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NUCLEAR POLICY
1 RedNova News: South Korean Nuclear Plant Halts Operation After Light
2 Persian Journal: Rice On Iran -
3 Newsweek: Iran's Nuclear Lies
4 LA Times: For Iranians, It Was the Economy, Stupid
5 ITAR-TASS: Iran insists on its right to use atom for peace
6 Al Jazeera: Changes in Irans nuclear policy -
7 MNA: Iran should promptly decide about construction of nuclear plant
8 Mehr: Next government should have new view of nuclear issue
9 Guardian Unlimited: The lies behind the lies
10 Korea: Digital Chosunilbo: New York Contacts Between Korean and U.S.
11 Daily Yomiuri: N. Korea gives no hint of move on 6-way talks
12 Xinhua: US, DPRK optimistic about resumption of six-party talks
13 Korea Times: S. Korea, US to Present Joint Proposal to NK
14 US: Bushs Uranium Lies: Case For A Special Prosecutor
15 US: Guardian Unlimited: Senate Keeps 'Bunker-Buster' Program Alive
16 Guardian Unlimited: Comment | A new generation of nuclear weapons?
17 US: Las Vegas RJ: HEADED TO CONFERENCE COMMITTEE: Energy spending bi
18 US: DallasNews.com: Running on empty
19 US: WorldNetDaily: Freezing assets on a whim
20 Guardian Unlimited: Minister ponders the nuclear option
21 London Times: BNFL on way back to the black as losses halve -
22 PRAVDA.Ru: Russia to help China oust the USA from Eurasia -
23 CRIENGLISH: Hu Jintao Wraps up Russia Tour
24 Guardian Unlimited: Nuclear fall-out
25 CTV.ca: What's all the fuss about G-8?
26 MNA: Next government should draft comprehensive energy plan - MP
27 The Observer: Minister ponders the nuclear option
28 The Observer: Comment | When the oil wars blow
NUCLEAR REACTORS
29 The Standard: Nuclear energy expansion stepped up as demand soars -
30 US: Brattleboro Reformer: Entergy offers to increase safety margin a
31 Malaysia Star: Driven by energy shortages, China races to expand nuc
NUCLEAR SECURITY
NUCLEAR SAFETY
32 US: Hawk Eye: IAAP back on federal agenda
33 US: OpEdNews.Com: BUSH'S UNFORGIVEABLE COVERUP / IGNORING VETERANS H
34 Reuters: Explosion at Japanese radiation lab injures two
NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE
35 US: Observer: Uranium missing at UK site
36 US: AU ABC: Commonwealth seeks advice on NT uranium ban
37 US: Bristol Phoenix: Warren council proactive on Narragansett Electr
38 Congressman Jon Porter (NV03) - Press Release - KEY USGS
39 US: SF Chronicle: Nuclear waste: 1 plant, 48 tons a year / In an age
40 RedNova News: BNFL's Fundraising Plan Sets Off Heated Reactions
41 US: Newsday.com: LIRR suspends Brookhaven waste
42 Pahrump Valley Times: Death Valley future 'cloudy'
43 US: St. Petersburg Times: Factory owner fined for' 04 spill
44 Guardian Unlimited: BNFL to sell building arm
45 The Observer: Report says Sellafield leak could happen again
PEACE
US DEPT. OF ENERGY
46 SF Chronicle: Senate scratches Livermore laser / Backers hope funds
47 ABQJOURNAL: LANL Successfully Completes Nuclear X-Ray Test
48 Oakland Tribune: Giant laser's fusion goal delayed
49 Times-News Online: Energy department offers three plutonium plans
50 Paducah Sun: Senators approve funding for cleanup
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FULL NEWS STORIES
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1 RedNova News: South Korean Nuclear Plant Halts Operation After Lightning
Posted on: Saturday, 2 July 2005
Text of report in English by South Korean news agency Yonhap
Yeonggwang, 2 July: A South Korean nuclear power plant was
forced to halt operation Saturday [2 July], after its power
transmission line was struck by lightning, a plant official
said.
The lightning did not cause any serious damage such as
radioactive leaks at the plant in Yeonggwang, 300 km south of
Seoul, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"The suspension is a mere lightning incident which doesn't
affect the plant's safety," the official said. "The plant will
soon resume operation after inspections on its related
facilities."
South Korea has 20 nuclear power plants in operation, which
produces about 40 per cent of its electricity needs.
Source: BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific
© 2002-2005 RedNova.com. All rights reserved.
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2 Persian Journal: Rice On Iran -
Iran News Jul 1st, 2005 - 19:03:01
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says that the U.S. "has
focused the world's attention" on the Iranian government's
pursuit of weapons of mass destruction:
"Along with our allies, we are working to gain full disclosure
of Iran's efforts to obtain nuclear weapons. The world must not
tolerate any Iranian [regime] attempt to develop a nuclear
weapon."
The people of the Middle East, says Ms. Rice, are "expressing
ideas and taking actions that would have been unthinkable only
one year ago." She says this "moment of transformation" is very
fragile, and still has committed enemies, particularly the
government of Iran, which is the world's leading sponsor of
terrorism. But other nations cannot tolerate efforts by Iran's
clerical regime to subvert democratic governments.
The Iranian government should pay more attention to the
democratic aspirations of the Iranian people. Iran's clerical
rulers, says Secretary of State Rice, cannot look away from what
is happening in the region:
"The Middle East is changing, and even the unelected leaders in
Tehran must recognize this fact. They must know that the energy
of reform that is building all around them will one day inspire
Iran's citizens to demand their liberty and their rights. The
United States stands with the people of Iran."
President George W. Bush has said that advancing the cause of
freedom is "the calling of our time." Secretary of State Rice
says that with the support of the United States and other
nations, the peoples of the Middle East "are demonstrating that
all great human achievement begins with free individuals who do
not accept that the reality of today must also be the reality of
tomorrow."
The preceding was an editorial reflecting the views of the
United States Government.
*****************************************************************
3 Newsweek: Iran's Nuclear Lies
Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful uses only. But a
history of deception raises doubts.
[Russian workers at Bushehr's main reactor]
Paolo Woods for Newsweek
Russian workers at Bushehr's main reactor
By By Christopher DickeyNewsweek
July 11 issue - Beyond the antiaircraft-gun emplacements and the
early-warning radar systems, and shortly before you get to the
high concrete walls topped with concertina wire that surround
Iran's Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant, there's a large sign
announcing that the facility welcomes guests. Like so much about
the Iranian nuclear program, the signals are incongruous,
contradictory and more than a little sinister.
If Iran is to be believed, then the world has nothing to fear
from its nuclear program. The United States, Europe, Israel,
Saudi Arabia and other oil producers nearby can rest easy,
because the ayatollahs have no plans to threaten the region with
atomic weapons or put nukes in the hands of terrorists. If Iran
is to be believed, its only goal, repeated countless times,
ratified in treaties and open to inspections, is to develop a
completely independent ability to make nuclear fuel and use it
to generate electricity.
But neither the United States nor Europe nor the United Nations
is ready simply to believe Iran, at least not easily, and not
without verification. Its record of concealment and deceit about
its nuclear program goes back at least 20 years. Its extensive
uranium-enrichment program was uncovered in detail only two
years ago; its promise of "full disclosure" and "transparency"
since then has been something considerably less. The election of
a new hard-line Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, last
month raises still more questions about how far Tehran can be
trusted about its nuclear programs, if at all.
Iran's concealments have been as vast as a secret underground
facility at Natanz that was being readied for 50,000 centrifuges
to enrich uranium when it was exposed in 2002. They have seemed
as small as some undeclared milligrams of plutonium from a
research laboratory. In a cat-and-mouse game reminiscent of the
lead-up to the Iraq invasion in 2003, the Iranians have claimed
to be cooperating while throwing up what often seem to be petty
obstacles in front of inspectors. Iranians have bulldozed
suspect sites. They have declined to allow investigators access
to some military areas. They say they just can't find key
documents that would show where and how they acquired key
designs when they started their enrichment program in the 1980s.
(Typically, under heavy international pressure this year, they
finally produced one page from 1987 for inspectors to look at,
but wouldn't turn it over.)
In Iran's case today, unlike that of Iraq in 2003, there is no
doubt that its nuclear program is large and growing. The Bushehr
reactor will be fueled by Russia, and the spent fuel, from which
plutonium could be extracted, will be returned there. But Iran
now also plans to build a heavy-water re-actor at the town of
Arak, and a facility to produce heavy water there is already
underway. Nor has it given up the project at Natanz for
enrichment facilities. It has just put it on hold, as it
negotiates for European and American concessions.
The breakthrough revelation about Iran's nuclear-enrichment
program came in August 2002 from the front organization for an
Iranian exile group on the State Department's list of terrorist
organizations, the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK). At a press conference
in Washington, it exposed the existence of the Natanz
uranium-enrichment facility. The group insisted that the tip came
from its own sources, but inspectors suspect that the MEK was
given the intelligence by an interested government. International
Atomic Energy Agency Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei is among
those skeptical about the MEK. "I'm sure this [group] is not the
original source of the information," he told NEWSWEEK. But never
mind. "This is the first time we got specific information we
could act on."
Paolo Woods for Newsweek
WHAT IF HE HAD THE BOMB? Iranian President-elect Ahmadinejad
The investigations moved slowly but persistently after that, and
in a clear direction. ElBaradei and his teams started a series of
visits to Iran in February 2003. The inspectors took
"environmental samples" to be analyzed by the IAEA's lab at
Seibersdorf outside Vienna. They were looking for telltale traces
of highly enriched uranium, plutonium or other isotopes. At first
the Iranians didn't seem to realize just how powerful an
investigative tool this had become: sort of the atomic equivalent
of DNA testing at a crime scene. When inspectors asked to visit
the Kalaye Electrical Co. in Tehran, for instance, the Iranians
at first put them off, apparently thinking they could clean up
the place. They let the IAEA (called "the Agency" for short)
visit parts of the facilities in March 2003, but not take
samples. Finally, in August 2003, the inspectors were allowed to
return to Kalaye, just to find part of it extensively retiled,
repainted and refloored. Only then were they allowed to take
samples. Yet even after all that, the swipes showed traces of
highly enriched uranium.
With this information in hand, but not yet public, Agency
inspectors found themselves listening to top Iranian officials
claiming their country designed and made all its own centrifuge
equipment, and that it never had been tested with radioactive
substances. "Simply lying in front of everyone," said a diplomat
who watched the show, and asked that his name be withheld because
of the sensitivity of his position.
In October 2003, with France, Germany and Britain holding out the
incentive of improved trade and relations, Tehran said it would
make a "full disclosure" of its nuclear-enrichment programs. But
the more it revealed, the more stunningly apparent it was how
much it had concealed. Efforts to develop a uranium-enrichment
program went back to 1985, and began in earnest in 1987, when
plans for centrifuges were bought from European middlemen with
connections to the network of A. Q. Khan in Pakistan.
Iran claims its right to develop its nuclear program under treaty
obligations, and -offers explanations related to peaceful
projects. It needs to manage its own nuclear-fuel cycle, it says,
because it cannot possibly depend on others, who might be
vulnerable to U.S. pressure, to provide fuel to run civilian
power plants. The Iranians' experience during their war with Iraq
in the 1980s, and with increasingly restrictive U.S. sanctions in
the 1990s, has taught them how vulnerable they can be. Plans to
make Iran nuclear-energy independent are supported throughout
society, and across the political spectrum. So officials like
Asadollah Saboury, vice president for nuclear power plants at the
Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, are frustrated by restraints,
including the suspension of uranium enrichment, put on them by
the international community. "We are wasting our time now," he
says.
Last week the United States put more pressure on, announcing it
would freeze the assets of any company doing business with the
Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, among other firms believed
involved with nuclear proliferation. In the past, some U.S.
officials have hinted at the possibility of military action. But
the United States is already overextended in the complicated mire
of the Middle East. Iran, with its diplomatic, intelligence,
religious and terrorist contacts throughout the region, "has a
lot of assets," says a senior international envoy who would not
be quoted by name because he is in the middle of the sensitive
negotiating process. "Look at what they can do in Iraq, in
Afghanistan, in Lebanon. They can turn the whole Middle East into
a ball of fire, and they know that."
Potential military targets in Iran are hardened and dispersed,
and many may be unknown. If attacked, Iran would almost certainly
"break out" of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that it
claims to honor. And from that point on, Israeli officials
believe, it would take Iran from six months to a year to produce
the makings of an atom bomb.
The Europeans, led by France, Germany and Britain, and now
supported by the United States, have tried to push for a
diplomatic solution. But Iran is using its incipient nuclear
power to bargain for a whole new, and enhanced, relationship with
the West-even as it insists on keeping control over production of
nuclear fuel that could give it the power to build the bomb. The
big threat that can be leveled against Iran on the diplomatic
front is to take it before the Security Council. But what the
Council might actually do, especially if China opposes strong
measures, is an open question. Economic sanctions, in any case,
are likely to have little impact at a time when record oil prices
are bringing the Iranian regime tens of billions of dollars in
windfall revenues every quarter.
Who or what can hold the line to prevent Iran's becoming a
nuclear-weapon state-or a "virtual" one, with all the necessary
technology and materials but no proven bomb? That job will be
left mainly to ElBaradei's IAEA. Often criticized and sometimes
under-mined by the current U.S. administration, it is supposed to
watch over compliance by the signatories to the Non-Proliferation
Treaty. In effect, it's supposed to be a watchdog that watches
its masters.
Because of limitations in the treaty itself, the Agency's ability
to sleuth out serious violations by uncooperative states is
virtually nil. It has had no jurisdiction over Israel, Pakistan
or India, which are not signatories. It lost jurisdiction over
North Korea when Pyongyang pulled out of the treaty. And while it
was able to inspect and verify Iraq's declared nuclear activities
in the 1980s, it completely missed Saddam Hussein's secret
efforts to build a bomb at that time. "We were looking where the
light was shining," says a European diplomat involved with the
investigations, "but we didn't have the right to look in the
shadows where they were building a parallel program."
Today the Agency is more inquisitive, but its mandate to
investigate is still limited. The United States, prodded in part
by concerns for Israel's security, keeps pushing for more
aggressive action. And the Israelis-after developing their own
nuclear weapons in secret-feel sure they know what the Iranians
are up to. An official in Jerusalem directly concerned with the
issue, who did not want to be named because he holds a sensitive
position in government, says, "Israel is convinced that Iran has
three separate sources for developing nukes: a civilian program,
a military program that draws off the civilian one and another
military program that's completely separate." But as the official
explains, "The basic problem is that there's no smoking gun."
Iran insists that it's been cooperative. In 2003, it even turned
over the names of several individuals and companies involved in
covert sales of uranium-enrichment designs and components as part
of the A. Q. Khan network. But when Libya decided to fold its
nuclear program a few weeks later, the trove of details it
supplied about the same network raised questions about just how
much the Iranians might still be hiding. Why had they not
mentioned plans for more-sophisticated centrifuges? If Libya was
given blueprints for the bomb, why hadn't Iran gotten the same
thing? As usual, the Iranians supplied explanations: they left
those centrifuge plans on a shelf; they just never received the
blueprints for the warhead. But the definitive answers-ones that
can be believed-are still pending.
With Babak Dehghanpisheh at Bushehr, Dan Ephron in Tel Aviv and
Michael Hirsh in Washington
c 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
*****************************************************************
4 LA Times: For Iranians, It Was the Economy, Stupid
July 3, 2005 latimes.com : Sunday Opinion : Commentary
COMMENTARY For Iranians, It Was the Economy, Stupid By Reza
Aslan, Reza Aslan is the author of "No god but God: The Origins,
Evolution, and Future of Islam" (Random House, 2005).
Anyone struggling to understand how Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the
obscure, hard-line mayor of Tehran who had never before run for
office, who spent almost no money on his campaign for president
and who barely registered in preelection polls could have
steamrolled former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, the enormously
powerful political moderate and overwhelmingly favored
technocrat, should ask my cousin Karim.
Karim, a 30-year-old engineer from Tehran with a wife, two kids
and his own software business, is a member of the city's
disproportionately large and technologically savvy middle class.
But although in the U.S. the term middle class implies a level of
financial comfort and security, Karim enjoys neither of these.
Like the rest of Tehran's young and highly educated populace,
Karim is forced to wade through an utterly collapsed economy by
performing menial jobs. Besides running his software business, he
works some nights as an unlicensed cab driver; he helps raise
chickens on his aunt's farm; he hires himself out as a tour guide
and translator; and, if he's lucky, he sometimes sells American
contraband compact discs, DVDs, designer purses out of the
trunk of his car.
For his life of toil and struggle, Karim naturally blames Iran's
clerical regime, which holds all the power and, increasingly, all
the wealth in the country. In fact, like many Iranians, he dreams
of one day dragging the clerics out of the government by their
beards and trampling on their bodies in the streets. But first,
he has to figure out a way to feed his family. And that is why he
voted for Ahmadinejad.
Despite the shrill rhetoric coming from Washington, where
officials are now wasting their time trying to determine whether
the incoming Iranian president was or was not a radical student
hostage taker 26 years ago, Ahmadinejad did not win because of
widespread fraud or because reform-minded voters boycotted the
elections (though both played small roles). He won because most
Iranians, especially younger voters like Karim who are the
natural constituency of the reform movement, saw him as the only
candidate willing to talk about what nearly everyone in Iran
regardless of class, degree of piety or political affiliation
is most concerned about: massive inflation, high unemployment
and soaring housing prices.
While Rafsanjani and the other half-dozen or so presidential
candidates stumbled over each other with promises of social
reform and rapprochement with the West, Ahmadinejad promised to
stop corruption in the government, distribute aid to the
outlying provinces, promote healthcare, raise the minimum wage
and help the young with home and business loans. Amid all the
talk of head scarves and pop music from the front-runners,
Ahmadinejad's message had enormous appeal not just for Iran's
poor, but also for the country's youth, many of whom were
attracted to Rafsanjani's promises of reform but who ultimately
voted with their pocketbooks for Ahmadinejad.
In fact, the crumbling economy perhaps even more than the
mass arrests and political repression is to blame for
Iranian's widespread disenchantment with the reform movement.
After all, when nearly a third of the population is unemployed
and about 40% live below the poverty line, it is nearly
impossible to focus on social reform.
In this sense, the U.S. must bear some responsibility for
Ahmadinejad's victory. Because the primary cause of Iran's
economic collapse (in addition to domestic corruption and
ineptitude) is more than two decades of U.S. sanctions,
isolation and containment which, according to a report issued
last year by the Council on Foreign Relations, has only
strengthened the hard-liners, accelerated Iran's nuclear program
and made full democracy a more distant prospect.
Over the last four years, a slew of American foreign policy
experts and Iranian intellectuals, such as Nobel Peace Prize
laureate Shirin Ebadi, have pressed the Bush administration to
abandon its failed policy of isolating Iran. Instead, they
recommend a broad program of economic incentives in exchange for
meaningful reform (something akin to what the administration is
enthusiastically doing for North Korea, a brutal, totalitarian
country in the grip of a murderous megalomaniac with nuclear
weapons and the will to use them). But the administration has
rebuffed these calls, choosing instead to pursue "regime change"
by threatening military action, fomenting dissent and
encouraging Iranians to revolt against the clerical
establishment, even though the vast majority are too preoccupied
with eking out a living to consider rising up en masse.
It is too early to say for certain what the election will mean
for Iran, let alone for Iran's relations with the West. However,
the election of a tough ultraconservative suggests that the time
when the U.S. could have helped move Iran toward greater freedom
by forcing the country out of its isolation and prying it open
to the rest of the world (as it did with the Soviet Union and
China), may have come and gone.
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times |
*****************************************************************
5 ITAR-TASS: Iran insists on its right to use atom for peace
03.07.2005, 09.24
TEHERAN, July 3 (Itar-Tass) - Iran insists on its right to
develop peaceful nuclear technologies and to use nuclear energy
for peaceful purposes, Iranian parliament speaker Gholamali
Haddad Adel who completed his Belgian visit on Saturday evening,
said in an interview with Iranian radio on Sunday.
We again stated at the talks in Brussels that the new
initiatives of the European Union should not be based on demands
to Iran to continue the moratorium on uranium enrichment. The
negotiating process on the Iranian nuclear programme should
continue in the framework of the Paris agreements and take into
account the Islamic Republics right to develop nuclear
technologies, Adel emphasized. He called his three-day visit to
Brussels useful.
Iran had fully suspended activities on uranium enrichment last
November on the basis of the Paris agreement, reached with the
European Union. However, Iranian officials stressed that the
moratorium is of temporary nature and would continue only for a
period of talks with the European Trio. Their next round is to
be held late this month after a lengthy pause in the negotiating
process, caused by the recent presidential elections in Iran.
ITAR-TASS. All rights reserved. You undertake not to copy,
*****************************************************************
6 Al Jazeera: Changes in Irans nuclear policy -
Aljazeera.com
7/3/2005 9:30:00 PM GMT
Khatami has failed to reach suitable results from nuclear talks
with the European Union
A close aide to Irans president-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
revealed on Sunday that the new government will make some
changes to the countrys nuclear policies.
Adopting a new approach towards the nuclear issue and talks
with the European Union will be one of Ahmadinejads top
priorities, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, head of the parliamentary
foreign policy and security commission, said on Sunday, without
giving further details on how different the new approach would
be.
Boroujerdi, moreover, slammed the government of President
Mohammad Khatami for failing to reach suitable results from
nuclear talks with the European Union over the past two years.
With the appointment of the new foreign minister, the framework
of cooperation between government and parliament on the nuclear
issue would become clear, Boroujerdi said.
Rowhani resigns
Also Sunday, some unconfirmed reports stated that moderate chief
nuclear negotiator and secretary of Irans National Security
Council, Hassan Rowhani has resigned.
Boroujerdis remarks come in contrast to a statement made by
Ahmadinejad last week, in which he affirmed that Irans nuclear
policy would not be changed.
Meanwhile, leaders of Russia, Germany and France are due to
discuss Irans nuclear program at a summit that will be held in
Kaliningrad today, a Kremlin official said.
The Russian President Vladimir Putin is holding talks with
French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard
Schroeder in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.
A discussion on the non-proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction, particularly as far as the Iranian nuclear
programme is concerned, is expected in Kaliningrad, the
official said o condition of anonymity.
Ignoring U.S. continuous pressure, Russia is building a reactor
in Irans first nuclear power plant at Bushehr, that will be be
switched on in 2006, the head of Russias federal atomic energy
agency Alexander Rumyantsev said last week.
Russia stressed more than once that Iran has the right to pursue
nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, yet there should be
international controls on the Islamic republics nuclear
program.
Copyright 2005 Al Jazeera Publishing Limited
*****************************************************************
7 MNA: Iran should promptly decide about construction of nuclear plants
- Salehi
2005/07/02
[ src=] Print version [ src=]
TEHRAN, July 2 (MNA) -- Iran’s former envoy to the
International Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Akbar Salehi, said on
Saturday that the construction of nuclear power plants should be
placed high on the agenda of the next government.
“Since construction of power plants is a time-consuming
process, we should not lose time in making a definite
decision,” he told the Mehr News Agency.
Referring to the rising price of oil, Salehi said previous
researches had shown if the price of oil increased to 30 dollars
per barrel it would be much more economical for all countries
including Iran to make use of nuclear energy than fossil fuels.
“With the current price of 60 dollars per barrel that will
probably rise even higher over the next few years, many
countries including China, India and Taiwan have been obliged to
seriously consider the use of nuclear energy; even the U.S. is
reviewing its policy on nuclear power plants.”
Salehi, who is currently deputy in charge of scientific and
technological affairs at the Organization of the Islamic
Conference, noted that the country’s current nuclear
capabilities are the result of the work of many universities and
the country’s industrial potential.
If the government makes a serious decision on the Majlis bill to
produce 20,000 megawatts of nuclear electricity, then it will
necessarily have to make serious efforts in developing nuclear
studies at universities, he observed.
Salehi also said Iran’s nuclear policies are free from
personal preferences.
“It’s the system that decides on the issue and the system is
obliged to move in line with the nation’s demand, that is to
benefit from the right to make use of nuclear energy for
peaceful purposes.”
HL/MS
End
© 2003 Mehr News Agency
*****************************************************************
8 Mehr: Next government should have new view of nuclear issue
MehrNews.com -
2005/07/03
[ src=] Print version [ src=]
TEHRAN, July 3 (MNA) -- Majlis National Security and Foreign
Policy Committee Chairman Aladdin Borujerdi announced on Sunday
that the next government should have a new outlook on Iran’s
nuclear energy program.
Access to nuclear technology is a right of the Iranian nation and
the next government should consider this fact in its future
moves, he told the Mehr News Agency.
“Over the past years we failed to reach a favorable result in
our nuclear negotiations with the European Union big three of
Britain, Germany and France,” Borujerdi noted, adding “This
is why the next government should make more strenuous efforts to
help the country advance in its nuclear program.”
“We are ready to cooperate with the new administration as soon
as it has appointed the next foreign minister,” he observed.
Iran’s diplomacy will not change with new government
Member of the Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy
Committee, Manuchehr Mottaki said on Sunday that Iran’s
foreign policy is based on national interests, the Constitution,
and the instructions of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic
Revolution.
“The Islamic Republic’s diplomacy will not change with the
new administration,” he told reporters after the Majlis open
session.
Mottaki called the recent moves against Iran’s newly elected
president by the U.S. as a psychological warfare.
“The next government is a ‘government of work’ seeking to
develop the country and we consider any move aimed to deprive
the administration from implementing its plans as an organized
attempt against the country,” he added.
Majlis speaker says foreign ministry did not neglect its duty
Majlis speaker Gholam Ali Haddad Adel presented a report on his
recent three-day trip to Belgium ahead of the Majlis open
session on Sunday. Haddad Adel noted that his visit to Brussels
took place at the invitation of his Belgian counterpart, adding
Iran-Belgium ties have expanded over the recent months.
He noted that in his meetings with President of the Belgian
Parliament's Lower House Herman De Croo, Foreign Minister Karel
De Gucht and Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, the two sides
discussed avenues for boosting bilateral relations as well as
issues of mutual interest.
Haddad Adel said that in his meeting with the EU Foreign Policy
chief Javier Solana, the issue of human rights and the Iranian
parliament’s position toward the peaceful use of nuclear
energy were discussed.
“Two minor incidents also occurred during the trip, which were
broadcast in a different light,” he went on to say.
“Iranian officials refuse to attend banquets where alcoholic
beverages are served but the Belgian side did not consent to
this and the ceremony was finally cancelled.”
The Majlis speaker stressed that the issue had put no influence
on the process of bilateral ties.
He added that the Iranian delegation also cancelled a meeting
with Senate female president Anne-Marie Lizin since the Belgian
side did not respect the Islamic principles that do not allow
men to shake hands with women.
“I didn’t feel the foreign ministry had neglected any part
its duty” he said.
“In fact foreign ministry officials performed their duties
quite efficiently,” he underlined.
MPs call on ministries to take action
A group of MPs called on various executive officials on Sunday
to pursue certain issues in separate written warnings.
Teymur Ali Asgari, an MP from Mashhad, called for holding an
unofficial session attended by the intelligence minister for
dealing with forces involved in the organized effort to ruin
certain candidates during the presidential election campaigns.
