*****************************************************************
06/24/04 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 12.150
*****************************************************************
RADBULL IS PRODUCED BY THE ABALONE ALLIANCE CLEARINGHOUSE
*****************************************************************
Send News Stories to news@energy-net.org with title on subject
line and first line of body
NUCLEAR POLICY
1 AFP: Japan offers energy aid to a nuclear-free North Korea
2 Las Vegas SUN: N. Korea Considers Freezing Nuke Program
3 washington post: U.S. Revises Proposal at North Korea Nuclear Talks
4 ABCNEWS.com: N. Korea Threatens to Test Nuclear Weapon
5 Xinhuanet: 6 parties raise proposals to solve nuke issue
6 Xinhuanet: Japan, DPRK agree on importance of peace settlement of nu
7 US: 11/3 of WMD report kept secret! tvnl
8 [DU-WATCH] Bunker busters explodes with a green flash ...
9 US: NRDC: Supreme Court Takes Pass on Task Force Secrecy
10 US: Las Vegas SUN: Excerpts From Cheney Ruling
11 US: Las Vegas SUN: Court Won't Order Cheney Papers Released
12 US: Salt Lake Tribune: Victims can testify at SLC hearing
13 US: Salt Lake Tribune: Administration tells Bennett it isn't plannin
14 US: Las Vegas RJ: Test site's new toolstarts job Monday
15 US: New York Times: Senate Passes $447 Billion Pentagon Package
16 US: BBC: Cheney papers to be kept secret
17 US: Washington Post: Senate Passes $447 Billion Defense Bill
18 US: Washington Post: High Court Backs Vice President
19 US: WGA: Proposed Policy Resolutions for Consideration at the 2004 W
20 US: Western Governors' Association: Key Issues
21 US: Public Citizen: Attorney General’s Reclassification of
22 [NukeNet] Man Who Saved the World Is Honored By Senate
23 Reuters: Syria may have shopped on nuke black market - sources
24 The Australian: Australia in Russian sub deal
25 Washington Post: A Critical Nuclear Moment
26 Hi Pakistan: Nuclear CBMs: good, not good enough -
27 Hi Pakistan: Nuclear CBM talks termed positive -->
28 ITAR-TASS: Putin calls far eastern fleet a key element in Russia's s
NUCLEAR REACTORS
29 US: NRC: NRC to Discuss Performance of Grand Gulf on July 22
30 US: NRC: NRC to Discuss Performance of Comanche Peak July 15
31 US: NRC: NRC to Discuss Performance of Columbia Generating Station J
32 US: NRC: NRC Proposes $7,500 Fine Against Connecticut Company
33 US: Brattleboro Reformer: Flames fanned (VY)
34 US: NRC: Notice of Availability of 2004-09; Regulatory Issue Summary
35 US: NRC: Nuclear Management Company, LLC; Notice of Withdrawal of
36 US: projo.com: Officials: Nuclear plant warning system has problems
37 US: Brattleboro Reformer: Letters: Entergy can't be trusted
38 Bellona: Russian Federal Atomic Energy Agency to “deal
39 Bellona: EU is freezing 100m euros of aid to Armenia after
40 Bellona: Unit 1 at Leningrad NPP to be launched August 1
41 US: APP.COM - Oyster Creek: The Recent Record
42 US: Rutland Herald: Yankee emergency warning system faulted
43 US: APP.COM - Part 1: On balance, it's not worth the risk
44 US: TheChamplainChannel: Vermont Yankee To Remain Off-Line Indefinit
45 US: Valley Advocate: No Hearings on Nukes
46 US: APP.COM - Part 2: Will the lights stay on without it?
47 US: APP.COM - Oyster Creek: Time to Retire
48 US: APP.COM - Part 3: Are the safety margins wide enough?
49 US: APP.COM - Part 4: Terrorist target on reactor's back
50 US: APP.COM - Part 5: What would a meltdown look like?
NUCLEAR SAFETY
51 US: [RADFOOD] Good Irrad. Articles and Action Alert
52 [DU-WATCH] WHO stealing from Iraq ... profiting form DU
53 [DU-WATCH] DU and recycling in Japan
54 [DU-WATCH] Uranium contamination in Iraqi scrap metal to Jordan
55 [DU-WATCH] History lesson - Iraq
56 [DU-WATCH] Independent Inquiry into gulf war illness
57 Prague Post: State plans end to radon-detection efforts
58 Whitehaven News: PASSPORT PLAN FOR N-WORKERS
NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE
59 NEWS.com.au: Premier warns Canberra over nuclear dump
60 NEWS.com.au: Court throws out land grab for nuke dump
61 NEWS.com.au: Court scuttles nuclear dump plan
62 Las Vegas RJ: Yucca deadline missed
63 Las Vegas SUN: Bill advances to change way Yucca funds can be obtain
64 Las Vegas SUN: Missed deadline for documents may not delay Yucca sch
65 US: Princeton and Central New Jersey: Contaminated soil removal comp
66 AU ABC: Federal Court says no to nuclear waste dump in SA
67 AU ABC: Govt to appeal court on nuclear dump plans
68 AU ABC: Dump ruling undermines nuclear reactor plans - ACF.
69 AU ABC: Govt still interested in waste dump site park plan.
70 Whitehaven News: MOST COPELAND JOBS SAFE IN WAKE OF RESTRUCTURING...
NUCLEAR WEAPONS
US DEPT. OF ENERGY
71 Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Hanford waste dumping will be scaled bac
72 Seattle Times: DOE curtails radioactive waste to be shipped to Hanfo
73 Tri-City Herald: Cleaning up, moving out
74 chillicothe gazette: License for Piketon plant essential for breakin
75 Idaho Statesman: INEEL does tests on hybrid cars
76 Oak Ridger: Geologists to meet in Oak Ridge
77 lamonitor.com: Defense bill passes with good news for Los Alamos
78 lamonitor.com: LANL tapped for propulsion study
OTHER NUCLEAR
79 Google News Alert - nuclear
80 U.S. Newswire: Arizona, Nevada and California Cities Show Fastest
*****************************************************************
*****************************************************************
FULL NEWS STORIES
*****************************************************************
*****************************************************************
1 AFP: Japan offers energy aid to a nuclear-free North Korea
[http://www.spacewar.com/]
BEIJING (AFP) Jun 24, 2004
Japan offered Thursday to match international offers of energy
aid to tempt North Korea to give up its nuclear ambitions,
despite a lingering row over the kidnapping of Japanese by the
Stalinist state.
It was the first time Tokyo announced its readiness to help the
impoverished but heavily armed North with its energy needs if
Pyongyang freezes all its nuclear programmes as a step toward
their abolition.
The pledge was made at the six-nation nuclear crisis talks here,
the day after the United States proposed Pyongyang dismantle its
plutonium and uranium weapons programmes in exchange for heavy
oil.
South Korea, China and Russia, also members of the six-nation
forum, have already been considering extending energy aid in
response to North Korea's demand for "corresponding measures" in
exchange for its nuclear freeze.
The United States will not join the energy aid but offered a
"provisional" guarantee not to invade the North.
Mitoji Yabunaka, the chief Japanese delegate, told the second-day
session of the six-nation talks that three conditions should be
set by North Korea for its nuclear freeze, according to a
statement from the Japanese delegation.
The conditions included that "all nuclear programmes" be covered
by the freeze, that North Korea volunteers information on the
details of nuclear programmes and that the freeze be verified in
"definite" terms.
"Our country is prepared to join international energy assistance
at the six-party talks if North Korea's freeze satisfies such
conditions as strict disclosure of information," Yabunaka said.
He added that the freeze should be limited to a "short period of
time" as the common goal was strict nuclear dismantlement.
Japan's softening stance on energy aid followed Japanese Prime
Minister Junichiro Koizumi's meeting with North Korean leader Kim
Jong-Il in Pyongyang last month.
At his second summit with Koizumi in 20 months, Kim promised to
be more helpful in solving the cases of Japanese kidnapped by
North Korean agents in the 1970s.
The abduction issue, along with the nuclear standoff, has been
stalling talks on normalisation of relations between the two
countries.
At the first Kim-Koizumi meeting in 2002, Japan vowed to help the
North with economic aid after ties were normalised, as a token of
atonement for its colonial rule of the Korean peninsula from 1910
to 1945.
Japan has been insisting that the abduction issue must be cleared
up as a precondition to rapprochement with North Korea.
"Energy assistance is a matter that should be separated from the
agenda of bilateral issues and considered within the six-nation
framework," a Japanese delegate to the talks said.
It marked a departure for Japan which had drummed up the
abduction issue in the two previous rounds of the six-nation
talks in February and in August last year.
In a meeting with Japan on the sidelines of the six-nation talks,
North Korea expressed satisfaction with the Japanese turnaround,
saying that the Japanese side had "demonstrated its attitude
toward solving the nuclear issue," the official said.
WAR.WIRE
*****************************************************************
2 Las Vegas SUN: N. Korea Considers Freezing Nuke Program
By JOE McDONALD ASSOCIATED PRESS
BEIJING (AP) -
North Korea presented a massive demand for energy aid Thursday
at six-nation talks as Washington insisted that the North give
up nuclear weapons development, Japanese news reports said.
The North wants the equivalent of 2 million kilowatts of power
per year in exchange for freezing work on its nuclear program,
the Kyodo News agency reported, citing diplomatic sources on the
second day of talks in the Chinese capital.
It wasn't clear whether Washington would even discuss such a
request, since the United States says the North must commit to
dismantling the program, not just freezing development.
The United States offered its first detailed proposal for ending
the dispute Wednesday, offering the North a step-by-step plan
that would provide energy aid and security guarantees in
exchange for the dismantling of the nuclear program.
Both Japan and South Korea say they would consider giving the
North fuel oil if it freezes its nuclear program as a step
toward its eventual dismantling. The United States says it
wouldn't provide energy assistance under its proposal.
Also Thursday, U.S. and North Korean envoys held a rare
one-on-one meeting at a Chinese government guesthouse, according
to a U.S. Embassy spokeswoman, who spoke on condition of
anonymity. She didn't immediately have any details of the
discussions.
Competing U.S. and North Korean proposals for ending the dispute
dominated the second day of talks, which also include Russia.
"There are considerable differences, but there is common ground
as well," said Cho Tae-yong, a member of the South Korean
delegation. He wouldn't give any details of the proposals.
North Korea was offering to freeze work at its main nuclear
facility at Yongbyon, according to Kyodo. It didn't say whether
that included a commitment sought by Washington to dismantle all
nuclear facilities.
The North's energy request is the equivalent of 2.7 million tons
of fuel oil per year, Kyodo said. It said North Korea is
believed to consume about 8 million kilowatts per year.
U.S. officials said their proposal was meant to break the
impasse in talks, which went through two earlier rounds with no
major progress.
The U.S. proposal would include a three-month preparation
period, in which the North would freeze work on its nuclear
program, submit a list of all nuclear activities and remove key
weapons ingredients.
U.S. officials said it might be several days before North Korea
responded to the "very complex" proposal.
Moscow would be willing to help provide energy aid and security
guarantees, said Russian envoy Alexander Alexeyev, according to
the Russian news agency Itar-Tass. The report didn't say what
conditions Russia might attach to that offer.
North Korea's negotiating partners all say they want an end to
the communist North's nuclear weapons development.
The dispute erupted in late 2002 when Washington said North
Korea admitted operating a secret nuclear program in violation
of a 1994 agreement.
North Korea has agreed in principle to give up its existing
weapons programs. But it denies a U.S. claim that it has a
uranium-based program in addition one based on plutonium that it
has acknowledged.
The U.S. government says the danger posed by the North Koreans
would remain if they dismantled their plutonium program while
leaving intact a uranium-based bomb program.
Washington says any settlement has to include monitoring to
ensure Pyongyang doesn't renege on its promises, and must
include all of the North's nuclear programs.
Ahead of the latest talks, North Korea demanded that Washington
withdraw its call for an "irreversible" dismantling of its
nuclear program, casting doubt on hopes for a breakthrough.
The North Korean envoy, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan, said
Wednesday that Pyongyang was willing to renounce nuclear weapons
in exchange for aid and an end to Washington's "hostile policy."
North Korea has insisted that without a security guarantee from
the United States, it must keep its nuclear program to deter a
possible U.S. attack.
U.S. envoy James Kelly said Wednesday that a resolution of the
dispute would "open the door to a new relationship" between
Washington and Pyongyang.
--
*****************************************************************
3 washington post: U.S. Revises Proposal at North Korea Nuclear Talks
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/]
Fuel Aid, Security Statement Possible During 3-Month Test
By Philip P. Pan and Glenn Kessler Washington Post Foreign
Service Thursday, June 24, 2004; Page A17
BEIJING, June 23 -- The Bush administration presented a more
specific proposal for resolving the North Korean nuclear crisis
Wednesday, offering the North the possibility of energy aid from
South Korea, security assurances and other benefits during a
three-month test period if it promises to disclose and end its
nuclear weapons programs.
U.S. negotiators at talks among six nations -- the United States,
North Korea, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia -- on the
standoff also backed away from hard-line language calling for the
"complete, verifiable and irreversible" dismantling of the
programs. The administration had insisted that the North Korean
government agree to the language in two previous rounds of the
talks but said it was now willing to consider other wording to
describe the same goal.
One senior U.S. official described the proposal as a "repackaging
and elaboration of things we have said before" and said it was
likely to be rejected by the North Koreans. But other U.S.
officials described it as a legitimate effort to flesh out a U.S.
plan for ending the stalemate.
In any case, the proposal represents an attempt by the Bush
administration to address criticism from its allies as well as
domestic critics. The allies complain that the administration has
not been flexible enough in the talks, while critics such as
Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry have described
its strategy as a failure that has allowed North Korea to produce
nuclear materials undisturbed for nearly 20 months.
North Korea's delegation did not immediately respond and
indicated it wanted to confer with superiors in the capital,
Pyongyang. A diplomat at the talks said the Chinese were not
pleased with aspects of the plan, and Russian officials said it
would be impossible for North Korea to accept it.
U.S. officials in Beijing and Washington acknowledged they
drafted the new proposal largely because of pressure from South
Korea and Japan. Both nations, as well as China, the host of the
talks, have been pushing the Bush administration to show more
flexibility and let North Korea demonstrate it is willing to
dismantle its nuclear program. An official in Washington said
"alliance management" was one of the key motivations for making
the proposal.
But a White House official said the proposal also was designed to
gauge North Korean intentions. "It is a test," he said, speaking
on condition of anonymity. "It is a pragmatic and reasonable way
forward."
A senior U.S. official who briefed reporters in Beijing on
condition of not being identified said the plan is "more tangible
and more specific" about what North Korea stands to gain by
abandoning its nuclear programs and "spells out in detail" what
North Korea needs to say in its promise to disarm.
Previously, U.S. officials had privately outlined a three-stage
approach for ending the crisis, placing much of the onus on North
Korea and providing only vague suggestions about what it would
receive in return. The proposal outlined Wednesday includes
stages tied directly to North Korea's performance in dismantling
its nuclear programs, and various elements could be suspended or
slowed if North Korea lagged in one or more areas, officials
said.
Under the plan, South Korea and possibly other countries could
begin providing heavy fuel oil to the North's battered economy
immediately if the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, promises to
dismantle the country's plutonium and uranium arms programs, U.S.
officials said. The idea was floated by South Korea at the last
round of talks and was neither rejected nor endorsed by the
United States.
U.S. officials said this fuel would aid North Korea with its
desperate energy situation and provide an incentive to begin
preparations for dismantling its programs. Once North Korea began
to display and secure its materials and weapons -- and its claims
have been verified by U.S. intelligence -- the United States and
the other nations at the negotiations would issue provisional
security assurances. This formula would effectively say the
countries had "no intention to invade or attack" North Korea. The
United States also would lay the groundwork for a study of North
Korea's non-nuclear energy needs, discussions on lifting economic
sanctions and removing North Korea from a U.S. list of state
sponsors of terrorism.
After Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld protested, President
Bush rejected a State Department proposal to immediately offer
security assurances to North Korea at the same time that fuel
shipments were started by South Korea, said an administration
official familiar with the interagency discussions.
North Korea would be given only three months to halt and disclose
all of its nuclear activities, including a secret uranium
enrichment program that it says does not exist, and to begin
securing and destroying nuclear materials under the supervision
of international monitors, the officials said. Otherwise, these
preliminary benefits would be halted.
North Korea has said it needs nuclear weapons because of Bush's
"hostile policy" and has demanded written security guarantees
from the United States before dismantling its programs.
The proposal does not specify a timetable of benefits that the
North would receive in exchange for specific steps, as North
Korean negotiators have previously demanded.
The Bush administration is retreating from its demand for the
"complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement" of the
North's programs because the phrase "seems to inflame
sensibilities," one official said. Another administration
official said the United States was using slightly softer
language -- asking North Korea to dismantle its programs "in a
permanent, thorough and transparent manner subject to effective
verification" -- because North Korean negotiators declared in a
working-level session last month that the previous wording was
"culturally offensive."
Kessler reported from Washington.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
*****************************************************************
4 ABCNEWS.com: N. Korea Threatens to Test Nuclear Weapon
June 24, 2004
(AP Photo) N. Korea Threatens to Test Nuclear Weapon North
Korea Threatens to Test Nuclear Weapon in Push for U.S. Approval
of Atomic Plan
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON June 24, 2004 — North Korea told the United States on
Thursday that it would test a nuclear weapon unless Washington
accepted Pyongyang's proposal for a freeze on its atomic program,
a senior administration official said.
Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan spoke with Assistant Secretary
of State James A. Kelly in a 2 1/2-hour private discussion in
China, where a six-nation conference is being held on the
long-running impasse over Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions.
The United States has been insisting on complete disarmament by
the communist state and submitted a proposal to the conference on
Wednesday outlining the benefits North Korea could receive if it
complies.
The senior administration official said the North Korean threat
suggested that the Beijing discussions were headed toward
failure. The conference ends on Friday with the issuance of a
communique.
There was no indication of when North Korea might carry out its
reported threat to test. The United States is uncertain as to how
many weapons North Korea possesses, but thinks it has at least
one or two with the potential for several more.
Near the end of their discussion, Kelly told Kim that there was
little trust in Washington for North Korea and that Kim's
statements wouldn't improve matters, the senior official said.
The official declined to be identified because private diplomatic
exchanges are normally kept confidential.
Thursday's discussion with Kim was not the first time that a
North Korean diplomat issued a nuclear test threat. A similar
warning came during a meeting between North Korean diplomat Ri
Gun and Kelly 14 months ago, also in Beijing.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher had no comment on
Kelly's meeting with Kim, except to confirm that it took place.
The United States is demanding the complete, verifiable and
irreversible dismantling of Pyongyang's weapons program.
It has been hopeful that the impoverished country would be
willing to meet the demand in return for a brighter economic
future for its people and broader diplomatic acceptance in the
region and beyond.
During a closed plenary meeting on Thursday, North Korea demanded
massive energy aid in exchange for a nuclear freeze, the Kyodo
news agency of Japan reported, citing diplomatic sources.
The report said Pyongyang asked for 2,000 megawatts of power per
year an estimated one-fourth of its current total consumption. In
the United States, a megawatt can supply power to about 1,000
homes.
Boucher refused comment on the reported proposal.
"The most concrete...and specific proposal on the table is that
made by the United States yesterday with the support of other
governments who were there," Boucher said.
"We look to the North Koreans to study that proposal seriously,"
he said.
Other participants are China, South Korea, Japan and Russia. All
agree with the United States that a denuclearized Korean
peninsula is a worthy goal.
Kim said earlier during the conference that his government has
been developing nuclear weapons for protection from possible U.S.
attack.
"If the United States gives up its hostile policy toward us ...
we are prepared to give up in a transparent way all plans related
to nuclear weapons," he said.
Both Japan and South Korea say they would consider giving the
North fuel oil if it freezes its nuclear program as a step toward
its eventual dismantling.
Russia would be willing to help provide energy aid and security
guarantees, said Russian envoy Alexander Alexeyev, according to
the Russian news agency ITAR-Tass. The report did not say what
conditions Russia might attach to that offer.
photo credit and caption:
The chief delegates to six-party talks on the North Korean
nuclear issue walk towards a meeting room at Beijing's Diaoyutai
State Guesthouse Wednesday June 23, 2004. From left are South
Korean Deputy Foreign Minister Lee Soo-hyuck, Chinese Vice
Foreign Minister Wang Yi, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James
Kelly, North Korean Deputy Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan,
Japanese chief delegate Mitoji Yabunaka, and Russian Ambassador
at Large Alexander Alexeyev. Kim announced at the opening of the
talks that North Korea is willing to give up nuclear weapons "in
a transparent way" if the United States ends its "hostile policy"
toward Pyongyang. (AP Photo/Greg Baker/Pool)
Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This
*****************************************************************
5 Xinhuanet: 6 parties raise proposals to solve nuke issue
www.xinhuanet.com
www.chinaview.cn 2004-06-25 01:36:48
BEIJING, June 24 (Xinhuanet) -- The parties to the third
round of six-party talks all raised proposals when the
negotiations entered the second day to solve the Korean Peninsula
nuclear issue.
In the briefing after the second-day closed-door meeting,
Chinese delegation member Zhang Qiyue said that on Thursday
parties discussed the detailed proposals put forward by the
Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), the United States
and the Republic of Korea (ROK). China, Russia and Japan also put
forward their own solution plans.
Cho Tae-yong, deputy head of the ROK delegation, said the US
delegation voiced its opinions on the program of "freezing for
compensation" set forth by the DPRK delegation and on the ROK
delegation's proposal.
The delegations to the talks held that substantial
consultations should be taken as a starting point to press ahead
toward the solution to the issue, and meanwhile, all relevant
parties have become aware that significant differences remain
between the proposals of the DPRK, the United States and the ROK.
Mitoji Yabunaka, head of the Japanese delegation, said Japan
would participate in the international energy assistance for the
DPRK if the DPRK's nuclear-freezing initiative was confirmed.
Russian delegation head Alexander Alexeyev said the on-going
talks will not go without any result. "Discussions on these
proposals were underway for seeking common platform," he said.
Since the delegations from the DPRK, the United States and
the ROK put forward their proposals Wednesday, neither the DPRK
nor the United States have openly made any comments. Chinese
delegation head Wang Yi said all parties concerned were willing
to treat other counterparts' plans seriously and in a spirit of
looking forward, which embodied mutual respect and equal
consultation.
The ROK side confirmed that the DPRK and the United States
held bilateral consultation Thursday afternoon for more than two
hours,and other bilateral consultations between the ROK and
China, between Japan and the DPRK were also held Thursday
afternoon.
The United States and the ROK revealed separately their
proposals Wednesday evening. The US delegation made a seven-page
proposal to give the DPRK three-month preparatory period for
dismantlement and removal of nuclear facilities, and to require
the DPRK to offer the US side a listing of nuclear activities at
various time. The proposal also set ways to solve the security
concerns of the DPRK.
The ROK delegation proposed detailed plans and corresponding
measures on the abandonment of the nuclear programs. Lee
Soo-Hyuck,the ROK delegation head, said there were no differences
between the US and ROK on the major orientations and principles
on resolving the nuclear issue. The DPRK still did not reveal its
proposal.
"Now the DPRK and the United States are both faced with
opportunities and obstacles," said Wang Yizhou, a researcher on
international relations from the Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences. "The DPRK would be under much pressure if it is
determined not to give up nuclear plan, and the United States
also hopes to win domestic support by achieving something from
the talks."
Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing gave a dinner here
Thursday evening for the six delegations. In his address at the
dinner, Li said this round of talks has a good beginning. Various
parties have set forth new proposals and new ideas, which added
originality to the talks.
However, good things never come easy, Li acknowledged. "We
need to resort to our patience, wisdom and creativity to surmount
obstacles, tide over twists and turns in fulfilling our glorious
mission." Enditem
Copyright ©2003 Xinhua News Agency. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
6 Xinhuanet: Japan, DPRK agree on importance of peace settlement of nuclear
issue
www.xinhuanet.com
www.chinaview.cn 2004-06-24 23:45:23
BEIJING, June 24 (Xinhuanet) -- The delegation heads from
Japan and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) both
agreed that it is "very important" to peacefully settle the
Korean Peninsula nuclear issue through six-party talks, said a
senior official from the Japanese delegation here Thursday.
The Japanese delegation member told press Thursday evening
that during a bilateral consultation lasting about 40 minutes
Thursday afternoon, Japanese delegation head Mitoji Yabunaka and
the DPRK delegation head Kim Kye-gwan exchanged views on the
nuclear issue and the bilateral issues.
The two sides also reiterated the importance of implementing
the Japan-DPRK Pyongyang Declaration as the basis for
settlementof the issues with common concern, he said.
He said Japanese delegation also made contacts with the
delegations from the Republic of Korea, China and the United
States Thursday afternoon.
He also confirmed the news reported by the Kyodo news service
that Japan would participate in the international
energyassistance for the DPRK if the DPRK's nuclear-freezing
initiativewas confirmed. It was the first time for Japan to make
clear the possibility of its energy assistance for the DPRK
during the six-party talks.
According the handouts from the Japanese side, Yabunaka said
atthe six-party talks' plenary session Thursday morning that all
concerned parties made detailed discussion for solving the
nuclear issue, and this was a significant phenomenon.
The concerned parties should show mutual trust and
flexibility,so as to make utmost progress in the six-party talks,
Yabunaka said. Enditem
Copyright ©2003 Xinhua News Agency. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
7 11/3 of WMD report kept secret! tvnl
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2004 01:12:53 -0500 (CDT)
HEADLINES and NEWS LINKS Courtesy of TvNewsLies.org
Dont forget to check out todays smile!
http://tvnewslies.org/html/smile_.html
June-16-04____________________________________________________
CONGRESS - http://www.tvnewslies.org/news/#congress
* Senate Votes to Continue Arms Research
*** CIA Restricts One-Third of U.S. Senate WMD Report
* Byrd lambastes Bush in book
WAR - http://www.tvnewslies.org/news/#war
11/3 of WMD report kept secret! tvnl
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2004 01:12:53 -0500 (CDT)
HEADLINES and NEWS LINKS Courtesy of TvNewsLies.org
Dont forget to check out todays smile!
http://tvnewslies.org/html/smile_.html
June-16-04____________________________________________________
CONGRESS - http://www.tvnewslies.org/news/#congress
* Senate Votes to Continue Arms Research
*** CIA Restricts One-Third of U.S. Senate WMD Report
* Byrd lambastes Bush in book
WAR - http://www.tvnewslies.org/news/#war
* Four Afghans Die in Blast Thought Aimed at NATO
* US Deputy Defence Secretary arrives in Iraq
* Nine killed in west Iraq blast: medic
* GAO report: Possible billions wasted in Iraq because of
a lack of planning and poor oversight
* Iraqi oil security chief killed
* US Army chief: Iraq "cannot be won militarily"
* Poll of Iraqis Reveals Anger Toward U.S.
* Videotape purports to show kidnapped American
* Pipeline sabotage reported in southern Iraq
* Iraqi Insurgents Blow Up Oil Pipelines
* US Army launches 445 million dollar campaign to win
Baghdadis' hearts, minds
* Baghdad convoy attacked by gunmen
* Anti-American sentiment growing among the Kurds
ECONOMY - http://www.tvnewslies.org/news#economy
* Fed Chair: Economy Still Fragile
9/11 - http://www.tvnewslies.org/news#911
* 9/11 Panel Says Iraq Rebuffed Bin Laden
* German Cancels 9/11 Hearing Appearance
DOMESTIC - http://www.tvnewslies.org/news/#domestic
* Uninsured? You're One Of Millions
* Fight against wildfires chronically underfunded
* Hospitals, Eager to Build, May Find Funds Scarcer
* Group pushes for electoral vote switch to
percentage of the statewide popular vote.
ENVIRONMENT - LIFE ON EARTH - http://www.tvnewslies.org/news/#environment
* Pollution shifting rain patterns in Sierra, worldwide
* Million hit by drought in Kenya
* Senior Official Resigns From Energy Dept.
* UN: World Land Turning Into Desert
INTERNATIONAL - http://www.tvnewslies.org/news/#international
* Labor Party Considers Joining Sharon Govt
* Congolese stream into Burundi
* Dozens die in Colombia massacre
* No Christianity in new E.U. Constitution
EDITORIAL - http://www.tvnewslies.org/news/#editorial
* Robert B. Reich, Author of "Reason: Why Liberals
Will Win the Battle for America," on the "Radcons"
JOURNALISM & MEDIA- http://www.tvnewslies.org/news/#media
* Voters Are Harder to Reach As Media Outlets Multiply
* Ark. Hosts Premiere of Bill Clinton Film - 'The
Hunting of the President'
* Business leader quits ABC board over governance concerns
* Thai reporters say bugging press room violates free press
* Attack Said to Blame for Slow Web Sites
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH - http://www.tvnewslies.org/news/#rights
* Aussie lawyer 'urged' Red Cross visits to Iraqi prison
* Bush Policies Led to Abuse in Iraq
OF INTEREST - http://www.tvnewslies.org/news/#interest
* British teen offers virginity on eBay
______________________________________________________________
Please help us fight corporate media deception!
http://tvnewslies.org/html/donate.html
*****************************************************************
8 [DU-WATCH] Bunker busters explodes with a green flash ...
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2004 01:45:59 -0500 (CDT)
Fluorines and their off spring are commonly used in explosives and to
cause conflagration (i.e. the accelerated igniton wave) in metal
powder fuel air explosions. When they burntogether with uranium, they
exhibit the color green. Ask some Iraqi's and Afghan's what colors
they saw when bunker busters and hardened target penetrators acquired
their targets.
http://www.ucc.ie/ucc/depts/chem/dolchem/html/elem/elem009.html
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~-->
Yahoo! Domains - Claim yours for only $14.70
http://us.click.yahoo.com/Z1wmxD/DREIAA/yQLSAA/Sj.0lB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->
[Brought to you by HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK]
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/du-watch/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
du-watch-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
*****************************************************************
9 NRDC: Supreme Court Takes Pass on Task Force Secrecy
[Natural Resources Defense Council]
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Press contact: Sharon Buccino, NRDC, 202-289-2397
If you are not a member of the press, please write to us at
nrdcinfo@nrdc.org [nrdcinfo@nrdc.org] or see our contact page.
WASHINGTON, D.C. (June 24, 2004) - The U.S. Supreme Court today
refused to rule on whether Vice President Cheney must disclose
information about the energy task force to the Sierra Club and
Judicial Watch. The case now goes back to a lower court for
further consideration.
"While not a clear-cut victory or loss for either side, the
Supreme Court dealt a blow to citizens' right-to-know what our
government is doing behind closed doors," said NRDC Senior
Attorney Sharon Buccino. "As a result of the court's decision,
the White House buys more time to keep secrets about Vice
President Cheney's role in crafting a national energy policy that
favors corporate special interests."
