Gregg Easterbrook

Once again, Western bombs are falling on the sand-blown weapons testing range that is north Africa, the Middle East and the landscape of the old Great Game. The area stretching roughly from Morocco to Afghanistan west to east, and Syria to the Persian Gulf north to south — let’s call this region Deathistan — long has been contested. But in the last century, the region has been treated as a plaything by Western capitals.

The United States and United Kingdom, which boast of enlightenment, cause harm when they please in the Deathistan region. Less than a generation ago it amused the United States to encourage Saddam Hussein to slaughter Iranians; then conditions changed, so the United States started killing in Iraq. Right now the United States and NATO are taking lives in Libya and Afghanistan. In these places, U.S. and other Western armed forces in the main behave with high ethics. But their missions are to slay and destroy, and here’s the bottom line: Western meddling in north Africa, the Arab world and the Great Game territories has not worked.

Israel exists: that is the West’s principal achievement in the region, though for a comparatively small number of people. Cheap oil flows. Moscow quit Afghanistan. Otherwise, the last century of attempts by the United States and European powers to manipulate the Deathistan region rarely has come to good.

We’ve sure blown a lot of stuff up. When innocents were killed inside the United States on 9-11, America claimed, with justification, a right of outrage. When innocents are killed by Western action elsewhere — hundreds of thousands have died in Iraq and Afghanistan in the U.S. retaliation for the 3,000 dead of 2001 — the West washes its hands, or issues a press release.

Muammar Gaddafi is an awful dictator. But no one in the Washington or London establishments seemed to care about that even a short time ago. Libyan oil money was moving freely; in 2009, Gaddafi was presented to the world by the New York Times as an op-ed columnist, as a “leader” and sage. Now the West is bombing Libya, without debate in Congress or European parliaments — and over the objections of Turkey, which understands much of the region better than does the West. Though aimed at Gaddafi’s arms, some of the bombs are killing civilians: others, killing military conscripts who have little choice about their fates.

Maybe the bombing will stop Gaddafi from repressing his country. Maybe it will just smash some stuff and usher in a different type of repression — this being the Western pattern of interactions with the region.

Despite extensive Western involvement in Deathistan, most nations there remain backward and authoritarian. Maybe that’s in part because of Western meddling, including periodic fits of use of force.

Much of the modern form of the region was created by Western fiat. Borders of Iraq, Iran and many Gulf states were drawn in London; British troops occupied Iran during World War II; the United States deposed a democratically elected government in Iran in 1953, then tried to control Iran in the 1970s; then armed Iraq against Iran in the 1980s; now regularly shakes its fist at Tehran; Britain and France attacked Egypt in 1956; the United States armed Islamic rebels in Afghanistan in the 1980s and now fights Islamic rebels there. I don’t mean this paragraph as a history of the region, merely a brief reminder of the extent of Western involvement.

The fact that Europe and the United States shaped the Deathistan region does not give them a right to do as they please there. Of course the West should advocate change. But there’s a vast difference between siding with democracy and sending in attack jets.

Choose any nation roughly the geographic size of Iraq (say, Spain) or roughly the population of Libya (say, Sicily). If the United States had staged all-out attacks on Spain twice in the last 20 years, or bombed Sicily twice in the last 25 years, how advanced or happy might these nations be? That’s what the United States has done to Iraq and Libya.

Suppose really something bad were happening in America. Suppose George W. Bush refused to leave office: was barricaded in the White House, and attempting to cancel civil liberties. Now suppose Libya or Iraq possessed supercarrier strike groups, and responded to the bad news from the United States by launching missiles at military bases near Washington and dropping bombs along the East Coast. Not only would America be furious — this wouldn’t work! Things would not get better in America; they’d get worse.

Yet the West expects such tactics to work in north Africa, the Middle East and the old Great Game areas. I will skip the complication that use of force may be morally wrong: is there one single soul in Washington who still cares about morality in use of force? It is enough that the bottom line is that U.S. meddling usually fails.

