Image via WikipediaDamn Washington elites. Technocrats and bureaucrats, every one of them. So sez the American people:
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/nuclear-regulatory-commission-interview-072210?src=rss#ixzz0ujiPngHXhttp://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/nuclear-regulatory-commission-interview-072210?src=rss#ixzz0ujiPngHX
Damn Washington elites. Technocrats and bureaucrats, every one of them. So sez the American people:
According to a new Politico poll, 45 percent of "Washington elites" say the country and the economy are headed in the right direction, while only 25 percent of the general population agrees. Not surprisingly then, according to Rasmussen, 68 percent of voters believe the nation's "political class" doesn't care what most Americans think.
This disconnect helps explain why only 23 percent of voters believe the federal government today has the consent of the governed.
This must bring joy to the hearts of Republicans, who have been attacking Washington elites for about a million years. It even provoked a rare moment of bipartisan consensus on the New York Times op-ed page the other day, with Bob Herbert attacking the competence of nuclear regulators on the left side of the page and David Brooks on the right side attacking the entire government for a "technocracy boom" (1,200 separate agencies in national defense alone!) that is, he said, based on the undying liberal belief that regulators can "impose rules, rationality and order" on our complex economy.
So I called up one of those dreaded technocrat regulators, a gen-u-wine government bureaucrat named Scott Burnell. He works for the most technocratic of all our government technocracies, a group passionately dedicated to imposing rules and order on private business — the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
ESQUIRE: Republicans and Tea Party types are calling for the abolition of the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency. Is anyone calling for the abolition of the NRC?
SCOTT BURNELL: The short answer is no. I'd be very surprised to find someone who feels the NRC is unnecessary.
ESQ: Why can't companies just regulate themselves? After all, they must know that a meltdown would be devastating for their industry. Shouldn't we trust the free market?
BURNELL: To the best of my knowledge, even our harshest critics on either side do agree we are performing a necessary function. Nuclear power provides a great benefit to society, but it does have potential risks that need to be regulated against.
ESQ: But nuclear power has never had a serious accident or killed a single civilian in the United States, and the oil industry just polluted the entire Gulf of Mexico.
BURNELL: That's a very accurate assessment — the accident at Three Mile Island did release materials into the environment but at levels that did not affect public health. Contrast that to the situation in the Gulf.
ESQ: Even so, why should the federal government be the one to do the regulating? Shouldn't each state be able to run its own nuclear power system?
BURNELL: I'm going to have to split a hair here — when it comes to licensing the use of radioactive materials for nuclear power, the NRC is the sole authority in the U.S. But there are other aspects of operating a nuclear power plant — utility regulations, water use permits — that fall under state purview. So it is a bit of a split decision.
[Burnell took a moment to fill me in on the NRC's background. It was established in 1975 with the mission of protecting public health and the environment from nuclear hazards. Its budget was trickling along at around $800 or $900 million for years but bumped up to just over a billion as the result of a surge of applications for new plants in the last five years. They have more than four thousand employees, almost all of them eggheads of one type or another — nuclear engineers, of course, but also electrical engineers, civil engineers, biologists, mechanical engineers, experts in the laws relating to nuclear power and environmental policy, and computer specialists. Many of them have masters and doctoral degrees.
In other words, the exact scourge feared by David Brooks: "a large cast of educated professionals, who have been trained to do technocratic analysis, who believe that more analysis and rule-writing is the solution to social breakdowns, and who have created ever-expanding networks of offices, schools and contracts."]
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