MP Sattar Hedayatkhah urged the foreign ministry to adopt a firm
position against British officials’ interfering remarks on
Iran’s presidential poll.
Three newly elected MPs sworn in
Three MPs elected during the Majlis by-elections were sworn in.
The swearing-in ceremony was held for MPs from Gachsaran, Ali
Morad Jabbari, from Qorveh, Emad Hosseini and from Marand and
Jolfa, Karim Shafe.
According to Article 3 of the Majlis bylaws and Article 67 of
the Constitution, the MP-elects should be sworn in upon their
first presence in the parliament.
HL/MS
End
MNA
© 2003 Mehr News Agency
*****************************************************************
9 Guardian Unlimited: The lies behind the lies
[UP]
Roy Greenslade salutes Dilip Hiro's Secrets and Lies, a
depressing but magisterial assessment of the reasoning that led
to the invasion of Iraq
Saturday July 2, 2005
The Observer
[Secrets and Lies by Dilip Hiro]
Buy Secrets and Lies at the Guardian bookshop
Secrets and Lies: The True Story of the Iraq War
by Dilip Hiro
564pp, Politico's, 9.99
Millions across the world who marched in the hope of preventing
the invasion of Iraq were angered by the fact that their
opposition was ignored. If they read this book their anger will
be redoubled. But the people who will surely feel even more
embittered are those who were taken in, having been persuaded by
the arguments of President Bush and Prime Minister Blair to
support the war.
Dilip Hiro coolly dismantles the political lies, distortions and
obfuscations that allowed the United States and Britain to
launch an illegal invasion of Iraq. That he does the job so
meticulously - even, arguably, in too detailed a fashion on
occasion - makes his overall indictment even more powerful than
the scatter-gun approach of other war critics, such as Michael
Moore.
Hiro brings to the subject a thorough knowledge of the Middle
East, having written extensively about the region in several of
his previous 26 books. Here is an author for whom, to paraphrase
Bush's secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, there are no
unknown unknowns. He has made it his business to know exactly
how Bush's White House team managed to prosecute a war based on
a giant fabrication. That, of course, was the claim that Iraq's
dictator, Saddam Hussein, had defied the United Nations by
holding on to weapons of mass destruction that presented a
threat to global stability. In order to support the central lie,
to give it the semblance of credibility, there were scores of
intertwined supporting lies. Saddam was not linked to al-Qaida
and was not, therefore, responsible for 9/11. He did not buy
uranium oxide from Niger. Iraq did not have a fleet of unmanned
aircraft nor did it have mobile labs to produce chemical and
biological weapons. Nor was it operating poison factories.
Hiro is painstaking as he holds up every piece of fake
intelligence to scrutiny, revealing both its falsity and the
propaganda use to which it was put. Every excuse advanced by
Bush and Blair for the invasion is shown to be hollow, as they
seek to conceal the main reason for their pre-emptive strike:
the desire for regime change. In some of the most telling
passages, Hiro reveals the key roles played by the sinister
group who surrounded Bush, such as his deputy, Dick Cheney;
Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz; the under secretary of
defence, Douglas Feith; the defence adviser Richard Perle; the
president's chief political adviser, Karl Rove; and, of course,
the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. Meanwhile, the
senior man, Colin Powell, the secretary of state, was largely
isolated from Bush's gung-ho squad. Despite his policy
disagreements however, he performed important tasks on behalf of
the warriors, none more so than his lengthy speech to the UN
Security Council in the build-up to the invasion. Hiro's
point-by-point rebuttal of Powell's allegations is masterly.
In similar fashion he destroys the so-called evidence in Blair's
now infamous dossiers on WMD and the far-fetched claim about
Iraq being able to deploy such weapons within 45 minutes.
Evidently, even the Americans scoffed at the statement, though
they grew less concerned themselves about the WMD reasoning
because they had successfully convinced their public that Saddam
was one of the 9/11 culprits.
Hiro mounts convincing evidence that Bush was determined to
invade Iraq on virtually any pretext soon after his first
election victory. He also shows how, some seven months before
the war, US special forces were operating within Iraq at the
behest of Rumsfeld. Their work was specifically linked to an
invasion that had not even been raised with the UN and while its
weapons inspectors were still carrying out their tasks with what
later transpired to be great efficiency.
The geopolitical manoeuvres are certainly riveting, but the more
human, and inhuman, story emerges in the passages that tell of
the invasion itself. There are several examples of just how
badly the civilian Iraqi population suffered as the
Anglo-American forces swept through their country. But the
haunting moments come, just as they did in the revelations about
the reality of the Vietnam war, when one discovers that neither
politicians nor military leaders ever tell the truth. For
example, the Pentagon strenuously denied that it had used napalm
in Iraq, despite an Australian correspondent witnessing its use.
That wasn't napalm, said a spokesman, it was a Mark 77 firebomb.
As Hiro observes this statement was "cynical sophistry", since
the Mark 77 is a mixture of kerosene and polystyrene, while
napalm is a mixture of jet fuel and polystyrene. The result is
just the same: death in a fireball.
There were also official denials about the use of lethal, and
indiscriminate, cluster bombs. Yet Hiro is not only able to
state that 1,566 cluster bombs were dropped along with more than
20,000 cluster munitions, he also reproduces a map to show
exactly where they were used.
In the greater scheme of things it was a small lie, just one
among so many. The promulgation of pre-war lies was followed by
further lies during the war. Now Bush and Blair tell us that
life in post-Saddam Iraq is improving. But why should we believe
them?
&183; Roy Greenslade is professor of journalism at London's
City University. To order Secrets and Lies for 9.99 with free
UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to
www.guardian.co.uk/bookshop
[UP]
Guardian Unlimited Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
*****************************************************************
10 Korea: Digital Chosunilbo: New York Contacts Between Korean and U.S. Officials End with
> Updated July.3,2005 18:17 KST
A series of contacts between officials from the U.S. and North
Korea, as well as North and South Korea, have ended without a
clear breakthrough regarding the stalled talks on North Korea's
nuclear weapons program.
While the American side is saying that North Korea has not
produced a date for the next round of talks, the North Korean
side is saying it will wait for the next move by the U.S.
Two days of contacts in New York among officials from Seoul,
Pyongyang and Washington wrapped up on Friday with no clear
progress toward the next round of talks on dismantling North
Korea's nuclear arsenal. While all three sides say frank
discussions were held during the security conference, organized
by the U.S. National Committee on American Foreign Policy, none
were forthcoming on the specifics of the contacts.
The U.S. State Department confirmed that its envoy Joseph
DeTrani met with Li Gun, the Pyongyang official at the
conference, but stressed that there was no negotiating during
the meeting.
"It was a contact. I'm not going to characterize it beyond that.
I have said what we and the other members of the six-party talks
continue to wait to hear from the North Koreans is that they
will return to the talks. That's what matters."
As for the North Koreans, Li Gun told reporters after the
conference that he had demanded the U.S. withdraw its reference
to North Korea as an "outpost of tyranny," reiterating that the
Bush administration had to give Pyongyang a reason to return to
the multilateral nuclear talks.
Wi Sung-lac, the South Korean official attending the gathering
had a positive assessment, saying that the contacts have
improved understanding and trust between North Korea and the
U.S. He also said he expects further dialogue between the two
sides in other formats and through other channels.
Arirang News
*****************************************************************
11 Daily Yomiuri: N. Korea gives no hint of move on 6-way talks
Takao Hishinuma Yomiuri Shimbun Correspondent
A senior North Korean diplomat participating in a three-day
conference that ended here Friday, demanded the United States
withdraw its reference to his country's government as
tyrannical, but failed to show any sign that Pyongyang would
return to six-way talks on its nuclear program any time soon.
"I urged [the U.S. officials] to withdraw the 'outpost of
tyranny' remark," Ri Gun, director of the North Korean Foreign
Ministry's American Affairs Bureau, told reporters after the
closed-door conference on Northeast Asian security that was
sponsored by a U.S. think tank.
Ri was referring to the remarks made earlier this year by U.S.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as she described North
Korea's regime.
Officials and scholars from all participating countries in the
six-way talks--Japan, China, North and South Koreas, Russia and
the United States--took part in the three-day New York
conference.
A U.S. government source said prior to the conference that the
administration had expected to hear some positive remarks from
Ri about setting a date for the next round of six-way talks, the
last of which were held in June 2004.
The source said the expectation was raised last month when North
Korean leader Kim Jong Il told a South Korean delegation that
his government might return to the talks in July. (Jul. 3, 2005)
Copyright The Yomiuri Shimbun.
*****************************************************************
12 Xinhua: US, DPRK optimistic about resumption of six-party talks
www.xinhuanet.com
www.chinaview.cn 2005-07-02 09:20:29
NEW YORK, July 1 (Xinhuanet) -- The academic conference on
northeast Asian security with participants from the United
States and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK)
concluded on Friday on an optimistic note that the six-party
talks on the Korean nuclear issue will be resumed.
The conference, which was held on Thursday and Friday, was
co-hosted by the National Committee on American Foreign Policy
(NCAFP) and the DPRK Institute of Disarmament and Peace.
Participants at the symposium included Ri Gun,
director-general from the DPRK Foreign Ministry and negotiator
on the nuclear issue, Joseph Detrani, the US State Department's
special envoy for the six-way talks, Jim Foster, director of the
State Department's Office of Korean Affairs, Henry Kissinger,
former US Secretary of State, George D. Schwab, president of the
National Committee on American Foreign Policy, and officials
from China, Russia, South Korea and Japan.
The officials discussed the nuclear issue on the Korean
Peninsula during the meeting, which, according to a press
release at the end of the meeting, was the third such conference
co-hosted by the two organizations.
In the press release, participants said the purpose for
organizing these dialogues is "to foster mutual understanding
among the parties to the official six-party talks."
Conference participants agreed that discussions were frank
and constructive and they are optimistic that the DPRK will
return to the six-party talks.
By June last year, three rounds of the six-party talks,
which involved the DPRK, South Korea, the United States, China,
Japan and Russia, had been held. The talks have since then been
stalled as the DPRK accused the United States of adopting a
hostile policy toward Pyongyang.
To revive the talks, officials from the United States and
the DPRK held negotiations last November, December and this May
respectively. Enditem
Copyright 2003 Xinhua News Agency. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
13 Korea Times: S. Korea, US to Present Joint Proposal to NK
Hankooki.com > The Korea Times > Nation
By Lee Jin-woo Staff Reporter
South Korea and the United States are ready to combine their
proposals to convince North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons
program, a senior Seoul official said.
Wrapping up his five-day visit to Washington on Friday,
Unification Minister Chung Dong-young said the two allies agreed
to combine the proposal the U.S. has presented in the third
round of six-way talks with South Koreas new ``important
proposal, so they could see ``substantial progress once
a new round of six-party talks is held.
``We agreed that the next six-party talks, once resumed, will
gain momentum if we combine the proposals from the previous
talks and South Koreas recent one, he said. He had a
series of meetings with top U.S. officials involved in
negotiations with North Korea, including Vice President Dick
Cheney.
Chung did not elaborate on the details of his talks with Cheney,
saying they had agreed not to disclose them. He only said the
vice president listened carefully and emphasized that a result
should be made promptly through peaceful and diplomatic
six-party talks.
Chung, who also heads the standing committee of South Koreas
National Security Council (NSC), met U.S. Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice and National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley.
The minister gave a detailed explanation to the high-level
American officials concerning his one-on-one meeting with North
Korean leader Kim Jong-il on June 17. Kim indicated his country
could rejoin the nuclear talks in July if Washington treats his
regime with respect.
On Thursday, Christopher Hill, assistant secretary of state and
the U.S. point man on the North Korean nuclear issue, told Chung
that Washington has no problems with Seouls much-vaunted
proposal, the contents of which has yet to be publicized.
Experts believe the ``important proposal includes calls for
simultaneous concessions by the U.S. and North Korea and a large
amount of economic aid to the impoverished state in return for
its denuclearization. Some news articles reported it would be a
kind of North Korean ``Marshall Plan, referring to the U.S.
program to rebuild Europe following World War II.
In the third round of talks in Beijing, South Korea, the U.S.
and North Korea presented their respective proposals in which
the North would dismantle its nuclear programs in exchange for
some rewards.
North Korea demanded various incentives for its nuclear freeze
from the very initial stages, such as a security guarantee and
economic aid from the U.S. But, the U.S. suggested such
incentives could be offered only at the end of a comprehensive
denuclearization process.
With both refusing to budge, Seoul offered a three-stage
proposal, which calls for verbal promises to address each
others concerns, followed by ``reciprocal actions toward
denuclearization, and finally, the normalization of diplomatic
ties between the two nations.
Meanwhile, the unofficial meeting between U.S. and North Korean
nuclear negotiators at an academic conference in New York ended
without any substantially good news for the Norths return to
the negotiation table, but room for the possibility in the
future.
Both Ri Gun, Pyongyangs deputy chief delegate to the six-way
talks, and his U.S. counterpart Joseph DeTrani described the
meeting as a good chance to exchange opinions, implying more
talks will follow to discuss resuming the negotiations.
The two Koreas, the U.S., China, Japan and Russia held three
rounds of six-party talks in Beijing until a year ago, to
resolve the growing North Korean nuclear crisis.
The nuclear row erupted in 2002 when U.S. officials claimed
North Korea had admitted to having a secret uranium-enrichment
program, in addition to its known plutonium-based arms program
frozen under a 1994 deal between the two sides.
things@koreatimes.co.kr 07-03-2005 17:16
*****************************************************************
14 Bushs Uranium Lies: Case For A Special Prosecutor
Date: Sun, 3 Jul 2005 02:27:04 -0500 (CDT)
http://democracyrising.us/content/view/268/164
Bushs Uranium Lies: Case For A Special Prosecutor
Written by Francis T. Mandanici
Wednesday, 29 June 2005
Some have observed that the Bush Administration's claims that Iraq
had weapons of mass destruction were not just good faith mistakes
but actual lies. Some have even recently compared President Bush's
false claims about Iraq to the Watergate scandal that led to President
Nixon's resignation. See Truth And Deceit by Bob Herbert and Don't
Follow the Money by Frank Rich in The New York Times, June 2, 12,
2005. Some, such as the organizations AfterDowningStreet and
DemocracyRising.US, have even called for the initiation of impeachment
proceedings based in part on the Downing Street Memo that revealed
that according to a British intelligence official the Bush
Administration prior to the war against Iraq fixed the intelligence
and facts to justify the war.[1]
In response to press reports on the Downing Street Memo, Congressman
John Conyers and 90 other Congressional Democrats in a May 5 letter
to President Bush asked him if there was a coordinated effort to
fix the intelligence and facts to justify the war.[2] Congressman
Conyers and other Congressional Democrats on June 16 held an
unofficial hearing concerning the Downing Street Memo that resembled
an impeachment inquiry.
Although the Downing Street Memo clearly raises serious questions
about President Bush's honesty about Iraq and some claim it to be
a smoking gun, it pales in comparison to the public record that
already exists concerning his specific claim that Iraq had sought
uranium for a nuclear weapon, which he presented as a key reason
to justify the war rather than wait for United Nations weapons
inspectors to finish their work. When the dots in the public record
are connected on that matter, including a close analysis of
Congressional investigative reports and resolutions, there is a
strong case that President Bush and senior members of his Administration
made fraudulent claims to Congress. Since criminal statutes prohibit
making fraudulent statements to Congress and obstructing its
functions, the Justice Department should pursuant to its regulations
appoint an outside special counsel. A specific motive for the
uranium claims that the Administration made would have been to
thwart the efforts of Congress and the UN to delay the start of the
war. The current public record is as strong as the Starr Report
that commenced the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton
and is surely strong enough to require the initial appointment of
a special counsel to conduct a criminal investigation. Such a
special counsel investigation could then lead to impeachment
proceedings, as well as expand to cover other possible fraudulent
claims.
President Bush and his senior officials made five uranium claims,
which along with other claims were catalogued and analyzed in the
report Iraq On The Record (IR) that was prepared by the Minority
Staff of the House Committee On Government Reform and released on
March 16, 2004.[3]
Concerning the uranium claims, that report including its database
states that (1) President Bush on January 20, 2003 told Congress
that Iraq's disclosure to the UN (which was supposed to reveal all
of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction) "failed to deal with issues
which have arisen since 1998, including ... attempts to acquire
uranium and the means to enrich it"; (2) President Bush on January
28, 2003 in his State of the Union Address told Congress that the
"British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought
significant quantities of uranium from Africa"; (3) then National
Security Advisor and now Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on
January 23, 2003 in an op-ed article stated that Iraq's disclosure
to the UN "fail(ed) to account for or explain Iraq's efforts to get
uranium from abroad"; (4) then Secretary of State Colin Powell on
January 26, 2003 in a speech stated "Why is Iraq still trying to
procure uranium and the special equipment needed to transform it
into material for nuclear weapons?"; and (5) Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld on January 29, 2003 at a press conference stated
that Hussein's "regime has the design for a nuclear weapon, was
working on several different methods of enriching uranium, and
recently was discovered seeking significant quantities of uranium
from Africa." IR pp. 13-15, and IR Database (Speaker: All; Keyword:
uranium; Subject: Nuclear Capabilities; choose Show All). All five
uranium statements were made within a nine-day period between January
20 and 29, 2003.
Furthermore President Bush's above two uranium claims are in documents
that he submitted to Congress. President Bush's 2003 State of the
Union Address that he gave to Congress is labeled House Document
108-1.[4] The report Iraq On The Record quotes the sentence
concerning uranium in President Bush's State of the Union Address
but the prior sentence is also important since it mentions the
purpose for the uranium. As shown by the document President Bush
told Congress that the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) confirmed in the 1990's that "Saddam Hussein had an advanced
nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a nuclear
weapon, and was working on five different methods of enriching
uranium for a bomb. The British government has learned that Saddam
Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from
Africa."
The statement that President Bush made to Congress on January 20,
2003 that Iraq's report to the UN "failed to deal with issues which
have arisen since 1998, including ... attempts to acquire uranium
and the means to enrich it" was made in a report that President
Bush submitted to Congress that is labeled House Document 108-23.[5]
After the above sentence, President Bush reported to Congress: "In
short, we have not seen anything that indicates that the Iraqi
regime has made a strategic decision to disarm. On the contrary,
we believe that Iraq is actively working to disrupt, deny, and
defeat (UN) inspection efforts." Public Law 107-243, which was
the war resolution that Congress passed earlier in October 2002
authorizing President Bush to use military force in Iraq, required
President Bush to submit the above report.
The report Iraq On The Record states that all of the Bush
Administration's above uranium claims were misleading. IR pp. 3,
13-15. Concerning the importance of the claims the report states:
"Another significant component of the Administration's nuclear
claims was the assertion that Iraq had sought to import uranium
from Africa. As one of few new pieces of intelligence, this claim
was repeated multiple times by Administration officials as proof
that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program." IR p.
13 (emphasis added).
The report further states that the above officials (President Bush,
Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary Powell and National Security Advisor
Rice) who made the uranium claims and Vice President Richard Cheney
made a total of 237 misleading statements about the threat that
Iraq posed (including the above mentioned uranium claims). IR pp.
ii, 3. The statements started on March 17, 2002, which was one
year before the start of the war. IR pp. ii, 3. Most (161) of the
misleading statements were made prior to the war while 76 misleading
statements were made after the war started to justify the decision
to go to war. IR pp. ii, 3-4. The 237 misleading statements covered
four areas: statements that Iraq posed an urgent threat, statements
about Iraq's nuclear capabilities (such as the uranium claims),
statements about Iraq's chemical and biological weapons programs,
and statements about Iraq's support for al Qaeda. IR p. 6. Minus
the 51 misleading statements of Vice President Cheney, the other
four officials who made the misleading uranium claims made a total
of 186 misleading statements. IR pp. 3, 26.
As observed in Iraq On The Record, the "Administration's statements
about Iraq's nuclear capabilities had a large impact on congressional
and public perceptions about the threat posed by Iraq." IR p. 8.
The most glaring examples of the misleading statements are the above
five uranium claims, which are discussed herein.
The report Iraq On The Record states that the uranium claims were
misleading because the Central Intelligence Agency had earlier
expressed doubts about the claim in two memos to the White House
including one addressed to then National Security Advisor Rice, and
the then CIA Director George Tenet argued personally against using
the claim in a telephone call to Rice's deputy, Stephen Hadley. IR
pp. 14-15, and IR Database (Speaker: All; Keyword: uranium; Subject:
Nuclear Capabilities; choose Show All).
In addition to Iraq On The Record, the full Senate Select Committee
On Intelligence released on July 7, 2004 an investigative report
entitled Report On The U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar
Intelligence Assessments On Iraq (SR).[6] That report cites President
Bush's above two uranium statements and Secretary Powell's uranium
statement, SR pp. 63-64, 66, and reveals many more details of what
President Bush and his senior officials did not disclose.
President Bush and his senior officials made their uranium claims
in January 2003, and the Senate report mentions that some in the
American intelligence community including in the CIA had believed
the uranium claim. SR pp. 47, 52, 62. Also the report states that
the CIA had actually cleared two proposed presidential speeches
that the White House's National Security Council (NSC) had sent to
the CIA in September 2002 that contained the claims that Iraq was
caught trying to purchase 500 tons of uranium and that Iraq had
sought large amounts of uranium from Africa. SR pp. 49, 51.
President Bush did not use the approved language publicly. SR pp.
49, 51.
The Senate report states that the British government on September
24, 2002 published a White Paper stating that "there is intelligence
that Iraq has sought the supply of significant quantities of uranium
from Africa." SR p. 50. The above information in British White
Paper did not state that the attempt was recent.
The Senate report then reveals that a CIA analyst in September 2002
suggested to a staff member of the White House's NSC that the White
House remove from a proposed speech the claim that Iraq attempted
to acquire uranium from Africa. SR p. 51. According to the CIA
analyst the NSC staff member responded by stating that removing the
claim would leave the British "flapping in the wind." SR p. 51.
The Senate report reveals that in October 2002, the White House's
NSC sent to the CIA a draft of a speech that President Bush was to
give in Cincinnati that contained the statement that Iraq had been
caught attempting to purchase up to 500 tons of uranium from Africa.
SR p. 55. Due to the concerns expressed by a CIA Iraq nuclear
analyst, the CIA's Associate Deputy Director for Intelligence faxed
a memo to the Deputy National Security Advisor (Hadley) and to the
speechwriters suggesting that they remove the uranium claim from
the speech because the amount was in dispute, the claim was debatable,
the CIA had told Congress that the British had exaggerated the
issue, and Iraq already had 500 tons of uranium in its inventory.
SR pp. 55-56. (The reference to telling Congress would be to certain
select intelligence committees that cannot divulge the secret
information to all members of Congress).
The NSC then sent to the CIA another draft of the speech containing
a revised statement that Iraq had been caught attempting to purchase
substantial amounts of uranium from Africa. SR p. 56. The CIA's
Associate Deputy Director believed that the NSC had not addressed
the uranium information in its later draft and alerted the CIA
Director (Tenet). SR p. 56. The CIA Director responded by telling
the Deputy National Security Advisor (Hadley) that President Bush
should not provide any facts on the issue in the speech because CIA
analysts told him that the "reporting (on the uranium claim) was
weak". SR p. 56. After the White House's NSC removed the claim
from the speech, the CIA sent a second fax to the White House stating
the "evidence (on the claim) is weak". SR p. 56. On October 7,
2002, President Bush delivered his speech in Cincinnati and kept
out the uranium claim. SR p. 57.
The Senate report states that the CIA on October 11, 2002 received
copies of documents that supposedly supported the claim that Iraq
had a deal to obtain uranium from Africa. SR p. 58. On January
13, 2003 (which was before the first above mentioned uranium claim
of January 20, 2003), the Iraq nuclear analyst for the State
Department's intelligence bureau (INR) sent an e-mail to several
American intelligence community analysts outlining the reasons why
he believed that the document supposedly supporting the uranium
deal was probably a "hoax" and a "forgery". SR p. 62.
After the State Department's intelligence bureau alerted the CIA
and Defense Intelligence Agency about the problems with the documents,
said agencies published assessments that, as summarized in the
Senate report, stated that "Iraq may have been seeking uranium from
Africa." SR pp. 77, 62, 64 (emphasis added).
Concerning the State of the Union Address of January 28, 2003, the
Senate report reveals that a NSC official at the White House and a
CIA official discussed the draft of that speech that the White House
had sent to the CIA that stated "we know that (Hussein) has recently
sought to buy uranium in Africa." SR pp. 64-65 (emphasis added).
The final draft that President Bush actually gave was that the
"British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought
significant quantities of uranium from Africa." SR p. 66 (emphasis
added). Both officials stated that there was never a discussion
on the credibility of the reporting. SR pp. 65-66. The stated
reason for the switch from we' to the British was the desire to
identify in the speech a source for the uranium claim that was not
classified, and the British White Paper source was not classified
while the American source was classified. SR pp. 65-66. However,
the original draft that the White House sent apparently did not
name any source for America's knowledge but merely said we'. There
was really no need to further identify any sources. Concerning
other claims against Hussein, President Bush in his speech actually
used the phrase intelligence sources' without providing any specifics
on the sources.[7]
Thus it might be argued that the forgotten reason why the switch
was made from "we know" to the "British government has learned" was
that the CIA was not really comfortable with the "we know" especially
since that might include the CIA Director who had previously told
the White House that the President should not make any uranium claim
because CIA analysts believed it was weak. It is plausible that
the CIA became comfortable with the speech only when it was changed
and merely repeated what the British had stated rather than what
the CIA Director knew. The CIA official had originally told the
Senate committee that he had told the White House official to remove
parts of the draft that contained the words "Niger" and "500 tons"
because of concerns about the sources and methods but he later
recanted that claim since such words were not in the draft of the
speech. SR p. 65.
The Senate report also states that according to the National
Intelligence Officer (NIO), on January 24, 2003 the NSC "believed
the nuclear case (against Iraq) was weak" and requested additional
information from the intelligence community. SR p. 240. The
intelligence officer then provided the NSC with portions of the
earlier October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which
mentioned that Iraq had vigorously tried to procure uranium and
which according to the intelligence officer "outlined possible
uranium acquisition attempts in Niger, Somalia, and possibly the
Congo." SR p. 240. However, the NSC members would have had the
NIE report for months and would have already read it. The NIE
contained the opinion of the State Department's intelligence bureau
that "the claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium from Africa
are ... highly dubious." SR pp. 53-54. Thus no additional information
was provided that would change the weak nuclear case against Iraq
concerning the uranium claim.
President Bush chairs the NSC as President, and the other key members
of the NSC include the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State,
and the National Security Advisor. Thus the very people who were
claiming in January 2003 that Iraq had sought uranium were the key
members of a council that believed in January 2003 that the nuclear
case against Iraq was weak.
The Senate report also states that after President Bush told the
American Congress on January 28, 2003 that the British had learned
that Iraq had recently sought significant quantities of uranium
from Africa, the American government a few days later on February
4, 2003 privately told the UN's IAEA that it "cannot confirm (the
uranium) reports". SR pp. 67-68. On that date the American
government gave the IAEA copies of documents that supposedly supported
the claim that Iraq attempted to acquire the uranium. SR p. 67.
On March 3, 2003, the IAEA told the American government that the
documents were forgeries. SR p. 69.
