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                         NUCLEAR POLICY
 
1 albawaba.com: Beijing supports Tehran nuclear stand
 
                         NUCLEAR REACTORS
 
2 US: [NukeNet] On Three Mile Island Anniversary, Dominion Should
3 US: NRC: Sunshine Act Meeting
4 Vive le Canada: Nuclear power still a deadly proposition
5 Haaretz: Report: Dimona reactor can survive earthquake       
6 US: NRC: Sacramento Municipal Utility District; Rancho Seco Independ
7 IHT: Considering nuclear power 
8 India Express: On N-energy for India, US says it's serious, will beg
9 US: courier post online: Watchdogs try to block merger
10 US: morris daily herald: Hydrogen leaks at Braidwood Nuclear Plant
11 US: AP New Jersey: Another radioactive steam leak shuts down Hope Cr
12 Guardian Unlimited: Nuclear power?
13 Moscow Times: Lithuania Reluctant to Close Nuke
14 US: NRC: NRC to Discuss 2004 Performance Assessment for Perry Nuclea
 
                          NUCLEAR SECURITY
 
15 [NYTr] US Profits Handsomely from India-Pakistan Conflict (RHC)
16 [NYTr] Vanunu's Defiance Rings across Jerusalem
17 Secrecy News -- 03/29/05
18 US: StarNewsOnline.com: Nuke plant risks being kept secret
19 US: Guardian Unlimited: WMD Panel to Fault Intelligence Agencies
20 Daily Times: Centrifuges being sent to IAEA at Iran’s request, says 
 
                          NUCLEAR SAFETY
 
22 US: [NukeNet] Action: oppose free-release of radioactive waste
23 US: Deseret News: CDC kills fallout study 
24 US: WTVC: Iodide Tablets 
 
                         NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE
 
25 US: Deseret News: Goshute admits misuse of tribal funds 
26 US: NRC: NRC Licensing Board in Private Fuel Storage Case to Open Or
27 US: Deseret News: Nuclear storage sounds like substantially risky be
28 Nevada Appeal - Opinion: Nevada is winning at Yucca
29 US: San Luis Obispo Tribune: Nuclear waste safety in doubt
30 Platts: Nevada tells court to throw out DOE rail route
31 Las Vegas RJ: YUCCA MOUNTAIN: Falsification suspicions spur hearings
32 BBC: Sellafield 'wind down' to
33 US: BYU NewsNet: Matheson criticizes nuke waste storage 
34 Platts: Germany to invest $73-mil in nuclear waste facility in 2005
35 US: APP.COM: NRC stonewalling spent fuel report
36 US: Salt Lake Tribune: Goshute leadership contender takes plea 
37 US: DenverPost.com: Declassify nuke-waste study
38 US: Roswell Daily Record: State official raps WIPP expansion idea   
39 Las Vegas SUN: Congress scheduling hearings about Yucca Mountain pro
40 Las Vegas SUN: Suspect Yucca e-mails turned over to congressional co
41 US: Deseret news: Experts clash on nuclear waste 
 
                           PEACE
 
42 Japan Times: The price of a clean project 
 
                        US DEPT. OF ENERGY
 
43 DOE: Environmental Management Site-Specific Advisory Board, Fernald
44 DOE: Environmental Management Site-Specific Advisory Board, Paducah
45 Tri-City Herald: Hanford budget proposal criticized 
46 Daily Californian: UC Backs New Research Institute - 
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                         FULL NEWS STORIES
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 1 albawaba.com: Beijing supports Tehran nuclear stand
              
  Posted: 29-03-2005 , 11:07 GMT   				
 					     					     					     				 			
Vice-Chairman of the China National People's Congress (NPC) Jiang 
Zhenghua on Tuesday expressed support for Iran's nuclear stance 
and hoped the case would be settled within the framework of the 
International Atomic Energy Agency. 

During a meeting with the Iranian delegation of the two 
countries' parliamentary friendship group, headed by Neishabour 
MP Hossein Sobhani Nia, Jiang said China supports Iran's right to 
use peaceful nuclear technology and Iran-Europe talks to settle 
the case, <i>IRNA</i> reported. 

He appreciated Iran's stances regarding the issues of China's
human rights as well as Taiwan. 

© 2005 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)   	 	 	
 		   			

  © 2005 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)   



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 2 [NukeNet] On Three Mile Island Anniversary, Dominion Should
 
Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2005 15:57:50 -0800

 
<x-flowed>
NukeNet Anti-Nuclear Network (nukenet@energyjustice.net)

PEOPLE'S ALLIANCE FOR CLEAN ENERGY * PUBLIC CITIZEN

NEWS RELEASE

For Immediate Release:
March 28, 2005

Contact: Jerry Rosenthal, PACE: (540) 967-2715
Elena Day, PACE: (434) 296-2494 or (434) 823-5477
Brendan Hoffman, PC: (202) 454-5130

On Three Mile Island Anniversary, Dominion Should Recognize Nuclear
Power is Not an Option

LOUISA, VA—Citing a recent flurry of events in the nuclear energy
sphere, plus recent independent analyses of Dominion's application to
expand its North Anna nuclear power station, the People's Alliance for
Clean Energy (PACE) called today for Dominion to take the responsible
step of withdrawing its application for an Early Site Permit (ESP) or,
barring that, for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to reject the
ESP application.  Today also marks the 26th anniversary of the partial
meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania.

"Remembering the Three Mile Island tragedy should make everyone think
long and hard about what nuclear power means in terms of risk," said
Elena Day, a founding member of PACE.  "Couple that with environmental
harm and thousands of tons of high-level waste lacking a permanent home,
and expansion of the nuclear industry is simply untenable in the current
environment.  Dominion should stop wasting taxpayer money on this
unsound project."  In February, more than 150 national, state, and local
groups from around the country endorsed a letter opposing new reactors
at North Anna.

Among the recent developments are new comments from both the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Virginia Department of
Environmental Quality (DEQ) on the environmental analysis done recently
by NRC.  Both agencies found significant flaws in the Environmental
Impact Statement prepared by the nuclear regulator that parallel
criticisms of the plan articulated by PACE and other groups such as
Public Citizen.

For instance, EPA found "The DEIS does not contain sufficient
information to fully assess environmental impacts that should be avoided
in order to fully protect the environment," and that it did not include
mitigation measures for the loss of wetlands, streams, and suitable lake
habitat.  EPA further criticized the NRC's permitting process for
postponing analysis of energy needs and alternatives, claiming it
"biases the subsequent energy alternative analysis toward nuclear
power."

Other concerns buttressed arguments made last month by the Spotsylvania
County Board of Supervisors in a resolution opposing the Draft EIS and
the ESP process.  EPA wrote that "the twenty year horizon allotted under
the proposed ESP does not have any protective assurance that unforeseen
population growth and/or additional stressor on the Air or Water
resources will be accounted for."  Spotsylvania, which neighbors Lake
Anna, expressed concern over population growth and the effect on water
availability.

The DEQ, which first critiqued Dominion's application in January 2004,
remains unconvinced that Lake Anna can handle additional reactors.
"DEQ's Division of Water Resources commented previously in regard to its
concerns for the adequacy of Lake Anna as a source of cooling water for
a third nuclear reactor; these concerns remain," the agency wrote.

"Dominion's plan has too many problems and not enough solutions," said
Wenonah Hauter, director of Public Citizen's energy program.  "The
issues we've been raising for over a year are finally reaching the point
where they can't be ignored anymore."

The ever-present issue of nuclear waste has also come to a head lately;
on March 16, a scandal broke involving falsification of documents
supporting the proposed nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.
While the nature of the falsification and its ultimate effect remains
unclear, it will almost certainly lead to even further setbacks in the
project's completion date.  Further, the falsification involves the
site's hydrology, the most crucial underpi
nning to the site's ultimate
suitability.  If it turns out that supporting data is false, the entire
plan could easily unravel.

Further, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced March 10
that he's considering introducing a bill that would allow the U.S.
Department of Energy to take possession of high-level nuclear waste
while leaving it at the various plant sites.  Such legislation would
make Yucca Mountain obsolete and would mean the full inventory of
high-level waste at North Anna will be there for many decades more.

The Louisa County Board of Supervisors has recently been grappling with
that issue, and last Monday reissued the seven-year Conditional Use
Permit (CUP) to Dominion for dry cask storage on the shore of Lake Anna;
the Board, however, instructed Dominion to carry out a study of
constructing an earth berm around the casks to eliminate the ability for
a terrorist to launch a shoulder-fired missile into the casks, or other
line-of-site attacks.  It also prohibited Dominion from storing MOX fuel
at North Anna, which means that reprocessing the waste is also not an
option.

"With the Yucca Mountain plan falling apart and Louisa County
recognizing some of the obvious vulnerabilities of spent fuel storage at
North Anna, Dominion has to realize that its options are growing ever
more limited," said Jerry Rosenthal, a PACE member and longtime Louisa
resident who worked closely with the Board of Supervisors on the CUP.
"No one can say how long it will be until Dominion can reduce the amount
of waste Lake Anna.  Perhaps we should find an answer to that question
before Dominion is allowed to make the problem even worse."

###

To view the EPA's comments, visit www.nrc.gov and enter accession
number ML050630407 into the ADAMS search.  Visit
http://www.deq.virginia.gov/eir/documents/NorthAnnaESPDEIS.pdf to
view DEQ's comments.

PACE, a central Virginia-based chapter of the Blue Ridge Environmental
Defense League, is a coalition of clean energy advocates in favor of
pursuing clean, renewable energy alternatives over nuclear power.  For
more information, visit www.northanna.org.

Public Citizen is a national, nonprofit consumer advocacy organization
based in Washington, D.C. For more information, please visit
www.citizen.org

_______________________________________________________________________
Subscribe/Unsubscribe Here: http://www.energyjustice.net/nukenet/
Change your settings or access the archives at:
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 3 NRC: Sunshine Act Meeting
 
                         FR Doc 05-6239 
[Federal Register: March 29, 2005 (Volume 70, Number 59)] 
[Notices] [Page 15939-15940] From the Federal Register Online via 
GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr29mr05-109]                         
 
Date: Weeks of March 28, April 4, 11, 18, 25, May 2, 2005.
 
Place: Commissioners' Conference Room, 11555 Rockville Pike, 
Rockville, Maryland.
 
Status: Public and closed.
 
Matters To Be Considered: Week of March 28, 2005 Monday, March 
28, 2005 9:30 a.m. Discussion of Security Issues (Closed--Ex. 1 & 
9). Tuesday, March 29, 2005 9:30 a.m. Briefing on Office of 
Nuclear Security and Incident Response (NSIR) Programs, 
Performance, and Plans (Public Meeting) (Contact: Robert 
Caldwell, (301) 415-1243).
 
The meeting will be webcast live at the Web 
address--http://www.nrc.gov 
[http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/leaving.cgi?from=leaving 
FR.html&log=linklog&to=http://www.nrc.gov] .
 
1 p.m. Discussion of Security Issues (Closed--Ex. 1). Week of 
April 4, 2005--Tentative Tuesday, April 5, 2005 9:30 a.m. 
Briefing on Office of Research (RES) Programs, Performance, and 
Plans (Public Meeting) (Contact: Alix Dvorak, (301) 415-6601).
 
This meeting will be webcast live at the Web 
address--http://www.nrc.gov 
[http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/leaving.cgi?from=leaving 
FR.html&log=linklog&to=http://www.nrc.gov] .
 
Wednesday, April 6, 2005 9:30 a.m. Briefing on Status of New Site 
and Reactor Licensing (Public Meeting) (Contact: Steven Bloom, 
(301) 415-1313).
 
This meeting will be webcast live at the Web 
address--http://www.nrc.gov 
[http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/leaving.cgi?from=leaving 
FR.html&log=linklog&to=http://www.nrc.gov] .
 
Thursday, April 7, 2005 1:30 p.m. Meeting with Advisory Committee 
on Reactor Safeguards (ACRS) (Public Meeting) (Contact: John 
Larkins, (301) 415-7360).
 
This meeting will be webcast live at the Web 
address--http://www.nrc.gov 
[http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/leaving.cgi?from=leaving 
FR.html&log=linklog&to=http://www.nrc.gov] .
 
Week of April 11, 2005--Tentative There are no meetings scheduled 
for the Week of April 11, 2005.
 
Week of April 18, 2005--Tentative Tuesday, April 19, 2005 9:30 
a.m. Discussion of Security Issues (Closed--Ex. 1) (Tentative). 
Wednesday, April 20, 2005 9:30 a.m. Meeting with Advisory 
Committee on the Medical Uses of Isotopes (ACMUI) (Public 
Meeting) (Contact: Angela McIntosh, (301) 415-5030).
 
This meeting will be webcast live at the Web 
address--http://www.nrc.gov 
[http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/leaving.cgi?from=leaving 
FR.html&log=linklog&to=http://www.nrc.gov] .
 
1:30 p.m. Briefing on Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation (NRR) 
Programs, Performance, and Plans (Public Meeting) (Contact: Laura 
Gerke, (301) 415-4099).
 
This meeting will be webcast live at the Web 
address--http://www.nrc.gov 
[http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/leaving.cgi?from=leaving 
FR.html&log=linklog&to=http://www.nrc.gov] .
 
Week of April 25, 2005--Tentative Tuesday, April 26, 2005 9:30 
a.m. Briefing on Grid Stability and Offsite Power Issues (Public 
Meeting) (Contact: John Lamb, (301) 415-1446).
 
This meeting will be webcast live at the Web 
address--http://www.nrc.gov 
[http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/leaving.cgi?from=leaving 
FR.html&log=linklog&to=http://www.nrc.gov] .
 
Week of May 2, 2005--Tentative There are no meetings scheduled 
for the week of May 2, 2005.
 
* The schedule for Commission meetings is subject to change on 
short notice. To verify the status of meetings
 
[[Page 15940]] call (recording)--(301) 415-1292. Contact person 
for more information: Dave Gamberoni, (301) 415-1651.
 
The NRC Commission Meeting Schedule can be found on the Internet 
at: http://www.nrc.gov/what-we-do/policy-making/schedule.html 
[http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/leaving.cgi?from=leaving 
FR.html&log=linklog&to=http://www.nrc.gov/what-we-do/policy-makin 
g/schedule.html] . The NRC provides reasonable accommodation to 
individuals with disabilities where appropriate. If you need a 
reasonable accommodation to participate in these public meetings, 
or need this meeting notice or the transcript or other 
information from the public meetings in another format (e.g., 
braille, large print), please notify the NRC's Disability Program 
Coordinator, August Spector, at (301) 415-7080, TDD: (301) 415- 
2100, or by e-mail at aks@nrc.gov [aks@nrc.gov] . Determinations 
on requests for reasonable accommodation will be made on a 
case-by-case basis.
 
This notice is distributed by mail to several hundred 
subscribers; if you no longer wish to receive it, or would like 
to be added to the distribution, please contact the Office of the 
Secretary, Washington, DC 20555 (301) 415-1969). In addition, 
distribution of this meeting notice over the Internet system is 
available. If you are interested in receiving this Commission 
meeting schedule electronically, please send an electronic 
message to dkw@nrc.gov [dkw@nrc.gov] . Dated: March 24, 2005.
 
R. Michelle Schroll, Office of the Secretary.
 
[FR Doc. 05-6239 Filed 3-25-05; 9:07 am] BILLING CODE 7590-01-M

 
*****************************************************************
 4 Vive le Canada: Nuclear power still a deadly proposition
 
Take action now and help us Oppose the 40-Point Smart Regulation
Action Plan, which will mean huge changes to our regulatory 
system and harmonization of Canada and U.S. regulations starting 
in June.
 
                         
Monday, March 28 2005 @ 10:22 AM MST 
Contributed by: Vera Gottlieb                   


WHILE VICE PRESIDENT Dick Cheney is actively promoting nuclear 
power as a significant plank in his energy plan, he claims that 
nuclear power is "a safe, clean and very plentiful energy 
source."
 
The Nuclear Energy Institute, the policy organization of the 
nuclear energy and technologies industries, is currently running 
an energetic campaign for the revivification of nuclear power. 
Ubiquitous TV and radio ads carry the admonition that "Kids today 
are part of the most energy-intensive generation in history. They 
demand lots of clean electricity. And they deserve clean air."

Also, a consortium of 10 U.S. utilities has requested funding 
from the federal government for the construction of new reactors 
based on a European design, and they hope to receive government 
approval by 2010. This is a major policy change since no new 
nuclear reactors have been ordered in the United States since 
1974.
 
Nevertheless, the claims of the Mr. Cheney and the nuclear 
industry are false. According to data from the U.S. Energy 
Department (DOE), the production of nuclear power significantly 
contributes both to global warming and ozone depletion.
 
The enrichment of uranium fuel for nuclear power uses 93 percent 
of the refrigerant chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) gas made annually in 
the United States. The global production of CFC is banned under 
the Montreal Protocol because it is a potent destroyer of ozone 
in the stratosphere, which protects us from the carcinogenic 
effects of solar ultraviolet light. The ozone layer is now so 
thin that the population in Australia is currently experiencing 
one of the highest incidences of skin cancer in the world.
 
CFC compounds are also potent global warming agents 10,000 to 
20,000 times more efficient heat trappers than carbon dioxide, 
which itself is responsible for 50 percent of the global warming 
phenomenon.
 
But nuclear power also contributes significantly to global carbon 
dioxide production. Huge quantities of fossil fuel are expended 
for the "front end" of the nuclear fuel cycle -- to mine, mill 
and enrich the uranium fuel and to construct the massive nuclear 
reactor buildings and their cooling towers.
 
Uranium enrichment is a particularly energy intensive process 
which uses electricity generated from huge coal-fired plants. 
Estimates of carbon dioxide production related to nuclear power 
are available from DOE for the "front end" of the nuclear fuel 
cycle, but prospective estimates for the "back end" of the cycle 
have yet to be calculated.
 
Tens of thousands of tons of intensely hot radioactive fuel rods 
must continuously be cooled for decades in large pools of 
circulating water and these rods must then be carefully 
transported by road and rail and isolated from the environment in 
remote storage facilities in the United States. The radioactive 
reactor building must also be decommissioned after 40 years of 
operation, taken apart by remote control and similarly 
transported long distances and stored. Fully 95 percent of U.S. 
high level waste -- waste that is intensely radioactive -- has 
been generated by nuclear power thus far.
 
This nuclear waste must then be guarded, protected and isolated 
from the environment for tens of thousands of years -- a physical 
and scientific impossibility. Biologically dangerous radioactive 
elements such as strontium 90, cesium 137 and plutonium will seep 
and leak into the water tables and become very concentrated in 
food chains for the rest of time, inevitably increasing the 
incidence of childhood cancer, genetic diseases and congenital 
malformations for this and future generations
 
Conclusion: Nuclear power is neither clean, green nor safe. It is 
the most biologically dangerous method to boil water to generate 
steam for the production of electricity.
 
Helen Caldicott, a pediatrican, is president of the Nuclear 
Policy Research Institute and author of The New Nuclear Danger, 
George Bush's Military Industrial Complex (The New Press). She 
lives near Sydney, Australia. 

  Nuclear power still a deadly proposition | 2 comments | Create 
New Account [http://www.vivelecanada.ca/users.php?mode=new] 
Highest Score first Most votes first Newest First Oldest First 
Flat Nested No Comments Threaded The following comments are owned 
by whomever posted them. This site is not responsible for what 
they say.   

Nuclear power still a deadly proposition by John Tiller 
[http://www.vivelecanada.ca/users.php?mode=profile&amp;uid=1187] 
on Tuesday, March 29 2005 @ 02:10 AM MST Australia's skin cancer 
is more likely the result of their sun worshipping lifestyle and 
shrinking beachwear fashions rather than anything happening in 
the stratosphere. But I live in Canada where a few degrees warmer 
would be nice. Then it would only average -43 during our six 
months of winter. And maybe the snow would melt off faster too, 
maybe by June. Lucky I'm from the temperate part of the country. 
I'm to cold to re-locate. 

        Terms of Use. Copyright © 2005 Vive le Canada All 
*****************************************************************
 5 Haaretz: Report: Dimona reactor can survive earthquake       

Homepage [http://www.haaretz.com]          

  News Updates    Wed., March 30, 2005 Adar2 19, 5765    Israel
    	 
  By Gideon Alon   	 
  
The nuclear reactor in Dimona can withstand an earthquake of the 
magnitude that strikes the Middle East once a century, according 
to a report delivered yesterday by MK Yuval Steinitz (Likud), 
chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.

