to turn those materials into an atomic bomb. But Japan’s war machine was nothing if not resourceful.

Yoshio Nishina

Since 1940, the Japanese had been aggressively researching the science of the nuclear chain reaction. Dr. Yoshio Nishina had been nominated for the Nobel Prize for his pre-war work in nuclear physics. Now he and a team of young scientists worked tirelessly at the Riken, the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, to beat the Americans to the bomb. After two years of preliminary research, the atom bomb program called F-Go began in Kyoto in 1942. By 1943, Japan’s Manhattan Project had not only produced a cyclotron that could separate bomb-grade uranium, but also had developed a team of nuclear scientists with the knowledge to unleash the atom’s unknown power. As America built a uranium enrichment plant in the Washington desert so enormous it drew every watt of electricity from the Grand Coulee Dam, the Japanese scoured their empire for enough raw uranium to make their own bomb, with only limited success.

Japan looked to Nazi Germany for help. The Nazis, too, had been pursuing the nuclear bomb. But, by early 1945, the Allies were on the Rhine and the Russians had taken Prussia. In a last-ditch effort, Hitler dispatched a U-boat to Japan loaded with 1,200 pounds of uranium. The submarine never arrived. American warships captured it in May 1945. Two Japanese officers on board the submarine committed suicide and the shipment of uranium was diverted to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for use in the American Manhattan Project. Without the uranium, Japan could not produce more than one or two small atomic bombs.

As the bomb programs in both countries neared completion in 1944, General Douglas MacArthur’s island-hopping campaign drew closer to Japan’s home islands. Fleets of B-29 bombers rained fire on Tokyo and other major cities. Nishina had to move his effort to the tiny hamlet of Hungman in what is now North Korea. The move cost the Japanese program three months.

On August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay dropped a single atomic bomb over Hiroshima. The blast killed more than 70,000 people outright, and in the days and weeks to come thousands more succumbed.

When word of the blast reached Nishina, he knew immediately that the Americans had beaten him to the prize. But he also had implicit confirmation that his own atomic bomb could work. Nishina and his team worked tirelessly to ready their own test. Historians such as Robert Wilcox and Atlanta Journal Constitution writer David Snell believe that they succeeded. Wilcox writes that on August 12, 1945 – three days after the Nagasaki bombing and three days before Japan signed the articles of surrender – Japan tested a partially successful bomb in Hungnam. By then the effort was merely symbolic. Japan lacked the means to produce more weapons or to deliver them accurately to the United States.

As Japan rebuilt after the war, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came to represent the folly of Japan’s imperial aspirations as well as American inhumanity toward the Japanese. The Japanese people held nuclear weapons in abhorrence. Japan’s leaders shared that view, but, having been on the receiving end of nuclear warfare, also developed a special appreciation for the bomb’s strategic value.

As the war ended, thousands of American troops occupied Japan. After the nuclear attacks on Japan, the United States feared that the desire and ability to create this power would spread throughout the world. Washington learned that Japan had been much closer to its own nuclear bomb than previously thought. Destroying Japan’s nuclear-weapons capability became a high priority. In addition to negotiating international non-proliferation agreements, U.S. occupation troops destroyed several cyclotrons and other vestiges of Japan’s atomic bomb project to prevent Japan from resuming its nuclear program. Though the troops could demolish the physical remnants of the F-Go project, they could not destroy the enormous body of knowledge Nishina and his team had accumulated during the war.

The Beginning the Japan’s Nuclear Program

In the years to come the men behind F-Go would become the leaders of Japan’s nuclear power program. Their first priority was to stockpile enough uranium to ensure that nuclear research could continue in Japan.

The war and the atomic blasts that ended it left a strong and enduring impression on the Japanese people. They abhorred the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the Japanese leadership recognized that in nuclear power there was an alternative to foreign energy dependence, a dependence that had hindered Japan since her entry into the industrial era.

With the surrender of Japan, the United States became the preeminent power in the Pacific. But that position was challenged in 1949 with the communist victory in China and successful nuclear tests by the Soviet Union. The communists were challenging America in the Pacific, and Japan suddenly shifted from vanquished adversary to valuable ally.

The United States was completely unprepared when North Korean troops swarmed south in 1952. Soon poorly armed, under-trained American Marines were surrounded in Pusan with their backs to the sea. For the first of many times during the Korean War, the American military commander, Gen. Douglass MacArthur, lobbied President Truman to use nuclear weapons.

Those weapons were stored on the Japanese island of Okinawa. While American troops faced annihilation in Pusan, American B-29s waited with engines running to bomb targets in China and Korea. Later in the war, when Chinese troops entered Korea, nuclear-laden bombers flying from Japan would actually penetrate Chinese and North Korean airspace. One jet fighter bomber was shot down.

The Korean War is an important milestone for Japan. Only seven years after the most humiliating defeat in its three-thousand-year history, Japan served as the staging ground for the same military that had defeated her. Japan’s own military at the time was practically nonexistent. As humiliating as the American servicemen who frequented Tokyo’s nickel brothels was the realization that Japan’s defense was wholly in American hands. As Truman played the game of nuclear brinkmanship with the Chinese, it became apparent that Japan’s defense now relied on the same nuclear bombs that had sealed her World War II defeat.

In the early 1950s, the United States aggressively urged Tokyo to get involved in the nuclear power business. Having witnessed the destructive power of nuclear energy, President Eisenhower was determined to keep it under strict control. He also realized that the world would never accept a complete U.S. monopoly on atom-splitting technology, so he developed an alternative — Atoms for Peace. Eisenhower gave resource-starved countries like Japan and India nuclear power reactors as a form of technical, economic and moral support. Lacking the indigenous resources to rebuild its economy and infrastructure, Japan quickly turned to nuclear power as the answer for its chronically energy-starved economy.

With the help of the American Atoms for Peace program, Japan began to develop a full-scale nuclear power industry. The Japanese sent scores of scientists to America for training in nuclear energy development. Desperate to regain a foothold in the international arena and reclaim its sovereignty and power after the war, the Japanese government willingly spent scarce funding on research labs and nuclear reactors.

Japan’s wartime experience had prepared her to build a nuclear industry from scratch, but with Atoms for Peace, it was cheaper to import complete reactors from the West.

Atoms for Peace supported British and Canadian nuclear exports as well as American. Britain went first, selling its Magnox plant to Japan. General Electric and Westinghouse rapidly secured the rest of the industry, selling reactor designs and components to Japan at exorbitant prices. The Japanese industry quickly became a model for other Atoms for Peace countries. A generation of brilliant young Japanese scientists came of age during this period, all committed to the full exploitation of nuclear energy.

Once the industry was vitalized, Japan resumed its own nuclear research independent from the United States. Encouraged by the Americans, in 1956 Japan’s bureaucrats mapped out a plan to exploit the entire nuclear fuel cycle. At that time the concept was only theoretical, no more a reality than the atomic bomb was when Einstein penned his infamous letter to Roosevelt in 1939. According to the theory, plutonium could be separated from the spent fuel burned in conventional reactors and used to fuel new “breeder reactors.” No one had yet been able to make it work, but this was the dawn of the age of technology. Scientists in Japan, America and Europe were intoxicated with the possibilities of scientific advancements. Japan’s central planners and bureaucrats were equally enthusiastic. The breeder reactor plan would make the most efficient use of the raw uranium Japan imported from the United States. It would wean Japan from her dependence on American energy and also create an enormous stockpile of plutonium – the most powerful and difficult to obtain bomb material.

Secret Cold War Nuclear Policies

Prime Minister Sato with President Johnson

In October 1964, communist China stunned the world by detonating its first nuclear bomb. The world was caught by surprise, but nowhere were emotions as strong as in Japan. Three months later Japanese Prime Minister Eisaku Sato went to Washington for secret talks with President Lyndon Johnson. Sato gave LBJ an extraordinary ultimatum: if the United States did not guarantee Japan’s security against nuclear attack, Japan would develop a nuclear arsenal. The ultimatum forced LBJ to extend the U.S. “nuclear umbrella” over Japan. Ironically, this guarantee later enabled Sato to establish Japan’s Three Non-Nuclear Principles: to never own or produce nuclear weapons or allow them on Japanese territory. The policy won Sato the Nobel Prize for Peace. The Japanese public and the rest of the world never knew that these three principles were never fully enforced, and Sato allowed the secret nuclear weapons program to go on.

In the years to come, thousands of U.S. nuclear weapons would pass through Japanese ports and American bases in Japan. Even before Sato’s historic meeting with LBJ, Japan had quietly agreed to officially ignore U.S. nuclear weapons stored in Japan. Japanese officials were shrewd enough to put nothing down on paper, but U.S. Ambassador to Tokyo Edwin O. Reischauer disclosed the pact in a 1981 newspaper interview. In 1960, the Japanese government had verbally agreed to allow nuclear-armed American warships access to Japanese ports and territorial waters. Several current and former U.S. and Japanese officials confirm Ambassador Reischauer’s interpretation, including the former Japanese Ambassador in Washington, Takezo Shimoda.

When asked about these issues in the 1980s, the Japanese government flatly denied there was any such understanding and said it was “inconceivable” that it had a different interpretation of the treaty conditions than the United States. Nonetheless, after Prime Minister Zenko Suzuki ordered his Foreign Ministry to investigate the facts, the best it could do was to say it could find no written records of the pact.

Declassified U.S. government documents make a mockery of the Three Non-Nuclear Principles. The papers reveal that Japanese government officials ignored evidence that the United States was routinely bringing nuclear weapons into Japanese ports. American military planners took Japan’s silence as tacit permission to carry nuclear weapons into Japanese harbors. The American aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk, home ported for decades in Yokohama, routinely carried a small arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Japan even participated in joint military exercises in which U.S. forces simulated the use of nuclear weapons. These revelations underline the dichotomy between the Japanese government’s public policies and its actions regarding nuclear weapons.

One of the pivotal debates in Japan during the early 1970s was whether to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The treaty basically froze the nuclear status quo. The five nuclear powers retained their arsenals while the rest of the world pledged to abstain from nuclear weapons. More than a hundred countries signed the treaty. The only notable exceptions were the few states that held open the nuclear option: India, Pakistan, Israel and Japan. The debate, like most decisions on these issues in Japan, was not carried out in a public forum. But the Americans were listening, and what they heard put Japan’s nuclear ambitions in a completely new light.

