***************************************************************** 05/20/04 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 12.121 ***************************************************************** RADBULL IS PRODUCED BY THE ABALONE ALLIANCE CLEARINGHOUSE ***************************************************************** Send News Stories to news@energy-net.org with title on subject line and first line of body NUCLEAR POLICY 1 Interfax: U.S., Russia want IAEA to report on Iran nuke program to U 2 AFP: US presses Russia over nuclear cooperation with Iran 3 AFP: US probes Russia over nuclear cooperation with Iran 4 AFP: Japanese PM's NKorea trip to tackle abduction, nuclear stalemat 5 US: Deseret news: Nevada Nuclear tests might resume 6 Strategists call for Israeli strikes against expanding WMD 7 Economic Times: Nuclear button to pass on to new govt - 8 RosBusinessConsulting: Kazakhstan not to share nuclear technologies 9 Pakistan News: Nuclear programme non-negotiable - Jamali 10 Daily Times: N-programme non-negotiable 11 CDI: Explaining Religious Terrorism Part 1: The Axis of Good and Evi 12 Express India: BARC staffers 'sat' on radioactive item NUCLEAR REACTORS 13 US: NRC: NRC Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards to Meet June 2 14 US: GreenvilleOnline.com: Nuclear power report: Oconee is model site 15 RosBusinessConsulting: Russia to bid for constructing nuclear facili 16 Interfax: Russia's nuclear electricity output tops 52.5 billion kWh 17 US: BBC: Nuclear option for nesting 18 US: Brattleboro Reformer: Jeffords to question NRC on safety issues 19 US: Poughkeepsie Journal: Officials, feds meet over Indian Point sec 20 US: PRN: Florida Power &Light Company Joins NuStart Energy Consortiu 21 AFL: AF family gives two Chernobyl children health, hope 22 US: NRC: NRC Renews License for R.E. Ginna Nuclear Power Plant, for NUCLEAR SAFETY 23 [du-list] killing the Iraq's weapon scientists 24 [du-list] Depleted Morality -- In These Times 25 Puerto Rico WOW: Samples taken in Vieques heavy metal study 26 US: Daily Gate City: New rule to help weapons workers comes under fi NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE 27 US: [NukeNet] Comment to PA on Nuke Waste to Landfills 28 US: Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Nuclear-waste talks being held in pr 29 Las Vegas RJ: Officials brace for cuts in Yucca budget 30 Las Vegas RJ: AG seeks states' help to halt nuclear shipments 31 US: Guardian Unlimited: Plutonium Waste Fight Stalls Defense Bill 32 US: BBC: Radioactive survey at rocket site 33 Las Vegas SUN: GOP leaders say Kerry's Yucca pledge a campaign 34 Las Vegas SUN: Yucca funds reportedly not available 35 US: Bradenton Herald: Flawed process 36 US: L.A. Daily News: 'Hot' water at Santa Susana 37 Nevada Appeal - Opinion: Kerry makes a clear promise on Yucca 38 US: NBC 4: Radioactivity Detected In Southland Groundwater 39 US: NPR: Nuclear Waste Clean-Up Plans Fuel Debate 40 US: U.S. Newswire: American Rivers Cries Foul Over Nuclear Waste 41 US: Cincinnati Enquirer: Arizona governor objects to Fernald waste s 42 US: OA Online News: Waste Control sale cancelled (Deal made) 43 US: Salt Lake Tribune: New wilderness area gets committee's nod NUCLEAR WEAPONS 44 [NYTr] World Honors Col.Stanislav Petrov, Who Averted Nuclear 45 US: TCS: Tech Central Station - The New Imperatives of Non-Prolifera US DEPT. OF ENERGY 46 [NukeNet] Win in Lawsuit Over DOE Bio-Warfare Agent Labs; 47 Tri-City Herald: Testimony scorns DOE changes to contracts 48 Tennessean: 2 hazardous materials accidents spark probes 49 DAILY BRUIN: UC poll shows faculty favor lab bids 50 Oak Ridger: NASA official talks tech summit, space 51 lamonitor.com: Senate debates LAPS bill 52 lamonitor.com: Groups disagree on bid procedure 53 Tri-Valley Herald: UC faculty backs weapons labs 54 Paducah Sun: PACRO eyes lab, electrical concerns OTHER NUCLEAR 55 Google News Alert - nuclear 56 EMS: After the Fighting Stops, How Do We Heal the Earth’s Battle Sca ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** FULL NEWS STORIES ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** 1 Interfax: U.S., Russia want IAEA to report on Iran nuke program to UN Interfax.com [http://www.interfax.com] Text version [http://www2.interfax.ru/eng/main.html] Site map Politics May 20 2004 6:23PM MOSCOW. June 20 (Interfax) - The United States and Russia believe the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) should report to the UN Security Council on Iran's nuclear program, a senior U.S. official said on Thursday. The U.S. and Russia have discussed Iran's alleged efforts to develop nuclear weapons and the threat such arms would pose to international security and stability, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton told a news conference at Interfax on Thursday. Washington and Moscow decided that it would be useful if the IAEA submitted a report on Iran's nuclear program to the Security Council, he said. © 1991-2004 Interfax All rights reserved ***************************************************************** 2 AFP: US presses Russia over nuclear cooperation with Iran http://www.spacewar.com/ MOSCOW (AFP) May 20, 2004 The United States pursued its efforts Thursday to persuade Russia to interrupt its controversial nuclear cooperation with Iran as the top US arms control official held high-level discussions in Moscow. But it apparently failed to have Moscow agree to a Washington-sponsored agreement that would allow for the interdiction of missiles and other potential components of weapons of mass destruction while they are being transferred at sea or in the air. US Under Secretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton met Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Kislyak for talks focusing on the spread of weapons of mass destruction and the potential threats posed by North Korea and Iraq. "The United States plans to focus on issues of the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and all issues linked to this," the ITAR-TASS news agency quoted Bolton as saying before the meeting. He was due to brief reporters on his visit later Thursday. However Kislyak told the Interfax news agency after the meeting that no agreement had been reached on Russia signing up to Proliferation Security Initiative -- also known as PSI -- proposed by US President George W. Bush last year. "As to the PSI agreement, we are continuing to discuss this question," Kislyak said. Russia has argued that the PSI agreement would open the way for unilateral military action from Washington and wants such deals to be negotiated through the United Nations, where it has veto power. The hawkish Bolton regularly visits Russia, though he is not always well-received here, and has become one of Washington's top pointmen on issues dealing with Moscow's potential military trade and the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Bolton was one of the key figures who helped negotiate a May 2002 arms reduction treaty signed by Presidents Bush and Vladimir Putin in Moscow that was meant to reduce the two sides' nuclear arsenals by two-thirds over 10 years. But that treaty -- to Russia's immense displeasure -- now appears to have been dropped as Washington used a legal loophole to ignore the deal. The United States has since aired plans to develop miniature nuclear weapons, a military potential that Russia does not yet have and which Washington argues are needed for regional conflicts in the post Cold War era. Iran has remained a sore point in Russia-US relations despite a new wave of cooperation following the September 11 attacks. Russia's Bushehr nuclear reactor project is frowned on by Washington amid fears that the Islamic state is using it as a guise to develop a weapons program. Moscow has since appeared to have put the breaks on the project and delivered strong pressure on Iran to submit to open United Nations inspections of its potential military sites. Iran's first nuclear reactor is now not due to become operational until 2005 -- years after schedule -- in a deal worth nearly one billion dollars (1.2 billion euros) to Moscow that Russian authorities appear to have used several strategies to push back to appease US concerns. Under US and Israeli pressure, Moscow is demanding that all of the fuel provided for the reactor is sent back to Russia, and has called for a guarantee that the fuel is delivered safely across Iran. It is now negotiating a new treaty on the fuel's safe return. WAR.WIRE ***************************************************************** 3 AFP: US probes Russia over nuclear cooperation with Iran [http://www.spacewar.com/] MOSCOW (AFP) May 20, 2004 The United States made another attempt Thursday to understand the true state of Russia's nuclear cooperation with Iran as the top US secretary for arms control flew in to Moscow for high-level discussions. US Under Secretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton met Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Kislyak for talks focusing on the spread of weapons of mass destruction and the potential threats posed by North Korea and Iraq. He was due to brief reporters on his visit later Thursday. Bolton regularly visits Russia and has become one of Washington's top pointmen -- a hawk who is not always well received here -- on issues dealing with Moscow's potential military trade and the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Bolton was one of the key figures who helped negotiate a May 2002 arms reduction treaty signed by Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin in Moscow that was meant to reduce the two sides' nuclear arsenals by two-thirds over 10 years. But that treaty -- to Russia's immense displeasure -- now appears to have been dropped as Washington used a legal loophole to ignore the deal. The United States has since aired plans to develop miniature nuclear weapons, a military potential that Russia does not yet have and which Washington argues are needed for regional conflicts in the post Cold War era. With these uneasy military relations, Bolton met Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Kislyak to discuss non-proliferation issues and potential cooperation in Iraq and North Korea. "The United States plans to focus on issues of the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and all issues linked to this," the ITAR-TASS news agency quoted Bolton as saying before the meeting. Iran has remained a sore point in Russia-US relations despite a new wave of cooperation following the September 11 attacks. Russia's Bushehr nuclear reactor project is frowned on by Washington amid fears that the Islamic state is using it as a guise to develop a weapons program. Moscow has since appeared to have put the breaks on the project and delivered strong pressure on Iran to submit to open United Nations inspections of its potential military sites. Iran's first nuclear reactor is now not due to become operational until 2005 -- years after schedule -- in a deal worth nearly one billion dollars (1.2 billion euros) to Moscow that Russian authorities appear to have used several strategies to push back in a bid to appease US concerns. Under US and Israeli pressure, Moscow is demanding that all of the fuel provided for the reactor is sent back to Russia, and has called for a guarantee that the fuel is delivered safely across Iran. It is now negotiating a new treaty on the fuel's safe return. Meanwhile, Tehran has agreed to the UN weapons inspections, but progress has been slow. UN sources said they will be unable to complete the inspection by June as had been planned because Iranian officials were not cooperating. Officials said Bolton would also discuss North Korea and Iraq during his stay, although there were no details about those negotiations. Russia has attempted to help mediate the nuclear dispute between Pyongyang and Washington, even though its influence over North Korea has waned since the Soviet era. Moscow, a staunch opponent of the US-led war, is also determined not to send any troops into Iraq, and is now negotiating with Washington over a new UN Security Council resolution over the transition of power over to Baghdad. WAR.WIRE ***************************************************************** 4 AFP: Japanese PM's NKorea trip to tackle abduction, nuclear stalemates [http://www.spacewar.com/] TOKYO (AFP) May 20, 2004 Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is to visit North Korea this weekend in a bid to break a stalemate over Pyongyang's nuclear programme and to bring back the families of kidnapped Japanese citizens. Koizumi's one-day trip to Pyongyang on Saturday will feature his second meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il following their historic summit in September 2002. Explaining the trip last week, the prime minister said he intended to make progress on both the abduction issue and stalled six-nation discussions on Pyongyang's nuclear arms ambitions. "It is necessary to break the stalemate," he said. The row over North Korea's nuclear programme has been deadlocked since October 2002, when Washington said the Stalinist state had broken a 1994 nuclear freeze by launching a secret weapons drive. And efforts to normalise relations between Tokyo and Pyongyang have stalled following a backlash from the Japanese public to North Korea's admission at the 2002 summit that it kidnapped 13 Japanese during the Cold War era, eight of whom died. In return for expected progress, Koizumi is reportedly ready to offer some 250,000 tonnes of rice as food aid to the impoverished state and to promise to refrain from imposing economic sanctions. The conservative Sankei Shimbun said Wednesday Japan was also prepared to give Pyongyang 10 million dollars' worth of medical supplies through an international organisation "if there is progress over the abduction issue." Any success from Koizumi's trip is likely to boost his support ahead of upper house elections in July and Japan's influence in the six-nation talks on the nuclear stand-off, analysts said. The talks involve the two Koreas, Japan, the United States, China and Russia. Koizumi's priority is to bring back eight relatives of five of the abducted Japanese who were allowed to return home following the 2002 summit, analysts noted. "The chances are high that the North will allow the eight to return to Japan," said Masao Okonogi, professor of politics at Tokyo's Keio University and an expert on Korean affairs. "For the North, returning the eight is a merit, which will lead to financial assistance from Japan," Okonogi said. "Better ties with Tokyo will also give the North an advantage in negotiations with the United States." Other analysts, however, warned it was still uncertain whether Koizumi could meet public expectations that he would be able to resolve the abduction issue. Besides having the eight come to Japan, Tokyo also wants Pyongyang to account for 10 other Japanese abductees whose whereabouts remain unknown. "We cannot rule out Koizumi's failure on the trip because North Korea is such an unpredictable state," said Hidekazu Kawai, professor of international politics at Tokyo's Gakushuin University. "A visit by a prime minister overseas is the last card you play in diplomacy," Kawai said. "Since he is resorting to the card, he's got to show tangible results. Otherwise, he will damage his political career." Public support for Koizumi has dropped to 45 percent from 50 percent amid growing public disillusionment over his admission to flaws in his pension payment record, according to a survey released by the Asahi Shimbun on Monday. His approval rating shot up immediately following the 2002 summit at which North Korea admitted its agents had abducted at least 13 Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s to train their spies in Japanese language and culture. On Monday Koizumi won US President George W. Bush's support for his planned visit but it was not disclosed whether they spoke of a US Army deserter who is one of the eight relatives the prime minister wants to bring back. American Charles Robert Jenkins, 64, is married to a woman who was among the five who returned to Japan. He is listed as having deserted from the US Army in 1965 and Tokyo is worried Washington could demand his handover for prosecution. WAR.WIRE ***************************************************************** 5 Deseret news: Nevada Nuclear tests might resume [deseretnews.com] Thursday, May 20, 2004 By Joe Bauman and Lee Davidson Deseret Morning News New projects planned for the Nevada Test Site are raising concern that nuclear bomb testing may resume there. Local and national military watchdogs say all indications are that President Bush, if re-elected, would begin testing some types of nuclear weapons before the end of the decade at the NTS, located about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas and upwind of Utah. "You put all the pieces of the puzzle together," said Steve Erickson, director of the local Citizens Education Project, "and it leads to the conclusion that yes, we may very well be on the road to a resumption of nuclear testing." Those concerns had Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, trying to amend the annual Defense Authorization Act this week to require clear permission from Congress before such testing could resume. The GOP-controlled Rules Committee blocked consideration of it. "If this country is going to resume the testing of nuclear weapons, the people's representatives — the U.S. Congress — should be involved," Matheson complained Wednesday in a speech to the full House. Often, during above-ground nuclear testing in the 1950s and early 1960s, radioactive fallout swept from the NTS into Utah and other regions. This contamination led to some cancer deaths and illness among downwind residents, said a later court ruling. Although more-recent tests were conducted underground, sometimes accidental venting released radioactive material. All nuclear-explosion tests were halted in 1992. Frank von Hippel, who teaches public and international affairs and works on nuclear weapons issues at Princeton, was a White House adviser on national security, concerned with science and technology policy, and was one of those responsible for arranging the present moratorium on nuclear testing. He told the Deseret Morning News on Monday that a Defense Department official told him earlier this year that "based on the way he saw things going inside the administration, that if the Bush administration is re-elected that we would resume testing in 2007 or 2008." The latest federal budget request calls for funding to improve the NTS so it could resume testing, if needed, in 18 months instead of the present 36 months. Also, researchers were working on new types of nuclear weapons that presumably would need testing before they could be added to the stockpile. However, Linton F. Brooks, chief of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said in a March Senate hearing the administration had no plans to resume nuclear tests in the foreseeable future. Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, has indicated he might attempt to write that into law. Democrats are also pushing an amendment to short-circuit nuclear work in Nevada by transferring $36.6 million for it toward improving conventional "bunker buster" capabilities. Matheson vowed to support that and to seek other opportunities to require congressional approval for any nuclear testing. Von Hippel refused to name the Defense Department official but said he believes his informant was reflecting high-level opinion in the DOD. He added, "But I think this would be very controversial, and therefore I told him, 'We'll cut you off at the pass.' " That is, opponents would try to thwart new testing. In another indication of action at the NTS, in April the U.S. Department of Energy released a proposed draft environmental assessment covering "activities using biological simulants and releases of chemicals" there. It said that after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the government found a need "for more operational testing, contamination and decontamination testing, forensics testing, personal protective equipment (PPE) testing, enclosed environment detection and decontamination testing and counter-terrorism training as they relate to biological or chemical agents." The NTS provides a remote, secure setting for such defensive testing, it added. Chemicals in low concentration and harmless biological simulants would be released on the NTS. About five to 20 test series per year would be carried out, and no more than two new employees would be required, it said. However, defensive research against chemical and biological threats already is carried out on the Army's Dugway Proving Ground, located in the western Utah desert. In 2002, Dugway issued a proposal to substantially increase chemical and biological defenses and counterterrorism training. Erickson said sometimes simulants can cause illness but that would be a minor problem, unless the exposed person was in compromised health. If simulants were used at the NTS, he does not think dangerous concentrations could reach Utah. As far as Erickson is concerned, the larger concern is the test site's future. "What's the public policy decision here?" he asked. The possibility of resuming tests is "more than talk," he said. "They're funding preparations for it. No decision has been made to proceed with tests." In addition to funding for nuclear testing, the Bush administration has requested funding to research and develop earth-penetrating nuclear bombs, he said. These bunker-busters are "what they call mini-nukes, or small-yield nuclear weapons." As part of the newly proposed program, test site officials would like to place caches of simulants in tunnels and blow them up, he added. Instruments would be checked to see whether they could sniff out the underground simulants. "One of the purposes of the robust nuclear earth penetrator, the bunker buster, is to dig its way down into the earth hundreds of feet before detonation of the nuclear warhead," Erickson said. Such a weapon could be used to vaporize any chemical or biological weapon stored in an underground bunker, he added. Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, based in Washington, D.C., said the Bush administration "has taken some steps that have eroded the legal and technical barriers to the resumption of testing." The group is dedicated to controlling arms, and von Hippel has contributed to its Web site. Kimball said a reason for thinking the Bush administration wants to resume testing is that it opposes ratification of the comprehensive test-ban treaty. E-mail: bau@desnews.com [bau@desnews.com] © 2004 Deseret News Publishing Company ***************************************************************** 6 Strategists call for Israeli strikes against expanding WMD Date: Thu, 20 May 2004 05:03:16 -0500 (CDT) http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/breaking_8.html Special to WORLD TRIBUNE.COM Friday, May 14, 2004 Strategists call for Israeli strikes against expanding WMD threat Tel Aviv Leading strategists in Israel have proposed preemptive strikes against the expanding threat posed by weapons of mass destruction arsenals in the Middle East. A report, entitled "Israel's Strategic Future," called such strikes an option in preventing the formation of a WMD coalition. The report said the Jewish state has been threatened by a biological or nuclear first-strike that seeks to exploit Israel's small space and high population density. "To meet its ultimate deterrence objectives that is, to deter the most overwhelmingly destructive enemy first-strikes Israel must seek and achieve a visible second-strike capability to target approximately 15 enemy cities," the report, presented to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, said. The report marked the last phase of Project Daniel, published by the Ariel Center for Policy Research. The contributors to the report included [Res.] Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Ben-Yisrael, the former director of research and development at Israel's military and Defense Ministry, Middle East Newsline reported. The report also urged the Israeli military to reduce the priority assigned to conventional warfare without impairing its superiority over any enemy coalition. The report said Israeli strategy must be revised to address the expanding threats from what it termed terrorism and long-range WMD attacks. One option, the report said, would be to target an enemy WMD regime. "The tools for preemptive operations would be novel, diverse and purposeful; for example, long-range aircraft with appropriate support for derived missions; long-range high-level intervention ground forces; long-endurance intelligence-collection systems; long-endurance unmanned air-strike platforms," the report said. "Ranges would be to cities in Libya and Iran, and recognizable nuclear bomb yields would be at a level sufficient to fully compromise the aggressor's viability as a functioning state. All enemy targets should be selected with the view that their destruction would promptly force the enemy to cease all nuclear/biological/ chemical exchanges with Israel." The report called on Israel to operate a multi-layered ballistic missile defense system as well as establish a second-strike capability. Such a missile defense should include a Boost Phase Intercept capability as well as enhanced real-time intelligence acquisition, interpretation and transmission. The report said that despite the prospect of a WMD attack, the principal existential threat to Israel was a conventional war mounted by a coalition of Arab states along with Iran. But such a war, the report said, could be facilitated by the development of WMD and result in nonconventional weapons strikes against the Jewish state. "Irrespective of its policy on nuclear ambiguity vs. disclosure, Israel will not be able to endure unless it continues to maintain a credible, secure and decisive nuclear deterrent alongside a multi-layered anti-missile defense," the report said. The report said advanced weaponry would enable Israel to reduce its defense expenditure while enhancing effectiveness and lethality in conventional warfare. The report cited the need for increased weapons range, precision, warhead efficiency; electronic warfare, reduced infrared and radio frequency signatures. The report also stressed the need for real time tactical and strategic intelligence within a command, control, communications, computer and intelligence [C4I] system. The technologies cited to combat strategic threats included ballistic missile defense, early-warning satellites, combat unmanned air vehicles and deep-strike forces. "There is no operational need for low-yield nuclear weapons geared for actual battlefield use," the report said. "There is no point in spreading and raising costs Israel's effort on low-yield, tactical nuclear weapons given the multifaceted asymmetry between Israel and its adversaries." Israel must also maintain its policy of refusing to acknowledge nuclear capability, the report said. The report said such a policy should be revised in the future if an enemy state turns nuclear. The report asserted that the development of an Arab and Iranian nuclear weapons program required 20 years while that of a long-range missile would need 12 years. But once development is completed, the report said, the production and acquisition of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles would entail a short process. Any country could build an arsenal of 100 atomic bombs within four years of the assembly of its first nuclear weapon. "Israel will have to maximize its long-range, accurate, real-time strategic intelligence," the report said. "Israel will have to maximize the credibility of its second-strike capability. Israel will have to develop, test, manufacture and deploy a BPI [Boost Phase Intercept] capability to match the operational requirements dictated by enemy ballistic missile capacities -- performance and numbers." The report also called on Israel to deploy recoverable and non-recoverable stealth UAVs to suppress enemy air defenses, electronic warfare, intelligence-gathering and strikes. The military was also urged to develop a second-strike land or sea nuclear capability. To finance such an effort, Israel must cooperate with the United States, make better use of U.S. military aid and eliminate obstacles to U.S.