
Michael Lewis: Why the Nuclear Threat May Be from Inside the White House - JumpCrisscross
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/department-of-energy-risks-michael-lewis
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JumpCrisscross
My favourite bits:

"Toward the end of his time as secretary of energy, Ernie Moniz suggested that
the department, for the first time ever, conduct a serious study of the risks
at Hanford. Once the risks were spelled out, perhaps everyone would agree that
it was folly to try to turn it into, say, a playground. Maybe the U.S.
government should just keep a giant fence around the place and call it a
monument to mismanagement. Maybe the people at the labs could figure out how
to keep the radioactivity from seeping into the Columbia River and leave it at
that. Maybe it shouldn’t be the D.O.E.’s job to deal with the problem, as the
problem had no good solution and the political costs of constant failure
interfered with the D.O.E.’s ability to address problems it might actually
solve.

It turned out no one wanted to make a serious study of the risks at Hanford.
Not the contractors who stood to make lots of money from things chugging along
as they have. Not the career people inside the D.O.E. who oversaw the project
and who feared that an open acknowledgment of all the risks was an invitation
to even more lawsuits. Not the citizens of Eastern Washington, who count on
the $3 billion a year flowing into their region from the federal government.
Only one stakeholder in the place wanted to know what was going on beneath its
soil: the tribes. A radioactive ruin does not crumble without consequences,
and yet, even now, no one can say what these are.

...

If your ambition is to maximize short-term gains without regard to the long-
term cost, you are better off not knowing those costs. If you want to preserve
your personal immunity to the hard problems, it’s better never to really
understand those problems. There is a downside to knowledge. It makes life
messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink
the world to a worldview."

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csa
I get the sense that some folks have reflexively downvoted this without
reading the article.

The article is about the Department of Energy, how the White House is reducing
funding to DOE, and the implications thereof.

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sn9
Don't ask for a tl;dr. Just read this excellently written article.

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notduncansmith
I read the article because of this comment and I'm sincerely glad I did.

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musha68k
What is this nightmare I seem to be trapped in since last year? Madness and
ignorance wherever I look. Please, somebody wake me up!

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gumby
"Since last year"? You've been asleep. What you see today has been a-building
for decades.

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mturmon
Just a beautiful summary of the role of the DOE and the know-nothing way it
has been treated.

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valuearb
"it lent money to Tesla to build its factory in Fremont, California, when the
private sector would not, for instance."

Why would Tesla borrow privately when the government is offering free cheap
loans?

