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Send News Stories to news@energy-net.org with title on subject
line and first line of body
NUCLEAR POLICY
1 AFP: UN watchdog unable to complete Iran nuclear probe by June
2 UN Envoy In Dpr Of Korea For Talks On Nuclear Programme
3 MSNBC: Riding a Tiger in North Korea
4 US: Las Vegas SUN: Editorial: One man can make a difference
5 US: KRT Wire: White House used unreliable defector
6 US: MSNBC: Why Rumsfeld Is Wrong
7 US: IEA: International Energy Outlook 2004
8 Hi Pakistan: N-restraint talks with India next week: FO -->
9 Hi Pakistan: Japan PM gambles on nuclear progress - By Linda Sieg
10 asahi.com EDITORIAL: Shield whistle-blowers
NUCLEAR REACTORS
11 US: NRC: Sunshine Act Meeting
12 US: Las Vegas SUN: GAO: NRC Misjudged Ohio Nuke Plant Risk
13 US: JS Online: Tangled diver forces nuclear plant shutdown
14 AFP: TEPCO sales hit by cool Japanese summer, reactor shutdowns
15 US: ONN Report: NRC shouldn't have let Davis-Besse run with reactor
16 US: ONN. Ohio News Now: New Davis-Besse Report Rips NRC
17 US: NRC: Agency Information Collection Activities: Proposed Collecti
NUCLEAR SAFETY
18 [du-list] ex US marine describes war crimes and DU
19 BBC: Admiral convicted for sub deaths
20 US: Hawk Eye Newspaper: IAAP claims process changed
21 Moscow Times: Admiral Convicted in Sinking of K-159
22 US: NRC: Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards; Notice of
NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE
23 US: Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Senate should halt nuclear waste pla
24 Las Vegas RJ: EDITORIAL: Kerry on Yucca
25 Las Vegas RJ: YUCCA MOUNTAIN PROJECT: DOE takes comment on plan
26 US: Spectrum: S. Utahns speak out on nuke testing -
27 Las Vegas SUN: Public offers thoughts on Yucca Mountain
28 Las Vegas SUN: Lincoln not saying yes to Yucca
29 US: Bradenton Herald: Tallevast parties to meet today to discuss pol
30 US: EnergyPulse: Nuclear Waste Perspectives - Part II
31 US: WBIR-TV, Knoxville, TN: RADIOACTIVE WASTE FOUND ON ANOTHER ROANE
32 FOX5 Las Vegas - D.O.E. Shows Plans To Ship Nuclear Waste
33 KLAS: DOE's Nuclear Waste Transport Proposal
34 KVBC: Public Expresses Views On Proposed Yucca Mtn Rail System
35 US: CBC Saskatchewan: Mine Flood transcripts??
NUCLEAR WEAPONS
US DEPT. OF ENERGY
36 Oakland Tribune: Decide fate of labs as one, panel reports
37 Tri-Valley Herald: New lab bidding plan advised
38 Tri-City Herald: K Basins fuel removal behind schedule
39 KIFI: INEEL Shows Off Technology of the Future
40 SanLuisObispo.comReport: Los Alamos, Livermore don't have to have sa
41 SF Chronicle: LIVERMORE / Concurrent bidding on nuclear lab pacts ur
42 IEER | The Savannah River at Grievous Risk
43 IEER: High-Level Radioactive Waste Mismanagement at SRS
44 Oak Ridger: NASA official to voice support for tech summit
45 Oak Ridger: Cleanup concerns raised
46 FOX5 Las Vegas: Yucca Mountain Public Meeting Today
OTHER NUCLEAR
47 Google News Alert - nuclear
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FULL NEWS STORIES
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1 AFP: UN watchdog unable to complete Iran nuclear probe by June
:diplomats
[http://www.spacewar.com/]
VIENNA (AFP) May 18, 2004
The UN atomic agency will not be able to complete an
investigation into Iran's alleged secret nuclear weapons program
by mid-June due to delays by Tehran in allowing international
inspections and disclosing its nuclear activities, diplomats
said.
"This is ironic since the Iranians are the ones who want the file
on them to be closed," a diplomat close to the Vienna-based
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and who asked not to be
named told AFP Tuesday.
During a visit by IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei to Tehran in
April, Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi had said Tehran
expected the IAEA investigation to be completed in June ahead of
a meeting of the IAEA board.
But an earlier delay to a crucial round on inspections in March
"threw us out of sequence," an official close to the IAEA said,
adding key results would not now be available for the board of
governors meeting in Vienna June 14.
"It takes a long time time to get analysis of environmental
samples (swipes to find traces of radioactive particles) so there
is no way to get results in June in order to wrap this thing up,"
a Western diplomat said.
The Iranians have "succeeded in slowing down the (investigation)
machine," a second Western diplomat said.
ElBaradei has said he hopes the IAEA can finish its investigation
by the end of the year, but he warned in a CNN interview Saturday
that Iran's cooperation so far had been insufficient.
"The jury is still out," he said about whether Iran's nuclear
program is peaceful as Tehran has insisted.
Iran delayed inspections after the IAEA board in March condemned
the country for failing to report key activities, particularly
its acquiring of blueprints for sophisticated centrifuges to
enrich uranium, which can be used in both civilian reactors and
to make atomic bombs.
Iran had also failed in a report filed in October to fully
disclose, as it had promised, its nuclear activities.
One diplomat said that while the international community may
tolerate a lack of resolution on Iran's nuclear program until the
US presidential elections in November, the issue "cannot go on
forever. We are not going to debate on this for the next three
years."
Diplomats were wary of speculating about whether Washington was
backing off from pushing for the IAEA to take Iran to the UN
Security Council for possible sanctions over its nuclear program
due to the Iraq conflict.
Washington, which charges Iran is hiding attempts to make nuclear
weapons, did not lobby for this at the last IAEA meeing in March
and is not expected to insist on it in June.
Iran is close to the majority Shiite community in Iraq, which is
crucial to securing peace there.
A diplomat said one thing sure was that "the Iranians are more
confident because they know they're needed in Iraq."
IAEA inspectors now say they can see a pattern of radiation
contamination in Iran which could indicate attempts to enrich
uranium to bomb-grade level, diplomats said.
But the agency is waiting for another, more complete report from
Iran on its nuclear program, which will take "half a year to a
year" to evaluate, the official close to the IAEA said.
IAEA inspectors have so far reported two concentrations of
particles of highly enriched uranium -- at a Kalaye Electric
Company workshop in Tehran and at the Natanz pilot fuel
enrichment plant 250 kilometres (150 miles) south of the capital.
Diplomats have confirmed other sites have been found, although
details have not been made available.
WAR.WIRE
*****************************************************************
2 UN Envoy In Dpr Of Korea For Talks On Nuclear Programme
Date: Tue, 18 May 2004 16:00:23 -0400
UN ENVOY IN DPR OF KOREA FOR TALKS ON NUCLEAR PROGRAMME
New York, May 18 2004 4:00PM
A United Nations envoy is in the Democratic People's Republic of
Korea (DPRK) this week to support six-way talks on the country's
nuclear programme and any other problems in the Korean Peninsula,
a UN spokesman said today.
Maurice F. Strong, Secretary-General Kofi Annan's Personal Envoy,
will be in the DPRK through Saturday. While in the capital Pyongyang,
Mr. Strong will discuss with the Government possible ways in
which the Secretary-General might be of further help in the six-nation
talks, as well as humanitarian and economic aspects of this
situation, spokesman Fred Eckhard <"http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2004/sgsm9314.doc.htm">said.
China, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Russian Federation and United
States have been engaged in discussions with the DPRK since Pyongyang
announced at the end of 2002 that it planned to "lift the
freeze" on its nuclear facilities and later that it was pulling out
of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT).
2004-05-18 00:00:00.000
________________
For more details go to UN News Centre at http://www.un.org/news
To change your profile or unsubscribe go to:
http://www.un.org/news/dh/latest/subscribe.shtml
*****************************************************************
3 MSNBC: Riding a Tiger in North Korea
By Selig S. HarrisonNewsweek International
May 17 issue - When you go to Pyongyang, the place to look for
the keys to resolving the nuclear crisis is not the Ministry of
Atomic Energy, the Foreign Ministry or the headquarters of the
Korean People's Army. It is the Tong-Il Market, the showcase for
Kim Jong Il's bold new market-based economic reforms. There some
2,200 vendors compete in a frenzy of newly released capitalist
fervor, selling everything from farm produce to TV sets.
Twenty more indoor markets patterned after Tong-Il are now under
construction in Pyongyang, and more are planned for other cities.
Small-business start-ups, including mom and pop stalls and shops,
are sprouting up with government approval. Even more important,
state-owned factories no longer receive subsidies to cover their
losses and are encouraged to find their own markets for products,
to trade with each other and to reinvest any profits. This
decentralization of economic power amounts to a "halfway house to
privatization," as one resident diplomat observed, and has
created a spurt of increased economic activity as well as a
budding class of hustlers and would-be entrepreneurs.
What does all this have to do with the nuclear issue? Unless
North Korea can get large-scale foreign aid to rebuild its
infrastructure, especially its electricity, water and
transportation systems, its economic problems will mount. If the
economic potential of the reforms isn't realized, the net social
and political effects could be destabilizing for the regime,
stirring up new economic aspirations that are not fulfilled and
tensions between "winners" and "losers" in the new competitive
environment. Kim Jong Il is riding a tiger. He urgently needs a
nuclear deal with the United States in order to open an influx of
aid, trade and investment, and he wants to start negotiating one
at six-nation talks in Beijing scheduled for May 12. But Kim
can't afford a deal at any price. He can get military hard-liners
to go along only if the deal includes significant aid commitments
and clearly removes the armed forces' fears of a U.S. pre-emptive
strike.
Four days of high-level conversations in Pyongyang recently made
clear that Kim is not likely to accept the Bush administration's
demand for the "complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantling"
(CVID) of his nuclear-weapons program, all at once, without
knowing what Pyongyang will get in return. What Kim wants is a
step-by-step denuclearization agreement, linked with progress
toward the normalization of relations with the United States. Kim
Yong Nam, chairman of the Supreme People's Assembly and No. 2 to
Kim Jong Il, told me that "we don't think Mr. Bush is at all
serious about resolving the nuclear issue with us in a fair way,
since we obviously can't accept 'CVID first.' My feeling is, he
is delaying resolution of the nuclear issue due to Iraq and the
presidential election. But time is not on his side. We are going
to use this time 100 percent effectively to strengthen our
nuclear deterrent, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Why
doesn't he accept our proposal to dismantle our program
completely and verifiably through simultaneous steps by both
sides?"
How would a phased deal work? In step one, explained Foreign
Minister Paik Nam Soon and his aides, North Korea would freeze
its plutonium program in exchange for multilateral energy aid, an
end to U.S. economic sanctions and the removal of North Korea
from the U.S. list of terrorist states, which would open the way
for World Bank and Asian Development Bank aid. The terms of the
freeze, they said, would depend on what the United States is
prepared to do in return. Thus, if the payoff in energy aid is
big enough, inspectors could have the access necessary to confirm
how much plutonium has been reprocessed, and the plutonium could
then be placed under controls. Further reprocessing could be
prohibited, and formal pledges not to transfer nuclear material
or to test a nuclear device could be written into the agreement.
North Korea has suggested that negotiations on the freeze begin
in Beijing during the May 12 meeting, said Paik. But that doesn't
seem likely. The United States wants the agenda restricted to
CVID.
Could the United States and its allies ever be sure that a closed
society like North Korea actually lives up to a denuclearization
agreement? I told my North Korean interlocutors that no U.S.
president could give Pyongyang the binding "no attack" pledge it
has sought. To my surprise, one of them said that Pyongyang might
reconsider its demand for a security guarantee if a new
administration proved less hostile than the present one. After
all, the presence of U.S. diplomats and businessmen in Pyongyang
after the normalization of relations might be a better guarantee
against a pre-emptive strike, he said, than any agreement written
on paper. "If you really end your hostility, and give up the goal
of regime change," he added, "the formalities will no longer be
important."
Harrison, director of the Asian program at the Center for
International Policy, is the author of "Korean Endgame." He
recently made his eighth visit to North Korea.© 2004 Newsweek,
Inc.
Press | MSNBC TV
*****************************************************************
4 Las Vegas SUN: Editorial: One man can make a difference
LAS VEGAS SUN
On Sunday Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry made a
campaign stop in Las Vegas, where he renewed his opposition to a
nuclear waste dump in Nevada. But Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev.,
dismissed Kerry's remarks, saying, "To say he's going to stop
Yucca Mountain, it's a nice thing in the campaign, but certainly
a false promise."
Ensign certainly knows a thing or two about false promises. It
was George W. Bush who told Nevadans, when he was campaigning
for president in 2000, that he wouldn't support Yucca Mountain
as a nuclear waste dump unless it had been deemed scientifically
safe. At the time, Bush's pledge elicited skepticism since the
nuclear power industry, which backs Yucca Mountain, was
supporting his candidacy. Nevertheless, Bush's views on Yucca
Mountain were defended by the state's top Republican leaders.
And what did Nevada get in return for delivering its electoral
votes -- and the election -- to Bush based on his promise? A
year after he was sworn into office, Bush enlisted Congress'
support for his plan to send 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear
waste to Nevada. Thanks, Mr. President.
Kerry, in contrast to Bush, has been a friend of Nevada. In
2000 Kerry voted to sustain President Clinton's veto of
legislation that would have made it easier to send nuclear waste
to Nevada, and in 2002 he voted against Bush's plan to send
nuclear waste to Nevada. And Kerry has promised, if elected, to
use his presidential power to block Yucca Mountain, by trying to
halt the flow of federal money to the project or by directing
regulatory agencies to acknowledge scientific studies that show
the project might be unsafe. Undoubtedly, derailing Yucca
Mountain will be incredibly difficult given the strong support
for the project in Congress, driven almost entirely by
Republicans, most if not all of them also beholden to the
nuclear power industry. Still, Nevadans should lend their
support to Kerry, who has stood with our small state before and
will do so again on the single most important federal issue
affecting Nevada. Yucca Mountain has proven that character
counts when electing! a president.
*****************************************************************
5 KRT Wire: White House used unreliable defector
| 05/17/2004 |
By JONATHAN S. LANDAY
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration helped rally public and
congressional support for a preemptive invasion of Iraq by
publicizing the claims of an Iraqi defector months after he
showed deception in a lie detector test and had been rejected as
unreliable by U.S. intelligence agencies.
The defector, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al Haideri, claimed he'd worked
at illegal chemical, biological and nuclear facilities around
Baghdad. But when members of the Iraq Survey Group, the CIA-run
effort to trace Saddam Hussein's illegal weapons, took Saeed back
to Iraq earlier this year, he pointed out facilities known to be
associated with the conventional Iraqi military. He couldn't
identify a single site associated with illegal weapons, U.S.
officials told Knight Ridder.
"The overall impression was that he was trying to pass
information far beyond his area of expertise," said a senior U.S.
official. He and another U.S. official spoke on condition of
anonymity because some details of the defector's case remain
classified.
Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday that other defectors
fed him and the CIA misleading information about Iraqi mobile
biological weapons facilities before the war.
"It turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and in
some cases, deliberately misleading. And for that I am
disappointed and I regret it," Powell said on NBC's "Meet the
Press" on Sunday.
The defectors and exile groups who provided false information on
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorism also
assured administration officials and advisers that Iraqis would
welcome American troops as liberators, that the Iraqi military
would surrender en masse and that former exiles could quickly
help form a new Iraqi government and revive the country's oil
industry.
While no evidence has surfaced to indicate that administration
officials knowingly fed dubious information to Congress, the
public and the media, Saeed's case suggests that officials either
were unaware that he'd done poorly on the polygraph exam or
overlooked that fact when they publicized his claims.
The administration also publicized claims about Iraqi mobile
biological weapons labs from a defector whom the Defense
Intelligence Agency had labeled a fabricator and charges that
Saddam had tried to buy uranium for nuclear weapons in Africa
even though the CIA had said it couldn't verify the charge.
The White House used Saeed's claims in a background paper nine
months after CIA and DIA officers had dismissed him as
unreliable.
An administration official, speaking for the White House and
insisting that his name and position not be used, said he
couldn't comment on intelligence matters and referred all
questions to the CIA.
But a senior U.S. intelligence official, who also asked not to be
named, said he was unaware that the paper, "A Decade of Deception
and Defiance," "was vetted through the CIA" before it was
released.
The White House paper gave prominent billing to Saeed's claims.
It was released Sept. 12, 2002, in conjunction with a speech Bush
delivered at the United Nations General Assembly.
The paper was the administration's first major compendium of
"specific examples of how Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has
systematically and continually violated 16 United Nations
Security Council resolutions over the past decade."
It's still available on the White House and State Department Web
sites.
A footnote in one version attributes Saeed's claims to a Dec. 20,
2001, front-page article in The New York Times that was based on
an interview with the defector in Bangkok, Thailand.
In the article, Saeed described himself as a civil engineer who
worked on renovating secret biological, chemical and nuclear
weapons facilities in fake lead-lined water wells, private villas
and beneath Baghdad's main hospital.
"Mr. Saeed's account gives new clues about the types and possible
locations of illegal laboratories, facilities and storage sites
that American officials and international inspectors have long
suspected Iraq of trying to hide," the newspaper said.
The article was reprinted or cited by news media around the
world.
The article appeared three days after CIA and DIA experts
dismissed Saeed as unreliable - after he showed deception in the
CIA-administered lie detector test, said the U.S. officials.
CIA experts conducted the polygraph at the request of DIA
officials who'd spent some eight hours questioning Saeed in the
Thai resort of Pataya prior to his interview with The New York
Times, they said.
The polygraph "raised doubts" about Saeed's credibility, said one
senior U.S. official. Said the second official: "The results were
not good for him."
After the test, the CIA flew Saeed out of Thailand and resettled
him in a country of his choice, said the senior U.S. official. He
declined to identify the country but said it wasn't the United
States and that Saeed wasn't admitted to a U.S. witness
protection program.
The officials said they didn't know what happened to copies of
contracts and other documents that Saeed provided to help
substantiate his allegations.
Like the two other Iraqi defectors Powell cited on Sunday, Saeed
was supplied by the Iraqi National Congress, a former exile group
that lobbied the United States to oust Saddam. The group's
leader, Ahmad Chalabi, is on the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing
Council and is close to some Pentagon and White House officials
and advisers.
INC spokesman Entifadh Qanbar and other INC officials denied that
the group knowingly provided defectors of dubious credibility.
They insisted that the INC did its utmost to check their
identities and reliability before turning them over to U.S.
officials.
An INC adviser, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that an
administration official whom he declined to identify had told him
that "a large amount" of Saeed's information "did check out."
He said the INC learned of Saeed in mid-2001 after he was
released from an Iraqi jail and went to Damascus, Syria. After
learning that Iraqi intelligence agents were coming for him, the
INC advised Saeed to leave the Syrian capital.
Saeed flew to Bangkok and met with two INC officials, who spent
10 days debriefing him, said the INC adviser. The adviser said
INC officials were convinced that Saeed was genuine and alerted
their contacts at the Pentagon.
Then U.S. officials debriefed Saeed, he said.
In a June 10, 2003, speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in
New York, Chalabi said the INC had no further contact with Saeed
after he was turned over to U.S. officials in Thailand on Dec.