-Israel defense trade. One option was for Israel to consider revising its defense strategy to account for an expanded U.S. military presence in the Middle East. The report urged Israel to seek U.S. cooperation for a joint BPI project, something the Defense Department has refused. Another option was for the United States to "participate technologically and financially in Israel's multi-layered missile defense efforts as fully as possible." -------- (For full report: http://www.acpr.org.il/ENGLISH-NATIV/03-ISSUE/daniel-3.htm) ----------- ***************************************************************** 7 Economic Times: Nuclear button to pass on to new govt - [http://www.indiatimes.com/] Thursday, May 20, 2004| NEW DELHI: With the proverbial nuclear button all set to be handed over to India’s new government, experts say perhaps even before a new cabinet is in place, the priority is to name a new national security adviser. Outgoing Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, during whose tenure India went nuclear, will  hand over the nuclear keys to Manmohan Singh as soon as he assumes power, in all probability on May 22. Experts say the appointment of a national security adviser will ensure continuity in the country’s Nuclear Command Authority (NCA). “There is need for the new government to name the national security adviser in advance of the government being sworn in so that he can liaise between the political and military leadership,” leading defence and strategic expert K Subrahmanyam said. “This will be the first transfer (of nuclear assets) since India became a nuclear weapon state. Therefore, there has to be a continuity of command,” Mr Subrahmanyam said. The national security advisor, a political appointee, is central to the continuity of the command structure of the nuclear assets, he said. The NCA, which was announced in January ’03, is a two-tier body consisting of a political council and an executive council. The political council, chaired by the prime minister, will be “the sole body which will authorise the use of nuclear weapons”. The executive council will be chaired by the principal secretary to the prime minister, who will “provide inputs for decision-making by the NCA” and execute the directives given to it by the Political Council. It will consist of top civil servants and military officers. In the outgoing government of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Brajesh Mishra, held the posts of both principal secretary to the prime minister as well as national security advisor. Copyright © 2004 Times Internet Limited. All rights reserved. | [http://www.indiatimes.com/advertise/contact.html] | ***************************************************************** 8 RosBusinessConsulting: Kazakhstan not to share nuclear technologies [http://www.rbc.ru/] RBC, 20.05.2004, Astana 17:06:21.Kazakhstani enterprises and organizations are not negotiating and have no intentions to export information related to nuclear technologies to third countries, Kazakhstani National Security Committee head Nartay Dutbayev declared at a meeting of the heads of secret services and security and law enforcement agencies of the member states of the G8, the EU, NATO, CIS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. He mentioned that the laws on using nuclear energy and on export control had come into force in the republic and they regulated a mechanism of control and prevention of export and import operations with nuclear materials. webland@webland.ru [webland@webland.ru] All rights reserved. © 1995-2003 RosBusinessConsulting (095) ***************************************************************** 9 Pakistan News: Nuclear programme non-negotiable - Jamali PakTribune.Com Raby` al-sani 1, 1425 Hijri May 21, 2004 Thursday May 20, 2004 (1000 PST) Dr Qadeer’s confessional statement on proliferation and its repercussions ISLAMABAD, May 21 (Online): Prime Minister Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali has declared in categorical terms that Pakistan’s nuclear programme, being the cornerstone of the nation’s security policy is non negotiable . He reiterated that the policy of Credible Minimum Deterrence had national consensus and it had stood the test of time and events over the past several years, even as we continue to monitor our security environment critically . He said his government will continue to make necessary resources available for the qualitative development and advancement of the strategic programme . The Prime Minister was talking to the scientists and engineers of Pakistan’s premier nuclear facility, the Khan Research Laboratories, during a daylong visit to Kahuta . The Prime Minister, who was given a detailed briefing on the role and functions of the uranium enrichment facility by Chairman KRL Dr Javed Mirza, strongly dismissed any misplaced apprehensions of roll back of freeze asked the nation to develop confidence and maturity becoming of a declared nuclear power . The international community, he said had accepted the reality of a nuclear power . The international community, he said, had accepted the reality of a nuclear Pakistan . Apprehensions of a roll back in some cynical domestic circles was outdated and at least two decades too late . The strategic programme knows only one direction, he said that of forward dynamism, and that will be maintained at all costs . The Prime Minister emphasized that Pakistan had acquired nuclear capability strictly for its own security and non-proliferation of nuclear technology was declared national policy . Pakistan moved swiftly to investigate the reports of past nuclear proliferation by certain individuals and we were determined to root out the network completely . Difficult decisions had been taken and we did not shy away from our international responsibilities . We had extended full cooperation to the IAEA in its efforts to investigate international proliferation and would continue to do so remaining within the bounds of national sovereignty and security . The Prime Minister went around various uranium enrichment plants and Ghauri missile production facilities and expressed satisfaction at the excellent standards being maintained in the plants, which were running to capacity . He complimented the officers and workers on their outstanding technical prowess and high motivation level, which had given Pakistan the ability to deter aggression . Earlier on arrival, the Prime Minister was received by the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee General Muhammad Aziz Khan, Director general Strategic plans Division Lt General Khalid Kidwai and Chairman KRL Dr Jave Arshad Mirza . End. year end: Shahzad Sadan - CEO Pakistan News Service © PakTribune.com Pvt Ltd 2003-2004 ***************************************************************** 10 Daily Times: N-programme non-negotiable Friday, May 21, 2004 * Jamali says world accepts Pakistan as nuclear power Staff Report ISLAMABAD: The nuclear programme is the cornerstone of Pakistan’s security policy and is as such non-negotiable, Prime Minister Zafarullah Jamali said on Thursday. “The policy of credible minimum deterrence has national consensus and has stood the test of time and events over many years. We continue to critically monitor our security environment,” Mr Jamali said in a speech to the scientists and engineers of Kahuta Research Laboratories (KRL). The prime minister said the government would continue to provide necessary resources for the qualitative development and advancement of the country’s strategic programme. The prime minister was briefed on the role and functions of the uranium enrichment facility during his daylong visit to the KRL. Mr Jamali dismissed apprehensions that the nuclear programme would be rolled back or frozen and asked the nation to develop confidence and maturity. “We are a declared nuclear power,” he said, adding that the international community had accepted the reality of a nuclear Pakistan. “The apprehensions of a roll-back in some cynical domestic circles are at least two decades late. There is only one direction, and that is forward dynamism, which will be maintained at all cost.” Mr Jamali said Pakistan had acquired nuclear capability strictly for defence and non-proliferation of nuclear technology was a declared national policy. “We moved swiftly to investigate the reports of past nuclear proliferation by certain individuals and we are determined to completely root out the network.” He said difficult decisions had been taken because Pakistan did not shy away from its international obligations. “We extended full cooperation to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in its efforts to investigate international proliferation and we will continue to do so, remaining within the bounds of national sovereignty and security.” During his visit to KRL, the prime minister saw various uranium enrichment plants and Ghauri missile production facilities and expressed his satisfaction at the standards being maintained in the plants running to capacity. He complimented the officers and workers on their technical prowess and motivation level which, he said, had given Pakistan the ability to deter aggression. Earlier on arrival, the prime minister was received by Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee Chairman General Muhammad Aziz Khan, Strategic Plans Division Director General Lt General Khalid Kidwai and KRL Chairman Dr Javed Arshad Mirza. Online adds: Also on Thursday, the Saudi ambassador to Pakistan, Brigadier (r) Ali Awaddh Asseri, called on Mr Jamali at Prime Minister’s House. They discussed matters related to Pakistan-Saudi relations and the prime minister’s upcoming visit to Saudi Arabia. Mr Jamali said Pakistan attached great importance to its relations with Saudi Arabia. He said that the traditionally close and brotherly relations between the two countries would be strengthened in the future. Mr Asseri said that the existing cooperation between the two countries in various fields would be enhanced. Daily Times - All Rights Reserved Site developed and hosted by WorldCALL Internet Solutions [http://www.wcis.com.pk] ***************************************************************** 11 CDI: Explaining Religious Terrorism Part 1: The Axis of Good and Evil [http://www.cdi.org May 20, 2004 The attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, seared the dangers of terrorism into the minds of Americans and horrified onlookers across the world as had no previous outrages. They also (as the identity, nature, and motivations of the perpetrators became almost immediately apparent) drew attention to terrorism’s most latently violent and paradoxical variant – namely that undertaken for reasons of religion. Yet religious terrorism was no more a new trend in 2001 than was terrorism driven by more earthly motives. Long before Sept. 11, fanaticism such as compels religious terrorists, rather than politics, was increasingly recognized as modern terrorism’s most noteworthy motivating factor. The modern terrorist, most particular the religiously motivated one, was also notably less restrained in his methods and willingness to inflict casualties than many of his predecessors.[1] The term terrorism did not itself appear until the end of the 18th Century, when it was used by the likes of the British political philosopher Edmund Burke to demonize the leaders of the French Revolution. Similarly, terrorism, as a phenomenon that would be readily-recognizable today, did not emerge for a couple of generations after this, when it was adopted by Russian Populists opposed to the Tsarist regime, as well as disparate groups of anarchists and nationalists. [2] However, to a degree, modern terrorism’s lineage can be dated at least as far back as the 1st Century. Since then, that which we today call terrorism has been constantly with us in one form or another and in various degrees of viciousness. That said, today’s terrorism differs in many ways from that of earlier eras, not least in terms of the weapons it employs and the mass-media saturated environment in which it operates. Undoubtedly, both have had an effect on how terrorists ply their trade and how the world perceives and reacts to it: so much was apparent from the use of simple box cutters on Sept. 11, 2001, to crash sophisticated airliners into high-profile buildings, at the cost of thousands of lives, and while the world watched transfixed via television. There is also continuity in terrorism, not least in the motives which lie behind it. Understanding this will prove more important than trying to frantically counter the terrorist’s latest means of the moment – a tactic which cedes strategic initiative to the terrorist. It also encourages the illusion that terrorism can be totally eradicated rather than managed, and will forever leave us closing the stable door long after the horse has bolted. This continuity in terrorist motivations is particularly salient with regard to religion. Like many of their present day equivalents, terrorism’s earliest practitioners were motivated by what they perceived to be a divine imperative. Early Holy Terror[3] Of the earliest religious ‘terrorists,’ three groups are of particular note: the Thugs; the Assassins; and the Zealots-Sciari.[4] These three groups, despite operating with the most primitive of weapons, inflicted a sustained casualty rate that their modern predecessors have thus far been unable to match.[5] They also illustrate the differing ratio between such groups’ political and religious motivations. At one end of the spectrum, the Thugs pursued entirely religious ends while, at the other, the Zealots-Sicari were moved as much by political considerations as spiritual ones. A Hindu sect active from the 7th until the mid-19th century, when they were eliminated by the British authorities, the Thugs (from whom the contemporary expression came) ritually strangled their victims as an offering to the Hindu goddess of terror and destruction, Kali. They sought to prolong their victims terror as long as possible – an important consideration in their sacrificial ritual. While the Thugs retained their victims’ property, using it to bribe the region’s various suzerains (whose complicity in providing sanctuary helped the sect to survive for so long), their overriding motivation was religious rather than financial. Indeed, the cult may be the only example of a ‘terrorist’ group motivated entirely by a religious imperative. Moreover, their strict adherence to a religious doctrine that prohibited the killing of foreigners helped secure the Thugs’ demise. While this prohibition allowed the cult to go undetected for a time, it also enabled its 10,000 members to be systematically hunted down in operations involving no more than 30 to 40 Europeans who went about their work with relative impunity.[6] Ironically, despite their activities being literally intended to terrify their victims (not as central a consideration in terrorism as is often believed[7]), the absence of a political motive could be viewed as excluding the Thugs from being classified as terrorists.[8] However, they are perhaps the exception to the widely-accepted rule that terrorists have politically motivated goals. Thugee methods and activities went sufficiently beyond “accepted norms”[9] to enable them to be classed as terrorists, albeit unique in their degree of religious motivation. Indeed, if the Thugs are considered terrorists, they are also perhaps the only terrorist to be solely motivated by religious considerations. By comparison, the Assassins were motivated by both politics and religion. An 11th century offshoot of Shia Ismaili sects, their name (from whence the modern term ‘assassin’ came) literally means ‘hashish-eater’ and referred to the ritualistic drug-taking they were (perhaps falsely) rumored to indulge in before missions.[10] These missions usually involved stabbing to death politicians or clerics who refused to convert to the Assassin’s version of Islam, the spreading of which was their primary goal. Such violence as the sect resorted to was used in the defense or furtherance of their religious mission. Compared to the Thugs, the Assassins regarded their religious doctrines with some degree of pragmatism. Not only where they prepared to pretend to denounce their faith as a subterfuge to close on their targets, they also interpreted the prohibition against using the sword on other Muslims to mean that other weapons could or should be used.[11] In the case of the Assassins, the weapon of choice was a dagger – with earlier Islamic cults using methods such as strangulation or clubbing to circumvent the restrictions on using the sword on co-religionists. The Assassins also differed from the Thugs in that they played to a physical as well as a spiritual audience. Whereas the Thugs eschewed publicity, the Assassins courted it, often carrying our killings at religious sites on holy days – a tactic intended to publicize their cause and incite others to it. This, and their choice of weapons, helped the Assassins achieve the martyrdom that they actively sought – a trait they share with their modern counterparts. However, such methods also proved counterproductive, incurring heavy reprisals from their enemies which the Assassin’s, doctrinally constrained to their policy of assassination, were unable or unwilling to match.[12] Within 40 years the sect was bereft of support and their activities at an end. Even more short-lived were the Zealot-Sciari -- two distinct but related First Century Jewish sects active for 25 years. Originally, the preferred weapon of the Sciari (whose name meant ‘daggermen’) was the same as that of the Assassins. Both Jewish groups took their inspiration from Phineas, an Old Testament priest who used the head of his spear (apparently like a dagger) to kill an Israelite and his mistress who were openly defying an edict from God.[13] The priest’s actions were attributed with averting a plague among the Israelites and preparing them for a God-ordained war against the Canaanites for possession of the Promised Land. His religious enthusiasm gave the Zealots their name and bequeathed us the modern term meaning “a fanatical partisan.”[14] Like the Assassins, the Zealots-Sciari sought to apply a political solution (in the form of political violence) to a religious problem. In the Jewish groups’ case, this took the form of a concerted campaign against Jews and non-Jews. As with the Assassins, such attacks often occurred in front of witnesses in broad daylight – the better to to send a message to the Roman authorities and Jews alike. As Rapport relates, this campaign had twin rationales: “to make oppression [in reaction to Zealots-Sciari attacks] so intolerable that insurrection [by the Jewish people] was inevitable, and, subsequently, to frustrate every attempt to reconcile the respective parties.”[15] These goals were achieved to a degree that modern terrorists, who would instantly relate to them, can only aspire to. The Zealots-Sciari not only incited one contemporaneous revolt but also inspired two subsequent ones. The sum of their activity, which, like that of the Assassins, proved ultimately counterproductive, comprised widespread devastation (including the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem), the mass suicide at Masada, and the virtual extermination of large Jewish populations in Cyprus and Egypt, culminating in the Exile itself. Through their actions, the Zealots-Sciari hoped to act as a catalyst in facilitating a long-prophesized messianic intervention. As such, like the Assassins, their immediate audience was human while their ultimate, and more important one, was divine. In this, as in their ruthlessness[16], both groups’ methods echoed those of the modern religious terrorists who emerged onto the international stage a little over 20 years ago. The Renaissance of Religious Terrorism Religion provided the dominant rationale for terrorism prior to the 19th century. This trend ended with the eradication of the Thugs, the last example of religiously-inspired terrorists until a little over 20 ago. The reemergence of religious terrorism in the 1980s followed an interlude when terrorists’ motivations were overwhelmingly secular. The move towards secular terrorism was fueled by those notions of nationalism and citizenship that the French Revolution both reflected and helped set in motion.[17] The anti-colonialist and nationalist liberation struggles that followed World War II -- and influenced the ethnic, separatist and ideologically-driven terrorists that came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s – further catalyzed the secularization of terrorism.[18] By 1980, when the number of active terrorist organizations that could be classified as international had reached 64, only two of these groups were motivated primarily by religion.[19] Within a dozen years, the number of religious terrorist groups had increased to 11, and now included adherents of all the major world religions as well as many minor cults. Within three years, this number had grown until almost half of the 56 identifiable, active international terrorist groups were religious ones.[20] [ src=] Figure 1: The Renaissance of Religious Terrorism[21] The appearance of a new trend in 1996 towards more secular and fewer religious terrorist groups is potentially misleading in assessing such organizations’ impact. As is discussed below, religious terrorist groups present an exponentially greater threat (just how much greater would not become widely-realized until the al Qaeda attacks of America on Sept. 11, 2001) given their higher proclivity towards mass casualty attacks relative to their secular counterparts. This renaissance in holy terrorism (illustrated in Figure 1, above) arose alongside the revival among the world’s religions which overlapped with the end of the Cold War. This latter event, which saw Communism largely discredited, yet the benefits of liberal democracy only partly realized, left a sort of ideological vacuum. As such, the heightened interest in religion that marked the ensuing period was perhaps unsurprising – not least as it was also marked by the dawning of a new millennium in the West, a much-anticipated augur for the numerous religious groups who attached great import to the fulfillment of historical prophecy.[22] A similar historical junction had been reached some 20 years earlier in the Muslim world, in whose calendar 1979 equated to the start of a new century (in this case the year 1400) – traditionally a period of unrest and messianic anticipation. This new century began bloodily, with an attack by a Sunni group on Mecca’s Grand Mosque, and would soon unfold against the backdrop of armed resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by Muslims who flocked there from across the world. Meanwhile, the Iranian revolution provided inspiration to those who decided to take up arms in the cause of a religion which was proving more seductive than the secularized alternative offer by the governments in many majority Muslim countries. The eventual Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, which many Muslims viewed as a victory for the Mujahadeen (often conveniently overlooking the role of Western support in securing this outcome) provided a further impetus for the re-politization of Islam. This re-politization formed a bigger process which all these factors were products and components of, and catalysts in. This process was further stimulated by the apparent military impotence of the Arab world in various encounters with Israel, as well as a wider disgruntlement across the Muslim world at the perceived ascendancy and cultural imperialism of the West in many realms. This re-politicization continues, echoing the earlier movement towards pan-Islamism that began in the 1860s and quickened in the 1920s, when, in reaction to moves by Mustafa Kemal to turn Turkey into a secular state, the Muslim Brotherhood was formed in Egypt.[23] Subsequent crackdowns by the authorities at best stifled the aspirations of the Brotherhood and others of replacing secular rule with religious rule, and, rather than extinguishing the flames of such discontent, may ultimately have served to stir and keep alive their embers. The ongoing disillusionment of many Muslims towards the governments of secularized Islamic states was mirrored in the West during the immediate post-Cold War period. In this case it was not secular politics but liberal democracy that was found lacking by many -- even at its apparent moment of victory. As Francis Fukuyama conceded in one of the most famous and articulate arguments for that victory: “One is inclined to say that the revival of religion in some way attests to a broad unhappiness with the impersonality and spiritual vacuity of liberal consumerist societies.”