Commissar Cuomo

After Rumania experienced crippling electric-power blackouts last winter, its Stalinist government resorted to Stalinist measures: it called in the army to man the power plants, presumably imprisoning the former management.

Although the petty details may differ, the essential idea of the government forcefully taking over electric power plants is not unknown in America: it is about to be executed by the Peoples Commissariat in Albany, New York.

The Long Island Lighting Co.'s Shoreham nuclear plant has been 100% complete since 1984; it obtained a low-power startup licence in October 1985, and completed all its tests successfully by the summer of last year. "The safest nuclear plant in America," says DoE Secretary Herrington.

Its cost has risen to a fantastic $4.7 billion and is still rising. To what extent charges of mismanagement are justified is hard (for me) to establish, but one point is clear: no mismanagement, even if LILCO were to be run by Jane Fonda and George Shultz, could ever accomplish what the commissars, catering to media-fanned hysteria, have achieved by their obstructions: the delay costs more than one million dollars per day in carrying charges alone.

What has bloomed out into a story of lawlessness, confiscatory expropriation and callous contempt for public safety, is based on the immediate pretext of evacuation plans. Evacuation is a luxury only nuclear power can offer: you don't evacuate when a dam breaks or an oil refinery blows up. Moreover, evacuation of a 10-mile zone will cost more lives (by traffic accidents, heart attacks of the elderly, etc., even without a panic) than most cases of even a meltdown. America has no Chernobyls; it is improbable that even the immediate neighborhood of a nuclear plant will need to be evacuated.

There are many aspects to this case. The legalities include unconstitutional expropriation, unconstitutional rectroactivity, conspiracy of NY State and Suffolk County (as charged in a LILCO suit), breach of oath of office by Commissar Cuomo in obstructing emergency measures, and several instances of gross abuse of power.

There are other aspects, such as the nonexistent liability for the $1 million/day inflicted on a stockholder-owned company by publicity-hungry politicians.

But one aspect surely overshadows them all, and that is the cold-blooded cynicism with which Cuomo & Co. are willing to sacrifice human lives for their political careers. Long Island is dotted with oil storage tanks and tank farms, some of them containing oil for LILCO's oil-fired plants. If such a tank farm catches fire during a temperature inversion, tens of thousands could be asphyxiated by the smoke. Even the fire itself can be a disaster with which no nuclear catastrophe can compete: when an oil-fired plant near Caracas, Venezuela, caught fire in December 1982, the result was more than 150 dead (five Chernobyls!), 500 injured, 1,000 homeless and 40,000 evacuated [AtE Feb 1983].

If Cuomo is so concerned about safety, what does he say to that far greater danger that Shoreham could eventually reduce?

"Let'em boin," is his answer, for like Markey, Weiss and the rest of the murderous pack, he knows that the lives lost to fossil-fired power can never rival the votes gained by antinuclear hysteria. Who needs safety when he can get votes?

Not il duce di New York.