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Seven Days
Wednesday, Nov. 17
• Overseers at a Spring Hill charity flea market are outraged by a vendor who is selling vibrators that look like little toy ducks. Several of the angry officials say that the “yellow duckies” are among the most disgusting things they have ever purchased.
Thursday, Nov. 18
• The News Sentinel reports that Knox County community leaders and educators are flying to Milwaukee in search of “role models” to help them improve education. Milwaukee was actually not our first choice, but officials in both Vegas and the South Bronx were busy last week.
Friday, Nov. 19
• A federal judge suggests that former Gov. Ned McWherter should take a formal role in efforts to salvage TennCare, the embattled state health care plan which he helped create. Pardon our skepticism, but isn’t that a bit like taking on Pol Pot as a human rights consultant in Cambodia?
Saturday, Nov. 20
• The football Vols eke out a sloppy 38-33 win over pathetic Vanderbilt to earn a secure berth in the SEC championship game. It reminded us of the recent presidential election: the favorite won, but no one seemed very happy about it.
Sunday, Nov. 21
• More good news/bad news in the education department: The bad news is that public school students in Tennessee were involved in a record number of drug-related offenses in 2003. The good news is that the officials doing the study scored some really good weed.
Monday, Nov. 22
• The Anderson County sheriff says traffic citations in Clinton went up 188 percent last year. Other officials credit the rise in arrests to a local statute that extends the definition of “drinking and driving” to include Yoo-hoo and RC Cola.
Street Talk
Amy Hubbard
Artistic Director, The Actors Co-op at the Black Box Theatre
What’s the mission of the Actors Co-op?
The mission of the Actors Co-op is to engage our community with inventive, thought-provoking and entertaining theater, and we do that by providing five elements of programming.
1.) Mainstage Season which includes five full length productions offering a variety of classic, contemporary and more edgy theater. 2.) Whippersnapper Series presents two plays for a young audience. In addition to the performances, the Actors Co-op has begun a Reading Awareness Initiative to motivate young people to read the original literary works from which they have been adapted. 3.) Apprentice Company consists of approximately twelve high school students interested in pursuing theater as a career. 4.) Actors Co-op Training Studio offers classes for all ages and abilities. 5.) Outreach includes regional and local touring shows to those underserved in the Arts. This year the Co-op is glad to once again participate with Knoxville Institute for the Arts through the Arts and Culture Alliance providing teaching residencies and performances in Elementary Schools. We will also be taking our spring production of Moliere’s The Imaginary Invalid to area Senior Citizen facilities. Last season we presented our production of Measured In Labor: The Coal Creek Project to coal mining communities in East Tennessee and Eastern Kentucky.
What’s currently being produced at the Black Box Theatre?
The Lion In Winter by James Goldman will be playing December 3 - 18. In January, our Whippersnapper Series presents a one-hour version of The Secret Garden.
When will you announce next year’s season?
We should be able to announce next year’s season by the end of January. Our company meets mid-January to debate and decide what we will be doing. The company works together on choosing a season that will fulfill our commitment to artistic integrity while maintaining financial stability. It’s usually a pretty fun meeting.
How does someone become involved with the Actors Co-op?
Audition or volunteer to work backstage on a show. We always have a general audition for the public for each of our productions. If you are wanting more experience, you could also take a class.
What’s on your Santa Wish List for the Actors Co-op?
The Co-op is growing and soon we’ll be needing a larger theater. The Co-op also needs another full-time staff person. But honestly, I’d be happy with sold-out houses for The Lion In Winter!
Meet Your City
A calendar of upcoming public meetings you should attend
PUBLIC HEARING - PROPOSED GAY STREET REDEVELOPMENT AREA
Monday, November 29 • 5 p.m. • KCDC Family Investment Center • 901 N. Broadway
KNOX COUNTY SCHOOL BOARD
Wednesday, December 1, 2004 • 5 p.m. • Main Assembly Room • City County Bldg. • 400 Main St.
Regular session.
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Critical Decision
Y-12 looks to overhaul bomb manufacturing facilities
A story in the Nov. 4 edition of the News Sentinel (“Oak Ridge sends Y-12 plans to Washington”) seemed innocuous enough, relating the slightly muddled details of how Department of Energy officials in Oak Ridge are seeking approval for a $1 billion overhaul of the city’s Y-12 warhead manufacturing operation.
But local political and environmental activists say the real story is that the Oak Ridge facility is at a crucial juncture, one that will define Y-12’s role for the coming years and that will speak volumes about the U.S.’s attitude toward nuclear non-proliferation.
“We’re skeptical about the need to put money into renovating nuclear weapons, unless there are safety issues involved,” says Stephen Smith of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. “If it’s actually to expand capabilities to build weapons of mass destruction, we’re not in favor of that.”
According to an Oak Ridge-area non-profit activist group, expanding WMD capabilities is exactly what the new Y-12 project is all about. “That (News Sentinel) story heralds a critical decision that will be made in the next several months,” says Ralph Hutchison, head of the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance, which has been tracking Y-12 issues for years. “It’s not a coincidence that the story ran as soon as the election was over. It’s a story that DOE officials hope will go away.”
Y-12 manager Bill Brumley told Sentinel reporter Frank Munger that Oak Ridge officials have requested preliminary approval of the pricey Y-12 overhaul, a process referred to arcanely as “Critical Decision Zero”, and the purpose of which is to establish a “mission need” for the project.
According to Hutchison, what all that means is that DOE is seeking permission to improve its bomb-building capabilities in an era where nuclear non-proliferation is allegedly a priority. “Oak Ridge has asked Washington to agree that, ‘Yeah, we have a need to build a newer, better facility,’” Hutchison says. “At that point, it would be written in stone. But it’s an issue that should trigger a debate in this country.”
Hutchison says this request represents another step in a larger effort by DOE to circumvent environmental regulations while rebuilding a number of Y-12 facilities. In the late 1990s, DOE presented a 10-year plan to retool Y-12, but shelved it when faced with the prospect of doing an environmental impact study.
What DOE did instead, says Hutchison, is segment the re-tooling into a number of smaller projects, each of which would seem more palatable than the project taken as a whole. “The idea was to float modernization, once piece at a time,” Hutchison says. “Technically, environmental laws prohibit them from doing that. But clearly, they did it anyway.”
The first two phases of the larger renovation—rebuilding Y-12’s uranium storage facility, and building a new chemical processing plant—have already been green-lighted and set in motion. But it is this latest phase, which will determine the complex’s actual manufacturing capabilities, that opponents believe is the most crucial.
Hutchison says rebuilding the manufacturing facilities would raise a number of environmental issues, some of them related to the hazards of working with nuclear materials, and others inherent to any new large industrial project.
“But the biggest issue, to me, is that I don’t think they can justify new bomb production to anyone other than themselves,” Hutchison says. “We asked them for their plans, what their justifications are, a long time ago. I haven’t received anything since.
“What we need to do now is to not build a new nuclear bomb plant. The rest of the world takes its cues from us, and this is a green light to build nuclear weapons to all of them.”
—Mike Gibson
November 24, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 48
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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