Games Anti-Nukes Play
Isaac, Rael Jean
VOL. 18, NO. 11 / NOVEMBER 1985 Rael Jean Isaac GAMES ANTI-NUKES PLAY The Government Accountability Project's assault on nuclear energy. a 'On December 22, 1983, ABC's "20/20" featured an...
...At Duke Power's Catawba plant in North Carolina, for example, where GAP teamed up with the local Palmetto Alliance to stop the plant, GAP announced that its "previous experience" with Zimmer and Midland had given it "a good idea of what to look for and what we will find at Catawba...
...It was an "environmental watchdog group," a "government watchdog group," a "national public interest organization...
...Yet demand for electricity has been growing steadily, and merely replacing existing aging plants makes new capital investment essential...
...Comparing the surge in nuclear plant construction abroad with the U.S...
...GAP established the pattern of its game in 1980 when it first entered the anti-nuclear energy arena to stop Cincinnati Gas and Elec-tric"s Zimmer plant, which was then 97-percent complete...
...It's an obsolete plant...
...11 say "seems certain" because ABC refuses to confirm that GAP was its source...
...its purpose was rather "to prevent health and safety dangers, corruption, fraud and other abuses...
...Canada goes France one better and permits no public participation at all...
...GAP's chief whistleblower in this case was Thomas Applegate, a private detective who had been hired by the utility to check rumors of time-card cheating by workers at the plant and who claimed that, in the course of his investigation, he had discovered dangerously bad work at the plant, above all faulty welds...
...The energy will be produced and disseminated through small scale technology...
...While "20/20" could not totally ignore the conclusion of its own story, it used the fruitless search for buried tools as a means to put the knife into Bechtel once again...
...Pressed by Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media, George Watson, vice-president of ABC News, would say only that GAP had been "among [their] sources...
...I n playing its game, GAP is greatly helped by an even bigger player: the Nuclear Regulatory Commission...
...technology...
...Rather it seems to be designed to offer opponents every opportunity to interfere with licensing...
...While no one ever proved there were faulty welds at Zimmer, GAP had stumbled onto something...
...GAP's 1984 budget was a mere $180,000, its staff three poorly paid lawyers and a community organizer (a fifth staff worker was added in 1985...
...Despite such activities, these groups maintain their credibility with the media as "public interest" organizations...
...Under these conditions the NRC for the most part is helpless to do anything but play the fly to GAP's spider...
...The media never question GAP's public persona...
...Robert Hager, a member of the law team that represented the estate of Karen Silkwood, told the assembled activists in 1983: "Let's face it...
...Harrison found there were people who were disgruntled, who had vendettas, who were getting even for having lost their jobs...
...It strains credulity to believe that all over the world, management has the secret of building U.S.-designed plants, while U.S...
...When the anti-nuclear groups have their annual get-togethers under the aegis of Ralph Nader's Critical Mass, they let their hair down...
...GAP community organizer Billie Garde appeared on ABC's "The Fire Unleashed" to say of the NRC: "The agency is ideologically corrupt...
...For it would be taking on not only GAP and its formidable parent, the Institute for Policy Studies, but the entire complex of organizations seeking to eliminate nuclear power...
...Congress, with only ten dissenting votes, passed a whistleblower protection act partly based on model As one disgruntled official put it, the NRC's licensing process "in no way lends itself to the objective of licensing nuclear power plants...
...debacle, Cook notes that like the U.S...
...GAP stands out not because it alone has mastered this game, but because it can boast that rarely have so few wreaked so much damage upon so many...
...Yet most of GAP's last minute allegations were based on the "seismic issue...
...E. Earl Kent had been employed by Bechtel at the Midland plant for three months...
...Whatever the motivation, GAP after a while even had "traveling allegers," workers who discovered hazards at more than one plant...
...Bechtel buried them unused or barely-used so as to be able to buy more tools from its subsidiary company, thus increasing profits...
...ABC may have extricated itself with admirable agility, but what had led it to broadcast the report in the first place...
...There can also be little doubt that GAP can be straightforward in its dealings with the Fund for Constitutional Government (the single largest donor to GAP), which receives most of its funds from Stewart Mott, a perennial funder of radical causes whose wealth derives from his father's part in building General Motors...
