***************************************************************** 10/28/04 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 12.258 ***************************************************************** RADBULL IS PRODUCED BY THE ABALONE ALLIANCE CLEARINGHOUSE ***************************************************************** Send News Stories to news@energy-net.org with title on subject line and first line of body NUCLEAR POLICY 1 * Disappeared Weapons * Iraqi WMDs 2 Guardian Unlimited: Blair 'used intelligence as PR tool' 3 UK Independent: Blair 'uses intelligence as PR tool' 4 Las Vegas SUN: Russia Denies Involvement in Iraq Weapons 5 BBC: Iran stays firm on nuclear curbs 6 Xinhuanet: EU nuclear talks with Iran fruitless 7 Al Jazeera: Powell warns Israel on using force against Iran - 8 UK Independent: Iran steps up confrontation with Europe on nuclear d 9 UPI: Iran nuclear talks report progress - 10 US: [du-list] 4 ex-detainees sue Rumsfeld, 10 others - Boston Globe 11 US: Roanoke Times: Vinton man saw fears of nuclear war rise to the s 12 US: Modesto Bee: JIM HIGHTOWER: Victories for the people and against NUCLEAR REACTORS 13 US: [NukeNet] Fwd: Hope Creek Nuclear Unit Declares Unusual Event 14 US: News Journal: Liquid gas plan worries nuclear plant 15 US: Platts: NPPD STUDY SAYS RENEWING COOPER COULD SAVE OVER $1-BILLI 16 US: NRC: NRC Staff Schedules Public Meeting for November 4 to Discus 17 Sofia Morning News: Bulgaria's N-plant on Schedule after Romania's Q NUCLEAR SAFETY 18 [DU-WATCH] Iraq: Report of Radioactive Contamination 19 [du-list] DU used in S.Korean weapon 20 [du-list] Household Survey Sees 100,000 Iraqi Deaths -Yahoo 21 [du-list] gieger counter readings of Iraqi tanks, and scrap 22 US: NRC: Cornell University to Provide Neutral Mediators for NRC's A 23 US: NRC: OAS petition over training for nuclear pharmacists 24 Whitehaven News: PLUTONIUM LEVELS RISING IN SEA NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE 25 Las Vegas Mercury: Backstory: Jonny-come-lately 26 Las Vegas SUN: Kerry makes late push in Nevada 27 US: Las Vegas SUN: Old nuke waste shipped to Nevada 28 US: PE.com: Tests: Well, house tainted 29 Arizona Daily Sun: Yucca Mountain tour underscores Flag challenge NUCLEAR WEAPONS US DEPT. OF ENERGY 30 Tri-City Herald: K Basins fuel project overcomes hurdles 31 eNewMexican: Whistle-blowers share hopes for congressional hearing 32 York Daily Record: BOEING, HONEYWELL: Uranium plant deals - 33 lamonitor.com: Whistleblowers gain momentum at meeting 34 KIFI: The INEEL Is Working on Hydrogen Fuel System That May Soon Pow OTHER NUCLEAR 35 [du-list] Some futher musings and clarifications ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** FULL NEWS STORIES ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** 1 * Disappeared Weapons * Iraqi WMDs Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 16:26:28 -0500 (CDT) Institute for Public Accuracy 915 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045 (202) 347-0020 * http://www.accuracy.org * ipa@accuracy.org ___________________________________________________ 4:30 p.m. ET -- Thursday, October 28, 2004 * Disappeared Weapons * Iraqi WMDs The 380 tons of high explosives missing from al Qaqaa in Iraq have become an issue in the waning days of the presidential campaign. The New York Times reports the explosives were there when U.S. soldiers arrived, but when local Iraqis asked the soldiers to guard them, they "were told this was not the soldiers' responsibility." KSTP-TV in Minneapolis/St. Paul reports that one of its film crews "in Iraq shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein was in the area where tons of explosives disappeared, and may have videotaped some of those weapons." [See: ] IMAD KHADDURI, imad.khadduri@rogers.com, http://www.iraqsnuclearmirage.com A former nuclear scientist with the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission, Khadduri wrote the new book "Iraq's Nuclear Mirage." Starting before the invasion of Iraq, he wrote a series of articles questioning the Bush administration's assertions regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capacity. He said today: "I am familiar with the facility at al Qaqaa. I dealt with people there when Iraq still had a nuclear program in the late 1980s. Iraq had no nuclear program after the Gulf War and it's ridiculous that the Bush administration got away with claiming that it did. Some are claiming that this shows that Iraq did in fact have weapons of mass destruction, but these explosives are conventional and are quite easily available on the global market. They are quite likely being used as explosives by the resistance. All this highlights that disarmament was hardly driving U.S. actions, contrary to the rhetoric we hear. This facility was being monitored by the IAEA before the invasion -- since these conventional weapons could be useful in building nuclear weapons -- and doors had IAEA seals on them which were apparently broken by U.S. forces. The U.S. ignored IAEA warnings about this facility. This also ominously occurred at another nuclear site, at the Nuclear Research Center at Tuwaitha, 20 km east of Baghdad. There were nuclear burial mounds there that contained hundreds of tons of yellow cake, unprocessed natural uranium, and other nuclear waste accumulated over 30 years of research and development. The U.S. military broke open the IAEA-locked mounds, probably got some of the U.S. soldiers contaminated, and then left the mound open to looters. That facility was in fact looted by villagers of three or four surrounding villages who needed the barrels that contained the yellow cake and caused serious radioactive contamination in these villages, which is harmful to civilians. But since they are Iraqi, and not American, the issue did not warrant that much attention, then." STEVEN KULL, skull@pipa.org, http://www.pipa.org Kull is director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes, which just released a study of public attitudes on Iraq. Kull said today: "There is now a consensus among the American public that if Iraq did not have WMD and was not providing substantial support to al Qaeda, the U.S. should not have gone to war with Iraq. Seventy-four percent overall have this view, including 58 percent of Bush supporters and 92 percent of Kerry supporters. A majority also rejects the argument that the U.S. should have gone to war with Iraq because Saddam Hussein had the intention to acquire WMD. Overall, support for the decision to go to war has eroded slightly since August, so that a majority of 51 percent now says that it was the wrong decision, and 46 percent say it was the right decision. It may seem contradictory that three-quarters of Americans say that the U.S. should not have gone to war if Iraq did not have WMD or was not providing support to al Qaeda, while nearly half still say the war was the right decision. However, support for the decision is sustained by persisting beliefs among half of Americans that Iraq provided substantial support to al Qaeda, and had WMD, or at least a major WMD program. Despite the widely-publicized conclusions of the Duelfer report, 49 percent of Americans continue to believe Iraq had actual WMD (27 percent) or a major WMD program (22 percent), and 52 percent believe that Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda." JONATHAN SCHWARZ, Jonathan_Schwarz@sbcglobal.net, http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/000213.html Author of the article "What We Think About When We Think About Iraq: How So Many Americans Can Be So Wrong About WMD," Schwarz said today: "Given the continuing dishonesty of the Bush administration and others, it's no wonder many Americans continue to believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The latest distortion is that the al Qaqaa explosives were WMD. Although highly dangerous, they were not. In the election season, it's vital that citizens get accurate information about this issue." For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167 _________________________________________________________________ You received this message as a subscriber on the list: public@lists.accuracy.org To be removed from the list, send any message to: public-unsubscribe@lists.accuracy.org For all list information and functions, including changing your subscription mode and options, visit the Web page: http://lists.accuracy.org/lists/info/public ***************************************************************** 2 Guardian Unlimited: Blair 'used intelligence as PR tool' [UP] Matthew Tempest and agencies Thursday October 28, 2004 An intelligence chief who lost his job after challenging the government's claims on Iraq today suggested intelligence had been used as a "PR tool" since Tony Blair came to power - including over Kosovo and Operation Desert Fox in Iraq. John Morrison lost his job as the intelligence and security committee's chief investigator after criticising the prime minister's claims that Saddam Hussein was a "threat" on the BBC's Panorama programme earlier this year. Today he returned to the fray with an interview on Radio 4's Today programme - the outlet which first broadcast the allegations that the government's Iraq dossier had been "sexed up" - and said there was media pressure on intelligence officials during both the bombing missions over Iraq codenamed Operation Desert Fox and the Kosovo conflict. He said: "There was a culture of news management which came in after 1997 which I had not seen before and intelligence got swept up in that." In the interview he makes two specific new allegations: that individual analysts were put under pressure to produce favourable intelligence during the Operation Desert Fox bombing campaign against Iraqi sites thought to hold weapons of mass destruction, and that during the Kosovo bombing campaign, intelligence was used as a "PR tool". On Desert Fox, he said: "I was under pressure and my analysts were under pressure to say the next day this had been a great success. You can't do that." "It got to the point that individual analysts were being rung up by the press office and being asked to say 'this is great, isn't it?'. I wasn't having that." Mr Morrison said the pressure did not necessarily come from outside the Ministry of Defence but the press office were looking to provide information for 10 Downing Street's news management "grid". When it came to the Kosovo campaign, Mr Morrison said: "Once bitten, twice shy." "What I did, in effect, was within my crisis staff, set up in effect my own press office to handle the MoD press office. "I took a very senior and tough-minded analyst and told him 'This is your job, to keep the press office off the analysts' backs and make sure we only say in public what we are absolutely certain about'. "We were under constant pressure to field talking heads at the press conference, to have themes for individual days and it was a very tricky balance not to reveal what one shouldn't." Mr Morrison said that in the case of Kosovo, he did not think there was "any attempt deliberately to distort". He told the Today programme: "I had the feeling at the time that intelligence was being seen as a PR tool. "I think, in that case, it was over-enthusiasm rather than a pressure to distort. I don't think they understood the problems of battle damage assessment." The MoD immediately responded, issuing a statement to Today: "At the time of operations there is a thirst for information in the media which the press office tries to satisfy within reasonable limits. "The press office will work closely with all parts of the department, including the Defence Intelligence Service, to obtain this information. "John Morrison is quite clear in his interview with the Today programme that he doesn't allege any improper pressure or misuse of intelligence occurred during the two operations in question." The Tory leader, Michael Howard, however, said that Mr Morrison's comments were "extremely grave". He told BBC Radio 4's The World at One: "What he has done today is to blow open the dodgy way this government operates," he said. "These are extremely grave allegations and their significance extends way beyond the war in Iraq. He added: "It is a pattern of behaviour that has destroyed the trust which should be at the heart of our democracy and it goes right to the top. The person responsible is the prime minister and as long as he is there, trust in government can't be restored." Mr Howard also dismissed the Ministry of Defence's response to Mr Morrison's comments. "The statement from the Ministry of Defence is a typical example of the kind of spin which I am criticising." Mr Morrison had said he had no regrets over the Panorama interview. "I felt somebody had to speak up about the misuse of intelligence by MI6, in not handling it properly, the misuse of intelligence by the senior management in the Defence Intelligence Staff and misuse of intelligence terminology by the prime minister in talking about a threat when no threat existed," he told the BBC this morning. The ex-deputy director of defence intelligence had told Panorama there was a "collective raspberry" at Mr Blair's claim that Saddam Hussein threatened Britain. Mr Morrison was later told his contract with the Committee, which monitors the intelligence services on the prime minister's behalf, would not be renewed. Mr Morrison once again said Mr Blair had been wrong to call Saddam Hussein a "threat". "In intelligence terms, threat is a combination of capability and intention," he said. "If you have got the capability but you don't intend to do anyone any harm, you are not a threat. "If you have got the intention but not the capability, then again you are not a threat. "Now, we all thought Saddam had some weapons of mass destruction capability but there was never any realistic suggestion that he intended to use it. "The only circumstances we thought ... he might use it was as a last resort if he was attacked. "In the end, as we know, he did not have any WMD so he could not have been a threat in the correct intelligence term." Mr Morrison said the contentious claim that Saddam could launch WMD in 45 minutes was given prominence in the government's dossier because "it was striking, it implied there was an immediate threat". The lesson of the Butler inquiry was that "we need to be professional in the intelligence community and not to let enthusiasm carry one away". "You can actually have a grown-up discussion in public without prejudicing intelligence sources and methods," he continued. "The function of intelligence is to speak truth unto power. If it doesn't do that, it fails and I felt somebody had to speak up for intelligence standards. I did that. I got sacked and I don't regret it for a moment." Special report Iraq Chronology Iraq timeline: Feb 1 2004 - present [http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/page/0,12438,1151021,00.html] Iraq timeline: July 16 1979 - Jan 31 2004 [http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/page/0,12438,793802,00.html] Interactive guides Click-through graphics on Iraq Key documents Full text of speeches and documents Audio reports Audio reports on Iraq More special reports Politics and Iraq International aid and development Iraq and the media The anti-war movement Useful links Provisional authority: rebuilding Iraq [http://www.rebuilding-iraq.net/] Iraqi-American chamber of commerce [http://www.i-acci.org/main.shtml] cnn.com: David Kay's evidence to US Senate committee [http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/01/28/kay.transcript/] [UP] Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004 ***************************************************************** 3 UK Independent: Blair 'uses intelligence as PR tool' By James Lyons, Political Correspondent, PA News 28 October 2004 Intelligence has been used as a "PR tool" since Tony Blair came to power, a former senior security services officer said today. John Morrison lost his job as the Intelligence and Security Committee's chief investigator after criticising the Prime Minister's claims about Iraq. Mr Morrison said he had no regrets and went further, suggesting media requirements influenced intelligence in Kosovo and an earlier operation in Iraq. "There was a culture of news management which came in after 1997 which I had not seen before and intelligence got swept up in that," he said. The former deputy director of Defence Intelligence said there was a "collective raspberry" at Mr Blair's claim that Saddam Hussein threatened Britain. Mr Morrison was later told his contract with the Committee, which monitors the intelligence services on the PM's behalf, would not be renewed. He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme he had no regrets over the Panorama interview. "I felt somebody had to speak up about the misuse of intelligence by MI6, in not handling it properly, the misuse of intelligence by the senior management in the Defence Intelligence Staff and misuse of intelligence terminology by the Prime Minister in talking about a threat when no threat existed," he said. Mr Morrison said the clerk and head of the ISC advised him against the original interview. They warned he would be "stitched up" but he decided to take the risk and Panorama were fair. "I was therefore slightly surprised when I was sacked from the job," he continued. "I thought perhaps there was a 30% chance they would ignore it, 60% chance that I would have my fingers rapped and told not to do it again, which I wouldn't, and a 10% chance that I would be fired and I was fired." Mr Morrison was told that the security agencies had got together and written a letter saying they no longer had trust in him. He said he could only put that down to "being slightly rude about the Prime Minister". "The phrase I used about the collective raspberry around Whitehall seems to have got under somebody's skin," he said. "I said that because 'threat' has got a very specific meaning in intelligence and the Prime Minister was misusing it." Mr Morrison added: "Given that my former colleagues could not appear in public, if they were still working, I felt somebody had to speak up for them. "And as the former head of the profession for intelligence analysts, I thought I was probably the best person to do it." Mr Morrison said individual analysts were put under pressure to produce favourable intelligence during the Operation Desert Fox bombing campaign against Iraqi sites thought to hold weapons of mass destruction. "I was under pressure and my analysts were under pressure to say the next day this had been a great success. You can't do that," he told Today. "It got to the point that individual analysts were being rung up by the press office and being asked to say 'this is great, isn't it?'