***************************************************************** 08/08/05 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 13.182 ***************************************************************** RADBULL IS PRODUCED BY THE ABALONE ALLIANCE CLEARINGHOUSE ***************************************************************** Send News Stories to news@energy-net.org with title on subject line and first line of body NUCLEAR POLICY 1 Iran Re-starts Uranium Conversion Plant Before UN Completes Surveill 2 IPS-English POLITICS-EU: Crisis Looms Over Iran 3 [NYTr] Iran says it is not worried by threat of UN sanctions 4 BBC: Iran restarts nuclear programme 5 Reuters: Iran restarts uranium conversion facility 6 Reuters: UN confirms Iran restarts nuclear activities 7 Guardian Unlimited: Iran Resumes Uranium Conversion Methods 8 Guardian Unlimited Newsview: Iran, N. Korea Pose Nuke Threats 9 IPS-English NORTH KOREA-NUKE TALKS: Don't just talk, address 10 Guardian Unlimited: No deal as Korea talks take recess 11 Korea Herald: Hill prompts change in talks but not without struggle 12 Xinhua: S. Korea says to "broker a deal " between DPRK, US 13 Xinhua: Russia hopes for successful completion of six-party talks 14 Xinhua: US commends China for role in six-party talks 15 Reuters: N.Korean demand for reactors underlines energy woes 16 US: [progchat_action] The myths of Hiroshima 17 US: [NukeNet] Call To Strip NY Times, W Laurence Of Pulitzer For 18 US: Las Vegas SUN: Bush Signs Massive Energy Bill Into Law 19 US: California Aggie: Sixty years after the bomb 20 US: Reuters: Bush focuses on energy bill's economic impact 21 Guardian Unlimited: Ancient Egypt provides key to storing nuclear 22 RIA Novosti: Russia to sign convention on nuclear terrorism 23 TehranTimes: The destroyer of worlds 24 AFP: India, Pakistan reach agreement on reducing military tension - 25 Guardian Unlimited: Brazil Dictatorship Wanted Atomic Bomb NUCLEAR REACTORS 26 US: NRC To Consider Including Safety Issues In Millstone Renewal 27 RIA Novosti: No serious accidents at Russian nuclear power plants 28 MSN-Mainichi Daily News: Radioactive leak at Japanese nuclear plant 29 US: APP.COM - Oyster Creek declares short alert 30 US: Clarion-Ledger: Myths indicate nuclear power not best choice 31 Xinhua: Malaysia needs no nuclear energy as alternative: official 32 Newswise: The Ecological Effects of the Chernobyl Disaster 33 US: Reuters: Dominion Va. North Anna 2 nuke exits outage 34 US: Reuters: Progress shuts N.C. Brunswick nukes 35 US: Reuters: Grass buildup causes alert at N.J. Oyster Creek nuke 36 US: Journal Star: Ameren Corp. and Commonwealth Edison agree to buy. 37 AU ABC: Lucas Heights image stays on Google - NUCLEAR SECURITY NUCLEAR SAFETY 38 US: The Effects of Nuclear Weapons by Russell D. Hoffman (1999) 39 US: NRC: National Source Tracking of Sealed Sources; Meeting 40 Las Vegas SUN: Doctor describes effects of radiation on unborn 41 Guardian Unlimited: After the bomb NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE 42 [NukeNet] Water standard for radioactivity unsafe (Yucca) 43 US: [NukeNet] Aus. Uranium Mining; Sweden to use leaking THORP 44 US: Bradenton Herald: FPL's nuclear waste probed 45 US: AU ABC: NT Govt to fight new uranium mines 46 US: BBC: SA farmer's joy at uranium find 47 The Herald: Terrorist risk over nuclear waste ‘ignored’ 48 Las Vegas SUN: Editorial: Another Yucca danger 49 US: MSNBC.com: Plant might enrich locals - Albuquerque - 50 NEWS.com.au: Couple face nuke dump in backyard 51 US: AU ABC: Gulf residents warn of opposition to uranium mines. 52 US: Pincher Creek Echo: Nuclear appeal PEACE 53 Hiroshima A-Bomb 60th anniversary 54 [NYTr] Hiroshima tells nuclear club: stop risking the world 55 [NYTr] We must act now to prevent another Hiroshima - or worse 56 [NYTr] For the 60th Anniversary of Hiroshima/Nagasaki 57 [NYTr] Cuba Fights Nuclear Weapons at World Conference 58 Guardian Unlimited: Nagasaki to Mark A-Bombing Anniversary US DEPT. OF ENERGY 59 DOE: Environmental Management Site-Specific Advisory Board, Paducah 60 KnoxNews: Sands Of Time (Oak Ridge during WWII) 61 The State: S.C. has work to do in hydrogen fuel field 62 SPI: Hanford's A-bomb builders focus on the lives they saved 63 lamonitor.com: North Wind opens office in Los Alamos ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** FULL NEWS STORIES ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** 1 Iran Re-starts Uranium Conversion Plant Before UN Completes Surveillance Tests Date: Mon, 8 Aug 2005 13:00:47 -0400 IRAN RE-STARTS URANIUM CONVERSION PLANT BEFORE UN COMPLETES SURVEILLANCE TESTS New York, Aug 8 2005 1:00PM Iran re-started activities at a uranium conversion plant today following the installation of surveillance cameras by the United Nations atomic watchdog but “regrettably” prior to completion of their testing, the agency entrusted with curbing the spread of nuclear weapons reported. Iran voluntarily suspended operations last year of all uranium enrichment-related and reprocessing activities during negotiations with European countries on its nuclear programme, which it insists is for peaceful energy production but which some countries, including the United States, say is part of an effort to produce nuclear weapons. Last week it announced that it was resuming activities at the Uranium Conversion Facility (UCF) in Isfahan. Enriched uranium can be used for peaceful purposes such as generating energy or for making nuclear weapons. Today, UN International Atomic Energy Agency (<"http://www.iaea.org/index.html">IAEA) Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei <"http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/PressReleases/2005/prn200509.html">informed members of the Vienna-based agency’s Board of Governors that Iran started to feed uranium ore concentrate (UOC) into the first part of the process line at the UCF. “This activity was commenced following the installation today by the IAEA of cameras covering the input stage of the UOC process line, but regrettably prior to completion of the in situ testing of the cameras, which normally takes 24 hours following installation,” IAEA said in a statement. “It should be noted that the sealed parts of the process line remain intact.” The cameras and seals are part of the safeguards under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which Iran has signed, aimed at ensuring that materials and equipment are not diverted to weapons production. Iran's nuclear programme has been a matter of concern since 2003, when the IAEA determined that the country had for almost two decades concealed its nuclear activities in breach of its NPT obligations. The IAEA Board is meeting in Vienna tomorrow at the request of the three European countries – France, Germany and the United Kingdom – who have been seeking a diplomatic solution to the issue. Last week the three said any resumption would breach agreements Iran had reached with them as well as the IAEA Board's resolution last November calling for a continued moratorium, and would end their negotiations. 2005-08-08 00:00:00.000 ________________ For more details go to UN News Centre at http://www.un.org/news To change your profile or unsubscribe go to: http://www.un.org/news/dh/latest/subscribe.shtml ***************************************************************** 2 IPS-English POLITICS-EU: Crisis Looms Over Iran Date: Mon, 08 Aug 2005 14:32:29 -0700 version=3.0.4 X-Spam-filter-host: darwin.ctyme.com - http://www.junkemailfilter.com ROMAIPS EU AP IP POLITICS-EU: Crisis Looms Over Iran By Stefania Bianchi BRUSSELS, Aug 8 (IPS) - An international crisis looms this week after Iran rejected a package of incentives offered by the European Union in return for abandoning its nuclear programme. The proposals from the European Union (EU) led by Britain, France and Germany and backed by the United States have not been made public but are said to offer recognition of Iran's right to produce nuclear power for civilian purposes, as well improved trade relations with the EU, and guarantees of alternative nuclear fuel sources from Europe and Russia. In return, the Europeans reportedly insist that Tehran should permanently give up nuclear enrichment and construction of a heavy-water reactor, which could be used to make a bomb. Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi has described the proposals as unacceptable. "The European proposals are unacceptable to the Islamic Republic of Iran, they provide no guarantees for Iran's interests and are contrary to the (nuclear) Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Paris agreement," he said Saturday. "The proposals are unacceptable because Iran's right to enrich uranium is not included," he added. Iran meanwhile announced Monday that it has resumed work at its nuclear enrichment plant. Tehran threatened last week to resume nuclear activities at the uranium conversion plant that have been suspended since a November 2004 deal with the EU under which Iran agreed to suspend uranium enrichment and conversion for the duration of talks with the bloc. The "EU3" -- Britain, France and Germany -- who are heading EU nuclear negotiations with Iran will now lobby countries on the United Nations nuclear watchdog's governing board in Vienna Tuesday (Aug. 9). They want the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to throw its weight behind a warning to Iran not to restart sensitive nuclear fuel work, and have said that if Iran breaks the suspension they will end talks and seek to have Tehran referred to the UN Security Council, which can impose sanctions. But Iran has accepted that the IAEA can keep an eye on the programme. "They need to install additional surveillance cameras and the work will resume once these have been installed," Asefi said. IAEA inspectors are due to install the surveillance equipment and oversee the removal of seals at the plant this week. Iran insists that its nuclear programme is peaceful, but Western countries suspect it is a front hiding efforts to build atomic bombs. The EU and the United States have been trying to find a compromise solution over Iran's nuclear plans for two years. While, the United States favours a more forceful approach, the EU has been negotiating with Iranian leaders. Washington has tried to have Iran referred to the Security Council for violating its obligations under the global pact against the spread of nuclear weapons. Its efforts were, however, blocked by other countries including the European trio, which wanted to persuade Iran to voluntarily give up all potentially weapons-related technology. The Iranian announcement Monday could bring the negotiating process of the past two years to an abrupt end. ***** +EU (www.europa.eu.int) +IAEA (www.iaea.org) (END/IPS/EU/AP/IP/SB/SS/05) = 08081433 ORP003 NNNN ***************************************************************** 3 [NYTr] Iran says it is not worried by threat of UN sanctions Date: Mon, 8 Aug 2005 13:22:34 -0500 (CDT) autolearn=ham version=3.0.4 X-Spam-filter-host: pascal.ctyme.com - http://www.junkemailfilter.com Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit sent by Simon McGuinness Reuters via The Irish Times, Mon, Aug 08, 05 http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/world/2005/0808/3829559966FR08IRAN.html Iran says it is not worried by threat of UN sanctions IRAN: Iran insisted yesterday it would resume uranium conversion this week after rejecting EU incentives to end its nuclear fuel work. It said it was not worried about being referred to the UN for possible sanctions. "Although we think referral of Iran's case to the Security Council would be unlawful and politically motivated, if one day they refer Iran's case .. we won't be worried in the least," said foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi. Britain, Germany and France, heading nuclear negotiations with Iran for the EU, have called an emergency meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) board tomorrow to discuss Iran's case. The EU trio say they will recommend referring Iran to the Security Council if it goes ahead with plans to break UN seals and resume work at the Isfahan