The Supreme Court's decision means that both lawsuits over the
Cheney energy task force records now sit before the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The Sierra Club/Judicial Watch case
involves the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) while NRDC's
lawsuit involves the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Oral
argument in the NRDC case is expected in the fall.
Despite the legal saga, NRDC's lawsuit has so far produced more
than 20,000 pages of task force records -- and more are due to be
released next week.
The Natural Resources Defense Council is a national, nonprofit
organization of scientists, lawyers and environmental specialists
dedicated to protecting public health and the environment.
Founded in 1970, NRDC has more than 1 million members and
e-activists nationwide, served from offices in New York,
Washington, Santa Monica and San Francisco.
Related NRDC Pages The Cheney Energy Task Force
© Natural Resources Defense Council
*****************************************************************
10 Las Vegas SUN: Excerpts From Cheney Ruling
By The Associated Press ASSOCIATED PRESS
Excerpts from Thursday's Supreme Court ruling on Vice President
Dick Cheney's private energy task force meetings.
From the main opinion written by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy:
"It is well established that a president's communications and
activities encompass a vastly wider range of sensitive material
than would be true of any ordinary individual. ... As United
States v. Nixon explained, these principles do not mean that the
`president is above the law.' Rather, they simply acknowledge
that the public interest requires that a coequal branch of
government `afford presidential confidentiality the greatest
protection consistent with the fair administration of justice,'
and give recognition to the paramount necessity of protecting the
executive branch from vexatious litigation that might distract it
from the energetic performance of its constitutional duties."
---
"The need for information for use in civil cases, while far from
negligible, does not share the urgency or significance of the
criminal subpoena requests in Nixon. As Nixon recognized, the
right to production of relevant evidence in civil proceedings
does not have the same `constitutional dimensions.'... The
situation here cannot, in fairness, be compared to Nixon, where
a court's ability to fulfill its constitutional responsibility
to resolve cases and controversies within its jurisdiction
hinges on the availability of certain indispensable information.
...
"This is not a routine discovery dispute. The discovery requests
are directed to the vice president and other senior government
officials who served on the NEPDG (energy task force) to give
advice and make recommendations to the president. The executive
branch, at its highest level, is seeking the aid of the courts
to protect its constitutional prerogatives. As we have already
noted, special considerations control when the executive
branch's interests in maintaining the autonomy of its office and
safeguarding the confidentiality of its communications are
implicated."
---
Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, agreeing in part:
"(Sierra Club and Judicial Watch) had to demonstrate in the
district court a clear and indisputable right to the Federal
Advisory Committee Act materials. If (their) right to the
materials was not clear and indisputable, then (the Bush
administration's) right to relief in the Court of Appeals was
clear. One need look no further than the district court's
opinion to conclude (the suing parties') right to relief in the
district court was unclear ... indeed, the district court
acknowledged this court's recognition `that applying FACA to
meetings among presidential advisers' presents formidable
constitutional difficulties.'"
---
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by David H. Souter, in a
dissent:
"As the Court of Appeals observed, it appeared that the
government never asked the district court to narrow discovery.
Given the government's decision to resist all discovery,
mandamus relief based on the exorbitance of the discovery orders
is at least `premature.' I would therefore affirm the judgment
of the Court of Appeals denying the writ, and allow the district
court, in the first instance, to pursue its expressed intention
`tightly to rein in discovery,' should the government so
request. ...
"The Court of Appeals stressed that the district court could
accommodate separation-of-powers concerns short of denying all
discovery or compelling the invocation of executive privilege.
Principally, the Court of Appeals stated, discovery could be
narrowed, should the government so move, to encompass only
`whether non-federal officials participated in NEPDG, and if so,
to what extent.'"
---
Justice John Paul Stevens, agreeing with the decision:
"Instead of requiring (the Bush administration) to object to
particular discovery requests, the district court should have
required (the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch) to demonstrate
that particular requests would tend to establish their theory of
the case. I therefore think it would have been appropriate for
the Court of Appeals to vacate the district court's discovery
order. I nevertheless join the court's opinion and judgment
because, as the architect of the de facto member doctrine, the
Court of Appeals is the appropriate forum to direct future
proceedings in the case."
*****************************************************************
11 Las Vegas SUN: Court Won't Order Cheney Papers Released
By GINA HOLLAND ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON (AP) -
The Bush administration won't have to reveal secret details of
Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force before the
election, after the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a lower
court should spend more time sorting out the White House's
privacy claim.
In a 7-2 decision, justices said the lower court should consider
whether a federal open government law could be used to get task
force documents. Even if that court rules against the
administration, appeals would tie up the case well past
November.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority, said the
federal district court judge who ordered records opened to the
public had issued too broad a release of documents, without
giving appropriate deference to the White House.
The president is not above the law, Kennedy wrote, but there is
a "paramount necessity of protecting the executive branch from
vexatious litigation that might distract it from the energetic
performance of its constitutional duties."
He said "special considerations applicable to the president and
the vice president suggest that the courts should be sensitive
to requests by the government" in such special appeals.
The issues in the case have been overshadowed by
conflict-of-interest questions about Justice Antonin Scalia, who
sided with the majority.
Scalia defiantly refused to recuse himself from the case,
rejecting arguments by critics who said his impartiality was
brought into question because of a hunting vacation that he took
with Cheney while the court was considering the vice president's
appeal.
He and Justice Clarence Thomas wrote separately Thursday to say
U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan "clearly exceeded" his
authority in ordering the administration to release records.
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David H. Souter said in a
dissent that Sullivan should be allowed to consider what records
should be released. They said it was not enough for the Bush
administration to request blanket protection from having to make
records public.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan said that while the
White House hasn't had a chance to review the decision, it is
pleased. "We believe the president should be able to receive
candid and unvarnished advice from his staff and advisers. It's
an important principle," he said.
At issue was a 1972 open government law, the Federal Advisory
Committee Act, which requires government panels to conduct their
business in public, unless all members are government officials.
Until the government produces some records, it won't be clear
who drafted the government's policies, lawyers for the groups
that sued to get the records argued.
Shortly after taking office, President Bush put Cheney, a former
energy industry executive, in charge of the task force which,
after a series of private meetings in 2001, produced
recommendations generally friendly to industry.
The Sierra Club, a liberal environmental club, and Judicial
Watch, a conservative legal group, sued to get the records. They
argued the public has a right to information about committees
like Cheney's. The organizations contended that
environmentalists were shut out of the meetings, while
executives like former Enron Corp. Chairman Kenneth Lay were key
task force players.
The suing groups allege the industry representatives in effect
functioned as members of the government panel, which included
Cabinet secretaries and lower-level administration employees.
The Bush administration argued that privacy is important to
ensure members of such panels can speak candidly. It contended
that the open records law did not apply to the task force.
Sierra Club lawyer David Bookbinder said that it's clear that
the groups will get some papers, but it's less clear when
because the case may end up a second time at the Supreme Court.
He said they may ask the appeals court to speed up the case.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said that "ultimately, we
can't believe courts will endorse the Bush administration's
assertion of unchecked executive secrecy and power."
The case had become a potentially embarrassing election-year
problem for the administration. Thursday's decision buys the
administration more time. If it loses in the appeals court, the
administration can return to the Supreme Court in another
extended appeal before having to release information.
The Sierra Club had asked Scalia to stay out of the case,
because the justice flew with Cheney to hunt in Louisiana in
January, weeks after the high court agreed to hear the
administration's appeal. Many Democrats and dozens of newspapers
also called for his recusal.
Scalia, a Reagan administration appointee and close friend of
the vice president, had said the duck hunting trip was
acceptable socializing that wouldn't cloud his judgment. "If it
is reasonable to think that a Supreme Court justice can be
bought so cheap, the nation is in deeper trouble than I had
imagined," he wrote in an unusual 21-page memo announcing his
decision to stay on the case.
The Supreme Court was the latest stop in a nearly three-year
fight over access to records of the task force that prepared a
national energy strategy in 2001. Most of the recommendations
stalled in Congress.
A separate lawsuit seeks thousands of documents under a separate
law, the Freedom of Information Act. A judge ruled this spring
that those documents should be released.
The case is Cheney v. U.S. District Court, 03-475.
---
On the Net:
Supreme Court: http:www.supremecourtus.gov
The opinion is available at:
[http://wid.ap.org/documents/scotus/040624cheney.pdf]
--
*****************************************************************
12 Salt Lake Tribune: Victims can testify at SLC hearing
June 24, 2004
By Christopher Smith
WASHINGTON -- Federal researchers advising Congress on
expanded compensation for victims of nuclear weapons testing
fallout have scheduled a return visit to Utah next month to hear
from downwinders.
The National Academies of Sciences Board on Radiation
Effects Research is now registering witnesses to testify at a
July 29 hearing at the Salt Lake City Library. The board held a
similar hearing in St. George in December under a $5 million
study appropriated by Sens. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah; Harry Reid,
D-Nev., and Pete Domenici, R-New Mexico.
The three Western senators want the board to determine if
the federal law providing for financial payments to fallout
victims should be amended to include compensation eligibility
for more forms of cancer, additional geographic areas of
exposure, other occupations that posed exposure risks and
shorter durations of exposure to fallout.
"The committee would like to finalize its report and in
order for them to do that, they want to hear from any
downwinders in the area they have not heard from before," said
Isaf Al-Nabulsi, the senior program officer for the board. Seven
members of the study committee plan on attending the Salt Lake
hearing, which will begin at 9:30 a.m.
The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) approved
compensation claims for downwinders in parts of Utah, Nevada and
Arizona suffering from 13 fallout-related cancers. Various
health groups and studies have noted that fallout exposure and
cancer consequences were much more widespread, although a study
by the National Research Council last year concluded that more
detailed, scientifically validated estimates of exposure were
almost impossible due to the scarcity of radioactivity
monitoring stations operating during the 1950s and 1960s, when
nuclear bombs were tested in Nevada.
Anyone wishing to testify on expanding eligibility under
RECA at the July 29 hearing must register in advance by
contacting Al-Nabulsi at 202-334-2671 or via email at
http://alnabul@nas.edu [http://alnabul@nas.edu] .
"> -->
Copyright Salt Lake City Tribune
*****************************************************************
13 Salt Lake Tribune: Administration tells Bennett it isn't planning nuke tests in
Nevada
June 24, 2004
By Christopher Smith
WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration has told Sen. Bob
Bennett in writing it has "no current plans or requirements" to
test new bunker-buster atomic bombs at the Nevada Test Site
upwind from Utah.
"I know you are concerned that the ongoing RNEP [Robust
Nuclear Earth Penetrator] study could lead to the resumption of
underground nuclear testing," National Nuclear Security
Administration boss Linton Brooks wrote in a June 15 letter to
the Utah Republican. "The RNEP study will not require an
underground test. Should the President support, and Congress
approve, full-scale engineering development of RNEP, the
Administration does not intend to conduct a nuclear test."
Utah's GOP lawmakers in both Houses of Congress joined
fellow Republicans last month beating back Democratic attempts
to slash funding for studying the proposed weapon, which would
auger into the earth's surface before detonating and
theoretically destroy buried enemy targets.
During a hearing this spring, Bennett told Brooks that
Utahns living downwind from the Nevada Test Site were "let down"
and "lied to" by the federal government on the health danger
from atmospheric testing of nuclear bombs in the 1950s and
1960s. A National Cancer Institute study released in 1997
estimated that every county in the contiguous United States was
exposed to radioactive Iodine-131 from the tests, causing as
many as 75,000 lifetime cases of thyroid cancer.
During a Senate floor colloquy Wednesday night, Bennett
withdrew his amendment to the 2005 defense authorization bill
that would have required congressional authorization before any
nuclear test of the RNEP. He said he had been "dissuaded" from
pursuing the amendment by Brooks' letter and a similar written
assurance he received Wednesday from Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz. He also had learned any RNEP test would need
congressial authorization under current law, and he asked
senators from both sides of the aisle to confirm that view, with
Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., and Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., agreeing.
Bennett supports studying the bunker buster, which would be
a new delivery mechanism for existing B-61 and B-83 nuclear
weapons, but has said he wants to avoid exposing another
generation of downwinders to health risks.
"I am answerable to the people of Utah, all of whom have a
very great concern, which I most thoroughly share, that we do
not want to disarm this country," he said. "But in the end, we
want to make sure that, as we move down the road to protect our
national security, we do not, in any way, endanger the health
and safety of any of our citizens, regardless of the state in
which they live."
Second District Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, voted to strip
the study funding, arguing that administration pledges of no
plans for testing don't jibe with the projected
half-billion-dollar expenditures for the study over the next
several years.
Members of Downwinders Opposed to Nuclear Testing (DON'T), a
coalition that includes Physicians for Social Responsibility and
the Catholic Diocese of Utah, met with Bennett and other members
of the state's congressional delegation last week to urge them
to vote against continued funding for research into new nuclear
weapons. DON'T Coordinator Vanessa Pierce, of Healthy
Environment Alliance of Utah, said the Brooks letter doesn't
assuage their concerns over future resumption of nuclear tests
in the Nevada desert.
"Brooks' assurance is based on the variable there will be no
design changes to the existing weapons and if the studies
determine changes are needed, his promises are hollow," said
Pierce. "The members of our delegation who are supporting these
feasibility studies are helping lay down the tracks for a
nuclear testing train and once it gets momentum, they won't be
able to muster the political power to stop it."
csmith@sltrib.com [csmith@sltrib.com]
"> -->
Copyright Salt Lake City Tribune
*****************************************************************
14 Las Vegas RJ: Test site's new toolstarts job Monday
Thursday, June 24, 2004
Scientists to use pulse machine to evaluate reliability of
nation's nuclear weapons By KEITH ROGERS
REVIEW-JOURNAL
From the days of full-scale weapons tests that rocked the high
desert for 41 years to the use of tools to check the nation's
aging nuclear weapons, government officials said this week they
are ready to open a new chapter in their stockpile stewardship
program at the Nevada Test Site.
On Monday, the National Nuclear Security Administration will
trot out Atlas, the rebuilt, relocated, pulsed-power machine
that will fire bursts of electrons at materials such as
tungsten, copper, tin, steel and aluminum.
The idea is to zap tiny, nonradioactive targets to simulate
temperatures and pressures at various stages of a nuclear
weapons detonation. The machine can crush targets at ultra-high
velocities, 22,500 mph, generating pressures equal to 1 million
times that of Earth's atmosphere, according to a Nevada Test
Site statement.
Scientists will use the data, with that from subcritical nuclear
experiments and the JASPER gas gun experiments at the test site,
to help them understand how plutonium and components of nuclear
weapons perform as they age.
Government scientists have been relying on such experiments to
certify the stockpile since full-scale testing was put on hold
after the nation's last underground test in 1992.
The 80-foot-diameter Atlas machine was dismantled at the Los
Alamos, N.M., national laboratory and hauled to its new home, 85
miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Atlas gives the test site three of the four physics tools that
scientists rely on in the absence of full-scale tests to tell
whether U.S. nuclear weapons are safe and reliable.
The other tool, a laser system known as the National Ignition
Facility, is at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 45 miles
southeast of San Francisco.
Administration spokesman Darwin Morgan said the unveiling Monday
will end a $20.7 million effort to bring Atlas to the test site,
where scientists from Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore and
other national labs can share the machine's capabilities.
The two-year relocation involved more than 400 workers from the
Los Alamos lab, Bechtel Nevada and the National Nuclear Security
Administration.
Copyright Las Vegas Review-Journal
*****************************************************************
15 New York Times: Senate Passes $447 Billion Pentagon Package
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: June 24, 2004
[W] ASHINGTON, June 23 - After defeating a Democratic measure
that would have greatly expanded health benefits for veterans,
the Senate gave final passage on Wednesday night to a $447.2
billion Pentagon spending measure for 2005 that includes a 3.5
percent raise for service personnel.
The unanimous vote, 97 to 0, came after the Republican-controlled
Senate rejected an effort by Democrats to compel the Bush
administration to release documents relating to the prisoner
abuse scandal in Iraq.
That measure failed by a vote of 46 to 50, but an earlier vote to
set it aside permanently without a vote also failed when five
Republicans joined Democrats to keep the measure alive. Instead,
the Senate unanimously adopted a measure calling for the Pentagon
to submit continuing reports to Congress on the status and
treatment of prisoners.
Democrats said later that the White House should regard the votes
as a warning.
"This was a shot across the bow,'' said Senator Edward M.
Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts. "The votes tonight show that
patience is wearing thin with this White House's refusal to level
with the American people.''
Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, said: "There is a
lot of dust in the air today from the circling of Republican
wagons. But when the dust clears, the issue before the Senate
also needs to be clear to the American people. The public is sick
of the secrecy.''
The Pentagon appropriations bill now goes to the House. The
Senate vote capped several weeks of debate, broken by a hiatus
for the funeral of former President Ronald Reagan. The veteran's
health measure, sponsored by Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota,
the Democratic leader, fell 11 votes short of the 60 required to
waive the Senate's budget rules so it could be considered.
Mr. Daschle said his proposal, which would have cost $300 billion
over the next decade, would give every veteran access to
prescription drugs and health services through the Department of
Veterans Affairs. Though all veterans are entitled to such care,
some endure long waits or are required to make higher co-payments
depending on their incomes.
"Today the Senate had the opportunity to make good on a pledge to
provide the nation's veterans with the health care they have
earned and deserve,'' Mr. Daschle said in a statement after the
vote. "Sadly, a narrow majority blocked the effort.''
But Senator Don Nickles, Democrat of Oklahoma, denounced the
Daschle measure as a new entitlement.
"I think this amendment is not really so much about helping
veterans,'' Mr. Nickles said. "I think it's trying to help
politicians.''
The vote on the Daschle amendment was originally scheduled for
Tuesday afternoon, prompting Senator John Kerry
[http://www.nytimes.com/top/news/washington/campaign2004/candidat
es/johnfkerry/index.html?inline=nyt-per-pol] of Massachusetts,
the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, to cancel
campaign events and return to Washington. But Republicans delayed
its consideration, thwarting efforts by Mr. Kerry to demonstrate
his support for it.
At a fund-raising breakfast on Wednesday morning, Mr. Kerry, who
has missed more than 80 percent of the Senate's votes this year,
expressed his irritation with Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee,
the Republican leader, saying he would have expected Dr. Frist to
respect Mr. Daschle's wishes.
"But oh no, oh no,'' Mr. Kerry said. "Not in this Senate, not
with these people. Once again, it's my way or the highway, shut
the door, lock people out, don't let them take part in
democracy.''
In addition to the raise for military personnel, the spending
bill increases the Pentagon's budget by 3.4 percent next year. It
authorizes a permanent increase in the rate of special pay for
military personnel facing hostile fire or imminent danger, to
$225 a month from $150. It also increases, to $250 a month from
$100, the allowance members of the military receive when they are
separated from their families.
During debate on the measure, the Senate repeatedly rejected
efforts by Democrats to pare President Bush's
[http://www.nytimes.com/top/news/washington/campaign2004/candidat
es/georgewbush/index.html?inline=nyt-per-pol] missile-based
defense program.
The bill allocates $1.7 billion for the program. On Tuesday,
lawmakers defeated a plan by Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of
Michigan, that would have shifted more than a fourth of that
amount, or $515.5 million, from the missile initiative to other
security programs, including border and port security and
programs that would combat what Mr. Levin called "the threat of
loose nukes, the threat of nuclear fissile material falling into
the hands of terrorists.''
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
*****************************************************************
16 BBC: Cheney papers to be kept secret
Last Updated: Thursday, 24 June, 2004
[US Vice-President Dick Cheney ]
Dick Cheney may yet have to release the documents
The US Supreme Court has refused to order Vice President Dick
Cheney to release secret papers detailing the administration's
energy policy.
But after judging the application brought by environmental
groups, the Supreme Court kept the case alive by sending it back
to a lower court.
The papers, which detail meetings of Mr Cheney's so called energy
task force, were first sought back in 2002.
A Congressional watchdog first demanded the papers after the
Enron scandal.
But 10 months later, in December 2002, a US District Court judge
ruled that the taskforce papers could remain closed.
Environmental concerns
The application for the Supreme Court to hear the case came from
The Sierra Club, which campaigns for reductions in the use of
fossil fuels, and the legal lobby group Judicial Watch.
A lower court will now have to reconsider whether the papers
should be released under a federal open government law.
The environmental groups want to see the documents because they
claim the Bush administration was too close to Enron, the
collapsed former energy giant.
However the issues involved have recently been overshadowed by a
conflict of interest dispute involving one Supreme Court judge.
Justice Antonin Scalia refused to step down from hearing the
case, despite having taken a hunting vacation with Mr Cheney
while the court was considering his appeal.
*****************************************************************
17 Washington Post: Senate Passes $447 Billion Defense Bill
(washingtonpost.com)
GOP Blocks Democrats' Effort to Hold Administration More
Accountable on Iraq
By Helen Dewar Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, June 24,
2004; Page A05
The Senate last night approved President Bush's military spending
blueprint for next year after a five-week struggle during which
Republicans turned back Democrats' attempts to reshape it.
The 97 to 0 vote to approve the measure followed a 50 to 48 vote
to defeat a proposal by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.)
directing the administration to report to Congress on progress in
Iraq, including estimates of the number of U.S. troops who will
be there at the end of next year. The Senate approved a
Republican alternative requiring a report on other aspects of
attempts to stabilize Iraq, but not troop estimates.
The Senate also rejected a proposal by Minority Leader Thomas A.
Daschle (D-S.D.) to guarantee annual increases in veterans'
health benefits. The vote was 49 to 48 in favor of Daschle's
proposal, but it needed 60 votes to pass because it violated
budget limits.
The $447.2 billion defense authorization bill includes $25
billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, which
may have to be augmented next year, and an increase of more than
$20 billion over current levels for other expenditures. Included
are record expenditures of about $70 billion for development of
an array of planes, ships and weapons, surpassing even the
buildup of the 1980s.
It includes a 3.5 percent military pay raise along with increases
in other benefits, $10.2 billion for Bush's planned missile
defense program and a go-ahead for further research on two new
nuclear weapons: a low-yield "mini-nuke" and a high-yield "bunker
buster" to destroy deep underground facilities.
In several votes over the past two weeks, Democrats attempted to
slow what they regard as unduly hasty deployment of initial
missile defenses -- the scaled-back version of President Ronald
Reagan's "Star Wars" plan for a nuclear shield that Bush has made
a centerpiece of his national security policy.
Although Republicans agreed to require operational tests next
year, they balked at forcing them to be conducted by an
independent testing office. They also refused to condition
spending for new weaponry on any test results and rejected
proposals to shift some of the funds to homeland security
programs.
Democrats also failed to derail the new nuclear weapons, make war
profiteering a crime and bar private contractors from
interrogating war prisoners. But they succeeded in adding to the
defense bill one of their major domestic priorities: legislation
to toughen hate-crime laws by including gays for the first time.
The Senate-passed bill must be reconciled with a House version
approved last month, a process that could prove difficult on
several points. Both bills include the same framework reflecting
Bush's priorities but include some politically charged
differences over key details.
For instance, the House bill would delay the next round of
military base closings from 2005 to 2007. The Senate's
legislation would let the closures proceed as scheduled next
year.
The House would permanently expand troop ranks by 39,000 --
30,000 for the Army and 9,000 for the Marine Corps -- over the
next three years. The Senate would mandate a 20,000 increase for
the Army only next year. The administration opposes any mandatory
increases, preferring authority to increase force levels at its
discretion.
The House also included far more stringent "Buy American" rules
for procurement of military materials than the Senate did. A
fight over these rules delayed agreement on last year's defense
bill for months, and the issue is bigger this year because of
military needs and elections.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
*****************************************************************
18 Washington Post: High Court Backs Vice President
(washingtonpost.com)
Energy Documents Shielded for Now
By Charles Lane Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, June 25,
2004; Page A01
The Supreme Court ordered a federal appeals court yesterday to
give Vice President Cheney another chance to shield the internal
workings of the 2001 energy policy task force he headed, all but
ensuring that none of its alleged contacts with industry
lobbyists will be aired before the November elections.
A 7 to 2 majority of the court said the U.S. Court of Appeals for
the District of Columbia Circuit had not given due weight to the
executive branch's need to be free of "vexatious litigation" when
it ruled last year that it could not grant Cheney a special order
blocking a federal district judge's order permitting two public
interest groups to examine the task force's records.
The decision set the stage for months or years of additional
legal wrangling if Cheney and President Bush are reelected.
Meanwhile, the White House will not have to release contested
documents, avoiding potentially embarrassing revelations of the
extent to which companies such as the now-bankrupt Enron Corp.
may have influenced its policies.
At the White House, spokesman Scott McClellan welcomed the
ruling, saying, "We believe that the president should be able to
receive candid and unvarnished advice from his staff and
advisers. It's an important principle."
Democrats renewed their charges of excessive White House secrecy,
with the presidential campaign of John F. Kerry declaring that
the "Nixon legacy of secrecy is alive and well in the Bush White
House."
Alan B. Morrison, a lawyer for the two organizations seeking
access to the records, said, "If the government's goal is to push
'no disclosure' through the election, they will win that."
Morrison is representing the Sierra Club, a liberal
environmentalist organization, and Judicial Watch, a conservative
anti-corruption organization.
Justice Antonin Scalia had come under fire for refusing to bow
out even though he went on a duck-hunting vacation with Cheney
while the case was pending before the court. Although he
indicated in a concurring opinion that he would have ruled more
broadly in the vice president's favor, Scalia did not determine
the outcome of the case by his vote with the majority.
While drafted in terms applicable mainly to the case before it,
the opinion revealed a court now sympathetic to the White House's
need to insulate itself from lawsuits. In 1997, the court ruled 9
to 0 that President Bill Clinton would not be unduly hampered by
Paula Jones's lawsuit for sexual harassment he had allegedly
committed while governor of Arkansas; yesterday, the court warned
of "meritless claims against the executive branch."
The Jones case flowed in part from the court's landmark 1974
ruling that ordered President Richard M. Nixon to divulge his
White House tapes to a Watergate special prosecutor, but in
yesterday's opinion, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy chided the D.C.
Circuit for reading the Nixon case too broadly.
During Watergate, Kennedy wrote, an intrusion on internal White
House deliberations was justified to produce information for a
criminal case. While prosecutors are relatively limited in the
charges they can file and evidence they can demand, Kennedy
wrote, "there are no analogous checks in the civil discovery
process here."
Given that fact, Kennedy wrote, the White House should not be
forced by the prospect of revealing its internal deliberations to
invoke executive privilege, as the D.C. Circuit had recommended
it do.
His opinion was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist,
Scalia and Justices John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor,
Clarence Thomas and Stephen G. Breyer.
Cheney's task force, known officially as the National Energy
Policy Development Group and made up of several Cabinet officers
and White House aides, was set up on Jan. 29, 2001. That May 16,
it issued a report including recommendations favored by industry,
but the administration has failed to win passage of energy
legislation that includes them.
From the beginning, environmental and consumer organizations, as
well as congressional Democrats, have said the White House shut
them out while throwing its doors open to industry lobbyists.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/admin/emailfriend?conte
ntId=A1988-2004Jun24&sent=no]
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1988-2004Jun24?languag
e=printer]
Permission to Republish
-->
_____About the Decision_____
•
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/mmedia/politics/062404-6s.h
tm] Cliff Sloan, washingtonpost.com general counsel discusses
Thursday's decision.
____ The Supreme Court ____ __ Cheney v. U.S. District Court
__
The Supreme Court sent the case (involving the vice president's
energy task force records) back to a lower court.
•
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/shoulders/scotus_che
ney_usdistrictcourt.html]
•
[http://washingtonpost.findlaw.com/supreme_court/docket/2003/apri
l.html#03-475]
• From FindLaw: Background:
[http://news.findlaw.com/legalnews/lit/energytaskforce/index.html
]
• Post Coverage:
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45569-2004Apr27.h
tml] (April 28, 2004)
• Audio:
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/mmedia/nation/042704-5s.htm
]
•
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/nation/courts/supremecourt/
]
__ Latest News __
•
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/nation/courts/supremecourt/
]
__ About the Supreme Court __
Interactive Primer
Background information on the court including biographies of
the current justices.
_____Free E-mail Newsletters_____
• News Headlines
• News Alert
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/buyphotos]
-->
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Navigate the Nation Section Nation National Security
Science Courts >Supreme Court Search the States
Special Reports Photo Galleries Live Discussions Nation
Index
[http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/wpni.politicsarticle/administrati
on;dir=administrationnode;dir=politics;dir=administration;page=ar
ticle;kw=;ad=bn;pos=ad2;sz=468x60;tile=40;ord=1088130914963?]
[http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/wpni.politicsarticle/administrati
on;dir=administrationnode;dir=politics;dir=administration;page=ar
ticle;kw=;ad=lb;ad=bn;pos=ad25;sz=728x90;tile=40;abr=!ie;ord=1088
130914964?]
+
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/]
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/print/a1] |
[http://washpost.com/wpnihomepage]
[http://washpost.com/wpnihomepage]
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/] |
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/opinion/] |
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/sports/] |
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artsandliving/] |
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artsandliving/entertainment
guide/]
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/liveonline/] |
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/photo/]
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wl/jobs/home] |
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/cars/] |
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/realestate/]
[http://www.washingtonpost.com] : |
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/contents/aboutsite.htm]
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?node=admin/email] |
[http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/washingtonpost/] |
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/contents/devices.htm] |
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-adv/mediakit/mediacenter/front.
htm] | [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-adv/mediakit/adinfo/]
[http://www.mywashingtonpost.com/] |
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-adv/rss/front.htm] |
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/headlines/]
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/contents/permissions.htm]
| [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/guide/setashome.htm]
Work at washingtonpost.com |
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/hr/intern.html] |
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/contents/]
The Washington Post: [http://washpost.com/wpnihomepage] |
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/subscriberservices]
[http://adsite.washpost.com/] |
[http://ee.washpost.com/index.jsp] |
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/buyphotos]
The Washington Post Co.: [http://washpost.com/]
[http://www.washpostco.com/index.htm]
SEARCH:
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/mostemailed/index.html]
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/interact/longterm/talk/memb
ers.htm] | ©
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/interact/longterm/talk/copy
.htm] 1996- The Washington Post Company
[ border=]
[http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/wpni.politicsarticle/administrati
on;dir=administrationnode;dir=politics;dir=administration;page=ar
ticle;kw=;ad=ss;pos=ad28;sz=160x600;tile=50;abr=!ie;ord=108813091
4988?]
