The greatest threat faced by Americans today is the projected $20 trillion debt because of expenditures to protect us against dangers that do not exist.


The U.S. Department of Energy has spent about one trillion dollars and done nothing of value to resolve critical energy challenges. It deliberately suppressed information in 1987 that should have been used to counter false claims in articles in MIT's Technology Review and the Washington Post of Chernobyl-scale accidents from nuclear waste stored at DOE sites in order to obtain funding for hundreds of billions of dollars for indefinite jobs to move the waste from where it was safely stored to other locations. My letter correcting the false claims was published in Technology Review but not the Washington Post. The editor of Technology Review admitted at a meeting of the Washington, D.C., MIT Alumni Association that the article had been a major mistake.


The nuclear fuel claimed in this article to be a terrorist target is just another in a long list of false allegations of danger made or supported by the DOE and its predecessors that includes:


the hypotheses accepted by the AEC in 1960 that low levels of radiation were dangerous despite overwhelming evidence of beneficial effects

claims in a Government Accounting Office report in 1968 after AEC headquarters staff review that nuclear waste at AEC sites was not well managed

false claims that well-managed, well-safeguarded reprocessing is a proliferation threat and that claims of scientists inexperienced with reprocessing that their concepts are proliferation-resistant

claims that plutonium is one of the most toxic substances despite several medical studies reviewed by the EPA and CDC and described in a CDC report showing significant health benefits and no adverse health effects to workers with significant amounts of plutonium in their bodies.

claims early this century that fully safeguarded nuclear power programs in North Korea and Iran and non-existent nuclear programs in Iraq were a nuclear proliferation threat.

Clinton Bastin
Chemical Engineer/Nuclear Scientist
US Department of Energy (Retired)
 

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