The report on safety at the Dimona reactor was prepared by a
Knesset committee, whose members included MKs Amram Mitzna
(Labor) and Aryeh Eldad (National Union), following warnings by
MK Zahava Gal-On (Yahad) of unsafe conditions at the site. The
committee visited the reactor a few weeks ago and surveyed
safety, maintenance, and passive and active protection practices.

The committee concluded that safety was improving at the reactor
following the upgrading of essential systems. The committee saw
data on the resources invested in changing or refurbishing
systems, especially during the 1990s. Committee members said the
safety situation at the reactor is much better than it was in
previous decades.

Steinitz noted that the committee's visit is part of his close
monitoring of safety at the reactor, which has included several
meetings with experts and visits to the site.   	 

  © Copyright  Haaretz. All rights reserved   
*****************************************************************
 6 NRC: Sacramento Municipal Utility District; Rancho Seco Independent 
 
                         FR Doc E5-1378 
[Federal Register: March 29, 2005 (Volume 70, Number 59)] 
[Notices] [Page 15938-15939] From the Federal Register Online via 
GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr29mr05-108]                         
 
Spent Fuel Storage Installation; Issuance of an Exemption and 
Conforming Amendment AGENCY: U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
 
[[Page 15939]] ACTION: Issuance of an exemption and conforming 
amendment.
 
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Amy M. Snyder, Project Manager, 
Spent Fuel Project Office, Office of Nuclear Material Safety and 
Safeguards, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC 
20555. Telephone: (301) 415-8580; fax number: (301) 415-8555; 
e-mail: ams3@nrc.gov [ams3@nrc.gov] .
 
SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission 
(NRC) has issued an exemption, pursuant to 10 CFR 72.7, from the 
provisions of 10 CFR 72.44(d)(3), to the Sacramento Municipal 
Utility District (SMUD or the licensee). The requested exemption 
(in conjunction with a conforming license amendment) relieves 
SMUD from the requirement to submit an annual radioactive 
effluent report for the Rancho Seco Independent Spent Fuel 
Storage Installation (ISFSI). SMUD submitted the exemption 
request by letter dated July 19, 2004, in which it also requested 
an amendment to the Rancho Seco ISFSI license; specifically, the 
deletion of Technical Specification 5.5.2., Radiological 
Environmental Monitoring Program, item (d). The licensee is 
currently storing spent nuclear fuel at the Rancho Seco ISFSI on 
the site of the decommissioned Rancho Seco Nuclear Generating 
Station in Sacramento County, California.
 
These actions comply with the standards and requirements of the 
Atomic Energy Act of 1954, as amended (the Act), and the 
Commission's rules and regulations. The Commission has made 
appropriate findings as required by the Act and the Commission's 
rules and regulations in 10 CFR chapter I, which are set forth in 
the license amendment.
 
In accordance with 10 CFR 72.46(b)(2), a determination has been 
made that this exemption and conforming amendment does not 
present a genuine issue as to whether public health and safety 
will be significantly affected. Therefore, the publication of a 
notice of proposed action and an opportunity for hearing or a 
notice of hearing is not warranted. Notice is hereby given of the 
right of interested persons to request a hearing on whether the 
action should be rescinded or modified.
 
Also in connection with these actions, the Commission prepared an 
Environmental Assessment (EA) and Finding of No Significant 
Impact (FONSI). The EA and FONSI were published in the Federal 
Register on January 11, 2005 (70 FR 1911).
 
The NRC maintains an Agencywide Documents Access Management 
System (ADAMS), which provides text and image files of NRC's 
public documents. Supporting documentation may be accessed 
through the NRC's Public Electronic Reading Room on the Internet 
at: http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams.html 
[http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/leaving.cgi?from=leaving 
FR.html&log=linklog&to=http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams.html] 
.
 
A copy of the EA and FONSI can be found at this site using the 
ADAMS accession number ML050040272. Copies of the referenced 
documents are also available for review at the NRC Public 
Document Room (PDR), located at 11555 Rockville Pike, Rockville, 
MD 20852. PDR reference staff can be contacted at 1-800-397-4209, 
301-415-4737 or by e-mail to pdr@nrc.gov [pdr@nrc.gov] . The PDR 
reproduction contractor will copy documents for a fee.
 
Dated in Rockville, Maryland, this 21st day of March, 2005.
 
For the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
 
Amy M. Snyder, Project Manager, Spent Fuel Project Office, Office 
of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards.
 
[FR Doc. E5-1378 Filed 3-28-05; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 7590-01-P

 
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 7 IHT: Considering nuclear power 

In "Nuclear power is the future" (Views, March 22), Donald
Johnston argues that the only credible response to the threat of
global warming is the development of civil nuclear energy
programs. However, aside from the obvious environmental and
safety issues in dealing with radioactive waste, there are very
serious global security concerns that he has underestimated. .

The "nuclear renaissance" that Johnston advocates encourages the
spread of technology and materials that can also be used in the
development of nuclear weapons. Johnston may argue that "we want
atoms for peace, not for war," but the peaceful atom and the
military atom are intimately linked: One cannot be used without
the other spreading out of control. The problem of safeguarding
society against these hazards would be formidable and could
result in a restriction of personal freedoms.. 

Rather than constructing new nuclear reactors, attention should 
be focused on the protection and security of existing facilities 
and options for phasing out their use altogether. . Chris Abbott, 
Oxford, England. . 

Donald Johnston trots out the same tired arguments in his call 
for a nuclear solution to the world's energy problems. In spite 
of engineers' promises since the 1950s to produce safe 
electricity, nuclear power is neither safe nor inexpensive.. 

Most of the radioactive waste produced still awaits effective 
disposal, and it piles up as a tempting target above ground or in 
temporary pools throughout the globe. The unsuccessful effort to 
prevent proliferation throughout Asia indicates the impossibility 
of separating peaceful and military atomic programs. . 

Nuclear power has a good safety record if you ignore Chernobyl, 
Three Mile Island and dozens of other accidents, large and small, 
that are less well known. Other small-scale sources of power 
generation - wind, wave, biomass, solar - are safer and can serve 
people who are not connected to the central grids that nuclear 
power requires. . 

Are there not better investments for people in the developing 
world? . Paul Josephson, Waterville, Maine. Zimbabwe's failed 
leader. Nicholas Kristof ("Zimbabwe's cruel paradox," Views, 
March 24) devalued an otherwise excellent column with his 
comments in the last paragraph in which he said that the 
international community is letting President Robert Mugabe get 
away with hurting his country. . 

This implies that what is going on in Zimbabwe is the fault of 
the international community (translation: rich Western 
countries). What more does Kristof expect the West to do? . Every 
Western country has condemned what is taking place there in the 
strongest possible language. 

It is the African countries themselves, the only ones that have 
any leverage with Mugabe, who have done very little. Foremost in 
this group is South Africa - its silence has been deafening. We 
have to stop always blaming the West for Africa's problems.. 
Cyril Farquharson, Badhoevedorp, Netherlands. 

A guide to fighting terror. I'm at a loss regarding Ian Bremmer's 
assertion that America must deliver basic security, health, 
education and modern economic development to failed societies 
("George Kennan's lessons for the war on terror," Views, March 
24). . 

America can't deliver these services to its own citizens. 
Millions of U.S. citizens and residents live without health 
insurance and the guarantee of a proper education. We certainly 
are vulnerable to terrorist attacks as demonstrated by porous 
borders between Mexico and the United States not to mention the 
shipping containers that enter main U.S. ports every day.. D. 
Greco, Deerfield Beach, Florida.

Copyright © 2005 the International Herald
Tribune All Rights Reserved 			 			   			   			[IHT]  			   			
*****************************************************************
 8 India Express: On N-energy for India, US says it's serious, will begin talks
 
Wednesday, March 30, 2005        
    
[http://www.indianexpress.com

C. RAJA MOHAN                             

NEW DELHI, MARCH 29: The Bush Administration will soon launch
negotiations with the Manmohan Singh Government as well as the
US Congress on facilitating nuclear energy cooperation with
India. 

In a conversation with a group of editors and analysts here, the
U.S. Ambassador David Mulford affirmed that President George W.
Bush’s offer to help India develop the nuclear energy option is
a “serious one”. 

Mulford, however, underlined the “many legal and other
difficulties” that have prevented such nuclear cooperation over
the last three decades “have not gone away”. The proposed talks
are aimed at sorting out those difficulties. 

The US proposal, part of a broad new strategic initiative
towards India unveiled by the Bush Administration, signals a
major shift in American nuclear policy towards India. Ever since
New Delhi conducted its first nuclear test in May 1974, the idea
of nuclear cooperation with India has been a taboo in
Washington. “We are now moving in a different direction”,
Mulford said. 

It might be recalled that the US company General Electric built
India’s first nuclear power plant at Tarapur under an agreement
signed in 1962. 

The Administration would need broad support from the US Congress
before it can either waive the requirements of the current
American legislation on international cooperation in nuclear
energy or come up with a new legislative mandate. The Indian
government which has long sought such cooperation with the US is
open to talks with the Bush Administration. India’s negotiating
approach is expected to be consistent with its national security
requirements. 

Meanwhile, in a speech on Monday at a seminar organised by the
Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses here, External
Affairs Minister Natwar Singh had reaffirmed the importance of
nuclear electric power in India’s energy mix and the role of
international cooperation in accelerating the nation’s atomic
energy development. 

Singh added that India has “repeatedly said that every
cooperation project in nuclear power would be open to
international safeguards”. India’s recent attempts to buy
additional nuclear power reactors from Russia and France had
come to nought. Both Moscow and Paris had to defer to American
opposition to such sales to India. 

Natwar Singh called on the international community to “discard
the old mindset and acknowledge the record of states, like
India, who have proved time and again that they are reliable
partners in the global effort to ensure non-proliferation.” 
Singh also declared that “India may not be a party to the NPT,
but, our conduct has always been consistent with the key
provisions of the (Nuclear Non-Proliferation) Treaty as they
apply to nuclear weapon states”. 

While Indian and American officials are mum on the terms of a
potential nuclear deal between the two nations, analysts here
say that a combination of credible assurances from India on
non-proliferation and putting some of its civilian reactors
under international safeguards could help clinch a path-breaking
accord. 

Mulford said results from President Bush’s ambitious agenda—that
also includes defence industrial partnership and enhancing
India’s role in global institutions—could begin to unfold in the
coming months. 

The proposed visit by Natwar Singh to the US in the near future
and that by PM Manmohan Singh to Washington in July are expected
to provide the impetus for moving the proposals for wide-ranging
cooperation between the two countries forward.
 	
© 2005: Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
*****************************************************************
 9 courier post online: Watchdogs try to block merger
 
[http://www.courierpostonline.com/

  Tuesday, March 29, 2005

 They oppose PSEG's deal with Exelon

 By EILEEN STILWELL Courier-Post Staff 

A coalition of state and national consumer advocacy groups
united Monday to oppose the pending merger of Exelon Corp. and
New Jersey's Public Service Enterprise Group Inc., which would
create the nation's largest utility.

 If the deal wins approval from the New Jersey Board of Public
Utilities and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the new
entity, Exelon Electric &Gas, would serve about 9 million
customers in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Illinois. The merger
also would establish Exelon as the largest U.S. producer of
nuclear energy by consolidating PSEG's three nuclear reactors
with Exelon's 17. Once the deal is completed, New Jersey is
expected to lose about 900 jobs when headquarters shift from
Newark to Chicago.

 The advocacy groups, which claim to represent about 240,000
individuals and organizations, want the state utilities board to
approve the merger only if it can establish a "positive benefit"
for ratepayers.

 "New Jersey ratepayers should not be up for sale to the highest
bidder. We're counting on the New Jersey Board of Public
Utilities to reject this buyout request if no consumer benefits
can be demonstrated," said Suzanne Leta, energy associate for
New Jersey Public Interest Research Group.

 Leta said she does not expect the merger to meet the standard
because according to her group's analysis, it will diminish
competition, raise rates to cover the high cost of acquisition
and dismantle New Jersey's regulatory power over PSEG's 3.6
million customers.

 "Ratepayers beware," said Ev Liebman of NJ Citizen Action, the
state's largest consumer watchdog organization.

 "The proposed buyout of PSEG by Exelon is the latest and
largest of a frenzy of mergers and acquisitions that have
blanketed the industry," Liebman said. "Yet the outcome, both in
New Jersey and other states, has resulted in meager and/or
short-term cost savings for ratepayers."

 The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities will conduct as many
public hearings as necessary before making its decision, said
Eric Hartsfield, board spokesman.

 "We welcome the input, perspective and comments of all
interested and concerned groups," said board President Jeanne
Fox in a written statement released Monday.

"While the Board is required by law to examine the impact of the
proposed merger on rates, competition, PSEG employees and system
reliability, it may go above and beyond these factors if it
deems such an analysis is appropriate and in the best interests
of New Jersey ratepayers," she added.

 The consumer groups filed a motion Monday with Administrative
Law Judge Richard Magill in Newark seeking permission to
intervene with the state utilities board before it decides the
fate of the merger. Those groups and Public Citizen, a consumer
rights organization based in Washington, D.C., also filed a
motion to intervene with the Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission, which also must approve the merger.

 Tyson Slocum, research director for Public Citizen's energy
program, accused the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission of
"meeting secretly" with principals from both energy companies
and violating federal law.

 The Jan. 13 meeting in question was standard practice to
encourage "potential merger partners to come in to make sure
their application is complete," said Paul Rosengren, PSEG
spokesman.

 "Everything is legal. The rules are clear," he said.

 The state Board of Public Utilities would still have oversight
over PSEG's regulated gas and electric utility after the merger,
said Rosengren.

 PSEG expects the merger to be complete in the first quarter of
next year.

 "We think the impact on consumers will be positive. By sharing
the companies' best practices, it will bring more energy to
market and lower costs over time," said Rosengren.

 Jennifer Medley, spokeswoman for Exelon, was unavailable for
comment.

 ON THE WEB

 
+ Federal Energy Regulatory Commission:  [http://www.ferc.gov] 


+ N.J. Board of Public Utilities: www.state.nj.us/bpu

 
+ Ratepayer Advocate (member of governor's Cabinet who
represents interests of utility consumers): www.rpa.state.nj.us

 
+ U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission:  [http:<a href=]
.gov" target='new'> [http://www.sec] .gov

 
+ Nuclear Regulatory Commission:  [http://www.nrc.gov] 


+ Federal Trade Commission:  [http://www.ftc.gov] 


+ U.S. Department of Justice:  [http://www.usdoj.gov] 

KEY POINTS

 
+ The new board would be composed of 12 members nominated by
Exelon and six members from PSEG.

 
+ John W. Rowe, chairman, president and CEO of Exelon, would
become president and CEO of Exelon Electric &Gas upon completion
of the merger.

 
+ E. James Ferland, chairman, president and CEO of PSEG, would
become nonexecutive chairman of the board of Exelon Electric
&Gas until his planned retirement in 2007.

 PSEG

 
+ Headquarters: Newark

 
+ Total assets: $28.1 billion as of Dec. 31, 2003

 
+ 2003 revenue: $11.1 billion

 
+ Employees: 10,500

 
+ Main subsidiaries: PSEG Power; Public Service Electric and Gas
Co. (PSE); PSEG Energy Holdings.

 
+ Customers: PSE provides electricity in New Jersey to 2 million
customers and gas to 1.6 million.

 
+ Web site:  [http://www.pseg.com] 

EXELON

 
+ Headquarters: Chicago

 
+ Total assets: $41.6 billion as of Dec. 31, 2003

 
+ 2003 revenue: $15 billion

 
+ Employees: 18,000

 
+ Main subsidiaries: Exelon Energy Delivery; Exelon Generation;
Peco Energy (serving utility customers in Pennsylvania);
Commonwealth Edison (serving utility customers in Illinois).

 
+ Customers: Electricity to 5.1 million in Illinois and
Pennsylvania; gas to 360,000 in suburban Philadelphia.

 
+ Web site:  [http://www.exelon.com] 

WHERE TO COMMENT

 
+ Public Citizen, an online site dedicated to giving citizens a
place to speak out about issues that concern them, can be found
at  [http://www.citizen.org/action] . 

Reach Eileen Stilwell at (856) 486-2464 or 
[estilwell@courierpostonline.com] 


*****************************************************************
 10 morris daily herald: Hydrogen leaks at Braidwood Nuclear Plant

news@morrisdailyherald.com 
                
  3/29/2005 2:23:00 PM

Leak shuts down generator, poses no safety threat
 
By Jo Ann Hustis [jhustis@morrisdailyherald.com] 
Herald Writer

 LISLE — No reactor safety issue was involved in the hydrogen gas 
leak that shut down a main generator Monday at Braidwood Nuclear 
Generating Station.

“No nuclear issue was involved,” said Jan Strasma, spokesman for 
Region 3 of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

“The NRC’s resident inspectors were on site during the incident, 
but there is no need for follow-up. We’re not talking about any 
reactor safety issue there,” he said today.

Unit 2 was shut down about 12:45 p.m. Monday after operators 
determined hydrogen gas might have been leaking from the 
generator into the turbine building, Braidwood spokesman Neal 
Miller said.

No workers were injured and public safety was not threatened 
because the event occurred on the non-nuclear side of the 
station, said Craig Nesbit, spokesman for Braidwood Station owner 
Exelon Nuclear.

Nesbit said a failed electrical connection resulted in shutting 
the generator down and releasing hydrogen inside the generator 
casing.

Strasma said the hydrogen is used for cooling in the generator.

“Because of a problem with the generator, the plant shut down 
automatically,” he said. 

“In the course of that, it was found they had a hydrogen leak, so 
they ventilated the turbine building and declared an ‘unusual 
event.’”

The declaration came at 1:59 p.m. Monday. The alert was ended at 
4:23 p.m., after the hydrogen was vented outside.

Miller said today a failed electrical connection apparently 
caused the incident.

“We declared it an unusual event because when operators found the 
hydrogen leak, they didn’t know if it posed a safety concern,” he 
said. “Until we found out it didn’t, we declared the unusual 
event.”

An unusual event is the least serious of the NRC’s four 
classifications of emergencies.

   Morris Daily Herald • 1804 N. Division St. • Morris, Illinois 
60450 (815) 942-3221 • (800) 215-9778 Software © 1998-2005 1up! 
*****************************************************************
 11 AP New Jersey: Another radioactive steam leak shuts down Hope Creek plant
 
Newsday.com   
                        		     
Tuesday, Mar 29, 2005, 11:22 PM EST     NEW YORK NOW:

By LINDA A. JOHNSON
 	 		Associated Press Writer
 	 	
 TRENTON, N.J. --                Operators of the Hope Creek 
nuclear power plant are investigating why a weld inside a 
containment building failed, causing a radioactive steam leak 
that led to the problem-plagued plant's latest shutdown. 

The slow leak began sometime in February, just weeks after the 
nuclear reactor went back online Jan. 26. That followed a 
3{-month shutdown due to a more-serious steam leak elsewhere in 
the plant, Chic Cannon, spokesman for plant operator PSEG 
Nuclear, said Tuesday. 

The latest problem caused the plant to be shut down Sunday
night, but could be diagnosed and fixed, and the plant
restarted, within a few weeks, Cannon said. 

"This was a very slight leak," he said. "It's a large industrial
facility, so you're going to have things like this." 

Cannon said no radioactivity was released outside the plant and
no workers were harmed in either of the steam leaks, which he
said were unrelated. 

The latest leak was noticed in February inside the containment
building, and the leak's volume had been increasing slowly to a
maximum of about three quarts of water per minute. Late Sunday
night, plant workers cut the reactor back to 5 percent power,
entered the primary containment building in protective suits and
determined steam was leaking from a short, rarely used pipe
welded at right angles to another pipe going to the reactor
coolant system, Cannon said. 

Workers later removed insulation around the pipe joint and began
trying to determine what caused the weld's flaw. Cannon said the
pipes were installed at least 20 years ago, before the plant
came online in 1986. He said workers now are checking other pipe
welds with similar configurations. 

The Hope Creek plant is one of three nuclear reactors, along
with Salem 1 and 2, operated by PSEG Nuclear at a complex in
Lower Alloways Creek Township in Salem County along the Delaware
River. One of the nation's largest nuclear generating stations,
the plants together provide electricity to more than half of
PSEG's 2 million New Jersey customers. 