[24] As happened across Muslim lands also, this unhappiness was to find its expression, not only in recourse to religion, but in recourse to religious terrorism. Terrorism Across Religions The Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda attacks highlighted just how dangerous a mix terrorism and religion is. This perception has been solidified by the series of terrorist strikes that have been launched since – whether by al Qaeda or its affiliates – as far a field as Bali, Spain, and Saudi Arabia. All these attacks highlight the threat posed by Islamic terrorists in particular. However, while, they reflect a wider phenomenon of Muslim extremists resorting to terrorism in pursuit of their aims, they are but the (as yet) bloodiest expression of a phenomenon which extends far beyond Islam. Indeed, before Sept. 11 the most deadly terrorist attack on American soil -- the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people – was perpetrated by professed adherents of Christianity. The bombers, believed linked to the American Christian Patriot movement, were apparently attempting to foment a nationwide revolution. Such extreme views as they represented are exhibited across the broader Christian Identity movement - an umbrella body for like-minded militia groups, many of whom have resorted to terrorism. Similarly, other Christian activists have long-indulged in a campaign of violence aimed at abortion clinics that has included bombings and assassinations. Christian fundamentalist groups have also been linked to right-wing terrorism in both Central and North America.[25] Judaism has also seem some of its followers resort to terrorism, as witnessed by events such as the 1994 gun attack by Baruch Goldstein, a member of the right-wing Jewish group, Kach, at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron ( a town known to its Palestinian inhabitants as al Khalil) which killed 30 Arab worshippers and injured dozens more. The following year saw another Jewish religious extremist, Yigal Amir, assassinate the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, in what was to be the first step in a mass murder campaign to destabilize the region’s peace process. Such individuals, and organizations such as Kach and its offshoot, Kahane Chai, are viewed by some as possibly posing a bigger threat to Israel than even the Palestinian group Hamas.[26] Nor is religious terrorism peculiar to the Abrahamic faiths and their offshoots. For instance, Sikhism has proved prone to it also, with the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Ghandi (in retaliation for what was perceived as the Indian Army’s desecration of the Golden Temple in Armritsar in 1984) leading to a wave of violence that was to claim over 35,000 lives. As with other religious terrorism, this violence was motivated by political as well as religious considerations – in this case the establishment of an autonomous Sikh state. Such was the stated aim of groups such as Dal Khalsa and Dashmesh. Among the most notable instances of Sikh terrorism was the 1985 bombing of an Air India airliner which killed 328 people. Meanwhile, cults have proved at least as inclined toward terrorism as the more ‘established’ religions. Indeed, guided are they are by doctrines which often appear to evolve ah hoc, and lacking the restraining influence of more a more orthodox and conventional membership (such as is often afforded to those of a more ‘established’ religion) cults may prove even more susceptible to terrorism and more unpredictable when they resort to it. Perhaps the most spectacular and worrying instance of religious terrorism by such a cult was the March 1995 sarin nerve gas attack in Tokyo’s subway system by Aum Shinryko. Although a dozen people died with thousands of others wounded, the casualty rate was mercifully low given the deadly nature of the nerve agent in question. The attack, with which the cult’s leader intended to help provoke a world-wide apocalypse, was to be the first in a series of identical attacks – some of which were to occur in America. The incident brought to the fore the specter of terrorists employing weapons of mass destruction (WMD), a fear which has heightened in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. This fear of a WMD strike has been incited, not just by the scale of the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, but by the nature of the group which carried them out. Asked in 1998 about rumors that his organization was seeking to obtain chemical or nuclear weapons, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden replied: Acquiring weapons for the defense of Muslims is a religious duty. If I have indeed acquired these weapons, then I thank God for enabling me to do so. And if I seek to acquire these weapons, I am carrying out a duty. It would be a sin for Muslims not to try to possess the weapons that would prevent the infidels from inflicting harm on Muslims.[27] As such clearly stated intent -- along with attacks such as those by Aum Shinryko -- show, while there may be some disagreement as to the risks posed by improvised WMD[28], the possibility of such weapons being used is one which cannot be discounted. Religious terrorists’ willingness to use such weapons reflects a readiness and eagerness to inflict mass casualties that secular terrorists would likely balk at as counter-productive. This inclination towards higher levels of violence has emerged as one of religious terrorism’s defining characteristics. That the Assassins, Thugs, and Zealots-Sciari achieved higher and more sustained casualty rates than have yet been attained by their modern day counterparts provides cold comfort. Indeed, in so much as today’s religious terrorists have access to immensely higher levels of technology and destruction than their predecessors, such considerations are a cause for further concern. This gives added urgency to the need to further understand religious terrorism – a necessary prerequisite to containing it. A sobering thought is all this is that of religious and secular terrorism it is the latter which is the relative newcomer. Notes ----------------------------------------------------------------- [1] National Commission on Terrorism, "Countering the Changing Threat of International Terrorism: Report of the National Commission on Terrorism," (2000). [2] See, an earlier article in CDI’s Terrorism Series , Mark Burgess, "A Brief History of Terrorism," Center for Defense Information (2003), for more on the emergence of ‘modern’ terrorism and the history of terrorism generally. [3] As has been noted in another article in the CDI Explaining Terrorism series no contemporaneous Christian terrorist groups are considered in this section as no such group easily lends itself to a comparative analysis. As Rapoport says: ‘[Late-Medieval period millenarian Christian] terror was a sort of state terror; the sects organized their communities openly, taking full control of a territory, instituting gruesome purges to obliterate all traces of the old order, and organizing large armies, which waged holy wars periodically sweeping over the countryside and devastating, burning, and massacring everything and everyone in their paths,” David C. Rapoport, "Fear and Trembling: Terrorism in Three Religious Traditions," American Political Science Review 78, no. 3 (1984), p. 660, n. 4. [4] These groups are examined in greater depth in, ibid. The following section draws on this text. [5] David C. Rapoport, "Fear and Trembling: Terrorism in Three Religious Traditions," American Political Science Review 78, no. 3 (1984), p. 659. [6] Ibid., p. 663, n. 16. [7] For more on this see, Burgess, "A Brief History of Terrorism." [8] See, Mark Burgess, "Terrorism: The Problems of Definition," Center for Defense Information (2003)for more on the issues pertaining to the definition of terrorism. [9] Rapoport, "Fear and Trembling: Terrorism in Three Religious Traditions," p. 660, n. 5. [10] According to Rapoport, there is no evidence that drugs were actually taken, with the term ‘hashish-eaters’ used by orthodox Muslims in reaction to the fact that the Assassins apparently showed no feelings or remorse in carrying out murders. Ibid., p. 666. [11] Similarly moot distinctions were drawn by Christian bishops fighting in the Crusades, who, being forbidden from using edged weapons, used maces in battle. [12] Per Rapoport, “Acts of urban terrorism [by the Assassins] occurred, the quarters of the orthodox were firebombed, but so infrequent were these incidents that one can only conclude that the rebels believed that another assassination was the only legitimate response to atrocities provoked by assassination.” Ibid., p. 667. [13] Numbers 25: 7-8, Holy Bible. [14] Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (Merriam-Webster, 1984), p. 2657. [15] Ibid., p. 669. [16] Such ruthlessness included the massacre of prisoners who had previously been granted safe conduct, a tactic apparently designed to lead to an increasing cycle of violence and which demonstrated that the Zealots-Sciari viewed their struggle as a ‘total’ war – something which can also be said of modern religious terrorists. [17] See, Burgess, "A Brief History of Terrorism." [18] Bruce Hoffman, InsideTerrorism, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 90. [19] Ibid., p. 90 [20] Ibid., p. 91. [21] Bruce Hoffman, "Old Madness New Methods: Revival of Religious Terrorism Begs for Broader U.S. Policy," Rand Review, Winter (1998-99): 12-6., p. 14. Based on a chart therein. Figures from the RAND-St. Andrews Chronology of International Terrorism. [22] Mark Juergensmeyer, "The worldwide rise of religious nationalism," Journal of International Affairs 50, no. 1 (1996), p. 13. [23] As such considerations indicate, today’s Islamic terrorism appears to have arisen from a remarkable convergence of historical precedents. The nature of this still-evolving dynamic, and the terrorist threat that it has begat, is such as to warrant further discussion than is possible here. Given this, and that Islamic terrorism is arguably the gravest variant of religious terrorism (and indeed terrorism) facing the West today, this topic shall be explored at greater depth in a subsequent article in CDI’s Explaining Terrorism series. [24] Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History?" The National Interest, Summer (1989), p. 14. [25] Paul Wilkinson, Terrorism versus Democracy: The Liberal StateResponse, (London; Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2001), p. 20. [26] Such an opinion has been expressed by Carmi Gillion, head of the Shabak (Israel’s general security service) at the time of Rabin’s assassination. Jessica Stern, Terror in the name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill, 1st ed. (New York: Ecco, 2003), pp. 105-106. [27] From a 23 December 1998 interview with Time Magazine. Cited in Frontline, ‘Osama bin Laden v.the U.S.: Indictments and Statements.’ Online at: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/who/edicts .html. Downloaded Feb. 4, 2004. [28] See, Dan Vergano, "Toll from 'Dirty Bomb' Could Be Costly," USA Today (2004), p. 9D. Author(s): Mark Burgess [mburgess@cdi.org] ***************************************************************** 12 Express India: BARC staffers 'sat' on radioactive item Friday, May 21, 2004 [http://www.indianexpress.com/archive.html] EXPRESS NEWS SERVICE MUMBAI, MAY 20: When there’s leakage of radioactive material at a high-security government lab, however small it might be, one doesn’t sit on the issue. Three employees of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) at Tarapur were exposed to radiation on April 17. The tool — a 10-ml bottle containing drops of radioactive liquid placed on a chair in the waste immobilisation department which the three staffers occupied from time to time on the second and third shifts. It was only later that another employee noticed that the radiation background in the laboratory was higher than usual. The reading of the trio’s radiation monitoring badges revealed that they had been exposed to radiation. The radiation was only one-tenth the annual permissible limit but staffers said it was a ‘‘deliberate man-made error’’. ‘We cannot take this lightly,’’ BARC director Srikumar Banerjee said. ‘‘It’s not a case of over-exposure but a serious question of discipline. That sample bottle should never have been placed where we found it.’’ The waste immobilisation plant, where the incident took place, studies characteristics of radioactive waste samples. Besides a probe and reviews by in-house safety committees, BARC has initiated an independent investigation to question employees. The three staffers are back to work. ‘‘Standard procedures are being followed to monitor the health of these employees,’’ a BARC statement said. There was ‘‘no over-exposure to employees, but since radioactive material was found in a place where it should not have been, the matter is also being independently investigated’’, the statement added. © 2004: Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd. ***************************************************************** 13 NRC: NRC Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards to Meet June 2 - 4 in Rockville, Maryland News Release - 2004-06 U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION Office of Public Affairs Telephone: 301/415-8200 Washington, DC 20555-0001 E-mail: opa@nrc.gov No. 04-062 May 20, 2004 The Nuclear Regulatory Commissions Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards will hold a public meeting from June 2 - 4 in Rockville, Maryland. The committees discussions will include, among other items, the NRCs revised process for reactor license renewal and the agency staffs response to the Committees March 17 report on the AP1000 advanced reactor design. Most of the meeting will be held in Room T-2B3 of the agencys Two White Flint North building, at 11545 Rockville Pike. A session with the Commission, from 1:30 p.m. - 3:30 p.m. on June 2, will be held in the Commissioners Conference Room in One White Flint North. The meeting will begin at 8:30 a.m. each day. A complete agenda will be available on the NRCs Web site at this address: http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/acrs/agenda/2004/. Videoconferencing is available for observing open sessions of ACRS meetings, at the cost of the requesting individual or organization, by contacting the Committees audio/visual technician at 301-415-8066, between 7:30 a.m. and 3:45 p.m., at least 10 days before the meeting. For additional information, please contact Sam Duraiswamy, at 301-415-7364, between 7:30 a.m. and 4:15 p.m. Last revised Thursday, May 20, 2004 ***************************************************************** 14 GreenvilleOnline.com: Nuclear power report: Oconee is model site Posted Tuesday, May 18, 2004 - 6:21 pm By Jason Zacher ENVIRONMENTAL WRITER jzacher@greenvillenews.com [jzacher@greenvillenews.com] The nation's nuclear reactors are getting older, and more should follow the safety example of the Oconee Nuclear Station in Seneca, the author of a new report said Tuesday. Duke Energy and Oconee have turned their safety records round, said David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists. The plant was "marginal" five years ago, he said. "Oconee shows things can be done right," Lochbaum said. "It makes us wonder why others aren't doing it." The bulk of the report chastises the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and power companies for not doing enough inspections, and not doing the correct inspections when they do them. Rather than focusing safety issues, the NRC is spending too much time and too many resources in relicensing and other business aspects of nuclear energy, Lochbaum said The industry and the NRC are forgetting the lessons of the Three Mile Island accident, said Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research near Washington. "If you don't anticipate safety, design and human problems through careful and detailed work, then you could be asking for a big disaster," he said. The NRC will review the report carefully, spokesman Scott Burnell said. It contains a number of conclusions the agency does not believe are relevant, he said. A spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group, had no comment on the report Tuesday afternoon. Duke expects its employees to find and fix problems themselves, said Rose Cummings, a spokeswoman for the company. Duke operates three nuclear plants in the Carolinas: Catawba and McGuire near Charlotte in addition to Oconee. All three have been granted license extensions to operate another 20 years. "We recognize our employees are our best sources of information," she said. "We have a great investment in the Carolinas in these plants. It's our backyard, too." Old reactor near here The Oconee Nuclear Station was the second plant in the nation to be certified to run for an additional 20 years, to 2034, bringing its total operational life to 60 years. Lochbaum uses a "bathtub curve" when describing accidents at nuclear plants. Nuclear accidents usually occur at the beginning or end of a reactor's life. In between, the plants are relatively safe, he said. Nobody is sure what the useful life of a nuclear reactor is. Some say the nation's reactors are at the end of their lives, some say they can run forever. However, in the past several years, more problems have been cited at Oconee. The Oconee Nuclear Station has filed one emergency and nine non-emergency event reports with the NRC since Jan. 2. The most recent came Monday when worker inside the non-operational No. 2 reactor had chest pains and was sent to Oconee Memorial Hospital. The report was filed because the worker might be contaminated. He wasn't. The uptick in reports could be because of a safety culture that looks for problems before they become serious, Lochbaum said. "If you're not finding problems, then things are only going to get worse with time," he said. A tenth and eleventh report were retracted after investigations, according to NRC documents. The one emergency occurred on Jan. 5, when contaminated coolant leaked from reactor No. 1. January's problem was not the first coolant leak in the Oconee 1 reactor. It was shut down in June 1992 because of a leaky seal on a coolant pump. Another coolant pump was found leaking during a shutdown in August 1998. There have been three other leaks at the plant's other two reactors since 1987, and the NRC expressed concerns about the cooling systems in 1998, 2001 and 2003. Before the January emergency, the last time an unusual event emergency was declared at Oconee was December 1999. In April, Duke was fined $60,000 by the NRC for a safety violation. The plant was declared safe a few days later during an annual safety review. More oversight needed The NRC's budget fell for eight years from 1993 until 2001, and then jumped again after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Staffing levels peaked in 1985, according to the NRC's 2003 Information Digest. Lochbaum criticized the NRC for not missing a deadline when re-licensing older nuclear reactors, but allowing warning signs of major problems to go unresolved for years, using the example of the Davis-Bessie nuclear reactor in Ohio. The NRC issued 11 warnings in 14 years about the possibility of cracked containment vessels, but allowed the Davis-Bessie reactor to continue operating. When the unit was finally shut down in 2002, acid had eaten away the six-inch thick carbon and steel wall, leaving only a layer of stainless steel 3/8 of an inch thick to contain the cooling water. "We continue to be comfortable with the budget and staffing we have in place," the NRC's Burnell said. Makhijani said the NRC needs to "wake up and reverse course." Lochbaum said much stricter inspections are needed. Davis-Bessie engineers were inspecting what they were told to inspect, but the problem ended up being somewhere else. "An aggressive regulator consistently enforcing federal safety regulations provides the best protection," he said. "Sadly, America lacks such protection." And it's time for Congress to step in and force the NRC and the industry to make changes, critics said. "This is not a pro-nuclear or anti-nuclear issue," said Makhijani. "This is a safety issue." Jason Zacher covers the environment and natural resources. He can be reached at 298-4272. Thursday, May 20 Copyright 2003 The Greenville News [http://greenvilleonline.com/] . Use of this site signifies your agreement to the Terms of Service [http://greenvilleonline.com/terms.htm] (updated 12/17/2002). ***************************************************************** 15 RosBusinessConsulting: Russia to bid for constructing nuclear facility in Bulgaria [http://www.rbc.ru/] RBC, 20.05.2004, Moscow 19:28:56.The Russian company Atomstroyexport will take part in a tender on constructing a nuclear power plant in Bulgaria in a consortium with some western company. Alexander Rumyantsev, the head of the Russian federal atomic energy agency, declared at a news conference in Moscow today that the second participant of this consortium might be the French company Framatome ANP. Rumyantsev also mentioned that Russia and Vietnam cooperated actively on issues regarding construction of a nuclear facility in Vietnam. According to the official, construction of a nuclear power plant in this country may start over the next 7 years. All rights reserved. © 1995-2003 RosBusinessConsulting (095) 363-11-11 Send your notes and suggestions to max@rbc.ru [max@rbc.ru] All rights reserved © 1995-2000 RosBusinessConsulting ***************************************************************** 16 Interfax: Russia's nuclear electricity output tops 52.5 billion kWh in 4 mths Updated: May 20 2004 4:28PM ( Interfax.com [http://www.interfax.com] May 20 2004 8:42AM MOSCOW. May 20 (Interfax) - Rosenergoatom, the state-owned nuclear power concern, generated more than 52.52 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in the first four months of 2004, or almost equal to the same period of last year. Rosenergoatom generated 52.534 billion kWh of electricity in the first four months of 2003. The installed capacity utilization coefficient from the beginning of 2004 was 81.3%. © 1991-2004 Interfax All rights reserved News and other data on this web site are provided for information purposes only, and are not intended for republication or redistribution. Republication or redistribution of Interfax content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Interfax. ***************************************************************** 17 BBC: Nuclear option for nesting Last Updated: Thursday, 20 May, 2004 [Kittiwake at Sizewell] The kittiwakes are nesting on a tower at Sizewell A colony of sea birds has turned its back on Suffolk's clifftops to nest at the county's nuclear power plant. Kittiwakes, small gulls which breed mainly in the North and West of England, have been found nesting at the top of a tower at Sizewell. Experts at at the plant say it is a rather unusual choice of nesting site for the birds. But the station's owners have hired environmental assistants to make sure the kittiwakes are in no danger. ***************************************************************** 18 Brattleboro Reformer: Jeffords to question NRC on safety issues [http://www.reformer.com/] May 20, 2004 Brattleboro, VT By IAN BISHOP Reformer Washington Bureau WASHINGTON -- With still no trace of the spent fuel rods missing for more than three weeks from Vermont Yankee, Vermont Sen. James Jeffords intends to grill members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission over safety practices during a congressional hearing today. "Recent events have only raised new questions about accountability and safety at the Vermont Yankee plant. Public confidence has been shaken," said Jeffords. Jeffords is the second-ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, which has purview over the NRC. NRC chairman Nils J. Diaz and commissioners Edward Mc-Gaffigan Jr. and Jeffrey S. Merrifield are scheduled to testify before the subcommittee on nuclear safety as part of an oversight review. In addition to the missing fuel rods, plant workers have found 20 hairline cracks in the facility's aging steam dryer. Both safety concerns come as Vermont Yankee seeks an increased uprate. "The commission needs to tell us what it is doing to locate the parts of missing fuel rods, what it is doing to assure Vermonters that the proposed uprate will not jeopardize safety at the plant, and how it plans to restore its credibility with the public," Jeffords added. A detailed engineering inspection of the facility agreed to by the NRC may be a significant step in restoring that credibility. The commission recently agreed to the inspection following a flurry of correspondence from the state's congressional delegation. Today's scheduled congressional hearing comes less than a week after Entergy Nuclear vice president Jay Thayer told the Vermont State Nuclear Advisory Panel that the fuel rod pieces from Vermont Yankee are probably in a low-level nuclear waste site in South Carolina or Washington state or in a now-closed federal facility in Beatty, Nev. The panel and members of the public questioned Thayer for most of an hour Tuesday about the rods, which were discovered missing April 20. An extensive search of the plant's spent fuel pool with robotic cameras failed to turn up a trace of the highly radioactive items. The hearing is scheduled to begin at 10:30 a.m. It will be broadcast live over the Internet at www.senate.gov [http://www.senate.gov] Copyright ©1999-2004 New England Newspapers, Inc., a ***************************************************************** 19 Poughkeepsie Journal: Officials, feds meet over Indian Point security poughkeepsiejournal.com Thursday, May 20, 2004 The Associated Press NEW YORK -- Federal officials met Wednesday with local leaders around the Indian Point nuclear power plant to discuss its security. Mike Brown, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and Nils Diaz, the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, met with county executives for the four surrounding suburban counties. The meeting came ahead of a security drill next month. Brown said the agency is using federal hazard mitigation dollars to offer the counties technical advisers and support. An NRC spokesman said the chairman met with the executives to discuss emergency preparedness and security concerns. HOME [http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/] ***************************************************************** 20 PRN: Florida Power &Light Company Joins NuStart Energy Consortium + "PR Newswire - A United Business Media Company" /> [http://www.prnewswire.com/] [ /] WASHINGTON, May 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Florida Power & Light Company, a premier operator of nuclear power plants in the U.S., has joined with seven other energy companies and two reactor vendors in pursuit of the nation's first Construction and Operating License (COL) for a new nuclear power plant. The addition of Florida Power & Light