Yasuhiro Nakasone was Director of the Japanese Defense Agency and one of a new generation of pro-nuclear politicians. Though he was not in favor of immediate nuclear armament, he opposed any action that would limit Japan’s right to develop nuclear weapons in the future. Nakasone was one of the principal authors of a 1969 policy paper that said in a chapter on national security: “For the time-being Japan’s policy will be not to possess nuclear weapons. But it will always maintain the economic and technical potential to manufacture nuclear weapons and will see to it that Japan won’t accept outside interference on this matter.”

Six years later Nakasone was again embroiled in the nuclear debate. At stake was Japan’s ability to go nuclear and the biggest prize in Japanese politics – the prime minister’s gavel. Nakasone assured his rise to prime minister by outwardly supporting the NPT. The price for Japan’s cooperation was President Gerald Ford’s pledge not to interfere with Japan’s nuclear programs, even when they included material and technology ideally suited to nuclear weapons use. With Ford’s guarantee, Japan finally ratified the NPT in 1976. Japan’s nuclear commerce continued unabated. The United States continued to supply enriched uranium to Japanese reactors and allowed the spent fuel to be reprocessed in Europe and the plutonium shipped back to Japan, where it was stockpiled for future use in breeder reactors.

Stopping the Spread of Fissile Material

Jimmy Carter Tours TMI Control Room

After Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976, he instituted an aggressive policy to control the spread of fissile materials. As a former nuclear reactor engineer on a Navy submarine, Carter knew better than any other world leader the immense power locked up in plutonium and highly enriched uranium. He was determined to keep it out of the hands of even our closest non-nuclear allies – including Japan.

Carter had good reason for this policy. Despite Japan’s ratification of the NPT in 1976, a study conducted for the CIA the following year named Japan as one of the three countries most able to go nuclear before 1980. Only the Japanese people’s historic opposition to nuclear weapons argued against Japanese deployment. Every other factor argued for a Japanese nuclear capability. By now the CIA – and its more secretive sister agency, the NSA — had learned the position of Japan’s inner circle.

Carter knew the incredibly volatile effect plutonium would have on world stability. Plutonium is the single most difficult to obtain ingredient of nuclear bombs. Even relatively backward countries – and some terrorist groups – now possess the technology to turn plutonium or highly enriched uranium into a nuclear weapon. But refining plutonium or enriching uranium is an extremely difficult, costly task. Carter knew that by limiting the spread of plutonium and uranium, he could control the spread of nuclear weapons. He made preventing the spread of plutonium the cornerstone of his nuclear non-proliferation policy.

The Japanese were shocked when Carter entered office and promptly pushed through Congress the 1978 Non-Proliferation Act, which subjected every uranium and plutonium shipment to congressional approval and blocked a host of sensitive nuclear technologies from Japan. Carter was determined not to transfer nuclear technology or materials that Japan could use to make nuclear weapons. The decision was hugely unpopular in America’s nuclear establishment as well. America’s nuclear scientists had expected much from Carter since he was one of them: someone who knew and understood nuclear energy.

Carter’s efforts ended America’s plans to reprocess spent nuclear fuel. Carter stopped reprocessing because he feared the consequences of Korean or Taiwan stockpiling plutonium. He believed it would lead to an Asian arms race involving Japan and China as well as Korea or Taiwan.

Carter’s U.S. nuclear doctrine was enormously unpopular among America’s nuclear science elite, who viewed a plutonium-based fuel cycle as the future of nuclear energy. They saw the atom as the solution to the problems that had stalled America’s great economic boom – acid rain from coal, shortages and embargos of oil. With an almost inexhaustible supply of cheap, clean nuclear energy, America would reclaim its position as the world’s unquestioned economic leader. But for many it went beyond even that. If America could complete the fuel-cycle – complete the nuclear circle, all of humanity could be lifted up by the nuclear bootstrap. At research centers around the country and in the Department of Energy’s Forrestal Building on Washington’s Independence Avenue, enthusiasm for the breeder program reached almost a religious crescendo.

If the breeder reactor was going to revolutionize the world’s nuclear economy, went the thinking in America’s nuclear establishment, the United States would have to share it with her allies in Europe and Japan. The very cornerstone of science is the free exchange of information, and the American scientists shared openly with their European and Japanese colleagues. The cooperation ran both ways. The breeder reactor was proving to be a monumental technical challenge, and DOE was eager to learn from the mistakes of Germany, Britain and France, all of which had been working on the problem nearly as long as the United States. Carter’s policies hindered America’s efforts to develop and share a plutonium-based nuclear energy cycle.

To the chagrin of the powerful nuclear weapons and nuclear power lobbies, Carter abandoned the idea of a new nuclear renaissance. Carter’s administration ushered in an era of reduced nuclear trade and an interruption to the free flow of ideas among scientists. For men like Richard T. Kennedy and Ben Rusche at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Harry Bengelsdorf at the U.S. Department of Energy, the restraints were completely unacceptable. Jimmy Carter’s re-election defeat brought the nuclear establishment another opportunity.

Reversing Course – Reagan Undermines Carter’s Policies

Richard Kennedy

One of the most passionate nuclear believers was a career bureaucrat named Richard Kennedy. A former Army officer, he labored in obscurity at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, his career held hostage by his vehement opposition to President Carter’s nuclear policies. All of that changed after Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. One of Reagan’s first acts as president was to effectively reverse Carter’s nuclear doctrine, which had barred the United States from using plutonium in civilian power projects with America’s friends or adversaries.

Reagan made Kennedy his right-hand man for nuclear affairs. From his new post as Ambassador at Large for Nuclear Energy, Kennedy oversaw the dismantling of the Carter policies he despised. The new administration rejuvenated American and international reliance on plutonium.

But one legacy of the Carter years hobbled America’s headlong leap into international nuclear commerce. Carter had pushed through Congress in 1978 the Atomic Energy Act, a sweeping piece of legislation that strictly limited how foreign countries could import and use nuclear materials originating in the United States. Under the Act, Congress had to approve every single shipment of reactor fuel that crossed an international border. The law was an insufferable impediment to Kennedy’s vision of unfettered nuclear commerce. So he set out to circumvent it.

In the early days of the Reagan buildup, as the massive injection of cash into America’s conventional and nuclear war-making industries dramatically increased, the administration force-fed money to the nuclear scientists designing new warheads and attempting to solve the nuclear breeder reactor conundrum.

Clinch River Breeder Reactor Design

At the center of this plan was an experimental facility at the DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee’s scenic Clinch River valley. Here in the Appalachian foothills, America’s most brilliant scientists were assembling a breeder reactor. The technology held incredible promise. As it generated power, it transformed previously spent nuclear fuel into pure plutonium. The breeder became the Holy Grail of nuclear science, a closed fuel cycle that would open up an almost limitless supply of energy. The Clinch River breeder project was on the cutting edge of technology, and, under Reagan, the Department of Energy flooded the project with money. The project cost $16 billion dollars between 1980 and 1987. And then, as suddenly as it had begun, Congress stopped the program cold.

Despite the efforts of the country’s best minds and nearly limitless budgets, the breeder program did not work. And it was not only the Clinch River team who failed. Breeder programs in Germany, France and the United Kingdom also could not make the leap from lab experiment to commercially viable practice. Reagan’s commitment to new nuclear weapons never flagged, but as the mid-eighties recession dragged on, he could not protect every facet of the military industrial complex from congressional cost-cutting. In 1987, Congress pulled the funding on Clinch River. To the cadre of scientists and Energy Department bureaucrats who had made the breeder reactor their life’s work, it was a disaster. Yet despite their failure and the nation’s lack of support, they remained faithful to the idea of the nuclear fuel cycle.

In the meantime, one country was still doggedly pursuing the breeder technology: Japan. In 1987, the resources of Japan’s runaway economy seemed limitless. If any nation could make the breeder economically viable, it was Japan. But if Japanese scientists were to succeed, they would need to start where the Americans had left off.

To understand what happened next requires an understanding of how American government really works. While administrations change every four or eight years and Congress, particularly the House of Representatives, regularly cycles its membership, the bureaucracy rolls on with almost monolithic continuity. In the bureaucracy, careerists can entrench behind their coveted projects to wait out administrations. Before Congress terminated the breeder program, Reagan left its future in the hands Richard T. Kennedy.

Kennedy looked like a Hollywood casting director’s version of the Washington insider, says long-time adversary Damon Moglen. “He had the nasty, florid appearance of a man who spent a lifetime in smoky back rooms, and his demeanor reeked of influence peddling. You could have seen him coming out of Tammany Hall.” Kennedy’s friends were kinder. Ben Rusche, a colleague at the NRC, praised Kennedy’s political instincts. “He was very attuned, perhaps to a degree greater than many that were in the business, to political realities both internally and externally.” Friend and foe alike agree that Kennedy trampled over lesser bureaucrats who stood in his way. He was the perfect man to orchestrate the salvation of the American breeder program by transferring it part and parcel to Japan.

The plan would require a masterful manipulation of Washington’s byzantine bureaucratic process. A technology transfer of this magnitude requires the approval of hundreds of officials at dozens of agencies. But precisely because it is so large and complicated, a canny insider can shepherd it through channels with the aid of a small cadre of true believers. Eight years of joint breeder development with Japan had created a crop of young scientists and bureaucrats passionately devoted to the cause. And Kennedy was still flush with an improbable victory—forcing Congress to allow the sale of nuclear reactors to Communist China in 1985.

Giving to Both Sides – Nuclear deals with China and Japan

Westinghouse AP 1000 in China

In 1984 the Westinghouse Corporation had struck a deal to supply nuclear reactors to China worth as much as $10 billion. The deal was an incredible windfall for the American nuclear industry and would be a cornerstone in Kennedy’s efforts to make the United States dominate in the world’s nuclear commerce. The only problem was China’s abysmal record of sharing nuclear secrets with all bidders.

In a bitter session on the Senate floor, then Democratic Assistant Majority Leader Alan Cranston charged that the Reagan administration on Kennedy’s watch had “systematically withheld, suppressed and covered up information – known virtually throughout the executive branch – which Congress might find worrisome.” China was already known to have sold nuclear technology to five international nuclear outlaws: Pakistan, Iran, South Africa, Brazil and Argentina. By 1984, Cranston and most of the American government knew that China had given sophisticated nuclear weapons designs to Pakistan. Beijing had also sold the enriched uranium that would find its way into South Africa’s nuclear bombs. China sold heavy water for use in Argentina’s bomb program, while also selling nuclear materials to arch rival Brazil and negotiating nuclear agreements with Iran. China’s nuclear proliferation track record could hardly have been worse, but instead of negotiating ironclad safeguards, Kennedy returned from Beijing with an agreement so ambiguous that both sides could interpret it however they liked. China had refused to sign a non-proliferation pledge or agree to give the United States the right to prevent China from reprocessing fuel burned in the reactors into plutonium for use in nuclear weapons.