Diane Screnci, spokeswoman for the federal Nuclear Regulatory
Commission, said the agency last August put all three plants
under additional oversight indefinitely, requiring more frequent
and more stringent inspections. 

"We expect the plants to find and fix problems" promptly, she
said. "Our inspections the past few years have noted issues with
that." 

NRC reports on the plants over the past year cite "numerous
indications of weaknesses in corrective actions and management
efforts to establish an environment where employees are
consistently willing to raise safety concerns." 

"We found examples of unresolved conflict and poor communication
between management and staff, as well as underlying staff and
management frustration with poor equipment reliability," state
the reports. 

Watchdog group Unplug Salem has said all three plants should be
shut down, arguing that repeated, relatively small problems
indicate inadequate maintenance. The group wants a vibrating
recirculation pump at Hope Creek replaced as soon as possible,
but NRC has agreed to let PSEG wait until the plant's next
refueling, scheduled for spring 2006. 

Cannon and Screnci both said the current shutdown won't affect
those plans. 

"We feel this leak is probably caused by the vibrations from the
circulation combo," Unplug Salem director Norm Cohen said. "If I
was running the corporation, I would want to replace the shaft
now and not risk having an accident." 

Last Thursday, Salem 1 reported a piping system leak that
exceeded NRC limits. It allowed a small amount of water from the
reactor coolant system to cross over a valve that wasn't tightly
closed and into an adjoining pipe. That was quickly fixed by
tightening the valve, Cannon said. 

Newark-based Public Service Enterprise Group Inc. is merging
with Chicago-based Exelon Corp., which owns the Oyster Creek
nuclear plant in Ocean County and co-owns the Salem I and II
plants with PSEG. The merger would make the new company the
biggest U.S. operator of nuclear power plants. 

On the Net: 

Public Service Enterprise Group: www.pseg.com 

NRC reports:
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/ 

	 
Subscribe to Newsday home delivery
[http://www.newsday.com/about/ny-subscribe.htmlstory] 
	
 	Copyright © 2005, The Associated Press 	
   
 Copyright © Newsday, Inc. Produced by Newsday Electronic
*****************************************************************
 12 Guardian Unlimited: Nuclear power?

EducationGuardian.co.uk: 

Show me the money 
		
The budget announced £30m a year more for energy research - but 
will any of that go into nuclear projects? Linda Nordling looks 
at the options           

Tuesday March 29, 2005
The Guardian [http://www.guardian.co.uk]  		
 		
The future of nuclear power is a potato too hot for any of the 
large political parties to handle in the run-up to the general 
election. But this month's science and national budgets together 
herald winds of change for nuclear research.

In its 2003 energy white paper, the government committed itself 
to cutting carbon emissions by 2020. Acknowledging that nuclear 
energy emits no carbon, it would "keep the nuclear option open". 
But how, it would not say.

Critics of the white paper said its targets were unreachable
without new investment in nuclear energy. Spearheaded by the
industry leader, British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL), the nuclear lobby
warned that without new research funds and training for nuclear
engineers to replenish the ageing workforce, the door on fission
would close.

The same lobbyists should have been pleased to see a near
doubling for energy research in the budget this month. Funds
will rise from £40m a year to £70m by 2007-08. The bulk of it
will be distributed by the Engineering and Physical Sciences
Research Council (EPSRC), which said applications to do all
types of research underpinning the UK's future energy supply
would be considered, including nuclear.

However, BNFL did not respond to the budget announcement. Nor,
surprisingly, did it welcome the UK's signing, on February 28,
of an agreement on international collaboration with Canada,
France, Japan and the US for research on the next generation
(Generation IV) of fission reactors.

In fact, BNFL has become almost mute over the past 12 months. It
could be that it wants to avoid a pre-election debacle that
could scare the winning party into retreat on nuclear power. Off
the record, both Tory and Labour sources have said that they
will tackle the nuclear question head-on after the election.
With this and last month's signature in mind, we could well see
more funding for international collaboration in the not too
distant future.

However, getting public acceptance for new nuclear build, or
even a new fission research effort, will not be easy. In
Finland, where new build is already taking place, it took the
government eight years to get the public on its side. In the
end, it succeeded by pointing to the creation of jobs and
environmental benefits.

It remains to be seen whether the British public would respond
to such discussions as the pragmatic Finns did. In the meantime,
there is the extra £30m to compete for. None of it is guaranteed
for nuclear research. Nor will all of it pay for more projects,
since the UK research councils have to pay a higher proportion
of university overheads from September this year. But what there
is should set nuclear researchers thinking about projects they
might want to do should more funds come on stream after the
election.

More details about how the EPSRC will spend its money until 2008
will be announced in late May.

· www.epsrc.ac.uk [http://www.epsrc.ac.uk] Linda Nordling is
news editor of Research Fortnight. ln@researchresearch.com
[ln@researchresearch.com] 
	
[UP] 

EducationGuardian.co.uk © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
*****************************************************************
 13 Moscow Times: Lithuania Reluctant to Close Nuke
 
Wednesday, March 30, 2005. Issue 3135. Page 7.     
Aa Aa Aa   

Bloomberg 

VILNIUS, Lithuania -- Lithuania will not be able to close its
Soviet-built Ignalina nuclear plant by 2010, as pledged to the
European Union, unless it first gets a connection with Western
Europe's electricity grid, Premier Algirdas Brazauskas said. 

"Closure of the second reactor would hardly be possible if a new
power line isn't built," Brazauskas said during a speech at
parliament Tuesday. "We're above all thinking of a link to
Poland, and are also very interested in another line that could
be laid across the Baltic Sea floor to Sweden." 

Lithuania wants to reduce its energy dependence on Russia, which
now supplies all of its oil and natural gas. Possible
electricity shortfalls after the closure of Ignalina, which
represents more than half the country's power generation
capacity, may leave Lithuania dependent on power imports from
Russia as well. 

Before joining the EU last year with eight other nations,
Lithuania and Slovakia agreed to close nuclear plants ruled
unsafe by the EU if the bloc would help pay the costs. 

Lithuania shut the first of Ignalina's two reactors on Dec. 31,
as was agreed with the EU. It must close the other in 2009. 

A project to build a power line from Lithuania to Poland is not
progressing because of Poland's scant interest, Brazauskas said. 
Lithuania's Economy Ministry has said it would also seek EU
support for an undersea power cable to Sweden. 

  	 © Copyright 2005 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved. 	   
*****************************************************************
 14 NRC: NRC to Discuss 2004 Performance Assessment for Perry Nuclear Power Plant
 
News Release - Region III - 2005-00
 U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION 

Office of Public Affairs, Region III
  No. III-05-009           March 29, 2005   
  CONTACT:     Jan Strasma (630) 829-9663
 Viktoria Mitlyng (630) 829-9662     E-mail: opa3@nrc.gov
[opa3@nrc.gov]   
  

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff will meet in Paineville,
Ohio, on Monday, April 4, with representatives of FirstEnergy
Nuclear Operating Company to discuss the agencys assessment of
safety performance for the year 2004 at the Perry Nuclear Power
Plant. The plant is located at Perry, Ohio. 

The meeting, which will be open to the public for observation,
is scheduled to begin at Monday, April 4, 2005, at 6 p.m. in the
Barberry Room at the Renaissance Quail Hollow Resort, 11080
Concord-Hambden Road, Painesville. 

Before the meeting is adjourned, NRC staff will be available to
answer questions from the public on the safety performance of
the Perry plant, as well as the role of the NRC in ensuring safe
plant operation. 

The NRC continually reviews the performance of the Perry plant
and the nations other commercial nuclear power facilities, NRC
Region III Administrator James Caldwell said. This meeting will
provide an opportunity for a discussion of our annual assessment
of safety performance with the company and with local officials
and residents who live near the plant. Our goal is to explain
the NRC oversight process and make as much information as
possible available to the public regarding our regulation of
these facilities. 

A letter sent from the NRC Region III Office to plant officials
addresses the performance of the plant during the period and
will serve as the basis for the meeting discussion. It is
available on the NRC web site at:
http://www.nrc.gov/NRR/OVERSIGHT/ASSESS/LETTERS/perr_2004q4.pdf
[PDF Icon] . 

The NRCs assessment concluded that the Perry plant operated
safely during the 2004. However, because of equipment problems
which occurred over a two-year period from 2002 through last
year, the NRC in August increased its regulatory scrutiny over
the plant. 

During 2004, NRC inspections also identified issues with the
plants corrective action program and with staff performance.
Instances were noted where the plant staff did not take
effective corrective actions in response to equipment problems
or had to perform multiple revisions of its evaluations of the
cause of the problems. 

NRC inspection findings during the year also identified problems
caused by failure to follow procedures or inattention to detail
by the plant staff. 

As a result of the NRCs heightened oversight, the agency is
conducting a broad inspection evaluating the performance of the
Perry plant and the status of its activities to improve plant
performance. The first two parts of this inspection have been
completed, and the remaining portion of the inspection will be
conducted in April and May. When the inspection in completed,
the NRC will schedule a public meeting to discuss the findings
of all three parts of the inspection and issue a written report. 

Routine inspections are performed by two NRC Resident Inspectors
assigned to the plant and by inspection specialists from the
Region III Office in Lisle, Ill., and the agencys headquarters
in Rockville, Md. Among the areas of plant operations to be
inspected this year by NRC specialists are emergency
preparedness, maintenance, safety system performance, and how
the plant finds and fixes problems. 

Current performance information for Perry is available on the
NRCs web site at:
http://www.nrc.gov/NRR/OVERSIGHT/ASSESS/PERR1/perr1_chart.html. 
 



  


 	Last revised Tuesday, March 29, 2005 	   
*****************************************************************
 15 [NYTr] US Profits Handsomely from India-Pakistan Conflict (RHC)
 
Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2005 16:53:03 -0600 (CST)

 
Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit
 
Late News Update from Radio Havana Cuba - March 29, 2005

US Profits Handsomely from India-Pakistan Conflict

New Delhi, March 29 (RHC)--The United States is seeking to profit from
the deadly rivalry between Pakistan and India by selling both nations
combat aircraft and other weapons, say reports.

P.R. Chari, a professor at the New Delhi Institute of Peace and
Conflict Studies, told IPS news agency that Washington was "laughing
all the way to the bank" in selling nuclear-capable F-16 Falcons and
F-18 Hornet fighters to both countries.

The sale of Falcons to India was likely directly associated with Bush,
says Chari, in that the fighter's factory was located in his home
state of Texas and that reportedly 5,000 jobs had been saved by the
deal. US Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, was also recently in
India and discussed the sale as well as providing further nuclear
technology for New Delhi's energy program. India has traditionally
bought its arms from Russia, but closer ties with the United States
has led to improved business deals for Washington.

Chari told IPS that he didn't see the logic in purchasing such
advanced fighter aircraft capable of delivering nuclear missile when
both countries already possessed missiles with more than adequate
range.

The research professor added that it was interesting to note the
cynical circle completed by Washington from its 1998 sanctions against
both Pakistan and India for conducting nuclear tests to actually
promoting the use of nuclear weapons today.

"It just shows that Washington has a flexible enough foreign policy to
accommodate what it judges to be in its own best interest and this
includes such issues as nuclear proliferation," Chari told IPS.

compiled by NY Transfer from http://www.radiohc.cu
       
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 16 [NYTr] Vanunu's Defiance Rings across Jerusalem
 
Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2005 08:49:31 -0600 (CST)

 
Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit
 
sent by Simon McGuinness

The Irish Times - Mar 29, 2005
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/world/2005/0329/2927233397FR29VANUNU.html

Nuclear whistleblower's defiance rings across city

by Nuala Haughey 

MIDDLE EAST: Every day at noon, Mordechai Vanunu climbs the stone
steps of an Anglican church bell-tower in East Jerusalem and rings the
bells.

For Israel's high-profile nuclear whistleblower, this simple daily
gesture is an act of defiance, a signal that he will not be silenced.

It is almost a year since the 50-year-old former nuclear technician was
released from an Israeli prison after serving 18 years for exposing the
country's secret atomic weapons programme.

Since then, he has lived in the guesthouse attached to St George's
Cathedral, owned by the Anglican Church which Vanunu converted to from
Judaism 18 years ago.

Vanunu's freedom has not been what he had hoped for; he is obliged to
report his movements to the Israeli authorities and remains prohibited
from leaving the Jewish state, which he disavows and wants to flee.

Seated yesterday in the guesthouse's tranquil courtyard amid citrus
trees, Vanunu was relaxed and measured as he talked about his life after
prison.

Tanned and fit, he was dressed casually in a blue shirt and beige
trousers, with a large silver crucifix dangling from his neck.

Vanunu said he volunteered for the job of church bell-ringer last June,
both to get exercise from climbing to the belfry, and to gain a new
voice.

"By ringing the bell it's like I'm saying remember my message, remember
my secrets. Anyone who hears the bell and knows it's Vanunu, they know
what is behind this," he said.

"From the tower I can see the district court where I was sentenced to 18
years . . . I'm telling them that what they did 18 years ago did not
work. I'm here, alive."

Since his release, Vanunu has vigorously resisted attempts by the
Israeli authorities to silence him, on the grounds that he was a risk to
state security and could still have secrets to tell.

He has long maintained that he has no more secrets to offer up to the
world, and has consistently flouted post-release restrictions which have
precluded him from talking to journalists and meeting foreign nationals.
Instead, anti-nuclear activists have been making pilgrimages to his
residence.

Among his international supporters is the Northern Irish Nobel Peace
Prize laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire, whose latest trip was last
December.

Maguire, who nominated Vanunu for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2001, is due
to visit him along with other Irish supporters late next month, when the
post-release restrictions imposed on him for 12 months are due for
review.

Such displays of international solidarity have long been Vanunu's
lifeline, sustaining him during his long incarceration, the first 11
years of which he spent in solitary confinement. He has long been
alienated from most of his large family of deeply religious Jews who
migrated to Israel from Morocco in 1963.

Only two of his brothers, both of whom live abroad, are supportive of
him. Many of his fellow nationals view him as a traitor who has betrayed
his country and his religion.

Vanunu shot to international fame in 1986 when he gave the Sunday Times
of London a description and photographs of Israel's nuclear reactor in
the desert town of Dimona, where he had worked for nine years as a
technician.

Based on his accounts, experts at the time estimated that Israel had the
world's sixth-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons. As part of its
controversial policy of "nuclear ambiguity", Israel neither confirms nor
denies it has nuclear weapons.

Shortly before the Sunday Times report was published, Vanunu was
kidnapped by the Israeli spy agency Mossad after a female agent posing
as an American tourist lured him to Rome in a "honeytrap" operation.
Following his capture, he was smuggled to Israel by yacht, tried behind
closed doors and sentenced to 18 years for treason and espionage.

Reflecting on the past 11 months of relative freedom, Vanunu said he
felt he had adapted well to his new life, despite the constant Israeli
surveillance. Apart from court appearances, he confines himself to
predominantly Arab East Jerusalem, preferring not to encounter Israelis
or speak Hebrew. He is supportive of the Palestinian cause and an
advocate of a secular state with equal rights for Jews and Palestinians.

Asked if he fears for his safety, Vanunu replied that "everything is
possible here but I am trying to behave like I have no fear, walk the
street, to ignore these people but I bear in mind that crazy people can
be anywhere."

Vanunu hopes he will be able to gain asylum abroad if Israel releases
its travel restrictions when they are reviewed next month. Ultimately,
he wants to move to America where his adoptive parents live, write a
memoir, and research and teach history or politics at a university.

On the wall of his modest room hangs a calendar depicting Irish
landscape photographs. He says he would like to visit Ireland and
Scotland.

"I would want to see Ireland. I have contacts with Irish people during
my time in prison. They used to write to me and I wrote to them. I read
about Irish history. So now I have many, many friends and I would be
happy to see Ireland."

Over a week ago, he was indicted for violating the terms of his release
on 21 occasions. Early next month he will appear in court to face these
charges, which could lead to him being imprisoned for up to three years.

However, Vanunu yesterday appeared confident that he would not face
another prison term.

"Maybe they will warn me again or I don't know, but they will not stop
me talking," he said.

) The Irish Times  
       
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 17 Secrecy News -- 03/29/05
 
Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2005 13:36:19 -0500

 
SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2005, Issue No. 28
March 29, 2005


**	HYUNDAI AND THE NORTH KOREAN NUCLEAR PROGRAM
**	A NEW COUNTERINTELLIGENCE STRATEGY
**	GAO URGES MORE COMPLETE DOD REPORTING
**	SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT THE WMD COMMISSION REPORT


HYUNDAI AND THE NORTH KOREAN NUCLEAR PROGRAM

The Congressional Research Service made headlines in South Korea
last week with a renewed allegation that cash payments provided to
the North Korean government by South Korea's Hyundai corporate
group between 1999 and 2003 may have been used to support the
North's clandestine uranium enrichment program.

"Larry A. Niksch of the Congressional Research Service (CRS)...
said in his Feb. 22 report [that] Hyundai funds went into
accelerating North Korea's secret HEU development program," Chosun
Ilbo reported on March 24.

See "Hyundai Helped Fund N.K. Uranium Program: Expert":

http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200503/200503240018.html

Similar allegations have been presented by Mr. Niksch in previous
CRS reports.  But the February 22 CRS report cited in the Chosun
Ilbo story may be found here:

     http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/IB98045.pdf


A NEW COUNTERINTELLIGENCE STRATEGY

The National Counterintelligence Executive (NCIX) yesterday
unveiled a new counterintelligence strategy, approved by the
President on March 1.

A copy of the deliberately vague "National Counterintelligence
Strategy of the United States" may be found here:

     http://www.fas.org/irp/ops/ci/cistrategy.pdf

The "seven pillars" of counterintelligence strategy were
enthusiastically described by NCIX chief Michelle Van Cleave in a
March 5 speech here:

     http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2005/03/ncix030505.pdf


GAO URGES MORE COMPLETE DOD REPORTING

In a splendid example of intelligent oversight, a Government
Accountability Oversight (GAO) study released yesterday identified
several defects in the way that the Department of Defense (DOD)
reports to Congress on the progress of major weapons acquisition
programs, and explained how those defects could be corrected.

One of the problem areas flagged by GAO concerned pervasive
overclassification by the Pentagon:

"DOD classified about 50 percent of the [reports] it submitted to
Congress in 2003, involving a total acquisition investment of $454
billion," the GAO noted.

"However, only a small amount of data contained in each classified
[report] is actually classified."

"Because these [reports] are classified, special handling
procedures must be used by those congressional staff with the
appropriate clearances even to access the unclassified cost and
schedule data. This practice also completely blocks access for
those staff without clearances to the unclassified cost and
schedule data."

"As a result, congressional oversight of DOD's adherence to
established cost and schedule baselines is unnecessarily
constrained," the GAO stated.

GAO recommended, and DOD concurred, that classification controls
should be much more selectively applied.

See "Defense Acquisitions: Information for Congress on Performance
of Major Programs Can Be More Complete, Timely, and Accessible,"
Government Accountability Office Report No. GAO-05-182, March
2005:

     http://www.fas.org/sgp/gao/gao-05-182.pdf


SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT THE WMD COMMISSION REPORT

The  Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United
States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction is supposed to report
this week to the President, providing its assessment of U.S.
intelligence on WMD and its recommendations for needed reforms.

Considering that the recommendations of last year's 9-11 Commission
-- notably including intelligence budget disclosure -- have been
rejected or not fully implemented, one may wonder about the likely
impact of the latest Commission.

Several impudent questions about the forthcoming WMD Commission
report were posed by myself for the Nieman Watchdog, a project of
the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

See "The WMD Commission and Intelligence Reform," March 28, linked
from here:

     http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/



_______________________________________________
Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the
Federation of American Scientists.

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_______________________
Steven Aftergood
Project on Government Secrecy
Federation of American Scientists
web:    www.fas.org/sgp/index.html
email:  saftergood@fas.org
voice:  (202) 454-4691
*****************************************************************
 18 StarNewsOnline.com: Nuke plant risks being kept secret

The Voice of Southeastern North Carolina
 	 	 	 	
March 29. 2005      

The federal government is trying to hide the dangers of storing
used nuclear fuel in power-plant pools. Southport comes to mind. 

Experts told the government last summer that these pools are
vulnerable to terrorist attack, and that used fuel should
instead be stored in lead and steel casks. 

