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                         NUCLEAR POLICY
 
1 Korea: Digital Chosunilbo: N.K. Will Return to Talks if U.S. Stops H
2 Xinhua: China welcomes positive signals on restarting six-party talk
3 US: White House: Energy Security, Energy Efficiency, Renewables and 
4 US: Platts: Barton may try to add Clear Skies during energy bill con
5 US: NRC: NRC Completes Restoration of Additional Documents to Public
 
                         NUCLEAR REACTORS
 
6 US: NRC: NRC Staff to Hold Public Meeting with Progress Energy June 
7 Executive Intelligence Review: How To Build 6,000 Nuclear Plants by 
8 BBC: Is nuclear energy cost-effective?
9 Platts: EC starts second, detailed, nuclear decommissioning funds 
10 US: News-Leader.com: Nuclear one day may be cheapest
11 US: NY Journal News: Lowey proposes changes to nuclear plant relicen
12 US: NRC: Draft Report for Comment: ``Consideration of Geochemical Is
13 US: NRC: Draft Report for Comment: ``Documentation and Applications 
14 US: NRC: Agency Information Collection Activities: Proposed Collecti
15 Ottawa Citizen: Happy campers beside the oily nuclear plant? 
16 US: Free Lance-Star!: North Anna plan's safety issues assessed 
17 US: Platts: NRC staff updates commission on uprate activities
 
                          NUCLEAR SECURITY
 
18 RIA Novosti: Moscow welcomes OSCE approval of nuclear terrorism conv
 
                          NUCLEAR SAFETY
 
19 US: [du-list] A possible solution to Depleted Uranium?
20 US: Columbus Dispatch: 43 uranium work led to cancer, man thinks - 
21 US: L.A. Daily News Higher tritium levels found at Santa Susana faci
 
                         NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE
 
22 US: Deseret News: Let Goshutes store nuclear waste
23 US: Salt Lake Tribune: Nuclear dump a step closer 
24 US: The Australian: Australia seeks China uranium deal 
25 RGJ: Budget could mean ‘yes’ on Yucca project
26 US: Australian Financial Review: Uranium exports to China coming soo
 
                           PEACE
 
27 Nagasaki bomb: First Western reports finally published 
28 Independent - Nagasaki: Wasteland of war
 
                        US DEPT. OF ENERGY
 
29 DOE: Environmental Management Site-Specific Advisory Board, Oak Ridg
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                         FULL NEWS STORIES
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 1 Korea: Digital Chosunilbo: N.K. Will Return to Talks if U.S. Stops Harsh Rhetoric
 
  Home> National/Politics    Updated Jun.21,2005 14:16 KST   
 
¡¯Kim Jong-il Would Trade Missiles for U.S. Friendship¡¯
 U.S. Official Keeps ¡®Tyranny Outpost¡¯ Catchphrase Alive
 Seoul Laments U.S. Official's 'Tyranny Outpost¡¯ Comment
   
A high-ranking North Korean official at the United Nations said
his country may return to the stalled six-country talks on
ending its nuclear pursuit if the U.S. stops using harsh and
provocative rhetoric. 

North Korea said it will resume the deadlocked six-party nuclear
negotiations as early as next month if the United States does
not refer to the communist state as an outpost of tyranny. 

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a North Korean official at
the United Nations told a South Korean news agency that
Pyongyang will "come running" to the talks if Washington
refrains from using such provocative terms, even for a month. 

Pyongyang has been boycotting the multilateral nuclear talks for
a year now, citing what it called Washington's "hostile" policy
toward it. 

The North Korean official said his country is confused about
Washington's true intentions, as high-ranking U.S. officials
continue to use harsh rhetoric against the North, even after
Washington's special envoy to the nuclear talks, Joseph DeTrani,
said the U.S. recognizes the North as a sovereign state that it
has no intention to attack the country. 

North Korea watchers see the latest development as somewhat
positive as North Korea had been insisting on a formal apology
for the "outpost of tyranny" remarks first made by U.S.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. 

But the harsh rhetoric continued. U.S. Under-Secretary of State
for Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky once again branded North
Korea as an outpost of tyranny. During a Hudson Institute policy
discussion in the U.S., the official used the term in reference
to North Korea, as well as Cuba, Zimbabwe and Myanmar. 

Arirang TV 

  
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 2 Xinhua: China welcomes positive signals on restarting six-party talks 

  www.xinhuanet.com

  www.chinaview.cn 2005-06-21 20:09:54   

    BEIJING, June 21 (Xinhuanet) -- China is pleased to see
positive signals emerge recently on resuming the six-party talks
on the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue, and "welcomes" such
signals, said Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao here
Tuesday. 

    US Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill said Monday
in Inchon, a northwest city of the Republic of Korea (ROK), that
the United States hopes the six-party talks can restart in July.
His country is ready to hold talks with the Democratic People's
Republic of Korea (DPRK) in a respectful atmosphere. 

    According to Chung Dong-young, the special envoy of ROK
President Roh Moo-hyun and also South Korean Unification
Minister, during his meeting with DPRK's top leader Kim Jong Il
last Friday,Kim said "the DPRK is willing to return to six-party
nuclear talks even in July, if the United States "recognizes and
respects" Pyongyang. 

    Liu said China has been pushing for the early resumption of
the six-party talks, and will continue to hold consultations
with the related parties on relevant issues. "As for the details
of the meeting, related parties should conduct efficient
communications,"he added. 

    "Although there are lots of problems, China will not give up
its efforts to promote the resumption of six-party talks," the
spokesman said. 

    He said China is committed to peace and stability of the
Korean Peninsula, aiming to realize denuclearization through
peaceful talks. 

    China also hopes that the relevant parties will make
concerted efforts, seize the present opportunities and show
greater flexibility in a bid to promote the peaceful settlement
of the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue, he noted. 

    In order to end the Korean Peninsular nuclear issue
peacefully,China, the DPRK, the United States, Russia, the ROK
and Japan have convened three rounds of six-party nuclear talks
in Beijing. However, the fourth round of the multilateral talks
failed to be convened as the DPRK refused to attend the talks,
citing hostile US policy. Enditem   


  Copyright ©2003 Xinhua News Agency. All rights reserved.
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 3 White House: Energy Security, Energy Efficiency, Renewables and Economic Development

For Immediate Release

 June 20, 2005 

The United States and the European Union share a long tradition
of working together to promote strong economic growth and
improve energy security. We pursue this through such mechanisms
as the International Energy Agency, the G-8 initiatives and the
Bonn "Renewables 2004" Action Plan. 

By working together the European Union and the United States
intend to cooperate to promote sound energy policies, improve
energy security and foster economic growth and development. We
recognize the need for stronger actions to increase energy
security and reduce the economic impact of high and volatile
energy prices. 

We recognize that one of the greatest needs for developing
countries today is to provide the basic energy services
necessary to lift their citizens out of poverty. We believe that
the advancement and deployment of technology can contribute to
the solution of the problem. By developing clean, efficient,
affordable energy technologies for the longer term, while
continuing to improve and deploy the current generation of
lower-emission technologies, we can help all nations, including
developing countries, meet the energy needs of their people and
grow their economies. 

The European Union and the United States recognize the important
potential that can result from further efforts. We will continue
to address energy efficiency through effective policy measures
and technology, and focus our efforts on achieving security of
supply and helping the developing world to address energy
challenges. 

To further these objectives, the United States and the European
Union will focus their activities in the following areas of
common action: 
  + Working in partnership with developing countries to help
them reduce poverty by promoting energy efficient policies and
the use of renewable energy sources, as well as deploying
advanced, efficient, affordable energy technologies to help meet
their energy needs. 
  + Working together through the Carbon Sequestration Leadership
Forum to foster the development and deployment of clean,
efficient technologies, especially in key developing economies,
as global reliance on fossil fuels, particularly coal,
continues. 
  + Promoting our work on hydrogen technologies and the
International Partnership for the Hydrogen Economy. 
  + Working together to ensure the continued safe operation of
existing nuclear generation and to exchange experience on
nuclear safety measures and control. We take note of the efforts
of those states who will continue to use nuclear energy to
develop more advanced technologies that would be safer, more
reliable, and more resistant to diversion and proliferation. 
  + Continuing work to advance all forms of renewable energy,
and to promote the use of renewable and energy efficiency
technology and policy measures, including promotion of energy
conservation. As members of the Renewable Energy and Energy
Efficiency Partnership (REEEP), we will place a greater emphasis
on cost-effective energy efficiency opportunities. 
  + Working together to promote the development, deployment and
adoption of cleaner, more efficient diesel vehicle technologies,
including by seeking to better align our regulatory standards
for diesel engines and fuels. 
  + Working through the international Methane to Markets
Partnership to capture and use methane as a clean-burning energy
source from coal mines, landfills and oil and gas systems. 
### 


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 4 Platts: Barton may try to add Clear Skies during energy bill conference
 
+ US House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton 
(Republican-Texas) Monday said he will consider adding to the 
energy bill all or part of the president's Clear Skies 
legislation if the Senate approves a climate-change amendment 
during floor debate this week. 

Sen Jeff Bingaman (Democrat-New Mexico) is expected to offer an 
amendment to the Senate version of the bill that would require a 
reduction in US greenhouse gas emission "intensity" beginning in 
2010. 

In remarks to the Edison Electric Institute's annual CEO meeting 
in Las Vegas, Barton said "if the Senate puts something in the 
bill, we will look at adding some...or all of the Clear Skies" 
bill, Barton said. 

The congressman also said he would support a "realistic" 
renewable portfolio standard that would include new and existing 
hydropower and nuclear energy. 

The Senate Friday approved an amendment requiring generators to 
obtain 10% of their power from renewable resources by 2020. 

"I'm not opposed to an RPS, but if we are going to do [one] let's 
include hydro and nuclear." 

This story was originally published in Platts Natural Gas Alert

http://www.naturalgasalert.platts.com 

Las Vegas (Platts)--20Jun2005
 
Copyright © 2005 - Platts, All Rights Reserved
 [The McGraw-Hill Companies]   
*****************************************************************
 5 NRC: NRC Completes Restoration of Additional Documents to Public Access via its On-Line Library
 
News Release - 2005-09
U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION   
  Office of Public Affairs     Telephone: 301/415-8200   
  Washington, DC 20555-0001     E-mail:   
  No. 05-094     June 20, 2005   
  


The Nuclear Regulatory Commission Friday completed the
restoration of public access to an additional 70,000 documents
through its on-line library, ADAMS, after conducting a
security-sensitivity review. Members of the public are now able
to access these documents, involving administrative,
contractual, research and other documents not related to a
specific licensee, which were removed from the public library on
Oct. 25 of last year. 

The documents may be viewed and retrieved through the NRCs
Web-based ADAMS at
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams/web-based.html or by using
CITRIX software at
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams/citrix-based.html. Using
CITRIX allows earlier access, by perhaps a day, but requires
downloading the appropriate software. Help in using Web-based
ADAMS or CITRIX is available by contacting the NRC Public
Document Room by phone at 800-397-4209 or 301-415-4737, or by
e-mail at . Links to many of these documents on the NRCs public
Web site have also been restored; NRC staff are working to
resolve information technology issues to restore the remaining
links. 

We are pleased that the public will once again be able to obtain
these documents, said Edward T. Baker, Director of the NRCs
Office of Information Services. While we are firmly supportive
of openness in our regulatory process, it was important to
remove these documents to conduct a security review and remove
information that could potentially be of use to a terrorist. 

The agency has previously restored access to about 163,000
non-sensitive documents. It continues to evaluate documents
dealing with nuclear materials licensees.   



  


 	Last revised Tuesday, June 21, 2005 	   
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 6 NRC: NRC Staff to Hold Public Meeting with Progress Energy June 24 to Discuss Initial
Brunswick Plant License Renewal Inspection

News Release - Region II - 2005-03
 U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION 

Office of Public Affairs, Region II
  No. II-05-030   		        June 21, 2005   
  CONTACT:     Ken Clark (404) 562-4416
 Roger D. Hannah (404) 562-4417     E-mail: opa2@nrc.gov  
  


Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials will meet with Progress
Energy management at 9:00 a.m. on Friday, June 24 to discuss the
preliminary results of an agency inspection of the Brunswick
nuclear plant license renewal program. The Brunswick plant is
located near Southport, N.C., about 30 miles southeast of
Wilmington. 

Progress Energy submitted an application to renew the licenses
of the two units at the Brunswick plant in October of last year.
That application, if approved by the NRC, would extend the
expiration date of the two units operating licenses from 2016
for Unit 1 and 2014 for Unit 2 to 2036 and 2034 respectively. 

The meeting, which is open to the public, will be held at the
Brunswick Media Center, located at 8520 River Road, S.E., in
Southport. NRC officials will be available prior to the close of
the meeting to answer questions from interested observers. 

NRC officials say the inspection is designed to verify that the
companys license renewal program is being implemented consistent
with its license renewal application and pertinent regulations.
Subsequent NRC inspections, if necessary, will verify that
programs are in place to manage the material condition of the
plants systems, structures and components.   



  


 	Last revised Tuesday, June 21, 2005 	   
*****************************************************************
 7 Executive Intelligence Review: How To Build 6,000 Nuclear Plants by 2050
                               
This article appears in the June 24, 2005 issue of
Executive Intelligence Review. 					

We asked nuclear engineer James Muckerheide how many nuclear
plants would be needed to bring the world's population up to a
decent standard of living, and how to do it. Here are his
answers. 					

In 1997-1998, I made an estimate of how many nuclear plants
would be needed in the world by 2050. It reflects an economy
that is directed to provide the energy necessary to meet basic
human needs, especially for the developing regions. 					

The initiative required is not unlike what the U.S. government
did to build the nation: for example, to bring electric power to
rural areas; to provide transportation by building roads and
highways and canals, and the intercontinental railroads, and
airlines; to develop water supplies and irrigation systems; to
provide telephone service, medical and hospital services; and
many other programs that were essential to develop an advanced
society, and to lift regions out of poverty. 					

