Now that I’ve totally broken all my self-imposed rules about keeping this blog light and celebratory,  I’m going to post an article about the Department of Energy (DOE) that John sent me.

The article is exceedingly long. You’re not going to be able to read it while standing waiting for your noodles to boil (unless you forgot to turn the burner on).

Worse, it’s very partisan. I try not to post partisan things on this blog. But I’m going to post it despite the fact that it is partisan, because I think the information in the article is interesting and important.

WHY THE SCARIEST NUCLEAR THREAT MAY BE COMING FROM INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE

“…With a very complex mission and 115,000 people spread out across the country, shit happens every day…football-field-length caverns inside New Mexico salt beds to store radioactive waste…The waste would go into barrels and the barrels would go into the caverns, where the salt would eventually entomb them. The contents of the barrels were volatile and so needed to be seasoned with [packed in], believe it or not, kitty litter. Three years ago, according to a former D.O.E. official, a federal contractor in Los Alamos, having been told to pack the barrels with “inorganic kitty litter,” had scribbled down “an organic kitty litter.” The barrel with organic kitty litter in it…burst and spread waste inside the cavern. The site was closed for three years, significantly backing up nuclear-waste disposal in the United States and costing $500 million to clean, while the contractor claimed the company was merely following procedures given to it by Los Alamos…”

“…D.O.E. has the job of ensuring that nuclear weapons are not lost or stolen, or at the slightest risk of exploding when they should not. “It’s a thing Rick Perry should worry about every day,” he says. “Are you telling me that there have been scares?” He thinks a moment. “They’ve never had a weapon that has been lost,” he says carefully. “Weapons have fallen off planes…” 

“…Roughly half of the D.O.E.’s annual budget is spent on maintaining and guarding our nuclear arsenal, for instance. Two billion of that goes to hunting down weapons-grade plutonium and uranium at loose in the world so that it doesn’t fall into the hands of terrorists. In just the past eight years the D.O.E.’s National Nuclear Security Administration has collected enough material to make 160 nuclear bombs. The department trains every international atomic-energy inspector; if nuclear power plants around the world are not producing weapons-grade material on the sly by reprocessing spent fuel rods and recovering plutonium, it’s because of these people. The D.O.E. also supplies radiation-detection equipment to enable other countries to detect bomb material making its way across national borders…A quarter of the budget [goes] to cleaning up all the unholy world-historic mess left behind by the manufacture of nuclear weapons. The last quarter of the budget [goes] into a rattlebag of programs aimed at shaping Americans’ access to, and use of, energy…”

“…The best argument for shoving together the Manhattan Project with nuclear-waste disposal with clean-energy research was that underpinning all of it was Big Science—the sort of scientific research that requires multi-billion-dollar particle accelerators…The office of science in D.O.E. is not the office of science for D.O.E…It’s the office of science for all science in America…the place where you could work on the two biggest risks to human existence, nuclear weapons and climate change…”

“…Our electricity is supplied by a patchwork of not terribly innovative or imaginatively managed regional utilities. The federal government offers the only hope of a coordinated, intelligent response to threats to the system: there is no private-sector mechanism. To that end the D.O.E. had begun to gather the executives of the utility companies, to educate them about the threats they face. “They all sort of said, ‘But is this really real?’ ” said MacWilliams. “You get them security clearance for a day and tell them about the attacks and all of a sudden you see their eyes go really wide…”

“…It’s easy to have no observable health effects when you never look,” the medical director of the Lawrence Livermore lab said, back in the 1980s, after seeing how the private contractors who ran Hanford studied the matter. In her jaw-dropping 2015 book, Plutopia, University of Maryland historian Kate Brown compares and contrasts American plutonium production at Hanford and its Soviet twin, Ozersk. The American understanding of the risks people ran when they came into contact with radiation may have been weaker than the Soviets’. The Soviet government was at least secure in the knowledge that it could keep any unpleasant information to itself. Americans weren’t and so avoided the information—or worse…”

“…Beneath Hanford a massive underground glacier of radioactive sludge is moving slowly, but relentlessly, toward the Columbia River…”