POWER July 2013 - 69

NUCLEAR POWER
ent daunting technical, geological, and
environmental issues. Building the canal
would require blasting out tunnels and aqueducts
at high altitudes and subzero temperatures.
A 2006 estimate put the cost of
the Western Canal at some $37.5 billion,
compared to the $25 billion needed to
build the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze
River. China has officially denied plans
to divert the river. In late 2009, China told
the Indian government that reports of the
diversion are not " consistent with facts. "
Indian foreign minister S.M. Krishna told
Parliament during a questioning period in
April 2010, " In November 2009, the foreign
ministry of China clarified that China
is a responsible country and would never
do anything to undermine any other country's
interests. " This statement produced
amusement among China mavens, noting
that China has unilaterally seized Tibet and
taken land from India over the years.
Chinese documents undercut the denials.
A 2005 book, Tibet's Waters Will Save China,
argues in favor of diverting Tibet's rivers
from India to China. New Delhi's Chellaney
observes, " Diversion of the Brahmaputra's
water to the parched Yellow River is an
idea that China does not discuss in public,
because the project implies environmental
devastation of India's northeastern plains and
eastern Bangladesh, and would thus be akin
to a declaration of water war on India and
Bangladesh. "
The Chinese apparently believe that nuclear
geo-engineering would help overcome
the technical obstacles to the Brahmaputra
project. According to Chellaney, " Chinese
desire to divert the Brahmaputra by employing
'peaceful nuclear explosions' to build
an underground tunnel through the Himalayas
found expression in the international
negotiations in Geneva in the mid-1990s on
the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. China
sought unsuccessfully to exempt 'peaceful
nuclear explosions' from the CTBT, a pact
still not in force. "
Under its current leadership, China has
emerged as more truculent and triumphalist
in its relations with other countries. George
Washington University's China scholar, David
Shambaugh, has described China as " an
increasingly narrow-minded, self-interested,
truculent, hyper-nationalist and powerful
country. "
Leading China's ambitious plans to drain
Tibet for the benefit of the ethnic Chinese
regions are party chief and state president
Hu Jintao and prime minister Wen Jiabao.
Hu, who is scheduled to turn power over
to a new generation of Chinese communist
leaders within the next year or so, is particularly
identified with the project to use nuclear
July 2013 | POWER
bombs to dewater Tibet. [Editor: Hu turned
over his positions as general secretary of
the Communist Party and chairman of the
Central Military Commission to Xi Jinping
on Nov. 15, 2012.] He is a hydro engineer,
long a traditional occupation among Chinese
leaders, and a former governor of what China
calls the Tibetan Autonomous Region, but
which much of the rest of the world regards
as conquered Tibet, brought under Chinese
control in 1949 and strengthened in 1959,
when Tibetan patriots spirited the young Dalai
Lama out of the country and into India,
where he has led a government in exile.
Wen is a geologist by training, and has a
long association with Chinese government
projects involving geology and hydro development,
including the Three Gorges Dam.
Will China continue with its still undisclosed
plans to use " peaceful nuclear explosions "
to divert the Brahmaputra River
system from its not-entirely-friendly neighbors
of India and Bangladesh to water arid
Chinese lands? That question is open, and the
emergence of Xi Jinping as the likely successor
to Hu in 2012 could soften Chinese geoengineering
plans. Fifty-seven-year-old Xi is
a lawyer by education, a Marxist theorist, and
a veteran bureaucrat. He's often portrayed
as a softer figure than either Hu or Wen, although
there is little tangible evidence for
this view. But the persistence of rumors of
a Chinese plan to use nukes to rearrange the
earth verifies the observation that dumb ideas
die hard.
Breed It
Breeder reactor enthusiasts have always been
possessed of a sort of religious fervor. Maybe
it's an engineering thing. Engineers seem to
venerate efficiency, even when it isn't economically
efficient, so the thought of leaving
unused energy behind in spent nuclear fuel
rubs a lot of nuclear power advocates against
the grain.
The notion that conventional nuclear
power might be leaving a lot of energy on the
table-or buried in a desert somewhere-has
motivated a significant number of nuclear
advocates to hew to breeder reactors and reprocessing:
no matter what. So the death of
the Clinch River Breeder Reactor didn't represent
the interment of the cult of breeders
and plutonium reprocessing.
Not long after the nuclear devastation in
Japan following an enormous earthquake and
tsunami, an official of the World Nuclear Association
in London (the spawn of the uranium
cartel) was arguing that the events at
Fukushima made the case for closing the fuel
cycle. Steve Kidd's reasoning was that because
the spent fuel pools at Fukushima were
damaged, it would be a good idea to empty
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them into plutonium reprocessing facilities.
But, even if reprocessing were in place-as
it is in Japan-those spent fuel pools would
have been full of waste, waiting for reprocessing.
Never mind.
Kidd even argued, rather astonishingly,
that the Fukushima aftermath demonstrated
that " the United States is gradually moving
away, it seems, from a clear preference for
the 'once through' nuclear fuel cycle, with
the termination of the Yucca Mountain repository
project. " Only a true believer could
see that vision. Rather, the United States is
clearly moving toward permanent, at-reactor
storage in large, dry casks.
The Bush administration, late in its eightyear
run in Washington, tried to revive reprocessing
and breeder reactors, through an
ill-designed and ill-fated Global Nuclear Energy
Partnership aimed at building a multinational
program to supply the world with
new reactors fueled with mixed plutonium
and uranium from first-world reactors. It
didn't survive the laugh test.
Salt It Away
With Yucca Mountain's waste dump program
shut, those who continue to push for burying
the byproducts of the U.S. nuclear endeavor
were once again looking kindly on salt deposits.
In particular, they are looking at a site
near Carlsbad, New Mexico, where a small,
test project has been storing wastes from the
nuclear weapons program for over a decade.
It's known as the Waste Isolation Pilot Project,
or WIPP.
When President Obama pronounced his
death sentence on an already senescent
Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project in
2009, he attempted to soften the blow a
bit with a classic Washington ploy. He announced
appointment of a committee of
credentialed and experienced insiders to
advise him where to look next for nuclear
waste disposal. These sorts of actions-
political window dressing-seldom result
in concrete results, but are popular among
the pols nonetheless.
Out of either naïveté or a sense of humor,
Obama named-what Washington has longtermed
" blue ribbon panels, " to denote their
putative quality-the Blue Ribbon Commission
on America's Nuclear Future. The commission
was part of a compromise between
Democratic Senate majority leader Harry
Reid of Nevada, the most dedicated opponent
of Yucca Mountain in Congress, and
the administration. Reid wanted a congressionally-appointed
commission to scope out
what should come next in waste disposal,
but the administration wanted more control.
In March 2009, Reid and Energy secretary
Steven Chu agreed to a White House-named
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