Their Nukes, Bad—Our Nukes Good!

t r u t h o u t | Report:

Cheney Pursuing Nuclear Ambitions of His Own
By Jason Leopold

Monday 05 November 2007

While Dick Cheney has been talking tough over the years about Iran's alleged nuclear activities, the vice president has been quietly pursuing nuclear ambitions of his own.

For more than two years, Cheney and a relatively unknown administration official, Deputy Energy Secretary Clay Sell, have been regularly visiting the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to ensure agency officials rewrite regulatory policies and bypass public hearings in order to streamline the licensing process for energy companies that have filed applications to build new nuclear power reactors, as well as applications for new nuclear facilities that are expected to be filed by other companies in the months ahead, longtime NRC officials said.

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Behind the scenes, Cheney and Sell have worked in tandem with the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), a powerful industry organization whose members include some of the country's largest energy corporations, to get the NRC to rewrite long-standing environmental review policies and limit oversight of new nuclear projects, thereby simplifying the application process, and significantly cutting down the time it takes to get new nuclear projects off the ground, an NRC official said.

The Nuclear Energy Institute spent $680,000 during the first half of 2007 lobbying the White House, Congress, the Department of Energy, and other federal agencies, according to a disclosure form posted online August 13 by the Senate's public records office. Cheney's longtime friend, Tom Loeffler, a former lobbyist and Republican congressman, represented the NEI. Loeffler's former aide, Nancy Dorn, worked as a Congressional liaison for Cheney, and later became a lobbyist for General Electric.

Cheney and Sell's behind-the-scenes efforts have been a boon for the nuclear energy industry - and to Westinghouse Electric, a nuclear reactor designer whose AP1000 reactor unit was certified by the Department of Energy. The company stands to earn tens of billions of dollars in profit through the sale of just a few of its nuclear reactor units. Cheney has said publicly he wants to see dozens scattered across the US.

In September, Princeton-based NRG Energy Inc., having emerged from bankruptcy proceedings, became the first company in 30 years to submit an application to build two new General Electric-designed nuclear reactors at its Bay City, Texas, nuclear power plant facility, a move that came as a direct result of several private meetings NRG lobbyists and executives held with Cheney and Sell, according to company officials. NRG's former president, David Peterson, traveled to Washington on two occasions in 2001 to help Cheney's Energy Task Force shape the country's energy policy, according to government records.

Prior to NRG's application, there had not been a filing for a new nuclear power plant in the United States since before the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor meltdown three decades ago.

NRG Chief Executive David Crane told investors recently that massive federal tax incentives and federal loan guarantees included in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 was the deciding factor in steering the company toward the $6 billion nuclear project.

"The whole reason we started down this path was the benefits written into the [Energy Policy Act] of 2005," Crane said.