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The Department of Energy announced on Tuesday that it conducted its 25th and 26th non-criticality nuclear test - aka Subcritical Nuclear Experiment (SNE) - this past February and December of last year.
Subcritical experiments were first introduced in 1997, five years after the last U.S.-held nuclear test. For the next 13 years or so, the Energy Department adhered to a custom they originally initiated of providing a 48-hour advance notice to the international community before carrying out each test. The Department, however, dispensed with that courtesy in late 2010 when it made public the news it had conducted the 24th subcritical experiment, dubbed 'Bacchus,' the day before. Now, in an unprecedented underhanded and nontransparent move, the Energy Department has told the world that it carried out these SNEs months ago.
It is my feeling that the Energy Department has outstayed its welcome as an American institution. Its primary purpose has been to keep building and maintaining nuclear weapons and see to it that Americans remain oblivious to the ugly truths of nuclear arms and the poisons nuclear arms activities have introduced to the environment in the absence of atomic conflict. Their very existence is antithetical to both those who are seeking freedom from the fear of nuclear holocaust and those who are trying to recover from the trauma of the physical abuse that the Department and its predecessors have incurred by its reckless and negligent oversight of more than six decades of international radiation releases.
That is why the Department of Energy should be disbanded and here are some ideas for how to do it:
The Energy Department's contaminated landholdings will be cleaned up as best as possible and join unremediatable lands as national sacrifice zones and uncontaminated lands will be returned to the public - as was intended when land-use rationales such as 'weapons testing' became obsolete.
As for our nuclear weapons, now in the hands of the National Nuclear Security Administration, the 'arm' of the DOE that insists that subcritical experiments are needed to ensure reliable warheads - what will it matter in a nuclear war if an unacceptable number of warheads fail...will it really change anything? - they can be dismantled and their multi-stage rockets stood upright ringing each DOE propaganda atomic museum and packed so closely together that no one can enter these museums-turned-sculpture landscapes.
While we're at it the CTBT should be scrapped and only resurrected until every nation-state agrees that the treaty should include prohibition of every single nuclear explosion, which would mean making obsolete every facility and activity that creates nuclear energy release events including nuclear reactors, particle-accelerators and even subcritical experiments.
Like subcritical experiments, which to any intelligent person have no real purpose and only contribute to needless radiological poisoning of the environment, the Energy Department has outstayed its welcome - seriously, dismantling it would do great things for America.