...more probing...
...All the ships challenged by Kent remain in safe operation today...
...Thanks to publicity such as that provided by "20/20," IPS could look forward to excellent sales of its book, being called upon by Congress as a source of expert advice, many more articles on the New York Times op-ed page, and continued foundation grants...
...It turned out the utility had neglected its paperwork, and was helpless to prove that the welds, or other work, were good...
...In any event, the media never failed to rise to the bait, and the NRC dutifully launched last minute investigations in plant after plant, even though the allegations of GAP whistleblowers were repeatedly found to be inaccurate or of no consequence for safety...
...In the case of Palo Verde, the timing coincided with hearings scheduled by the Arizona public utility commission on the utility's request for emergency rate relief...
...At that point, according to the memo, GAP could demand that the utility prove its ability to compensate all claimants in the event of an accident, and to pay for all possible future repairs...
...Of course, no issue is ever resolved to GAP's satisfaction...
...The NRC put off making any decision until the end of June 1984...
...ABC did not question why IPS had put out such a publication∔that IPS was dedicated to the public's "right to know" was simply assumed...
...GAP has been playing behind the scenes for quite a while...
...On March 7, 1985, in the context of yet another attack on the Palo Verde plant, this time focusing on "rate shock," "20/20" complained loftily that the ratepayer had to pay for such controversies, which "drive up the cost of the already over-budgeted project...
...We don't want safe plants∔we want the ones being planned to be blocked and the ones operating to be shut down.' tates...
...But there is no question that much of GAP's money comes from foundations in no way averse to GAP's goals...
...GAP had acted as counsel for the Palo Verde Intervention Fund, a tiny group, and so it seems obvious that GAP used its media connections to bring "20/20" to Palo Verde...
...By then the issue was moot: A week earlier Consumers Power had thrown in the towel, postponing the project indefinitely...
...The Playboy Foundation, another donor, has liberally supported IPS, the more radical "peace" groups, and remarkably, women's liberation groups...
...Another donor is the Funding Exchange, which channels money from nine of the most radical funds in the United States, their money coming from young people whose wealth in turn derives from such fortunes as DuPont, Gulf and Western, IBM, Pillsbury, and General Motors...
...Sometimes allegations were the by-product of tensions, typical of all the plants, between workers and safety inspectors, who often faced verbal abuse for refusing to approve work...
...managers alone lack competence...
...Parks explained to workers that "we are the line of defense to protect the general population" and urged them to come to GAP with their "concerns," assuring them that "our intention is not to stop the nuclear plants...
...One senior welding engineer remarked that Kent wanted tungsten steel around the turbine exhaust so thick and heavy it would have sunk the ship...
...ABC's reporter, Tom Jarriel, held up large whirring tools in each hand to illustrate the useful character of the machinery Bechtel had entombed in the shifting Arizona sands...
...IPS co-founder Marcus Raskin specifically called for the dismantling of America's "Colonies," including "the Violence Colony" (our military and police), "the Channeling Colony" (our educational system), and "the Plantation Colony" (our economic system...
...The NRC does little to impede GAP's game because of fear, and the NRC has good reason to be intimidated...
...Babcock was the daughter of R.J...
...Despite the wide publicity accorded the original charges, the revelation that the charges were without substance was confined to such journals as Highway and Heavy Construction...
...In February 1985 Forbes magazine, self-styled "capitalist tool," published a 17-page analysis of the decline and fall of nuclear energy by executive editor James Cook...
...The U.S...
...It began as IPS's Project on Official Illegality, which helped whistleblowers from national security agencies, like Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame (IPS had the Pentagon Papers a year before legislation drafted by GAP...
...Through Congress it appeared GAP might well succeed in reopening the seismic issue after even the NRC had done with it...
...Both in its current effort to prevent restart of the undamaged TMI reactor and to block the licensing of Commonwealth Edison of Illinois's Braidwood plant, GAP has dispensed with worker allegations to focus instead on charges that the NRC has failed to follow its own rules...
