A now for the next BIG E scandal!
A Company's Gain From
Energy Report's
Recommendation
By DON VAN NATTA Jr.
W ASHINGTON, March 23 — In Chapter
5 of Vice President Dick Cheney's
national energy report, executives of the
once-moribund nuclear power industry were
probably thrilled to read that the White House
supported "the expansion of nuclear power in the
United States as a major component of our national
energy policy."
The energy report had embraced a wide array of
proposals that the executives advanced in private
meetings with Mr. Cheney and documents submitted to members of the task force that formulated a national
energy policy.
One such proposal was the development of a new nuclear reactor designed to produce electricity — a
gas-cooled reactor built on tennis-ball-size graphite spheres — that the report said "has inherent safety
features."
"The industry has an interest in this," the report said, "and other advanced reactor designs."
But only one company, the Exelon Corporation of Chicago, which provided hundreds of thousands of dollars
to Republican campaigns in recent years, has an interest in promoting the so-called pebble-bed reactor.
Exelon, the nation's largest nuclear energy company, is the only American corporation developing a design for
the pebble-bed reactor, which it says will lead to a new generation of cheaper, smaller and more efficient
nuclear reactors. The company says the pebble-bed reactor will be safer, too, though environmentalists in the
United States and in other countries have sharply disputed this, calling the pebble-bed reactor a failed system
vulnerable to terrorist attack.
The May 2001 national energy report is filled with dozens of positive
assessments of proposed new technologies, including nuclear designs and
wind-generated power. Most of those assessments favor sectors of various
industries, and some undoubtedly favor individual corporations.
But it is impossible to know how and why the task force endorsed most of
those proposals, and which corporations they help, because Mr. Cheney has
steadfastly refused to release the names of industry executives who advised
the energy task force as it was researching and compiling its report.
Next week, more than 14,000 pages of documents related to the task force
will be released by the Energy Department, which was ordered by a federal
judge to make the material public under the Freedom of Information Act. The
Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmentalist group, had sued for
the information.
The General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, has sued
Mr. Cheney for a list of industry executives who advised the task force.
The administration's endorsement of Exelon's technology was learned through
interviews and documents provided to The New York Times by the
corporation itself.
Although Exelon's name is not mentioned in the energy report, its executives
lobbied the task force on the benefits of the pebble-bed design.
The task force's endorsement of the reactor was contained in a single paragraph. But a paragraph in a national
energy report, like a sentence in a State of the Union Message or a line in a legislative bill, can be a huge boon
to a corporation.
Don Kirchoffner, a spokesman for Exelon, said campaign contributions had nothing to do with the
pebble-bed reactor's mention in the report. "We didn't influence anybody," Mr. Kirchoffner said.
Using the initials of the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor, he added: "I don't think that it's correct to connect dots
between contributions the company made and the fact something on P.B.M.R. appeared in the national
energy policy. The P.B.M.R. is just an example of the advanced nuclear technology that everybody says we
need."
For Exelon, the paragraph was seen as "a good thing," Mr. Kirchoffner said, but he insisted that the mention
of the reactor's design did not necessarily represent a boon for the corporation.
"A good thing for the industry and the country was the fact that the administration came out with a
recommendation for new forms of nuclear power, and our pebble-bed modular reactor is a byproduct of
that," Mr. Kirchoffner said. "We just happened to have it. They took a look at what we gave them and they
said this kind of makes sense."
Exelon owns and operates about 20 percent of the nation's nuclear capacity. Its co-chief executives, John W.
Rowe and Corbin A. McNeill Jr., who has since retired, were among a group of about 75 energy executives
who met with Mr. Cheney in March 2001. Along with other participants of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the
industry's trade group, Mr. McNeill also met that month with Karl Rove, President Bush's chief strategist, and
Lawrence B. Lindsey, the president's top economic adviser.
That information was revealed by Exelon officials, not the White House.
Critics of the task force have noted that many companies represented at its meetings gave financial support to
the Bush campaign or the Republican Party in the 2000 election. Exelon was no exception.
Exelon, its executives and its political action committee, gave the Republican Party a total of $564,661 in the
two years before the 2000 election. Last year, Exelon increased its donations to the Republican Party, giving
it a total of $347,514, according to Federal Election Commission reports.
Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, a frequent critic of the administration's energy policies, said:
"The more we learn about the Cheney task force, the easier it is to understand why the White House is
fighting so hard to keep everything secret. The biggest donors didn't just have the best access — it now
appears they were allowed to write specific sections of the administration's energy plan."
Anne Womack, a spokesman for the White House, disputed the notion that campaign contributions were
responsible for the endorsement of Exelon's reactor design.
"Advanced reactor technology would increase our energy supply and do it in a way that is safe and clean,"
Ms. Womack said. "That benefits not only the industry but the American people."
Ms. Womack also said that the task force had consulted "a broad variety of groups, including industry,
unions, environmental groups and consumer groups."
"They all had input, and the product of all the input is in the report," Ms. Womack said.'
nytimes.com
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