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                         NUCLEAR POLICY
 
1 Guardian Unlimited: Queen left in dark on nuclear attack
2 NYT: Questions for Hans Blix: What Weapons?
3 WorldNetDaily: Clarke's insights on Bush's 'Vulcans'
4 BBC: Nuclear inspectors return to Iran 
5 Hi Pakistan: UN team in Iran for crucial visit     --> 
6 CNN.com: Iran starts up uranium site - 
7 Las Vegas SUN: N. Korea Rejects U.S. Nuclear Demand
8 Hi Pakistan: ‘No progress in N Korean nuclear talks before US polls’
9 KoreaTimes: FM in China to Discuss NK Nukes 
10 US: AP Wire: Nuke Industry Cites 25 Years of Progress
11 resend FISK: On pending release of Vanunu  
12 The Hindu: Nuke proliferation: Rumsfeld's observation on Musharraf's
13 Haaretz: Report slams assessment of dangers posed by Libya, Iraq    
14 UKAEA: UKAEA moves up a gear 
15 AFP: Pakistan's Musharraf not involved leak nuclear secrets leak 
16 Hi Pakistan: Clarification sought from IAEA     --> 
17 Hi Pakistan: Pakistan not to allow N-inspection     --> 
18 Hi Pakistan: Pakistan not to allow N-inspection     --> 
19 Hi Pakistan: No request yet made for nuclear inspection     --> 
20 Hi Pakistan: No IAEA inspections, only talks: Pakistan     --> 
21 KoreaTimes: [Tom Plate] Here Comes Dick Cheney! 
22 The Oracle: The reality of the nuclear scenario                
23 Pakistan Times: Pakistan not to allow IAEA inspection of Nuclear 
24 Scotsman: Blunkett plays down al-Qaeda threat
 
                         NUCLEAR REACTORS
 
25 US: Brattleboro Reformer: Event was traumatic for 11-year-old
26 US: Brattleboro Reformer: Douglas backs NRC, uprate
27 US: Brattleboro Reformer: TMI marked turning point
28 US: Brattleboro Reformer: NRC 'end of cycle' meeting is March 31
29 US: Salt Lake Tribune: Three Mile Island memories still linger 25 ye
30 Daily Yomiuri: TEPCO to put 4 N-plants on hold 
31 US: BBC ON THIS DAY | 28 | 1979: Nuclear leak causes alarm in Americ
32 US: Post Gazette: Study claims infant deaths increased after Three M
33 US: Post Gazette: Cheaper, safer plant might revive market
34 US: Post Gazette: The cloud remains: Today, questions still persist 
35 US: Iowa City Press-Citizen: Three Mile Island changed UI professor'
36 US: USNews.com: A nuclear anniversary in Pennsylvania 
37 US: Portsmouth Herald: Nuclear plant's tax payments drop over years
38 US: The State: NUCLEAR POWER IN S.C.
39 US: Beacon Journal: Three Mile Island still a symbol of wrong, right
40 US: Beacon Journal: Davis-Besse came close to accident two years ear
41 US: Mercury News: NUCLEAR REVIVAL
42 US: toledoblade.com: 2 agencies laud Fermi II plant in crisis drill
43 US: toledoblade.com: 25 years of skepticism clings to nuclear plants
44 US: DN: U-M dismantles nuclear reactor - 03/28/04
45 US: North County Times: Remembering Three Mile Island
46 US: Today's Sunbeam: For county residents, nuclear power also a conc
47 US: YDR: Journal chronicled crisis - TMI
48 US: YDR: At the core of a national crisis  - TMI
49 US: YDR: TMI TIMELINE - 
50 US: Daily Herald: Getting to know Fermilab 
51 US: CS Monitor: After nuclear's meltdown, a cautious revival 
 
                          NUCLEAR SAFETY
 
52 FW: [DU-WATCH] studies link birth defects to gulf war
53 US: Salt Lake Tribune: Nuke foes unite to oppose tests 
54 US: Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Respirators required for Hanford wor
55 (DV) Nichols: Radiation in Iraq Equals 250,000 Nagasaki Bombs 
 
                         NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE
 
56 US: NEWS.com.au: Billabongs in peril 
57 US: AU SMH: Mine faces prosecution over uranium spill in creek - 
58 Las Vegas RJ: EDITORIAL: A Buckeye volunteer (Yucca)
59 BBC: Sellafield near miss claim
60 Sunday Herald:  Uranium pond at Sellafield sparks court threat by EU
61 US: GL: Workers contaminated at Ranger mine
62 Las Vegas SUN: Neighbors fret about removal of most hazardous
63 US: Press Herald: Nuclear waste in Wiscasset for 'a long time,' acti
64 Toronto Star: Where to put the stuff
65 AFP: Iran resumes works on nuclear fuel cycle: official
66 CNSC - Environmental Assessments
67 US: AU ABC: Probe continues into uranium mine water woes. 
68 US: AU ABC: Three separate inquiries probing mine contamination. 
69 UK Independent: Kintyre may be nuclear submarine dump
70 online.ie: EU policies may spell end for Sellafield                 
 
                         NUCLEAR WEAPONS
 
71 [progchat_action] Hiroshima Message :  Reconciliation instead
 
                        US DEPT. OF ENERGY
 
72 thedailytimes.com: Reports suggest Y-12 vulnerable
73 Tri-City Herald: Cantwell listens to Hanford concerns 
74 PISJ: Post-trial documents filed in INEEL cleanup lawsuit
75 Rocky Mountain News: Worker struggles to prove Flats ties
 
                          OTHER NUCLEAR
 
76 Google News Alert - nuclear
77 Google News Alert - nuclear
78 Oakland Tribune: Bush's laser, bunker buster under attack from Senat
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                         FULL NEWS STORIES
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 1 Guardian Unlimited: Queen left in dark on nuclear attack
 		
www.guardian.co.uk

War of the Worlds 'better than Home Office plans'              
 		
Martin Bright Sunday March 28, 2004
 		
H.G. Well's War of the Worlds provided a better blueprint for 
Britain after a nuclear holocaust than plans prepared by the Home 
Office, says a senior civil servant working on the 'doomsday' 
scenario of war between the USSR and America. 

The scathing internal memo - reminiscent of present-day rows over 
contingency planning for a terrorist attack on Britain ... - was 
written in 1954 by the Treasury mandarin, Richard 'Otto' Clarke, 
the father of Labour's current Education Secretary, Charles 
Clarke. 

The three-page letter is one of a series of documents in a new 
exhibition about the Cold War, 'The Secret State', which opens at 
the National Archive this week. Based on the book of the same 
name by the historian and intelligence expert, Professor Peter 
Hennessey, the exhibition reveals that Britain's preparedness for 
war was often woefully poor, as Ministers and officials tried to 
ready the country for a potential global conflict without 
inducing outright panic. 

He was especially critical of evacuation plans for London, where 
the Home Office planned to split the population into those who 
would escape to the country and those who would stay to face the 
bombs. 

Clarke, who became Permanent Secretary to the Treasury and was 
later knighted, penned a furious internal memo after he found out 
about plans being hatched by an evacuation working party based at 
the Home Office. 

His note drips with a black humour: 'The standard work on this 
subject is by Mr H.G. Wells, written, I think, in 1896 - War of 
the Worlds - which is much better than any piece of Home Office 
paper that I have yet seen. It is very important to know whether 
anybody will be willing to stay in London under imminent threat 
of annihilation and there is something faintly comical about 
dividing the population up into classes, some of which are told 
by Home Office officials that they are to go and others to stay.' 

Clarke advised against funding the 'half-baked' scheme and 
suggested that 'fresh minds' be put to work. 

Other Cold War documents to be put on public display for the 
first time include notes scribbled on the back of an envelope in 
1965, outlining how the Queen would be informed of the outbreak 
of a third world war. Horrified officials had come to the 
extraordinary realisation that the only person in the inner 
circle of the British state who had not been informed of the 
various levels of alert was the Queen. 

Civil servants then realised that they needed to remind 
themselves of the various stages themselves. Experts believe the 
scribbled note may possibly have been released in error: the 
final advice on alerting the monarch has remained classified. The 
note shows a 10-stage escalation of readiness to war: these 
include 'precautionary stage', 'mobilisation', 'set ting up of 
regional government', 'assignment of forces to Nato', 
'repatriation to UK of dependants overseas', 'dispersal of 
population within UK' and 'manning of Turnstile', the emergency 
bunker for the Cabinet. The tenth and final stage is the 
chillingly named Operation Visitation, the euphemistic code for 
all-out nuclear war. 

The exhibition will also reveal the very British way in which the 
Prime Minister would have been informed of war if he was 
travelling in his ministerial car at the time. 

Before the age of mobile phones, it was decided in 1960 that the 
PM's car would be linked up to the radio system used by the AA to 
alert patrolmen to members whose cars had broken down. He would 
have been told that the Soviet Union had launched 
inter-continental ballistic missiles in the exactly the same way 
as an AA man would be alerted to a broken clutch cable. 

National Archive historian Stephen Twigge, who has curated the 
exhibition with Hennessey said the exhibition could inform the 
current debate over contingency planning: 'There is a real 
difficulty of providing enough information to reassure the public 
without giving out too much information that might will panic 
them. 

'In many ways, it is the dilemma that the Government faces 
today.' 

· 'The Secret State' exhibition runs from 2 April to 14 August at 
the National Archives, Kew. 


[UP] 
      Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
*****************************************************************
 2 NYT: Questions for Hans Blix: What Weapons?
 
What Weapons?
 Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON

Published: March 28, 2004

[Q] Your new book, ''Disarming Iraq,'' recounts your futile 
search for weapons as the former chief United Nations weapons 
inspector. 

Yes, President Bush and Tony Blair were convinced there was 
something there. They were convinced there were witches. 

You yourself initially believed there were weapons! Only later 
did you change your mind. 

Yes, I, too, believed there were weapons. I began to be skeptical 
when we went to sites that were given to us by U.S. intelligence 
and we found nothing. They said this is the best intelligence we 
have, and I said, if this is the best, what is the rest? 

Anyway, Saddam Hussein is a kind of witch, isn't he? 

No, he is Satan himself! Evil personified. 

You never even met him. 

He considered it far below his dignity to meet any sort of lowly 
creatures like international inspectors. 

Can one say the same of certain leaders in democratic countries? 
Wasn't Vice President Cheney equally dismissive of you? 

The Pentagon and Cheney have been very negative toward 
inspections. Cheney said inspections are useless at best. 

How many times did you meet with him? 

Just once. We were invited in to see Bush, and somewhat to my 
surprise, we were taken in to see Cheney first. We had no note 
takers. It was not offered to us. 

And then you met with the president in the Oval Office? 

It didn't look oval to me at the time, but I didn't pay much 
attention. It was Colin Powell, Cheney and Bush and others -- and 
a note taker! They had one on their side, and we had none on 
ours! 

Couldn't you just have jotted down a few notes in a pad? 

It's not the decorum when you meet a president. You have to 
concentrate on the conversation. 

What was Bush like? 

He made on me a boyish impression. He was agile, moving, moving 
in the chair, especially compared to Cheney. 

Who, I suppose, seems more wooden. 

Yes, the rumors that Cheney is alive are somewhat exaggerated. 
It's Mark Twain in reverse. 

I assume you're referring to Twain's comment that the rumors of 
his death were greatly exaggerated. Did President Bush seem 
supportive of your belief in weapons inspection? 

Yes, but I never thought that Bush would have such short patience 
as three and a half months. It was clearly not reasonable to 
break off the inspections when he did. 

What do you think of John Kerry? 

I welcome his attitude toward multilateral cooperation. I think 
he is trying to get back to the traditional U.S. attitudes. 

What do you make of the presidential race? 

I think maybe we foreigners should have the right to vote in your 
next election, since we are so dependent on you. 

Do you like the phrase ''weapons of mass destruction''? 

It is a very poor phrase, because it lumps together chemical, 
biological and nuclear weapons, which are very different. About 
35 to 40 countries have chemical weapons. If you just take 
nuclear, you have 8 -- plus 2. 

By plus 2, you mean Iran and North Korea, who may or may not have 
them. Have we made the world safer by removing Hussein? 

No. It doesn't look that way. 

I find you salty in conversation, but your book is somewhat dry. 

Perhaps it could have been colorful. But my attitude is one of 
understatement. In Sweden, we have a strong civil service 
tradition. I think we are even-tempered and patient. Diplomacy 
needs patience. 

Isn't your wife a diplomat? 

She is retired, but she was an ambassador in charge of Arctic and 
Antarctic issues. 

Are there any nuclear weapons in Antarctica? 

Not that I can see. 

You never see any nuclear weapons! Perhaps they're buried under 
the snow. Or perhaps you are blind. 

Or bland. Do you know the saying that diplomacy is the bland 
leading the bland? 

*****************************************************************
 3 WorldNetDaily: Clarke's insights on Bush's 'Vulcans'
 
 MARCH 27 2004           
        
 [Gordon Prather] 
 
© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com 

Now that you've watched the testimony of Richard Clarke – who was 
for 10 years the "counter-terrorism czar" in the White House – 
maybe you ought to re-read Nicholas Lemann's excellent article, 
"The Next World Order," in the April 1, 2002, issue of the New 
Yorker. 

Thanks to Lemann, we already knew that the neo-crazies – who 
reportedly refer to themselves as "Vulcans" – have been hell-bent 
on establishing an American hegemony for at least the last 
decade. Now Clarke tells us their first step was to invade and 
occupy Iraq – and any excuse would do. 

Many Vulcans had occupied influential positions under Presidents 
Reagan, Bush and Clinton, but – evidently – not influential 
enough. One Vulcan – Richard Perle – has just resigned (under 
fire) from the influential Defense Policy Board after "17 years 
of continuous service." Before that, Perle "served" six years as 
assistant secretary of defense for international security 
programs, a post created specifically for him in the early days 
of the Reagan administration. 

The Vulcans reckon it would be nice if other nation-states were 
"willing" to help establish their hegemony. But, if international 
organizations – such as the U.N. International Atomic Energy 
Agency – get in the way, they are to be ignored, denigrated or 
flat run over. 

For example, in May, 1998, Pakistan – not subject to the IAEA 
Safeguards regime, but principal supporter of the Taliban in 
nearby Afghanistan – tested a half-dozen fairly sophisticated 
"Islamic" nukes. Worse, in August, 1998, al-Qaida – protected in 
Afghanistan by the Taliban – bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and 
Tanzania. What was the Vulcan reaction? 

Well, the Vulcans virtually ignored real nukes and real 
terrorists. They stayed focused on Iraq, charging that Saddam was 
reconstructing his nuke programs – right under the noses of IAEA 
inspectors – and was consorting with terrorists. They argued that 
such "violations," in and of themselves, constituted sufficient 
grounds under the U.N. cease-fire resolution for U.S. military 
action against Iraq, even invasion. 

Of course, the Vulcans were wrong on all three counts. 

Nevertheless, in December 1998, they got Clinton to launch cruise 
missiles at several Iraqi "prohibited" weapons "sites," in a 
thinly veiled attempt to kill Saddam. 

Two years later, transitioning into high-level positions in the 
Bush administration, the Vulcans were still focused on Iraq, 
still virtually ignoring al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Islamic 
nukes in nearby Pakistan. 

Then, September 11th dawned. 

Here is how "Czar" Richard Clarke – left in charge that day – 
describes things in the White House the next morning: 

I expected to go back to a round of meetings examining what the 
next attacks could be, what our vulnerabilities were, what we 
could do about them in the short term. Instead, I walked into a 
series of discussions about Iraq. 

At first I was incredulous that we were talking about something 
other than getting al-Qaida. Then I realized with almost a sharp 
physical pain that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to 
take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda 
about Iraq. 

Fortunately, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff argued 
that it would take some months to assemble a large enough allied 
force to invade and occupy Iraq. 

Furthermore, it soon became apparent that, while most nations 
were more than willing to help us hunt down Osama bin Laden, 
hardly any were willing to help us hang Saddam Hussein from a 
sour apple tree. 

Hence, it was a year later before President Bush sought – and got 
– a resolution from Congress, authorizing the use of force if he 
or the U.N. Security Council determined that Saddam was 
reconstructing "prohibited" weapons programs and was consorting 
with terrorists. 

He also sought – but did not get – a Security Council resolution 
condemning Saddam for reconstructing his "prohibited" weapons 
programs and authorizing the use of military force by member 
states to disarm him. 

Instead, the U.N. Security Council asked Saddam to "invite" the 
U.N. inspectors to come in and investigate Bush's charges. By 
mid-March 2003, the IAEA – in particular – was able to report 
that the nuke charges were completely unfounded. 

Realizing that the focus could not be shifted back to 
Afghanistan-Pakistan from Iraq, Richard Clarke resigned and began 
writing his book. His thesis is that President Bush "launched an 
unnecessary and costly war in Iraq that strengthened the 
fundamentalist, radical Islamic terrorist movement worldwide." 

Perhaps worse, those fundamentalist, radical Islamic terrorists 
may soon have nukes. 

Pakistani nukes. 

You see, the IAEA was right; Saddam never came close to having 
nukes.

Physicist James Gordon Prather has served as a policy 
implementing official for national security-related technical 
matters in the Federal Energy Agency, the Energy Research and 
Development Administration, the Department of Energy, the Office 
of the Secretary of Defense and the Department of the Army. Dr. 
Prather also served as legislative assistant for national 
security affairs to U.S. Sen. Henry Bellmon, R-Okla. -- ranking 
member of the Senate Budget Committee and member of the Senate 
Energy Committee and Appropriations Committee. Dr. Prather had 
earlier worked as a nuclear weapons physicist at Lawrence 
Livermore National Laboratory in California and Sandia National 
Laboratory in New Mexico. 

[WorldNetDaily.com] 

--> news@worldnetdaily.com--> Contact WND
*****************************************************************
 4 BBC: Nuclear inspectors return to Iran 
 
  Last Updated: Saturday, 27 March, 2004
 
[Aerial view of Natanz facility]                                

The inspectors will visit the gas centrifuge facility in Natanz                                                                

Experts from the UN atomic watchdog are back in Iran to resume 
inspections of the country's nuclear facilities. 

The Iranians suspended the inspections earlier this month, 
because of a dispute with the International Atomic Energy Agency 
(IAEA). 

The IAEA accused Tehran of keeping some nuclear activities 
secret. 

The US says Iran is using its nuclear power programme to develop 
weapons, while Iran insists it is designed to meet its energy 
needs. 

Rebuke 

A team of two inspectors arrived in Tehran on Saturday and 
immediately began work, IAEA spokesperson Melissa Fleming said. 

They are due to visit a gas centrifuge enrichment facility at 
Natanz and the Isfahan nuclear research centre. 

[IAEA chief Mohammed ElBaradei]                                 
ElBaradei is due in Iran in April                                                                

The inspectors are looking for any evidence that Iran has been 
trying to develop nuclear weapons. 

IAEA chief Mohammed ElBaradei is expected to visit Iran next 
month. 

On 13 March the Vienna-based agency issued a resolution rebuking 
Iran for failing to disclose certain aspects of its nuclear 
programme, as it is expected to do as a signatory to the Nuclear 
Non-proliferation Treaty. 

The US has called on Iran to suspend all uranium-related 
activity. 

The IAEA has a June deadline to present a judgment on Tehran's 
nuclear activities. 

*****************************************************************
 5 Hi Pakistan: UN team in Iran for crucial visit     --> 
 
March 29 2004     
 
VIENNA, March 27: United Nations nuclear inspectors arrived in 
Iran on Saturday, an IAEA spokeswoman said, in what is an ongoing 
investigation to determine whether the Iran is secretly 
developing atomic weapons , as Washington accuses it of doing. 

Iran had tried to put off the mission earlier this month after 
the UN's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency 
(IAEA), condemned it for continuing to hide sensitive nuclear 
activities. 

But Tehran yielded and allowed the visit after a delay of two 
weeks, following an international outcry against Iran for failing 
to cooperate with the atomic agency. 

The two-man IAEA team, which arrived early Saturday in Tehran 
after flying from IAEA headquarters in Vienna, was already on its 
way on Saturday to the Natanz uranium enrichment plant, 250 
kilometres south of Tehran. 

The inspectors will also visit the Isfahan nuclear technology 
centre, in what is a regular inspection on monitoring safeguards 
set up under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), 
spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said. 

More aggressive inspections are expected later in April, 
diplomats said. 

Meanwhile, IAEA chief Mohammed ElBaradei is to visit Iran in 
early April to urge Iran to cooperate fully in answering 
questions about its nuclear programme, Fleming said. 

It will be Elbaradei's third visit to Iran since the IAEA began 
in February 2003 to verify whether Iran's nuclear programme is 
peaceful, or devoted to secretly developing atomic weapons, as 
the United States claims.-AFP 
					     							 				 				   				 				
      
Copyright 1996-2002 . Hi Pakistan. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
 6 CNN.com: Iran starts up uranium site - 

Mar 27, 2004

VIENNA, Austria (Reuters) -- Iran has begun operating a facility 
for converting uranium, a key step toward enriching it for use as 
fuel or in a nuclear bomb, a spokeswoman for the U.N. nuclear 
watchdog said on Saturday.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said there was 
nothing controversial about the plant's opening and Tehran has 
said its nuclear program is solely for the peaceful generation of 
electricity.

"We were informed in February that they were going to start 
uranium conversion at Isfahan in March," IAEA spokeswoman Melissa 
Fleming said, adding that agency inspectors had arrived in Iran 
and would examine the site this week.

"Conversion activities were not subject to suspension," Fleming 
said.

"Iran has told us it has been operating on the basis of a test 
run," she added.

Iran first pledged to suspend activities related to uranium 
enrichment last November as a goodwill gesture while under 
intense U.S. pressure to prove it was not seeking nuclear 
weapons.

Last month Iran promised to suspend all "remaining enrichment 
activities" after Tehran sparked a row by interpreting the 
suspension in the narrowest possible sense.

Uranium conversion plants are key to the enrichment process. They 
convert uranium oxide concentrate into uranium hexafluoride gas, 
which is placed in centrifuges, the machines that enrich uranium. 
Delayed inspections resume


"We are planning to inspect the Isfahan site this week," Fleming 
said. "The inspectors have arrived in Iran and they have already 
begun their work."

Tehran delayed the inspections in retaliation against a 
harshly-worded resolution on the Islamic republic.

The agency's inspectors had originally planned to leave for Iran 
on March 12 to visit Natanz and Isfahan, but Tehran canceled the 
visit in response to an IAEA Board of Governors resolution, then 
in draft form. The Iranians later relented and said the IAEA 
could return on March 27.

The resolution, passed on March 13, "deplores" Iran's failure to 
inform the IAEA of potentially arms-related research, such as 
work on "P2" uranium-enrichment centrifuges, capable of making 
bomb-grade uranium.

Copyright 2004 Reuters. All rights reserved.This material may not 
*****************************************************************
 7 Las Vegas SUN: N. Korea Rejects U.S. Nuclear Demand

March 27, 2004 

 By SANG-HUN CHOE ASSOCIATED PRESS 

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - North Korea on Saturday rejected a
U.S. demand for a "complete, verifiable and irreversible
dismantling" of its nuclear weapons programs, calling it a plot
to start a war and overthrow the government. 

The North's reiteration of its hard-line posture comes after
Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing met reclusive North Korean
leader Kim Jong Il earlier this week. 

Li later said the two agreed to "push forward" toward a third
round of six-nation talks on North Korea's nuclear programs. 

North Korea's state-run Radio Pyongyang, monitored by South
Korea's Yonhap news agency, said Saturday that it would never
accept the U.S. demand that it first dismantle its nuclear
facilities. 

"Complete nuclear dismantling is a plot to overthrow the North's
socialist system after stripping it of its nuclear deterrent at
no cost at all. 'Verifiable nuclear dismantling' reflects a U.S.
intention to spy on our military capabilities before starting a
war," it said. 

"'Irreversible nuclear dismantling' is nothing other than a
noose to stifle us after eradicating our peaceful nuclear-energy
industry," it added. 

North Korea says it will allow nuclear inspections and dismantle
its atomic facilities only if the United States provides
economic aid and written guarantees that U.S. forces will not
invade. 

The communist country also insists that it will keep a nuclear
program for power generation. 

Washington demands that North Korea first dismantle all its
nuclear facilities, saying it has previously broken
international agreements not to develop nuclear weapons in
return for oil and other economic aid. 

Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency berated the
joint U.S.-South Korea military drills that began last Sunday,
calling them preparations for "pre-emptive nuclear strikes." 

"The present situation on the Korean peninsula remains dangerous
owing to the reckless moves of the U.S. warhawks and their
followers to unleash a war of aggression against the DPRK so
that a nuclear war may break there anytime," it said, using the
initials of the North's official name, Democratic People's
Republic of Korea. 

Both Washington and Seoul say their annual military exercises
are aimed at testing defense readiness. But North Korea claimed
that the United States was preparing to invade the isolated
country, "applying the same method of 'pre-emptive attack' to
the DPRK as they used in the Iraqi war." 

The second round of six-party talks about the North's nuclear
ambitions ended last month in Beijing without a settlement.
China has since sought to push ahead with another meeting among
the two Koreas, the United States, China, Japan and Russia. 

The countries have agreed to keep the process going by creating
lower-level working groups to resolve obstacles that might not
be suitable for the high-level talks. 

Li visited Pyongyang on Tuesday through Thursday and conferred
with senior North Korean officials over the nuclear dispute. 

China, Pyongyang's only major ally, has taken on the role of
host and coordinator of the nuclear talks. 

-- 


 
*****************************************************************
 8 Hi Pakistan: ‘No progress in N Korean nuclear talks before US polls’     --> 
 
March 29 2004     
 
        TOKYO: Former South Korean president Kim Dae-Jung has 
ruled out major progress in six-nation talks on ending North 
Korea’s nuclear arms program before the US presidential election 
in November, a press report said on Friday.

"North Korea is hoping that Democratic candidate (John) Kerry 
will win the US presidential election in the autumn," Kim was 
quoted as saying by the Japanese newspaper Nihon Keizai Shimbun 
in an interview in Seoul on Thursday.

"The United States for its part is no more committed than seeing 
to it that the framework of six-nation talks will not break 
down," he told the major business daily. "It will formulate a 
full-fledged policy (on North Korea) after the election." If 
elected to the White House in November, Senator Kerry has vowed 
to resume a direct dialogue with North Korea’s Stalinist regime 
that was broken off by President George W. Bush.

North Korea called the demand "criminal" and said progress was 
impossible because of a "fundamental difference" between 
Pyongyang and Washington.

However, the six parties agreed to establish a working group and 
convene a third round before June.

Kim, who met with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il and won the 
Nobel peace prize in 2000 for his efforts on national 
reconciliation, said that North Korea’s national strength "is at 
rock bottom" and it badly needs cash.

 					     							 				 				   				 				
      
Copyright 1996-2002 . Hi Pakistan. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
 9 KoreaTimes: FM in China to Discuss NK Nukes 

Hankooki.com > Korea Times > Nation   

By Ryu Jin Staff Reporter

 Foreign Affairs and Trade Minister Ban Ki-moon embarked on his 
three-day visit to Beijing yesterday to discuss the North Korean 
nuclear crisis with Chinese officials. 

During his first visit to China since taking office in 
mid-January, Ban will also talk about other pending bilateral 
issues between the two countries including the one related to 
North Korean defectors, according to officials. 

Upon arriving at a Beijing airport, Ban told reporters that he 
would ``ask the Chinese government to help North Korean defectors 
come to Seoul in accordance with their wishes and from a 
humanitarian point of view.¡¯¡¯ 

Ban is scheduled to meet his Chinese counterpart Li Zhaoxing 
today, who met North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and Foreign 
Minister Paek Nam-sun in Pyongyang last week. 

``This trip will be a good opportunity for me to listen to the 
position of North Korea since Minister Li recently visited 
Pyongyang,¡¯¡¯ Ban said. 

Returning home from his March 23-25 visit, Li said Kim agreed to 
a new round of six-party talks on the North¡¯s nuclear program as 
planned. 

The second round of six-party talks ended inconclusively late in 
February with participating nations agreeing only on setting up a 
lower-level working group and convening the third round of parley 
by the end of June. 

If Kim responded positively to Li, as experts analyzed, the first 
working group talks can be convened by late next month. China 
said that right after Li¡¯s visit the two countries reached a 
``broad consensus on a wide range of issues.¡¯¡¯ 

``A schedule may be fixed for the first working group talks 
during Ban¡¯s China visit as Ban has already consulted with the 
United States and Japan closely on the issue,¡¯¡¯ a senior 
government official said on condition of anonymity. 

In the meantime, Ban is also expected to talk about North Korean 
defectors in relation to the reports by local media last week 
that a group of defectors detained at a center in Jilin, 
northeastern China, recently held sit-in protests to call for 
China to send them to South Korea. 

Ban in the afternoon will also meet with Chinese Prime Minister 
Wen Jiabao and Tang Jiaxuan, a state councilor who served as 
China¡¯s foreign minister in the past. 

jinryu@koreatimes.co.kr 03-28-2004 17:24         
        
Ban Ki-moon
   
*****************************************************************
 10 AP Wire: Nuke Industry Cites 25 Years of Progress

| 03/27/2004 | 

H. JOSEF HEBERT

 Associated Press

WASHINGTON - A quarter-century after the country's worst nuclear 
accident, the atomic power industry is talking about revival. Yet 
no one can predict when a new reactor will be built and the 
industry cannot shake perceptions about safety, uncertain 
economics and a new specter - terrorism. 

Still, by most accounts, nuclear power is back in style. That is 
the case despite continuing uncertainty about the fate of the 
radioactive waste that reactors generate and fears that 
terrorists might target a reactor. 

Those were not the concerns 25 year ago. 

On the morning of March 28, 1979, a series of events unfolded 
that would rivet world attention on a nuclear power plant in 
central Pennsylvania. Three Mile Island would become a catchword 
for the industry's perils and shortcomings. 

For five days, there was a fear the reactor at the plant near 
Harrisburg, Pa., might unleash tons of radioactivity and perhaps 
even explode. Some worried that the radioactive fuel could eat 
through the containment floor, spew radiation down the 
Susquehanna River and contaminate the Chesapeake Bay watershed. 

In fact, the reactor core meltdown resulted in little release of 
radiation and there was no evidence of long-term harm to public 
health. But it was a watershed for the nuclear industry and the 
government officials who regulate it. 

"Few experts thought that such a severe accident was even likely 
to happen," says Nils Diaz, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory 
Commission. "Confidence in the technology was very high." 

The accident exposed an industry complacent and ill-informed, and 
government regulators who, for a time, could not even communicate 
with those inside the plant to understand the seriousness of what 
was unfolding. 

"Up until TMI the industry said, `Trust us. We're the experts.' 
After TMI the public said, `We don't trust the experts anymore,'" 
says Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass. 

Such skepticism continues, said Markey, among the sharpest 
critics in Congress of the industry and the NRC. 

The industry cites statistics that it says show reactors have 
never been safer. 

The number of NRC reportable events has dropped every year to 
0.02 per unit; automatic reactor shutdowns have declined to less 
than 1 per unit and half the plants report none. Plants are 
producing power on average at better than 90 percent of their 
capacity. 

Those in reactor control rooms are better educated. Nuclear 
executives are better trained. Direct lines now link the NRC to 
every reactor control room. 

For two decades the industry has operated its own safety 
monitoring organization to track emerging problems and 
disseminate the latest safety data to power plants. 

"If you look at safety, by just about any measure, you'll see a 
remarkable change in the last 12 years or so," says Will Travers, 
executive director for operations at the NRC. 

But have all the "TMI demons" - as nuclear consultant Harold 
Denton refers to the complacency that existed 25 years ago within 
the industry - been exorcized? 

Denton was a senior staff member at the NRC when the TMI accident 
happened. He made a name for himself when he emerged as a 
calming, knowledgeable voice during the height of the crisis, 
easing the frayed nerves of state officials and the throngs of 
media during daily briefings. President Carter made him his 
personal representative at the accident site. 

Now a consultant, Denton said in an interview that he has no 
doubt nuclear power plants are safer today, that executives in 
charge of plants are better trained and that utilities take the 
unique nature of nuclear power seriously. 

"By and large, many utilities (in 1979) thought boiling water in 
a reactor was no different than boiling water with coal, and you 
didn't need highly educated people," he said. "You don't find 
complacent utilities today." 

Yet industry critics ask, what about Davis Besse? 

The Ohio power plant was shut down for two years after it was 
discovered that an accumulation of boric acid over time had eaten 
nearly through the 6-inch steel reactor vessel. Only a thin 
interior membrane kept the vessel from bursting, resulting - as 
occurred in TMI, but for different reasons - in a loss of 
critical reactor coolant. Restarted recently, the plant again was 
shut down because of problems with valves. 

"If Davis Besse hadn't happened I would be saying that the TMI 
demons had been exorcized from our list of ills," Denton said. 

Industry critics said the incident again raises questions about 
the adequacies of federal inspections and the safety mind-set of 
some industry executives. 

"After TMI, the pendulum definitely swung in favor of safety," 
says Jim Riccio, a nuclear industry watchdog for Greenpeace. But 
he maintains that financial pressures to keep reactors running 
has "forced the pendulum back in the other direction." 

--- 

The country's 103 commercial nuclear power reactors produce 
nearly three times as much electricity today as they did on the 
eve of the TMI accident. They account for one of every five 
kilowatts of electricity used in America, compared with one in 
eight in 1978. 

Not a single permit for a new plant has been sought since the 
accident, but 51 reactors under construction in 1979 have gone 
into operation. 

Still, in three decades, no utility executive has ordered a new 
reactor and there is no indication construction will begin on a 
new one anytime soon. 

Wall Street is not ready to finance a next-generation reactor, 
which could cost $2 billion, because of continued uncertainties 
within the electricity industry and the ample power generating 
capacity in most parts of the country, analysts say. 

The industry has sought government help to spur a building 
program, with a target to have a new reactor built by 2010. But 
the Bush administration has backed away from offering money. Its 
most recent budget asks for only $10.2 million for next fiscal 
year, far short of the $60 million to $80 million a year 
anticipated by industry leaders. 

"Financing large, capital-intensive energy projects like new 
nuclear power plants in today's business environment is a 
significant challenge," Joe Colvin, president of the Nuclear 
Energy Institute, the industry trade group, wrote recently. 

Nonetheless, the industry is upbeat about its future even as it 
marks the 25th anniversary of its lowest point. 

The operating performance of nuclear reactors has so improved 
that they are competitive with coal-burning power plants in 
electricity production. The average operating costs, including 
fuel, for nuclear has declined from 3.48 cents per kilowatt hour 
in 1987 to 1.68 cents in 2002, according to the institute. 

Ironically, the industry now cites Three Mile Island as a symbol 
of its competitiveness. 

The destroyed TMI Unit 2 remains sealed. Its core was shipped 
away years ago and what is left inside the containment building 
remains highly radioactive. But Unit 1 nearby, now owned by 
Chicago-based Exelon, efficiently is churning out electricity. 
Last year it concluded a record 688 days of continuous operation 
by a pressurized water reactor. 

"Today's reactors are the cheapest way to make electricity," says 
Roger Gale, president of GF Energy, a consulting company. He says 
almost all the reactors are being operated efficiently in an 
industry that is rapidly consolidating. 

About a dozen large energy companies operate the country's 103 
power reactors. Companies such as Exelon and New Orleans-based 
Entergy, as well as Dominion in Virginia, have bought up 
reactors. Unlike a few years ago, Gale says, "There are no fire 
sales." 

Utilities want those reactors to continue operating as long as 
possible. The NRC has issued 20-year license extensions for 23 
reactors; an additional 19 requests are under review. Operators 
of virtually all the reactors are expected to seek extensions of 
their initial 40-year licenses when they come close to expiring, 
industry officials say. 

But the future of nuclear power is anything but secure, some 
leading energy experts say. 

"At present ... nuclear power faces stagnation and decline," 
according to a recent study from the Massachusetts Institute of 
Technology. 

The cross-section of energy experts involved in the MIT study 
concluded that the industry's future may rest on its ability to 
argue successfully that nuclear reactors - which produce no 
greenhouse pollution - are needed to combat climate change. 

--- 

Never has industry been challenged as it is today to protect 
against a potential terrorist attack on a nuclear plant. Reactors 
are believed to be a prime target of al-Qaida, based on documents 
and other information obtained since the Sept. 11 attacks. 

The NRC has acknowledged that the government does not require 
that reactors be designed to withstand the impact of an airliner 
loaded with fuel or explosives. The commission also has 
acknowledged that plant security forces on their own could not 
likely hold off a large-scale terrorist attack. 

Industry critics maintain that more and better trained security 
guards are needed. The industry says it has increased its guard 
force at power plants by one-third to some 7,000 security 
personnel and made other security enhancements. 

"The extent to which nuclear facilities should be hardened to 
(withstand) possible terrorist attack has yet to be resolved," 
says the MIT study, although acknowledging improvements in both 
reactor safety and plant security. 

"We do not believe there is a nuclear plant design that is 
totally risk free." 

---_ 

EDITOR's NOTE - H. Josef Hebert, the AP's energy writer, covered 
the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island and the subsequent 
investigation by a presidential commission. 