After the United States on February 4, 2003 gave the IAEA the forged
documents along with the warning that the uranium reports could not
be confirmed, it does not appear that the Bush Administration ever
again risked making the public claim that Iraq had attempted to
acquire uranium from Africa. The next day on February 5 Secretary
of State Powell gave a speech to the UN in which he did not make
any uranium claims but as noted above he had made a uranium claim
in an earlier speech on January 26, 2003. SR pp. 68, 64.
According to the presidential commission, the Commission On The
Intelligence Capabilities Of The United States Regarding Weapons
Of Mass Destruction and its report released on March 31, 2005 (PCR),
Secretary of State Powell during meetings at the CIA to vet his UN
speech was informed that there were doubts about the reporting on
the Niger uranium matter and he did not include it in his speech
for that reason. PCR p. 213, note 210.[8] Thus the Bush
Administration stopped using the uranium claim the day after the
IAEA obtained possession of the forged documents that supposedly
supported the claim.
Approximately two weeks after the IAEA told the Bush Administration
that the documents were forgeries, the Bush Administration on March
19, 2003 commenced the war against Iraq. According to the presidential
commission, the Iraq Survey Group that conducted investigations
after the United States commenced the war "found no evidence that
Iraq sought uranium from abroad after 1991." PCR p. 64. President
Bush and his senior officials had a motive for their misleading
uranium claims that they made in late January 2003 - they needed
to maintain support for the war and to thwart efforts of Congress
and the UN to delay the start of the war. Although President Bush
and said officials had obtained the Congressional resolution for
the war against Iraq in October 2002, they did not start the war
until five months later in March 2003 and during that five months
they needed to maintain support for the war resolution that Congress
could have withdrawn if Congress believed that the purpose of the
resolution had been accomplished. The war resolution had not been
unanimous, the vote in the House had been 296 to 133, and the vote
in the Senate had been 77 to 23, and the resolution had strings
attached. The resolution, Public Law 107-243, Sec. 4, stated that
the "President shall, at least once every 60 days, submit to Congress
a report on matters relevant to this joint resolution". One of the
grounds for the war resolution was that international weapons
inspectors had left Iraq in 1998 because Iraq had thwarted their
efforts, and another ground was the belief of Congress that Iraq
was "actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability". As observed
in Iraq On The Record, the Bush Administration's barrage of misleading
statements about Iraq's nuclear capabilities had a "large impact
on congressional and public perceptions about the threat posed by
Iraq." IR p. 8.
After Congress passed the war resolution, the UN Security Council
on November 8, 2002 passed Resolution 1441 that demanded a declaration
by Iraq of all its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and
programs, and which also set forth an enhanced weapons inspections
regimen in Iraq that gave inspectors unrestricted access to any
sites and buildings as well as the right to remove and or destroy
any prohibited weapons.[9] The resolution stated that if Iraq
provided a false declaration and did not cooperate then there could
be serious consequences.
Iraq then agreed to the resolution and on November 27, 2002 allowed
UN weapons inspectors to reenter Iraq, and on December 7 Iraq
provided a declaration that it had no weapons of mass destruction
or programs.
According to Bob Woodward's Plan Of Attack, p. 253, in the first
week of January 2003 President Bush discussed with then National
Security Advisor Rice the loss of support for the war. According
to Woodward the press reports of Iraqis cooperating with UN weapons
inspectors by opening up buildings "infuriated" President Bush who
believed in Woodward's words that the "unanimous international
consensus of the November (UN) resolution was beginning to fray."
President Bush told Rice that the "pressure isn't holding together".
President Bush also commented about the antiwar protests in the
United States and Europe.
On January 27, 2003, which was the day before President Bush gave
his State of the Union Address to Congress in which he claimed that
Iraq had recently sought significant quantities of uranium from
Africa, the UN issued a press release stating that "it would appear
that Iraq had decided in principle to provide cooperation on substance
in order to complete the disarmament task through inspection."[10]
Although there were some outstanding issues and questions concerning
chemical and biological weapons, the press release stated regarding
nuclear weapons that the UN weapons inspectors had reported that
after 60 days of inspections with a total of 139 inspections at 106
locations they had found "no evidence that Iraq had revived its
nuclear weapons programme" and "no prohibited nuclear activities
had been identified". The press release stated that the inspectors
had investigated the claim that Iraq had sought to import uranium
and that the Iraqis denied the claim but the inspectors would
continue to pursue the matter.
The UN press release concluded with the UN chief nuclear weapons
inspector's statement that "With our verification system now in
place, barring exceptional circumstances, and provided there is
sustained proactive cooperation by Iraq, we should be able, within
the next few months, to provide credible assurance that Iraq has
no nuclear weapons programme. These few months would be a valuable
investment in peace because they could help us avoid a war."
In response to the fact that Iraq had allowed UN weapons inspectors
to reenter Iraq and in apparent response to the same press reports
that President Bush read, five members of Congress on January 7,
2003 submitted a resolution, H.Con.Res.2, which expressed the sense
of Congress that Congress should repeal the war resolution in order
to allow more time for the UN weapons inspections.[11] The new
resolution contended that the threat posed by Iraq had lessened
because after the war resolution was passed Iraq then "allowed
international weapons inspectors to re-enter Iraq in order to
identify and destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction stockpiles
and development capabilities." The new resolution stated "Congress
should reexamine the threat posed by Iraq, including by allowing
time to review fully and accurately the findings of the international
weapons inspectors". As of February 25, 2003, seven more members
of Congress signed onto the resolution as cosponsors.
The Bush White House would certainly have learned about the new
resolution since, according to Woodward's Plan of Attack, pp. 137,
171, the White House has a congressional relations office that it
runs like an intelligence agency and which has 25 people who monitor
everything in Congress including closed-door briefings.
Also, according to Woodward's Plan of Attack, p. 286, in January
2003 the Bush White House "was planning a big rollout of speeches
and documents to counter Saddam and the growing international antiwar
movement."
On February 5, 2003, thirty members of Congress submitted another
resolution, H.J.Res.20, to actually repeal the war resolution.[12]
Prior to the start of the war on March 19, 2003, eight more members
of Congress signed onto the February 5 resolution to repeal the
earlier war resolution, bringing the total to thirty-eight members
of Congress who supported the repeal resolution since it had been
introduced.
Thus during the nine-day period of January 20 to 29, 2003 when
President Bush submitted the above reports to Congress and his
senior officials made their speeches and statements about the
uranium, they were facing and apparently infuriated by Iraq's
cooperation with UN Resolution 1441. More specifically, when
President Bush submitted his State of The Union Address to Congress
on January 28, 2003 in which he claimed that Iraq had recently
sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa, he was obviously
aware of the fact that the UN had issued a press release the previous
day stating that Iraq was cooperating with UN weapons inspectors
and that after 60 days of inspections the weapons inspectors had
found no evidence that Iraq had revived its nuclear program.
More significantly, when President Bush and his senior official
made their uranium claims between January 20 and 29 there was pending
the Congressional resolution of January 7 that suggested that the
purpose of the war resolution had been achieved because Iraq had
allowed weapons inspectors to reenter Iraq to make inspections as
well as to destroy any weapons of mass destruction. As mentioned
earlier, one of the grounds for the war resolution was that weapons
inspectors had left Iraq in 1998 because Iraq had thwarted their
efforts. Another ground was the belief of Congress that Iraq was
actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability. Thus many in Congress
who had voted for the war resolution might now actually claim victory
and declare that Hussein had surrendered, perhaps not to an invading
army but to the UN and if he flinched then he would face that army.
Thus to thwart the UN and Congressional efforts to delay the start
of the war, President Bush and said officials needed to show that
Iraq posed an immediate threat and that the UN weapons inspections
were not working. Although they were the key members of the NSC
which believed that the nuclear case against Iraq was weak, President
Bush and his said senior officials in January 2003 in order to
deceive the UN and Congress into believing that the nuclear case
against Iraq was actually strong twisted the unconfirmed uranium
reports into unquestioned evidence that would surely scare everyone.
According to President Bush and his senior officials they might not
have found a smoking gun but they did have evidence that Iraq had
an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for
a nuclear weapon and just recently sought the fuel that could without
further delay ignite such a weapon that would produce a mushroom
cloud over America. To persuade Congress that the UN weapons
inspections approach was not working, President Bush in his report
to Congress, House Document 108-23, told Congress that Iraq was
defeating the inspection process by not disclosing its attempts to
acquire uranium, and a few days later in his State of the Union
Address, House Document 108-1, he told Congress that the British
had learned that Iraq had sought that uranium. The uranium claim
had an impact on Congress because it was "one of few new pieces of
intelligence" and the Administration offered it "as proof that Iraq
had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program." IR p. 13 (emphasis
added).
President Bush and his senior officials kept using the uranium claim
until a few days prior to February 4, 2003 when the American
government handed over to the UN the supporting documents that were
found to be forgeries and actually told the UN that the uranium
reports could not be confirmed. Approximately two weeks after the
UN told the American government that the documents were forgeries,
President Bush on March 19, 2003 started the war rather than allow
the UN weapons inspectors to finish their work.
Some have described the Bush Administration's uranium claims as
deceptive and misleading, which implies that the claims were perhaps
criminal. In a statement issued January 25, 2005 involving the
confirmation hearings of now Secretary of State Rice, Senator Carl
Levin who is a member of the Senate Select Committee On Intelligence
criticized the uranium claim that President Bush made in his 2003
State of the Union Address to Congress.[13] Senator Levin stated
that the CIA received the original draft of the speech that asserted
the purported American view that Iraq had sought uranium and that
did not mention the British. A senior CIA staff member then called
the NSC to repeat its concerns about the allegation. Senator Levin
stated that the NSC and White House instead of removing the text
from the speech "changed the text to make reference to the British
view, suggesting, of course, that the US believed the British view
to be accurate." Senator Levin stated that this was a "formula
(that) was highly deceptive" since the "only reason" to say that
the British learned that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa "was
to create the impression that we believed it" although "we actually
did not believe" it. Senator Levin noted Secretary Rice's above
op-ed article and stated that she was "responsible for her own
distortions" and that she "distorted the facts and the intelligence
provided to her to help convince the American public of the need
to go to war." Senator Levin complained that no one in the Bush
Administration was held accountable.
The report Iraq On The Record that concluded that the Bush
Administration's above uranium claims were misleading defined a
statement as misleading "if it conflicted with what intelligence
officials knew at the time or involved the selective use of
intelligence or the failure to include essential qualifiers or
caveats." IR p. 2.
Such misleading statements can be considered actually fraudulent
since legal cases hold that a statement is fraudulent if it is
misleading, conveys a false impression, contains half-truths, and
discloses favorable information but omits unfavorable information.
The legal treatise Corpus Juris Secundum (Fraud, Sec. 2) states
that fraud is "a generic term which embraces all the multifarious
means which human ingenuity can devise and are resorted to by one
individual to gain an advantage over another by false suggestions
or by suppression of the truth." That treatise also states that
"(f)raudulent misrepresentation may be effected by half truths
calculated to deceive; and a half truth may be more misleading than
an outright lie. A representation literally true is actionable if
used to create an impression substantially false, as where it is
accompanied by conduct calculated to deceive or where it does not
state matters which materially qualify that statement." Fraud,
Sec. 24.
The uranium claims that President Bush and his senior officials
made were fraudulent statements because although some in the American
intelligence community including in the CIA somewhat agreed with
the British about the uranium and that "Iraq may have been seeking
uranium from Africa", SR p. 77 (emphasis added), President Bush and
his senior officials did not tell the whole truth consisting of the
contrary views held by prominent American intelligence officials.
Nor did President Bush and his senior officials use the weak word
may' but rather used much stronger and unqualified words such as
when President Bush stated that the "British government has learned
that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium
from Africa."
Furthermore, the statements that President Bush and Secretary
Rumsfeld made on January 28 and 29, 2003 that Iraq recently attempted
to acquire uranium, and the statement that Secretary Powell made
on January 26, 2003 that Iraq was still trying to acquire uranium
were actually false in that there was no evidence that Iraq had
recently sought uranium. The British White Paper did not provide
any information concerning the timing of the alleged attempt. SR
p. 50.
The Bush Administration's uranium claims were not only false and
fraudulent claims but were arguably actual crimes. Concerning the
two uranium claims that President Bush made directly to Congress,
the criminal statute 18 U.S.C., Sec. 1001(a) states that "whoever,
in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative,
or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly
and willfully - (1) falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick,
scheme, or device a material fact; (2) makes any materially false,
fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or (3) makes
or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain
any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry;
shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years,
or both." (Emphasis added.) However, the statute does not prohibit
all false and fraudulent statements to Congress but only those made
under certain circumstances, such as statements involving "administrative
matters ... or a document required by law, rule or regulation to
be submitted to the Congress".
The statute covers the statement that President Bush made on January
20, 2003 to Congress since that statement was made in a report that
the Congressional war resolution required. The war resolution,
Public Law 107-243, Sec. 4, states that the "President shall, at
least once every 60 days, submit to the Congress a report on matters
relevant to this joint resolution". President Bush in his said
report actually mentioned that he was making the report "(p)ursuant"
to Public Law 107-243 and that he was "providing a report prepared
by (his) Administration on matters relevant to that Resolution".
President Bush's uranium claim was relevant to the part of the war
resolution that expressed the belief of Congress that Iraq was
"actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability". The uranium claims
buttressed that belief. President Bush's report to Congress is
labeled House Document 108-23.
The statute also covers the statement that President Bush gave on
January 28, 2003 in his State of the Union Address since Article
II, Section 3 of the United States constitution requires the President
to give a State of the Union Address to Congress. That constitutional
provision states that the President "shall from time to time give
to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend
to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary
and expedient". President Bush's 2003 State of the Union Address
is a document since a document according to Merriam-Webster's
Collegiate Dictionary is a "writing conveying information". Presidents
hand the State of the Union Address to the Speaker of the House and
Vice President. President Bush's 2003 State of the Union Address
is labeled House Document 108-1.
President Bush's uranium claims arguably violated Section 1001
because both claims were fraudulent and one was actually false. In
his January 28 State of the Union Address President Bush stated
that the attempt to acquire uranium was recent but that was a false
claim since there was no evidence that the attempt was recent.
President Bush's basic uranium claims in that Address and in his
January 20 report to Congress were fraudulent claims because he did
not provide Congress with the whole truth. As mentioned earlier,
legal cases and treatises hold that a statement is fraudulent if
it is misleading or contains half-truths. As Senator Levin stated,
the formula that President Bush used in his State of the Union
Address was a "formula (that) was highly deceptive". The report
Iraq On The Record described President Bush's uranium statements
as misleading. IR pp. 13-15.
Concerning all five uranium claims that President Bush and his
senior officials made, the criminal statute 18 U.S.C., Sec. 371
states: "If two or more persons conspire ... to defraud the United
States ... in any manner or for any purpose, and one or more of
such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy,
each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than
five years, or both." The Supreme Court in the case of Hammerschmidt
v. United States, 265 U.S. 182, 188 (1924) held that to "conspire
to defraud the United States means primarily to cheat the government
out of property or money, but it also means to interfere with or
obstruct one of its lawful governmental functions by deceit, craft
or trickery, or at least by means that are dishonest." This statute
does not restrict its application to documents that are required
to be given to Congress nor does it require proof that the conspiracy
was successful.
The Administration's five uranium claims arguably violated Section
371 because the claims had the effect of obstructing or interfering
with the function of Congress to reconsider its war resolution and
to allow further time for UN weapons inspections. Some claims were
made directly to Congress in reports while other claims were made
indirectly to Congress in public statements to counter Iraq's
cooperation with UN weapons inspectors, which was the basis for the
Congressional resolution that sought a delay in the start of the
war. If President Bush and his senior officials had told the whole
truth surrounding their uranium claims, including telling Congress
what the American CIA Director told the White House, what Secretary
Powell was told during meetings at the CIA, what the American
government privately told the UN, and what the NSC believed, then
their half-truths about the uranium or what the British believed
would have lost their effect. If they had only stated that "Iraq
may have been seeking uranium from Africa", then no one would have
paid attention. If the whole truth had been told, Congress might
have withdrawn the war resolution or delayed the start of the war
to allow further UN weapons inspections, which would have shown
what we now know which is that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction
nor had sought the uranium.
Of course President Bush and his senior officials will claim ignorance
as a defense and that they are not accountable for their own
statements. But few convictions are based on confessions but rather
most convictions are based on circumstantial evidence. The public
record has overwhelming circumstantial evidence concerning their
knowledge of the whole truth and the reasons why they did not tell
it. There is also the evidence of their pattern of misconduct
consisting of their 186 misleading statements on the threat posed
by Iraq. Rule 404(b) of the Federal Rules of Evidence allows the
admission of evidence of other crimes, wrongs or acts for the purpose
of establishing "motive, opportunity, intent, preparation, plan,
knowledge, identity, or absence of mistake or accident". (Emphasis
added.) A few mistakes might be plausible but 186 mistakes would
be absurd. So many misleading statements clearly reveal a plan of
deception.
The circumstantial evidence now includes the Downing Street Memo.
President Bush and his senior officials can no longer claim with
any believability that they just received and analyzed the intelligence
but now must explain why their British ally believed that they fixed
the intelligence to justify the war.
Rather than wait to see if President Bush and his senior officials
will again mislead our nation into war possibly against Iran or
North Korea, it is necessary to hold them accountable now for their
misleading statements that led us to war against Iraq. The public
record is compelling enough to require the Justice Department to
appoint an outside special counsel to commence a criminal investigation
on the five fraudulent uranium claims. The Department has a
regulation, 28 CFR, Sec. 600.1, under which it can appoint an outside
special counsel when it has a conflict of interest.
Prior to the independent counsel law, the Nixon Administration felt
enough pressure to appoint Archibald Cox as an outside special
prosecutor to investigate the Watergate scandal. Prior to the
reenactment of the independent counsel law under which courts
appointed independent counsels such as Kenneth Starr, then Attorney
General Janet Reno felt enough pressure to appoint under the above
Justice Department regulation Robert Fiske as an outside special
counsel to investigate the Whitewater matter. Although the independent
counsel law has now expired, the Bush Justice Department felt enough
pressure to appoint a current United States Attorney, Patrick
Fitzgerald, as a type of special prosecutor to investigate the leak
of the name of a CIA agent, who happened to be the wife of Joseph
Wilson who in an op-ed article published in The New York Times on
July 6, 2003 was the first person to publicly challenge President
Bush's claim that Iraq had sought uranium. See The Politics of
Truth by Joseph Wilson.
The new special counsel could base an investigation on the Watergate
mantra of what did the President and his top officials know and
when did they know it, as well as why did they say it. Certainly
any such violations of the above criminal statutes would necessitate
not only a criminal prosecution by the special counsel but also
impeachment proceedings by Congress.
Francis T. Mandanici
The author is a lawyer in Connecticut. In 1968 he graduated from
Fairfield University where he wrote a lengthy paper on the
unconstitutionality of the Vietnam War. From 1968 to 1970 he served
in the Peace Corps as a rural community development worker in Roi
Et Province in northeast Thailand. He was a public defender for
18 years. In the late 1990's he filed a series of ethical grievances
against independent counsel Kenneth Starr. Of the four judges who
addressed the merits of his grievances, two of the four agreed that
Starr suffered from the appearance of a conflict of interest that
should be investigated. The judge who dismissed his last grievance
and ridiculed him also a few days later dismissed an ethics complaint
that 6 federal judges had filed against Starr's office. That
complaint and its dismissal were kept secret until after the 2000
presidential elections when Robert Ray revealed the matter in his
final independent counsel report. Go to
http://icreport.access.gpo.gov/lewinsky.html (pages 109-112, 140).
The author's summary of his grievances and the statements of the
judges who agreed with him can be found in the Comments section at
the end of Ray's report, pages 195-222.
[1] The Downing Street Memo is available on the website
of AfterDowningStreet at www.afterdowningstreet.org. See also the
website of DemocracyRising.US at www.democracyrising.us/.
[2] The letter is on the website of House Judiciary
Committee Democrats. Go to www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/ and
choose Latest News, May 5, 2005 Text of Letter from Democratic
Members Calling on the President to Answer Questions Concerning the
"Secret Downing Street memo".
[3] The report is on the website of the House Reform
Committee Democrats. Go to www.democrats.reform.house.gov/ and on
the right side choose Iraq On The Record, which then goes to the
Database on the left, and in the comments on the right provides
further access to the summary report Iraq On The Record Report (IR)
referred to above.
[4] The document is on the website of the Government
Printing Office. Go to www.gpo.gov/, then to GPO Access, go to A-Z
Resource List, go to Congressional Documents 104th Congress forward,
under Previous Congresses, go to Search, and Select 108th Congress,
Choose House Documents, Search "108-1", go to #4, which shows
President Bush's State of the Union Address.
[5] This document is also on the website of the Government
Printing Office. Follow the same procedure as in note 4 but at the
end search for "108-23", and go to #3 which is President Bush's
report to Congress.
[6] The report is on the website of the Senate Select
Committee On Intelligence. Go to www.intelligence.senate.gov/ and
choose Report On The U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence
Assessments On Iraq.
[7] See note 4.
[8] The report is available on the presidential commission's
website. Go to www.wmd.gov/report/ and choose Part One: Chapter
One Case Study: Iraq.
[9] The resolution is available on the UN's website. Go
to www.un.org/, go Welcome (English), go to Search on the top row,
enter "Resolution 1441", go to second listing - Links to documents
S/RES/1441(2002), and enter English.
[10] The press release is on the UN's website. Go to
www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2003/sc7644.doc.
[11] The resolution is available on the website of the
House of Representatives. Go to www.house.gov/, then under Legislative
Information go to Find a Bill or Law, Search the Thomas website,
go to Legislation, Search Bills and Resolutions, under Simple Search
go to Search in and enter Summary and Status Information about Bills
and Resolutions, then Search for Bill Number, then Enter Search
"H.Con.Res.2", then Select Congress 108th.
[12] That resolution is also available on the website of
the House of Representatives. Follow the same procedure as in note
11 but at the end, Enter Search "H.J.Res.20", Select Congress 108th.
[13] That statement is available on Senator Levin's website.
Go to www.levin.senate.gov/ and go to Newsroom, enter January 25,
2005 to January 25, 2005, under Issue go to All Issues, under
Category go to Statements, then go to Nomination of Condoleezza
Rice to be Secretary of State.
*****************************************************************
15 Guardian Unlimited: Senate Keeps 'Bunker-Buster' Program Alive
From the Associated Press
[UP]
Friday July 1, 2005 10:16 PM
By H. JOSEF HEBERT
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration may get another chance
to try to develop an earth-penetrating nuclear warhead. The
Senate on Friday agreed to revive the ``bunker-buster'' program
that Congress last year decided to kill.
Administration officials have maintained that the country needs
to try to develop a nuclear warhead that would be capable of
destroying deeply buried targets including bunkers tunneled into
solid rock.
But opponents said that its benefits are questionable and that
such a warhead would cause extensive radiation fallout above
ground killing thousands of people. And they say it may make it
easier for a future president to decide to use the nuclear
option instead of a conventional weapon.
The Senate early Friday voted 53-43 to include $4 million for
research into the feasibility of a bunker-buster nuclear
warhead. Earlier this year, the House refused to provide the
money, so a final decision will have to be worked between the
two chambers.
The money is included in a $31.2 billion spending measure for
the Energy Department and other programs. Last year Congress
killed the program, but the Bush administration asked that it be
revived.
Supporters of the program said the $4 million does not signal
development of any new warheads. They argue that the money would
be used to see whether a sufficiently hardened casing could be
developed for an existing warhead so that it can penetrate
beneath the earth before exploding and destroy reinforced
underground bunkers.
But Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., one of Congress' most vocal
opponents of the bunker-buster, said the program ``sends the
wrong signals to the rest of the world by reopening the nuclear
door and beginning the testing and development of a new
generation of nuclear weapons.''
``A bunker-buster cannot penetrate into the Earth deeply enough
to avoid massive casualties and the spewing of millions of cubic
feet of radioactive materials into the atmosphere,'' said
Feinstein.
Last April, a panel of the National Academy of Sciences,
concluded that an earth-penetrating nuclear device would likely
cause the same casualties as a surface burst if the weapons are
of the same size. Such a bomb could cause from several thousand
to 1 million casualties depending on its yield and location,
according to the report requested by Congress.
At a congressional hearing earlier this year, Linton Brooks,
head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which
oversees nuclear weapons programs, acknowledged that there is no
way to avoid significant fallout of radioactive debris from use
of a bunker-buster warhead.
He said the administration never intended to suggest ``that it
was possible to have a bomb that penetrated far enough to trap
all fallout. I don't believe the laws of physics will ever let
that be true.''
Nevertheless, Brooks and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have
argued that a nuclear weapon that can destroy hardened, deeply
buried targets is needed in the U.S. arsenal.
When challenged by Feinstein over the bunker buster at a hearing
in April, Rumsfeld said there are many potential U.S.
adversaries that are capable of putting hardened facilities deep
underground, often in solid rock, that conventional weapons
cannot reach.
Guardian Unlimited Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
*****************************************************************
16 Guardian Unlimited: Comment | A new generation of nuclear weapons?
Let's talk about it
The Trident decision must not be made in secret
Marjorie Thompson and Julian Lewis
Monday July 4, 2005
Just three days before the last general election, Tony Blair was
reported to have secretly decided that Britain would build a new
generation of nuclear weapons to replace Trident. The story was
denied, which is why so many believed it to be true.
Since then it has been very difficult to get a straight answer
out of either the prime minister or his new defence secretary,
John Reid. In the debate that is happening without them, there
have been some surprises. Among them is the assertion by Michael
Portillo, the former Tory defence secretary, that "the case for
Britain having an independent nuclear deterrent depended on the
existence of the Soviet Union". With the downfall of communism,
he says, the capability became redundant. It is time Blair and
Reid stopped trying to circumvent what is undoubtedly an
unpalatable debate for Labour.
In December 2003, the defence white paper Delivering Security in
a Changing World stated: "Our minimum nuclear deterrent
capability, currently represented by Trident, is likely to remain
a necessary element of our security ... Decisions on whether to
replace Trident are not needed in this parliament but are likely
to be required in the next one."
That parliament has now arrived, but there is little sign of
those decisions being opened up to democratic debate. Why is
this? History gives us a clue. The transition from the V-bombers
to Polaris saw the first wave of the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament break on to the British political scene in the late
1950s.
The transition from Polaris to Trident, coupled with the
deployment of US cruise missiles, saw the second wave of CND
rise up even more dramatically in the early 1980s. The hugely
expensive Chevaline upgrade of Polaris attracted no debate or
protest between these dates, because no one knew anything about
it. Is this New Labour's model for the Trident replacement
programme?
For more than 20 years the authors of this article have debated,
disputed and totally disagreed about almost every aspect of
British nuclear-weapons policy. From our opposite perspectives,
we anticipate that any announcement on a successor to Trident
will swiftly rekindle CND. This prospect gives New Labour
nightmares. Yet, irrespective of one's viewpoint, it is
essential that key questions are addressed.