Democratic Assistant Majority Leader Alan Cranston

Kennedy returned to Beijing in June 1985 to lead the American side of the nonproliferation negotiations. He brought back a new agreement that was almost identical to the first. But $10 billion projects die hard in Washington, and a threat to cancel Chinese Premier Deng Xiaoping’s upcoming visit to Washington provided Kennedy the opening he needed. As the administration promoted its argument that the best way to contain the Chinese nuclear threat was to become its primary supplier, Westinghouse passed out subcontracts that made the deal popular among politicians.

The China agreement had forged Kennedy’s inner circle into an administrative juggernaut, and despite the potential rewards awaiting key players in lobbying firms and Japanese-funded think tanks, the nucleus of Kennedy’s circle remained in the government. Now with the Japanese breeder program on the line, Kennedy’s right-hand man at the U.S. State Department, Fred McGoldrick, and DOE contractor Harold Bengelsdorf, would rally breeder disciples throughout the government. Their goal was to transfer the American taxpayer funded technology of the $16 billion Clinch River project to Japan’s largest utility company for less than one-thousandth the American investment. The plan had already been approved, largely by Japanese and American consultants working for the Big Five Japanese corporations.

Two major obstacles stood in their way. U.S. and international law strictly limited the technology developed in the Clinch River program, particularly reprocessing technology used to separate plutonium from spent nuclear fuel. And the plan would require hundreds of international shipments of weapons-grade plutonium and high level nuclear waste on ships.

Lewis Dunn, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency

In the early days of 1986, Kennedy met almost daily with Lewis Dunn, a midlevel functionary in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. ACDA had the contract to write the proliferation threat assessment that would determine in large part whether the deal with Japan would survive.

Dunn had committed his career to opposing the spread of nuclear weapons. But like Kennedy, he believed that the best way to manage nuclear technology was to become the world’s leading nuclear supplier. In his quiet, determined way, Dunn was as powerful an advocate of the Japan agreement as Kennedy. Records of Dunn’s frequent meetings with Kennedy remain classified, but Kennedy’s calendars reveal an extraordinarily close collaboration between the two men.

Dunn worked for ACDA, a semi-autonomous agency housed in the State Department’s office building at Foggy Bottom. At least three times a week for nearly a year, Dunn made the long walk from ACDA’s offices on the third floor to Kennedy’s corner office. They talked for hours about the threat assessment that Congress would use to decide whether or not to allow the transfer to Japan.

The report Dunn penned made the agency rounds in the middle of 1986 and met with immediate skepticism from the Pentagon, the CIA and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Central Intelligence Agency had been warning for years that Japan had the technology, and perhaps the will, to go nuclear. Contrary to the popular view inside the U.S. government, Japan had never given up the legal right to go nuclear. In fact, in a series of policy papers and internal debates going back to the early 1950s, Japanese policymakers had explicitly reserved the nuclear option. Most tellingly, an internal planning document that circulated at the highest level of Japanese government in 1969 stated that Japan would maintain —and, if necessary, develop – the technical and financial means to develop nuclear weapons. In an ominous aside, the paper vowed to do so “no matter what foreign pressures were applied.”

The CIA knew of the 1969 planning paper and reams of other evidence that suggested Japan had the will and the means to go nuclear if it felt threatened. Reports the CIA sent to U.S. presidents on the issue beginning in the 1960s shored up the nuclear umbrella commitment Lyndon Johnson had made to Prime Minister Eisaku Sato in 1965. The agency made sure that every president since LBJ knew Japan’s nuclear potential. Yet the warnings rarely trickled down to the working levels of the bureaucracy, where nuts and bolts decisions such as the transfer of the Clinch River hardware and research results were hammered out with Japan.

Getting Around The Department of Defense

The CIA had been skeptical of Japan’s nuclear program for decades. The CIA and NSA eavesdropped routinely on America’s allies as well as her adversaries. Over the years, the CIA had consistently reported that Japan had both the potential and – under the right circumstances – the will to go nuclear.

But in 1987, when Kennedy was pushing hard to accelerate the trade in nuclear secrets and materials with Japan, the CIA was out of the loop. Ironically, the agency that knew the most about Japan’s nuclear potential knew the least about the internal deliberations in the United States about transferring nuclear technology to Japan. The CIA is charged with monitoring foreign governments. While it has never completely restrained itself from spying on rival agencies, in this case the agency knew almost nothing about Kennedy’s internal effort to move the Clinch River project to Japan. Ultimately, the CIA was cut out of the decision. The role of chief opponent belonged to the Pentagon.

State, DOE and ACDA favored wholesale collaboration with Japan, while the Pentagon feared terrorists could hijack sea shipments of bomb-grade plutonium carried between Europe and Japan. Leading the Pentagon’s camp was Fred Ikle, Reagan’s Undersecretary of Defense for Nuclear Programs. Ikle’s concern about terrorist attacks was genuine, but a far greater concern lurked beneath the surface of open debate, a subject so politically unpopular that it was barely raised outside the Pentagon. For years intelligence analysts at DOD and the CIA had believed that Japan was capable of developing a formidable nuclear arsenal. Though few in the administration doubted Japan’s technical abilities, Ikle and a few others were alone in their belief that Japan had the political potential to go nuclear.

Captain James Auer

Kennedy had one ally in the Pentagon. Captain James Auer was the Japan officer in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He was the Pentagon’s first authority on all things Japanese. Auer had spent nearly half his 20-year naval career in Japan, first as commanding officer of a guided missile frigate home-ported in Yokohama, and later as a student at the Japanese equivalent of the U.S. Naval Academy. Like many Westerners who come into close contact with Japanese culture, Auer was a convert. He spoke the language, read the literature and became a connoisseur of the Japanese classic dance form, Kabuki.

That talent would serve him well in the Pentagon in 1986, as the American military bureaucracy squared off against the State and Energy departments over Japan. While the civilian bureaucrats viewed Japan as a vibrant and able partner in world affairs, and particularly in the field of nuclear energy, the warriors in the Pentagon held a far darker view. Since the time of the Korean War, the American military had regarded Japan largely as a freeloader that had built its monstrously successful economy on the backs of American servicemen who held the Soviets, Chinese and North Koreans at bay. Before any evidence had been examined, the Defense Department was far less likely to be sympathetic to Japan’s case than were the other major agencies in Washington.

The chief exception to this rule was Auer, who as a committed Japanophile was also in exactly the right place to help push the U.S.-Japan Agreement through the Pentagon. Early in 1986, Auer’s name begins to appear in Kennedy’s official calendar. As the Japan Desk officer at Defense, Auer was privy to almost all of the paperwork and high-level meetings regarding the proposed plutonium deal. He also was in weekly contact with his many friends and colleagues in the Japanese Embassy and at the Big Five corporate offices that served as a shadow foreign service for Japan. It is not clear whether Auer leaked the Pentagon’s deliberations or strategy to Kennedy or the Japanese. The Pentagon’s chief concern with the U.S.-Japan Agreement was the transport of enormous quantities of weapons-grade plutonium and nuclear waste along sea-lanes that could not be adequately defended.

The Pentagon confronted Kennedy on the security issue. In report after report, the Defense Department concluded that nothing less than a destroyer escort could adequately protect the plutonium shipments. Men like Richard Spear, with twenty years command experience in the Navy, found their warnings overruled by Kennedy and his colleagues on the strength of Lewis Dunn’s ACDA analysis. In the only plutonium shipment through the Panama Canal before the U.S.-Japan Agreement entered force, the Navy deployed a small armada to ensure its safe passage. The operation was coordinated by Lt. Col. Oliver North, of Iran-Contra fame. Now, on the force of an analysis conducted almost entirely within Foggy Bottom by Kennedy and Dunn, the United States was preparing to allow hundreds of tons of plutonium and other fissile materials to transit the high seas protected only by a few policemen on a cargo ship.

Frank Gaffney, then a deputy assistant secretary for defense, recalls the Pentagon’s reaction to the transport plan as one of almost total resistance. “There was just no way we were going to protect those shipments. It would be too much of a drain on our readiness. And the Japanese were neither willing nor able to stop a determined attack halfway around the world.”

The scenario Ikle and Gaffney foresaw was a slow and poorly armed nuclear transport vessel incapable of fighting off even a lone gunboat. A plutonium laden ship would be at the mercy of any nation or terrorist organization that could get its hands on a World War Il-vintage destroyer or even an armed speed-boat.

The Pentagon had favored air transport of the plutonium, but that option had been stymied when supposedly crash-proof casks smashed open in tests. Greenpeace got the tests results and took them straight to the media. That ended the Pentagon’s favored option of transporting plutonium and high-level nuclear waste by air. The Defense Department also had concerns that the Japanese would use the plutonium in their own weapons program. Except for the CIA, no branch of the U.S. government believed more firmly that Japan could one day go nuclear. But a nuclear Japan was not a deal-breaker for Defense as much as it would be for other agencies. In the ongoing industrial, economic and ideological campaign against communism, Japan was perhaps America’s strongest Cold War ally. Although her military was purely defensive, and she did not have the will in 1986 to use it, the long memories at Defense recalled a Japan that had been an extremely formidable military force. Many of the top-ranking officers came from old-line military families and had fathers and uncles who had fought against the Japanese in World War II. If the State Department regarded Japan as an enormous pacifist economic engine, and Energy regarded her as a surrogate womb for its cherished breeder reactor, Defense still saw Japan as a sleeping giant. But this time the giant was on America’s side.

A nuclear-armed Japan would relieve much of the drain on American military resources. The need to keep two divisions on the ground in Korea, as well as nuclear armed ships and aircraft in the Pacific as a hedge against China and the missile bases in the Soviet Far East detracted from the Pentagon’s chief mission – preparing for all-out war on the plains of Central Europe. The Reagan administration’s strategy was to push the Soviet war machine until it broke, taking the Soviet Union and its satellite regimes with it. A more aggressive, nuclear-armed Japan would be a tremendous asset in this effort. So while Defense fought against the sea-shipment of plutonium on tactical grounds, its opposition to plutonium and technology transfer to Japan was only pro forma.