. I wasn't having that." Mr Morrison said the pressure did not necessarily come from outside the Ministry of Defence but the press office were looking to provide information for 10 Downing Street's news management "grid". When it came to the Kosovo campaign, Mr Morrison said: "Once bitten twice shy. "What I did, in effect, was within my crisis staff set up, in effect, my own press office to handle the MoD press office. "I took a very senior and tough-minded analyst and told him 'This is your job, to keep the press office off the analysts' backs and make sure we only say in public what we are absolutely certain about'. "We were under constant pressure to field talking heads at the press conference, to have themes for individual days and it was a very tricky balance not to reveal what one shouldn't." UK Independent Ltd. ***************************************************************** 4 Las Vegas SUN: Russia Denies Involvement in Iraq Weapons By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV ASSOCIATED PRESS MOSCOW (AP) - Russia angrily denied allegations Thursday that Russian forces had smuggled a cache of high explosives out of Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion in March 2003. Defense Ministry spokesman Vyacheslav Sedov dismissed the allegations as "absurd" and "ridiculous." "I can state officially that the Russian Defense Ministry and its structures couldn't have been involved in the disappearance of the explosives, because all Russian military experts left Iraq when the international sanctions were introduced during the 1991 Gulf War," he told The Associated Press. The denial followed a story in The Washington Times on Thursday that quoted a high-ranking U.S. defense official alleging that Russian special forces had "almost certainly" helped spirit out the hundreds of tons of high explosives that went missing from the al-Qaqaa base. The newspaper based its report on an interview with John Shaw, the deputy U.S. undersecretary of defense for international technology security. Two weeks ago, Iraqi officials told the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency that 377 tons of explosives had vanished as a result of "theft and looting ... due to lack of security." The compounds, HMX and RDX, are key components in plastic explosives, which insurgents in Iraq have used in bomb attacks. Russia' charge d'affaires in Iraq, Ilya Morgunov, also denied the report. "I didn't hear about any weapons to be taken out," Interfax quoted him as saying. "Moreover, there was nobody to take them out, because we actually evacuated all of our personnel." He said there had been no Russian special forces in Iraq, only civilian specialists working for foreign firms. -- ***************************************************************** 5 BBC: Iran stays firm on nuclear curbs Last Updated: Thursday, 28 October, 2004 By Frances Harrison BBC correspondent in Tehran [Hossein Mousavian] Mousavian: Referral to the UN Security Council is an empty threat Top Iranian nuclear negotiator Hossein Mousavian has ruled out a long-term suspension of uranium enrichment. Mr Mousavian told the BBC it was completely illogical for the international community to ask Iran to stop its enrichment activities. What was being considered was a suspension for a few months, he said. On Wednesday, Iran's spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said illogical demands from the Europeans would lead Iran to break off talks. The European side h requested the indefinite suspension of uranian emrichment, but we have to define what does indefinite suspension mean. If they mean a suspension for a decade, definitely it is not going to work Hossein Mousavian Full text: Hossein Mousavian interview In an interview with the BBC, Mr Mousavian, the Secretary of the Foreign Policy Committee of the Supreme Council for National Security, said the key question was whether Europe is asking Iran to suspend enrichment of uranium or stop it altogether. He said an indefinite suspension for a decade was not going to work. Iran had in mind a suspension for two or three or four months and would not consider a very long time frame. 'Empty threat' Mr Mousavian said asking Iran to stop enrichment altogether was illogical. What Iran is offering the Europeans instead is a series of objective guarantees and confidence building measures to prove it is not diverting uranium for a weapons programme. But it is not at all clear that will be enough and if no deal is reached, Europe is threatening immediate referral of Iran to the United Nations Security Council. But Mr Mousavian described referral as an empty threat because he said the Security Council could not do anything serious against Iran - like an oil embargo - because it would double world oil prices. And he said Iran had been preparing for referral to the Security Council since June when it began to lose hope in the dialogue with Europe. ***************************************************************** 6 Xinhuanet: EU nuclear talks with Iran fruitless www.xinhuanet.com www.chinaview.cn 2004-10-28 14:09:11 BEIJING, Oct. 28 (Xinhuanet) -- Germany, Britain and France have failed to persuade Iran to halt its nuclear program during talks in Vienna. Representatives from the European trio said Wednesday that they had reached no consensus with Iranians from the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency. However, an Iranian negotiator indicated that both sides might soon resume talks. Earlier, the three European nations proposed to Iran that if it drops its uranium enrichment plan, they will not support the US to bring the issue to the UN Security Council. Tehran has been denying the US accusation of developing secret nuclear weapons for years, asserting that this accusation is politically motivated and Iran's nuclear research is fully peaceful. Copyright ©2003 Xinhua News Agency. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 7 Al Jazeera: Powell warns Israel on using force against Iran - [http://www.aljazeera.com] 10/28/2004 7:30:00 PM GMT Powell warned Israel that diplomacy and not force is the way to deal with Iran's nuclear program. Secretary of State Colin Powell warned Israel on Wednesday that diplomacy and not force is the best way to deal with Iran's nuclear program. Powell said that he had no information on rumors that Israel might launch pre-emptive strikes on Iranian nuclear reactors. He said that "there was a lot of speculation and horror stories and other stories about what this might lead to in the way of crisis and part of that speculation is that the Israelis might do something or not do something." "I have no information on that," Powell said. "And I think the whole world, to include Israel, is trying to find a diplomatic and peaceful solution to this problem." In 1981, Israeli warplanes have destroyed an unfinished Iraqi nuclear reactor in order to prevent former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein from producing nuclear weapons. Powell alleged that Iran is planning to develop nuclear weapons, but he said that he doesn’t believe it could be done overnight or in the next several months. "It's going to take them time," he said. Powell also said that it was time to refer Tehran’s nuclear file to the UN Security Council, which could impose possible sanctions on Iran. "It is not in the interests of the region or the world for Iran to be moving in this direction," he said. The State Department spokesman, Richard Boucher, also said at the daily media briefing that sending Iran’s dossier to the UN Security Council remains the U.S. position even with the talks taking place in Vienna. "At this point, we have not seen anything different," he said. "But in terms of Iranian commitments or behavior, we will have to see how the meeting went." The U.S. accuses Iran of covertly developing nuclear weapons. Iran denies the U.S. claims and insists that its program is mainly aimed at the peaceful generation of electricity. In talks Wednesday in Vienna, Iranian delegates and European officials failed to reach a deal concerning Iran’s nuclear program, but both sides said that they would meet again soon. Iran's delegates insisted on their right to enrich uranium, and Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei excluded any long-term suspension of the enrichment process. The Europeans are offering Iran a trade deal and nuclear technology, including a light-water research plant, in return for a suspension of enrichment. Copyright 2004 AlJazeera Publishing Limited ***************************************************************** 8 UK Independent: Iran steps up confrontation with Europe on nuclear deal By Anne Penketh, Diplomatic Editor 28 October 2004 Iran yesterday stepped up its confrontation with European countries as its Supreme Leader threatened to break off negotiations over its suspect nuclear weapons programme. Senior officials from Britain, France and Germany yesterday held negotiations in Vienna with an Iranian delegation to persuade Iran into indefinitely suspending uranium enrichment ahead of a deadline in one month. It could be used to produce a nuclear weapon. The EU countries are warning that Iran must comply with the demand in time for the next governors' meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency on 25 November or face being referred to the UN Security Council for punishment. Initial reports after the talks sounded positive, as both sides spoke of some progress and agreed to meet again next week. But a British official said ominously: "I don't think we're that close yet" to an agreement. Last night, making his first comments on the dispute on which he has the final say on behalf of Iran, the country's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, rejected a long-term suspension of uranium enrichment. "If there is any form of threat in the talks, it will show a lack of logic on the part of [Iran's] partners in the negotiations. In that case, the great Iranian nation and the Islamic Republic of Iran will reconsider the very basis of negotiations and co-operation," he said. Iran has heightened tensions by testing a long-range missile on 20 October, while hardliners in parliament have introduced a bill to force the government to resume enrichment and halt snap UN inspections of nuclear facilities. There are fears that the Iranians will try to wring every possible concession right up to the IAEA meeting. The Iranians also have their eye on the American elections next Tuesday, in the hope that a Kerry administration would adopt a less hard line than George Bush, who wants the Security Council to take action against Iran. Iran has insisted its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes. In their "last chance" offer to Tehran, the three European countries are offering Iran the acquisition of a light water research reactor and resumed trade negotiations with the EU, in return for compliance. The EU states would also back the Russian Bushehr nuclear reactor project in Iran and Russia's guarantees of reactor fuel. They privately recognise that there is not enough support among Security Council members to impose sanctions, and there are fears that sanctions could prove counter-productive if the Council is not united. The International Institute for Strategic Studies said last week that in the cases of Iran and North Korea, "the US and its allies may not have sufficient instruments of enticement or coercion to achieve disarmament. The threat of effective sanctions is difficult to realise and military options are unappealing." An independent expert said the deal being offered by the Europeans was favourable for Iran, adding that the Iranians would rather accept European technology than Russian. UK Independent Ltd. ***************************************************************** 9 UPI: Iran nuclear talks report progress - (United Press International) October 28, 2004 Vienna, Azerbaijan, Oct. 27 (UPI) -- Progress was reported in Vienna Wednesday on the talks over Iran's nuclear program but details were not available. Negotiators for Britain, Germany and France met with Iranians to discuss the issue, CNN reported. Iran's state-run news agency, however, said the talks on a European proposal to halt Tehran's uranium enrichment program ended without "a tangible result." "Some progress was made towards identifying the elements of a common approach to the issues and the two sides agreed to meet shortly," the British foreign office said. A similar assessment was made by Germany which said the talks were useful and that the two sides had agreed to meet again. The Iranian Republic News Agency reported the Iranian delegates told the Europeans that "restricting Iran's access to nuclear technology marks a red line for the country and it would not be acceptable at all." The talks are designed to ease concerns in the United States and Europe that Iran is seeking to develop nuclear weapons. Iran has said its nuclear program is intended for peaceful civilian uses. [UPI Perspectives] ***************************************************************** 10 [du-list] 4 ex-detainees sue Rumsfeld, 10 others - Boston Globe Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 18:14:48 -0700 http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2004/10/28/4_ex_detainees_sue_rumsfeld_10_others/ Begins.... 4 ex-detainees sue Rumsfeld, 10 others Plaintiffs allege officials to blame for abuse at base By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | October 28, 2004 WASHINGTON -- Four former Guantanamo detainees yesterday sued Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and 10 others in the military chain of command overseeing the American interrogation prison in Cuba, alleging that the officials are personally responsible for illegal acts of prolonged arbitrary detention and torture. ADVERTISEMENT The lawsuit, believed to be the first of its kind by former detainees who have since been released from the prison, seeks $10 million for each of the men to be paid by the officials out of their own pockets as compensation for their role in the alleged abuses. All four plaintiffs are British citizens who were taken into US military custody in December 2001 in Afghanistan, and released in March from Cuba. Although they were imprisoned and interrogated for more than two years, none has been charged with a crime. "This case is not about the money," Eric Lewis, a lawyer for the detainees, said at a press conference yesterday. "It is about accountability. Torture is un-American. Arbitrary detention is un-American. And what these young men have suffered, and continue to suffer, is something for which we and the American justice system need to hold these people accountable." Plaintiff lawyers acknowledged that before they can air the merits of their case in court, they will first have to overcome an anticipated claim that all the officials are immune from being sued because they were acting on behalf of the government. The lawyers said yesterday that because it is illegal for any official to authorize torture, they can defeat that defense. However, Major Michael Shavers, a Pentagon spokesman, disputed the basis for the former detainees' case and said there is no US policy that condones torture. "These individuals were captured in Afghanistan fighting illegally for Al Qaeda," he said. "They were properly classified as enemy combatants. Their detention was directly related to this combat activity, as determined by an appropriate DOD official before they were taken to Guantanamo. There is no basis in US law to pay claims to those captured and detained as a result of combat activity." The lawsuit asserts that the four men "never engaged in terrorist activity or took up arms against the United States." It says that three of the men, all friends from Tipton, England, traveled to Afghanistan in October 2001 "to offer help in the ongoing humanitarian crisis and were detained in November 2001 by the Northern Alliance and turned over to the US military. It claims the fourth, a web designer from Manchester, England, went to Pakistan in October 2001 for a "religious retreat" and quickly decided to return home, but was kidnapped, taken to Afghanistan, and jailed by the Taliban as an accused British spy. After the Taliban regime fell, it says, US soldiers took custody of him. Continued... 1 2 Next [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Make a clean sweep of pop-up ads. Yahoo! Companion Toolbar. Now with Pop-Up Blocker. Get it for free! http://us.click.yahoo.com/L5YrjA/eSIIAA/yQLSAA/FGYolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> To unsubscribe from this groups send a message to du-list-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com. In the body of the message type unsubscribe and send. Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/du-list/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: du-list-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ ***************************************************************** 11 Roanoke Times: Vinton man saw fears of nuclear war rise to the surface in 1962 [http://www.roanoke.com] Thursday, October 28, 2004 Cyril Cook's Air Force team raised the Titan missiles, preparing for launch, but "for a reason I never knew, the launch was terminated." By [john.cramer@roanoke.com] The Roanoke Times [john.cramer@roanoke.com] 981-3140 For 13 days in October 1962, the world was close to nuclear war. All eyes were on President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but in a vast underground military complex in the high plains of Colorado, a high school dropout from Vinton also had a role in the Cold War showdown. Cyril "Morey" Cook, then a 24-year-old electrical power production operator in the U.S. Air Force, said he believes he and his teammates came within seconds of launching missiles at a Soviet target. "My teammate looked at me and said, 'I believe we're about to put one over the fence,'" Cook said. "We never blinked an eye, but for a reason I never knew, the launch was terminated." Today, on the 42nd anniversary of the end of the crisis, historians say the world was at the brink of nuclear war but that there's no evidence an actual countdown had commenced. Nonetheless, Cook said the experience was a sobering lesson in the realities of the modern warfare. He maintains the United States should preserve a nuclear arsenal as a deterrent against enemies. "I'm not a warmonger or nothing like that, but you got to be tough," said Cook, 66, a gray-haired great-grandfather. The crisis became known as the "Thirteen Days," a reference to Attorney General Robert Kennedy's description of the period from the Oct. 16 briefing of Kennedy on the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba to Khrushchev's Oct. 28 decision to withdraw the weapons. Born in 1938 in England, Cook came to the United States when he was 9. His father, a British soldier, had been killed early in World War II and his mother had married a U.S. soldier, Roy Claytor, a truck driver from Roanoke. When his stepfather died in 1955, Cook and his brother dropped out of William Byrd High School to support themselves and their mother. "My principal told me education was the most important thing in life, but we didn't have a choice," Cook said. After working at a dairy farm and a weaving mill, Cook joined the Air Force in 1959 and became an electrical power production operator. In 1961, he was assigned to an Air Force long-range missile complex being constructed underground east of Denver. A series of missile sites spread across 100 miles, it was the first facility of its kind and the airmen studied, trained and drilled relentlessly, Cook said. "It was nerve-racking," he said. "We'd train, train, train, train. We could do things automatically without hesitation." The crisis culminated in growing tension - including the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin crisis, the nuclear arms race, the deployment of U.S. missiles in Turkey - between the United States and the Soviet Union. In May 1962, Khrushchev and Cuban leader Fidel Castro decided to put medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba to improve the Soviet strategic arsenal and deter a potential U.S. attack against the Soviet Union and Cuba. In mid-October, U.S. spy planes photographed Soviet missile bases under construction in Cuba. Kennedy ordered the withdrawal of the missiles and a naval blockade of Cuba. "Suddenly, we went on alert," Cook said, recalling the "hardened condition" status that locked the missile crews underground for long shifts behind massive concrete and steel doors. "We were sealed off from the world." About 100 feet underground were the power production facilities with 1,000-kilowatt diesel engines. Each missile site contained three missiles and had enough electrical power to supply a town of 6,000 houses. The electricity was needed, in large part, for the massive elevators that lifted the missiles to the surface before launch. Cook said he and the other airmen worried about their families. "You're under shelter and they're not," he said, "but you black that out and follow your training. In your mind, you know you might never see them again, but you're so trained, you just do your job." During the crisis, security was intense at Lowry Air Force Base above ground and in the underground missile facilities. The airmen received intelligence briefings before being sent underground. Cook recalls being given an old .38-caliber revolver and three bullets on his shift guarding the airmen's underground barracks. "I still don't know why they only gave me three bullets," he said. When the order came to raise the missiles to the surface in preparation for firing, Cook said he and his teammates did not hesitate. Their engines supplied the power - the needles in the engine-room gauges surged as the missiles were lifted - and Cook expected the walls to shudder at any moment under the power of missiles fired. "We didn't know the targets," he said. "All we knew was those missiles had a range of 6,200 miles and traveled 15,000 mph." The Titan missiles were positioned for firing for about an hour before they were lowered, Cook said. "There was relief," he said. "Just relief." Graham Allison, the