ON THE NET 

Nuclear Regulatory Commission: www.nrc.gov 

Nuclear Energy Instituted: www.nei.org   

*****************************************************************
 11 resend FISK: On pending release of Vanunu  
 
Date: Sat, 27 Mar 2004 07:59:02 -0600 (CST)

 
I lost a substantial part of this item during reformat. Ouchh! - Thanks 
JW. for noticing.
MichaelP

--------------------------------------------------

http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk03262004.html

The Independent March 26, 2004
	By ROBERT FISK 

The Man Who Knew Too Much

The Ordeal of Mordechai Vanunu

Any Israeli who bought the 16 February edition of the daily newspaper
Yedioth Ahronoth would have believed that a truly wicked man was about to
be released from Ashkelon prison. Each time a suicide bomber blew himself
up, the prisoner would celebrate. Worse still, said the paper, the inmate
-- once a keeper of Israel's nuclear secrets -- wants to endanger his
country further after his release. "He told me," a former prisoner was
quoted as saying, "that he has additional material and that he will reveal
secrets..."

Should it be a surprise, then, that the very same prisoner, supposedly
celebrating the slaughter of innocents while preparing to betray his
country yet again, holds a clutch of awards from European peace groups,
the Sean McBride Peace prize and an honorary doctorate from the University
of Tromso? In 2000, the Church of Humanism told him: "You are honest,
courageous and morally highly motivated, and may the great sacrifice you
have made serve to protect not only those living in Israel but all the
peoples of the Middle East and perhaps the world." The same man has also
been put forward as a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Mordechai Vanunu, it seems, can only be loved or loathed. Indifference to
the former Israeli nuclear technician is impossible. For he is the man
who, in 1986, took evidence to The Sunday Times of the full story behind
Israel's secret nuclear weapons plant at Dimona in the Negev desert,
complete with the total number of advanced fission bombs there -- 200 at
the time -- and, even more disturbingly, complete with pictures. He said
that Israel had mastered a [polant.jpg] thermonuclear design and appeared
to have a number of thermonuclear bombs ready for use. He was subsequently
lured by a girl from London to Rome and then kidnapped, drugged and
freighted back to Israel by Israeli secret policemen. But in just six
weeks' time, after 18 years of imprisonment -- 12 of them in solitary
confinement -- the world's most famous whistleblower is scheduled for
release. Israel -- not to mention the world -- is holding its breath.

Will he divulge further secrets of Dimona -- always supposing he has any
after 18 years of incarceration -- or curse the country of which he is a
citizen, albeit a citizen who converted to Christianity before his arrest
and who wants to emigrate to the United States? Will he emerge a cowed
man, anxious only to apologise for the terrible betrayal he inflicted upon
his country? Or will he, as his friends and supporters and his adopted
American parents hope, become an apostle of peace, one of the greatest of
this generation's prisoners of conscience, the man who tried to rid the
world of the threat of nuclear annihilation?

The Israeli government is still uncertain how to confront Vanunu's release
on 21 April. They are known to be considering -- perhaps have already
decided upon -- "certain supervisory means" and "appropriate measures" to
shut Vanunu up. In the second half of January, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
met with Menachem Mazuz, Israel's attorney general, and the defence
minister, Shaul Mofaz, and discussed whether Vanunu should be refused a
passport. Vanunu would be free to sunbathe on the beaches of Tel Aviv but
could not tour the world advertising Israel's nuclear power. It's a sign
of how fearful the Israeli administration has become at the prospect of
this one man's release that Sharon also summoned to this conference Yehiel
Horev's so-called "Defence Ministry Security Unit", the country's internal
and external intelligence services -- Shin Beth and the equally
overestimated Mossad -- and a representative of the Israeli Atomic Energy
Committee.

Horev, it is now known, wanted to go much further than Sharon. He proposed
clapping an administrative detention order on Vanunu -- Israel's usual way
of dealing with Palestinians whom they regard as "terrorists" -- although
the meeting apparently came to the conclusion that this would only enhance
Vanunu's reputation as a martyr for world peace. There's another way of
shutting Vanunu up, of course. He can be publicly freed and then -- the
moment he starts talking about his work as a nuclear technician -- he can
be tried again and thrown back into Ashkelon jail -- or Shikma prison, as
the Israelis call it now.

But the real problem that Vanunu represents is that he will remind the
world at a critically important moment in the history of the Middle East
that Israel is a nuclear power and that its warheads stand ready to be
fired from the Negev desert. He will also remind the world that the
Americans, despite battering their way into Iraq to destroy Saddam
Hussein's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, continue to give their
political, moral and economic support to a country that has secretly
amassed a treasure trove of weapons of mass destruction.

How can President Bush remain silent on Israel's nuclear power when he has
not only illegally invaded an Arab state for allegedly harbouring nuclear
weapons and condemned Iran for the same ambitions, but also praised --
along with Tony Blair's government -- Colonel Gaddafi of Libya for
abandoning his nuclear pretensions? If the Arab states are being
"defanged" -- always supposing they had any real fangs in the first place
-- why should Israel not be "de-nuclearised"? Why can't the United States
apply the same standards to Israel as it does to the Arabs? Or why, for
that matter, can't Israel apply the same standards to itself that it
demands of its Arab enemies?

This is the debate that the Israeli and the American governments wish to
stifle. In the United States, where any discussion of the Israeli-American
relationship that deviates from the benign is routinely condemned as
subversive or "anti-Semitic", discussion of Israel's nuclear power is not
something that Washington will want to hear on the Sunday talk shows.
Vanunu, it should be said at once, is well aware of all this, of his own
importance -- infinitely greater than it was when he was a mere junior
technician at Dimona -- and of the role that tens of thousands of anti-
nuclear campaigners expect him to play in the world. Many times, through
friends and through his own brothers, Vanunu has said that he has no new
nuclear secrets but has the right to oppose nuclear weapons in Israel or
anywhere else. "All I want to do is to go to America, get married and
start a new life," he says.

No one can doubt Vanunu's conviction. Born in 1954 to a religious Jewish
family in Morocco, he immigrated to Israel at the age of nine, performed
his military service in the mid-Seventies and began work at Dimona in
November 1976 while completing a graduate course in philosophy and
geography. Perhaps it was during his travels in Thailand, Burma, Nepal and
Australia in early 1986 that he decided he had a moral duty to talk about
Israel's nuclear weapons. In the same year, he was baptised at an Anglican
church in Sydney. Vanunu had clearly become deeply distressed at Israel's
growing nuclear power when he walked into British newspaper offices in
September of 1986 in the hope of telling the world the truth about Dimona.
He had dropped by Robert Maxwell's Daily Mirror at first, handed over his
photographs of the nuclear plant and waited for a reply. Unknown to
Vanunu, Maxwell sent the pictures round to the Israeli embassy in London
to "take a look at them", supposedly to "confirm" whether or not the story
was true. It seems likely that Maxwell had motives other than journalistic
integrity in this betrayal of Vanunu. After his death at sea in 1991,
Maxwell, who had stolen millions in pensioners' funds, was given a state
funeral in Israel at which Shimon Peres praised his "services" to the
state.

Maxwell's Daily Mirror ran a "spoiler" story on 28 September, belittling
Vanunu and carrying the headline "The Strange Case of Israel and the
Nuclear Con Man." The Sunday Times ran with the full story -- but Vanunu
had already disappeared. Entrapped by a female Mossad agent, he had been
lured on to a British Airways flight to Rome and promptly kidnapped. It
seems, in fact, that he was seized inside Rome's Fiumicino Airport. Unable
to speak to journalists, he carefully wrote out details of his movements
on the palm of his hand and pressed it to the window of his prison truck
as it took him to court. "Rome ITL 30:9:86 2100 came to Rome by BA504," he
had written. He had been kidnapped at 9pm on 30 September at Rome
International. Were the Italian authorities involved in his kidnap? Were
they present when he was seized? Perhaps Vanunu can tell us.

He is certainly a man of endurance. Once, during his 12 years of solitary,
the prison authorities accidentally freed him for exercise before Arab
prisoners in the jail-yard had been returned to their cells. Vanunu
immediately walked towards them. One of the Arabs, a Lebanese imprisoned
for smuggling arms into the West Bank, was among the first strangers to
bring word of Vanunu's appearance to the outside world. "Vanunu fell into
step with us and smiled at us and it was a time before we realised who he
was," the freed Lebanese later told The Independent. "He said it was good
to be with us and we thought he was a brave man. Then the guards realised
their mistake and we were pushed and shoved away from him, back to our
cells."

An Israeli journalist visiting another prisoner was amazed to see Vanunu.
"For a short moment I saw a bucolic scene," he wrote, "as if taken from
some other reality: a serene man, sitting on a bench in a garden and
reading Nietzsche in English. I approached him and extended my hand.
Pleased to meet you, my name is Ronen,' I said. I'm Motti,' the most
confined prisoner in the State of Israel replied. Before we could continue
to talk, screaming wardens rushed over and grabbed him away."

A former prisoner, Yossi Harush, has provided another glimpse of the
imprisoned Vanunu in the years after his solitary confinement ended.
"During the day," Harush told Yedioth Ahronoth, "during walks, he meets
people and talks with them. I spoke a lot with Vanunu. We were friends. He
would come to my cell... He has good conditions. He is treated nicely in
prison... He has no restrictions on leaving his cell, but he is restricted
within the prison. I myself, as a working prisoner, painted a red line
that he is forbidden to cross. I was ordered to do that, and afterwards
our relationship cooled off."

Vanunu has been regularly visited by an Anglican clergyman, Dean Michael
Sellors. It was Sellors who pointed out to him that his release date
coincided with the Queen's birthday. "He said that in that case, he'd
better get a ticket and greet her himself."

Vanunu has also taken heart in the actions of the Association for Civil
Rights in Israel, a normally conservative organisation, which has stated
that, "any sanctions against Mordechai after release would be illegal and
immoral." A chatline on the Hebrew website of the Israeli daily Maariv
shows that a number of young Israelis regard Vanunu as a hero rather than
a threat. Mary Eoloff, a retired American school teacher who, with her
husband, adopted Vanunu in the hope that he could be given US citizenship
and released, was the first to reveal that when Israeli security men
offered to release him a year before the expiry of his 18 years in jail,
Vanunu turned them down. "He believes in freedom of speech," she said.

It remains to be seen if Israel will allow Vanunu the free speech he
loves. Horev, the defence ministry security official who attended Sharon's
meeting, has spoken of the threat that he believes the nuclear technician
represents, which seems to be about ambiguity rather than state secrets.
Horev compares this ambiguity to water in a glass. "My job is to ensure
that the water doesn't spill over the glass," he said recently. "Up until
the Vanunu affair, the water was at a very low level. The affair caused
the water level to rise significantly and caused Israel great damage, but
the water still didn't overflow. If we let certain people act in the
matter, the water will spill."

The Israeli journalist Raanan Shaked was a good deal more cynical when he
spoke on the subject on Israel's Channel 10 TV. "Who is the main threat to
Israel?" he asked. "Of course, Mordechai Vanunu! He is the big danger.
Israeli democracy simply cannot withstand the impact of this one man
saying what every child knows: we have nuclear weapons."

On 21 April, when Vanunu is released, we shall find out if the water is
going to overflow -- and whether Vanunu will cross the red line painted so
ominously on the floor at the instruction of the authorities.
*****************************************************************
 12 The Hindu: Nuke proliferation: Rumsfeld's observation on Musharraf's
denial 

Monday, March 29, 2004 : 0230 Hrs
 
Washington, March 29. (PTI): U.S. Secretary of State, Donald
Rumsfeld, on Sunday said that Pakistan President Pervez
Musharraf's denial of military involvement in A.Q. Khan's
nuclear proliferation activities was not a blanket denial. 
Musharraf, said Rumsfeld, has said that the Pakistani Army had
no involvement. "He did not say that no officer of the military
was involved. That is quite a distinction," Rumsfeld told
ABC-TV. 

Rumsfeld said if he was asked to say that no person connected
with the Pakistani military over some sustained period of time
had any knowledge or participation whatsoever, "I could not do
that." 

But he added, "If you ask me, if Musharraf either now or when he
was head of the military was engaged in this, I don't believe it
and ...I have seen no evidence to suggest it." 

"I don't believe there is any evidence or any suggestion that
President Musharraf was involved," said Rumsfeld.. "I have no
knowledge that would permit me to support (such) allegations." 

"He is a person with a lot of courage. Several times he tried to
move the country as part of the global war on terror in
partnership in a very bold way, not always popular in that
country, indeed very unpopular among large sections of his
population. He has been tremendously cooperative." 

Rumsfeld added that A Q Khan had "damaged the civilised world by
engaging in the proliferation of nuclear technologies and doing
it systematically, and doing it aggressively and doing it with
multiple countries for a sustained period of time."

Copyright © 2004, The Hindu. Republication
*****************************************************************
 13 Haaretz: Report slams assessment of dangers posed by Libya, Iraq       

News Updates    Mon., March 29, 2004 Nisan 7, 5764    Israel
    
  By Gideon Alon, Haaretz Correspondent          
    
A Knesset report released Sunday criticizes the Israel Defense 
Forces' Military Intelligence branch and the Mossad in their lack 
of an accurate assessment of dangers posed by both Libya and 
Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq.    

The report - compiled by a special investigation panel created by 
the Knesset subcommittee that monitors Israel's secret services - 
censures the intelligence services for failing to recognize that 
Libya was in the advanced stages of developing its nuclear 
capability. 

The committee, headed by Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense 
Committee chairman MK Yuval Steinitz (Likud), said this was a 
"serious intelligence failure that must lead to housecleaning and 
reorganization."

As a result, the report recommended that changes be made to the 
structure of the intelligence community, including the removal of 
the intelligence-gathering unit "8200" from Military Intelligence 
auspices and transforming it into a independent national 
intelligence agency. 

The committee also slammed Israeli intelligence for failing to 
discover whether or not Iraq possessed weapons of mass 
destruction:

"The wide-ranging information that the intelligence services 
succeeded in gathering by various means ahead of the war did not 
succeed in providing incontrovertible indications regarding the 
existence of non-conventional capabilities or the existence of 
land-to-land missiles and missile launchers in Iraq. At the same 
time, they were unable to negate the existence of these weapons 
in Iraq and dissipate concern."

The release of the report is likely to stir interest in the U.S. 
and Britain, countries in which investigative panels about issues 
connected to Operation Iraqi Freedom have been established. 

A large number of foreign journalists were expected to take part 
in the Knesset press conference Sunday, to mark the release of 
the public part of the report.

The report, the first copy of which Steinitz was to present to 
President Moshe Katsav, recommended instituting several reforms, 
including appointing an intelligence official to report to the 
prime minister.

While an 80-page public report is to be released, the 
investigation committee's main findings and conclusions are to be 
relayed in a classified section of the document. This classified 
section, complete with graphs and tables, will be finished in 
another few weeks, and will be submitted to the prime minister, 
Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, and IDF Chief of Staff Moshe 
Ya'alon.

The investigation committee did not hold public hearings, but 
sources close to the panel claim it has concluded that 
intelligence officials issued mistaken assessments asserting Iraq 
possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Also, the sources say, the intelligence officials were surprised 
by recent disclosures concerning progress reached by Libya in its 
non-conventional weapons program. The panel, however, has 
concluded that Israel's intelligence officials did not make a 
fundamental error in assessments about Iraq, and so it does not 
recommend that particular officials be censured or removed.

The investigation committee held 50 meetings over an eight-month 
period, and heard testimony from 70 witnesses, including the 
prime minister, the defense minister, the chief of staff, and the 
heads of the Mossad, Military Intelligence and the Shin Bet 
security service.

The panel considered a number of issues, including what 
intelligence officials knew about Iraq's ability to fire 
conventional or non-conventional missiles at Israel, the nature 
of intelligence cooperation between Israel and friendly nations, 
whether the decision to order citizens to open gas masks was 
warranted, and whether there was justification for the decision 
to vaccinate some 15,000 security and health workers against 
smallpox.

The investigation committee was comprised of MK Haim Ramon 
(Labor), Ehud Yatom (Likud), David Levy (Likud), Eli Yishai 
(Shas) and Ilan Leibowitz (Shinui). Ramon has issued a minority 
opinion about the gas mask issue claiming the decision to open 
the kits was rash and erroneous, and cost the state NIS 100 
million. 

Meretz MK Yossi Sarid has already criticized the investigation 
committee's findings, saying he was sure from the start that the 
panel's composition was not conducive to a thorough, non-partisan 
inquiry. Too many of the panel's members shared the basic 
strategic conception of the intelligence officials they were 
supposed to evaluate, Sarid claimed.        

  MK Yuval Steinitz presenting some of the intelligence report's 
findings in Jerusalem on Sunday. (AP)   

  © Copyright  Haaretz. All rights reserved   
*****************************************************************
 14 UKAEA: UKAEA moves up a gear 

[Decommissioning work at Harwell] UKAEA continues to make good 
progress in preparing for the forthcoming changes to the 
management of the civil nuclear decommissioning sector. 

Monday 15th March saw the company submit its Near Term Work Plan 
to the Liabilities Management Unit (LMU), setting out detailed 
two-year plans for the nuclear liabilities work at each of the 
five sites it operates. 

In addition, UKAEA is launching its new business information 
system at the end of March and is preparing for the introduction 
of shadow contracts with the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority 
(NDA), which is taking over the management of the UKs civil 
decommissioning programme in 2005. Attention is also focussed on 
delivering the companys next Lifecycle Baseline plan - 
describing the whole restoration programme for each site - to the 
LMU in June. 

Stephen White, UKAEAs Director of Business Improvement, 
explains: The successful delivery of these key processes and 
systems is central to ensuring that UKAEA is in the strongest 
position to operate as a contractor to the NDA. If we maintain 
the same level of determination and energy shown so far, Im 
confident we will achieve all the vital milestones necessary to 
prepare for our future under the NDA.

View the pdf summary brochure for UKAEAs 2004/05-2005/06 Near
Term Work Plan at the link below:

 UKAEA Near Term Work Plan summary brochure (pdf - 433kb)
 
Preserving the past into the future 

[New Dounreay records archive] A new archive facility at
Dounreay is to preserve one of the most important collections in
the history of nuclear energy. 

The £400,000 archive houses some 10 million pages of paper
records from 21,000 boxes. They chart the history of Dounreay
from its construction, almost fifty years ago, through the
pioneering days of research and development of Britains fast
reactor programme to the present-day decommissioning of the
site. 

Records Office Manager Ian Pearson is rightly proud of the new
archive.
 We have a facility which, under the old storage system, could
only hold 7,500 boxes; now using modern mobile shelving there is
space for 30,000 boxes. 

Older records not required by decommissioning staff are reviewed
periodically. Those that are deemed to be of national importance
are transferred to the national archives at Kew in Surrey. Other
older records of local historical importance are being made
available to the North Highland Archive at Wick.
 
Shop window for fusion 

[Fusion roadshow at Cowley&#8217;] UKAEA Fusion staff set up
shop in the busy shopping centre in Oxfords Templar Square,
Cowley, as part of the Oxfordshire Science Festival, a
science-awareness event run by the Oxford Trust. 

Throughout the day the stall had a steady stream of visitors,
with children in particular fascinated by demonstrations with
plasma balls, magnets and vacuums. 

The event was part of UKAEAs busy fusion education outreach
programme, which aims to encourage public interest in science in
general and fusion in particular. 
*****************************************************************
 15 AFP: Pakistan's Musharraf not involved leak nuclear secrets leak 
- Rumsfeld

WASHINGTON (AFP) Mar 28, 2004

 US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Sunday he had seen no 
evidence that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf was involved 
in leaking nuclear secrets, but he could not say if Pakistan's 
military was involved.

"I do not believe that there's any evidence or any suggestion 
that President Musharraf was involved," Rumsfeld told ABC 
television.

He added that Musharraf is a "person with a lot of courage" who 
has been "tremendously cooperative" in the US "war on terror."

Musharraf has been roiled in a controversy over top Pakistani 
scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan's involvement in leaking nuclear 
secrets.

Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, last month publicly 
confessed that he had shared nuclear secrets with Iran, Libya and 
North Korea. Musharraf later pardoned Khan.

Asked whether high-level Pakistani military officials could have 
been involved, Rumsfeld said: "I'm not going to say that."

"That's where -- listen, you can't prove a negative. You can't 
say that I know that every person connected with the Pakistani 
military over some sustained period of time had no knowledge or 
participation whatsoever. That's silly. I couldn't do that."

  WAR.WIRE
*****************************************************************
 16 Hi Pakistan: Clarification sought from IAEA     --> 
 
March 29 2004     
 
ISLAMABAD, March 27: Pakistan on Friday sought clarification from 
the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) spokesperson 
regarding her remarks about a request for inspection of 
Pakistan's nuclear facilities, Dawn learnt through diplomatic 
sources on Saturday. 

The Pakistan Mission in Vienna contacted the IAEA spokeswoman, Ms 
Melissa Fleming, to seek clarification on the remarks attributed 
to her in a press report on Friday, the sources said. 

The IAEA spokesperson was quoted as saying that the agency had 
sought permission for inspection of some "relevant" Pakistani 
nuclear facilities. 

Foreign Office spokesman had on Friday categorically denied 
Pakistan's receiving of such a request saying there was no 
question of Pakistan allowing IAEA inspection of its nuclear 
installations. 

The sources said Ms Flemming had already been approached by the 
Pakistan Mission in Vienna and she had conceded that indeed no 
request had been made by the IAEA to send inspectors to Pakistan. 

It was pointed out to the IAEA spokesperson that Pakistan was not 
under verification, but some other countries were, and it was in 
that context that Pakistan was cooperating with the Agency. 

The IAEA spokesperson was also told that authorities in Islamabad 
found it odd that she chose to single out Pakistan in her press 
comments at a time when the IAEA was holding consultations with 
several countries. 

When the IAEA spokesperson was asked by the Pakistan Mission to 
issue a clarification, she said that she would send an email to 
the reporter to correct the comments attributed to her. 

Meanwhile, officials here maintain that there is no question of 
any IAEA inspectors coming to Pakistan as Pakistan is not a 
signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. 

It is Pakistan's involvement in the IAEA inquiry being conducted 
on Iran's nuclear programme that has brought Pakistan'snuclear 
programme into the IAEA fray. 
					     							 				 				   				 				
      
Copyright 1996-2002 . Hi Pakistan. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
 17 Hi Pakistan: Pakistan not to allow N-inspection     --> 
 
March 29 2004     
 
ISLAMABAD, March 26: Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed 
said on Friday that Pakistan would not allow the International 
Atomic Energy Agency to inspect the country's nuclear facilities 
and if the UN body wanted to ascertain origin of any material it 
acquired from Iran it should hand it over to Pakistan. 

Speaking at a press conference here, the minister condemned the 
statement of Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, in which he asked 
the people of Pakistan to overthrow the government of President 
Gen Pervez Musharraf. 

The minister said being the official spokesman he would like to 
say that the statement of Mr Zawahiri was mischievous and aimed 
at creating divisions in the ranks of the Pakistan Army. 

Sheikh Rashid said the army had launched an operation in the 
tribal areas in the larger interest of the country, and its 
target was foreign militants hiding in the region. He said it was 
the present government's policy that no terrorist activity would 
be allowed on the country's soil. 

The minister said the Al Qaeda activists tried to kill President 
Musharraf at least on two occasions, and the government had 
evidence that the terror network provided gunpowder to the 
suicide bombers for the job. 

After their failure, they were now trying to incite the people of 
Pakistan, he added. Describing tribal people as patriotic 
Pakistanis, the minister said the army had gone to the rugged 
mountainous areas to protect the country's sovereignty. 

If Pakistan Army did not move to flush out terrorists from the 
country's territory, it was possible that some other country's 
force might enter the area for the purpose, but then the people 
would object. 

He said opposition parties should realize the gravity of the 
situation and refrain from playing up the issue, as dozens of 
army soldiers had lost their lives in the ongoing operation. 

He said the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal should try to understand that 
these terrorists might escape from the area, leaving it in a 
difficult situation. When pointed out that these foreigners, whom 
the government was now dubbing as terrorists, were supported by 
Islamabad to take part in the Afghan jihad during the Soviet 
occupation, the minister said the situation had changed after the 
twin tower attack in the United States and should be realized as 
such. 

					     							 				 				   				 				
      
Copyright 1996-2002 . Hi Pakistan. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
 18 Hi Pakistan: Pakistan not to allow N-inspection     --> 
 
March 29 2004     
 
ISLAMABAD, March 26: Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed 
said on Friday that Pakistan would not allow the International 
Atomic Energy Agency to inspect the country's nuclear facilities 
and if the UN body wanted to ascertain origin of any material it 
acquired from Iran it should hand it over to Pakistan. 

Speaking at a press conference here, the minister condemned the 
statement of Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, in which he asked 
the people of Pakistan to overthrow the government of President 
Gen Pervez Musharraf. 

The minister said being the official spokesman he would like to 
say that the statement of Mr Zawahiri was mischievous and aimed 
at creating divisions in the ranks of the Pakistan Army. 

Sheikh Rashid said the army had launched an operation in the 
tribal areas in the larger interest of the country, and its 
target was foreign militants hiding in the region. He said it was 
the present government's policy that no terrorist activity would 
be allowed on the country's soil. 

The minister said the Al Qaeda activists tried to kill President 
Musharraf at least on two occasions, and the government had 
evidence that the terror network provided gunpowder to the 
suicide bombers for the job. 

After their failure, they were now trying to incite the people of 
Pakistan, he added. Describing tribal people as patriotic 
Pakistanis, the minister said the army had gone to the rugged 
mountainous areas to protect the country's sovereignty. 

If Pakistan Army did not move to flush out terrorists from the 
country's territory, it was possible that some other country's 
force might enter the area for the purpose, but then the people 
would object. 

He said opposition parties should realize the gravity of the 
situation and refrain from playing up the issue, as dozens of 
army soldiers had lost their lives in the ongoing operation. 

He said the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal should try to understand that 
these terrorists might escape from the area, leaving it in a 
difficult situation. When pointed out that these foreigners, whom 
the government was now dubbing as terrorists, were supported by 
Islamabad to take part in the Afghan jihad during the Soviet 
occupation, the minister said the situation had changed after the 
twin tower attack in the United States and should be realized as 
such. 

					     							 				 				   				 				
      
Copyright 1996-2002 . Hi Pakistan. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
 19 Hi Pakistan: No request yet made for nuclear inspection     --> 
 
March 29 2004     
 
ISLAMABAD, March 26: Pakistan on Friday made it clear that it 
will not allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to 
inspect its nuclear sites but has proposed a non-inspection route 
for the agency's inquiry requirements relating to Iran's nuclear 
programme. 

The IAEA spokesperson was quoted in a section of the Press on 
Friday as saying that the nuclear watchdog had sought permission 
for inspection of some "relevant" Pakistani nuclear 
installations. 

"No such request has been received and there is no question of 
allowing IAEA inspection to Pakistan's nuclear installations," 
Foreign Office spokesman told Dawn on Friday. 

The IAEA spokesperson reportedly said the agency wanted its 
designated inspectors to take environmental samples from certain 
Pakistan nuclear facilities to corroborate Tehran's claim that 
the highly-enriched uranium contamination found in Iran 
originated from Pakistan. 

IAEA inspectors discovered traces of radioactive elements and 
advanced equipment in Iran last year that could be used to make 
nuclear weapons. While denying that Islamabad received any formal 
request from IAEA for inspection of Pakistan's nuclear 
facilities, senior officials acknowledged that there was an 
ongoing dialogue between Pakistan and the UN nuclear watchdog 
over matters pertaining to the latter's inquiry of Iran's nuclear 
programme. 

"Pakistan is fully cooperating with the IAEA and providing all 
information which it requires and will continue to do so but we 
will not provide access to our nuclear facilities to any UN 
inspectors," said a senior official from Pakistan's security 
establishment. 

In Islamabad, officials maintain that "IAEA is neither 
pressurising Pakistan on its nuclear programme nor does it 
believe that Pakistan, a non-signatory to the Non-Proliferation 
Treaty (NPT), is obliged to open its nuclear sites to IAEA 
inspection." 

According to informed sources the IAEA had sought Pakistan's help 
in determining the source of traces of highly-enriched uranium 
discovered by its inspectors in Iran. IAEA has asked Pakistan to 
allow it to compare those traces with samples of highly-enriched 
uranium produced at Pakistan's own nuclear facilities, these 
sources told Dawn. 

"Pakistan has agreed to cooperate and has asked IAEA to provide 
specifications of the uranium traces found in Iran so that 
Pakistani authorities can compare the same against specifications 
of Pakistan's own enriched uranium," the sources said. This would 
not require IAEA inspectors to physically visit Pakistan's 
nuclear sites. 

"They can give us a sample and we can compare," a senior official 
said not specifying the form in which the sample could be 
received. "Modalities will be worked out once a decision has been 
taken," the official said. 
					     							 				 				   				 				
      
Copyright 1996-2002 . Hi Pakistan. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
 20 Hi Pakistan: No IAEA inspections, only talks: Pakistan     --> 
 
March 29 2004     
 
BRUSSELS: Pakistan has indicated its intention to welcome 
International Atomic Energy Agency’s officials’ in Islamabad, not 
for inspection of nuclear installations, but to discuss the 
outcome of probe into activities of scientists accused of nuclear 
proliferation.

"IAEA officials would be welcome to visit Islamabad and Pakistan 
would discuss with them the results of its own investigations on 
nuclear issue," is the terse message received in Vienna after the 
IAEA requested Pakistan to extend a higher level of cooperation.

Officials confirmed that Pakistan had officially conveyed to the 
international nuclear watchdog its willingness to welcome 
agency’s officials to Islamabad. IAEA Director General Dr 
ElBaradei in his last week’s visit to Washington, according to 
officials, emphasised effective cooperation from Pakistan. The 
officials claim that the latest assurance given by Washington to 
the IAEA chief underlines President Pervez Musharraf’s promise to 
"share all the information...about the Khan network".

A Vienna-based official, however, says Islamabad has officially 
conveyed a "resounding no" to the IAEA in response to the latest 
request seeking permission for the inspection of Pakistani 
nuclear installations. The agency wants to verify the Iranian 
claim that highly enriched uranium (HEU) traces found in Iran 
came with the equipment provided by Pakistan.

The quintessence, according to official, of the Pakistani message 
to the IAEA is: "This is a sovereign country, no documents will 
be submitted to the IAEA, or to an independent inquiry, and we 
will not allow the UN to supervise our nuclear programme".

Assuring all possible cooperation, the official said top 
Pakistani authorities maintained that Pakistan as non-NPT member 
had a right to decline the IAEA’s request for inspection of 
nuclear installations. As another gesture of cooperation 
Islamabad has offered to analyze in Pakistan traces of highly 
enriched uranium found in Iran and subsequently provide a report 
on this account to the IAEA after conducting comparison of 
Pakistani environmental sample, a source said.

 					     							 				 				   				 				
      
Copyright 1996-2002 . Hi Pakistan. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
 21 KoreaTimes: [Tom Plate] Here Comes Dick Cheney! 

Hankooki.com > Korea Times > Opinion > Tom Plate   

 Asia Is Sure to Get an Earful   
      
By Tom Plate

 Professor at University of California, Los Angeles 
Director of Asia Pacific Media Network 

LOS ANGELES _ The Ear is going to Asia, says the White House.

 The White House didn¡¯t put the announcement exactly this way, 
of course. But Dick Cheney, the U.S. vice president, is widely 
known in Washington to have President George W. Bush¡¯s ear. When 
Cheney talks, Bush listens. And so the Ear is to visit three 
Asian countries next month _ Japan, China and South Korea, in 
that order. That¡¯s an interesting order. 

Putting Japan first is absolutely the right thing to do; it¡¯s 
our long-standing ally. But ranking the Republic of Korea, which 
also has placed troops in Iraq to help out, last might be 
suspect, except the top agenda item is North Korea, and China has 
been heavily and helpfully involved in the diplomacy. Moreover, 
South Korea is embroiled in deep political turmoil _ so much so 
that a pre-arrival Valium is recommended to anyone with a prior 
history of heart trouble visiting there nowadays. 

Cheney¡¯s trip is presumably designed to demonstrate his amazing 
good health, in spite of his well-known heart problems. It might 
also suggest that Bush has decided to keep him on the ticket.

 That¡¯s a questionable domestic political call. First time out, 
Bush desperately needed the Ear, older and presumably wiser, to 
dim the glare of his sometimes obnoxious Texas cowboy image. 
Turns out, the Ear was more cowboy policy-wise than the Texan.

 This time around, Bush, who will have a hard fight to garner a 
plurality of votes and earn a true second-term mandate, gains 
nothing with Cheney still in the second spot. Bush would be 
stronger with perhaps Colin Powell, the popular secretary of 
State. Many African-Americans and even some liberals who may be 
less than enthralled with Sen. John Kerry would have a hard time 
passing up the opportunity to vote for America¡¯s first black 
vice president, but a heartbeat away from the presidency itself. 

Moreover, the Ear now is carrying some heavy domestic political 
baggage.

 Along with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, he is the 
principal architect of the post-9/11 strategy. The jury is still 
out on whether it¡¯s working, but now there seems to be a 
critical verdict on the quality of the pre-9/11 planning by this 
administration. The official nonpartisan commission investigating 
the Sept. 11 attacks has so far received shockingly negative 
testimony on the terrorism-awareness level of the 
administration¡¯s top people.

 Coming out of his cave to make this high-profile trip, the Ear 
will thus need to prove himself in Asia. The problem is he has 
some foreign-policy baggage that will irk most of the high Asian 
officials with whom he talks.

 That¡¯s the administration¡¯s hard line on North Korea, of which 
he is a creator. Neither China, which has been pressuring North 
Korea to behave itself at the six-party talks in Beijing, nor 
Japan, which has plenty of yen to aid Pyongyang if only it will 
begin to neutralize its nuclear-weapons capabilities, likes the 
Ear¡¯s approach. These countries know it is dangerous to play 
brinksmanship with the difficult, testy and well-armed North 
Koreans. They would surely be happy to do some sort of Agreed 
Framework Revisited (i.e. aid for disarmament, their dollars for 
regional peace), with the Chinese presumably offering 
verification.

 But the Ear will say no to that because you can¡¯t trust those 
Communists, right? Trust isn¡¯t the issue, verification is. If 
the Bush administration doesn¡¯t want to trust North Korea, it 
will have to trust China if it doesn¡¯t want tension to ratchet 
up on the Korean peninsula.

 But that¡¯s what the cocksure North Koreans will do _ and they 
may purposefully and pointedly pull a few tension strings in the 
heat of the U.S. presidential campaign to embarrass Bush and help 
Kerry, whom they believe would be less difficult to live with. 
Call it Pyongyang¡¯s Fall Offensive.

 Doing that, however, would run a huge risk: There is every 
possibility that Bush will be reelected, with or without the Ear 
on the ticket. And Bush is not known for being an easygoing, 
forgive-and-forget kind of person. 

Even so, whether the Ear stays on the ticket or not, he would 
give Bush¡¯s reelection prospects a huge boost if his trip 
results in eased tensions on the peninsula with a diplomatic 
compromise by Washington that Beijing and Tokyo could applaud. 

And the vice president _ as the administration¡¯s primo 
hard-liner _ is just the man to do it. If there¡¯s one thing 
Cheney still offers the president, it¡¯s credibility with the 
ever-in-a-flutter world of U.S. hawks. 

In the time-honored fashion of conservative Nixon going to Red 
China to break bread, Cheney could bring back a North Korean 
breakthrough and pump life into Bush¡¯s international security 
record. 

But for that to happen, Cheney will have to give heed to his 
counterparts in Tokyo and Beijing and hear the shrill and 
conflicting voices in deeply politically divided South Korea.

 The only problem is, does the Ear listen to anyone at all? 

03-28-2004 15:26 	 
        
*****************************************************************
 22 The Oracle: The reality of the nuclear scenario                
 		
Friday, March 26, 2004
Oracle/VICTOR GRILEY

 Daniel Lim speaks about the effects of nuclear blasts at the
Embassy Suites hotel Thursday night.   			 				 	

It's no secret a nuclear blast would have devastating effects. 
Just how devastating lecturer Michael Courey outlined Thursday 
night.
 
By Grace Agostin Staff Writer March 26, 2004 

Michael Courey knows there's nothing practical about the 
situation, if and when a nuclear event should occur. He also 
knows that with even the blast from one of the smallest nuclear 
devices would cause complete destruction within a 2-mile radius. 

At a lecture Thursday night at the Embassy Suites, Courey and 
four researchers addressed the possibilities terrorism could have 
in the United States and the role the USF Center for Biological 
Defense has played in bioterrorism studies. 

In the event of a nuclear attack, Courey said clean-up would be 
extremely difficult because of the amount of radioactive material 
that would be deposited in the area, not to mention mortality 
rates. 

Courey said with one megaton, which is a relatively small nuclear 
device, the blast damage within a 3.2-mile diameter would have a 
50 --percent-blast mortality. 

"Now that doesn't mean 50 percent will survive because nobody is 
going to survive," Courey said. "Not to mention, things will 
instantly burn into flames because of the temperature." 

Courey said the temperature from the explosion would result in 
degrees measured in the millions, causing first-degree burns 
within 22 miles from where the air blast occurred. 

Even if a fallout shelter was provided, Courey said, there would 
be little or no life-support conditioning. 

"I'm not an expert and I don't know any experts because we don't 
have experience with this," Courey said. "But we have to do 
everything we can to prevent this." 