Auer was able to capitalize on this sentiment behind the scenes. Late in 1986, the Pentagon grudgingly signed off on Dunn’s report stating that sea transport of plutonium did not constitute a major proliferation risk. The Pentagon was not the lead agency, Gaffney explains, so even had it fought tooth and nail, State and Energy would probably have been able to muster the support to defeat the opposition, and possibly the career ambitions of its major figures.

Savannah River Site, South Carolina, USA.

The Secrets of Savannah River and Hanford

The Pentagon knew that the Clinch River technology was ideally suited for use in nuclear weapons. Most of the project’s theoretical research had been carried out at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. But the hardware development and much of the hands-on research took place at the plutonium separation canyons at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, South Carolina, and at Hanford, Washington, two of the country’s other major nuclear weapons laboratories.

The facilities in Washington State were built to separate plutonium for the Manhattan Project in the early 1940s and had been vastly expanded in a new Savannah River facility in the 1950s and 60s. By the time the Clinch River program was in full swing, the plants that first gave birth to the bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki and now were building hydrogen bomb warheads, were accepting dozens of Japanese visiting scientists each year. When the program’s demise became inevitable, the Japanese came in even greater numbers.

The breeder reactor runs on plutonium, a substance that is otherwise useful only in nuclear weapons. Any technology that yielded plutonium was by definition a nuclear weapons project. In the United States, such projects are limited to a handful of nuclear weapons facilities owned exclusively by the government. President Harry Truman, recognizing the inherent risk of privatizing nuclear weapons capability, established the American bomb program independent of private industry and the military.

The most sensitive technologies in the Clinch River project were housed on these remote nuclear reservations. And from the very outset, Japanese industry officials wanted onto the American bases to see what they were getting. The U.S.-Japan Agreement called for a five-year period of cooperation in which Japanese and American scientists would work together on breeder projects, funded largely by the Japanese utilities. The idea, as DOE project director William Burch put it, is to “stay in the ball game.” To stay in the game, the United States would have to play by Japan’s rules. And the specific items Japan wanted came straight from the nuclear weapons program.

On top of the list was sophisticated plutonium separation hardware housed at the Savannah River Site, which had churned out weapons plutonium for a generation. Savannah River built and tested centrifuges, which after further testing at the Argonne National Laboratory, were shipped to Japan for use in the Recycle Energy Test Facility (RETF), a deceptively named plant for separating weapons-grade plutonium from spent fuel. RETF was central to the Japanese breeder reactor plan. The Japanese needed the high-capacity plant to manufacture their own high-grade plutonium. While the plant was under construction, Japan contracted the refining job to France and Great Britain.

America’s experience producing military plutonium at Savannah River was ideally suited for use in the Japanese program. Other U.S. weapons labs have also contributed to the Japanese program. Hanford and the Argonne-West laboratory in Idaho conducted thousands of hours of tests on plutonium fuel assemblies for the Joyo breeder reactor. Japanese scientists were integrally involved in these tests and had virtual free-run of the U.S. nuclear weapons establishment. If Japan does someday deploy nuclear weapons, it will have been made possible by the wholesale transfer of weapons-usable technology through the U.S.-Japan Agreement.

US-Japan Alliance Discuss Importance of U.S. Nuclear Umbrella

The Agreement between the Energy Department and Japan’s monolithic nuclear energy utility, the Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation (PNC), violated a laundry-list of anti-nuclear prohibitions. It provided no Japanese guarantee that nuclear material would not be transferred to other countries without American consent, nor any assurance that Japan would not reprocess American reactor fuel into plutonium without prior U.S. approval. In short, the United States abdicated all control of U.S.- origin nuclear material in Japan for the next 30 years.

The deal also violated Carter’s Atomic Energy Act, a U.S. law which mandates that the reprocessing or retransfer of American nuclear material must not increase the risk of proliferation. In particular, the agreement did not ensure timely warning to the United States of any diversion for weapons purposes. In fact, Japan has lost track of more than 70 kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium at its accident plagued Tokai reprocessing plant – enough to make more than 20 nuclear weapons. In a single agreement, the United States ceded control of nuclear material and gave up whatever safety margin it had to prevent a rapid nuclear deployment. At the time of the transfer, officials in both Washington and Tokyo knew that the only thing the breeder program would produce reliably was plutonium and that it would churn it out in enormous quantities, and in a form twice as pure as the plutonium used in American nuclear weapons.

To the American bureaucrats and scientists who engineered the transfer, it was a coup for science and international cooperation. As always, the concept of a nuclear armed Japan was difficult to believe in light of the atomic devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In addition to the wholesale transfer of U.S. fast-breeder and reprocessing technology to Japan, the U.S-Japan Agreement gave Japan the right to import unlimited amounts of nuclear materials from the United States, reprocess it into plutonium without restriction, and retransfer it to other countries.

Senator John Glenn

Senator John Glenn, who as a former astronaut knew enough science to grasp the implications of the agreement, fought vehemently against it. But Kennedy’s people had sent it to Capitol Hill unannounced, only hours before the holiday recess. Most of Glenn’s supporters had already left, and he could only stand back and watch as the agreement passed. The Comptroller General of the United States immediately declared the agreement illegal. President George H.W. Bush signed it anyway. Before signing the U.S.-Japan Agreement, the United States had considered requests to separate plutonium from U.S.-origin fuel on a request-by-request basis. This agreement, instead, gave Japan blanket authority to reprocess and store U.S.-origin nuclear material within Japan, as well as the authority to transfer spent fuel to designated facilities in Europe for plutonium separation.

Soon after the legislation was signed into law, Kennedy and his team were duly rewarded. For James Auer, the Navy captain who had helped Kennedy get the agreement past the Pentagon, it was a great career boost. Auer, soon after passage, traded in his Navy Blue for the tweed jacket of a tenured professor at Vanderbilt University in a new position at a think tank fully funded by Japanese industry.

McGoldrick and Bengelsdorf retired from government service several years later and established a business of their own making hundreds of thousands of dollars as private consultants for the Japanese nuclear industry.

By 1988, when the Senate ratified Kennedy’s U.S.-Japan Nuclear Agreement, Japan was one of only a few countries in the world that regarded plutonium as an asset, not a liability. The Soviets and Americans were trying to devise ways to store and secure vast quantities of this long-lived, radioactive element. In places like Germany and Italy, strong public protests compelled governments to store plutonium outside their own national borders.

Japan’s Weapons Delivery Program

By the 1970s, Japan began to aggressively pursue a space program. Japan had risen from her World War II defeat to establish herself as a premier manufacturing and technological power. The Jet Age had given way to the Space Age, and a world power like Japan had to have its own space program. The decision, as is almost always the case in Japan, was pragmatic rather than emotional. Communications in the future would depend on satellites, and warfare would be conducted with long-range missiles. By 1969, Japan had already decided to maintain the ability to go nuclear on short notice. From the start, long-range ballistic missiles and satellite targeting abilities were part of that defense architecture.

In 1969 Japan delved aggressively into space, opening the National Aerospace Development Agency (NASDA) and funded it lavishly. The agency’s goal was to promote the useful role of space. Japan was not interested in a headlong race to the moon; it wanted satellites for communication and surveillance. And it knew how to get them.

Just as America transferred nuclear technology to Japan under Atoms for Peace, America opened its space secrets to Japan as well. NASDA developed the N-I liquid-fuel launch vehicle with American assistance and used it to loft the Kiku 2 communications satellite in 1977. The feat made Japan the third nation, after the United States and the Soviet Union, to place an artificial satellite in geostationary orbit.

After the successful launch of Kiku 2, NASDA developed the N-II and H-II rockets, to launch various utility satellites for telecommunications, broadcasting, weather monitoring and other Earth observation functions. The H-II — a large-scale and highly efficient international class launcher — has been flying since 1994. The H-II’s lift capability corresponded to the ability to launch nuclear payloads to transcontinental ranges. Despite the initial success of Kiku II, Japan’s consistent stumbling block was accuracy. Unlike the Americans, and even the Russians, Japanese rocket scientists lacked the ability to consistently place satellites in precise orbits.

Successors to the Kiku II had a history of imprecise, wobbly orbits. Kiku III, designed for a decade of service, exhausted its fuel trying to hold its orbit and fell from the sky after only two and a half years. Kiku IV lasted less than two years. As scientists everywhere do when faced with a hard problem, the Japanese looked for a shortcut. It came with the decline of Soviet communism.

In 1991, the seemingly airtight security of the Soviet space and missile programs was thrown wide open as scientists fled to the West. Japan’s secret service capitalized on the chaos and procured the design and some hardware of an SS-20 missile bus, the critical third stage of the Soviets’ then most advanced medium-range ballistic missile. With its three warheads, the SS-20 bus was an engineering treasure, from which Japan learned a great deal about missile guidance. They learned from the Russian missile how to place several warheads on one rocket. The technology, called MIRVing, is key to all modern ballistic missile forces. When one missile disgorges several warheads to an individual target, it is virtually impossible to defend against it.

Japan also developed the Lunar-A moon probe, a space exploration vehicle that in many ways resembles an intercontinental ballistic missile system. The Lunar-A system was designed to place three probes at exactly determined targets on the moon. The technology is directly transferable to a ballistic missile application. In addition to testing multiple reentry vehicle technology and targeting, the probe could test Japan’s ability to produce hardened electronics. The instruments aboard the probe would have to withstand the tremendous pressure of striking the moon’s surface and burrowing into the rock. This is precisely the same technology the United States has perfected for its bunker-busting small nuclear weapons, such as the B-61-11 developed for the B-2 bomber. The technology perfected in the Lunar-A mission gave Japan the option to develop nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles as sophisticated as any in the world.

Regional Concerns and Early Nuclear Catastrophes

Ambassador Walter Mondale

The mood toward nuclear weapons was changing in Japan. Perhaps the most telling statement was uttered by cabinet minister Hatsumo Hada to then U.S. Ambassador Walter Mondale at an embassy dinner party. Hada, who later became ambassador to China, told Mondale that Japan would have to go nuclear if North Korea obtained the bomb or the regional security situation worsened. The Japanese public would have to be educated, Hada said, but that would not present a problem. The fragility of the stability of the area over the years has only increased as China and North Korea’s tested nuclear weapons. Japan feels it must be ready to quickly respond in the region. In the early 1980s, when her bubble economy burst, Japan cut back on spending in many areas. But it never abandoned its commitment to nuclear energy. In that area, it was still a world leader.