17, 2001.
ON THE WEB
"A Decade of Deception and Defiance" can be found on the White
House Web site at
[http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/09/iraqdecade.pdf]
*****************************************************************
6 MSNBC: Why Rumsfeld Is Wrong
[IMG: Robin Cook]
Former British foreign secretary Robin Cook discusses his
resignation over the Iraq war—and why it’s unlikely that
Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction
Robin Cook addresses the British Parliament on March 17, the
day of his resignation from Tony Blair's cabinet
By William UnderhillNewsweek Web ExclusiveUpdated: 1:21
p.m. ET May 18, 2004
May 30 - On the eve of the Iraq war, Robin Cook shook British
politics by quitting the government in protest of the planned
invasion. In his powerful resignation speech, the foreign
secretary urged respect for multilateral agreements and insisted
that the dangers posed by the regime of Saddam Hussein had been
overstated. Cook, who served in Tony Blair’s cabinet as leader
of Parliament’s House of Commons, claimed in particular that
Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction “in the commonly
understood sense.” His supporters now say that the
Coalition’s failure to find such weapons has vindicated his
stand. Cook, who is still has his seat in Parliament, spoke this
week to NEWSWEEK’s William Underhill in London.
NEWSWEEK: COALITION FORCES only overthrew Saddam Hussein a few
weeks ago. There must be a chance that weapons of mass
destruction will still be uncovered? Robin Cook:
These are things that are not easy to conceal. For a nuclear bomb
you need a nuclear reactor. For a missile you need a large
factory. You won’t find them round in someone’s back garden.
And all these synthetic claims about Iraq being a big country are
irrelevant. If Saddam had the capacity to hit us with weapons of
mass destruction, we would have found it. I did say it was quite
probable that he had laboratory stocks of biological toxins and
chemical shells that might be used on the battlefield, but it’s
an awful long time after the end of the war [and] we haven’t
found any of them, either. One other point is frequently
overlooked. Chemical and biological weapons have a limited shelf
life. All the materials that Saddam had in 1991 (at the end of
the gulf war) would have degraded to the point of being useless
long before 2003, whether or not he had destroyed them.
Isn’t it possible that Saddam Hussein ordered their
destruction, as U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has
suggested?
No. I don’t think it’s even remotely possible. I just cannot
follow the Rumsfeld logic; that watching CNN and seeing the
American build-up Saddam said to his generals, “It’s obvious
that the U.S. is going to invade; we had better destroy our
biggest weapons, so that when I am toppled there might be some
very difficult questions for Donald Rumsfeld to answer.”
So was the public deliberately misled over the weapons’
existence?
These are charged terms. I think it’s much wiser to keep the
spotlight on the issues, and leave questions for the government
to answer rather than end up [with] personalized headlines that I
would then have to defend. The focus should be on how the
government can square what it said at the time of the build-up to
[war with] Iraq with what they have discovered—or failed to
discover—in the aftermath. It is a real issue, which they are
not entitled to brush under the carpet. We were sold the menace
of the weapons of mass destruction as the reason for the war. And
the [British] attorney general based his legal justification for
war on the necessity to disarm Saddam Hussein. If those weapons
didn’t exist then the justification falls away.
Are you saying that the Blair government itself never believed in
the existence of these weapons of mass destruction?
I never saw any [cabinet] briefing or other evidence that
suggested that there was an urgent or compelling threat from
Saddam Hussein. I am not going to comment on the motivation or
sincerity of others, but I am rather puzzled that people who went
to the same briefings as me and saw the same material could come
to such radically different conclusions. To be fair to the United
States administration, it never made any bones about the reasons
why it went to war. It wanted to carry out a change of regime in
Iraq. And many of the proponents of were lobbying for it long
before September 11.
And that’s also why the British government went to war?
No, but they were madly keen to prove that they were reliable
allies of President Bush—and there were those around President
Bush who were determined to have a war.
There are those in Washington who now appear to see the weapons
issue as irrelevant.
It was their decision to put this at the heart of their case. It
cannot be a side issue after the war when they made it a central
issue before the war.
Recent weeks have produced still more evidence to demonstrate the
brutality of Saddam Hussein’s rule. Has that altered your
position in any way?
I was never in any doubt about the brutality of the Saddam
Hussein’s regime, but neither government [the United States or
Britain] ever based its case for invasion on brutality—because
that’s simply no basis in international law for going to war
just to change a regime. If we do decide that we are going to go
to war to remove brutal regimes then we have a very busy time in
front of us. We are not proposing to intervene to relieve the
people of Zimbabwe of the repressive rule of President [Robert]
Mugabe. We are not proposing to intervene in Burma where the
military junta has run the country for longer than Saddam
Hussein. We have allowed more people to be killed in the Congo
civil war than were ever killed inside Iraq. If you are going to
decide that brutality is a reason for military intervention, it
must be a decision that is [made] multilaterally by an
international forum. You cannot have individual nations such as
the U.K. or the U.S. deciding for themselves which ones they are
going to pick on next. One important reason is that if you accept
that principle that countries can invade countries where you
disapprove of the regime, the next time it may not be the U.S. or
the U.K. that acts on that principle.
How much damage has this affair done to Prime Minister Tony
Blair?
There is an issue of credibility not just for the prime minister,
but for the government more generally. It is going to have to
bite the bullet and admit there are no weapons of mass
destruction that could have posed a credible threat to Britain
and probably were none at the time. The longer they continue to
pretend that one day they are going to turn the corner and find a
nuclear reactor the more improbable it becomes. © 2004 Newsweek,
Inc.
Newsweek The War in Iraq Section Front
• Iraq: Detainees Tell of Other Abuses
• Abu Ghraib and Beyond
• Questions of Justice
• A Who's Who of the Accused
• Q&A: The Politics of Denial
• War Stories: Torture vs. Interrogation
• Dickey: Is There an Exit Strategy for Iraq?
• Rough Justice in Iraq
• Chinks in Our Armor
• Mixed Messages
• Newsweek The War in Iraq Section Front
About MSNBC.com | Newsletters
*****************************************************************
7 IEA: International Energy Outlook 2004
The full HTML version of the International Energy Outlook 2004
Report will be available by May 31, 2004
The Highlights section of the International Energy Outlook 2004
is available in HTML and PDF formats at:
[http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/highlights.html]
[http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/pdf/highlights.pdf]
The full report is available in PDF format at:
[ftp://ftp.eia.doe.gov/pub/pdf/international/0484(2004).pdf]
The International Energy Outlook 2003 Report has been archived
and is available at:
[http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/archive/ieo03/index.html]
*****************************************************************
8 Hi Pakistan: N-restraint talks with India next week: FO -->
May 18 2004
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan will hold its first talks with India since
its change of government on nuclear restraint next week, the
foreign ministry announced Monday.
Senior foreign ministry officials will discuss nuclear confidence
building measures on May 25 and 26, spokesman Masood Khan said.
"We are making preparations and our delegation will leave for New
Delhi on May 24," Khan told a weekly news briefing.
"The talks are about strategic stability, crisis management and
nuclear risk reduction." Pakistan and India are nuclear states
and they must have a strategic restraint regime, he said. Both
Pakistan and India have refused to sign nuclear non-proliferation
treaties because they are not formally recognised as nuclear
powers.
The nuclear talks were scheduled under a calendar of activities
agreed on during the outgoing government of Atal Behari Vajpayee.
Khan welcomed as "positive and constructive" the statement given
by the Congress party leader and prime minister in waiting Sonia
Gandhi to continue the nascent peace process initiated by her
rival Vajpayee.
"I think it was very positive statement. She said her party would
continue to engage Pakistan and it would continue to support the
peace process. Other Congress leaders have also given very
positive and constructive statements. We welcome them," Khan
said.
"This is a must. I think they realise that war is not the
option." The neighbouring countries launched a two-pronged
strategy of confidence building and dialogue after a landmark
agreement between President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister
Vajpayee in January to resolve all issues, including the Jammu
and Kashmir dispute.
Under the agreed timetable, the foreign secretaries are to meet
in June for talks on Kashmir and security issues. Foreign
ministers are scheduled to meet in August to review progress.The
FO spokesman said a considerable number of Pakistanis detained in
Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistans Shiberghan prison would soon be
released. He said most of the 41 Pakistanis currently held at
Guantanamo Bay and a couple of hundred of those in Afghan jails
are likely to be released shortly.
A Pakistan delegation met Pentagon officials in Washington early
this month to seek the release of these prisoners, which Pakistan
believes had no links with al-Qaeda. "There is some doubt about
the nationality of two or three prisoners, which are probably
Afghans," Khan said but added a considerable number of these
detainees will be repatriated very soon.
The spokesman confirmed that the US provided Pakistan counsellor
access to the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. He said a Pakistani
delegation had visited the Guantanamo Bay last year to ensure
that the prisoners were not maltreated.
Khan also confirmed reports that about 400 Pakistanis had
recently been shifted from Shiberghan to Kabul and would soon be
sent to Pakistan. Replying to a question, the spokesman said the
recent meeting between Pakistani and US officials was planned and
did not come out of the blue. He said the US officials were to
meet with the commerce ministry officials Monday to discuss
export control. He said the issue of Dr Qadeer Khan was not
discussed during the meeting.
To a question about the Shakai agreement in South Waziristan, the
spokesman again said that it was part of the broader
understanding that all foreigners living in the area would have
to be registered. "It is a must, we cant side step it, all the
aliens will have to get themselves registered," he added.
Copyright 1996-2002 . Hi Pakistan. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
9 Hi Pakistan: Japan PM gambles on nuclear progress - By Linda Sieg -->
May 18 2004
TOKYO: Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi will win kudos at home if
he reunites the families of kidnapped Japanese as a result of his
upcoming summit in Pyongyang , but he needs to make progress in
the crisis over North Korea's nuclear programmes to earn global
applause as well.
Mr Koizumi will meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang
on Saturday to seek both a break through in the dispute over the
Japanese abductees and progress in deadlocked six-party talks on
the communist state's nuclear arms programme.
"I think the prime minister has a very strong determination to
act in a very proactive way to bring about peace and stability in
the region," a government source said. "We have no intention
whatsoever of putting the question of nuclear weapons on the
shelf," the source added.
Working level talks on the nuclear crisis ended in Beijing on
Saturday with little apparent success in narrowing gaps between
the two main protagonists, the United States and North Korea. The
other participants were South Korea, Japan, China and Russia.
"The nuclear question is the delicate part," said Masao Okonogi,
a Korea specialist at Keio University in Tokyo. "There was little
progress at the working talks and it is very hard for North Korea
to compromise with the United States. Conversely, there is a
chance that Mr Kim wants to use Japan as a messenger, a mediator,
and so will say something to Koizumi."
North Korea wants compensation for giving up its nuclear arms
programme, with a deal for a freeze as a first step, and says it
has the right to pursue nuclear projects for peaceful purposes.
The United States wants North Korea to abandon completely both a
programme to make weapons-grade plutonium and a uranium
enrichment programme that Pyongyang now says does not exist.
"It's very hard to expect North Korea to accept in talks with
Japan the demand for complete, verifiable, irreversible
dismantling that it has rejected in the six-way talks," defence
policy analyst Satoshi Morimoto said in a weekend TV talk show.
But he added: "While not accepting complete dismantlement, North
Korea may show a more positive stance towards freezing its
nuclear programme." The latest crisis over North Korea's nuclear
ambitions emerged on October 2002, when US officials said
Pyongyang had confessed to pursuing a project to enrich uranium
for weapons.
That was just one month after Mr Koizumi's first summit in
Pyongyang, where Mr Kim made the stunning admission that his
agents had kidnapped 13 Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s
to train spies.
Five Japanese abductees then came home to Japan, but had to leave
behind their seven North Korean-born children and an American
spouse, who Washington says was a defector.
Japan wants all the relatives to be allowed to come to Japan. It
also wants better information about eight abductees Pyongyang
says are dead and another two Tokyo believes were also kidnapped.
Mr Kim also promised Mr Koizumi in 2002 that North Korea would
keep its international pledges about its atomic ambitions. But
after the October disclosure by US officials - later denied by
North Korea - Pyongyang pulled out of the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty, expelled UN inspectors and took a
plutonium plant out of mothballs."
Copyright 1996-2002 . Hi Pakistan. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
10 asahi.com EDITORIAL: Shield whistle-blowers
[asahi.com]
A toothless protections bill won't change society.
Asingle phone call or a letter sometimes can have great
repercussions on the health of society.
A phone call four years ago blew the lid off a cover-up of user
complaints at Mitsubishi Motors Corp., culminating in the
massive recalls of vehicles. The recent arrest of several of its
executives in connection with a scandal over defective
large-vehicle parts came as a renewed indictment of the
automaker's culture.
A more recent example concerns the bird flu outbreak at a
chicken farm in Tanba, Kyoto Prefecture. Mass deaths of birds at
the farm were reported by an anonymous caller to a local center
for livestock hygiene. If it had not been for the tip-off, which
later turned out to have been made a week after avian flu broke
out at the farm, the damage to the nation's poultry industry
would have been more devastating.
Other instances of corporate fraud and abuse have been exposed
by whistle-blowers in recent years, including cases where firms
mislabeled food and energy companies concealed cracks in nuclear
reactors.
Blowing the whistle on wrongdoers is often thought to be done in
secret, swathed in dark mystery. But it is a moral action aimed
at driving out corruption within an organization and aiding the
interests and welfare of society.
Traditionally, it has been the exception rather than the rule
for fraud and misconduct in Japan's business and government
world to surface. Potential whistle-blowers are often hesitant
to expose wrongdoing by their superiors and colleagues, and they
also fear workplace retaliation for reporting it.
The Diet will soon start deliberations on a bill to shield
whistle-blowers. The bill would protect employees from wrongful
dismissal and demotion for trying, in the public interest, to
expose illegal acts and practices within their organizations.
This is obviously a public-minded piece of legislation.
Disturbingly, however, it contains serious flaws that cannot be
ignored.
First, the bill would not make it easier for corporate or
government workers to supply information about internal
malfeasance to outside organizations like the media or consumer
groups. To receive legal protection under the new law,
whistle-blowers would be required to prove that there is
legitimate concern about reprisals and destruction of evidence.
This requirement greatly discourages whistle-blowers from
tipping off outsiders. The Diet should rethink and revise this
part of the bill. The Japan Federation of Bar Associations
proposes that the act of tipping off the media and other outside
watchdogs should also be protected when the circumstances show
there is good reason to fear reprisals.
Another serious problem with the current proposed bill is that
it would limit legal protection only to cases involving
violations of certain laws, such as the Penal Code, the Food
Sanitation Law and the Securities and Exchange Law. Offenses
regarding political fund-raising and tax evasion would not be
included. Clearly, the scope of protections should cover these
only-too-common infractions, too.
And ominously, some provisions have backtracked on principles
that were spelled out late last year in the law's first outline.
The outline said legal protection would be provided for
whistle-blowers whenever there was reasonable concern that
criminal acts have taken or could take place, for instance. The
drafted bill would not give such protection to people who report
problems unless a crime is about to be committed. The outline
was changed in response to protest from the business sector,
worried that too many situations could fall under the definition
of being eligible for such protection. The original provision
should be restored.
The government seems to be aware that the pending bill contains
these gaping loopholes. A senior government official called the
bill only a tiny baby step toward full-fledged legislation for
protecting whistle-blowers.
Japan desperately needs such legislation to bring to light and
disseminate a vital way of thinking about corporate
responsibility and compliance in society. The bill should be
redesigned as an even bigger stride toward accountability.
--The Asahi Shimbun, May 17(IHT/Asahi: May 18,2004) (05/18)
[Copyright Asahi Shimbun. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
11 NRC: Sunshine Act Meeting
FR Doc 04-11292
[Federal Register: May 18, 2004 (Volume 69, Number 96)] [Notices]
[Page 28182] From the Federal Register Online via GPO Access
[wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr18my04-81]
Agency Holding the Meeting: Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Date: Weeks of May 17, 24, 31, June 7, 14, 21, 2004.
Place: Commissioners' Conference Room, 11555 Rockville Pike,
Rockville, Maryland.
Status: Public and Closed.
Matters to be considered: Week of May 17, 2004 There are no
meetings scheduled for the Week of May 17, 2004.
Week of May 24, 2004--Tentative Tuesday, May 25, 2004 2
p.m.--Discussion of Management Issues (Closed--Ex. 2) Wednesday,
May 26, 2004 10:30 a.m.--All Employees Meeting (Public Meeting)
1:30 p.m.--All Employees Meeting (Public Meeting) Week of May 31,
2004--Tentative Wednesday, June 2, 2004 9:30 a.m.--Briefing on
Equal Employment Opportunity Program (Public Meeting) (Contact:
Corenthis Kelley, 301-415-7380) This meeting will be webcast live
at the Web address--http://www.nrc.gov1:30
[http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/leaving.cgi?from=leaving
FR.html&log=linklog&to=http://www.nrc.gov1:30] p.m.--Meeting with
Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards (ACRS) (Public Meeting)
(Contact: John Larkins, 301-415-7360) This meeting will be
webcast live at the Web address--http://www.nrc.gov
[http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/leaving.cgi?from=leaving
FR.html&log=linklog&to=http://www.nrc.gov] Week of June 7,
2004--Tentative Thursday, June 10, 2004 1:30 p.m.--Discussion of
Security Issues (Closed--Ex. 1) Week of June 14, 2004--Tentative
There are no meetings scheduled for the Week of June 14, 2004.
Week of June 21, 2004--Tentative There are no meetings scheduled
for the Week of June 21, 2004.
*The schedule for Commission meetings is subject to change on
short notice. To verify the status of meetings call
(recording)--(301) 415- 1292. Contact person for more
information: Dave Gamberoni, (301) 415- 1651.
* * * * *
SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: By a vote of 3-0 on May 7 and 10, the
Commission determined pursuant to U.S.C. 552b(e) and Sec.
9.107(a) of the Commission's rules that ``Affirmation of Final
Rule: Revision 10 CFR 50.48 to Allow Performance-Based Approaches
Using National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) Standard 805
(NFPA 805), `Performance- Based Standard for Fire Protection for
Light Water Reactor Electric Generating Plants,' 2001 Edition''
be held on May 11, and on less than one week's notice to the
public.
* * * * * The NRC Commission Meeting Schedule can be found on the
Internet at:
http://www.nrc.gov/what-we-do/policy-making/schedule.html
[http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/leaving.cgi?from=leaving
FR.html&log=linklog&to=http://www.nrc.gov/what-we-do/policy-makin
g/schedule.html] . * * * * * This notice is distributed by mail
to several hundred subscribers; if you no longer wish to receive
it, or would like to be added to the distribution, please contact
the Office of the Secretary, Washington, DC 20555 (301-415-1969).
In addition, distribution of this meeting notice over the
Internet system is available. If you are interested in receiving
this Commission meeting schedule electronically, please send an
electronic message to dkw@nrc.gov [dkw@nrc.gov] . Dated: May 13,
2004.
Dave Gamberni, Office of the Secretary.
