JIMMY CARTER: Commemorations by nuke watchdogs

[White House Oval Office photograph, signed by President Carter (October 1, 1924 — December 29, 2024), showing him with S. David Freeman (January 14, 1926 – May 12, 2020). Thank you to Glenn Carroll, Nuclear Watch South coordinator, for sharing the photo.]

Given his very extensive involvement in key nuclear issues, president Jimmy Carter’s death, at age 100, on December 29, 2024, elicited response from nuclear watchdogs. (See Peter Baker and Roy Reed’s New York Times obituary, here. Also see the Washington Post’s obit, here, by Kevin Sullivan and Edward Walsh.)

Tom Clements, Savannah River Site (SRS) Watch director, published a tribute: “Thank you, Jimmy Carter, for your monumental environmental and non-proliferation decision in 1977! South Carolina and the nation owe you a debt of gratitude.”

Clements focused on Carter’s decision to halt commercial reprocessing in the U.S., which led to the cancellation of the Barnwell, South Carolina reprocessing facility near the border with Georgia, in the same town as a leaking “low-level” radioactive waste dump “serving” several dozen states for decades on end. Rural Barnwell, South Carolina is majority African American, with low-income challenges. It is also the birthplace of musician James Brown. It is nearby not only the SRS nuclear weapons complex, but also the Vogtle nuclear power plant on the Georgia side of the Savannah River, the largest in the country by both number of reactors (four), as well as nuclear mega-wattage-electric (more than 4,000).

Bob Alvarez of Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), former senior advisor to the Energy Secretary during the Clinton administration, added that “Carter, as Governor of [Georgia], stopped the [Atomic Energy Commission] plan to dig a 15-foot diameter shaft and dispose of 80 million gallons of high-level radioactive wastes at the Savannah River Plant beneath the region’s primary ground water supply.”

Glenn Carroll, Nuclear Watch South coordinator, celebrated Carter’s appointment of Tennessee Valley Authority chair S. David Freeman (pictured above, with the president in the Oval Office), who cancelled nine proposed atomic reactors.

As Carroll pointed out, “Jimmy Carter’s stand against [commercial] reprocessing not only halted the U.S. reprocessing endeavor but largely chilled the technology globally.”

This came at a crucial time. Argentina and Brazil, as well as South Korea and Taiwan, followed Carter’s lead and banned commercial radioactive waste reprocessing. Each country was a military dictatorship at the time, embroiled in cross-border tensions with their geopolitical neighbors, and were flirting with the idea of becoming nuclear weapons powers. Commercial irradiated nuclear fuel reprocessing would have provided them with a pathway to obtaining weapons-usable Plutonium-239.

In 1974, India followed just such a pathway to nuclear weapons status, using a Canadian CANDU research reactor, and U.S. reprocessing technology. This sparked a nuclear arms race with rival Pakistan.

Ian Fairlie echoed Carroll’s observation, saying:

“…[Carter’s] non-proliferation efforts extended beyond the US, e.g. he twisted the IAEA’s arm to establish its International Fuel Cycle Evaluation (INFCE) program (https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/22204883033.pdf) in order to stop (commercial) reprocessing world-wide.”

Fairlie added:

“In my lectures, I sometimes highlight the fact that there have only been 2 political leaders in the West who questioned their nuclear establishments, and both were well versed in nuclear physics. Carter, a nuclear chemist, and Angela Merkel the former German Chancellor, who was a theoretical quantum physicist.”

As previously mentioned above, Carroll also shared that:

“Dave Freeman and Arjun Makhijani’s Time to Choose report on renewable energy inspired Carter to appoint Dave to the TVA board where Dave distinguished himself by cancelling nine reactors on order and launched a public power career in which he saw goals of the [1974] report becoming real. Despite nuclear industry hype we see the present day colossal success of wind and solar energy as nuclear continues to lose momentum.”

Freeman, nicknamed “The Green Cowboy,” headed up the Ford Foundation’s Energy Policy Project in the early 1970s. Freeman hired Makhijani to co-author the A Time to Choose: America’s Energy Future report.

Makhijani went on to found the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER), where he serves as president. In August, 2007, Makhijani authored Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free: A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy, which he dedicated to Freeman, as well as to Beyond Nuclear’s founding president, Helen Caldicott.

Carroll also commented that: “Jimmy Carter cast a long shadow! His example of wearing a sweater and turning down the thermostat resulted in flat energy demand growth for at least two decades.”

Carroll also shared a Mother Jones article, by Kai Bird, published on Dec. 29, 2024, “The Bold Environmental Vision of President Jimmy Carter: He protected Alaska’s wilderness and promoted solar energy before it was cool.”

Carter was also famous for installing solar panels on the White House. The New York Times has published an article entitled “What Happened to Carter’s White House Solar Panels? They Lived On. The panels, removed under Ronald Reagan, found new homes from Maine to China. And their legacy still reverberates.”

(In a later presidential administration, Steven Strong of Solar Design Associates was hired to install solar panels in the White House swimming pool area. After Ronald Reagan’s “solar sabotage” decades earlier, Strong joked he installed the solar panels extra well, so they would be very difficult to remove. Steven Strong, and his wife Marilyn Strong, were Beyond Nuclear Launch Partners in 2007 when we were founded, and continued to serve and support us for years thereafter.)

Jimmy Carter also established a key radioactive waste policy task force during his administration. Its final report laid much of the groundwork for the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, as Amended.

Carter, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, also attempted to hammer out a key nuclear arms reduction treaty — SALT II, Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty II — with the Soviet Union. He effectively succeeded, even though the U.S. Senate never ratified the treaty. As reported by the U.S. State Department:

“…On June 17, 1979, Carter and [Soviet leader] Brezhnev signed the SALT II Treaty in Vienna. SALT II limited the total of both nations’ nuclear forces to 2,250 delivery vehicles and placed a variety of other restrictions on deployed strategic nuclear forces, including MIRVs [Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles].