But the power industry prefers pools because they're cheaper. So
the Bush administration says they're fine. 

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission insists there's little reason
to believe terrorists could start fires or release radiation by
damaging pools and letting the water drain out. It also insists
there's little reason to believe anyone could steal fuel rods
and use them for nefarious purposes. 

The National Academy of Sciences isn't so sure. At the behest of
Congress, it asked experts to evaluate the vulnerability of
storage pools. They concluded that we should put spent fuel in
casks, and quickly. 

The administration ignored the scientists' report, just as it
ignores many other scientific conclusions it doesn't like. 

The administration also misled Congress and the public about the
contents of the report, according to the executive director of
the National Academy of Sciences. The NRC released only some
parts – ones that made the pools look safe – and kept the rest
secret. 

The administration argues, of course, that it doesn't want
terrorists to get useful information. 

But it's also keeping the neighbors of nuclear power plants from
learning about the dangers they might face – dangers their
government is refusing to confront. 

All material ©2005 Wilmington Star-News
*****************************************************************
 19 Guardian Unlimited: WMD Panel to Fault Intelligence Agencies
 
From the Associated Press        

[UP] 

Wednesday March 30, 2005 1:16 AM

AP Photo DCSA101 

By KATHERINE SHRADER 

Associated Press Writer 

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush's commission on weapons of mass
destruction will castigate U.S. intelligence agencies for their
continued failure to share information after numerous reforms
aimed at improving coordination, federal officials said Tuesday. 

One official familiar with the commission's workings, speaking
on condition of anonymity, said the report also goes into great
detail on why prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs
turned out to be flawed. The report is scheduled to be released
Thursday. 

The report examines factors that might have led to errors, the
official said, such as whether policy-makers were seeking
preconceived conclusions, whether foreign intelligence agencies
had reached similar conclusions and whether analysts had little
information to work with. 

The panel considered a range of intelligence issues going beyond
Iraq, including congressional oversight, satellite imagery and
electronic snooping. Among numerous soft spots, officials
familiar with the findings say ``human intelligence'' - the work
of actual operatives on the ground - is lacking. 

In the three years since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S.
intelligence apparatus has been revamped. At Congress'
direction, the government is establishing a new intelligence
chief - a director of national intelligence - and new centers to
focus on counterterrorism and counterproliferation. 

Yet the nine-member panel has found that there's more to be done
to improve the coordination among the 15 agencies that comprise
the intelligence community. The commission will blame enduring
cultures at each agency for driving decisions to prevent
intelligence sharing among them, according to U.S. officials who
spoke on condition of anonymity. 

A lesson learned from the report is that the information belongs
to the entire government, not one agency, the officials said.
That will require people - not just better technologies - to
find improved methods of sharing and coordination. 

The report will stress the importance of management and
leadership, officials said, as well as a renewed emphasis on
questioning assumptions in intelligence analysis. Even before
the report, intelligence analysts were faulted for rejecting
information that contradicted presumptions that Iraq had active
weapons of mass destruction programs before the 2003 invasion. 

The report took more than a year of work, and the White House
has taken pains to signal it is taking the panel's findings
seriously. 

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Bush would discuss
the report with Cabinet members on Thursday, immediately after
the president meets with the full commission. 

``Making sure we have the best possible intelligence is critical
to protecting the American people,'' McClellan said. ``We will
carefully consider the recommendations and act quickly on the
recommendations as well.'' 

Bush created the commission under pressure after U.S. inspectors
failed to find any Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, or WMD,
despite prewar administration assertions about deadly
stockpiles. 

Under orders from Bush, the commission has assessed whether U.S.
intelligence agencies are sufficiently organized, equipped and
trained to warn the government about the threat of WMD from
foreign entities, including terror groups. 

Bush also asked the commission to consider the merits of recent
intelligence reforms, including the new counterproliferation
center and the post of national intelligence director, to which
Bush has nominated John Negroponte, former U.S. ambassador to
the U.N. and to Iraq. 

U.S. officials say the commission took apart the Iraq
intelligence with a highly critical eye, including the misstated
estimates on the former regime's efforts to obtain yellowcake
uranium from Africa, its biological weapons capabilities and its
purported mobile weapons labs. 

For each issue, such as biological weapons or nuclear weapons,
the report looks at what intelligence agencies believed about
the Iraq's capabilities before the war and compares that to the
findings afterward. It then seeks to explain the reasons for the
discrepancies. 

The commissioners have assembled numerous detailed
recommendations for intelligence operations, the officials said.
Most will have to be implemented by the national intelligence
director or other parts of the executive branch and will not
require legislation. 

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a commission member, said the panel,
led by Republican Laurence Silberman and Democrat Charles Robb,
reached nearly unanimous conclusions. 

``We argue over certain points, but there has never been any
major disputes,'' he said. ``A lot of times it's wording, and
what words mean. We've had a remarkably congenial commission.'' 

--- 
Associated Press writers Jennifer Loven and Ken Guggenheim
contributed to this report. 	 
		 	 	   
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
*****************************************************************
 20 Daily Times: Centrifuges being sent to IAEA at Iran’s request, says Kasuri 

 Wednesday, March 30, 2005 
	   
* FM says Pakistan will not allow use of its territory against
Iran 

* F-16s will not affect peace with India

Staff Report

KARACHI: Foreign Minister Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri said on
Tuesday that “old and useless parts of outdated centrifuges”
were being sent to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
for inspection following a request from Iran and the UN nuclear
watchdog and that this would not affect Pakistan’s nuclear
programme. 

“We hope the controversy will end after their inspection.
Pakistan wants to be transparent in this controversy,” he told
reporters.

He reiterated that Pakistan would never allow a third country to
use its soil against Iran, saying that Islamabad had good
relations with Tehran. “They (centrifuge parts) are being sent
only for matching the contamination level with Iran’s
centrifuges in the custody of the IAEA.” 

“At no point will those currently useless centrifuge components
be out of our custody. The analysis will be carried out in the
presence of our experts and the entire results will be shared.”
The parts will be brought back to Pakistan,” Kasuri said.

He said Pakistan was committed to a peace process with India and
the acquisition of F-16 fighters from the US would not harm a
thaw in relations. “I am surprised by the Indian reaction,”
Kasuri said, referring to Indian protests over a US decision to
sell Pakistan F-16s. 

“It will not change the overall balance of power. This is not at
all in discord with the emerging thaw in relations with India,”
he said. 

Kasuri said India was also in the process of acquiring Phalcons
from Israel, and its forces were “far, far ahead of Pakistan.” 

“Pakistan faces a formidable challenge in terms of approaching
conventional balance vis-à-vis India,” he said. 

Kasuri rejected the opposition’s claim that Pakistan had
compromised its nuclear capability to acquire the F-16s. “The
F-16 offer is unconditional and the missile and nuclear
capability is there to stay”.

He claimed that Pakistan’s nuclear and missile programmes were
self-sufficient and indigenous, adding that there was a command
and control system in place to secure them. Kasuri rejected that
the F-18s were more advanced aircraft than the ones given to
Pakistan.

He said there were four possible sources of funds to purchase
F-16s out of the $3 billion aid package.

He said Pakistan and India had been involved in the talks to
resolve the Kashmir issue. “Compared to 2002 when Indian troops
were amassed on Pakistan’s border, relations between the two are
far better.”

Kasuri said that the Kashmir bus passengers would be issued
special permits instead of visas and passports. He said that
President Musharraf and Indian leaders would hold “serious”
talks during his Delhi visit. 

Daily Times - All Rights Reserved
and hosted by WorldCALL Internet
Solutions [http://www.wcis.com.pk] 
*****************************************************************
 21 Daily Times: Centrifuges being sent to IAEA at Iran’s request, says Kasuri

 Wednesday, March 30, 2005 
 
* FM says Pakistan will not allow use of its territory against
Iran 

* F-16s will not affect peace with India

Staff Report

KARACHI: Foreign Minister Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri said on
Tuesday that “old and useless parts of outdated centrifuges”
were being sent to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
for inspection following a request from Iran and the UN nuclear
watchdog and that this would not affect Pakistan’s nuclear
programme. 

“We hope the controversy will end after their inspection.
Pakistan wants to be transparent in this controversy,” he told
reporters.

He reiterated that Pakistan would never allow a third country to
use its soil against Iran, saying that Islamabad had good
relations with Tehran. “They (centrifuge parts) are being sent
only for matching the contamination level with Iran’s
centrifuges in the custody of the IAEA.” 

“At no point will those currently useless centrifuge components
be out of our custody. The analysis will be carried out in the
presence of our experts and the entire results will be shared.”
The parts will be brought back to Pakistan,” Kasuri said.

He said Pakistan was committed to a peace process with India and
the acquisition of F-16 fighters from the US would not harm a
thaw in relations. “I am surprised by the Indian reaction,”
Kasuri said, referring to Indian protests over a US decision to
sell Pakistan F-16s. 

“It will not change the overall balance of power. This is not at
all in discord with the emerging thaw in relations with India,”
he said. 

Kasuri said India was also in the process of acquiring Phalcons
from Israel, and its forces were “far, far ahead of Pakistan.” 

“Pakistan faces a formidable challenge in terms of approaching
conventional balance vis-à-vis India,” he said. 

Kasuri rejected the opposition’s claim that Pakistan had
compromised its nuclear capability to acquire the F-16s. “The
F-16 offer is unconditional and the missile and nuclear
capability is there to stay”.

He claimed that Pakistan’s nuclear and missile programmes were
self-sufficient and indigenous, adding that there was a command
and control system in place to secure them. Kasuri rejected that
the F-18s were more advanced aircraft than the ones given to
Pakistan.

He said there were four possible sources of funds to purchase
F-16s out of the $3 billion aid package.

He said Pakistan and India had been involved in the talks to
resolve the Kashmir issue. “Compared to 2002 when Indian troops
were amassed on Pakistan’s border, relations between the two are
far better.”

Kasuri said that the Kashmir bus passengers would be issued
special permits instead of visas and passports. He said that
President Musharraf and Indian leaders would hold “serious”
talks during his Delhi visit.
            
Daily Times - All Rights Reserved
      and hosted by WorldCALL Internet
Solutions [http://www.wcis.com.pk] 
*****************************************************************
 22 [NukeNet] Action: oppose free-release of radioactive waste
 
Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2005 15:57:56 -0800

 
<x-flowed>
NukeNet Anti-Nuclear Network (nukenet@energyjustice.net)

This e-mail contains several items:

(1) An ACTION ALERT for organizations to endorse a letter to the U.S.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) calling for the cessation of efforts
to deregulate and release radioactive waste.
(2) Accompanying BACKGROUND information on the deregulation effort and
the text of the LETTER to the NRC.
(3) A PRESS RELEASE about Public Citizen's opposition to an NRC plan to
cloak industry information with a new "Safeguards" rule.

==========

!!! A C T I O N    A L E R T !!!

OPPOSE THE DEREGULATION OF RADIOACTIVE WASTE!

ORGANIZATIONS: Sign on to a letter [see text below] to the NRC calling
for a cessation of efforts to deregulate and release radioactive waste!

TO SIGN, please e-mail the following contact information to Diane
D'Arrigo (dianed@nirs.org) at the Nuclear Information and Resource
Service (NIRS): your name, title, organization name, city, and, state.
Please include "rad waste letter" in the subject line.

THE DEADLINE is TOMORROW, Wednesday, March 30th, at 6 p.m. Eastern
time.

If you have any questions, contact Melissa Kemp at Public Citizen
(202-454-5176) or Diane D'Arrigo at NIRS (202-328-0002 ext. 16).

==========

BACKGROUND:

Stop the NRC from Authorizing the Release of Low-Level Radioactive
Waste into Communities!

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Staff is expected to submit a
"Controlling the Disposition of Solid Materials" rulemaking package to
the Commission by the end of March. The proposal, however, has nothing
to do with control.

Specificially, the proposal is to instigate a rulemaking to once again
try to deregulate significant portions of the "low-level" radioactive
waste stream, permitting nuclear material to go to unlicensed sites such
as local municipal garbage dumps, hazardous waste sites, and recyclers
for transformation into consumer goods and construction materials.
Landfills are known to contaminate nearby soil and drinking water, and
recycled materials are used throughout our cities, suburbs, and rural
communities. There is no safe level of exposure to ionizing radiation.

In addition, the NRC staff is moving to present this misnamed
rulemaking to the Commission without making the recommendation
immediately public, and without scheduling a Commission meeting to hear
from staff and key stakeholders.

Don't let the NRC proceed in this manner! This is a regulatory agency
whose stated number-one priority is the protection of public health! The
release of radioactive waste into our communities is dangerous and
unacceptable, and decisions of this importance should not be done
secretly!

Click here for more background and history on this issue:
http://www.citizen.org/cmep/energy_enviro_nuclear/nuclear_waste/low-level/recycling/


==========

[LETTER TEXT]

March 2005

U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Washington, DC 20555

Re: Opposition to Proceeding with Rulemaking on the Release of
Currently Regulated Radioactive Waste and Materials to Unlicensed
Destinations ("Controlling" the Disposition of Solid Materials)

Dear Commissioners Diaz, Jaczko, Lyons, McGaffigan and Merrifield:

Nineteen years ago, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission ignited a
national firestorm of concern and outrage when it issued a Policy
Statement on radioactive waste "Below Regulatory Concern" (BRC),
essentially attempting to deregulate a major portion of the "low-level"
radioactive waste stream. The BRC Policy would have permitted
radioactive wastes to be disposed of in landfills not licensed or
designed to handle radioactive wastes, and to be otherwise  "free
released," so they could end up in schools, farms, and parks, throughout
our cities, suburbs, and rural communities. The proposed policy would
have allowed "recycling" nuclear waste into consumer products. The
Commission, charged with regulating such materials so as to isolate them
from the human environment, had chosen instead - in order to save money
for industry rather than protect the health of the public - to permit
nuclear wastes to be placed into intimate human contact.

The outcry was intense. State legislatures around the country passed
laws barring BRC practices within their borders. Eventually the Congress
intervened, in a remarkable fashion, and by statute overturned the NRC's
BRC 1986 Policy and its 1990 expanded BRC policy, and expressly reserved
for the states the right to regulate any radioactive material that NRC
might subsequently try to deregulate [Energy Policy Act of 1992].

Several years later, the Commission asked the National Academy of
Sciences to perform a study about whether another attempt at
deregulating certain radioactive wastes should be undertaken.  Hoping
for some political cover from the Academy, the NRC was shocked when NAS
declined to endorse such an effort and provided very strong criticism of
NRC's credibility in such matters.  The Academy report concluded that if
the NRC nonetheless remained interested in such a BRC endeavor, no such
effort should be undertaken until and unless NRC had taken significant,
successful measures to repair its credibility with stakeholder groups.
The National Academy of Sciences committee - established at the request
of the Commission - stated:

"[T]hat in the past, the USNRC failed to convince any environmental and
consumer advocacy groups that the clearance of slightly radioactive
solid material can be conducted safely, and failed to convince certain
industry groups that such clearance is desirable.  Furthermore, a legacy
of distrust of the USNRC has developed among many of the environmental
stakeholder groups, resulting from their experience with the BRC policy,
the enhanced participatory rulemaking on license termination
("decommissioning rule"), and the USNRC's 1999 issues paper, published
in the Federal Register on June 30, 1999, on the clearance standards.
Reestablishing trust will require concerted and sustained effort by the
USNRC.

***
The USNRC must overcome serious levels of distrust, generated by its
actions during the BRC policy and License Termination Rule efforts,
before [any effort to revive a new BRC policy] is likely to succeed."

Despite these strong recommendations, however, no such efforts have
truly been undertaken; indeed, every action has further eroded public
confidence. Although NRC has had some public meetings and workshops,
these have been few and far between, and NRC has used these meetings
simply as a way to improve the image of the proceedings without
seriously taking the input of citizen and industry groups into account.


Rather than give up on deregulating radioactive wastes, NRC has been
quietly proceeding to put the pieces in place to try again. NRC has
spent large amounts of staff and contractor time and international
effort to do exactly what the public opposes - release radioactive waste
into our communities.

At present, the NRC staff is set to submit to the Commission a
recommendation that it approve a kind of "BRC II". The proposal is to
instigate a rulemaking to once again try to deregulate significant
portions of the "low-level" radioactive waste stream, permitting
licensed nuclear material to go to unlicensed sites such as local
municipal garbage dumps, hazardous waste sites, and recyclers for use in
consumer goods and construction materials (giving new meaning to the
phrase "hot roads"). This can only create, as did the ill-fated BRC
efforts of the early 1990s, tremendous concern across the country and
further damage the Commission's very tattered credibility.

We are therefore dismayed that the NRC is moving forward with BRC, the
Sequel. We are furthermore concerned that the Commission is doing so in
a non-transparent way that will further erode public trust. In
particular, it is our understanding that the staff proposal will be
presented to the Commission with no public meeting, no testimony from
key stakeholders, and without the proposal becoming immediately public.
The Commission rather will vote in private on this important and
controversial proposal, after having only seen recommendations from the
staff but not hearing directly from those who would be most affected.

There will of course be an opportunity for the public to submit written
comments to the staff after the Commission approves the proposal for
rulemaking and directs the proceeding to begin. But the Commissioners
themselves really should hear directly from stakeholders NOW, prior to
embarking on this dangerous course.

Furthermore, NRC appears to intend the rulemaking to have a
pre-ordained outcome. NRC is already considering and approving such
deregulations without public input and now seeks to do so generically.
For example, the operators of the Connecticut Yankee reactor are
requesting to dispose of significant quantities of radioactive
decommissioning waste at an unlicensed landfill in Idaho. NRC staff
appears on the verge of approving this request without any opportunity
for a public hearing.

We therefore strongly urge you to:

1. Vote against initiating any rulemaking to remove from full
regulatory control portions of the radioactive waste stream -- i.e., do
not move forward with a new, highly controversial BRC/deregulation
endeavor.

2. Insist that before any such vote, the Commissioners hold a public
meeting at which representatives of our stakeholder community can
testify to the Commissioners as to why you should not proceed with the
staff's proposal. It is highly inappropriate to vote on such an
important issue after having only had input from the staff pushing the
proposal and not from anyone opposing it.

3. Require that the staff recommendation be made public immediately
when it is submitted to the Commissioners and before the Commission
meeting requested in (2) above, so that stakeholders can effectively
inform you of its problems in detail.

4. Direct staff to not approve the Connecticut Yankee request, or any
similar requests to send decommissioning wastes to landfills not
licensed to receive Atomic Energy Act radioactive wastes.

The job of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is to regulate nuclear
materials, not deregulate them. The lessons of the BRC controversy of a
decade and a half ago should not be forgotten. The release of
radioactively contaminated materials violates your mission of protecting
public health. Proceeding with this ill-conceived favor to industry
would destroy the last vestiges of opportunity for the Commission to
resurrect public confidence. We urge you to not go down this dangerous
path.

Sincerely,

Wenonah Hauter
Director
Energy Program
Public Citizen
Washington, DC

Michael Mariotte
Executive Director
Nuclear Information and Resource Service
Washington, D.C.

Dan Hirsch
Committee to Bridge the Gap
Santa Cruz, CA

==========

*** P R E S S    R E L E A S E ***

For Immediate Release: March 29, 2005
Contact: Joseph Malherek (202) 454-5109; Michele Boyd (202) 454-5134

Public Citizen Calls on Nuclear Agency to Withdraw Secrecy Proposal

"Safeguards Information" Rule Would Unjustifiably Restrict Public
Access to Industry Information

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The consumer advocacy group Public Citizen has
called on the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to withdraw a
proposed rule that would unduly and perhaps illegally broaden the scope
of nuclear industry security information that would be restricted from
public access.  The group made the assertion in formal comments
submitted this week to the NRC on the agency's proposed rule to revise
its regulations governing the protection of so-called "Safeguards
Information," access to which is restricted to people who have undergone
extensive background checks and demonstrated a "need to know" the
information.

"If instituted, these new regulations would further compromise the
public's ability to hold the nuclear industry and its government
regulators accountable for their management of nuclear facilities and
materials," said Wenonah Hauter, director of Public Citizen's Critical
Mass Energy and Environment Program.

The proposed regulations go beyond the "minimum restrictions needed to
protect the health and safety of the public or the common defense and
security," as required by the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, the law that
established the Safeguards category, Public Citizen said in its
comments.