[FR Doc. 04-11292 Filed 5-14-04; 11:42 am] BILLING CODE 7590-01-M
*****************************************************************
12 Las Vegas SUN: GAO: NRC Misjudged Ohio Nuke Plant Risk
By MALIA RULON ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Nuclear Regulatory Commission
miscalculated the risk to the public of letting an Ohio nuclear
power plant continue to run in 2001 with suspected reactor
leaks, congressional auditors said Tuesday.
The General Accounting Office said in a report that government
inspectors should have recognized warning signs years earlier
that an unsafe amount of corrosive boric acid was accumulating
on the reactor head at the Davis-Besse plant near Toledo.
"NRC should have but did not identify or prevent the corrosion
at Davis-Besse because its oversight did not generate accurate
information on plant conditions," the GAO said. A copy of the
GAO report was obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press.
Davis-Besse was among 14 plants that were supposed to have been
inspected in the fall of 2001 because of cracking in nozzles on
the reactor head. The NRC, however, allowed the plant to
postpone the inspection until a scheduled maintenance shutdown
months later.
Had the commission shut down the plant sooner, officials would
have found a corroded hole that nearly penetrated the reactor,
the GAO said. The auditors said that three years later, they
still aren't convinced that the NRC has addressed the problem
adequately.
"We do not yet have adequate assurances from NRC that many of
the factors that contributed to the incident at Davis-Besse will
be fully addressed," said the GAO report.
Davis-Besse, located along Lake Erie about 30 miles east of
Toledo, started producing electricity again in March after it
was shut down for more than two years. It was closed for routine
maintenance in February 2002. A month later, inspectors found
corrosion on the reactor vessel, where leaking boric acid had
eaten almost through a 6-inch-thick steel cap.
The GAO said that three engineering consultants it retained
concluded that the reasons cited by the NRC for delaying the
shutdown in 2001 "lacked credibility." It said the decision was
so poorly documented that they couldn't judge if it was
reasonable.
The commission was faulted by the auditors for not making plant
owners cultivate a "safety culture" among reactor workers and
managers. The NRC should have better guidelines on when to shut
down reactors for safety concerns, the auditors said.
NRC spokesman Scott Burnell said Tuesday the agency has such
guidelines. "There are many areas of oversight, regulations, the
technical specifications that a plant has to follow while it
shuts down in order to be in compliance with its license," he
said.
Burnell said the idea of assessing a plant's safety culture "is
too subjective to have any real effect on safety performance."
The commission's executive director, William Travers, said the
GAO auditors did not take into account how much the agency
depends on reactor operators to tell the truth about plant
conditions.
The NRC contends Davis Besse owner FirstEnergy Corp. gave the
agency inaccurate and incomplete information about the reactor
lid's status. A federal grand jury is probing whether the
utility did so intentionally.
Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, who chairs the Senate Environment
and Public Works subcommittee with oversight of the NRC, plans
to hold a hearing Thursday on the report's findings on Thursday.
Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich and Republican Rep. Steve
LaTourette, both of Ohio, requested the report along with
Voinovich. Kucinich said the latest report must make the
commission, the nuclear industry and Congress realize that
changes are necessary.
"This report must serve as a wake-up call," said Kucinich. He
opposed allowing the plant to start back up two months ago and
last year he asked the commission to lift its license.
---
On the Net:
Nuclear Regulatory Commission: http://www.nrc.gov
[http://www.nrc.gov]
--
*****************************************************************
13 JS Online: Tangled diver forces nuclear plant shutdown
By THOMAS CONTENT
tcontent@journalsentinel.com Posted: May 17, 2004
Unit 2 of the Point Beach nuclear power plant remained shut down
Monday after a scuba diver inspecting a water intake pipe ran
into trouble.
A cord connecting the diver to his boat became tangled with the
water pipe's grate. With 300,000 gallons of water per minute
being sucked into the pipe, the diver was unable to dislodge the
cord until the plant was shut down, said Maureen Brown,
spokeswoman for plant operator Nuclear Management Co.
"The force of the water pulling is quite strong, and once the
intake was turned off he easily surfaced and climbed into the
boat of his own accord and didn't require any medical treatment,"
she said.
The two units at Point Beach are now both shut down. Unit 1 was
shut down beginning April 5 for maintenance, inspection and
refueling. A problem detected with a nozzle on that reactor's
vessel head extended the shutdown, the company said.
The diver, who works for Seymour-based Seaview Diving Co., was
back on the job Monday, although not at the nuclear plant, said
Mike Holdridge, one of Seaview's owners. Holdridge declined to
identify the diver.
Holdridge praised Nuclear Management for its swift decision to
shut down the plant during the incident, which occurred Saturday.
"He really was never in any serious danger," Holdridge said. "It
was just that in order to retrieve him the way we wanted to
retrieve him, the call was made to shut down the flow of the
intake."
Brown said the diver and plant operators were in constant contact
and that the plant was shut down within minutes.
"They made a terrific call," Holdridge said. "For the personnel
involved here, really the only concern they had was for the
safety of the individual, and they made sure that it remained
that way."
In a similar incident in October 2000, Unit 1 at Point Beach was
shut down as a precaution after divers lost radio contact with
another diver who was inspecting a discharge pipe. That diver,
too, was unhurt.
The company notified the Nuclear Regulatory Commission of the
incident, and details were posted on the commission's Web site.
Seaview, which has conducted diving inspections and related work
at Point Beach, Kewaunee and other nuclear plants for 25 years,
was inspecting the water intake and a system that uses sound
waves to keep fish away from the intake pipe, Brown said. Other
divers were installing safety buoys to keep boaters from motoring
too close to the plant, in accordance with rules set up after the
Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, she said.
The exact reason the diver became entangled hasn't been
determined and will be reviewed by Nuclear Management, Brown
said.
The incident won't require a special inspection from the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission, agency spokeswoman Viktoria Mitlyng said,
because all nuclear-safety functions at Point Beach operated
normally.
However, as with all incidents at the plant, the agency will
review Nuclear Management's assessment of what happened and why.
The two-reactor Point Beach plant is already under heightened
oversight by the agency because of problems in 2001-'02. Those
problems were fixed, but the agency saw a pattern and faulted
plant management's ability to correct problems to ensure they
don't happen again.
Representatives of plant owner Wisconsin Energy Corp. and Nuclear
Management declined comment on when either reactor might resume
running, saying that commenting on the future status of the plant
could affect energy futures prices in the spot market. The
reactor taken out of service on Saturday is in standby mode,
Brown said, which means it could restart more quickly than a
reactor that is completely shut down. Unit 1 is completely shut
down.
When both reactors are operating, Point Beach generates 1,036
megawatts of electricity, or about 24% of the power generated by
all of Wisconsin Energy's plants.
Wisconsin Energy spokeswoman Wendy Parks said the utility didn't
anticipate any problems in meeting customers' electricity needs.
From the May 18, 2004 editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
[http://adserver.journalinteractive.com/RealMedia/ads/click_nx.cg
i/www.jsonline.com/adsections/new/default@Bottom1]
[http://www.jsonline.com/copyright.html] , Journal Sentinel
Inc. All rights reserved.
Journal Sentinel Inc. is a subsidiary of [http://www.jc.com]
*****************************************************************
14 AFP: TEPCO sales hit by cool Japanese summer, reactor shutdowns
[http://www.spacewar.com/]
TOKYO (AFP) May 18, 2004
Tokyo Electric Power Co., the world's largest private power
company, said Tuesday sales fell in the year to March due to an
unusually cool summer and forced shutdowns of its nuclear power
plants.
Group net profit fell 9.5 percent from a year earlier to 149.5
billion yen (1.3 billion dollars) after the firm booked 44.8
billion yen in special loss associated with the devaluation of
fixed assets.
Sales fell 1.3 percent to 4.85 trillion yen but recurring profit
rose 13.5 percent to 307.7 billion yen as the company squeezed
personnel and other costs.
"The sales volume fell as air conditioning needs fell due to the
extremely wet summer and warmer-than-usual winter," TEPCO said.
"Industrial demand also declined as production (in the Japanese
economy) was slow in the first-half of the fiscal year," it said.
As a result, total sales volume dropped 2.1 percent to 276
billion kilowatt-hours.
But looking ahead, the company is optimistic that expected normal
weather this year and higher industrial demand amid Japan's
strong economic recovery should push up its sales and profits.
For the current year to March 2005, TEPCO expects its group net
profit to rise to 265.0 billion yen, recurring profit to rise to
410.0 billion yen on higher sales of 5.03 trillion yen and 282
billion kilowatt-hours.
TEPCO closed 17 nuclear reactors in various parts of Japan last
year for safety checks after scandals about the systematic
cover-up of inspection data showing cracks in reactors.
Closing reactors was costly for the company, which had to boost
production at its thermal power plants to meet electricity
demand.
The recent upturn of the economy was expected to boost power
demand by corporate users, TEPCO said.
Although inspections and repairs of nuclear reactors as well as
rising oil price were likely to raise cost, resumed operation of
nuclear power plants and continued cost cutting efforts should
raise profits, the company said.
WAR.WIRE
*****************************************************************
15 ONN Report: NRC shouldn't have let Davis-Besse run with reactor leaks
Ohio News Now:
May 18, 2004
OAK HARBOR, Ohio The Nuclear Regulatory Commission miscalculated
the risk to the public of letting the Davis-Besse nuclear power
plant continue to run with suspected reactor leaks, according to
a report obtained by The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer.The General
Accounting Office report that was to be released Tuesday also
says the commission's refusal to fix the oversight flaws that
caused the NRC to miss a rust hole in the plant's nuclear
reactor means there may be major incidents at other
plants.Davis-Besse, located along Lake Erie about 30 miles east
of Toledo, started producing electricity again in March after it
was shut down for more than two years. It was closed for routine
maintenance in February 2002, and inspectors a month later found
corrosion on the reactor vessel, where leaking boric acid had
eaten almost through a 6-inch-thick steel cap.The damage led to
a review of 68 similar plants nationwide.The GAO report says
that the handling of Davis-Besse indicates problems with the way
the NRC polices the nation's 103 nuclear plants."We do not yet
have adequate assurances from NRC that many of the factors that
contributed to the incident at Davis-Besse will be fully
addressed," the investigators said.Three engineering consultants
to the GAO found that the decision to let Davis-Besse run
"lacked credibility" but was so poorly documented that they
couldn't judge if it was reasonable.The commission already has
rejected the report's recommendations that the agency should
start inspecting whether nuclear plant workers and managers have
an appropriate "safety culture" and that it should spell out
what evidence and criteria must be used to shut down a reactor
for safety concerns."It is fair to say we have major differences
of opinion on some of the findings," said NRC spokesman Scott
Burnell.Congressional investigators failed to take into account
how much the commission depends on reactor operators to tell the
truth about plant conditions, executive director William Travers
wrote in the commission's response to the General Accounting
Office.The NRC contends owner FirstEnergy Corp. gave the agency
inaccurate and incomplete information about the reactor lid's
status. A federal grand jury is probing whether the utility did
so intentionally.The NRC, which reviewed the GAO study for a
month before its public release, said it already has begun many
reforms as a result of its own assessment of the Davis-Besse
affair.Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio sought the review of the
Davis-Besse situation, along with U.S. Sen. George Voinovich and
Rep. Steven LaTourette, both R-Ohio.Kucinich tried to persuade
the NRC to pull Davis-Besse's operating license last year and
opposed restarting the plant in March. He said the latest report
must make the commission, the nuclear industry and Congress
realize that changes are necessary.A message seeking additional
comment was left at NRC regional offices in Chicago.___On the
Net:Nuclear Regulatory Commission: http://www.nrc.gov
Copyright 2003 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This
*****************************************************************
16 ONN. Ohio News Now: New Davis-Besse Report Rips NRC
May 18, 2004
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission miscalculated the risk to the
public of letting the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant continue to
run with suspected reactor leaks, according to a report obtained
by The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer.
The General Accounting Office report that was to be released
Tuesday also says the commission's refusal to fix the oversight
flaws that caused the NRC to miss a rust hole in the plant's
nuclear reactor means there may be major incidents at other
plants.
Davis-Besse, located along Lake Erie about 30 miles east of
Toledo, started producing electricity again in March after it was
shut down for more than two years.
It was closed for routine maintenance in February 2002, and
inspectors a month later found corrosion on the reactor vessel,
where leaking boric acid had eaten almost through a 6-inch-thick
steel cap.
The damage led to a review of 68 similar plants nationwide.
The GAO report says that the handling of Davis-Besse indicates
problems with the way the NRC polices the nation's 103 nuclear
plants.
"We do not yet have adequate assurances from NRC that many of the
factors that contributed to the incident at Davis-Besse will be
fully addressed," the investigators said.
Three engineering consultants to the GAO found that the decision
to let Davis-Besse run "lacked credibility" but was so poorly
documented that they couldn't judge if it was reasonable. The
commission already has rejected the report's recommendations that
the agency should start inspecting whether nuclear plant workers
and managers have an appropriate "safety culture" and that it
should spell out what evidence and criteria must be used to shut
down a reactor for safety concerns.
"It is fair to say we have major differences of opinion on some
of the findings," said NRC spokesman Scott Burnell.
Congressional investigators failed to take into account how much
the commission depends on reactor operators to tell the truth
about plant conditions, executive director William Travers wrote
in the commission's response to the General Accounting Office.
The NRC contends owner FirstEnergy Corp. gave the agency
inaccurate and incomplete information about the reactor lid's
status.
A federal grand jury is probing whether the utility did so
intentionally. The NRC, which reviewed the GAO study for a month
before its public release, said it already has begun many reforms
as a result of its own assessment of the Davis-Besse affair.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio sought the review of the Davis-Besse
situation, along with U.S. Sen. George Voinovich and Rep. Steven
LaTourette, both R-Ohio. Kucinich tried to persuade the NRC to
pull Davis-Besse's operating license last year and opposed
restarting the plant in March.
He said the latest report must make the commission, the nuclear
industry and Congress realize that changes are necessary. A
message seeking additional comment was left at NRC regional
offices in Chicago.
Copyright 2004 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This
[http://www.worldnow.com] All content Copyright 2004,
WorldNow and Dispatch Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
*****************************************************************
17 NRC: Agency Information Collection Activities: Proposed Collection;
FR Doc 04-11184
[Federal Register: May 18, 2004 (Volume 69, Number 96)] [Notices]
[Page 28181-28182] From the Federal Register Online via GPO
Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr18my04-80]
Comment Request AGENCY: U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).
ACTION: Notice of pending NRC action to submit an information
collection request to OMB and solicitation of public comment.
SUMMARY: The NRC is preparing a submittal to OMB for review of
continued approval of information collections under the
provisions of the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 (44 U.S.C.
Chapter 35). Information pertaining to the requirement to be
submitted: 1. The title of the information collection: 10 CFR
Part 63-- Disposal of High-Level Radioactive Wastes in a Proposed
Geologic Repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.
2. Current OMB approval number: 3150-0199. 3. How often the
collection is required: One time. 4. Who is required or asked to
report: The State of Nevada, local governments, or affected
Indian Tribes, or their representatives, requesting consultation
with the NRC staff regarding review of the potential high-level
waste geologic repository site, or wishing to participate in a
license application review for the potential geologic repository.
5. The estimated number of annual respondents: 3. 6. The number
of hours needed annually to complete the requirement or request:
363 (An average of 40 hours per response for consultation
requests, 80 hours per response for license application review
participation proposals, and one hour per response for statements
of representative authority).
7. Abstract: 10 CFR Part 63 requires the State of Nevada, local
governments, or affected Indian Tribes to submit certain
information to the NRC if they request consultation with the NRC
staff concerning the review of the potential repository site, or
wish to participate in a license application review for the
potential repository. Representatives of the State of Nevada,
local governments, or affected Indian Tribes must submit a
statement of their authority to act in such a representative
capacity. The information submitted by the State, local
governments, and affected Indian Tribes is used by the Director
of the Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards as a
basis for decisions about the commitment of NRC staff resources
to the consultation and participation efforts.
Submit, by July 19, 2004, comments that address the following
questions: 1. Is the proposed collection of information necessary
for the NRC to properly perform its functions? Does the
information have practical utility? 2. Is the burden estimate
accurate? 3. Is there a way to enhance the quality, utility, and
clarity of the information to be collected? 4. How can the burden
of the information collection be minimized, including the use of
automated collection techniques or other forms of information
technology? A copy of the draft supporting statement may be
viewed free of charge at the NRC Public Document Room, One White
Flint North, 11555 Rockville Pike, Room O-1 F21, Rockville, MD
20852. OMB clearance requests are available at the NRC worldwide
Web site:
http://www.nrc.gov/public-involve/doc-comment/omb/index.html
[http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/leaving.cgi?from=leaving
FR.html&log=linklog&to=http://www.nrc.gov/public-involve/doc-comm
ent/omb/index.html] . The document will be available on the NRC
home page site for 60 days after the signature date of this
notice.
Comments and questions about the information collection
requirements may be directed to the NRC Clearance Officer, Brenda
Jo. Shelton, (T-5 F52), U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission,
Washington, DC 20555-0001, by telephone at 301-415-7233, or by
Internet electronic mail to INFOCOLLECTS@NRC.GOV
[INFOCOLLECTS@NRC.GOV] . Dated at Rockville, Maryland, this 12th
day of May, 2004.
[[Page 28182]] For the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Brenda Jo. Shelton, NRC Clearance Officer, Office of the Chief
Information Officer.
[FR Doc. 04-11184 Filed 5-17-04; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 7590-01-P
*****************************************************************
18 [du-list] ex US marine describes war crimes and DU
Date: Tue, 18 May 2004 14:46:37 -0700
http://www.sacbee.com/content/opinion/story/9316830p-10241546c.html
Atrocities in Iraq: 'I killed innocent people for our government'
By Paul Rockwell -- Special to The Bee
Published 2:15 am PDT Sunday, May 16, 2004
"We forget what war is about, what it does to those who wage it and those
who suffer from it. Those who hate war the most, I have often found, are
veterans who know it."
- Chris Hedges, New York Times reporter and author of "War Is a Force That
Gives Us Meaning
For nearly 12 years, Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey was a hard-core, some say
gung-ho, Marine. For three years he trained fellow Marines in one of the
most grueling indoctrination rituals in military life - Marine boot camp.
The Iraq war changed Massey. The brutality, the sheer carnage of the U.S.
invasion, touched his conscience and transformed him forever. He was
honorably discharged with full severance last Dec. 31 and is now back in
his hometown, Waynsville, N.C.
When I talked with Massey last week, he expressed his remorse at the
civilian loss of life in incidents in which he himself was involved.
Q: You spent 12 years in the Marines. When were you sent to Iraq?
A: I went to Kuwait around Jan. 17. I was in Iraq from the get-go. And I
was involved in the initial invasion.
Q: What does the public need to know about your experiences as a Marine?
A: The cause of the Iraqi revolt against the American occupation. What they
need to know is we killed a lot of innocent people. I think at first the
Iraqis had the understanding that casualties are a part of war. But over
the course of time, the occupation hurt the Iraqis. And I didn't see any
humanitarian support.
Q: What experiences turned you against the war and made you leave the Marines?
A: I was in charge of a platoon that consists of machine gunners and
missile men. Our job was to go into certain areas of the towns and secure
the roadways. There was this one particular incident - and there's many
more - the one that really pushed me over the edge. It involved a car with
Iraqi civilians. >From all the intelligence reports we were getting, the
cars were loaded down with suicide bombs or material. That's the rhetoric
we received from intelligence. They came upon our checkpoint. We fired some
warning shots. They didn't slow down. So we lit them up.