If the United States and European Union stopped trying to manipulate the Deathistan region, and stopped dropping bombs there, the nations of this area might stay backward and repressive. Or, might improve. We’ll never find out until such time as the West simply leaves these nations alone, and lets them reform themselves.

Photo, top to bottom: People look at a U.S Air Force F-15E fighter jet after it crashed near the eastern city of Benghazi March 22, 2011. The fighter jet crashed in Libya overnight after apparent mechanical failure but its crew were safe, a spokesman for the U.S. military Africa Command said on Tuesday. REUTERS/Suhaib Salem; A protester sits in a makeshift shelter on a street during an anti-Gaddafi demonstration in Benghazi March 22, 2011. REUTERS/Suhaib Salem

At the malfunctioning Japanese atomic reactor, attention has shifted from the cores to the spent-fuel pools as the real radiation threat — the spent-fuel pools contain far more uranium than the reactor cores. Guess where most spent-fuel rods are stored in the United States? In pools at atomic power stations: exactly the situation at the Fukushima power plant in Japan.

There are much safer alternatives. One is “dry cask” storage of atomic waste, which does not require constant circulation of cooling water. Failure of cooling water circulation caused both the Three Mile Island and Fukushima accidents.

Hardly any of the spent fuel at Fukushima has been transferred to dry casks — only about five percent. That’s why the current emergency is extreme. Some atomic waste in the United States has been transferred to dry casks — your columnist once visited such an installation. Most has not, because dry casks are more expensive than wet pools and incredibly, U.S regulations do not mandate this safety step.

There is an even better idea than dry casks — the Yucca Mountain storage area in Nevada, designed specifically for spent fuel rods. Since 1992, the federal government has planned to move old fuel rods thousands of feet below the Nevada desert. Some $10 billion has been spent building the tunnels and elevators of the Yucca Mountain facility. The National Academy of Sciences has reviewed the design. A 2006 Senate report called Yucca Mountain “the most studied real estate on the planet.” Much of the spent fuel rods in the United States could already be far underground beneath Yucca Mountain, eliminating not just a Fukushima-style risk but all risks posed by this material.

Except that immediately after taking office in 2009, President Barack Obama cancelled the Yucca Mountain project. Environmentalists hate deep storage, because by solving the atomic-waste problem, this would eliminate an argument against nuclear power. With pollution-free electricity from the atom increasingly attractive because of climate change, environmental orthodoxy wants the spent-rods problem to continue indefinitely.

Obama also cancelled Yucca Mountain as a favor to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who had to stand for reelection in 2010. Many Nevada voters oppose Yucca Mountain — they want atomic wastes stored somewhere else. Voters in all states say “not in my backyard” to spent reactor fuel rods (and to practically everything else). But old reactor rods must go into someone’s backyard. The alternative is leaving them in everyone’s backyard, by leaving them at power plants.

Of course politics is always a factor in Washington decisions. But for President Obama to cancel a badly needed safety facility in order to appease an interest group, and to help reelect a senator who supports his agenda, was placing Obama’s personal interests ahead of the national interest. That was disgraceful.

Since not many people follow power-production issues, the president’s 2009 decision went unnoticed outside of Nevada. Now, with a nuclear emergency in Japan, the foolishness of cancelling Yucca Mountain should become a high-profile matter. Opening this facility would allow the systematic elimination of most risk posed by spent fuel rods at U.S. power plants. And there’s no serious argument (there are plenty of nutty arguments) that moving old fuel rods from leaky pools at reactor facilities, to deep underground in a stable geologic formation, won’t improve public safety without environmental risk.

Consider this quote: “If a relatively simple dry-cask fuel-rods storage system 200 feet from a parking lot can render nuclear wastes nearly harmless, how can it be that burying the same wastes deep below a remote desert is an astonish risk to the biosphere?” Your columnist wrote those words 16 years ago, in my book on environmental policy, A Moment on the Earth. I never would have guessed that 16 years later the country would still be avoiding the same problem.

