*****************************************************************
04/05/04 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 12.82
*****************************************************************
RADBULL IS PRODUCED BY THE ABALONE ALLIANCE CLEARINGHOUSE
*****************************************************************
Send News Stories to news@energy-net.org with title on subject
line and first line of body
NUCLEAR POLICY
1 AFP: Head of UN nuclear watchdog arrives in Iran with firm warning
2 BBC: IAEA raps Iran's nuclear stance
3 Korea: Digital Chosunilbo: Pyongyang Willing to Abandon Nuclear Prog
4 US: Guardian Unlimited: The White House
5 US: SF Chronicle: Hiding in the White House
6 US: Insight Mag: Pentagon Presses for New Nukes -
7 US: Insight Mag: Reform Overdue for Central Intelligence -
8 NYT: Brazil's N-Weapons Program? & Group: N.Korea Can Make 'Unlimite
9 Las Vegas SUN: Researcher Is Found Guilty of Espionage
10 Reuters: Brazil says nuclear program purely peaceful - report
11 Reuters: Russian Nuclear Expert Convicted of Spying
12 O-R Online: Khrushchev's son offers inside view of Cold War
13 BBC: Brazil hopes to end nuclear 'row'
14 BBC: Pakistan proposes nuclear talks
15 BBC: Russia arms expert 'spied for US'
16 IHT: Nuclear clients: Don't overlook the unusual suspects
17 AxisofLogic: It's a dirty job and terrorists are doing it
18 Toronto Star: Physicists warn PM of missile defence problems
19 RJD: NATO says new members to observe all previous agreements with R
20 Pakistan News: No uranium depleted weapons used in Afghanistan - Hel
21 Hi Pakistan: Kashmir more important than N-issue: Blix -->
22 AU ABC: Pakistan offers to host nuclear talks.
NUCLEAR REACTORS
23 US: [NukeNet] Meltdown at Three Mile Island, Monday April 5th, 9
24 US: NRC: Dominion Nuclear Connecticut, Inc., Millstone Power Station
25 BBC: Wylfa reactor
26 US: Toledo Blade: Davis-Besse at full power for first time in 2 year
27 Xinhuanet: France to build nuclear plant with pressurized water reac
28 US: NRC: NRC to Discuss Annual Performance Assessment of Seabrook
29 US: NRC: NRC to Meet with Exelon Generation Company to Discuss Perfo
30 US: NRC: NRC to Meet with TVA Nuclear Officials to Discuss Safety Pe
31 US: NRC: NRC to Meet with Progress Energy Officials to Discuss Safet
32 US: PR News: Palisades Nuclear Plant Claims Continuous Run Record fo
33 US: SP Times: Utilities developing warm glow for nuke plants
NUCLEAR SAFETY
34 US: [NukeNet] In 4 years, DOE compensates 1 sick woker out of 22,
35 Fw: Poisoned? US Soldiers sickened by DU
36 Guardian Unlimited: GIs Tested for Depleted Uranium Exposure
37 Las Vegas SUN: Six Held for Taking Ukraine Nuke Equipment
38 US: NRC: STP Nuclear Operating Company Notice of Consideration of
39 New York Daily News: Daily News Special Investigation - Poisoned?
40 KR: Lawsuits first ray of light for victims of secret Russian nuclea
41 NEWS.com.au: Worker may sue over uranium drink
NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE
42 Las Vegas SUN: Nevada says DOE isn't telling those affected of Yucca
43 Las Vegas SUN: DOE picks rail option, Caliente corridor to Nevada nu
44 Las Vegas RJ: YUCCA MOUNTAIN: Railroad secrecy irks state
45 US: Las Vegas SUN: Ex-NTSB chief rips nuke transport plan
46 Las Vegas SUN: Battle lines form over fed funds for project
47 US: Waste News: Retired Army general nominated for American Ecology
48 US: AU ABC: Uranium mine worker tells of fear.
49 Yucca Mountain Update: Volume 2 Issue 4 ~ April 2, 2004
NUCLEAR WEAPONS
US DEPT. OF ENERGY
50 Tri-City Herald: Steam plant near Hanford's N Reactor nears end of s
51 Albuquerque Tribune: Los Alamos Lab helps heat things up in space
52 Contra Costa Times: Livermore lab operators must love, foster scienc
53 WATE: $500 million may entice BNFL back into nuclear cleanup
54 Tri-City Herald: Pension plan irks Hanford board
OTHER NUCLEAR
55 Google News Alert - nuclear
56 Las Vegas RJ: LETTERS: Nothing unreasonable about border searches
57 Bellona: Bellona leads in the EU hydrogen debate
58 Platts: Global Power Plant Additions Reach Unprecedented Levels,
*****************************************************************
*****************************************************************
FULL NEWS STORIES
*****************************************************************
*****************************************************************
1 AFP: Head of UN nuclear watchdog arrives in Iran with firm warning
[http://www.spacewar.com/]
TEHRAN (AFP) Apr 05, 2004
The head of the United Nations' atomic energy watchdog, Mohamed
ElBaradei, arrived in Iran early Tuesday with a warning to the
Islamic republic's clerical leaders that they were failing to
ease suspicions that the country was seeking to develop nuclear
weapons.
On his arrival, ElBaradei was asked by an Iranian journalist why
he needed to visit when Iran had cooperated with the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), to which he bluntly
replied: "I think that does not necessarily reflect the facts."
"This is not a political issue, this is a technical issue," he
added. He comment was an apparent dismissal of Iranian
allegations that the IAEA was putting pressure on the Islamic
republic because of lobbying by Tehran's arch-enemy, the United
States.
The US accuses Iran of using its atomic energy programme as a
cover for the secret development of nuclear weapons, a charge
angrily denied by Tehran.
"I would like to close the issue tomorrow, if not today, but
there are outstanding issues," ElBaradei said.
The IAEA director general told reporters accompanying him on his
one-day visit that the 35-member board of governors of his
Vienna-based anti-proliferation agency had become "impatient with
Iran's cooperation".
WAR.WIRE
*****************************************************************
2 BBC: IAEA raps Iran's nuclear stance
Last Updated: Monday, 5 April, 2004
[IAEA chief Mohammed ElBaradei]
ElBaradei is travelling to Iran for fresh talks
IAEA chief Mohammad ElBaradei says Iran has not been co-operating
as openly and quickly as it should to dispel claims that it wants
to build nuclear weapons.
The UN nuclear agency head said the pace of Iranian assistance
had slowed and there had been inspection delays.
Mr ElBaradei prior to his arrival in Tehran early on Tuesday for
talks.
He said he hoped to make it clear during his visit that restoring
and accelerating the pace of co-operation was in everyone's
interests.
Claims rejected
Mr ElBaradei added that he hoped to cover two key issues during
his talks: the origins of the highly-enriched uranium found in
the country; and details about advanced nuclear centrifuges that
can be used to produce weapons-grade material.
"We need to satisfy ourselves that there are no undeclared
activities that have taken place in Iran," Mr ElBaradei said. "I
and the international community would like to bring the issue to
a conclusion. It obviously cannot go on forever."
[Aerial view of Natanz facility]
Iran has been accused of keeping some of its nuclear activities
secret [Photo: Digitalglobe]
His remarks came after Britain, France and Germany expressed
concern last week over Iran's announcement that it was resuming
uranium conversion - a crucial stage in the production of both
nuclear weapons and nuclear fuel.
Iran hit back after the criticism, with UN ambassador Pirooz
Hosseini telling Reuters that the plant near Isfahan was not in
breach of Iran's commitment to suspend uranium enrichment.
Iran insists that its nuclear programme is peaceful and only
aimed at producing electricity.
But analysts in the US and elsewhere have expressed concern that
Iran is not revealing all of its activities.
*****************************************************************
3 Korea: Digital Chosunilbo: Pyongyang Willing to Abandon Nuclear Program
Updated Apr.5,2004 11:28 KST
A possible change in North Korea's stance has been detected as
Pyongyang says it is willing to give up all of its nuclear
facilities including those for peaceful purposes. North Korea is
willing to abandon its peaceful nuclear programs to produce
energy if it is offered "appropriate corresponding measures" at
six-party nuclear talks. Officials in Seoul say this change in
stance was reportedly disclosed by North Korea during a meeting
with Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing in Pyongyang late last
month.
In previous negotiations with South Korea, the United States,
China, Japan, and Russia, North Korea had said it would only
consider scrapping its nuclear weapons ambitions. Earlier this
week, South Korean foreign minister Ban Ki-moon back from a trip
to Beijing had said North Korean officials had indicated their
intention to resolve the nuclear standoff and expressed interest
in compensation measures and a security guarantee for its
regime.
Ban also said Pyongyang had agreed to participate in
working-level discussions and another round of six-party
negotiations on the nuclear issue. According to officials here,
South Korea and China are working to put together a working
group meeting as soon as possible but are at the same time
concerned that the talks may not happen within this month as
Washington has yet to show any response to this latest
development.
Arirang TV
*****************************************************************
4 Guardian Unlimited: The White House
Bush's latest abuse of power fails to rouse the Washington media
Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday April 1, 2004
The Guardian [http://www.guardian.co.uk]
Within hours of the testimony of Richard Clarke, the former
counterterrorism chief, before the 9/11 commission, where Clarke
discussed how resources spent on the Iraq war undermined the war
on terrorism, President Bush acknowledged that Saddam Hussein's
weapons of mass destruction - the rationale for the war -
remained absent. Bush's admission took the form of a comic
monologue before about 1,000 black-tied members of the Radio and
TV Correspondents' Association gathered for its annual dinner.
The lights dimmed and Bush presented a slide show of himself
peering out of windows and looking under furniture in the Oval
Office. "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be
somewhere ... nope, no weapons over there ... maybe under here?"
With each gag the press corps roared. Bush was acting as the
college fraternity house president he once was and the
journalists as pledges eager for acceptance by the Big Man on
Campus. "I'm the commander - see, I don't need to explain - I do
not need to explain why I say things," Bush told Bob Woodward in
Bush at War. "That's the interesting thing about being
president."
Through its laughter the press corps didn't grasp that the joke
was on them. The problem is not that Bush's jest was
inappropriate and tasteless - the widow of David Bloom, the NBC
reporter who died in Iraq, had tearfully preceded Bush on the
platform. It is not that much of the media, including elements of
the quality press, had been complicit in the choreographed
disinformation campaign in the rush to war. Rather, it is that
the press is accepting of Bush's radical undermining of the
long-established arrangements of Washington, including the
demotion of the press's own role by breaking the off-the-record
rule in order to have a weapon to use against Clarke. The
implicit deal that the press thought it had with the Bush White
House, as with previous White Houses, has been
broken-unilaterally, like other policies.
The new rules of the game are that there are no rules of the
game. In the preface of his book Against All Enemies, Clarke
wrote that he expected an assault on his reputation from the
"Bush White House leadership" that was "adept at revenge".
Clarke had observed the politics of intimidation become standard
operating procedure. The former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who, at
the administration's behest, looked into the claim that Saddam
was seeking uranium in Niger and concluded it was bogus, was
subjected to a sustained attack that included outing the identity
of his wife, a covert CIA operative. Paul O'Neill, a former
secretary of the treasury, had revealed that an invasion of Iraq
was being pushed from the earliest days of the administration,
and he instantly became the target for personal vituperation.
Richard Foster, the chief actuary for the Centres for Medicare
and Medicaid Services, was threatened that if he told Congress
the actual cost of Bush's Medicare bill while it was being
considered, he would be fired. So Clarke knew the new rules.
Throughout the long day that ended with the president's WMD joke,
the White House directed strikes on Clarke's integrity. It
declassified an off-the-record background briefing given by
Clarke in 2002, when he had been ordered to put a "positive
spin", as he put it, on Bush's pre-September 11 terrorism record
in response to a critical report in Time magazine. The White
House press secretary read out portions of the briefing out of
context. Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser whose
neglect of terrorism was among Clarke's revelations, summoned
reporters to her office to point to the background briefing and
call his story "scurrilous".
While she was putting a stiletto into Clarke, the background
briefing paper was shuffled by her press office to Fox News to
broadcast as Clarke testified. Republican members of the 9/11
commission waved the paper at him, and much time was taken up by
his explanation of how, as a staffer, he had been acting
properly, like a lawyer representing a client, and why his
briefing was not at odds with his information now.
This selective declassification signalled to professionals in
government that anything they said to reporters could be held
against them if they ever in the future contradicted the Bush
line. Yet not one news organisation tried to uphold the old rule
by threatening to reveal sources of off-the-record briefings
unless the White House reverted to the accepted convention that
makes informed journalism possible.
The Clarke episode is symptomatic of a systematic abuse of power.
Reality is raw and dangerous to report - better to laugh along.
· Sidney Blumenthal was senior adviser to President Clinton and
is Washington bureau chief of Salon.com [http://www.Salon.com]
sidney_blumenthal@yahoo.com [sidney_blumenthal@yahoo.com]
Guardian Newspapers Limited
*****************************************************************
5 SF Chronicle: Hiding in the White House
Leon Wofsy [chronfeedback@sfchronicle.com]
Monday, April 5, 2004
It's almost nine months since someone at the White House broke
the law by telling columnist Robert Novak that Joseph Wilson's
wife worked for the CIA. This was retaliation for Wilson's
revelation that Iraq's supposed purchase of uranium from Niger
was already known to be a fraud when President Bush included it
in his January 2003 State of the Union.
For a long time after going to war (ostensibly) to find and
destroy Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction," we were told the
reason WMDs eluded discovery is that Iraq is so big: "WMDs could
be hidden anywhere in a country as vast as California." But how
big is the White House? Why can't the culprit of the vindictive
and criminal leak of a CIA agent's identity be found? Is someone
in the White House keeping secrets from the boss? What does the
president know? Is the guilty party too high up? Isn't there
anyone down the line willing to fall on his sword?
The reasonable answer is that the Wilson episode just happens to
be the way this White House deals with critics, something now
proven too often to escape notice. The messenger of bad news for
the White House is personally attacked and punished. Each charge
is treated in isolation from similar, corroborative revelations
from independent sources. Then the formula is to allow the
particular story to fade from public view.
The latest case in point is Richard Clarke. All the fury against
Clarke blows a screen of smoke over truths that would seem almost
impossible to hide: that the war in Iraq was an obsession that
had nothing to do with a threat from WMDs or combating al Qaeda;
that it expanded terrorism and heightened worldwide antagonism
and distrust of the United States.
The Bush people want desperately to avoid public focus on the
central part of Clarke's charge, that the war and occupation of
Iraq have made us and the world far less safe. They hope that
they can separate the Clarke story from the whole story -- that
by going one-on-one to nullify Clarke, no one will notice the
long line of corroborative insider witnesses preceding him: Scott
Ritter, Joseph Wilson, Paul O'Neill and David Kay, as well as
Hans Blix.
But the line of damning evidence is even longer than the line of
witnesses, from the disastrous news and mounting casualties in
Iraq and from the dangerous repercussions elsewhere. It might be
worth reminding the non- inquisitive media that the scoundrel who
broke the law to get Wilson's wife is still in hiding in the
White House. He or she or they should be easier to find than
Iraq's WMDs.
Leon Wofsy is a professor emeritus of molecular and cellular
biology at UC Berkeley.
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle
*****************************************************************
6 Insight Mag: Pentagon Presses for New Nukes -
[http://www.insightmag.com
Posted April 5, 2004
By Pamela Hess
A panel of independent advisers is counseling the Pentagon to
develop smaller, specialized nuclear weapons using money saved
from cutting back on the number of older nuclear warheads and
their attendant maintenance costs.
The Pentagon has already earmarked $500 million over the next
five years for research into a "Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator,"
a nuclear missile that could burrow into underground bunkers to
attack an enemy's nuclear or chemical missile programs.
The program is controversial: The United States has not produced
a new nuclear weapon in more than a decade and has not tested its
warheads with an actual explosion since 1992. Congress put
significant restriction on spending for RNEP, requiring two
separate approvals from Congress before a new weapon can be
built.
The Pentagon insists the weapon is needed.
"Underground facilities are proliferating throughout the world,"
said Linton Brooks, the director of the Energy Department's
National Nuclear Security Administration, at a meeting with
reporters Thursday. "Generic dictators are only deterred by (the
United States) holding what they value at risk. They tend not to
value their population but their instruments of power."
Those instruments of power are likely to be hidden deep
underground where a conventional military assault can't reach
them.
"We want to make it absolutely clear he doesn't have any
invulnerable sanctuary," Brooks said.
Brooks said the missile is intended to deter a dictator from
developing his own nuclear capabilities in underground
facilities. Militants are unlikely to be dissuaded from their
nuclear ambitions no matter what weapons the United States has,
Brooks said.
The new missile is still in the investigative stages. Under the
current concept, it would be encased in an extremely hard shell
and detonate explosions to sequentially break through layers of
rock or concrete and then discharge its nuclear warhead.
Because the warhead would, notionally, be buried, the radioactive
fallout and collateral damage to surrounding civilian areas would
be far less than a standard surface detonated nuclear weapon.
There would be some fallout, however, Brooks told PBS in a
television show that aired April 2.
"This will be a weapon that will still cause collateral damage.
It will still cause fallout. It will still be a hugely serious
decision. But it will be quantitatively and qualitatively
different from conventional weapons," Brooks told "Now, with Bill
Moyers."
He said Thursday the United States would consider the "generic
dictator's" population to be hostages that must be protected in a
war. Taking out the dictator's capabilities underground might be
the best way to do that, he said.
"Do we want a future president to have a capability like this in
his hip pocket? I don't know," Brooks said.
But the question should be investigated, he insisted. "Let get me
the money I've asked for and let me study the weapon," he said.
"If we decide it is technically feasible, and the president
decided to refine the design, then Congress has to approve that."
If after it is designed, the White House wants to build it,
Congress also requires that it have approval power for
production, he said.
Not everyone agrees the new weapon would be needed. Retired Air
Force Gen. Chuck Horner told PBS he is not convinced. "I'm not
necessarily in favor of developing a small penetrating low-yield
nuclear weapon," he said, according to a transcript made
available to United Press International.
Horner, who commanded the air assault during the 1991 Persian
Gulf War, warned that nuclear weapons carry "political baggage."
"During the Gulf War, I said to myself, what would I use these
weapons for? How would I use them? We weren't gonna do it, but I
had to say to myself, if I was (going) to do it, what would I do?
So I sat down with a nuclear planner. ... The only thing nuclear
weapons were good for, really, was busting cities. And if we go
around killing women and children in cities, we've lost the war."
The new report from the Defense Science Board says that for a
bunker-busting nuclear weapon to be a dissuading factor against a
dictator with nuclear ambitions, that dictator would have to be
convinced the United States would be willing to use the weapon.
"We join others in judging that a credible force should include
... some nuclear weapons that cause much less collateral damage
to achieve their desired effects against the highest priority
targets," the report states.
According to the report, the problem with developing this
capability is one of both politics and money. "The problem is
that the current plan embedded in the Stockpile Stewardship
Program consumes virtually all available resources simply to
sustain the aging stockpile of declining relevance," the report
states.
The United States has about 7,000 strategic nuclear warheads and
has agreed with Russia to draw them down to about 2,000 over a
course of several years. Those weapons have to be maintained and
an expensive computer modeling program run to determine whether
the weapons could be safely used if they were needed.
"Changing this plan requires ... leadership from the Defense
Department to state clearly and persuasively the specific
requirements for a different nuclear stockpile," the report
states.
Brooks' report to the Congress on the size and state of the
nuclear stockpile is two weeks overdue. He said it is being
reviewed by the Pentagon before being sent to the White House and
then will go to Capitol Hill.
Brooks also said nuclear material from old weapons currently
stored at Los Alamos, N.M., would be moved to a facility in
Nevada. The Los Alamos site could not be properly defended
because it sits at the bottom of a canyon.
"The material couldn't be secure there," Brooks said.
One-half the special nuclear material stored at Los Alamos will
begin to be moved in September over an 18-month period. The
Washington-based Project on Government Oversight said the move to
the Device Assembly Facility at the Nevada Test Site will save
the government about $30 million a year. POGO recommended the
movement of the material for security reasons in October 2001.
Pamela Hess is a Pentagon correspondent for UPI, a sister news
organization of Insight magazine.
[http://www.broadbandpublisher.com]
Copyright © 1990-2003 News World Communications, Inc.
[editor@insightmag.com
*****************************************************************
7 Insight Mag: Reform Overdue for Central Intelligence -
Insight on the News - National
[http://www.insightmag.com
Posted April 5, 2004 By Jamie Dettmer
[George Tenet remains a stout defender of his CIA, but there is a
growing consensus in Washington that far-reaching reforms are
necessary.] George Tenet remains a stout defender of his CIA, but
there is a growing consensus in Washington that far-reaching
reforms are necessary.
George Tenet has been on the offensive all winter, defending the
CIA's recent record as more details emerge of his agency's
failures from overstating Saddam Hussein's
weapons-of-mass-destruction programs to not fully appreciating
the extent of the work undertaken by Libya and Iran to develop
nuclear weapons. In speeches and in congressional testimony, the
U.S. Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) has sought cautiously
to shift blame elsewhere, suggesting that high administration
officials may have ignored equivocations in intelligence reports
concerning Iraq and elected to highlight worst-case scenarios.
The New York Times' interpretation of Tenet's testimony, quickly
denied in official circles, is that at least three times he had
to advise Vice President Dick Cheney to restrain himself when
making the public case for war against Saddam and urged him to
soften his claims about the immediacy of an Iraqi threat.
Tenet hardly has shifted his ground since the terror attacks
struck New York City and Washington on 9/11. In the wake of the
attacks he insisted, "Failure means no focus, no attention, no
discipline - and those were not present in what either we or the
FBI did here and around the world." Subsequently, he has admitted
to a mistake here or there, and he has acknowledged that CIA
headquarters in Langley, Va., needs to improve its skills when
"connecting the dots." But he still won't concede that Sept. 11
represented a massive failure on the part of the agency he heads.
Despite Tenet's spirited defense, grave questions remain about
the CIA, its recent performance and what is to be done to improve
it. A report due soon by the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence on 9/11 intelligence failures, currently undergoing
a final edit, reportedly delivers a devastating verdict on the
CIA performance. Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan said of the report:
"It's shocking," and added, "There has to be accountability."
The report is bound to fuel calls for reform and to intensify the
Washington debate about reform. For critics outside Langley it is
difficult to get a full picture of the CIA, as intelligence
successes have to remain cloaked, whereas dramatic failures
stumble into the public light, often as a result of efforts by
the stumblers to avoid blame. Even so, while Tenet remains a
stout defender of his agency, there is a growing consensus in
Washington that reform is necessary, although there is often
little agreement about what reforms are needed or the scale of
the change that may be required.
Most lawmakers and intelligence insiders accept that the CIA has
to do a better job of collecting intelligence and analyzing the
information that is gathered. But many larger institutional
questions remain unresolved, such as how to achieve greater
coordination between U.S. intelligence agencies and whether there
should be a unification of national-level collection and analytic
agencies under the CIA director to give him maximum control of
the whole intelligence apparatus - a move that would be fought
tooth-and-nail by the Pentagon, which commands the lion's share
of the intelligence budget.
And it isn't clear that Congress is capable of biting the reform
bullet. Though there have been angry exchanges in recent months
between the congressional panels - most notably last September
over a report by the chief investigator for the House and Senate
Joint Inquiry Committee on the Sept. 11 attacks accusing agency
officials of withholding vital information from committee staff -
the panels are reluctant to take on the intelligence community.
Former and current CIA officials say that, on the whole, the
panels traditionally are supine, don't ask enough questions about
ongoing everyday matters and give the agency the benefit of the
doubt.
And the panels are fearful of rocking the boat when it comes to
major reform. Many lawmakers who serve on the oversight panels
enjoy a cozy relationship with the community and are loath to
risk endangering their good ties. "That has become more obvious
with the current intelligence committees," says an intelligence
source with experience on Capitol Hill. The Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence saw Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of
Kansas replace Democratic Sen. Bob Graham of Florida as chairman,
and congressional insiders say that has helped Tenet mount his
arguments for the status quo. Roberts is a strong defender of
Tenet, unlike Graham, who was critical.
The panel also lost the CIA director's most uncompromising
critic, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), who had to leave because of
an eight-year time limit for service on the committee. Shelby
placed many of the problems at the CIA firmly at Tenet's door,
claiming that the DCI's leadership was weak. On the House side,
the intelligence chairman, Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), is a former
CIA officer. As an intelligence insider, Capitol Hill aides
claim, he tends to pull his punches.
Reform has been held back in the past and congressional oversight
blunted because of the CIA's tendency to co-opt lawmakers and
Hill aides and to turn them in effect into agents of influence in
Congress for the agency. In the mid-1990s, Republican Sen. Arlen
Specter of Pennsylvania rebuked the CIA for doing this, saying,
"The CIA's Directorate of Operations would be better advised to
improve its reputation and standing by real performance, instead
of attempting to rely on factors like personal, school or family
ties."