director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, said many Kennedy administration officials had believed nuclear war was imminent and that military systems of that time lacked safeguards that would have prevented an accidental or premature launch. But that does not mean the nuclear button was seconds away from being pushed, he said. "To the best of my knowledge, there was never a countdown to launch of an official sort," said Allison, who was assistant secretary of defense under President Clinton and special adviser to the secretary of defense under President Reagan. He said Cook's recollection of the missiles being raised may have been part of the high-alert preparation to launch, but it didn't mean a countdown had started. "Obviously, this was an event where thousands of things were happening and people experience things differently, so what someone recalled is not what always went on," said Allison, co-author of the book "Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis." Cook earned a high school equivalency diploma and some college credits in the Air Force before retiring as a technical sergeant in 1981. He was a civilian contractor for the military and a city building inspector in Nebraska before moving back to Vinton in 1990 to be near family. He worked as the maintenance supervisor at the Poff Federal Building until retiring in 2002. Today, he has yellowed newspaper clippings, commendations, medals and other mementos from his years with the Strategic Air Command and the Titan and Minuteman missile systems. He spends retirement doing occasional home repairs for friends - he's still a jack of all trades - and relaxing with his wife, Edna, at their Vinton home. He thinks about the Cuban Missile Crisis each October, although the anniversary often passes with little public notice. "For me, that's something you don't forget," he said. "I remember I was never afraid of dying myself. You thought about the people [who would have been killed by the nuclear missiles], but you didn't dwell on it. You didn't think about killing individual people - just hitting a target - or you'd never do it." [http://www.roanoke.com/services/privacy.html] ***************************************************************** 12 Modesto Bee: JIM HIGHTOWER: Victories for the people and against the powerful Modbee.com [http://www.modbee.com] The Providence Journal [metro@modbee.com?subject=JIM Last Updated: October 28, 2004, 11:40:00 AM PDT (SH) - For those who sit around whining that the Powers That Be are just too powerful, so there's no use even bothering with battling - take note and take heart in not one, not two, but three big court victories by grassroots battlers. First is a coalition of environmental and citizen groups in the West Virginia area that has been battling the coal industry giants. For years, these groups have been trying to stop the industry from using a devastating, disgusting, and just plain dumb mining practice called "mountaintop removal." Instead of tunneling into the mountains to get at the coal, the corporations simply blow up the top third of the mountains, shove the rubble into valleys and streams below, then scoop out the coal. Not only is this unbelievably destructive, but, thanks to the coalition's determined push, a federal judge has now ruled that the permitting process that rubber stamps this abomination is illegal. Next, a never-say-die coalition of environmental groups and Nevada officials have stunned the nuclear-power giants who had concocted a cockamamie scheme to bury all of America's high-level nuclear waste in Nevada's Yucca Mountain. The cockamamie part is that this is an earthquake zone, the standards for protecting the public from long-term radiation leaks are absurdly inadequate, and the hot stuff would be hauled for years on trucks and trains running right through our population centers. Now a federal appeals court has ruled in favor of the coalition, at least slowing this corporate rush to nuclear-powered insanity. Third, a coalition of community radio broadcasters and citizen groups took on the media giants that had gotten lapdog regulators to let the giants grow ever larger, shrinking media competition, diversity, and our democracy. But now, a federal appeals court has ruled against the media Goliaths - in favor of the local Davids. These battles are far from over, but grassroots forces are winning! Jim Hightower is the author of "Thieves In High Places: They've Stolen Our Country And It's Time To Take It Back," (Viking Press). Copyright © 2004 The Modesto Bee. About The Bee ***************************************************************** 13 [NukeNet] Fwd: Hope Creek Nuclear Unit Declares Unusual Event Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 18:15:53 -0700 Investor News NYSE:PEG For further information, contact: Brian Smith, Director, Investor Relations Phone: 973-430-6564 Sue Carson, Director, Financial Communications Phone: 973-430-6565 Greg McLaughlin, Sr. Investor Relations Analyst Phone: 973-430-6568 October 28, 2004 HOPE CREEK NUCLEAR UNIT DECLARES UNUSUAL EVENT DUE TO FREON LEAK IN HVAC UNIT IN SECURITY CENTER No Injuries, No Release of Radiation, and No Impact on Security Unit Had Been Out of Service for Refueling and Maintenance PSEG Nuclear said today that an unusual event was declared today at its Hope Creek generating station. The unusual event occurred at 10:03 a.m. due to a freon leak in a HVAC unit in the station’s security center. The leak resulted in restricted access to the second floor. Anytime access restrictions that impact routine plant operations are caused by an uncontrolled toxic gas release, the requirements for an unusual event are met. The unusual event was terminated at 1:16 p.m. Hope Creek has been shut down for refueling and maintenance. However, no maintenance was being performed when the HVAC unit failed, and no personnel were in the area. No injuries resulted, and there was no release of radiation related to the event. Also, there was no impact on security. The HVAC unit is located on the second floor in a ventilation room that is normally secured. When the freon leak occurred, it activated the smoke detector in the ventilation room, which prompted the control room to contact fire protection to investigate. Fire protection responded and identified the cause to be the freon leak. Fire protection personnel proceeded to limit access to the area, isolated power to the HVAC unit that ended the leak, and monitored the remainder of the area to ensure personnel safety. Shortly after the incident, fire protection confirmed the freon had dissipated and the work environment was safe to enter. Access restrictions have been lifted and a team will now determine the cause of the leak and commence repairs. Overall plant security was not impacted by the unusual event. All local, state and federal agencies were notified. FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENT Readers are cautioned that statements contained in this press release about our and our subsidiaries’ future performance, including future revenues, earnings, strategies, prospects and all other statements that are not purely historical, are forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provisions under The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Although we believe that our expectations are based on reasonable assumptions, we can give no assurance they will be achieved. The results or events predicted in these statements may differ materially from actual results or events. Factors which could cause results or events to differ from current expectations include, among other things: the effects of weather; the performance of generating units and transmission systems; the availability and prices for oil, gas, coal, nuclear fuel, capacity and electricity; changes in the markets for electricity and other energy-related commodities; changes in the number of participants and the risk profile of such participants in the energy marketing and trading business; the effectiveness of our risk management and internal controls systems; the effects of regulatory decisions and changes in law; changes in competition in the markets we serve; the ability to recover regulatory assets and other potential stranded costs; the outcomes of litigation and regulatory proceedings or inquiries; the timing and success of efforts to develop domestic and international power projects; conditions of the capital markets and equity markets; advances in technology; changes in accounting standards; changes in interest rates and in financial and foreign currency markets generally; the economic and political climate and growth in the areas in which we conduct our activities; and changes in corporate strategies. For further information, please refer to our Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent reports on Form 10-Q and Form 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These documents address in further detail our business, industry issues and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated in this release. In addition, any forward-looking statements included herein represent our estimates only as of today and should not be relied upon as representing our estimates as of any subsequent date. While we may elect to update forward-looking statements from time to time, we specifically disclaim any obligation to do so, even if our estimates change, unless otherwise required by applicable securities laws. ------- Forwarded message ------- From: PSEG To: ncohen12@comcast.net Subject: Hope Creek Nuclear Unit Declares Unusual Event Due To Freon Leak In Hvac Unit In Security Center Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 15:44:20 -0400 PSEG has added a news release to its Investor Relations website. Hope Creek Nuclear Unit Declares Unusual Event Due To Freon Leak In Hvac Unit In Security Center Date(s): 10/28/2004 ------------------------------------------------------------ To unsubscribe from this JoinMail list, please go to this url: http://www.corporate-ir.net/ireye/unsubscribe.zhtml?t=6067&a=ir-news -- Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/m2/ _______________________________________________________________________ Subscribe/Unsubscribe Here: http://www.energyjustice.net/nukenet/ Change your settings at: http://energyjustice.net/mailman/listinfo/nukenet_energyjustice.net Attachment Converted: "c:\program files\eudora\attach\109899266048769@envoyww.htm" ***************************************************************** 14 News Journal: Liquid gas plan worries nuclear plant www.delawareonline.com Utility urges scrutiny from regulators By JEFF MONTGOMERY / The News Journal 10/28/2004 One of the region's largest utilities has urged federal regulators to consider threats to a nuclear complex along the Delaware River while reviewing plans for a new liquefied natural gas import terminal opposite Claymont in New Jersey. In a document filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, PSEG Nuclear said it has launched its own analysis of risks posed by LNG shipments passing the Salem/Hope Creek nuclear generating station on the way to a proposed new BP terminal. The vessels, each carrying about 140,000 cubic meters of frozen, concentrated fuel, would pass within a mile of the seawall at the three-reactor station on their way to the proposed LNG storage and distribution complex in Logan Township, N.J. PSEG spokesman Paul Rosengren said Wednesday the utility does not have a firm date for when the nuclear risk study would be completed. The company also has questions about the impact of BP's project on a gas distribution system and gas-burning power plants operated by PSEG subsidiaries. "We're not opposed to LNG terminals, as long as the issues are resolved," Rosengren said. "If they're not, we have some concerns." The filing by PSEG was one of several submitted to the commission recently by private companies, government agencies, citizens and environmental groups. Concerns submitted to the commission ranged from public security and safety matters to national energy policy and the possibility that BP's gas imports will burn hotter than domestic supplies, creating problems for industrial users and gas pipeline operators. Delaware's Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control was among those seeking formal standing to participate in the federal review. BP's docks and piers would extend into a part of the river inside Delaware and potentially be off limits to new bulk transfer facilities. Some environmental groups have argued that Delaware's Coastal Zone Act bans BP's proposal. BP wants a permit by July 2005 to build a terminal that would open in 2008 and would receive two or three vessels weekly, with storage and piping capable of sending out enough energy to meet the daily needs of 5 million homes. Federal regulators are tentatively expected to release a draft environmental impact study for the project, including assessments of potential risks, early next year. BP spokesman Tom Mueller said late Wednesday that officials are aware of concerns about the nuclear plant. "The safety issues around river transit are being considered as part of the federal permit," Mueller said. Safety and security concerns have been expressed about dozens of LNG terminal proposals around the country as energy suppliers scramble to supply the American gas market. Conflicting reports about catastrophic fire threats resulting from terrorist attacks already have scuttled some projects, and have prompted repeated calls by some city officials in Boston for the shutdown of an existing LNG terminal. Studies released earlier this year said a moderate-sized hole in a tanker, caused by an accident or terrorist attack, could produce a short, intense fire that would send blistering heat nearly a mile away. Contact Jeff Montgomery at 678-4277 or jmontgomery@delawareonline.com. [jmontgomery@delawareonline.com] (updated 09/30/2004) Sections: News Journal ***************************************************************** 15 Platts: NPPD STUDY SAYS RENEWING COOPER COULD SAVE OVER $1-BILLION [The McGraw-Hill Companies] + Nebraska Public Power District (NPPD) study says renewing Cooper's license could save over $1-billion in costs associated with building a new coal-fired plant to replace the reactor, according to a NPPD study presented last night in Brownville, Neb. NPPD management is expected to recommend to the board next month that the utility in first quarter 2005 begin the process of seeking a 20-year renewal of the plant's NRC operating license. The 801-MW BWR's license now expires in 2014. Managers also will recommend beginning work on a power uprate feasibility study after Cooper's refueling and maintenance outage, scheduled to start in January. A separate study, which will look at how to further increase the plant's output, will investigate what benefit if any could be gained by switching from the plant's current 18-month operating cycle to a 24-month cycle. Cooper is the largest single generator of electricity in Nebraska. Washington (Platts)--27Oct2004 Copyright © 2004 - Platts, All Rights Reserved [The McGraw-Hill Companies] ***************************************************************** 16 NRC: NRC Staff Schedules Public Meeting for November 4 to Discuss License Renewal Process for Brunswick Nuclear Plant News Release - Region II - 2004-05 U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION Office of Public Affairs, Region II No. II-04-054 October 27, 2004 CONTACT: Ken Clark (404) 562-4416 Roger D. Hannah (404) 562-4417 E-mail: opa2@nrc.gov [opa2@nrc.gov] The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff will hold a public meeting on Thursday, November 4, in Southport, N.C., to discuss how the agency will review the application from Progress Energy to renew the operating licenses for both units of the Brunswick nuclear plant, just north of Southport. Members of the public are invited to ask questions and comment on license renewal issues the NRC should consider in its review of the application. The meeting will be held in the Hampton Inn, 5181 Southport Supply Road, beginning at 7:00 p.m. The NRC staff will provide information on how the license renewal process works and how the public can participate in this process. The NRC received the license renewal application from Progress Energy on October 20. If approved by the NRC, the Brunswick licenses would be renewed for an additional 20 years. The current operating licenses for Units 1 and 2 expire on Sept. 8, 2016, and Dec. 27, 2014, respectively. The Brunswick license renewal application can be found on the NRC web site at www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/licensing/renewal/applications/bru nswick.html. Last revised Thursday, October 28, 2004 ***************************************************************** 17 Sofia Morning News: Bulgaria's N-plant on Schedule after Romania's Quake [Sofia News Agency] novinite.com Politics: 28 October 2004, Thursday. Bulgaria's sole nuclear power plant Kozloduy continued its regular operations after a strong earthquake shook the country late on Wednesday, officials said. Kozloduy nuclear plant is situated on the Danube river, which makes the border with Romania, 200 kilometres north of Sofia. Last night's earthquake did not affect the technological regime of nuclear power plant Kozloduy, director Yordan Kostadinov told the national radio. The earthquake, epicentred in the Vrancea Mountain in southern Romania, measured about 5.5 on the Richter scale and was felt across the country. The tremour was felt strongest in Northern and Northeastern Bulgaria. In settlements along the Danube river, which makes Bulgaria's border with Romania, people rushed to the streets in panic. In the town of Silistra the tremour cracked the walls of buildings. An earthquake hit Romania simultenously, shaking buildings in the capital Bucharest but apparently causing little damage.