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Send News Stories to news@energy-net.org with title on subject
line and first line of body
NUCLEAR POLICY
1 Al Jazeera: Iran’s air force on alert to defend nuclear sites -
2 Xinhua: Over 10 nuclear spies arrested in Iran since March
3 Korea: Digital Chosunilbo: Seoul, U.S. Fail to See Eye-to-Eye on Nor
4 Guardian Unlimited: Tremors that may signal political earthquake in
5 US: [shundahaialerts] Nuclear News from Utah
6 US: Salt Lake Tribune - Opinion: Toward an energy policy
7 US: MSN: Harry Reid Is Not Boring - Has Scorsese fictionalized your
8 Xinhua: Putin says US trying to "isolate" Russia
9 RADIO FREE EUROPE/ RADIO LIBERTY: Mixed Feelings On Nuclear Issue (P
10 RADIO FREE EUROPE/ RADIO LIBERTY: To Develop Nuclear Weapons? (Part
11 RFE: RL: Progressing Along Two Tracks To Develop Nuclear Weapons (Pa
12 Hi Pakistan: MUMBAI: The official record of the Reserves Bank of Ind
13 RADIO FREE EUROPE/ RADIO LIBERTY: Nuclear Debate Go From Here? (Part
NUCLEAR REACTORS
14 US: [NukeNet] Exelon/PSE&G Merger
15 US: [NukeNet] Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial re. Hope Creek --
16 US: [NukeNet] Exelon in Pennsylvania - looks like another PSEG
17 US: Exelon Nuclear (Complete fact sheet)
18 US: TMI refuses to pay taxes; Peach Bottom scrams again
19 UK The Times: Nuclear creditors swap debt for control
20 Moscow Times: Meanwhile, Back in Chernobyl
21 US: thenews-messenger.com: Suit against FirstEnergy dismissed -
22 The Herald: Investors back nuclear power generator’s restructuring p
23 FT.com: BE investors back £5bn rescue terms
24 US: Brattleboro Reformer: Disaster plan needs 'better coordination'
25 US: Boston Globe: Seabrook shows off new
26 US: The Star: Largest US utility emerging
27 US: Brattleboro Reformer: The uprate battle: A reader's guide to the
28 US: Times-Standard: PG to vacuum nuke pool in search for rods
29 US: NRC: NRC Extends Public Comment Period on Proposed Uranium Enric
30 US: NRC: Proposed Interim Staff Guidance (ISG)-17 on; Periodic Inspe
31 US: Deseret News: 2 tons of nuclear product shipped from Idaho
NUCLEAR SAFETY
32 US: [RADFOOD] Protect COOL for seafood
33 US: [RADFOOD] Inspectors' Union: mad cow risk remains in food
34 [du-list] The whole truth about Humvee armor
35 [du-list] A Flood of Mentally Ill Soldiers Coming Home From
36 US: [du-list] How Good Is Good Enough?
37 US: [du-list] 'Danger Dismissed'
38 [du-list] Have Lessons of the Gulf Been Learned?
39 US: [du-list] For Veterans, What's Next?
40 US: SitNews: Diving for signs of nuclear contamination
41 US: DenverPost.com: State seeks help in finding radioactive rod
42 US: Rossmoor News: Energy employees may be eligible for Occupational
43 US: DOL: Energy Employees Compensation Program Home Page
44 US: Norwell Mariner Opinion: Cancers linked to radiation exposure
NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE
45 [du-list] Uranium arrives at new Japanese plant
46 US: sacbee.com: Feinstein plans bill package to reduce perchlorate r
47 US: FT.com: Growing uranium demand triggers a shift in mining
48 US: Boston Globe: Debris removed from polluted site
49 Whitehaven News: BNFL TO RETURN MORE N-WASTE
50 Whitehaven News: UNIONS URGE DECISION ON N-WASTE
51 Yucca Mountain Newsletter: YUCCA MOUNTAIN ON ITS KNEES
NUCLEAR WEAPONS
52 Japan Times: Mongolia's nuclear-free wish
US DEPT. OF ENERGY
53 Tri-City Herald: Vit plant work slows for review of quake design
OTHER NUCLEAR
54 [du-list] DU in the news (Deuxieme Part) - 22nd Dec 04
55 [du-list] Art Exhibition Launches Anti-Depleted Uranium
56 BBC: Wind farm decision 'in New
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FULL NEWS STORIES
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1 Al Jazeera: Iran’s air force on alert to defend nuclear sites -
[http://www.aljazeera.com]
Aljazeera.com
12/23/2004 6:55:00 AM GMT
The Bushehr nuclear power plant in Iran
Iran’s military has been ordered to stand ready to defend the
country in case of an attack targeting its nuclear facilities,
army chief General Mohammad Salimi said on Wednesday.
Gen Mohammad Salimi said that the training had been suspended to
concentrate more on patrolling the sky.
"The air force has been ordered to protect the nuclear sites,
using all its power," Mr. Salimi told a government newspaper.
"The air force has temporarily suspended all its maneuvers and
focused its means on patrolling the sky," he added.
"All our forces including land forces, anti-aircraft, radar
tactics ... are protecting the nuclear sites and an attack on
them will not be simple," the general said.
Iran fears that Israel may launch a military strike on its
nuclear sites as it has repeatedly accused Tehran of developing
nuclear weapons, claims that Iran strongly rejects.
Also Wednesday, Iran said it had arrested at least 10 spies paid
by Israel and the U.S. to pass information on Iran’s nuclear
program.
Gen Salimi's remarks came amid claims that the U.S. military
planners have run simulations of a complex attack on Iran's
nuclear sites.
The U.S. magazine, Atlantic Monthly, has speculated over a
possible U.S. and Israeli attack targeting Iran’s nuclear sites.
However, the U.S. and Israeli officials have denied any such
plans.
During an Iranian cabinet meeting, Intelligence Minister Ali
Yunesi asserted that those who were arrested for spying had been
working for the CIA and Mossad.
Also an official said that three of those arrested had been
working within the state's nuclear programme itself.
In August, Tehran announced the arrest of a number of spies
accused of passing secret information to other countries.
"More than 10 nuclear spies were arrested during the current
Iranian year," Mr. Yunesi was quoted by the official Irna news
agency as saying.
"They are currently in the custody of the revolutionary court,
and we will not announce their names before their trials ...
There is no prominent person among them," Mr Yunesi added.
He added that the 10 were arrested in Tehran and Hormuzgan in
southern Iran.
The U.S. claims that Iran is covertly trying to develop nuclear
weapons.
Iran denies those allegations and maintains that its nuclear
program is purely for peaceful purposes, like generating energy.
Last month an opposition political movement in Iran claimed that
the Islamic republic was hiding a uranium enrichment facility in
Tehran and that it aimed at getting the atomic bomb next year.
The group also said that Pakistani scientist Dr. Abdul Qadeer
Khan gave Iran bomb designs and weapons-grade highly enriched
uranium.
Copyright 2004 AlJazeera Publishing Limited
*****************************************************************
2 Xinhua: Over 10 nuclear spies arrested in Iran since March
www.xinhuanet.com
www.chinaview.cn 2004-12-22 19:01:37
TEHRAN, Dec. 22 (Xinhuanet) -- Iran has arrested more than 10
spies in the country's nuclear field since March, the official
IRNA news agency reported Wednesday.
Iranian Minister of Information Ali Younesi was quoted as
saying that among them, three used to work at Iran's Atomic
Energy Organization.
Younesi said the arrested, believed to be agents of Israeli
Mossad and US CIA, were seized in Tehran and the southern
province of Hormozgan.
Their identities would not be disclosed until the trials
began, the official added.
The United States and Israel, accusing Iran of developing
secret nuclear weapons, have repeatedly threatened to launch
preemptive attacks on Iran's nuclear sites. Enditem
Copyright ©2003 Xinhua News Agency. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
3 Korea: Digital Chosunilbo: Seoul, U.S. Fail to See Eye-to-Eye on North - Minister
Updated Dec.23,2004 19:42 KST
visit to China Thursday that recent statements from U.S.
administration figures concerning the collapse or modification
of the North Korean regime diverged greatly from the position
held by Seoul.
During a discussion with reporters in Shanghai on Thursday,
Chung explained that in the future, South Korea would deal with
the North Korean nuclear issue in accordance with its own needs
rather than American ideas.
He also revealed that he had made a request to Wu Bangguo,
president of the Standing Committee of the National People`s
Congress of China, urging that the old headquarters of the
Korean Provisional Government in Shanghai not be caught up in
provincial redevelopment works.
China's central government proffered a verbal agreement to the
effect that it would take a special interest in the issue and
bear the compound's safety in mind.
Following his discussion with reporters over a brief brunch,
Chung paid a visit to Suzhou Industrial Park during which he
expressed hope that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il would visit
the industrial zone near Shanghai.
(Kwon Kyeong-bok, kkb@chosun.com )
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4 Guardian Unlimited: Tremors that may signal political earthquake in North Korea
Jonathan Watts, East Asia correspondent
Thursday December 23, 2004
[http://www.guardian.co.uk]
European policymakers have been advised to prepare for "sudden
change" in North Korea amid growing speculation among diplomats
and observers that Kim Jong-il is losing his grip on power.
A EU delegation to Pyongyang recommended a review of the union's
policy towards the peninsula, including proposals for closer
engagement with North Korea and contingency plans for a possible
collapse of the reclusive state, the Guardian has learned.
The sense of urgency was prompted by reports of divisions within
the North Korean leadership and expectations that the second Bush
administration will intensify pressure on a country the US
president labelled part of an "axis of evil".
Despite boasting about its nuclear deterrent, North Korea has
been left on the diplomatic backburner for the past 12 months.
Six-country talks aimed at resolving one of the world's last cold
war conflicts have been postponed largely because the two main
protagonists - Washington and Pyongyang - were awaiting the
results of the US presidential election.
In the past month, however, the North Korean rumour mill has been
working overtime. While no one is ever quite sure what is going
on in one of the world's most closed countries, diplomats,
intelligence agents, academics and defectors across the political
spectrum and from several different countries are reporting signs
of potentially destabilising change.
There are strong indications of a power struggle centring on the
successor to Kim Jong-il.
Last weekend South Korean news agencies reported an assassination
attempt on Kim Jong-nam, a son of the "Great Leader", while he
was on a trip to Europe. The plan, which was foiled by Austrian
police, is believed to have been hatched by supporters of a rival
son.
Another possible successor, Kim Jong-il's brother-in-law, Chang
Sung-taek, has been purged from government and possibly placed
under house arrest, according to a South Korean intelligence
official who testified to a parliamentary committee late last
month. Mr Chang, who had close connections to the military, was
often cited as Mr Kim's second-in-command, but he has not been
seen in official leadership line-ups for more than a year.
Mr Kim has also been out of the public eye long enough to prompt
rumours that he has been killed or struck down by disease. Such
speculation is not unusual, but it coincides with reports that
his portraits have been removed from several public places.
Since the summer Pyongyang residents have reported a security
crackdown, with extra checkpoints and ID inspections. Even
Chinese academics - usually cautious in criticising North Korea -
say there have been a large number of high-level defections
because of growing dissatisfaction with the political system.
Veteran North Korea watchers say government officials are
contradicting one another and being forced to wear military
uniforms instead of their usual civilian clothes. "I've never
seen or heard so many signs of division within the leadership,"
said a western observer who has been travelling in and out of
Pyongyang for more than five years. "Kim Jong-il seems to be
losing control."
"There is a great deal of pressure coming from somewhere," a
North Korea-based diplomat said. "We don't know whether it is
internal or external, but something is going on."
In typically pugnacious style, North Korea denounced such
speculation as part of a psychological warfare campaign by the US
and its allies. "The system in the Democratic People's Republic
of Korea is politically stable and is as firm as a rock," the
state-run Korean Central News Agency said. "No matter how noisily
the US may cry out, we will take it as no more than a dog's
barking at a moon."
Even if the reports are part of a new whispering campaign, it
would be a sign of heightened pressure. Colin Powell, the main
advocate of a cautious approach to North Korea, is leaving the
White House next month. This will strengthen the position of
hawks who favour a more combative policy, including taking the
North Korean nuclear issue to the UN security council, which
could lead to sanctions.
Japan is also taking a tougher stance. This week the foreign
minister, Nobutaka Machimura, said time was running out for
Pyongyang. "The international community as a whole, the United
Nations, will have to implement stricter policies, including
sanctions," he said.
Alarmed at the prospect of instability in north-east Asia - an
increasingly important centre of economic growth - European
diplomats are urging EU policymakers to draw up contingency
plans. The delegation to Pyongyang has called for a report, which
is expected to be completed by early March.
"There is a lot of discussion now about how the EU should react
in the event of a sudden change taking place in North Korea," a
diplomat said. "The idea is to pull opinions together so we are
prepared."
Among matters under consideration are an emergency fund to
support refugees and rebuild the country in the event of a
collapse, and the response of EU members to a US call for
sanctions.
A sharpening of policy could cause another transatlantic rift.
Most European countries have maintained links with North Korea,
while the US has tried to isolate it. "One of the options is to
intensify our engagement as a way of persuading them to shift
their position in the six-party talks," said Glynn Ford, a
European MP who has visited North Korea on several occasions.
"I'm in favour. The best way to persuade them is to use carrots
rather than sticks."
Timelines
12.02.2003: North Korea's nuclear programme
North Korea - 1991 to the present
Graphic
[http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/graphic/0,5812,331538,00.html
]
World news guide
20.12.2001: North Korea
South Korea
Useful links
[http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/]
[http://www.kcna.co.jp]
[http://www.wfp.org/index2.html]
[http://www.tcsaz.com/koreanwar.html]
[http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/kn.html]
[http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/ks.html]
[UP]
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
*****************************************************************
5 [shundahaialerts] Nuclear News from Utah
Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 15:55:40 -0800
Huntsman stresses: No hotter N-waste
http://www.shundahai.org/nfgb_news_121604_2.htm
Envirocare owner cashes out
Sale triggers new worries about N-waste disposal in Utah
http://www.shundahai.org/nfgb_news_121604.htm
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
SHUNDAHAI NETWORK--Dedicated to Breaking the Nuclear Chain
Shundahai is a Newe (Western Shoshone) word meaning "Peace and Harmony
with all Creation"
Shundahai Network
PO Box 1115
Salt Lake City, UT 84110
Office: 801.533.0128
Fax: 801.533.0129
mailto:Shundahai@shundahai.org
http://www.Shundahai.org
========================================================
It's in our back yard... it's in our front yard. This nuclear contamination
is shortening all life. We are going to have to unite as a people and say
no more! We, the people, are going to have to put our thoughts together to
save our planet here. We only have One Water...One Air...One Mother Earth."
Corbin Harney -Newe (Western Shoshone) Spiritual leader, Founder & Chairman
of the Board of The Shundahai Network
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6 Salt Lake Tribune - Opinion: Toward an energy policy
Article Last Updated: 12/22/2004 11:43:29 PM
Everybody says the United States needs a national energy
policy, but neither Congress nor President Bush has managed to
come up with one. However - drum roll, please - a bipartisan
committee of people outside government has done the job.
Earlier this month, the privately funded National Commission
on Energy Policy issued its report after three years of work.
It's an integrated plan that is neither a sell-out to the Texas
oiligarchs nor a hippie environmental manifesto. Instead, it's a
sensible, balanced approach.
For example, it proposes to both expand and diversify
international oil supplies while also significantly raising
federal fuel economy standards for cars and trucks and appliance
efficiency. It would introduce mandatory tradable emissions
permits to reduce greenhouse gases and also create incentives
for new generations of nuclear reactors, coal-gasification and
advanced biomass technologies.
That's just a sample of the recommendations in the report.
Congress and the president should look to it as a basis for
reform, much as they have used the 9-11 Commission Report to
spur repairs of the nation's intelligence services. After all,
the first goal of the energy commission was to end the current
stalemate over a national energy policy.
Of particular interest to Utahns is a proposal to provide
10-20 percent more funds to the Bureau of Land Management and
U.S. Forest Service to evaluate and manage access to natural gas
on public lands. The commission also urges $4 billion in
incentives over 10 years to spur deployment of advanced coal
technologies. One of these and then burn the resulting synthetic
gas to fuel a combustion turbine. Not only is that process more
efficient than generating electricity with a steam turbine, as is
done today, but it reduces harmful emissions, including mercury.
The commission also would pump $2 billion over 10 years into
researching and building one or two new advanced nuclear power
plants. Without expansion of nuclear power generation, American
energy dependency on fossil fuels will increase, and natural gas
supplies will be exhausted in order to generate electricity.
But to succeed, the federal government must resolve concerns
about nuclear waste management (the Yucca Mountain repository)
and proliferation.
This is only a snapshot of the proposals, and a partial one
at that. For the full report, go to www.energycommission.org.
We hope that members of Congress and the Bush administration
will log onto that site. It is hard to think of a policy
gridlock that is more of a threat to national security and the
economy than this one.
© Copyright 2004, The Salt Lake Tribune.
*****************************************************************
7 MSN: Harry Reid Is Not Boring - Has Scorsese fictionalized your U.S. senator?
By Chris Suellentrop
By Chris Suellentrop
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 22, 2004, at 5:51 PM PT
Like flies to wanton boys are politicians to the press. We kill
them for our sport. But rarely has a public figure been subject
to a campaign of character assassination as unfair as the one
that's targeted Harry Reid since the Nevada senator was chosen
to replace Tom Daschle as Senate minority leader. A vast
conspiracy has lacerated Reid as "plain," or worse, boring. "As
dry as the martinis he never drinks," Las Vegas Review-Journal
political columnist Steve Sebelius told Matthew Continetti of
the Weekly Standard, though Continetti devised an even better
insult for the Democratic leader's "soporific public persona":
Reid "might be taken for the man in the gray flannel suit's
shorter, quieter second cousin," he wrote. The attacks on Reid's
charm deficit aren't new—Congressional Quarterly noted 10
years ago, "Even Reid's supporters call him 'colorless'"—but
Charles Babington of the Washington Post took the rhetoric to a
new low last month when he declared that Reid "lacks Daschle's
flair."
There was a time when a remark like that—akin to saying that
someone lacks Emmanuel Lewis's height—was considered out of
the bounds of respectable Washington discourse. Granted, Reid
compares poorly to say, Mary Lou Retton when it comes to
charisma. But what congressional leader doesn't? The Republican
leadership, after all, includes Bill Frist and Mitch McConnell.
Reid may not be the most colorful figure in Washington, but his
career is far more interesting than that of the average senator.
In politics, Nevada is the next best thing to Louisiana. To take
just one example, is there another U.S. senator who has been
part of the inspiration for a character in a Martin Scorsese
film? (A character played by Dick Smothers, no less.) In Casino,
Robert DeNiro's character melts down in front of the Nevada
Gaming Commission after the commission denies him a license to
operate a casino. The scene is loosely based on a December 1978
hearing when Reid was the commission's chairman, and some of the
dialogue spoken by Smothers is taken directly from Reid's words
during the hearing. (The rest of the scenes involving Smothers,
who plays a composite politician known only as "Senator," have
nothing to do with Reid.) OK, it's lackluster Scorsese, but at
least it's not Gangs of New York. And there are other Reid
echoes in Casino: Joe Pesci's character refers to a "Mr.
Cleanface," which gangster Joe Agosto said was his nickname for
an in-his-pocket Reid, but a five-month investigation of
Agosto's claims cleared Reid of wrongdoing.
Sure, Reid can sap these stories of some of some of their innate
interest. "Well, it's true that when I served with the Gaming
Commission that I had a number of threats on my life," he told
me during a brief interview earlier this week. When talking
about taping the windows in his house to protect his family from
the threat of shattered glass, he used the same tone that he
used to discuss the importance of Senate procedure. But no
matter what tone you use to discuss the fact that your wife once
discovered a bomb wired to one of the family cars, it's not
boring.
Besides, on other occasions, Reid can, despite his reputation,
give good quote. He has called the move to put a nuclear waste
repository at Yucca Mountain the "Screw Nevada Law." On meeting
his wife, he once told the Las Vegas Review Journal, "The first
time I saw her, she was washing her parents' car. She was
wearing short shorts." He's a reliable defender of pork who once
said, "I resent and object to people who refer to this as being
'pork' in the negative sense. Would they rather that money go to
New Orleans?" He skipped the 1992 Democratic convention to stay
home and campaign for re-election to the Senate, noting dryly
that "it's a foregone conclusion who is going to win" the
nomination.
And here's another story from Reid's tenure as chairman of the
gaming commission: A man named Jack Gordon, who later married
LaToya Jackson, tried to give Reid a $12,000 bribe. Reid let the
FBI videotape Gordon offering him the bribe, and then, according
to a Las Vegas Review-Journal account, he "put his hands around
Gordon's neck and said, 'You son of a bitch, you tried to bribe
me.'" That's right, Senate Democrats are being led by a man who
once tried to strangle LaToya Jackson's future husband-manager.
You call that boring?
Even if he had never served on the gaming commission, Reid's
biography would still be a better read than the average
senator's. He is the son of an alcoholic gold miner who killed
himself. His mother did laundry for, in Reid's words, "houses of
ill repute." He once disguised himself as a homeless man and
spent the night at a mission in Las Vegas. Quirkily, he never
says good-bye, even to his children, when he hangs up the phone.
He once filibustered the Republicans for nine hours, by himself,
by reading from the history book he wrote about his hometown of
Searchlight, Nev. (Even better, the reason for the filibuster
was to prevent the GOP from protesting the delaying tactics
being used by Democrats.) And just this past week in Time, Reid
told Joe Klein that he got into a fistfight with his future
father-in-law before he eloped with his wife.
I'll concede. Harry Reid is no Tom Daschle. Whether that will be
good for the Democrats remains to be seen. But it won't be
boring.
Chris Suellentrop is Slate's deputy Washington bureau chief. You
can e-mail him at .
Photograph of Harry Reid on the Slate home page by Shaun
Heasley/Reuters.
©2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Terms
*****************************************************************
8 Xinhua: Putin says US trying to "isolate" Russia
www.xinhuanet.com
www.chinaview.cn 2004-12-24 08:24:46
MOSCOW, Dec. 23 (Xinhuanet) -- Russian President Vladimir
Putin Thursday accused the United States of trying to "isolate"
Russia from its neighbours among the former Soviet republics.
Russian President Vladimir Putin answers questions during his
annual press conference at Kremlin in Moscow. He accused the
United States of trying to "isolate" Russia from its neighbours
among the former Soviet republics. (Xinhua)
Speaking at an annual press conference in Moscow, Putin said
he has paid heed to Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski's
reported comments that the United States preferred a "Russia
without Ukraine."
Putin said he would ask US President George W. Bush at a
meeting next year whether it is an established policy of the
United States to limit the development of Russia's relations
with its neighbors.
"I don't think it's the purport of the United States'
policy," Putin said, "We'll have a meeting with Bush next year,
and I will certainly ask him this question," Putin said.
Putin also criticized US-led plans to push ahead with an
election next month in Iraq, saying: "We do not understand how
there can be an election in a country under conditions of total
occupation."
He said the United States are not only a partner for Russia,
but also an ally in the fight against terrorism.
Russia and the United States, he said, "are definitely
partnersin solving a number of acute problems of modern times.
This concerns first of all the joint fight against terrorism. As
regards this, I would without any exaggeration call our
relations with the US not just (relations of) partnership but
allies."
[Speaking at an annual press conference in Moscow, Putin said he
has paid heed to Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski's
reported comments that the United States preferred a
"Russia without Ukraine."]
Speaking at an annual press conference in Moscow, Putin said
he has paid heed to Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski's
reported comments that the United States preferred a "Russia
without Ukraine." (Xinhua/AFP)
"Russia, along with the US, are major nuclear powers, and
therefore we are bearing special responsibility in terms of
weapon control and nonproliferation of means of mass
destruction,"the Russian president said.
Putin also said that he personally has good relations with
Bush,saying "Bush himself, in my view, is a very decent and
consistent man. Our views don't always coincide, but I fully
trust him as a partner and know that if he and I reach an
agreement on something,then he will make efforts to implement
these agreements. I act in the same manner."
Putin was obviously referring to the controversy between
Russiaand Western countries, particularly the United States,
over the political crisis in Russia's neighboring Ukraine,
sparked a disputed presidential election last month.
Ukraine has been hit by divisions since the disputed
presidential election on Nov. 21.
[Russian President Vladimir Putin answers questions during his
annual press conference at Kremlin in Moscow.] Pro-Moscow
Ukrainian Primer Minister and presidential candidateViktor
Yanukovych enjoys backing in eastern and southern
Russian-speaking regions while his opponent in the upcoming
re-run of the presidential election run-off, the pro-West Viktor
Yushchenko, draws strong support in western Ukrainian-speaking
regions, a traditional stronghold of nationalism.
Several regions in eastern and southern Ukraine called for
autonomy after the Yushchenko-led opposition contested the
results of the Nov. 21 presidential election run-off.
The Supreme Court later annulled the Nov. 21 poll results
whichproclaimed Yanukovych the winner, saying the vote was
rigged in Yanukovych's favor. A re-run was scheduled for Dec.
26.
As the Dec. 26 re-run of the presidential runoff draws near,
Yanukovych and his rival candidate, opposition leader Viktor
Yushchenko have been engaged in intensive pre-election
campaigning. Enditem
Copyright ©2003 Xinhua News Agency. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
9 RADIO FREE EUROPE/ RADIO LIBERTY: Mixed Feelings On Nuclear Issue (Part 4) By Golnaz
Thursday, 23 December 2004
Esfandiari
[Iran -- Ebadi, Shirin, Nobel winner, in black]
Nobel laureate Ebadi said the West would be better served by
promoting democracy in Iran (file photo)
Iran's nuclear program has become the subject of international
debate and concern. Iranian and U.S. officials frequently
comment on the issue, and numerous articles and analyses about
Tehran's nuclear aspirations are published on an almost daily
basis in the international press. But little is known about the
views of ordinary citizens. RFE/RL reports on the results of a
recent poll, and also speaks with several residents of Tehran to
get their opinions about the controversy. (
[http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2004/12/c4d001c0-2a9f-4a55-
86a7-10271eda48e1.html] looks at what is known -- and unknown
-- about Iran's nuclear ambitions.
[http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2004/12/d3a60813-5569-4d71-
bb50-e02e26229a0b.html] looks at two separate routes that Tehran
might be taking in its alleged efforts to make a nuclear bomb.
Part 3 examines diplomatic efforts under way to give Iran trade
advantages and technical assistance in exchange for giving up
its uranium-enrichment activities.)
Prague, 23 December 2004 (RFE/RL) -- Iranian officials
say the country's civilian nuclear program is a matter of
national pride and claim widespread public support for
continuing research and development.
According to a poll published in October by Iran's semi-official
Mehr news agency, around 80 percent of respondents said they
were opposed to halting nuclear activities. More than 65 percent
said Iran should continue its nuclear pursuits under any
circumstances. And 80 percent believe the United States and
other Western countries are pressuring the UN's International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to crack down on Iran.
But some observers question the validity of such polls and
reject the idea that Iranians are united in their desire for the
country to have a nuclear program.
An analyst who travels to Iran on a regular basis -- who wished
to remain anonymous -- told RFE/RL that he believes people have
mixed feelings about the issue.
"The overwhelming feedback I get from people is ambivalence or
mixed thoughts," he said. "They feel that the money could be
better spent or that lots of people are not even paying
attention. It doesn't affect their daily lives."
Several Iranian citizens interviewed by RFE/RL endorse the view
that Iran should continue its peaceful nuclear activities."It's
[Iran's] legitimate right, and other countries in the region
have these possibilities. This is our right. Why shouldn't we
use it?"
Hamid is a 54-year-old businessman in Tehran: "It's [Iran's]
legitimate right, and other countries in the region have these
possibilities. This is our right. Why shouldn't we use it?"
He said he believes the Islamic Republic is not secretly trying
to produce nuclear weapons.
Tehran says its nuclear program is peaceful and is aimed at
producing energy for civilian use. The United States and Israel
accuse Iran of pursuing a clandestine nuclear-weapons program.
Ladan is a 45-year-old office manager in the capital: "One thing
is very strange for me, and that is why there is so much
pressure [on Iran], because I think every country has the right
to have some plans of its own, apart from [producing] nuclear
weapons. If [nuclear activities] are for peaceful purposes, then
there is nothing wrong. Israel now has about 200 to 300 nuclear
bombs. Why isn't there any pressure on Israel?"
But she added that it is possible that UN inspections have
succeeding in preventing Iran from producing a nuclear bomb: "I
don't think Iran has [a nuclear bomb]. But I think that if the
inspectors hadn't come to Iran, it would possibly have produced
one."
She said the Iranian regime would consolidate its power by
developing nuclear weapons, and that's not something most people
are in favor of.
Twenty-two-year-old Ali said students at his university do not
talk much about the nuclear issue.
"There isn't much talk about it among the youth, maybe only
small talk regarding, for example, whether the case has been
referred to the Security Council," Ali said. "Otherwise, they
don't go into too many details. At Azad University, where I
study, it's like that, I think. For students at other
universities, the issue might be more important because the
atmosphere there is more political."
Ali said he believes Iran is interested in developing nuclear
weapons, but said the country should have a nuclear capability
only for energy production.
"I think it is something that is necessary," he said. "It means
that Iran should by all means have a nuclear capability -- not
military nuclear capabilities -- but for producing energy. I
think we are after nuclear weapons, but I'm not sure if they've
reached them or not."
The analyst who spoke with RFE/RL said inconsistencies in
statement by the Iranian government over the past year have
convinced many people that the regime is pursuing a clandestine
weapons program. But he said most Iranians do not see how a
nuclear program can improve their lives and solve problems, such
as unemployment and inflation.
Ladan, the Tehran office manager, said she agrees that most
ordinary Iranians are concerned with day-to-day problems: "There
was some concern about the possible referral of Iran's case to
the Security Council [for possible sanctions] because, in such a
case, it would be the people who would have to carry the burden
on their shoulders. People are facing so many problems regarding
the economy; pollution in Tehran, which makes people nervous;
terrible traffic jams; unemployment; and other issues. Nuclear
activities are really lost among these [other issues]."
Iranian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi recently said
that while she, too, opposes nuclear weapons, the West would do
more good by focusing not on Tehran's nuclear program but on
promoting democracy in the Islamic Republic.
"In a country or a society where people supervise decisions and
everything else, like a democratic country, the existence of an
atomic bomb cannot be dangerous," Ebadi said. [
Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty © 2004 RFE/RL, Inc. All
Rights Reserved. Contact us: [web@rferl.org]
*****************************************************************
10 RADIO FREE EUROPE/ RADIO LIBERTY: To Develop Nuclear Weapons? (Part 1) By Charles Recknagel
Wednesday, 22 December 2004
[Iran -- Khatami, Mohammad, president, 2]
President Khatami has insisted that Iran's nuclear intentions
are peaceful (file photo)
In the wake of the Iraq invasion, there has been a faint but
growing drumbeat sounded in Washington by officials who believe
the Bush administration should now confront another member of
what it has described as the "axis of evil" -- Iran. Washington
alleges that Tehran is a state sponsor of terrorism and that it
is trying to develop nuclear weapons. Tehran's nuclear
activities include building a commercial reactor with Russian
assistance near the Gulf port of Bushehr. But what worries
Washington are Tehran's efforts to master uranium enrichment --
a process that can produce fuel for nuclear reactors or, at
advanced levels, material for nuclear bombs. Until recently,
Tehran kept those efforts secret from the UN's nuclear watchdog
agency. Now, as UN inspectors insist that Iran fully disclose
all of its activities, the question of whether Iran is seeking
to develop nuclear weapons is the focus of worldwide debate. In
the first of a four-part series, "Iran Nuclear Crisis," RFE/RL
looks at what is known -- and unknown -- about Iran's nuclear
ambitions. (Part 2 of this series looks at two separate routes
that Tehran might be taking in its alleged efforts to make a
nuclear bomb. Part 3 examines diplomatic efforts under way to
give Iran trade advantages and technical assistance in exchange
for giving up its uranium-enrichment activities. Part 4 examines
the seldom-heard views and sentiments of Iranian citizens about
the country's nuclear aspirations.)
Prague, 22 December 2004 (RFE/RL) -- U.S. Secretary of
State Colin Powell recently put Washington's position toward
Iran's nuclear activities in very clear terms.
"The evidence that has been put forward so far demonstrates
clearly that Iran has been moving in the direction of creating a
nuclear weapon," Powell said. "And that is why the International
Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] got so involved, why the Russians
have been careful about providing fuel for the new reactor at
Bushehr, and why the European Union sent their three foreign
ministers in to get the Iranians to stop."
But Iranian officials, including President Hojatoleslam Mohammad
Khatami, say Tehran is only interested in nuclear energy for
peaceful purposes.
"We have made our choice: Peaceful nuclear technology -- yes.
Atomic weapons -- no. Not 'no' only for ourselves -- no [nuclear
weapons] for the region, no [nuclear weapons] for the world,"
Khatami said.
So who is right?
