Tournament:  | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge: 

1AC—Industry Adv

Advantage One – Reactor Leadership

US reactor construction is declining and with it the US commercial nuclear trade is collapsing.

Cullinane 11 (Scott, Staff Member at the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Graduate Fellow at the Institute of World Politics in Washington DC, America Falling Behind: The Strategic Dimensions of Chinese Commercial Nuclear Energy, September 28^th, Journal of Energy Security, Accessed Online)

America: dominant no longer History has recorded well American wartime nuclear developments which culminated in the July 1945 Trinity Test, but what happened near Arco, Idaho six years later has been overlooked.

[…]

The drive for research, development, and scientific progress that grew out of the Cold War propelled America forward, but those priorities have long since been downgraded by the US government. The economic development of formerly impoverished countries means that the US cannot assume continued dominance by default.

Trade of commercial nuclear tech is inevitable but expanded US nuclear construction resurrects nonproliferation controls.

Bengelsdorf 7 (Harold – currently a Principal with the consulting firm of Bengelsdorf, McGoldrick, and Associates, held numerous senior positions in the U.S. government, including the Energy Department and its predecessor agencies, the State Department, and the U.S. Mission to the IAEA. Among his appointments, he served as the director of both key State and Energy Department offices that are concerned with international nuclear and nonproliferation affairs. Throughout his career, Mr. Bengelsdorf contributed significantly to the development and implementation of U.S. international fuel cycle and nonproliferation policies, having participated in several White House and National Security Council studies. He was involved in the negotiation of numerous bilateral and multilateral nuclear and nonproliferation agreements, including the development of full-scope IAEA safeguards (INFCIRC/153) to implement the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). He retired from government service in 1982, Fred McGoldrick – currently a Principal with the consulting firm of Bengelsdorf, McGoldrick, and Associates, has been involved in the field of nuclear nonproliferation and international nuclear cooperation for over 25 years. From 1973 until 1982, he served in the Department of Energy and its predecessor agencies where he played a major part in formulating and implementing U.S. nonproliferation and international nuclear fuel cycle policy. In 1982, Dr. McGoldrick joined the U.S. State Department where he negotiated peaceful nuclear cooperation agreements with China, the European Atomic Energy Agency, Japan, South Africa, Switzerland, Argentina and Brazil. He also played a key role in U.S. policy to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons in countries in South Asia, Latin America, South Africa and the Middle East. He participated in developing and implementing U.S. policy toward the NPT and the fissile material cutoff treaty. Dr. McGoldrick also served as Minister Counselor in the U.S. Mission to the IAEA. He retired from the State Department in 1998, Michael Schwartz – a Principal with the Washington, D.C. based consulting firm of Energy Resources International, Inc., which he co- founded in 1989. Mr. Schwartz has provided consulting services to electric utility companies, suppliers, industry associations and governments on an international basis since the mid 1970s. His areas of involvement have included market analyses for all components of the nuclear fuel cycle, including uranium supply, conversion services, uranium enrichment services, fuel fabrication, and spent fuel storage and disposal. In each of these areas, Mr. Schwartz has provided a broad range of assistance to his clients in policy formulation, strategic planning, commercial and economic evaluation, and technical analyses. In the course of these activities he has also performed viability assessments and due diligence reviews of major fuel supply companies. Mr. Schwartz has supported applicants in both federal and state regulatory hearings associated with matters such as the need for new uranium enrichment facilities and at-reactor spent fuel storage, THE U.S. DOMESTIC CIVIL NUCLEAR INFRASTRUCTURE AND U.S. NONPROLIFERATION POLICY, White Paper Presented by the American Council on Global Nuclear Competitiveness, May 2007, http://www.nuclearcompetitiveness.org/images/COUNCIL_WHITE_PAPER_Final.pdf)

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This report examines the issue of whether the current United States (U.S.) civil nuclear infrastructure is sufficiently robust to help the United States maximize its opportunities to achieve its nonproliferation objectives, and if not, what new directions the U.S. Government and industry should take to help rectify the situation.

[…]

However, only the U.S., Australia and Canada have consent rights over enrichment and reprocessing of the nuclear materials subject to their agreements. Consequently, if there is a major decline in the U.S. share of the international nuclear market, the U.S. may not be as effective as it has been in helping to ensure a rigorous system of export controls.

US reactor construction is critical. It prevents China from becoming the worlds leading supplier. That cases tech sales to unstable states.

Cullinane 11 (Scott, Staff Member at the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Graduate Fellow at the Institute of World Politics in Washington DC, America Falling Behind: The Strategic Dimensions of Chinese Commercial Nuclear Energy, September 28^th, Journal of Energy Security, Accessed Online)

Due to a confluence of events the United States has recently focused more attention on nuclear weapons policy than it has in previous years; however, the proliferation of commercial nuclear technology and its implications for America’s strategic position have been largely ignored.

[…]

Nuclear energy commerce is important for US energy security with proliferation implications, but it is even more important because it is indicative of larger efforts on both sides of the Pacific to shape the 21st century.

The plan prevents Chinese dominance. It locks countries into US reactor sales.

Loudermilk 10 (Micah, Research Associate for the Energy and Environmental Security Policy program with the Institute for National Strategic Studies at National Defense University, Losing Its Edge? The U.S. and Nuclear Cooperation Deals, http://inssblog.wordpress.com/2010/08/19/losing-its-edge-the-u-s-and-nuclear-cooperation-deals/)

During the last year of the George W. Bush administration, the United States pursued a number of civilian nuclear cooperation deals with countries around the world including, among others, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Jordan, and Vietnam.

[…]

. Without advances in the field, the need for other countries to strike civilian nuclear agreements with the U.S. will begin to diminish and the global leader in nonproliferation efforts will eventually be forced into a backseat.

Proliferation causes nuclear war.

Horowitz 9 (Michael, Professor of Political Science @ University of Pennsylvania (Former Emory debater and NDT Champion), The Spread of Nuclear Weapons and International Conflict: Does Experience Matter?, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Volume 53 Number 2, April 2009 pg. 234-257]

Learning as states gain experience with nuclear weapons is complicated.

[…]

While a stable and credible nuclear arsenal communicates clear information about the likely costs of conflict, in the short term, nuclear proliferation is likely to increase uncertainty about the trajectory of a war, the balance of power, and the preferences of the adopter.

Don't risk human survival. Deterrence is unstable.

Krieger 9 (David, Pres. Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and Councilor – World Future Council, Still Loving the Bomb After All These Years, 9/4, https://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/2009/09/04_krieger_newsweek_response.php?krieger)

Jonathan Tepperman’s article in the September 7, 2009 issue of Newsweek, “Why Obama Should Learn to Love the Bomb,” provides a novel but frivolous argument that nuclear weapons “may not, in fact, make the world more dangerous….” Rather, in Tepperman’s world, “The bomb may actually make us safer.” Tepperman shares this world with Kenneth Waltz, a University of California professor emeritus of political science, who Tepperman describes as “the leading ‘nuclear optimist.’”

[…]

Do we really want to bet the human future that Kim Jong-Il and his successors are more rational than Mr. Tepperman?

SMRs are the only design that allows the US to sustain its position verse China.

Rosner 11 (Robert – Past Director of the Argonne National Laboratory, The William E. Wrather Distinguished Service Professor @ the Departments of Astronomy and Astrophysics and Physics, Enrico Fermi Institute, and the College, Senior Fellow @ the Computation Institute (CI), Stephen Goldberg – Special assistant to the director at Argonne National Laboratory, Small Modular Reactors – Key to Future Nuclear Power Generation in the U.S., Energy Policy Institute at Chicago The Harris School of Public Policy Studies, Technical Paper, November 2011)

3.0 SMR OPPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES

[…]

A viable U.S.-centric SMR industry would enable the U.S. to recapture technological leadership in commercial nuclear technology, which has been lost to suppliers in France, Japan, Korea, Russia, and, now rapidly emerging, China.

Effective regulation prevents proliferation and sustains the US nuclear capability.

Wallace and Williams 12 (Michael – Comes to CSIS from Constellation Energy, where he served as vice chairman and COO. During his nine years at Constellation Energy, he led many company business activities, including the formation and operation of two joint ventures with EDF related to nuclear energy. Prior to joining Constellation Energy, he was cofounder and managing director of Barrington Energy Partners, LLC, a strategic consulting firm specializing in energy industry transactions and advisory services. Before joining Barrington Energy, he had more than 25 years of senior executive and utility operations experience. He holds a B.S. in electrical engineering from Marquette University and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago, with a specialization in finance. He also served as a naval officer in the U.S. Navy nuclear submarine force. Member of the National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC), which advises the president on matters related to homeland security. He is also a member of the Nuclear Sector Coordinating Council under the Department of Homeland Security’s National Infrastructure Protection Plan and a member of Business Executives for National Security (BENS), the Naval Historical Foundation Advisory Council, and the Marquette University College of Engineering National Advisory Council, Sarah Williams – program coordinator and research associate in the U.S. Nuclear Energy Project at CSIS. Prior to joining CSIS, she was a Herbert Scoville Jr. peace fellow and program coordinator at the Center for Science, Technology and Security Policy at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She holds an M.A. in global policy studies from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in Austin and a B.A. in political science from the University of Maryland, Nuclear Energy in America: Preventing its Early Demise, http://csis.org/publication/nuclear-energy-america-preventing-its-early-demise)

America’s nuclear energy industry is in decline.

[…]

To maintain its leadership role in the development, design, and operation of a growing global nuclear energy infrastructure, the next administration, whether Democrat or Republican, must recognize the invaluable role played by the commercial U.S. nuclear industry and take action to prevent its early demise.

1AC—Warming Adv

Advantage Two – Warming

Consumption of dirty energy is causing climate change. Action is needed now to prevent crossing the 2-degree tipping point.

Montgomery 11 (Scott L. – Geologist, independent scholar and adjunct faculty member in the Jackson School of International Studies and Honors Program, University of Washington, Ambassador Thomas Graham Jr. – President of the Lawyers Alliance for World Security (LAWS). He served as Special Representative of the President for Arms Control, Non-Proliferation, and Disarmament from 1994-1997. He led U.S. Government efforts to achieve a permanent Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty (NPT) leading up to and during the 1995 Review and Extension Conference of the NPT. Graham headed the U.S. Delegation to the 1996 Review Conference of the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty and the U.S. Delegation to the 1993 ABM Treaty Review Conference. In addition, he led a number of delegations to foreign capitals in the period 1994-1996, first to persuade countries to support indefinite extension of the NPT and in 1996 to urge conclusion of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) negotiations in Geneva, Switzerland (the CTBT was signed in September 1996). In November 1995 and June 1996, Ambassador Graham led a U.S. Delegation to Indonesia to discuss with ASEAN nations the emerging Southeast Asia Nuclear Weapon Free Zone Treaty, Climate Strategies and Implications for U.S. Policy, Task Force Report 2011)

RISING ENERGY DEMANDS AND THE BENEFITS OF NUCLEAR POWER

[…]

There are a variety of mitigation approaches that must be considered by the leaders of every country because the alternative is adaptation to climate change at enormous costs.

Warming is anthropogenic.

Schiermeier 11 (Quirin, At least three-quarters of climate change is man-made, December 4th, 2011, http://www.nature.com.proxy.library.emory.edu/news/at-least-three-quarters-of-climate-change-is-man-made-1.9538)

Natural climate variability is extremely unlikely to have contributed more than about one-quarter of the temperature rise observed in the past 60 years, reports a pair of Swiss climate modellers in a paper published online today.

[…]

“This tightens estimates of past responses,” says Gabriele Hegerl, a climate scientist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, “And it should also lead to predictions of future climate change that are grounded in the kind of changes already being observed.

SMR deployment prevents runaway warming. All alternatives are of insufficient scope.

Loudermilk 11 (Micah J., Research Associate for the Energy and Environmental Security Policy program with the Institute for National Strategic Studies at National Defense University, Contracted through ASE Inc, Small Nuclear Reactors and US Energy Security: Concepts, Capabilities, and Costs, May 31^st, http://www.ensec.org/index.php?option=com_contentandview=articleandid=314:small-nuclear-reactors-and-us-energy-security-concepts-capabilities-and-costsandcatid=116:content0411andItemid=375)

Nuclear vs. Alternatives: a realistic picture

[…]

While this is not to say that small reactors should supplant large ones, the US would benefit from diversification and expansion of the nation’s nuclear energy portfolio.

Econometric models indicate US nuclear decisions are the biggest determinate of warming.

Menyah 10 (Kojo, Yemane Wolde-Rufael, Professor of Economics at London Metropolitan Business School, London Metropolitan, CO2 emissions, nuclear energy, renewable energy and economic growth in the US, January / February 2010, Accessed Online @ Elseiver, Energy Policy 38 (2010) 2911–2915)

Abstract

This study explores the causal relationship between carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, renewable and nuclear energy consumption and real GDP for the US for the period 1960–2007. Using a modified version of the Granger causality test, we found a unidirectional causality running from nuclear energy consumption to CO2 emissions without feedback but no causality running from renewable energy to CO2 emissions.

[…]

Future research should investigate the experience of other countries individually and collectively through panel cointegration analysis.

The impact of warming is greater than all others. No humans will survive.

Brandenberg 99 (John and Monica Paxson, Visiting Prof. Researcher @ Florida Space Institute, Physicist Ph.D., Science Writer, Dead Mars Dying Earth, Pg 232-233)

The ozone hole expands, driven by a monstrous synergy with global warming that puts more catalytic ice crystals into the stratosphere, but this affects the far north and south and not the major nations’ heartlands.

[…]

Earth becomes the second Mars—red, desolate, with perhaps a few hardy microbes surviving.

1AC—Solvency

Plan – The United States federal government should eliminate its restrictions external to a fast track process for small modular reactors.

Contention Three – Solvency

The plan solves the only major roadblock to the creation of a robust domestic SMR industry.

Loris 11 (Nicolas D. Loris – Research Associate in the Roe Institute, Jack Spencer – Research Fellow in Nuclear Energy in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies, Currently is The Heritage Foundation’s senior reesrach fellow in nuclear energy policy, Previously worked on commercial, civilian and military components of nuclear energy at the Babcock and Wilcox Companies, Holds a bachelor's degree in international politics from Frostburg State University and a master's degree from the University of Limerick, A Big Future for Small Nuclear Reactors?, February 2^nd, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/02/a-big-future-for-small-nuclear-reactors)

Abstract: More and more companies—in the U.S. and abroad—are investing in new commercial nuclear enterprises, chief among them, small modular reactors (SMRs). The SMR industry is growing, with many promising developments in the works—which is precisely why the government should not interfere, as subsidies and government programs have already resulted in an inefficient system for large reactors.

[…]

The NRC has acknowledged the need for this to be resolved and has committed to doing so, including developing the budget requirements to achieve it. It has not committed to a specific timeline.[15] Congress should demand that these issues be resolved by the end of 2011.

Only the plans action can overcome existing obstacles to SMR commercialization.

Sullivan et al 10 (Mary Anne Sullivan – Partner in Hogan Lovells' energy practice in Washington, D.C., Daniel F. Stenger – Partner in Hogan Lovells' energy practice in Washington, D.C., Amy C. Roma – Senior associate in Hogan Lovells' energy practice in Washington, D.C., Are Small Reactors the Next Big Thing in Nuclear?, November 2010, Electric Light and Power, Nov/Dec2010, Vol. 88 Issue 6, p46)

With development of large-scale reactors in the United States slowed by constrained debt capital markets, the absence of climate legislation, low gas prices and flagging power demand, talk in the nuclear industry has shifted to next-generation reactors that are smaller, less capital-intensive and therefore more flexible.

[…]

But SMRs and the struggling loan guarantee program will have reached milestones if the question of how best to structure loan guarantees to meet the needs of SMR developers and customers for assistance in commercial deployment becomes important for resolution.

Finally, the plan jumpstarts the US nuclear industry and leads to comprehensive regulatory reform of nuclear power.

Spencer 8 (Jack, Research Fellow in Nuclear Energy at The Heritage Foundation's Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies, Current is The Heritage Foundation’s senior reesrach fellow in nuclear energy policy, Previously worked on commercial, civilian and military components of nuclear energy at the Babcock and Wilcox Companies, Holds a bachelor's degree in international politics from Frostburg State University and a master's degree from the University of Limerick, Time to Fast-track New Nuclear Reactors, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/09/time-to-fast-track-new-nuclear-reactors)

Nuclear technology can help to meet America's growing demand for reliable, clean, affordable electricity. This has led many politicians, including presidential candidate John McCain, to conclude that the nation needs to start building new nuclear plants now.

[…]

And finally, it would provide the information necessary to bring about comprehensive regulatory reform that the nation needs for a nuclear renaissance to take hold.

Tournament: Harvard | Round: 4 | Opponent: Minnesota SS | Judge: 

Advantage One-~--Exports

The US is loosing market share to China -~-- SMRs allow the US to prevent Chinese proliferation.  

Cullinane 11 (Scott, Staff Member at the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Graduate Fellow at the Institute of World Politics in Washington DC, America Falling Behind: The Strategic Dimensions of Chinese Commercial Nuclear Energy, September 28^th, Journal of Energy Security)

Due to a confluence of events the United States has recently focused more attention on nuclear weapons policy than it has in previous years; however, the proliferation of commercial nuclear technology and its implications for America’s strategic position have been largely ignored. While the Unites States is currently a participant in the international commercial nuclear energy trade, America’s own domestic construction of nuclear power plants has atrophied severely and the US risks losing its competitive edge in the nuclear energy arena.¶ Simultaneously, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has made great strides in closing the nuclear energy development gap with America. Through a combination of importing technology, research from within China itself, and a disciplined policy approach the PRC is increasingly able to leverage the export of commercial nuclear power as part of its national strategy. Disturbingly, China does not share America’s commitment to stability, transparency, and responsibility when exporting nuclear technology. This is a growing strategic weakness and risk for the United States. To remain competitive and to be in a position to offset the PRC when required the American government should encourage the domestic use of nuclear power and spur the forces of technological innovation.¶ America: dominant no longer¶ History has recorded well American wartime nuclear developments which culminated in the July 1945 Trinity Test, but what happened near Arco, Idaho six years later has been overlooked. In 1951, scientists for the first time produced usable electricity from an experimental nuclear reactor. Once this barrier was conquered the atom was harnessed to generate electricity and permitted America to move into the field of commercial nuclear power. In the next five years alone the United States signed over 20 nuclear cooperation agreements with various countries. Not only did the US build dozens of power plants domestically during the 1960s and 1970s, the US Export-Import Bank also distributed $7.1 billion dollars in loans and guarantees for the international sale of 49 reactors. American built and designed reactors were exported around the world during those years. Even today, more than 60% of the world’s 440 operating reactors are based on technology developed in the United States. The growth of the US civilian nuclear power sector stagnated after the Three Mile Island incident in 1979 – the most serious accident in American civilian nuclear power history. Three Mile Island shook America’s confidence in nuclear power and provided the anti-nuclear lobby ample fuel to oppose the further construction of any nuclear power plants. In the following decade, 42 planned domestic nuclear power plants were cancelled, and in the 30 years since the Three Mile Island incident the American nuclear power industry has survived only through foreign sales and merging operations with companies in Asia and Europe. Westinghouse sold its nuclear division to Toshiba and General Electric joined with Hitachi. Even the highest levels of the American government came to cast nuclear power aside. President Bill Clinton bragged in his 1993 State of the Union Address that “we are eliminating programs that are no longer needed, such as nuclear power research and development.” ¶ America’s slow pace of reactor construction over the past three decades has stymied innovation and caused the nuclear sector and its industrial base to shrivel. While some aspects of America’s nuclear infrastructure still operate effectively, many critical areas have atrophied. For example, one capability that America has entirely lost is the means to cast ultra heavy forgings in the range of 350,000 – 600,000 pounds, which impacts the construction of containment vessels, turbine rotors, and steam generators. In contrast, Japan, China, and Russia all possess an ultra heavy forging capacity and South Korea and India plan to build forges in this range. Likewise, the dominance America enjoyed in uranium enrichment until the 1970s is gone. The current standard centrifuge method for uranium enrichment was not invented in America and today 40% of the enriched uranium US power plants use is processed overseas and imported. Another measure of how much the US nuclear industry has shrunk is evident in the number of companies certified to handle nuclear material. In the 1980s the United States had 400 nuclear suppliers and 900 holders of N-stamp certificates (N-stamps are the international nuclear rating certificates issued by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers). By 2008 that number had reduced itself to 80 suppliers and 200 N-stamp holders. ¶ A recent Government Accountability Office report, which examined data from between 1994 and 2009, found the US to have a declining share of the global commercial nuclear trade. However, during that same period over 60 reactors were built worldwide. Nuclear power plants are being built in the world increasingly by non-American companies.¶

