I was gonna do the same but it's taken me a while to read to the end and I didn't wanna engage with it until I'd read all of it.
A few notes:
- 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.
It's processed here. Growing up, this was one of three roads to take to my oboe teacher's house (the community at the lower right is White Rock, where the nicer houses of the scientists who work at LANL live). About 2003-2004 they put up gates that Google wasn't allowed to drive up to.
- Anyway, he figured out soon enough that the D.O.E., though created in the late 1970s, largely in response to the Arab-oil embargo, had very little to do with oil and had a history that went back much farther than the 1970s.
It was created as the AEC in 1946 as a way to draw down the military budget and keep the weapons labs alive in a time when nobody had nukes but the US. During the late '60s/early '70s things got politically hot enough that it got folded into the DoE but it was abundantly clear growing up that we were still the AEC. The signage was everywhere, well into the '90s.
- It sent teams with equipment to big public events—the Super Bowl, for instance—to measure the radiation levels, in hopes of detecting a dirty bomb before it exploded.
This is NEST, who employed my father from '92 until he retired last year. They aren't all legit jump-out-of-helicopters realtree-wearing Rainbow 6 ninjas (my dad sure isn't) but they have them on salary.
- Why do I, as an incoming official at the D.O.E., need to be worried about North Korea?
Oddly enough, North Korea interfaces with the national labs more than they do with the US government. Sig Hecker, who shows up whenever North Korea is mentioned, ran LANL from '86 to '97. Bill Richardson, former head of the DOE, remains one of the primary points of contact with North Korea. During the last crisis during the Bush administration, North Korea asked for him by name and he's been the point man on many hostage exchanges. This is one reason all the alarmist shit coming out about North Korea lately doesn't impress me - it's mostly that dipshit in Connecticut that hasn't been a part of the process.
- Late one night, just southeast of San Jose, at Pacific Gas and Electric’s Metcalf substation, a well-informed sniper, using a .30-caliber rifle, had taken out 17 transformers. Someone had also cut the cables that enabled communication to and from the substation. “They knew exactly what lines to cut,” said Tarak Shah, who studied the incident for the D.O.E. “They knew exactly where to shoot. They knew exactly which manhole covers were relevant—where the communication lines were. These were feeder stations to Apple and Google.”
...all I will say is that growing up in the house of environmental scientists at a nuclear weapons lab, particularly those involved in nonproliferation, teaches you a lot about the fragility of every major system in your life... and convinces you that the principle thing keeping us all safe is a lack of intent. The vulnerability of American infrastructure is not a secret, but exploiting it remains an act of war and contrary to Republican fantasies, few countries in the world want war with the US.
- Anyway, when I had asked him for the fifth risk he thought about it and then seemed to relax a bit. I realized later that the fifth risk did not put him at risk of revealing classified information. To begin, he said simply, “Project management.”
It's worth noting that the principle criticism political appointees have about the national labs is their unaccountability to politics. They're run for cowboys by cowboys and they have no patience for your 4-year-horizon bullshit. When they get in trouble, it's generally for not following the rules set by political appointees. So while Lewis is not wrong about the biblical-grade clusterfuck that is Hanford, the fact that nobody's at home in Washington doesn't really play into it.
It's also worth noting that the Rocky Flats cleanup was largely successful, and they found something like 60lbs of weapons-grade plutonium in the goddamn ductwork. Clearly, Hanford is a different scale of contamination (greater volume, lower toxicity) but don't count the DOE out when it comes to aggressive cleanup.
- The barrel with organic kitty litter in it had burst and spread waste inside the cavern.
Note that the WIPP site is largely intended for low-level products. A glove that has touched plutonium goes to WIPP. The plutonium goes somewhere else. Where? Well, that's been a problem for half a century now. But the kitty litter thing is pretty much how cowboys run things.
- The driver of a heavily armed unit assigned to move plutonium around the country was pulled over, on the job, for drunken driving.
Which is one reason LANL, at least, is hated to fuck by everyone else in New Mexico. Note that he was not charged with drunken driving - but Santa Fe hates the shit out of everything that comes out of the lab (going as far as demanding DOE pay for a 40-mile road that bypasses Santa Fe with all of the waste intended for the WIPP plant) and that the local Native American tribes will gladly hassle any citizen with Los Alamos stickers on their license plates. Rolling a WIPP shipment is baller but entirely within the profile of every tribe I grew up with.
Magnolia released a hell of a documentary about nuclear non-proliferation, by the way; learning about why you want the DOE fully funded is just two entertaining hours away:
Portland is downstream from Hanford.
The Hanford cleanup faces constant missed deadlines and battles for funding from the government. Certain aspects of the cleanup are moving so slow that the people who know how to do the work are retiring and the newer workers have never seen the task done in person.