In the 1990s, the governor of Tokyo prefecture –essentially Tokyo’s mayor and one of Japan’s most powerful politicians, Shintaro Ishihara, first openly advocated the acquisition of a nuclear arsenal. Surprisingly, there was little public outcry, and the governor was re-elected by a wide margin.

From the very start, the Japanese breeder program was predicated on the belief that Japanese industry could do what the Americans and Europeans had failed to do – run the extremely complicated breeder cycle safely and profitably. That belief was rooted in Japan’s national self-confidence, nurtured by two generations of success in manufacturing. Japan’s dedicated and educated workforce and its special brand of quality management made it the world leader in a host of industries. Nuclear power generation would, it was believed, merely be one more success, made possible by Japan’s superior workers and management.

Tsuruga Nuclear Power Plant

Thirty years ago even Japan’s harshest critics might have agreed that perhaps it could succeed where Western efforts had failed. But that optimism soon faded as a string of nuclear catastrophes demonstrated that nuclear industries are far different than any other. Both the Monju fast-breeder reactor in 1995 and the Tokai reprocessing plant in April 1997 suffered serious, accidental radiation leaks; both accidents were the subjects of attempted cover-ups. Most egregious was the fire and leak of radioactive sodium at the Monju FBR. Japan’s Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation (PNC), the government corporation that operated Monju, lied repeatedly to the public about the accident. PNC attempted to suppress video footage that showed the cause of the accident: a ruptured pipe in a secondary cooling system that had spilled an estimated two to three tons of radioactive sodium – the largest such leak in the history of fast-breeder technology. One of the reasons PNC gave for releasing the misinformation was that Monju was too important to Japan’s energy program to jeopardize the reactor’s operation. In other words, the public’s safety was secondary to the breeder program.

Had it not been for a courageous act by a group of Fukui prefecture officials in the early morning of December 11, PNC’s attempted cover-up probably would have succeeded. Suspecting a cover-up, the officials entered the plant and secured the videotape. The action came as a direct result of a previous accident at Fukui’s Tsuruga Unit I reactor in the early 1980s. Fukui prefecture officials were not permitted to investigate that mishap. When the Monju accident took place, the officials were determined not to be turned away a second time. Following revelations that the agency itself had been involved in trying to withhold the video, a PNC executive committed suicide.

In the midst of the major problems at Japan’s nuclear facilities, a military response not seen since World War II came back into the Japanese psyche. In the spring of 1999, Japanese warships fired on North Korean trawlers that had strayed into Japanese waters. This action was the first time Japanese guns had fired in anger since the end of the war. In pure military terms, the engagement was insignificant, but the North Pacific region took notice because it symbolized the reawakening of the Japanese warrior ethic.

Barnwell Nuclear Reprocessing Facility

Besides Japan, only France, Russia and Great Britain still regard plutonium as an asset. These countries have invested tens of billions of dollars in their commercial reprocessing industry. The United States abandoned its only reprocessing facility in Barnwell, S.C., just outside the gates of the Savannah River Site without ever operating the facility. Only huge government-owned plants in La Hague, France, and Sellafield, England, separate tons of plutonium from spent nuclear fuel for foreign customers. The biggest of these customers is Japan, which, despite its confidence in its ability to build a breeder reactor, had turned to purchasing plutonium from the British and French.

The plutonium that the French and British reprocessors return to Japan is pure enough to use in nuclear weapons, and some of it comes from uranium mined in the United States. Thanks to the U.S.-Japan Agreement pushed through by the Reagan administration’s Richard Kennedy, the United States no longer has any influence over the transport and use of this material. So even after Japan’s disastrous nuclear accidents, and despite efforts to limit nuclear weapons and prevent terrorist groups from obtaining nuclear material, U.S.-origin nuclear material is still being shipped to Japan by the ton. Every shipload contains enough plutonium for hundreds of bombs.

Though the Japanese people are among the world’s most ardent nuclear weapons opponents, Japan’s security is inextricably tied to nuclear weapons. The American nuclear umbrella is currently Japan’s last line of defense against nuclear armed neighbors like China and North Korea. And the Japanese leadership’s rationale has been that there is no real certainty that the Americans will step into a nuclear fray to protect Japan. With the possibility of bombs from China or North Korea exploding over its territory, many Japanese leaders have come to consider the nuclear option not merely desirable, but indispensable.

Richard Kennedy died in 1998 and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. As the years passed his disciples lived lives of comfort. But as these men enjoyed the fruits of their labor for Ambassador Kennedy, the reality of the policies they had created were playing out in a most dramatic fashion.

Sellafield Nuclear Reprocessing Facility, Seascale, Cumbria, England

The Sellafield nuclear reprocessing facility is the British government-owned version of the Savannah River Site. Once dedicated to the production of the world’s most deadly substance, plutonium, the key ingredient of nuclear bombs, Sellafield was up until a few years ago the nearby town’s lifeblood. Sixty-five hundred people work at Sellafield separating the coveted plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel irradiated in power plants around the world. It is dangerous work. A microscopic particle of plutonium is enough to cause deadly lung or blood cancers. Sellafield produced plutonium by the ton, as well as even greater quantities of other radioactive wastes. Like Savannah River, the British plant spread radiation into the surrounding environment. Since 1952, fish, shellfish, and sea plants in the Irish Sea, and even the local pigeons, have been heavily contaminated with radioactive waste from Sellafield. The plutonium plant released into the sea 30 billion liters of radioactive waste in a single decade.

The most dangerous result of Sellafield’s reprocessing industry is the arms race it may cause on the other side of the world. That is because British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. (BNFL), the government-owned corporation that runs Sellafield, churns out plutonium for the highest bidder. Dr. Frank Barnaby, a retired British nuclear weapons designer, says that the plutonium fuel produced at Sellafield that was repeatedly shipped to Japan was sufficiently pure to be used in nuclear weapons. He explains that both the United States and Great Britain have both built and tested nuclear weapons made with the so-called reactor grade plutonium.

The late Paul Leavanthal, a non-proliferation expert, said the people of Seascale, the town nearest Sellafield, unwittingly supplied plutonium that could have ended up in nuclear bombs, and charged that “the Thatcher British government did it in the name of British jobs.”

Ambassador Kennedy’s agreement required the ships transporting the materials to be escorted by government ships dedicated to protecting the plutonium from possible terrorist attack. The intent of this language was to require warships to escort the shipments, but, in response to domestic Japanese pressure, the shipping company persuaded the American, British and Japanese governments to allow two transport ships to escort each other. The transport ships are owned by Pacific Nuclear Transport Limited, a subsidiary of BNFL that is partially owned by a consortium of Japanese utility companies that wanted to save money.

The ongoing nuclear commerce between Japan and France and Britain soon became routine. The shipments of thousands of tons of U.S.-origin reactor waste for Japan each year were largely uneventful until the spring of 1995. Beyond profit, there is another reason France and Britain continue to ship plutonium to Japan. If they do not, Russia will. In economic terms, the balance of supply and demand favors Japan, the world’s only serious plutonium buyer. Faced with the prospect of a nuclear-armed Japan – and given the bloody history between these nations – Japan’s Asian neighbors began buying from Areva, the French government owned reprocessor.

These shipments have not been uneventful.

Pacific Pintail

The Fukushima nuclear disaster was not Japan’s first close call with nuclear weapons grade plutonium. Japan came very close to contaminating the Chilean coast on March 20, 1995, when the Pacific Pintail, laden with enough waste plutonium to build hundreds of nuclear bombs, tried to head into the protection of Chilean waters during a storm.

On March 20, 1995, Captain Blaine Axton had never seen worse weather in his forty years at sea. His lightly armed trawler, the Pacific Pintail, labored in the heavy seas, the 40-foot waves crashing over her bow, the spray flying away horizontally in the storm. He was in the midst of an Antarctic gale off Cape Horn at the tip of South America – the deadliest ocean in the world – but the weather was only one of Axton’s problems.

The Pintail was locked in a tense standoff with a Chilean Navy gunboat over the contents of the Pintail‘s hold: twenty-eight canisters of high-level plutonium-laden radioactive waste, en route from France to Japan. If the Pintail were to founder, her toxic cargo could poison the entire west coast of South America. Both Axton and his Chilean counterpart were acutely aware of the potential for disaster.

Through the spray and driving rain, Axton could make out a gunboat flying the Chilean flag. The Chilean captain had already warned Axton that he was authorized to use any means necessary to prevent the Pintail from entering Chile’s 200-mile exclusion zone. The language was clear to Axton; it was the most polite way of saying “turn around, or we’ll sink you or board you.”

The Chilean government was determined that if the Pintail were to go down, it should be as far away as possible from the South Sea fisheries that are a mainstay of the Chilean economy. The Chilean gunboat captain continued to shout warnings over the Guard Channel. As she battled her way through the sea to take up a firing position against the Pintail, her captain was on the radio to Santiago, begging for permission to open fire. It did not come. As Axton gambled, the Chileans were not about to put a cargo of nuclear waste at the bottom of their sea. The sea was so rough that both ships were struggling just to stay afloat. A boarding party was out of the question. The Chilean gunboat had no choice but to let her continue into Chilean waters, where the Pintail survived the storm in the lee of the Patagonian coast. Tellingly, when the storm-battered Pintail arrived in Japanese waters two weeks later, with a typhoon building in the east, her Japanese owners ordered the Pintail to wait out the storm 300 miles from Japanese shores.

Waste and Mox shipments from Europe

In September 2010, France’s Areva loaded the first plutonium-based mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel into Reactor Number 3 at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. As the years passed more and more Japanese leaders have become bolder in their pro-military and pro-nuclear pronouncements. In the weeks leading up to the March 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster, the issue of a nuclear-armed Japan became very public after a Chinese captain was arrested after he rammed Japanese coast guard vessels with his ship. In an interview with the British newspaper, The Independent, Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara asserted that Japan could develop nuclear weapons within a year and send a strong message to the world. “All our enemies: China, North Korea and Russia – all close neighbors – have nuclear weapons. Is there another country in the world in a similar situation? People talk about the cost and other things but the fact is that diplomatic bargaining power means nuclear weapons. All the [permanent] members of the [United Nations] Security Council have them.” Ishihara told The Independent the clash, which ended when police released the captain of the Chinese ship accused of ramming the Japanese coast guard vessel, had exposed his country’s weakness in Asia. “China wouldn’t have dared lay a hand on the Senkakus [if Japan had nuclear weapons].”

