***************************************************************** 03/07/05 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 13.52 ***************************************************************** 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 Mos News: Iranian, Russian Officials Discuss Completion of Bushehr P 2 Mehr News: Iran frequently invited IAEA to visit Arak nuclear facili 3 Guardian Unlimited: Iran: Uranium Enrichment Plant Underground 4 Korea Herald: 'U.S. approach worsens N.K. nuclear issue' 5 Xinhua: NYT report on DPRK nuclear issue "not tallies with fact" 6 asahi.com: EDITORIAL: Japan-N. Korea relations 7 Guardian Unlimited: U.S. Envoy to Try for N.Korean Nuke Talks 8 US: [NukeNet] THE FATE OF THE EARTH: Please Call C-Span Re Dr 9 US: Re: [du-list] TNT trouble halts bomb production - AGAIN 10 US: Las Vegas SUN: Bush Selects Steve Johnson to Head EPA NUCLEAR REACTORS 11 US: [NukeNet] Fwd: UCS comments on PSEG "cherry pickin on safety" 12 US: Exelon's Policy of Divide & Conquer 13 US: Children at risk 14 Slovak Spectator: Reader feedback: Close down the nuclear plants 15 AFP: EU gives Japan until June to reach deal on nuclear project - 16 US: NRC: Carolina Power & Light Company, Brunswick Steam Electric Pl 17 US: NRC: RIN 3150 AH-54 NUCLEAR SAFETY 18 US: [du-list] It's a Family Affair: Uncle Bucky makes a killing 19 US: [du-list] 'Poison DUst' features vets exposed to DU 20 US: Coastal Post Online: Depleted Uranium Deaths 21 US: Salt Lake Tribune: Atomic museum not a hit with downwinders NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE 22 [du-list] Nuclear waste dumped on Britain's beaches 23 US: [du-list] No nuke waste on Native lands! Please help by 24 Herald: Ex-safety officer at Dounreay claims cover-up 25 Las Vegas SUN: Shoshone file suit against Yucca dump 26 Las Vegas SUN: DOE, Nye officials take Yucca case door-to-door 27 Inyo Register: Eyes on Amargosa's Yucca link 28 Inyo Register: Yucca Mtn. project rife with snarls 29 US: Las Vegas SUN: Officials visiting homeowners along Nevada nuclea 30 US: NRC: Material Control and Accounting at Reactors and Wet Spent F 31 US: deseret news: Too much hysteria over nuclear waste, Utah physici 32 US: CPO: New Report On Widespread Rocket Fuel Pollution In Food And NUCLEAR WEAPONS US DEPT. OF ENERGY 33 San Francisco Chronicle: UC's Los Alamos chances looking better 34 Daily Bruin: Groups consent to clean Los Alamos lab 35 lamonitor.com: Senators defend LANL pensions; express concern 36 lamonitor.com: UC looking at management OTHER NUCLEAR 37 [du-list] DU in the news -4th March 05 38 Animated Nuclear Power 101s 39 Hans Bethe, Father of Nuclear Astrophysics, Dies at 98 40 Nuclear Test Watch: Nuclear Test Watch - Issue No. 5 ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** FULL NEWS STORIES ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** 1 Mos News: Iranian, Russian Officials Discuss Completion of Bushehr Plant - NEWS - MOSNEWS.COM [Deputy Speaker of the Russian State Duma Sergy Baburin (left) speaks to participants after the International Conference on Nuclear Technology and Sustainable Development in Tehran / Photo: Reuters] Deputy Speaker of the Russian State Duma Sergy Baburin (left) speaks to participants after the International Conference on Nuclear Technology and Sustainable Development in Tehran / Photo: Reuters Created: 07.03.2005 12:38 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 14:20 MSK MosNews Iran’s Majlis Speaker Gholam Ali Haddad Adel in a meeting with Vice-Speaker of Russian State Duma Sergei Baburin on Sunday said Iran-Russia historic and social friendship was the main factor behind consolidation of bilateral relations, Iranian news agency IRNA reported. Haddad Adel said that the two countries should do their utmost to take coordinated stances in line with their mutual interests. Referring to the US expansionist policies, he said the US seeks to play down the United Nation’s activities in a bid to take its place and dictate its own policies. He pointed to the construction of Bushehr nuclear power plant as a symbol of Iran-Russia technical and industrial cooperation. The Iranian Majlis speaker expressed hope that the completion of the power plant would open a new chapter in Tehran-Moscow cooperation. He termed the Caspian Sea as the sea of peace and friendship, saying that the Caspian Sea littoral states particularly Iran and Russia should try to determine the legal status of the sea and put an end to the presence of foreigners in this region. He said that the Tehran-Moscow international cooperation was at a satisfactory level, expressing his country`s readiness to cooperate with Russia for reconstruction of Iraq. Baburin, for his part, expressed satisfaction with his visit to Tehran, saying he was in Tehran to attend the seminar on nuclear energy and sustainable development and to hold talks with Iran`s political and parliamentary officials. He said that Moscow was happy with the agreement signed by Iran and Russia on return of the spent fuel, adding the agreement is a major step towards completion of the Bushehr power plant. “Russia believes that peaceful use of nuclear energy is Iran`s legitimate right,” he said, adding Russia will cooperate with Iran within the frameworks of international laws. He expressed his country`s readiness to set up other nuclear power plants in Iran. Write us: info@mosnews.com Copyright © 2004 MOSNEWS.COM ***************************************************************** 2 Mehr News: Iran frequently invited IAEA to visit Arak nuclear facility - source MehrNews.com - Iran, world, political, sport, economic news TEHRAN, Mar. 7 (MNA) – An informed diplomat said on Monday that Iran has frequently invited inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to visit the heavy water production plant in Arak. The IAEA inspectors, despite the fact that Iran regularly announced its readiness for inspections, only visited the site once earlier in June, the source told the Mehr News Agency on condition of anonymity. Following the publication of satellite images of the heavy water production plant and nuclear research reactor construction in Arak, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov insisted that the IAEA should be allowed to inspect the site. A western diplomat told AFP on Thursday that that Iran was pouring the foundation of a heavy water production plant built to supply a nuclear research reactor which could make plutonium for atom bombs. The construction work for the reactor began in September, just after the IAEA had asked Iran to refrain from building it as a "confidence-building measure" to show it does not seek to make nuclear weapons, the diplomat said. HL/MS End © 2003 Mehr News Agency ***************************************************************** 3 Guardian Unlimited: Iran: Uranium Enrichment Plant Underground From the Associated Press [UP] Monday March 7, 2005 7:01 PM AP Photo XHS114 By ALI AKBAR DAREINI Associated Press Writer NATANZ, Iran (AP) - An Iranian official confirmed Monday a uranium enrichment plant in central Iran is underground as a protection against airstrikes, but insisted that is not a sign the program aims to produce nuclear weapons. U.S. officials have said building nuclear facilities underground is inconsistent with Iran's contention its atomic program is intended only for the generation of electricity. The Iranians deny Washington's accusation that they are trying to build nuclear weapons. Ali Akbar Salehi, a nuclear affairs adviser to the foreign minister, said U.S. and Israeli threats forced Iran to take precautions to protect its technology, including the string of centrifuges used to enrich uranium - a process that can produce fuel for nuclear reactors that generate electricity but also make material suitable for atomic warheads. ``To protect the safety of equipment against possible danger of aerial attack, a major part of the plant has been constructed underground, especially where thousands of centrifuges need to be located,'' Salehi told The Associated Press. It was the first public confirmation by Iran that the Natanz facility is underground. On Saturday, Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Hasan Rowhani, confirmed Iran is building a tunnel next to another nuclear facility in Isfahan. He said that the tunnel, under a mountain, will be used to store unspecified equipment and that air attacks would not be able to destroy it. The central cities of Natanz and Isfahan house the heart of Iran's nuclear program. The conversion facility in Isfahan reprocesses uranium ore concentrate, known as yellowcake, into uranium hexaflouride gas. The gas is then taken to Natanz and fed into the centrifuges for enrichment. The facility at Natanz is at the foot of a mountain in an otherwise barren desert some 200 miles south of the capital, Tehran. Some of its buildings, which are believed to be administrative offices, are visible from the main road running from Kashan to Natanz. There are military bases not far from the facility. Travelers who stop on the road close to the facility are approached by security officers in plainclothes and asked to leave. Iran began its nuclear program in secrecy, and now says it has achieved proficiency in the full range of activities involved in enriching uranium. Iran's former president, Hashemi Rafsanjani, said Sunday that Iran initially developed the program in secret and bought nuclear materials on the black market because of U.S. sanctions and European restrictions that denied Iran access to advanced civilian nuclear technology. He said that Iran has been very open about the program since 2002, when secret aspects of its nuclear activities were revealed, and that it is cooperating with the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog. The government argues it is entitled to work on civilian uses of uranium enrichment under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Iran suspended enrichment-related activities last year to create confidence during negotiations over its program and avoid the U.N. Security Council considering sanctions. But it says maintaining the voluntary freeze depends on progress in talks with Britain, Germany and France, which are negotiating on behalf of the European Union. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005 ***************************************************************** 4 Korea Herald: 'U.S. approach worsens N.K. nuclear issue' By Seo Hyun-jin (shj@heraldm.com) 2005.03.08 The Nation's No.1 English Newspaper [HERALD PREMIER INTERVIEW] Malaysian ex-PM Mahathir stresses need to reinterpret goals of globalization Main points - U.S. hard-line policy has worsened the N.K. nuclear crisis - World needs to reinterpret globalization to benefit all - Asian values can evolve to match changing times - East Asia should cooperate in feasible areas to realize a regional community - Religious tolerance is attainable if people accept and accommodate - Leaders must be conscious and knowledgeable about their followers - Al Gore is (still) the rudest man in the world - Since retirement, it's been "hands off" on government issues - Best achievement: maintaining diversity and stability in Malaysia Well known for his anti-U.S. stance and barbs during his two decades in power, Malaysia's former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad declared here that Washington's hard-line policy has worsened the tension surrounding North Korea's nuclear ambitions. In a wide-ranging interview with The Korea Herald, Mahathir also said the world needs to reinterpret the goals of globalization to benefit everyone, not just the rich and powerful, which is what he feels it now does. "If you see very belligerent acts... especially America starting off by accusing the country on all kinds of things and imposing sanctions, this does not contribute to a proper negotiation," he said while talking about the North Korean nuclear issue during a discussion with Herald Media publisher Hong Jung-wook. Mahathir, 79, who stepped down in 2003 after 22 years in power, was in Seoul last week to attend the Asian Leadership Conference on March 4-5. "I am quite sure that if you want to allow things to come down a bit, you have to understand that North Korea also lives in fear, it feels threatened. So a normal thing to do, when you are afraid of something, is you prepare for your defense," he said. With the United States and North Korea engaging in a stiff tug-of-war, the six-party disarmament talks have yet to make any breakthrough toward resolving the nuclear standoff which erupted in October 2002. The North recently raised the stakes with its Feb. 10 statement that it possesses nuclear weapons and will indefinitely stay away from the multilateral dialogue, although it has since backed away slightly regarding renewed negotiations. "Just imagine North Korea suddenly becoming very belligerent and attacking South Korea. What will happen to North Korea? The United States will destroy the whole of North Korea, completely, the way they did in Iraq, for example," Mahathir said. "This idea that every problem can be resolved through military means, this policy is wrong, should not be promoted at all. We have to learn to negotiate, to give and take," he said. Mahathir, who emphasized the need to engage Pyongyang, added that North Korea will not actually launch nuclear bombs as it knows its military power cannot rival that of the United States. The current standoff flared up when U.S. officials said the North had admitted to harboring nuclear bombs using highly enriched uranium. The North denies this. Reflecting his stormy relations with Washington during his tenure as Malaysia's longest-serving leader, Mahathir said he maintains his position that the United States should be condemned about its wrongdoings. "It is important that they should be told that it was bad and wrong when they continue to do more wrong things," he said. "We cannot keep on saying 'Yes, he is my friend and what he does is all right.' Then that friend is going to do worse things." When Hong asked whether he still considers former U.S. Vice President Al Gore as the rudest man in the world, Mahathir nodded. "Yes. It is very unfortunate. He shouldn't do like that. Americans must learn that they cannot come around telling people what to do," he said. A blazing row erupted between Mahathir and Gore in 1998 when the then U.S. vice president voiced open support for the "brave people of Malaysia" who had lined up behind sacked finance minister Anwar Ibrahim to launch pro-democracy protests against Mahathir's rule. "Among nations suffering economic crisis, we continue to hear calls for democracy in many languages... We hear them today right here, right now - among the brave people of Malaysia," Gore said in a keynote speech at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Kuala Lumpur. Mahathir lashed out at Gore following his remarks, and was quoted as saying, "I've never seen anybody so rude." On globalization, Mahathir said countries should discuss how to develop the irreversible trend to serve to solve global concerns like poverty and to benefit both the haves and have-nots. "Today, globalization is focused simply on opening borders for business and for big corporations and companies. But there is, for example, no globalization program for eradicating poverty," he said. "So what we need now is to reinterpret the goals of globalization as well as how to get the maximum benefits for everyone, not just for big corporations." Decrying the rich and powerful countries for trying to control the fate of poor countries, he defended his policy of curbing the inflow of foreign capital when his country faced up to the Asian financial crisis in 1997. "To them, the most important thing is foreign companies must be allowed to come in the country and buy up all the companies and all the banks that have been bankrupted because of what they have done. And if foreign companies are allowed to come in and buy up everything, it will become like a banana republic. We (then would) have to listen to them," he said. Mahathir thumbed his nose at the International Monetary Fund, rejecting its orthodox economic theory and taking his own dramatic actions - pegging the ringgit to the dollar and imposing controls on capital. In South Korea around the same time, then President Kim Dae-jung swallowed the bitter medicine prescribed by the IMF. Mahathir's methods paid off as Malaysia gained around 5 percent economic growth after a 7.5 percent drop in 1998. "It was painful. We had to reject while going against opinions of the whole world. It is not something that you do freely and without fear," he said. Mahathir and Hong exchanged views on whether a viable community in East Asia is possible as talk of regional cooperation has gained some momentum these days. In December this year, Malaysia will host the first meeting of the East Asian Summit, which groups 10 Southeast Asian nations, South Korea, China and Japan. When Hong pointed to cultural, historical and religious differences between Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia, Mahathir, a champion for a regional community in East Asia, said he believes such a grouping is possible if the countries begin with cooperation on feasible areas such as currency trading. But he insisted that countries like the United States, Australia and New Zealand should not be included as they are not part of East Asia. "If you see such calls, then we should insist that we have to become a member of the European Union and NAFTA," he said. The United States has expressed concern about the East Asia Summit, saying it could become an "exclusive" and "inward looking" grouping. During the interview, Mahathir, still an influential figure in Asia, talked about his ideas about leadership and a good leader. "If you are a leader, you must lead. But at the same time, you must also be conscious and knowledgeable about your followers and what they think. Leaders who do not care about the ability or ideas of his own followers, he is not a true leader," the former prime minister said. He had a positive assessment of former President Park Chung-hee, who receives mixed reviews here for his dictatorship and achievements in economic development during his rule in the 1960s and 70s. "Korea became an industrialized country, but it could have taken a long long time. So a strong push was needed. I think that is what President Park provided," Mahathir said, while acknowledging Park had some faults. Asked about his future plans to contribute to his nation, Mahathir said that, despite widespread speculation, he has not involved himself in government decisions since his retirement in line with a promise to himself, his successor and the whole country. "Now, they are not my business anymore. I have done my best and I have a feel in that sense. And I have to be satisfied. I have no authority now, so I cannot contribute much. And there are other things I can do like giving talks," he said. Mahathir, who played a pivotal role in turning Malaysia into an Asian economic tiger, cited as his major accomplishment the facts that he maintained cultural, religious and linguistic diversity in the country, maintained peace and stability, and achieved major economic growth. When Hong asked how he would like to be remembered by the world, Mahathir said, with a smile, that he doesn't care much about it. "I have very a cynical view about people remembering people of the past. There will be people who will play it down because they don't like (me) and there will be people who will say he had done something good," he said. "To me, it is not very important because I am going to go. In time, I will be in the next world." His favorite tune is said to be Frank Sinatra's "My Way." ***************************************************************** 5 Xinhua: NYT report on DPRK nuclear issue "not tallies with fact" www.xinhuanet.com www.chinaview.cn 2005-03-07 21:35:38 BEIJING, March 7 (XinhuaNET) -- Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said Monday that a report published by US-based New York Times on the Korean nuclear issue "not tallies with the fa ct." "We don't know why the reporter held such irresponsible attitude towards the clear-cut facts," Liu said in response to a journalist's question to comment on the story. After reiterating that China's stance on the Korean nuclear issue was "consistent and firm", Liu elaborated that China stands for a nuclear-weapon-free Korean Peninsular and the maintenance ofpeace and stability in the peninsula. The nuclear issue must be peacefully resolved through dialogue,he said. "All issues related with the nuclear problem should and can be tackled through talks," he said. China has maintained contacts, coordination and cooperation with all sides concerned, including the United States, on the Korean nuclear issue, he said. China's efforts to push forward the trilateral talks and the later six-party talks were "obvious to all," Liu said, adding that China will continue to maintain and enhance coordination and cooperation with all sides on the issue, including the United States. The trilateral talks involves China, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the United States and the ensuing six-party talks added the Republic of Korea, Russia and Japan. All the talkswere held in Beijing during the last two years. Enditem Copyright ©2003 Xinhua News Agency. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 6 asahi.com: EDITORIAL: Japan-N. Korea relations [asahi.com] Opinion,Editorial Koizumi must get Bush to ease up on tensions. One thing is certain about the stalemate over North Korea's nuclear program. Each passing day with no prospect of a breakthrough in sight is a squandered opportunity. The same can be said of the issue of abducted Japanese citizens. Relations between Japan and North Korea have deteriorated sharply in the nearly 2 years since Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visited Pyongyang for summit talks for the first time and issued the Pyongyang Declaration. Last month, North Korea announced it would stay away indefinitely from six-nation talks on the nuclear issue and formally declared it had manufactured nuclear weapons. Nothing is known for certain about the extent of North Korea's nuclear weapons development. But if it does indeed possess nuclear weapons, that poses a grave security issue for this country. The more time passes, the further the North goes in developing nuclear weapons and missiles. Pyongyang must be drawn back to the table of six-way talks. A framework must be worked out at an early date for North Korea to give up its nuclear program. These key points are what the Japanese government should be endeavoring to realize right now. The abduction issue has bogged down over differences between the two governments on the supposed remains of Megumi Yokota. North Korea wants to put the matter behind it by the return to Japan of the five abductees and their family members. It has refused to respond with sincerity to Japan's requests for information on other missing Japanese or start a full investigation of the matter. Meantime, the Japanese public grows increasingly bitter, and calls are growing daily for economic sanctions to be imposed against the North. By referring to economic sanction, Japanese people want North Korea to be aware of their anger, which makes North Korea feel pressure. The fact is that sanctions imposed by Japan without the participation of South Korea and China would not be very effective. Also, there is no way of knowing whether sanctions would prompt North Korea to offer more information about Japanese citizens missing since the 1970s and '80s. The U.S. government worries that sanctions would have a negative effect on the six-way talks. There must be a way to break the stalemate. And we believe there is one. Koizumi must call U.S. President George Bush to try to get him to relax tensions between the United States and North Korea. Even though North Korea is refusing to take part in the six-way talks, it has dropped hints that it would be willing to sit at the negotiating table if the atmosphere vis-a-vis the United States improves. The North suggested that it would be amenable to negotiation if the United States drops its hostile attitude toward the North and guarantees the safety of the North's regime. All this suggests that North Korea may be willing to make deals with the United States under such conditions. The Bush administration clearly does not intend to hold bilateral talks with North Korea for the moment. Nor does it seem in any hurry to strike a bargain as long as Pyongyang does not export nuclear arms to a third party or pose a direct threat to the United States itself. But that is not the case with Japan. Both the North's nuclear development and the abduction issue are urgent matters for Tokyo. If progress is made in the six-way talks as the United States accepts direct talk in one way or another, the atmosphere will be much improved. China, which is in the chair for the six-way talks, will be in a better position to persuade North Korea. Washington may drag its feet in giving North Korea what it wants for maintaining its regime. But this is a matter for diplomatic negotiation. Bush himself referred to diplomatic solution of the North's nuclear program in his State of the Union message the other day. We cannot be sanguine about North Korea's actions. It is incumbent on Koizumi to figure out a way to make some sort of headway. Koizumi already has close relations with Bush, courtesy of Japan's cooperation with the United States in the Iraq war. This policy aspect aside, Koizumi should use all the diplomatic resources at his disposal to find a solution to these pressing issues. --The Asahi Shimbun, March 7(IHT/Asahi: March 8,2005) [Copyright Asahi Shimbun. All rights reserved. No reproduction or republication without written permission ] ***************************************************************** 7 Guardian Unlimited: U.S. Envoy to Try for N.Korean Nuke Talks From the Associated Press [UP] Monday March 7, 2005 4:01 AM SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - The top U.S. negotiator for the North Korea nuclear dispute will visit Washington and Tokyo this week to seek ways to lure Pyongyang back to the negotiating table, the U.S. Embassy said Monday. Christopher Hill will meet Kenichiro Sasae, director-general of the Japanese Foreign Ministry's Asia-Oceania bureau on Thursday, the embassy said. In Washington, Hill is expected to hold consultations on the six-party talks and give a speech at the Brookings Institution and return to South Korea. The White House said Friday it was nominating Hill as head of the State Department's East Asia and Pacific bureau. The appointment must be approved by the Senate. Diplomatic efforts to bring back North Korea to the six-party talks gained urgency following the North's Feb. 10 claim that it has nuclear weapons. Since 2003, Beijing has hosted three rounds of six-party negotiations that have failed to reach any breakthroughs. A fourth round scheduled for last September never took place because North Korea refused to attend. The United States wants the North to dismantle all nuclear facilities immediately before granting concessions. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005 ***************************************************************** 8 [NukeNet] THE FATE OF THE EARTH: Please Call C-Span Re Dr Date: Mon, 07 Mar 2005 15:35:43 -0800 NukeNet Anti-Nuclear Network (nukenet@energyjustice.net) C-SPAN TELEPHONE NUMBERS Main Number: (202) 737-3220 Viewer Services: (765) 464-3080 (for programming questions) Dear All, For those of you fortunate enough to see Dr Helen Caldicott yesterday [Sunday March 6, 2005] on C-Span's "Book TV" please call the number[s] below to thank them for having Dr Caldicott on and suggest to them that they have her and others on again to discuss these absolutely crucial issues dealing literally with the fate of the earth. Please ask them to replay the interview, too. Nuclear winter and the deliberate "successful" burying of this issue by those with a vested interest in wanting the ongoing existence of nuclear weapons, Russia's decrepid infrastructure for monitoring incoming objects which can easily cause them to accidently launch a nuclear strike, the 2500 nuclear weapons on launch on warning status and the contempt for the NPT Treaty [who's 35th anniversary of going into effect was two days ago- March 5, 1970/March 5, 2005] shown by the NWS, especially Russia and the USA. These all need to be mainstream, every day knowledge and media issues that are addressed as most people address movies, sports and situation comedies. The fate of the earth quite literally is laying in the balance and unless we lobby media as much as possible and continuously the world will continue courting catastrophe. The weaponization of space and commercial nuclear power, which amomg other things are stationary radiological nuclear weapons, and their extraordinarilly dangerous spent nuclear fuel pools also are areas of expertise for Dr Caldicott [and others] and these crucial issues need consistent, drum beat media coverage until the public becomes knowledgeable and collectively makes the rational decision- again before it's too late. Please call [see phone#] below and please forward this to all other lists, NGOs and interested parties. Thanks. -Bill Smirnow Nuclear Winter: http://www.mothersalert.org/nuclearwinter.html http://www.mothersalert.org/nuclearwinter2.html http://www.c-span.org C-SPAN TELEPHONE NUMBERS Main Number: (202) 737-3220 Viewer Services: (765) 464-3080 (for programming questions) _______________________________________________________________________ Subscribe/Unsubscribe Here: http://www.energyjustice.net/nukenet/ Change your settings or access the archives at: http://energyjustice.net/mailman/listinfo/nukenet_energyjustice.net ***************************************************************** 9 Re: [du-list] TNT trouble halts bomb production - AGAIN Date: Mon, 07 Mar 2005 15:39:10 -0800 Q. why, if the Pentagon "has not been shy " and is so proud of a material they feel is comparatively harmless, would they be so entirely secretive about its use on other applications, to the point of unequivocal denials when forensic evidence or whistleblowing bombmakers or ordnance handlers might eventually demonstrate otherwise? A. Maybe it is because the targets sheltering in bunkers are more often children and women.. like the multitudes that were fried in a bunker courtesy of US taxpayers with a guided missile with a camera on board, publicized by Saddam. Nuking a tank is one thing, and acceptable to the uninformed US electorate. Nuking mothers and babies is not such a good look, even for US war crims. Secondly "enemies" will continue hardening defenses, making easy targets instead of diverting and concealing etc. And thirdly "they feel is comparatively harmless" is not the case. It is not a question of feeling. It is question of not feeling and also of understanding. And they are not so stupid as to not know. Early evidence is available that DU is not harmless. This pre-knowledge compounds the USUK war crime. It is a question of lying to avoid compensation, which diverts profits from the arms cartel. Like the guilty tobacco, drug, chemical companies will deny and lie for as long as possible as the victims die off, claims get less, and lying to be able to continue the cash flow to cartel shareholders. ---------- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.308 / Virus Database: 266.6.2 - Release Date: 3/4/05 [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Has someone you know been affected by illness or disease? Network for Good is THE place to support health awareness efforts! http://us.click.yahoo.com/RzSHvD/UOnJAA/79vVAA/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/ ***************************************************************** 10 Las Vegas SUN: Bush Selects Steve Johnson to Head EPA March 04, 2005 By JOHN HEILPRIN ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON (AP) - 0303bush-cia President Bush turned to a career scientist Friday to head the Environmental Protection Agency and push changes Bush wants in air pollution and clean water programs. Bush nominated Stephen L. Johnson, a biologist and pathologist by training, to become the first person in the agency's 35-year history to rise from within its ranks to the top job of administrator. The nomination must be confirmed by the Senate. Johnson's first task will be to sell air pollution regulations - expected to come out within the next two weeks - aimed at reducing mercury emissions from power plant smokestacks and other pollutants carried by winds across state lines. Johnson also faces the immediate chore of freeing Bush's top legislative priority, a "clear skies" bill stalled more than two years in the Republican-controlled Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. That measure would impose mandatory ceilings on three of the biggest pollutants from power plants - sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and mercury - but allow individual plants to exceed their shares by buying pollution rights. Environmentalists say the legislation would delay needed cleanups. "If confirmed, it will be my distinct privilege to serve you and our nation to continue to advance your environmental agenda while maintaining our nation's economic competitiveness," Johnson told Bush during a White House ceremony. He praised Bush as having made "great strides in environmental protection" his first term. Johnson would succeed former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, who last month became head of the Health and Human Services Department. Johnson would take the reins of an 18,000-employee agency with an $8 billion budget. Bush wants to cut EPA spending by nearly a half-billion dollars next year, primarily from clean water programs. He wants to reduce by one-third the low-interest loans to states for water quality protection and decrease spending on replacing aging water treatment facilities and pipes by 83 percent. The president said one of Johnson's top jobs also would be to "lead federal efforts to ensure the safety of our drinking water supply," saying the EPA has "an important role in the war on terror." Senate Environment Chairman James Inhofe, R-Okla., who once called for abolishing EPA, said Johnson would be moving into "one of the toughest jobs in the federal government." Environmentalists expressed pleasure that Bush looked at professional rather than political credentials for filling the job but cautioned that Johnson has a reputation as a loyal foot soldier with political savvy and may not set his own agenda. "We hope that Mr. Johnson can rise above the White House's expectations that he will be a figurehead," said Carl Pope, the Sierra Club's executive director. Sen. James Jeffords, I-Vt., a frequent critic of Bush's policies, said he hoped Johnson would bring a fresh approach and "help repair and restore the credibility of the Bush administration's environmental record with the American public, Congress and the world." Johnson, 53, has been with the agency 24 years. He is well-respected among the agency's career employees and on Capitol Hill, where he is viewed as having succeeded recently in mixing professionalism with increasing political astuteness. He led the pesticides office until 2003, when he became EPA's No. 2 official, taking on more public duties. Jay Vroom, president of CropLife America, a pesticide trade group, called Johnson "well-respected by the stakeholders and constituents that work with the EPA on a daily basis." Johnson replaced Leavitt as acting administrator in January. In nominating him Friday to fill the job full-time, Bush called Johnson "a talented scientist and skilled manager with a lifelong commitment to environmental stewardship." "He knows the EPA from the ground up and has a passion for its mission," Bush said. "He will listen to those closest to the land because they know our environmental needs best." --- On the Net: http://www.epa.gov -- All contents copyright 2005 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 11 [NukeNet] Fwd: UCS comments on PSEG "cherry pickin on safety" Date: Mon, 07 Mar 2005 15:35:39 -0800 NukeNet Anti-Nuclear Network (nukenet@energyjustice.net) Once again, PSEG puts profits ahead of safety. I also have Daves letter in PDF - pls email me & I'll send you a copy norm Good Day: Below please find comments by UCS in response to a notice published in the Federal Register last week about a license amendment sought by the Hope Creek licensee. As detailed in our comments, this licensee seeks to short-cut a long and established process for reducing defense-in-depth. This licensee seeks to "cherry pick" among the Improved Technical Specifications and adopt only those that can speed up its refueling outages. The established process is to convert completely to the Improved Technical Specifications as virtually all of the other licensees have done or are currently doing so. The NRC must deny this short-cut and make this licensee convert entirely to the Improved Technical Specifications if it wants the luxury of this one defense-in-depth rollback. Thanks, Dave Lochbaum Nuclear Safety Engineer Union of Concerned Scientists 1707 H Street NW Suite 600 Washington, DC 20006-3962 (202) 223-6133 (office) (202) 331-5430 (direct line) (202) 223-6162 (fax) -- Washington Office: 1707 H Street NW Suite 600 · Washington DC 20006-3919 · 202-223-6133 · FAX: 202-223-6162 Cambridge Headquarters: Two Brattle Square · Cambridge MA 02238-9105 · 617-547-5552 · FAX: 617-864-9405 California Office: 2397 Shattuck Avenue Suite 203 · Berkeley CA 94704-1567 · 510-843-1872 · FAX: 510-843-3785 March 7, 2005 Chief, Rules and Directives Branch Division of Administrative Services Office of Administration U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Washington, DC 20555-0001 SUBJECT: COMMENTS ON NOTICE OF CONSIDERATION OF ISSUANCE OF AMENDMENT TO SALEM UNITS 1 AND 2 FACILITY OPERATING LICENSES, FEDERAL REGISTER NOTICE DATED MARCH 1, 2005, PAGES 9983-9985 Good Day: At the request of Norm Cohen, Executive Director for the UNPLUG Salem Campaign, UCS reviewed the subject Federal Register notice and the license amendment request dated July 23, 2004, by the licensee for Salem Generating Stations, Units 1 and 2, that prompted the staff’s action. The licensee seeks to amend the Technical Specifications for Salem Units 1 and 2 to allegedly conform with the Improved Technical Specifications defintion of OPERABLE. As the licensee explained in the license amendment request, this change is desired so irradiated fuel can be moved when either normal power or emergency power is unavailable. Currently, defense-in-depth requires fuel movements to stop until both power sources are again available. This requirement seems to be inconvenient for the Salem licensee, particularly when it seeks really short refueling outages. On behalf of the UNPLUG Salem Campaign and UCS, I respectfully request the NRC not approve this license amendment request. This licensee is “cherry-picking” the pieces of the Improved Technical Specifications that allow it to maximize its profits. The proper thing for this licensee to do would be to completely convert over to the Improved Technical Specifications as so many other licensees have already done. This piecemeal implementation of the cost-beneficial portions of the Improved Technical Specifications is wrong for many reasons. It imposes undue burdens on the NRC staff and creates the very real potential for reducing safety margins at Salem. I joined UCS in 1996. Prior to joining UCS, I worked for many years as a consultant in the nuclear power industry. One of my consulting assignments was to the licensee who served as the lead plant for the BWR/6 Improved Technical Specifications project. In a later assignment, I developed and taught a lesson plan on current licensing basis for another licensee that had recently converted to the Improved Techical Specifications.1 Thus, I have a strong background on the Improved Technical Specifications (ITS). 1 NOTE: Neither of these two licensees “cherry-picked” the Improved Technical Specifications. They converted to the Improved Technical Specifications en masse as the NRC intended when it worked with industry on this burden reduction initiative. That this license amendment request places an undue burden on the NRC staff is evident in the request itself. Specifically, the following paragraph appears at the bottom of page 1 in Attachment 1: On November 1, 2001, PSEG Nuclear LLC submitted License Change Request (CLR) S01-02 (LR-N01-0200) to incorporate ITS provisions regarding operability of normal and emergency power during Modes 1-4. LCR S01-02 was supplemented by letter dated October 1, 2002 (LRN02- 0332). LCR S01-02 was approved by License Amendments 253 and 234 for Units 1 and Unit 2, respectively. The above amendments did not change the definition of OPERABLE and did not address Modes 5 and 6. The changes proposed by this request extend flexibility to cover Modes 5 & 6 and revise the definition of OPERABLE to coordinate with the LCOs of TS section 3/4. 3.8. The proposed changes are intended to provide outage scheduling flexibility and avoid unnecessary disruption of refueling activities while still providing for appropriate actions to assure nuclear safety. Thus, PSEG adopted part of the ITS in 2001. The little bit it chose back then was not enough to give it the schedule flexibility now, so it’s back before the NRC wanting another bite at the apple, or cherry. Had PSEG completely converted to ITS, it would not subject the NRC staff to wasteful, iterative reviews and approvals as it “cherry picks” its way through the ITS. The PSEG approach imposes an undue burden on NRC staff resources. The PSEG approach is also contrary to standard industry practice (hardly surprising considering the poor safety culture and underperforming results produced by this licensee in recent years). For example: By letter dated September 8, 2004 (ML042530368), the licensee for the Monticello nuclear plant informed the NRC of its intent to convert to ITS. · By letter dated June 7, 2004 (ML041610082), the licensee for Beaver Valley Units 1 and 2 informed the NRC of its intent to convert to ITS. · By letter dated April 6, 2004 (ML041200298), the licensee for D C Cook Units 1 and 2 submitted a license amendment request to convert to the Improved Technical Specifications. · By letter dated December 5, 2003, the NRC issued the Improved Technical Specifications (ML033070060) for Catawba Units 1 and 2. · By letter dated December 5, 2003, the NRC issued the Improved Technical Specifications (ML033070046) for McGuire Units 1 and 2. · By letter dated November 21, 2003, the NRC approved and issued the Improved Technical Specifications (ML033160528 and ML033210260) for Indian Point Unit 2. · By letter dated July 26, 2002, the NRC approved and issued the Improved Technical Specifications (ML022070658, ML022070654, and ML022070613) for Prairie Island Units 1 and 2. · By letter dated April 5, 2002, the NRC approved and issued the Improved Technical Specifications (ML021200265) for North Anna Units 1 and 2. · By letter dated February 6, 2002 (ML020420241), the licensee for the FitzPatrick nuclear power plant submitted its request for conversion to the Improved Technical Specifications (subsequently pproved by NRC). · By letter dated November 26, 2001 (ML020160187), the licensee for Point Beach Units 1 and 2 notified the NRC that it had implemented the change to the Improved Technical Specifications approved on August 8, 2001. · By letter dated March 19, 2001 (ML010930225), the licensee for Indian Point Unit 3 notified the NRC that the Updated Final Safety Analysis Report had been revised to reflect changes resulting from the NRC’s approval of the Improved Technical Specifications on February 27, 2001. · By letter dated June 30, 2000 (ML003729396), the licensee for Diablo Canyon Units 1 and 2 informed the NRC that the NRC-approved Improved Technical Specifications had been implemented. · By letter dated April 13, 2000 (ML003704298), the licensee for the Callaway nuclear plant informed the NRC that the NRC-approved Improved Technical Specifications had been implemented. · By letter dated February 15, 2000 (ML003685211 and ML00368855), the NRC approved and issued the Improved Technical Specifications for Nine Mile Point Unit 2. · On February 7, 2000, the NRC staff met with the licensee for Dresden Units 2 and 3, Quad Cities Units 1 and 2, and LaSalle County Units 1 and 2 to discuss license applications for conversion to Improved Technical Specifications (ML003687159). The NRC approved and issued the ITS for these reactors. · By letter dated December 20, 1999 (ML993630428), the licensee for Wolf Creek notified the NRC that the NRC-approved Improved Technical Specifications had been implemented. · By letter dated November 30, 1999 (ML993510317), the NRC approved and issued the Improved Technical Specifications for Palisades. · By letter dated July 14, 1998 (ML020040291), the licensee for Browns Ferry Units 1, 2, and 3 submitted a license amendment request for conversion to the Improved Technical Specifications. This is an abridged listing of licensees who have already obtained and who plan to convert to Improved Technical Specifications. Clearly, the generally accepted practice is to fully convert to the Improved Technical Specifications and not to “cherry pick” pages or portions of pages. The Improved Technical Specifications were developed to be a cohesive set of requirements to manage the risk at nuclear power plants. Licensees who have converted to ITS must comply with all of the limiting conditions for operation, actions statements, and surveillance requirements in the Improved Technical Specifications, not just those they find convenient or cost-beneficial. But the Salem licensee seeks to “cherry pick” from among the ITS set of requirements and selectively adopt those that it finds profitable. The licensees who have converted to ITS do not have the luxury of picking which parts they chose to meet. Neither should the Salem licensee. Salem’s attempted short-cut insults the licensees who have converted to ITS. It insults those who live downwind and downriver of the Salem nuclear plant. It insults the NRC staff who must expend needless resources reviewing Salem’s iterative “cherry pickin’” requests. The NRC and the industry expended considerable effort developing the Improved Technical Specifications. Much of that effort was devoted to ensuring there were no seams between requirements that resulted in real or potential safety shortfalls. The Salem licensee must not be permitted to shortcut the process and selectively pick and chose which of the ITS parts it wants to follow. The Salem licensee must not be allowed to burden the NRC staff with needless repetition of seam-checking effort expended during ITS development. The NRC must deny this license amendment request. If the Salem licensee wants the cost savings associated with this ITS section, it is welcome to convert to the ITS as so many other licensees have already done. That is the established, proper way of acquiring the refueling outage accelerator that this licensee seeks. The pathway is abundantly clear, to even this wayward licensee, via the numerous documents publicly available in ADAMS. Absent conversion, selection adoption of this ITS section may not have the associated protections of ITS sections to ensure that safety margins are not compromised. Sincerely, David Lochbaum Nuclear Safety Engineer Union of Concerned Scientists 1707 H Street NW, Suite 600 Washington, DC 20006 (202) 331-5430 cc: Norm Cohen, Executive Director UNPLUG Salem Campaign 321 Barr Ave Linwood, NJ 08221 (609) 601-8583 -- Coalition for Peace and Justice UNPLUG Salem Campaign; 321 Barr Ave, Linwood NJ 08221; 609-601-8583; cell 609-742-0982 ncohen12@comcast.net; http://www.unplugsalem.org http://www.coalitionforpeaceandjustice.org "A time comes when silence is betrayal. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought, within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world." - Martin Luther King Jr. No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.308 / Virus Database: 266.6.2 - Release Date: 3/4/05 _______________________________________________________________________ Subscribe/Unsubscribe Here: http://www.energyjustice.net/nukenet/ Change your settings or access the archives at: http://energyjustice.net/mailman/listinfo/nukenet_energyjustice.net Attachment Converted: "c:\program files\eudora\attach\attachment2361.dat" ***************************************************************** 12 Exelon's Policy of Divide & Conquer Date: Mon, 07 Mar 2005 15:35:50 -0800 "Press Journal" Divide And Conquer by Editorial March 2, 2005 Divide and conquer. That's a good strategy for both armies and business. It worked for TMI's owners in the three-year battle to eliminate the utilities' tax obligations to local government. That fight ended last week when the Dauphin County Commissioners voted 2-1 to accept the companies' settlement offer defining the plant's value for tax purposes. The other two jurisdictions affected, Lower Dauphin School District and Londonderry Twp., settled previously. The plants' owners, Illinois-based Exelon Energy and Ohio-based FirstEnergy, succeeded in reducing their tax liability to the three bodies by 69 percent. Looked at another way, of course, what they really did was shift more than two-thirds of their obligations on to the residents who will be forced to make up the difference. So, when local tax rates spike again, save some ire and blame for the utilities. This was, foremost, a battle of attrition. The out-of-state generation giants were prepared to outwait and outspend the local governments. The officials, who were elected to protect the citizens' interests, cried "uncle" and gave up the fight. It's difficult to blame the companies. Like wolves that prey on sheep, they just do what they're programmed to do. Wolves eat sheep. Businesses maximize profits. There really is no room for morals in either action. If predators shared our values, we wouldn't need shepherds or guard dogs. And if businesses could be trusted, we wouldn't need laws and regulations. There is no doubt that big business can outgun small government. Particularly when it is as fragmented as the jurisdictions in Pennsylvania. The utilities didn't have to divide and conquer. They simply took advantage of the existing divisions and waited. We have before commented on the waste and inefficiencies inherent in the commonwealth's patchwork of governments. Here, we have another example of how it doesn't work. Each of the three taxing entities hired their own lawyers and embarked on individual negotiations. And all failed their constituencies. The county even wasted a month or so of Eric Epstein's time in preparation of an analysis of the deal. Not surprising, Epstein of TMI Alert found the settlement to be unfair and suggested it be rejected. His opinions were based on several factors, including historical improvements at the plants, market value and existing agreements between utilities with similar facilities in other communities. The three taxing bodies may have fared better had they presented a united front. There is a disparity between how other nuclear plants and TMI are valued. There is also the fact that Unit 2, the non-generating plant, is a nuclear waste repository and its storage capacity for spent fuel is being expanded. Certainly, that has a value for its owner and it represents a liability for the community. Nonetheless, FirstEnergy managed to reduce the plant's taxable value from $16.2 million to $0 and is demanding refunds of over $1 million from the county, district and township. Then there's the matter of Exelon's, the current owner of TMI Unit 2 and Peach Bottom nuclear plants, buyout of Newark-based Public Service Enterprise Group (PSE&G). The deal, reportedly worth $12 billion, will create the nation's largest power company with customers in Illinois, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. It's possible that a company might want to avoid the hassles and negative publicity of a local tax dispute when trying to fry a fish of that size. But, we'll never know. The deal is done; the wrangling has ceased. And, as usual, ordinary taxpayers will pay for it. Return To March 2, 2005 Index site © 2004 eMarketSouth ***************************************************************** 13 Children at risk Date: Mon, 07 Mar 2005 15:39:12 -0800 Jobs | Customer Care Center Report: children at risk Says evacuation plans around TMI inadequate By Tom Knapp Intelligencer Journal Published: Mar 03, 2005 9:07 AM EST Subscribe to LANCASTER COUNTY, PA - Child-care facilities within a 10-mile radius of Three Mile Island are not receiving adequate support from the state in planning for a nuclear emergency. That's the conclusion of a study released Wednesday by the EFMR Monitoring Group, a nonpartisan organization that monitors radiation around the TMI and Peach Bottom nuclear plants. The study surveyed all child-care facilities within the 10-mile emergency planning zone, although the state Legislature in July exempted nonprofit agencies from the law requiring child-care agencies to have evacuation plans. That exemption, according to a statement by Gov. Ed Rendell, leaves about 183,000 children - two-thirds of all children under supervision in the zone - unprotected by the law. A worker for a nonprofit day-care center in the Elizabethtown area, who asked not to be identified, said she does not understand why the state exempts nonprofits from emergency preparedness. Her day-care facility has a plan in place, she said, because they weren't told of the exemption until after they "had developed the plan, paid for someone to develop the plan and trained the staff." "We should not be exempt," she said. She also complained that emergency management services were not helpful when devising a plan. "They said it's up to us to develop a plan ... and to call them on the day of the emergency if we need them," she complained. "We have 150 to 160 children here. It's very difficult to make transportation arrangements for that many people on the day of an emergency." Eric Epstein, principal author of the EFMR plan, said the survey clearly shows "that child-care facilities located in Pennsylvania are not receiving required emergency support services, leaving them unprepared to handle a nuclear accident or terrorist attack." Those emergency services, Epstein said, must be provided for a state to retain a nuclear power license. The survey, he added, is "further evidence that the commonwealth of Pennsylvania is in violation of federal law which continues to leave our youngest and most vulnerable population without radiological emergency planning." Among the findings listed in the report: The state does not review plans or coordinate transportation as federal law requires. In some instances, transportation for day-care children is only available after other populations have been moved. Several facilities were unaware they were within the 10-mile zone. Although the federal law requiring emergency planning was established nearly 20 years ago, emergency planning for child-care facilities in Pennsylvania began only recently. Survey results were submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Federal Emergency Management Agency and Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency on Feb. 22. Preparation of emergency response plans was directed by President Carter following the accident at TMI in 1979. The law requires plans for people "whose mobility may be impaired," such as preschool and nursery school children, prison inmates and residents of nursing homes. The EFMR study surveyed all child-care facilities in the TMI zone that are licensed by the state Department of Public Welfare and care for at least 12 children. Of those 74 facilities, only 38 responded. Seven of 14 day-care facilities within Lancaster County responded to the survey. Other facilities surveyed are in Cumberland, Dauphin, Lebanon and York counties. Of those responding, 45 percent indicated that neither state nor local agencies have provided them with emergency planning in event of a radiological incident, and 66 percent said neither state nor local agencies have provided them with transportation in case of an emergency. Additionally, 58 percent of respondents said they have not been provided with directions to a prearranged relocation center outside the danger zone. E-mail is welcome at tknapplnpnews.com. ***************************************************************** 14 Slovak Spectator: Reader feedback: Close down the nuclear plants - Slovakia's English Language Newspaper Volume 11, Number 9 Slovakia's English language newspaper March 7 - March 13, 2005 RE: Enel plans clear, Austria unhappy, Volume 11, Number 8, February 28 - March 6, 2005 They should close down all the nuclear power plants throughout the world. Nuclear power plants generate too much nuclear waste and there is nowhere to get rid of it. Remember Chernobyl and Three Mile Island here in Pennsylvania. Most of the power from the nuclear power plant in Berwick Pennsylvania is sold to the casinos in Atlantic City...what a waste! There is so much demand for electricity but nobody seems concerned about the health and welfare of people. Pollution knows no borders. It circles the globe and everyone suffers with cancers of all sorts. Hopefully, we'll find alternatives to nuclear plants and perhaps they can place the spent nuclear fuel rods on rockets and send them to the moon or some other planets? Is the often frivolous use of electricity, on things like gaming machines, worth the actual and potential dangers associated with nuclear power? Jose, Plymouth, Pennsylvania, USA [3/7/2005] Copyright © 1998-2003 The Rock spol. s r.o. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 15 AFP: EU gives Japan until June to reach deal on nuclear project - Monday March 7, 06:23 PM BRUSSELS (AFP) - The European Union gave Japan until June to reach a deal about who will host a revolutionary nuclear reactor, saying that otherwise it could press ahead with the project without Tokyo's support. Japan and France are vying to host the multi-billion dollar International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), one of the most exciting ventures in international science. But talks among the six parties involved are deadlocked: the United States and South Korea support Japan's offer to build ITER in Rokkasho-mura, a northern Japanese village near the Pacific Ocean, while the EU, China and Russia back France's bid for it to be based in Cadarache, southern France. Research Minister Francois Biltgen of Luxembourg, which holds the rotating EU presidency through June, warned Monday that an agreement had to be reached before July. According to the current plans "work on ITER should begin by the end of this year," Biltgen said at a meeting of European science ministers. "That means a decision should be taken under the Luxembourg presidency." EU commissioner for science and research Janez Potocnik issued the latest barely-disguised warning to Japan the bloc could proceed with the project without Tokyo if no deal is reached. "While I intend to pursue a six-party agreement until the last possible moment, I am at the same time determined that the solution including the highest possible number of parties should be found soon, that is in due time to allow construction to start before the end of this year," he said. He added that he continued to believe that the best solution is to build ITER with the six international parties, "not least as a model for future international joint endeavors," he said. "And I still hope to receive a clear signal from Japan indicating their genuine willingness to pursue negotiations regarding the EU offer on a political level." Potocnik said last week that the EU was pressing Japan to consider a "high political level" compromise to resolve the standoff, but Japan said it was to early to seek such a compromise while technical discussions were still taking place. ITER, which would emulate the sun's nuclear fusion, was not expected to generate inexhaustible supplies of electricity before 2050. The project was expected to cost 10 billion euros (13 billion dollars) over the next 30 years, including 4.7 billion euros for the reactor. Copyright © 2005 AFP AFP. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 16 NRC: Carolina Power & Light Company, Brunswick Steam Electric Plant, FR Doc 05-4312 [Federal Register: March 7, 2005 (Volume 70, Number 43)] [Notices] [Page 11034-11035] From the Federal Register Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr07mr05-90] Unit Nos. 1 and 2; Environmental Assessment and Finding of No Significant Impact Introduction The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is considering issuance of an exemption from 10 CFR Part 50, Appendix J for Facility Operating Licenses Nos. DPR-71 and DPR-62 issued to the Carolina Power & Light Company (the licensee, also doing business as Progress Energy Carolinas, Inc.) for operation of the Brunswick Steam Electric Plant, Unit Nos. 1 and 2 located in Brunswick County, North Carolina. Environmental Assessment Identification of the Proposed Action The proposed action would exempt the licensee from requirements to include main steam isolation valve (MSIV) leakage in the overall integrated leakage rate test measurement required by Section III.A of Appendix J, Option B. The proposed action is in accordance with the licensee's application dated October 6, 2004, for exemption from certain requirements of Title 10 of the Code of Federal Regulations (10 CFR), Part 50, Appendix J. The Need for the Proposed Action Section 50.54(o) of 10 CFR Part 50 requires that primary reactor containments for water-cooled power reactors be subject to the requirements of Appendix J to 10 CFR Part 50. Appendix J specifies the leakage test requirements, schedules, and acceptance criteria for tests of the leaktight integrity of the primary reactor containment and systems and components that penetrate the containment. Option B, Section III.A requires that the overall integrated leak rate must not exceed the allowable leakage (La) with margin, as specified in the Technical Specifications (TS). The overall integrated leak rate, as specified in the 10 CFR Part 50, Appendix J definitions, includes the contribution from MSIV leakage. By letter dated October 6, 2004, the licensee has requested an exemption from Option B, Section III.A requirements to permit exclusion of MSIV leakage from the overall integrated leak rate test measurement. The above-cited requirement of Appendix J requires that MSIV leakage measurements be grouped with the leakage measurements of other containment penetrations when containment leakage tests are performed. These requirements are inconsistent with the design of the Brunswick facilities and the analytical models used to calculate the radiological consequences of design-basis accidents. At Brunswick and similar facilities, the leakage from primary containment penetrations under accident conditions is collected and treated by the secondary containment system or would bypass the secondary containment. However, the leakage from MSIVs is collected and treated via an Alternative Leakage Treatment (ALT) path having different mitigation characteristics. In performing accident analyses, it is appropriate to group various leakage effluents according to the treatment they receive before being released to the environment, i.e., bypass leakage is grouped, leakage into secondary containment is grouped, and ALT leakage is grouped, with specific limits for each group defined in the TS. The proposed exemption would permit ALT path leakage to be independently grouped with its unique leakage limits. Environmental Impacts of the Proposed Action The proposed action will not significantly increase the probability or consequences of accidents. The NRC staff has completed its evaluation of the [[Page 11035]] proposed action and finds that the proposed exemption involves no increase in the total amount of radioactive effluent that may be released off site in the event of a design-basis accident. Therefore, the calculated doses remain within the acceptance criteria of 10 CFR Part 100 and Standard Review Plan Section 15, and there is no significant increase in occupational or public radiation exposure. The NRC staff thus concludes that granting the proposed exemption would result in no significant radiological environmental impact. The proposed action does not affect non-radiological plant effluents or historical sites and has no other environmental impact. Therefore, there are no significant non-radiological impacts associated with the proposed exemption. Accordingly, the NRC concludes that there are no significant environmental impacts associated with the proposed action. Alternative to the Proposed Action As an alternative to the proposed action, the staff considered denial of the proposed action (i.e., the ``no action'' alternative). Denial of the exemption would result in no change in current environmental impacts. The environmental impacts of the proposed action and the alternative action are similar. Alternative Use of Resources This action does not involve the use of any resources not previously considered in the Final Environmental Statement dated January 1974 for the Brunswick Steam Electric Plant, Unit Nos. 1 and 2. Agencies and Persons Consulted In accordance with its stated policy, on March 1, 2005, the NRC staff consulted with the North Carolina State official, Ms. Wendy Tingle of the North Carolina Department of Environmental and Natural Resources, Division of Radiation Protection, regarding the environmental impact of the proposed action. Ms. Tingle had no comments. Finding of No Significant Impact On the basis of the environmental assessment, the NRC concludes that the proposed action will not have a significant effect on the quality of the human environment. Accordingly, the NRC has determined not to prepare an environmental impact statement for the proposed action. For further details with respect to the proposed action, see the licensee's letter dated October 6, 2004. Documents may be examined, and/or copied for a fee, at the NRC's Public Document Room (PDR), located at One White Flint North, Public File Area O1F21, 11555 Rockville Pike (first floor), Rockville, Maryland. Publicly available records will be accessible electronically from the Agencywide Documents Access and Management System (ADAMS) Public Electronic Reading Room on the Internet at the NRC Web site, http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams.html. Persons who do not have access to ADAMS or who encounter problems in accessing the documents located in ADAMS, should contact the NRC PDR Reference staff by telephone at 1-800-397-4209 or 301-415- 4737, or by e-mail to pdr@nrc.gov. Dated at Rockville, Maryland, this 28th day of February, 2005. For the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Brenda L. Mozafari, Senior Project Manager, Section 2, Project Directorate II, Division of Licensing Project Management, Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation. [FR Doc. 05-4312 Filed 3-4-05; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 7590-01-P ***************************************************************** 17 NRC: RIN 3150 AH-54 FR Doc 05-4314 [Federal Register: March 7, 2005 (Volume 70, Number 43)] [Proposed Rules] [Page 10901-10917] From the Federal Register Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr07mr05-17] Fire Protection Program--Post-Fire Operator Manual Actions Draft Regulatory Guide: Issuance, Availability AGENCY: U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. ACTION: Proposed rule and Issuance of Draft Regulatory Guide. SUMMARY: The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) proposes to amend its fire protection regulations for nuclear power facilities operating prior to January 1, 1979. The amendment would allow nuclear power plant licensees to use manual actions by plant operators as an alternative method to achieve hot shutdown conditions in the event of fires in certain plant areas, provided that the actions are evaluated against specified criteria and determined to be acceptable and that fire detectors and an automatic fire suppression system are provided in the fire area. The Commission believes that the proposed action would provide realistically conservative regulatory acceptance criteria for operator manual actions to achieve and maintain hot shutdown condition. The NRC is also proposing and requesting comments on a draft regulatory guide to support this proposed rulemaking. The NRC has developed the Regulatory Guide Series to describe and make available to the public such information as methods that are acceptable to the NRC staff for implementing specific parts of the NRC's regulations, techniques that the staff uses in evaluating specific problems or postulated accidents, and data that the staff needs in its review of applications for permits and licenses. The draft regulatory guide, entitled ``Demonstrating the Feasibility and Reliability of Operator Manual Actions in Response to Fire,'' is temporarily identified by its task number, DG-1136, which should be mentioned in all related correspondence. This proposed regulatory guide offers guidance for NRC licensees and applicants to use in implementing the feasibility and reliability criteria that the staff developed for post-fire operator manual actions. DATES: Submit comments on the proposed rule and the draft regulatory guide by May 23, 2005. Submit comments specific to the information collection aspects of this rule by April 6, 2005. Comments received after these dates will be considered if it is practical to do so, but assurance of consideration cannot be given to comments received after these dates. ADDRESSES: You may submit comments on the proposed rule by any one of the following methods. Please include the following number RIN 3150 AH- 54 and/or DG-1136 in the subject line of your comments. Comments on the rulemakings or the draft regulatory guide submitted in writing or in electronic form will be made available for public inspection. Because your comments will not be edited to remove any identifying or contact information, the NRC cautions you against including any information in your submission that you do not want publicly disclosed. Mail comments to: Secretary, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC 20555-0001, ATTN: Rulemakings and Adjudications Staff. E-mail comments to: SECY@nrc.gov. If you do not receive a reply e- mail confirming that we have received your comments, contact us directly at (301) 415-1966. You may also submit comments via the NRC's rulemaking Web site at http://ruleforum.llnl.gov. This site provides the capability to upload comments as files (any format), if your web browser supports that function. Address questions about our rulemaking website to Carol Gallagher (301) 415-5905; e-mail cag@nrc.gov. Comments can also be submitted via the Federal Rulemaking Portal http://www.regulations.gov. Hand deliver comments to: 11555 Rockville Pike, Rockville, Maryland 20852, between 7:30 am and 4:15 pm Federal workdays. (Telephone (301) 415-1966). Fax comments to: Secretary, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission at (301) 415-1101. Publicly available documents related to this rulemaking 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 comments, may be viewed and downloaded electronically via the NRC rulemaking Web site at http://ruleforum.llnl.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. From this site, the public can gain entry into the NRC's Agencywide Documents Access and Management System (ADAMS), which provides text and image files of NRC's public documents. Electronic copies of Draft Regulatory Guide DG-1136 are available in ADAMS at http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams.html , under Accession ML050350359. Note, however, that the NRC has temporarily suspended public access to ADAMS so that the agency can complete security reviews of publicly available documents and remove potentially sensitive information. Please check the NRC's Web site for updates concerning the resumption of public access to ADAMS. 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 email to pdr@nrc.gov. Electronic copies of Draft Regulatory Guide DG-1136 are also available through the NRC's public Web site under Draft Regulatory Guides in the Regulatory Guides document collection of the NRC's Electronic Reading Room at http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/ . You may submit comments on the information collections by the methods indicated in the Paperwork Reduction Act Statement. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: David T. Diec, 301-415-2834, dtd@nrc.gov or Alexander Klein, 301-415-3477, ark1@nrc.gov. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: [[Page 10902]] I. Background II. Rulemaking Initiation III. Proposed Action A. Operator Manual Actions Alternative B. Addition of Paragraph III.P, Operator Manual Actions Acceptance Criteria C. Response to Stakeholder Comments on Operator Manual Action Acceptance Criteria IV. Interim Enforcement Discretion Policy V. Section-by-Section Analysis of Substantive Changes VI. Plain Language VII. Voluntary Consensus Standards VIII. Finding of No Significant Environmental Impact: Environmental Assessment IX. Paperwork Reduction Act Statement X. Regulatory Analysis XI. Regulatory Flexibility Certification XII. Backfit Analysis I. Background Section 50.48, Fire protection, requires each operating power plant to have a fire protection plan that satisfies Criterion 3 of Appendix A to 10 CFR part 50. Criterion 3 requires structures, systems, and components important to safety to be designed and located to minimize, consistent with other safety requirements, the probability and effect of fires and explosions. The specific fire protection requirements for safe shutdown capability of a plant are further discussed in paragraph G of Section III of Appendix R to 10 CFR part 50. The more specific Sec. 50.48 and Appendix R requirements were added following a significant fire that occurred in 1975 at the Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant. The fire damaged control, instrumentation, and power cables for redundant trains of equipment necessary for safe shutdown. In response to the fire, an NRC investigation found that the independence of redundant equipment at Browns Ferry was negated by a lack of adequate separation between cables for redundant trains of safety equipment. The investigators subsequently recommended that a suitable combination of electrical isolation, physical distance, fire barriers, and sprinkler systems should be used to maintain the independence of redundant safety equipment. In response to these recommendations, the NRC interacted with stakeholders for several years to identify and implement necessary plant fire protection improvements. In 1980, NRC promulgated Sec. 50.48 to establish fire protection requirements and Appendix R to 10 CFR part 50 for certain generic fire protection program issues, including paragraph III.G, fire protection of safe shutdown capability. The requirements for separation of cables and equipment associated with redundant hot shutdown trains were promulgated in paragraph III.G.2. Paragraph III.G.2 of Appendix R requires that cables and equipment of redundant trains of safety systems in the same fire area be separated by either: a. A 3-hour fire barrier, or b. A horizontal distance of more than 20 feet with no intervening combustibles in conjunction with fire detectors and an automatic fire suppression system, or c. A 1-hour fire barrier combined with fire detectors and an automatic fire suppression system. Appendix R applies to only those licensees who received operating licenses before January 1, 1979. Plants licensed after January 1, 1979, are not required to meet Appendix R. These plants were licensed to meet Branch Technical Position CMEB 9.5-1, ``Guidelines for Fire Protection for Nuclear Power Plants,'' that contains criteria similar to the Appendix R requirements. Specific licensing basis information for these plants is usually contained in license conditions issued at time of licensing. Because the rule was to apply to facilities which were already built, the NRC knew that compliance with various parts of Appendix R might be difficult at some facilities. Accordingly, the NRC included a provision which allowed licensees to submit alternative acceptable methods for protecting redundant equipment for NRC review and approval through an exemption process. During implementation of the Appendix R requirements, the NRC reviewed and approved a large number of exemptions for 60 licensees who proposed alternative acceptable methods of compliance in various areas, including numerous exemptions from paragraph III.G.2. In the early 1990s, generic problems arose with Thermolag \1\ fire barriers, which many licensees were using to comply with paragraph III.G.2 of Appendix R. Licensees were ultimately required to replace Thermolag material with other fire barriers. Several years later, fire protection inspectors began to notice that many licensees had not upgraded or replaced Thermolag fire barrier material (or had not otherwise provided the required separation distance between redundant safety trains) used to satisfy the paragraph III.G.2 criteria. Some licensees compensated by relying on operator manual actions \2\ which were not reviewed and approved by the NRC through the Sec. 50.12 exemption process. Currently, operator manual actions are not an alternative specified in paragraph III.G.2 of Appendix R. However, such actions may be an acceptable means of achieving hot shutdown in the event of a fire under certain conditions. ----------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- \1\ Thermolag is a brand-name for a particular type of material used to construct fire barriers typically for protecting electrical conduits and cable trays. In the early 1990's, issues arose regarding the testing and qualification process used for this material. It was determined that barriers made of this material would not provide protection for the required periods of time. \2\ Operator manual actions are an integrated set of actions needed to ensure that a redundant train of systems necessary to achieve and maintain hot shutdown conditions located within the same fire area outside the primary containment is free of fire damage. ----------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- In 2002, the NRC met with nuclear power plant licensees and informed them that the use of unapproved manual actions was not in compliance with paragraph III.G.2. During a meeting on June 20, 2002, the Nuclear Energy Institute representative stated that there was widespread use of operator manual actions throughout the industry based on the industry's understanding of past practice and existing NRC guidance. The industry representative also stated that licensees' use of unapproved manual actions had become prevalent even before the concerns arose with Thermolag material. Subsequent to the public meeting, the NRC developed criteria for inspectors to use in assessing the safety significance of violations resulting from licensee use of unapproved operator manual actions. The criteria were based on past practice and experience by NRC inspectors when reviewing operator manual actions used to comply with Appendix R, paragraph III.G.3, on alternate reactor shutdown capability. Licensees were familiar with these criteria through their interactions with the NRC staff during the implementation of the NRC inspection process. These criteria were issued in the revision to Inspection Procedure 71111.05 in March 2003. While unapproved operator manual actions are still violations, those actions that meet the interim criteria are viewed to have low or no safety significance. II. Rulemaking Initiation Instead of continuing the current practice of requiring all noncompliant licensees to submit individual exemption requests for staff review to determine if their operator manual actions are acceptable, the Commission believes that amending Appendix R to 10 CFR part 50 would be the most orderly and efficient way to provide an option for licensees to utilize acceptable operator manual actions in lieu of the separation or barrier requirements in paragraph III.G.2. In this way the NRC [[Page 10903]] would codify conservative acceptance criteria for licensees to use in evaluating operator manual actions to ensure that the actions were both feasible and reliable. These criteria would maintain safety by ensuring that licensees perform thorough evaluations of the operator manual actions comparable to evaluations a licensee would provide to NRC for review and approval of an exemption request. The NRC staff developed a rulemaking plan (SECY-03-0100) and the Commission approved the staff plan on September 12, 2003. The rule change would revise 10 CFR part 50, Appendix R, paragraph III.G.2 to allow licensees to implement acceptable operator manual actions after documenting that the actions met the regulatory acceptance criteria. Through the established Reactor Oversight Process (ROP), the NRC will continue to inspect licensees' methodologies for achieving and maintaining hot shutdown conditions in accordance with the requirements set forth in paragraph III.G.2 of Appendix R to 10 CFR part 50. The NRC fire protection inspectors will verify that the licensees' operator manual actions met the NRC acceptance criteria and will evaluate the licensees' analyses, procedures and training, implementation, and demonstration of operator manual actions to ensure the licensees have adequately demonstrated the feasibility and reliability of manual actions. III. Proposed Action The Commission proposes to allow the use of operator manual actions coincident with fire detectors and an automatic fire suppression system as an additional alternative method for compliance with paragraphs III.G.2(a), (b) or (c) of Appendix R.\3\ The Commission has determined that implementing any one of the alternatives in paragraph III.G.2 will provide reasonable assurance that at least one method for achieving and maintaining the hot shutdown condition will remain available during and after a postulated fire anywhere in the plant. The Commission proposes to add a new paragraph G.2.c-1 and a paragraph P to section III of Appendix R to 10 CFR part 50. The new paragraph G.2.c-1 would establish operator manual actions, in conjunction with fire detectors and an automatic fire suppression system, as a fourth compliance option with paragraphs III.G.2(a), (b) or (c), provided that the operator manual actions satisfy the acceptance criteria in the new paragraph P. The new paragraph P would define operator manual actions and set forth the required acceptance criteria which must be met before a licensee could use operator manual actions outside the containment to comply with paragraph III.G.2 of Appendix R. Compliance with these acceptance criteria is necessary to provide reasonable assurance of the feasibility and the reliability of the operator manual actions. ----------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- \3\ The requirements in Appendix R are applicable only to licensees who received operating licenses before January 1, 1979. Post-January 1, 1979, licensees were licensed to meet GDC-3, Sec. 50.48(a), and Branch Technical Position CMEB 9.5-1, which contain criteria that are similar to the Appendix R requirements. Post- January 1, 1979 licensees who use operator manual actions without NRC approval may or may not be in compliance with applicable fire protection requirements. Compliance depends on the specific licensing commitments (usually specified in license conditions for these licensees), the change control process, and how the change was justified and analyzed to demonstrate that the operator manual actions are feasible and reliable and thus do not adversely affect the ability to achieve or maintain safe shutdown. ----------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- A. Operator Manual Actions Alternative The Commission proposes to add a new paragraph c-1 to paragraph III.G.2 of 10 CFR part 50 to codify the use of operator manual actions in conjunction with fire detectors and an automatic fire suppression system, as an additional alternative compliance method. Implementing any of the alternatives in paragraph III.G.2 will provide reasonable assurance that at least one method for achieving and maintaining the reactor in a hot shutdown condition will remain available during and after a postulated fire. The basis for this determination is provided below. The Commission's fire protection requirements constitute a defense- in-depth approach to protect safe shutdown functions. The overall objectives of the NRC's fire protection regulations are to minimize the potential for fires and explosions; to rapidly detect, control, and extinguish fires that do occur; and to ensure that the fires will not prevent the accomplishment of necessary safe shutdown functions and will not significantly increase the risk of radioactive releases to the environment. The NRC has concluded if these objectives are met, there is reasonable assurance that a licensed facility is providing adequate protection of public health and safety. These objectives are met by a set of NRC requirements for control of combustible materials and ignition sources, fire detection and suppression systems, fire brigade procedures and training, and physical separation of cables and equipment of redundant trains of safe shutdown equipment. The physical separation requirements in paragraph III.G.2 of Appendix R are one component of the NRC's overall fire protection objectives. In paragraph III.G.2, the NRC specified three different methods for providing separation of cables and equipment of redundant trains of equipment located in the same fire area. These three options for compliance with paragraph III.G.2 offer sufficient but varying levels of protection. In general, the 3-hour passive fire barrier is judged to offer more protection than either of the other options (i.e., the 1-hour passive fire barrier or 20 feet of horizontal separation with no intervening combustibles, in combination with fire detectors and an automatic fire suppression system installed in the fire area). The NRC published a final rule in the Federal Register on November 19, 1980 (45 FR 76602) stating that redundant trains of safe shutdown systems are best protected by 3-hour passive fire barriers that provide ample time for manual fire suppression activities to control any fire. The proposed operator manual action offers protection comparable to the latter two options, both of which require the additional layer of defense-in-depth protection provided by having fire detection and automatic suppression capability. The basis for automatic suppression capability in III.G.2 is found in the final rule published on November 19, 1980 (45 FR 76602), which stated, ``The use of 1-hour barrier in conjunction with automatic fire suppression and detection capability * * * is based on the following considerations. Automatic suppression is required to ensure prompt, effective application of a suppressant to a fire that could endanger safe shutdown capability.'' The prompt, effective application of a suppressant to a fire also applies to III.G.2.b with 20 feet of horizontal separation with no intervening combustibles. Accordingly, the NRC proposes to allow use of operator manual actions only in conjunction with fire detectors and an automatic fire suppression system. In issuing the current Appendix R, paragraph III.G.2, requirements on physical separation of safe shutdown systems, the Commission recognized that strict compliance with the III.G.2 criteria might be difficult for certain licensees at existing facilities. At that time, the Commission was aware that other fire protection alternatives might exist that could provide adequate fire protection at these facilities. For this reason, the Commission included an [[Page 10904]] exemption provision in Sec. 50.48 \4\ to allow licensees to propose alternative fire protection methods to the Commission for review and approval. Under the exemption process, the Commission has used its fire protection engineering experience and judgment to review and grant (or in some cases deny) exemptions to licensees who, because of plant physical limitations, sought to implement operator manual actions in lieu of complying with the paragraph III.G.2 separation requirements. ----------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- \4\ The exemption provision no longer exists in 10 CFR 50.48. It has been subsumed by the exemption provisions in 10 CFR 50.12, which apply to all sections of 10 CFR part 50. ----------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- The NRC recognized in the SECY-03-0100 rulemaking plan that ``[r]eplacing a passive, rated, fire barrier * * * with human performance activities can increase risk. For some simple operator manual actions, the risk increase associated with human performance may be minimal. For other actions, unless the operator manual actions are feasible, the risk increase could be significant * * * However, if the operator manual actions are feasible, the overall risk increase is minimal.'' On the basis of inspection experience, the NRC has concluded that certain manual actions can be accomplished and provide an adequate level of safety to satisfy the underlying purpose of the fire protection rule for the areas set forth in paragraph III.G.2. In addition, the NRC has reviewed and granted certain exemption requests for the use of manual actions in lieu of the separation criteria of paragraph III.G.2. This experience demonstrates that properly analyzed and implemented manual actions provide an adequate level of assurance that a nuclear power plant could achieve and maintain hot shutdown conditions. Due to misunderstanding of acceptable past practice and existing fire protection guidance that led licensees to implement unapproved operator manual actions, the NRC may be faced with a large number of operator manual action exemption requests from licensees. To provide a more efficient and effective process and to ensure more uniform and consistent regulatory treatment of these cases, the NRC is proposing to codify conservative, state-of-the-art acceptance criteria for licensees to use in evaluating operator manual actions to ensure that they are both feasible and reliable. The NRC believes that codifying this alternative in the rule will be more efficient than using the exemption process, and will provide for enhanced safety by allowing resources to be focused on safety rather than administrative compliance. Something that is ``feasible'' is ``capable of being accomplished or brought about; possible.'' Something that is ``reliable'' will ``yield the same or compatible results in different experiments or statistical trials; dependably repeatable.'' To credit operator manual actions under paragraph III.G.2 for outside containment, the licensee must prove to the satisfaction of the NRC not only that the actions can be successfully accomplished, but also that they can be accomplished repeatedly by all personnel who are required to perform the actions. Together, proof that the operator manual actions are both feasible and reliable provides the level of reasonable assurance necessary for credited operator manual actions to be in compliance with paragraph III.G.2. If shown to be feasible and reliable, operator manual actions are likely to be successfully achieved, and any potential increases in risk to the public due to their use will be minimal. Requiring the operator manual actions to meet conservative acceptance criteria provides the NRC with reasonable assurance that such operator manual actions can be accomplished to safely shut down the plant in the event of a fire. These criteria maintain safety by ensuring that licensees perform thorough evaluations of the required operator manual actions and pre- plan equipment needs. NRC fire protection inspectors will verify that licensees' documented operator manual actions meet the NRC acceptance criteria through the existing triennial inspection process. The use of operator manual actions does not diminish the other defense-in-depth objectives of the NRC fire protection program (i.e., the requirements that minimize the potential for fires and explosions and those which provide for rapid controlling and extinguishing of fires that do occur). To support the objective for rapidly controlling and extinguishing fires, the NRC is requiring fire detectors and an automatic fire suppression system as part of the new operator manual actions option. Accordingly, the NRC has determined that the proposed rulemaking provides reasonable assurance that the public health and safety are protected, consistent with the assurance provided by compliance with the current three options in paragraphs III.G.2(a), (b) or (c). B. Addition of Paragraph III.P, Operator Manual Actions Acceptance Criteria The proposed paragraph III.P specifies the required acceptance criteria which must be met before a licensee may utilize operator manual actions to comply with paragraph III.G.2 of Appendix R. A detailed discussion of each criterion is provided further in this Statement of Consideration. These criteria are as follows: III.P Operator Manual Actions 1. For purposes of this section, operator manual actions means the integrated set of actions needed to ensure that a redundant train of systems necessary to achieve and maintain hot shutdown conditions located within the same area outside the primary containment is free of fire damage. 