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President George Bush is proposing the United States withdraw all regulations that the government currently has over internal nuclear safety, especially relating to the protection of workers and the environment, and instead Mr. Bush would leave the drawing of such regulations to the nuclear weapons contractors themselves.

Is this going to make America more "nu-klar" safe?

Remember, this is the president who could not quite manage to pronounce the very word "nuclear" before the horrors of Sept. 10, 2001.

It was a joke all over the nation. There was a soap opera with George Bush as a dim wit. Things haven’t changed. Recently David Letterman aired a clip he entitled, "George W. Bush, Genius," in which Mr. Bush is shown by news cameras at a podium during a public meeting trying desperately to state common phrases relating to weapons of mass destruction, and failing entirely, to the point where he gives up and uses shorter words.

But now he seems to be either truly trying to make us believe he is mentally challenged, or he is incapable of doing otherwise. Either way it is terrifying.

This is not cheese or beer or even oil.

These are nuclear facilities. Some are nuclear weapons facilities. Handled just a little bit incorrectly and the result could cause domestic danger or even nuclear threats to other parts of the world.

Are we to presume that the nuclear contractors will hold to all their own rules as carefully as they do rules created by the government on behalf of the people, and enforced by government officials looking over their shoulder? Will they do as well as the government in watching for saboteurs in their plants?

At best, this changeover is only partly thought out. At worst, the rationale and concept behind this reversal of government authority is simply incomprehensible.

Mr. Bush and his GOP supporters are on the verge of a reckless abandonment of public responsibility; by their industry friendly cynicism they may turn every nuclear plant in the United States into a potential Chernobyl.

Yes, there still would be overlapping responsibility through the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. But that is woefully inadequate.

The root of these policy initiatives all came into being when Congress enacted a law that enabled the government to begin exacting fines from nuclear contractors when they committed a violation of federal rules and regulations. Now, the industry friendly Bush Administration is showing just how pro-active it can be by proposing that the nuclear contractors themselves should draw up all the rules they operate under. Naturally, of course, this will greatly reduce, if not eliminate, any worry about paying fines.

This is idiocy. Giving contractors this authority is the same as throwing the rules away!

Why would a nuclear contractor – normally a large regional or national energy company or conglomerate – create or enact any rule or regulation that might be expensive or hard to adhere to or accomplish? Clearly profitability is the bottom-line credo of all corporate structures, and all the more so when driven by wall street demands, as is the case with virtually all companies large enough to be nuclear plant operators of one sort or another; i.e., either weapons producers or energy generators.

It would be against all reason to assume that the contractors will have an egalitarian point of view and will retain the same level of regulation that currently exists in order to assure that the general public is safe. The natural criteria such companies will follow will be based on protecting the stock value, period. To think otherwise is naïve. Yet when something is outrageous and is blatantly undertaken, it has a unique facility to make everyone wonder if perhaps they are mistaken in their apprehensions. Perhaps this is what the Bush Administration hopes will happen with this latest attempt to fly in the face of everything that has gone before and is accepted as traditional wisdom.

But this time, even some of the Republicans are screaming against this most ill-advised proposition.

Senator Jim Bunning, Republican of Kentucky, is one of the authors of the bill that invokes fines for violations by nuclear contractors. He broke party lines recently and spoke out against Mr. Bush. He said Bush is twisting the meaning of the regulations Congress passed and proposing something that "will likely decrease worker protection."

John Conway, who heads the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, said, "The way (the Bush Administration proposal ) is written, I don’t like it at all."

Indeed.

The existing rules cover more than 100,000 workers. Some of those 100,000 are among the most important workers on the planet. That is not a stretch or an exaggeration. If these workers do not do their work properly, nuclear materials could imperil American society.

If Mr. Bush prevails in his proposal, it would be the Department of Energy (DOE) that would be the remaining federal overseer. DOE officials say that new regulations provided by the contractors would have to always be aware and wary of the workers need for health and safety protections. This is of course expected rhetoric, and ambiguous at best.

What DOE and the Bush Administration could absolutely guarantee, however, if they were candid, is that nuclear contractors will become richer because they will run the whole game. Self regulation means the likelihood of no penalties for excessive, fast paced production, questionable internal safety policies, or any of a myriad of other situations. It will be all profit all the time.

This is so transparent as to be laughable. And it would be so, except it is the nation’s most dangerous commercial material, nuclear materials.

Mr. Bush is once again playing tough guy with Congress. If Congress wants to invoke regulations with fines attached as the price one pays to be in the nuclear production and use business, well then, the president will use administrative counter moves in order to protect the industry. It should be recalled that in this particular instance, Mr. Bush and his administrative associates are in conflict with a thoroughly conservative GOP Congress.

Mr. Bush and his administrative cohorts, Richard Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, et al, are clearly too right-wing radical even for the reactionary GOP Congress.

The man who had such trouble pronouncing "nuclear" now has the power to change the whole nation’s nuclear safety. That is bone chillingly true.

2/04