...In the hundreds of stories on GAP's activities that I read in local papers near GAP-targeted plants, not one described GAP as an anti-nuclear group...
...Although Three Mile Island had a handful of causes, most of them to do with deficiencies in the control room, the NRC imposed 2,000 new regulations resulting in an additional 6,000 required steps to comply with the guidelines...
...closed up the coal mines, oil and gas fields...
...U, nfortunately, it looks as if the achievements of GAP and its sister anti-nuclear organizations∔halting nuclear energy development and blowing billions of dollars of investment in abandoned plants∔may be invisible to those who will pay the price...
...If the NRC dared to take on GAP, the weight of the entire anti-nuclear complex would be thrown into the lists, with the media as its propagandist...
...The circumstantial evidence, however, is overwhelming...
...In courts of law, those who are found to bring a case frivolously can be forced to bear its costs...
...In the case of Zimmer, an NRC official estimated that 4 million documents 2 Apart from Zimmer, the main GAP targets have been Callaway in Missouri, Catawba in North Carolina, Comanche Peak in Texas, Diablo Canyon and San Onofre in California, LaSalle and Braidwood in Illinois, Midland in Michigan, Palo Verde in Arizona, Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, and Waterford in Louisiana...
...GAP has become the most successful anti-nuclear organization in the country, stopping at least one multi-billion dollar project cold (Cincinnati's Zimmer plant), playing a role in stopping Consumers Power's Midland facility in Michigan...
...For, said the memo, the economic consequences could be "devastating if a significant percentage of the population tried to leave due to fear that the facility will reopen...
...When that too exonerated the plant, GAP, along with the local anti-nuclear Orange County Alliance for Survival, staged a press conference in March 1985 demanding an investigation of the investigation of the investigation...
...The Government Accountability Project has no hidden agendas...
...Local media are crucial in arousing the public and politicians, forcing the NRC to bend over backwards in its dealings with GAP...
...16...
...a 'On December 22, 1983, ABC's "20/20" featured an expose of alleged "bizarre activities" at the Palo Verde nuclear plant being constructed in the Arizona desert...
...taken down oil refineries and much of the petrochemical establishment...
...Moreover, it appeared that Kent had earlier worked for Litton industries, building ships for the Navy...
...Several earnest-sounding former employees came before the camera to contend that they had themselves been involved in regular evening burials of electric tools, portovans, acetylene hose, hard hats, welding gloves, boots, wrenches, tape measures, saws∔some of them still in crates...
...Cook's analysis was then echoed by National Review several months later...
...15 transfer money, much of it from corporate foundations (these, to be sure, in most cases have no conception of the nature of the Youth Project), to radical grass-roots groups...
...Yet GAP's funders include one of the largest U.S...
...There is no cut-off point, which permits GAP to store up its allegations∔ and, in the case of California's Diablo 13 Canyon, to unload thousands of them on the unfortunate NRC commissioners at one time...
...Cook's contention about management failures in the U.S...
...When GAP claimed it was concerned about keeping the identities of its whistleblowers secret, Consumers Power said the identities of GAP's sources could be deleted from the affidavits∔the utility wanted only the substance of the charges so that it could correct any problems that might exist...
...His thesis is that nuclear energy had been destroyed not by its enemies but by its friends...
...There are in fact signs that GAP may be shifting its tactics to make the NRC they were published by the New York Times), Victor Marchetti (of the CIA) and Robert Wall (of the FBI...
...Occasionally the commissioners flap their wings in protest...
...Cook writes that "prohibition may be half the battle...
...After the program, the Bechtel Corporation, stung by the dreadful publicity, paid $300,000 for the attorney general's office to dig up the sites pinpointed by its accusers...
...It is possible, although not likely, that simple stupidity is the explanation for these donations to GAP...
...This gave it greater legitimacy...
...While the focus here has been on the Government Accountability Project, it is simply the most effective of the many groups who play similar games...
...Yet Cook's own analysis should have led him directly to the anti-nuclear in-tervenors...
...Nor did the ABC interviewer inquire of Arkin as to the extent to which "leaks" had been used, whether the "leaks" had involved secret documents, and the propriety of publishing information thus obtained...