Daniel Lim, professor of microbiology for the USF Center for 
Biological Defense, said USF has been working with government 
agencies, companies and other universities to develop tests for 
biosensor hardware. 

"Every conventional technique we have today is limited," Lim 
said. 

Technology for detecting toxic substances or anthrax, he said, 
are time consuming and require sophisticated equipment and 
training. 

Lim said the USF Center for Biological Defense is able to detect 
e.coli, salmonella, ricin, small pox, anthrax, protein toxins, 
bacteria and cocaine. "Very few platforms can detect all types of 
agents," Lim said. 

Lim added that powder substances could be processed for anthrax 
in minutes, and any threatening substances that test positive can 
be archived for criminal prosecution, which no other lab can do. 

"After Sept. 11, agencies in New York ... called me to see how 
they could use (USF's) technology," Lim said. 

But in October 2001, USF received 1,100 items thought to be 
anthrax, none of which tested positive, said Jacqueline Cattani, 
director of USF Center For Biological Defense. 

"These were just everyday things that people became afraid of," 
Cattani said. "The impact totally overwhelmed the public health 
system." 

Cattani said items such as cookies, computer keyboards and 
luggage were brought to the center to be tested, simply because 
people were afraid. 

Cattani added that the disaster chain for response was not 
followed properly in October when handling anthrax cases. The 
chain begins at the city level and from there, follows to the 
county, state and then federal levels. Cattani said there were 
cases being reported from the city level to the federal level, 
which created political problems in areas. 

A more recent concern occurred when the United States went to war 
with Iraq, which created a fear that water could be contaminated 
with life-threatening substances. Lim said USF is now working on 
establishing biosensors online so it could constantly monitor the 
water. 

"A lot has happened in the last two and a half years concerning 
bioterrorism," Lim said. "Five years ago, it was a much different 
issue." [end of article] 
   	 
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 23 Pakistan Times: Pakistan not to allow IAEA inspection of Nuclear 
Facilities, says Ambassador Qazi 

[PakistanTimes [PakistanTimes.net]]

 Pakistan Times Monitoring Report  

WASHINGTON (US): Ambassador Ashraf Jehangir Qazi Sunday said 
Pakistan will not allow the International Atomic Energy Agency 
(IAEA) inspection of nuclear facilities, though it will continue 
to cooperate with the United Nations agency.
 
He said this in an interview with Jonathan Curiel, staff writer 
of 'The San Francisco Chronicle' appearing Sunday.
 
Ambassador Qazi said Pakistan will not accept any such request. 
"We won't allow any intrusive inspections of our sites --no state 
does that, and neither will we," Qazi said. 

"We are mindful of our own sovereign independence and sites. 

Those are off-limits. That doesn't mean we can't work out 
modalities which can provide the necessary information. Within 
those parameters, we will cooperate with the IAEA, and I think 
we'll be able to work out something where they can verify or 
ascertain whatever information they need." 

The newspaper referred to Dr. AQ Khan's confessions with respect 
to leakage of nuclear know-how any so-called Khan network.
 
Iran says it's developing a nuclear program for peaceful 
purposes. It says traces of highly enriched uranium found in Iran 
by IAEA inspectors came from contaminated equipment bought from 
Khan's network -- not from its own equipment. 

Probe of the Khan
 
Without getting into any debate, Qazi said Pakistan is continuing 
its own investigation of Khan, who is under surveillance despite 
being pardoned by President Pervez Musharraf.
 
"His pardon is conditional on him cooperating fully with Pakistan 
and (on) obtaining information about the proliferation network 
that he set up," Qazi said. "We have made it quite clear that if 
anything were to surface that led to him -- which was not 
included in his confessions -- his pardon would not cover those 
acts. For the time being, he's confined to his own home and is 
under surveillance."
 
Qazi was in San Francisco to address a local chapter of 
Developments in Literacy, an organization that supports education 
in remote villages of Pakistan. 

No Pressure for crusade against al-Qaeda 

Talking about Pakistan's military operation to arrest al-Qaeda 
operatives in Pakistan's semiautonomous tribal regions near 
Afghanistan, he said Islamabad is not doing it under U.S. 
pressure. 

"The operations that are going on in South Waziristan are really 
in the interests of Pakistan itself," he said. 

"Extremism is something that will blight our prospects of 
becoming a modern country. America is enhancing our capability of 
dealing with this issue. There is domestic criticism in Pakistan 
(of cooperation with the United States)." In this behalf, he 
referred to parliamentary proceedings and reports carried by the 
media.
 
". . . The vast majority of Pakistanis knows there is no 
alternative but to take these tough measures in order to 
exterminate these extremists. We don't see these extremists as 
friends of Pakistan, nor as proper interpreters of what Islam 
requires of people."   
       
Copyright © 2003-2004 TIMES Group of Publications All rights
*****************************************************************
 24 Scotsman: Blunkett plays down al-Qaeda threat
 
Sun 28 Mar 2004   			 			

HOME Secretary David Blunkett played down suggestions last night 
that Britain was certain to be targeted by Osama bin Ladenâ€™s 
terror group al-Qaeda. 

His comments were seen as a rebuke to Metropolitan Police 
Commissioner Sir John Stevens, who warned after the March 11 
train bombs in Madrid that a similar attack on London was 
"inevitable". 

Blunkett cautioned that such warnings might serve no purpose 
other than to make the public "jumpy". Meanwhile, a senior 
Whitehall official was reported as having told the Prime 
Minister, Tony Blair, he was worried about measures to protect 
Britain from a nuclear â€˜dirty bombâ€™ attack. 

Sir Peter Gershon, the governmentâ€™s adviser on civil service 
efficiency, told Blair of his worries about Operation Cyclamen - 
a screening programme to prevent radioactive material being 
smuggled through sea and air ports - in a letter leaked to the 
Sunday Times.
*****************************************************************
 25 Brattleboro Reformer: Event was traumatic for 11-year-old

March 29, 2004 Brattleboro, VT                                                                                 
 			 								 					
By CAROLYN LORIÉ 
Reformer Staff

BRATTLEBORO -- On March 28, 1979, Cindy Coble was 11 years old 
and living in Lancaster, Pa.

 She remembers it as one of the first warm days of spring, 
prompting her and a friend to skip school and sneak off to a 
neighboring town to play tennis.

 As Coble and her friend played on the court, the town's sirens 
began to wail. Although she didn't know it at that moment, the 
worst nuclear accident in the history of the United States was 
well under way less than 30 miles from where they stood.

 At 4 that morning, the feedwater pumps at the Three Mile Island 
Unit 2 nuclear power plant had stopped working. The failure 
caused the reactor to shut down, which in turn increased the 
pressure within the core. A valve designed to open when the 
pressure got too high did just that.

 What it didn't do was close again. 

Water meant to cool the core flowed freely out of the valve. This 
was discovered only later because at the time, the operators in 
the control room didn't know what was happening.

 The instrument board didn't show whether the valve was open. It 
only indicated if there was power going to it. So, as the water 
poured out of the containment vessel, the operators, believing 
the coolant level to be adequate, cut the pumps.

 And that's when the core began to melt.

 Making their way back to Lancaster, Coble, who now lives in 
Brattleboro, and her friend caught snippets of news on the radio 
about an accident at Three Mile Island. She remembers seeing 
families packing up their cars, getting ready to leave.

 When Coble got home, she learned that her father left work early 
and found her parents watching the news on television.

 "My parents explained to me that there was a possible radiation 
leak. I had a sense of what that meant," she remembers.

 Although she was only 11, Coble says that she had a neighbor who 
was an anti-nuclear activist and had taught her about the perils 
of nuclear power.

 Coble was scared.

 "I remember not wanting to be there. I remember very adamantly 
wanting to leave the area," she said.

 On March 30, it was discovered that radiation had leaked out of 
an auxiliary building at the plant. Then-Gov. Richard Thornburgh 
advised pregnant women and young children living within a 
five-mile radius of the plant to evacuate.

 Well outside of that zone, Coble nonetheless remembers her 
mother talking on the phone with other mothers, wondering if they 
too should leave. In the end, the family stayed put, but Coble 
and her sister spent several days confined to the house, allowed 
only to go to school.

 "There was definitely a bit of terror in (the event). We didn't 
really know what was happening. There was this elusive chemical 
in the air that I couldn't see or taste or hear but could be 
harmful," says Coble.

 Coble doesn't remember the specifics of the accident as it 
unfolded over the next several days. She doesn't remember the 
hydrogen bubble and the threat it posed of a massive radiation 
leak. She doesn't remember the helicopters sent to measure the 
radiation levels around the plant.

 What she does recall was feeling powerless and angry.

 Coble considers it to be one of the defining events in her life.

 "It really scared me. I woke up a little bit," she said.

 Before she moved to Brattleboro seven years ago, Coble says that 
she didn't know about Vermont Yankee. She was "horrified" when 
she discovered that she had moved within 10 miles of a nuclear 
power plant, and says she worries about her three children ages 
7, 11, and 14.

 Coble considered moving, decided against it, but always has bags 
packed in case of an accident at Vermont Yankee. The monthly test 
of the evacuation sirens brings her back to that day on the 
tennis courts.

 "I literally just panic. 'Oh, my God, not again,' " she said.

 Although nuclear industry insiders say that the safety of 
nuclear power plants has improved dramatically since, and because 
of, Three Mile Island, Coble isn't convinced. She wants all 103 
nuclear power plants in the country shut down.

 "Living through something like that was terrible," she said. "If 
we can't learn from that, what are we going to learn from?"

*****************************************************************
 26 Brattleboro Reformer: Douglas backs NRC, uprate

March 29, 2004 Brattleboro, VT                                                                                 
 			 								 					
By RANDY HOLHUT Reformer Staff

BRATTLEBORO -- Gov. James Douglas said Friday he was confident 
that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would do a thorough review 
of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant in Vernon before granting it 
permission to increase its power output by 20 percent.

 In a wide-ranging interview with the Reformer that focused on 
energy issues, Douglas said that while he agreed in principle 
with the state Public Service Board's condition that an 
independent safety assessment for the plant be done before an 
"uprate" is granted, he had faith that the NRC could perform that 
role.

 "The most important consideration is the safety of the plant and 
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is certainly an independent 
entity," said Douglas. 

"The NRC is independent from the plant, it's independent from the 
state," Douglas said, expressing confidence in the competence of 
federal regulators.

 Douglas said he supports the uprate because he believes all of 
the state's ratepayers will benefit from it. 

As for concerns raised by the New England Coalition that the 
uprate will ultimately increase the cost of decommissioning the 
plant and cut into the balance of the decommissioning fund that 
is to be split between the plant and the ratepayers, Douglas said 
the Legislature and the PSB ultimately will decide the rates of 
return.

 He dismissed the need for a House bill identical to one that 
passed the Senate immediately following the Public Service Board 
decision, reiterating the call for an independent assessment. The 
House bill was proposed this week by state Rep. Sarah Edwards, 
P-Brattleboro, but has been held up in committee.

 Turning to hydro power, Douglas said it is likely that the 
state, working with a private partner, will make an offer soon on 
the hydroelectric facilities on the Deerfield and Connecticut 
rivers.

 "We've identified a private-sector partner that we're going to 
work with, although I can't say who it is right now," Douglas 
said. Pointing out the the facilities' current owner, USGen, a 
subsidiary of PG, is in bankruptcy, Douglas said sharing the risk 
of the project "makes the most sense."

 He said the bankruptcy court will clear the facilities for sale 
"within a few months."

 Douglas was noncommittal on wind power. His administration is 
currently holding a series of hearing throughout the state in a 
effort to formulate a policy on the development of wind turbines 
on states lands.

 Meanwhile, a private wind generation project in the Northeast 
Kingdom is before the Public Service Board.

 "It's a tough one," Douglas said. "The debate is a real clash of 
interests and a clash of cultures."

 He said the ultimate policy might be "to develop wind power on a 
'Vermont' scale, not large, industrial turbines in huge 
quanitites."

 As required by state law, the Douglas administration is crafting 
a 20-year statewide energy plan which critics have lambasted as 
short-sighted, focused on conventional sources, and short on 
details. Further, the Department of Public Service has been 
criticized for developing the plan before public hearings were 
held.

 Douglas admitted Friday that hearings should have been held 
earlier. "But there is a tremendous opportunity now for public 
input," he added.

 The high cost of electricity in the state is a concern of 
Douglas. Even though the state's contract with Hydro-Quebec 
doesn't start to sunset until 2016, Douglas said he has been 
talking with the Hydro-Quebec officials with an eye toward the 
possibility of a new deal.

 Douglas also said his administration is working out agreements 
with Central Vermont Public Service and Green Mountain Power to 
reduce their rate of return and keep a lid on residential 
electric rates.

 Rates for industrial users remain a concern for Douglas. He said 
he regularly meets with people from IBM, the state's largest 
private employer, and is sensitive to their concerns and the 
concerns of other businesses about high energy costs.

Kathryn Casa contributed to this report.

*****************************************************************
 27 Brattleboro Reformer: TMI marked turning point

Article Published: Saturday, March 27, 2004 -
 		   	 	
By CAROLYN LORIÉ Reformer Staff

BRATTLEBORO -- If there is one thing the public doesn't 
understand about the accident at Three Mile Island, says Jay 
Thayer, site vice president of Vermont Yankee, it's that it was a 
defining moment in the nuclear industry.

 "I'm not sure people realize how many changes we've made," says 
Thayer.

 On March 28, 1979, Thayer was working in the Framingham, Mass., 
office of the Yankee Atomic Electric Co., when faxes began 
arriving about a problem at a Pennsylvania plant.

 The information was incomplete and often conflicting and what 
did come in, came in slowly. Thayer says that his first reaction 
wasn't fear but an eagerness for more and clearer information.

 "That first morning, it was hard to decipher what was 
happening," he says.

 One reason it was so hard to get accurate information is that 
there wasn't any. 

"Nobody knew what was happening in those first few hours. They 
were struggling to figure it out," says Howard Shaffer, a retired 
nuclear engineer who does public outreach about nuclear power.

 What was happening was this: There was either an electrical or 
mechanical failure that caused the feedwater pumps to stop 
working. The interruption of the pumps triggered an automatic 
shutdown, known as a "scram." Although a scram stops the reaction 
process, there is still a great deal of heat, called decay heat, 
being generated in the core.

 Another byproduct of the scram was a sharp increase in the 
amount of pressure in the tank. A valve automatically opened to 
relieve some of the pressure, but then did not automatically 
shut, as it should have.

 Making matters worse was the fact that the operators in the 
control room didn't know that the valve had failed to close. As 
coolant poured out of the open valve, the operators shut off the 
pumps, allowing the top portion of the core to be exposed. 
Without the requisite water flowing around it, the core began to 
melt.

 According to Thayer, who within 10 days of the meltdown was at 
Three Mile Island as a technical advisor, the accident and the 
ensuing chaos resulted from major deficiencies in three areas of 
the nuclear power industry -- operator training, instrument 
design and emergency planning.

 Up to 1979, control room operators were trained what to do but 
not why to do it, explains Thayer.

 "We trained operators for event-based response," he says, adding 
that at Three Mile Island "they were responding to what they 
thought was happening."

 But what they thought was happening and what was really 
happening turned out to be vastly different. One of the things 
that Thayer, who has an electrical engineering degree, as well as 
certification as a senior operator, did while he was in 
Pennsylvania was to walk the operators through the accident, 
explaining to them what had actually occurred.

 Adding to the operators' confusion during the accident was a 
poorly designed instrument panel that, according to Shaffer, 
contained "booby traps."

 As an example of how problematic the instruments were, Shaffer 
says that the operators at Three Mile Island had removed the 
handle of one switch that was identical to one right next to it 
that had a completely different function. It was replaced with 
the handle of a beer tap.

 The poor design came into play during the accident when the 
operators couldn't tell by looking at the panel whether the valve 
had shut. They could only tell that power was going to it and 
consequently assumed that it was functioning properly. This led 
to the decision to shut down the pumps.

 What happened outside of the plant wasn't much of an improvement 
over the chaos that was unfolding within it.

 "It was very confusing from a command and control point of view. 
The protocol we use today didn't exist. Everything was ad hoc," 
says Thayer.

 As news of the accident spread, more and more people got 
involved, including officials from the county, the Nuclear 
Regulatory Commission, the state, all the way up to President 
Jimmy Carter. But the increasing level of authority did nothing 
to clarify the overriding questions: What happened and what has 
to happen.

 By the time Thayer arrived, he says the situation was more 
orderly and organized. He stayed for more than three weeks and 
took part in the precedent-setting procedural review.

 As a result of the accident the Institute of Nuclear Power 
Operations was formed. The institute is responsible for setting 
safety regulations and guidelines for the industry. According to 
Thayer, it has greatly improved the safety and reliability of 
nuclear power plants.

 Even industry whistleblower, Paul Blanch, agrees that nuclear 
power is a much safer industry than it was in 1979.

 Where Blanch disagrees with others in the field is in the 
assertion that the amount of radiation released was negligible. 
As an expert witness for a class-action lawsuit brought by 
residents living near the plant, Blanch argues that the levels of 
radiation released remain unknown due to inadequate testing.

 The suit was dismissed in the mid-1990s.

 Looking back on the 25 years since the accident, Thayer says 
that all three areas that were so sorely lacking in 1979 have 
been remedied. Control room operators now undergo a much more 
comprehensive training and go through retraining exercises every 
six weeks.

 The instrumentation underwent a major overhaul to protect 
against the kind of confusion that dominated the control room at 
Three Mile Island. And there are now protocols in place as to 
what should happen after an accident.

 Despite lingering concerns among opponents to nuclear power that 
all the details about the accident at Three Mile Island have not 
been revealed, Thayer says that he is confident that nothing was 
hidden.

 "I don't think there was an untold story," says Thayer. 		   	 	
 		   			 		   	 	
*****************************************************************
 28 Brattleboro Reformer: NRC 'end of cycle' meeting is March 31

Brattleboro, VT 				 		 	 			
 			 								 					
Article Published: Saturday, March 27, 2004 -
 		   	 	
VERNON -- The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will hold a public 
meeting at 7 p.m. at the Vernon Elementary School, on Wednesday, 
March 31.

 It will be an "end of cycle" meeting, where the NRC will discuss 
the safety assessment of Vermont Yankee for 2003, as well as the 
plant's proposed "uprate."

 From 3:30-5 p.m., members of the Vermont State Nuclear Advisory 
Panel will meet at the Vernon Town Hall to discuss, among other 
things, the Public Service Board's recent order and the NRC 
review of the uprate.

 Panel members will then attend the 7 p.m. meeting.

 According to Cliff Anderson, branch chief in the division of 
reactor projects in region one, the NRC decided to expand this 
year's meeting to include discussion of the proposed changes at 
the plant. 

The meeting will include an NRC presentation on their review 
process of the uprate, which will be followed by a discussion 
between the commission and Vermont Yankee officials regarding the 
NRC's safety assessment of the plant for the past year.

 The last segment of the meeting with include NRC officials with 
specific knowledge of the uprate answering questions from the 
public.

 Peter Alexander, executive director of the New England Coaltion, 
is encouraging anyone who can to attend the meeting.

 "This is likely to be the one chance where the people of 
Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts who feel that they are 
in the danger zone can come and speak to directly to the NRC 
about their concerns," said Alexander.

 Citizens Awareness Network will also send representatives, 
including Derrik Jordan, who said that the talk will also provide 
the public with an opportunity to ask questions about an 
independent safety assessment.                          
 		   			 		   	 	
*****************************************************************
 29 Salt Lake Tribune: Three Mile Island memories still linger 25 years on 
 
March 28, 2004   
 
  [PHOTO] 
A spokesman for Three Mile Island 's new owner, First Energy
nothing there to look at." (Associated Press file photo)   
By Dawn Fallik 
Knight Ridder News Service 
 
    Tom Richards retired from his job at Three Mile Island 10
years ago, but the nuclear power plant remains ever-present,
shadowing his moves on the Sunset Golf Course, where he works as
a groundskeeper. 
 
    Some day when the still-operating Unit 1 is closed and the
complex razed, maybe people will stop asking about what happened
in Middletown, Pa., during the early morning of March 28, 1979. 
 
    "It'll be just like Pearl Harbor -- they won't know what
happened at Three Mile Island and where it happened," he said. 
 
    Yet those memories still linger. Twenty-five years after the
accident, America's closest brush with nuclear disaster looms
large for the plant's neighbors and former workers, even as they
focus on the future, not the past. 
 
    There is plenty to remember for people such as Richards and
three other men -- a former Middletown resident, the mayor and a
retired radiation inspector. 
 
    Richards, who worked at Unit 1 for more than 25 years,
believes nuclear fuel is the energy of the future. 
 
  
 
 
 
  
 
    "I was surprised at how bad it was, but I was younger then
and thought nothing could happen to me," he said. 
 
    Robert Reid, who was mayor of Middletown during the crisis
and took the office again in 2002, said he feels safe again
beneath the steam of Unit 1. Yet a Geiger counter remains in his
office, sputtering sporadically. 
 
    John Garnish, whose home directly across from the plant
became ground zero for reporters, left for Florida, more toward
the sun than away from Three Mile Island. 
 
    He harbors bitterness toward the reporters he feels abused
his hospitality. And he worries about friends and family lost to
cancer -- fallout, he believes, from a still-contentious nuclear
disaster. 
 
    "No one wrote about all the dead birds that I found, or how
people would get a metallic taste in their mouths," he said.
"The press were just a bunch of liars who wanted to use the
telephone." 
 
    And Thomas Gerusky, former head of the Pennsylvania Bureau
of Radiation Protection, who went on to help clean up some of
the nation's most contaminated nuclear sites, wonders if there
should be a future for nuclear fuel. 
 
    "I've got mixed emotions. Even working for the Department of
Energy, it's hard to figure out whether we need nuclear plants
or not," he said. 
 
    Nestled among small islands, which once held fishing shacks,
Three Mile Island appears small and weary today, dressed in
faded '70s blue and beige. 
 
    For 25 years, only two of the hourglass cooling towers have
waved the signature white steam flags. The other two stand
empty, gray skeletal reminders of the nation's most dangerous
nuclear disaster. 
 
    It began at 4 a.m. on March 28, 1979, with a simple
malfunction in a valve that drained water from the Unit 2
reactor. That led to a release of radiation -- how much remains
a matter of contention -- a potentially explosive hydrogen
bubble and the meltdown of five feet of the radioactive core. 
 
    Five days later, the nightmare ended with a visit from
President Jimmy Carter, touring the plant in white plastic
booties. 
 
    Since then, the plant, which is about 10 miles from
Harrisburg, Pa., has been emptied of radioactive material, at a
cost of a billion dollars and 10 years. A spokesman for Three
Mile Island 's new owner, First Energy Corp., refused requests
to tour the plant, saying "there is nothing there to look at." 
 
    
 
   Although he thought the accident was "overblown," Garnish
said the plant had been bad news since it opened. 
 
    "They had contaminated the area long before the accident,"
he said. "They would do releases of gas -- everyone would get a
metallic taste in their mouths." 
 
    Garnish left for Florida in 1983, returned in 1988, and then
left for good two years later. 
 
    "It was more the small-town feel that we couldn't get used
to again. You could predict what everybody was going to do," he
said. 
 
    When he left, he took a dosimeter, which registers
radiation, that had been put on the tree in his front yard. He
said he didn't remember what it registered anymore. 
 
    "Our next-door neighbor died of liver cancer. The man down
the street died of brain cancer. My sister, she had breast
cancer," Garnish said. "It's just a farce that they're not
reporting it." 
 
    When Garnish left Middletown, Reid was the mayor of the
Dauphin County town. He is the mayor once again, having served
from 1978 to 1994, and returning in 2002. 
 
    The elementary school here bears Reid's name, and he
substitute-teaches there from time to time. 
 
    Reid said that it took 10 years after Three Mile Island for
Middletown to feel "close to normal" again and that it is always
on his citizens' minds. Every year at the high school, the
football coach shows a documentary about the accident, and Reid
talks afterward. 
 
    There have been changes, and they have been for the better. 
 
    "They know to be truthful to the people they're neighbors
with," Reid says of the current Three Mile Island management.
"If a siren goes off, I get a call. If a fish jumps out of the
water onto the island, I get a call. 
 
   "There will always be reminders," said Reid, leaning back in
his chair as the Geiger counter next to him clicked softly in
the background. "But would my life be easier without a nuclear
plant? Probably not. We just need to come up with a way to make
sure they're safe." 
 
    
 
    
 
    
 
   
 
   
			   				 	 "> 	                 				 
 
  
Copyright Salt Lake City Tribune
*****************************************************************
 30 Daily Yomiuri: TEPCO to put 4 N-plants on hold 

Yomiuri Shimbun 

Tokyo Electric Power Co. decided Saturday to delay bringing 
online four nuclear power reactors it is planning to build in 
Fukushima and Aomori prefectures for about a year in anticipation 
of a long-term decline in demand for electricity. 

The postponement is expected to be included in an electric power 
supply plan for fiscal 2004 TEPCO is to release Monday. 

Operations at No. 7 and No. 8 nuclear power reactors at Fukushima 
No.1 nuclear power plant, which would have an output capacity of 
1.38 million kilowatts each, will be delayed for a year from 
October 2009 and October 2010, respectively. 

Operations at No. 1 and No. 2 nuclear power reactors at 
Higashidori power plant in Aomori Prefecture--both with an output 
capacity of 1.38 million kilowatts--were initially planned to 
start in fiscal 2011 and sometime after fiscal 2011, 
respectively. 

But they also will be postponed for more than a year.   

Copyright 2004 The Yomiuri Shimbun 
*****************************************************************
 31 BBC ON THIS DAY | 28 | 1979: Nuclear leak causes alarm in America
 		 
bbc.co.uk

Radioactive steam has leaked into the atmosphere in Pennsylvania, 
USA. 

The accident happened when a water pump broke down at the Three 
Mile Island nuclear plant, 10 miles (16km) south-east of the 
state capital Harrisburg. 

There are fears some of the plant's 500 workers have been 
contaminated. 

The authorities have declared a "general emergency" but did not 
inform the public until five hours after the gas escaped at 0400 
local time. 

There's a hell of a lot of radiation

Joe Fouchard, USNRC spokesman
 			 			   		 		 		
Director of the County Civil Defence Organisation (CCDO) Les 
Jackson said they had drawn up an evacuation plan, but nearby 
residents have not been moved yet. 

He described the scene at the large power station in the 
Susquehanna River as "a madhouse". 

Spokesman for the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission 
(USNRC) Joe Fouchard said: "There's a hell of a lot of radiation 
in the reactor building." 

A spokesman for Metropolitan Edison - one of the companies that 
runs Three Mile Island - said the nuclear reactor automatically 
shut down after the malfunction, but not before the leak. 

According to a US Government report radiation has been detected a 
mile away, but the calm weather has helped contain the spread of 
the noxious fumes. 

One of the nuclear engineer at the the Pennsylavania Department 
of Environmental Protection, William Dornsife, said: "There was 
very little wind this morning, so the radioactivity shouldn't 
have gone very far." 

"What small release there was will be confined to the local 
vicinity," he continued. 

The emergency status will remain until there has been a thorough 
investigation by teams in anti-radiation suits. 

The nuclear industry has been under increasing scrutiny in the
US recently. 

Five plants were closed down there just two weeks ago over fears
of the effects of earthquakes on cooling towers. 	 	

Concern mounted in the days following the accident as 
investigations showed serious damage to the nuclear fuel rods, 
which threatened melt-down of the plant. 

The authorities recommended pregnant women and children under 
school age living within five miles of the site should be 
evacuated. 

And Pennsylvania Governor Dick Thornburgh gave a warning that the 
four counties surrounding Three-Mile Island might have to be 
cleared of people too. 

The accident was caused by a combination of human error and 
equipment failure and the plant was partially shut down. 

Three Mile Island remains the largest nuclear incident in US 
history. 

It has attracted enormous public attention, although nobody died 
as a direct result of the accident and subsequent radioactive 
fall-out. 

Research released in 2002 showed incidences of cancer in the area 
were not significantly higher than elsewhere.
 			 			   		 		 		
*****************************************************************
 32 Post Gazette: Study claims infant deaths increased after Three Mile Island
 
Nuclear accident was 25 years ago
 
Saturday, March 27, 2004 By Bill Toland, Post-Gazette Harrisburg
Bureau
             
HARRISBURG -- A nuclear industry watchdog group yesterday 
released a study claiming infant death rates in the counties 
surrounding the Three Mile Island nuclear plants rose in the 
years after the 1979 accident.

Tomorrow: Cloud from Three Mile Island remains.

, which organized a seminar to commemorate the 25th anniversary 
of America's most notable nuclear accident, released the study at 
the seminar, suggesting the number of infants who died within a 
month of birth grew by 21 percent immediately after the accident.

 That percentage increase is calculated in "the counties closest 
and directly downwind of the plant." The group, which has 
criticized previous University of Pittsburgh studies on the 
health effects of Three Mile Island's radioactive fallout, did 
not provide the total number of infant deaths in the years after 
the accident, or the difference between total infant deaths and 
what would be considered average.

 The study was compiled by New York's , a nonprofit nuclear 
research group. That group said the data doesn't prove any 
correlation between the near-meltdown and infant death rates or 
increased radiogenic cancer rates, but recommends following up on 
the numbers.

 The Radiation and Public Health Project's board of directors 
includes Dr. Ernest Sternglass, a longtime opponent of the former 
Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Beaver County.

 Dave Lochbaum of the the same group that's scuffling with the 
Bush administration over its bending of scientific reports to fit 
political goals said most of the nuclear plants still in 
operation in the U.S. are three decades old or more and nearing 
the end of their useful lives.

 The likelihood of an accident at a nuclear plant generally 
follows a "bathtub curve," he said, meaning likelihood is higher 
when a plant first begins operating, lower in the middle, then 
higher at the end, when machinery grows old and wears down.

 He called it a "recipe for disaster."

 If a near-meltdown similar to Three Mile Island's happened 
today, "the outcome would be just as bad."

 Steve Wing, an epidemiology professor at the University of North 
Carolina, said it's OK to keep questioning "accepted" findings 
and standard government reports on Three Mile Island health 
effects, even though the accident is a quarter-century in the 
rear view mirror.

 "To fail to question is to fail our ability to exercise 
democracy," he said.

(Bill Toland can be reached at or 1-717-787-2141.)                                              
 				 			 	   	 	     	   			 
|   |   |   |   |   |   |   | Copyright ©1997-2004 PG 
Publishing Co., Inc. All Rights Reserved.                        

*****************************************************************
 33 Post Gazette: Cheaper, safer plant might revive market
 
Westinghouse says new design is uses gravity, not pumps, for 
cooling
 
Sunday, March 28, 2004 By Don Hopey, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
 
There hasn't been an application to build a nuclear reactor filed 
in the United States since the accident at Three Mile Island, but 
Westinghouse is banking that its newest "cookie-cutter" design 
will revive the market that melted down 25 years ago.

 The Pittsburgh-based company boasts its AP1000, which uses a new 
passive safety technology that relies on gravity instead of 
pumps, is simpler, safer and faster to build.

 The design uses existing advanced, pressurized water reactor 
technology that can generate 1,117 megawatts of electricity -- in 
the ballpark of existing nuclear plants -- yet requires 50 
percent fewer valves, 35 percent fewer pumps, 80 percent less 
piping and 70 percent less wiring.

 "That means there's less to buy, less to maintain," said Vaughn 
Gilbert, a Westinghouse spokesman. "And the chance of an accident 
is much less than the existing plants. These reactors can 
automatically shut down if there is a problem, even without 
anyone around."

 The technology places tanks of water above the reactor core and 
uses gravity instead of pumps and motors to supply cooling water. 
It also allows the reactor cooling system to operate 
independently of an alternative power source in the event of an 
emergency.

 Westinghouse also has developed the reactor so that its 
components can be built in a factory and then assembled on-site, 
much like a modular home. This "cookie-cutter" process produces a 
reactor with more uniform parts and one that is faster to build 
on site.

 "It was designed in cooperation with our customers, both in 
terms of safety and economics," Gilbert said. "It's unbelievably 
safe and cost-competitive. Since it will be pre-licensed, it will 
take only 36 months from ground-breaking to operation."

 Over the past four years, interest in nuclear power generation 
has risen as the cost of fossil fuels -- coal, oil and natural 
gas -- and concern over climate change and global warming has 
increased. Nuclear plant operating costs also have been going 
down, allowing nuclear power to approach cost-competitiveness 
with other types of power generation.

 Ed Cummins, a Westinghouse nuclear plant designer, said the 
initial cost of the AP1000 was approximately $1.3 billion, about 
two to three times the construction costs for a new gas or 
coal-fired electric generating facility, but the fuel would be 
cheaper.

 Cummins said the company expected to receive final design 
approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in September, a 
major step toward federal design certification, which could come 
by July 2005.

 He said markets for new nuclear plants existed in China, Korea, 
Finland, Russia and India, and eventually in the United States.

 "In the U.S., it will come because it will be economical," 
Cummins said.

 The Bush administration is pushing nuclear power and wants to 
see a new plant ordered in the country by 2010, but decisions on 
whether to build nuclear power plants ultimately will be made by 
Wall Street financiers who heretofore have shown little faith in 
investing in nuclear power.

 Gilbert said it was likely that any nuclear power plant built in 
the United States would be constructed at the sites of existing 
plants because the space is available and such a facility has 
gained local community acceptance.

 But Eric Epstein, a leader of the TMI Alert Group in Middletown, 
Dauphin County, south of Harrisburg, said that theory of 
community acceptance didn't hold up in the communities around 
Three Mile Island.

 "There's still 720 metric tons of nuclear waste at TMI Unit 1. 
How are they going to remove that so they can build a new reactor 
in that footprint?" Epstein said. "And TMI 2 is still a 
high-level radioactive site. ... They can design what they want, 
but I just think they have to deal with the mess they've already 
created before they move on."

 Cummins said that issue would be settled within the next three 
to five years when the nuclear waste disposal site at Yucca 
Mountain receives its federal license as a spent fuel storage 
facility.

 "What to do with it is a national policy decision that's about 
made," he said. "The policy will be that it's safe to dispose of 
lightwater reactor spent fuel at Yucca Mountain for 10,000 years 
if it's properly encapsulated."

Copyright ©1997-2004 PG Publishing Co., Inc. All Rights Reserved.                        
*****************************************************************
 34 Post Gazette: The cloud remains: Today, questions still persist about the true 
cause of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident
 
Some challenge handling, whether health effects it caused
haven't dissipated
 
Sunday, March 28, 2004 By Don Hopey, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

ROYALTON, PA. -- Across a narrow Susquehanna River backwater from 
the island where two mammoth stone cold dead cooling towers sit, 
a radiation monitor silently flashes digital readouts that change 
every few seconds.

      Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette

Eric Epstein is chairman of Three Mile Island Alert, a citizens 
group formed after the worst accident in the history of the 
civilian nuclear industry. On March 28, 1979, Unit 2 of the Three 
Mile Island nuclear power plant (seen in background) suffered a 
loss-of-cooling accident, an event so dangerous that it's 
considered a "worst-case scenario" in safety manuals. Unit 2 is 
now crippled beyond repair. "It was an historical crime," he 
said, "and we're in a battle now over memory."

 Yesterday

 Study claims infant deaths increased after Three Mile Island
(March 27, 2004)

 Online graphic

 See a map showing the location of the Three Mile Island nuclear
power plant.

 On the Internet

 Dickinson College has posted the interviews done 25 years ago
online at www.ThreeMileIsland.org. The Web site includes a
virtual museum and government and industry documents not widely
available to the public.
 
The numbers jump between 7.0 and 7.8 microrems per hour, well 
within the normal background radiation range at ground zero for 
the worst commercial nuclear accident in the nation's history.

 Twenty-five years ago today, a series of mechanical malfunctions 
and human errors led to a partial core meltdown at the Three Mile 
Island Unit 2 reactor and the uncontrolled venting of at least 
two major plumes of radioactive gas into the atmosphere.

 The accident had a devastating impact on the nuclear power 
industry; the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has not reviewed an 
application to build a new nuclear power plant in the United 
States since. And it triggered fear, panic, confusion and anger 
among thousands of people in Central Pennsylvania who lived in 
the long shadow of the cooling towers and beyond.

 Jane Seller, who still lives about 22 miles west of Three Mile 
Island in Carlisle, Cumberland County, remembers being worried 25 
years ago about a core meltdown and how that might cause 
long-lasting devastation of the region.

 "It was very scary," said Seller, 70. "The fact that we didn't 
have a total meltdown was lucky. We found out later it was worse 
than we thought."

 What she thought in the days after the accident was captured for 
posterity by Lonna Malmsheimer, a professor of American studies 
at Dickinson College in Carlisle who, along with two dozen 
professors and students, interviewed more than 400 people in 
Carlisle and communities around Three Mile Island in the weeks 
after the accident. Those audiotaped interviews, kept 
confidential for 25 years as promised, are now being released by 
the school.

 In her interview, Seller, then 45 and the mother of two preteen 
children, said she took the threat posed by the accident 
seriously, although her children did not. By Friday morning, two 
days after the accident, she was so concerned about a meltdown 
and radiation exposure that she began getting ready to leave the 
area. Pillows, prescriptions and toothbrushes were packed and put 
in the car.

 "I realized that all the women sitting next to their radios were 
losing their minds," she said in the interview. "That was really 
a bad thing to do. We should have been doing our wash or 
something."