But if there were real impetus behind reform, what changes should
be made? Former and current intelligence agents say that Tenet
has made one post-9/11 change that will pay dividends. Recently,
the Directorate of Operations (DO) was instructed to inform
analysts in the Directorate of Intelligence of the identities and
track records of sources for raw reports, thereby allowing
analysts a better chance of evaluating the information being
provided. Previously, analysts were not told about DO sources and
assets and therefore often were unable to distinguish the value
of the information they received in DO reports. Some of the
inaccuracies in the agency's assessments of the weapons programs
in Iraq were the result of analysts' lack of knowledge about
sources, say CIA insiders.
That reform doesn't satisfy Tenet critics such as Shelby; he
believes change requires a much bigger shake-up. He sees Sept. 11
as "part of a pattern of intelligence failures" that resulted in
the bombing of U.S. embassies in Africa and the successful attack
on the USS Cole. Shelby also questions whether Tenet has the
determination or ability to reform the CIA and to bring order to
the Byzantine organization of America's $30 billion intelligence
community.
Former senior Reagan Pentagon official Frank Gaffney, now
president of the Center for Security Policy, agrees with the
Shelby line, arguing that "A man who does not understand what is
wrong with his organization is unlikely to be able to fix it." As
he wrote recently: "Tenet has insisted in the aftermath of the
9/11 attacks that there was no failure of intelligence. Such a
stance has become increasingly untenable, as more and more
evidence emerges that neither the CIA nor the FBI properly
handled information about threats of deadly aircraft-delivered
attacks by Islamist operatives against U.S. government facilities
and/or other prominent sites."
Failure in leadership has been a common complaint of assorted
intelligence aides covering their own failures stretching back
decades. In the early 1990s, former veteran analyst John Gentry
argued in a long and detailed reform paper that the culture of
the agency needed to be altered, with the agency ridding itself
of deadwood and bringing in agents of change. "The president
[Bill Clinton] and Congress must understand the culture - the
disease - before they can prescribe remedial medicine," he wrote.
"Reorganizational Band-Aids will only briefly ameliorate
symptoms. They must also understand the disease-causing agents -
the senior responsible executives - and remove them from the
organs of intelligence agencies to prevent reinfection." Several
former CIA directors when taking up their posts at Langley noted
the need for a cultural change but failed to bring it about. John
Deutch noted the importance of changing the culture in his
confirmation hearing but failed to unleash the bloodletting that
was needed to do that.
Aside from cultural problems, Gaffney believes a root cause for
recent intelligence mishaps rests with the agency's "failure to
invest adequately in the traditional espionage techniques known
as human intelligence, or 'HUMINT.'" He says this "problem has
its roots in the deliberate emasculation of the agency's HUMINT
assets and capabilities when Jimmy Carter turned the CIA over to
Adm. Stansfield Turner. But it has persisted and metastasized
during the years since - especially during the Clinton
presidency." The CIA needs to stop being overreliant on
electronic means of intelligence collection, he argues.
Former and current CIA officials concur with Gaffney. They add
that the agency also needs to widen the type of operatives and
assets it hires, and former State Department and CIA
counterterrorism official Larry Johnson cites the lack of ability
of the agency to hire foreign nationalities. "We need to be like
Russia - hire the nationalities that can blend in and don't worry
about getting soiled by hiring thugs if that's what it takes," he
told United Press International, Insight's sister wire service.
"Either you are willing to soil your hands a bit for the sake of
the information, or you're going to think well of yourself and
get blindsided the way we did on Sept. 11."
The CIA's analytical setup is the focus of many of the reform
calls. Former and current intelligence officials argue that the
system is cumbersome and is top heavy with managers. Reports,
they say, are overedited and there is little communication
between analysts and the higher reaches of the agency. Further,
analysts often are inexperienced and assignment transfers are
frequent, preventing analysts from developing real expertise. The
average assignment is about two years. Veterans say transfers
should be kept to a minimum and the average length of assignment
should be at least five years and maybe longer.
Analysts' morale is low. Many feel they are at the bottom of the
pile and that their promotion opportunities to management levels
are few. Fast-track promotion opportunities should be instituted
and those with analyst backgrounds should be welcome in the
higher echelons of the agency, say some intelligence insiders.
Critics also worry that the DI welcomes and rewards those who
subscribe to prevailing orthodoxies and punishes analysts who
buck conventional wisdom and think out of the box. "Loyalty to
individual bosses has assumed a great role within the
directorate," complains a current CIA analyst. "Your career can
be ruined if you take on the prevailing opinion of senior
managers." Again, this is an old problem, and Gentry in the 1990s
was lamenting it, claiming analysis was "tailored to gain
personal and institutional kudos - one that DCIs [William] Casey,
[William] Webster, [Robert] Gates and [James] Woolsey showed no
inclination to alter."
Gentry also urged major bloodletting in the DI, arguing that "The
CIA's problem managers have prospered for so long that they are
ubiquitous in senior executive suites and common throughout
middle management as well." He called for widespread sackings.
"The upheaval would be considerable, but it would be relatively
short-lived. Some temporary disruption is far preferable to the
ongoing malaise that has plagued the DI for a decade." That
malaise could continue if Congress doesn't insist something be
done.
Away from change at the CIA, many reformers maintain that the
role and power of the DCI need to be strengthened. Writing
several years ago, Victor Marchetti noted that Richard Helms
frequently would rage at his limited powers when it came to
trying to coordinate the intelligence community as a whole,
observing "to his staff that while he, the DCI, was theoretically
responsible for 100 percent of the nation's intelligence
activities, he in fact controlled less than 15 percent of the
community's assets - and most of the other 85 percent belonged to
the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff."
Without a central figure knocking the heads of the myriad
agencies that go to make up the U.S. intelligence community,
interagency rivalry has been allowed to thrive. There is
tremendous duplication, and confusion is sown among consumers of
the intelligence product. Some reformers maintain that larger
chunks of the intelligence community should come directly under
the sway of the DCI and that he should have control of more of
the budget. Such a move, though, would trigger a major turf war
between Langley and the Pentagon, and any efforts to bring the
National Security Agency under the CIA's control likely would
bring the reform process to a shuddering halt with a lobbying
fight being waged on Capitol Hill, insiders say.
Still, to overcome the ravages of poor leadership in the past and
the dysfunction among the different parts of the intelligence
community today will require tough remedial action and upheaval,
but without boldness there can be no major improvement. The
question is whether Congress and the White House are ready to
grasp the nettle.
Jamie Dettmer is a senior editor for Insight.
[jdettmer@insightmag.com]
[http://www.broadbandpublisher.com]
Copyright © 1990-2003 News World Communications, Inc.
[editor@insightmag.com
*****************************************************************
8 NYT: Brazil's N-Weapons Program? & Group: N.Korea Can Make 'Unlimited'
Date: Mon, 05 Apr 2004 11:32:57 -0700
Return-path:
Envelope-to: rogerh@energy-net.org
Delivery-date: Mon, 05 Apr 2004 23:05:50 -0700
Received: from chrome.nocdirect.com ([69.73.140.230])
by darwin.ctyme.com with esmtp (TLSv1:DES-CBC3-SHA:168)
(Exim 4.30)
id 1BAjiX-0006yP-TG
for rogerh@energy-net.org; Mon, 05 Apr 2004 23:05:50 -0700
Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] helo=chrome.nocdirect.com)
by chrome.nocdirect.com with esmtp (Exim 4.24)
id 1BAjh2-0005BM-Aj; Tue, 06 Apr 2004 01:04:16 -0500
Received: from [207.69.200.226] (helo=blount.mail.mindspring.net)
by chrome.nocdirect.com with esmtp (Exim 4.24) id 1BAjgz-0005BD-EC
for nukenet@energyjustice.net; Tue, 06 Apr 2004 01:04:13 -0500
Received: from user-2ive74f.dialup.mindspring.com ([165.247.28.143]
helo=BILLSNEWCOMPUTER)
by blount.mail.mindspring.net with smtp (Exim 3.33 #1)
id 1BAjf3-0006q0-00; Tue, 06 Apr 2004 02:02:14 -0400
Message-ID: <01a601c41b9c$a52d15e0$0100a8c0@BILLSNEWCOMPUTER>
From: "Bill Smirnow"
To: "Bill Smirnow"
Date: Tue, 6 Apr 2004 02:01:44 -0400
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2800.1158
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1165
Cc:
Subject: [NukeNet] Brazil's N-Weapons Program? & Group: N.Korea Can Make
'Unlimited' Nuclear Arms
X-BeenThere: Nukenet@energyjustice.net
X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.3
Precedence: list
Sender: Nukenet-bounces@energyjustice.net
Errors-To: Nukenet-bounces@energyjustice.net
X-AntiAbuse: This header was added to track abuse, please include it with any abuse report
X-AntiAbuse: Primary Hostname - chrome.nocdirect.com
X-AntiAbuse: Original Domain - energy-net.org
X-AntiAbuse: Originator/Caller UID/GID - [47 12] / [47 12]
X-AntiAbuse: Sender Address Domain - energyjustice.net
X-Sender-Nameserver:
X-Sender-Hostname: chrome.nocdirect.com
X-Temp-Whitephrase: YES
X-Temp-Whitelink: YES
1. Brazil Says It's Nuke Program Is Peaceful
2. Group: N.Korea Can Make 'Unlimited' Nuclear
Arms
http://www.nytimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Brazil-Nuclear-Program.html
Brazil Says It's Nuke Program Is Peaceful
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: April 5, 2004
Filed at 8:43 p.m. ET
SAO PAULO, Brazil (AP) -- Brazil's nuclear program
is peaceful and the country remains committed to
the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Foreign
Minister Celso Amorim said Monday, in an effort to
defuse tensions over international inspections.
Amorim's comments came as the Science and
Technology Ministry confirmed that U.N. nuclear
inspectors were denied access in February and
March to uranium-enrichment centrifuges at a
facility that is being built in Resende, near Rio
de Janeiro.
The report of International Atomic Energy Agency
inspectors' being denied access was first reported
Sunday by the Washington Post.
Amorim said Brazil's nuclear program is
exclusively aimed at the production of cheap
energy and that the ``country must have the right
to protect its own technology.''
``Brazil is complying with all its international
obligations'' pertaining to its nuclear program
and reports indicating otherwise are
``groundless,'' Amorim told reporters.
He said the world's nuclear powers should make a
concerted effort toward nuclear disarmament
instead of focusing their attention on countries
like Brazil that do not have nuclear weapons.
Science and Technology Minister Eduardo Campos
said the inspectors had access to uranium that
would be sent to Canada for enrichment ``but we
are not obliged to show the technology that took
us years to develop.''
Campos told the O Globo newspaper that Brazil had
already invested close to $1 billion and years of
research to develop its own technology to enrich
uranium to be used in power plants.
Repeated calls to the IAEA in Vienna were not
returned Monday.
Brazil has the world's sixth largest uranium
reserve. The country has had the capacity to
enrich uranium since the 1980s, but has so far
only done so for research purposes. The country
signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in
1997.
Brazil's ambassador of the United States, Roberto
Abdenur, also defended the decision to deny
inspectors access.
``Brazil has legitimate industrial and
technological reasons for not allowing the
inspectors to see the centrifuges,'' Abdenur told
the O Estado de Sao Paulo newspaper.
One of Brazil's top nuclear scientists, however,
accused government officials of ``abusing the
concept of national sovereignty.''
``Centrifuges are being used by many countries
around the world and even if Brazil's has some
kind of new technology, I am sure that technology
is not earthshaking enough to hide,'' Jose
Goldemberg told The Associated Press.
Refusing access to IAEA inspectors could lead to
``suspicions that it indeed has something to hide
and thus create a certain tension or impasse with
the agency and the United States,'' Goldemberg
said.
Uranium mined from the ground is run through
centrifuges where it is enriched for use in either
in nuclear power plants for electricity generation
or in atomic weapons.
Brazilian officials hope to be enriching enough
uranium by 2014 to run its only two nuclear power
plants -- called Angra 1 and Angra -- plus a third
that is expected to come on line that year. The
country also expects to have a surplus of enriched
uranium by then, which could be exported.
Brazil has also refused to sign on to another
clause in the nuclear treaty, which would allow
the IAEA to conduct spot inspections of Brasilia
nuclear facilities.
Abdenur reiterated Brazil's long-held view against
signing the additional protocol, saying some
industrial countries, especially the United
States, have unfairly made signing it a condition
for obtaining new nuclear technology.
^------
Associated Press writer Harold Olmos contributed
to this report from Rio de Janeiro.
2.
http://www.nytimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-nuclear-eu.html
Group: N.Korea Can Make 'Unlimited' Nuclear Arms
By REUTERS
Published: April 5, 2004
Filed at 2:24 p.m. ET
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - North Korea can probably make
unlimited quantities of nuclear weapons from its
own plutonium stocks, the head of a consortium
that until recently was building nuclear power
stations there said Monday.
``I feel very confident that their plutonium
program is now in full operation and it's one that
can produce almost unlimited quantities of nuclear
weapons,'' Charles Kartman, executive director of
the Korean Peninsula Energy Development
Organization (KEDO) told the European parliament.
KEDO, of which the European Union is a member, had
been building two light-water nuclear reactors,
which could not be used for weapons programs, in
North Korea, in exchange for a 1994 pledge by
Pyongyang to freeze its own nuclear program.
KEDO's work was suspended on December 1 for a year
to try to persuade North Korea to make good on its
offer to abandon its nuclear weapons program.
Kartman said he believed North Korean scientists
probably had the expertise to weapons the
plutonium.
``There are people who consider themselves to be
expert on this question who believe that...they've
had enough years now to work on it that they
should be able to weapons the plutonium that they
have,'' he said.
``The plutonium program is a very real and very
large problem.''
He was less sure about Pyongyang's uranium
enrichment program: ``Although I have no doubt
whatsoever that there is a problem there, its
dimensions are beyond my knowledge,'' he said.
China has been the driving force behind six-nation
talks involving North and South Korea, Japan,
Russia, the United States and China itself, to
resolve Pyongyang's nuclear impasse.
But South Korean experts said last week that North
Korea appeared to have lost interest in the talks
until after the U.S. presidential elections in
November, despite strenuous efforts by Beijing to
keep Pyongyang engaged.
KEDO unites Japan, South Korea, the European Union
and the United States.
_______________________________________________________________________
Subscribe/Unsubscribe Here: http://www.energyjustice.net/nukenet/
Change your settings at:
http://energyjustice.net/mailman/listinfo/nukenet_energyjustice.net
*****************************************************************
9 Las Vegas SUN: Researcher Is Found Guilty of Espionage
By JIM HEINTZ ASSOCIATED PRESS
MOSCOW (AP) - Researcher Igor Sutyagin was found guilty of
espionage on Monday, Russian news agencies reported, in a case
that raised fears of a resurgence of Soviet-style tactics and
alarmed the scientific community.
Sutyagin, a scholar at Moscow's respected USA and Canada
Institute, was jailed in October 1999 when arested arrest on
charges he sold information on nuclear submarines and missile
warning systems to a British company that Russian investigators
claim was a Central Intelligence Agency cover.
Sutyagin maintained the analyses he wrote were based on open
sources and that he had no reason to believe the British company
was an intelligence cover.
He faces up to 20 years on the conviction, but a sentence was
not immediately announced and officials at the Moscow City Court
could not be reached for comment
The Interfax news agency quoted Sutyagin's lawyer, Boris
Kuznetsov, as saying only four of the 12 jury members
recommended mercy when the judge determines the sentence.
Human rights advocates say the Federal Security Service, or FSB,
the KGB's main successor, is deeply suspicious of Russian
scientists' contacts with foreigners. They say that its agents
have been emboldened by the rise of ex-KGB agent and FSB
director Vladimir Putin's ascension to the presidency.
In only a few cases have courts challenged such cases. In
December, a jury acquitted Valentin Danilov, a professor at
Krasnoyarsk Technical University in Siberia, who had been
charged with selling classified information on space technology
to China and misappropriating university funds.
Russia's constitution provides for jury trials, but until
recently they existed only on an experimental basis.
A court had been expected to deliver a verdict in the case in
2001, but instead instructed prosecutors to continue
investigating and left Sutyagin in jail. Russian courts,
including the Supreme Court, have repeatedly denied his request
to await trial out of jail.
--
*****************************************************************
10 Reuters: Brazil says nuclear program purely peaceful - report
Sun Apr 4, 2004 09:25 PM ET
SAO PAULO, Brazil (Reuters) - A top Brazilian
official responded to a U.S. newspaper report on Sunday that the
nation is denying international inspectors access to its nuclear
facilities by saying Brazil's atomic program is geared
exclusively for peaceful use, a local news agency said.
According to an article in The Washington Post, the Brazilian
government has refused to allow the International Atomic Energy
Agency to examine a uranium-enrichment facility under
construction near Rio de Janeiro.
Although the facility will be used to produce low-enriched
uranium for use in power plants, not the highly enriched
material used in atomic weapons, Brazil is refusing to let IAEA
inspectors into the plant, saying it needs to protect its
propriety information.
Brazil's science minister, Eduardo Campos, who oversees the
nation's nuclear program, told the Globo news agency that any
speculation casting doubt on the program's peaceful intentions
was unacceptable.
"The Brazilian nuclear program's objective is exclusively for
peaceful purposes. Apart from the fact that our constitution
determines this, we are signatories of the non-proliferation
treaty of nuclear weapons," Campos was quoted as saying.
Neither the Ministry of Science nor the Foreign Ministry were
immediately available for comment.
Several Western diplomats have told Reuters that Brazil is not
considered a problem state and that there are no concerns that
it is developing nuclear weapons.
However, after Iran was discovered covering up potential
arms-related atomic research, the IAEA -- the United Nations
atomic watchdog -- is pressing all countries to open up their
nuclear programs.
Brazil has some of the world's largest uranium reserves and the
most sophisticated nuclear program in Latin America. The
government has said the new plant will begin enriching uranium
this year to produce fuel for its atomic power plants.
In January 2003, just as the United States was grappling with a
possible nuclear crisis with North Korea and preparing for war
with Iraq, Brazil's former science minister made headlines by
arguing that Brazil should not rule out acquiring the ability to
produce an atomic bomb.
The government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva swiftly
distanced itself from the remarks, saying Brazil favored
research in nuclear energy "solely and exclusively for peaceful
purposes."
*****************************************************************
11 Reuters: Russian Nuclear Expert Convicted of Spying
Mon Apr 5, 2004 03:54 PM ET
MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian nuclear weapons expert
accused of passing secrets to the United States and Britain was
found guilty of treason Monday, Russian news agencies reported.
Igor Sutyagin, an arms expert from Moscow's respected USA-Canada
Institute, could receive a prison term of up to 20 years from a
judge in the Russian capital. The judge is due to pass sentence
Tuesday.
"The jury were unanimous in finding him guilty," Sutyagin's
lawyer Boris Kuznetsov was quoted as saying by Interfax news
agency. "Moreover only four of them felt he deserved leniency.
Most -- eight -- came to the conclusion that he did not."
Sutyagin has been held since his arrest in October 1999. His
trial was halted in December 2001 so prosecutors could gather
more evidence against him.
He was accused of passing state secrets about plans for the
development of Russia's nuclear forces, as well as information
on planes and missiles, to foreign intelligence agents working
for a consulting firm called Alternative Futures.
His lawyers said the information was all in the public domain
and there was no proof that the staff of Alternative Futures
included foreign spies.
Sutyagin was one of several Russian researchers and journalists
accused of spying in separate cases brought since President
Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000.
The FSB, successor to the KGB secret police and once headed by
Putin, said foreign intelligence services had taken advantage of
Russia's difficulties after the collapse of the Soviet Union in
1991 and had stepped up espionage in the country.
In December, Valentin Danilov, a Siberian scientist accused of
spying for China, was cleared of all charges.
Military reporter Grigory Pasko was sentenced in December 2001
to four years in prison. He was released in January 2003.
Jury trials, designed to deal with the most serious crimes, were
reintroduced in Russia in 2002, having been abolished after the
1917 Bolshevik Revolution. In Soviet times courts with a single
judge and two assistants handled the gravest crimes.
But after Danilov's trial the FSB called into question the
legitimacy of using a jury to decide the fate of spying cases.
*****************************************************************
12 O-R Online: Khrushchev's son offers inside view of Cold War
[http://www.observer-reporter.com]
Monday, April 5, 2004
BY HEIDI PRICE, Staff writer
hprice@observer-reporter.com [hprice@observer-reporter.com]
As the son of Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev, Sergei
Khrushchev witnessed some of the most defining moments of the
Cold War.
But the younger Khrush-chev's version is not one steeped in
events or dates.
"It's boring," Khrushchev told honors history students from area
colleges who congregated at Washington &Jefferson College
Saturday. "And you know all that history."
Khrushchev instead talks of the relationships between his father
and Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. The
relationships matter, Khrush-chev said, because miscommunications
between the leaders, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, brought us
"as close to nuclear war as 20 minutes."
Khrushchev said his father, who fought against the German
invasion in World War II, had no desire to go to war and wanted
to focus resources on building the country from within.
"He told me stories of war have nothing to do with war É they're
much more disturbing. He couldn't sleep afterward," he said.
Nikita Khrushchev wanted to open relations with Americans. But he
also knew the Soviet military must be perceived as equally mighty
so Americans wouldn't attack. And so, Khrushchev bluffed at every
opportunity.
Khrushchev, who served as prime minister from 1958 to 1964,
reported that the USSR was producing missiles "like sausages"
when, in fact, they had only a handful, the younger Khrushchev
said.
In relating the first meeting between Nikita Khrushchev and
Eisenhower, Khrushchev said his father, who liked to speak
freely, was amazed that Eisenhower's secretary of state handed
him a prepared script that he read from beginning to end.
Still, Nikita Khrushchev respected Eisenhower, also a former war
general. Sergei Khrushchev said his father also liked and
respected Kennedy but did not like President Richard M. Nixon,
who was Eisenhower's vice president.
Sergei Khrushchev became a historian and scholar accidentally,
after he was asked to edit his father's memoirs. From 1958 to
1968, he worked in the Soviet missile and space program.
Khrushchev and his wife became American citizens in 1993, and he
is now a senior research fellow at Brown University.
In closing, Khrushchev expressed hope about the future.
"The possibility that I can lecture here after designing
ballistic missiles that would destroy your college É" he said.
Senior Joshua Andy invited Khrushchev to speak at Saturday's Phi
Alpha Theta Conference. Andy met Khrushchev at a conference in
Pittsburgh in November 2002 and interviewed him for his senior
thesis on American and Soviet military policies and spending
under Eisenhower and Khrushchev.
Copyright ©2004 Observer Publishing Co.
[http://www.observer-reporter.com/INTERACT/about.html] of
Washington, Pa.
*****************************************************************
13 BBC: Brazil hopes to end nuclear 'row'
Last Updated: Monday, 5 April, 2004
[Eduardo Campos]
Campos says Brazil has nothing to hide
Brazil says it is negotiating with UN nuclear inspectors to try
to break a deadlock over inspections of a uranium enrichment
facility.
Science and Technology Minister Eduardo Campos told the BBC that
Brazil was "hiding absolutely nothing" and that its nuclear
programme was peaceful.
But he added that his government needed to protect
commercially-sensitive data.
In recent months Brazil has barred UN experts from looking at
sections of the Resende facility near Rio de Janeiro.
Mr Campos said protective covers placed on centrifuges there were
designed to ensure commercial protection of technology developed
by Brazilian scientists at a cost of $1bn.
Brazil is submitting itse to all inspections Eduardo Campos
Science and Technology Minister
The Resende plant - which is under construction - will produce
only low-grade uranium for nuclear plants, not weapons-grade
material, the minister insisted.
He said his government was negotiating with the UN's
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to try to find a
mutually-acceptable way of inspecting the facility.
"Brazil is submitting itself to all inspections," Mr Campos told
the BBC.
The IAEA told BBC News Online it was not prepared to comment on
the issue.
Foes and friends
Brazil has the world's sixth largest uranium reserves and has had
the capacity to enrich uranium since 1980.
Last October it announced that it would start producing
industrially-enriched uranium in 2004 to feed its two nuclear
power plants.
The IAEA has been involved in efforts to investigate
uranium-enrichment facilities in North Korea and Iran.
The Washington Post, in its Sunday edition, says US nuclear
experts are urging Washington to insist on inspections in Brazil
as well.
"If we don't want these kinds of facilities in Iran or North
Korea, we shouldn't want them in Brazil," the paper quoted former
US nuclear negotiator James Goodby as saying.
"You have to apply the same rules to adversaries as you do to
friends."
The plant in Resende is legal under international treaties - but
it remains subject to UN inspections aimed at making sure it is
not used for producing weapons-grade material.
*****************************************************************
14 BBC: Pakistan proposes nuclear talks
Last Updated: Monday, 5 April, 2004
[Indian Foreign Secretary Shashank (R) and his Pakistani
counterpart, Riaz Khokhar]
Negotiations between India and Pakistan are becoming more common
Pakistan has offered to host nuclear disarmament talks with India
next month, the foreign ministry said.
Islamabad has suggested 25-26 May for the talks, which would
focus on confidence-building measures.
The proposal was conveyed to the Indian High Commission, and
follows on from a meeting between the foreign secretaries of the
two countries in February.
Nuclear discussions then focused on each country establishing a
minimum deterrence threshold, officials say.
'Durable peace'
The Indian foreign ministry in Delhi said it would reply soon to
the Pakistani invitation.
