Since 1974, I’ve been deeply concerned about the economic, safety, and environmental hazards of nuclear power generation. It was the subject of my first book, published in 1980.

Today’s edition of my local paper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, reported that three nuclear plants were awarded a combined total of $143 million in a court judgment, because the federal government has broken its contract to remove the waste.

The article is subscription-only, but here’s an excerpt:

It also could foreshadow a series of additional financial awards to operators of reactors nationwide who have argued the federal government broke contractual agreements that promised the waste would be taken away by 1998.

The award, granted by Court of Claims Judge James Merow on Saturday, was unsealed Wednesday.

It gives $32.9 million in damages to Yankee Atomic Electric Co., operator of the former Yankee Rowe reactor in Massachusetts; $34.1 million to Connecticut Yankee Atomic Power Co., operator of Connecticut Yankee reactor, and $75.8 million to Maine Yankee Atomic Power Co., operator of the Maine Yankee reactor.

Note that first paragraph. As a taxpayer, I am far from enthusiastic about a long series of payouts to nuclear utilities.

The reason the feds can’t take the waste is they have nowhere to put it, and that’s in large part because there is no safe way to store the stuff for tens of thousands of years, and that’s what would be required. So it’s not surprising that local activists don’t want a waste dump shoved down their throats. This was true even before anyone thought they might be a terrorist target.

‘Nuff said–shut ‘em down!

Come on, people–what possible justification can there be for re-classifiying ancient records of how many and which kinds of nuclear weapons the US government deployed through 1971? The stuff was made public, widely reported in newspapers at the time, and is completely irrelevant to today’s security concerns.

And as a taxpayer, I can only hope this is a typo: The Department of Energy alone…

…has reported to Congress that 6,640 pages have been withdrawn from public access (at a cost of $3,313 per page)

The cost per page cited here is almost exactly half the number of pages, so I’m hoping someone garbled their statistics. Surely there are better uses for $21,998,320 than to obscure information from a public that already has access, but now has to work much harder; if you’ve never had the “pleasure” of scanning old newspapers on microfilm, I can tell you that the Web is a heck of a lot easier. These are the people that are supposed to be fiscally conservative? What can they be doing to run up three thousand dollars in expenses for every single page?

Is this just a case of Bush Administration paranoia, or is it still another instance of a more disturbing trend to take away the rights of Americans, pull down the curtain on any sort of openness in government, and make it ever-harder for journalists and researchers to do their work?

Unfortunately, I suspect the latter.

I have been writing about abundance for many years–and particularly the idea that you can have an abundance-filled life even if your wallet is approaching empty. This is the focus of my first website, Frugal Fun, which I set up back in 1996–and of my fourth book, The Penny-Pinching Hedonist: How to Live Like Royalty with a Peasant’s Pocketbook, from back in 1995.

So when my friend Bob Burg wrote in his wonderful Winning Without Intimidation newsletter about Kyle MacDonald, a young Internet- and media-savvy Montrealer who traded a single paperclip, and then traded the resulting trades, until he ended up–in only 14 steps–the proud owner of a house, I went off to view the TV segment.

ABC’s 20/20 did an eight-minute profile on Kyle’s journey–and eight minutes on network TV is kind of like the amount of coverage when a major head of state dies. Many news segments are under two minutes.

He started by posting his paperclip, and his dream, on Craig’s List, and it spiraled out from there to inclue encounters with rock star Alice Cooper, among others.

It took him exactly a year. Oh yes, and he clearly had a great deal of fun along the way!

Each trade was carefully documented–though the TV segment doesn’t answer the question of who flew whom around the US and Canada to connect, and at what cost. The recent trades, obviously had a lot of media attention, and probably a lot of media footing the bill. But I wonder how it worked out in the beginning. If the goal is to create abundance, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to interject plane fare.

Kyle’s own site is called, not surprisingly, One Red Paperclip–and perhaps also not surprisingly, it’s actually a Blogger blog–which means it’s free.

You go, guy!