 Seller and her children did leave Carlisle that Friday for her 
mother's summer home in northern Pennsylvania but stayed away 
only a day. They were among approximately 200,000 who left their 
homes, some for days or weeks.

 Looking back on the accident now, Seller said, she remembers 
feeling angry.

 "A meltdown could have made that valuable, beautiful countryside 
uninhabitable for years and I couldn't understand how that could 
be allowed," she said. "It didn't feel healthy to be there and I 
still don't feel good about it.

 "It certainly isn't Chernobyl," Seller said, referring to the 
fatal nuclear plant accident in 1986 near Kiev, Ukraine. "But I 
still think the nuclear industry is problematic because no one 
has figured a good thing to do with the nuclear waste."

 A complicated occurrence

 Across the road from TMI, a stone's throw from the digital 
radiation monitor, is a blue and yellow highway marker erected by 
the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission in 1999, the 
accident's 20th anniversary, that attributes the accident to 
"technical malfunctions and human error."

 But the real causes were more complicated. And today, questions 
persist about the true cause of the malfunction, how it was 
handled and what health effects it caused.

 TMI Unit 1 was brought "on line" by General Public Utilities 
Nuclear and its plant operator, Metropolitan Edison, in September 
1974. The controlled nuclear reaction created heat to boil water 
that produced steam to turn a turbine which began producing 
electric power.

 TMI Unit 2 came on line in December 1978, behind schedule and 
grossly over budget. It had been operating for 90 days when the 
accident occurred.

 According to an official Nuclear Regulatory Commission report 
released earlier this month to mark the anniversary, a 
malfunctioning pressure relief valve in the reactor's cooling 
system caused a loss of coolant and the core to overheat. The 
intense heat -- the core temperature rose to well over 2,000 
degrees Fahrenheit -- damaged the reactor and collapsed its 177 
fuel rods into a mass of debris and twisted sticks.

 At least 15 million curies of radiation was released into the 
atmosphere, according to the NRC, but some independent 
investigators put the radiation releases three to six times 
higher.

 NRC Chairman Nils Diaz, speaking at the March 3 NRC meeting, 
said the accident was preventable if plant procedures had been 
followed.

 "That these measures were not taken has less to do with the 
technology than with human error driven by a lack of 
understanding," Diaz said, "or, at times, a profound 
misunderstanding of what was taking place in the core in the 
first few hours of the accident."

 What Diaz and the NRC didn't say, according to Three Mile Island 
Alert, a Middletown-based anti-nuclear organization that opposed 
construction of the nuclear plants, is that Metropolitan Edison 
plant operators had been falsifying reactor leak rates to the NRC 
for weeks before the accident. Because of that practice, they had 
learned to ignore the most obvious sign that the valve had stuck 
open and coolant was being lost.

 If the leak rate had been properly reported or NRC inspectors 
had found it, according to the organization, the Babcock & 
Wilcox-designed plant would have been shut down for repairs and 
there would have been no accident that day.

 "It was an historical crime," said Eric Epstein, a Holocaust 
historian and chairman of Three Mile Island Alert, "and we're in 
a battle now over memory."

 Preserving that memory are federal court records that show 
Metropolitan Edison struck a plea bargain with the Department of 
Justice in February 1984 to settle the leak rate falsification 
case. The utility pleaded guilty to one count and no contest to 
six others in an 11-count indictment. It was fined $45,000 and 
required to establish a $1 million fund to assist the state 
Emergency Management Agency in formulating an emergency 
preparedness plan for a 20-mile zone around the plant.

 "The community was held hostage and we all experienced 
psychological terrorism," Epstein said. "No one who lived through 
it will ever be the same. We find ways to deal with it. The 
cooling towers are in our back yard where we live, marry, parent 
and work. They still cast a shadow."

 A lot of radiation, or a little?

 A person standing at the radiation monitor across the road from 
TMI and within the cooling towers' shadows when the accident 
occurred would have been exposed to less than 100 millirem of 
radiation, according to the NRC, about the same as the average, 
annual, natural background dose for residents of the Central 
Pennsylvania region.

Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette Physicist Priscilla Laws and one of 
her colleagues gave twice-daily briefings at Dickinson College, 
updating students and faculty on radiation readings during the 
days after the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power 
plant on March 28, 1979. Click photo for larger image.

 The NRC, citing detailed state, federal and independent studies, 
estimates the average radiation dose to about 2 million people in 
the area around the accident was about 1 millirem. By comparison, 
the exposure during a set of chest X-rays is about 6 millirem.

 Most of the radiation produced by the accident was contained, 
the NRC and industry have said, and the radiation exposure caused 
no detrimental health effects.

 But a new analysis of health statistics in the region has found 
that the death rates for infants, children and the elderly soared 
in the first two years after the accident in Dauphin, Lancaster, 
Lebanon and York counties.

 The study released last week by the Radiation and Public Health 
Project, found the infant mortality rate for Dauphin County, 
where TMI is situated, increased by 47 percent, from 81 to 119 
deaths.

 "These data suggest strongly that the 1979 meltdown immediately 
harmed the local population, especially the youngest and very 
elderly, who are most vulnerable to the toxic effects of 
radiation," said Joseph Mangano, national coordinator for the 
nonprofit educational and scientific organization formed to reach 
a better understanding about the effects of low-level radiation 
on public health.

 Mangano said the long-term health of the region's residents also 
was affected by the accident. Cancer death rates among children 
younger than 10 years old in the downwind counties were 24 
percent below the U.S. rate in the 1970s, before the accident, 
but have been 30 percent higher since.

 Priscilla Laws, a 39-year-old physicist at Dickinson in 1979, 
took soil and air radiation samples around Carlisle and across 
the river from TMI in the days after the accident, and gave twice 
daily briefings on the findings. Her work, along with that of her 
fellow physicist, John Luetzelschwab, is credited with keeping 
students, fellow faculty members and Carlisle residents from 
panicking.

 In an interview with Malmsheimer done in the weeks after the 
accident, she said she was worried about a meltdown, but 
convinced that the radiation releases were not dangerous. Today, 
she still feels that way.

 But Laws, now 64, says the risk posed by the accident was not 
exaggerated.

 "After the initial radiation release, everyone living near the 
plant left. All we saw was two state troopers stationed to deter 
looters. It was like a ghost town, very weird," she said.

 "We know in retrospect that there was a partial meltdown that 
did have the potential for an explosion in the containment 
building. That building is so contaminated they gave up on 
cleaning it up. We've given future generations a big problem 
because we wanted cheap energy now."

 Malmsheimer, who conducted numerous interviews in the weeks 
after the accident and was interviewed herself, said the people 
in Carlisle felt a lot safer than those who lived closer to TMI.

 Radio was the communications media of choice. Newspapers weren't 
fast enough in getting out the breaking news, she said, and 
television stations were sensationalizing the situation.

 Malmsheimer said the oral history project sought to document how 
people responded to a crisis they didn't know enough about.

 "Some used humor, some religion. It differed by age, with people 
who had lived through World War II thinking about bombs and 
radiation releases like they saw in Japan. And there was great 
sadness and concern about whether the area here would become 
uninhabitable."

 She said women were more worried about their children and less 
trustful than men of the company's explanations about the 
accident. Many people didn't understand the risk and weren't 
happy with the way the company handled the crisis.

 "Radiation is invisible and they didn't know if they were 
exposed," she said. "People learned mistrust of government and 
industry. They changed. ... Even very conservative people around 
here are skeptical of nuclear power now."

 TMI Unit 2 was drained of its fuel and contaminated water in the 
early 1990s. It will not be decommissioned until TMI Unit 1 is 
shut down. The Unit 1 reactor was restarted in 1985 and is 
licensed to operate through April 2014.

 "Is it safe? I don't have the information to make that 
judgment," Malmsheimer said. "I haven't moved."


Copyright ©1997-2004 PG Publishing Co., Inc. All Rights
*****************************************************************
 35 Iowa City Press-Citizen: Three Mile Island changed UI professor's life 
 
Sunday, March 28, 2004 
By Mike McWilliams

Iowa City Press-Citizen Bill Field first heard of a small leak at 
the Three Mile Island nuclear plant about 10 a.m. as he drove his 
1969 Ford Mustang to class at Millersville University in 
Pennsylvania. 

"They said there was a leak of some type, but not to be
worried," said Field, who was a 25-year-old graduate student at
the time. "I thought it was interesting, but not too worried." 

Reports later that night indicated the leak was growing.

Officials thought there was a chance that a radioactive hydrogen
bubble inside one of the reactor vessels would explode. Field
said his concerns grew when he saw firetrucks driving down his
Elizabethtown, Pa., neighborhood, urging people to shut their
windows to keep out radioactive iodine gas. 

"At that point, I tried to call my wife, but the lines were
busy," he said. "You couldn't get a dial tone." 

Precisely 25 years after a near catastrophe at the Three Mile
Island facility, Field, an associate professor in the
occupational and environmental health and epidemiology
departments at the University of Iowa, said the event changed
his life and career path. 

On the morning of March 28, 1979, pumps feeding a cooling tower 
to the plant's reactor failed and 32,000 gallons of radioactive 
superheated water spewed into the domed concrete reactor housing. 
Without water, more than half the reactor's 36,000 nuclear fuel 
rods ruptured at the plant, located on an island in the 
Susquehanna River, near Harrisburg, Pa. 

Although no deaths or injuries resulted because of the accident, 
some radioactive gases were released into the environment. As 
more information about the accident was released, Field said, the 
atmosphere became more chaotic. He said several people emptied 
their bank accounts and lines of 10 to 15 cars waited at gas 
stations to fill up and flee the area. National Guard troops 
arrived to make sure people didn't loot. 

Field joined his wife, who was completing her medical residency
at Penn State University's Medical Center in Hershey. The
medical center is about 10 miles away from Three Mile Island.
The couple was committed to stay near the medical center in case
patients had to be moved. 

They packed their clothes, took their wedding pictures, and
moved into the medical center, unsure if they would ever return
home. 

"It's hard to describe the feeling of leaving your home and
trying to decide what to take," Field said. "It's a hard feeling
to convey to people and it's pretty much how everyone felt." 

About one week after the incident, Field said he started testing
voles, or field mice, near the nuclear plant for radioactive
iodine gas. Field said he wasn't testing for effect of the gas
on the mice but was looking at whether the radiation could be
detected in the animals. 

Later that year, Field expanded his radiation study to 15
surrounding counties on teeth from whitetail deer. Two years
after the accident, Field published a paper, which he said was
the only scientific paper to document radioactive contamination
on the wild food chain. 

"We were surprised to find anything, but what we were trying to
accomplish was finding the upper levels of exposure and
differences between the exposure of different areas relative to
exposures," Field said. 

In Iowa since 1988, Field has since earned his P.h.D. The former
marine biology major is now focused on exposure assessment to a
variety of chemicals, not just radiation. 

"The origins of my interest really started out in the days after
Three Mile Island," he said. 
  
*****************************************************************
 36 USNews.com: A nuclear anniversary in Pennsylvania 

(4/5/04)
 

U.S.News & World Report

By Lisa Stein 

MIDDLETOWN, PA.--A quarter century later, this central
Pennsylvania town is quiet; there are few strangers in the crowd
of regulars at Kuppy's Diner, the old-fashioned eatery on Brown
Street that boasts of serving up fine food since 1933. "I don't
worry, never really did," says Ed Costik, 51, as he sits at the
counter eating fries and a bacon-with-mustard sandwich on white
bread. Well, maybe a bit, you know, back then, he allows. He
smiles and recounts the story: He was working at the lumberyard
he owns--a jog down the road--when his wife called to tell him
about news reports of an accident at Three Mile Island, the
nuclear power plant a mile or so away. They'd never really
thought much about the facility on the 3-mile spit of land in
the Susquehanna River. The first unit was built in 1974, but the
trouble that day--March 28, 1979--was in the unit that had begun
operating just three months earlier. Two days later, Costik's
wife, then pregnant, and their toddler son would briefly leave
town after Gov. Dick Thornburgh recommended that pregnant women
and preschoolers within 5 miles of the plant evacuate. 

On a recent evening, white steam billows from the chunky, twin
hourglass-shaped cooling towers of TMI's only functioning unit;
the crippled reactor, now a dead skeleton, never reopened. The
plant--site of the nation's worst commercial nuclear
accident--looks imposing against the bruised purple and pink
dusky sky from the visitor center across the Susquehanna. The
center, once full of reporters, is now empty, shuttered as a
post-9/11 precaution. A lone public phone booth serves as a
reminder of the pre-cellphone era, when journalists hustled to
get there first--or to the one at the 7-Eleven. Could it happen
again? "Never think about it," says John Redmon, 58, a retired
government worker, as he pays his tab at Kuppy's. "I'm one of
those guys who figures, if you're gonna go, you're gonna go. If
you live in fear, what's the point of living?"   

*****************************************************************
 37 Portsmouth Herald: Nuclear plant's tax payments drop over years
 
  Portsmouth, NH     Sunday, March 28, 2004   

By Susan Morse
 smorse@seacoastonline.com

SEABROOK - As the value of the Seabrook Station nuclear power 
plant continues to decline, residents and other businesses are 
picking up more of the tab to support town and school services. 

In 2003, Seabrook Station represented 42 percent of the town’s 
tax base, compared to 87 percent eight years earlier in 1995. 

In 1995, Seabrook Station paid $20 million of the town’s $23 
million tax bill; in 1999, it paid $18 million out of $27 
million; and in 2003, $11 million of the $26 million total. 

Taxes increased during those years from $7.29 per $1,000 in 1995 
to $15.25 per $1,000 in 2003. 

"As the plant decreases, the (tax) rate increases," said Tax 
Collector Lillian Knowles. 

The town was especially hit in 1999, when taxes jumped from $9.40 
per $1,000 to $15.27 per $1,000, because of the new tax for state 
funding for education. 

In 1999, Knowles said, Seabrook Station began paying a different 
tax rate to the town because it was paying $6.60 per $1,000 in 
education tax directly to the state. While Seabrook taxpayers 
were paying $15.27 to the town in taxes in 1999, Seabrook 
Station’s share was $9.04 per $1,000. 

Last year, Seabrook got $1.5 million back from the state for 
education. This year, it is slated to receive nothing, Knowles 
said. 

In a "worst-case scenario" - that being the state gives Seabrook 
no state aid for education and the power plant is assessed at 
$402 million, the rate Seabrook Station has given for its 
assessment - taxes would climb from the current $15.25 per $1,000 
to $21 per $1,000, Town Manager Fred Welch said. 

The plant has placed its value at $402 million, $573 million less 
than the town’s assessment of $975 million. The power plant has 
requested an abatement on its $11 million tax bill for 2003. 

Town representatives are in negotiations with FPL Energy Seabrook 
Station for a new, five-year agreement on the plant’s valuation. 
There are positives for the town, such as, according to Welch, 
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently approving an increase 
in the wattage output of Seabrook Station, which is expected to 
increase the plant’s value. 

Overall, the plant’s value is expected to decline, with Seabrook 
Station paying less of the town’s yearly expenses. 

From 1995 to 2003, the amount of tax money Seabrook raised to pay 
for town, school and county expenses, and starting in 1999, the 
state school portion of the tax bill, remained relatively 
constant, fluctuating from $23 million in 1995 to $26 million in 
2003. 

Seabrook Station’s share of the tax bill in those years has shown 
a steady decrease, from 87 percent in 1995; to 81 percent in 
1998; 67 percent in 1999; 55 percent in 2001; and 42 percent in 
2003. | Portsmouth Herald

Seacoast Online is owned and operated by Seacoast Newspapers. 
*****************************************************************
 38 The State: NUCLEAR POWER IN S.C.
 
 
 03/28/2


• Slightly more than half of South Carolinas electrical power
is produced by atomic generating plants, according to the
Nuclear Energy Institute. 

• The state has four nuclear power generating stations. They are
operated by Duke Energy in York and Oconee counties; South
Carolina Electric & Gas Co. in Fairfield County; and Progress
Energy in Darlington County. 

• Low-level nuclear waste from across the country is shipped to
a disposal site in Barnwell County. The dump accepts old reactor
parts and contaminated material from nuclear power plants. The
dump is scheduled to close to the country in 2008. It is the
only site of its kind in the nation.   




TheStateOnline
*****************************************************************
 39 Beacon Journal: Three Mile Island still a symbol of wrong, right 25 years later

 | 03/28/2004 | 

  [The Three Mile Island nuclear plant on Thursday, March 11,
2004 in Pennsylvania&#039;s Londonderry Twp. It was 25 years ago
on March 28, 1979 that an accident in the Unit Two nuclear
reactor at the plant caused a near meltdown of the unit&#039;s
core.]   

  Ed Suba Jr, ABJ   

  The Three Mile Island nuclear plant on Thursday, March 11, 2004 
in Pennsylvania's Londonderry Twp. It was 25 years ago on March 
28, 1979 that an accident in the Unit Two nuclear reactor at the 
plant caused a near meltdown of the unit's core. | More photos...   

By Bob Downing

 Beacon Journal staff writer

MIDDLETOWN, PA.: - 

Mayor Robert Reid keeps a Geiger counter running in his office. 
Though the only radiation it detects these days is from the 
building's limestone walls, he's still wary. 

The Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station is only three 
miles away. 

``What we learned is that something bad can happen,'' the 
71-year-old mayor says. ``The fear around here is that history 
has a way of repeating itself.'' 

With its four, 370-foot,hourglass-shaped cooling towers rising 
above a landscape of scattered houses and farms, Three Mile 
Island is an imposing complex. Two nuclear plants occupy an 
814-acre island in the Susquehanna River in south-central 
Pennsylvania. 

Unit 1 produces low-cost electricity. 

Ghostly Unit 2, now owned by Akron's FirstEnergy Corp., is empty 
and dangerous. 

Three Mile Island has become an American nuclear icon. 
Ironically, it's a rallying symbol for two points of view -- for 
what's right and for what's wrong with nuclear power. 

Twenty-five years ago today, on March 28, 1979, the core of the 
Unit 2 reactor came close -- by some estimates within 30 minutes 
-- to melting through the 8-inch-thick steel container that 
encloses the reactor. Had that happened, radiation could have 
been dispersed over a multistate region. 

For days, experts struggled to determine what was happening 
inside the plant and politicians struggled to determine whether a 
massive public evacuation was needed. To many, nuclear power was 
a mystery, and what was happening was a technological nightmare. 

``The accident was the most harrowing, gut-wrenching and 
bone-chilling crisis in the history of commercial nuclear power 
in the United States, bar none,'' says J. Samuel Walker, an 
author and historian for the federal Nuclear Regulatory 
Commission. ``... But it did not produce catastrophe by releasing 
large amounts of radiation to the environment.'' 

What it did produce was change within the nuclear power industry 
and in the attitudes of Americans toward nuclear plants. It 
shocked a complacent and overconfident industry that felt such an 
accident could never happen. 

``It was really bad and an expensive lesson, but we learned a lot 
from it,'' says David Lochbaum of the Massachusetts- based Union 
of Concerned Scientists, a national organization that keeps watch 
over the nuclear industry. ``It highlighted and revealed serious 
problems... and many things have been changed and improved.'' 

Equipment failure 

The crisis at Three Mile Island was the result of equipment 
failure and the inability of plant operators to understand the 
reactor's condition at key times. 

The $700 million Unit 2 plant was only 90 days old when a pump in 
itscooling system malfunctioned. It was about 4 a.m. on 
Wednesday, March 28, 1979. 

Two blasts of steam were heard and felt a quarter-mile away as 
the plant shut itself down as designed. Within the 
horseshoe-shaped, 40-foot-long control room, colored warning 
lights flashed and sirens wailed. 

A valve, which was stuck open for two hours and 22 minutes, and 
operator errors combined to drain the water cooling the reactor 
core -- an accident considered one of the worst-case scenarios in 
nuclear-safety manuals. 

The relief valve, which opened to relievesteam pressure within 
the reactor building, should have closed when the pressure 
dropped. But it remained open, and signals available to the plant 
operators failed to show this. Operators incorrectly assumed the 
core was properly covered with water. They took a number of steps 
that made conditions worse by reducing the flow of coolants 
through the core. 

By the time the operators realized what was happening, the top 4 
feet of the 12-foot-long, uranium-filled fuel rods were exposed, 
no longer covered by the cooling liquid. 

The reactor -- designed and built by Babcock &Wilcox Co. with 
some components made in Barberton -- overheated, and temperatures 
inside reached 5,000 degrees. In 1985, when robotic cameras were 
sent into the reactor, it was discovered that half of the 36,000 
highly radioactive fuel rods had melted during the incident. 

The plant's co-owner and operator, Metropolitan Edison Co. of 
Reading, Pa., assured the public that everything was under 
control, though residents were advised to stay indoors with their 
windows closed and farmers were warned to keep animals inside 
barns and on stored feed. 

Federal and state officials and plant operators spent much of 
Wednesday trying to stabilize the reactor and keep it cool. 

On Thursday, bubbles of gas formed in the reactor's coolant 
system. Traces of radioactive iodine were detected in the air in 
nearby communities. 

New concerns surfaced on Friday. A significant amount of 
radiation was vented into the air, to keep the reactor cool. That 
triggered widespread fear and led Pennsylvania Gov. Richard 
Thornburgh, with federal approval, to call for 3,500 pregnant 
women and small children within five miles of the plant to be 
evacuated. As many as 200,000 people fled from Harrisburg, 10 
miles to the north, and other nearby towns. 

Also on Friday, a large hydrogen bubble was discovered in the 
dome of the pressure vessel, the container that holds the reactor 
core. The worry was that the bubble would burn, explode or 
rupture the containment vessel and release more radiation. 

It was Sunday before officials were convinced that the bubble 
would not be a major problem and it was vented, ending the 
crisis. 

Susan Stranahan, a former reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer 
whose coverage of Three Mile Island helped win a Pulitzer Prize, 
said it was just about impossible to get accurate information 
during the crisis. 

``No one could give you any information on what was happening,'' 
she recalls. ``And I've never been in a situation like that as a 
reporter. It was frightening.'' 

Radiation released 

During the five-day crisis, some radioactive gases and water were 
released into the environment, although how much risk that 
created is still debated. 

Joyce Corradi, a 59-year-old resident of nearby Lower Swatara 
Township and the founder of Concerned Mothers and Women, a group 
formed after the accident to investigate health issues, worries 
about the long-term effects of Three Mile Island on her five 
children, now in their 20s and 30s. 

``People here still have concerns and doubts,'' she says. ``When 
someone passes away, people wonder: `Could it be linked?' '' 

Though there was no way to measure the amount of radiation 
released during the crisis, government investigators ultimately 
decided that the average radiation exposure to the region's 2 
million people was 1 millirem. 

A full set of chest X-rays produces 6 millirems. Typically people 
are exposed to 100 to 125 millirems of radiation per year, mostly 
from natural sources such as radon gas, food, water and cosmic 
rays. 

A dozen studies by federal and state agencies and universities in 
the years after the accident concluded that whatever radiation 
was released at Three Mile Island was too small to result in 
major health problems. 

Over the past two and a half decades, Metropolitan Edison and 
later GPU Nuclear, along with their insurers, spent in excess of 
$80 million to settle a number of claims for medical problems, 
loss of business income and emergency and relocation expenses. 

Metropolitan Edison operated and co-owned the two plants with New 
Jersey Central Power and Light and Pennsylvania Electric. These 
three firms were organized under the New Jersey-based General 
Public Utilities Corp. holding company. GPU Nuclear, a subsidiary 
of General Public Utilities, took over the plants in late 1980. 

The companies paid federal fines of $1.5 million for the 
accident. 

In 1989, GPU said the accident could be expected to cause two 
additional cancer cases, but finding those two cases among the 
541,000 cases likely among the 2 million people in the region 
would be impossible. 

Last December, in a decision that ended Three Mile Island 
litigation, a federal appeals court in Philadelphia threw out the 
cases of 2,000 plaintiffs who were seeking compensation for 
health problems. The court said the plaintiffs failed to present 
evidence that they received enough radiation from Three Mile 
Island to affect their health. 

Problem caught 

Supporters of nuclear energy point to the fact that no one died 
or was seriously injured during the Three Mile Island crisis as 
evidence that the plant's safeguards worked. 

The coolant problem was caught and corrected. Unit 2's 
containment features held in an estimated 18 billion curies of 
radiation, more than 100 times the amount believed released in 
the 1986 nuclear accident at the Chernobyl reactor in the Soviet 
Union. That accident killed about 50 people and exposed thousands 
of others to dangerous levels radiation. 

The federal government and the nuclear industry responded swiftly 
to Three Mile Island. The Kemeny Commission, appointed by 
President Carter to investigate the crisis, concluded that ``the 
response to the emergency was dominated by an atmosphere of 
almost total confusion.'' 

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the nuclear industry made 
sweeping changes in the management and operation of power plants. 
Today, operators are required to get more training, every reactor 
has an on-site simulator for practicing both day-to-day 
operations and emergency situations, the number of workers in 
plant control rooms has been increased, federal inspectors have 
stepped up their oversight, and top management must be more 
familiar with daily operations. 

But those changes didn't deflect the crippling blow Three Mile 
Island dealt to the nuclear power industry. 

The incident triggered increased public concern over the dangers 
of nuclear reactors. (Intensifying the concern was the release of 
the Hollywood film, The China Syndrome,12 days before Three Mile 
Island. That movie, starring Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas and Jack 
Lemmon, dealt with the threat of a meltdown at a nuclear power 
plant.) 

Public support for nuclear power plummeted. Surveys taken before 
Three Mile Island showed that 58 percent of Americans were 
willing to have a nuclear plant near their homes. After the 
accident, 34 percent were willing to have a plant as a neighbor. 

The Three Mile Island accident killed nuclear power plant 
construction in the United States. At the time of the accident, 
129 plants were under construction. Only 53 of those were 
completed and no new construction was started. Thirteen plants 
operating in 1979 have since closed. 

Today there are 103 operating nuclear plants in the United 
States, producing 20 percent of America's electricity. That 
includes two Ohio plants owned and operated by FirstEnergy: Perry 
in North Perry and the troubled Davis-Besse at Oak Harbor, which 
was restarted this month after a two-year shutdown because of 
safety concerns over a damaged reactor lid. 

Loss of innocence 

Reid, the Middletown mayor, believes the biggest impact of Three 
Mile Island was how the accident affected the lives of the 
plant's neighbors. 

``There's been a great loss of innocence in this community as far 
as people in authority and utility officials having all the 
answers,'' he says. ``We're less trusting and more cynical 
today.... We feel that we were betrayed and let down.'' 

Stranahan, the former Philadelphia reporter, agrees with that 
assessment of attitudes. 

``It left them angry, distrustful and legitimately skeptical,'' 
she says. ``That's good if you're fighting a nuclear power plant 
in your back yard, I guess. That's the attitude you need.... But 
it's a crime and it's very sad that people had to suffer that.'' 

Lonna Malmsheimer, a professor at Dickinson College in 

nearby Carlisle, says most people living near Three Mile Island, 
though ``scared to death'' in 1979, have let go of the incident 
and moved on in their lives. 

``It's like nothing happened,'' she says. ``It may be an icon, 
but it's just not a serious concern. It's not something that 
people reminisce about.'' 

Malmsheimer was part of a Dickinson College team that surveyed 
400 residents following the accident. The interviews are being 
posted for the first time at www.ThreeMileIsland.org. 

Nuclear activism 

Three Mile Island got Eric Epstein deeply involved in nuclear 
activism. 

Epstein, 44, who lives outside Harrisburg, directs the aggressive 
grass-roots organization Three Mile Island Alert, and oversees 
the EFMR Monitoring Group. 

``People here just want TMI to go away,'' Epstein says. ``We'll 
fight to shut down Unit 1 and to clean up both sites. We want 
them to be safe. TMI was not a one-day or a one-week disaster. 
It's been with us for 25 years.'' 

Three Mile Island Alert, which has about 600 members, is gearing 
up to fight renewal of the federal permit to operate Unit 1 for 
another 20 years. 

The 11-year-old EFMR records radiation readings from 90 monitors 
in eight counties in Pennsylvania and Maryland around Three Mile 
Island and two other nuclear plants. Of the 330,000 readings 
taken so far, none has been deemed dangerous. 

The monitoring operation was funded by a 1992 settlement with 
Unit 2 owner GPU. The company agreed to provide equipment, share 
data collected near Three Mile Island and spend $900,000 on 
robotics to reduce worker exposure. 

In exchange, Epstein dropped a lawsuit blocking the company's 
plans to mothball, rather than decommission, Unit 2. 

Prospective cost 

Mothballing Unit 2 means putting it in storage and cleaning it up 
later. 

Decommissioning would entail an immediate full-scale cleanup. 
That could cost an estimated $433 million. 

During a $1 billion preliminary cleanup from 1985 to 1990, most 
of the uranium fuel was removed from the plant. About 150 tons of 
radioactive rubble were shipped to Idaho to be stored. 
High-pressure water sprays were used to wash walls, floors and 
pipes. Air chisels and hydraulic pounders broke up the top layer 
of contaminated concrete. 

From 1991 to 1993, more than 2.2 million gallons of contaminated 
water were safely evaporated. 

Then in late 1993, Unit 2 was placed in ``monitored storage.'' 
But the closed plant won't be decommissioned and totally cleaned 
up until Unit 1 shuts. 

FirstEnergy acquired Unit 2 in November 2001, when it took over 
GPU. The decommissioning fund for Unit 2, now at $432.3 million, 
was transferred from GPU to FirstEnergy. 

Epstein, for one, doubts that Unit 2, which still holds as much 
as 20 tons of uranium, will ever be disassembled. It would be 
cheaper and easier, he says, to entomb the plant in concrete. 

Three Mile Island's Unit 1, which was shut down for refueling at 
the time of the accident, was restarted in 1985 after opponents 
lost a U.S. Supreme Court case to keep it closed. 

That plant now is owned by AmerGen Energy Inc., which bought it 
for $100 million in late 1999 from GPU. 

Unit 1 is licensed through 2014. AmerGen has not said whether it 
will seek federal approval to extend the operations for an 
additional 20 years. 

Back in limelight 

Today, with the Three Mile Island accident slipping further into 
history and pollution problems being linked to coal-fired plants, 
nuclear power is again being touted as a key energy source for 
the future. 

Ron Simard, a vice president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, a 
trade group in Washington, D.C., says new reactors would have 
safer designs, with half the moving parts of the existing ones 
and two-thirds as much cable and concrete. 

Though these gas-cooled or pebble-bed reactors probably would not 
be built for 10 to 12 years, at the earliest, Simard says, 
companies would be making the decisions to use them by late 2005 
or early 2006. 

Nuclear power remains a viable energy option, he says, because it 
doesn't pollute like coal and can compete cost-wise with coal and 
natural gas. 

Simard says the new reactors would probably be built next to 
existing nuclear plants because the infrastructure is already 
there. Perhaps 30 to 40 plants would have space for reactors. 

But building a nuclear power plant today would be costly -- an 
estimated $1.5 billion to $2 billion -- says Nuclear Energy 
Institute spokesman Marvin Ferteland, and companies will have 
major difficulty financing such projects. 

Talk of building new nuclear plants isn't something people like 
Corradi, who lived through the Three Mile Island crisis 25 years 
ago, like to hear. 

``We live with a sleeping giant and we never know when it might 
wake up,'' she says. ``That's what it's like to live around here. 
God forbid that it ever happen again at another nuclear plant.'' 

Bob Downing can be reached at 330-996-3745 or 
bdowning@thebeaconjournal.com  


*****************************************************************
 40 Beacon Journal: Davis-Besse came close to accident two years earlier

 | 03/28/2004 | 

1977 coolant problems similar to Three Mile Island's lasted only 
22 minutes

 By Bob Downing

 Beacon Journal staff writer

The accident that caused a partial meltdown at Three Mile Island 
Nuclear Generating Station almost occurred at theDavis-Besse 
nuclear plant in northwest Ohio two years earlier. 

Operators of the Davis-Besse nuclear plant in Oak Harbor ran into 
coolant problems strikingly similar to those at Three Mile 
Island. 

But the 1977 problem atDavis-Besse only lasted 22 minutes before 
a Toledo Edison Co. employee realized what was happening and made 
the necessary corrections. 

At Three Mile Island, the problem lasted more than two hours and 
caused more than 50 percent of the core to melt. 

The Ohio incident got little attention in 1977, but it is 
chronicled in a new book by J. Samuel Walker, a historian with 
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. 

He wrote about the Davis-Besse incident in A Nuclear Crisis in 
Historical Perspective, Three Mile Island (University of 
California Press, $24.95). The details were confirmed by David 
Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a 
Massachusetts-based nuclear watchdog group. 

The incident at Davis-Besse occurred on Sept. 24, 1977, when the 
plant was running at 9 percent capacity. (Three Mile Island was 
running at full power when its accident occurred.) 

Davis-Besse shut down after a disruption in its cooling system. A 
few seconds later, a pressure relief valve stuck open, allowing 
coolant to escape. 

Alarms sounded and operators struggled to figure out what was 
happening. At one point, the plant's emergency cooling pumps were 
erroneously turned off. A worker then realized that the valve was 
stuck open. He shut a backup valve and the problem was solved. 

No radiation was released and the plant was undamaged. 

Toledo Edison and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission both 
investigated the incident, but nothing came from those studies. 

Babcock & Wilcox, the company that designed the plant, realized 
that operator error made a bad situation potentially dangerous. 
It drafted a warning memo to operators of B&W-designed plants but 
that warning was never sent. 

Bob Downing can be reached at 330-996-3745 or 
bdowning@thebeaconjournal.com  

*****************************************************************
 41 Mercury News: NUCLEAR REVIVAL

 | 03/28/2004 | 

By Tom Avril

 Knight Ridder

PHILADELPHIA - When Three Mile Island's Unit 2 sustained a 
partial meltdown 25 years ago, conventional wisdom held that the 
accident would cripple the nuclear power industry. 

So much for conventional wisdom. 

The United States now generates three times as much nuclear power 
as in 1979, by far the steepest increase among major sources of 
electricity. 

Though no new reactors have been ordered since the Three Mile 
Island accident, 50 previously ordered units have been built, for 
a total of 103 in operation today. And owners have squeezed more 
power out of the old reactors, by burning more fuel per hour and 
by running the reactors practically non-stop. 

Now, as the national thirst for energy grows amid increased 
concerns about environmental and economic costs of other fuels, 
nuclear power is enjoying renewed interest. 

Owners are seeking to renew the operating licenses for older 
plants, 28 of which will expire by 2015. 

President Bush is urging construction of modern reactors, and the 
final version of the energy bill now before Congress is expected 
to contain incentives for that. Three companies, among them 
Chicago-based Exelon, parent of Philadelphia's Peco Energy, have 
applied for early site permits to build plants. 

Critics worry that the old plants are unsafe, and that the 
designs for new ones are unproven. Then there are the questions 
about terrorist vulnerability and where to store radioactive 
spent fuel. 

On the morning of March 28, 1979, a series of events unfolded 
that riveted world attention on Three Mile Island, a nuclear 
power plant in central Pennsylvania. For five days, there was a 
fear the reactor at the plant near Harrisburg, Pa., might unleash 
vast amounts of radioactivity and perhaps even explode. Some 
worried that the radioactive fuel could eat through the 
containment floor, spew radiation down the Susquehanna River and 
contaminate the Chesapeake Bay watershed. 

The reactor core meltdown resulted in little release of radiation 
and there was no evidence of long-term harm to public health. But 
it was a watershed for the nuclear industry and the government 
officials who regulate it. 

Opponents of Three Mile Island, where two of the four cooling 
towers remain forever idle, say society is forgetting the lessons 
of the 1979 accident. 

The burning of coal and natural gas -- the other major U.S. 
sources of electricity -- releases pollutants that can impair 
breathing and, according to many scientists, contribute to global 
warming. 

In a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last 
year, the authors said the world probably would need to build 
hundreds of nuclear plants to reduce the ``greenhouse effect.'' 

As for the safety issue, the 1979 accident led the Nuclear 
Regulatory Commission to require safety upgrades in new and old 
plants. And various safety indicators are improving. 

For example, the number of automatic ``scrams'' -- emergency 
reactor shutdowns -- declined from 1.61 per plant in 1990 to 0.44 
in 2002. 

Yet critics warn that conditions are ripe for more accidents. 

Inspections by the NRC are down sharply. In 1990, each reactor 
was inspected an average of 4,700 person-hours. In 2002, that 
number was 3,100 hours -- a decline of about one-third. 

The commission says the decline is due in part to a more targeted 
approach, reducing inspections for safe plants and increasing 
inspections for those with problems. 

Now that natural-gas prices have shot up in recent years -- they 
nearly doubled from 1998 to 2001 but have since declined slightly 
-- new nuclear plants are a topic of discussion once again. 

The Associated Press contributed to this report.   
*****************************************************************
 42 toledoblade.com: 2 agencies laud Fermi II plant in crisis drill
 
  Article published Saturday, March 27, 2004
 
By TOM HENRY BLADE STAFF WRITER

MONROE - Two federal agencies yesterday said they feel good about 
southeast Michigan's chances of averting a crisis if a nuclear 
accident were to occur at Fermi II.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Federal Emergency 
Management Agency said their preliminary assessment of a mock 
drill involving some 400 people - about 200 Detroit Edison Co. 
employees and 200 off-site government workers - revealed no major 
issues.

