NY Times, February 3, 2008
Nuclear Leaks and Response Tested Obama in Senate
By MIKE McINTIRE
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.