The American nuclear industry entered the 1960s in a strong position, yet over the past 30 years other countries have closed the development gap with America. The implications of this change go beyond economics or prestige to include national security. These changes would be less threatening if friendly allies were the ones moving forward with developing a nuclear export industry; however, the quick advancement of the PRC in nuclear energy changes the strategic calculus for America. ¶ The shifting strategic landscape¶ While America’s nuclear industry has languished, current changes in the world’s strategic layout no longer allow America the option of maintaining the status quo without being surpassed. The drive for research, development, and scientific progress that grew out of the Cold War propelled America forward, but those priorities have long since been downgraded by the US government. The economic development of formerly impoverished countries means that the US cannot assume continued dominance by default. The rapidly industrializing PRC is seeking its own place among the major powers of the world and is vying for hegemony in Asia; nuclear power is an example of their larger efforts to marshal their scientific and economic forces as instruments of national power.¶ The rise of China is a phrase that connotes images of a backwards country getting rich off of exporting cheap goods at great social and environmental costs. Yet, this understanding of the PRC has lead many in the United States to underestimate China’s capabilities. The Communist Party of China (CPC) has undertaken a comprehensive long-term strategy to transition from a weak state that lags behind the West to a country that is a peer-competitor to the United States. Nuclear technology provides a clear example of this. ¶ In 1978, General Secretary Deng Xiaoping began to move China out of the destructive Mao era with his policies of 'reform and opening.' As part of these changes during the 1980s, the CPC began a concerted and ongoing effort to modernize the PRC and acquire advanced technology including nuclear technology from abroad. This effort was named Program 863 and included both legal methods and espionage. By doing this, the PRC has managed to rapidly catch up to the West on some fronts. In order to eventually surpass the West in scientific development the PRC launched the follow-on Program 973 to build the foundations of basic scientific research within China to meet the nation’s major strategic needs. These steps have brought China to the cusp of the next stage of technological development, a stage known as “indigenous innovation.”¶ In 2006 the PRC published their science and technology plan out to 2020 and defined indigenous innovation as enhancing original innovation, integrated innovation, and re-innovation based on assimilation and absorption of imported technology in order improve national innovation capability. The Chinese seek to internalize and understand technological developments from around the world so that they can copy the equipment and use it as a point to build off in their own research. This is a step beyond merely copying and reverse engineering a piece of technology. The PRC sees this process of absorbing foreign technology coupled with indigenous innovation as a way of leapfrogging forward in development to gain the upper hand over the West. The PRC’s official statement on energy policy lists nuclear power as one of their target fields. When viewed within this context, the full range of implications from China’s development of nuclear technology becomes evident. The PRC is now competing with the United States in the areas of innovation and high-technology, two fields that have driven American power since World War Two. China’s economic appeal is no longer merely the fact that it has cheap labor, but is expanding its economic power in a purposeful way that directly challenges America’s position in the world.¶ The CPC uses the market to their advantage to attract nuclear technology and intellectual capital to China. The PRC has incentivized the process and encouraged new domestic nuclear power plant construction with the goal of having 20 nuclear power plants operational by 2020. The Chinese Ministry of Electrical Power has described PRC policy to reach this goal as encouraging joint investment between State Owned Corporations and foreign companies. 13 reactors are already operating in China, 25 more are under construction and even more reactors are in the planning stages. ¶ In line with this economic policy, China has bought nuclear reactors from Westinghouse and Areva and is cooperating with a Russian company to build nuclear power plants in Taiwan. By stipulating that Chinese companies and personnel be involved in the construction process, China is building up its own domestic capabilities and expects to become self-sufficient. China’s State Nuclear Power Technology Corporation has partnered with Westinghouse to build a new and larger reactor based on the existing Westinghouse AP 1000 reactor. This will give the PRC a reactor design of its own to then export. If the CPC is able to combine their control over raw materials, growing technical know-how, and manufacturing base, China will not only be a powerful economy, but be able to leverage this power to service its foreign policy goals as well.¶ Even though the PRC is still working to master third generation technology, their scientists are already working on what they think will be the nuclear reactor of the future. China is developing Fourth Generation Fast Neutron Reactors and wants to have one operational by 2030. Additionally, a Chinese nuclear development company has announced its intentions to build the “world’s first high-temperature, gas-cooled reactor” in Shandong province which offers to possibility of a reactor that is nearly meltdown proof. A design, which if proved successful, could potentially redefine the commercial nuclear energy trade. ¶ The risk to America¶ The international trade of nuclear material is hazardous in that every sale and transfer increases the chances for an accident or for willful misuse of the material. Nuclear commerce must be kept safe in order for the benefits of nuclear power generation to be realized. Yet, China has a record of sharing dangerous weapons and nuclear material with unfit countries. It is a risk for America to allow China to become a nuclear exporting country with a competitive technical and scientific edge. In order to limit Chinese influence and the relative attractiveness of what they can offer, America must ensure its continuing and substantive lead in reactor technology.¶ The PRC’s record of exporting risky items is well documented. It is known that during the 1980s the Chinese shared nuclear weapon designs with Pakistan and continues to proliferate WMD-related material. According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to Congress, China sells technologies and components in the Middle East and South Asia that are dual use and could support WMD and missile programs. Jane’s Intelligence Review reported in 2006 that China, ¶ Despite a 1997 promise to Washington to halt its nuclear technology sales to Iran, such assistance is likely to continue. In 2005, Iranian resistance groups accused China of selling Iran beryllium, which is useful for making nuclear triggers and maraging steel (twice as hard as stainless steel), which is critical for fabricating centrifuges needed to reprocess uranium into bomb-grade material. ¶ China sells dangerous materials in order to secure its geopolitical objectives, regardless if those actions harm world stability. There is little reason to believe China will treat the sale of nuclear reactors any differently. Even if the PRC provides public assurances that it will behave differently in the future, the CPC has not been truthful for decades about its nuclear material and weapons sales and hence lacks credibility. For example, in 1983 Chinese Vice Premier Li Peng said that China does not encourage or support nuclear proliferation. In fact, it was that same year that China contracted with Algeria, then a non-NPT Non-Proliferation Treaty state, to construct a large, unsafeguarded plutonium production reactor. In 1991 a Chinese Embassy official wrote in a letter to the The Washington Post that 'China has struck no nuclear deal with Iran.' In reality, China had provided Iran with a research reactor capable of producing plutonium and a calutron, a technology that can be used to enrich uranium to weapons-grade. It has been reported that even after United Nation sanctions were put on Iran, Chinese companies were discovered selling “high-quality carbon fiber” and “pressure gauges” to Iran for use in improving their centrifuges.¶ In 2004 the PRC joined the Nuclear Suppliers Groups (NSG), gaining international recognition of their growing power in the nuclear field. In spite of this opportunity for China to demonstrate its responsibility with nuclear energy, it has not fulfilled it NSG obligations. ¶ The PRC has kept the terms of its nuclear reactor sale to Pakistan secret and used a questionable legal technicality to justify forgoing obtaining a NSG waiver for the deal. Additionally, China chose to forgo incorporating new safety measures into the reactors in order to avoid possible complications¶ A further consequence of China exporting reactors is that these countries may wish to control the fuel cycle which provides the uranium to power their new reactors. The spread of fuel cycle technology comes with two risks: enrichment and reprocessing. Uranium can be enriched to between 3% and 5% for reactor use, but the process can be modified to produce 90% enriched uranium which is weapons-grade. Even if a country only produces low enriched uranium they could easily begin enriching at a higher level if they so choose. Every new country that nuclear technology or information is spread to exponentially increases the risk of material being stolen, given to a third party or being used as the launching point for a weapons program. China’s history of proliferation and willingness to engage economically with very unsavory governments seems likely to increase the risks involving nuclear material. ¶ Strategy and policy¶ In the context of US – PRC relations, nuclear energy is more than a matter of generating electrical power; it is a critical issue of national and global security. The direct consequences of China’s proliferation of commercial nuclear technology are accompanied by even larger issues which require new responses from the United States. China’s ability to connect and integrate economic and energy policy with their grand strategy is as impressive as it is menacing. The PRC leadership has established a coherent policy of economic diplomacy to leverage their economic and technological advancements in a way currently unmatched by the US government. ¶ The US in contrast has not matched its strategy with actions. The US National Security Strategy (NSS), released in 2010, recognizes that economic competitiveness is the “wellspring of American power.” The strategy cites American’s enduring need for a “strong, innovative, and growing” economy, yet these words are hard to reconcile with the current state of the US nuclear and related industries. The NSS goes further and explicitly spells out that:¶ The United States has a window of opportunity to lead in the development of clean energy technology… If the United States does not develop the policies that encourage the private sector to seize the opportunity, the Unites States will fall behind and increasingly become an importer of these new energy technologies.¶ Yet, this recognition from the highest levels of the US government has not done enough to substantially alter the situation or effect the bureaucratic operations of government. A Government Accountability Office report released after the NSS was written found that the US government still lacked a well defined strategy to support and promote US nuclear exports, and the domestic nuclear industry is being stifled by an "outdated and unclear… authorization process" from the Department of Energy.¶ It appears that over the past two decades the US government has grown to accept America’s economic soft power as a permanent condition and hence has not felt compelled to promote or actively defend America’s position. The PRC is now showing that America’s economic strength can be mitigated and co-opted. To adequately counter Chinese activities the US will have to make greater efforts to clearly identify the situation and ensure that policy conforms to strategy in order for the US to advance its position. Prudent actions for US government include:¶ • Build a permanent storage facility, either at Yucca Mountain or elsewhere, to dispose of nuclear waste material. The lack of a permanent storage area is a limiting factor on any expansion of domestic nuclear power plants. ¶ • Streamline the licensing and authorization process for new reactors. Some recent progress has been made in this area, but more can be done to improve efficiencies. ¶ • Continue to build on the incentives for the construction of nuclear power plants that were put in place by the Energy Policy Act of 2005.¶ • Re-write US export controls to guard against PRC industrial espionage, improve US counterintelligence in places of nuclear research, and confront problems associated with deemed-export at US research institutions. ¶ • Invest in nuclear energy research, specifically in safer more efficient reactors that reduce the upfront costs that often hamper nuclear power plant construction. Small reactors or modular construction represent two areas with good potential. ¶ • Create a whole of government strategy for the construction and export of nuclar reactors and related equipment. ¶ • These previous steps will allow the US to engage the PRC from a position of strength and begin a more serious dialogue that links economic cooperation on reactor construction to safer proliferation practices. America cannot stop the PRC from developing and exporting reactors, but the US can present more attractive, more technically sophisticated options and use diplomatic and economic pressure to influence China to act responsibly when exporting nuclear technology. ¶ • Perhaps most importantly, consistent and strong leadership from the executive branch will be critical for implementing these policy changes and for framing the issue of nuclear commerce with regards to China in terms of security and international influence, not only in commercial terms. ¶ The United States today still holds many advantages, both potential and actual, over the PRC. The innovative culture inherent in America is still pushing forward research. America has the means and tools at its disposal to remain competitive and successful in a world where China is a global power. The question is what America will decide it wants its place in the nuclear world to be. Nuclear energy commerce is important for US energy security with proliferation implications, but it is even more important because it is indicative of larger efforts on both sides of the Pacific to shape the 21st century.

Chinese tech sales are uniquely destabilizing.

Tu 12 (Kevin, Senior associate in the Carnegie Energy and Climate Program, He leads Carnegie’s work on China’s energy and climate policies, He is also a nonresident research fellow at the Canadian Industrial Energy End-use Data and Analysis Centre, Previously senior energy and environmental consultant from 2004 to 2011 for M.K. Jaccard and Associates – a premier energy and climate consulting firm in Vancouver, Senior China’s Nuclear Crossroads, carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/11/china-s-nuclear-crossroads)

It’s first important to acknowledge that the safety oversight mechanism is one of the weakest links of the Chinese nuclear industry. Currently, the National Development and Reform Commission, which overseas nuclear development, is the most politically powerful ministry. In comparison, China’s civil nuclear watchdog is supervised by a much weaker Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP). Such an unbalanced bureaucratic hierarchical arrangement and internal power struggle among different stakeholders has prevented a timely overhaul of China’s nuclear oversight mechanism. ¶ Right after the Fukushima disaster, the MEP publically expressed support for the further expansion of the Chinese nuclear industry. Since the MEP supervises China’s civil nuclear safety watchdog, such a gesture has unnecessarily blurred the administrative boundary between the nuclear safety regulator and industry development administration. This again underlines the urgent need for China to fundamentally reform its nuclear safety oversight mechanism in order to avoid the cozy bureaucratic collusion between government and industry that has befallen the Japanese nuclear industry. ¶ A lack of transparency in the industry also remains an issue. Immediately after the disaster in Japan, there was a panicked buying spree of iodized salt across China. Even after both the Chinese government and experts publically clarified that this was entirely unnecessary, it still took quite a while for the general public to calm down. This event not only indicates Chinese society’s lack of fundamental understanding on nuclear issues, due largely to the prolonged secretive operations of the Chinese nuclear industry, but also clearly illustrates the absence of basic trust between the Chinese government and civil society. ¶ Since then, the lack of transparency hasn’t fundamentally changed. On January 11, when a new Global Nuclear Materials Security Index was launched, China ranked 29th among a group of 32 nuclear nations in terms of nuclear security and materials transparency.¶ The country’s ability to safely export nuclear technology and equipment to overseas markets is yet another challenge that needs to be addressed. Thus far, China has exported its second generation reactors to Pakistan, which are less sophisticated than the imported third generation reactors under construction in China. But the country lacks both sufficient domestic capacity and faces numerous patent-related constraints before it can develop its own export-ready advanced nuclear reactors. While the second generation nuclear technology exported to Pakistan has already been phased out domestically due to safety concerns, it’s still possible for China to be lured by economic and geopolitical considerations into additional nuclear export deals with other developing countries in the future.¶ Last year, both Germany and Switzerland decided to gradually phase out nuclear power. Furthermore, any nuclear project in the United States has become much more difficult to finance and license. Even France, the most nuclear reliant major economy, has already expressed its intention to increase the share of renewables in its electricity mixture. Such dim prospects for nuclear power in developed countries may lead international nuclear companies to look to developing countries – especially China – for business opportunities.¶ Related, if more nuclear power plants are built in developing countries with little experience of operating a reactor, or bordering a region where terrorism is a concern, or without sufficient financial resources to import state of the art technology, then the chance of a major nuclear accident hitting the developing world will loom large in the coming decades. Not surprisingly, the ability of the Chinese government to resist short-term geopolitical and economic temptation and stop exporting outdated nuclear reactors to other developing countries will have profound safety implications in a post-Fukushima world.¶ Nuclear emergency planning, meanwhile, is important in ensuring the safety of nuclear power plants. Yet due to concerns about cost escalation and the unwillingness to scare the general public, both national governments and nuclear power companies often ignore the worst-case scenarios of nuclear accidents when facility-specific emergency plans are prepared and exercised. For instance, although 25 years have passed since the Chernobyl disaster, the Fukushima nuclear crisis still caught both the Japanese government and the plant operator entirely unprepared. ¶ When China’s first national nuclear emergency drill was held at Tianwan Nuclear Power Plant in November 2009, authorities simply assumed that an effective emergency response would be sufficient to contain the hypothetic accident. However, after Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima Daiichi in 2011, it becomes increasingly difficult for the Chinese government and state-owned nuclear power companies to continue to not prepare emergency plans for worst-case nuclear accidents that have already befallen major nuclear economies in the past. ¶ Given the devastating impacts of major nuclear accidents, and the tarred safety record of global nuclear industry, the Chinese government should prioritize its nuclear safety agenda by fundamentally reforming its nuclear oversight mechanism and continuously improving transparency of its nuclear industry. Instead of actively advocating an overly ambitious nuclear target by 2020, Chinese nuclear power companies should build and indigenize imported third generation nuclear reactors step by step. Finally, the Chinese government needs to continue to suspend the approval of new nuclear power plants until China gains sufficient experience to operate and improve advanced reactors that are still under construction. Otherwise, deficiencies in the insufficiently tested prototype reactors could be easily built into a hastily ordered nuclear generation fleet, which is a fatal mistake that energy-thirsty China can’t afford to make. 

Each sale increases the risk of nuclear war.

Kroenig 12 (Matthew, Assistant Professor of Government, Georgetown University and Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations, “The History of Proliferation Optimism: Does It Have A Future?” Prepared for the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, May 26, 2012, http:~/~/www.npolicy.org/article.php?aid=1182andtid=30url:http://www.npolicy.org/article.php?aid=1182andtid=30(%%))

Nuclear War. The greatest threat posed by the spread of nuclear weapons is nuclear war. The more states in possession of nuclear weapons, the greater the probability that somewhere, someday, there is a catastrophic nuclear war. A nuclear exchange between the two superpowers during the Cold War could have arguably resulted in human extinction and a nuclear exchange between states with smaller nuclear arsenals, such as India and Pakistan, could still result in millions of deaths and casualties, billions of dollars of economic devastation, environmental degradation, and a parade of other horrors.¶ To date, nuclear weapons have only been used in warfare once. In 1945, the United States used one nuclear weapon each on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing World War II to a close. Many analysts point to sixty-five-plus-year tradition of nuclear non-use as evidence that nuclear weapons are unusable, but it would be naïve to think that nuclear weapons will never be used again. After all, analysts in the 1990s argued that worldwide economic downturns like the great depression were a thing of the past, only to be surprised by the dot-com bubble bursting in the later 1990s and the Great Recession of the late Naughts.53 This author, for one, would be surprised if nuclear weapons are not used in my lifetime.¶ Before reaching a state of MAD, new nuclear states go through a transition period in which they lack a secure-second strike capability. In this context, one or both states might believe that it has an incentive to use nuclear weapons first. For example, if Iran acquires nuclear weapons neither Iran, nor its nuclear-armed rival, Israel, will have a secure, second-strike capability. Even though it is believed to have a large arsenal, given its small size and lack of strategic depth, Israel might not be confident that it could absorb a nuclear strike and respond with a devastating counterstrike. Similarly, Iran might eventually be able to build a large and survivable nuclear arsenal, but, when it first crosses the nuclear threshold, Tehran will have a small and vulnerable nuclear force.¶ In these pre-MAD situations, there are at least three ways that nuclear war could occur. First, the state with the nuclear advantage might believe it has a splendid first strike capability. In a crisis, Israel might, therefore, decide to launch a preemptive nuclear strike to disarm Iran’s nuclear capabilities and eliminate the threat of nuclear war against Israel. Indeed, this incentive might be further increased by Israel’s aggressive strategic culture that emphasizes preemptive action. Second, the state with a small and vulnerable nuclear arsenal, in this case Iran, might feel use ‘em or loose ‘em pressures. That is, if Tehran believes that Israel might launch a preemptive strike, Iran might decide to strike first rather than risk having its entire nuclear arsenal destroyed. Third, as Thomas Schelling has argued, nuclear war could result due to the reciprocal fear of surprise attack.54 If there are advantages to striking first, one state might start a nuclear war in the belief that war is inevitable and that it would be better to go first than to go second. In a future Israeli-Iranian crisis, for example, Israel and Iran might both prefer to avoid a nuclear war, but decide to strike first rather than suffer a devastating first attack from an opponent. ¶ Even in a world of MAD, there is a risk of nuclear war. Rational deterrence theory assumes nuclear-armed states are governed by rational leaders that would not intentionally launch a suicidal nuclear war. This assumption appears to have applied to past and current nuclear powers, but there is no guarantee that it will continue to hold in the future. For example, Iran’s theocratic government, despite its inflammatory rhetoric, has followed a fairly pragmatic foreign policy since 1979, but it contains leaders who genuinely hold millenarian religious worldviews who could one day ascend to power and have their finger on the nuclear trigger. We cannot rule out the possibility that, as nuclear weapons continue to spread, one leader will choose to launch a nuclear war, knowing full well that it could result in self-destruction.¶ One does not need to resort to irrationality, however, to imagine a nuclear war under MAD. Nuclear weapons may deter leaders from intentionally launching full-scale wars, but they do not mean the end of international politics. As was discussed above, nuclear-armed states still have conflicts of interest and leaders still seek to coerce nuclear-armed adversaries. This leads to the credibility problem that is at the heart of modern deterrence theory: how can you threaten to launch a suicidal nuclear war? Deterrence theorists have devised at least two answers to this question. First, as stated above, leaders can choose to launch a limited nuclear war.55 This strategy might be especially attractive to states in a position of conventional military inferiority that might have an incentive to escalate a crisis quickly. During the Cold War, the United States was willing to use nuclear weapons first to stop a Soviet invasion of Western Europe given NATO’s conventional inferiority in continental Europe. As Russia’s conventional military power has deteriorated since the end of the Cold War, Moscow has come to rely more heavily on nuclear use in its strategic doctrine. Indeed, Russian strategy calls for the use of nuclear weapons early in a conflict (something that most Western strategists would consider to be escalatory) as a way to de-escalate a crisis. Similarly, Pakistan’s military plans for nuclear use in the event of an invasion from conventionally stronger India. And finally, Chinese generals openly talk about the possibility of nuclear use against a U.S. superpower in a possible East Asia contingency.¶ Second, as was also discussed above leaders can make a “threat that leaves something to chance.”56 They can initiate a nuclear crisis. By playing these risky games of nuclear brinkmanship, states can increases the risk of nuclear war in an attempt to force a less resolved adversary to back down. Historical crises have not resulted in nuclear war, but many of them, including the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, have come close. And scholars have documented historical incidents when accidents could have led to war.57 When we think about future nuclear crisis dyads, such as India and Pakistan and Iran and Israel, there are fewer sources of stability that existed during the Cold War, meaning that there is a very real risk that a future Middle East crisis could result in a devastating nuclear exchange.

Independently causes Asia proliferation.

Ferguson 10 President of the Federation of American Scientists.  Adjunct Professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University and an Adjunct Lecturer in the National Security Studies Program at the Johns Hopkins University. (Charles, Nuclear Energy and Nonproliferation: The Implications of Expanded Nuclear Energy in Asia, in Asia’s Rising Power and America’s Continued Purpose, Ed Tellis, Marble and Tanner, 167-9)

Further nuclear power use in Asia will undoubtedly occur. This should not alarm Washington, however, as long as the United States remains engaged in ensuring the highest international standards of nuclear safety and security, maintaining access to all components of the fuel cycle, upholding adequate controls on enrichment and reprocessing components of this cycle, shoring up security alliances, and working to bring pariah states into the international system. Rather than an alarming prospect, more nuclear power plants in Asia would offer environmental and energy security benefits. Nuclear power plants do not emit greenhouse gases when operating, and the fuel cycle as a whole emits a proportionally small amount of these gases compared to other energy sources. If nuclear power plants further displace coal and other fossil fuel plants, air quality will tend to improve. Regarding energy security, more nuclear power use will reduce the demand for foreign sources of fossil fuels for electricity generation. The United States should welcome these developments.¶ Balancing these benefits are the risks of accidents at and attacks on nuclear facilities, the erosion of U.S. economic competitiveness, and the threat of proliferation. To effectively engage in reducing the likelihood of accidents, the United States has led and should continue to lead by example. In particular, states that possess or want to possess nuclear power plants look to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission as the gold standard because of its independence, authority to order the shutdown of unsafe plants without too much pressure from industry, and technical capacity. Similarly, it is important for the United States to support financially and technically the capability of the IAEA to provide safety and regulatory assistance, especially to nuclear power entrant states. The IAEA also has been offering security advice to nuclear facility operators. The United States and all other states using nuclear power have a vital interest in preventing major accidents and attacks because such events could put the brakes on a potential global nuclear energy revival.¶ The rise of Asian nuclear energy competitors should not overly alarm the United States, but neither should it call for complacency. For instance, although China's deals to secure uranium supplies may appear threatening, the fact is that uranium is an abundant element, and reserves estimates forecast that the world will have many decades worth of uranium based on current demand for nuclear power and the current price range of ura|nium. A large increase in demand would tend to increase the price, but this will create an incentive for more uranium prospecting and mining. The price of uranium fuel is a relatively small fraction of the total cost of nuclearpower. If underground uranium resources run low, uranium in seawater is estimated to supply more than one thousand years of nuclear power. The price of seawater extraction of uranium, however, is prohibitive with current technologies.¶ The United States presently does not have the ability to manufacture a complete large nuclear power plant. However, the corporate alliances formed between U.S. and Japanese nuclear companies—Westinghouse with Toshiba and GE Nuclear with Hitachi—have given the United States a more significant role in the global marketplace. Like Japan, South Korea also has benefited from U.S. technology transfer, but unlike Japan, South Korea is venturing largely on its own in marketing its nuclear wares. For example, South Korea beat out French-based Areva and the Japan-U.S. corporate alliances to secure the major reactor deal with the UAE in December 2009. South Korea was able to win this deal because it was the lowest bidder and was able to convince the UAE that it could build the reactors faster than competitors. The lesson learned is that the Japan-U.S. alliance will need to become more competitive and provide added value such as greater safety features to plants.

That goes nuclear.

Cimbala 10 Professor of Political Science @ Penn State, (Stephen, Nuclear Weapons and Cooperative Security in the 21st Century, p. 117-8)

A five-sided nuclear competition in the Pacific would be linked, in geopolitical deterrence and proliferation space, to the existing nuclear deterrents in India and Pakistan, and to the emerging nuclear weapons status of Iran.  An arc of nuclear instability from Tehran to Tokyo could place U.S. proliferation strategies into the ash heap of history and call for more drastic military options, not excluding preemptive war, defenses, and counter-deterrent special operations.  In addition, an eight-sided nuclear arms race in Asia would increase the likelihood of accidental or inadvertent nuclear war.  It would do so because: (1) some of these states already have histories of protracted conflict; (2) states may have politically unreliable or immature command and control systems, especially during a crisis involving a decision for nuclear first strike or retaliation; unreliable or immature systems might permit a technical malfunction that caused an unintended launch, or a deliberate but unauthorized launch by rogue commanders; (3) faulty intelligence and warning systems might cause one side to misinterpret the other’s defensive moves to forestall attack as offensive preparations for attack, thus triggering a mistaken preemption.

A strong SMR industry is key to US leadership, market share, and cradle to grave.

Mandel 9 (Jenny – Scientific American, Environment and Energy Publishing, LLC, “Less Is More for Designers of "Right-Sized" Nuclear Reactors” September 9, 2009, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=small-nuclear-power-plant-station-mini-reactor)

Tom Sanders, president of the American Nuclear Society and manager of Sandia National Laboratories' Global Nuclear Futures Initiative, has been stumping for small rectors for more than a decade. American-made small reactors, Sanders insists, can play a central role in global nonproliferation efforts. "Our role at Sandia is the national security-driven notion that it's in the interests of the U.S. to be one of the dominant nuclear suppliers," Sanders said. While U.S. companies have been exiting the industry over the past decades as government and popular support for new construction has waned, Sanders maintains that strong U.S. participation in the nuclear energy marketplace would give diplomats a new tool to use with would-be nuclear powers. "It's hard to tell Iran what to do if you don't have anything Iran wants," he explained. Sanders said mini-reactors are ideal to sell to developing countries that want to boost their manufacturing might and that would otherwise look to other countries for nuclear technologies. If the United States is not participating in that market, he said, it becomes hard to steer buyers away from technologies that pose greater proliferation risks. Sanders been promoting this view since the 1990s, he said, when he realized "we were no longer selling nuclear goods and services, so we could no longer write the rules." The domestic nuclear industry had basically shut down, with no new construction in decades and a flight of talent and ideas overseas. There is a silver lining in that brain drain, though, he believes, in that U.S. companies getting back into the game now are less tied to the traditional, giant plants and are freer to innovate. A feature that several of the new product designs share is that the power plants could be mass-produced in a factory to minimize cost, using robots to ensure consistency. Also, with less design work for each installation, the time to complete an order would be shortened and some of the capital and other costs associated with long lead times avoided, Sanders said. Another feature he favors is building the plants with a lifetime supply of fuel sealed inside. Shipped loaded with fuel, such reactors could power a small city for 20 years without the host country ever handling it. Once depleted, the entire plant would be packed back up and shipped back to the United States, he said, with the sensitive spent fuel still sealed away inside. Sanders is working on a reactor design hatched by the lab with an undisclosed private partner. He believes it is feasible to build a prototype modular reactor -- including demonstration factory components and a mockup of the reactor itself -- as early as 2014, for less than a billion dollars. A mini-reactor could ring up at less than $200 million, he said, or at $300 million to $400 million with 20 years of fuel. At $3,000 to $4,000 per kilowatt, he said, that would amount to significant savings over estimates of $4,000 to $6,000 per kilowatt for construction alone with traditional plant designs. To get a design ready to build, Sanders is urging a partnership between the government and the private sector. "If it's totally a government research program, labs can take 20 to 30 years" to finish such projects, he said. "If it becomes a research science project, it could go on forever." New approach, old debates So far, there is no sign that the government's nuclear gatekeeper, NRC, is wowed by the small-reactor designs. NRC's Office of New Reactors warned Babcock and Wilcox in June that the agency "will need to limit interactions with the designers of small power reactors to occasional meetings or other nonresource-intensive activities" over the next two years because of a crowded schedule of work on other proposals. Meanwhile, opponents of nuclear technologies are not convinced that small reactors are an improvement over traditional designs. Arjun Makhijani, who heads the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, a think tank that advocates against nuclear power, sees disseminating the technology as incompatible with controlling it. "A lot of the proliferation issue is not linked to having or not having plutonium or highly enriched uranium, but who has the expertise to have or make bombs," Makhijani said. "In order to spread nuclear technologies, you have to have the people who have the expertise in nuclear engineering, who know about nuclear materials and chain reactions and things like that -- the same expertise for nuclear bombs. That doesn't suffice for you to make a bomb, but then if you clandestinely acquire the materials, then you can make a bomb." Peter Wilk, acting program director for safe energy with Physicians for Social Responsibility, an anti-nuclear group, argues that expanding nuclear power use runs counter to the goal of nonproliferation. "The whole proposition presupposes an ... international economy in which more and more fuel is produced and more and more waste must be dealt with, which only makes those problems that are still unsolved larger," he said. "It may or may not do a better job of preventing the host country from literally getting their hands on it, but it doesn't reduce the amount of fuel in the world or the amount of waste in the world," Wilk added. And then there is the issue of public opinion. "Imagine that Americans would agree to take the waste that is generated in other countries and deal with it here," Makhijani said. "At the present moment, it should be confined to the level of the fantastic, or even the surreal. If the technology's backers could come up with a plan for the waste, then we could talk about export." Makhijani pointed to a widely touted French process for recycling nuclear waste as a red herring (ClimateWire, May 18). "It's a mythology that it ameliorates the waste problem," he said. According to Makhijani's calculations, the French recycling process generates far more radioactive waste than it cleans up. One category of highly radioactive material, which ends up stored in glass "logs" for burial, is reduced, he said. But in processing the waste, about six times the original volume of waste is produced, he said. Much of that must be buried deep underground, and the discharge of contaminated wastewater used in recycling has angered neighboring countries, he said. Operational risk, of course, is another major concern. "One has reduced the amount of unnecessary risk," Wilke said, "but it's still unnecessary risk." He added, "I get the theory that smaller, newer, ought to be safer. The question is: Why pursue this when there are so many better alternatives?" To Sandia's Sanders, Wilke is asking the wrong question. With the governments of major economies like China, Russia and Japan putting support and cash into nuclear technologies, the power plants are here to stay, he believes. "There's going to be a thousand reactors built over the next 50 years," he said. "The question is: Are we building them, or are we just importing them?"