The emergency at Fukushima is a warning to the United States — stop playing politics with old atomic materials, open the Yucca Mountain facility and eliminate public-health risk from spent fuel rods.

Note 1: For “dry cask” storage, spent fuel rods first are cooled in water for about a year, then surrounded by inert gases and encased in steel. Wrapping your arms around a dry cask would be a bad idea. At about 200 feet, Geiger counters show no radiation.

Note 2: Renee Schoff of McClatchy News Service reports that many utilities continue to use dangerous wet-pool storage of old fuel rods simply because federal regulations don’t require them to build safer dry casks.

Note 3: Here is one of the goofiest federal documents of all time, an Environmental Protection Agency forecast of what will happen to Yucca Mountain over the next million years. We can’t reliably predict what will happen next week.

Photos, top to bottom: Plutonium-uranium mixed oxide (MOX) fuel rods are placed in a storage pool at the No. 3 reactor of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture, northern Japan, in this picture taken August 21, 2010. REUTERS/Kyodo; The U.S. Energy Department approved on January 10, 2001 the remote Nevada site of Yucca Mountain as the final resting place for the nation’s vast amounts of radioactive waste, a plan immediately opposed by the Senate’s top two Democrats. A repository would be built under the mountain, 90 miles from Las Vegas, and would store 70,000 tons of radioactive materials from the nation’s nuclear power plants for about 10,000 years. REUTERS/Dept Of Energy-Handout RC/HB

The situation in Japan is horrific — but because of the earthquake and tsunami, not because of the malfunctioning atomic reactor station. The earthquake and its awful aftermath killed at least thousands of people, perhaps tens of thousands. That is an unspeakable tragedy. The damaged reactors at Fukushima haven’t killed anyone, and while posing a clear danger, especially to workers heroically fighting the malfunction, the odds are that any harm to public health will be minor, if public health is harmed at all.

Yet in the United States and European Union, what’s happening at the power plant is receiving more attention, and generating more anxiety, than thousands of innocents crushed or drowned.

Japan is the sole place nuclear weapons have been used: to see the Japanese suffer, again, from fear of the atom is heartrending. But the reaction to the power plant in Japan shows lack of perspective. Today’s Washington Post front page proclaims, in large type, a “FULL- BLOWN NUCLEAR CATASTROPHE.” The earthquake and tsunami were catastrophes; the power plant leaks may cause little harm, let alone represent a “catastrophe.”

And in all the words and pictures being devoted to the Fukushima reactors, the most important concern raised is being missed. But first consider:

Atomic reactors are not particularly dangerous.
They cannot cause a nuclear blast — this is a common misconception. They can leak radiation, but this has happened only a couple times, and except at Chernobyl, radiation leaks from power reactors have had only slight impact on public health.

The sort of radiation you would experience standing close to an exposed atomic reactor is deadly, which is why being a reactor-station worker is a perilous occupation. But the kind of radiation that extends more than a few hundred yards away is less dangerous than a medical X-ray. Everyone’s terrified of the word “radiation.” Most types of radiation — you are being exposed to several forms right now, from the sun, the stars, radio broadcasting and some types of rocks — have mild if any health consequences.

The worst U.S. atomic accident, at Three Mile Island in 1979, was spooky and scary but caused no public health harm. Many studies, including this one from the Columbia University School of Public Health, found a slight increase in cancers near Three Mile Island in the years afterward, but also found radiation “did not account for the observed increase.” The Columbia researchers theorized that people who lived  near Three Mile Island went to doctors to get checked, and physicians found cancers that were already incipient before the accident.

Studies found people who lived near Three Mile Island experienced stress and anxiety, and stress is bad for you. But it’s nothing like the panic-in-the-streets threat being suggested by coverage of the Japan reactors. Here, the Washington Post details the relatively mild nature of most forms of radiation from power generation, and recounts studies showing fear is a greater hazard than cancer. This story appeared on page 9.