"This was one that was part of the joint statement issued after
the official talks of February 18," an Indian official said.
Pakistan's semi-official APP news agency said that the invitation
had been issued as part of the peace roadmap agreed between the
two countries.
ROADMAP TIMETABLE March 8 and 9: Talks o
Kashmir bus service March 29 and 30: Talks on a bus service
between Pakistan's Sindh province and India's Rajasthan state
March or April: Border security officials to talk on smuggling
and drug trafficking May: Experts discuss nuclear
confidence-building measures May or June: Foreign secretaries
to discuss Kashmir July: Talks on terrorism and economic
co-operation August: Summit between foreign ministers Joint
statement: Full text
The nuclear-armed rivals say they want to reach a peaceful
settlement of all bilateral issues, including disputed Kashmir.
They have already agreed some confidence-building measures in
relation to nuclear arms, including an annual exchange of
information on the location of each other's nuclear installations
and facilities, APP said.
The proposed discussions are separate from negotiations due to
take place between the foreign secretaries of the two countries
in May or June, and their foreign ministers in August.
The talks schedule was agreed at February's landmark meeting in
Islamabad - the first such dialogue in three years.
Top of the agenda for Pakistan then was Kashmir, over which the
nations have fought two wars since independence in 1947.
*****************************************************************
15 BBC: Russia arms expert 'spied for US'
Last Updated: Monday, 5 April, 2004
[A Moscow policeman escorts Igor Sutyagin (right) to a courtroom
in September 2002]
Sutyagin says any information he provided was in the public
domain
A Russian nuclear weapons expert has been found guilty of spying
for the US, Russian news agencies report.
A closed military trial convicted Igor Sutyagin of passing on
information on nuclear submarines and missile warning systems to
the Americans.
Investigators claim he sold the information to a British company
that was a cover for the CIA.
But Sutyagin says he was only writing analysis based on publicly
available sources.
Sutyagin - a senior weapons control researcher at Moscow's
respected USA-Canada Institute - says he had no reason to believe
the company was an intelligence cover.
Sutyagin's case is part of pattern of arbitrary prosecutions of
independent scientists, journalists and environmentalists in
Russia International human rights groups
His sentence has not yet been announced but he could face up to
20 years in prison.
Sutyagin's lawyer Boris Kuznetsov criticised the conduct of the
trial and accused the presiding judge of manipulating the jury.
"The questions addressed to the jury did not correspond to the
charges," Mr Kuznetsov was quoted by Russia's NTV television as
saying.
The lawyer said he would be appealing the verdict.
In January, four international human rights groups said that
Sutyagin was "the target of politically-motivated treason
charges", and urged the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of
Europe to appoint a rapporteur on his case.
"Sutyagin's case is part of a pattern of arbitrary prosecutions
of independent scientists, journalists and environmentalists in
Russia who work on sensitive topics," the four groups - including
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch said in a statement.
Correspondents say the case has alarmed the scientific community,
and prompted fears of a resurgence of Soviet-era KGB tactics.
High-profile cases
Sutyagin's trial is believed to be the first espionage case in
Russia to be decided by a jury.
Sutyagin has been in prison since his arrest in October 1999.
A court had been expected to deliver a verdict in the case in
February 2001, but instead instructed prosecutors to continue
investigating and left Sutyagin in jail.
Mr Sutyagin's trial is one of a series of high-profile spy cases
against Russian researchers.
In December, Valentin Danilov - a scientist accused of spying for
China - was cleared of all charges.
Last year, military reporter Grigory Pasko imprisoned for treason
after disclosing how Russia dumped nuclear waste in the Pacific
Ocean was released on parole.
Pasko, a former naval officer, was sentenced to four years in
jail in 2001.
*****************************************************************
16 IHT: Nuclear clients: Don't overlook the unusual suspects
Michael A. Levi and Susan E. Rice IHT
Monday, April 5, 2004
WASHINGTON Recently, a potential new front in the fight against
nuclear proliferation suddenly emerged and, just as quickly,
retreated from public view. In a surprising official statement
issued at the conclusion of bilateral military talks last month,
Nigeria's defense ministry quoted a Pakistani general as
announcing that his country was "working out the dynamics of how
[it] can assist Nigeria's armed forces to strengthen its military
capability and to acquire nuclear power."
As alarm spread, furious retractions followed. Nigerian and
Pakistani officials insisted that mention of nuclear power had
been a "typographical error."
Following revelations earlier this year that Pakistan had sold
nuclear technology to three terrorist-list states, the Nigerian
announcement raises eyebrows. How exactly does one accidentally
type "nuclear power"?
In any case, the incident should remind U.S. experts and
International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors that even though
they have discovered that Iran, Libya and North Korea did
business with Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan Khan, it does
not mean they have necessarily uncovered the full extent of
Pakistani proliferation. As the investigators dig further, they
would be wise to consider suspects beyond the obvious candidates
in the Middle East. They should also consider the possibility
that Pakistan's customers may not have purchased their own
difficult-to-disguise nuclear production capability, but instead
bought weapons to be stored in Pakistan until needed.
Investigators should pay special attention to those countries
that combine the following four characteristics:
Resource-rich. It costs a lot of money to purchase nuclear
capability. Two of Pakistan's clients, Iran and Libya, had ample
oil supplies to pay for it. (North Korea is a strange case - its
resource is ballistic missiles.) To be sure, Pakistan has made
acquiring a nuclear weapon cheaper than before and analysts
should be careful not to exclude all low and middle-income
countries.
Undemocratic. States that may have done business with Khan are
also likely to have had undemocratic governments. Autocratic
leaders of resource-rich governments that lack transparency can
more easily divert resources to an illicit arms program.
Threatened. Beyond opportunity, a state needs a motive for
seeking nuclear arms. Traditional security concerns are the most
obvious. In the 1980s, Iran sought nuclear arms in part to deter
Iraq. Repressive regimes, such as North Korea's, may fear that
powerful outsiders are trying to topple them. Analysts should
consider not only states that perceive external security threats
but also those that face armed internal opposition or civil
conflict. Apartheid South Africa developed nuclear weapons while
facing both international isolation and an internal threat.
States confronting lengthy civil wars might also seek weapons to
shock their opponents into surrender.
Islamic. States with Islamic governments or military
establishments may have been more likely customers for Khan. This
is not because Islamic states are more inclined to seek the bomb,
but because Khan appears to have been inclined towards selling it
to them. Khan says what he did was for Islam. Nevertheless, his
dealings with North Korea underscore that money, not Islam, may
have been his principal motive.
By our conservative estimate, at least 15 states believed to lack
nuclear technology combine all these characteristics. Another
seven make the list if we include non-Islamic governments. The
countries span Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, Central Asia,
North Africa and the Middle East, and Latin America.
Take Nigeria as an example. It sits on the world's tenth largest
oil reserves and was long governed by military dictators from its
Muslim north. The country has a history of internal conflict and
has traditionally viewed itself as a regional superpower. While
it is doubtful that Nigeria's current elected civilian leaders
seek nuclear weapons, the possibility that elements of Nigeria's
military might have sought such weapons before democracy returned
in 1999 cannot be excluded.
The United States and the IAEA may lack the resources and the
justification to investigate all suspect states thoroughly,
especially given only circumstantial reasons for suspicion.
Still, they do need a logical and coherent framework to guide
their search for states that may have been Khan's customers. That
framework must not be constrained by conventional wisdom.
Systematically applying the criteria above would help overcome
analytical biases and increase the likelihood that the full reach
of Khan's network is ultimately exposed. Michael A. Levi is the
science and technology fellow and Susan E. Rice is a senior
fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Copyright © 2004 the International Herald Tribune All
*****************************************************************
17 AxisofLogic: It's a dirty job and terrorists are doing it
[http://www.axisoflogic.com
By Paul Sheehan Apr 5, 2004, 10:58
ON September 13, 1987, two scrap metal scavengers broke into an
abandoned radiotherapy clinic in the Brazilian city of Goiania.
They broke open a machine containing a radioactive material,
cesium chloride, and took a pile of scrap away by wheelbarrow.
By the end of the day, both men were vomiting and one had
diarrhoea. They sold their scrap to a junkyard dealer. He began
showing the "glowing blue powder" to family and friends. By the
time the danger had been identified and contained, five people
had died, 28 had suffered radiation burns, 249 were contaminated,
and 112,000 people had to be tested for radiation.
This was, unwittingly, the Western world's first experience with
a "dirty bomb", albeit a small and accidental one, and the
message was dark. A recently published study, Dirty Bombs: The
Threat Revisited, written by two scientists from the National
Defence University in Washington, concludes: "Many experts
believe an RDD [radiological dispersion device] is an economic
weapon capable of inflicting devastating damage on the US. This
paper is in full agreement with that assessment ..."
The report states that a well-placed RDD would ruin the heart of
a major city. It could contaminate several hectares, requiring
contaminated buildings to be razed and the debris and topsoil
removed. A bomb isn't even necessary. Radiation could be released
through smoke or aerosol, an attack unnoticed until after it had
happened.
And the ingredients are available on the open market. "By far the
most likely route for terrorist acquisition of intermediate
quantities of radioactive material is open and legal purchase
from a legitimate supplier," the report concludes. "Given the
relatively weak and lax laws and regulations surrounding the
storage, sale and shipment of radiological source material,
coupled with the vast number of orphaned and unprotected sources
located throughout Russia and former Soviet states, a determined
and well-financed group easily could obtain even quite large
sources openly."
Determined and well-financed sources have indeed been busy. In
The New Yorker of March 8 the investigative reporter Seymour
Hersh quotes a former senior American intelligence official's
dismay at the lenient treatment of A.Q. Khan, the scientist who
built Pakistan's nuclear program and the man most culpable for
the illegal spread of nuclear weapons technology: "Khan was
willing to sell blueprints, centrifuges and the latest in
weaponry. He was the worst nuclear-arms proliferator in the world
and he's been pardoned - with not a squeak from the White House."
Hersh describe a nuclear black market centred on Pakistan,
implicating Pakistani intelligence, with main distribution points
in Malaysia and the free-trade zone in Dubai. He quotes an
unnamed official from the International Atomic Energy Agency: "I
was absolutely struck by what the Libyans were able to buy.
What's on the black market is absolutely horrendous.
"IAEA inspectors, to their dismay, even found in Libya precise
blueprints for the design and construction of a [450 kilogram]
nuclear weapon. 'It's a sweet little bomb, put together by
engineers who know how to assemble a weapon,' an official in
Vienna told me. 'No question it will work ... It's too big and
too heavy for a Scud, but it'll go into a family car. It's a
terrorist's dream."'
Robert Gallucci, a former UN weapons inspector, told Hersh: "Bad
as it is with Iran, North Korea and Libya having nuclear weapons
material, the worst part is that they could transfer it to a
non-state group. That's the biggest concern. That's the scariest
thing about all this - that Pakistan could work with the worst
terrorist groups on earth to build nuclear weapons. The most
dangerous country for the United States now is Pakistan, and
second is Iran."
And let's not forget the thirst for huge conventional bombs. Last
Tuesday, 700 British police and MI5 intelligence officers mounted
a sweep, codenamed Crevis, which picked up eight men and half a
tonne of ammonium nitrate, the same fertiliser used in the bomb
attacks in Bali. All were radical Muslims. Seven of the eight
came from Pakistani immigrant families.
Two days before the raid an eminent analyst of the Islamic world,
Professor Fouad Ajami, of Johns Hopkins University, writing for
The Wall Street Journal, addressed the issue of why Muslims born
in the liberal West would wage war and mass murder on the liberal
West: "In the 1980s, terrible civil wars were fought in Arab and
Islamic countries ... Defeated opponents took to the road: from
Hamburg and London and Copenhagen, the battle was now joined. If
accounts were to be settled with rulers back home, the work of
subversion would be done from Europe. Muslim brotherhoods
sprouted all over the continent. There were welfare subsidies in
the new surroundings, money, constitutional protections and rules
of asylum to fight the old struggle ..."
So many immigrants escaped, legally and illegally, from the
economic stagnation of the Arab world that 15 million Muslims now
live in Western Europe. Cultural fault-lines have opened up.
Ajami writes: "Political-religious radicals savoured the space
afforded them by Western civil society. But they resented the
logic of assimilation ... You would have thought that the
pluralism and tumult of this open European world would spawn a
version of the faith to match it. But precisely the opposite
happened ...
"Europe is host to a war between order and its enemies, fuelled
by demography: 40 per cent of the Arab world is under 14.
Demographers tell us that the fertility replacement rate is 2.1
children per woman. Europe is frightfully below this level ...
Fertility rates in the Islamic world are altogether different:
3.2 in Algeria, 3.4 in Egypt and Morocco, 5.2 in Iraq and 6.1 in
Saudi Arabia. This is Europe's neighbourhood, and its
contemporary fate."
The velocity of murder is increasing. On Saturday came reports
from Spain that an al-Qaeda plot to bomb a high-speed train
between Madrid and Seville, packed with Easter pilgrims, had been
foiled by mere chance.
The Cold War has been replaced by a hot war. The murder and
intimidation of "infidels" has become an end in itself. In this
war, Iraq is a sideshow. The main front is the race for a dirty
bomb, and the monumental amount of blackmail that comes attached.
This story was found at:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/04/04/1081017033655.html
*****************************************************************
18 Toronto Star: Physicists warn PM of missile defence problems
Mon. Apr. 5, 2004. | Updated at 09:09 PM
PETER CALAMAI SCIENCE WRITER
OTTAWATaking a rare public stance, Canada's physicists have
warned Prime Minister Paul Martin that the proposed U.S. missile
defence system has little scientific chance of working and could
endanger Canadian lives and property.
Missiles launched from the ground against the United States from
Korea or Iran could crash and explode on Canadian soil if the
American interceptor missiles merely cripple them, the
1,600-member Canadian Association of Physicists said in its
letter to the Prime Minister.
Martin replied that the government was "struck by the depth and
thoroughness" of the Canadian analysis that relied on a 400-page
study by the American Physics Society.
The exchange of letters is reproduced in the current issue of the
association's magazine, Physics In Canada, being mailed to
members this week.
The public representation by the physicists constitutes a bold
step for Canadian scientists.
Unlike their more outspoken American counterparts, professional
scientific groups here have mostly limited their lobbying in the
past to pushing for increased government support for research.
"We felt as scientists we couldn't keep quiet," said Bela Joos,
president of the Canadian Association of Physicists.
"We wanted the government to be aware of all the science, of all
the facts."
Joos said the association didn't want to get involved in a
political debate over the missile defence system but decided that
physicists should speak out on the scientific and technical
aspects.
Much of the work of physicists centres on studying dynamics,
ballistics and the laws of motion all core scientific aspects
of the proposed missile defence system.
Last year's study by the American physicists concluded that it
was highly unlikely any of the proposed defence systems would
protect North America from current missiles and virtually certain
they wouldn't be effective against next-generation missiles.
"When a scientist says it is very unlikely, he usually means it
won't work," said Joos, a physics professor at the University of
Ottawa.
"The interceptors have to be bigger than the missiles you're
shooting at to have enough fuel to catch them. It's like the
police chasing a car. You have to be faster than the thief."
In his March 11 reply to the physicists, Martin repeated the
government's position that no decision has been made to join the
U.S. missile defence system.
Current discussions are intended to help Canada make "an informed
decision about participation," the Prime Minister wrote.
Additional articles by Peter Calamai
Copyright Toronto Star
*****************************************************************
19 RJD: NATO says new members to observe all previous agreements with Russia
Russia Journal Daily:
April 05, 2004 Posted: 12:44 Moscow time (08:44 GMT)
Top NATO representatives have assured officials of the Russian
Foreign-Affairs Ministry that its newly adopted members will
observe all existing agreements reached between Russia and the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), including the July 4,
2003, Madrid Declaration, which has spelt out the rules for
deployment of nuclear weapons on the continent.
The NATO leadership gave the assurance at the Russia-NATO
council’s session last Friday following the accession of three
former Soviet republics -Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia into the
military alliance on March 29 - along with four former Warsaw
Pact signatories Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.
The session was preceded by high-level diplomatic activities
between Russian and NATO officials. Russian Foreign Minister
Sergei Lavrov and NATO General Secretary Jaap de Hoop Scheffer
exchanged letters confirming the “disarmament status quo” as one
of the conditions under which the new members were accepted into
the alliance. In the letters, de Hoop Scheffer assured Lavrov
that four of the seven newly accepted members - Slovenia, Latvia,
Lithuania and Estonia, which have not joined the adapted Treaty
on Conventional Military Forces in Europe, would do so after the
treaty goes into force. They are also required to observe its
provisions even if they have not signed the treaty.
Commenting on this and other issues tabled at the session,
representatives of the Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry and
military establishment said these assurances mean that neither
nuclear weapons nor nuclear facilities will be located on the
territories of the new alliance members. They also noted that
NATO leadership has also assured Russian officials that the new
alliance members would have only military forces that are
necessary for their defense. The Russia Journal
[http://www.russiajournal.com/] NATO says new members to observe
all previous agreements with Russia
ADVERTISING | DOWNLOAD [http://www.e-russiajournal.com/] |
SEARCH Copyright © 1999-2003 Norasco
*****************************************************************
20 Pakistan News: No uranium depleted weapons used in Afghanistan - Helifirty
PakTribune.Com
Monday April 05, 2004 (1610 PST)
KABUL: Spokesman US forces in Afghanistan Col. Bryn Helifirty
rejected the reports published by US press and internet sites
that Us had been using uranium coated weapons in Afghanistan, BBC
reports.
Chief Editor Chicago Journal Robert cooler wrote in his article
that US forces had been using uranium-coated weapons in
Afghanistan and Iraq.
Spokesman US forces in Afghanistan rejected the report and said
that although the US forces had uranium dipped weapons in
Afghanistan yet he did not believe that such weapons had been
used here.
Mr Helifirty said that such weapons were used in destroying
tanks and armoured vehicles.
While replying to question as what sorts of weapons were used in
the operation in Afghanistan, he said advanced air and ground
weapons were used according to the requirement of operation and
geographical condition of the area where the operation had been
conducted.
[http://www.paktribune.com
Pakistan News Service © PakTribune.com Pvt Ltd
2003-2004
*****************************************************************
21 Hi Pakistan: Kashmir more important than N-issue: Blix -->
April 06 2004
ISLAMABAD: Dr Hans Blix, former chief UN Arms Inspector for Iraq,
believes that tackling the issue of nuclear weapons in South Asia
requires a settlement of the Kashmir dispute first.
In an exclusive interview on Geo’s talk show "Follow Up With
Fahd", Dr Blix said in all questions concerning nuclear weapons,
it was important to solve political and security issues first.
"When in Pakistan you have acquired nuclear weapons, it is your
security you’ve been thinking of, and the same applies to the
Indians," he said. "So tackling this problem, getting rid of
these weapons, I think requires thinking how to solve the
political and security problems. You have the Kashmir problem and
the most important thing in my view that can happen on your
peninsula, that is a detente and a settlement of the Kashmir
issue."
As the chief UN Arms Inspector mandated to determine whether or
not Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, Dr Blix had argued
passionately for more time for inspections. He had counseled the
Security Council and the Bush administration not to rush into
war. The failure of the US to find any weapons of mass
destruction has vindicated Dr Blix position.
In his interview in "Follow Up With Fahd" which airs tonight
(Monday) at 10.30 pm Dr Blix describes his meeting with President
Bush and Vice President Cheney, and how Cheney threatened to
discredit the UN Inspectors.
Blix also reveals when and how he became convinced that Iraq did
not have any WMDs. He talks about how US Deputy Secretary of
Defence Paul Wolfowitz asked the CIA to dig up stuff on Blix
himself.
In addition, did he think the war was avoidable? Did he believe
Colin Powell when he made the famous presentation in the Security
Council? And why did Saddam Hussein not come clean on the weapons
and save himself and his government? Blix answers all these
questions in the comprehensive interview tonight on Geo.
Copyright 1996-2002 . Hi Pakistan. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
22 AU ABC: Pakistan offers to host nuclear talks.
05/04/2004. ABC News Online
[http://www.abc.net.au/]
Pakistan has formally offered to host nuclear disarmament talks
with rival India next month, the foreign ministry said. "Pakistan
has today proposed 25-26 May as the dates for hosting
expert-level talks on nuclear CBMs [confidence building
measures]," a formal statement said.
The proposal was conveyed to the Indian High Commission, it
added. The proposed talks are part of efforts to mend ties and
resume dialogue which has been stalled since July 2001.
During foreign secretary-level meetings mid-February, Pakistan
proposed holding discussions on "strategic restraint" and a
minimum deterrence threshold, officials said then.
The often-hostile neighbours' possession of nuclear arsenals has
made South Asia one of the world's most feared potential nuclear
flashpoints.
Many observers believed the subcontinent was on the verge of
plunging into atomic conflict when the two sides came close to
their fourth war two years ago over the disputed territory of
Kashmir.
Pakistan went public as a nuclear power when it conducted a
series of test nuclear explosions in May 1998, weeks after
similar tests by India.
Neither side is signatory to non-proliferation treaties. Pakistan
was uncovered earlier this year as the center of the world's
worst nuclear proliferation scandal, when the founder of its
nuclear program publicly confessed to selling nuclear technology
and expertise to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
The government has denied any knowledge of or role in the
proliferation activities. -- AFP
© 2004 Australian Broadcasting Corporation
*****************************************************************
23 [NukeNet] Meltdown at Three Mile Island, Monday April 5th, 9
Date: Mon, 05 Apr 2004 18:00:12 -0700
This just in from Abhaya with People's Action for Clean Energy near North
Anna nuclear power plant in Virginia.
Kevin Kamps, NIRS, 202.328.0002 ext. 14
Hi, Folks! Late News Update!
Today, Monday, April 5th at 9:00 p.m. PBS on its "American Experience"
showwill air a documentary called The Meltdown at Three Mile Island.
PBS has an entire website designed about the show:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/three/index.html
I was wondering what angle they would take on it, but then I saw that Liev
Shreiber is the narrator and
I knew it would be excellent. As it turns out, I know Liev Shreiber because
he is the son of my friend, Uma. I think that what will really help that
happen is if PBS gets many positive letters about the show. We can easily
give our feedback online, at a special website specifically set up for
responses about the show! It's:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/three/feedback.html
This is so great! Yours for No More Nukes,
Abhaya
PACE
Virginia
_______________________________________________________________________
Subscribe/Unsubscribe Here: http://www.energyjustice.net/nukenet/
Change your settings at:
http://energyjustice.net/mailman/listinfo/nukenet_energyjustice.net
*****************************************************************
24 NRC: Dominion Nuclear Connecticut, Inc., Millstone Power Station,
FR Doc 04-7555
[Federal Register: April 5, 2004 (Volume 69, Number 65)]
[Notices] [Page 17717-17718] From the Federal Register Online via
GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr05ap04-118]
Unit 1; Exemption 1.0 Background Dominion Nuclear Connecticut,
Inc. (the licensee) is the holder of Facility Operating License
No. DPR-21, which authorizes the licensee to possess the
Millstone Power Station, Unit 1. The license states, in part,
that the facility is subject to all the rules, regulations, and
orders of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (the Commission
or NRC) now or hereafter in effect.
The facility consists of a boiling water reactor located at the
licensee's site in Waterford, Connecticut. The facility is
permanently shut down and defueled and the licensee is no longer
authorized to operate or place fuel in the reactor.
2.0 Request/Action Section 140.11(a)(4) of 10 CFR part 140
requires a reactor with a rated capacity of 100,000 electrical
kilowatts or more to maintain primary liability insurance of $300
million \1\ and to participate in a secondary insurance pool. All
operating reactor sites carry $300 million in primary insurance
coverage. All decommissioning plants except Millstone Power
Station Unit 1 have been allowed to discontinue the secondary
insurance coverage. Single unit decommissioning plants without
operating reactors on the same site have been allowed to reduce
their primary insurance coverage to $100 million. When Millstone
Unit 1 receives its exemption it will still be covered by $300
million in primary insurance because two other operating reactors
exist on the same site.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
---------- \1\ At the time that Northeast Nuclear Energy Company
requested the exemption from secondary financial protection the
requirement for primary insurance coverage was $200 million. The
regulation now requires $300 million in primary coverage.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
---------- By letter dated September 28, 1999, as supplemented by
a letter dated March 2, 2000, Northeast Nuclear Energy Company
requested an exemption from 10 CFR 140.11(a)(4). Dominion Nuclear
Connecticut, Inc., which assumed operating authority for
Millstone Unit 1 in March 2001, provided a supplementary letter
dated November 6, 2003. The licensee requested to withdraw from
participation in the secondary insurance pool.
3.0 Discussion The NRC may grant exemptions from the requirements
of 10 CFR Part 140 of the regulations which, pursuant to 10 CFR
140.8, are authorized by law and are otherwise in the public
interest. The underlying purpose of Section 140.11 is to provide
sufficient liability insurance to ensure funding for claims
resulting from a nuclear incident or a precautionary evacuation.