The scheduled drill onTuesday included Michigan State Police and 
agencies from Monroe and Wayne counties.

"The players all did a good job," Bill King, FEMA exercise 
director, said during an exit briefing at Monroe County Community 
College.

NRC inspectors judged on-site performance at the nuclear plant in 
northern Monroe County; FEMA evaluated the coordination skills of 
those who would be evacuating people within an at least 10-mile 
radius of the plant.

Such drills are to be done at least annually within the perimeter 
of nuclear complexes, at least once every two years on a regional 
basis. Both were required after the meltdown that began 25 years 
ago tomorrow at the Three Mile Island Unit 2 nuclear plant near 
Harrisburg, Pa. The five-day crisis there ex-

posed weaknesses nationally in emergency planning and other 
nuclear-related issues.

The NRC, which plans to issue its findings in 30 days, said 
Detroit Edison's staff demonstrated savvy in identifying problems 
early enough to avoid a meltdown. "It was a successful test," 
said Tom Ploskie, a senior emergency planning inspector from the 
agency's Midwest regional office in Lisle, Ill.

FEMA said state officials met 14 of 16 objectives, Monroe County 
15 of 16, and Wayne County all 16. The two flaws had no safety 
consequences: State emergency responders had a problem with 
completeness and accuracy of one press release, while Monroe 
County officials provided inaccurate information to one out of 90 
callers on a make-believe hotline. Hundreds of items were 
evaluated.

"This was a very good performance by the state and the two 
counties," Mr. King said.

In the mock exercise, Detroit Edison employees were told to show 
how they would respond first to an earthquake, then a fire, and, 
ultimately, a coolant-line break at Fermi II that could threaten 
their ability to maintain control over the reactor. To further 
complicate things, they were told to respond as if the events had 
made the plant's technical support staff inaccessible until it 
was relocated to another building a mile away.

Off-site teams showed how they would coordinate emergency 
vehicles such as fire trucks and ambulances while evacuating 
people from homes, jails, and hospitals.

Bill O'Connor, Fermi II vice president, said he was pleased. "We 
want to challenge everybody by practicing the really hard 
scenarios," he said.

Contact Tom Henry at: thenry@theblade.com or 419-724-6079.

© 2004 The Blade. The Toledo Blade Company, 541 N. Superior St., 
Toledo, OH 43660 , (419) 724-6000 
*****************************************************************
 43 toledoblade.com: 25 years of skepticism clings to nuclear plants
 
Article published Sunday, March 28, 2004
 
THREE MILE ISLAND ANNIVERSARY
 
Reactor operators monitor and adjust operations in the
Davis-Besse plant control room. 

( THE BLADE/LORI KING ) 

By TOM HENRY BLADE STAFF WRITER

Twenty-five years ago today, America lost some of its naivete 
about nuclear power.

While historians view the 1960s as an era in which the Vietnam 
War, the civil rights movement, and the quest for sexual equality 
eroded much of the blind faith people had in public officials, 
experts believe a similar level of distrust arose with the 
nuclear industry after a five-day series of events began on March 
28, 1979, at the Three Mile Island nuclear power complex about 10 
miles southeast of Harrisburg, Pa.

Nuclear power had, until then, been largely embraced by the 
mainstream public as a technologically advanced form of producing 
energy that would help the U.S. remove the shackles of the OPEC 
oil embargo. Americans were eager for the day the nuclear 
industry would live up to its claim it could deliver electricity 
too cheap to meter.

Half or more of today's population was old enough in the late 
1970s to remember the famous Atoms for Peace speech that 
President Dwight Eisenhower delivered on Dec. 8, 1953, signaling 
the dawn of the nuclear age.

But while America was figuratively and literally asleep at 4 a.m. 
on March 28, 1979, a meltdown was in progress at a TMI reactor 
that was a mere 90 days old.

The nation gasped. It held its breath. It prayed that some 
unthinkable radioactive explosion would be averted. Despite 
assurances that Harrisburg-area residents were safe, a nationally 
broadcast TV documentary years later reported it had obtained 
State Department records showing government officials had grave 
concerns about former President Jimmy Carter visiting the site.

Even today, the words Three Mile Island send chills up the spines 
of nearby residents and nuclear industry officials. Although no 
single death has been linked conclusively to the meltdown of 
TMI-2's reactor core, the debate rages on about how much 
radiation was released into the atmosphere and how many lives 
have been cut short by cancer.

The question isn't if TMI caused cancer, but how much, contends 
Eric Epstein, chairman of a watchdog group called Three Mile 
Island Alert.

Even the president and chief operating officer of one of 
America's largest utilities said there is no question that TMI-2 
was a major disaster in terms of maintaining public confidence 
in nuclear power.

It was a turning point. We must never forget it, said Oliver 
Kingsley, Jr., of Chicago-based Exelon Corp., which now owns 
TMI-2's sister unit, TMI-1. That unit went online in September, 
1974, and continues to operate today.

TMI-2, the younger of the two units, was the one that had the 
meltdown. It went online in December, 1978, and has remained 
closed since the accident. Akron-based FirstEnergy Corp., which 
owns Davis-Besse, inherited the unit as a result of a 2001 
utility merger.

Ironically, the near rupture of the reactor lid at the 
Davis-Besse plant before it was discovered in March, 2002, is 
considered the worst safety failure in U.S. nuclear plant 
history, behind only TMI.

Skepticism abounds to this day as to how much information about 
the TMI meltdown was withheld from the public by the Nuclear 
Regulatory Commission and Metropolitan Edison, the utility which 
had operated both Three Mile Island reactors in 1979.

NRC Chairman Nils Diaz is among those who believe there was a 
smug attitude  some senior-level NRC officials have gone so far 
as to call it an arrogance  about nuclear power then. Indeed, 
few experts thought such an accident could ever happen, he said.

Confidence in the technology was so high in 1979 that the whole 
concept of planning for an evacuation was an afterthought. 
Indeed, one of the legacies of the TMI crisis was that it led to 
the modern era of emergency evacuation planning at and around the 
nation's 103 nuclear plants.

On the third day of the crisis, President Carter dispatched 
Harold Denton, the NRC's nuclear reactor regulation director, to 
the scene to report back directly to him. Both had been trained 
in the nuclear Navy. The situation had grown so tense that Mr. 
Denton, who stayed three weeks, wore bullet-proof vests to the 
multiple press briefings he held. If you asked me a couple of 
years ago, I would have said the demons of Three Mile Island had 
been exorcised. But you can't quite say that today because of 
Davis-Besse, Mr. Denton said at a recent nuclear industry 
conference in Washington. He ranked the near-rupture of 
Davis-Besse's reactor head in 2002, and the plant's temporary 
loss of coolant water in 1985, as the second and third most 
significant events, respectively, in U.S. nuclear history behind 
Three Mile Island.

The two events at Davis-Besse resulted in shutdowns in excess of 
two years and 18 months, respectively. But Davis-Besse is not an 
anomaly in terms of extensive, safety-related shutdowns: NRC 
records show there have been more than 25 of them since 1979. Few 
parallels exist between the technological problems that occurred 
at TMI-2 in 1979 and at Davis-Besse in 1985 and 2002, even though 
the two plants have similar designs and were made by the same 
company, Babcock &Wilcox. Nuclear reactors designed by Babcock 
&Wilcox operate under higher temperatures and pressure than most 
others.

Mr. Epstein wonders if all the messages about Three Mile Island 
and Davis-Besse will get lost as memories fade. To most young 
people, TMI, the Vietnam War, and civil rights are distant events 
 right up there with the pharaohs of Egypt, he said.

The big loser at TMI is democracy, because people feel impotent 
about the process, he added. The arrogance that existed at TMI 
was at Davis-Besse two years ago.

Nevertheless, he said northwest Ohio was lucky because the 
Susquehanna River valley around Harrisburg was held under a form 
of psychological terror back in 1979. It's a nightmare we 
haven't woken up from yet. There has been no closure, he said.

Three Mile Island's legacy includes:


+  A chilling effect on the nuclear industry. No applications to 
build plants have been submitted to the NRC since the accident.


+  An era of emergency planning. Evacuation zones and procedures 
were adopted for people living within 10 miles of all the 
nation's nuclear plants. Preparedness training exercises like the 
one last week at the Fermi nuclear plant near Monroe were 
created. 


+ An industry attempt to police itself and foster networking 
among utilities led to the creation of the Atlanta-based 
Institute for Nuclear Power Operations. The institute, known as 
INPO, was used by FirstEnergy to help get Davis-Besse ready for 
restart.

Contact Tom Henry at: thenry@theblade.com or 419-724-6079.

        © 2004 The Blade.The Toledo Blade Company, 541 N. 
Superior St., Toledo, OH 43660

*****************************************************************
 44 DN: U-M dismantles nuclear reactor - 03/28/04
 
Sunday, March 28, 2004 

  [Image] John M. Galloway / Special to The Detroit News

The nuclear fuel rods have already been removed from U-M's 
nuclear reactor, said manager Chris Becker. It will take three 
years and $9.8 million to dismantle.
  
Operating costs, less research bring end after 46 years 
By Maureen Feighan / The Detroit News 

  [Image] John M. Galloway / Special to The Detroit News
U-M's nuclear reactor was one of three flagship facilities for
nuclear research when activated in 1957. It is being
decommissioned.
  

  [Image] John M. Galloway / Special to The Detroit News
 Once dismantled, the materials will be shipped to burial sites
in South Carolina and Utah.


ANN ARBOR — Located in a bland brick building with an aging 
greenhouse on one end and what looks like a school gym on the 
other, the Ford nuclear reactor sits amid a blue-green pool of 
water, waiting to be dismantled. 

The University of Michigan is decommissioning the 46-year-old 
reactor, once a flagship facility for nuclear research, because 
of high operating costs and decreased use by university 
researchers. 

The process will take roughly three years and cost about $9.8 
million. But university officials say they can no longer afford 
to subsidize the reactor’s outside uses. The facility, on U-M’s 
North Campus, has a $1 million annual budget and needs $10 
million in upgrades, they say. 

“Federal and industry users do not provide us with adequate 
financial support for their use of the reactor,” said Fawwaz 
Ulaby, U-M’s vice president for research. “We have applied for 
federal programs that help support university-based research 
reactors, but we have not been selected for additional funding.” 

The shutdown marks the end of an era for the reactor and the 
university. Built from 1955-57 with a $1 million gift from the 
Ford Motor Co., the reactor was once part of the Michigan Phoenix 
Memorial Project created after World War II to study peaceful 
uses for nuclear energy. It was the only university-owned nuclear 
research reactor in Michigan. 

For engineers working at the facility, research will continue at 
the connected Phoenix Memorial Laboratory, but irradiated 
materials will have to be shipped in from other areas rather than 
being irradiated on site. Students, meanwhile, who once used the 
reactor for some lab classes, now have to drive an hour and a 
half to Dow Chemical’s reactor in Midland. 

“Students are very disappointed,” said John Lee, professor and 
chairman of U-M’s nuclear engineering and radiological sciences 
department. “It’s been a flagship for the entire nuclear 
community.” 

But Lee and other administrators acknowledge the reactor has been 
used less by university researchers and more by outside clients 
such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. 

“It’s just part of the natural cycle of things,” said Chris 
Becker, reactor manager. “After 50 years, people don’t do things 
the same way anymore.” 

Nationwide, nuclear reactors dedicated to research are a 
vanishing sight on college campuses. As larger, better, more 
precise facilities become available, the number of university-run 
research reactors has dropped from 50 to 25. 

But when the Ford nuclear reactor was activated in 1957, it was 
one of three flagship reactors on universities nationwide that 
operated year-round at sufficient power to conduct major 
research, Lee said. The other two are at the Massachusetts 
Institute of Technology and the University of Missouri Columbia. 

The reactor, which officially shut down in July, is in a 
70-foot-by-68-foot concrete box with 6-foot-thick concrete walls 
and 40,000 gallons of demineralized water. Inside a 28-foot-deep 
tank, a latticework cage rests vertically in the water at one end 
of which is the reactor grid. 

Today, the reactor grid is still visible — it looks like a large 
metal checkerboard — but the reactor fuel once inside the grid is 
gone. The fuel was removed in December. 

Eventually, the entire reactor will be dismantled, and materials 
will be shipped to burial sites in South Carolina and Utah, 
Becker said. The decommissioning process will be paid for through 
investments, officials said. 

In the meantime, a faculty committee has assembled to determine 
the reactor’s future use, either as office space or labs. There 
will be no radioactive contamination, and the building will be 
used for research purposes, said Rick Francis, the university’s 
associate dean for research. 

Francis said whatever the building is used for, at least a 
portion of it will still be dedicated to nuclear energy research. 

“Continuing to address (the facility’s) historical mission will 
be an important priority,” Francis said. 

You can reach Maureen Feighan at (313) 222-2690 or 
mfeighandetnews.com. 

 The Detroit News.
*****************************************************************
 45 North County Times: Remembering Three Mile Island

 - North San Diego and Southwest Riverside County columnists
 
Saturday, March 27, 2004 8:40 PM PST 
 
By: PAUL SISSON - Staff Writer 

William Murray remembers Three Mile Island better than most. 
"Those are days I'll always remember," Murray said, sipping from 
a glass of ice water in his duplex near the Escondido Country 
Club.

On March 28, 1979, Murray was vice president of communications 
for General Public Utilities, the company that operated the Three 
Mile Island nuclear power plant 10 miles southeast of Harrisburg, 
Pa. 

On that fateful day, exactly 25 years ago today, Murray found 
himself and the company he worked for facing the nation's worst 
nuclear accident. 

"For several days the people of central Pennsylvania didn't know 
that was going to happen," Murray said.

Even though no one died from the accident, Murray and his company 
were reviled by the entire nation.

"Immediately after the accident you didn't want to show your face 
anywhere," he said. "We didn't just lose our reputation for 
technical expertise; we lost our integrity, as well. We were 
being called the great Satan of nuclear power."

Today, Three Mile Island generates about 800 megawatts of 
electricity from its Unit 1 reactor, which was not involved in 
the meltdown at nearby Unit 2.

Murray stayed with General Public Utilities for six years after 
the accident and has recently published "Nuclear Turnaround," a 
book that chronicles the company's journey from the brink of 
bankruptcy back to relative financial health. The book is 
available online through Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com.

Anatomy of the accident

To understand what happened at Three Mile Island a quarter 
century ago, one must understand a few basic facts about 
pressurized water reactors.

Three Mile Island's reactor, like the one at the San Onofre 
Nuclear Generation Station 15 miles north of Oceanside, used a 
bundle of uranium fuel rods to turn water into steam. The steam 
turns a turbine that is hooked to a electrical generator.

Pressurized water reactors have two separate supplies of water:

The first, called the coolant loop, circulates through the 
reactor's core, absorbing heat generated by uranium fuel rods 
whose atoms are undergoing nuclear fission.

The second, called the steam loop, runs outside the reactor dome 
and through the plant's steam turbine.

Though the two separate loops of water never come in physical 
contact, they do come extremely close to each other in the 
plant's steam generator. There extremely hot water from the 
coolant loop is pumped through thousands of thin steel tubes, 
similar to a gigantic radiator on a car. Around those tubes cool 
water from the steam loop is pumped. The hot coolant tubes 
instantly boil that water, turning it into steam. After the steam 
passes through the turbine, it is cooled and condensed back into 
liquid form, then pumped back into the steam generator for 
another go around.

It is at this stage that the Three Mile Island accident occurred.

A pump that was supposed to send cool water back into the plant's 
steam generator failed. Suddenly, the steam generator no longer 
had a supply of cool water to turn into steam. Worse, the steam 
generator was no longer able to absorb heat from the reactor's 
main coolant loop, the one that circulates through the 
radioactive core.

Pressure inside the main coolant loop increased and plant 
operators triggered a release valve to relieve that pressure. The 
valve was supposed to close after releasing enough pressure to 
keep the coolant loop from exploding. But it didn't. Instead, the 
valve stuck open, venting a stream of radioactive coolant into a 
holding tank and eventually leaving the reactor's core partially 
uncovered.

With no coolant to absorb the core's furious heat, its uranium 
fuel rods began to melt, thrusting the term "meltdown" into 
headlines across the nation.

Over the next eight days, nuclear technicians, the Nuclear 
Regulatory Commission and plant operators struggled to cool the 
core.

Murray, 81, remembers those tense days well. He found himself 
holding daily press conferences before a throng of about 400 
reporters. He remembers Walter Cronkite terming the accident 
"Armageddon."

Because America had never experienced an accident like the one at 
Three Mile Island, media coverage reached a hysterical pitch.

"We were the first company that had to face the public's phobia 
of nuclear power," Murray said. "I remember the Philadelphia 
Inquirer had 40 reporters assigned to the story. They were just 
sure that we were trying to hide something,"

He remembers reporters scrawling messages to potential whistle 
blowers on the plant's bathroom walls. He remembers one big-city 
columnist writing that he could "see radiation dripping down the 
cooling tower's walls" even though no leaks were ever found 
there.

"Every day there was another huge headline," Murray said.

Learning from mistakes

In the years after the accident at Three Mile Island, 
investigators found that a combination of human error, mechanical 
failures and inadequate oversight turned what should have been a 
minor pump failure into a very dangerous partial meltdown.

For example, there was no sensor inside the reactor's core that 
could tell operators how much water was flowing through. When 
warning alarms sounded inside the plant's control room, operators 
"took a series of actions that made conditions worse," according 
to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

At the time, the NRC and the plant owners were found to have 
inadequate emergency response plans, leading various agencies to 
waffle on whether or not evacuation was necessary.

Even after the core was cooled, operators detected a large 
hydrogen bubble inside the reactor core. For a week, the public 
was on pins and needles, fearing that the bubble would explode, 
ejecting the radioactive fuel and perhaps rupturing the plant's 
containment dome. Eventually, everyone agreed that the hydrogen 
bubble could not explode because hydrogen cannot burn without 
oxygen and there was no oxygen inside the core.

Since the accident, the nation's 104 operating nuclear reactors 
have been forced to rethink the way they operate.

When Three Mile Island happened, the two reactors currently 
operating at the San Onofre plant were under construction. Ray 
Golden, spokesman for Southern California Edison, which owns and 
operates the plant, said construction of both reactors stopped.

"The TMI accident was a watershed event for the commercial 
nuclear power industry," Golden said in an e-mail. "It changed 
the way we design, operate, maintain and manage commercial 
nuclear power plants."

Specifically, San Onofre installed a third back-up water pump in 
its two reactors' steam loops to prevent a pump failure like the 
one at Three Mile Island. A reactor venting system also was 
installed, as were instruments to monitor the water level inside 
the core.

Modifications to the plant's two control rooms also were made to 
help prevent the confusion that led to human errors at Three Mile 
Island. Machines called hydrogen recombiners were installed to 
help prevent a hydrogen bubble like the one that filled the core 
in 1979.

Each nuclear power plant in the country was also required to 
build a stand-alone mock control room where reactor operators 
practice responding to a range of dangerous situations. There 
were few if any such simulators back in 1979. Plants like San 
Onofre also have been forced to adopt emergency response plans 
that are tested and graded by the NRC every other years.

A system of warning sirens was installed throughout a 10-mile 
radius around all nuclear plants and residents are told what to 
do if those sirens sound.

Still unsafe?

But all of the lessons learned from Three Mile Island are not 
enough to convince the nuclear activist community that the 
nation's nuclear power plants are safe.

Paul Gunter, director of the Nuclear Information and Resource 
Service's reactor watchdog project in Washington, D.C., said he 
believes there are still problems with nuclear plants' emergency 
preparedness plans, plant security and the NRC's oversight.

He pointed to a six-inch-deep hole in the head of the Davis Besse 
reactor near Toledo, Ohio, as proof that regulators are not doing 
their jobs. In 2000, inspectors found the hole, which was only 
3/16 of an inch away from piercing the reactor's containment 
vessel. Had the hole pierced the vessel, a loss of coolant inside 
the reactor could have caused a meltdown.

Gunter noted that, even though there were a series of routine 
maintenance procedures in place to prevent corrosion of the 
reactor vessel and even though on-site NRC inspectors were 
supposed to be making plant operators stick to their safety 
procedures, the hole happened anyway.

"The concerns are that the regulatory agency is more of a 
promoter than a regulator," Gunter said.

He said he believes that, as plants age, they will begin to show 
more failures even though no serious accidents on the order of 
Three Mile Island have occurred for 25 years. He also noted that 
today's nuclear power plants sit next to a growing pile of super 
radioactive spent nuclear fuel accumulated during more than two 
decades of uninterrupted operation.

"There are more orders of magnitude of danger present in today's 
reactors than were present 25 years ago with Three Mile Island," 
Gunter said.

Contact staff writer Paul Sisson at (760) 901-4087 or 
psisson@nctimes.com.  

  webmaster@nctimes.com © 1997-2004 North County Times - Lee 
Enterprises    editor@nctimes.com  
*****************************************************************
 46 Today's Sunbeam: For county residents, nuclear power also a concern
 
Sunday, March 28, 2004 By BILL GALLO JR. 
Staff Writer 

SALEM -- At the time of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, 
the presence of nuclear power in Salem County was a relatively 
new thing. 

After several surveys, Newark-based Public Service Electric and 
Gas Co. settled on Artificial Island in rural Lower Alloways 
Creek Township as the site to build its nuclear generating 
complex. <IMG 
SRC="http://ads.nj.com/RealMedia/ads/adstream_nx.ads/www.nj.com/x 
ml/story/Today's%20Sunbeam/l/local_news/@StoryAd?x">

Sites farther north along the river had been considered, but 
later rejected. The location in LAC where the Delaware River and 
bay met provided an ample, steady supply of water needed for the 
plants' cooling system. 

In March 1979 when the world's attention was turned on TMI, only 
one of the three units at Artificial Island was in commercial 
operation. Salem 1 had begun commercially producing power in June 
1977. It would not be until October 1981 that Salem 2 went 
on-line and neighboring Hope Creek would not send out power until 
December 1986. 

While the Artificial Island nuclear generating complex, operated 
by what is today PSEG Nuclear, is the second largest commercial 
nuclear complex in the United States, it originally was planned 
to be larger. 

The Salem units have a combined total output capacity of 2,212 
megawatts, while Hope Creek is capable of an output of 1,049 
megawatts. 

While nuclear power today accounts for 20 percent of all 
electricity used in the United States, 50 percent of all the 
electricity used in the State of New Jersey is produced by 
nuclear power, according to PSEG Nuclear. 

While the eyes of the world were fixed on the unfolding drama at 
the Three Mile Island site near Harrisburg, Pa., concerns were 
raised by LAC officials about the safety of the power plant they 
were host to, Today's Sunbeam news accounts from the time show. 

As the drama in Pennsylvania was reported through Associated 
Press dispatches, local news stories focused on residents' fears 
of "can it happen here?" 

PSE&G officials were bombarded with questions about its LAC 
plants. 

"We're getting questions, 'Can it happen here?' we have to know 
what happened (at TMI) before we can say anything," then-PSE&G 
Spokesman Eugene Murphy said. 

Then-LAC Mayor Samuel Donelson told the Sunbeam that if the 
circumstances seen at Three Mile Island had taken place in his 
township, including the release of radiation, he would have not 
waited for an executive order, but would have ordered an 
evacuation. 

Lower Alloways Creek at the time had already had three practice 
runs in case of an Island emergency and he felt the township was 
prepared, according to the 1979 Sunbeam account. Other 
surrounding towns weren't officials felt, and Donelson called on 
county officials to pressure towns within a 15-mile radius of the 
plants to get civil defense plans in place. 

Shortly after the Three Mile Island accident, PSE&G officials 
appeared in LAC to quell residents' fears. 

The 1979 Three Mile Island incident remains the worst commercial 
nuclear power plant accident in the country. In many ways it 
served as a wake-up call for emergency planners and the Nuclear 
Regulatory Commission which oversees the operations of the 
nation's nuclear plants. 

Extensive plans are now in place on municipal, state and local 
levels here on how to handle a potential emergency, especially a 
release of radiation from nuclear power plants. Drills are 
conducted and assessed annually. Detailed evacuation plans are in 
place and state regulators have contingency plans to deal with 
everything from shelter to deciding what foods would be safe to 
consume in the instance there is a severe accident and radiation 
is released from a nuclear power plant. 


Copyright 2004 Today's Sunbeam. Used with permission.
*****************************************************************
 47 YDR: Journal chronicled crisis - TMI

- York Daily Record [ydr.com]                      

Daily Record staff Saturday, March 27, 2004 

The New Cumberland couple penned their letter to Gov. Dick
Thornburgh on April 16, 1979.

        After 2½ decades, the couple almost forgot about their 
correspondence with the governor. But they have not forgotten 
America’s worst nuclear crisis, just miles away from their home.

        Sitting in her Florida room with her husband and enjoying 
the woodsy scenery in their back yard, Ann Heilman looked over 
her letter.

        “That last sentence,” she said. “I agree with that 
today.”

 	That sentence read:

        “It would be an act of courage, integrity and reason to 
develop an alternative source of power while we are an example to 
the rest of the world.”

        While the Heilmans were concerned enough about the 
accident at TMI to write a letter to the governor, they didn’t 
panic as the crisis unfolded either. The day of the accident, the 
couple went out for a shrimp dinner, Ann Heilman recalled.

        “Here the place is blowing up, and we’re eating shrimp,” 
she said, with a chuckle.

        Like many Central Pennsylvania residents, the Heilmans 
had plans in place if they needed to leave the area. But the 
couple, along with many neighbors, chose to stay.

        “We’re very stoic around here,” she said. “Either that or 
stupid. We were trying to assess it every day.”

        Ann Heilman logged the progress being made at the plant 
in her journal.

        “Still leaks of radiation,” Heilman read as she flipped 
through the pages of her 25-year-old diary. “Bubble still there.”

        Then the references to TMI, like the fears of a hydrogen 
bubble at the plant itself, dissipated.

 	“I let it go,” she said.

 	“We sort of took it in stride,” said Boyce Heilman.

        A few weeks after the accident, the couple even went to 
see “The China Syndrome,” starring Jane Fonda. The movie was 
about a nuclear accident.

        “The movie was very scary,” Ann Heilman said. “But not as 
scary as living through it.”

        To this day, plumes of steam rising from the plant’s 
cooling towers are never far from her mind.

        “I’ve often said after 9/11, it’s a scary thing to live 
so close to Three Mile Island,” she said. “It’s so well known. It 
might be one they (terrorists) choose to make a statement.”

        But an errant airplane from Capital City Airport in 
Fairview Township or Harrisburg International Airport worries 
Boyce Heilman more.

        “That’s more of a concern to me,” he said. “More than 
someone deliberately blowing it (TMI) up.”


Copyright © York Daily Record 2004 122 S. George St., P.O. Box 
15122 York, PA 17405, (717) 771-2000
*****************************************************************
 48 YDR: At the core of a national crisis  - TMI

- York Daily Record [ydr.com]                      

One man had the power of the presidency behind him as he helped
stop the spiral of TMI. 

By SHARON SMITH and SEAN ADKINS Daily Record staff Saturday,
March 27, 2004 

  Jason Plotkin - YDR   

  The Three Mile Island Unit 1 cooling towers loom over Goldsboro 
in York County, ever-present reminders of the 850 megawatts of 
electricity constantly pumped into the region’s power grid — 
enough to power 500,000 homes. The Unit 1 reactor, which was 
built and operated separately from the Unit 2 reactor, was shut 
down for refueling at the time of the Unit 2 crisis. bigger 
version &more photos (2)   

By the time officials at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s 
headquarters in Bethesda, Md., learned about the problem at Three 
Mile Island, the accident was already in its fourth hour.

        The plant called the regulatory office in King of Prussia 
and left a message, said Harold Denton, the nuclear regulatory 
official President Jimmy Carter personally sent to Dauphin 
County.

        That message wasn’t received until 8 a.m. that Wednesday, 
March 28, 1979.

 	“It didn’t sound like a crisis at the time,” Denton said.

        Twenty-five years later, the partial meltdown at TMI is 
considered the worst nuclear disaster in American history. Key 
figures who managed the crisis, including Denton, recently spoke 
with the York Daily Record about their recollections of the 
accident.

        Initially, federal regulators didn’t believe the 
situation at TMI was dire. But by 4 p.m. March 28, 1979, NRC 
officials realized the event was significantly unusual. By 
mid-afternoon the next day, it was hard to be confident about the 
safety of the nuclear power plant.

 	By Friday, March 30th, the situation had grown worse.

        “President Carter wanted somebody up there,” said Denton, 
who would become the president’s point man at TMI. Carter got 
involved on Friday after it became clear that someone from the 
NRC’s headquarters needed to be on the ground.

  Paul Kuehnel - YDR Harold Denton, the man who answered directly 
to the president of the United States from the site of the TMI 
accident, recalled this week the smart decisions and foolish 
mistakes of those who helped avert disaster. bigger version &more 
photos (2)   

        The White House arranged for a military helicopter to fly 
Denton from the Washington, D.C., area to TMI. He landed in a 
cornfield. The NRC already had 20 people at TMI. On Friday 
afternoon, Denton brought an additional 12 regulators with him.

        “Once I got up there and got into the control room, the 
atmosphere was calm,” he said. “Things were not getting worse. It 
didn’t appear to be out of control when I arrived.”

        Denton hadn’t been on the ground long before he received 
a message to call the White House. The president wanted to be 
informed daily on what was happening at TMI and whenever anything 
significant happened.

        “He got deeply into it,” Denton said. “In this case, it 
was very helpful.”

        Carter was well-versed in the terminology and technical 
terms associated with the nuclear industry. While in the U.S. 
Navy, Carter took graduate courses in reactor technology and 
nuclear physics. He served as a senior officer on the Seawolf, 
the second nuclear submarine.

        Carter also had an appreciation for the gravity of the 
situation.

 	“The whole nuclear industry was at stake,” Denton said.

        Carter set Denton up with a phone that rang directly to 
the White House. Whatever Denton needed, he would get.

        “There were things the president could do that nobody 
else could do,” Denton said. “If the White House wanted anything 
done, it got done.”

        For example, workers and regulators at the accident site 
needed 40,000 tons of lead bricks. Normally, a mammoth order like 
that might be difficult to arrange; Denton simply called the 
White House and got his bricks without any trouble.

        “It didn’t get massaged by 16 layers of bureaucracy,” he 
said. “It was just remarkable. I had this magic number to the 
White House that could make anything happen.”

        While the White House assisted Denton with his bricks, 
Denton helped Central Pennsylvanians receive the information they 
needed by holding news conferences with the governor. He became 
the credible voice among many voices.

        Denton and an NRC public affairs officer were greeted by 
Met-Ed’s president shortly after their arrival. Met-Ed President 
Walter Creitz handed Denton a joint news release.

        Denton looked the paper over and decided the NRC would 
not be putting out any joint statements with the company.

 	“We would have lost credibility,” he said.

        For instance, a hydrogen bubble had formed in the 
pressure vessel. The fear was that if the hydrogen combined with 
oxygen, the vessel would explode.

        “The company would say, for example, that the bubble was 
gone before the data supported that claim,” Denton said. “The 
fact we were putting out slightly different comments confused 
people.”

        Denton said he had to be onsite to deal with the source 
of the problem and to cut through misinformation.

        Managing the TMI crisis from Bethesda, Md., where the NRC 
had it headquarters, hadn’t worked. The federal agency’s 
misguided recommendation that the governor evacuate the area, 
Denton said, was evidence of that.

        “That’s why you don’t run a public health crisis from 
downtown Bethesda,” he said. “I think it’s like covering a fire 
from 100 miles away.”

        For the next 21 days, Denton’s office was a trailer on 
Three Mile Island. His home was a room at a Red Roof Inn near the 
plant. 

NRC recommends evacuation 

        Back at the NRC’s headquarters in Bethesda, Joseph M. 
Hendrie and his staff had spent most of Thursday, March 29, 
mulling over the issue of evacuation.

        “It wasn’t clear to me that anyone should leave the 
area,” said Hendrie, chairman of the commission at the time. 
“From my perception, you either have to evacuate everyone or you 
don’t have an evacuation.”

        By Friday morning, NRC officials stationed at the plant 
told their headquarters that radiation readings in the 
neighborhood of 1,200 millirems — a rate above what is considered 
safe by federal standards — had been recorded at the plant.

        At about the same time, TMI operators were venting 
radioactive gases from the plant’s auxiliary building. Workers 
had to release the gases from the building to ensure continued 
cooling of the core.

        Department of Energy officials flew a helicopter about 
100 feet above the reactor’s stack and had recorded the high 
1,200-millirem readings coming off the vented gases, said Thomas 
Gerusky, director of the state’s Bureau of Radiation Protection.

        Several NRC officials believed that the harmful readings 
had been recorded offsite and not from the stack. They 
recommended an evacuation.

        “It was a great mistake,” he said. “There was no need for 
that. We did the best we could.”

        By noon that day, Gov. Dick Thornburgh advised pregnant 
women and small children within five miles of the plant to leave.

        Lt. Gov. Bill Scranton was aware that thousands of people 
had fled the area well before any official call for evacuation.

        “There was a de facto evacuation going on,” he said. 
“Evacuation was the right thing to do at the time.”

        By Saturday, the overriding issue for the state had 
shifted from that of evacuation to medication.

        Commonwealth officials and state health experts spent 
Saturday considering the idea of distributing potassium iodide 
pills.

        The pills help protect people from radioactive iodine 
that can be released into the atmosphere by way of a damaged 
nuclear reactor.

        The pills soak the thyroid gland with non-radioactive 
iodine, temporarily blocking the gland from absorbing harmful 
iodine for about 24 hours.

        As a result of the partial meltdown, people near the 
plant were exposed to a miniscule amount of radioactive material, 
about 1 millirem.

        A set of chest X-rays exposes a person to 6 millirems of 
radiation.

        While state officials knew the commonwealth was in short 
supply of the drug, the questions of how and if to distribute the 
pills continued to surface, Scranton said.

        “Health experts could not agree if the pills would work,” 
he said. “We felt the pills were worth having.”

        Regardless of the obstacles, Scranton said, the state 
would have found a way to distribute the pills if the threat of 
high-dose radiation was imminent. 

President Carter arrives

        On Sunday, April 1, 1979, President Carter’s helicopter 
flew over the same cooling towers that had caused so much fear 
just days before. Rosalynn Carter accompanied her husband, Jimmy, 
to the plant.

        Like Scranton, the president took it upon himself to tour 
the plant and get a first-hand account of what dangers 
Pennsylvanians faced.

        But Carter’s visit to the plant was more than a 
fact-finding mission.

        When his helicopter touched ground, people knew it was 
safe.

        “His visit defused the psychology of the situation,” 
Scranton said. “He asked very intelligent questions about the 
reactor.”

 	For many, that Sunday acted as a turning point.

        “I was very grateful to him,” Thornburgh said, looking 
back on the event. “It was an important thing for him to do 
that.” 

Reach Sean Adkins at 771-2047 or sadkins@ydr.com, and Sharon 
Smith at 771-2029 or ssmith@ydr.com. 

Copyright © York Daily Record 2004 122 S. George St., P.O. Box 
15122 York, PA 17405, (717) 771-2000
*****************************************************************
 49 YDR: TMI TIMELINE - 

York Daily Record [ydr.com]                      

Saturday, March 27, 2004 

May 1968: Metropolitan Edison begins construction on Unit 1.

 	July 1969: Met-Ed begins construction on Unit 2.

 	September 1974: Unit 1 goes online.

 	December 1978: Unit 2 goes online.

 	March 28, 1979: Accident at Unit 2 leads to partial meltdown.

 	April 1, 1979: President Carter visits plant and says the
crisis is over.

 	July 1979: The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission orders the
undamaged Unit 1 reactor to remain shut down until accident is
studied.

 	October 1979: Presidential commission says human,
institutional and mechanical failures caused accident. The
commission and the NRC begin work on new safety measures for
plants and evacuation plans for communities close to plants.

 	February 1980: NRC fines Met-Ed $155,000 for the accident —
the maximum amount allowed at the time.

 	April 1981: The first load of radioactive steam residue from
the damaged reactor core is shipped to Hanford, Wash.

 	May 1982: Residents of Cumberland, Dauphin and Lebanon
counties, in a non-binding referendum, vote 2-1 against the
restart of Unit 1.

 	August 1983: The last shipment of waste leaves for Hanford.

 	May 1985: NRC allows GPU, which took over from Met-Ed as the
plant’s operating company after the accident, to restart Unit 1.

 	October 1985: Removal of damaged fuel begins at Unit 2, and
Unit 1 restarts. The company sends the damaged fuel to an Idaho
storage site.

 	December 1989: Unit 1 is ranked the most productive of 357
nuclear plants worldwide.

 	1990-91: Unit 1 operates 479 consecutive days, the longest
operating run at that point in the history of U.S. commercial
nuclear power. NRC names Unit 1 as one of the four safest plants
in the country.

 	February 1993: Plant declares on-site emergency when a Bucks
County man drives through the gates and hides inside for nearly
four hours. He is arrested without incident.

 	October 1997: NRC fines GPU $210,000 for various violations at
Three Mile Island.

 	April 1999: The NRC approves the sale of TMI to AmerGen
Energy, a joint venture between Exelon Nuclear and British
Energy.

 	April 2000: The NRC gives TMI high marks for its performance
in the areas of reactor safety, radiation and security.

 	September 2001: Plant officials have armed security guards man
the main gates following the terrorist attacks.

