Cars and Parts Springfield Swap Meet
Carroll Commencement
Fairborn commencement
Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2009 > June > 18
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Editorial: Nuclear power still has big problems, too
Back to the future.
Duke Energy announced this week that it wants to build a nuclear power plant in Piketon, about 100 miles east of Cincinnati, due south of Columbus.
Duke provides electricity to most of Warren and Butler counties, as well as the Cincinnati area (and tiny parts of Montgomery and Preble counties).
The company is confronting the fact that its Ohio business is now coal-based. And coal is a problem.
Washington seems to be moving toward some sort of limit on the carbon emissions that are associated with coal. (Some legislative proposals would hit Ohio particularly hard.)
Whether the much-talked-about “cap and trade” legislation passes or not, the coal industry seems likely to be on the defensive for a while, given the ties that science sees between carbon dioxide and global warming.
The utility apparently doesn’t see the new-fangled likes of solar, wind or geothermal energy as quite ready to meet its needs. So it’s returning to a technology that it sees as relatively tried and true. It operates other nuclear reactors out of state.
The last time Ohio turned to the nuclear option, things didn’t work out. Three utilities, including Dayton Power & Light, started work on a nuclear plant known as the Zimmer project — also east of Cincinnati — in the early 1970s.
After much went wrong, and after $1.7 billion was spent, they gave up, turning the plant into a coal-fired one, and spending another $2 billion to do it.
So the fact that Duke says it wants a plant now doesn’t mean a plant will happen, notwithstanding the enthusiastic support of the likes of Gov. Ted Strickland and Sen. George Voinovich. This is the beginning of a long, long effort.
The people around Piketon are more familiar than most with the dangers of a badly run nuclear operation. The Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a Cold War project, resulted in several thousand workers and their survivors collecting hundreds of millions of federal dollars in this decade for resulting medical problems. The contamination is still being cleaned up, with stimulus money.
Even today, nuclear reactors come with a lot of problems. They are enormously expensive. They take forever to come on line, in part because every plant is different; there’s no kit. Also, the country is still fighting about what to do with waste that nuclear reactors generate. And what to do with nuclear plants when their lives are over is still an issue.
Still, the fact is that nuclear energy has undergone a sort of rebirth in popularity since its earlier problems, including the famous Three Mile Island incident. A partial core meltdown at that nuclear plant in Pennsylvania scared the nation. That happened as the Zimmer plant was being built.
Nuclear technology — and the attendant safety precautions — have come a long way. And nuclear plants have operated a long time without any huge human catastrophe, at least in the West. France has 59 nuclear plants providing most of its electrical power, with excess to export.
Meanwhile, every other kind of power generation turns out to have its problems. These days, any kind of mass energy source that doesn’t necessarily hurt the environment and doesn’t come from the Mideast has a lot of attraction.
Ohio — especially Appalachian southern Ohio — has to be somewhat happy about any major corporation wanting to build just about any major project these days. Officials are saying that construction alone could provide 4,000 jobs.
But any nuclear project does still have to be kept under a powerful microscope. Nuclear is very far from problem-free. It just poses a different set of problems.
Related:
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Editorials, Energy, Local Business, Martin Gottlieb
Guest column: Defense contractors are not the bad guys here
Rick Schikora, of Beavercreek, is director for ARINC Engineering Services. A member of the Carlyle Group, the company has 55 local employees. It does program management and consulting for the military and federal government.
The editorial, “War on contractors had to happen,” May 29, said that Defense Secretary Robert Gates and President Barack Obama are intent on reining in a contracting system that has “gone amok” by returning defense contractor strength to pre-President George W. Bush levels. While the commentary cited the KC-X (refueling tanker) as emblematic of the problem, earlier this year, on Feb. 9, the DDN quoted Gates as faulting the government for KC-X’s woes.
He blamed “entrenched attitudes throughout the government (that) are particularly pronounced in the area of acquisition: a risk-averse culture … parochial interests, excessive and changing requirements, budget churn and instability, and sometimes adversarial relationships within the Department of Defense and between the DoD and other parts of the government.”
My experience as a defense contractor is similar, with program cost overruns and schedule delays primarily being driven by a lack of control in the government’s definition of requirements and execution processes.
These problems won’t be resolved by converting contractor positions to government jobs. The same people planning acquisition today will be executing acquisition tomorrow.
The problems Gates observed require greater discipline in balancing requirements against mission needs, achievable technology and available budgets; building requirement packages in deference to known constraints; and, most important, once defined, letting the requirements stand.
There will always be new technology and new ways to employ it. But at some point you have to go with what you have — or you’ll end up with nothing, as we have with KC-X and CSAR-X (helicopter).
