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The New York Times
Politics
Nuclear Leaks and
Response
Tested Obama in
Senate
By MIKE McINTIRE,
nytimes.com on the Web, February 3. 2008
When residents in Illinois voiced
outrage two years ago upon learning that the Exelon Corporation had not
disclosed radioactive leaks at one of its nuclear plants, the state’s freshman
senator, Barack Obama, took up their cause.
Mr. Obama scolded Exelon and federal regulators for inaction and introduced a
bill to require all plant owners to notify state and local authorities
immediately of even small leaks. He has boasted of it on the campaign
trail, telling a crowd in Iowa in December that it was “the only nuclear
legislation that I’ve passed.”
“I just did that last year,” he said, to murmurs of approval.
A close look at the path his legislation took tells a very different story.
While he initially fought to advance his bill, even holding up a presidential
nomination to try to force a hearing on it, Mr. Obama eventually rewrote it to
reflect changes sought by Senate Republicans, Exelon and nuclear regulators.
The new bill removed language mandating prompt reporting and simply offered
guidance to regulators, whom it charged with addressing the issue of unreported
leaks.
Those revisions propelled the bill through a crucial committee. But,
contrary to Mr. Obama’s comments in Iowa, it ultimately died amid parliamentary
wrangling in the full Senate.
“Senator Obama’s staff was sending us copies of the bill to review, and we could
see it weakening with each successive draft,” said Joe Cosgrove, a park district
director in Will County, Ill., where low-level radioactive runoff had turned up
in groundwater. “The teeth were just taken out of it.”
The history of the bill shows Mr. Obama navigating a home-state controversy that
pitted two important constituencies against each other and tested his skills as
a legislative infighter. On one side were neighbors of several nuclear
plants upset that low-level radioactive leaks had gone unreported for years; on
the other was Exelon, the country’s largest nuclear plant operator and one of
Mr. Obama’s largest sources of campaign money.
Since 2003, executives and employees of Exelon, which is based in Illinois, have
contributed at least $227,000 to Mr. Obama’s campaigns for the United States
Senate and for president. Two top Exelon officials, Frank M. Clark,
executive vice president, and John W. Rogers Jr., a director, are among his
largest fund-raisers.
Another Obama donor, John W. Rowe, chairman of Exelon, is also chairman of the
Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear power industry’s lobbying group, based in
Washington. Exelon’s support for Mr. Obama far exceeds its support for any
other presidential candidate.
In addition, Mr. Obama’s chief political strategist, David Axelrod, has worked
as a consultant to Exelon. A spokeswoman for Exelon said Mr. Axelrod’s
company had helped an Exelon subsidiary, Commonwealth Edison, with
communications strategy periodically since 2002, but had no involvement in the
leak controversy or other nuclear issues.
The Obama campaign said in written responses to questions that Mr. Obama “never
discussed this issue or this bill” with Mr. Axelrod. The campaign
acknowledged that Exelon executives had met with Mr. Obama’s staff about the
bill, as had concerned residents, environmentalists and regulators. It
said the revisions resulted not from any influence by Exelon, but as a necessary
response to a legislative roadblock put up by Republicans, who controlled the
Senate at the time.
“If Senator Obama had listened to industry demands, he wouldn’t have repeatedly
criticized Exelon in the press, introduced the bill and then fought for months
to get action on it,” the campaign said. “Since he has over a decade of
legislative experience, Senator Obama knows that it’s very difficult to pass a
perfect bill.”
Asked why Mr. Obama had cited it as an accomplishment while campaigning for
president, the campaign noted that after the senator introduced his bill,
nuclear plants started making such reports on a voluntary basis. The
campaign did not directly address the question of why Mr. Obama had told Iowa
voters that the legislation had passed.
Nuclear safety advocates are divided on whether Mr. Obama’s efforts yielded any
lasting benefits. David A. Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists
agreed that “it took the introduction of the bill in the first place to get a
reaction from the industry.”
“But of course because it is all voluntary,” Mr. Lochbaum said, “who’s to say
where things will be a few years from now?”
Others say that turning the whole matter over to the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission, as Mr. Obama’s revised bill would have done, played into the hands
of the nuclear power industry, which they say has little to fear from the
regulators. Mr. Obama seemed to share those concerns when he told a New
Hampshire newspaper last year that the commission “is a moribund agency that
needs to be revamped and has become a captive of the industry it regulates.”
Paul Gunter, an activist based in Maryland who assisted neighbors of the Exelon
plants, said he was “disappointed in Senator Obama’s lack of follow-through,”
which he said weakened the original bill. “The new legislation falls
short” by failing to provide for mandatory reporting, said Mr. Gunter, whose
group, Beyond Nuclear, opposes nuclear energy.