...The source of ABC's story, it seems certain,1 was the Government Accountability Project (GAP), at the time part of the Institute for Policy Studies, the Washington, D.C...
...In his letter of April 16, 1983, Clark said that the purposes of Energy Ratepayers United and GAP were the same: "At least I have been given to understand that you want the Zimmer Nuclear Power Station to operate safely...
...When an NRC investigation of GAP allegations at the San Onofre plant in California failed to come up with the result GAP desired, it demanded∔and got∔an NRC investigation of the original NRC investigation...
...Miss Perl would not give the necessary permission...
...Jay Harrison, whom the NRC's Office of Special Cases assigned to investigate many of GAP's 190 allegations against Midland, summed up his experience: "You get some real strange people making charges for various reasons...
...A bare two weeks later, however, GAP prepared a memorandum for its own use analyzing a Supreme Court decision permitting the state of California to rule out nuclear plants on economic but not on safety grounds...
...In the end the prob4 In March 1985 James R. Tourtellotte, appointed by the NRC to be chairman of its Regulatory Reform Task Force, delivered a devastating and, in view of his position as an NRC executive, distinctly courageous report...
...Those early red, white, and blue brochures had their counterpart in the appeals sent out by alleger Richard Parks on behalf of GAP to workers at the Callaway plant...
...When despite such efforts insufficient workers came forward, GAP accused the utility of intimidating workers and demanded the NRC "break down" the plant's "omniscient image...
...The state attorney general vowed to Jarriel that he would find some- way to dig up the desert dump site, but lamented the absence of any funds at his command to do so...
...Much of the technology is U.S...
...Yet surely the NRC's behavior cannot be explained without reference to the vociferous demands of the anti-nuclear groups which have been so successful in intimidating it...
...The NRC dutifully launched last minute investigations in plant after plant, even though the allegations of GAP whistleblowers were repeatedly found to be inaccurate or of no consequence for safety...
...A leader of the group, which over the years had thrown up every possible roadblock to completion of the plant, from mass demonstrations to legal challenges, complained to the NRC: "That plant is fourteen years old...
...The Wall Street Journal has referred to GAP as "a private watchdog group" and Business Week describes it as a "public interest group...
...GAP wins the battle, because in being unable to deny the charges immediately, the utility has given them credibility...
...the plants built many years ago in the United States provide inexpensive and dependable energy...
...Cook notes that in some cases utilities had to tear apart nearly completed plants to conform to the changes...
...Although GAP managed to wring three separate investigations from the NRC, it suffered from an embarrassing paucity of whistleblowers, and Catawba was ultimately licensed earlier this year...
...GAP lashed out at the investigators, announced that Kent's credentials were "impeccable," and declared the NRC would be held accountable for his "shabby treatment...
...It was typical in that GAP worked together with a local anti-nuclear group (in this case, the Palo Verde Intervention Fund), that it relied upon "whistleblowers," usually former workers at the targeted plant, and that it went directly to the media with their stories...
...GAP refused to honor the subpoenas, and it was then up to the NRC to request court enforcement...
...We don't want safe plants∔we want the ones being planned to be blocked and the ones operating to be shut down...
...Normally, however, GAP "stores" allegations until a plant is almost complete∔sometimes awaiting the plant's license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to operate at low, or even full power∔before it charges the plant is unsafe and should not be permitted to operate...
...Appeals Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the issues GAP raised were the province of a federal court in California, and at this writing GAP has readied its mandamus action for filing in that state...
...Ultimately GAP's game rests on the pretense that we all share the same goal, namely the safe operation of nuclear power plants...
...Of course, this did not stop GAP from doing its best to prevent completion of Duke's Catawba plant...
...Indeed neither the activities nor even the names of "the enemies" are mentioned in the article...
...Whistleblowers could be required to provide evidence for their charges...
...GAP went to the media with its charges, triggering an NRC investigation...
...The Center for National Security Studies (which targets our intelligence agencies), the Center for International Policy (which targets our alliances), and the Center for Constitutional Rights are only a few of the most skillful game-players...