To what extent, if any, are nuclear weapons relevant after
September 11? Have they any role at all after the end of the
cold war? Is a new generation of British nuclear weapons
compatible with the non-proliferation treaty and its strictures
on vertical proliferation? Can British nuclear disarmament be
safely reconciled with the unpredictable nature of international
relations? Could conventional military campaigns be stymied by
enemy WMD that cannot be stalemated? And what type of successor
generation, if any, could Britain afford to deploy and maintain?
It is beyond the scope of this article to attempt to answer any
of these questions: we would be unable to agree on a single
point. But we both know that these are the key points that need
to be publicly debated - and that this is unlikely to happen.
Reid was repeatedly asked in the House of Commons on June 6 if
the government intends to replace Trident and keep nuclear
weapons as long as other countries have them. He equivocated:
"Labour's recent general election manifesto spelled out our
commitment to the retention of the independent nuclear
deterrent. However, as I confirmed to the house on May 18, no
decision on any replacement for Trident has been taken either in
principle or otherwise."
What are we to make of this? If no decision on replacement has
been taken in principle, then it is possible that no replacement
will occur; but the Labour manifesto committed the government
"to retaining the independent nuclear deterrent". Did this refer
only to the existing Trident system or to the maintenance of a
British nuclear-weapons capability in general, whenever Trident
comes to an end? Reid is not saying.
Nor was he pleased to be questioned from his own backbenches by
such committed anti-nuclear MPs as Harry Cohen and David
Chaytor. He was probably lucky that more Scottish MPs were not
in the chamber given some of their constituents' concerns about
hosting Trident and any submarine-based successor system. These
concerns will no doubt find a voice in the Scottish parliament
too, whether or not it is supposed to have jurisdiction over
defence.
At Westminster, a series of written questions has produced
singularly evasive answers. What is the relationship between the
new building programme at Aldermaston and the next generation of
British nuclear weapons? Answer: to "keep open options in
respect of any decision on whether or not to replace Trident".
What preliminary assessments have been made of the relative
merits of extending the life of Trident and of replacing it with
a new system? Answer: "We have not yet made an assessment of the
relative merits of such options."
Do the options for the future of the UK deterrent include not
proceeding with a new generation of weapons? Answer: "The Labour
party's manifesto for the 2005 general election made clear our
commitment to retain the UK's independent nuclear deterrent.
Although decisions on any replacement for Trident are likely to
be taken in the current parliament, it is too early to rule out,
or rule in, any particular option."
The prime minister has been no less delphic. Asked last
Wednesday by Chris Mullin for an assurance that "before any
irrevocable decisions are made, he will take parliament into his
confidence", Blair said that the government "will listen to
honourable members before making any decisions on replacing
Trident". No decisions had yet been taken, he said, but "they
are likely to be necessary in the current parliament".
Labour's manifesto commitment "to retaining the United Kingdom's
independent nuclear deterrent" was again trotted out, but
immediately qualified with a promise of "plenty of opportunities
to discuss that before the final decision is taken".
So there you have it (or not). We are going to keep Britain's
"independent nuclear deterrent" but we are not ruling out "any
particular option" - including an option of not proceeding with
a new-generation weapons system at all.
If, as is claimed, we are bringing democracy to Iraq, we should
not be stifling it in the most important and controversial area
of British military policy - whether or not we continue to
possess nuclear weapons.
Marjorie Thompson was parliamentary officer, vice-chair and
chair of CND between 1983 and 1993; Julian Lewis MP was a
director of the Coalition for Peace Through Security in the
1980s and is a shadow defence minister
[UP]
Guardian Unlimited Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
*****************************************************************
17 Las Vegas RJ: HEADED TO CONFERENCE COMMITTEE: Energy spending bill clears
Saturday, July 02, 2005
Senate Measure contains $338 million for projects in Nevada
By STEVE TETREAULT STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU
WASHINGTON -- The Senate early Friday passed a bill that
contains more than $300 million for energy research and water
projects in Nevada. In addition, the bill sets Yucca Mountain
spending next year at $577 million, which is less than President
Bush requested.
The annual appropriations bill for the Energy Department, the
Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
passed 92-3. Sens. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and John Ensign, R-Nev.,
voted for it.
The $577 million allocation advances nuclear waste repository
planning at Yucca Mountain during the fiscal year that begins
Oct. 1. The amount is the same that Congress approved last year,
but $74 million less than the president's requested budget.
The bill was sent to a conference committee where it will be
negotiated against a corresponding House bill. The House
approved $661 million for the nuclear project, including $10
million to develop temporary nuclear waste storage at government
sites.
Senators rejected the idea of temporary nuclear waste storage,
making it a point that would be subject to negotiations on a
final bill.
Some lawmakers worry that temporary storage could become
permanent and the House plan alarmed lawmakers representing
sites such as the Hanford complex in Washington state that were
mentioned in a report accompanying the House bill.
The $31.2 billion bill contains $338 million in Nevada
earmarked spending for flood control, environmental management
and energy research at the University of Nevada, Reno and the
University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
The Nevada Test Site was allocated almost $80 million in
spending above its budgeted amount through the Department of
Energy. Among the added improvements were $20 million for
security and $15 million for road upgrades.
Research into the feasibility of a bunker-busting nuclear weapon
also would be kept alive under the legislation. The bill
contained $4 million for studies of the weapon, which would be
aimed at penetrating underground enemy bunkers.
Administration officials have maintained that the country needs
to try to develop a nuclear warhead that would be capable of
destroying deeply buried targets including bunkers tunneled into
solid rock.
But opponents said that its benefits are questionable and that
such a warhead would cause extensive radiation fallout above
ground killing thousands of people.
"A bunker buster cannot penetrate into the Earth deeply enough
to avoid massive casualties and the spewing of millions of cubic
feet of radioactive materials into the atmosphere," said Sen.
Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.
Critics also say the bunker buster may make it easier for a
future president to decide to use the nuclear option instead of
a conventional weapon. And they say the weapon is unworkable and
that the development of a new nuclear weapon would be the wrong
signal for the United States to send to countries such as North
Korea while trying to persuade them to shelve their weapons
programs.
The House measure contains no money for the bunker buster,
officially known as the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator.
Supporters of the weapon won a 53-43 Senate vote.
They said the funding was only for a feasibility study to see
whether a new, sufficiently hardened casing can be developed for
existing warheads to see whether it could penetrate the earth
sufficiently to destroy reinforced underground bunkers.
Ensign voted for bunker-buster research. Reid voted to delete
the funding.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Copyright Las Vegas Review-Journal
*****************************************************************
18 DallasNews.com: Running on empty
In 'The Long Emergency,' author JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER envisions
the end of the fossil-fuel era - and of life as we know it
06:23 PM CDT on Saturday, July 2, 2005
Carl Jung, one of the fathers of psychology, famously remarked
that "people cannot stand too much reality." What you're about to
read may challenge your assumptions about the kind of world we
live in, and especially the kind of world into which events are
propelling us. We are in for a rough ride through uncharted
territory.
It has been hard for Americans lost in dark raptures of nonstop
infotainment, recreational shopping and compulsive motoring to
make sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter
the terms of everyday life in our technological society. I call
this coming time the Long Emergency. Most immediately we face the
end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era. It is no exaggeration to state
that reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural gas underlie
everything we identify as the necessities of modern life not to
mention all of its comforts and luxuries: central heating, air
conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric lights, inexpensive
clothing, recorded music, movies, hip-replacement surgery,
national defense you name it.
The few Americans who are even aware that there is a gathering
global-energy predicament usually misunderstand the nature of
the crisis. We don't have to run out of oil to start having
severe problems with industrial civilization and its dependent
systems. We only have to slip over the all-time production peak
and begin a slide down the arc of steady depletion.
The term "global oil-production peak" means that a turning point
will come when the world produces the most oil it will ever
produce in a given year and, after that, yearly production will
inexorably decline. It is usually represented graphically in a
bell curve. The peak is the top of the curve, the halfway point
of the world's all-time total endowment, meaning half the
world's oil will be left.
That seems like a lot of oil, and it is, but there's a big
catch: It's the half that is more difficult to extract, far more
costly to get, of much poorer quality, and located mostly in
places where the people hate us.
**
What's the best thing ordinary Americans
can do to prepare for a possible permanent oil crisis? Comment |
**
The United States passed its own oil peak about 11 million
barrels a day in 1970, and since then production has dropped
steadily. Today, we have to import about two-thirds of our oil,
and the ratio will continue to worsen.
Now we are faced with the global oil-production peak. The best
estimates of when this will actually happen have been somewhere
between now and 2010. It will be a permanent energy crisis that
will change everything about how we live.
To aggravate matters, American natural-gas production is also
declining, at 5 percent a year, with the potential of much
steeper declines ahead. Just about every power plant built after
1980 has to run on gas. Half the homes in America are heated
with gas and gas isn't easy to import.
The wonders of steady technological progress achieved through
the reign of cheap oil have led many Americans to believe that
anything we wish for hard enough will come true. But no
combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American
life the way we have been used to running it.
The widely touted "hydrogen economy" is a particularly cruel
hoax. We are not going to replace the U.S. automobile and truck
fleet with vehicles run on fuel cells. For one thing, the
current generation of fuel cells is largely designed to run on
hydrogen obtained from natural gas.
The other way to get hydrogen in the quantities wished for would
be electrolysis of water using power from hundreds of nuclear
plants. Apart from the dim prospect of our building that many
nuclear plants soon enough, there are also severe problems with
hydrogen's nature as an element that present forbidding
obstacles to its use as a replacement for oil and gas.
Solar-electric systems and wind turbines face enormous problems
of scale. Coal is far less versatile than oil and gas, extant in
less abundant supplies than many people assume and fraught with
huge ecological drawbacks.
If we wish to keep the lights on in America after 2020, we may
indeed have to resort to nuclear power. Under optimal
conditions, it could take 10 years to get a new generation of
nuclear power plants into operation, and the price may be beyond
our means.
The upshot of all this is that we are entering a historical
period of potentially great instability, turbulence and
hardship. Obviously, geopolitical maneuvering around the world's
richest energy regions has already led to war and promises more
international military conflict.
Since the Middle East contains two-thirds of the world's
remaining oil supplies, the U.S. has attempted desperately to
stabilize the region by, in effect, opening a big police station
in Iraq. The intent was not just to secure Iraq's oil but to
modify and influence the behavior of Persian Gulf states. The
results have been far from entirely positive, and our future
prospects in that part of the world are not something we can
feel altogether confident about.
And then there is the issue of China, which in 2004 became the
world's second-greatest consumer of oil. If China wanted to, it
could easily walk into some of these places the Middle East,
former Soviet republics in central Asia and extend its
hegemony by force. Is America prepared to contest for this oil
in an Asian land war with the Chinese army? I doubt it.
Nor can the U.S. military occupy regions of the Eastern
Hemisphere indefinitely, or hope to secure either the terrain or
the oil infrastructure of one distant, unfriendly country after
another. The U.S. could exhaust and bankrupt itself trying to do
this.
Our national leaders are hardly uninformed about this
predicament. In March, the Department of Energy released a
report that officially acknowledges for the first time that peak
oil is for real and states plainly: "The world has never faced a
problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade
before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be
temporary."
Most of all, the Long Emergency will require us to make other
arrangements for the way we live in the United States. We let
our towns and cities rot away and replaced them with suburbia.
We made the ongoing development of housing subdivisions, highway
strips, fried-food shacks and shopping malls the basis of our
economy, and when we have to stop making more of those things,
the bottom will fall out.
The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to
downscale and rescale virtually everything we do and how we do
it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the
way we grow our food to the way we work and trade. Our lives
will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be
far less about mobility and much more about staying where you
are.
Anything organized on the large scale, whether government or a
corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as
the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away.
Food production is going to be an enormous problem. As
industrial agriculture fails because of a scarcity of oil- and
gas-based inputs, we will have to grow more food closer to where
we live and do it on a smaller scale. This raises difficult
questions about the reallocation of land and the nature of work.
Readjustment is apt to be disorderly and improvisational.
The way that commerce is currently organized in America will not
survive. Tens of thousands of the common products we enjoy today
are made out of oil. They will become increasingly scarce or
unavailable. Commerce will have to be reorganized at the local
scale. It will have to be based on moving merchandise shorter
distances. It is almost certain to result in higher costs for
the things we buy and far fewer choices.
The automobile will be a diminished presence in our lives. With
gasoline in short supply, not to mention tax revenue, our roads
will surely suffer. If we don't refurbish our rail system, then
there may be no long-range travel or transport of goods at all a
few decades from now. The commercial aviation industry is likely
to vanish.
The successful regions in the 21st century will be the ones
surrounded by viable farming hinterlands that can reconstitute
locally sustainable economies on an armature of civic cohesion.
Small towns and smaller cities have better prospects than the
big cities, which will probably have to contract substantially.
The process will be painful and tumultuous.
Some regions will do better than others. The Southwest will
suffer in proportion to the degree that it prospered during the
cheap-oil blowout of the late 20th century. Sun Belt states like
Arizona and Nevada will become significantly depopulated, since
the region will be short of water as well as gasoline and
natural gas. Imagine Phoenix without cheap air conditioning.
I'm not optimistic about the Southeast, either. I think it will
be subject to substantial levels of violence as the grievances
of the formerly middle class boil over and collide with the
delusions of Pentecostal Christian extremism. The latent encoded
behavior of Southern culture includes an outsized notion of
individualism and the belief that firearms ought to be used in
the defense of it. This is a poor recipe for civic cohesion.
The Mountain States and Great Plains will face an array of
problems, from poor farming potential to water shortages to
population loss. The Pacific Northwest, New England and the
Upper Midwest have somewhat better prospects. I regard them as
less likely to fall into lawlessness, anarchy or despotism and
more likely to salvage the bits and pieces of our best social
traditions and keep them in operation at some level.
These are daunting and even dreadful prospects. The Long
Emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race.
We will not believe that this is happening to us, that 200 years
of modernity can be brought to its knees by a worldwide power
shortage.
If there is any positive side to stark changes coming our way,
it may be in the benefits of close communal relations, of having
to really work intimately (and physically) with our neighbors,
to be part of an enterprise that really matters and to be fully
engaged in meaningful social enactments instead of being merely
entertained to avoid boredom.
Years from now, when we hear singing at all, we will hear
ourselves, and we will sing with our whole hearts.
Adapted from "The Long Emergency," copyright 2005 by James
Howard Kunstler and reprinted with the permission of the
publisher, Atlantic Monthly Press, a division of Grove/Atlantic
Inc. Mr. Kunstler is the author of "The Geography of Nowhere"
and other books. You may e-mail him at kunstler@aol.com. This
text is invisible on the page, but this text is affected by the
invisible item's flow. This text is invisible on the page, but
this text is affected by the invisible item's flow. More
2005 The Dallas Morning News Co.
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19 WorldNetDaily: Freezing assets on a whim
SATURDAY JULY 2 2005
[Supercritical Thoughts] [Gordon Prather]
2005 WorldNetDaily.com
President Bush will no doubt have U.N. Ambassador John Bolton
once ensconced demand the Security Council endorse the
implementation of his Proliferation Security Initiative. That
is, demand the Security Council endorse the use of 1) economic
sanctions, 2) interdiction and seizure, and/or 3) pre-emptive
military force against any and all entities Bush judges to be
"proliferators" of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons [and
of the means of delivering such weapons] as well as to all
entities "facilitating the procurement" thereof.
Meanwhile, Bush has issued a presidential directive "blocking"
the transfer, sale, withdrawal or export of "all property and
interests in property" of "proliferators" of "weapons of mass
destruction and the means of delivering them as well as that of
their "supporters."
What property does the directive effectively seize?
All properties "that are in the United States, that hereafter
come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come
within the possession or control of United States persons."
Who does Bush define to be a WMD "proliferator"?
(ii) any foreign person determined by the secretary of state
in consultation with the secretary of the treasury, the attorney
general and other relevant agencies to have engaged [or
attempted to engage] in activities or transactions that have
materially contributed to [or pose a risk of materially
contributing to] the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction or their means of delivery [including missiles
capable of delivering such weapons], including any efforts to
manufacture, acquire, possess, develop, transport, transfer or
use such items, by any person or foreign country of
"proliferation concern."
Great Zot!
Condi Rice can effectively seize the U.S. assets of any "foreign
person" she supposes may have attempted to engage in activities
she supposes may pose a risk of materially contributing to the
development of among other things a "wheat smut" production
capability?
Well, what about "supporters" of WMD proliferation? Who are
they?
(iii) any person determined by the secretary of the treasury
in consultation with the secretary of state, the attorney
general and other relevant agencies to have provided [or
attempted to provide] financial, material, technological or
other support for or goods or services in support of any
activity or transaction described in paragraph (ii) of this
section, or any person whose property and interests in property
are blocked pursuant to this order.
So, Secretary Snow can effectively seize all the U.S. assets of
any person foreign or domestic he "determines" may have
attempted to provide financial support to any foreign person
that Condi has "determined" may have attempted to engage in
activities that might have contributed to the development of a
wheat smut production facility.
Can you believe that?
In other words, if Condi decides some Iranian is purchasing
equipment to brew wheat smut rather than beer and "blocks"
all his U.S. assets, including his line-of-credit, if you loan
him the money to buy the equipment, Snow can effectively seize
all your assets, too.
It gets worse:
Any transaction or dealing by a United States person or within
the United States in property or interests in property blocked
pursuant to this order is prohibited, including, but not limited
to, (i) the making of any contribution or provision of funds,
goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of, any person
whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to
this order, and (ii) the receipt of any contribution or
provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person.
Incredible!
You can't even give him or accept from him a lift to the
airport!
Of course, "person" as defined in the directive includes an
"individual, partnership, association, trust, joint venture,
corporation, group, subgroup or other organization."
An "annex" to the directive lists eight "persons" whose U.S.
assets have now been summarily "blocked." Three are North Korean
semi-government companies, four are Iranian including the
Atomic Energy Agency of Iran and one is a Syrian government
research agency.
Bush-Bolton-Rice have made it very clear they believe that the
Iranians are pursuing a nuclear weapons program. But
Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei continues to report that his
International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors can find no
'indication' that Iran has, ever had, or intends to have a
nuclear weapons program.
Hence, Bush's executive order, which threatens to effectively
confiscate all the U.S. assets of those "persons" including
European Union companies and banks that are still attempting
to negotiate big business deals with the Iranian Atomic Energy
Agency.
Physicist James Gordon Prather has served as a policy
implementing official for national security-related technical
matters in the Federal Energy Agency, the Energy Research and
Development Administration, the Department of Energy, the Office
of the Secretary of Defense and the Department of the Army. Dr.
Prather also served as legislative assistant for national
security affairs to U.S. Sen. Henry Bellmon, R-Okla. -- ranking
member of the Senate Budget Committee and member of the Senate
Energy Committee and Appropriations Committee. Dr. Prather had
earlier worked as a nuclear weapons physicist at Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory in California and Sandia National
Laboratory in New Mexico.
2005 WorldNetDaily.com, Inc.
*****************************************************************
20 Guardian Unlimited: Minister ponders the nuclear option
Business focus: the energy crunch
Oliver Morgan
Sunday July 3, 2005
The Observer
When Malcolm Wicks stepped in to his new job as Energy Minister,
he faced a number of problems that needed urgent solutions.
These were spelt out for him on his first day as follows: (1) how
to achieve goals on climate change while maintaining security of
(energy) supply and international competitiveness; (2) how to
handle the tight supply/ demand balance next winter; (3) how far
he could rely on the present market framework to deliver the very
large investment needed to ensure security of supply in future;
(4) what role nuclear build and new technologies might play in
helping to meet CO2 and supply objectives; (5) implications of
energy prices staying high or going even higher.
Tricky enough without Blair choosing climate change as a key
issue for the Gleneagles G8 summit this week.
Wicks says he loved the pensions job, and loves energy too:
'They are both complex and controversial and everyone has got a
view. Everyone has got an opinion on nuclear, it is big stuff,
it is controversial.'
So, since he brings it up, what's his opinion on nuclear? 'I
don't have an opinion. I am open-minded about it, which I don't
think is the same as being empty-minded.'
Does this mean the subject is closed - as it has officially been
since 2003, when the last energy White Paper constructed a
compromise policy that neither backed the building of nuclear
power stations to generate 'carbon- free' electricity nor closed
the door on them to placate both pro- and anti-nuclear ministers?
Sort of. Wicks points out that the polarised positions of the
nuclear and renewable power lobbies have distorted the argument.
'A lot of enthusiasts say it is all about wind power or all
about nuclear,' he says. 'Quite a chunk [a fifth] of our
generation comes from nuclear. It is about whether we maintain
that in future.'
The background is what makes the decision tricky. Britain will
probably fail to meet its target of reducing CO2 emissions by 20
per cent from 1990 levels by 2010 - they have risen in recent
years thanks to high oil and gas prices and cheap coal, which
generators have increasingly used. Old nuclear and coal power
stations will start closing in 2008. The DTI calculates that 25
gigawatts of generation - around a third of today's capacity -
will need to be built by 2020. These will need to be low- or
zero-emission.
'It [climate change] is the most pressing issue in the world, I
think it is as big an issue for this department as it is for
Defra [the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural
Affairs]. There can be no doubt that the climate is changing in
very worrying ways. People who doubt it, for whatever reasons,
have got their heads in the sand.
'We disagree with the American analysis and have told them so.
But that is not a reason for us to become belligerent.' He adds
that some states - New England and California - have taken
measures to reduce emissions.
Despite widespread scepticism in and outside the DTI, Wicks is
sticking to its target of 10 per cent of electricity from
renewable sources (chiefly onshore wind power) by 2010 and to
its aspiration of 20 per cent by 2020, which will depend on the
development of offshore wind and new technologies.
'It is a tough target to hit,' he says of 2010. 'I am very
committed to it. But this is more than a story about wind
turbines... it is also other technologies.' He believes that the
Renewables Obligation, which supports the higher price of
renewables - wind turbines, energy crops, wave and solar power -
through tradeable certificates, is clearing a space in the
market for these technologies. He mentions two social housing
solar power schemes (among the most expensive of the
technologies) he has visited: 'From what I can see, I am
convinced.'
Wicks has another emerging area - directing 25 million of
public money into clean coal technology, where CO2 from
coal-fired power stations is separated and pumped into former
North Sea oil reservoirs or into aquifers under the mainland.
Opec, he says, has expressed interest in the technology and 'the
Norwegians are doing it and there are some pilots in the US I
want to look at'.
In reflections that might appeal to Lee Raymond, chief executive
of Exxon, but be less welcome to environmentalists, he adds: 'We
[he highlights India and China] are going to be burning lots of
fuels, lots of coal, lots of oil and lots of gas. If we can find
ways of burning the stuff more efficiently and more
significantly if we can find ways of capturing CO2, maybe in the
North Sea, I think we have to look at that very hard.'
Despite his view that the DTI has as important a role in climate
change policy as Defra, he concedes that the key policy work is
the Defra-led Climate Change Review, due to be finalised this
year.
Central to that review - which deals with meeting Kyoto targets
to 2010, and so will not be affected by longer-term decisions on
generation - is the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, which caps the
output of generators and industrial users and forces them to pay
for overshooting by buying tradeable certificates from those who
undershoot, who in turn receive payment. The scheme has seen the
price of carbon rise from about 7 a tonne to 24 this year.
Wicks is in a difficult position. The DTI, wary of threats to
business competitiveness, is fighting in the European courts to
increase the UK cap. Defra wants it raised in phase two, from
2008. He repeats the DTI line that the original cap was a
miscalculation and stresses the importance of competitiveness
and economic growth.
But asked which is more important, competitiveness or global
warming, he is blunt: 'Climate change. In the long term if you
don't get that right we are all dead.'
On building new nuclear plants he says: 'We are not going to
take a decision this year.' He adds that it is unlikely that a
white paper on nuclear is necessary. 'What we need is a
decision,' he says.
And if the answer was yes? Could they be funded privately?:
'There would have to be some kind of understanding between the
government and the market.'
That would probably mean fixed-price contracts to guarantee
investors a return - a highly controversial move.
[UP]
Guardian Unlimited Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
*****************************************************************
21 London Times: BNFL on way back to the black as losses halve -
Angela Jameson
thetimes.co.uk
BNFL is part way through a restructuring that will transfer all
its assets and historic liabilities to the Nuclear
Decommissioning Authority (NDA). After that, the company will
concentrate on cleaning up nuclear sites, including Sellafield,
and will have to compete for contracts with private sector
rivals.
Mike Parker, group chief executive, said that the group would be
able to continue its transition into becoming the contractor of
choice for nuclear decommissioning work.
The improved numbers were achieved by progress in BNFLs
controversial MOX (mixed oxide) plant which made its first
shipment to a Swiss customer, but is still not fully
operational; changes to customer arrangements; and higher
wholesale electricity prices, which offset low volumes of
output.
The figures would have been higher had it not been for
exceptional charges of 243 million, associated with the
restructuring, and a provision of 132 million to draw a line
under US legacy contracts.
Despite record electricity prices, BNFLs ageing Magnox power
generators continued to record a 200 million loss,
demonstrating their inefficiency.
BNFL spent 725 million to clean up historic liabilities. This
will be financed by the NDA. The cash outflow of 438 million
was substantially improved at the year end by a $460 million
(260 million) payment from the US as settlement of certain
legacy contracts.
The strong operational performance was spoilt by a serious leak,
which was detected in April, after the year-end.
The leak from a pipe at Thorp, BNFLs main unit for reprocessing
nuclear waste, was classified as a level three incident, on a
scale of one to seven. The company said that the leak was
contained in a heavily shielded cell and that there was no
danger to the staff, the public or the environment.
Mr Parker added: All the spilt liquor has now been collected
and drained. We think we know how to fix this problem but it
will take several more months and our solution will need to be
said grace over by a safety inspector.
The company also confirmed that it would sell Westinghouse, its
profitable US nuclear plant construction arm drawing criticism
from unions and the Conservative party.
Prospect, the union that represents 6,000 nuclear engineers,
scientists and managers, said that the decision to sell would
amount to economic madness and would deprive the UK of
essential nuclear expertise. He called it short termism at its
worst.
BNFL expects to make operating profits of 150 million in 2006,
which will allow the company to pay interest on its 575 million
debenture and pay a dividend to the Government for the first
time in six years.
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22 PRAVDA.Ru: Russia to help China oust the USA from Eurasia -
07/02/2005 21:11
Russia de facto loses the status of the world's center of force,
which jeopardizes the global stability
The rapidly developing economy of China pushes the country to
search for sources of raw materials and sales markets abroad.
The USA is China's major obstacle in this respect. China and the
USA have been sharing their spheres of influence since 1979,
when a semi-secret US-Chinese agreement about the strategic
coordination was brought to light after Dang Xiaoping's visit in
Washington (the USA prefers to keep the document a secret). The
significance of the agreement could be compared to protocols to
the Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty. Bill Clinton prolonged the
agreement in 1999. China has been consistently asking the USA to
withdraw its presence from Eurasia. The USA, however, believes
that it can refer to Russia and the entire post-Soviet space as
its catch.
It was China, which preserved Russia's integrity during the US
triumph in 1991-1993: the dismembered Russia would deprive China
of the strategic back area. In its struggle for Russia, China
will inevitably try to put an end to USA's expansion attempts
towards the Far East of Russia. One may expect Chinese
politicians making statements about the USA's threat to Russia:
China and the USA will most likely commence negotiations about
the division of the spheres of influence in the Far Eastern
region.