Company, the principal subsidiary of FPL Group, Inc., expands the NuStart Energy Development LLC consortium to 10 companies, eight of whom operate 55 nuclear units -- more than half of the 105 nuclear power plants in the U.S. Florida Power & Light Company, based in Juno Beach, FL, has four nuclear power reactors in Florida. FPL's wholesale generator affiliate, FPL Energy, owns a controlling interest in and operates Seabrook Station, a nuclear power reactor in New Hampshire. "This group of power companies recognizes the significant contribution being made today by nuclear power generation, and we are taking action to preserve nuclear energy for future investment decisions," said Marilyn Kray, vice president at Exelon Nuclear in Philadelphia and executive lead of NuStart Energy. "Our country needs new nuclear for energy diversity, energy independence and clean air." "We are delighted to join this group of industry leaders to develop a license for the next generation of nuclear power plants," said Art Stall, senior vice president, nuclear division, Florida Power & Light Company. "Nuclear power is an important part of our business and an important part of the nation's energy mix." NuStart Energy, formed March 31, filed a proposal April 26 with the Department of Energy under its Nuclear Power 2010 program designed to get a new nuclear plant under construction by that date. DOE is offering to share 50-50 the cost of preparing a COL. NuStart Energy's proposal is designed to test the new licensing process of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by preparing an application for a COL and filing it with NRC in 2008. It would be the first license application for a new nuclear plant in 30 years and the first under the NRC's new streamlined licensing process, which has never been used. None of the consortium companies has committed to build a new nuclear plant. But NuStart Energy does plan to complete detailed engineering design work and to prepare COL applications for two advanced reactors, then commits to choose one of the applications and file it for NRC review and approval. After NRC approval, any individual company or group of companies could decide to use the license to build a new nuclear plant, based on its assessment of power demand, the price of competing electricity technologies, environmental requirements and other factors at that time. Florida Power & Light Company joins Constellation Generation Group, a subsidiary of Constellation Energy, Baltimore; Duke Energy, Charlotte, N.C.; EDF International North America, Washington, a subsidiary of the large French utility; Entergy Nuclear, Jackson, Miss.; Exelon Generation, Philadelphia; Southern Company, Atlanta; the Tennessee Valley Authority, Knoxville; and two nuclear reactor vendors, Westinghouse Electric Co., Pittsburgh, and GE Energy's nuclear operations, Wilmington, N.C. SOURCE Florida Power &Light Company; NuStart Energy Consortium Web Site: Copyright © 1996-2004 PR Newswire Association LLC. All Rights ***************************************************************** 21 AFL: AF family gives two Chernobyl children health, hope [Air Force Link] LANGLEY AIR FORCE BASE, Va. -- (From left) Hannah, Irena, Edgor and Catherine pose for a photo during the summer of 2003. Hannah and Catherine are the daughters of Tech. Sgt. Mike and Brenda Kelly of the 1st Component Maintenance Squadron here. The Kellys invited Irena and Edgor, who are affected by contamination from the Chernobyl accident, to visit with them each summer. (Courtesy photo) by Staff Sgt. Melissa Hancock 1st Fighter Wing Public Affairs 5/20/2004 - LANGLEY AIR FORCE BASE, Va. (AFPN) -- On April 26, 1986, the world’s worst nuclear power accident occurred at Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union, now the Ukraine. Plant workers noticed something drastically wrong with a reactor and began an emergency shutdown -- a procedure that only takes 20 seconds. Unfortunately, that was 13 seconds too long. Seven seconds after they started the shutdown, an explosion ripped through the control room, killing 30 people and sending 190 tons of radioactive uranium and graphite into the atmosphere. More than 9 million people -- including 3 to 4 million children -- continue to struggle with the health affects of what United Nations officials call “the greatest environmental catastrophe in the history of humanity.” For the children affected, there is hope. Many nonprofit organizations in the United States and Europe provide respite and relief to children affected by the disaster. The number of programs is growing. Tech. Sgt. Mike Kelly and his family have always had an open-door policy at their house; that is one of the reasons he did not think twice when he heard about the chance to help children affected by contamination from the Chernobyl accident. “A church member approached me on the subject while I was volunteering one Sunday,” said Sergeant Kelly, a 1st Component Maintenance Squadron jet propulsion craftsman here. “I thought it would be a great (opportunity) and would give my children insight on how other people live. I’ve traveled to several countries where I’ve seen thousands of unfortunate children and the conditions they live in -- I just couldn’t say no.” After a long chat with a host family involved in one of the programs, the Kellys decided to become involved in the program themselves. “Mike came home from church and mentioned the idea to me,” said Brenda Kelly, Sergeant Kelly’s wife of 25 years. “I said, 'sure.'” This particular program was being offered through a local church that would pay the cost for a child to come to America. To qualify for the program, there were several rules: The host family would agree to have the child examined at a local doctor's and dentist's office, they would treat the child as their own, and they would promise to send the child home after the six-week visit. These children face an increased risk of cancer, thyroid disease and many psychological diseases. Bringing them to a noncontaminated area can add two years to their life, program officials said. Breathing fresh air, eating noncontaminated food and drinking water can do wonders for a child’s immunity -- giving him or her a chance for a normal life. In the summer of 1998, Sergeant Kelly’s family met 8-year-old Irena at the airport. She was tiny with blonde hair and was dressed in her best sweat suit. She was very shy and nervous, he said. Because the Kelly family knew little Russian and the girl did not speak English, they said they relied on a “blue book” to communicate. The book contained Russian phrases and words translated into English. “Whenever we went somewhere I would always say, ‘Did we remember the blue book?’” said Mrs. Kelly. “It went everywhere with us.” They said their first experience as a host family was full of surprises, some good, one bad. They knew saying goodbye would be sad, but nothing could have prepared them for it. “It was a horrifying experience,” Mrs. Kelly said. “She was begging us to not send her back. I wanted to run away with her but Mike wouldn’t let me. I vowed I’d never be the one to take her to the airport.” In their second year of the program, the Kellys said they did not know if they could get Irena again. They requested her and fortunately, she returned. She felt more comfortable around them this time. She began telling stories of her family back home. After hearing Irena’s stories of how poverty stricken her family was, the Kellys began discussing bringing another child from Irena’s family over to stay. “There wasn’t a big discussion about bringing another child,” Mrs. Kelly said. “We thought, ‘What’s one more child?’” What Mrs. Kelly did not know was that she would be getting Irena’s brother -- the boy that Sergeant Kelly never had -- Edgor. “Edgor is a pistol,” said Mrs. Kelly. “The first night he was here, we all sat down to eat as a family. When dinner was over, the children got up to do dishes, but Edgor said he had a stomachache; so we told him to go lie down. When the children were done with the chores, they went to play, and Edgor wanted to go, too. We explained to him he couldn’t because he was sick. The tears started right then.” That is when Mrs. Kelly found out boys in Russia play while the girls do the chores -- just one of many differences she learned about during the children’s stay. “Once we took the kids to McDonalds,” she said. “My daughter put ketchup on her fries. Edgor got upset and wanted her to lick the ketchup up. He thought she was being wasteful.” Things like ketchup and fruit are scarce in the children’s country, Mrs. Kelly said. The smallest things to Americans, like salt, are like diamonds to them. There are even differences in everyday occurrences, like bathing. “We had to make (Irena) drain the tub,” said Mrs. Kelly. “Where she is from, they don’t waste water.” Every time the six weeks is up, the family must say goodbye to the children. “We don’t give thought to the children leaving until the night before,” Mrs. Kelly said. “Then we pack a duffel bag with as much as we are allowed and tape it for security reasons.” The truth is that if the Kellys did not secure the bag, the contents might not make it back to the children’s home. The family sends $100 in new $1 bills home with each of the children. Mrs. Kelly sews the money into a homemade pocket in each of the child’s undershirts. “We have to tell Edgor not to say anything,” Mrs. Kelly said. “People will steal the money and gifts from the children if they know they have them.” The Kellys said they hope they can continue to sponsor Irena, now 15, and Edgor, 12, until they are of legal age. “The whole experience has brought our family closer together,” Mrs. Kelly said. “It helps our kids to appreciate what they have even more. The things we do when Irena and Edgor are here have become our family’s traditions. These children are now like our own.” (Courtesy of Air Combat Command News Service) ***************************************************************** 22 NRC: NRC Renews License for R.E. Ginna Nuclear Power Plant, for an Additional 20 Years News Release - 2004-06 U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION Office of Public Affairs Telephone: 301/415-8200 Washington, DC 20555-0001 E-mail: opa@nrc.gov No. 04-061 May 19, 2004 The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has renewed the operating license of the R.E. Ginna Nuclear Power Plant, located 20 miles from Rochester, N.Y., for an additional 20 years. The plant is operated by Rochester Gas and Electric Corporation. Rochester Gas and Electric submitted its license renewal application to the NRC on July 30, 2002. The renewal extends the license for R.E. Ginna from September 18, 2009, to September 18, 2029. The NRCs environmental review is described in a site-specific supplement to the NRCs Generic Environmental Impact Statement for License Renewal of Nuclear Power Plants," (NUREG-1437, Supplement 14). In the Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement, issued in January 2004, the staff concluded that there were no impacts that would preclude renewal of the license for environmental reasons. Two public meetings to discuss the environmental review were held near the plant. In its Safety Evaluation Report Related to the License Renewal of R.E. Ginna Nuclear Power Plant, issued in March 2004, the NRC staff concluded there were no safety concerns to preclude license renewal, because the licensee had demonstrated the capability to manage the effects of plant aging. In addition, the NRC conducted inspections of the plants to verify information submitted by the licensee. The safety evaluation report and the environmental review are available on the NRC Web site at this address: http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/licensing/renewal/applicati ons/ginna.html. On April 23, 2004, the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards -- an independent body of technical experts which advises the Commission -- issued its recommendation that the operating license for the plant be renewed. That recommendation is contained in "Report on the Safety Aspects of the License Renewal Application for the R.E. Ginna Nuclear Power Plant. This document is available on the NRC Web site at this address: http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/acrs/letters/2004/5 112073.pdf [PDF Icon] . The R.E. Ginna license renewal brings the total number of renewals to 26 units. A complete listing of completed renewal applications, as well as those currently under review, can be found on the NRCs Web site at this address: http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/licensing/renewal/applicati ons.html. Last revised Thursday, May 20, 2004 ***************************************************************** 23 [du-list] killing the Iraq's weapon scientists Date: Thu, 20 May 2004 19:44:44 -0700 If no ammunition was left-what is a reason for these killings? Iraqi scientists targeted Killings prompt calls for US to evacuate weapons researchers. 13 May 2004 JIM GILES This story is from the news section of the journal Nature. http://www.nature.com/nsu/040510/040510-9.html Iraqi scientists hold considerable knowledge of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. The assassination of several of Iraq's former weapons scientists has hit US plans to employ them to help rebuild the war-torn country. The killings, together with the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, have led some non-proliferation experts to call for the researchers to be evacuated from the country. Between five and ten scientists have been killed in the past six months, according to a US Department of State official who runs programmes aimed at keeping former weapons scientists in employment. "The most common explanation is that they've shown an interest in working with the coalition," says the official, who declined to be identified by name and who returned from Iraq earlier this month. Between them, the Iraqi scientists hold considerable knowledge of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons from programmes that now seem to have been defunct long before the US-led coalition invaded Iraq in March 2003. But the killings are only the latest setback in plans to redirect their knowledge and skills. Non-proliferation experts who wanted to work with Iraqi scientists were angered when initial responsibility for contacting them was given to military forces. Some scientists hid, fearing that they could be taken prisoner (see Nature 423, 371; 2003). Such independent experts have since left Iraq because of security concerns, further weakening non-proliferation efforts. And David Albright, a former nuclear-weapons inspector in Iraq, says these problems mean that attempts to keep researchers in Iraq should no longer be a priority for the US government. "They should shift the programme to getting people out," says Albright, who now heads the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington. "There are scientists with secret documents who could go to Iran or Syria." Such a change in policy would come too late for Majid Hussein Ali, a nuclear scientist reported to be at Baghdad University. Ali was not directly involved in weapons research, but he was said to have met with US weapons inspectors. He was killed by an unknown gunman in Baghdad in February. Despite the death of Ali and other researchers, state-department officials insist that most scientists want to stay in their country. Officials have visited Iraq regularly this year, and say that they were able to win the confidence of Iraqi scientists by distancing themselves from the military activities of the coalition forces. Job creation The state department sought to ramp up its activities last November with a US$2-million programme aimed at identifying former weapons researchers and finding them work in Iraq (see Nature 426, 371; 2003). Since then, officials have drawn up a list of 400 scientists, engineers and technicians who had worked on weapons research and related fields. Officials say that about 75 of these people are unaccounted for, but nearly all of the others have been located in Iraq. The officials add that these researchers would stay in Iraq if meaningful work can be found for them. Most are currently employed in industry and academia, at least in theory. But many universities and other facilities have been closed by the invasion and subsequent insurgencies. "They are all employed in the sense that they get a pay cheque," says the state-department official. "But some are very unhappy because they have nothing to do." The official is trying to raise $40 million for reconstruction projects over the next three years. "We're talking to coalition partners now," he says. State-department staff have meanwhile established an International Center for Science and Industry in Baghdad, consisting of office space that they say will be used to house Iraqi researchers who will determine how any reconstruction money will be spent. Many Iraqi scientists have criticized schemes by outsiders to unite the country's researchers, officials at the state department acknowledge. They say that scientists felt excluded from an attempt by a largely expatriate group of Iraqi researchers to form an Iraqi academy of science (see Nature 426, 484; 2003). By ensuring that local scientists play a prominent role in the new centre, the officials hope that the facility will be accepted as legitimate by Iraqi researchers. But Albright, who initially backed the state department's programme, is worried about what will happen to the former weapons scientists. He went to Iraq last year and helped US officials to locate many of them. Such trips ended in the autumn, as the security situation worsened. Even then, Albright says, "everyone wanted to get out". © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004 ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Make a clean sweep of pop-up ads. Yahoo! Companion Toolbar. Now with Pop-Up Blocker. Get it for free! http://us.click.yahoo.com/L5YrjA/eSIIAA/yQLSAA/FGYolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> To unsubscribe from this groups send a message to du-list-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com. In the body of the message type unsubscribe and send. Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/du-list/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: du-list-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ ***************************************************************** 24 [du-list] Depleted Morality -- In These Times Date: Thu, 20 May 2004 16:02:54 -0700 --------------------- Depleted Morality The first signs of uranium sickness surface in troops returning from Iraq By Frida Berrigan It’s a year into the occupation and U.S. troops are being killed at a rate of more than four a day. These deaths from roadside bombs, suicide attackers, anti-U.S. militia and mobs of angry civilians make headlines. More quietly, American soldiers also are beginning to suffer injuries from a silent and pernicious weapon material of U.S. origin—depleted uranium (DU). DU weaponry is fired by U.S. troops from the Abrams battle tank, A-10 Warthog and other systems.… http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/depleted_morality/ To unsubscribe from this groups send a message to du-list-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com. In the body of the message type unsubscribe and send. Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/du-list/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: du-list-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ ***************************************************************** 25 Puerto Rico WOW: Samples taken in Vieques heavy metal study SAN JUAN (AP) – Officials from the Department of Health confirmed that they have collected of 300 samples to test for the presence of heavy metals in Vieques and that the first phase of the study will conclude on Saturday. For years Vieques residents have blamed contamination left behind by United States Naval activities over the last 60 years for the high occurrence of cancer on the island municipality. "The study will officially establish for the first time whether Vieques residents have been exposed to high levels of heavy metal contamination,” said auxiliary Health Secretary, Walter Rivera. He added that the study will test for uranium, cadmium, nickel, mercury, lead, arsenic, and aluminum. The study was designed by Health Department Epidemiological director Juan Alonso, who hopes to collect 500 random samples from Vieques. Initially samples would only be collected from underage residents, but after protest from civic leaders the studies were extended to adults as well. --> Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | Advertise with PuertoRicoWOW! Copyright © 2000-2003 Casiano Communications Inc. All rights ***************************************************************** 26 Daily Gate City: New rule to help weapons workers comes under fire [http://www.fcb-keokuk.com] By TODD DVORAK/Associated Press Writer IOWA CITY -- A new federal rule enacted this week is intended to speed compensation to 650 nuclear weapons workers who became sick from exposure to radiation and other harmful materials. But critics say it's not enough to help the former Iowa Army Ammunition Plant workers, all diagnosed with cancer. Some have died while waiting for government payments and help with their medical bills -- promised four years ago. The new rule published Monday creates a special classification, exempt from certain processing requirements, to speed the claims of such workers. Called a "Special Exemption Cohort," the class of workers would be made immediately and automatically eligible for compensation. Sens. Tom Harkin, a Democrat, and Charles Grassley, a Republican, have sought for years to win such a designation for the workers. The group is among 4,000 workers who assembled and tested nuclear weapons components at the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant in Middletown from 1947 to the mid-1970s. Other former workers have lung disease and other illnesses blamed on exposure to materials that were used in weapons production, such as silica and beryllium. Harkin said the language in the rule, drafted by the Department of Health and Human Services, falls short of helping those who are now paying the price for building the nation's Cold War arsenal. "Under the new rule, each Iowa worker would have to make an individual case to be included in the Special Exposure Cohort, which is a very time-consuming process," he said in a statement. "These workers have waited long enough, and shouldn't have to wait any longer." Four years ago, Congress passed legislation making the nation's former nuclear weapons workers -- or their survivors -- eligible for a $150,000 payment and coverage of medical bills. Lawmakers put the Labor and Energy Departments in charge of the program, and doctors hired by the National Institute for Safety and Health in charge of investigating exposure levels, a process called dose reconstruction. Lawmakers also created a special exempt cohort for workers at factories in Tennessee, Alaska, Ohio and Kentucky. Since the law was enacted, more than 1,600 former IAAP employees have filed claims, but only 39 have received compensation, according to figures reported by the Labor Department in March. Federal officials processing claims, especially from those workers diagnosed with cancer, blame a variety of factors for the delay, chiefly the lack of records detailing radiation exposure. Harkin said federal records show the plant did little or no radiation testing before 1975. But the wait may not be over, yet, said Richard Miller, a policy analyst with The Government Accountability Project. Miller criticized the rule because it is too vague and lacks specific guidelines for approving exemption status. "This is pretty mushy," Miller said. "This rule, which has been subject to endless foot dragging, really provides us with much less than what we had hoped for." ***************************************************************** 27 [NukeNet] Comment to PA on Nuke Waste to Landfills Date: Thu, 20 May 2004 16:02:56 -0700 Please continue to send comments even though it's after the May 17th deadline. It will still make a difference. Please pass along to other lists and interested parties. Thanks. -Bill Smirnow ----- Original Message ----- From: "Diane D'arrigo" To: Sent: Thursday, May 13, 2004 11:16 PM Subject: EComment to PA on Nuke waste to landfills and more-Deadline Mon May 17 (apologies for repeats- my email lists are under repair and not all repeats are cleared out yet) Thanks to those that already commented. Environmental Protection Agency Proposes New Rule: Nuclear Power and Weapons Waste to go to Regular Landfills and other "Non-Regulated Management" Comments due to EPA by MAY 17, 2004 (note deadline extended from March) (Late comments probably okay) Email to: a-and-r-Docket@epa.gov Attn: Docket OAR-2003-0095 or upload them onto EPA's website www.epa.gov/radiation The US Environmental Protection Agency is proposing a new rule (68 FR 22:65120-65151, Nov 18, 2003) that would allow nuclear and mixed waste to go to places that are not licensed for radioactive materials. The goal appears to be to "redefine" radioactive materials, no matter what their source (nuclear power, nuclear weapons, naturally occurring or other), based on EPA-calculated and projected risks. The new category of nuclear materials (once called BRC or Below Regulatory Concern) would supposedly not need radioactive regulatory controls. EPA does not consider all the potential health effects of radiation and hazardous materials in estimating the risks. They have never demonstrated the accuracy of their predictions. (See "Summary of EPA Proposal" below for more details.) TAKE ACTION! 1) Send a letter to the new EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt encouraging him to withdraw EPA's proposed action. leavitt.michael@epa.gov Administrator Mike Leavitt, US Environmental Protection Agency, 1101A, Ariel Rios Building, 1200 Pennsylvania Avenue N.W. Washington, DC 20460 2) Send comments to EPA and get organizations and landfill boards to do so at: a-and-r-Docket@epa.gov Docket No. OAR-2003-0095. Or Upload at www.epa.gov/edocket; Click on View Open Docket; The proposal is on the EPA website www.epa.gov/radiation. 