Q: Lit up? You mean you fired machine guns?
A: Right. Every car that we lit up we were expecting ammunition to go off.
But we never heard any. Well, this particular vehicle we didn't destroy
completely, and one gentleman looked up at me and said: "Why did you kill
my brother? We didn't do anything wrong." That hit me like a ton of bricks.
Q: He spoke English?
A: Oh, yeah.
Q: Baghdad was being bombed. The civilians were trying to get out, right?
A: Yes. They received pamphlets, propaganda we dropped on them. It said,
"Just throw up your hands, lay down weapons." That's what they were doing,
but we were still lighting them up. They weren't in uniform. We never found
any weapons.
Q: You got to see the bodies and casualties?
A: Yeah, firsthand. I helped throw them in a ditch.
Q: Over what period did all this take place?
A: During the invasion of Baghdad.
'We lit him up pretty good'
Q: How many times were you involved in checkpoint "light-ups"?
A: Five times. There was [the city of] Rekha. The gentleman was driving a
stolen work utility van. He didn't stop. With us being trigger happy, we
didn't really give this guy much of a chance. We lit him up pretty good.
Then we inspected the back of the van. We found nothing. No explosives.
Q: The reports said the cars were loaded with explosives. In all the
incidents did you find that to be the case?
A: Never. Not once. There were no secondary explosions. As a matter of
fact, we lit up a rally after we heard a stray gunshot.
Q: A demonstration? Where?
A: On the outskirts of Baghdad. Near a military compound. There were
demonstrators at the end of the street. They were young and they had no
weapons. And when we rolled onto the scene, there was already a tank that
was parked on the side of the road. If the Iraqis wanted to do something,
they could have blown up the tank. But they didn't. They were only holding
a demonstration. Down at the end of the road, we saw some RPGs
(rocket-propelled grenades) lined up against the wall. That put us at ease
because we thought: "Wow, if they were going to blow us up, they would have
done it."
Q: Were the protest signs in English or Arabic?
A: Both.
Q: Who gave the order to wipe the demonstrators out?
A: Higher command. We were told to be on the lookout for the civilians
because a lot of the Fedayeen and the Republican Guards had tossed away
uniforms and put on civilian clothes and were mounting terrorist attacks on
American soldiers. The intelligence reports that were given to us were
basically known by every member of the chain of command. The rank structure
that was implemented in Iraq by the chain of command was evident to every
Marine in Iraq. The order to shoot the demonstrators, I believe, came from
senior government officials, including intelligence communities within the
military and the U.S. government.
Q: What kind of firepower was employed?
A: M-16s, 50-cal. machine guns.
Q: You fired into six or ten kids? Were they all taken out?
A: Oh, yeah. Well, I had a "mercy" on one guy. When we rolled up, he was
hiding behind a concrete pillar. I saw him and raised my weapon up, and he
put up his hands. He ran off. I told everybody, "Don't shoot." Half of his
foot was trailing behind him. So he was running with half of his foot cut off.
Q: After you lit up the demonstration, how long before the next incident?
A: Probably about one or two hours. This is another thing, too. I am so
glad I am talking with you, because I suppressed all of this.
Q: Well, I appreciate you giving me the information, as hard as it must be
to recall the painful details.
A: That's all right. It's kind of therapy for me. Because it's something
that I had repressed for a long time.
Q: And the incident?
A: There was an incident with one of the cars. We shot an individual with
his hands up. He got out of the car. He was badly shot. We lit him up. I
don't know who started shooting first. One of the Marines came running over
to where we were and said: "You all just shot a guy with his hands up."
Man, I forgot about this.
Depleted uranium and cluster bombs
Q: You mention machine guns. What can you tell me about cluster bombs, or
depleted uranium?
A: Depleted uranium. I know what it does. It's basically like leaving
plutonium rods around. I'm 32 years old. I have 80 percent of my lung
capacity. I ache all the time. I don't feel like a healthy 32-year-old.
Q: Were you in the vicinity of of depleted uranium?
A: Oh, yeah. It's everywhere. DU is everywhere on the battlefield. If you
hit a tank, there's dust.
Q: Did you breath any dust?
A: Yeah.
Q: And if DU is affecting you or our troops, it's impacting Iraqi civilians.
A: Oh, yeah. They got a big wasteland problem.
Q: Do Marines have any precautions about dealing with DU?
A: Not that I know of. Well, if a tank gets hit, crews are detained for a
little while to make sure there are no signs or symptoms. American tanks
have depleted uranium on the sides, and the projectiles have DU in them. If
an enemy vehicle gets hit, the area gets contaminated. Dead rounds are in
the ground. The civilian populace is just now starting to learn about it.
Hell, I didn't even know about DU until two years ago. You know how I found
out about it? I read an article in Rolling Stone magazine. I just started
inquiring about it, and I said "Holy s---!"
Q: Cluster bombs are also controversial. U.N. commissions have called for a
ban. Were you acquainted with cluster bombs?
A: I had one of my Marines in my battalion who lost his leg from an ICBM.
Q: What's an ICBM?
A: A multi-purpose cluster bomb.
Q: What happened?
A: He stepped on it. We didn't get to training about clusters until about a
month before I left.
Q: What kind of training?
A: They told us what they looked like, and not to step on them.
Q: Were you in any areas where they were dropped?
A: Oh, yeah. They were everywhere.
Q: Dropped from the air?
A: From the air as well as artillery.
Q: Are they dropped far away from cities, or inside the cities?
A: They are used everywhere. Now if you talked to a Marine artillery
officer, he would give you the runaround, the politically correct answer.
But for an average grunt, they're everywhere.
Q: Including inside the towns and cities?
A: Yes, if you were going into a city, you knew there were going to be ICBMs.
Q: Cluster bombs are anti-personnel weapons. They are not precise. They
don't injure buildings, or hurt tanks. Only people and living things. There
are a lot of undetonated duds and they go off after the battles are over.
A: Once the round leaves the tube, the cluster bomb has a mind of its own.
There's always human error. I'm going to tell you: The armed forces are in
a tight spot over there. It's starting to leak out about the civilian
casualties that are taking place. The Iraqis know. I keep hearing reports
from my Marine buddies inside that there were 200-something civilians
killed in Fallujah. The military is scrambling right now to keep the raps
on that. My understanding is Fallujah is just littered with civilian bodies.
Embedded reporters
Q: How are the embedded reporters responding?
A: I had embedded reporters in my unit, not my platoon. One we had was a
South African reporter. He was scared s---less. We had an incident where
one of them wanted to go home.
Q: Why?
A: It was when we started going into Baghdad. When he started seeing the
civilian casualties, he started wigging out a little bit. It didn't start
until we got on the outskirts of Baghdad and started taking civilian
casualties.
Q: I would like to go back to the first incident, when the survivor asked
why did you kill his brother. Was that the incident that pushed you over
the edge, as you put it?
A: Oh, yeah. Later on I found out that was a typical day. I talked with my
commanding officer after the incident. He came up to me and says: "Are you
OK?" I said: "No, today is not a good day. We killed a bunch of civilians."
He goes: "No, today was a good day." And when he said that, I said "Oh, my
goodness, what the hell am I into?"
Q: Your feelings changed during the invasion. What was your state of mind
before the invasion?
A: I was like every other troop. My president told me they got weapons of
mass destruction, that Saddam threatened the free world, that he had all
this might and could reach us anywhere. I just bought into the whole thing.
Q: What changed you?
A: The civilian casualties taking place. That was what made the difference.
That was when I changed.
Q: Did the revelations that the government fabricated the evidence for war
affect the troops?
A: Yes. I killed innocent people for our government. For what? What did I
do? Where is the good coming out of it? I feel like I've had a hand in some
sort of evil lie at the hands of our government. I just feel embarrassed,
ashamed about it.
Showdown with superiors
Q: I understand that all the incidents - killing civilians at checkpoints,
itchy fingers at the rally - weigh on you. What happened with your
commanding officers? How did you deal with them?
A: There was an incident. It was right after the fall of Baghdad, when we
went back down south. On the outskirts of Karbala, we had a morning meeting
on the battle plan. I was not in a good mindset. All these things were
going through my head - about what we were doing over there. About some of
the things my troops were asking. I was holding it all inside. My
lieutenant and I got into a conversation. The conversation was striking me
wrong. And I lashed out. I looked at him and told him: "You know, I
honestly feel that what we're doing is wrong over here. We're committing
genocide."
He asked me something and I said that with the killing of civilians and the
depleted uranium we're leaving over here, we're not going to have to worry
about terrorists. He didn't like that. He got up and stormed off. And I
knew right then and there that my career was over. I was talking to my
commanding officer.
Q: What happened then?
A: After I talked to the top commander, I was kind of scurried away. I was
basically put on house arrest. I didn't talk to other troops. I didn't want
to hurt them. I didn't want to jeopardize them.
I want to help people. I felt strongly about it. I had to say something.
When I was sent back to stateside, I went in front of the sergeant major.
He's in charge of 3,500-plus Marines. "Sir," I told him, "I don't want your
money. I don't want your benefits. What you did was wrong."
It was just a personal conviction with me. I've had an impeccable career. I
chose to get out. And you know who I blame? I blame the president of the
U.S. It's not the grunt. I blame the president because he said they had
weapons of mass destruction. It was a lie.
----------
About the Writer
---------------------------
Paul Rockwell ( rockyspad@hotmail.com) is a
writer who lives in Oakland.
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19 BBC: Admiral convicted for sub deaths
Last Updated: Tuesday, 18 May, 2004
[Suchkov (left) and Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov]
Admiral Suchkov (left) plans to appeal against the verdict
A Russian military court has handed down a suspended four-year
prison sentence to an admiral over the sinking of a
decommissioned nuclear submarine.
Admiral Gennady Suchkov was suspended as head of the Russian
Navy's Northern Fleet shortly after the submarine sank last
August.
Nine of the 10 crewmen died when a storm ripped the pontoons from
the K-159 submarine in the Barents Sea.
The vessel was being towed to a scrapyard at the time.
The submarine had been out of service for 14 years and was being
taken to have its nuclear reactors removed.
Only two of the bodies of the dead seamen were recovered.
Admiral Suchkov pleaded not guilty to the charge of negligence
and his lawyers said he would appeal.
"As the chief commanding officer of the fleet I do not absolve
myself from responsibility," he said after the sentence. "But I
do not feel guilty in the judicial sense of the term."
The trial was held behind closed doors at the naval base of
Severomorsk, in Russia's Arctic north.
The Russian navy commander, Admiral Vladimir Kuroyedov, has said
Northern Fleet commanders disregarded safety rules when they
authorised the towing of the submarine despite a bad weather
forecast.
He also said that the tugboat had moved faster than allowed by
official regulations.
Even after the storm ripped off some of the pontoons and the
submarine tilted onto its stern, the commanders did not move to
evacuate the crew, he was quoted as saying.
The submarine, whose two nuclear reactors were shut down in 1989,
is still lying at a depth of 238 metres (780 feet) in the Barents
Sea.
*****************************************************************
20 Hawk Eye Newspaper: IAAP claims process changed
[http://archive.thehawkeye.com]
Tuesday, May 18, 2004, Site updated daily at 11 a.m. CST
Former Army plant workers may have better chance of getting
payment.
MATTHEW LeBLANC
mleblanc@thehawkeye.com [mleblanc@thehawkeye.com]
Former Iowa Army Ammunition Plant employees who contracted cancer
from work at the Middletown plant during the Cold War could be
closer to receiving compensation benefits after sweeping changes
to workers' compensation program guidelines were released last
week.
The revised rules, detailed in an 89page Department of Health
and Human Services report issued Friday, could pave the way for
former IAAP workers and their families to skip an arduous "dose
reconstruction" process designed to determine how much radiation
they were exposed to at the former nuclear weapons plant.
If deemed eligible by government officials, the workers could
receive a onetime $150,000 compensation payment.
"The former workers at the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant will now at
least know the procedure for which to move forward so they may
petition for special status and be compensated," Sen. Charles
Grassley said in a statement last week. The Iowa Republican has
pushed since September for changes in the Energy Employees
Occupational Illness Compensation Program, which doles out the
compensation payments under the Department of Labor.
Workers at IAAP assembled, testfired and disassembled components
of nuclear weapons from the 1940s to the mid1970s. The work has
been linked to various forms of cancers and lung diseases.
In the past, workers or their surviving family members filed
claims under EEOICP and waited for government doctors to
determine whether the level of radiation to which they were
exposed was high enough to warrant compensation. Now, because a
determination on exact amounts of radiation at the 19,000acre
plant may never come to light, the former workers could be able
to skip the waiting period and move straight to the payment.
Under the new rules, IAAP and other former Department of Energy
workers injured while working at facilities across the U.S. can
petition government officials to bypass the costly and
timeconsuming dose reconstruction and proceed to payment with
the approval of Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy G.
Thompson.
Workers, if an accurate assessment of radiation levels cannot be
determined, can petition federal officials to be included in a
"special exposure cohort" that, in essence, estimates the amount
of radiation to which the worker was exposed. If the amount is
deemed high enough to be worth of payment, the worker will be
paid.
The special exposure cohort rules, while not mentioning IAAP
specifically, states that former DOE workers nationwide as a
group can petition HHS, which completes dose reconstructions
for the Labor Department, for inclusion into the cohort.
An Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health, appointed by
President Bush, will recommend to Thompson that the workers be
included in the cohort. Only Thompson, however, can make the
final decision regarding whether to admit them.
Individuals cannot petition for inclusion. Currently, only
workers in Paducah, Ky., Portsmouth, Ohio, Amchitka Island,
Alaska, and Oak Ridge, Tenn. qualify for special exposure cohort
status.
A report released in midApril by the National Institute for
Occupational Safety and Health could prove to be the key to
cohort status for IAAP employees.
Government doctors in the report state that data necessary to
make determinations on the health of former workers at IAAP is
unavailable and may never be recovered. The document also states
that an accurate inventory of radiation and chemical exposures of
some former IAAP workers may never be possible because
information on the topic was "generally not measured prior to
1955 ... because monitoring data have not been located."
But the HHS report states that research from scholarly journals
or universities could provide enough information necessary to
deny special exposure cohort status. In that case, the workers
would follow general claims procedures.
"IAAP workers deserve guidance on their compensation claims,"
Sen. Tom Harkin, DIowa, said. "Their compensation is long
overdue, and it is high time they receive the help they need."
The HHS report caps a monthslong effort by Grassley, Harkin and
other members of Congress to overhaul EEOICP, which has been slow
to compensate many injured workers since the program began
processing claims in 2001. Both Grassley and Harkin have
indicated they will introduce legislation aimed at further
changing the program, though it's unclear when that will take
place.
The Hawk Eye 800 S. Main St., Burlington Iowa 52601 319-754-8461
Front Desk 319-754-6824 FAX 1-800-397-1708 Toll Free
*****************************************************************
21 Moscow Times: Admiral Convicted in Sinking of K-159
Wednesday, May 19, 2004. Page 3.
By Oksana Yablokova [oks@imedia.ru] Staff Writer
For MT
Northern Fleet commander Admiral Gennady Suchkov
A Severomorsk court on Tuesday found Northern Fleet commander
Admiral Gennady Suchkov guilty of negligence in the sinking of a
decommissioned submarine that killed nine sailors in August and
handed him a four-year suspended sentence.
The navy court held Suchkov solely responsible for the accident,
rather than any of the other officers in the chain of command
between him and the submarine commander.
Suchkov, who was suspended of his duties last fall, has
maintained his innocence, and supporters say he was made a
scapegoat in a show trial.
Suchkov's lawyers said Tuesday they would appeal.
"We believed that the investigation would be objective and
[investigators] would thoroughly look into the details of the
case. Unfortunately, this did not happen," Suchkov told
reporters after the trial, Interfax reported.
Suchkov said he was not trying to duck responsibility for the
accident, but did not consider the criminal prosecution against
him fair.
The K-159 nuclear submarine sank in the Barents Sea while being
towed to a scrap yard.
Nine of the 10 crew members on the K-159 drowned when a fierce
storm ripped away pontoons supporting the submarine.
The sinking occurred on Aug. 30, near the site where the Kursk
submarine sank in August 2000, killing all 118 sailors on board.
Suchkov also said he had come under pressure during the
investigation, but did not elaborate. His trial started Jan. 12.
Prosecutor Igor Murashov said Tuesday that he was satisfied with
the verdict, because it was based on "a thorough analysis and
unbiased evaluation of the evidence."
Murashov earlier had asked the court to sentence Suchkov to a
four-year term to be served in a special village for prisoners.
In March, the commander of the Navy, Admiral Vladimir Kuroyedov,
took the stand to testify against Suchkov.
Navy spokesman Igor Dygalo said the sinking and the trial
"reflected on the reputation" of the fleet, but that prosecutors
had apportioned blame for the accident correctly.
"Of course, all this is said, but the men died and this is a
fact to be dealt with," Dygalo said.
But many of Suchkov's supporters disagreed that he was the only
official responsible for the disaster.
Igor Kurdin, head of the St. Petersburg-based veteran seamen's
club, said that there were a number of Navy officers and
technical personnel who were involved in planning and conducting
the towing operation.
"This is a political trial aimed at holding a public whipping,"
Kurdin said by telephone from Odessa.
Kurdin said that he, along with 29 acting and retired admirals,
had signed an open letter in Suchkov's defense.
He also noted that no Navy official had been convicted in the
sinking of the Kursk.
Copyright 2004, The Moscow Times. All Rights Reserved.
*****************************************************************
22 NRC: Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards; Notice of
FR Doc 04-11183
[Federal Register: May 18, 2004 (Volume 69, Number 96)] [Rules
and Regulations] [Page 28043-28044] From the Federal Register
Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr18my04-3]
Issuance of Final Backfit Guidance AGENCY: Nuclear Regulatory
Commission.
ACTION: Final issuance; effective date announcement.
SUMMARY: The U. S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) Office
of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards (NMSS) has issued the
final document, NMSS 10 CFR Part 70 Backfit Guidance.
The final document provides guidance for implementing the backfit
provisions in 10 CFR 70.76. As a result of this final issuance
and as discussed in 10 CFR 70.76, backfit provisions are now
effective for all part 70
[[Page 28044]] requirements, except for subpart H, and following
NRC approval of a licensee's Independent Safety Analysis (ISA)
Summary, the requirements of 10 CFR 70.76 become effective for
subpart H requirements.
DATES: The effective date of 10 CFR 70.76 is May 18, 2004.
ADDRESSES: A copy of the final document is available for public
inspection and copying from the Publicly Available Records (PARS)
component of NRC's document system (ADAMS). ADAMS is accessible
from the NRC Web site at 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]
. The ADAMS Accession Number is ML040980122. Documents can also
be viewed electronically on the public computers located at the
NRC's Public Document Room (PDR), O-1F21, One White Flint North,
11555 Rockville Pike, Rockville, MD 20852. The PDR reproduction
contractor will copy documents for a fee. Persons who do not have
access to ADAMS, should contact the NRC PDR Reference staff by
telephone at 1 (800) 397-4209, or (301) 415-4737, or by e-mail to
pdr@nrc.gov [pdr@nrc.gov] . FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT:
William Gleaves, Office of Nuclear Material Safety and
Safeguards, Division of Fuel Cycle Safety and Safeguards, Mail
Stop T-8 A33, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC
20555-0001, Telephone (301) 415-5848, or by e-mail at bcg@nrc.gov
[ bcg@nrc.gov] . Dated at Rockville, Maryland, this 30th day of
April, 2004.