 	October 2001: Federal, state and local officials respond to a
threat against TMI. The threat, later deemed non-credible, warns
of internal and external plant sabotage. Flights at Harrisburg
International Airport are briefly grounded. Flights are diverted
away from the plant.

 	November 2001: Gov. Mark Schweiker deploys the National Guard
to supplement security at the state’s five nuclear power plants.

 	May 2002: AmerGen Energy starts to install a state-of-the-art
siren control system at 911 dispatch centers in counties that
surround TMI. The company invests about $250,000 to install new
siren monitoring computers, siren controls and communication
radios.

 	March 2002: An NRC inspection report lists 17 minor violations
pertaining to work-performance issues conducted at TMI.

 	August 2002: Exelon spends $2.2 million to implement security
measures at all of its nuclear power plants. The NRC ordered the
upgrades in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

 	August 2002: State officials distribute 436,300 potassium
iodide pills to residents living within a 10-mile radius of
Pennsylvania’s five nuclear plants.

 	November 2002: The NRC releases a two-paragraph e-mail from
Joseph Furia, a commission inspector, who advises that the NRC
should have been better prepared to respond to the Oct. 11,
2001, non-credible threat made against TMI

 	December 2002: Attorneys for 1,990 people who claim that their
health was put in jeopardy by the 1979 accident at TMI end their
legal action following the refusal of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court
of Appeals to hear the appeal.

 	December 2002: AmerGen officials blame a software problem and
an inadvertent computer keyboard stroke for the sounding of the
TMI’s sirens in Dauphin County.

 	March 2003: The NRC approves AmerGen’s request to move its
Emergency Operating Facility located 12 miles away from TMI to
Coatesville in Chester County, about 50 miles away.

 	May 2003: Gov. Ed Rendell opts not to extend an executive
order to keep the Pennsylvania National Guard and state police
stationed at TMI and the state’s four other nuclear power plants.

 	June 2003: NRC inspectors discover that, on three instances,
plant officials found potentially disqualifying medical
conditions among its licensed operators but had not reported
them to the commission within the required 30 days.

 	July 2003: A transformer about the size of a 55-gallon drum
catches fire inside a turbine building near TMI Unit 2. No
radiation is released from the site. Damages caused by the fire
cost the plant $100,000.

 	October 2003: Exelon agrees to pay British Energy $276.5
million for its 50 percent share in AmerGen Energy. The deal
will make Exelon sole owner of TMI.

 	October 2003: The U.S. Coast Guard proposes a permanent rule
to close off sections of the Susquehanna River adjacent to TMI.

 	October 2003: Unit 1 operates 680 consecutive days in what
AmerGen claims to be a world record for the continuous operation
of its pressurized-water reactor.

 	January 2004: AmerGen Energy invests $730,000 in a project to
upgrade its emergency siren system around TMI Unit 1. The plan
will add eight new sirens in York County, five in Dauphin County
and one in Lancaster County. The project will be complete this
summer.

Copyright © York Daily Record 2004 122 S. George St., P.O. Box 
15122 York, PA 17405, (717) 771-2000
*****************************************************************
 50 Daily Herald: Getting to know Fermilab 
 
Suburban Chicago's Information Source                                            | | | | 

By Amanda Vinicky Daily Herald Correspondent
Posted Sunday, March 28, 2004           

 There are a lot of myths about Fermi National Accelerator 
Laboratory. One is that nuclear warheads and missiles secretly 
come in by the truckload overnight. Another suggests that "mole 
people" live in subterranean tunnels beneath the Batavia 
facility.

Edi Eckley, a former hairdresser whose Warrenville home backs up 
to the lab, has heard them all. She didn't necessarily believe 
them. A client who worked at Fermilab had assured Eckley she was 
"not going to be radioactive," but Eckley didn't know exactly 
what did go on at the U.S. Department of Energy lab.

"Most people don't know anything about (Fermilab) at all. They 
just know it's a good place to ride their bikes," Eckley said.

On Saturday, however, Eckley and other members of a new Community 
Task Force began their Fermilab education as part of a new effort 
by the lab to connect with area residents and establishments.

Eckley said a physicist from the lab who's a member of the task 
force explained that those "suspicious missile-looking things" 
brought in by semitrailer trucks were actually tanks of gas.

The group also toured the facilities, saw several experiments and 
listened to a talk on particle physics. The intent, Fermilab 
Public Affairs Director Judy Jackson said, is to bring together 
individuals from DuPage, Kane and DeKalb counties, Warrenville 
and Batavia residents, and officials, environmentalists and 
Fermilab physicists.

The task force of 25 will meet once a month to help the lab 
create a plan and policy for interacting with the community when 
issues come up that will affect the community.

"Right now we don't have any burning issues. We also don't have 
any project we're momentarily planning," Jackson said. "Now is a 
good time to take the time to sit down with members of the 
community and ask how they'd like us to interact with them when 
these issues do come up."

In the mid-1980s, Fermilab was a contender for an accelerator 
that would have involved digging 52 miles of tunnels. The issue 
was a contentious one, and the public made clear such a project 
was not welcome, Jackson said. The accelerator instead was built 
in Texas.

"We felt like the public participation in that situation 
definitely could be improved. We'd like to do better if a similar 
decision comes up," Jackson said.

There is a likelihood this will come up again, as, Jackson said, 
there is a possibility that in 12 years or so Fermilab may again 
have the opportunity to host another particle accelerator that 
will extend beyond the site's borders. "It's a decision that not 
only we but the community would have to make."

Another issue that will probably come up, Jackson said, is 
development, and particularly what to do about a current effort 
to build a road through the lab.

Eckley, who volunteered to serve on the task force because she 
enjoys science and wanted to learn about that mysterious lab in 
her back yard, said she thinks if more people learn about what 
Fermilab is and what physicists there do, they may be more 
receptive to projects.

"If the community knew how wonderful the place is, that there are 
only a few places in the world like it, that it's globally run - 
70 languages are spoken in only two labs - they would be so 
excited if they knew how valuable this is," Eckley said.

At the task force's first meeting, Consultant Dave Bidwell of The 
Perspectives Group, who will facilitate the meetings, told the 
task force about their charge: to recommend guidelines the lab 
should follow to identify types of issues needing community 
consultation and how to keep the community informed of and 
involved in these issues.

The report will be used to help Fermilab management create an 
official public participation policy, Jackson said.

For Jackson, developing such a policy is exciting, especially 
since it's a chance to share news about the lab's research on 
dark matter. "It's nice to know we at the lab aren't the only 
ones that are worried about our future; we're really not alone. 
The community cares about what happens, too," Jackson said.

Task force meetings are open to the public. For information, call 
(630) 840-3351.

Daily Herald, Paddock Publications, Inc.
*****************************************************************
 51 CS Monitor: After nuclear's meltdown, a cautious revival 

| csmonitor.com

March 29, 2004 edition         
 
THREE MILE ISLAND:                      A quarter-century after 
its partial meltdown, the Pennsylvania plant has only one reactor 
operating. ROGER ARCHIBALD
 		   	 	
 By David R. Francis | Staff writer of The Christian Science
Monitor 

It was the near-disaster that scared a nation. A quarter century 
ago this week, a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island underwent a 
partial meltdown. No one was killed and only a small amount of 
radioactivity escaped. But since that time, no American utility 
has dared to build a brand new nuclear power plant. 

But the accident near Middletown, Pa., has faded from public 
memory. And power blackouts, rising natural-gas prices, and 
concerns about greenhouse gases have changed public attitudes. 
Here and there, the nuclear industry is beginning to stir.                      

Today, a fifth of the United States' electricity comes from 103 
commercial nuclear reactors. 

The most visible evidence of new interest remains invisible to 
most. "It's hard to tell from the outside," says William Baxter, 
one of three directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority. But 
inside TVA's massive concrete plant in Browns Ferry, Ala., a $1.8 
billion construction project is under way to modernize and 
upgrade a reactor that hasn't been operating for nearly 20 years. 
If the project is completed by 2007, as expected, Unit I of 
Browns Ferry would become America's first nuclear power unit 
brought online in the 21st century. 

Meanwhile, Chicago-based Exelon has been buying up nuclear plants 
to become the largest operator of nuclear power in the nation. As 
its plants have reached the end of their regulatory life, the 
company has successfully convinced the Nuclear Regulatory 
Commission (NRC) to renew the licenses. In all, Exelon and other 
utilities have received 20-year license extensions for 23 plants 
and are seeking renewal for 19 other reactors. 

In 2000, Exelon bought Three Mile Island with its remaining 
undamaged unit still churning out power and the damaged unit 
still "cooling down" - gradually losing radioactivity - within 
its protective containment building. 

The NRC operating license for Unit 1 at Three Mile Island is good 
until 2014. If all goes well, that license could be extended 20 
years, notes Craig Nesbit, a company spokesman. The shuttered 
plant could remain until the end of that period and then be 
dismantled. 

Along with two other utilities, Exelon is also testing out a new 
NRC "early site-permit application" for a new plant. In Exelon's 
case, it's making the application for a new plant at its existing 
Clinton nuclear power station in central Illinois. The procedures 
regarding safety and environment could take 2-1/2 years. That 
application doesn't mean Exelon has firmly decided to build the 
first new nuclear plant since the Three Mile Island accident. 
Exelon first would have to see a new plant, perhaps costing $2 
billion for two units, as economically feasible. 

"We are not there yet," says Mr. Nesbit. "It's not likely for a 
few years." 

The business case for nuclear power is getting easier to make. 
Within recent years, existing nuclear power plants have become 
desirable sources of electricity because of their relatively 
reliable production of emission-free, low-cost power. According 
to Mr. Baxter, TVA nuclear power costs 2.5 cents per kilowatt 
hour, compared to 4.5 cents for coal and 6 cents for natural gas. 

"We are laying the foundational work with an eye for a new order 
in three or four years," says Steve Kerekes, a spokesman for the 
industry's Nuclear Energy Institute in Washington. 

Could a Three Mile Island happen again? The NRC blames that 
accident on "a combination of personnel error, design 
deficiencies, and component failures." The event, adds an NRC 
fact sheet, led to "permanent and sweeping changes in how NRC 
regulates its licensees - which, in turn, has reduced the risk to 
public health and safety." 

David Lockbaum, an engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists, 
agrees that the NRC has become much tougher, even before 9/11 
raised the specter of terrorists flying a jet into a nuclear 
power plant. Instead of inspecting nuclear plants every two years 
for four safety categories, the NRC since April 2000 has been 
looking them over every three months for 26 or so safety factors. 

"When performance starts to fall, it should show up sooner," says 
Mr. Lockbaum, a longtime campaigner for reducing the risks of 
nuclear power. 

In addition, nuclear power-plant owners have dramatically stepped 
up their security measures since 9/11. "We are spending several 
million dollars more per year," says Baxter of TVA. Guards are 
heavily armed at its three plants. The "setback" around the 
plants has been enlarged to protect them from truck bombs. 

Westinghouse, which has made or licensed about 200 of the 435 
nuclear power reactors operating in the world, hopes a new order 
is sooner rather than later. With federal government 
encouragement, it has designed one of three new "advanced 
passive" generation reactors. The company hopes for NRC approval 
of the design by the end of the year. 

"It's designed to be a hundred times safer than existing plants," 
says a Westinghouse spokesman. In an emergency, even without 
plant operators, the pressurized-water reactor would shut itself 
down. 

But some critics of nuclear power will not be satisfied with such 
assurances, promising to fight any application for a new plant.   

  www.csmonitor.com | Copyright © 2004 The Christian Science
Monitor. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
 52 FW: [DU-WATCH] studies link birth defects to gulf war
 
Date: Sat, 27 Mar 2004 11:07:56 -0600 (CST)

 
Thank God for able researchers like Elaine, who question official stats and
are ingenious enough to fish out the truth.
For folks interested to learn about the complex's methods of coverup and
confusion, ECRR report 2003 is stuffed with descriptions of
"epidemiological" coverups of radioactivity effects. The upcoming Chernobyl
anniversary is a good occasion to do thhat. The report writes quite a bit
about the coverupo of this particular disaster, too.
Piotr

-----Original Message-----
From: Elaine Hunter [mailto:kalubowilakids@yahoo.com]
Sent: March 25, 2004 3:56 AM
To: du-watch@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [DU-WATCH] studies link birth defects to gulf war

><> ><> ><> It should also be noted that Texas is one of the
 largest states not to have a birth defect registry
 program.><>   ><>   ><> [plus the rest of the message below my response ><>
><>   ><>
Some input for those considering the birth defects concerns.  Probably I've
sent some of this out before, but here goes.  I've done a great deal of work
using brith defect statistics from:  the State of Arizona Health Status and
Vital Statistics; the US statistics for Mortality and Morbidity.

Some are gathered as "births with congenital anomalies per 1000 live
births."  Some as "deaths due to."  And so on.  This makes it difficult to
do comparisons.

 In the US "fetal deaths" is the category that covers spontaneous
abortion/miscarriage, however it is only for fetuses lost at 26 or more
weeks gestation [though I know a woman in a superfund area that insisted on
a fetal death certificate for a child lost before 26 weeks!].

Lethal abnormalities would result in spontaneous abortion/stillbirths.  In
looking at US statistics [early 1940's to late 1980's], there were two
instances of rate-doubling of fetal deaths in the 1960, in Colorado and
Hawaii that corresponded with lower rates of deaths due to birth defect--so
actually there was a high rate of hidden deaths due to birth defects.

If a whole bunch of Iraqi midwifes said they have become afraid to attend
birth because of so many horrible outcomes due to birth defects, that's peer
review enough for me.

Agencies who publish such statistics can be quite crafty.  I followed
Arizona statistic [for a period covering more than 20 years] and one year
there was such a high rate in one county, the agency did not publish the
rates chart they usually published.  It was necessary to do the extra step
of using numbers to calculate the rates.  Few would have done that and
noticed the shocking rate of 125 per 1,000 live births.  Arizona has changed
it's format to be more obtuse, though they do have a birth defects registry.

It's a difficult endeavor, any way you look at it.  Still it's worth doing
for those who have no way to speak for themselves.  They show us about some
of the horrors in-humane humans are doing to the Earth, to Life, to each
other.

As for studies funded by any agency--as a former atomic worker, I've been a
guinea pig for two followup studies.  NIOSH took away from the principal
investigator all blood smears, including mine--as one of the most highly
exposed--that had been made to check for chromosomal abberations.  There was
no indication to me that the study was done to benefit me or co-workers in
any way.

 I my own case, I believe that I did my homework, saw that I was just as
irrsponsible as the company if I continued and walked away before having
enough exposure to do serious harm; was involved in the effort that closed
them down.  But she was right--my whole body has been irradiated from the
inside out--maybe the hormesis believers would tell you that's why I don't
look so old.!

Once again, the sperm of males is the most sensitive, most vulnerable link
in the reporductive chain when it comes to environmental toxins, due to
synthesis of new DNA for their formation.

Elaine
*****************************************************************
 53 Salt Lake Tribune: Nuke foes unite to oppose tests 
 
March 27, 2004   

By Judy Fahys 
 
    The county that is home to the Vermilion Cliffs became the
unlikely common ground on a big, green issue this week when
people of all political stripes came together to oppose any new
atomic-weapons tests in nearby Nevada. 
 
    Galvanized by a public meeting where some of Utah's more
liberal Democrats joined forces with its more conservative
Republicans, the Kane County Commission voted unanimously Monday
for a resolution opposing the resumption of weapons testing at
the Nevada Test Site. Commissioner Mark W. Habbeshaw said
Washington decision-makers need to know that if they choose to
test again, the southern Utah community would face a threat to
life, health, tourism and the economy. 
 
    "We can't let this pick up steam," said Habbeshaw. "We've
got to tell Congress and other people to stop." 
 
    The weekly television news magazine, Bill Moyers' "Now,"
filmed the March 9 community meeting at the Kanab library where
the diverse group hammered out its message. The episode is
scheduled to air on PBS this Friday at 8 p.m. in most of Utah. 
 
    The resumption of nuclear testing has been a hot-button
issue in Utah -- southern Utah, in particular -- for more than a
decade. Congress approved the Radiation Exposure and
Compensation Act (RECA) in 1990 to provide reparations to
nuclear testing victims, thousands of whom blame the fallout for
cancer, thyroid disease and death. It has already paid more than
$700 million to 10,637 radiation victims and their families. 
 
    And, although testing in Nevada was banned in 1992, Utahns
have become increasingly alarmed at the prospect it could begin
again soon. Under the Bush administration, Congress has pledged
more than $30 million to prepare the Nevada Test Site for more
testing, although no tests are planned. 
 
    U.S. Sens. Bob Bennett and Orrin Hatch, both Republicans,
have said recently they understand why Utahns don't want testing
again. U.S. Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, has introduced
legislation to require additional protections in the event that
the federal government wants to resume nuclear tests. 
 
    "We don't want this," said Myrna Cox, a downwinder and Kanab
resident. "We don't want to repeat the situation again." 
 
  
 
 
 
  
 
    With so many who trace family disease and death to the
Nevada fallout, sentiment runs strong in the community, said
Cox, who used to watch the "beautiful green and orange mushroom
clouds" with her family as child. 
 
    "I'm impressed that Democrats and Republicans have come
together and said this is not a partisan issue. It is a health
issue and it's a human issue." 
 
    Tom Forsyth, chairman of the Kane County Democratic
Committee, helped his party's progressive caucus to organize a
community meeting about the resumption of testing in February.
Habbeshaw's wife and mother-in-law attended. 
 
    Though he was surprised to see how the proposed resolution
got even tougher by the time local Republican leaders got ahold
of it, Forsyth said he understands now how strongly people feel
about it. 
 
    "When people see their lives could be put in danger by
something that has been the subject of so many government lies,
they come together," he said. "They just don't want to be
victims again." 
 
    State Rep. Mike Noel, R-Kanab, agreed government distrust is
driving the issue forward. 
 
    "We Utahns have paid our dues on this nuclear testing
fiasco, and we have suffered enough," he said. "There should be
no more testing at the Nevada Test Site." 
 
    Though, like Noel, he was suspicious at first that Democrats
might be using the issue as "a campaign ploy," Habbeshaw said he
was driven to action after learning from a thick packet of
Internet research his wife prepared about the legacy about the
damage done by fallout from 900 tests the federal government had
conducted over four decades. 
 
    About 100 people assembled at the March 9 community meeting
and urged leaders to make the resolution tougher. He took an
informal poll. 
 
    "We didn't really count hands," said Habbeshaw. "We didn't
need to." 
 
    Eight or 10 raised their hands when he asked who supported
more research on nuclear testing. About five or six said testing
outside of the United States would be OK. 
 
    But not one hand went up when he asked who supported testing
at the Nevada Test Site. 
 
    The resolution was formalized at the county commission's
meeting on Monday. 
 
    fahys@sltrib.com
 
    
 
   
 
   
			   				 	 "> 	                 				 
 
  
Copyright Salt Lake City Tribune
*****************************************************************
 54 Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Respirators required for Hanford workers
 	 	 	 	 	 
[seattlepi.com]     

Saturday, March 27, 2004 

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER NEWS SERVICES

RICHLAND -- All workers laboring near the Hanford Nuclear 
Reservation's underground waste tanks will be required to wear 
respirators to protect them against potentially harmful vapors, 
officials announced yesterday. 

Exposure to the vapors has sent nine workers to the doctor since 
March 16. All were able to return to work. 

Official with cleanup contractor CH2M Hill said the respirator 
requirement would be in place while the company reviews safety 
policies, which could be "an extended period of time." 

Respirators were previously available on request, but some 
workers claimed they were discouraged from wearing them. At the 
heart of the concern are allegations that no one at the tank site 
really knows what chemicals are in the vapors, and what dangers 
they pose.                 


  [Seattle Post-Intelligencer] 101 Elliott Ave. W. Seattle, WA 
98119 (206) 448-8000
 
*****************************************************************
 55 (DV) Nichols: Radiation in Iraq Equals 250,000 Nagasaki Bombs 

There Are No Words ...  
Radiation in Iraq Equals 250,000 Nagasaki Bombs

 by Bob Nichols www.dissidentvoice.org March 27, 2004 

As a writer I do not have a set of words to describe what 142 
Degrees in the shade is like. I've seen 120 D. in Phoenix and 110 
D in the spa's sauna I use. One hundred forty-two degrees leaves 
me speechless. Try to imagine 142 D temperature while wearing a 
helmet, long sleeve shirt, long pants, a bullet proof vest, 
boots, and carrying a 70 pound pack.
 
By contrast the Inuit of Alaska and Canada have thirty-seven 
words to precisely talk about different kinds of snow. 

So, since the temperature is heating up in Iraq it seemed like a 
good time to float this story to different Internet sites and 
news publications. There was one story in 2003 of one 19 year old 
British soldier whose military job was to work in a British tank. 
In Iraq. In the summer. Word is, from London, that he forgot to 
drink enough water and he literally cooked in his tank.
 
But, this story is not about the temperature in Iraq. You can 
bet, though, the weather will be really important for those 
Americans unfortunate enough to still be in Iraq this summer. 

This story is about American weapons built with Uranium 
components for the business end of things. Just about all 
American bullets, 120 mm tank shells, missiles, dumb bombs, smart 
bombs, 500 and 2,000 pound bombs, cruise missiles, and anything 
else engineered to help our side in the war of us against them 
has Uranium in it. Lots of Uranium. 

In the case of a cruise missile, as much as 800 pounds of the 
stuff. This article is about how much radioactive uranium our 
guys, representing us, the citizens of the United States, let fly 
in Iraq. Turns out they used about 4,000,000 pounds of the stuff, 
give or take. That is a bunch.
 
Now, most people have no idea how much Four Million Pounds of 
anything is, much less of Uranium Dust (UD), which this stuff 
turns into when it is shot or exploded. Suffice it to say it is 
about equal to 1,333 cars that weigh three thousand pounds per 
car. That is a lot of cars; but, we can imagine what a parking 
lot with one thousand three hundred and thirty three cars is 
like. The point is: this was and is an industrial strength 
operation. It is still going on, too.
 
No sir-ee, putting Four Million Pounds of Radioactive Uranium 
Dust (RUD) on the ground in Iraq was a definitely "on-purpose" 
kind of thing. It was not "just an accident." We, the citizens of 
the United States, through our kids in the Army, did this on 
purpose. 

When the uranium bullets, missiles, or bombs hit something or 
explode most of the radioactive uranium turns instantly to very, 
very small dust particles, too fine to even see. When US Troopers 
or Iraqis breathe even a tiny amount into their lungs, as little 
as One Gram, it is the same as getting an X-Ray every hour for 
the rest of their shortened life. 

The uranium cannot be removed, there is no treatment, there is no 
cure. The uranium will long outlast the Veterans' and the Iraqis' 
bodies though; for, you see, it lasts virtually forever.
 
But, it gets worse. Seems an Admiral who is the former Chief of 
the Naval Staff of India wanted to know how much radiation this 
represented. He also wanted to express the amount in a figure 
that the world, especially the non American world, could easily 
understand. 

The Admiral decided to figure out how many Nagasaki Atom Bombs it 
would take to deliver the equivalent of the total amount of 
radiation deployed in Iraq in 2003 in Four Million Pounds of 
uranium.
 
The Admiral also wanted to figure out how much radiation the 
United States Military Forces have deployed in the last Five 
American Wars, the so-called Five Nuclear Wars.
 
That is a simple enough task for somebody like the Naval Chief of 
Staff for a country that is a member of the Nuclear Club. Using 
the Nagasaki bomb for the measuring stick is a particularly 
gruesome twist, though. For those of you in the States who do not 
know it, the United States Military Forces dropped two nuclear 
Bombs on Japan at the close of World War II. The whole world 
remembers that.
 
One Atom Bomb was dropped by Americans on the city of Hiroshima, 
the other on the city of Nagasaki three days later. About 170,000 
people were incinerated immediately. It was a really big deal. 

It is a measuring stick that plays very well in the rest of the 
world; but, not very well on Fox News (Fair & Balanced) (c) or 
the rest of the Fox-like American media. The Department of Energy 
still lists the Hiroshima and Nagasaki detonations as "tests." 
The admiral released the data months ago at a scientific 
conference in India. This article is the first report of the data 
in the United States. It will first be released on the Internet.
 
The admiral in India calculated the number of radioactive atoms 
in the Nagasaki bomb and compared it with the number in the 
4,000,000 pounds of uranium left in Iraq from the 2003 war. Now, 
believe me, it is a lot more complex than that; but, that is 
essentially what the experts in India did. 

How many Nagasaki Nuclear Bombs equal the Radiation loosed in the 
2003 Iraq war? Answer: About 250,000 Nuclear Bombs.
 
How many Nagasaki Nuclear Bombs equal the Radiation loosed in the 
last Five American Nuclear Wars? Answer: About 400,000 Nuclear 
Bombs.
 
Who would do something like this? 

We would. The only people in the history of the world to engage 
in Nuclear Wars are Americans, citizens of the United States. 
Allegedly, the Germans and Japanese of WWII also wanted to engage 
in nuclear wars, except the American Military beat them to the 
draw, so to speak. 

Respected academic scholars could debate forever whether or not 
Herr Hitler, Fuhrer of Germany, would have deployed uranium 
munitions in the Sudetenland if the weapons had been available. 
Certainly the Germans knew just as much about uranium wars as we 
did at the time. It seems doubtful that Adolph Hitler would have 
ordered the use of uranium munitions there because the 
Sudetenland was so close to the Fatherland, Nazi Germany.
 
An American General named Leslie Groves was in charge of the bomb 
making operation called The Manhattan Project. In 1943 The War 
Department knew exactly what uranium bullets and bombs were good 
for. 

If the nuclear weapons did not detonate in Japan, the use of 
uranium bullets and bombs were the fall back position. It was not 
till Ronald Reagan was President in 1980 did the re-named Defense 
Department resurrect the deadly radioactive uranium bullets, 
bombs, and missiles. No wonder his popular nick-name was Ronnie 
Ray-Guns. 

The American Military knew the symptoms of radiation poisoning in 
1943 too; starting with the irritated sore throat through to an 
agonizing death from being cooked from the inside out. 

President Bush promised to invade twelve countries in the 2003 
State of the Union speech. I believe the man. For some reason, 
some misguided Americans do not believe him, or think he was 
"exaggerating." The rest of the world has every reason to believe 
him, though. 

Not to worry, the President has plenty of raw material for 
radioactive uranium munitions left. There are more than 77,000 
Tons stored at the 103 nuclear waste plants and the several 
Nuclear Weapons Labs in the US. Each one makes another 250 pounds 
of radioactive material a day for radioactive bullets, bombs, and 
missiles. Not to put too fine a point on it; but, that is enough 
for 40.5 more gloriously successful campaigns like the 2003 
Nuclear War in Iraq.
 
Every year about this time the Southern winds leave a fine desert 
sand on the windshields of cars parked outside in Continental 
Europe and Britain. Soon this sand dust will carry a surprise. 
Thanks to the Americans. Thanks to us. We did this to the world. 
And, we wonder why they hate and despise us so.
 
These uranium weapons' indiscriminate killing effect gives a 
whole new meaning to the age old term: cannon fodder. In Iraq, 
what goes around, comes around. If not the uranium munitions 
themselves, the uranium dust will be in the bodies of our 
returning armed forces, time bombs slowly ticking away the lives 
of the gullible and the ignorant with their very own internal 
radiation source, the cannon fodder of the 21st Century American 
Nuclear Wars.
 
Put your ending to this article next.
 
A lot of people have done everything we can think of to stop 
these nuclear wars. Even more specifically to stop the use of 
uranium as a munition and shut down the nuclear power plants. We 
have tried and failed for years. Why don't you give it a try? 
Can't hurt anything! Write what steps you would take to turn this 
situation around. Contact me at: bobnichols@cox.net. Bob Nichols 
writes in Oklahoma City and is the Editorial writer for 
DemoOkie.com. Bob Nichols is a contributing writer for 
LiberalSlant, Democratic Underground, OnlineJournal, 
AmericaHeldHostage, and other online dot com publications. Mr. 
Nichols is a frequent contributor to The Oklahoma Observer and 
other print publications. 

He lives and works in Oklahoma. He is a member of CASE -- 
Citizens' Action for Safe Energy, and President of the Carrie 
Dickerson Foundation. CASE has successfully killed two serious, 
well funded attempts to build Nuclear Power Plants in Oklahoma 
and several attempts to site what is now known as the "Yucca 
Mountain Reactor Dump" in Oklahoma. All these efforts to build 
nuclear facilities have failed. CASE won every time. Copyright 
2004, Bob Nichols. All rights reserved. Permission for reposting 

*****************************************************************
 56 NEWS.com.au: Billabongs in peril 

(March 28, 2004)

  By SUELLEN HINDE
 				 				 
  TRADITIONAL owners say the spill of water contaminated with 
uranium near Ranger Uranium Mine has exposed more than 110 people 
to an unprecedented threat.

                                                                  
                               The mine _ operated by Energy 
Resources Australia (ERA) _ remains closed after the discovery on 
Thursday night that about 150,000L of water contaminated with 
uranium had leaked from a holding tank near the airport at Jabiru 
East _ 3km from the mine. 

The Gundjehmi Aboriginal Corporation is concerned the water may 
have entered Coonjimba Billabong _ used by more than 10 people at 
camp 009. And more than 100 people live downstream from the 
billabong at Mudginberri. 

Gundjehmi Aboriginal Corporation executive officer Andy Ralph 
said the Mirrar traditional owners were fearful of people 
becoming sick. 

``This incident has potentially put at risk not only the 
ecosystems of Kakadu's waterways (the billabong feeds into 
Magella Creek _ a link to Kakadu's wetlands) but also the health 
of the Aboriginal people who live and hunt nearby as well as 
employees at Jabiru East and tourists at the airport,'' Mr Ralph 
said. 

``Along with the NT Government and Commonwealth regulators, the 
company (ERA) is responsible for protecting the environment and 
people. It appears this incident is not simply a matter of human 
error but there is an endemic problem with the management of 
process and potable water at Ranger. At present no one can rule 
out that the events which led to this contamination have not 
taken place before.'' 

An ERA spokeswoman said testing would continue. 				

Northern Territory News
 				 							 				 					 	 						
Copyright 2004 News Limited. All times AEDT (GMT+11).                            
*****************************************************************
 57 AU SMH: Mine faces prosecution over uranium spill in creek - 

www.smh.com.au [Sydney Morning Herald Online]   

By Lindsay Murdoch, in Darwin March 29, 2004
 		 	   	   		
The Northern Territory Government is set to launch a landmark 
prosecution against the controversial Ranger mine over the spill 
of uranium contaminated water into a creek flowing into the 
Kakadu National Park and the contamination last week of workers' 
drinking water. 

Environmental groups are demanding the federal and Northern 
Territory governments order the mine closed indefinitely, 
claiming the owner, Energy Resources of Australia, has breached 
its operating licence by failing to ensure that contaminated 
water stays within a closed system. 

Government supervising scientist Arthur Johnston recommended the 
mine, 230 kilometres east of Darwin, remain closed at the 
weekend. 

"I have requested that operations at Ranger do not resume until I 
have complete confidence that there are systems in place that 
will not allow a similar incident to happen again and that there 
is no risk to the health of people and the environment," Dr 
Johnston said. 

Traditional owners of the mine said in a statement issued by 
their Gundjehmi Aboriginal Corporation at the weekend that the 
spill into the creek puts Kakadu's ecosystems at risk, along with 
the health of indigenous people who live and hunt nearby. 

Dr Johnston will today review the results of water samples taken 
from the creek into which contaminated water from a holding tank 
spilled last Tuesday or Wednesday in what environmental groups 
say is one of the most serious environmental incidents at the 
mine since it opened in 1981. 

Mining officials of both governments are privately appalled at 
the latest incidents at the troubled mine. 

"We will prosecute this time. Our patience has run out," an 
official said at the weekend. 

The Federal Government has been considering a Senate committee 
report recommending an overhaul of the regulation of uranium 
mines, including Ranger. 

The committee had found there had been more than 110 pollution 
incidents and numerous breaches of environmental requirements at 
the mine. 

ERA, which is majority owned by Rio Tinto, said last week that 
six people suffered "minor symptoms" when uranium and acidity 
were leaked into workers' drinking water when a mistake was made 
connecting pipes. 

But environmentalists said the spilling of contaminated water 
from a holding tank into a creek was potentially even more 
serious than the pipes incident. 

Mine workers met on Thursday to complain about safety. Didge 
McDonald, a health and safety officer at the Northern Territory 
Trades and Labor Council, said the workers were "very unhappy." 

The leak was the "latest in a history of spills, leaks, and 
breakdowns at Ranger", Dave Sweeney, a nuclear campaigner for the 
Australian Conservation Foundation, said. 

"The mine is getting old, the infrastructure is getting worn and 
the miners and regulators are getting complacent," Mr Sweeney 
said. 

"It seems extraordinary that a fundamental mistake was made such 
as not clearly identifying a pipe carrying drinking water and a 
pipe carrying high levels of contamination." 

Friends of the Earth spokesperson Loretta O'Brien said that in 
July 1983 errors in the processing plant caused a similar leak to 
last week's pipe mix-up.             

Copyright  © 2004. The Sydney Morning Herald.     
*****************************************************************
 58 Las Vegas RJ: EDITORIAL: A Buckeye volunteer (Yucca)
 
Sunday, March 28, 2004

Seven-term Ohio Republican Congressman David Hobson, who chairs 
the House subcommittee that helps set annual spending for the 
Department of Energy, said Wednesday he objects to Nevadans 
"being negative and saying 'Not in my back yard' " about the 
proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump.
 
 Nevada's should "look at what's good for the next generation," 
Mr. Hobson said.
 
 Nevada Congresswoman Shelley Berkley quite properly responded 
that "the next generation" of Nevadans might well be exposed to 
radioactivity from the dump, inviting Mr. Hobson to "start 
shipping nuclear waste to Ohio so he can be proud of doing his 
duty."
 
 Indeed, given that the DOE has guaranteed the casks will be safe 
for 10,0000 years, it's hard to think of any reason they couldn't 
start lining up containers on Ohio's Clark County Fairgrounds -- 
right behind where they hold that big monthly antique show -- 
right away. Meantime, compared to the 82 percent of Nevada set 
aside for federal use ... how many million acres of Ohio are set 
aside for aerial gunnery ranges? How much above-ground nuclear 
testing have Ohioans welcomed "for the good of the country"? And 
how many million acres of Ohio have out-of-state 
environmentalists fenced off to human use (as ranching is now 
banned from most of Clark County, Nevada to "protect" the desert 
tortoise) in order to protect the endangered Ohio Piping Plover 
"for future generations"? What's that? You wiped 'em all out?
 
 We thought so.

 
 
Copyright Las Vegas Review-Journal
*****************************************************************
 59 BBC: Sellafield near miss claim
 
  Last Updated: Sunday, 28 March, 2004
 
[Sellafield]                            
Planning permission has been given to build safety structures at 
the site                                                          

The operators of the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant have 
denied claims that an RAF jet came within a second of crashing 
into it. 

A report in the Sunday Express cites a company source claiming 
the aircraft came within 100ft of the cooling tower at the 
Cumbrian plant in December. 

But British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) said it rejected the claims 
calling them "without foundation". 

BNFL is set to erect new safety structures at Sellafield. 

Alan Hughes, a BNFL spokesman, told BBC Newsonline: "The alleged 
incident simply did not happen." 

He said if a fighter jet was to come within 100ft of Sellafield, 
people living nearby would have known about it and called police. 

Enhance security 

He said: "If this had happened there would be no way that we 
could have kept it secret even if we wanted to." 

RAF regional community relations officer for Cumbria, Tony 
Parrini, also said they had no record of such an incident. 

He said: "As far as I have been able to determine, there is 
nothing to substantiate the story. 

"If they would like to submit it with dates and times it would be 
fully investigated by the Ministry of Defence." 

New safety work is being carried out at Sellafield but no details 
are being released for what the company says are security 
reasons. 
*****************************************************************
 60 Sunday Herald:  Uranium pond at Sellafield sparks court threat by EU 

New alert over nuclear bomb risk

By Rob Edwards, Environment Editor   

 THE European Commission is threatening to take the British 
government to court for failing to account for hundreds of tonnes 
of dangerous radioactive waste at the Sellafield nuclear complex.

A confidential EC memo leaked to the Sunday Herald alleges that 
the state-owned company British Nuclear Fuels Ltd (BNFL) has been 
breaking European law for years by leaving unknown amounts of 
mixed-up waste in an open pond at the Cumbrian site. The waste 
should be properly looked after because some of the plutonium and 
uranium it contains could be made into nuclear bombs.

Delays and difficulties in solving the problem since it was first 
raised by the Commission in 1986 are causing increasing concern, 
the leaked memo says. A further delay in overcoming the 
continuous infringements cannot be further tolerated.

The EC executive is expected to decide this week to give the UK 
until May 1 to come up with a comprehensive plan for retrieving 
and quantifying the waste. If the deadline is not met, the EC 
will go to the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg seeking to 
impose fines on BNFL.

Environmental groups welcomed the ECs action, arguing that BNFL 
had to be forced to solve the problem. To prevent some 
unthinkable disaster, we need much more urgent action to put 
waste into a safer form, said Greenpeace campaigner Pete Roche.