3) Let your elected officials know how you feel about these dangers by sending them a copy of your letter to Secretary Leavitt and telling them about your opposition to the federal rules that would deregulate and exempt nuclear materials from regulation. For more information contact: Diane D'Arrigo, Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS), 1424 16th Street NW Suite 404, Washington, DC 20036, dianed@nirs.org, 202 328-0002 ext 16. See NIRS website under Campaigns at www.nirs.org for more info and actions. The proposal was published Nov 18, 2003 at 68 FR 22-65120-65151. Summary of EPA Proposal 1) First, EPA would allow mixed radioactive and hazardous wastes to go to facilities permitted for hazardous waste only (RCRA C hazardous waste dumps & processors). 2) Second, radioactive waste (not mixed with hazardous) could be permitted to go to places that do not have radioactive licenses or regulations, such as regular garbage dumps or incinerators or hazardous sites. Since the nuclear waste would no longer be regulated for radioactivity, it could go to regular recyclers. EPA justifies this by claiming they will provide an acceptable level of protection from radiation risk. It seems obvious this would be a problem for communities around the waste sites, many of which already leak. 3) Third, EPA suggests that a "non-regulatory approach" to management of radioactive waste is an option and requests creative ideas for "partnering" with waste generators or other schemes to relieve the regulatory burden. Nothing would prevent radioactive materials from going to recycling facilities and being mixed with the normal recycling streams which are made into everyday household items like toys, cookware, personal use items, cars, furniture and civil engineering projects like roads and buildings. 4) EPA's rule threatens to preempt and supercede existing state laws that prohibit nuclear waste in solid waste landfills or other sites. VT, ME, OH, WI, IL, MN, CO, OR, PA, CT, WV, NM, IA, are among states that have passed such laws and regulations. OK, GA and VA passed resolutions in one or both houses and counties and towns in many other states have resolutions against this action. Notify your state and local officials to comment and uphold your protections against nuclear power and weapons wastes! 5) This dangerous proposal dovetails neatly into the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission's rulemaking to deregulate and release radioactive material from control, ironically called "Control of Solids." The NRC is considering several options for nuclear waste deregulation including continuing the current case-by-case release procedures, starting new release procedures that are based on projected risks, sending the waste to sites that are not licensed for nuclear materials. NRC is claiming they could approve "restricted" release of nuclear waste meaning certain conditions would apply but that NRC would not enforce them--someone else, as yet un-named would. The upshot is that NRC and EPA are joining forces to allow nuclear power and weapons waste which is now generally required to be regulated and controlled, to be released to waste sites and processors never designed to take radioactive materials and to the marketplace where it will come into routine daily contact with us, our kids and environment. 6) To make matters even worse, the US NRC and US Department of Transportation on 1-26-04 finalized new transport regulations (TSR-1) that would exempt various levels of hundreds of radionuclides from regulatory control in transit. This will make it easier for NRC and EPA to deregulate nuclear wastes since they will no longer require regulation, labeling or control as radioactive material during transportation. (This is especially distressing in light of increased security concerns about transportation of nuclear materials that could be used for dirty bombs. More unregulated nuclear materials will be on the roads, rails, barges and aircraft.) NIRS is challenging DOT & NRC on this. 7) Finally, the Department of Energy is in the process of a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement on releasing radioactive materials from its sites. In 2000, DOE halted the commercial recycling of potentially radioactive metals from certain contaminated area on its sites, but could resume it. DOE continues to allow radioactively contaminated metals out for unregulated disposal and to allow other radioactively contaminated materials out for recycling or unregulated disposal-soils, concrete, asphalt, plastic, wood, equipment, buildings, sites and more. EPA's Nov. 18, 2003 notice would help legalize DOE's release of nuclear weapons wastes from regulatory control. _______________________________________________________________________ Subscribe/Unsubscribe Here: http://www.energyjustice.net/nukenet/ Change your settings at: http://energyjustice.net/mailman/listinfo/nukenet_energyjustice.net ***************************************************************** 28 Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Nuclear-waste talks being held in private [seattlepi.com] Thursday, May 20, 2004 By LISA STIFFLER SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER The fate of thousands of truckloads of radioactive and hazardous waste potentially destined for Eastern Washington is being hashed out between state and federal regulators in closed-door discussions. The U.S. Department of Energy wants to haul radioactive debris from nuclear-cleanup projects nationwide for permanent and temporary disposal at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. The action is needed, Energy Department authorities say, to finish other cleanup projects around the country. Officials with Gov. Gary Locke's office and the Ecology Department are in discussions over the conditions of how existing and incoming waste will be handled and stored. The talks have outraged a local watchdog group and prompted a letter from Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., urging the state not to agree to take the waste. "It would be a major mistake to allow the importation of nuclear waste ... in exchange for a simple affirmation that the (Energy Department) will comply with its existing legal obligations," Inslee wrote in a letter Tuesday addressed to Locke, his chief of staff, Tom Fitzsimmons, and the head of Ecology. State and Energy Department officials say the talks are being mischaracterized. We are "not in process of trying to make any sort of quid pro quo deal," Fitzsimmons said. Rather, the state is providing its input to the Energy Department on plans for importing waste. "The suggestion that deals are being cut behind closed doors is just really not fair," he said. "Addressing the concerns of the state of Washington and the state of Oregon is what we ought to be doing," said Colleen Clark, an Energy spokeswoman. Up to 70,000 truckloads, or about 12.7 million cubic feet of waste, would be driven across the country. The debris includes items such as clothing, tools and soil contaminated with dangerous chemicals and long-lived radioactive material -- including plutonium -- known as transuranic waste. Considering all of the dangerous waste already buried at Hanford, "they would more than double the amount of radioactive waste," said Gerald Pollet, executive director of Heart of America Northwest, a watchdog group. But Ecology officials argue that a compromise is possible in which some waste does come to the site temporarily or for permanent burial with assurances of faster cleanup and the end of the use of unlined trenches that could allow dangerous materials to leak into the soil. "We have never blocked the idea of shipments to Hanford," said Sheryl Hutchison, an Ecology spokeswoman. "We wanted to tie it to cleanup." The talks are over the language of a record of decision being completed by the Energy Department. It is the final result of an environmental impact statement released in January. Hutchison and Fitzsimmons said the public has had numerous opportunities to weigh in on the issue and that many actions that arise from the record of decision will be subject to further public comment. The Washington Attorney General's Office hasn't taken a position on the talks, but David Mears, chief of the office's ecology division, said the Energy Department still needs to make the case that it's essential to the cleanup effort nationally that more waste comes to the former bombing-making site. The state and watchdog groups are still fighting the Energy Department in federal court over the importing of transuranic waste. For approximately four months beginning in December 2002, the Energy Department trucked this kind of waste into Hanford until stopping the shipments in March 2003, around the time the suits were filed. The sides disagree over whether the state has authority over the shipments. Other types of waste are still being imported to Hanford. Also at question is whether the talks could undermine Initiative 297, which would prohibit importing more waste until current waste storage is improved and brought into line with regulations. The measure, which will be on the November ballot, bans the use of unlined trenches, creates an advisory board to oversee waste issues and requires disclosure of waste budget information. "It's clear to us that the Energy Department motivation here is to try to deflect I-297 or to have the state strike a deal and issue permits before I-297 takes effect," said Pollet, whose organization is a primary supporter of the initiative. It's unclear whether the record of decision would trump the initiative should it pass. Fitzsimmons said the concerns are moot. "It isn't connected," he said. "The initiative is a separate process." P-I reporter Lisa Stiffler can be reached at 206-448-8042 or lisastiffler@seattlepi.com [Seattle Post-Intelligencer] 101 Elliott Ave. W. Seattle, WA 98119 (206) 448-8000 Home Delivery: (206) 464-2121 or (800) 542-0820 Send comments to [newmedia@seattlepi.com] ©1996-2004 Seattle Post-Intelligencer Terms of Service/Privacy Policy ***************************************************************** 29 Las Vegas RJ: Officials brace for cuts in Yucca budget Thursday, May 20, 2004 Lawmaker repeats warning of deep reductions, says Bush administration took 'poor gamble' By STEVE TETREAULT STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU WASHINGTON -- Energy Department officials are weighing the impact of potentially deep budget cuts in the Yucca Mountain Project, making calculations of layoffs and delays for the proposed nuclear waste repository. Seeking to head off a budget crisis, DOE managers are re-examining their finances after being warned that Congress might allocate only a small amount for Yucca Mountain next year, officials said. Their report will be sent to Capitol Hill in a few days, they said. Rep. David Hobson, R-Ohio, chairman of a House subcommittee that is preparing to write an energy spending bill, repeated on Wednesday a warning that DOE's $880 million nuclear waste request for 2005 might be chopped to $131 million. "I don't believe in coming here and telling you everything is rosy, because it is not," Hobson said in a speech to the U.S. Transport Council, an association of nuclear waste shippers. "I don't have the money." The Energy Department plans to file a repository license application in December and has stepped up its activity to form a transportation strategy to get highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel shipped from reactors in 34 states. But the Yucca Mountain budget suddenly has become complicated because the Bush administration also wants Congress to make accounting changes in the fund that pays for the repository program. The reclassification has run into roadblocks, creating a shortfall in how much money might be available for Congress to spend on the Yucca project, Hobson said. "I don't have the flexibility to steal money from other accounts in the energy and water bill to make up for shortfalls in Yucca Mountain," Hobson said. This is not the first time the Yucca Mountain Project has faced a severe budget crunch. In 1995, the Clinton administration requested $630 million along with a budgeting change that proved unpopular in Congress. The Energy Department ended up with only half its requested amount, forcing a major restructuring and hundreds of layoffs amounting to one-third of its contractor workforce, officials said. Hobson said he is trying to persuade the White House to send Congress an amended DOE budget that restores Yucca Mountain funding, or to shift money from nuclear weapons programs or environmental cleanups to the repository effort. Another possible option might be for the White House to carry out the budgeting change administratively, Hobson said. But Rick Mertens, energy branch chief of the White House budget office, said, "In our view, that is not something the executive branch can unilaterally do. We're looking at the options, and there aren't any easy ones." Hobson said the Bush administration took "a poor gamble" by pushing to reclassify the nuclear waste fund in the face of obvious opposition from Nevada's senators, who oppose any initiative that would make it easier for the government to send nuclear waste to the state. Sens. John Ensign, R-Nev., and Harry Reid, D-Nev., blocked the proposal in the Senate Budget Committee earlier this year. Aides said they are being watchful for other attempts to get it passed. Hobson characterized the administration's Yucca Mountain budget plan as "a three-way bank shot." "I don't think you could pull this off in the Senate when the Nevada senators have their hands in all the pockets," he said. Copyright Las Vegas Review-Journal ***************************************************************** 30 Las Vegas RJ: AG seeks states' help to halt nuclear shipments Thursday, May 20, 2004 Ohio waste supposed to go to test site By STEVE TETREAULT STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU WASHINGTON -- Attorney General Brian Sandoval is attempting to recruit other states to help Nevada head off shipments of nuclear waste from a closed uranium processing factory in Ohio. Sandoval said in a letter Wednesday that residents along shipping routes may be subjected to "significant health risks" from a special class of radioactive material the Department of Energy has proposed to send from its Fernald plant to the Nevada Test Site. The letter was sent to attorneys general in 16 states along two major interstate highway routes between Ohio and Nevada, Sandoval spokesman Tom Sargent said. Nevada has objected to the Energy Department shipping 153 million pounds of radioactive waste that has accumulated in silos at Fernald, located 18 miles northwest of Cincinnati. Plans call for 3,750 flatbed truck shipments over 18 months. Two of the 20-foot-tall concrete silos contain 240,030 cubic feet of potent waste materials tainted with by-products of high-grade uranium that was processed at the factory. The third silo, from which initial shipments were to be made, contains 137,700 cubic feet of low-level thorium waste. Sandoval has threatened to sue DOE, contending the waste was unsafe for disposal at the test site, where the government has buried 21 million cubic feet of lower level nuclear waste since the 1970s. The material is different from the high-level nuclear waste the Energy Department has proposed to bury at Yucca Mountain. DOE officials have promised Nevada 45 days notice before starting to ship the Fernald waste. Nevada officials said this week they were hearing from sources in Ohio that such a notice will be issued "in the very near term." A DOE spokesman at the Fernald plant said he did not know when the department will issue its notification. "We're in consultation with stakeholders and regulators to determine what the path is going to be on the silos," said Gary Stegner. Sandoval warned the Energy Department in a letter Tuesday not to begin moving waste from any of the silos until the burial dispute is resolved. Nevada has asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to step in and assume control of the material. The state also is preparing to file a lawsuit to challenge the shipments soon after it receives a 45-day notice of DOE's intentions. Copyright Las Vegas Review-Journal ***************************************************************** 31 Guardian Unlimited: Plutonium Waste Fight Stalls Defense Bill From the Associated Press [UP] Friday May 21, 2004 12:31 AM By H. JOSEF HEBERT Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON (AP) - A Bush administration plan to cover nearly 1 million gallons of highly radioactive sludge with grout has run into obstacles in the Senate, where Democrats say grout is for bathrooms, not leftovers from Cold War weapons. Senate action on a defense bill stalled Thursday because of disagreement over the Energy Department's plan to leave the sludge in South Carolina, Washington and Idaho, with a protective coating over it. ``For most Americans grout is something they see in their bathrooms and not something used to deal with nuclear waste,'' said Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash. ``...I do not believe you can grout over it, put sand in a tank and say we've cleaned up the waste.'' The administration wanted to use the broad defense bill to change a 1982 law requiring that the wastes left from reprocessing plutonium for weapons be shipped to a central repository in Nevada. The Energy Department contends the new administration plan would shorten by years the time it takes to clean up the wastes and save billions of dollars, while still protecting the environment. Provisions in a defense bill would let the government reclassify the sludge in tanks in South Carolina so it could be treated as low-level waste. The bill also would allow the department to withhold cleanup funds for Energy Department facilities in Washington and Idaho until they also agree to keep the wastes. An amendment by Cantwell to get the nuclear waste provision out of the defense bill was debated throughout the day Thursday, but a vote on it was delayed until Congress returns in June from a Memorial Day vacation. ``Who wants to save money by leaving nuclear waste in the ground?'' Cantwell asked. But Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., who had the language inserted into the defense bill during a closed meeting, argued that South Carolina still will have final say in assuring that any cleanup meets state water regulations. He has argued some of the sludge should never have been viewed as high-level waste and that reclassifying it would save $16 billion and shorten cleaning of storage tanks at the government's Savannah River facility near Aiken, S.C., by 23 years. That didn't satisfy the state's other senator. ``This is a highly dangerous procedure,'' complained Sen. Fritz Hollings, D-S.C., predicting environmental disaster hundreds of years from now if the waste is kept in the tanks and leaks into the nearby Savannah River. There are 34 million gallons of waste in underground tanks at Savannah River, 53 million gallons in tanks at DOE's Hanford site near Richland, Wash., and 900,000 gallons in tanks at the INEEL facility in Idaho. Energy Department officials argue that 1 percent of the tank waste - residual sludge adhering to the bottom and sides of the tank - would be extremely expensive to remove. So, they want to cover it with cement-like grout and keep it in place. A federal judge in Idaho has ruled that would violate the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act. The provision in the defense bill would change the 1982 law and, according to Idaho and Washington officials, could jeopardize the Idaho court ruling. The Energy Department maintains that by mixing the waste with grout the residual sludge would lose radioactive intensity and qualify as low-level waste. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004 ***************************************************************** 32 BBC: Radioactive survey at rocket site Last Updated: Thursday, 20 May, 2004 A full-scale survey of a rocket range in the Western Isles has begun in an attempt to allay concerns of radioactive contamination. Radioactive material was buried at West Gerinish on South Uist 25 years ago. There are fears that there could be a link between a high incidence of cancer and the radioactive material. The 10-day survey is being carried out by the Ministry of Defence amid fears poisonous substances such as Cobalt 60 could have contaminated the site. Cobalt 60 was contained in missiles being tested at the site in the 1970s. Large area The department of health and the committee on medical aspects of radiation in the environment requested that the survey be carried out by the MoD. The MoD is confident that no such contamination exists. The site was cleared in 1980 with the Cobalt 60 stored in drums underground. Subsequent testing of the site has found no evidence of leakage. The survey will cover a large area, including much of the foreshore. But it is unclear whether this will be sufficient to allay the concerns of many local people who want the survey to be carried out by an independent body. ***************************************************************** 33 Las Vegas SUN: GOP leaders say Kerry's Yucca pledge a campaign issue Today: May 20, 2004 at 9:38:32 PDT By Cy Ryan < [cy@lasvegassun.com] > SUN CAPITAL BUREAU CARSON CITY -- Gov. Kenny Guinn and Attorney General Brian Sandoval, both Republicans, say that Sen. John Kerry's pledge to stop Yucca Mountain if he is elected president will be a campaign issue in Nevada this election. Both Guinn and Sandoval side with Kerry in opposition to the high-level nuclear waste dump, but they said the voters in Nevada should consider all of the issues, not just one. Sandoval is head of President Bush's re-election effort in Nevada. Sandoval said he is fully committed to the defeat of Yucca Mountain, which is now in a federal appeals court. Kerry, in a visit to Las Vegas, said Sunday, "Rest assured, Nevada, if I'm the president of the United States, Yucca Mountain will not be a repository." Bush last year approved the designation of Yucca Mountain as the site for the repository. Sandoval said voters would have to decide if the Kerry statement is a "valid pledge." At the state Republican convention, the members voted for a plank in the party platform that says the state should negotiate with the federal government over benefits for Yucca Mountain, despite the opposition to the plank by high-ranking Republicans. Greg Bortolin, press secretary for the governor, said Yucca Mountain would "obviously be a factor" in the election campaign. But the governor feels Nevadans should make a decision for president on "the entire package and not one issue," Bortolin said, adding the governor doesn't think the Kerry statement will hurt the president in Nevada. The governor agrees with the president more than he disagrees, Bortolin said. "The governor has excellent access to the administration on multiple issues, such as homeland security, the Department of Interior, wild horses and environmental decisions," he said. Yucca Mountain is an important issue and the governor has stood up to the president, Bortolin said. "But you have to look at the entire picture," he said. Sandoval said Yucca Mountain is one issue but the voters have to decide also who is better for the economy, for taxes, for education and health care. ***************************************************************** 34 Las Vegas SUN: Yucca funds reportedly not available By Suzanne Struglinski SUN WASHINGTON BUREAU WASHINGTON -- House appropriators can only give the Yucca Mountain project $131 million -- $749 million less than the Energy Department wants -- because there is no way yet to get more money to the program, a key congressman said Wednesday. The department and the nuclear industry have repeatedly said that without the $880 million requested for the project next year, it will be very difficult to open the nuclear waste storage site planned for Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, by 2010. Rep. David Hobson, R-Ohio, said that unless the administration comes up with an alternative to its proposal to take $749 million for the project out of the usual congressional budget process, there is not much he can do to get more money for Yucca Mountain. Hobson is the chairman of the House Appropriations Energy and Water Development Subcommittee, which crafts the Energy Department's budget, including funding for the Yucca Mountain project. He discussed the expected funding shortfall Wednesday at a conference of the U.S. Transport Council, a group of nuclear industry officials and those interested in moving waste to Yucca. Conference-goers will visit Capitol Hill today to press lawmakers to get more Yucca funding this year. The department split its $880 million request into $749 million to be taken directly from the Nuclear Waste Fund, an account into which the nuclear industry pays, and $131 million to come from the Defense Department to pay for its share of the waste. The $749 million can only be taken directly from the fund if Congress approves a policy change. Hobson said the policy change could probably pass the House, but couldn't be pulled off in the Senate because of the influence of Nevada's senators. Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., who sits on the Senate budget committee that sets the spending level each year, successfully prevented the policy change from getting into the budget resolution. That forced the Yucca Mountain project onto a level playing field with other projects competing for federal funds. "I don't know how I am going to negotiate this bill in the Senate if I don't have the money to do it," Hobson told the nuclear industry group Wednesday. "I've been told this is not possible but there could be a creative way to do it." The Office of Management and Budget is evaluating whether it can make the policy change through an administrative action, which would require some congressional approval but not a bill. Rick Mertens, the OMB's energy branch chief, said this involves a technical side of the budget that probably will require some changes as the Yucca project grows to $1 billion in the next few years. He said the administration can not just reclassify the Nuclear Waste Fund on its own but it can work with members of Congress for approval. Hobson also suggested the OMB would amend the budget request to include the $749 million without the change or the department could propose its own cuts in other areas such as nuclear weapons activities and defense cleanup program to divert money to the program. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the top Democrat on the Senate version of Hobson's committee, still aims to cut the project's budget, however. Reid spokesman Tessa Hafen said he is waiting to see what final number Hobson and the administration produce. But, she noted, Reid always works to cut the Yucca Mountain budget. She said any money that does go toward the project Reid wants to go toward more science, not just finishing a license application. Hobson said he would like to give the project more money but said it will be hard to find more since other projects in the energy and water spending bill also need money. "I've done everything except personally get in the face of the president," Hobson said. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said the department is still working to get the policy change passed and he has not given up on it. "Unless I am convinced otherwise, (the administration) is going to go for the proposal we offered," Abraham said at a meeting with reporters Tuesday. The Office of Management and Budget, meanwhile, is evaluating whether it can make the policy change through an administrative action, which would require some congressional approval but not a bill. Hobson said he has tried to be respectful of Nevada and its residents and that the new rail line to be built to move nuclear waste to the mountain might actually "improve their way of life" since it would add the train. But he also said Congress has to follow the law of the land, which says the repository can be built. "This the potential funding cut--may be popular in certain parts of Nevada but it's not popular in Massachusetts and other parts of this country." Hobson said. "It's a tragedy for the next generation if we don't continue." Democratic Presidential Candidate John Kerry promised Sunday in Las Vegas that he would stop the project. But nuclear power plants in Kerry's home state of Massachusetts have waste that needs to be moved, Hobson said. Hobson said if the project gets put off, it is only going to get more expensive and cause problems for using nuclear power, which produces electricity with no carbon dioxide emissions. ***************************************************************** 35 Bradenton Herald: Flawed process Updated Thursday, May 20, 2004 Commissioners vow to end pollution secrecy Finally, Tallevast residents are being heard. Finally, someone in a position of power realizes that the residents' health and peace of mind are more important than sticking to a flawed bureaucratic process. It's gratifying to see Manatee County commissioners and state Rep. Bill Galvano acknowledge the wrong done in failing to notify Tallevast residents in a timely manner of a potential chemical threat in soil and water around their homes emanating from the closed American Beryllium Co. plant. The pollution threat was discovered in January 2000, but residents didn't learn of it until fall of 2003 when they noticed lots of drilling and soil testing activity in their neighborhood. Even then the information they got came because they began to ask questions about what was going on, not because state regulatory agencies issued warnings not to drink their well water. The residents didn't have the information, but both the state Department of Environmental Protection and Manatee County's department of environmental management received reports of pollution months earlier. That's because agencies like the DEP aren't required to notify residents of a potential threat unless you can actually see the poisons running onto your property. Unless there is a "noticeable discharge," state law says, the DEP doesn't have to notify plant neighbors of a potential threat until a clean up plan has been worked out. That isn't good enough, commissioners said Tuesday. They unanimously voted to draft a new policy requiring property owners to notify the county as soon as they discover a pollution source. In addition, Galvano, R-Bradenton, plans to work the state angle to amend the law so DEP and state health officials must notify the county of a potential threat early in the process. As it is, said Karen Collins-Fleming, director of the county's environmental management department, "DEP notifies us, if at all, way down the line." Galvano called the notification requirements "a mess," and vowed to "get to the bottom of this, in terms of disclosure." That can't happen soon enough. It's unconscionable that residents relying upon private wells for their drinking water weren't immediately notified of a plume of trichloroethylene, a cleaning solvent, that had seeped off the plant site into the surrounding neighborhood. At least they could have switched to drinking bottled water while their wells were tested. So far, test wells show no contamination near homes that still use well water, the DEP says. But what if that hadn't been the case? Presumably, these residents would have continued to drink toxic water for who knows how much longer while DEP tried to decide what to do. It's no wonder that Tallevast residents are wary of reassurances offered by DEP officials. Who wouldn't be, knowing a potential health hazard lay beneath your feet for almost three years without anyone telling you about it? Of course, a new county policy requiring timely notification would benefit more than the relative handful of Tallevast residents affected by the Beryllium pollution. Doubtless there are other residents living in the shadow of aging industrial plants who may be sitting on similar pollution plumes without knowing it. If such a threat is discovered, they wouldn't have to wait two or three years to find out, if the county and state follow through on promises of reform. ***************************************************************** 36 L.A. Daily News: 'Hot' water at Santa Susana dailynews.com Article Published: Wednesday, May 19, 2004 - High-level radioactivity found in groundwater at Rocketdyne lab By Kerry Cavanaugh Staff Writer High levels of radioactivity were found for the first time in groundwater at the Santa Susana Field Lab where nuclear reactors were tested beginning in the late 1940s, federal officials said Wednesday. Officials said the contamination does not pose a risk to the public or neighbors of the facility located in the Simi Hills above Chatsworth, but longtime critics of the operations and Department of Energy cleanup efforts questioned why the radioactive material was only showing up now after a 15-year cleanup effort. The Daily News first disclosed in 1989 that a DOE survey had found massive radioactive and chemical contamination problems at the lab, triggering the effort. 'They have told us over and over and over again that they have no radioactivity showing up above a trip level at the site," said Dan Hirsch, president of the nuclear watchdog group Committee to Bridge the Gap. "(The public) should be concerned about what else may be there that Boeing and the Department of Energy hasn't found yet." Groundwater samples taken in March show tritium at 80,000 picocuries per liter, or four times the national drinking water limit. The contamination was caused by nuclear research conducted at the lab. "We have not seen levels of tritium at these concentrations before," said Mike Lopez, DOE project manager. The federal government funded nuclear testing at the lab, which was run by Rocketdyne, now a division of Boeing, from the 1950s through the 1980s and is now cleaning the property for future uses, which could include homes. "We've been reviewing our data to see if there are any gaps in what we know. We found tritium. To me, it shows our process is working," Lopez said. Tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen with a half-life of 12 years, will degrade and meet drinking water standards in 25 years. It has been found before at low levels around the lab. In 1991, it was found at the Brandeis Bardin Institute, a Jewish retreat and camp on the Simi Valley edge of the lab. The highest level was 5,400 picocuries per liter, well below the EPA's limit of 20,000 picocuries per liter. In 1993, lab officials found elevated levels of tritium, along with strontium 90, cesium 137 and plutonium 238, in soil samples from Brandies Bardin taken near the lab property line. The readings again were considered low enough to not pose a health threat. Officials with the Boeing Co., which owns the lab, said the tritium findings should be no surprise. Earlier tests were conducted at the edge of the lab property or on neighboring property and the results always showed low levels of tritium. The higher tritium levels were found after drilling three new wells near the old nuclear reactor site. One well showed tritium and two wells showed hits of chemical contamination, including trichloroethylene at 15 times the national limit. "We're more likely to find higher concentrations closer to the source," said Majelle Lee with Boeing. "Again there is not an exposure to people. It's not used as drinking water and there's additional work to be done to create the characterization of it." The Department of Energy will hold a public meeting to discuss the tritium findings at 6:30 p.m. June 3 at the Rancho Santa Susana Community Center at 5005 Los Angeles Ave., Simi Valley. Kerry Cavanaugh, (818) 713-3746 kerry.cavanaugh@dailynews.com [kerry.cavanaugh@dailynews.com] Copyright © 2004 Los Angeles Daily News ***************************************************************** 37 Nevada Appeal - Opinion: Kerry makes a clear promise on Yucca Nevada Appeal editorial board May 20, 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, known for waffling on issues large and small, made a definite commitment when he was in Las Vegas on Sunday. "Rest assured Nevada," Kerry said. "If I am president of the United States, Yucca Mountain will not be a repository." This was nothing like the "sound science" folderol that both George W. Bush and Al Gore issued four years ago. Although Bush has taken the heat - and rightly so, for it was his decision to go ahead with nuclear-waste storage at Yucca Mountain - the statements issued by both candidates at the time were so similar as to be indistinguishable. Now Kerry has stepped forward with a promise. It echoed an opinion article for the Las Vegas Review-Journal in which he wrote: "It's a shame that the Bush administration has put the financial interests of the nuclear industry above the health and safety of DOE workers and Nevadans. I believe there is a better way to secure Nevada's health, environmental and financial well-being. That includes putting a stop to the dump once and for all." The skeptics among us believe it's all political posturing, designed to win votes in a state that usually is barely a blip on presidential contenders' radar screens. But after the close call of 2000, Nevada's electoral votes might just matter after all. Of course it's political posturing. Isn't that what Yucca Mountain has become? For all the science that has, indeed, gone on in the tunnel beneath the Nevada desert and in the laboratories designing casks to last longer than recorded human history, the decisions ultimately are made by politicians in Congress and the White House. We'd rather those politicians gave us clear choices than dwell in the gray areas of contingency and circumstance. Between Bush and Kerry on the issue of Yucca Mountain, we have that choice. Kerry hasn't exactly said what he would do with the nuclear waste. That might be an issue residents of states producing and storing the waste want to explore with the candidate. All contents © Copyright 2004 nevadaappeal.com Nevada Appeal - 580 Mallory Way - Carson City, NV 89701 ***************************************************************** 38 NBC 4: Radioactivity Detected In Southland Groundwater IBS network"> [http://www.ibsys.com/] POSTED: 10:55 am PDT May 20, 2004 LOS ANGELES -- Radioactivity has been detected in the groundwater near a Rocketdyne facility where nuclear reactors were once tested. Samples taken in March from the Santa Susana Field Laboratory show levels of tritium at more than four times the limit for drinking water. But federal officials say the contamination does not pose a threat to the public or those who live near the facility. Community activists say the tests show a 15-year cleanup effort has not been sufficient. Copyright 2004 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. © 2004,Internet Broadcasting Systems, Inc [http://www.ibsys.com/] . ***************************************************************** 39 NPR: Nuclear Waste Clean-Up Plans Fuel Debate [http://www.npr.org Groups Question Government Plans for Radioactive Materials [A nuclear waste storage tank, filled to the top with nuclear waste, sludge and salts.] A DOE storage tank, filled to the top with nuclear waste, sludge and salts. Credit: Department of Energy Storage Tank After Clean-Up See a DOE tank after its nuclear waste has been removed. [http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/2004/may/nuclearwas te/after.html] May 21, 2004 -- The Senate is immersed in a floor fight over nuclear waste clean-up. A bill now under debate would allow the Department of Energy to leave what could be millions of gallons of high level waste in old underground tanks. The DOE says the material, left over from nuclear weapons production, won't pose a hazard. But opponents contend it could leak out, contaminating rivers and groundwater. At question are nuclear waste storage tanks in Washington state, Idaho and South Carolina. The DOE says it can remove more than 99 percent of the radioactive sludge from the tanks, and seal the remaining traces in concrete or grout. But environmental groups say studies haven't convinced them that the grout prevents small leaks over time. NPR's David Kestenbaum [http://www.npr.org/about/people/bios/dkestenbaum.html] reports. Related NPR Stories U.S. Eyes Security Reforms for Nuclear Sites [http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1888675] U.S. Eyes Security Reforms for Nuclear Sites [http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1888675] The Science of Yucca Mountain [http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2002/july/yucca/] The Science of Yucca Mountain [http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2002/july/yucca/] Web Resources •DOE's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management [http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/] •Natural Resources Defense Council's Position on Nuclear Waste Clean-Up [http://www.nrdcaction.org/action/index.asp?step=2&item=52103] [http://www.npr.org ***************************************************************** 40 U.S. Newswire: American Rivers Cries Foul Over Nuclear Waste Provision in Defense Bill; Group Supports Cantwell's Challenge to "Cynical Name Game" 5/20/2004 5:33:00 PM To: National Desk Contact: Liz Birnbaum or Eric Eckl, 202-347-7550 both of American Rivers SEATTLE, May 20 /U.S. Newswire/ -- American Rivers called on the Senate to strike a provision from the authorizing bill for the Department of Defense that would allow the Department of Energy to leave a lethal brew of nuclear and toxic waste along the Savannah River between Georgia and South Carolina. Conservationists oppose the exemption -- and fear that the precedent could affect the fate of similar material stored at the Hanford Nuclear Facility along the Columbia River in the state of Washington, and the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory near the Snake River. More than 100 million gallons of high-level radioactive waste are stored in underground tanks at the three sites. Federal law currently requires that the Department of Defense relocate high- level waste from these vulnerable facilities to a safer location. However, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has attached a provision to the authorization bill for the Defense Department that would circumvent this requirement by fiat -- reclassifying high-level waste at the Savannah River site as low-level waste subject to different standards. Conservationists support an amendment offered by Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) to strike the provision. "The American people expect their leaders to preserve a healthy environment for our children, and we applaud Senator Cantwell for challenging this cynical effort to use name games to get around that responsibility," said Rob Masonis, Northwest regional director for American Rivers. "Radioactive waste isn't tap water no matter how you label the bottle, and as long as it's along the Savannah River it's an accident waiting to happen." The Senate Armed Services Committee never held a hearing on the provision, denying the public an opportunity to scrutinize the consequences of leaving dangerous materials in vulnerable locations for indefinite time periods. Masonis noted that radioactive materials leaching from the Hanford site have already been measured in the Columbia River. Conservationists pointed to the disturbing parallel between this Senate provision and a recent proposal from the Bush administration to reclassify hatchery-raised salmon as wild fish - - a transparent effort to inflate salmon numbers to the point where they would no longer merit special protection. That proposal appears to be motivated by a desire to make it easier for timber companies and developers to foul streams inhabited by the endangered fish. "People in the Pacific Northwest are getting a lot of doubletalk out of Washington DC these days, and the result could be dirty water for them and their children," Masonis said. http://www.usnewswire.com/ [http://www.usnewswire.com/] -0- /© 2004 U.S. Newswire 202-347-2770/ ***************************************************************** 41 Cincinnati Enquirer: Arizona governor objects to Fernald waste shipments [http://www.cincinnati.com] Thursday, May 20, 2004 By Dan Klepal The Cincinnati Enquirer CROSBY TOWNSHIP - Another roadblock has been raised - this time in Arizona - that could jeopardize the Department of Energy's plan to dispose of radioactive waste from three Fernald concrete silos in Nevada. Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano wrote Energy Department Assistant Secretary Jessie Roberson on May 11, saying the plan to truck Fernald waste through her state on the way to Nevada from Ohio is illegal. The letter doesn't threaten a lawsuit, but asks energy officials to "prevent the transport of waste" through Arizona. "DOE's plan to bring this dangerous waste through Arizona appears to be a violation of applicable federal and state laws," the letter says. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, along with the Ohio EPA, has approved the transportation plan for the 7,000 containers of powdery waste from Silo 3. EPA officials on Wednesday said they don't think the shipments would violate any law, but declined to comment further. Department of Energy officials did not return phone messages left Wednesday. This is the latest crisis involving silo waste at Fernald in northwest Hamilton County. Officials with the Nevada Attorney General's Office have threatened a federal lawsuit if energy officials continue with their plan to ship 153 million pounds of silo waste for permanent disposal at the Nevada Test Site, outside of Las Vegas. The shipments are scheduled to begin in late June. That problem leads to another for crews responsible for removing the waste from the silos: Rules governing the cleanup say the waste cannot be even temporarily stored at Fernald. It must be processed, packaged and shipped in a continuous process. That means there has to be some agreement with Nevada before energy officials can tell their prime contractor, Fluor Fernald, to begin removing the waste. Energy officials from Fernald went to Chicago this week to discuss the situation with EPA officials. Jim Saric, a U.S. EPA project manager for Fernald, said his agency cannot give energy officials any waiver that would allow them to begin temporary storage of the material on Fernald property. E-mail dklepal@enquirer.com [dklepal@enquirer.com] CINCINNATI.COM [http://www.cincinnati.com] | ENQUIRER ***************************************************************** 42 OA Online News: Waste Control sale cancelled (Deal made) [http://www.oaoa.com] Thursday, 20 May 2004 American Online c /o Odessa American 222 E. 4th Street P.O. Box 2952 Odessa, TX 79760 Copyright © 1999-2004 Odessa American. All rights reserved. Settlement reached one day before sale Odessa American A public sale of a 10 percent interest in Waste Control Specialists, the company that wants to open a low-level radioactive disposal facility in western Andrews County, has been cancelled. A settlement was reached May 13, one day before the scheduled sale, between Waste Control Specialists and KNB Holdings Ltd., which had a 10 percent interest in the company. Waste Control Specialists has now taken back that interest, said Tony Proffitt, spokesman for Waste Control Specialists. Proffitt declined Wednesday to discuss the terms of the settlement because of a confidentiality agreement. Waste Control Specialists Texas operates a low-level radioactive storage facility. Texas lawmakers passed legislation this past session allowing a private entity to obtain a license to dispose of low-level radioactive waste. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality will start taking proposals from interested companies in July. [http://wire.ap.org] ***************************************************************** 43 Salt Lake Tribune: New wilderness area gets committee's nod May 20, 2004 By Christopher Smith WASHINGTON -- Legislation creating a new protected wilderness area in Utah's west desert and simultaneously blocking rail shipments of nuclear waste to a proposed storage area was unanimously passed out of a congressional committee Wednesday. Sponsored by Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, the bill would create the 100,000-acre Cedar Mountain Wilderness, the first federal wilderness area on Bureau of Land Management property in state history and the first Utah parcel set aside as wilderness in more than two decades. Although it faces more hurdles -- including opposition by the Goshute Indian Tribe and the consortium of utilities seeking to build a nuclear waste repository on the Skull Valley reservation -- the chances of the bill becoming law before year's end are considered good. However, proponents of the Skull Valley dump plan a vigorous lobbying effort to defeat the measure. "This is basically a stealth maneuver to try to kill the opportunity for the Goshutes' economic development," said Sue Martin of Private Fuel Storage in Salt Lake City, the private entity seeking to build the $3 billion facility to temporarily hold waste destined for Yucca Mountain in Nevada but now stored in 39 states. "We are going to fight this every way we possibly can," she said. Western conservatives like Bishop are not prone to sponsor wilderness bills. But protection of the rugged Great Basin mountain range became a legislative vehicle for preserving the nation's largest swath of military airspace at the Utah Test and Training Range while thwarting developers of the proposed nuclear waste dump nearby. Bishop said because of the potential catastrophe to the Wasatch Front should a military jet accidentally crash into the casks of high-level nuclear waste, the Air Force would likely avoid overflights near Skull Valley, effectively reducing the training range airspace by 30 percent. "That would destroy the range" and threaten the livelihood of Hill Air Force Base, he said. "That's why I want to have all this decided before [the Pentagon's base closure commission] begins." Bishop amended his bill during a session of the House Resources Committee to address concerns by environmentalists and private landowners, while also trying to lessen the sting for Goshute tribal leaders, who say it violates their treaty rights by limiting access to the reservation. Rather than the original draft's prohibition on BLM granting right-of-way for a rail line to a dump, the final version reported out of committee allows for a railroad to be constructed but only on state lands, allowing the state to prohibit trains from carrying nuclear waste to Skull Valley. It also directs BLM to set aside 640 acres of public land near Interstate 80 or another state or federal highway and hold the property in trust for the Goshutes to use for economic development. "The rail line would have to go through state land so there would be restrictions on it, but eventually getting rail down there or even to Dugway [Proving Grounds] could be positive economically for the tribe in the future," said Bishop. Bishop's amendments also appeased the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance by requiring that any new communications facilities for the training range inside the wilderness be subject to environmental impact reviews and satisfied neighboring ranchers by withdrawing the Browns Spring wilderness study area from further consideration as wilderness. "He's been diligent in bringing together a number of groups to work out a compromise," the top Democrat on the House Resource Committee, Rep. Nick Rahall of West Virginia, said of Bishop. "Hopefully, this clears the way to act on other worthy wilderness legislation." © Copyright 2004, The Salt Lake Tribune. ***************************************************************** 44 [NYTr] World Honors Col.Stanislav Petrov, Who Averted Nuclear Date: Thu, 20 May 2004 15:33:32 -0500 (CDT) Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit sent by FOE Sydney John Hallam Nuclear Weapons Campaigner Friends of the Earth Australia, nonukes@foesyd.org.au 61-2-9567-6222, 61-2-9567-7533 fax 61-2-9567-7166 1 Henry Street Turella NSW Aust 2205 FRI 21 MAY 2004 FRIENDS OF THE EARTH AUSTRALIA AUSTRALIAN PEACE COMMITTEE WORLD HONOURS A FORGOTTEN SAVIOR ON SEPTEMBER 26 1983, COLONEL STANISLAV PETROV LITERALLY SAVED THE WORLD FROM DESTRUCTION. ON FRIDAY 21 IN MOSCOW, HE IS TO BE AWARDED THE WORLD CITIZENS AWARD. On the 26th September 1983, Colonel Stanislav Petrov was the duty officer at Serpukhov-15, the then Soviet Unions main nuclear command and control centre. Sometime after midnight, alarms sounded, lights flashed and klaxons blared as a new satellite surveillance system detected what it thought were a series of missile launches from US nuclear launch sites in North Dakota. Colonel Stanislav Petrov was expected, according to his rules of procedure, to press a large red flshing button labelled 'START', which would have commenced a sequence that would have unleashed approximately 15,000 warheads at the US and its allies. The ensuing holocaust would have ended civilisation and possibly destroyed the human race and most living things. Since that time, Colonel Petrov has lived in obscurity and poverty in a flat outside Moscow. On Friday 21 at 2pm Moscow Time, in the editorial offices of the Moscow News, Colonel Petrov is to be given the WorldCitizens Award. (Contact - Tel 095- 540- 99-22 Zagorodnoe Schosse Hause#5 - info@mn.ru) World Citizens Assn Contact: Doug Mattern (president) 1-650-326-1409 fax 650-745-0640 55 New Montogmery Street, Suite 224, San Francisco, CA, 94105 Aust Comment: John Hallam 61-2-9567-7533. H61-2-9810-2598 Irene Gale AM 08-8364-2291 RELEASE FROM ASSOCIATION OF WORLD CITIZENS, SAN FRANCISCO FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE FORGOTTEN HERO OF OUR TIME TO BE HONORED BY SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL PEACE GROUP Colonel Stanislav Petrov, formerly of the Red Army, is credited by many experts in the nuclear weapons field for probably saving humanity from a nuclear war while on duty in the Soviet Union in September of 1983. The Association of World Citizens is honoring Colonel Petrov's heroic decision on that fateful September night with a special World Citizen Award (text below) The award ceremony will take place this Friday (May 21) at 2:00 pm in the editorial offices of the Moscow News - Moskovskije Novosti - (Russia 's largest liberal newspaper that is printed in both Russian and English). The telephone and address for Moscow News is: 095 540 99 22. Zagorodnoe schosse, hause #5. Email: info@mn.ru Contact: Douglas Mattern, President, Association of World Citizens 55 New Montgomery Street, Suite 224, San Francisco, CA 94105 Tel: 650 326 1409 email: worldcit@best.com FAX: 650 745 0640 The award is a beautiful large plaque on redwood with gold lettering on black metal, plus a cash award of $1,000. A Danish film crew that is making a documentary film on Petrov will also be present. . Petrov has been interviewed by BBC, NBC Dateline, The Daily Mirror, NOVA, the Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor and other media. However, until now, he has not been honored with an award recognizing his heroic deed. Previous recipients of our World Citizen Award include Rev. Jesse Jackson and Dr. Robert Muller, former UN Assistant-Secretary-General and founder of the University for Peace Note: This award is part of an ongoing project to have all U.S. and Russian nuclear warheads taken off the current "hair-trigger" alert status before it is too late. The condition that Colonel Petrov faced in 1983 still exist today, and the overwhelming danger to humankind will continue until the "hair-trigger" status is ended. ********************************************************************* WORLD CITIZEN AWARD STANISLAV PETROV This special World Citizen Award is presented to Stanislav Petrov for his courage and judgment on September 26, 1983, when in charge of an early warning bunker outside of Moscow. On that fateful day of high tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, the early warning system reported the U.S. had launched a missile attack on Russia. Instead of alerting command headquarters, which may have set in motion a retaliatory nuclear exchange, Colonel Petrov retained his composure for an agonizing time as alarms blared with more warnings of an attack, trusting his judgment that the warning was a false alarm. Colonel Petrov was correct and his decision may have saved humanity from a nuclear catastrophe. Dr. Bruce Blair, President of the Center for Defense Information, and a former U.S. Minuteman Missile Launch Officer, believes this incident is the closest we have come to accidental nuclear war. We are all indebted to Stanislav Petrov, a Hero of our time and Citizen of the World. Presented in Moscow, Russia on May 21, 2004 by the Association of World Citizens Headquarters in San Francisco, CA USA Douglas Mattern, President * To subscribe or unsubscribe or change your settings via the web, visit: http://tania.