[ width=] novinite.com Forum Google Tourism Business All Rights Reserved © Novinite Ltd., 2001-2004 - Copyright Bulgaria news Novinite.com (Sofia News Agency - www.sofianewsagency.com) is unique with being a real time news provider in English that informs its readers about the latest Bulgarian news. The editorial staff also publishes a daily ***************************************************************** 18 [DU-WATCH] Iraq: Report of Radioactive Contamination Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 23:39:01 -0500 (CDT) "The scientist also notified the World Health Organisation but has had no response at all" Message: 21 Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2004 19:57:59 -0000 From: jobak17@yahoo.co.uk Subject: DU article Please see attached article. Jo Child Victims of War 14C Eccleston Road, London W13 0RL +44 (0)20 8567 4237 info@childvictimsofwar.org http://www.childvictimsofwar.org Hard Weapons for Soft Targets We cannot under any circumstances acquiesce in the non-utilisation of any weapons which are available to procure a speedy termination of the disorder which prevails on the frontier. Winston Churchill On March 28th 2003, a US A-10 aircraft fired into a convoy of five British vehicles near Basrah in a friendly fire incident. It was reported by the Guardian newspaper that the British troops who retrieved the bodies wore chemical warfare suitsbecause of the threat from the depleted uranium used in American weapons. Two days later, on the morning of March 30th 2003, an Iraqi troop carrier passing through Kibla, a residential suburb of Basrah, broke down and signalled to a second troop carrier to come to its assistance. As the Iraqi soldiers were trying to sort out the mechanical problem, an A-10 fired rounds of depleted uranium ammunition into both vehicles causing instant inferno. At the same time, two young men were entering a nearby house. Thinking they too were soldiers, the pilot targeted the house. The soldiers were incinerated, as were the two boys in the house, Jelaal and Nasir aged 21 and 18. A young cousin sustained severe burns on his leg. The explosive blasts created a plume of uranium oxide dust, some of it so fine that is entered the atmosphere as a gas. The heavier particles landed close to the vehicles and inside the building. Neighbours and family buried the dead; the grieving parents and remaining eight children continued to live in what was left of their home, and dozens of local children played daily in and around the burnt out vehicles. No one warned them of the nature of the bullets that had and would continue to cause so much death and destruction. In July 2004, an Iraqi environmental scientist, who was researching DU, happened to be driving through Kibla with his fianci. They were on the way to church to arrange their wedding. His fianci mentioned to him that she always got a headache after passing some burnt out vehicles in the area, so a few days later, he went to investigate. His Geiger counter immediately told him that the area was radioactive and later, equipped with full radioactive gear, he cleaned the troop carriers and damaged area of the house to the best of his ability. He then went straight to the British military in Basrah, explained the situation and asked for their help. Apart from some sympathy from an environmental adviser, who has subsequently returned to the UK, the response was very dismissive and no action has been taken. The scientist also notified the World Health Organisation but has had no response at all. A few weeks after this photographer Jenny Matthews, Dr Al-Ani and myself happened to be in Basrah and were taken to visit the family in Kibla. We walked around the burnt troop carriers and watched the rising dial of the Geiger counter, as wind whipped up the dust around us. Children were playing all around and were very excited to see us. In the house we spoke to the mother and daughters, two of whom, Ibtehal and Delaal, are suffering from breathing problems and skin rashes, a younger boy, Kemal who is now thirteen, is losing his night vision, and the burns sustained by their cousin Sad are still not healing properly. Our own enquiries through the British Embassy in Basrah resulted in the following response, The clean up of DU is the responsibility of the civil administration, with assistance from the international community, after any armed conflict. In this instance the civil administration is the Iraqi Interim Government and, we wonder, which bit of the international community? - Apparently not the US or UK. After the war of 1991, 24 US vehicles caught in DU friendly fire were returned to the United States and it took three years to fully decontaminate them. The clean up of the environment itself, is of course not possible. Nature excels at recycling. Radioactive particles have already entered Iraqs air, water, soil and vegetation and are working their way through the food chain. Nor do such particles respect borders the wind, sun and rain will move them endlessly. During the Gulf War of 1991 the US and Britain used up to 350 tons of DU shells in southern Iraq. They were used mainly on the tanks and trucks returning from Kuwait. Despite the fact that they were used mainly in a desert area, the health problems in Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have escalated. In Basrah childhood leukaemia has increased 7 fold, overall cancers 10 fold and birth deformities 20 fold. Many allied troops returning from the Gulf and the Balkans have suffered similarly. A German doctor, Dr Siegfried Horst Guenther who studied the rare health effects in Iraq after 1991 also noted severe immunodeficiencies, AIDS-like syndromes, and kidney and liver dysfunction. Other noted symptoms are reactive airway disease, neurological problems, rashes, vision degradation and night vision losses, gum tissue problems, sexual dysfunction and neuro-psychological disorders. DU is both radioactive and chemically toxic and many doctors and scientists like Dr Guenther are convinced that the inhalation or ingestion of microscopic DU particles does have an adverse effect at a cellular level. Children, because of their fast cell growth, are particularly vulnerable. Dr Alexandra Miller from the US Armed Forces Radiological Research Institute concludes that "DU compounds can transform cells into a state that appears to be able to induce tumors, based on the changes in the physical appearance of the cell, and based on the chemical changes induced in the cells by it, and other tumor-favoring changes. She also states that the radioactive and toxic properties of DU seem to reinforce each other, thus causing more extensive damage. Depleted uranium has been found in the urine and tissue of sick veterans and civilians many years after the initial exposure, and chromosome testing by Dr Schott in Germany shows not only chromosomal damage to veterans exposed to DU but the same genetic damage in their children. DU is known to enter the sperm and the ovary and can cross the placenta. This not only accounts for the high rise in congenital deformities but indicates that such deformities could be intergenerational. Young women like Ibtehal and Delaal must not only fear for their own health, but that of any children they may bear. To compound the health problem, some of the DU used in munitions comes from the other end of the nuclear fuel cycle and is contaminated with artificial isotopes such as U-236 and plutonium and neptunium. As depleted uranium isotopes decay they become increasingly radioactive. Moreover, according to Dr Dan Bishop, if Neptunium 235 is present, its short half life will spike the radioactivity and will triple the alpha radiation over natural uranium and double the total alpha, beta and gamma radiation over natural radiation. The environmental and health effect of DU munitions could be far greater than is generally assumed. Samples taken from civilians in Afghanistan by the Uranium Medical Research Centre also showed excessive levels of non depleted uranium and one tissue sample from Basrah has shown the presence of enriched uranium. The British have admitted to the use of 9 tons of uranium in the 2003 war nine times more than in 1991, but the US refuse to be specific. The estimates range between 200 to 2000 tons. While the US and UK only admit to the use of DU in anti-tank penetrators, there is growing evidence that it is being used in a variety of other weapons. High levels of radioactivity have been found in large bomb craters such as the Mamoon telephone exchange in Baghdad which was hit by several bunker busting bombs. The missiles cut through six layers of steel before exploding below ground level. This supports the contention that uranium is being used in some guided missiles to enhance the penetration of hard structures and to incinerate them. These large bombs could release significant amounts of uranium oxide into the atmosphere. The difference between the war of 2003 and previous conflicts is that the use of uranium has been almost exclusively in urban, residential areas. The UK and US military justify this by saying that there are no known health effects from depleted uranium, yet are they really convinced? In fact, the military and governments have known the health risks of depleted uranium for decades. In 1991, a UKAEA report stated The DU will be spread around the battlefield and target vehicles in varying sizes and quantities from dust particles to full size penetratorslocalised contamination of vehicles and soil may exceed permissible limits and these could be hazardous to both clean up teams and the local population. In 1995 the US Army environmental Policy Institute wrote, If DU enters the body, it has the potential to generate significant medical consequences. The risks associated with DU in the body are both chemical and radiological. All military personnel working with DU in the UK are classified radiation workers and subject to constant monitoring. Hard target testing, which took place in Eskmeals, Cumbria until 1995, was done under very strict conditions and it still costs the British tax payer #360 000 a year to maintain and protect the site. DU rounds were fired at a hard target in a concrete bunker, known as the VJ Butt and in July 2000, the Radioactive Waste Management Advisory Committee (RWMAC) made the following report, a well-defined protocol is in place for workers required to enter the VJ Butt after test firing. Before they can do so, allowance is made for a cooling period during which cooling fans with three levels of air filtration are in operation. Members of the butt entry party are required to wear full protective clothing with pureflow hoods and carry personal air samplers. All well and good, but how can the use of the same material be justified, if it is targeting houses, buses and people in Iraq? While there is acknowledged military advantage in using uranium against hard targets, it is very difficult to understand why it is also being used so liberally on soft targets. In this last war on Iraq, these have included military personnel, cars, trucks, buses and houses. Even the Iraqi troop carriers hardly merited extreme penetrative force. And where in places like Kibla are the air filters and pureflow hoods to be found? When Abdul Zahra Misbal Shindi buried his dead sons he was not, like the British soldiers, provided with a chemical suit. Kibla is not alone. The same Iraqi scientist has discovered 26 radioactive sites in just one area of Basrah. In parts of Baghdad radiation has been monitored as 1 000 and 1 900 times greater than normal background level and high recordings have been made in towns such as Samawah and Negev. Our mission to Iraq in August was not to measure radiation, but to assess the needs of Iraqi children for our charity Child Victims of War. Basrah Childrens Hospital is crying out for even the most basic equipment to treat its ever growing numbers of young leukaemia and cancer patients. Despairing doctors said that this was not really a cancer ward where children were treated, just a place where they came to die. Basrah is in desperate need of an oncology centre. If even a few of the young children we met are dying from the allied use of radiological weapons, then the lack of medicine and pain relief created by the long years of sanctions and now occupation, compounds a most terrible crime. Joanne Baker MSc Co-ordinator Child Victims of War ***************************************************************** 19 [du-list] DU used in S.Korean weapon Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 18:14:50 -0700 Depleted uranium once used in S. Korean weapons Joins.com October 22, 2004 http://joongangdaily.joins.com/200410/21/200410212244327139900090409041.html Representative Cho Seung-soo of the Democratic Labor Party and the environmental group Green Korea United said yesterday that the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute had produced anti-tank shells in the 1980s made from depleted uranium, alloyed with titanium. They claimed that the Ministry of Science and Technology had hidden the fact. In response, the ministry said, "We applied for an inspection waiver for development of uranium armaments and received permission in 1987." The ministry said that it has discussed the production with the United States from an early stage. The ministry said the shells were destroyed in 1989 with U.S. Embassy officials present when they no longer had commercial value. Depleted uranium is a dense, non-fissile metal. ---- S Korean munitions violated N-accord The News International October 22, 2004 http://jang.com.pk/thenews/oct2004-daily/22-10-2004/world/w7.htm SEOUL: South Korea produced anti-tank munitions in the 1980s using depleted uranium imported for non-military use and failed to make required disclosures, a South Korean lawmaker and an environmental group said on Thursday. A government official said depleted-uranium munitions were produced for five years and the government had told the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1987 when the programme was ended. Depleted uranium is a by-product of nuclear fuel production. It can be used to strengthen ammunition and enable it to penetrate armour. The disclosure comes at a sensitive time for South Korea, which said in September some of its scientists had enriched a small amount of uranium in 2000 and separated plutonium in 1982. The government said scientists purely out of curiosity conducted those tests, although the IAEA said the failure to disclose them was a matter of serious concern. South Korea is involved in international efforts to get communist North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons ambitions but the North has said it would not resume talks until an investigation of the South's tests was complete. Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Make a clean sweep of pop-up ads. Yahoo! Companion Toolbar. Now with Pop-Up Blocker. Get it for free! http://us.click.yahoo.com/L5YrjA/eSIIAA/yQLSAA/FGYolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> To unsubscribe from this groups send a message to du-list-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com. In the body of the message type unsubscribe and send. Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/du-list/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: du-list-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ ***************************************************************** 20 [du-list] Household Survey Sees 100,000 Iraqi Deaths -Yahoo Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 18:15:58 -0700 Household Survey Sees 100,000 Iraqi Deaths (AP) A survey of deaths in Iraqi households estimates that as many as 100,000 more people may have died throughout the country in the 18 months after the U.S. invasion than would be expected based on the death rate before the war. There is no official figure for the number of Iraqis killed since the conflict began, but some non-governmental estimates range from 10,000 to 30,000. As of Wednesday, 1,081 U.S. servicemen had been killed, according to the U.S. Defense Department. More... a.. Civilian Deaths Increase Dramatically After Invasion (jhsph.edu) b.. Civilian Deaths (IBC) | ***************************************************************** 21 [du-list] gieger counter readings of Iraqi tanks, and scrap Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 18:14:42 -0700 My apologies for reposting this again, but I have modified the article to include a few sample gieger counter readings taken from other media sources. Thank you for the previous feedback, and I hope people don't mind me using this forum as a testing ground for my writing. Scrap of Mass Destruction (draft v3) This article will explore the issues surrounding the destroyed remnants of Iraqi armoured vehicles. The weapons used to destroy many of them contained the radioactive and toxic metal Uranium.This article will examine what has happened to these tanks since the war ended, focussing on the scrap metal trade. While I will briefly review the nature of “depleted” Uranium weapons used by Coalition forces, I shall not dwell on it, as this has been covered in other articles. For now, all you need know is that the Americans used “depleted” Uranium-tipped weapons in the two wars against Iraq, and according to US government statements they fired an estimated 350 tons in 1991 and another estimated 140 tons1 in the 2003 war. It is possible that more was used, and many activists suspect much larger amounts were used, but a figure of 2000 tons that it widely quoted is based on the theory that hard-target penetrators, bunker-busting bombs and some cruise missiles contained Uranium, which has been denied by the US military. Until further evidence to contradict this is available, I shall use the official figures. Nevertheless, 140 tons is a huge quantity when discussing a substance that can be deadly even if it is only a single speck of dust. “depleted” Uranium, nuclear waste in laymans terms, is estimated to be about 70% as radioactive as normal Uranium, though some of it is contaminated with post-reactor waste, and consequently much more radioactive due to the exotic isotopes it contains. The Americans used it for its hard, dense and pyrophoric qualities, which make it ideal as an armour-penentrating weapon. They claim its radioactivity is so weak as to be harmless, and its chemical toxicity, which is worse than lead, to be similarly harmless. Upon impact with tanks, it burns and creates a cloud of radioactive and toxic dust, most of which disperses into the air and ground ­ while some of this can be contained and cleared up by expensive bulldozering of the topsoil, much of it cannot and ends up contaminating the environment of Iraq forever. Some remains inside the destroyed tank either as a layer of fine black dust, or as splinters and fragments of the metal itself. Gieger counter readings2 taken from burnt-out tanks in Iraq revealed high levels of radioactivity. In a visit to Iraq, David Sparling MD, Clinical Proffessor of Pediatrics at the medical college of the University of Washington (since retired), reported an Iraqi tank near the Saudi border that: ”Compared with background radiation readings of 7 to 21 counts per minute, his Geiger counter read 1945 counts per minute at the location of missile entry. Inside the tank next to the residue of the missile it sounded like a buzz saw and read 2450 counts per minute.”3 According to another report: “when Mahmoud Hossein from Iraq's Atomic Energy Commission [swept a] radiation detector over the black specks of DU dust near a bullet-entry hole, the instrument erupts with staccato chirping. Its meter surges to 35 times background levels, causing Mr. Hossein to appear startled.” Various other reports have mentioned high readings when a gieger counter is passed over the wreckage. However, many reports do not specify exactly what they take to be ”background levels” of radiation, even when quoting readings as “x times the background level.”. Below is a sample of media reports of such readings, with the stated figures in bold, and the calculated figures in italic. Sometimes I have calculated the counts per minute, sometimes I have calculated how much higher that is than a background reading of 20. Only one of these reports gives a background reading of 7-21. I have taken 20 as the basic level. One article provides data that lets me calculate approximately what the author intended the background reading to be, at about 30 counts per minute, but I have kept the calculations to 20 for consitant comparison to the other articles. Bold figures indicate original article, italic indicate my calculations based on those figures. A rare visit to Iraqs radioactive battlefield http://csmonitor.com/cgi-bin/durableRedirect.pl?/durable/1999/04/29/fp13s1-csm.shtml 700 counts per minute. 35 times background level. On Depleted Uranium http://www.tacomapjh.org/ondepleteduranium.htm Background count is 7-21 1945 counts per minute. 97.25 times background level. Weapon entry point 2450 counts per minute. 122.5 times background level. Interior of tank Remains of Toxic Bullets Litter Iraq http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0515/p01s02-woiq.html 26,000 counts per minute. 1300 times background level. 20,000 counts per minute. 1000 times background level.. 11,585 counts per minute. 579 times background level. 9839 counts per minute. Over 300 times background. (Therefore background is under 32.79 counts. For purpose of calculations background count is taken as 20, even though Scott Peterson may hay intended 30. This has a significant effect on the extrapolated figures, and indicates the need for precision in reports of this kind.) . Hard weapons against Soft Targets http://www.iraqsolidaritycampaign.blogspot.com/ In this article Joanne Baker reports various incidents and sites (26+) where gieger counters assessed that a site was radioactive, and also reports residents complaining of radiation sickness symptoms. However she gives few definate figures. 20,000 counts per minute. 1,000 times background level. 38,000 counts per minute. 1,900 times background level. Use of Depleted Uranium weapons Lingers as Health Concern http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/iraq2002/133581_du04.html In this article the Seattle Post Intelligencer carried out “tests at six sites from basra to baghdad, and found elevated levels of radiation at all of them.” 30,000 counts per minute. 1,500 times background level 28,000 counts per minute. 1,400 times background level Iraqi cancers, birth defects, blamed on US depleted Uranium http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/95178_du12.shtml In this article readings carried out by Dr Khajak Vartaanian of the Iraq Department of Radiation Protection in Basra, found that vehicles on the Highway of Death are 1,000 times more radioactive than background. 20,000 counts per minute. 1,000 times background level. Iraq: a Nuclear polluted land http://www.japanfocus.org/059.html The author took readings of earth, water and urine in different parts of Iraq, and found elevated levels, though he is not precise in what levels at what sites. He gave only the highest and lowest reading. 