Atomic power causes significantly less harm than fossil fuel.
In 2010, 11 people were killed in the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling explosion while 29 people died in a coal mine in West Virginia. Nothing so bad has ever happened at an atomic power plant in the United States or European Union. Annually, coal mining and oil refining accidents kill several hundred people: annual worker deaths at atomic power plants, and in uranium mining, are much lower. Fossil fuel generates greenhouse gases that are causing climate change: atomic power production is just shy of zero-emission for greenhouse gases. Smog from coal burning in the developing world causes respiratory diseases and tens of thousands of premature deaths each year: no similar problem is associated with atomic power.

This morning, Reuters said the Fukushima situation is “the world’s most serious nuclear accident since the Chernobyl meltdown in Ukraine in 1986”. That statement surely is true, but think what it means — a quarter century of atomic power did no harm at all, and now the major problem in Japan may be resolved with only minor public harm. In the same 25 years, oil and coal use worldwide have killed many thousands of people while triggering global warming.

If the Japan accident increases political opposition to nuclear power, climate change will get worse.
So if you don’t like nuclear power, be careful what you wish for.

But won’t the radiation come after us?
Greenhouse gases are invisible: a  reactor station venting smoke is a cinematic image. That you can take dramatic pictures of one, but cannot photograph the other, causes many to obsess about atomic power while shrugging about greenhouse gases.

Science illiteracy — of which the media, not just voters, may be guilty — causes many to fear that clouds of deadly radiation will drift from Japan around the world. There is a tiny chance this could occur, if the elaborate “containment” structure at Fukushima should fail. (Chernobyl had no containment structure, which is why Chernobyl was a true catastrophe.) But the odds anyone outside Japan ever will be harmed by the reactor malfunction there are far lower than the odds you will be killed in a car crash today — and you’re not afraid to get into your car.

And now the issue everyone’s missing:

Antiquated reactors like Fukushima should be replaced with new nuclear designs.
The Japanese station uses a half-century-old engineering concept called “boiling water” reactors. The devices are obsolete plumber’s nightmares: they need to be torn down and replaced with modern reactors. Broadly across the world, old reactors designed in the 1950s and 1960s, when far less was known about controlling atomic power, need to be taken out of service and replaced with modern designs that do not have the problems experienced at Fukushima.

All 104 nuclear power reactors in use in the United States are 30 or more years old, based on obsolete engineering. They need to be demolished and replaced with improved designs. Modern reactors require fewer moving parts than reactors of the 1950s and 1960s, and employ a new idea, “passive” safety. Passive safety means failures are not emergencies — if the cooling pumps fail, as happened at Fukushima, the atomic reaction simply stops. Hit by the same earthquake, a modern reactor would not have gone haywire.

Yet political opposition to construction of new atomic power plants is preventing the spread of improved modern reactors. Yesterday, Germany and Switzerland said they would postpone plans to tear down obsolete reactors and replace them with modern designs. Attempts in the U.S. to obtain political permission to demolish obsolete reactors, in favor of new systems, are likely to be set back.

This is exactly the wrong conclusion. If the Japan accidents produce a new wave of opposition to new reactor construction, the result will be to lock into place a profusion of obsolete reactors with antiquated engineering. Japan should have replaced the Fukushima reactors with a modern station years ago. Will other nations refuse to act, and wait till the next obsolete reactor fails?

Photos: Top; A family photograph is half buried in the mud in Rikuzentakata after it was a destroyed by an 8.9 magnitude earthquake and tsunami, in Iwate prefecture, northeast Japan March 13, 2011. REUTERS/Lee Jae-Won; Bottom; A man looks at the damage caused by the earthquake and tsunami in Ofunato town, in Iwate Prefecture March 13, 2011. State broadcaster NHK said more than 10,000 people may have been killed as the wall of water hit, reducing whole towns to rubble. REUTERS/KYODO

With another federal spending controversy brewing on Capitol Hill, recall that in his 2010 State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama said, “We’ve already identified $20 billion in savings for next year.” Now it’s next year — so what happened to the $20 billion in savings? Let’s follow the bouncing budget cut.