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= ***************************************************************** 45 TCS: Tech Central Station - The New Imperatives of Non-Proliferation By Jamie M. Fly Published 05/20/2004 A little more than a decade after the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a young Harvard professor named Henry Kissinger predicted that this new technology would quickly proliferate: "Within a generation the peaceful uses of atomic energy will have spread across the globe. Most nations will then possess the wherewithal to manufacture nuclear weapons. Foreign policy henceforth will have to be framed against the background of a world in which the 'conventional' technology is nuclear technology." Although nuclear technology has indeed spread across the globe, it is not yet the "conventional" war fighting technology. Membership in the nuclear club remains exclusive -- the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, and Pakistan are all declared nuclear powers, while Israel and North Korea are widely believed to have nuclear arsenals. In recent decades, many countries were convinced to cease their nuclear programs or give up their weapons peacefully (among them several former Soviet republics, Argentina, Brazil, South Korea, South Africa, and Libya). Others had their programs slowed or destroyed by force (Iraq), while some that posses the scientific know-how and industrial capability have chosen not to develop weapons (Canada, Germany, and Japan are prominent examples). Despite these successes, after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, nonproliferation became a hot topic in Washington policy circles, as the United States became concerned that the Soviet Union's vast arsenal of poorly secured weapons might fall into the wrong hands. But as is common inside the Beltway, a multitude of experts did not result in a multitude of sensible ideas. Washington's foreign policy establishment quickly coalesced around a consensus that stressed multilateral cooperation and international treaties and conventions to keep the nuclear genie in the bottle. The Clinton administration adopted the Washington consensus wholeheartedly -- pay off the former Soviet Union to keep their nukes under lock and key, employ Russian scientists to preclude them from traveling to warmer climes, and encourage countries to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treat (NPT), thus requiring them to submit to inspections. Only infrequently was the threat of force used as a tool to prevent proliferation. Upon taking office in January 2001, the Bush administration quickly discovered that the diplomatic band-aid approach that characterized the Clinton years was not sustainable. Iran and North Korea were flagrantly violating the NPT's restrictions, while using their status as signatories to escape approbation. Then came September 11, and with it a starker awareness of the frightening reality that al Qaeda and other terrorist groups are trying to obtain weapons of mass destruction for a catastrophic attack on an American city. This gave new and added impetus to efforts to contain the spread of nuclear weapons technology. The Bush administration believes that September 11 changed the world. That horrible day exposed the true threat posed by fundamentalist Islam. As noted in the administration's National Security Strategy of 2002, the use of weapons of mass destruction by terrorist groups is the "gravest danger" facing the United States. The administration understands the big picture, but needs to take three immediate steps to implement its vision: First, it must emphasize to our allies in Europe and Asia that there is no universal right to nuclear weapons. There is no reason that rogue regimes such as Iran, Iraq, or North Korea need nuclear weapons. An international consensus must be developed that possession of nuclear weapons by rogue states is cause for action to disarm these regimes. Second, the administration must increase security at America's ports, which receive 95 percent of all non-North American U.S. trade. As was noted at an [http://www.eppc.org/] event on the subject in late April, a series of tests by weapons experts and media organizations have shown the ease with which uranium can be smuggled into this country. It is impossible to stop all such materials at the border, but we can surely stop some, and our current defenses are utterly overwhelmed. Finally, the administration should continue to threaten the use of force in cases where rogue regimes do not disarm. Libya's recent disarmament is an example of the benefits of robust action in Iraq. The United States cannot be caught unaware simply because our European allies want to slowly explore every diplomatic option. If the European approach is taken, regimes can develop sufficient stockpiles of weapons to make a military solution practically impossible, the strategy pursued by North Korea during the 1990s, and a tactic used currently by Iran. In the end, winning the war on terror and thus eliminating the potential consumers of weapons of mass destruction is the key to reducing the threat to America's cities. Our response must be more than meaningless words on paper. September 11 has changed the equation for American policymakers. As on many issues, the administration's critics need to realize that the security of America's streets cannot be left to international bureaucrats in paneled conference rooms in New York and Geneva. President Bush understands this. One hopes it will not take a mushroom cloud in the skyline of Washington, New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles to win the nonproliferation "experts" over to his side. Jamie M. Fly is a Research Associate working on national security issues at the Council on Foreign Relations. This is his first contribution to TCS. The views expressed here are his own. [http://www2.techcentralstation.com/1051/feedback.jsp?CID=1051-05 2004C] ***************************************************************** 46 [NukeNet] Win in Lawsuit Over DOE Bio-Warfare Agent Labs; Date: Thu, 20 May 2004 16:03:02 -0700 PRESS RELEASE MAY 20, 2004 for more information, contact Marylia Kelley, Executive Director, Tri-Valley CAREs, (925) 443-7148 Jay Coghlan, Executive Director, Nuclear Watch New Mexico, (505) 989-7342 Steve Volker, Lead Attorney, Law Offices of Stephan Volker, (510) 496-0600 for immediate release, May 20, 2004 FEDERAL COURT ALLOWS TESTIMONY PROVING SECURITY LAPSES AND HEALTH AND SAFETY HAZARDS AT LIVERMORE BIO-WARFARE AGENT RESEARCH LAB OAKLAND, CA -- Yesterday, United States District Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong rejected a motion by the United States Department of Justice to strike testimony by whistleblower Mathew Zipoli describing ongoing security lapses at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and testimony by several national experts documenting serious health and safety hazards at the Livermore Lab. Ruling in a lawsuit brought by environmental organizations attacking the Department of Energy's (DOE's) proposed bio-warfare agent research at the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories, Judge Armstrong denied the Department of Energy's motion to strike key testimony submitted by these organizations documenting the extreme hazards posed by this proposed research. The Livermore and Los Alamos facilities, styled "Biosafety Level 3" (BSL-3) laboratories by DOE, would be used for experiments with live anthrax, botulism, bubonic plague and other deadly pathogens on live animals utilizing aerosol (spray) delivery techniques. Plaintiffs seek withdrawal of DOE's approval of the Livermore facility because of the grave risks to public health documented in this testimony. Today's ruling caps nine months of litigation against operation of this bio-warfare agent laboratory, which has already resulted in DOE withdrawing its approval of the Los Alamos facility. Two environmental organizations -- Tri-Valley CAREs (Communities Against a Radioactive Environment) of Livermore, CA and Nuclear Watch of New Mexico, located in Santa Fe, New Mexico -- filed suit against both facilities on August 26, 2003. Their litigation charges DOE with violating the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by approving advanced research on bio-warfare agents at its two principal nuclear weapon design labs without conducting a thorough review of the resulting environmental risks. The lawsuit asks the Court to compel DOE to prepare Environmental Impact Statements before DOE can begin operations. Last December, Judge Armstrong had issued an Order prohibiting any shipment of select agents (those capable of being weaponized) to these proposed bio-warfare agent research facilities pending the Court's ruling on the merits of the lawsuit, which is expected soon. Judge Armstrong's ruling yesterday accepting this testimony directly undermines DOE's justification for not preparing an EIS on the Livermore bio-warfare lab; that it had already considered and addressed all of the potential environmental hazards of this new facility. The Court allowed the testimony of Mathew Zipoli, a former Security Police Officer of the Lawrence Livermore security force, Professor Robert Curry, an Emeritus Professor of Geology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Dr. Matthew McKinzie, an Experimental Physicist with expertise in the dispersal of hazardous materials, Terrell Watt, an Urban Planner familiar with the rapid urban growth engulfing the Livermore Laboratory, and Marion Fulk, a retired Chemical Physicist previously employed at the Livermore Lab for 18 years. The testimony upheld by Judge Armstrong documents profound security and safety risks at the laboratory: * Former Livermore Lab police officer Zipoli testified that security officials at Livermore have not been trained to detect bombs, have never been trained in the use of bio-suits (or even told where such suits might be found), have never trained with local law enforcement authorities nor with the FBI, have never been trained in the use of Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus (SCBA) gear which is essential for use in responding to the release of biological, chemical or radioactive agents, have never conducted practice exercises involving the simulated release of such hazardous materials, and are even removed from their posts to perform other duties, jeopardizing laboratory security. Officer Zipoli also testified that DOE's own Inspector General documented many of these deficiencies in a report dated December, 2001, which DOE ignored when it approved Livermore's bio-warfare facility. Mr. Zipoli testified regarding the recent resignation of the Livermore Laboratory=s top security official, William Cleveland, in response to FBI accusations that he had a sexual relationship with a known Chinese agent between 1993 and 2003. Mr. Zipoli also testified to numerous other security breaches at the Livermore Laboratory, including the disappearance of a security officer=s skeleton keys and access badges, and suspicious delays in the reporting of these security lapses. * Professor Curry testified that DOE's conclusion that an EIS was not needed was based on the erroneous claim that no active earthquake faults are located in proximity to the proposed laboratory. In fact, as Dr. Curry testified, the Los Positas fault and the Greenville fault -- both major, active fault zones -- are located in proximity to this site. Professor Curry testified that an earthquake on January 24, 1980 had caused substantial structural damage in the Livermore area, and that major earthquakes are likely to recur in the area, posing a significant risk to human health and safety. * Chemical Physicist Marion Fulk testified that the High Efficiency Particulate Air (HEPA) filters utilized at the Livermore Lab to prevent the escape of hazardous airborne chemicals to the surrounding community have a high failure rate. Mr. Fulk testified that DOE's reliance on HEPA filters to assure that toxic pathogens would not be released from the BSL-3 facility ignored their propensity to fail. According to Mr. Fulk, surveys have shown that approximately 12 percent of all HEPA filters fail when wet, may be defective, may be torn during installation, may leak due to changes in air pressure, and may become brittle and fail over time. For example, in 1969, a fire at DOE's Rocky Flats Nuclear Facility near Denver, Colorado, blew out multiple HEPA filters. In 1977, an accident at Lawrence Laboratory blew HEPA filters through an exhaust stack. According to retired Lawrence Livermore staff scientist Fulk, DOE=s reliance on HEPA filters is a blueprint for disaster. * Physicist Matthew McKinzie testified that using the United States' military's Hazard Prediction and Assessment Capability (HPAC) computer model, a foreseeable accident at the Lawrence Laboratory, resulting in the release of about 2 teaspoons of dry anthrax spores, would result in the deaths of thousands of nearby residents. From October through March, when prevailing winds often move from the east, up to 240,000 people would be exposed to a potentially deadly dose of anthrax, resulting in nearly 5,000 deaths. At times when the easterly winds reach 9 miles per hour, over one-half million people would be exposed to potentially deadly dosages, resulting in more than 10,000 fatalities in the San Francisco Bay Area. Yet, DOE claims that its proposed bio-warfare laboratory would pose no risk to human health and safety. * Urban Planner Terrell Watt testified that rapid urban growth will continue both in the San Francisco Bay Region and in the vicinity of Livermore. She testified that within 20 years, the population within 50 miles of the Livermore Lab would exceed 10 million people. Ms. Watt concluded that because of the heavy traffic on Highway 580, which is very close to the Livermore Lab, "[a]n accidental release of pathogens from [the Livermore Lab] when the prevailing winds are from the south or east could expose tens of thousands of people driving on Highway 580 to potentially lethal dosages" and that "[t]hese drivers and their passengers would effectively disperse these pathogens throughout the San Francisco Bay Area within minutes." Yet none of the accidental scenarios that DOE examined ever addressed the potential exposure to Bay Area residents traveling on Highway 580. Marylia Kelley, Executive Director of Tri-Valley CAREs, was pleased with the ruling: "We brought this lawsuit because DOE's planned bio-warfare agent facility endangers Livermore Lab workers and the 7 million people who live in the Bay Area. We are gratified with Judge Armstrong's ruling to allow our experts' testimony, which documents the serious threat to public health posed by this facility. We believe we have a strong case, and we fully expect to win it." "We are elated that the Judge has rejected DOE's challenges to this crucial testimony, on which she will now base her decision," said Nuclear Watch of New Mexico Director Jay Coghlan. "DOE must now explain to the Court why it shouldn't withdraw its decision to operate the Livermore biolab just like this lawsuit has already compelled it to withdraw the Los Alamos biolab." "We are pleased that Judge Armstrong has rejected the Department of Justice's attempt to muzzle our witnesses and prevent the Court from hearing the truth," commented plaintiffs' lead attorney Stephan Volker of Oakland, California. "Both the Court and the public are entitled to know that this bio-warfare agent lab could become a magnet for terrorist attacks, exposing the entire Bay Area to potential contamination," added Mr. Volker. "DOE's attempt to silence our witnesses ignores the lessons that we should have learned from 9/11," Volker stated. "Now that the Court has a full and fair record, we expect the Court will order DOE to halt this ill-advised bio-warfare research program until its grave risks to public safety are fully aired and considered," Volker added. For further information, please call Tri-Valley CAREs at (925) 443-7148 or Nuclear Watch of New Mexico at (505) 989-7342. Or, visit their websites at www.trivalleycares.org and www.nukewatch.org. Copies of Judge Armstrong=s Order and the testimony in question are available in PDF format from the above-listed offices. --30-- Marylia Kelley Executive Director Tri-Valley CAREs (Communities Against a Radioactive Environment) 2582 Old First Street Livermore, CA USA 94551 - is our web site address. Please visit us there! (925) 443-7148 - is our phone (925) 443-0177 - is our fax _______________________________________________________________________ Subscribe/Unsubscribe Here: http://www.energyjustice.net/nukenet/ Change your settings at: http://energyjustice.net/mailman/listinfo/nukenet_energyjustice.net ***************************************************************** 47 Tri-City Herald: Testimony scorns DOE changes to contracts This story was published Wednesday, May 19th, 2004 By Les Blumenthal Herald Washington, D.C., bureau WASHINGTON -- Major changes in the Department of Energy's small-business contracting system would be a mistake that would have far-reaching consequences, a Senate committee was told Tuesday. Until recently, prime contractors traditionally have taken the lead in ensuring that small businesses receive some of the work at the department's nuclear sites and laboratories, as required by federal law. But a ruling by the White House budget office that the department instead needs to contract directly with small businesses has raised questions about that practice and created concerns about possible problems at DOE sites such as Hanford. "Breaking up large prime contracts has unintended consequences that negatively impact local communities, decreases management accountability, increases potential costs and potentially impacts safety and security at DOE sites," said Richland City Councilman Robert Thompson, chairman of the Energy Communities Alliance, which represents communities adjacent to DOE sites. Thompson's comments came even as some in the Tri-Cities have suggested that a $4 billion contract for cleanup work along the Columbia River at Hanford should be broken up into a handful of jobs in the $300 million to $500 million range so smaller businesses can bid. But Thompson, in testifying before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said changes are unnecessary. He added that the current system has actually protected local businesses from outside competition when it came to work at Hanford. "DOE's past small business contracting system worked," Thompson said. "The concept of contracting highly technical, complicated large projects to small businesses that may not have the work force or expertise unless they partner with large contractors is not sensible or efficient." Both the committee chairman, Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., and ranking Democratic Sen. Jeff Bingaman, also of New Mexico, said that even though on the surface it would appear the department is being asked to simply change its accounting practices, it is actually more complicated. "This seemingly simple change in accounting has had serious effects," Domenici said. Bingaman said he didn't think it would be "wise" to break up the prime contracts because the department would be swamped with additional oversight responsibilities. The department awards more than $19 billion in prime contracts every year. About 85 percent of that total, or about $16 billion, goes to large facility management contractors, said Kyle McSlarrow, deputy secretary of energy. McSlarrow said about half of the subcontracts awarded by the large-site contractors go to small businesses, or about $800 million annually. Until 1999, DOE was granted an exception to a law that requires government agencies to award 23 percent of their contracts to small businesses. DOE actually has been able to reach the 23 percent level, but only because it was allowed to count the subcontracts its large-site contractors award to small businesses in its total. Without counting those subcontracts, the department actually awards slightly more than 4 percent of its contract funds to small businesses. Under questioning from Domenici and Bingaman, McSlarrow said it might be difficult for the department to reach the 23 percent target on its own. He said some of the large contracts would have to be broken into smaller pieces if DOE was to comply. A new report from Congress' investigative arm, the General Accounting Office, concluded the department would have to increase the number of contracts it has with small businesses sixfold to reach the 23 percent level on its own. GAO said increasing the contracts with small businesses would result in more competition and potentially some savings. But GAO also said the risks include having more contracts to administer and more contractors at sites where safety and security is a top consideration. Operators of DOE's national laboratories also are concerned that some of their management contracts may have to be broken up to boost work for small businesses. The new policy has the potential to "weaken or even destroy" the government-owned, contractor-operated system that the department and its predecessors have used for more than 50 years, said Joan Woodard, deputy director of New Mexico-based Sandia National Laboratories. © 2004 Tri-City Herald, Associated Press &Other Wire Services ***************************************************************** 48 Tennessean: 2 hazardous materials accidents spark probes - Thursday, 05/20/04 tennessean.com Associated Press OAK RIDGE — The Energy Department has started formal investigations into two hazardous materials accidents at its Oak Ridge operations in the past two weeks, the agency said Tuesday. The probes were launched because of the ''potential for harm'' to the public and because the cost to clean them up will exceed a regulatory threshold of more than $1 million, DOE-Oak Ridge spokes-man Steven Wyatt said. The investigations, which could take a month, will determine what caused the accidents and all aspects of emergency response. Wyatt said DOE already was reviewing a May 8 chemical fire near the former K-25 uranium enrichment plant that forced the closure of state Highway 58 and the evacuation of residents for about 24 hours. The agency decided Tuesday also to conduct a formal investigation of last weekend's radiation leak from a truck hauling waste to a nearby landfill that closed a portion of state Highway 95. John Owsley, the state's environmental oversight chief in Oak Ridge, said he thinks the public is being protected and that emergency response in both recent cases was effective. But the state wants to know if federal pressure to quicken the cleanup of DOE's Oak Ridge Reservation, which has been dealing with hazardous and nuclear material since World War II, is a factor. ''The fact that DOE and its contractors are attempting to accelerate the amount of work they can do in a particular amount of time is a concern to us,'' Owsley said. ''We intend to follow up on that. We don't know that's what caused the problem, but we intend to make sure that it didn't or, if it did, to ensure that it does not occur again.'' Gerald Boyd, DOE's Oak Ridge chief, said he didn't know the root cause of the chemical fire, which involved the processing of sodium metal, or of the leaking radioactive waste. ''I think both of them could have been prevented, quite