2000 counts per minute. 100 times background level 80,000 counts per minute. 4,000 times background level. Army shells pose cancer risk in Iraq http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1106687,00.html “readings taken from destroyed Iraqi tanks in Basra reveal radiation levels 2,500 times higher than normal.” 50,000 counts per minute. 2,500 times background level >From Boston to Babylon http://www.xs4all.nl/~stgvisie/VISIE/ahram-fe2.html “The next day we travelled down south to the desert near Basra, where "The Mother of All Battles" was fought. All the dead tanks were still lying there. We found a lot of contamination. I'd already measured the levels of alpha emitters in the air in Baghdad. I found that there was a 20-fold increase in alpha activity in the air in the desert round the Desert Storm area. In Basra itself, it was already 10 times higher than it was in Baghdad.” 400 counts per minute. 20 times background level. Clearly there is some variation in the level of radioactivity recorded. This is most probably because the readings vary from environmental samples in the vicinity of battles, to readings taken of piles of depleted uranium dust inside burnt out tanks. It is also possible that the authors of these various articles considered background levels of radiation to be different figures. There is evidence that background radiation levels in Iraq may have risen, and depending on the location, so-called background readings may vary considerably. There are other issues that can cloud this data, as different types of gieger counters have different efficiency at detecting different types of radioactive emmisions. The most common form of gieger counter, because of its reliability and price, is the Gieger-Mueller detector, which is perfectly adequate for most uses, but is not so good at detecting weak or widely dispersed radioactive contamination. This is especially significant in the case of DU, as a substantial amount of the radioactive particles will be dispersed as a dust around the impact site, so while an entry hole, or the tank interior may register highly on such a device, it may fail to alert its users of the lower, but still significant dispersed radiation in the vicinity. What these readings do reveal, is that radiation levels vary between 400 counts a minute to 80,000 counts per minute. If we exclude the most extreeme readings, the average reading from these samples is between 2000 and 40,000 counts,, which is between 100 and 2000 times the background level. The Maximum Safe Working Level of exposure for workers in the nuclear industry is 1095 counts per minute.4 These workers would not only be paid well for such risks, but would be trained to handle such materials, would have specialised safety equipment, and would know to decontaminate clothing after contact, would wash hands thoroughly, and would not eat or drink during exposure to such hazards. Iraqis have no such protection. The radioactive and toxic dust and debris from tons of nuclear waste is mainly dispersed over southern Iraq, in the vicinity of Basra, site of major tank battles during the 1991 war, and in the cities and suburbs of Iraq, but it is spreading far. Huge sandstorms during the hieght of the Invasion will have dispersed some of this radioactive fallout throughout the middle-east. Like the fallout from atmospheric testing, it is thought this has already spread across the planet, contributing to the rising world toll from cancer. Many Iraqi doctors have reported a huge increase in birth deformities, cancers in children, and symptoms of radiation poisoning.5 Many of them lay the blame entirely on the use of “depleted” Uranium. Some estimates claim as many as 44% of Iraqis will now get cancer.6 Unfortunately the destruction of medical and demographic records during the recent war makes any comparison with “normal” rates of cancer very difficult. According to CPA spokesman Sam whitfield7, over 3,000 tanks and armoured vehicles littered iraq following the march 2003 invasion. Some of these remained from the 1991 Gulf war, including many along the “highway of death” the road from Kuwait to Basra where US forces massacred the retreating Iraqi Army. This and other sources of war scrap have since been exported from Iraq in large quantities, an estimated 130,0008 tonnes of scrap metal went to Jordan, only a “small part”9 of the total exported to Iraqs other nieghbours, Iran, Turkey, Syria, and Suadi Arabia. As many as a hundred trucks a day have been reported at scrapyards in the north of Amman, in Jordan. Some shipments of this scrap have been turned back at the border after registering high levels of radiation, but the majority of trucks are never properly examined, as recent events in India have revealed10, when a live missile in a cargo of Iraqi scrap exploded and killed 10 workers. Subsequent investigation by the Indian authorities revelaed more live shells and other UXO (Unexploded Ordinance), and exposed the inneffectiveness of existing checks on this trade.11 The high value of scrap metal in the world market has driven this huge export of war debris, and created a thriving smuggling industry. As prices over the last few years have double then tripled, and further rises are expected, there is a lot of money to be made from this legacy of war. But when scrap metal workers in Jordan reported symptoms of radiation poisoning12, a committee of 10 government ministries recommended banning the import of this scrap. They are not alone in their concerns. Peoples Deputies in the Egyptian parliament have called for a similar ban13, also citing concerns about radioactive contamination. The United Arab Emirates have already put a ban in place, and are spending millions upgrading their radiation detection facilities at major ports and scrapyards. In the wake of the missile explosion and UXO discoveries in India, that country looks set to ban the import of certain types of scrap, and to tighten its safety checks, a move that is predicted to add another $50 per ton to the price of scrap metal.14 1http://www.antenna.nl/wise/index.html?http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/dissgw.html Statements at a press conference by Micheal Kilpatrick 2http://www.tacomapjh.org/ondepleteduranium.ht On Depleted Uranium 3http://www.tacomapjh.org/ondepleteduranium.htm On Depleted Uranium 4http://www.antirad.com/operate.htm 5http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,411366,00.html Letter from Iraq: The Childrens ward 6http://www2.gol.com/users/bobkeim/Iraq/duiraq.html New Internationalist Magazine 7http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=5045 In the Scrapyards of Jordan, Signs of a looted Iraq 8http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/09/08/iraq.scrap.ap/ Iraqi missile parts trade exposed 9http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_10/Iraq_WMD.asp More US claims on Iraq WMD rebutted 10http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/879401.cms Scrap bomb trail leads to Iraq 11http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/876069.cms Intelligence Bureau calls for scanners at ports 12http://www.islam-online.net/English/News/2004-06/16/article06.shtml Jordan considers ban on Iraqi scrap imports 13http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2004/10/c2967a97-8fb8-4334-9bdb-3978d435375e.html IAEA concerned over dismantaling of Iraqi Nuclear sites 14http://news.newkerala.com/india-news/?action=fullnews&id=36180 Scrap import restrictions will push up steel prices ***************************************************************** 22 NRC: Cornell University to Provide Neutral Mediators for NRC's Alternative Dispute Resolution Program News Release - 2004-13 U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION Office of Public Affairs Telephone: 301/415-8200 Washington, DC 20555-0001 E-mail: opa@nrc.gov No. 04-137 October 28, 2004 The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has contracted with Cornell Universitys Institute on Conflict Resolution to act as the neutral administrator in the agencys alternative dispute resolution program (ADR) for addressing discrimination complaints and other allegations of wrongdoing. The Institute will make its nationwide roster of expert mediators available to the NRC, its licensees and their employees to facilitate quick and amicable resolution of workplace disputes. The agencys ADR program, announced in August, aims to promote a safety-conscious work environment by providing a means for prompt and fair resolution of worker complaints and timely and effective resolution of enforcement issues. The NRC program aims to use ADR in two potential scenarios: (1) before initiation of an NRC investigation (so-called early ADR), when those involved would be the employee and the licensee; and (2) after completion of an investigation, when the parties would be the NRC and the licensee. The aim is to reach settlement within 90 days of agreeing to mediation. Cornell Universitys participation will enhance our program for responding to disputes by reassuring both workers and licensees that their complaints or concerns will be considered by a truly neutral person if they choose the early ADR approach, said Frank Congel, director of the NRCs Office of Enforcement. For early ADR, the mediators fees will be paid by the NRC. For ADR after an investigation has been completed, the NRC and the licensee will share the mediators fee. The dollar amount of NRCs contract with Cornell therefore depends on how often Cornells services are used. While Cornells list of mediators will be offered to parties in any dispute, the parties are not obligated to choose a neutral party from that list. More information about the NRCs alternative dispute resolution program is available on the agencys Web site at http://www.nrc.gov/what-we-do/regulatory/enforcement.html. Last revised Thursday, October 28, 2004 ***************************************************************** 23 NRC: OAS petition over training for nuclear pharmacists [Docket No. PRM-35-17] FR Doc 04-24097 [Federal Register: October 28, 2004 (Volume 69, Number 208)] [Proposed Rules] [Page 62831-62832] From the Federal Register Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr28oc04-17] Organization of Agreement States; Receipt of Petition for Rulemaking AGENCY: Nuclear Regulatory Commission. ACTION: Petition for rulemaking; notice of receipt. SUMMARY: The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is publishing a notice of receipt of a petition for rulemaking, dated September 3, 2004, which was filed with the Commission by Stanley Fitch, on behalf of the Organization of Agreement States (OAS). The petition was docketed by the NRC on October 1, 2004, and has been assigned Docket No. PRM-35-17. The petitioner requests that the NRC amend its regulations to specify the minimum number of didactic (classroom and laboratory) training hours required to meet the requirement for training and experience to qualify as an authorized nuclear pharmacist and an authorized user identified in the NRC's regulations on training for uptake, dilution, and excretion studies; imaging and localization studies; and use of unsealed byproduct material for which a written directive is required. This notice of receipt is being published for information only, not for public comment. DATES: This petition for rulemaking was docketed on October 1, 2004. ADDRESSES: The notice of receipt and any publicly available documents related to this petition may be viewed electronically on the public computers located at the NRC's Public Document Room (PDR), O1 F21, One White Flint North, 11555 Rockville Pike, Rockville, Maryland. The PDR reproduction contractor will copy documents for a fee. Selected documents, including this notice of receipt, may be viewed and downloaded electronically via the NRC rulemaking Web site at http://ruleforum.llnl.gov [http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/leaving.cgi?from=leaving FR.html&log=linklog&to=http://ruleforum.llnl.gov] . Address questions about our rulemaking Web site to Carol [[Page 62832]] Gallagher (301) 415-5905; e-mail cag@nrc.gov [cag@nrc.gov] . Publicly available documents created or received at the NRC after November 1, 1999, are available electronically at the NRC's Electronic Reading Room at http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams.html [http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/leaving.cgi?from=leaving FR.html&log=linklog&to=http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams.html] . From this site, the public can gain entry into the NRC's Agencywide Document Access and Management System (ADAMS), which provides text and image files of NRC's public documents. If you do not have access to ADAMS or if there are problems in accessing the documents located in ADAMS, contact the NRC Public Document Room (PDR) Reference staff at 1-800- 397-4209, 301-415-4737 or by e-mail to pdr@nrc.gov [pdr@nrc.gov] . FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Michael T. Lesar, Chief, Rules and Directives Branch, Division of Administrative Services, Office of Administration, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC 20555-0001, Telephone: 301-415-7163 or Toll Free 800-368-5642, or e- mail mtl@nrc.gov [mtl@nrc.gov] . SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Petitioner The OAS is a nonprofit, voluntary, scientific and professional society incorporated in the District of Columbia. The membership of OAS consists of state radiation control directors and staff from the 33 Agreement States who are responsible for implementation of their respective radioactive materials programs. The purpose of the OAS is to provide a mechanism for these Agreement States to work with each other and with the NRC on regulatory issues associated with their respective agreements. Agreement States are those states that have entered into an effective regulatory discontinuance agreement with the NRC under subsection 274b. of the Atomic Energy Act (AEA). The role of the Agreement State is to regulate most types of radioactive material in accordance with the compatibility requirements of the AEA. Discussion The petitioner requests that the NRC amend its regulations in 10 CFR 35.55, 10 CFR 35.190, 10 CFR 35.290, and 10 CFR 35.390, specify the minimum number of didactic (classroom and laboratory) training hours for the authorized nuclear pharmacists and the authorized users identified in these sections. The NRC revised 10 CFR Part 35, Medical Use of Byproduct Material, on April 24, 2002. The revised training and experience requirements in 10 CFR 35.55, 35.190, 35.290 and 35.390 require training and experience to include both classroom and laboratory training and supervised work experience, but there is no specified breakdown in these sections of these hours. The petitioner states that, in the current regulations, minimum numbers of didactic training hours for radiation safety training are not specified or separated from the total training hours. Part 35, Subpart J (which was reinserted into the current rule but will expire in October 2005), does specify a minimum number of classroom and laboratory training hours and supervised work experience. The petitioner believes that the lack of clearly defined didactic (i.e., classroom and laboratory) training hours for this rule weakens the rule's consistency and uniformity. The petitioner further believes that need for specified didactic training hours is a radiation safety issue rather than a ``practice of medicine'' issue. The petitioner also believes that radiation safety for the patient and the occupational radiation workers may be compromised. The petitioner states that a majority of radiation safety principles and procedures are learned during this classroom and laboratory training. The petitioner also asserts that the inclusion of a specification for a minimum number of hours of classroom and laboratory training (`didactic' training), in Sec. Sec. 35.55, 35.190, 35.290, and 35.390, will increase consistency and uniformity of requirements between States and make it easier to maintain regulations that are consistent with the NRC's designation of requirements for training and experiences as compatibility category B. Conclusion The NRC is currently revising the training and experience requirements of Part 35. Among the issues being addressed in the current rulemaking is whether a minimum number of didactic training hours should be defined and specified in Sec. Sec. 35.55, 35.190, 35.290 and 35.390. Therefore the NRC will address the issues raised in this petition as part of the ongoing rulemaking, ``Medical Use of Byproduct Material--Recognition of Speciality Boards (RIN No. AH19).'' A proposed rule was published in the Federal Register on December 9, 2003 (68 FR 68549). Because the issues raised by this petition are being considered in a current rulemaking, NRC is not instituting a separate public comment period for this action. Dated at Rockville, Maryland, this 22nd day of October 2004. For the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Annette Vietti-Cook, Secretary of the Commission. [FR Doc. 04-24097 Filed 10-27-04; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 7590-01-P ***************************************************************** 24 Whitehaven News: PLUTONIUM LEVELS RISING IN SEA By David Siddall AFTER decades of declines in radioactive discharges into the sea from Sellafield, plutonium and other isotopes have started to rise again according to Government figures. The rise in plutonium, amercium and carbon 14 discharges is partly blamed on the Magnox reprocessing plant increasing its throughput to meet a 2012 deadline to deal with all the nation’s older spent Magnox reactor fuel. The fuel is corroding in storage ponds and must be reprocessed. Not all the radioactive discharges have risen. Discharges of radioactive technetium are shown to be dropping after Sellafield started a new waste treatment plant to remove this form of radioactivity from the discharges. Norway has protested at the levels of Sellafield technetium appearing in its lobster fisheries. The report by Defra, the Food Standards Agency and the Environment Agency says the radioactivity getting into the environment is not giving any members of the public a dose above the current safety standards. They conclude that even the most theoretically exposed member of the public – heavy consumers of local seafood – are below the government safety threshold. The report states: “The critical group of high-rate fish and shellfish consumers has been established by a survey of consumption and occupancy habits. “The dose to the critical group on the basis of the observed levels in the marine environment in 2003 was 0.013 mSv, which is less than 2% of the dose limit for members of the public.” The report states that: “Discharges from the Sellafield pipelines during 2003 show total alpha and beta discharges were 0.407 and 83.3 TBq respectively (compared with 2002: 0.35 and 112 TBq, respectively). Most of the reduction in total beta discharge was due to technetium-99. Discharges of it decreased from 85.4 TBq in 2002 to 37.0 TBq in 2003 and are now much lower than the peak reached in 1995 of 192 TBq.” There were rises in the dangerous alpha-emitting plutonium and americium isotopes pumped out to sea. The report adds: “There were small increases for carbon-14 and ruthenium-106 linked to the highest throughput of Magnox fuel reprocessing in the last ten years, necessary to ensure all Magnox reprocessing ceases in 2012 as required by the UK strategy for radioactive discharges. “No discharges exceeded the limits set.” [http://www.whitehaven-news.co.uk/ ***************************************************************** 25 Las Vegas Mercury: Backstory: Jonny-come-lately Thursday, Oct 28, 2004, 06:29:51 PM By Michael Green Recently, Jon Ralston suggested in the Las Vegas Sun that voters would be unwise if they voted early and didn't get the chance to watch Rep. Jon Porter debate challenger Tom Gallagher. Gallagher certainly would agree. The debate was fascinating enough to divert our attention from a number of other political issues--a pro-Bush R-J poll that even Republicans discount; an Independent American judicial candidate doing well while his party spews racism and homophobia and claims judges and the 14th Amendment