*****************************************************************
19 WGA: Proposed Policy Resolutions for Consideration at the 2004 WGA Annual Meeting
Western Governors’ Association
2004 Policy Resolutions
NO. TITLE SPONSORS Adopted at the 2003 WGA Winter Meeting 04-01
Sage Grouse Conservation Governors Guinn & Owens Adopted at
the 2004 WGA Annual Meeting
04-02
Assessing the Risks of Terrorism and Sabotage Against High-Level
Nuclear Waste Shipments to a Geologic Repository or Interim
Storage Facility
Guinn, Richardson, Walker & Napolitano
04-03
Prevention and Control of Foreign Animal Diseases in North
America
Johanns & Rounds
04-04
Rural Health Improvements
Owens, Napolitano, Richardson & Johanns
04-05
Zero Tolerance for Violence
Guinn
04-06
Farm Bill Reauthorization: New Approaches, Flexibility Needed
for Western Agriculture
Johanns and Hoeven
04-07
Negotiated Indian Water Rights Settlements
Napolitano and Richardson
04-08
Watershed Restoration Through Partnerships
Napolitano
04-09
Federal Non-Tribal Fees in General Water Adjudications
Richardson & Kempthorne
04-10
Cleaning Up Abandoned Mines
Owens, Guinn, and Richardson
04-11
Arid West Water Quality Issues
Napolitano and Richardson
04-12
Undesirable Aquatic, Riparian, and Invasive Species
Locke & Rounds
04-13
Western States Presidential Caucus/Primary
Richardson
04-14
Clean and Diversified Energy Initiative for the West
Richardson & Schwarzenegger
04-15
Ensuring Adequate and Stable Natural Gas and Petroleum Supplies
Napolitano
04-16
Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILT)
Richardson, Napolitano & Rounds
04-17
Veterans Cemeteries
Richardson & Napolitano
04-18
Treatment of Workers' Compensation Claims in Bankruptcy
Richardson & Rounds
04-19
Community Right to Know/ Toxic Release Inventory
Guinn
04-20
National Minerals Policy
Guinn
04-21
Conservation Efforts Regarding Black-Tailed Prairie Dogs
Johanns & Rounds
04-22
Abandoned Mine Land (AML) Program
Martz, Freudenthal & Richardson
June 24, 2004
*****************************************************************
20 Western Governors' Association: Key Issues
[WGA Logo]
Serving the Governors of 21 States and US-Flag Pacific Islands
[Issues, Projects and Initiatives]
[Governors' Policy Resolutions]
[Governors' Letters and Testimony]
[List of Member Governors]
[WGA Mission]
[Publications]
[Western Governors Foundation]
[WGA Working Groups]
[Contact WGA]
[http://www.picosearch.com/]
What's New
Gov. Judy Martz of Montana submitted testimony to Congress
urging continued support for forest health initiatives as the
West braces itself for another devastating wildfire season.
(5/5/04)
California Energy Commission Chairman Tells Western Governors
Development of Renewable Energy Certificate Tracking System Is
On Schedule (4/15/04)
WGA report cites energy efficiency measures critical to meeting
energy demand along the U.S.-Mexico border (4/15/04)
Most Requested Reports
Coal Bed Methane Best Management Practices Handbook
National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS)
Annual Meeting Highlights - June 20 - 22
Gov. Richardson turns gavel over to Gov. Owens, WGA's newly
elected Chairman
Gov. Janet Napolitano was elected Vice Chair
(Photos Courtesy of Tony Bonanno Photography. For larger images
click on photos. For other photos from the meeting, click here)
Press Releases
+
Governor Bill Owens elected Chairman of Western Governors'
Association. (6/22/04)
+
Western Governors discuss energy supplies and set ambitious
goals for development of renewable energy sources and improved
energy efficiency. (6/22/04)
+
Western governors call for a national drought policy that would
integrate and build upon existing data on drought and its
impacts across the country into the National Integrated Drought
Information System (NIDIS), a nationwide database accessible by
anyone. (6/21/04)
+
Western governors today called for a regional presidential
caucus and primary in the West to draw attention to regional
issues and increase their states' influence in future
presidential elections. (6/21/04).
+
Governors kick off meeting with issues roundtable (6/20/04)
Reports and Resolutions
+
National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS)
+
Conserving the Greater Sage Grouse (draft)
+
Policy resolutions adopted by Governors at Annual Meeting.
+
WGA 2004 Annual Report
Remarks
+
Gov. Owens remarks upon assuming WGA Chairmanship
+
Intel President Paul Otellini on U.S. competitiveness
WGA Key Issues
Energy
Western Governors are working collaboratively to ensure
adequate energy supplies and electricity for the region. Most
recently, they set a goal of 30,000 megawatts of clean energy by
2015 and a 20 percent improvement in energy efficiency by 2020.
A new working group is being formed to determine how to reach
that goal, and at the same time, ensure the region has the
necessary generation and transmission capacity. WGA and the
California Energy Commission are leading a region-wide effort to
create an independent regional tracking system to verify and
track renewable energy generation in the region in support of
the goal. In addition, the Department of Interior recently
recognized
WGA's leadership
[http://www.doi.gov/news/040622a.htm] in developing a coal bed
methane best management practices handbook. Learn more about
WGA's involvement in energy issues...
Forest Health
The Western Governors' Association is working proactively to
address the threat and consequences of wildfire to communities
and the environment by assisting in the implementation of the
10-year strategy in cooperation with federal agencies, state
foresters and local community and stakeholder representatives.
Several partners recently released the Handbook Helps At-Risk
Communities
Better Prepare for Wildfires
[http://www.safnet.org/policyandpress/cwpp.cfm] .
Learn more about WGA's involvement in forest health issues...
© 1996 Western Governors' Association
*****************************************************************
21 Public Citizen: Attorney General’s Reclassification of
Information Critical of FBI Is Illegal
June 23, 2004
Project On Government Oversight Has Right to Inform Public of
Problems at FBI, Lawsuit Says
WASHINGTON, D.C. The Project On Government Oversight
[http://www.pogo.org/] (POGO) sued Attorney General John
Ashcroft and the U.S. Department of Justice
[http://www.usdoj.gov/] (DOJ) today over the DOJs
reclassification of information that alleges corruption,
incompetence and cover-ups in an FBI translation unit. Public
Citizen and Georgetown University Law Center professor David
Vladeck are representing POGO.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District
of Columbia, asks the court to find the DOJs May
reclassification of information unlawful and unconstitutional
and require the agency to declassify the information. The
information relates to allegations made by whistleblower Sibel
Edmonds, a former FBI linguist who was fired after reporting to
superiors numerous instances of wrongdoing in the FBI
translation unit where she worked.
This information was presented by the FBI during two
unclassified 2002 briefings held by the Senate Judiciary
Committee and was referenced in letters from U.S. Sens. Patrick
Leahy (D-Vermont) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) to DOJ
officials. The letters were posted on the senators Web sites,
but were removed after the DOJ reclassified the information.
POGO has the letters and wants to post them on the Web to
initiate public debate.
We believe the Department of Justice reclassified the
information to stifle congressional oversight of the department
and shield it from legitimate public inquiry, said Danielle
Brian, POGOs executive director. It is absurd to reclassify
information that has been in the public domain for so long. This
is an entirely inappropriate use of the classification system.
According to the lawsuit, the DOJ failed to comply with the
requirements of Executive Order 12958, as amended by Executive
Order 13292, which provides that information may be reclassified
only if the information may be reasonably recoverable and the
reclassification is reported to the Director of the Information
Security Oversight Office. The suit contends that the
information is not reasonably recoverable because it was posted
on the Web and remains available on numerous Web sites. Further,
the DOJs reclassification of the information was not reported
promptly to the Director of the Information Security Oversight
Office.
In addition, the DOJ has violated POGOs First Amendment rights,
according to the lawsuit. The reclassification of the documents
has stifled public discussion regarding the adequacy of the
FBIs translation capabilities and Ms. Edmonds reports of
problems in the translation unit, it says.
Public Citizen got involved in this case because the
reclassification of information that is so widely available to
the public is a new step in John Ashcrofts push for secrecy,
said Michael Kirkpatrick, the Public Citizen attorney handling
the case. We have been doing national security litigation for
more than 30 years, and in our view, this is the most egregious
misuse of the classification authority weve seen.
Classification is to keep secret information that is
sensitive. It is not to suppress debate over widely public
information. Yet that is exactly what Ashcroft is doing.
[http://www.citizen.org/documents/ACF681C.pdf] .
*****************************************************************
22 [NukeNet] Man Who Saved the World Is Honored By Senate
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2004 16:45:56 -0700
From:
John Hallam
Nuclear Weapons Campaigner Friends of the Earth
Australia,
nonukes@foesyd.org.au
61-2-9567-6222, 61-2-9567-7533/7644 fax
61-2-9567-7166
1 Henry Street Turella NSW Aust 2205
-------------------------------------------
IMMEDIATE USE 24/6/2004
FRIENDS OF THE EARTH AUSTRALIA
CAMPAIGN FOR INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION AND
DISARMAMENT (CICD)
SENATE HONOURS MAN WHO SAVED WORLD BUT US, RUSSIA
KEEP THOUSANDS OF WARHEADS READY TO LAUNCH
Shortly before 5pm yesterday the Australian Senate
passed a motion put by Democrat Senator Lyn Alison
recognising that on 26 September 1983, the world
had come frighteningly close to nuclear
annihilation. It was saved by the reluctance of
duty officer Colonel Stanislav Petrov of the
Soviet missile corps to press a flashing red
button that would have initiated an automatic
sequence that would have sent 15,000 warheads to
incinerate the US and its allies. This would most
likely have ended civilisation and most life.
Amid wailing sirens and flashing light, Colonel
Petrov held firm and convinced his superiors that
what seemed to be a US missile attack was a
'glitch'. Experts on nuclear weapon systems
generally credit Colonel Petrov with having saved
the world.
Colonel Petrov was awarded the World Citizens
Award on 21 May of this year.
The Senate resolution put by Senator Alison not
only recognises Colonel Petrovs achievement in
ensuring our continued survival, but calls on the
Australian government to support measures to lower
the alert status of nuclear weapon systems so that
it will never again be possible to destroy
civilisation by accident as so nearly happened.
The Canberra Commission recommended in 1996 that
nuclear weapon systems be taken off
launch-on-warning status. Many resolutions have
passed the United Nations General Assembly,
calling for this to be done.
However, to this day, the US and Russia maintain
thousands of warheads on Launch-on-Warning status,
able to destroy civilisation and life within
minutes, just as when Colonel Petrov was on watch
that fateful night of September 1983
Contact:
John Hallam 9567-7533 h9810-2598
Pauline Mitchell CICD 03-9663-3677
The following motion was passed by the Australian
Senatejust before 5pm today.
Congratulations to Senator Lyn Alison who put it
up.
John HallamNuclear Weapons Campaigner Friends of
the Earth Australia 02-9567-7533 h9810-2598
Item of Business No 895 - Nuclear Weapons Systems
and Colonel Stanislav Petrov
Notice of Motion from Senator Lyn Alison
On the next day of sitting, I shall move that the
Senate:
a) Recalls the incident that took place in the
USSR at Serpukhov-15
on 26 September, 1983, 12.30pm Moscow Time and the
role of Colonel
Stanislav Petrov in this incident.
b) Notes:
i. that the Serpukhov-15 incident, in which a
newly installed Soviet
surveillance system, reported that the US had
launched nuclear
missiles at the USSR, is considered by many
analysts to have been the
closest the world has ever come to nuclear war;
ii. that the megatonnage likely to have been
used at that time was
between 30 and 60 times the amount required to
produce a nuclear
winter and that the number of nuclear weapons that
would have been
launched would have ended civilisation and most
living things.
iii. the role played by Colonel Stanislav Petrov
in refraining from
launching a number of thousands of warheads at the
US in retaliation
and in pressing his superiors to consider it a
false alarm;
iv. that the Canberra Commission of 1996
recommended that strategic
nuclear weapons be taken off 'Launch on Warning'
status;
v. the resolution of the European Parliament on
that matter of Nov
11 1999, and its own resolutions as well as
repeated calls to lower
the alert status of strategic nuclear weapons by
the Non -Aligned
Movement and the New Agenda Coalition have been
passed year after
year by the UN General Assembly.
c) Offers its congratulations to Colonel Petrov
for being presented
with the World Citizen Award on Friday 21 May
2004, in recognition of
his actions.
d) Urges the Government to give support to
measures aimed
at lowering the readiness to launch nuclear weapon
systems and to
support such measures on the floor of the UN
General Assembly.
Press Release 17/6/2004
_______________________________________________________________________
Subscribe/Unsubscribe Here: http://www.energyjustice.net/nukenet/
Change your settings at:
http://energyjustice.net/mailman/listinfo/nukenet_energyjustice.net
*****************************************************************
23 Reuters: Syria may have shopped on nuke black market - sources
Thu Jun 24, 2004 03:10 PM ET
By Louis Charbonneau
VIENNA (Reuters) - The U.N. nuclear watchdog is probing whether
Abdul Qadeer Khan, father of Pakistan's atomic programme and the
world's chief nuclear black marketeer, sold Syria arms-related
technology, Vienna-based sources told Reuters.
Diplomats and intelligence experts described reports from Middle
Eastern and Western agencies that Khan repeatedly met with Syrian
officials in the late 1990s to discuss the sale of technology
used to enrich uranium, a process of purifying uranium for use as
fuel for atomic power plants or in weapons.
Khan, founder of Pakistan's atomic weapons programme, confessed
in February to using an intricate, illicit procurement network to
sell enrichment technology and know-how to Libya, North Korea and
Iran -- all countries that were under embargo and either admitted
to or were suspected of wanting the bomb.
Diplomats said inspectors from the International Atomic Energy
Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, were working with governments
and intelligence agencies to crush Khan's network.
In order to do that, the IAEA first needs to know its scope.
Diplomats said the agency is convinced Khan had more than three
customers -- one of them probably Syria.
"They (the IAEA) are saying that Khan had links with other
countries and are 99 percent sure that Iran, Libya and North
Korea were not the only customers," a non-U.S. Western diplomat,
who declined to be identified, told Reuters on Thursday.
The diplomat, from one of the 35 countries on the IAEA's Board of
Governors, said when experts talk about a possible fourth
customer it is generally assumed to be Syria.
He said the IAEA was not able to question Khan or his associates
but had to get their information from Pakistani investigators.
The Syrian mission to the U.N. in Vienna declined to comment for
this article. Last month, a Syrian official said the country has
"no programme to acquire ... nuclear weapons."
The IAEA also declined to comment.
But one expert said even if Khan did sell equipment to Syria, it
did not mean Damascus was close to producing a bomb.
"SHOULDN'T PANIC"
"We shouldn't panic about this," said Joe Cirincione, head of
non-proliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace.
"It's a long way from enrichment centrifuges to the bomb. They're
dabbling in nuclear technology, perhaps like someone who buys
expensive stereo equipment and doesn't know how to hook it up."
Last month, officials told Reuters an experimental high-tech
intelligence technique developed by the United States had
detected operating uranium-enrichment centrifuges in Syria.
Diplomats said the centrifuges, which spin at supersonic speeds
to purify uranium, could only have come from Khan's network.
But some U.S. officials are sceptical about the centrifuges.
Also, two U.S. officials said the reports about Khan and his
associates meeting with Syrian officials and the possible sale of
nuclear technology to Damascus were unconfirmed.
"We don't have enough to know whether it's accurate or not but
it's certainly one of the leads we are pursuing and that have
asked the Pakistanis to pursue as well," one official said.
A Middle Eastern intelligence source told Reuters: "We were aware
that Khan took his traveling salesman routine through the Arab
world during the late 1990s, including Syria."
"Khan may well have had missile technology to sell as well as
nuclear know-how, but there is no doubt the Syrians were as
interested in the latter, if not more," the source said.
(Additional reporting by Arshad Mohammed in Washington)
c Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.
*****************************************************************
24 The Australian: Australia in Russian sub deal
[June 24, 2004]
AUSTRALIA would give $10 million to help dismantle old Russian
nuclear submarines, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said today.
More than 40 decommissioned submarines from the Russian Pacific
Fleet are moored in the Russian far east, posing a possible
terrorist target and possibly threatening the environment.
"Australia regards the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction as one of the greatest security challenges facing the
world," Mr Downer said in a statement.
"The submarine project supports global non-proliferation efforts
by reducing the danger that nuclear fuel on board could find its
way into rogue states."
The $10 million will be administered through the G8 group's
global partnership against the spread of weapons of mass
destruction.
© The Australian
*****************************************************************
25 Washington Post: A Critical Nuclear Moment
(washingtonpost.com)
By Brent Scowcroft Thursday, June 24, 2004; Page A25
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has just rebuked
Iran for failing to cooperate fully with international inspectors
who are examining whether Tehran is meeting its nonproliferation
commitments.
How concerned should we be about this development? What does it
mean? By its own admission, Iran has been taking steps to develop
the capability to enrich uranium, one of the two methods used to
produce weapons-grade fissile material. While Iran says its
activities are solely for peaceful production of nuclear power
and are permitted by the Non-Proliferation Treaty, once
enrichment capability exists, a major barrier to producing a
nuclear weapon virtually vanishes. The IAEA condemnation is an
indication that the world may be on the verge of a major
breakdown of the nonproliferation regime, to say nothing of a
huge new source of instability in a critically important region.
The absence of an effective international response to North
Korean efforts to develop a nuclear weapons capability may
already have resulted in the entry of another country into the
ranks of nuclear-capable powers. North Korea not only can be
presumed to have reprocessed enough plutonium this year for an
additional six to eight nuclear weapons, it reportedly also is
working on a uranium enrichment capability to accompany its
existing ability to reprocess plutonium from spent fuel rods.
Should Iran now be permitted to develop the capability to enrich
uranium, it is almost impossible to imagine that other countries
could be dissuaded from creating their own enrichment
capabilities and consequently the capacity to produce
weapons-grade material for nuclear weapons.
We are at a critical moment. Are we serious in our efforts to
prevent nuclear proliferation, or will we watch the world descend
into a maelstrom where weapons-grade nuclear material is
plentiful and unimaginable destructive capability is available to
any country or group with a grudge against society?
Staring into that abyss should stir us to action. What can we do?
The United States, Britain, France and Germany have already shown
an encouraging, if insufficient, degree of cooperation with
respect to the Iranian nuclear program. Russia has been the
principal source of assistance in the development of Iranian
nuclear power. But Russia has already informed Iran that it would
expect spent nuclear fuel from the Bushehr plant to be returned
to Russia, appearing to indicate that it too has no interest in
allowing Iran to develop a nuclear weapons capability.
This situation should allow these five powers to deepen their
cooperation to the point of presenting a united front to Iran.
They could announce that they would be prepared to give Iran full
assistance in developing nuclear power generation capability,
under appropriate safeguards. They could offer to guarantee an
adequate supply of nuclear fuel for Iranian power reactors at
favorable rates and to remove spent nuclear fuel from Iran. In
return, Iran would be required to forswear any attempt either to
enrich uranium or to reprocess spent nuclear fuel.
It must be acknowledged that this would be a difficult offer for
the United States to make, requiring it to put aside its serious
concerns about a range of other objectionable Iranian behavior.
But the nonproliferation stakes are so great that they warrant
addressing this issue separately.
If Iran is sincere in its protestations that it seeks nuclear
energy only for power generation, this would be by far the most
efficient and economical way for it to reach that goal. Agreement
could also pave the way for discussions on broader issues of
concern among the parties, including security questions.
Should Iran reject such an offer, it would be clear that its
objective is the acquisition of nuclear weapons. In that event,
the issue should be taken to the U.N. Security Council, and the
most serious forms of sanction and isolation should be applied.
But while Iran is an urgent matter, we will not succeed in
dealing with it if we treat it as an isolated case. Like Iran,
Brazil has announced its intention to construct a uranium
enrichment facility. If we give Brasilia a pass at the same time
that we are bearing down on Tehran, it not only will send exactly
the wrong message to would-be proliferators but will sharply
diminish any prospects for success with Iran.
Acquiescing in the Brazilian enrichment program would have the
effect of dividing nuclear power aspirants into good guys and
bad. Such an approach would provide a powerful weapon to Iran as
it seeks to rally international support for its "peaceful"
nuclear program and split us from the Europeans and the Russians.
Our goal instead should be to delegitimize the spread of uranium
enrichment and plutonium reprocessing facilities to any country,
because these capabilities are the linchpin of any program to
develop nuclear weapons.
Put simply, the way Brazil is dealt with could prove to be one of
the keys to dealing with the Iranian nuclear problem, either by
persuading Tehran to abandon its nuclear weapon ambitions or by
rallying the international community to crack down on Iran if it
does not. We therefore should make the same offer to Brazil as to
Iran and make clear the consequences if Brazil turns down that
offer.
These steps are certainly no substitute for a carefully
thought-out general program to enhance the safeguards of the
Non-Proliferation Treaty and otherwise improve the effectiveness
of the nonproliferation regime. But if we do not act swiftly and
decisively now, attempts to provide a future comprehensive
framework will be worse than fruitless.
Now is the moment of truth.
The writer was national security adviser to presidents Gerald
Ford and George H.W. Bush. He is president of the Forum for
International Policy.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
*****************************************************************
26 Hi Pakistan: Nuclear CBMs: good, not good enough -
By Praful Bidwai
June 25 2004
Within barely a month of the swearing-in of a new government in
New Delhi, the Pak-India dialogue process has taken off. Besides
a "secret" meeting between National Security Advisers J N Dixit
and Tariq Aziz, there were at least three telephone conversations
between Foreign Ministers Natwar Singh and Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri
in the past fortnight. Then came Sunday’s agreement on nuclear
confidence-building measures (CBMs), followed by a meeting
between the two Foreign Ministers in China in a "very cordial,
friendly and warm atmosphere". Their "chemistry" was "pretty
good".
Clearly, both governments are trying to impart a serious momentum
to the peace process. The coming Foreign Secretaries’ meeting
should see progress towards a comprehensive discussion of many
issues. After assessing "the progress on all aspect of bilateral
relations including Jammu and Kashmir", Singh and Kasuri
described the result as "positive". Kasuri says: "We want
summit-level talks to be a success ... we can’t afford a
failure".
This should put at rest fears, especially in Pakistan, that the
United Progressive Alliance government would not have the same
commitment to seeking reconciliation with Pakistan as Vajpayee’s
regime. As this Column has argued, there is across-the-broad
support in India for a peace dialogue. Civil society solidly
favours it. Many UPA constituents and supporters have always been
keen on it. Some took sober positions on Pakistan just when the
NDA, including Vajpayee, was hysterically threatening Pakistan
with an "aar-paar ki ladai" (battle to the finish), and had
declared peaceful co-existence with it virtually impossible. The
peace process’s resumption is good news.
Amidst these hope-bearing developments, a note of caution might
sound off-key. Yet, that has become necessary after the nuclear
CBMs agreement. The measures, it must be stressed, are welcome
even though half of them restate what was agreed in 1999. They
put nuclear risk-reduction on the table and promote transparency,
a rare commodity in the subcontinent. South Asia would be worse
off without them.
However, the measures are modest, and may prove inadequate in
reducing the regional nuclear danger. It would be a grave error
to celebrate them as a way of stabilising the strategic balance,
leave alone establishing "control" over the nuclear "genie".
Contrary to claims, the two nuclear "twins" have not learnt how
"to tango" happily.
On the positive side, Pakistan and India have reiterated the 1999
agreement to notify each other in advance of missile test-flights
and to continue with "unilateral" moratoria on nuclear tests.
Besides, they will establish a "dedicated and secure" hotline
between their Foreign Secretaries and upgrade the existing
hotline between their Directors-General of Military Operations.
Secondly, they will work towards "an agreement with technical
parameters on pre-notification of flight-testing of missiles",
furnishing to each other details on their missile test-flights’
timing and paths. This will mark a minor improvement on the
practice followed even before 1998.
However, these are, strictly, not confidence-building but
transparency measures. They cannot generate confidence that India
and Pakistan will substantially reduce the nuclear danger. The
hotline between the two Foreign Secretaries will help clear
misunderstandings, especially in crises. But these officers are
not the key decision-makers in nuclear-military matters. They can
at best act as conveyors of information and facilitators of
decision-making by the political/military leadership. This might
discourage "loudspeaker diplomacy". But it cannot be a substitute
for nuclear risk-reduction measures (NRRMs).
I have three simple reasons for saying so. First, the grave
nuclear danger in India-Pakistan is the use of nuclear weapons,
whether by intent or accident. This isn’t imaginary. The two
neared the brink of a nuclear confrontation three times since
1998: over Kargil, and in January and June 2002 when one million
soldiers eyeballed one another.
The only way of reducing nuclear risks is non-deployment of
nuclear weapons - by keeping warheads separated from delivery
systems (missiles, aircraft, etc). Once nuclear weapons are
deployed, there is a definite risk that they might be used -
unauthorisedly, unintentionally, or by design. The two should
have agreed to non-deployment for one or three years. They
didn’t.
Second, there is an urgent need to halt the India-Pakistan
nuclear and missile arms-races. Once medium- and long-range
missiles are fully developed and deployed, the likelihood of
their use becomes high. There is little strategic distance
between India and Pakistan. Missile flight-time between their
major cities is 3 to 8 minutes - too little for corrective
action.
Logically, India and Pakistan should have frozen missile
development through a moratorium on further test-flights for two
to three years. But they failed to negotiate this. Worse, the
agreed nuclear-test moratorium clause takes away with one hand
what the other has given. The test ban will hold - "unless, in
exercise of national sovereignty, [either state] decides that
extraordinary events have jeopardised its supreme interests".
This qualification is fatal.
Third, they should have agreed to address four specific risks:
use of nuclear weapons through miscalculation because of faulty
information processing or technologies; unauthorised use of
nuclear weapons by "rogue" groups or fanatics; accidents, fires
and explosions near nuclear weapons; and rumours of imminent use
and the resultant panic response. They did none of this. These
have been serious accidents in both countries’ military
installations and nuclear facilities, including aircraft crashes,
fires, adventurist actions by commanders. Good NRRMs must address
these risks - by making authorisation procedures transparent, and
installing systems to detect preparations for unwarranted
launches. The two failed to negotiate such NRRMs.
The result is inadequate. The inadequacy’s roots lie in the
belief that "deterrence", including hair-trigger readiness, is
more important than safety; secondly, the CBM agreement’s
assumption that nuclear weapons possession promotes "stability".
The first assumption is dangerously untenable in the
India-Pakistan context, marked by a history of war, strategic
miscalculation and volatility. The second is falsified by
experience. Nuclear weapons have proved immensely destabilising
in South Asia. Their possession has encouraged nuclear
sabre-rattling and adventurism.
The real downside of the CBMs is that India and Pakistan are
anxious to appear "responsible" nuclear weapons-states so they
get to keep their nuclear weapons. That’s why there isn’t a
single word about nuclear disarmament in the agreement, not even
as a long-term goal. Equally important is the clause jointly
calling for "regular working-level meetings to be held among all
nuclear powers to discuss issues of common concern", and also for
"bilateral consultations" on "security and non-proliferation ...
in multilateral negotiations." Clearly, India and Pakistan want a
place in the Nuclear Club - itself the greatest danger to world
security. They have no intention of promoting regional or global
disarmament.
We should know better. True safety and security lies in the total
elimination of nuclear weapons. NRRMs are best a transitional
step to that goal.
One final word. Experience shows that CBMs on verification don’t
create trust. Rather, it is the pre-disposition to trust that
guarantees that CBMs will work effectively and promote greater
trust. India and Pakistan agreed to conventional CBMs in the
1990s - such as prior warning of large-scale military exercises
and a commitment not to violate each other’s airspace. These were
breached because there was no pre-disposition to trust. Under
today’s more favourable climate, India and Pakistan should have
aimed high. They didn’t. Their CBMs could fall below the
threshold.
Copyright 1996-2002 . Hi Pakistan. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
27 Hi Pakistan: Nuclear CBM talks termed positive -->
June 25 2004
ISLAMABAD, June 23: The Foreign Office has described the two-day
nuclear experts' talks, held in New Delhi last weekend, as "very
positive".
The engagement represented the first step in pursuance of the
dialogue, as agreed to at the summit level on January 6, 2004,
which would be continued and upgraded at the scheduled next round
between the foreign secretaries of the two countries on June
27-28.
A Foreign Office spokesman here on Wednesday briefed the press on
the Delhi talks, and said that the objective of the planned
composite dialogue between India and Pakistan was to resolve the
issue of Jammu and Kashmir which was essential for a lasting and
durable settlement for peace and security in South Asia.
The Jammu and Kashmir issue would be discussed at the next week's
talks, Masood A. Khan, the FO spokesman, said. During the future
engagements between the two sides on the nuclear CBMs, the
nuclear experts would hold further exchanges on the draft nuclear
CBMs to formalize an agreement on a draft missile treaty handed
over in Delhi by the Indian team to its counterpart.
This would be further deliberated upon by the foreign secretaries
and later by the foreign ministers when they meet in the coming
weeks. Asked whether India and Pakistan discussed 'No first use'
of nuclear weapons, Mr Khan said: "Of course the stand of
Pakistan is very clearly stated. There is no ambiguity about
that."
He recalled that in the past, the two sides had clearly stated
their differing positions about a 'No aggression' or 'No war'
pact. In Delhi, too, the issues were discussed during the CBM
talks, he added.
Mr Masood Khan said: "These issues were discussed at the CBM
talks but in a general sense. There was no specific purpose
because we had to identify the CBMs which were durable and
awaiting implementation, and the areas where we were cooperating
had to be taken forward".
He told a questioner: "So the answer to the question is, these
things were discussed but there was no definitive direction and
there was no time-line as to when we can reconcile our
differences on these issues. But the good thing is that both
sides exchanged views on security concerns and their respective
nuclear doctrines.
He added: "You must have seen the statement (from Delhi) where
there is an element and there is a declaration by both the states
that their nuclear capabilities, which are driven by their
national security imperatives, are a factor of stability".
"So this is a very significant statement," he observed. The
spokesman said that a reported statement of Indian foreign
minister Natwar Singh, suggesting including China in the
India-Pakistan CBM talks, was not on the table.
Mr Khan told a questioner that according to 9/11 commission's
findings, Pakistan had no truck with Al Qaeda though it had
relations with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the
Mujahideen which were broken off after 9/11.
Copyright 1996-2002 . Hi Pakistan. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
28 ITAR-TASS: Putin calls far eastern fleet a key element in Russia's security
[ITAR-TASS News Agency of Russia]
24.06.2004, 12.15
VILYUCHINSK /Kamchatka/, June 24 (Itar-Tass) - President
Vladimir Putin said the fleet in the Far East is "one of the most
important elements of Russia's security." The president chaired a
conference with the Pacific Fleet command on Thursday. "All the
elements of the fleet -- those which belong to the nuclear
deterrent forces and the fleet of general purpose will develop in
the Far East, and it will be supported," Putin said. "The fleet
in the Far East is one of the most important elements of the
state's security," the president stated, adding that "there are
development plans which will be implemented."