When the USSR collapsed in 1991, China was left alone face to
face with the USA. The conflict potential of relations between
the USA and China has been growing nonstop since then. One may
say that the USA has been involved in the conflict with China
from 2003, although it is a financial and economic struggle so
far. The war of the American and Chinese economies may be
toughened by 2009 with US-placed embargoes. China might exercise
its military potential in return with a view to demoralize the
West. China has been trying to restrain and oust the USA from
Eurasia with a threat to destroy the US dollar as the global
measure of value.
The nuclear field as the field of political maneuvers for
Russia.
A maneuver as an aspect of war is always possible, even when
there are no efforts to strike a blow. The year 2005 is the
year, which marks the final revision of WWII results and the
removal of the world order, which the winning powers set in
Yalta and Potsdam in 1945. The period of 60 years is the basic
cycle of changes of a certain historic field. The new world
order can be characterized as the globalization, North American
style.
Establishing the control over Russian nuclear objects is a
rather important issue for the USA. This problem is currently
being successively solved under the disguise of mutual security
and cooperation in the anti-terrorist struggle. Russia de facto
loses the status of the world's center of force, which
jeopardizes the global stability.
According to the laws of changes, the three-polar world order
with any type of centralization is harmonious and safe: a
nation, which does not wage a war, wins. The world of the second
half of the 20th century was exactly like that: the USA and the
USSR were the active poles of the forces, whereas China was like
an absorber between them.
According to the law of the struggle of the opposites, any
bi-polar world order is dangerous. Those, who will not be making
preparations for a war will inevitably lose. This is the
description of the world in the beginning of the 21st century:
the USA found itself in the bi-polar world, not in the unipolar
world, as it may seem at first sight. China will become a
visible center of force in 2007, when it declares its ambitions
for influence to the USA.
Russia may make a political maneuver to return to the stable
form of the triangular world structure. The USA's dual control
over Russian nuclear objects changes the pattern of mutual
obligations for members of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. In
other words, Russia's agreement for control over its nuclear
objects should be linked with addenda to the Treaty in the part
of the dual control in other countries too. Furthermore, the
globalization in the North-American style requires Russia's
membership in the World Trade Organization. The coercive
membership implies that participating states should not have any
territorial claims to each other. Japan is the state, which sets
most serious territorial claims to Russia. Japan's refusal to
give up its claims would be a worthy way out of the situation.
The refusal could be linked with Japan's obligation to become a
nuclear state. Japan could receive nukes from Russia, along with
the technical help for their servicing and the dual control over
the nuclear force of Japan.
Japan as a nuclear power would balance the nuclear problem of
North Korea (Japan's former colony): the China-Japan-Korea
triangle would be created. North Korea's nuclear status, which
was declared in the spring of 2005, deprived Japan of its face,
which could be compared to Russia's dual-control-diminished
sovereignty. On the other hand, North Korea's nuclear status
poses a problem for the USA, which loses control over the
affairs in North-Eastern Asia, the control over the spirit of
South Korea and Japan, first and foremost.
Japan's nuclear status will relieve the nation of the American
guardianship, which may open a perspective for building new
groups with Japan as a full member of world politics. Special
terms for Japan's connection to the Russian base of natural
resources would also save Japan from the USA's devastating oil
and gas price pressure. A possible blockade against Japan could
be aimed against the USA: Japan could require the return of
Micronesia islands, which were given away to the USA as a trophy
after the end of WWII. It is noteworthy that the islands
received the status of the US free association in 1986, in
defiance of the UN Charter.
Strategy of retreat as a way to the Russian victory
As a WTO member, which Russia obliged to become before 2006,
Russia will not have a right to "defend itself" from the
movement of Chinese and Japanese capitals: only the Western
capital has preferences until Russia joins the WTO.
The attraction of Chinese and Japanese capitals on the territory
of the Russian Far East (within the framework of the WTO) will
make for the financial and economic expulsion of the USA from
Eurasia. China and Japan will thus obtain the strategic back
areas in Russia's Siberia and the Far East. Being China's and
Japan's back area, Russia avoids being a front. Otherwise,
Russia will inevitably become a battlefield between the USA and
China.
The strategy of retirement is not a light-minded strategy to
abandon the front. It is a way to victory with the help of a
political and economic maneuver to avoid the direct opposition
with the dominating adversary.
P.Gvaskov, scientist of China
Read the original in Russian:
http://www.pravda.ru/world/2005/5/15/42/20224_future.html
(Translated by: Dmitry Sudakov)
Pravda.Ru
1999-2002 "PRAVDA.Ru".
*****************************************************************
23 CRIENGLISH: Hu Jintao Wraps up Russia Tour
2005-7-3 18:05:51 CRIENGLISH.com
Chinese President Hu Jintao has concluded his state visit to
Russia, and heads to Kazakhstan to attend the summit meeting of
the SCO in Astana.
Chinese President Hu Jintao has concluded his state visit to
Russia, and heads to Kazakhstan to attend the summit meeting of
the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Astana.
Before leaving Russia, Hu Jintao and his Russian counterpart
Vladimir Putin issued a joint communiqu.
Russia reiterates its respect for the one-China principle, while
China reaffirmed its support for Moscow's efforts to maintain
state sovereignty and fight terrorism.
Both countries agreed that the North Korea nuclear issue, should
be solved through dialogue, and peace and stability should be
maintained in the Korean Peninsula.
During Hu Jintao's visit in Moscow, the two leaders signed a
Joint Declaration on the International Order in the 21st
Century, in which they called for a stronger United Nations role
in global affairs.
After a two-day visit in Moscow, Hu Jintao left for Novosibirsk
on Saturday.
In Novosibirsk, Hu Jintao visited the Chkalov aircraft
manufacturer and held talks with local officials on regional
cooperation and civil exchanges.
After his trip to Kazakhstan, Hu Jintao will fly to Scotland for
an informal meeting between leaders of the Group of Eight
industrialized countries and five major developing countries,
Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa.
Copyright of crienglish.com. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
24 Guardian Unlimited: Nuclear fall-out
Postwar Japan turned its back on violence. But its artists
embraced it. By Stuart Jeffries
Monday July 4, 2005
The Guardian
A row of model God-zillas is lined up against the wall. Beside
them is an extract from the postwar Japanese constitution.
"Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice
and order, the Japanese people for ever renounce war as a
sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as
means of settling international disputes," it reads. "In order to
accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air
forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained.
The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognised."
This bizarre juxtaposition is part of an extraordinary exhibition
in New York called Little Boy - the Arts of Japan's Exploding
Subculture. Little Boy was the code name for the atomic bomb that
was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6 1945 by the American B-29
superfortress Enola Gay. A second bomb, called Fat Man, exploded
over Nagasaki three days later. These bombs, which killed more
than 210,000 people and afflicted at least 150,000 more, led to
Japan's surrender and, this exhibition argues, profoundly shaped
the country's postwar cultural development - including everything
from Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai to manga comics, the seeming
kitsch of global brands like Hello Kitty and Pokemon, right up to
the concerns of Hayao Miyazaki's cult anime film Spirited Away.
As we near Hiroshima's 60th anniversary, it's timely to reflect
on what happened to those martial impulses that spurred Japan in
the 15 years before Hiroshima to fight the imperialistic Pacific
War. What happens when a polity annuls the right to
belligerency? A quick answer is that those impulses have been
sublimated wholesale into Japanese popular culture.
Godzilla, we learn in the catalogue, was awakened from eons of
sub-marine sleep by a hydrogen bomb explosion. "His
radiation-induced malformity and his nightly attacks on Tokyo,
which reduced the city and its screaming population to ashes,
became symbols of Japan's vulnerability and the essential state
of terror," writes Alexandra Monroe. Nor was he the only mutant
monster to be inspired by the war. Teruhiko Yokoyama created
Tetsujin 28 (known in the west as Iron Man), a postwar magnum
opus of manga and anime, after witnessing the flights of B-29s
over Japan: "In the firebombing of Tokyo, huge pieces of steel
flew through the sky. I could never get that image out of my
head and it became the basis for my iron-man idea."
Other anime creators found inspiration in a series of world war
two battle paintings by the graphic artist Shigeru Komatsuzaki.
His pioneering e-monogatari (serialised pictorial stories)
depict in meticulous detail Pacific battles in which kamikaze
planes descend towards US warships and aircraft carriers.
Worryingly, the note below these naval scenes records that
"children captivated by the incomparable graphic verisimilitude
attained by Komatsuzaki in his depictions of such iconic images
as the battleship Yamato practically learned about the Pacific
War from his illustrations". Komatsuzaki's work proved
influential to, among other anime creators, the makers of 1970s
TV anime series Space Battleship Yamato, which moved militarism
from the Pacific to the grander stage of outer space.
Artist Takashi Murakami, who curated this show at New York's
Japan Society, argues that the metallic superheroes and robots
that abound in manga and anime incarnated postwar Japanese
artists' dreams of a better trans-human future, where our
manifold failings can be transcended. "Humans regard robots as
extensions of themselves and alter egos. For the Japanese in
particular, robots are the avant-garde of self-portraiture,
poised to become reality."
But Murakami also contends that Japan's popular culture has
created a society dominated by childish tastes, and seduced by
the feelings of safety such tastes provoke. The title of his
exhibition is deliberate: the term Little Boy does not just
refer to the first atomic bomb, but also to the infantilisation
of a traumatised, though materially wealthy, nation.
In the catalogue he writes about kawai, a Japanese word meaning
cute and used to describe everything from Hello Kitty and
Lolicoms (depictions of Lolita-like girls in cartoons and
models) to the strangely aestheticised reactions among some in
younger generations to the war. "Kawai culture has become a
living entity that pervades everything. With a population
heedless of the cost of embracing immaturity, the nation is in
the throes of a dilemma: a preoccupation with anti-ageing may
conquer not only the human heart, but also the body.
"It is a utopian society," he continues, "as fully regulated as
the science-fiction world George Orwell envisioned in Nineteen
Eighty-four: comfortable, happy, fashionable - a world nearly
devoid of discriminatory impulses. A place for people unable to
comprehend the moral coordinates of right and wrong as anything
other than as a rebus for, 'I feel good.'"
Murakami's exhibition is an examination of a national pathology,
an infantilism brought on by war and sustained by a thriving
consumer culture. It features films, paintings, models, cartoon
strips, scary monsters, cuddly toys and more fast-handed,
jump-suited robots than you can shake a stick at. It's a
wonderful show - and a very weird one.
The west's ready embrace of certain Japanese cultural exports
does not quite prepare one for what Murakami has assembled. For
example, Little Boy teems with (for western viewers in
particular) disturbing little girls: Japanese Lolitas, big eyed,
short skirted and intensely problematic. There's one little girl
astride a smaller-scale tube train. There's another, clutching a
teddy bear and looking over her shoulder with doe eyes as she
pulls her knickers down to expose her naked bottom. (Those big
eyes, it turns out, were appropriated in Japanese anime from
Betty Boop and her imitators - another example of Nippo-American
symbiosis.)
These Lolitas are as disturbing as the Chapman brothers' models
of small children with hard-ons growing out of their foreheads,
as discomforting as Jeff Koons' Dirty-Jeff on Top, a life-size
plastic representation of Jeff Koons and his wife engaging in
that fresh hell, kitsch coitus. And yet these paintings and
models of little girls have found their way into Japanese hearts
not just as troubling erotica but as cherished depictions of
innocence. Indeed, such difficult ambiguity is typical of much
postwar Japanese art and culture.
What are we to do with these examples of putative kawai except
blush and walk on? One answer can be found in the terrific
acrylic pictures of Aya Takano and the inkjet prints of Chiho
Aoshima, created with Mac Illustrator. Both women take the
androgynous girl nudes of hentai anime (erotic animation) and
subvert them, using them to create kitschy images that play with
the notion of cyborg feminism, which means putting these figures
in imaginary utopias beyond the philosophies of the Japanese
dirty raincoat brigade.
That very obsessive interest in, and subversive playing with,
what looks like trashy consumerist art is at the heart of a
Japanese subcultural trend called otaku, a term that means geek
and connotes those people who are obsessively interested in what
seems to western eyes kitsch. Otaku has been a term of abuse for
those perceived as childish deviants who refuse the challenge
and responsibility of adulthood. Alexandra Monroe, though, takes
otaku to be subcultural in the sense defined by the British
cultural studies guru Dick Hebdige, who regarded subcultures as
pockets of resistance that work against the bland hegemony of a
culture's dominant ideologies.
But how are geeks who spend their lives immersed in Lolicoms,
manga magazines and anime films resistant to the blandness of
Japanese culture? Murakami contends that otaku sensibilities
have much in common with US hippies in the 1970s. "A lifestyle
that seems to turn its back on the world," he writes, "is
founded on a nearly groundless obsession with peace and
happiness, tremendous curiosity for the internal world of the
self, extreme sentimentality, all of which contribute to
futuristic creation."
This is no doubt true, but it's worth remembering that several
of those involved in the millennarian cult responsible for the
Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo underground in 1995, killing 12
and injuring 6,000, were described as otaku. Those geeks weren't
content to inherit the earth, but sought rather to destroy it in
order to create what they thought would be a better one. Otaku
are always dreaming of achieving such transcendence, often by
means of the nuclear holocausts that are so obsessively imagined
in postwar Japanese popular culture.
Of course, in a sense, all these pathologies and lurid creations
are America's fault. Murakami contends that the Japanese people
have developed a dependency on the US as protector that began
with the postwar occupation and continues today: "Our general
removal from world politics and distorted dependence on the US
leaves us in a circumscribed, closed-in system, inhabiting an
Orwellian, science-fiction realm."
The ghastly centrepiece to the whole show is a huge, grossly
yellow, plastic mutant-cum-turd that sits with tree branches
sticking out of it like an irradiated porcupine. We are told
Noboru Tsubaki's exhibit, called Aesthetic Pollution, represents
the conflicting feelings of love and hate towards American
culture. Looking at Aesthetic Pollution, though, I didn't feel
the love, just plenty of hate and resentment - as if 60 years of
national trauma had been given physical form and airlifted
across the Pacific in repayment for some long-nurtured wound.
Little Boy is at the Japan Society, New York, until July 24.
Details: 001 212 832 1155.
[UP]
Guardian Unlimited Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
*****************************************************************
25 CTV.ca: What's all the fuss about G-8?
The Web CTV.ca [|]
[ /] Sat. Jul. 2 2005 11:29 AM ET
Thousands gather in the Scottish City of Edinburgh on Saturday.
(AP / John Giles)
With the help of Bob Geldof and a few dozen rock stars, this
year's G-8 Summit is getting more than its usual share of media
attention. So what exactly is the G-8 and what does it hope to
accomplish at this year's summit?
What is the G-8?
The G-8 refers to the Group of Eight leading industrialized
countries: Italy, France, the United States, the United Kingdom,
Russia, Canada, Japan, and Germany.
The group was formed during the 1973 oil crisis with six members
to coordinate economic policy. It became the G-7 in 1977, when
Canada joined, and the G-8 in 1998, when Russia signed on. The
G-8 has no headquarters, budget or permanent staff.
The group's main focus now is stabilizing and expanding the
world economy and managing international trade, although they
also deal with other topics that come up each year.
The leaders of all the G-8 countries gather to meet once a year
for what amounts to a photo op, as they announce agreements
hashed out at smaller meetings in the weeks ahead of the summit
by teams of diplomats known as "sherpas."
The G-8 presidency rotates every year, and the president hosts
the group's annual summit and decides the agenda. This year,
it's the United Kingdom's Tony Blair's turn. He's holding the
summit in Gleneagles, a posh golf resort in the Scottish
Highlands.
Russia takes over the presidency at the end of the year.
How is the G-8 different from the G-20 and the G-7?
The G-20, formally created in 1999, brings together finance
ministers and bank governors from the G-8 industrialized
countries -- as well as emerging-market countries. Together, the
Group of 20 account for more than 90 per cent of the world's
economic output.
The G7 meetings involve finance ministers from all the G-8
countries, minus Russia, which is not considered a major
economic power. The group tries to develop unified positions on
international currency and financial systems.
What's on this year's agenda?
While the G-8's main focus is the world economy, members often
work on a wider range of issues. A few years ago, G-8 countries
signed onto an initiative to secure nuclear materials vulnerable
to theft in the former Soviet Union.
Recently, G-8 members have discussed the technical obstacles
facing the international pedophile tracking system set up in
2003.
At this year's summit, G-8 president Tony Blair has put Africa
and climate change at the top of the agenda, as well as more
mundane topics such as the rising price of oil and export
subsidies.
With Africa, Blair hopes to stir action on the UN's Millennium
Development Goals, which include eliminating extreme poverty,
combating AIDS, and ensuring universal primary education. He is
also calling for a boost of $25 billion in annual aid to Africa
by 2010.
With climate change, Blair hopes to get the United States to
sign on for a strong climate agreement that acknowledges the
need to curb greenhouse gas emissions. But he admits that
securing such a deal will be "obviously very difficult."
How likely is a deal on climate change?
There still remains significant disagreement from the United
States on the causes of global warming. The U.S. disputes the
notion that global warming is due in large part to "human
activity" and was the only G-8 member to reject the Kyoto
Protocol, which requires developed countries to cut greenhouse
gas emissions.
And yet U.S. President George Bush has acknowledged that America
must end its reliance on Arab oil. That's why his country is
funding research into alternative fuels, such as methane,
hydrogen and nuclear power. Bush argues that these initiatives
will go a long way to cutting greenhouse emissions and will be
far less costly than trying to meet the Kyoto targets.
Nevertheless, it is unlikely that the Gleneagles summit will
result in a concrete commitment on climate change. A leaked
draft of a final statement on climate change included no firm
targets, timetables or cash, although British officials insist
the wording could yet be stiffened before the summit is over.
Hasn't the G-8 already agreed to African debt cancellation?
On June 11, the finance ministers of the G-8 agreed to forgive
the debts of 18 impoverished nations, 14 of them African,
including Burkina Faso, Ethiopia and Ghana. The debts were owed
to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and
the African Development Bank (AFDB) and totaled about $40
billion.
But because those poor countries will have difficulty seeking
more loans, Blair is hoping to secure a pledge at this year's
summit to double aid to Africa. So far, he has already received
a qualified commitment by the EU to double aid by 2015 but has
had less success securing a deal with the U.S. (The pressure is
on Canada to help nudge this along.)
Ahead of the summit, Bush moved to blunt criticism against him
by pledging a number of initiatives for Africa. He said he'd ask
Congress for $1.2 billion to cut malaria deaths in half over
five years, to double spending on promoting education programs
for girls in Africa, and improve legal protections for women
against violence and sexual abuse.
Bush has said more aid will be offered to Africa in the future,
but the U.S. must be convinced that governments are acting
responsibly and spending wisely, saying "African leaders should
be agents of reform and progress not passive recipients of
money."
How is Live 8 connected to the G-8?
The Live 8 series of music concerts are not affiliated with the
economic group but the shows will be held in each of the G-8
countries. The concerts are part of Bob Geldof's plan to raise
awareness for proposed solutions to global poverty.
The concerts' sponsoring groups, including Make Poverty History,
are calling for 100 per cent debt relief for poor countries, the
revision of international trade rules, and a doubling of aid for
Africa.
Geldof insists that unlike Live Aid in 1985, the focus of the
concerts is raising awareness, not money.
Will there be more protests?
Because G-8 countries represent much of the world's economic
power, their summit always draws fire from anti-globalization
groups and human rights activists. In recent years, the protests
have grown bigger and angrier. The most notable recent incident
was in 2001, when a protester was shot to death by police during
the G-8 summit in Genoa.
This year, many protest groups are subscribing to the Live 8
message of global debt relief. About 100,000 people are expected
to march through Edinburgh on Saturday in support of the Make
Poverty History Campaign.
They are planning a series of parades and meetings from Saturday
until Tuesday. The protests will escalate on Wednesday when the
summit begins, with marches and attempted road blockades planned
for around the summit site.
The protesters' main target is the United States, which has
agreed to only modest extra aid for Africa and has refused to
sign on to the Kyoto Accord.
2005 Bell Globemedia Inc. All Rights Reserved.
*****************************************************************
26 MNA: Next government should draft comprehensive energy plan - MP
2005/07/01
[ src=] Print version [ src=]
Majlis Energy Committee said here on Friday that the next
government should draft a comprehensive plan on the country’s
energy resources.
The next administration should first determine the share of the
country’s energy needs that must be produced by nuclear power
and then attempt to supply it, Afarideh told the Mehr News
Agency.
Iran’s next government is obliged to keep pace with the rapid
advancements in nuclear technology, he added.
Afarideh referred to the significant rise in the price of oil
over the past few months and predicted that the trend would
continue in the future.
“Today no one can argue that making use of nuclear (energy) in
place of fossil fuel energy is uneconomical,” he said.
Afarideh, who was formerly the chairman of the Iran Atomic
Energy Organization, stressed the necessity to invest in nuclear
power plants, adding that both identified and unidentified
uranium mines should be exploited in order to produce nuclear
fuel.
“We have to be able to resolve international issues concerning
our nuclear program.
“The hindrances in the way of Iran’s access to nuclear
energy as a source of electricity are political, and now that
the West has seen our (nuclear) capabilities, these obstacles
will gradually be removed.”
The MP noted that a specific budget should be allocated for the
country to purchase nuclear reactors and to further develop its
nuclear program.
New government should be able to purchase nuclear reactors: MP
Majlis Education and Research Committee Chairman Ali Abbaspur
said here on Friday that the next government should be able to
purchase 20 nuclear reactors, as approved by the Majlis, from
Europe or Russia.
“As an oil-producing country, Iran must make use of its
resources to produce higher quality products or export them to
other countries,” he told the Mehr News Agency.
“In order to supply its fuel, the country must consider using
more reliable and long-lasting resources like nuclear energy,
Abbaspur explained.
The MP noted that Iran’s nuclear activities are all within the
framework of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and meant for
peaceful purposes, adding that the International Atomic Energy
Agency cannot and should not protest against these activities
since they are in line with the agency’s charter.
There are unlimited peaceful applications of nuclear technology,
and no one can restrict a country in its efforts to conduct
research and make progress in the field, he said in conclusion.
HL/HG
End
MNA
© 2003 Mehr News Agency
*****************************************************************
27 The Observer: Minister ponders the nuclear option
The Guardian
[UP]
Oliver Morgan
Sunday July 3, 2005
When Malcolm Wicks stepped in to his new job as Energy Minister,
he faced a number of problems that needed urgent solutions.
These were spelt out for him on his first day as follows: (1)
how to achieve goals on climate change while maintaining
security of (energy) supply and international competitiveness;
(2) how to handle the tight supply/ demand balance next winter;
(3) how far he could rely on the present market framework to
deliver the very large investment needed to ensure security of
supply in future; (4) what role nuclear build and new
technologies might play in helping to meet CO2 and supply
objectives; (5) implications of energy prices staying high or
going even higher.
Tricky enough without Blair choosing climate change as a key
issue for the Gleneagles G8 summit this week.
Wicks says he loved the pensions job, and loves energy too:
'They are both complex and controversial and everyone has got a
view. Everyone has got an opinion on nuclear, it is big stuff,
it is controversial.'
So, since he brings it up, what's his opinion on nuclear? 'I
don't have an opinion. I am open-minded about it, which I don't
think is the same as being empty-minded.'
Does this mean the subject is closed - as it has officially been
since 2003, when the last energy White Paper constructed a
compromise policy that neither backed the building of nuclear
power stations to generate 'carbon- free' electricity nor closed
the door on them to placate both pro- and anti-nuclear ministers?
Sort of. Wicks points out that the polarised positions of the
nuclear and renewable power lobbies have distorted the argument.
'A lot of enthusiasts say it is all about wind power or all
about nuclear,' he says. 'Quite a chunk [a fifth] of our
generation comes from nuclear. It is about whether we maintain
that in future.'
The background is what makes the decision tricky. Britain will
probably fail to meet its target of reducing CO2 emissions by 20
per cent from 1990 levels by 2010 - they have risen in recent
years thanks to high oil and gas prices and cheap coal, which
generators have increasingly used. Old nuclear and coal power
stations will start closing in 2008. The DTI calculates that 25
gigawatts of generation - around a third of today's capacity -
will need to be built by 2020. These will need to be low- or
zero-emission.
'It [climate change] is the most pressing issue in the world, I
think it is as big an issue for this department as it is for
Defra [the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural
Affairs]. There can be no doubt that the climate is changing in
very worrying ways. People who doubt it, for whatever reasons,
have got their heads in the sand.
'We disagree with the American analysis and have told them so.
But that is not a reason for us to become belligerent.' He adds
that some states - New England and California - have taken
measures to reduce emissions.
Despite widespread scepticism in and outside the DTI, Wicks is
sticking to its target of 10 per cent of electricity from
renewable sources (chiefly onshore wind power) by 2010 and to
its aspiration of 20 per cent by 2020, which will depend on the
development of offshore wind and new technologies.
'It is a tough target to hit,' he says of 2010. 'I am very
committed to it. But this is more than a story about wind
turbines... it is also other technologies.' He believes that the
Renewables Obligation, which supports the higher price of
renewables - wind turbines, energy crops, wave and solar power -
through tradeable certificates, is clearing a space in the
market for these technologies. He mentions two social housing
solar power schemes (among the most expensive of the
technologies) he has visited: 'From what I can see, I am
convinced.'
Wicks has another emerging area - directing 25 million of
public money into clean coal technology, where CO2 from
coal-fired power stations is separated and pumped into former
North Sea oil reservoirs or into aquifers under the mainland.
Opec, he says, has expressed interest in the technology and 'the
Norwegians are doing it and there are some pilots in the US I
want to look at'.
In reflections that might appeal to Lee Raymond, chief executive
of Exxon, but be less welcome to environmentalists, he adds: 'We
[he highlights India and China] are going to be burning lots of
fuels, lots of coal, lots of oil and lots of gas. If we can find
ways of burning the stuff more efficiently and more
significantly if we can find ways of capturing CO2, maybe in the
North Sea, I think we have to look at that very hard.'
Despite his view that the DTI has as important a role in climate
change policy as Defra, he concedes that the key policy work is
the Defra-led Climate Change Review, due to be finalised this
year.
Central to that review - which deals with meeting Kyoto targets
to 2010, and so will not be affected by longer-term decisions on
generation - is the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, which caps the
output of generators and industrial users and forces them to pay
for overshooting by buying tradeable certificates from those who
undershoot, who in turn receive payment. The scheme has seen the
price of carbon rise from about 7 a tonne to 24 this year.
Wicks is in a difficult position. The DTI, wary of threats to
business competitiveness, is fighting in the European courts to
increase the UK cap. Defra wants it raised in phase two, from
2008. He repeats the DTI line that the original cap was a
miscalculation and stresses the importance of competitiveness
and economic growth.
But asked which is more important, competitiveness or global
warming, he is blunt: 'Climate change. In the long term if you
don't get that right we are all dead.'
On building new nuclear plants he says: 'We are not going to
take a decision this year.' He adds that it is unlikely that a
white paper on nuclear is necessary. 'What we need is a
decision,' he says.
And if the answer was yes? Could they be funded privately?:
'There would have to be some kind of understanding between the
government and the market.'
That would probably mean fixed-price contracts to guarantee
investors a return - a highly controversial move.
