Saved, in Spite of Ourselves

Omaha, Nebraska -- Things could still go wrong, but it looks likely, if not certain, that although the Missouri River floods that have been threatening the Ft. Calhoun and Cooper nuclear power plants here will put tremendous stress on both the systems and their operators, the risk of an immediate plant meltdown like those that occurred in Japan at Fukushima is small.

But it's also clear that if these same floods had occurred a year ago, before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission forced plant operators to upgrade safety standards, Ft. Calhoun, at least, would have been at serious meltdown risk. If the floods recede with no further damage to these plants, President Obama could, quite legitimately, claim that he saved Omaha. He probably won't, though, because the politics of doing so would reveal a deeper and more disturbing truth: While the Obama Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), led by Gregory Jaczko, has begun to take seriously the problems it inherited, America's fleet of 104 operating nuclear power plants are anything but safe.

Let's look at Ft. Calhoun and Cooper first. While a rubber berm at Ft. Calhoun has failed, causing flooding around the transformers and forcing the plant temporarily to rely on backup power, current projections for the flood peak are below the level of the newly reinforced levee system. The plant had also been shut down for other reasons in the spring and is not currently operating. Cooper is a bit higher and seems to be at less risk -- although any dam failure or other event greatly raising the levels of the river will mean that all bets are off.

All this is anything but reassuring. The flood level is expected to peak at 1,008 feet, below the current levee line of 1,014. But a year ago, the plant's flood protection was eight feet lower, meaning at 1,010 the main reactor area itself would have been flooded, and the NRC's inspectors concluded the plant would fail:

NRC inspectors concluded that at flooding levels above 1,008 feet, the plant "would experience a loss of offsite power and loss of intake structure" and water pumps providing essential cooling water to the plant. In that case, "the plant would be incapable of reaching cold shutdown" with normal operations -- a fundamental safety requirement imposed by the NRC…

But when the NRC, last October, demanded that the Omaha Public Power District (OPPD) raise the flood barrier, the OPPD resisted and had to be forced to make the improvements over its strenuous objections. The final improvements were completed only on June 4.

And, as the OPPD has been pointing out in an attempt to reassure the public, this flooding is very different from the kind of unexpected, catastrophic event that hit Japan. Gary Gates, the CEO at Ft. Calhoun, stoutly and correctly insisted, "It is not another Fukushima. The difference is the rapid flooding that occurred at Fukushima. This was a predicted event, to a degree, from the Corps of Engineers…"

Well and good. But how well would the Nebraska reactors have withstood an unexpected flooding event, one caused, for example, by a terrorist attack on one of the upstream dams? Or how would any of the 15 reactors that are near the New Madrid Earthquake fault? Past earthquakes on the New Madrid were powerful enough change the course of the Mississippi River -- certainly a flooding event that makes what is happening this week in Nebraska look like a mud puddle -- and those 15 nuclear plants are almost all located along major river systems.

The good news is that it appears that the NRC has started taking this more seriously. Since Fukushima, the NRC has been reviewing its whole approach to safety. The agency will get the results of the staff review on July 12, with public release a week later, but the agency is signaling that, in the words of Martin Virgilio, deputy executive director for reactor and preparedness programs, "What we once thought was not necessary for adequate protection, may in fact become …"

Among the key issues flagged are that many safety precautions against the worst disasters -- in which multiple systems fail simultaneously -- are voluntary, not mandatory, and that many plant operators do not consistently observe them. Additionally, it's now obvious that the kinds of failures that would result from intentional attacks were not adequately analyzed. In spite of this, the NRC's ingrained culture of deferring to utilities and defending the indefensible continues. Recently, for example, spokespeople have asserted that the probability of more extreme weather events because of climate change does not pose a risk because new nuclear power plants are built to withstand those kinds of weather extremes. The real issue, of course, is not new plants, but existing ones.

The bottom line is that how the NRC handles the new safety review is, arguably, one of the most important responsibilities facing the Obama administration. Will it get the attention it deserves?