The pond in which the waste is stored is known officially as B30, 
but nicknamed dirty thirty by Sellafield workers. It emits so 
much radiation that for safety reasons people are only permitted 
to work near it for less than an hour a day.

The pond was built in 1959 to store and unpack uranium fuel rods 
burnt in Britains first generation of military and civil 
reactors. The hot fuel was stored under water to keep it cool, 
and to shield workers from its intense radiation.

After some fuel started corroding in the 1970s, the pond was 
phased out and eventually closed down in 1992. But it has been 
left with a huge legacy of nuclear waste under the water, which 
is slowly leaking into the surrounding air and earth.

According to the leaked memo, the European Commission is strongly 
concerned about the situation regarding radioactive contamination 
of the environment surrounding the pond.

But it is even more worried about BNFLs persistent inability to 
accurately account for the potential bombs-grade material in the 
pond. 

It takes only a few kilograms of plutonium to make an explosion 
capable of wiping out a city.

BNFL has told the EC that the pond might contain about 1.3 tonnes 
of plutonium, 400 kilograms of which is lying on the bottom in a 
sludge. A significant amount of strategically important nuclear 
material is not properly accounted for, says the leaked memo. 

Another confidential document from BNFL, revealed by the Sunday 
Herald last July, suggests there is somewhere between 300 and 450 
tonnes of uranium metal in the pond. It is impossible to be sure 
of the amounts because much has corroded and spilt over the 
years, and the water is impenetrably murky.

The pond was first inspected by the ECs nuclear watchdog, 
Euratom, in 1986, and has been visited by inspectors every year 
since 1991.

After every inspection, BNFL was informed that the storage of 
waste in the pond was unsatisfactory.

Now the EC seems to have run out of patience. Measures have to be 
taken to terminate this clear infringement of essential Euratom 
safeguard requirements, the EC memo concludes.

It includes a draft EC directive alleging that BNFL is in breach 
of articles 79 and 81 of the Euratom Treaty. The company is 
accused of a continuous failure to keep proper records of the 
nuclear material and to give EC inspectors access to it.

The directive gives the UK government until 1 May 2004 to come up 
with a comprehensive plan for removing the waste from the pond 
and quantifying it. Otherwise the EC will proceed by imposing 
sanctions on BNFL proportionate to the severity of the 
infringements, the leaked memo says.

Environmentalists pointed out that most of the radioactive 
pollution around the Scottish coast comes from Sellafield. 

Forcing BNFL to put its house in order is good news whether you 
live north or south of the Border, said Fred Edwards, the 
spokesman for a coalition of 26 Scottish environmental groups.

On Tuesday the coalition, under the banner of the everyone 
campaign, is planning to launch its bid to influence the 
elections to the European parliament in June. 

This case neatly highlights the role Europe can take in advancing 
environmental protection and public safety here in the UK, 
claimed Edwards.

BNFL declined to comment on the matter and referred all inquiries 
to the governments Department of Trade and Industry in London. 

Weve not received anything official from the European Commission, 
so it would be premature to comment, said the departments spokes 
woman yesterday. 28 March 2004 

© newsquest (sunday herald) limited. all rights reserved   
*****************************************************************
 61 GL: Workers contaminated at Ranger mine
 
www.greenleft.org.au
                                                                                                                         
Jon Lamb, Darwin 

Twelve workers at the Ranger uranium mine near Jabiru were sent 
home on March 24, after they were poisoned by 
uranium-contaminated water. 

The workers complained of bad nausea and headaches after drinking 
“strange tasting” water. Staff from the previous night’s shift 
also noted the contaminated water while showering. 

Within two hours of workers notifying Energy Resources Australia 
management, the mine was closed. The affected workers, along with 
170 non-essential staff, were sent home without explanation. 

According to the March 25 Northen Territory News, one worker 
said: “They didn’t ask whether we needed to seek medical 
advice... we’re all pretty worried because we’re not being told 
anything”. 

Despite assurances from ERA that the contamination has been 
contained, it is not known for how long the contaminated water 
has been mixing with drinking water, which is also used to supply 
the local airport and some businesses. 

The Commonwealth’s supervising scientist for the mine, Dr Arthur 
Johnston, told ABC Radio on March 25 that “the concentration [of 
uranium] that has been reported to me has been about 400 times 
the drinking water limit”. He also claimed that it contained 
acids and other chemicals. 

Johnston said the problem occurred because a flexible hose was 
incorrectly connected, allowing contaminated water from a 
processing pit to mix with the clean water supply. 

On March 26, a second incident was revealed when contaminated 
water reached the water system surrounding Ranger, threatening 
the wetlands of Kakadu National Park. 

Contamination was found in the nearby Coonjumba Billabong, which 
feeds into Magella Creek. Johnston told ABC radio: “We are now 
concerned, however, about the traditional owners living 
downstream and we’re concerned about any effects that could have 
taken place on the environment... I’ve now requested that the 
mining company does not resume operations”. 

It is believed that contaminated water from the mine’s retention 
tanks is responsible for the second incident. ABC TV reported on 
March 26 that up to 150,000 litres of contaminated water might 
have been involved. 

From Green Left Weekly, March 31, 2004. Visit the Green Left 
Weekly home page. 

*****************************************************************
 62 Las Vegas SUN: Neighbors fret about removal of most hazardous
waste at former uranium plant
        
 By JOHN NOLAN ASSOCIATED PRESS 

CINCINNATI (AP) - Neighbors of a former plant that processed
uranium for the government's Cold War nuclear weapons production
are nervous about a new phase of environmental cleanup: Treating
and removing the site's most hazardous radioactive wastes. 

Disposing of wastes in three half-century-old concrete silos at
the former Fernald plant is the toughest remaining job for the
company overseeing the government's $4 billion cleanup at the
1,050-acre site. 

The project, in the planning stages for more than three years,
must be completed if Fluor Fernald Inc. is to make good on the
U.S. Department of Energy's promise to finish by December 2006. 

Silos 1 and 2 contain sludge residue of uranium ore from which
uranium was extracted during processing at Fernald and a sister
plant near St. Louis. Those wastes are to be mixed with water,
pumped through a piping system into holding tanks and then
turned into cement before being packed into steel containers and
trucked to the Energy Department's Nevada test site for
permanent storage. 

Silo 3 contains powdery, metallic production wastes that are to
be removed with a large vacuum device and bagged for trucking to
the Nevada disposal site. 

Fluor Fernald designed enclosed systems intended to remove the
wastes without letting them escape into the environment. Workers
are completing construction of the $220 million systems, and
testing is to begin in late April. Truck shipments of the wastes
to Nevada are to start this year and continue into 2006. 

"This is the worst stuff that we have," said Lisa Crawford,
president of Fernald Residents for Environmental Safety and
Health. 

The organization has monitored the cleanup work for almost 20
years. Crawford and others will scrutinize results of the
upcoming tests. 

"Everybody's going to be on edge ... I hope it works," Crawford
said. "The silos have always been the No. 1 concern of the
people in the community, so this is a really scary thing for
everybody." 

Dennis Carr, a 23-year Fernald employee managing the silo
project for Fluor Fernald, said he understands the concern. 

"This is obviously the No. 1 concern of the community, these
materials, and rightly so," he said. 

The Silo 3 waste won't need treatment before disposal, so truck
shipments of it are to begin in May, Carr said. In August,
wastes from Silos 1 and 2 will start being pumped into four
tanks. By November, conversion of those wastes into cement will
begin for the truck shipments west. 

Fernald, 18 miles northwest of Cincinnati, processed and
purified uranium metal that was sent to the government's Hanford
site near Richland, Wash., and the Savannah River operation near
Aiken, S.C., for use in reactors to produce plutonium for
nuclear weapons. Fernald's operations, begun in the early 1950s,
were stopped in 1989 as the government designated it among the
first environmental restoration sites. 

The cleanup got under way in 1992. It has included removal of
contaminated soils, demolition of old production buildings and
removal of waste from ground pits for shipment offsite. 

The Energy Department is spending billions of dollars on dozens
of radioactive waste cleanups around the country. Some of the
cleanups involve far more toxic wastes, including at the Hanford
and Savannah River sites. 

But Fernald's extraction of wastes from the silos posed an
engineering challenge that had not come up at other cleanup
sites, said Gene Branham, president of the Fernald Atomic Trades
and Labor Council, the umbrella organization for all 13 craft
unions at the site. 

Branham, a 51-year Fernald employee, will tour the silo site
within days to examine the systems. Branham said he will monitor
the upcoming operational tests to make sure the systems work and
don't pose a hazard to workers. 

"It's truly a complicated procedure," Branham said. "It's one of
those things where you just have to wait and see. They have good
people assigned to it who are totally dedicated, and they've
worked real hard." 

--- 

On the Net: http://www.fernald.gov

-- 


 
*****************************************************************
 63 Press Herald: Nuclear waste in Wiscasset for 'a long time,' activists fear

 Maine Yankee will be decommissioned next year, but a waste
facility won't be empty until 2023, or later. --> --> 

  Sunday, March 28, 2004 

By DENNIS HOEY, Portland Press Herald Writer

Maria Holt is not quite ready to celebrate the end of Maine 
Yankee. 

Holt, a former state legislator and nuclear activist from Bath, 
said the fact that the decommissioning of the former nuclear 
power plant is just a year away doesn't impress her. 

"I don't think we should put our hopes on Yucca Mountain," said 
the 74-year-old Holt, referring to a federally designated waste 
disposal site in Nevada. "I think what the people of Maine should 
count on is having a high level nuclear waste dump for a long 
time. When they finally move this stuff away, I don't think I 
will be alive." 

Earlier this month, Maine Yankee president Ted Feigenbaum took 
the unusual step of sending a letter to hundreds of homeowners in 
Wiscasset and Westport. In the letter, Feigenbaum points out that 
the $500 million decommissioning project that began in 1997 is 85 
percent complete. 

Feigenbaum also took the opportunity to warn residents of 
increased truck traffic. Maine Yankee is importing huge amounts 
of sand from Whitefield so that it can fill in areas where 
buildings once stood. The nuclear reactor containment dome - the 
plant's 150-foot landmark - will be imploded with explosives in 
September. All the buildings that are left, including a 
70,000-square-foot office building, are scheduled to be 
demolished by the end of 2004. 

In about a year from now, all that will remain on the 820-acre 
site is Maine Yankee's Independent Spent Fuel Storage Facility. 
It houses 64 casks containing spent nuclear fuel. Feigenbaum, in 
his letter, says the company is working with the state, its 
congressional delegates and others on removing the spent fuel as 
soon as possible. 

Yucca Mountain is located in the desert, about 160 miles 
northwest of Las Vegas. The government plans to bury waste 1,000 
feet beneath the mountain. 

Eric Howes, spokesman for Maine Yankee, said the Yucca Mountain 
site won't be licensed to receive waste until 2010 at the 
earliest. A more likely scenario, according to Howes, is for the 
last shipment of waste from Maine Yankee to be sent there in 
2023. 

In July, a trial will begin in federal claims court involving 
Maine Yankee and the federal Department of Energy. Howes said 
Maine Yankee is seeking $165 million in damages. Maine Yankee and 
two other New England nuclear power plants will argue that the 
DOE reneged on its pledge to provide a national repository for 
high level radioactive waste. The fuel storage facility cost 
Maine Yankee $80 million to build. 

But for Holt and other skeptics, such as Ray Shadis, the process 
of moving that high-level radioactive waste to Yucca Mountain 
could take much longer than 2023. 

The issue was discussed Thursday night at a meeting in Wiscasset 
of the Maine Yankee Community Advisory Panel. 

"Realistically, this stuff is going to stay in Wiscasset for a 
long time," said Shadis, spokesman for Friends of the Coast. 

Friends of the Coast announced Friday that Dr. Tom Hess of the 
University of Maine and Dr. James Churchill of the Woods Hole 
Oceanographic Institute had been retained to conduct a 
radiological survey of the Sheepscot River estuary. 

The $165,000 study, which will be paid for by Maine Yankee, will 
examine how radioactive effluent that was discharged into the 
Back River by Maine Yankee over the years has affected the local 
marine environment. 

Shadis said he won't rest easy until all the spent nuclear fuel 
has been moved to Yucca Mountain. He said Wiscasset's storage 
facility remains a target for terrorists. 

Even U.S. Rep. Thomas Allen has become frustrated with the 
process. 

During testimony Allen gave last week before the House 
subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality, he called on the 
Department of Energy to begin developing a plan for moving the 
spent nuclear fuel. 

"While the decommissioned plant will soon be nothing but a 
parking lot, its spent fuel sits there waiting for the Department 
of Energy to pick it up," Allen said. "Maine Yankee no longer 
exists, but the community of Wiscasset cannot redevelop its 
shoreline, cannot entice business, and cannot open the peninsula 
for public use. In effect, the community is held hostage by this 
spent fuel." 

Allen said Congress had not made good on a 1982 agreement to 
build a permanent waste storage center by the end of the century 
in exchange for a surcharge on electricity. 

Staff Writer Dennis Hoey can be contacted at 725-8795 or at: 

dhoey@pressherald.com

 Copyright © 2004 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.          
  
*****************************************************************
 64 Toronto Star: Where to put the stuff
 
TheStar.com - 

  Mar. 27, 2004. 01:00 AM  
     
The search is on for a place to permanently store or bury nuclear 
reactor waste

PETER CALAMAI

Arrayed across a hotel meeting room in a double arc of chairs, a 
potentially influential group of GTA residents watches an 
information video about Canada's potentially scariest 
environmental problem: safely dealing with radioactive waste 
nuclear fuel.

Over the course of the day, most will say they knew little or 
nothing about nuclear wastes before, and speaker after speaker 
will express amazement and, often, anger at the amounts amassed 
already, enough fuel bundles to fill five hockey rinks piled to 
the top of the boards.

What really got the participants riled was learning that the 
federal and provincial governments embraced nuclear power plants 
four decades ago without having a plan to deal with the dangerous 
waste that was inevitably produced.

"What were they thinking? That's simply criminal," one man said.

A white male in his 40s, he was fairly typical in a room that 
didn't seem to reflect the demographics of Toronto and area. Only 
six of the participants were visible minorities, for example, and 
only eight of the 30 were women.

Also atypically, no one volunteered that they worked for any 
level of government, although announced occupations included such 
rarities as songwriter, forensic geologist, chiropodist and 
aerospace worker as well as more common jobs like engineer, 
teacher, financial planner, roofer, independent businessman and 
food industry worker.

Yet, if the views of those 30 residents prove typical, then the 
nuclear industry and the federal government face a daunting 
challenge in selling the public on any plan for storing or 
disposing of the waste fuel, a challenge that will surface by the 
end of next year.

Those gathered at the Jarvis St. hotel largely didn't think 
governments tell the truth, didn't believe governments will carry 
out promises, didn't see evidence that governments really protect 
the environment and simply did not trust most government 
officials. Substitute "nuclear industry" for "governments" in 
those sentences, and the distrust needle went right off the 
scale.

Yet, they also counted on governments to finance, manage and 
police the handling of radioactive wastes that will remain 
dangerous for tens of thousands of years.

In theory, these contradictory views reflect the general public 
because the GTA residents were randomly picked by public opinion 
pollster EKOS Research Associates Inc. as supposedly "uncommitted 
citizens," people who don't have an axe to grind about nuclear 
power. They were under the watchful guidance of the Canadian 
Policy Research Networks, an Ottawa think-tank with wide 
experience in this innovative kind of deliberation.

That's what makes the group from last Saturday potentially 
influential. Their collective insights — and especially the 
underlying personal values — are being gathered to guide the 
Nuclear Waste Management Organization, a new body that has to 
make recommendations by Nov. 15, 2005, to the federal government 
for dealing with waste fuel from Canada's 22 nuclear power 
reactors.

The solution will be one of two choices — either storage of some 
kind or disposal deep inside the Canadian Shield. The storage can 
be above or below ground and in one central location or at 
individual power stations. In the NWMO's master plan, these 
details are supposed to be shaped by the values typical Canadians 
hold dear. 

The all-day gathering here was the second-last of a dozen 
so-called Citizens Dialogues held across the country to dig out 
those underlying values. The last such session is scheduled 
tomorrow in Halifax but three major themes are already clear, 
according to NWMO president Elizabeth Dowdeswell.

In combination with the deep cynicism about governments, the 
dialogues have reverberated with an overwhelming desire for 
safety and security in the long-term management of waste nuclear 
fuel — for the environment, people's health and the nation. 

As well, Canadians want a "responsible" approach, Dowdeswell told 
the annual meeting of the Canadian Nuclear Association last 
month. That means taking steps now to handle the waste, but also 
building in flexibility for our children or grandchildren to take 
advantage of possible technological breakthroughs.

Finally, people want to nail down accountability, all the way 
from the community level to the international, and improve public 
awareness so that all these individual players are really held to 
task.

 All these concerns — and others — boiled and bubbled during more 
than six hours of "citizens dialogue" where a Star reporter was a 
fly on the wall, allowed to report the exchanges so long as 
individual speakers weren't identified. This eavesdropping took 
place in plenary sessions that brought everyone together and also 
in more intense exchanges involving only 10 participants.

The experience proved both depressing and encouraging.

`Surely the experts can solve this problem'

Participant at Citizens Dialogue in Toronto

Depressing, because the comments quickly demonstrated serious 
misconceptions and myths about nuclear energy and specifically 
about how Ontario gets more than a third of its electricity, 
despite almost non-stop news coverage about the Pickering power 
station in recent months.

Participants declared, without contradiction from others, that:

 Ontario Hydro has been privatized. (It was broken up into three 
separate operations but a planned privatization was put on hold.)

The Bruce nuclear power complex is privately owned. (A private 
company merely leases it from Ontario Power Generation, the 
provincially owned successor to Ontario Hydro.)

The federal nuclear safety watchdog regularly renews reactor 
operating licences for five years. (Some licences have been as 
short as six months.) 

An international watchdog shut down Pickering. (The International 
Atomic Energy Agency, which monitors anti-proliferation measures, 
has never shut down a reactor in Canada.)

"I have no clue about the subjects I'm talking about now," said a 
man in his early 30s after almost two hours of briefings and 
discussion.

That comment captures one reason the day's experience was also 
encouraging.

As Dowdeswell and others emphasize, the management of nuclear 
waste isn't simply a technical issue to be settled by nuclear 
engineers, scientists and government technocrats. Like climate 
change and genetically modified foods, waste fuel is an issue 
where sound scientific knowledge has to be the oxygen that feeds 
a thorough airing by Canadians.

The unaffiliated citizens gathered at the hotel took that second 
part of the task seriously and didn't shy away from some of the 
toughest moral and ethical aspects, even as they struggled with 
the complexities of Canada's nuclear past, present and future.

"This is a war between the left and right brain, the logic side 
and the emotion side," said one man.

Initially, the emotion side dominated, as participants only 
half-jokingly suggested burying radioactive waste under the 
legislative buildings at Queen's Park or imposing deliberate 
brownouts to reduce wasteful electricity use.

Even in emotion-mode, however, participants saw through the 
bafflegab and obfuscation in the explanatory material they'd 
received. 

One woman laughed out loud at the statement that communities 
would "host" a fuel waste facility. Several pointed out that a 
trust fund set up to pay for handling nuclear fuel waste still 
amounted to taking $12 billion from the public's pockets.

As the logic brain took hold, the participants acknowledged that 
those distrusted governments would still have to be in charge of 
managing the waste.

 And somewhere in between the left and right brains was the 
repeatedly expressed hope that a miracle technology would 
magically transmute radioactive wastes into something useful, 
just as the Philosopher's Stone supposedly turned lead to gold. 
This surfaced strongly in the summing-up by participants at the 
end of the day.

"Surely the experts can solve this problem. I'm a strong believer 
in Gene Roddenberry," said another man.

Star Trek solutions probably won't feature this November when the 
waste management organization draws upon these Citizens Dialogues 
for its preliminary comparison of the different waste management 
approaches. Twelve months later comes the final recommendation to 
the federal government.

But 30 GTA residents who should now be better prepared than most 
to take part in that coming debate didn't seem all that 
interested.

They all picked up their $100 fee upon leaving but only three 
signed up for further information.

Additional articles by Peter Calamai

Legal Notice: Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All
*****************************************************************
 65 AFP: Iran resumes works on nuclear fuel cycle: official

TEHRAN (AFP) Mar 28, 2004

 Iran has resumed work on a key part of the nuclear fuel cycle, 
its atomic energy chief announced Sunday in an apparent step back 
from a deal with the UN nuclear watchdog to suspend all uranium 
enrichment-related activities.

Gholam Reza Aghazadeh told state television that "the 
experimental phase of the Isfahan processing installation has 
begun and by the end of this phase, in the next 20 days, 
experimental production at this facility will start."

"The uranium processing plant in Isfahan will produce all raw 
materials for the fuel cycle," he added.

The Isfahan installation is described as a Uranium Conversion 
Facility (UCF), where the refining of yellow cake takes place to 
produce materials that can be then used to produce enriched 
uranium.

In a deal with the International Atomic Enegy Agency (IAEA) 
brokered by Britain, France and Germany late last year, Tehran 
agreed to suspend uranium enrichment -- and all related 
activities -- while UN inspectors delved into suspicions Iran was 
using a bid to generate atomic energy as a cover for developing 
nuclear weapons.

But Iran, under massive international pressure to maintain the 
suspension, has consistently emphasised its right under the 
nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to produce nuclear fuel 
for what it insists are strictly peaceful purposes.

Iran also appears to be working to a more narrow definition of 
the suspension -- which diplomats say the Europeans had hoped 
would entirely halt Tehran's work on the highly sensitive nuclear 
fuel cycle.

Aghazadeh said the "voluntary suspension of uranium enrichment in 
Iran was a move to build trust with the IAEA, and based on the 
order of the Supreme National Security Council secretariat, the 
Iranian Atomic Energy Organisation will suspend in the field of 
building parts and facility construction."

He did not elaborate, but state television added in a commentary 
that the Isfahan facility, situated near the historic city in the 
centre of the country, was "not part of the deal with the IAEA" 
and had been declared to the Vienna-based body in 2000.

Iran's Supreme National Security Council is headed by Hassan 
Rowhani, the official charged with negotiations with the IAEA and 
who negotiated the deal with the European Union's 'big three'.

Aghazadeh, who is also one of the Islamic republic's 
vice-presidents, confirmed that IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei 
would visit Tehran on April 6 for talks with "high-ranking 
officials".

It will be Elbaradei's third visit to Iran since February 2003.

And he said that a team of IAEA inspectors presently in the 
country had visited an enrichment facility in Natanz, 250 
kilometres (150 miles) south of Tehran, on Sunday and would also 
travel to the Isfahan installation.

IAEA inspectors arrived in Iran on Saturday for a visit which 
Tehran had delayed earlier this month after the body condemned 
Iran for failing to report that it had designs for sophisticated 
P2 centrifuges for enriching uranium to levels that could be 
weapon-grade.

Tehran yielded and allowed the visit after a delay of two weeks, 
however, due to an international outcry against Iran.

A diplomat in Vienna said another inspection team slated to go 
into Iran in about two weeks would be "determining if the 
commitment to suspension is being honored."

Even more aggressive inspections are expected later in April, 
particularly to look into the P2 question, diplomats at the IAEA 
said.

The IAEA has been investigating since February 2003 whether 
Iran's nuclear programme is peaceful, or devoted to secretly 
developing atomic weapons, as the United States alleges.

The body is to report its findings at a meeting in Vienna in June 
that ElBaradei has said will be "key in the ... consideration of 
Iran's implementation" of the NPT.

An IAEA ruling that Iran is in non-compliance with the NPT would 
send the issue to the UN Security Council, which could then 
impose punishing sanctions on the Islamic Republic.

hj-fpn-sas/hc

  WAR.WIRE
*****************************************************************
 66 CNSC - Environmental Assessments
 	
[Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission / Commission Canadienne de
Canada] 

Request for Public Comment
 
Screening Report – Additional Low Level Storage Buildings (LLSBs) 
at the Western Waste Management Facility on the Bruce Power Site 

The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) invites public 
comment on the Screening Report concerning the Environmental 
Assessment of the proposed construction and operation of three 
additional Low Level Storage Buildings (LLSBs) at the Western 
Waste Management Facility on the Bruce Power Site near Tiverton 
Ontario. This environmental assessment is being conducted 
pursuant to the requirements of the Canadian Environmental 
Assessment Act. 

The Screening Report is based on an Environmental Assessment 
Study Report prepared by Ontario Power Generation in response to 
Environmental Assessment Guidelines approved and issued by the 
CNSC Designated Officer on November 3, 2003. 

Interested parties should address their written comments to the 
CNSC environmental assessment project manager at the address 
indicated below. The public comment period ends April 30, 2004. 
CNSC staff will review comments and address all comments received 
before forwarding the Screening Report to the CNSC Designated 
Officer for approval and decision under the Canadian 
Environmental Assessment Act. All comments received regarding the 
Screening Report are considered public. 

Copies of the Screening Report, the Environmental Assessment 
Study Report and information on the project are available at the 
following locations: 


  Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission Library 280 Slater Street, 
4th Floor Ottawa, ON K1P 5S9     Port Elgin Public Library 708 
Goderich Street Port Elgin, ON N0H 2C0 
    
  Tiverton Public Library 56 King Street North Tiverton, ON N0G 
2T0 Kincardine Public Library 727 Queen Street Kincardine, ON N2Z 
1Z9 Southampton Public Library 215 High Street Southampton, ON 
N0H 2L0     Bruce Power Visitors’ Centre, Bruce Township 
Concession #4 Box 1540 Tiverton, ON N0G 2T0   



Written comments on the Screening Report document should be 
submitted by regular mail or E-mail by April 30, 2004 to: 

Guy Riverin, Environmental Assessment Specialist, Canadian 
Nuclear Safety Commission, P.O. Box 1046, Station B, Ottawa, ON 
K1P 5S9 

Phone: 1-800-668-5284, E-mail: ceaainfo@cnsc-ccsn.gc.ca                                
*****************************************************************
 67 AU ABC: Probe continues into uranium mine water woes. 

28/03/2004. ABC News Online
 	
Investigations are continuing at the Ranger uranium mine after
the contamination of the drinking water system last week.

 The mine is surrounded by Kakadu National Park and was shutdown
on Wednesday after revelations drinking water was contaminated
by process water.

 The mine's operators, Energey Resources of Australia (ERA), has
also confirmed two more cases of water contamination.

 An ERA spokeswoman says the water system is being cleaned and
flushed out and testing of the tank that overflowed is underway. 


© 2004 Australian Broadcasting Corporation 
This service may include material from Agence France-Presse
(AFP), AAP(International), APTN, Reuters, CNN and
the BBC World Service which is copyright and cannot be
reproduced. 

*****************************************************************
 68 AU ABC: Three separate inquiries probing mine contamination. 

29/03/2004. ABC News Online
 	
="Australian Broadcasting Corporation Online">   

The operators of the Ranger uranium mine in the Northern
Territory say they will have a clearer picture today about when
the mine can resume operations.

 The mine is surrounded by Kakadu National Park and was shut
down last week after drinking water at the site was found to be
contaminated.

 The operator of the mine, Energy Resources of Australia (ERA),
says three separate inquiries are underway by the NT Department
of Business, Industry and Resource Development (DBIRD), the
Commonwealth Supervising Scientist and the mine.

 ERA says medical testing is available for any employee affected
by the contamination.

 It is waiting to hear back from the Federal Government this
week. 

© 2004 Australian Broadcasting Corporation 
*****************************************************************
 69 UK Independent: Kintyre may be nuclear submarine dump
 
By Paul Kelbie, Scotland Correspondent
 
27 March 2004

A former RAF base on the Mull of Kintyre has been earmarked as a 
potential storage site for Britain's mounting stockpile of 
redundant nuclear submarines. 

Ministry of Defence officials are seeking somewhere to dump up to 
27 submarine reactors, each the size of two double-decker buses, 
until at least 2040. The refused to rule out the peninsula as a 
nuclear graveyard is creating fear and alarm among residents. 

In Campbeltown, locals believe the former RAF base at 
Machrihanish, on the west coast of Kintyre, is high on the MoD's 
target list. 

While a decision is still three years away there are mounting 
fears among the community that speculation will be enough to 
destroy investment in the area, cripple tourism and turn the 
already remote peninsula into a ghost town. 

The population of the peninsula has crashed by a fifth following 
the closure of the Nato base at Machrihanish - which took more 
than £1.5m from the local economy. 

The recent closures of Campbeltown Shipyard, a Jaeger clothing 
factory and a number of other industrial and seafood businesses 
are only just being reversed. 

Tourism chiefs are hoping to capitalise on the area's rugged 
hills, lush green countryside and golden sandy beaches. 

The ferry service to Ballycastle - 13 miles across the channel 
from Torr Head has recently been re-established and a new 
international golf course is planned. 

John Semple, of the Campeltown and Kintyre Enterprise Trust, 
which works to promote the area, said: "All this could be 
destroyed by a nuclear dump on the doorstep. There is a huge 
potential to turn this area into a major tourist attraction but 
how many people would want to bring their families to a place 
stigmatised as a radioactive dustbin? The MoD and the Government 
should not think we will just roll over and accept this. There 
will be civil disobedience if necessary. We are united and we 
will fight to the bitter end." 

Already posters have started appearing in shop windows throughout 
the town against the nuclear plans, and a petition is being 
circulated demanding that Machrihanish is ruled out of the 
running. 

"We have already done our bit for the country, now it's the turn 
of some other community," said Nancie Smith, chairman of the 
Campbeltown Community Council. "This community is only now 
starting to recover from a number of setbacks suffered over the 
last 10 years. Despite this we have managed to remain a vibrant 
and supportive community. We had thought that with a number of 
investment projects being considered we were at last seeing the 
light at the end of a very long and dark tunnel then we get an 
announcement like this." 

An MoD spokesman said Machrihanish was one of a number of sites 
where the broken-up, empty reactor shells could be stored and 
that while some had already been ruled out it was still too early 
to give a decision on Machrihanish.                  


UK Independent Ltd.
*****************************************************************
 70 online.ie: EU policies may spell end for Sellafield                                        
 
  [online.ie home]    

2004-03-28 18:50:01+01                          
 			 			 	 	 	   	 	
The British Government may be forced to spell out a definite 
timetable for the closure of the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing 
plant under new policies being set out by the European 
Commission.

The EU has stipulated, as part of accession agreements, that 
similar facilities in Slovakia and Lithuania must be phased out. 

It remains unclear what, if any, directions the commission will 
give the British government, but Fianna Fáil Party chairman 
Seamus Kirk believes these new policies are a positive step and 
will put additional pressure on British Nuclear Fuels.                            
	 	
  


 
  
*****************************************************************
 71 [progchat_action] Hiroshima Message :  Reconciliation instead
 
Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2004 14:27:39 -0600 (CST)

 
ZNet | Japan

Hiroshima Message

                  Reconciliation instead of Retaliation

by Tadatoshi Akiba
March 26, 2004

We have long continued our effort to raise public awareness of the need
to abolish nuclear weapons by conveying to the world the facts of the
atomic bombing and the message born out of the suffering and struggles
of the hibakusha, the survivors of the atomic bombings. Our hope and
wish is to create a 21st century of peace and humanity free from nuclear
weapons and violence and free from all hatred and terror.

The theme of my presentation today is ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.
According to Ernst Heinrich Haeckel and Sigmund Freud, it means that the
development of the individual is a short and quick recapitulation of the
development of the entire human race. I am interpreting this rather
loosely to mean that the rebuilding of Hiroshima recapitulated the
essence of human history by recapturing the wisdom and legacy of the
entire human race. Actually I am saying more. In order for evolution to
occur, the arrow should also be directed the other way as well. The
rebirth and re-creation of Hiroshima should become a model for building
the future for all of us.

A-bomb Damage

On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped a single atomic bomb on the
center of Hiroshima. At the time, approximately 350 thousand people were
living in the city and by the end of December 1945 about 140 thousand of
them were dead.

The combined effects of heat, blast, and radiation instantaneously
slaughtered a hundred thousand human beings and reduced Hiroshima to
rubble -- an experience that was, to those who witnessed it, the "end of
the world." Conditions in the city immediately after the bombing are
impossible to convey adequately in words. People became ghosts or
demons, their skin charred and dangling from their bodies, their flesh
and even bones exposed. Mothers tried desperately to nurse charred
babies. Babies clung desperately to the breasts of dead or dying
mothers. Those who managed to survive had lost everything, even hope.
Many who survived sincerely envied the dead. In fact, we know from
eyewitness accounts that many victims took their own lives as soon as
they were fully conscious of having survived.

To make matters worse, uninjured survivors and even relief workers or
relatives who entered Hiroshima after the explosion fell ill and died of
what was then called A-bomb disease. We know it now as radiation
poisoning.

Including these "entry survivors," 85 thousand official A-bomb survivors
were living in Hiroshima City at the end of March 2003. Even now, a
half-century later, thousands still suffer the physical and emotional
aftereffects. A-bomb survivors, or hibakusha, know in their bones the
devastating inhumanity of the atomic bomb. What they saw of "the end of
the world" was enough to convince them that nuclear weapons are an
"absolute evil." They are determined "never to allow anyone else to
experience such horror." Having seen the end of the world, they have
worked for five decades to prevent it.

Reconstruction of Hiroshima

(1) The heroic efforts of Hiroshima citizens

For hibakusha, the reconstruction of the city started with securing
their own lives. As I mentioned earlier, the entire city was hell, a
lifeless chaos. And in this hell, while many of the living literally
envied the dead, many of those who wanted to live were dying
mysteriously.

Under these circumstances, courage was not enough. For the hibakusha to
continue to live, they needed desperately to understand the meaning of
life, the meaning of survival. Philosophy to them was not an academic
exercise, it was the first essential step toward mobilizing the energy
for survival. They were forced to capture and internalize, mostly on a
subconscious level, the entire wisdom of human history and philosophy.

As a symbolic representation of this process, let me read an English
translation of Sadako Kurihara's poem entitled "We shall bring forth new
life" :

                       We Shall Bring Forth New Life

                It was night in the basement of a broken
                building.
                Victims of the atomic bomb
                Crowded into the candleless darkness,
                Filling the room to overflowing --
                The smell of fresh blood, the stench of
                death,
                The stuffiness of human sweat, the
                writhing moans --
                When, out of the darkness, came a wondrous
                voice.
                "Oh! The baby's coming!" it said.
                In the basement turned to living hell
                A young woman had gone into labor!
                The others forgot their own pain in their
                concern:
                What could they do for her, having not
                even a match
                To bring light to the darkness?
                Then came another voice: "I am a midwife.

                I can help her with the baby."
                It was a woman who had been moaning in
                pain only
                                 moments before.
                And so, a new life was born
                In the darkness of that living hell.
                And so, the midwife died before the dawn,

                Still soaked in the blood of her own
                wounds.
                We shall give forth new life!
                We shall bring forth new life!
                Even to our death.

                                                      Sadako Kurihara

Thus the reconstruction of the city started on a new terrain. Hibakusha
built most of what they needed with their bare hands initially. I do not
have to tell you how difficult the job must have been. Finding clothes
to wear, food to eat and shelters to sleep in for that population was
not easy. However, the mayor, city officials, business people, citizens
and all others who had the tiniest relation to the city made a
gargantuan effort. Even today I cannot think of that period without
bowing my head toward those whose blood, sweat and tears accomplished so
much.

It is also important to note that, in addition to the heroic efforts of
Hiroshima citizens, the reconstruction of our city was made possible by
generous help from our neighbors and from all over the world.

As soon as people in the suburbs of Hiroshima and nearby areas had heard
that Hiroshima was in need of help, right after the bombing, many came
into the central areas of Hiroshima to help the injured and those in
need. It is an essential part of human nature to help those in distress.
All of us want to help. And I must mention especially that even today
hibakusha and their friends have strong urges to help. For example, at
the time of the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, hibakusha and citizens of
Hiroshima organized relief teams to help the victims and to restore the
city. After September 11th, Hiroshima citizens reacted in a similar
fashion. Some people flew to New York to participate in reconstruction
efforts and others raised funds for the same purpose.

(2) Generous help from all over the world

People throughout the world poured considerable good will and fresh
energy into sustaining and reconstructing the lives and health of the
hibakusha, their society and the city itself.

Let me mention just a few names to illustrate the kinds of acts that
touched Hiroshima.

Dr. Marcel Junod, the chief representative to Japan of the Red Cross
International Committee, negotiated with GHQ and obtained roughly 15
tons of medical supplies, which he gave to the governor of Hiroshima
Prefecture. These supplies included normal human plasma and other
valuable items never before available to Japanese doctors.

The New Yorker magazine devoted one entire issue of August 31, 1946, to
report the story of the tragedy as told by Mr. John Hersey. Within one
day, 800,000 copies were sold. As a result, the world understood the
human dimensions of the tragedy and suffering. Also notable were the
thousands of letters we received encouraging Hiroshima citizens and
making generous personal offers of assistance in rebuilding the city.

Mr. Floyd Schmoe, a Quaker activist, built "Houses for Hiroshima" using
money donated by American citizens and his own hands, together with
those of international volunteers. Mr. Norman Cousins, chief editor of
the Saturday Review, created a program that recruited "spiritual
parents" to adopt the orphans who had lost their parents, family and
relatives. Another effort by Mr. Cousins called the "Hiroshima Maidens"
project made it possible for twenty-five girls to receive operations at
Mt. Sinai Hospital to remove keloid scars. The operations improved the
girls' appearances, but more importantly gave them new hope and
confidence for the future.