The “$20 billion” promise was not the sort of empty verbiage that dominates the federal spending debate. How many times have you heard a politician thunder about cutting spending but not cite even one specific reduction he or she supports? A year ago, the Office of Management and Budget laid out Obama’s proposed cuts in specific detail.

Some highlights: End production of the C-17 cargo plane, $2.5 billion saved. End federal funding for local hospital construction, $338 million saved. End the Save America’s Treasures program, $30 million saved. (The new book “Triumph of the City” by Edward Glaeser of Harvard argues that programs such as this actively backfire by slowing urban rebirth.)

Cut the Homeland Security Activities budget of the Environmental Protection Agency — the EPA fights terrorism? — by $35 million. Cut $1.5 billion in tax favors to Big Oil. Eliminate numerous overlapping education-grant initiatives. Cut $20 million from the critical, crucial, vital Right-Size Component Personnel Travel program. A litany of specific federal spending or tax-favor reductions were proposed in 2010 by the White House. The total saved came to $23 billion, more than the president promised.

Here’s what happened: nothing.

The spending cuts the president requested in 2010 were part of his fiscal 2011 budget proposal — and Congress never voted on the FY11 budget. Since October, the country has been operating on “continuing resolution,” meaning the budget of fiscal 2010 is frozen in place:  including billions of dollars in spending that even a liberal Democratic White House considers improvident.

Congress failed to enact an FY11 budget because of the childish sandbox fight between Republicans and Democrats over who would be blamed for what. The effect of Congress’s failure to fulfill its duty is to ensure that even clearly undentified wasteful spending continues. Welcome to Washington!

Last week, Congress approved a continuing resolution that keeps government in operation till mid-March. Included in the bill was about $2 billion in spending cuts for 2011 — less than 10 percent of what President Obama backed, and more to the point, a barely detectable 0.05 percent of all federal spending for this year. Nevertheless, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California called the cut “huge.” For politicians  whose mindset is giveaway, giveaway, giveaway, a 0.05 percent reduction is strict discipline.

The Senate is considering a continuing resolution that would carry the country through the end of the fiscal year. Democrats have proposed an additional $11 billion in cuts, which Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois calls “the limit” of possible cuts. Durbin’s “limit” — $2 billion already cut, $11 billion more reduced — would be considerably less than what President Obama said in 2010 he wanted to cut. And this “limit” cut would still represent just one-third of 1 percent of 2011 federal spending.

Many of the reductions in spending and tax favors that President Obama requested in 2010 are now in the White House’s proposed fiscal 2012 budget. So that critical, crucial Grants to Manufacturers of Worsted Wool program may finally go out of existence — assuming Congress ever deigns to enact an FY12 budget. Congress might even finally eliminate an Army Corps of Engineers allocation hilariously called the Low-Priority Construction Projects Program. Deleting the program — “Mr. Chairman, my agency desperately needs more funding for low-priority projects” — would save $214 million in a year. If, that is, Congress ever enacts a budget.

The lesson of the phantom $20 billion budget cut is that anybody can blow hot air about big spending reductions in the future: all that can be believed is cuts in the current year.

Last month, President Obama announced a plan to reduce the deficit by $2.2 trillion over the next decade. But hardly any cuts take effect now; the bulk of the president’s proposed reductions would not begin until 2016, when a second-term Obama would be preparing to leave office. Tea Party types, for their part, call for extensive future spending cuts — but want to exempt defense and Social Security. Unless defense and Social Security are on the table, as the recent bipartisan debt-reduction commission concluded, no significant fiscal reform are possible.

Saying the country will spend without restraint now but switch to strict fiscal discipline in the future is like saying, “I can quit smoking anytime I want.” In 2010, the White House asked for $20 billion in spending cuts, and Congress would not make the cuts. Until Congress makes right-now, this-year cuts, the national debt situation will keep getting worse.