The financial protection limits of 10 CFR 140.11 were established
to require a licensee to maintain sufficient insurance to cover
the costs of a nuclear accident at an operating reactor. Although
the risk of an accident at an operating reactor is very low, the
consequences can be large, in part due to the high temperature
and pressure of the reactor coolant system, as well as the
inventory of radionuclides. In a permanently shutdown and
defueled reactor facility, the possibility of accidents involving
the reactor and its systems, structures and components, is
eliminated. Further reductions in risk occur because (1) the
decay heat from spent fuel decreases over time, which reduces the
amount of cooling required to prevent the spent fuel from heating
up to a temperature that could compromise the ability of the fuel
cladding to retain fission products; and (2) the relatively
short-lived radionuclides contained in the spent fuel,
particularly volatile components such as iodine and noble gases,
decay away, thus reducing the inventory of radioactive materials
that are readily dispersible and transportable in air.
Although the risk and consequences of a radiological release
decline substantially after a plant permanently defuels its
reactor, they are not completely eliminated. There are potential
onsite and offsite radiological consequences that could be
associated with the onsite storage of the spent fuel in the spent
fuel pool (SFP).
In addition, a site may contain an inventory of radioactive
liquids, activated reactor components, and contaminated
materials. For purposes of modifying the amount of insurance
coverage maintained by a power reactor licensee, the potential
consequences, despite very low risk, are an appropriate
consideration.
By letter dated March 2, 2000, the licensee submitted an analysis
of the heatup characteristics of the spent fuel in the absence of
SFP water inventory. The licensee concluded that air cooling of
the fuel would be sufficient to maintain the integrity of the
fuel cladding. The staff independently evaluated the licensee's
analysis and found it to be acceptable.
The above analyses established that air cooling was adequate in
the normal storage configuration, but events could change the
configuration of stored fuel or otherwise degrade the
effectiveness of cooling. This potential was addressed in
NUREG-1738, ``Technical Study of Spent Fuel Pool Accident Risk at
Decommissioning Nuclear Power Plants,'' which concluded that the
probability of fuel uncovery is very low, and the probability of
a random event that substantially reconfigures stored fuel such
that cooling becomes inadequate is much lower still.
Even with inadequate cooling, NUREG-1738 presented data
indicating that fuel with over 5 years' decay time would require
over 24 hours of complete adiabatic conditions (obstructed air
flow) to reach temperatures associated with rapid cladding
oxidation and release of fission products. The staff considers
these conclusions applicable to Millstone Unit 1 since its spent
fuel has been decaying since November 1995. A partial drain-down
of the SFP could interfere with natural convection heat transfer
and lead to a heatup of the spent fuel. However, if this were to
occur, sufficient time is available for the licensee to take
compensatory actions (such as refilling the SFP or spraying water
on the spent fuel) thereby restoring necessary cooling. The staff
judges that the analyses in NUREG-1738 are conservative and that
there will be sufficient time for reasonable compensatory action
for this small likelihood event.
The NUREG-1738 study did not evaluate the risk from malevolent
acts. With regard to physical protection, the Millstone Unit 1
SFP is located within the overall Millstone site protected area
(PA) which also contains operating Millstone Units 2 and 3. The
licensee maintains a protective strategy for Units 2 and 3 that
is in compliance with the requirements of 10 CFR 73.55 and
interim compensatory measures issued by Order on February 25,
2002. By
[[Page 17718]] virtue of its location in the overall Millstone
site PA (including Units 2 and 3), the Unit 1 SFP is accorded the
substantial protection provided by the licensee's compliance with
the Unit 2 and 3 requirements.
Based on insights from NUREG-1738 and other SFP analyses, the
probability of a zirconium fire involving the Millstone Power
Station, Unit 1 spent fuel is expected to be very low and well
within the Commission's safety goals. The staff considers that
the significant age of the spent fuel (over eight years),
improved security measures at the site and the location of two
operating reactors at the same site significantly reduce the risk
of a spent fuel accident/incident at the Millstone Power Station
Unit 1. For this reason, an accident/incident involving the spent
fuel resulting in a large offsite release or the need to evacuate
a large portion of the local population has a very low
likelihood. Additionally, the fuel at Millstone Power Station,
Unit 1 has decayed in excess of eight years, substantially
reducing the potential offsite consequences of fuel damage. The
potential consequences continue to decrease as time passes.
A licensee's liability for offsite costs may be significant due
to lawsuits alleging damages from offsite releases. An
appropriate level of financial liability coverage is needed to
account for potential judgments and settlements and to protect
the Federal government from indemnity claims. The staff believes
that the Commission's requirement to maintain the $300 million in
primary offsite financial protection at the Millstone site is
sufficient for this purpose.
In a letter from the Executive Director for Operations to the
Chairman of the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards (ACRS)
dated September 17, 2001, post-shutdown insurance requirements
for decommissioning nuclear power plants were addressed. The
staff and the ACRS agreed that onsite and offsite insurance
coverage can be substantially reduced shortly after a facility
permanently shuts down. The ACRS also accepted the staff's
assessment that the primary insurance level be reduced to $100
million (the Millstone site maintains a primary insurance level
of $300 million because of the two operating units) and that
decommissioning licensees be released from participation in the
secondary insurance pool.
The staff has completed its review of the licensee's request to
withdraw from participation in the secondary insurance pool. On
the basis of its review, the staff finds that the risk from
random events associated with the spent fuel stored in the
Millstone Power Station, Unit 1 SFP is very low and well within
the Commission's safety goals. Additionally, the staff believes
that the security measures already implemented for the Millstone
site (collectively for Millstone Units 1, 2 and 3) including
supplemental requirements issued by Order on February 25, 2002,
provide reasonable assurance of protection against radiological
sabotage and adequate protection of public health and safety and
the common defense and security. Therefore, the licensee's
proposed protection limits (i.e., $300 million in primary
insurance coverage) will provide sufficient insurance to recover
from limiting hypothetical events, if they occur, and the
underlying purpose of the regulation will not be adversely
affected by the reduction in insurance coverage.
4.0 Conclusion Accordingly, the Commission has determined that,
pursuant to 10 CFR 140.8, an exemption to withdraw from the
secondary insurance pool for offsite liability insurance is
authorized by law and is otherwise in the public interest.
Therefore, the Commission hereby grants Dominion Nuclear
Connecticut, Inc., an exemption as described above from the
secondary insurance requirements of 10 CFR part 140.11(a)(4) for
the Millstone Power Station, Unit 1.
Pursuant to 10 CFR 51.32, the Commission has determined that this
exemption will not have a significant effect on the quality of
the human environment (65 FR 42038).
This exemption is effective upon issuance.
Dated at Rockville, Maryland, this 30th day of March 2004.
For the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Eric J. Leeds, Deputy Director, Division of Licensing Project
Management, Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation.
[FR Doc. 04-7555 Filed 4-2-04; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 7590-01-P
*****************************************************************
25 BBC: Wylfa reactor
Last Updated: Monday, 5 April, 2004
No2 reactor at Wylfa is shut for maintenance
British Nuclear Fuels has shut two units at its Wylfa nuclear
power station on Anglesey as part of planned maintenance.
The company said No2 reactor was shut down last Friday, with No1
reactor still in production.
A BNFL spokesman declined to say when the units would resume
production, due to commercial confidentiality
megawatts.
Last summer, the plant was shut down for several weeks after
problems were found in a reactor.
They were uncovered at the ageing station during a routine
maintenance.
Opened in 1971, the station, which at full capacity produces
enough daily electricity for two cities the size of Manchester
and Liverpool, is due to stop generating permanently in 2010.
The station also underwent a 15-month shutdown in 2001.
*****************************************************************
26 Toledo Blade: Davis-Besse at full power for first time in 2 years
Article published Monday, April 5, 2004
OAK HARBOR - FirstEnergy Corp. got Davis-Besse's reactor
operating at a consistent 100 percent power yesterday for the
first time in more than two years, Richard Wilkins, utility
spokesman, said.
Barring complications, the reactor will continue to operate at
full power until FirstEnergy takes the plant offline for a
mid-cycle maintenance outage in a year, he said.
The reactor is refueled once every two years.
It had been idle for more than two years until the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission gave authorization for a deliberately slow
and careful restart in March. Numerous tests were performed as
power was gradually increased and, at times, temporarily
decreased for more work to be done.
The plant had been idle since February, 2002, because of numerous
equipment, management, design, and performance issues the NRC had
cited after agency officials learned in March, 2002, that acid
had eaten a hole in the steel lid covering the nuclear device.
The damage of the vessel head was by far the most pronounced in
U.S. nuclear history.
© 2004 The Blade.The Toledo Blade Company, 541 N.
Superior St., Toledo, OH 43660 , (419) 724-6000
*****************************************************************
27 Xinhuanet: France to build nuclear plant with pressurized water reactor
www.xinhuanet.com
www.chinaview.cn 2004-04-05 04:27:03
PARIS, April 5 (Xinhua) -- French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre
Raffarin announced Monday that France will build its third
generation of nuclear plant with Pressurized Water nuclear
Reactor(PWR) and urged the French parliament to kick off
discussions in this regard.
"Our responsibility is to ensure the future of nuclear power
generation," he said in his first major address on the general
policy at the National Assembly.
He noted Finland, which is concerned about the environment,
just started the construction of a nuclear power plant unit with
aPWR to be delivered by a French-German company, adding that
"France should take this way."
The French group EDF (Electricity of France) applauded
Raffarin's commitment on the PWR policy.
"EDF is glad to hear the commitment of the prime minister on
the open nuclear option to build a (plant unit with) PWR," said
anofficial of the state company.
The project concerning the construction of a nuclear power
plant unit with the PWR in France is listed in the law bill on
energy directive elaborated by former French minister for
industryNicole Fontaine. Enditem
Copyright ©2003 Xinhua News Agency. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
28 NRC: NRC to Discuss Annual Performance Assessment of Seabrook
Nuclear Power Plant
News Release - Region I - 2004-01 U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY
COMMISSION
Office of Public Affairs, Region I No. I-04-018
April 5, 2004 CONTACT: Diane Screnci (610) 337-5330 Neil A.
Sheehan (610) 337-5331 E-mail: opa1@nrc.gov
[opa1@nrc.gov]
Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff will meet with
representatives of FPL Energy Seabrook, LLC, on Monday, April 12,
to discuss the results of the agencys annual assessment of
safety performance at the Seabrook nuclear power plant. FPL
operates the plant, which is located in Seabrook, N.H.
The meeting, which will be open to the public for observation, is
scheduled to begin at 3 p.m. at the Hampshire Inn, 20 Spur Road
(Route 107) in Seabrook. Before the session is adjourned, NRC
staff will be available to answer questions from the public on
the plants safety performance, as well as the role of the NRC in
ensuring safe operation of the facility.
The performance period to be discussed is January 1 to December
31, 2003. In addition, NRC staff will provide a brief overview of
how the agencys Reactor Oversight Process works.
A letter sent from the NRC Region I Office to plant officials
addresses the performance of the plant during the period and will
serve as the basis for the meeting discussion. It is available on
the NRC web site at:
www.nrc.gov/NRR/OVERSIGHT/ASSESS/LETTERS/seab_2003q4.pdf [PDF
Icon] .
Overall, the Seabrook plant operated safely and met all
cornerstone objectives during the period. (Cornerstones are
measures of plant performance.) However, based on a white
Performance Indicator for reactor coolant system leakage during
the fourth quarter of 2003, the plant will receive some
additional oversight. The Performance Indicator was exceeded as a
result of a reactor coolant system flow instrument leak that took
place on November 11, 2003. The leak was halted early the next
day when plant operators closed valves to isolate it. In response
to the change in the Performance Indicator, the NRC will conduct
a supplemental inspection at the plant in May to review
corrective actions related to the problem. Other than that
inspection, the NRC will conduct baseline-level inspections at
the plant.
With regard to security issues, the NRC has issued several orders
and threat advisories to enhance security capabilities and
improve guard force readiness since the terrorist attacks on
September 11, 2001. The agency has also conducted inspections to
review the implementation of these requirements and has monitored
the action of plant operators in response to changing threat
conditions. The NRC will continue security inspections during
2004.
Current performance information for the Seabrook plant is
available on the NRC web site at:
www.nrc.gov/NRR/OVERSIGHT/ASSESS/SEAB1/seab1_chart.html.
Last revised Monday, April 05, 2004
*****************************************************************
29 NRC: NRC to Meet with Exelon Generation Company to Discuss Performance of Clinton
Nuclear Plant
News Release - Region III - 2004-01
U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION
Office of Public Affairs, Region III
No. III-04-019 April 1, 2004
CONTACT: Jan Strasma (630) 829-9663
Viktoria Mitlyng (630) 829-9662 E-mail: opa3@nrc.gov
[opa3@nrc.gov]
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff will meet with
representatives of Exelon Generation Company on Thursday, April
8, to discuss the results of the agencys assessment of safety
performance at the Clinton Nuclear Power Plant during 2003. The
facility is located near Clinton, Illinois.
The meeting will be held at 1 p.m. at the Vespasian Warner
Public Library, 310 N. Quincy Street, in Clinton. The public is
invited to observe the meeting, and NRC officials will be
available before the conclusion of the meeting to answer
questions from the public. In addition, the NRC staff will
provide an overview of how the agencys Reactor Oversight
Process works.
The NRC concluded that the plant operated safely last year. All
NRC inspection findings during the year were of very low safety
significance. This inspection record and the plants performance
indicators (statistical data measuring safety performance) led
the agency to conclude that the Clinton plant does not require
NRC oversight beyond the normal routine inspection program.
Routine inspections are performed by the two NRC resident
inspectors assigned to the plant and by inspection specialists
from Region III office in Lisle, Illinois.
A March 4 letter from the NRC to Exelon officials addresses the
performance of the plant during 2003 and will serve as the basis
for the meeting discussion. It is available at:
http://www.nrc.gov/NRR/OVERSIGHT/ASSESS/LETTERS/clin_2003q4.pdf
[PDF Icon] .
With regard to security issues, the NRC has issued several
orders and threat advisories to enhance security capabilities
and improve guard force readiness since the terrorist attacks on
September 11, 2001. The agency has also conducted inspections to
review the implementation of these requirements and has
monitored the action of plant operators in response to changing
threat conditions. The NRC will continue security inspections
during 2004.
Current performance indicators and inspection findings for
Clinton are available on the NRC web site at:
http://www.nrc.gov/NRR/OVERSIGHT/ASSESS/CLIN/clin_chart.html.
Last revised Friday, April 02, 2004
*****************************************************************
30 NRC: NRC to Meet with TVA Nuclear Officials to Discuss Safety Performance at Watts Bar
Nuclear Power Plant
News Release - Region II - 2004-02 U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY
COMMISSION
Office of Public Affairs, Region II No. II-04-022
April 5, 2004 CONTACT: Ken Clark (404) 562-4416 Roger D.
Hannah (404) 562-4417 E-mail: opa2@nrc.gov [opa2@nrc.gov]
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff will meet with
Tennessee Valley Authority officials on Friday, April 9, to
discuss the results of NRC's annual assessment of safety
performance at the Watts Bar nuclear power plant near Spring
City, Tennessee.
The meeting will be held at 2:00 p.m. at the Best Western Motel
at 1421 Murrays Chapel Road, in Sweetwater, Tennessee, just off
I-75 at Exit 60. The public is invited to observe the meeting,
and NRC officials will be available before its conclusion to
answer any questions.
The NRC told TVA that plant safety performance during the
previous year forms the basis for the meeting discussions. The
NRC said that Watts Bar operated safely and that plant
performance was at a level requiring no additional NRC inspection
beyond normal. A letter from NRC to TVA detailing the results of
the evaluation is available from Region II Public Affairs and on
the NRC web site at
www.nrc.gov/NRR/OVERSIGHT/ASSESS/LETTERS/wb_2003q4.pdf [PDF Icon]
. The NRC said the NRC staff, in addition to the normal
inspections at Watts Bar, will conduct additional inspections at
Watts Bar of the plants implementation of any new security
Orders and any new security requirements. The NRC will also
continue to inspect the lay-up and preservation of Watts Bar Unit
2, which has been deferred by TVA and has not received an
operating license.
Current performance indicators for Watts Bar Unit 1 are available
at www.nrc.gov/NRR/OVERSIGHT/ASSESS/WB1/wb1_chart.html.
Last revised Monday, April 05, 2004
*****************************************************************
31 NRC: NRC to Meet with Progress Energy Officials to Discuss Safety Performance at
Crystal River Nuclear Power Plant
News Release - Region II - 2004-02
U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION
Office of Public Affairs, Region II
No. II-04-023 April 5, 2004
CONTACT: Ken Clark (404) 562-4416
Roger D. Hannah (404) 562-4417 E-mail: opa2@nrc.gov
[opa2@nrc.gov]
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff will meet with
Progress Energy officials on Tuesday, April 13, to discuss the
results of NRC's annual assessment of safety performance at the
Crystal River nuclear power plant near Crystal River, Florida.
The meeting will be held at 11:00 a.m. at the Crystal River
Nuclear Operations Training Facility, 8200 W. Venable Street in
Crystal River. The public is invited to observe the meeting, and
NRC officials will be available before its conclusion to answer
any questions.
The NRC told Progress Energy that the Crystal River plant
operated safely during 2003 and that plant performance was at a
level requiring no additional NRC oversight beyond routine
inspections. A letter from the NRC to Progress Energy detailing
the results of the evaluation is available from Region II Public
Affairs and on the NRC web site at
www.nrc.gov/NRR/OVERSIGHT/ASSESS/LETTERS/cr_2003q4.pdf [PDF
Icon] .
The NRC staff, in addition to the normal inspections at Crystal
River, will conduct additional inspections of the plants
implementation of any new security Orders and any new security
requirements, as well as an inspection in the area of spent fuel
material control and accountability.
Current performance indicators for Crystal River are available
at www.nrc.gov/NRR/OVERSIGHT/ASSESS/CR3/cr3_chart.html.
Last revised Monday, April 05, 2004
*****************************************************************
32 PR News: Palisades Nuclear Plant Claims Continuous Run Record for
Consumers Energy Generating Fleet
www.consumersenergy.com"
[http://www.prnewswire.com/comp/203850.html]
JACKSON, Mich., April 1 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- The
Palisades nuclear power plant has claimed the continuous
production run record for Consumers Energy generating units and
continues to better the old mark of 345 days.
At 11:46 p.m. Tuesday, Palisades eclipsed the 345-day run set
in April 2002 by a coal-fired unit at the J.R. Whiting generating
plant, near Luna Pier. Palisades broke two other records in the
past 10 days. On March 23, Palisades moved past its own mark of
337 continuous days of operation and on Sunday it surpassed the
longest production run for a Consumers Energy nuclear plant, 343
days, set by Big Rock Point in July 1977.
The Palisades continuous production run began April 20, 2003,
when the plant returned to service after a 35-day refueling and
maintenance outage, the shortest in the plant's history.
Consumers Energy owns the Palisades plant, which can generate
up to 789 megawatts of electricity, enough to serve a community
of 500,000 people. Nuclear Management Company (NMC) operates the
plant, located near South Haven, for the utility.
"We are pleased with the continuous performance records that
NMC has achieved at Palisades. Those records show we're making
progress toward our goal of having the best generating fleet in
the Midwest so we can continue to provide reliable and affordable
power to our 1.7 million electric customers. We wish the staff
and management of Palisades continued success in their pursuit of
excellence," said Robert Fenech, Consumers Energy's senior vice
president of nuclear, fossil and hydro operations.
"This achievement is possible because all the Palisades
employees are focusing on nuclear safety," said Daniel J. Malone,
Palisades site vice president for NMC.
Nuclear power plants strive to operate safely and
continuously from the end of one refueling outage to the start of
the next. That milestone is about six months away for Palisades,
which has a refueling outage scheduled for the fall.
Consumers Energy, the principal subsidiary of CMS Energy,
provides natural gas and electricity to more than six million of
the state's nearly 10 million residents in all 68 Lower Peninsula
counties.
The Nuclear Management Company operates six upper Midwest
nuclear power plants and is based in Hudson, Wis. It began
operating the Palisades plant in 2001.
For more information about Consumers Energy, visit our
Website at http://www.consumersenergy.com
[http://www.consumersenergy.com] SOURCE Consumers Energy Web
Site: http://www.consumersenergy.com
[http://www.consumersenergy.com]
*****************************************************************
33 SP Times: Utilities developing warm glow for nuke plants
By ROBERT TRIGAUX, Times Business Columnist
Published April 5, 2004
It's been 25 years since the near-meltdown at Three Mile Island
in Pennsylvania scared the heck out of America and sounded the
death knell to the expansion of commercial nuclear power.
Now there is concrete evidence the industry is rising from the
dead.
Last week, two separate groups composed of U.S. power companies
and corporations skilled in the design and construction of
nuclear plants disclosed plans to gain approval to build the
nation's first new nuclear power reactors in decades.
Such plans do not mean new nuclear power plants will arrive any
time soon. Matters as complex and touchy as nuclear power take
years. But the wheels are turning. Plants are coming.
"I think you will see nuclear power with a much higher profile
in the years ahead," says Bill Habermeyer, chief executive of
Progress Energy Florida in St. Petersburg. Progress Energy Corp.,
the parent company in North Carolina, operates nuclear power
plants in North and South Carolina, as well as the Crystal River
nuclear facility north of the Tampa Bay metro area.
Progress Energy is not among the power companies in the two
groups now seeking a federal okay for new nuclear power plants.
Still, the company is run by nuclear power advocates who - like
Habermeyer - cut their teeth as young men aboard nuclear-powered
submarines in the Navy.
Company executives have obviously mapped out some expansion
scenarios that could include building additional nuclear power
plants at existing facilities big enough to handle another nuke
plant. The Progress Energy power plant site at Crystal River,
Habermeyer says, has the land for a second nuke plant - if there
comes a day when it makes sense to build one there.
What's fueling the national revival in commercial nuclear power?
Plenty:
- Other fuels used to run power plants are getting more
expensive and riskier. Oil prices are rising and keeping this
country reliant on foreign sources. Though natural gas is
preferred these days as a "cleaner" fuel, its popularity is
driving up its price. And coal? While plentiful in the United
States and enjoying a comeback, it continues to face criticism as
a major cause of air pollution.
- Increasing demand for electricity in the United States has
policymakers scrambling to maintain a reasonable balance of fuels
sources used in power plants.
- Nuclear power helps generate about 20 percent of the
electricity used each day in the country. As some aging nuclear
plants begin to close, new plants will be needed if the nation
wants to maintain that 20 percent level.
- The Bush White House is the most pronuke administration in at
least a generation. A strategic plan issued jointly in February
by the Department of Energy and the nuclear power industry calls
for more nuclear power. "This plan focuses on safely sustaining
and expanding the electricity output from currently operating
nuclear power plants and expanding nuclear capacity through the
deployment of new plants," the plan says.
- Public trust in nuclear power has slowly increased in the
quarter century since the radioactive leak at the Three Mile
Island power plant.
* * *
In an interview Friday, Progress Energy Florida's Habermeyer said
the nuclear power plant accident at Three Mile Island in 1979
actually proved to be a major benefit to the industry. Here are a
few excerpts from our conversation:
Q. How did Three Mile Island possibly help?
Before Three Mile, I guess Yankee ingenuity prompted each power
company to build its own nuclear power plant with its own design
and set of operational controls. After the Three Mile accident,
the industry realized it needed a better benchmark to measure a
plant's performance and the ability to share best practices.
Industry organizations were created to improve safety. These were
very profound changes that have contributed to the industry's
strong safety record.
Q. Where were you when the Three Mile Island accident happened?
About 300 feet underwater in the Pacific on a nuclear-powered
Navy submarine. We got the news by radio transmission when we
surfaced.
Q. Given the controversy of nuclear power, do you see any new
plants being built on new sites or at existing power plant
locations?
Existing sites are most likely. It's more cost-efficient and
easier as a matter of security. But that does not rule out a
greenfield (new) site.
Q. What about power companies that currently do not operate nuke
plants. Will we see them get into the business in the coming
years?
I doubt we will see companies without nuclear experience getting
into the business. The groups that have filed plans seeking a
license are made up of companies with experience.
* * *
The first group last week to disclose its filing with the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission includes five energy companies - Chicago's
Exelon Corp., New Orleans' Entergy Corp., Baltimore's
Constellation Energy, Atlanta's Southern Co. (which owns Gulf
Power on Florida's Panhandle) and a U.S. subsidiary of
Electricite de France.
The second group consists of one power company, Dominion
Resources of Richmond, Va., as well as Hitachi America, Bechtel
and a U.S. subsidiary of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.
With rising gas and oil prices, the pronuke industry argues
nuclear power has become the cheapest way to generate
electricity. That's true, but only if the long-term cost of
safely storing the highly radioactive waste of spent nuclear fuel
is left out of the equation.
The federal government promised more than 20 years ago that by
1998 it would handle the waste from commercial nuclear reactors.
The government chose a remote site in Nevada called Yucca
Mountain as a the best place to build a massive storage site for
radioactive waste. As the site became controversial and mired in
court battles, the date for the Yucca facility has slipped to
2010 or later.
The result? Commercial nuclear power plants must store their
highly radioactive spent fuel at their plant sites, even after
traditional underwater storage facilities become full.
At the Crystal River nuke plant, underwater storage is still
available. But Progress Energy is starting to store nuclear fuel
waste in dry casks at one of its plant sites in South Carolina.