Analysts say the only way to decide is to weigh the physical
evidence that has kept the crisis at the center of the world
stage since 2002. Much of that evidence emerged when an exiled
Iranian opposition group exposed a secret pilot project to
master the process of uranium enrichment. The project included
some 160 assembled gas centrifuges -- plus equipment to build
some 5,000 more -- hidden in reinforced underground bunkers
strong enough to resist air strikes.
In the process, uranium is first converted to uranium
hexafluoride gas, a substance that is fed into centrifuges used
to enrich uranium.Experts have expressed concern over
indications that Iran might have built some of its
uranium-enrichment equipment according to blueprints acquired on
the global black market for nuclear secrets.
The discovery of the sites was alarming because enriched uranium
can be used either as a nuclear fuel or -- at higher levels of
enrichment -- as material for nuclear bombs. It also showed that
Iran was violating safeguards in the international Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), of which it is a signatory. The
treaty gives Tehran the right to acquire nuclear energy for
peaceful purposes, but also binds it to declare all such
facilities to the UN's IAEA and to open such sites to its
inspectors.
Later visits to the site by IAEA inspectors revealed that some
of the centrifuges had been used to enrich two types of uranium
to 20 percent or more. That is far higher than the usual 2 to 3
percent enrichment level required for nuclear fuel.
Nonproliferation experts say uranium enriched to a 20 percent
level is sufficient to make a very cumbersome nuclear bomb. But
it falls well short of the enrichment levels -- 90 percent or
higher -- needed to produce the kinds of missile or
airplane-deliverable warheads that make a country a nuclear
power.
Fred Wehling, an arms-control expert at the Center for
Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, says the
discovery of Iran's uranium-enrichment activities made many
nonproliferation experts skeptical of Tehran's explanation that
it was seeking only to master the nuclear fuel cycle for energy
purposes.
"If Iran was to develop an indigenous enrichment capacity, it
could eventually make its own fuel, which could then be used in
Bushehr," Wehling said. "But then if that were really the case,
you wouldn't need to go to all the trouble of having a
clandestine facility and acquiring uranium under the table to
test it and so on."
Equally worrisome, nonproliferation experts said, are
indications that Iran might have built some of its
uranium-enrichment equipment according to blueprints acquired on
the global black market for nuclear secrets.
The suspected source is the trafficking network organized by
Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. It is not known
whether the network also sold Iran information about how to
design a nuclear weapon, as it did to Libya.
Since the discovery of Iran's clandestine efforts, Tehran has
sought to assure the IAEA that it is now fully cooperating with
international inspectors to disclose all of its nuclear work.
But Tehran said it still insists on its right under the NPT to
develop its own nuclear fuel cycle and will not give that up.
There are varying estimates of how long it could take Iran to
develop a nuclear weapon, if it wished.
Daniel Keohane, an international security expert at the Center
for European Reform in London, put the timeline this way: "If
you ask the Europeans how far away are the Iranians from a bomb,
the general consensus seems to be four to six years. And in
Washington, I understand, the consensus is closer to three years
and possibly even sooner, depending on how the Iranians behave
over the next year or so."
Keohane said any progress Tehran might make in developing a
nuclear weapon will be determined by how much it cooperates with
current efforts by European states to persuade it to give up
programs related to uranium enrichment in exchange for trade
incentives. [ border=] author biography
[[ RFE/RL ]]
Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty © 2004 RFE/RL, Inc. All
Rights Reserved. Contact us: [web@rferl.org]
*****************************************************************
11 RFE: RL: Progressing Along Two Tracks To Develop Nuclear Weapons (Part 2)
RADIO FREE EUROPE/ RADIO LIBERTY
Wednesday, 22 December 2004
By Charles Recknagel
[Iran -- map]
The challenge for any country clandestinely seeking to become a
nuclear power is how to acquire enough fissile material for such
weapons. Most countries begin by starting a commercial nuclear
program, a right to which any state that has signed the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is entitled. The commercial
program can then provide a cover for engaging in so-called
dual-use activities, which can have either peaceful or military
uses. In Part 2 of our series on the crisis over Iran's nuclear
program, looks at the progress Tehran is believed to have made
along two separate routes to making a nuclear bomb. (Part 1
looks at what is known -- and unknown -- about Iran's nuclear
ambitions. Part 3 examines diplomatic efforts under way to give
Iran trade advantages and technical assistance in exchange for
giving up its uranium-enrichment activities. Part 4 examines the
seldom-heard views and sentiments of Iranian citizens about the
country's nuclear aspirations.)
Prague, 22 December 2004 (RFE/RL) -- One of the
"dual-use" activities often exploited by nations who are seeking
to acquire nuclear weapons is the enrichment of uranium.
Enriched uranium can be used for nuclear fuel or -- at high
levels of enrichment -- for nuclear bombs.
The other method is the production of plutonium, a material that
can be used in medical research or -- again -- for nuclear
weapons.
Earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell
reiterated Washington's concerns over how Tehran intends to use
this technology.
"We have to be nervous when a nation such as Iran continues to
take action that, at least suggests to us, that it continues to
be interested in a nuclear weapons program," Powell said.
Iranian officials said Tehran will not give up its right under
international treaties to produce its own reactor fuel, but said
they have no interest in nuclear weapons.
Iranian President Mohammad Khatami put Tehran's position this
way in late October: "We are ready for complete cooperation and
[to reach an] understanding with the world and also with the
[International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA] to make sure that
Iran's [nuclear] activities do not move toward nuclear weapons."
Shannon Kile, an expert in nonproliferation issues at the
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) in
Sweden, noted that although Iran maintains that its programs are
entirely aimed at civilian nuclear energy and research, there
are aspects of each that are highly troubling to experts because
they appear to go well beyond normal civilian activities.
"Well, Iran basically has two uranium-enrichment facilities that
we know about," Kile said. "They are both located at Natanz,
which is south of Tehran. One is a very small-scale facility,
holding about 1,000 centrifuge cascades. The other one is a much
larger facility, holding up to 50,000 centrifuges. And what is
striking about it is that it is built deep underground with
heavily reinforced walls and roofs, which would indicate that,
a) the Iranians are interested in hiding it, and b) they are
concerned about the possibility of military strikes against it."
Tehran did not declare the existence of these facilities to UN
arms inspectors -- as required under the NPT -- until the sites
were exposed by an exile Iranian opposition group in 2002.
Follow-up UN inspections of the facilities raised serious
questions about whether they were being used to enrich uranium
to levels above that needed for nuclear fuel.
"There are some specific activities that are troubling," Kile
said. "The International Atomic Energy Agency has detected the
presence of high-enriched uranium on some of the centrifuge
components that they have examined. Now, they do accept that it
is possible that some of that contamination has come, in part,
from a third-country supplier, which would most likely be
Pakistan. But it is difficult to accept that all of it has come
from a third-country supplier. And that means that Iran might
have enriched uranium. And it is difficult to know why it would
enrich [uranium] to that level if it were going to simply use it
for a nuclear fuel program."
The UN nuclear agency's inspectors found traces of uranium
enriched to 20 percent -- far higher than the usual 2 to 3
percent enrichment level required for nuclear fuel.
Kile said many nuclear experts believe that unless Iran commits
to abandoning its uranium-enrichment activities, it could
acquire enough weapons-grade material for a bomb by 2007 or
2008.
However, he said it remains uncertain whether Iran is seeking to
produce a bomb immediately or is merely trying to perfect a
technical capacity for future production. That would permit
Tehran to "break out" as a nuclear power anytime in the future,
should it feel the need.
As for the second route to making a nuclear weapon, Iran has a
program to produce plutonium that centers around a heavy-water
nuclear reactor to be built near the central city of Arak. The
project -- which was again not declared to arms inspectors until
it was exposed in 2002 -- is described by Tehran as an effort to
produce isotopes for medical use.
But Iran's plans worry many nuclear experts because it is
building what is commonly known as a "breeder reactor." Such
reactors are efficient at quickly producing significant amounts
of plutonium, particularly for military use.
Kile said the "breeder" design exceeds normal specifications for
reactors generating plutonium for civilian uses.
"The 40-watt heavy-water reactor at Arak is ideally suited for
producing weapons-grade plutonium," Kile said. "And, in fact,
this is the type of reactor that was used by all of the
[original] nuclear weapons states [United States, Russia,
Britain, France, and China] in the early years of their nuclear
programs."
Construction of the reactor is just now getting under way, and
it will be eight to 10 years before it becomes operational.
Kile said there is ample precedent for countries successfully
using both uranium enrichment and plutonium production as
clandestine routes to nuclear weapons. He noted that Pakistan is
believed to have derived a bomb using uranium enrichment, while
India and Israel are thought to have taken the plutonium route.
The five "nuclear-weapons nations" recognized under the NPT --
the United States, Russia, Britain, France, and China -- have
used both technologies to produce their nuclear arsenals.
[ border=] author biography
Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty © 2004 RFE/RL, Inc. All
Rights Reserved. Contact us: [web@rferl.org]
*****************************************************************
12 Hi Pakistan: MUMBAI: The official record of the Reserves Bank of India
December 24 2004
(RBI) reveals that the nuclear explosions of 1998 and dangerous
conflict with Pakistan on Kargil turned out to be a big blessing
for Indian economy as $ 11 billion were collected both from local
and overseas Indians in the name of patriotism, hardly within a
year time.
Unlike Pakistan, the Indian government had not frozen bank
accounts in foreign currency, rather it issued bonds that were
purchased by the Indians all over the world. The Indian foreign
reserves at present stood at $ 130 billion, highest in the region
after China, and are expected to grow further because of the flow
of foreign direct investment.
A delegation of seven Pakistani journalists visited Reserves Bank
of India where they were given a comprehensive briefing by one of
its top economist Rajiv Ranjan on the working, system and role of
the bank in the Indian economy.
Replying to a series of questions by the Pakistani journalists,
Mr Rajiv said when the Indian government in 1998 decided to go
nuclear, it was punished with strict economic sanctions by
Western countries. But, he said, both political leaders and
policy-makers decided to fight all kinds of pressures.
After a lot of thinking and deliberations, he said, they came out
with the idea of issuance of dollar bonds to be sold to the
Indians. The name of the scheme was Indian Development Bond.
He said these dollar bonds were purchased by common Indians in
love for their country and at least $ 5 billion were collected at
the end of the scheme. He said the Indian government expected $ 5
billion investment from the USA that was stopped after the
blasts. He said the Indians themselves arranged $ 5 billion by
buying these bonds.
He said the Indians who purchased dollar bonds during the nuclear
crisis were repaid in 2003. Likewise, he said, when the Kargil
crisis surfaced the Indian government decided to issue dollar
bonds named Indian Resurgence Bond. This scheme too worked and $
6 billion were collected.
Replying to a question, Mr Rajiv said at present India was
receiving $ 23 billion annually from overseas Indians as
remittances and it was one of the major sources of foreign
reserves. He said the Reserves Bank did not buy a single dollar
from the open market against local currency as it was done in
Pakistan during the last five years. According to official
figures of Finance Ministry, SBP purchased at least $ 15 billion
from the open market to improve its foreign reserves situation
after printing well over Rs 900 billion of new currency notes.
He said no concept exists in India of buying dollars from private
money changers or other individuals. He said at one stage after
the Gulf War broke out, India was left with only $ 1 billion
reserves. Afterwards, he said, the Indian government introduced
massive economic and fiscal reforms that led to confidence of
both local and foreign investors, resulting in building up of
reserves.
He said during the last three years, the Indian government got
well over $ 60 billion of foreign reserves that was unprecedented
in its history. Mr Rajiv said the building up of foreign reserves
has given confidence both to Indian economy as well as investors
and now direct foreign investment to the tune of $ 4 billion
annually was heading towards India.
He said India is the first South Asian country from whom the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) has sought a loan to further
advance it to other cash starved nations. He said initially IMF
borrowed $ 300 million and it could attain more loans at any time
as now India had touched bench mark of the international lending
agency.
He said India was chosen for borrowing loans by IMF after Indian
economy showed tremendous improvement in last ten years and above
all it met all tough conditionalities set by the international
lending agency.
Copyright 1996-2002 . Hi Pakistan. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
13 RADIO FREE EUROPE/ RADIO LIBERTY: Nuclear Debate Go From Here? (Part 3) By Charles
Thursday, 23 December 2004
Recknagel
[UN -- Security Council]
The UN Security Council (file photo)
When Iran agreed to negotiate with Europe over its nuclear
activities, much of the international community breathed a sigh
of relief. The negotiations -- which opened on Monday (Dec 20)
-- focus on an offer by Britain, Germany and France to give Iran
trade advantages and technical assistance in exchange for Tehran
indefinitely -- that is, permanently -- giving up its uranium
enrichment activities. While a final deal has yet to be worked
out, the three European Union nations view their initiative as
already partly successful because Tehran has agreed to
temporarily suspend uranium enrichment while the negotiators
meet. That has defused -- for now -- U.S. and European worries
that Iran was progressing with its efforts to master uranium
enrichment while the world only discussed what to do. In Part 3
of a four-part series on the crisis over Iran's nuclear program,
RFE/RL looks at where the debate goes from here. (Part 1
[http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2004/12/c4d001c0-2a9f-4a55-
86a7-10271eda48e1.html] looks at what is known -- and unknown
-- about Iran's nuclear ambitions. Part 2
[http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2004/12/d3a60813-5569-4d71-
bb50-e02e26229a0b.html] looks at two separate routes that Tehran
might be taking in its alleged efforts to make a nuclear bomb.
Part 4 examines the seldom-heard views and sentiments of Iranian
citizens about the country's nuclear aspirations.)
Prague, 23 December 2004 (RFE/RL) -- Even as the diplomatic
initiative by the three European Union nations proceeds, there
are signs that a final deal to end the Iranian nuclear crisis
could be very hard to reach.
One reason is Tehran's insistence of its right under the
international Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to produce
its own reactor fuel -- a right that it says it might briefly
suspend but will never give up.
Hossein Mousavian, Iran's chief delegate to the UN's
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), put Tehran's position
this way: "We have emphasized that the suspension [of
uranium-enrichment activities] should be for
confidence-building, not as a legal obligation."
Analysts say statements like those make Washington skeptical
that Iran and the three EU states can reach a long-term accord
that satisfies all sides. A similar "suspension" deal between
European powers and Iran in late 2003 fell apart amid
disagreements over the terms.Earlier this week, U.S. President
George W. Bush reiterated Washington's desire to see the nuclear
disputes with both Iran and North Korea resolved through talks.
Iran has already come under criticism this week by diplomats for
breaking the spirit of its nuclear accord with the EU by using a
loophole to keep preparing raw uranium for nuclear enrichment.
David Albright, a nuclear expert at the Institute for Science
and International Security in Washington, said U.S. officials
are watching the EU deal with interest because -- if successful
-- it could be an ideal solution to the crisis.
"I think many in the U.S. government want [the European effort]
to succeed," Albright said. "It's a dream deal in terms of U.S.
objectives to get Iran to give up its ability to make nuclear
explosives material and have that verified, and then have Iran
shift its civil nuclear energy program toward just nuclear
electricity production using imported reactors."
Earlier this week, U.S. President George W. Bush reiterated
Washington's desire to see the nuclear disputes with both Iran
and North Korea resolved through talks.
"Diplomacy must be the first choice and always the first choice
of an administration trying to solve an issue of, in this case,
nuclear armament, and we'll continue to press on diplomacy,"
Bush said.
But Albright said U.S. officials do not really believe Iran is
ready to give up what Washington says has been a determined
effort to acquire nuclear weapons. Iran has denied such
allegations, saying it needs nuclear power stations to meet
domestic energy demands.
Analysts said that means that, over the coming months, the
Iranian nuclear crisis could go in either of two directions.
One possibility is that the European initiative will lead to
good-faith negotiations with Iran. Then, the United States would
have to decide whether to abandon its skepticism and join the
talks in an effort to reach a final "grand bargain" that would
end the nuclear crisis.
Neil Partrick of the Economist Intelligence Unit in London said
Washington's participation would be necessary because Iran would
most likely want incentives from the United States, too, as part
of any final deal.
"The Iranian version of a grand bargain -- as far as it's
possible to divine a clear line on this -- would be one that
involves a significant degree of engagement by the U.S.,"
Partrick said. "And the Europeans must be seen as really rather
secondary players on this issue, ultimately. And along with that
engagement would come some [demands for] clear guarantees about
[Iran's] own security."
But Partrick said hostile relations between the United States
and Iran could make it difficult for any American administration
to join the EU nations in negotiating directly with Tehran.
"It's very hard to imagine a U.S. administration of any kind
being prepared to make those kind of guarantees to an Iranian
regime that remains extremely controversial [in America],"
Partrick said.
Washington has had no formal relations with Iran since U.S.
diplomats were taken hostage for 444 days in Tehran immediately
after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
The second possible course for the nuclear crisis is that Tehran
could balk at abandoning its uranium-enrichment activities.
Then, a frustrated Europe might move closer to Washington's
position -- that is, that Iran must be forced to do so.
In that case, Washington would likely try to enlist the
Europeans in its own efforts to persuade the International
Atomic Energy Agency to refer Tehran to the UN Security Council
for discussion of possible sanctions. The United States might
also seek to persuade the European Union to join it in its
efforts to isolate Iran politically or economically.
With so many variables at play, analysts said it is impossible
to predict how the Iranian nuclear crisis might end. But many
said the least likely scenario at the moment is U.S. military
action against Iran.
Albright called U.S. air strikes a "poor option," precisely
because Washington's greatest worry about Iran is that it could
be pursuing weapons development work at sites that have not yet
been discovered. He said that means Washington could never be
sure its air strikes had destroyed all of any clandestine
nuclear program.
And such strikes would raise a new problem of how to deal with
an Iranian government that would be only more convinced it needs
nuclear weapons for its own security. [
Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty © 2004 RFE/RL, Inc. All
[web@rferl.org]
*****************************************************************
14 [NukeNet] Exelon/PSE&G Merger
Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 15:37:17 -0800
NukeNet Anti-Nuclear Network (nukenet@energyjustice.net)
------- Forwarded message -------
From: hmosk@earthlink.net
To: ncohen12@comcast.net
Subject: Exelon/PSE&G Merger
Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 19:36:38 -0500
"Exelon Plans to Buy New Jersey Utility," New York Times, Dec. 21, 2004,
at C2,
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/21/business/21utility.html?oref=login&pagewanted=all.
[NukeNet] Exelon/PSE&G Merger
Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 15:37:17 -0800
NukeNet Anti-Nuclear Network (nukenet@energyjustice.net)
------- Forwarded message -------
From: hmosk@earthlink.net
To: ncohen12@comcast.net
Subject: Exelon/PSE&G Merger
Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 19:36:38 -0500
"Exelon Plans to Buy New Jersey Utility," New York Times, Dec. 21, 2004,
at C2,
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/21/business/21utility.html?oref=login&pagewanted=all.
see re anticipated "nuclear operating services agreement" next month "so
that about two dozen of [Exelon's] managers could oversee...."
"PSEG deal generates talk of a rate freeze, cuts," Star-Ledger, Dec. 21,
2004, at 1,
http://nj.com/news/ledger/index/index.ssf?/base/news-19/1103609423126670.xml
.
similar.
There's another Ledger story, "Exelon is empowered to deal," at 61 -
apparently not on the net - about Exelon's sterling performance on all
levels when then-named Unicom merged with Peco Energy five years ago:
"[David] Schanzer, the Janney Montgomery [Scott] analyst, said Exelon has
an excellent reputation in the [utility] industry and is considered one of
the top three nuclear plant operators in the country.
"With ownership interests in 11 nuclear plants, Exelon already is the
nation's largest producer of nuclear power, generating 20 percent of the
country's output. Profit margins at those plants helped make the merger
work, said [Danielle] Seitz, the Maxcor [Financial] analyst. 'The
tremendous profit margin you're getting out of nuclear power plants today
would not have been easily forecast at the time,' she said.
"After putting the nuclear business in order, Exelon executives then
turned to the fossil fuel operations and trimmed costs there, using its
combined economies of scale, Seitz said."
The Ledger has two large "data boxes." Included in the first is the
following: "OPERATIONS: Corporate headquarters will be in Chicago, with
energy trading and nuclear operations based in Pennsylvania. The
headquarters of the combined generation company will in Newark, as will
the PSE&G headquarters." Included in the second: Exelon "[c]ontrols the
largest group of nuclear plants in the United States, with 17 [Is it 11,
17 or what?] reactors and 20 percent of the nation's atomic
energy-generating capacity. Four are owned jointly with PSEG."
Apart from obtaining documents from the companies, all agreements should
be accessible - eventually - through the SEC, NRC, BPU and/or the PA and
IL regulators.
With all the regulatory approvals required to put the merger through, if
Exelon is as smart as is said, it's already nixed - at least until its own
people and consultants assess the situation - PSE&G's plan to put Hope
Creek back on-line.
hm
____________________________
Howard Moskowitz, Esq.
157 West 10th Street
Bayonne, NJ 07002
(201) 436-5432 (telephone/fax)
hmosk@earthlink.net
--
Coalition for Peace and Justice
UNPLUG Salem Campaign; 321 Barr Ave, Linwood
NJ 08221; 609-601-8583; cell 609-742-0982
ncohen12@comcast.net; www.unplugsalem.org
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15 [NukeNet] Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial re. Hope Creek --
Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 15:37:35 -0800
NukeNet Anti-Nuclear Network (nukenet@energyjustice.net)
------- Forwarded message -------
From: Drkymn@aol.com
To: Drkymn@aol.com
Subject: Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial re. Hope Creek -- 12/17/04
Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 22:31:03 EST
Posted on Fri, Dec. 17, 2004
Editorial | Hope Creek Reactor Put public safety first
Mention "nuclear power" in Philadelphia and most people think of Three Mile
Island near Harrisburg or Limerick in Montgomery County. Few remember that
the
nation's second largest plant sits on the Delaware River, just south of
Wilmington.
Though off the radar screen of many area residents, this three-reactor
complex in Salem County, N.J., has been squarely in the sights of the
federal
Nuclear Regulatory Commission for more than a year because of lax
maintenance and
serious problems with its "safety-conscious work environment."
Now, owner Public Service Electric & Gas Nuclear wants to restart its Hope
Creek reactor, currently down for maintenance, amid questions that a key
pump is
too damaged to function properly.
The plant's recent record hardly inspires confidence. NRC should err on the
side of caution and keep the reactor shut down until its safety is more
certain. A decision - either way - requires a public hearing. People need
to know
more about what's happening to improve conditions at this plant.
Reports earlier this year found the plant deficient in reliability of
equipment, availability of spare parts, and control-room supervision. Some
workers
became so discouraged by lack of maintenance that they stopped calling for
repairs; others feared angering supervisors by reporting problems. For
public
safety, that climate must change.
The atmosphere echoes Salem's situation in the 1990s, when the NRC found
that
management "tolerated an atmosphere that accepts degraded conditions." NRC
slapped PSEG with a hefty fine, and the plant had to shut down to shape up.
That may have to happen again. NRC and company engineers are meeting today
at
NRC headquarters in Rockville, Md., to review an industry consultant's
assessment of Hope Creek's 18-year-old recirculation pump, which has been
described
as vibrating violently and banging "like a freight train."
Company consulting engineers acknowledge the need to replace the faulty
pump
but say it can wait until the next refueling outage 18 months from now.
Other
scientists, state officials and safety activists disagree.
If the pump bursts, it could cause an accident by spilling cooling water
from
the reactor vessel. PSEG says that's unlikely. It says safety systems would
protect the public from harm.
Also, the company has installed monitors to anticipate failure and shut
down
the pump before an accident happened. That's been described as the best
"Plan
B" in the business.
None of this comforts New Jersey Environmental Protection Commissioner
Bradley Campbell. "It doesn't seem wise to essentially plan a breakdown,"
he said.
"DEP thinks they should fix the pump before they come back online." That's
certainly the safer course.
David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer with the nonprofit Union of
Concerned Scientists, said the pump's vibration was damaging other vital
equipment.
The problems would "prompt a prudent person to call for immediate
replacement,"
he wrote in a letter to PSEG.
The company's chief nuclear officer, A. Christopher Bakken, a
troubleshooter
brought in last summer to straighten out the plant, estimates it will take
at
least two years to winnow the plant's maintenance list and restore worker
confidence. He calls progress "fragile" so far.
That hardly seems the environment to proceed with a major piece of
questionable equipment. With the pump at least, PSEG should adopt a
"fix-it-first"
attitude.
Nancy Kymn Harvin, Ph.D.
LEADERS WORTH FOLLOWING
cell: 267 312 1252
--
Coalition for Peace and Justice
UNPLUG Salem Campaign; 321 Barr Ave, Linwood
NJ 08221; 609-601-8583; cell 609-742-0982
ncohen12@comcast.net; www.unplugsalem.org
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16 [NukeNet] Exelon in Pennsylvania - looks like another PSEG
Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 15:55:04 -0800
NukeNet Anti-Nuclear Network (nukenet@energyjustice.net)
Thanks to Eric Epstein of TMI Alert for this history
------- Forwarded message -------
From: "Eric Epstein"
Exelon Nuclear in Pennsylvania, 1998-2004*:
A History of High Rates & Poor Performance
Historically, Exelon/PECO Energy has maintained the highest electric
rates in Pennsylvania and delivered the high-levels of customer
dissatisfaction.
Exelon Nuclear has also slashed their labor force and contested property
valuations. This what an Exelon Nuclear ³synergy² looks like for the Three
Mile Island community:
Year AmerGen + Contractor = Total Number of Employees
1998 804
1999 704
2000 579 65 644
2001 517 81
598-618
2002: 532-540 103 643
2003: 550
Since 1999 when deregulation shifted power plants back to the local tax
rolls, under the assumption that utilities would pay at least the same
amount had they been subject to real estate taxes, Exelon has crated revue
shock for local communities. From 1998 through 2003, according to AmerGen,
TMI¹s tax payments have steadily decreased The figures from 2000-2003
reflect an Interim Settlement Agreement amount. AmerGen may actually pay
less in future years if they win their Appeal.
Londonderry Township Dauphin County
1998 $6,727 $506,956
1999 $2,816 $206,397
2000 $1,339 $129, 171
2000 - 2001 $30,000 (ISA - Nonrefundable)* $146,940 (Two years)
2002 -2003 $30,000 (ISA- Nonrefundable)* $146,940 (Two years)
Nuclear News Update provided by tmia.com
Three Mile Island Alert , Inc., a safe-energy organization based in
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and founded in 1977. TMIA monitors Peach Bottom,
Susquehanna, and Three Mile Island nuclear generating stations.
1
ˆ April 30, 2004: The NRC announced that the agency did not know how
many people worked at Three Mile Island-1, but ³Personnel didn¹t
consistently recognize degraded conditions. And therefore did not identify
degraded conditions in a timely manner (NRC¹s Annual Assessment Meeting,
Middletown, Borough Hall.)
The NRC issued eight violations and ³in the are of problem
identification and resolution (PI&R) at TMI² (A. Randolph Blough, NRC
Director of Division Projects, Region I, March 3, 2004).
ˆ April 10, 2004: Increased oversight was maintained by the NRC at
Peach
Bottom-2, ³which will face a Nuclear Regulatory Commission supplemental
inspection later this year as a result of deficient performance based on
its
number of unplanned shutdowns. The commission will follow a normal
inspection schedule for the power station's third unit through Sept. 30,
2005. (York Daily Record.)
ˆ January 17, 2004: The pilot who terrorized the airways with his
erratic flying for four hours Thursday night - circling the Limerick
nuclear
plant and buzzing Philadelphia International Airport - was drunk.
ˆ November 15, 2003: The NRC increased its inspections after four
unplanned shutdowns of the nuclear plant¹s Unit 2 reactor. For the next
year, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission will increase the frequency of
its inspections at Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station¹s unit 2.
ˆ On August 6, 2003: Exelon announced it would eliminate about 1,900
positions--10% of its workforce--by 2006 as part of its restructuring.
Carley said most cuts will be in Exelon's information technology and
communications areas. Exelon plans to cut 1,200 positions by 2004 and
another 700 by 2006 (Source: Platts, Nuclear News).
2
ˆ May 21, 2003: EXELON'S FORMER CHIEF EXECUTIVE MADE THE TOP 10
LIST OF BEST-PAID U.S. energy executives for 2002, according to a
compilation by the Platts Energy Business & Technology (EB&T) magazine.
Corbin McNeill, Jr., the ex-chairman and co-CEO of Exelon Corp. had a
compensation package of nearly $29.8- million last year, making him the
fourth highest paid CEO out of the 250 executives that were examined.
McNeill's 2002 package included a severance payment and benefits from a
pension benefit plan from PECO Energy. He retired from Exelon in April
2002.
ˆ May 14, 2003: An employee at the Limerick plant in Montgomery County
and the Peach Bottom plant in York County nuclear power plants was been
suspended for being intoxicated on the job, according to the NRC.
ˆ January 29, 2002: Exelon announced it would cut 3,400 or 15% of its
work force by the end of 2002.
ˆ 2000-2003: The average residential electric rate per kWh in
Pennsylvania in 2000 and 2001 was 9.5 cents per kWh (1) PECO weighed in at
13.27 per kwh in October 2002, and 13.38 per kWh n January, 2003. (2)
ˆ August 31, 2002: Nuclear security budget increased to $2.2 million
annually or $550,300 less than John W. Rowe¹s base salary.
ˆ May 31, 2002: The public learned that the National Guard were
equipped with unloaded M-16¹s at TMI and the four nuclear power plants in
Pennsylvania.
ˆ 1999-2002: Between July 1999 and December 2002, 143 workers and
short-term contractors at Three Mile Island and Peach Bottom Atomic Power
Station tested positive for drugs or alcohol, according to biannual
Fitness-for-Duty reports. (York Daily Record, November 14, 2003)
_____
1 Energy Information Administration/Electric Sales and Revenue
Publication.
2 Jacksonville Electric Authority, February 27, 2003. The price includes
the cost of base rates, fuel adjustments and franchise fees.
3
ˆ December 21, 2001: Exelon eliminated 900 jobs.
ˆ December 8, 2001: TMI resumed operation after a 58 day refueling
outage (planned for 29 days) outage cost the company over $100 million in
lost revenues, replacement energy, and repairs including: replacement of
the turbine generator and four main transformers; repairs of cracks in six
control-rod drive mechanisms; trouble shooting on emergency feed water
problems; and, steam tube generator repairs.
ˆ October 23, 2001: On August, 15, 2001, the NRC¹s Office of
Investigation documented criminal behavior by two of Exelon¹s Emergency
Preparedness personnel. In accordance with the Enforcement Policy, a base
civil penalty in the amount of $55,000 is considered for Severity Level III
violation or problem. (Hubert Miller, NRC, Regional Administrator, October
23, 2001).
ˆ October 17, 2001: Due to a ³credible threat² against Three Mile
Island, the Harrisburg and Lancaster airports were closed for four hours,
air travel was restricted in a 20-mile radius, a fighter jets were
scrambled
around TMI.
ˆ On August, 15, 2001, the NRC¹s Office of Investigation documented
criminal behavior by two of Exelon¹s Emergency Preparedness personnel. In
accordance with the Enforcement Policy, a base civil penalty in the amount
of $55,000 is considered for Severity Level III violation or problem
(Hubert
Miller, NRC, Regional Administrator, October 23, 2001).
ˆ June 13, 2001: Exelon Nuclear ³announced its intent today to
eliminate
292 Local 15 Union positions, including 138 layoffs in Exelon Nuclear and
154 at Commonwealth Edison.² (Exelon, New Release, June 13, 2001.)
ˆ March 23, 2001: Examinations for reactor operators and senior
reactor
operators held from February 5-12, 2001,³indicated that a relatively high
percentage of the applicants were not well prepared for the exam.² (Richard
J. Conte, NRC, Chief, Operations Safety Branch, Division of Reactor
Safety.)
4
ˆ July 17, 1998 to December, 2003: The NRC issued 31 Non-Cited
Violations or ³Apparent Violations² to Three Mile Island Unit-1¹s owners
and
operators: AmerGen. Based on calculations prepared by the Nuclear Energy
Institute, the average cost to a company to respond to a Notice of
Violation
is $50,000. The NRC has saved Exelon $1,705,000 by ³redefining² 31
violations.
ˆ June, 1998 to November, 2003: The NRC found 42 Non-Cited
Violations at Peach Bottom 2 & 3. Exelon's total cost avoidance for 42
Non-Cited Violations = $2,160,000.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
Forced Shutdown of Peach Bottom
* 1987: PECO was ordered by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to
shutdown Peach Bottom-2 and -3 on March 31, 1987 due to operator
misconduct,
corporate malfeasance and blatant disregard for the health and safety of
area. This was the first and only occasion that the NRC ordered a nuclear
power plant shut down. Zack Pate, President of the Institute for Nuclear
Power Operations, declared that Peach Bottom ³was an embarrassment to the
industry and to the nation...The grossly unprofessional behavior by a wide
range of shift personnel...reflects a major breakdown in the management of
a
nuclear facility.²
PECO¹s partners at Peach Bottom, Public Service Electric & Gas Company,
Atlantic City Electric Company and Delmarva Power& Light Company, sued
PECO
for breaching the Owners Agreement. Philadelphia Electric agreed to pay
$130,985,000 to resolve the litigation.