"Rather than applying the 'minimum restrictions needed' requirement,
the commission is attempting to expand the category of Safeguards
Information to encompass virtually anything it wants -- including
information important to the public such as engineering and safety
analyses, emergency planning procedures and inspection reports on
nuclear facilities," Hauter said.  "This is an unacceptable information
blackout that will leave the public in the dark about the competency of
the nuclear industry and the NRC."

The group also charged that the NRC's proposed rule would improperly
restrict the public's access to important information that has proved
useful in the past.  For example, using information obtained from the
NRC about nuclear facilities' security capabilities, citizen groups in
the early 1990s successfully pressured the agency to adopt higher
standards for the protection of nuclear facilities, incorporating the
possibility of adversaries using truck bombs.

The proposed rule comes at a time when the NRC is under fire for its
allegedly improper use of the Safeguards classification to conceal
industry vulnerabilities.  U.S. Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) recently
said in a letter to the NRC's inspector general that the suppression of
a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) study about the security
vulnerabilities of the pools in which reactor operators store irradiated
nuclear fuel may be "based on the fact that it disagrees with the NAS'
conclusions, not on any legitimate security concerns."

The NRC also has been criticized recently -- by Markey, Public Citizen
and others -- for its decision to bar public access to its online
document library for several months while it conducted a security review
"to ensure that documents which might provide assistance to terrorists
will be inaccessible."  Despite this restricted access, the NRC did not
suspend its licensing or rulemaking proceedings, compromising the
participation of stakeholders who needed access to the NRC's documents.
While most of the documents are back up on the Web, some have been
redacted.

Public Citizen further noted in its comments that the Safeguards
category is not subject to the protections from institutional abuse as
is National Security Information, a government-wide category. The public
may challenge perceived instances of abuse or excessive secrecy
surrounding information in this category.

"This proposal gives the NRC and its licensees free rein to make secret
virtually any information even tangentially related to the security of
nuclear facilities," said Joseph Malherek, policy analyst for Public
Citizen and principal author of the comments.  "The NRC should withdraw
this regressive proposal and instead establish responsible reforms to
its rules for the protection of Safeguards Information."

To read Public Citizen's comments, please go to
http://www.citizen.org/documents/sgicomments.pdf

###

Public Citizen is a national, nonprofit consumer advocacy organization
based in Washington, D.C. For more information, please visit
www.citizen.org.

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*****************************************************************
 23 Deseret News: CDC kills fallout study 

[deseretnews.com] 

Tuesday, March 29, 2005 

By Joe Bauman Deseret Morning News 

The federal government, after already 
spending $8 million on the project, has yanked funding for a 
study of possible connections between thyroid health effects and 
the radioactive fallout that hit southern Utah and nearby areas 
of Nevada decades ago. 

The study has rechecked about 1,300 of 4,000 former 
students who lived in southwestern Utah and eastern Nevada, plus 
a control group of Arizona residents. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based in 
Atlanta, ended the program. 

"CDC does not have the financial resources available to 
continue the project," agency spokesman John Florence told the 
Deseret Morning News. "It's a funding issue." 

Notification of the study's halt came in a March 21 
letter from Michael A. McGeehin, director of the CDC Division of 
Environmental Hazards and Health Effects, to Dr. Joseph L. Lyon, 
a University of Utah researcher who has been heading the 
investigation. 

Lyon said he is loath to use the word cover-up, but it 
seems the federal government does not want to know about health 
effects of fallout on American citizens. Still, "That's the only 
interpretation I can place on it," he said. 

Asked how often the CDC pulls funding in the middle of a 
major study, Lyon said, "I've never known it to happen before. I 
haven't done a survey there, but it's the first time I've heard" 
about such a thing happening. 

Lyon's earlier studies, beginning in 1977, demonstrated 
that fallout from open-air nuclear bomb blasts at the Nevada 
Test Site caused cancer downwind. After his report was published 
in the New England Journal of Medicine in February 1979 and 
another review showed excess leukemia deaths, Congress passed a 
fallout compensation measure. 

In 1993, a new study by Lyon and colleagues found 
radioactivity from the detonations increased the incidence of 
thyroid tumors 3.4 times over the expected rate among 
schoolchildren who were exposed to the highest doses. 

That study, published by the Journal of the American 
Medical Association, examined the children when they were 
adults. They had been checked by federal researchers between 
1965 and 1970. The federal researchers had not found any 
connection. However, the 1993 study showed 56 children had 
thyroid nodules. Of those, 11 were benign tumors and eight were 
malignancies. 

The latest study was an attempt to re-examine those 
residents. They were in grades six through 12 in the Washington 
County School District in 1965. Some scientists suspect health 
effects may develop slowly for thyroid disease and that there 
may be lifelong risk. 

McGeehin wrote that the CDC "has determined that no 
further funding is available for this study." He noted that so 
far, seven years of funding has been provided at a total cost of 
$8,049,988. 

"This funding has included a five-year cooperative 
agreement begun in 1998, a 12-month cost extension of the 
cooperative agreement and a one-year grant awarded in September 
2004," he wrote. 

A "special emphasis panel," which is a board of 
scientific experts from outside the CDC, reviewed Lyon's 
protocol and recommended that the Utah Tyroid Disease Study not 
be funded beyond the 2004 grant award, McGeehin wrote. 

"Furthermore, CDC at present does not have the resources 
to extend funding for this study beyond the current budget 
period. We recommend that you take measures to close out this 
study by the end of the current budget period, which will occur 
on Aug. 31, 2005." 

Lyon said the study involved examining about 4,000 people 
who were originally identified in 1965, "and we've examined 
1,300 of them." 

The study's subjects were children when fallout swept 
through the St. George-eastern Nevada area. They were in sixth 
through 12th grades in 1965. In addition, a control group was 
established in Safford, Ariz. 

It turned out that the control group also was exposed to 
fallout, but it wasn't as heavy in Safford. 

"We've found just about 90 percent of them," Lyon said, 
speaking of the study's 4,000 subjects. "Most of them are 
willing to participate." 

Researchers have been examining them in Salt Lake City, 
St. George, Phoenix, Tucson and Safford, Ariz. 

The study is incomplete and analysis has not been carried 
out yet, so he is hesitant to talk about results. The analysis 
can't be concluded until the 4,000 people are examined. 

But that may not happen. The federal government is 
saying, "tough luck," he said. 

Lyon had this explanation for the study's continuation 
beyond the five years originally envisioned: The federal 
government "put all kinds of bureaucratic hurdles in our path 
that were not part of the original agreement." 

For example, researchers were told they needed to have an 
institutional review board at the CDC, besides the review at the 
University of Utah. Establishing that took two years. Then the 
CDC wanted the National Academy of Sciences to look at the plans 
— a process that took another two years, including comment time, 
he said. 

A review panel of three U.S. Department of Energy 
employees "basically focused on the way we calculated the dose 
for these people," he said. 

The researchers responded with a 50-page answer, showing 
their efforts were state-of-the-art, according to Lyon. 

The National Academy of Sciences said changes should be 
made but that the study should be carried out, he said. "They 
were supportive." 

An outside review by the university "basically said the 
same things, needs to be done and the methods look good," Lyon 
said. "So I don't know what's going on at the CDC. It's a total 
puzzle to us. 

"But essentially they're saying, 'We don't want your 
study.' " 

Only about half of the $8 million spent so far was used 
in the research, because overhead took a huge amount, he said. 

Among this group, "We've already reported that there's an 
excess of benign tumors of the thyroid gland," Lyon said. 

"I've been working on this now since 1977," he said. "I'm 
about ready to retire, and I'm sort of saying, 'I'd like to 
finish up this thyroid study and get more definitive 
information.' " 

The scientists are protesting against the end of the 
funding, "and we are upset about it," he said. "We've got pretty 
strong indications that there are other disease problems that 
ought to be looked at." 

Jay Truman, founder and director of the group Downwinders 
and one of the former students, said the government was wrong to 
halt funding. This was supposed to be a definitive study, he 
said. 

"All of us downwind are still, as we were at the time the 
heaviest fallout fell, expendable!" Truman added. 

E-mail: bau@desnews.com [bau@desnews.com] 

© 2005 Deseret News Publishing Company 
*****************************************************************
 24 WTVC: Iodide Tablets 

Gina Bennett [gbennett@newschannel9.com] 

March 29,2005   
  				 
It's time for those of you who live near
Sequoyah to restock your supply of potassium Iodide tablets. 
The Hamilton County Health Department says the tablets lose
strength over the years, and they last handed them out in 2000. 
The K-I tablets help protect families from possible harmful
effects of radiation in the event of an accident at the nuclear
plant. 

The tablets are only for people who live within FIVE miles of
Sequoyah. 

You can pick up your tablets at the Chattanooga- Hamilton County
Health Department. 

the Birchwood Health Center... the Ooltewah Health Center and 
Sequoyah Health Center. The tablets are free and they are only to 
be taken if the Tennessee Commissioner of Health declares a 
nuclear emergency. 

   Copyright 2005 WTVC NEWS Channel 9 , Chattanooga, TN - <img
[http://www.newschannel9.com/rss/rss.xml] 
*****************************************************************
 25 Deseret News: Goshute admits misuse of tribal funds 

[deseretnews.com] 

Tuesday, March 29, 2005 

By Angie Welling Deseret Morning News 

The precise dollar amount remains in dispute, but a member of the
Skull Valley Band of Goshutes admitted Monday to taking money 
from tribal coffers and using it for his own purposes. 

Sammy Blackbear pleaded guilty to one count of theft from 
an Indian tribal organization. Federal prosecutors contend 
Blackbear took $25,000 in the single act of theft on Oct. 2, 
2001. Blackbear, however, maintains it was much less than that 
and will dispute the amount at a June hearing. 

Defense attorney David Finlayson acknowledged Monday that 
$25,000 can be traced back to Blackbear through receipts, but 
said some of it went to legitimate tribal expenses, such as 
attorneys' fees. 

Blackbear, 40, was charged in December 2003 along with 
fellow Goshutes Marlinda Moon and Miranda Wash and tribal 
attorney Duncan Steadman. Those defendants have pleaded not 
guilty and are scheduled to stand trial on the charges in June. 

Under the terms of his plea agreement, Blackbear will be 
required to cooperate, and possibly testify, in the government's 
case against Moon, Wash and Steadman, as well as a related case 
against tribal chairman Leon D. Bear. 

Wash, Blackbear and Moon claimed they were elected tribal 
chairman, vice chairman and secretary, respectively, in a 
September 2001 election. The election was not recognized by the 
U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the U.S. Attorney's Office 
for Utah accused the group of using the election to gain access 
to some $1 million in the band's bank accounts. 

The trio are part of a faction opposed to Bear's ongoing 
leadership of the small band. Bear has been a major proponent of 
storing high-level nuclear waste on Goshute land in Utah's west 
desert, leading to dissention and contentious leadership 
disputes among the Goshutes. 

Bear is scheduled to go to trial next month on a separate 
federal indictment, also handed down in December 2003. The 
embattled Goshute leader is charged with one count of theft from 
Indian tribal organizations, one count of theft concerning 
federally funded programs, and three counts of fraud and false 
statements. 

Blackbear faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 
fine when he is sentenced on the single theft charge in July. At 
that time, prosecutors will dismiss five counts of bank fraud, 
each of which also carried a possible five-year prison sentence. 

E-mail: awelling@desnews.com [awelling@desnews.com] 

© 2005 Deseret News Publishing Company 
*****************************************************************
 26 NRC: NRC Licensing Board in Private Fuel Storage Case to Open Oral Arguments on Accidental F-16
Crashes to Public Observation April 6

News Release - 2005-05
U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION   
  Office of Public Affairs     Telephone: 301/415-8200   
  Washington, DC 20555-0001     E-mail: opa@nrc.gov
  No. 05-056     March 29, 2005   
  


The Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, an independent judicial
arm of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, will hear oral
arguments in the Private Fuel Storage (PFS) proceeding
Wednesday, April 6, in Rockville, Md. The session will be open
to the public for observation, but participation will be limited
to counsel for the State of Utah, the Applicant (PFS) and the
NRC staff. 

The Board had called for the oral arguments to obtain more
insight about the State of Utah's request that the Board
reconsider its February 24 decision that ruled against the State
on the second phase of the accidental aircraft crash issue. The
argument will take place in the Board's hearing room (Third
Floor of the Two White Flint North Building) at NRC
Headquarters, 11545 Rockville Pike, and will begin at 1 p.m. 

All the earlier proceedings leading to the Boards February 24
decision had been closed to the public because they involved
non-publicly-available (Safeguards Information) facts and
analyses concerning the impact of plane crashes on concrete and
steel objects. The Board today directed all counsel to frame
their oral arguments about the matters in issue (already covered
in non-public written pleadings) to avoid direct reference to
the specific facts underlying those issues, so that the session
could be an open one. In the event that Safeguards Information
needs to be discussed explicitly, such discussions will be
deferred to the end of the proceeding with the room emptied of
those who are not appropriately cleared. 

The facility proposed by the PFS consortium would be located on
the Reservation of the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians,
about 50 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. The facility, whose
principal opponent is the State of Utah, is intended for
temporary above-ground storage, in large cylindrical casks, of
the waste fuel from U.S. nuclear power plants. 

On February 24, the Board decided the last issue then pending
before it. By a 2-1 vote, the Board ruled in favor of PFS,
rejecting the State of Utahs assertions that there is too high a
probability that a radiation release could be caused by the
accidental crash of one of the 7,000 flights made down Skull
Valley every year by F-16 single-engine jets from Hill Air Force
Base. (The evidence before the Board did not deal with
deliberate crashes, because the Board has no jurisdiction over
terrorism issues.) 

The Board majority concluded that the probability of a crash
into a cask at a speed and angle sufficient to breach one of the
internal stainless steel canisters holding spent nuclear fuel
was less than one-in-a-million per year. Under the NRCs
standards, a facility like PFS does not have to be designed
against such an unlikely accident. That decision, on the
consequences a crash would have on a canister, superseded the
Licensing Boards decision of two years ago, which had upheld the
States initial argument that the probability of a crash onto the
proposed site was too high, leaving it to PFS to attempt to show
that such a crash would have no adverse radiological
consequences. 

The formal 16-day evidentiary hearing that led to the Boards
decision had been closed to the public because the three
litigants -- PFS, the NRC Staff, and the State of Utah -- had
presented expert witnesses and documentary evidence that could
not be disclosed . Similarly, the full reasoning justifying the
Licensing Boards February 24 decision could not be released.
However, the Board did prepare a publicly-available version of
its opinion that sets forth only a general summary of those
aspects of its reasoning. A copy of that 68-page version is
available on the NRCs web site at:
http://www.nrc.gov/what-we-do/regulatory/adjudicatory/pfs-aircraf
t05.pdf [PDF Icon] .   



  


 	Last revised Tuesday, March 29, 2005 	   
*****************************************************************
 27 Deseret News: Nuclear storage sounds like substantially risky bet
for Utah 

[deseretnews.com] 

Tuesday, March 29, 2005 

By Marjorie Cortez 
Deseret Morning News 

Like most Christian churches, my church teaches that gambling is 
a menace to society, that Christians should abstain from gambling
and should minister to those victimized by gambling. 

As religious tenets go, abstaining from gambling is a 
no-brainer for me. It's not just an issue of morality, it's an 
issue of economics. I can think of a million other ways to spend 
my hard-earned money than to feed it into a slot machine or 
wager it at the roulette table. Being cooped up in a 
smoke-filled building with people, some of whom are gambling 
away their rent and grocery money, is not my idea of 
entertainment. 

I say this as a person who has scratched a couple of 
lottery cards in her day. I played nickel slots in Wendover 
twice. I've bet on horse racing. I've become convinced it would 
be more satisfying to light money on fire and watch it burn than 
to squander it away at a gaming table. Different means, same 
outcome. 

A few years ago, I covered an initiative campaign to 
legalize horse-race betting in Utah. As you may recall, it 
failed miserably at the polls. Opponents of the initiative said 
giving the OK to pari-mutuel wagering would open the door to 
gaming on Indian reservations, which was another reason to keep 
gambling out of Utah. Utah and Hawaii remain the only states 
that prohibit gambling. 

Elsewhere, many tribes consider gambling their economic 
salvation. They say it creates tourism, jobs and economic 
development. No one talks about the accompanying social problems 
that come with acquiring material gain by chance and at the 
expense of one's neighbor. I don't like gaming because it 
fosters the notion that work is unimportant and that all of our 
problems can be solved with money. 

I've thought a lot about gaming in Utah in recent weeks 
in the context of the Skull Valley band of Goshutes, which has 
negotiated with a consortium of nuclear power utilities to 
temporarily store spent nuclear fuel rods on the tribe's 
reservation in Tooele County. 

I'm not suggesting that a full-scale Caesar's Palace-like 
casino would have been the answer to the Goshutes' economic 
woes. But with that option off the table, the tribe may have 
landed on a substantially riskier proposition on its 
reservation: becoming the de facto Yucca Mountain. 

The risks are much different, I'll grant you. Most people 
gamble at their own peril, although the negative impacts of 
gambling do not confine themselves to the individual throwing 
down the poker chips or feeding coins into a slot machine. If 
Mom or Dad bets the mortgage, the entire family's security is 
jeopardized. 

Moving spent nuclear fuel rods to Utah would likewise 
imperil the entire nation, with little prospect of benefit to 
the public. But If I was a terrorist bent on making a nuclear 
weapon, I'd be smacking my lips at the prospect of stealing or 
hijacking a truck or train carrying spent nuclear fuel rods 
across the county. Five years ago I would have dismissed such 
talk as the stuff of an action-adventure motion picture. After 
four commercial jets were hijacked and used as missiles to plow 
into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and a fourth 
that crashed in rural Pennsylvania, we'd better be open to the 
prospect of any and all possibilities. 

If the spent fuel rods are as safe as the utilities 
purport, why not leave them where they are until a permanent 
solution can be determined? 

The business deal between the Skull Valley Goshutes and 
Private Fuel Storage, the consortium of utilities, is 
proprietary, so the financial benefit to the tribe for 
permitting the disposal on their land is speculative at best. It 
would be accurate to say that it's very lucrative. A billion 
dollar baby, one might say. 

The issue is further complicated by a federal law that 
requires the U.S. government to take nuke waste off the hands of 
nuclear power operators. Eight sites have closed their doors, 
and operators are spending about $5 million a year to secure 
each site until the government comes up with a permanent 
solution. Add to that the potential of a legal settlement for 
the government's delays in assuming responsibility for the waste.

Is it just me, or does it feel as though other interests 
are gambling away our security? It's yet another game of chance 
we can't afford to play. 

Marjorie Cortez is a Deseret Morning News editorial writer. 
E-mail her at marjorie@desnews.com [marjorie@desnews.com] 

© 2005 Deseret News Publishing Company 
*****************************************************************
 28 Nevada Appeal - Opinion: Nevada is winning at Yucca

Gov. Kenny Guinn
                                                

March 27, 2005
 						
 The most recent revelation of falsified documents related to
the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project in Nevada further
underscores what a dangerous and unnecessary project the federal
government has sponsored for the past two decades.

Recent news reports that U.S. Geological Survey employees
falsified documents are a clear reminder that the Yucca Mountain
project has never been presented with all of the facts in plain
sight. The state of Nevada has had to fight the battle against
Yucca Mountain on an uneven playing field that has apparently
been lined with deception.

And, in defiance of this obvious handicap, the State of Nevada
seems to have finally taken the upper hand.

Since a perplexing vote by Congress in July 2002 to override my
veto and permit the Department of Energy to move ahead for
licensure to construct the facility, developments have all been
very much in the state of Nevada's favor regarding the future of
Yucca Mountain.

In July 2004, after years of litigation, the U.S. District Court
for the District of Columbia handed Nevada a major legal victory
in the fight to stop the nuclear waste dump when it threw out
the Environmental Protection Agency's radiation health
protection regulations that had been tailored for Yucca
Mountain. 

The court's ruling effectively stopped DOE because Yucca
Mountain, by virtue of its porous geology and other fundamental
flaws, is incapable of meeting the more stringent health and
safety regulations required by the court. Since then, the Bush
administration cut the fiscal year 2006 Yucca Mountain budget in
half, and the DOE has acknowledged a series of missed deadlines. 