Cradle to grave independently solves.

McGoldrick 11 Fred McGoldrick, CSIS, spent 30 years at the U.S. State and Energy Departments and at the U.S. mission to the IAEA, negotiated peaceful nuclear cooperation agreements with a number of countries and helped shape the policy of the United States to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, May 2011, Limiting Transfers of Enrichment and Reprocessing Technology: Issues, Constraints, Options, http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/MTA-NSG-report-color.pdf

The U.S. has been exploring the possibilities of developing offers by one or more suppliers to lease or sell power reactor fuel to consumer states, with the understanding that the resultant spent fuel would be returned to one of the supplier countries or to suitable alternative locations, such as a regional or international used fuel storage facility or waste repository, (if a host state can be found), where it would be treated, recycled or where wastes could be ultimately disposed of. 4.3.1 Offering a Broad-based Cradle-to-Grave Fuel Cycle Service. This option would involve a major diplomatic initiative to explore the possibility that one or more supplier states could offer cradle-to-grave services to all states without EandR plants as an incentive for states to forgo the development of such capabilities. Advantages If one or more suppliers could offer a “cradle-to-grave” fuel supply program, it could prove to be far more effective than some other techniques in discouraging the spread of reprocessing facilities. Because the commercial market already provides strong assurance of fresh fuel supply, while management of spent fuel is unresolved, such a service offer could create stronger incentives for countries to rely on international fuel supply than steps such as fuel banks would. Russia has already implemented such a program on a limited scale. Moscow has concluded an agreement to provide fresh nuclear fuel for the Bushehr nuclear power plant in Iran and to take back the used nuclear fuel to Russia. The Russians have also taken back some spent pow- er reactor fuel from East European countries and have indicated that they might be willing to consider taking back spent fuel of Russian-origin in the future—they have recently offered such deals to Vietnam and Turkey—but do not seem ready to accept spent fuel produced from fuel from non-Russian suppliers. If Russia were to offer a broad-based a cradle-to-grave program, it may put pressure on its competitors in the reactor and enrichment markets to try to follow suit. If a country agreed to accept spent fuel from other countries on a commercial basis, the supplier of the fresh fuel and the country to which the spent fuel was sent would not have to be the same for a cradle-to-grave service to work.

Tournament: Harvard | Round: 4 | Opponent: Minnesota SS | Judge: 

Advantage Two-~--The DoD

Domestic DoD bases are vulnerable due to connectivity to the civilian grid.

Robitaille 12 (George, Department of Army Civilian and US Army War College, Small Modular Reactors: The Army’s Secure Source of Energy?, March, Strategy Research Project)

In recent years, the U.S Department of Defense (DoD) has identified a security issue at our installations related to the dependence on the civilian electrical grid. 1 The DoD depends on a steady source of electricity at military facilities to perform the functions that secure our nation. The flow of electricity into military facilities is controlled by a public grid system that is susceptible to being compromised because of the age of the infrastructure, damage from natural disasters and the potential for cyber attacks. Although most major functions at military installations employ diesel powered generators as temporary backup, the public grid may not be available to provide electricity when it is needed the most. The United States electrical infrastructure system is prone to failures and susceptible to terrorist attacks. 2 It is critical that the source of electricity for our installations is reliable and secure. In order to ensure that our military facilities possess a secure source of electricity, either the public system of electric generation and distribution is upgraded to increase its reliability as well as reducing its susceptibility to cyber attack or another source of electricity should be pursued. Although significant investments are being made to upgrade the electric grid, the current investment levels are not keeping up with the aging system. Small modular reactors (SMRs) are nuclear reactors that are about an order of magnitude smaller than traditional commercial reactor used in the United States. SMRs are capable of generating electricity and at the same time, they are not a significant contributor to global warming because of green house gas emissions. The DoD needs to look at small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) to determine if they can provide a safe and secure source of electricity. Electrical Grid Susceptibility to Disruptions According to a recent report by the Defense Science Board, the DoD gets ninety nine percent of their electrical requirements from the civilian electric grid. 3 The electric grid, as it is currently configured and envisioned to operate for the foreseeable future, may not be reliable enough to ensure an uninterrupted flow of electricity for our critical military facilities given the influences of the aging infrastructure, its susceptibility to severe weather events, and the potential for cyber attacks. The DoD dependency on the grid is reflected in the $4.01 Billion spent on facilities energy in fiscal year 2010, the latest year which data was available. 4 The electricity used by military installations amounts to $3.76 billion. 5 As stated earlier, the DoD relies on the commercial grid to provide a secure source of energy to support the operations that ensure the security of our nation and it may not be available when we need it. The system could be taken down for extended periods of time by failure of aging components, acts of nature, or intentionally by cyber attacks. Aging Infrastructure. The U.S electric power grid is made up of independently owned power plants and transmission lines. The political and environmental resistance to building new electric generating power plants combined with the rise in consumption and aging infrastructure increases the potential for grid failure in the future. There are components in the U.S. electric grid that are over one hundred years old and some of the recent outages such as the 2006 New York blackout can be directly attributed to this out of date, aging infrastructure. 6 Many of the components of this system are at or exceeding their operational life and the general trend of the utility companies is to not replace power lines and other equipment until they fail. 7 The government led deregulation of the electric utility industry that started in the mid 1970s has contributed to a three decade long deterioration of the electric grid and an increased state of instability. Although significant investments are being made to upgrade the electric grid, the many years of prior neglect will require a considerable amount of time and funding to bring the aging infrastructure up to date. Furthermore, the current investment levels to upgrade the grid are not keeping up with the aging system. 8 In addition, upgrades to the digital infrastructure which were done to increase the systems efficiency and reliability, have actually made the system more susceptible to cyber attacks. 9 Because of the aging infrastructure and the impacts related to weather, the extent, as well as frequency of failures is expected to increase in the future. Adverse Weather. According to a 2008 grid reliability report by the Edison Electric Institute, sixty seven per cent of all power outages are related to weather. Specifically, lightning contributed six percent, while adverse weather provided thirty one percent and vegetation thirty percent (which was predominantly attributed to wind blowing vegetation into contact with utility lines) of the power outages. 10 In 1998 a falling tree limb damaged a transformer near the Bonneville Dam in Oregon, causing a cascade of related black-outs across eight western states. 11 In August of 2003 the lights went out in the biggest blackout in North America, plunging over fifty million people into darkness over eight states and two Canadian provinces. Most areas did not have power restored four or five days. In addition, drinking water had to be distributed by the National Guard when water pumping stations and/or purification processes failed. The estimated economic losses associated with this incident were about five billion dollars. Furthermore, this incident also affected the operations of twenty two nuclear plants in the United States and Canada. 12 In 2008, Hurricane Ike caused approximately seven and a half million customers to lose power in the United States from Texas to New York. 13 The electric grid suffered numerous power outages every year throughout the United States and the number of outages is expected to increase as the infrastructure ages without sufficient upgrades and weather-related impacts continue to become more frequent. Cyber Attacks. The civilian grid is made up of three unique electric networks which cover the East, West and Texas with approximately one hundred eighty seven thousand miles of power lines. There are several weaknesses in the electrical distribution infrastructure system that could compromise the flow of electricity to military facilities. The flow of energy in the network lines as well as the main distribution hubs has become totally dependent on computers and internet-based communications. Although the digital infrastructure makes the grid more efficient, it also makes it more susceptible to cyber attacks. Admiral Mr. Dennis C. Blair (ret.), the former Director of National Intelligence, testified before Congress that “the growing connectivity between information systems, the Internet, and other infrastructures creates opportunities for attackers to disrupt telecommunications, electrical power, energy pipelines, refineries, financial networks, and other critical infrastructures. 14 ” The Intelligence Community assesses that a number of nations already have the technical capability to conduct such attacks. 15 In the 2009 report, Annual Threat Assessment of the Intelligence Community for the Senate Armed Services Committee, Adm. Blair stated that “Threats to cyberspace pose one of the most serious economic and national security challenges of the 21st Century for the United States and our allies.”16 In addition, the report highlights a growing array of state and non-state actors that are targeting the U.S. critical infrastructure for the purpose of creating chaos that will subsequently produce detrimental effects on citizens, commerce, and government operations. These actors have the ability to compromise, steal, change, or completely destroy information through their detrimental activities on the internet. 17 In January 2008, US Central Intelligence Agency senior analyst Tom Donahue told a gathering of three hundred international security managers from electric, water, oil and gas, and other critical industry, that data was available from multiple regions outside the United States, which documents cyber intrusions into utilities. In at least one case (outside the U.S.), the disruption caused a power outage affecting multiple cities. Mr. Donahue did not specify who executed these attacks or why, but did state that all the intrusions were conducted via the Internet. 18 During the past twenty years, advances in computer technologies have permeated and advanced all aspects of our lives. Although the digital infrastructure is being increasingly merged with the power grid to make it more efficient and reliable, it also makes it more vulnerable to cyber attack. In October 2006, a foreign hacker invaded the Harrisburg, PA., water filtration system and planted malware. 19 In June 2008, the Hatch nuclear power plant in Georgia shut down for two days after an engineer loaded a software update for a business network that also rebooted the plant's power control system. In April 2009, The Wall Street Journal reported that cyber spies had infiltrated the U.S. electric grid and left behind software that could be used to disrupt the system. The hackers came from China, Russia and other nations and were on a “fishing expedition” to map out the system. 20 According to the secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano at an event on 28 October 2011, cyber–attacks have come close to compromising the country’s critical infrastructure on multiple occasions. 21 Furthermore, during FY11, the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team took action on more than one hundred thousand incident reports by releasing more than five thousand actionable cyber security alerts and information products. 22 The interdependence of modern infrastructures and digital based systems makes any cyber attacks on the U.S. electric grid potentially significant. The December 2008 report by the Commission on Cyber Security for the forty fourth Presidency states the challenge plainly: “America’s failure to protect cyberspace is one of the most urgent national security problems facing the new administration”. 23 The susceptibility of the grid to being compromised has resulted in a significant amount of resources being allocated to ensuring the systems security. Although a substantial amount of resources are dedicated to protecting the nation’s infrastructure, it may not be enough to ensure the continuous flow of electricity to our critical military facilities. SMRs as they are currently envisioned may be able to provide a secure and independent alternative source of electricity in the event that the public grid is compromised. SMRs may also provide additional DoD benefit by supporting the recent government initiatives related to energy consumption and by circumventing the adverse ramifications associated with building coal or natural gas fired power plants on the environment.

SMR’s solve -~-- they address weaknesses which otherwise leads to nuclear retaliation.

Andres 11 (*Richard B. – Professor of National Security Strategy at the National War College and a Senior Fellow and Energy and Environmental Security and Policy Chair in the Center for Strategic Research, Institute for National Strategic Studies, at the National Defense University, **Hanna L. Breetz – Doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Small Nuclear Reactors for Military Installations: Capabilities, Costs, and Technological Implications, Strategic Forum, National Defense University, Institute for National Strategic Studies, February 2011, http://www.ndu.edu/press/lib/pdf/StrForum/SF-262.pdf)

Small reactors and energy Security The DOD interest in small reactors derives largely from problems with base and logistics vulnerability. Over the last few years, the Services have begun to reexamine virtually every aspect of how they generate and use en- ergy with an eye toward cutting costs, decreasing carbon emissions, and reducing energy-related vulnerabilities. These actions have resulted in programs that have signif- icantly reduced DOD energy consumption and green- house gas emissions at domestic bases. Despite strong efforts, however, two critical security issues have thus far proven resistant to existing solutions: bases’ vulnerability to civilian power outages, and the need to transport large quantities of fuel via convoys through hostile territory to forward locations. Each of these is explored below.  Grid Vulnerability. DOD is unable to provide its bases with electricity when the civilian electrical grid is offline for an extended period of time. Currently, domestic military installations receive 99 percent of their electricity from the civilian power grid. As explained in a recent study from the Defense Science Board: DOD’s key problem with electricity is that critical missions, such as national strategic awareness and national command authorities, are almost entirely dependent on the national transmission grid . . . which is fragile, vulnerable, near its capacity limit, and outside of DOD control. In most cases, neither the grid nor on-base backup power provides sufficient reliability to ensure continuity of critical national priority functions and oversight of strategic missions in the face of a long term (several months) outage.7 The grid’s fragility was demonstrated during the 2003 Northeast blackout in which 50 million people in the United States and Canada lost power, some for up to a week, when one Ohio utility failed to properly trim trees. The blackout created cascading disruptions in sewage systems, gas station pumping, cellular communications, border check systems, and so forth, and demonstrated the interdependence of modern infrastructural systems.8 More recently, awareness has been growing that the grid is also vulnerable to purposive attacks. A re- port sponsored by the Department of Homeland Secu- rity suggests that a coordinated cyber attack on the grid could result in a third of the country losing power for a period of weeks or months.9 Cyberattacks on critical infrastructure are not well understood. It is not clear, for instance, whether existing terrorist groups might be able to develop the capability to conduct this type of attack. It is likely, however, that some nation-states either have or are working on developing the ability to take down the U.S. grid. In the event of a war with one of these states, it is possible, if not likely, that parts of the civilian grid would cease to function, taking with them military bases located in affected regions. Government and private organizations are currently working to secure the grid against attacks; however, it is not clear that they will be successful. Most military bases currently have backup power that allows them to func- tion for a period of hours or, at most, a few days on their own. If power were not restored after this amount of time, the results could be disastrous. First, military assets taken offline by the crisis would not be available to help with disaster relief. Second, during an extended blackout, global military operations could be seriously compromised; this disruption would be particularly serious if the blackout was induced during major combat operations. During the Cold War, this type of event was far less likely because the United States and Soviet Union shared the common understanding that blinding an opponent with a grid black- out could escalate to nuclear war. America’s current opponents, however, may not share this fear or be deterred by this possibility. In 2008, the Defense Science Board stressed that DOD should mitigate the electrical grid’s vulnerabilities by turning military installations into “islands” of energy self-sufficiency.10 The department has made ef- forts to do so by promoting efficiency programs that lower power consumption on bases and by constructing renewable power generation facilities on selected bases. Unfortunately, these programs will not come close to reaching the goal of islanding the vast majority of bases. Even with massive investment in efficiency and renew- ables, most bases would not be able to function for more than a few days after the civilian grid went offline. Unlike other alternative sources of energy, small reactors have the potential to solve DOD’s vulnerability to grid outages. Most bases have relatively light power de- mands when compared to civilian towns or cities. Small reactors could easily support bases’ power demands separate from the civilian grid during crises. In some cases, the reactors could be designed to produce enough power not only to supply the base, but also to provide critical services in surrounding towns during long-term outages. Strategically, islanding bases with small reactors has another benefit. One of the main reasons an enemy might be willing to risk reprisals by taking down the U.S. grid during a period of military hostilities would be to affect ongoing military operations. Without the lifeline of intelligence, communication, and logistics provided by U.S. domestic bases, American military operations would be compromised in almost any conceivable contingency. Making bases more resilient to civilian power outages would reduce the incentive for an opponent to attack the grid. An opponent might still attempt to take down the grid for the sake of disrupting civilian systems, but the powerful incentive to do so in order to win an ongoing battle or war would be greatly reduced.

That causes nuclear world war three. 

Lawson 9 (Sean, Assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah, Cross-Domain Response to Cyber Attacks and the Threat of Conflict Escalation, May 13^th 2009, http://www.seanlawson.net/?p=477)

Introduction At a time when it seems impossible to avoid the seemingly growing hysteria over the threat of cyber war,1 network security expert Marcus Ranum delivered a refreshing talk recently, “The Problem with Cyber War,” that took a critical look at a number of the assumptions underlying contemporary cybersecurity discourse in the United States.  He addressed one issue in partiuclar that I would like to riff on here, the issue of conflict escalation–i.e. the possibility that offensive use of cyber attacks could escalate to the use of physical force.  As I will show, his concerns are entirely legitimate as current U.S. military cyber doctrine assumes the possibility of what I call “cross-domain responses” to cyberattacks. Backing Your Adversary (Mentally) into a Corner Based on the premise that completely blinding a potential adversary is a good indicator to that adversary that an attack is iminent, Ranum has argued that “The best thing that you could possibly do if you want to start World War III is launch a cyber attack. ... When people talk about cyber war like it’s a practical thing, what they’re really doing is messing with the OK button for starting World War III.  We need to get them to sit the f-k down and shut the f-k up.” 2 He is making a point similar to one that I have made in the past: Taking away an adversary’s ability to make rational decisions could backfire. 3  For example, Gregory Witol cautions that “attacking the decision maker’s ability to perform rational calculations may cause more problems than it hopes to resolve… Removing the capacity for rational action may result in completely unforeseen consequences, including longer and bloodier battles than may otherwise have been.” 4 Cross-Domain Response So, from a theoretical standpoint, I think his concerns are well founded.  But the current state of U.S. policy may be cause for even greater concern.  It’s not just worrisome that a hypothetical blinding attack via cyberspace could send a signal of imminent attack and therefore trigger an irrational response from the adversary.  What is also cause for concern is that current U.S. policy indicates that “kinetic attacks” (i.e. physical use of force) are seen as potentially legitimate responses to cyber attacks.  Most worrisome is that current U.S. policy implies that a nuclear response is possible, something that policy makers have not denied in recent press reports. The reason, in part, is that the U.S. defense community has increasingly come to see cyberspace as a “domain of warfare” equivalent to air, land, sea, and space.  The definition of cyberspace as its own domain of warfare helps in its own right to blur the online/offline, physical-space/cyberspace boundary.  But thinking logically about the potential consequences of this framing leads to some disconcerting conclusions. If cyberspace is a domain of warfare, then it becomes possible to define “cyber attacks” (whatever those may be said to entail) as acts of war.  But what happens if the U.S. is attacked in any of the other domains?  It retaliates.  But it usually does not respond only within the domain in which it was attacked.  Rather, responses are typically “cross-domain responses”–i.e. a massive bombing on U.S. soil or vital U.S. interests abroad (e.g. think 9/11 or Pearl Harbor) might lead to air strikes against the attacker.  Even more likely given a U.S. military “way of warfare” that emphasizes multidimensional, “joint” operations is a massive conventional (i.e. non-nuclear) response against the attacker in all domains (air, land, sea, space), simultaneously. The possibility of “kinetic action” in response to cyber attack, or as part of offensive U.S. cyber operations, is part of the current (2006) National Military Strategy for Cyberspace Operations 5: Of course, the possibility that a cyber attack on the U.S. could lead to a U.S. nuclear reply constitutes possibly the ultimate in “cross-domain response.”  And while this may seem far fetched, it has not been ruled out by U.S. defense policy makers and is, in fact, implied in current U.S. defense policy documents.  From the National Military Strategy of the United States (2004): “The term WMD/E relates to a broad range of adversary capabilities that pose potentially devastating impacts.  WMD/E includes chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and enhanced high explosive weapons as well as other, more asymmetrical ‘weapons’.   They may rely more on disruptive impact than destructive kinetic effects.  For example, cyber attacks on US commercial information systems or attacks against transportation networks may have a greater economic or psychological effect than a relatively small release of a lethal agent.” 6 The authors of a 2009 National Academies of Science report on cyberwarfare respond to this by saying, “Coupled with the declaratory policy on nuclear weapons described earlier, this statement implies that the United States will regard certain kinds of cyberattacks against the United States as being in the same category as nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, and thus that a nuclear response to certain kinds of cyberattacks (namely, cyberattacks with devastating impacts) may be possible.  It also sets a relevant scale–a cyberattack that has an impact larger than that associated with a relatively small release of a lethal agent is regarded with the same or greater seriousness.” 7 Asked by the New York Times to comment on this, U.S. defense officials would not deny that nuclear retaliation remains an option for response to a massive cyberattack: “Pentagon and military officials confirmed that the United States reserved the option to respond in any way it chooses to punish an adversary responsible for a catastrophic cyberattack. While the options could include the use of nuclear weapons, officials said, such an extreme counterattack was hardly the most likely response.” 8 The rationale for this policy: “Thus, the United States never declared that it would be bound to respond to a Soviet and Warsaw Pact conventional invasion with only American and NATO conventional forces. The fear of escalating to a nuclear conflict was viewed as a pillar of stability and is credited with helping deter the larger Soviet-led conventional force throughout the cold war.  Introducing the possibility of a nuclear response to a catastrophic cyberattack would be expected to serve the same purpose.” 9 Non-unique, Dangerous, and In-credible? There are a couple of interesting things to note in response.  First is the development of a new acronym, WMD/E (weapons of mass destruction or effect).  Again, this acronym indicates a weakening of the requirement of physical impacts.  In this new definition, mass effects that are not necessarily physical, nor necessarily destructive, but possibly only disruptive economically or even psychologically (think “shock and awe”) are seen as equivalent to WMD.  This new emphasis on effects, disruption, and psychology reflects both contemporary, but also long-held beliefs within the U.S. defense community.  It reflects current thinking in U.S. military theory, in which it is said that U.S. forces should be able to “mass fires” and “mass effects” without having to physically “mass forces.”  There is a sliding scale in which the physical (often referred to as the “kinetic”) gradually retreats–i.e. massed forces are most physical; massed fire is less physical (for the U.S. anyway); and massed effects are the least physical, having as the ultimate goal Sun Tzu’s “pinnacle of excellence,” winning without fighting. But the emphasis on disruption and psychology in WMD/E has also been a key component of much of 20th century military thought in the West.  Industrial theories of warfare in the early 20th century posited that industrial societies were increasingly interdependent and reliant upon mass production, transportation, and consumption of material goods.  Both industrial societies and the material links that held them together, as well as industrial people and their own internal linkages (i.e. nerves), were seen as increasingly fragile and prone to disruption via attack with the latest industrial weapons: airplanes and tanks.  Once interdependent and fragile industrial societies were hopelessly disrupted via attack by the very weapons they themselves created, the nerves of modern, industrial men and women would be shattered, leading to moral and mental defeat and a loss of will to fight.  Current thinking about the possible dangers of cyber attack upon the U.S. are based on the same basic premises: technologically dependent and therefore fragile societies populated by masses of people sensitive to any disruption in expected standards of living are easy targets.  Ultimately, however, a number of researchers have pointed out the pseudo-psychological, pseudo-sociological, and a-historical (not to mention non-unique) nature of these assumptions. 10  Others have pointed out that these assumptions did not turn out to be true during WWII strategic bombing campaigns, that modern, industrial societies and populations were far more resilient than military theorists had assumed. 11  Finally, even some military theorists have questioned the assumptions behind cyber war, especially when assumptions about our own technology dependence-induced societal fragility (dubious on their own) are applied to other societies, especially non-Western societies (even more dubious). 12 Finally, where deterrence is concerned, it is important to remember that a deterrent has to be credible to be effective.  True, the U.S. retained nuclear weapons as a deterrent during the Cold War.  But, from the 1950s through the 1980s, there was increasing doubt among U.S. planners regarding the credibility of U.S. nuclear deterrence via the threat of “massive retaliation.”  As early as the 1950s it was becoming clear that the U.S. would be reluctant at best to actually follow through on its threat of massive retaliation.  Unfortunately, most money during that period had gone into building up the nuclear arsenal; conventional weapons had been marginalized.  Thus, the U.S. had built a force it was likely never to use.  So, the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s saw the development of concepts like “flexible response” and more emphasis on building up conventional forces.  This was the big story of the 1980s and the “Reagan build-up” (not “Star Wars”).  Realizing that, after a decade of distraction in Vietnam, it was back in a position vis-a-viz the Soviets in Europe in which it would have to rely on nuclear weapons to offset its own weakness in conventional forces, a position that could lead only to blackmail or holocaust, the U.S. moved to create stronger conventional forces. 13  Thus, the question where cyber war is concerned: If it was in-credible that the U.S. would actually follow through with massive retaliation after a Soviet attack on the U.S. or Western Europe, is it really credible to say that the U.S. would respond with nuclear weapons to a cyber attack, no matter how disruptive or destructive? Beyond credibility, deterrence makes many other assumptions that are problematic in the cyber war context.  It assumes an adversary capable of being deterred.  Can most of those who would perpetrate a cyber attack be deterred?  Will al-Qa’ida be deterred?  How about a band of nationalistic or even just thrill-seeker, bandwagon hackers for hire?  Second, it assumes clear lines of command and control.  Sure, some hacker groups might be funded and assisted to a great degree by states.  But ultimately, even cyber war theorists will admit that it is doubtful that states have complete control over their armies of hacker mercenaries.  How will deterrence play out in this kind of scenario?

And attacks collapse military war fighting capability.