--
Coalition for Peace and Justice
UNPLUG Salem Campaign; 321 Barr Ave, Linwood
NJ 08221; 609-601-8583; cell 609-742-0982
ncohen12@comcast.net; www.unplugsalem.org
_______________________________________________________________________
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17 Exelon Nuclear (Complete fact sheet)
Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 15:55:32 -0800
Exelon Nuclear in Pennsylvania, 1998-2004*:
A History of High Rates & Poor Performance
Historically, Exelon/PECO Energy has maintained the highest electric
rates in
Pennsylvania and delivered the high-levels of customer dissatisfaction.
Exelon Nuclear has also slashed their labor force and contested property
valuations.
This what an Exelon Nuclear ³synergy² looks like for the Three Mile Island
community:
Year AmerGen + Contractor = Total Number of Employees
1998
804
1999
704
2000 579 65
644
2001 517 81
598-618
2002: 532-540 103
643
2003: 550
Since 1999 when deregulation shifted power plants back to the local tax
rolls, under the
assumption that utilities would pay at least the same amount had they been
subject to real
estate taxes, Exelon has crated revue shock for local communities. From
1998 through 2003,
according to AmerGen, TMI¹s tax payments have steadily decreased The
figures from
2000-2003 reflect an Interim Settlement Agreement amount. AmerGen may actually
pay less in future years if they win their Appeal.
Londonderry Township Dauphin County
1998 $6,727 $506,956
1999 $2,816 $206,397
2000 $1,339 $129, 171
2000 - 2001 $30,000 (ISA - Nonrefundable)* $146,940 (Two years)
2002 -2003 $30,000 (ISA- Nonrefundable)* $146,940 (Two years)
Nuclear News Update provided by tmia.com
Three Mile Island Alert , Inc., a safe-energy organization based in
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and founded
in 1977. TMIA monitors Peach Bottom, Susquehanna, and Three Mile Island
nuclear generating stations.
1
ˆ April 30, 2004: The NRC announced that the agency did not know how
many
people worked at Three Mile Island-1, but ³Personnel didn¹t consistently
recognize
degraded conditions. And therefore did not identify degraded conditions in
a timely
manner (NRC¹s Annual Assessment Meeting, Middletown, Borough Hall.)
The NRC issued eight violations and ³in the are of problem
identification and resolution
(PI&R) at TMI² (A. Randolph Blough, NRC Director of Division Projects,
Region I, March 3,
2004).
ˆ April 10, 2004: Increased oversight was maintained by the NRC at
Peach Bottom-2, ³which
will face a Nuclear Regulatory Commission supplemental inspection later
this year as a result
of deficient performance based on its number of unplanned shutdowns. The
commission will
follow a normal inspection schedule for the power station's third unit
through Sept. 30, 2005
(York Daily Record.)
ˆ January 17, 2004: The pilot who terrorized the airways with his
erratic flying for four
hours Thursday night - circling the Limerick nuclear plant and buzzing
Philadelphia
International Airport - was drunk.
ˆ November 15, 2003: The NRC increased its inspections after four
unplanned shutdowns
of the nuclear plant¹s Unit 2 reactor. For the next year, the U.S. Nuclear
Regulatory Commission
will increase the frequency of its inspections at Peach Bottom Atomic Power
Station¹s unit 2.
ˆ On August 6, 2003: Exelon announced it would eliminate about 1,900
positions--10%
of its workforce--by 2006 as part of its restructuring. Carley said most
cuts will be in Exelon's information technology and communications areas.
Exelon plans to cut 1,200 positions by 2004
and another 700 by 2006 (Source: Platts, Nuclear News).
2
ˆ May 21, 2003: EXELON'S FORMER CHIEF EXECUTIVE MADE THE TOP 10
LIST OF
BEST-PAID U.S. energy executives for 2002, according to a compilation by
the Platts Energy
Business & Technology (EB&T) magazine. Corbin McNeill, Jr., the ex-chairman
and co-CEO of
Exelon Corp. had a compensation package of nearly $29.8- million last year,
making him the
fourth highest paid CEO out of the 250 executives that were examined.
McNeill's 2002 package
included a severance payment and benefits from a pension benefit plan from
PECO Energy. He
retired from Exelon in April 2002.
ˆ May 14, 2003: An employee at the Limerick plant in Montgomery County
and the Peach
Bottom plant in York County nuclear power plants was been suspended for
being intoxicated
on the job, according to the NRC.
ˆ January 29, 2002: Exelon announced it would cut 3,400 or 15% of its
work force by
the end of 2002.
ˆ 2000-2003: The average residential electric rate per kWh in
Pennsylvania in 2000 and 2001
was 9.5 cents per kWh (1) PECO weighed in at 13.27 per kwh in October
2002, and 13.38 per
kWh January, 2003. (2)
ˆ August 31, 2002: Nuclear security budget increased to $2.2 million
annually or
$550,300 less than John W. Rowe¹s base salary.
ˆ April 3, 2002: The NRC convened a public meeting at TMI to discuss
the plant¹s operating
record for April 1 through December 31, 2001.
AmerGen was cited for 18 violations the NRC said posed risks rated at
the lowest safety level. The plant was also cited for one infraction of
Œlow to moderate safety risk¹, the next step up the the danger ladder
...that finding means TMI faces possible increased NRC oversight for
the next year. Its one of the 25 reactors in the country under
heightened regulation, while 73 of the nation¹s 103 reactors will
receive only baseline inspections (York Dispatch, April 4, 2002.)
_____
1 Energy Information Administration/Electric Sales and Revenue Publication.
2 Jacksonville Electric Authority, February 27, 2003. The price includes
the cost of base rates,
fuel adjustments and franchise fees.
3
ˆ May 31, 2002: The public learned that the National Guard were
equipped with unloaded
M-16¹s at TMI and the four nuclear power plants in Pennsylvania.
ˆ 1999-2002: Between July 1999 and December 2002, 143 workers and
short-term contractors
at Three Mile Island and Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station tested positive
for drugs or alcohol, according to biannual Fitness-for-Duty reports. (York
Daily Record, November 14, 2003)
ˆ December 21, 2001: Exelon eliminated 900 jobs.
ˆ December 8, 2001: TMI resumed operation after a 58 day refueling
outage (planned for
29 days) outage cost the company over $100 million in lost revenues,
replacement energy,
and repairs including: replacement of the turbine generator and four main
transformers; repairs
of cracks in six control-rod drive mechanisms; trouble shooting on
emergency feed water problems;
and, steam tube generator repairs.
ˆ October 17, 2001: Due to a ³credible threat² against Three Mile
Island, the Harrisburg and Lancaster airports were closed for four hours,
air travel was restricted in a 20-mile radius, a fighter
jets were scrambled around TMI. Through the Freedom of Information Act, the
York Daily Record (December 21, 2003) found a ³twofold² challenge when a
threat against Three Mile Island: the
threat and chaos on the Island:
Officials struggled with whom to call first, next and last.
Officials
struggled with notifying state and local officials. And officials
struggled
with when and whether to notify the public...One NRC official
had
difficulty reaching senior management at TMI...No one
contacted
enforcement officials in York County about the threat...[PEMA]
officials
had to push plant officials to staff their emergency operations
facility
[in Susquehanna Township which was later relocated to Coatesville].
4
ˆ On August, 15, 2001, the NRC¹s Office of Investigation documented
criminal behavior by
two of Exelon¹s Emergency Preparedness personnel. In accordance with the
Enforcement Policy
a base civil penalty in the amount of $55,000 is considered for Severity
Level III violation or problem (Hubert Miller, NRC, Regional Administrator,
October 23, 2001).
ˆ June 13, 2001: Exelon Nuclear ³announced its intent today to
eliminate 292 Local 15 Union positions, including 138 layoffs in Exelon
Nuclear and 154 at Commonwealth Edison.² (Exelon,
New Release, June 13, 2001.)
ˆ March 23, 2001: Examinations for reactor operators and senior
reactor operators held from February 5-12, 2001,³indicated that a
relatively high percentage of the applicants were not well prepared for the
exam.² (Richard J. Conte, NRC, Chief, Operations Safety Branch, Division
of Reactor Safety.)
ˆ July 17, 1998 to December, 2003: The NRC issued 31 Non-Cited
Violations or ³Apparent Violations² to Three Mile Island Unit-1¹s owners
and operators: AmerGen. Based on calculations prepared by the Nuclear
Energy Institute, the average cost to a company to respond to a Notice of
Violation is $50,000. The NRC has saved Exelon $1,705,000 by ³redefining²
31 violations.
ˆ June, 1998 to November, 2003: The NRC found 42 Non-Cited
Violations at Peach
Bottom 2 & 3. Exelon's total cost avoidance for 42 Non-Cited Violations =
$2,160,000.
5
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Forced Shutdown of Peach Bottom
* 1987: PECO was ordered by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to
shutdown Peach Bottom-2 and -3 on March 31, 1987 due to operator
misconduct, corporate malfeasance and blatant disregard for the health and
safety of area. This was the first and only occasion that the NRC ordered a
nuclear power plant shut down. Zack Pate, President of the Institute for
Nuclear Power Operations, declared that Peach Bottom ³was an embarrassment
to the industry and to the nation...The grossly unprofessional behavior by
a wide range of shift personnel...reflects a major breakdown in the
management of a nuclear facility.²
PECO¹s partners at Peach Bottom, Public Service Electric & Gas Company,
Atlantic City Electric Company and Delmarva Power& Light Company, sued
PECO for breaching the Owners Agreement. Philadelphia Electric agreed to
pay $130,985,000 to resolve the litigation.
6
*****************************************************************
18 TMI refuses to pay taxes; Peach Bottom scrams again
Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 15:59:28 -0800
TMI Remains Deadbeat Taxpayer;
Peach Bottom Scrams Again
TMI wins $1 million tax refund
2 school districts, county would pay
Thursday, December 23, 2004
BY JACK SHERZER Of The Patriot-News
³Fallout from the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island nuclear plant is
again affecting area residents -- this time in their wallets.²
³In a proposed tax appeal settlement, Dauphin County, Lower Dauphin
School District and Londonderry Township would pay back real estate taxes
collected from 2002 to 2004 on a nonworking part of the plant. The bill
from all three totals $1.07 million.²
AmerGen (Exelon) which owns Unit-1 is refusing to pay its fair share of
taxes by insisting TMI-1 (valued at $600 million by Wall Street) is only
worth $5 million. Through 2003, Lower Dauphin School District expended
$75,000 in legal and appraisal fees to fight the Exelon appeal according
business manager Bill Miller.
Since 1999 when deregulation shifted power plants back to the local tax
rolls, under the assumption that utilities would pay at least the same
amount had they been subject to real estate taxes, Exelon has created
revenue shock for local communities. From 1998 through 2003, according to
AmerGen, TMI¹s tax payments have steadily decreased The figures from
2000-2003 reflect an Interim Settlement Agreement amount. AmerGen may
actually pay less in future years if they win their Appeal.
Londonderry Township Dauphin County
1998 $6,727 $506,956
1999 $2,816 $206,397
2000 $1,339 $129, 171
2000 - 2001 $30,000 (ISA - Nonrefundable)* $146,940 (Two years)
2002 -2003 $30,000 (ISA- Nonrefundable)* $146,940 (Two years)
Nuclear News Update provided by: Three Mile Island Alert , Inc., a
safe-energy organization based in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and founded in
1977. TMIA monitors Peach Bottom, Susquehanna, and Three Mile Island
nuclear generating stations.
For more information contact: tmia.com or ericepstein@comcast.net
Peach Bottom-2, already under increased NRC supervision
(1), scrams again (2)
REACTOR SCRAM AND ECCS INJECTION FOLLOWING OPENING OF
TURBINE BYPASS VALVES
"At approximately 04:55 on December 22, 2004, Unit 2 experienced a
malfunction of Electro-Hydraulic Control (EHC) system resulting in opening
of main turbine bypass valves and resultant loss of reactor pressure...All
Unit parameters are stable and RPS/PCIS/ECCS systems performed as
designed...The EHC malfunction is presently under investigation by Station
Management... The reactor water level is now at 23 inches and stable and
the licensee is conducting a slow depressurization to Mode 4 to investigate
the EHC system malfunction...The licensee has notified the NRC Resident
Inspector.² (NRC, Region I,Power Reactor Event Number: 41277.)
_____
1 April 10, 2004: Increased oversight was maintained by the NRC at
Peach Bottom-2, ³which will face a Nuclear Regulatory Commission
supplemental inspection later this year as a result of deficient
performance based on its number of unplanned shutdowns. The commission will
follow a normal inspection schedule for the power station's third unit
through Sept. 30, 2005 (York Daily Record.)
2 For a complete listing of the ³Chronology of Problems at Peach Bottom
2 & 3², please visit tmia.com
2
Attachment Converted: "c:\program files\eudora\attach\Exelon Nuclear in PA"
*****************************************************************
19 UK The Times: Nuclear creditors swap debt for control
December 23, 2004
By Times Online
British Energy moved a step closer to a debt restructuring today
after shareholders and creditors supported the terms of a
proposed overhaul.
The nuclear power group will now seek court approval as part of
the final stages of a complex process expected to be completed
in mid-January.
The shake-up, which was drawn up in October 2003 after low
wholesale electricity prices sent the company deep into the red,
involves banks and bondholders agreeing to write off £1.3
billion in debt in return for control of the group.
Shareholders, who backed the proposals at a meeting in Edinburgh
today, will be left with 2.5 per cent of a newly-listed company,
with the opportunity to subscribe for warrants covering another
5 per cent.
Without the restructuring, British Energy said it would face
insolvency proceedings and that there was unlikely to be any
return to shareholders.
The group’s sites are at Hartlepool, Heysham, Heysham; Hinkley
Point, Somerset; Hunterston, Ayrshire; Dungeness, Kent;
Sizewell, Suffolk and Torness, East Lothian.
Copyright The Times - timesonline.co.uk
*****************************************************************
20 Moscow Times: Meanwhile, Back in Chernobyl
news [http://www.themoscowtimes.com]
AP
Need a break from the Orange Revolution? Consider a tour of
Chernobyl.
By Helen Womack
Published: December 24, 2004
Ukraine has been a happening place since Ruslana, dressed as a
warrior, won the Eurovision Song Contest earlier this year. Now
that the Orange Revolution leading up to Sunday's election has
put Ukraine squarely on the map, tour operators are expecting a
boom next summer.
Kiev, or Kyiv, as the Ukrainians say, is a gorgeous panorama of
golden-domed churches. If you go to the Kyiv-Pechersk Cave
Monastery and then take in the adjacent World War II memorial
complex with its giant silver statue of the grieving Mother, you
can see Ukrainian history from the 11th to the 20th century in a
single sweep. As for the night life, well, this autumn there was
no need to go in search of clubs, as the main thoroughfare, the
Khreshchatik, was one continuous orange street party.
But what to do with that extra free day? Despite the distractions
of contemporary Kiev, I couldn't get Chernobyl out of my mind
after coming across a web site written by Yelena, a biker who
zooms down the abandoned roads of the contaminated Zone and calls
herself the Kid of Speed. On her web site, kiddofspeed.com,
Yelena waxes lyrical about the peace of the countryside, left to
nature since the residents were evacuated following the nuclear
power plant disaster on April 26, 1986.
But Yelena detests journalists and refuses to give interviews. I
was stuck until I found a small business run by a former
Chernobyl worker that organizes single- or multiple-day tours to
the Zone. Chernobyl External Services deals mainly with foreign
specialists going to ecological conferences, of course, but it
will also get out the white minibus and roll out the red carpet
for the curious layperson. If 20 people can be found to fill the
bus, then the cost for each individual is only $60.
The firm says that on a short visit to Chernobyl, the danger from
radiation is now no greater than flying in an airplane, and
advertises its guided tour as a "safe adventure." In fact, CES is
not the only company offering trips to the Zone, although the
number of takers among visitors from overseas has evidently not
been great so far. The contaminated air is only one disincentive:
In order to enter the 30-kilometer exclusion zone that was thrown
around the nuclear plant after the accident and is still in
force, visitors also need permission from the SBU, the Ukrainian
successor to the Soviet KGB.
Tour leader Sergei Akulinin works with good humor and military
precision. "See you at the bus in eight-and-a-half minutes," he
joked. Not eight, not nine, but eight-and-a-half.
On the eve of the tour just over two weeks ago, I left Kiev for
Slavutich, the new town that was built for atomic workers after
the accident made their old town of Pripyat uninhabitable. It is
a journey of 186 kilometers to the north. Slavutich, with a
population of 25,000 people, is like a model of the old Soviet
Union, as different Soviet republics helped to build it.
Dinner was in a converted bomb shelter, now a restaurant with
nautical themes called Nautilus. The wall decorations hinted at
the Great Barrier Reef. Trout was on the menu, not locally
caught. The drinking water was bottled. Accommodation was in the
three-star European Hotel, originally built by Finns to be the
town hospital. The tour started at 7 a.m. sharp.
Before the tour began, Sergei took me to the Slavutich Cultural
Center to see its explanatory exhibition and memorial bells. The
diagrams of pipes and turbines could only be of interest to a
specialist, but I was moved by the sight of 30 faces staring from
photographs. These were the first victims who died from massive
doses of radiation straight after the accident, which happened
because an experiment on the fourth bloc went wrong. On another
wall was the face of Viktor Bryukhanov, the then-director of
Chernobyl, who was made to bear the responsibility and jailed for
10 years.
"It was not an atomic explosion but a heat explosion," Sergei
made clear. Nevertheless, radioactive dust from the ruined
reactor was carried on the wind over a wide area of Ukraine and
into neighboring Belarus and Russia. The communist authorities
failed to warn the population immediately -- indeed, May Day
parades went ahead in Kiev -- and it was Sweden that first
alerted the world to the disaster.
AP
Workers who covered the ruined fourth reactor pose in 1986 with
a poster that reads, "We Will Fulfill the Government's order!"
Many later died of radiation poisoning.
The death toll has now run into the thousands, and incidences of
thyroid cancer and leukemia are high in the area. Hundreds of
thousands of people, including Army conscripts, were involved in
the cleanup, and all of these people face the possibilities of
illness and premature death. An exact toll will never be
calculated.
Under pressure from Europe, Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma
closed the whole power station in 2001. Which was why I was
astonished to start the tour the next morning by commuting to
the mothballed power station on an electric train together with
hundreds of workers from Slavutich. Far from being a ghostly
scene, the power station is a hive of activity, as the workers
have to maintain the metal sarcophagus that seals the fourth
reactor and keep an eye on the other closed blocs.
The route to Chernobyl from Slavutich runs through the territory
of Alexander Lukashenko's Belarus. Because I did not have a visa
to enter the country, I went on the train with all the sleepy
workers, who are not checked by the border guards. The driver of
the white minibus took my luggage over the Belarussian border
and met me with it at the station, which is back inside
Ukrainian territory. I had spent 10 days in Kiev with the orange
protesters, and if Lukashenko was interested, my rucksack
contained nothing but dirty clothes.
The train passed through a landscape of pine forests and
rust-colored marshes. Storks' nests and bunches of mistletoe
decorated the dark skeletons of the deciduous trees.
The workers poured out onto a platform enclosed with corrugated
iron and trudged down a plastic-floored corridor to machines
that checked them for radiation. Then they changed into the
clothes they keep for work -- turquoise jackets with black suits
underneath -- so as not to spread the contamination back home.
They are happy to work here because the wages at Chernobyl
average $350 per month, which is good pay by Ukrainian standards.
After the dosimeter machine pronounced me clean, I was whisked
off to the Sarcophagus Viewing Center, where you get to watch a
video and see a scale-model of the inside of the wrecked fourth
reactor while looking out the wide glass window at the encased
reactor itself. For some reason, I had expected a dome, but the
sarcophagus, built to last for 30 years, looks more like a roof,
gray as a crow's wing.
In elegant English, tour guide Yulia Marusich explained that the
sarcophagus is unstable and that plans are being drawn up to
replace it, as the plutonium and other elements in the reactor
will be lethal for centuries to come.
Next stop was the ghost town of Pripyat, abandoned in the days
immediately after the accident. The silence was eerie. Sergei
pointed to his old flat in an apartment building at 34 Lesya
Ukrainka. He sighed. "My wife and I used to push our sons' baby
carriage up this alley. Our youth is here." Stray dogs barked.
We thought it wise to move on.
The air smelled sweet after the car fumes of Kiev. Blue jays
flitted in the bushes. In the absence of people, the streets and
countryside around were completely litter-free. The red rose
hips and black wolfberries looked a normal size. Sergei said
that after the accident, monster pinecones had appeared and the
needles of the pine trees had grown the wrong way around, but
that gradually Nature had righted herself.
We drove on to the town of Chernobyl, an old settlement with
little cottages and a white, blue and yellow Orthodox church.
Here, specialists from the Ukrainian Emergency Situations
Ministry work 15 days on and 15 days off, studying and cleaning
up the Zone. We lunched royally in their cafeteria; from the
taste of the food, there was nothing wrong with it.
Itar-Tass
The silence is eerie in ghost towns like Terekhi, abandoned
after the accident at Chernobyl.
Mykola Dmitruk, the information officer for the ministry, said
that scientists are still not sure how safe the Chernobyl area
is and that, personally, he does not recommend visits to
ordinary tourists.
"The tour operators include a day at Chernobyl," he said.
"Twenty to 30 people sign up, but when Day Zero comes, most of
them decide to stay in Kiev. We get one or two people coming.
Mostly they have an interest in ecology."
Our last stop was the village of Ilyntsi, once home to 100
people but now nearly deserted except for a few elderly
residents who returned after evacuating to other regions of
Ukraine. Up a lane, some men were cutting wood. In the yard of
one house, clean washing was hanging on a line. We rang the bell
and were invited into the home of Galya Pavlovna.
Weeping, the old woman, originally from southern Ukraine,
explained how she had married for a second time and come to the
Zone with her new husband. Then he had died and she had been
left in what she called an "alien" place with few social
services.
As a parting gift, Pavlovna pressed on me a pillowcase decorated
with Ukrainian embroidery. To my shame, I passed this gift from
the heart, together with myself, through the dosimeter when I
departed. The radiation reading was normal.
To book a trip to Chernobyl through Chernobyl External Services,
contact Sergei Akulinin at chvs@slavutich.kiev.ua
Copyright © 2004 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
21 thenews-messenger.com: Suit against FirstEnergy dismissed -
Thursday, December 23, 2004
By KRISTINA SMITH Staff writer
PORT CLINTON -- A judge has dismissed a former Davis-Besse
nuclear power plant consultant's lawsuit that alleged he was
wrongfully fired in 1988.
Ottawa County Common Pleas Court Judge Paul Moon ruled that
William Keisler of Leesville, S.C., should have filed the
complaint, within four years of his firing, court records show.
The statute of limitations on his allegations have expired by
more than a decade, according to court records. The court also
did not have jurisdiction to hear the case, Moon ruled.
Keisler's attorney, Howard Whitcomb III of Toledo, has appealed
Moon's decision to the Sixth District Court of Appeals. Whitcomb
said his interpretation of the law differs from Moon's, and
Whitcomb believes federal law has no statute of limitations.
Keisler was a mechanical engineer who was in charge of helping
review safety-related components at the plant, records show. He
alleged that Toledo Edison, which operated the plant before
FirstEnergy, fired him because he refused to modify reports
involving nuclear safety requirements, records show.
Keisler alleged the safety issues the company covered up in the
report led to the plant's reactor head corrosion, which caused
the plant to close for more than two years, records show.
He asked for more than $150,000 in damages and alleged federal
whistleblower violations, negligence, intentional infliction of
emotional distress and breach of contract.
Richard Wilkins, spokesman for FirstEnergy that operates
Davis-Besse, said Keisler did not property complete the report
the company requested because he did not include specifics the
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission requested.
"Ultimately, the report was given to somebody else to do, and it
was completely re-written," Wilkins said.
Wilkins said FirstEnergy is pleased with Moon's decision.
"At the very beginning when the suit was filed, we did not
believe it had merit," Wilkins said.
Originally published Thursday, December 23, 2004
Copyright ©2004 The News-Messenger. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
22 The Herald: Investors back nuclear power generator’s restructuring plans
Web Issue 2165 December 23 2004
Herald [http://www.sundayherald.com/]
BEN GRIFFITHS December 23 2004
Shareholders and creditors of British Energy yesterday
approved restructuring arrangements at a special meeting in
Edinburgh, taking the troubled nuclear power generator closer to
a settlement after months of wrangling.
The East Kilbride-based firm is now seeking court approval for
the life-saving scheme with completion pencilled in for
mid-January. If all goes according to plan, British Energy will
relist on the London Stock Exchange at the end of next month.
The agreed restructuring could yet be derailed, and
shareholders have been warned that unless they back the deal by
January 13, any new shares and warrants they were entitled to
will be sold on the open market instead.
If the creditors and members' schemes become effective,
shareholders stand to get 2.5% of the issued shares in British
Energy, which supplies around a fifth of the UK's annual
electricity needs. They will also be awarded warrants to buy a
further £29m of stock, representing 5% of the company once the
deal does through.
In a statement, British Energy warned that if the creditors'
scheme lapses and the company is unable to implement its
restructuring plan before March 31, it would be unable to meet
its financial obligations and would be forced to enter voluntary
insolvency. Such a move would strip the majority of entitlements
from unsecured creditors and is likely to leave shareholders
with nothing.
British Energy, which is being propped up by a loan from the
state, is undergoing a major restructuring after low wholesale
prices sent the group to the brink of collapse in 2002 before
the government rescued it.
The deadline for the overhaul, which involved banks and
bondholders agreeing to write off £1.3bn in debt in return for
control of the group, was delayed by three months until March to
give British Energy more time to battle potential objections to
the overhaul plan.
While institutional shareholders control around 70% of British
Energy's shares, about 215,000 small investors still have a
stake in the firm's future. Many acquired shares in the former
state-owned group when it was privatised in 1996. British Energy
delisted its shares in October to prevent US hedge funds from
wrecking the restructuring.
Copyright © Newsquest (Herald & Times) Limited. All Rights
Reserved
[http://www.pressnow.co.uk/] :: About Us :: Terms of Use
*****************************************************************
23 FT.com: BE investors back £5bn rescue terms
By Andrew Taylor
Published: December 23 2004 02:00 | Last updated: December 23
2004 12:29
[British Energy] British Energy shareholders have backed
overwhelmingly a £5bn government-supported rescue of the nuclear
generator, which will leave them owning just just 2.5 per cent of
the company, with warrants to acquire another 5 per cent.
Creditors, following a debt-for-equity swap, would own the
balance.
Shareholders had been warned that the group could be placed into
administration, leaving them with nothing if they rejected the
terms.
At Wednesday's meeting, investors representing 302m shares voted
in favour with 16.3m against.
The group will now seek court backing for the deal.
Hearings are expected to be held in mid-January with a listing
of the new shares, warrants and bonds expected to follow shortly
afterwards if the rescue terms are sanctioned.
© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2004. "FT"
and "Financial Times" are trademarks of the Financial Times.
*****************************************************************
24 Brattleboro Reformer: Disaster plan needs 'better coordination'
[http://www.reformer.com/]
December 23, 2004 Brattleboro, VT
By JUSTIN MASON Reformer Staff
BRATTLEBORO -- State and local officials discussed the need to
improve interstate coordination and communication in the wake of
a school evacuation drill conducted last week to test part of the
town's radiological response plan.
"There was acknowledgment at the highest levels that there needs
to be better coordination," said Ron Stahley, superintendent of
the Windham Southeast Supervisory Union.
The purpose of Wednesday's closed-door meeting, called by
Stahley and Town Manager Jerry Remillard, was to discuss any
positives or negatives coming out of the first test of an
evacuation plan on Dec. 16.
The meeting brought together all of the main officials who
participated in the drill, including members from the state
Department of Public Safety, from both Vermont and New Hampshire
Emergency Management, as well as the general manager and regional
representative of Laidlaw Transit.
"We discussed what went wrong what went right," Remillard said.
"We're trying to pull another scenario for early February."
Apparently, the main factor hampering the drill was a breakdown
in communication between emergency management teams in Waterbury
and Concord, N.H., which delayed the deployment of buses from the
Swanzey, N.H., Laidlaw terminal.
Another factor playing into confusion with Concord may have been
a graded drill that occurred last month at Seabrook Station
nuclear plant, Stahley added. Monitored by the Federal Emergency
Management Agency, the drill was an unannounced test of the
town's radiological emergency response plan.
"I think that complicated some of their involvement," he said.
Stahley said Laidlaw officials also acknowledged that some bus
drivers -- many of them leaving from Swanzey -- had not followed
the designated evacuation plan along Route 9 and instead,
traveled along Route 119 through Winchester and Hinsdale.
The drill's goal was to load students from 17 public and private
schools -- located within a designated disaster zone --onto
buses, where faculty would then take attendance to account for
them. Originally, official expected the entire process to take
about 40 minutes.
"Within 40 minutes is reasonable," said Stahley. "That would
have been the case had the other buses been there."
But a miscommunication somewhere between participating Vermont
and New Hampshire agencies led to a shortage of buses, leaving
nearly 1,000 students within the disaster zone.
Despite evident failures, Stahley noted that the plan wasn't
wholly unsuccessful. He said all of the schools participating in
the drill had mobilized in an orderly fashion and in an
acceptable amount of time, which provides optimism at the local
level.
"They went through the plan and did a good job," he said.
Even at Brattleboro Union High School -- which lacked the proper
amount of buses to conduct the drill -- Stahley said students
completed the attendance portion of the drill by filing onto
buses vacated by middle school students. He also commended those
BUHS students designated to take their cars during the drill,
noting they had performed adequately.
Over the next month, Stahley said town officials would meet with
emergency planners to tweak the school evacuation plan, work out
glitches and run through the process several times to ensure all
participants are well-versed before staging another full-scale
drill, which will again be announced.
For follow-up drills, Stahley said emergency management
officials in Waterbury would make a greater commitment to be
connected with the evacuation process at the local level.
Officials from Vermont Emergency Management are expected to
produce a summary report about the drill to town and school
officials, Stahley said, which will then be released to the
public.
Copyright ©1999-2004 New England Newspapers, Inc., a
*****************************************************************
25 Boston Globe: Seabrook shows off new
Seabrook shows off new security Associated Press New
Hampshire's Seabrook nuclear plant has a new layer of fencing,
bullet-resistant guard towers, new concrete barriers and
better-trained security officers as part of new national
security requirements.
December 23, 2004 --> [The Associated Press]
SEABROOK, N.H. -- New Hampshire's Seabrook nuclear plant has a
new layer of fencing, bullet-resistant guard towers, new concrete
barriers and better-trained security officers as part of new
national security requirements.
The plant has spent $14 million in the past year improving
security as part of requirements that followed the September
2001 terrorist attacks.
The improvements include a 1,500-foot-long vehicle barrier
system and double fencing to keep intruders out. High-tech
detection equipment is available to keep trespassers from
penetrating the plant's fencing system and employees pass
through explosive detectors, metal detectors and x-ray machines.
The plant's perimeter also has several manned and bullet
resistant towers.
John Giarrusso, the plant's security manager, said the number of
security personnel is "well over 100," of which 75 percent have
prior security, law enforcement or military experience. Of the
total, all but four are employees of Wackenhutt Security, a
private company.
Giarrusso said all applicants for security positions must
undergo a psychological assessment, education, credit and FBI
checks, going back three years, as well as alcohol and drug
screening.
The plant uses a hand configuration identity system in critical
areas. Employee handprints are registered in a plant computer
database.
Prior to coming on site, applicants for security positions
undergo eight to 10 weeks of training. "Mock adversity team"
drills, which depict trespassers, are used in training security
personnel. Different drills are done weekly.
David Barr, who coordinates the center's educational programs,
said in its history, Seabrook Station has experienced nine
"unusual events," the lowest level of operational problem.
To date, there have been no "alerts," the second-lowest level of
operating problem, or "site area emergencies," a more
significant problem, which can result in the release of small
amounts of radiation. Nor has the facility experienced a
"general emergency," the most significant operational problem,
which could result in the release of significant amounts of
radiation and could also require evacuations.
The plant, located on 900 acres, hugs a portion of a salt marsh,
a natural barrier that also helps protect it from unwanted
visitors, officials said. The plant generates enough electricity
to power more than 1 million homes throughout the New England
region. [ /] © Copyright 2004 Associated Press. All rights
*****************************************************************
26 The Star: Largest US utility emerging
[http://thestar.com.my/]
NEW YORK: Exelon Corp, America's largest nuclear power company,
has agreed to buy New Jersey utility Public Service Enterprise
Group Inc for US$13.2bil in stock, creating the country's largest
utility.
Exelon said the purchase of PSEG, with which it already owns
some nuclear plants, would boost earnings immediately. The two
companies said on Monday the deal could close by the end of next
year, but some analysts said regulatory challenges may arise.
The deal values PSEG at US$52.84 a share, a nearly 12% premium
over the company’s closing stock price on Friday and a nearly 16%
premium over its closing price on Thursday, before word of the
deal leaked out.