...The costly retrofits that in some instances may have actually reduced plant safety,4 the often absurd paperwork demands, the delays to examine frivolous allegations were attempts to satisfy the anti-nuclear activists as they rode high in the wake of Three Mile Island...
...GAP has taken on the task of administering the last blows to a nuclear power industry already on the ropes, thanks to the earlier efforts of organizations such as Ralph Nader's Critical Mass, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the Mobilization for Survival...
...GAP has devised the rules, and it has made the media, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the courts, and the utilities play by them...
...If GAP had been let loose while these were being built, "Let's face it...
...A national television audience was soberly treated to a collection of old wives' tales about staggering cats, deformed dandelions, under-producing ducks, waves of heat, hair turning white overnight∔all the result of Three Mile Island, whose clean-up GAP successfully delayed by a full year...
...And yet, were it not for the bottomless credulity of the media, it is doubtful that GAP's game would work...
...Even specifically business-oriented segments of the national press are no...
...GAP had developed a game-plan so successful it saw no reason to alter it: Go in with accusations of defective welds and inadequate paperwork, known in the trade as "quality assurance," and demand the NRC issue a stop-work order until a full investigation of all safety-related issues could be completed...
...What motivates GAP's whistle-blowers...
...In a single eight-month period (from November 1983 to June 1984) the NRC calculated that it devoted 18,000 staff hours to examining GAP allegations at Diablo Canyon alone...
...Perhaps the ultimate effrontery came from Mothers for Peace, the anti-nuclear group that invited GAP to Diablo Canyon...
...For example, the Youth Project, which gave GAP $35,000 in 1984,3 serves as a funnel to 3 All the figures are for 1984, but normally the pattern of donations to IPS and its spinoffs is fairly stable from year to year...
...When GAP turned its attention to nuclear power in 1980, it thus had experience in presenting a mask of "working to make the system function better...
...Above all, there could be penalties for false allegations...
...Whistleblowers, the key to GAP's game, were solicited, with the cooperation of local anti-nuclear groups, through everything from printed appeals to plant workers to visits to their local hangouts...
...In fact it has opposed all major new weapons systems since its inception in 1972, releases data that obfuscate Soviet superiority in any weapons area, even conventional forces, and works to incite pacifist and neutralist sentiment in Europe...
...Haymarket People's Fund, one of the nine, announces in its annual report that the fund is "dedicated to eliminating rich people" and to remaking "a sexist and racist system that puts profits for a few people before the needs of the majority...
...After being fired in 1971, Kent sent a 26-page telegram to President Nixon, claiming the ships being designed and built would create "a bunch of widows and orphans...
...They believe that the public is the enemy and it is their job to help the industry figure out a way to break the law and survive...
...IPS leaders have called since 1971 for "dismantling" what they refer to as the "national-security state...
...These funds are quite explicit about their goals...
...once the decision was made to abandon the plant, an independent study commissioned by the Ohio Public Utilities Commission, while highly critical of what it called Cincinnati Gas and Electric's "substantial mismanagement," concluded that the plant had in fact been well-built overall but had "become the victim of an elusive unknown percentage of unacceptable work which cannot be identified...
...Nuclear energy, in other words, is only the initial target, selected because of the ease of arousing public fear, and the broader goal is to eliminate all centralized energy...
...And in a rare show of unanimity, all five commissioners promptly voted to license Callaway...
...There could be a cut-off point after which charges could no longer be submitted...
...The Navy set up a board of inquiry, which found the charges without merit...
...December 1984 the attorney general's office issued its report, which said that apart from a few broken hammers and pieces of wire, it had found nothing at all...
...Ironically, were missing...
...is ultimately beside the point...
...Last June Massachusetts Congressman Edward Markey, chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy Conservation and Power (and author of Nuclear Peril, which calls for the elimination of nuclear energy), blasted the NRC in words that directly echoed Billie Garde's on "The Fire Unleashed...
...Paul Sieck, a business executive active in Energy Ratepayers United, a group that fruitlessly did battle against GAP, says that Zimmer had become such an emotional public issue the utility had no choice: It simply saw no light at the end of the tunnel...
