According to the Times, the state government "cut regulatory corners and exploited a loophole in state laws to dodge full environmental reviews," and is pushing to quickly set up the new turbine facilities. Although four of the six plants could generate 88 megawatts, the state government decided to run them at 79.9 megawatts, thus avoiding the public and environmental review mandated for any facility generating 80 megawatts or more.

Two dozen opponents of a plant slated to be constructed in Queens held a rally after winning a judge's ruling that the state had repeatedly violated its own environmental laws in its drive to set up the plants.

"This shows they just can't go putting anything they want in this neighborhood," said Rita Normandeau, president of the Queensbridge Tenants Association. "We have a lot of kids with asthma because of the plants already here, and seniors with respiratory illnesses. We put up a big fight because that is the only thing that works, when they know you're not going away."

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani backed Con Edison's decision to open the oil-fired boiler near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. "I think there is going to be opposition to any power plant, but then people are going to wonder why the lights don't go on," he said. According to press reports, the city has 25 percent more capacity than needed for peak summertime loads.

In early March 200 people crowded a town hall meeting in Cortlandt, New York, to express their concern over the safety of operations at the nearby Indian Point 2 nuclear power plant. The facility has been plagued by incidents of radiation leaks and safety violations. The 27-year-old plant is being restarted after a 10-month shutdown last year following the rupture of a corroded steam generator tube. Superheated radioactive water leaked inside the plant, and some radioactive steam also escaped into the atmosphere.

Entergy Nuclear, a company that operates nuclear power plants around the country, is buying the Indian Point 1--built in the 1950s--and Indian Point 2 nuclear plants. They are located just 35 miles north of New York City. Indian Point 1 has been mothballed for many years. The company has declared its intention to run them at maximum capacity. Entergy Nuclear last year bought the adjacent Indian Point 3 plant from the New York Power Authority.

These moves by capitalist energy monopolies and the rationalizations for them by government officials are similar to those at the heart of a "national energy plan" announced by U.S. president George Bush last week. Bush's proposals are fashioned to meet the growing energy needs of the U.S. economy, and include the relaxation of environmental and other regulations, which, as in New York, will mean greater health problems for working people. The administration will also seek to open up broader areas of the country--onshore and off--for increased exploitation by oil, gas, and coal companies, and encourage the expansion of electrical generation by nuclear power.

Standing on the banks of the Mississippi River in St. Paul, Minnesota, the president asserted May 17 that without accepting the moves contained in the administration's 170-page energy report, "Americans will face more, and more widespread, blackouts." This future, he asserted, "is unfortunately being previewed in rising prices at the gas pump and rolling blackouts in the great state of California."  
 
Wooing labor officials
A few days before announcing the energy plan, Bush sought to portray it as benefiting working people by inviting top officials from 23 labor unions to rub elbows with Vice President Richard Cheney for a few hours May 14. Seeing prospects for shoring up their declining dues base, the select group embraced the proposals.

James Hoffa, the president of the Teamsters union, called Bush's policy "the beginning of finding a solution to many of the problems we're having." He added, "The amount of people involved would be in the literally hundreds of thousands."

Hoffa also backed the promotion of nuclear power, telling conservative Washington Post columnist Robert Novak, "We're for it. America has been scared off this idea."

Douglas McCarron, president of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, said, "If it helps America, we're going to work with this administration."

According to a May 15 Post report, "Mike Mathis, director of government affairs for the Teamsters, said Cheney and other officials stressed 'over and over' the number of jobs that would be created by the policy's call for 1,300 to 1,900 new power plants over the next 20 years and 38,000 miles of natural gas transmission lines. 'Those are good-paying, often union jobs,' Mathis said."

The Post added, "Labor leaders cited a private study showing that oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which Bush's plan recommends, would create 25,000 Teamsters jobs and 700,000 jobs overall." The plan also calls for creating a national electricity grid similar to the interstate highway system, and for giving the federal government the right to seize private land for electrical power lines by "eminent domain."  
 