The acquisition will increase Exelon’s generating capacity by
about 50%, to 52,000 megawatts.
The new company will be called Exelon Electric &Gas and will
serve seven million electricity customers and two million gas
customers in Illinois, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. – Reuters
The companies said they expected to save US$400mil before taxes
in the first year after the deal closes through efficiencies in
areas including generation, transmission, distribution and power
marketing, and through increased production.
The combined workforce of 28,000 was expected to be cut by 5%,
they said. – Reuters
More @ The Star Online [http://thestar.com.my] :
Copyright © 1995-2004 Star Publications (Malaysia) Bhd
[http://thestar.com.my/info/thestar.asp] (Co No 10894-D)
Managed by I.Star.
*****************************************************************
27 Brattleboro Reformer: The uprate battle: A reader's guide to the process
[http://www.reformer.com/]
December 23, 2004 Brattleboro, VT
By CAROLYN LORIé Reformer Staff
BRATTLEBORO -- In February, it will be two years since officials
at Vermont Yankee nuclear power station filed an application with
the Vermont Public Service Board to increase power by 20 percent.
Since then, the case has taken many turns, some expected, others
less so. What follows is a summary of events from February 2003
to the present.
The request
Vermont Yankee currently produces 550 megawatts of electricity
and provides roughly a third of the state's power. Officials at
the nuclear power plant want to increase production by 110
megawatts or 20 percent -- enough electricity to power about
110,000 homes. This would be achieved by replacing the fuel in
the plant more rapidly.
In the industry, boosting power production is known as an
"uprate," and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission categorizes
uprates by the percentage of increase.
There are three types: increases of less than 2 percent,
increases up to 6 percent, and increases between 6 to 20 percent.
Power boosts that are 6 percent and higher, such as the one
Vermont Yankee is seeking, are known as extended power uprates.
Twenty percent is the most that is currently allowed.
The first extended power uprate was approved by the NRC in 1998.
It was an 6.3 percent increase at Monticello plant in Minnesota.
Since then, 11 other plants have increased power by more than 6
percent; seven more, including Vermont Yankee, have pending
applications.
The only other nuclear power plant to increase power by 20
percent was the Clinton plant in Illinois, which did so in 2002.
Clinton began operating in 1987; Vermont Yankee started in 1972.
Entergy officials have not revealed how much the company would
profit from the uprate. During testimony before the Public
Service Board, however, state nuclear engineer Bill Sherman
estimated that Entergy could make an additional $20 million a
year. The cost of the uprate modifications were said to be in the
range of $60 million.
The applications
To increase power by 20 percent, Vermont Yankee officials had to
submit several applications. One was to the Vermont Public
Service Board and another to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
On Feb. 21, 2003, the Louisiana-based Entergy Nuclear, owner of
Vermont Yankee, filed a petition with the Public Service Board
for a "certificate of public good," in other words, the board's
approval.
The board is made up of three members -- currently David Coen,
Michael Dworkin and John Burke -- who are appointed by the
governor and serve six-year terms. It is a quasi-judicial body
charged with supervising the rates, quality of service and
overall financial management of Vermont's public utilities.
Since 1969, Vermont law requires board approval before any
physical modifications can be made to an electricity-generating
plant. The extended power uprate at Vermont Yankee entails
significant modification.
When deciding to grant a certificate of public good, the board
considered, among other things, the impact the change would have
esthetically, environmentally and economically. What the board
could not do was base its decision on anything having to do with
radiological health and safety, as only the NRC can regulate such
matters.
On March 15, the Vermont Public Service Board granted a
conditional certificate of approval for the uprate. One of the
conditions was that the plant undergo an independent engineering
assessment by the NRC. An assessment was completed in August. The
board has not yet ruled on whether it meets the criteria outlined
in its order.
The application for NRC approval was filed by Entergy on Sept.
10, 2003, but was not completed until January 2004.
Generally, NRC uprate reviews take one year from the completed
filing date, which meant that Vermont Yankee's application should
have been approved or rejected by January 2005.
On Oct. 15, however, the NRC announced that the decision would
be delayed by at least several months, due to ongoing concerns
about the ability of the steam dryers to withstand the uprate.
Although the steam dryer is not safety related, problems with it
can interfere with other safety components. Other plants that
have had uprates have had numerous problems with the steam
dryers.
NRC officials have not said when the review will be completed.
The opposition
Vermont Yankee's bid to boost power production was met with
strong opposition from some quarters.
The Douglas administration initially voiced reservation but then
came out in support of the project after learning more about the
potential benefits -- such as increased tax revenue -- to
Vermonters.
The company also provided financial incentive after agreeing to
pay roughly $14.6 million to the state, to be given in annual
installments through 2012.
The strongest opposition came from locally based anti-nuclear
groups, including Nuclear-Free Vermont, Citizens Awareness
Network and the New England Coalition.
While all opposed the uprate, only the coalition became an
intervenor in the Public Service Board case and are now
intervenors before the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board.
The state, represented by the Department of Public Service, has
also become an intervenor before the Atomic Safety and Licensing
Board. The decision to intervene was made after the state's
nuclear engineer, Bill Sherman, raised some concerns with the NRC
regarding the uprate and state officials were not satisfied with
the response.
The crux of the matter
While the New England Coalition opposes the uprate on several
grounds, both the coalition and the state have one common concern
having to do with containment overpressure.
If the plant were producing 20 percent more power, the water in
the containment will be hotter. This is potentially dangerous if
there were to be an accident -- a pipe break, for example-- where
water was no longer being pumped into the core. In this scenario,
the emergency core cooling pumps would have to take over to keep
the reactor core covered.
Because the water is hotter, steam bubbles could form, which
would interfere with the functioning of the emergency pumps.
Without water constantly flowing in and out of the reactor core,
it would eventually become exposed, resulting in a meltdown.
According to engineers at Vermont Yankee, there will be
sufficient pressure in the containment to prevent the steam
bubbles from forming. As long as the pressure is maintained, the
emergency pumps will not fail.
This is known as taking credit for containment overpressure. In
other words, the Vermont Yankee engineers consider it safe to
risk the increased water temperature in the tank because the risk
will be offset by the pressure created during the accident.
Several other plants have been allowed to take credit for
containment overpressure in order to increase power generation.
Opponents argue that this is a violation of one of the NRC's
most fundamental safety principles and that there are ways,
though more costly, for Vermont Yankee to avoid taking credit for
containment overpressure.
Entergy officials, as well as NRC staff, have argued that the
prohibition against this practice is only a guide and not a
regulation that must be followed.
In addition to this issue, the coalition also maintains that
Vermont Yankee -- which is 32 years old -- is an aging facility
that is on its way out. (The plant's operating license is due to
expire in 2012, though NRC does allow for license extensions.)
The group has also accused Entergy officials of poor management
and of prioritizing profits over safety.
Entergy officials vehemently deny such allegations.
Intervening
On Aug. 30, the New England Coalition and the Vermont Department
of Public Service filed petitions with the NRC to intervene in
the Vermont Yankee uprate case. It is the first time in the
country that an uprate has been challenged.
NRC cases in which parties intervene are turned over to the
Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, which is part of the agency
but independent of its staff.
The petitions, however, are reviewed by NRC staff which issues
opinions to the ASLB.
To intervene and be granted a hearing, the parties had to show
that they had standing -- that is, they had to demonstrate how
they would be affected from the uprate.
The intervenors also submitted contentions, or legal challenges,
to the uprate. Contentions must be based on specific NRC
regulations and not on a general opposition to nuclear power.
The department initially filed five contentions, then added a
sixth after the deadline. Seven were filed by the coalition.
On Sept. 29, the NRC staff filed its response to both petitions.
While there was no opposition to granting the parties standing,
the staff concluded that only one of the coalition's contentions
had merit and only two of the state's. (The sixth contention will
be responded to separately.)
Those opinions were issued in writing and were also presented at
the ASLB pre-hearing held in Brattleboro on Oct. 21 and 22.
Entergy opposed all of the contentions.
At the pre-hearing, all the involved parties --the Vermont
Department of Public Service, the New England Coalition, NRC
staff and Entergy -- argued their respective positions on the
requests for a hearing.
The hearings
The right to intervene on matters regulated by the NRC was
established by the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, which allows anyone
potentially effected by a licensing action to request a hearing.
The petitioner must have at least one contention that is
considered to have legal merit by the board.
On Nov. 22, the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board accepted two
of the challenges submitted by the department and two from the
coalition. Once the contentions were admitted, the board then had
to decide what type of hearing it would grant.
There are two types of hearings. The more formal of the two,
known as a "subpart G," is an adjudicatory process very similar
to a court trial. It includes discovery and the cross-examination
of witnesses.
The other hearing type, known as "subpart L," is less formal, in
that there is no discovery -- which is full disclosure of all
relevant information from all parties -- and cross-examination of
witness occurs only if the board grants permission. The board
gathers information by requesting documents.
In January, the NRC announced a rule-change in which it was
decided that cross examination and discovery are not essential to
the hearing process. In other words, the new rules state that an
intervenor's rights can be satisfied without a full adjudicatory
hearing.
The New England Coalition and the Department of Public Service,
however, both petitioned for a formal hearing, arguing that
discovery and the ability to question witnesses would be
essential to supporting their cases.
On Dec. 16, the board granted the less formal of the two
hearings. It will, however, hold at least one session of the
hearing in the Brattleboro area.
While the state, coalition and Entergy are parties to the case,
the NRC staff must decide if it wants to be a party. They have 15
days from the board's order to decide. If the NRC were to be a
party, it would argue its position before the board in the same
manner as the other three.
What's next
There are several key decisions pending.
* The Vermont Public Service Board must decide whether the NRC
engineering inspection satisfies their order of March 15, which
granted Entergy conditional approval for the uprate. The board is
keeping the case open until all the conditions are met.
If the board does not accept the assessment, Entergy may be
forced to have more inspections done. The New England Coalition
has asked the board to hold a comment period on the NRC
inspection, which the group does not believe fulfills the order's
conditions.
* The NRC has not announced when a decision will be made on the
uprate. According to the Oct. 15 press release from the agency,
the decision will be delayed by at least several months from the
original deadline of January 2005.
* Before the NRC staff makes a final decision on the uprate, it
must first be reviewed by the Advisory Committee on Reactor
Safeguards, which considers all uprate requests. The committee's
conclusions, however, do not have regulatory weight -- the NRC
staff does not have to follow its suggestions.
* The subpart L hearing before the Atomic Safety and Licensing
Board is already under way. The parties are in the process of
submitting documents to the board in support of their respective
arguments.
There is no timeline for how long the hearing will last. An NRC
spokesman said that it would be months before the board would
hold its session in Brattleboro, so it is unlikely to be decided
before spring.
In the meantime, however, the NRC staff can make a decision on
the uprate. If it is approved, Vermont Yankee could increase
their power production by 20 percent, despite the ongoing case
against the uprate.
Copyright ©1999-2004 New England Newspapers, Inc., a
*****************************************************************
28 Times-Standard: PG to vacuum nuke pool in search for rods
[http://www.times-standard.com]
Article Last Updated: Thursday, December 23, 2004 -
Andrew Bird
The Times-Standard
KING SALMON -- Frustrated in their attempts to locate missing
spent uranium fuel rods, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. has hired
an outside company to continue the search at the decommissioned
nuclear power plant next to Humboldt Bay.
The company specializes in cleaning and maintaining pools that
contain spent nuclear fuels, said PG spokesman Jeff Lewis, who
could not immediately recall the name of the firm on Wednesday.
The firm will start its work early next month, Lewis said.
The company will vacuum the bottom of the pool, where there is
a thick layer of resin sediment, Lewis said.
"There's enough on the bottom that it might be hiding the
rods," Lewis said Wednesday.
"This will take until the end of January," Lewis added.
But Lewis, filling in for Lloyd Coker, the PG spokesman
normally assigned to Humboldt County, said he did not know what
the next step would be if the vacuum job did not turn up the
rods.
PG discovered in June that three 18-inch-long segments of
enriched uranium, cut from a spent fuel assembly in 1968, are
missing.
What became of these segments, weighing about 4 pounds total,
has evolved into a 36-year-old mystery that has PG's nuclear
power officials and representatives from the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission bewildered.
After an initial search of the pool -- which took more than a
month -- was completed in August, the utility announced the
segments were not in the most likely places in the pool. It is
also possible the segments were shipped to one of three
facilities in the 1960s: Battelle in Ohio, General Electric's
Vallecitos Nuclear Center in Livermore or Nuclear Fuel Services
in West Valley, N.Y., the utility has said.
But there are no records of the rods being shipped to or
arriving at any of these locations.
*****************************************************************
29 NRC: NRC Extends Public Comment Period on Proposed Uranium Enrichment Plant in New Mexico until Jan. 7
News Release - 2004-16 U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION Office
of Public Affairs Telephone: 301/415-8200 Washington, DC
20555-0001 E-mail: opa@nrc.gov No. 04-165 December 22,
2004
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has extended until Jan. 7 the
public comment period for the draft environmental impact
statement for a proposed uranium enrichment plant to be built in
Lea County, N.M.
Public access to documents concerning the license application of
Louisiana Energy Services for the proposed plant was limited
after the NRC shut down its online documents library for a
security review.
The agency is placing on its Web site redacted versions of the
draft environmental impact statement, the environmental report
submitted by LES as part of its application, and LESs responses
to NRC staff requests for additional information related to the
environmental report. These documents will be available no later
than Dec. 23 through this address:
http://www.nrc.gov/materials/fuel-cycle-fac/lesfacility.html.
The redactions withhold potentially sensitive information
relating to the security of the proposed facility.
Other publicly available documents may be available by request
to the NRCs Public Document Room by calling (800) 397-4209 or
(301) 415-4737, or through e-mail at PDR@nrc.gov [PDR@nrc.gov] .
Requested documents will be screened by the agency for sensitive
information before they are released.
Comments on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement should be
postmarked by Jan. 7 and sent to Chief, Rules Review and
Directives Branch, Mail Stop T6-D59, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory
Commission, Washington, D.C. 20555-0001. Comments may also be
submitted by e-mail to nrcrep@nrc.gov [nrcrep@nrc.gov] or by
facsimile to (301) 415-5397, attention: Anna Bradford. Please
note Docket Number 70-3103 on all submissions.
Last revised Wednesday, December 22, 2004
*****************************************************************
30 NRC: Proposed Interim Staff Guidance (ISG)-17 on; Periodic Inspection
FR Doc 04-28067
[Federal Register: December 23, 2004 (Volume 69, Number 246)]
[Notices] [Page 76960-76962] From the Federal Register Online via
GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr23de04-97] [[Page
76960]]
of Bus Ducts for License Renewal Solicitation of Public Comment
AGENCY: Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).
ACTION: Solicitation of public comment.
SUMMARY: The NRC is soliciting public comment on its proposed
interim staff guidance (ISG) for license renewal. This ISG
proposes an acceptable aging management program (AMP), ``Periodic
Inspection of Bus Ducts,'' to manage the effects of aging on bus
ducts during the period of extended operation. The NRC staff
issues ISGs to facilitate timely implementation of the license
renewal rule and to review activities associated with a license
renewal application. Upon receiving public comments, the NRC
staff will evaluate the comments and make a determination to
incorporate the comments, as appropriate. Once the NRC staff
completes the ISG, it will issue the ISG for NRC and industry
use. The NRC staff will also incorporate the approved ISG into
the next revision of the license renewal guidance documents.
DATES: Comments may be submitted by February 22, 2005. Comments
received after this date will be considered, if it is practical
to do so, but the Commission is able to ensure consideration only
for comments received on or before this date.
ADDRESSES: Comments may be submitted to: Chief Rules and
Directives Branch, Office of Administration, U.S. Nuclear
Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC 20555-0001.
Comments should be delivered to: 11545 Rockville Pike, Rockville,
Maryland, Room T-6D59, between 7:30 a.m. and 4:15 p.m. on Federal
workdays. Persons may also provide comments via e-mail at [
NRCREP@NRC.GOV] . The NRC maintains an Agencywide Documents
Access and Management System (ADAMS), which provides text and
image files of NRC's public documents. These documents may be
accessed through the NRC's Public Electronic Reading Room on the
Internet at
[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 Public Document Room (PDR) reference staff at 1-800-
397-4209, (301) 415-4737, or by e-mail at [pdr@nrc.gov] . FOR
FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Mr. Mark Lintz, License Renewal
Project Manager, Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, U.S.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC 20555-0001;
telephone (301) 415- 4051 or e-mail [mpl2@nrc.gov] .
SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Attachment 1 to this Federal Register
notice, entitled Staff Position and Rationale for the Interim
Staff Guidance (ISG)-17: Proposed Aging Management Program (AMP)
XI.E4, ``Periodic Inspection of Bus Ducts'' contains the NRC
staff's rationale for publishing ISG-17. Attachment 2 to this
Federal Register notice, entitled Proposed Aging Management
Program: Periodic Inspection of Bus Ducts, contains the proposed
AMP required to implement ISG-17.
NRC Information Notice 89-64, entitled ``Electrical Bus Bar
Failures,'' and NRC Information Notice 98-36, entitled
``Inadequate or Poorly Controlled, Non-Safety-Related Maintenance
Activities Unnecessarily Challenged Safety Systems,'' provide
examples that illustrate the importance of periodic inspection of
bus ducts and the potential problems that can arise from
age-related bus duct failures. Instances of the loosening of the
bus bar connecting bolts at several plants due to thermal cycling
have been reported in Sandia National Laboratory Report entitled
Aging Management Guideline for Commercial Nuclear Power Plants
(Sandia 96-0344; September 1996) and in NRC Information Notice
2000-14, entitled ``Non-Vital Bus Fault Leads to Fire and Loss of
Offsite Power.'' The last report identified torque relaxation of
splice plate connecting bolts as one potential cause of a bus
duct failure.
Operating experience has shown that electrical buses in bus ducts
have failed due to cracked insulation in the presence of
moisture, debris buildup, and loosening of bus connecting bolts.
These failures could lead to loss of power to electrical loads
connected to the buses and could cause unnecessary challenges to
plant safety systems.
To prevent such failures, NRC has developed ISG-17 to ensure
that: (1) Internal portions of bus duct assemblies are free of
corrosion, debris, excessive dust buildup, and moisture
intrusion; (2) Electrical buses and their supports are free of
insulation cracking; and (3) Bolted connections of the buses are
secure.
Additionally, the external portions of bus ducts and structural
supports will also be inspected in accordance with a
plant-specific structural monitoring program.
Dated at Rockville, Maryland, this 16th day of December 2004.
For the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Pao-Tsin Kuo, Program Director, License Renewal and Environmental
Impacts Program, Division of Regulatory Improvement Programs,
Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation.
Attachment 1: Staff Position and Rationale for the Interim Staff
Guidance (ISG)-17: Proposed Aging Management Program (AMP) XI.E4,
``Periodic Inspection of Bus Ducts'' Staff Position Consistent
with the requirements specified in 10 CFR 54.4(a), bus ducts
(non-segregated phase bus and isolated phase buses) support
safety-related and non-safety-related functions in that the
failure of the bus ducts precludes a safety function from being
accomplished [10 CFR 54.4(a)(1) and (a)(2)]. Thermal cycling of
bus ducts can result in torque relaxation of connecting bolts,
causing loose connections that lead to arcing, overheating, and
explosive damage. Bus insulation material may experience a
significant temperature rise during operation that may cause
age-related degradation during the period of extended operation.
Insulation failure, along with the presence of moisture or
debris, may provide phase-to-phase or phase-to-ground electrical
tracking paths that eventually result in catastrophic failure of
the bus ducts.
These bus ducts, therefore, need to be inspected periodically
during the period of extended operation to preclude their
failure.
In order to prevent such occurrences, the staff has developed an
aging management program for periodic inspection of bus ducts for
license renewal to ensure that; (1) Internal portions of bus duct
assemblies are free of corrosion, debris, excessive dust buildup,
and moisture intrusion; and (2) Electrical buses and their
supports are free of insulation cracking; and (3) Bolted
connections of the buses are secure.
Additionally, the external portions of bus ducts and structural
supports will also be inspected in accordance with a
plant-specific structural monitoring program.
Rationale An electrical bus is an assembly of bus conductors with
the associated connections, joints, and insulating supports. Bus
ducts are electrical buses installed on electrically insulated
supports and are constructed with all
[[Page 76961]] phase conductors enclosed in either a separate
metal enclosure or a common metal enclosure. The conductors are
separated and insulated from each other and from the ground by
insulating bus supports. Also, the conductors in the
non-segregated bus are insulated throughout to reduce corona and
electrical tracking. The bus ducts are used in power systems that
connect various elements of electric power circuits, such as
switchgears, transformers, main generators, and diesel
generators.
Industry operating experience indicates that the failure of bus
ducts is caused by the cracking of bus bar insulation (bus
sleeving) combined with the accumulation of moisture or debris.
Cracked insulation results from high ambient temperatures and
contamination from bus bar joint compound. Cracked insulation in
the presence of moisture or debris provides phase-to-phase or
phase-to-ground electrical tracking paths, which results in
catastrophic failure of the buses. Bus failure leads to loss of
power to electrical loads connected to the buses, causes
subsequent reactor trips, and initiates unnecessary challenges to
plant safety systems.
Bus ducts exposed to appreciable ohmic heating during operation
may experience loosening of bolted connections because of the
repeated cycling of connected loads. This phenomenon can occur in
heavily loaded circuits, i.e., those exposed to appreciable ohmic
heating. A Sandia National Laboratory Report entitled, Aging
Management Guideline for Commercial Nuclear Power Plants (Sandia
96-0344; September 1996) documents instances of bolted connection
loosening at several plants due to thermal cycling. NRC
Information Notice 2000-14, entitled Non- Vital Bus Fault Leads
to Fire and Loss of Offsite Power, identified torque relaxation
of splice plate connecting bolts as one potential cause of a bus
duct fault.
In addition to NRC Information Notice 2004-14, NRC Information
Notice 89-64, entitled Electrical Bus Bar Failures, and NRC
Information Notice 98-36, entitled Inadequate or Poorly
Controlled, Non-Safety- Related Maintenance Activities
Unnecessary Challenged Safety Systems, also provide examples that
underscore the safety significance of bus ducts and the potential
problems that can arise from age-related bus duct failures.
Attachment 2: Proposed Aging Management Program: Periodic
Inspection of Bus Ducts XI.E4 Periodic Inspection of Bus Ducts
Program Description An electrical bus is an assembly of bus
conductors with the associated connections, joints, and
insulating supports. Bus ducts are electrical buses installed on
electrically insulated supports and are constructed with all
phase conductors enclosed in either a separate metal enclosure or
a common metal enclosure. The conductors are separated and
insulated from each other and from the ground by insulating
supports. Also, the conductors in the non-segregated bus are
insulated throughout to reduce corona and electrical tracking.
The bus ducts are used in power systems that connect various
elements of electric power circuits, such as switchgears,
transformers, main generators, and diesel generators.
Industry operating experience indicates that the failure of bus
ducts is caused by the cracking of bus bar insulation (bus
sleeving) combined with the accumulation of moisture or debris.
Cracked insulation results from high ambient temperatures and
contamination from bus bar joint compound. Cracked insulation in
the presence of moisture or debris provides phase-to-phase or
phase-to-ground electrical tracking paths, which results in
catastrophic failure of the buses. Bus failure leads to loss of
power to electrical loads connected to the buses, causes
subsequent reactor trips, and initiates unnecessary challenges to
plant systems.
Bus ducts exposed to appreciable ohmic heating during operation
may experience loosening of bolted connections because of the
repeated cycling of connected loads. This phenomenon can occur in
heavily loaded circuits, i.e., those exposed to appreciable ohmic
heating. Sandia 96- 0344 identified instances of bolted
connection loosening at several plants due to thermal cycling.
NRC Information Notice 2000-14 identified torque relaxation of
splice plate connecting bolts as one potential cause of a bus
duct fault.
One objective of the aging management program is to provide an
inspection of bus ducts. In managing this aspect of the aging
management program, bolted connections at sample sections of the
buses in the bus ducts will be checked for proper torque, or the
bolted joints will be checked for low resistance. This activity
will include visual inspection of interior portions of bus ducts
to identify aging degradation of insulating and metallic
components and water/debris intrusion. The external portions of
bus ducts and structural supports will be inspected in accordance
with a plant-specific structural monitoring program.
Evaluation and Technical Basis 1. Scope of Program: This program
applies to all bus ducts within the scope of license renewal.
2. Preventive Actions: This is an inspection program and no
actions are taken as part of this program to prevent or mitigate
aging degradation.
3. Parameters Monitored/Inspected: A sample of accessible bolted
connections (bus joints and ending devices) will be checked for
proper torque, or the resistance of bolted joints will be checked
using a micro-ohm meter of sufficient current capacity that is
suitable for checking bus bar connections. This program will also
inspect the internal portions of accessible bus ducts for cracks,
corrosion, foreign debris, dust buildup, and moisture intrusion.
The bus insulating system will be inspected for signs of
embrittlement, cracking, melting, swelling, or discoloration,
which may indicate overheating or aging degradation. The bus
supports will be inspected for structural integrity and cracking.
4. Detection of Aging Effects: Visual inspection of internal
portions of bus ducts detects cracks, corrosion, debris, dust and
moisture. Visual inspection of the bus insulating system detects
embrittlement, cracking, melting, swelling and discoloration.
Visual inspection of bus supports detects cracking and lack of
structural integrity. Internal portions of bus ducts, the bus
insulating system, and the bus supports are visually inspected at
least once every 10 years.
A torque test or a resistance test of a sample of accessible
bolted connections is performed at least once every 10 years.
This program will be completed before the end of the initial
40-year license term and every 10 years thereafter. This is an
adequate period to identify failures of the bus ducts since
experience has shown that aging degradation is a slow process. A
10-year inspection frequency will provide two data points during
a 20-year period, which can be used to characterize the
degradation rate.
5. Monitoring and Trending: Trending actions are not included as
part of this program because the ability to trend inspection
results is limited. Although not a requirement, trending would
[[Page 76962]] provide additional information on the rate of
degradation.
6. Acceptance Criteria: Bolted connections must meet the
manufacturer's minimum torque specifications, or the resistance
of bolted joints must meet required specifications. Bus ducts are
to be free from any surface anomalies that suggest that conductor
insulation degradation exists. An additional acceptance criterion
includes no indication of unacceptable corrosion, cracking,
foreign debris, dust buildup, or moisture intrusion. Any
condition or situation that, if not corrected, could lead to a
loss of intended function is considered unacceptable.
7. Corrective Actions: Further investigation and evaluation is
performed when the acceptance criterion is not met. Corrective
actions may include but are not limited to sample expansion,
increased inspection frequency, and replacement or repair of the
affected bus duct insulation components. When an unacceptable or
situation is identified, a determination shall be made as to
whether the same condition or situation is applicable to other
areas, and sample expansion shall include those areas. As
discussed in the appendix to this report, the staff finds the
requirements of 10 CFR part 50, appendix B, acceptable to address
corrective actions.
8. Confirmation Process: As discussed in the appendix to this
report, the staff finds the requirements of 10 CFR part 50,
appendix B, acceptable to address the confirmation process.
9. Administrative Controls: As discussed in the appendix to this
report, the staff finds the requirements of 10 CFR part 50,
appendix B, acceptable to address administrative controls.
10. Operating experience: Industry operating experience has
demonstrated that the failures of bus ducts are caused by cracked
insulation of the bus combined with moisture or debris buildup
internal to the bus ducts. It has also been shown that bus duct
internals exposed to appreciable ohmic heating during operation
may experience loosening of bolted connections related to
repeated cycling of connected loads.
References 1. IEEE Std. P1205-2000, IEEE Guide for Assessing,
Monitoring and Mitigating Aging Effects on Class 1E Equipment
Used in Nuclear Power Generating Stations.
2. SAND 96-0344, Aging Management Guideline for Commercial
Nuclear Power Plants--Electrical Cable and Terminations, prepared
by Sandia National Laboratories for the U.S. Department of
Energy, September 1996.
3. EPRI TR-109619, Guideline for the Management of Adverse
Localized Equipment Environments, Electric Power Research
Institute, Palo Alto, CA, June 1999.
4. EPRI TR-104213, Bolted Joint Maintenance & Application Guide,
Electric Power Research Institute, Palo Alto, CA, December 1995.
5. NRC Information Notice 89-64, ``Electrical Bus Bar Failures.''
6. NRC Information Notice 98-36, ``Inadequate or Poorly
Controlled, Non-Safety-Related Maintenance Activities Unnecessary
Challenged Safety Systems.'' 7. NRC Information Notice 2000-14,
``Non-Vital Bus Fault Leads to Fire and Loss of Offsite Power.''
[FR Doc. 04-28067 Filed 12-22-04; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 7590-01-P
*****************************************************************
31 Deseret News: 2 tons of nuclear product shipped from Idaho
[deseretnews.com]
[http://deseretnews.com/dn/wir]
Thursday, December 23, 2004
Shipment is first of many set over next 5 years of cleanup
ARCO, Idaho (AP) — Almost 5,000 pounds of
nuclear material containing highly enriched uranium has been
moved out of Idaho to South Carolina and Tennessee, said
officials overseeing the cleanup project.
That's the first shipment of many destined to leave the
Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory over the
next five years.
The single shipment actually took place four months ahead
of schedule in August.
But it was announced only Tuesday as the U.S. Department
of Energy keeps a tight lid on details of nuclear-related
activities at the site.
"We're going to get this stuff out safely," Stacey
Francis, a spokeswoman for the Idaho Completion Project, the
entity overseeing the clean up of nuclear waste generated from
years of atomic research at the Eastern Idaho site.
The material — about 2.4 tons of a product called
denitrator product — had been stored at the Idaho National
Engineering and Environmental Laboratory since being produced by
a fuel reprocessing project in 1992.
The material was shipped to the Department of Energy's
Savannah River facility in South Carolina and nuclear Fuel
Services, Inc. in Erwin, Tenn., where it will be processed into
commercial nuclear fuel and used to generate electricity in
reactors.
Francis said the ICP is under contract to have the entire
stock of 40 different classifications of nuclear material moved
offsite to an appropriate destination by September 2009.
© 2004 Deseret News Publishing Company
*****************************************************************
32 [RADFOOD] Protect COOL for seafood
Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 01:34:12 -0600 (CST)
Take Action to Protect Country of Origin Labeling for Seafood!
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has finished its rules
mandatory country of origin labeling (COOL) for seafood. (COOL for
seafood is set to be implemented in the spring, two years sooner than
such labeling for other products.) The public has the opportunity to
comment on these rules, but the January 3rd deadline is fast
approaching. These rules will allow consumers to know where their
seafood comes from and if it is farm-raised or wild-caught.
Some farm-raised seafood, such as farm-raised shrimp, is grown with a
host of chemicals to combat diseases, algae and pests that run rampant
in the intensive shrimp ponds. Many of those chemicals are banned in the
United States because of serious health threats to consumers.
Unfortunately, the USDA has released rules that fall short of
implementing a strong labeling program.
* Processed Foods are exempt under these rules - more than 50% of
the seafood sold in the U.S. is "processed" according to the USDA's
definition. "Processed" includes canned salmon, cooked shrimp and
breaded frozen seafood.
* The USDA omitted up to 90% of retailers from requirements to
notify consumers which country their seafood comes from and how it is
raised because they have less than $750,000 in annual receipts.
* The USDA has no enforcement mechanism in place and will charge
business an insignificant fine if they are found to violate the rules.
The USDA is not implementing the law, as set out by Congress, and they
need to be held accountable. Send them an email and tell them to
implement country of origin labeling so consumers can make an informed
choice when purchasing seafood, whether it be at a fish market or at a
supermarket.
Send them an email at:
http://capwiz.com/pc/mail/oneclick_compose/?alertid=6771021
The email is as below:
Country of Origin Labeling Program
Room 2092-S
Agricultural Marketing Service,
USDA STOP 0249
1400 Independence Avenue SW
Washington, DC 20250-0249
cool@usda.gov
RE: Docket No. LS-03-04
I am writing to urge you to strengthen the final interim rules for the
country of origin labeling for fish and shellfish, so the law is
implemented as Congress intended. As a consumer, I have the right to
know where my seafood comes from so I can make an informed decision as
to what seafood to buy.
Some seafood, such as shrimp, is farmed with chemicals that the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration has banned in the United States. Some
chemicals, such as chloramphenicol and nitrofurons, are used around the
world to raise shrimp in coastal farms for exportation to the U.S.
Chloramphenicol is linked to human aplastic anemia, intestinal problems,
and neurological reactions; while nitrofurons have been found to be
carcinogenic. Recent scientific studies have determined that farm raised
salmon contains contaminants harmful to human health. Given these
concerns, I have the right to know what I am eating and to make an
informed choice.
Specifically, I urge you to narrow the rule's definition of processed
foods, to insure that canned seafood, breaded and cooked products are
labeled with their country of origin and method of production.