frankly,'' Boyd said. He did not blame the agency's overall cleanup plan or rising pressure for contractors to cut costs and meet deadlines. ''I guarantee you I'm working very hard to try to determine the causes of these incidents, but I would not equate them with accelerated cleanup,'' he said. ''I don't think it's the cause.'' Paul Clay, manager for DOE's cleanup contractor Bechtel Jacobs Co., also doubts that tighter schedules were to blame. He said safety had improved since the accelerated cleanup plan began. DOE changed strategy last year and shortened the cleanup schedule, promising it would save millions of dollars and reduce long-term risks to the public and workers. Several Oak Ridge projects are now slated to be finished by late 2008. Susan Gawarecki, staff director of the Local Oversight Committee, which represents local governments on environmental issues, said rushing the cleanup could pose problems. ''If you're going to ask people to do more with less resources, then they're going to cut corners somewhere,'' Gawarecki said. ''These recent incidents may be sheer bad luck and coincidence, but ultimately, when you're pushing hard, you're going to find engineering failures.'' Oak Ridge Mayor David Bradshaw in a letter Monday urged DOE not to let current issues derail the aggressive cleanup program. TOP | HOME [http://www.tennessean.com/] | LOCAL NEWS © Copyright 2004 The Tennessean A Gannett Co. ***************************************************************** 49 DAILY BRUIN: UC poll shows faculty favor lab bids [http://www.dailybruin.ucla.edu/] Thursday, May 20, 2004 Moving to compete for Los Alamos, Livermore still controversial By Adam Foxman DAILY BRUIN STAFF afoxman@media.ucla.edu SAN FRANCISCO — Faculty members of the University of California voted nearly three to one in an electronic poll that the UC should bid to keep stewardship of the Department of Energy Labs when bidding begins later this year. The two-week long survey was intended to determine what UC faculty members thought about the university competing for management of labs which are involved in nuclear weapons research. Of 3,300 faculty members who responded to the survey, 67 percent said the UC should compete to keep the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore labs when they go up for bid later this year. The Lawrence Berkeley lab, which will be up for bid this summer, was not part of the survey, since it does not do classified research or deal with nuclear weapons and is therefore not as controversial. In November 2004, a committee of the House and Senate determined that any contracts that have been held uncontested for more than 50 years, which include all three of the the university's lab contracts, will be put up for bid. If the UC decides to bid for the labs, it will likely face stiff competition from other universities and private companies. The UC's survey, which included links to informational materials and videos of town hall meetings, also found that 75 percent of faculty members think it is inappropriate for the UC to be associated with the manufacturing of nuclear weapons. Currently, some plutonium pits, which are used in nuclear weapons, are manufactured at Los Alamos. Despite the strong support from faculty, the UC will still face controversy if it decides to bid. The public comment period at Wednesday's regents meeting was a reminder of the controversial nature of the labs. Although the regents were slated to address student fee increases – a traditionally hot topic – many of the speakers in the extended comment period spoke about the labs. Jonathan Chao, a doctoral student in political science at UC Berkeley, criticized the UC for participating in nuclear weapons research that contributed to the development of "bunker busters and mini nukes." Retired Admiral Robert Foley, vice president for laboratory management, said the number of faculty in favor of bidding for the labs are a good foundation for preparing to bid for the labs. He said it is important that the UC prepare to vote now, because once the Request for Proposals come out, which will likely be next fall for Los Alamos and Livermore, the UC will only have about 45 days to respond. The survey showed virtually no statically significant difference between the professors based on gender or specialty. Faculty who voted in favor of bidding for the labs often cited the quality of non-classified research done at the labs – such as the human genome project – and the value of collaboration between UC faculty and other scientists at the labs as reasons to bid for them. Of the faculty who opposed bidding on the labs, 80 percent said the mission of the labs was essentially different from that of the UC, and 50 percent felt the UC's image has suffered from association with the recent administrative scandals at Los Alamos and Livermore. Such administrative scandals, which occurred last year, included the misappropriation of funds and misplacing equipment. Contact Us Email News at news@
media.ucla.edu [news@media.ucla.edu] for questions or concerns about this ***************************************************************** 50 Oak Ridger: NASA official talks tech summit, space Story last updated at 12:15 p.m. on May 20, 2004 OFFICIAL: For quite some time, Tennessee has played an integral role in NASA's mission. By: Paul Parson | Oak Ridger Staff paul.parson@oakridger.com [paul.parson@oakridger.com] The director of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center spoke Wednesday to local officials about his organization's mission and the help it has received from the state of Tennessee. David King, the NASA official, also voiced support for the upcoming Knoxville/Oak Ridge Technology Summit during his talk before key leaders of the East Tennessee Economic Council at the University of Tennessee Outreach Center in Oak Ridge. King said he plans to attend the event that runs from May 31 to June 2, with portions of the program taking place at the Knoxville Convention Center and Oak Ridge Associated Universities. Marie Moffitt/Staff David King voiced support for the upcoming Knoxville/Oak Ridge Technology Summit during his talk before key leaders of the East Tennessee Economic Council at the University of Tennessee Outreach Center in Oak Ridge. 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 quite some time, Tennessee has played an integral role in NASA's mission, according to King. NASA has contractors located in Nashville, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Oak Ridge and several other cities. Locally, for example, Information International Associates Inc. has a contract to provide technical services in support of the Wallops Island and Greenbelt libraries. The local Department of Energy-related facilities also have ties to NASA, with projects ranging from the lock boxes used to collect moon rocks on the Apollo 11 mission to more current efforts like the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter - a plan to fly a spacecraft out to Jupiter. As for the future of NASA, King addressed the new vision for NASA that has been outlined by President Bush. This includes finishing the International Space Station by 2010. According to King, other priorities include the development of a new manned exploration vehicle, called the Crew Exploration Vehicle, by 2008 and returning to the moon by 2020 as a launching point for missions beyond. For more information about NASA, go to www.nasa.gov [http://www.nasa.gov] . To find out more about the Knoxville/Oak Ridge Technology Summit, visit www.tennvalleycorridor.org [http://www.tennvalleycorridor.org] or call (865) 637-0251. ***************************************************************** 51 lamonitor.com: Senate debates LAPS bill The Online News Source for Los Alamos [http://www.lanl.gov/worldview] [http://www.lac-nm.us] CAROL A. CLARK, lanews@lamonitor.com, Monitor Staff Writer The Senate took up a defense policy bill Monday, which includes a provision by Sen. Pete Domenici authorizing continued Energy Department Funding for Los Alamos Public Schools. "We are hopeful that this provision will pass," School Board President Michael Schick said. "We also are working on our own funding and part of that challenge is to supplement the erosionary effects inflation has on that $8 million each year." The district has been receiving $8 million each year and Schick estimates that inflation probably drops that number by about $200,000 annually. The language authorizing the continued funding is included in the FY2005 Defense Authorization Bill, which the Senate is debating, according to a press release Friday. The directive was included in the legislation by the Senate Armed Services Committee at Domenici's request. The Domenici language directs the DOE to modify the management and operating contract for Los Alamos National Laboratory to provide $8 million annually to LAPS. "The capacity for the Los Alamos Schools to provide a good education has been an important factor in LANL's ability to attract and retain top-notch scientists to the lab," Domenici said in the press release. "This provision makes it clear that we don't want there to be any question that the Energy Department should provide this aid." "This DOE funding is critical to maintaining the quality programs and opportunities that are available to our students throughout the district," LAHS Principal Lynne Saccaro said. "This is especially important to our high school students who we will be sending out to the military, the workforce and to further educational institutions." Domenici is chairman of the Senate Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee that funds DOE and the national laboratories. His subcommittee will soon gear up for development of the FY2005 Energy and Water Appropriations Bill, which would include the actual DOE and Los Alamos related funding outlined in FY2005 defense policy bill. Domenici pointed out that the bill maintains President Bush's authorization request for $30 million in new plant projects for LANL. These include $20 million for security perimeter improvements and $10 million for power grid infrastructure upgrades. The funding for the schools was not included in the DOE budget requests submitted to Congress in February. The Senate is expected to complete debate and pass the FY2005 Defense Authorization Bill by the end of the week, Domenici said. © 2003 Los Alamos Monitor All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 52 lamonitor.com: Groups disagree on bid procedure [http://www.lac-nm.us] MONITOR STAFF REPORT The National Research Council suggests management contracts for Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories be bid at the same time, but that one contractor does not necessarily have to manage both. 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 bidders to participate. "What's clear in this report is that the National Research Council agrees that one of the most critical questions in all this is how to protect the quality of the science," Jim Fallin, LANL public affairs director said. "We have to make sure that the criteria and the process do not compromise the quality of the science done at these laboratories," he said. LANL Director G. Peter Nanos and other officials at both labs have argued that splitting their management would hurt cooperation and coordination. The University of California currently manages both labs under a contract that expires next year. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham announced last year that management contracts for the labs would go to competitive bids for the first time after management problems arose. 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 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. He doesn't think it gives an inherent advantage to any particular contractor or to any particular type of contractor. © 2003 Los Alamos Monitor All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 53 Tri-Valley Herald: UC faculty backs weapons labs 5/20/2004 Professors vote to support operating Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore facilities By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER By more than three to one, University of California faculty have voted in favor of keeping the nation's largest public university at the helm of two federal labs that design all U.S. nuclear explosives. In the second such vote in less than a decade, a majority of professors on all 10 campuses reaffirmed support for continuing UC's more than 60 years operating Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national labs, which invented and maintain thermonuclear devices at the heart of every bomb and warhead in the U.S. arsenal. Leaders of the Academic Senate reported Wednesday to the university's Board of Regents that 67 percent of faculty voted in favor of UC bidding to keep operating the two labs, with 21 percent opposed and the remainder undecided. It is the strongest faculty support to date on UC's weapons lab work and removes one of the final political obstacles to continuing that work, if university regents decide to bid. Several regents signalled that they still want a broad debate on the lab bids. The U.S. Department of Energy is expected to list its draft demands of potential lab managers in early summer, with a formal request for bids in late fall or early winter. Bidders will have only 45-60 days to apply. The faculty vote capped decades of vacillation and debate over whether the largely classified job of inventing weapons of mass destruction is in keeping with university traditions of academic freedom and open dissemination of information. "This very clear result is something which very few of us expected," said Regent Peter Preuss, chairman of a regent's committee overseeing the labs. The clash of secret, military and open, academic cultures -- coupled with the Reagan administration pursuit of new nuclear arms and "Star Wars" missile defenses -- turned UC faculty sharply against operation of the weapons labs in 1990, when 64 percent voted against continued lab management. But Bush administration policies calling for new and modified nuclear weapons designs and for contingency attack plans against rogue nations appeared to have figured very little in the electronic polling of UC faculty. George Blumenthal, a UC-Santa Cruz astrophysics professor who analyzed the polling results, said faculty favoring the bids saw the weapons labs mostly as opportunities for joint research and havens for high-quality, unclassified science. Faculty were wary, however, of the shift toward weapons production at Los Alamos, which has inherited the tools, engineers and assignment to make plutonium fission cores or "pits" from the defunct Rocky Flats plant outside Boulder, Colo. Livermore also plans to start exploring robotic manufacturing for plutonium pits. "An overwhelming majority of faculty are not in favor of UC overseeing manufacturing at these laboratories," Blumenthal told the regents. Taking each lab separately, only 1 percent of faculty favored bidding for Los Alamos alone, and 9 percent wanted to bid for Livermore alone, though the Livermore-only vote was higher -- 13 percent -- among UC's northern campuses. MIT cultural anthropologist Hugh Gusterson has studied UC and its weapons scientists for two books. "In 1990, they were reacting against Reagan's nuclear policy and the end of the Cold War, and now they see the labs as this treasure trove that they get access to," Gusterson said. The vote seemed to reflect both a new vision of the weapons labs as key players in the technological war on terrorism, as well as a common trend in research universities toward finding new sources of research funding, he said. "Post-9/11, in the war on terror, people tend to value a lot more of the work done in these labs. But the primary motive seems to be UC researchers wanting access to funding and technology at the labs and access to collaboration," Gusterson said. Faculty did suggest that UC, with its strong insistence on external peer review of science and technology at the labs, was better able to run them than private contractors and other universities that are eyeing lab bids. But it was unclear to regents that UC as lab manager would have major influence over national nuclear policy calling for new weapons and testing. "Do we have the chance to say that's a piece of this thing we don't want to do?" asked Regent Richard Blum, whose wife, Dianne Feinstein, has led Senate Democrats in opposition to the Bush administration's new weapons research. "It is not the role of the national laboratories to make public policy," said UC vice president for lab management Robert Foley. "On the other hand," said UC president Robert Dynes, "having a lot of experience and presence in this area, having a lot of knowledge, can put you in a position where your association with the labs puts you in a policy-making position." Tri-Valley Herald All Rights Reserved ***************************************************************** 54 Paducah Sun: PACRO eyes lab, electrical concerns Paducah, Kentucky [http://www.paducahsun.com/] Thursday, May 20, 2004;Paducah, Kentucky By Joe Walker jwalker@paducahsun.com--270.575.8650 The group says closing the gaseous diffusion plant may hurt the region's power grid, and a 100-job lab could be useful past 2010. An economic development group wants the federal government to determine if the regional power grid will be hurt when Paducah's uranium enrichment plant closes around 2010, idling switchyards that carry enough electricity to run a major city. Members of the Paducah Area Community Reuse Organization also think the Department of Energy and plant operator USEC Inc. should not close a 100-job laboratory when the plant shuts down. The plant lab could be used to perform tests for Energy Department facilities nationwide, and for a gas centrifuge plant in Piketon, Ohio, that will replace the Paducah plant, PACRO officials say. Concerns were raised Wednesday in PACRO reuse and finance committee meetings that two of the plant's four huge switchyards route considerable power from the nearby Shawnee Fossil Plant as well as in southern Illinois. The plant receives electricity both from Shawnee, a part of the Tennessee Valley Authority system, and Electric Energy Inc. in Joppa, Ill. "This is a revelation to some of us, and we think it is not well understood," said Henry Hodges, reuse committee chairman. "I think we're going to have to ask DOE and USEC to take a look at what's there and how it impacts the community." PACRO members want to include the switchyard and lab issues in a master plan of how to create other industrial uses for the plant to offset the loss of its 1,300 jobs. Other developments discussed in the meetings: The Coca-Cola Bottling Co. has targeted Tuesday to close its $434,000 purchase of a spec building and 10 acres in Industrial Park West off Olivet Church Road. The building was financed by the Greater Paducah Economic Development Council through a $704,834 low-interest loan through PACRO. The city and county contributed equal amounts to make up the difference in the purchase price and the loan amount. The site will be a regional distribution center for Coke, which is merging Paducah and Hopkinsville shipping operations, preserving 117 jobs. The move, expected to be finished in October, will mean vacating the old Coke plant at 3141 Broadway. Coca-Cola officials say they will sell the historic building only with an agreement that it and its Coke memorabilia be protected. Initial tests are promising that contaminated scrap nickel at the plant can be sufficiently cleaned for commercial reuse. Further testing this summer will determine if the metal can be decontaminated to the level of commercial nickel, which has some natural radiation. PACRO hopes to create jobs through recycling 9,700 tons of nickel, whose value has been estimated at $8 million to $10 million. After lengthy delays, abandoned fluorine cells will be moved out of the plant this summer. PACRO has an agreement with Los Angeles-based ToxCo to recycle the cells, creating 10 jobs and saving the Energy Department about $2.5 million in cleanup costs. [http://www.paducahsun.com/cgi-bin/mailto.cgi?/200405/20+0jhy_bus iness.html+20040520] All staff photographs are available for purchase. Please call 270-575-8682 or 270-575-8683. * Using this feature as a means to send unwanted emails (SPAM) to people is not permitted. Online subscriptions will be cancelled if this service is misused. 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See all stories on this topic: INDIA News > Nuclear button to pass on to new government New Kerala - Ernakulam,Kerala,India With the proverbial nuclear button all set to be handed over to India's new government, experts say one of its priorities, even perhaps before a new cabinet is ... See all stories on this topic: US probes Russia over nuclear cooperation with Iran Channel News Asia - Singapore MOSCOW : The United States made another attempt to understand the true state of Russia's nuclear cooperation with Iran as the top US secretary for arms control ... See all stories on this topic: NEVADA Nuclear tests might resume Salt Lake City Deseret News - Salt Lake City,UT,USA New projects planned for the Nevada Test Site are raising concern that nuclear bomb testing may resume there. ... All nuclear-explosion tests were halted in 1992. ... See all stories on this topic: NUCLEAR-WASTE talks being held in private Seattle Post Intelligencer - Seattle,WA,USA The US Department of Energy wants to haul radioactive debris from nuclear-cleanup projects nationwide for permanent and temporary disposal at the Hanford ... See all stories on this topic: NUCLEAR programme non-negotiable: Jamali PakTribune.com - Pakistan ISLAMABAD, May 20 (Online): Prime Minister Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali has declared in categorical terms that Pakistan’s nuclear programme, being the ... PAKISTAN reiterates non-negotiable position on nuclear program Xinhua - China ISLAMABAD, May 20 (Xinhuanet) -- Pakistani Prime Minister Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali Thursday declared that Pakistan's nuclear program is non-negotiable and ... See all stories on this topic: NORTH Korea Requested Nuclear Reactor, State Department Says Bloomberg - USA May 20 (Bloomberg) -- North Korea requested a light-water nuclear reactor as part of its proposed settlement of the standoff over its nuclear program, the US ... See all stories on this topic: US Expresses Continued Concern about Russia's Nuclear Aid to Iran Voice of America - Washington,DC,USA US arms control envoy John Bolton has expressed continued American concern about Russia's nuclear aid to Iran. Mr. Bolton made the ... NUCLEAR option for nesting birds BBC News - London,England,UK A colony of sea birds has turned its back on Suffolk's clifftops to nest at the county's nuclear power plant. Kittiwakes, small ... This daily-once News Alert is brought to you by Google News (BETA)... - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Remove this News Alert: http://www.google.com/newsalerts/remove?s=92d1672a1b037a07&hl=en Create another News Alert: http://www.google.com/newsalerts?hl=en Try Google News: http://news.google.com/ ***************************************************************** 56 EMS: After the Fighting Stops, How Do We Heal the Earth’s Battle Scars? Releases &advisories: [Environmental Media Services - Washington, DC] [http://www.ems.org/index.html] Thursday, 20 May 2004 Source: Wilson Center's Environmental Change &Security Project Posted by: Woodrow Wilson Center [http://www.wilsoncenter.org/ecsp] - archive [http://www.ems.org/rls/authors.php?author=woodrow_wilson_center] Pekka Haavisto Discusses UNEP's Post-Conflict Environmental Assessments at the Wilson Center War can devastate the environment, leaving a dirty legacy that threatens survival even after the fighting ends. Deforested land, polluted water, poisonous weapons, and other environmental problems can prevent a nation from recovering from conflict and its citizens from rebuilding healthy, sustainable livelihoods. Whether from "scorched earth" bombing or floods of refugees, a degraded environment threatens not only the survivors' wellbeing but also long-term strategies for development. Since 2001, the United Nations Environmental Program's (UNEP) Post-Conflict Assessment Unit has investigated some of the world's most war-torn environments: Afghanistan, Liberia, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, Albania, Serbia and Montenegro, and Macedonia. In Iraq, UNEP found serious environmental problems that require immediate attention, including looting of sites holding nuclear and toxic materials, environmental contamination exacerbated by military actions, and the ongoing destruction of the Mesopotamian Marshlands. In the Balkans, UNEP assessed pollution "hotspots" at bombed or abandoned industrial sites, the impact of air strikes on biodiversity, and contamination by depleted uranium. Join us as Pekka Haavisto, the former Minister of Environment and Development Cooperation for Finland, discusses how UNEP and its partners integrate environmental issues into recovery and rehabilitation to promote cooperation, good governance, and sustainable development in the aftermath of war. **This meeting will be webcast live at www.wilsoncenter.org/ecsp [http://www.wilsoncenter.org/ecsp] .** What: "UNEP Post-Conflict Assessments: A New Tool for Improving the Environment in Post-Conflict Countries" Who: Pekka Haavisto, Chairman, Post-Conflict Assessment Unit United Nations Environment Programme When: May 25, 2004, 12:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. Where: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 6th Floor Flom Auditorium. The Wilson Center is located in the Ronald Reagan Building at 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue. The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars is the living, national memorial to President Wilson established by Congress in 1968 and headquartered in Washington, D.C. The Center establishes and maintains a neutral forum for free, open, and informed dialogue. It is a nonpartisan institution, supported by public and private funds and engaged in the study of national and world affairs. Media planning to cover the event should contact Sharon McCarter at mccarters@wwic.si.edu or (202) 691-4016. [http://www.ems.org/rls_help/rls_update.html] Environmental Media Services 1320 18th Street NW 5th Floor Washington, DC 20036 (202) 463-6670 Website comments: Copyright © 2003 Environmental Media Services ***************************************************************** NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: *****************************************************************