uranium-conversion plant. Iran, which on Saturday rejected an EU package of economic and political incentives designed to persuade it to halt nuclear fuel work for good, says it will restart the Isfahan plant as soon as IAEA surveillance equipment is in place. "The European proposal has no value," state television quoted foreign minister Kamal Kharrazi as saying. "We will insist on our rights, and have decided to resume Isfahan activities as the first step of our measures. This does not mean we will stop negotiations with Europe." German chancellor Gerhard Schrvder said Iran faced economic sanctions if it refused to accept the EU proposals. "I don't think anyone at the moment is thinking about a military confrontation," he told ARD television. "If Iran doesn't back down one has to expect it will be referred to the Security Council. If that happens we will be talking about possible sanctions. This would not be good for either side." Mr Asefi, speaking at a weekly news conference, said IAEA technicians would be at the Isfahan plant today to install additional cameras. He said the 35-page EU proposal, which contained an offer of help with developing a civilian nuclear programme, was rejected because it did not recognise Iran's right to enrich uranium. Iran's official reply will be delivered to the EU today. Iran's new president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad yesterday called for closer co-operation with Syria in the face of pressure from the US. "The existence of common threats requires more co-operation between Tehran and Damascus," Iran's official news agency IRNA quoted Mr Ahmadinejad as saying at a joint news conference with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Mr Assad arrived earlier in the day, the first foreign leader to visit the new president. "There is no limit for Iran and Syria's co-operation... Boosting the ties can protect the Middle East region from possible aggressions," said Mr Ahmadinejad. - (Reuters) * ================================================================ .NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems . Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us . .339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org .List Archives: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/ .Subscribe: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr ================================================================ ***************************************************************** 4 BBC: Iran restarts nuclear programme Last Updated: Monday, 8 August 2005 [Two technicians carry a box containing yellowcake at the Iranian nuclear facility at Isfahan] UN officials say they have installed monitoring equipment Iran has resumed sensitive fuel cycle work at its uranium conversion facility near the city of Isfahan. The UN's nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, confirmed work had begun at the plant, after it was suspended in 2004 to allow for negotiations with the EU. The US and EU had previously warned that any resumption could lead to Iran being referred to the UN Security Council for economic sanctions. Iran's move had been expected and comes on the eve of an IAEA crisis meeting. IRAN'S NUCLEAR STANDOFF September 2002: Wor begins on Iran's first nuclear reactor at Bushehr December 2002: Satellite photographs broadcast on US television reveal the existence of nuclear sites at Arak and Natanz. Iran agrees to an IAEA inspection September 2003: IAEA gives Iran weeks to prove it is not pursuing atomic weapons November 2003: Iran suspends uranium enrichment and allows tougher inspections; IAEA says no proof of any weapons programme June 2004: Iran rebuked by IAEA for not fully co-operating with inquiry into nuclear activities November 2004: Iran suspends uranium enrichment as part of deal for negotiations with EU August 2005: Iran rejects EU proposals and resumes work at Isfahan nuclear plant On Saturday, Iran rejected European proposals to persuade it to give up its controversial programme. The International Atomic Energy Agency is meeting on Tuesday to discuss the deadlock. It will submit a report to the Security Council, which could then consider the possibility of sanctions. A US state department official told the AFP news agency reports Iran had restarted nuclear activities were "unfortunate" and that the US expected Tehran to be taken before the United Nations. Mohammad Saeedi, deputy head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation, said that work at Isfahan had resumed under the supervision of the IAEA, which had installed surveillance equipment. A reporter for the Reuters news agency said she saw two workers at the Isfahan plant lifting a barrel full of uranium yellowcake, opening its lid and feeding it into the processing line. "We are restarting work in Isfahan stage by stage, as technical work requires to do so. Today, we restarted work for production of AUC [ammonium uranyl carbonate]," Mr Saeedi said. Production stages The AUC unit had not been sealed by IAEA inspectors, but Mr Saeedi said that inspectors from the agency would remove seals from other parts of the facilities on Tuesday after installing monitoring equipment, making the plant fully operational. The Isfahan plant is Iran's main uranium conversion facility. Conversion is an early stage in the nuclear fuel cycle, turning raw uranium - known as yellowcake - into the feedstock for enriched uranium. NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE Mined urani ore is purified and reconstituted into solid form known as yellowcake Yellowcake is converted into a gas by heating it to about 64C (147F) Gas is fed through centrifuges, where its isotopes separate and process is repeated until uranium is enriched Low-level enriched uranium is used for nuclear fuel Highly enriched uranium can be used in nuclear weapons In depth: Nuclear fuel cycle Uranium enriched to a low level is used to produce nuclear fuel, while further enrichment makes it suitable for use in atomic weapons. Iran insists it wants only to use its facilities to produce power, but the US suspects it of running a secret nuclear weapons programme. Under international pressure, Iran suspended uranium conversion and enrichment activities in November 2004, but it said the move was only temporary. Iran says it is still interested in holding negotiations with the EU, but says it must have the right to develop its own nuclear fuel. The Iranian government on Monday replaced its chief nuclear negotiator, Hassan Rohani, with Ali Larijani, a conservative former head of state broadcasting who is known to have close ties with Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. The appointment was made by newly elected conservative President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, two days after he was sworn in. It is being seen as a hardening of Iran's position. ***************************************************************** 5 Reuters: Iran restarts uranium conversion facility Mon Aug 8, 2005 7:39 AM ET ISFAHAN, Iran, Aug 8 (Reuters) - Iran resumed uranium conversion on Monday at its facility near Isfahan, a move EU officials have warned will probably see its nuclear case sent to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions. "The uranium conversion facility in Isfahan has started its activities under IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) supervision," Mohammad Saeedi, deputy head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation, told reporters at the plant. Iran agreed to suspend all nuclear fuel work last November as part of a deal with the European Union while both sides explored a long-term arrangement for Iran's nuclear programme. But Tehran has complained about the slow pace of the negotiations and on Saturday rejected an EU proposal offering it economic and political incentives to halt nuclear fuel work for good. Iran says its nuclear ambitions are entirely peaceful and that its atomic plants will be used to generate electricity, not make bombs. At the Isfahan plant two workers wearing white overalls, face masks and hard hats lifted a barrel full of uranium yellow cake, opened its lid and fed it into the processing line. Other workers at the plant watched excitedly via closed circuit television screens. A nuclear scientist at the site, who declined to be named, said: "I am excited, I didn't believe it until the last moment thinking this may not happen, but now I am very happy." © Reuters 2005. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 6 Reuters: UN confirms Iran restarts nuclear activities Mon Aug 8, 2005 4:35 PM ET VIENNA (Reuters) - The U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, confirmed on Monday that Iran has restarted nuclear activities that had been mothballed under a deal with the European Union's three biggest powers. "IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei informed members of the (IAEA) board of governors that Iran today started to feed uranium ore concentrate into the first part of the process line at the uranium conversion facility," it said in a statement. "It should be noted that the sealed parts of the process line remain intact." The IAEA board will hold an emergency meeting on Tuesday to discuss the escalating standoff over Iran's nuclear ambitions. Iran suspended all parts of its nuclear programme that could be used to produce enriched-uranium fuel for nuclear power plants or weapons under a deal it reached with France, Britain and Germany in Paris in November 2004. The EU trio, sharing Washington's suspicions that Tehran's nuclear programme is aimed at developing atomic weapons, have asked Tehran to voluntarily give up all sensitive nuclear activities in exchange for economic and political incentives. But Iran has refused, insisting its programme is aimed solely at the peaceful generation of electricity. To monitor Tehran's compliance with the Paris agreement, the IAEA had sealed sensitive equipment at Iran's uranium conversion facility at Isfahan and its uranium enrichment plant at Natanz. Diplomats from the EU trio said the question of whether or not Iran had broken IAEA seals was a crucial one, as it would determine the severity of any violations of the Paris agreement. The Vienna-based IAEA said it has installed cameras at Isfahan to monitor Iran's renewed activities at the plant. "This activity was commenced following the installation today by the IAEA of cameras ... but regrettably prior to completion of the in situ testing of the cameras, which normally takes 24 hours following installation," the IAEA said. © Reuters 2005. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 7 Guardian Unlimited: Iran Resumes Uranium Conversion Methods From the Associated Press [UP] Monday August 8, 2005 1:16 PM AP Photo VAH101 TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Iran resumed uranium conversion activities Monday after inspectors from the U.N. nuclear watchdog installed surveillance equipment at a nuclear facility in Isfahan. Reopening the Isfahan plant, where activity has suspended since November, was likely to spark a confrontation with the United States and Europe, which have threatened to refer Iran to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions. The facility converts raw uranium into gas, which in the next stage of the process is fed into centrifuges for enrichment. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005 ***************************************************************** 8 Guardian Unlimited Newsview: Iran, N. Korea Pose Nuke Threats From the Associated Press [UP] Monday August 8, 2005 9:16 PM AP Photo VAH108 By WILLIAM J. KOLE Associated Press Writer VIENNA, Austria (AP) - Both regimes are suspected of running covert nuclear weapons programs. Both are increasingly defiant, accusing Western envoys of meddling in what they insist is their right to develop peaceful nuclear technology. By refusing to blink or budge, Iran and North Korea have the international community scrambling to cool and contain two high-stakes cases of nuclear brinksmanship - one in the Middle East, the other on the Korean peninsula. ``Is there diplomatic overload? Yes, there is,'' said Terence Taylor, an expert on weapons of mass destruction who runs the Washington office of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. ``Clearly, these issues are reaching critical stages at the same time,'' he said. ``You're seeing the limits of treaties and diplomatic activities. It's been said that treaties bind with ropes of paper. They're certainly not useless, but there are limits.'' Despite the similarities between the two cases, the West is approaching them differently - asking Iran to merely limit its nuclear activities in exchange for economic incentives, while insisting that North Korea drop even its civilian nuclear power program. ``The two cases are different and therefore the approaches are different,'' State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said Monday. ``The substance of the programs, the substance of the policies are not the same and therefore you're not going to deal with them the same way.'' The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency holds an emergency meeting of its 35-nation board of governors on Tuesday to review the standoff with Iran, which announced Monday it resumed uranium conversion at one of its nuclear facilities. The IAEA could refer Iran to the U.N. Security Council, which has the authority to impose economic and political sanctions on Tehran - punitive measures that could impact the country for years to come. Tehran insists its nuclear program is peaceful and geared solely toward generating electricity. But the United States and others contend it's hiding a weapons program. With its vast petroleum reserves, Iran has a credibility problem. Why, many wonder, does it need nuclear energy when, by some estimates, its natural gas reserves won't run dry for 200 years? ``There is no logic behind a peaceful nuclear program in Iran,'' said Alireza Assar, an Iranian scientist living in exile in Austria. President Bush once called Iran, Iraq and North Korea an ``axis of evil.'' Ever since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Iran has been concerned that it might be next. North Korea's motivations are clearer - its army faces hundreds of thousands of South Korean and U.S. troops just across the border, and for years, Pyongyang's leaders were convinced they faced the threat of a full-scale American invasion. Up to now, diplomats have resorted to a combination of threats and enticements in an effort to get both nations to abandon their nuclear ambitions. Neither has achieved a breakthrough, though envoys involved in talks with North Korea remain hopeful that the country's desperate economic and energy needs will be the lever the West is looking for. Britain, France and Germany, negotiating for the European Union, offered Iran a package of economic, political and technological incentives in return for assurances that it would not pursue nuclear weapons. On Saturday, Iran rejected the package. ``It's now clear that the best course of action is to refer the case directly to the U.N. Security Council,'' said Farid Soleimani of the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran, an exiled opposition group. The IAEA board is expected to issue at least a sternly worded warning to Iran, and the EU and the United States are likely to press for Security Council involvement. But getting agreement on sanctions from key Security Council members - including Russia, which has a $800 million contract to build a reactor in the southern Iranian port city of Bushehr - could be tricky. For now, the international community is playing for time and hedging its bets on expert assessments that suggest Tehran is a long way from building a warhead. ``Even the most concerned and skeptical of intelligence agencies now estimate that Iran is nearly a decade away from developing a nuclear weapon,'' said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Washington-based Arms Control Association. North Korea, by contrast, is widely considered far more advanced in its nuclear program. Pyongyang claimed in February that it already had atomic weapons. On Sunday, deadlocked disarmament talks aimed at persuading the North to renounce nuclear weaponry entered a three-week recess. U.S. officials said the negotiations stalled over the North's demand that it be given a nuclear reactor - a notion all six countries involved in the talks rejected. ``If they can come to a conditional agreement regarding North Korea's peaceful nuclear program, the talks could have a chance,'' said Lee Geun, professor of international relations at Seoul National University's Graduate School of International Studies. The IAEA's ability to intervene in North Korea is limited because Pyongyang - unlike Tehran - has withdrawn from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. ``There's a lot at stake there,'' Taylor said. ``North Korea is not just an issue of nuclear capabilities. They also have a very large conventional (weapons) capability. That raises questions about what they could do if it came down to the use of force.'' But Taylor sees some chilling similarities between the two regimes. ``They are both very serious threats. If they develop full nuclear capabilities, they would represent a threat not only to countries in their own region but to the world,'' he said. ``The trick is to find out what it is that will make them stop.'' --- William J. Kole is Vienna bureau chief for The Associated Press. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005 ***************************************************************** 9 IPS-English NORTH KOREA-NUKE TALKS: Don't just talk, address Date: Mon, 08 Aug 2005 14:32:29 -0700 autolearn=ham version=3.0.4 X-Spam-filter-host: darwin.ctyme.com - http://www.junkemailfilter.com MM NA IP HD IK NORTH KOREA-NUKE TALKS: Don't just talk, address the issue, says UAE daily Att.Editors: The following item is from the Emirates News Agency (WAM) ABU DHABI, Aug. 8 (WAM) - A major United Arab Emirates (UAE) English daily today commented on the six-party talks on North Korea's nuclear ambition which have gone into three-week recession. Commenting on the issue today, the Dubai-based 'Gulf News' said: "Winston Churchill was a font of the soundbite decades before they came into vogue. His 'jaw-jaw is better than war-war' remains as valid today as when he uttered it in 1954. "This is especially true of the six-party talks on North Korea's nuclear ambitions which have gone into a three-week recess. "There was never any real likelihood that the talks would achieve an immediate breakthrough since they commenced in late July. "There are grounds for optimism, limited admittedly, that at least the talks did not dissolve into the acrimony that accompanied last year's negotiations which broke down when the communist state walked out accusing the United States of 'hostility' and 'insincerity'. "North Korea has so far rejected U.S. demands to begin dismantling its nuclear weapons in return for food aid and other assistance. "Washington has given a pledge that it would not attack North Korea and would hold bilateral talks with it in the context of the six-party talks. "Simply put, Pyongyang wants maximum concessions from the United States before it ditches its nuclear arsenal. North Korea demands a phased schedule in which it will be rewarded for each step it takes towards denuclearisation. "The United States, rightly, wants verifiable proof that the North Koreans have dismantled their weapons before it grants aid and assistance. "The three-week break will allow Northern delegates to return to Pyongyang to persuade their reclusive and temperamental leader Kim Jong-il that a solution is possible but only on condition that North Korea dismantles its weapons. "These three weeks in August for the Far East could well determine whether the nuclear threat is lifted from the Korean peninsula. "The North Koreans must understand that the international community will not tolerate their continued nuclear bluff," concluded the paper. (WAM) ***************************************************************** 10 Guardian Unlimited: No deal as Korea talks take recess Associated Press in Beijing Monday August 8, 2005 The Guardian The US and North Korea yesterday called on each other to make concessions after disarmament talks stalled. Envoys called a three-week recess after failing to reach agreement over North Korea's demand for a nuclear power plant. The US envoy, assistant secretary of state Christopher Hill, said: "We decided it was time to end it and go to recess, with the idea that [the North Korean delegation] can go back and think about what they've been told, which is, they're not going to get a light-water reactor." But the North's chief envoy, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan, said that during the recess Washington should "change its policy on not letting us have any kind of nuclear activities". The nuclear standoff began in 2002 when North Korea admitted running a secret nuclear programme in violation of a 1994 agreement to give up nuclear development. In February, Pyongyang claimed it had nuclear weapons. A light-water reactor was promised to the North in the 1994 deal as part of a US aid package. The latest round of talks is the fourth in a series arranged by China, which diplomats say has lobbied North Korea aggressively to make a deal. The talks also involve South Korea, Japan and Russia. Beijing is North Korea's biggest ally and aid donor. But experts say Chinese leaders worry that letting Pyongyang acquire nuclear weapons could destabilise the region by encouraging South Korea and Japan - which China sees as its regional military rival - to do the same. [UP] Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005 ***************************************************************** 11 Korea Herald: Hill prompts change in talks but not without struggle BEIJING - Meeting top U.S. nuclear negotiator Christopher Hill for the first time, it's hard to tell whether he is a person of importance or a good-old neighbor next door. He has such a friendly face and an approachable style. But in leading the U.S. team at the fourth round of six-party talks on the North Korean nuclear standoff, Hill certainly carved out a niche for himself as a celebrity, regardless of the outcome of the laborious 12 days of negotiations that were recessed on Sunday for three weeks. His flexibility in dealing with the whimsical North Koreans made him one of the communist state's favorite negotiating partners, resulting in exceptionally active discussions between Washington and Pyongyang during the talks. His modest manner and candid talking style also made him a favorite interviewee of the swarm of journalists covering the talks. Hill's approach to the North showed observers that the two hostile countries can actually talk in an open surrounding. But final judgment of his accomplishments will have to wait, with the talks having broken off into a recess without any breakthrough, much to the aggravation of not only the U.S. government but to Hill himself. He will no doubt face a barrage of criticism back in Washington from hard-liners, who will once again press for stern action, such as referring the nuclear issue to the U.N. Security Council. It is also questionable whether Hill will return to the six-party talks at the end of this month with as wide a mandate as he had when the fourth round began July 26. Under the "nice guy" veneer, however, Hill is ready and capable of turning as tough as necessary to get his government's policy across. "We'll stay as long as we feel we are making progress. If we are not making progress we are not going to stay," Hill told reporters midway through the negotiations last week as the discussion began to slip into a deadlock when North Korea refused the draft presented by the host country China. Determined to get his job done, Hill agreed to a recess to give the North Koreans time to rethink their refusal to accept the latest draft on a joint statement that all the other members had hoped would become the set of principles to move the negotiations forward. Whether Hill's dexterous diplomacy will work