Photos; Top: Shadows are cast on the White House in the early morning in Washington, February 4, 2009. REUTERS/Larry Downing, Bottom: Marine One (top) carrying U.S. President Barack Obama approaches the South Lawn as he returns to the White House from Camp David in Washington, February 8, 2009. REUTERS/Jim Young

The public-sector union showdowns in Wisconsin and Ohio are proceeding as if it was the 1950s. Democrats and liberals call labor oppressed, and want the unions to win; Republicans and conservatives call labor a threat, and want unions broken. That’s the wrong way to think about the entire situation.

Labor unions and collective bargaining are important tools. There are good reasons to form unions. But unions must be reasonable. If the customer is not happy with a union’s performance, or if the cost of doing business becomes too high — whether the customer is the state of Wisconsin or otherwise — then unions must make reasonable compromises.

Collective bargaining is, after all, about negotiation.

Half a century ago, when most members of unions worked in dangerous conditions for low pay in factories or mines, it was fair for labor to demand justice. It is still fair for unions representing the mistreated, such as those who work as hotel maids or clean offices, to demand justice.

But today’s government employees are not mistreated. For today’s government employees to occupy the Wisconsin statehouse and turn red in the face angrily shouting demands shows public-sector unions have become spoiled and out of touch. That needs to change.

In the main, public-sector union members have good deals. They work in safe white-collar circumstances. Civil service rules afford protection against dismissal. Public-sector worker pay is about the same as pay for private-sector workers who have no protection against firing, while public workers’ benefits are better, sometimes much better.

California allows many unionized state employees to retire at 55 with a pension of half their final year’s salary. Ohio allows public-sector union members to “retire,” start drawing pensions, then be rehired for the same jobs. The Columbus Dispatch has reported that in 2009, Ohio paid $741 million in pension benefits to teachers and school administrators who were working full time. They “retired,” qualified for pensions, then went back to their previous jobs. In Wisconsin, public school teachers average nearly $100,000 annually in pay and benefits; private sector workers in Wisconsin average $60,000 in pay and benefits. In all these cases, private-sector workers are taxed so that public-sector workers can have better deals.

If public-sector workers in Wisconsin or any state were having money forcibly removed from their pockets and given to private-sector workers who already had better deals, the public employees would be furious.

Union members matter, but voters matter more. A situation in which customers (taxpayers) are penalized (taxed) so that public employees can have better deals than the public they serve is not reasonable. That’s where the negotiation aspect comes in. Government workers in Wisconsin, Ohio and other states must negotiate contracts that meet the needs of the customer, and that inevitably will mean lower benefits. States have at least $3.2 trillion in unfunded pension promises to union employees: this can’t go on.

Private-sector unions face market competition, which causes them to moderate their positions. Government unions work for a monopoly, so must moderate themselves. In recent decades, public-sector unions have adopted a mindset of demand, demand, demand — assuming politicians will always cave. This labor mindset is obsolete in a era of rapidly rising public debt. Public-sector unions must negotiate in good faith to provide taxpayers with improved terms.

Employers must negotiate in good faith too. In Wisconsin, new Republican Governor Scott Walker has handled the situation poorly. Rather than negotiate for reasonable reductions in public-employee benefits, he went directly to attempting to end collective bargaining, an extreme step that shows Walker is not a thoughtful man, merely a union-buster.

Walker’s anti-union bill also has Trojan horse provisions, including one that would allow the state to sell publicly owned power plants to corporate campaign donors on a no-bid basis. This isn’t reform — it’s corruption. If I were a Wisconsin voter, I’d be advocating public-sector union concessions on the one hand and on the other, signing a recall petition to get rid of Governor Walker.

Louis Brandeis, the leading progressive of the early 20th century, said it was a mistake for labor and management to be out to get each other. Their fortunes, Brandeis maintained, rise and fall together.

That’s the spirit missing from current labor-management disputes. Belonging to a union does not guarantee endless money increases regardless of business conditions; belonging to management does mean issuing ultimatums to workers. Both sides must negotiate toward reasonable outcomes.

Photo: A demonstrator holds a placard near the State Capitol building during protests against the proposed budget cuts from Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, in Madison February 25, 2011. REUTERS/Darren Hauck