ruined the Constitution; George W. Bush's daily diet of lies and murder. Oh, yeah, the debate. One cause for fascination--or consternation--was Porter answering Gallagher's charges that he marches in lockstep with other Republicans, who favor a waste dump. If my ears were working, he said--twice--he had stopped interim storage of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain. First, Porter managed to pronounce the word correctly (new-clee-er) and as nucular, perhaps out of deference to fellow Republicans in the White House and governor's mansion who can't say it. Second, his success in stopping interim storage must have been news to the rest of Nevada's congressional delegation, whose members might think they had something to do with it, too. Even the press release that Porter's office issued on the subject mentioned the efforts of his House colleague, Jim Gibbons. Another oddity was what seems to be a Porter campaign strategy that Gallagher handled well but really could have beaten to a bloody pulp. Several times, Porter mentioned living here for 26 years while Gallagher has lived in Nevada just seven years and rented a house in Henderson so he could run for Congress. Porter changed districts in 2000 to run against Rep. Shelley Berkley, but that's beside the point. So are the ads referring to Porter as "our mayor." He was mayor of Boulder City, a wonderful community, but not exactly the entire valley. It almost makes him sound like he was Oscar Goodman's predecessor. Understandably, Porter might prefer not to be specific about such topics. Besides, who would know? Probably those who have lived here a long time--like Porter. That's why Porter asked Gallagher about the Santini-Burton Act, an important piece of public lands legislation from more than two decades ago. Gallagher handled the question well, saying he didn't know what it was, but it was more important to know about "the things that matter" to voters. Porter's goal was to show Gallagher as a Johnny-come-lately to Nevada. It isn't the first time something like this has happened and won't be the last. In 1991, running for the Las Vegas City Council, Frank Hawkins asked opponent Nicole Stupak where City Hall was. She didn't know. That hurt her chances. Maybe Porter hoped Gallagher would say the Santini-Burton Act used to open for Siegfried &Roy. One of the classic campaigns in Nevada history was the 1952 Democratic Senate primary. Alan Bible was the frontrunner, for good reason: He was a lifelong Nevadan, a former attorney general and the political protege of Sen. Pat McCarran, the state's most powerful man. Tom Mechling challenged Bible. He had some Nevada connections: His father-in-law was a longtime Elko businessman and politico. But most Bible supporters saw him as a carpetbagger, a term coined after the Civil War to describe Northerners who moved to the South--some, as their critics claimed, to make money. But some came because they legitimately wanted to help a defeated region overcome its horrible legacy of slavery and ex-slaves to enjoy their basic rights. Carpetbaggers enjoyed some success. So did Mechling: He beat Bible in the primary. He lost in the general election, because he kept attacking McCarran despite belonging to the same party, then tried to make peace with McCarran's supporters by offering to sell out to them. But even in 1952, many Nevadans were recent arrivals. Southern Nevada's population had tripled in the past decade. They resented the attitude that as newcomers--carpetbaggers--they had no business expressing their views. Indeed, since the Santini-Burton bill passed, Nevada's population has just about tripled. That's why Gallagher should have responded to Porter with this answer, provided free of charge: Jon, I admit I don't know about that legislation. But this is part of your effort to show I'm a newcomer to Nevada because I've only lived here seven years. In those seven years, our population has grown by several hundred thousand. You think someone has to live here a long time to have a say in what goes on here. Unlike you, I think if you live in Nevada, you have the right to have a voice in Nevada. The irony is obvious. In 1926, the Las Vegas Review got a new editor, Al Cahlan, who once complained that a ruling elite ran his old stomping grounds in Reno. A quarter-century later, he was unhappy when a recent arrival, Hank Greenspun, challenged the R-J's primacy with the Sun. Maybe in 25 years, Gallagher will be lamenting these newcomers. That reminds me. On Nov. 1, my family celebrates an anniversary. On that day in 1967, we moved here from California. I was 2 and had little say in the matter. But as a 37-year resident, I wish newcomers like Jon Porter would let the people who have lived here a while run the state. Correction: Last week's column referred to Assemblywoman Kathy McClain's "exoneration" for double-dipping during the 2003 legislative session. While an arbitrator held that she should be reinstated, she was suspended without pay for four months. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Home | 2AM Club Guide | Archive | Contact | Personals Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury, 2001 - 2004 Stephens Media Group ***************************************************************** 26 Las Vegas SUN: Kerry makes late push in Nevada October 27, 2004 By Kirsten Searer LAS VEGAS SUN Sen. John Kerry, in a late-in-the-game swing through Las Vegas, told a crowd of at least 8,000 at Jaycee Park on Tuesday that President Bush has lost allies, lost jobs and racked up a deficit. "George Bush has not made America safer," Kerry said. "I will." This was Kerry's seventh trip to the state since February, and he joked that he saw a guy holding up a sign that said, "You again?" Most polls give Bush a small advantage in Nevada, though Kerry's visit -- and reports that President Clinton will come to town Friday -- show the campaign thinks the state is still in play. Kerry implored his supporters to give their everything in the next week before Tuesday's election, even asking them to approach people in stores to ask who they're voting for and why. "I need you to have my back the next seven days," he said. "I need you to have my back on Tuesday." In return, he said, "I'll be able to look you in the eye and tell you everyday for the next four years, 'I've got your back.' " The worst lie Bush has told to Nevadans, Kerry said, was that he would evaluate sound science before proceeding with the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, a project that Kerry has vowed to stop because of concerns it would not be safe. "He promised you he wouldn't go ahead with Yucca Mountain unless it was safe," Kerry said. "I tell you, Nevada, not on my watch." Kerry continued to hammer the Bush administration on reports that a huge cache of explosives were lost in Iraq and could play into the hands of terrorists. Similar explosives were used to take down Pan Am Flight 103 and to attack the USS Cole, he said. The Iraqi interim government had said this month that the explosives were lost to theft and looting because they weren't secured by U.S. troops. It's another example of how Bush didn't sent in enough troops to fight the war in Iraq while protecting the border and weapons there, Kerry said. Bush officials fought back against those charges on Tuesday. In the morning, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said at a Green Valley rally that the explosives that were in Iraq showed that the country had dangerous weapons that needed to be dealt with. Shortly after Kerry started his speech, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., interrupted him to say that a high school classmate of his has decided to vote for Kerry even though he is a Republican. The man has three grandchildren with juvenile diabetes, and he wants the federal government to support stem cell research, Reid said. Later, Kerry called Bush's decision to not extensively fund stem cell research an "insult." Actors Michael J. Fox, who suffers from Parkinson's disease, and Christopher Reeve, who recently passed away from complications of his quadriplegia, know that, Kerry said. "We are going to do stem cell research and find the cures to diabetes, Parkinson's and other diseases," Kerry said. After Kerry's speech, buses and vans transported supporters to early voting sites. America Coming Together, a third-party group opposed to Bush, recruited supporters outside to do last-minute grass-roots work for $10 an hour. Supporters behind Kerry unfolded a sign that said, "Like father like son, one term you're done." Signs passed out in the crowd read, "Seven more days to a fresh start." Before leaving Las Vegas, Kerry took time out on the tarmac to play a lengthy game of catch with personal aide Marvin Nicholson. The men traded suit coats for baseball mitts and threw a baseball for some time as secret service agents, police officers, and a bank of photographers looked on. Kerry then thanked the motorcycle officers who had led his motorcade. With a wave he boarded the campaign's Boeing 757. The plane -- a large American flag painted on its side and "The Real Deal" slogan painted on its engines -- took off from McCarran International Airport at about 5 pm. All contents copyright 2004 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 27 Las Vegas SUN: Old nuke waste shipped to Nevada ASSOCIATED PRESS OAK RIDGE, Tenn. -- About 429,000 gallons of radioactive wastes have been retrieved from old storage tanks on the Oak Ridge nuclear research and weapons reservation and shipped to Nevada since January, officials said Wednesday. Rep. Zach Wamp, R-Tenn., praised the Department of Energy and contractor Foster Wheeler Environmental Corp. for their efforts in beginning to remove some of Oak Ridge's hottest and nastiest wastes dating to its Manhattan Project creation a half century ago. "Working closely together, DOE and Foster Wheeler were able to successfully clean up this very hazardous material," he said. "The end result is an excellent outcome for Tennessee and a model for other DOE projects." Foster Wheeler built a $76 million processing plant to handle the project, which ultimately could involve up to 700 shipments of nuclear waste to long-term disposal sites in Nevada and New Mexico. Wednesday's ceremony marked the first of four milestones in the process -- the safe completion of 97 shipments of low-level radioactive waste, known as Supernate, to the Nevada Test Site. Later, the Oak Ridge plant will begin processing and packaging transuranic or highly radioactive wastes, such as plutonium and californium. They will be sent to the Waste Isolation Plant, an underground disposal facility in Carlsbad, N.M. - ***************************************************************** 28 PE.com: Tests: Well, house tainted | Inland Southern California | Corona-Norco NORCO: Water and air samples from property near Wyle Laboratories show contamination. 08:04 AM PDT on Thursday, October 28, 2004 The Press-Enterprise Groundwater tests taken this month and recent indoor air-quality investigations showed contamination from Wyle Laboratories in a private well and in a house, according to results released Wednesday by the state Department of Toxic Substances Control. The agency has scheduled a community meeting next month to address the results. Indoor air-quality samples taken from three houses on Golden West Lane in Norco closest to the Wyle site show no vapor contamination in two of the three houses, the agency reported. Agency officials have ordered Wyle to install ventilation equipment at the one home where trichloroethylene was found. The levels of contamination pose no immediate threat to people's health, but could increase the risk of cancer after 30 years of daily exposure to an additional two cases per 10,000, the agency reported. Details of the test results can be found at Norco City Hall and the Corona Public Library. Wyle will implement cleanup measures to address the risk, including adding the ventilation system to clear the trichloroethylene vapors from the affected house, the state agency said. Excessive levels of trichloroethylene and perchlorate, chemicals used in rocket fuels, were found in a well at a residence near Hillside Avenue and Third Street, the agency said. Water from the well is used for livestock and irrigation. Final test results of soil gas samples taken recently from Norco High School's football field should be available within two weeks. Preliminary results show no contamination. The Department of Toxic Substances Control will host a community meeting at 7 p.m. Nov. 29 at the Corona-Norco school district headquarters at 2820 Clark Ave. in Norco. Homeowners who have private wells within a half-mile radius of Wyle are asked to contact Juan Osornio, a project manager for the state agency, at (714) 484-5498. More headlines... [http://www.pe.com/pe/] © 2004 Belo Interactive Inc. [http://www.belointeractive.com] ***************************************************************** 29 Arizona Daily Sun: Yucca Mountain tour underscores Flag challenge [http://www.azdailysun.com] Thursday, October 28, 2004 By LARRY HENDRICKS Sun Staff Reporter YUCCA MOUNTAIN, Nev. -- At the top, cold wind cuts to the bone. Creosote bush grabs defiantly to parched soils of a dozen different shades of brown. Desolation abounds in spartan splendor. The nearly three dozen visitors from Coconino County stare in one direction last Tuesday morning at the Nevada Test Site, where hundreds of atomic bombs have been detonated over the years. In another direction, they see a mountain range that shrouds Groom Lake, also known as Area 51, in mystery. Death Valley is beyond another mountain range to the southwest. And 1,000 feet below them, through dense and sometimes porous volcanic rock called "tuff," a 5-mile tunnel runs through the mountain. They stand on the site proposed (but yet to be licensed to operate) as a repository of all high-level radioactive waste in the country. Three Flagstaff elected officials are among the crowd atop Yucca Mountain. Based on what they've heard by staff under contract with the U.S. Department of Energy, they said the repository appears to be a done deal. What concerns them is not the safety of the repository itself, which has more than a decade of scientific study to its credit, but the fact that tons of the radioactive waste to be stored here -- tentatively scheduled to begin in 2010 -- will have to come through Coconino County and Flagstaff to get here. Mayor Joe Donaldson took the trip for a better understanding of the repository. "I know enough now to take a solid position on it," he said, adding that he supports the site's completion. "Doesn't it make sense to bring (high-level radioactive waste) to one location? It certainly does to me," Donaldson said. "There has to be some place for it." According to information from DOE, nearly 50,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste sit in 131 locations in 39 states. All of that material is above ground and within 75 miles of more than 160 million citizens, posing vast environmental hazard and making the material potentially vulnerable to sabotage or theft. Yucca Mountain is an effort to put all of that radioactive waste in one spot, deep under ground. If Yucca Mountain gets licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to be built and operate, tons of deadly radioactive waste will be transported by rail or by truck through Coconino County and Flagstaff. Jim Driscoll, emergency services coordinator for Coconino County, said the trip was organized for the benefit of the county's Local Emergency Planning Committee as part of the federal Community Right-to-Know Act. The LEPC is responsible for developing local hazardous material plans, and the act requires that communities to be informed of all hazardous materials that go into and through a community -- including high-level radioactive waste. The Flagstaff Fire Department has radiation response capability, Driscoll said. The county also has hazardous materials emergency response plans in place, to include radioactive waste. And radioactive waste of a much lower level than the waste proposed to be stored at Yucca Mountain already gets transported through the city on a regular basis to a low-level nuclear waste site near Carlsbad, N.M. "Our main concern is transport, and the transport of those materials through Coconino County," Driscoll said. "(The Yucca trip) gives us the opportunity to see the safety measures for its storage." Among the agencies that sent staff on the trip were the Coconino County Department of Health Services, Flagstaff Medical Center, Flagstaff Fire Department, Flagstaff Police Department, Coconino County Sheriff's Office, Williams Police Department and the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality. Transportation safety is what concerns Donaldson and city councilmembers Karen Cooper and Kara Kelty, who also took the trip to Yucca Mountain. During the trip, Donaldson began planning with Driscoll on setting up a demonstration in the near future for city residents to see how high-level radioactive waste will be transported through the city. Cooper said her next order of business on the issue is to get busy educating herself on who to lobby for railroad and highway safety and maintenance to ensure deadly loads like those going to Yucca Mountain make it to their destination. Although transportation issues were addressed and information was made available by the DOE contractor (see related story), the focus of the tour was on the safety of the repository and how much money was spent on the project so far: in excess of $5 billion. Kelty said the tour had a "propaganda feeling." Cooper characterized the tour as a "concerted selling effort." Donaldson, Cooper and Kelty all said they were impressed with the amount of study and science that has gone into the project. The trip has increased their knowledge about the project and their ability to talk about the project with Flagstaff residents. The tour began with a visit to the Yucca Mountain Science Center, located in downtown Las Vegas. The center contains volumes of literature about the site and has dozens of displays on how the site is supposed to work. The displays explain how nuclear reactors work, why Yucca Mountain is a good choice for a repository, how a repository would work -- and how radioactive materials would be transported to the repository. Max Powell, with the company Bechtel, the contractor for DOE, acted as tour guide for the group. "It's the most studied piece of real estate in the world," he said during the two-hour bus ride across the Nevada desert from Las Vegas. That study has focused on storing, for at least 10,000 years, high-level radioactive waste, Powell said. That waste includes used nuclear fuel rods from civilian power plants and military vessels and material left over from making nuclear weapons. In the early 1980s, Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which made the federal government responsible for the waste. To fund the creation of a national repository, citizens who used power from nuclear power plants were taxed on the electricity used, creating a surplus of more than $20 billion to find a site, conduct studies, build a repository, operate it until full, then monitor it. The military portion of the waste will be covered in the federal budget. Currently, there is about 50,000 tons of solid radioactive waste slated to make the journey to a repository, Powell said. The Yucca Mountain project makes accommodation for more than 70,000 tons of waste, and if it becomes operational, will remain open, at present calculations, for approximately 25 years, with approximately 175 rail and truck shipments to the site per year. Because there is no railway to the site, more than 300 miles of track will have to be laid. And roads will have to be paved for trucks bearing shipments of waste. Powell said the U.S. government was to take possession of all radioactive waste to be placed in a national repository by 1998. That did not happen, and several companies that operate nuclear power plants have sued for breach of contract. Several sites in eight states were selected for study. That number was reduced to one in 1987 -- Yucca Mountain, Powell said. Although President George Bush has approved Yucca Mountain to be developed, the site must still get a license to build and operate from the NRC. The license application is anticipated to be submitted in December. After that