Loudermilk 11 (Micah, Research Associate for the Energy and Environmental Security Policy program with the Institute for National Strategic Studies at National Defense University, Small Nuclear Reactors: Enabling Energy Security for Warfighters, Small Wars Journal, March 27^th 2011, http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/small-nuclear-reactors-enabling-energy-security-for-warfighters)

Last month, the Institute for National Strategic Studies at National Defense University released a report entitled Small Nuclear Reactors for Military Installations: Capabilities, Costs, and Technological Implications. Authored by Dr. Richard Andres of the National War College and Hanna Breetz from Harvard University, the paper analyzes the potential for the Department of Defense to incorporate small reactor technology on its domestic military bases and in forward operating locations. According to Andres and Breetz, the reactors have the ability to solve two critical vulnerabilities in the military's mission: the dependence of domestic bases on the civilian electrical grid and the challenge of supplying ample fuel to troops in the field. Though considerable obstacles would accompany such a move -- which the authors openly admit -- the benefits are significant enough to make the idea merit serious consideration. At its heart, a discussion about military uses of small nuclear reactors is really a conversation about securing the nation's war fighting capabilities. Although the point that energy security is national security has become almost redundant -- quoted endlessly in government reports, think tank papers, and the like -- it is repeated for good reason. Especially on the domestic front, the need for energy security on military bases is often overlooked. There is no hostile territory in the United States, no need for fuel convoys to constantly supply bases with fuel, and no enemy combatants. However, while bases and energy supplies are not directly vulnerable, the civilian electrical grid on which they depend for 99% of their energy use is -- and that makes domestic installations highly insecure. The U.S. grid, though a technological marvel, is extremely old, brittle, and susceptible to a wide variety of problems that can result in power outages -- the 2003 blackout throughout the Northeast United States is a prime example of this. In the past, these issues were largely limited to accidents including natural disasters or malfunctions, however today, intentional threats such as cyber attacks represent a very real and growing threat to the grid. Advances in U.S. military technology have further increased the risk that a grid blackout poses to the nation's military assets. As pointed out by the Defense Science Board, critical missions including national strategic awareness and national command authorities depend on the national transmission grid. Additionally, capabilities vital to troops in the field -- including drones and satellite intelligence/reconnaissance -- are lodged at bases within the United States and their loss due to a blackout would impair the ability of troops to operate in forward operating areas. Recognition of these facts led the Defense Science Board to recommend "islanding" U.S. military installations to mitigate the electrical grid's vulnerabilities. Although DOD has undertaken a wide array of energy efficiency programs and sought to construct renewable energy facilities on bases, these endeavors will fall far short of the desired goals and still leave bases unable to function in the event of long-term outages. As the NDU report argues though, small nuclear reactors have the potential to alleviate domestic base grid vulnerabilities. With a capacity of anywhere between 25 and 300 megawatts, small reactors possess sufficient generation capabilities to power any military installation, and most likely some critical services in the areas surrounding bases, should a blackout occur. Moreover, making bases resilient to civilian power outages would reduce the incentive for an opponent to disrupt the grid in the event of a conflict as military capabilities would be unaffected. Military bases are also secure locations, reducing the associated fears that would surely arise from the distribution of reactors across the country. Furthermore, small nuclear reactors, by design, are significantly safer than prior generations of reactors due to passive safety features, simplified designs, sealed reactor cores, and lower operational requirements.

Conventional wars are inevitable -~-- ineffectiveness leads to major power aggression and violent competition.

Horowitz 9 (Michael C. Horowitz and Dan A. Shalmon, Professor of Political Science @ University of Pennsylvania and Senior Analyst @ Lincoln Group, LLC. The Future of War and American Military Strategy, Orbis, Spring 2009)

It is important to recognize at the outset two key points about United States strategy and the potential costs and benefits for the United States in a changing security environment. First, the United States is very likely to remain fully engaged in global affairs. Advocates of restraint or global withdrawal, while popular in some segments of academia, remain on the margins of policy debates in Washington D.C. This could always change, of course. However, at present, it is a given that the United States will define its interests globally and pursue a strategy that requires capable military forces able to project power around the world. Because ‘‘indirect’’ counter-strategies are the rational choice for actors facing a strong state’s power projection, irregular/asymmetric threats are inevitable given America’s role in the global order.24 Second, the worst-case scenario is a loss of U.S. conventional superiority. Losing military control of the sea and the air, ‘‘the global commons,’’25 would render American global strategy outmoded in an instant. The idea that the United States must improve its capacity to fight counterinsurgency operations presumes a need to do so beyond defending the homeland and that the United States will have the capacity to intervene in future conflicts around the world. However, while it seems unlikely at present, what if developments in warfare cut down and then eliminated the conventional military superiority of the United States? The loss of conventional military superiority by the United States would probably make the current strategic environment look like a picnic.26 For example, currently a Marine unit deploying to Afghanistan or Iraq focuses most on the post-deployment battlefield tasks. However, imagine a world where commanders and soldiers, like their World War II forbears, must fear being sunk on a transport ship or shot out of the sky on the way over, or being targeted by electronic, nanotechnological, or directed energy or precision guided munitions when preparing to search a village for insurgents.27 In such a strategic environment, overseas deployments to win hearts and minds in a low intensity war or wipe out radical jihadi groups would likely—and logically— take a backseat to more ‘‘traditional’’ concerns: convoys, tank battles, air and coastal defenses, and crash programs to build a new generation of naval and air weapons to take back the seas and skies. Meanwhile, in the interim, the United States homeland would be more at risk than at any point since the World War II—arguably more threatened than in its entire history. What John Mearsheimer has called the ‘‘stopping power of water’’ previously functioned to shield the United States, with its oceanic buffers to the east and west, from existential threats. However, in the information age and if the United States no longer controls the waterways of the world, water may not be enough. A world without American conventional military superiority would also encourage aggression by regional actors eager to settle scores and take advantage of the fact that the United States could no longer destroy their military forces at a low cost, to say nothing of the global dangers inherent in the competition among major powers that could result. The latter scenario is the worst case and it bears mentioning only because it should inform the framework in which any debate about defense strategy occurs.  Pg.  307-308

That competition goes nuclear.

Kagan 7 (Frederick Kagan and Michael O’Hanlon 7, Fred’s a resident scholar at AEI, Michael is a senior fellow in foreign policy at Brookings, “The Case for Larger Ground Forces”, April, http:~/~/www.aei.org/files/2007/04/24/20070424_pdf(%%))

We live at a time when wars not only rage in nearly every region but threaten to erupt in many places where the current relative calm is tenuous. To view this as a strategic military challenge for the United States is not to espouse a specific theory of America’s role in the world or a certain political philosophy. Such an assessment flows directly from the basic bipartisan view of American foreign policy makers since World War II that overseas threats must be countered before they can directly threaten this country’s shores, that the basic stability of the international system is essential to American peace and prosperity, and that no country besides the United States is in a position to lead the way in countering major challenges to the global order. Let us highlight the threats and their consequences with a few concrete examples, emphasizing those that involve key strategic regions of the world such as the Persian Gulf and East Asia, or key potential threats to American security, such as the spread of nuclear weapons and the strengthening of the global Al Qaeda/jihadist movement. The Iranian government has rejected a series of international demands to halt its efforts at enriching uranium and submit to international inspections. What will happen if the US—or Israeli—government becomes convinced that Tehran is on the verge of fielding a nuclear weapon? North Korea, of course, has already done so, and the ripple effects are beginning to spread. Japan’s recent election to supreme power of a leader who has promised to rewrite that country’s constitution to support increased armed forces—and, possibly, even nuclear weapons— may well alter the delicate balance of fear in Northeast Asia fundamentally and rapidly. Also, in the background, at least for now, Sino Taiwanese tensions continue to flare, as do tensions between India and Pakistan, Pakistan and Afghanistan, Venezuela and the United States, and so on. Meanwhile, the world’s nonintervention in Darfur troubles consciences from Europe to America’s Bible Belt to its bastions of liberalism, yet with no serious international forces on offer, the bloodletting will probably, tragically, continue unabated. And as bad as things are in Iraq today, they could get worse. What would happen if the key Shiite figure, Ali al Sistani, were to die? If another major attack on the scale of the Golden Mosque bombing hit either side (or, perhaps, both sides at the same time)? Such deterioration might convince many Americans that the war there truly was lost—but the costs of reaching such a conclusion would be enormous. Afghanistan is somewhat more stable for the moment, although a major Taliban offensive appears to be in the offing. Sound US grand strategy must proceed from the recognition that, over the next few years and decades, the world is going to be a very unsettled and quite dangerous place, with Al Qaeda and its associated groups as a subset of a much larger set of worries. The only serious response to this international environment is to develop armed forces capable of protecting America’s vital interests throughout this dangerous time. Doing so requires a military capable of a wide range of missions—including not only deterrence of great power conflict in dealing with potential hotspots in Korea, the Taiwan Strait, and the Persian Gulf but also associated with a variety of Special Forces activities and stabilization operations. For today’s US military, which already excels at high technology and is increasingly focused on re-learning the lost art of counterinsurgency, this is first and foremost a question of finding the resources to field a large-enough standing Army and Marine Corps to handle personnel intensive missions such as the ones now under way in Iraq and Afghanistan. Let us hope there will be no such large-scale missions for a while. But preparing for the possibility, while doing whatever we can at this late hour to relieve the pressure on our soldiers and Marines in ongoing operations, is prudent. At worst, the only potential downside to a major program to strengthen the military is the possibility of spending a bit too much money. Recent history shows no link between having a larger military and its overuse; indeed, Ronald Reagan’s time in office was characterized by higher defense budgets and yet much less use of the military, an outcome for which we can hope in the coming years, but hardly guarantee. While the authors disagree between ourselves about proper increases in the size and cost of the military (with O’Hanlon preferring to hold defense to roughly 4 percent of GDP and seeing ground forces increase by a total of perhaps 100,000, and Kagan willing to devote at least 5 percent of GDP to defense as in the Reagan years and increase the Army by at least 250,000), we agree on the need to start expanding ground force capabilities by at least 25,000 a year immediately. Such a measure is not only prudent, it is also badly overdue.

Tournament: Harvard | Round: 4 | Opponent: Minnesota SS | Judge: 

Advantage 3-~--Warming

Warming is real, anthropogenic, and reversible if we start mitigation now.

Nuccitelli 11 (Dana, An environmental scientist at a private environmental consulting firm in the Sacramento, California area. He has a Bachelor's Degree in astrophysics from the University of California at Berkeley, and a Master's Degree in physics from the University of California at Davis. He has been researching climate science, economics, and solutions as a hobby since 2006, and has contributed to Skeptical Science since September, 2010., Updated 2011, Originally Posted 9/24/2010, The Big Picture, http://www.skepticalscience.com/big-picture.html)

The Earth is Warming We know the planet is warming from surface temperature stations and satellites measuring the temperature of the Earth's surface and lower atmosphere. We also have various tools which have measured the warming of the Earth's oceans. Satellites have measured an energy imbalance at the top of the Earth's atmosphere. Glaciers, sea ice, and ice sheets are all receding. Sea levels are rising. Spring is arriving sooner each year. There's simply no doubt - the planet is warming (Figure 1). Global Warming Continues And yes, the warming is continuing. The 2000s were hotter than the 1990s, which were hotter than the 1980s, which were hotter than the 1970s. 2010 tied for the hottest year on record. The 12-month running average global temperature broke the record three times in 2010, according to NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) data. Sea levels are still rising, ice is still receding, spring is still coming earlier, there's still a planetary energy imbalance, etc. etc. Contrary to what some would like us to believe, the planet has not magically stopped warming. Those who argue otherwise are confusing short-term noise with long-term global warming (Figure 2). Foster and Rahmstorf (2011) showed that when we filter out the short-term effects of the sun, volcanoes, and El Niño cycles, the underlying man-made global warming trend becomes even more clear (Figure 3). For as much as atmospheric temperatures are rising, the amount of energy being absorbed by the planet is even more striking when one looks into the deep oceans and the change in the global heat content (Figure 4). Humans are Increasing Atmospheric Greenhouse Gases The amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere - particularly carbon dioxide (CO2) - has been rising steadily over the past 150 years. There are a number of lines of evidence which clearly demonstrate that this increase is due to human activities, primarily burning fossil fuels. The most direct of evidence involves simple accounting. Humans are currently emitting approximately 30 billion tons of CO2 per year, and the amount in the atmosphere is increasing by about 15 billion tons per year. Our emissions have to go somewhere - half goes into the atmosphere, while the other half is absorbed by the oceans (which is causing another major problem - ocean acidification). We also know the atmospheric increase is from burning fossil fuels because of the isotopic signature of the carbon in the atmosphere. Carbon comes in three different isotopes, and plants have a preference for the lighter isotopes. So if the fraction of lighter carbon isotopes in the atmosphere is increasing, we know the increase is due to burning plants and fossil fuels, and that is what scientists observe. The fact that humans are responsible for the increase in atmospheric CO2 is settled science. The evidence is clear-cut. Human Greenhouse Gases are Causing Global Warming There is overwhelming evidence that humans are the dominant cause of the recent global warming, mainly due to our greenhouse gas emissions. Based on fundamental physics and math, we can quantify the amount of warming human activity is causing, and verify that we're responsible for essentially all of the global warming over the past 3 decades. The aforementioned Foster and Rahmstorf (2011) found a 0.16°C per decade warming trend since 1979 after filtering out the short-term noise. In fact we expect human greenhouse gas emissions to cause more warming than we've thus far seen, due to the thermal inertia of the oceans (the time it takes to heat them). Human aerosol emissions are also offsetting a significant amount of the warming by causing global dimming. Huber and Knutti (2011) found that human greenhouse gas emissions have caused 66% more global warming than has been observed since the 1950s, because the cooling effect of human aerosol emissions have offset about 44% of that warming. They found that overall, human effects are responsible for approximately 100% of the observed global warming over the past 60 years (Figure 5). There are also numerous 'fingerprints' which we would expect to see from an increased greenhouse effect (i.e. more warming at night, at higher latitudes, upper atmosphere cooling) that we have indeed observed (Figure 6). Climate models have projected the ensuing global warming to a high level of accuracy, verifying that we have a good understanding of the fundamental physics behind climate change. Sometimes people ask "what would it take to falsify the man-made global warming theory?". Well, basically it would require that our fundamental understanding of physics be wrong, because that's what the theory is based on. This fundamental physics has been scrutinized through scientific experiments for decades to centuries. The Warming will Continue We also know that if we continue to emit large amounts of greenhouse gases, the planet will continue to warm. We know that the climate sensitivity to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 from the pre-industrial level of 280 parts per million by volume (ppmv) to 560 ppmv (we're currently at 390 ppmv) will cause 2–4.5°C of warming. And we're headed for 560 ppmv in the mid-to-late 21st century if we continue business-as-usual emissions. The precise sensitivity of the climate to increasing CO2 is still fairly uncertain: 2–4.5°C is a fairly wide range of likely values. However, even if we're lucky and the climate sensitivity is just 2°C for doubled atmospheric CO2, if we continue on our current emissions path, we will commit ourselves to that amount of warming (2°C above pre-industrial levels) within the next 75 years. The Net Result will be Bad There will be some positive results of this continued warming. For example, an open Northwest Passage, enhanced growth for some plants and improved agriculture at high latitudes (though this will require use of more fertilizers), etc. However, the negatives will almost certainly outweigh the positives, by a long shot. We're talking decreased biodiversity, water shortages, increasing heat waves (both in frequency and intensity), decreased crop yields due to these impacts, damage to infrastructure, displacement of millions of people, etc. Arguments to the contrary are superficial One thing I've found in reading skeptic criticisms of climate science is that they're consistently superficial. For example, the criticisms of James Hansen's 1988 global warming projections never go beyond "he was wrong," when in reality it's important to evaluate what caused the discrepancy between his projections and actual climate changes, and what we can learn from this. And those who argue that "it's the Sun" fail to comprehend that we understand the major mechanisms by which the Sun influences the global climate, and that they cannot explain the current global warming trend. And those who argue "it's just a natural cycle" can never seem to identify exactly which natural cycle can explain the current warming, nor can they explain how our understanding of the fundamental climate physics is wrong. There are legitimate unresolved questions Much ado is made out of the expression "the science is settled." The science is settled in terms of knowing that the planet is warming rapidly, and that humans are the dominant cause. There are certainly unresolved issues. As noted above, there's a big difference between a 2°C and a 4.5°C warming for a doubling of atmospheric CO2, and it's an important question to resolve, because we need to know how fast the planet will warm in order to know how fast we need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. There are significant uncertainties in some feedbacks which play into this question. For example, will clouds act as a net positive feedback (by trapping more heat, causing more warming) or negative feedback (by reflecting more sunlight, causing a cooling effect) as the planet continues to warm? And exactly how much global warming is being offset by human aerosol emissions? These are the sorts of questions we should be debating, and the issues that most climate scientists are investigating. Unfortunately there is a there is a very vocal contingent of people determined to continue arguing the resolved questions for which the science has already been settled. And when climate scientists are forced to respond to the constant propagation of misinformation on these settled issues, it just detracts from our investigation of the legitimate, unresolved, important questions. Smart Risk Management Means Taking Action People are usually very conservative when it comes to risk management. Some of us buy fire insurance for our homes when the risk of a house fire is less than 1%, for example. When it comes to important objects like cars and homes, we would rather be safe than sorry. But there is arguably no more important object than the global climate. We rely on the climate for our basic requirements, like having enough accessible food and water. Prudent risk management in this case is clear. The scientific evidence discussed above shows indisputably that there is a risk that we are headed towards very harmful climate change. There are uncertainties as to how harmful the consequences will be, but uncertainty is not a valid reason for inaction. There's very high uncertainty whether I'll ever be in a car accident, but it would be foolish of me not to prepare for that possibility by purchasing auto insurance. Moreover, uncertainty cuts both ways, and it's just as likely that the consequences will be worse than we expect as it is that the consequences won't be very bad. We Can Solve the Problem The good news is that we have the tools we need to mitigate the risk posed by climate change. A number of plans have been put forth to achieve the necessary greenhouse gas emissions cuts (i.e. here and here and here). We already have all the technology we need. Opponents often argue that mitigating global warming will hurt the economy, but the opposite is true. Those who argue that reducing emissions will be too expensive ignore the costs of climate change - economic studies have consistently shown that mitigation is several times less costly than trying to adapt to climate change (Figure 7). This is why there is a consensus among economists with expertise in climate that we should put a price on carbon emissions (Figure 8). should US reduce emissions The Big Picture The big picture is that we know the planet is warming, humans are causing it, there is a substantial risk to continuing on our current path, but we don't know exactly how large the risk is. However, uncertainty regarding the magnitude of the risk is not an excuse to ignore it. We also know that if we continue on a business-as-usual path, the risk of catastrophic consequences is very high. In fact, the larger the uncertainty, the greater the potential for the exceptionally high risk scenario to become reality. We need to continue to decrease the uncertainty, but it's also critical to acknowledge what we know and what questions have been resolved, and that taking no action is not an option. The good news is that we know how to solve the problem, and that doing so will minimize the impact not only on the climate, but also on the economy. The bottom line is that from every perspective - scientific, risk management, economic, etc. - there is no reason not to immeditately take serious action to mitigate climate change, and failing to do so would be exceptionally foolish.

SMRs are the only solution that adresses the magnitude of warming before its too late.

Nordhaus 12 (Michael Shellenberger, Jessica Lovering, Founder of the Breakthrough Institute, graduate of Earlham College and holds a masters degree in cultural anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, "New Nukes: Why We Need Radical Innovation to Make New Nuclear Energy Cheap", September 11, http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/programs/energy-and-climate/new-nukes/)

Arguably, the biggest impact of Fukushima on the nuclear debate, ironically, has been to force a growing number of pro-nuclear environmentalists out of the closet, including us. The reaction to the accident by anti-nuclear campaigners and many Western publics put a fine point on the gross misperception of risk that informs so much anti-nuclear fear. Nuclear remains the only proven technology capable of reliably generating zero-carbon energy at a scale that can have any impact on global warming. Climate change -- and, for that matter, the enormous present-day health risks associated with burning coal, oil, and gas -- simply dwarf any legitimate risk associated with the operation of nuclear power plants. About 100,000 people die every year due to exposure to air pollutants from the burning of coal. By contrast, about 4,000 people have died from nuclear energy -- ever -- almost entirely due to Chernobyl. But rather than simply lecturing our fellow environmentalists about their misplaced priorities, and how profoundly inadequate present-day renewables are as substitutes for fossil energy, we would do better to take seriously the real obstacles standing in the way of a serious nuclear renaissance. Many of these obstacles have nothing to do with the fear-mongering of the anti-nuclear movement or, for that matter, the regulatory hurdles imposed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and similar agencies around the world. As long as nuclear technology is characterized by enormous upfront capital costs, it is likely to remain just a hedge against overdependence on lower-cost coal and gas, not the wholesale replacement it needs to be to make a serious dent in climate change. Developing countries need large plants capable of bringing large amounts of new power to their fast-growing economies. But they also need power to be cheap. So long as coal remains the cheapest source of electricity in the developing world, it is likely to remain king. The most worrying threat to the future of nuclear isn't the political fallout from Fukushima -- it's economic reality. Even as new nuclear plants are built in the developing world, old plants are being retired in the developed world. For example, Germany's plan to phase-out nuclear simply relies on allowing existing plants to be shut down when they reach the ends of their lifetime. Given the size and cost of new conventional plants today, those plants are unlikely to be replaced with new ones. As such, the combined political and economic constraints associated with current nuclear energy technologies mean that nuclear energy's share of global energy generation is unlikely to grow in the coming decades, as global energy demand is likely to increase faster than new plants can be deployed. To move the needle on nuclear energy to the point that it might actually be capable of displacing fossil fuels, we'll need new nuclear technologies that are cheaper and smaller. Today, there are a range of nascent, smaller nuclear power plant designs, some of them modifications of the current light-water reactor technologies used on submarines, and others, like thorium fuel and fast breeder reactors, which are based on entirely different nuclear fission technologies. Smaller, modular reactors can be built much faster and cheaper than traditional large-scale nuclear power plants. Next-generation nuclear reactors are designed to be incapable of melting down, produce drastically less radioactive waste, make it very difficult or impossible to produce weapons grade material, use less water, and require less maintenance. Most of these designs still face substantial technical hurdles before they will be ready for commercial demonstration. That means a great deal of research and innovation will be necessary to make these next generation plants viable and capable of displacing coal and gas. The United States could be a leader on developing these technologies, but unfortunately U.S. nuclear policy remains mostly stuck in the past. Rather than creating new solutions, efforts to restart the U.S. nuclear industry have mostly focused on encouraging utilities to build the next generation of large, light-water reactors with loan guarantees and various other subsidies and regulatory fixes. With a few exceptions, this is largely true elsewhere around the world as well. Nuclear has enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress for more than 60 years, but the enthusiasm is running out. The Obama administration deserves credit for authorizing funding for two small modular reactors, which will be built at the Savannah River site in South Carolina. But a much more sweeping reform of U.S. nuclear energy policy is required. At present, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has little institutional knowledge of anything other than light-water reactors and virtually no capability to review or regulate alternative designs. This affects nuclear innovation in other countries as well, since the NRC remains, despite its many critics, the global gold standard for thorough regulation of nuclear energy. Most other countries follow the NRC's lead when it comes to establishing new technical and operational standards for the design, construction, and operation of nuclear plants. What's needed now is a new national commitment to the development, testing, demonstration, and early stage commercialization of a broad range of new nuclear technologies -- from much smaller light-water reactors to next generation ones -- in search of a few designs that can be mass produced and deployed at a significantly lower cost than current designs. This will require both greater public support for nuclear innovation and an entirely different regulatory framework to review and approve new commercial designs. In the meantime, developing countries will continue to build traditional, large nuclear power plants. But time is of the essence. With the lion's share of future carbon emissions coming from those emerging economic powerhouses, the need to develop smaller and cheaper designs that can scale faster is all the more important. A true nuclear renaissance can't happen overnight. And it won't happen so long as large and expensive light-water reactors remain our only option. But in the end, there is no credible path to mitigating climate change without a massive global expansion of nuclear energy. If you care about climate change, nothing is more important than developing the nuclear technologies we will need to get that job done.

The impact of warming is greater than all others. No humans will survive. 

Brandenberg 99 (John and Monica Paxson, Visiting Prof. Researcher @ Florida Space Institute, Physicist Ph.D., Science Writer, Dead Mars Dying Earth, Pg 232-233)

The ozone hole expands, driven by a monstrous synergy with global warming that puts more catalytic ice crystals into the stratosphere, but this affects the far north and south and not the major nations’ heartlands. The seas rise, the tropics roast but the media networks no longer cover it. The Amazon rainforest becomes the Amazon desert. Oxygen levels fall, but profits rise for those who can provide it in bottles. An equatorial high-pressure zone forms, forcing drought in central Africa and Brazil, the Nile dries up and the monsoons fail.  Then inevitably, at some unlucky point in time, a major unexpected event occurs—a major volcanic eruption, a sudden and dramatic shift in ocean circulation or a large asteroid impact (those who think freakish accidents do not occur have paid little attention to life or Mars), or a nuclear war that starts between Pakistan and India and escalates to involve China and Russia . . . Suddenly the gradual climb in global temperatures goes on a mad excursion as the oceans warm and release large amounts of dissolved carbon dioxide from their lower depths into the atmosphere. Oxygen levels go down precipitously as oxygen replaces lost oceanic carbon dioxide. Asthma cases double and then double again. Now a third of the world fears breathing. As the oceans dump carbon dioxide, the greenhouse effect increases, which further warms the oceans, causing them to dump even more carbon. Because of the heat, plants die and burn in enormous fires, which release more carbon dioxide, and the oceans evaporate, adding more water vapor to the greenhouse. Soon, we are in what is termed a runaway greenhouse effect, as happened to Venus eons ago. The last two surviving scientists inevitably argue, one telling the other, “See! I told you the missing sink was in the ocean!” Earth, as we know it, dies. After this Venusian excursion in temperatures, the oxygen disappears into the soil, the oceans evaporate and are lost and the dead Earth loses its ozone layer completely. Earth is too far from the Sun for it to be the second Venus for long. Its atmosphere is slowly lost—as is its water—because of ultraviolet bombardment breaking up all the molecules apart from carbon dioxide. As the atmosphere becomes thin, the Earth becomes colder. For a short while temperatures are nearly normal, but the ultraviolet sears any life that tries to make a comeback. The carbon dioxide thins out to form a thin veneer with a few wispy clouds and dust devils. Earth becomes the second Mars—red, desolate, with perhaps a few hardy microbes surviving.