with unpredictable North Koreans is guesswork, as the long route to solving the North's nuclear prolem is just beginning. Achieving a breakthrough with North Korea on its nuclear ambitions, which have been a Washington headache for a long time, will spur Hill's career. He was sworn in as the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs in April this year during his tenure as the U.S. ambassador to South Korea. He had earlier been designated to head the U.S. delegation to the six-party talks. Although his stay as ambassador in South Korea was only short eight months, Hill's attachment to the country persisted, with his family staying behind in Seoul for four more months while Hill traveled back and forth for both personal and business purposes. Hill's popularity back in South Korea continues to be immense, with some citizens on the Internet even holding a campaign to give him a Korean name. A career member of the Senior Foreign Service, he was ambassador to Poland from 2000 and 2004, ambassador to Macedonia between 1996 and 1999 and special envoy to Kosovo 1998-99. He was also the special presidential assistant and senior director for Southeast European Affairs in the National Security Council. He received the Robert S. Frasure Award for Peace Negotiations for his work during the Kosovo crisis. Hill graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine and received a Master's degree from the Naval War College in 1994. Despite the murky outlook on the long-standing nuclear standoff with North Korea, Hill seems to have a strong will to persevere. "I think a lot of things in life, you have to ask yourself if you have done everything you could do, and when you've done everything you could do, you should feel pretty relaxed about it," Hill said during a tug-of-war with his North Korean counterparts in Beijing last week. (angiely@heraldm.com) By Lee Joo-hee Korea Herald correspondent 2005.08.09 ***************************************************************** 12 Xinhua: S. Korea says to "broker a deal " between DPRK, US www.xinhuanet.com www.chinaview.cn 2005-08-08 20:47:00 SEOUL, Aug. 8 (Xinhuanet) -- South Korea would use the three-week recess of the fourth six-party talks to make every diplomatic effort to narrow differences between the United States and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), said a South Korean senior official on Monday. "In a sense, Seoul's diplomatic role and ability has been put to a real test," the unnamed official was quoted by South Korean Yonhap News Agency as saying. "It is Seoul that can broker a deal that seems to be difficult to make between Pyongyang and Washington," said the official. He also said the recess will not sap the energy of the talks, but will inject fresh momentum into them. He said since all the stances were on the table, full-scale negotiations will start in the second stage of the fourth round ofthe talks. "The talks are now aimed at finding a more fundamental measure for regional peace as well as ending the nuclear issue," he said. On last Sunday, the six parties, China, the DPRK, the US, Russia, South Korea and Japan, decided to take a recess for the fourth round of the six-party talks and to embark on second stage of the talks in the last week of August. Enditem Copyright ©2003 Xinhua News Agency. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 13 Xinhua: Russia hopes for successful completion of six-party talks www.xinhuanet.com www.chinaview.cn 2005-08-08 22:45:15 MOSCOW, Aug. 8 (Xinhuanet) -- Russia is still hopeful that the fourth round of six-party talks on the nuclear issue of the Korean Peninsula would be completed successfully after a recess of three weeks, the Foreign Ministry said Monday. Delegations at talks focused on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and have agreed on most of the final joint document of the talks. However, "there is still no consensus on a number of essential issues," the ministry said in a statement. "The discussions were useful and there is still hope for the successful completion of the fourth round in the near future," it added. The six parties to the talks -- China, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the United States, South Korea, Russia and Japan -- have agreed to take a recess after 13 days of discussions and resume the talks in the week starting on Aug. 29. The talks began in Beijing on July 26. The Russian delegation expressed gratitude to the Chinese side for its impeccable organization of the talks and stressed that all delegations had tried to make a constructive contribution to the negotiations, the ministry said. Enditem Copyright ©2003 Xinhua News Agency. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 14 Xinhua: US commends China for role in six-party talks www.xinhuanet.com www.chinaview.cn 2005-08-09 04:37:47 WASHINGTON, Aug. 8 (Xinhuanet) -- The United States commends China for its role in hosting and moving forward the six-party talks, State Department deputy spokesman Adam Ereli said at a briefing on Monday. "We certainly commend and appreciate the Chinese government for the really great work that they did in convening the talks, in moving the talks forward, in working up the draft joint statements that were the basis for so much of the negotiations in Beijing," Ereli said. As to the six-party talks, Ereli said that "good progress" was made during 13 days of talks in Beijing. "We have before us a draft declaration of principles. We would expect and hope that we can come back in three weeks to conclude an agreement on that draft," he said. China announced on Sunday that all the six parties to the fourth round of the Korean nuclear issue talks agreed to take a recess and resume the talks in the week that begins on Aug. 29. However, a specific date of when the six-party talks will resume is yet to be set. Enditem Copyright ©2003 Xinhua News Agency. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 15 Reuters: N.Korean demand for reactors underlines energy woes Mon Aug 8, 2005 7:24 AM ET By Jon Herskovitz and Park Sung-woo SEOUL, Aug 8 (Reuters) - North Korea's demand for light-water nuclear reactors, one of the deal-breakers in the six-party talks that ended in deadlock on Sunday, highlights North Korea's desperate need for energy. But energy experts said the most pressing need for North Korea is not to look at a future with light-water reactors, but to respond to its present needs of updating an inefficient grid and realising the full potential of its present capacity. Washington believes North Korea could use light-water reactors to clandestinely make nuclear bombs. Pyongyang says it has a sovereign right to peaceful nuclear power, which is vitally needed to deal with its energy crisis. Both countries blamed the other for the impasse in six-party talks in Beijing among the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States. The talks are scheduled to resume in Beijing on Aug. 29. Some commentators are suspicious about the North's aims after watching Pyongyang try for decades to develop nuclear weapons while abandoning international agreements to curb proliferation. "North Korea tries to maintain its nuclear option by having this light-water programme," said Paik Jin-hyun a professor of international studies at Seoul National University. North Korea built a nuclear energy research complex in 1964 in Yongbyon, about 100 km (60 miles) north of Pyongyang. By the 1980s, U.S. intelligence reports said the North's main pursuit in its research was to develop nuclear weapons. In October 1994, the United States and North Korea struck a deal to freeze and eliminate Pyongyang's nuclear activities in exchange for oil and two proliferation-resistant light-water reactors to be built by an international consortium called KEDO. The reactors could supply 1,000 megawatts of power each, but the project has since been suspended. MELTING THE GRID North Korea can generate about 7,800 megawatts of power, but fuel shortages have cut its actual output to about one-third of that. The power shortage means much of the country is in darkness at night and about two-thirds of its industries sit idle. The main domestic sources of energy for North Korea are hydroelectric and coal. Unlike Iran, whose nuclear programme is also a source of great concern to Washington and others, North Korea does not have an ample supply of oil. "It's like a vicious circle. Since they cannot produce enough power, they cannot dig much coal. With little coal available, they cannot produce more power," said Byun Jun-yeon, KEDO project manager at KEPCO, South Korea's power monopoly. Byun said if North Korean tried to bring a light-water reactor on steam, the power from it would likely blow out its outdated electric infrastructure. South Korea said it is willing to double the North's electrical output if it dismantles its nuclear weapons programmes. Proliferation experts have said that if North Korea abides by terms of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and guidelines set by the International Atomic Energy Agency, a light-water reactor programme makes the best sense for a peaceful nuclear programme. But North Korea has had a bad track record in compliance. It expelled IAEA inspectors in December 2002 and quit the NPT in January 2003. It broke IAEA seals and removed IAEA electronic monitors to restart operations at Yongbyon in February 2003 and said in May 2005 it had extracted rods from the nuclear plant in order to produce material that could be used in a plutonium bomb. The power generated by its 5-megawatt reactor in Yongbyon is used to run the complex. (With additional reporting by Frances Yoon) © Reuters 2005. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 16 [progchat_action] The myths of Hiroshima Date: Mon, 8 Aug 2005 01:39:20 -0500 (CDT) autolearn=ham version=3.0.4 X-Spam-filter-host: pascal.ctyme.com - http://www.junkemailfilter.com The myths of Hiroshima By Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin 08/05/05 "Los Angeles Times" -- -- Sixty years ago, an atomic bomb was dropped without warning on the center of the Japanese city of Hiroshima. One hundred and forty thousand people were killed, more than 95% of them women and children and other noncombatants. At least half of the victims died of radiation poisoning over the next few months. Three days after Hiroshima was obliterated, the city of Nagasaki suffered a similar fate. The magnitude of death was enormous, but on Aug. 14, 1945 just five days after the Nagasaki bombing Radio Tokyo announced that the Japanese emperor had accepted the U.S. terms for surrender. To many Americans at the time, and still for many today, it seemed clear that the bomb had ended the war, even "saving" a million lives that might have been lost if the U.S. had been required to invade mainland Japan. This powerful narrative took root quickly and is now deeply embedded in our historical sense of who we are as a nation. A decade ago, on the 50th anniversary, this narrative was reinforced in an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution on the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first bomb. The exhibit, which had been the subject of a bruising political battle, presented nearly 4 million Americans with an officially sanctioned view of the atomic bombings that again portrayed them as a necessary act in a just war. But although patriotically correct, the exhibit and the narrative on which it was based were historically inaccurate. For one thing, the Smithsonian downplayed the casualties, saying only that the bombs "caused many tens of thousands of deaths" and that Hiroshima was "a definite military target." Americans were also told that use of the bombs "led to the immediate surrender of Japan and made unnecessary the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands." But it's not that straightforward. As Tsuyoshi Hasegawa has shown definitively in his new book, "Racing the Enemy" and many other historians have long argued it was the Soviet Union's entry into the Pacific war on Aug. 8, two days after the Hiroshima bombing, that provided the final "shock" that led to