...There was even an effort to bring Kent to testify at Catawba, although he had never been there, to back up the testimony of one Howard Nunn, fired for excessive unexcused absences, who had announced: "I'm concerned [Catawba] is permeated with laminated, stinking rotten pipe...
...The Project on Official Illegality served to assemble sensitive information and leak it to the press...
...Reynolds of tobacco fame), and a member of the Rockefeller family, whose identity is not revealed by GAP, which has disclosed only that it is a younger member of the family who earmarked a $20,000 contribution specifically for "nuclear investigations...
...Cook divides the blame among the federal government and the NRC, equipment manufacturers, contractors and subcontractors, utility executives, and state regulatory commissions...
...In explanation, "20/20" offered the theory that the tools were supplied by a company Bechtel owned...
...In the end, pounded by the media, excoriated by politicians leaping on a popular bandwagon, placed under a stop-work order by the NRC, and facing huge costs to tear down large parts of the plant so as to start the paperwork all over again, Cincinnati Gas and Electric in 1984 abandoned its plant, announcing it would convert it to coal...
...All this is not to say that there have not been management failures or a few companies that have managed to surmount all obstacles, like Duke Power, which Cook singles out as the best of the utilities...
...But the last thing GAP wanted, of course, was for the utility to investigate the allegations...
...when GAP was ready to demand a stop-work order, the utility might be able to refute the charges or say the problems had already been addressed...
...sites, and the material on the Soviet Union came from published Western sources, while much of the information on the U.S...
...Nuclear energy abroad has been successful because plants are built in half the time it takes in the United States...
...As one disgusted Commonwealth Edison of Illinois official put it, the NRC's licensing process "in no way lends itself to the objective of licensing nuclear power plants...
...and running up many millions of dollars in costs for other plants whose operations it has delayed by a variety of means...
...He concluded that the "backfitting" demands of the NRC, which have "cost consumers billions," inflicted "paralyzing delays into the administrative process," and "made nuclear plants more difficult to operate and maintain," may also in some cases "have reduced rather than enhanced public health and safety...
...But for the most part the NRC has meekly played GAP's game...
...As it is, the NRC reaps no gratitude from GAP for its forbearance...
...GAP could hope, with good reason, that the millions in interest the utility would be forced to pay at this last minute stage of construction would force it to abandon the plant before such a study could even be undertaken...
...Like other successful IPS projects, it has now formally "spun off from the mother organization, although its headquarters remain in the IPS building...
...He zeroes in on cost overruns as the culprit, and points to the indifference of the NRC to the economic cost of the regulations it imposed...
...The whole plant is old...
...Whatever the details of GAP's approach in the particular case, the group owes its success to its masterful playing of an anti-nuclear "game...
...In 1976 it was expanded beyond the national security and intelligence agencies to include other branches of government and renamed the Government Accountability Project...
...One of GAP's attorneys, Tom Devine, cheerfully dismissed the NRC's efforts: "We don't know any better now whether Diablo Canyon can withstand an earthquake than we did in 1981...
...Utilities are reluctant to invest in building any new capacity: While it has been eight years since the last nuclear plant was ordered, in the last three years only one coal plant has been ordered...
...For the impact of intervenors has not been solely on nuclear plants...
...had not hitherto been published...
...France has a two-stage regulatory process, but permits no public participation once the project gets underway...
...the decision, the GAP memo said, could be used "creatively," so as "to impose a statutory ban on construction and probably on operation," since economic impact studies could be The hypocrisy can get wearing...
...In Rael Jean Isaac's most recent book (with Erich Isaac) is The Coercive Utopians (Regnery Gateway...
...Undaunted, after Midland Kent turned up on the West Coast at another GAP-targeted plant, San Onofre, to allege thousands of defective welds...
...What GAP achieved in most cases was significant delay that drove up costs to GAP established the pattern of its game in 1980 when it first entered the anti-nuclear energy arena to stop Cincinnati Gas and Elec-tric's Zimmer plant, which was then 97-percent complete...
...foundations, the J. Roderick MacArthur Foundation, as well as the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation (Mrs...