However, a broad coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats grew increasingly skeptical of the Soviet Union’s crackdown on internal dissent, its increasingly interventionist foreign policies, and the verification process delineated in the Treaty. On December 17, 1979, 19 Senators wrote Carter that “Ratification of a SALT II Treaty will not reverse trends in the military balance adverse to the United States.” On December 25, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and on January 3, 1980, Carter asked the Senate not to consider SALT II for its advice and consent, and it was never ratified. Both Washington and Moscow subsequently pledged to adhere to the agreement’s terms despite its failure to enter into force. Carter’s successor Ronald Reagan, a vehement critic of SALT II during the 1980 presidential campaign, agreed to abide by SALT II until its expiration on December 31, 1985, while he pursued the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) and argued that research into the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) adhered to the 1972 ABM [Anti-Ballistic Missile] Treaty.”

Jimmy Carter’s Nobel Peace Prize had to do with his use of the Office of the President of the United States as a mere stepping stone. Carter, a highly skilled carpenter himself, made Habitat for Humanity a household name, thanks to his decades of volunteer home-building for low-income families. The Carter Center in Atlanta, under the former president’s leadership, pursued such noble causes as international peace negotiations, overseas election observation, and disease eradication.

(As reported in the New York Times obit linked at the top of this post:

“While his presidency was remembered more for its failures than for its successes, his post-presidency was seen by many as a model for future chief executives. Rather than vanish from view or focus on moneymaking, he established the Carter Center to promote peace, combat disease and tackle social inequality. He transformed himself into a freelance diplomat traveling the globe, sometimes irritating his successors but earning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002…

The First Lady served as his co-equal partner is many of these pursuits, just as she had done in the White House years. At the time of her death, Eleanor Rosalynn (née Smith) Carter, also born and raised in Plains, GA, had been married to Jimmy Carter for 77 years. She trail-blazed her own advocacy path as First Lady, including on mental health issues, promoting childhood reading, etc.

Despite Jimmy Carter’s positive and praiseworthy record summarized above, throughout his career, including while president of the United States, some of his actions re: nuclear power and weaponry were more troubling.

Of course, as president and commander in chief, Carter oversaw the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal. This included full-scale nuclear weapons testing on Western Shoshone land, at the Nevada Test Site, from 1977 to 1981. Although such testing was conducted underground during that time period, under the requirements of the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty, an estimated one-third of underground tests in the U.S. were vented to the atmosphere anyway, either accidentally, or intentionally.

Along with First Lady Rosalynn Carter ((August 18, 1927 – November 19, 2023), Jimmy Carter toured the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, just days after Unit 2 had a 50% core meltdown. An element of the staff at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) was, at that moment, still concerned a dangerous hydrogen explosion could occur.

The Carters’ TMI-2 tour was an attempt to downplay concerns about the worst reactor meltdown in U.S. history. Its significance still unfolds to this day. (See, for example, Beyond Nuclear’s coverage at the 35th annual commemoration in 2014. Also see Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) coverage at the 25th annual commemoration in 2004.)

The Carters’ tour of TMI led to a spoof by Saturday Night Live entitled “The Coca-Cola Syndrome.”

However, TMI-2 was not Jimmy Carter’s first close encounter with a serious reactor disaster. In 1952, as a young U.S. Nuclear Navy officer, Carter was sent to Chalk River, Ontario, Canada, to help deal with the aftermath of the first known reactor disaster in world history. (See a Jan. 4, 2025 New York Times article about Carter’s role at the Chalk River reactor meltdown disaster recovery mission.)

Jimmy Carter, a Naval Academy graduate (Class of 1946), also served in high posts in Admiral Hyman Rickover’s Nuclear Navy, including coordinating the pre-operational deployment of a very early nuclear submarine. As mentioned in the Times article immediately above, Carter was certified as among the very first “Atomic Submariners” in U.S. Nuclear Navy history.

As John D. Miller detailed:

“[Carter] was the precommissioning commanding officer of the ship that I later served as a nuclear engineering officer on for 30 months, the USS SEAWOLF (SSN575), the world’s second oldest nuclear submarine.”

And as reported in the New York Times obit linked at the top of this post:

“…In October 1952, Lieutenant Carter went to work for Capt. Hyman Rickover, who was well along in developing the Navy’s first nuclear-powered submarines and ships. After going back to school to study nuclear engineering, Lieutenant Carter became the executive officer in a crew that would build and prepare the first nuclear submarine, the Nautilus. By the winter of 1953, he was dreaming of commanding his own sub…”

After leaving office, former President Carter spoke at the dedication of a nuclear-powered, and -armed, attack submarine named after him.

Although Rickover had offered Carter a very high-ranking command position in the Nuclear Navy, Carter instead chose to return to his tiny hometown of Plains, Georgia to carry on the family’s peanut farming, after his father’s death. (Carter’s father had also served in the Georgia state legislature.) Jimmy Carter then later served on the Sumter County school board, and was eventually elected to the Georgia state legislature, the Georgia governorship, and the U.S. presidency.

While campaigning for president in New Hampshire in 1976, Jimmy Carter got in hot water with the groundbreaking anti-nuclear power movement there — the Clamshell Alliance — which was battling against the Seabrook nuclear power plant. As documented by Green Mountain Post Films in the 1978 documentary film “The Last Resort,” Carter referred to nuclear power as just that:

Candidate Jimmy Carter comes to New Hampshire in 1976 and calls nuclear power “the last resort”; Tony and Louisa Santasucci, angry Seabrook residents whose land borders the plant site: “We don’t need a monster like that!”.