come years of public hearings on the public safety and environmental impacts the site might pose. Critics have already voiced opposition to Environmental Impact Statements for the site that only went out 10,000 years into the future. The lifespan of the danger posed by radioactive material is much, much longer. If the license is granted, DOE anticipates the first shipments of radioactive material to arrive in 2010. If the license is not granted, the site will be abandoned, Powell said. The ball will be back in the court of Congress to decide what to do next. The site currently consists of a huge 5-mile tunnel bored into Yucca Mountain at a depth of 1,000 feet. The tour stopped at the south end of the tunnel, called the south portal, to view the huge 25-foot diameter drilling machine used to bore the hole over a three-year period. Bruce Reinert, an engineer with the Los Alamos Test Lab, who met the tour at the north portal into the mountain, said the north portal will be where rail and truck shipments will deposit the radioactive waste for storage. Because the tunnel was undergoing maintenance, the tour was not allowed inside. Reinert explained the scientific study that has gone into the site. "Our main enemy in the mountain is water," Reinert said. The type of rock, coupled with the areas slight rainfall, and making the containers that hold the nuclear material out of material that is nearly impossible to corrode will ensure that the water table 1,000 feet below the repository doesn't get contaminated. T The geology of the mountain is also stable with very few fault lines for water to flow into the water table, which is a slow moving, ancient body of water that is not used by the closest population centers. The area is not prone to earthquakes or vulcanism. Another concern is the heat, Reinert said. When radioactive material breaks down, it creates heat as a by-product. "We're really going to heat the mountain up," Reinert said. For instance, inside the tunnels where the waste is to be kept, the temperature is expected to increase to 212 degrees Fahrenheit -- the boiling point of water -- and will stay that way for hundreds of years. Such heat will increase the surface temperature at the top of the mountain by 1 degree. A section of the tunnel has been fitted with heaters to simulate the effect of the heat on the rock. So far, so good, Reinert said. Needless to say, people will not be able to enter the tunnels where the waste is stored after they are sealed, which will require robotic monitoring to ensure that no breaches of the containers occur, Reinert said. After the tour, Donaldson said that the presentations about the testing affirms for him the quality of the work that has gone into the site, and he is satisfied Yucca Mountain appears to be, at this time, the best place to put the repository. Cooper said she was impressed, and sometimes startled, by the frank explanations of the testing that has gone into the site. She expressed concern about the theories and the methodologies that spanned a 10,000-year period without mention of differing thoughts on alternative concepts to treat the waste -- like reprocessing it. Kelty said she was impressed by the ingenuity of the science used to address the problem of what to do with the nuclear waste. "But at the same time, I was disheartened by the path this ingenuity put us on," Kelty said. She said she felt that during the tour the issue of controlling the use of energy through sustainable living was not addressed. Instead, the project, to her, appeared an effort to ensure unrelenting use of energy. There are already plans in place for the repository to grow and stay open hundreds of years longer, according to DOE contractor staff on the tour. And at some point in the future, the issue of what to do with nuclear waste will have to be addressed again. Reporter Larry Hendricks can be reached at lhendricks@azdailysun.com or 556-2262. On the web at: www.ymp.gov © 2000-2004 Arizona Daily Sun ***************************************************************** 30 Tri-City Herald: K Basins fuel project overcomes hurdles This story was published Thursday, October 28th, 2004 Even the most strident Pollyanna couldn't describe progress at Hanford's K Basins as an unqualified success. Efforts to remove spent nuclear fuel from the leak-prone ponds has chronically trailed behind schedule and hundreds of millions over budget. Fines associated with the project have cost Fluor Hanford more than $1.2 million. The company lost hundreds of thousands more in potential award fees because of problems. And cleanup isn't complete. Dealing with contaminated equipment and removal of the deadly sludge that lines the bottom of the basins is expected to take until 2008. Despite that imperfect record, it's doubtful anyone could have completed the task of fuel removal any better. Fluor, especially the workers who actually retrieved the highly radioactive fuel, deserve the community's gratitude. Here's what they accomplished: The removal of 2,300 tons of irradiated fuel, containing 50 million curies of radioactivity, from the banks of the Columbia River. The risk posed by the ponds wasn't just some scary prediction. About 15 million gallons of radioactively contaminated water had leaked from K Basin East into a patch of ground that sits just 400 yards from the river. The fuel is destined for permanent disposal at the federal repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev., if that facility ever opens. For now, it's now safely stored nine miles from the Columbia River. Getting the fuel there meant not only overcoming complex technical challenges, but also the bureaucratic whiplash that seems ingrained in the Department of Energy's culture. It's an atmosphere that's toxic to the concept of consistency. Presidential politics guarantee a re-evaluation of priorities at least every eight years and sometimes after four. The churn of contractors and contractor management occurs at a frequently dizzying pace. We're in the fourth administration since President Reagan's White House originally negotiated environmental restoration plans for Hanford. The turnover of contractors leading the K Basins job has almost kept pace with the changing politics. Planning for the effort started with Westinghouse Hanford and moved to DE Hanford, operating as a subcontractor to Fluor. Finally Fluor pushed DE out and took over the job. Problems grew so troubling by the mid-1990s that the U.S. House of Representatives launched an investigation into the K Basins. They found the initial budget process unrealistic and the projections overly optimistic. No wonder the price tag of $1.4 billion was nearly twice the original estimate. Testimony before the oversight and investigations subcommittee of the House Commerce Committee revealed that the pressure from DOE to hold down cost estimates was so great that Westinghouse wasn't even allowed to include contingencies in its spending plan. That's an absurd way to prepare a budget for a one-of-a-kind project in a potentially deadly environment. Predictably, the unpredictable happened. Among the unexpected obstacles was fuel corroded so badly that it fused to metal storage baskets, fuel so fragile that it fell apart at the touch of a retrieval tool and mystery fuel from an unknown source and of unknown content. Certainly, Fluor is not above criticism for the debacle that the K Basins project temporarily became, but any fair assessment has to consider that many of the hurdles the company faced weren't of its own making. And in the final analysis, Fluor got the fuel moved. An imminent threat to the environment and public safety is greatly reduced as a result. © 2004 Tri-City Herald, Associated Press &Other Wire Services ***************************************************************** 31 eNewMexican: Whistle-blowers share hopes for congressional hearing [http://www.santafenewmexican.com/ DIANA HEIL | The New Mexican October 27, 2004 POJOAQUE -- In biblical times, lepers were considered dead people. As they passed through the streets, they had to yell out, "Unclean!" so everyone knew their status. Thousands of years later, Glenn Walp, a Los Alamos National Laboratory employee who was fired for speaking up about corruption, understands what it's like to be a leper. "In parallel, when you become a whistle-blower, you likewise become among the unclean and people avoid you," he told a gathering Tuesday at the Cities of Gold Casino Hotel. The lab fired him a few days before Thanksgiving in 2002. Walp, former head of the lab's Office of Security Inquiries, was later reinstated as a lab employee and won $930,000 in a settlement agreement, but the stigma lives on, he said. Many gathered at the meeting are hoping for a congressional hearing in Washington, D.C., about retaliation against whistle-blowers at national laboratories, including LANL. Eight whistle-blowers were present at the meeting -- and three told their stories. Other employees in attendance shared some of their experiences. One woman warned: "When you back down, it doesn't matter. The retaliation continues." The meeting, which was open to the public, was sponsored by the union University Professional and Technical Employees and two national nonprofit watchdog groups, the Government Accountability Project and the Project on Government Oversight. Staff from U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., and Rep. Tom Udall, D-N.M., voiced support for the protection of whistle-blowers. (U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., was not invited, according to union president Manny Trujillo, because Trujillo doubted Domenici would send someone from his office.) Speaking up about safety, security, fraud and waste is risky at many work sites, not just nuclear-weapons labs. Pete Stockton of the Project On Government Oversight in Washington, D.C., said he encourages whistle-blowers to remain anonymous as long as they can while his group checks into problems. He recommended the book, The Art of Anonymous Activism: Serving the Public While Surviving Public Service, as mandatory reading for anyone who is thinking about raising concerns at work. "You've got to keep your head down, and you simply can't tell people you're doing it," he said. The Government Accountability Project tells people who are contemplating blowing the whistle, "Don't do this if you care about your career. You probably aren't going to survive this career-wise," said attorney Tom Carpenter, who has represented whistle-blowers at numerous laboratories across the country. "Most people decide to go forward anyway." Some people don't lose their jobs. Instead, they might be given fewer and fewer assignments at work. Their security clearance might be yanked. They might be sent to a psychologist to have a fitness-for-duty evaluation. Tommy Hook, another whistle-blower, and Walp said they tried to do their jobs with honesty and integrity, but they allege LANL did not value their efforts. Walp said managers told him, "Your No. 1 job is to protect the lab and the contract." The contract refers to the University of California, which has a contract with the U.S. Department of Energy to manage LANL. The contract will go out for bid the first time ever late this year or early next year. Walp said LANL's "elite" know the top leaders of LANL will be let go if a new contractor wins. Hook said he had a similar experience. When he alleged a division leader was covering up fraud, waste and abuse involving the University of California, he said he was told his job was to protect UC, not to damage it. The lab did not send a representative to attend Tuesday's meeting. Despite all the anguish, Walp has no regrets about the stand he took. "Is it worth it? Yes, it's absolutely, unequivocally worth it, and I would do it again," he said. "I truly believe that some people have lives and others have destinies." The state of California and the federal government offer whistle-blower-protection programs, but this set of LANL employees says neither approach works. When a new contract to run the lab is given, they want the contract to include a mechanism, possibly an independent mediation council, to be in place, so people aren't afraid to point out problems. It's a simple dynamic, Carpenter said. Work sites are not safe unless workers are free to raise concerns without retaliation. Conversely, if someone is fired for speaking up, it suppresses reporting among other employees, Carpenter noted. Trujillo and Stockton said LANL would not be in its current state of affairs, having spent the months since July focusing on safety and security training at the expense of normal work if management had heeded the warnings of whistle-blowers in the past. Santa Fe New Mexican Privacy Policy | ©2004, Santa Fe New Mexican, all rights ***************************************************************** 32 York Daily Record: BOEING, HONEYWELL: Uranium plant deals - [ydr.com] Thursday, October 28, 2004 OAK RIDGE, Tenn. — Boeing Co. and Honeywell International have signed agreements to support manufacture of centrifuge machines in Oak Ridge for USEC's planned $1.5 billion uranium enrichment plant in Piketon, Ohio. "This is huge," said Jim Campbell, president of the East Tennessee Economic Council, noting the Piketon plant is expected to require about 12,000 centrifuge machines — work that could support hundreds of jobs. Campbell said the project immediately may add about 50 jobs to the 150 workers Boeing already employs in Oak Ridge. USEC, formerly U.S. Enrichment Corp., is a publicly traded company based in Bethesda, Md. The company assumed uranium enrichment operations from the U.S. Department of Energy in 1998. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission agreed in February to let USEC build a test plant in Piketon to demonstrate its centrifuge technology, which is common in Europe but never tried in the United States on a large scale. The prototype plant will require about 240 centrifuges and is slated to open in 2005. That would be followed by a commercial plant — also at the Ohio site — that would employ about 500 and be operating by the end of the decade. Copyright © York Daily Record 2004 122 S. George St., P.O. Box 15122 York, PA 17405, (717) 771-2000 ***************************************************************** 33 lamonitor.com: Whistleblowers gain momentum at meeting The Online News Source for Los Alamos [http://www.lac-nm.us] ROGER SNODGRASS, roger@lamonitor.com [roger@lamonitor.com] , Monitor Assistant Editor Participants in a whistleblower forum Wednesday night were excited about prospects for more effective protections for whistleblowers at Los Alamos National Laboratory and others who suffer retaliation from speaking out on the job. "The whistleblower movement is blossoming and becoming better organized," said Betty Gunther, a board member of the University Professional and Technical Employees Union local at LANL. UPTE sponsored the forum, along with the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) and the Government Accountability Office (GAP), two non-profit public interest organizations based in Washington, D.C. Both have been active nationally in advancing legislation to provide greater protection to government employees who report waste, fraud and malfeasance in their workplace. Manny Trujillo, president of the UPTE local said the meeting came about because of the growing number of supporters that have been coming forward out of the LANL workforce, many of whom had first been in touch with POGO and GAP. UPTE and the Hispanic Roun Table gave presentations to the N.M. legislative oversight committee on LANL earlier this year on issues of retaliation at the lab. Among the panelists Tuesday were Peter Stockton of POGO, Tom Carpenter of GAP and Glenn Walp, the security investigator who was fired by LANL during Thanksgiving week, 2002, after discussing his concerns with staff of the Department of Energy Office of Inspector General. Walp was later awarded nearly $1 million in a settlement with the University of California. Stockton distributed literature on how to report incidents anonymously. Gunther said. "That's the best way to go because of the intense retaliation whistleblowing causes." Congressional staff from Sen. Jeff Bingaman's office and from Tom Udall's office attended the meeting. Out of the meeting, participants said this morning, is a plan to carry the message to Washington, Santa Fe, and Sacramento. "We will be formulating a strategy paper in support of a congressional hearing, which will be addressed to our New Mexico legislators and our joint legislators in California, not only about the situation here in Los Alamos, but also on behalf of our sister labs in Berkeley and Livermore," Trujillo said. LANL said it strengthened its whistleblower procedures after the financial management scandals last year. Officials frequently point to several options available, through a grievance and appeal procedure, an Ombudsman office, and a "Tell Pete" hotline that connects directly and anonymously with lab Director G. Peter Nanos. The lab's managers at the University of California, also offer a variety of avenues for complaint. "The problem is that if you use them - if your're lucky you'll be ignored and if you're unlucky you'll be retaliated against," said Gunther. "They have a very good rule, if only they followed it." "We were impressed by the attendance that we had," Trujillo said. "We noticed that people felt very secure in speaking out at this forum." UPTE stewards are currently involved in 25-30 cases involving some kind of retaliation, and, Trujillo said, more are coming forward, as people realize that there is a support network. © 2003 Los Alamos Monitor All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 34 KIFI: The INEEL Is Working on Hydrogen Fuel System That May Soon Power Navy Ships www.localnews8.com 10/27/04 The INEEL is working on a new project that could end up in your home someday. It’s technology that converts diesel into hydrogen fuel. The hydrogen power system the INEEL is fine tuning right now may be used to power U.S. Navy ships soon. Regular diesel fuel you can buy at any gas station is being converted. Lyman Frost, dir. of special energy projects, says, “We can convert it into a clean fuel that can be used much more efficiently, much more productively and generate electricity in remote locations.” Remote places like in the middle of an ocean. Mark Cervi, project coordinator, Naval Power Systems, says, “This technology provides the opportunity for quiet, efficient and environmentally clean fuel cell generators for all electric U.S. Navy ships and in the commercial marine and power generation industry.” There are high hopes for this power system, including the possibility of it being marketed commercially. The Navy is designing a destroyer ship and it could be powered by hydrogen. The decision about whether to use it or not will made in the next couple of years. [http://www.localnews8.com/ ***************************************************************** 35 [du-list] Some futher musings and clarifications Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 18:14:46 -0700 My apologies for the typos and slips in the text I posted two days ago. With regard to the WHO and the UNEP, I am enclosing an article published in THE NATION April 9, 2001, that was subjected to THE NATION's rigorous fact-checking, and available from THE NATION archives only to subscribers, plus a letter from the WHO to THE NATION and my response. The ar Robert James Parsons Geneva United Nations Office Press Room No 1 CH - 1211 Geneva 10, Switzerland Telephone: + 41 22 917-20-18 E-mail: rjparsons@hotmail.com THE NATION April 9, 2001 The Balkans DU Cover-Up by ROBERT JAMES PARSONS Last November, when stories first appeared in the European press of deaths from leukemia among Italian soldiers who had served in the Balkans, alarm bells started ringing across the Continent. The leukemia was--and still is--believed by many independent experts to be caused by radiation from depleted uranium (DU) arms used in the Balkans during the war. Since most European countries are members of NATO, most of them have troops stationed in or near areas believed to be contaminated. In France, the February 2000 broadcast of a documentary about DU triggered a steadily increasing demand for more and better information. At the same time, reports were surfacing in Belgium of illness among that country's troops stationed in the Balkans. Early this