However, we need to do more to meet those needs, both within the
United States and for the developing world, to bring those
people into the economic mainstream, instead of leaving them to
be just cheap sources of our labor and raw materials. 					
The Role of Nuclear Energy
 					

My projections simply envisioned nuclear energy growing from
supplying 6% of world energy needs today to one third of the
energy demand in 2050, which was taken to grow by about a factor
of 3 from 2000. But, of course, that begs the question: Can
fossil fuels continue to provide energy at or slightly above
present levels, to produce about one third of the energy demand
in 2050? And is it likely that hydro, wind energy, and other
alternatives can provide the other third, which is also the
equivalent of 100% of today's total energy use? 					

So, nuclear power in 2050 would be roughly 18 times its current
use. This requires fewer than the number of plants I projected
in 1997, and is equivalent to about 5,100
1,000-megawatt-electric (MWe) plants. 					

But nuclear energy must produce more than just electricity; it
must produce fresh water by desalination of seawater, hydrogen
production to displace gasoline and diesel fuel for
transportation, process heat for industry, and so on. 					

Note that, in this case, nuclear energy does not displace coal,
oil, and gas. About 200% of current energy use would still have
to come from fossil fuels and alternative sources. If oil and
gas production cannot be maintained up to about 100 millions
barrels per day, this would require an even greater commitment
to nuclear energy, especially if nuclear energy is needed to
extract oil from tar sands, oil shales, and coal. 					

There are pollution-control and other cost pressures limiting
supply that will make fossil fuels more costly in any event. We
need to consider this in the light that nuclear energy can be
produced indefinitely at roughly the cost that it can be
produced today. 					

The alternative is to continue "business-as-usual." These
conditions are even now producing international conflicts over
oil and gas supplies, large environmental pollution costs in
trying to increase fossil fuel production, and high costs to try
to subsidize uneconomical "alternative" energy sources. This is
leading the world into economic collapse, without adequate
energy supplies, where the rich feel the need to acquire the
significant resources of the economy, with growing disparities
in income and wealth, even in the developed world, and
frustration in the developing and undeveloped world from the
limits on their ability to function economically. 					
Calculating Energy Demand
 					

By 2050, given current trends, world population will increase
from today's 6 billion-plus people to an estimated 9 to 10
billion people, with most of the increase coming from the
developing world. The current development in China, India, and
elsewhere, indicates the enormous growth now in progress. Today,
if anything, such development projections may be understated.
					

The industrialized world per capita energy use may drop to 65 to
75% of current use, with increased efficiency, however there
will be greater energy demands for the new, non-electrical
applications, using more energy to extract end-use energy such
as oil and hydrogen. 					

The developing world will substantially increase per capita
energy use, to 40 to 50% of current use in the developed world.
Going from a bicycle to a motor scooter, may require only a few
gallons of fuel per year, but it's a large increment over the
amount being used with the bicycle. And motorbikes lead to cars.
Even in the last 5 to 10 years, there has been an enormous
increase in vehicles, in China especially, and in other
developing regions. These are large population—more than 2
billion people—and their need for oil is becoming enormous. 					

Therefore, if we are to achieve a world that is providing the
energy required for developed and developing societies, along
with substantial relief of human suffering and deprivation,
energy use will be around three times that of today. 					
Nuclear Energy is Competitive and Cost-effective
 					

Nuclear power is currently competitive and cost-effective.
Numerous pragmatic current and recent construction projects
around the world provide a strong basis for cost projections in
the United States, Europe, and other locations that do not have
current experience. Electricity from available nuclear power
plant designs is lower than current costs from recent coal and
gas plants, and reasonable projections of electricity costs from
future coal and gas plants. 					

There is a popular view that nuclear power is the high-cost
option. However, during the 1968 to 1978 nuclear power
construction period, there were economic benefits even when
there were almost 200 plants ordered and being procured and
constructed, with massive construction costs. All of those
plants established strong competition with oil, gas, and coal,
and the competitive pressure brought down the cost of
fossil-fuel-generated electricity a great deal. Ratepayers in
the United States saved billions of dollars in fossil fuel costs
over almost three decades. 					

Without the nuclear option, we have lost that competitive
pressure. Prices are not constrained by that competition and
have been increased, along with increased demand for scarce oil,
gas, and coal resources. So, if we build nuclear power plants,
even before a significant number of plants are operational, and
especially if we have the ability to build plants in a timely
manner, we will have an effect of reducing the excessive demand
for, and costs of, coal and gas for providing electricity—to the
benefit of the whole economy. We must consider that as part of
the economic equation that doesn't presently exist in the way we
evaluate nuclear power costs: the externalized benefits to
society. 					

We know about calculating externalized costs, but we do not
adequately calculate externalized benefits. It's time to do so.
					

Of course, people still consider the very high costs of the
large nuclear plants ordered in the early 1970s. But these
suffered the unanticipated effects of high component and labor
costs, design changes in process after the Three Mile Island
accident, and long construction times with high financing costs.
					

Today, we are prepared to manufacture and pre-build modules,
reducing construction schedules to limit that long-term
financial exposure, even if there were increases in interest
rates. Future projects will undertake plant construction with
approved designs, with "constructability" incorporated. The
current generation of early plants are simply artifacts of the
historical first phase of nuclear power plant design and
construction, just as the Ford Tri-Motor and the DC-3 are
artifacts of the first phases of passenger aircraft. 					
The Mass Production Road to 2050
 					

Because the time frames for these construction requirements are
long, and we need significant contributions to power supplies by
2020, we can't just increase production exponentially to put a
lot of the power on line in the decade from 2040-2050. We need a
substantial amount of nuclear electricity before 2030, and need
to install a construction capacity that would produce a stable
plant production rate for the future, to meet both a nominal
energy growth and to replace old nuclear, and other energy
plants. Consider that China is building roughly one new coal
plant per week now, and the United States has about 100 coal
plants on the drawing board. These plants and hundreds of others
will need to be replaced after 2050. 					

Obviously, we would install much of that capacity between 2030
and 2050. But to get from here to 2030, we have to re-examine
how we plan, and commit, to installing nuclear plants. The
current idea in the United States, of building one plant by
2010, and 10 more by 2020, is a long way from the needed 2,000
or so in the world by 2030. Fortunately, other countries are
doing more to meet the need. 					

We have to commit now to manufacturing the pressure vessels and
other large components in mass quantities, instead of waiting
for future ad hoc contracts from individual companies. Waiting
leads to substantial overheads and delays to develop contracts,
which are subject to the ad hoc process of integrating such
plans into the production capabilities of vendors, with, again,
rising costs and/or extended schedules, as negotiations are
entered for limited production capacity, with high risks
perceived for commitments to expand manufacturing capacity vs.
the assurance that the industry will not collapse again.
Individual companies would still have to develop plans and
contracts for new plants, but those plants would come from
national policies that engage the developed and developing
countries to commit to the production and installation of
nuclear power plants to produce a large, worldwide plant
manufacturing capacity. 					

We must also commit to working on evolutionary designs that can
reduce the cost of current and future plants. For example,
current requirements for containment pressure and leakage,
radiation control, including ALARA (the as low as reasonably
achievable standard), and so on, can be made more reasonable,
along with designs that have less conservatism in design and
analysis, without reducing nuclear power plant safety. In
addition to engaging the manufacturing industries directly, we
must engage the major national and international standards
organizations, and other international non-governmental
organizations, in this effort. 					

A plan for rapid growth to a level long-term production capacity
to support long-term energy growth and replacement of old plants
and fossil fuels, would result in producing roughly 200 new
units per year. We can plan for 6,000 equivalent units, taking
our present operating plant capacity as about 300 1,000-MWe
equivalent units (from about 440 actual units). 					

There are about 30 units now in construction in the world, with
construction times of five to six years, so we are now building
about 6 units per year. This will substantially increase in the
next two to three years, so we can take something more than 10
units per year as a current baseline, and can plan for a rapid
increase in current capacity to a level of about 200 units per
year after 2040. We would use current and near-term nuclear
power plant construction experience to adopt initial plant
designs and major suppliers. We would focus primarily on the
required fuel cycle capacity and major component manufacturing,
and primary materials and infrastructure, including the required
people, to produce nuclear units more like the way we build
747s, with parts in modules being delivered for assembly from
around the world, while moving to a more regional manufacturing
strategy. 					

Note that "manufacturing" applies to on-site and near-site
support of construction by producing major modules outside of
the construction area of the plant itself. The modules built
on-site in Japan to construct the two 1,356-MWe ABWRs (advanced
boiling water reactors) in about four years, which came on line
in 1996 and 1997, weighed up to 650 tons and were lifted into
the plant. 					
The World War II and TVA Precedents
 					

We have the experience of the expansion of production capacity
in a few years before and during World War II. President
Roosevelt anticipated the need, by engaging industry leaders
before the U.S. entry into the war, including earlier production
to support U.S. merchant marine shipbuilding, and to supply
Britain and Russia using the "lend-lease" program. Henry Kaiser
built Liberty ships, which took six months before the war,
delivering more than one per day. 					

The early TVA experience built large projects that integrated
production and construction, with labor requirements and
capabilities. Unfortunately, as with many large organizations,
the later management failed to fully understand and maintain the
capabilities that were largely taken for granted as the
historical legacy of the organization, with inadequate
commitments to maintain that capability. However, there are
examples of maintaining those capabilities, in organizations
like DuPont and the U.S. Nuclear Navy. These principles must be
applied. 					

In addition, our original nuclear power construction experience
demonstrates that these capabilities are readily achievable.
Today there are 103 operating nuclear units in the United
States, ordered from 1967 to 1973. There were about 200 units in
production and construction by the late 1970s. So, even with
little management coordination—poor management by many owners
and constructors, with plant owners, vendors, and constructors
jockeying for position and running up costs in the
marketplace—we were building about 20 units per year. 					

But we got ahead of ourselves. Costs were driven up by
competitive bidding and capital constraints, but more important,
there was much lower electricity growth following the 1973 oil
embargo, which had not returned to near pre-embargo rates as had
been expected by many in the industry. The then-existing excess
baseload plant capacity was sufficient to satisfy the slower
growth in demand for two decades, relying primarily on coal,
which we have in abundance, and in the 1990s, by building
low-cost natural gas-burning plants, when the cost of gas was
low. But that was an obvious failure to do competent planning,
which has clearly exacerbated our current inadequate ability to
provide for long-term energy needs of the U.S. and the world,
with rising costs that will threaten the world economy.                                         

The Industrial Gear-up Required for Mass Production

What kind of industries would have to gear up—steel, concrete,
new materials, nuts and bolts, and reactor vessel producers?
					

The cornerstone of manufacturing for an accelerated program is
in fuel supplies and reactor pressure vessels, along with steam
generators and turbines, and large pumps. Much of the piping and
plumbing, power systems, cables, instrumentation and other
systems, plus the concrete and steel for the containment and
other buildings, are high volumes of materials, but these should
be more readily met within the general industrial production of
concrete and steel, and other industrial components and
equipment. 					

This also contributes to redevelopment of essential production
capacities that need to expand and to be retooled, along with
reactivating substantial steel capacity. 					

The fuel supply is critical. Initially, uranium mining can be
substantially expanded. However, high-grade uranium supplies
will be exhausted, along with surplus nuclear weapons materials,
requiring the use of lower-grade ores. Ultimately, uranium can
also be extracted from ocean water, at only about 10 times the
extraction costs of lower grade ore, where it is replenished
from natural discharges into the oceans. Because, unlike other
fuels, the cost of uranium is a relatively small fraction of the
cost of producing nuclear energy, such an increase does not
substantially affect the costs and advantages of nuclear power.
Extraction of uranium might be effectively done in conjunction
with desalination plants. Uranium from seawater, combined with
breeder reactors, makes it clear that these resources are good
for thousands of years. 					

The need for conversion and enrichment capabilities would be
substantial, along with fuel assembly manufacturing, including
the need to establish large-scale ceramic fuel manufacturing for
the high-temperature gas reactors, and develop reprocessing
facilities to extend uranium fuel supplies. Initially, this
would be done by making plutonium-uranium mixed oxide (MOX)
fuels, and then later developing breeder reactor fuels. India,
for example, is developing a thorium-based breeder reactor to
take advantage of its thorium resources, and limited uranium.
					
Production to Follow the Eurasian Land-Bridge
 					

As to where the facilities would be located: The idea of
Land-Bridge development applies here. Today, pressure vessels
are built in a few locations and transported around the world.
But in planning for necessary nuclear power plant construction,
it would be rational to locate pressure vessel, steam generator,
large pump and valve manufacturing, and other major component
facilities relative to the major plant construction and
transportation locations, along with steel sources. These
decisions would be made with the industries and countries that
would produce the components. 					

Initially, two or more major pressure vessel facilities might
need to be developed to be able to produce about 20 vessels per
year. These would be massive facilities. With an initial target
to ultimately produce 200 plants per year in the 2040s, we would
decide later whether to develop 10 to 20 such facilities around
the world, or to make larger and fewer facilities. This will
reflect the capabilities of the various companies that must do
the work. We can get that capability into simultaneous
production. We can construct the large PWRs in four to five
years, even three-and-one-half years or so, and down to two
years for the gas reactors, using factory production, and
on-site manufacturing production of modules. On-site plant
construction is therefore more of an assembly process, as well
as the construction process that we normally think of in
building large concrete and steel structures and facilities.
					

Manufacturing facilities would be located with consideration of
the known and anticipated locations of future power plants,
steel suppliers, transportation capabilities, and so on. A
constructive competitive environment can be established to keep
the system dynamically improving and reducing costs, with
necessary elements of competition and rewards to the companies
and people producing the components. 					

