President Barack Obama's support this week for the construction of more nuclear power plants in the United States, amid the ongoing nuclear power plant disaster in Japan, must be considered -- against stiff competition -- as one of the most wrong-headed and irrational positions ever taken by a U.S. president.
As a
candidate for president, Obama knew about the deadly dangers of nuclear power. "I start off with the premise that nuclear energy is not optimal and so I am not a nuclear energy proponent," Obama said at a campaign stop in Newton, Iowa on December 30, 2007. "My general view is that until we can make certain that nuclear power plants are safe...I don't think that's the best option. I am much more interested in solar and wind and bio-diesel and strategies
alternative fuels."
As he told the editorial board of the Keene Sentinel in New Hampshire on November 25, 2007: "I don't think there's anything that we inevitably dislike about nuclear power. We just dislike the fact that it might blow up…and irradiate us…and kill us. That's the problem."
But as president, he hired a nuclear power proponent out of the national nuclear laboratory system, Steven Chu, as his energy secretary. Chu, who had been director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, minimizes, indeed denies, the impacts of radioactivity, as do many of the atomic physicists in the national laboratory system. Obama's two top White House aides, meanwhile, had been deeply involved with what is now the utility operating more nuclear power plants than any other in the U.S., Exelon. Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff, was as an investment banker central to the $8.2 billion corporate merger in 1999 that produced Exelon. David Axelrod, senior advisor and chief political strategist, was an Exelon PR consultant. Candidate Obama received sizeable contributions from Exelon executives including John Rowe, its president and chief executive officer who, in 2007, also became chairman of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear industry's main trade group. Forbes magazine, in a January 18, 2009 article about Rowe and how he has "focused the company on nuclear," displayed a sidebar titled "The President's Utility." It read: "Ties are tight between Exelon and the Obama administration," noting Exelon political contributions and Emanuel's and Axelrod's Exelon links.
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