Re: Industry Lackeys and Bad Legislation

[RuthWeiner@aol.com]

In a message dated 3/22/02 7:18:03 AM Mountain Standard Time, michael.g.stabin@vanderbilt.edu writes:



> This is often as well the position of the federal government. "We can't hire anyone who has every actually worked in this industry, they will have conflicts of interests (which means: they have made a few friends over the years, everyone does not hate their guts). We must hire people who know nothing about what they are regulating." I know I'm overstating this, they are not quite this strident, but the attitude does exist.


Unfortunately this is not an overstatement.  NRC won't let it's contractors hire people who have ever worked for DOE (although NRC does hire such people).  This is a one-way prohibition, however.  On committees and commissions, having worked for a DOE or NRC contractor is seen as a conflict of interest, but having worked for (on a salary) an organization like NRDC, Sierra Club, EPI, etc. is apparently  not a conflict of interest.  I even ran into a situation where, because I spoke in support of Sandia at a public hearing, I was not appointed to an oversight commission for the particular Sandia project.  


At the behest of the anti-Yucca Mountain groups, DOE had the Justice Department do a six-months-long "conflict of interest" investigation of the Yucca Mountain characterization because an employee of the M&O contractor attached a brief handwritten note to an internal document stating that Yucca Mountain did not appear to have fatal flaws ("looked OK" -- at least this was what I was given to understand.  I never saw the document in question and we were not provided details wof exactly what sparked the investigation).  My faith in the process was somewhat restored by the conclusion that there was no conflict of interest.  As contractors, we were not permitted to speak at public hearings on the EIS, and even our attendance was discouraged (in contrast, those of us who worked on the WIPP were encouraged, by enlightened DOE management, to speak at public hearings, and many of us did.)



Ruth Weiner, Ph. D.

ruthweiner@aol.com