year, Spain and Greece announced they will screen their soldiers for contamination, and Portugal has decided to remove its troops entirely from Kosovo. Country after country summoned US ambassadors or dispatched delegations to NATO headquarters in Brussels in search of more information about DU. But NATO--which in effect means the United States--has stuck to the Pentagon's oft-repeated refrain: If there is a problem, soldiers' health should certainly be studied, but it is impossible that DU is involved because its radiation is so low as to be utterly harmless. A major reason for Pentagon evasiveness is the almost 200,000 Gulf War vets apparently suffering from the variety of illnesses lumped together as Gulf War Syndrome who have filed claims against the VA for service-related illnesses. Three-quarters of that group are now classified by the VA as disabled, and almost 7,000 of the original total have died. In the case of contamination by Agent Orange in Vietnam, the Pentagon ended up admitting claims from anybody who had served in the theater after use of the defoliant had begun. If this were repeated in the case of Gulf War Syndrome, most of the almost 700,000 vets who served on the ground in the Persian Gulf would be eligible to press claims. Further, in addition to helping solve the serious problem of what to do with nuclear waste, DU weapons play a key role in the US military's concept of a "no loss" war. If such arms performed brilliantly against tanks in the Iraq war, they performed equally brilliantly against the Serbian regime's huge underground installations ("hardened targets" in military jargon) in Kosovo, where NATO has admitted to using some nine and a half tons of DU. Hence, far from planning to remove DU from its arsenal anytime soon, the Pentagon wants to increase its use. Thus, duly attentive to its own interests, the US government has consistently pressured its NATO allies and the UN--which has assumed responsibility for Kosovo--to keep the lid on DU contamination investigations (to the extent that such inquiries cannot be thwarted outright). Such pressure, however, has not stopped information from slowly leaking out, as evidenced by the French documentary and the reports from Belgium. But until the Italian government decided in December to launch an official inquiry into DU use in Kosovo, there was no general awareness of the danger among the European public. Significantly, Britain, whose government has long been at odds with its own veterans over Gulf War Syndrome and is the only country other than the United States to admit to using DU, has been a low-key but insistent supporter of the Pentagon line. Much, in fact, is already known about DU. Contrary to what the Pentagon keeps insisting, the "depleted" in the name depleted uranium does not indicate uranium bereft of all but weak, hence harmless, radiation. Rather, it is depleted of its contents of the uranium isotope U-235, which, because it is fissionable, is used for bombs and for fuel in nuclear reactors. What's left, U-238, is 40 percent less radioactive but still extremely dangerous. Anybody handling DU metal must wear clothing resistant to high-level radiation, hermetically sealed and equipped with a respirator. The Pentagon itself knows the dangers. On July 22, 1990, the US Army made public an exhaustive study of armor-piercing DU munitions (quoted in the Military Toxics Project's 2000 report "Don't Look, Don't Find"), which warned of respirable DU oxides, created during combat, that could cause cancer and kidney problems. It further warned that "following combat, the condition of the battlefield and the long-term health risks to natives and combat veterans may become issues in the acceptability of the continued use of DU kinetic energy penetrators for military applications." Nevertheless, since the Gulf War, the Pentagon has spent millions to convince the public--and especially Gulf War veterans--that radiation from DU is essentially harmless. In May 1999, during the Kosovo war, the UN arranged for representatives of all humanitarian aid agencies involved in the conflict to make an initial assessment of the overall situation in the field. However, the UN Environment Program's report, sounding the alarm on DU contamination, was not made public until it was leaked to this journalist by people within the organization who described themselves as exasperated with UNEP director Klaus Töpfer's willingness, as they saw it, to defer to US foreign policy. According to the sources, the pressure had come directly from Washington, presumably from the Pentagon, through UN headquarters in New York. The leaked report appeared on June 18, 1999, in two Swiss French-language dailies, Le Courrier and La Liberté. Later, at a UN press conference in Geneva, Töpfer denied suppressing the report. Reminded that it had been written up in the press, he said that was proof that it was public information. Another report, funded by the European Commission and published shortly after the war, made virtually no mention of depleted uranium. However, without identifying them, the report incorporated, verbatim, several paragraphs of the suppressed UNEP report. Under pressure to do something after the end of the war, UNEP set up a working party, the Balkans Task Force, to make a full report. Töpfer appointed Finland's former Environment Minister Pekka Haavisto to lead it. Haavisto was adamant that depleted uranium was part of the overall pollution picture and could not be left out of the inquiry. When the resulting report was released in October 1999, it was shorn of all but two of its seventy-two pages on DU. Throughout this period a procession of officials conspicuously uncritical of the US position on DU came to Geneva. These included Dennis McNamara, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees' special envoy to the Balkans, who stressed at a press conference on July 12, 1999, NATO's assurances that depleted uranium posed no problems. Dr. Keith Baverstock of the World Health Organization's regional office for Europe also insisted that there was absolutely no danger, though he added that depleted uranium could cause problems in a battle situation. And former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, now the UN Secretary General's special envoy to the Balkans, curtly stated that depleted uranium was a "nonissue." After news leaked that the Balkans Task Force had received a targets map from NATO, Töpfer called a meeting in Geneva on March 20, 2000, to consider how to deal with the leak, but on the same day, Le Courrier published the map. The next day Haavisto was allowed to present it to the Geneva media. Töpfer received a second, much more detailed, targets map in early July. Haavisto is said to have become aware of it only in September, at which time he pressed to send a mission as soon as possible into the field to investigate at least some of the target spots before winter set in. Töpfer's response was to postpone any mission until after the October 24 municipal elections in Kosovo, allegedly out of fear that if disquieting information got out it might trigger mass exoduses such as had occurred during the war, thus marring the "democratic" system the "humanitarian war" had created. The mission finally began its investigation in November. UNEP was far from alone in its timidity. As the world's highest instance of policy-setting in the area of public health and as a member of the UN system, the World Health Organization should have taken the lead in investigating DU. But the WHO is bound by an agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)--whose mandate boils down to promoting nuclear power--to obtain the agency's consent whenever it proposes to undertake anything pertaining to radiation and public health. (When questioned by telephone, David Kyd, spokesman for the IAEA, claimed that his agency's mandate did not allow it to investigate DU, adding that DU was, in any case, perfectly harmless.) Thus it is no surprise that the fact sheet on DU that the WHO announced as being in the works right after the end of the war was quietly canceled. A subsequent general study of DU due out in December 1999 has still not materialized, and a fact sheet hurriedly brought out this past January in response to the European public's outcry is vague, contradictory and at odds with current scientific knowledge about radiation and its effect on humans. When the Balkans Task Force undertook its initial 1999 Kosovo study, the IAEA did the measuring, and no radiation worthy of notice was found. The November 2000 field assessment mission by the Balkans Task Force, which has just reported its findings, further perpetuates the cover-up. Using WHO radiation safety standards designed for measuring a brief "one event" source of radiation conceived of as hitting the whole body, it concludes that there is no real problem. However, the greatest danger from DU comes from the uranium oxide dust created when the metal hits its target and can then be inhaled. The Swiss government, whose military now cooperates with NATO, paid for the project, and people from a lab run by the Swiss military were part of the team, significant because the lab has echoed the Pentagon in declaring that the whole DU issue is not worthy of discussion. (Switzerland, with a huge Kosovar population that acted like a magnet for refugees during the war, has its own reasons for downplaying the danger.) The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the chief coordinator of humanitarian relief during and immediately after the war, took the contamination threat seriously enough to launch its own inquiries and to issue a directive made available to Le Courrier in early 2000 by Deputy High Commissioner Frederick Barton. Among other things, it lays down rules for personnel in the field: No pregnant women are to be sent to Kosovo, those assigned there must be given the option of another post elsewhere and those ultimately sent must have a note in their file to facilitate any later compensation claims. Barton also made clear on several occasions that efforts had been made to warn the refugees as they were returning to Kosovo--efforts that he said had later been thwarted by the UN administration, by NATO and by the local Albanian political leaders. Others share this skepticism. Dr. Chris Busby, a low-radiation specialist, recently conducted his own field assessment, whose results were presented to Britain's Royal Society. In addition to finding radiation more than a hundred times higher than natural background levels near target sites, he has concluded that most of the uranium oxide particles are constantly being resuspended in the air, allowing them to be blown by the wind throughout the country and easily inhaled. For those long critical of US influence in European affairs, whether they are concerned with the Continent's military structure or simply a European identity with reduced US influence, the DU dispute is heaven-sent. The latest UN report, as well as a whitewash from the European Commission a week earlier, far from calming the storm, seem to have intensified mistrust. The extent to which such feelings affect EU public policy will depend on how long the European public keeps up its demand for a reliable explanation of what is behind the "nonissue" now known as Balkans War Syndrome. ____________________________________________________________________ World Health Organization 20, avenue Appia CH-1211 Geneva 27 Switzerland Geneva, 12 April 2001 The Editor The Nation 33, Irving Place, 8th floor New York, NY 10003 RE: The Balkan DU Cover-Up: Washington is Pressuring NATO and the UN to keep the Lid on Investigations by Robert James Parsons; 9 April 2001 Dear Ms. vanden Heuvel: I would be most grateful if your magazine could publish the following 296-word letter: The article's author is incorrect on a number of counts. He claims that the UN system is under pressure "to keep the lid on DU contamination investigations." Concerned about possible public health consequences of the use of DU munitions and aware of concerns voiced by governments and the public, the World Health Organization (WHO) has, on the contrary, undertaken a number of activities related to this issue. These include a field mission to Kosovo, a meeting with an Iraqi delegation of scientists on further cooperation and future action, publication of a Fact Sheet on DU, an appeal to donors to fund WHO work on DU and health in affected countries and a forthcoming monograph on DU. The WHO monograph on DU was never expected to be released in December 1999. A document of some 200 pages, encompassing a review of a large amount of the best available scientific literature on uranium and DU, this work was undertaken only in autumn 1999. Studies of this scope take more than a few months to complete. The 4-page WHO Fact Sheet on DU (www.who.int/inf-fs/en/fact257.html) is consistent with all major reviews recently conducted on the possible health effects of exposure to DU and is not contradictory. WHO intended to release its Fact Sheet together with its monograph on DU, but due to intense public concern about DU early this year, the Fact Sheet was issued earlier than planned. The Fact Sheet was never "quietly cancelled." The 1959 Agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) does not affect the impartial and independent exercise by WHO of its statutory responsibilities, nor does it place WHO in a situation of subordination to IAEA. The above-mentioned DU-related activities were all undertaken independently by WHO, without any approval or influence whatsoever by the IAEA. [from THE NATION's editor to R.J.P.: Due to the word limitation, the following paragraphs were removed, but you may nevertheless wish to have them as information. [The author writes that "...WHO radiation safety standards are designed for measuring a brief 'one event' source of radiation...." In reality, WHO radiation safety standards cover both short and long term effects. [WHO may only conduct a field investigation if the governmental authorities request it and if funding is provided by donors. Two such requests were made in January 2001; WHO replied positively and took action rapidly. Thank you very much for your consideration of this letter. Please contact Melinda Henry, Office of the Spokesperson, WHO should you have any questions; Tel. +41 22 791 2535; Fax +41 22 791 48 58, E-mail henrym@who.int] Sincerely yours, Dr Richard Helmer Director Protection of the Human Environment World Health Organization _____________________________________________________________________ Reply to Helmer’s letter If the WHO was “concerned about possible public health consequences of the use of DU munitions and aware of concerns voiced by governments and the public”, it certainly has been discreet about making that concern known. The field mission, meetings with the Iraqi delegation of scientists etc. have all taken place since mid-January 2001, whereas the alarm bells concerning Kosovo were first sounded by Bakary Kante’s preliminary assessment, written in May 1999. The problem in Iraq was brought before the world’s public long before that, largely by the Gulf War veterans. Further, once the Iraqi government had finally made up its mind to officially seek help from the WHO (in November 1999), the WHO did not respond to the letter until the end of July 2000. The stories vary as to what happened to it and how, with headquarters in Geneva claiming that it was misplaced at the Middle East Regional Office. If this is indeed the case, such a politically hot document, received after YEARS of waiting and conjecture as to just what the Iraqis were intending to do about the DU problem, could never have been simply mislaid without knowledge and approval from the highest echelons at WHO headquarters in Geneva. The WHO monograph is not a monograph at all, as acknowledged by Ann Kern, WHO’s Executive Director, Sustainable Development and Healthy Environments, but a review of some of the available literature on the subject of both chemical and radiological toxicity of uranium, literature obviously selected for its complete lack of treatment of the subject of non-soluble, ceramic-like DU particles, which are the source of the threat to health and the environment where DU munitions have been used. The Fact Sheet to which Dr Helmer refers, was, indeed, not cancelled. But an earlier one was. If the WHO did it quietly, with the result that this journalist, as well as a Dutch journalist, Saskia Jansens, a long-time veteran of DU enquiry, kept having to ask about its progress before Gregory Hartl, the WHO’s principal spokesman, finally admitted that it would never see the light of day, we did not go quietly upon hearing the news in August 1999, barely two months after the Fact Sheet had been announced as in the works. The result was an announcement that the WHO was undertaking a “generic” study of DU, a study to be focused exclusively on its chemical toxicity as a heavy metal and thus entrusted to the direction of a Mr Barry Smith, a geologist. It is this generic study that has been rechristened “monograph”. Dr Michael H. Repacholi, WHO Coordinator for Occupation and Environmental Health, Sustainable Development and Healthy Environments, announced at a January 2001 press conference at the Palais des Nations (headquarters of the UN in Geneva) that the scope of the generic study had been extended to include radiological toxicity. He also stated that in addition to a review of literature, there would be actual testing of people, such as urine analysis. Now he is claiming (press conference of 26 April on the occasion of the release of the “monograph”) that its scope has always included radiotoxicity as well as chimiotoxicity, while admitting that it is only a review of some available literature with no clinical or field studies ever intended. The four-page WHO Fact Sheet, mentioned by Dr Helmer, is at stark variance with the draft of the original, cancelled, one, obtained by this journalist. The latter dealt with DU as a source of internal, constant radiation, DU in the form of ceramic-like, inhalable particles that have been let loose on the planet by the thousands of billions where DU munitions have burned on contact with their target. The January Fact Sheet deals essentially with DU as natural uranium, soluble in the human body, hence easily, and often quickly, eliminated. The 1959 agreement with the IAEA, was, according to this journalist’s sources, the reason why the initial fact sheet was cancelled as well as the reason why the generic study had to be confined to DU’s chemical toxicity until the public outcry, particularly in Europe, in January of this year, made it necessary to deal with the radiation side. Not surprisingly, that radiation side is dismissed by the “monograph” as of negligible importance. Dr Helmer’s statement that ”WHO radiation safety standards cover both short and long term effects” does not address the question of constant, long-term radiation from an internal source. The long-term effects of “one event” radiation, are still effects from “one event” radiation such as a bomb blast, and not applicable to the radiation generated by the ceramic-like particles lodged for years in lung tissue. As for the statement that the WHO may conduct a field investigation only if the governmental authorities request it, one may point out that regardless of the huge and increasing mountain of evidence about Iraq, the WHO never requested an invitation to investigate, as they could have done. The just released “monograph” is just one more stone in the huge wall of denial about the dangers of radiation that the WHO and the UN are party to. Since the “monograph” and the UNEP report are supposed to be the last word on the subject for a long time, we still have a long way to go before anything serious is done about what the WHO perceived as a major threat to the human species, back in the 1950s, before the IAEA agreement silenced the WHO on the subject of radiation and public health. Robert James Parsons Published May 28, 2001, in The Nation, along with the initial letter from Dr Richard Helmer _________________________________________________________________ Wußten Sie, daß Sie Ihren Posteingang auch über den MSN Messenger abrufen können? http://messenger.msn.de Jetzt kostenlos downloaden! ***************************************************************** NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. 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