For the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Joseph J. Holonich, Deputy Director, Division of Fuel Cycle
Safety and Safeguards, Office of Nuclear Material Safety and
Safeguards.
[FR Doc. 04-11183 Filed 5-17-04; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 7590-01-P
*****************************************************************
23 Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Senate should halt nuclear waste plan
[seattlepi.com]
[OPINION]
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD
Senators should halt the Bush administration's Department of
Energy's attempts to boss everyone around on nuclear waste
policy and end run the federal courts. The administration's
bullying tactics should be met with a firm refusal to submit.
The DOE has a responsibility to clean up the heavily
contaminated radioactive waste in tanks at Hanford and several
other sites around the country. A federal judge already has
overruled the department's attempts to reclassify the waste in
order to save money and leave it at the sites.
Legitimately, Energy has filed an appeal. But it has shown
horrid judgment with attempts to dictate changes in federal law
to evade its responsibility, blackmail states into accepting the
waste and free itself of state controls.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., has put language into a defense
authorization bill to give the department much of what it wants.
The bill would authorize reclassification of the waste in his
state and let DOE withhold $350 million in cleanup money for
Hanford and other sites until their states cave in to
reclassification schemes.
Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., is leading a fight against the
plan. Tank waste at Hanford threatens to pollute the Columbia
River. Environmental groups rightly complain about rewriting the
waste law in a defense bill without public hearings.
The Senate should strip Graham's amendment from the bill. The
Energy Department needs to clean up nuclear waste fully, not
evade public accountability.
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24 Las Vegas RJ: EDITORIAL: Kerry on Yucca
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
The John Kerry show made its way through Las Vegas on Sunday, and
the Democrat showed he can pander with the best of them on the
obligatory Yucca Mountain issue.
"Rest assured Nevada," Mr. Kerry thundered. "If I am president
of the United States, Yucca Mountain will not be a repository."
Well.
The good senator didn't even go that far in a commentary he
penned for us which appeared in Sunday's paper. In that piece, he
simply said he would "fight against" Yucca Mountain as president.
So if we're to take Sen. Kerry at his word, we can expect that
sometime during the first month of his administration -- we'll
give him time to unpack -- all work at Yucca Mountain will cease?
Then we're to believe that the first budget he submits to
Congress will include no money for Yucca Mountain?
Further, a President Kerry will of course veto any congressional
attempts to get the project back on track and he will inform
millions of voters in states with nuclear reactors that they're
just going to have to live with the spent fuel being stored on
site?
Sure ... and the tooth fairy lives at the North Pole with Santa.
Copyright Las Vegas Review-Journal
*****************************************************************
25 Las Vegas RJ: YUCCA MOUNTAIN PROJECT: DOE takes comment on plan
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
Responses mixed on transportation of nuclear waste By KEITH
ROGERS
REVIEW-JOURNAL
Wayne Horlacher, right, and Ken MacDonald read a display about
transporting nuclear materials Monday during a meeting on the
Yucca Mountain Project at the Cashman Center.
Photo by Craig L. Moran.
For the fifth time this month, Department of Energy officials on
Monday brought out their maps and displays on how they plan to
build a 319-mile railroad to haul nuclear waste to Yucca
Mountain.
This time, at the Cashman Center, more than 120 Las Vegas Valley
residents and a few from outside Clark County had a chance to let
DOE know what they think about the plan.
Some said they were not impressed. Others said the federal
government was going about it backwards.
Several said they liked the idea and Nevadans stand to reap
economic benefits.
Still others wondered what it would do to the local economy and
whether the rail line and a repository, if built, will be safe.
"They're not even pretending any more that they care what we
think," said Peggy Maze Johnson, executive director of Citizen
Alert, an environmental group. "We're protesting the whole
process."
Maze Johnson said the scoping meetings DOE has held in Las
Vegas, Reno, Caliente, Goldfield and Amargosa Valley were really
open houses that didn't allow for the same information exchange
that takes place at a public hearing.
As such, she said Citizen Alert will hold community meetings of
its own at 6 p.m. today at the Senior Center in Caliente and
again at the same time on May 27 in Pahrump.
Jeff van Ee, representing the Toiyabe Chapter of the Sierra
Club, said he, too, is "deeply troubled by the process that has
been used to select Yucca Mountain, evaluate the environmental
impacts and restrict the consideration of alternatives."
In a written statement, he accused the DOE of skirting the
National Environmental Policy Act by holding a meeting on what
should be included in an impact statement for the Caliente rail
line "before all of the science is in on Yucca Mountain and
before the mountain is licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission." The DOE's meetings, he noted, took place after the
agency selected the Caliente rail corridor and sought permission
to withdraw that land from public use.
"They've got the cart before the horse," he said with wilderness
advocate Susan Potts at his side.
Potts, Southern Nevada director of Friends of Nevada Wilderness,
pointed to a map that shows the planned rail line running through
wilderness study area. It will be illegal to allow railroad
tracks to be installed in those areas without Congress releasing
the land from its protected status, she said.
Then, there was John Baietti, 52, who runs a small business in
the Las Vegas Valley and who spoke loud and clear against the
Yucca Mountain opponents.
"We strongly believe that what they're saying is absolutely
garbage," he said.
Baietti was referring to the concerns of environmentalists and
the state's congressional delegation about the risks involved
with hauling 77,000 tons of the nation's most potent nuclear
waste to Yucca Mountain.
"There is no risk. Absolutely none. Nada," he said. "Leaving it
where it is now is insane."
Instead of opposing the nuclear waste project, Nevada should
seek financial relief from the federal government, Baietti said.
But Robert Halstead, transportation consultant for the Nevada
Nuclear Projects Agency, noted that although the rail line would
run across the largely uninhabited terrain of the state's rural
counties, up to 89 percent of the shipments would still come
through downtown Las Vegas.
Cassandra Fletcher, a newcomer to Las Vegas, said she's trying
to get a grasp on the issues from her perspective as an educator.
Fletcher said it is obvious that the federal government
eventually will consolidate the nation's spent nuclear fuel at a
repository at Yucca Mountain.
"We are going to have to face the reality that we are being
railroaded here," she said.
Copyright Las Vegas Review-Journal
*****************************************************************
26 Spectrum: S. Utahns speak out on nuke testing -
thespectrum.com
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
50 gather in St. George for downwinder forum
By PATRICE ST. GERMAIN patrices@thespectrum.com
[Photo] Nick Adams/Daily News Beth Neiderman, outreach director
for Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah, gives a presentation
Monday night at a public meeting presented by Downwinders Opposed
to Nuclear Testing.
On TV
+ The forum will be broadcast via tape on KCEC, Charter Cable
channel 25, at the following times:
+ 7 p.m. Wednesday.
+ 7 p.m. Friday.
+ 7 p.m. Saturday.
+ 7 p.m. May 23.
ST. GEORGE -- With the threat of renewed nuclear testing at the
Nevada Test Site very real, a crowd of about 50 gathered in
Washington County Commission chambers Monday for a forum on the
topic.
Several speakers from HEAL Utah (Healthy Environment Alliance of
Utah), DONT (Downwinders Opposed to Nuclear Testing) and local
downwinder Michelle Thomas spoke at the meeting. The meeting
covered the atomic history, the effects of nuclear testing at
the Nevada Test Site and the future of nuclear testing along
with the transportation and storage of nuclear waste.
Some of the issues brought up at the meeting included illegal
funding of nuclear weapons development back in the 1940s during
World War II. Laura Bonham, a member of DONT said the project to
develop nuclear weapons, known as the Manhattan Project, was
given a $133 million budget, money taken from the Army Corp of
Engineering budget, yet the cost of the project was $2 billion.
The uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima would have effectively
ended the war but Bonham said documents show that the second
bomb, a plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki, was created in part
with illegal appropriations of money.
Thomas, who once aspired to be a dance teacher, said being a
downwinder with several health problems, including a
degenerative muscle disease, instead gave her a career that she
didn't want -- as a poster child for downwinders. Thomas talked
about what it was like growing up in St. George.
"My mother had a chart in our home with rows and rows of squares
that covered a 3-block area in our neighborhood," Thomas said.
"Not long after testing began, children became affected with
illnesses and my mother would put an "X" on their house."
Thomas said over the years, more and more houses would have
"X's" on them and day in and day out, Thomas heard her mother
say they (the government) were killing them. The day came when
their own house had an "X" on it when Thomas, then in high
school, was diagnosed with a pre-cancerous ovarian growth.
During the years from 1951-1962 when above ground nuclear
testing was conducted, fallout from these nuclear clouds
stretched across the United States.
Even though the new weapons, if tested, would be underground, an
underground test done in 1970 showed that radioactive debris was
spewed 10,000 feet into the atmosphere.
Beth Neiderman, outreach director for HEAL Utah, said that test
also opened a 315-foot fissure in the ground that for the 24
hours following the test, released radioactive steam into the
atmosphere.
Following the presentation, several people in the audience asked
questions including one about how much radioactive fallout is
still in the soil today. Bonham said there were over 150
isotopes in the nuclear blasts but only one was ever studied in
depth so no one knows how much still exists in the soils or the
effects.
Congressional hopeful Tim Bridgewater attended the meeting along
with representatives for Congressman Jim Matheson and Senator
Orrin Hatch. Bridgewater remarked that county commissions,
mayors and representatives at a local level need to be involved.
But as one woman remarked, no local or county officials attended
the meeting.
Moderator Todd Seifert said that in his opinion, nuclear testing
could be one of the most critical issues in Southern Utah.
Bridgewater said that the standards for Environmental Impact
Studies need to be much higher.
"The government can get any result it wants out of an EIS,"
Bridgewater said.
Next month, the Energy Commission will vote on the possible
appropriation of more funds for more studies that could result
in the renewal of nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site.
DONT and HEAL Utah are asking concerned residents to contact
officials regarding their feelings on the issue.
Vanessa Piece, HEAL Utah program director, said the issue of
nuclear testing and the transportation and storage of nuclear
waste is not a political issue.
"Too few city and county officials are fighting this issue," she
said. "We need to oppose all effort for renewed nuclear
testing."
For more information, log on to [http://www.healutah.org]
Originally published Tuesday, May 18, 2004
Copyright 2004 The Spectrum. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
27 Las Vegas SUN: Public offers thoughts on Yucca Mountain
Return to the
Las Vegas SUN
Today: May 18, 2004 at 9:40:34 PDT
By Mary Manning < [manning@lasvegassun.com] > LAS VEGAS SUN
Las Vegas native Bob Haygood said he is neutral on the
controversial nuclear waste repository project at Yucca
Mountain, where the government wants to bury 77,000 tons of
high-level radioactive waste.
Haygood worked at the Nevada Test Site preparing deep holes for
underground nuclear-weapons experiments from 1978 until 1995 and
is a certified welding inspector familiar with using X-rays to
examine pipeline welds.
"I'm not for it, I'm not against it," Haygood said about the
proposed repository Monday night, when 128 people visited
Cashman Field Center to comment on the Energy Department's Yucca
Mountain Project at the last public scoping meeting before an
environmental impact statement is released next year.
"The problem with radiation is that most people are ignorant
about it," Haygood said. "People are scared to death of it."
Haygood said that other energy sources, such as gasoline and
natural gas, are also dangerous.
Bud Tangren, a Las Vegas fence builder since the 1950s,
supported the Yucca project.
"I'm in favor of the dump," Tangren said. "Give us $10 billion
a year, then bring it on."
Of course, no one has promised the state $10 billion in
exchange for serving as the permanent home for the nation's
high-level nuclear waste, much less $10 billion per year.
Yucca supporters like Tangren were in the clear minority, with
at least two-thirds of the people opposed, including state and
Clark County officials.
Despite the Energy Department's preferred route bringing the
bulk of the nuclear waste shipments through Caliente northeast
of Las Vegas in Lincoln County, the critical issue is the number
of trains or trucks that will travel through Las Vegas on
railroad tracks or interstate highways, said Bob Halstead,
transportation expert for the state of Nevada.
The nuclear waste routes have not been designated yet, Halstead
said. Weather and the time of year could increase rail shipments
on the Union Pacific's tracks that run through downtown Las
Vegas, or trucks could haul nuclear waste containers on
Interstate 15, U.S. 95 or U.S. 93.
The state estimates up to 89 percent of the 130 nuclear waste
rail shipments expected annually could pass through downtown Las
Vegas, Halstead said.
The proposed 319-mile rural rail route from Caliente, around
the Air Force's Testing and Training Range and into Yucca
Mountain, poses its own set of problems, Halstead said,
primarily from Nevada's geography.
The first 100 miles of the current Caliente rail corridor
crosses, skirts or dodges seven mountain ranges, Halstead said.
"It means you are going to have safety concerns on routes
because of grades and in the valleys because of speed, up to 60
mph," Halstead said.
Clark County's emergency rescue teams would have to respond to
a nuclear waste accident in Southern Nevada, Utah, Arizona or
Southern California, said Irene Navis, director of the county's
Nuclear Waste Division.
Nevada's largest county in population has the most ability,
manpower and equipment, Navis said.
The county has agreements with all contiguous counties to
respond in the case of an accident, such as a recent tour bus
collision, Navis said.
With nuclear waste, Clark County's emergency responders will be
spread thinner, Navis said. "While the agreements work well, we
are going to be tested to the limit," she said.
Surveyor Russ Avery's biggest concern was thousands of acres of
land in Nye County, in the shadow of Yucca Mountain, 90 miles
northwest of Las Vegas. These rural acres support grazing cattle
and raising alfalfa, he said.
If a radioactive spill occurred during transportation, it could
threaten the ground water for the ranchers in the area, Avery
said.
For Indian tribes such as the Western Shoshone and the Moapa
Valley Band of Paiutes, the nuclear waste repository threatens
cultural sites, since archaeological surveys have been conducted
in less than 1 percent of the Caliente corridor.
Calvin Meyer, chairman of the Moapa Valley Band of Paiutes,
said that he had just learned of Monday's hearing. "We didn't
even know about it until this morning," he said.
For the past 20 years the Air Force has been concerned about
the possibility nuclear waste might be shipped across its
Testing and Training Range, Nellis Air Force Base spokesman Mike
Estrada said.
However, the Air Force, the Bureau of Land Management and the
Surface Transportation Board have applied for cooperating agency
status to oversee the Energy Department's development of
shipping routes through Nevada, Col. Bob Zielinski, Air Force
liason with the Energy Department, said.
Pentagon officials have said that they need "elbow room" to
train an international fleet of military pilots on the unique
training range spanning southern and central Nevada, Zielinski
said.
Most important is to protect buffer zones around firing ranges,
he said.
"We don't have competing missions, but complimentary ones,"
Zielinski said, "if we cooperate ahead of time."
The Bureau of Land Management agreed in December 2003 to a
two-year segregation of 308,600 acres of land along the Caliente
corridor. The withdrawal will protect the proposed corridor from
mining claims and other uses for about two years, said Jackie
Gratton of the BLM's Las Vegas Field Office.
In May the BLM will formally request that land-use planning be
added as an issue to the environmental scoping required by the
Energy Department.
The Surface Transportation Board would have to issue a license
to the Energy Department if the special track to Yucca Mountain
would be used for commercial freight, said Dave Navecky
representing the board.
The Sierra Club and seven other environmental organizations
oppose the nuclear waste repository and transporting waste
across the nation, Tara Smith, the club's conservation
organizer, said.
When Peggy Maze Johnson, executive director of Citizen Alert,
walked into the hearing, she saw a sign reading, "Transporting
nuclear waste is safe."
"How do we know?" Johnson asked.
Questions or problems? Click here.
*****************************************************************
28 Las Vegas SUN: Lincoln not saying yes to Yucca
Today: May 18, 2004 at 11:08:48 PDT
By Stephen Curran LAS VEGAS SUN
The Lincoln County commission on Monday voted to soften
language in its official reaction to an environmental study for
a rail line to the proposed nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain.
All five commissioners voted to change terminology within a
two-page document that members felt incorrectly implied that the
319-mile railroad, which would travel through Lincoln County,
was inevitable. The Energy Department proposes to ship as much
as 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste to the mountain, 90
miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Commissioner Hal Keaton, voicing strong opposition to the
project, said the original version of the letter that is to be
sent to the Energy Department "encourage(d) the transportation
of nuclear waste to Nevada."
"It makes presumptions it's going to happen and I don't think
that's a position we should take," he said during the commission
meeting in Pioche.
Other Lincoln County officials, including Caliente Mayor Kevin
Phillips and Commission Chairman Spencer Hafen, have touted
perceived economic benefits from the proposed rail route, which
would wind through Lincoln, Nye and Esmeralda counties.
The decision to alter the letter came after a contentious
morning decision to appoint Hafen as a primary liaison between
the board and the federal agency.
The revised comments will be sent to Robin Sweeney,
Environmental Impact Statement manager for the Energy
Department's transportation office in Las Vegas, Hafen said
after the meeting.
Among items changed was a written assumption about a possible
rail spur operations and maintenance facility proposed for the
county. The document now reads: "DOE (the Energy Department) is
encouraged to identify and evaluate economic impacts associated
with locating various transportation system and rail support
facilities for communications and shipment tracking ..."
Both versions of the document encouraged the agency to
"identify all reasonable means to maximize favorable rail and
transportation system economic impacts on Lincoln County."
Changing the document was a subtle way to address a growing
schism between those in favor of and those against the Yucca
Mountain project, Keaton said.
"Some will tell you it's going to happen and I don't think
that's the case," he said.
Also at issue was what Keaton called a "glaring example of
miscommunication" within the commission related to Hafen's
self-appointment last month as the board's principal contact for
dealings with the department. Keaton and Lea Rasura-Alfano, a
coordinator for the Lincoln County Nuclear Oversight Program,
said they were not aware of the decision that afforded Hafen and
county consultants the ability to speak on behalf of the
five-member body.
Hafen said the appointment was simply an effort to streamline
communications between the two bodies.
"Decisions (regarding Yucca Mountain) still have to come to the
commission," he said.
Neither Keaton nor Rasura-Alfano received the April 21 letter
from Energy Department Deputy Director W. John Arthur,
confirming Hafen as the county's prime contact, they said.
The members then voted unanimously to appoint Hafen the
county's primary liaison between the commission and the federal
agency.
"It didn't matter who the contact person was," Keaton said. "My
point is that one person shouldn't be doing business on behalf
of the commission."
Questions or problems? Click here.
*****************************************************************
29 Bradenton Herald: Tallevast parties to meet today to discuss pollution
| 05/18/2004 |
DANA SANCHEZ
Herald Staff Writer
Agencies and organizations involved in the unfolding account of
pollution in Tallevast will gather at a public meeting today to
share information.
The meeting was planned so that all those involved could come
together simultaneously, said Wanda Washington, vice president of
Tallevast's community group FOCUS.
"A lot of the players are saying they didn't all have the same
information at the same time," Washington said. "This will bring
all the players to the table."