Indications of waning support for the project from the nuclear
industry have also followed, with statements by utility industry
representatives advocating de-linking the repository from the
industry's perceived ability to proceed with new nuclear power
plants. 

Then, this month, Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman announced
that scientists working on DOE's Yucca Mountain project had
falsified reports and data in critical site suitability and
repository performance areas. The revelation set off a storm of
outrage, not only from Yucca Mountain critics, but also from
project proponents who viewed the falsification of scientific
data and studies as a potentially fatal blow to Yucca Mountain.

For Nevada's citizens, the recent revelations are good news.
Given the events of past days, the question of "if" Yucca
Mountain will crumble has become a question of "when." 

I am extremely proud of the fact that Nevadans have chosen to
fight this repository through all of the proper channels, in an
intellectually honest and above-board manner. Those who have
been involved are to be commended for being so vigilant during
this fight.

Kenny Guinn, a Republican, has been governor of Nevada since
1999.

All contents © Copyright 2005 nevadaappeal.com
Nevada Appeal - 580 Mallory Way - Carson City, NV 89701                         
*****************************************************************
 29 San Luis Obispo Tribune: Nuclear waste safety in doubt

| 03/29/2005 | 

In a classified report, experts say spent fuel is a dangerous
terror target; Diablo maintains its underground storage is safe

 Tribune Staff and Wire Report

WASHINGTON - Nuclear experts assembled by the National Academy
of Sciences have challenged federal regulators' decision to
allow commercial nuclear facilities, including Diablo Canyon, to
store large quantities of radioactive spent fuel in pools of
water. 

A classified report concluded that the government does not fully
understand the risks that a terrorist attack could pose to the
pools and ought to expedite the removal of the fuel to dry
storage casks that are more resilient to attack. 

The Bush administration has long defended the safety of the
pools while the nuclear industry has warned that moving large
amounts of fuel to dry storage would be unnecessary and very
expensive. 

The main danger posed by the pools is that they could be drained
of their water in a terrorist attack and the spent fuel could
catch on fire, releasing radiation into the atmosphere. Diablo
Canyon nuclear power plant has two spent fuel pools, one for
each reactor. 

However, officials with Pacific Gas and Electric Co., which owns
Diablo Canyon, say it would be nearly impossible for their
plant's pools to be drained. That is because they are well below
ground. Other nuclear plants have pools above ground. 

The report was requested by Congress following the terrorist
attacks of Sept. 11 as homeland security officials sought to
understand the potential consequences of such an attack on a
nuclear facility. 

Because it is classified, the contents of the report were not
made public when it was delivered to the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission last summer. Even a stripped-down, declassified
version has remained under wraps since November because the
commission says it contains sensitive information. 

However, the commission made excerpts of the report public when
Chairman Nils Diaz sent a letter to Congress on March 14
rebutting some of the academy's concerns. His letter also
suggested the academy had largely backed the government's views
about the safety of existing fuel storage systems. 

William Colglazier, executive officer for the academy, said the
letter was misleading and warned that the public needs to learn
about the report's findings. 

"There are substantive disagreements between our committee's
views and the NRC," he said in an interview. "If someone only
reads the NRC report, they would not get a full picture of what
we had to say." 

Deep pools 

PG&E officials maintain the pools at Diablo Canyon are safe
because they are below ground and lined with steel and concrete. 

"It's difficult to imagine a scenario where you could drain
those pools," said Jeff Lewis, Diablo Canyon spokesman. "Our
spent fuel pools are built much more robustly than other
plants." 

Unlike Diablo Canyon, some plants store their used fuel in
above-ground pools. Many of these plants are in the eastern
United States, where nuclear power is more commonly used. 

Although the commission said it is keeping the report under
wraps for security reasons, some officials who have seen the
document suggest the NRC is merely suppressing embarrassing
criticism. 

"At the same time that the NRC is saying that the National
Academy's study is classified and not releasable to the public,
it has somehow managed to send a detailed rebuttal of the
report's conclusions to Congress in unclassified form," said
Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., who has seen the report. 

NRC spokesman Eliot Brenner said the commission is "a very open
agency" and that regulators are working with the academy to make
the report public. "Our core concern is making sure that
information that could reasonably be expected to be available to
a terrorist is not publicly available," he said. "We are
continuing to work with them on finding the right balance." 

Critics of the NRC say its refusal to release the NAS report
follows a long-standing pattern by the agency of being overly
secretive. This ultimately reduces the public's confidence in
the safety of nuclear power, said Rochelle Becker with the
Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility, a San Luis Obispo-based
group that opposes renewing the licenses of California's nuclear
plants. 

"When information that is vital to the health, safety,
environment and economy of reactor communities is hidden from
the public and from those who would be first responders in the
event of a radioactive release, then it is time for California
to say 'no more' to production of radioactive waste licensed by
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to be stored on our fragile
and precious coast," Becker said. 

How to store? 

The report was solicited by Congress to study how best to store
spent nuclear fuel -- tons of rods containing radioactive
byproducts of nuclear fission reactions are produced each year
by the nation's 103 electricity-generating nuclear reactors.
Spent fuel rods generate intense heat and dangerous long-term
radiation that must be contained. 

Most of the spent rods are currently stored in large swimming
pool-like structures called spent fuel pools, said Dave
Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer at the science and advocacy
group, Union of Concerned Scientists, who has worked at several
plants. The pools, like those at Diablo Canyon, are about 45
feet deep and 40 feet square and are filled with about 100,000
gallons of circulating water to remove heat and serve as a
radiation shield, he said. 

After cooling for about five years, the rods can be moved to dry
storage -- heavy casks of lead and steel. But the casks are
expensive, and commercial reactors have elected to leave the
rods in the pools until the pools fill up. Lochbaum said some
pools now hold 800 to 1,000 tons of rods. In the event of a
terrorist strike, Lochbaum said, the dry casks would be much
safer, because explosions could drain the pools and set off fire
and radiation hazards. 

In 1987, PG&E received permission to install higher-density
racks to store the fuel assemblies in the pools because the
planned national repository at Yucca Mountain is not yet
available. 

Those racks are also filling up, and the utility is planning to
build an above-ground dry cask storage facility that will open
in February 2007. 

The casks will be loaded at about the rate needed to create
space for the next batch of used fuel to be removed from the
reactors, Lewis said. Each pool currently has about 1,000
assemblies or 700 tons of fuel. 

Returning the pools to their low-density configuration is
impractical, Lewis said. The casks need to be loaded with a
combination of older and newer assemblies. Older rods are
"cooler" than new ones, and technicians try to mix them so there
is not a concentration of newer, hotter assemblies. 

"If you accelerate emptying the pools too much, you lose the
ability to have the right balance of older and newer fuels,"
Lewis said. 

The amount of fuel currently in Diablo Canyon's pools is
generally less than other nuclear plants because Diablo Canyon
is one of the nation's newer plants. Some plants have reracked
their pools twice. 

The nuclear industry wants the fuel moved to a storage site in
Nevada, but that project has long been plagued by delays and
opposition. Steven Kraft, director of waste management at the
Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group, said studies had
shown the pools are as safe as the dry casks, the same position
adopted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. 

Kraft said the risk of catastrophic attacks is minuscule and
modeling analyses have shown that even plane crashes are
unlikely to affect the integrity of the pools. And even if they
did cause damage, he added, there would not be catastrophic
consequences because of safety systems in place. 

"If the pool is safe and the casks are safe and they both meet
the requirements, there is no justification for going through
what is a huge amount of expense and worker exposure" to move
the rods to dry storage, he said. 

In his letter to Congress, commission chairman Diaz said the
academy's recommendation to move fuel to dry storage was based
on "scenarios that were unreasonable." 

Tribune staff writer David Sneed and the Washington Post
contributed to this report.   

*****************************************************************
 30 Platts: Nevada tells court to throw out DOE rail route
 
+ DOE'S decision selecting a 319-mile route within Nevada for a
new railroad line to the repository planned for Yucca Mountain,
Nev. should be thrown out because the underlying environmental
review was "fundamentally flawed and legally defective," Nevada
asserted in a brief filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals in
Washington, D.C. March 24. Nevada, which last September
challenged DOE's record of decision on the route selection,
argued that DOE's final environmental impact statement on the
selection was inadequate and that DOE usurped the Surface
Transportation Board's "exclusive jurisdiction over common
carrier rail projects." 

Washington (Platts)--28Mar2005
 
Copyright © 2005 - Platts, All Rights Reserved
 [The McGraw-Hill Companies] 
  





*****************************************************************
 31 Las Vegas RJ: YUCCA MOUNTAIN: Falsification suspicions spur hearings 
 
Tuesday, March 29, 2005

Senate, House sessions in April to focus on possibilitythat
scientific studies for nuclear waste project are suspect By

STEVE TETREAULT
STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON -- Congress is broadening its hearings on Yucca
Mountain after disclosures that quality-assurance documents for
the proposed nuclear waste repository might have been falsified. 
Leaders of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee
announced Monday they have scheduled an April 7 hearing on the
Nevada nuclear waste site. A House subcommittee led by Rep. Jon
Porter, R-Nev., is preparing for an April 5 hearing. 

The Senate committee chairman is Pete Domenici, R-N.M., an
influential voice on nuclear issues who aides said is open to
examining other options for nuclear waste storage while the
Yucca Mountain Project is mired in delays. 

Domenici spokeswoman Angela Harper said the committee is
compiling a witness list and defining the scope of its inquiry.
 
 In the House, Porter has called on the Energy Department to
provide copies of an estimated 20 e-mails in which a U.S.
Geological Survey hydrologist suggested that some
quality-assurance documents related to climate studies and water
infiltration to the repository level had been falsified.
 
 The March 16 disclosure has prompted at least three
investigations at the Energy Department and the Department of
Interior and has provided critics of the nuclear waste program
with fresh ammunition to challenge the project. 
Gov. Kenny Guinn and Attorney General Brian Sandoval are among
Nevada representatives scheduled to testify before the House
subcommittee. 

The U.S. Geological Survey work accounted for only a part of a
broader DOE analysis, the industry newsletter Nuclear Fuel
reported Monday citing USGS and an unidentified source. The
source told the newsletter the work in question did not affect
the repository's safety calculations.
 
 But others have said that the issue of water travel through the
mountain is crucial and that the disclosure raises new
credibility problems for the Energy Department. 
A troubled quality-assurance program has been considered an
Achilles heel for the Yucca program, and Nevada officials were
weighing whether to highlight information that more than a half
dozen geologists received copies of the e-mails but did not
report them.
 
 Also Monday, the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce
Committee gave a boost to the proposed repository, saying that
Yucca Mountain remains "the safest option" for disposing of
nuclear fuel. 

Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, stepped into a dispute involving a
National Academy of Sciences report that questioned the safety
of radioactive spent fuel stored in 45-foot-deep pools of water
at nuclear reactor sites.
 
 "Temporary storage in spent-fuel pools will never be as secure
at disposal in Yucca Mountain," Barton said. 

"The National Academy of Sciences report is one more argument
for finishing Yucca Mountain," Barton said. "A single, remote,
underground facility would be impervious to aircraft impacts,
far more difficult for terrorists to penetrate and safer than
storage facilities scattered across the country."
 
 According to excerpts of a secret report that have been made
public, an academy panel of scientists concluded last summer
that more needs to be known about the terrorism risks of keeping
nuclear waste in pools of water. The report suggested the
nuclear industry consider storing more spent fuel in
above-ground cement, lead and steel casks. 

Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Nils Diaz said in a
letter to Congress last week that the recommendation to move
more spent fuel into the dry casks was based on "scenarios that
are unreasonable." 

Joe Egan, Nevada's lead nuclear waste attorney, said the academy
report gives weight to arguments by the state and other Yucca
Mountain critics that nuclear waste can be stored in casks at
reactor sites for hundreds of years rather than be taken to a
central repository. 

"This is one more piece of evidence in a shifting paradigm, to
the point where Yucca is no longer necessary for the survival of
nuclear power," Egan said.
 
 
Copyright Las Vegas Review-Journal
*****************************************************************
 32 BBC: Sellafield 'wind down' to
 
Last Updated: Tuesday, 29 March, 2005
 
[Sellafield]                            

Work on decommissioning Sellafield is due to begin in April                                                                

Cumbria's nuclear industry is preparing for arguably its biggest 
challenge since it was established in the 1950s. The Nuclear 
Decommissioning Authority (NDA) will assume responsibility for 
the clean-up of the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing complex from 
1 April. 

It marks the start of work to wind down the site, with the loss 
of thousands of jobs over the next 10 years. 

The government has pledged massive support for the area after the 
West Cumbria-based NDA begins work. 

The arrival of the NDA has been blighted by a row over state help 
to Sellafield owner British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL). The 
European Commission (EC) called into doubt a proposed £40bn 
transfer of liabilities from BNFL to the NDA. 

Pension provision 

The trade union Amicus has called for permanent staff to be 
retrained to carry out the decommissioning work and plans to 
oppose the outsourcing of any core work. 

Amicus general secretary Derek Simpson said: "We need to maximise 
the number of job opportunities available through the 
decommissioning process by re-skilling Sellafield workers. 

"Unless we start training people now, we are in danger of 
damaging the whole of UK manufacturing and disadvantaging 
Sellafield workers and the whole Cumbrian economy. 

"Amicus is committed to maintaining our members' terms and 
conditions at Sellafield - ensuring that pay and pensions 
provision are not threatened by the outsourcing of work." 

The union says permanent staff posts at Sellafield are likely to 
be cut from 12,000 now to 4,000 by 2011. 

The government has pledged to create "high quality jobs" to 
replace those lost during and after the decommissioning process 
at Sellafield. 
*****************************************************************
 33 BYU NewsNet: Matheson criticizes nuke waste storage 

By Alicia Barney        Daily Universe Staff Reporter - 29 Mar 2005
 		   	 	
	Resuming nuclear weapon testing in Nevada would endanger
Utahns, said Rep. Jim Matheson at Utah Valley State College on
Monday.

 	Rep. Jim Matheson voiced his opposition to nuclear weapons
testing and answered audience questions.

 	Federal nuclear weapons testing that took place from 1951 to
1992 in Nevada has spread cancer-causing radiation throughout
the nation, Matheson said. 

	â€œIt turns out the government lied to us when they told us it
[nuclear testing] was safe,â€ he said. â€œMany people in Utah
have died from exposure to this radiation. Itâ€™s difficult for
me to imagine why we would want to go down this road again.â€

 	Matheson, D-Utah, referenced his bill to stop nuclear weapons
testing from resuming at the Nevada site and discussed the
predicted consequences of future testing.

 	An audience question-and-answer period followed Mathesonâ€™s
short speech.

 	Storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada or at the
Goshute Indian reservation in Tooele County as proposed would
also have disadvantages for Utah, Matheson said. 

	â€œIf youâ€™re not worried about the safety aspects with
storing this stuff above ground, which I am, then you should be
worried about the chilling effect on economic development in
this state and on attracting companies that want to come to this
state when we have high level nuclear waste 70 miles away from
here,â€ he said. 

	Matheson criticized President George W. Bushâ€™s recent Town
Hall meetings on Social Security reform.

 	â€œPresident Bush actually stacks the audience with people who
support his position so everyone applauds what he says,â€
Matheson said. â€œThatâ€™s not a town meeting, this is a town
meeting. You can disagree with me on an issue, Iâ€™m your
representative and I need to hear what you disagree with. Itâ€™s
too bad that those Town Meetings have been scripted like
theyâ€™ve been.â€

 	Publicity prior to Mathesonâ€™s speech stated he would deliver
a speech on ethics and Social Security reform, but his overall
presentation diverged from that topic.

 	However, Matheson said he wasnâ€™t aware about the assigned
topic of social security.

 â€œWe [UVSC and Matheson] never talked about that, there were
five or six issues we talked about addressing, but that wasnâ€™t
one of them,â€ Matheson said after the event. â€œI candidly did
not come with a speech about social security.â€

 	 Brett Ellingson, a UVSC freshman from Highland majoring in
history, attended the event because he is a self-described
â€œpolitical nut,â€ but was confused when Matheson did not talk
about the ethics of Social Security plans.

 	â€œI came with Social Security questions but he kind of blew
over that,â€ Ellingson said. â€œHe did a pretty good job, but
it wasnâ€™t really structured.â€

 	Matheson also visited BYU on Monday to speak in a political
science class. 

Matheson is serving his third term in the House of
Representatives for Utahâ€™s Second Congressional District. The
district covers northern Utah County, eastern Salt Lake County
and several other counties. 

He serves on the House Financial Services Committee, the House
Transportation Committee and House Science Committee.

 	Matheson is the son of former Governor Scott M. Matheson and
the brother of Scott Matheson, Jr., a Utah gubernatorial
candidate in last yearâ€™s election. 

Copyright, BYU NewsNet                                                           
*****************************************************************
 34 Platts: Germany to invest $73-mil in nuclear waste facility in 2005
 
+ Germany's federal environment ministry has earmarked Eur56-mil 
($73-mil) this year to start decommissioning at the Morsleben 
nuclear waste storage facility, in eastern Germany, the country's 
nuclear protection agency (BfS) said Tuesday. 

Final decommissioning of the facility, which has not received any 
waste since 1998, is scheduled to start in 2009 and is expected 
to take about 15 years. 

In 2000, Germany invested Eur20-mil in decommissioning work at 
the unit. 

German nuclear power plants operate intermediate storage 
facilities on site, and waste fuel rods are transported to 
reprocessing units in France and the United Kingdom. 

Intermediate storage facilities can store 80-170 castors, or 
about 1,000-2,000 tons of waste. 

This story was originally published in Platts European Power 
Alert http://www.europeanpoweralert.platts.com 

Copyright © 2005 - Platts, All Rights Reserved
 [The McGraw-Hill Companies] 
*****************************************************************
 35 APP.COM: NRC stonewalling spent fuel report
         
   [http://www.app.com/]     	 	

Asbury Park Press 03/29/05 		 		 		 

Wary of conflicting claims about the safety of spent nuclear fuel 
storage at commercial nuclear power plants, Congress in late 2003 
directed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to have the National 
Academy of Sciences study the issue.

Its classified report was completed last summer, but an 
unclassified summary of its findings has not been made public, 
despite explicit instructions from Congress to do so. The first 
insight into what the report contained came two weeks ago in a 
letter the NRC sent to Congress rebutting the report's findings 
and objecting to several of its recommendations.

Among other things, the NRC opposed NAS' call for fuller analysis 
of the implications of the loss of coolant in spent fuel pools — 
including a loss triggered by a terrorist assault — and an 
analysis detailing the vulnerabilities of various spent fuel pool 
designs.

The NRC also took exception to the report's finding that it 
needed to consider "maximum-credible scenarios" in analyzing 
spent fuel pool safety and security. The NRC said "that analysis 
of bounding or unrealistic scenarios can lead to a 
misinterpretation of the actual risk and this can cause confusion 
among the public." Nonsense. The NAS wasn't suggesting 
"unrealistic scenarios." It was proposing security standards that 
posed realistic worst-case scenarios — a perfectly reasonable 
request given the consequences of a catastrophic event.

For people living in the shadow of the Oyster Creek nuclear power 
plant in Lacey, and the state and federal elected officials 
responsible for safeguarding public health and safety, the NRC's 
refusal to release the findings of the NAS report, and its 
repeated failure to adequately address the risks posed by spent 
fuel, should be cause for grave concern.

Oyster Creek, the oldest commercial nuclear power plant in the 
nation, is one of 32 whose design makes its spent fuel pool 
particularly vulnerable to airborne attack. The pool is located 
high inside the reactor building and is protected by thin roofs 
and walls that could be easily penetrated by an aircraft. In 
August 2004, the attorneys general of seven states, including New 
York and Connecticut, asked the NRC to order security upgrades at 
nuclear power plants with such designs to better guard against 
terrorist attacks from the air and water. There has been no 
response.

In addition to assessing the vulnerability of spent fuel storage 
to terrorist attacks, the NAS studied the potential health risks 
posed by storing far more spent fuel rods in the pools than many 
scientists believe is safe — as is the case at Oyster Creek — and 
the potential safety advantages, if any, of various dry cask 
storage designs. It is not clear from the NRC response what the 
NAS recommended.

Scientists and public interest groups have suggested relatively 
inexpensive solutions to decrease vulnerability from airborne 
attacks — suggestions stubbornly ignored by the industry and the 
NRC. But no one has come up with a long-term answer to how to 
dispose of the millions of tons of nuclear waste that continue to 
pile up at the nation's more than 100 nuclear plants.

