Tom Zeller Jr., one of Huffington Post's best environmental reportors has an excellent, long, comprehensive, and important analysis of the failures of the Inspector Generals Office, OIG, to oversee and investigate the failures of the Nuclear Regulatory Agency to perform vital functions, raising issues of the potential incompetence of both agencies. It's title is "Critics Question Competency Of Inspector General's Office At Nuclear Regulatory Commission," that is directly relevant to our solar flare discussions of the past few days. (I repeat this title below with the link, after criticism that links in the first 3 sentences screw up DK4's ability to show pop-up summaries. Sorry, I wasn't aware of this bug.)
Coming after highly visible and potentially highly consequential failures of the NRC to response to advance warning from Robert Alvarez, et. al, at NRC hearings in 2003, to adequately protect radioactive cooling ponds, at our nations nuclear reactors, failure to anticipate and react properly to design failures in our GE Mark 1 nuclear plants of the same design as those at Japan's failed Fukushima nuclear plants, and failure to understand and take proper precautions for solar flare EMP damage that could leave all 104 of our nuclear plants vulnerable to meltdown during potential longer-term l "off-grid" situations in the events predicted as possible in the next decade by the NOAA, we need to have immediate congressional hearings, and resignations from the directors of both the NRC, and OIG, in my opinion. The NRC has only required nuclear plants to have back up power for cooling systems that will last 72 hours.
I only just learned day before yesterday of the danger to our nation's nuclear plants, that is not just possible, but likely, in the event of an extensive month, to possibly even a year of damage to our nation's electrical grids. We have a healthy debate, going in my solar flare diaries as to whether the National Atmospheric and Oceanic.... Administration's forecasts of national electric grid damage of "years" rather than "months" was too long. But, even our most skeptical scientific and electrical engineering experts confirm that it has been well known for decades that our nations electrical grids are vulnerable to high intensity electro-magnetic field pulses, EMPs, that are predicted in X6 to X9 solar flares, (on the GOES scale), or from atmospheric bursts of nuclear warheads, that are the known first strike strategies for nuclear war, and the potential for a terrorist strike, if rogue nuclear warheads from the former USSR, North Korea, China, Israel, or home made warheads fall into the hands of terrorist groups, or unstable or hostile governments, such as Libya, Iran, Yemen, etc. They would not even have to have missile capability, but could flight these warheads in on a Cessna, or Cruise missiles.
The NRC has been well aware of these scenarios for decades and has failed in its duty to warn and regulate on behalf of the public. Instead, it has redefined its role as to promote nuclear power, prevent the American people from becoming alarmed, or even concerned, and perhaps, even has suppressed information it should have been presenting to Congress for appropriate Congressional oversight, as is mandated by our Constitution.
With a few notable exception, such as our Massachusetts' Representative Ed Markey, (D-MA), our Congressional Oversight Committee responsible for the NRC, seems to have failed as well. We need immediate hearings, and response from all of these agencies immediately, to reassure the public that our public safety, and best interest, are not being compromised due to potential incompetence, negligence, conflict of interest, and intentional corporate, agency, and congressional malfeasance.
Critics Question Competency Of Inspector General's Office At Nuclear Regulatory Commission
"This is a total whitewash," Mulley says. "They've taken out anything that implicates anyone at the NRC."
Mulley had probed a potentially dangerous pipe leak that forced the shutdown of the Byron nuclear power plant in Illinois in 2007 -- and more importantly, the failure of NRC inspectors to adequately monitor the plant's operations and prevent the incident from happening in the first place. The investigation capped Mulley's highly-decorated, 25-year career with the inspector general's division, an independent office inside NRC charged with keeping the regulator honest and focused on its work.
Since its formation inside the NRC in 1989, the OIG has fielded thousands of whistleblower complaints and conducted a compelling list of investigations, many exposing abuse and neglect both at the NRC and within the nuclear power industry that led to Congressional investigations and subsequent agency reform. The OIG became legendary for preparing exhaustively detailed, and publicly available, reports of its investigations.
Zellner tell a long, well documented story of insider George Mulley, who worked as an investigator in the Office of the Inspector General at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, for decades.
Since its formation inside the NRC in 1989, the OIG has fielded thousands of whistleblower complaints and conducted a compelling list of investigations, many exposing abuse and neglect both at the NRC and within the nuclear power industry that led to Congressional investigations and subsequent agency reform. The OIG became legendary for preparing exhaustively detailed, and publicly available, reports of its investigations.