[UP]
Guardian Unlimited Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
*****************************************************************
28 The Observer: Comment | When the oil wars blow
[UP]
The more China flexes its economic muscle, the more American
politicians are crying foul
Will Hutton
Sunday July 3, 2005
Occasionally, there are tipping-point moments and we are
witnessing one at the moment. Seismic change is afoot. As oil
prices breach $60 a barrel and pessimists warn that the world
could be as little as 10 years away from a first-order resources
crisis, China's largest oil company, CNOOC, has launched a 10
billion bid for one of the US's juiciest medium-sized oil
companies, Unocal.
The world's two biggest continental economies are suddenly head
to head over who controls increasingly scarce oil. The stuff of
pulp novels at airport bookstalls is a reality.
The reaction in the US has been immediate, aggressive and
hypocritical. Much Congressional sound and fury has been vented
on Russia for not opening up more to US oil companies which want
to buy strategic reserves. Now that the boot is on the other
foot - China buying an American oil company and its reserves -
US congressmen and senators are deploying President Putin's
arguments as their own. America's oil, jobs and national
security are at issue, they blaze, and an investigation is
already under way to see whether China's bid should be blocked
on national security grounds. It is rigged to take months.
The Chinese, for their part, implausibly plead innocence.
Assuming the improbable rhetoric of a Wall Street investment
banker, the chairman of CNOOC, 71 per cent owned by the
communist People's Republic of China, says that the bid will be
good for shareholders on both sides of the Pacific.
It certainly offers Unocal shareholders more cash than rival
American oil company Chevron was offering, but only because the
Chinese government has lent CNOOC a $2.5bn interest-free loan to
support the loan and subsidised billions more. This is hardly
fair play but Unocal shareholders aren't complaining.
Nor will CNOOC sack any Unocal workers in America as Chevron
plans, it says, and promises not to export any oil and gas from
the US to China. It portrays itself as a benevolent, wronged and
misunderstood good fairy.
What it wants, and is paying well over the odds for, is Unocal's
oil reserves. It plainly calculates that today's $60 a barrel
oil price is just the beginning of a sustained rise in oil
prices that will make Unocal, even at 10bn, a snip. China's
interest is obvious. After the US, it is now the world's largest
oil importer and acquiring some strategic reserves is vital.
CNOOC's full name is telling; the China National Offshore Oil
Company - an organisation committed to offshore exploration.
China is the world leader in developing robotic underwater
exploration submersibles; in 1994, it built a robot capable of
working at depths of 3,000 feet. Now, according to the People's
Daily, it has one that can work at up to 20,000 feet. The
Chinese want oil very badly.
And they want it to be imported into China by oil pipeline and
not by tankers from the Middle East under the watchful eye of
the US navy. The US controls the sea lanes and thus the
viability of China's economy, as it regularly lets the Chinese
know by shadowing Chinese oil tankers.
The US has pre-empted China's attempts to build oil pipelines
from the Caspian into China. Unocal's attraction is that its oil
reserves are all in central and south east Asia, and once owned
by China can be moved into China overland.
This is a new great geopolitical game and neither the Chinese
nor American military are impressed by arguments that the market
must rule and that great powers in today's globalised world no
longer need strategic oil reserves. The US keeps six nuclear
battle fleets permanently at sea supported by an unparalleled
network of global bases not because of irrational chauvinism or
the needs of the military-industrial complex, but because of the
pressure they place on upstart countries like China.
Japan's decision this year to abandon its effort to build its
own oil company and attempted strategic reserve was an overt
acceptance of its dependent position. China is not ready to make
the same admission of defeat.
No country has offered such a comparable challenge to the world
order since Germany's rise at the end of the 19th century. Like
China today, it wanted markets and raw materials; like China
today, it confronted a world ordered around the needs of the
existing powers; like China today, its gigantic size and
explosive growth could not be ignored. Germany built fleets and
scrambled for colonies in Africa. Today, China builds fleets and
scrambles for oil reserves. The open question is whether it will
end in another 1914.
The optimistic reply is that China is being much cleverer than
the Kaiser's Germany. It has expanded by opening up to the
world, so giving its great power rivals a stake in its growth;
400 of the US's top 500 companies manufacture in China.
Wal-Mart, the US's largest retailer, is founded on cheap Chinese
imports. China may have built up immense foreign currency
reserves, but it judiciously lends them to the US, so financing
the US's trade deficit.
Although oil prices are troublingly high, some experts like
Erasmus University's Professor Peter Odell believe that, far
from oil reserves running out, the earliest world production
might peak is well after 2050, and that takes no account of more
efficient energy use. Today's upward oil price spike won't last
long. There is more than enough oil for China.
The pessimistic reply is that's not how it feels or how the game
is currently being played. Even if there is enough oil, it is in
parts of the world that are endemically volatile. As Paul
Roberts points out in The End of Oil, the geological formations
that create oil have already been identified and the easily
exploitable reserves are rapidly depleting.
There is a Panglossian tendency to overstate oil reserves by
oil-producing countries and oil companies alike, as we have
learned from Shell. Oil production is set to peak much earlier.
In any case, what matters is less reality than perceptions of
reality; the European powers didn't need colonies in Africa to
ensure their prosperity, they just believed they did, as China
believes it needs oil reserves in Asia today. And there are the
third, fifth and seventh US fleets as a constant reinforcer of
its instincts.
Nobody knows how this drama will play out. The optimists could
be right. But judge the vitriolic tone of the letter from 40
congressmen to President Bush complaining about CNOOC's bid;
look at the disposition of US naval power; recognise the force
of China's conviction that it must never again be humiliated as
it was in the 19th century and its will to catch up with the
West; and plot the growth of China's oil demand as its economy
doubles again.
The best way of avoiding war is not to dismiss its possibility
as outlandish; it is to recognise how easily it could happen and
vigilantly guard against the risk. Too few in Washington or
Beijing are currently doing that.
[UP]
Guardian Unlimited Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
*****************************************************************
29 The Standard: Nuclear energy expansion stepped up as demand soars - China
July 4, 2005
China's first nuclear power plant at Qinshan plans to have four
new reactors to boost generating capacity.AP
The shadows of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island no longer reach to
the pine-crested hillsides of Hangzhou Bay, where China is
rushing to expanding a nuclear power station to meet soaring
demand for electricity for its economic boom.
Driven by crushing fuel shortages, smog and ambitions to profit
from its hard-won nuclear prowess, Beijing has embarked on a
quest to more than double its nuclear power generating capacity
by 2020.
The push for more nuclear power means opportunities for US,
French and Russian technology suppliers that are competing for up
to US$8 billion (HK$62.4 billion) in contracts for two new
nuclear power plants - the biggest deals in years for the
industry.
The French nuclear group AREVA; Westinghouse Electric, the US
unit of British Nuclear Fuels; and Russia's AtomStroyExport are
awaiting the central government's decision on bids for facilities
at Sanmen, in the eastern province of Zhejiang, and Yangjiang in
Guangdong province.
At Qinshan, a two-hour drive southwest of Shanghai and its 20
million residents, sites are being prepared for four new
reactors, in addition to the five already operating at three
different facilities.
``The excavation is almost finished,'' said Yang Lanhe, general
manager for Qinshan Phase II, China's showcase for domestically
developed nuclear technology and equipment, pointing out the
window to a site cleared and waiting for construction to begin.
Yang and other executives at Qinshan speak of China's own
accident-free record after 14 years of nuclear power generation.
And they say technology has advanced far beyond that used decades
earlier, when the 1979 partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island
nuclear plant in Pennsylvania and the 1986 explosion at the
Chernobyl plant in Ukraine decimated public support for atomic
energy in the West.
``We know and understand that nuclear power is a clean and good
energy and we think it would be good to increase its share,''
said Hu Haiyun, Communist Party boss for the Qinshan Nuclear
Base.
China's nuclear program, dating back to the 1950s, began
commercial operations only in 1991, at Qinshan.
For six years, beginning in 1997, dozens of potential projects
were put on hold amid concerns over excess capacity, safety and
the relatively high costs of nuclear-generated electricity.
The race to build more plants resumed last year, as China
struggled with blackouts amid its worst energy crisis in decades.
China expects the share of its power supplied by nuclear
generation to grow to 4 percent by 2020 from 2.3 percent today.
To meet that goal, it must build about two new facilities every
year.
``After 2020, nuclear power's growth will increase much much
faster. Its importance in China's energy framework will be
indisputable,'' Shen Wenquan, vice chairman of China National
Nuclear Corp's science and technology committee, told an industry
conference in Shanghai.By 2060, nuclear power could provide about
a third of China's energy needs, he said.
Qinshan reflects the industry's evolution so far. Phase I was
designed by Chinese engineers, with main components imported from
Japan, Germany and France. Phase II was designed and built with
domestic technology and equipment. Phase III, with more modern
facilities, is a joint venture between China National Nuclear
Corp and Atomic Energy Canada.
China hopes to begin operating a prototype fast reactor by 2008,
with commercial operations expected by 2020, Shen said. It is the
center of a top-priority 1.38 billion yuan (US$1.3 billion)
national research project.
Chinese researchers also have been preparing to build a
pebble-bed nuclear reactor, using a new technology fueled by
small graphite spheres with uranium cores. Since the uranium is
spread among small spheres, dissipating heat, risks of a meltdown
are smaller and radioactive waste is less likely to be useful for
building nuclear weapons.
Shen noted that resolving the ``fuel cycle problem'' would be
crucial to future expansion plans for the industry.
He said research was focusing on fast reactor technology to
reduce the amount of waste and boost efficiency of uranium usage
by up to 70 times. China will eventually need to import most of
its uranium as its nuclear program expands. ASSOCIATED PRESS
Standard, Sing Tao Newspaper Group and
Global China Group. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
30 Brattleboro Reformer: Entergy offers to increase safety margin at Vermont Yankee
July 03, 2005 Brattleboro, VT
By The Associated Press
VERNON (AP) -- Entergy Nuclear has offered to expand the margin
of safety at the Vermont Yankee plant in a bid to win federal
approval to generate 20 percent more power at the plant.
The details of Entergy's proposal have not been released
because the company and its chief subcontractor, General
Electric met privately with federal regulators at Nuclear
Regulatory Commission headquarters outside Washington, D.C.
John McCann, Entergy's director of licensing, told NRC staff
that the company would agree to "operating restrictions" that
would increase safety margins.
It also said it would provide an additional analysis requested
by the NRC at a later date. The nature of that analysis and the
date by which it must be supplied were not made public.
Entergy has proposed to produce 20 percent more power with more
efficient equipment, but also with more and fresher nuclear fuel
inside the reactor. While the temperature inside the reactor
would remain the same, around 400 degrees, the company plans to
pump more water through the reactor to keep it cool. More steam
would be created to produce the extra 110 megawatts of power.
The NRC had called the status conference at its headquarters in
Bethesda, Md., to discuss Entergy's still incomplete 2003
application. The NRC has for about a year repeatedly requested
additional information from Entergy about its Vermont Yankee
plans.
Most of those questions deal with what Entergy and GE would do
differently at Yankee to avoid problems seen at similar
GE-designed reactors that have also boosted their power.
During the public portion of the NRC-Entergy meeting Thursday,
dozens of anti-nuclear activists and members of the public
listened in via telephone conference call. Entergy and the NRC
later adjourned behind closed doors to protect sensitive
proprietary information about Yankee and the proposed uprate,
officials said.
Entergy has been stymied by federal regulators, who over the
past year have been asking safety and technical questions about
Entergy's plan to increase power at the 33-year-old reactor. As
a result, Entergy is already more than a year behind its
original schedule, and is facing another critical deadline: its
next refueling outage is slated for October.
The refueling would be Entergy's opportunity to set up the
reactor core for higher output.
NRC spokeswoman Diane Screnci said after the closed-door
meeting that there was "progress," but declined to offer any
specifics.
Copyright 2005 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This
*****************************************************************
31 Malaysia Star: Driven by energy shortages, China races to expand nuclear power industry
AllMalaysia.info Global Malaysians Kuali.com
Sunday July 3, 2005
QINSHAN, China (AP) - The shadows of Chernobyl and Three Mile
Island no longer reach to the pine-crested hillsides of Hangzhou
Bay, where China is rushing to expanding a nuclear power station
to meet soaring demand for electricity for its economic boom.
Driven by crushing fuel shortages, smog and ambitions to profit
from its hard-won nuclear prowess, Beijing has embarked on a
quest to more than double its nuclear power generating capacity
by 2020.
The push for more nuclear power means opportunities for U.S.,
French and Russian technology suppliers that are competing for
up to US$8 billion (euro6.6 billion) in contracts for two new
nuclear power plants _ the biggest deals in years for the
industry.
The French nuclear group AREVA; Westinghouse Electric Co., the
U.S. unit of British Nuclear Fuels PLC; and Russia's
AtomStroyExport are awaiting a Chinese decision on bids for
facilities at Sanmen, in the eastern province of Zhejiang, and
Yangjiang in Guangdong province, which borders Hong Kong.
"We are fully committed to transferring our advanced nuclear
technology to China,'' Paul Felten, a senior vice president of
AREVA's Framatome, said at a recent conference in Shanghai.
At Qinshan, a two-hour drive southwest of Shanghai and its 20
million residents, sites are being prepared for four new
reactors, in addition to the five already operating at three
different facilities.
"The excavation is almost finished,'' said Yang Lanhe, general
manager for Qinshan Phase II, China's showcase for domestically
developed nuclear technology and equipment, pointing out the
window to a site cleared and waiting for construction to begin.
Yang and other executives at Qinshan speak of nuclear power
with the conviction of true believers.
They point to China's own accident-free record after 14 years
of nuclear power generation. And they say technology has
advanced far beyond that used decades earlier, when the 1979
partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in
Pennsylvania and the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl plant in
Ukraine decimated public support for atomic energy in the West.
"We know and understand that nuclear power is a clean and good
energy and we think it would be good to increase its share,''
said Hu Haiyun, Communist Party boss for the Qinshan Nuclear
Base.
China's nuclear program, dating back to the 1950s, began
commercial operations only in 1991, at Qinshan.
For six years, beginning in 1997, dozens of potential projects
were put on hold amid concerns over excess capacity, safety and
the relatively high costs of nuclear-generated electricity.
The race to build more plants resumed last year, as China
struggled with blackouts amid its worst energy crisis in
decades.
From the highest levels of Chinese government to the
technicians running Qinshan and other plants, there is a
newfound conviction that nuclear power is the most practical
option for reducing the country's reliance on heavily polluting
coal-fired power plants.
"Build Nuclear Power, Enrich the People,'' says a slogan on
billboards throughout the sprawling facility, built into a
peninsula surrounded by farms and fishing villages.
China expects the share of its power supplied by nuclear
generation to grow to 4 percent by 2020 from 2.3 percent today.
To meet that goal, it must build about two new facilities every
year.
"After 2020, nuclear power's growth will increase much much
faster. Its importance in China's energy framework will be
indisputable,'' Shen Wenquan, vice chairman of China National
Nuclear Corp.'s science and technology committee, said at an
industry conference in Shanghai.
Shen showed a chart forecasting that by 2060, nuclear power
could provide about a third of the country's energy needs.
In regions like Zhejiang, where both Qinshan and Sanmen are
located, and in Guangdong, home to the Daya Bay and Ling'ao
facilities, nuclear energy already supplies 13 percent of total
power generation _ a figure certain to rise significantly as
plants now being planned or built come on line.
China is concentrating its nuclear power facilities in those
heavily populated, industrialized coastal regions, where demand
is highest and pollution levels are too severe to burn more
coal.
"Much of the new nuclear power will be built in the south and
east where they lack their own supplies of coal, gas, oil and
large hydro(power),'' says Philip Andrews-Speed, director for
the Center for Energy, Petroleum and Mineral Law and Policy at
the University of Dundee, in Scotland.
"Nuclear will grow to form a large part of the power supply in
certain areas,'' he said.
As higher crude oil prices and worries over global warning
prompt countries such as Finland, India and South Korea to
increase reliance on nuclear energy, China is focusing on
developing its own technology to the point where its nuclear
power industry can become both self-sufficient and
internationally competitive.
Qinshan reflects the industry's evolution so far.
Phase I was designed by Chinese engineers, with important
components imported from Japan, Germany and France. Phase II was
designed and built with domestic technology and equipment. Phase
III, whose facilities are noticeably more modern, is a joint
venture between China National Nuclear Corp. and Atomic Energy
Canada Ltd.
Industry officials point to Qinshan's success in exporting
technology to Pakistan to build a nuclear plant as evidence of
China's own capabilities. But they are frank about their need
for foreign help in developing future generations of technology.
"Rest assured, we certainly will continue our international
cooperation for a long time to come,'' said Xu Lianyi, an
official from the State Nuclear Power Technology Corp. He said
the more than 100 manufacturers making nuclear power equipment
were keen to introduce technology from overseas.
China plans to build a reactor using CNP1000, its next
generation of pressurized water reactor, by 2007.
China hopes to begin operating a prototype fast reactor by
2008, with commercial operations anticipated by 2020, CNNC's
Shen said. It is the center of a top-priority 1.38 billion yuan
(US$167 million; euro138 million) national research project.
Chinese researchers also have been preparing to build a
pebble-bed nuclear reactor, using a new technology fueled by
small graphite spheres with uranium cores. Since the uranium is
spread among small spheres, dissipating heat, risks of a
meltdown are smaller and radioactive waste is less likely to be
useful for building nuclear weapons.
But like other countries China is still struggling over how to
handle the radioactive waste from its plants.
CNNC's Shen noted that resolving the "fuel cycle problem''
would be crucial to future expansion plans for the industry.
He said research was focusing on fast reactor technology can
reduce the amount of waste and boost efficiency of uranium usage
by up to 70 times, a bonus for China, which will eventually need
to import most of the uranium it needs as its nuclear program
expands.
Managers at Qinshan refused to say how much waste is stored
there.
Originally, plans called for the waste to be stored there for
up to 15 years, or until a national nuclear waste dump is set
up.
"We have enough space to hold it,'' said Hu, the Communist
Party secretary. "I trust our country has the ability to resolve
this problem.''
Copyright 1995-2005 Star Publications (Malaysia) Bhd (Co No
10894-D)
Managed by I.Star.
*****************************************************************
32 Hawk Eye: IAAP back on federal agenda
Industrial radiographers' health topic of St. Louis discussion.
By KILEY MILLER
kmiller@thehawkeye.com
It's not finished yet.
A federal panel in charge of reviewing radiation illnesses among
the nation's nuclear weapons workers will once again take up the
Iowa Army Ammunition Plant next month.
But this time, members of the Advisory Board on Radiation and
Worker Health gathering in St. Louis won't be talking about the
thousands of men and women who assembled nuclear weapons
components at the Middletown plant during the Cold War.
Instead, they will hash over the dangers faced by industrial
radiographers, a tiny subgroup of employees who used Xray
machines to peer inside conventional weapons looking for chinks
and defects.
The advisory board meets July 5 to 7 at Chase Park Plaza Hotel,
212232 N. Kingshighway Blvd. IAAP is on the firstday docket
for 5:15 p.m., with a public comment period following at 7:30
p.m.
A small number of industrial radiographers "Certainly less
than 10," according to Marek Mikulski, a researcher at the
University of Iowa worked in the energy section of the plant
from May 1948 to March 1949 and have since been diagnosed with
cancer. They were included in a wider petition filed by other
former weapons workers seeking automatic compensation from the
federal government for radiationrelated cancers.
The advisory board got behind the bulk of the petition two
months ago, determining that anyone who worked for the
Department of Energy or Atomic Energy Commission at the plant
from 1949 to 1974 likely encountered dangerous radioactive
materials and should get government aid for their cancer
treatment.
The radiographers were put on hold until the National Institute
of Occupational Safety and Health could gather more facts.
Should they be added as a class of the Special Exposure Cohort
a group set aside for automatic compensation in a mammoth
federal aid program for energy workers the radiographers or
their survivors would be eligible for the same $150,000 payment
and medical coverage now available to other plant nuclear
weapons workers.
The nuclear program kicked off in the spring of 1949, but that
doesn't mean radiation was entirely absent before then.
Radiographers with their powerful Xray equipment could have
endured a heavy bombardment of cancercausing radiation during
quality checks on conventional bombs.
"If you're taking an Xray through an inch of steel and 10
inches of explosives, it has to be pretty powerful to get down
that far," said Jack Polson, a West Burlington man who headed
the plant's laboratory four decades ago.
Some of the strongest radiation doses may have come from flash
Xrays, a technique allowing scientists to click superfast
pictures of bomb explosions to determine their strength. Safety
measures were suspect, at best.
"We supposedly hid behind concrete bunkers," said Polson, who
watched the flash Xray procedure but never participated.
The Hawk Eye 800 S. Main St., Burlington, Iowa 52601 319-754-8461
1-800-397-1708 FAX 319-754-6824 webmaster@thehawkeye.com
*****************************************************************
33 OpEdNews.Com: BUSH'S UNFORGIVEABLE COVERUP / IGNORING VETERANS HEALTH
Progressive, Tough Liberal News and Opinion
"Justice, sir, is the great interest of man on earth. It is the
ligament which holds civilized beings and civilized nations
together." : Daniel Webster
by Allen L Roland
I'm a Navy veteran, a former Navy carrier pilot, and I cannot
condone the action of this administration regarding its veterans
~ who are risking their lives and health fighting Bush's illegal
war and occupation and being ignored as to their growing health
care needs.
According to today's Washington Post, the Department of Veteran
Affairs predicted that just 23,533 veterans from Iraq and
Afghanistan would need medical treatment this fiscal year. A
more realistic projection? The VA now says the number is more
likely to be 103,000.
This is the unforgiveable coverup by the Cheny/Bush
administration who have not only refused to honor the dead but
refuse to acknowledge the seriously sick and maimed ~ especially
by radio-active weapons ( code name Depleted Uranium )
The Post also writes " Given the magnitude of claims that
emerged from the Gulf War and the longstanding refusal to
acknowledge by the problem of illnesses caused by U.S. weapons
themselves, especially depleted uranium, on the part of the U.S.
government (as well as on the part of the U.S. mainstream media
) it is not difficult to foresee that a fiscal problem of truly
gargantuan problems will soon be emerging."
The Sunday herald reports that an expert report warning that the
long-term health of Iraqs civilian population would be
endangered by British and US depleted uranium (DU) weapons has
been kept secret. The study by three leading radiation
scientists cautioned that children and adults could contract
cancer after breathing in dust containing DU, which is
radioactive and chemically toxic. But it was blocked from
publication by the World Health Organisation (WHO), which
employed the main author, Dr Keith Baverstock, as a senior
radiation advisor. He alleges that it was deliberately
suppressed, though this is denied by WHO.
In other words, British and American coalition forces are using
depleted uranium (DU) shells in the war against Iraq and
deliberately flouting a United Nations resolution which
classifies the munitions as illegal weapons of mass destruction
~ and then ignoring the after effects by not acknowledging the
victims as war casualties.
Why am I not shocked and surprised ~ in light of the ongoing
actions of this insensitive and corrupt administration.
Once again, this is an unforgivable coverup which is finally
making its way to the floor of Congress and the media.
And the Post quotes Jerry Lewis, the Republican chairman of the
House Appropriations Committee Chairman, as saying that the use
of the bad budget numbers "borders on stupidity -- or worse. "
Somebody was hoping they could hide the ball for a while and
talk about it later, and frankly in this arena you can't afford
to do that," Lewis said.
In that regard, here is a short editorial from The Toledo Blade
~ deep in Bush country ~ which should make the White House
extremely nervous.
Excerpt: For several years now, the Bush bean counters have been
slashing funds for veterans medical care. Playing cheap with
those who have put their lives on the line would be a concern
any time. Coming as the shortfall does as soldiers return home
daily from war in Afghanistan and Iraq with horrific injuries,
its a scandal...The result has been a longer wait for medical
care and the closing of some VA clinics.....Such discriminatory
policies clearly are out of line. The federal government cannot
be all things to all of the American people, but the least it
can do is to keep faith with those who kept faith with it by
serving in the armed forces. "
Allen L Roland
The war against veterans
PRESIDENT Bush gives plenty of lip service to men and women in
uniform. Now its time for the President to put his money where
his mouth is and fully fund veterans benefits.
An official of the Department of Veterans Affairs admitted last
week that it is short $1 billion for the current fiscal year,
which ends Sept. 30, but giving short shrift to those who have
served their country is nothing new for this administration.
For several years now, the Bush bean counters have been slashing
funds for veterans medical care. Playing cheap with those who
have put their lives on the line would be a concern any time.
Coming as the shortfall does as soldiers return home daily from
war in Afghanistan and Iraq with horrific injuries, its a
scandal.
The outrage on Capitol Hill is bipartisan, even though
Republicans have continually thwarted Democratic attempts to
give the VA more money under the guise of budget restraint.
Sen. Larry Craig (R., Idaho), chairman of the Senate Veterans
Affairs Committee, let it be known that he has reamed out Jim
Nicholson, who heads the VA.
Sen. Patty Murray (D., Washington), a member of an
appropriations subcommittee overseeing the VA, declared that the
administration is unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary to
fulfill the promises we have made to our veterans.
The result has been a longer wait for medical care and the
closing of some VA clinics.
Veterans groups are understandably hot, with most of their ire
directed at Republicans, who control Congress and have made a
priority of cutting so-called domestic spending at the behest
of Mr. Bush. One thrust of the Bush policies has been to direct
benefits mostly toward those with certain medical problems that
are directly attributable to military service.
Steve Robertson, legislative director of the American Legion,
says the spending cuts are inconsistent with a nation at war.
Hes especially critical of dividing veterans into little
groups, the ones that deserve and the ones who dont
deserve.
Such discriminatory policies clearly are out of line. The
federal government cannot be all things to all of the American
people, but the least it can do is to keep faith with those who
kept faith with it by serving in the armed forces.
Allen L Roland is a practicing psychotherapist, author and
lecturer who also shares a daily political and social commentary
on his weblog and website www.allenroland.com He also guest
hosts a monthly national radio show TRUTHTALK on Conscious talk
radio www.conscioustalk.net
Copyright OpEdNews, 2002-2005
*****************************************************************
34 Reuters: Explosion at Japanese radiation lab injures two
02 Jul 2005 10:17:29 GMT
Source: Reuters
TOKYO, July 2 (Reuters) - An explosion at a government-owned
experimental radiation laboratory in western Japan slightly
injured two researchers on Saturday, police said.
No radiation was leaked, an official at the Spring 8 facility
in Hyogo Prefecture said, adding that it was the first such
explosion at the centre and the cause was unknown.
Two scientists, one from Taiwan and the other from France,
suffered slight injuries when a container exploded during an
experiment. They were taken to hospital and the laboratory was
sealed because of a leak of beryllium, a toxic metal, a police
spokesman said.
The incident occurred at the synchrotron radiation facility
about 430 km (270 miles) west of Tokyo.
The facility creates intense beams of electromagnetic radiation
used in a range of scientific experiments -- from materials
physics to life sciences -- and is the most powerful of its type
in the world, according to the Spring 8 Web site.
*****************************************************************
35 Observer: Uranium missing at UK site
[UP]
Search is ordered after deadly samples are found at
atomic weapons facility
Mark Gould and Robin McKie
Sunday July 3, 2005
The Observer
Nuclear inspectors have ordered the UK's atomic bomb-making
establishment at Aldermaston to carry out an urgent search of all
its premises after it was discovered that samples of highly
dangerous uranium had gone missing.
