The Fifth Risk(9)

Along the way he’d come to know a nuclear physicist, Ernie Moniz, who asked him to join an MIT task force to study the future of nuclear power. In early 2013, when Moniz was named energy secretary, he called MacWilliams and asked him to come to Washington with him. “I recruited him because my view was you should collect talent,” says Moniz. “And it’s unusual to have someone willing to work in government who has been so deeply involved in private-sector investment.” “I always wanted to serve,” says MacWilliams. “It sounds corny. But that’s it.” Still, he was an odd fit. He’d never worked in government and had no political ambition. He thought of himself as “a problem solver” and a “deal guy.” “I’d been investing in energy since the mid-1980s and never once went to the DOE and didn’t think I needed to,” he said. “I was just wrong.”

In the beginning he spent much of his time bewildered. “Everything was acronyms,” he said. “I understood twenty to thirty percent of what people were talking about.” He set out, aggressively, to educate himself, pulling people from every nook and cranny and making them explain until he understood what they did. “It took me about a year to understand it all,” he said, which inadvertently raises the question of how long it would take someone who wasn’t so curious. Anyway, he figured out soon enough that the DOE, though created in the late 1970s, largely in response to the Arab oil embargo, had very little to do with oil and had a history that went back much further than the 1970s. It contained a collection of programs and offices without a clear organizing principle. About half its budget in 2016 went to maintaining the nuclear arsenal and protecting Americans from nuclear threats. It sent teams with equipment to big public events—the Super Bowl, for instance—to measure the radiation levels, in hopes of detecting a dirty bomb before it exploded. “They really were doing things to, like, keep New York safe,” said MacWilliams. “These are not hypothetical things. These are actual risks.” A quarter of the budget went to cleaning up all the unholy world-historic mess left behind by the manufacture of nuclear weapons. The last quarter of the budget went into a rattlebag of programs aimed at shaping Americans’ access to, and use of, energy.

There were reasons these things had been shoved together. Nuclear power was a source of energy, and so it made sense, sort of, for the department in charge of nuclear power also to have responsibility for the weapons-grade nuclear materials—just as it sort of made sense for whoever was in charge of making weapons-grade uranium and plutonium to be responsible for cleaning up their own mess. But the best argument for shoving together the Manhattan Project and nuclear waste disposal and clean-energy research was that underpinning all of it was Big Science—the sort of scientific research that requires multi-billion-dollar particle accelerators. The DOE ran the seventeen national labs—Brookhaven, the Fermi National Accelerator Lab, Oak Ridge, the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, and so on. “The Office of Science in DOE is not the Office of Science for DOE,” said MacWilliams. “It’s the Office of Science for all science in America. I realized pretty quickly that it was the place where you could work on the two biggest risks to human existence, nuclear weapons and climate change.”

He was surprised—a little shocked, even—by the caliber of civil servants working on these problems. “This idea that government is full of these bureaucrats who are overpaid and not doing anything—I’m sure that in the bowels of some of these places you could find people like that,” he said. “But the people I got to work with were so impressive. It’s a military-like culture.” Federal employees tended to be risk-averse, the sort of people who carry an umbrella around all day when there’s a 40 percent chance of rain. But, then, sometimes, they weren’t. In 2009, amid protests that helped touch off Libya’s bloody civil war two years later, a young woman who worked for him went into the country with Russian security forces and removed highly enriched uranium. The brainpower of those still willing to enter public service also surprised him. “There were physicists everywhere. Guys whose ties don’t match their suits. Passive nerds. Guys who build bridges.”

Ernie Moniz had wanted MacWilliams to evaluate the DOE’s financial risks—after all, that’s what he’d done for most of his career—but also, as Moniz put it, to “go beyond financial risks to all the other risks that weren’t being properly evaluated.” To that end Moniz eventually created a position for MacWilliams that had never existed: chief risk officer. As the DOE’s first-ever chief risk officer, MacWilliams had access to everything that went on inside of it and a bird’s-eye view of it all. “With a very complex mission and 115,000 people spread out across the country, shit happens every day,” said MacWilliams. Take the project to carve football-field-length caverns inside New Mexico salt beds to store radioactive waste, at the WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) facility. The waste would go into barrels and the barrels would go into the caverns, where the salt would eventually entomb them. The contents of the barrels were volatile and so needed to be seasoned with, believe it or not, kitty litter. In 2014, according to a former DOE official, a federal contractor in Los Alamos, having been told to pack the barrels with “inorganic kitty litter,” had scribbled down “an organic kitty litter.” The barrel with organic kitty litter in it had burst and spread waste inside the cavern. The site was closed for three years, significantly backing up nuclear waste disposal in the United States and costing $500 million to clean, while the contractor claimed the company was merely following procedures given to it by Los Alamos.