The plan results in global SMR exports – massively reduces emissions.

Rosner 11 (Robert – Past Director of the Argonne National Laboratory, The William E. Wrather Distinguished Service Professor @ the Departments of Astronomy and Astrophysics and Physics, Enrico Fermi Institute, and the College, Senior Fellow @ the Computation Institute (CI), Stephen Goldberg – Special assistant to the director at Argonne National Laboratory, Small Modular Reactors – Key to Future Nuclear Power Generation in the U.S., Energy Policy Institute at Chicago The Harris School of Public Policy Studies, Technical Paper, November 2011)

As stated earlier, SMRs have the potential to achieve significant greenhouse gas emission reductions. They could provide alternative baseload power generation to facilitate the retirement of older, smaller, and less efficient coal generation plants that would, otherwise, not be good candidates for retrofitting carbon capture and storage technology. They could be deployed in regions of the U.S. and the world that have less potential for other forms of carbon-free electricity, such as solar or wind energy. There may be technical or market constraints, such as projected electricity demand growth and transmission capacity, which would support SMR deployment but not GW-scale LWRs. From the on-shore manufacturing perspective, a key point is that the manufacturing base needed for SMRs can be developed domestically. Thus, while the large commercial LWR industry is seeking to transplant portions of its supply chain from current foreign sources to the U.S., the SMR industry offers the potential to establish a large domestic manufacturing base building upon already existing U.S. manufacturing infrastructure and capability, including the Naval shipbuilding and underutilized domestic nuclear component and equipment plants. The study team learned that a number of sustainable domestic jobs could be created – that is, the full panoply of design, manufacturing, supplier, and construction activities – if the U.S. can establish itself as a credible and substantial designer and manufacturer of SMRs. While many SMR technologies are being studied around the world, a strong U.S. commercialization program can enable U.S. industry to be first to market SMRs, thereby serving as a fulcrum for export growth as well as a lever in influencing international decisions on deploying both nuclear reactor and nuclear fuel cycle technology. A viable U.S.-centric SMR industry would enable the U.S. to recapture technological leadership in commercial nuclear technology, which has been lost to suppliers in France, Japan, Korea, Russia, and, now rapidly emerging, China.

Tournament: Harvard | Round: 4 | Opponent: Minnesota SS | Judge: 

Plan -~-- The United States federal government should obtain, through alternative financing, electricity from small modular reactors for military instillations in the United States and reduce its relevant licensing restrictions on small modular reactors.

Contention Three – Solvency

Military action is necessary-~--it shapes technology development and overcomes market failures-~--that's key to commercialization.

Andres 11 (*Richard B. – Professor of National Security Strategy at the National War College and a Senior Fellow and Energy and Environmental Security and Policy Chair in the Center for Strategic Research, Institute for National Strategic Studies, at the National Defense University, **Hanna L. Breetz – Doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Small Nuclear Reactors for Military Installations: Capabilities, Costs, and Technological Implications, Strategic Forum, National Defense University, Institute for National Strategic Studies, February 2011, http://www.ndu.edu/press/lib/pdf/StrForum/SF-262.pdf)

DoD as first Mover Thus far, this paper has reviewed two of DOD’s most pressing energy vulnerabilities—grid insecurity and fuel convoys—and explored how they could be addressed by small reactors. We acknowledge that there are many un- certainties and risks associated with these reactors. On the other hand, failing to pursue these technologies raises its own set of risks for DOD, which we review in this section: first, small reactors may fail to be commercialized in the United States; second, the designs that get locked in by the private market may not be optimal for DOD’s needs; and third, expertise on small reactors may become concentrated in foreign countries. By taking an early “first mover” role in the small reactor market, DOD could mitigate these risks and secure the long-term availability and appropriateness of these technologies for U.S. military applications. The “Valley of Death.” Given the promise that small reactors hold for military installations and mo- bility, DOD has a compelling interest in ensuring that they make the leap from paper to production. How- ever, if DOD does not provide an initial demonstration and market, there is a chance that the U.S. small reactor industry may never get off the ground. The leap from the laboratory to the marketplace is so difficult to bridge that it is widely referred to as the “Valley of Death.” Many promising technologies are never commercialized due to a variety of market failures— including technical and financial uncertainties, information asymmetries, capital market imperfections, transaction costs, and environmental and security externalities—that impede financing and early adoption and can lock innovative technologies out of the marketplace.28 In such cases, the Government can help a worthy technology to bridge the Valley of Death by accepting the first mover costs and demonstrating the technology’s scientific and economic viability.29 Historically, nuclear power has been “the most clear-cut example . . . of an important general-purpose technology that in the absence of military and defense-related procurement would not have been developed at all.”30 Government involvement is likely to be crucial for innovative, next-generation nuclear technology as well. Despite the widespread revival of interest in nu- clear energy, Daniel Ingersoll has argued that radically innovative designs face an uphill battle, as “the high capital cost of nuclear plants and the painful lessons learned during the first nuclear era have created a prevailing fear of first-of-a-kind designs.”31 In addition, Massachusetts Institute of Technology reports on the Future of Nuclear Power called for the Government to provide modest “first mover” assistance to the private sector due to several barriers that have hindered the nu- clear renaissance, such as securing high up-front costs of site-banking, gaining NRC certification for new technologies, and demonstrating technical viability.32 It is possible, of course, that small reactors will achieve commercialization without DOD assistance. As discussed above, they have garnered increasing attention in the energy community. Several analysts have even ar- gued that small reactors could play a key role in the sec- ond nuclear era, given that they may be the only reactors within the means of many U.S. utilities and developing countries.33 However, given the tremendous regulatory hurdles and technical and financial uncertainties, it appears far from certain that the U.S. small reactor industry will take off. If DOD wants to ensure that small reactors are available in the future, then it should pursue a leadership role now. Technological Lock-in. A second risk is that if small reactors do reach the market without DOD assistance, the designs that succeed may not be optimal for DOD’s applications. Due to a variety of positive feedback and increasing returns to adoption (including dem- onstration effects, technological interdependence, net- work and learning effects, and economies of scale), the designs that are initially developed can become “locked in.”34 Competing designs—even if they are superior in some respects or better for certain market segments— can face barriers to entry that lock them out of the mar- ket. If DOD wants to ensure that its preferred designs are not locked out, then it should take a first mover role on small reactors. It is far too early to gauge whether the private market and DOD have aligned interests in reactor de- signs. On one hand, Matthew Bunn and Martin Ma- lin argue that what the world needs is cheaper, safer, more secure, and more proliferation-resistant nuclear reactors; presumably, many of the same broad qualities would be favored by DOD.35 There are many varied market niches that could be filled by small reactors, because there are many different applications and set- tings in which they can be used, and it is quite pos- sible that some of those niches will be compatible with DOD’s interests.36 On the other hand, DOD may have specific needs (transportability, for instance) that would not be a high priority for any other market segment. Moreover, while DOD has unique technical and organizational capabilities that could enable it to pursue more radically innovative reactor lines, DOE has indicated that it will focus its initial small reactor deployment efforts on LWR designs.37 If DOD wants to ensure that its preferred reactors are developed and available in the future, it should take a leadership role now. Taking a first mover role does not necessarily mean that DOD would be “picking a winner” among small reactors, as the market will probably pursue multiple types of small reactors. Nevertheless, DOD leadership would likely have a profound effect on the industry’s timeline and trajectory.

Alternative financing arrangements uniquely reduces costs and spur commercial spillover.

Fitzpatrick 11 (Ryan Fitzpatrick, Senior Policy Advisor for Clean Energy at Third Way, Josh Freed, Vice President for Clean Energy at Third Way, and Mieke Eoyan, Director for National Security at Third Way, Fighting for Innovation: How DoD Can Advance CleanEnergy Technology... And Why It Has To, June 2011, content.thirdway.org/publications/414/Third_Way_Idea_Brief_-_Fighting_for_Innovation.pdf)

The DoD has over $400 billion in annual purchasing power, which means the Pentagon could provide a sizeable market for new technologies. This can increase a technology’s scale of production, bringing down costs, and making the product more likely to successfully reach commercial markets. Unfortunately, many potentially significant clean energy innovations never get to the marketplace, due to a lack of capital during the development and demonstration stages. As a result, technologies that could help the military meet its clean energy security and cost goals are being abandoned or co-opted by competetors like China before they are commercially viable here in the U.S. By focusing its purchasing power on innovative products that will help meet its energy goals, DoD can provide more secure and cost-effective energy to the military—producing tremendous long-term savings, while also bringing potentially revolutionary technologies to the public. Currently, many of these technologies are passed over during the procurement process because of higher upfront costs—even if these technologies can reduce life-cycle costs to DoD. The Department has only recently begun to consider life-cycle costs and the “fullyburdened cost of fuel” (FBCF) when making acquisition decisions. However, initial reports from within DoD suggest that the methodology for determining the actual FBCF needs to be refined and made more consistent before it can be successfully used in the acquisition process.32 The Department should fast-track this process to better maximize taxpayer dollars. Congressional appropriators— and the Congressional Budget Office—should also recognize the savings that can be achieved by procuring advanced technologies to promote DoD’s energy goals, even if these procurements come with higher upfront costs. Even if the Pentagon makes procurement of emerging clean energy technologies a higher priority, it still faces real roadblocks in developing relationships with the companies that make them. Many clean energy innovations are developed by small businesses or companies that have no previous experience working with military procurement officers. Conversely, many procurement officers do not know the clean energy sector and are not incentivized to develop relationships with emerging clean energy companies. Given the stakes in developing domestic technologies that would help reduce costs and improve mission success, the Pentagon should develop a program to encourage a better flow of information between procurement officers and clean energy companies—especially small businesses. Leverage Savings From Efficiency and Alternative Financing to Pay for Innovation. In an age of government-wide austerity and tight Pentagon budgets, current congressional appropriations are simply not sufficient to fund clean energy innovation. Until Congress decides to direct additional resources for this purpose, the Defense Department must leverage the money and other tools it already has to help develop clean energy. This can take two forms: repurposing money that was saved through energy efficiency programs for innovation and using alternative methods of financing to reduce the cost to the Pentagon of deploying clean energy. For several decades the military has made modest use alternative financing mechanisms to fund clean energy and efficiency projects when appropriated funds were insufficient. In a 2010 report, GAO found that while only 18% of renewable energy projects on DoD lands used alternative financing, these projects account for 86% of all renewable energy produced on the Department’s property.33 This indicates that alternative financing can be particularly helpful to DoD in terms of bringing larger and more expensive projects to fruition. One advanced financing tool available to DoD is the energy savings performance contract (ESPC). These agreements allow DoD to contract a private firm to make upgrades to a building or other facility that result in energy savings, reducing overall energy costs without appropriated funds. The firm finances the cost, maintenance and operation of these upgrades and recovers a profit over the life of the contract. While mobile applications consume 75% of the Department’s energy,34 DoD is only authorized to enter an ESPC for energy improvements done at stationary sites. As such, Congress should allow DoD to conduct pilot programs in which ESPCs are used to enhance mobile components like aircraft and vehicle engines. This could accelerate the needed replacement or updating of aging equipment and a significant reduction of energy with no upfront cost. To maximize the potential benefits of ESPCs, DoD should work with the Department of Energy to develop additional training and best practices to ensure that terms are carefully negotiated and provide benefits for the federal government throughout the term of the contract.35 This effort could possibly be achieved through the existing memorandum of understanding between these two departments.36 The Pentagon should also consider using any long-term savings realized by these contracts for other energy purposes, including the promotion of innovative technologies to further reduce demand or increase general energy security. In addition to ESPCs, the Pentagon also can enter into extended agreements with utilities to use DoD land to generate electricity, or for the long-term purchase of energy. These innovative financing mechanisms, known respectively as enhanced use leases (EULs) and power purchase agreements (PPAs), provide a valuable degree of certainty to third party generators. In exchange, the Department can leverage its existing resources—either its land or its purchasing power—to negotiate lower electricity rates and dedicated sources of locallyproduced power with its utility partners. DoD has unique authority among federal agencies to enter extended 30-year PPAs, but only for geothermal energy projects and only with direct approval from the Secretary of Defense. Again, limiting incentives for clean energy generation to just geothermal power inhibits the tremendous potential of other clean energy sources to help meet DoD’s energy goals. Congress should consider opening this incentive up to other forms of clean energy generation, including the production of advanced fuels. Also, given procurement officials’ lack of familiarity with these extended agreements and the cumbersome nature of such a high-level approval process, the unique authority to enter into extended 30-year PPAs is very rarely used.37 DoD should provide officials with additional policy guidance for using extended PPAs and Congress should simplify the process by allowing the secretary of each service to approve these contracts. Congress should also investigate options for encouraging regulated utility markets to permit PPA use by DoD. Finally, when entering these agreements, the Department should make every effort to promote the use of innovative and fledgling technologies in the terms of its EULs and PPAs. CON C L U S ION The Defense Department is in a unique position to foster and deploy innovation in clean energy technologies. This has two enormous benefits for our military: it will make our troops and our facilities more secure and it will reduce the amount of money the Pentagon spends on energy, freeing it up for other mission critical needs. If the right steps are taken by Congress and the Pentagon, the military will be able to put its resources to work developing technologies that will lead to a stronger fighting force, a safer nation, and a critical emerging sector of the American economy. The Defense Department has helped give birth to technologies and new economic sectors dozens of times before. For its own sake and the sake of the economy, it should make clean energy innovation its newest priority.

Regulatory reform is necessary-~--it sends a signal to investor that overcomes current barriers.

Loris 11 (Nicolas D. Loris – Research Associate in the Roe Institute, Jack Spencer – Research Fellow in Nuclear Energy in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies, Currently is The Heritage Foundation’s senior research fellow in nuclear energy policy, Previously worked on commercial, civilian and military components of nuclear energy at the Babcock and Wilcox Companies, Holds a bachelor's degree in international politics from Frostburg State University and a master's degree from the University of Limerick, A Big Future for Small Nuclear Reactors?, February 2^nd, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/02/a-big-future-for-small-nuclear-reactors)

Abstract: More and more companies—in the U.S. and abroad—are investing in new commercial nuclear enterprises, chief among them, small modular reactors (SMRs). The SMR industry is growing, with many promising developments in the works—which is precisely why the government should not interfere, as subsidies and government programs have already resulted in an inefficient system for large reactors. Heritage Foundation nuclear policy experts explain how the future for small reactors can remain bright. Small modular reactors (SMRs) have garnered significant attention in recent years, with companies of all sizes investing in these smaller, safer, and more cost-efficient nuclear reactors. Utilities are even forming partnerships with reactor designers to prepare for potential future construction. Perhaps most impressive is that most of this development is occurring without government involvement. Private investors and entrepreneurs are dedicating resources to these technologies based on their future prospects, not on government set-asides, mandates, or subsidies, and despite the current regulatory bias in favor of large light water reactors (LWRs). The result is a young, robust, innovative, and growing SMR industry. Multiple technologies are being proposed that each have their own set of characteristics based on price, fuel, waste characteristics, size, and any number of other variables. To continue this growth, policymakers should reject the temptation to offer the same sort of subsidies and government programs that have proven ineffective for large LWRs. While Department of Energy cost-sharing programs and capital subsidies seem attractive, they have yet to net any new reactor construction. Instead, policymakers should focus on the systemic issues that have continued to thwart the expansion of nuclear power in recent years. Specifically, the federal government needs to develop an efficient and predictable regulatory pathway to new reactor certification and to develop a sustainable nuclear waste management strategy. Why SMRs? Small modular reactors share many of the attractive qualities of large reactors, such as providing abundant emissions-free power, while adding new features that could make them more appropriate for certain applications, such as providing power to rural communities or for dedicated industrial use. SMRs are not yet positioned to take the place of traditional large LWRs, but they represent an important growth area for the commercial nuclear industry. Indeed, should the promise of small modular reactors be realized, the technology could transform the nuclear industry. That is because these attributes would potentially mitigate some of the financial and regulatory problems that nuclear energy has recently faced. SMRs potentially cost less (at least in up-front capital), are more mobile and multifunctional, provide competition, and can largely be produced by existing domestic infrastructure. Lower Costs Up Front. Large reactors are very expensive to license and construct and require massive up-front capital investments to begin a project. Small reactors, while providing far less power than large reactors, can be built in modules and thus be paid for over time. For example, estimates for larger reactors range from $6 billion to $10 billion and must be financed all at once. The Babcock and Wilcox Company’s modular mPower reactors, alternatively, can be purchased in increments of 125 megawatts (MW), which would allow costs to be spread out over time. Though cost estimates are not yet available for the mPower reactor, its designers have stated that they will be competitive. This should not be used as a reason to refrain from building larger, 1,000-plus MW reactors. Each utility will have its own set of variables that it must consider in choosing a reactor technology, but given that one of the primary justifications for government subsidies is that the high costs of large reactors puts unacceptable strain on utility balance sheets, an option that spreads capital outlays over time should be attractive. Safe Installation in Diverse Locations. Some designs are small enough to produce power for as few as 20,000 homes. One such reactor, Hyperion Power’s HPM (Hyperion Power Module) offers 25 MW of electricity for an advertised cost of $50 million per unit. This makes the HPM a potential power solution for isolated communities or small cities.1 The Alaskan town of Galena, for example, is planning to power its community with a small reactor designed by Toshiba, while Fairbanks is looking into a small plant constructed by Hyperion.2 In addition, Western Troy Capital Resources has stated that it will form a private corporation to provide electric power from small reactors for remote locations in Canada.3 Public utility officials in Grays Harbor, Washington, have spoken with the NuScale Power company about powering the community with eight small nuclear plants;4 and Hyperion Power has reported a high level of interest in small nuclear reactor designs from islands around the world.5 Using a small nuclear reactor could cut electricity costs in isolated areas since there would be no need for expensive transmission lines to carry power to remote locations.6 SMRs could also potentially be integrated into existing energy infrastructure. SMRs could be built into old coal plants, for instance. The reactors would replace the coal boilers and be hooked into the existing turbines and distribution lines. According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, these modifications could be completed safely since small reactors will likely be easier to control during times of malfunction.7 Multi-functionality. SMRs can be used in a variety of applications that have substantial power and heat requirements. The chemical and plastics industries and oil refineries all use massive amounts of natural gas to fuel their operations. Similarly, small reactors could produce the heat needed to extract oil from tar sands, which currently requires large amounts of natural gas. While affordable today, natural gas prices vary significantly over time, so the long-term predictable pricing that nuclear provides could be very attractive. SMRs may also provide a practical solution for desalination plants (which require large amounts of electricity) that can bring fresh water to parts of the world where such supplies are depleting.8 Perhaps most important, is that SMRs have the potential to bring power and electricity to the 1.6 billion people in the world today that have no access to electricity, and to the 2.4 billion that rely on biomass, such as wood, agricultural residue, and dung for cooking and heating.9 Competition. While competition among large nuclear-reactor technologies currently exists, small reactors will add a new dimension to nuclear-reactor competition. Multiple small technology designs are set to emerge on the market. Not only will competition among small reactors create a robust market, it will also provide an additional incentive for large reactors to improve. If smaller reactors begin to capture a share of the nuclear market and the energy market at large, it will drive innovation and ultimately lower prices for both new and existing technologies. Domestic Production. Although the nuclear industry necessarily shrank to coincide with decreased demand, much of the domestic infrastructure remains in place today and could support the expansion of small-reactor technologies. Although the industrial and intellectual base has declined over the past three decades, forging production, heavy manufacturing, specialized piping, mining, fuel services, and skilled labor could all be found in the United States. Lehigh Heavy Forge Corporation in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, could build the forges while Babcock and Wilcox could provide the heavy nuclear components, for instance. AREVA/Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding broke ground on a heavy components manufacturing facility last June.10 Further, a number of companies are expanding manufacturing, engineering, and uranium enrichment capabilities—all in the United States. If SMRs are so great, where is the construction? While some designs are closer to market introduction than others, the fact is that America’s regulatory and policy environment is not sufficient to support a robust expansion of existing nuclear technologies, much less new ones. New reactor designs are difficult to license efficiently, and the lack of a sustainable nuclear waste management policy causes significant risk to private investment. Many politicians are attempting to mitigate these market challenges by offering subsidies, such as loan guarantees. While this approach still enjoys broad support in Congress and industry, the reality is that it has not worked. Despite a lavish suite of subsidies offered in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, including loan guarantees, insurance against government delays, and production tax credits, no new reactors have been permitted, much less constructed. These subsidies are in addition to existing technology development cost-sharing programs that have been in place for years and defer significant research and development costs from industry to the taxpayer. The problem with this approach is that it ignores the larger systemic problems that create the unstable marketplace to begin with. These systemic problems generally fall into three categories: Licensing. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is ill prepared to build the regulatory framework for new reactor technologies, and no reactor can be offered commercially without an NRC license. In a September 2009 interview, former NRC chairman Dale E. Klein said that small nuclear reactors pose a dilemma for the NRC because the commission is uneasy with new and unproven technologies and feels more comfortable with large light water reactors, which have been in operation for years and has a long safety record.11 The result is that enthusiasm for building non-light-water SMRs is generally squashed at the NRC as potential customers realize that there is little chance that the NRC will permit the project within a timeframe that would promote near-term investment. So, regardless of which attributes an SMR might bring to the market, the regulatory risk is such that real progress on commercialization is difficult to attain. This then leaves large light water reactors, and to a lesser extent, small ones, as the least risky option, which pushes potential customers toward that technology, which then undermines long-term progress, competition, and innovation. Nuclear Waste Management. The lack of a sustainable nuclear waste management solution is perhaps the greatest obstacle to a broad expansion of U.S. nuclear power. The federal government has failed to meet its obligations under the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, as amended, to begin collecting nuclear waste for disposal in Yucca Mountain. The Obama Administration’s attempts to shutter the existing program to put waste in Yucca Mountain without having a backup plan has worsened the situation. This outcome was predictable because the current program is based on the flawed premise that the federal government is the appropriate entity to manage nuclear waste. Under the current system, waste producers are able to largely ignore waste management because the federal government is responsible. The key to a sustainable waste management policy is to directly connect financial responsibility for waste management to waste production. This will increase demand for more waste-efficient reactor technologies and drive innovation on waste-management technologies, such as reprocessing. Because SMRs consume fuel and produce waste differently than LWRs, they could contribute greatly to an economically efficient and sustainable nuclear waste management strategy. Government Intervention. Too many policymakers believe that Washington is equipped to guide the nuclear industry to success. So, instead of creating a stable regulatory environment where the market value of different nuclear technologies can determine their success and evolution, they choose to create programs to help industry succeed. Two recent Senate bills from the 111th Congress, the Nuclear Energy Research Initiative Improvement Act (S. 2052) and the Nuclear Power 2021 Act (S. 2812), are cases in point. Government intervention distorts the normal market processes that, if allowed to work, would yield the most efficient, cost-effective, and appropriate nuclear technologies. Instead, the federal government picks winners and losers through programs where bureaucrats and well-connected lobbyists decide which technologies are permitted, and provides capital subsidies that allow investors to ignore the systemic problems that drive risk and costs artificially high. This approach is especially detrimental to SMRs because subsidies to LWRs distort the relative benefit of other reactor designs by artificially lowering the cost and risk of a more mature technology that already dominates the marketplace. How to Fix a Broken System At the Global Nuclear Renaissance Summit on July 24, 2008, then-NRC chairman Dale Klein said that a nuclear renaissance with regard to small reactors will take “decades to unfold.”12 If Members of Congress and government agencies do not reform their current approach to nuclear energy, this will most certainly be the case. However, a new, market-based approach could lead to a different outcome. Instead of relying on the policies of the past, Congress, the Department of Energy, and the NRC should pursue a new, 21st-century model for small and alternative reactor technologies by doing the following: Reject additional loan guarantees. Loan guarantee proponents argue that high up-front costs of new large reactors make them unaffordable without loan guarantees. Presumably, then, a smaller, less expensive modular option would be very attractive to private investors even without government intervention. But loan guarantees undermine this advantage by subsidizing the capital costs and risk associated with large reactors. A small reactor industry without loan guarantees would also provide competition and downward price pressure on large light water reactors. At a minimum, Congress should limit guarantees to no more than two plants of any reactor design and limit to two-thirds the amount of any expanded loan guarantee program that can support a single technology. Such eligibility limits will prevent support from going only to a single basic technology, such as large light water reactors.13 Avoid subsidies. Subsidies do not work if the objective is a diverse and economically sustainable nuclear industry. Despite continued attempts to subsidize the nuclear industry into success, the evidence demonstrates that such efforts invariably fail. The nuclear industry’s success stories are rooted in the free market. Two examples include the efficiency and low costs of today’s existing plants, and the emergence of a private uranium enrichment industry. Government intervention is the problem, as illustrated by the government’s inability to meet its nuclear waste disposal obligations. Build expertise at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The NRC is built to regulate large light water reactors. It simply does not have the regulatory capability and resources to efficiently regulate other technologies, and building that expertise takes time. Helping the NRC to develop that expertise now would help bring new technologies into the marketplace more smoothly. Congress should direct and resource the NRC to develop additional broad expertise for liquid metal-cooled, fast reactors and high-temperature, gas-cooled reactors. With its existing expertise in light water technology, this additional expertise would position the NRC to effectively regulate an emerging SMR industry. Establish a new licensing pathway. The current licensing pathway relies on reactor customers to drive the regulatory process. But absent an efficient and predictable regulatory pathway, few customers will pursue these reactor technologies. The problem is that the legal, regulatory, and policy apparatus is built to support large light water reactors, effectively discriminating against other technologies. Establishing an alternative licensing pathway that takes the unique attributes of small reactors into consideration could help build the necessary regulatory support on which commercialization ultimately depends.14 Resolve staffing, security, construction criteria, and fee-structure issues by December 31, 2011. The similarity of U.S. reactors has meant that the NRC could establish a common fee structure and many general regulatory guidelines for areas, such as staffing levels, security requirements, and construction criteria. But these regulations are inappropriate for many SMR designs that often have smaller staff requirements, unique control room specifications, diverse security requirements, and that employ off-site construction techniques. Subjecting SMRs to regulations built for large light water reactors would add cost and result in less effective regulation. The NRC has acknowledged the need for this to be resolved and has committed to doing so, including developing the budget requirements to achieve it. It has not committed to a specific timeline.15 Congress should demand that these issues be resolved by the end of 2011.