Without a long-term resolution, the safe storage of spent
nuclear fuel remains the industry's Achilles heel.
But today, that's not where the spotlight shines. With
electricity demand on the rise and alternative fuel prices
rising, nuclear power looks poised to enjoy a return to center
stage.
- Robert Trigaux can be reached at trigaux@sptimes.com
[trigaux@sptimes.com] or 727 893-8405. [Last modified April 3,
2004, 21:25:09]
St. Petersburg Times. [http://www.sptimes.com/] All rights
reserved.
*****************************************************************
34 [NukeNet] In 4 years, DOE compensates 1 sick woker out of 22,
Date: Mon, 05 Apr 2004 18:00:04 -0700
Sent to me by Terry Lodge in Toledo.
Kevin Kamps, NIRS
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-3933699,00.html
'Officials to Quit Sick Nuke Worker Program'
By NANCY ZUCKERBROD Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - Two Bush administration officials
in charge of a widely criticized program that is
supposed to help sick nuclear weapons workers are
leaving their jobs, the Energy Department announced
Friday. The agency announced the resignations of
Undersecretary Robert Card, the department's third top
official, and Assistant Secretary Beverly Cook, who
reports to Card, in news releases. The two officials took the brunt of
criticism from
lawmakers this week after it was disclosed that a $74
million program to aid workers sickened from
on-the-job exposure to toxic chemicals had paid out a
single claim, $15,000, to one worker. ``The fact of the matter is that
they want to spend
time with their respective families,'' Energy
Department spokesman Joe Davis said of the
resignations. David Garman, the department's assistant secretary
for renewable energy, was named acting undersecretary
replacing Card. Congress established the sick worker program in
2000. Its job is to collect workers' records, help
them navigate state compensation systems and
ultimately cover the costs of claims awarded against
government contractors. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, accused the
department of overpaying its contractor, New
Orleans-based Science and Engineering Associates, to
run the program. Card denied Grassley's accusation at
a hearing last Tuesday. Responding to the resignations Friday, Grassley
said, ``It's important that the department find people
who can now move this program forward.'' Grassley and several other
lawmakers had
recommended moving the program to the Labor
Department, which runs a separate effort for
compensating weapons plant workers sick from radiation
exposure. The lawmakers have cited the massive backlog the
Energy Department faces as it tries to process roughly
22,000 claims filed since the law took effect. As of
Tuesday, only 372 claimants had heard whether their
illnesses were job-related. Energy officials say they can shorten the backlog
if Congress agrees to changes. A House committee this week endorsed a
request from
the agency to spend an extra $30 million atop the
roughly $26 million being spent on the program this
year. The Energy Department also wants Congress to lift a
cap on fees paid to doctors who help assess worker
claims. Most of the claims are from people who worked for
contractors at Energy Department facilities in these
states: Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, New Mexico,
Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee and Washington. Both Card and Cook also
oversaw the development of
a proposed rule that the Energy Department withdrew
under pressure in February. It would have let
contractors at nuclear facilities pick which safety
rules they should follow. Card is no relation to White House Chief of Staff
Andrew Card.
_______________________________________________________________________
Subscribe/Unsubscribe Here: http://www.energyjustice.net/nukenet/
Change your settings at:
http://energyjustice.net/mailman/listinfo/nukenet_energyjustice.net
*****************************************************************
35 Fw: Poisoned? US Soldiers sickened by DU
Date: Mon, 05 Apr 2004 17:59:59 -0700
----- Original Message -----
From: Dstacey
To: Undisclosed-Recipient:;
Sent: Sunday, April 04, 2004 3:12 PM
Subject: Poisoned?
New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com
Poisoned?
By JUAN GONZALEZ
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Saturday, April 3rd, 2004
Four soldiers from a New York Army National Guard company serving in Iraq
are contaminated with radiation likely caused by dust from depleted uranium
shells fired by U.S. troops, a Daily News investigation has found.
They are among several members of the same company, the 442nd Military
Police, who say they have been battling persistent physical ailments that
began last summer in the Iraqi town of Samawah.
"I got sick instantly in June," said Staff Sgt. Ray Ramos, a Brooklyn
housing cop. "My health kept going downhill with daily headaches, constant
numbness in my hands and rashes on my stomach."
A nuclear medicine expert who examined and tested nine soldiers from the
company says that four "almost certainly" inhaled radioactive dust from
exploded American shells manufactured with depleted uranium.
Laboratory tests conducted at the request of The News revealed traces of
two manmade forms of uranium in urine samples from four of the soldiers.
If so, the men - Sgt. Hector Vega, Sgt. Ray Ramos, Sgt. Agustin Matos and
Cpl. Anthony Yonnone - are the first confirmed cases of inhaled depleted
uranium exposure from the current Iraq conflict.
The 442nd, made up for the most part of New York cops, firefighters and
correction officers, is based in Orangeburg, Rockland County. Dispatched to
Iraq last Easter, the unit's members have been providing guard duty for
convoys, running jails and training Iraqi police. The entire company is due
to return home later this month.
"These are amazing results, especially since these soldiers were military
police not exposed to the heat of battle," said Dr. Asaf Duracovic, who
examined the G.I.s and performed the testing that was funded by The News.
"Other American soldiers who were in combat must have more depleted uranium
exposure," said Duracovic, a colonel in the Army Reserves who served in the
1991 Persian Gulf War.
While working at a military hospital in Delaware, he was one of the first
doctors to discover unusual radiation levels in Gulf War veterans. He has
since become a leading critic of the use of depleted uranium in warfare.
Depleted uranium, a waste product of the uranium enrichment process, has
been used by the U.S. and British military for more than 15 years in some
artillery shells and as armor plating for tanks. It is twice as heavy as lead.
Because of its density, "It is the superior heavy metal for armor to
protect tanks and to penetrate armor," Pentagon spokesman Michael
Kilpatrick said.
The Army and Air Force fired at least 127 tons of depleted uranium shells
in Iraq last year, Kilpatrick said. No figures have yet been released for
how much the Marines fired.
Kilpatrick said about 1,000 G.I.s back from the war have been tested by the
Pentagon for depleted uranium and only three have come up positive - all as
a result of shrapnel from DU shells.
But the test results for the New York guardsmen - four of nine positives
for DU - suggest the potential for more extensive radiation exposure among
coalition troops and Iraqi civilians.
Several Army studies in recent years have concluded that the low-level
radiation emitted when shells containing DU explode poses no significant
dangers. But some independent scientists and a few of the Army's own
reports indicate otherwise.
As a result, depleted uranium weapons have sparked increasing controversy
around the world. In January 2003, the European Parliament called for a
moratorium on their use after reports of an unusual number of leukemia
deaths among Italian soldiers who served in Kosovo, where DU weapons were
used.
I keep getting weaker. What is happening to me?
The Army says that only soldiers wounded by depleted uranium shrapnel or
who are inside tanks during an explosion face measurable radiation exposure.
But as far back as 1979, Leonard Dietz, a physicist at the Knolls Atomic
Power Laboratory upstate, discovered that DU-contaminated dust could travel
for long distances.
Dietz, who pioneered the technology to isolate uranium isotopes,
accidentally discovered that air filters with which he was experimenting
had collected radioactive dust from a National Lead Industries Plant that
was producing DU 26 miles away. His discovery led to a shutdown of the plant.
"The contamination was so heavy that they had to remove the topsoil from 52
properties around the plant," Dietz said.
All humans have at least tiny amounts of natural uranium in their bodies
because it is found in water and in the food supply, Dietz said. But
natural uranium is quickly and harmlessly excreted by the body.
Uranium oxide dust, which lodges in the lungs once inhaled and is not very
soluble, can emit radiation to the body for years.
"Anybody, civilian or soldier, who breathes these particles has a permanent
dose, and it's not going to decrease very much over time," said Dietz, who
retired in 1983 after 33 years as nuclear physicist. "In the long run ...
veterans exposed to ceramic uranium oxide have a major problem."
Critics of DU have noted that the Army's view of its dangers has changed
over time.
Before the 1991 Persian Gulf War, a 1990 Army report noted that depleted
uranium is "linked to cancer when exposures are internal, [and] chemical
toxicity causing kidney damage."
It was during the Gulf War that U.S. A-10 Warthog "tank buster" planes and
Abrams tanks first used DU artillery on a mass scale. The Pentagon says it
fired about 320 tons of DU in that war and that smaller amounts were also
used in the Serbian province of Kosovo.
In the Gulf War, Army brass did not warn soldiers about any risks from
exploding DU shells. An unknown number of G.I.s were exposed by shrapnel,
inhalation or handling battlefield debris.
Some veterans groups blame DU contamination as a factor in Gulf War
syndrome, the term for a host of ailments that afflicted thousands of vets
from that war.
Under pressure from veterans groups, the Pentagon commissioned several new
studies. One of those, published in 2000, concluded that DU, as a heavy
metal, "could pose a chemical hazard" but that Gulf War veterans "did not
experience intakes high enough to affect their health."
Pentagon spokesman Michael Kilpatrick said Army followup studies of 70
DU-contaminated Gulf War veterans have not shown serious health effects.
"For any heavy metal, there is no such thing as safe," Kilpatrick said.
"There is an issue of chemical toxicity, and for DU it is raised as
radiological toxicity as well."
But he said "the overwhelming conclusion" from studies of those who work
with uranium "show it has not produced any increase in cancers."
Several European studies, however, have linked DU to chromosome damage and
birth defects in mice. Many scientists say we still don't know enough about
the long-range effects of low-level radiation on the body to say any amount
is safe.
Britain's national science academy, the Royal Society, has called for
identifying where DU was used and is urging a cleanup of all contaminated
areas.
"A large number of American soldiers [in Iraq] may have had significant
exposure to uranium oxide dust," said Dr. Thomas Fasey, a pathologist at
Mount Sinai Medical Center and an expert on depleted uranium. "And the
health impact is worrisome for the future."
As for the soldiers of the 442nd, they're sick, frustrated and confused.
They say when they arrived in Iraq no one warned them about depleted
uranium and no one gave them dust masks.
Experts behind News probe
As part of the investigation by the Daily News, Dr. Asaf Duracovic, a
nuclear medicine expert who has conducted extensive research on depleted
uranium, examined the nine soldiers from the 442nd Military Police in late
December and collected urine specimens from each.
Another member of his team, Prof. Axel Gerdes, a geologist at Goethe
University in Frankfurt who specializes in analyzing uranium isotopes,
performed repeated tests on the samples over a week-long period. He used a
state-of-the art procedure called multiple collector inductively coupled
plasma-mass spectrometry.
Only about 100 laboratories worldwide have the same capability to identify
and measure various uranium isotopes in minute quantities, Gerdes said.
Gerdes concluded that four of the men had depleted uranium in their bodies.
Depleted uranium, which does not occur in nature, is created as a waste
product of uranium enrichment when some of the highly radioactive isotopes
in natural uranium, U-235 and U-234, are extracted.
Several of the men, according to Duracovic, also had minute traces of
another uranium isotope, U-236, that is produced only in a nuclear reaction
process.
"These men were almost certainly exposed to radioactive weapons on the
battlefield," Duracovic said.
He and Gerdes plan to issue a scientific paper on their study of the
soldiers at the annual meeting of the European Association of Nuclear
Medicine in Finland this year.
When DU shells explode, they permanently contaminate their target and the
area immediately around it with low-level radioactivity.
*****************************************************************
36 Guardian Unlimited: GIs Tested for Depleted Uranium Exposure
Monday April 5, 2004 11:31 PM
FORT DIX, N.J. (AP) - The U.S. Army is conducting medical tests
on a handful of GIs who complained of illnesses after reported
exposure to depleted uranium in Iraq.
Up to six soldiers from a National Guard unit based in
Orangeburg, N.Y., have undergone exams at Fort Dix, and three of
them remain there under observation, Fort Dix spokeswoman Carolee
Nisbet said Monday.
``We are following up on this. We are on top of it. It's not
something that has fallen by the wayside,'' she said.
Of nine members of the unit examined by a doctor at the request
of the New York Daily News, four had ``almost certainly'' inhaled
radioactive dust from spent U.S. artillery shells containing
depleted uranium, the newspaper reported Monday.
Six of the nine contacted the newspaper after unsuccessfully
appealing to the Army for testing because of unexplained
illnesses, the Daily News reported.
The soldiers complained of headaches, fatigue, shortness of
breath, nausea, dizziness, joint pain and unusually frequent
urination.
The exposures apparently occurred last summer when the 442nd
Military Police Co. served in Samawah, Iraq. Most members of the
unit, which includes many New York police officers, firefighters
and prison guards, remain in Iraq.
Military medical officials from Walter Reed Army Medical Center
in Washington and the Army's Center for Health Promotion and
Preventive Medicine conducted testing at Fort Dix, Nisbet said.
The Army would not identify the soldiers or say whether testing
revealed contamination or illness.
All National Guard and Reserve soldiers mobilized through Fort
Dix receive physical exams upon their return from overseas,
Nisbet said. The soldiers who complained of ailments asked for
and received a second round of evaluations, she said.
Depleted uranium, which is left over from the process of
enriching uranium for use as nuclear fuel, is an extremely dense
material that the U.S. and British militaries use for tank armor
and armor-piercing weapons. It is far less radioactive than
natural uranium.
Army spokeswoman Cynthia O. Smith would not comment Monday on
whether other troops have complained of similar ailments or
whether the Pentagon would take precautions aimed at preventing
future exposure.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
*****************************************************************
37 Las Vegas SUN: Six Held for Taking Ukraine Nuke Equipment
ASSOCIATED PRESS
KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - Authorities detained six men on suspicion
of stealing equipment from the Rivne nuclear plant in western
Ukraine to sell as scrap metal, a prosecutor said Monday.
Police arrested the plant's security officer and five workers on
suspicion of stealing the reactor's evaporator heating chamber,
said Mykola Tomylovich, a local deputy prosecutor, according to
the Interfax news agency.
The piece of equipment was from a batch of unused spare parts
and was not radioactive, a spokesman for the state-run
Energoatom told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of
anonymity. He said the nuclear plant was not affected and was
operating normally.
The suspects apparently tried to sell the equipment, worth more
than $150,000, to scrap metal dealers for $280, Tomylovich said.
Ukraine was the site of the world's worst nuclear disaster in
April 1986, with an explosion and fire at a reactor in the
Chernobyl nuclear plant. Chernobyl was closed in 2000.
--
*****************************************************************
38 NRC: STP Nuclear Operating Company Notice of Consideration of
FR Doc 04-7554
[Federal Register: April 5, 2004 (Volume 69, Number 65)]
[Notices] [Page 17718-17720] From the Federal Register Online via
GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr05ap04-119]
Issuance of Amendment to Facility Operating License, Proposed No
Significant Hazards Consideration Determination, and Opportunity
for A Hearing The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (the
Commission) is considering issuance of an amendment to Facility
Operating License Nos. NPF-76 and NPF-80, issued to STP Nuclear
Operating Company (STPNOC or the licensee), for operation of the
South Texas Project, Units 1 and 2, located in Matagorda County,
Texas.
The proposed amendment would change the Technical Specification
(TS) Surveillance Requirement (SR) 4.7.7.e.3 to add a footnote
that will allow an evaluation for points that do not meet the
\1/8\ inch Water Gauge criterion of the current TS. The footnote
would state that ``Measured points at a positive pressure but
less than \1/8\ inch Water Gauge are acceptable if an evaluation,
considering appropriate compensatory action, demonstrates that
the condition meets the requirements of GDC [General Design
Criterion]-19. The provisions of this note expire at 0800 on
September 19, 2005.'' During testing, STPNOC identified points on
the boundary of the control room envelope that do not meet the
\1/8\ inch Water Gauge requirement of SR 4.7.7.e.3. On March 17,
2004, STPNOC requested and received from the NRC staff
enforcement discretion from taking the TS actions required if SR
4.7.7.e.3 is not met. Based on information submitted as part of
the enforcement discretion process, STPNOC committed to submit a
proposed change to the TS.
Exigent approval of the proposed license amendments is needed in
accordance with the enforcement discretion granted on March 17,
2004. Therefore, STPNOC has requested approval of this license
amendment application on an exigent basis and issuance of the
amendment as described in the terms of the enforcement
discretion.
Before issuance of the proposed license amendment, the Commission
will have made findings required by the Atomic Energy Act of
1954, as amended (the Act) and the Commission's regulations.
Pursuant to 50.91(a)(6) of Title 10 of the Code of Federal
Regulations (10 CFR) for amendments to be granted under exigent
circumstances, the NRC staff must determine that the amendment
request involves no significant hazards consideration. Under the
Commission's regulations in 10 CFR 50.92, this means that
operation of the facility in accordance with the proposed
amendment would not (1) involve a significant increase in the
probability or consequences of an accident previously evaluated;
or (2) create the possibility of a new or different kind of
accident from any accident previously evaluated; or (3) involve a
significant reduction in a margin of safety. As required by 10
CFR
[[Page 17719]] 50.91(a), the licensee has provided its analysis
of the issue of no significant hazards consideration, which is
presented below: 1. Does the proposed change involve a
significant increase in the probability or consequences of an
accident previously evaluated? Response: No.
The proposed change does not involve a significant increase in
the probability or consequences of a previously evaluated
accident. The Control Room ventilation system has no significant
role as a potential accident initiator. The Control Room
ventilation system continues to remain functional and provides
positive pressure with respect to adjacent areas. The test
results demonstrate that the operator dose limits of General
Design Criterion 19 of 10 CFR 50, Appendix A are met.
2. Does the proposed change create the possibility of a new or
different accident from any accident previously evaluated?
Response: No.
The proposed change does not create the possibility of a new or
different accident from any previously evaluated. No new accident
precursors will be created by adding a provision to allow
compensatory action to mitigate the margin lost if the control
room envelope is degraded. The Control Room ventilation system
continues to remain functional and provides positive pressure
with respect to adjacent areas and to limit inleakage so that the
operator dose limits of General Design Criterion 19 of 10 CFR 50,
Appendix A are met.
3. Does the proposed change involve a significant reduction in a
margin of safety? Response: No.
The proposed change does not involve a significant reduction in
the margin of safety. Three trains of Control Room ventilation
remain functional and continue to provide positive pressure with
respect to adjacent plant areas. The proposed condition of the
plant meets the operator dose limits of General Design Criterion
19 of 10 CFR 50, Appendix A.
The NRC staff has reviewed the licensee's analysis and, based on
this review, it appears that the three standards of 10 CFR
50.92(c) are satisfied. Therefore, the NRC staff proposes to
determine that the amendment request involves no significant
hazards consideration.
The Commission is seeking public comments on this proposed
determination. Any comments received within 14 days after the
date of publication of this notice will be considered in making
any final determination.
Normally, the Commission will not issue the amendment until the
expiration of the 14-day notice period. However, should
circumstances change during the notice period, such that failure
to act in a timely way would result, for example, in derating or
shutdown of the facility, the Commission may issue the license
amendment before the expiration of the 14-day notice period,
provided that its final determination is that the amendment
involves no significant hazards consideration. The final
determination will consider all public and State comments
received. Should the Commission take this action, it will publish
in the Federal Register a notice of issuance. The Commission
expects that the need to take this action will occur very
infrequently.
Written comments may be submitted by mail to the Chief, Rules and
Directives Branch, Division of Administrative Services, Office of
Administration, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington,
DC 20555-0001, and should cite the publication date and page
number of this Federal Register notice. Written comments may also
be delivered to Room 6D59, Two White Flint North, 11545 Rockville
Pike, Rockville, Maryland, from 7:30 a.m. to 4:15 p.m. Federal
workdays. Documents may be examined, and/or copied for a fee, at
the NRC's Public Document Room (PDR), located at One White Flint
North, 11555 Rockville Pike (first floor), Rockville, Maryland.
The filing of requests for hearing and petitions for leave to
intervene is discussed below.
Within 60 days after the date of publication of this notice, the
licensee may file a request for a hearing with respect to
issuance of the amendment to the subject facility operating
license and any person whose interest may be affected by this
proceeding and who wishes to participate as a party in the
proceeding must file a written request for a hearing and a
petition for leave to intervene. Requests for a hearing and a
petition for leave to intervene shall be filed in accordance with
the Commission's ``Rules of Practice for Domestic Licensing
Proceedings'' in 10 CFR Part 2. Interested persons should consult
a current copy of 10 CFR 2.309, which is available at the
Commission's PDR, located at One White Flint North, Public File
Area 01F21, 11555 Rockville Pike (first floor), Rockville,
Maryland. Publicly available records will be accessible from the
Agencywide Documents Access and Management System's (ADAMS)
Public Electronic Reading Room on the Internet at the NRC Web
site, http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/crf/
[http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/leaving.cgi?from=leaving
FR.html&log=linklog&to=http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collecti
ons/crf/] .
If a request for a hearing or petition for leave to intervene is
filed by the above date, the Commission or a presiding officer
designated by the Commission or by the Chief Administrative Judge
of the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Panel, will rule on the
request and/or petition; and the Secretary or the Chief
Administrative Judge of the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board
will issue a notice of a hearing or an appropriate order.
As required by 10 CFR 2.309, a petition for leave to intervene
shall set forth with particularity the interest of the petitioner
in the proceeding, and how that interest may be affected by the
results of the proceeding. The petition should specifically
explain the reasons why intervention should be permitted with
particular reference to the following general requirements: (1)
The name, address and telephone number of the requestor or
petitioner; (2) the nature of the requestor's/petitioner's right
under the Act to be made a party to the proceeding; (3) the
nature and extent of the requestor's/petitioner's property,
financial, or other interest in the proceeding; and (4) the
possible effect of any decision or order which may be entered in
the proceeding on the requestor's/petitioner's interest. The
petition must also identify the specific contentions which the
petitioner/requestor seeks to have litigated at the proceeding.
Each contention must consist of a specific statement of the issue
of law or fact to be raised or controverted. In addition, the
petitioner/requestor shall provide a brief explanation of the
bases for the contention and a concise statement of the alleged
facts or expert opinion which support the contention and on which
the petitioner intends to rely in proving the contention at the
hearing. The petitioner/requestor must also provide references to
those specific sources and documents of which the
petitioner/requestor is aware and on which the
petitioner/requestor intends to rely to establish those facts or
expert opinion. The petitioner/requestor must provide sufficient
information to show that a genuine dispute exists with the
applicant on a material issue of law or fact.\1\ Contentions
shall be limited to matters within the scope of the amendment
under consideration.
The contention must be one which, if proven, would entitle the
petitioner/ requestor to relief. A petitioner/requestor who fails
to satisfy these requirements with respect to at least one
contention will not be permitted to participate as a party.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
---------- \1\ To the extent that the applications contain
attachments and supporting documents that are not publically
available because they are asserted to contain safeguards or
proprietary information, petitioners desiring access to this
information should contact applicant's counsel and discuss the
need for a protective order.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
---------- Each contention shall be given a separate numeric or
alpha designation
[[Page 17720]] within one of the following groups, and all like
subject-matters shall be grouped together.
1. Technical--primarily concerns issues relating to technical
and/ or health and safety matters discussed or referenced in the
applicant's safety analysis for the application (including issues
related to emergency planning and physical security to the extent
such matters are discussed or referenced in the application).
2. Environmental--primarily concerns issues relating to matters
discussed or referenced in the Environmental Report for the
application.
3. Miscellaneous--does not fall into one of the categories
outlined above.
As specified in 10 CFR 2.309, if two or more
requestors/petitioners seek to co-sponsor a contention or propose
substantially the same contention, the requestors/petitioners
will be required to jointly designate a single representative who
shall have the authority to act for the requestors/petitioners
with respect to that contention within ten (10) days after
admission of such contention.
Those permitted to intervene become parties to the proceeding,
subject to any limitations in the order granting leave to
intervene, and have the opportunity to participate fully in the
conduct of the hearing.
If a hearing is requested, the Commission will make a final
determination on the issue of no significant hazards
consideration. The final determination will serve to decide when
the hearing is held. If the final determination is that the
amendment request involves no significant hazards consideration,
the Commission may issue the amendment and make it immediately
effective, notwithstanding the request for a hearing. Any hearing
held would take place after issuance of the amendment. If the
final determination is that the amendment request involves a
significant hazards consideration, any hearing held would take
place before the issuance of any amendment.
A request for a hearing or a petition for leave to intervene must
be filed by: (1) First class mail addressed to the Office of the
Secretary of the Commission, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission,
Washington, DC 20555-0001, Attention: Rulemaking and
Adjudications Staff; (2) courier, express mail, and expedited
delivery services: Office of the Secretary, Sixteenth Floor, One
White Flint North, 11555 Rockville Pike, Rockville, Maryland,
20852, Attention: Rulemaking and Adjudications Staff; (3) e-mail
addressed to the Office of the Secretary, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory
Commission, HEARINGDOCKET@NRC.GOV [HEARINGDOCKET@NRC.GOV] ; or
(4) facsimile transmission addressed to the Office of the
Secretary, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC,
Attention: Rulemaking and Adjudications Staff at (301) 415-1101,
verification number is (301) 415-1966. A copy of the request for
hearing and petition for leave to intervene should also be sent
to the Office of the General Counsel, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory
Commission, Washington, DC 20555-0001, and it is requested that
copies be transmitted either by means of facsimile transmission
to (301) 415-3725 or by email to
OGCMailCenter@nrc.gov [ OGCMailCenter@nrc.gov] . A copy of the
request for hearing and petition for leave to intervene should
also be sent to A. H. Gutterman, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, 1111
Pennsylvania Avenue, NW., Washington, DC 20004, attorney for the
licensee.