Representatives will include FOCUS, Lockheed Martin, Tetra Tech,
the Department of Environmental Protection, Manatee County
Department of Health, Manatee County Utilities and David
Rothfuss, assistant county administrator.
Robert Walker, of Richmond, Va., the attorney for FOCUS, plans to
attend.
A small army of Lockheed agents, Manatee County health,
environmental and utility staffers and FOCUS leaders walked
through the Tallevast neighborhood Friday, trying to identify
wells in an area identified as contaminated by earlier Lockheed
tests.
Lockheed purchased a five-acre plant in the heart of Tallevast
from the now-defunct American Beryllium in 1997, but never used
the property. Pollution showed up in routine testing when
Lockheed sold the property to its current owner, WPI.
Lockheed has pledged to do the cleanup.
Questions that come up in today's meeting could serve as a guide
for addressing future issues, said Karen Collins-Fleming,
director of Manatee County Environmental Management Department.
"I think there's been gaps in our information," Collins-Fleming
said. "Different agencies had little parts of it. I want to make
sure from here on out, we're all on the same page."
Environmental management has come a long way in the past few
weeks in terms of defining the issues, Collins-Fleming said.
Dana Sanchez, Herald business reporter, can be reached at
dsanchez@bradentonherald.com [dsanchez@bradentonherald.com] or at
745-7080, ext. 4500.
INFOBOX
IF YOU GO
WHAT: Tallevast public meeting
WHEN: from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. today
WHERE: Manatee County Transportation Department, 1022 26th Ave.
E., Bradenton.
*****************************************************************
30 EnergyPulse: Nuclear Waste Perspectives - Part II
5.19.04
[http://www.energypulse.net/centers/author.cfm?at_id=283] ,
Chief Scientist, Edutech Enterprises
This is the second of several articles on nuclear wastes. It
examines the potential energy value in spent fuel, and in the
world stockpiles of depleted uranium.
Spent Fuel is too valuable to be Nuclear Waste
'When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.'
This describes the dominant environmental activist characteristic
when faced by rational science of any kind. One could also add
'And never acknowledge the facts'.
This is especially true concerning the subject of nuclear waste
management or disposal of relatively trivial quantities of
well-managed waste; recycling spent nuclear fuel; or even
admitting that nuclear power is the most socially valuable,
cost-effective, versatile, capable, safe, and environmentally
friendly of all of our reasonable primary energy options. Use of
nuclear power does not lead to risk of war nearly as much as our
increasing reliance upon politically unstable sources of
expensive oil and gas, as several of the last few wars have
shown.
What is Spent Fuel?
Uranium fuel that has been in a nuclear reactor at power,
typically from about 1 year (CANDU) to about 6 years (PWR, BWR)
or more (marine propulsion reactors - 20+ years), and which is
then discharged from the reactor core, is described as 'spent'
fuel.
The difficulty with this definition is that even this
once-through fuel is NOT 'spent' in the true sense of the word.
It is still a massive potential source of energy. 'Spent' fuel
from commercial reactors still contains from 95 to 99% of unused
uranium that can be and is re-cycled and re-used in some
countries, but not in the U.S. although it once was.
If fully utilised, each kilogram of uranium could produce 3.5
million kWh of electricity rather than about 50,000 to 250,000+
kWh(e) as at present (about 7,800 MWdays (thermal)/tonne (CANDU)
to about 45,000+ MWdays(th)/tonne - PWR).
However, even if not reprocessed in the short-term, the resource
does not disappear or become worthless just because it has been
through the reactor for only one cycle instead of many.
Discarding it or managing it as waste, does not make it waste,
as it is still a highly valuable resource.
Whether it is recycled in the short or long-term, is immaterial,
as it can be (and will be) re-cycled and re-used in the future.
It is extraordinarily valuable for its unused energy content, and
it doesn't suddenly disappear from society as some seem to
believe or would like to see. This will happen, once the
politicians recognize that they will eventually have to make some
difficult decisions about energy, and with them, their likelihood
of re-election if they get it wrong. This recently happened in
California, and it is likely to confront Governor Schwarzenegger
in short order, maybe even this coming summer, even if he can
eventually turn the political steamroller around.
Whether spent fuel actually gets put into the Yucca facility or
not, is several years away (maybe 2015 now), and is also still
very much up in the air, though few politicians would dare to
admit it. Its fate can change with the stroke of a political pen
or a court decision. If, through political inertia, spent fuel is
placed into Yucca, it is worth taking bets as to how long it will
reside there before it is recovered and re-processed in our
rapidly changing, and increasingly vulnerable and
politically-manipulated, energy climate.
We may choose not to recycle it at this time, but our descendants
are likely to view any spent fuel we might discard, as a
gold-mine of energy. Leaving it out of Yucca is the best thing we
could do for everyone, so I hope the various activists don't
realize that their obstruction to Yucca is desirable in some ways
even though their concerns and fears are more science fiction
than anyone inside of our Hollywood-media entertained populace
(Silkwood, China Syndrome, Mutant Ninja Turtles) might believe.
The potential energy value in 'spent' nuclear fuel is
'impressive'
The use of individual fuels to produce electricity is compared in
Table 1. It also shows the energy density of our common fuels
along with a rough comparison of their fuel costs to produce 1
gigawatt-year (1,000 MW(e) for one year) 8,760,000 MWh - of
electricity.
At today's approximate electricity value (about $40/MWh for
baseload electricity), the gross ultimate electrical value of the
use of 1 tonne of various significant fuels is: 1. From nuclear
fuel - natural uranium and once-through (as used in a CANDU
reactor) - the gross potential electrical value is about
$2,000,000 per tonne of natural uranium (costing about
$29,000/tonne), for a ratio of gross value to cost of about 70.
(Uranium recently reached a high of about $35,000/tonne)
2. From nuclear fuel - enriched and once-through (PWR) - the
gross potential electrical value is about $10,000,000/tonne of
uranium, ($10 million!) with uranium costing $29,000/tonne, for a
ratio of gross value to cost of more than 300.
3. From nuclear fuel - enriched, with total recycling - the
gross potential electrical value is about $140,000,000/tonne of
uranium, ($140 million!) with uranium costing $29,000/tonne, for
a ratio of gross value to cost of about 4.8 million. However,
reprocessing and fuel re-fabrication costs are also high. With
the fast breeder cycle and reprocessing, not only can the spent
fuel resource be re-used, but so can the 7 tonnes or so of
depleted uranium produced during enrichment, per tonne of fuel,
and this is also potentially worth about $140E6/tonne!
4. From coal (about $120 worth of electricity, per tonne of
coal, with coal costing about $35 per tonne) for a gross
electrical value to cost of 3.4. The potential energy value of
the uranium and thorium in the discarded bottom ash (sometimes
above ore grade for uranium) is worth up to several thousand
times more than the energy value of the coal itself before it was
burned. Discarded coal ash (billions of tonnes), is typically a
significant, but usually ignored, uranium/thorium resource of
immense future value and significance - at least in a rational,
technological society - and should be managed with this in mind;
5. From heavy oil (about $160 worth of electricity, per tonne
of oil, with heavy oil costing about $120/T) for a gross
electrical value to cost of about 1.3;
6. From natural Gas (about $240 worth of electricity from
burning 1 tonne of natural gas, costing about $270/tonne when the
price is just $5/GJ) for a gross electrical value to cost of 0.9,
at this time! It was much better with gas at $2/GJ. With gas
costs bouncing around above $5, and especially above $6 or $7/GJ,
using gas for electricity, rather than for space heating (still
cost effective), is not too smart unless you can charge a lot
more than $40/MWh - which is usually the case - or operate with
much greater than 40% efficiency. (One gigajoule (GJ) is almost
the same as a million BTUs.)
But back to uranium. It comes out of the ground, is purified,
refined, converted to yellowcake, and then sells for about
$29,000/tonne (about $13/pound, or about $29/kg). It is usually
then enriched to become 3% to 4% U-235 fuel that costs about
$200,000/tonne in the reactor (plus fabrication costs), with
about 7 tonnes of uranium-238 (depleted uranium) rejected and
stockpiled (Table 2). In one pass through the reactor, which
takes up to about 4 to 6 years, this 1 tonne of enriched fuel
produces about $10,000,000 worth of electricity, despite only
about 3% of it being fissioned (used) by the time of discharge.
The depleted uranium is generally regarded as relatively
worthless, even though it is far from this.
Now, would anyone - who claims to be rational - willingly choose
to bury a refined product (spent fuel) that even after one cycle
of use, still has a future potential gross electricity value of
at least $130,000,000/tonne (or about 260 billion dollars for
each year's worth of U.S. spent fuel) and is recyclable? It would
be like junking a Mercedes after driving it for a few days. Even
pure gold is worth only $14,000,000/tonne, and look how we
protect and recover that.
Consider these approximate figures (assuming the resources were
all used to produce electricity, for ease of comparison): 1. Each
year's worth of U.S. spent fuel (2,000 tonnes), still contains
about the same energy (electrical) potential value (7E12
kWh)(e)), as we actually derived in 2001 from all of our use of
coal (555 millions of tonnes of oil equivalent, Mtoe megatonnes
of oil equivalent), oil (896 Mtoe), and natural gas (555 Mtoe)
combined (about 8E12 kWh(e), assuming about 30% efficiency of
use). And we propose to treat it as dangerous waste because a
small part of it is highly radioactive for a relatively short
time! 2. The depleted uranium (very low specific activity - i.e.
not very radioactive) that we produce and stockpile (about 20,000
tonnes each year, containing about 7E13 kWh(e) of potential
electrical energy equivalent), contains about one fifth of the
energy contained in the entire Middle East oil reserves (almost
100E9 tonnes (BP statistical review), or about 3.72E14 kWh of
potential electrical energy equivalent). (Thermal energy
equivalents are 3 times higher).
3. The total U.S. refined DU stockpile so far (about 610,000
tonnes by 2002), sitting at the surface and neglected, though
managed, potentially contains 2E15 kWh of electrical energy, or
about 5 times the potential energy contained in the entire
estimated Middle East oil resource.
4. The world combined spent fuel and DU total to about 2002
(about 240,000 tonnes of spent fuel, and about 1.45E6 T of DU
respectively) most of which is sitting at the surface, is highly
refined and contains enough potential energy (about 6E15 kWh of
electrical energy equivalent) to make the entire known oil
reserves (excluding the very significant tar sands and oil
shales) of the whole world look very limited.
This analysis could go on, and evaluate the potential energy
contained in the total world estimated uranium resource at
increasing resource prices (including ocean uranium), and include
the thorium resource, but I think I made my point already. Any
spent fuel placed into Yucca would be worth (potentially) more
than all of the gold in Fort Knox (Hollywood blockbuster anyone?
But Ill be the technical advisor)! We're hording the wrong stuff
folks! We should be recycling, reprocessing, and re-using this
energy resource as befits a rational, technologically-advanced,
energy-intensive society, so increasingly dependant upon energy
imports.
To neglect it (as we do with DU), or to consider putting such a
massive amount of potential wealth and energy back into the
ground, and to behave as though it were waste - as is still
considered for spent fuel - defies logic, especially when it can
be safely and easily re-cycled.
The accumulated surface-stored stockpile of DU so far (Table 2),
is potentially worth (for its untapped electrical energy) about
$83 trillion in the U.S. alone, or about 8 times the value of the
U.S. annual economy. It is sitting around, when it could all be
eventually brought back into an advanced reactor cycle as
originally planned, researched and defined almost 60 years ago,
and exploited to the very great benefit of everyone. Rather than
do this, however, we continue to agonize and moan about uncertain
and high priced oil supplies from mostly unstable suppliers
abroad; the availability and supplies of natural gas; and terrify
ourselves about the possible extreme environmental effects from
burning coal and other fossil fuels. Surely it is also time that
we began to get concerned about the socially destructive aspects
of having insufficient or unaffordable energy. Go figure!
Ah well! So much for environmentalist cant about recycling
everything, and being concerned about resources, sustainability,
waste, pollution, energy conservation, Global Climate Change, and
the environment.
[Get Copyright Clearance] Copyright 2004 CyberTech, Inc. Want
Copyright 2002-2004, CyberTech, Inc. - All rights
*****************************************************************
31 WBIR-TV, Knoxville, TN: RADIOACTIVE WASTE FOUND ON ANOTHER ROANE ROAD
More radioactive material has been found on a Roane County road
near last Friday's leak of hazardous waste. Parts of Bear Creek
Road were shut down Monday while crews worked to remove
contaminated asphalt and repave.
Highway 95 was reopened Sunday night after being closed for the
weekend so crews could clean up pavement contaminated by
radioactive waste. The material was identified by the Department
of Energy (DOE) as "droplets" of the nuclear isotope
Strontium-90. It apparently spilled onto the roadway when a
tanker transporting the hazardous waste between two East
Tennessee DOE facilities sprung a leak.
DOE continues to insist that there was and is no threat to the
public from the nuclear material that was leaked onto the Roane
County roads. DOE and Bechtel Jacobs, the contractor whose truck
leaked the waste during transport say they are still
investigating how the leak could have happened.
----
DISCUSSION: [http://www.wbir.com/message/forum.asp?FORUM_ID=89]
to talk about DOE operations in East Tennessee.
RELATED STORIES FROM WBIR.com:
[http://www.wbir.com/News/news.asp?ID=18168]
MORE INFORMATION ONLINE:
[http://www.ci.oak-ridge.tn.us/eqab/] for the Oak Ridge
Environmental Quality Advisaory Board.
5/18/2004 12:57:55 PM
Reporter: Katie Allison Granju
[feedback@wbir.com?subject=ID: 18175 - UPDATE: RADIOACTIVE
WASTE FOUND ON ANOTHER ROANE ROAD&body=Web News Feedback:
Reporter: Katie Allison Granju -
Dated: 5/18/2004 12:57:55 PM]
[http://www.knoxnews.com]
*****************************************************************
32 FOX5 Las Vegas - D.O.E. Shows Plans To Ship Nuclear Waste
May 18, 2004
(KVVU) -- The Department of Energy sought to convince Las Vegans
about the safety of transporting nuclear waste on a rail line to
Yucca Mountain at a special meeting yesterday.
The 800-million dollar rail route would bring the waste in from
existing rail lines to the mountain. It's a 319 mile corridor,
that could open for shipments by the end of the decade.
Armed with maps, and video, the D.O.E. laid out it's plans to
build a new rail line through the Caliente Corridor, a route that
would bring the waste through towns, ranches, and wild-life
areas.
The D.O.E. took public comment from people like Susan Davies.
She, like many Yucca opponents, have a deep mistrust over an
agency who they say has misled them since the days of nuclear
testing.
"This is one of the fastest growing cities, and they treat it
like garbage," said Susan.
A member of the Department of Energy, Allen Benson, stated that
"in the last 30 years, with about some 3,000 shipments around the
country, there has never been a release of harmful radiation to
the public."
Construction on the rail line won't begin until 2005 and is
planned to open by 2009, with waste brought in the following
year.
But opponents say they don't want to be nuclear guinea pigs for a
project they believe was shoved down their throats.
Yucca opponents say a lot will happen between now and then,
including an election.
Copyright 2004 KVVU. All rights reserved.
2004 WorldNow and KVVU. All Rights Reserved.
*****************************************************************
33 KLAS: DOE's Nuclear Waste Transport Proposal
May 18, 2004
Edward Lawrence, Reporter
(May 17) -- Presidential candidate John Kerry's bold statement
made during a campaign stop in Las Vegas has both Republicans and
Democrats talking.
John Kerry says if he's elected he won't send nuclear waste to
Yucca Mountain. That statement may give hope to those opposed to
bringing waste to Nevada. But what are the options if the
Department of Energy doesn't bring waste here?
On Monday, the DOE held an important public meeting about the
proposal to transport nuclear waste Yucca Mountain by train
through the Caliente Corridor.
So far, 307 people have attended public hearings like this one.
Monday's public meeting at Cashman Center was last of five public
input-scoping sessions. People in attendance talked about
transporting nuclear waste and John Kerry's comments.
Senator John Kerry said, "I think the science out there today
tells us that Yucca Mountain is not a good idea."
Kerry shocked a lot of people Sunday at the end of his campaign
speech at the Four Seasons hotel.
Senator John Kerry continued, "Rest assured Nevada, if I'm
President of the United States, Yucca Mountain will not be a
repository for nuclear waste. Thank you and God bless.
While these are words some residents have longed to hear,
Republicans say it's simply campaign rhetoric.
Republican consultant Steve Wark said, "If he says Nevada will
never become a repository, who's to believe him? He's not
consistent with anything else he says."
Wark is a political consultant for the Republican Party. He says
Yucca Mountain is not a partisan issue. Wark points out that
lawmakers from both parties voted to approve money for the
repository.
Alan Benson, with the DOE, explained, "We want to make sure it
safe for the citizens."
Caught in the middle is the Department of Energy. If Kerry is
elected and halts plans for the waste site -- there is no Plan B.
Alan Benson said, "For whatever reason, if Yucca Mountain doesn't
get its license, the law requires us to stop work, restore the
site and report back to Congress."
It also means high-level waste produced across the country will
remain on the site it was created, Spreading out among 39 states.
Alan Benson continued, "The only requirement under law is that
the DOE develop Yucca Mountain as a repository and submit a
license application."
That application will be submitted in December and then the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission will research for the next 3 years.
The public hearing Monday was not about the repository license.
It was about where and how the nuclear waste will travel across
Nevada.
John Kerry Talks With Jon Ralston
John Kerry sat down with political analyst Jon Ralston to talk
about a number of projects, including Yucca Mountain, which he
says he doesn't believe is based on sound science. More>>
[http://www.worldnow.com] All content Copyright 2000 -
2004 WorldNow and KLAS. All Rights Reserved.
*****************************************************************
34 KVBC: Public Expresses Views On Proposed Yucca Mtn Rail System
May 18, 2004
Proposed Yucca Rail System
Gerard Ramalho Reporting [Gramalho@kvbc.com]
It's an issue that pits many Nevadans against the federal
government -- the plan to ship nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain.
The government says those shipments will be safe, others say it's
too risky.
Last night, dozens of people went to a special open house forum
at the Cashman Center. The Department Of Energy outlined its plan
for a rail line to carry the radioactive material. That line
would start in Caliente. But Nevada leaders say some waste will
still come through populated areas of the state, including Las
Vegas. They say that puts those areas at risk.
"The Caliente route is unacceptable because it will result in
shipments moving through Las Vegas. The only question is whether
it will be six percent, as DOW says, or 89 percent, as our
studies show that it could be."
"We're not going to rule anything in or anything out. At this
point it's still in the planning stage."
Some say the rail shipments could spill or be targeted by
terrorists. DOE leaders say they will take precautions to prevent
accidents or attacks. The environmental group, Citizen Alert,
counters many of the DOE's claims. It will hold its own
informational meeting at the senior center in Caliente tonight at
6PM.
[http://www.worldnow.com] All content Copyright 2000 -
2004 WorldNow and KVBC. All Rights Reserved.
*****************************************************************
35 CBC Saskatchewan: Mine Flood transcripts??
Web Posted | May 18 2004 09:19 AM CDT
PART 1: Dan Kerslake reports on the mine flood on CBC's Morning
Edition (runs 6:21 in RealPlayer).