Absent military involvement SMRs will not come to market.

Cohen 12 (Armond, Executive Director – Clean Air Task Force, DoD: A Model for Energy Innovation?, http://energy.nationaljournal.com/2012/05/powering-our-military-whats-th.php#2211477)

Recently, the Clean Air Task Force and our colleagues at The Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University, assessed the opportunities and challenges at the U.S. Department of Defense for accelerating a national and even global transition to advanced and clean energy technologies.

Building on background papers, a workshop, new research, and a previous project that articulated foundational principles for federal energy innovation policies, this report identified the sources of DoD’s success in fostering new technology that can be applied to both civilian energy innovation efforts and future defense-related energy efforts.

Unlike most other agencies, including the Energy Department, the Pentagon is the ultimate customer for the new technology it helps create, spending some $200 billion each year on RandD and procurement. The implications of DoD’s role as customer have not been widely appreciated, as:

· DoD, uniquely in government, supports multi-year, billion-dollar “end to end” innovation efforts that produce technology that is continuously tested, deployed and refined on bases and in the field, providing real world feedback that leads to increases in performance and reductions in cost. By contrast, most of the federal government’s civilian energy innovation efforts involve research loosely connected at best with the few commercialization efforts that it supports.

· DoD and its contractors know how to bring together multiple innovations to achieve system-level advances leading to big performance gains (examples range from nuclear submarines to unmanned aircraft to large-scale information systems). This systems approach is precisely what is needed to advance clean energy technologies.

· Relatively stable, multi-year funding allows the Pentagon to pursue “long cycle” innovation that is necessary for large, capital- intensive technologies and supports a highly capable contractor base that can respond to changing national security demands.

· The Pentagon’s scope and budget has allowed it to experiment with new and creative innovation tools such as the well-known Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, which has produced extraordinary technological breakthroughs; and the Environmental Security Technology Certification Program, which develops and demonstrates cost-effective improvements in environmental and energy technologies for military installations and equipment.

· Because of DoD’s size and demands for performance and reliability, it is unique among government and private sector organizations as a demonstration test-bed. Smart-grid technologies and advanced energy management systems for buildings are already poised to benefit from this aspect of the Pentagon’s innovation system.

· DoD has collaborated effectively with other federal agencies, including the Department of Energy and its predecessors (for example, to advance nuclear energy technologies). Continuing competition and cooperation between DoD and DOE will spur energy innovation.

DoD’s innovation capabilities can enhance U.S. national security, improve U.S. international competitiveness, and spur global energy restructuring and greenhouse gas emissions reductions.

At the same time, while providing enormous opportunities to develop and test energy efficiency technologies and small scale distributed energy appropriate to forward bases, the Pentagon is unlikely to become an all-purpose hub for advancing all categories of clean-energy technologies, because its energy innovation activities will be sustainable only where they can support the nation’s defense capabilities.

Therefore, many other large-scale technologies that are of great importance to improving the environment, such as carbon-free central station generation or zero carbon transportation, may not as easily fit with DoD’s mission. Possible exceptions might include small modular nuclear reactors that can be used for producing independent, non-grid power at military bases, or, conceivably, zero-carbon liquid fuels other than anything resembling current generation biofuels.

In any case, the challenge for military-led energy innovation is to further define and delineate avenues for improved clean-energy performance that are linked to the national strategic mission. History shows that when such linkages are strong, DoD’s innovation capabilities are second to none.

But perhaps the more important lesson from this work is that a serious American program of civilian energy innovation could profitably look to Pentagon history for clues about how to succeed. Stable and significant funding; “end to end” thinking on long innovation cycles; procurement of advanced energy technology at commercial scale as well as research and testing; and institutional experimentation and diversity using multiple institutional channels – these have been important reasons that the United States has the most lethal and effective military arsenal in world history. If we’re serious about maintaining American superiority in the energy technology domain, some of this “defense innovation DNA” needs to be replicated or adapted to meet the challenge.

Funding for SMRs now

HSNW 9/26—Homeland Security News Wire September 26, 2012, “DOE promotes small-nuclear reactors (SMRs)” http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/dr20120926-doe-promotes-smallnuclear-reactors-smrs

South Carolina’s Savannah River Site (SRS) located in Aiken, along with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), have announced three partnerships to develop three small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) at the SRS facility; SMRs produce less energy than a regular reactor, but they produce enough energy to power small cities and remote areas

South Carolina’s Savannah River Site (SRS) located in Aiken, along with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), have announced three partnerships to develop three small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) at the SRS facility.

The DOE released a statement saying the agreement “will help leverage Savannah River’s land assets, energy facilities and nuclear expertise to support potential private sector development, testing and licensing of prototype SMR technologies.”

Helen Belecan, DOE’s deputy assistant manager for infrastructure and environmental stewardship at the SRS facility, told Government Technology the goal of the reactors are “to apply the nuclear knowledge and expertise that we have from over 60 years of supporting the nation in its defense-type operation in nuclear material production and help these companies develop the technology and manufacturing capability in the United States so that the United States can take on a leadership role in the manufacturing of these small modular reactors.”

DOE will focus on the advancing SMRs in the United States. $450 million “will be made available to support first-of its kind engineering, design decertification and licensing for up to two SMR designs over five years, subject to congressional appropriations,” DOE says.

Proposals for funding were received in May and are being reviewed to see which proposal will meet the standards of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The DOE plans to announce the recipients later this year.

A SMR is about one-third the size of a regular nuclear reactor and is built at a fraction of the cost. A traditional single-unit nuclear reactor costs roughly $8 billion dollars to build and that number jumps to $14 billion for twin reactors. SMRs produce less energy than a regular reactor, but they produce enough energy to power small cities and remote areas.

Thomas Sander, an associate laboratory director for the Clean Energy Imitative and the Savannah River National Laboratory, told Government Technology the first SMR will cost almost $1 billion, but the price will drop down the line.

“If you are talking about the 100th, my expectation is that cost is going to be reduced significantly as a result of advance factory manufacturing and just a learning process and the licensing process.”

 “If you are going after the old coal replacement market, you are looking at 150 to 200 megawatts on average,” Sander said, “but if you are looking at the Alaskan market for small cities or island market or export market for developing countries, you are talking 45 to 100 megawatts.”

The DOE is beginning to sign off on SMR’s for nuclear energy technology, and the government has began to approve projects around the country. DOE spokeswoman Niketa Kumar told Government Technology these new projects will allow the U.S. to compete with other countries in nuclear energy.

Tournament: Harvard | Round: 4 | Opponent: Minnesota SS | Judge: 

Financial incentives induce production using cash – that includes power purchasing

Webb 93 – lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa (Kernaghan, “Thumbs, Fingers, and Pushing on String: Legal Accountability in the Use of Federal Financial Incentives”, 31 Alta. L. Rev. 501 (1993) Hein Online)

One of the obstacles to intelligent discussion of this topic is the tremendous potential for confusion about what is meant by several of the key terms involved.  In the hopes of contributing to the development of a consistent and precise vocabulary applying to this important but understudied area of regulatory activity, various terms are defined below.

In this paper, "financial incentives" are taken to mean disbursements 18 of public funds or contingent commitments to individuals and organizations, intended to encourage, support or induce certain behaviors in accordance with express public policy objectives. They take the form of grants, contributions, repayable contributions, loans, loan guarantees and insurance, subsidies, procurement contracts and tax expenditures.19 Needless to say, the ability of government to achieve desired behavior may vary with the type of incentive in use: up-front disbursements of funds (such as with contributions and procurement contracts) may put government in a better position to dictate the terms upon which assistance is provided than contingent disbursements such as loan guarantees and insurance. In some cases, the incentive aspects of the funding come from the conditions attached to use of the monies.20 In others, the mere existence of a program providing financial assistance for a particular activity (eg. low interest loans for a nuclear power plant, or a pulp mill) may be taken as government approval of that activity, and in that sense, an incentive to encourage that type of activity has been created.21 Given the wide variety of incentive types, it will not be possible in a paper of this length to provide anything more than a cursory discussion of some of the main incentives used.22 And, needless to say, the comments made herein concerning accountability apply to differing degrees depending upon the type of incentive under consideration.

By limiting the definition of financial incentives to initiatives where public funds are either disbursed or contingently committed, a large number of regulatory programs with incentive effects which exist, but in which no money is forthcoming, 23 are excluded from direct examination in this paper. Such programs might be referred to as indirect incentives. Through elimination of indirect incentives from the scope of discussion, the definition of the incentive instrument becomes both more manageable and more particular. Nevertheless, it is possible that much of the approach taken here may be usefully applied to these types of indirect incentives as well.24 Also excluded from discussion here are social assistance programs such as welfare and ad hoc industry bailout initiatives because such programs are not designed primarily to encourage behaviors in furtherance of specific public policy objectives. In effect, these programs are assistance, but they are not incentives.

For means in support of

Cambridge Dictionary, 2k

 Cambridge University Press p.334

For – prep. Intended to be given to; having to purpose of because of, as a result of (doing something); instead of, to help; considering (something or someone with reference to things or people as the usually are); in support or relation to (someone or something); in support of or agreement with

Precision – our definition’s from the DoE

Waxman 98 – Solicitor General of the US (Seth, Brief for the United States in Opposition for the US Supreme Court case HARBERT/LUMMUS AGRIFUELS PROJECTS, ET AL., PETITIONERS v. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, http://www.justice.gov/osg/briefs/1998/0responses/98-0697.resp.opp.pdf)

2  On November 15, 1986, Keefe was delegated “the authority, with respect to actions valued at $50 million or less, to approve, execute, enter into, modify, administer, closeout, terminate and take any other necessary and appropriate action (collectively, ‘Actions’) with respect to Financial Incentive awards.” Pet. App. 68, 111-112. Citing DOE Order No. 5700.5 (Jan. 12, 1981), the delegation defines “Financial Incentives” as the authorized financial incentive programs of DOE, “including direct loans, loan guarantees, purchase agreements, price supports, guaranteed market agreements and any others which may evolve.” The delegation proceeds to state, “however, a separate prior written approval of any such action must be given by or concurred in by Keefe to accompany the action.” The delegation also states that its exercise “shall be governed by the rules and regulations of DOE and policies and procedures prescribed by the Secretary or his delegate(s).” Pet. App. 111-113.

No limits explosion – we agree to buy power from SMR’s, not the reactors themselves – solves their weapons laundry list

We are the topic - money for energy! Arbitrarily excluding one mechanism is unpredictable

Aff ground-last year proves weak mechanisms stink and only purchasing can defeat states

Reasonability – competing interpretations causes a race to the bottom – over incentivizes going for T.

Not extra topical -~-- gives them more ground.

Uq is a crush – 90% of the field is already reading one mechanism for one-energy source.

Tournament: Harvard | Round: 4 | Opponent: Minnesota SS | Judge: 

Util outweighs ethics impact.

Dan W. Brock, Professor of Philosophy and Biomedical Ethics at Brown University, 1987 (“Truth or Consequences: The Role of Philosophers in Policy-Making," Ethics, Volume 97, July, Available Online via JSTOR, p. 787)

When philosophers become more or less direct participants in the policy-making process and so are no longer academics just hoping that an occasional policymaker might read their scholarly journal articles, this scholarly virtue of the unconstrained search for the truth—all assumptions open to question and follow the arguments wherever they lead—comes under a variety of related pressures.  What arises is an intellectual variant of the political problem of "dirty hands" that those who hold political power often face.  I emphasize that I do not conceive of the problem as one of pure, untainted philosophers being corrupted by the dirty business of politics.  My point is rather that the different goals of academic scholarship and public policy call in turn for different virtues and behavior in their practitioners. Philosophers who steadfastly maintain their academic ways in the public policy setting are not to be admired as islands of integrity in a sea of messy political compromise and corruption. Instead, I believe that if philosophers maintain the academic virtues there they will not only find themselves often ineffective but will as well often fail in their responsibilities and act wrongly. Why is this so? The central point of conflict is that the first concern of those responsible for public policy is, and ought to be, the consequences of their actions for public policy and the persons that those policies affect. This is not to say that they should not be concerned with the moral evaluation of those consequences—they should; nor that they must be moral consequentialists in the evaluation of the policy, and in turn human, consequences of their actions—whether some form of consequentialism is an adequate moral theory is another matter. But it is to say that persons who directly participate in the formation of public policy would be irresponsible if they did not focus their concern on how their actions will affect policy and how that policy will in turn affect people. The virtues of academic research and scholarship that consist in an unconstrained search for truth, whatever the consequences, reflect not only the different goals of scholarly work but also the fact that the effects of the scholarly endeavor on the public are less direct, and are mediated more by other institutions and events, than are those of the public policy process.  It is in part the very impotence in terms of major, direct effects on people's lives of most academic scholarship that makes it morally acceptable not to worry much about the social consequences of that scholarship.  When philosophers move into the policy domain, they must shift their primary commitment from knowledge and truth to the policy consequences of what they do.  And if they are not prepared to do this, why did they enter the public domain?  What are they doing there?

The alt kills missions and causes global conflict -~-- we cannot turn of capitalism.

Barnhizer 6 — David R. Barnhizer, Emeritus Professor at Cleveland State University’s Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, 2006 (“Waking from Sustainability's "Impossible Dream": The Decisionmaking Realities of Business and Government,” Georgetown International Environmental Law Review (18 Geo. Int'l Envtl. L. Rev. 595), Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)

The scale of social needs, including the need for expanded productive activity, has grown so large that it cannot be shut off at all, and certainly not abruptly. It cannot even be ratcheted down in any significant fashion without producing serious harms to human societies and hundreds of millions of people. Even if it were possible to shift back to systems of local self-sufficiency, the consequences of the transition process would be catastrophic for many people and even deadly to the point of continual conflict, resource wars, increased poverty, and strife. What are needed are concrete, workable, and pragmatic strategies that produce effective and intelligently designed economic activity in specific contexts and, while seeking efficiency and conservation, place economic and social justice high on a list of priorities. n60

The imperative of economic growth applies not only to the needs and expectations of people in economically developed societies but also to people living in nations that are currently economically underdeveloped. Opportunities must be created, jobs must be generated in huge numbers, and economic resources expanded to address the tragedies of poverty and inequality. Unfortunately, natural systems must be exploited to achieve this; we cannot return to Eden. The question is not how to achieve a static state but how to achieve what is needed to advance social justice while avoiding and mitigating the most destructive consequences of our behavior.

Capitalism is not the root cause of war.

Dandeker 92 — Christopher Dandeker, Professor of Military Sociology in the Department of War Studies at King's College London, 1992 (“The Causes of War and the History of Modern Sociological Theory,” Effects of War on Society, Edited by Giorgio Ausenda, Published by the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Social Stress by Boydell and Brewer Ltd, ISBN 0851158684, 1st Edition Published in 1992, 2nd Edition Published in 2002, p. 44-45)

All these arguments presuppose two specious sociological contentions: first that capitalism, as the most historically developed and dynamic form of class exploitation, is the source of modern militarism, and second, that socialism, preferably on a world scale would involve the abolition of war. The deficiencies in these views, and indeed of those associated with the industrial society thesis discussed earlier, can be revealed by drawing on Machiavellian themes which can then be set out more explicitly in the next section.

Despite the fact that industrial capitalism has produced two world wars, as Aron (1954) and more recently Michael Mann (1984) have argued, there is no 'special relationship' between capitalism and militarism—or the tendency to war—only one of historical indifference. All the pre-dispositions of 'capitalist states' to use warfare calculatively as a means of resolving their disputes with other states predate the formation of capitalism as an economic system. Of course, it could be argued that capitalism merely changes the form of militarism. That is to say, pre-capitalist patterns of militarism were still expressions of class relations and modern capitalism has just increased the destructive power of the industrialised means of war available to the state. But this argument will not do. Socialist societies in their use of industrialised power show that the technological potential for war is transferable and can be reproduced under non-capitalist conditions. Furthermore, the military activities of socialist states cannot be explained in terms of a end page 44 defensive war against capitalism or even an aggressive one, as national and geopolitical power motives are arguably just as significant in the determination of state behaviour. Furthermore, imperial expansion not only predates capitalism but it is also difficult to reduce the causes of wars then and now to the interests of dominant economic classes (Mann 1984:25-46).

Growth is necessary for environmental transition—resource access.

Ben-Ami 11 — Daniel Ben-Ami, journalist and author, regular contributor to spiked, has been published in the American, the Australian, Economist.com, Financial Times, the Guardian, the Independent, Novo (Germany), Ode (American and Dutch editions), Prospect, Shanghai Daily, the Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Times, and Voltaire (Sweden), 2011 (“Growth is good,” Ode, June, Available Online at http://www.odemagazine.com/doc/print/75/growth-is-good, Accessed 08-16-2011)

But is this notion of environmental limits really true? It is certainly the case that, say, building a factory can lead to pollution. However, it is also true that economic growth can generate the resources to clean up the environment and mold it to benefit human beings. That is why, as a general rule, developed countries are less polluted and cleaner than developing ones.

Typically, countries experience an environmental transition as they develop. In the early stages, cities may be grossly unsanitary and factories might billow filthy smoke. But as they become richer, these cities clean things up. In London, my hometown, cholera was widespread in the mid-19th century as raw human waste flowed into the Thames River. Then the authorities built an extensive sewage system, a pioneering civil engineering project at the time, and the problem was solved.

If anything, today’s developing countries potentially have it easier. They do not need to reinvent sewage systems or modern medicine. Instead, they just need to generate the resources to be able to afford the type of infrastructure already available in the West.

Psychoanalysis can’t explain international politics

Sharpe 10  (Matthew and Geoff, lecturer, philosophy and psychoanalytic studies, and Goucher, senior lecturer, literary and psychoanalytic studies – Deakin University, Žižek and Politics: An Introduction, p. 182 – 185, Figure 1.5 included)

Can we bring some order to this host of criticisms? It is remarkable that, for all the criticisms of Žižek’s political Romanticism, no one has argued that the ultra- extremism of Žižek’s political position might reflect his untenable attempt to shape his model for political action on the curative final moment in clinical psychoanalysis. The differences between these two realms, listed in Figure 5.1, are nearly too many and too great to restate – which has perhaps caused the theoretical oversight. The key thing is this. Lacan’s notion of traversing the fantasy involves the radical transformation of people’s subjective structure: a refounding of their most elementary beliefs about themselves, the world, and sexual difference. This is undertaken in the security of the clinic, on the basis of the analysands’ voluntary desire to overcome their inhibitions, symptoms and anxieties.

As a clinical and existential process, it has its own independent importance and authenticity. The analysands, in transforming their subjective world, change the way they regard the objective, shared social reality outside the clinic. But they do not transform the world. The political relevance of the clinic can only be (a) as a supporting moment in ideology critique or (b) as a fully- fl edged model of politics, provided that the political subject and its social object are ultimately identical. Option (b), Žižek’s option, rests on the idea, not only of a subject who becomes who he is only through his (mis) recognition of the objective sociopolitical order, but whose ‘traversal of the fantasy’ is immediately identical with his transformation of the socio- political system or Other. Hence, according to Žižek, we can analyse the institutional embodiments of this Other using psychoanalytic categories. In Chapter 4, we saw Žižek’s resulting elision of the distinction between the (subjective) Ego Ideal and the (objective) Symbolic Order. This leads him to analyse our entire culture as a single subject–object, whose perverse (or perhaps even psychotic) structure is expressed in every manifestation of contemporary life. Žižek’s decisive political- theoretic errors, one substantive and the other methodological, are different (see Figure 5.1)

The substantive problem is to equate any political change worth the name with the total change of the subject–object that is, today, global capitalism. This is a type of change that can only mean equating politics with violent regime change, and ultimately embracing dictatorial government, as Žižek now frankly avows (IDLC 412–19). We have seen that the ultra- political form of Žižek’s criticism of everyone else, the theoretical Left and the wider politics, is that no one is sufficiently radical for him – even, we will discover, Chairman Mao. We now see that this is because Žižek’s model of politics proper is modelled on a pre- critical analogy with the total transformation of a subject’s entire subjective structure, at the end of the talking cure. For what could the concrete consequences of this governing analogy be?

We have seen that Žižek equates the individual fantasy with the collective identity of an entire people. The social fantasy, he says, structures the regime’s ‘inherent transgressions’: at once subjects’ habitual ways of living the letter of the law, and the regime’s myths of origin and of identity. If political action is modelled on the Lacanian cure, it must involve the complete ‘traversal’ – in Hegel’s terms, the abstract versus the determinate negation – of all these lived myths, practices and habits. Politics must involve the periodic founding of

entire new subject–objects. Providing the model for this set of ideas, the fi rst Žižekian political subject was Schelling’s divided God, who gave birth to the entire Symbolic Order before the beginning of time (IDLC 153; OB 144–8).

But can the political theorist reasonably hope or expect that subjects will simply give up on all their inherited ways, myths and beliefs, all in one world- creating moment? And can they be legitimately asked or expected to, on the basis of a set of ideals whose legitimacy they will only retrospectively see, after they have acceded to the Great Leap Forward? And if they do not – for Žižek laments that today subjects are politically disengaged in unprecedented ways – what means can the theorist and his allies use to move them to do so?

No empirical basis for applying psychology to state action

Epstein 10 (Charolotte, senior lecturer in government and IR – University of Sydney,“Who speaks? Discourse, the subject and the study of identity in international politics,” European Journal of International Relations XX(X) 1–24)

One key advantage of the Wendtian move, granted even by his critics (see Flockhart, 2006), is that it simply does away with the level-of-analysis problem altogether. If states really are persons, then we can apply everything we know about people to understand how they behave. The study of individual identity is not only theoretically justified but it is warranted. This cohesive self borrowed from social psychology is what allows Wendt to bridge the different levels of analysis and travel between the self of the individual and that of the state, by way of a third term, ‘group self’, which is simply an aggregate of individual selves. Thus for Wendt (1999: 225) ‘the state is simply a “group Self” capable of group level cognition’. Yet that the individual possesses a self does not logically entail that the state possesses one too. It is in this leap, from the individual to the state, that IR’s fallacy of composition surfaces most clearly.

Moving beyond Wendt but maintaining the psychological self as the basis for theorizing the state

Wendt’s bold ontological claim is far from having attracted unanimous support (see nota­bly, Flockhart, 2006; Jackson, 2004; Neumann, 2004; Schiff, 2008; Wight, 2004). One line of critique of the states-as-persons thesis has taken shape around the resort to psy­chological theories, specifically, around the respective merits of Identity Theory (Wendt) and SIT (Flockhart, 2006; Greenhill, 2008; Mercer, 2005) for understanding state behav­iour.9 Importantly for my argument, that the state has a self, and that this self is pre-social, remains unquestioned in this further entrenching of the psychological turn. Instead questions have revolved around how this pre-social self (Wendt’s ‘Ego’) behaves once it encounters the other (Alter): whether, at that point (and not before), it takes on roles prescribed by pre-existing cultures (whether Hobbessian, Lockean or Kantian) or whether instead other, less culturally specific, dynamics rooted in more universally human char­acteristics better explain state interactions. SIT in particular emphasizes the individual’s basic need to belong, and it highlights the dynamics of in-/out-group categorizations as a key determinant of behaviour (Billig, 2004). SIT seems to have attracted increasing interest from IR scholars, interestingly, for both critiquing (Greenhill, 2008; Mercer, 1995) and rescuing constructivism (Flockhart, 2006).

For Trine Flockart (2006: 89–91), SIT can provide constructivism with a different basis for developing a theory of agency that steers clear of the states-as-persons thesis while filling an important gap in the socialization literature, which has tended to focus on norms rather than the actors adopting them. She shows that a state’s adherence to a new norm is best understood as the act of joining a group that shares a set of norms and val­ues, for example the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). What SIT draws out are the benefits that accrue to the actor from belonging to a group, namely increased self-esteem and a clear cognitive map for categorizing other states as ‘in-’ or ‘out-group’ members and, from there, for orientating states’ self–other relationships.

Whilst coming at it from a stance explicitly critical of constructivism, for Jonathan Mercer (2005: 1995) the use of psychology remains key to correcting the systematic evacuation of the role of emotion and other ‘non-rational’ phenomena in rational choice and behaviourist analyses, which has significantly impaired the understanding of inter­national politics. SIT serves to draw out the emotional component of some of the key drivers of international politics, such as trust, reputation and even choice (Mercer, 2005: 90–95; see also Mercer, 1995). Brian Greenhill (2008) for his part uses SIT amongst a broader array of psychological theories to analyse the phenomenon of self–other recog­nition and, from there, to take issue with the late Wendtian assumption that mutual recognition can provide an adequate basis for the formation of a collective identity amongst states.