The revelation comes in a highly critical safety report by the
government's Nuclear Installations Inspectorate following recent
visits to the Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Establishment. In
addition to the uranium complaint, the establishment was
criticised for weakness in the quality of its procedures.
Aldermaston, which occupies a 750-acre site in west Berkshire,
has been the home of Britain's nuclear weapons industry for more
than 50 years. Warheads using highly radioactive and highly
unstable plutonium and uranium were designed and built there.
The establishment has a 5.3 billion government contract that
guarantees its life for another 25 years. It is owned by the
Ministry of Defence and run by a government contractor and a
consortium of three companies: British Nuclear Fuels, US weapons
manufacturer Lockheed Martin, and facilities management company
Serco. The NII report, published this week, reveals the
'discovery of radioactive material not previously accounted for,
although safely controlled within the facilities. In the past
this non-fissile material was not classified as accountable
material.'
Inspectors have insisted that Aldermaston staff search its
facilities to identify any further unaccounted for material. Last
night a spokesman for the establishment told The Observer that
the number of unaccounted for samples was in 'the low tens' and
related to highly toxic but no longer radioactive depleted
uranium.
He added the survey would be completed within the next three
months, but so far no further unaccounted for nuclear materials
had been found.
NII inspectors warned Aldermaston that 'further instances of the
discovery of similar materials will not be viewed
sympathetically', and added they were concerned about
'weaknesses' in complying with nuclear licence conditions for
record keeping and basic measures such as displaying proper
safety warning notices.
Their report also states the sites need modernisation to comply
with regulatory requirements and talks of 'weaknesses' at
corporate level in identifying underlying causes of potential
problems - so called 'root cause analysis'.
The independent nuclear consultant, John Large, said the report
underlines 'sloppy, disorganised management'.
'This is Aldermaston we are talking about. It handles dangerous,
esoteric materials like plutonium and uranium. To say there are
weaknesses in root cause analysis goes to the fundamentals of the
way this place is managed by three private companies; they find a
problem and the management systems don't get to the bottom of the
cause.'
Di McDonald, from anti-nuclear campaigners Nuclear Information
Service, said: 'It's worrying that a military establishment can
"lose" radioactive material, but significant that the NII made
this public in its report. However, the inspectors don't have any
powers over the military at the end of the day.'
Aldermaston says it has noted the concerns 'and will be seeking
to refine our process in this area'.
Special report
The nuclear industry
Graphics
The Mox ships' journey around the world (pdf)
Useful links
British Energy
Department of Trade and Industry
British Nuclear Fuels Ltd
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Greenpeace
HSE nuclear glossary
UK atomic energy authority
National Radiological Protection Board
Friends of the Earth
World Nuclear Association
World Nuclear Transport Institute
[UP]
Guardian Unlimited Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
*****************************************************************
36 AU ABC: Commonwealth seeks advice on NT uranium ban
Sunday, 3 July 2005. 06:50 (AEST)Sunday, 3 July 2005. 06:50
The federal Resources Minister says he is seeking written
advice on whether he has the power to overrule the Northern
Territory Government's ban on new uranium mines.
The Minister, Ian Macfarlane, had said he had no power to
intervene if Territory Labor chose to stop uranium mining.
But a legal academic from the Australian National University has
since challenged the Minister, saying the Commonwealth does have
the power to override the Territory, as it did with the right to
die bill in 1996.
The Minister has declined to respond to the comments.
But a spokeswoman says Mr Macfarlane is now seeking further
advice.
*****************************************************************
37 Bristol Phoenix: Warren council proactive on Narragansett Electric contamination
Updated: Sat, Jul 2, 2005
Thursday, June 30, 2005 e-mail this
The Warren Town Council is concerned that pollutants on
Narragansett Electric Company land will be released during
upcoming bridge project.
WARREN - Prompted by concern that lead, arsenic and other
compounds in soil on the Narragansett Electric property on North
Main Street could be released when the state Department of
Transportation (DOT) begins to build a new Warren Bridge over
the Palmer River, the Warren Town Council is drafting a letter
regarding the contamination and sending copies to the electric
company and two state agencies Because of its location next to
the site, the DOT plans to use the property to store equipment
during construction.
"I just wanted it (the existing contamination) to be on the
record before they starting working on the bridge," said council
president Frank Alfano.
Officials at DOT, Narragansett Electric and the state Department
of Environmental Management said they are aware of the existing
contamination. When the DOT asked to use the property in 2004,
Narragansett Electric hired a contractor to test the soil near
the chain-link fence along Main Street before signing an
agreement. Test results showed levels of arsenic, beryllium and
benzoid pyrene above DEM's standards for industrial areas. They
also showed levels of lead and other contaminants above DEM's
more stringent standards for residential areas.
"The contamination was above threshold levels, spurring us to
notify DEM," said Narragansett Electric spokesman David Graves.
"According to our environmental engineer, the contaminants in
those initial soil borings were not at a level that would demand
remediation."
Once site of gas manufacturer
Mr. Graves said the contaminants are consistent with those found
in the soil of most cities and towns. The arsenic could have
come from herbicides. The beryllium was detected at natural
background levels. But Narragansett Electric might be partially
responsible for the benzoid pyrene contamination. Although the
company no longer produces energy at the Main Street facility,
the site once housed a gas manufacturing plant. Workers burned
coal to generate natural gas, releasing coal ash that contained
benzoid pyrene as a byproduct.
Mr. Graves said Warren leased the property to a gas company in
1854. It was used as a gas works from the 1850s to the 1930s.
The company operating the plant became part of Narragansett
Electric in 1914. Mr. Graves said it is possible the benzoid
pyrene came from the plant. But he added that auto emissions
also contain the compound.
In April, the DEM directed Narragansett Electric to conduct more
investigations. The company recently hired contractors to take
additional soil samples and test groundwater.
Although the contaminants are currently capped with pavement,
Narragansett Electric employees worry that DOT might disturb the
soil during the bridge project. But a DOT spokesman said their
fears are unfounded.
"We're not going to re-grade and we're not going to excavate,"
said Kazem Farhoumand, deputy chief engineer for DOT. "We have
even agreed not to penetrate the pavement."
Mr. Farhoumand said the state will merely use the site for
storage and as a staging area. To allay Narragansett Electric's
concerns, DOT agreed to be responsible for remediation should
excavation occur.
"Anything that DOT disturbs in the course of construction,
they're going to have to deal with," said Jeffrey Crawford, a
principal environmental scientist at DEM. "They know what they
have to do with the material."
Mr. Farhoumand said DOT is going to solicit bids from
contractors for the project in July. He said it will take time
to award the contract. He expects bridge work to begin in the
fall.
By Alyssa Kneller
akneller@eastbaynewspapers.com
Copyright 2005 East Bay Newspapers. All rights reserved.
PO Box 90 Bristol, RI 02809-0090 - 401-253-6000
*****************************************************************
38 Congressman Jon Porter (NV03) - Press Release - KEY USGS
SCIENTIST TESTIFIES AT YUCCA MOUNTAIN HEARING - Chairman Porter
vows to continue probe
+
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 29, 2005
Press Release
KEY USGS SCIENTIST TESTIFIES AT YUCCA MOUNTAIN HEARING
Chairman Porter vows to continue probe
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Today, at a hearing of the Government
Reform Committees Subcommittee on Federal Workforce and Agency
Oversight, Joseph Hevesi, a key figure in the Yucca Mountain
investigation, responded to questions posed by Subcommittee
Chairman Jon Porter (R-NV) and other Subcommittee members
regarding the safety of the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear
waste repository. Mr. Hevesi, a United States Geological Survey
(USGS) scientist, appeared before the Subcommittee under
subpoena.
Im pleased that Mr. Hevesi chose to answer the Subcommittees
questions rather than invoke his Fifth Amendment rights, and I
appreciate his willingness to continue the dialog so that we can
better understand the circumstances under which he was
operating, said Porter. However, the vagueness of many of his
answers and his own assertion that the level of scrutiny
surrounding the Yucca Mountain Project and his e-mails is one
hundred percent warranted confirms my belief that there is much
more to learn with regards to whether or not the science behind
the project is sound. The fact that Mr. Hevesi denied
falsifying any data does not close the door on the
investigation. As Ive stated before, we will get to the bottom
of this mess.
At the core of the investigation are e-mails sent by Hevesi to
other USGS scientists while they were testing the viability of
Yucca Mountain as a storage facility for 77,000 tons of nuclear
waste. A number of the e-mails suggest that data used in the
testing may have been falsified, which would put the safety of
the entire project into question. After repeated attempts by
Subcommittee investigators to speak with Hevesi about the
e-mails were ignored, Chairman Porter was left with no choice
but to subpoena Hevesi to appear at todays hearing.
In addition to Hevesis lack of cooperation in the months
leading up to his testimony today, officials at the Department
of Energy (DOE) have not complied with numerous Subcommittee
requests for documents, nor have they assisted in arranging
interviews with DOE employees who may be able to contribute to
the investigation. W. John Arthur, III, a DOE official with
intimate knowledge of the Yucca Mountain project, testified at
todays hearing that DOE is currently in the process of
re-evaluating the data that has come under question, but could
not answer a number of the questions posed to him by the
Subcommittee.
Mr. Arthurs reluctance or inability to provide the
Subcommittee with solid answers to our questions simply wont
do, nor will the arrogance exhibited by his agency when refusing
to comply with Subcommittee requests for key documents and
access to individuals with knowledge of the Yucca Mountain
project. Is DOE unable to provide information due to poor
management, or, are they hiding something? Porter concluded.
# # #
Next
Previous
[Press Release] Press Release List
[Press Release]
*****************************************************************
39 SF Chronicle: Nuclear waste: 1 plant, 48 tons a year / In an age of terrorism
fears, no plan to dispose of society's most lethal toxin
Ralph Vartabedian, Los Angeles Times
Sunday, July 3, 2005
Morris , Ill. -- Along the headwaters of the Illinois River,
engineers at the Dresden nuclear power station have erected two
dozen steel and concrete silos that rise 20 feet above the
Midwest plain.
The gray structures are unremarkable except for what is loaded
inside: Each contains roughly 13 tons of high-level nuclear
waste that has been accumulating at the plant since the
Eisenhower administration. With nowhere to go, the waste will
most likely remain in place for decades.
Dresden's reactors have produced one of the largest stockpiles
-- 1,347 tons -- of civilian nuclear waste in the nation. With
the plant churning out nearly 48 tons more waste each year,
engineers are preparing to double the size of the outdoor
storage pad this summer.
The plant has the same problem as nearly all of the nation's 103
commercial reactors: They were never designed to store waste
long-term and are now forced to deal with large quantities of
spent uranium fuel rods that produce high levels of radiation.
The problem reflects decades of miscalculations and missteps by
the federal government, which promised at the dawn of the
nuclear age to accept ownership of the waste. The plan to build
a waste repository at Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert has
faced so many political, legal and technical problems that it's
impossible to project when -- or even if -- it will be built.
As a result, the most lethal waste product of industrial society
is being handled outside any federal policy and without any road
map for how it will be managed in the future, according to
industry officials, nuclear waste experts, lawyers and
academicians.
"It is a statement of reality," acknowledges Clay Sell, deputy
secretary of energy. "Is it the right policy? No."
The deep storage pools traditionally used to keep nuclear waste
are filling up at most plants. Utilities have turned to outdoor
storage in so- called dry casks as the de facto standard for
dealing with waste.
From California to South Carolina, utilities have loaded 700 of
the steel and concrete casks, and scores of additional casks are
scheduled to be filled this year.
It is a stopgap measure that has averted a shutdown of the
nuclear power industry. But it means leaving all of the roughly
50,000 tons of civilian nuclear waste spread across the nation
for the next half-century or more. And storing the waste at
power plant sites is creating significant economic,
environmental, legal and security challenges -- including the
potential for it to become a terrorist target.
A recent study by the National Academy of Sciences found that
the waste stored in pools was most vulnerable, but the outdoor
casks also were potential targets. Such an attack could trigger
an environmental catastrophe.
"These are the ultimate dirty bombs," said Bob Alvarez, a senior
scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and a former Energy
Department official. "Let's not pretend the way we are storing
this waste is safe and secure in an age of terrorism."
Utility executives and government officials sharply dispute such
allegations, saying the plants have multiple layers of
protection from any attack. Exelon Corp., the nation's largest
nuclear utility, has erected heavy barriers and security towers
at Dresden that are staffed round the clock by guards with
automatic weapons.
Though the nuclear industry has a good record for preventing
radiation leaks during normal operations and dry casks are
widely regarded as safe, many outside experts say their biggest
fear is that future generations might lack the willpower and
financial capability to safeguard tons of radioactive waste
dispersed across the nation. Waste is already stored in casks at
five shuttered nuclear plant sites.
"We are muddling into an alternative plan by default," says Joe
Egan, a longtime attorney for the nuclear industry who now
represents Nevada in fighting Yucca Mountain.
Nuclear waste also has created a legal mess. The Energy
Department is facing more than four dozen lawsuits by the
utility industry for its failure to take the waste. Damages
could reach $56 billion over the next three decades, according
to the Nuclear Energy Institute, a powerful trade group for
nuclear utilities.
At the Department of Energy, Sell argues that deep geologic
storage of the waste at Yucca Mountain would be the best
technical solution. He believes the project will eventually be
completed. But the loss of a key court case last year and
political resistance in Congress have put the dump at least 14
years behind schedule.
Without a dump, utilities have few options short of shutting
down their reactors and eliminating 20 percent of the U.S.
electricity supply that comes from nuclear power. And without a
solution to the waste, the proposal by President Bush to start a
new era of nuclear plant construction could go nowhere.
Indefinite storage of nuclear waste at reactor sites is a bitter
pill for many politicians, particularly those from
environmentally fragile areas such as Lake Michigan, which is
ringed by nuclear plants.
"I want the waste off the shores of Lake Michigan," said Rep.
Fred Upton, R-Mich., whose district includes two nuclear plants
built on the lake's eastern boundary. "Ultimately, there is a
safety problem."
Nuclear waste at power plants will remain radioactive for
hundreds of thousands of years. The fission of uranium inside
reactors produces heat for electricity production. Afterward,
the uranium fuel rods are far more radioactive than when they
entered the reactor.
To maximize storage capacity for the spent fuel rods, the
nuclear industry devised a way to pack them more closely in the
50-foot-deep storage pools than initially planned. Critics say
this kind of dense packing poses a safety risk, however. If
terrorists were to puncture the pool wall and drain the water,
the rods could ignite and disperse lethal amounts of radiation,
according to a recent report by the National Academy of
Sciences.
Even with dense packing, the pools are running out of space.
Twenty years ago, nuclear plants began removing the oldest fuel
rods, which have radioactively decayed somewhat, and started
storing them in huge outdoor storage casks like the ones at
Dresden.
Officials at Nuclear Regulatory Commission "anticipate that
there will be an increase in the number of casks being loaded
over the next few years," said E. William Brach, director of the
commission's spent fuel project office.
The logistics of nuclear waste ensure it will be around a long
time. Even if the federal government gets a license to operate
Yucca Mountain, the earliest it could accept waste shipments
would be 2012. By that year, more than 60,000 tons of civilian
nuclear waste would be spread across about three dozen states.
It would take about 50 years to work down the backlog, according
to Frank von Hippel, a nuclear expert at Princeton University
and former White House national security adviser. That's because
under current plans Yucca could process a maximum of 3,000 tons
of waste annually, while nuclear power plants would be
generating 2,000 tons of waste each year. That means a net
reduction of just 1,000 tons each year, he said.
"We have to assume that these casks will be around for a very
long time," Von Hippel said. "It will take quite a while to move
them, even if we had someplace to send them today."
In any case, "on the day Yucca Mountain opens" it would be too
small to handle all the waste, said Sell, the Energy Department
official. There is no Plan B. Under federal law, the department
can pursue only Yucca Mountain.
Further complicating matters are the divided lines of authority
between the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Energy
Department. The commission regulates waste at plant sites and
authorizes dry cask storage but has no role in national policy
for disposing of nuclear waste. That policy responsibility rests
with the Energy Department, which has no voice or authority in
the use of dry casks.
In the vacuum, a private consortium is planning to build an
above-ground storage site for hundreds of casks on an Indian
reservation in Utah. Despite state opposition, it is getting
approval from the nuclear commission.
Meanwhile, utilities see dry cask storage as a cheap and safe,
if not permanent, solution.
Holtec International, one of the leading suppliers, says its
casks can safely store waste for at least 100 years without
leaking, according to company marketing manager Joy Russell.
On the inside of the casks, the waste is so radioactive it would
deliver a fatal dose in minutes, but the outside can be touched.
"An individual can stand right next to the cask," Brach said.
"There is a dose, but it is a minimal dose."
Anti-nuclear groups, such as the Washington-based Nuclear
Information and Resource Service and the Chicago-based Nuclear
Energy Information Service, say the casks should be better
protected. In Germany, for example, the casks are inside
fortified buildings.
Government tests at the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in
Maryland showed that a shoulder-fired missile could penetrate a
cask wall, causing some radioactive fuel to disperse.
"We don't want this 10-pin bowling alley out in the open," said
Dave Kraft, an anti-nuclear activist for more than 20 years.
"Anybody with a shoulder-fired missile could hit one of these
things from outside the plant."
Acceptance of cask storage worries experts who say that in the
future the casks will become a poor permanent solution.
Kevin Crowley, a nuclear expert at the National Academy of
Sciences who helped guide an investigation into the
vulnerability of spent fuel storage, said the casks would become
a risky legacy if left in place too long.
"The major uncertainty," he said, "is in the confidence that
future societies will continue to monitor and maintain such
facilities."
Page A - 3
San Francisco Chronicle]
*****************************************************************
40 RedNova News: BNFL's Fundraising Plan Sets Off Heated Reactions
Posted on: Saturday, 2 July 2005,
STATE-owned BNFL came under fire yesterday over its latest plan
to sell off its U.S.
nuclear power station construction business just as nuclear
power is rising up the global political agenda.
Early City estimates suggest the sale of Westinghouse could
fetch up to Pounds 1bn for the British taxpayer, although union
leaders and energy market analysts said the timing of the
decision was 'bizarre'.
It comes after BNFL received at least 15 tentative approaches
for Westinghouse from private equity groups and trade buyers
around the world.
Prospect, Britain's biggest nuclear union, raised fears of a
'brain drain' at BNFL just as the UK is considering building a
new generation of nuclear plants and as Westinghouse could
benefit from growing markets in China and the U.S..
It called the move ' shorttermism at its very worst'.
However BNFL chief executive Mike Parker said that 'given all
the expressions of interest, we want to see if a disposal can
realise appropriate value at this time'.
He added that the 'tide for nuclear power is rising', citing the
new technologies developed by Westinghouse that have been
approved in the U.S., and America's Export-Import bank giving
approval for up to $5bn of loans to the business for the
construction of four nuclear plants in China.
The Westinghouse sale process should start next week when
investment bank Rothschild, advising BNFL, will send out teaser
packs to interested parties.
General Electric and French nuclear group Areva have been mooted
as potential bidders.
Westinghouse employs around 1,400 staff in the UK.
BNFL's annual results yesterday showed group losses halved to
Pounds 144m in the year to March. Parker said: ' Westinghouse is
a very successful operation. It generated $2bn in trade sales
last year and $150m in operating income.'
Source: Daily Mail; London (UK)
© 2002-2005 RedNova.com. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
41 Newsday.com: LIRR suspends Brookhaven waste
BY KATIE THOMAS AND JOIE TYRRELL STAFF WRITERS
July 2, 2005
The Long Island Rail Road has suspended the shipment of
radioactive soil from Brookhaven National Laboratory,
complicating the future of a massive cleanup at the lab that was
only six weeks from ending.
Citing an agreement with Queens prohibiting the "carrying of any
solid waste" through the borough, railroad officials ordered New
York &Atlantic Railway -- the freight arm of the LIRR -- to cease
hauling the soil and all other solid waste through Queens.
"This is a potential nightmare," said Adrienne Esposito,
executive director of Citizens Campaign for the Environment, an
environmental group that monitors the cleanup at the federal lab.
"The greater the delay, the greater the cost may be."
Tom Kelly, spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation
Authority, said the railroad acted after learning about the
transport of radioactive soil earlier this week.
"We immediately informed New York &Atlantic that we would not
handle any of the solid waste material and they were in
violation of the Queens agreement," Kelly said.
Lab officials said they learned of the suspension on Tuesday,
but have been shipping the soil for more than two and a half
years. Les Hill, director of the lab's environmental restoration
projects, said workers load about 30 train cars' worth of debris
per week, and the shipments -- whose final destination is a Utah
facility -- comply with safety regulations. Their last shipment
was on June 22.
"We're sitting by our phone," Hill said. "We're just very, very
hopeful of having shipments resume as soon as possible."
Fred Krebs, president of the freight line, declined to comment
about the agreement Friday, saying only: "We did exactly what we
were supposed to do."
Kelly said freight officials have told the LIRR that they
believe the agreement with Queens is invalid, a position shared
by New York City's corporation counsel. Susan Kath, division
chief of environmental law for New York City, said in a
statement that then-Borough President Claire Shulman lacked the
authority to enter into the 1997 pact.
"The agreement is not in effect and cannot be enforced by the
city," Kath said.
Kelly said the railroad decided to halt shipments "while we
research the legality of the agreement."
Work is stopped on the removal of low-level radioactive soil
around the lab's former hazardous waste management facility as
well as concrete and soil from near the Graphite Research
Reactor, Hill said. Although the debris could be carted by
truck, doing so would "be a pretty big shift in the way we're
doing things," he said.
Work on dismantling the Graphite Research Reactor has not yet
begun, Hill said, so he's unsure of what impact the stoppage
will have on that project.
However, lab workers were only about a month and a half away
from completing the soil cleanup. "We're close to the finish
line," Hill said.
Copyright 2005 Newsday Inc.
*****************************************************************
42 Pahrump Valley Times: Death Valley future 'cloudy'
July 1, 2005
By ROBIN FLINCHUM SPECIAL TO THE PVT
Sleeping out in the open under the desert sky, covered in a
blanket of stars, is one of the things the old-timers often said
drew them to Death Valley and kept them coming back. The
prospectors loved that sky, the American Indian loved that sky,
and today nearly a million people a year find their way into
Death Valley National Park to stand under its broad expanse in
awestruck silence.
But that affinity for twinkling stars and wide open spaces may
not be enough to protect the desert sky from the many threats
looming and lurking all around the edges of Death Valley
National Park today, according to a recent State of the Parks
report released by the National Parks Conservation Association.
Ongoing development in Pahrump, the proposed Yucca Mountain
Repository, and clouds of pollution wafting in from Southern
California and the Central Valley are converging on this fragile
desert landscape with potentially disastrous results.
This year the air quality in Death Valley National Park was
rated "fair" according to the report, receiving a higher score
than its beleaguered sister, the Mojave National Preserve, which
rated "poor." The NPCA attributes these conditions to
ever-increasing pollution emanating from nearby population
centers such as Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino and Las
Vegas - places with "some of the worst air quality in the
nation."
But while the air is still in fair condition, that clear night
sky, and the Death Valley National Park "soundscape" (its
weighty and impressive silence) are threatened by the potential
development of the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Repository just 50
miles northeast of the park border in Nye County. But the night
sky is, perhaps, one of the least concerns resulting from the
development of Yucca Mountain. "A myriad of unknown threats
associated with proximity to the disposal site itself" are also
of concern to the NPCA.
And, of course, water ranks high on the list of worries. The
park has more than 400 water sources within its boundaries but,
"With growing populations demanding millions of gallons of water
annually, groundwater levels are being depleted, which impacts
desert springs, seeps, and oases," the NPCA reports. The water
levels in Devil's Hole, a water-filled cavern housing the
world's entire, endangered population of Devil's Hole pupfish in
a park annex within the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge
close to Pahrump, is being strained by "rapid regional growth."
"Myriad wells are already approved for withdrawing groundwater
from adjacent lands, and applications continue to be filed,"
according to the report. These wells could result in the
depletion of the carbonate aquifer underlying Death Valley,
which feeds the many seeps and streams vital to the survival of
its plant and animal life.
And if that weren't enough, the NPCA also reports that today
there are still 146 inactive patented mining claims within the
park boundaries, causing "some uncertainty over the future of
lands and associated resources."
In addition, while the park scored far better than the Mojave
National Preserve or Joshua Tree National Park in the
preservation of cultural resources, the park is under-funded in
resource management and its interpretive displays in the Furnace
Creek Visitor Center are "woefully out of date." Because of
federal budget cuts, 44 staff positions within Death Valley are
currently unfilled, about a third of them in resource
management, according to the report.
In terms of air quality, the park is sitting far above some
other California parks, especially Kings Canyon and Sequoia
National Parks, rated among the top five most polluted parks in
the nation. But as overall air quality declines; a recent poll
funded by the NPCA also indicated that so would visitation in
the parks. Some 68 percent of respondents surveyed said they
would not visit a smoggy national park.
So how does a national park manage to get along in the face of
such staggering odds? For Superintendent J.T. Reynolds, it's a
matter of "putting things in perspective and prioritizing," he
said. First, he said, "Death Valley National Park is not out
here on an island. We have regional resources, we have entities
we can call on for support."
And, perhaps most importantly, Reynolds adds that he is part of
an organization called the Desert Managers Group that allows him
to communicate regularly with representatives of some of the
organizations posing the biggest threats to Death Valley.
Members include federal, state, and county entities with
jurisdiction over most of Southern California and Nevada.
"The key thing is if we can all get on the same page. Water is
where we're placing a lot of emphasis. We're dealing with issues
in Amargosa Valley, Pahrump Valley, Inyo County, Clark County.
If we can bring all these entities together and share the
science, there are a lot of lessons we all can learn."
The results, said Reynolds, are not always encouraging.
"Economics plays a role. If Death Valley dries up (as the result
of overuse of the aquifer that feeds the park), then things die.
Even lowering the water table will have an impact. Sometimes we
leave a meeting and realize they didn't get it, didn't want to
get it and maybe we have to figure out how to say it with more
vigor. I believe if we keep talking, maybe they will get it
eventually."
All of the members of the Desert Managers Group at some point
have lamented the way in which a neighbor's actions have
impacted their ability to achieve their missions, Reynolds said.
The trouble is that sometimes neighboring entities have
conflicting missions, such as California Fish and Wildlife and
the Department of Defense when it comes to desert tortoises at
Fort Irwin; or, when it comes to Death Valley and neighboring
counties that want water to support rapid growth.
But a water flow model, developed at the expense of millions of
dollars to the Department of Energy as part of the Yucca
Mountain studies, shows clearly that water pumped from the
aquifer east of Death Valley is water that would otherwise have
fed into the park. "We are managers who have to speak for the
wildlife and the plants because they can't speak for
themselves," Reynolds said. "Our mission is the protection of
these resources, and I include the wildlife in that category."
The NPCA report outlines some daunting challenges for the park,
Reynolds said. "That report, if anything, is understated." But
most of the issues brought up in the report are ongoing items
that Reynolds has been dealing with since becoming park
superintendent.