Radio One Live [http://sask.cbc.ca/radio/cbcsask.smi]
Latest
Radio Newscast
[http://radio.cbc.ca/news-audio/regional/latest-regina.ram]
Latest
TV Newscast
[http://sask.cbc.ca/tv/rams/saskedition.ram]
[http://www.cbc.ca/digest/]
Miners fear for their health after radioactive flood
PRINCE ALBERT -
Some Saskatchewan miners are speaking out about a flood at a
northern uranium mine last year.
Radioactive water began flooding in, after a partial cave-in at
the Cameco McArthur River mine in April 2003. Workers fought for
two days to save the mine, without being offered radiation
protection.
Bill Good was part of the first crew that went down into the
mine to install water pumps.
Bill Good
The radon gas alarm was red, but Good says the miners put their
faith in the company's radiation technician, who told them
everything was fine.
"I put my life in his hands, and so did a whole bunch of other
guys," says Good.
Radon is a carcinogen, but workers were in the mine for 48
hours without respirators.
The Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility calls
Cameco's actions unconscionable. But the mining company says the
increased exposures were well within federal guidelines, and its
workers face no increased health risk.
Cameco's actions are being investigated by the Canadian Nuclear
Safety Commission. The findings will be released in a report in
June.
+ From NOV. 19, 2003:
Cameco reports stellar earnings under
pall of radon leak
[http://sask.cbc.ca/regional/servlet/View?filename=cameco031119]
[http://www.cbc.ca/aboutcbc/contact/] | Help
Copyright CBC 2004
*****************************************************************
36 Oakland Tribune: Decide fate of labs as one, panel reports
Article Last Updated: Tuesday, May 18, 2004
Panel advises simultaneous
bids for labs
By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER
A prestigious scientific panel says the nation's only two labs
for designing nuclear explosives should be put up for competitive
bid at the same time -- advice that, if followed, could cut the
field of challengers to the University of California's more than
50-year lock on running Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore
weap-ons labs.
Experts tapped by the National Academy of Sciences' National
Research Council debated, yet stopped short of recommending that
a single bidder operate Los Alamos and Livermore, as UC does now.
Instead, the U.S. Energy Department and its weapons arm, the
National Nuclear Security Administration, should let bidders vie
for either or both labs simultaneously, the panel said, then see
what proposals preserve the odd blend of cooperation and critical
peer review that marks their sibling relationship.
"I certainly felt it was important that they be competed together
because the laboratories have interacted with each other quite a
bit," said Rice University chemistry professor Robert Curl.
"They've been sort of friendly rivals and yet view each other's
work with great skepticism."
The NRC proposal for simultaneous bids, released Monday, is
opposite of the recommendation of Energy Secretary Spencer
Abraham's Blue Ribbon Commission on the lab competi-tions, which
advised competing them separately.
"I think you would like to ensure that peer review is not subject
to outside influences, and I think most people would agree that
having a single management would alleviate that concern," said
University of New Mexico professor and former Los Alamos resident
Arthur Guenther, an NRC panelist.
Panelists also wanted to reduce the demand for more management by
the NNSA, seen by several panelists as lacking the technical
talent for resolving disagreements between the two weapons labs
on such important matters as where multibillion-dollar
experimental machines will be located, whether an H-bomb design
remains reliable and whether to advise the president to restart
nuclear testing.
Potential lab bidders praised the panel's other recommendations
-- finding contractors of proven scientific management to recruit
top talent and position the labs for future advances -- but some
panned the simultaneous bidding.
"Frankly, putting both those labs into turmoil simultaneously is
something I don't understand," said Bill Madia, vice president
for lab operations at Battelle Memorial Institute, a nonprofit
contractor managing Oak Ridge, Brookhaven and Pacific Northwest
national labs.
If the Energy Department and NNSA follow the recommendations, the
start of the Los Alamos bid could be delayed -- a draft request
for bids was expected next month with formal bidding close to
Christmas.
"You'll have a much more complex bidding environment," Madia
said. "This strategy will cause the contractor community to ask a
huge amount of questions that will take a huge amount of time to
resolve."
The panel staff briefed members of Congress, the Energy
Department and the NNSA on the recommendations last week. NNSA
spokesman Bryan Wilkes said his agency is studying the report.
"It is important that we take our time and are very thorough and
careful in how we proceed," Wilkes said.
Contact Ian Hoffman at
ihoffman@angnewspapers.com [ihoffman@angnewspapers.com] .
*****************************************************************
37 Tri-Valley Herald: New lab bidding plan advised
5/18/2004
New lab bidding plan advised
By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER
A prestigious scientific panel says the nation's only two labs
for designing nuclear explosives should be put up for
competitive bid at the same time -- advice that, if followed,
could cut the field of challengers to the University of
California's more than 50-year lock on running Los Alamos and
Lawrence Livermore weapons labs.
Experts tapped by the National Academy of Sciences' National
Research Council debated yet stopped short of recommending that
a single bidder operate Los Alamos and Livermore, as UC does
now.
Instead, the U.S. Energy Department and its weapons arm, the
National Nuclear Security Administration, should let bidders vie
for either or both labs simultaneously, the panel said, then see
what proposals preserve the odd blend of cooperation and
critical peer review that marks their current sibling
relationship.
"I certainly felt it was important that they be competed
together because the laboratories have interacted with each
other quite a bit," said Rice University chemistry professor
Robert Curl. "They've been sort of friendly rivals and yet view
each other's work with great skepticism."
The NRC proposal for simultaneous bids, released Monday, is
opposite of the recommendation of Energy Secretary Spencer
Abraham's Blue Ribbon Commission on the lab competitions, which
advised competing them separately.
"I think you would like to ensure that peer review is not
subject to outside influences, and I think most people would
agree that having a single management would alleviate that
concern," said University of New Mexico professor and former Los
Alamosan Arthur Guenther, an NRC panelist.
Panelists also wanted to reduce the demand for more management
by the NNSA, seen by several panelists as lacking the technical
talent for resolving disagreements between the two weapons labs
on such important matters as where multibillion experimental
machines will be located, whether an H-bomb design remains
reliable and whether to advise the president to restart nuclear
testing.
Potential lab bidders praised the panel's other recommendations
-- finding contractors of proven scientific management to
recruit top talent and position the labs for future advances --
but some panned the simultaneous bidding.
"Frankly, putting both those labs into turmoil simultaneously is
something I don't understand," said Bill Madia, vice president
for lab operations at Battelle Memorial Institute, a nonprofit
contractor managing Oak Ridge, Brookhaven and Pacific Northwest
national labs.
If the Energy Department and NNSA follow the recommendations,
the start of the Los Alamos bid could be delayed -- a draft
request for bids was expected next month with formal bidding
close to Christmas -- and require a branched analysis for both
bidders and the government.
"You'll have a much more complex bidding environment," Madia
said. "This strategy will cause the contractor community to ask
a huge amount of questions that will take a huge amount of time
to resolve."
The panel staff briefed members of Congress, the Energy
Department and the NNSA on the recommendations last week. NNSA
spokesman Bryan Wilkes said his agency is studying the report.
"It is important that we take our time and are very thorough and
careful in how we proceed," Wilkes said.
Tri-Valley Herald All Rights Reserved
*****************************************************************
38 Tri-City Herald: K Basins fuel removal behind schedule
This story was published Tuesday, May 18th, 2004
By Annette Cary Herald staff writer
Removing the last of the spent nuclear fuel at Hanford's K Basins
has proved a tougher job than contractor Fluor Hanford had
anticipated.
But the project still is expected to be completed by late summer,
about a month behind schedule.
It will be the second major risk in the Department of Energy
nationwide nuclear complex eliminated in 2004 by Fluor employees.
A list prepared several years ago named spent fuel at Hanford's K
Basins and plutonium at Hanford's Plutonium Finishing Plant as
among the top five risks in the DOE complex, said George Jackson,
executive vice president of Fluor Hanford, in a meeting with the
Herald editorial board Monday.
A four-year effort to stabilize and package nearly 20 tons of
plutonium left at the Plutonium Finishing Plant after the Cold
War ended was finished ahead of legal schedules in February.
Hanford produced nearly 60 tons of plutonium for the nation's
weapons program during World War II and the Cold War.
Now Fluor is turning its attention to closing down facilities and
taking down the structures that dot the Hanford skyline.
The DOE contractor also is working to dig up thousands of drums
of buried radioactive wastes and ship the recovered wastes to a
New Mexico site for permanent storage. Since work began at the
end of 2003, more than 3,000 drums have been retrieved from the
trenches. The amount is expected to double by the end of the
year.
Fluor faces some of its toughest work at the K Basins, two huge
indoor pools of water near the Columbia River built in the early
1950s for temporary storage of spent nuclear fuel. With the
sometimes leaky K East Basin far past its design life, the
corroding spent fuel and radioactive sludge that's collected on
the bottom of the pool must be removed.
Last fall, Fluor was two months ahead of schedule to meet its
July 31 deadline for fuel removal.
Now, just 15 percent of the approximately 2,300 tons of spent
fuel remains to be removed. But it's fuel that's in far worse
condition than the fuel that was removed first. Some of the fuel,
stored in the pool in open-topped canisters, has fallen apart.
"We're dealing with the very complex task of raking up and
picking up parts," said Fluor Hanford President Ron Gallagher.
The pieces of fuel then have to be taken to a washing station to
rinse off any sludge. The pieces are requiring four or five
rinses compared with the single rinse that fuel in good condition
needed.
Fluor also is preparing to begin the first step in removing
sludge from the K Basins. It has completed a readiness review for
removing some of the least radioactive sludge and expects DOE to
be asking for any changes next week.
It's waiting on approval for a new plan to remove and treat the
majority of the sludge. Removal of the sludge was to have started
by the end of 2002.
If the plan is approved, Fluor expects to remove the sludge from
the K East Basin, which is known to have leaked, and move it to
the K West Basin for treatment. It is proposing contracting the
sludge treatment work, which could be a $20 million project.
As Fluor finishes projects, it has required a different mix of
employee skills as it moves on to new work. It announced plans at
the end of April to cut up to 100 jobs by June 10.
That number may be slightly reduced, Jackson said. Based on the
number and types of workers who have volunteered to resign and
take severance packages, Fluor expects about 50 of the layoffs to
be voluntary.
Fluor officials also discussed the role Fluor Hanford has played
in the Tri-City community, including being the largest
contributor to the Tri-Cities Visitor &Convention Bureau, Junior
Achievement, the Reading Foundation, the Volunteer Center,
Leadership Tri-Cities and the Tri-City Industrial Development
Council.
One advantage that large corporations bring to Hanford as
contractors is trust funds to make substantial and sustained
contributions to local organizations, Gallagher said.
2004 Tri-City Herald, Associated Press &Other Wire Services
*****************************************************************
39 KIFI: INEEL Shows Off Technology of the Future
www.localnews8.com
May 17, 2004
With gas prices where they are right now we're all looking to
save on fuel costs and the Idaho National Engineering and
Environmental Laboratory is showcasing their new idea.
Right now the big attention getter is this demonstration of the
INEEL's hydrogen-powered model car! This car is some of the
envisioned technology the INEEL is working on for the future. It
uses hydrogen so it's clean burning and non-polluting.
Also going on Monday were information seminars and demonstrations
on INEEL cleanup, and nuclear energy research and development.
They want to tell everyone what they're doing to clean up nuclear
waste to protect the aquifer.
What we're trying to do is do that cleanup as efficiently as
possible and as quickly as possible to remove that material or
stabilize it and prevent any migration of contamination, says
Rick Provencher, INEEL.
All these things were developed right here at the INEEL, so if
you come down you can see what other things are being developed
here.
The information fair goes on until 9 p.m. Monday. At 7:30 p.m. a
public meeting on retrieving waste buried at the INEEL will also
be held.
*****************************************************************
40 SanLuisObispo.comReport: Los Alamos, Livermore don't have to have same manager
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
Associated Press
LOS ALAMOS, N.M. - The National Research Council suggests
management contracts for Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore
national laboratories be bid at the same time, but said one
contractor does not necessarily have to manage both nuclear
weapons labs.
The report, released Monday, disagreed with an earlier
blue-ribbon commission that said the labs need not be managed by
the same operator, but that the U.S. Department of Energy should
bid contracts for the labs separately "to allow all interested
and qualified bidders to participate."
Currently, both labs are managed by the University of California.
The contract expires next year.
After a series of management lapses and security questions at the
labs, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham announced last year the
contracts would go to competitive bids for the first time. UC has
run Los Alamos since it was formed in northern New Mexico during
World War II to work on the world's first atomic bomb and has run
Lawrence Livermore since that lab was founded in California in
1952.
The National Nuclear Security Administration, the DOE's nuclear
weapons branch, will evaluate the council's recommendations as it
prepares for bidding, said NNSA spokesman Bryan Wilkes of
Washington, D.C. He said he didn't know when the request for
proposals would be released.
The National Research Council said that to preserve the
"interplay of science" between the labs, one DOE panel should
simultaneously judge bids on either or both contracts so as to
allow the Energy Department a broader view of how each option
would affect the labs.
Paul Fleury, dean of engineering at Yale University and member of
the panel, said the recommendations were meant to ensure that the
DOE properly evaluates the relationship between Los Alamos and
Lawrence Livermore.
UC's contract has minimized the barriers to cooperation in terms
of communication and exchanging staff members, he said.
Holding both competitions at the same time "ensures that the
issues will be given equal weight, because they affect both
laboratories ... equally," Fleury said. "I don't think it gives
an inherent advantage to any particular contractor or to any
particular type of contractor."
Los Alamos Director Pete Nanos and other officials at both labs
have argued that splitting their management would hurt
cooperation and coordination.
However, both the research council and the DOE's blue-ribbon
panel reasoned that other DOE facilities managed under separate
contractors cooperate on projects.
Others contend independently operated nuclear weapons
laboratories could foster the kind of competition that replaces
the standard peer-review process for classified weapons work.
*****************************************************************
41 SF Chronicle: LIVERMORE / Concurrent bidding on nuclear lab pacts urged
Research council also recommends single manager
David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor
[dperlman@sfchronicle.com] Tuesday, May 18, 2004
[San Francisco Chronicle]
The National Research Council recommended Monday that
competitions to manage the Livermore and Los Alamos nuclear
weapons laboratories should be held at the same time, and it
acknowledged that the lab staffs would prefer a single
institution to manage both.
The University of California has managed both labs for decades --
Los Alamos since World War II and Livermore since its founding in
1952. The university system receives $2 billion a year to run
them.
But after revelations of missing documents at Los Alamos and
security problems concerning plutonium storage at Livermore,
Congress and the Department of Energy have decided to open up the
bidding next year on new five- year management contracts.
The University of Texas has announced that, for the first time,
it will compete against UC for at least the Los Alamos contract.
The National Research Council report called both labs "national
treasures" and noted that "there is a strong sentiment at the
laboratories that their coordination and constructive competition
are facilitated by their being managed by the same contractor."
The research council is an arm of the National Academies, a
prestigious body mandated by Congress to provide independent
scientific advice and policy guidance to the government.
The council's report noted that scientists at both Los Alamos and
Livermore maintained a high level of important unclassified
research beyond designing bombs and devising ways to keep
America's nuclear weapons stockpile workable.
Because pursuing unclassified research in that environment can be
difficult, the council recommended that security and management
issues in the contracts "should be balanced and integrated with
actions to preserve and improve science and technology quality."
S. Robert Foley, a retired Navy admiral and the UC vice president
for laboratory management, said in a statement Monday that the
university "continues to aggressively prepare as if we will
compete" for the contracts, although the final decision will be
up to the regents.
Foley called the National Research Council's report "thorough,
thoughtful and professional," as well as "sensitive to the issues
and challenges of managing the complex nuclear weapons
laboratories."
The Energy Department and its National Nuclear Security
Administration oversee the management of the two laboratories and
award the contracts to run them.
E-mail David Perlman at dperlman@sfchronicle.com
[dperlman@sfchronicle.com] .
2004 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback | FAQ
*****************************************************************
42 IEER | The Savannah River at Grievous Risk
IEER [http://www.ieer.org/index.html] | Subject Index
[http://www.ieer.org/webindex.html]
The Savannah River at Grievous Risk Analysis of the Proposal to
Allow the Department of Energy to Leave a Significant Portion of
Its High-Level Radioactive Waste at the Savannah River Site in
the Savannah River Watershed
Arjun Makhijani, Ph.D. President, Institute for Energy and
Environmental Research 17 May 2004
The U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee has passed a proposal
that would allow the DOE to leave virtually any fraction of the
high-level waste, now stored in large tanks, at the Savannah
River Site in grouted form, if approved by the State of South
Carolina. This proposal would convert SRS into a vast high-level
radioactive waste dump in the watershed of the Savannah River.
The State of South Carolina has already allowed high-level waste
to be grouted in two tanks.
I have performed some calculations to illustrate the potential
effect on the Savannah River of this proposal. In principle the
proposal would allow any fraction of the radioactivity in the
tanks to be left there permanently in grouted form in the tanks
at SRS. There are currently about 400 million curies of
radioactivity in the high-level waste tanks. Strontium-90 and
cesium-137 each are about 100 million curies, plus an equal
amount of the decay products of each in equilibrium with each of
these radionuclides.
If only 10 percent, i.e., about 10 million curies, of the
strontium-90 presently in the tank farms were left behind and
grouted, the grout would have to work nearly perfectly for
hundreds of years to prevent the Savannah River from becoming
polluted above the present Safe Drinking Water limit of 8
picocuries per liter. Leakage of even a small fraction of the
strontium-90 at SRS into the Savannah River would be disastrous
to the river. This threat will persist for centuries.
Strontium-90 has a half-life of 29 years. Even after decaying for
100 years, a leakage of just 1 part in 10,000 per year of
strontium-90 into the river would cause the Savannah River to
exceed the Safe Drinking Water limit. This estimate is based on
median river flow.
In the past (1991) major economic damage has occurred when the
drinking water standard was exceeded for only a few days due to a
tritium leak, even though the standard is calculated as an annual
average and there was no annual violation. Maintaining the river
within drinking water limits every month, even in low flow years
and months, will likely require containment many times stricter
-- on the order of 1 part in 100,000 per year. Even after 200
years a high degree of containment, better than 1 part in 10,000
per year would be needed to meet this goal. Further, containment
would have to be ten times better that these figures if
essentially all the strontium-90 were left in the tanks.
There is no experience with grout for such periods of time that
can allow confident projections of containment of such
perfection. On the contrary, experience with grout so far has
been unsatisfactory, as we have discussed in the recent IEER
report on SRS (Nuclear Dumps by the Riverside, an excerpt of
which is reproduced below). For instance, waste cast into cement
blocks at Rocky Flats disintegrated in a few years. The tanks
themselves were not designed to last for hundreds of years. Grout
simply cannot be relied on as a waste form to protect the river
even if grout quality is improved. Shallow land burial of waste
by grouting in the tanks or by creating grouted vaults onsite is
a dangerous idea.
These problems will be exacerbated by the vast amount of
cesium-137 now in the tanks. Due to gross mismanagement, the
Department of Energy wasted 16 years and $500 million before
abandoning as dangerous a process to extract and concentrate the
cesium-137. A replacement process is needed. If the DOE simply
abandons the Cs-137 in the tanks and leaves behind 10 percent of
the strontium-90, then containment roughly twice as stringent as
that estimated above for strontium-90 alone would be needed to
maintain the usability of Savannah River water.