Strategic development and implementation of nuclear plants, like
the Eurasian Land-Bridge concept, lies in building networks, not
just building out linearly as the United States did in moving to
join the East and West in building the transcontinental
railroad. It is more like the following period in railroad
history, when simultaneous railroad lines were tying together
the country; for example, the north and south in bringing Texas
cattle to the Chicago stockyards, supported by the telegraph
with its ability to implement network communications. The
process is explicitly oriented to develop along a strategic
path, rather than ad hoc plans to develop energy sources and
communications around cities that grow as a result of a
non-planned, non-networked, model. To be more precise, in the
1800s the city-region was the network, even in large cities
where water and power had to be brought from hundreds of miles
away. Today, intercity infrastructure needs to be integrated
with intracity-regional systems. 					

Such strategic plans anticipate growth of large nodes that
require substantial infrastructure, which rely on and include
power requirements—as in industrial complexes and large cities
of more than a few hundred-thousand people. We can consider
somewhat separately the mega-cities of 20-plus million people
that are being created. They require an obvious, localized,
large energy component, with a primary role for electricity, but
with a heavy demand on the transportation capacity to supply the
population and industries, and export the products of the
cities. The growing cities of an integrated industrial economy
are networked by transportation and communications.
Electrification of the railways, and non-electric energy for
heat, for example, to provide desalinated water, must be
considered. 					

Electric grids also require that power loads be balanced, which
further requires planning in a network strategy, instead of
linear development as occurred in the early United States,
where, even after the beginning of installing electricity, "the
grid" was essentially localized to cities. 					

In building out a network, we can take a manufacturing mode with
the construction of nuclear plants to supply the network that is
growing an industrial economy, instead of a focus on the major
cities, as occurred with the original U.S. electric power system
development. This fragmented result of ad hoc private decisions,
responding to individual profit opportunities, had to later be
fixed by government, including, for power, government agencies
like the great Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the creation of
the Rural Electrification Administration, and so on, to bring
the nation together. As still is true today, this could not have
happened effectively by leaving ad hoc decisions with the
private financial interests, focussing on assured quick-return
profit opportunities in individual projects. It could be
delivered by corporate America when given the opportunity, just
as with the great dam projects, providing power and water for
cities and irrigation, and even recreation, with the associated
economic development of the American West. 					

So, nuclear power plant construction should be transformed from
the mode of plant-by-plant construction of ad hoc projects, into
a manufacturing-based strategy. France is a prototype. In
1973-1974 a national decision was made to build nuclear plants
in convoy series, to make decisions on designs and to install
those designs multiple times, with evolutionary enhancements in
size, costs, and safety for future plants. Many plants are put
on line in a manufacturing planning mode, not constrained by
plant-by-plant decision-making and plant construction mode only
as individual project profits can be reasonably assured. 					

This allows the advantage of mass production, with programmatic
commitments to make the vessels and major components to support
a plant assembly approach. Individual plants would be installed
to meet the electric power market needs. This is especially true
of the modular gas reactors. 					

There are areas that have high power demands now—southern China
for example. In addition, there are developing areas extending
inland to produce energy for local development along a Silk Road
model. Initial energy demands in such areas are not enormous, so
that instead of large light water reactor plants, we could
incrementally build dozens of modular units over decades,
combined with evaluating power to eventually be fed to, and
supplied from, the growth of the larger regional and national
grid. 					

Installation sequences would dynamically respond, to both lead
and follow growth. We could build two or four plants in one
location, and move down the road 200 miles and build two or four
more; then build two or four more at the original location as
the demand grows. This would be very responsive to local
conditions and growing demand over time, while the central
facilities would build units in a long-term planned strategy for
a number of pressure vessels per year. Although the 285-MWe
GT-MHR (General Atomics' gas-turbine modular helium reactor)
modular plants are small, compared to light water reactors, the
pressure vessels are as large as 1,200-MWe pressurized water
reactors (PWRs). When, 10 or 20 years later, we need to expand
the capacity to build pressure vessels, we will work with the
manufacturers either to expand existing facilities or to select
and develop other locations. 					
Political Framework: The Rai1roads as a Model
 					

So, we have the intercontinental railroad model: Start at key
nodes, and expand toward other nodes. The railroad development
in the United States is a paradigm. It shows that we need a
central strategy, to empower the private sector to build in the
national interest. The people doing the work were competing for
contracts and building from, and developing, private industrial
growth. Meanwhile, President Lincoln and the Congress made
national decisions to establish routes, resolve public domain
issues, provide incentives, and so on, that were required to
support that strategic development. So, governmental direction
and vision are needed, with private development, initiative and
competition. This has to establish the framework in which the
private industries can compete and succeed, to implement that
vision in the national economic interest. 					

COMSAT is another model. Congress chartered a for-profit
corporation to build a global system based on geosynchronous
satellites instead of having to later fix a system that AT&T was
ready to build based on low earth-orbit satellites with
tracking-antenna to address the most profitable city links
first, but would have left much of the world without satellite
communications. COMSAT also developed contracts with many
nations for their own communications development. 					

We need a similar government vision now on behalf of the nation,
and the world, as a whole, with an orientation to critical
infrastructure, that recognizes the human and economic needs,
that rely primarily on low-cost energy. This does not need to be
done by government directly, as was done, for example, with the
TVA. But it must reflect a vision that engages the private
sector and the public, to inspire people to see that their
future security and opportunities are going to be provided by
adequate development and growth in national and world economies,
that are geared to meet human needs. 					

Otherwise, we are all going to be in a real crisis. That will
become increasingly visible to the general public as our lack of
adequate economic infrastructure, especially for energy
supplies, with associated environmental and financial costs, as
overwhelming the nation, and the world. 					

So, how do we proceed with this ambitious building and
development program? We need both top-level direction and
authorization, and private-sector initiatives. 					

Certainly, the fundamental decisions can only be made at the
top. An organization must be created that has the resources and
authority to make plans and commitments. But just how
centralized that would be beyond the essential commitments and
responsibilities for infrastructure planning and financing, how
it works as a government/private sector implementation program,
is flexible. It does not have to be large. 					

Private initiatives can be authorized, directed, and supported
by government, more like the transcontinental railroad
development. It was justified by national needs for mail
delivery and military purposes, which also supported stage
coaches and early airlines development, providing guarantees and
funds for services. Or it can be a more centralized government
role, like the TVA development, but thinking of this like
Admiral Rickover thought of it, in using the private sector and
competition to build the U.S. Nuclear Navy: Get the private
sector to develop and deliver the technology, while government
makes major strategic and programmatic decisions, contracting to
undertake production capacity to meet demanding specifications
and performance requirements. 					

We need a dynamic, competitive, management-driven enterprise, to
prevent becoming trapped or captured by either private interests
or self-serving government bureaucracies that don't, or don't
continue to, perform well, either on the technology side or on
the economic side. Such failures leave the national interest
hostage to self-serving organizations and financial interests,
whether private or governmental. 					

Consider the building of the transcontinental railroads in the
United States, where the Union Pacific and Central Pacific were
chartered to do the job, with subsidies, but they had to raise
their own money, with government direction and guarantees. This
was compromised in many ways, however, including buying
Congressional support with Credit Mobilier stock for changes
favorable to the owners, and so on. That was not a clean
process. 					

Thomas Durant, who headed the Union Pacific effort, saw that
most of the wealth would be generated from developing the
track-side land and resources. The companies weren't making much
progress on actually building the railroad, so Lincoln worked to
shift incentives to have to build so many miles of track, and
the company with the most miles of track at the end was going to
make more money. Without that, the Union Pacific would have
built out only slowly, focussing more on developing the more
valuable land resources. So, for many years it was a substantial
competition that had them going "hammer and tong." When they
were building out, the Central Pacific was trying to get past
Salt Lake City, Utah, to the coal deposits in the Wasatch
mountains. They failed to do that when they could only get to
Promontory Point, where the railroads joined up. But
construction was being driven by rewards in obtaining such
resources. 					

But historically, the transcontinental railroads, originally
championed by Stephen Douglas, even with the major scandals,
were a great and economically important success, as a national
economic and political achievement. They captured the
imagination of the country. 					

Achieving a great project transcends such details, and provides
for the generation of great wealth for the economy as a whole,
for the nation and the world. This wealth is greatly out of
proportion to the costs from any such malfeasance. 					

So, there are lessons from considering where the interests and
values are in developing an economy, beyond just thinking of it
as a point A to point B transportation construction project,
unlike ocean shipping. Or the need to have airlines serve
smaller cities as well as the large cities. 					

What a Nuclear Energy Initiative Can Bring to the World

First, even though such a nuclear power enterprise is an
enormous project to salvage the world energy lifeline and to
limit conflicts, while being a primary economic development
engine, it is just the core of the larger decisions to provide
adequate energy from coal and other technologies, plus other
critical infrastructure required to provide for the human needs
of the developing and undeveloped world, and expanding
productive wealth in the developed world. 					

In addition, such a nuclear power and/or energy technology
development initiative is also a foundation of common science
and technology, and common purpose, for the world. It can be a
model. It is a national and international enterprise, founded on
government and private industry participation. It has the power
to limit those non-productive machinations of both government
and private financial interests that are in conflict, which
constrain responsible government and private interests from
working for greater general wealth and constructive progress for
both the developed and developing world, while being enormously
successful financially. 					

Nuclear power also has the advantage that it currently has a
high international profile, and substantial, if relatively
non-productive, ongoing national and international government
organizations. For example, the United Nations, especially with
the International Atomic Energy Agency, the International Energy
Agency, and the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which is essential to
our need to safeguard uranium enrichment and plutonium
production, plus many other institutional components. The major
industry organizations are also more coordinated and compatible,
with technologies and capabilities that are more complementary
than other equivalent industries. 					

In addition, such actual public/private mechanisms can transcend
some of the destructive national conflicts and destructive
financial conditions, to meet actual worldwide energy needs, and
to actually implement essential nuclear power energy supplies to
prevent world conflicts over energy—in the real world. This can
provide an initiative with a productive purpose that can push
current non-productive governmental organizations to replace
non-productive dialogue and make actual progress in meeting the
human needs of the world. 					

With any success, these mechanisms can also contribute to models
that can address other substantial national and international
purposes, to engage the developed and developing nations to
enable solutions, beyond current "policy discussions." These
mechanisms can enable productive cooperation, along with healthy
competition, that can enhance relevant technologies, and lower
costs, instead of seeing little actual progress in major
projects. This can include basic infrastructure, health care,
and drug delivery, education and communications, and so on.
These initiatives can constrain costs, and preclude destructive
financing costs on developing and undeveloped nations. 					

The nuclear power enterprise can reduce the coming world energy
conflicts, create wealth, and be a model to address the
inability to deliver technology and services to the developing
and undeveloped world and bring these societies into the
economic mainstream. This can be the primary economic engine,
the wealth-generating machine, for the 21st Century. 					

James Muckerheide, the State Nuclear Engineer for the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is a founder and President of
Radiation, Science, & Health. He is also director of the Center
for Nuclear Technology and Society at Worcester Polytechnic
Institute, which is working to establish a level playing field
for decisions on the costs and benefits of nuclear technologies
that are essential to human prosperity in the 21st Century. 					

A full version of this article will appear in the Summer 2005
issue of <b>21st Century Science &amp; Technology</b><i>
magazine</i>. 				   				     			 			


 		

 	 
*****************************************************************
 8 BBC: Is nuclear energy cost-effective?
 
Last Updated: Monday, 20 June, 2005
 
By Guy Robarts 

BBC News Online business reporter   

[Sellafield]                            

This sight conjures up mixed emotions for the British public                                                                 

The debate over the future of nuclear power is set to reach 
meltdown as the UK prepares to decide how to keep the home fires 
burning over the next few decades. 

Advocates of splitting the atom have been at loggerheads with
the anti-nuclear movement for half a century. 

Old passions die hard. 

But is the nuclear option as scary as it was in the 1950s? 

Or is it now vital in the drive to stop global warming and meet
the Kyoto targets for reducing carbon emissions? 

It depends which side you are on. 

The pro-nuclear lobby is keen to show the public how things have
changed in the industry, particularly on the safety front. 

Doubling nuclear power in t UK would reduce greenhouse gas 
emissions by no more than 8%             

Friends of the Earth    

And Tony Blair says he is ready to consider the nuclear power 
option if he can convince the public that it is safe and 
cost-effective.

More importantly for politicians, nuclear-derived electricity is
estimated to be less than half the cost of coal and wind power. 

Fear factor 

Opponents to the use of nuclear fuel often brandish three
haunting reminders of nuclear power's fallibility: Sellafield,
Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. 

No new nuclear power stations have been built in either the US
and Britain since these incidents. 

Meanwhile, a recent poll by BBC 2's Newsnight found that more
than half of Britons are opposed to an expansion of nuclear
power. 

In its general election campaign, the Green Party warned that
while nuclear power produces energy from 30 to 40 years, it
produces nuclear waste for thousands and thousands of years. 

NUCLEAR POWER            

Nuclear power accounts for abou 16% of the global electricity 
supply One tonne of nuclear fuel is equivalent to burning about 
120,000 tones of coal Uranium, unlike fossil fuels, can be 
recycled Source: World Nuclear Transport Institute     

However, radioactive waste has been stored in the UK without any
problems or loss of life since the 1950s, the nuclear industry
says; while engineers say that they have learnt their lessons
from previous accidents at nuclear power plants. 

Nuclear power already supplies 20% of UK electricity and,
crucially for the pro-nuclear lobby, this form of power is
"carbon neutral", meaning it does not contribute to global
warming; nor does it spew out the sulphurous chemicals that
cause acid rain. 

Britain needs to cut its carbon emissions by 20% by 2010 and
alternatives such as hydroelectric and wind power are very
dependent on geographical factors. 

Friends of the Earth (FOE), however, is adamant that investment
in a programme to construct new nuclear power plants is not
justified. 

"Doubling nuclear power in the UK would reduce greenhouse gas
emissions by no more than 8%," it says. 