2. A licensee relying on operator manual actions must meet all of the following acceptance criteria: (a) Analysis. The licensee shall prepare an analysis for each operator manual action which demonstrates its feasibility and reliability. (1) The analysis must contain a postulated fire timeline showing that there is sufficient time to travel to action locations and perform actions required to achieve and maintain the plant in a hot shutdown condition under the environmental conditions expected to be encountered without jeopardizing the health and safety of the operator performing the manual actions. The fire timeline shall extend from the time of initial fire detection until the time when the ability to achieve and maintain hot shutdown is reached, and shall include a time margin that reasonably accounts for all important variables, including (i) differences between the analyzed and actual conditions and (ii) human performance uncertainties that may be encountered. (2) The analysis must address the functionality of equipment or cables that could be adversely affected by the fire or its effects but still used to achieve and maintain hot shutdown. (3) The analysis must identify all equipment required to accomplish the operator manual action within the postulated timeline, including (but not limited to) (i) all indications necessary to identify the need for the operator manual actions, enable their performance, and verify their successful accomplishment, and (ii) any necessary communications, portable, and life support equipment. (b) Procedures and training. Plant procedures must include each operator manual action required to achieve and maintain hot shutdown. Each operator [[Page 10905]] must be appropriately trained on those procedures. (c) Implementation. The licensee shall ensure that all systems and equipment needed to accomplish each operator manual action are available and readily accessible consistent with the analysis required by paragraph 2(a). The number of operating shift personnel required to perform the operator manual actions shall be on site at all times. (d) Demonstration. Periodically, the licensee shall conduct demonstrations using an established crew of operators to demonstrate that operator manual actions required to achieve and maintain the plant in a hot shutdown condition can be accomplished consistent with the analysis in paragraph 2(a) of this section. The licensee may not rely upon any operator manual action until it has been demonstrated to be consistent with the analysis. The licensee shall take prompt corrective action if any subsequent periodic demonstration indicates that the operator manual actions can no longer be accomplished consistent with the analysis. These acceptance criteria for operator manual actions are intended to assure the safe shutdown goals and objectives for operating reactors as required in 10 CFR 50.48. The primary objective for safe shutdown is to maintain fuel integrity (i.e., fuel design limits are not exceeded). For alternative or dedicated shutdown capability, the reactor coolant system process variables should be maintained within those predicted for a loss of normal ac power and fission product boundary integrity should not be affected. The applications of these acceptance criteria are as follows. First, the criteria are the means by which the NRC will establish standards that provide a reasonable level of assurance that operator manual actions will be satisfactorily and reliably performed to bring the plant to a hot shutdown condition, thus protecting public health and safety. Second, a standard set of acceptance criteria will permit both the licensees and NRC to establish consistency as to what operator manual actions will be allowed. Third, the criteria will provide the parameters which both the licensees and NRC will use to conduct evaluations and inspections in a thorough manner. The supporting basis for each criterion is discussed in detail below. The acceptance criteria in the proposed rule are structured to ensure both feasibility and reliability of the operator manual actions. To credit operator manual actions, the licensee must prove not only that the actions can be successfully accomplished (are feasible), but also that they can be done so repeatedly (are reliable). Central to the approach is the preparation of an analysis that determines what actions must be taken in order to reach a hot shutdown condition. This analysis would also identify the time available (timeline) for successful performance of such actions. A demonstration of the accomplished operator manual actions within the established timeline verifies the feasibility of such actions. In order to also achieve reliability of the actions, the Commission is proposing a criterion for a time margin needed to complete the actions because of potential variations in fire characteristics, plant conditions, and human performance that the demonstration cannot adequately address. This concept is further described in the sections below. Timeline Analysis The Commission will require that a licensee perform an analysis to determine the feasibility and reliability of operator manual actions. As part of the analysis, there shall be a fire timeline, which extends from the initial fire detection to the achievement of maintainable hot shutdown conditions, to define the time boundaries of the analysis for the fire scenario in which the operator manual actions will be performed. The analysis must identify all actions that must be completed, the equipment needed, the number of people needed, the communications equipment required, and the time available to perform the actions before unsafe plant conditions occur (i.e., before exceeding safe shutdown goals and objectives). The proposed rule has more specific requirements on each of these aspects that are discussed in subsequent sections of this notice. The Commission will require a licensee to show that a sufficient amount of extra time would be available for the required operator manual actions and that the process for determining the time available for such actions adequately addressed the potential variations in fire characteristics, plant conditions, and human performance. This concept is referred to in this statement as a ``time margin.'' Proper demonstration requires that the licensee meet all operator manual action acceptance criteria other than Time Margin (this is evaluated after all other criteria, including requirements in section 2(d), have been met) and show that at least one randomly-selected, established crew can successfully perform the actions within an acceptable time frame. For example, if there are questions about whether operators can reach the locations where they must perform the manual actions, these questions should be addressed to the extent practicable during the demonstration. However, successful demonstration does not fully determine reliability for the operator manual actions. Additional factors must be considered to show that the actions can be performed reliably under the variety of conditions that could occur during a fire. For example, factors that the licensee may not be able to recreate in the demonstrations could cause further delay under real fire conditions (i.e., the demonstration would likely fall short of actual fire situations). Furthermore, typical and expected variability among individuals and crews could lead to variations in operator performance. Finally, variations in the characteristics of the fire and related plant conditions could alter the time available for the operator actions. In order to ensure that a particular action could be performed reliably, licensees must show that a sufficient amount of extra time (i.e., a time margin) would be available for the action and that the process for determining the time available for the action adequately addressed the potential variations in fire characteristics and plant conditions. The time margin ensures that operator manual actions can be performed reliably: (1) Through well-thought out demonstrations that the actions are feasible, (2) by ensuring that there is extra time available for given actions with respect to the fire scenario, and (3) by adequately addressing all other related acceptance criteria. The analysis should include realistically conservative scenarios, and such variables as environment and human performance uncertainties should be considered in the time margin. For example, a licensee may perform a worst case demonstration that requires the operator to wear a self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA), if there is a reasonable expectation that the operators will need to pass through a zone containing smoke in order to reach the location where the operator manual action is to be carried out. Use of a time margin is an appropriate safety factor for ensuring realistically reliable operator manual actions. The rule would require the time margin to account for all important variables, including differences between the analyzed and actual conditions and for human performance uncertainties that may be encountered. The factors necessitating the time margin are: [[Page 10906]] 1. The time margin should account for what the licensee is not likely to be able to recreate in the demonstration that could cause further delay (i.e., where the demonstration falls short). 2. The time margin should account for the variability of fire and related plant conditions. 3. The time margin should account for the variability in human performance among individuals and between different crews and for the effects of human-centered factors that could become relevant during fire scenarios. These factors are important considerations for the time margin for the following reasons: 1. They address likely limitations of the demonstration. 2. The demonstration can replicate only a subset of all possible fires and resulting variability in fire and plant conditions. 3. Some degree of human performance variability is to be expected, some of which could further delay the times to perform the desired actions during real fire situations. In order to establish a standard to show time margin, it was necessary to establish a time margin (or margins) for fire-related operator manual actions to ensure that they would be reliably successful. In other words, if the licensee can meet all of the operator manual action acceptance criteria, which include demonstrating that at least one randomly-selected, established crew can successfully perform the actions, and show that the actions can be performed within an acceptable time frame that allows for adequate time margin to cover potential variations in plant conditions and human performance, then the operator manual action rule would be met. For example, as long as it can be shown that there is an ``X-percent'' time margin to perform the particular operator manual action, plant damage or an undesirable plant condition will still be avoided and all of the other criteria have been met, then there is confidence to conclude that the action will be performed reliably. The establishment of an appropriate time margin requires a supported technical basis. While the best technical basis for a time margin would be empirical data from which it could be derived, a database search was unable to find relevant data that could be used directly for or generalized to the operator manual actions of interest. To further develop this concept, the NRC convened an initial expert panel to identify a time margin for inclusion in this proposed rule statement for further stakeholder consideration and feedback. The expert panel members concluded that a time margin factor of at least 2 would ensure that the operator manual actions in response to fire are sufficiently reliable. For example, if the operator manual action can be shown typically to take less than 15 minutes, then at least 30 minutes (15x2) should be available to achieve and maintain hot shutdown. A time margin factor of at least 2 is assumed to absorb delays that might be caused by the following set of factors (1) the need to recover from or respond to unexpected difficulties or random problems associated with instruments or other equipment, or communication devices; (2) environmental and other effects that are not easily replicated in a demonstration, such as radiation, smoke, toxic gas effects, and increased noise levels; (3) limitations of the demonstration to account for all possible fire locations that may lend the need for such operator manual actions; (4) inability to show or duplicate the operator manual actions because of safety considerations while at power; and (5) individual operator performance factors, such as physical size and strength, cognitive differences, time pressure, and emotional responses. In addition, the time margin includes adequate time for personnel to recover from any initial errors in conducting the actions. The time margin concept could alternatively consist of a range of multiplicative values. For example, instead of a single multiplicative value of 2, perhaps a range of multiplicative values (e.g., 2-4 times) could determine adequate time margin. This may be appropriate where additional factors were identified that may influence the timeline. These factors may be those unknown and not considered by the expert elicitation panel and which may result in a lower or higher multiplicative factor. The Commission can also foresee situations where a licensee may be able to define a different multiplicative value for different scenarios. For example, an operator manual action consisting of a single action by one plant operator could have a different multiplicative value than a scenario that involves more than one plant operator or where several sequential actions are necessary. As with the discussion of the range of multiplicative values above, the time margin concept may have to include a minimum additive time (predetermined minimum amount of time added to the demonstrated time) necessary for certain situations. For example, the time in the demonstration is shown to be short (e.g., http://www.nrc.gov/public-involve/doc-comment/omb/index.html for 60 days after the signature date of this notice and are also available at the rule forum site, http://ruleforum.llnl.gov. Send comments on any aspect of these proposed information collections, including suggestions for reducing the burden and on the above issues, by April 6, 2005, to the Records and FOIA/Privacy Services Branch (T-5 F52), U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC 20555-0001, or by Internet electronic mail to INFOCOLLECTS@NRC.GOV and to the Desk Officer, John A. Asalone, Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, NEOB-10202, (3150-0011), Office of Management and Budget, Washington, DC 20503. Comments received after this date will be considered if it is practical to do so, but assurance of consideration cannot be given to comments received after this date. You may also e-mail comments to John_A._Asalone@omb.eop.gov or comment by telephone at (202) 395-4650. Public Protection Notification The NRC may not conduct or sponsor, and a person is not required to respond to, a request for information or an information collection requirement unless the requesting document displays a currently valid OMB control number. X. Regulatory Analysis The Commission has prepared a draft regulatory analysis on this proposed regulation. The analysis examined the costs and benefits of Commission alternatives for updating the existing rule to accommodate technological advances. The analysis examined two baselines. The Main baseline reflects the effects of the rule as of the date of publication, that is, full compliance with all existing regulations. The Industry Practices baseline reflects a more ``real world'' assessment of compliance. The regulatory alternatives examined under each baseline were No Action, under which no regulatory changes would be undertaken; Regulatory Guidance, under which Section 50.48 and Appendix R would not be modified but regulatory guidance would be updated; and the Proposed Alternative, under which the proposal outlined above would be implemented. The regulatory analysis showed that the proposed alternative was the most cost beneficial of the three alternatives. The benefit is the greatest under the Industry Practices baseline because fourteen reactors would take immediate advantage of the proposed rule with corresponding savings to industry. Option 3, the Proposed Alternative, was determined to be the most preferable based on best professional [[Page 10916]] judgment and quantitative analysis because it (1) improves effectiveness and efficiency of the NRC regulatory process by assuring adequate and uniform operator manual actions; (2) eliminates the need for some licensees to request exemptions from Paragraph III.G.2 or make equipment modifications; and (3) reduces NRC costs by reducing the number of exemption requests to be reviewed. Under Option 3, public health and safety would be maintained at the current level. The results of the analysis are summarized in the following table. Net Present Value of Regulatory Alternatives ----------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------- Option 2 Option 3 Baseline Option 1 no regulatory proposed action guidance alternative ----------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------- Main............................................................ .............. ($42,240) $13,992,793 Industry Practices.............................................. .............. (42,240) 16,839,000 ----------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------- The Commission requests public comment on the draft regulatory analysis. The regulatory analysis may be viewed and downloaded via the NRC rulemaking Web site at http://ruleforum.llnl.gov. Single copies of the analysis are also available from David T. Diec, Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, (301) 415-2834, e-mail dtd@nrc.gov or Alexander Klein, Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, (301) 415-3477, e-mail ark1@nrc.gov. Comments on the draft analysis may be submitted to the NRC as indicated under the ADDRESSES heading. XI. Regulatory Flexibility Certification As required by the Regulatory Flexibility Act, as amended, 5 U.S.C. 605(b), the Commission certifies that this proposed rule, if adopted, would not have a significant economic impact on a substantial number of small entities. This proposed rule would affect only licensees authorized to operate nuclear power reactors. These licensees do not fall within the scope of the definition of ``small entities'' set forth in the Regulatory Flexibility Act or the Size Standards established by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (10 CFR 2.810). XII. Backfit Analysis Section 50.109 (a)(1) defines backfitting as ``the modification of or addition to systems, structures, components, or design of a facility * * * any of which may result from a new or amended provision in the Commission rules or the imposition of a regulatory staff position interpreting the Commission rules that is either new or different from a previously applicable staff position.'' The requirements in Appendix R are only applicable to licensees who received operating licenses before January 1, 1979. To resolve an existing regulatory compliance issue for these licensees under paragraph III.G.2 of Appendix R, the proposed rule represents a voluntary alternative to the current requirements. The proposed rule would allow the use of operator manual actions for achieving and maintaining hot shutdown during a fire in an area where redundant shutdown trains are located as an additional method beyond the three alternatives presently provided. Licensees who currently have approved operator manual actions will not be required to perform any additional actions (such as analysis or documentation). Licensees who employ operator manual actions but have not received NRC approval are in violation of paragraph III.G.2 of Appendix R. There is no backfitting as defined in 10 CFR 50.109(a)(1) because licensees may choose to continue to meet paragraph III.G.2 through other provisions. Post-January 1, 1979 licensees who use operator manual actions without NRC approval may or may not be in compliance with applicable fire protection requirements (GDC-3, Sec. 50.48(a), applicable license conditions, or current fire protection programs). Compliance for plants licensed after January 1, 1979, depends on the specific licensing commitments, the change control process, and how the change was justified and analyzed to demonstrate that the operator manual actions are feasible and reliable and do not adversely affect the ability to achieve or maintain safe shutdown. This rule is not applicable to these licensees as they are not required to meet Appendix R. Based on the above discussion, the NRC has concluded that the proposed rule would not constitute a backfit as defined in 10 CFR 50.109(a)(1). List of Subjects 10 CFR Part 50 Antitrust, Classified information, Criminal penalties, Fire protection, Intergovernmental relations, Nuclear power plants and reactors, Radiation protection, Reactor siting criteria, Backfitting, Reporting and record keeping requirements. For the reasons set forth in the preamble and under the authority of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, as amended; the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974, as amended; and 5 U.S.C. 553, the NRC is proposing to adopt the following amendments to 10 CFR part 50. PART 50--DOMESTIC LICENSING OF PRODUCTION AND UTILIZATION FACILITIES 1. The authority citation for part 50 continues to read as follows: Authority: Secs. 102, 103, 104, 105, 161, 182, 183, 186, 189, 68 Stat. 936, 937, 938, 948, 953, 954, 955, 956, as amended, sec. 234, 83 Stat. 444, as amended (42 U.S.C. 2132, 2133, 2134, 2135, 2201, 2232, 2233, 2236, 2239, 2282); secs. 201, as amended, 202, 206, 88 Stat. 1242, as amended, 1244, 1246 (42 U.S.C. 5841, 5842, 5846); sec. 1704, 112 Stat. 2750 (44 U.S.C. 3504 note). Section 50.7 also issued under Pub. L. 95-601, sec. 10, 92 Stat. 2951 (42 U.S.C. 5841). Section 50.10 also issued under secs. 101, 185, 68 Stat. 955, as amended (42 U.S.C. 2131, 2235); sec. 102, Pub. L. 91-190, 83 Stat. 853 (42 U.S.C. 4332). Sections 50.13, 50.54(dd), and 50.103 also issued under sec. 108, 68 Stat. 939, as amended (42 U.S.C. 2138). Sections 50.23, 50.35, 50.55, and 50.56 also issued under sec. 185, 68 Stat. 955 (42 U.S.C. 2235). Sections 50.33a, 50.55a and Appendix Q also issued under sec. 102, Pub. L. 91-190, 83 Stat. 853 (42 U.S.C. 4332). Sections 50.34 and 50.54 also issued under sec. 204, 88 Stat. 1245 (42 U.S.C. 5844). Sections 50.58, 50.91, and 50.92 also issued under Pub. L. 97- 415, 96 Stat. 2073 (42 U.S.C. 2239). Section 50.78 also issued under sec. 122, 68 Stat. 939 (42 U.S.C. 2152). Sections 50.80--50.81 also issued under sec. 184, 68 Stat. 954, as amended (42 U.S.C. 2234). Appendix F also issued under sec. 187, 68 Stat. 955 (42 U.S.C. 2237). 2. In Appendix R to Part 50, Section III.G.2.c. is revised and a new Section III.G.2.c-1 and Section III.P. are added to read as follows: [[Page 10917]] Appendix R to Part 50--Fire Protection Program For Nuclear Power Facilities Operating Prior to January 1, 1979 * * * * * III. Specific Requirements * * * * * G. * * * 2. * * * c. Enclosure of cable and equipment and associated non-safety circuits of one redundant train in a fire barrier having a 1-hour rating. In addition, fire detectors and an automatic fire suppression system shall be installed in the fire areas; or c-1. Operator manual actions that satisfy the acceptance criteria in paragraph III.P. In addition, fire detectors and an automatic fire suppression system shall be installed in the fire area. * * * * * P. 1. For purposes of this section, operator manual actions means the integrated set of actions needed to ensure that a redundant train of systems necessary to achieve and maintain hot shutdown conditions located within the same area outside the primary containment is free of fire damage. 2. A licensee relying on operator manual actions must meet all of the following requirements: (a) Analysis. The licensee shall prepare an analysis for each operator manual action which demonstrates its feasibility and reliability. (1) The analysis must contain a postulated fire timeline showing that there is sufficient time to travel to action locations and perform actions required to achieve and maintain the plant in a hot shutdown condition under the environmental conditions expected to be encountered without jeopardizing the health and safety of the operator performing the manual action. The fire timeline shall extend from the time of initial fire detection until the time when the ability to achieve and maintain hot shutdown is reached, and shall include a time margin that reasonably accounts for all important variables, including (i) differences between the analyzed and actual conditions, and (ii) human performance uncertainties that may be encountered. (2) The analysis must address the functionality of equipment or cables that could be adversely affected by the fire or its effects but still used to achieve and maintain hot shutdown. (3) The analysis must identify all equipment required to accomplish the operator manual actions within the postulated timeline, including (but not limited to) (i) all indications necessary to identify the need for the operator manual actions, enable their performance and verify their successful accomplishment, and (ii) any necessary communications, portable, and life support equipment. (b) Procedures and training. Plant procedures must include each operator manual action required to achieve and maintain hot shutdown. Each operator must be appropriately trained on those procedures. (c) Implementation. The licensee shall ensure that all systems and equipment needed to accomplish each operator manual action are available and readily accessible consistent with the analysis required by paragraph 2(a). The number of operating shift personnel required to perform the operator manual actions shall be on site at all times. (d) Demonstration. Periodically, the licensee shall conduct demonstrations using an established crew of operators to demonstrate that operator manual actions required to achieve and maintain the plant in a hot shutdown condition can be accomplished consistent with the analysis in paragraph 2(a) of this section. The licensee may not rely upon any operator manual action until it has been demonstrated to be consistent with the analysis. The licensee shall take prompt corrective action if any subsequent periodic demonstration indicates that the operator manual actions can no longer be accomplished consistent with the analysis. Dated at Rockville, Maryland, this 24th day of February, 2005. For the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Annette Vietti-Cook, Secretary of the Commission. [FR Doc. 05-4314 Filed 3-4-05; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 7590-01-P ***************************************************************** 18 [du-list] It's a Family Affair: Uncle Bucky makes a killing Date: Mon, 07 Mar 2005 15:35:06 -0800 Bloomington Alternative, Sun, 06 Mar 2005 5:52 AM PST by Jeffrey St. Clair http://www.bloomingtonalternative.com/subscribers/news.php?topicid=715 Back in 1991, shortly after the depleted uranium-flaked dust had settled some from the first Gulf War, there was a minor tempest in the press over influence peddling by members of the President George H. W. Bush's family, including his son Neil and his brother Prescott, Jr. Both Neil and Prescott, neither of whom had proven to be exceptionally talented businessmen, had made millions by flagrantly...... is It's a Family Affair: Uncle Bucky makes a killing March 6, 2005 by Jeffrey St. Clair Back in 1991, shortly after the depleted uranium-flaked dust had settled some from the first Gulf War, there was a minor tempest in the press over influence peddling by members of the President George H. W. Bush's family, including his son Neil and his brother Prescott, Jr. Both Neil and Prescott, neither of whom had proven to be exceptionally talented businessmen, had made millions by flagrantly trading on their relationship to the president. Seeking to distinguish himself from his more predatory relatives, William Henry Trotter Bush, the younger brother of Bush Sr. and an investment banker in St. Louis, gave an interview to disclaim any profiteering on his own part. Indeed, he sounded downright grumpy, as if his older brother hadn't done enough to steer juicy government deals his way. "Being the brother of George Bush isn't a financial windfall by any stretch of the imagination," huffed William H.T. Bush. Well, perhaps being the brother of the president didn't generate as much business as he hoped, but having the good fortune to be the uncle of the president certainly appears to have padded the pockets of the man endearingly known to George W. Bush as "Uncle Bucky." A few months before his selection as president, Bush's Uncle Bucky quietly joined the board of a small and struggling St. Louis defense company called Engineered Support Systems, Incorporated (ESSI). Since Bush joined the team, ESSI's fortunes have taken a dramatic turn for the better. This once obscure outfit is now one of the top Pentagon contractors. Next year its revenues will top $1 billion, nearly all of it derived from defense contracts with the Pentagon or with foreign