According to your interim final rule, 50% of the shrimp sold in the
United States is breaded, but according to the USDA definition, breaded
shrimp would be exempt from labeling. Shrimp is the number one seafood
choice in the United States, and it is unacceptable that half of it be
exempt from country of origin labeling.
I also urge you to require small businesses to comply with the law,
since up to 90% of seafood is sold in small business, according to the
USDA research. Lastly, I urge you to develop a comprehensive enforcement
and penalty system that would deter companies from not complying with
the law.
As a consumer, as a member of the public, I have the right to know
where all of my seafood comes from and if it is farm raised or wild
caught.
Sincerely,
***
Audrey Hill
Organizer
Public Citizen
215 Pennsylvania Avenue, SE
Washington, DC 20003
(202) 454-5185
********************
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Questions about the radfood list can be directed to RADFOOD-request@LISTSERVER.CITIZEN.ORG
-Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program
*****************************************************************
33 [RADFOOD] Inspectors' Union: mad cow risk remains in food
Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 01:40:01 -0600 (CST)
Inspectors' Union Charges that Mad Cow (BSE) Risk Materials are Not
Being Removed Completely
Public Citizen today sent a letter to Dr. Merle Pierson, acting under
secretary for food safety at the USDA, urging the agency to pay closer
attention to BSE-related enforcement concerns in meat plants. The
consumer group pointed to a recent letter from the chairman of the
National Joint Council of Food Inspection Locals, the union which
represents federal government meat inspectors. The NJC letter detailed
reports by inspectors that they have limited ability to enforce current
BSE-related regulations.
Both letters focus on specific concerns related to specified risk
materials (SRMs), the nervous system tissues believed to be most likely
to carry the infectious prions that cause BSE. The USDA's policies
regarding the removal of SRMs from human food has been widely promoted
by the agency as an important public health protection.
The most serious complaints from inspectors are:
-- Plant employees are not correctly identifying and marking all heads
and carcasses of animals over 30 months old, resulting in errors in SRM
removal down the line. (Many of the rules governing what materials must
be removed from human food are dependent on the age of the animal, with
30 months as the dividing line.)
-- Inspectors are not authorized to take action in plants producing
beef for export when they see plant employees failing to meet the
standards required by other governments.
Public Citizen's letter notes, "These reports from government
inspectors, whose job it is to prevent unsafe meat from entering the
human food supply, are extremely disturbing."
The group called on the agency to instruct government inspectors to
examine each head to ensure that plant personnel are correctly
determining the age of cattle, and that written instructions are given
to inspectors enabling them to take action regarding any violation of
export requirements.
To read the letter from Public Citizen, please go to
http://www.citizen.org/documents/PiersonLetter12-20-04.pdf
To read the letter from the NJCFIL, please go to
http://www.citizen.org/documents/NJCletter-12-8-04.pdf
----
December Food Alert!
In this issue:
-Rad-Food Protests Span the Globe
-The Foulness of Factory Farms
-Avoid Farm-Raised Shrimp
-Rad-Food Dynamic Duo Leave USDA
-WTO Ravages Family Farmers
-Action: Stop Factory Farming
Read it here: http://www.citizen.org/documents/FoodAlertDec04.pdf
***
Audrey Hill
Organizer
Public Citizen
215 Pennsylvania Avenue, SE
Washington, DC 20003
(202) 454-5185
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34 [du-list] The whole truth about Humvee armor
Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 15:59:36 -0800
Sent to DetNews.com as an online comment on 12-23-04, regarding their (old
but presently posted) article of 12-19-03
"Humvees without armor make troops vulnerable"
By Craig Gordon / Newsday
Name: Roger Belling
Topic for discussion: Humvee armor
Your comments:
When your article refers to Humvee armor "designed to withstand
armor-piercing bullets", that will obviously be made of depleted uranium,
or "DU". This is a lightly radioactive and highly pyrophoric nuclear waste
material, which when burnt and aerosolized in combat can bring permanent
disability and early death to large numbers of people among friend and foe.
Wouldn't it be fair for the press to tell the whole story, before the
public is tricked into clamoring for "more armor"?
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35 [du-list] A Flood of Mentally Ill Soldiers Coming Home From
Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 15:36:49 -0800
A Flood of Mentally Ill Soldiers Coming Home From Iraq
By Sam Hamod
Al-Jazeerah, December 17 ,2004
http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20editorials/2004%20opinions/December/17%20o/A%20Flood%20of%20Mentally%20Ill%20Soldiers%20Coming%20Home%20From%20Iraq%20By%20Sam%20Hamod.htm
Contrary to the NY Times reports by Scott Shane today,
psychologists at Camp Pendleton Marine Base in California
have said that approximately30 % of the marines returning
from Iraq have serious mental problems. Shane writes of 1
in6 , those psychologists who spoke with me said it was more
like 1 in3 --twice what the NY Times is reporting. But then
again, we know the NY Times has been soft on the Bush team
in its reporting about negative matters pertaining to the
Iraq and Afghan wars.
Elaine Cassel and I wrote an article about this, "When the
Killers Come Home," back when the war in Iraq started,
because we knew what kind of brutality our leaders were
urging the military to train into our soldiers. This brutal
training, pushed especially by Wolfowitz and the generals
under Rumsfeld at the Pentagon and in the field, went, and
continues to go against, the decency most of our soldiers
were taught in their churches and in their homes. This
attitude of treating Iraqis as "ragheads," "satan's
soldiers," "worthless pieces of shit," and "the enemy,
destroy them all," has made our soldiers into animals on the
kill--that's why they are killing so many innocent civilians
in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Another factor in this equation that no one in the major
American media will touch, but the British journalists like
Robert Fisk, Patrick and Alexander Cockburn, do speak about,
is the Israeli presence and influence on American troops
through their new influence at the Rumsfeld Pentagon. Many
ex-Israeli officers, Mossad, and South African Israeli
trained mercenaries are directing and training American
troops in "urban warfare," and torture methods. This Israeli
posture on behavior is contrary to the best of American
values of decency and humanity.
An example of how our homecoming troops have been damaged
can be seen in the case of Jeffrey Lucey who was so upset
with his recollections of the war that he hanged himself
shortly after returning from Iraq.
Another case is Robert Brown
" Robert E. Brown was proud to be in the first wave of
> Marines invading Iraq last year. But Mr. Brown has also
> found himself in the first ranks of returning soldiers to
> be unhinged by what they experienced.
>
> He served for six months as a Marine chaplain's assistant,
> counseling wounded soldiers, organizing makeshift memorial
> services and filling in on raids. He knew he was in trouble
> by the time he was on a ship home, when the sound of a
> hatch slamming would send him diving to the floor.
>
> After he came home, he began drinking heavily and saw his
> marriage fall apart, Mr. Brown said. He was discharged and
> returned to his hometown, Peru, Ind., where he slept for
> two weeks in his Ford Explorer, surrounded by mementos of
> the war." (NY Times, Dec.16 ,2004 )
Thus, the mental breakdowns in our troops because they were
being taught to behave in ways that were contrary to
everything they'd been taught as they grew up in a more
humane America. Our military, with the influence of the
Israelis has created this problem, has sickened our
soldiers, some unto death. Now, these soldiers and their
families, and all the rest of us, must live with these
mentally sick people--many of whom have already violently
attacked their wives and children or taken their own lives.
There is little word on how the women have behaved on their
return, but I'm sure it is not good. Many have wondered what
transformed Ms. England from a "down home girl" into the
person she became in Iraq at Abu Ghraib.
Also, we, as citizens, will be paying the financial bill for
these soldiers and their mental disabilities for years,
according to psychological experts in and out of the
military. Add to this the long term illnesses these soldiers
will sustain, as will their deformed children, from the
Depleted Uranium they have lived in since the invasion began.
Also, to be dealt with in another article in the near
future, is the psychological damage our invasion of Iraq has
visited upon generations of Iraqis, old to the very
young--as well as the physical injuries the Iraqis sustained
from our incessant bombings and the long-term illnesses from
Depleted Uranium. Also, remember that the whole world has
seen our cruelty on the Iraqi and Afghan scenes--this has
turned not only Muslims and Arabs against us, but also
over80 % of the citizens of the world (regardless of what
their governments may say in England, Poland and Australia).
All I can say is that the worst is yet to come. Perhaps
then, the American citizenry will awaken to the truth about
Bush,Rumsfeld,Cheney, Tommy Franks, General Myers,
Wolfowitz, Sanchez and General Abizaid--that they were the
enemy of America and its people, they were the ones
responsible for the poisoning of American soldiers with D.U.
and the mental breakdowns because of the brutality they
forced on our soldiers, not the Iraqi or Afghan civilians
who were traumatized, maimed and killed
Sam Hamod writes on international and domestic affairs; he
edits, www.todaysalternativenews.com ; he published and
edited3 rd World News in Wash,DC . He may be reached at
shamod@cox.net
--
Posted for educational and research purposes only,
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36 [du-list] How Good Is Good Enough?
Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 15:36:52 -0800
How Good Is Good Enough?
Chapter 5: The best test
BY BOB EVANS
247-4758
HAMPTON ROADS, VA. Daily Press
December 15, 2004
http://www.dailypress.com/news/specials/dp-du5,0,4881579.story?coll=dp-breaking-news
The world's most accurate test for depleted uranium exposure
is now available - but only in Britain and Germany. The
Pentagon says U.S. vets don't need it.
ABOUT DU
What is it?
It's a byproduct of making "enriched uranium" for nuclear
weapons and fuel. "Enriched uranium" is somewhat misleading
because processors take uranium with natural levels of
radioactive isotopes, primarily Uranium 238 and Uranium 235,
and remove as much of the U-235 as possible. Weapons makers
and nuclear plant owners want almost-pure, highly
radioactive U-235. What's left behind is primarily U-238
(other isotopes remain, in very small quantities). That
substance has about 40 percent less radioactivity than
natural uranium and is "depleted uranium."
What makes it so important?
It's proven to be the most effective tank-killing weapon
ever. A round of depleted uranium no bigger than your little
finger can stop a top-of-the line tank without depleted
uranium armor. The weapons get sharper as they hit and plow
through thick steel. They also create fireballs of thousands
of degrees, a potent combination.
What is the controversy?
As they strike, the weapons get sharper by peeling off
millions of shards of burning depleted uranium. Those
burning pieces become microscopic dust that can be inhaled.
Depleted uranium is a mildly radioactive, toxic substance
that can cause damage to live tissue and cells once inside
the body.
In Great Britain, veterans of the 1991 Gulf War are signing
up to take the world's most precise test for determining
exposure to depleted uranium.
The U.S. government advertises a test for its veterans of
that war too. But the test that it offers can't detect
uranium in low amounts, has a high error rate and uses
equipment that's less sensitive and accurate than the
machines the British are using. U.S. vets and soldiers
who've had this test say they've been told they weren't
exposed when, in fact, the tests were simply incapable of
detecting whether depleted uranium was present.
Members of Congress have asked the Pentagon to look into
testing programs in other countries. The chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff promised to do that in April. But
after that promise was made, the officer in charge of U.S.
testing said he had no reason to gather such data because
his test was good enough.
"Our labs would easily detect depleted uranium levels
approaching U.S. peacetime safety standards," says Lt. Col.
Mark Melanson, who runs the health physics program at the
Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine.
One of those labs handles all depleted uranium testing for
the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Randall Parrish, a scientist who played a big role in
developing the British test, says he can't understand why
the United States is satisfied with an inferior test.
"It is incorrect to assume that a low concentration of
uranium in urine means there is no contamination," he says,
because there's no good data to support that conclusion.
The U.S. government's refusal to adopt a state-of-the art
test also prevents researchers from finding out why tens of
thousands of veterans of the Gulf War have debilitating
illnesses, says Mohamad B. Abou-Donia, a researcher at Duke
University.
Abou-Donia has conducted many significant experiments into
the causes of illnesses suffered by Gulf War vets. He also
recently published a study that reviewed available
scientific work on the health effects of depleted uranium.
Knowing which veterans were definitely exposed to depleted
uranium - not just those who might have been exposed to huge
doses - would fill a huge gap in the research, he says.
But until a better test is adopted and used on a larger
number of vets, that data isn't available, he says.
So there's no certainty about who was exposed and who was
not. Until scientists can reliably determine who was exposed
and who was not, they can't prove or disprove links between
depleted uranium and individual veterans' health problems,
Abou-Donia says.
Veterans and scientists have questioned for several years
whether the use of depleted uranium weapons in the Gulf War
is one of the reasons that so many veterans of that war came
home weak and full of pain.
The weapons provided a decisive edge in tank warfare in the
1991 and 2003 battles in the Persian Gulf region. They also
left behind millions and millions of pieces of easily
inhalable black dust that's toxic and mildly radioactive.
The dust is a necessary result of using the weapons to hit
and destroy hard targets.
In recent years, researchers have shown that laboratory
animals that inhaled depleted uranium dust developed
cancerous tumors. They've also found that a single particle
of depleted uranium can alter the genetic structure of
nearby cells in ways consistent with widely held scientific
beliefs about the way cancer starts in the human body. And
they've found evidence that once depleted uranium gets in
the body, it migrates through the bloodstream to the brain,
testicles, lungs, kidneys and bones, where it can reside for
years.
But all that research constitutes preliminary steps toward
figuring out how big a problem the dust from depleted
uranium weapons might be, researchers say. Meanwhile, the
military plans to significantly reduce its investigations
into possible health effects resulting from depleted
uranium, as well as other possible causes of Gulf
War-related illnesses.
IN BRITAIN, SAME COMPLAINTS PROMPTED DIFFERENT RESPONSE
The government's attitude toward critics of the weapon isn't
much different in Britain. British and U.S. troops are among
the few who actually used depleted uranium weapons in
battles. A large number of British vets have also been
complaining about health problems similar to those
experienced by U.S. armed forces from that war.
Parrish says his government paid to develop the more
accurate tests for veterans in part because of political
pressure and in part because of medical experts' suspicions
that existing tests yielded inconclusive and inadequate
evidence of exposure.
Those tests were being used to dismiss the veterans'
benefits claims. Some British veterans went to independent
labs and received results that proved depleted uranium was
in their urine. Analysis of 24 hours' worth of urine is the
commonly accepted method of determining whether someone has
been exposed to uranium of any kind.
The British veterans' pleas for a better depleted uranium
test also got support from the British Royal Society, an
invitation-only group of prominent scientists. The Royal
Society carries clout in Britain: It dates to 1660, and its
members are readily acknowledged as among the best
scientific minds in the country. Society members decided to
tackle the problem of Gulf War illnesses independent of the
government, and after several years, they issued a series of
findings.
While those findings didn't contradict the government's
official viewpoint in many ways, the society did call for a
testing program that could more accurately detect whether
someone had depleted uranium in their body. That, coupled
with activism by veterans groups, left the government little
political choice.
It took about two years to develop the highly accurate
tests, says Parrish, a professor of isotope geology at the
University of Leicester.
In addition to his teaching, he runs a laboratory at the
British Geological Survey supported by Britain's Natural
Environment Research Council. The council is independent of
the government and is similar to the National Science
Foundation in the United States, Parrish says.
Parrish and David Coggon, a scientist and chairman of the
board that runs the testing program, say there are only four
labs (three in England, the other in Germany) that have
adopted the more rigorous testing regimen so far.
Part of the difficulty of testing for depleted uranium in
someone's body is that you can't cut up a person and look
for the uranium like you would if it were in a rock, soil
sample or lab rat. That's why scientists look for it in
urine. While not a perfect source, it's the best available
right now, Parrish and others say. Even the U.S. military
agrees.
Finding depleted uranium in the body gets complicated.
Natural uranium is in everyone's body because it's in the
food and water we ingest. Therefore, there's natural uranium
in everyone's urine. It's difficult to accurately identify
the depleted uranium as opposed to the natural uranium, in
part because the amounts of both are so small.
Once obtained, the uranium in a 24-hour urine sample is
typically measured in nanograms. A nanogram is one-billionth
of a gram or one billion times lighter than a dollar bill.
If a total of 1 nanogram of natural and depleted uranium are
involved, the quantities of each are even lower. It takes
extremely sophisticated machines to help find and identify
the microscopic bits of depleted uranium.
The British and U.S. governments have been giving veterans
and soldiers urine tests for depleted uranium for years. But
unless the soldiers had relatively large quantities of
uranium in their bodies, the tests couldn't detect depleted
uranium apart from natural uranium without a high margin of
error, Parrish and other scientists say.
LIMITATIONS ON TESTS CREATE QUESTIONABLE RESULTS
U.S. military testing officials say that unless a sample has
a relatively high total uranium level, no attempt is made to
determine how much uranium is natural and how much is
depleted uranium. The level is deemed safe, and there's no
need to tell the difference, they say.
As a result, U.S. and British veterans have been told for
years that they tested negative for depleted uranium,
Parrish and others say. Instead, all that had been
demonstrated was that the methods used in testing were
incapable of detecting depleted uranium in such small
quantities.
Painstakingly careful methods to collect the urine and
separate the uranium from the liquid and other chemicals in
the sample are important, Parrish says.
Axel Gerdes, a German scientist who worked with Parrish to
develop the tests, says a crucial difference involves the
methods used to concentrate the uranium in urine before it's
analyzed.
He says the labs used by the U.S. Army dilute the urine with
water, which makes it easier to examine, and take other
shortcuts that reduce the time and manpower to do the tests.
That comes at the cost of losing the ability to detect small
quantities with accuracy, he says, by a factor of about 1,000.
SUPERIOR SPECTROMETER USED BY BRITISH LABORATORIES
The British testing program also calls for using superior
hardware to aid the analysis, Gerdes and Parrish say.
Several machines are employed for that task, they say,
including a multicollector ICP mass spectrometer. A mass
spectrometer is a machine used to determine the contents of
an unknown substance. A multicollector ICP mass spectrometer
is an even more sophisticated version that's specially
equipped to accurately measure minute quantities of
radioactive substances, including the various forms of an
element known as isotopes. The way that scientists tell the
difference between natural uranium and depleted uranium in a
sample is by counting these isotopes, a process that at
times involves tiny amounts of an element.
Scientists using the procedures and hardware developed for
the British test are now able to reliably identify the
difference between depleted uranium and regular uranium in
samples with as little as 0.1 nanogram of total uranium per
liter of urine, Parrish says. That's 10 billion times
lighter than a dollar bill. All this is done with a margin
of error of less than 1 percent, making it a very accurate test.
Lt. Col. Melanson, who oversees much of the Pentagon's
scientific research into the health hazards of depleted
uranium, says the most exacting lab test used on U.S.
veterans and active-duty military personnel must have at
least 3 nanograms of total uranium to examine per liter of
urine. That's 30 times more than the minimum for the new
British test.
The most sophisticated U.S. testing labs use a quadruple ICP
mass spectrometer, Melanson says. Parrish and other experts
in using mass spectrometry to identify materials say that's
a much less capable machine than the multicollector type
that the British are using, a machine that's been available
for about 10 years.
Gerdes now works at a university in Germany and does testing
there for privately financed groups. He has an even more
sensitive version of the machine than the British labs do.
He says it enables his lab to accurately detect even smaller
quantities of depleted uranium.
Earlier this year, nine soldiers from a New York-based
National Guard unit who had health problems after serving in
Operation Iraqi Freedom had their urine tested at Gerdes'
lab at the University of Frankfurt.
Gerdes says the nine veterans had anywhere from 1.6 to 5.7
nanograms per liter of uranium in their urine. Of those,
five had little or no depleted uranium in their samples,
while the others' samples contained 1.2 percent to 8.2
percent depleted uranium.
After publicity about the tests in the New York Daily News,
those veterans were tested by the labs used by the U.S.
military, says Michael J. Kilpatrick, deputy director for
the Pentagon's office of health protection for deployed
troops. None had enough total uranium in their urine to be
concerned about, Kilpatrick says, and the U.S. labs didn't
find any depleted uranium. The cause of the soldiers'
illnesses remain undiagnosed.
Gerdes says the use of total uranium as a guide to the level
of depleted uranium in someone's body is a mistake because
there's often no correlation between how much total uranium
is in a sample and what percentage of it was depleted
uranium. That's an important point that the U.S. military
seems to overlook, he says. The U.S. military says the only
difference is that depleted uranium is less radioactive and
therefore less harmful.
After initial reports about the results from Gerdes' lab
involving the New York veterans, several members of Congress
questioned whether the U.S. military should be looking at
more rigorous testing. They directed the questions to Gen.
Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a
congressional hearing April 20.
They specifically asked about tests being developed in other
countries, in light of the different results involving the
New York National Guard unit.
JOINT CHIEFS CHAIRMAN SAID STAFF WOULD LOOK INTO TESTS
Myers told them he didn't know about the other countries'
testing but that he would look into the matter.
Coggon, head of the board that oversees the British testing,
says he's not aware of any effort from the United States to
get information about the processes or procedures developed
there. Melanson, the U.S. military official deemed the most
knowledgeable about depleted uranium testing, says he's not
familiar with the British program and sees no need to inquire.
The tests available in the United States are good enough, he
says, and are capable of determining the presence of
depleted uranium at levels nearly 1,000 times lower than the
health safety standards established in the United States.
When U.S. troops or veterans are tested, they're usually
told that their results didn't contain uranium outside the
normal background levels of uranium intake and therefore
aren't considered a health risk.
That standard is set by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory
Commission and is based on a representative sample of 1,006
people given urine tests collected and analyzed by another
federal agency. But the NRC attaches a warning to those
standards, noting it's "unknown" whether the levels of
uranium in the survey "represent cause for health concern."
It's merely a level of uranium in urine for a cross section
of the population 6 years and older and says nothing of how
healthy or unhealthy they are or will be, the NRC says.
The NRC further cautions that "more research is needed" to
determine what the healthy level is.
In the draft of a 2002 report outlining the issues involved
in using urine testing for soldiers' exposure to depleted
uranium, Melanson's own staff pointed out those same
limitations and warnings.
One thing everyone agrees on is that no one has been able to
credibly determine how much depleted uranium is in someone
based on the level of depleted uranium in their urine.
Research shows pretty clearly that when any uranium is
swallowed, it passes through the intestines and is excreted
quickly. Particles created by the use of depleted uranium
weapons, when inhaled, stay in the body much longer,
Pentagon research shows.
The tiny bits of depleted uranium created when the weapons
hit hard targets tend to be what chemists call ceramic,
which means they don't easily break down in liquid. Various
forms of uranium have a wide range of solubility, Parrish
says. The effect of the high heat from the explosions and
other factors make this particular kind of uranium a big
unknown regarding how much and how fast it breaks down in
the body and enters the blood and urine.
DUST IN LUNGS DOESN'T DISSOLVE QUICKLY, STUDY FINDS
The Army's recently completed five-year $6 million Capstone
study of those tiny pieces of depleted uranium concluded
that there's "a significant source of uncertainty" regarding
how fast inhaled particles would dissolve in simulated lung
fluid. Still, the study concluded, there was no significant
health risk from inhaling particles of depleted uranium that
result from use of the weapons in combat.
The Capstone study said the vast majority of the particles
created from use of the weapons and small enough to be
inhaled took 100 days or more before dissolving halfway in
simulated lung fluid. Generalizations were not easy, it
said, but the smallest particles tended to be the least
soluble. That means that pieces more likely to get more
deeply into the lungs last longer.
Anywhere from less than 1 percent to 35 percent of the
inhalable-sized pieces tested in Capstone dissolved halfway
in 10 days or less, the study found, while 58 percent to 99
percent took more than 100 days to dissolve half their mass.
Dissolution of half of the mass of a contaminant is the
government's standard measure of how long it might take to
clear something from the lungs after occupational exposures.
That data indicates that even the smallest particles could
stay in the lungs for several years, Melanson says, though
he doubts that they would pose any significant health risk.
So far, the British have tested only about 30 troops as part
of making sure that their procedures are accurate. None of
those people had depleted uranium in their samples.
Parrish says it's possible that by now, all the inhaled
depleted uranium that will ever dissolve in these soldiers'
lungs has dissolved and the rest will remain inside without
a way to detect it. He also says it's possible that all the
uranium is dissolved.
That's one reason why the testing program is so important,
he says - to find out, instead of speculating.
U.S. government scientists still find evidence of depleted
uranium in the urine of troops with shrapnel wounds. But
those larger particles tend to be more soluble than the dust
that's inhaled, the Capstone study says.
Some researchers say the relatively lower solubility of
depleted uranium dust could spell even more trouble for the
veterans than thought. If those little pieces in the lungs
and nearby lymph nodes aren't dissolving quickly and getting
flushed out of the body through the blood and urinary tract,
then they're sitting next to live tissue and blood cells,
emitting DNA-altering alpha particles for years.
Under this theory, it would be extremely important to know
how much of the uranium in someone's body is natural
uranium, as opposed to depleted uranium, even if there are
small quantities involved. That's because the level of
natural uranium in someone's body is mostly swallowed, and
more than 90 percent of it is flushed from the body within a
day or two through excretory systems. The swallowed uranium
therefore doesn't stay in one place to irradiate tissue or
blood for hundreds of days.
Richard J. Albertini, a cancer researcher at the University
of Vermont, says those pieces of radioactive dust in the
lungs, as opposed to the digestive system, are important for
another reason.
LOCATION OF THE METAL MAKES A BIG DIFFERENCE
Research indicates that inhaled depleted uranium can cause
genetic mutations in blood, he says. Those mutations signal
what very well might be the first step toward cancer.
Because all of a person's blood passes through the lungs to
pick up oxygen to be distributed throughout the body, large
quantities of blood are subject to mutations from exposure
to depleted uranium. In contrast, he says, veterans with
shrapnel in isolated parts of the body aren't irradiating as
much of their blood because their wounds are rarely in
places where most blood circulates.
Kilpatrick dismisses these arguments, in part because
natural uranium is even more radioactive than depleted
uranium. He also dismisses a possible link between inhaling
depleted uranium and the neurological problems that seem to
form the bulk of complaints by Gulf War veterans.
None of the neurological problems associated with those vets
has been noted in the 50 years of research involving workers
in the uranium industry, he says. So if the quantities of
either form of uranium are lower than the Pentagon testing
program shows, there shouldn't be a problem, he says.
The British Royal Society's final report on the hazards of
depleted uranium basically agreed with the Pentagon's views
of the health risks. But it called for better testing to
help scientists get a better understanding of the
relationship between intake and risks, as well as help
figure out what might be ailing individual veterans.
Abou-Donia, the Duke University scientist who recently
published a survey of available research on depleted
uranium, says data from better tests - such as the ones
being done in Britain - could prove very helpful.
"Absolutely. Any monitoring of this chemical would be
helpful," he says.
Abou-Donia has been conducting experiments and other studies
on various possible causes of Gulf War veterans' illnesses
for several years. One of the biggest problems that
scientists have in that field is a lack of fundamental data,
he says.
If thousands of veterans in the United States got the new
tests, the lack of data regarding depleted uranium might be
eased, he says.
Scientists might be able to tell, for example, whether
veterans who definitely have depleted uranium inside them
also have a type of brain abnormality thought to be
characteristic of the neurological symptoms among Gulf War
veterans, he says.
But until now, no one has had a test considered reliable
enough to detect small enough quantities to determine who
was probably exposed and who wasn't.
Scientists don't know what causes the brain abnormalities in
those vets, Abou-Donia says. But unlike other chemicals and
causes under suspicion, the depleted uranium in urine is
measurable and might still be in the body.
The level of exposure to chemical weapons, bug spray and
other suggested causes of the veterans' illnesses isn't
detectable at this late date because those toxins are long
gone from the body and no one kept accurate records of doses
and other information on the 1991 battlefield, Abou-Donia
says. Those toxins have done their damage and are gone.
That's one reason that finding the cause of the veterans'
complaints has been so difficult.
ACTUAL BENEFITS OF NEW TESTS NOT DETERMINED YET
Gerdes, an environmental geochemist, says he questions
whether there's a link between depleted uranium exposure and
the illnesses suffered by veterans. But doing the science
and the testing is an important step toward understanding
the problem. "There is simply a need to do further research
in this topic," he says.
Parrish says he's not sure what the testing is going to
find. He notes that though the British government agreed to
finance use of the new tests for veterans of the Persian
Gulf War and peacekeeping missions in Bosnia and Kosovo,
veterans of the continuing war in Iraq are tested with the
less precise measurement.
A British Ministry of Defense spokesman says the new testing
is considered important for veterans of the other wars
because of the long period that's elapsed since the exposure
and therefore the need to identify what might be smaller
quantities.
He says the military is satisfied with the less-exact
testing for veterans of the current fighting in Iraq and
Afghanistan, though some will be given the more
sophisticated tests as an expedience.
The new testing program for the British veterans is just
starting. Advertisements and notices directed at veterans
started in late September, and about 300 people have signed
up so far, Coggon says. About 1,500 are expected to sign up,
says Charles Williams, a spokesman for the Ministry of Defense.
Williams and Parrish say it will probably take six months to
a year before enough tests are concluded to get an accurate
picture of how many vets have been exposed and at what level.
Parrish says that as long as Britain and the United States
refuse to let outside independent laboratories handle the
testing, there will be suspicions that the truth about
exposures and possible problems are being concealed.
The two labs in Britain performing the tests are considered
independent.
He says he and other lab workers do the testing and
analysis, but they don't know whether they're working on
"dummy" samples or actual veterans' urine. That's one of the
many levels of exactitude they've built into the process to
help ensure accuracy. Some dummy samples might be "spiked"
with known quantities of uranium and depleted uranium in
another lab and sent out with the vets' samples, but others
are taken from people known to have no depleted uranium in
their urine. That keeps the labs on their toes, Parrish says.
In the United States, the most precise testing that the
Pentagon does is handled at a national Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention laboratory, Melanson says.
When that federal agency does testing for the military, it
won't release any information about the tests conducted
there and won't even answer questions about the procedures,
error rates or scientific standards for the tests, says
Kathy Harben of the disease control agency.
She referred all questions about the agency's testing for
the military to the Pentagon.
VETS SAY U.S. DOESN'T WANT TO PAY FOR BETTER TESTING
Steve Robinson, executive director of the Gulf War Resource
Center Inc., a veterans rights group, says he suspects there
are two reasons that the United States uses the less
sophisticated testing method.
First, he says, is the cost.
Pentagon officials say their tests cost $200 to $400 a
sample, depending on whether there's enough total uranium in
the urine sample for the government to attempt to determine
whether it contains depleted uranium.
Melanson initially refused to divulge the cost of this
testing, saying it wasn't a factor in his decision-making.
Parrish says his test costs about $1,000 each.
Robinson and other veterans advocates say the second reason
that the U.S. government doesn't want to use the more
sophisticated tests is they're afraid the tests might help
show possible links between the highly valued depleted
uranium weapons and veterans' health problems.
"These are very effective weapons, and they want to keep
them," says Steve Smithson, assistant director of the
American Legion's Veterans Affairs and Rehabilitation Division.
Kilpatrick says the critics are wrong.
He and Melanson say there's no need to identify the low
levels of depleted uranium that the British can find because
the tests that the United States uses can detect depleted
uranium 1,000 times less than what's dangerous to health.
They cite World Health Organization, or WHO, and U.S.
Institute of Medicine reports as authorities, based on 50
years of health research involving uranium miners, millers
and processors. The Institute of Medicine is part of the
National Science Foundation and is considered the country's
best impartial health research organization. Kilpatrick and
Melanson also cite the recently completed Capstone study. It
involved measurements of inhalable-sized particles of
depleted uranium that resulted from test-range firing of the
weapons into a real tank, the hulls and turrets of tanks,
and other combat vehicles.
Kilpatrick and Melanson say the Capstone research got its
title because officials think that it provides the last
pieces of data necessary to determine the health effects of
depleted uranium.
Scientists who have been working outside the Pentagon to
answer that question say there are still some important
pieces missing before drawing such final conclusions.
Carolyn Fulco is one of the authors of the Institute of
Medicine's reports on Gulf War illnesses. She says it would
not be accurate to say her organization was as conclusive as
the Pentagon officials when it comes to how much depleted
uranium can harm someone.
"There was almost no literature on depleted uranium," she
says. Nearly all of it was on uranium before it became
depleted and in circumstances very different from the
possible exposure resulting from use of the weapons, she says.
As a result, the institute recommended additional study into
nearly all the health questions raised by the use of
depleted uranium in warfare. The WHO report says the same.
Beate Ritz is an epidemiologist at the University of
California, Los Angeles, who specializes in how internal
radiation sources cause cancer. She's also the primary
author of several of the most recent studies of the health
effects of working with uranium.
SCIENTISTS SAY SAFE LEVEL OF EXPOSURE ISN'T REALLY KNOWN
When the Institute of Medicine needed an expert to review
the report that Melanson cited to support his view that the
U.S. testing program is adequate, it turned to her for
approval. That's because she's one of the few people in the
world qualified to pass judgments of that type, Fulco says.
Ritz now sits on an advisory panel for the institute's
continuing review of possible causes of the illnesses
suffered by Gulf War vets.
She says no one knows what the safe level of depleted
uranium is inside someone's body when it comes to cancer and
risk from radiation.
The field is rife with errors and misclassifications because
actual testing to settle the matter with scientific
assurance is almost impossible, she says.