...For instance, the Center for Defense Information, an "expert" source for both the media and liberal congressmen, describes itself in a full page newspaper ad soliciting memberships and contributions as an organization that works to "support a strong, but not excessive, military posture...
...In 1982, Consumers Power received permission from the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board to subpoena GAP affidavits alleging serious safety problems at its Midland plant...
...There is no requirement that the allegations have any relation to safety or that they be backed up by proof, and there is no penalty for false charges, although investigating them can consume vast quantities of taxpayer dollars and, because the cost of delay is so high, increase the cost of the plant by millions of dollars...
...At the end of his article, Cook obliquely gives the activists their due...
...He came forward with GAP's favorite charge of defective welds...
...GAP's modus operandi in the tale of buried tools was a variation on its nor12 mal procedure...
...On the program, one of the workers declared, "We know what size the pits are and where they are...
...Allowing utilities to know what allegations are pending against them is not the only means to stop GAP's game: A more courageous NRC could change the rules...
...Simultaneously GAP has turned to Congress...
...Rather it seems to be designed to offer opponents every opportunity to interfere with licensing.' its primary target...
...We simply would have got rid of most of the extra high voltage wires strung around the country...
...The NRC's rules provide that allegations against a plant can be brought forward in any form or forum (for example, the rules specifically mention phone, letter, newsmedia reports, offices, business meetings, even social functions), at any time, by anyone...
...This does not include the much larger damage to the economy that will result from shortages of electricity in the years ahead...
...When you go to interview them they are incoherent or vague for whatever reason...
...When Energy Ratepayers United, the citizens' group that tried to save Zimmer, sent letters-to-the-editor trying to expose GAP's real purposes, Louis Clark, GAP's executive director, took the troudemanded even after a plant was on line...
...It is true the IPS volume also contained information on Soviet nuclear sites...
...Even when presented with opportunities for bringing GAP to heel, the NRC has been afraid to act...
...based "think-tank" which for two decades has served as the intellectual hub of radical activism in the United States...
...GAP is equally successful with national media...
...At a cost of $200,000 these charges were duly investigated by the NRC with the assistance of Southern California Edison and Bechtel, and found to be without merit...
...Intervenors like GAP and the local 14 anti-nuclear groups it works with might have to post a bond which would be forfeited if the allegations proved untrue...
...One would never know there was such an organization as GAP or the Clamshell Alliance or Critical Mass or even the Union of Concerned Scientists...
...During an NRC meeting on the plant, one commissioner observed: "You know, collectively we have spent several years and probably a billion dollars dealing with the seismic issue...
...Cut energy and you cut the jugular of our way of life...
...Thus in a 1983 statement submitted to the NRC, GAP was careful to insist that "the Project [GAP] is not an 'anti-nuclear' organization...
...When in October 1984 GAP, two days before the NRC's final hearing on granting a full power license to Union Electric Company's Callaway plant, came up with forty-eight new allegations, two of the commissioners lost patience...
...But for the cause of the problems one must look to the intervenors, not management or the NRC, which have merely responded to their challenge in totally inadequate fashion...
...I tried to elicit information on the origin of the story from the "20/20" segment's producer, Kathy McManus, who said she was unable to speak without permission of Mauri Perl of the ABC public relations department...
...One of them declared, "I simply find it difficult to believe that many of these [allegations] were not known for some period of time," and added that GAP's effort to toss all the charges on the table at the last minute "just isn't going to work...
...By their actions, it is clear that utility executives around the country share his sentiments...
...In the wake of Zimmer, GAP was flooded with requests from anti-nuclear groups from around the country, and it selected eleven plants that looked particularly promising.2 To be sure, the game has never gone quite as smoothly again, if only because the other plants GAP targeted did not suffer from such overwhelming paperwork failures...
...Nor does GAP allow an NRC decision to go against it without a fight...
...The Palo Verde Intervention Fund's press conference in December 1983 first publicly airing the charges could not have triggered ABC's interest because ABC had already filmed its interviews with local whistleblowers months earlier...
...For the courts this might seem a more clear-cut issue than deciding disputed safety claims∔and could be equally effective in stopping nuclear plants...