Unmoored from Their Base

Washington, DC -- In the spring of 1995, Newt Gingrich made a big mistake. He allowed Pennsylvania Representative Bud Shuster to introduce a frontal assault on clean water that went beyond the procedural environmental attacks hidden in the Contract with America. When environmentalists and the New York Times dubbed Shuster's bill "the Dirty Water Act," Gingrich's political momentum stalled and went into reverse. Bill Clinton was reelected the next year.

Gingrich should not have been surprised. Republican pollsters like Frank Luntz had warned that clean water occupies a special place in the hearts of American voters, particularly Republican and conservative voters.  Gingrich and his party were out of touch with their voting base on an issue that they perceived, quite simply,  as an "inalienable right."

Now, in the wake of an electoral victory, the right wing of the Republican party has once again lost touch with its own base and is going after the Clean Water Act. A raft of legislative proposals have surfaced in the Tea Party-dominated House Republican caucus -- proposals that would, if passed, devastate the progress made since 1972 in cleaning up our rivers, lakes, and beaches. Simply by being proposed, though, they also create an enormous political threat to their advocates.

HR 2018, which is making its way through the House Transportation Committee, would eliminate the EPA's authority to enforce clean water standards should states decline to do so -- or even to get involved effectively in disputes between states. The key language is quite direct:

"…the Administrator may not promulgate a revised or new standard for a pollutant in any case in which the State has submitted to the Administrator and the Administrator has approved a water quality standard for that pollutant, unless the State concurs with the Administrator's determination that the revised or new standard is necessary to meet the requirement of this Act."

If this bill were to become law, all progress in improving clean water standards to reflect the latest health and science would be halted.

An attempt by Rep. Tim Bishop of New York, the ranking minority member of the committee, to limit this language so that it would apply only to critical bodies of water, failed.

The leader of the HR 2018 effort is Ohio Republican Tea Party freshman Bob Gibbs, who says he views protecting clean water as a secondary issue that the nation can afford only in good economic times. The impetus for this wholesale assault on the Clean Water Act -- worse than anything Gingrich ever dared contemplate -- was the unhappiness of Florida Tea Party Republicans in Congress that federal courts had ruled that the EPA must step in after Florida failed to clean up its own waterways.

Politically, the Tea Party seems to be doing well in Florida -- and new governor Rick Scott has rushed through his complaisant legislature a bill challenging clean water standards for Florida's waterways. Scott also put through a bill that would prevent local government (which the Tea Party is supposed to support, remember?) from enacting ordinances to limit fertilizer runoff that creates red tides on the state's beaches. Confronted with this threat, the city of Tampa rushed forward its own ordinance -- creating a web of city and county governments from Tampa Bay down to Naples that have prohibited the use of nitrogen fertilizers on lawns during the rainy season. And the vote in Tampa was not even close –- the bill passed 6-1.

But Florida is not the only place where Tea Party politicians are trying to get rid of clean water. In Missouri the legislature almost voted to turn clean water enforcement over to the EPA by stripping their state environmental agency of the ability to collect the permit fees that fund state enforcement -- but then, on the last day of the session, they blinked and restored state authority. Here, at least, fear of the how voters might react prevailed.

Nor is there much evidence that grassroots Tea Party Republicans elsewhere in the country share the enthusiasm of their congressional representatives for dirty water. The current second round of devastating floods in the Midwest, for example, has created enormous public anxiety about the pollutants being swept up by those floods.

There's a reason why Republican pollsters like Frank Luntz consistently find that clean water ranks at the very top of public environmental concerns, particularly among conservatives and Republicans. Unlike dirty air, which is dangerous but often hard to see, sewage on the beaches is visible, tangible, visceral, and (especially) disgusting -- a value cluster that's particularly strong among conservatives.

While the Fox News/Rush Limbaugh media echo chamber, backed with huge funding from Koch Industries and the oil and coal lobbies, has managed to create a major partisan split on global warming (narrowly defined), they have not managed to shake Republican support for clean energy sources like wind and solar nor to diminish conservative concern about oil dependence. And their disinformation campaign has even less hope of convincing Republican mothers to accept more toxic chemicals coming out of their faucets and more animal waste on their beaches.

