Los Angeles Times Interview : James Watkins : For the Energy Department, a Man Willing to Call Them as He Sees Them

Retired Adm. James D. Watkins was born in 1927, in Alhambra, Calif., the son of Louise Ward Watkins, a prominent conservative; the grandson of George C. Ward, a founder of Southern California Edison; a sort of second son to Earle M. Jorgensen, the steel entrepreneur and confidant of Ronald Reagan. Watkins rose through Annapolis, tours in the Korean and Vietnam wars, and a close relationship with the late Hyman G. Rickover to become chief of naval operations during most of the Reagan Administration. Shortly after leaving the Navy, he agreed to head George Bush’s Department of Energy.

Watkins is a free spirit--at the Pentagon his nickname was Radio Free Watkins--most of whose thoughts bend conservative. Yet Watkins constantly surprises observers with unexpected views. Appointed by Reagan to head a commission on AIDS, Watkins not only showed great sympathy for victims of the virus, but exceeded his mandate by recommending all discrimination against the HIV-afflicted be made a federal offense.

During the 1970s, Watkins locked horns with the Navy status quo by insisting women be given greater opportunities in the all-volunteer services. Watkins grew up in a household of strong sisters. His view of women was shaped by his mother, who, in 1938, was California’s GOP nominee for the U.S. Senate, losing in the general election. “She lost only because she was a woman,” Watkins states. At the DOE, Watkins has appointed women to a number of top positions.

The Energy Department that Watkins inherited makes the Navy seem a tight ship. Run by a succession of lightly qualified secretaries, DOE was infamous for shoddy standards and environmental problems at its plants that fashion materials for nuclear weapons. Watkins promptly dedicated himself to overturning the DOE’s sloppy culture and to making environmental controls the No. 1 priority. This has earned him a new nickname: Mr. Cleanup.

At the DOE, Watkins has fought for more nuclear power--but also for energy conservation. During White House debates over the Bush Administration’s National Energy Strategy, Watkins more often sided with Environmental Protection Agency Administrator William K. Reilly than with Chief of Staff John H. Sununu, a pro-nuclear conservative who would seem to be Watkins’ cup of tea. Watkins was privately peeved when Sununu vetoed several conservation initiatives that Watkins considered logical.

Watkins has a military demeanor: gruff, clipped, precise. He is a tall, solidly built man who, like H. Norman Schwarzkopf, has learned to carry himself in ways that emphasize his bigness. Watkins speaks well off the cuff, and says precisely what he thinks. He is probably one of the few men alive who could at this moment engage Schwarzkopf in a staring-down contest.

Question: What do you think you’ve accomplished with the DOE so far?

Answer: Reorganized the entire department. Set up Tiger Teams (which conduct surprise inspections of DOE plants). This year, we’re trying to get a solid, integrated energy bill for the first time in the nation’s history. And by the end of the year, the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP, mainly for nuclear weapons wastes) will open in New Mexico. That will be a major achievement.

Q: Court orders may block the opening.

A: Oh, sure, we will be sued. But we’ll be sued not on the basis of environment concerns. We already demonstrated we know how to deal with all safety and environmental aspects of WIPP. The suits will be emotionally anti-nuclear--we don’t like bombs and we don’t like any thing connected with bombs, even safe waste disposal. OK, I understand there is a body of American thinking that says the nuclear deterrent is bad. I don’t think it is majority thinking. But only pure emotionalism from this faction now stands between us and accepting wastes at WIPP.

Q: Do you intend soon to restart the nation’s nuclear-weapons production lines?

A: Rocky Flats (Denver plant where nuclear-bomb triggers are fashioned) will restart. We will have suits by Greenpeace, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, but we will win them on the merits. From now on, we’re going to run all our weapons-production facilities in full compliance with every environmental statute. We remain totally committed to cleaning up the mess of 40 years of nuclear deterrence. The Savannah River (S.C.) reactor (which makes tritium, a nuclear explosive) will start in the fourth quarter of this year. It had serious safety violations that reflected very poorly on the nuclear industry. But this year it’s going to come on line and be well run--nearly to commercial standards. (In the wake of Three Mile Island, regulations for commercial rectors became more strict than those used by the DOE.) In fact, we’ll have Savannah River up to full commercial standards within just two more years.

Q: What about Yucca Mountain, Nev., the proposed waste site for byproducts of the commercial power industry?

A: That’s been a longstanding feud. We’ve had to go to nearly every court in the country, including the Supreme Court. But now we are on the mountain, doing research. We’ve already debunked one theory: There isn’t any ground water coming up from below. All that media hype about this being a flawed site has already been debunked in this particular.

Q: Are there other technical issues at Yucca Mountain?

A: There could be. We’re going to do years and years of research there before we make a final decision. There’s been nothing like that kind of extended research on a waste-disposal site anywhere else in the world. We’re trying to build a repository that will be safe as long as 100,000 years. That’s not something you bang out overnight.

Q: With Congress effectively having mandated that Yucca Mountain be the next repository, isn’t the research for show?

