What is it?

As stated in the introduction the DOE is barely what its name implies. Or more to the point, maybe this country's energy policy isn't its primary agenda. Robert Alveraz of the Institute for Policy Studies has released a new report looking at President Obama's 2011 DOE budget, and sadly, it doesn't look much different than his predecessor's (Bush).

To be fair, the DOE does administer a very large number of energy related loans that aren't part of its own budget, but these loans also say something about a larger much more disturbing trend everyone remembers all too well, the Great Recession of 2008. Its no secret that since the 1980's our government has been in a massive shift of privatizing and deregulating its activities.

Nearly 90% of DOE's workforce today are made up of private contractors. A national watchdog group called POGO recently posted an article about how the DOE is now attempting to slacken its regulatory oversite of these contractors.

As the above Alveraz' chart shows, 65% of DOE's 2011 budget is dedicated to nuclear weapons. Its great news that the president recently agreed to a new treaty with Russia to reduce its stockpile of nuclear weapons and has even reversed plans to upgrade to new weapons systems. The core problem this country faces is that the very agency that is supposedly in charge of our country's energy development has an internal political culture that is almost totally skewed toward nuclear weapons and power and the fuel cycle. It has been the policy of this country to wrap this country's scientific resources around the manipulation of nuclear fission that has resulted in the greatest human disaster in world history. It is all but a miracle that we did not go to war against the Soviet Union. For younger people who may not be familiar with the strategic realities that this world faced for the last half of the 20th century, this country was prepared to launched nuclear weapons at every major Soviet city and military target in an all out attack that came to be known as Mutually Asurred Distruction or MAD. The Soviets having about the same capacity was ready to do the same, thus several times due to flocks of birds, computer malfunctions etc. this world was and still is today on hair trigger alert that could have launched thousands of nuclear weapons, destroying the world as we know it for life.

 

 

 

The image to the right shows the size of the two nuclear bombs that were dropped in 1945 on Japan that killed over 300,000.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today's nuclear weapons dramatically dwarf the size of those first weapons.

 

The fact that both Russia and the U.S. have thousands of these city killer weapons still pointed at each other on hair trigger alert means that the world is still in a deadly grip from the cold war.

 

 

 

 

 

This is a sample map of what a 10 kiloton bomb could do to a city. Note, that's the Hiroshima sized bomb rather than size of the new Megaton bombs that are 1,000 times bigger.

 

 

 

 

And it is the DOE that is in charge of designing, construction and maintaining the this country's nuclear weapons infrastructure, the single largest industrial military complex the world has ever known. The overall costs of this infrastructure has been estimated to have cost this country a trillion dollars since the inception of the Manhattan Project in 1942. From 1948 on the U.S. has conducted over 1,000 nuclear weapons tests. The fallout from those tests fell across the country impacting the health of millions of Americans young and old.

 

See 50 nuclear weapons facts here.

Soon after the first bombs were dropped on Japan scientists who were involved in the design and production of the first bombs began voicing their concern about their use that spawned a global peace movement that is still calling for the abolition of all nuclear weapons worldwide.

Today the the U.S. has thousands of nuclear weapons deployed on military vessels and at nearly 900 bases around around the world. We spend more money on weapons today than the rest of the world does. Besides what the DOE spends the entire annual nuclear weapons budget is estimated to be about $50 billion a year. The largest of the DOE's dozens of massive facilities is located in Nevada and is called the Nevada Test Site (NTS) and is approximately 1,300 square miles in size. The next largest DOE facility is in Hanford Washington and is 586 square miles in size. It was from Nevada where most atmospheric nuclear weapons took place.

Not only did the weapons infrastructure have large amounts of land, it also built some of the largest industrial operations in world history. The largest of these facilities was known as K-25 and was built in Oak Ridge Tennessee costing over $6 billion in today's dollars. The K-25 facility was over a half mile long and employed 12,000 workers. It was used to enrich uranium into weapons grade.

Along with two other sister facilities, they were the single largest energy and water users of this country. The Oak Ridge facility would employ over 50,000 workers during the height of WW II. K-25 is being demolished for about $1 billion.

The map to the right shows some of the DOE's main facilities, the most important of these being the Livermore Labs located outside of San Francisco, where the original idea of building and designing the nuclear weapons first took place and and still does.

Besides the legacy of health effects to military veterans, DOE workers and civilians from the era of atmospheric testing, an even more deadly problem of what to do with the deadly radioactive wastes this massive infrastructure manages represents the single most dangerous problem the world faces today next to a nuclear war. In the late 1980's as the cold war was winding down, and at the height of the anti-nuclear era, the public began to learn of the scale of the weapons operations and the growing health problems and contamination from its operations. Today, the DOE's office of Environmental Management has the responsibility of managing the cleanup of this era that has been estimated at between $270-330 billion. The chart below is from Alverez' report.