Shut-downs 

From this maelstrom of argument, the government has to decide
whether to support the crisis-hit UK nuclear industry as the
country faces becoming a large net importer of energy. 
[Jet engine]                            

Nuclear power will not be enough to service our other energy 
needs                                                          

It may have to learn the lesson of Sweden, a country which voted
to phase out its own nuclear industry 25 years ago but, hit by
the lack of a cost-effective alternative, is now Europe's third
largest consumer of nuclear-generated energy. 

Of the UK's 14 ageing nuclear power stations, all but one will
have shut by 2023 and the share of nuclear-generated electricity
is expected to drop to just 7% by that time. 

Government ministers need to act fast if they choose to expand
the industry. It takes a good 10 years to plan and construct a
nuclear reactor. 

"Wind turbines and wave power can be approved very quickly,"
says Roger Higham, from Friends of the Earth (FoE). 

And the cost of the nuclear option is likely to be at least
£10bn over a period of about 20 years. 

Oil quandary 

Part of the difficulty of making such a major decision can be
blamed on rising oil prices and the impossibility of predicting
the future. 

Nuclear electricity has been reported to be cheaper than gas as
long as oil is more expensive than $28 a barrel. It's currently
above the $50 mark. 

In this climate, nuclear power looks very cost-effective indeed,
but who can tell what the price of oil will be in a year's time,
never mind in three or four decades from now? 

Another factor is the financial state of British Energy, the
company which runs Britain's existing nuclear power stations. 

It desperately needs investment having nearly collapsed in 2002
in the wake of a slump in wholesale power prices. 

And the cost of decommissioning the older Magnox nuclear power
stations has bedevilled BNFL, the government-run company that
reprocesses nuclear fuel at Sellafield which has taken over that
financial responsibility. 

However, investors may be loath to put money into a reactor that
could be unprofitable in a few years' time, so government
support is vital to offset such a huge financial commitment. 

Planning problems have already hampered the industry. The
Sizewell B reactor in Suffolk had to wait six years for approval 
- too long for a country with dwindling domestic energy supplies. 

Chain reaction 

At next month's G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, the US is
expected to push its "Generation IV" plans to "broaden the
opportunities for the use of nuclear energy". 

I think the cost of nucle will be higher than for fossil fuels 

Dr Keith Melton, NaREC          

Public support in the US for the continued use of nuclear energy
in the US now stands at a record high of 70%, according to the
Nuclear Industry Association. 

And Prime Minister Tony Blair's scientific advisers are known to
consider new reactors as the only way for the UK to meet targets
for cutting greenhouse emissions. 

One major allay for the pro-nuclear lobby has come, ironically,
in the form of James Lovelock, the "father" of the environment
movement and author of the Gaia hypothesis. 

Mr Lovelock came out and declared that nuclear energy was the
only practical answer to the challenges of global warming, but
regarded it as a necessary medicine rather than a cure to the
problem. 

Meanwhile, Dr Keith Melton, at the New &Renewable Energy Centre,
believes the CO2 advantages of nuclear energy outweigh any
cost-effectiveness issues, but dismisses claims that the atomic
option is a cheaper one. 

"I think the cost of nuclear will be higher than for fossil
fuels. If oil goes up to $100 a barrel and drags up gas and
electricity with it, that could be different. But at the moment,
the argument is CO2s," Dr Melton says. 

Cheaper alternatives 

According to the Nuclear Industry Association, if the government
acts quickly a new generation of nuclear power stations could be
in place to help the UK meet its target of a 10% cut in
emissions by 2010. 

At the moment all our cars, a our aeroplanes and most of our 
central heating systems all depend on fossil fuel           

                Roger Higman, Friends of the Earth      

	 

But the political and financial costs may take years to
ascertain. 

Interestingly, the last time the government had a debate about 
the economics of nuclear energy in 2002, it concluded that 
nuclear power was going to be much more expensive in 20 years' 
time than wind power, while solar and hydroelectric prices were 
coming down. 

As Friends of the Earth points out, nuclear power can only 
address a fraction of our energy needs. 

"At the moment all our cars, all our aeroplanes and most of our 
central heating systems all depend on fossil fuel," says Roger 
Higman. 

"Nuclear power is not all that relevant anyway." 
*****************************************************************
 9 Platts: EC starts second, detailed, nuclear decommissioning funds 
probe
 
+ The European Commission has started its second nuclear 
decommissioning funds survey, an EC official said Monday. 

"We have sent questionnaires to all 25 European Union member 
states, plus Romania and Bulgaria, asking them about their 
nuclear decommissioning plans,' said Ute Blohm-Hieber, head of 
the nuclear energy and waste management unit in the EC's nuclear 
directorate. 

"The questionnaire is more detailed than last year--we want them 
to fill in the gaps in last year's report, and give more details 
on their strategy and what the money will be spent on." 

Last year the EC simply asked the 14 member states with nuclear 
power plants to confirm and update the information it already 
had. 

Few added any detail. "We know the first report was not 
satisfactory," the EC's nuclear energy director, Christian 
Waeterloos, told the European Parliament energy committee. 

"It was based on the available information." This year's survey 
similarly depends on voluntary cooperation--those surveyed are 
not obliged to give details. 

This story was originally published in Platts European Power 
Alert

http://europeanpoweralert.platts.com 

Brussels (Platts)--21Jun2005
 
Copyright © 2005 - Platts, All Rights Reserved [The McGraw-Hill 
Companies]   
*****************************************************************
 10 News-Leader.com: Nuclear one day may be cheapest

      Tuesday, June 21, 2005

 Emissions tax will be the difference.

Wes Johnson News-Leader 

If Congress forces power plants to remove carbon dioxide from
their smokestacks to help slow global warming, nuclear power
could suddenly become one of the cheapest energy options,
according to an analysis by Associated Electric Cooperative.

Jim Jura, AEC general manager, delivered that assessment to the
Springfield Power Supply Community Task Force on Monday.

The 17-member task force plans to deliver a power supply
recommendation to Springfield City Utilities by the end of July.

"There was a time in my career that I thought I'd never see
nuclear power come back," Jura told the task force. "I don't say
that any more."

The reason? It's all a matter of economics.

Both pulverized coal plants and coal gasification power plants
produce baseload electricity cheaper than nuclear plants, he
said.

But Jura said Congress is facing a lot of pressure to reduce
carbon dioxide emissions, which it has never mandated before.

AEC studied how a "tax" on carbon dioxide emissions would affect
coal power.

A tax of $10 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions still leaves
coal as the least-costly option.

But if the tax were set at $12.30 per ton, "suddenly nuclear
power becomes the cheapest baseload source," Jura said.

No one knows what a carbon dioxide tax might actually be, but
Jura said one group estimated it could be as high as $40 per ton.

At that rate, nuclear power would by far be the cheapest source
of baseload power, second only to hydro power dams.

"I'm a big advocate for coal, but I've told my board we have to
be realistic about the possibility of these emission
requirements," Jura said.

Power plants that turn coal into a burnable gas — and also make
it relatively easy to capture carbon dioxide — may offer the
cleanest way to use the nation's huge reserves of coal.

But Jura said he believed "integrated gasification combined
cycle" (IGCC) technology is still in a research and development
phase.

By 2011, AEC plans to build a $1 billion pulverized-coal plant
in Norborne, northeast of Kansas City.

But after the task force meeting, Jura said that plant could be
affected by future carbon dioxide rules.

"We think baseload coal is still the way to go, but if something
were to happen on carbon dioxide rules in the next two or three
years, we'd still have enough flexibility to move to an IGCC
plant," he said.

As AEC adds power plants, it might be possible to sell excess
electricity to CU, Jura said. But the contracts would have to be
relatively short-term.

Meeting the needs of AEC's existing customers comes first, he
said.

For example, AEC decided not to renew a 30-year contract with
one of its large industrial users so it could serve growing
demand from its residential customers.

SMS CUTS WASTE

 The task force also heard about Southwest Missouri State
University's aggressive efforts to cut energy waste.

Bob Eckels, SMS physical plant manager, said a 1994 energy
survey showed the university was wasting nearly $80,000 in
electricity per month.

In 1997 the university decided to spend $5.5 million on
energy-efficient lighting, more efficient electric motors in air
conditioners and a computerized central energy management system.

The improvements have saved about $1 million a year in energy
costs, allowing SMS to pay off the loan for the upgrade almost
three years early.

In 2004 the university also decided to upgrade its building
cooling system at a cost of $10.9 million.

The plan will remove 16 aging and inefficient water chillers and
replace them with five highly efficient electric chiller units.

Eckels said the upgrade is expected to save $930,000 a year and
allow the project to be paid off three years early.

HIGH EXPECTATIONS

 The task force also heard from Mariesa Crow, dean of the School
of Materials, Energy and Earth Resources at the University of
Missouri-Rolla.

She said consumers primarily are concerned about two issues when
it comes to electricity — low cost and nearly perfect
reliability.

"We don't expect our computers to be 99.9 percent reliable, but
we do with electricity," she said. "We accept that our cars
break down, but we don't with electricity."

An energy expert who has worked on power issues for many years,
Crow said she would recommend CU take a serious look at IGCC
technology to meet its future energy demand.

"It's a very attractive way to use coal," she said.

She also said CU should consider nuclear power, but only if it
could share the costs with other utilities.

News-Leader | Terms of Service
*****************************************************************
 11 NY Journal News: Lowey proposes changes to nuclear plant relicensing

By JIM FITZGERALD

 ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
 
(Original publication: June 20, 2005)
 
WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. (AP) — Rep. Nita Lowey introduced a bill
today that would force the nation's nuclear power plants,
including the Indian Point reactors, to meet the same standards
for re-licensing that were required for their original license.

If the bill became law, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would
have to take into account such factors as population density and
vulnerability to terrorist attacks if the owners of Indian Point
seek relicensing in the next decade. Currently, the NRC
concentrates on how the owners have managed the aging of the
plants and the plants' effect on the environment.

"With 280,000 people living within a 10-mile radius of the
plants and millions more just minutes away in New York City,
Indian Point is located in one of the most densely populated
areas of the country," Lowey said. "We couldn't locate a new
nuclear plant there today and it is a double standard to allow
Indian Point to continue operating under such circumstances."

The legislation reflects the recent strategy of Indian Point
opponents to concentrate on blocking the relicensing rather than
seek an immediate shutdown, which was tried and failed in 2003.
Indian Point 2's license runs until 2013, Indian Point 3's until
2015.

Westchester County Executive Andrew Spano said last week that he
would propose to Entergy Nuclear Northeast, the owners of Indian
Point, that they negotiate a shutdown of the plant in exchange
for compensation of up to $1.4 billion. He said that proposal
was the "carrot" of a "carrot-and-stick" approach, with
legislation like Lowey's the "stick."

The Lowey bill does not include compensation for plant owners.

Larry Gottlieb, an Entergy spokesman, said the announcement of
the bill showed "They've skipped over the carrot and have gone
right to the stick part. That's not fair to Entergy because
they're not giving us the respect that they offered." He said
Spano had not yet contacted Entergy about negotiating.

Passage of the bill appears problematic. Lowey said she did not
yet have House co-sponsors or a Senate backer and acknowledged,
"We have a lot of work to do." She expressed the hope that even
if the bill, which would be an amendment to the Atomic Energy
Act, did not pass, it might "influence" the NRC.

The bill would also mandate that any state within 50 miles of a
nuclear plant approve the evacuation plans for emergencies,
which would bring Connecticut and New Jersey, for example, into
the approval process for Indian Point.

 

  
  
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 12 NRC: Draft Report for Comment: ``Consideration of Geochemical Issues 
 
                         FR Doc E5-3199 
[Federal Register: June 21, 2005 (Volume 70, Number 118)] 
[Notices] [Page 35744-35745] From the Federal Register Online via 
GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr21jn05-122]                         
 
in Groundwater Restoration at Uranium In-Situ Leach Mining 
Facilities,'' NUREG/CR-6870 AGENCY: Nuclear Regulatory 
Commission.
 
ACTION: Notice of availability and request for comments.
 
Background

Some mining processes use fluids to dissolve (or leach) a mineral 
without the need to remove physically the ore containing the 
mineral from an ore deposit in the ground. In general, these 
``in-situ'' leach mining operations at uranium mines are 
considerably more environmentally benign than traditional mining 
and milling of uranium ore. Nonetheless, the use of leaching 
fluids to mine uranium may contaminate the groundwater aquifer in 
and around the region from which the uranium is extracted. The 
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) requires licensees to 
restore the aquifer to established water-quality standards 
following the cessation of in-situ leach mining operations.
 
The NRC also requires licensees to ensure that sufficient funds 
will be available to cover the cost of decommissioning their 
facilities. For these uranium mines, restoration generally 
consists of pumping specially treated water into the affected 
aquifer and removing the displaced water--and thereby the 
undesirable contaminants--from the system. Because groundwater 
restoration can represent approximately 40 percent of the cost of 
decommissioning a uranium leach mining facility, a good estimate 
of the necessary volume of treatment water is important to 
estimate the cost of decommissioning accurately.
 
The subject report, prepared for the NRC by the U.S. Geological 
Survey, summarizes the application of a geochemical model to the 
restoration process to estimate the degree to which a licensee 
has decontaminated a site where a leach mining process has been 
used. Toward that end, this report analyzes the respective 
amounts of water and chemical additives pumped into the mined 
regions to remove and neutralize the residual contamination using 
10 different restoration strategies. The analyses show that 
strategies that used hydrogen sulfide in systems with low natural 
oxygen content provided the best results. On the basis of those 
findings, this report also summarizes
 
[[Page 35745]] the conditions under which various restoration 
strategies will prove successful. This, in turn, will allow more 
accurate estimates of restoration and decommissioning costs.
 
The subject report will be useful for licensees and State 
regulators overseeing uranium leach mining facilities, who need 
to estimate the volume of treatment water needed to decontaminate 
those facilities.
 
Solicitation of Comments: The NRC seeks comments on the report 
and is especially interested in comments on the utility and 
feasibility of the modeling techniques described in the report.
 
 
DATES: The NRC will consider all written comments received before 
August 31, 2005. Comments received after August 31, 2005, will be 
considered if it is practical to do so, but the NRC staff is able 
to ensure consideration only for comments received on or before 
this date. Comments should be addressed to the contact listed 
below.
 