militaries financed by US aid and loan guarantees. Even sweeter, most of these contracts have been awarded in no bid, sole source deals. True to form, Uncle Bucky claims that ESSI's amazing transformation has nothing to do with him or his nephew, the president. "I don't make any calls to the 202 (DC) Area Code," Bush sneered to the Los Angeles Times. Uncle Buck's characteristic modesty was swiftly undercut by statements made by top executives at ESSI, who seemed proud that their foresight in inviting Bush on board had paid off so handsomely for all concerned. "Having a Bush certainly doesn't hurt," chuckled Dan Kreher, ESSI's vice president for industrial relations. Uncle Bucky Bush is 16 years younger than his brother, the former president. According to Kitty Kelley's gripping history of the Bush clan The Family, Bucky was raised "almost as an only child" by his aging parents Dorothy and Prescott Bush, the senator who traded with the Nazis. Bucky was a sensitive and precocious kid with a peculiar devotion to choral music. In fact, the highlight of his career at Yale University was his starring spot with Whiffenpoofs, an elite choir. While his older brother headed to Texas to make his name in the oil patch, Bucky returned to St. Louis, the Gateway City where the original Bush fortune had been built. He settled into a modest career as an investment banker and corporate consultant. Then, with his nephew poised to seize the White House, Uncle Bucky was offered a seat on the board of ESSI, a military support and defense electronics firm. ESSI's company prospectus describes it as "a diversified supplier of high-tech, integrated military electronics, support equipment and logistics services for all branches of America's armed forces and certain foreign militaries." Shortly after the attacks of 9/11, ESSI positioned itself to win a series of lucrative Pentagon contracts that would catapult the diminutive firm into the top ranks of defense contractors. Within a few short months, the company's shareholders were given the financial ride of their lives. By the time of the Iraq war, ESSI was a brawny new player on the defense block. In the spring of 2003, ESSI acquired a military communications company called TAMSCO, whose prime activity was in developing military satellite terminals in the Gulf region and in US bases in Germany in anticipation of a US invasion of Iraq. After the ESSI buy-out, TAMSCO swiftly won contracts from both the Air Force and the Army for more than $90 million for the training of troops in the operation of the system and the installation of radar equipment in Kuwait. Then Pentagon awarded ESSI a $49 million contract to remodel military trailers for use in Iraq. In 2003, the Defense Department gave ESSI a huge deal to provide the Army with equipment to search for Iraq's non-existent chemical and biological weapons. Part of this package included a $19 million contract to provide protective tents for US troops from chemical bombs. The tents didn't arrive in Iraq until after it was evident to nearly everyone that the Iraqi military didn't have access to such weapons. This didn't stop the money from flowing into ESSI's coffers and it didn't stop ESSI's executives from playing along in the grand charade. "The potential threat of our troops facing a chemical or biological attack during the current conflict in Iraq remains very real," huffed Michael Shananan, the company's former chairman. As the invasion transformed into a military occupation of Iraq, ESSI continued to pluck off sweet deals. In late 2003, the Coalition Provisional Authority, whose contracts passed across the Pentagon desk of arch neocon Douglas Feith, awarded ESSI an $18 million deal to engineer a communications system for the CPA offices, barricaded inside Baghdad's Green Zone. Its executives openly clucked at the likelihood for protracted war. "The increasing likelihood for a prolonged military involvement in Southwest Asia by US forces well into 2006 has created a fertile environment for the type of support products and services we offer," gloated Gerald L. Daniels, the company's Chief Executive Officer. Rarely has corporate glee over the prospects of war profiteering been expressed so brazenly. But Daniels had a point. Even as things began to go sour for the US in Iraq, ESSI stood to make lots of money. One of its biggest no-bid contracts came in 2004 in the wake of mounting causalities in light-armored vehicles hit by roadside bombs. ESSI won a deal to upgrade the armor of thousands of vehicles in or bound for Iraq. The company's annual report for 2005 forecast that ESSI might make as much as $200 million from this bloody windfall alone. As the flood of new contracts poured in, ESSI's stock soared. In January of 2005, it reached its all-time high of $60.39 per share. A few days before the stock hit this lofty peak, Uncle Bucky quietly exercised his option to sell 8,438 shares of ESSI stock. He walked away from that transaction with at least $450,000. The stock sale occurred a few days after ESSI announced that the Pentagon had awarded it $77 million in new contracts for the Iraq war and a few days before word leaked to the press that the company was under investigation for its handling of older Pentagon contracts. The timing of the trade was perfect. In a February 2005 filing with the Securities Exchange Commission, ESSI discreetly disclosed to its shareholders that the inspector general of Pentagon had launched an inquiry into a series of contracts awarded to the company in 2002 for work on the Air Force's troubled automated cargo loading machine called the Tunner. While the company's chief financial dismissed the probe as "routine" and assured investors that it would have "no effect" on ESSI's fortunes, the Pentagon held to a more restrained assessment of the potential liability. Michael Wynne, acting undersecretary of Defense, said he had referred ESSI contracts valued at $158 million to the Pentagon's inspector general because the deals "appear to have anomalies in them." Many of the contracts were awarded on a no-bid basis and much of the probe appears to focus on the role Pentagon insiders played in steering the contracts to ESSI. Much of the thrust behind ESSI's sudden rise has been fueled by no-bid or sole-source deals with the Pentagon. These no-risk deals are part of a corporate strategy cooked up in part by non other than Uncle Bucky himself. In a profitable bit of self-dealing, ESSI hired its board member, Bucky Bush, as a consultant in 2002. Bush, who pulls in about $45,000 a year in director's fees, was paid an additional $125,000 for his advice on ESSI's buyout of other military contractors. The acquisition strategy outlined by Bush was to train the company's appetite on the gobbling up of companies that held no-bid or sole source deals with the Pentagon. In January, ESSI spent $37.6 million to buy a New York electronics testing firm called Prospective Computer Analysis, Inc. In defending the purchase to shareholders, executives at ESSI emphasized that the company held "a lot of sole-source contracts." Most recently, ESSI acquired Spacelink, Inc, a Virginia-based defense company, for $150 million. Spacelink, which supplies parts for military satellites, is poised to cash in on the $80 billion missile defense bonanza. ESSI isn't the only defense-oriented company to acquire the services of Uncle Bucky. The banker from St. Louis has also been retained as a trustee for the global investment firm Lord Abbott, one of the primary financial underwriters of Halliburton. Lord Abbott is both one of the top 10 shareholders in Dick Cheney's former company, as well as one of its top mutual fund holders. It's all in the family. Uncle Bucky didn't unload all of his ESSI stock. He still owns 45,000 shares valued at more than $2.5 million. He used the profits from the recent sale to purchase a vacation home in Florida near his other nephew nourishing presidential ambitions, Jeb Bush. Who knows if the Bucky will finally stop there? Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature. This essay is excerpted from his forthcoming book Grand Theft Pentagon, to be published in July by Common Courage Press. He is co-editor of CounterPunch -- http://www.counterpunch.com -- where this article originally appeared. ---------- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.308 / Virus Database: 266.6.2 - Release Date: 3/4/05 [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> What would our lives be like without music, dance, and theater? Donate or volunteer in the arts today at Network for Good! http://us.click.yahoo.com/TzSHvD/SOnJAA/79vVAA/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/ ***************************************************************** 19 [du-list] 'Poison DUst' features vets exposed to DU Date: Mon, 07 Mar 2005 15:35:32 -0800 'Poison DUst' features vets exposed to DU By David Hoskins Published Feb 23, 2005 10:53 AM http://www.workers.org/us/2005/poison-dust-0303/ New York - The premiere showing on Feb. 15 of "Poison DUst"--a documentary highlighting the effects of Depleted Uranium [DU] on veterans returning from the Iraq war--attracted a large and engaged crowd at the New School theater. Filmmaker Sue Harris was on hand to introduce the film and take questions afterward. Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark and Sara Flounders, national co-director of the International Action Center, also spoke at the event. DU refers to that portion of uranium left over after the enrichment process that makes natural metallic uranium suitable for nuclear uses. DU has limited civilian applications in the development of medical radiation therapy machines. However, the military has found a more sinister use for DU in its operations. Because of its high density, DU is used in armor-penetrating munitions. DU munitions were used extensively by United States forces in both the first and current Iraq wars, putting soldiers and civilians at risk of exposure. DU is both radioactive and toxic to the human body. Exposure to DU can cause a host of ailments associated with the kidneys, lungs and immune system. An increased risk of lung tissue damage and lung cancer has been documented among uranium miners. The film features soldiers whose health has been affected by DU exposure, along with the wives of military personnel discussing genetic disabilities faced by their children as a result of a parent's exposure to DU. An increased risk of miscarriages, maternal mortality and congenital disabilities is associated with DU contamination. It's a weapon of mass destruction. The top U.S. military brass are complicit in the cover-up of DU's harmful effects on civilians and soldiers. The current attitude of the U.S. military leadership is similar to the approach taken during the Vietnam War, when military leaders ignored the health risks connected to the use of Agent Orange as a defoliant. Several military servicemembers and their families, including veterans featured in the film, were in attendance at the premiere of "Poison Dust." The anger these individuals harbor toward the government that disregarded their health and safety was apparent during the open discussion that followed the film. It is up to the anti-war movement to channel this anger into an active resistance of the U.S. war of occupation in Iraq. As the Troops Out Now Coalition organizes for a mass demonstration in New York City's Central Park on March 19, "Poison DUst" helps demonstrate why soldiers have both a right and a duty to resist serving in a military that disregards the lives of GIs and Iraqis. -- Posted for educational and research purposes only, ~ in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 ~ NucNews Links and Expanded Archives - http://nucnews.net ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Need a home for your web domain? We recommend our provider, Hosting Direct https://support.hostingdirect.net/cgi-bin/affiliates/clickthru.cgi?id=nucnews ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> What would our lives be like without music, dance, and theater? Donate or volunteer in the arts today at Network for Good! http://us.click.yahoo.com/TzSHvD/SOnJAA/79vVAA/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 Coastal Post Online: Depleted Uranium Deaths March, 2005 What Happened To The Test Tube Paradigm? By Dennis Kyne    These members of the 369th transportation battalion from New York City fought in Operation Desert Storm in 1991. They walked into the "test tube"-they were the "experiment"-that tested the effects, including the genetic effects, of the 300 tons of uranium used by the US military on that battlefield. Now half a million of them are sick, and many of their babies have birth defects. Far more uranium is being used in Iraq. When I was in eighth grade science class, Mr. Wadley, who reminded us more of an ice cream truck driver than a teacher, taught the pupils one thing with an incredible amount of emphasis: If the test tube paradigm does not reflect the real world paradigm, then there is absolutely no reason to ever do scientific experiments. Wadley further explained that if you monitor the results of a laboratory experiment and allow this information to be a basis for your intelligence in real world applications, you should see results that are nearly identical.    If the results are not nearly identical, then your departure point was faulty. That is the only safe conclusion. Again, if the results are not similar in scope or comparable in nature, then the departure point was wrong and the test tube lacked something that the real world provides to the equation.    This makes my inquiry most important: "Why does the United States Army violate the very simplest of scientific requirements when it determines the validity of using uranium weapons on the battlefield? What test tube did the military explode hundreds of tons of uranium in and then walk hundreds of thousands of humans into?" We live in a real world result of the use of uranium that you could never put into a test tube to study.    Recently, while in New York, I had the opportunity to discuss the implications of uranium use with Dr. Thomas Fasy, associate professor of pathology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Dr. Fasy casually informed GNN's Anthony Lappe and me that the most damaging research regarding uranium is coming out of government laboratories in Bethesda, Md.    Lappe, author of the recent "True Lies," with an entire chapter dedicated to uranium, was on the lookout for this evidence. Not only does it prove uranium is horrific to the human experience, it illustrates the military knows just how pathetic it is to denounce us who have been exposed to this microwave wasteland.    In 1994, Lt. Gen. Calvin Waller said in a "Dateline" television interview with Storm Phillips that he had never been informed this uranium could be deadly. He appeared disgusted by memorandums which stated exposure to uranium used in weaponry could leave a residual effect which might cause death, sickness and, worst of all, genetic mutations.    Calvin Waller was the second in command, behind Norman Schwarzkopf, during Operation Desert Storm. Waller has since passed away, and over a decade after his interview, Bethesda is busy burning through test tubes to come up with conclusions that are late by any standard of science.    Tests should have been done before the military dumped a minimum of 300 tons of uranium in the Middle East in 1991. One ton is equal to 2,600 pounds. Studies should have been conclusive after they stuffed returning veterans into a slew of study groups.    I was in one that tested for ionizing radiation, and in 1995 I was compensated for undiagnosed illnesses. The results should have been solid by the time they dumped bombs in Somalia and Yugoslavia.    What are they going to tell the people living in Vieques, Puerto Rico? Sorry, they didn't have a test tube that resembled your city, so we will just go with the studies from Bethesda. Whatever happened to the test tube paradigm? Maybe Vieques is the test tube.    Pandora's box was opened by the mining of uranium from the cradle it rested passively in. It has killed millions of indigenous humans and altered millions of others genetically.    Modern medicine calls it cancer; I call it radiation exposure. Both express themselves as ruptured cells and altered organs.    With hundreds of thousands of veterans from Operation Desert Storm filing for disability compensation, it is alarming how many of us cannot be diagnosed. How many years will it be before they can diagnose a human being with radiation sickness? Sounds like the half million veterans who stood on the front line of Desert Storm got tossed in the test tube as well.    While we know the test tube was broken, we are sure that other problems were ignored. There was no test tube that included the results of uranium's 21 phases of oxidation, all deathly. There was no test tube that had metallurgical particles cooking down to become smaller than bacteria and viruses.    There was no study of the implications of walking into these gaseous oxides or these particulates so small that even a standard military issue protective mask could not keep them from lodging in lungs. There was no study of the short term, long term or genetic effects of walking into low level radioactive particulate.    I say was, and now there is us. Us being the 500,000 men and women sent to the front who walked into this madness remembered as Operation Desert Storm. Sadly, the 10,000 dead troops and half a million sick and dying veterans are left wondering what happened.    What happened to the daughter of Sgt. Daryl Clark, who was on the front line and drowned in uranium dust from the tank buster rounds that were pelted at his feet? In the same "Dateline" episode, Phillips asks Clark how he feels. Clark responds, "When America called, we were there. Now that we are calling, America isn't answering."    This cry has been echoed in the hospitals, psych wards, prison cells and gutters of America for the past decade, and it is an indicator of what the returning veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom can expect.    Later in this same "Dateline" episode, a goofy looking general by the name of Blank admits to the viewers that the Army dropped the ball. Storm asks him, "Who dropped the ball?" Blank can't provide a name. This is the military way: field grade officers promise to take care of the soldiers and can't seem to figure out who is dropping the ball.    A general sat in the television monitor and said the buck stops somewhere else, but I can't tell you where. The ball dropped so hard that Clark's daughter Kennedy was born without a thyroid and with expressions of radiation exposure. Looks like Kennedy got stuffed down the test tube also.    Middle East experts state that there is an incredible amount of pesticides and herbicides being used in the current war, and this is confirmed by the Department of Defense as well. What does that do in the test tube of 25 million Iraqi citizens? Pesticides, uranium, herbicides, fires, plastics, gases and a list of potential hazards, from rifle cleaner fluid to brake fluid, are being spilled all over the place by gallons.    Science hijacked the battlefield, and supporters say the uranium is necessary because we can pierce the armor of a tank with it. They did the studies, it is conclusive, the stuff pierced armor. Testing officers would fire uranium tipped rounds and watch them pierce tanks.    While we can't dispute these occurrences, surely we would never call it science. Surely it isn't scientific enough to base conclusions that put life as we know it in jeopardy.    Mr. Wadley, my science teacher, would have failed the experiment. He'd have stamped a big "F" on the report entitled "Saving the Middle East with a history of good solid scientific research." He'd say, "There is not one bit of scientific support to substantiate the use of uranium. First of all, everyone knows that most military troops couldn't hit the broad side of a barn when firing any weapon. So, how many of these rounds hit innocent people? Churches, tin shacks, people on motor scooters?"    Wadley was sharp. I know this is where he would lead us: "To fire a round in a piece of steal such as a tank that contains the explosion and say it is safe to fire at a wedding somewhere off the battlefield in Afghanistan is ridiculous."    His style was such he might throw in: "You won't be getting out of junior high school bringing projects like this in. Do you know why?"    "Class, do you know why this fails?" Wadley wasn't afraid of a little embarrassment for the kids either. The class loved it when they spotted one as easy as this, though, and got to yell as loud as their voices could bellow, "It doesn't meet the test tube paradigm."    If the test tube paradigm does not reflect the real world paradigm, then there is absolutely no reason to ever do scientific experiments. It doesn't matter if you are an ice cream truck driver or a teacher, an eighth grade student or a four star general; firing a round into a tank as the test tube paradigm is not even close to the real world paradigm.    We have been tossed in the tube together on this one. Are you going to rely on Gen. Blank telling the world someone dropped the ball here, and we don't know who?    We can slip back into junior high with Wadley for a moment, though, and accept the fact that this is not science they provide us. It is a military misdirection, one that has cost thousands of lives and untold environmental consequences. It is a crime against all living species. Worst of all, it doesn't meet the test tube paradigm.    Dennis Kyne is a combat veteran with 15 years in the US Army. He holds a degree in political science cum laude from San Jose State University with an emphasis on nuclear proliferation. Email him at d_kyne@hotmail.com and visit his website, www.denniskyne.com. originally published in SF Bayview http://www.sfbayview.com/020905/whathappened020905.shtml ***************************************************************** 21 Salt Lake Tribune: Atomic museum not a hit with downwinders Article Last Updated: 03/07/2005 02:19:02 AM At odds: Curators say new Atomic Testing Museum is educational; foes say it's a forum for nuclear apologists By Ken Ritter The Associated Press Spectators walk down a passageway, built to represent an underground test tunnel, at the Atomic Testing Museum last month in Las Vegas. The museum has received negative reviews from Utah's downwinders. (Joe Cavaretta/The Associated Press ) LAS VEGAS - Descending a dark tunnel past Civil Defense relics toward a digital countdown on a bomb shelter's concrete walls might chill those from a Cold War generation weaned on nuclear fallout drills. But curators of the new Atomic Testing Museum said they hope it stirs the imagination of those with no memory of mushroom clouds and the role the nearby Nevada Test Site played in the development of nuclear deterrence. ''Nuclear weapons aren't gone,'' museum Director William Johnson said as he led the way through the $3.5 million facility that opened last month just east of the Las Vegas Strip. ''The world is just a different place now.'' The museum traces a half-century of nuclear weapons testing in a world that grew to love or loathe the bomb. It describes developments that let scientists peer into the first millionth of a second of a nuclear blast before instruments vaporized and it charts research that continued after earthshaking explosions ended in 1992 at the test site. It also has drawn criticism as revisionist history among advocates who call it a forum for nuclear apologists, and it has reopened wounds for ''downwinders'' sickened by fallout from atmospheric atomic blasts. ''Once you've been a victim of nuclear weapons you're less enthusiastic about it,'' said Michelle Thomas, 52, a lifelong resident of St. George, Utah. ''I don't hate or fear anyone bad enough to want to see happen to them what happened to us.'' Johnson doesn't deny that testing caused problems. He pointed to exhibits describing the plight of downwinders and of test-site workers sickened by silicosis, and to a reading room and nuclear testing archive containing more than 310,000 documents. ''I want people to come here and learn,'' Johnson said. ''But if there's only one message taken away, it's that the Cold War was a war. It was a struggle with the Soviet Union.'' The story is told with a timeline, artifacts, interactive and touch-screen displays and several films, including a 10-minute presentation in the concrete bunker dubbed the Ground Zero Theater. Visitors sit on varnished wooden seats modeled after the warped, weathered benches still on News Nob, a rocky outcrop overlooking Yucca Flat where news reporters observed atmospheric nuclear tests beginning with ''Charlie'' in April 1952. Light bursts as the big screen shows a nuclear test. The room rumbles with embedded speakers. Air blasts tousle the hair, imitating a shock wave. ''It's almost like you're sitting there. That's real stuff to me,'' said Mike Margalski, 49, a Las Vegas maintenance engineer who said he wanted to experience what his father did as an Army soldier exposed to more than one nuclear test in the early 1950s. Eugene ''Geno'' Margalski died of prostate cancer in 1996, at age 65. ''My dad never ever talked about it until just a few days before he passed away,'' Margalski said. ''He talked about going out and walking in it while they came around with Geiger counters.'' This is no theme park. It is as somber as the 230,000 deaths and injuries in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945; as sober as the concept of ''mutually assured destruction'' that shadowed the world for half a century afterward. Some exhibits have a gee-whiz element - chronicling how scientists tested nuclear rocket engines, shrank the size of nuclear devices and measured the effects of radionuclides on plants, animals and food. This being Las Vegas, the museum also chronicles how tourists sipped cocktails on casino rooftops, gazing at blast clouds on the horizon at the test site, 65 miles to the northwest. The museum is a partnership between the Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation and the Desert Research Institute, an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution. Administrators foresee schoolchildren marveling at the column of instruments used to measure underground nuclear explosions, working a manipulator arm like the one scientists used to handle radioactive materials and hearing the clicks of a Geiger counter measuring low-level radioactivity. ''I would hope they come away with an understanding of what is radiation and why we did testing,'' said Loretta Helling, a former Energy Department public affairs specialist who spent eight years curating the collection. ''We try to have a balanced view in there.'' Preston Truman foresees the museum ignoring unpleasantries while teaching ''that everything was good and beneficial and that America won the Cold War.'' ''In 50 years, when all the people who had a negative opinion are dead, it will be just that - one-sided history,'' said Truman, who founded and directs an advocacy group called Downwinders. Truman, 53, a Malad, Idaho, resident, said his first memory in life is sitting on his father's knee in Enterprise, Utah, watching a mushroom cloud at the Nevada Test Site. He figures that was 1955, a year that the government conducted 18 atmospheric tests. ''We're children of the bomb. We saw the flash. We heard the bangs. A couple of times, the shock waves broke out windows that they paid for,'' he said. ''We got radiated and we got lied to.'' Thomas remembers a fine ash falling like snow across St. George. When fallout warnings sounded, her mother would don an old straw hat, pull on rubber dish gloves and tie a dish towel around her own mouth to pluck laundry from the outdoor drying line. ''She would wash the sheets twice in hot water so her kids wouldn't have to sleep with radioactive fallout,'' Thomas said. Thomas said she started developing maladies as a junior in high school: ovarian cysts, breast cancer, a benign salivary gland tumor. She said she was diagnosed in 1974 with polymyositis, an autoimmune system disease similar to lupus. She and two siblings each received a one-time ''downwinder'' payment of $50,000 under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990. ''I think we've learned that the government is fallible and may not be entirely up-front,'' Thomas said. ''But it was considered unpatriotic in those days to question the government.'' Johnson, 47, recalled hearing the wail of Friday morning Civil Defense sirens as a child in Miami. He said the museum tried to put the nation's 1,054 above- and below-ground nuclear tests in context. Of the 928 detonated at the test site, 100 were atmospheric tests. Seven tests were exploded elsewhere in Nevada, three each in New Mexico and Alaska, two each in Colorado and Mississippi and 106 on Pacific islands. Three tests were conducted in South Atlantic islands. The number of nuclear tests peaked at 96 in 1962 - the year the United States and the Soviet Union stared each other down with their fingers on the button during the Cuban missile crisis. ''The paradigm of the 1950s, '60s and '70s was that the Northern Hemisphere was going to be blown to bits,'' Johnson said. The scientists, technicians and administrators at the test site, he said, ''were thinking they were saving the world.'' Items associated with the nuclear age are displayed at the Atomic Testing Museum, Friday, Feb. 11, 2005 in Las Vegas. The newly-opened museum is operated in conjuction with the Smithsonian Institution. (Joe Cavaretta/The Associated Press) © Copyright 2005, The Salt Lake Tribune. ***************************************************************** 22 [du-list] Nuclear waste dumped on Britain's beaches Date: Mon, 07 Mar 2005 15:35:48 -0800 Nuclear waste dumped on Britain's beaches: report LONDON (AFP) Mar 06, 2005 Highly radioactive waste has been dumped in Britain's seas and washed ashore, and nuclear research station workers covered up the pollution, The Sunday Times quoting a former safety officer Sunday as saying. The newspaper said the owner of the Dounreay nuclear plant in... Read the article: http://www.terradaily.com/2005/050306084748.smz4omnf.html ---------- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.308 / Virus Database: 266.6.2 - Release Date: 3/4/05 [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Has someone you know been affected by illness or disease? Network for Good is THE place to support health awareness efforts! http://us.click.yahoo.com/RzSHvD/UOnJAA/79vVAA/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/ ***************************************************************** 23 [du-list] No nuke waste on Native lands! Please help by Date: Mon, 07 Mar 2005 15:35:45 -0800 Dear Friends and Colleagues in the Military Toxics Project network, I had the pleasure of meeting many of you - if but briefly - in October 2002 at the Shundahai Network's fall gathering at the Nevada Test Site at the culmination of the Family Spirit Walk from Los Alamos, and also at the Environmental Justice Summit in Washington, D.C. that same month. I'm writing you now about a critical environmental justice matter of great urgency. Culminating a seven-year process, a U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Licensing Board on February 24, 2005 ruled in favor of granting a license to the proposed Private Fuel Storage (PFS) high-level radioactive waste dump targeted at the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation in Utah. Opening of this dump would initiate the transportation of thousands of casks of high-level radioactive waste across the nation, putting millions of people in jeopardy of a Mobile Chernobyl from an accident or terrorist attack. In addition, the Skull Vally Goshute community is already surrounding by toxic industrial and military facilities, such as U.S. Army nerve gas incinerators and storage, the Dugway Proving Ground for chemical/biological/radiological weaponry, and the Hill Air Force Base/Utah Test and Training Range. A national, group sign on letter at http://www.nirs.org/alerts/02-24-2005/1 , urging the NRC Commissioners to reject the PFS license application, will be sent to the NRC Commissioners in early March. Please sign on to this letter, by sending your name, title (if any), organization, city and state to kevin@nirs.org by 5 pm Eastern time, Thursday, March 10. We currently have about 15 Native American groups (including Skull Valley Goshute tribal opponents to the dump targeted at their community), 15 national U.S. environmental groups, and over 100 regional/state/local environmental groups signed onto this letter. If you'd like to see the list of those groups already signed on, let me know. Please consider signing your group onto this important letter aimed at preventing radioactive racism - the dumping of high-level atomic wastes from giant nuclear utilities on a tiny Native American community. And please spread the word to other, kindred spirit groups which might also sign on. Thanks for your help! ---Kevin Kamps, Nuclear Information & Resource Service, Washington, D.C., 202.328.0002 ext. 14, kevin@nirs.org , www.nirs.org [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Has someone you know been affected by illness or disease? Network for Good is THE place to support health awareness efforts! http://us.click.yahoo.com/RzSHvD/UOnJAA/79vVAA/FGYolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> To unsubscribe from this groups send a message to du-list-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com. In the body of the message type unsubscribe and send. Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/du-list/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: du-list-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ ***************************************************************** 24 Herald: Ex-safety officer at Dounreay claims cover-up Web Issue 2217 March 07 2005 BILLY BRIGGS March 07 2005 A FORMER safety officer at a nuclear plant yesterday described his former employers as cowboys who breached safety rules and showed a reckless disregard for public health. Herbie Lyall, a health physics surveyor at the Dounreay facility in Caithness for 30 years, spoke out two weeks after it emerged that the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), Dounreay's owner, could face prosecution over radioactive releases. In the past two decades, more than 50 radioactive particles have been recovered from Sandside beach, two miles west of the plant, which is being decommissioned. The Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) lodged a report with the procurator-fiscal into the release of fragments of spent nuclear fuel from the reprocessing plant in the 1960s and 1970s. In a dossier, Mr Lyall accused nuclear chiefs of covering up the discovery of a radioactive particle on Sandside in 1984. He claimed high-level nuclear waste was washed down drains intended for low-level waste and that radioactive materials were handled without appropriate protection  in one case by two workers who died from cancer in their forties. Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, who has lodged several parliamentary questions about Dounreay, demanded a ministerial inquiry after the claims. The UKAEA conceded that practices in previous decades were not as stringent as they are now, but it insisted that the discovery of a particle on Sandside was made public in 1984 and it could find no record to substantiate claims about a second find that year. However, Mr Lyall said he was a member of a team which found a particle on Sandside which was not reported. Mr Lyall had intended that his account should come to light after his death, but said continuing concerns had persuaded him to speak now. Copyright © Newsquest (Herald & Times) Limited. All Rights ***************************************************************** 25 Las Vegas SUN: Shoshone file suit against Yucca dump Today: March 07, 2005 at 9:36:18 PST By Jace Radke LAS VEGAS SUN The Western Shoshone Nation has rejected millions of dollars in compensation for the loss of their ancestral lands, and now the tribe is suing the federal government to stop nuclear waste from being housed at Yucca Mountain. The lawsuit, filed in Las Vegas on Friday, asks a federal judge to enjoin the Energy Department from moving forward with plans to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles north of Las Vegas. The tribe's attorney, Robert Hager, said the Energy Department has completely disregarded an 1863 treaty between the government and the the tribe that specifies uses for the tribe's nearly 60 million acres. "The government has ignored the treaty and ignored the (Western Shoshone National) Council, and not allowed the tribe to participate in the intergovernmental process," Hager said. Hager said the Shoshone have brought the treaty to the attention of the government but have been rebuffed, which has led to the lawsuit. In summer 2004 President Bush signed a measure to distribute $145 million to the approximately 10,000 Western Shoshone in compensation for land that was taken from the tribe. "The tribe has not accepted any of that money, and even if it had, it wouldn't affect the treaty," Hager said. The Ruby Valley Treaty specifies that the government could only use the land for settlements, mines, ranches and the construction of roads and railroads. The Shoshone land encompassed by the treaty covers most of Nevada, with the exception of its southern tip and an area in the northwest corner. The land also stretches into California, Idaho and Utah, and includes the Nevada Test Site and Yucca Mountain. "The restrictions on use of lands covered by the treaty reflect the spiritual beliefs of the Western Shoshone people who hold the earth and all living things sacred," the lawsuit states. "It is the responsibility of plaintiffs to past, present and future generations to prevent the dispoiling of traditional Western Shoshone lands which the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump would portend." Along with the Western Shoshone National Council, four Western Shoshone tribe members are also listed has plaintiffs in the suit. Energy Department Secretary Samuel Bodman and Interior Department Secretary Gale Norton are named as defendants along with the United States. The Western Shoshone have had a long history of litigation with the federal government over ancestral lands. In 1991 the Western Shoshone Defense Project was created to protect the rights of Mary and Carrie Dann, Shoshone sisters who refused to pay the Bureau of Land Management to graze their cattle on land they said belonged to them under the Ruby Valley Treaty. The Bureau of Land Management seized and sold 227 of the sisters' cattle in February 2003 and confiscated 500 horses from them in fall 2002. A hearing on Hager's motion for an injunction against the government has not yet been set by U.S. District Judge Philip Pro. All contents copyright 2005 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 26 Las Vegas SUN: DOE, Nye officials take Yucca case door-to-door Today: March 07, 2005 at 11:03:22 PST By Benjamin Grove SUN WASHINGTON BUREAU WASHINGTON -- The Energy Department and Nye County officials are taking a door-to-door tour of part of Nevada through which proposed rail routes would haul nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain. The officials have been to roughly 35 homes since June to explain the department's plan to transport highly radioactive waste through their backyards. Reactions at kitchen tables have included shock, anger and cautious curiosity, said Susan Moore, administrative technical coordinator for the Nye County Department of natural resources and federal facilities. She helped organize the field trips. More sit-downs are planned to connect with as many of the 100 or so residents, ranchers and mining companies that own land affected by the proposed mile-wide rail corridor, she said. "The DOE needs to tell them what is going on," Moore said. "So I think this has been a good thing. Hopefully, the DOE takes heed of their concerns." Despite years of budget shortfalls and other setbacks, the Energy Department is plodding ahead with the federal plan to construct a national repository at Yucca Mountain for the highly radioactive waste that is piling up at U.S. nuclear reactor plants and U.S. Defense sites. The plan has been delayed for years. Energy Department officials say the repository won't open until at least 2012, while some program critics say it would be at least 2015. One hurdle is construction of a $1 billion, 319-mile rail route through Lincoln and Nye Counties that would be used to ship the waste from near the Utah border to Yucca. Energy Department officials have said the construction would not be difficult, although Yucca critics say the desert route is fraught with trouble, including rough terrain and occasional flooding. It's also peppered with people who pose a public relations problem for Yucca managers. Lots of folks on or near the proposed rail line moved to the desert to get away from populations and development -- and now don't appreciate the idea of atomic trains rolling by, several land owners said. Kevin Emmerich owns property near Beatty roughly 2.5 miles from the planned rail line. He and his wife bought the six-acre former cattle ranch three years ago from the Nature Conservancy, a national environmental group that buys up environmentally sensitive land and sells it to owners with strict land-preservation conditions. Emmerich's property, dotted with cottonwood and willow trees, is also home to Amargosa toads, found only in Nye County. That prompted him to nickname the place the "Atomic Toad Ranch." On Jan. 24, Emmerich invited several officials from the Energy Department, and a representative from Yucca contractor Bechtel SAIC, into his home for a 45-minute grilling. He got some answers. He said they told him the trains would travel up to 59 mph and would pass by three to four times a week -- at any time of the day or night. There may be at least one highway overpass built to accommodate the trains, the officials told him. A bad-weather protocol will be developed, they said. But the department didn't have specific answers to some questions, Emmerich said. "The biggest concerns I have are that they don't seem to have any plans for informing people if there is an accident, or creating an evacuation plan," Emmerich said. "I want to see details. When they left, I felt more helpless than I did before they came." The Energy Department officials who made the visits would not be made available for comment, department spokesman Allen Benson said, speaking on their behalf. "We don't have all the answers yet," Benson said. "That's why we are so engaged in transportation planning activities." Calls to Bechtel SAIC were referred to the Energy Department. Some Nye County residents believe Yucca could be an economic boon. Nye County elected officials have long sought to negotiate for economic benefits if the repository is constructed. Nye County Commissioner Joni Eastley went along for some of the visits, but declined to describe the conversations. Residents directed their questions to the Energy Department, not her, she said. Reactions to the visits were "mixed," she said. "Some people support it," she said, "and some people are against it." Benson said the Energy Department will provide full details about the proposed shipping campaign well before trains ever begin hauling waste to Yucca. Local emergency responders will be trained about three years in advance of the shipments, he said. Benson noted that more public hearings on rail line will be held along the proposed route this year, perhaps late this summer. "There are a lot of people who look at this from an economic development point of view," Benson said. "And there are a lot of people who have questions about safety. And those are legitimate questions. That's why we are spending a lot of time there." The Energy Department faces more than just residents. Anxious mining companies have questions -- and suggestions -- about the rail route. The Energy Department has proposed withdrawing 308,600 acres of public land for the route, which would prohibit mining. The rail line would cut through some of the roughly 20,000 acres in the Goldfield area that Metallic Ventures Inc. has been exploring for years. Company officials have met with Yucca managers numerous times, most recently at the company's Goldfield office, urging them to consider another route west of their claims, said Ed Devenyns, vice president for corporate development. So far, the department seems at least open to considering alternatives, he said. "We believe the exploration potential is great," he said. "It just doesn't make sense to even potentially preclude development there. There are better alternatives." Joe Fellini, who owns one of the largest ranches in Nevada and holds grazing rights on a large swath of Nye County, said the train route would impact access to about 20 of his springs and wells. He's "mad as hell" and considering a lawsuit, he said. "They don't care," Fellini said. "They're going to do whatever they want." All contents copyright 2005 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 27 Inyo Register: Eyes on Amargosa's Yucca link Monday, March 07, 2005 A river runs through the controversy over proposed nuke waste dump, and potential contamination of Death Valley By Robin Flinchum The Inyo Register Correspondent Swollen by record rainfalls, Death Valley's seldom seen Amargosa River rushed through its Tecopa monitoring station at more than 1,000 cubic-feet per second last week, measuring 8.5 feet high, according to U.S.Geologic Survey readings, and raged on to spill over State Route 127, causing brief closures and some hair-raising moments for motorists trying to navigate the rising waters. Running at about 500 times its normal strength, the river caught the attention of desert enthusiasts interested in kayaking or rafting this rare phenomenon they've dubbed the Mighty Amargosa. But the mighty and sometimes unpredictable Amargosa, normally shy and flowing at about two cubic-feet per second under the surface of the dust-dry desert, is also the subject of a quieter and more somber study. For both independent and government-employed scientists, the Amargosa and its tributaries, otherwise so little thought of or noticed, are of grave importance. The course of this water could help decide the future of the proposed Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository in Nevada, just 17 miles past the Inyo County, and California state line. And if Yucca Mountain is ever built, studying the water in the Amargosa drainage could help protect future generations in Inyo County. "Every drop of surface water in the Yucca Mountain area of Nevada that is not evaporated flows south to Inyo County," said Jennifer Viereck, coordinator of an independent research project formed to study and document current levels of elements identified in the Safe Drinking Water Act. And she added, some studies indicate that the Amargosa is fed by deep aquifers running from under the Yucca Mountain area into California. In short, this means that the residents of the small Inyo County communities such as Death Valley Junction, the Timbisha Shoshone reservation, the employee housing complex at Furnace Creek in Death Valley National Park and the families living in Tecopa and Shoshone "would be among the first to be poisoned if something went wrong." Despite ongoing assurances by the Department of Energy, which is building Yucca Mountain, that nothing can go wrong in the packaging, transportation or storage of nuclear waste that must remain contained for at least 10,000 years, Viereck and several other researchers are unconvinced. So, under the auspices of a nonprofit group called Healing Ourselves and Mother Earth (HOME), they are developing baseline water tests in order to create a record for future generations to use when evaluating the amounts of radiation and other carcinogens that could leak from Yucca Mountain or the Nevada Test Site into water tables. In January, the team visited locations all along the course of the Amargosa River from Beatty, Nev., to its terminus in the Badwater basin inside Death Valley National Park. Along its route, south to the Dumont Dunes area where it turns north again, the Amargosa crosses under State Route 127 13 times. This highway currently sees sometimes as much as a truckload a day of low- or mixed-level nuclear waste rolling to the Nevada Test Site, according to a 2004 DOE report. "This is not a road specifically engineered for heavy traffic. This is just an old two-lane road made of asphalt rolled out over the desert," Viereck said. Minor flooding in the roadway is common during heavy rains and could lead to accidents involving vehicles carrying nuclear waste. While the federal government bets on the ability of its scientists and engineers to design containment systems that will last several hundred thousand years, HOME and other groups are tackling the task of how to respond if the gamble fails. Transportation issues are an immediate concern, but Viereck's group is currently focused on collecting data that could help protect future generations if concerns arise over whether the water has become polluted with radionuclides. Some testing has already been done in this area, Viereck said, but most testing is to determine water direction and levels. "We don't want to reinvent the wheel so we're investigating what other researchers have already done and trying to pull all of that information together." While a variety of organizations, including federal and Nye and Inyo counties, are studying the local water tables, few are coordinating their program objectives with one another, Viereck said, or publishing their findings so far. This makes getting basic information difficult, so another of the team's objectives is to establish a collection of this material for public access. "Remember Erin Brockovich?" Viereck asked. When Brockovich began her campaign to prove that PG had poisoned the people of Hinkley, Calif. with hexavalent chromium, she had no baseline studies to go from. If residents of Inyo County find themselves wondering in the future, they will have a place to start. And the Brokovich analogy is relevant in another way, Viereck said, since some of the new protective cask designs include chromium in their makeup. "This will make them last longer but when they do start to break down, and inevitably they will, then there will also be chromium hexafluoride leaking into the water." But knowing how to preserve the information for a time when it might be needed is tricky. "It could be 500 years before anyone needs this," Viereck said. "Information mediums are changing every couple of years so predicting what will be most accessible in 500 years or more is difficult." Depositing copies of the material in university libraries seems the most sensible choice, Viereck said. "We hope we'll still have universities in 500 years, but we don't really know what we'll have." The HOME studies are funded by a grant from the Citizens Monitoring and Technical Assessment Fund, created with a 1996 settlement from the DOE after 39 organizations charged the department with failure to provide affected citizens with adequate information about nuclear projects. The CMTA fund, Viereck said, has funded a variety of similar studies and projects all over the country. "It allows the people to hire their own experts," she said. The HOME experts on this project are hydrologist George Rice, and John Hadder, a chemist who has been working on the Yucca Mountain issue for many years. Together, Viereck said, they will decide what tests seem most appropriate and work with other interested agencies to get the testing done. "Obviously we can't drill our own wells for testing," Viereck said, so the group hopes to cooperate with landowners and other agencies such as Inyo County's Yucca Mountain Repository Assessment Office in obtaining samples. Studies done by Inyo County in wells drilled especially for that purpose were among the first to begin establishing the connection between the aquifer under Yucca Mountain and the springs inside Death Valley National Park. So far these wells and the studies generated by the data collected, said Viereck, "tell us where the water is moving. That tells us who would be poisoned first, but it doesn't tell us whether the water meets Safe Drinking Water standards now. We hope this testing can clarify current conditions and encourage ongoing monitoring. We have to be able to predict what people might be exposed to and you can't do that if you don't have a starting point." The testing can be expensive, Viereck said, so the group has to choose wisely. Costs can range between $15 and $1,000 per test, "so we have to figure out what's most important." For more information, visit www.h-o-m-e.org. ©2005 The Inyo Register ***************************************************************** 28 Inyo Register: Yucca Mtn. project rife with snarls Monday, March 07, 2005 Delay, funding cuts, possible lawsuits some of challenges facing nuclear waste storage effort at nearby Nev. site By Jon Klusmire The Inyo Register Staff Maybe it should be called the "Yuck-A" Mountain Nuke Waste Mess. In-fighting in the federal government, a new boss coming online, squabbles between counties over money, nuclear utilities getting cold feet, political posturing and uncertainty about what Congress will do have put a cloud of confusion over the progress of the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Disposal Project. Oh, and any sort of terrorist attack could blow up the debate over transporting high-level nuclear waste across the country and create a whole new level of paranoia and public fear. The end of 2004 brought several waves of uncertainty and outright confusion regarding Yucca Mountain, prompting plenty of speculation and supposition about the program's progress in 2005 and the fate of the entire endeavor, according to John Gervers, of Latir Energy Consultants, Inyo County's consultant for national nuclear waste affairs. The political and scientific climate now surrounding Yucca Mountain has caused some experts monitoring the huge undertaking to begin to get a feeling, and it's just a feeling, that the Yucca Mountain project "has not reached the point where it's a done deal," said Gervers. While work continues on the Yucca Mountain site, located on the Nevada Test Site, about 15 miles from the Death Valley area in Inyo County, developments in Washington, D.C., and across the country, have cast some doubt about the pace of work on Yucca Mountain. First came the announcement that the Department of Energy could not meet its December 2004 deadline to apply to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain. That delay pushed back the target opening date for the nuclear waste depository two years, from 2010 to 2012. However, Gervers said the recent resignation of Yucca Mountain Project Director Margaret Chu will likely push that opening date back another year, if not more. "Everyone knows it's going to keep slipping," he noted. If money is any gauge, President Bush isn't in any hurry to press ahead quickly with Yucca Mountain. Bush's proposed 2005 fiscal year budget for Yucca Mountain is $650 million, a significant reduction from last year's $880 million, and far from the $1 billion the DOE was seeking for the next year's work on Yucca Mountain, said Gervers. Also on the political front, Democrat Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, a Yucca foe, is the new Senate minority leader, Gervers pointed out, and only time will tell how Reid will use his clout to shape Congressional oversight and funding for the project. Another unknown is the position of the nation's nuclear utilities, who provide partial funding for Yucca Mountain, which is supposed to become the permanent home for the high-level nuclear waste generated by nuclear power plants. In recent months, "the first hints of a changing position" in the nuclear industry have started to emerge, Gervers said. With the NRC approving and extending nuclear plants' licenses for storing waste on-site, utilities could start "easing off their level of commitment to Yucca Mountain," said Gervers. A more radical step could also be in the offing. Since those utilities have been paying into the Nuclear Waste Fund since 1983, the longer the opening of Yucca Mountain is delayed, the better the chance some of those utilities could begin to sue DOE for taking their money and not meeting the obligation to build a permanent nuclear waste disposal facility, he noted. There is currently $16 billion in the fund. Conflicting scientific opinion about the containment standards that should be met at Yucca Mountain have also arisen. The National Academy of Sciences wants the depository to be able to contain radioactivity from spent nuclear fuel rods for 300,000 years, while DOE has been shooting for 10,000 years' worth of containment, said Gervers. A compromise consisting of a two-stage response, based on the 10,000-year standard and working on containing a "peak dose" of radioactivity for 300,000 years, could be under consideration, he noted. The unknown is if Congress will "intervene and make a decision not based on the best science," Gervers said. The recent brouhaha over the funding formula to split about $8 million between 10 counties, including Inyo, that are "Affected Units of Government" appears to be "a money grab" by the nine Nevada counties, said Gervers. He noted that Nye County, Nev., had failed a DOE audit of how the county used its oversight funds, and was the driving force behind a proposed funding formula that would cut Inyo County's DOE money in the upcoming 2005 federal fiscal year from $600,000 to $285,000. The county has officially protested that proposed cut and pointed out any change in the funding formula has to be agreed upon unanimously by the 10 affected counties. "I would recommend Inyo make a lot of noise, anyway you can," to the DOE and the county's Congressional delegation to ensure the county continues to receive its previous level of funding to continue scientific studies of Yucca Mountain's potential impacts on Inyo County, said Gervers. With Inyo County containing a potential shipping route to Yucca Mountain, transportation of nuclear waste has been one of the county's primary concerns. The transportation issue has not received a significant amount of national attention, noted Gervers, but that could change dramatically. If the unthinkable happens - "a terrorist act in the United States" - the public's "tolerance for nuclear shipments will likely drop very significantly," Gervers said. Adding that unthinkable unknown to the list of uncertainties and unknowns enveloping Yucca Mountain will, needless to say, add another time-consuming complicating the already complex, controversial plans to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain. ©2005 The Inyo Register ***************************************************************** 29 Las Vegas SUN: Officials visiting homeowners along Nevada nuclear waste route ASSOCIATED PRESS LAS VEGAS (AP) - Federal and Nye County officials have been making door-to-door visits in parts of Nevada where a proposed rail line would be built to haul radioactive waste to a national nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain. Energy Department officials have been to about 35 homes since June to explain the plan to transport highly radioactive waste through their backyards, officials and residents said. Reactions at kitchen tables have included shock, anger and cautious curiosity, said Susan Moore, an official with the Nye County Department of natural resources and federal facilities. "The biggest concerns I have are that they don't seem to have any plans for informing people if there is an accident, or creating an evacuation plan," said Kevin Emmerich, whose property near Beatty is about 2.5 miles from the planned rail line. Energy Department and Yucca contractor Bechtel SAIC representatives told him Jan. 24 that trains traveling up to 59 mph would pass three to four times a week, at any time of the day or night, Emmerich said. At least one highway overpass might be built to accommodate the trains, the officials told him, and a bad-weather protocol will be developed. Rancher Joe Fellini, who has grazing rights to a large areas of Nye County, said the train route would limit access to about 20 of his springs and wells. "They don't care," said Fellini, who said he was considering a lawsuit. "They're going to do whatever they want." More visits are planned with many of the 100 or so residents, ranchers and mining companies that own land affected by the proposed mile-wide rail corridor, said Moore, who helped organize the field trips. Energy Department spokesman Allen Benson said the officials who made the visits would not be available for comment. Calls to Bechtel SAIC were referred to the Energy Department. Some Nye County residents support Yucca development, and some county officials want to negotiate for economic benefits. "There are a lot of people who look at this from an economic development point of view," Benson said. "And there are a lot of people who have questions about safety. That's why we are spending a lot of time there." Despite budget shortfalls and other setbacks, the Energy Department is continuing with its plan to entomb at Yucca Mountain some 77,000 tons of radioactive waste now being stored at nuclear reactors and U.S. defense sites in 39 states. With recent delays, Energy Department officials say the repository won't open until at least 2012. Some program critics say it would be 2015 at the earliest. One hurdle is construction of a $1 billion, 319-mile rail route through Lincoln and Nye Counties to ship waste from a railhead near the Utah-Nevada state line. Energy Department officials have said construction won't be difficult, while critics say the route is across rugged terrain prone to occasional flooding. Benson said the Energy Department will provide full details about a shipping campaign well before trains begin hauling waste to Yucca, and emergency responders will be trained about three years in advance of the shipments. He said public hearings will be held this year along the proposed route. --- On the Net: Yucca Mountain project: --- Information from: Las Vegas Sun, -- All contents copyright 2005 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 30 NRC: Material Control and Accounting at Reactors and Wet Spent Fuel FR Doc 05-4313 [Federal Register: March 7, 2005 (Volume 70, Number 43)] [Notices] [Page 11035] From the Federal Register Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr07mr05-91] Storage Facilities AGENCY: Nuclear Regulatory Commission. ACTION: Notice of issuance. SUMMARY: The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has issued Bulletin (BL) 2005-01 to all holders of operating licenses for nuclear power reactors, decommissioning nuclear power reactor sites storing spent fuel in a pool, and wet spent fuel storage sites. This bulletin contains sensitive information relating to material control and accounting (MC) programs and is, therefore, being withheld from public disclosure in accordance with 10 CFR 2.390. The bulletin is being provided to only those licensees needing to respond to it. DATES: The bulletin was issued on February 11, 2005. ADDRESSES: Not applicable. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Martha Williams, at 301-415-7878, Glenn Tuttle, at 301-415-7644, or Dori Votolato, at 301-415-7633. Dated at Rockville, Maryland, this 28th day of February 2005. For the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Patrick L Hiland, Chief, Reactor Operations Branch, Division of Inspection Program Management, Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation. [FR Doc. 05-4313 Filed 3-4-05; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 7590-01-P ***************************************************************** 31 deseret news: Too much hysteria over nuclear waste, Utah physicist says [deseretnews.com] Monday, March 7, 2005 Blaine Howard isn't the kind of man to say I told you so. So when he heard the latest in the long-running controversy regarding locating a nuclear waste facility on Goshute Indian land in Utah's west desert — namely, that a Nuclear Regulatory Commission board did not bow to political and public pressure and scuttle the proposal on the grounds that it is unsafe — he did not get all smug about being right. But the retired health physicist does admit that, "my reaction was one of a relief." As I have stated in this column on numerous previous occasions, Howard, who served as the state of Utah's health physicist for 18 years in the 1970s and 1980s and has degrees from Ricks, New York University and BYU, has no personal stake in the business of dumping nuclear waste. Whether or not spent nuclear rods are transported to Utah is not his agenda. What is his agenda is educating Utahns that it is not dangerous to our health if nuclear waste is transported here. That and letting us know his belief that a little radiation could actually raise our average life span by a few more years and reduce our risk of contracting cancer. "It's not that the material they're talking about transporting isn't dangerous if it's not handled properly," says Blaine. "But precautions have been taken to ensure it is safe. The citizens of the state of Utah could not possibly get more than a trivial amount of radiation from the cannisters the way they're packaged. The regulatory agency knows this." As for that trivial amount of radiation that could get into our air supply, Blaine's educated opinion, after a lifetime immersed in the field, is that it would do us all a lot of good. He cites a number of statistical studies — one in Taiwan, another in France, another dealing with shipyard workers — that reveal that people exposed to low amounts of radiation have significantly lower mortality rates and cancer rates. In the shipyard case, more than 38,000 workers who dealt regularly with small amounts of radiation were compared with a similar number of workers not in regular contact with nuclear material. Those exposed to the radiation had a mortality rate more than 20 percent lower and a cancer rate 15 percent less. There are spas in places such as the Austrian Alps, the Czech Republic and the Canadian Rockies where people pay to immerse themselves in increased alpha particles in the belief it will improve their health. © 2005 Deseret News Publishing Company ***************************************************************** 32 CPO: New Report On Widespread Rocket Fuel Pollution In Food And Water Coastal Post Online MARIN COUNTY'S NEWS MONTHLY - FREE PRESS (415)868-1600 - (415)868-0502(fax) - P.O. Box 31, Bolinas, CA, 94924 March, 2005    In February the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) released its long anticipated report on the human health effects of perchlorates, a byproduct of rocket fuel. Perchlorates, which are a common pollutant near military sites, have recently been found in the water at concerning levels in 35 states as well as in 93% of lettuce and milk.    The government funded NAS report reveals that perchlorates are roughly ten times more toxic to humans than the Department of Defense has been claiming. Perchlorates can inhibit thyroid function, cause birth defects and lower IQs, and are considered particularly dangerous to children. Due to pressure on congress from the US military complex, there are currently no federal environmental policies regulating perchlorates.    The new NAS report recommends human exposure at no more than .0007 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. If this were developed into an actual drinking water standard, it would translate into no more than around 20ppb for drinking water. This is bad news for military sites and rocket fuel plants around the country, including Henderson, Nevada, where EPA well monitoring has found perchlorates at a level 30,000 times higher than that. Again, due to lack of federal policy on perchlorates, this excessive pollution is currently legal.    To date, only one Senator has had the backbone to propose legislation that would hold the military (and other perchlorate polluters) responsible for this excessive pollution of the US food and water supply.    Feinstein proposes legislation that would spend $200 million to identify and clean up perchlorate sources and provide grants for technologies to clean up existing contamination. She also plans to seek a new federal limit for perchlorate in drinking water and hold perchlorate polluters responsible for cleanup efforts.    "It is imperative that we reduce the perchlorate in our drinking water and protect Californians, especially pregnant women, the unborn, infants, and young children from this threat to their health," said Feinstein of the bill.    Ą 2002: EPA releases draft report highlighting widespread water contamination of a toxic rocket fuel byproduct known as perchlorate. The report indicates that most of the pollution is coming from US military sites [Source]    Ą January 2003: Courtroom proceedings reveal that aerospace and defense contractor Lockheed Martin was concealing documents for several years indicating the company knew about toxic levels of percholate contamination in the nation's vegetable produce. [Source]    Ą March 2003: California's Senator Feinstein demands the military clean up perchlorate pollution as a matter of public safety. The Department of Defense responds by saying it must be exempt from perchlorate liability, as a matter of anti-terrorist "readiness." [Source].    Ą April 2003: Bush Administration puts gag order on the Environmental Protection Agency, mandating complete silence regarding military perchlorate pollution and human health impacts. [Source]    Ą November 2004: FDA finds perchlorate in 93% of lettuce and milk samples across the nation. Bush Administration requests no regulatory action take place until the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) concludes investigation of human health implications. [Source]    Ą January 2005: NAS announces perchlorates are as much as ten times as toxic as what the Department of Defense had been claiming. Senator Feinstein of California announces forthcoming bill proposal to create federal perchlorate regulations and to allocate funding for cleanup of existing contamination. ***************************************************************** 33 San Francisco Chronicle: UC's Los Alamos chances looking better Charles Burress, Chronicle Staff Writer Monday, March 7, 2005 UC's chances for continuing to manage the nation's leading nuclear weapons lab, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, have won an apparent boost with the withdrawal of one of the most formidable potential competitors. The Battelle Memorial Institute, which runs five other U.S. Department of Energy labs, decided not to compete in order to focus on its existing lab contracts, said Bill Madia, Battelle's executive vice president for laboratory operations. UC has managed the Los Alamos facility, birthplace of the atomic bomb, since its World War II origin, but security and management lapses prompted the Department of Energy to open the contract to outside bidding. The current contract expires Sept. 30. The removal of Battelle from the competition is likely to boost UC's prospects for keeping the contract if UC regents decide to proceed with their own bid and if the shrinking field of potential competitors doesn't provoke a delay in the contract renewal process. Battelle, based in Columbus, Ohio, just recently added its fifth national lab when a Battelle-led consortium won a 10-year, $4.8 billion contract to manage the 3,000-employee Idaho National Laboratory. That new responsibility, in combination with seeing the Department of Energy's draft competition guidelines issued in December for managing the 8,300-employee Los Alamos facility, convinced Battelle to withdraw, Madia said in a telephone interview Sunday. Battelle was a top potential competitor for Los Alamos because it also manages or co-manages the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. "We thought it would be better for us to focus on running these five labs with excellence rather than extend beyond our current resources," Madia said. He said Battelle decided not to compete about six weeks ago but did not announce it. "We don't typically announce no-bid decisions," he said. Battelle's withdrawal follows that of several other potential competitors, including the University of Texas, Texas A University and Lockheed Martin. Among those still believed to be eyeing a bid are Northrop Grumman and General Atomics. The Department of Energy is expected to release its formal request for proposals for the Los Alamos contract in the next few weeks, triggering a 60- day period during which official proposals would have to be submitted. Selection is expected this summer. UC spokesman Chris Harrington declined to speculate Sunday on whether Battelle's withdrawal would strengthen UC's chances. "The university is not watching the playing field here," he said, "but we are focused on the ongoing playing field of managing our national labs." UC also is the founding manager of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Those labs' contracts also were opened to competition, though continued UC management of the Berkeley lab appears assured. Congress authorized extending the Livermore contract until 2007. UC officials have been actively preparing a bid to keep the Los Alamos contract, and UC regents are expected to vote soon on whether to give the green light. A UC bid would likely include a private-sector partner. "The University of California is preparing a very strong bid (for Los Alamos) should the regents decide to compete," Harrington said. E-mail Charles Burress at cburress@sfchronicle.com Page A - 8 The San Francisco Chronicle] ***************************************************************** 34 Daily Bruin: Groups consent to clean Los Alamos lab Monday, March 07, 2005 By Nancy Su DAILY BRUIN CONTRIBUTOR nsu@media.ucla.edu A legally enforceable order to clean up environmental contamination at the University of California-managed Los Alamos National Laboratory was signed last week after nearly two years of negotiations. The order of consent made March 1 between the New Mexico Environment Department, the U.S. Department of Energy and the UC requires comprehensive investigation and cleanup of environmental contamination, including cleanup of material disposal areas, ground water and other areas of contamination by the lab. "The order provides a clear path forward for cleaning up the environment. We are happy to have reached an agreement based on trust with the state of New Mexico," said Los Alamos spokeswoman Kathy Delucas. Lab director Pete Nanos said in a statement that the order will help meet the lab's commitment to protecting the safety of the its employees and of the surrounding environment. The agreement sets a timetable for completion of the cleanup by 2015, well beyond the reach of the UC's current management contract of the lab. After operating Los Alamos for more than half a century, the UC's management contract expires in September of this year, and the UC Board of Regents has not announced whether it would seek for a renewal of the contract. UC officials declined to comment on how the environmental-cleanup agreement will affect the regents' decision on the management contract. The board is not expected to vote for the renewal until after a final request for proposals is released by the U.S. Department of Energy. Nuclear Watch of New Mexico, an organization that works to inform the public on nuclear issues and encourage greater environmental protection, announced it would bid for management of the lab. Scott Kovac, operations director of Nuclear Watch of New Mexico, said they are strongly in favor of the order to clean up. "We look forward to the opportunity to clean up Los Alamos National Laboratory. We would do it as quickly as possible," Kovac said. Kovac added that his organization is concerned that standards used to clean up the land may not be high enough and that many contaminated places should be cleaned up to agricultural standards instead of the industrial standards that the order calls for. The order for cleanup was based on information that past actions by the Los Alamos lab have caused hazardous waste to be released into the environment and that an estimated 1,900 sites at the lab currently require corrective action. UC officials have said they followed required cleanup processes in a draft order issued by state officials last year while the state and the university negotiated the final agreement. Since 1945 the lab has created, treated, stored, and disposed of hazardous and radioactive wastes, some of which have created environmental contamination in the surrounding land and water, according to the New Mexico Environment Department. In a statement, New Mexico Lt. Gov. Diane Denish said that "the agreement will help protect New Mexicans for generations to come." Email News at news@
media.ucla.edufor questions or concerns about this article. Copyright 2005 ASUCLA Student Media ***************************************************************** 35 lamonitor.com: Senators defend LANL pensions; express concern The Online News Source for Los Alamos ROGER SNODGRASS, roger@lamonitor.com, Monitor Assistant Editor New Mexico's two senators were on the same page Friday, joining to issue a single set of comments to the most recent revisions of the Department of Energy's request for proposals on managing Los Alamos National Laboratory. The senators were not satisfied with Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman's answers to their questions during a committee hearing on the administration's budget request for the department in Washington Thursday. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-NM, and Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-NM, the two top leaders of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee with jurisdiction over DOE, objected particularly to the idea of a stand-alone benefits and pension plan for LANL employees. The idea was included in white papers prepared by the Source Evaluation Board (SEB) overseeing the competition process. The white papers were intended to respond to a first round of comments on the draft request for proposals. The first draft drew criticism from LANL employees and expressions of concern from the senators that employee pensions were not adequately protected. Now, the senators rejected the procurement committee's suggestion that the winning bidder would create a separate corporate entity to carry out the contract. Such a move, the senators say, could push senior weapons designers into retirement, in order to lock in current benefits, while deterring younger scientists from seeking employment at LANL. A management mechanism in the previous draft described a process for adjusting lab pensions closer to prevailing compensation at other DOE laboratories. Since LANL employees under the University of California pension plan receive pensions well above average, a leveling could only mean a reduction. The revised RFP language would still apply the leveling influence, but over a period of time established by the contracting officer. In a joint letter to Bodman Friday, the deadline for submitting comments, the two Senators insisted that the National Nuclear Security Administration that manages the nuclear complex for DOE "not foreclose the option of continuing the existing benefits plan or allowing the new contractor to utilize the existing plan." The senators called for flexibility and preserving options. They criticized "competition at any cost." They wrote, "We believe the best way for the SEB to guarantee that employees receive 'substantially equivalent' benefits would be to allow existing employees to remain within the University of California Retirement Plan." Following the current course outlined in the RFP, the senators estimated for the first time, could add $100 million per year to the lab's overhead, an increase that runs counter to the FY 2006 budget request which proposes precisely the opposite funding, a reduction of $500 million over the next five years. "We hope the SEB will publish a Final RFP that will not: reduce employee compensation and retirement benefits, reduce the mandate to support world-class scientific research, or increase operating costs to a level that cannot be supported with the budget," they concluded. The senators did find positive features in the proposed modifications, including the 180-day contract extension that will be requested, in order to provide adequate time for the winning bidder to prepare pension and benefit plans that meet the contracting officers approval and allows employees enough time during the transition to evaluate any changes and differentials. © 2003 Los Alamos Monitor All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 36 lamonitor.com: UC looking at management The Online News Source for Los Alamos ROGER SNODGRASS, , Monitor Assistant Editor A story out of Oakland suggesting that the University of California was shopping for a new director at Los Alamos National Laboratory was neither confirmed nor denied by the end of the day Friday. A UC statement partly corroborated Ian Hoffman's article in the Oakland Tribune. Hoffman cited an unnamed source that had been approached by a management search company, looking for a senior manager who might be qualified to run a national laboratory. Chris Harrington, a UC spokesperson, acknowledged only that the university was reviewing its management personnel in preparation for its bid, should the Board of Regents decide to compete for the LANL contract. A statement from LANL Director G. Peter Nanos affirmed he served at the pleasure of UC and agreed with UC's thorough review of the senior management team. Having risen to his position at the lab by the sudden resignation of his predecessor, Nanos said during the first few months on the job that he knew there were no guarantees that he would not face the same fate. In the months since the laboratory's security and safety crises prompted a total suspension of activities, LANL public affairs spokespeople have denied a number of rumors that Nanos might be replaced. © 2003 Los Alamos Monitor All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 37 [du-list] DU in the news -4th March 05 Date: Mon, 07 Mar 2005 15:40:26 -0800 Reuters via Yahoo! News, Fri, 04 Mar 2005 9:29 AM PST Tungsten Shrapnel Leads to Tumors in Rats http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050304/hl_nm/tungsten_cancer_dc_1 Shrapnel wounds caused by weapons grade tungsten alloy triggers aggressive tumors in rats, according to military researchers. Mineweb, Fri, 04 Mar 2005 8:01 AM PST Energy Metals Corporation http://www.mineweb.net/co_releases/421579.htm Vancouver, BC, March 4, 2005 - Energy Metals Corporation (the "Company") announces that William M. Sheriff, President of the Company's wholly-owned subsidiary, Energy Metals Corporation (US), has been appointed to the board of directors of the Company. Belfast Telegraph, Fri, 04 Mar 2005 4:01 AM PST Vietnam War victims of Agent Orange poisoning sue US chemical companies http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/story.jsp?story=616746 Vietnamese citizens who say they have suffered a lifetime of health problems after being poisoned by Agent Orange during the Vietnam War are suing the American chemical companies that provided the Pentagon with the toxic defoliant. Myrtle Beach Online, Fri, 04 Mar 2005 0:08 AM PST Duke gets OK to use mixed fuel in Lake Wylie nuclear reactor http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/mld/myrtlebeachonline/news/local/11048420.htm COLUMBIA - Duke Power has received final approval to begin testing nuclear reactor fuel that contains weapons-grade plutonium at its power plant on Lake Wylie. The Palestine Chronicle, Fri, 04 Mar 2005 6:03 AM PST Welcome to Palestine Chronicle Weekly Journal! http://www.palestinechronicle.com/story.php?sid=20050304080116377 "Almost everything about a Blair regime was known before it was elected. Blair's Vichy-like devotion to Washington was known. His devotion to Rupert Murdoch was known. His devotion to an extreme neoliberal Thatcherite economics was known. His class contempt for the poor was also known.." News Daily, Thu, 03 Mar 2005 8:05 PM PST First Army caring for soldiers http://www.news-daily.com/articles/2005/03/04/news/news1.txt Army Master Sgt. Anthony Kingston was doing physical training in Uzbekistan when he noticed that one of his legs would grow numb when he ran. ---------- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.308 / Virus Database: 266.6.2 - Release Date: 3/4/05 [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Has someone you know been affected by illness or disease? Network for Good is THE place to support health awareness efforts! http://us.click.yahoo.com/RzSHvD/UOnJAA/79vVAA/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/ ***************************************************************** 38 Animated Nuclear Power 101s Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2005 18:52:34 -0500 ----- Original Message ----- From: "Russell D. Hoffman" To: Sent: Monday, March 07, 2005 2:24 PM Subject: New Macromedia Flash web site presents U.S. nuclear reactor systems in animated format March 7th, 2005 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Re: New interactive animations show the inner workings of U.S. nuclear power reactors. To help people understand nuclear power, the author has created a web site with animated drawings of the two types of nuclear reactors in use in the United States: Pressurized Water Reactors (PWRs) and Boiling Water Reactors (BWRs). There is an animated overview for each type and, for the PWR, there is also a view showing a typical steam generator arrangement. For the BWR, there is a reactor core flow diagram. All four animations are based on common, well-known industrial illustrations of Westinghouse and General Electric reactors. The program may be freely copied if left unchanged. Here is the URL for these new animations: http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environm/nukequiz/nukequiz_one/nuke_parts/reactor_parts.swf Depending on your browser and/or email settings, you might want to try the "html" file instead: http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environm/nukequiz/nukequiz_one/nuke_parts/reactor_parts.html -------------------------------------------------- ------------------------ This author would also like to gratefully acknowledge Synthesis/Regeneration: A Magazine of Green Social Thought, which included my essay about the dangers of tsunamis and nuclear power plants in their March issue (page 4). Other places the Tsunami article can be found include: http://www.counterpunch.org/hoffman12292004.html http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/printer_123004W.shtml http://progressivetrail.org/articles/041231D.Hoffman.shtml http://www.leftgatekeepers.com/articles/TsunamisAndNuclearPowerPlantByRussellDHoffman.htm These sites have also either posted the article, or at least a link to one of the other postings, and usually a description as well: http://www.malaysia-today.net/Blog-i/2004_12_30_MT_international_archive.htm http://www.semitic.org/hoffman12292004.html http://www.fornits.com/renegade/peaars.cgi?fetch=8028 http://www.thedeprogrammer.com/nukes.html http://lightspeedpub.blogspot.com/2004_12_01_lightspeedpub_archive.html http://r7rock.blogdrive.com/comments?id=26 http://lists.nfg.nl/mhonarc/listeeworld/msg00237.html You'll also find the essay mentioned at the dukeemployees.com web site: http://www.dukeemployees.com/nuclear31.shtml -------------------------------------------------- ------------------------ To see what can go wrong at these reactors, please view my previous animation, called ONE BAD DAY AT SAN ONOFRE, about an internal memo sent by the plant's management to all employees in December, 2004 regarding this author. ONE BAD DAY includes a graphic depiction of various natural (and unnatural) disasters which might befall the facility (move your mouse over the icon ONE BAD DAY, on the left, to view the animated destruction of the facility): http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environm/onofre/2005/sce_memo/sce_memo_2004.swf or try: http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environm/onofre/2005/sce_memo/sce_memo_2004.html -------------------------------------------------- ------------------------ Here are some additional URLs for essays and animations about nuclear power by this author: Animated history of U.S. nuclear activities, including over 1500 data points (ongoing project): 21 subcritical tests 1033 bomb blasts on, above, or under continental U.S. soil 113 additional U.S. bomb blasts 10 U.S. Carriers 190 U.S. Nuclear Submarines 28 U.S. Nuclear rockets 9 U.S. Nuclear Cruisers 1 U.S. "Civilian" nuclear ship 41 BWRs (8 closed) 83 PWRs (13 closed) 1 Yucca Mountain A few dozen mines, also research facilities, processing plants, etc. etc.. http://www.animatedsoftware.com/poifu/poifu.swf or try: http://www.animatedsoftware.com/poifu/poifu.html List of U.S. Nuclear Power Plants with , with activists, output levels, CRAC-2 estimates, years of operation, owners, locations, etc: http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environm/no_nukes/nukelist.htm Glossary of Nuclear Terminology (aka "the Demon Hot Atom"): http://www.animatedsoftware.com/hotwords/index.htm List of most of the ~500 books in my collection about nuclear energy, atomic theory, and nuclear weapons: http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environm/no_nukes/mybooks.htm NASA's Nuclear Nuttiness (which is ongoing, with the expected 2006 launch of another "RTG)": http://www.animatedsoftware.com/mx/nasa/columbia/index.swf The Effects of Nuclear War -- don't let this happen to you (or in your name)!: http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environm/no_nukes/tenw/nuke_war.htm Shut San Onofre home page: http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environm/onofre/index.htm My own personal Flash-based home page: http://animatedsoftware.com/mx/ Non-Flash: http://animatedsoftware.com/ =============================================== Contact information for the author of this email: =============================================== ************************************************* ** THE ANIMATED SOFTWARE COMPANY ** Russell D. Hoffman, Owner and Chief Programmer ** P.O. Box 1936, Carlsbad CA 92018-1936 ** (800) 551-2726 ** (760) 720-7261 ** Fax: (760) 720-7394 ** Visit the world's most eclectic web site: ** http://www.animatedsoftware.com ************************************************* rhoffman@animatedsoftware.com MailTo:rhoffman@animatedsoftware.com?Subject=Unsubscribe-me-please . Please be sure that "Unsubscribe-me-please" appears in the subject line. ***************************************************************** 39 Hans Bethe, Father of Nuclear Astrophysics, Dies at 98 Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2005 20:07:09 -0500 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/07/science/08cnd-bethe.html?hp Hans Bethe, Father of Nuclear Astrophysics, Dies at 98 By WILLIAM J. BROAD Published: March 7, 2005 ans Bethe, who discovered the violent force behind sunlight, helped devise the atom bomb and eventually cried out against the military excesses of the cold war, died late Sunday. He was 98, among the last of the giants who inaugurated the nuclear age. His death was announced by Cornell University, where he worked and taught for 70 years. A spokesman said he died quietly at home. Advertisement Except for the war years at Los Alamos, N.M., Dr. Bethe lived in Ithaca, N.Y., an unpretentious man of uncommon gifts. His students called him Hans and admired his muddy shoes as much as his explaining how certain kinds of stars shine. For number crunching, in lieu of calculators, he relied on a slide rule, its case battered. "For the things I do," he remarked a few years ago, "it's accurate enough." For nearly eight decades, Dr. Bethe (pronounced BAY-tah) pioneered some of the most esoteric realms of physics and astrophysics, politics