© ITAR-TASS. All rights reserved. You undertake not to copy,
*****************************************************************
29 NRC: NRC to Discuss Performance of Grand Gulf on July 22
News Release - Region IV - 2004-02 U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY
COMMISSION
Office of Public Affairs, Region IV No. IV-04-027 June
24, 2004 CONTACT: Victor Dricks Phone: 817-860-8128 E-mail:
opa4@nrc.gov [opa4@nrc.gov]
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff will meet with
representatives of Entergy Operations Inc., on July 22 to
discuss the results of the agencys assessment of safety
performance at the Grand Gulf nuclear plant during 2003. The
plant is located near Port Gibson, Mississippi.
The meeting will be held at 6 p.m. at Port Gibson City Hall,
1005 College Street, Port Gibson. The public is invited to
observe the meeting and NRC officials will be available before
the conclusion of the meeting to answer questions from the
public.
"The meeting will give people an opportunity to hear first-hand
from NRC staff how safely Grand Gulf has been run in the past
year, as required by our regulations," said NRC Region IV
Administrator Bruce S. Mallet. In effect, we will be presenting
the plants annual report card to the public.
The performance period to be discussed is January 1 to December
31, 2003. In addition, the NRC staff will provide an overview of
how the agency Reactor Oversight Process works.
A letter from the NRC to Entergy Operations addresses the
performance of the plant during this period and will serve as
the basis for the meeting discussion. It is available on the NRC
web site at:
http://www.nrc.gov/NRR/OVERSIGHT/ASSESS/LETTERS/gg_2003q4.pdf
[PDF Icon] .
The NRC concluded that the plant operated safely last year and
will receive routine inspections during 2004.
With regard to security issues, the letter points out that NRC
has issued several orders and threat advisories to enhance
security capabilities at all nuclear power plants and improve
guard force readiness since the terrorist attacks on September
11, 2001. The agency has also conducted inspections to review
the implementation of these requirements and has monitored the
action of plant operators in response to changing plant
conditions. The NRC will continue security inspections during
2004.
Current performance indicators for Grand Gulf are available on
the NRC web site at:
http://www.nrc.gov/NRR/OVERSIGHT/ASSESS/GG1/gg1_chart.html.
Last revised Thursday, June 24, 2004
*****************************************************************
30 NRC: NRC to Discuss Performance of Comanche Peak July 15
News Release - Region IV - 2004-02 U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY
COMMISSION
Office of Public Affairs, Region IV No. IV-04-028 June
24, 2004 CONTACT: Victor Dricks Phone: 817-860-8128 E-mail:
[opa4@nrc.gov]
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff will meet with
representatives of TXU Energy on July 15 to discuss the results
of the agencys assessment of safety performance at the Comanche
Peak nuclear plant during 2003. The plant is located near Glen
Rose, Texas.
The meeting will be held at 6 p.m. at the Somerville County Expo
Center, 202 Bo Gibbs Blvd., Glen Rose. The public is invited to
observe the meeting and NRC officials will be available before
the conclusion of the meeting to answer questions from the
public.
"The meeting will give area residents a chance to hear
first-hand how NRC inspectors think the plant has been run from
a safety standpoint. NRC regulations require the plant be
operated in a safe manner, and this is our report card on how
they've done in the past year," said NRC Region IV Administrator
Bruce S. Mallet.
The performance period to be discussed is January 1 to December
31, 2003. In addition, the NRC staff will provide an overview of
how the agency Reactor Oversight Process works.
A letter from the NRC to TXU Energy addresses the performance of
the plant during this period and will serve as the basis for the
meeting discussion. It is available on the NRC web site at:
http://www.nrc.gov/NRR/OVERSIGHT/ASSESS/LETTERS/cp_2003q4.pdf
[PDF Icon] .
The NRC concluded that the plant operated safely last year and
will receive routine inspections during 2004.
With regard to security issues, the letter points out that NRC
has issued several orders and threat advisories to enhance
security capabilities at all nuclear power plants and improve
guard force readiness since the terrorist attacks on September
11, 2001. The agency has also conducted inspections to review
the implementation of these requirements and has monitored the
action of plant operators in response to changing plant
conditions. The NRC will continue security inspections during
2004.
Current performance indicators for Comanche Peak Unit 1 are
available on the NRC web site at:
http://www.nrc.gov/NRR/OVERSIGHT/ASSESS/CP1/cp1_chart.html.
Current performance indicators for Unit 2 are available at:
http://www.nrc.gov/NRR/OVERSIGHT/ASSESS/CP2/cp2_chart.html.
Last revised Thursday, June 24, 2004
*****************************************************************
31 NRC: NRC to Discuss Performance of Columbia Generating Station July 22
News Release - Region IV - 2004-02 U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY
COMMISSION
Office of Public Affairs, Region IV No. IV-04-029 June
24, 2004 CONTACT: Victor Dricks Phone: 817-860-8128 E-mail:
[opa4@nrc.gov]
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff will meet with
representatives of Energy Northwest on July 22 to discuss the
results of the agencys assessment of safety performance at the
Columbia Generating Station. The plant is located near Richland,
Washington.
The meeting will be held at 6 p.m. at the Energy Northwest
Office Complex, Walkley room, 3000 George Washington Way,
Richland. The public is invited to observe the meeting and NRC
officials will be available before the conclusion of the meeting
to answer questions from the public.
"The meeting will give area residents a chance to hear
first-hand how NRC inspectors think the plant has been run from
a safety standpoint. It is the plant's responsibility to operate
in a safe manner, and this is our report card on how they've
done in the past year," said NRC Region IV Administrator Bruce
S. Mallet.
The performance period to be discussed is January 1 to December
31, 2003. In addition, the NRC staff will provide an overview of
how the agency Reactor Oversight Process works.
A letter from the NRC to Energy Northwest addresses the
performance of the plant during this period and will serve as
the basis for the meeting discussion. It is available on the NRC
web site at:
http://www.nrc.gov/NRR/OVERSIGHT/ASSESS/LETTERS/wnp_2003q4.pdf
[PDF Icon] .
The NRC concluded that the plant operated safely last year and
will receive routine inspections during 2004.
With regard to security issues, the letter points out that NRC
has issued several orders and threat advisories to enhance
security capabilities at all nuclear power plants and improve
guard force readiness since the terrorist attacks on September
11, 2001. The agency has also conducted inspections to review
the implementation of these requirements and has monitored the
action of plant operators in response to changing plant
conditions. The NRC will continue security inspections during
2004.
Current performance indicators for Columbia are available on the
NRC web site at:
http://www.nrc.gov/NRR/OVERSIGHT/ASSESS/WASH2/wash2_chart.html.
Last revised Thursday, June 24, 2004
*****************************************************************
32 NRC: NRC Proposes $7,500 Fine Against Connecticut Company
News Release - Region I - 2004-03 U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY
COMMISSION
Office of Public Affairs, Region I No. I-04-034
June 24, 2004 CONTACT: Diane Screnci (610) 337-5330 Neil A.
Sheehan (610) 337-5331 E-mail: opa1@nrc.gov
[opa1@nrc.gov]
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff has proposed a $7,500
civil penalty against Pepperidge Farm, Inc., of Norwalk, Conn.,
for violations associated with the loss of a device containing
radioactive material.
The NRC staff conducted a special inspection on March 3 to
review the circumstances associated with the loss of a moisture
sensor device containing 36 millicuries of cesium-137. The State
of Connecticut had notified the agency that the device was
missing from a closed facility and believed to have been sent to
a salvage yard with other material for recycling. At the salvage
yard, the device would have been shredded, bailed and sent with
other scrap metal to a metal processing company. Although
searches were performed to locate the device, it was never
found.
Following the NRC inspection, the NRC offered the company the
opportunity to meet for an enforcement conference to discuss the
apparent violations and discuss the companys corrective
actions. The company declined the meeting, but responded in
writing. The companys corrective actions, which are considered
prompt and comprehensive, include conducting an inventory and
searches for remaining equipment at its facilities, conducting
searches of the salvage yard, alerting two metal processing
companies of the potentially contaminated metal, and revising
company procedures to include requirements for ensuring proper
disposal of NRC licensed devices.
In a letter to the company, Region I Administrator, Hubert J.
Miller said, The NRC considers the failure to control licensed
radioactive material to be a serious matter. He said, the
violation is of concern to the NRC because the failure to
control the device resulted in the likely entry of radioactive
material into the metal recycling process. But, because the
device was apparently sent directly to the salvage yard and
likely shredded, the potential for a substantial radiation dose
to individuals is considerably lower than if the device were
lost intact.
Pepperidge Farm was cited and a fine proposed for failing to
maintain control of the device containing radioactive material.
The company was also cited for three other violations for which
a fine was not assessed.
The company has 30 days from receipt of the letter to either pay
the civil penalty or protest its imposition.
The notice to the company of the proposed fine and the notice of
violation are available from the Region I Office of Public
Affairs and on the NRCs web site at:
http://www.nrc.gov/what-we-do/regulatory/enforcement/current.html
#materials.
Last revised Thursday, June 24, 2004
*****************************************************************
33 Brattleboro Reformer: Flames fanned (VY)
[http://www.reformer.com/]
June 24, 2004 Brattleboro, VT
Damage to Vermont Yankee's main transformer during a Friday
morning fire may have been "minimal," similar perhaps to the lean
news release issued by the company Friday, or even an effort to
downplay the "unusual event" on Sunday.
But a fire at an atomic power plant -- even in the non-nuclear
part of the site -- is not the same thing as, say, a fire in a
garbage can in a company board room. Yet, company board rooms are
where fires get put out.
Entergy Nuclear's Vermont Yankee power plant has been hit hard
by bad news over the past several months. While pursuing a 20
percent boost in its power production of 540 megawatts, first,
cracks were found in a steam dryer; second, spent fuel went AWOL;
and the latest, the transformer caught fire and oil spilled into
the Connecticut River.
No one here is questioning the integrity of the engineers and
workers who check the plant daily to ensure its safety and ours.
But if something as fundamentally simple as oil drips on a hot
piece of metal and ignites a transformer, it makes one wonder
what else could go wrong?
Vermont Yankee shouldn't continue to flame public concern by
inane discrepancies about how long it took to extinguish the
fire. We refer to the Vermont Yankee news release saying it took
35 minutes (when flames weren't visible), and its internal SCRAM
report which said the fire was declared out in an hour.
At least the plant came to a screeching halt as planned and fire
companies from area towns dutifully doused the fire. At least
states and communities were notified soon, though some have
questioned if it couldn't -- in some cases --have been sooner. At
least those plans went off without a hitch, no radiation was
released and no one was hurt. The lesson learned here is that
accidents will happen and may happen despite the best precautions
and the most earnest safety measures.
Call it a string of bad luck. Call it Murphy's Law. Call it what
you will, but it all comes down to one thing: Vermont Yankee's
public credibility has received another blow -- and this can't be
assuaged by a press release. A string of events such as these on
the eve of an uprate makes one question the sanity of increasing
power production at Vermont Yankee.
Copyright ©1999-2004 New England Newspapers, Inc., a
*****************************************************************
34 NRC: Notice of Availability of 2004-09; Regulatory Issue Summary for
FR Doc 04-14297
[Federal Register: June 24, 2004 (Volume 69, Number 121)]
[Notices] [Page 35397] From the Federal Register Online via GPO
Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr24jn04-109]
Status on Deferral of Active Regulation of Ground-Water
Protection at In Situ Leach Uranium Extraction Facilities AGENCY:
Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
ACTION: Notice of availability.
SUMMARY: The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has
developed Regulatory Issue Summary (RIS) 2004-09, ``Status on
Deferral of Active Regulation of Ground-Water Protection at In
Situ Leach (ISL) Uranium Extraction Facilities,'' to inform
interested parties of NRC's proposal to defer active ground-water
regulation at ISL facilities to the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA)-authorized States. The NRC shares the regulatory
oversight of ground-water at ISL facilities with the EPA and
EPA-authorized States, under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA).
The RIS summarizes the process that the NRC plans to use to
assure that EPA-authorized States' ground-water protection
programs provides adequate protection of public health and
safety, and the environment, equivalent to the NRC program. On
February 23, 2004, the NRC issued RIS 2004-02, requesting
interested parties to submit information, on a voluntary basis,
regarding the proposed action. RIS 2004-09 summarizes the
comments received from interested parties and supersedes RIS
2004- 02 in its entirety. No specific action or written response
is required to this RIS.
ADDRESSES: Electronic copies of this document are available for
public inspection in the NRC Public Document Room or from the
Publicly Available Records (PARS) component of NRC's document
system (ADAMS). ADAMS is accessible from the NRC Web site at
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams.html
[http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/leaving.cgi?from=leaving
FR.html&log=linklog&to=http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams.html]
(The Public Electronic Reading Room). RIS 2004-09 is under Adams
Accession Number ML041540558. The document is also available for
inspection or copying for a fee at the NRC's Public Document
Room, 11555 Rockville Pike, Room O1-F21, Rockville, Maryland
20852. This guidance document is not copyrighted, and Commission
approval is not required to reproduce it.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: John Lusher, Office of Nuclear
Material Safety and Safeguards, Division of Fuel Cycle Safety and
Safeguards, Mail Stop T-8A33, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission,
Washington, DC 20555-0001, Telephone (301) 415-7694, or by e-mail
to jhl@nrc.gov [ jhl@nrc.gov] . Dated at Rockville, Maryland this
14th day of June, 2004.
For the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Robert A. Nelson, Chief, Uranium Processing Section, Fuel Cycle
Facilities Branch, Division of Fuel Cycle Safety and Safeguards,
Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards.
[FR Doc. 04-14297 Filed 6-23-04; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 7590-01-P
*****************************************************************
35 NRC: Nuclear Management Company, LLC; Notice of Withdrawal of
FR Doc 04-14298
[Federal Register: June 24, 2004 (Volume 69, Number 121)]
[Notices] [Page 35396-35397] From the Federal Register Online via
GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr24jn04-108]
Application for Amendment to Facility Operating License The U.S.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission (the Commission) has granted the
request of Nuclear Management Company, LLC (the licensee) to
withdraw its January 16, 2004, application for proposed amendment
to Facility Operating License No. DPR-43 for the Kewaunee Nuclear
Power Plant, located in Kewaunee County, Wisconsin.
The proposed amendment would have revised the Technical
Specifications (1) to allow the containment equipment hatch to be
open during refueling operations and/or
[[Page 35397]] during movement of irradiated fuel assemblies
within containment, (2) to require verification of the ability to
close the equipment hatch periodically during refueling
operations, and (3) to include requirements for operability of
the control room post accident recirculation system during fuel
handling operations in which the fuel that is being moved has
been irradiated within less than 30 days.
The Commission had previously issued a Notice of Consideration of
Issuance of Amendment published in the Federal Register on
February 17, 2004 (69 FR 7525). However, by letter dated June 8,
2004, the licensee withdrew the proposed change.
For further details with respect to this action, see the
application for amendment dated January 16, 2004, and the
licensee's letter dated June 8, 2004, which withdrew the
application for license amendment. Documents may be examined,
and/or copied for a fee, at the NRC's Public Document Room (PDR),
located at One White Flint North, Public File Area O1 F21, 11555
Rockville Pike (first floor), Rockville, Maryland. Publicly
available records will be accessible electronically from the
Agencywide Documents Access and Management Systems (ADAMS) Public
Electronic Reading Room on the Internet at the NRC Web site,
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams/html
[http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/leaving.cgi?from=leaving
FR.html&log=linklog&to=http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams/html]
. Persons who do not have access to ADAMS or who encounter
problems in accessing the documents located in ADAMS, should
contact the NRC PDR Reference staff by telephone at
1-800-397-4209, or (301) 415-4737 or by e-mail to
pdr@nrc.gov [ pdr@nrc.gov] . Dated in Rockville, Maryland, this
16th day of June, 2004.
For the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Carl F. Lyon, Project Manager, Section 1, Project Directorate
III, Division of Licensing Project Management, Office of Nuclear
Reactor Regulation.
[FR Doc. 04-14298 Filed 6-23-04; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 7590-01-P
*****************************************************************
36 projo.com: Officials: Nuclear plant warning system has problems
| Providence, R.I. | AP's The Wire
06.24.2004 6:18 P.M.
The Associated Press
grafs 5-7 on request for investigation adgawarh
BRATTLEBORO, Vt. (AP) - Operators of the Vermont Yankee nuclear
plant were 15 minutes late in notifying the state of Vermont
about an emergency at the plant last week, officials say.
In addition, the town of Brattleboro, which is located within
the plant's emergency evacuation zone, was notified 20 minutes
after Keene, N.H., which is not.
By federal law, Entergy should have notified Vermont by 7:05
a.m., 15 minutes after the unusual event was declared at 6:50
a.m. Friday. Instead the call from Entergy was verified at 7:17
a.m. by Vermont's Office of Emergency Management.
Plant spokesman Robert Williams said Thursday that Vermont
Yankee's logs showed that the plant had notified the state of
Vermont at 7:11 a.m. last Friday, with word going to New
Hampshire and Massachusetts officials shortly after that.
Meanswhile Thursday, an anti-nuclear group, the New England
Coalition, asked the Public Service Board to investigate whether
last Friday's fire should be attributed to recent work at the
plant done as part of its plan to boost its power output by 20
percent.
Under an agreement with the state, plant owner Entergy Nuclear
has agreed to pay the state's retail utilities the extra cost if
a plant outage related to the power boost forces the retail
companies to buy more expensive power elsewhere.
"The real possibility that the electrical fault, fire, and thus
the outage, resulted from extended power uprate modifications
made in the switchyard area cannot be excluded," the coalition
said in papers filed at the Public Service Board.
Entergy Nuclear control room operators failed to correctly use a
new nuclear alert telephone system during Friday's low-level
emergency, resulting in delays in notifying the state about the
emergency, state and Entergy officials said Wednesday.
Albert Lewis, director of the Vermont Office of Emergency
Management, said the problems were not Vermont's fault, although
he declined to point the finger directly at Entergy.
"Let's just say it was 'operator error,"' Lewis said, who said
the state was reviewing its overall emergency response.
Williams acknowledged there were problems in the plant's control
room in using the new nuclear notification phones. He said
Entergy officials were investigating the problem and the plant
personnel's response to the emergency.
At the same time, the town of Brattleboro raised questions about
Vermont's notification system, which they said lags far behind
the New Hampshire emergency alert system.
Lewis said the new phone system involved a dedicated telephone
line that linked the emergency management offices of Vermont,
New Hampshire and Massachusetts, with the Yankee control room.
The new system was installed in May.
No one was hurt in the fire, which was confined to the
non-nuclear part of the plant. Yankee remains shut down, and
Williams had no timetable for repairs or how soon the plant
would be back on line.
Providence Journal newsroom at (401) 277-7303.
© Belo Interactive Inc.
*****************************************************************
37 Brattleboro Reformer: Letters: Entergy can't be trusted
[http://www.reformer.com/]
June 24, 2004 Brattleboro, VT
Editor of the Reformer:
Entergy Nuclear Vermont Yankee is at it again: damage control,
"spin," deceit, and weasel-words. This time, it is to "pretty up"
the story of last Friday's transformer explosion and fire. And
they are apparently working nights and weekends: Sunday night at
8 o'clock, Entergy jumped the Monday morning news with a "don't
worry, be happy" fantasy press release.
In it, ENVY PR man Rob Williams made the patently absurd claim
that oil and fire-fighting chemical foam spilled into the
Connecticut River as a result of the fire had been "cleaned up."
In fact, according to news accounts, the company that was called
in to contain and clean up the spill was able only to remove a
small amount of oil residue from a few rocks at the river's edge.
A good portion of the oil was long gone before the so-called
"clean up" even began. New England Coalition is attempting to
verify reports by downstream fisherman of a substantial fish kill
that coincided with the time of the fire.
Further, Entergy minimized the cause of the accident, saying "a
small oil supply line used for electrical component cooling
leaked onto metal that had been heated by the electrical fault."
This sounds harmless enough, but in its statement Entergy ignored
the cause of the massive electrical short circuit that ignited
the explosion and fire in the first place.
The fact that it took four fire companies more than 35 minutes
to douse the 30-foot flames -- and an hour to cool off the
switchyard equipment enough to ensure the fire would not
re-ignite -- is a good indicator this was no small fire.
How can the public reasonably believe anything this corporation
says about its operations in Vermont? Missing nuclear fuel,
cracks in the steam dryer, leaking pump seals, continuing
electrical cable issues, illegal grading and construction,
dumping of untested and potentially radioactive dirt into a local
landfill, obstruction of the Vermont regulatory process resulting
in sanctions and monetary fines against the company, deceptive
and misleading statements to the mediathe list goes on. No wonder
even Governor Douglas said, "Vermonters, and I among them, have
lost some confidence in the operation of the nuclear power plant
in Vernon" [Rutland Herald, April 23, 2004].
Through numerous regulatory interventions and interactions in
both public and private, New England Coalition has plenty of
experience dealing with Entergy's lawyers, PR men, and other
corporate "professionals." We have found that their every word
must be put through a high level of scrutiny, put back into
context, and weighed against other critical information they have
often conveniently omitted.
These are not the signs of good corporate citizenship. This is
evidence of an irresponsible and uncaring corporation bent on
wresting maximum profit from an old plant. Entergy has shown that
it will take outrageous chances, ignore regulations, and do or
say almost anything to get there. One thing is clear: Entergy
cannot be trusted with the well-being of the community. Entergy
should not have permission to undertake a risky 20 percent
"extended power uprate" of its aging reactor. The company should
not be granted permission to store high-level nuclear waste in
casks outside the reactor building just so they can generate ever
more toxic waste. And this reactor should not be granted a
license extension past 2012 when its current license expires.
Rather, this troubled, antiquated, and dangerous machine should
be responsibly, deliberately and permanently put to rest.
Peter Alexander
Brattleboro, June 21
The writer is the executive director of the New England
Coalition.
Copyright ©1999-2004 New England Newspapers, Inc., a
*****************************************************************
38 Bellona: Russian Federal Atomic Energy Agency to “deal
professionally” with environment
The head of the agency Alexander Rumyantsev announced this during
his trip to Krasnoyarsk region in Siberia in April, ITAR-TASS
reported.
2004-06-23 15:14
Rumyantsev was optimistic regarding reforms in the Atomic Agency
and promised to reduce its staff from 623 to 500 people and keep
the dialogue with the environmental organisations, including
radical ones. Concerning Zheleznogorsk Chemical Combine,
Rumyantsev said about the intention to draw a plan for conversion
of the production there. ”Zheleznogorsk is still a problem city
for us” added Rumyantsev.
Besides, the head of the Russian Federal Atomic Energy Agency, or
FAEA, assured that the environmental situation is improving.
“Environmental issues are very sensitive, but we have begun to
deal with them professionally” he added.
Publisher: [bellona@bellona.no] , President:
[frederic@bellona.no]
Information: [info@bellona.no] , Technical contact:
[webmaster@bellona.no]
Telephone: +47 23 23 46 00 Telefax: +47 22 38 38 62 * P.O.Box
2141 Grunerlokka, 0505 Oslo, Norway
*****************************************************************
39 Bellona: EU is freezing 100m euros of aid to Armenia after
refusal to shut down its nuclear plant.
"Our position of principle is that nuclear power plants should
not be built in highly active seismic zones."
2004-06-23 15:53
It was said by Alexis Loeber, head of the EU's delegation in
Armenia, BBC reported. The European Union, as part of its general
policy seeking the closure of elderly nuclear plants constructed
in territories of the former Soviet Union, agreed to give the
grant aid ($122m) to Armenia for finding alternative energy
sources and for helping with decommissioning costs at the plant.
In return, the government in Yerevan would commit to a definite
date for the plant's closure. "We cannot force Armenia to close
the plant," says the EU's Mr Loeber. "We feel that should
definitely be well in advance of the end of Metsamor's design
lifecycle in 2016." The Metsamor plant has no secondary
containment facilities, a safety requirement of all modern
reactors, BBC reported.
Another concern is that due to border and railway closures with
surrounding territories, nuclear material to feed the plant is
flown into Armenia from Russia. "It is the same as flying around
a potential nuclear bomb," says Mr Loeber. "It's an extremely
hazardous exercise." Areg Galstyan, the country's deputy minister
of power, says $50m has been spent on upgrading safety at
Metsamor. "It was a big mistake to shut the plant in 1988," says
Mr Galstyan. "It created an energy crisis and the people and
economy suffered. Electricity industry specialists say that due
to the expansion and updating of existing thermal and
hydro-energy plants, the country has become an electricity
exporter in recent years. A major new power source will come on
stream in 2006 when a pipeline supplying gas from neighbouring
Iran is due to be completed, BBC reported.
At the same time PACE prepared four documents urging to close the
station. Despite some calls of international organizations to
close the station, the Armenian government did not respond to
them. European Union many times suggested Armenia to close
Metsamor but Armenia rejected them. As a result, European Union
had to impose an economic sanction on Armenia by refusing to
allocate $100 million. the Armenian Trade Minister Chshmaritian
reiterated Yerevan’s rejection of the offer, saying that as much
as $1 billion is needed for safely shutting down Metsamor safely
and putting in place an alternative source of inexpensive energy.
He added the Armenia-EU body decided to set up a working group
that will look into the issue in detail and present its findings
by the end of this year, Baku Today reports.
The Metsamor Nuclear Power plant produced 1.9 billion kilowatt
hours of electricity in 2003, or 36 percent of the total
generation of electricity in Armenia. ZAO Inter RAO UES, a
subsidiary of Russia's Unified Energy System, and Armenia signed
a contract in September 2003 to hand over trust management of the
plant to Inter RAO UES.
Publisher: Bellona Foundation [bellona@bellona.no] , President:
Frederic Hauge [frederic@bellona.no] Information: info@bellona.no
[info@bellona.no] , Technical contact: webmaster@bellona.no
[webmaster@bellona.no] Telephone: +47 23 23 46 00 Telefax: +47 22
38 38 62 * P.O.Box 2141 Grunerlokka, 0505 Oslo, Norway Menu
*****************************************************************
40 Bellona: Unit 1 at Leningrad NPP to be launched August 1
This was reported by ”St Petersburg Echo” with the reference to
the Information Centre of the Leningrad NPP.
2004-06-24 16:08
”By August 1 the modernisation of the first unit should be
completed which has been going on in stages since 1989 and the
State Nuclear Regulatory should issue the licence” said the LNPP
representative. According to him the licence should be valid for
3-5 years with the possibility for prolongation. He also added
that the first unit satisfies all modern requirements of the
radiation safety and the state of its equipment allows extending
its lifetime for 15 years.
The price of the modernisation is not announced, but the experts
believe it is 25% of the new unit, i.e. $200m. The money was
allocated by the local and state budget as well as Rosenergoatom
concern. The 30-years lifetime of the first unit was expired back
in December 2003.
According to “Echo-St Petersburg”, 5 incidents at the Leningrad,
Balakovo and Kola NPPs were registered in May when automatic
safety shutdown system was triggered.
Publisher: [bellona@bellona.no] , President:
[frederic@bellona.no]
Information: [info@bellona.no] , Technical contact:
[webmaster@bellona.no]
Telephone: +47 23 23 46 00 Telefax: +47 22 38 38 62 * P.O.Box
2141 Grunerlokka, 0505 Oslo, Norway
*****************************************************************
41 APP.COM - Oyster Creek: The Recent Record
ASBURY PARK PRESS
Published in the Asbury Park Press Pundits say there are three
ways to judge a politician: the first is to look at the record;
the second is to look at the record; the third is to look at the
record.
Applying that same principle to the management at Oyster Creek,
there's reason to be skeptical about whether the confidence that
company owner Exelon Corp. insists the public should have in the
nuclear plant's safe operation is warranted.
The following incidents have been reported at Oyster Creek since
it underwent a change in ownership in August 2000:
+ April 2004: Oyster Creek and the state Attorney General's
Office reached a $1 million settlement stemming from violations
that resulted in a major fish kill in 2002.
+ March 2004: The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced
it would be increasing oversight at Oyster Creek because of a May
2003 incident in which workers failed to notice a power line that
was ruined by water, causing an electrical problem that knocked
out power to about half the plant's safety systems, including
security cameras, alarms, sensors, pumps and valves. It was the
third time in eight years and second time in 2 ˝ years that a
damaged power line went unnoticed by plant workers, NRC officials
said.
+ April 2003: Two security guards were suspended when one pointed
his gun at the other. That prompted a call by state Sen. Leonard
T. Connors Jr., R-Ocean, to replace the private security guards
with National Guard troops.
+ March 2003: Two private security guards were suspended when
they were found sleeping on the job at the plant's second
security checkpoint.
+ March 2003: Officials discovered that Oyster Creek's 42
emergency sirens used to alert residents in the 10-mile radius
around the plant had been inoperable for an undetermined amount
of time because of a computer problem. The system later underwent
a complete overhaul.
+ March 2003: After a two-month investigation into lax security
at Oyster Creek, News 12 aired a segment that included a
videotape shot by an amateur documenting how easy it was to drive
around the plant's access road and parking areas unchallenged by
security.
+ December 2002: Oyster Creek was fined $190,000 by the
Department of Environmental Protection for violating the Water
Pollution Control Act. The generating plant was in full operation
when the dilution pumps -– used to regulate the temperature of
water after it has cooled the nuclear reactor – were removed from
service. That caused water in the discharge canal to heat up to
101 degrees. More than 5,876 fish of 24 different species died
from heat shock.
Oyster Creek was also cited by the state for failing to provide
timely notification of the incident. Plant officials are required
to do so within two hours; more than five hours passed before the
DEP was alerted.
+ November 2001: A faulty transmitter caused the water
temperature to drop significantly in a discharge canal that is
normally warmed by the reactor's cooling pumps. The resulting
thermal shock killed 1,400 fish and led to an unscheduled outage
at the plant.
Asbury Park Press
*****************************************************************
42 Rutland Herald: Yankee emergency warning system faulted
- Jun. 24, 2004
By SUSAN SMALLHEER Herald Staff
BRATTLEBORO - The emergency at Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant
last week was plagued with problems in its emergency notification
system, officials said Wednesday.
Entergy Nuclear control room operators failed to correctly use a
new nuclear alert telephone system during Friday's low-level
emergency, resulting in delays in notifying the state about the
emergency, state and Entergy officials said Wednesday.
As a result, Entergy Nuclear was 12 minutes late in notifying the
state of Vermont of the emergency. By federal law, Entergy should
have notified Vermont by 7:05 a.m., 15 minutes after the unusual
event was declared at 6:50 a.m.
Instead the call from Entergy was verified at 7:17 a.m. by
Vermont's Office of Emergency Management.