The main problem with this psychological turn is the very utilitarian, almost mecha­nistic, approach to non-rational phenomena it proposes, which tends to evacuate the role of meaning. In other words, it further shores up the pre-social dimension of the concept of self///

 that is at issue here. Indeed norms (Flockhart, 2006), emotions (Mercer, 2005) and recognition (Greenhill, 2008) are hardly appraised as symbolic phenomena. In fact, in the dynamics of in- versus out-group categorization emphasized by SIT, language counts for very little. Significantly, in the design of the original experiments upon which this approach was founded (Tajfel, 1978), whether two group members communicate at all, let alone share the same language, is non-pertinent. It is enough that two individuals should know (say because they have been told so in their respec­tive languages for the purposes of the experiment) that they belong to the same group for them to favour one another over a third individual. The primary determinant of individual behaviour thus emphasized is a pre-verbal, primordial desire to belong, which seems closer to pack animal behaviour than to anything distinctly human. What the group stands for, what specific set of meanings and values binds it together, is unimportant. What matters primarily is that the group is valued positively, since posi­tive valuation is what returns accrued self-esteem to the individual. In IR Jonathan Mercer’s (2005) account of the relationship between identity, emotion and behaviour reads more like a series of buttons mechanically pushed in a sequence of the sort: posi­tive identification produces emotion (such as trust), which in turn generates specific patterns of in-/out-group discrimination.

Similarly, Trine Flockhart (2006: 96) approaches the socializee’s ‘desire to belong’ in terms of the psychological (and ultimately social) benefits and the feel-good factor that accrues from increased self-esteem. At the far opposite of Lacan, the concept of desire here is reduced to a Benthamite type of pleasure- or utility-maximization where mean­ing is nowhere to be seen. More telling still is the need to downplay the role of the Other in justifying her initial resort to SIT. For Flockhart (2006: 94), in a post-Cold War con­text, ‘identities cannot be constructed purely in relation to the “Other”’. Perhaps so; but not if what ‘the other’ refers to is the generic, dynamic scheme undergirding the very concept of identity. At issue here is the confusion between the reference to a specific other, for which Lacan coined the concept of le petit autre, and the reference to l’Autre, or Other, which is that symbolic instance that is essential to the making of all selves. As such it is not clear what meaning Flockhart’s (2006: 94) capitalization of the ‘Other’ actually holds.

The individual self as a proxy for the state’s self

Another way in which the concept of self has been centrally involved in circumventing the level-of-analysis problem in IR has been to treat the self of the individual as a proxy for the self of the state. The literature on norms in particular has highlighted the role of individuals in orchestrating norm shifts, in both the positions of socializer (norm entre­preneurs) and socializee. It has shown for example how some state leaders are more sus­ceptible than others to concerns about reputation and legitimacy and thus more amenable to being convinced of the need to adopt a new norm, of human rights or democratization, for example (Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998; Keck and Sikkink, 1998; Risse, 2001). It is these specific psychological qualities pertaining to their selves (for example, those of Gorbachev; Risse, 2001) that ultimately enable the norm shift to occur. Once again the individual self ultimately remains the basis for explaining the change in state behaviour.

To summarize the points made so far, whether the state is literally considered as a person by ontological overreach, whether so only by analogy, or whether the person stands as a proxy for the state, the ‘self’ of that person has been consistently taken as the reference point for studying state identities. Both in Wendt’s states-as-persons thesis, and in the broader psychological turn within constructivism and beyond, the debate has con­sistently revolved around the need to evaluate which of the essentialist assumptions about human nature are the most useful for explaining state behaviour. It has never ques­tioned the validity of starting from these assumptions in the first place. That is, what is left unexamined is this assumption is that what works for individuals will work for states too. This is IR’s central fallacy of composition, by which it has persistently eschewed rather than resolved the level-of-analysis problem. Indeed, in the absence of a clear dem­onstration of a logical identity (of the type A=A) between states and individuals, the assumption that individual interactions will explain what states do rests on little more than a leap of faith, or indeed an analogy.

Tournament: Harvard | Round: 6 | Opponent: Northwestern HM | Judge: 

CP leads to more vulnerability

Mo et al 12 (Yilin Mo received the Bachelor of Engineering degree from Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 2007. He is currently working towards the Ph.D. degree at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Carnegie Mellon University, Tiffany Hyun-Jin Kim received the B.A. degree in computer science from University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, in 2002 and the M.S. degree in computer science from Yale University, New Haven, CT, in 2004. She is currently working towards the Ph.D. degree at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Carnegie Mellon University, Kenneth Brancik completed a rigorous one year program in systems analysis at the former Grumman Data Information Systems in 1984 and an intensive two year program at Columbia University in the analysis and design of information systems in 1997. He received the M.S. degree in management and systems from New York University (NYU), New York, in 2002 and the Ph.D. degree in computing from Pace University, Dona Dickinson received the B.A. degree in industrial psychology from California State University, Heejo Lee received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in computer science and engineering from POSTECH, Pohang, Korea, Adrian Perrig received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University, Bruno Sinopoli received the Dr. Eng. degree from the University of Padova, Padova, Italy, in 1998 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, “Cyber–Physical Security of a Smart Grid Infrastructure” “Proceedings of the IEEE” January 2012, Vol. 100, No. 1)

A wide variety of motivations exist for launching an attack on the power grid, ranging from economic reasons (e.g., reducing electricity bills), to pranks, and all the way to terrorism (e.g., threatening people by controlling electricity and other life-critical resources). The emerging smart grid, while benefiting the benign participants (consumers, utility companies), also provides powerful tools for adversaries. The smart grid will reach every house and building, giving potential attackers easy access to some of the grid components. While incorporating information technology (IT) systems and networks, the smart grid will be exposed to a wide range of security threats 5. Its large scale also makes it nearly impossible to guarantee security for every single subsystem. Furthermore, the smart grid will be not only large but also very complex. It needs to connect different systems and networks, from generation facilities and distribution equipment to intelligent end points and communication networks, which are possibly deregulated and owned by several entities. It can be expected that the heterogeneity, diversity, and complexity of smart grid components may introduce new vulnerabilities, in addition to the common ones in interconnected networks and stand-alone microgrids 3. To make the situation even worse, the sophisticated control, estimation, and pricing algorithms incorporated in the grid may also create additional vulnerabilities. The first-ever control system malware called Stuxnet was found in July 2010. This malware, targeting vulnerable SCADA systems, raises new questions about power grid security 6. SCADA systems are currently isolated, preventing external access. Malware, however, can spread using USB drives and can be specifically crafted to sabotage SCADA systems that control electric grids. Furthermore, increasingly interconnected smart grids will unfortunately provide external access which in turn can lead to compromise and infection of components.

Effective regulation key.

Wallace and Williams 12 (Michael – Comes to CSIS from Constellation Energy, where he served as vice chairman and COO. During his nine years at Constellation Energy, he led many company business activities, including the formation and operation of two joint ventures with EDF related to nuclear energy. Prior to joining Constellation Energy, he was cofounder and managing director of Barrington Energy Partners, LLC, a strategic consulting firm specializing in energy industry transactions and advisory services. Before joining Barrington Energy, he had more than 25 years of senior executive and utility operations experience. He holds a B.S. in electrical engineering from Marquette University and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago, with a specialization in finance. He also served as a naval officer in the U.S. Navy nuclear submarine force. Member of the National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC), which advises the president on matters related to homeland security. He is also a member of the Nuclear Sector Coordinating Council under the Department of Homeland Security’s National Infrastructure Protection Plan and a member of Business Executives for National Security (BENS), the Naval Historical Foundation Advisory Council, and the Marquette University College of Engineering National Advisory Council, Sarah Williams – program coordinator and research associate in the U.S. Nuclear Energy Project at CSIS. Prior to joining CSIS, she was a Herbert Scoville Jr. peace fellow and program coordinator at the Center for Science, Technology and Security Policy at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She holds an M.A. in global policy studies from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in Austin and a B.A. in political science from the University of Maryland, Nuclear Energy in America: Preventing its Early Demise, http://csis.org/publication/nuclear-energy-america-preventing-its-early-demise)

America’s nuclear energy industry is in decline. Low natural gas prices, financing hurdles, new safety and security requirements, failure to resolve the waste issue and other factors are hastening the day when existing reactors become uneconomic, making it virtually impossible to build new ones.

Two generations after the United States took this wholly new and highly sophisticated technology from laboratory experiment to successful commercialization, our nation is in danger of losing an industry of unique strategic importance, unique potential for misuse, and unique promise for addressing the environmental and energy security demands of the future.

The pace of this decline, moreover, could be more rapid than most policymakers and stakeholders anticipate. With 104 operating reactors and the world’s largest base of installed nuclear capacity, it has been widely assumed that the United States—even without building many new plants—would continue to have a large presence in this industry for some decades to come, especially if existing units receive further license extensions. Instead, current market conditions are such that growing numbers of these units are operating on small or even negative profit margins and could be retired early.

Meanwhile, China, India, Russia, and other countries are looking to significantly expand their nuclear energy commitments. By 2016, China could have 50 nuclear power plants in operation, compared with only 14 in 2011. India could add 8 new plants and Russia 10 in the same time frame. These trends are expected to accelerate out to 2030, by which time China, India, and Russia could account for nearly 40 percent of global nuclear generating capacity.

Meanwhile, several smaller nations, mostly in Asia and the Middle East, are planning to get into the nuclear energy business for the first time. In all, as many as 15 new nations could have this technology within the next two decades. Meanwhile, America’s share of global nuclear generation is expected to shrink, from about 25 percent today to about 14 percent in 2030, and—if current trends continue—to less than 10 percent by mid-century.

With the center of gravity for global nuclear investment shifting to a new set of players, the United States and the international community face a difficult set of challenges: stemming the spread of nuclear weapons-usable materials and know-how; preventing further catastrophic nuclear accidents; providing for safe, long-term nuclear waste management; and protecting U.S. energy security and economic competitiveness.

In this context, federal action to reverse the American nuclear industry’s impending decline is a national security imperative. The United States cannot afford to become irrelevant in a new nuclear age.

Our nation’s commercial nuclear industry, its military nuclear capabilities, and its strong regulatory institutions can be seen as three legs of a stool. All three legs are needed to support America’s future prosperity and security and to shape an international environment that is conducive to our long-term interests. Three specific aspects of U.S. leadership are particularly important.

First, managing the national and global security risks associated with the spread of nuclear technology to countries that don’t necessarily share the same perspective on issues of nonproliferation and nuclear security or may lack the resources to implement effective safeguards in this area. An approach that relies on influence and involvement through a viable domestic industry is likely to be more effective and less expensive than trying to contain these risks militarily.

Second, setting global norms and standards for safety, security, operations, and emergency response. As the world learned with past nuclear accidents and more recently with Fukushima, a major accident anywhere can have lasting repercussions everywhere. As with nonproliferation and security, America’s ability to exert leadership and influence in this area is directly linked to the strength of our domestic industry and our active involvement in the global nuclear enterprise. A strong domestic civilian industry and regulatory structure have immediate national security significance in that they help support the nuclear capabilities of the U.S. Navy, national laboratories, weapons complex, and research institutions.

Third, in the past, the U.S. government could exert influence by striking export agreements with countries whose regulatory and legal frameworks reflected and were consistent with our own nonproliferation standards and commitments. At the same time, our nation set the global standard for effective, independent safety regulation (in the form of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission), led international efforts to reduce proliferation risks (through the 1970 NPT Treaty and other initiatives), and provided a model for industry self-regulation.

The results were not perfect, but America’s institutional support for global nonproliferation goals and the regulatory behaviors it modeled clearly helped shape the way nuclear technology was adopted and used elsewhere around the world. This influence seems certain to wane if the United States is no longer a major supplier or user of nuclear technology. With existing nonproliferation and safety and security regimes looking increasingly inadequate in this rapidly changing global nuclear landscape, American leadership and leverage is more important and more central to our national security interests than ever.

To maintain its leadership role in the development, design, and operation of a growing global nuclear energy infrastructure, the next administration, whether Democrat or Republican, must recognize the invaluable role played by the commercial U.S. nuclear industry and take action to prevent its early demise.

Tournament: Harvard | Round: 6 | Opponent: Northwestern HM | Judge: 

Alternative financing doesn’t spend cash up-front

DOE 11 “Funding Federal Energy and Water Projects”, July, http:~/~/www.nrel.gov/docs/fy11osti/52085.pdf

On-site renewable PPAs allow Federal agencies to fund on-site renewable energy projects with no upfront capital costs incurred. A developer installs a renewable energy system on agency property under an agreement that the agency will purchase the power generated by the system. The agency pays for the system through these power purchase payments over the life of the contract. After installation, the developer owns, operates, and maintains the system for the life of the contract. The PPA price is typically determined through a competitive procurement process.

Doesn’t spend appropriations

GAO 8 “Federal Energy Management: Addressing Challenges through Better Plans and Clarifying the  Greenhouse Gas Emission Measure Will Help Meet Long-term Goals for Buildings”, September, http:~/~/www.gao.gov/assets/290/282358.html

Constrained Budgets Limit Agencies' Ability to Undertake Energy Projects, and Agencies Are Turning to Alternative Financing: Meeting long-term energy goals will require major initial capital investment. According to DOE, to meet the energy goals under E.O. 13423, the federal government would have to invest approximately $1.1 billion annually (beginning in fiscal year 2008, based on fiscal year 2007 performance) through 2015 on energy-related projects. In addition, in June 2007, ASE reported that meeting federal energy goals will require an investment of approximately $11 billion from 2009 through 2015, or $1.5 billion annually.Footnote 23 Paying for this investment up front with appropriated funds may be difficult for agencies because energy projects compete with other budget priorities. As figure 10 shows, from fiscal years 2000 through 2007, upfront funding ranged from approximately $121 million to $335 million annually--well below the $1.1 billion level of investment needed annually to meet future energy goals, according to DOE's estimate. Furthermore, according to draft DOE data for fiscal year 2007, federal agencies will face an estimated $5.3 billion gap in appropriated funding for energy investment from fiscal year 2008 through 2015. Figure 10: Approximate Upfront Funding for Energy Projects, Fiscal Years 2000-2007: This figure is a shaded line graph showing approximate upfront funding for energy projects, fiscal years 2000-2007. The X axis represents the fiscal year, and the Y axis represents the dollars (in millions). Source: GAO analysis of DOE data for 2000-2005 and draft data for 2006 and 2007. Chart Deleted Officials from all six agencies we reviewed cited budget constraints as a challenge to meeting future energy goals. For example, only 4 of the 10 military installations we visited have received upfront funding from DOD's Energy Conservation Investment Program since 2003.Footnote 24 Furthermore, several DOD installation officials told us that they no longer request funding for energy improvements because they do not believe upfront funding will be made available. In our previous work we similarly noted that agency officials had stopped requesting such funding. We also noted that paying for energy efficiency improvements with upfront funding is generally the most cost-effective means of acquiring them.Footnote 25 Because the total amount of upfront funding is limited, federal officials increasingly rely on alternative financing mechanisms--such as contracts with private companies that initially pay for energy improvements and then receive compensation from the agencies over time from the monetary savings they realize from these projects-- to meet energy goals. Seven of the 11 civilian sites and 9 of the 10 military installations we visited have used, are currently using, or are planning to use alternative financing to implement energy projects. Furthermore, in an August 2007 memo, the White House Council on Environmental Quality directed agency heads to enter into energy savings performance contracts (ESPC) and utility energy savings contracts (UESC) for at least 10 percent of annual energy costs to accomplish energy-related goals.Footnote 26 It further directed them to report on progress toward finding and developing alternatively financed projects.Footnote 27 Figure 11 shows the total amount of funding agencies received from upfront funding and alternative financing for UESCs and for ESPCs. As discussed earlier, most agencies met their fiscal year 2007 goals. However, for 2008 onward, if funding stays at the current level, there is an apparent gap between the amount received and the amount estimated to meet energy goals.

We solve without busting the budget

Chang et al. 99 Ike Y. Chang, Steven Galing, Carolyn Wong, Howell Yee, Elliot I. Axelband, Mark Onesi and Kenneth R Horn, “Use of Public-Private Partnerships to Meet Future Army Needs,” Rand Corporation, Prepared for the United States Army by RAND's Arroyo, 1999

Access to Capital

Access to capital often means access to financing. In this case, the money would be used to help finance a collaborative effort. Access to capital is relevant to infrastructure, intellectual property, and financial arrangement PPPs.

The private sector often borrows money to finance its business expenses. Business expenses could include the expansion of a company's infrastructure, the development of intellectual property, or the launching of a new financial arrangement. A firm may enjoy excellent credit with one or more financial institutions that can extend loans to the company. These factors indicate that the private¶ sector may have access to capital that could be applied toward collaborative efforts that benefit the Army.

The amount the Army can spend on infrastructure is limited each year by its budget. The Army does not borrow money for infrastructure needs. Hence, the Army does not have the experience or the legal authority to access capital beyond its budgetary constraints. Therefore, in infrastructure PPPs, the Army should look to its private sector partner for at least some of the collaborative effort funds.

The Army's SandT budget has been decreasing and is likely to continue to decline. In addition, the Army funds its RandD based on the size of its budget. The Army does not borrow money to fund any project beyond what budget funds will provide for, regardless of how advantageous the project may seem. So the Army has only one source of RandD funds, and the level of those funds is often inadequate to pay for all the research the Army needs to reach its RandD goals. One way for the Army to leverage its RandD dollars is to enter into collaborative efforts with leading-edge firms that have access to capital and share¶ in the funding of dual-use research. 5 pg. 14-15

OandM Budget expense

DoD Financial Management Regulation 8 “SUMMARY OF MAJOR CHANGES TO DOD 7000.14-R, VOLUME 2A, CHAPTER 1,” Volume 2A, Chapter 1, October 2008, pg. http://comptroller.defense.gov/fmr/02a/02a_01.pdf

0102 FUNDING POLICIES

010201. Criteria for Determining Expense and Investment Costs

A. Appropriation accounts form the structure for the President’s budget request and are the basis for congressional action. The appropriations are further organized into budget activities of appropriations with programs, projects or activities of similar purposes. To support management of the Department of Defense’s programs, projects or activities, resource requirements should be organized and categorized consistently within the appropriation and budget activity structure. The following sections provide guidance for categorizing resource requirements into the various appropriations.

B. Basic Distinctions Between Expense and Investment Costs. The criteria for cost definitions consider the intrinsic or innate qualities of the item such as durability in the case of an investment cost or consumability in the case of an operating cost and the conditional circumstances under which an item is used or the way it is managed. In all cases where the definitions appear to conflict, the conditional circumstances will prevail. The following guidance is provided to determine whether a cost is either an expense or an investment. All costs are classified as either an expense or an investment.

1. Expenses are the costs incurred to operate and maintain the organization, such as personal services, supplies, and utilities.

2. Investments are the costs that result in the acquisition of, or an addition to, end items. These costs benefit future periods and generally are of a long-term character such as real property and personal property.

C. Policy for Expense and Investment Costs

1. DoD policy requires cost definition criteria that can be used in determining the content of the programs and activities that comprise the Defense budget. The primary reasons for these distinctions are to allow for more informed resource allocation decisions and to establish criteria for determining which costs are appropriate to the various defense appropriations.

2. The cost definition criteria contained in this policy are only applicable to the determination of the appropriation to be used for budgeting and execution. Cost definitions for accounting purposes are contained in Volume I of this regulation.

3. Costs budgeted in the Operation and Maintenance (OandM) and Military Personnel appropriations are considered expenses. Costs budgeted in the Procurement and Military Construction appropriations are considered investments. Costs budgeted in the Research, Development, Test and Evaluation (RDTandE), Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC), and Family Housing appropriations include both expenses and investments.  Pg. 1-13

Tournament: Kentucky | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge: 

Warming outweighs -~-- Brandenburg says it causes sea level rise, deforestation, oxygen disappearance, ocean evaporation, and ultraviolet radiation -~-- that cumulatively results in total extinction -~-- their impact does not rises to this level.

Matheny 7 (Jason, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, Reducing the Risk of Human Extinction, Risk Analysis, Volume 27, Number 5, Available Online at http://www.upmc-biosecurity.org/website/resources/publications/2007_orig-articles/2007-10-15-reducingrisk.html)

We may be poorly equipped to recognize or plan for extinction risks (Yudkowsky, 2007). We may not be good at grasping the significance of very large numbers (catastrophic outcomes) or very small numbers (probabilities) over large timeframes. We struggle with estimating the probabilities of rare or unprecedented events (Kunreuther et al., 2001). Policymakers may not plan far beyond current political administrations and rarely do risk assessments value the existence of future generations.18 We may unjustifiably discount the value of future lives. Finally, extinction risks are market failures where an individual enjoys no perceptible benefit from his or her investment in risk reduction. Human survival may thus be a good requiring deliberate policies to protect. It might be feared that consideration of extinction risks would lead to a reductio ad absurdum: we ought to invest all our resources in asteroid defense or nuclear disarmament, instead of AIDS, pollution, world hunger, or other problems we face today. On the contrary, programs that create a healthy and content global population are likely to reduce the probability of global war or catastrophic terrorism. They should thus be seen as an essential part of a portfolio of risk-reducing projects.Discussing the risks of “nuclear winter,” Carl Sagan (1983) wrote: Some have argued that the difference between the deaths of several hundred million people in a nuclear war (as has been thought until recently to be a reasonable upper limit) and the death of every person on Earth (as now seems possible) is only a matter of one order of magnitude. For me, the difference is considerably greater. Restricting our attention only to those who die as a consequence of the war conceals its full impact. If we are required to calibrate extinction in numerical terms, I would be sure to include the number of people in future generations who would not be born. A nuclear war imperils all of our descendants, for as long as there will be humans. Even if the population remains static, with an average lifetime of the order of 100 years, over a typical time period for the biological evolution of a successful species (roughly ten million years), we are talking about some 500 trillion people yet to come. By this criterion, the stakes are one million times greater for extinction than for the more modest nuclear wars that kill “only” hundreds of millions of people. There are many other possible measures of the potential loss—including culture and science, the evolutionary history of the planet, and the significance of the lives of all of our ancestors who contributed to the future of their descendants. Extinction is the undoing of the human enterprise. In a similar vein, the philosopher Derek Parfit (1984) wrote: I believe that if we destroy mankind, as we now can, this outcome will be much worse than most people think. Compare three outcomes:

1. Peace

2. A nuclear war that kills 99% of the world’s existing population

3. A nuclear war that kills 100%

2 would be worse than 1, and 3 would be worse than 2. Which is the greater of these two differences? Most people believe that the greater difference is between 1 and 2. I believe that the difference between 2 and 3 is very much greater.... The Earth will remain habitable for at least another billion years. Civilization began only a few thousand years ago. If we do not destroy mankind, these thousand years may be only a tiny fraction of the whole of civilized human history. The difference between 2 and 3 may thus be the difference between this tiny fraction and all of the rest of this history. If we compare this possible history to a day, what has occurred so far is only a fraction of a second. Human extinction in the next few centuries could reduce the number of future generations by thousands or more. We take extraordinary measures to protect some endangered species from extinction. It might be reasonable to take extraordinary measures to protect humanity from the same.19 To decide whether this is so requires more discussion of the methodological problems mentioned here, as well as research on the extinction risks we face and the costs of mitigating them.20

Every increase must be resisted.

Pittock 10 (Barrie, Led the Climate Impact Group in CSIRO until his retirement in 1999. He contributed to or was the lead author of all four major reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He was awarded a Public Service Medal in 1999 and is CSIRO Honorary Fellow, Climate Change: The Science, Impacts, and Solutions, 2010, pg. 326)

It is absolutely crucial that options for reducing greenhouse gas emissions be pursued with a real sense of urgency. Every extra tonne of carbon dioxide placed into the atmosphere increases the very real risk of dangerous climate change, and nobody will escape the direct or indirect consequences. We are in danger of inadvertently tripping the 'on' switch to disaster, with an inevitably long delay before it can be turned off again. What is done now that enhances climate change cannot be easily undone, so we should err on the side of caution. But it is not all doom and gloom: we can save the day. As we have seen earlier in this book, the technology already exists to rapidly reduce emissions via large investments in energy efficiency (which saves money) and renewable base-load power (which will rapidly come down in price as it is scaled up). Supplemented later this century by large-scale carbon capture and sequestration and (if necessary) by safe nuclear power, the peak in greenhouse gas concentrations can be minimized and then brought down. We need to reduce carbon emissions, and we need to do it fast. Although we are facing an emergency, with an appropriate allocation of ingenuity and resources, together we can do it. We owe that, at least, to our children.

Overshooting is possible.

Washington 11 (Haydn and John, An environmental scientist of 35 years’ experience. His PhD ‘The Wilderness Knot’ was in social ecology ** the Climate Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland. He studied physics at the University of Queensland, Australia. After the graduating, he majored in solar physics in his post-grad honors year and created the website skepticalscience.com, Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand, Published in 2011 by Earthscan, Page 30-31)

It has been suggested that warming the world by more than two degrees could push us into the area where we may cause runaway climate change. It may then take thousands of years to get back to current world temperatures. The world has already warmed by .7 degrees Celsius (Houghton, 2008; Pittock, 2009) and another .6 degrees is in the pipeline (Hansen, 2009). Runaway climate change means that human actions would then be unlikely to stop the temperature increase (short of massive government engineering). Hansen et al. (2008) define the ‘tipping point’ as the climate forcing threat that, if maintained for a long time, gives rise to a specific consequence. They define the ‘point of no return’ as a climate state beyond which the consequence is inevitable, even if climate forcings are reduced. A point of no return can be avoided, even if the tipping level is temporarily exceeded. This has been called an ‘overshoot’ scenario, where one exceeds the ‘safe’ CO2 level but then removes CO2 to return to that level (Pittock, 2009). Ocean and ice sheet inertia permit overshoot ‘provided the climate forcing is returned below the tipping level before initiating irreversible dynamic change’ (Hansen et al, 2008). Points of no return are difficult to define. We may be at a tipping level already at 387 ppm CO2, and it will require strong action to reduce CO2 levels so that we don’t pass the point of no return and can return CO2 levels below 350 ppm. Hansen et al (2008) note we may been to drop CO2 below 325 ppm to restore sea ice to the area it had 25 years ago (and so remove this positive feedback). 