Availability: An electronic version of the report is available in 
Adobe Portable Document Format at 
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/ 
nuregs/contract/cr6870/cr6870.pdf and can be read with Adobe 
Acrobat Reader software, available at no cost from 
http://www.adobe.com. Hard and electronic copies are available 
from the contact listed below.
 
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Dr. John D. Randall, Mail Stop 
T9C34, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 11545 Rockville Pike, 
Rockville, MD 20852, telephone (301) 415-6192, e-mail 
jdr@nrc.gov. Dated at Rockville, Maryland, this 10th day of June, 
2005.
 
For the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
 
Cheryl A. Trottier, Chief, Radiation Protection, Environmental 
Risk & Waste Management Branch, Division of Systems Analysis and 
Regulatory Effectiveness, Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research.
 
[FR Doc. E5-3199 Filed 6-20-05; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 7590-01-P

 
*****************************************************************
 13 NRC: Draft Report for Comment: ``Documentation and Applications of
 
                         FR Doc E5-3200 
[Federal Register: June 21, 2005 (Volume 70, Number 118)] 
[Notices] [Page 35743-35744] From the Federal Register Online via 
GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr21jn05-121]                         
 
the Reactive Geochemical Transport Model RATEQ,'' NUREG/CR-6871 
AGENCY: Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
 
ACTION: Notice of availability and request for comments.
 
Background

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) uses environmental 
models to evaluate the potential release of radionuclides from 
NRC- licensed sites. In doing so, the NRC recognizes
 
[[Page 35744]] that, at many sites, groundwater-related pathways 
could contribute significantly to the potential dose received by 
members of the public. Consequently, consistent with its mission 
to protect the health and safety of the public and the 
environment, the NRC uses contaminant transport models to predict 
the locations and concentrations of radionuclides in soil as a 
function of time. Through this notice, the NRC is seeking comment 
on documentation of a subsurface transport model developed for 
the NRC by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) for realistic 
transport modeling at sites with complex chemical environments.
 
Because many radionuclides temporarily attach, or adsorb, to the 
surfaces of soil particles, their mobility is reduced compared to 
that of compounds that move with the groundwater without 
interacting with solid surfaces. As a result, most 
subsurface-transport models used by the NRC and its licensees 
estimate the effects of the anticipated interactions between 
radionuclides and solids in the ground.
 
Toward that end, these subsurface-transport models use a 
``distribution coefficient,'' which is assumed to be constant and 
reflects the proportion of radionuclide in the groundwater 
compared to the radionuclide associated with the solids in the 
ground. These distribution coefficients are widely used, and 
consequently, the relevant literature documents ranges of their 
values for various soil types and radionuclides. However, the 
documented ranges can be very large because the chemical 
reactions that cause radionuclides to attach to solids are very 
sensitive to water chemistry and soil mineralogy. As a result, 
uncertainties in the parameters used to characterize the 
adsorption of radionuclides in soils have been identified as a 
major source of uncertainty in decommissioning, uranium recovery, 
and radioactive waste disposal cases evaluated by the NRC.
 
Surface-complexation and ion-exchange models offer a more 
realistic approach to considering soil-radionuclide interactions 
in performance- assessment models. These models can also account 
for variable chemical environments that might affect such 
interactions. The subject report, prepared for the NRC by the 
USGS, describes the theory, implementation, and examples of use 
of the RATEQ computer code, which simulates radionuclide 
transport in soil and allows the use of surface- complexation and 
ion-exchange models to calculate distribution coefficients based 
on actual site chemistry.
 
The RATEQ code will help the NRC staff define realistic site- 
specific ranges of the distribution coefficient values used to 
evaluate NRC-licensed sites. In site-remediation cases, such as 
restoration of the groundwater aquifer in and around uranium 
in-situ leach mining facilities, the RATEQ code can aid in the 
estimation of restoration costs by estimating the volume of 
treatment water needed to restore sites to acceptable 
environmental conditions.
 
Solicitation of Comments: The NRC seeks comments on the report 
and is especially interested in comments on the value of the 
report to users who run the RATEQ code and are familiar with the 
types of complex chemical environments that complicate many 
remediation projects.
 
 
DATES: The NRC will consider all written comments received before 
September 30, 2005. Comments received after September 30, 2005, 
will be considered if it is practical to do so, but the NRC staff 
is able to ensure consideration only for comments received on or 
before this date. Comments should be addressed to the contact 
listed below.
 
Availability: An electronic version of the report is available in 
Adobe Portable Document Format at 
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/ 
nuregs/contract/cr6871/cr6871.pdf and can be read with Adobe 
Acrobat Reader software, available at no cost from 
http://www.adobe.com. The report and the computer files for the 
test cases discussed therein are available at 
http://wwwrcamnl.wr. usgs.gov/rtm. Hard and electronic copies of 
the report are available from the contact listed below.
 
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Dr. John D. Randall, Mail Stop 
T9C34, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 11545 Rockville Pike, 
Rockville, MD 20852, telephone (301) 415-6192, e-mail 
jdr@nrc.gov. Dated at Rockville, Maryland, this 10th day of June, 
2005.
 
For the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
 
Cheryl A. Trottier, Chief, Radiation Protection, Environmental 
Risk & Waste Management Branch, Division of Systems Analysis and 
Regulatory Effectiveness, Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research.
 
[FR Doc. E5-3200 Filed 6-20-05; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 7590-01-P

 
*****************************************************************
 14 NRC: Agency Information Collection Activities: Proposed Collection: 
 
                         FR Doc E5-3201 
[Federal Register: June 21, 2005 (Volume 70, Number 118)] 
[Notices] [Page 35734-35735] From the Federal Register Online via 
GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr21jn05-119]                         
 
Comment Request AGENCY: Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).
 
ACTION: Notice of pending NRC action to submit an information 
collection request to OMB and solicitation of public comment.
 
SUMMARY: The NRC is preparing a submittal to OMB for review of 
continued approval of information collections under the 
provisions of the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 (44 U.S.C. 
Chapter 35). Information pertaining to the requirement to be 
submitted: 1. The title of the information collection: NRC Form 
313, ``Application for Material License''; and NRC Form 313A, 
``Training and Experience and Preceptor Statement.'' 2. Current 
OMB approval number: 3150-0120. 3. How often the collection is 
required: There is a one-time submittal of information to receive 
a license. Once a specific license has been issued, there is a 
10-year resubmittal of the information for renewal of the 
license.
 
4. Who is required or asked to report: All applicants requesting 
a license for byproduct or source material.
 
5. The estimated number of annual respondents: 15,914 (3,074 NRC 
licensees + 12,840 Agreement State licensees).
 
6. The number of hours needed annually to complete the 
requirement or request: 70,022 (13,526 hours for NRC licensees 
and 56,496 hours for Agreement State licensees).
 
7. Abstract: Applicants must submit NRC Forms 313, and 313A to 
obtain a specific license to possess, use, or distribute 
byproduct or source material. The information is reviewed by the 
NRC to determine whether the applicant is qualified by training 
and experience, and has equipment, facilities, and procedures 
which are adequate to protect the public health and safety, and 
minimize danger to life or property.
 
Submit, by August 22, 2005, comments that address the following 
questions: 1. Is the proposed collection of information necessary 
for the NRC to properly perform its functions? Does the 
information have practical utility? 2. Is the burden estimate 
accurate? 3. Is there a way to enhance the quality, utility, and 
clarity of the information to be collected?
 
[[Page 35735]] 4. How can the burden of the information 
collection be minimized, including the use of automated 
collection techniques or other forms of information technology? A 
copy of the draft supporting statement may be viewed free of 
charge at the NRC Public Document Room, One White Flint North, 
11555 Rockville Pike, Room O-1 F21, Rockville, MD 20852. OMB 
clearance requests are available at the NRC worldwide Web site: 
http://www.nrc.gov/public-involve/doc-comment/omb/index.html. The 
document will be available on the NRC home page site for 60 days 
after the signature date of this notice.
 
Comments and questions about the information collection 
requirements may be directed to the NRC Clearance Officer, Brenda 
Jo. Shelton, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, T-5 F53, 
Washington, DC 20555-0001, by telephone at 301-415-7233, or by 
Internet electronic mail to INFOCOLLECTS@NRC.GOV. Dated at 
Rockville, Maryland, this 15th day of June, 2005.
 
For the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
 
Brenda Jo. Shelton, NRC Clearance Officer, Office of Information 
Services.
 
[FR Doc. E5-3201 Filed 6-20-05; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 7590-01-P

 
*****************************************************************
 15 Ottawa Citizen: Happy campers beside the oily nuclear plant? 

canada.com network 
			

  Tom Spears Ottawa Citizen   

June 20, 2005
 
  Inverhuron Provincial Park, on Lake Huron, pre-oil spill.  

Bruce Power makes it sound like a pretty small event: A
transformer fire and oil spill on their property, the Bruce
Nuclear Power Development, on Lake Huron. Itâ€™s North
Americaâ€™s biggest commercial nuclear complex, so peopleâ€™s
attention naturally turned to one question: Are the nukes safe? 

Yes. The explosion and fire of April 15 never touched them. 

But two months later, the lake is still fouled by spilled oil. 

The official version is that only a small bit of oil reached the
lake, not enough to do any serious harm. 

Bruce Power's version: The oil will leave a fine sheen but
shouldn't hurt the fish. 

"The oil is biodegradable, has very low levels of toxicity and
contains no PCBs or radioactive 

material. It breaks down naturally over time in sunlight and
exposure to various weather conditions." 

Still, local resident Bob MacKenzie was walking along the shore
on the weekend, and the shoreline is still fouled with oil. He
reports finding on the rocks: 
  + White absorbent material that soaks up oil. Thereâ€™s oil
apparent in it. 
  + Canvas-like strips, bright yellow and each about four metres
long, stretching in hundreds of metres along the shoreline.
These were from an attempt to surround contain the oil in a
small area of the waterâ€™s surface. 
  + Metal floatation devices stamped with the name of a company
that makes equipment for cleaning up oil spills. 
  + Dead fish. 

The dead fish may be natural. The rest seems less so. 

And what makes it creepier is that this piece of shoreline is an
Ontario provincial park - Inverhuron, which is due to re-open to
overnight campers for the first time in 29 years next month. It
had been closed because of the danger of a chemical leak from
the Bruce plant, but the source of that chemical work is now
closed. 

As Mr. MacKenzie walked around picking up samples, boats were
chugging along the lake, dragging booms along the water's
surface. 

Let's hope the campers appreciate it. © Ottawa Citizen 2005 


Tom Spears reports on science, space, the environment and
medical matters for the Ottawa Citizen, where he has worked
since 1989. Tom has covered two space shuttle launches for the
newspaper, the announcement of the Human Genome project and most
recently graduated from "mini-medical school" at McGill
University. He can be reached at darkmatter@canada.com

  Copyright © CanWest Interactive Inc. All rights reserved.
CanWest Interactive Inc. is an affiliate of CanWest Global
*****************************************************************
 16 Free Lance-Star!: North Anna plan's safety issues assessed 

Fredericksburg.com

NRC issues final safety report on Dominion's bid to add two
nuclear reactors to its North Anna Power Station

 Date published: 6/21/2005 

By RUSTY DENNEN 

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has issued a final report on
safety aspects of a plan to add up to two new nuclear reactors
at North Anna Power Station. 

Some details of the report were released by the regulatory
agency Friday. Dominion Power, which owns and operates the plant
on Lake Anna in Louisa County, is reviewing the full report. The
NRC will release the complete report, though it will not include
Dominion's business plan because it contains proprietary
information. 

The NRC staff recommended eight conditions on Dominion's
application. Only two of those were made public: 

A dry cooling tower would be required for the proposed Unit 4
during normal operation. A dry tower would not require millions
of gallons a day of lake water to cool the reactor. 

A pool for storing highly radioactive spent fuel would have to
be designed so that it could not contaminate groundwater. 

Those two items address some of the major arguments made by
opponents of the reactor plan--namely, water levels in the lake
and spent fuel security. 

Several environmental groups contend that adding more reactors
at the plant will adversely affect water levels in the lake,
especially during times of drought, and harm heat-sensitive
striped bass. Unit 3 would use lake water for cooling, as do the
existing Units 1 and 2. 

Spent fuel is currently stored in two locations: in a swimming
pool-like enclosure near the reactors, where it cools for
several years after being removed from the reactor, and later in
steel casks, for long-term storage. Opponents say those sites
are vulnerable to terrorist attack. 

Dominion has said that new reactors would not significantly
change water levels or harm fish and that spent fuel is well
contained and protected. 

The safety evaluation report is part of Dominion's application
for an early site permit. 

The utility is among three in the U.S. seeking a permit and is
farthest along in the regulatory process. The others are Exelon
Generation Co. in Illinois and System Energy Resources in
Mississippi. 

The permit would allow Dominion to resolve site and
environmental issues prior to submitting a construction plan and
to "bank" a site for 20 years. 

The NRC has been looking at several items that could affect the
safe operation of any new reactors. They include: geology,
weather and hydrology; risks from potential accidents; security
for operations and nuclear materials; and major features of an
emergency plan. 

A final environmental impact statement is also in the works and
should be available in August, along with the final safety
evaluation report. After that, the Atomic Safety and Licensing
Board will weigh in on Dominion's early site permit by February
2006, and the NRC could make its final decision by June 2006. 

If the early site permit is approved, Dominion would have to
obtain a combined construction and operating permit before
adding any reactors at the plant. 

Any new reactors would be built next to Units 1 and 2, which sit
under thick concrete containment domes overlooking the
13,000-acre lake. Those began operation in 1979 and 1980. 

The plant was originally designed for four reactors, but Units 3
and 4 were scrapped in the early 1980s. 