The week before the governor made his comments, Beijing announced that its 2011 defense budget would be increased by 13 percent. Further adding to the tension with Japan is that China officially surpassed Japan as the world’s second largest economy in January 2011.

The governor said that a nuclear-armed Japan would also win more respect from Russia, which seized four Japanese-owned islands during the Second World War. And he advised his nation to rid itself of all restrictions in its constitution on the manufacture and sale of weapons. “We should develop sophisticated weapons and sell them abroad. Japan made the best fighters in the world before America crushed the industry. We could get that back.” Japanese nationalists have urged Japan’s postwar constitution, written by the United States during the American occupation, be abandoned. It makes Japan initiating war illegal.

A month after the governor made these comments, three reactors at the Fukushima nuclear power plant melted down including Reactor Number 3 with the plutonium-based MOX fuel. For the first time the larger Japanese public began to ask serious questions about the relationship between their government and the powerful Japanese utility companies and their plutonium stockpile.

A year later, more questions than answers remain.

Editor’s Note: Beginning in 1991 reporters for the National Security News Service undertook an investigation into a covert Japanese nuclear weapons program. Our work has continued over the years. It gave NSNS unique insights into the reasons for the misstatements and secrecy that surround the ongoing tragedy at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. This story represents the work of a team of current and former reporters, fellows and interns for NSNS.

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EPA Loses Major Supreme Court Decision on Wetland Enforcement

David Rosenfeld — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 15:50:13 +0000

(Photo courtesy of the Pacific Legal Foundation)

A unanimous Supreme Court ruling yesterday in favor of Mike and Chantell Sackett marks a significant victory for private property advocates. It also represents one of the biggest wins for the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) in its 30-year history as a nonprofit law firm working to rollback environmental laws and advance a broad conservative agenda.

For the PLF, the story of an Idaho couple getting strong-armed by the Environmental Protection Agency while trying to build their dream home represented far more than the interests of a single family and their dashed American dream. It was textbook PLF.

For three decades the foundation has targeted environmental regulations. The Justice Department argued that it could tie up enforcement of wetland regulations in courts for years.

Damien Schif

The case fit with the PLF’s mission of defending personal property rights. It also offered an ideal chance to chip away at what Damien Schiff, lead attorney in the case, called a “significant expansion” of powers by the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers over the past 25 years.

“Our mission is to protect private property rights,” Schiff recently told DCBureau.org. “It’s not surprising that we run up against the cause of the infringement which is usually an environmental regulation and more frequently dealing with wetlands.”

EPA inspectors halted construction in 2007 on the Sackett’s lakeside property because of a wetland designation. If they did not comply, the couple was subject to $75,000 fines per day. They sued the EPA essentially to challenge the compliance order, which they were previously denied. The Supreme Court’s ruling now makes such orders immediately subject to judicial review rather than after the enforcement action takes place.

The Justice Department in its argument defending the EPA said the case could allow corporations to tie up environmental orders in court. EPA issued more than 600 compliance orders under the Clean Water Act in 2010 and more than 1,300 overall. The real winners are the business interests – the mining, logging, real estate and oil companies that are most often affected by the Clean Water Act.

Schiff said the ruling Wednesday shows the EPA is not above the law. “That’s the bottom line with today’s ruling,” Schiff said in a written statement. “It is a great day for all Americans, for all property owners, and for the rule of law.”

“EPA can’t try to micromanage people and their property – it can’t order property owners to dance like marionettes – while denying them any meaningful right to appeal to the courts. It can’t threaten property owners with financial ruin and not have to justify its threats to a judge. And it can’t issue lazy, drive-by ‘wetlands’ edicts about private property. It will have to put in some honest work and use credible science, because the regulators must be able to justify their wetlands orders in a court of law.”

The Sackett's empty lot

The government had argued that giving property owners a hearing would limit the agency’s ability to immediately stop violators. But in the opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia the court said it believed those abilities would still be preserved. Justice Samuel Alito in a joint opinion said it was “unthinkable” the Sacketts and other property owners could not sue the EPA. “In a nation that values due process, not to mention private property, such treatment is unthinkable,” Alito wrote.

Sympathies run deep

It is easy to feel sorry for the Sacketts, but far less deserving of sympathy are the corporations that stand to benefit from this and other cases PLF has advanced over the past 30 years. The firm got its start in the early 1970s with major victories in cases that benefited utility companies without representing them directly. It now employs 50 attorneys – five on environmental matters – with offices in four U.S. cities.

PLF files dozens of amicus briefs each year in favor of corporations such as Monsanto and Wal-Mart, arguing against everything from cattle rustling to affirmative action and the federal health reform law. Endangered species and wetlands are their two main environmental targets. They supported school voucher programs and the free speech rights of pharmaceutical companies.

For the corporations and individuals that donate to PLF, their contributions support a vital legal defense for their causes without having to wage battle themselves or even be named in a lawsuit. And they can do it anonymously. PLF discloses none of their donors either by request or on the nonprofit’s IRS 990 Forms.

Those forms do reveal, however, that PLF earned $14 million in 2010 – the most ever in its existence – and it spent about $7 million on expenses. Some of its revenues come from events such as its spring gala in April with a keynote address from conservative Fox News correspondent John Stossell.

In another landmark environmental case, PLF defended the mining company Couer Alaska in the Supreme Court over another case involving a wetland, this time in a remote section of southeast Alaska. The company won the case, which represented the first time in 30 years a mining company was allowed to turn a natural lake into a tailings pond.

Conservation groups are monitoring the effects of the waste pond at the Kensington Mine, but the site is very remote, says Lyndsey Ketchel, executive director of the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council.

“It’s not something you can go for a Sunday drive to see what’s happening,” Ketchel says. “It’s easier to take for granted when you see that vastness, but when you look at the world in general there are very few wild places. From many people’s perspective every development matters. My hope is the EPA understands it has an authority and should use it at appropriate times.”

She says the case was extremely divisive in the community.

“Most of the political leaders were in favor of Kensington being developed,” Ketchel says. “We and a couple of other groups were in negotiations with the mining company to avoid court. We had just won in appeals court. And it was when those negotiations fell apart the case got picked up by the Supreme Court.”

Targeting endangered species

PLF attorneys often take aim at the endangered species act, arguing against protecting lynx in Maine, polar bears in Alaska, sturgeon in California and a range of other threatened or endangered species. The reason is often that they infringe on someone’s ability to develop their property. Schiff said the firm seeks a balanced approach to environmental regulation.

“There’s absolutely no question that PLF stands for clean air and clean water,” Schiff said. “Our job is not to eliminate environmental regulation. I don’t know anyone who thinks it’s a good idea to dump sewage in rivers and eliminate various species to extinction for no good reason. The difficulty comes with who pays for it. So often individuals are disproportionately and unfairly baring the cost of environmental regulations.”

While PLF has had some notable success, much of its work ends with a whimper. In 2007 and 2008, PLF attorneys successfully compelled the Department of Fish and Wildlife to complete status reviews for all endangered species. But the results were less than impressive. The department determined six species, among them one fish and five plants, should be reclassified. Yet to date none have been removed from protected status.

Noah Greenwald, endangered species director for the Center for Biological Diversity, says the reevaluations turned out to be a good thing for species conservation because it actually strengthened the classifications in many cases.

“They are essentially using a law to protect an endangered species in order to weaken or loosen those protections,” Greenwald says. “They essentially try and argue that somehow people are threatened by these laws. I think the exact opposite is the truth. Protecting wetlands and protecting endangered species benefit us and future generations. It’s hard to think of something that’s been more beneficial to people than the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act.”

Jon Devine, senior attorney in the water program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said, “The Supreme Court did not give anyone a license to pollute. Pure and simple. Those who pollute our waters will still be held accountable. Today’s decision affirmed the legal principle that the EPA under the Clean Water Act may issue compliance orders to promote speedy resolution of pollution problems. It grants recipients of such orders, at a time of their choosing, a day in court to challenge them. The court did not adopt any of the radical ideas advanced by industry and its allies that could have severely hampered public health and environmental protections.”

EPA’s Enesta Jones said, “EPA will of course fully comply with the Supreme Court’s decision, which the agency is still reviewing, as we work to protect clean water for our families and future generations by using the tools provided by Congress to enforce the Clean Water Act.”

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Cuomo and Corbett Ignore Health Concerns from Gas Fracking

Peter Mantius — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 20:39:09 +0000

After natural gas drilling began near their rural homes about 30 miles southwest of Pittsburgh, Carol Moten and her neighbors noticed that their well water began to smell. Then came the headaches, skin lesions, and diarrhea, in household after household. A two-year-old dog fell over dead.

“We’re talking about little children that have nosebleeds, cats that fall off windowsills,” she said.

Three years ago, Moten and her neighbor, Donald Allison, visited Dr. Amelia Pare in nearby McMurray for their skin infections. Allison’s health continued to deteriorate and earlier this month he died from what the neighborhood understood to be bone cancer. He was 46.

Dr. Amelia Pare

Since there was no autopsy, Pare said, the exact cause of Allison’s death is unclear. “Does anybody really know?” she said. “There’s no funding for this.”

Some experts are concerned that the chemical make-up of the witches brew used to force gas from rock is at the heart of these health problems. When a few members of Congress tried to amend the Safe Water Drinking Act to remove a special exemption for hydraulic fracturing and require that drillers disclose to state regulators the chemicals being used, the industry objected. The actual content of these chemical mixes is a closely guarded secret. Exxon’s top official, Rex Tillerson, said that his company would not go through with its $41 billion dollar purchase of gas giant XTO if Congress made hydraulic fracturing “commercially impracticable.” DCBureau reported in 2010 that nanotechnology is being used in a new generation of drilling fluids.

Reports of drilling-related chemical spills that cover an acre or more fuel suspicion that drilling operations are triggering the outbreak of symptoms in heavily drilled Washington County, Pennsylvania. But as Pare acknowledged, there is no proof – no smoking gun –that a specific drilling practice or byproduct makes animals and people sick.

Industry vigorously challenges any assertion that a link exists – in Pennsylvania or anywhere else – and scientific study of the question is still in its infancy. Experts in government tread cautiously in describing the potential threat, and regulatory efforts lack focus.

In January, a senior official at the National Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta declined to say for certain that gas drilling poses a threat to public health, but he added that “site-by-site work is turning up data of concern.”

