The US Government's Nuclear Millstone (note: Millstone)

[ensho]

http://counterpunch.com/alvarez03092011.html


Twelve Moments That Shook the World


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Hold on. If truth in labeling were enforced, this agency should be called the Department of Nuclear Weapons. More than 60 percent of funding for the Energy department goes to propping up an antiquated nuclear infrastructure, naval reactors, maintaining thousands of nuclear warheads and cleaning up the agency's enormous environmental mess at its weapons sites in Washington, South Carolina and elsewhere. In fact, DOE spends more than 15 times on military nuclear activities than energy conservation.

Taking the perennial back seat are actual energy functions which make up less than 20 percent of the DOE's budget. Within that small slice, nuclear energy gets the most -- about a third of all energy research and development funds. Energy conservation, the one bright spot in this picture, gets about 23 percent. That's not going to change if Congress accepts Obama's budget plan, which would boost the department's spending by about 4 percent from 2011. Solar, wind, geothermal, and other authentically "clean" alternative energy sources each less than 10 percent of DOE's R&D funds.

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This is a down payment for the $167 billion the Energy Department plans to spend over the next 20 years. Even though the U.S. nuclear arsenal has been cut in half, and new weapons design and manufacture ended 20 years ago, spending on nuclear warheads has increased by more than 30 percent since the Cold War ended. And this doesn't even include an additional $100 billion the Pentagon plans to spend on new deliver systems such as bombers, subs and ICBMs.

Nuclear warheads are proving to cost many more bucks for the bang. Between 2003 and 2016 DOE estimates that it will cost about $15 billion to extend warhead lives. For instance, based on DOE budgets, the per-unit life extension cost for hundreds of the B-61 warheads deployed on bombers appears to be as much as $11 million.

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the US's premier business is War

and if we don't have an enemy the War Barons will invent one

when are we going to stop the War Barons?

[Tikki]

1. Hi ensho...Thank You for this...So many hide their heads..

in the sand...but, I can tell you, there is some nasty nuclear waste hiding in that sand.
And it isn't going away. It is harmful.
:hi:
Tikki