To reach RUSTY DENNEN: 
+ 540/374-5431 
+ rdennen@freelancestar.com 

Date published: 6/21/2005 

Fredericksburg.com, 605 William Street, Fredericksburg, VA 22401 
Comments? Send us Feedback, Phone: 540-368-5055 To contact all 
other newspaper departments, please call 540-374-5000. Copyright 
2005, The Free Lance-Star Publishing Co. of Fredericksburg, Va. 
*****************************************************************
 17 Platts: NRC staff updates commission on uprate activities
 
+ NRC staff has approved power uprates at five nuclear units 
since last June, resulting in an additional electric capacity of 
245 megawatts, it told the commission in a paper released today.

The paper, Secy 05-98, provided an update on uprate-related 
activities since the staff's last report in June 2004. 

The staff said it has approved a total of 105 power uprate 
requests since 1977, resulting in an increase of 4,417 MW. 

There are 11 other requests under review, including three 
measurement uncertainty uprates (for less than 2%), two stretch 
power uprates (for up to 7%), and six extended power uprates (for 
increases as high as 20%). Based on results of a January survey, 
the staff said it expects uprate requests from 28 units over the 
next five years. 


Washington (Platts)--20Jun2005
 
Copyright © 2005 - Platts, All Rights Reserved
 [The McGraw-Hill Companies]   
*****************************************************************
 18 RIA Novosti: Moscow welcomes OSCE approval of nuclear terrorism convention
 
21/06/2005

MOSCOW, June 21 (RIA Novosti) - Moscow welcomed the Organization
for Security and Cooperation in Europe's statement in support of
a new convention on fighting nuclear terrorism. 

"The fact the OSCE adopted the ministerial statement shows
growing solidarity among the members of the Organization in the
fight against terrorism and the OSCE's increasingly prominent
role in this important sphere of international cooperation,"
Russia's foreign ministry said in a statement.

 The OSCE adopted the foreign ministerial statement on June 20
in support of the International Convention for the Suppression
of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism. The initiative to adopt the
statement was advanced by Russia and France. Fifty-five OSCE
countries thereby pledged to make efforts to sign the convention
in New York on September 14, when the UN summit opens. They also
pledged to ensure its ratification as soon as possible. 

The UN General Assembly adopted the convention on April 13,
2005. To come into force, 22 countries must ratify it.

 If ratified, it would be the 13th in a series of anti-terrorism
conventions and protocols.
 
  © 2005 "RIA Novosti"   
*****************************************************************
 19 [du-list] A possible solution to Depleted Uranium?
 
Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 14:19:52 -0700

 
<x-flowed>
A POSSIBLE DEPLETED URANIUM SOLUTION?

Brian David Andersen will be a guest on Thursday morning, June 22
from 1 am ­ 2 am Eastern and he is working on PROJECT: SEAWEED that
he believes might help with the depleted uranium problem presently
facing the world.

In an e-mail to me, Brian said, "There is no way I could personally
profit from the criminal acts of the U.S. Government and the
injuries and death inflected upon the victims."

Visit www.xzone-radio.com and click on the PROECT SEAWEED banner.

Listen and see what you think. Maybe, just maybe, he CAN make a
difference. Wouldn't that be wonderful!


Rob McConnell,
Host & Executive Producer,
The 'X' Zone Radio Show.
Studio Call-in Line: 1-877-528-8255
The `X' Zone Radio Show: (905) 575-5916
MSN Messenger - talkstarradio@hotmail.com,
AOL IM - xzonestudio
ICQ - 6272860
xzone@talkstarradio.com,
www.xzone-radio.com


The 'X' Zone Radio Show is available on satellites Galaxy 4R and AMC-
4.

The 'X' Zone Radio Show WELCOMES It's Newest Affiliates in the
United States -  KCHR 1350 AM, Charleston, Missouri; WPGS 840 AM
Orlando / Titusville Florida; WZNG 1400 AM Shelbyville / Nashville
Tennessee; WMEX 106.7 FM Rochester, New Hampshire; KNTS 89.7 FM John
Day, Oregon; WELW AM 1330 Cleveland, Ohio; KSEK 1340 AM Pittsburg,
Kansas; WDRF 1510 AM Wooddruff, South Carolina and  in Canada - CKOV
630 AM Kelowna, British Columbia; CFRA 580 AM Ottawa, Ontario; CKGL
570 AM Kitchener, Ontario.

REL-MAR McConnell Media Company is a Proud Member of the Hamilton
Chamber of Commerce, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.






To unsubscribe from this groups send a message to 
du-list-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com.  In the body of the message type 
unsubscribe and send.
Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
     http://groups.yahoo.com/group/du-list/

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
     du-list-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
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</x-flowed>
*****************************************************************
 20 Columbus Dispatch: 43 uranium work led to cancer, man thinks - 

Felix Hoover
 
Columbus company was part of project to build atom bomb 

Tuesday, June 21, 2005 

Cecil W. Campbell hopes to get financial compensation from the
government. 

A dozen men were sworn to secrecy about the work they did with a
mysterious metal at a Franklinton factory in 1943. 

Time and circumstance have left the sole survivor a shell of his
former self, much like the roofless, red-brick B &T Metals
building at 425 W. Town St. 

Cecil W. Campbell, 88, of the South Side, worked in a special
department on the second floor with what he now knows was
uranium. 

He and his family say illnesses have afflicted him for 50 years.

Among them are two types of cancer. He´s trying to convince the
federal government that they stem from his work at B &T from
1940 to ´68. 

Although the rest of the plant dealt with aluminum, the dozen
handled a metal with strange properties for eight months during
World War II. 

"Rays would come off of extruded bars like heat waves off the
highway," Campbell said. "If two extruded 7- to 8-foot bars
would roll together by accident, it would cause a spark or small
explosion, sometimes causing fire in a wood pilaster." 

Campbell knew that the metal and its heavy ash were distinctive,
but the work crew had no special safety gear or ventilation, he
said. He was an inspector who ensured that parts met precise
tolerances. 

"You can´t wear gloves using a micrometer; I touched each piece
with my bare hands," he said. 

Not until about 1947 did he learn that the metal was uranium and
that he and the other 11 had been part of the Manhattan Project
— America´s effort to build an atomic bomb. B &T was among
dozens of such plants across the country. 

"We made uranium rods for the A-bomb," said David L. Tolbert, B
&T´s current president. Guards with pistols drawn took the rods
from the plant. 

Neither Tolbert nor Campbell knows the plant´s full role in the
effort, but they think it contributed to production of the bomb
that Columbus pilot Paul Tibbetts dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. 

In the ´30s, Tolbert´s maternal grandfather, Lyman Kilgore,
bought the business from the original owners, William L. Bonnell
and William U. Thompson. Bonnell, who was white, stayed on as
president through the mid´40s, but Kilgore, who was black, was
in charge when the company machined more than 50 tons of
uranium, Campbell said. Campbell was one of six blacks on the
special team; the other men were white. 

Many wartime workers were exposed to uranium and many of them
developed cancer, but the disease can come from other causes. To
prevail with the U.S. Department of Labor, Campbell must prove
that uranium is most probably to blame in his case. He´s seeking
up to $150,000 and medical expenses under the Energy Employees´
Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act of 2000. 

Campbell thinks a relative of another worker at the plant
forwarded his name to the department. Initially, he didn´t want
to pursue a claim, he said, because he didn´t want to waste time
on paperwork and interviews. But after researchers for the
government repeatedly contacted him, he relented. 

He must prove at least a 50 percent likelihood that his exposure
to uranium caused his prostate cancer, diagnosed in 1993, or his
lymphoma of the bone marrow, diagnosed in November. Because he
is black and older than 40, he already was at high risk for
prostate cancer, according to the American Cancer Society. But
lymphoma is less common among blacks than whites, the society
says. 

Campbell has no medical records from his time at the plant, not
even in the ´50s when his health problems began, he said. Nor
does he have records from later jobs, including those as a
banker and deliveryman. 

Some of his son Michael´s earliest memories are of his ailing
father. 

"He had kidney issues in the early ´60s when I was 5, 6 or 7
years old," said the younger Campbell, now 48 and living in
Houston. "He was in the hospital and had surgery." 

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health used a
reconstruction to estimate Campbell´s radiation exposure. He was
interviewed by phone, and independent health physicists
collected such data as site information, and blood and urine
samples. The type of cancer and a person´s age at the time of
diagnosis are among other factors considered, the Labor
Department says. 

The institute´s report includes a statement from Dr. Mark Segal,
a local oncologist, who said exposure to uranium "very
conceivably" caused Campbell´s cancer. Even so, the agency found
only a 32 percent chance that uranium had caused the cancer. A
May 31 letter recommends that Campbell´s claim be denied. 

He is still scrambling for more information to bolster his claim
for an appeal at 12:30 p.m. Thursday at 200 N. High St. Maybe
he´ll find the lapel pin Secretary of War Henry Stimson
presented to him for his work in helping to defeat Japan. 

Some cleanup was done at B &T when the Manhattan Project work
was completed, but the Department of Energy found low
contamination levels in 1989 and ordered more work. Last year,
city inspectors condemned the deteriorating building where the
uranium had been handled. 

The company once employed 500 people in Columbus, Toronto and
Los Angeles, but now it has only four. Its main products are
aluminum parts for cars, electronic devices and frames for
chalkboards. 

fhoover@dispatch.com

Copyright © 2005, The Columbus Dispatch 
*****************************************************************
 21 L.A. Daily News Higher tritium levels found at Santa Susana facility

Simi Valley
 
Article Published: Tuesday, June 21, 2005 -

By Kerry Cavanaugh, Staff Writer

Radioactive contamination has again been detected -- at higher
levels than last year -- in groundwater at the Santa Susana
Field Lab, Department of Energy officials said Monday.

 In the latest round of testing at the former nuclear research
facility, officials found tritium at levels ranging from 12,000
to 117,000 picocuries per liter -- the peak being nearly six
times the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's standard for
drinking water.

 Last year, the DOE and the Boeing Co., which owns the lab,
discovered tritium at a high of 80,000 picocuries per liter --
four times the 20,000 ppl standard for drinking water.

 DOE Project Manager Mike Lopez said the recent readings of
12,000 ppl near the property boundary suggest the contamination
hasn't traveled far and does not threaten drinking water
supplies.

 "I don't think there's any risk to the public," Lopez said. 

The DOE and Boeing will present more detailed information on the
tritium tests at a community meeting Wednesday in Simi Valley.

 Tritium is a radioactive form of hydrogen that is produced as a
byproduct in nuclear reactors. Drinking tritiated water
increases the risk of cancer. 

Groundwater at the lab is not currently used for drinking water,
and lab officials have said they provided workers alternate
sources of drinking water since the 1960s.

 Lab watchdogs said they're concerned about latest tritium
findings.

 "Very high doses must have existed before, as bad as it is now,
it was much worse before," said Dan Hirsch with the Committee to
Bridge the Gap.

 Given the new test results, it's possible the tritium in the
lab's groundwater was 50 times the EPA drinking water limit in
the 1960s, when DOE officials suspect the contamination
occurred. 

Kerry Cavanaugh, (818) 713-3746 kerry.cavanaugh@dailynews.com

If you go: Boeing Co. and the Department of Energy will hold a
community meeting at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Grand Vista
Hotel, 999 Enchanted Way, Simi Valley. The historical site
assessment is available online at http://apps.em.doe.gov/etec.
		   	 	
Copyright © 2005 Los Angeles Newspaper Group     
*****************************************************************
 22 Deseret News: Let Goshutes store nuclear waste
 	 
[deseretnews.com] 
 	
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
 	   	 
I think I'm safe in saying Dennis Kucinich
isn't concerned about Utah's Goshute Indians (June 18). He
decries the "history of exploitation and racism carried out
towards Native Americans by the U.S. government," then proceeds
to do his best to make sure they remain wards of the state
living in poverty.

One would think from your article that Private Fuel
Storage with the connivance of the nuclear Regulatory Commission
was trying to ram the nuclear waste down the Goshutes' throat.
Seems to me it was the Goshutes' idea in the first place. I
think it's a good idea. Being a downwinder (Washington County
1949-1954), I'm well aware of the dangers of radiation, but the
obfuscation surrounding depleted nuclear fuel rods just flat
amazes me.

Let the Goshutes profit from the miserable desert
wasteland we "gave" them. We should agree to the storage if the
state can take possession of the material at any time. Then we
should develop a way to reprocess the fissionable material
instead of running around like Chicken Little. The sky isn't
falling. The Goshutes can profit, and so can the rest of us.

 George Hawkins
 Bountiful

 © 2005 Deseret News Publishing Company 
*****************************************************************
 23 Salt Lake Tribune: Nuclear dump a step closer 

Article Last Updated: 06/21/2005 12:54:25 AM 

NRC rejects another Utah attempt to block the facility 

By Robert Gehrke The Salt Lake Tribune 

WASHINGTON - The Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Monday denied 
Utah's latest bid to block a license for a nuclear waste storage 
area on the Skull Valley Indian reservation, rejecting the 
argument that the waste could be stuck at the site permanently. 

The unanimous ruling leaves the state just one remaining 
avenue to challenge - over the risk of a fighter jet crash - and 
moves the commission a step closer to a decision on granting a 
license to Private Fuel Storage, a group of electric utilities 
seeking to store 44,000 tons of waste on the Skull Valley 
reservation until a permanent dump is opened. 

Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr.'s general counsel, Mike Lee, said he 
expects the NRC's final determination by the end of the summer. 

"We're profoundly disappointed, but we remain optimistic 
about our other arguments, including the remaining argument 
before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission," Lee said. "We're 
still several steps away from any point we would deem even the 
beginning of construction on the project to be imminent." 

State attorneys argued that Gary Lanthrum, director of the 
Department of Energy's transportation program, stated that, 
under the existing DOE waste storage contracts, the department 
would refuse to bury nuclear waste in a permanent dump if the 
storage casks are welded shut as planned. 

"Our concern is, as it has always been, once the fuel gets 
here is it ever going to leave?" said Assistant Utah Attorney 
General Denise Chancellor. 