"When you're looking at humans, you need large numbers of
subjects," to make sure that you have accurate results, she
says. "But you can't cage humans and feed them uranium and
count the exposure for 20 years."
The next best thing is to pick an animal - and hope that
you've picked the right one, she says.
Even then, rats, mice and monkeys often have genetic and
other differences that can't tell you whether a human will
react the same way, she says.
So to be sure, you have to try things out on humans. Or see
what happens to them after exposure.
Lots of them.
Kilpatrick, Melanson and others say 50 years of experience
watching the health and health problems of people who have
worked as uranium miners, millers and processors during the
Nuclear Age give them the number of people and the
confidence to say that enough research has been done. They
point out that they add in a large margin of error to make
sure they're right.
They also dismiss the idea that depleted uranium exposures
resulting from combat can be a serious radiation or cancer risk.
Ritz and Alexandra Miller, a researcher at the Armed Forces
Radiobiological Research Institute, say that isn't a
justified conclusion, as far as science goes.
"I don't see the data that supports that at all," Miller says.
The studies on people who worked in the uranium industry are
often flawed and don't involve the same issues and exposures
as soldiers on the battlefield, Miller says. The Institute
of Medicine's report says the same thing, and so does the
Department of Veterans Affairs' educational program for
physicians and other health care workers.
Using uranium industry workers' health experiences as a
benchmark might not be a good measure either, say critics of
the military's dismissal of the health threat from depleted
uranium.
Several studies by Congress' Government Accountability
Office, or GAO, note that getting an accurate picture of
nuclear workers' health is difficult. That's in part because
for years, the government encouraged its contractors and
managers to refuse to acknowledge work-related diseases and
health problems. This helped mask the true death and illness
rate to researchers.
As for whether the health standards are adequate, there's
also a great deal of debate. The GAO says the government
will probably need to spend more than $1 billion this decade
to compensate nuclear workers for health problems - a higher
cost than estimated because the number of workers with
legitimate claims keeps rising.
In addition, the GAO says, there's little or no scientific
agreement on what constitutes an acceptable radiation risk,
even among U.S. government agencies.
SCIENTIFIC MODELS NEED TESTING TO PROVE ACCURACY
Kilpatrick and Melanson say the Capstone study's
data-gathering enabled them to determine how much depleted
uranium dust would be inhaled in the worst of battle
circumstances. They say the calculations on that volume of
dust, using mathematical and other models of human health
adopted by government occupational and safety agencies,
prove little or no adverse health effect from use of the
weapons.
Those calculations create a new standard for discussing the
issue, Kilpatrick says.
Ritz and Miller say the Capstone work doesn't change the
fact that there has been insufficient experimentation on
animals to prove or disprove the assertions of safety.
The calculations and models that the Pentagon points to are
nothing more than theory waiting to be tested, they and
other scientists say.
"You know the problem with models, don't you?" Ritz asks.
"You get out of them what you put in."
The type of models that the Capstone study relies on for its
conclusions are frequently shown to be flawed, she says.
That's much of what health science is all about - testing
the models and showing whether they work.
A recent example of how these models can be flawed occurred
with the chemical paraquat, Ritz says.
For decades, the U.S. government had been using it - and
giving it to other countries - to eradicate marijuana and
other plants used to make drugs. Critics questioned the
wisdom of those programs, noting that the possible effects
of ingesting the drugs were not known.
Government officials dismissed the caution warnings.
For one thing, they noted that long-established scientific
models said paraquat couldn't cause brain damage because its
chemical composition kept it from penetrating through a
layer of cells that protect the brain from impurities in the
blood.
The layer of cells is called the "blood-brain" barrier.
"All that was true," Ritz says. But just a few years ago,
one of her colleagues found that paraquat could get into the
brain anyway.
Like other parts of the body, the brain needs amino acids to
make proteins to keep going.
The brain has special nerves to directly transfer those
acids to the brain, bypassing the brain-blood barrier.
Paraquat is made of molecules that look like amino acids.
So the brain sucks up the paraquat molecules, thinking that
they're amino acids, she says. "And it can cause brain
damage when it happens."
That's one of many examples where the models aren't good enough.
And it's why sufficient research involving human cells and
animals should be done to test the models thoroughly before
declaring something safe, she and Miller say.
Vernon Walker, a cancer biologist at the Lovelace
Respiratory Research Institute in New Mexico, conducted a
study that found that when rats inhaled depleted uranium,
they developed genetic mutations indicative of cancer.
He says the government exposure standards and scientific
models used to determine workplace safety - the barometers
of safety used in the Capstone study - don't include the
potential for developing cancer in the way that his
experiments showed is likely.
The military has drugs, developed in the World War II era
for troops exposed to radiation, that can reduce those
mutations to safer levels, he says.
Experiments are being conducted to see whether they have the
same effect on depleted uranium inhaled from the
battlefield, as well as from shrapnel.
He says that based on his experiments and what he's seen
from other science on the subject, he'd be taking those
drugs if he were a soldier in Iraq and was exposed -
especially if he were hit by depleted uranium shrapnel.
"I'd be taking the pills for the rest of my life," Walker says.
Miller says her research has found that a single particle of
depleted uranium can deform cells and DNA, the basic
building block of life, in ways thought to lead to cancer.
Others have shown that uranium in the body and inhaled
uranium can make its way to the brain.
Those findings haven't solved the riddle of Gulf War vets'
illnesses, but they're far from comforting about how safe
the black dust from the explosions must be, Miller says.
Someone practicing good science shouldn't be closing the
book on the subject and declaring a particular level of
exposure safe under those under-researched circumstances,
she says.
TOO FEW PEOPLE HAVE BEEN STUDIED TO KNOW THE TRUTH
Ritz says the same thing about the possibility that cancer
risks might increase after inhalation of depleted uranium.
"Our human research, as valuable as it is, has a lot of
severe limitations," she says.
At most, she says, it proves that we've been unable to
detect anything, not that there's no risk.
There might be 6,000 people involved in the studies that the
government is relying on, she says.
Perhaps that's enough to figure out whether something's
toxic, she says, but it's far from enough to determine
whether it's carcinogenic.
For cancer, if you had a million people and followed them
for 50 years, you might be able to determine a safe level of
exposure with confidence, she says.
But no study has ever attempted to follow uranium workers on
that large a scale, not to mention people exposed to
depleted uranium, she says.
After the Pentagon tested the New York reservists and
announced that the soldiers tested negative for depleted
uranium, a news briefing was called.
William Winkenwerder Jr., a physician who is assistant
secretary of defense for health affairs, told reporters that
10 years of health studies found that "low levels of
depleted uranium that our troops would be exposed to are
neither a radiological or chemical health threat to our
service members."
He also said there was no evidence linking depleted uranium
to radiation-induced illnesses such as leukemia and cancers.
But Ritz says the failure to find a link to cancer at this
point isn't surprising at all.
It will take about 30 more years before soldiers from the
Persian Gulf War could reasonably be expected to start
showing evidence of most cancers spawned as recently as
1991, she says.
Lung cancer - which many researchers say is the most likely
form that might result from inhaling depleted uranium -
would take a few years longer to show up, she says.
Some forms of leukemia and lymphomas might have started
showing up in the past year or two, she says.
Those forms of cancer have also been identified as possible
problems because lymph nodes are vulnerable when particles
are inhaled.
Even if an outbreak of leukemia and lymphomas has begun
among veterans of the Gulf War, it's unlikely that the data
to prove it would have been collected and that anyone would
know about it, the GAO says.
No one is comparing a list of cancer deaths in the 50 states
with the names or Social Security numbers of veterans from
the Gulf War, the GAO says.
And no one is likely to begin doing it anytime soon because
the money has not been made available, the agency says.
NO MONEY TO TRACK VETS' CANCER RATE ANYWAY
In the past 13 years, only two studies have been financed to
determine cancer incidence among Gulf War veterans, the GAO
says, and both of them had limited ability to study the problem.
The studies' access to data is being curtailed as a result
of financial and legal issues, the report says. Veterans in
only a few states were included.
VA officials say they're studying ways to fill this gap in
the data.
In the meantime, Ritz says, the best that we can do is guess
what a safe level of exposure to depleted uranium might be.
Depleted uranium isn't alone in this respect.
Of all known carcinogens, "none of those in the carcinogenic
fields have accepted a threshold level," where safe and
unsafe can be identified with a measurable number, Ritz says.
Threshold levels are set by government agencies, not
scientists, Ritz says.
"These are all policy decisions about what is acceptable,"
not to be confused with scientific proof, she says.
There are many critics of the military's approach to
establishing safety levels and standards, but there are also
many scientists who agree with how Kilpatrick, Melanson and
others have handled the problem that they're faced with.
Terry C. Pellmar - who works at the same lab as Miller -
co-authored the first research paper citing that depleted
uranium from pellets embedded in the bodies of rats might
migrate to their brains.
Still, she says, she doubts that depleted uranium is
responsible for the neurological problems suffered by
veterans of the Persian Gulf War. And she doubts that the
government is making a mistake in the policies it's
established regarding the safety of depleted uranium on the
battlefield.
"As a scientist, I'm not sure of anything" that could be
deemed absolutely safe, she says.
"As an individual, I would have no personal concerns."
Knowing the science as well as she does, she thinks that a
soldier can trust the Pentagon's assessment of the risks.
If she were a soldier on a battlefield, she says, she would
feel safe, as far as the danger from inhaling depleted
uranium dust.
"We all live in a world that's filled with things that
increase the chances of getting cancer," Pellmar says.
Even if Miller's research shows that a single particle of
inhaled depleted uranium might increase the risk of cancer,
that degree of increased risk is accepted by people all the
time in everyday life. There's an increased risk of cancer
if you spend time in smoky bars, she says. "Yet, we all walk
into smoky bars."
Similarly, she says, there's increased risk from living in
Colorado, for instance, because there's more uranium in the
environment there naturally, compared with most states.
Yet thousands of people have been moving to Colorado for years.
So given the battlefield advantages that depleted uranium
gives soldiers, she says, taking that little extra risk
might be a good bet.
--
Posted for educational and research purposes only,
~ in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 ~
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37 [du-list] 'Danger Dismissed'
Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 15:36:54 -0800
'Danger Dismissed'
HAMPTON ROADS, VA. Daily Press
December 17, 2004
http://www.dailypress.com/news/opinion/dp-34222sy0dec17,0,5353143.story?coll=dp-opinion-editorials
There's that old saying: If you don't want to know the
answer, don't ask the question.
Even though the U.S. government has spent more than $247
million trying to determine why so many veterans of the 1991
Persian Gulf War are sick, you get the feeling the Pentagon
doesn't really want to know the truth about one critical
part of the arsenal in that war: depleted uranium.
How dangerous is it, really?
How much of the illness afflicting Gulf War vets can be
attributed to depleted uranium?
"Danger Dismissed," a six-day series on depleted uranium by
Daily Press staff reporter Bob Evans, made clear that the
military does not believe the vets' problems are a result of
exposure to depleted uranium. Veterans such as Matt Rohman
of York County, who was a bull of a man when he went to war,
but who today suffers horribly: numbness in his hands and
feet, joint pain, migraine headaches, sleeplessness, asthma,
fatigue.
Why is he so sick?
Why are so many of the men and women who fought in the war
sick? The figures are astounding: Of the 697,000 U.S. men
and women who went to war, more than one-fourth have a
disability for which they are compensated by the Department
of Veterans Affairs. That's a rate nearly three times higher
than for previous wars.
These vets were exposed to a buffet of chemicals and
medicines and dangerous materials, some of which were
intended to protect them from other threats. They were
exposed at different levels, under different circumstances.
No one suggests that trying to figure out what made them
sick would be easy. But it's easy to understand why the U.S.
military might not want to look too deeply into the effects
of exposure to depleted uranium: It's the best weapon ever
made for destroying tanks.
But when depleted uranium hits a hard target, the result is
burning pieces of microscopic dust. And there's a link
between inhaling that dust and cancer.
How many vets inhaled the dust? The military shows no
interest in using the most sophisticated test for measuring
exposure.
What level of exposure is acceptable? The military appears
too comfortable with standards that might be flawed.
Shouldn't there be greater research in the whole area of
detection and health effects, given the importance of this
weapon? Research dollars are starting to dry up.
Shouldn't there be aggressive training of U.S. troops, so
they'll know the risks of depleted uranium and how to
protect themselves in situations where exposure is possible?
Apparently training can be labeled, at best, haphazard.
Many people who get cancer get it only years after exposure
to the cancer-causing substance. Will there be an epidemic
of cancer among Gulf War vets in another 30 years? That's
when the first of the lung cancers are likely to show up.
Forms of lymphoma and leukemia would be evident right about
now, but we wouldn't know it because the government hasn't
been willing to fund the studies to find out. Shouldn't that
be a top priority?
We live in a world where depleted uranium weapons may well
be used again. They give U.S. forces an incredible advantage
on the battlefield. But at what cost?
A better understanding of the health effects of depleted
uranium would bring nothing but benefits. For the vets who
are sick, even if their sickness isn't caused by depleted
uranium - because then doctors could focus on other possible
causes. For the men and women in the military today, because
a better assessment of the danger would allow for their
better protection. And for the credibility of the Defense
Department, which has a sad history of dismissing the
dangers its troops face.
What's needed is more study, more understanding of the
effects of depleted uranium. The military shouldn't be
afraid to ask the questions - over and over - until there
are answers that satisfy all reasonable doubts.
--
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38 [du-list] Have Lessons of the Gulf Been Learned?
Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 15:36:56 -0800
Have Lessons of the Gulf Been Learned?
The Pentagon's new rules for training and evaluating troops
exposed to depleted uranium aren't being followed in many
cases, troops say.
December 17, 2004
Hampton Roads, VA, Daily Press
By BOB EVANS
bevans@dailypress.com 247-4758
http://www.dailypress.com/news/specials/dp-du7,0,5012653.story?coll=dp-breaking-news
When U.S. troops deployed for the 1991 Persian Gulf War,
very few of them had even heard of depleted uranium.
Even fewer received any training about its characteristics
or possible health hazards.
"There was no training for depleted uranium," says Steve
Smithson, assistant director of the American Legion's
Veterans Affairs and Rehabilitation Division.
In the Gulf War, Smithson was in the 1st Marine Division.
Since then, he's been working to help vets with health
problems they think are related to their service.
There are a lot of them. More than a quarter of the 697,000
men and women who went to the 1991 war have some form of
disability from the Department of Veterans Affairs, a rate
nearly three times higher than those of previous wars.
Government officials deny that any of those veterans are
suffering as a result of inhaling the toxic and mildly
radioactive dust that results from explosions involving
depleted uranium.
But after spending more than $247 million, they also can't
say what's made all those veterans so sick.
Which raises the question: What will happen to the troops
from the latest wars?
The official list from the 1991 conflict still has depleted
uranium weapons as a possible culprit. But it also includes
high-strength bug repellent containing DEET and other
chemicals; experimental pills and shots given to ward off
the effects of diseases; exposure to chemical weapons; and
inhalation of high levels of hydrocarbons from oil-well fires.
Military health officials say the troops who fought in Iraq
and Afghanistan will be spared most of those risks, but they
acknowledge that it'll be years before they'll be able to
say with certainty how much healthier they will be.
Many of the dangers encountered by troops in the 1991 war
have simply been avoided: Different bug sprays and drugs are
being employed to keep people healthy, for instance.
But not all have been replaced, including the use of
depleted uranium weapons. The weapons provide a decisive
advantage on the battlefield because they can slice through
the toughest armor used in opponents' tanks and other
hardware. Pentagon officials say about 150 tons of the slim
depleted uranium projectiles were fired in Operation Iraqi
Freedom - about half the amount used in the Gulf War.
Pentagon officials insist that any dangers to U.S. troops
from the use of depleted uranium weapons will be reduced
significantly as a result of training programs enacted since
the 1991 war.
No training was offered for reservists at Fort Eustis
The Government Accountability Office, or GAO, has raised
questions about how much of the training has been pushed
down the ranks, particularly when it comes to reserve units.
So do the troops who've gone to fight the latest war.
A key Army environmental and health study says
transportation soldiers are among those who should have
special training. Fort Eustis in Newport News is the home of
the Army Transportation Corps, a post that's sent thousands
of active-duty and reserve troops off to war in the past two
years.
It offered no training in depleted uranium to hundreds of
reservists called up to be deployed overseas, and it stopped
giving that training to the regular Army troops at the post
in late 2002, officials there say.
Having any training at all on the dangers of depleted
uranium on the battlefield is a big change from what the
soldiers who went off to fight the 1991 Gulf War
experienced, says Michael J. Kilpatrick, deputy director of
deployment health at the Pentagon.
"The Army has done an excellent job in doing depleted
uranium awareness training," he says. Several years ago, the
Army made questions about depleted uranium part of its
"Common Tasks Manual," a compilation of military knowledge
and skills that makes up an annual quiz each soldier takes
before being certified up to speed in training.
Kilpatrick says one indication this is working is that only
about 1,000 men and women returning home from service in
Operation Iraqi Freedom have asked for testing so far. Only
five have tested positive for exposure to depleted uranium,
he says, and all of them had depleted uranium shrapnel.
More than 250,000 Army soldiers have been to the Iraqi war
theater so far, an Army spokesman says. Navy and Air Force
personnel aren't considered likely for exposure to depleted
uranium from a battlefield, though at least one of the
people who tested positive for depleted uranium from the
recent fighting was in the Air Force, Pentagon officials say.
Critics say the low numbers could result from other factors.
K. Craig Hyams, a medical doctor and consultant to the
Department of Veterans Affairs, says the Pentagon's method
of deciding who needs to be tested is flawed - and probably
is part of the reason that the number of returning service
personnel designated for medical attention isn't higher.
Unless someone has an obvious exposure on the battlefield
and is tested by medical personnel overseas, the military
relies on a four-page questionnaire to identify who's been
exposed and who needs to be tested, Kilpatrick says. Troops
are supposed to fill out the questionnaire, identifying
whether they experienced possible exposures to depleted
uranium or other hazards. Each questionnaire is then
supposed to be reviewed by trained medical personnel.
Hyams points out that the questionnaire depends on the
troops to identify and remember potential hazards. Like any
self-reporting survey, it therefore has inherent flaws.
Additionally, he says, it's handed to troops just as they're
ready to go home from war. It's not a time when troops want
to identify themselves as someone in need of additional
attention from doctors or officers, he says, or set
themselves apart from their buddies.
"When they come home, they're thinking about coming home,"
he told a congressional panel. "They don't want to get held
up in medical."
Troops know that if they raise a fuss about possible health
issues when they come back from deployment, it will only
delay the time when they get to be with their loved ones.
"So these are not good periods of time to try to put all
your eggs in that basket to collect information," Hyams
testified.
More than two dozen veterans of the war interviewed by the
Daily Press say they weren't questioned or tested for
depleted uranium, even after they'd reported exposures on
the forms. They were from six units and processed back into
the country at three sites.
Steve Robinson is executive director of the Gulf War
Resource Center veterans rights group. He says that while he
helped congressional aides look into the problems of
soldiers returning home from war, some troops said their
senior officers discouraged them from asking for depleted
uranium testing. He says troops returning to Army posts in
Georgia, Kentucky and New Jersey made those complaints.
Members of Congress have warned that one result of the
Pentagon's failure to promptly address health problems with
troops is that the cost of testing and medical care is
shifted from the defense budget to the overburdened VA
budget and health care system.
Anyone who deployed to the Persian Gulf region is eligible
for up to two years of VA care. After the Gulf War, those
who left the military had to prove that their problems were
service-related before they could get that care.
Veterans say foolproof training isn't likely
Thousands of troops have been processed back into the
country through Fort Eustis and Langley Air Force Base since
the fighting began in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Military health officials at each installation say every
returning airman and soldier is given the four-page
post-deployment health questionnaire, which asks for
information about where they saw service, what they did,
what part of the military they're in, their pay grade and
other facts.
It's a form that can be fed into a computer, so it involves
mostly "yes," "no" or fill-in-a-circle questions. Troops are
asked about any health complaints, how many times they went
to sick call, and about any drugs that they took while
deployed. Pentagon officials say they plan to archive the
completed forms in case the information is needed later.
Question 14 is a list of 22 possible hazards that the
soldier thinks he or she might have been exposed to. The
soldier is supposed to color in a circle under the heading
of "no," "sometimes" or "often" for each one.
The list includes "DEET insect repellent applied to skin,"
"flea or tick collars," "paints," "radar/microwaves," "loud
noises," "sand/dust" and other items.
The second-to-last item on the list is "Depleted Uranium (If
yes, explain)."
A 11/2 -inch-long black line comes after "explain" for
anyone who wants to fill it in.
That's the only question that specifically inquires about
depleted uranium, though there's a question that asks, "Were
you in or did you enter or closely inspect any destroyed
military vehicles?" Another asks, "Do you think you were
exposed to any chemical, biological or radiological warfare
agents during this deployment?"
Smithson, who fought in the Persian Gulf War as a Marine,
and Robinson, who spent 20 years in the Army and served as a
Ranger, say the questionnaire's reliance on foolproof
training is a mistake. "Just because the course is there or
the information is there doesn't mean it's being implemented
across the board," says Smithson of the American Legion.
Kilpatrick says the level of training about depleted uranium
before deployment makes the self-reporting approach to the
problem valid. He says anyone who says on the questionnaire
that they were exposed to depleted uranium "sometimes" or
"often" is questioned thoroughly by trained medical staff. A
urine test for depleted uranium is given when the military
examiner thinks that one is necessary or when someone asks.
Troops back from the war disagree.
Some troops say testing for DU is discouraged
Michael Lemke, 45, of Denver rejoined the Army Reserve after
the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He'd seen the
destruction and carnage, then saw his former college
roommate on television in a New York Fire Department
uniform, going through the rubble.
He'd left the Reserve 13 years earlier, and active duty
years before that, but he knew that he wanted to be part of
the response to terrorism. "I wanted to kick some ass," he
says. "I was mad."
He figured that young troops could use an old sergeant to
help them. So he left his wife, his kids and a secure
government job as an airline baggage safety inspector and
finagled his way back into uniform. When he learned that his
Reserve unit wasn't likely to be called up, he worked his
way into another - a combat support unit accompanying troops
during the hottest part of the war in Iraq. His unit
captured the later-notorious Abu Gharib prison and the
railhead in Baghdad, Iraq's capital, he says.
Racing through - and to - the enemy involved breathing a lot
of smoke from Iraqi tanks and other vehicles hit by depleted
uranium, he says. After suffering some injuries, he was sent
to a hospital in Germany and eventually to a hospital in his
home state of Colorado, at Fort Collins.
At each step, he says, he was told that he had to fill out
the post-deployment questionnaire before he could move
forward for treatment. And at each step, he says, he
reported exposure to depleted uranium weapons and the tanks
and other objects they'd hit.
No one in the military medical system ever asked him about
the exposures, he says, even though he spent a year in the
hospital at Fort Collins, mostly waiting to be discharged
with a medical disability. Usually, no one whom he saw even
read the form.
Now he's got breathing problems and wants VA officials to
give him a urine test for depleted uranium.
Other veterans of the war, whether they thought they had
exposure to depleted uranium or not, say that happened to
them too. They simply handed in the forms and went on their
way, with no indication that anyone ever read what they
checked or wrote.
Lemke says he's worried that several of his health problems
might be related to depleted uranium exposure. He's
constantly short of breath, "with or without physical
exertion," he says. He quit smoking years ago and says he
ran five miles a day before the war.
Memory loss, heart problems and frequent migraine headaches
are also part of the picture, he says. All are typical of
problems reported by veterans of the Persian Gulf War.
Lemke says he's willing to talk about the Army's failures
now because he's left the service on partial disability and
is beyond the reach of reprisals. He says soldiers whom he
lived with in the hospital at Fort Collins frequently talked
about the military's failure to address their concerns
involving exposure to depleted uranium and other problems.
He says they also talked about how they couldn't take their
worries public, for fear of punishment.
Other troops who deployed - but asked that their names not
be used because they feared retribution before their
benefits were settled - told similar stories to the Daily
Press about how faulty the screening process was when they
came home.
Robinson, of the Gulf War Resource Center, says he's talked
to dozens of soldiers who've returned from Afghanistan and
Iraq who say their superiors made it clear that they
shouldn't press for depleted uranium testing.
Those who want to continue their careers go without the
tests, he says. The others are planning to ask for testing
once they're in the VA system.
Few troops are tested, despite reporting exposures
Earlier this year, the GAO briefly looked into how well the
testing program was going. It was part of a wider
investigation into the Pentagon's health screening for
deployed troops.
Rep. Robert Filner, D-Calif., asked for the investigation,
and Dan Fahey, a longtime researcher on depleted uranium,
sat in on a September briefing on the topic at the
congressman's request. The agency's final report isn't finished.
Fahey says GAO investigators reported examining records at
seven bases where Army, Air Force, Navy or Marine personnel
were processed back from the war.
After examining 1,126 questionnaires, they found only 32
people who reported possible exposure to depleted uranium,
Fahey says. Of the 32, only three received testing, the GAO
investigators reported.
An Army Reserve unit processed through Fort Eustis was one
of those the GAO auditors examined, Fahey says, but it was
not identified. Of the 127 people in that unit, three
indicated depleted uranium exposure "sometimes" or "often."
The GAO investigators said one was given depleted uranium
testing, another was referred for additional medical
examination but not necessarily for depleted uranium, while
the third was deemed by the fort's medical personnel to be
someone who didn't need testing.
The GAO investigators said they did not ask why that person,
or any others, weren't tested, Fahey says. In one case, 19
members of a 146-person Air Force special operations unit
reported depleted uranium exposure, but only one of them was
tested.
None of the 270 Marines reported potential exposure, Fahey
says, even though Marine units typically were involved in
the type of combat where the weapons are used extensively.
The Pentagon lists three levels of exposure
Kilpatrick says filling in the "sometimes" or "often" circle
on the questionnaire isn't enough reason to give someone a
depleted uranium test.
The criteria that determines who gets tested and who doesn't
puts exposure risks into three categories:
Level I involves people who were in or on a vehicle struck
by a depleted uranium weapon, or someone who tried to rescue
someone from a vehicle immediately after it had been struck.
Level II involves soldiers who did not wear a respirator
when they spent several hours entering vehicles struck by
depleted uranium or fought fires involving depleted uranium
munitions.
Level III involves people who drove through smoke from a
fire involving depleted uranium, entered a vehicle that had
been hit or had "infrequent and short-term exposures."
Kilpatrick says medical personnel trained in depleted
uranium exposure risks should question troops who filled in
the "sometimes" or "often" answer involving depleted uranium
exposure. Those questions should lead to an assessment
exposure levels.
Troops with exposures in Level I and Level II are supposed
to be tested, Kilpatrick says. Tests aren't recommended for
Level III exposures but will be given if someone requests
it, he says.
He and other Pentagon officials say it's unlikely that
anyone who wasn't exposed to a lot of the dust is in danger.
But some scientists have found that a single particle of
depleted uranium dust can cause the type of mutations in
cells thought to lead to cancer.
The exposures that Lemke and most troops report fall into
Level III.
Health officials at Langley and Fort Eustis say they're
confident that the post-deployment health form and screening
is working properly. That's in part, they say, because of
the training that people receive before their deployment and
in part because of the care that's given when they return.
Smithson and Robinson, who have served in the military and
are familiar with the training, say they're being too
optimistic.
The training is so poor, so out of date and so biased,
soldiers can't be expected to fill in the questionnaires in
a meaningful way, Robinson says.
Smithson says the military isn't likely to emphasize the
danger of the weapons because "they don't - and this is my
personal opinion - want to freak people out."
After the 1991 war and the thousands of undiagnosed
illnesses suffered by its veterans, the Pentagon finally
admitted in 1997 that soldiers ordered to clean up
battlefield sites were unnecessarily exposed to potentially
dangerous levels of depleted uranium dust. The admission
occurred after Congress asked the Army Environmental Policy
Institute to make a full report on the issue.
The institute's long report to Congress called for a number
of changes in policies. The recommendations included
improved training "for the wide variety of soldiers and
support personnel who may come in contact with depleted
uranium or depleted-uranium-contaminated equipment."
"At a minimum," it read, "the Army should include armor,
infantry, engineer, ordnance, transportation and medical
personnel in this training."
'I didn't ever think I'd have a need.'
Transportation personnel were identified because they might
be responsible for delivering the ammunition and also could
be expected to be near the front lines where it was used.
Pentagon investigations into possibly hazardous depleted
uranium exposures during the Gulf War include instances
where trucks thought to be carrying depleted uranium
munitions caught fire because of faulty brakes and other
reasons. Once the fires started, the trucks' cargos burned,
creating a possible contamination problem in the air for
nearby troops and the truck crews, the reports read.
Depleted uranium weapons are prone to easy combustion. Once
they start burning, tiny bits of the weapons start turning
into mildly radioactive toxic dust particles that are easily
inhaled and can carry on the wind or drafts of air that
accompany a fire, Army records show. Once inhaled, those
particles provide risk of cancer and other health problems.
At Fort Eustis, most of the troops who have deployed and
returned from Operation Iraqi Freedom are members of Reserve
transportation units.
Interviews with members of the 547th Transportation
Battalion - a Reserve unit from Washington, D.C., and one of
the largest Reserve units to process through Fort Eustis -
found that only one soldier recalled getting any training in
depleted uranium - the commanding officer. Rank-and-file
troops, even squad and platoon leaders, say it didn't happen.
Shannon Goodwin, a Head Start administrator and pastor who
serves as a platoon sergeant in the Reserve unit, says she's
never received training in depleted uranium. While deployed
in Iraq, she was responsible for the safety and training of
32 to 36 soldiers, she says. She's been in the Reserve seven
years and says she'd know what training her platoon received.
Goodwin says her troops could have been asked to transport
depleted uranium weapons while in Iraq, but were never
called on to do it. Mostly, they provided security for
convoys carrying mail and other items.
While in Iraq, they saw plenty of blown-up Iraqi tanks and
other vehicles, but she never got close to them, she says.
Many were left from the 1991 war. "They were off-limits, a
safety hazard," she says. But no one ever said exactly why.
She says she's never researched or studied depleted uranium
and doesn't know much about it. "I didn't ever think I'd
have a need," Goodwin says. "I never thought I'd be in Iraq,
either."
When she got back to Fort Eustis after her 18-month
deployment, Goodwin says, she was handed the health
questionnaire and saw the question about depleted uranium.
She says she asked the medics in the unit what to do, and on
their advice, she wrote "not sure," just in case there might
be a problem later.
Other members of the unit reported similar experiences. Sgt.
Awadit Ramdat said he, too, had never been trained about the
hazards of depleted uranium or how to spot where it had been
used.
"I do not know much about it," he says. He says he checked
one of the boxes to indicate possible exposure on the health
questionnaire, just in case.
No one questioned him about it further, he says, other than
to ask whether he ever went into any Iraqi tanks that had
been blown up.
He hadn't gone inside, but "we were close," he says. "The
tanks were right there," no more than 20 to 30 feet away.
Training, at best, consisted of a 15-minute film
Army training materials say people not wearing protective
masks and clothing should stay 160 or more feet away to
avoid the dust from explosions. Army medical personnel are
taught to consider exposures such as Ramdat's inconsequential.
Ramdat and Goodwin say they feel just fine, now that they're
home.
Capt. Malik Freeman, commander of their unit, says his
health is good too. He also says his troops were trained
about depleted uranium before deployment. "They brief you
several times about it," he says, but he acknowledges that
"there's not a lot of time spent on it."
The training mostly involves a 15-minute film, which his
unit saw at Fort Eustis, he says. "Sometimes, soldiers don't
remember. We give them so many briefings."
Those briefings didn't include the dangers of depleted
uranium, at least not at Fort Eustis, officials there say.
They say they didn't offer any training like that to
reservists from the 547th or any other unit that processed
through.
"None of those people asked for, or got, any training," says
Betty Bartz, a spokeswoman for Fort Eustis.
Freeman says he wasn't aware any of his troops marked their
health questionnaires in a way that indicated possible
exposure once they'd returned home. In civilian life, he's
an agent for the U.S. Department of Transportation who
investigates illegal transportation of hazardous substances,
he says.
His unit spent 11 weeks at Fort Eustis before it could be
deployed, Freeman says. Originally, it was supposed to take
only four weeks, but the Army wasn't satisfied that the unit
was safely ready to go and kept it until it was adequately
prepared.
The Army has a long checklist of training, medical and other
requirements that must be met before Reserve troops can be
deployed.
Checking to see whether they had training in depleted
uranium wasn't one of them, says Col. Don Caldwell, who
commanded the Reserve unit responsible for administering
that checklist for deploying Reserve units at Fort Eustis
from April 2003 until July. He says no training in the
subject was provided there that he knew about.
"That was one issue that I don't remember being raised," he
says.
Lemke and members of Reserve units deployed from several
other sites say they also didn't receive any training about
the possible hazards of depleted uranium on the battlefield
before or during deployment.
