Obama’s Wish List for Energy

[PamW]

4. It used to be...

Most of this shit should be in the fracking military budget.
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It used to be...up until 1947. In 1947, the USA made a decision that nuclear weapons and the knowledge and facilities needed to design, build, and maintain them; was going to be under civilian control.

So in 1947, the Congress passed the Atomic Energy Act of 1947, and amended it in 1954 by passing the Atomic Energy Act of 1954.

Those Acts created the AEC; which owned the nuclear weapons design / production complex as well as nuclear power research and nuclear power regulation. In 1974, Congress decided to split the regulatory function away and created the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) to supplant the AEC. In 1978, Congress created the Dept. of Energy by folding ERDA, and several other energy agencies into a new Cabinet Department.

So the responsibility for maintenance of nuclear weapons remains in civillian hands in the DOE, and is NOT part of the Pentagon budget, so it is not managed by the military.

In 1992, President George H.W. Bush began a nuclear testing moratorium ( the last US nuclear test was in Sept 23, 1992 ). In July 1993, President Clinton decided that the Bush moratorium would be extended indefinitely. However, those nuclear tests were used to check both the reliability and safety of nuclear weapons. The USA had to have a program to ensure reliability and safety. The USA couldn't ignore the reliability and safety of nuclear weapons any more than an airline could stop doing regular maintenance on its airliners and just "hope" that they would function properly.

So President Clinton instituted a program called "Science-based Stockpile Stewardship" in which laboratory-scale experiments, and massive computer simulations supplanted nuclear testing. President Clinton was told, and acknowledged that Stockpile Stewardship would be much more expensive than doing nuclear testing, but made the decision it was worth it to stop testing. ( Image safety tests for cars. The cheapest thing is to put instumented dummies in a car and actually crash it into a wall. That's analogous to nuclear testing. However, imagine if the car companies couldn't crash test cars and had to buy big supercomputers and do lots of laboratory tests on steel to determine all the mechanical properties of steel to input into the simulations...)

As a condition to the Senate's ratification of the latest arms control agreements with Russia ( the Kyl Amendment ), the price for further reductions in the US stockpile was increase assurance of the remainder of the stockpile; and hence an increase in spending for nuclear weapons. It's a condition on the Senate's ratification. If President Obama doesn't increase the nuclear weapons budget as he agreed, the Kyl Amendment revokes the Senate's ratification of our latest arms reductions treaty with Russia.

You have your choice; spend more on nuclear weapons, or lose the latest arms reduction treaty.

PamW