Re: Sandia Security Concerns

[Steven Dapra <sjd@swcp.com>]

August 23



	With respect to oversight, and DOE oversight in particular, first, one has

to understand that in the final analysis professional anti-nukers and

anti-DOE partisans, are not interested in health and safety - probably not

even their own health and safety.  They have a political agenda that

consists primarily of getting all nuclear weapons (especially those in the

United States) dismantled and scrapped, and of wrecking the nuclear

industry.  They also want to shut down all power reactors, and we see this

happening already in Europe.



	 A key part of their polemic consists of slandering, vilifying, and

denigrating the Department of Energy and its employees every chance they

get.  For the record I take a dim view of the DOE myself, but I don't see

any need to go around running the Department and its employees into the

ground.  But - even if the DOE were to come clean on everything tomorrow,

and stop the stonewalling and become fully cooperative would that help

matters any?  No.  The anti-nukes are determined to destroy the DOE as

well, or to remake it in their perverse mold, and short of disbanding

itself I doubt that anything the DOE could do would satisfy the anti-nukers.  



	Bill Lipton wrote, "If citizens living near DOE facilities become

frustrated and feel stonewalled by DOE, some of them will become

disruptive."  True enough.  There is no telling what people will do when

they become sufficiently frustrated.  Is becoming disruptive going to

accomplish anything constructive?  Marching and demonstrating, waving

placards, spouting glib cliches, dressing in skeleton costumes and so forth

will do nothing to make the DOE mend its ways.  I can only speak for

myself, but rabble-rousers lying on the ground with fake radiation

injuries, or fake blood poured on themselves is not something I can take

seriously.  



	I sympathize with Bill over the electrical safety problems at the

accelerator where he worked - with the manager who harassed him for

pointing out safety violations.  Bill writes, "Instead of dismissing the

CAB's out of hand, DOE needs to implement an effective means of

demonstrating accoutability [sic] to the community."  Is this really the

solution?  If I may be pardoned for using the "m" word, isn't this actually

a moral problem -- a problem of dishonesty in the manager in question, as

well as in the higher up "leaders" who undoubtedly know about the

dishonesty and either wink at it; or who tacitly or even actively encourage

it by refusing to put a stop to it?



	We can have Citizens' Advisory Boards, review panels, and internal

auditors piled up to the sky but who is going to keep them honest?  More

CABs, reviewers, and auditors?  Furthermore, if the agencies they are

assigned to watch have dishonest employees and managers who refuse to take

advice and correct violations, and engage in coverups anyway, what is the

point of having the watchdogs?  



	As Bill trenchantly pointed out about the acclerator operators, they "had

thought of many creative ways to violate the most basic rules of electrical

safety."  What is to keep people like this from devising creative ways to

violate other rules?  Until the moral problem is solved you are only

wasting your time with CABs, etc.   



Steven Dapra

sjd@swcp.com







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