Bruce - Sellout: how washington gave away Americas technological soul, and one mans fight to bring it home

For
Dravin, Shale & Evelyn

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

No Apparent Danger: The True Story of Volcanic Disaster at Galeras and Nevado del Ruiz

Hostage Nation: Colombias Guerrilla Army and the Failed War on Drugs

In 1994, as an undergraduate in geology at the University of California, Riverside, I stood atop a rocky outcrop in the Mojave Desert. Our field trip guidea geologist from the Molycorp mining companyhanded me a chunk of light pink rock. We were the worlds first and only mine for rare earth elements, he explained. I had no idea what rare earths were, but apparently the metals in these rocks were of economic value and used in the latest tech products. The year before we were there, he told us, a group of Chinese geologists came. We gave them a tour. We showed them everything about our operationwhich type of rocks have rare earths, how we find them. Then the Chinese went home and found their own deposit a thousand times bigger. Now China was selling rare earths for next to nothing, and Mountain Pass was barely treading waterthanks to their own hospitality.

Sixteen years later, in 2010, the subject of rare earths exploded in the headlines. Apparently, China was now the only source in the world for the critical metals. What had become of Mountain Pass? China controlled not only all of the worlds rare earth metals but the entire manufacturing chain for every goddamn thing made with them. How could America be so stupid?

I discovered the answer to that question over the course of hundreds of hours of intense investigation: folly, greed, hubris, and shortsightedness. I felt sick. I felt helpless. I felt like my daughter had no chance of growing up in the land of opportunity as I had. The most innovative country on earth, the country that put a man on the moon and split an atom, just sold everything off in return for cheap, disposable junk. I didnt want to write this book after all. It was just too dismal.

Then I met Jim Kennedya man with a burning mission to bring back manufacturing and innovation to America; a self-described stupid Irishman who wont take no for an answer, even when hes knocking on the Pentagons door. The road hes traveled has cost him dearly, but I truly believe that no matter how many battles he loses, Jim will never give up this fight. And knowing that there are people like him in the world is enough impetus for me to tell a brutally hard story in the hope that one day, it may have a happy ending.

Victoria Bruce, June 2016

Riva, Maryland

On a January evening in 2011, in the lobby of a nondescript hotel off Route 62 in eastern Tennessee, Jim Kennedy opened his laptop and tabbed through a slide presentation. Hyper by nature, the native Missourian was coming undone. The next day was a big one. In the afternoon, he would give a talk that he knew would change the course of his life, and at the same time rescue the United States of America from the technological abyss that he believed it was hurtling toward. Kennedy had been to dozens of meetings with scientists over the last few years, but this was different. Oak Ridge National Laboratory had emerged from the hills as the largest single site of the Manhattan Project in 1943, becoming one of the greatest research institutions America had ever known. Some of the biggest brains on the planet appeared in its secret laboratories to fashion the most powerful energy release the world had ever seen. To Kennedy, the thought was mind-blowing. A self-described punk teenager who slept through five years of high school and who knew nothing about chemistry or nuclear physics just a few years backwas now invited to give a science and policy presentation to the current crop of Oak Ridge masterminds.

With Kennedy was John Kutsch, an engineer from Chicago with a built-in megaphone for a voice box who recently brought Kennedy into his inner circle of proponents for new, safer nuclear technology. Together, their mission was to convince Oak Ridge to restart its nuclear program using thorium instead of uranium for fuel, in a molten salt reactor rather than a solid fuel reactora design that successfully went critical in the Oak Ridge hills in 1965. The invention promised safe nuclear energy that couldnt explode because it wasnt cooled by pressurized steam. It also produced very little plutonium, mitigating the risk of nuclear weapons material making its way to countries that hadnt signed onto the 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treatycountries that included Pakistan, North Korea, Israel, South Sudan, and India. But after four years of continuous operation, the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment was unceremoniously abandoned by the Department of Energy, without a word of explanation to the Oak Ridge engineers.

In a matter of minutes, Kutsch went from confident about the following days meeting to completely unnerved. I started getting all these texts and e-mails about China, and Im wondering what the hell is going on, he remembers. A barrage of expletives erupted from his giant mouth just

As bad as the translation was, the message was clear. Our first reaction is like, Holy shit. Were fucked, says Kutsch.

The Chinese were going to develop the exact technology that he and Kennedy and were trying to get the United States to revivetechnology invented right here in Oak Ridge and paid for by the U.S. government. Then China planned to patent the technology and sell the final product to the rest of the world.

The United States would be buying its own nuclear energy technology from China.

When Kennedy and Kutsch wondered aloud how China could be pursuing the same thing that Oak Ridge invented in the 1960s, Gehin told them something that rendered even Kutsch speechless. He said there had recently been a bunch of high-level visits by Chinese scientists to Oak Ridge, Kutsch says. The head of the delegation was Jiang, the man in the article. Not only was Jiang one of the most prominent scientists in China but his ties to the Chinese government couldnt be any tighter; his father, Jiang Zemin (in China, last names come first), was the former president of the Peoples Republic of China. To Kennedy, the visit to Oak Ridge seemed more like an act of espionage than a scientific exchange of ideas, but Gehin seemed unconcerned and unforthcoming. It was like an inside secret, said Kennedy. When pressed for details, Gehin downplayed the visit. Its no big deal. Dont panic. Its fine, he told us.

Having grown up in a violent home, as the third of eight punching bags for a volatile Irish American father, Kennedy was quick to assess a threat and execute a survival maneuver. As with his early home life, there was really no bright side to look on. Still, he gave it his best shot. Having China in this race could be bad news, yes. But if Oak Ridge would get moving and be competitive, like in the old Cold War days, the United States could restart its own molten salt nuclear program and revolutionize safe nuclear energy. The U.S. would own the intellectual property and patents, and perhaps not spend the coming century dependent on buying Chinese nuclear reactors. Regardless of how Kennedy spun it in his head, knowing China had been right here in this national lab, ground zero of thorium molten salt technology, was a hard pill to swallow.

The next morning, the Chinese elephant that Jess Gehin introduced into the room followed Kennedy and Kutsch into the car and onto Route 62 toward the national laboratory. Kennedy drove the rental car past half-empty strip malls and abandoned buildings. Back in the mid-1940s, the town of Oak Ridge had a population of 75,000 and the feel of a bustling city. But as the need for massive human resources to work in the lab plummeted in the years after World War II, the town began a unidirectional spiral downward. By the turn of the century, Oak Ridge was a place of abandoned malls and few gastronomic resources beyond fast food chains. Soon after arriving, spouses and partners of young researchers landing gigs at the laboratory began to count the days before they could leave. Grown kids of emeritus scientists rarely returned for a visit. Grandchildren living elsewhere in the country were seldom seen on the local playgrounds.