Now, Mulley -- along with numerous freelance and non-profit nuclear safety advocates who for years relied on the IG's office as a vital backstop against lax nuclear oversight at the NRC -- all say that the IG's office appears to be broken.
"This is not the same office that I worked for," Mulley says, anxiously fingering the two different Byron reports. "It's like they're afraid to take on the NRC's oversight of nuclear power, but that's exactly what they're supposed to be doing."
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
These oversight agencies, such as the NRC have been allowed to form delusional fantasies that they are the absolute power and experts for nuclear power, for too long.
HoundDog's First Law of Regulatory Democracy is "any agency, that does not regulate itself will be regulated by someone else, eventually."
The NRC has failed to competently perform it's vital duty.
NRC Commissioner Jacko needs to resign immediately with apologies, and we need an extensive formal investigation, and Congressional Oversight hearings immediately, to give these Congressmen one last chance to perform their Constitutional duties they took an oath to perform. If they can not or will not, the voters, bloggers, media, and others must step in, throw them out, and perform this vital task to protect our public safety for them.
I'm sorry I have not done a better job at distilling this excellent, dense, fiver page article by Zellner, down to it's most important 5 paragraphs with synopsis, but I have to take care of my partner today after a knee replacement surgery has developed complications, and I have five other articles I'm trying to get out.
I hope my readers can help me boil these issues down to their essence, and get some some lobbying out to our congress critters to light a much need fire under the butts.
We need to rally a loud and expressive, progressive indignation about cases where government is failing to protect the public in vital ways.
The Teabagger movement has captured the right mood, but has the content of their indignation wrong.
We have the content of our indignation right, but not the right mood.
The answer is not to get rid of incompetent government agencies, but to repopulate them with competent people.
We need to better communicate the dire, and even catastrophic consequences of failure of government to do it's vital jobs of regulation.
This solar flare, EMP fiasco, is a vivid way to do this, regardless of it's immediate probability, which is too high to ignore.
Here we have a vivid case study. But, one which is still to complicated, abstract, and verbose, to get beyond our academic like circles. We need to concentrate to boil this down to bite size pieces that fit the intellectual attention spans, and emotional resonance of the typical TeaParty follower.
Like "Listen-Up NRC Assholes, Do Your Jobs, Or Get Fired!"
"Or, NRC allows 104 Nuclear Cooling Ponds to be On-site Radiactive Dirty Bombs Waiting For Ignition By Terrorists, or Solar Flare Power Outages!"
Come on Kossacks!
Let's focus and get these messages out for the 2012 election.
I have a report from several months ago, documenting that the majority of folks receiving federal assistance do not even know it. A lot of Teabaggers are complaining about government programs they not only receive, but demand.
Let's make this public. And, cure folks of the delusional "false consciousness" we suffer from about what the world would look like without a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" to protect our common interest, would be like.
But, that also means we can not just send folks off to Washington, to let them be co-opted by corporate lobbyists, which sadly is what to many TeaParty folks think. We need to demand performance, competence, and integrity from government agencies with the same kind of "throw the bums out" for incompetent, and miscreants. No matter what Party.
To put it in a vernacular that regular older folks can sit around the tables of diners, and fast-food restaurants in the morning rant and raving about how everyone else other than themselves is incompetent, we need to say to the Republicans, Teabaggers, and free market folks, that to accept this kind of NRC incompetence is intolerable and demand proper funding, and oversight to do so.
We need competent government to protect us. So, therefore, we can not be soft of incompetent government officials, who allow voters to become confused, and reject all government, and Democrats.
Cutting the NRC, EPA, FDA, SEC, and other budgets would be an idiotic thing to do. As a progressive Democrat I might try to avoid hurting the feelings of those on the bottom half of the Bell Curve in IQ and instead say "perhaps, our regulatory agencies have failed to accomplish every opportunity to optimize the public good." But, this rolls off most folks like water off a duck back. Worse, it sounds strangely namby-pamby in ways I can't express in the vernacular without being offensive to other groups.
So, how do we get indignant "TeaParty" followers to realize when it comes to protecting public safety, we need more, not less government involvement?
First, of all, it might help if I didn't call them "Teabaggers," to be deliberately contemptuous. But, then after that, someone needs to say:
"Hey, incompetent Government bureaucrats, get off lazy asses and do your job protecting the public, or we will throw out out and get someone who will do their jobs!"
And, we need to get our acts in order, here, and in other places, and put half as much of our energy as we put in self-flagellation, into getting government to properly do the jobs we are paying them to do, and the Constitution and laws, of the United States require them to be doing.
Thanks.