Japan's capitulation. The Enola Gay exhibit also repeated such outright lies as the assertion that "special leaflets were dropped on Japanese cities" warning civilians to evacuate. The fact is that atomic bomb warning leaflets were dropped on Japanese cities, but only after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed. The hard truth is that the atomic bombings were unnecessary. A million lives were not saved. Indeed, McGeorge Bundy, the man who first popularized this figure, later confessed that he had pulled it out of thin air in order to justify the bombings in a 1947 Harper's magazine essay he had ghostwritten for Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. The bomb was dropped, as J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, said in November 1945, on "an essentially defeated enemy." President Truman and his closest advisor, Secretary of State James Byrnes, quite plainly used it primarily to prevent the Soviets from sharing in the occupation of Japan. And they used it on Aug. 6 even though they had agreed among themselves as they returned home from the Potsdam Conference on Aug. 3 that the Japanese were looking for peace. These unpleasant historical facts were censored from the 1995 Smithsonian exhibit, an action that should trouble every American. When a government substitutes an officially sanctioned view for publicly debated history, democracy is diminished. Today, in the post-9/11 era, it is critically important that the U.S. face the truth about the atomic bomb. For one thing, the myths surrounding Hiroshima have made it possible for our defense establishment to argue that atomic bombs are legitimate weapons that belong in a democracy's arsenal. But if, as Oppenheimer said, "they are weapons of aggression, of surprise and of terror," how can a democracy rely on such weapons? Oppenheimer understood very soon after Hiroshima that these weapons would ultimately threaten our very survival. Presciently, he even warned us against what is now our worst national nightmare and Osama bin Laden's frequently voiced dream an atomic suitcase bomb smuggled into an American city: "Of course it could be done," Oppenheimer told a Senate committee, "and people could destroy New York." Ironically, Hiroshima's myths are now motivating our enemies to attack us with the very weapon we invented. Bin Laden repeatedly refers to Hiroshima in his rambling speeches. It was, he believes, the atomic bombings that shocked the Japanese imperial government into an early surrender and, he says, he is planning an atomic attack on the U.S. that will similarly shock us into retreating from the Mideast. Finally, Hiroshima's myths have gradually given rise to an American unilateralism born of atomic arrogance. Oppenheimer warned against this "sleazy sense of omnipotence." He observed that "if you approach the problem and say, 'We know what is right and we would like to use the atomic bomb to persuade you to agree with us,' then you are in a very weak position and you will not succeed. You will find yourselves attempting by force of arms to prevent a disaster." KAI BIRD and MARTIN J. SHERWIN are coauthors of "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer," published earlier this year by Knopf. Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Fair play? Video games influencing politics. Click and talk back!. --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/progchat_action/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: progchat_action-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ ***************************************************************** 17 [NukeNet] Call To Strip NY Times, W Laurence Of Pulitzer For Date: Mon, 08 Aug 2005 14:39:23 -0700 version=3.0.4 X-Spam-filter-host: darwin.ctyme.com - http://www.junkemailfilter.com NukeNet Anti-Nuclear Network (nukenet@energyjustice.net) ----- Original Message ----- From: "Democracy Now!" To: "Democracy Now! Daily Digest" Sent: Friday, August 05, 2005 4:10 PM Subject: DN!: Hiroshima Cover-up: Stripping the War Department's Timesman of Special from Democracy Now! : In case you missed this - please pass this around. This weekend marks the sixtieth anniversary of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. William Laurence, the New York Times reporter who covered the bombings was also on the US government payroll. Journalists Amy Goodman and David Goodman call for the Pulitzer Board to strip Laurence and his paper, The New York Times, of the undeserved prize. What do you think about this effort strip the Pulitzer Prize from William Laurence and the New York Times? Email us at mail@democracynow.org and let us know. = = = = = = = = = Read "The Hiroshima Cover-Up" By Amy Goodman and David Goodman in today's Baltimore Sun: http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0805-20.htm (the article is also included below) To thank the Baltimore Sun for running this piece, please e-mail letters@baltsun.com . If you would like your letter to the editor published, be sure to include contact information, including full name and day and evening phone numbers. = = = = = = = = = Published on Friday, August 5, 2005 by the Baltimore Sun The Hiroshima Cover-Up by Amy Goodman and David Goodman A story that the U.S. government hoped would never see the light of day finally has been published, 60 years after it was spiked by military censors. The discovery of reporter George Weller's firsthand account of conditions in post-nuclear Nagasaki sheds light on one of the great journalistic betrayals of the last century: the cover-up of the effects of the atomic bombing on Japan. On Aug. 6, 1945, the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima; three days later, Nagasaki was hit. Gen. Douglas MacArthur promptly declared southern Japan off-limits, barring the news media. More than 200,000 people died in the atomic bombings of the cities, but no Western journalist witnessed the aftermath and told the story. Instead, the world's media obediently crowded onto the battleship USS Missouri off the coast of Japan to cover the Japanese surrender. A month after the bombings, two reporters defied General MacArthur and struck out on their own. Mr. Weller, of the Chicago Daily News, took row boats and trains to reach devastated Nagasaki. Independent journalist Wilfred Burchett rode a train for 30 hours and walked into the charred remains of Hiroshima. Both men encountered nightmare worlds. Mr. Burchett sat down on a chunk of rubble with his Baby Hermes typewriter. His dispatch began: "In Hiroshima, 30 days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly - people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague." He continued, tapping out the words that still haunt to this day: "Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller has passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world." Mr. Burchett's article, headlined "The Atomic Plague," was published Sept. 5, 1945, in the London Daily Express. The story caused a worldwide sensation and was a public relations fiasco for the U.S. military. The official U.S. narrative of the atomic bombings downplayed civilian casualties and categorically dismissed as "Japanese propaganda" reports of the deadly lingering effects of radiation. So when Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter George Weller's 25,000-word story on the horror that he encountered in Nagasaki was submitted to military censors, General MacArthur ordered the story killed, and the manuscript was never returned. As Mr. Weller later summarized his experience with General MacArthur's censors, "They won." Recently, Mr. Weller's son, Anthony, discovered a carbon copy of the suppressed dispatches among his father's papers (George Weller died in 2002). Unable to find an interested American publisher, Anthony Weller sold the account to Mainichi Shimbun, a big Japanese newspaper. Now, on the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombings, Mr. Weller's account can finally be read. "In swaybacked or flattened skeletons of the Mitsubishi arms plants is revealed what the atomic bomb can do to steel and stone, but what the riven atom can do against human flesh and bone lies hidden in two hospitals of downtown Nagasaki," wrote Mr. Weller. A month after the bombs fell, he observed, "The atomic bomb's peculiar 'disease,' uncured because it is untreated and untreated because it is not diagnosed, is still snatching away lives here." After killing Mr. Weller's reports, U.S. authorities tried to counter Mr. Burchett's articles by attacking the messenger. General MacArthur ordered Mr. Burchett expelled from Japan (the order was later rescinded), his camera mysteriously vanished while he was in a Tokyo hospital and U.S. officials accused him of being influenced by Japanese propaganda. Then the U.S. military unleashed a secret propaganda weapon: It deployed its own Times man. It turns out that William L. Laurence, the science reporter for The New York Times, was also on the payroll of the War Department. For four months, while still reporting for the Times, Mr. Laurence had been writing press releases for the military explaining the atomic weapons program; he also wrote statements for President Harry Truman and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. He was rewarded by being given a seat on the plane that dropped the bomb on Nagasaki, an experience that he described in the Times with religious awe. Three days after publication of Mr. Burchett's shocking dispatch, Mr. Laurence had a front-page story in the Times disputing the notion that radiation sickness was killing people. His news story included this remarkable commentary: "The Japanese are still continuing their propaganda aimed at creating the impression that we won the war unfairly, and thus attempting to create sympathy for themselves and milder terms. ... Thus, at the beginning, the Japanese described 'symptoms' that did not ring true." Mr. Laurence won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the atomic bomb, and his faithful parroting of the government line was crucial in launching a half-century of silence about the deadly lingering effects of the bomb. It is time for the Pulitzer board to strip Hiroshima's apologist and his newspaper of this undeserved prize. Sixty years late, Mr. Weller's censored account stands as a searing indictment not only of the inhumanity of the atomic bomb but also of the danger of journalists embedding with the government to deceive the world. Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!, and David Goodman, a contributing writer for Mother Jones, are co-authors of The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them. © 2005 Baltimore Sun = = = = = = = = = ABOUT DEMOCRACY NOW! Democracy Now! airs on over 350 radio and TV stations, including Pacifica, NPR, community, and college radio stations; on public access, PBS, satellite TV stations (DISH network: Free Speech TV ch. 9415 and Link TV ch. 9410; DIRECTV: Link TV ch. 375); on the World Radio Network's European Service and on the Community Broacasting Association of Australia service; as a "podcast", automatically downloaded to your computer or portable audio player; and streams live M-F at 8am EST at www.democracynow.org = = = = = = = = = Now real-time CLOSED CAPTIONED on TV! You can also view/listen/read all Democracy Now! shows online: http://www.democracynow.org To bring Democracy Now! to your community, go to: http://www.democracynow.org/bringDNtoyou.html _______________________________________________________________________ Subscribe/Unsubscribe Here: http://www.energyjustice.net/nukenet/ Change your settings or access the archives at: http://energyjustice.net/mailman/listinfo/nukenet_energyjustice.net ***************************************************************** 18 Las Vegas SUN: Bush Signs Massive Energy Bill Into Law Today: August 08, 2005 at 13:17:35 PDT By DEB RIECHMANN ASSOCIATED PRESS ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) - President Bush on Monday signed sweeping legislation that provides billions of dollars in tax subsidies to energy companies, yet does little quickly to ease gas prices or lower America's reliance on foreign oil. "This bill is not going to solve our energy challenges overnight," Bush said just before signing the bill into law. "It's going to take years of focused efforts to alleviate those problems." Bush traveled here from his ranch in Crawford, Texas, to sign the 1,724-page bill, which was passed, with bipartisan support, to end a yearlong standoff in Congress over national energy policy. The bill-signing ceremony at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque begins a week of events meant to highlight recently passed legislation and underscore economic and national security issues. In coming days, Bush meets at his Texas ranch with his defense and economic advisers and travels to Illinois to sign a highway bill. Supporters of the energy bill say that in the long run, the new law will refocus the nation's energy priorities and promote cleaner and alternative sources of energy. Bush has said he believes the nation must find new ways, besides fossil fuels, to power the economy. "This economy is moving, and what this energy bill does is that it recognizes that we need more affordable and reliability sources of energy," Bush said. "This bill launches an energy strategy for the 21st century and I've really been looking forward to signing it." But even the bill's sponsors acknowledged the legislation will have little, if any impact, on today's energy prices or less dependence on oil imports. Crude-oil prices rallied to a new high above $63 a barrel on Monday, reflecting market fears over the U.S. embassy closure in Saudi Arabia due to security threats and concerns that shutdowns of U.S. oil refineries would reduce supply. When he arrived, Bush took a tour of the Energy Department's national solar thermal test facility, which was built in 1976 in response to the oil embargo and energy crisis. Bush walked in a field of mirrored solar panels, wearing shirt sleeves and sunglasses to ward off the bright midday sun. New Mexico is home to Republican Sen. Pete Domenici, a driving force in getting the measure passed. Domenici, who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said the bill is not for today or tomorrow, but is a "bill for the future." "It means less dependence on foreign oil," he said. "When we expand ethanol and the other things in this bill, we will grow less dependent, not all the way, but less dependent." New Mexico Sen. Jeff Bingaman, the top Democrat on Energy Committee, praised the passage of the bill but said more must be done to tap the potential of renewable energy, address global warming and use less oil from overseas. The bill did not "markedly reduce these imports," Bingaman said in a statement. "We need to build a consensus around effective steps to use less oil in our transportation sector, which is the basic cause of our increasing reliance on oil imports." The measure funnels billions of dollars to energy companies, including tax breaks and loan guarantees for new nuclear power plants, clean coal technology and wind energy. But for the first time, utilities will be required to comply with federal reliability standards for its electricity grid, instead of self-regulation. That is intended to reduce the chance of a repeat of a power blackout, such as the one that struck the Midwest and Northeast in the summer of 2003. For consumers, the bill would provide tax credits for buying hybrid gasoline-electric cars and making energy-conservation improvements in new and existing homes. Also, beginning in 2007, the measure extends daylight-saving time by one month to save energy. "If you're in the market for a car, this bill will help you save up to $3,500 on a fuel-efficient hybrid or clean-diesel vehicle," Bush said. The bill's price tag - $12.3 billion over 10 years - is twice what the White House had first proposed. It does not include Bush's desire to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration. Drilling advocates, however, have a backup plan that is expected to unfold in mid-September. Domenici said he will include a provision authorizing Arctic drilling as part of a budget procedure that is not subject to filibuster. A similar maneuver is being planned in the House, although the final strategy is being worked out. Critics of the energy bill are speaking out while Bush is in New Mexico. The League of Conservation Voters, The Wilderness Society, the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance, USAPIRG and others plan to highlight what else is not in the energy bill. Martha Marks of Santa Fe, N.M., president of the National Republicans for Environmental Protection, said the 10-year-old grass-roots organization was disappointed in the final version passed by Congress. "It really gives a short shrift to conservation and it still continues to subsidize the well-established oil and gas industries that really don't need subsidizing especially when (crude) oil is $60 a barrel," she said. All contents copyright 2005 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 19 California Aggie: Sixty years after the bomb August 08, 2005 By MELISSA B. TADDEI and JUSTIN MALVIN / Aggie Staff Writers Sixty years after the β€œLittle Boy” bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the Los Alamos National Laboratory β€” the secret home to the Manhattan Project in the early ’40s β€” now houses research in health science and homeland security. The compound in northern New Mexico boasts 2,000 facilities spread over 36 square miles serviced by thousands of employees and general staff. Studies include work with nanomachines, bioinformatics, fuel cell technology, HIV and infrastructure modeling or counterterrorism. While work at the lab has diversified, the lab’s reputation is still very much tied to its history as a nuclear lab. The primary function of the lab today is stockpile stewardship β€” the maintenance and storage of nuclear weapons for immediate use in case of nuclear conflict. The lab’s mission is to sustain international peace through the threat of nuclear war, according to lab spokesperson Kevin Roark. β€œEverybody who comes to work at Los Alamos knows what the mission of this lab is β€” it’s national security,” Roark said. β€œNuclear weapons from our arsenal will work and they will bring down mass destruction, and that knowledge keeps everyone in a peaceful posture.” UC and non-UC affiliates, including students present at UC Board of Regents meetings, have protested the production and upkeep of nuclear weapons, arguing that the academic mission of the UC is contradicted by the maintenance of a nuclear arsenal. Lab officials insist no one is looking for another Hiroshima. β€œIf a nuclear device is ever actually detonated in anger, then we have failed…. Our job is deterrence,” Roark said. However, 60 years ago the United States was steeped in World War II, with conflicts in Europe and Asia. The lab at Los Alamos was being managed by the UC and secretly heading the Manhattan project β€” a research endeavor to create a weapon powerful enough to end the war. β€œWe always have managed it, we were asked to come to Los Alamos,” said Chris Harrington, a spokesperson for the UC Office of the President. β€œThe university has done this work as a public service for over 60 years.” At that time, the center was headed by famed physicist, J. Robert Oppenheimer who, less than a month earlier, led his secret staff of scientists to success in the first test of an implosion nuclear device (β€œFat Man”) under the code name β€œproject Trinity.” On Aug. 6, 1945, the order was given to drop a companion nuclear device known as β€œLittle Boy” on Japan. The crew of the Enola Gay loaded the bomb aboard their aircraft and took off in the early morning. Once they were over Hiroshima, they dropped the 14-kiloton atomic bomb. The employees at the secret lab were stricken with the humanity of their work. Thousands had died in the blast and more would contract radiation sickness. Three days later, the 20-kiloton β€œFat Man” was dropped on Nagasaki, prompting Japan’s surrender to the allied powers. Fighting in the Pacific ceased shortly after on Aug. 14. Today, the future of the lab is uncertain, as a competition is underway between the U.S. Department of Energy and the UCOP for continued management. The current contract ends in September and the race is on to see which organization can best bear the burden of post-9/11 security and deterrence. UC President Robert Dynes announced that the UCOP’s strategy for contract competition would hinge on a four-way partnership linking the UC with the firms of Betchel, BWX Technologies and Washington Group International. β€œScience and technology are critical to national security,” Dynes said in a statement to the UC regents. β€œWe will not have national security if we do not have the best science, conducted by the best scientists, supported by the highest-quality research organization β€” which is what we have at the University of California.” JUSTIN MALVIN and MELISSA B. TADDEI can be reached at campus@californiaaggie.com. © 1995 - 2005 by The California Aggie. ***************************************************************** 20 Reuters: Bush focuses on energy bill's economic impact Mon Aug 8, 2005 5:48 AM ET By Patricia Wilson CRAWFORD, Texas, Aug 8 (Reuters) - With polls showing Americans are anxious about the economy despite positive trends, President George W. Bush signs a $14.5 billion energy bill on Monday that he says will keep U.S. growth on track. The legislation, passed by Congress after a four-year battle, boosts oil, natural gas and electricity supplies and promotes alternative energy sources, but offers consumers no short-term relief from high gasoline prices. Bush, on a 33-day vacation at his Texas ranch, makes a trip to the Energy Department's Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to sign it. "To keep our economy growing, we need affordable, reliable supplies of energy," he said. Although job numbers and average hourly earnings are both on the rise, a new Newsweek poll found that 52 percent of respondents disapproved of Bush's handling of the economy, while 40 percent approved. Those results mirrored a CBS News survey last week which showed that just 20 percent thought the economy was improving, while 32 percent said it was getting worse. White House spokesman Trent Duffy said the polling data ran counter to evidence of strong consumer confidence and spending on big ticket items like cars and houses. "American consumers are putting their money where their mouth is," Duffy said. "What the president's focused on is keeping the economy growing." NUCLEAR POWER Bush's White House economic team will gather at his ranch in Crawford on Tuesday and, on Wednesday, the president will sign a $286 billion transport and highway bill that he said would help "create good jobs." Supporters of the energy bill say it will revive America's nuclear power industry, boost oil drilling, convert coal into a cleaner-burning fuel and use home-grown, corn-based ethanol to stretch gasoline supplies. But environmental groups and some Democrats criticize its extensive tax breaks, subsidies and loan guarantees as a lavish gift to energy companies already enjoying near-record profits. Most Americans will feel the impact of new law in 2007 when daylight-saving time is extended by one month to save energy. Consumers will also be able to claim tax credits for installing more energy-efficient windows and solar panels on their homes and purchasing hybrid fueled vehicles. The new law will not curb oil imports with stricter fuel mileage requirements for gas-guzzling SUVs and other vehicles. The United States relies on foreign oil to meet 60 percent of its daily petroleum demand of almost 21 million barrels. Gasoline use accounts for 2 out of every 5 barrels consumed. When Congress returns from its summer break in September, lawmakers will turn to implementing the next -- and most controversial -- phase of the Bush administration's national energy plan -- allowing oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Bush's Republican allies in Congress plan to add ANWR drilling language to legislation that funds the day-to-day working of the federal government. If Congress approves drilling in the Arctic refuge this year, the first oil would not begin flowing until 2015 and reach a peak output of almost 1 million barrels a day, assuming the government leased the first exploration tracts in 2007, according to the Energy Department. (Additional reporting by Tom Doggett) © Reuters 2005. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 21 Guardian Unlimited: Ancient Egypt provides key to storing nuclear heritage Curry spice may protect against cancer Ancient Egypt provides key to storing nuclear heritage Paul Brown, environment correspondent Tuesday August 9, 2005 The Guardian The pyramids of the pharaohs and the nuclear bunkers of the past century may appear to have very little in common. But that could be about to change as the guardians of Britain's atomic heritage discover the benefits of working like an Egyptian. The United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority has undertaken an £8bn project to dismantle 26 research reactors and bury nuclear waste (that will remain dangerous for thousands of years) in concrete bunkers and storage facilities. The problem is that the details of the dismantling and the dangers in handling of the plutonium, uranium and other wastes are outlined on computer software that will become outdated in a decade. Fortunately, someone remembered their ancient history - and the papyrus scrolls beloved of the Egyptians. When stored in the right conditions, the scrolls can preserve readable records for millennia, making them perfect for the nuclear waste industry. The difficulty for scientists is that modern recycled paper has a high lignin acid content, and will rot over time. So they have used something called permanent paper, which is as close to papyrus as they can get. It is acid free, and will not deteriorate or discolour. About 423 documents have been photocopied onto 11,718 sheets of this paper, packed in copper impregnated bags, and stored in 16 special long-life archive boxes - as close to the dry, airless conditions of the desert pyramids as possible. The first batch of documents sets out details of the intermediate level radioactive waste arising from decommissioning the Windscale reactor in Cumbria, which will be completed next year. The waste has been grouted into concrete boxes for storage on the site until a permanent solution is found. For extra assurance, two further sets of records for archiving at different places have been prepared. David Gray, who led the project, said: "Our successors in the years and decades ahead must have access to detailed and reliable records of the stored radioactive waste as part of its long-term, safe management. For this reason the authority carried out a thorough study of all the options before deciding on the permanent paper solution. We hope that it will now be adopted across the industry." [UP] Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005 ***************************************************************** 22 RIA Novosti: Russia to sign convention on nuclear terrorism 08/ 08/ 2005 MOSCOW, August 8 (RIA Novosti) - Russian President Vladimir Putin gave orders to sign the UN International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism, the Kremlin press-service said Monday. The document is the 13th UN convention on combating terrorism. It was drafted by Russia in 1998 and became the first convention passed by the UN at the initiative of post-Soviet Russia. The convention will be presented for signing on September 14 at the UN Summit 2005, the 60th session of the UN General Assembly, in New York. Although the convention becomes effective with 22 ratifications, a foreign ministers' session of the 55-member Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) decided to ratify it unanimously. The convention, the first international treaty on preventing nuclear terrorism, provides for civilian and military application of nuclear materials, the prevention of terrorist attacks involving homemade nuclear devices, and the prosecution of those responsible for terrorist attacks, either via extradition or by domestic courts. The convention includes legal procedures for the retrieval of stolen nuclear materials, devices, and substances. The treaty is designed for close coordination with the International Atomic Energy Agency. © 2005 "RIA Novosti" ***************************************************************** 23 TehranTimes: The destroyer of worlds August 9, 2005 By Hamid Golpira After the first test of an atomic bomb in July 1945 at the Trinity Site in New Mexico, Manhattan Project director Robert Oppenheimer described the event by quoting from the Bhaghavad-Gita, saying, “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” This is something to reflect upon, especially today, since it is the sixtieth anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Where is humanity 60 years into the Nuclear Age? Paradoxically, many people both fear nuclear war and believe their countries’ must possess nuclear weapons to defend themselves. In the 2005 Hiroshima Peace Declaration, delivered on Saturday, the sixtieth anniversary of the atomic bombing of that city, Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba criticized nuclear weapons states for opposing calls for complete nuclear disarmament and encouraging trust in the bomb, saying, “Based on the dogma ‘Might is right’, these countries have formed their own ‘nuclear club’, the admission requirement being possession of nuclear weapons. Through the media, they have long repeated the incantation, ‘Nuclear weapons protect you.’” The hibakusha (atomic bombing survivors) of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their allies around the world are calling for total nuclear disarmament as mentioned in the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Article VI of the NPT states: “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.” Elsewhere in the Peace Declaration, the mayor of Hiroshima said that a consensus and harmony on the abolition of nuclear weapons and the realization of genuine world peace was taking hold all over the world, adding, “The keynote of this harmony is the hibakusha warning, ‘No one else should ever suffer as we did’, along with the cornerstone of all religions and bodies of law, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Our sacred obligation to future generations is to establish this axiom, especially its corollary, ‘Thou shalt not kill children’, as the highest priority for the human race across all nations and religions.” There are seven declared nuclear weapons states, the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, India, and Pakistan. The Zionist regime, which has never declared its nuclear status, is the eighth member of the nuclear weapons club. North Korea has also declared that it possesses nuclear weapons, but its claim has not been conclusively confirmed. The United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France are also veto-wielding permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and official nuclear weapons states according to the NPT. This means that they do not have to commit themselves to immediate nuclear disarmament and can set the tone of the non-proliferation debate. The United States and Russia both possess MIRVed ICBMs, which in plain English means they have intercontinental ballistic missiles with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles armed with nuclear weapons that can hit anywhere on Earth in about 25 minutes. According to many scientists, the detonation of 7000 nuclear weapons would spread so much radioactive fallout throughout the world that it would kill every human being on Earth and would perhaps kill almost all life on the planet. In the 1970s, the United States and the Soviet Union each possessed about 25,000 nuclear weapons. This means that their combined nuclear arsenals could have destroyed the world seven times. They have since reduced their nuclear arsenals. Today, the U.S. has approximately 10,600 nuclear warheads and Russia has about 20,000, so now they can only destroy the world about four times. Some scientists say the detonation of 400 nuclear weapons would trigger a nuclear winter. In the nuclear winter scenario, hundreds of nuclear explosions would set off firestorms in targeted cities and adjacent forests, sending several hundred million tons of smoke, soot, and dust into the atmosphere that would form clouds that would screen out most sunlight for several weeks. This would in turn cause a sudden drop in temperature and interrupt plant photosynthesis, which would destroy crops and cause food shortages and starvation. The term nuclear winter was coined in the 1983 TTAPS study (from the initials of the last names of its authors, R.P. Turco, O.B. Toon, T.P. Ackerman, J.B. Pollack, and Carl Sagan). According to the TTAPS study, surface temperatures would plunge for a few weeks, perhaps by as much as 11° to 22° C (20° to 40° F). The TTAPS study set a threshold of 1000 nuclear explosions for nuclear winter to occur. The authors of the TTAPS study noted that "the possibility of the extinction of Homo Sapiens cannot be excluded." Other scientists have said that a limited nuclear exchange would only cause a nuclear autumn, but that would also damage crops and cause food shortages. In addition, studies in the 1970s showed that the ozone layer that shields living things from much of the sun's harmful ultraviolet radiation could be depleted by the large amounts of nitrogen oxides produced by hundreds of nuclear explosions. Depleted uranium (DU) weapons have been used by the U.S. military in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Serbia. DU causes genetic damage, birth defects, cancer, immune system damage, and other serious health problems and is probably the cause of Persian Gulf War syndrome. Physicians in Iraq have documented a threefold increase in childhood cancers and a fivefold increase in birth defects since 1990. The U.S. military used DU weapons in that country for the first time in 1991. U.S. forces used DU weapons in Iraq again in 2003 and are probably still using them in the war. There were unconfirmed reports that DU weapons were used in the assault on Fallujah. The internet site Albasrah.net has a link to a site, http://www.einswine.com/atrocities/du/, which shows photos of Iraqi babies with horrible deformities. From that site there is a link to another site, http://www.web-light.nl/VISIE/extremedeformities.h tml, which shows more photos. Many physicians believe these birth defects were caused by the use of DU weapons. After the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986, over 116,000 people were permanently evacuated from the area. Zones of Exclusion were set up, including the towns of Pripyat and Chernobyl, which were declared unfit for human habitation due to the high levels of radioactivity. It is believed that the area is so contaminated that it will not be safe for people to live there for at least 100,000 years. In a violation of the letter and spirit of the NPT, the U.S. government is currently making plans to develop a new generation of smaller tactical nuclear weapons, dubbed mini-nukes. In addition, U.S. officials have recently begun using expressions like “full spectrum dominance” and the U.S. Space Command is talking about putting nuclear weapons in space. Obviously, China and Russia are becoming extremely concerned. Due to this irresponsible nuclear brinksmanship, there is now the possibility of an arms race in space. The nuclear waste generated by both civilian and military nuclear programs is also a major problem. In the United States, they are planning to establish a permanent nuclear waste dump, perhaps in the area of the Nevada nuclear test site, which is already contaminated. They are now trying to formulate a universal warning symbol, since the site will be radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, when every modern language will most probably be extinct. Imagine that, a universal warning symbol that would be understandable for