Despite the security and safety threats posed by Oyster Creek, 
New Jersey's U.S. senators, Jon Corzine and Frank Lautenberg, 
have yet to take a position on whether to oppose Oyster Creek's 
bid for a 20-year license extension. They need to take a stand. 
And they need to start putting pressure on the NRC to release the 
full NAS study and to begin taking steps to improve spent fuel 
security. Rep. James H. Saxton, a Republican whose district 
includes the communities most at-risk should there be a disaster 
at Oyster Creek, also should start making some noise. At the same 
time, acting Gov. Codey, environmental commissioner Bradley M. 
Campbell and the state Assembly Environment Committee, which has 
been holding hearings on Oyster Creek, should pay close attention 
to the threat posed by spent fuel pools.

In the preface to the NRC's letter to Congress, NRC Chairman Nils 
J. Diaz concluded, "The results of security assessments completed 
to date clearly show that storage of spent fuel . . . provides 
reasonable assurance that public health and safety, the 
environment, and the common defense and security will be 
adequately protected."

Given the risks associated with a cataclysmic event at a nuclear 
power plant, "reasonable assurance" is far too low a standard. 
The state's elected officials and residents must hammer that 
point home to the NRC and to Congress until it's clear they 
understand it.

  Copyright © 1997-2005 IN Jersey.
*****************************************************************
 36 Salt Lake Tribune: Goshute leadership contender takes plea 

Article Last Updated: 03/29/2005 12:57:51 AM 

Sammy Blackbear: The deal means he will help the feds pursue 
disputed leader Leon Bear 

By Patty Henetz The Salt Lake Tribune 

					 					 					 					 						[''] 					 					 				 

Goshute member Sammy Blackbear, right, who is part of the 
dispute over leadership of the Goshute tribe, leaves Moss 
Federal Courthouse in Salt Lake City - where he pled guilty to 
misuse of tribal funds - on Monday with his attorney Dave 
Finlayson, center. (Leah Hogsten/The Salt Lake Tribune) 

A Skull Valley Band of Goshutes member who is fighting to be 
recognized as tribal leader pleaded guilty Monday to misusing 
$1,000 in tribal funds and agreed to help the federal government 
in its cases against other tribal members also caught up in a 
leadership dispute. 

In exchange, the U.S. Attorney's Office agreed to drop five 
bank-fraud charges against Sammy Blackbear that could have led 
to prison sentences of up to 185 years and penalties of up to 
$5.25 million for Blackbear and three other defendants who are 
being prosecuted separately. 

Blackbear's sentencing hearing was scheduled for July 14 
after he pleaded guilty to the single count. Prosecutors had 
sought a guilty plea to misusing $25,000 but during a court 
hearing Monday agreed to the lesser charge, which is still a 
felony. 

The amount Blackbear must repay will be determined at a June 
16 restitution hearing. 

Blackbear, Marlinda Moon, Miranda Wash and their attorney, 
Duncan Steadman, were charged in December 2003 with embezzlement 
and bank fraud after they used what prosecutors alleged were 
bogus legal documents to take control of nearly $1.4 million in 
tribal funds that were held at Zions Bank, Brighton Bank and 
Bank One. 

The three Goshutes insist they were elected the Skull Valley 
Band's chairman, vice chairman and secretary at a Sept. 22, 
2001, tribal meeting. 

The charges have no direct ties to plans by utility 
consortium Private Fuel Storage to build a $3.1 billion 
high-level nuclear waste storage facility on the Goshute 
reservation 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. But they stem 
from the leadership dispute that erupted after Leon Bear and 
two other tribal members in 1997 signed a confidential lease 
with PFS. 

Blackbear contends Bear never was elected tribal leader. 
Blackbear has said that as the legitimate tribal leader, he had 
a right to move the funds to prevent Bear from spending them. 

Prosecutors originally said the banks allowed the defendants 
access to the Goshute accounts after they proffered a phony 
election certification and a court order from the "Nato Indian 
nation," a Provo-based group that claims to be a nationwide 
tribe. The defendants were able to withdraw $45,800 from one 
account and gave attorney Steadman $11,000 before the accounts 
were frozen. 

The original indictment said the federal Bureau of Indian 
Affairs didn't recognize the tribal leadership change that put 
Blackbear in charge and declared the defendants didn't have the 
authority to act on behalf of the tribe. The government's 
dismissal of those charges against Blackbear could indicate a 
growing unwillingness to back Bear's leadership. 

Defense attorney Dave Finlayson, who represented Blackbear on 
Monday, said his understanding of the plea deal was that 
Blackbear would assist the federal government in the criminal 
case against Bear as well as the remaining prosecution of Moon, 
Wash and Steadman. 

After the hearing, Blackbear declined to comment on his plea. 
But another dissident Goshute, Margene Bullcreek, was 
displeased. 

"I don't think Sammy should take any plea bargain," said 
Bullcreek, who attended the hearing. "He's messing things up. 
He's taking the easy way out." 

Blackbear was the lead plaintiff in a case pending before 
the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that accuses the BIA of 
supporting an illegitimate tribal government headed by Bear, who 
was indicted separately on embezzlement and tax charges in 
December 2003. Bear is scheduled for a two-week trial on those 
charges beginning April 18. 

The 10th Circuit last year rebuffed Blackbear's appeal, 
agreeing with a lower court ruling that the dissidents couldn't 
pursue court action until the BIA finished with administrative 
appeals. Those appeals were dismissed in January. 

Bullcreek and five other tribal members three weeks ago filed 
a lawsuit in federal court against the federal Interior 
Department, Interior Secretary Gale Norton and two Bureau of 
Indian Affairs superintendents. 

The lawsuit charges that the federal government acted 
illegally when it gave conditional approval to plans for a 
high-level nuclear waste facility on the reservation in spite of 
the ongoing leadership dispute. The lawsuit also contends the 
BIA acted illegally when it recognized Bear as tribal leader. 

Â© Copyright 2005, The Salt Lake Tribune. 
*****************************************************************
 37 DenverPost.com: Declassify nuke-waste study

EDITORIALS
 
Published: Tuesday, March 29, 2005                                        
	 	
 A dispute between the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the
National Academy of Sciences over nuclear waste storage raises
some dicey issues that should concern the West. 

Long term, the government wants nuclear power plant spent fuel
rods to be stored at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. But the project
has experienced so many delays that nuclear utilities must store
some used fuel at their reactors. The issue is how best to do
so. 

After fuel rods lose their effectiveness, they must be put at
least 20 feet underwater to "cool off" for about a year. The
commission also lets utilities use storage pools as de facto
interim storage for spent fuel. 

But a classified academy study apparently says that the pools
could be vulnerable to terrorism under some credible scenarios.
The academy concluded it would be safer if utilities were to use
dry cask storage. In that process, fuel rods are cooled
underwater, then removed from the pool and put in 15-foot-long
metal containers. The casks can then be inserted in concrete
bunkers surrounded by thick berms. Such storage makes the rods
more difficult to attack. 

Still, the NRC favors the less expensive use of pools. The
commission sent Congress a detailed response to the academy's
concerns - yet the NRC won't release last summer's original
academy report or even an edited version produced last fall. 

Events may be bypassing the regulatory arguments. The Yucca
Mountain project has been delayed so long that utilities are
seeking alternatives. There are 103 operating private reactors
in the country, located at 79 sites - and 38 of them are
building dry cask storage. Last spring, operators of the other
65 reactors asked the NRC for licenses to build dry cask
facilities. It seems odd that the NRC is telling Congress dry
cask storage is impractical even as it's approving such
facilities. 

Seven utilities also have formed a Private Fuel Storage
consortium to build a 20,000 metric ton dry cask facility 45
miles southwest of Salt Lake City, on land owned by the Skull
Valley Band of the Goshute Indian tribe. The state of Utah is
unhappy about the project, which is one step away from final
federal licensing. 

Since most of the consortium's reactors are in the East and
Midwest, one possible route for 1,000-2,000 total waste
shipments is Interstate 70 through Colorado. It's important to
ask whether shipping waste hundreds of miles on a busy
interstate would make the nuclear materials more vulnerable to
terrorism or accidents than keeping them in dry cask storage at
the reactors that produced the waste. 

Given the high stakes, the academy's report should be
declassified so that the public, state officials and a broader
circle of scientists can weigh the issues. 		   	 	
 		   			 

Editorials alone express The Denver Post's opinion. 

 All contents Copyright 2005 The Denver Post or other copyright
*****************************************************************
 38 Roswell Daily Record: State official raps WIPP expansion idea                                                                
                      
ALBUQUERQUE (AP)  The state environment secretary opposes a 
proposal by an Ohio congressman to expand the federal 
government’s underground nuclear waste dump in southeastern New 
Mexico.
 					 					
‘‘It’s a bad idea, and I haven’t found anyone in New Mexico who 
thinks it’s a good idea,’’ Ron Curry said.
 					
 					
Rep. David Hobson, R-Ohio, said March 16 that the U.S. Department 
of Energy should act now to enlarge the Waste Isolation Pilot 
Plant because WIPP is running smoothly and has strong support in 
the Carlsbad area.
 					
‘‘The stars are aligned correctly now to get it done,’’ said 
Hobson, chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee on 
energy and water.
 					
‘‘We’re going to need more space,’’ he said.
 					
 					
‘‘That’s something that I think we need to look into,’’ Paul
Golan, DOE assistant secretary, said during the hearing.
 					
Hobson believes WIPP should be enlarged to hold only waste that
eventually would need to be sent there, Sara Perkins, his
spokeswoman, said last week.
 					
But Curry said the temptation to place other, more radioactive
waste into WIPP would always be there if the dump is enlarged.
 					
‘‘If you’ve got some capacity that’s unused some place, then you
might try to fill it with something else,’’ he said.
 					
WIPP, which accepted its first radioactive shipment in 1999, is
designed to permanently store defense-related
plutonium-contaminated waste.
 					
The waste  which includes contaminated clothing, tools and other
debris  is buried more than 2,100 feet underground in ancient
salt beds 26 miles east of Carlsbad.
 					
‘‘The idea of expanding WIPP for additional transuranic waste
storage is worth exploring, as long as WIPP stays within the
confines of its current mission and does not move into
higher-level wastes,’’ said Senate Energy Committee Chairman
Pete Domenici, R-N.M.
 					
‘‘Given the lengthy process that went into building WIPP, I’m
certain that any changes would require substantial review,’’ he
said.
 					
Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., said great care should be taken
before making any changes to the amount of waste WIPP is allowed
to take.
 					
‘‘The federal law that created WIPP and determined what waste
would be stored there was the result of thorough debate in
Congress and lengthy negotiations with the state of New
Mexico,’’ he said.
 					
‘‘Changing the agreement on waste headed for WIPP should not be
done without very careful consideration and study, requiring the
strong input of the state and Congress,’’ Bingaman said.
 					
*****************************************************************
 39 Las Vegas SUN: Congress scheduling hearings about Yucca Mountain project snags
 
Today: March 29, 2005 at 11:44:43 PST 

ASSOCIATED PRESS 

LAS VEGAS (AP) - Congress is scheduling hearings about the Yucca
Mountain project after recent disclosures that quality-assurance
documents for the proposed nuclear waste repository might have
been falsified. 

Leaders of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee
announced Monday they will hold an April 7 hearing about the
Nevada nuclear waste site. 

A House subcommittee led by Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., is
preparing for an April 5 hearing. 

The Senate committee chairman is Pete Domenici, R-N.M., an
influential voice on nuclear issues who has been promoting talk
of alternatives while the Yucca Mountain project is delayed. 

The Energy Department had focused on a 2010 opening date, but
project officials have said in recent months that opening the
underground repository could occur in 2012 or later. Project
critics and have said it could be 2015 or 2017. 

Domenici spokeswoman Angela Harper said the Senate committee is
compiling a witness list and defining the scope of its inquiry. 

In the House, Porter has called on the Energy Department to
provide copies of an estimated 20 e-mails in which a U.S.
Geological Survey hydrologist suggested that some
quality-assurance documents related to climate studies and water
infiltration to the repository level had been falsified. 

The March 16 disclosure has prompted at least three
investigations at the Energy Department and the Interior
Department. 

Gov. Kenny Guinn and Attorney General Brian Sandoval are among
Nevada representatives scheduled to testify before the House
subcommittee. 

Opponents say the issue of water travel through the mountain is
crucial and that the disclosure raises new credibility problems
for the Energy Department. 

Also Monday, the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce
Committee gave a boost to the proposed repository, saying that
Yucca Mountain remains "the safest option" for disposing of
nuclear fuel. 

Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, called a National Academy of Sciences
report questioning the safety of radioactive spent fuel stored
in 45-foot-deep pools of water at nuclear reactor sites another
argument for finishing Yucca Mountain. 

"Temporary storage in spent-fuel pools will never be as secure
at disposal in Yucca Mountain," Barton said. "A single, remote,
underground facility would be impervious to aircraft impacts,
far more difficult for terrorists to penetrate and safer than
storage facilities scattered across the country." 

An academy report recommends the nuclear industry consider
storing more spent fuel in above-ground cement, lead and steel
casks. 

Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Nils Diaz said in a
letter to Congress last week that the recommendation to move
more spent fuel into dry casks was based on "scenarios that are
unreasonable." 

Joe Egan, the lawyer heading Nevada's legal opposition to the
repository, said the academy report bolsters arguments that
nuclear waste can be stored in casks at reactor sites for
hundreds of years rather than be taken to a Nevada repository. 

--- 

On the Net: 

Yucca Mountain project: http://www.ymp.gov [http://www.ymp.gov] 

Nevada's Agency for Nuclear Projects:
http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste
[http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste] 

U.S. Geological Survey: www.usgs.gov 

--- 

Information from: Las Vegas Review-Journal, http://www.lvrj.com
[http://www.lvrj.com] 
*****************************************************************
 40 Las Vegas SUN: Suspect Yucca e-mails turned over to congressional committee
 
Today: March 29, 2005 at 17:36:54 PST 

ASSOCIATED PRESS 


LAS VEGAS (AP) - In advance of a hearing set for next week, the
government on Tuesday gave a congressional subcommittee e-mails
suggesting workers on the Yucca Mountain project may have
falsified documents. 

The Energy Department and the Interior Department complied with
a request for the e-mails from Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., chairman
of a House Government Reform Committee panel that has scheduled
a hearing on the matter April 5. 

Subcommittee spokesman Chad Bungard confirmed the e-mails were
turned over, along with some other documents. He said staffers
planned to make redacted versions available to the public on
Friday. 

The Energy and Interior departments disclosed earlier this month
that e-mails written by a U.S. Geological Survey scientist from
1998 to 2000 indicated he had fabricated documentation of his
work. 

At the time, the USGS was studying how water moves through the
site of the proposed nuclear waste dump 90 miles northwest of
Las Vegas - a crucial issue in determining the potential spread
of radiation from the dump. 

The inspectors general of the Energy and Interior departments
are investigating. 

Porter's hearing of the Committee on Government Reform's
subcommittee on the federal work force and agency organization
will include testimony from Nevada Sens. Harry Reid and John
Ensign and Gov. Kenny Guinn, as well as Energy Department
employees and Nevada Yucca Mountain experts. 

Meanwhile, a second hearing on Yucca was scheduled Monday. That
hearing, by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee,
will be chaired April 7 by Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M. 

Committee spokeswoman Marnie Funk said Tuesday a witness list
was still being developed, but she said the hearing was in the
works before the revelations about the USGS e-mails. 

--- 

On the Net: 

Yucca Mountain project: http://www.ymp.gov [http://www.ymp.gov] 

Nevada's Agency for Nuclear Projects:
http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste
[http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste] 

U.S. Geological Survey: www.usgs.gov 

-- 



*****************************************************************
 41 Deseret news: Experts clash on nuclear waste 

[deseretnews.com] 

Monday, March 28, 2005 

They disagree on how to analyze safety of storage 

By Joe Bauman Deseret Morning News 

The National Academy of Sciences and the Nuclear Regulatory 
Commission disagree on how to analyze the safety of nuclear waste
storage facilities in case of terrorist attack. 

The matter takes on special urgency for Utahns because 
the NRC is considering a request to license Private Fuel Storage 
to build a storage facility for the country's nuclear power 
plant wastes in Skull Valley, Tooele County. 

In February, the commission's Atomic Safety and Licensing 
Board gave preliminary approval to the facility. The NRC itself 
has not yet acted, and a state appeal of the board decision is 
set for hearing on April 6. 

Meanwhile, the NRC disagrees with the National Academy of 
Sciences on how to assess danger from terrorist attacks against 
stored nuclear waste. 

The NAS is an organization of distinguished scholars, 
chartered by Congress in 1863 to advise the federal government 
on scientific and technical matters. The NRC is the federal 
agency regulating nuclear matters. 

Congress had asked the academy to study "the safety and 
security of commercial spent nuclear fuel storage," as outlined 
in a March 14 cover letter from NRC Chairman Nils J. Diaz to 
Congress. 

The academy produced the study, which has not yet been 
made public, and sent it to Congress. In response, a joint 
congressional report indicated members of Congress expected the 
NRC to improve its analysis. 

The NRC responded with a document, "U.S. Nuclear 
Regulatory Commission Report to Congress on the National Academy 
of Sciences Study on the Safety and Security of Commercial Spent 
Nuclear Fuel Storage." 

Diaz's cover letter and the report are posted on the NRC 
Web site, www.nrc.gov. Once at the site, click on "Web-based 
ADAMS" and then "Begin ADAMS Search," then search under the 
heading "G20050024." 

Activists concerned about the safety of nuclear power 
have complained about the fact that the NAS study has not yet 
been released. Congress commissioned that study about 18 months 
ago because lawmakers were not fully confident the NRC was 
covering all the bases, said David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety 
engineer with the group Union of Concerned Scientists. 

While the report itself is still classified, the NRC has 
provided a peek at parts of it through its public response. 

In 2002, NRC initiated a classified program about 
withstanding terrorist attacks, says the report. 

"Today, spent fuel is better protected than ever. The 
results of security assessments completed to date clearly show 
that storage of spent fuel in both spent fuel pools and in dry 
storage casks provides reasonable assurance that public health 
and safety, the environment and the common defense and security 
will be adequately protected," adds the NRC. 

Some of the agency's responses show where the NRC and the 
NAS disagree. 

The NAS supported analyzing "maximum-credible scenarios" 
as a particularly useful tool to understand the damage that 
could be inflicted by a terrorist attack on spent fuel storage 
facilities, noted the NRC. 

"In characterizing a maximum-credible scenario, the NAS 
report indicates that terrorists must be able to carry out the 
attack as designed — for example, to hit a spent fuel storage 
facility with an aircraft at its most vulnerable point." 

The NAS criticized the NRC for not adapting that sort of 
analysis. In its reply, the commission defended that position. 

"The NRC considers that the maximum-credible scenario 
method is not an effective and efficient use of NRC and licensee 
resources," said the NRC document. "This method would direct 
analysis at an overly large scope of scenarios, including some 
unrealistic scenarios. 

"Rather, the NRC focuses on realistic or credible 
scenarios." 

The NRC report said the agency's analysis employs what it 
calls reference scenarios. These are "based upon either the 
characteristics of previous terrorist attacks or upon 
qualitative judgements of the technical means and methods 
terrorists might employ to attack a spent fuel facility." 

The commission believes that analysis of unrealistic 
scenarios could lead to a misinterpretation of the actual risk, 
"and this can cause confusion among the public and other 
stakeholders," wrote the NRC. 

Lochbaum commented, in an e-mail to the Deseret Morning 
News, "The NAS did not recommend 'unrealistic' scenarios be 
analyzed. They recommended that maximum credible, repeat 
credible, scenarios be considered." 

E-mail: bau@desnews.com 

© 2005 Deseret News Publishing Company 
*****************************************************************
 42 Japan Times: The price of a clean project 

Tuesday, March 29, 2005 

[OPINION] 

By TAKAMITSU SAWA 

On March 28, 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush declared that 
the United States would pull out of the Kyoto Protocol for two 
reasons: The protocol was imperfect because it did not require 
developing countries to cut their emissions of greenhouse gases, 
and it was detrimental to U.S. economic interests. 