Christopher Portier, head of CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health and Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, said in an email to The Associated Press that future studies should explore “all the ways people can be exposed, such as through air, water, soil, plants and animals.”

“In addition to groundwater,” Portier said, “exposure pathways could include the air at well sites, impoundment sites, and compressor stations… livestock … and recreational fish.”

In the face of official calls for “future studies” of how high-volume hydro fracking might affect human health, states like Pennsylvania and New York have avoided these issues.

In Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Corbett and the Republican political establishment have eagerly embraced fracking, touting its economic benefits and downplaying its possible health consequences. Corbett’s 52-member advisory panel on Marcellus Shale drilling has no members with health expertise, according to a recent analysis by professors at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Public Health. (Neither do advisory panels on gas drilling for the state of Maryland and for the U.S. Secretary of Energy.)

New York State, which is poised to allow high-volume hydro fracking of shale formations as soon as it completes its final rules, has rejected repeated calls for a thorough study of the health implications of fracking.

In 2009, a regional official at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency urged the New York Department of Health to take a major role with the Department of Environmental Conservation in preparing the fracking rules. That did not happen. In 2011, dozens of physicians and health care professionals signed a letter to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, urging him to order a comprehensive health impact assessment of fracking. If the state DOH would not perform one, the health professionals said, the governor should assign the task to a graduate school of public health.

But Cuomo took no action. The draft drilling rules, which run more than 1,000 pages, still do not have a section devoted to drilling’s potential effects on human health.

The Independent Oil and Gas Association of New York has repeatedly argued that the state has – if anything – erred on the side of too much study. The rule-making process is in its third year, and drillers have long criticized the DEC for delays in issuing permits to use high-volume fracking on horizontal wells.

That process involves drilling vertically down into a shale formation and then angling the drill horizontally along the shale stratum. Drillers then force roughly 5 million gallons of water, along with sand and proprietary chemicals, into each well to crack the shale and free gas. Much of the fracking fluid returns to the surface mixed with subsurface brine, which tends to be laced with heavy metals and radioactive materials. In Pennsylvania, this flowback mixture often sits in open pits, which are prone to leaking into fields and streams.

While the industry has used less invasive forms of fracking for decades, the efficiency of high-volume fracking has led to an explosion of gas drilling activity across the country.

That growth trend could be threatened by evidence that fracking endangers human health, and drillers have aggressively challenged hints of a link.

That is what happened after the EPA issued a draft report on December 8, 2011, that concluded that groundwater in Pavillion, Wyoming, had been contaminated by chemicals associated with fracking. In a press release, Encana, a driller in Pavillion, called the EPA’s findings “irresponsible.” The same day an official of Chesapeake Energy, another leading driller, sent an email to employees that accused the EPA of being “more interested in their PR strategy and in establishing a connection between hydraulic fracturing and water contamination than finding the truth.”

On Dec. 18 – less than three months after Chesapeake Energy had contributed $250,000 to a super PAC backing his then-active presidential bid – Texas Gov. Rick Perry declared that there had never been a proven case of fracking causing groundwater contamination.

In fact, even when circumstantial evidence is strong, it is extraordinarily difficult to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that a gas drilling operation caused a contamination.

In April 2009, 17 cows foamed at the mouth and fell dead within an hour after they allegedly lapped up frackingflowback that had leaked into a Louisiana field from a nearby natural gas well that had recently been fracked.

(Photo supplied by Michelle Bamberger)

The companies that operated the well, Chesapeake and Schlumberger, entered agreements with Louisiana regulators under which they each reportedly paid a $22,000 fine for failure to report the spill and other infractions. But in those agreements, the companies denied that material from their site killed the cows, and they did not admit liability for the cows’ deaths.

Michelle Bamberger and Robert Oswald. (Photo by Peter Mantius).

The case drew the attention of Michelle Bamberger, a veterinarian in upstate New York who wondered what lethal toxins could kill thousand-pound animals so efficiently.

She also wondered whether livestock around the country were vulnerable, given the rapidly growing use of undisclosed chemicals in drilling for shale gas near beef and dairy farms. And what implications did the 17 dead cows have for humans and for the nation’s food supply?

The incident in Louisiana led Bamberger to team with her husband, Robert Oswald, a professor of pharmacology in the College of Veterinary Science at Cornell University, to search the medical literature for studies on the effects of gas drilling on animal health.They found it barren, so they launched their own study.

In January, the husband-wife research team published a report in the peer-reviewed journal New Solutions analyzing 24 cases in six states involving animal and human health problems potentially associated with gas drilling.

Typically, the subject animals suffered death or reproductive problems after drinking water from contaminated wells, ponds or streams. Humans suffered from burning of the eyes, nose and throat, headaches and dizziness, rashes, vomiting and diarrhea. In one case, a boy missed a year in school due to an illness that was attributed to poisoning from arsenic, a common ingredient in frackingflowback.

The research duo examined several cases involving cows that were suspected of drinking spilled fracking fluids or flowback. Animals tend to be attracted to its salty taste. In one case, 28 animals were quarantined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, while in several other cases many cows died. Bamberger and Oswald said they were concerned that gas drilling accidents might be degrading the nation’s food supply.

“We documented cases where food-producing animals exposed to chemical contaminants have not been tested before slaughter and where farms in areas testing positive for air and/or water contamination are still producing diary and meat products for human consumption without testing of the animals or the products,” the study said. “Some of these chemicals could appear in milk and meat products made from these animals.”

In the Louisiana case, the researchers found that the 17 animals were buried within 24 hours of their deaths. A necropsy report from one of the animals that died on route to the laboratory concluded that death was due to respiratory failure and circulatory collapse. The fracking fluid was found to contain ammonium compounds associated with lesions, which were found on the cow’s lung, trachea, liver and kidneys.

For Bamberger, the evidence did not provide absolute proof of a link between the spill and the deaths. Asked if she had concluded that the cows died “from exposure” to the fracking fluids, she said in an email: “I said AFTER exposure to frack fluid.”

In their report, Bamberger and Oswald wrote about several obstacles they met in trying to establish links between fracking and health problems. They cited the lack of pre-testing of well water and air before drilling. They noted that they were prevented from identifying many of the chemicals used in fracking because of confidentiality rules drillers obtained under a 2005 federal law nicknamed the “Halliburton loophole.”

The researchers also wrote that confidentiality agreements often hid evidence that might shed light on a contamination. They said drillers have been known to compensate owners for animal deaths or illnesses in exchange for their legally binding silence. But their report did not cite specific gag order cases or even provide rough estimates of how often they are used.

The Bamberger/Oswald report has drawn criticism from certain scientists, including Professor Ian Rae of the University of Melbourne in Australia. Rae noted that the study omits names, dates and places of events and “certainly does not qualify as a scientific paper but is rather, an advocacy piece…”

Bamberger said confidentiality promises were key to obtaining information, including vet records and toxicology reports, from those sources who often feared retaliation.

Others agree that winning the trust of people who feel overwhelmed by their illnesses and their relative powerlessness is the key to serving them.

In February, a non-profit group called the Southwest Pennsylvania Environmental Health Project opened a clinic in McMurray, Penn., to treat residents of Washington, Green and Fayette counties who believe their health has been, or could be, compromised by natural gas drilling activities.

David Brown, SWPA-EHP

“We’re taking a public health approach to gas drilling,” said David R. Brown, an SWPA-EHP organizer and former supervisor of superfund sites for the CDC. Brown has also served as chief of epidemiology for the Connecticut Department of Health. “We want to treat the people, not track the cause … to break the train of transmission. That’s what you do in any outbreak.”

The clinic is staffed by a nurse practitioner who, during the intake procedure, asks patients about their symptoms and about their proximity to gas drilling operations. Organizers insisted their focus is treating (or referring) patients to heal them, not compiling data for research purposes or crossing the line into anti-drilling advocacy.

“The phone’s been ringing off the hook. It’s clearly tapped an unmet need,” said John Suggs, another of the group’s organizers who once served as director of public policy and government affairs for the United Way of Los Angeles.

Suggs said the clinic, the first of its kind in the nation when it opened in mid-February, has seen patients complaining of nosebleeds, rashes, headaches and fatigue, among other symptoms.

The project lists funding from the Heinz Endowments, the Pittsburgh Foundation and the Claneil Foundation. Though its leaders are based all over the country, its director, Raina Rippel, is a well-known local resident, Brown and Suggs noted. Local ties matter when many patients – particularly the poor – feel frustrated that public officials are not representing their interests, they said.

Pare, the McMurray physician, said many of the wealthier, more educated local residents who have health problems are suing gas companies. Generally, the poor who are sick – many of whom live within 1,000 feet of a compressor station or an open frack pond – are fending for themselves because state and local health officials seem overwhelmed, she said.

Christine Cronkright, director of communications for the Pennsylvania Department of Health, said her agency responds to all environmental health complaints, including “those believed to be in relation to gas drilling.”

Cronkright said officials from her agency had met with SWPA-EHP representatives but “have not yet coordinated any efforts.”

Pare said she considered a government solution unlikely. “The government is never going to pay for this,” she said. “They’re never going to tax the industry so they can pay.

“People of Pennsylvania have seen this before from coal, from steel. This state is used to getting hosed. The people have to say, ‘We’re not going to be your playground.’”

PCBs linked to inattention issues for children in New Bedfod, Mass.

DC Bureau — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 17:10:47 +0000

Scientists first documented that PCBs had neurological effects in children in the mid 80s. Now new research suggests they may also play a role in attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In late February, researchers published findings from their investigation into the prevalence of inattentive and impulsive behaviors in boys and girls in New Bedford, Mass. Although the children studied were born to mothers who lived near the contaminated harbor and dumpsites, their exposures were comparable to children’s levels throughout the US.

Read Lindsey Konkel’s full article on the Environmental Health News website.

Judge’s Ruling Complicates Hydrofracking Controvery in New York

DC Bureau — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 17:16:30 +0000

Justice Phillip R. Rumsey of the State Supreme Court ruled this week that New York municipalities can use their zoning laws to ban oil and natural gas drilling. This decision is one of the first in the nation to uphold a local drilling ban and a key victory for opponents of this extraction technique. It is expected to lead to further debate and litigation.

For more on this case, read N.Y. Gov. Andrew Cuomo Sidesteps Natural Gas Hydrofracking Controversies. Read the full article in The New York Times.

Roger Boisjoly – The Conscience of Engineering

Joseph Trento — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 21:47:29 +0000

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.