These efforts not only gave hibakusha new hope to live and renewed their
trust in humanity but also helped volunteers, participants and others
who cooperated to heal from the collective wounds brought by the atomic
bombs, thus uniting those people who were trying to transcend the
framework of hatred, violence and retaliation.

(3) The Hiroshima Peace Memorial City Construction Law

A major instrument that made the citywide reconstruction effort possible
was a special piece of legislation, The Hiroshima Peace Memorial City
Construction Law. It was promulgated on August 6, 1949, to promote
Hiroshima's recovery. The intent of the law is expressed in Article One:
The law "aims at the construction of Hiroshima as a Peace Memorial City,
a symbol of the ideal of making lasting peace a reality."

The law established basic guidelines for the reconstruction. The
national government began to provide substantial financial support and
granted the city former military and other national property. The
rebuilding of Hiroshima was underway.

In 1952, the Peace Memorial Park and the Peace Memorial Museum, also
known as the A-Bomb Museum, were completed. On the memorial cenotaph in
the park one can read the following inscription: Please rest peacefully,
for we will not repeat the evil. These words summarize exactly what I
have tried to convey to you.

The achievements of hibakusha

Having witnessed the ultimate consequence of animosity, hibakusha
deliberately envisioned a world beyond war in which the human family
learns to cooperate to ensure the wellbeing of all. In fact, they
believed for decades that the human family was evolving slowly but
steadily in that direction.

Now, however, they see the world being forced into a framework of fear
and hatred. They see gullible publics being persuaded that only a
powerful military backed by nuclear weapons can protect them from their
enemies. They see the world diving headlong toward a militarism far too
reminiscent of the militaristic fascism that commandeered their nation
prior to World War II.

If we hope to survive the 21st century, we must emphasize that
understanding the experience of the A-bomb survivors is among the most
important tasks we face.

In my 1999 Peace Declaration, I summarized three important achievements
of the hibakusha. The first is that the survivors opted for life under
the circumstances under which no one could have blamed them had they
chosen death. Even under those conditions, they chose to live not as
desperate animals but as decent human beings. Very early on they began
rejecting hatred and revenge in favor of reconciliation. This superhuman
effort to remain human has proven extremely important.

The second accomplishment of the hibakusha derives from their
willingness and determination to tell the world what happened to them.
To talk about an experience burned so intensely into one's unconscious
is to re-experience the unspeakable pain of that day. Nevertheless, our
hibakusha tell over and over about an experience they would prefer to
forget. In doing so, they may very well have prevented a third use of
nuclear weapons.

The third achievement of the hibakusha is their rejection of revenge and
their pursuit of reconciliation. They do not see the human race as a
collection of enemies. They refuse to view international society as a
tense standoff among selfish entities inevitably battling over territory
and resources. Rather, they see all human individuals as members of one
big human family, a single unit. They have adopted a revolutionary
worldview that regards the human race as a single whole and works toward
reconciliation.

Reconciliation and humanity

Their point of departure is deceptively simple. When the hibakusha tell
their stories, one of the most commonly heard phrases is "I want no one
else to suffer the way I did." This statement is revolutionary because
it truly means "no one." Not President Truman who ordered the bomb
dropped, not the scientists who created the bomb, not even the military
personnel who actually delivered it. This inclusiveness is the essence
of the hibakusha's worldview.

Personally, I believe that hibakusha had subconsciously captured this
truth the moment they chose to live. Then slowly but surely, it has
emerged on the conscious level as their determination to turn the world
away from revenge and retaliation, and toward reconciliation and
co-creation of a collective future. Every day it becomes more obvious to
me that within this message lies our only hope.

World situation

Why do I feel this way? The answer is quite simple. Worship of nuclear
weapons is rapidly leading us toward a crisis. The Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the primary international agreement for
the abolition of nuclear weapons, is on the verge of collapse.

The United States, the nuclear superpower, has publicly reserved the
option of a preemptive first strike with nuclear weapons. It has openly
stated its intention to develop small "useable" nuclear weapons and is
seeking to resume production of plutonium pits, the atomic bomb triggers
for hydrogen bombs. All these efforts are clear violations of the NPT.
In addition, North Korea has withdrawn from the NPT and has told the US
it plans to build and possess nuclear weapons. India, Pakistan, and
Israel still refuse to sign the NPT.

However, the problem goes beyond nuclear weapons. Since the terrorist
attacks of September 11 two years ago, the world appears enthralled by
the concept of retaliation. Somehow it has become acceptable to claim,
as President Bush did in his September appearance at the UN, that war is
necessary to preserve the peace. We have finally entered that Orwellian
realm in which politicians say "War is peace," and people believe them.

This situation is symbolized most powerfully by the US-UK war on Iraq.
Those who started that war discounted millions of people around the
world who were calling desperately for continued UN inspections and a
peaceful resolution. As a result, thousands upon thousands of innocent
women, children and elderly have been needlessly slaughtered, and the
natural environment has been contaminated with substances that will
remain dangerously radioactive for billions of years. Meanwhile, the
weapons of mass destruction, which were the original excuse for the war,
have yet to be found.

It is no exaggeration to say that by ignoring UN inspections and
resolutions representing the "rule of law," we are returning to an age
in which the "rule of power" based on violence determines the fate of
the world. The planetary symbol of the rule of law is the United
Nations. The United Nations is a light illuminating a future of peace
for the human race. We must make every effort to ensure that this light
is not extinguished. We must help it shine ever more brightly.

It is important to remember that the United Nations was established
because we, the human race, learned important lessons from World War II
and our pre-World War II history. We wanted to make sure that we would
not repeat our predecessors' mistakes. However, I fear that our memories
of World War II, especially those of the atomic bombings, are fading
rapidly around the world.

Most of us, including those guiding the world today, have no experience
of war. We, and they, just can't imagine the horror of the atomic bomb.
We don't spend much time learning about it either. John Hersey's
Hiroshima, Arata Osada's Children of the A-bomb, Kenzaburo Oe's
Hiroshima Notes, and Jonathan Schell's Fate of the Earth -- these good
books are all but forgotten. As George Santayana warned, "Those who do
not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Unfortunately, we are
forgetting, and the danger of nuclear war is mounting.

Toward the abolition of nuclear weapons

We cannot simply sit and watch this ominous trend develop. Let me
describe briefly what the City of Hiroshima is doing to change it.

(1) Hiroshima-Nagasaki Peace Study Course

As I mentioned earlier, I believe that the hibakusha's message carries
our only hope. We must make sure that the facts about Hiroshima and
Nagasaki and the hibakusha's message are shared throughout the world.
For this purpose we are making efforts to establish Hiroshima-Nagasaki
Peace Study Courses in major colleges and universities around the world.

Earlier I described three major achievements of the A-bomb survivors,
the second of which was the hibakusha's commitment to talk about the
A-bomb tragedy and thereby help to prevent a third use of a nuclear
weapon.

A-bomb survivor testimony is extremely effective in conveying the
tragedy of the bombings. The words and gestures, the very presence of a
survivor is so powerful. Therefore, we have relied too heavily on
sending them to classes, meetings, exhibitions, conferences and
symposia.

Now we are beginning to realize that we will not be able to rely on them
much longer. Their average age is already over 70, and we have lost some
of our most dependable speakers. Whole groups have disbanded for lack of
membership.

Therefore, we must find effective ways to present the hibakusha message
and the tragic facts of the atomic bombings without the hibakusha. One
way we have found is by establishing what we are calling the
Hiroshima-Nagasaki Peace Study Course in colleges, universities and
communities around the world. Through this academic approach, we seek to
educate students from vastly differing backgrounds. We will take steps
to provide information about these courses, and their curricula, through
websites around the world in order to encourage their propagation and
exchange experiences.

The Jewish experience, particularly the holocaust experience, has a
prominent position in academia. It has been studied formally and taught
to succeeding generations in numerous college and community courses as
an important human experience or legacy.

The experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, however, are barely mentioned
in most school and university curricula. Few have any courses at all
that convey this experience to our young. The basic information is
sometimes presented as part of a peace campaign or a special lecture.
Sometimes survivors receive special opportunities to tell their stories,
but it is extremely rare for a university to take the A-bombings up as a
formal academic subject.

With gratitude, I would like to mention several of the few universities,
which have been engaged in this effort. International Christian
University and Waseda University in Tokyo, Hiroshima University,
Hiroshima City University and Hiroshima Shudo University in Hiroshima,
and several other universities in Japan, have offered courses such as
this. In the United States, I know that Tufts University, where I
formerly taught, American University in Washington DC, Wesleyan
University, Brown University, Binghamton University, Connecticut College
and a few others have offered courses similar to what I am calling for.
And other universities will join shortly. One is the Institute of
Political Science Studies in Paris (Institut d'Etudes Sciences
Politiques) , a national educational and research institute, which is
going to start a Ph.D. course on Hiroshima and Nagasaki this coming
spring. Berlin Technical College will start its course next summer. A
number of other universities are showing great interest in starting
their own courses as well.

This activity is among our highest priorities, and I will do whatever I
can to encourage the establishment of these courses in schools around
the world.

(2) Mayors for Peace and its Emergency Campaign to Ban Nuclear Weapons

Since I used to teach at a university, working with academic
institutions comes natural. Another effort has to do more directly with
my role as the mayor of a city.

The cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki formed an international
organization called the Mayors for Peace in 1982 to encourage solidarity
among the cities of the world in an effort to arouse demand for a
peaceful world free from nuclear weapons. Today, we have 555 city
members in 107 countries and regions. The number is increasing quite
rapidly. We meet every four years in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and we
employ a number of techniques to lobby national governments to eliminate
nuclear weapons. This is another responsibility of the highest priority,
and I encourage all mayors to join our conference and strengthen our
solidarity in working toward the elimination of nuclear weapons.

Last April, as President of Mayors for Peace, I attended the NPT
Preparatory Committee meeting held in Geneva, Switzerland. At this
meeting, I had the opportunity to speak to the delegates and express the
intense desire of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the abolition of nuclear
weapons. I requested that when the States Parties review the NPT in
2005, they take this opportunity to pass by majority vote, regardless of
any nations that may oppose it, a final document that stipulates the
following: first, the immediate de-alerting of all nuclear weapons;
second, unequivocal action toward dismantling and destroying all nuclear
weapons in accordance with a clearly stipulated timetable; and third,
negotiations on a universal Nuclear Weapons Convention establishing a
verifiable and irreversible regime for the complete elimination of
nuclear weapons.

In 2005, the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombings, the mayors who
belong to Mayors for Peace are going to help our people raise their
voices and lobby their government leaders to end the nuclear crisis. In
October 2003, at our Executive Meeting in Manchester, the Secretariat
proposed an Emergency Campaign to Ban Nuclear Weapons. We received
overwhelming support, and it has now been decided that we will work with
other NGOs around the world to promote a worldwide grassroots campaign.

First, we will mobilize a dozen or more members of the Mayors for Peace
and hundreds of NGO representatives to attend the NPT Preparatory
Committee next year in New York. This will lead to mobilizing hundreds
of mayors and thousands of NGO representatives to attend the Review
Conference itself in the year 2005.

I am happy to report that while I was in Pakistan, India and the United
Kingdom recently I talked to the mayors of several cities and they are
willing to join this campaign.

At the 2005 NPT Review Conference, member mayors will attend the opening
ceremony and speak during the time allotted for NGO presentations. They
will use techniques of nonviolent activism to pressure their national
governments. They will coordinate their efforts with other NGOs to hold
meetings, symposia, concerts, picture exhibitions and other grassroots
events to ensure that governments know where the people stand on this
issue.

Between the 2004 Preparatory Committee and the 2005 Review Conference
itself, we will call on member cities to raise the profile of the
anti-nuclear movement on Hiroshima and Nagasaki days, August 6 and 9 of
the year 2004. Making these days major events will arouse public
interest leading toward the 2005 Review Conference. Each city will
implement its own citizen-oriented program, but we are also hoping to
find a way to link these activities, perhaps through television or
Internet simulcasts.

"Impossible," some will say, "The nuclear powers will never agree", and
"The military industrial complex is too powerful". Well, I have no
illusions about the task before us. It took a hundred years and a
terribly bloody war to free the slaves in the United States, and then
another century to free them from the terror of lynchings and the
humiliation of segregation. It took 30 years for Gandhi and Ali Jinnah
to free India and Pakistan from British rule. It took 15 years to stop
the Vietnam War. And Nelson Mandela was in prison for 28 years.
Bottom-up change requires time and great sacrifice. Again, people of
moral and spiritual vision must again take up the struggle. The
abolition of nuclear weapons is no less important and no less just than
the abolition of slavery. We are not just fighting a technology or a
weapon, either. We are fighting the very idea that anyone could, for any
reason, unleash a nuclear holocaust. We are fighting the idea that a
small group of powerful men should have the capacity to launch
Armageddon. We are fighting the idea that we should spend trillions of
dollars on military overkill while billions of us live in dire,
life-threatening poverty.

Concluding Remarks

Our immediate objective is the elimination of nuclear weapons, but our
long-term goal is to make this planet a "spiritual home for all people."
We need our planet home to be filled with compassion, to be a source of
creativity and energy for our children and youth, a personal place of
rest and comfort for all, young or old, male and female. In that
"spiritual home for all people" grows an abundant Forest of Memory, and
the River of Reconciliation and Humanity flowing from that forest is
plied by Reason, Conscience and Compassion, ships that sail ultimately
to the Sea of Hope and the Future.

I want my children and grandchildren to gaze with yours at the setting
sun over the Sea of Hope and know that, despite our conflicts and other
serious problems, their world will not explode in terminal, radioactive
violence. To achieve this simple and obvious objective, we must all do
everything we can to eliminate nuclear weapons and eliminate war
altogether. I hope you will join with me here today in committing
ourselves wholeheartedly to accomplishing this lofty goal, this
realistic goal, by the time we turn this world over to our children.

          Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba delivered this
          address to the inaugural conference of the Asia
          office of UNITAR in Hiroshima on November 17, 2003.
          Akiba is the chairman of Mayors for Peace.

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 72 thedailytimes.com: Reports suggest Y-12 vulnerable
 
 2004-03-28
 by Larry Bivins Gannett News Service
 
WASHINGTON -- Despite efforts to beef up homeland security since 
the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, recent reports by federal 
investigators and a watchdog group suggest that the nation's 
nuclear weapons sites are vulnerable. 

The reports focus particularly on the Y-12 National Security 
Complex at Oak Ridge. 

The Oak Ridge facility is the nation's primary site for 
processing highly enriched uranium used to make nuclear bombs. 
Tons of weapons grade uranium are stored at the 60-year-old 
complex, one of the nation's 12 nuclear weapons facilities. 

Since 9/11, concern has heightened over the possibility of 
terrorists gaining access to the nuclear materials stored at Y-12 
to create a ``dirty bomb'' or cause a detonation on-site, 
endangering the lives of the facility's 4,700 workers, 28,000 Oak 
Ridge residents and the 175,000 people in Knoxville. 

``You can create an improvised nuclear device with this stuff 
rather quickly ... which would make one hell of a mess of 
Tennessee,'' said Peter Stockton, senior investigator for the 
Project on Government Oversight, a Washington watchdog 
organization. 

Such concern is illuminated by two recent events: the March 15 
arrival of 48 crates of nuclear weapons materials from Libya at 
the Oak Ridge complex and last week's public hearings in 
Washington by a commission investigating whether the 9/11 
terrorist attacks could have been prevented. 

Government officials in charge of security expressed confidence 
in the security at Y-12 and the nation's other nuclear weapons 
facilities. 

``We stand by the security at our sites,'' said Bryan Wilkes, a 
spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, 
created in 2000 specifically to oversee security at the weapons 
complexes. ``We feel strongly that we have some excellent, tough 
measures in place.'' 

The oversight group and others disagree. Stockton's group 
reported in January that the guard forces at Y-12 fared poorly on 
an impromptu Department of Energy evaluation in December. The 
group said sources described the results as ``pretty ugly.'' 

The Energy Department's inspector general reported in January 
that the Y-12 security force cheated on a performance test in 
June, having gained access to elements of the examination in 
advance, skewing the assessment of the personnel's readiness. 

More recently, the inspector general reported March 12 that the 
Y-12 complex was among 10 out of 12 nuclear weapons sites 
inspected that had made significant cuts and modifications to the 
required 320-hour basic training program for security personnel. 

A study released in June by the General Accounting Office blamed 
security lapses on a lack of accountability and responsibility at 
the Energy Department and the nuclear security agency. Rep. 
Christopher Shays, R-Conn., the chairman of a House Government 
and Reform Committee panel on national security and who requested 
the GAO probe, said the findings were alarming. 

``Neither the Department of Energy nor the NNSA can yet provide 
reasonable assurance weapons grade material is protected against 
a determined, well trained adversary force willing to die in a 
nuclear detonation or radiological dispersion of their own 
making,'' Shays said during a hearing last summer. 

The conclusion coincides with what Ralph Hutchison and other 
members of the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance have been 
saying for more than a decade. 

``Long before September 11, we were concerned (Y-12) was 
vulnerable to attack,'' said Hutchison, the anti-nuclear group's 
coordinator. ``When we were putting this out in '93, people just 
sort of rolled their eyes and said, `yeah, what are the chances 
of that happening.''' 

The peace alliance has conducted numerous ``Stop the Bomb'' 
demonstrations at the Oak Ridge complex. Hutchison recalled 
demonstrators entered the site on New Year's Day 2002 and held 
prayer vigils for 35 minutes before being confronted by security 
police. 

``It was a stunning example,'' Hutchison said, of lax security. 

Wilkes said the nuclear security agency is addressing some of the 
training, preparedness and staffing issues that came out in the 
inspector general's January report. He dismissed the watchdog 
group's report as unfounded. And he noted that it was his agency 
that called for the investigation into whether Y-12 security 
personnel had undermined performance tests. 

``We take very seriously any allegations of impropriety or any 
potential problems,'' Wilkes said. ``And we pounce on any 
indication of discrepancy.'' 

The House Energy Committee held a closed hearing on the Oak Ridge 
plant March 4. Rep. Shays' subcommittee intends to hold another 
hearing on April 27 on overall security at the nuclear weapons 
sites. 

Tennessee lawmakers also are following developments. Sens. Lamar 
Alexander, who grew up near the Y-12 complex, and Bill Frist said 
they have been in contact with the Energy Department and believe 
it is correcting any deficiencies that may exist. 

''In this post-9/11 environment, security must be everyone's 
highest priority,'' Frist said. ``I will continue to closely 
monitor this issue to ensure that the problems are remedied as 
quickly as possible.'' 

Rep. John Duncan Jr., R-Knoxville, suggested that the problems at 
the Oak Ridge site have been overblown and there is no reason for 
increased alarm. Duncan said the government already is spending 
way too much on anti-terrorism activities. 

``The truth is we're going ridiculously overboard in regards to 
terrorism,'' said Duncan, who also sits on Shays' House panel. 
``Almost every department in the federal government has 
exaggerated the threat of terrorism to get more money.'' 

Duncan said that while Americans should take the threat of 
terrorism seriously, they are more likely to be killed in an auto 
accident or die from a heart attack than to become victims of a 
terrorist strike at one of the nuclear sites. He said security is 
much better than in the past. ``Is it perfect, no,'' he said. 
``But you can't make it perfect.''                                                                                     
 
Materials All materials Copyright © 2004 Horvitz Newspapers.              

  The Daily Times 307 East Harper Ave. Maryville, TN 37804

 Mailing Address: PO Box 9740 Maryville, TN 37802-9740

*****************************************************************
 73 Tri-City Herald: Cantwell listens to Hanford concerns 

This story was published Sunday, March 28th, 2004 

By John Stang Herald staff writer 

The frustration with federal bureaucracy was thick, almost a 
physical force. 

The subject of that frustration: The hurdles and slow movement in 
the federal program designed to compensate workers who've 
developed cancer or certain lung diseases at Hanford and the 
nuclear reservation. 

About 35 former Hanford workers and their relatives told U.S. 
Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., Saturday in Richland about their 
problems with the compensation program. 

"The promise of timely uniform compensation has not been met," 
said Joy Gest, whose husband died in his 30s in 1974 after 
working at Hanford's processing plants and the 300 Area. 

Going into effect in 2000, the Employees Occupational Illness 
Compensation Program pays $150,000 in compensation to former 
nuclear reservation workers who have cancer with at least a 50 
percent likelihood of it being caused by radiation on the job. 
Surviving family members also are eligible for the payment. 

Also, the program pays $150,000 to workers with chronic beryllium 
disease, a lung illness caused by exposure to the metal 
beryllium, which is used in the nuclear industry. Numerous 
Hanford buildings were heavily laced with beryllium. 

Cantwell said she decided to hold Saturday's session after her 
office received numerous complaints about the program. 

Also, she is preparing for a Tuesday hearing of the Senate's 
Energy and Natural Resources Committee in Washington, D.C., which 
is looking into nationwide problems with the program. The 
committee will quiz Department of Energy Undersecretary Robert 
Card, plus representatives from the U.S. Department of Labor, the 
National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and the 
General Accounting Office. 

"The hearing is called because myself and my colleagues don't 
think enough progress is being made (with this program)," 
Cantwell said. 

The hearing is supposed to identify where the program has broken 
down. And if the senators don't see the potential for 
administrative improvement, they might try legislative action, 
Cantwell said. 

She noted that Tuesday's hearing does not include any former 
workers among those giving testimony. She hopes to eventually get 
some former workers to testify before the committee. 

"We need to put a human face on the issue," she said. 

Complaints voiced to Cantwell's office and at Saturday's session 
included: 

n People filing claims as long as three years ago, and not seeing 
any action. Some people talked about periodically checking up on 
their claims, and continually being told to check back in one or 
two months. 

n Applicants' records going to NIOSH where their radiation 
exposures are checked and calculated; few, if any, get any 
answers from NIOSH. 

n Applicants and bureaucrats not finding the appropriate medical, 
radiation and beryllium exposure records, some of which date back 
to the 1950s. 

"That has left people with the almost impossible task of proving 
their claims," Cantwell said. 

n Applicants obtaining their medical and radiation records, only 
to find significant segments redacted on the paperwork. 

"When I had access to the files, a lot of it was blacked out, a 
lot I couldn't read," said Shirley Matheny, who worked in 
contaminated Hanford buildings in the 1960s, and has had lung 
cancer and several other cancers. 

n Several were not told when working during Hanford's Cold War 
production days that they were inhaling harmful beryllium and 
asbestos dust. 

© 2004 Tri-City Herald, Associated Press &Other Wire Services
*****************************************************************
 74 PISJ: Post-trial documents filed in INEEL cleanup lawsuit
 
Pocatello Idaho State Journal: 

By Journal Staff

POCATELLO - Post-trial documents have been filed in a federal 
court case to decide whether Lockheed Martin Advanced 
Environmental must pay for failing to complete a subcontract to 
clean up buried waste at Idaho's nuclear site.

Judge B. Lynn Winmill will decide the case later this year. The
post-trial documents are the final piece of a four-month trial
in U.S. District Court from August to November 2003.

Lockheed Martin Idaho, the contractor that operated the Idaho
National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory from 1994 to
1999, sued Lockheed Martin Advanced Environmental for allegedly
failing to complete a subcontract to complete cleanup at Pit 9,
a demonstration pit for cleaning INEEL's buried nuclear waste.

In August 1994, Lockheed Martin Idaho hired Lockheed Martin
Advanced Environmental, a sister company, as a subcontractor to
clean the 1-acre pit used from 1967 to 1969 to store radioactive
waste from Cold War nuclear weapons production at the Department
of Energy's Rocky Flats site in Colorado.

Pit 9 is part of the 97-acre Subsurface Disposal Area at the
Radioactive Waste Management Complex at the INEEL. Cleanup of
Pit 9 is required under an early 1990s agreement between DOE and
the state of Idaho.

The suit alleges Lockheed Martin Advanced Environmental failed
to meet required deadlines, made unjustified and unreasonable
demands and failed to return money as required in a "guarantee
of performance" clause.

Lockheed Martin Idaho seeks the $54 million it paid to Lockheed
Martin Advanced Environmental and any money spent because of the
company's performance. 

Copyright © 2004 Pocatello Idaho State Journal
 P O Box 431 Pocatello, ID 83204-0431   

*****************************************************************
 75 Rocky Mountain News: Worker struggles to prove Flats ties

By Ann Imse, Rocky Mountain News

March 27, 2004

Rocky Flats has routinely destroyed records that subcontractors 
sickened by their jobs at the former nuclear weapons plant need 
to qualify for government aid. 

People who worked at Rocky Flats and other atomic bomb facilities 
and have developed cancer and other illnesses may apply for 
$150,000 and/or weekly workers compensation payments if they can 
prove the sickness was caused by radiation or other toxic 
substances encountered on the job. 

 The first step in qualifying is proving that the person worked 
at a nuclear weapons facility, and that is proving hard for 
employees of subcontractors at the Denver plant. 

That's because Rocky Flats says it destroys records of 
subcontracts six years after the subcontract has finished, 
according to a letter to a worker seeking such records. 

Rocky Flats spokeswoman Karen Lutz said she was unable to 
discover whether that policy continues today. 

The result: Robert Posey of Denver can't prove that he worked as 
a union construction laborer at Rocky Flats in 1969 for four 
subcontractors: A&G Masonry, Monterey Construction, BLT Legacy 
and Chambco Inc. 

Posey, 76, came down with colon cancer in 1994. "In the process 
of the operation, I died three times," he said. Speculating he 
may have been contaminated with radiation while at the weapons 
plant, he applied for the compensation program. 

He has Social Security records that prove he worked for those 
four companies, but he can't prove that the companies did work at 
Rocky Flats. 

Apparently, all four no longer exist, so he can't get records 
from the employers. 

When he asked Rocky Flats for proof that these companies did work 
at the nuclear weapons plant, he was sent a letter saying 
subcontracts are routinely destroyed after six years, in 
accordance with Department of Energy rules. 

The Department of Energy was unable to say if this meant that all 
nuclear weapons plants have been destroying their subcontractor 
records. 

Lutz said the Denver plant keeps its radiation exposure records 
for 75 years, but was unable to find any for Posey. 

Nor did it find him on the list of workers with security 
clearances. Posey's job, however, may not have required one. 

Lutz said the compensation program would help Posey try to find 
other ways to prove he worked at Rocky Flats. Officials said they 
check online records and Social Security. 

But so far, Posey is having no luck. Officials even offered to 
take the testimony of co-workers. But Posey said, "All of them 
are dead." 

A shortage of records is just one of many problems with the 
compensation program, which has been able to pay only about 4,000 
of the 40,000 factory workers in three and a half years. The 
Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will hold a hearing 
Tuesday on the program, "and what we are going to do to make sure 
the program will work," said Marni Funk, press secretary for the 
committee. 

Interested persons can listen to the hearing on the Internet at 8 
a.m. at http://energy.senate.gov/ 

imsea@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5438 
  
*****************************************************************
 76 Google News Alert - nuclear
 
Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2004 01:04:44 -0800 (PST)

 
AMERICA quenches thirst for energy with nuclear power
Roanoke Times - Roanoke,VA,USA
PHILADELPHIA - When Three Mile Island's Unit 2 sustained a partial meltdown
25 years ago, conventional wisdom held that the accident would cripple
the nuclear ...
<http://www.roanoke.com/roatimes/news/story164836.html>
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NUCLEAR inspectors head back to Iran
Kansas City Star - Kansas City,MO,USA
TEHRAN, Iran — UN nuclear agency inspectors returned to Iran on Saturday
for the first time since Tehran reversed a decision to bar them because
of ...
<http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/world/8294046.htm>
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IRAN is said to conceal nuclear program
Boston Globe - Boston,MA,USA
ISTANBUL -- Senior Iranian officials are overseeing efforts to conceal
key elements of the country's nuclear program from international inspectors,
according ...
<http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2004/03/28/iran_is_said_to_conceal_nuclear_program>
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25 years ago, catastrophe loomed on Three Mile Island Nuclear ... 
Allentown Morning Call - Allentown,PA,USA
By Sam Kennedy. ''There is a general emergency at Metropolitan Edison Co.'s
Three Mile Island nuclear power plant,'' announced a local station, which
was tipped ...
<http://www.mcall.com/news/local/all-5tmimar28,0,617318.story?coll=all-newslocal-hed>
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QUEEN left in dark on nuclear attack
Guardian - UK
HG Well's War of the Worlds provided a better blueprint for Britain after
a nuclear holocaust than plans prepared by the Home Office, says a senior
civil ...
<http://politics.guardian.co.uk/politicspast/story/0,9061,1179852,00.html>
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CONGO uranium mine poses no nuclear risk: US
Daily Times - Pakistan
WASHINGTON: Workers illegally quarrying a Congo mine that provided uranium
for the first atomic bombs have no link to nuclear proliferators and extract
so ...
<http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_28-3-2004_pg4_13>

JOHN Armstrong: Let nuclear dogs lie
New Zealand Herald - Auckland,New Zealand
Nothing threatens to blight National's remarkable renaissance quite as
much as its potentially fraught rethink on the ban on port visits by nuclear-propelled
...
<http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3557232&thesection=news&thesubsection=dialogue>

N. Korea Rejects US Nuclear Demand
Atlanta Journal Constitution - Atlanta,GA,USA
SEOUL, South Korea (AP)--North Korea on Saturday rejected a US demand for
a ``complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantling'' of its nuclear
weapons ...
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US-LED group wins Korea nuclear site cooperation
Daily Times - Pakistan
NEW YORK: North Korea has agreed to cooperate with a US-led international
consortium on worker safety and other issues at its suspended nuclear
power plant, an ...
<http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_28-3-2004_pg7_11>

ALGERIA COULD BE NUCLEAR CHALLENGE FOR US
Middle East Newsline - Middle East
Western diplomatic sources said the United States has been quietly advising
Algeria to open its nuclear facilities to inspection in an attempt to
stop the ...
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 77 Google News Alert - nuclear
 
Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2004 13:13:48 -0800 (PST)

 
25 years of skepticism clings to nuclear plants
Toledo Blade - Toledo,OH,USA
... the quest for sexual equality eroded much of the blind faith people
had in public officials, experts believe a similar level of distrust arose
with the nuclear ...
<http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040328/NEWS08/40328021/-1/NEWS>
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FOR county residents, nuclear power also a concern
Today's Sunbeam - Salem,NJ,USA
By BILL GALLO JR. SALEM -- At the time of the Three Mile Island nuclear
accident, the presence of nuclear power in Salem County was a relatively
new thing. ...
<http://www.nj.com/news/sunbeam/local/index.ssf?/base/news-3/1080465630168650.xml>
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NUCLEAR plant's tax payments drop over years
Portsmouth Herald - Portsmouth,NH,USA
SEABROOK - As the value of the Seabrook Station nuclear power plant continues
to decline, residents and other businesses are picking up more of the
tab to ...
<http://www.seacoastonline.com/news/03282004/news/7645.htm>

NUCLEAR waste in Wiscasset for 'a long time,' activists fear
Press Herald - Portland,ME,USA
Holt, a former state legislator and nuclear activist from Bath, said the
fact that the decommissioning of the former nuclear power plant is just
a year away ...
<http://www.pressherald.com/news/state/040328meyankee.shtml>
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CENTRAL Pennsylvania residents mark 25th anniversary of the worst ... 
Boston Herald - Boston,MA,USA
Camp Hill, Pennsylvania - A quarter-century after the country's worst nuclear
accident, people who live near the Three Mile Island nuclear facility
say many ...
<http://news.bostonherald.com/national/view.bg?articleid=1552>

US urged to rethink its nuclear stockpiles
Sydney Morning Herald - Sydney,New South Wales,Australia
A Defence Department panel has recommended big changes to the US nuclear
arsenal, saying the current plans to update the existing weapons stockpile
will not ...
<http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/03/28/1080412237337.html>
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PYONGYANG rejects US demands in nuclear talks
Chicago Tribune (subscription) - Chicago,IL,USA
NORTH KOREA -- North Korea on Saturday rejected a complete, verifiable
and irreversible dismantling of its nuclear programs, calling the main
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 78 Oakland Tribune: Bush's laser, bunker buster under attack from Senate
 
Article Last Updated: Saturday, March 27, 2004 -
 		   	 	
Feinstein vows to oppose 'bizarre' weapons at 'every step of the
road'

By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER

A powerful Senate appropriations chairman threatened this week to 
shut down the world's largest laser if the Bush administration 
falters in creating a miniature sun inside a California 
laboratory. 

At the same time, Republicans and Democrats are signaling even 
tougher scrutiny than last year of administration plans for a 
powerful nuclear weapon to threaten foreign adversaries hiding in 
underground bunkers with a single, regime-toppling strike. 

Sen. Dianne Feinstein suggested creating "weapons systems that 
are so bizarre and so catastrophic goes beyond the moral code." 

"I'm going to oppose it at every step of the road because I do 
not believe the American people want to support a new generation 
of nuclear weapons," she said. 

Neither the giant laser at Lawrence Livermore lab nor the big 
nuclear bunker buster is, by itself, a do-or-die test of 
President Bush's defense policies. 



But the administration's $6.6 billion spending proposal for 
nuclear weapons research and maintenance is coming under 
unusually rigorous attack early in an election year, and not from 
the rambunctious House but a less expected quarter, the 
ordinarily staid Senate. 

"Your problem is going to be holding on to what you already 
have," Nevada Democratic Sen. Harry Reid warned the nation's top 
nuclear-weapons executive, Linton Brooks. 

Brooks' deputy was at a loss to explain the bipartisan 
resistance. 

"There's definitely more intensity, more controversy -- no 
question," said deputy National Nuclear Security administrator Ev 
Beckner. 

In recent months, Brooks and Beckner have shuttled around Capitol 
Hill to stave off attacks on multiple Bush initiatives -- $27 
million for the new bunker buster, $9 million for "advanced" 
weapons designing teams, $30 million to shorten the time to a 
nuclear test, plans for a plutonium bomb-component factory and a 
delay in hydrogen fusion experiments on Livermore's $4 billion 
National Ignition Facility until 2014. 

The delay caught the attention of the four committees overseeing 
nuclear weapons spending, especially the Senate Energy and Water 
Development Appropriations subcom- mittee. 

As nuclear-weapons spending soared to levels 50 percent higher 
than the Cold War average, two administrations have relied on the 
panel's chairman, Sen. Pete V. Domenici, R-N.M., to carry their 
case in the Senate and in spending negotiations with his House 
counterparts. St. Pete, as Domenici is fondly known in three 
weapons labs, is the latest in a dynasty of nuclear purse-string 
holders from the high-desert state where nuclear weapons were 
invented. 

Since 1996, Domenici poked a critical finger at the giant laser 
on several occasions but always preserved its budget, even in the 
face of a $2 billion cost overrun and substantial drain on pet 
projects at the two weapons labs in Domenici's own state. 

The sacrifice, the senator made clear this week, was for one 
reason: to realize after more than 40 years the dream of 
controlled thermonuclear-fusion -- the creation of a momentary 
sun -- inside a lab. 

"You know how I feel right now is that I've been hoodwinked," 
Domenici told executives of the National Nuclear Security 
Administration on Tuesday. "And not a little hoodwink. Big one." 

If Livermore's stadium-sized National Ignition Facility simply 
becomes the world's greatest laser research facility and doesn't 
actually achieve ignition -- that is, harvest more energy from 
hydrogen fusion than the electricity in its laser beams -- then, 
Domenici said, no more money will flow its way. 

"And I tell you, if I see that coming, it (the laser lab) better 
not be asking me for any money, because I'd close it down, 
because that's not fair," Domenici said. "We never intended to 
spend $5 billion to $6 billion to build a laser facility or a 
laboratory that would provide civilian research and visitations 
from around the world." 

Beckner assured Domenici that a recent technical advance -- and 
the emphatic objections of all four congressional committees -- 
had made it possible to shoot for ignition in 2010. 

"They made sure that we understood," Beckner said Friday. 

Originally, scientists planned on fusing hydrogen gases frozen 
solid inside spheres of plastic or beryllium. But their plan 
required designing and building a cryogenic robot to carry the 
frozen target from a filling lab into the laser's target chamber, 
maintaining it at subzero temperatures. 

Rough estimates suggest the scheme would cost at least $100 
million and scientists aren't certain it will succeed. In order 
to try for ignition in 2010, Beckner said, they are reaching for 
a backup plan to pump the gases into the sphere through a straw 
about a tenth of a hair's width and freeze it inside the target 
chamber. 

"We have very good target designs there. The complication is in 
the experimental realization," Beckner said. Which is to say, no 
one has built such a target, nor filled it, frozen it and crushed 
it with X-rays driven by laser beams. 

"We have a higher level of risk associated with this. But in view 
of the importance of getting earlier results, we will change 
those priorities," he said. 

Project critics have seen the promised date of ignition slip from 
2003 to 2008 to 2010 to 2014 and now back to 2010 with a novel 
target. Some plan to lobby Congress for an investigation of the 
laser's ability to meet its promise of ignition. 

"The idea that at this late date that they still are designing 
the target for which they designed the entire facility is 
indicative of what's wrong with the entire project," said Chris 
Paine, a senior nuclear weapons analyst for the Natural Resources 
Defense Council.

 Contact Ian Hoffman at
    
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material is distributed without profit or payment to those who 
have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for 
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