During the fire and emergency there were two different paths of
emergency notification - the 911 fire call and the second call
about low-level nuclear emergency.
The problems lay with the notification about the low-level
nuclear emergency.
Albert Lewis, director of the Vermont Office of Emergency
Management, said the problems were not on the side of the state
of Vermont, although he declined to point the finger directly at
Entergy.
"Let's just say it was 'operator error,'" Lewis said, who said
the state was reviewing its overall emergency response.
Robert Williams, spokesman for Entergy Nuclear, acknowledged
there were problems in the plant's control room in using the new
nuclear notification phones. He said Entergy officials were
investigating the problem and the plant personnel's response to
the emergency.
At the same time, the town of Brattleboro raised questions about
Vermont's notification system, which they said lags far behind
the New Hampshire emergency alert system.
Lewis said the new phone system involved a dedicated telephone
line that linked the emergency management offices of Vermont, New
Hampshire and Massachusetts, with the Yankee control room. The
new system had been installed in May.
"There were operator errors, not involving Vermont. We're
reviewing everything. I'm not a perfectionist, and I'm never
happy if we can't do better. We need to do better and we'll take
those corrective actions," Lewis said.
"We are reviewing the performance of the plant and plant staff,"
Williams said, "like we do with every shutdown. Part of that is
we're looking at the notification sequence between the control
room and the state's communication system."
Last Friday, firefighting crews from the nuclear reactor itself,
the towns of Vernon, Brattleboro and Guilford, as well as
Northfield and Bernardston, Mass., battled a transformer fire at
the Vernon reactor.
The fire prompted Vermont Yankee into an emergency shutdown, and
also forced Entergy Nuclear to declare a low-level emergency, or
"unusual event."
No one was hurt in the fire, which was confined to the
non-nuclear part of the plant. Yankee remains shut down, and
Williams had no timetable for repairs or how soon the plant would
be back on line.
Lewis Stowell, a planner with the Office of Emergency Management,
said last Friday's fire came minutes before Entergy staff were to
go through one of their regular quarterly drills. Stowell said
the drill was supposed to start around 7:30 a.m.
The drill was called off, as firefighters from four towns in two
different states battled a fire which sent a giant column of
black smoke and flames 35 feet into the air over the nuclear
reactor.
The fire was fueled by a 1,000-gallon tank of cooling oil, which
contained the overflow oil from the transformer. The transformer,
which wasn't damaged in the fire in part because of a fire deluge
system, contains 27,000 gallons of oil, Williams said.
Entergy declared a low-level emergency at the plant, the first in
seven years, because crews quickly realized they couldn't put the
fire out in the required 10 minutes, Lewis said.
Lewis said Entergy Nuclear employees were finally able to notify
the state by using the old phone system, which was still in the
control room. The old system had been slated to be removed by the
end of June, but now it will remain for at least a while longer,
Stowell said.
Lewis said that if the old system had failed, Entergy would have
used a regular telephone line.
The town of Brattleboro is concerned about its late notification
as well, but for different reasons. The town manager said formal
notice of the "unusual event" came 20 minutes after New Hampshire
emergency officials sent off their tone alert system to emergency
responders.
Brattleboro Town Manager Jerry Remillard said he was contacted by
Vermont emergency officials 20 minutes after Keene, N.H., Mutual
Aid sent out its message to surrounding towns in the 10-mile
emergency planning zone, which included Vernon, Guilford and
Dummerston.
Remillard said Brattleboro receives its nuclear emergency alert
from Vermont State Police, rather than Keene Mutual Aid because
Brattleboro does its own fire dispatching. The other, smaller
towns depend on Southwestern New Hampshire Mutual Aid dispatch
center, which is based in Keene.
"The question is, 'Are you making it more complicated then it
needs to be?'" asked Remillard, a veteran of numerous Vermont
Yankee drills. "It doesn't flow smoothly, but we've learned to
work with it."
Under the current Vermont scenario, Entergy notifies Vermont
Emergency Management in Waterbury, and they in turn notify the
Rockingham barracks of the Vermont State Police, whose
dispatchers sent out the page.
Vermont State Police Capt. William Pettengill of Troop D in
Rockingham said he was off Friday, but all reports were that
State Police involvement in the emergency went smoothly.
Remillard said Brattleboro emergency officials know that Keene is
going to get the word out much faster than Vermont emergency
officials.
"We just know we're going to hear it from Keene first," Remillard
said.
Remillard said he was still at home Friday morning when he got a
telephone call from Brattleboro Deputy Fire Michael Bucossi,
telling him about the transformer fire at Vermont Yankee.
Brattleboro Fire Chief David Emery and eight firefighters took
three engines, including Brattleboro's ladder truck, to the
blaze.
Remillard said he then overheard that the unusual event was
declared, listening to Keene Mutual Aid while standing in the
Brattleboro fire and police dispatch center, at 7:26 a.m.
Remillard said he waited for his own official notification from
Vermont officials. He said it came 20 minutes later, at 7:46
a.m., slightly more than an hour after the fire started and four
minutes short of when the emergency was first declared by Entergy
at 6:50 a.m.
"It is my opinion that it could have happened quicker and should
have happened quicker. We're discussing it," Remillard said, who
added that he met with Vermont emergency officials, along with
representatives from New Hampshire and Massachusetts on Tuesday
to review Friday's events.
Lewis said part of the problem was the different pager systems
Vermont and New Hampshire uses.
He said New Hampshire uses a tone alert pager system and Vermont
an alpha-numeric pager system. He said the alpha-numeric has been
slower, but he said the state chose it over tone alert because it
has the call-back verification capability that the state likes.
Lewis said his office was in the process of upgrading the pager
response system, and he said he might consider returning to the
tone-alert system.
Williams was emphatic that there wasn't any confusion between the
drill and the real emergency that contributed to the delay.
"Not at all," he said. Most of the drill was supposed to occur at
the simulated control room at Entergy's headquarters in
Brattleboro.
Williams said the company still had no timetable for completing
repairs or going back on line. The unexpected shutdown is costing
Vermont utilities higher power costs. Green Mountain Power said
the first week would cost them an additional $300,000.
Jason Gibbs, press secretary to Vermont Gov. James Douglas, said
earlier in the week that rumors that Douglas was also a victim of
late notification were untrue. One rumor had him being notified
by New Hampshire Gov. Craig Benson rather than Vermont officials.
Gibbs said Douglas was notified about the fire and the emergency
declaration by Kerry Sleeper, the commissioner of the Department
of Public Safety, 20 minutes after the fire began. He said that
the two governors discussed the Entergy emergency later in the
day.
Gibbs said the fire continued to fuel the governor's concern
about Vermont Yankee.
"Safety will be the most important factor in assessing the plant.
With each of these incidents, concerns continue to mount," he
said.
Contact Susan Smallheer at susan.smallheer@rutlandherald.com.
Copyright © 2004 Rutland Herald
[http://www.rutlandherald.com/] and Barre-Montpelier Times Argus
[http://www.timesargus.com/]
*****************************************************************
43 APP.COM - Part 1: On balance, it's not worth the risk
[http://www.app.com/]
ASBURY PARK PRESS
Published in the Asbury Park Press 6/20/04
The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission may begin deciding as
early as next year whether to grant a 20-year license extension
for the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station in Lacey.
Its decision will be based entirely on two considerations: Can
the aging plant be operated safely and will it have an adverse
impact on the environment?
History suggests the decision will be little more than a
formality. The NRC has yet to deny a license renewal to any of
the 23 nuclear plants that have sought one. And recent changes to
the licensing process "limit the public's role to essentially
that of a casual observer," says the Union of Concerned
Scientists, a nuclear industry watchdog group.Local and state
officials, the area's congressional delegation and the public
must work to make certain Oyster Creek -- the oldest large-scale
commercial plant in the nation -- is permanently retired.
When all factors are considered in determining whether the
nuclear reactor is a net plus or minus to the region, the risks
posed by the plant to the security, health and safety of those
living within its wide shadow clearly outweigh the benefits.
Plant owner Exelon Corp.'s case for keeping Oyster Creek open
goes something like this:
The plant has provided safe, reliable and relatively cheap power
since it opened in 1969. It has been continually upgraded and
modernized. The plant provides high-paying jobs for 450 people.
It contributes to the local and state economy, and provides Lacey
with an annual $11.5 million subsidy that has helped keep the
municipal portion of property taxes low. The plant has met all
applicable health and safety standards.
The case for shutting the reactor down is far stronger:
+ It's an aging facility whose faulty design the government
ordered changed just three years after it was built.
+ Over the past few years, the security, environmental and safety
lapses at Oyster Creek have raised serious questions about the
competence of its management and the adequacy of resources
devoted to safety and security.
+ More than 50 years after the discovery of nuclear power, there
is still no plan in place for the safe transport and disposal of
radioactive spent fuel.
+ Studies about the health effects of those living near nuclear
power plants remain inconclusive.
+ Oyster Creek's reactor building and the spent fuel rod pool
that sits above it are vulnerable to terrorist attack from jet
aircraft.
+ The deregulation of the electricity industry has forced nuclear
plant owners to become fiercely competitive, providing new
incentives for trimming staff, reducing maintenance, deferring
repairs and taking shortcuts that can improve profitability at
the expense of safety. For some, cutting costs is the only way to
survive.
+ The Oyster Creek plant was conceived when the population in
Ocean County was less than 125,000. Today, more than 530,000
people live in Ocean County -- the second-fastest growing county
in the most densely populated state in the nation. More than 3.5
million people live within a 50-mile radius of the plant.
+ The evacuation plan is inadequate. The consequences of a major
radiation leak or reactor core meltdown are unimaginable.
+ The electricity needs of New Jersey and the multistate grid of
which it is a part can be met without Oyster Creek, which
generates less power than all but seven of the nation's 103
nuclear plants. The loss of Oyster Creek would have no
appreciable impact on the supply of power in New Jersey, electric
rates or reliability of service.
In fairness to the plant's operators, the odds of a meltdown or
major accidental release of radiation at Oyster Creek are
relatively low. But the threat of terrorism has increased those
odds substantially.
The recent security lapses at Oyster Creek, the vulnerability
demonstrated during its mock terrorist drills, the flawed
evacuation plan and the errors in judgment by plant managers that
have led to fish kills and undetected safety problems all argue
in favor of coming down on the side of caution.
Caution in this case means shutting down Oyster Creek
permanently. The stakes involved are too high to consider any
other course.
Asbury Park Press
*****************************************************************
44 TheChamplainChannel: Vermont Yankee To Remain Off-Line Indefinitely
[http://www.ibsys.com/]
[TheChamplainChannel.com]
Critics Express Concern Over Plant's Embarrassing Year
POSTED: 9:31 pm EDT June 23, 2004
UPDATED: 10:40 am EDT June 24, 2004
BURLINGTON, Vt. -- Vermont Yankee remained off-line Thursday
after two fires there on Friday, but Entergy now says the plant's
safety system didn't respond the way it should have.
Vermont Yankee officials said the accident was far less serious
than originally feared, but critics charge it's the pattern
they're concerned about. It's just one safety lapse after the
next, they said.
"A fire at a nuclear plant is a big deal," one customer said.
Five days after the fire there, critics call the accident more
serious -- and more telling -- than first believed.
"Powerplants have what's called a bathtub curve," said longtime
nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen. "They fail a lot when they're
new. They fail a lot when they're old. In between though, they
don't fail a lot. I have been saying that they're on the upslope
of the bathtub curve, and we should see more of these failures as
the plant gets older."
Gundersen cites three forced shutdowns in nine months due to
broken valves and pumps.
Vermont Yankee turns 32 this year, but marks the year with a
series of embarrassments: cracks in the steam dryer, a pair of
missing fuel rods and, most recently, the transformer fire.
Public service commissioner David O'Brien sent the state nuclear
engineer to Vernon this week for a closer look.
"We've got to find out what caused it," Public Service
Commissioner David O'Brien said. "Was it a problem with the
equipment? Was it a problem with maintenance? We've got to find
that out first."
Officials hope to find out what caused the accident within a
week.
The plant will remain off-line indefinitely.
The NRC, meanwhile, still plans to assess Vermont Yankee for its
proposed uprate later this summer.
Here's a look at what's been going on at Vermont Yankee in the
last few months:
April 3: The plant closed down for a scheduled refueling, and new
equipment was installed.
April 21: Officials at the plant announced that two fuel rods
were missing.
May 4: The plant reopened after completing the scheduled 30-day
refueling.
June 18: Two fires started at the plant, including one inside the
turbine building.
Have a comment about this story? E-mail our newsroom
[newstips@thechamplainchannel.com] . Copyright 2004 by
TheChamplainChannel.com [planews@ibsys.com] . All rights
reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast,
*****************************************************************
45 Valley Advocate: No Hearings on Nukes
valleyadvocate.com
by Stephanie Kraft - June 24, 2004
I t always took a lot of vigilance to live near a nuclear power
plant. Neighbors had to watch every move in the game when plant
owners moved for relicensing, power uprates or other changes
requiring the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's approval.
But groups that researched the records, got hip to the NRC's
bureaucratic quirks and followed the letter of the hearing
process sometimes won shutdowns, got more thorough cleanups, or
at least unearthed vital information about their local reactors.
Now, however, new NRC regulations may make the hearing process --
which won many victories for people who didn't want their local
nuke to become a Three Mile Island -- a thing of the past.
The new rules, effective since February, would nearly eliminate
the public's right to demand full-scale hearings on such matters.
Citizens would in most cases lose the right to the formal
hearings that in the past allowed them to force plant owners to
hand over crucial documents and to cross-examine witnesses.
Instead, the normal process would involve so-called "informal"
hearings that do not include the right to demand documents and
examine witnesses. The new rules also give people far less time
to research the problems they want to discuss at hearings.
But Valley nuke watchers aren't giving up without a fight.
Charlemont-based Citizens Awareness Network late this winter sued
the NRC over the new regulations in federal appeals court in
Boston. The NRC tried to get the venue moved to Washington, D.C.
-- closer to its own territory --but the Boston court refused to
change the venue. So the case remains in the court that 12 years
ago, when CAN sued to force the NRC to hold hearings on the
Yankee Rowe plant decommissioning, found the NRC "arbitrary,
capricious and utterly irrational."
Public Citizen, the National Whistleblower Center and the Nuclear
Information and Resource Service have joined the CAN suit. Last
week Massachusetts Attorney General Tom Reilly and the AGs of
Connecticut, New Hampshire, New York, Wisconsin and California
all filed a brief in the Boston court supporting CAN's case,
arguing that the states have an interest in public safety and in
the environmental and economic effects of nuclear operations. A
trial on the new rules is expected in September.
"This will determine whether there are hearings on uprates,
relicensing, all these things, for communities across the
country," said CAN executive director Deborah Katz. "Hearings are
our right. The NRC can't just take it away. " -- Stephanie Kraft
skraft@valleyadvocate.com [skraft@valleyadvocate.com] Use our
contact form to write to Stephanie Kraft.
*****************************************************************
46 APP.COM - Part 2: Will the lights stay on without it?
[http://www.app.com/]
ASBURY PARK PRESS
Published in the Asbury Park Press 6/21/04
'The bottom line on everything is money, and without that plant,
we're dead."
So says Lacey Mayor John Parker, employing an unfortunate
metaphor, about the economic importance of the Oyster Creek
nuclear plant to his township.
Parker, Oyster Creek's giddiest cheerleader, is wrong on two
counts.
First, when it comes to nuclear power, the bottom line is
safety, not money.
Second, Lacey would not suffer financially from the shutdown of
Oyster Creek. The township receives an annual $11.5 million
subsidy from the state for hosting the plant. State law requires
that the subsidy be granted in perpetuity, with annual
adjustments for inflation, whether the plant remains open or not.
Even if that weren't the case, to suggest that Oyster Creek
should be kept open to keep taxes low in the town that hosts it
is an affront to neighboring towns and to the millions of people
who would pay a much larger price should a severe accident ever
occur at the plant.
Next to safety, the most important question state officials
should be asking is this: How would the loss of Oyster Creek's
generating capacity affect New Jersey's ability to obtain
reliable, affordable power?
The short answer: The impact would be negligible.
Oyster Creek's overall contribution to New Jersey's energy needs
and the multistate power grid of which it is a part is modest;
its loss would have to be replaced, but it's already being
planned for. New capacity from natural gas plants that is
expected to come online would more than compensate for Oyster
Creek's shutdown, according to the state Board of Public
Utilities.
Oyster Creek is one of the smallest nuclear plants in the
nation; only seven of the 103 reactors have less generating
capacity, according to the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Oyster Creek supplies about 9 percent of the state's electricity
but contributes less than 1 percent to the regional grid, PJM
Interconnection, of which New Jersey is a part.
PJM plans for the energy needs and coordinates the movement of
electricity for 35 million people throughout New Jersey,
Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and parts of three other states.
New Jersey can draw on that grid for any shortfalls when the need
arises.
The BPU is not expected to take a formal position on Oyster
Creek's license renewal, but it has provided information to the
governor's office about the possible impact of the loss of the
plant. BPU Commissioner Jeanne Fox says she is confident the
state's energy needs can be met without Oyster Creek and the B.L.
England coal-burning plant in Cape May County, which is expected
to shut down in 2007.
David Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nuclear
energy watchdog group, says he is unaware of any electricity
disruptions or price spikes that have resulted from the shutdowns
-- some of them abrupt -- of more than 20 nuclear plants. Some of
the plants generated two or three times the amount of electricity
produced by Oyster Creek.
In addition to being able to draw on the regional grid for
power, New Jersey has established renewable alternative energy
source targets of 4 percent by 2008 and 20 percent by 2020 for
the state's four major electricity providers -- JCP, PSE,
Conectiv and Rockland. Fox believes the targets are achievable,
even with today's technology. New developments could push those
targets upward. The chief alternative sources projected for New
Jersey are solar, wind and biomass electricity generation, a
process in which organic material is converted into energy.
Although the Bush administration wants to jump-start the nuclear
industry, the opposition is certain to be fierce. It's been more
than 30 years since a new nuclear plant has been ordered and
built because of profitability concerns and political and
environmental opposition. Today, nuclear power plants generate
about 20 percent of the nation's electricity.
When commercial nuclear power debuted more than three decades
ago, its enthusiasts gushed that it would provide a new energy
source "too cheap to meter." Today, Oyster Creek and the industry
continue to tout nuclear energy's low costs. But a 2001 study by
Public Citizen, a national consumer advocacy group, debunked that
myth.
It found that the greater a state's dependence on nuclear
energy, the higher its rates. In the five states that drew more
than 50 percent of their power from nuclear, electric rates were
37 percent higher than those in non-nuclear states. Nuclear power
is more expensive than other forms of energy because its capital
costs are far higher and because it is costly to meet safety
standards.
When capital outlays, which account for 60 to 75 percent of the
cost of operating a nuclear plant, are factored in,
nuclear-generated electricity is nearly four times as costly to
produce as gas-powered energy, according to an International
Energy Agency report. Those figures don't include the value of
federal subsidies for such things as insurance and waste
disposal.
Safe, renewable alternatives must be found and developed.
Extending the life of aging plants that generate tons of
radioactive waste that will remain threats to the environment for
thousands of years makes no sense. The longer nuclear power is
deemed an appropriate response to our energy needs, the longer we
will defer investing in the development of cleaner, safer,
cheaper alternatives. And the longer we will postpone having to
confront the issue of how to deal with some of the planet's most
toxic waste -- radioactive spent fuel rods.
TOMORROW: A look at Oyster Creek's record.
the Asbury Park Press
*****************************************************************
47 APP.COM - Oyster Creek: Time to Retire
[http://www.app.com/]
ASBURY PARK PRESS
PART 1: OVERVIEW
* Nuclear Regulatory Commission [http://www.nrc.gov/]
* Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Plant
[http://www.oystercreeklr.com/]
* Nuclear Information Resource Service. (Networking center for
citizens and environmental organizations) [http://www.nirs.org/]
* Nuclear Energy Institute [http://www.nei.org/]
* Union of Concerned Scientists. [http://www.ucsusa.org/]
PART 2: ENERGY NEEDS
* PJM Interconnection. [http://www.pjm.com/index.jsp]
* New Jersey Board of Public Utilities: The Renewable Energy
Task Force Report
[http://www.bpu.state.nj.us/reports/RenEnergyTFR.pdf]
PART 3: THE SAFETY RECORD
* Union of Concerned Scientists, U.S. Nuclear Plants in the
21st Century: The risk of a lifetime
[http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/nuclear_safety/page.cfm?pageI
D=1408]
* Oyster Creek news
[http://www.nuclear.com/n-plants/Oyster_Creek/Oyster_Creek_news.h
tml]
* List of nuclear accidents
[http://www.campusprogram.com/reference/en/wikipedia/l/li/list_of
_nuclear_accidents.html]
PART 4: TERRORISM
* Nuclear security: before and after Sept. 11
[http://www.nrc.gov/what-we-do/safeguards/response-911.html]
* Nuclear terrorism and health effects
[http://www.bt.cdc.gov/radiation/terrorismqa.asp]
* Spent fuel and half lifes
[http://www.nirs.org/roadsrails/hlrw-nir.PDF]
* Facts on high-level radioactive waste
[http://www.nirs.org/roadsrails/hlrw-nir.PDF]
* Yucca Mountain Project
[http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/ymp/index.shtml]
PART 5: WORST-CASE SCENARIO
* Chernobyl information Web site [http://www.chernobyl.info/en]
* Guide to radioactive waste resources on the Internet
[http://www.radwaste.org]
Chernobyl, Assessment of Radiological and Health Impacts, 2002
update [http://www.nea.fr/html/rp/chernobyl/chernobyl.html]
* President's Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island
[http://stellar-one.com/nuclear/staff_reports/technical_analysis_
reports_summary.htm]
PART 6: EVACUATION
* Federal Emergency Management Agency: Backgrounder: Nuclear
Power Plant Emergency
[http://www.fema.gov/hazards/nuclear/radiolo.shtm]
* NJ DEP Bureau of Nuclear Engineering
[http://www.nj.gov/dep/rpp/bne/]
PART 7: HEALTH EFFECTS
* Sources of radiation
[http://www.physics.isu.edu/radinf/risk.htm]
* How does radiation affect the public?
[http://www.nrc.gov/what-we-do/radiation/affect.html]
* Calculating your radiation dose
[http://www.epa.gov/radiation/students/calculate.html/]
-->
Part 5: What would a meltdown look like?
June 24, 2004
What if the unthinkable happened? What if the byproduct of the
technology used to help generate electricity were turned against
us?
Part 4: Terrorist target on reactor's back
June 23, 2004
A 9/11 commission report released last week revealed that the
mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed,
originally proposed using hijacked planes to strike 10 targets,
including unidentified nuclear plants.
Oyster Creek: The Recent Record
June 22, 2004
Pundits say there are three ways to judge a politician: the
first is to look at the record; the second is to look at the
record; the third is to look at the record.
Part 3: Are the safety margins wide enough?
June 22, 2004
When the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission reviews the
application for a 20-year license extension for the Oyster Creek
Nuclear Generating Station, it will consider only two factors.
Part 2: Will the lights stay on without it?
June 21, 2004
'The bottom line on everything is money, and without that
plant, we're dead."
Part 1: On balance, it's not worth the risk
June 20, 2004
The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission may begin deciding as
early as next year whether to grant a 20-year license extension
for the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station in Lacey.
What's your opinion?
June 20, 2004
Tell us your views on license renewal, and we'll share them
with our readers. E-mail us at yourviews@app.com
[yourviews@app.com] .
the Asbury Park Press
*****************************************************************
48 APP.COM - Part 3: Are the safety margins wide enough?
[http://www.app.com/]
ASBURY PARK PRESS
Published in the Asbury Park Press 6/22/04 An Asbury Park Press
editorial
When the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission reviews the
application for a 20-year license extension for the Oyster Creek
Nuclear Generating Station, it will consider only two factors:
Can the plant be operated safely and will it cause any harm to
the environment?
Officials at Oyster Creek say the plant has a good record on
safety and has had a negligible adverse impact on the
environment. They say they have continually modernized equipment,
upgraded safety procedures and benefited from the additional
resources, technical expertise and experience of its new owner,
Exelon Corp., the nation's largest producer of nuclear energy.
Oyster Creek's critics argue that all nuclear plants pose risks
to public safety and the environment. And Oyster Creek, the
nation's oldest commercial nuclear plant, carries even greater
risks because of its age and its dated design.
Three years after Oyster Creek opened, the NRC's predecessor,
the Atomic Energy Commission, determined that Oyster Creek's Mark
I design had serious flaws and prohibited future construction of
plants using that design. Yet Oyster Creek, in seeking a license
extension, will only be required to demonstrate that it can meet
the safety standards established when it was originally licensed.
Many of those standards had safety waivers and exemptions.
Throughout its history, Oyster Creek has had its share of
problems -- cracks in containment walls, accidental releases of
iodine gas, electrical and piping problems, and unscheduled
shutdowns. In 1979, about two months after the partial meltdown
at Three Mile Island, the level of cooling water inside Oyster
Creek's reactor fell to one or two feet above the uranium fuel
rods -- one-tenth the normal level.
Power failures and equipment malfunctions at Oyster Creek
knocked out all three pumps supplying the water. The problem was
severe enough for the NRC to close the plant for safety reasons,
but Oyster Creek officials never disclosed the incident publicly.
Not long after, Oyster Creek's sister plant in Forked River,
which had been under construction for nine years, was abandoned
for economic reasons stemming from the Three Mile Island
accident.
Exelon says Oyster Creek has been fully modernized and operates
as safely and efficiently as new designs. But age continues to be
a concern. Safety margins in older plants can decline if adequate
resources aren't invested in monitoring their systems and
upgrading their equipment. Pipes become more brittle, insulation
of wiring and cable breaks down, and transformers and pumps fail.
Because it is impossible to inspect every inch of the miles of
pipe, cable and electrical wiring, inspections and monitoring are
done through sampling.
A 1995 cost analysis by the Energy Information Administration,
the research arm of the Department of Energy, concluded that
utilities did not adequately increase expenditures for
maintenance of older plants to mitigate the effects of aging.
Critics also question the rigor of the safety monitoring, most
of which is done by the plant operators themselves and reported
to the NRC. Federal testing and monitoring have been reduced as
staffing levels have been cut at the NRC by 20 to 25 percent over
the past five years.
Today, good data about safety in the post-9/11 environment is
difficult to come by. Based on what is known, however, Oyster
Creek's safety and maintenance record is considered somewhere
above the norm for the industry. "Oyster Creek hasn't had a long
history of failures that would suggest its inspection programs
are deficient," said David Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned
Scientists, a nuclear industry watchdog group.
However, a study by consumer advocate group Public Citizen found
that between October 1996 and May 1999, all but nine of the
country's more than 100 reactors had operated outside the safety
parameters established in their licenses. Oyster Creek did so 16
times. Only seven nuclear plants had more violations.
In the past decade, according to the NRC, nuclear plants have
reported more than 200 events in which the cooling water for
nuclear plants' reactor cores was unexpectedly lost, which could
lead to a meltdown.
There also have been several other serious accidents triggered
by ruptured pipes, electrical failures and fires. None has led to
a reactor core meltdown -- a fact the industry says is proof that
safety redundancies are working.
Yet many observers fear that safety has been compromised in
recent years by the deregulation of the electric industry,
reduced staffing levels at nuclear plants, federal policies
designed to make the industry more attractive to investors and
the premium put on profitability in 21st Century corporate
America.
A report issued last month by the Union of Concerned Scientists
on risks posed by nuclear plants found that while the number of
"significant events" has decreased in recent years, the number of
"near misses" has increased. The report also listed 27 plants
that had been shut down for more than a year because of severe
safety problems since 1986.
In addition to concerns about aging equipment, there also are
fears about human error. A 1998 study found that 44 percent of
the problems reported by 10 nuclear plants over a 14-month period
were caused by inadequate procedures. Another 35 percent involved
human error. The NRC itself has found that 50 to 80 percent of
serious safety problems at nuclear plants involve worker errors.
Some believe reduced staffing levels have increased the risk of
a serious accident. At Oyster Creek, the plant's payroll of 450
is down from its peak of nearly 1,000 in 1989. Bud Swenson, the
new plant manager, says Oyster Creek has benefited from its
ownership under Exelon, which operates 17 plants that account for
about 20 percent of the nation's nuclear capacity.
As part of a larger organization, Oyster Creek has been able to
capitalize on efficiencies of scale, with many jobs once
performed in Lacey being handled by the company's regional and
national offices. Improved systems and procedures also have
allowed the company to run leaner. In addition, Swenson says,
Exelon's size and resources have enabled Oyster Creek to improve
staff training and draw on the experiences and best-practice
safety procedures of others.
But some critics say the industry's emphasis on profit
maximization has eroded safety margins. The safety of nuclear
plants, they argue, correlates directly with the amount of money
that is poured back into the plants for safety and security
upgrades, and improved training.
During a 2003 strike, Ed Stroup, president of Oyster Creek's
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers local, said the
union's 217 workers twice rejected the company's contract offer
because of safety concerns, not because of salary or benefits
issues. He said the company proposed sweeping changes in
workplace rules that would allow it to transfer employees to
positions for which they were inadequately trained or skilled. "A
nuclear power plant electrician is not a nuclear power plant
mechanic," Stroup said at the time. "To assume that they can do
different jobs is not only illogical but, in fact, potentially
dangerous."
In 1998, GPU Nuclear, one of the plant's previous owners,
announced that it would be mothballing Oyster Creek in 2000
because it feared it couldn't operate profitably in the
soon-to-be deregulated electricity industry.
Other nuclear power companies apparently agreed. GPU couldn't
find a buyer. "These aren't the best of times to be selling a
power plant, not to mention the nation's oldest commercial
nuclear power plant still in operation," industry analyst David
Schanzer of Janney Montgomery Scott said at the time, noting
there was ample power generation but falling demand for it
because of a poor economy. "There's no market out there right
now, not for nuclear plants."
But in August 2000, AmerGen, a joint venture of PECO Energy Co.
and British Energy, agreed to buy Oyster Creek for the fire-sale
price of $10 million. That amount was $86 million less than it
cost to construct the plant in the 1960s and $90 million less
than the purchase price in 1999 of Three Mile Island.
By 2002, AmerGen had put Oyster Creek up for sale. There were no
takers. In December 2003, AmerGen parent Exelon purchased British
Energy's 50 percent stake in the company to become sole owner.
Schanzer says Oyster Creek has been profitable, and the industry
as a whole has been posting profit margins of 10 to 10.5 percent.
The outlook for the nuclear power industry has improved under
the Bush administration, which supports its expansion. Bush has
pushed for streamlined rules and regulations that will not only
speed up the approval process for plants seeking license
extensions, but enable the industry to start placing orders for
new plants for the first time since 1973.