and armaments, long advising the federal government and in time emerging as the science community's liberal conscience. During the war, he led the theoreticians who devised the atom bomb and for decades afterwards fought against many new arms proposals. His wife, Rose, often discussed moral questions with him and, by all accounts, helped him decide what was right and wrong. Dr. Bethe fled Europe for the United States in the 1930's and quickly became a star of science. As a physicist, he made discoveries in the world of tiny particles described by quantum mechanics and the whorls of time and space envisioned by relativity theory. He did so into his mid-90's, astonishing colleagues with his continuing vigor and insight. In a 1938 paper, Dr. Bethe explained how stars like the Sun fuse hydrogen into helium, releasing energy and ultimately light. That work helped establish his reputation as the father of nuclear astrophysics, and nearly 30 years later, in 1967, earned him the Nobel Prize in physics. In all, he published more than 300 scientific and technical papers, many of them originally classified secret. Politically, Dr. Bethe was the liberal counterpoint (and proud of it) to Edward Teller, the physicist and conservative who played a dominant role in developing the hydrogen bomb. That weapon brought to earth a more furious kind of solar fusion, and Dr. Bethe opposed its development as immoral. For more than half a century, he championed many forms of arms control and nuclear disarmament, becoming a hero of the liberal intelligentsia. His wife called him a dove, Dr. Bethe once told an interviewer, adding his own qualifier: "A tough dove." His gentle manner hid an iron will and mind that had few hesitations about identifying what he saw as error, hypocrisy or danger. "His sense of duty toward society is so deeply ingrained that he isn't even aware of its being a sacrifice," a close colleague, Dr. Victor F. Weisskopf, once remarked. In a 1997 interview in his Cornell office, at age 90, Dr. Bethe said he had no regrets about his role in inventing the atom bomb, done amid worries about the Nazis' getting it first and conquering the world. But as the most senior of the living scientists who initiated the atomic age, he urged the United States to renounce all research on nuclear arms and called on scientists everywhere to do likewise. His ultimate dream, he said, his blue eyes calm, was for nations to cut their nuclear arsenals to a few hundred weapons or less. "Then," added the survivor of Hitler and Mussolini, "even if statesmen go crazy again, as they used to be, the use of these weapons will not destroy civilization." Throughout life, he remained a staunch advocate of nuclear power, defending it as an answer to inevitable fossil-fuel shortages. Dr. Bethe was the last of the scientific greats who initiated the nuclear era, outliving not only Teller but Enrico Fermi and Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific head of wartime Los Alamos. "He was one of Oppenheimer's first recruits," noted Robert S. Norris, author of "Racing for The Bomb" (Steerforth Press, 2002), "and was among the last survivors of that extraordinary story." Mr. Norris added that Dr. Bethe was "the almost perfect expression" of the scientist-activist, driven by a sense of responsibility for his own atomic breakthroughs and those of his physicist colleagues. "He saw his role as to educate the public and the policymakers about the new dangers and help figure out ways to control them," Mr. Norris said. A biographer, Silvan S. Schweber of Brandeis University, author of "In the Shadow of the Bomb" (Princeton, 2000), said he had despaired of mastering Dr. Bethe's achieve of letters, papers and documents. Later, he feared that he would need "three fat volumes" to tell the physicist's story. He described Dr. Bethe as a moralist who took stands in defense of universities, democracy and society. What gave him the courage to do so, he added, was self-confidence, a strong personality and the support of the community of friends and scientists he nurtured for nearly seven decades at Cornell. Advertisement Richard Rhodes, who wrote of Dr. Bethe in "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" (Simon and Schuster, 1986), remarked on his sunny disposition despite his long struggle with nuclear dilemmas. "He seemed so calm and, later in life, so serene," Mr. Rhodes said. "That's interesting because he, more than any other leading figure of the Manhattan Project, agonized over his participation, first in the bomb itself and then in thermonuclear research" to see if a hydrogen bomb was possible. Mary Palevsky, who interviewed Dr. Bethe for a book on the nuclear age, recalled him as so remarkably "intellectually open that he was always a pleasure to talk to." His warmth, his modesty, his integrity, won the respect of all who knew him, friend and foe alike. He was not a tragic figure wracked by guilt - the fate of some who came to regret their bomb labors - but a man famous for his indefatigable appetite. His lean body could boom with laughter. He loved to ski and climb mountains with colleagues. Students learned to rely on his patience and readiness to help, be it with research or personal problems. His door, they found, was always open. Freeman Dyson, a mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton who was born in Britain, recalled meeting Dr. Bethe at Cornell in 1947. "The thing that impressed me the most," he said, "was that he had very muddy shoes and all the students called him Hans. So he was just the opposite of a European professor. That was part of his greatness. He was totally unpretentious and never tried to be bigger than he was." Dr. Bethe, he added, "always had lunch with the students and had a real concern for the teaching and all the students he was responsible for. He had a wonderful gift for finding the right problem for them, not too difficult and not too easy." What is perhaps most remarkable about Dr. Bethe is how his long life embodied a deep faith not in the ultimate authority of science but of people and the human spirit - a surprising stance for a man often viewed as one of the field's high priests. He understood its limits. His personal philosophy seemed deceptively simple: science and technology, while good friends of great importance, cannot save humanity. Instead, he taught that only humane reasoning and the struggle to foster just human relationships would keep civilization from using the accomplishments of science to destroy itself. Hans Albrecht Bethe was born on July 2, 1906, in Strasbourg, Alsace-Lorraine, to a family of modest means. His father, a physiologist at the University of Strasbourg, was a Protestant and his mother Jewish. He was their only child. The frail youth showed an early genius for mathematics, which his father discouraged, not wanting his son to get ahead of his peers. The precocious boy took to secretly reading his father's books on trigonometry and calculus. Dr. Bethe once said he grew up in the solace of "numbers and fairy tales" - things, he added, that a young boy got interested in when he did not have a little sister to beat up. The family moved to Frankfurt, where his father founded a physiology department at the new university. At the nearby gymnasium, or secondary school, his son studied Greek and Latin, French and English, but excelled at math and physics, deciding he wanted to do both. His father, meanwhile, became active as a liberal democrat, running for the city parliament and winning the young man's admiration. At the University of Munich, Dr. Bethe studied with Arnold Sommerfeld, one of the day's leading theoretical physicists. His teacher bristled with excitement for modern physics, and the student was soon lost to anything else. In 1928, Dr. Bethe received his doctorate, graduating summa cum laude, having already made contributions to the fledgling science of quantum mechanics. The next year he worked for Paul P. Ewald, a noted physicist in Stuttgart, and befriended his family, often visiting and having dinner. Advertisement Have our Top 20 Newsletter delivered to your Inbox each week! The Most "WOW!" Travel Deals on the Internet - here's a sampling: Released MAR 2, 2005 Major Airlines $75-$85 Fly Coast-to-Coast to/from 10 Cities Stein Eriksen Lodge $119 Luxury 5-Diamond Resort in Park City (Utah) United Airlines $179 London from Chicago, Roundtrip (!) Major Airlines $37-$94 San Diego from 30+ Cities Expedia.com $249 4-Night Cruises from California on 4 Upscale Ships Belleview Biltmore Resort & Spa $99 Florida Spa Resort at Half-Price in April Click on any deal and check them out today! *Fares listed may not include all taxes, charges and government fees. More information. © 2005 Travelzoo Inc. At times, Dr. Bethe took the older Ewald children on Sunday walks, including Rose, his future wife. After stints at several universities, he came into conflict with the new Nazi race laws and fled Germany in 1933. For two years he taught in England and then came to Cornell University, in Ithaca, where he remained the rest of his academic life. While lecturing at Duke University in 1937, he bumped into Rose Ewald, who had emigrated and was going to the school. The two fell in love. At Cornell, Dr. Bethe wrote a series of brilliant papers that culminated in the 1938 treatise, "Energy Production in Stars." It set forth the first and only explanation of stellar energy that explained all the known facts - essentially why stars like the Sun burn for billions of years. His talents were synthetic as well as analytic, as evidenced by his production of a wealth of incisive review articles that became required reading for generations of physicists. Known as "Bethe's bible," they, like much else he did, mirrored his precision, thoroughness and extraordinary powers of concentration The world - and his world, in particular - changed forever in 1938, when German scientists discovered that the atom could be split in two in a burst of atomic energy, starting quiet deliberations around the globe into the practicality of chain reactions and a bomb. In America, Dr. Bethe discussed the matter with Teller, another refugee from the Nazis. The two were close friends. In New Rochelle, N.Y., the Hungarian physicist was one of the few guests invited when Dr. Bethe and Rose got married in September 1939. In addition to his wife, Dr. Bethe is survived by two children, Henry, of Ithaca, and Monica, who lives near Kyoto, Japan, and three grandchildren. Dr. Bethe's reputation grew with the war effort. In 1940, Time magazine called him "one of Nazi Germany's greatest gifts to the United States." He was helping advance radar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when an atomic recruiter came to call, meeting him conspiratorially in the Harvard Yard. In 1942, during a walk in the mountains of Yosemite, his wife asked him "to consider carefully" if he wanted to continue assessing the feasibility of nuclear arms, Dr. Bethe told Jeremy Bernstein, author of "Hans Bethe, Prophet of Energy" (Basic Books, 1979). Worried that Nazi Germany wanted such weapons, he decided that he did. In 1943, he was named the first director of the theoretical division at Los Alamos, the secret laboratory in the mountains of New Mexico where thousands of scientists, technicians and military personnel were gathering to see if a nuclear bomb was indeed possible. Behind rows of barbed wire, he coaxed some of world's brightest and most idiosyncratic experts to work hard on how to unlock the atom. In typical fashion, he bore down on the problems like a battleship, studying them carefully and then crushing them. Colleagues often balked. "No, no, you're crazy!" Dr. Richard Feynman, a young scientist who eventually gained fame as an eccentric genius, protested one day. But Dr. Bethe plowed ahead, proving his idea exactly right. At Los Alamos, Dr. Bethe's group calculated such things as how much plutonium it would take to build an atom bomb, and whether the detonation would ignite the atmosphere and destroy the earth. The bomb's horrors became a turning point for Dr. Bethe. After the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he devoted himself to trying to stop the weapon's "own impulse," as he put it. While retaining links to the government and Los Alamos, he helped lead the corps of atomic scientists who, in an unprecedented wave, left secluded laboratories to plead before Congress and the American public for nuclear restraint. He also plunged back into academic life at Cornell, educating a new generation of physicists. He recruited Dr. Feynman, his Los Alamos protégé, and helped him develop quantum electrodynamics, an advanced theory for which Dr. Feynman eventually shared the Nobel Prize. In April 1950, Dr. Bethe wrote a provocative article in Scientific American arguing against development of the hydrogen bomb, an advance then looming. He had concluded, after discussions with his wife and colleagues, that it had little military use and was primarily a weapon for incinerating civilians in large cities. "We must save humanity from this ultimate disaster," he wrote. "And we must break the habit, which seems to have taken hold of this nation, of considering every weapon as just another piece of machinery and a fair means to win our struggle with the U.S.S.R." Advertisement Have our Top 20 Newsletter delivered to your Inbox each week! The Most "WOW!" Travel Deals on the Internet - here's a sampling: Released MAR 2, 2005 Major Airlines $75-$85 Fly Coast-to-Coast to/from 10 Cities Stein Eriksen Lodge $119 Luxury 5-Diamond Resort in Park City (Utah) United Airlines $179 London from Chicago, Roundtrip (!) Major Airlines $37-$94 San Diego from 30+ Cities Expedia.com $249 4-Night Cruises from California on 4 Upscale Ships Belleview Biltmore Resort & Spa $99 Florida Spa Resort at Half-Price in April Click on any deal and check them out today! *Fares listed may not include all taxes, charges and government fees. More information. © 2005 Travelzoo Inc. By contrast, Teller lobbied hard for the superbomb, as it was called. Dr. Bethe worked on it too, hoping to prove the idea impossible and considering his work a hedge against the possibility that the Soviets might get it first. In 1952, a blinding flash of light marked the detonation of the world's first hydrogen bomb, its power roughly one thousand times greater than the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima. During the cold war, Dr. Bethe and Teller went from increasingly cool friends to bitter foes. The denouement came in 1954 - at the height of the McCarthy era - over the government's push to remove the security clearance of Oppenheimer, then the top scientific adviser to the Atomic Energy Commission and a man who probably held more nuclear secrets in his head than any other American. One charge was that Oppenheimer had argued against a crash program for H-bomb development. Another was that he had Communist ties. In Washington, Dr. Bethe and his wife spent an evening trying to persuade Teller to testify in favor of Oppenheimer - to no avail. At a secret hearing, Dr. Bethe defended his former boss and Teller strongly faulted Oppenheimer's judgment. The clearance was eventually revoked, and Oppenheimer quickly fell from power. Afterward, Dr. Bethe wrote a long article charging that Teller, not Oppenheimer, had hindered the nation's pursuit of the superbomb for years due to a series of mathematical errors. It was only after the size of Teller's mistakes became apparent, Dr. Bethe wrote, that Teller and his colleagues were forced to find the right way to go about solving the problem. The article, written in 1954, was quickly stamped top secret and only declassified three decades later. Despite his fears of an unfettered arms race, Dr. Bethe continued to consult for the government and on occasion to help make weapons. In 1955, he perfected a general theory of ablation that was applied to the construction of warheads that could withstand the searing heat of re-entry through the earth's atmosphere. His idea helped beget the intercontinental ballistic missile. Increasingly, he also sought ways to slow the nuclear arms race, winning new influence for his ideas in Washington. As a member of the President's Science Advisory Committee, starting in 1956, he became a driving force behind the world's first and most successful arms control pact - the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, which confined nuclear tests to beneath the earth. In usual fashion, Teller fought it all the way. Dr. Bethe saw the treaty as a bold step toward disarmament and a way to end the rain of radioactive fallout that had increased people's risk of cancer and birth defects. "Very good. Very right," he remarked on the occasion of its signing, visibly moved. His influence soaring, in 1967 Dr. Bethe was awarded the Nobel Prize for his explanation of how the stars shine. A 1968 profile by the journalist Lee Edison described Dr. Bethe as "a tall, spare man with a deceptively distracted look." He wrote: "His graying hair seems permanently electrified; his shoes are scuffed, and his tie seems to have been studiously arranged to miss his collar button. He listens attentively, nodding his head as if in agreement, but - as devastated colleagues and adversaries have discovered - this habit is far from a sign of agreement. His 'yes, yes, yes' is rather a signal that his mental apparatus is receiving. What he does with the input is another matter." In the late 1960's and early 1970's Dr. Bethe lent his growing prestige to fight the government's plans to deploy antimissile weapons. Having studied the issue for President Dwight D. Eisenhower, he was convinced that all such systems could be easily defeated. It was just too easy, he held, for an adversary to make decoys and other countermeasures that offensive missiles would jettison to outwit defensive arms. And while militarily futile, he argued, antimissile arms would succeed extremely well at adding costly new spirals to the arms race as each side struggled for advantage. Like before, Dr. Bethe found himself strongly opposed by Teller, who this time wanted to shield America from the hydrogen bombs that adversaries had learned how to make. In 1975, at a cost of some $6 billion, the government switched on a limited antimissile system that was soon abandoned because of its ineffectiveness. Advertisement In the 1970's, after the Arab oil embargo started a global economic crisis, Dr. Bethe threw himself into championing new ways to produce energy. In articles, speeches and Congressional hearings, he argued that the dangers of nuclear reactors were small compared with many other risks judged to be socially acceptable. During this period, Dr. Bethe and Teller, both firm advocates of nuclear power, became somewhat closer, "although not with the intimacy of the old days," Dr. Bethe recalled. He formally retired from Cornell in the summer of 1975. But that did little to slow his activity. In the 1980's, with the arrival of the Reagan administration, Dr. Bethe again found himself the elder spokesman of scientists opposed to unfettered development of nuclear arms. And his relations with Teller again began to cool. The Pentagon, he said in an article, "proposes to address all threats - real and imagined - by raising the ante," adding, "It refuses to recognize that our worst nightmares can be laid to rest only by constraints on technology." With passion, he fought President Reagan's proposed shield against enemy missiles, known popularly as "Star Wars." It again pitted him against Teller in what would be their last battle. In February 1983, Teller tried to win over Dr. Bethe by revealing the secret details of what he considered the ultimate technical fix - the X-ray laser, powered by a nuclear bomb. It would emit powerful beams to smash Soviet warheads before consuming itself in a ball of nuclear fire, an H-bomb to destroy H-bombs. "You have a splendid idea," Dr. Bethe said, complimenting Teller on its physics. But he soon led opposition to the X-ray laser, arguing that an enemy could easily outwit the exotic weapon. "We need to try to understand the other fellow and negotiate and try to come to some agreement about the common danger," Dr. Bethe said after his Teller meeting. "That is what's been forgotten. The solution can only be political. It would be terribly comfortable for the president and the secretary of defense if there was a technical solution. But there isn't any." Ultimately, the government sided with Dr. Bethe, foregoing antimissile deployments in the 1980's and 1990's, a decision the Bush administration has now reversed. In his memoirs, Teller accused Dr. Bethe of letting his political views color his technical judgment. Throughout the political activism that marked his later life, Dr. Bethe never abandoned his first love - science. With what might be seen as poetic finesse, he turned his attention to the question of why old stars can suddenly explode with the brilliance of an entire galaxy. An average star like the sun dies quietly. But larger ones can die violently, though no one is quite sure why. "They go on a rampage," Dr. Bethe said with a smile, the blackboard behind him filled with equations. "In a year they emit as much energy as the sun does in 10 billion years of history. Why does this happen?" At the start, he said, the central part of a star exhausts its fuel supply, collapsing so fast that the outside of the star stays uninvolved. The small core then bounces back. "The question we are studying," he continued, "is whether that shock wave is strong enough to go all the way through the star and to expel essentially all its outside, because that is what is observed in supernovas." In 1995, many of Dr. Bethe's colleagues gathered to hail his 60th year at Cornell with a two-day tribute. "If you know his work," commented John Bahcall, an astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, "you might be inclined to think he is really several people, all of whom are engaged in a conspiracy to sign their work with the same name." Alan Lightman, a physicist and author at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recalled attending a meeting with Dr. Bethe in October 1997, after the celebrated physicist had turned 91. He expected reminiscences. But Dr. Bethe, after tottering up to the podium, surprised him. "It was a paper on astrophysics that he had just published," Dr. Lightman recalled. "And it was good." Dr. Schweber of Brandeis University, a physicist and historian, said Dr. Bethe achieved a life of professional and personal fulfillment because he learned the redemptive power of love, of serving family and friends, students and society. Dr. Bethe's élan seemed to confirm that judgment. "I am a very happy person," he said with a relaxed smile a few years ago. "I wouldn't want to change what I did." ***************************************************************** 40 Nuclear Test Watch: Nuclear Test Watch - Issue No. 5 url("http://www.blogger.com/dyn-css/authorization.css?blogID=1011 7120"); /* ----------------------------------------------- Nuclear Test Watch is dedicated to monitoring US Government activity relevant to the resumption of nuclear testing, and advocating a continuation of the moratorium on test explosions of American nuclear weapons Monday, March 07, 2005 Nuclear Test Watch - Issue No. 5 1. Bill Gertz is up to his old tricks at the Washington Times. With Rowan Scarborough, he reported in Friday’s Inside the Ring, a weekly feature at that paper, that Russia “will break out of its ban on testing nuclear weapons in the next two years.” Two years hence, pressure will mount on the Bush administration to conduct nuclear tests for the United States, they follow up. Interestingly, the two-year span would put us at a period of Spring-Summer 2007, approximately the timeframe that was predicted for Bush to authorize nuclear testing in the prior issue of this publication. No response to this news so far from the Russian Foreign Ministry. Gertz quotes a “senior Bush administration official” as his source. Readers might remember that Gertz has often warned of ill intent on Russia’s part with regard to nuclear testing. An excellent evaluationof Gertz’s relay of leaks was published in the September 2002 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, from the Monterrey Institute’s Charles D. Ferguson (see the sidebar article at the bottom). The article, also with Mike Jasinski and Cristina Chuen, asks more questions about the likelihood that Russia will test nuclear weapons. Curiously, Russia is a few months off from the fifth anniversary of its ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Unlike the United States, a Russian decision to test nuclear weapons would require not only the mettle to brave the political implications of an action that would be roundly condemned by almost every country on the planet; it would require complicated international legal maneuvering as Russia can only withdraw from the CTBT in the event that it declares that tests are in its “supreme national interest.” Many countries would question the legal basis for such a Russian action. Russia has enough political trouble these days; unilaterally undertaking nuclear tests seems an unlikely decision given the circumstances. Actually, Russia’s political troubles make this story easier to stick in the minds of many Americans; Russia is meddling with the democratic transitions of its neighbors in Ukraine and Georgia, killing Chechens, persecuting its press, and helping Iran build a nuclear power plant. While Russia openly tests ballistic missiles it claims are capable of dodging any and all missile defense interceptors, it’s not difficult to cast the shadow that it plans to test nuclear weapons. They will, the logic stands, so we must as well. And another front is added to the case for nuclear testing. 2. Foreign Affairs published a significant rebuttal to John Deutch’s foolish proposals on the US nuclear posture in the last issue of that publication. Steve Andreasen, former arms control specialist in the Clinton National Security Council, and Stanford Physics Professor Sidney Drell go to bat, warning that Deutch’s “notion that the United States could conduct "scientific confirmation tests" without triggering additional nuclear tests in Russia, China, India, or Pakistan is not credible. Most of these states have much more to gain from further tests than the United States could ever hope to, and such tests might also lead to a nuclear cascade elsewhere.” They add that renegotiation of the Comprehensive Test Ban treaty is fraught with peril, and would encourage “similar efforts by other nations to revise other portions of the text.” Finally, “The key to reaping the treaty's benefits is bringing it into force, and the key to that is not renegotiation but ratification.” 3. The Atomic Testing Museum opened up in Las Vegas, promoting a kinder, gentler version of the legacy of nuclear testing in America, or so says Mary Dickson of the Salt Late City Weekly. A bizarre collection of donors came together to make this museum possible, leading Nuclear Test Watch subscriber Preston Truman, who directs Downwinders, to label the museum a “propaganda con job.” The members of the Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation, which runs the museum, declare themselves to be “stewards of history” atop their homepage. Apparently, the history they want to tell lacks any politics, with Dickson reporting the assessment of interim museum director Bill Johnson that the site “is not a place for “political discussion.”” The fact sheet for the museum includes the sunny prediction of 800,000 visitors a year. Good luck with that effort to get 800,000 people each year to blithely believe that 40 years of irradiating the environment at the Nevada Test Site are simple history to be preserved. Many photos of the exhibits have been posted. 4. There has been quite a bit of coverage of Linton Brooks’ testimony before the Strategic Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee. One overlooked detail is that Brooks strongly emphasized in his oral remarks, concerning the Reliable Replacement Warhead Program, that “not only will this program not result in nuclear testing, it will decrease the chances that we will have ambiguities in performance that might otherwise call us to consider that.” This commitment is one that the National Nuclear Security Administration should be held to – if RRWP is advancing apace, any minor doubts about the state of certain weapons in the stockpile should take a back seat to allow development of this warhead design, rather than backing us into the awful position of being the first state in the world to violate its commitments under the CTBT. 5. Finally, the reporting on Brooks’ statements about the real effects of the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, if ever used, has been excellent. But it is important to focus in on the heroics that produced this statement. Indeed, the line of questioning that provoked the statement has not been emphasized. Rep. Ellen Tauscher took time to back Brooks into a corner on an issue that does little to earn her political points with anyone. Looking over the transcript (thanks to John Fleck for making it available), it is evident that Tauscher and her staff performed careful research into a complicated technical question. The level of detail in Tauscher’s presentation is uncommon for congressional discourse these days, and shows that her primary agenda in this matter was to yield an important statement for the record, once and for all dispelling the foolish notion that we can use nuclear weapons without experiencing the awful collateral damage that has long deterred their casual use. She took this action after a recess for two votes, when the attention to a congressional hearing often wanes, with few cameras or newshounds watching her – only because democratic deliberation required that it take place out in the open. Tauscher’s efforts represent the kind of open discourse that we need – like GOP Rep. David Hobson, she has taken on this issue not with any questions of dogmatic security fundamentalism in mind, but based on the public policy concern of whether the move to develop a provocative new nuclear weapon best serves America’s interests. Seeing what Tauscher did last Wednesday gives me faith that Americans of conscience will continue to have allies on Capitol Hill as we fight the efforts of those in our government who seek to slouch injudiciously into nuclear war by resuming the live testing of nuclear weapons. For a fine update on where everything stands with these current nuclear weapons programs, please see Wade Boese’s thorough reporting in the March edition of Arms Control Today. This has been NUCLEAR TEST WATCH. posted by Michael Roston at 2:05 AM *****************************************************************