From its first flight in 1981, Boisjoly discovered that the big, twin, 150-foot-long solid rocket boosters on the space shuttles were leaking hot gases through seals that connect the booster segments. It got worse on each flight. He knew this compromise of the boosters could lead to the destruction of a manned shuttle and the death of its crew. He wrote memos. He told everyone in authority. He went to the Cape and inspected the recovered boosters after launch and, based on decades of experience, he wanted to ground the shuttle fleet until the problem was fixed. No one listened to him.

The night before the Challenger space shuttle was scheduled to launch on January 26, 1986, there was a meeting to decide if it was safe to launch. Although he did not know it, that night Roger committed professional suicide by stating clearly and flatly the shuttle was not safe to fly the next morning. During a pre-launch conference call with NASA executives and his bosses, he argued that the cold weather made the joint problem even more serious. He was shocked when NASA and Morton Thiokol management (his bosses) overruled his recommendation and gave a go for launch.

Seven astronauts, including a schoolteacher, were killed when the shuttle blew apart 73 seconds after liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center. Years later, as he sat in my backyard with tears streaming down his round face, Roger talked about the tragedy as if it were still that horrible morning. “I knew they were all going to die, and I could not do anything to stop it.”

What Roger revealed to the world after the Challenger explosion shocked the nation. He showed what a shell NASA had become and that corporate and government malfeasance was the foundation on which the manned space program was built. The Rogers Commission, set up to investigate the Challenger tragedy, heard Roger’s moving testimony and, for a few months, he had real hope that NASA would institute meaningful reforms. Roger ignored symptoms of post- traumatic stress and soldiered ahead trying to get NASA to approve a redesign of the shuttle boosters.

Roger was a religious man with a big enough conscience to sacrifice his career to try to stop NASA and its contractors from doing it again. But he learned the Rogers Commission was a public relations stunt to keep the money flowing to the contractors and keep Congress from shutting down manned space flight.

“When I realized what was happening, it absolutely destroyed me,” Roger said to the Associated Press in 1988. “It destroyed my career, my life, everything else. I’m just now getting back to the point where I think I’ll be able to work as an engineer again.”

Roger’s leave from Morton Thiokol soon became unemployment. As good a rocket engineer as he was, no contractor wanted to hire the man who had told the truth about NASA and embarrassed his bosses by putting evidence in the public domain that they could not deny. They told him no employer could afford to have a whistleblower of such consequence around. He had spent a career working on the most advanced engineering programs: designing spacecraft from Gemini to Apollo to the Space Transportation System (the shuttles) as well as their sister, secret, lethal space weapons systems. Roger took his work – and his responsibility – very seriously.

Morton Thiokol and the blacklist of big contractors destroyed Roger’s engineering career. No modern corporate management wanted to receive a memo in advance of disaster that said: “The result would be a catastrophe of the highest order – loss of human life,” as Roger had written to his bosses before Challenger.

So Roger dedicated his life to lecturing engineering students on the importance of ethics in his beloved profession. Schools around the nation invited Roger to speak. He told his own story and spoke about corporate responsibility being key to engineering ethics. After his lectures at the University of Maryland, we would catch up. He never made much money – usually modest expenses and a small stipend, but he received awards and recognition for his work, and he always kept an eye on NASA.

In 2003 he called me very upset and almost breathless, his New England accent exaggerated by his emotions: “Columbia was badly damaged on liftoff. NASA is playing it down. There is an internal fight at NASA on whether the shuttle could be destroyed on reentry. NASA is keeping it secret.” Roger explained he had been getting emails and calls from NASA engineers who were predicting the loss of another shuttle. Roger was an icon among engineers, and, when faced with the same moral dilemma he had experienced, they wanted his advice.

While NASA debated the extent of damage to Columbia, Roger relived Challenger all over again. And like Challenger, NASA management did not listen to the engineers who recommended emergency measures to determine the extent of the damage and a possible rescue mission before risking reentry. They, too, were overruled. So on a terrible Saturday morning, February 1, 2003, Columbia began to break apart over California as the second shuttle nightmare played out. I spoke to Roger on the phone that morning and he was so upset he had to end the conversation.

NASA and the contractors were aware that Roger had tried to stop a second tragedy. Once again, he would pay a price.

Some universities where Roger spoke told him that corporations that funded university research were complaining about what he was telling students. These companies threatened to pull their funding if Roger Boisjoly was allowed to lecture about engineering ethics. Remarkably, some university administrators chose the cash over character.

Today NASA’s manned space program is grounded. There was no national outcry when the shuttle program was shuddered. NASA no longer captures our imagination. We are no longer a nation that dreams big dreams. We no longer feel that together we can meet huge, seemingly impossible challenges.

The young NASA was a seat-of-the-pants, try anything experiment that reached for the moon and distant planets. It tried risky rescue missions. It united the country and made us all feel like the sky was not the limit. It honored men like Roger Boisjoly.

Roger is survived by his wife of nearly half a century, Roberta, two daughters and eight grandchildren.

Monster Mystery at SRS

Joseph Trento — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:56:53 +0000

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 has a monster mystery on its radioactive hands.

Stumpy the SRS alligator has some serious competition – possibly a new breed of spider that thrives in highly radioactive cooling ponds. A spider web like substance found in cooling pools caused enough concern that SRS officials filed a report with the Defense Facilities Safety Board. The Daily Mail reports a possibly new and weird kind of spider that thrives in radioactive cooling pools may be responsible for making webs among the most dangerous of SRS’s nuclear waste. The Daily Mail story makes all the usual Spiderman references.

The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board – a federal oversight panel – concluded: ‘The growth, which resembles a spider web, has yet to be characterized, but may be biological in nature.” The report said the initial sample of the growth was too small to characterize, and that ‘further evaluation still needs to be completed. ” Will Callicott, a spokesman for Savannah River National Laboratory, wrote in an e-mail to the media that officials hope to collect a larger sample for analysis. He added: “Whatever it is, it doesn’t appear to be causing any damage.”

Spencer Abraham Cashes In

Joseph Trento — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 21:43:59 +0000

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.

Today, the DOE’s MOX fuel plant is still under construction. It has cost billions of dollars, is over budget and behind schedule. But Spencer Abraham will never be held responsible for the cost overruns and delays. In fact, he has been handsomely rewarded.

Despite spending billions of dollars on the MOX plant, DOE has yet to line up a single customer even with massive government subsidies being offered to buy the fuel. No utility will touch it. DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration has been playing hardball trying to get the Tennessee Valley Authority to use the fuel.

With the MOX plant, Abraham set in motion a program that will create even more high level nuclear waste at SRS with no facility or ability to dispose of it. The need for related facilities that have yet to be built or approved will add hundreds of millions of dollars to the cost. The plant is supposed to produce the MOX fuel from old nuclear bomb pits. This fuel will be more potent than the MOX made from spent fuel from civilian reactors in France. The support facilities to chemically separate plutonium from other warhead elements will cost hundreds of millions of dollars more. While separation and waste facilities await approval and construction, decrepit, giant, crumbling canyons are kept going to support plutonium disposition at enormous annual costs. To make matters worse, the waste from these processes all add to the huge amount of waste already stored in leaking tanks at SRS.

DOE’s MOX plant is the first of its kind with no indication that it will work. Even if it does work and a customer is found, the spent nuclear fuel rods will be more difficult and expensive to store safely.

But the good news for Areva is the tax paid contract is still bringing in the big bucks with no end in sight.

According to the website of The Abraham Group, Abraham started with Areva in 2006. He says he resigned “due to other roles and commitments I have undertaken …I have enjoyed my association with the company and have the highest regard for the management and team at Areva.”

Last year DCBureau published a series of articles about the French-government-owned company and their operations in the United States. At the time, the United States was in the midst of a “nuclear renaissance” and Areva was one of the main beneficiaries. In March, a tsunami swept across the coast of Japan and set in motion a series of events that made the world pause. Three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant exploded.

We reported that Areva had fueled the number three reactor with MOX fuel made in France. The hydrogen explosions spewed plutonium over northern Japan. Plutonium, a byproduct of uranium fission, is also an ingredient in MOX fuel. If inhaled, plutonium can cause cancer. It lingers in the environment for thousands of years. It will take generations to address the damage.

Enthusiasm for the nuclear renaissance in the United States and other countries waned after Fukushima, and Areva’s profits collapsed. Atomic Annie was shown the door by the French government and, as she took her leave, the handwriting was on the wall for her American colleague.

For more than 10 years both Abraham and Lauvergeon dined on their governments’ energy dime.

Abraham, like so many others in Washington, sells his influence. His website says:

“During his four years as Secretary of Energy, Secretary Abraham developed a close working relationship with the corporate leadership of energy companies as well as many energy-intensive companies. He launched several important energy studies involving CEOs and other top private sector leaders on many energy issues including nuclear, oil and natural gas, coal, and hydrogen.”

After he worked for former Vice President Dan Quayle, Abraham became a U.S. Senator from his home state of Michigan. (“The Abraham Group will also provide assistance to clients on issues in which Secretary Abraham was a key Senate leader, such as technology, manufacturing and immigration issues.”)

Six years later, in 2000, when he lost reelection, he did not go home. Instead, he became Energy Secretary. When he left the Energy Department in 2005, he did not go home. Instead, he became an executive to one of the contractors he oversaw while Energy Secretary. And now that he is stepping down from Areva, he is not going home. His group, comprised of his stafffrom the Energy Department and Capitol Hill, is signing contracts for new clients.

One association he sells is his relationship with his former Michigan congressional colleague, Fred Upton. Now the chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce for the U.S. House of Representatives, Upton is a key energy policy player. Upton and Abraham write opinion pieces together.

And Abraham does not sell influence only in the United States. He sells himself to the entire world.

“Another major focus and specialization of our firm is the international energy sector. The energy business is first and foremost a global market. Our aim is to help our clients enter and operate in the international energy market, whether it is a U.S. energy company doing business in the Middle East or a foreign energy company seeking to enter the U.S. market. We provide valuable insight and help to enhance relationships with key stakeholders to meet the business objectives of our clients.”

When is enough, enough? How much money do former government officials have to make before they go home and give back to their communities rather than take money to influence their friends in Washington? Perhaps if we knew that answer, we could save the American taxpayers money. Instead of drafting ethic laws that become jokes before the ink is dry, perhaps we could just cut to the chase, cut them a check, and make them go home.

Abraham Areva Documents