Analyst Schanzer says if new facilities are built, it will
likely be on sites adjacent to existing ones because of political
opposition to putting them on virgin land. Locating them next to
existing plants also would increase efficiency and produce
economies of scale. Oyster Creek would be a logical candidate for
a second reactor, he said. Asked whether Exelon had any such
plans, an Oyster Creek spokesperson last month issued a one-word
response: "No."
The short-term glow of industry proponents regarding the
industry's future could dim quickly if a permanent disposal site
for the nation's high-level nuclear waste is stalled much longer.
At Bush's urging, in 2002 Congress overwhelmingly approved Yucca
Mountain in Nevada as the permanent site with a 2010 target date
for completion. But Nevada state and federal representatives have
promised a protracted legal fight. They are sure to have many
allies. In the absence of a permanent disposal site, the threats
posed by the continued production and storage of nuclear waste at
Oyster Creek loom even larger. And the case for shutting the
plant down becomes even more compelling.
TOMORROW: The terrorist target on Oyster Creek's back.
the Asbury Park Press
*****************************************************************
49 APP.COM - Part 4: Terrorist target on reactor's back
[http://www.app.com/]
ASBURY PARK PRESS
Published in the Asbury Park Press 6/23/04 An Asbury Park Press
editorial
Nuclear plants are obvious terrorist targets. A 9/11 commission
report released last week revealed that the mastermind of the
9/11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, originally proposed using
hijacked planes to strike 10 targets, including unidentified
nuclear plants.
A reporter for Al-Jazeera, the Arab news network, said on a "60
Minutes II" broadcast in April 2003 that Mohammed told him in an
interview that al-Qaida's first choice of a target was nuclear
facilities. They were removed from the list for fear "it might
get out of hand," but future attacks were not ruled out.
In November 2003, the Department of Homeland Security advised
law enforcement officials that al-Qaida may be planning to fly
cargo planes from another country into vital U.S. targets,
including nuclear power plants.
In President Bush's 2002 State of the Union address, he told the
nation that diagrams of American nuclear plants had been found in
al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan.
Few plants have a bigger target painted on them than Oyster
Creek -- a facility that is more vulnerable than most because of
its design, because more than 3.5 million people live within a
50-mile radius of it and because its chief evacuation routes are
two-lane roads that have long been inadequate to handle even
normal demands. Oyster Creek also is only a few minutes flying
time from Newark Liberty International Airport, which has had a
notoriously checkered security record.
In a risk assessment presented to Congress by the NRC in 1985,
it was determined that in a population of 100 nuclear reactors
operating over a period of 20 years, the probability of a severe
reactor accident would be 45 percent. After 9/11, those risk
assessments were classified.
Industry officials say safety improvements have reduced those
odds. But David Lochbaum of the Union for Concerned Scientists,
the leading nuclear industry watchdog, says safety enhancements
in recent years have done little to alter risk probabilities. And
those probabilities don't factor in the risk of possible
terrorist attacks from the air or the ground -- a risk that has
fundamentally altered nuclear power's risk-benefit equation. Yet
the NRC is not required to consider the risk of a possible
terrorist attack when determining whether to extend Oyster
Creek's license.
After 9/11, the NRC said the best way to guard against the
threat of an airborne attack on a nuclear power plant was to
control the airspace above it. But the Federal Aviation
Administration and the Department of Homeland Security have
refused to impose no-fly zones around plants. Instead, pilots
have been told to avoid airspace above nuclear power plants "when
practical." Bills in Congress to mandate no-fly zones during
periods of high alert have gone nowhere.
Today, the NRC maintains that the best way to protect nuclear
plants from aerial attacks is by tightening security at airports.
That's hardly reassuring to anyone who has gone through security
at Newark Liberty. Newark not only missed the first congressional
deadline in December 2002 to have all passenger luggage
electronically screened, but was one of five of the nation's 420
major airports not to have done so after being granted a one-year
extension.
Last month, the federal government announced that 100 percent of
the luggage at Newark Liberty finally was being screened, but
Gov. McGreevey and New Jersey's two U.S. senators, Jon S. Corzine
and Frank R. Lautenberg, both D-N.J., expressed doubts and said
security at the airport remained deficient.
If terrorists did succeed in hijacking a plane, the 9/11
commission hearings last week did little to inspire confidence
that the Federal Aviation Administration or the military could
react quickly to head off an attack. The commission determined
that the order to intercept and shoot down hijacked planes on
9/11 did not reach Air Force commanders until after all four
planes had crashed -- nearly two hours after American Airlines
Flight 77 slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center.
After the 9/11 attacks, the industry and the NRC said that
government tests showed nuclear plants could withstand a direct
hit from a Boeing 757 jet. But scientists at the
government-funded Sandia National Laboratories who conducted the
tests disavowed those conclusions. A new study has been
commissioned by the NRC, but no date has been set for its release
and the results will be classified.
Relatively affordable means of fortifying the reactors against
potential attacks from terrorists exist, but the industry has
argued they are unnecessary, given the modest risk of such an
attack succeeding.
Despite the increased threat levels made obvious by 9/11, there
have been no efforts to increase the protection afforded the
exteriors of nuclear plants, even at older boiling water reactor
plants such as Oyster Creek. These plants are particularly
vulnerable because the spent fuel pools, which are used to cool
the in-tensely radioactive spent fuel rods after they have been
re-moved from the reactor core, are located above ground in the
reactor building.
In newer plants, the spent fuel pools are located in a separate
building below ground, better protecting them from a possible
terrorist attack from the air.
At Oyster Creek, more than 2,500 assemblies holding the spent
fuel are located on the top floor of the five-story reac-tor
building, beneath a 50-foot high metal structure. The pool has no
significant reinforce-ment to prevent damage from an intentional
attack on the fa-cility.
Water loss could expose the spent fuel rods, resulting in a
catastrophic fire with conse-quences potentially worse than a
reactor meltdown. A major fire in the spent fuel pool also could
melt the wires and elec-trical cables used to shut down the
reactor and systems that cool the water in the spent fuel pool.
The pools were designed to be temporary, storing the rods for
about a year until they were safe to be transported to a
permanent disposal site. But because no such site exists in the
United States, there are only two options: leave the rods in the
spent fuel pools for longer periods of time or store them onsite
in steel-encased structures called casks. Oyster Creek has filled
10 casks and has permission to store spent fuel in eight more.
In the United States, only about 4 percent of the spent fuel
rods are in casks, which many experts argue is safer than storage
in spent fuel pools, because there is no financial incentive to
move them there. A 2003 study led by Princeton University
researcher Frank N. von Hippel found that nuclear power plants
routinely hold four to five times the number of spent fuel rods
in water-cooled tanks than the tanks were designed to hold. The
consequences of a leak or rupture, which could be caused by a
hijacked jet crashing into the cooling pool or by sabotage, would
be catastrophic, the study concluded.
Such a fire, the NRC concedes, would take days to extinguish,
and it could take less than an hour for the radioactive material
contained in the spent fuel pool -- five to 10 times greater in
volume than that in the reactor core -- to be released into the
environment.
A 1997 report for the NRC by Brookhaven National Laboratory, a
federal Department of Energy research facility, found that a
severe pool fire could leave 188 square miles uninhabitable and
cause as many as 28,000 cancer fatalities. A 2002 report by
Sandia National Laboratories concluded that a spent fuel meltdown
could cause radiation-induced deaths in thousands of people as
far as 500 miles from the site, and that people living within 10
miles of the plant might never be able to return to their homes.
After years of denial, the NRC staff reported in 2001 that
terrorist threats against spent fuel pools were credible and
could not be ruled out. Yet little has been done to safeguard
those pools.
Oyster Creek, along with many other nuclear plants, also has
shown vulnerability to land-based terrorist attacks. The NRC
testified before Congress that of 81 drills designed to test the
readiness of plants' private security forces, mock attackers were
able to gain access to the plant and simulate the destruction of
enough safety equipment to cause a meltdown nearly half of the
time.
In many of those exercises, the attackers also used simulated
explosives to breach the containment building. Even though the
failure rate was high, critics maintained that the challenges
presented by the drills were insufficient, especially because the
plant operators typically were given six months' advance notice
of the tests.
During the last "force-on-force exercise" conducted at Oyster
Creek in May 2001, the response in one of four exercises was
"insufficient to successfully interdict an adversary force" or
"prevent or mitigate core damage," according to the NRC. Lochbaum
of the Union of Concerned Scientists said an NRC official told
him that the mock terrorists were able to break into a back door
that had not been secured and easily could have shot all the
guards. After doing so, the intruders could have taken the
card-controlled access passes from the dead guards, giving them
free access to sensitive parts of the plant. Lochbaum said the
drill did not result in any security changes regarding access
passes.
After 9/11, force-on-force drills were suspended. A new pilot
program was tested, and the drills resumed late last year. The
exercises are to be conducted every three years. An NRC
spokesperson said no date has been set for the next drill at
Oyster Creek.
Concerns about security at Oyster Creek were compounded by a
series of lapses in spring 2003 that sounded like scripts from
"The Simpsons" animated cartoon TV series. The lead character of
the show, Homer Simpson, is a clueless security guard at a
nuclear power plant. The lapses at Oyster Creek included guards
falling asleep at their posts, inoperable warning sirens, a
private citizen shooting videotape on the plant grounds without
being challenged and a guard pulling his gun on a co-worker. If
it were fiction, it would have been funny. But it was fact. There
was nothing amusing about it.
Oyster Creek poses a number of threats to the safety of the
residents living nearby. The prospect of a terrorist attack is
the gravest threat of all.
TOMORROW: Worst-case scenario.
the Asbury Park Press
*****************************************************************
50 APP.COM - Part 5: What would a meltdown look like?
[http://www.app.com/]
ASBURY PARK PRESS
Published in the Asbury Park Press 6/24/04 An Asbury Park Press
editorial
What if the unthinkable happened? What if the byproduct of the
technology used to help generate electricity were turned against
us? What would happen if there were a successful terrorist strike
or a meltdown that resulted in a major release of radioactivity
at Oyster Creek?
Experts disagree on the exact consequences of such an accident
at a nuclear power plant. The extent of the loss of life,
injuries and devastation to the environment would depend on
several variables, including how quickly the release occurred,
the extent and rate of the release, the weather conditions, the
time of year the event occurred and the way in which a planned
evacuation proceeded.
The last publicly released study of projected casualties,
environmental harm and property damage for specific nuclear
plants was done in 1981. A Sandia National Laboratories report
prepared for the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission estimated
that tens of thousands of deaths would result from radiation
exposure occurring in the first year after an accident at many of
the nuclear sites in the nation. It estimated 100,000 deaths from
such an accident at the Salem 1 and 2 units in Lower Alloways
Creek.
At Oyster Creek, the study projected 13,000 deaths within the
first year of the accident, 10,000 cases of radiation poisoning
and 23,000 additional deaths over the lifetime of the population
exposed to radiation. At the time, Ocean County's population was
only about 60 percent of what it is today.
Following the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl in the former
Soviet Union, the NRC was asked to testify about the potential
for a severe nuclear accident in this country. An NRC
commissioner said that given the level of safety in the United
States then, a core meltdown could be expected within 20 years.
In 1990, the NRC would not respond to a request by the National
Academy of Sciences for a new assessment of the likelihood of a
severe core meltdown, saying only that "there is reasonable
assurance that the health and safety of the public are adequately
protected."
An analysis of the implications of a spent fuel pool meltdown
prepared for the NRC in 2002 concluded that such an accident
could result in thousands of radiation-induced deaths in an area
extending as far as 500 miles from the site. The study also said
millions of people within a 500-mile radius of a meltdown might
have to be evacuated for up to one year, and that people living
within 10 miles of the plant might never be able to return to
their homes. The NRC pulled the report from the NRC's public
database after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Industry officials criticized the report, saying it was a
worst-case scenario based on unrealistic assumptions and it
ignored the effectiveness of plant safety systems. One of the
authors responded that the study's estimates of the possible
fatal cancers were based on the conservative premise that a spent
fuel pool fire would release up to nine times as much deadly
radiation as the meltdown at Chernobyl.
Chernobyl provides the starkest example of what can happen when
things go terribly wrong. In April 1986, plant operators were
testing the electrical backup supply when a power surge triggered
an explosion that blew the lid off the reactor. Tons of
radioactive materials were spewed into the atmosphere for the
next 10 days, exposing people to radiation levels estimated to be
more than 100 times greater than Hiroshima, where an atomic bomb
was dropped to end World War II.
About 30 people died immediately at Chernobyl. Thousands more,
including an estimated 4,000 people who took part in the cleanup,
died later from the effects of the accident. More than 200,000
people living within an 18-mile radius of the plant were
evacuated or later resettled. More than 180 towns with a combined
population of 100,000 have been permanently evacuated. The
radioactivity spread to much of Europe, where some residual
effects are apparent today.
According to government figures, 70,000 people were disabled by
the radiation. Overall, about 3.4 million Ukrainians, including
1.5 million children, were directly affected by Chernobyl. Many
more may not experience the effects for years. Some scientists
believe the accident could result in long-term genetic damage for
future generations.
The radiation released at Chernobyl will cause 50,000 new cases
of thyroid cancer among young people living in the affected area,
according to the World Health Organization. Researchers predict
that in some parts of the region, more than one of every three
children who were under age 4 when the accident took place will
develop thyroid cancer.
A 2002 update on the Chernobyl accident by the Nuclear Energy
Agency, an international organization that promotes nuclear
power, concluded that ground contamination will be present for
300 years. Forests were particularly hard-hit because of the high
filtering characteristics of trees: "Forests, being a source of
timber, wild game, berries and wild mushrooms, as well as a place
for work and recreation, continue to be of concern in some areas
and are expected to constitute a radiological problem for a long
time," the report said.
The report also noted that the accident had severe psychological
effects on the population, resulting in a general "degradation of
health" in the contaminated territory. Previous reports have
noted an abnormally high incidence of suicide, anxiety,
depression and alcoholism among the affected populations. The
Baylor College of Medicine, in a paper describing the health
consequences of Chernobyl, observed that the populations exposed
to radiation were at greater risk for digestive, pulmonary and
central nervous system disorders. Researchers also found that
exposure to radiation weakened immune systems, making the
population more susceptible to bacterial and viral infections.
The impact of Chernobyl is still felt in Western Europe.
Restrictions on the slaughter and distribution of animals remain
in force in parts of the United Kingdom and Scandinavia because
of fears of contamination. In other parts of Europe, the
contamination of lakes has prevented the sale of fish.
The problems caused by Chernobyl are by no means over. The
"sarcophagus structure, although still generally sound, raises
concerns for its long-term resistance and represents a standing
potential risk," according to the Nuclear Energy Agency update.
Radioactive waste and contaminated equipment from Chernobyl is
stored in about 800 sites in and around the reactor's 18-mile
"exclusion zone," which remains encircled by a barbed-wire fence.
Some of the radioactive material is buried in trenches or kept in
containers inadequately isolated from groundwater. "All these
wastes are a potential source of contamination of the groundwater
which will require close monitoring until a safe disposal into an
appropriate repository is implemented," the report said. Eighteen
years after the accident, a suitable repository has yet to be
identified.
No one has even tried to estimate the costs of cleaning up and
repopulating the 18-mile zone around the plant. "It's impossible
to calculate the costs of the Chernobyl tragedy because they keep
growing year by year," Alexander Borovoy, a Chernobyl expert at
the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, told the Christian Science
Monitor in June 2000. "Since the contamination will last for
thousands of years, somebody will probably have the job of
dealing with it for at least that long."
A 1990 article in the Wall Street Journal on the economic impact
of the disaster said the costs related to the accident far
exceeded the economic benefits from the dozens of Soviet nuclear
power reactors operated between 1954 and 1986.
The NRC and the nuclear industry argue that improved plant
designs and safety protocols, and better and more redundant
backup systems make a Chernobyl-like accident in this country
highly unlikely. But Chernobyl stands as an example of what can
happen if that assessment is wrong.
A 2003 Princeton study said it accepted earlier estimates by the
NRC that a major radioactive release as a result of a spent fuel
pool fire at a boiling water reactor would cause 54,000 to
143,000 additional cancer deaths, contaminate vast tracts of
agricultural land and cost between $117 billion and $566 billion.
"It is obvious that all practical measures must be taken to
prevent the occurrence of such an event," the authors said.
Shutting down Oyster Creek would be a step in that direction.
*****************************************************************
51 [RADFOOD] Good Irrad. Articles and Action Alert
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2004 01:36:19 -0500 (CDT)
**ACTION ALERT! CONTACT YOUR SENATORS!**
If you haven't yet contacted your senators to include Notice of
Irradiated Food (section 502) of the House version of the Child
Nutrition Act in the final version of the bill, now is your chance! The
bill is moving along quickly, so now is the time to help restrict the
use of irradiated meat in the National School Lunch Program.
Send a free fax:
It's quick and easy and will help get this important language in the
bill.
http://www.citizen.org/fax/background.cfm?ID=324&source=12
Or, call the capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and ask for your
senators!
Notice of Irradiated Food section (502) contains the following:
1) irradiated food products are made available only at the request of
states and school food authorities; the USDA cannot mandate the use of
irradiated foods
2) schools would be required to pay for the additional cost of
irradiated products; the USDA could only reimburse them for the amount
equal to what non-irradiated products cost
3) states and school food service authorities will be provided factual
information on irradiation, including notice that irradiation is not a
substitute for safe food handling techniques
4) states and school food service authorities will be given a model
for
how to share food irradiation information with school food service
authorities, parents, and students
5) irradiated food products distributed to the Federal school meals
program will be labeled with a symbol or other printed notice
indicating
that the product was treated with irradiation
6) irradiated products will not be commingled with non-irradiated
products
7) schools that offer irradiated foods will be encouraged to offer
alternatives to irradiated food as part of the meal plan
For background info go to www.safelunch.org
**ARTICLES**
Irradiated ground beef's popularity isn't sizzling
Consumers haven't been buying the meat that's zapped to kill E. coli,
so it's not being sold in most supermarkets anymore.
By PHILIP BRASHER
REGISTER WASHINGTON BUREAU
June 15, 2004
Washington, D.C. - A device set up in Sioux City several years ago was
supposed to be the future of safe food.
The equipment could zap ground beef with an electron beam to destroy
deadly E. coli bacteria, rendering burger meat safe for the most
vulnerable child or elderly person.
The Sioux City facility, set up in the heart of one of the nation's
largest beef-processing regions, was designed to process up to 250
million pounds of food annually.
But consumers have shown little enthusiasm for irradiated food, and now
the company that manufactured the equipment, the SureBeam Corp., is
bankrupt and the Sioux City facility is closed.
Irradiated beef has all but disappeared from the nation's supermarkets
this year.
"I don't think it is dead because there are still irradiation
processors which are turning out product," said Tony Corbo, a critic of
food irradiation with the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.
"But I believe that the market for it is very small unless there is a
mandate to serve it in government- sponsored nutrition programs."
SureBeam's bankruptcy was not the only setback for the irradiation
business.
After the anthrax attacks in 2001, the U.S. Postal Service rushed to
find a way to sterilize the mail and make it safe and decided to buy
eight of the SureBeam machines for $40 million.
There was one problem: They couldn't do the job.
The Postal Service recently disclosed that it has given all eight
machines away to a university and other government agencies.
The machines could not kill anthrax quickly enough to accommodate the
line speeds the Postal Service needed. SureBeam's parent company, San
Diego-based defense contractor Titan Corp., gave the Postal Service a
new, more powerful machine, but it has not yet been installed.
"It's easy to sit back afterward and look at this with 20-20 hindsight.
When congressmen, senators and newspapers were all getting anthrax-laced
letters, what they wanted was a solution," said Titan spokesman Wil
Williams.
Many food-safety experts still hold out hope that irradiation will be
widely used on food.
It has "the potential to decrease the incidence of foodborne disease
dramatically," according to a recent paper in the New England Journal of
Medicine.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that
irradiation could stop 900,000 illnesses and 352 deaths if half the
nation's meat and poultry were treated.
The U.S. Agriculture Department approved the irradiation of beef in
2000.
SureBeam was the biggest irradiator of beef products, treating about 15
million pounds a year, before filing for bankruptcy in January after
investors accused the company of misstating its earnings.
A Florida company, Food Technology Services, continues to irradiate
beef using radioactive cobalt rather than the electron-beam technology
that many grocers believe is easier to sell to consumers.
"We still believe the potential is there," said Ruth Mitchell, a
spokeswoman for Hy-Vee Inc. of West Des Moines. Hy-Vee started selling
SureBeam-treated meat in 2002, but it was never more than a tiny
percentage of the chain's beef sales.
"The companies are reluctant to build the facilities until they know
there is a market for the product, and we can't build a market for that
product until we have a product available," Mitchell said.
The irradiation industry, with assistance from U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin,
D-Ia., has pushed the government to allow irradiated products to be
labeled with the term "cold pasteurization."
"I think it is very appropriate and long overdue that this term
'pasteurization' be broadly applied to represent the destruction of
harmful bacteria," said Christine Bruhn, director of the Center for
Consumer Research at the University of California-Davis.
The 2002 farm bill required the USDA to offer irradiated beef to
schools, but so far, none has asked for it.
There is still at least one place that Iowa consumers can get
irradiated burgers if they don't mind the price: Omaha Steaks started
trucking frozen ground beef to Florida to have its meat irradiated by
Food Technology Services after the Sioux City plant closed.
The mail-order burgers cost about $5 a pound.
Reporter Philip Brasher can be reached at (202) 906-8138 or
pbrasher@dmreg.com
*****************************
Washington, D.C. - Consumers don't seem to stomach the idea of having
their food irradiated. But what if irradiation were called something
else - namely pasteurization?
Under a provision that U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Ia., put in the 2002
farm bill, the government is required to allow the use of the term
pasteurization for any kind of technology that can destroy harmful
bacteria in food the same way that traditional heat treatments make milk
safe to drink.
A panel of scientific advisers is studying a list of technologies,
including irradiation, that could qualify for the term. Other candidates
include: high pressure, ultrafiltration, pulsed magnetism and
ultraviolet light.
"I suspect that some of them will ultimately meet the definition," said
Jenny Scott, a member of the panel and an executive with the National
Food Processors Association. "Some of them are capable of producing a
shelf-stable product," which doesn't need refrigeration.
Government approval is expected to take several years.
It remains to be seen whether consumers will go along with the use of
pasteurization for irradiation and other technologies.
Studies with focus groups for the Food and Drug Administration and the
Agriculture Department found a lot of resistance to the idea of
substituting the term "pasteurization" for "irradiation" on meat
labels.
"Products treated with irradiation should be acknowledged as such on
the label," according to a summary of consumer views in a FDA-authorized
study.
********************
If you would like to be removed from the radfood list, send an email to listserv@listserver.citizen.org with the words "unsubscribe radfood" in the message.
If you would like to be added to the radfood list, send an email to listserv@listserver.citizen.org with the words "subscribe radfood" in the message.
To learn more about food irradiation, visit our website at http://www.citizen.org/cmep/
Questions about the radfood list can be directed to RADFOOD-request@LISTSERVER.CITIZEN.ORG
-Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program
*****************************************************************
52 [DU-WATCH] WHO stealing from Iraq ... profiting form DU
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2004 01:14:01 -0500 (CDT)
Its time to shut the WHO down. This is outragous. Medical apartcheks
have lost touch with moral and ethical reality. And they are
inflating the cost to pad the agency income. I can get this study
done for 100,000$ US.
http://www.gulfnews.com/Articles/News.asp?ArticleID=26610
Iraq ordered to pay for uranium probe
Geneva |Reuters | 15-09-2001
Print friendly format | Email to Friend
Iraq must pay for a two-year probe by the World Health Organisation
(WHO) into possible links between cancer and depleted uranium (DU)
dropped by U.S.-led forces during the Gulf War, a WHO official said
yesterday.
"None of these projects can really start until funding has been found
for them, and funding, it has been agreed, will be at the Iraqi
initiative," Neel Mani, the new director of the WHO's Iraq programme,
said.
The UN health agency says it does not have enough approved funding of
its own to help the Iraqis.
WHO officials and Iraqi health authorities agreed at a meeting in
Baghdad last month that future work would focus on four projects,
notably an examination of the health effects of environmental risks
including DU.
The other areas deal with cancer surveillance, documenting cases of
birth defects and kidney disease, and a plan to control cancer and
other non-communicable diseases.
"If the Iraq government is not able to come up with the short sources
of financing we would not be able to carry these projects forward,"
Mani said.
Iraq has claimed that investigations on the ground would start within
two weeks.
However, Mani said implementation depended on Iraq's ability to find
funding, estimated to run into millions of dollars, and to agree on
technical criteria that the WHO would set out over the weekend.
"WHO would not involve itself in a project where it was not able to
gather data that it could validate scientifically," he said.
He insisted that international experts must be able to go where they
need inside Iraq and estimated that it would take between 18 to 24
months to complete the study.
"If certain equipment is required and it is not approved to be taken
into the country by the sanctions committee then I'm afraid that that
will mean that that part of the project will be at a stalemate," Mani
said.
Baghdad says the United States and Britain fired more than 940,000
armour-piercing DU projectiles during the 1991 conflict and had
requested a WHO study.
WHO studied radiation levels caused by the use of DU weapons in the
Balkans and concluded that the health effect was minimal.But it
believes that reports of increased cancer rates and birth defects in
Iraq over the past decade warrant further investigation.
The agency regards existing cancer data for regions outside Baghdad
as scientifically unreliable and said it would be improved if the
study can go ahead.
The UN health agency has stressed that depleted uranium will not be
the only focus of its research, and that it wants to study wider
health issues. It cites the high rate of smoking among Iraqi men as a
possible reason for high cancer rates.
Economic sanctions imposed after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait have
hit the nation's health sector hard.
------------------------ 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/Sj.0lB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->
[Brought to you by HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK]
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/du-watch/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
du-watch-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
*****************************************************************
53 [DU-WATCH] DU and recycling in Japan
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2004 01:36:43 -0500 (CDT)
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/20040618wo33.htm
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~-->
Yahoo! Domains - Claim yours for only $14.70
http://us.click.yahoo.com/Z1wmxD/DREIAA/yQLSAA/Sj.0lB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->
[Brought to you by HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK]
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/du-watch/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
du-watch-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
*****************************************************************
54 [DU-WATCH] Uranium contamination in Iraqi scrap metal to Jordan
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2004 01:22:59 -0500 (CDT)
http://www.islam-online.net/English/News/2004-06/16/article06.shtml
Jordan Considers Ban On Iraqi Scrap Imports By Tareq Delwani, IOL
Correspondent AMMAN , June 16 (IslamOnline.net) Jordan is considering
a ban on Iraqi military scrap imports amid fears that they could
be contaminated.
A committee of ten ministries and other government-run institutions
has recommended the ban, citing health and environmental hazards
of the booming scrap business.
Tons of scrap metals have been imported from Iraq by Jordanian
traders at low prices since the fall of Baghdad to the US-led
occupation forces.
The committee said that local inhabitants of northern Amman have
complained of health problems including breath difficulty and severe
headaches.
The imported scrap metals include destroyed military vehicles and
tanks of the disbanded Iraqi army.
Jordanians fear that these military vehicles were shelled by depleted
uranium during the US-British invasion of Iraq .
On April 25, the Observer quoted military sources as affirming that
depleted uranium shells and bombs used by US and British troops
during Iraq invasion were five times more than the number used
during 1991 Gulf war.
The Pentagon had admitted shelling Iraq with about 350 tons of
depleted uranium in 1991, aggravating cancerous tumors cases among
Iraqis.
In a report issued Thursday, April 24, the UN Environment Program
(UNEP) pressed the occupation forces to pinpoint Iraqi sites hit
by depleted uranium.
Booming Business With a large amount of scrap metals trucked from
the neighboring country, the trade is booming in Jordan .
In Al-Zarqa district in southern Amman , people tell of gangs
smuggling the scrap metals from Iraq .
Others allege they had seen dismantled parts of Russian-made tanks
of the Iraqi army.
Some estimated that more than 100 trucks loaded with scrap metals
drive from Iraq to Jordan and the other five countries sharing
borders with the war-scarred country every month.
"Spare parts of military equipment used in the Iraqi water and oil
sectors are also smuggled every month to Jordan ," said Abu Abdel-
Rahman, a worker in the "Scrap Area" in the northern Amman city of
Sahab .
Acting chief UN inspector Demetrius Perricos told the Security
Council on Tuesday, June 10, that 20 engines from banned Iraqi
missiles were found in a Jordanian scrap yard, raising new security
questions about Iraq 's scrap metal sales since the occupation of
the country.
The missile engines and some other equipment discovered in the scrap
yards had been reportedly tagged by UN weapons monitors because of
their potential dual use in legitimate civilian activities.
Perricos suggested that the interim Iraqi government, which will
assume power on June 30, may want to reconsider policies for exporting
scrap metals that apparently began in mid-2003.
He told reporters that up to a thousand tons of scrap metals were
leaving Iraq every day.
"The only controls at the borders are for the weight of the scrap
metal, and to check whether there are any explosive or radioactive
materials within the scrap," he said.
But the Jordanian government's spokeswoman, Asma Khedr, dismissed
the statements.
"The spare metals are only disposable scraps."
Khedr said that Jordan has carried out stringent procedures to
prevent access of poisonous materials across borders.
But traders still make good money out of the smuggling.
US To Blame Analysts heaped blame on the US-led occupation forces
for allowing the scrap metals to move from Iraq .
Sufyan Al-Tal accused the American troops of facilitating the scrap
exports to protect their soldiers.
"The scrap metals had been hit by depleted uranium, something which
highlights the danger of keeping them in Jordan ," he said.
A military source close to NATO unveiled in July last year that
several mysterious diseases were reported among a number of American
troops within the vicinity of Baghdad airport.
He asserted there were levels of radioactive pollution with destructive
impacts on man and environment that may lead to risks suffered by
generations to come.
Following the invasion, the US occupation authority signed contracts
with Israeli companies to export the scrap metals to Jordan .
The contracts could not be cancelled by the Jordanian government
or the new Iraqi interim government
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~-->
Yahoo! Domains - Claim yours for only $14.70
http://us.click.yahoo.com/Z1wmxD/DREIAA/yQLSAA/Sj.0lB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->
[Brought to you by HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK] Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/du-watch/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
du-watch-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
*****************************************************************
55 [DU-WATCH] History lesson - Iraq
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2004 00:15:17 -0500 (CDT)
A great little piece to send around to those who wish
to learn their history a little better, great
eduational tool here, similar to the DU one!!
magic!!
http://www.ericblumrich.com/thanks.html
Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com
------------------------ 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/Sj.0lB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->
[Brought to you by HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK]
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/du-watch/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
du-watch-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
*****************************************************************
56 [DU-WATCH] Independent Inquiry into gulf war illness
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2004 00:31:05 -0500 (CDT)
Independent inquiry into Gulf war illnesses
http://www.guardian.co.uk/military/story/0,11816,1238167,00.html
James Meikle, health correspondent
Monday June 14, 2004
The Guardian
An unprecedented independent inquiry into whether more
than 5,000 veterans of the first Gulf war became ill
as a result of their service will be announced today.