We know many tanks are leaking. I don't believe the government when they say they know what's leaking and how much of it. It's a huge facility, over 500 sq miles. There is a lot to keep track of and I don't think they know how much of what is where to the extent they try to claim. Every year of delay is one year closer to an avoidable catastrophe.
It's worrisome situation.
I wonder what percentage of the population even know about Hanford. I bet that less than half could tell you anything about it and that the number of people who haven't a clue skyrockets in the younger demographics.
The degree to which we live, unaware of our fragility can be breathtaking.
This is really insightfull, thanks for sharing.
- The vulnerability of American infrastructure is not a secret, but exploiting it remains an act of war and contrary to Republican fantasies, few countries in the world want war with the US.
There are also non-state actors to worry about, some of which are already at war with the US.
I'm honestly more woried about losing the grid to a (cyber)sabotage attack than any nuclear incidents, because I think the probability is higher. But I'm really woried about climate change and the whole madness that is climate change denial. We (as in, the world) are losing precious time that we can't get back.
You gotta keep in mind what a non-state actor gets out of it, though. Contrary to popular belief, there aren't a lot of doomsday cults. Aum Shinrikyo? They just wanted to fuck shit up and that was totally their jam. But even ISIS wants to foment an apocalyptic war specifically in the Middle East... and that means US boots-on-ground. You do something super WMD-ful in the US and we begin by saturation bombing and then come through for cleanup once we've cratered the shit out of the theater. So even an outfit like ISIS, the most chaotic evil terrorist organization in memory, has to act in such a way as to provoke the US to do something rather than simply fucking up shit wherever they can.
Pulling down the grid doesn't benefit any non-state actor I can think of, outside of Hans Gruber, George Clooney/Brad Pitt or Enron (fuck those guys) and Enron did it within the system, no mayhem necessary. Do you have a scenario in mind?
Doing that crossed my mind too.
Bumping with a comment.
Too much good content lately, Hubski! (boohoo)
Man. What an article. I wish every Trumpistani I knew would read this. Politics is stupid, but it's still fucking important.
My anecdote about Hanford.
Ex-girlfriend's grandfather used to work heavy equipment at Hanford, back in the good ole days. They'd frequently wake him up at night, have him get the backhoe out and drive out into the dark, dig holes and bury stuff, and then go back to bed.
He's now been called out of retirement and is working for the DOE full-time as they try to dislodge 40-year old information from his 80+ year old brain, and piece together some sort of map of these late night sojourns.
"How many times did this happen?"
Ummm....?
"Where did you bury things?"
Uhhh... overrrr... umm... (points vaguely into the distance)... over there? Maybe?
"Where else?"
Uhhh....
"What years did this happen?"
Erm...
Yeah... Hanford just needs to be walled off and called a "learning opportunity". And when the sludge gets to the river, maybe we will experience an evolutionary explosion as nature tries to deal with the crap herself...
- 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. To maintain the nuclear arsenal, it conducts endless, wildly expensive experiments on tiny amounts of nuclear material to try to understand what is actually happening to plutonium when it fissions, which, amazingly, no one really does. To study the process, it is funding what promises to be the next generation of supercomputers, which will in turn lead God knows where.
Well how can we start a war with Iran? We could...cut the DoE budget so it can't properly do it's job to help ensure that Iran is abiding by the Obama administration nuclear agreement...then we can make arbitrary demands and claim that Iran isn't abiding by our new pray I don't alter the agreement further deal...then we put boots on the ground in Iran! What a perfect plan!!!!!
I would. Once Israel goes kinetic they're on their own playbook. We go from being in control to attempting to cajole a military power acting as if they're facing an existential threat into behaving in our best interests, rather than theirs, and it always gets sticky. No matter what we do, we lose prestige, we lose control, and we get condemned by half the Arab world for letting our dog off leash. Then Iran reefs up Hamas and Hezbollah, Qassams fall like rain, big ugly slow tanks crush into the occupied territories and suddenly we're mired knee-deep in brokering an end to Intifada.
Our peace process with Iran has been protracted and byzantine but it hasn't been hot. Whenever Israel pulls the trigger shit gets dodgy. Remember - we lost 243 marines, a CIA station chief and Spooks-Only-Know what else simply by attempting to moderate Israel's attempt to moderate Lebanon's civil war. A US airstrike on Iran would likely be less destabilizing than an Israeli airstrike on Iran.
I know that what they call "the deep state" is what the rest of us call "a functioning government" and I know that if Steve Bannon et. al. could get the Israelis to bomb Iran they would already have done so.
Foreign policy isn't carried out by Rick Perry and Rex Tillerson. It's carried out by arguewithatree and that one of the principle benefits of bureaucracy is its resilience to shock. The current administration may very much want to kick the anthill that is the Middle East but everyone they didn't appoint has a much better understanding of the risks and consequences than they do.