Nontimely requests and/or petitions and contentions will not be
entertained absent a determination by the Commission or the
presiding officer or the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board that
the petition, request and/or the contentions should be granted
based on a balancing of the factors specified in 10 CFR
2.309(a)(1)(i)-(viii). For further details with respect to this
action, see the application for amendment dated March 18, 2004,
which is available for public inspection at the Commission's PDR,
located at One White Flint North, Public File Area O1 F21, 11555
Rockville Pike (first floor), Rockville, Maryland. Publicly
available records will be accessible electronically from the
ADAMS Public Electronic Reading Room on the Internet at the NRC
Web site http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams.html
[http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/leaving.cgi?from=leaving
FR.html&log=linklog&to=http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams.html]
. Persons who do not have access to ADAMS or who encounter
problems in accessing the documents located in ADAMS, should
contact the NRC PDR Reference staff by telephone at 1 (800)
397-4209, (301) 415-4737, or by e-mail to pdr@nrc.gov
[pdr@nrc.gov] . Dated at Rockville, Maryland, this 30th day of
March 2004.
For the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Michael K. Webb, Project Manager, Section 1, Project Directorate
IV, Division of Licensing Project Management, Office of Nuclear
Reactor Regulation.
[FR Doc. 04-7554 Filed 4-2-04; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 7590-01-P
*****************************************************************
39 New York Daily News: Daily News Special Investigation - Poisoned?
By JUAN GONZALEZ DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Army Sgt. Hector Vega at his Bronx home.
Augustin Matos with his daughter Samantha
Four soldiers from a New York Army National Guard company serving
in Iraq are contaminated with radiation likely caused by dust
from depleted uranium shells fired by U.S. troops, a Daily News
investigation has found.
They are among several members of the same company, the 442nd
Military Police, who say they have been battling persistent
physical ailments that began last summer in the Iraqi town of
Samawah.
"I got sick instantly in June," said Staff Sgt. Ray Ramos, a
Brooklyn housing cop. "My health kept going downhill with daily
headaches, constant numbness in my hands and rashes on my
stomach."
A nuclear medicine expert who examined and tested nine soldiers
from the company says that four "almost certainly" inhaled
radioactive dust from exploded American shells manufactured with
depleted uranium.
Laboratory tests conducted at the request of The News revealed
traces of two manmade forms of uranium in urine samples from four
of the soldiers.
If so, the men - Sgt. Hector Vega, Sgt. Ray Ramos, Sgt. Agustin
Matos and Cpl. Anthony Yonnone - are the first confirmed cases of
inhaled depleted uranium exposure from the current Iraq conflict.
The 442nd, made up for the most part of New York cops,
firefighters and correction officers, is based in Orangeburg,
Rockland County. Dispatched to Iraq last Easter, the unit's
members have been providing guard duty for convoys, running jails
and training Iraqi police. The entire company is due to return
home later this month.
"These are amazing results, especially since these soldiers were
military police not exposed to the heat of battle," said Dr. Asaf
Duracovic, who examined the G.I.s and performed the testing that
was funded by The News.
"Other American soldiers who were in combat must have more
depleted uranium exposure," said Duracovic, a colonel in the Army
Reserves who served in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
While working at a military hospital in Delaware, he was one of
the first doctors to discover unusual radiation levels in Gulf
War veterans. He has since become a leading critic of the use of
depleted uranium in warfare.
Depleted uranium, a waste product of the uranium enrichment
process, has been used by the U.S. and British military for more
than 15 years in some artillery shells and as armor plating for
tanks. It is twice as heavy as lead.
Because of its density, "It is the superior heavy metal for
armor to protect tanks and to penetrate armor," Pentagon
spokesman Michael Kilpatrick said.
The Army and Air Force fired at least 127 tons of depleted
uranium shells in Iraq last year, Kilpatrick said. No figures
have yet been released for how much the Marines fired.
Kilpatrick said about 1,000 G.I.s back from the war have been
tested by the Pentagon for depleted uranium and only three have
come up positive - all as a result of shrapnel from DU shells.
But the test results for the New York guardsmen - four of nine
positives for DU - suggest the potential for more extensive
radiation exposure among coalition troops and Iraqi civilians.
Several Army studies in recent years have concluded that the
low-level radiation emitted when shells containing DU explode
poses no significant dangers. But some independent scientists and
a few of the Army's own reports indicate otherwise.
As a result, depleted uranium weapons have sparked increasing
controversy around the world. In January 2003, the European
Parliament called for a moratorium on their use after reports of
an unusual number of leukemia deaths among Italian soldiers who
served in Kosovo, where DU weapons were used.
I keep getting weaker. What is happening to me?
The Army says that only soldiers wounded by depleted uranium
shrapnel or who are inside tanks during an explosion face
measurable radiation exposure.
But as far back as 1979, Leonard Dietz, a physicist at the
Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory upstate, discovered that
DU-contaminated dust could travel for long distances.
Dietz, who pioneered the technology to isolate uranium isotopes,
accidentally discovered that air filters with which he was
experimenting had collected radioactive dust from a National Lead
Industries Plant that was producing DU 26 miles away. His
discovery led to a shutdown of the plant.
"The contamination was so heavy that they had to remove the
topsoil from 52 properties around the plant," Dietz said.
All humans have at least tiny amounts of natural uranium in
their bodies because it is found in water and in the food supply,
Dietz said. But natural uranium is quickly and harmlessly
excreted by the body.
Uranium oxide dust, which lodges in the lungs once inhaled and
is not very soluble, can emit radiation to the body for years.
"Anybody, civilian or soldier, who breathes these particles has a
permanent dose, and it's not going to decrease very much over
time," said Dietz, who retired in 1983 after 33 years as nuclear
physicist. "In the long run ... veterans exposed to ceramic
uranium oxide have a major problem."
Critics of DU have noted that the Army's view of its dangers has
changed over time.
Before the 1991 Persian Gulf War, a 1990 Army report noted that
depleted uranium is "linked to cancer when exposures are
internal, [and] chemical toxicity causing kidney damage."
It was during the Gulf War that U.S. A-10 Warthog "tank buster"
planes and Abrams tanks first used DU artillery on a mass scale.
The Pentagon says it fired about 320 tons of DU in that war and
that smaller amounts were also used in the Serbian province of
Kosovo.
In the Gulf War, Army brass did not warn soldiers about any risks
from exploding DU shells. An unknown number of G.I.s were exposed
by shrapnel, inhalation or handling battlefield debris.
Some veterans groups blame DU contamination as a factor in Gulf
War syndrome, the term for a host of ailments that afflicted
thousands of vets from that war.
Under pressure from veterans groups, the Pentagon commissioned
several new studies. One of those, published in 2000, concluded
that DU, as a heavy metal, "could pose a chemical hazard" but
that Gulf War veterans "did not experience intakes high enough to
affect their health."
Pentagon spokesman Michael Kilpatrick said Army followup studies
of 70 DU-contaminated Gulf War veterans have not shown serious
health effects.
"For any heavy metal, there is no such thing as safe,"
Kilpatrick said. "There is an issue of chemical toxicity, and for
DU it is raised as radiological toxicity as well."
But he said "the overwhelming conclusion" from studies of those
who work with uranium "show it has not produced any increase in
cancers."
Several European studies, however, have linked DU to chromosome
damage and birth defects in mice. Many scientists say we still
don't know enough about the long-range effects of low-level
radiation on the body to say any amount is safe.
Britain's national science academy, the Royal Society, has
called for identifying where DU was used and is urging a cleanup
of all contaminated areas.
"A large number of American soldiers [in Iraq] may have had
significant exposure to uranium oxide dust," said Dr. Thomas
Fasey, a pathologist at Mount Sinai Medical Center and an expert
on depleted uranium. "And the health impact is worrisome for the
future."
As for the soldiers of the 442nd, they're sick, frustrated and
confused. They say when they arrived in Iraq no one warned them
about depleted uranium and no one gave them dust masks.
Experts behind News probe
As part of the investigation by the Daily News, Dr. Asaf
Duracovic, a nuclear medicine expert who has conducted extensive
research on depleted uranium, examined the nine soldiers from the
442nd Military Police in late December and collected urine
specimens from each.
Another member of his team, Prof. Axel Gerdes, a geologist at
Goethe University in Frankfurt who specializes in analyzing
uranium isotopes, performed repeated tests on the samples over a
week-long period. He used a state-of-the art procedure called
multiple collector inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry.
Only about 100 laboratories worldwide have the same capability
to identify and measure various uranium isotopes in minute
quantities, Gerdes said.
Gerdes concluded that four of the men had depleted uranium in
their bodies. Depleted uranium, which does not occur in nature,
is created as a waste product of uranium enrichment when some of
the highly radioactive isotopes in natural uranium, U-235 and
U-234, are extracted.
Several of the men, according to Duracovic, also had minute
traces of another uranium isotope, U-236, that is produced only
in a nuclear reaction process.
"These men were almost certainly exposed to radioactive weapons
on the battlefield," Duracovic said.
He and Gerdes plan to issue a scientific paper on their study of
the soldiers at the annual meeting of the European Association of
Nuclear Medicine in Finland this year.
When DU shells explode, they permanently contaminate their
target and the area immediately around it with low-level
radioactivity.
Originally published on April 3, 2004
All contents © 2004 Daily News, L.P.
*****************************************************************
40 KR: Lawsuits first ray of light for victims of secret Russian nuclear wasteland
KR Washington Bureau
| 04/05/2004 |
[webmaster@krwashington.com]
Safia Skaripova comforts her son, 8-year-old Misha, at her
small apartment in southern Russia.
By Mark McDonald
Knight Ridder Newspapers
KARABOLKA, Russia - One of the world's ghastliest nuclear
accidents happened just upwind of here, in a secret atomic city
that didn't have a name and never appeared on any maps. An
explosion of radioactive sludge sent up a toxic plume that
contaminated a quarter-million people.
This was the Soviet Union, 1957, but only now are the voices of
the victims being heard.
Communist authorities responded to the accident with a global
cover-up and a scorched-earth cleanup. Even as they evacuated
entire Russian communities, they were sending 1,500 ethnic Tatar
farmers into the hot zones to do the dirty work. Children were
pressed into service, too, from fourth-graders on up.
Many of the "young liquidators," as the children came to be
known, died from radiation-related diseases soon after the
explosion, which few people know about even today. They came down
with afflictions they couldn't have imagined, illnesses they
couldn't even pronounce.
Finally, however, the surviving liquidators are starting to win
victories in the Russian courts. It's taken nearly half a century
for Moscow to admit any sort of responsibility for the disaster,
but three Karabolka residents recently won absurdly small but
perhaps precedent-setting judgments that give them reparations of
$8 a month, plus an annual stay at a Russian spa.
The children and grandchildren of the liquidators inherited a sad
array of congenital health problems. They, too, have begun filing
damage claims.
The Karabolka farmers never were told about the dangers of the
explosion at the secret nuclear lab called Mayak ("The
Lighthouse"). Authorities told the villagers the cleanup was
necessary because crude oil somehow had seeped into their fields
and groundwater. Even if the villagers had been told the truth,
terms such as atom, radiation and nuclear simply weren't part of
the vocabulary of a remote village in the southern Urals circa
1957.
The Karabolka children helped with the nuclear triage alongside
their parents. Week after week they dug potatoes and carrots out
of the ground with their bare hands, then buried the contaminated
crops in deep pits. They cleaned bricks that were covered in
radioactive soot. They buried dead cattle, filled in poisoned
wells and dismantled clapboard houses.
"Our hands were bleeding. Everybody was vomiting," said Glasha
Ismagilova, a 57-year-old paramedic who was an 11-year-old tomboy
at the time. "My vomit was very green. The doctor looked at it
and said I had eaten too many peas, and he sent me back to work.
But of course I hadn't eaten any peas at all."
The explosion wouldn't be the only nuclear disaster to befall the
area. People living along the nearby Techa River now are suing
for the damage caused by decades of Mayak engineers dumping
radioactive waste into the water. That practice, which began in
the late 1940s, ended only recently.
Environmental experts have called the Techa district the most
polluted place on earth. Radiation levels once reached the rough
equivalent of four Chernobyl accidents.
"But this was no accident," said Alexander Aklayev, the director
of a small, underfunded research hospital in Chelyabinsk that
studies and treats radiation diseases. "The Techa discharges were
authorized."
Aklayev's database, developed with help from the U.S. National
Cancer Institute, is tracking 69,000 documented victims from the
Mayak disasters.
They've even issued ID cards to the sufferers.
Victim No. 001213 is Safia Skaripova.
"I want the state to pay for killing my first son and damaging my
second son," said Skaripova, 51, a single mother who's launched
the first lawsuit based on what's known in Russia as moral
damages.
Skaripova wasn't exposed during the Mayak blast, but she grew up
along the Techa, swimming in its pools, drinking its water,
eating its fish. She believes her contamination from the
radioactive river caused Valery to die of brain cancer at age 5
and Misha, 8, to have Down syndrome.
"Children exposed to Mayak are no different than the children
from Chernobyl," she said, stroking Misha's broad, sweet face.
"They have the same diseases. They have the same fate."
"A big group of children," Aklayev agreed, "were irradiated
inside the womb."
Glasha Ismagilova spoke calmly about her own various illnesses,
about the new 3-inch tumor on her liver and the painful crumbling
of her knees and hips.
She's a strong, plainspoken woman, but the tears started to come
when she remembered borrowing her mother's orange sundress on
that morning 47 years ago when the Mayak cleanup began. She
wanted to look nice that day because she thought she and her
fourth-grade class were headed off on a special field trip.
They were headed, of course, to their doom.
"We were treated like laboratory rabbits," she said. "This was a
horrible crime by the state. What kind of monsters would assign
children to do such work?"
The secret Mayak lab, hidden in the closed city now known as
Ozersk, was the epicenter of the Soviet nuclear-weapons program.
A heavily guarded city of some 80,000, Ozersk is still operating
full-bore, and it's still off-limits to nonresidents.
Sept. 29 arrived hot and hazy that year, another muggy Sunday in
the southern Urals, another typical workday down on the
collective farm. But then in midafternoon, 70 tons of superheated
atomic waste blew the lid off its concrete storage vault.
The ground in neighboring Karabolka, 12 miles away, shook so
badly that one resident said "the teacups were flying." World War
II combat veterans in the village thought Cold War hostilities
had broken out. Women hurried their children indoors while the
men climbed onto barn roofs and haystacks to look for approaching
American tanks.
All they could see was a strange cloud - black and low, and
coming their way.
The cloud was gone the next morning - it rained during the night
- but a few days later a squad of Red Army soldiers arrived to
seal off the Tatar half of Karabolka. Nobody in, nobody out,
except to help in the decontamination effort on the far side of
the village, where there was a native Russian community.
The initial cleanup lasted throughout the fall of `57, then began
again in the spring of 1958 when the winter snows receded.
Once again, the kids were taken out of school and put to work.
Almost all of them were Muslims, the children of ethnic Tatar and
Bashkir families that had lived in the area for centuries. A
couple hundred Russian families lived across town; these "Volga
Russians" were relative newcomers who'd come to work in the
foundries and chemical plants in the nearby industrial center of
Chelyabinsk.
"But when we got there, not a single soul was left in Russian
Karabolka," Ismagilova said. "They had all been evacuated and
resettled."
Aklayev, the clinic director, said 10,000 people from seven
villages were resettled after the blast. "No one knows why some
were resettled (from Karabolka) and others were not," he said.
"Even for the evacuees, though, it was too late."
Ismagilova doesn't buy the government's explanation that the
Tatar side of her village was safe enough while the Russian side
had been contaminated. She said it was genocide.
"Our farms and houses were right next to the Russians'," she
said. "They lived on one side ... we lived on the other side. But
our (Tatar) families were not well-educated, so it was easier for
the authorities to keep us in the dark. They used us to clean up
their disaster."
Sipping tea in her mother's home in the village, Ismagilova
scraped the frost from a windowpane and looked out at Karabolka's
snow-covered fields. Even now, more than four decades on, the
irradiated fields and pastures remain dangerous and unplantable:
no hay, no potatoes, no carrots.
Only 520 destitute villagers remain from an original population
of 2,900.
"Almost all the people here were liquidators, but they're too old
and sick to press their claims," she said, the tears coming
again. "They did the state's dirty work 45 years ago and now they
have no money. Not even enough for bread. They have no future."
*****************************************************************
41 NEWS.com.au: Worker may sue over uranium drink
(April 5, 2004)
By Karen Michelmore
A WORKER at an Australian mine is considering legal action after
falling ill from drinking water mistakenly contaminated with
uranium.
Twelve workers at Energy Resources of Australia's Ranger mine in
Kakadu National Park reported suffering nausea, headaches and
stomach cramps after drinking the contaminated water.
The Ranger mine - Australia's biggest uranium mine - was shut
down for eight days after the contamination was discovered on
March 24. The mine's uranium ore processing plant, where the
contamination originated from, remains closed.
The water supply became polluted with uranium and other
chemicals after processed water was mistakenly connected to the
drinking water supply.
Federal Environment Minister David Kemp today said the incident
was unacceptable, and he had asked for a full report.
"This event should not have happened - it's very hard to see
standing from outside the mine how it did happen," Dr Kemp told
ABC radio.
"There's obviously management issues that need to be addressed
within the mine ... (and) we will make sure those steps are
taken."
Worker Paul McDonald said he was sacked by his contractor after
returning home from the Northern Territory to Perth to seek
further medical treatment.
Mr McDonald, a casual fitter, said he had only been at Ranger a
couple of days when the contamination occurred.
He said he was now considering legal action after falling ill.
Mr McDonald said he only found out about the extent of the
contamination by reading about it "on a newspaper billboard".
"We actually read it in the newspaper ... (that) it was
contaminated with uranium 400 times above the accepted level and
obviously we all went into a panic then," Mr McDonald told ABC
radio.
"I was just very annoyed that nobody had been and told me
exactly how serious it was - I just thought the contamination had
been just probably a little too much sulphur or chloride or
whatever.
"I was mortified when I was found out it was uranium and another
cocktail of acids."
ERA had paid all of his medical bills, he said.
"You feel okay and then all of a sudden you go into this sick
feeling for three or four hours, and then you come out and you
feel okay again.
"The doctors ... really have not got a lot of idea how to deal
with this, because not many people go around drinking uranium."
A spokeswoman for ERA said the company was working with the NT
government and the Office of the Supervising Scientist to fully
investigate the incident.
"It's hoped that preliminary investigations may soon be
completed," the spokeswoman said.
"Some affected persons on site were employees of contractors
based in Perth and we understand that some people have have
sought legal advice.
"ERA has implemented a program of providing information, support
and counselling, including specialist medical advice for those
who might have been affected by the incident."
AAP
Copyright 2004 News Limited. All times AEST (GMT+10).
*****************************************************************
42 Las Vegas SUN: Nevada says DOE isn't telling those affected of Yucca rail plan
Today: April 05, 2004 at 8:51:08 PDT
ASSOCIATED PRESS
LAS VEGAS (AP) - Nevada is accusing the federal government of
neglecting to inform ranchers, miners and rural Nevada residents
about plans to withdraw 319 miles of federal land from public
use while studying a rail corridor to a national nuclear waste
dump at Yucca Mountain.
The Bureau of Land Management has a "proactive responsibility"
to ensure the Energy Department tells affected parties about its
plans, the Nuclear Projects Agency Nevada said in written
comments submitted last week on the proposed Caliente corridor.
"In this regard, both the BLM and the DOE have been derelict in
their duties and responsibilities," the document said.
Allen Benson, a spokesman for the Energy Department's Office of
Repository Development in Las Vegas, told the Las Vegas
Review-Journal for a Monday report that the department had not
seen the state's comments and could not comment.
Benson said no decision has been made on the proposed Caliente
corridor rail line, or whether to ship most waste to the Yucca
Mountain repository by rail.
But the department was following the law for developing a rail
spur to Yucca Mountain, Benson said.
The state agency, headed by Bob Loux, submitted 16 pages of
comment before a comment period closed March 29 on the Energy
Department and Bureau of Land Management proposal to withdraw
the land from public use for 20 years.
"For most, if not all, of the ranchers impacted by this action,
the first indication they had that such an action was
contemplated was the December 29th Federal Register notice," the
state said.
One rancher, Joe B. Fallini Jr., submitted written comments
echoing the state concerns.
"Why was the Twin Springs Ranch, clearly an affected party,
never notified or invited to these public hearings?" Fallini
asked in a six-page letter to the BLM.
Dennis Samuelson, Bureau of Land Management realty specialist,
said his office received and will forward to the Energy
Department about 50 written comments on land-withdrawal
requests.
Loux said Nevada was laying the groundwork for legal challenges
of what the state contends is the Energy Department's reluctance
to follow the National Environmental Policy Act.
He told the Review-Journal the state's biggest concern is the
plan to withdraw the corridor land for 20 years. Nevada also
calls a 1-mile-wide corridor "wildly excessive."
Benson said the actual right-of-way for a rail line would be "a
couple hundred feet."
The state also raised concerns about the possibility of
environmental damage from thousands of rail shipments during a
40-year nuclear waste transportation campaign.
According to the BLM, the rail corridor would cut across two
wilderness study areas, Weepah Spring and South Reveille, and
would come within about a mile of two other wilderness study
areas.
Loux said the Energy Department lacks a plan to ship 77,000 tons
of radioactive waste from commercial power reactors in 39 states
to Nevada to be entombed in the yet-to-be-built repository, 90
miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Energy Department officials said last week they were not sure a
rail spur across Nevada can be built in time for the Yucca
Mountain project to open in 2010.
The agency plans by the end of the year to submit to the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission an application for licenses to build and
operate the repository and take possession of the waste.
Information from: Las Vegas Review-Journal
--
*****************************************************************
43 Las Vegas SUN: DOE picks rail option, Caliente corridor to Nevada nuke dump
Today: April 05, 2004 at 16:06:02 PDT
By KEN RITTER ASSOCIATED PRESS
LAS VEGAS (AP) - Radioactive waste bound for a planned national
nuclear dump in Nevada would be transported by trains on a
319-mile rail line to be built across the state, the federal
government announced Monday.
Allen Benson, spokesman for the project, said the Energy
Department believes the rail line will cost $880 million and
take four years to build.
"Of the alternatives, this is the most feasible route," Benson
said.
The department has made no announcement about the routes it
intends to use to transport the waste from 127 sites across the
nation to a rail head near Caliente, 150 miles northeast of Las
Vegas near the Utah line.
Nevada officials and anti-dump activists have derided the
Caliente-to-Yucca Mountain route - which loops around the vast
Nevada Test Site and Nellis Air Force Base bombing range - as
unrealistically expensive, circuitous and dangerous.
Bob Loux, state nuclear projects chief, predicted Monday that
despite the announcement, the Energy Department eventually will
decide to ship nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain almost
exclusively by truck.
Nevada consultants say it will take nearly 10 years to acquire
necessary land and build the rail line, at a cost of more than
$2 billion.
"We think there are going to be too many logistical problems,"
Loux said of the rail route.
Shipping waste by truck would address some of the problems, he
said. "But it won't be as safe."
Regardless, Loux said state officials will try to challenge the
rail plan.
"When it comes out, we're going to look at it and meet with our
lawyers about it," Loux said. "This is the most difficult to do,
by far, of the options."
Making rail - rather than trucks - the preferred method for
shipping nuclear waste to the Yucca Mountain dump 90 miles
northwest of Las Vegas and choosing the Caliente corridor as the
preferred route becomes official when the decision is published
in the Federal Register, Benson said.
The Caliente-to-Yucca route was one of five originally
considered and among two finalists announced in December. The
department's backup route, the Carlin Corridor, would have cut
323 miles north-to-south from between Carlin and Battle Mountain
in northern Nevada to Yucca Mountain.
Two of the other rejected routes skirted Las Vegas - home to 1.6
million residents - and the third traveled north-south through
the vast Nellis Air Force Base bombing range and the Nevada Test
Site.
The Bush administration and Congress in July 2002 approved Yucca
Mountain as the site to store 77,000 tons of radioactive waste
now held in 39 states. The Energy Department plans by the end of
the year to submit to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission an
application for licenses to build and operate the repository.
Benson said community meetings will be held May 3-5 in Amargosa
Valley, Goldfield and Caliente to collect comments about the
process leading to an environmental study next spring on the
railway route.
"The purpose is to help people understand what it is that the
department is proposing to do so they can make comments," Benson
said.
Nevada has accused the federal government of neglecting to
inform ranchers, miners and rural Nevada residents about its
plan to withdraw about 319 square miles of federal land from
public use while studying the rail corridor to Yucca Mountain.
Loux said the state is concerned about the plan to withdraw a
1-mile-wide swath of land across Nevada from public use for 20
years.
Benson said the width of the right of way would be far less than
that.