A: No. If Yucca Mountain is no good, then we’re not going to go there. If it can be proved safe, the nation needs it. We’re up to our eyeballs in waste in this country--municipal waste, toxic waste, low-level radioactive waste from hospitals, high-level waste. We have to deal with it somewhere. The fact that we’ve been stalled on this research for some time is part of the political game you have to play. All my obstacles at Yucca Mountain are political, not technical. We have the best scientists in the country working on it, with independent management. I don’t control those people. I can’t give them orders. Some of the (Western state) governors have been holding up the one or two scientists you can find who object to that site, while ignoring the vast majority who support research there.

Q: Now that the START treaty is official, why is it necessary to power up the reactors that produce nuclear weapons material?

A: The START treaty reduces strategic arsenals by 30%. This is a significant step, but it leaves 70%. Those weapons must be maintained. The stockpile must be safe and reliable. I have no plutonium production needs at least for the next four years. So we’re not going to produce any more plutonium; we will remanufacture (plutonium) pits from old weapons. But tritium has a 12.5-year half-life. We must keep producing tritium or we would have significant drop off in weapons effectiveness. That would undermine deterrence. You know, because the START treaty reduces the need to manufacture new bomb material, I’ve been able to postpone restarting the Savannah River reactor for an extra year. That gives us more time to bring it back on line at a higher level of safety.

Q: The Administration finally lost its long fight over the brand-new Shoreham, Long Island, nuclear reactor, which will now be dismantled because of popular opposition even though it has no technical problems. Are you upset?

A: The federal government made a serious mistake in 1987 by not immediately attacking the flawed rationales for Shoreham shutdown. It’s silly to shut down a plant that cost $6 billion, that had 1,000 megawatts of capacity in an electricity-starved area, where the risks were extremely small, if not negligible. To replace the lost power will require fossil sources producing carbon dioxide, at the time the same people who don’t like Shoreham are talking about global warming. It’s preposterous. This plant had first-rate, modern safety equipment. This is not a plant that needed anything except to pull the rods and get it up to temperature.

Q: Yet political opposition to Shoreham was intense. New York Gov. Mario Cuomo attacked the plant repeatedly.

A: For people to be hyped by politicians and warped science into irrational terror of nuclear power is sin. The rate payers of Long Island don’t understand that they are going to experience a significant growth in their rate base and get nothing in return. They haven’t been told that honestly, and they don’t understand what they have been forced to politically. So many nuclear-power opponents and people in the media just don’t know what they are talking about. That’s why anybody in the science business, like DOE, must now be in the education business.

Q: At DOE, you have sponsored a number of science education initiatives, though this would seem beyond your mandate.

A: Education must be everyone’s concern. Remember that for eight years under President Reagan, the official White House policy was to shut down the Department of Energy and the Department of Education. Can you think of anything more ridiculous than to shut down these departments when energy and education are two of the leading issues in the nation? We have a nation of scientific illiterates, a nation of kids who are not being educated to be competitive in modern society. That’s what was really at stake in the Shoreham issue--what it says about science literacy.

Q: George Bush’s proposed National Energy Strategy, composed mainly by DOE, has been widely criticized as lending too little weight to conservation.

A: Baloney. Thirty-six of the 100 initiatives in that bill deal with conservation. The only reason people slam our bill is because CAFE (the federal auto miles-per-gallon standard) was not given a number. That’s the sweetheart of the other side. Supposedly, all we need is a higher CAFE and we’d never go to war again in the Middle East and so forth. That is a bunch of baloney.

Q: Why not raise the mpg standard, currently at 27.5?

A: The American people do not like midget cars on big highways. There are 51-mpg cars on the market today. Few people buy them. Why? Americans want a high-performance machine they will be comfortable in out there on the L.A. freeways. To impose on the American people things they find distasteful is not this Administration’s policy.

Q: That sounds like an excuse for inaction.

A: We believe in finding alternatives that will satisfy the American people--which is why alternative-fuels technology is heavily focused on in our bill. We want to research electric cars, methanol, reformulated gasoline, compressed-natural-gas vehicles. These are the very things Southern California is doing--we in the Administration are right in sync with the Air Quality Management District on this issue. Why alternatives to oil don’t ring a bell with Energy Strategy opponents, I don’t know. They keep pushing for more restrictions on use of oil, rather than alternatives to oil.

Q: There was no gasoline tax in the Energy Strategy, an idea many economists favor both for conservation and national- security reasons.

A: One senator told me, “You should have been bold and called for a dollar-a-gallon gasoline tax.” I said “Senator, why don’t you be bold and propose it yourself?” The transportation bill collapsed in Congress because they were afraid to put a five-cent tax on gasoline. Come on. Taxes aren’t the solution for energy problems, new research is. By the end of this decade we will have an electric car for cities like Los Angeles that performs, goes 200 to 300 miles per day, and uses a battery that creates no waste problem downstream. We will have compressed-natural-gas vehicles that perform. We have unlimited natural gas, at 78-cents-per-gallon equivalent cost. These ideas are not talk--they’re going to roll. High-performance vehicles that don’t use gasoline and don’t cause smog or global warming. We’re going to do it. Let’s go for that. That’s solving the problem technologically--which is where we are at our best. So what’s the beef?