Recent successful protests didn’t happen because contractors had “blank checks.” Rather, they were upheld by the Government Accountability Office because of flawed processes. Source selection authorities should be empowered to solicit and evaluate proposals free from congressional special interests, requirements creep and the suffocating layers of oversight reporting, second-guessing, and scrap and rework exercises that drag procurement decisions out for years.
If sound requirements are established, and acquisition professionals are left to do their job, they will almost always deliver a best value solution.
Converting 20,000 acquisition positions from contractor to federal civil service will not reform acquisition processes, nor will it punish the contractors that Gates, Sen. Carl Levin, and others argue are slopping at Washington’s money trough.
Instead, the brunt of the punishment will be borne by the community of businesses that evolved to support Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and other military acquisition centers. Small businesses cannot sustain prolonged hemorrhages of talent. Gates’ plan, if passed, doesn’t begin until October, yet Wright-Patterson got a head start last year, advertising more than 200 new acquisition support positions.
When the 20,000 new federal acquisition positions are posted, the work force shift will be dramatic. Since the bulk of the Air Force’s acquisition corps and budget resides here at Wright-Patterson, a negative impact on our region’s businesses seems inevitable — an issue whose significance to our community has been largely absent from the media or public discussion.
Many in the contractor acquisition community suspect this conversion will create no real job growth. The government needs acquisition experts. Congressman Mike Turner notes the need to hire the best.
That means the government’s selection process will focus on experienced contractors either already in place or in close support roles, leaving the military’s total acquisition head count here largely the same.
However, small businesses created out of the government’s earlier need for contracted support will see their payrolls steadily decrease, until their staffs and eventually CEOs lose their jobs. If these conversions happened all at once, there would be an outcry from the small business community, and it would reach Washington.
But stretched out over five years, the drain is slow and withering, finishing businesses off one at a time. We in the Dayton area should see some new jobs under the Base Realignment and Closure Commission process that will offset these moves, but there are no guarantees.
And what about other defense acquisition centers? It’s hard to imagine how these job losses could benefit them, the economy or us as a nation. Our elected leaders’ time would be better spent reforming the cumbersome acquisition laws, directives and mandates that got us here to begin with, rather than punishing those who work under them.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Guest Columns, Wright Patterson Air Force Base
Editorial: ‘Clunker’ bill is a good bet for Midwest
There are a lot of reasons for Midwesterners — still tied to the auto industry, despite everything — to like an idea proposed by Akron-area Democratic Congresswoman Betty Sutton (and supported by local Republican Reps. Mike Turner and Steve Austria).
Her idea is to use $4 billion in Energy Department stimulus funds to spur auto sales while helping to reduce emissions and increase fuel efficiency in the nation’s auto fleet.
The proposal, known as “Cash for Clunkers,” would offer up to $4,500 to car owners who agree to trade in their old, gas-guzzling vehicles for new cars with better gas mileage. The plan still needs work. That’s coming now that it has passed the House and is headed to the Senate. But it’s promising, both as a stimulus and for its environmental benefits.
In Europe, where versions of “cash for clunkers” are already in play, the results have been promising. Car sales have jumped significantly. The Wall Street Journal reports Germany saw a 20 percent gain in auto sales in February alone, and there is evidence car owners truly did swap primarily for compact, fuel-efficient vehicles.
Would the impact be as great here? It’s hard to say. Germany has more incentives for drivers to be fuel-sensitive. A high gas tax makes the per-gallon cost of gasoline well above U.S. prices. And the Germans tax big cars heavily.
The bill the U.S. House passed may not have the right incentives. In that version, the vouchers can only be used for new cars, not used cars. And owners would have to just turn over their old cars for no trade-in. (Remember, they’re being scrapped).
The old cars have to be operable and have been insured for the past year. So they can’t really be true junkers. At the same time, it wouldn’t make economic sense for an individual to turn over a car worth more than $4,500. You’d be better off selling it or doing a traditional trade-in.
Also, if you’re buying a new car, you can probably expect to pay at least $12,000. That could be a tall order for many folks worrying about their jobs in an economic downturn.
Meanwhile, environmental groups aren’t sure the bill, as it stands now, serves the planet well enough to justify its cost. For instance, the sliding scale in the law would allow a car owner to get $3,500 for trading up from a vehicle getting 18 miles to the gallon to one that gets 22 miles to the gallon. Environmentalists say that’s not enough payoff. They’d like to require the new car be even more fuel-efficient.
The opportunity is there for fixes to be made. If senators put some work into refining it, “cash for clunkers” could be good for the environment, could reduce demand for oil and could spur car sales.
All of those outcomes would be good for Ohioans. Despite the dramatic downsizing of General Motors and Delphi, Ohio still has a lot of jobs tied to the auto industry directly and indirectly. The state needs the industry to prosper and hopefully even start growing eventually. Given that the stimulus funds are to be spent one way or another, this is a well-conceived way.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment | Categories: Auto industry, Economy, Scott Elliott