The state argued, at the very least, the waste would have to 
be returned to the reactors and repackaged before being shipped 
to Yucca Mountain and that the NRC should have to redo its 
environmental impact studies to take that into account. 

The commission disagreed, affirming an earlier decision by 
the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board that sided with PFS. 
Several letters provided by PFS from the Energy Department to 
various utility companies promised flexibility to accommodate 
waste stored in a variety of casks. 

"In the face of this rather overwhelming written record, Utah 
offers only the unexplained [and apparently off-the-cuff] remarks
of Lanthrum, and argues that his remarks require a rethinking of 
fundamental assumptions about the PFS project," the commission 
wrote. "The board sensibly thought differently." 

The commission noted that Lanthrum was not in 
chain-of-command for such decisions and that the state was 
unable to offer any additional evidence that DOE policy had 
changed, or explain why the policy might have been altered. 

"It was one of the last couple of hurdles we had to get 
through in this whole process, so we're pleased that the 
commission agreed with the licensing board and with our 
position," said PFS spokeswoman Sue Martin. 

The state has one more challenge pending - its contention 
that the dangers of a fighter jet crash or errant cruise missile 
smashing into the site were not adequately considered. The state 
filed that appeal this month, shortly after the Atomic Safety 
and Licensing Board rejected similar claims. 

If the NRC grants the license - and every significant recent 
decision by the commission and licensing board has gone against 
the state - Utah will have other avenues remaining to challenge 
the PFS site. 

The state could challenge the granting of its license in a 
federal appeals court, either in the 10th Circuit in Denver or 
in the District of Columbia. 

It also is working to persuade the Interior Department not to 
grant a right of way for shipments to travel to the Skull Valley 
Goshute Indian reservation, or persuade Interior Secretary Gale 
Norton, as trustee for Indian issues, not to approve the tribe's 
contract with PFS. 

Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, also has added language to a Defense 
Department bill that has passed the House that would create a 
wilderness area near the Skull Valley Goshute Indian reservation 
to prevent a rail line being built to the facility. It has yet 
to be considered in the Senate. 

Â© Copyright 2005, The Salt Lake Tribune. 
*****************************************************************
 24 The Australian: Australia seeks China uranium deal 

[June 21, 2005]
 	 
From correspondents in Los Angeles

FEDERAL Industry and Resources Minister Ian Macfarlane said today 
Australia could have an agreement to export uranium to China 
within 12 months.

Mr Macfarlane said the safeguard agreement, which would allow 
Australia to monitor China's use of the uranium, is currently 
being negotiated.

 He's told reporters at an international conference in the US 
that China has no thought of using the uranium for nuclear 
weapons, and is only interested in power generation. 
		 		 	 	 	 		   		 		

    
  privacy       terms      © The Australian   

    	 	 	 		 			 

*****************************************************************
 25 RGJ: Budget could mean ‘yes’ on Yucca project
 
[Reno Gazette-Journal] 

Reno, Nevada, USA  775-788-6200

Posted: 6/20/2005 10:33 pm 

State representatives in Congress should look with a skeptical
eye at the budget appropriations proposed for Nevada in the
House and Senate. The funding budgeted for Nevada sounds like a
windfall, but accepting some of it can imply that Nevadans also
agree to accept the Yucca installation.

That is not the message Nevadans want to send anyone in
Washington. The state’s congressional delegation has its work
cut out to make certain that any allocations don’t come with
strings attached.

The Yucca Mountain project has run into roadblocks, certainly.
Among them is Senate Appropriations Committee approval for less
than the administration requested. But it is clear the Energy
Department intends to have its Nevada repository. 

The Senate bill calls for more than $12 million for the state
and counties to conduct oversight of Yucca Mountain. Additional
funds would go to Nye County, where officials expect to build
the facility and for laboratories and nearby roads. Oversight,
laboratories and roads are non-issues, unless someone plans for
the project to go forward. All those funds assume implementation
of the project. Accepting them would assume the state’s consent.

Among the budget items that should keep our representatives
alert to the administration’s intentions is an item in the House
bill that would allocate millions of dollars for an interim
storage site.That’s in addition to the repository funds. It’s a
way to get around the roadblock that is holding up their plans
for the short term.

It is interesting that the Senate committee also has approved
more than $67 million for Army Corps of Engineer projects in
Nevada. Truckee Meadows officials have tried for some time to
get Corps support for the Truckee River flood control project.
Finally allocations seem to be in the plan. But budget writers
are not above attaching needed funding to undesired programs,
such as Yucca Mountain, thus requiring lawmakers to vote for
both measures or against them.

Nevadans saw that happen repeatedly during this state’s
legislative session. It happens on an even grander scale in the
Congress. It means our congressional delegation must stay alert.
Political games related to Yucca Mountain are in full effect. 


© Copyright Reno Gazette-Journal, a Gannett Co. Inc.Newspaper.
*****************************************************************
 26 Australian Financial Review: Uranium exports to China coming soon 

  June 21 2005

Angeles on Monday.-->   2005/06/21-->   AUSTRALIA-->    


Australia could have a safeguard agreement to export uranium to
China within 12 months, federal Industry and Resources Minister
Ian Macfarlane said in Los Angeles on Monday. 

Mr Macfarlane, attending the BIO 2005 conference in
Philadelphia, rejected fears that China, despite the safeguard
agreement, might use Australian uranium for nuclear weapons. 

"They are interested purely in power generation," Mr Macfarlane
told AAP. 

"We are confident of their objectives, but we are also confident
of the ability to track the uranium. 

"I don't think it's an issue."

Mr Macfarlane said the safeguard agreement, which will allow
Australia to monitor China's use of the uranium, is being
negotiated and could be finalised within a year. 

Mr Macfarlane criticised the recently re-elected
Labor-controlled Northern Territory government, particularly
Chief Minister Clare Martin, who has promised no new uranium
mines in the NT.

Copyright 

*****************************************************************
 27 Nagasaki bomb: First Western reports finally published 
 
Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 05:39:12 -0500 (CDT)

 
My source adds the following as preface to the INDEPENDENT story

==================

George Weller was the first Western journalist in Nagasaki after we
dropped the plutonium bomb.
  MacArthur censored Weller's reports, but Weller's son just discovered
the carbons of the stories.

The NYT coverage of this story, since it's about our war crimes (by
definition a null set) and their coverup, omitted this information:

  William Laurance, a science reporter with The New York Times and - it
  later emerged - someone also paid by the White House as a
  "consultant", was among a group of reporters taken to the atomic
  testing site in New Mexico to demonstrate there was no lingering
  radiation. Laurance's subsequent story said: "This historic ground in
  New Mexico, scene of the first atomic explosion on earth and a cradle
  of a new era in civilisation, gave the most effective answer today to
  Japanese propaganda that [radiation was] responsible for deaths even
  after the day of the explosion."

Paying pundits to promote a bogus education bill, as Bush did, is
amateur night compared to Truman paying for such coverage or for this
coverage, again from Laurance:

  ..."Awestruck, we watched it shoot upward like a meteor coming from
  the earth instead of from outer space, becoming ever more alive as it
  climbed skyward through the white clouds ... It was a living thing, a
  new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes."

For which reporting Laurance won the Pulitzer prize.  In the theatre of
the absurd, only Kissinger winning the Nobel Peace Prize outplays that.

The article below, unlike the NYT coverage, quotes Gregg Mitchell,
co-author of _Hiroshima in America: A Half Century of Denial_, and
explains the theme of his book:

  ...[it] details the official suppression of the effect of the atomic
  weapons and the controversy surrounding America's decision to use them
  when many in the West believed Japan was already ready to surrender.
-------------------------------

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=648484

Nagasaki: Wasteland of war, by the first Western reporter to witness it

The American journalist George Weller was the first Allied observer to
see the devastation wreaked by the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of
Nagasaki. But his account was censored at the command of General
MacArthur, and only now, three years after his death, have his
astonishing reports finally been published. 

Independent (London)21 June 2005
	By Andrew Buncombe

The scenes that confronted the reporter George Weller would fill his
dispatches with horror and stay with him for life. The first Western
reporter into the bombed and off-limits city of Nagasaki in September
1945, Weller encountered sickness and suffering of a kind never seen
before. He described the cityscape though which he passed as a "wasteland
of war".

But his unflinching reports written a month after the atomic bomb had
dropped caught the eye of General Douglas MacArthur's US military censors.
Concerned at the effect Weller's reporting would have on worldwide opinion
as well as his subsequent political ambitions, the general ensured that
none of the reportage he filed from Nagasaki would be published.

Until now. Three years after Weller's death at the age of 95, and 60 years
after the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killing more
than 200,000 people and ushering the world into the nuclear era, some of
those first-hand dispatches have been published in a Japanese newspaper.

They provide a raw and unique insight into the bomb's devastation and the
horrifying effect of radiation poisoning, known to the author of the
reports and the bewildered doctors he spoke to simply as "Disease X".

In a report filed from Nagasaki on 8 September 1945, Weller wrote: "In
swaybacked or flattened skeletons of the Mitsubishi arms plants is
revealed what the atomic bomb can do to steel and stone, but what the
riven atom can do against human flesh and bone lies hidden in two
hospitals of downtown Nagasaki. Look at the pushed-in fagade of the
American consulate, three miles from the blast's centre, or the face of
the Catholic cathedral, one mile in the other direction, torn down like
gingerbread, and you can tell that the liberated atom spares nothing in
the way." Weller's remarkable dispatches might not have been discovered
but for his son Anthony, also a writer and journalist, who was dealing
with his father's belongings after his death in 2002. At his father's home
in San Felice Circeo, Italy, Mr Weller was working his way through a box
of papers when he came across 75 typed pages of carbon-paper copies
containing reports from the war in the Pacific, which his father had
believed lost. The reports ran to about 25,000 words.

Speaking yesterday by telephone from his father's home, Mr Weller, 47,
told The Independent: "My father had spoken of these reports many times
over the years and it was a source of great frustration to him [to be
censored]. It was one of the biggest stories of his life.

"It was very poignant to find his carbons no more than 20ft from where he
was sitting. One of the rooms in his house was overflowing with papers
from his more than 65 years as a foreign correspondent. There were boxes
and crates with these papers jammed into them. I spent some time going
through a crate full of mildewed papers from the Pacific war and there
they were. The crate was a few feet from the chair in which he used to
sit. He did not know they were there."

The story of Weller's suppressed dispatches from the southern coastal city
of Nagasaki - devastated by the 4.5-ton "Fatman" nuclear device that was
exploded at a height of 1,500ft at 11.02am on 9 August - are made all the
more remarkable for the effort it took him to get into the city. With the
city and much of southern Japan placed off-limits by MacArthur, commander
of the US forces, Weller, already a Pulitzer Prize winner with the now
defunct Chicago Daily News, made his way to the distant island of Kyushu.
There, with official permission, he visited what had been a Japanese
kamikaze base. But he also noticed that the town on the mainland - just a
few hundred yards from the island - was connected to Nagasaki by railroad.
Using a combination of boat, train and a bravura performance in which he
impersonated a senior US officer and commandeered two military cars, he
was able to get into Nagasaki several days before any other Western
reporters. Weller, who had earlier been among the very last journalists to
leave Singapore and then Indonesia in the face of the Japanese advance,
was not at the time particularly opposed to the atomic bomb. "I think the
Japanese military had cleared any sense of remorse out of him," said his
son, who usually lives in Annisquam, Massachusetts. And his initial
reports from Nagasaki suggested that he believed the atomic weapon, while
clearly deadly, had worked with a rare degree of precision.

He started one early dispatch by writing: "The atomic bomb may be
classified as a weapon capable of being used indiscriminately, but its use
in Nagasaki was selective and proper and as merciful as such a gigantic
force could be expected to be. The following conclusions were made by the
writer - as the first visitor to inspect the ruins - after an exhaustive,
though still incomplete study of this wasteland of war." He suggested that
the death toll stood at no more than 24,000 and that this number (later
shown to be more than 75,000, with another 75,000 injured and countless
more left to die later from radiation sickness) was largely the result of
poorly designed civilian air shelters and a refusal by the local
authorities to take air-raid warnings seriously. He later added in his
report: "Nobody here in Nagasaki has yet been able to show that the bomb
is different than any other, except in a broader extent flash and a more
powerful knock-out." But as he travelled more around Nagasaki, visiting
hospitals filled with sick and dying people, witnessing the flattened city
and talking to the baffled Japanese doctors unable to help so many of the
sick, Weller became aware that something was terribly wrong. Many of those
brought into the hospitals were not responding to treatment.

He witnessed children with red blotches on their skin, people who had lost
their hair, patients with blackened tongues, patients with lock-jaw.
Doctors at one hospital told him that a month after the explosion, people
were dying at a rate of 10 a day.

He noted that the doctors had performed precise assessments of the
patients brought to them. Their hair had fallen out, they had skin
haemorrhages, lip sores, diarrhoea, swelling of the throat. There had been
a fall in the number of their red blood cells and there was an almost
absence of white blood cells.

He wrote in another dispatch: "The atomic bomb's peculiar 'disease',
uncured because it is untreated and untreated because it is not diagnosed,
is still snatching away lives here. Men, women and children with no
outward marks of injury are dying daily in hospitals, some after having
walked around for three or four weeks thinking they have escaped. The
doctors here have every modern medicament, but candidly confessed in
talking to the writer - the first Allied observer to Nagasaki since the
surrender - that the answer to the malady is beyond them. Their patients,
though their skin is whole, are all passing away under their eyes."

After his achievement of entering Nagasaki and acting as an eye-witness to
the destruction, Weller's mistake was to send his reports back to Tokyo by
hand, to be approved by the military censor. Concerned about their
potential effect on public opinion, MacArthur ordered that that they be
destroyed.

Weller's son said his father later believed he had lost the carbon copies
and would go to his grave summarising his experience with the censors
simply as "They won." Indeed, at the same time as it was suppressing
Weller's reports and denying similar reports filed from Hiroshima by the
Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett and published by the Daily Express in
London, the Pentagon was actively going to great lengths to persuade its
own citizens that there was no danger of radiation poisoning from the
atomic bombs.