In addition, there are large amounts of various transuranic
isotopes, including plutonium-238, plutonium-239, and
americium-241. In Tank 17, for instance, the residual
radioactivity of transuranic radionuclides planned to be left in
the tank exceeds the low-level waste limit by more than 600 times
(before dilution).
There are over 2 million curies of plutonium-238 in the Tank
Farms at SRS. If only ten percent of the plutonium-238 were left
behind in the tanks and diluted with grout 6 feet deep, the
residual radioactivity in both tank farms would exceed the
maximum Class C limit allowed for low-level waste by about ten
times. Other residual transuranic radionuclides, such as
americium-241 and plutonium-239, would add to the extent of the
violation.
In sum, the performance of the grout would have to be such that
leakage would remain at one part in 100,000 per year or better
for a hundred years or more. If the grout fails to meet this
test, the river may have to be written off for drinking water
use. This is because once the tanks are grouted, it will be
essentially impossible to remediate them. In other words, if the
grout fails, South Carolina and Georgia will likely have to write
off one of their most precious water resources. The resultant
health and economic and ecological harm would be incalculable,
far greater, in my view, than any benefit to be derived from
shortening the cleanup period for SRS or reducing high-level
waste management expenditures. Nothing less than the future of
the Savannah River is at stake in the current debate over the
management of tank wastes at SRS.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Attachment Performance of Grout This is an excerpt from Nuclear
Dumps by the Riverside (IEER, 2004), pages 48 to 50. The full
report can be downloaded from www.ieer.org/reports/srs
[http://www.ieer.org/reports/srs] , where full details of the
footnotes in this excerpt can be found.
There is insufficient understanding of the long-term risks to
groundwater and surface water from shallow land burial of grouted
wastes. Given past experience with grouting of wastes (discussed
below), these contaminants could leach out into the groundwater
much faster than anticipated and add to the existing
contamination in the groundwater, and eventually to the surface
water. Moreover, grouting the tanks in place would put the
residual wastes in a form that would be very difficult or
impossible to retrieve were they found to be leaking. Grouting
would also make remediation of the vadose zone even more
difficult. DOE admits that "tank closure is, for all practical
purposes, irreversible. DOE would have great difficulty undoing a
closure [with grout] if it were later discovered that [a dose]
estimate had been improperly developed, or that the performance
had been improperly evaluated."1
According to a report on long-term stewardship by the National
Academy of Sciences: Predicting performance in resisting water
infiltration can be difficult because of uncertainties that
include the degree to which the first layers of grout take up the
residue, the water pathway effects of the cold joints between
successive pours of grout, and the effects of preferential
corrosion of the tank metal and penetrating structures (thereby
offering a partial bypass path). Moreover, waste tank residue is
likely to be highly radioactive and not taken up in the grout, so
there is substantial uncertainty associated with the volumetric
classification and average concentration of the waste and
prediction of the isolation performance of the system.2
While experience at other sites with grout does not correspond in
its details with that at SRS, it is indicative of the kinds of
problems that have already been experienced with grouting. We
examine two such cases here.
DOE sponsored studies on grout durability in the context of a
grouting program at Hanford. The durability of grout depends on
many factors, such as temperature and moisture, and the
composition of the grout. The heat due to radioactive decay, for
instance, and/or the heat that is released when the grout sets
can raise the temperature above 90 degrees Celsius (194 degrees
F). At such temperatures the grout may not set properly, and
hence it may subsequently crack. According to a 1992 study of the
durability of double-shell tank waste grouts at Hanford: The
grouts will remain at elevated temperatures for many years. The
high temperatures expected during the first few decades after
disposal will increase the driving force for water vapor
transport away from the grouts; the loss of water may result in
cracking, dehydration of hydrated phases, and precipitation of
salts from saturated pore solution. As the grout cools, osmotic
pressure caused by the high salt content may draw moisture back
into the grout mass. The uptake of moisture may have detrimental
impacts on the behavior of the grout.3
The history of grout at Rocky Flats, the nearly decommissioned
DOE plant near Denver, Colorado, where plutonium pits for nuclear
bombs were made, indicates the risks in the real world, even in
the absence of elevated temperatures.
Rocky Flats operations resulted in the generation of liquid and
solid wastes containing radioactive and hazardous materials and
large quantities of contaminated soil and groundwater. From 1953
to 1986, five ponds lined with asphalt and concrete (called Solar
Ponds) were used to store and evaporate low-level waste
contaminated with nitrates and radionuclides. Other waste was
also dumped in the ponds from time to time.4 The linings were
ineffective, as demonstrated by the fact that the shallow
groundwater in the area became contaminated with radioactive
materials, nitrates, VOCs, and heavy metals.5
Because of the existing contamination and possible further
contamination, DOE began phasing out the use of the ponds in
early 1980s; it soon began another experiment with cement. In
1985, sludge from the solar evaporation ponds began to be mixed
with cement to form large blocks of "pondcrete," which were
packaged in fiberglass boxes and shipped to the Nevada Test Site
for disposal. Soon after the project began, the waste had to be
reclassified from low-level to mixed waste, because it was
determined that the waste contained hazardous chemicals,
regulated under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act
(RCRA). Over 16,500 pondcrete blocks of mixed waste were
manufactured and stored onsite, outdoors, for nearly two years,
while the permitting necessary for offsite shipment was being
pursued.6
In 1988, it was discovered that some of the fiberglass boxes on
the outdoor pad had deteriorated while exposed to the weather and
some of the pondcrete blocks had crumbled and cracked. At least
one box had spilled open. It was later determined that the ratio
of cement to sludge waste in making the pondcrete was incorrect.
The problem apparently arose because the equipment used to
introduce cement plugged up intermittently. Over 8,000 pondcrete
blocks, that is, about half of the blocks stored outdoors, had to
be remixed and repackaged.7
The Nevada Test Site found that 25 of the 28 blocks of pondcrete
that had not yet been buried were, contrary to specifications,
with surfaces soft enough to be scored by a stick; it was decided
to bury them anyway because no liquids were found. The Nevada
Test Site determined that the approximately 2,000 blocks that had
already been buried posed little threat of contaminant migration,
based on its assessment of the 28 blocks, the distribution of the
containers throughout the burial ground, and the dryness of the
soil. However, in October 1988, the Nevada Test Site changed its
acceptance criteria for the pondcrete. It required that the
pondcrete be packaged in plywood boxes with a compressive
strength of 4,000 pounds per square foot.8
Rocky Flats has been left with some of the legacy of the mess as
well, despite the shipment of the pondcrete blocks to Nevada. The
quantity of underlying contaminated soil under the Solar Ponds
has not been fully determined, but is estimated to be slightly
less than 153,000 cubic meters (200,000 cubic yards) in that
general vicinity.9
DOE is pursuing a cleanup program under which soil with
contaminant concentrations greater than specified radionuclide
soil action levels (RSALs) will be removed. However, the proposed
RSALs at Rocky Flats are quite high: 50 picocuries per gram of
plutonium in the top three feet, and 3000 pCi/g (based upon
concentration and area/volume) in the three to six foot depth
range.10 These levels are far too lax and represent an
unacceptable risk to future generations by traditional radiation
protection standards, which aim at protecting future farmers or
ranchers who might settle on the site, in case site control and
information about the contamination are lost.11
In sum, grouting residual high-level waste in tanks that contains
significant quantities of long-lived radionuclides (including
cesium-137 and plutonium-238, and plutonium-239/240) is a policy
that poses considerable risks to the long-term health of the
water resources in the region. --- Endnotes
1. DOE-SRS, November 2001 2. NRC-NAS, 2000c, page 40 3. Lokken,
Martin, and Shade, December 1992, page 2 4. BEMR, 1996. Rocky
Flats Environmental Technology Site section 5. GAO, January 1991,
page 3 6. GAO, January 1991, pages 1 to 6 7. GAO, January 1991,
pages 2 to 4 8. GAO, January 1991, page 5 9. BEMR, 1996. Rocky
Flats Environmental Technology Site section 10. Rocky Flats, 2003
, General Response, page 1 11. See Makhijani and Gopal, December
2001, for further discussion of setting radionuclide soil action
levels for Rocky Flats.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Also see: + Press release regarding this statement (May 17, 2004)
+ The report, Nuclear Dumps by the Riverside: Threats to the
Savannah River from Radioactive Contamination at the Savannah
River Site (SRS), with links to press release and statements
(March 11, 2004)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Institute for Energy and Environmental Research Comments to
Outreach Coordinator: ieer{insert the symbol "at"}ieer.org Takoma
Park, Maryland, USA
May 17, 2004
*****************************************************************
43 IEER: High-Level Radioactive Waste Mismanagement at SRS
For use after noon, EDT, May 17, 2004
For further information contact:
Arjun Makhijani: (301) 270-5500
Bob Schaeffer: (239) 395-6773
P R E S S R E L E A S E
ENERGY DEPT. BUDGET AMENDMENT PUTS SAVANNAH RIVER WATER AT RISK
PAST PERFORMANCE OF GROUT INDICATES IT MAY NOT ADEQUATELY
CONTAIN WASTE, CREATING RISK OF IRREPARABLE RIVER POLLUTION
BEYOND DRINKING WATER LIMITS
Takoma Park, MD, May 17, 2004: A new analysis by the Institute
for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) concludes that a
Senate budget amendment allowing the U.S. Department of Energy
(DOE) to abandon highly radioactive wastes in tanks next to the
Savannah River poses severe risks for the environment and public
health. DOE wants to attempt to grout, or cement, residual wastes
in place rather than spend additional funds to pump them out.
According to IEER President, Dr. Arjun Makhijani, "Calculations
show that if only ten percent of the strontium-90 presently in
the tank farms at the Savannah River Site were left behind and
grouted, the grout would have to work nearly perfectly for
hundreds of years to prevent the Savannah River from becoming
polluted above the present Safe Drinking Water limit. There is no
experience with grout that can allow containment projections of
this magnitude. On the contrary, experience with grout so far has
been unsatisfactory."
Leakage of even a small fraction of the strontium-90 at Savannah
River Site (SRS) into the Savannah River could be disastrous,
environmentally and economically.
"In 1991, major economic damage occurred when the drinking water
standard for the Savannah River was exceeded for only a few days
due to a tritium leak," Makhijani noted, "even though the
standard is calculated as an annual average and there was no
annual violation."
Strontium-90 is just one of the radioactive contaminants DOE
hopes to leave in SRS waste tanks. They also contain large
amounts of cesium-137, plutonium-238 and americium-241.
"If only ten percent of the plutonium-238 was left behind the
tanks and covered with six feet of grout, the residual
radioactivity would exceed the limit for low-level wastes by
about ten times," Makhijani added. "This plan would convert SRS
into a vast high-level radioactive waste dump in the watershed of
the Savannah River."
Makhijani concluded that if the grout fails, South Carolina and
Georgia would likely have to write off one of their most precious
water resources.
"The performance of the grout would have to be such that leakage
would remain at one part in 100,000 per year or better for a
hundred years or more," stated Makhijani. "If the grout fails to
meet this test, the river may have to be written off for drinking
water use. This is because once the tanks are grouted, it will be
essentially impossible to go back and clean them out."
Makhijani continued: "The resultant health, economic and
ecological harm would be incalculable-far greater than any
benefit from shortening the cleanup period for SRS or reducing
high-level waste management expenditures. Nothing less than the
future of the Savannah River is at stake."
A recent IEER report, "Nuclear Dumps by the Riverside,"
documented environmental threats from radioactive wastes at DOE's
Savannah River site. The report concluded that "capping or
grouting the wastes in place compounds the risks." A statement by
Dr. Makhijani is attached, along with excerpts from the IEER
report on the subject of grout performance.
IEER is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization in Takoma Park,
Maryland, that provides the public and policy makers with clear,
thoughtful studies on a variety of energy and environmental
issues. IEER has analyzed radioactive waste management policy for
more than 20 years and has published numerous reports, books, and
articles on the subject. See the IEER web site for more
information. -30-
See IEER's analysis: The Savannah River at Grievous Risk:
Analysis of the Proposal to Allow the Department of Energy to
Leave a Significant Portion of Its High-Level Radioactive Waste
at the Savannah River Site in the Savannah River Watershed
Institute for Energy and Environmental Research
[http://www.ieer.org/index.html] Comments to Outreach
Coordinator: ieer{at}ieer.org Takoma Park, Maryland, USA
May 17, 2004
*****************************************************************
44 Oak Ridger: NASA official to voice support for tech summit
Story last updated at 12:19 p.m. on May 18, 2004
from staff reports
David King, director of NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, will
be in town Wednesday to brief local officials on his
organization's new mission and to voice support for the upcoming
Knoxville-Oak Ridge Technology Summit.
King will meet with key leaders of the East Tennessee Economic
Council at the University of Tennessee Outreach Center, 1201 Oak
Ridge Turnpike.
The Knoxville/Oak Ridge Technology Summit will run from May 31 to
June 2, with portions of the program taking place at the
Knoxville Convention Center and Oak Ridge Associated
Universities.
Since its inception, the summits have garnered a great deal of
participation from businesses, researchers and others located in
the Tennessee Valley Corridor, which runs from North Alabama
through East Tennessee into Southwest Virginia.
For more information on the corridor or the summit, go to
www.tennvalleycorridor.org [http://www.tennvalleycorridor.org] or
call 637-0251.
*****************************************************************
45 Oak Ridger: Cleanup concerns raised
Story last updated at 11:56 a.m. on May 18, 2004
MAYOR: 'We would not want this isolated incident to slow the pace
or to place current [environmental management] efforts on hold.'
By: Paul Parson | Oak Ridger Staff paul.parson@oakridger.com
[paul.parson@oakridger.com]
A recent series of events could have an impact on cleanup efforts
for the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Reservation.
But, local officials said they hope that's not the case.
The first issue has to do with small droplets of strontium 90
leaking onto a portion of Highway 95 Friday, which resulted in
the well-traveled road being closed to the public.
The second event - as reported Monday in an Energy Communities
Alliance bulletin - has to do with the resignation of Jessie
Roberson, DOE's assistant secretary for Environmental Management.
However, DOE denied this morning that she had resigned.
Lynn Freeny/DOE Road crews spent this weekend repaving Highway 95
in Roane County following a contamination incident.
Oak Ridge City Council unanimously approved Monday night a letter
that will be sent to Gerald Boyd, manager of DOE's Oak Ridge
Operations office, regarding the Highway 95 incident.
In the letter, Mayor David Bradshaw noted that the long-term,
overarching benefit of DOE's cleanup program should outweigh the
short-term concern the incident generated within DOE's
Environmental Management Program.
"I have complete confidence that the root causes for this
specific event will be determined and actions initiated to
prevent a reoccurrence in the future," Bradshaw wrote.
The contamination on Highway 95 was the result of leaks from a
truck carrying radioactive waste material from a cleanup project
at the old Hydrofracture Facility in Melton Valley to the
Environmental Management Waste Management Facility - a disposal
site located on Bear Creek Road near the Y-12 National Security
Complex.
In his letter, Bradshaw also stated that DOE has City Council's
"complete and unequivocal support" for the pace of the federal
government's Oak Ridge cleanup efforts.
"The fact that DOE-ORO is making real progress in assessing and
cleaning up waste sites, and is aggressively managing currently
generated wastes, is positive for Oak Ridge," Bradshaw wrote.
"We would not want this isolated incident to slow the pace or to
place current [environmental management] efforts on hold."
Bechtel Jacobs Co., DOE's Oak Ridge cleanup contractor, has
launched an investigation into Friday's strontium 90 incident,
according to Dennis Hill, a spokesman for the company.
Hill described the effort as an independent "Type B like"
investigation. "Type B" is considered DOE's second-highest level
of investigation.
In addition, Bechtel Jacobs has suspended work at the
Hydrofracture Facility. Safety and Ecology Corp. is responsible
for the cleanup of the facility that was built in 1963 to test
the concept for deep geologic disposal of liquid radioactive
waste.
A leak in a 600-gallon tank associated with the cleanup of the
old Hydrofracture Facility had been identified earlier last week.
But, officials thought they had remedied the situation. However,
when the tank arrived at the Environmental Management Waste
Management Facility Friday, it was surveyed and officials
determined that material had leaked out during transport.
As a result of Friday's incident, a portion of Highway 95 had to
be repaved this weekend. It was open to motorists by Monday
morning.
And, while all of the radioactive contamination from Highway 95
was removed, DOE and Bechtel Jacobs have also been addressing
contamination on the western portion of Bethel Valley Road and
Bear Creek Road on the Oak Ridge Reservation. These roads are not
open to the public, but are used for employee access to ORNL and
Y-12.
Hill said a portion of Bethel Valley Road also had to be repaved,
but that project is complete. Officials expected to have a
similar project on Bear Creek Road finished by Wednesday.
A Melton Valley access road is also being looked at. Asphalt
removal and repaving is expected to be completed by the end of
the week, according to Hill.
While Bechtel Jacobs manages local cleanup efforts for DOE's Oak
Ridge Operations office, the projects ultimately fall under
Roberson's purview in the grand scheme of things.
Roberson's position is essentially a political appointment, and
the person filling that seat could be replaced if a new
presidential administration takes office. It could be difficult
for DOE to get Senate confirmation on a new appointment prior to
the election.
Though, the big question is whether an appointment is needed.
"The department has no resignation from Jessie Roberson," said
Chris Kielich, who is with DOE headquarters' press office, when
asked about the issue this morning.
*****************************************************************
46 FOX5 Las Vegas: Yucca Mountain Public Meeting Today
May 17, 2004
(KVVU) -- The Department of Energy is inviting the public to
share their thoughts on transporting nuclear waste to Yucca
Mountain.
FOX5 FORUM: Discuss this story
The Energy Department is holding a meeting today about the
potential Caliente Rail Corridor at the Cashman Center. The tiny
central Nevada town could serve as the railhead and transfer
station for the nation's radioactive waste being shipped to a
proposed nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain.
To voice your thoughts, attend the Yucca Meeting today at the
Cashman Center (850 N. Las Vegas Blvd.) from 4 PM - 8 PM.
FOX5 will be there to cover the meeting and will have complete
details tonight on FOX5 News at 10.
(Copyright 2004. All Rights Reserved.)
*****************************************************************
47 Google News Alert - nuclear
Date: Tue, 18 May 2004 13:01:52 -0700 (PDT)
BRITAIN presses North Korea on nuclear issue during minister's ...
Channel News Asia - Singapore
... Britain pressed a visiting North Korean minister over Pyongyang's he
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POINT Beach Nuclear Reactors Shut Down
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... The diver works for Seaview Diving Company of Seymour. The Nuclear
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INDIA-PAK Nuclear CBMs Talks From May 25: Islamabad
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Britain today urged North Korea to push ahead with the decommissioning
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NUCLEAR plot foiled, secret service says
International Herald Tribune - Paris,France
... that several Ukrainians and citizens of Middle Eastern countries had
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NEW leaders named at Point Beach nuclear power plant
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MILWAUKEE - A Tennessee Valley Authority official has been named as the
top manager at the Point Beach nuclear power plant near Two Rivers. ...
TIME to Go Nuclear?
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by David Batstone. Nuclear power is making a comeback. Energy industry
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