Whether the National Park Service has enough clout to protect
Death Valley against the encroachment of urban development and
the nuclear waste storage dilemma remains to be seen, said
Reynolds. The results of his actions today may not be apparent
in his lifetime, "but what we have to think about now is, how do
we set the table for the future managers?"
"If we worried about what we can't do," he said, "We'd all be
basket cases. So we look back and see what we've accomplished
and keep moving forward, working for solutions."
For comment or questions, please e-mail
webmaster@pahrumpvalleytimes.com
Copyright Pahrump Valley Times, 1997 - 2005
*****************************************************************
43 St. Petersburg Times: Factory owner fined for' 04 spill
By CRAIG PITTMAN, Times Staff Writer
Published July 2, 2005
Fish-killing wastewater escaped through a broken dike at a
Riverview phosphate plant during Hurricane Frances.
The owner of a Riverview phosphate factory has been fined
$270,000 over a dike that broke during Hurricane Frances,
dumping millions of gallons of acidic wastewater into a nearby
creek.
An investigation by state environmental regulators determined
that the breach allowed 65-million gallons of waste from a
phosphate processing plant to flow into Archie Creek, which
leads to Hillsborough Bay.
The spill posed no threat to humans but killed fish and other
sea life and may have damaged fragile mangroves and sea grass
beds. A federal-state investigation is continuing and could lead
to more penalties.
The fine, announced Friday by the state Department of
Environmental Protection, covers only the factory's violations
of state water quality standards by allowing the waste to flow
unchecked into the creek. The waste, which is both slightly
acidic and radioactive, violated standards for arsenic, heavy
metals and a variety of other pollutants.
The DEP can levy fines of as much as $10,000 per day for each
violation, agency spokeswoman Cragin Mosteller said.
DEP levied the fine against Mosaic, the largest phosphate
producer in the world, with annual revenues of $4.5-billion.
Mosaic was formed last year when Cargill Crop Nutrition, which
owned the Riverview plant, merged with industry giant
IMC-Global.
"We hoped we would not have a fine," said Mosaic vice president
Gray Gordon, pointing out the company has spent $30-million so
far to improve safety systems and avoid a repeat of last year's
spill. "We feel like we have taken all the appropriate steps."
Nevertheless, Gordon said, Mosaic will not appeal the fine,
which is part of a settlement of the DEP enforcement case.
The settlement also calls for Mosaic to spend another
$10-million to enhance evaporation and treatment systems that
will allow the Riverview factory to hold at least 41 inches of
rainfall.
Factories producing fertilizer from phosphate also churn out a
radioactive byproduct called phosphogypsum. To dispose of it,
the phosphate industry stacks it into white sandy mountains, and
stores wastewater in ponds atop the stacks.
At the Riverview plant, 18 inches of above-average rainfall in
July and August 2004 left the plant holding more than
300-million gallons more wastewater than usual atop its
100-foot-high gypsum stack. DEP officials sent the company
letters warning it should reduce the excess.
Then, when Hurricane Frances hit, waves driven by the storm
bashed a hole in the dike's southwest corner, causing the spill.
Company officials tried to neutralize the acidic water by mixing
in lime, but they ran out. In addition, a pump used in the
mixing process broke down.
The spill occurred just a month after the Alafia River Basin
Board honored the company for its restoration of 4 miles of
company-owned coastline. The board said it provided "significant
environmental benefits to the Tampa Bay estuary."
It was not the first time a gypsum stack pond has spilled waste.
During heavy rains in December 1997, a dike broke and 55-million
gallons of the water poured into the Alafia River near Mulberry
in Polk County. The spill killed more than 1-million fish. The
owner, Mulberry Phosphates, promised to spend millions to make
up for the error. Instead, it went out of business.
The same company owned another plant with a gypsum stack in
Manatee County, in an area known as Piney Point. When Mulberry
went out of business, the DEP wound up taking over the plant and
dumping waste into Bishop Harbor.
Ultimately, to get rid of as much as possible before hurricanes
hit, the state got federal permission in 2003 to dump
240-million gallons of Piney Point's waste into the Gulf of
Mexico. [Last modified July 2, 2005, 01:51:39]
2005 All Rights Reserved St. Petersburg Times 490 First
Avenue South St. Petersburg, FL 33701 727-893-8111
*****************************************************************
44 Guardian Unlimited: BNFL to sell building arm
Mark Milner, industrial editor
Saturday July 2, 2005
State-owned nuclear energy group BNFL yesterday put its
Westinghouse power plant construction business up for sale.
The group said the move - which could value Westinghouse at
around $1bn (550m) - was in line with its strategy to
concentrate on its role as contractor to the nuclear industry
rather than constructor.
However the decision has run into criticism from the Prospect
trade union, which described the move as "economic madness".
Following a strategy review in 2003 BNFL has structured itself
into three divisions: Westinghouse; British Nuclear Group (BNG),
which concentrates on decommissioning and clean-up work; and
Nexia Solutions, its research and technology arm.
Chief executive Mike Parker said BNFL's strategy had been to look
for private equity investment in Westinghouse. "Over the last 18
months we have had a lot of expressions of interest with regard
to the acquisition of Westinghouse."
Some 15 "pretty viable" inquiries had been received and on
Thursday the board had decided to set the sales process in
motion, which could take up to 18 months.
Finance director John Edwards said the approaches had been
unsolicited and the first stage would be to ascertain the likely
value Westinghouse would be able to command.
But he warned: "If we don't get the appropriate value we won't
move forward."
BNFL would not be drawn on the price it was seeking for
Westinghouse, which had sales of $2bn last year and profits
before interest and tax of $150m, but it is expected to attract
bids in the region of about $1bn, helped by increasing interest
in building new nuclear plants in some parts of the world.
Dai Hudd, assistant general secretary of Prospect, which
represents about 6,000 scientists, engineers and managers at
BNFL, condemned the sale. "It was this Labour government which
approved the strategy to purchase Westinghouse. It clearly
recognised its importance to the future of the industry in the
UK, not to realise a quick buck like any market speculator. This
is short-termism at its worst."
Many of BNFL's UK assets have been transferred to the Nuclear
Decommissioning Authority - although the move still requires EU
state aid clearance. That has left BNFL's BNG subsidiary to take
on the job of cleaning up Britain's nuclear sites, a role in
which it will face increasing competition from the private
sector.
Engineering group Amec has already expressed an interest in
acquiring BNG but Mr Parker said BNFL had not received any
approaches. "We are thinking more about partnerships with other
companies to strengthen our ability to win [decommissioning and
clean-up] contracts."
Yesterday BNFL reported that it had made a loss of 144m before
investment income, interest, taxation and exceptional items
compared with a loss of 283m the previous year.
Without the financial impact of the Magnox stations, which are
being transferred to the NDA and are heavily lossmaking because
of the costs of cleaning up the stations that have already
closed, the company would have made a profit of about 150m, Mr
Edwards said.
[UP]
Guardian Unlimited Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
*****************************************************************
45 The Observer: Report says Sellafield leak could happen again
[UP]
BNFL 'complacency' blamed for major nuclear contamination
Oliver Morgan, industrial editor
Sunday July 3, 2005
The Observer
A damning internal report into a major leak of radioactive liquid
at British Nuclear Fuels' Thorp reprocessing plant at Sellafield
has found that management was complacent and that the incident
was not detected for eight months.
The report finds that there was 'operational complacency' at the
plant, despite previous incidents, and says that, even if its 18
recommendations are comprehensively implemented, there remains a
'significant chance of further failures occurring'.
The 34-page report, commissioned by Barry Snelson, managing
director of Sellafield operations for BNFL subsidiary British
Nuclear Group, will give ammunition to people in Whitehall who
believe that BNFL should be broken up.
Last week, BNFL confirmed it was to sell its Westinghouse reactor
design business, and senior government officials believe BNG,
BNFL's decommissioning and operations business, is incapable of
winning work on UK sites in future without a partner or new
owner.
In April, ownership and control of Sellafield and more than 20
other sites around the UK passed to the Nuclear Decommissioning
Authority, which has responsibility for contracting out the work
to dismantle them and for the 48bn liability they represent.
Thorp has been shut down since detection of the leak, and senior
figures at the NDA believe it should not reopen.
The report examines events leading up to the leak of 83,000
litres of radioactive material, including plutonium and uranium,
into an internal compartment. It finds the leak started in July
2004, and that, despite indications that there were discrepancies
in the amount of material recorded going through the system,
BNFL's safeguards department did not sent an email on the matter
until 17 March this year. It then took almost a month before
operations management were told, on 15 April.
The report concludes that a culture of 'operational complacency'
grew up because Thorp is a relatively new plant (it opened on
1994). It states: 'The reaction of all staff interviewed ... was
that they believed that material losses on this scale could not
conceivably be due to a leak; there had been an error in the
paperwork.' It goes on to say that the 'new plant culture
pervades all levels within the ... organisation' and that it 'has
continued despite previous experience that leaks can and do
happen.'
Jean McSorley of Greenpeace said: 'The report shows that BNFL is
not competent to run this plant.'
There was no comment from BNFLlast night.
[UP]
Guardian Unlimited Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
*****************************************************************
46 SF Chronicle: Senate scratches Livermore laser / Backers hope funds will be
restored in joint conference
Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer
Saturday, July 2, 2005
[Rep. Ellen Tauscher]
A Senate vote Friday might halt construction of a super-laser at
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that military officials
regard as vital for maintaining the nation's nuclear weapons
arsenal.
The Senate voted 92-3 to approve an appropriations bill that
deletes $146 million for continued construction of the laser,
known as the National Ignition Facility. But backers of the
program held out hope that construction funding might be
restored later in a Senate-House joint conference meeting.
"We've had big cuts before, but this is a dramatic (move and)
obviously a death blow" to NIF unless it can be reversed, said
Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D- Walnut Creek, in an interview with The
Chronicle on Thursday, before the Senate vote. Her district
includes the Livermore lab.
She and other NIF allies blame Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., for
deleting the funding. As chairman of the Senate Committee on
Energy and Natural Resources, he has repeatedly tried to cut NIF
funding in recent years, even though the project is now about 80
percent finished.
The project is vital for the Energy Department's "stockpile
stewardship" program, nuclear weapons experts have long argued.
Launched after the end of the Cold War more than a decade ago,
the program is charged with developing ways to ensure that the
aging U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal remains reliable and safe --
and without having to detonate bombs in controversial
atmospheric or underground tests, as the nation did from 1945
until 1992.
"I can't believe that when we're standing here at the 80-yard
line that he (Domenici) is going to fail to continue the
project," Tauscher said. "It would be not only fiscally
irresponsible -- which I don't believe the senator is -- but it
would be heretical" in light of U.S. nuclear policy, she said.
"This happens every year. ... As far as I can remember, for the
last four to five years, his subcommittee has cut money from the
NIF," Tauscher said.
What's different this time, she said, is that Domenici pushed to
eliminate all construction funding, rather than deleting partial
funds.
Tauscher said she hoped the move could be reversed. Every time
in the past when funds were cut, "in the end, we found a way to
restore the money," she said. To save the project this time, "we
would like to have the White House issue a statement of
administration policy and unambiguously state for the record
that this (NIF) is what they want."
Officials at Domenici's office couldn't be reached for comment
Friday. In a statement earlier in the week, Domenici said he was
committed to a strong science-based program of stockpile
stewardship, but added: "Unfortunately, neither this budget nor
the long-term budgetary outlook is consistent with this
objective."
Livermore spokeswoman Susan Houghton said Friday that program
officials hoped the funding could be restored.
"We believe it is extremely important that (restoration of
funding) occur, first, because NIF is a crucial component of
stockpile stewardship, and, second, because (NIF) is one of the
greatest scientific challenges under way in the nation."
The nation stopped conducting full-scale underground test
explosions of its nuclear weapons in the early 1990s, after the
collapse of the Soviet Union. The precisely designed weapons
degrade over time, especially due to the radioactive decay of
their fissionable plutonium "pits." Experts have feared that
without a way of test-exploding the bombs, their reliability
might become more and more doubtful as decades pass.
Thus, weapons scientists have tried to develop ways of
"virtually" testing the bombs without exploding them -- for
example, by conducting simulated explosions of nuclear blasts
involving "subcritical" amounts of fissionable material, or by
modeling the blasts in supercomputers.
Slated for completion in 2009, NIF is expected to cost a total
of $3.4 billion to build and almost $5 billion to operate over
three decades. Upon completion, the program should contain 192
huge lasers. Four lasers have already been installed and
successfully tested. Most of the money spent so far has been
spent on the facilities.
Advocates have long tried to popularize the nonmilitary aspects
of NIF. They believe it offers a way to simulate astrophysical
spectacles such as exploding stars, or a potential solution to
the nation's energy needs.
In theory, NIF will use its giant lasers to heat and implode
tiny pellets of nuclear fuel. During implosion, if all goes as
planned, the fuel's atomic nuclei would merge or "fuse,"
unleashing "fusion" energy, the same kind of energy that powers
the sun.
However, NIF's primary purpose is military. Among other things,
it would help the nation to retain a cadre of physicists who
possess the necessary technical skills for "virtual" testing of
nuclear weapons. Many of the skills needed to use NIF for
developing commercial fusion energy are similar to the skills
needed for using it for "virtual" testing of nuclear bombs.
Asked whether funding was likely to be restored, Houghton
replied: "I don't have a crystal ball. We believe it's a serious
situation right now. We hope it'll be restored."
E-mail Keay Davidson at kdavidson@sfchronicle.com.
Page A - 3
San Francisco Chronicle
*****************************************************************
47 ABQJOURNAL: LANL Successfully Completes Nuclear X-Ray Test
the Albuquerque Journal newspaper.
Friday, July 01, 2005
Albuquerque Journal-->
Associated Press
LOS ALAMOS Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory
have successfully completed a series of experiments to help
ensure the reliability of aging W76 nuclear warheads.
The experiment at the northern New Mexico lab's Dual Axis
Radiographic Hydrodynamic Test Facility on Wednesday used the
world's most powerful flash X-ray machine, according to the lab.
Working on the same principle as a dental X-ray, the lab's
machine can see what happens during an explosion of the
non-nuclear parts of a warhead.
The X-ray image and other data collected during the series
of tests will be used to improve computer models of weapons
explosions, which replaced underground nuclear tests after they
were banned in 1992.
"Now the (computer) model is much more important,'' lab
spokesman Jim Danneskiold said Friday. "We spend much more time
to put more and more data into the model.''
In the next few months, Los Alamos researchers will compare
the image and data with the computer models to refine them so
they accurately reflect weapon behavior.
The W76 is carried on Trident submarine-launched ballistic
missiles. There are about 2,700 W76s in the U.S. nuclear arsenal
more than any other nuclear weapon.
Late next year, the National Nuclear Security Administration
plans to begin manufacturing some W76 components based on the
data collected in this series of experiments, the release said.
The lab's test facility will be the primary experimental
site for certifying the nuclear stockpile in the next decade,
the lab said.
As the stockpile ages, the Energy Department started
programs at Los Alamos and other labs to determine the effects
of time and changing maintenance on different weapons.
Copyright Albuquerque Journal
Steve@abqjournal.com
*****************************************************************
48 Oakland Tribune: Giant laser's fusion goal delayed
Updated: 07/02/2005 02:49:20 AM
Congress weighing future funding for Livermore project
By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER
A giant laser at Lawrence Livermore weapons lab might but is
"unlikely" to in early experiments achieve its defining
mission: the world's first creation of a miniature star inside a
laboratory, according to an elite panel of defense scientists
advising the federal government.
Instead, when scientists fire up the National Ignition Facility
more than four years from now, they will be pouring half its
energy into a fusion target different from the one used to
persuade the physics community and Congress to spend billions of
dollars on the laser.
The odds of making hydrogen burn itself into helium, the key to
stars and a potentially limitless energy supply on Earth, will
improve as Livermore scientists boost the laser's energy and
delve into fusion physics more deeply, according to the panel,
known as the JASONs.
That leaves the nation's most promising attempts at
self-sustaining fusion with a laser a brass ring that has
eluded scientists for 40 years receding at least a year to
2011 or later, in a project recently recovered from delays and
cost overruns in the late 1990s.
Even so, many fusion scientists still are enthusiastic about
getting the laser running. Fusion or not,
it will produce pressures
and temperatures found only at the centers of stars and planets.
"Some questions won't be answered until you can get a megajoule
(of energy) in that laser or another laser so why not charge
ahead with construction?" said Raymond Jeanloz, a planetary
scientist at the University of California, Berkeley who reviewed
the chances of fusion burn.
"By delaying gratification a little bit, the experimentalists
hope to work on a truly unique facility," Jeanloz said.
Meanwhile, a new government review says Livermore dramatically
has improved its management of what is the nation's largest
scientific construction project.
"The project staff is a strong team with demonstrated
professional commitment," federal reviewers wrote. "The project
is being managed appropriately for successful completion."
Directors of all three U.S. nuclear weapons labs plus a laser
fusion lab at the University of Rochester also endorsed the
laser's completion Thursday in a letter to Congress, backing a
plan to suspend all experiments on the laser until late 2009 and
focus solely on finishing its construction.
"This is a major scientific and technical challenge," they
wrote.
But
news of the reduced likelihood of success in the first round of
ignition experiments comes at a politically difficult time. A
senior Senate appropriator, New Mexico Republican Pete Domenici,
has nixed all construction money for NIF, and Thursday night the
full Senate agreed. That puts the laser's supporters in Congress
on the defensive even as prospects dim for accomplishing its
signature mission on time.
"I don't think this JASONs report helps very much in pursuing
it," Domenici said.
The big laser is designed to pour more energy into a tiny ball
of hydrogen than scientists ever have attempted outside of a
thermonuclear explosion. Scientists would aim 192 intense light
beams into a small metal pipe containing an even tinier sphere
of frozen hydrogen. A flood of
X-rays would crush the hydrogen pellet at 400 times the speed of
a rifle bullet to
1/30th of its original size, heating it so that the nuclei of
hydrogen would fuse, releasing enormous amounts of energy.
Scientists think they've already fused small amounts of hydrogen
on other experimental machines, but the National Ignition
Facility is billed as the most serious attempt to date at true
fusion ignition burning enough hydrogen to produce more energy
than the lasers deliver in the beginning.
NIF's beams carry many times more energy than any other laser,
roughly the energy in 1,800 fastballs thrown at 100 mph or the
caloric energy content of a liter of orange juice. But the
laser's beams deliver that energy in a lightning strike of a few
ten-billionths of a second.
Nature has erected high hurdles for fusion scientists, however,
because the laser beams can scatter harmlessly, the X-rays can
drain away, and the hydrogen pellet can squirt apart, all in
billionths of a second.
In a report to Congress on Thursday, the JASONs made an
"incomplete" list of 11 separate, potential obstacles to success
at ignition. Many of those challenges ease as scientists
increase the energy of the laser. But for 2010, Livermore
scientist expect to conduct experiments at a megajoule of laser
energy or so, slightly more than half of its design energy of
1.8 megajoules.
The JASONs concluded that the first round of fusion experiments
carry "substantial technical risk" and that ignition "while
possible, is unlikely." It is "unrealistic" to expect success in
2010, the panel found.
"Backing down from 1.8 to 1.2 or 1.1 (megajoules) has to increase
the likelihood of failure, but how great is that likelihood?"
said Berkeley's Jeanloz. "It's hard to tell."
Livermore scientists are more optimistic, said physicist Ed
Moses, head of the National Ignition Facility project.
"But we understand why people from the outside might be more
conservative than we would be," he said. "These risks can and
should be mitigated. And we are doing all that."
The JASONs report contrasts with more than a decade of
assurances by Livermore scientists and federal officials that
the giant laser as early as 2003 was almost certain to achieve
fusion ignition.
"I guess that I would be willing to bet I don't know, a
quarter of my retirement that if it gets built as advertised,
it will reach ignition," former Livermore lab director Bruce
Tarter told The Energy Daily in 1997.
How the new findings will play in Congress remains to be seen.
"There has been a lot of skepticism about NIF from the
beginning," Domenici said. But federal nuclear weapons officials
in the Clinton and Bush administrations have insisted the big
laser be built, he said, even as the cost estimates climbed from
$800,000 to $1.1 billion to $2.5 billion to more than $4 billion.
In recent years, expenditures on NIF have drained money away from
other research more closely tied to "stockpile stewardship," the
government's program for keeping nuclear weapons in operable
condition.
"If one funds NIF the way the laboratory is asking us and the
president is asking, we have to take a whole lot of other things
in stockpile stewardship and say they have to be cut or cut out
while we proceed with NIF," Domenici said.
But he suggested the laser will be built. Two administrations
have asked for NIF as a priority, Domenici said, "and that can't
be ignored up here" in Congress.
Contact Ian Hoffman at ihoffman@angnewspapers.com.
2005 ANG Newspapers
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49 Times-News Online: Energy department offers three plutonium plans
July 3, 2005 Twin Falls, Idaho
By Michelle Dunlop Times-News writer
ARCO -- When Department of Energy officials roll into town later
this month, they will present three options for the production
of nuclear materials involving the Idaho National Laboratory.
One option they will not present, however, is to cease
manufacturing plutonium-238 used in space exploration and
national security missions.
And, that's just fine with Idaho's congressional delegation. The
delegation believes that consolidating plutonium-238 production
at INL -- the department's preferred option -- makes sense. INL
offers both the needed security and the most capable test
reactor that the energy department has available, the delegation
says.
However, the delegation's confidence in the DOE's consolidation
plan doesn't ease the worries of nuclear watchdog organizations
like the Snake River Alliance. The group and other concerned
residents have voiced frustration over the energy department's
unwillingness to disclose details of the national security
applications in which plutonium-238 will be used.
"We are being asked to bear a risk without ever being able to
weigh whether it is economically, environmentally, or ethically
worth it," says Beatrice Brailsford, program director for the
Snake River Alliance.
The United States' own supply of plutonium-238 is dwindling, and
its agreement for purchasing the material from Russia for
non-national defense applications runs out in 2010. Both the
Environmental Protection Agency and the DOE maintain that
plutonium-238 is not useful for nuclear weapons proliferation.
Currently, INL's Advanced Test Reactor is used to make the
plutonium-238 power systems along with two other DOE sites. The
department ships materials between INL, the Oak Ridge National
Laboratory in Tennessee and the Los Alamos National Laboratory
in New Mexico. One option is to continue this method of
production.
The department's preferred alternative would consolidate
production to the INL site alone. A third option eventually
would do the same but would allow for production in the meantime
at the Oak Ridge facility.
"We would have to put some security in place to do it at Oak
Ridge," said Timothy Frazier, program director for the
Department of Energy.
However, the Oak Ridge facility cannot produce enough
plutonium-238 annually to be a viable alternate consolidation
spot, Frazier said. And, expansion is not an option, he said.
Therefore, if INL takes on the burden of plutonium-238
production, what happens to the nuclear waste created in the
process?
"We're hoping not to store it at INL," Frazier said.
Transuranic waste generated during plutonium-238 production
would be shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New
Mexico, Frazier said. The Department of Energy estimates that
the consolidation will produce roughly 20 cubic meters of
transuranic waste annually.
The 215 cubic meters of low-level radioactive waste that the DOE
expects to generate could be shipped to a facility such as
Envirocare, Frazier said.
"We're hoping to treat the mixed waste within the facility," he
said.
DOE officials hope to have the final Environmental Impact
Statement ready by November 2005. If the department decides to
go ahead with consolidation at INL, construction could begin in
2008 or 2009, Frazier said.
Times-News reporter Michelle Dunlop can be reached at 735-3237
or by e-mail at mdunlop@magicvalley.com.
The Department of Energy's Proposed Plutonium-238 Consolidation
Plan
The DOE lists three options in its Environmental Impact
Statement for consolidating plutonium-238 operations:
* No Action Alternative: The DOE would continue producing
plutonium-238 in its existing manner. Currently, the department
completes this in a five-step process that involves the
transport of materials between the Idaho National Laboratory,
the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and the Los
Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. To continue this
process, the Oak Ridge facility would need updating. The
Department of Energy projects the cost of this alternative
between $80 million and $90 million.
* Consolidation Alternative (DOE's preferred plan): The
production of plutonium-238 would be consolidated at INL,
eliminating the transport of materials between other DOE sites.
Processes that are currently completed at the Oak Ridge or Los
Alamos facilities would take place in Idaho. The DOE expects
this option to cost $250 million to $300 million and estimates
that the consolidation could be completed in 2011.
* Consolidation with Bridge Alternative: Under this option, all
plutonium-238 production ultimately would be consolidated at
INL. However, if national security needs exceed the Department
of Energy's existing inventory, the Oak Ridge facility would
begin producing a small amount -- up to 2 kilograms annually --
of plutonium-238. This production could occur from 2007 to 2011,
"bridging" the gap until consolidation occurs. This option is
projected to cost between $15 million and $25 million more than
the DOE's preferred plan for a total of $265 million to $325
million.
# How can you comment?
* Aug. 29, 2005 marks the end of the public comment period.
* Read the draft consolidation environmental impact statement on
the Internet at http://consolidationeis.doe.gov.
* Contact Timothy Frazier, document manager, at (800) 919-3706
for more information or requests for copies of the plan.
* Mail written comments to Timothy Frazier, document manager,
U.S. Department of Energy, NE-50/GTN Building Office, Office of
Nuclear Energy, Science and Technology, 1000 Independence Ave.
S.W., Washington, D.C. 20585-1290.
* Fax comments to (800) 919-3765.
* E-mail comments to Frazier at
ConsolidationEIS@nuclear.energy.gov.
* Attend a public meeting. The DOE will hold meetings in seven
locations including Boise, Twin Falls, Fort Hall and Idaho Falls
during the last two weeks in July. The Twin Falls meeting will
be held at 7 p.m., July 27, in room 276 of the Taylor Building
at the College of Southern Idaho. The Times-News will print a
complete schedule of meetings when the Department of Energy
finalizes the dates, times and locations.
Story published at magicvalley.com on Sunday, July 03, 2005
Copyright 2005, Lee Publications Inc. Magicvalley.com is an
on-line division of The Times-News, published daily at 132 W.
Fairfield St., Twin Falls, Idaho 83301 by Lee Publications, Inc.,
a subsidiary of Lee Enterprises.
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50 Paducah Sun: Senators approve funding for cleanup
Paducah, Kentucky
Saturday, July 02, 2005
The U.S. Senate on Friday approved requests by Sen. Mitch
McConnell for $191.3 million for environmental cleanup at the
Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant.
The fund is included in the fiscal year 2006 Energy and Water
Appropriations bill. It now goes to a House/Senate conference
committee for final approval.
The bill sets aside $85.8 million for construction of DUF6
facilities in Paducah and Portsmouth. The Paducah facility will
convert 39,000 canisters of hazardous depleted uranium
hexaflouride into a more stable compound. Construction of the
plant began last July 24 and will create 200 construction jobs
and 150 permanent operational jobs.
Under the legislation, worker health monitoring would continue
with an appropriation of $465,000. That would provide a mobile
health unit to screen current and former workers at the plant
for early signs of lung cancer. The unit travels to gaseous
diffusion plants in Paducah, Portsmouth, Ohio, and Oak Ridge,
Tenn.
Also included is $32 million for the Kentucky Lock project at
Kentucky Dam, and $85 million for the Olmsted Locks and Dam
construction on the Ohio River.
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