So why, given the lack of any evident public support for dirty water, are House Republicans going so far overboard? Well, part of it is the hubris of winning a big election -- big winners almost always go too far. But there is also the small matter of who is paying for the Tea Party. A news profile of Ohio's Bob Gibbs summed up his paymasters this way:

"The mining and oil and gas industries rank as top contributors to the Gibbs campaign, with $171,000 in total donations. Likewise, in a ranking of Gibbs' corporate benefactors by dollars given, mining firms hold three of the top five spots, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics."

Once again, beneath the surface of seemingly inexplicable and depressing American politics, we find the issue of campaign finance.

Stay tuned: I'm watching and will blog next on the threat of a nuclear reactor site in Nebraska that's been flooded in a "made in America" version of the Japanese catastrophe. We might dodge the bullet this time because, for once, our nuclear regulators got tough with the utility a year ago -– but we might not.

We Can Only Mar It

Mather Point, AZ -- It's remarkable how often crucial moments in America's quest to preserve its wild legacy are embodied on the rim of the Grand Canyon. This is the single place where that battle is joined most often.

Here, in 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed Grand Canyon National Monument by saying: "Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it." And in response, his slash-and-burn opponents in the U.S. Congress proposed legislation to strip the president of the power to withdraw federal lands from commercial destruction, saying, in effect, "Posterity? What has posterity ever done for us?"

Here, in the late 1960s, Dave Brower and the leadership of the Sierra Club launched a campaign to prevent the construction of dams in the Grand Canyon -- the battle that caused the Club to lose its charitable tax exemption (and that kickstarted the modern, fighting environmental tradition it exemplifies today).

Here, in 1996, President Clinton announced the creation of the 1.9 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, beginning his land legacy, which set aside 6 million acres of new parks and monuments. And once again, the enemies of America's wild legacy went ballistic. One wise-use group went so far as to claim: "…this seemingly innocuous action represents the greatest single look at the tremendous threat to our individual liberties, our right to freedom of speech, of religion, of Association, and of the right to own Private Property, which the coming New World Order represents."

And here, last week, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar declared his commitment to protect a million acres surrounding this magnificent national park from being desecrated by new uranium mining claims. In July of 2009, Salazar asked the Bureau of Land Management to review the question of whether these claims should be permitted or whether the land should instead be protected. Salazar announced that, based on that study, he is extending the temporary withdrawal for another six months on the full one million acres and that permanent protection will be the preferred alternative in the environmental review that will now commence.

"This is a great day for the Grand Canyon, its wildlife and everyone in the Southwest who relies on the Colorado River for drinking water," said Sandy Bahr, the Sierra Club's Grand Canyon Chapter Director.

In his own remarks, Salazar echoed Teddy Roosevelt and sent a powerful message to those in Congress who, just as in 1908, will surely try to undo this act of leadership: "Our decisions -- our actions -- can alter billions of years of history in all its wonder and glory. Let us be cautious. Let us be patient. Let us be humble. "

But humility does not seem to be the Tea Party's style.

Arizona governor Jan Brewer immediately blasted the action.

And a mining front group with the Orwellian name "American Clean Energy Resources Trust" came out swinging: "The whole thing is built on a house of cards," said Bob Weidner of the Trust. "While the secretary sounds reasonable saying, 'We should wait,' the facts are already out based on experience that there is no link between uranium mining and pollution to the Colorado River."

Republicans in Congress repeated the pattern of their predecessors. "This shameful effort by the Obama administration is a step in precisely the wrong direction for the American economy, making the U.S. even more dependent on foreign powers and potentially creating a serious national security threat going forward," said Rep. Trent Franks. "Putting the desires of a handful of rabid environmentalists above America's long-term energy independence and national security." Franks has a bill pending that, once again, would strip the president of the power to protect these public lands. Somehow, the fact that the state of Arizona, which protested the creation of Grand Canyon National Park in the first place, now features it on its license plates still hasn't sunk in after 103 years.