On Jimmy Carter

Carter’s legacy as President, in the public eye, was his infamous “fireside chats” with him dressed in a sweater, while everyone else in the nation was freezing due to being unable to afford heating fuel caused by the Arab Oil Embargo and the worst inflation since the 1930s.

To be fair Carter didn’t cause it. But he also was ineffective in addressing it, and a large part of it, which was caused by energy supply dislocation, he made worse with his decision that civilian nuclear power “couldn’t be done safely” and thus he sought to destroy it.

But not overtly; he knew that wouldn’t fly. No, he instead shut down civilian fuel reprocessing, fully-aware that doing so would, he believed, slowly strangle the industry.

What it did instead was cause the civilian power operators to leave spent fuel on-site almost forever, which now dots our land and, while it certainly has limited our deployment of nuclear power it also has left us extremely vulnerable to any sort of serious dislocation that violates the integrity of those facilities.

One of the most-interesting aspects of that part of his policy, which I remember distinctly as an adolescent, is that there’s basically no note about any aspect of it in the public section of his Presidential library.  I’ve been there. There is note given to his naval service and nuclear propulsion training but not one sentence about the E/O that shut down fuel reprocessing.

Given the focus on energy at the time and Carter’s background nobody has ever explained why he didn’t go after and push the ORNL work with LFTRs. Perhaps it was as simple as his belief that outside of military discipline we lacked what was necessary to use nuclear power safely as a nation — a position he held — irrespective of the technology. I doubt we’ll ever get a clear answer to that question, especially now.

Carter’s post-Presidency focused on charitable works — and not like basically every other ex-President either.  He didn’t just set up a foundation and skim off a piece of it — he actually picked up a hammer and physically worked to assemble houses for poor people.

You have to give the man credit for that; it can probably be argued he did more good there than anything he could do as President.