...This in turn is seen by IPS as fundamental to the total reshaping of society in accordance with the sixties movement philosophy it espouses...
...What was the motive for Bechtel's peculiar management decision...
...And when the NRC, after years of delay, finally issued operating permits for both units of Diablo Canyon (one at full power), GAP went to court...
...But there were only 18 pages on this subject in the appendix as against 82 pages on U.S...
...Parks's earlier allegations, focusing specially on a polar crane designed for use in removing the reactor vessel head at the damaged Three Mile Island plant, held up work there for a full year∔the crane was ultimately used and worked fine...
...According to "Secrets of the Desert," as the segment was called, the Bechtel Corporation, prime contractor for the plant, was engaged in secret massive dumping of new or barely used tools in a giant landfill on a scale so large that it could go at least part way toward explaining the project's huge cost overruns...
...GAP now described itself as a "public interest group to help restore confidence in the federal system" and handed out brochures to government employees in colors of red, white, and blue, with an American flag on the cover, inviting them to contact GAP with stories of waste and abuse in their agencies...
...ble to write to the group's leader, Robert Acomb, denying the charges...
...It turned out Kent had been fired after twice failing the certification exam for his job as welding inspector...
...Given GAP's origin and goals, it is ironic that its funding comes from foundations representing some of the major beneficiaries of the economic system IPS seeks to "dismantle...
...with "conspiracy" to unleash nuclear war "against the peoples of the world...
...While this is indeed a tribute to bad paper work, it is also an indication of the paper quagmire into which those who construct plants are pushed by NRC regulations and of the propitious conditions under which GAP works...
...The NRC, admonished Markey, should "stop looking at the public as 'the enemy,' " and he demanded a written statement within 30 days explaining why hearings on the earthquake issue should not be held now...
...consumers, and creation of a climate of fear and distrust of nuclear power among the public to be served by the plant...
...Yet merely investigating one relatively minor GAP charge at Consumers' Midland plant cost the NRC $800,000, and overall GAP has cost the nuclear industry (and ultimately the consumer) many billions of dollars...
...When, in 1985, the Institute for Policy Studies published a handbook disclosing nuclear weapons sites around the country (based, according to its authors, IPS fellows William Arkin and Richard Fieldhouse, on information obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and "leaks"), ABC's "20/20" did a respectful segment on the publication, with Arkin explaining the most "interesting" findings (e.g., the high number of sites in New York State...
...If even conservative magazines dismiss the role of anti-nuclear activists as inconsequential, there is every prospect that GAP and the others will enjoy the ultimate triumph of seeing the blame for the consequences of their actions fall upon their victims...
...Essential or not, Frederick Mielke, chairman of the board of Pacific Gas and Electric, remarked in February 1985: "No prudent investor will risk the capital needed to build coal or nuclear-fueled plants in California...
...For example, ABC, in addition to the Palo Verde fairy tale, earlier this year featured GAP's charges against Texas's Comanche Peak in a three-hour anti-nuclear documentary entitled "The Fire Unleashed," whose segment on nuclear energy must go down as one of the silliest performances in television history...
...Ironically, the Government Accountability Project's ability to operate rests on the fact that it is accountable to no one and nothing...
...In respect to energy, the goals of GAP can be inferred from the sketch of an ideal energy system that IPS provides in its proposal for an Encyclopedia for Social Reconstruction, a long-favored IPS project...
...The Center for Constitutional Rights recently conducted a series of "war crimes trials" of the United States in cities around the country and submitted to the United Nations an "indictment" charging the U.S...
...In the event of an accident or even "major unanticipated repairs" the notion of "psychological trauma" could be introduced...
...While typically the media invite the utility to respond to GAP's charges, the utility, which has no prior knowledge of the charges, is afraid to call them groundless without a detailed internal investigation...
...He blames contractors and subcontractors for failing "to question the cost-effectiveness of the NRC's diclem may boil down simply to this: Can a technology as rigorous and demanding and for all that as useful as nuclear power find a place in a society as open as the U.S...
...who can doubt but that it would have found "allegers" and paperwork deficiencies with which to have demanded stop-work orders...
Vol. 18 • November 1985 • No. 11
