by Dennis Myers
Camp Fire and pG&e bankruptCy
South Carolina waste is now in Nevada—at thisNational Security Site, though the U.S. Energy Department disputes the term waste.
Ben Ehrenreich in the Nation Magazine: “In August, as fires raged through Northern California, the Democratic National Committee passed a resolution to ‘welcome’ donations from the fossil-fuel industry, reversing a ban it had voted in two months earlier. This would be corrupt and cynical in the best of circumstances, even if the status quo wasn’t literally in flames.” Wes Venteicher and Sophia Bollag in the Sacramento Bee: “As California wildfires grew, so did PG&E lobbying spending. An end-of-the-year bump put PG&E among the top lobbying spenders of the last legislative session, according to disclosures filed Thursday.”
How muCH From don? Nevada billionaires Miriam and Sheldon Adelson have given half a million dollars to the Patriot Legal Expense Fund Trust, a fund set up to assist people associated with Donald Trump with their legal bills. Trump himself has received $30 million from the Adelsons over the years. Also contributing to the fund is Phil Ruffin, Trump’s business partner in Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas. Ruffin ponied up $50,000.
nanCy GraCe roman 1925-2018 Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, first woman executive at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, died on Christmas Day. Known as the mother of the Hubble, she was the first chief of astronomy in NASA’s Office of Space Science. In the 1930s, 11-year-old Nancy became bewitched by the stars in the night sky over Reno. “In Reno, of course, the skies were very clear, a beautiful place to observe the sky, and we lived on the edge of the city at the time,” she told a National Air and Space Museum interviewer in 1980. She and her friends formed an astronomy club for girls, though later some of her teachers told her it was not a calling for women. “We learned the constellations, read astronomy. I just never lost my interest in it,” she said. The website O3H2.com noted that though she never won the Nobel prize, there is an honor that is probably more impressive to later little girls who might want to overcome skepticism that they belong in the field—a Nancy Grace Roman figurine by Lego.
—Dennis Myers
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RN&R
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02.07.19
Notification They have their own brand of it in D.C. if nevada had not filed suit to try to stop plutonium from coming into the state, it would never have known the stuff was already in Nevada. On Dec. 20, 2017, U.S. District Judge J. Michelle Childs ordered the U.S. Department of Energy to remove a metric ton of plutonium from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina within two years or no later than Jan. 1, 2020. A few weeks ago, on Nov. 30, while Nevada officials were in talks with the DOE—and shortly before the DOE released a “progress report” that said the plutonium move would mean “additional radiation exposure to workers”—Nevada filed a lawsuit to halt any shipment to the state. Then, last week, a DOE lawyer filed papers updating the court on what he claimed was newly declassified information. It informed the court that a half ton of plutonium had already been shipped to the Nevada National Security Site (formerly called the Nevada Test Site) before the state filed its lawsuit.
Nevada officials were livid. “I am beyond outraged by this completely unacceptable deception from the U.S. Department of Energy,” Gov. Steve Sisolak said in a prepared statement. “We’re going to be really pissed off if it turns out they snuck a shipment in here while they were engaged in what we thought were good faith negotiations,” Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects Executive Director Robert Halstead told the Nevada Independent. “The Department of Energy (DOE) and NNSA [National Nuclear Security Administration] negotiated in bad faith, hiding the timing of their shipment and refused to share crucial information with Members of Congress who had the security clearance to know,” said a prepared statement by U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto. Did the DOE fail to tell Nevada officials before shipping the plutonium?
It’s not an easy question to answer. Federal agencies are amazingly skilled at obfuscating their actions, and news stories of 50 or 100 words don’t deal in nuance. Snopes, the website that started out exposing urban legends and has expanded to fact-check claims in the news, has rated the Nevada officials’ claim “unproven.” The accompanying text merely recounted the events that brought the waste to Nevada. There was no examination of the record. “It is inaccurate to state that the members of the Nevada delegation were not informed of this movement,” said a prepared statement from the DOE. “The Department of Energy was as transparent as operational security would permit. Efforts were made to ensure that Members of Congress and state officials representing the states involved were notified of the planned movement ahead of time, as early as August 2018 when NNSA publicly released the plan in a Supplement Analysis. Since then, NNSA confirmed that it was ‘actively engaged’ in removing one metric ton of plutonium from South Carolina to Nevada, Texas, and New Mexico.” The “supplement analysis” referenced is a 49-page report with an index and glossary and verbiage that, if it ever came to the attention of Nevada officials, may well have seemed to be describing a future shipment. It does not say that the DOE is about to move plutonium. It says the DOE “proposes to move” plutonium. Nor does it say where the shipment would be taken. That was yet to be decided: “near Amarillo, Texas and/or Nevada National Security site.” The DOE claim that Nevada officials were informed, incidentally, seems to conflict with the court filing by its lawyer, Bruce Diamond, who wrote, “In order to provide security for its shipments of these kinds of materials, DOE normally will not release information about the status of the shipment(s) until sometime after the shipping ‘campaign’ is concluded.” Moreover, the notion that informing members of the Nevada congressional delegation was adequate notice is faulty. Federal agencies also have a responsibility to inform the public of their actions. The DOE says it did that