 

When combining what the DOE and the Department of Defense spends on nuclear war, its on a par with the amount of money the U.S. government spends on all forms of education.

The DOE has employed hundreds of thousands of workers since the advent of the bomb. As a result of major public campaigns the country finally passed legislation that finally opened the door to workers being compensated for contamination that maimed or killed them. The program was put in the hands of the Department of Labor but continues to be organized to block real access to promised funding. Out of over 100,000 workers or families of workers who have applied less than a quarter of those have been given money. Workers have been forced to fight the combined legal forces of the government to prove their conditions. In 2006 DOE administrators were caught having purposely contaminated workers health records and then dumping them in a nuclear waste dump in New Mexico. Obtaining records to prove contamination as well as finally get money can take years as a recent Government Accountability report disclosed. The suffering of these workers just didn't start yesterday, but has been going on for decades. It has long been covered up by a compliant media on the grounds that it might affect the status of support for the country's nuclear weapons operations.

The DOE, next to the DOD has the largest body of secret documents of any government agency. Activists have been fighting for decades to gain acess to documents that disclose the wrong doing of this massive agency of death and destruction. Please go to the scandal section to see more on the global nature of what this agency has done.

Over the last decade the DOE as mentioned briefly has been privatizing its massive operations. Nearly 200,000 private contractors now work for the DOE. Just as the Obama administration announcned plans to reduce the nuclear arsenal the DOE also set forward a push to reduce its regulatory oversight of the giant corporate contractors like General Electric, Bechtel, Batelle and Sandia Labs setting up a whole new potential for more workers having their health destroyed.

Energy!

When you hear the Nuclear Industry claim that it has never suffered any deaths directly due from radiation at its facilities, its important to understand that the DOE manages the fuel cycle for the commercial nuclear industry. It is at DOE where the real horror of radiation has effected workers. The U.S. government has done everything imaginable to hide its role in the health crisis of its workers.

After huge public anger in the 1980's, in a desperate attempt to keep the nuclear infrastructure from being shut down, a very large segment of DOE's nuclear fuel operations that supported the commercial nuclear industry was privatized with the formation of the U.S. Energy Corp (USEC) in 1998. Today, USEC which is managed by a board overseen by government officials that have applied for $2 billion to construct a new state of the art nuclear fuel enrichment facility in Piketon Ohio, near one of its massive old facilities in Ohio.

The DOE does science. The DOE doesn't like to talk a lot about its nuclear operations, but it loves to talk about the work it does in science. Again, everything this agency does, it does big. It has some of the largest computer operations in the world, including billions it has spent on fusion technology. As seen with the pie chart at the beginning of this section, the DOE will spend over $5 billion on research and development. Its within the DOE's science programs where we can see the politicized priorities of how money is spent on energy development. Since the inception of the nuclear age more money has been spent on the development of nuclear energy by the DOE and its predecessor than any other single energy source. Various reports suggest that over $115 billion has been spent by the agency on nuclear power between 1947-1999.

At its Idaho labratory there are dozens of reactors that were built and tested over the years. It is also the home of where workers were killed in the 1962 when the SL-1 test reactor blew up. Its at Idaho where reactor designs were built and tested for both commercial and military application. Yes, the DOE is oversees the operation of the country's nuclear fleet of reactors that are on submarines and surface naval vessels. Claims that these reactors have operated safely is or not is a classified secret. However, it is known that submarine reactors have had numerous accidents including meltdowns, including the loss of several nuclear submarines that have sank. The country's primary cold war opponent, the Soviet Union has also suffered numerous nuclear disasters too many to mention here, some of which were far worse than any suffered by the U.S.

One of the most important functions the DOE carries out is within its Energy Information Administration. It is this segment of the DOE that monitors the use of energy here and around the world.

Another one of the DOE's more recent developments was the formation of its National Renewable Energy Labs in Colorado. One of the older sectors of the Livermore Labs in Berkeley California has also shifted to the focuss of energy efficiency renewables.

Last but not least the DOE is proposing to administer over $160 billion in loans to the energy sector of which over 1/3 is earmarked for commercial nuclear reactor construction. Another substantial portion of the loans will go to renewable energy development as well as over $25 billion that went to bail out the car industry when it collapsed in 2008.

The DOE is long overdue for a complete overhaul. Its longterm involvement and role in the cold war is still the driving force for an agency that is highly biased towards what is at best a failed experiment with nuclear fission that needs to be put out of existance. The cold war mentality of its heros like Edward Teller must be closed down.