The Energy Department would begin building the rail line after
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issues the repository an
operating license in 2007, Benson said. Last week DOE officials
said they were unsure whether a rail spur across Nevada could be
built in time for the project to open in 2010.
--
*****************************************************************
44 Las Vegas RJ: YUCCA MOUNTAIN: Railroad secrecy irks state
Monday, April 05, 2004
Officials set aside more than 300 milesof Nevada land for
hauling nuclear waste By KEITH ROGERS
REVIEW-JOURNAL
The Department of Energy has kept ranchers, miners and rural
Nevada residents in the dark about its plan to withdraw more
than 300 miles of public land to study a rail corridor for
hauling nuclear waste from Caliente to Yucca Mountain, state
officials contend in comments about the proposal.
"For most, if not all, of the ranchers impacted by this action,
the first indication they had that such an action was
contemplated was the December 29th Federal Register notice," the
state Nuclear Projects Agency said in written comments last week
to the Bureau of Land Management.
The agency, led by Bob Loux, said the BLM "has a proactive
responsibility" to ensure that the Energy Department has told
affected parties about its plans and potential effects "and has
sought their input prior to having made the request for
withdrawal. In this regard, both the BLM and the DOE have been
derelict in their duties and responsibilities."
At least one rancher, Joe B. Fallini Jr., has submitted written
comments that align with the state's concerns.
"Why was the Twin Springs Ranch, clearly an affected party,
never notified or invited to these public hearings?" Fallini
asked in a six-page letter to the BLM, referring to numerous
hearings he said were held regarding a preferred rail route.
In all, Fallini seeks answers to 23 questions about DOE's
planned rail corridor.
The state submitted its 16-page document as the comment period
on the land withdrawal notice closed a week ago today.
The submitted comments are general in nature, but Loux said
they are aimed at laying the groundwork for possible legal
challenges over what the state contends is DOE's reluctance to
follow the National Environmental Policy Act.
In a telephone interview last week, Loux said the state's
biggest concern is the length of time for the corridor
withdrawal, 20 years.
He said the feasibility of building a rail spur still is
embryonic. And he said DOE lacks a national transportation
strategy to carry out its plan to ship 77,000 tons of
radioactive defense waste and spent nuclear fuel from U.S.
commercial power reactors to a yet-to-be-constructed repository
in Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
"They're doing a lot of disruption of a lot of people's lives
in central Nevada. ... It's not necessary to withdraw this land
for 20 years," Loux said.
A state BLM official, realty specialist Dennis Samuelson, said
his office has received about 50 written comments on
land-withdrawal requests, including the state's document. All
the comments will be forwarded for the Department of Energy to
address.
Allen Benson, a spokesman for the DOE's Office of Repository
Development, said department officials haven't seen the state's
document and can't comment on it. He said the department hasn't
reached a final decision on the Caliente corridor or the mostly
rail transportation mode.
Although the 319-mile Caliente corridor is 1 mile wide, Benson
said, the actual right-of-way needed for a rail line would be "a
couple hundred feet."
He said the department is following the law "and will continue
to follow all the procedures that are required" for siting a
rail spur to Yucca Mountain.
Because the Energy Department is not sure it can get a rail spur
built in time for the repository's targeted opening in 2010,
federal officials said last week they are considering trucking
casks of spent fuel assemblies to the mountain from a
rail-transfer station in the Caliente area during the first six
years of a shipping campaign.
That plan hinges on whether the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
issues the DOE licenses to build and operate the repository and
take possession of the waste. The Energy Department intends to
submit its license application by the end of this year.
Nevada officials claim a 1-mile-wide corridor is "wildly
excessive."
"A corridor a quarter of a mile wide, or even less, would still
provide more than enough land for conducting studies and for
constructing and operating the proposed rail line," according to
the state's comments.
According to the BLM, the rail corridor would cut across two
wilderness study areas, Weepah Spring and South Reveille, and
would come within about a mile of two other wilderness study
areas.
Samuelson, the BLM realty specialist, said the Energy
Department will have to address impacts of a rail corridor on
such wild lands. "The way I understand it, Congress would have
to release those areas for a rail line," he said.
State officials raised concerns about the potential for
environmental damage from thousands of rail shipments during a
40-year, nuclear waste transportation campaign.
"An accident involving release of this material could result in
massive and long-lasting environmental damage," state officials
said. "Even without an accident, repeated exposure to routine
radiation being emitted by the shipping containers over long
periods of time can result in negative health consequences.
"The mere fact that the land will be used as a nuclear waste
transportation corridor also has the potential to stigmatize
both the withdrawn land and surrounding areas, having potential
effects on property values and other economic impacts."
Copyright Las Vegas Review-Journal
*****************************************************************
45 Las Vegas SUN: Ex-NTSB chief rips nuke transport plan
By Suzanne Struglinski
SUN WASHINGTON BUREAU
WASHINGTON -- The Energy Department needs a clear
transportation plan on how it intends to ship nuclear waste to
Nevada, Jim Hall, former chairman of the National Transportation
Safety Board, told congressional aides Friday.
A lack of final decisions on shipping routes, what types of
trains will be used -- if any -- and which containers will hold
the waste leaves too much uncertainty, Hall said. He spoke on
behalf of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects at a Foundation
for Nuclear Studies briefing for congressional staff.
The department plans on shipping nuclear waste to Yucca
Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, by 2010 if it
receives a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The
department anticipates announcing if it will use rail or truck
shipments in Nevada sometime this month.
If the department chooses the mostly rail scenarios, Hall said
it is "almost a no-brainer" the Energy Department use dedicated
trains that would only move spent fuel and nothing else.
John Vincent, a senior project manager for the Nuclear Energy
Institute who also spoke at the briefing, agreed that dedicated
trains would be best and said a plan for moving the waste seems
to be evolving.
Vincent also pointed to the industry's clean safety record on
moving spent fuel through the country with no problems for years.
"We continue to tell DOE (the Energy Department) they can learn
from the success of commercial shipments," Vincent said.
*****************************************************************
46 Las Vegas SUN: Battle lines form over fed funds for project
By Suzanne Struglinski
SUN WASHINGTON BUREAU
WASHINGTON -- The Yucca Mountain project, which would build a
place to bury the nation's high-level nuclear waste in Nevada by
2010, will need a $1.4 billion annual budget by 2007, and it
will need more yearly after that, according to Energy Department
estimates.
The size of the budget, a large one for a single program, even
by federal standards, has proponents of the nation's first
proposed nuclear waste repository fighting to remove the project
from the annual battle for federal funding. But the project's
opponents want to keep Yucca Mountain in the thick of the budget
debate, giving them a yearly forum to question its safety and
the soundness of its science.
To put it in context, the estimated cost of the Hoover Dam
bypass bridge, a fairly large and complex project, is estimated
at a total $234 million. One year of Yucca money is almost four
times the cost of the bridge.
The Energy Department requested $880 million for next year.
Similar requests in past years have been cut -- and this year's
request has been cut in committee -- but this year's debate is
also marked by an Energy Department move to tap directly into a
fund set aside for nuclear waste disposal.
The $14 billion Nuclear Waste Fund comes from a fee nuclear
utilities pay for every kilowatt hour sold. The law requires the
fee to be paid, yet there is no law requiring the money to be
spent, said Steve Kraft, director of waste management for the
Nuclear Energy Institute, a nuclear power industry group.
Each year Congress sets an overall budget limit that it divides
among the 13 spending bills. Lawmakers negotiate how to allocate
that money among numerous federal programs in each bill,
especially since each person has different priorities. The Yucca
Mountain project is among the programs whose budgets get
increased and cut as deals get made to finalize the bill and
stay within its spending cap.
Since 1995 Congress has provided the Yucca program with $712
million less than the department requested, Kraft said. The
shortfall forces the Energy Department to "find ways of coping"
as it tries to stay on track for the 2010 opening date, he said.
"There are a small number of members of Congress who have
significant questions in their mind about the project and don't
want to fund it," Kraft said.
As the Yucca price tag increases it will strain the energy and
water spending bill, which funds other Energy Department
programs, Army Corps of Engineer projects and some defense
activities, since lawmakers who want to fund Yucca will have to
take money from other programs. Even if the limit for the energy
spending bill were increased, the money would have to come from
other bills to stay within the overall budget cap.
Kraft said the department, with the industry's support, has
tried at least 20 different proposals to get more money from the
nuclear waste fund to go toward the site.
"In none of the proposals did we ever say there should be no
control by Congress," Kraft said. "We want Congress to control
spending but make it easy for Congress to give it (the Yucca
Mountain project) the money Congress wants it to have."
This year, the department wants $750 million of its $880
million request to be removed from the annual budget fight. Any
amount over $750 million -- which is the what utilities will pay
into the fund this year -- would still have to compete with
other programs, but it all would come out of the waste fund.
"They (Congress) can decide Yucca funding on its own merit. It
takes it out of the equation," Kraft said. "It's subject to the
same controls, subject to the same oversight. The statement that
they (the department) are taking controls from Congress is
ridiculous."
But critics say the proposal would reduce congressional control
by leaving the Yucca budget out of the competition. Congress
controls the budget, and sets priorities, in part based on how
the requests for money stack up against each other during the
budget process.
"It should have to compete with other programs to prove its
muster," said Michele Boyd, a legislative representative for
Public Citizen. "It needs to prove it is a valid program to get
all that money."
Rep. Shelley Berkley's spokesman, David Cherry, said if
Congress were to give up control on any portion of the budget,
it would lose oversight on the program.
Berkley, D-Nev., as well as Rep. Jon Porter and Rep. Jim
Gibbons, both R-Nev., all made that argument last month when
testifying before the House energy and commerce subcommittee.
"People who would benefit from the change the most want to look
at it as spending ratepayer's money," Cherry said. "They want to
spend the money whether it is a good program or not." The House
and Senate budget resolutions, now in final negotiations, did
not contain the change. Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., who sits on
the Budget Committee, kept the project at the $577 million mark,
the same amount of funding it received last year.
Ensign spokesman Jack Finn said Ensign uses different angles to
fight against the program, not only pointing to the scientific
problems and safety concerns but its cost as well.
"We attack it on all fronts," Finn said.
Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., has regularly cut the Yucca budget.
Reid, who is the top Democrat on the energy and water
appropriations subcommittee that funds the project every year,
said the department's efforts to change the funding have "moved
nowhere."
"There's a chance, but I don't think it's a very good one,"
Reid said, pointing out that Sen. Don Nickels, R-Okla., who
heads the Budget Committee and Sen. Kent Conrad, N.D., the
committee's top Democrat also oppose the idea.
The House and Senate budget resolutions, now in final
negotiations, did not contain the change. Two pending bills in
the House are keeping the option alive, but supporters admit it
will be tough to get them approved in the Senate.
"Obviously, Senator Reid of Nevada is not supportive of the
repository," House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Joe
Barton, R-Texas, said. Barton sponsored a bill that would
implement the change. He could not pinpoint the next step for
the bill but said he aims to move it through the House.
"The president is very supportive and the secretary is, but we
still have to work with the budget committee," Barton said.
"We're going to try. I can't guarantee success."
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said it is wrong that the
nuclear industry pays money toward the Yucca project but can't
get it spent on the project.
"We are going to work as hard as we can," Abraham said. "We
recognize we'll have to work very hard in the Senate, but we are
going to everything we can to make that happen. We think it's
appropriate to fence that money off."
-----------------------------------------------------------------
*****************************************************************
47 Waste News: Retired Army general nominated for American Ecology Corp. board
[Wastenews.com
BOISE, IDAHO (April 5) -- A retired four-star general in the
U.S. Army, Jimmy D. Ross, will stand for election to American
Ecology Corp.´s board at the company´s annual meeting May 20 in
Chicago.
"General Ross offers an important independent perspective to our
board," said Stephen Romano, president and CEO of Boise-based
American Ecology. "We also look forward to his advice and
assistance in expanding American Ecology´s business serving the
U.S. Department of Defense and other federal agencies."
Ross was nominated to fill a seat being vacated by Roger Hickey,
who opted not to stand for re-election, the company said.
American Ecology provides radioactive, PCB, hazardous and
nonhazardous waste services to commercial and government
customers.
Entire contents copyright 2004 by Crain Communications Inc.
webmaster@wastenews.com [webmaster@wastenews.com]
*****************************************************************
48 AU ABC: Uranium mine worker tells of fear.
05/04/2004. ABC News Online
[http://www.abc.net.au/]
One of the workers affected by a water contamination incident at
the Ranger uranium mine in the Northern Territory says he and
his colleagues are extremely disappointed and shocked at how
they have been treated.
Paul McDonald is one of 12 workers who drank or showered in
water that was found to be contaminated with the mine's process
water, which contained 400 times the legal limit of uranium.
Mr McDonald says he and two of his co-workers had to pay their
own airfares when they wanted to leave the Territory to seek
medical treatment in their home state of Western Australia.
He says they did not find out about the extent of the
contamination until the day after the mine was closed.
"I was quite annoyed and at the time I was quite frightened as
well. I suppose I still am," he said.
"I was just very annoyed that nobody had been and told me
exactly how serious it was.
"I just thought the contamination would be a little bit too
much salt, or chloride, or whatever - I was mortified when I
found out it was uranium and another cocktail of acids."
Legal firm Slater and Gordon has confirmed it is representing
three of the workers affected.
The three men were hired by a Western Australian contractor and
had only been working at the mine for two days when it was shut
down because the drinking water was found to be contaminated
with the mine's process water.
They claim the contractor dismissed them when they wanted to go
home to Perth.
A spokesman for Slater and Gordon says the firm has requested
information from the mine's operator and will give ERA time to
respond before considering the legal options.
Federal Environment Minister David Kemp says last month's water
contamination incident should never have happened.
Dr Kemp is visiting Darwin today and says the incident is
unacceptable.
"This event should never have happened," he said. "It's hard to
see standing from outside the mine how it did happen."
[http://www.abc.net.au]
© 2004 Australian Broadcasting Corporation
*****************************************************************
49 Yucca Mountain Update: Volume 2 Issue 4 ~ April 2, 2004
[Yucca Mountain Update -- A Publication of the State of Nevada
Agency for Nuclear Projects] Volume 2 Issue 4 ~ April 2, 2004
http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste
IN THIS ISSUE...
- Nevada sues DOE to recoup $4 million in grants
- What’s wrong with putting nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain?
Migration of waste down to the water table/The bottom line (last
in a series)
- Outrage of the Week
Nevada sues DOE to recoup $4 million in grants
As it awaits the outcome of several lawsuits aimed at derailing
the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, the state
of Nevada recently lodged another complaint arguing that the U.S.
Department of Energy (DOE) is denying the state grants to which
it is entitled under federal law.
Filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia
Circuit, the state argues that DOE and Secretary of Energy
Spencer Abraham are violating provisions of the Nuclear Waste
Policy Act (NWPA) by denying Nevada $4 million for fiscal year
2004 for the costs of the state’s participation in the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission's (NRC) licensing process, evaluating DOE's
technical program and conclusions, and performing oversight and
independent studies as provided for in the NWPA.
The same court is deliberating the state’s suits against DOE,
NRC, and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and a
constitutional challenge against the project. A decision in
those cases could come as early as this month.
“The state – including Gov. Kenny Guinn, Attorney General Brian
Sandoval, and Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects Executive
Director Bob Loux – has tried repeatedly to secure these funds
via letters to Secretary Abraham and other DOE officials, but has
not received an answer,” said Joe Egan, an attorney representing
Nevada in its case against Yucca Mountain.
“Since neither the Secretary nor any other DOE official has ever
responded to Nevada’s communications concerning the funding issue
raised by the Petition for Review, we do not know what, if any,
objection DOE has to the position taken by Nevada with regard to
these funds,” Egan said.
The grants are, by law, a continuing appropriation. Abraham has
the authority and obligation to issue the funds to Nevada, Egan
said. However, at the same time that he “zeroed out” Nevada,
Abraham and DOE approved a $45 million, five-year contract with
an outside law firm to assist the federal government in pursuing
licensure of Yucca Mountain, Egan added.
Until Nevada receives the $4 million grant, the state is asking
the court to order the DOE to cease working on its licensing
application to the NRC, and to direct Abraham to establish a
procedure allowing Nevada to receive all NWPA funds to which it
is entitled "that cannot be encumbered by ad hoc judgments of DOE
growing out of its adversarial relationship with Nevada in the
NRC proceedings," according to the lawsuit.
"As it stands now, the Secretary will be an adversary against
Nevada in front of the NRC while he also controls our funding,"
said Loux. "We want this to be on the up and up."
Congress has appropriated $1 million for the state, but Nevada
needs the additional $4 million to complete an array of work
associated with the proposed repository. Nevada’s fiscal year
2004 budget includes $2 million for scientific evaluation of
DOE’s proposed engineered barrier system at Yucca Mountain,
$700,000 for scientific evaluations of the probability and
effects of volcanic eruptions in Yucca Mountain, $300,000 for
general scientific review of other key technical issues including
geology, $1 million for independent scientific evaluation of
DOE’s total systems performance assessment (TSPA) of how the
repository will perform, and $1 million for licensing
preparation.
“If we are forced to assume that we will be receiving no more $1
million this year, our ongoing scientific research would need to
end or be cut to the bone,” said Loux. What’s wrong with putting
nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain? Migration of waste down to the
water table/The bottom line (last in a series)
DOE has assumed that a broad variety of radioisotopes released
from corroding waste packages will not descend through the
mountain to the water table, claiming they will be retarded by
attaching to minerals in the rock, or by diffusing into the rock.
But Nevada’s studies show this phenomenon is not significant for
many of the most prevalent radioactive constituents. Once
radioactive materials get to the water table, DOE concedes they
will rapidly migrate to Amargosa Valley (in as little as 100
years). Amargosa Valley today hosts Nevada’s largest dairy and
organic milk producer, using locally grown feed. It’s about 80
miles north of Las Vegas, the nation’s fastest growing city. The
Bottom Line DOE’s performance models assume Nevadans will one day
be drinking and using water contaminated with nuclear waste; the
only questions being “how soon?” and “how much?” The Yucca
Mountain high-level waste repository fails the tests of science
and can never be made safe. Outrage of the Week Deja Vu All Over
Again? It’s the 1950s, and the Atomic Energy Commission is
engaged in a program of nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site
that involves the dispersal of large amounts of toxic
contaminants (i.e., radioactive fallout) into the environment,
exposing thousands on and off the site to varying levels of
contamination.
Despite having good information that such exposures would have
harmful – even deadly – consequences, the AEC intentionally
downplays the risks, telling people downwind that the fallout is
more a nuisance than a danger: Just brush off the dust with a
broom and take a shower; there’s nothing to be alarmed about.
The justification: Something so mundane as public health and
safety cannot be permitted to interfere with or delay the
national security imperative of atomic weapons testing.
Fast forward the 1990s at the western corner of the NTS, where
the Department of Energy, successor agency to the AEC, has
embarked on construction of an underground tunnel that is to be
used to characterize the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste
repository site.
Despite having been told repeatedly by its own consultants and
experts that the dust being spewed into the tunnel by the
drilling operation was extremely hazardous and contained
dangerous amounts of silica, erionite and mordenite, DOE
proceeded with tunnel construction without telling workers and
others of the potential life-threatening conditions and without
requiring respirators and other simple protective measures that
would easily have mitigated the risk.
As a result, thousands of workers and support personnel were
unknowingly exposed and their lives put at risk.
The justification this time? Something so important as a
national nuclear waste repository requires that the project meet
cost and schedule milestones, which means keeping workers in the
dark about health and safety conditions.
In 40 years, with all of the revelations about DOE’s abhorrent
track record of contamination and health and safety violations at
almost every weapons complex facility in the country and with all
of the attention paid to – and ostensible changes made in – the
“culture” at AEC/DOE that permitted such travesties to occur, one
would think the DOE people in charge of the Yucca Mountain
project would have learned something.
Sadly, that is not the case, and once again, a major DOE program
in Nevada has been shown to have inflicted untold suffering and
potential death on innocent and unsuspecting people.
Even more disturbing is the fact that this is all occurring in
what should be the less risky and more predictable phase of the
Yucca Mountain project, without any radioactive material at the
site or in transit. If DOE cannot assure public health and
safety in so simple, straightforward and thoroughly understood a
matter as the prevention of silicosis among construction workers,
how can the nation possibly expect this same agency to manage the
largest and most complex nuclear waste disposal program in
history in a manner that does not result in yet another human
health and environmental fiasco?
We welcome comments and story ideas for this newsletter. For
media information, please contact Tom Bradley, Brown & Partners,
at (702) 876-5611 or via e-mail at tbradley@brown-partners.com.
For a text-only version of this newsletter, please contact
tbradley@brown-partners.com
To subscribe to or unsubscribe from this newsletter, please
e-mail nwpo@nuc.state.nv.us. Do not reply to this e-mail.
*****************************************************************
50 Tri-City Herald: Steam plant near Hanford's N Reactor nears end of service
This story was published Mon, Apr 5, 2004 By John Stang Herald
staff writer
JFK blessed the spot on Sept. 26, 1963.
He waved a "magic wand" holding a bit of uranium fuel over a
Geiger counter, which triggered a nearby crane's clamshell bucket
to dig out a scoop of dirt.
About 37,000 people applauded.
It was the groundbreaking for Hanford's steam plant, a Washington
Public Power Supply System facility linked to N Reactor being
built next door, and President John F. Kennedy's visit proved a
red-letter day in Hanford's history.
Steam generated by N Reactor went through four parallel
zigzagging pipes 30 feet above the ground to turn turbines in the
steam plant.
The plant produced 860 megawatts of electricity -- 75 percent of
the power of today's Columbia Generating Station's 1,150-megawatt
reactor.
This setup married Cold War plutonium production with creating
electricity for peaceful purposes.
It was "not a sword, but a plowshare," Kennedy said at the 1963
ceremony.
Today, the steam plant is gone. It's less than three months away
from becoming a 3-foot mound of dirt on top of some subterranean
concrete turbine pedestals. Energy Northwest is in the final
stages of burying Hanford's landmark steam power generation
plant.
Everything above ground is gone.
Just a three-story-deep, 400-foot-long and 100-foot-wide concrete
box burial pit remains, already partly filled with dirt, debris
and leftover junk from the plant.
A concretelike substance is being poured over some final pieces
of slightly radioactive junk -- steam pipes and turbines --
stashed in the pit.
"We're close to where all we're doing is pushing dirt into it,"
said Dean Montgomery, the steam plant project manager for Energy
Northwest. WPPSS renamed itself Energy Northwest in 1999.
Contractor R.W. Rhine of Tacoma is scheduled to finish the nearly
yearlong, $6.5 million demolition job on June 11. The final
inspections, cleanup, I-dotting and T-crossing is supposed to be
done by June 30.
Then the Department of Energy, which owns Hanford, will look the
leased site over and decide whether to take it back under federal
control.
The federal government finished building N Reactor in 1964. It
was the ninth and last of Hanford's plutonium production reactors
to be built.
Using N Reactor's steam, WPPSS' power generation plant began
sending electricity to the Bonneville Power Administration on
April 8, 1966.
The plant had to mesh its operations with N Reactor's work.
Whenever N Reactor shut down for maintenance or to solve problem,
the WPPSS power plant also went offline.
The steam plant recorded few major problems during its 20-year
life.
Its interior was a three-story jungle gym of steel grate
platforms, control panels, steam pipes, water pipes, tanks and
generators.
Old-timers contend the place was clean enough that people could
eat off the floor.
The steam plant and N Reactor hummed along together until the
Chernobyl disaster in 1986. N Reactor -- then in a maintenance
shutdown -- resembled the Chernobyl reactor too much for comfort.
Despite safety upgrades, N Reactor never was restarted -- closing
for good in 1987. The steam power plant closed with it.
The plant sat there for more than a decade.
A few years ago, Energy Northwest began hiring a series of
contractors to remove the plant's transformers, the outdoor steam
pipes and trestles and huge amounts of asbestos.
Most of the plant's innards were too antiquated to be used in
modern power generation facilities.
Some innards were sold as scrap. The rest is being buried at the
site.
"It's kind of hard to take it down, knowing the pride people took
in it," Montgomery said.
Copyright Tri-City Herald. All rights reserved. This material may
not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
*****************************************************************
51 Albuquerque Tribune: Los Alamos Lab helps heat things up in space
By Sue Vorenberg
[svorenberg@abqtrib.com] Tribune Reporter
Los Alamos National Laboratory gives the Mars rovers a warm
feeling all over.
That feeling isn't love - not exactly.
It's plutonium heat.
For more than 40 years the lab has supplied the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration with plutonium-based devices
that provide power and keep spacecraft warm in the frigid
temperatures of space.
A bit of lab plutonium has been on just about every major NASA
mission, including navigational satellites in the early 1960s,
Apollos 12 through 15, Pioneer II, Vikings 1 and 2, Voyagers 1
and 2, Galileo and most recently the Cassini mission - which
arrives at Saturn on July 1 - and the Mars Exploration Rovers,
which landed early this year.
"Without our devices the Mars rovers would have to use battery
power to keep their electronics warm," said Jeff Huling, a Los
Alamos scientist. "That would cut down on the lifespan of the
mission. Our heaters have extended the lifetime of each rover
from 20 days to 90 days or more."