The episode that prompted Mr. Obama’s legislation began on Dec. 1, 2005, when
Exelon issued a news release saying it had discovered tritium, a radioactive
byproduct of nuclear power, in monitoring wells at its Braidwood plant, about 60
miles southwest of Chicago. A few days later, tritium was detected in a
drinking water well at a home near the plant, although the levels did not exceed
federal safety standards.
At least as disturbing for local residents was the revelation that Exelon
believed the tritium came from millions of gallons of water that had leaked from
the plant years earlier but went unreported at the time. Under nuclear
commission rules, plants are required to tell state and local authorities only
about radioactive discharges that rise to the level of an emergency.
On March 1, Mr. Obama introduced a bill known as the Nuclear Release Notice Act
of 2006. It stated flatly that nuclear plants “shall immediately” notify
federal, state and local officials of any accidental release of radioactive
material that exceeded “allowable limits for normal operation.”
To flag systematic problems, it would also have required reporting of repeated
accidental leaks that fell below those limits. Illinois’ senior senator, Richard
J. Durbin, a fellow Democrat, was a co-sponsor, and three other senators,
including Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, later signed on.
But Mr. Obama remained its primary champion.
In public statements, Mr. Obama dismissed the nuclear lobby’s arguments that the
tritium leaks posed no health threat.
“This legislation is not about whether tritium is safe, or at what concentration
or level it poses a threat,” he said. “This legislation is about ensuring
that nearby residents know whether they may have been exposed to any level of
radiation generated at a nuclear power plant as a result of an unplanned,
accidental or unintentional incident.”
Almost immediately, the nuclear power industry and federal regulators raised
objections to the bill.
The Nuclear Energy Institute jumped out in front by announcing its voluntary
initiative for plant operators to report even small leaks. An Exelon
representative told an industry newsletter, Inside N.R.C., that Exelon was
“working with Senator Obama’s office to address some technical issues that will
allow us to support the legislation.”
Last week, an Exelon spokesman, Craig Nesbit, said the company sought, among
other things, new language to specify what types of leaks should be reported,
and assurance that enforcement authority remained with the nuclear commission
and not state or local governments.
“We were looking for technical clarity,” Mr. Nesbit said.
Meanwhile, the nuclear commission told Mr. Obama’s staff that the bill would
have forced the unnecessary disclosure of leaks that were not serious.
“Unplanned releases below the level of an emergency present a substantially
smaller risk to the public,” the agency said in a memorandum to senators, which
ticked off about a half-dozen specific concerns about the bill.
Senate correspondence shows that the environment committee chairman at the time,
Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma who is a strong supporter of
industry in battles over energy and environmental legislation, agreed with many
of those points and held up the bill. Mr. Obama pushed back, at one point
temporarily blocking approval of President Bush’s nominee to the nuclear
commission, Dale E. Klein, who met with Mr. Obama to discuss the leaks.
But eventually, Mr. Obama agreed to rewrite the bill, and when the environment
committee approved it in September 2006, he and his co-sponsors hailed it as a
victory.
In interviews over the past two weeks, Obama aides insisted that the revisions
did not substantively alter the bill. In fact, it was left drastically
different.
In place of the straightforward reporting requirements was new language giving
the nuclear commission two years to come up with its own regulations. The
bill said that the commission “shall consider” — not require — immediate public
notification, and also take into account the findings of a task force it set up
to study the tritium leaks.
By then, the task force had already concluded that “existing reporting
requirements for abnormal spills and leaks are at a level that is risk-informed
and appropriate.”
The rewritten bill also contained the new wording sought by Exelon making it
clear that state and local authorities would have no regulatory oversight of
nuclear power plants.
In interviews last week, representatives of Exelon and the nuclear commission
said they were satisfied with the revised bill. The Nuclear Energy
Institute said it no longer opposed it but wanted additional changes.
The revised bill was never taken up in the full Senate, where partisan
parliamentary maneuvering resulted in a number of bills being shelved before the
2006 session ended.
Still, the legislation has come in handy on the campaign trail. Last May,
in response to questions about his ties to Exelon, Mr. Obama wrote a letter to a
Nevada newspaper citing the bill as evidence that he stands up to powerful
interests.
“When I learned that radioactive tritium had leaked out of an Exelon nuclear
plant in Illinois,” he wrote, “I led an effort in the Senate to require
utilities to notify the public of any unplanned release of radioactive
substances.”
Last October, Mr. Obama reintroduced the bill, in its rewritten form.
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