Expanding oil drilling on public lands
The federal government controls 31 percent of the land in the United States. Washington's aim is to reverse a policy that puts much of this off-limits to exploitation by the capitalists who own the giant energy companies. Towards this end, the report calls for beginning oil exploration on 8 percent of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as "the single most promising prospect in the United States."

Drilling in the refuge, Bush argues, can produce 600,000 barrels of oil a day for the next 47 years. "That happens to be exactly the amount the United States now imports from Iraq," he stated.

Reinforcing this American nationalist framework to drum up support for his energy plan, Bush further said the United States "imports 52 percent of all our oil. If we don't take action, those imports will only grow."

Besides oil and gas expansion, Bush's plan calls for stepping up the production of coal, which already accounts for 52 percent of all energy consumed in the United States. "Currently the United States has enough coal to last for another 250 years," the report states. "Yet very few coal-powered electric plants are now under construction."

The day after the president released the proposals of this energy task force, Bush signed an executive order instructing government agencies to issue energy impact statements, detailing how the proposed moves will affect the nation's "energy health." These statements will in practice be used to counteract the environmental impact statements that federal law for decades has required anyone wanting to drill oil wells, lay pipelines, or build power plants to prepare.

"Instead of 'why drill?' commented a May 18 New York Times news analysis article by Douglas Jehl, "the basic presumption of the Bush team seems to be 'why not?' Under that approach, the interior secretary Gale A. Norton, is being instructed 'where opportunities exist' to review and modify restrictions that stand in the way of oil and gas leasing across America's public lands."

Emphasizing the speed with which they intend to move on this front, 85 recommendations made by the energy task force, which was headed by Cheney, can be carried out by executive decision, while only 20 depend on Congressional action.

Some press coverage of the plan has lifted the lid somewhat on the lack of enforcement of existing environmental regulations well before Bush entered the White House. According to the New York Times, "At least half of the country's 152 oil refineries are believed to be violating air-pollution laws, federal officials say, but with the refineries stretched near capacity, the Bush administration is debating how hard to crack down." Refineries are now operating at 96 percent of their capacity, according to the American Petroleum Institute. Over the past 25 years only one refinery has been built in the United States, and more than 100 of them have been shut down since 1980.

The energy package projects streamlining regulations to speed the relicensing of nuclear reactors and licensing of new plants. Some 20 percent of the nation's energy is produced by the 103 nuclear power plants in operation throughout the country, many of them nearing 30 to 40 years of age and prone to a multitude of safety problems. Since the Three Mile Island nuclear accident near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1979, no new reactors have been licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and none have been built since the 1970s.

Pitching his proposals around nuclear power as a way of defending the environment while insisting the technology involved is now much safer, Bush asserted, "By renewing and expanding existing nuclear facilities, we can generate tens of thousands of megawatts of electricity, at a reasonable cost, without pumping a gram of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere."

Bush's energy policy also calls for a tax break to reduce the cost of decommissioning nuclear plants, and backs the industry's perspective of adding more reactors to sites that already have them. "Many U.S. nuclear plant sites were designed to host four to six reactors, and most operate only two or three," the report states.

The White House's energy plan asks Congress to renew a law that caps liabilities for nuclear power companies in the event of a disaster at their plants. It also calls for "reevaluating" a 25-year-old ban on breeder reactors and the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel, which would extract the plutonium produced for further use in nuclear power plants.

Meanwhile, the administration has vowed to press forward with securing a national nuclear waste repository. Plants for decades have been storing nuclear waste on site on a temporary basis. One place under consideration by the administration is Yucca Mountain in Nevada, a former weapons testing area 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. This proposal has generated opposition among individuals and groups concerned about the environment, and opened a debate among many in the area. The report emphasizes the urgency of establishing such a site. It warns that "the Department of Energy is over a decade behind schedule for accepting nuclear waste from utilities."  
 
 
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