Lord Lloyd of Berwick, the former law lord, will
conduct hearings in central London in the next few
months and pose a political dilemma for the government
which has refused to authorise a public inquiry for
the past six years.
He is expected to invite current and former ministers,
civil servants, health and scientific experts, as well
as veterans and their families to establish the
medical consequences of their service.
It is understood that Lord Lloyd, a law lord until
1999 and a former attorney general to the Prince of
Wales, is determined to begin with no preconceptions
about the veterans' claims that they were made ill,
but believes an inquiry will help settle the
long-standing sores between former service personnel
and the Ministry of Defence.
"I was delighted to be invited to conduct an
independent public inquiry into Gulf war illnesses. My
intention is to open the inquiry as soon as possible
and to hold hearings in public," he said yesterday.
The arrangements for an inquiry have been prepared in
confidence, leaving the government little time to
decide how to react. Although Lord Lloyd will not have
formal legal powers, ministers will have to consider
how to respond to invitations to give evidence.
Refusal to cooperate could be damaging politically.
The pressure for an inquiry, first made by the Royal
British Legion in 1998, has intensified since February
when an eight-year legal battle by more than 2,000
veterans collapsed because there was insufficient
scientific evidence to pursue their case. The Legal
Services Commission which paid an estimated #4m in
legal aid, withdrew further funding after reviews of
research could find no specific cause for the
veterans' health problems.
But their lawyers said there was no doubt many of them
were ill and that their suffering was genuine. They
called for an independent inquiry and urged the
government to instigate a "process of conciliation"
with veterans' groups.
It is thought the inquiry will be funded by anonymous
independent donations by people not directly involved
in the controversy.
Lord Morris of Manchester, who has been involved
behind the scenes, said last night: "I hope this will
clear an impasse that has been of deep concern to the
ex-service community. There is no one more suited or
well-qualified to lead aninquiry."
Other eminent figures are expected to help in the
inquiry. They include Sir Michael Davies, former clerk
to the parliaments, who chaired the management board
of the House of Lords. Former presidents of the
General Medical Council are also thought to be
involved as medical advisers.
Many former troops who served in the Gulf during the
1991 conflict have reported symptoms such as muscle
weakness, neurological symptoms, headaches,
depression, skin rashes and shortage of breath.
The suggested causes have ranged from the pre-conflict
injections which Lord Morris has referred to as "a
veritable blitzkreig on the immune system" to
pollution from burning oil wells, stress, depleted
uranium, organophosphates and the effect of low-level
exposure to chemical agents destroyed during and after
the war.
A US congressional investigation has suggested that
far more troops and civilians were exposed to chemical
agents than was previously estimated by the Pentagon
and the CIA.
The government has not ruled out an inquiry, but it
does not regard one as useful. It has instead stressed
the value of its #8.5m research programme, much of
which has compared the health of veterans with those
who did not serve in the Gulf.
This has failed to find any single Gulf war syndrome,
although veterans are twice as likely as non-veterans
to report symptoms when asked about them. Death rates
are similar between the groups.
Lord Morris accepted the value of research, but said:
"We are now 13 years on. None of us wants to see the
afflicted and bereaved of the conflict made to suffer
added strain and hurtful and demeaning indignities
that preventable delay in dealing with their concerns
might impose."
About 2,000 Gulf veterans have been awarded "no-fault"
war pensions: the onus in these was on the MoD to
prove that the illness was not linked to service in
the Gulf war, and there was no need for the claimants
to prove negligence. There has been pressure from MPs
and peers for the government to introduce ex-gratia
payments for veterans to avoid further proceedings.
___________________________________________________________ALL-NEW Yahoo! Messenger - sooooo many all-new ways to express yourself http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com
------------------------ 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/Sj.0lB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->
[Brought to you by HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK]
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/du-watch/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
du-watch-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
*****************************************************************
57 Prague Post: State plans end to radon-detection efforts
[http://www.praguepost.com]
UN: Country has highest average levels of cancer-causing gas
worldwide
Jan Hradecky from the Radon Expert Group Department measures
radon June 7.
By Filipa Sebova For The Prague Post The Prague Post --> (June
24, 2004)
More than 200,000 people in the Czech Republic are regularly
exposed to dangerous levels of radon, and almost half of those
don't know it.
Some don't care.
"Sometimes it's better not to know something," said retiree
Ruzena Gerbnerova, 57, who lives in Obdenice, about 80 kilometers
(50 miles) south of Prague. Though her village lies in an area
with one of the country's highest concentrations of the
cancer-causing gas, she refuses to allow state inspectors into
her home.
"It was here for thousands of years in the ground; just now
people are talking about it. In the end we all have to die of
something," Gerbnerova said.
But even those who want to find out if their home is one of the
tens of thousands suspected of having dangerously high radon
levels may find it more difficult. The government has cut the
budget for radon detection by two-thirds and has plans to phase
out the program entirely within five years.
"We will end up searching only half of the needed houses."
Jiri Hulka, radon inspector
"If the program stops in the year 2009, as planned, with today's
level of support, we will end up searching only half of the
needed houses," said Jiri Hulka, deputy director for radiation
exposure at the National Radiation Protection Institute (SÚRO).
Due to the funding cut, the number of homes inspected annually is
down to 5,000-10,000 from 30,000 during the 1990s.
The World Health Organization ranks radon as the second-leading
cause of lung cancer, behind smoking. Odorless, colorless and
tasteless, it is a naturally occurring byproduct of the breakdown
of uranium, which is present in particularly high levels in Czech
bedrock and was widely mined here. According to the UN's
Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, the
country has the highest average concentration of radon in the
world.
Alena Heribanova, head of the Exposure Control Division of the
State Office for Nuclear Safety (SÚJB), estimates that 10 percent
of the country's 5,000 to 6,000 lung-cancer deaths a year are
caused by radon. She said maintaining detection efforts is vital
to reducing that number.
Inspected, detected
So far inspectors have found more than 23,000 houses across the
country containing dangerous levels of radon. A total of 50,000
to 70,000 homes are located on sites where radon concentrations
could be life-threatening, experts say.
There's just one obstacle, according to SÚJB inspector Josef
Thomas: knowing which 50,000 to 70,000.
INVISIBLE KILLER
• What is radon? A naturally occurring radioactive gas that comes
from the breakdown of uranium.
• Where can it be found? In soil, water and some building
materials, particularly concrete produced in the 1960s and '70s
• What does it cause? Lung cancer. An estimated 10 percent of the
country's 5,000-6,000 lung-cancer deaths a year are attributed to
radon.
• How widespread is it? More than 23,000 homes have been found to
have dangerously high levels of radon. Experts estimate that
there are 50,000 to 70,000 such homes nationwide.
Source: State Office for Nuclear Safety, National Radiation
Protection Institute
"Our main problem is to identify all the buildings," Thomas said.
"Sometimes we have a problem with citizens who won't cooperate."
Inspection involves placing a small measuring device in an
out-of-the-way corner of a home; obtaining an accurate reading
can take from a week to a year, depending on the type of device
used. Inspection is available from numerous state-sanctioned
private firms, as well as from the state itself.
Buildings found to contain dangerous levels can be retrofitted
with radon-proof insulation and improved ventilation. Owners of
older houses with dangerous levels of radon are entitled to state
support to fix the problem -- at least until 2009.
Radon is measured in becquerels, a unit of radioactive
disintegration. Under Czech law, new houses cannot contain a
radon level higher than 200 becquerels per cubic meter (Bq/m3) A
measurement of 400 Bq/m3 is recognized as dangerous.
"The decrease of 100 Bq/m3 means a 10 percent decrease in
lung-cancer risk," said Ladislav Tomasek, head of epidemiology
for the SÚRO.
One early success for the radon remediation program came in the
early 1990s in the village of Petrovice, not far from Obdenice.
Homes there were found to have the highest concentration of radon
in the country, an average level of 500 Bq/m3.
"They knocked on every single door here," recalled resident
Frantisek Adam, 68. "People really welcomed the program and
besides, they liked the fact that they were getting a new floor
for free."
Whether more people in at-risk homes will welcome inspectors and
regulators may pose less of a challenge than whether those people
know about the risk at all. According to a 2002 survey conducted
by SÚRO, a quarter of the country's population doesn't even know
what radon is.
"Our main problem is that we get calls from people who are not at
risk, while the ones who are rarely contact us," Thomas said. •
Filipa Sebova can be reached at news@praguepost.com
[news@praguepost.com] -->
*****************************************************************
58 Whitehaven News: PASSPORT PLAN FOR N-WORKERS
UNIONS at Sellafield are to ask for clarification of a plan to
issue “passports” to all nuclear workers in the new NDA.
Copeland councillors heard yesterday afternoon, at a briefing,
about a plan for a database of all workers and passports showing
all a worker’s qualifications and experience. The North West
Development Agency has paid Ł250,000 to fund a feasibility study
into this and other aspects of the NDA. The study will report its
findings in October.
Peter Kane, convenor for the GMB union, said unions were unaware
of the proposed workers’ passports idea but would be asking for
full clarification of the proposals.
whitehavennews.co.uk
*****************************************************************
59 NEWS.com.au: Premier warns Canberra over nuclear dump
(June 24, 2004)
By Tim Clarke June 24, 2004
THE Federal Government has been warned Western Australia is not a
backup destination for a nuclear waste dump, after a court
decision scuttled a plan to build a facility in South Australia's
outback.
The Full Court of the Federal Court today set aside the
Commonwealth compulsory acquisition of land near Woomera in SA's
north, which was selected for a low-level nuclear waste dump.
Federal Science Minister Peter McGauran said the government would
probably appeal the case to the High Court, but was also
considering other options.
But Premier Geoff Gallop today warned any consideration of WA as
a possible site would be met with fierce opposition.
"WA is a clean and green state and this will not be compromised
by a federal government intent on offloading its nuclear waste in
our backyard," Dr Gallop said.
Dr Gallop also said the state had "legislated to ensure it was
not viewed as a potential dumping ground for other people's
dangerous waste" by amending WA's Nuclear Waste Storage
Prohibition Act earlier this year.
The act – which prohibits the construction and operation of a
nuclear waste storage facility for any radioactive material – was
extended to cover all nuclear waste, whether generated in
Australia or overseas.
AAP
Copyright 2004 News Limited. All times AEST (GMT+10).
*****************************************************************
60 NEWS.com.au: Court throws out land grab for nuke dump
(June 25, 2004)
By Jeremy Roberts and Patricia Karvelas
PLANS to build a low-level nuclear waste dump in South Australia
came unstuck yesterday when the Commonwealth's secret land grab
was thrown out in the Federal Court.
The Federal Government immediately signalled it would appeal
against the decision and insisted the dump would be built on the
remote site in the state's far north "one way or another".
The Full Court of the Federal Court ruled in favour of the South
Australian Government, finding that the Commonwealth could not
use emergency powers under the Lands Acquisition Act to control
the land, without due process, because of "urgent necessity" and
"the public interest".
At the time, the Rann Government was moving legislation that
would have turned the land - on Arcoona Station near Woomera, -
into a public park.
Federal Science Minister Peter McGauran said yesterday the
federal Government would probably take the decision to the High
Court.
But Premier Mike Rann warned that the storage of radioactive
waste in South Australia would become a federal election issue.
"The nuclear waste dump issue is firmly on the political agenda
and there is nothing the federal Government can do prior to the
federal election to avoid South Australians casting their
verdict," he said.
Mr Rann harked back to the decades-long struggle to try to clean
up the former nuclear bomb test site at Maralinga, west of
Woomera, as a reason to consult the voters on the waste dump
issue.
"We were the bunnies back in the 1950s with the whole Maralinga
exercise in South Australia," Mr Rann said.
He said that following the election, "wiser heads must prevail"
than Mr McGauran, who has called Mr Rann "the Daffy Duck of
Australian politics" in increasingly personal attacks over the
waste dump issue.
"Maybe (the Howard Government) should take a closer look at a
minister that has behaved like a total goose throughout the whole
process."
The decision is a major setback for Mr McGauran, who was forced
last year to relocate the dump from a planned site near Woomera
rocket range after intense pressure from officials in the Defence
Department who were concerned it would hurt future rocket testing
programs.
A Nuclear Safety Committee report last month found more work was
needed to demonstrate the site's safety before regulatory
approval could be granted for the dump.
"We all know you need a national repository. The only person who
doesn't seem to know it is Mike Rann, the Premier, but he is more
influenced by politics than anything else," Mr McGauran said. Mr
McGauran said he might also consider seeking legislative change
to pursue the acquisition. He said there was "no possibility" of
selecting an alternative site.
The Australian
Copyright 2004 News Limited. All times AEST (GMT+10).
*****************************************************************
61 NEWS.com.au: Court scuttles nuclear dump plan
(June 24, 2004)
THE Federal Government's plan to build a nuclear waste dump in
South Australia's outback was today scuttled by the Full Court of
the Federal Court.
In a major victory for the SA Government, the court set aside the
commonwealth's compulsory acquisition of land near Woomera in the
state's north.
The Federal Government will study the judgement, but was likely
to appeal the decision, Finance Minister Nick Minchin said.
The Commonwealth made the compulsory acquisition of the land
last year and proposed to build a low level nuclear waste
repository at the site.
Today the court ruled in favour of an SA government appeal
against the compulsory acquisition.
Judges Paul Finn, Andrew Finkelstein and Catherine Branson were
unanimous in ruling there was no "urgent necessity for the
acquisition", or that it would be contrary to public interest for
the acquisition to be delayed.
"We will take legal advice but I think we will look very
seriously at appealing that judgment to the High Court," Senator
Minchin told ABC radio in Adelaide.
"This really is important to the nation, the safe storage of
radioactive waste."
The Commonwealth made the compulsory acquisition after learning
of SA Government moves to designate the land as a public park,
and thereby denying the building of the dump.
"The orders of the Full Court have the effect of setting aside
the compulsory acquisition of the proposed site for the national
repository and the access corridor to that site," Judge Finn said
today in a summary of the ruling.
"Had the Full Court not concluded that the acquisition failed
for the reasons outlined ... it would in any event have concluded
that the acquisition failed because of denials of procedural
fairness to the appellants."
The appeal was against the compulsory acquisition of the land
made by Peter Slipper, parliamentary secretary to finance
minister Nick Minchin, on behalf of the Commonwealth.
The acquisition was appealed by the SA Government and the land
owner, Mark McKenzie.
The three Full Court judges said much depended on section 42 of
the Lands Acquisition Act, under which the Commonwealth made the
acquisition.
"If the commonwealth minister takes the view that section 42
gives rise to opportunities for legitimate Commonwealth
initiatives to be frustrated, he should invite the commonwealth
parliament to amend or repeal section 42," Judge Finn said.
Australian Conservation Foundation spokesman David Noonan
welcomed the ruling.
"The court has shown here today that the federal government
exceeded their powers in trying to override the will of the South
Australian community and the will of the SA parliament," Mr
Noonan said.
SA Environment Minister John Hill also welcomed the ruling.
"This is a major win for South Australia," Mr Hill said.
"They haven't succeeded in compulsorily acquiring that land from
South Australia.
"The judges found unanimously that the Commonwealth had
improperly used their urgency power to obtain this land."
AAP
Copyright 2004 News Limited. All times AEST (GMT+10).
*****************************************************************
62 Las Vegas RJ: Yucca deadline missed
Thursday, June 24, 2004
Tardiness by DOE could delay project By STEVE TETREAULT
STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU
WASHINGTON -- The Department of Energy missed a self-imposed
deadline Wednesday that could cause delays for the Yucca
Mountain Project.
The department had set June 23 as its target to finish
certifying 1 million or more documents for posting to a special
government Web site, an early milestone toward licensing the
Nevada nuclear waste repository.
But Allen Benson, an Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste
Management spokesman, said Wednesday that DOE was not ready to
declare legally that its task was complete.
Benson said the hold-up would be "days at this point, but I
don't want to speculate. It's got to be done right, and so we're
working on it." He declined to give details explaining the
delay.
Federal rules require DOE to certify its contributions to the
"licensing support network" six months before it files an
application to build a repository. Therefore, delays past June
23 probably will mean delays beyond the Dec. 23 target that DOE
officials have set to file a Yucca Mountain license application
with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, officials said.
Dan Graser, the NRC administrator of the licensing database,
said DOE officials told him they would be ready to certify their
contributions on Friday or Monday.
"We can turn on the DOE collection when it is time to do it,"
Graser said.
A short delay in license filing would have little practical
effect in December, except to complicate Christmas vacations for
workers who will be putting finishing touches on the paperwork,
according to Nevada officials who scrutinize the Yucca program.
But DOE's failure to meet its goal for the Internet network
suggests that managers are struggling to get the job done, said
Bob Loux, executive director of the state's Agency for Nuclear
Projects.
"They clearly are having problems with the NRC regulations,"
Loux said. "We knew this was coming."
Benson said he could not confirm that a December license
application would be delayed, but Loux said the rules are clear.
"There's no question that every day they delay means a day
beyond Dec. 23 that they can't file," Loux said.
Copyright Las Vegas Review-Journal
*****************************************************************
63 Las Vegas SUN: Bill advances to change way Yucca funds can be obtained
Today: June 24, 2004 at 11:10:47 PDT
By Suzanne Struglinski SUN WASHINGTON BUREAU
WASHINGTON -- The House Energy and Commerce Committee passed a
bill today that would allow Congress to get $750 million for the
Yucca Mountain project directly from a pool of money funded by a
surcharge on nuclear power for the next five years.
The bill changes the usual federal budget rules that would keep
the project under a limit put on the Energy and Water
Development spending bill. Through the bill the project would be
considered separately.
Critics of the project say the bill limits congressional
oversight and makes it too easy to funnel money into a dangerous
project.
"This is an inappropriate way to fund federal projects,
especially a project that is clearly mismanaged, facing pending
legal challenges, and ignoring unresolved safety issues,"
according to a letter signed by seven groups, including Judy
Treichel of the Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force. "The problems
with the Yucca Mountain Project are deeper than funding and
cannot be solved by throwing more ratepayer money at the DOE
(the Energy Department)."
But the nuclear industry wants Congress to be able to tap into
$15 billion in the pool earmarked for the project. Nuclear
ratepayers pay a fee into the fund but the money goes unused
when Congress cuts the budget.
*****************************************************************
64 Las Vegas SUN: Missed deadline for documents may not delay Yucca schedule
Today: June 24, 2004 at 11:14:36 PDT
By Suzanne Struglinski SUN WASHINGTON BUREAU
WASHINGTON -- The Energy Department's failure to meet a
document deadline for the Yucca Mountain project Wednesday may
not delay the project's schedule by much.
The department did not finish sending millions of documents to
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last night as intended, but a
close reading of commission rules shows that the department
faces few consequences if it still submits a license application
in December.
The department needs to submit its license application for the
Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage site, 90 miles northwest of
Las Vegas, by December to stay on track to open the repository
in 2010.
Under commission regulations, the department must "certify" all
of the technical documents it will use to support the
application six months before the submission of the application.
Simply put, the department has to tell the commission that
everything it knows is in the database.
The department aims to get the license application to the
commission by a self-imposed deadline of Dec. 23. This made
Wednesday the six-month mark to get the documents into the
database, but it did not complete it.
"I see a high quality license application in December," Joseph
Ziegler, of the department's Office of Repository Development
told the commission's Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste today.
Ziegler said about 50 key technical issue agreements, or
scientific questions, remain that will be answered by August and
updates to other reports that should be completed by September
-- all while completing chapters of the license application.
"I won't tell you that is not a challenge but this is where we
wanted to be two years ago," Ziegler said. "I don't want to
downplay the challenge, but they (department technical staff)
are up for it."
"We certainly don't expect wrong answers across the board,"
Ziegler said. "There should be no technical errors."
Charles Fitzpatrick of Egan, Fitzpatrick, Malsch and Cynkar,
the Virginia law firm hired by Nevada to handle Yucca Mountain
legal issues, said it looks like the department created a
"cushion" for itself by not picking a deadline at the end of the
month.
He expects the certification will come in the next few days and
that will allow the license application to be submitted in
December, so the missed deadline Wednesday will not have much of
an impact on the project. It would mean a bigger delay if the
commission found the amount of documentation was not sufficient
and told the department it needed more.
Bob Loux, executive director of the state's Agency for Nuclear
Projects, agreed that nothing in the rules prevents the
department from still submitting a license application in
December, even though it missed Wednesday's deadline.
Fitzpatrick said the regulations say the department "shall"
submit documents six months prior to the license application.
"Shall" isn't the same as "must" in legal terms, but the only
consequence if is that the commission will not put the
application on its docket until at least six months after the
certification.
Bechtel SAIC, the project's main contractor, will get $15
million it if finishes the application for the department by
Nov. 30, and $22 million if the commission puts the application
on its docket by March, so that provides an incentive for the
company to get the application in on time, Fitzpatrick said.
Once the department certifies its documents, the commission has
30 days to turn in its own documentation while the state and
other parties allowed to participate in the process have 90 days
to get their documentation online.
Nevada will object to several aspects of the license
application and needs to include everything upon which it will
base its arguments.
Loux said the state will still have 90 days to gets its
documentation together, but the longer the Energy Department
waits, the less time the state will have to review the documents
before the application goes to the commission, if the department
still submits in December. If the department had gotten all its
documentation in by Wednesday, Nevada would have had nine months
to study documents until the commission would make a docketing
decision in March, but now that amount decreases every day the
department waits.
Once docketed, a three-year review clock starts for the
commission to decide whether the storage site could be built.
The department can ask Congress for an additional year if needed.
Yucca Mountain Project spokesman Allen Benson on Wednesday
would not specify why the department did not meet that day's
deadline and would not say when the department plans to submit
the documents.
"We're working hard to get it done," Benson said. "The whole
issue is to do it right. We are hoping it will be shortly and I
can't say more than that."
Benson said the department is reviewing documents and making
sure everything it submits is correct. The law specifies what
needs to be sent.
*****************************************************************
65 Princeton and Central New Jersey: Contaminated soil removal complete
Thursday 24 June, 2004 Home [http://www.pacpub.com] >
[ hspace=] Princeton Business Journal
[ hspace=] The Beacon
[ hspace=] The Cranbury Press
[ hspace=] Hopewell Valley News
[ hspace=] Hillsborough Beacon
[ hspace=] The Lawrence Ledger
[ hspace=] The Manville News
[ hspace=] The Messenger-Press
[ hspace=] The Princeton Packet
[ hspace=] Register-News
By: Scott Morgan Staff Writer
06/24/2004
The last known contaminated soil has been removed from the site
of a 1960 nuclear silo fire at Fort Dix.
FORT DIX — Air Force officials announced last week that
ground crews have removed the last known contaminated soil from
the site of a 1960 nuclear silo fire.
Maj. John Dorrian, an Air Force spokesman, said the last
trainload of soil known to have been contaminated when a BOMARC
missile caught fire in July 1960 was shipped by rail to a
treatment site in Utah on May 27. The $23.2 million cleanup,
which ultimately shipped nearly 22,000 cubic yards of tainted
ground to Utah, began in April 2002.
Maj. Dorrian stopped short of calling work at the site —
which covers 75 acres crossing McGuire Air Force Base, Fort Dix
and Plumsted Township, Ocean County — completed. Rather, he said
the Air Force will continue to monitor the site to assure that
it does not find any more contamination.
"This might be a real significant milestone," Maj. Dorrian
said. "But we're not going to say we're done at this point."
The state Department of Environmental Protection and the
federal Environmental Protection Agency must concur with the Air
Force's assessment of the site before the Air Force can backfill
the area, Maj. Dorrian said. He said that could be as early as
next year.
The Air Force, which owned the BOMARC site, has been in
charge of the cleanup project from the beginning.
- Princeton and Central New Jersey 2004
Copyright © 1995 - 2004 PowerOne Media, Inc.
[http://www.poweronemedia.com] All Rights Reserved.
*****************************************************************
66 AU ABC: Federal Court says no to nuclear waste dump in SA
[http://www.abc.net.au/]
The World Today - Thursday, 24 June , 2004 12:10:00
Reporter: Nick Grimm
ELEANOR HALL: First today to Adelaide, where the Federal Court
has this morning dealt a major blow to the Commonwealth
Government and its plans for a national nuclear waste dump in
outback South Australia.
The full bench of the Federal Court, which is comprised of three
senior judges, has delivered a unanimous ruling that the Federal
Government's compulsory acquisition of the land earmarked for the
dump was in breach of Commonwealth law.
The South Australian Government launched the Federal Court appeal
last year when the Federal Government made its surprise
acquisition move, and the State Government is today claiming a
victory for its campaign to have the nuclear waste dump scrapped
entirely.
This report from Nick Grimm.
NICK GRIMM: The fight over a nuclear waste dump has, in recent
months, led to an increasingly bitter stand-off between the
Federal Government and the State Government in South Australia.
Just last week, Labor Premier Mike Rann was threatening to have
the Commonwealth's contract workers charged with trespass if they
went ahead with plans to enter the proposed site near Woomera in
the state's outback and commence sinking wells for groundwater
testing.
This week, Mike Rann was crowing that he'd forced the Federal
Government into retreat. Now, there's an emphatic legal victory
for the South Australian Government which will further force the
Federal Government onto the back foot.
A sitting of the full court of the Federal Court, which in fact
is constituted by three senior judges, has ruled that the Federal
Government overstepped its authority when it acquired the land
for the proposed dump.
The judgement released this morning states:
"All three members of the full court have taken the view that it
was not open to the Minister, in the circumstances of this case,
to be satisfied that there was an urgent necessity for the
acquisition or that it would be contrary to the public interest
for the acquisition to be delayed.
"Had the full court not concluded that the acquisition failed for
the reasons outlined above, it would in any event have concluded
that the acquisition failed because of denials of procedural
fairness to the appellants.
"The orders of the full court have the effect of setting aside
the compulsory acquisition of the proposed site for the national
repository and the access corridor to that site."
The Commonwealth had acted to acquire the land near Woomera last
year after it learned that the South Australian Government was
attempting to outmanoeuvre it by designating the land as a public
park.
The Commonwealth had claimed the urgency of the matter allowed it
to over-ride section 42 of the Lands Acquisition Act. The Federal
Court today disagreed, stating in part:
"The judges have concluded that the Commonwealth minister's
desire to avoid the operation of section 42 of the Lands
Acquisition Act was not a factor which the Lands Acquisition Act
intended could constitute an urgent necessity for an acquisition.
"If the Commonwealth minister takes the view that section 42
gives rise to opportunities for legitimate Commonwealth
initiatives to be frustrated, he should invite the Commonwealth
Parliament to amend or repeal section 42."
The South Australian Government today was claiming a moral and
technical victory.
South Australian Environment Minister, John Hill.
JOHN HILL: Well, I think all South Australians will be very
pleased that the Federal Court has decided that the Commonwealth
acted improperly when it attempted to confiscate land in South
Australia for the radioactive waste dump. They've found three to
zip that they acted inappropriately, and it's really now back in
their court, the ball's back in their court.
NICK GRIMM: Okay, can you just explain to those who are coming
new to this legal action? What was at stake?
JOHN HILL: Well, the Commonwealth Government used its powers
under the Compulsory Acquisition of Land Act to urgently acquire
land in the northern part of our state to put a radioactive waste
dump.
We said that they inappropriately used that urgency power. The
reason for using the urgency power was the State Government was
attempting to get legislation through to declare a public park on
that land. Ultimately that legislation failed in our Upper House.
If we'd been successful, we could have stopped the use of that
power – the Commonwealth power – and they saw that as a threat,
and they used their urgency powers to try and block it, but the
Federal Court found that that was an inappropriate use of that
power, they denied us natural justice as well, and so on two
bases we were successful.
NICK GRIMM: Of course, you're an opponent of the nuclear waste
dump, but in your view, John Hill, where does this leave the
project?
JOHN HILL: Well, I think this has left the project in a shambles,
I mean, on several fronts the Commonwealth is losing on this.
Legally they've just lost. The ARPANSA (Australian Radiation
Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency ) process has found that
there's not sufficient scientific evidence to justify the
construction of the dump in South Australia, they don't believe
there's been sufficient water monitoring, and they've ordered
more science on that.
And politically, I think, they've got nowhere to go. There's a
Federal election coming up, and I think they'd be very worried
about going through another process of public consultation about
this dump in the lead-up to a Federal election. I think the only
one sensible thing they can do is admit defeat and go back to the
drawing boards and find another place to put their waste
material.
ELEANOR HALL: South Australia's Environment Minister, John Hill,
ending that report from Nick Grimm. [ border=] PRINT FRIENDLY
[http://www.abc.net.au]
*****************************************************************
67 AU ABC: Govt to appeal court on nuclear dump plans
. 24/06/2004. ABC News Online
"Australian Broadcasting Corporation Online">
[http://www.abc.net.au/]
The Federal Government is refusing to give up in the struggle to
place a radioactive waste dump in South Australia's outback.
The Federal Court has quashed the Commonwealth's acquisition of
the land.
The full court of the Federal Court has upheld an appeal by the
South Australian Government against last year's rushed
acquisition.
It is not the ruling Science Minister Peter McGauran was hoping
for.
"It is our intention to appeal it at this stage," he said.
Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) spokesman David Noonan
is warning against such a move.
"They may try and proceed further, but they really will have to
answer to the South Australian community in the election if they
try and break the will of our community here," he said.
South Australian Premier Mike Rann has labelled the decision a
win for the people.
"Incredible arrogance was shown towards the people of South
Australia, but the court has found in favour of the people of
South Australia and the court has found that the Federal
Government acted improperly," he said.
The court awarded costs to South Australia.
Despite a big legal setback the Federal Government is not giving
up its fight with South Australia to dump low-level nuclear
waste in the state's north. [RealMedia 28k+
[http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200406/r23937_59144.ram] ]
[WinMedia 28k+
[http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200406/r23937_59145.asx] ]
© 2004 Australian Broadcasting Corporation
*****************************************************************
68 AU ABC: Dump ruling undermines nuclear reactor plans - ACF.
25/06/2004. ABC News Online
"Australian Broadcasting Corporation Online">
[http://www.abc.net.au/]
The Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) says a court
decision quashing the compulsory acquisition of South Australian
land for a radioactive waste dump throws into question plans for
a new nuclear reactor in Sydney.
Yesterday, the Full Court of the Federal Court upheld an appeal
by the Rann Government against last year's rushed acquisition.