That translates to more time to explore, more data to gather and
ultimately more scientific understanding of our solar system,
said Horton Newsom, a planetary scientist at the University of
New Mexico Institute of Meteoritics.
"In order to explore the outer solar system, including Mars and
beyond, nuclear heaters and power systems are essential," Newsom
said. "Without the nuclear technology, we would not have had the
Voyager missions, the missions to Jupiter. We would know almost
nothing about the outer solar system. Even the Viking landers on
Mars in the 1970s wouldn't have happened."
The rovers use batteries and solar panels for energy, but that
isn't enough to keep electronics warm through the night. The Los
Alamos plutonium keeps them warm - protecting delicate electronic
leads from cracking - without wasting valuable energy.
In fact, components on the rovers are working so well that NASA
now thinks the missions will last about 240 days each, almost
three times the amount previously thought, Huling said.
Los Alamos stores a part of the U.S. supply of plutonium in a
vault. The supply is used for nuclear weapons experiments and
NASA projects, Huling explained.
Plutonium 238, a different type than the plutonium used in
bombs, decays quickly to uranium 234. When it decays, particles
break off and bump around, creating heat.
"That's kinetic energy," Huling said. "It's like when you clap
your hands together quickly and they get warm, or if you drive
your car a lot the air in the tires gets hot."
For some craft, that heat is used to keep things warm. In
others, like Cassini, a much larger supply of plutonium is used
to generate electricity, he said.
"What we do with probes like Cassini is take the heat and
convert it to electrical energy that can power instruments,"
Huling said. "It's difficult to get reliable power in space,
especially as craft travel farther from the Sun, but our energy
units don't rely on solar power or heavy chemical battery
components."
Each Mars rover uses eight evenly spaced film-container-sized
plutonium capsules for heat.
Cassini, on the other hand, has four 5-foot-long modules that
together generate about 300 watts of power - or enough to power
three 100 watt light bulbs.
"That might not sound like much," Huling said. "But NASA and
other science organizations compete vigorously to use every last
fraction of a watt."
Next on the lab's agenda will be to build a power system for
NASA's planned New Horizons mission to Pluto, scheduled to launch
in 2006 and arrive in 2015.
NASA could use more of the power and heat sources than Los
Alamos can make. The lab's plutonium was originally created at
the Savannah River Site in Georgia, but the site doesn't make
plutonium anymore.
In fact, nobody in the United States makes it, Huling said.
"We have a very large backlog of missions that the Department of
Energy and NASA want us to provide heat sources for," Huling
said. "We have enough plutonium for the short term, but DOE is
already planning on establishing a domestic source."
© The Albuquerque Tribune. Users of this site are subject to our
*****************************************************************
52 Contra Costa Times: Livermore lab operators must love, foster science, panel told
| 04/05/2004 |
By Chris Metinko
LIVERMORE - Lawrence Livermore Laboratory officials and the
public shared their visions today of what they want from
organizations interested in taking control of the lab and its
sister facility, Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico.
And the overriding sentiment didn't come as much of a surprise --
that whoever bids to operate the two labs had best know their
science, and be passionate about it being conducted right.
The special meeting, convened by a 13-member panel of the
National Academies of Science committee, was intended to develop
standards for evaluating the capability of bidders to manage
science and technology at the labs.
Michael Anastasio, lab director, said any bidder interested in
taking charge of the lab should meet a variety of criteria,
including demanding intellectual integrity and scientific
objectivity, fostering an atmosphere of innovative science,
promoting a culture committed to ambitious goals and nurturing a
cooperative yet competitive relationship with Los Alamos.
The committee will report its findings to the National Nuclear
Security Administration. The information gathered is expected to
be incorporated into an official request for bids to be released
by the federal Department of Energy.
It was the lab's relationship with Los Alamos that took
precedence for most of the two-hour meeting this morning, with
many committee members asking for differences and similarities
between the two top nuclear weapons labs and whether separate
contracts to two different bidders would be acceptable for both
labs.
Anastasio said that while both labs have different environments
-- with Los Alamos being more corporate and academic, in his
opinion -- they weren't that incompatible.
"I believe the same contract is best" for operating both of them,
said Anastasio. If the labs were run by different public or
private groups, he added, the two facilities could run into a
situation where they were competing against each other for market
share.
"I think that would be to the detriment of national interest,"
Anastasio said.
The University of California's contracts with both labs expire in
early 2005. UC had run both labs unchallenged for more than a
half century. However, the federal Department of Energy last year
decided to put the contract of Los Alamos up for bid after
business problems were brought to light . Following that
decision, a congressional amendment was executed last year that
requires all lab contracts that have not faced competition for 50
years or more to be subject to competitive bidding. That action
brought Lawrence Livermore, managed by UC since it was founded in
1952, into the mix.
Reach Chris Metinko at 925-847-2125 or cmetinko@cctimes.com
[cmetinko@cctimes.com] .
*****************************************************************
53 WATE: $500 million may entice BNFL back into nuclear cleanup
[http://www.wate.com
April 4, 2004
KNOXVILLE (AP) -- BNFL may become involved in the K-25 and K-27
cleanup projects after all.
Earlier, the company said there were too many uncertainties in
dismantling the two huge buildings constructed in World War II to
enrich uranium for atomic bombs.
The company says it lost more than $150 million in another
cleanup project at the same site.
But the U.S. government may be ready to deliver a $500 million
bailout to BNFL's parent company, British Nuclear Fuels. The
money would compensate the company for cost overruns at Oak Ridge
and another big Department of Energy cleanup project in Idaho.
Jeff Stevens, general manager of BNFL's Oak Ridge operation, says
he can't comment on reports of a financial settlement.
The deal was reported by Energy Daily, a Washington-based
newsletter. But he did confirm that discussions are going on.
Copyright 2004 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
[http://www.worldnow.com] All content © Copyright 2000 -
2004 WorldNow and WATE. All Rights Reserved.
*****************************************************************
54 Tri-City Herald: Pension plan irks Hanford board
This story was published Sun, Apr 4, 2004 By Annette Cary Herald
staff writer
The Hanford Advisory Board fears that a Department of Energy move
to curtail pension benefits in new contracts would jeopardize the
quality of cleanup at Hanford.
"The board believes it to be false economy to proceed with any
initiative to erode worker benefits," said advice prepared at the
board's Thursday and Friday meeting in Richland to be sent to
DOE.
It recommended that DOE continue the pension, savings and medical
benefit plans now offered to workers cleaning up the nuclear
reservation where much of the nation's plutonium for nuclear
weapons once was produced.
Cutting benefits is likely to attract a more transient work force
with less training and less understanding of safety procedures to
protect workers and the environment from highly radioactive waste
and other hazards at Hanford, the board concluded.
Dr. Margery Swint, a HAB member who did occupational medicine
work at Hanford, said longtime workers understood regulations and
took precautions needed to stay safe.
"The transient worker was less healthy, had more drug use and the
quality of the work was not as good," she said. Transient workers
also were usually the ones who became contaminated, she said.
Three bid proposals or draft proposals released by the Department
of Energy for new cleanup contracts do not safeguard traditional
retirement plans nor require 401(k) plans that allow workers to
save for retirement.
Under the bid proposals, employees who are vested in the Hanford
pension plan would be allowed to continue in the plan for five
years. Then the new contractor could switch to another retirement
package and workers no longer would build up earnings in the old
plan.
Workers are concerned, based on comments from DOE officials, that
even more of them will see pension benefits removed when Fluor
Hanford and CH2M Hill Hanford Group contracts expire in 2006.
"Given that the average Hanford employee is 48 years old,
cessation of contractor pension contributions could potentially
be devastating to as many as 10,000 workers at the site," wrote
U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., in a letter to Energy
Secretary Spencer Abraham in late March. She is calling for DOE
to rethink its new pension policy.
The change appears to be an "inappropriate" attempt by DOE to cut
costs, Cantwell wrote. Contractors are directly reimbursed by DOE
for pension costs.
HAB members Friday wrote that discontinuance of the current plan
would be unlikely to produce significant savings.
One of the more immediate concerns with the pension proposals is
the change in the work force that could result in Hanford's 300
Area. Cleanup and demolition of some highly contaminated
facilities in the 300 Area would be included in the new River
Corridor Contract. A draft proposal for that contract includes
the changed pension provisions.
Hanford workers have the option to switch to other available work
based on seniority. That likely would mean the most experienced
workers would ask to work on projects other than the 300 Area to
maintain their established pension benefits longer.
Board members generally agreed that Hanford workers have better
pay and benefits than industry averages, but several said that
pay was earned.
"There is a reason they get that," Swint said after the board
meeting. "Pipe fitters in town do not have the same hazards as
those working at the site."
She also was concerned about Hanford's record of frequently
changing contractors, when many other nuclear sites keep the same
contractors, some for decades, she said. Keeping a loyal work
force with shifting contractors, each offering its own benefit
plan, could be difficult, she said.
That was part of the reason that the current Hanfordwide benefit
plan was adopted. Even though contractors changed, workers'
pensions continued to build.
"One thing of concern is that there are people within the
Department of Energy who are too new to understand" the Hanford
pension system, said HAB board member Keith Smith.
In the 1960s and even 1970s, he knew Hanford workers who were
receiving monthly pension checks from past Hanford contractors
for $65 to $80 a month. Retirement benefits slowly improved as
organized labor exchanged wage hikes for better retirement plans,
but the system continued to have a range of very different
pension plans until the mid-1980s, he said. Then a plan to offer
the same retirement package sitewide was adopted.
With proposals to return to a system of allowing each contractor
to provide a separate retirement plan, "we could end up in the
same mess we started in," Smith said.
Several HAB members who work for Hanford contractors and
anticipate collecting Hanford pensions in the future withdrew
from the discussion and did not help draft the board's advice.
Copyright Tri-City Herald. All rights reserved. This material may
not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
*****************************************************************
55 Google News Alert - nuclear
Date: Mon, 05 Apr 2004 13:18:21 -0700 (PDT)
IAEA raps Iran's nuclear stance
BBC News - London,England,UK
IAEA chief Mohammad ElBaradei says Iran has not been co-operating as openly
and quickly as it should to dispel claims that it wants to build nuclear
weapons. ...
See all stories on this topic:
GROUP: N.Korea Can Make 'Unlimited' Nuclear Arms
Reuters - United States
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - North Korea can probably make unlimited quantities
of nuclear weapons from its own plutonium stocks, the head of a consortium
that until ...
See all stories on this topic:
BRAZIL hopes to end nuclear 'row'
BBC News - London,England,UK
Brazil says it is negotiating with UN nuclear inspectors to try to break
a deadlock over inspections of a uranium enrichment facility. ...
See all stories on this topic:
PAKISTAN Offers Nuclear Disarmament Talks with India
Voice of America - Washington,DC,USA
Pakistan has offered to hold nuclear disarmament talks with India next
month in Islamabad. A foreign ministry statement says Pakistan ...
See all stories on this topic:
NUCLEAR clients: Don't overlook the unusual suspects
International Herald Tribune - Paris,France
WASHINGTON Recently, a potential new front in the fight against nuclear
proliferation suddenly emerged and, just as quickly, retreated from public
view. ...
See all stories on this topic:
NEVADA: Feds neglect to disclose details of nuclear dump
AZ Central.com - AZ,United States
... and rural Nevada residents about plans to withdraw 319 miles of federal
land from public use while studying a rail corridor to a national nuclear
waste dump at ...
See all stories on this topic:
SIX arrrested for stealing equipment from a nuclear plant
Tulsa World (subscription) - Tulsa,OK,USA
KIEV, Ukraine (AP)-- Authorities detained six men on suspicion of stealing
equipment from the Rivne nuclear plant in western Ukraine to sell as scrap
metal, a ...
See all stories on this topic:
EMIRATES freezes accounts of businessman linked to nuclear black ...
WXXA - Albany,NY,USA
... Monday, a day after announcing the freezing of assets of a Sri Lankan
businessman accused by Washington of brokering black-market deals for
nuclear technology. ...
See all stories on this topic:
RUSSIAN Nuclear Expert Convicted of Spying
Reuters - United States
MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian nuclear weapons expert accused of passing
nuclear submarine secrets to the United States and Britain was found guilty
of treason ...
NUCLEAR POWER SHORTFALL: Ministry calculates sharp rise in CO2
Asahi Shimbun - Tokyo,Japan
An erosion of public trust in nuclear power is making it tougher for Japan
to meet its environmental goals set out in the Kyoto Protocol on global
warming. ...
This daily-once News Alert is brought to you by Google News (BETA)...
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Remove this News Alert:
http://www.google.com/newsalerts/remove?s=92d1672a1b037a07&hl=en
Create another News Alert:
http://www.google.com/newsalerts?hl=en
Try Google News:
http://news.google.com/
*****************************************************************
56 Las Vegas RJ: LETTERS: Nothing unreasonable about border searches
Monday, April 05, 2004
To the editor:
The secondary editorial in Thursday's Review-Journal continues
to carry on your paper's anti-law enforcement sentiment. You
state that the Fourth Amendment protects Americans from
"unreasonable" searches and seizures. The courts have long
established that Fourth Amendment rights do not pertain to ports
of entry into the United States.
For one thing, you are not considered to have entered the United
States until you pass through the port. I also refer you to 19
U.S.C. 1581(a), which gives inspectors the right to board,
search, etc. any person or conveyance entering the United States.
Back in 1977, in U.S. v. Ramsay, the court wrote that border
searches "have been considered to be reasonable by the single
fact that the person or item in question entered into our country
from the outside."
Lastly, Mr. Flores -- the defendent in the case in question --
was not a U.S. citizen. He may have been a North American (from
Mexico), but he was not an "American" as we know and use the
term. As to your statement about the high court chipping away at
our rights, this was the way it was when I entered border
enforcement 37 years ago -- and it wasn't anything new then. BOB
MILLER LAS VEGAS
Yucca debate To the editor:
Could anything have been more political or more orchestrated
than the railroad subcommittee field hearing regarding Yucca
Mountain transportation? It was so loaded with those opposed to
the project, it wasn't funny.
If it's OK to detonate nuclear weapons at the Nevada Test Site,
why is a multiple engineered barrier system at Yucca Mountain
bad?
If Yucca Mountain is so bad for our economy and tourism
industry, why is a sharp businessman such as Steve Cloobeck
building a multimillion-dollar timeshare on our famed Las Vegas
Strip?
If there are more dangerous cargoes such as gasoline and
chlorine going through our valley, why are we worried about spent
fuel in a solid form, not a liquid?
And finally a question to ponder: Why are we worried if the
waste is going to be shipped through Caliente and rural Nevada --
we should be applauding the Department of Energy for announcing a
preference to keep the waste out of the state's population
centers.
Keep fighting this scientific project with politics, emotions
and blatant disregard for the facts -- and, yes, that's why a
repository is inevitable at Yucca Mountain. REBECCA WAMSLEY LAS
VEGAS
Bush oil To the editor:
In response to Henry Schmid's letter about drilling in the Artic
National Wildlife Refuge:
Even if drilling were to commence in ANWR, 60 percent of our oil
would still come from overseas. Our men and women are dying in a
war that an oil friendly administration started. We are not there
to free Iraq; we are there to free the oil they have.
Let's not forget George W. Bush got his start by unsuccessfully
drilling for oil in Texas. Once again Mr. Bush is trying to make
a decision without using science. The oil in ANWR will not ease
the prices. This is just a ploy so Mr. Bush's business associates
can make more money at the expence of our environment. SCOTT
GARNCARZ LAS VEGAS
History lesson To the editor:
Regarding Adam Carpenter's March 31 letter about the U.S.
Supreme Court case involving the Nevada rancher who refused to
identify himself to the police:
Mr. Carpenter was quoted as saying in part, "Only those who have
something to fear, attempt to side-step a system that works quite
well."
The most feared phrase in Nazi Germany was "Papieren, bitte"
(Papers, please). That kind of mind-set lit off the gas ovens and
6 million innocent people went up the chimney in smoke.
Is history beginning to repeat itself, Mr. Carpenter? AARON
CANTOR LAS VEGAS
Poor words To the editor:
You recently published a letter that I submitted which addressed
comments made by the new dean of the Osteopathic Medical School,
Dr. Foreman. In that letter I stated that I felt it was
"intellectually dishonest" of him to imply that osteopathic
physicians, D.O.s, focus more on promoting healthy lifestyles
than M.D.s. That choice of words was irresponsible.
My intent was to express my passion for preventative medicine
and to contribute to the debate between our two philosophies and
approaches to health care. Instead, the tone of the letter came
off spiteful and attacking. I wish to express my sincerest
apologies to Dr. Foreman and the osteopathic physicians of Las
Vegas. MARK E. MCKENZIE, M.D. LAS VEGAS
Dumb move To the editor:
I read your article on cashless slots -- and just as making
Vegas "family friendly" was a giant mistake, so is the ticket
payout. We come to visit as often as we can and tend to shy away
from the casinos that have the cashless machines. First, they
elimiate the "arm" of the "one armed bandit." Now the sound of
real coins hitting the bowl is gone. Stupid, really stupid.
LYNETTE KEEN PARMA, OHIO
Real whopper To the editor:
I am writing in response to recent articles on Assemblyman Chad
Christensen. After reading his explanations of his outlandish
personal expenditures, I think I understand why we needed two
special sessions to accomplish anything in Carson City: Everyone
was at Taco Bell.
If Mr. Christensen honestly thinks that spending on dry
cleaning, car washes and drinks at local saloons is a good use of
his donors' money, more power to him. But to his donors I say:
Beware.
Mr. Christensen is clearly pushing the line on the Nevada
statutes that disallow the use of campaign funds for "personal
use." I am looking for a representative who follows the spirit of
the law, not just the letter, and it does not seem that Mr.
Christensen is willing to do that.
I hope come November, my neighbors will join me in electing
someone who is willing to put his constituents ahead of his
Burger King bill. A'SHANTI GHOLAR LAS VEGAS
Copyright Las Vegas Review-Journal
*****************************************************************
57 Bellona: Bellona leads in the EU hydrogen debate
BRUSSELS—If we take the greenhouse effect seriously, there are no
other solutions than to produce larger amounts of hydrogen from
oil, gas and coal with carbon dioxide handling, Frederic Hauge
proposed at the European Union Convention “Fuels for a Future
Generation—a Sustainable Energy Outlook for Europe,” held in
Brussels late last month.
Bellona President Frederic Hauge.
Hanne Bakke/Bellona
Paal Frisvold, 2004-04-05 13:20
In his address March 18, Hauge urged Europe’s Petroleum and coal
industry to start producing hydrogen in order that the auto
industry can cease its complaints that there is no hydrogen
available on the market.
The convention was organized by The Economist magazine group’s
Brussels publication “The European Voice,” and summoned over two
hundred participants from the European petroleum industry. Among
them were auto manufacturers as well as energy and environmental
organizations. Environmental organizations were represented by
the European Renewable Energy Council, the European Wind Energy
Association, the World Fuel Cell Council, the Climate Action
Network and Bellona.
Bellona calls on petroleum industry to invest in future of CO2
capture and storage
During his key note speech to the European and US
oil-industry-led workshop in Brussels last week, Bellona
President Frederic Hauge presented new opportunities arising from
CO2 capture and storing techniques, a controversial topic that
Bellona has sought to bring into international environmental
debate. Read on »
[http://www.bellona.no/en/energy/31585.html]
Pure Fossil Energy is the way to go for the hydrogen community EU
Development Commissioner Phillipe Busquin made the main
contribution to the conference by , presenting the EU’s strategy
for advancing the hydrogen community. Busquin emphasized the need
for new technology which can purify fossil fuel. Though such
technologies do exist today, he emphasized that fossil energy is
the only way to reach the goal of a hydrogen community and that
by building renewable energy sources in parallel with the
operation of the old, renewable sources can eventually replace
fossil fuel for the long-term.
Bellona's Hauge participated in a lively panel discussion with
Jeremy Benthan from Shell Hydrogen, Pirjo-Liisa Koskimäki from DG
TREN, Richard Clegg from BNLF and André Martin from Ballard Power
Systems, among other participants.
Hauge presented the results of Bellona’s work in identifying
practical and realisable opportunities to accelerate the
transition to a hydrogen-based energy economy. His presentation
was followed by questions from, among others, Carmen Difigloi of
the Paris-based International Energy Association, or IEA, which
has traditionally been complimentary of Hauge’s innovations.
What emerged from a debate on what a hydrogen-based society would
look in practice was an intense debate on carbon dioxide handling
and what opportunities hydrogen would allow for the petroleum
sector.
Report: World fuel cell markets on the rise
A report recently appearing in the British periodical
Materials Technology Publications indicated the market in fuel
cell sales is booming and that the American Auto-making giant,
General Motors, expects mass production of fuel cell vehicles by
2010.
[http://www.bellona.no/en/energy/32640.html]
Chicken and egg polemics—again
Several representatives of the European petroleum sector were
somewhat behind on what their opportunities would be for
producing pure energy under a hydrogen-based system. Auto-makers
often present the argument that they cannot start the production
of hydrogen fuel cell powered cars before the petroleum sector
has established a sufficient filling station infrastructure along
Europes roadways.
Shell’s Jeremy Bentham, who is also the leader of the European
Commission’s technology platform for hydrogen and fuel cells,
said that these “chicken or the egg” polemics are threatening to
derail the entire hydrogen debate. He said that Europe already
produce vast amounts of hydrogen, and that there is nowhere in
Europe that lies more than 100 kilometres from a refinery. He
underscored that the technology exists and what is needed to
intensify the industry, with a special eye to reducing prices on
fuel cell cars. .Europe’s biggest problem is fragmented market
politics and research, said Bentham.
The nuclear industry joined in the vigorous panel debate. Its
report, “The Environmental Impact Study for The Use of Nuclear
Power,” was summarized by Richard Clegg of British Nuclear Fuels,
or BNFL, and was supported by French representatives of Areva.
Frederic Hauge, meanwhile promised a response to the nuclear
power study.
Publisher: Bellona Foundation [bellona@bellona.no] , President:
Frederic Hauge [frederic@bellona.no] Information: info@bellona.no
[info@bellona.no] , Technical contact: webmaster@bellona.no
[webmaster@bellona.no] Telephone: +47 23 23 46 00 Telefax: +47 22
38 38 62 * P.O.Box 2141 Grunerlokka, 0505 Oslo, Norway
*****************************************************************
58 Platts: Global Power Plant Additions Reach Unprecedented Levels,
According to Platts
www.platts.com"> [http://www.platts.com] http://www.mcgraw-hill.com"
WASHINGTON, April 5 /PRNewswire/ -- During the first years of
the 21st century, power companies and their suppliers have
undertaken an unprecedented expansion of electric generating
capacity according to the most recent release of the Platts UDI
World Electric Power Plants Database.
Worldwide capacity additions completed or scheduled from 2000
to 2006 now are estimated to be 906 gigawatts (GW), and the 2003
value of just less than 140 GW is an all-time record. Plant
completion during the current building cycle has more than
matched the worldwide peaks attained in 1973 and 1974 (106 GW and
107 GW added, respectively) and again in 1984 and 1985 (116 GW
and 111 GW added, respectively). Global installed capacity at
the end of 2003 currently is estimated to be 3,923 GW.
"During the last four years, the global power sector has
witnessed a truly historic mobilization of construction and
managerial resources to bring about this tremendous physical
plant expansion," said Christopher Bergesen, editorial director
of Platts UDI products. "The United States was a major
contributor to the building boom, with 264 GW online or scheduled
from 2000- 2006, but China is building fast at 165 GW. Eight
other countries installed or are scheduled to complete more than
18 GW each over the period," he added.
The new plant data are extracted from the Platts UDI World
Electric Power Plants Database. This file has 114,000 records and
is maintained on a company- by-company, unit-by-unit basis using
direct surveys and a wide variety of other sources. The database
and its predecessor files have been in continuous publication
since the late 1970s.
Platts, a division of The McGraw-Hill Companies (NYSE: MHP
[http://alliance.marketwatch.com/custom/alliance/interactivechart
.asp?symb=MHP&astyle=0,0,0,0,0,0,0,10,0,0&c=179&urlpull=&logourl=
&post=0] ), is the global leader in providing energy information.
For nearly a century, the energy industry has looked to Platts as
the most reliable source of independent industry news and price
benchmarks. From 14 offices worldwide, Platts covers the oil,
natural gas, electricity, nuclear power, coal, petrochemical and
metals markets. Additional information on Platts real-time news
and price assessment services, publications, databases,
geospatial tools, conferences, research and analytical services
and energy financial services is available at
http://www.platts.com [http://www.platts.com] .
About The McGraw-Hill Companies
Founded in 1888, The McGraw-Hill Companies is a leading
global information services provider meeting worldwide needs in
the financial services, education and business information
markets through leading brands such as Standard & Poor's,
BusinessWeek and McGraw-Hill Education. The Corporation has more
than 322 offices in 33 countries. Sales in 2003 were $4.8
billion. Additional information is available at
http://www.mcgraw-hill.com
[http://www.mcgraw-hill.com] .
SOURCE Platts
Copyright © 1996-2004 PR Newswire Association LLC. All Rights
*****************************************************************
NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 this
material is distributed without profit or payment to those who
have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for
non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more
information go to:
*****************************************************************