Tournament: Kentucky | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge: 

Proliferation causes uncertainty that results in nuclear war. New nuclear states disagree about likelihood of conflict as well as relative capabilities. They also lack knowledge, experience communicating, or the ability to select adversaries effectively. Weak civil military relations mean decision-making is skewed toward offensive strategies and loose it or use it mentalities – that's Horowitz.

There is significant global nuclear growth.

Adnani 6/7 (Amir, Founder of Uranium Energy Corp. and has served as the president, CEO and a director since 2005, Under his leadership, Uranium Energy has become North America’s newest uranium-producing company and the first uranium producer in the U.S. in more than seven years. The company has achieved its prime status, including the broad support of major securities analysts and institutional investors, due in large part to Adnani’s early and continuing focus on bringing many of the uranium industry’s most experienced technical personnel into management, Uranium Investing – Why Nuclear Power Has A Bright Future, http://oakshirefinancial.com/2012/06/07/uranium-investing-why-nuclear-power-has-a-bright-future/)

If you asked Amir Adnani, chief executive of Uranium Energy Corp., why he was so bullish about uranium in 2007, his answer would be the same as it is today: There is not enough supply to meet demand. Investors might wonder if Fukushima has drawn the curtain on this industry, but Adnani says in this exclusive interview with The Energy Report that this is just the first act for nuclear power. Adnani is taking advantage of what he sees as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to grow his Texas-based company, snapping up properties that are now “on sale.”

The Energy Report: More than a year after a tsunami left the Fukushima nuclear reactor in Japan without the ability to sufficiently cool itself, Japan shut down the Tomari 3 nuclear reactor, leaving all 44,200 megawatts (MW) of the country’s nuclear capacity idle with no set date for restart. When investors hear news like that, they might get the impression that nuclear power is a sunset industry. What’s your take?

Amir Adnani: There is no doubt that the nuclear disaster in Japan has been one of the more challenging events facing the industry. Although just a couple weeks after those reactors were taken off-line, a town with two reactors in the western prefecture of Fukui voted in favor of restoring operations. Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda and the federal government now have to make the final decision and several media outlets are reporting that the government may order the restart of two reactors next week. Many industry observers and analysts are expecting about 20–30 of the reactors to come back on-line over the course of the next year.

Japan is very much dependent on nuclear power. About one-third of Japanese electricity was generated through nuclear power prior to Fukushima. As recently as this February, major industries, like Japan’s steelmakers, have been urging the early restart of nuclear power plants. They fear potential power cuts and the rising costs associated with electricity from fossil fuels could affect their viability. Japan is a major export economy and has very energy-intensive industries to maintain and run competitively. Nuclear power will ultimately, in my opinion, be part of the energy mix in Japan. With time, we’ll see plants come back on-line.

TER: Is that enough to assuage investor concerns? What about what’s happened in Germany, Switzerland and some other European nations that have curtailed energy produced by nuclear reactors?

AA: Certainly investors have sold off uranium holdings based on the situation in Japan and I believe there was both an emotional and political knee-jerk reaction toward the industry. However, if we take a closer look at this through a sober vantage point, the effects of Germany phasing its reactors offline by 2022 is not nearly as material as the flip side of it: There remains significant nuclear growth in developing markets. Led by China and India, countries like Russia, South Korea and even oil-rich nations like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are planning to build reactors that would nearly double the world’s installed nuclear capacity by 2030. These countries continue to see nuclear power’s unique ability to generate baseload power in a carbon dioxide-free and low-cost way as a very big advantage in their energy mix.

TER: Where is the growth for nuclear in a post-Fukushima world going to come from?

AA: The growth in the nuclear industry is going to come from exactly where it was going to come from pre-Fukushima. The countries and the economies that are expanding most rapidly are the ones that really need more power. The growth isn’t going to come from the West. In fact, only 3% of the reactors that are under construction right now—there are about 65 reactors under construction—are in G7 countries. The top four markets are China, Russia, India and South Korea. Saudi Arabia plans to build 16 nuclear reactors, which is a $400 billion program. Chinese officials have reiterated the country’s plans to grow its nuclear capacity to about 70 gigawatts (GW) by 2020. India plans to get to about 60–63 GW of installed nuclear capacity by 2030 and it further aims to supply 25% of electricity from nuclear power by 2050.

The plans to develop nuclear power in China and other countries are very much driven by a set of realities that is very different and very acute. People are dying every year in China, literally choking to death, because of all of the nasty toxins that are being put into the environment by burning coal. It takes a lot of infrastructure to get coal into various places in China where some of that infrastructure doesn’t exist yet. No other form of power can match nuclear power’s ability to generate electricity in a low-cost, emission-free manner on a baseload scale.

Having said that, there is incremental growth in the developed world, too. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved four licenses earlier this year for operating nuclear reactors to come on-line in Georgia and South Carolina. They are the first licenses of this type to be issued in the U.S. in almost 30 years. Even in the United Kingdom there have been announcements to build seven or eight new nuclear reactors. It is very positive to see those developments post-Fukushima.

Tournament: Kentucky | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge: 

SMR’s are the only solution to a dozen otherwise inevitable water conflicts.

Palley 11 (Reese, The London School of Economics, 2011, The Answer: Why Only Inherently Safe, Mini Nuclear Power Plans Can Save Our World, p. 168-71)

The third world has long been rent in recent droughts, by the search for water. In subsistence economies, on marginal land, water is not a convenience but a matter of life and death. As a result small wars have been fought, rivers diverted, and wells poisoned in what could be a warning of what is to come as industrialized nations begin to face failing water supplies. Quite aside from the demand for potable water is the dependence of enormous swaths of industry and agriculture on oceans of water used for processing, enabling, and cleaning a thousand processes and products. It is interesting to note that fresh water used in both industry and agriculture is reduced to a nonrenewable resource as agriculture adds salt and industry adds a chemical brew unsuitable for consumption. More than one billion people in the world already lack access to clean water, and things are getting worse. Over the next two decades, the average supply of water per person will drop by a third, condemning millions of people to waterborne diseases and an avoidable premature death.81 So the stage is set for water access wars between the first and the third worlds, between neighbors downstream of supply, between big industry and big agriculture, between nations, between population centers, and ultimately between you and the people who live next door for an already inadequate world water supply that is not being renewed. As populations inevitably increase, conflicts will intensify.82 It is only by virtue of the historical accident of the availability of nuclear energy that humankind now has the ability to remove the salt and other pollutants to supply all our water needs. The problem is that desalination is an intensely local process. Some localities have available sufficient water from renewable sources to take care of their own needs, but not enough to share with their neighbors, and it is here that the scale of nuclear energy production must be defined locally. Large scale 1,000 MWe plants can be used to desalinate water as well as for generating electricity However we cannot build them fast enough to address the problem, and, if built they would face the extremely expensive problem of distributing the water they produce. Better, much better, would be to use small desalinization plants sited locally. Beyond desalination for human use is the need to green some of the increasing desertification of vast areas such as the Sahara. Placing twenty 100 MWe plants a hundred miles apart along the Saharan coast would green the coastal area from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, a task accomplished more cheaply and quickly than through the use of gigawatt plants.83 This could proceed on multiple tracks wherever deserts are available to be reclaimed. Leonard Orenstein, a researcher in the field of desert reclamation, speculates: If most of the Sahara and Australian outback were planted with fast-growing trees like eucalyptus, the forests could draw down about 8 billion tons of carbon a year—nearly as much as people emit from burning fossil fuels today. As the forests matured, they could continue taking up this much carbon for decades.84 The use of small, easily transported, easily sited, and walk away safe nuclear reactors dedicated to desalination is the only answer to the disproportionate distribution of water resources that have distorted human habitation patterns for millennia. Where there existed natural water, such as from rivers, great cities arose and civilizations flourished. Other localities lay barren through the ages. We now have the power, by means of SMRs profiled to local conditions, not only to attend to existing water shortages but also to smooth out disproportionate water distribution and create green habitation where historically it has never existed. The endless wars that have been fought, first over solid bullion gold and then over oily black gold, can now engulf us in the desperate reach for liquid blue gold. We need never fight these wars again as we now have the nuclear power to fulfill the biblical ability to “strike any local rock and have water gush forth.”

Capability asymmetry and desperation results in nuclear escalation.

Zahoor 12 (Musharaf, Researcher at Department of Nuclear Politics – National Defense University, Water Crisis can Trigger Nuclear War in South Asia, http://www.siasat.pk)

Water is an ambient source, which unlike human beings does not respect boundaries. Water has been a permanent source of conflict between the tribes since biblical times and now between the states. The conflicts are much more likely among those states, which are mainly dependent on shared water sources. The likelihood of turning these conflicts into wars is increased when these countries or states are mainly arid or receive low precipitations. In this situation, the upper riparian states (situated on upper parts of a river basin) often try to maximize water utility by neglecting the needs of the lower riparian states (situated on low lying areas of a river basin). However, international law on distribution of trans-boundary river water and mutually agreed treaties by the states have helped to some extent in overcoming these conflicts. In the recent times, the climate change has also affected the water availability. The absence of water management and conservation mechanisms in some regions particularly in the third world countries have exacerbated the water crisis. These states have become prone to wars in future.  South Asia is among one of those regions where water needs are growing disproportionately to its availability. The high increase in population besides large-scale cultivation has turned South Asia into a water scarce region. The two nuclear neighbors Pakistan and India share the waters of Indus Basin. All the major rivers stem from the Himalyan region and pass through Kashmir down to the planes of Punjab and Sindh empty into Arabic ocean. It is pertinent that the strategic importance of Kashmir, a source of all major rivers, for Pakistan and symbolic importance of Kashmir for India are maximum list positions. Both the countries have fought two major wars in 1948, 1965 and a limited war in Kargil specifically on the Kashmir dispute. Among other issues, the newly born states fell into water sharing dispute right after their partition. Initially under an agreed formula, Pakistan paid for the river waters to India, which is an upper riparian state. After a decade long negotiations, both the states signed Indus Water Treaty in 1960. Under the treaty, India was given an exclusive right of three eastern rivers Sutlej, Bias and Ravi while Pakistan was given the right of three Western Rivers, Indus, Chenab and Jhelum. The tributaries of these rivers are also considered their part under the treaty. It was assumed that the treaty had permanently resolved the water issue, which proved a nightmare in the latter course. India by exploiting the provisions of IWT started wanton construction of dams on Pakistani rivers thus scaling down the water availability to Pakistan (a lower riparian state). The treaty only allows run of the river hydropower projects and does not permit to construct such water reservoirs on Pakistani rivers, which may affect the water flow to the low lying areas. According to the statistics of Hydel power Development Corporation of Indian Occupied Kashmir, India has a plan to construct 310 small, medium and large dams in the territory. India has already started work on 62 dams in the first phase. The cumulative dead and live storage of these dams will be so great that India can easily manipulate the water of Pakistani rivers. India has set up a department called the Chenab Valley Power Projects to construct power plants on the Chenab River in occupied Kashmir. India is also constructing three major hydro-power projects on Indus River which include Nimoo Bazgo power project, Dumkhar project and Chutak project. On the other hand, it has started Kishan ***** hydropower project by diverting the waters of Neelum River, a tributary of the Jhelum, in sheer violation of the IWT. The gratuitous construction of dams by India has created serious water shortages in Pakistan. The construction of Kishan ***** dam will turn the Neelum valley, which is located in Azad Kashmir into a barren land. The water shortage will not only affect the cultivation but it has serious social, political and economic ramifications for Pakistan. The farmer associations have already started protests in Southern Punjab and Sindh against the non-availability of water. These protests are so far limited and under control. The reports of international organizations suggest that the water availability in Pakistan will reduce further in the coming years. If the situation remains unchanged, the violent mobs of villagers across the country will be a major law and order challenge for the government.    The water shortage has also created mistrust among the federative units, which is evident from the fact that the President and the Prime Minister had to intervene for convincing Sindh and Punjab provinces on water sharing formula. The Indus River System Authority (IRSA) is responsible for distribution of water among the provinces but in the current situation it has also lost its credibility. The provinces often accuse each other of water theft.  In the given circumstances, Pakistan desperately wants to talk on water issue with India. The meetings between Indus Water Commissioners of Pakistan and India have so far yielded no tangible results. The recent meeting in Lahore has also ended without concrete results. India is continuously using delaying tactics to under pressure Pakistan. The Indus Water Commissioners are supposed to resolve the issues bilaterally through talks. The success of their meetings can be measured from the fact that Pakistan has to knock at international court of arbitration for the settlement of Kishan ***** hydropower project. The recently held foreign minister level talks between both the countries ended inconclusively in Islamabad, which only resulted in heightening the mistrust and suspicions. The water stress in Pakistan is increasing day by day. The construction of dams will not only cause damage to the agriculture sector but India can manipulate the river water to create inundations in Pakistan. The rivers in Pakistan are also vital for defense during wartime. The control over the water will provide an edge to India during war with Pakistan. The failure of diplomacy, manipulation of IWT provisions by India and growing water scarcity in Pakistan and its social, political and economic repercussions for the country can lead both the countries toward a war. The existent asymmetry between the conventional forces of both the countries will compel the weaker side to use nuclear weapons to prevent the opponent from taking any advantage of the situation. Pakistan's nuclear programme is aimed at to create minimum credible deterrence. India has a declared nuclear doctrine which intends to retaliate massively in case of first strike by its' enemy. In 2003, India expanded the operational parameters for its nuclear doctrine. Under the new parameters, it will not only use nuclear weapons against a nuclear strike but will also use nuclear weapons against a nuclear strike on Indian forces anywhere. Pakistan has a draft nuclear doctrine, which consists on the statements of high ups. Describing the nuclear thresh-hold in January 2002, General Khalid Kidwai, the head of Pakistan's Strategic Plans Division, in an interview to Landau Network, said that Pakistan will use nuclear weapons in case India occupies large parts of its territory, economic strangling by India, political disruption and if India destroys Pakistan's forces. The analysis of the ambitious nuclear doctrines of both the countries clearly points out that any military confrontation in the region can result in a nuclear catastrophe. The rivers flowing from Kashmir are Pakistan's lifeline, which are essential for the livelihood of 170 million people of the country and the cohesion of federative units. The failure of dialogue will leave no option but to achieve the ends through military means. The only way to discard the lurking fear of a nuclear cataclysm is to settle all the outstanding disputes amicably through dialogue. The international community has a special role in this regard. It should impress upon India to initiate meaningful talks to resolve the lingering Kashmir dispute with Pakistan and implement the water treaty in its letter and spirit. The Indian leadership should drive out its policy towards Pakistan from terrorism mantra to a solution-oriented dialogue process. Both the countries should adopt a joint mechanism to maximize the utility of river waters by implementing the 1960 treaty, Besides negotiations with India, Pakistan should start massive water conservation and management projects. The modern techniques in agriculture like i.e. drip irrigation, should be adopted. On the other hand, there is a dire need to gradually upgrade the obsolete irrigation system in Pakistan. The politicization of mega hydropower projects/dams is also a problem being faced by Pakistan, which can only be resolved through political will.

Tournament: Kentucky | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge: 

Wallace says effective regulation sustains US nuclear capability.  That is key to nonproliferation and bioterrorism.

Perry 9 (William J. Perry and James R. Schlesinger et al, 2009. Former Secretary of Defense, Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor at Stanford University, senior fellow at FSI and serves as co-director of the Preventive Defense Project, and former Secretary of Defense, Secretary of Energy and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Counselor to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, lecturer @ SAIS, Johns Hopkins University, PhD International Relations @ UPenn. “America’s Strategic Posture,” Report of the Congressional Commission  on the Strategic Posture  of the United States, media.usip.org/reports/strat_posture_report.pdf)

It is important to understand the weapons laboratories are more than a complex of facilities and instruments. The foundation of their work in support of the national deterrent is a unique scientific and engineering capability. Although nuclear weapons have existed for over sixty years, weapons science was largely an empirical science for much of that period. Nuclear weapons are exceptionally complex, involving temperatures as high as the sun and times measured in nanoseconds. Understanding these weapons from first principles requires a broad, diverse and deep set of scientific skills, along with complex experimental tools and some of the fastest and most powerful computers in the world. The weapons laboratories also play an important role in maintaining U.S. scientific leadership, especially in nuclear and plasma physics and in material sciences, including shock physics. Academic research cannot operate on the scale comparable to the weapons laboratories and industry has largely abandoned basic research in the physical sciences. It is also important to note that the laboratories make important contributions to national security challenges other than weapons science. Their unique expertise and experimental and computational tools enable work on many other high national priorities, including nonproliferation, nuclear threat reduction, nuclear forensics, countering bioterrorism, ballistic missile defense, countering improvised explosive devices, nuclear energy and alternative energy sources, and assistance to the intelligence community with advanced technology and analysis of foreign programs.

Bioterrorism outweights.

Ochs 2 (Richard, Member of the Baltimore Emergency Response Network and founding chairman of the Students for a Democratic Society in 1964 at the University of Maryland in College Park, June 9, 2002, “Biological Weapons Must Be Abolished Immediately,” http://www.freefromterror.net/other_articles/abolish.html)

Of all the weapons of mass destruction, the genetically engineered biological weapons, many without a known cure or vaccine, are an extreme danger to the continued survival of life on earth. Any perceived military value or deterrence pales in comparison to the great risk these weapons pose just sitting in vials in laboratories.

While a "nuclear winter," resulting from a massive exchange of nuclear weapons, could also kill off most of life on earth and severely compromise the health of future generations, they are easier to control. Biological weapons, on the other hand, can get out of control very easily, as the recent anthrax attacks has demonstrated. There is no way to guarantee the security of these doomsday weapons because very tiny amounts can be stolen or accidentally released and then grow or be grown to horrendous proportions. The Black Death of the Middle Ages would be small in comparison to the potential damage bioweapons could cause.

Tournament: GSU | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge: 

Leadership prevents nuclear terrorism.

Sagan 11 (Scott D., Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science Co-Director, Center for International Security and Cooperation Stanford University Co-Chair, Global Nuclear Future Initiative American Academy of Arts and Sciences, The International Security Implications Of U.S. Domestic Nuclear Power Decisions, Prepared for the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, April 18^th, http://brc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/sagan_brc_paper_final.pdf)

Promoting multinational ownership in the U.S. – and advertising this to others – can help set new standards for the spread of civilian nuclear technology. A second set of policy issues in which the U.S. can provide more leadership concerns efforts to promote strong physical protection against nuclear terrorism. The U.S. nuclear security standards are widely considered to be the “gold standard” for physical protection around the globe. We have not been as effective as we could be, however, in promoting these standards for us in other countries. While the Obama Administration’s 2010 Nuclear Security Summit, by asking foreign leaders to review and improve their national programs to secure nuclear materials, was certainly a positive step, there is much that the U.S. could do to promote further global physical security improvements. First, UN Security Council Resolution 1540 calls for all states to have “appropriate effective” physical protection systems, but the U.S. has never defined what that means nor, with partners, set up minimum standards to meet that requirement.32 Second, the U.S. has a rich experience in “trial and error” learning regarding adjustments made to our security procedures and design basis threats (DBT) after vulnerabilities were exposed after a terrorist attack or in response to a security violation. The U.S. government has not declassified a detailed history of terrorist plots or attacks against U.S weapons facilities or power facilities. It would be a major step toward greater transparency, and would help other governments understand the seriousness of the threat, if the U.S. government produced and published such a detailed history of terrorist threats and responses. Efforts at increased transparency in the U.S. also should remind the leaders of other governments that even the U.S. system is not perfect, and would encourage them to maintain continual vigilance about their own regulatory systems and nuclear protection measures. How has the US DOE and NRC reacted to the growing threat of terrorism? After the September 11 attacks, security at nuclear facilities throughout the U.S. was stepped up to address the growing threat of terrorists attack. According to the NRC, this included “increasing the number of security forces onsite,” “requiring greater training,” “strengthening the design basis threat,” integrating response training with federal, state, and local agencies,” and improving “emergency preparedness programs.”33 Nevertheless, the case of Sharif Mobley – a former employee of six different nuclear plants arrested in March 2010 in Yemen on terrorism charges – highlights continued concerns about the security of U.S. nuclear power plants. An NRC investigation following Mobley’s arrest found that no reports were filed suggesting that he had become radicalized during his time working in nuclear power plants, from 2002 to 2008. However, some of his co-workers reported suspicious statements, including: “We are brothers in the union but if a Holy War comes, look out.” 34 He also made comments expressing his belief that non- Muslims were “infidels,” and perused “unusual” websites, including one displaying an image of a mushroom cloud.35 The NRC review of the case recommended allowing the NRC direct access to background information on nuclear power plant employees; frequently checking employees to the terrorist watch list; improving the culture of security; and require disclosure of all foreign travel.36 My point in raising this case is not to criticize the NRC. It is to call attention to the need for the U.S. government and the NRC to be more transparent in explaining U.S. physical security challenges, improvements over time, and procedures for evaluation and exercises to foreign governments, to encourage them to adopt similar procedures and make similar changes as new threats emerge. U.S. support for influential non-governmental organizations – such as WINS – and U.N. organizations – such as the IAEA – can further enhance their ability to promote strong global standards and the implementation of physical protection of nuclear facilities and materials in transport and storage. Current standards for physical protection of nuclear facilities vary widely around the world, and are often overly reactive. Through active support and participation in WINS, U.S. companies and the U.S. government can help identify and promote global best practices for the use of Design Basis Threat methodologies, for training guard forces and emergency management teams, and for assessing risks to facilities. The IAEA safeguards inspections discussed above also have a less direct, but nonetheless important, role in promoting physical security. IAEA oversight and the promise of visits encourage vigilance and watchfulness. The U.S. government could further improve nuclear security by increasing its funding to the Nuclear Security Fund (NSF), an IAEA body established to support activities related to the prevention, detection, and response to nuclear terrorism. Funded entirely by voluntary contributions from member states, the NSF has an annual operating budget of approximately $33 million.37 U.S. contributions to the Nuclear Security Fund have already risen by 59% from 2007 to 2010.38 However, though the Obama Administration is currently seeking to raise its total voluntary contributions to the IAEA from $65 million in 2010 to $85 million in 2011 and to $107 million in 2012, disputes in Congress over the FY 2011 budget may upend this plan.39 The Blue Ribbon Commission could usefully weigh in on this issue, encouraging Congress to support increases in voluntary funding for the IAEA, recognizing the importance to national security of improving global standards for the control of nuclear material. The BRC should recommend that the operators of all new U.S. facilities join WINS, in order to share best practices and learn from the experiences of others. Furthermore, the Congress should be urged by the BRC to pass the necessary legislation, including explicit criminalization of acts not currently covered by U.S. code, to bring U.S. laws into compliance with the International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism and the 2005 Amendment to the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material, so that the U.S. may submit the instruments of ratification to the IAEA.40 On April 13, 2011, the Obama administration submitted to Congress the legislation required to bring U.S. law into accordance with the provisions of the treaty, stating: “We call on Congress to pass these bills as swiftly as possible so that the United States can fully ratify these treaties and continue to lead the global effort to prevent the world’s most deadly weapons from falling into the hands of terrorists.”41 Working towards entry into force of these agreements represents an important step in standardizing global nuclear security measures. While this paper has focused on nuclear safeguards and physical security, in the wake of the Fukushima-Daiichi accident in Japan, it is important to mention one way in which improved nuclear safety and improved nuclear security are connected. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor crisis should highlight the fact that fuel rods kept in spent fuel ponds inherently create a higher risk of producing an environmental catastrophe – whether caused by natural disaster or a terrorist attack – than are nuclear materials placed in interim dry cask storage.42 Currently 63,000 tons of spent fuel sit in U.S. nuclear fuel facilities, and can remain on-site for 60 years beyond the licensed life of any reactor.43 The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission added extra safety and security measures and spent fuel panels after September 11, but it was only after the March 2011 crisis in Japan that the NRC was transparent about “having utilities prepare to use fire hoses to pump in extra water in the event ordinary cooling systems are knocked out” in the wake of a natural disaster or attack.44 The NRC has not, however, provided detailed assessments of alternative measures, such as the use of long-lived batteries for back up power sources, to prevent loss of water circulation. Moreover, the Fukushima accident should lead to consideration of more fundamental changes. The U.S. should accelerate the use of dry cask storage, but not only because it would reduce risks of terrorist attacks or natural disasters in the U.S., but also because it would model better practices for the many other nations that keep their spent fuel for very long periods of time in, often overcrowded, fuel ponds. Conclusions: Specific nuclear energy policy proposals, and how best to evaluate trade-offs between competing objectives, can and should be debated in the United States. In these debates, however, it is important to recognize that American nuclear policies play an important role in shaping – if not fully determining – the decisions made in other capitals regarding nuclear power, the nuclear fuel cycle, and nuclear security. The U.S. has an opportunity to promote a safer and more secure global nuclear future by adopting policies that encourage other countries to restrict the spread of sensitive fuel cycle facilities and to adopt higher standards for nuclear safety, security and safeguards. The Blue Ribbon Commission should encourage the U.S. government to place nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear terrorism prevention very high on its priority list of objectives as it makes domestic nuclear energy decisions and should support steps that better contribute to global nuclear non-proliferation and global nuclear security.