For active-duty Army personnel, depleted uranium is covered
in basic training for all soldiers, says Camille Kenner, a
spokesman for the Army Training and Doctrine Command at Fort
Leonard Wood, Mo. For troops who get later specialized
training in battle-damage repair, chemical weapons or
Bradley Fighting vehicles, there's additional training.
She and other Training and Doctrine Command officials say
they have no record of how many troops who participated in
Operation Iraqi Freedom and subsequent operations had
depleted uranium training. They said it wasn't up to them to
keep those records. They referred questions about training
in that area to Central Command, which oversees all troops
deployed to the Iraqi and Afghanistan war theaters.
Officials there said they didn't know, either.
Four years ago, the GAO reported the same problem to
Congress and the Pentagon. It also recommended that the
military do a better job of ensuring that troops receive
proper training before deployment.
Depleted uranium training comes off the list
The watchdog agency found that Army combat infantry troops
deployed to Kosovo, where depleted uranium weapons were used
extensively, often didn't receive training about depleted
uranium's dangers.
Only 65 percent of the troops that it interviewed had that
training, the GAO says, and there was great variation among
units as to whether soldiers had been trained and how
well-versed they were in issues related to the hazards of
depleted uranium.
Active-duty unit commanders can add training to their
troops' plates, even if it isn't required, Kenner says, so
it's possible that many units go beyond the minimum. The
Army doesn't keep track of that, either, she says.
The GAO and several members of Congress have pointed out a
difference between the training and equipment provided to
Reserve units deployed to Iraq and the regular Army units
sent to that battlefield.
Fort Eustis sent a number of Reserve and National Guard
units to Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the 7th
Transportation Group, an active-duty regular Army unit now
in the gulf region.
Before the 7th deployed, Capt. Thelonious McLean-Burrell was
the group's training officer, as well as the nuclear,
biological and chemical warfare officer. He says members of
his unit have been going to assignments in the battle zone
since the fall of 2002.
Even though Pentagon officials say that all soldiers are
supposed to be tested on their knowledge of depleted uranium
safety issues each year, that has not been a part of the
unit's training since the deployments began, he says.
Before that, it was an annual requirement, he says.
"It came off the list in 2003 and again this year,"
McLean-Burrell says. "I don't expect it to come back on.
We're not fighting any tank battles."
McLean-Burrell and other members of the 7th are now deployed
in Iraq and Kuwait.
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39 [du-list] For Veterans, What's Next?
Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 15:36:58 -0800
For Veterans, What's Next?
BY BOB EVANS
bevans@dailypress.com 247-4758
247-4758
December 17, 2004
http://www.dailypress.com/news/dp-32824sy0dec17,0,6397887.story?coll=dp-headlines-topnews
After he came home from the 1991 Persian Gulf War as an
honorably discharged vet, Matt Rohman tried to go back to
work as a landscaper, the job that he'd held before joining
the Army.
When he enlisted in 1989, he was 24, 200 pounds and a few
years past his glory as a multisport athlete at Tabb High
School. Essentially, friends say, Rohman was a bigger,
stronger version of the linebacker who helped win the 1981
state football championship.
By the time he came home from the Gulf War, he was down to
about 160 pounds. He'd lost his teeth and, seemingly, all
his strength. The Army offered an early honorable discharge
and a 20 percent disability for a knee injury that he'd
suffered in Iraq, then sent him home. Months passed, and it
only got worse. On many days, Rohman was too weak to work.
An unexplained fatigue sapped him.
Bobby Kriegbaum, owner of Nature's Way landscaping in York
County, knew Rohman as a hard worker before the war.
Kriegbaum, a retired vet, wanted to help. So he looked the
other way when Rohman wasn't up to par, giving him easy
duties or paying him to stay home or go to doctors.
Unlike many veterans of the Gulf War who came home sick and
without health insurance, Rohman had access to the U.S.
Department of Veterans Affairs' health system because of his
service-related knee injury.
Those doctor visits didn't stop the onslaught of medical
mysteries, though. Things got worse, and more things went
wrong. The fatigue was followed by severe pains in his
joints and head. His lungs wouldn't draw a full breath. He
lost feeling in his hands and feet.
By 1997, Rohman was so weak, in so much daily pain and so
debilitated by the numbing neuropathy in his hands and feet,
he couldn't work even a few days a week or month. On most
days, he was lucky to be able to get out of bed.
A Williamsburg lawyer, Edgar R. Jones, volunteered to get
Rohman a better VA disability check. After four years of
fighting, he finally convinced the government that Rohman's
other ills were service-related from the war. He won Rohman
a 70 percent disability rating that now yields about $1,200
a month. Jones and another attorney, Cynthia Thorpe, won
Rohman a supplemental Social Security disability check of
about $700 a month.
By then, Rohman had married his high school sweetheart,
Kimberly. He'd planned to ask her out when he got home after
the war, he says. But then he decided to wait until the VA
doctors solved his health problems. He'd never expected it
to take so long. Meanwhile, Kimberly had married someone
else, had a daughter and then got divorced.
'We break a lot of glasses,' veteran's wife says
Rohman eventually decided not to wait for a cure to ask her
out, even though he could hardly walk.
"Personalitywise, he hasn't changed a bit," Kimberly says.
He's still the kind, gentle and good-humored guy she'd dated
as a teenager. The frail body and pain were no reason not to
marry him.
"We break a lot of glasses," she says with a smile, when
asked what it's like. The glasses break because her husband
can't feel how hard he's gripping anything. He either drops
them from squeezing too little or shatters them into bloody
shards from squeezing too tight.
He also has memory problems, typical of Gulf War vets who
are sick and of people who take a lot of medications. "That
causes a lot of discussions between the two of us," she
says, closing her eyes briefly, then glancing at her
husband, who grins.
The Rohmans also can't take trips or vacations, or plan big
events with certainty, because Matt can't count on being
well enough to travel or even be able to show up that far in
advance.
Kimberly can't work more than a few days a week without
hiring a baby sitter or calling on a relative because Matt
can't physically handle taking care of the kids more often
than that. Sometimes they have to call the relative in
anyway, because there are days when he simply can't handle it.
They had a son nearly two years ago. Jacob, now 22 months,
has a respiratory problem normally associated with premature
babies. But he wasn't born prematurely.
Matt has severe respiratory problems too, but doctors tell
him Jacob's illness isn't inherited.
Health researchers are still looking into whether illnesses
suffered by Gulf War vets are being passed to their
offspring. Some studies say yes, others no. None has looked
comprehensively at enough of the 697,000 who deployed to
know for sure.
Rohman says he's now resigned to the likelihood that he'll
never get any better. "I was taking 15 pills a day," he
says, but when he did, "they numbed you, they kept you loopy."
So now he chooses carefully among the bottles and inhalers,
in search of a combination that makes the pains endurable
without losing his family to unconsciousness.
Backlogs are reported at VA, military hospitals
How many men and women like Rohman are out there as a result
of the hazards and toxins of the Gulf War isn't known. How
many there might be as a result of the continuing battles in
Iraq isn't known any better.
Steve Robinson, a retired Army Ranger who heads the Gulf War
Resource Center veterans rights group, says he fears that
the problem will be just as huge in a few years. Talking
with soldiers at posts in Georgia, New Jersey, Kentucky and
other locations that deployed large numbers of armor and
ground troops to the new war indicates a large problem is
brewing, he says.
VA and military hospitals in those areas can't keep up with
the backlog, and at congressional hearings, veterans have
complained about being left in "medical hold" for months
without getting treatment. Robinson suspects that the
government isn't being forthcoming about the problem and
that the numbers of troops with undiagnosed illnesses will
become apparent in only another year or two.
Steve Smithson, who handles similar issues for the American
Legion, says he's heard and seen the same thing. Smithson, a
Marine in the 1991 Gulf War, says he doesn't expect the
illnesses from the more recent fighting to be as widespread
but cautions that there'll be different illnesses and
problems to unravel. "It's a different war," he says.
Besides, he says, there are more troops with obvious
physical and psychological injuries this time.
Michael Kilpatrick, the Pentagon's deputy director of health
for deployed troops, says 20,000 people had been evacuated
for health reasons from the Iraqi theater of war as of
October. About 80 percent of them had noncombat injuries,
illnesses or health complaints. Others were injured, treated
and sent back to their units.
That's not a full count of troops with war-related health
problems, he says. It doesn't include those who came back
home with their units but realized later they needed
treatment. VA hospitals are reporting many veterans of
Operation Iraqi Freedom have checked in for treatment for
post-traumatic stress disorder.
None of the troops officially listed as medical evacuees is
ill as a result of exposure to depleted uranium, Kilpatrick
says. But he can't say how many of those cases have
diagnoses or fit into the pattern of fatigue, muscle
weakness, pain and other symptoms similar to those exhibited
after the Gulf War.
About 5,789 troops were being held in medical units as of
Oct. 22, he says, which indicates their health problems are
unresolved. That could mean there's a diagnosis but
treatment hasn't happened yet. The number changes every day
as ill or injured people come into that status and well
people leave. "To look at numbers of people in that
category, that's still a work in progress," Kilpatrick says.
About 9,000 others have been in and out of that status.
Most of the troops held in medical units for treatment have
diagnoses and are getting treatment, he says.
For the others, the lack of a diagnosis doesn't necessarily
mean there's another wave of sick soldiers coming like the
one from the 1991 war, he says.
The inability to diagnose an illness is common in civilian
and military medical practice. In about 75 percent of those
cases, there's never a diagnosis, he says. The symptoms just
go away.
The rest of the time, doctors order more tests, evaluations
and specialists, he says. That's why reservists coming back
from the war can go into medical hold for up to a year.
That's about how long it takes to make sure that every case
is evaluated and treated to the best of the military medical
system's ability. At year's end, a medical board decides
whether the person is disabled and can't return to duty. For
regular Army, Navy, Marine and Air Force personnel, it can
mean the end of their careers.
For reservists, the time in medical hold allows them to get
medical care so they're healthy and able when they return to
civilian life, he says.
Matt Rohman was 27 when he returned home from his war. Now
he's 40. His hair is overrun with gray, and on a good day,
he walks like a man more than twice his age.
When Rohman gets sick, there are days of anxious waiting to
see whether the symptoms will go away. If they do, he knows
that the problem was a cold or the flu. If they don't, it
could mean that another health problem has erupted, another
disability he must endure.
Earlier this year, his bowels shut down, and his stomach
lining became inflamed. No one's sure why or how it happened
or what it means. They just gave him more pills.
"Digestive problems" joined the parade of ills on his
medical chart.
As more problems get added to that list, more possible
causes emerge.
Soldiers used to cook with toxin containing C-4
In Iraq, Rohman and his unit used C-4 plastic explosive for
months after the war was over to blow up enemy tanks, trucks
and munitions. The essential ingredient in C-4 is a chemical
called RDX, a well-known toxin that affects the brain. Until
July, Rohman didn't know that the C-4 he slapped on tanks,
slept on and worked with for months in the Iraqi desert
might explain his neurological problems.
The Army used to teach soldiers to use C-4 to heat meals in
the field, scientific research papers indicate.
Scientists have known since 1972 that inhaling fumes from
C-4, or ingesting it in even small quantities, could cause
violent seizures and neurological damage. "These acute
exposures to RDX result in confusion, hyperactivity, muscle
twitching and ultimately seizures," a scientific report read.
Those problems are usually short-lived, research found. The
effect of lower, but frequent, doses on humans isn't well
known. Experiments to find out what low doses might do
caused lab animals to exhibit amnesia, disorientation,
insomnia, restlessness and irritability, all signs of
effects on the brain and central nervous system, the report
read. It says RDX is on the federal Environmental Protection
Agency's list of suspected carcinogens too.
The modern battlefield is filled with new dangers and new
toxins, making conventional bullets and bombs less
significant hazards than many of the newer weapons and tools
that we've given our troops to win the war, Robinson says.
"I'm an Army Ranger. I'm all for things that kill and give
me a combat edge," he says. But the changes in warfare
demand a new response from the military, he says, to do a
better job of evaluating troops before they go to war,
collecting data while they're there and testing them
thoroughly when they're done, whether they exhibit severe
problems or not.
He compares the care and attention given to a warplane on an
aircraft carrier - after each flight, it's examined,
double-checked and evaluated - with the lack of care given a
soldier. He and others are lobbying Congress to guarantee
soldiers a higher level of care.
In the meantime, anyone expecting a cure for Gulf War ills
anytime soon will be disappointed, says Kay Reid of the
Hampton VA Medical Center.
There isn't one.
"We're going to treat you based on what we know," she says,
"but we do not know all the answers yet."
How long will it take? After more than 40 years of research,
VA is still finding out things about Agent Orange, a
plant-killing chemical used in Vietnam that made veterans of
that war sick, she says. Just last year, type II diabetes
was added to the list of problems officially associated with
its use.
Rohman and his wife say they doubt that anything beneficial
will come from the depleted uranium testing or the doctors
at VA. After serving as a human guinea pig for years, they
say, Matt Rohman doesn't have more to offer.
"I don't think they'll do anything more for him," Kimberly
says. "It's all been done."
--
Posted for educational and research purposes only,
~ in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 ~
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40 SitNews: Diving for signs of nuclear contamination
Ketchikan, Alaska - News, [http://www.sitnews.us/]
by Ned Rozell
December 23, 2004 Thursday
After Stephen Jewett and his diving partners emerged from the
chilly waters of the Aleutians last summer, crewmembers of the
Ocean Explorer scanned their bodies with Geiger counters.
Checking for nuclear contamination isn't standard diving
protocol, but they were working off Amchitka Island, the site of
three atomic blasts in the late 1960s and 1970s.
University of Alaska diver Shawn Harper takes a water sample
from the ocean off Amchitka Island in summer 2004. Amchitka, one
of the Aleutian Islands, was the site of three nuclear blasts in
the 1960s and 1970s.
Photo courtesy Steve Jewett.
Jewett is a research professor at UAF's Institute of Marine
Science who was diving with colleagues off Amchitka to get
samples of fish and other marine life, bottom water, and
sediments to check for effects of the nuclear testing. The
Geiger counter stayed silent throughout their June-July 2004
mission in the Aleutians.
"It's a good feeling to hear those things not making any noise,"
said Jewett. "Everybody was a little anxious when we started
out, but we had no readings above zero the whole time."
Jewett was part of a crew sponsored by the U.S. Department of
Energy to sample the aquatic life off Amchitka as part of a
larger look at how the area has responded to three nuclear
blasts.
Amchitka's nuclear legacy began in 1964, when officials with the
Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission needed a
place to test nuclear devices that were too large for the Nevada
Test Site. They chose vacant Amchitka Island, about 1,400 miles
west of Anchorage.
In 1965, the Department of Defense drilled a deep hole in the
island and set off an 80-kiloton nuclear blast. Four years
later, the Atomic Energy Commission workers drilled a 4,000-foot
hole and detonated the second explosion underneath Amchitka. The
largest blast of nearly 5 megatons came on Nov. 6 1971, when the
AEC detonated a warhead of the Spartan antiballistic missile
system underground about one mile beneath Amchitka. During the
explosion of "Project Cannikin," the green and brown surface of
Amchitka rose and fell 20 feet, and the shock registered 7.0 on
the Richter scale. Within two days after the explosion, a crater
more than one mile wide and 40 feet deep formed.
Beneath the surface of Amchitka, the blasts created spherical
cavities that later collapsed and filled with rubble. These
underground chambers trapped nuclear contaminants, but
earthquakes or groundwater percolating through the areas may
carry radioactive materials towards the ocean.
[jpg Dan Volz]
Dan Volz of the University of Pittsburgh's Department of
Environmental and Occupational Health checks halibut caught near
Amchitka Island with a Geiger counter. Amchitka, one of the
Aleutian Islands, was the site of three nuclear blasts in the
1960s and 1970s. Photo courtesy Steve Jewett.
Jewett's group, in partnership with researchers at the Robert
Wood Johnson Medical School, Rutgers and Vanderbilt
universities, and the University of Pittsburgh, is testing
tissue and bone samples of oceanic life.
"The main question we're trying to answer is 'Is the food safe
to eat,'" Jewett said.
The nearest Native village to Amchitka is on the island of Atka,
about 300 miles east of Amchitka. Residents there eat many
creatures from the sea, including sea lion, salmon, halibut and
harbor seals.
To find the status of food sources around Amchitka, university
divers went to specific spots offshore of the blast sites and
also dove off Kiska, a "reference site" about 50 miles west of
Amchitka. The divers collected water samples, sand, kelp, sea
urchins, chitons, blue mussels, snails, octopus, and many
species of fish. In one month, they filled more than 12 chest
freezers with samples that researchers at labs in Idaho and
Kentucky are now analyzing. Government researchers with the
Amchitka Bioenvironmental Program took similar samples in the
late 1960s until 1973. Jewett and his colleagues will compare
some of the current results to radiological readings taken 40
years ago.
The results of the University of Alaska team's 136 dives and 93
hours of "bottom time" should be official by May 2005, when the
research team has a report due. Even though none of the hundreds
of tissue samples they scanned showed the initial signs of
radioactive contamination, Jewett said the island should be
tested periodically in the future because of the seismic
instability of the mid-Aleutians.
"Even if the current level of testing turns up nothing, Amchitka
should be monitored on some level over the long term," he said.
This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical
Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks
[http://www.gi.alaska.edu/] , in cooperation with the UAF
research community. Ned Rozell (nrozell@gi.alaska.edu
[nrozell@gi.alaska.edu] ) is a science writer at the institute.
[editor@sitnews.us]
[http://www.sitnews.us/]
Stories In The News
Ketchikan, Alaska
*****************************************************************
41 DenverPost.com: State seeks help in finding radioactive rod
Article Published: Thursday, December 23, 2004
By Kim McGuire Denver Post Staff Writer
Motorists traveling on Arapahoe Road in the next few days can
expect to see signs asking for help in the case of a missing
radioactive rod.
Even after the Englewood firm that lost an engineering gauge
posted a $2,500 reward last week, investigators still haven't
located the device, which is commonly used to probe moisture at
construction sites.
"We've had several calls but no substantial leads," said Steve
Tarlton, manager of the state health department's radiation
management unit.
The gauge fell off a Ground Engineering Consultants Inc. truck
on East Arapahoe Road between South Havana and South Potomac
streets Dec. 10.
Health department officials said the gauge was in a cooler-size
container when it slid out of the truck, which had its tailgate
open.
While most pieces of the container and gauge were found
immediately, company officials discovered that a 24-inch-long
steel rod containing a radioactive pellet of cesium-137 was
missing.
Radiation levels from the source would be almost 31 millirems
from about 1 foot away - about twice the amount of radiation a
person would receive from a chest X-ray.
The radiation management unit has swept Arapahoe Road with
Geiger counters since the gauge was reported missing but hasn't
detected anything unusual.
Tarlton said he didn't suspect that the rod was obliterated in
traffic, given that the other pieces of the gauge had been
found.
He added that anyone who either knows where the gauge is or may
have seen it fall off the truck should call the Arapahoe County
Sheriff's Office at 303-795-4711 or the health department's
emergency spill line at 1-877-518-5608.
Staff writer Kim McGuire can be reached at 303-820-1240 or
[kmcguire@denverpost.com] .
All contents Copyright 2004 The Denver Post or other copyright
*****************************************************************
42 Rossmoor News: Energy employees may be eligible for Occupational Illness
Compensation Program
Wednesday, December 22, 2004
During the period of the cold War, thousands of workers were
employed in the nation's atomic weapons programs and may have
been exposed to radioactive and toxic substances. Recognizing
that workers at these facilities may be suffering from illness
caused by their work, Congress passed the Energy Employees
Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act (EEOICPA).
Department of Energy (DOE) employees, or their eligible
survivors, who worked as a contractor or subcontractor at DOE
facility (such as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sandia
National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,
Stanford Linear Accelerator and G.E. Vallecitos) may be eligible
for benefits. Atomic weapons employers or designated beryllium
vendors under contract with DOE may also qualify for benefits.
Part B of the EEIOCP was enacted to provide compensation to
workers with beryllium disease, silicosis, or radiation induced
cancer. Employees or their survivors, whose claims are approved,
may receive a lump-sum payment of $150,000 and medical benefits
for the covered illness.
In October 2004, Congress amended the EEOICP with Part E, which
provides compensation and medical benefits for DOE contractor
and subcontractor employees whose illness were caused by
exposure to any toxic substance while working at a DOE facility.
Eligible survivors may receive federal compensation, if the
employee's death was caused or contributed to by the covered
occupational illness.
The passage of this legislation means some individuals who have
received payments under the existing Part B may be eligible for
a new federal payment if qualified under Part E.
Residents who need additional information about this program or
would like to file a claim, should contact the Energy Employees
Compensation Resource Center, 2600 Kitty Hawk Road, Suite 101,
Livermore, CA 94551, or call (925)606-6302, or toll-free:
(866)606-6302.
[morourke@rossmoor.com] ©Copyright © 2004. The Rossmoor News 1006
Stanley Dollar Drive, P.O. Box 2190 • Walnut Creek, CA 94595-0987
• (925) 988-7800 • Fax (925) 935-8348
*****************************************************************
43 DOL: Energy Employees Compensation Program Home Page
U.S. Department of Labor
Employment Standards Administration
[Photos representing the workforce - Digital Imagery© copyright
2001 PhotoDisc, Inc.] Office of Workers' Compensation Programs
www.dol.gov/esa [ ] Search / A-Z Index
December 23, 2004 DOL Home > ESA > OWCP > EEOICP [ ]
Division of Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation
Part E
On October 28, 2004, the President signed into law an
amendment that replaces Part D of the Energy Employees
Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act (EEOICPA) with a
new program called Part E. The amendment gives the Department
of Labor (DOL) the responsibility for administering this new
program.
The amendment grants covered employees a federal payment based
on the level of impairment and/or wage loss if they develop an
occupational illness as a result of exposure to toxic substances
at a Department of Energy (DOE) facility. Medical benefits will
also be available to qualifying employees for treatment and care
of the accepted occupational illness. Eligible survivors may
receive federal compensation, if the employee’s death was caused
or contributed to by the covered occupational illness.
+ 2004 EEOICPA Amendment Summary
+ The Law
+ Press Release
+ Contact Information
OWCP EEOICP About EEOICP EEOICP Contacts EEOICP Customer
Assistance
[Back to Top] Back to Top www.dol.gov/esa
[http://www.dol.gov/esa] www.dol.gov [http://www.dol.gov/]
U.S. Department of Labor
Frances Perkins Building
200 Constitution Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20210 [Phone Numbers] 1-866-4-USA-DOL
TTY: 1-877-889-5627
Contact Us [http://www.dol.gov/dol/contact/index.htm]
*****************************************************************
44 Norwell Mariner Opinion: Cancers linked to radiation exposure
TownOnline.com - Norwell Mariner - Opinion &Letters
By Veterans corner
Thursday, December 23, 2004
Help is available for our atomic vets. In May 2003, the National
Academies' National Research Council released results of a random
study of 99 atomic vets, including those who occupied Hiroshima
and Nagasaki after WWII, and others who participated in 235
nuclear tests in New Mexico. The Council noted that, "with so
many cancers falling in the presumptive category, many vets
automatically qualify for compensation."
As of October, this year, some 18,000 vets have applied for
VA disability compensation. Only 11.4 percent of the claims were
granted.
VA provides atomic veterans special priority enrollment for
health-care services and are eligible to participate in the VA
ionizing radiation registry examination program. As of September,
about 23,000 have received exams.
If we have any veterans who think they have a cancer related
to their exposure to radiation, they should apply at a VA
regional office. Once 'service connection' is determined -
initially at 100 percent - they are eligible for compensation and
health care.
If you do not know the name of the nuclear test you were
involved in, the VA can determine it if you know when and where
you participated. You may apply on line at www.va.gov, or reach a
regional VA office by calling 1-800-827-1000. The DOD maintains a
toll-free help-line 1-800-462-3638 for information about test
participation.
Atomic veterans who suffer from cancers not on the
presumptive list, (the two most common are skin and prostate)
also can file a claim for service connection.
The Department of Justice also administers a compensation
program for atomic vets under RECA, but emphasizes that accepting
payment from Justice precludes vets from being eligible for VA
compensation. If you receive RECA payments your VA benefit is
terminated.
For more information on the Justice Department program
contact:
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
Radiation Exposure Compensation Program
P.O. Box 146, Ben Franklin Station
Washington, D.C. 2044-0146
1-800-729-7327
If you participated in nuclear tests you may obtain copies
of your Film Badge Radiation Exposure History from the U.S.
Department of Energy:
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
Attn: Dosimetry Research Project,
M/S 401
Bechtel Nevada
P.O. Box 98521
Las Vegas, NV 89195-0100
Tel.: 702-295-3521
e-mail: Nevada@nv.doe.gov/
MASS DEPARTMENT OF VETERANS SERVICES
In recognition of 100 percent disabled veterans and
un-remarried spouses of those veterans who gave their lives in
service to their country during wartime, an annuity of $1,500
annually is available. Eligible applicants must have entered the
military from MA and continue to reside here, have a discharge
other than dishonorable, meet the requirement of blindness,
paraplegia or double amputation, or otherwise 100 percent VA
certified disabled. A parent or spouse must reside in MA and
continue to reside in MA while in receipt of the annuity and
spouses can not be remarried. If you feel that you might qualify
please make contact with me during office hours of Tuesday or
Wednesday afternoon.
© Copyright of CNC and Herald Interactive Advertising Systems,
Inc.
*****************************************************************
45 [du-list] Uranium arrives at new Japanese plant
Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 15:36:45 -0800
Uranium arrives at new Japanese plant
Yomiuri Shimbun, December 20, 2004
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/20041221wo03.htm
About 31 tons of depleted uranium was delivered to a spent
nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in Rokkashomura, Aomori
Prefecture, on Monday.
The uranium arrived at the village's Mutsuogawara Port
aboard the Hokushin Maru freighter earlier in the day from a
nuclear facility in Tokaimura, Ibaraki Prefecture.
The radioactive material will be used from Tuesday to
produce a depleted uranium solution, according to Japan
Nuclear Fuel Ltd. (JNFL), which operates the reprocessing
plant currently under construction.
JNFL said it would start running tests using the solution at
the reprocessing plant Tuesday.
The test run will check the performance of equipment and
detect any technical faults.
The plant is the first commercial installation of its kind
that can separate and extract plutonium and uranium from
spent nuclear fuel. JNFL plans to start operating the plant
officially in July 2006.
--
Posted for educational and research purposes only,
~ in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 ~
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46 sacbee.com: Feinstein plans bill package to reduce perchlorate risks -
By Mike Lee -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 am PST Thursday, December 23, 2004
Sacramento Bee
U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Wednesday that she plans to
introduce legislation in January that would help identify and
clean sources of perchlorate, a contaminant that is turning up
in food and water across the nation.
The California Democrat wants to create a multiagency
perchlorate cleanup task force, push the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency to set a national drinking water standard for
perchlorate and make polluters responsible for cleanup. Her bill
would authorize $200 million for related work.
Perchlorate is both naturally occurring and man-made. Most of
the perchlorate manufactured nationwide is used as the primary
ingredient in rocket fuel.
New tests reveal that perchlorate is widespread at low levels.
Most recently, the Food and Drug Administration released a
survey of supermarkets and farms that showed the compound was in
almost all of the milk and lettuce it sampled nationwide.
"It is imperative that we reduce the perchlorate in our
drinking water and protect Californians ... from this threat to
their health," Feinstein said in a statement. "There is much
more work to do to determine the scope and the severity of the
contamination across the country."
At high doses, perchlorate can disrupt thyroid function,
although scientists and health officials said the levels being
detected nationally should not harm healthy adults. Thyroid
disruption is especially dangerous for children and nursing
infants because it can retard development.
Some of the worst perchlorate contamination is in California,
where the compound has been found in more than 350 drinking
water sources. The Colorado River, a major source of irrigation
and municipal water for Southern California, is among the fouled
bodies of water.
The Environmental Working Group, an environmental organization
that has investigated perchlorate contamination, said the FDA's
recent tests highlighted the need for national action.
Bill Walker, the group's vice president in Oakland, praised
Feinstein's plan, saying it would force the Bush administration
"to quit stalling and take action."
About the writer:
+ The Bee's Mike Lee can be reached at (916) 321-1102 or
mflee@sacbee.com [mflee@sacbee.com] .
*****************************************************************
47 FT.com: Growing uranium demand triggers a shift in mining
[http://www.ft.com]
By Alex Fak
Published: December 23 2004 02:00 | Last updated: December 23
2004 02:00
When Swiss-based Xstrata made a A$7.4m bid for WMC in October,
the Melbourne mining group was far from happy.
The Australians said the offer grossly undervalued Olympic Dam,
a copper and uranium mine in the South Australia outback. With
spot prices for yellowcake oxide - the main uranium grade -
having risen 49 per cent in the year to November in nominal
dollar terms, and global production satisfying just 58 per cent
of demand from nuclear reactors, WMC wants a better offer.
WMC says it will invest some A$4bn in Olympic Dam in a move that
would triple its output of yellowcake. But Xstrata says it is
only interested in the copper and gold potential of the mine.
The tussle between the two companies reflects the unusual nature
and geography of uranium.
Yellowcake packs a lot of energy, which nuclear reactors release
by splitting uranium atoms. It can also be stored cheaply.
During the 1970s and 1980s, the world's nuclear powers stocked
up, storing the stuff in reactor warehouses and
ever-proliferating nuclear weapons.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and
decommissioning of Soviet nuclear weapons flooded the market
with enriched uranium. By 2000, prices were a quarter of their
levels in the early 1980s. Many users stopped building up
inventories and began buying the sludgy yellowcake on the spot
market. Mines closed and investment in those that remained
virtually seized up.
But with the world consuming more energy, inventories are slowly
being depleted and mining is once again needed. Uranium, the
heaviest naturally occurring element, is as abundant in the
earth's crust as tin, but concentrated lodes are rare. Tapping
new veins takes time, and so does expanding the market for
uranium.
"Demand has been rising by maybe 1-2 per cent per year," says
Steve Kidd, director of strategy and research at the
London-based World Nuclear Association. Asian governments are
planning some three dozen nuclear power plants.
But authorities take years to decide on a nuclear reactor and,
when they do, building the plant takes even more time.
Producers seem in no hurry. "The mining companies are saying,
'We haven't invested for 10 or 20 years because the price was so
weak; now the price is $20 a pound, but you have got to give us
some sort of security'," says Mr Kidd.
This means longer-term contracts at higher prices. However, old
agreements at weak prices have not yet expired.
According to The Sydney Morning Herald, WMC is committed to
selling uranium to some clients for as little as $11 a pound for
four more years. The current spot price is $20.50.
Geography has also conspired against production. Outside the
former Soviet states - who tend to hold on to their uranium -
Canada and Australia accounted for two-thirds of uranium
production in 2003, according to Ux, the nuclear consultants.
Environmental standards there are strict.
"Things have become a bit problematic in recent years almost
entirely due to the environmental side," says John Meyer, an
analyst at Numis Securities in London. "It can take five to 10
years to get a mine up and running as it is, and another five
years to get environmental permission beforehand."
Besides spending on safety precautions, companies need to win
over activists and hostile locals.
In a presentation in Sydney last week, WMC cited eight forecasts
from uranium consulting firms, predicting that current prices
will hold until 2010. But analysts note that the company did not
exactly trumpet its vast reserves until Xstrata came along.
© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2004. "FT"
and "Financial Times" are trademarks of the Financial Times.
*****************************************************************
48 Boston Globe: Debris removed from polluted site
Debris removed from polluted site Boston Globe CONCORD -- A
cleanup crew spent the last few weeks removing metal debris and
remnants of some 60 underground drums from a small area on the
Starmet Corp. Superfund site in West Concord. Davis Bushnell
December 23, 2004 --> ![]()
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0412/S00246.htm
Contains..
Depleted uranium will kill more than all the bombs and bullets and
artillery shells it is attached to. For 4.5 billion years Iraq will burn in
the silent heat of radiation, condemning millions of innocents to
radioactive black dust penetrating bodies, like a parasite attaching itself
to all vital organs, bones and muscles. Cancers and diseases have and will
continue to increase exponentially; birth defects will only get worse.
Already Iraq is producing reproductive mutations the likes of which have
never been seen. Invisible clouds of silent death are infecting the land,
the soil and water of a land once called fertile, gushing with rivers that
helped spawn civilization.
How many hundreds of thousands will die thanks to a nuclear war
commenced by the Amerikan Nazis? How many deformities will Iraq have to
deal with? The genetic code of these people may be in the process of
mutating thanks to depleted uranium, a process not discriminatory on
Amerikan troops. The same madness of cancers, disease, lower immune
systems, chronic illness and birth defects affecting Iraqis is also being
transported back to the United States inside the bodies of soldiers. They
will suffer the same consequences as their Iraqi counterparts, having
already experienced such ramifications after Gulf War I, where thousands of
veterans have already died from depleted uranium exposure, though nicely
covered up the corporate media and the government.
Full item...........
Valenzeula: Amerikan Terrorists, American Tragedy
Wednesday, 22 December 2004, 11:25 am
Opinion: Manuel Valenzuela
Rise of the Amerikan Nazis
Part III of III: Amerikan Terrorists, American Tragedy
By Manuel Valenzuela
See also.