ACF campaign officer David Noonan says pushing ahead with plans
for a new nuclear reactor, without a plan for managing existing
radioactive waste, is irresponsible.
He says the Government must now shelve plans to license the
reactor.
"By stopping the nuclear dump we've essentially unravelled any
capacity they have to demonstrate waste management coming out of
the new reactor in Sydney," he said.
"That may well significantly count against them in the
licensing issues that are still all to happen yet for that
reactor project."
© 2004 Australian Broadcasting Corporation
*****************************************************************
69 AU ABC: Govt still interested in waste dump site park plan.
25/06/2004. ABC News Online
"Australian Broadcasting Corporation Online">
[http://www.abc.net.au/]
The South Australian Government says it is considering another
push to classify as a public park land set aside for a
radioactive waste dump in outback South Australia.
It follows yesterday's Federal Court ruling quashing the
Commonwealth's takeover of the land.
The Commonwealth forcibly acquired the land in July last year,
just before the State Government's bill to turn the land into a
park failed.
State Environment Minister John Hill says the State Government
will now consider another attempt to proclaim the land a park.
"We'd certainly do it if we could get the numbers in the Upper
House," he said.
Family First MP Andrew Evans voted against the previous bill,
saying it lacked integrity.
But he is now willing to reconsider.
"If the parks bill works out okay and looks good and has all
the requirements, then obviously that's the way I'd go," he said.
He says he has made a commitment to prevent the nuclear dump
being built in South Australia.
© 2004 Australian Broadcasting Corporation
*****************************************************************
70 Whitehaven News: MOST COPELAND JOBS SAFE IN WAKE OF RESTRUCTURING...
THE first stage of Copeland Council’s staff restructure will see
a reduction in the top tier of management but the vast majority
of the rest of the council’s employees should keep their jobs.
Under the new set-up a nuclear expert will be recruited to head
up a small team to deal specifically with nuclear issues. The
council accepts it is important that it is adequately resourced
to deal with its unique responsibilities in relation to the
nuclear industry and feels the move will increase its ability to
represent the community. And the Department of Trade and Industry
has indicated it may grant a secondment of one of its own experts
to this unit.
The current senior management team numbers 12 people, now that
two key officers have moved over to Copeland Homes along with the
transfer of council houses. But under two new options on the
table this number will be cut back; by just how many is yet to be
revealed.
All employees, trade unionsand councillors are currently being
consulted about the new proposals for senior management before
the options go before a special meeting of the council’s
Executive on July 13. A report on how the rest of the council’s
staffing structure should look is expected in October.
All this will co-incide with the major office upheaval, moving
from the old dilapidated Catherine Street building into the
council’s brand new civic centre currently under the final stages
of its construction.
Council leader Elaine Woodburn said she accepted that during this
period of uncertainty council employees were concerned about
their jobs. “We are continuing to be open and honest with the
staff and consulting fully. There will be natural wastage,
redundancy will be a last resort. We have to make sure we get the
right people in the right jobs.’’ The majority of employees will
be “assimilated or appointed to posts in the new structure’’.
The senior management alternatives have been developed by human
resources expert Norman Rollo of Solace Enterprises, who has
recently formulated a new staff restructure at Sedgefield, the
Prime Minister’s constituency.
He says the new structure will be simpler to understand, have
clearer reporting lines and be more flexible in its ability to
respond to change. It will not cost any more, indeed some savings
are hoped for. Any vacant posts at senior level will be
advertised internally and externally.
The job description for each post has been looked at closely and
if the new job is substantially the same then the existing
post-holder will move over into it. If however there is a major
change then the new job will be advertised.
Organisational changes have been deemed necessary primarily
because of the loss of the housing stock which saw the transfer
out of 162 jobs, almost one-third of the council’s 550 strong
workforce, but also because of other priorities such as
e-government, the need to deal with nuclear changes and issues
raised by the recent CPA report (performance inspection).
The council maintains the changes will strengthen the council,
improve its performance, its internal and external communications
and help it link together key areas such as regeneration and
tourism.
In its new corporate plan document for 2004/05 the council lists
its aims and objectives as: creating and sustaining a health
local economy, managing the impact of the nuclear industry,
quality of life and social inclusion and the delivery of quality
services. These may be an indicator as to what the management
streams will be under the emerging new structure.
Coun Mike Ashbrook (Lab), deputy leader with responsibility for
the staff restructure, said: “It is about change and the
management of change. It would have been wrong not to take this
opportunity to look at our structures.’’
The council’s key management posts under the current structure
are: General Manager (Dr John Stanforth), Community Services
Director (Terry Chilcott), Community Regeneration Director
(Fergus McMorrow), Chief Finance Officer (Mary McDonald), Chief
Legal Officer (Martin Jepson), Head of Strategy and
Communications (Ken Hastings), Head of Contracts and Projects
(Chris Lloyd), Head of Economic Development and Local Plans (Bern
Hellier), Head of Amenity and Environmental Services (Keith
Parker), Head of Personnel (Len Gleed) Head of Leisure Services
(Phil Sutton) and Head of Development and Environment (vacant,
following the departure of Brian White). The two posts which
transferred to Copeland Homes were that of Chief Housing Officer
and Head of Building Services.
*****************************************************************
71 Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Hanford waste dumping will be scaled back
[seattlepi.com]
Thursday, June 24, 2004
By LISA STIFFLER SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
The federal government promised yesterday to immediately stop
dumping radioactive garbage into unlined dirt trenches at the
Hanford Nuclear Reservation, and agreed to send much less waste
there than originally proposed.
The decision by the U.S. Department of Energy ended more than
six years of planning and debate over how much low-level
radioactive and toxic waste will be imported to the Eastern
Washington site.
Watchdog groups and Washington state regulators have criticized
plans to bring thousands of truckloads of waste to Hanford, most
of it for permanent disposal, arguing that it undermines a
multibillion-dollar cleanup and poses new health and
environmental risks.
Officials with the Energy Department said they've tried to allay
those fears.
"We've taken very seriously their concerns," said Jessie
Roberson, the agency's assistant secretary in charge of cleanup.
"We really are focused on, and committed to, the cleanup of
Hanford."
Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., applauded the decision to stop using
unlined trenches for disposal.
"Today's announcement ... represents an incredible and
long-fought victory for the people of Washington state," Inslee
said. "There is no reason we should continue to dump radioactive
wastes in unlined fills, particularly at Hanford where there is
a track record of groundwater contamination ending up in the
Columbia River."
Washington Attorney General Christine Gregoire, however, wasn't
satisfied with the federal plan.
"There should be no more shipments to Hanford until waste
improperly stored at the site is cleaned up," Gregoire said.
"Until (the Energy Department) has demonstrated the commitment
and capacity to clean up the contamination already at Hanford,
they should not ship additional waste."
Washington Ecology Department officials were reviewing the
federal decision yesterday afternoon and were not sure if the
Energy Department addressed all of their concerns.
In addition to stopping the use of unlined trenches, Ecology
wanted monitoring to track underground leaks from the trenches
already in use and clear plans for treating waste that is so
dangerous it can only be handled with remote-controlled devices.
Another key issue for the state is getting written commitments
for specific cleanup projects at Hanford in return for importing
waste from nuclear cleanup sites around the country.
"This issue of linking waste-import to measurable milestones has
not been resolved," said Ecology spokeswoman Sheryl Hutchison.
Some environmental groups also bristled at the federal plan to
truck radioactive waste along interstates for burial at Hanford.
"This decision opens a tremendous floodgate of radioactive waste
to be dumped in the ground at Hanford," said Gerald Pollet,
executive director of Heart of America Northwest, a
Seattle-based watchdog group.
The department is planning to send 2.9 million cubic-feet of
debris to Hanford -- about one-quarter of the volume proposed as
recently as January.
Hanford is the largest radiation cleanup project in the nation.
The site along the Columbia River was created for production of
plutonium used in a bomb dropped on Japan during World War II.
The Energy Department has argued that waste needs to be shipped
to Hanford from other former defense projects so they can finish
cleanup of smaller sites and close them down, which will save
money. Agency officials say Hanford is exporting some of its
waste for disposal in other states and that there needs to be
reciprocity.
Pollet is promoting Initiative 297, a measure that will be on
the November ballot that bans the use of unlined trenches,
creates an advisory board to oversee waste issues and requires
disclosure of how much is being spent on handling waste.
The state and watchdog groups are still battling the Energy
Department in federal court over the importing of transuranic
waste, which includes long-lived radioactive material, such as
plutonium.
The Energy Department briefly 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. P-I reporter Lisa Stiffler can
be reached at 206-448-8042 or lisastiffler@seattlepi.com.
HEADLINES
CD trove is proving short on treasures
U.S. moves to classify Guantanamo abuse suit documents
Cows' killer was toxic agent
Canadian firm downplays links to I-892 backers
Shelton blast injures 5
More Stryker troops going to Iraq
Hanford waste dumping will be scaled back
Woman ruled insane in slayings of parents
2nd guilty plea in case of Cambodian baby adoptions
National Guardsman won't face death for offering to help
al-Qaida
Injured firefighting recruit tells court of his ordeal
Want to know what your insides look like? Check out the giant
colon
Missing Oregon coach, teen found in Tennessee
5 added to list of women man allegedly exposed to HIV
Luna still elusive, stays near Indian canoes
Northgate library branch to close
Man dies after being shot while sitting in car
Boy, 7, dies when bike collides with pickup
Man sought in possible kidnap attempt at Issaquah day care
King County Deaths
Home | Site Map | About the P-I | Contact Us | P-I Jobs | Home
Delivery
[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
[newmedia@seattlepi.com]
©1996-2004 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Terms of Service/Privacy Policy
*****************************************************************
72 Seattle Times: DOE curtails radioactive waste to be shipped to Hanford
Thursday, June 24, 2004 - Page updated at 12:49 A.M.
By Seattle Times staff and The Associated Press
The federal government plans to dramatically scale back the
amount of radioactive waste it will ship to Hanford from nuclear
sites around the country, and will build a special facility to
house some of it rather than burying it in unlined trenches.
The release late yesterday of the government's final plan to make
the nuclear reservation in Washington state a storage and burial
ground for several million cubic feet of the nation's most
troublesome nuclear waste sets the stage for a political fight in
November.
That's when Washington voters will decide on a ballot initiative
that seeks to ban such shipments until a multibillion-dollar
cleanup at the 586-square-mile reservation outside of Richland is
completed.
Yesterday, U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) officials said they
agreed to reduce by 75 percent the amount of low-level
radioactive waste as well as the amount of low-level nuclear
waste mixed with hazardous chemicals, in response to state
officials who have been critical of the government's previous
plan.
"We made it clear our commitment was to continue and accelerate,
where we could, the cleanup of Hanford," said Jessie Roberson,
assistant DOE secretary for environmental management. "Our
commitment is not to just bring lots of stuff to Hanford and
leave it."
But a Hanford watchdog said such a commitment does little to
resolve the real conflict.
"It is a massive amount of waste to bring here, even though they
are talking about bringing substantially less than originally
planned," said Gerald Pollet with Heart of America Northwest, a
sponsor of Initiative 297. "And they've reserved the right to
make new decisions in the future, when it's not such a political
hot potato."
Hanford, where the first atomic weapons were built as part of the
Manhattan Project, is home to 177 underground storage tanks
filled with a stew of millions of gallons of radioactive and
chemical waste — about two-thirds of the nation's nuclear
garbage. Over the years, more than a third of those tanks have
leaked material that can take thousands of years to decay to safe
levels, and underground plumes have migrated, making Hanford the
most polluted spot in North America.
The federal government has tried for years to make Hanford a
central place to store the rest of the country's waste. But state
officials always have fought such a move, or at least demanded it
be tied directly to meeting cleanup goals, and "we do not have
that yet," said Sheryl Hutchison, spokeswoman for the state
Department of Ecology.
While yesterday's decision reduced the low-level and mixed waste
proposed for transfer to Hanford from 360,000 cubic meters to
82,000, Hutchison said the original numbers were unrealistic —
"the outer limits of what they could possibly imagine."
And the government also wants to ship so-called transuranic waste
— clothing and equipment spotted with plutonium, among the most
problematic radioactive elements — for temporary storage before
it's buried permanently in a salt mine in New Mexico.
Roberson said a new lined facility will be constructed at Hanford
by 2007 to hold the low-level and mixed waste. "Existing and
modified" facilities will contain the plutonium-contaminated
waste.
Seattle Times staff reporter Craig Welch contributed to this
story.
Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company
*****************************************************************
73 Tri-City Herald: Cleaning up, moving out
This story was published Wednesday, June 23rd, 2004
By Annette Cary Herald staff writer
Three tractor-trailers rolled out of Hanford last week, carrying
the 100th, 101st and 102nd shipment of radioactive waste from the
Washington nuclear reservation bound for permanent disposal.
The waste, produced at Hanford to support the nation's nuclear
weapons program, will decay over thousands of years in an ancient
underground salt formation in the remote Chihuahuan Desert of
Southeastern New Mexico.
The shipments demonstrate progress in a program to retrieve
buried transuranic waste at Hanford and find it a resting place
off the nuclear reservation. The program has ramped up. After
sending just a dozen shipments to New Mexico in the three years
ending in 2002, DOE aims to send more than 90 shipments this
year.
"We're satisfied," said Sheryl Hutchison, spokeswoman for the
Washington State Department of Ecology, a Hanford regulator.
"They're on track."
Getting the waste moved has been a long time coming.
Since 1970 when the Atomic Energy Commission ruled that
transuranic waste must be buried in a deep geological repository,
55-gallon drums of the waste have been piling up at Hanford. The
Department of Energy did not open its repository, the Waste
Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP, in New Mexico until 1999.
Transuranic waste is contaminated with plutonium or another
radioactive element heavier than uranium, the heaviest element to
occur naturally. Radiation from transuranic waste consists mostly
of alpha particles that travel only a short distance in air, but
are of concern because the contamination decays over thousands of
years.
The first plan at Hanford was to bury the waste temporarily until
a repository was open. At first drums, many of them holding
plutonium-tainted clothing and equipment, were dumped helter
skelter into trenches. But soon workers developed a system of
stacking drums and boxes into tidy rows at the bottom of
trenches.
The drums were typically stacked four high on an asphalt pad.
They were covered with a plastic liner and then a layer of
Hanford's sandy dirt.
Starting in about 1985, the temporary burial plan was abandoned
and drums went into storage to wait for a national disposal site
to open.
But Hanford is left with nearly half the waste -- about 37,000
drums and 1,200 boxes -- to dig up and sort out.
Workers have dug up almost 3,000 drums, with larger boxes
included in that tally based on how many drums they would hold.
Each drum is checked against records for what it should contain,
given a physical check for holes and pressure buildup and then a
radiation survey to see if it is safe for workers to get near.
"Then we take it off the stack," said Dale McKenney, deputy
project director for waste disposal at Fluor Hanford, the DOE
contractor for the project.
DOE expects only about half the drums to contain transuranic
waste. The others hold waste that can be classifed as low-level
and buried at Hanford.
"A lot of this stuff went in the trenches because it was guilty
by association," McKenney said. It might have come from an area
where other waste was contaminated by plutonium or be
contaminated at too low levels to qualify as transuranic waste.
Workers have started digging up some of the trenches with drums
believed to be in the best condition to gain experience before
they tackle drums that may be more corroded. They've still faced
some challenges, coming upon drums with high dose rates of
radiation, said Mark French, Department of Energy project
director for solid waste disposition.
They've also had to carefully move boxes, often used to hold
large pieces of equipment, the size of 28 drums and weighing more
than 10,000 pounds.
The waste containers are taken to the Waste Receiving and
Processing Facility, or WRAP, at Hanford, which has . Drums are
X-rayed by an operator who sits in a control room and turns the
drums remotely, identifying cloth, glass beakers, pieces of wire
and contaminated tools jammed inside.
If the operator finds waste that cannot be sent in the drums to
WIPP, such as fire extinguishers or aeresol cans, the drums are
sent to a hot cell and emptied.
Once drums are approved for shipment, they're packed into
10-foot-tall shipping containers that typically hold 14 drums.
Tractors pull trailers with two or three of the shipping
containers, depending on their weight and radioactivity.
The waste shipped so far has been from the drums that were not
buried, but later this summer some of the drums retrieved from
underground also will be loaded onto the trucks.
The trucks are tracked by satellite as they travel south to
Oregon, and then through Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado and New
Mexico. There the containers will be unloaded in disposal rooms,
some nearly a half mile underground.
© 2004 Tri-City Herald, Associated Press &Other Wire Services
*****************************************************************
74 chillicothe gazette: License for Piketon plant essential for breaking ground -
www.chillicothegazette.com
Thursday, June 24, 2004
By DANIEL PRAZER Gazette Staff Writer
PIKETON -- With the U.S. Enrichment Corp. scheduled to apply in
August for a license to build their $1.5 billion uranium
enrichment plant in Piketon, representatives from the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission invited the public to hear a little about
the licensing process Wednesday.
About 100 people showed up to the meeting at the Vern Riffe
Career Technology Center to hear several NRC officials explain
the commission's role as a regulator. The NRC is an independent
federal agency funded through congress and charged with ensuring
the safe operation for both employees of the plant and the
surrounding areas, said Yawar Faraz, the project manager
overseeing USEC's application process.
"We are not really a promoter of this technology, or of our
applicants or licensees," he said. "We want to make sure any
license we issue is for a facility that is safe, secure and
environmentally clean."
USEC cannot build the plant until the license is approved.
After USEC submits its application for licensing in August, the
commission will take up to 18 months to review its technical
merits, and USEC has asked for a response within 24 months, said
Matt Blevins, the site's environmental project manager for the
NRC.
During this time, at least three periods of public input will be
involved for the environmental review process, Blevins said, each
of at least 45 days. A parallel review process will highlight the
proposed plant's safety.
Waverly resident Judi Jeska said there's been a history of
distrust in the area in the past, and she hopes through the
process of getting the proposed plant up and running, the public
will be able to feel secure in its dealings with the governmental
agencies that police it.
"We can't fight progress," she said. "We have to go ahead with
clean air and a clean environment."
Dan Minter, president of the union that represents workers at the
plant, said a rapport is being built, calling the public
involvement "vastly different than 50 years ago."
"It appears to me that obviously, the NRC is making a vested
effort to let everybody know what's going on," he said.
(Prazer can be reached at 772-9364 or via e-mail at
dprazer@nncogannett.com) [dprazer@nncogannett.com]
Originally published Thursday, June 24, 2004
*****************************************************************
75 Idaho Statesman: INEEL does tests on hybrid cars
06-24-2004
Statesman staff
Edition Date: 06-24-2004
If the purchase of a new hybrid electric vehicle is in your
plans, you may want to check the results of recent testing by the
U.S. Department of Energy's Idaho National Engineering and
Environmental Laboratory.
The Advanced Vehicle Testing Activity, managed by INEEL, has
completed 1 million miles of hybrid electric vehicle testing.
The testing includes fuel use, vehicle maintenance and repair
data for Honda Civics and Insights and the Toyota Prius.
Test details are available on the Web at avt.inel.gov.
*****************************************************************
76 Oak Ridger: Geologists to meet in Oak Ridge
Story last updated at 11:56 a.m. on June 24, 2004
By: from staff reports
About 100 scientists from 12 countries are expected to
participate in a conference at Pollard Technical Conference
Center that will explore how the deepest structures of the
Earth's crust affect the surface geology of the planet and how
the crust of today formed over the course of four billion years.
"What should come out of this conference is a better
understanding of the way continents are put together and the
relationships between continental and ocean crusts and the mantle
that lies under them," said Robert D. Hatcher Jr., a primary
planner and host of the event. "The more we know, the better we
can understand how mineral deposits and oil and gas form."
The conference kicks off Monday in Oak Ridge, and the four-day
event is jointly sponsored by the University of Tennessee Science
Alliance and the International Basement Tectonics Association.
Hatcher, a UT distinguished scientist and professor in tectonics
and structural geology said the central issue of the conference
will be whether the processes that formed the early crust are
different from the processes at work today.
"When the early crust was formed, the planet was much hotter than
it is today," he said. "Crust-forming processes may have been
different because of the greater amount of heat available. The
compositions of the atmosphere and oceans were different, and
many of today's most abundant rock types were not very common on
the Earth four billion years ago."
As part of the conference, a day-long field trip is planned to
examine East Tennessee geology. In addition, at the conference's
end, Hatcher and several other geologists will lead a five-day
trip from Knoxville to Columbia, S.C., so scientists to examine
the crust types that formed in the Appalachians some 500 to 270
million years ago.
*****************************************************************
77 lamonitor.com: Defense bill passes with good news for Los Alamos
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
Superintendent James Anderson said he was extremely pleased with
the news that his district was included in the latest defense
bill passed Wednesday by the Senate. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M.,
voted with the majority to approve a national defense policy bill
that includes a number of provisions he sponsored, including one
important to Los Alamos Schools.
Domenici authored language, co-sponsored by Sen. Jeff Bingaman,
D-N.M., directing the Secretary of Energy to modify the
management and operating contract for the Los Alamos National
Laboratory to provide $8 million annually to the Los Alamos
Public School District.
The language is intended to ensure continued federal funding to
support public education associated with LANL.
The funding to support the Los Alamos schools was not included in
the DOE budget requests submitted to Congress in February.
"Education is really the foundation that will mold our youth to
be competitive in the workplace and be responsible and informed
adults in the future," Domenici said.
"I believe it is necessary for Los Alamos National Laboratory to
have a continued relationship with the local school district that
encourages cooperation within the community and maximizes the
benefits that come from these partnerships." Anderson was
appreciative of both of the senators' efforts to ensure the
schools can count on the $8 million from DOE, no matter who ends
up managing the lab.
"This is fantastic news and a great step forward in dealing with
the long term funding issue for the school district," Anderson
said. "We are so fortunate to have the support of Senators
Domenici and Bingaman. We'll be moving ahead aggressively to
enhance our funding to maintain the value of the $8 million and
manage the deflation of the fixed amount out into the future."
[http://www.dncu.org/]
[http://www.lanb.com/]
© 2003 Los Alamos Monitor All Rights Reserved.
*****************************************************************
78 lamonitor.com: LANL tapped for propulsion study
The Online News Source for Los Alamos
[http://www.lac-nm.us]
ROGER SNODGRASS, roger@lamonitor.com, Monitor Assistant Editor
Sen. Pete Domenici gave a challenging new assignment to Los
Alamos National Laboratory - and the money to pay for it - tucked
into next year's defense appropriation bill. His office announced
Wednesday that a $2 million item was included in the $416 billion
defense bill at Domenici's request for a preliminary study on how
to reduce costs and find new uses for a superconducting
technology known as electromagnetic propulsion (EM).
Of interest to the office of naval research for powering
next-generation ships and weapons systems, the propulsion might
also be used to lower costs for public transportation by magnetic
levitation trains.
A spokesperson for the senator said that current maglev train
costs, like the new Shanghai airport express are prohibitively
expensive, but the idea of traveling from Albuquerque to Las
Cruces in less than an hour was appealing.
According to a Washington Post article that caught the senator's
attention, China intends to follow up on its 20-mile, $1.2
billion maglev to the airport with a $16 billion, 865-mile
Shanghai to Beijing high speed rail line. "Los Alamos has found
great ways to break through and find efficient ways of doing
things," Matt LeTourneau said.
The project connects the senator's interest in superconductivity
and energy efficiency, LeTourneau said, and the lab's
Superconductivity Technology Research Center, which has led the
effort within the Department of Energy to apply superconductivity
to the nation's power grid. Dean Peterson, leader of the STC at
Los Alamos, said new high temperature superconductivity materials
developed by the laboratory will lower costs and open new
possibilities for electric trains, ships and planes.
"The wires are the enabling technology. You need lots of wire at
a low cost to wind into a supermagnet, or it will never be
applied commercially," he said. "This is especially important
before we start having problems finding energy."
The maglev projects in China and Japan are based on a more
expensive low temperature superconductivity.
Peterson predicted trains traveling 350 miles an hour and 1000
miles an hour in a vacuum tube.
The research will begin with a detailed analysis of the major
cost drivers and potential development risks for lower cost, high
velocity systems, Domenici's office said.
The project is expected to grow in time and involve Sandia
National Laboratories and several universities in New Mexico, as
well as the laboratory's industrial partners.
Mark up was completed Wednesday by both the defense subcommittee
and the defense appropriation committee. The bill, the first of
all the appropriation bills, has been passed out of committee and
may reach the Senate floor as early as this week, but certainly
before the August recess.
More than $100 million in additional appropriations will be
directed toward New Mexico in this year's appropriations bill,
primarily to support a gamut of high-technology research,
development and testing programs, Domenici's announcement said.
Overall, the bill will provide an average 3.5 percent
across-the-board pay raise for military personnel. It provides
$15.7 billion for the Defense Health Program, $460 million above
the president's budget request. The bill also provides the $25
billion requested by President Bush to support antiterrorism
activities in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition, the measure
contains $500 million overall for equipment for the National
Guard and Reserve.
© 2003 Los Alamos Monitor All Rights Reserved.
*****************************************************************
79 Google News Alert - nuclear
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2004 15:00:03 -0700 (PDT)
NORTH Korea in nuclear talks
Guardian - UK
... negotiators held a rare one-to-one meeting today to discuss a plan
to swap energy aid in exchange for the communist country dismantling its
nuclear programme. ...
See all stories on this topic:
OFFICIALS: Nuclear plant warning system has problems
Providence Journal (subscription) - Providence,RI,USA
BRATTLEBORO, Vt. (AP) - Operators of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant were
15 minutes late in notifying the state of Vermont about an emergency at
the plant ...
SECOND day of six-party talks on Korean nuclear issue
Xinhua - China
... The parties to the third round of six-party talks all raised proposals
when the negotiations enteredthe second day to solve the Korean Peninsula
nuclear issue. ...
See all stories on this topic:
NUCLEAR Accidents: Fact and Fiction
Korea Times - Seoul,South Korea
ATLANTA - Rising fuel prices and worries about global warming should have
inspired another look at nuclear power as one of the most viable alternative
energy ...
See all stories on this topic:
AGENCY trims total for nuclear waste shipments
Oregonian - Portland,OR,USA
The US Department of Energy on Wednesday reasserted a plan to ship waste
from nuclear plants nationwide to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in eastern
...
See all stories on this topic:
COURT blocks Canberra's nuclear dump plan
Australian Financial Review (subscription) - Pyrmont,NSW,Australia
... blow in its attempts to win key marginal seats in Adelaide, with the
Federal Court blocking Canberra's plan for a highly controversial nuclear
waste dump in ...
See all stories on this topic:
IMPORTANT consensus reached at nuclear talks in Beijing
Interfax - Moscow,Russia
June 24 (Interfax-China) - An important consensus has been reached at the
third round of the six-nation negotiations on the Korean nuclear problem
in Beijing ...
See all stories on this topic:
A Critical Nuclear Moment
Washington Post - Washington,DC,USA
... While Iran says its activities are solely for peaceful production of
nuclear power and are permitted by the Non-Proliferation Treaty, once
enrichment ...
See all stories on this topic:
NUCLEAR CBMs: good, not good enough - By Praful Bidwai
Hi Pakistan - Lahore,Pakistan
... Then came Sunday’s agreement on nuclear confidence-building measures
(CBMs), followed by a meeting between the two Foreign Ministers in China
in a "very ...
See all stories on this topic:
MINISTER 'wrong on nuclear power'
Dispatch Online - East London,Eastern Cape,South Africa
CAPE TOWN - Minerals and Energy Minister Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka was misinformed
if she believed nuclear power had a future as an energy source, Earthlife
...
See all stories on this topic:
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/
*****************************************************************
80 U.S. Newswire: Arizona, Nevada and California Cities Show Fastest
Growth, Census Bureau Says
6/24/2004 12:01:00 AM
To: National Desk
Contact: Robert Bernstein of the U.S. Census Bureau,
301-763-3030 or 301-457-1037 (TDD),
WASHINGTON, June 24 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Eight of the nation's top
10 fastest growing large cities (100,000 or more population)
since Census 2000 lie in the Western states of Arizona, Nevada
and California, according to new U.S. Census Bureau population
estimates for July 1, 2003.
Gilbert, Ariz., a suburban community, south of Phoenix, of
145,250 people, led the list with a growth rate of 32 percent in
the 39-month period between April 1, 2000, and July 1, 2003. It
was followed by North Las Vegas (25 percent) and Henderson (23
percent), both in Nevada's Clark County. Henderson, with a
population gain of 39,446, ranked eighth in the nation in
numerical increase.
Rounding out the 10 fastest-growing large cities were Chandler,
Ariz.; Irvine, Calif.; Port St. Lucie, Fla.; Rancho Cucamonga,
Calif.; Fontana, Calif.; Peoria, Ariz.; and Cape Coral, Fla. (See
Table 1.)
New York City continued to be the nation's most populous city,
with 8.1 million residents. The estimates show that among the 10
largest cities, only one change has occurred in the rankings
since Census 2000: Dallas and San Antonio switched places, with
San Antonio now ranking eighth and Dallas ninth. (See Table 2.)
Los Angeles, the second most populous city at 3.8 million, had
the largest population increase, adding 125,209 people since
Census 2000. (See Table 3.)
In addition to the estimates for the nation's 19,450 incorporated
places, the Census Bureau also released estimates for all of
America's minor civil divisions.
The estimates are based on Census 2000 population counts --
updated using administrative records. Incorporated places include
cities, towns, villages and boroughs in most states. For more
information about the geographic areas for which the Census
Bureau produces population estimates, see
http://eire.census.gov/popest/geographic/estimatesgeography.php
[http://releases.usnewswire.com/redir.asp?ReleaseID=32387&Link=ht
tp://eire.census.gov/popest/geographic/estimatesgeography.php] .
EDITOR'S NOTE: The embargoed data can be accessed at
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/embargo
ed_releases/index.html
[http://releases.usnewswire.com/redir.asp?ReleaseID=32387&Link=ht
tp://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/embargoed
_releases/index.html] . After the release time, go to
http://eire.census.gov/popest/data/cities.php
[http://releases.usnewswire.com/redir.asp?ReleaseID=32387&Link=ht
tp://eire.census.gov/popest/data/cities.php] .
------
The Commerce Department's Census Bureau policy for embargoed news
releases is generally 12:01 a.m. the day of release. This
information may not appear in print until after 12:01 a.m.
Broadcast may not use this information until 12:01 a.m. the day
of release. Access to embargoed news releases and data sets may
be revoked for any person or organization failing to adhere to
this policy. Please contact the Public Information Office if you
have any questions regarding this policy at 301-763-3030 or by
e-mail
http://www.usnewswire.com/ [http://www.usnewswire.com/]
*****************************************************************
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:
*****************************************************************