On June 11 of that year, Bush said the protocol had "fatal 
flaws," thus leaving no doubt that America would quit the 
landmark international agreement aimed at reducing the emissions 
of gases held responsible for global warming. The reasons Bush 
gave, however, do not make the protocol fatally flawed. 

Japan reportedly plans to urge the U.S., China and India to 
join the treaty at London's Group of Eight summit in June. Tokyo 
must first examine fully what Bush means by "fatal flaws" and 
then prepare a mediation plan to try to correct the defects. Yet 
bringing Europe and America together will be difficult because 
of their ideological differences. 

At first glance, "fatal flaws" imply that the protocol, even if 
fully implemented, will not do much to slow global warming. 
Closer analysis suggests the treaty could even hamper 
development of effective technologies for reducing carbon 
dioxide (CO2 emissions. I base this view on several years of 
discussions by climate-change scientists before the 1997 Kyoto 
conference. Their debate raised three questions: 

* What should be the target -- an actual reduction in emissions 
flow, or a lower concentration in the atmosphere? 

* Is it necessary to take early action, or can measures be put 
off? 

* Do we set numerical-reduction targets, or use price-based 
approaches such as emission-credits trading? 

The Kyoto Protocol adopted the first option in each case. But 
climate-change scientists who echo the views of the U.S. 
Republican Party support the second options. Which option is 
correct depends on one's ideology. 

Before the Industrial Revolution, the CO2concentration in the 
atmosphere was about 280 parts per million (ppm). As a result of 
burning fossil fuels, the concentration increased and now 
measures about 380 ppm. Meteorologists say it must be held below 
550 ppm to prevent global warming. 

How should the concentration be capped? Is it necessary to set 
mandatory reductions on emission rates for developed countries? 
If so, is there an immediate need for action? And what is the 
best way to cut emissions from the standpoint of costs vs. 
benefits? 

Another question is whether the protocol will hamper 
development -- for which a lead time of at least 10 years is 
required -- of large-scale technologies that could effectively 
reduce CO2emissions. Such technologies may involve CO2isolation, 
solar power generation and research and development of 
next-generation nuclear power. 

On one hand, there are those who maintain that early action is 
needed as a precaution. They are skeptical of developing 
large-scale CO2reducing technologies, which they view as 
contributing to environmental degradation. They believe that 
conservation should take precedence over economic growth. 
Naturally, these people support the Kyoto Protocol. 

Others have big hopes for technology. They believe there's 
nothing to lose if action is delayed. They favor large-scale 
centralized power generation, and argue that economic growth 
should come first when it conflicts with conservation. They do 
not back the protocol. 

Is it any wonder that Russia took such a long time to ratify 
the protocol? After all, it can now expect to earn huge amounts 
of hard currency by selling a rare commodity known as emission 
rights. Before the U.S. withdrew from the protocol, estimated 
prices for emission rights were at least $50 per ton of CO2 
After the pullout, prices plummeted to between $3 and $5. Russia 
sought a compensatory measure -- assurance of economic gain -- 
as a condition for its ratification. 

Many think Russia has nothing to lose and everything to gain 
from global warming because it is in a cold climate. They are 
wrong. Global warming is melting permafrost and generating 
methane in the process. The flammable gas is already causing 
frequent forest fires. From January to August 2003, the amount 
of Russian forestland consumed by fire was equivalent to 60 
percent of Japan's area. 

According to a simulated calculation, were it not for the U.S. 
pullout from the protocol, total CO2emissions from developed 
(Annex 1) countries that signed on to the protocol would have 
risen 8 percent in 2010 from 1990 levels. With the U.S. opting 
out, Annex 1 emissions are expected to drop by more than 5 
percent. 

Consequently, the protocol's "clean development mechanisms" 
(CDM), which were designed to increase the use of emission 
rights for developed countries, will become unnecessary. And 
creating an emission-rights market for trading carbon credits 
will become less likely. 

Without such a market, emission rights or carbon credits will 
have to be traded one on one. Since private companies are unable 
to estimate the value of carbon credits earned through 
investment in emissions-reduction technologies, there are likely 
to be fewer CDM projects than had been anticipated. 

The Japanese government should encourage Japanese companies to 
undertake CDM projects by promising to buy at a fair price the 
carbon credits they earn through development. Prices should be 
set according to the domestic marginal cost of emissions 
reduction, prices in the European Union's carbon market and 
other relevant factors, and in ways that give domestic companies 
CDM incentives. 

Without such measures, once the first commitment period under 
the protocol is over, Japan will have to purchase Russia's "hot 
air" through one-on-one transactions to acquire emission rights. 

Takamitsu Sawa, a professor of economics at Kyoto University, 
is director of the university's Economic Research Institute. 

The Japan Times: March 29, 2005 
(C) All rights reserved 
*****************************************************************
 43 DOE: Environmental Management Site-Specific Advisory Board, Fernald
 
                         FR Doc 05-6134 
[Federal Register: March 29, 2005 (Volume 70, Number 59)] 
[Notices] [Page 15848-15849] From the Federal Register Online via 
GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr29mr05-55]                         
 
AGENCY: Department of Energy.
 
ACTION: Notice of open meeting.
 
SUMMARY: This notice announces a meeting of the Environmental 
Management Site-Specific Advisory Board (EMSSAB), Fernald. The 
Federal Advisory Committee Act (Pub. L. 92-463, 86 Stat. 770) 
requires that public notice of this meeting be announced in the 
Federal Register.
 
 
DATES: Saturday, April 9, 2005, 8:30 a.m.-12 noon.
 
ADDRESSES: Fernald Closure Project Site, Crosby Township Senior 
Center, 8910 Willey Road, Harrison, Ohio 45030.
 
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Doug Sarno, The Perspectives 
Group, Inc., 1055 North Fairfax Street, Suite 204, Alexandria, VA 
22314, at (703) 837-1197, or e-mail: 
djsarno@theperspectivesgroup.com 
[djsarno@theperspectivesgroup.com] .
 
SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Purpose of the Board: The purpose of 
the Board is to make recommendations to DOE in the areas of 
environmental restoration, waste management, and related 
activities.
 
Tentative Agenda Goals: Review Plans for Fernald Local 
Stakeholder Organization (LSO) Review the Revised Legacy 
Management and Institutional Controls Plan Advance Fernald 
Citizen's Advisory Board (FCAB) History Project Finalize plans 
for a Fernald History
 
[[Page 15849]] Roundtable 8:30 a.m.--Call to Order 8:30 
a.m.--Updates and Announcements Projects Updates Silos Projects 
Status Ex-Officio Updates 9:15 a.m.--Legacy Management and 
Institutional Controls Plan 10 a.m.--Break 10:15 a.m.--Local 
Stakeholder Organization (LSO) for Fernald 10:45 a.m.--History 
Roundtable Plans 11 a.m.--FCAB Project Update 11:30 a.m.--Prepare 
for SSAB Chairs Meeting 11:50 a.m.--Public Comment 12 
p.m.--Adjourn Public Participation: The meeting is open to the 
public.
 
Written statements may be filed with the Board chair either 
before or after the meeting. Individuals who wish to make oral 
statements pertaining to agenda items should contact the Board 
chair at the address or telephone number listed below. Requests 
must be received five days prior to the meeting and reasonable 
provisions will be made to include the presentation in the 
agenda. The Deputy Designated Federal Officer, Gary Stegner, 
Public Affairs Office, Ohio Field Office, U.S. Department of 
Energy, is empowered to conduct the meeting in a fashion that 
will facilitate the orderly conduct of business. Individuals 
wishing to make public comment will be provided a maximum of five 
minutes to present their comments. This notice is being published 
less than 15 days before the date of the meeting due to 
programmatic issues.
 
Minutes: The minutes of this meeting will be available for public 
review and copying at the Freedom of Information Public Reading 
Room, 1E-190, Forrestal Building, 1000 Independence Avenue, SW., 
Washington, DC 20585 between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., Monday-Friday, 
except Federal holidays. Minutes will also be available by 
writing to the Fernald Citizens' Advisory Board, Phoenix 
Environmental Corporation, MS-76, Post Office Box 538704, 
Cincinnati, OH 43253-8704, or by calling the Advisory Board at 
(513) 648-6478.
 
Issued at Washington, DC on March 22, 2005.
 
Carol Matthews, Acting Advisory Committee Officer.
 
[FR Doc. 05-6134 Filed 3-28-05; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 6450-01-P

 
*****************************************************************
 44 DOE: Environmental Management Site-Specific Advisory Board, Paducah
 
                         FR Doc 05-6135 
[Federal Register: March 29, 2005 (Volume 70, Number 59)] 
[Notices] [Page 15849] From the Federal Register Online via GPO 
Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr29mr05-56]                         
 
AGENCY: Department of Energy.
 
ACTION: Notice of open meeting.
 
SUMMARY: This notice announces a meeting of the Environmental 
Management Site-Specific Advisory Board (EMSSAB), Paducah. The 
Federal Advisory Committee Act (Pub. L. 92-463, 86 Stat. 770) 
requires that public notice of this meeting be announced in the 
Federal Register.
 
 
DATES: Thursday, April 21, 2005, 5:30 p.m.-9:30 p.m.
 
ADDRESSES: 111 Memorial Drive, Barkley Centre, Paducah, Kentucky 
42001.
 
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: William E. Murphie, Deputy 
Designated Federal Officer, Department of Energy 
Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office, 1017 Majestic Drive, Suite 
200, Lexington, Kentucky 40513, (859) 219-4001.
 
 
SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Purpose of the Board: The purpose of 
the Board is to make recommendations to DOE in the areas of 
environmental restoration, waste management and related 
activities.
 
Tentative Agenda 5:30 p.m.--Informal Discussion 6 p.m.--Call to 
Order Introductions Review of Agenda Approval of March Minutes 
6:05 p.m.--DDFO's Comments 6:25 p.m.--Federal Coordinator 
Comments 6:30 p.m.--Ex-officio Comments 6:40 p.m.--Public 
Comments and Questions 6:50 p.m.--Task Forces/Presentations Waste 
Disposition Task Force Water Quality Task Force Long Range 
Strategy/Stewardship Task Force --Chairs Meeting Homework 
Community Outreach Task Force --Speakers Bureau 7:50 p.m.--Public 
Comments and Questions 8 p.m.--Break 8:10 p.m.--Administrative 
Issues Review of Work plan Review of Next Agenda 8:20 
p.m.--Review of Action Items 8:25 p.m.--Subcommittee Reports 
Executive Committee 8:40 p.m.--Final Comments 9:30 p.m.--Adjourn 
Copies of the final agenda will be available at the meeting.
 
Public Participation: The meeting is open to the public.
 
Written statements may be filed with the Board either before or 
after the meeting. Individuals who wish to make oral statements 
pertaining to agenda items should contact David Dollins at the 
address listed below or by telephone at (270) 441-6819. Requests 
must be received five days prior to the meeting and reasonable 
provision will be made to include the presentation in the agenda. 
The Deputy Designated Federal Officer is empowered to conduct the 
meeting in a fashion that will facilitate the orderly conduct of 
business. Individuals wishing to make public comment will be 
provided a maximum of five minutes to present their comments.
 
Minutes: The minutes of this meeting will be available for public 
review and copying at the Freedom of Information Public Reading 
Room, 1E-190, Forrestal Building, 1000 Independence Avenue, SW., 
Washington, DC 20585 between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., Monday-Friday, 
except Federal holidays. Minutes will also be available at the 
Department of Energy's Environmental Information Center and 
Reading Room at 115 Memorial Drive, Barkley Centre, Paducah, 
Kentucky between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., on Monday thru Friday or by 
writing to David Dollins, Department of Energy, Paducah Site 
Office, Post Office Box 1410, MS-103, Paducah, Kentucky 42001 or 
by calling him at (270) 441-6819.
 
Issued at Washington, DC on March 22, 2005.
 
Carol Matthews, Acting Advisory Committee Officer.
 
[FR Doc. 05-6135 Filed 3-28-05; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 6450-01-P

 
*****************************************************************
 45 Tri-City Herald: Hanford budget proposal criticized 

This story was published Tuesday, March 29th, 2005 

By Annette Cary, Herald staff writer 

Hanford's proposed fiscal year 2006 budget appears to abandon
Department of Energy plans for accelerated cleanup on some key
projects, according to the Washington State Department of
Ecology. 

That's just one of the criticisms being leveled at a proposed
budget for cleaning up the nuclear reservation that would drop
spending from about $2 billion to about $1.8 billion next year. 

DOE's environmental management program nationwide is being cut
by $548 million, but Hanford alone would suffer 54 percent of
the cut, said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash, speaking at a hearing
of the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee. 

"This fact, combined with the absolute lack of sound rationale
for the majority of Hanford budget cuts, can easily lead one to
believe Washington state was targeted by DOE and OMB (the Office
of Management and Budget)," she said. 

The numbers actually are worse than they appear on paper,
disproportionately reducing the amount that will be available to
spend on cleanup, according to the state Department of Ecology. 

That's because a significant proportion of the money Hanford
would receive would go for costs that either remain constant or
cannot be reduced proportionally with funding reductions, Nolan
Curtis, program administration section manager for the
Department of Ecology, said at a committee meeting of the
Hanford Advisory Board. 

That includes maintenance, pensions, security and other
overhead. 

In fact, in some instances those costs are going up and must be
paid for out of the reduced budget. Contractor pension costs
have increased and in the current year are expected to be $20
million greater than budgeted. The fiscal year 2006 budget will
have to set aside more money to cover those costs. 

Regulators of the Hanford site -- the state and the federal
Environmental Protection Agency -- are both concerned that
increased security costs for weapons-grade plutonium stored on
the site would come out of the cleanup budget. 

The federal government plans to consolidate plutonium at one
site, likely in Savannah River, S.C., but plutonium made at
Hanford for the nation's nuclear weapons program will remain at
Hanford until a national policy decision is made to ship it
off-site. 

Because of post-9/11 security concerns, the budget would take
about $30 million from cleanup to spend on improvements to keep
about 4.4 tons of plutonium at Hanford safe from terrorists. 

"We certainly recognize and support the need to keep special
nuclear materials secure and well-guarded, but the costs of
providing additional storage and maintenance, new facilities and
increasingly higher levels of security should not come at the
expense of cleanup," Curtis said. 

He told the advisory board that DOE is not complying with the
Tri-Party Agreement, which requires it to take all reasonable
steps to find the money to finish cleanup projects. 

The concern is less about meeting immediate deadlines than it is
about putting accelerated cleanup in long-term jeopardy. 

At Hanford's heavily contaminated Central Plateau, DOE has few
deadlines to meet in the next few years to clean up waste
trenches and disposal areas. But work needs to continue to meet
plans for accelerated cleanup. 

"It's going to be a continuing issue to get the commitment to do
work," said Nick Ceto, EPA's Hanford project manager. 

The state described funding cuts at the Central Plateau as
drastic. The proposed budget would include $71 million for the
work, compared with $107 million this year. 

"The proposal would support operations, maintenance,
surveillance and monitoring, but almost no actual cleanup,"
Curtis said. 

At the $5.8 billion vitrification plant being built to turn
radioactive waste in Hanford's underground tanks into a stable
glass form, the budget would be reduced by $64 million -- about
a 10 percent cut. 

"(DOE) has consistently advised that level funding for the
project is necessary to ensure that it's operating by 2011,"
according to information prepared by the state for the Hanford
Advisory Board. 

"The schedule relies upon carryover from low-spending years to
supplement later higher-spending years," according to the state.
"The proposed cut would provide no carryover in fiscal year 2007
and will affect out-year project costs and schedules." 

The tank farms, fields of underground tanks that hold 53 million
gallons of radioactive waste, would see funding reduced from
$391 million this year to $302 million in fiscal year 2006. 

"That makes no sense," Murray said. She said the cuts appear to
be based on legal uncertainties caused by a dispute over how
completely the tanks must be emptied. 

"The fact is that tank farm activities going on this year can
and should proceed in fiscal year 2006," she said. "There is
absolutely no legal or technical reason that these activities
must suddenly end Sept. 30." 

Part of EPA's concern is that the budget would be too tight to
address unexpected problems and delays, such as the troubles
Hanford workers have had vacuuming radioactive sludge into
underwater containers at the leak-prone K Basins near the
Columbia River. 

The budget for the K Basins would be reduced from $122 million
this year to $58 million under the proposed budget, in part
because workers have succeeded in getting spent fuel removed
from the storage pools. But the lower budget could put part of
the work at risk, such as starting efforts to remove the K East
Basin once it is emptied of sludge and contaminated water. 

Money for investigating, monitoring and cleaning up plumes of
radioactive and chemical contamination below ground at Hanford
also is cut in the proposed budget. Funding would drop from $81
million this year to $73 million. 

Money for cleanup of the river corridor -- where old reactors,
laboratories and burial sites sit near the Columbia River --
would remain about level at $168 million. However, the amount
being spent this year is significantly less than what DOE had
planned to spend along the river corridor. 

"This funding level suggests the Department of Energy will have
to abandon its plan for accelerated cleanup near the Columbia
River," Curtis said. 

The proposed budget cuts would mean fewer jobs at Hanford, but
it's not clear how extensive job losses might be. DOE estimates
each $1 million of the budget supports about 10 jobs. But
because some of the lost funding would be for materials, a $200
million budget cut would not necessarily equal 2,000 lost jobs,
according to DOE. 

The budget cuts are only proposed, however, and Washington's
congressional delegation has said it will work for increased
funding. 

EPA has acknowledged Hanford will not be immune from federal
budget pressures as the nation grapples with the war in Iraq and
the federal budget deficit, but says that should not affect the
quality of cleanup. 

"Even though there is a slower pace, we are not going to have
less rigorous cleanup," Ceto said. "If it takes longer, it takes
longer." 

© 2005 Tri-City Herald, Associated Press &Other Wire Services
*****************************************************************
 46 Daily Californian: UC Backs New Research Institute - 

   [http://www.dailycal.org/]       
  
By TONIA BUI Contributing Writer 

Tuesday, March 29, 2005

	UC announced last week that it will partner with several New
Mexico universities to form a new research institute at the
UC-run Los Alamos National Laboratory, a move that may signal
UC’s intention to fight to hold on to the lab. 
	UC will collaborate with the newly created New Mexico
Consortium—made up of the University of New Mexico, New Mexico
State University and New Mexico Institute of Mining and
Technology—to establish the Institute for Advanced Studies that
would enable collaborative research between the institutions and
the lab. 
	UC spokesperson Chris Harrington said the institute would
provide additional scientific and technological expertise for
work being done at Los Alamos. 
	The institute would be established if the UC Board of Regents
decides to enter a bid to compete for the lab’s contract, which
should be decided within the next few months. 
	“If they decide to compete, the bid will be moving forward in
partnering with the (New Mexico) institutions to run the
Advanced Studies institute,” Harrington said. 
	UC has managed the nuclear weapons facility since its inception
in 1943, but reports of financial and security mismanagement
prompted then-Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham to put the lab
up for national competition. 
	If UC bids to retain control of the lab, the institute will
conduct scientific research that includes biology, astronomy,
environmental science, material science, quantum computing and
optics. 
	Although the Regents are waiting for the Department of Energy—
which owns the lab—to issue a final proposal that will outline
what the university must to do to manage the facility, both UC
and New Mexico universities are preparing for the bid,
Harrington said. 
	The energy department is expected to release its formal request
for proposals as early as April. 
	UC selected the group of New Mexico research institutions
because of its proximity to the lab and its long history of
collaborative research in technology and education with the UC
system, said Terry Yates, University of New Mexico vice
president for research and economic development. 
	By partnering with the New Mexico institutions, the institute
will already have in place the staff and researchers needed for
the studies, Yates said. 
	“It’s advantageous to have an arrangement with LANL. (The
partnership) is a leverage for human physical infrastructure,”
Yates said. 
	However, Senior Investigator Peter Stockton of the Project on
Government Oversight said in order for UC to hold onto the
contract, UC must have a legitimate contractor that would help
them manage the lab smoothly. 
	“The UC can’t manage the laboratory without combining with a
major contractor with strong management,” Stockton said. 
	He said UC, which has managed the lab for more than 60 years,
lacks the capability to manage the lab because of previous
financial, security and safety problems UC has had in the past. 
	The university is up against other universities that specialize
in science- oriented research with general contractors, Stockton
said. 
	UC’s contract expires Sept. 30 and the energy department has
said it hopes to award the contract by July.
Contact Tonia Bui at tbui@dailycal.org.
  
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