Word: project
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...faceted one involving Executive-Congressional power struggles, the background and geographical origins of individuals involved in the dispute, and questions of illusion versus reality in the creation of a national energy policy. In the end, though, political debate over the breeder--and more specifically the Clinch River, Tenn. breeder project--aptly symbolizes some of the vexing problems of the whole energy question...
Designed as a demonstration breeder for the U.S., Clinch River has been jinxed from the start. When Richard Nixon gave the go-ahead in 1971, its cost was projected at $699 million. Seven years later the price tag is $2.2 billion and ground has yet to be broken in the Tennessee valley. What's more, the architectural firm given the contract for the project wrote in a 1973 report that Clinch River was "one of the worst sites ever selected for a nuclear power plant based on its topography and rock conditions." And with the increased amounts of uranium...
...indicative of the costs involved in such projects that in order to kill Clinch River, Carter had to propose that $33 million be spent to do so--even though construction has yet to begin. Congress wanted to see the project continue, and that took a lot more money. Last summer, the House voted $150 million for fiscal 1978; the Senate $75 million and the conference committee settled on $80 million...
...override hadn't even been necessary. Breeder-backers Sens. Henry Jackson (D-Wash.) and Howard Baker (D-Tenn.) easily subverted the veto--and got extra appropriations to boot--by securing a General Accounting Office (GAO) report saying Carter's termination of Clinch River was "substantially inconsistent" with the project's original long-term authorization. In other words, as Sen. James McClure (R-Idaho) put it: the Clinch River appropriation is "in effect, self-authorizing;" it needed to be killed with a specific bill, not just left out of a budget as Carter had done. The senators had seen the President...
...DISTRESSING to find that the Carter administration, for all the lip service it has paid to non-proliferation, now finds itself endorsing precisely the same position. The President still objects to the Clinch River project, but the arguments are now phrased in economic terms. Secretary of Energy James R. Schlesinger '50, who stood beside Nixon when he first announced plans for Clinch River and has since consistently surrounded himself with pro-nuclear staffers from the old Atomic Energy Commission, goes before Congress to speak against Clinch River on the economic terms he believes to be the government's best strategy...