Manuel Valenzuela: The Rise of the Amerikan Nazis (Part I)
Manuel Valenzuela: Death of Democracy (Part II)
American Mutation
When the thunderous clouds of fascists past and corporatists present
finally dissipate over the vast lands of the United States, leaving in its
wake a nation recovering from the violent downpours of mass lunacy, fear
and collective schizophrenia that have caused a dustbowl-style drought of
humanity in the nation of gluttonous undertakings, it will finally be seen,
beyond the enveloping haze of post 9/11 hypnosis hindering American
visibility, the devastation of what was done to us and what has been done
to the world in our name, oftentimes with our willing consent and through
our complicit guilt through silence and acquiescence.
The shock and awe storm of the Amerikan Nazis will inevitably one day
pass, as all tyrannies eventually do, yet what will remain to haunt us,
what will tug at our conscious for years to come, will be the dishonor and
shame upon our society for the human malice spawned in the minds of so many
millions of Americans. For the Amerikan Nazi phenomenon has with the
passing of each sunset grown and mutated beyond the small cabal of criminal
corporatists, power hungry warmongering fascists, military-industrial
complex elites, delusional Zionist-first neocons, religious Bible-Belt
fundamentalists and profit over people capitalists. Today, the cancer is
spreading far and wide, infecting those residing inside the belly of the
beast, afflicting first and foremost the most unenlightened and ignorant
among us.
Tens of millions of Americans are being transformed into conduits of
barbarism and catalysts of violence, regenerating the evil of racism
against an entire population of purposefully scapegoated innocents whose
only crime is belonging to a group the Amerikan Nazis have chosen as the
necessary enemy from which to unleash perpetual war for perpetual profit.
The deliberate conditioning of tens of millions of citizens by the Amerikan
Nazis into purveyors of mass murder and violence accepting and indeed
deriving pleasure from the death of 100,000 innocent Iraqis should send
shockwaves throughout the world that perhaps a communal lunacy has
infiltrated a large segment of the American people.
This has been achieved through the deadly mixture of raging
patriotism/nationalism and the powerful ignorance ingrained in Christian
fundamentalism methodically injected into the populace. The Amerika of the
Amerikan Nazis is a land where the collective memory of the population is
easily forgotten and recycled in spans of eight and twelve hours. It is a
land where news is as artificial as aspartame, and as corrosive and
cancerous to the mind as the sweetener is to the body. Amerika is a nation
where the attention-span of the average American is that of a gnat, from
birth the brain rewired through ceaseless hours of watching rapid-moving,
perfection-filled fiction television imagery.
The country of the Amerikan Nazis is one where more and more citizens
are dependent on the effects of mind-altering and controlling pill popping
pharmaceutical drugs, a land where education in schools is nonexistent,
serving only to brainwash to the tunes of a corporate dominated world and a
government obedient drone, and where corporate controlled television spawns
state-sponsored jingoism in a raging orgy of propaganda, in the process
becoming the thinking grey matter of so many people who not only believe
every word they listen to, they regurgitate it as their own. In a country
where the airwaves are both omnipresent and omnipotent, the minds of those
residing in its entrails are easily corralled, controlled and conditioned.
In order for the fictional war on terror to succeed, an enemy must
exist, for offensive wars of conquest cannot exist without enemies. The
masses must be conditioned that this enemy must be feared, for fear blinds
human logic and analytical thinking, and this fear must be manipulated into
hatred, for hatred is itself a catalyst for ceaseless war through control
of a now conditioned, manipulated and militarized populace. As long as fear
leads to hate war will be present if it is sought by warmonger leadership,
for hate blinds and is easily controlled by puppet masters moving minds
like sacrificed pawns on a chessboard.
With an enemy selected, alien in culture, language and religion,
fictionalized, stereotyped, slandered and ostracized, conditioned into the
American mind as an uncivilized barbarian seeking only destruction and
terror, unknown and not understood, made to be feared and hated, the
Amerikan Nazis, through their vast army of lackeys in government and the
corporate media, indoctrinated a susceptible public to the next enemy
created to captivate the minds of the American citizenry. The new heathen
and savage, the inhuman 'Untermensch' of the German Nazis and the
Israeli-Zionists had been born, now free to be mass murdered and
dehumanized, their lands, resources and lives invaded and conquered.
With a complacent and indifferent Amerikan populace, conditioned that to
be Arab-Muslim was to be below human, thereby erasing any human guilt of
complicit murder and devastation done in their name, validating the savage
assault on human rights, the reality and truth of what has transpired in
Iraq hidden and whitewashed by a criminal corporate media enterprise, the
war of aggression and utter annihilation of a society could commence.
Amerikan Terrorists
It is perhaps a product of the lack of accountability at the highest
reaches of governance why tens of millions of Amerikans applaud the utter
destruction of an entire society. If the Amerikan Nazis at the top, nothing
but war criminals and criminals against humanity and the planet, are able
to direct atrocities on a massive scale without so much as a whisper of
guilt or questioning, then average Amerikans are surely able to discern
from this that tacit approval of the brutality occurring in lands thousands
of miles away is therefore warranted. Thus the acceptance of state
sponsored terrorism has been birthed.
Indeed, at the upper echelons of government Amerika is about to approve
as Attorney General the man responsible for making legal the use of
dehumanizing torture on prisoners of war, thus validating war crimes
oftentimes against innocent people who happened to be in the wrong place at
the wrong time. To nominate and approve such a man to head the Justice
Department would be to make torture an accepted mechanism in the perpetual
war abroad and the growing police state at home. Before long, torture,
whose resulting confessions can now be used against the victim, will become
a mainstay part of Amerikan justice and jurisprudence, used to find guilt,
imprison the innocent and instill the face of fear on a terrified populace.
When an aggressive, invading nation is also the most powerful country on
Earth, the rules of war, in a battle pitting poor versus rich, can get
trumped and rewritten to suit the interests of the Amerikan Nazis.
Interpreting the laws of war and of enemies in favor of the superpower,
with hardly a voice of disapproval from the larger world community, has led
to untold levels of torture and humiliation, dehumanization and suffering.
Suddenly torture has become a legal justification to condemn prisoners,
many of whom will say anything so the pain and suffering will stop, to a
sadistic ritual prevalent in the Amerikan armed forces and in society in
general. It is a product of a violence based society, a war culture
conditioned from birth to seek the way of the gun and the philosophy of
force. This reality can be seen in the incessant war crimes being committed
in Iraq and Afghanistan today. The truth is never easy to accept, but it is
the truth nonetheless.
Based on the racist idea that Arabs and Muslims are nothing more than
subhuman barbarians, the systematic torture of body and mind has caused
terrible suffering to the victim and inhuman pleasure to the perpetrator.
Interpreted and given credence by Alberto Gonzalez, approved by George Bush
and implemented by both the Justice and War Departments, torture has become
as symbolic of Amerika as apple pie. The photos of torture we have all seen
countless times are the true face of Amerika, a land the Amerikan Nazis
call home to the roaring applause of tens of millions of people.
From sleep deprivation to loud music to solitary confinement to
imprisonment in tiny claustrophobic cages to intimidation and bites by
attack dogs to verbal abuse to food and water deprivation to heat exposure
to the wearing of blinding hoods to asphyxiation to being submerged in
water to having all appendages tied together to laying motionless on the
ground for days, surrounded by your own fecal and urine waste to getting
punched with fists throughout your body to getting struck by rifle butts in
the head to being forced to live life completely nude (the most disgraceful
form of punishment to Muslims) to being beaten and kicked to being forced
to perform degrading sexual simulations with other prisoners to being
sexually raped to being anally sodomized by brooms and light fixtures to
being slowly electrocuted with wires attached to your appendages and
private parts to slowly being pummeled to death to getting shot in the
stomach without medical assistance to finally succumbing to human evil and
leaving the wretched world you had been trapped in. This is the work of
wickedness, of an evil whose dehumanization will leave those not yet dead
wishing they were. This is the product of the Amerikan Nazis, of Amerikan
Terrorists.
Yet in the realm of the psychotic only grunts and pawns have been
brought to justice. Only those told what to do by hierarchical chain of
command emanating directly from the White House have been made scapegoats.
It is those at the top, however, the Amerikan Nazis, who initiated the
reign of terror upon the lands of the Middle East. It was those without
empathy, those without a sense of human understanding that signed the
paperwork necessary so that evil could be unearthed.
Trained by the Israelis to the best dehumanizing devices, tools and
forms of torture to be used against Arab Muslims, Amerika now finds itself
on par with the German Nazis of the 1930's in the sheer ruthlessness of its
indiscretions. Amerikan gulags now dot the Earth, from Guantanamo in Cuba
to Abu Ghraib in Iraq, from the prisons known to nobody in Afghanistan to
those financed by Amerika in Israel to the CIA torture jet flying victims
to your friendly neighborhood torture-loving regime. A system of gulags and
concentration camps now abound, hidden from view and from reality,
invisible but known, undoubtedly unspeakable in horror and devastating to
both body and mind.
In a year or two or three, these institutions of human malice might be
imported to Amerika, serving as centers of re-education against dissidents,
artists, progressives, minorities and the ever useful scapegoated enemy.
How many Muslims picked up after 9/11 remain missing? How many have been
disappeared, never to be seen again? After all, it is said that human
rights violations are first enacted on foreigners before commencing on
citizens. This is Amerikan fascism at its best, a way to silence and
disappear those whose opinions differ from the regimes, much like those
Amerikan sponsored despots in Brazil, Chile and Argentina.
The Amerikan Terrorists have devastated an entire nation, destroying the
fabric of society, exporting chaos and anarchy into the Cradle of
Civilization. Fear reigns in Iraq, its citizens unable to feel secure or
live life as they once used to. Most prefer the tyranny of Saddam to the
devastation of the Amerikans. Over 100,000 of their loved ones have been
killed in a year and a half. Many more have been maimed in body and mind,
forever to carry the physical and mental scars inflicted on them by the
occupiers.
Entire cities, such as Fallujah, lie in ruins, devastated by aerial
bombardments meant as a form of collective punishment on an entire
population. Daisy cutters and 2,000 pound bombs flatten entire city blocks,
candy-like cluster bombs spread destruction throughout neighborhoods, their
sinister candy and toy-like appearance a curious delight to young children.
Napalm is being dropped onto homes and streets, its gel-like petrol
attaching itself to human flesh as it burns the life out of innocent
Iraqis. Soldiers have been told to shoot anything that moves; snipers pick
off women and children as if they were carrying AK-47s. Bullets riddle the
skies, mortars explode on the ground, car bombs devastate the occupiers and
all hell has broken loose in the lands of Mesopotamia. A much deadlier and
silent killer, however, lurks in the wings.
Depleted uranium will kill more than all the bombs and bullets and
artillery shells it is attached to. For 4.5 billion years Iraq will burn in
the silent heat of radiation, condemning millions of innocents to
radioactive black dust penetrating bodies, like a parasite attaching itself
to all vital organs, bones and muscles. Cancers and diseases have and will
continue to increase exponentially; birth defects will only get worse.
Already Iraq is producing reproductive mutations the likes of which have
never been seen. Invisible clouds of silent death are infecting the land,
the soil and water of a land once called fertile, gushing with rivers that
helped spawn civilization.
How many hundreds of thousands will die thanks to a nuclear war
commenced by the Amerikan Nazis? How many deformities will Iraq have to
deal with? The genetic code of these people may be in the process of
mutating thanks to depleted uranium, a process not discriminatory on
Amerikan troops. The same madness of cancers, disease, lower immune
systems, chronic illness and birth defects affecting Iraqis is also being
transported back to the United States inside the bodies of soldiers. They
will suffer the same consequences as their Iraqi counterparts, having
already experienced such ramifications after Gulf War I, where thousands of
veterans have already died from depleted uranium exposure, though nicely
covered up the corporate media and the government.
Amerikan Nazis are Amerikan terrorists, unleashing fear and insecurity
in the United States and savage carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have
manipulated our psychology just as they have devastated that of Iraqis and
Amerikan troops returning to a world now alien to them. Tens of thousands
of soldiers whose vital organs are now protected by Kevlar vests have
survived deadly attacks, though to many, a life maimed and without
appendages, with severe burns and head injuries, suffering the corrosive
demons of a war that will never escape their thoughts, is what they can
expect for the remainder of their lives. Sacrificed for a war without
honor, based on lies and deceit, fought for profit and power, the Amerikan
soldier returning home will be eaten from the inside out by inner demons
tearing him or her apart thanks to the atrocities they saw or committed, or
by the deadly and oftentimes miserable manifestation of depleted uranium as
it tears the body in pieces.
Karma has a way of returning favors. For every action, after all, there
is an equal and opposite reaction.
The legacy of the Amerikan Nazis abroad will be the utter destruction of
human rights in the Middle East and the untold level of carnage created in
Iraq, where the resurrection of human evil has been successfully
implemented. Hundreds of thousands are now dead, entire cities lay in
ruins, now glowing with the poison of radioactive depleted uranium, and an
entire society has been gutted. Reincarnations of Nazis past does the world
find itself dealing with, though blind most remain to the human evil taking
place in Iraq thanks to a complete propaganda-laced blackout of the reality
and truth behind the war.
Through the illegal invasions and occupations, the torture, the gulags,
the razing of cities, the dehumanization of Muslims, the use of DU and
napalm, acts of collective punishment, the death of 100,000 innocents, the
disappearance of Arabs and the willful trashing and utter disrespect for
human rights the world can see what leads the United States today. It is a
new form of Nazi, or human wickedness if you will, running amok, in control
of the most powerful nation on Earth, as well as its population.
From the past arrives the present, as Nazis have existed throughout
man's brief but tumultuous history. Always reincarnated to once more
unleash humanity's evil upon our kind, brought back from the dead to
baptize violence among the plains of the planet and reborn to once more
tempt mankind's will to self-annihilate itself, the Nazi rise to power, and
its grip on war and human violence, is but the challenge we give ourselves
to see whether or not we can learn from our historical mistakes and
progress forward in time and space.
Their rise is the greatest obstacle we grant ourselves, being that we
forever remain addicted to suffering, and the ultimate marker by which we
measure our insatiable need for violence. We always let them rise,
inexplicably blinded by their ascension, yet, somehow, the Nazi always
falls, after laying waste to land and man, and nearing us to the
self-extinction we always seemingly toy with. At the end, the goodness of
humanity defeats the evil of greed, the addiction to power and the violence
of warmongering leaders.
We only grant them an enormous head start from which they unearth their
devastation upon the world. We fall asleep, becoming drones captivated by
their aura, only when on the verge of their triumph do we mobilize. The
time to catch up is upon us, for this batch of Amerikan Nazi is as rabid as
they come.
American Tragedy
Lacking education while growing abundant in ignorance, sprouting from
birth conditioned chants of patriotic fervor and for years dumbed-down
through school and television, possessing no free logical thought while
regurgitating the opinions of corporate media puppets, manipulated through
fear and insecurity, brainwashed to the dogma of false prophets and
religious fundamentalists, trained to never question authority and always
follow the dictates of governance, tens of millions of Americans are
falling prey to the hypnotizing light of the Amerikan Nazis. Tens of
millions are in the process of or have already become Amerikans, trying to
establish the tyranny of the United Corporations of Amerika, the antithesis
of what hundreds of millions of sane, good, decent human beings who live in
America wish their nation to be.
Amerika is the country at the opposite parallel dimension of America, a
land born through the paradigm shift that was 9/11, a nation of hate and
racism, a land where at present almost half of its population wants to
restrict the civil liberties of Arab and Muslim Americans, simply out of
ignorance, which leads to fear, which itself leads to hatred and racism,
and simply because marionettes tens of millions of people have become,
their strings easily toyed and manipulated with. (What's next, Muslim
ghettos, cattle-car trains, concentration camps, gas chambers? What is this
nation becoming? I fear what another 'terrorist' attack will lead to)
Amerika is a country captured by fear and madness, bred by ignorance and
brainwash education, a populace hanging in the trance-like vortex of
schizophrenia, afraid of dark-skinned bogeymen and different cultures,
captivated by the systemic manipulations of the corporate world and its
brainwashing media. Hypnotized like deer to car lights, Amerikans are
traveling down a slippery slope of lunacy, tens of millions transfixed in
collective psychosis, regressing back to 1930's Germany, each month hating
more, fearing more, racism and scapegoating fusing into a deadly mixture of
acceptance of what is being done in their name, their thirst and acceptance
of Arab blood growing with each new drumbeat of war and image of Muslim
carnage.
To live in Amerika is to live in a nation devoid of free-thinking minds,
with education, healthcare and necessary social services being eviscerated
each year in favor of an ever-growing Department of War budget - now
$450,000,000,000.00 annually, not to mention another $200,000,000,000.00
that it has taken to prosecute the war in Iraq - providing untold
sustenance and profit to the military industrial complex. It is to live in
a nation embarked on preemptive war of aggression, illegal and immoral,
designed for oil control and profits, imperial hegemonic expansion, for the
security of an apartheid, racist regime, for Iraqi resource pillage and
usurpation, and the complete highway robbery of America's treasure by the
criminal elite, even as poverty, unemployment, outsourcing, hunger and
illness grows throughout America and even as the gap between rich and poor
continues to increase. In the billions of dollars being stolen, both from
Iraqis and Americans, can the real reasons of this greed-infected,
capitalism-crazed invasion and occupation be seen.
The Amerikan Crony Capitalism Crusade has been unearthed from the soils
of centuries ago, designed to bring the 'miracles' of the Almighty Dollar
to savages and barbarians of the Middle East, with the expansion of
imperial hegemony disguised as bringing freedom, democracy and human rights
to the region. In reality, only death, destruction, chaos and human hell
are being exported by Amerika and its platoons of corporate mercenaries
killing and maiming in the name of Amerikan style debauched democracy and
crony capitalism.
The delusional and fanatical among us, however, see what Amerika is
doing in Iraq as the beginning of yet one more failed Christian Crusade,
pitting Christianity (good) versus Islam (evil) on the way to Armageddon
and the second coming, an event extremists have been waiting 2000 years
for, each generation as disappointed as the previous when no higher power
arrives to turn off the lights on humanity. This time will be no exception,
but to the Amerikan Nazis it is a useful fiction to pacify and gain the
support of millions of worshiping Amerikans who see the salvation of Israel
and the invasion of evildoers as necessary steps on the way to the Rapture.
It seems theological control of believers still thrives, in the present as
it did the past, to attain the vested interests of those in power.
The Amerika of the Amerikan Nazis is designed to exist as a Christian
fundamentalist theocracy, the better to dumb-down and control the populace,
where tectonic shifts are blamed on the gastrointestinal rumblings of an
imaginary entity, where Earth is believed created in six days, where woman
is believed derived from a single male rib (talk about the male ego of
those who concocted such fiction), where through fault of women humanity
was banished from Eden, forever tainted with sin, where Noah saved every
conceivable species on Earth in his ark during the Great Flood (which now
is said to have created the Grand Canyon), where the continuing erosion of
the fable of creationism by science is giving rise to ever more creative
and desperate strategies trying to save the primitive and archaic thought
of thousands of years ago (think intelligent design being taught in
schools), where a metaphysical god allows the unmerciful mass murder of
tens of thousands of those it created in its own image, where killing and
inflicting misery onto others is seen as a key needed to enter the kingdom
of god, where peace and love are but impediments to the conquest of new
souls and the exploitation of their lands, where destroying an entire
society has the blessings of the Almighty because hey, it speaks directly
to Amerika's Dear Leader, George Bush, though his actions are the
antithesis of Jesus' teachings, making him the opposite of Christ, the
Anti-Christ.
At the opposite end of the American spectrum, the America millions
idealistically dream of, Amerika is an imperial bully arrogant in power and
ignorant to history. It is a warmongering Empire addicted to both black
blood below ground and red blood on the surface, a violence-laden nation
apathetic and unknowing to the ways and peoples of the world, lacking
precepts of humanity, breeding entire generations of desensitized and
sadist-seeking robots programmed that only through the barrel of a gun can
problems be solved. Amerika is a land controlled by the corporate world,
spoiled by greed, rotting from the inside out by the exploitation and
subjugation prevalent in crony capitalism, where profit will always come
before people, the bottom line trumps the moral line and where the Almighty
Dollar is the omnipotent sovereign ruling over its domain.
Amerika is a land of despotism and non-existent democracy, where
Washington has become an overflowing and randy bordello opening its legs to
the highest corporate bidder. It is an Empire of hypocrisy, espousing
democracy and freedom abroad yet denying it throughout the globe, even in
its own lands, where elections are a sham designed to give the appearance
of legitimate democracy giving power to the People. The Amerikan Nazis have
rigged elections in Afghanistan and in the United States, have devastated
Haiti with a pre-planned coup, have meddled in the elections of former
Soviet countries like the Ukraine and tried to destroy democracy in
Venezuela, though failing in the process. As the need for natural resources
continues to grow, with competition from China, Europe and Russia
expanding, Latin America and Africa will likely see, once again, the
exportation and infiltration of Amerikan style 'democracy' into their lands.
The Amerikan Nazis are no doubt attempting to subvert real democracy in
Iraq, destabilizing the citizenry and installing yet another puppet proctor
to mangle the interests of Iraqis in favor of those that put him in power.
Throughout the globe, the Amerikan Nazis have installed, protected and
sponsored dictators, despots and royalty in numerous underdeveloped
nations, nothing but Amerikan puppets, minions and lackeys, pilfering these
countries of their riches and of the interests of the native population,
making extinct any semblance of honest and real democracy, sequestering
freedoms, liberties and rights, and installing neo-liberal economic
policies that act to exploit and pillage lands, peoples and their
governments. This is democracy and freedom, Amerikan style. This is market
colonialism and economic genocide. This is Amerikan capitalism.
Claiming a leadership mandate in human rights even as it tortures,
rapes, pillages, destroys and murders tens of thousands abroad, Amerika
holds two million of its citizens in prisons, many sent to rot inside cages
for years at a time for petty crimes, many indigent and of color, unable to
afford adequate representation in a system designed to imprison those who
lack the education and resources to escape the halls of so-called justice.
Amerika is the only industrialized nation to execute prisoners, for years
hanging, shooting, electrocuting and poisoning inmates, many of who, it
turns out, were sentenced unjustly, based on indigence, skin color and racism.
Amerika is the land of overabundance and of waste, even when the planet
can no longer sustain the appetite wrought by a plague of locusts devouring
everything in its path. Addicted to materialism, programmed to produce and
consume, millions of gluttonous Amerikans sustain their habits through the
exploitation, oppression and subjugation of third-world land, resources and
peoples such as Iraq. Wars of conquest are validated and subsidized by
those same citizens demanding inexpensive gasoline and heating bills, cheap
foods and products, ever-larger homes made from forest and jungle wood,
abundance of material wealth and the comforts afforded to those lucky to
live in the most superfluous nation in the brief history of humankind. It
is the control, subjugation and exploitation of poor nations' governments,
economies, resources and citizens by the United States that allows for the
high standard of living for those residing inside its borders. It is our
demand for cheap, excessive-filled lifestyles that makes us complicit in
the devastation of countries such as Vietnam and Iraq.
In the lands owned by the Amerikan Nazis, the environment is seen as a
resource to be exploited and destroyed, forever scarred by industrial
machinery and the destructive hands of man. For wherever man goes,
destruction soon follows. Amerika pollutes with wretched abandon,
contributing twenty-five percent of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions even
when its population is only five percent of the world. It refuses to abide
by environmental protocols, mechanisms and regulations, arrogantly denying
accepted science and thumbing its nose at the plight of the world, even as
Earth continues getting sicker and more volatile.
Its corporate dominated government allows industry to pollute air, land
and water with various toxins and poisons, contributing to tens of
thousands of annual deaths, all premature and avoidable. In the Amerika of
the Amerikan Nazis, the corporate world runs free to lace our foods with
carcinogens, chemicals, hormones, preservatives, toxins and poisons that
are killing and making sick hundreds of thousands per year, all in the name
of profit, the bottom line and expanding revenues. If corporations were
living, breathing human beings, they would be sentenced for mass murder,
executed for being psychotic and criminal entities. Instead, their
executives get bonuses and promotions.
Society is one based on an almost inescapable caste system that
determines the future and present of millions, robbing them of talent and
ability, denying them opportunity based on their hereditary environment,
their socio-economic status and the color of their skin. Amerika is a
nation whose system socially engineers castes, promising dreams and
delivering nightmares, from birth creating divisions of labor, ethnicity,
education, health, economic viability, environmental upbringing and
opportunity, creating from the indigent and working classes the next
generation of capitalism's slaves and from the privileged elite the next
generation of exploiters and oppressors, criminals and murderers.
The Amerika of the Amerikan Nazis is at war with science and education,
bastardizing fact while espousing myth and fable in an attempt to further
dumb down the citizenry. It is immersed in a never-ending battle against
truth and reality, blitzkrieging us in a deluge of lies, delusions,
deceptions, misrepresentations and manipulations, mixed together for
control over millions of minds. The dumber the masses, the more power and
control the Amerikan Nazis will have. The more power and control they
possess, the harder it will become to abort their hegemony.
The Amerika of the Amerikan Nazis honors its cherished principles of
corruption, criminality, mass murder, illegal wars and sadistic torture. It
fights wars for Zionist interests, drops bombs for Israeli security and
applies Zio-Nazi dehumanization methods perfected after years of
Palestinian occupation. It abhors justice, civil rights, freedoms and
equality. Capitalism, profit over people and greed are its mantras, the
military industrial complex its lifeblood, corporatism it goal, the
Establishment its true and only cerebral cortex.
In Amerika, the corporate media is nothing more than state and
government propaganda, its journalist leeches sucking the mammary glands
from the great corporate Leviathan. It hides truth, suppresses reality,
sponsors the interests of its sponsors, fails to report and inform,
distorts facts, whitewashes news and protects the interests of the hand
that feeds it. It is a tool of the corporate world, a loudspeaker of the
interests of the Amerikan Nazis. From its complicity in the debacle in Iraq
Americans cannot see the reality of war, with its devastation and death,
its destruction and suffering. Americans are prevented from seeing
flag-draped coffins and the thousands of soldiers maimed for life. They are
prevented from seeing the sacrifice made for mistake after bloody mistake
and for achieving the interests and wealth of those in power. Through the
sellouts acting as journalists we are given false propaganda and fictions
designed to placate and control us. The Vietnam lessons have been learned,
and under no circumstance will the populace be allowed to see the reality
of war. Decades ago truth led to a growing tidal wave of anti-war action,
which inevitably led to division, instability and a raging citizenry
demanding an end to the conflict. To those in power, this mistake cannot be
repeated.
This is the Amerika so loved by the Amerikan Nazis, the home of greed
and the land of the slave, the cradle of growing ignorance and
indifference. Fighting for the continued growth of wealth and power of the
elite, the new Amerikans thus become the slaves and army of capitalism,
living like serfs in beehive housing, forever indebted to their corporate
masters, living day to day through the wages they must inevitably return to
their employers and controlled by a system that decides how they spend
their waking hours, what they can and cannot do, what foods they will eat,
what products they will buy, what they will watch, how society will shift,
how long they will work, how happy they will be. Amerikans thus become
trapped and exploited by the same system they ignorantly follow and defend.
Beyond the appetite for vengeance and violence, the thirst for
dark-skinned Arab blood and destruction, Muslim suffering and maiming,
rampant scapegoating of enemies through xenophobia and homophobia, blind,
psychotic patriotism and hypnotic nationalism, fundamentalist ignorance and
brainwashing, and the blatant racism and arrogance of tens of millions of
Americans since 9/11, lies a much more disgraceful, shameful, cold-blooded
demon in the Amerikan consciousness. This is the silent complicity in the
destruction of an entire nation and its people. Millions have relished the
tragedy, and in this mindset the Amerikan Nazis have succeeded in turning
once moral citizens into ravaging demons craving violence and destruction.
In time we will look back in shame and disgust at what was done in our
name, at the war crimes tens of millions applauded and cheered. Only then
will those hypnotized by lunacy awake, finding their humanity missing and
their goodness extinct. To those who cry and lament the evil sponsored by
the same nation that created the Declaration of Independence and the Bill
of Rights, the devastation taking place is testament to the evil of the
Amerikan Nazis, and our wonderment of how so many could be blinded and made
to hate is only reinforced by the truth that emerges out of Iraq, usually
from the wonders of the Internet.
We can only hope the return of America ushers in a new dawn of goodness
and humanity, finally exorcising the fiend that is Amerika. Until then,
however, the inner demons of what Amerika did in Iraq and Afghanistan will
linger like a bad drought, drying our humanity and scorching the once
temperate beliefs of hundreds of millions of good, decent, enlightened
Americans whose head now bows in shame at the atrocities committed under
the red, white and blue.
The Amerika of the Amerikan Nazis must not be allowed to exist, for if
it does then the America of the majority will cease to exist, only to be
found in the history books being fed to the bonfire of despotism,
devastation and fascist belief. The struggle to regain the America of our
dreams and our wishes is upon us, for everything that goes up must
inevitably come back down. So it must be with the rise of the Amerikan Nazis.
*************
Manuel Valenzuela is social critic and commentator, international
affairs analyst, Internet columnist and author of Echoes in the Wind, a
novel now on sale by Authorhouse.com. A collection of essays, Beyond the
Smoking Mirror: Reflections on America and Humanity, will be published in
early 2005. His articles appear in alternative news websites and you can
find him regularly on http://www.informationclearinghouse.info. His unique
style and powerful writing is read internationally and seeks to expose
truths and realities confronting humanity today. Mr. Valenzuela welcomes
comments and can be reached at manuel@valenzuelas.net. A diverse collection
of many of his essays and articles can be found below:
Articles by Manuel Valenzuela, 2004 and at at my archives
Echoes in the Wind Sales Page
Mr. Valenzuela´s new novel is now on sale. Almost 600 pages in trade
paperback form on sale internationally through secure web page transaction.
In one month this title will be available on amazon.com and
barnesandnoble.com. Also, if preferred, the novel can now be ordered at any
local bookstore worldwide through its ISBN number (found on the sales
webpage).
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55 [du-list] Art Exhibition Launches Anti-Depleted Uranium
Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 15:36:42 -0800
Art Exhibition Launches Anti-Depleted Uranium Campaign
Posted: 12/20/04 Mathaba.net
From: Another Iraq
http://mathaba.net/x.htm?http://mathaba.net/0_index.shtml?x=90596
Map of global DU use and storage:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/dayart/20021112/DepletedUrnaiumMap.gif
Why would an art exhibition be used to launch a campaign
against the use of depleted uranium?
Because one of Iraq's leading artists, Nuha al-Radi, blamed
the 1991 DU use in Iraq for the leukaemia that killed her.
The exhibition was a tribute to Al-Radi, acclaimed artist,
painter, ceramicist, sculputress and writer whose life
spanned many worlds. Her work has been exhibited all over,
including the British Museum. Her background was an
international as the recognition she drew.
Maya Askari of the International Network for Contemporary
Iraqi Artists was determined to pay a positive tribute to
Al-Radi. She launched Internationally with Iraq stop
Depleted Uranium at her London residence on December 19th
with an exhibition of the works of contemporary Iraqi artists.
Depleted Uranium, a chemical and radiological toxic
substance is almost twice as heavy as lead. Used in
ammunition, bombs and missiles, it aerosolises on contact
contaminating the air and groundwater and is insoluble. It
has a 4.5 billion year half life. Wherever it has been used,
exposed ground troops and populations from Iraq, the Balkans
and Afghanistan report health problems and fatalities. DU
attacks the DNA mastercode. It is illegal under existing
international law and US Military Law which classifies it as
a weapon of mass destruction.
"The (the Americans) have broken their own laws" pointed out
artists Rashad Salim who took part in the exhibition.
The works of Maysaloun Faraj, Leila Kubba, Jannane el-Ani,
Carol Fulton, Hanna MalAllah, and other Iraqi and Western
artists were on display.
International with Iraq Stop Depleted Uranium aims to:
* Organise events, exhibitions and workshops;
* Affiliate with the international campaign against DU;
* Help fund and promote documentaries;
* Target special interest groups;
*Facilitate links and networking with professionals in Iraq
and the international community;
* Develop and implement programmes of action;
*Raise awareness.
For further information contact: iandixdu@yahoo.co.uk
--
Posted for educational and research purposes only,
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56 BBC: Wind farm decision 'in New
Last Updated: Thursday, 23 December, 2004
[Site of proposed wind farm in Somerset]
Opponents say the wind farm will dominate the landscape
A decision on plans to build wind turbines near Hinkley Point in
Somerset will not be made until the New Year.
A planning application for 12 turbines near the nuclear power
station has been submitted and a decision was originally expected
before the end of 2004. West Somerset District Council says more
questions need to be put to the applicants - Your Energy -
following an independent study.
Greenpeace backs the plans, which are opposed by a residents'
action group.
The group says the turbines threaten to destroy the coastline,
but Greenpeace says they could power 20,000 homes.
The proposed turbines are 100 metres tall and 320 to 360 metres
apart.
A decision is not expected before February or March.
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have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for
non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more
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