William Laurance, a science reporter with The New York Times and - it
later emerged - someone also paid by the White House as a "consultant",
was among a group of reporters taken to the atomic testing site in New
Mexico to demonstrate there was no lingering radiation. Laurance's
subsequent story said: "This historic ground in New Mexico, scene of the
first atomic explosion on earth and a cradle of a new era in civilisation,
gave the most effective answer today to Japanese propaganda that
[radiation was] responsible for deaths even after the day of the
explosion."

Laurance was so liked by the military that he was even taken in the
squadron of planes accompanying the B-29 bomber from Tinian Island near
Guam, which dropped the Nagasaki bomb. In contrast to Weller's reports of
suffering and sickness, Laurance described the bomb's explosion thus:
"Awestruck, we watched it shoot upward like a meteor coming from the earth
instead of from outer space, becoming ever more alive as it climbed
skyward through the white clouds ... It was a living thing, a new species
of being, born right before our incredulous eyes." Ironically, such
reporting won Laurance himself a Pulitzer prize.

Gregg Mitchell, co-author of Hiroshima in America: A Half Century of
Denial and editor of the magazine Editor and Publisher, said the story of
Weller's suppressed and then lost dispatches was one of journalism's more
considerable mysteries.

"It's different to Deep Throat, but in nuclear history and journalism
history, [it is important]," said Mr Mitchell, whose book details the
official suppression of the effect of the atomic weapons and the
controversy surrounding America's decision to use them when many in the
West believed Japan was already ready to surrender. "It is one of the
great mysteries. People have always wondered what was in those reports.
For them to emerge intact solves it."

Weller's son, who has also discovered a cache of his father's photographs,
said his father had believed his reports from Nagasaki would not be
censored. He believed that during the three weeks he spent in Nagasaki he
was there "as a witness".

"He had been fighting the censors for four years," he said. "[The censors]
did not want the US people to get a bad impression of the bombs, and that
it was not MacArthur who had won the war but a bunch of scientists in New
Mexico."

Indeed, the conclusion to one of his father's most moving dispatches
relates to some of those very scientists, the effect of whose labours he
had just witnessed, and who were about to arrive in the city to measure
the radiation. "Twenty-five Americans are due to arrive September 11 to
study the Nagasaki bombsite. Japanese hope they will bring a solution for
Disease X."
*****************************************************************
 28 Independent - Nagasaki: Wasteland of war
 
Editor's Choice 

Nagasaki: Wasteland of war, by the first Western reporter to
witness it The American journalist George Weller was the first
Allied observer to see the devastation wreaked by the atomic
bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. But his account was
censored at the command of General MacArthur, and only now,
three years after his death, have his astonishing reports
finally been published. 

By Andrew Buncombe 

21 June 2005

 	 

The scenes that confronted the reporter George Weller would fill
his dispatches with horror and stay with him for life. The first
Western reporter into the bombed and off-limits city of Nagasaki
in September 1945, Weller encountered sickness and suffering of
a kind never seen before. He described the cityscape though
which he passed as a "wasteland of war". 

But his unflinching reports written a month after the atomic
bomb had dropped caught the eye of General Douglas MacArthur's
US military censors. Concerned at the effect Weller's reporting
would have on worldwide opinion as well as his subsequent
political ambitions, the general ensured that none of the
reportage he filed from Nagasaki would be published. 

Until now. Three years after Weller's death at the age of 95,
and 60 years after the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki killing more than 200,000 people and ushering the world
into the nuclear era, some of those first-hand dispatches have
been published in a Japanese newspaper. 

They provide a raw and unique insight into the bomb's
devastation and the horrifying effect of radiation poisoning,
known to the author of the reports and the bewildered doctors he
spoke to simply as "Disease X". 

In a report filed from Nagasaki on 8 September 1945, Weller
wrote: "In swaybacked or flattened skeletons of the Mitsubishi
arms plants is revealed what the atomic bomb can do to steel and
stone, but what the riven atom can do against human flesh and
bone lies hidden in two hospitals of downtown Nagasaki. Look at
the pushed-in façade of the American consulate, three miles from
the blast's centre, or the face of the Catholic cathedral, one
mile in the other direction, torn down like gingerbread, and you
can tell that the liberated atom spares nothing in the way."
Weller's remarkable dispatches might not have been discovered
but for his son Anthony, also a writer and journalist, who was
dealing with his father's belongings after his death in 2002. At
his father's home in San Felice Circeo, Italy, Mr Weller was
working his way through a box of papers when he came across 75
typed pages of carbon-paper copies containing reports from the
war in the Pacific, which his father had believed lost. The
reports ran to about 25,000 words. 

Speaking yesterday by telephone from his father's home, Mr
Weller, 47, told The Independent: "My father had spoken of these
reports many times over the years and it was a source of great
frustration to him [to be censored]. It was one of the biggest
stories of his life. 

"It was very poignant to find his carbons no more than 20ft from
where he was sitting. One of the rooms in his house was
overflowing with papers from his more than 65 years as a foreign
correspondent. There were boxes and crates with these papers
jammed into them. I spent some time going through a crate full
of mildewed papers from the Pacific war and there they were. The
crate was a few feet from the chair in which he used to sit. He
did not know they were there." 

The story of Weller's suppressed dispatches from the southern
coastal city of Nagasaki - devastated by the 4.5-ton "Fatman"
nuclear device that was exploded at a height of 1,500ft at
11.02am on 9 August - are made all the more remarkable for the
effort it took him to get into the city. With the city and much
of southern Japan placed off-limits by MacArthur, commander of
the US forces, Weller, already a Pulitzer Prize winner with the
now defunct Chicago Daily News, made his way to the distant
island of Kyushu. There, with official permission, he visited
what had been a Japanese kamikaze base. But he also noticed that
the town on the mainland - just a few hundred yards from the
island - was connected to Nagasaki by railroad. Using a
combination of boat, train and a bravura performance in which he
impersonated a senior US officer and commandeered two military
cars, he was able to get into Nagasaki several days before any
other Western reporters. Weller, who had earlier been among the
very last journalists to leave Singapore and then Indonesia in
the face of the Japanese advance, was not at the time
particularly opposed to the atomic bomb. "I think the Japanese
military had cleared any sense of remorse out of him," said his
son, who usually lives in Annisquam, Massachusetts. And his
initial reports from Nagasaki suggested that he believed the
atomic weapon, while clearly deadly, had worked with a rare
degree of precision. 

He started one early dispatch by writing: "The atomic bomb may
be classified as a weapon capable of being used
indiscriminately, but its use in Nagasaki was selective and
proper and as merciful as such a gigantic force could be
expected to be. The following conclusions were made by the
writer - as the first visitor to inspect the ruins - after an
exhaustive, though still incomplete study of this wasteland of
war." He suggested that the death toll stood at no more than
24,000 and that this number (later shown to be more than 75,000,
with another 75,000 injured and countless more left to die later
from radiation sickness) was largely the result of poorly
designed civilian air shelters and a refusal by the local
authorities to take air-raid warnings seriously. He later added
in his report: "Nobody here in Nagasaki has yet been able to
show that the bomb is different than any other, except in a
broader extent flash and a more powerful knock-out." But as he
travelled more around Nagasaki, visiting hospitals filled with
sick and dying people, witnessing the flattened city and talking
to the baffled Japanese doctors unable to help so many of the
sick, Weller became aware that something was terribly wrong.
Many of those brought into the hospitals were not responding to
treatment. 

He witnessed children with red blotches on their skin, people
who had lost their hair, patients with blackened tongues,
patients with lock-jaw. Doctors at one hospital told him that a
month after the explosion, people were dying at a rate of 10 a
day. 

He noted that the doctors had performed precise assessments of
the patients brought to them. Their hair had fallen out, they
had skin haemorrhages, lip sores, diarrhoea, swelling of the
throat. There had been a fall in the number of their red blood
cells and there was an almost absence of white blood cells. 

He wrote in another dispatch: "The atomic bomb's peculiar
'disease', uncured because it is untreated and untreated because
it is not diagnosed, is still snatching away lives here. Men,
women and children with no outward marks of injury are dying
daily in hospitals, some after having walked around for three or
four weeks thinking they have escaped. The doctors here have
every modern medicament, but candidly confessed in talking to
the writer - the first Allied observer to Nagasaki since the
surrender - that the answer to the malady is beyond them. Their
patients, though their skin is whole, are all passing away under
their eyes." 

After his achievement of entering Nagasaki and acting as an
eye-witness to the destruction, Weller's mistake was to send his
reports back to Tokyo by hand, to be approved by the military
censor. Concerned about their potential effect on public
opinion, MacArthur ordered that that they be destroyed. 

Weller's son said his father later believed he had lost the
carbon copies and would go to his grave summarising his
experience with the censors simply as "They won." Indeed, at the
same time as it was suppressing Weller's reports and denying
similar reports filed from Hiroshima by the Australian reporter
Wilfred Burchett and published by the Daily Express in London,
the Pentagon was actively going to great lengths to persuade its
own citizens that there was no danger of radiation poisoning
from the atomic bombs. 

William Laurance, a science reporter with The New York Times and
- it later emerged - someone also paid by the White House as a
"consultant", was among a group of reporters taken to the atomic
testing site in New Mexico to demonstrate there was no lingering
radiation. Laurance's subsequent story said: "This historic
ground in New Mexico, scene of the first atomic explosion on
earth and a cradle of a new era in civilisation, gave the most
effective answer today to Japanese propaganda that [radiation
was] responsible for deaths even after the day of the
explosion." 

Laurance was so liked by the military that he was even taken in
the squadron of planes accompanying the B-29 bomber from Tinian
Island near Guam, which dropped the Nagasaki bomb. In contrast
to Weller's reports of suffering and sickness, Laurance
described the bomb's explosion thus: "Awestruck, we watched it
shoot upward like a meteor coming from the earth instead of from
outer space, becoming ever more alive as it climbed skyward
through the white clouds ... It was a living thing, a new
species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes."
Ironically, such reporting won Laurance himself a Pulitzer
prize. 

Gregg Mitchell, co-author of Hiroshima in America: A Half
Century of Denial and editor of the magazine Editor and
Publisher, said the story of Weller's suppressed and then lost
dispatches was one of journalism's more considerable mysteries. 

"It's different to Deep Throat, but in nuclear history and
journalism history, [it is important]," said Mr Mitchell, whose
book details the official suppression of the effect of the
atomic weapons and the controversy surrounding America's
decision to use them when many in the West believed Japan was
already ready to surrender. "It is one of the great mysteries.
People have always wondered what was in those reports. For them
to emerge intact solves it." 

Weller's son, who has also discovered a cache of his father's
photographs, said his father had believed his reports from
Nagasaki would not be censored. He believed that during the
three weeks he spent in Nagasaki he was there "as a witness". 

"He had been fighting the censors for four years," he said.
"[The censors] did not want the US people to get a bad
impression of the bombs, and that it was not MacArthur who had
won the war but a bunch of scientists in New Mexico." 

Indeed, the conclusion to one of his father's most moving
dispatches relates to some of those very scientists, the effect
of whose labours he had just witnessed, and who were about to
arrive in the city to measure the radiation. "Twenty-five
Americans are due to arrive September 11 to study the Nagasaki
bombsite. Japanese hope they will bring a solution for Disease
X." 	           


©2005 Independent News &Media (UK) Ltd.   
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 29 DOE: Environmental Management Site-Specific Advisory Board, Oak Ridge 
 
                        FR Doc 05-12190 
[Federal Register: June 21, 2005 (Volume 70, Number 118)] 
[Notices] [Page 35660] From the Federal Register Online via GPO 
Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr21jn05-73]                         
 
Reservation AGENCY: Department of Energy.
 
ACTION: Notice of open meeting.
 
SUMMARY: This notice announces a meeting of the Environmental 
Management Site-Specific Advisory Board (EMSSAB), Oak Ridge 
Reservation. The Federal Advisory Committee Act (Pub. L. No. 
92-463, 86 Stat. 770) requires that public notice of this meeting 
be announced in the Federal Register.
 
 
DATES: Wednesday, July 13, 2005, 6 p.m.
 
ADDRESSES: DOE Information Center, 475 Oak Ridge Turnpike, Oak 
Ridge, Tennessee.
 
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Pat Halsey, Federal Coordinator, 
Department of Energy Oak Ridge Operations Office, P.O. Box 2001, 
EM-90, Oak Ridge, TN 37831. Phone (865) 576-4025; Fax (865) 
576-5333 or e- mail: halseypj@oro.doe.gov or check the Web site 
at http://www.oakridge.doe.gov/em/ssab .
 
 
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: Status of Work in the Melton Valley, East 
Tennessee Technology Park, and Balance of Reservation Programs.
 
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 the agenda item should contact Pat Halsey at the 
address or telephone number listed above. Requests must be 
received five days prior to the meeting and reasonable provision 
will be made to include the presentation in the agenda. The 
DeputyDesignated Federal Officer is empowered to conduct the 
meeting in a fashion that will facilitate the orderly conduct of 
business. Individuals wishing to make a public comment will be 
provided a maximum of five minutes to present their comments.
 
Minutes: Minutes of this meeting will be available for public 
review and copying at the Department of Energy's Information 
Center at 475 Oak Ridge Turnpike, Oak Ridge, TN between 8 a.m. 
and 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, or by writing to Pat Halsey, 
Department of Energy Oak Ridge Operations Office, P.O. Box 2001, 
EM-90, Oak Ridge, TN 37831, or by calling her at (865) 576-4025.
 
Issued at Washington, DC on June 15, 2005.
 
R. Samuel, Deputy Advisory Committee Management Officer.
 
[FR Doc. 05-12190 Filed 6-20-05; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 6450-01-P

 
    
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NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 this 
material is distributed without profit or payment to those who 
have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for 
non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more 
information go to: 
<http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml> 
    
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