hundreds of thousands of years. So, where is humanity 60 years into the Nuclear Age, and where are we going? Well, some people still have hope about the human race. Mayor Akiba ended this year’s Hiroshima Peace Declaration with these words: “On this, the sixtieth anniversary of the atomic bombing, we seek to comfort the souls of all its victims by declaring that we humbly reaffirm our responsibility never to repeat the evil. “Please rest peacefully; for we will not repeat the evil.” Send your questions and comments to: webmaster@tehrantimes.com ***************************************************************** 24 AFP: India, Pakistan reach agreement on reducing military tension - Monday August 8, 10:27 PM NEW DELHI (AFP) - India and Pakistan, striving to end decades of hostility, agreed on seven steps to reduce military tension, including a ban on the building of new army posts along their frontier in divided Kashmir. The two sides also agreed to continue a ceasefire along the Line of Control (Loc), the de facto border in Kashmir, said a joint statement after day-long talks between senior foreign ministry officials. In addition, India and Pakistan would upgrade an existing military hotline and hold monthly "flag" meetings between senior military officers along their borders, the statement said. Other measures were the continuation of existing agreements to respect each other's air space, to speedily return civilians who inadvertently stray across their borders and constantly to review existing confidence-building measures. The statement said the discussions, billed as expert-level talks on Conventional Confidence Building Measures, were held "in a cordial and constructive atmosphere". The neighbouring nations on Saturday formally agreed to notify each other in advance of plans to test ballistic missiles and to establish by September a hotline between top foreign ministry officials to prevent accidental nuclear exchanges. Analysts have said the weekend agreements represented the first nuclear confidence-building measures in two decades between the two sides, who have been to war three times since independence from Britain in 1947. They are currently engaged in a slow-moving peace process which aims to resolve disputes including the core problem of Kashmir, the Himalayan state claimed by both countries. An Islamic insurgency in the Indian zone has killed tens of thousands since 1989. Copyright © 2005 AFP. All rights reserved. All information ***************************************************************** 25 Guardian Unlimited: Brazil Dictatorship Wanted Atomic Bomb From the Associated Press [UP] Monday August 8, 2005 11:31 PM AP Photo NY190 By HAROLD OLMOS Associated Press Writer RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) - A former president has disclosed that the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil for two decades tried to develop an atomic bomb, but says the program was scrapped when an elected government assumed power in 1985. The 1964-85 dictatorship was long suspected of seeking nuclear weapons, but ex-President Jose Sarney's comments Sunday were the first confirmation of the program. Sarney, who led the first democratic civilian government after the dictatorship ended and previously denied the existence of the program, said he was informed that the military had dug a deep well for an eventual nuclear test explosion in a remote area of the northern state of Para. He did not say when or how he received the information, but it was shortly after he became president in 1985. ``I reacted with surprise,'' Sarney told Globo TV, adding that he gave instructions for the well to be sealed. He offered no other details during an interview about the most difficult moments of his presidency. Brazilian authorities on Monday reaffirmed that the country's constitution states that nuclear energy may only be used for peaceful purposes. ``Any initiative before the 1988 Constitution is buried,'' said Sergio Rezende, Brazil's science and technology minister. ``All we have from the old nuclear program is knowledge related to nucelar fuel for peaceful purposes.'' Sarney said he denied the existence of the atomic weapons program when he was president so as not to jeopardize talks intended to head off a nuclear arms race with neighboring Argentina. Argentina also had reinstated democratic rule and both civilian governments were negotiating a nuclear cooperation agreement that eventually cooled a long rivalry between two of South America's most powerful nations. ``The Argentines also were engaged (in developing atomic weapons), but they also denied it, the same way as we did,'' Sarney said. Argentina, which had South America's most advanced nuclear power facilities, has always denied it ever had an atomic arms program. But until the early 1980s, the country's nuclear energy program was closely tied to the Argentine military. During Sarney's 1985-89 term, Brazil and Argentina negotiated a treaty for peaceful use of nuclear energy that gives officials of the two nations free access to most of their nuclear installations. Sarney would not say how far along Brazil's military was in its work on atomic weapons or how close it was to detonating a nuclear device. But he said that after the treaty with Argentina, Brazilian officials found out their neighbors ``were at least 10 years ahead of us.'' The two nations later signed the United Nations-sponsored Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which commits them to not obtaining atomic weapons. In the wake of their treaty, Brazil and Argentina engaged in an economic integration program and created Mercosur, a trade bloc that also includes Paraguay and Uruguay. Bolivia, Chile, Peru and Venezuela are associate members of the bloc. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005 ***************************************************************** 26 NRC To Consider Including Safety Issues In Millstone Renewal Date: Mon, 08 Aug 2005 14:39:55 -0700 version=3.0.4 X-Spam-filter-host: darwin.ctyme.com - http://www.junkemailfilter.com New London Day - NRC To Consider Including Safety Issues In Millstone Renewal - Patricia Daddona NRC To Consider Including Safety Issues In Millstone Renewal By PATRICIA DADDONA Day Staff Writer, Waterford Published on 8/5/2005 The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has agreed to review a request from Suffolk County, N.Y., to challenge emergency preparedness plans at Millstone Power Station in Waterford. Part of Suffolk County, across Long Island Sound from Connecticut, is within Millstone's emergency evacuation zone. County executives are seeking to force Millstone owner Dominion Nuclear Connecticut to address what they call outdated evacuation plans and related emergency issues during the process of applying for license renewals for the reactors. Dominion has applied for license renewals at the Unit 2 and 3 reactors that would allow the plants to continue operating from 2015 and 2025, to 2035 and 2045, respectively. A decision on re-licensing is due next summer, but could take longer if Suffolk County is granted standing to air its concerns. As part of the re-licensing application process, NRC regulations call for staff and public reviews and any legal intervention to focus on the aging of nuclear reactors, safety and environmental impacts of 20-year license extensions. The NRC decided Thursday, however, that the county's late filing to challenge the application is ³excusable,² and its arguments for intervening legally should be considered. Three NRC commissioners voted to consider the county's arguments. NRC Chairman Nils Diaz was absent for the vote but would have been in favor, too, had he been present, said Neil Sheehan, spokesman for the NRC's Region 1 division. Suffolk County's attempt to broaden the areas the NRC would consider when reviewing a license renewal application could lead to a change in the license renewal review process itself, if the NRC agrees with the county, Sheehan added. Up to this point, the NRC's three-judge panel, the Atomic Safety & Licensing Board, had urged county and NRC officials to establish a written agreement that would outline terms for informally reviewing and addressing evacuation issues, but the parties could not agree on a plan. When that failed, the judges ruled that the county's ³heavy burden² in being accountable to its citizens for emergency issues related to Millstone warranted a closer look by the full commission. Suffolk County maintains it is not interested in closing the reactors but rather wants the best and most comprehensive emergency preparedness plans in place sooner rather than later. The NRC has ordered the parties and its own staff to submit initial briefs by Aug. 18 and response briefs by Aug. 25. County Executive Paul Sabatino II said Thursday he was encouraged by the NRC's willingness to consider the county's case. Dominion spokesman Jim Norvelle declined comment. The NRC's safety review of Millstone is due today. © The Day Publishing Co., 2005 ***************************************************************** 27 RIA Novosti: No serious accidents at Russian nuclear power plants for 13 years 08/ 08/ 2005 MOSCOW, August 8 (RIA Novosti) - No serious accidents have occurred at Russian nuclear power plants since the State Concern for Electricity and Heat Generation at Nuclear Power Plants (Rosenergoatom) was set up 13 years ago, a spokesman for the concern said Monday. Security systems at Russian nuclear reactors "minimize the influence of the human factor," he said. "We assign priority to the human factor in NPP safety, as well as equipment reliability," the spokesman said, adding that staffers at NPPs were constantly improving their qualifications. The Russian Federal Service for the Oversight of the Ecology, Technology and Nuclear Management said the number of failures at power-generating units of Russian nuclear power plants had fallen from 51 in 2003 to 46 in 2004. None of the failures affected the radiation situation. Rosenergoatom is the state manager of 10 Russian nuclear power plants. It is also responsible for nuclear, technical and fire security, including emergency relief measures. © 2005 "RIA Novosti" ***************************************************************** 28 MSN-Mainichi Daily News: Radioactive leak at Japanese nuclear plant Sunday poses no danger, officials say August 9, 2005 National A nuclear power station in northern Japan which had only just resumed operations after more than three months of inspections has been shut down again after two radioactive leaks were discovered, the power company said Monday. The leaks at Tokai power station in Ibaraki Prefecture posed no danger to the general public, Japan Atomic Power Company said in a statement. The first leak was found Sunday night at the entrance to a chamber linking the number two reactor to a turbine, and the nuclear reactor was manually closed soon after its discovery, the company said. The second leak was found early Monday in a steam pipe in the same chamber, it said. The power station was closed in April for regular inspections and had only resumed operations on Sunday, the company said. The company was investigating the cause of the leaks, said an official at the company who declined to be named because he wasn't authorized to talk to the media. The station remained closed on Monday afternoon and the company did not say when it would reopen. (AP) August 8, 2005 Copyright 2004-2005 THE MAINICHI NEWSPAPERS. All ***************************************************************** 29 APP.COM - Oyster Creek declares short alert Asbury Park Press Online Blockage from algae, sea grass forces power reduction Published in the Asbury Park Press 08/8/05 BY ERIK LARSEN MANAHAWKIN BUREAU LACEY — The Oyster Creek nuclear power plant declared an "alert" on Saturday, the second step in a four-step emergency classification system, after algae and sea grass became trapped against one of its underwater intake screens. The alert lasted for three minutes after it was declared at 4:03 a.m., during which time the plant's engineers reduced power to 43 percent, according to AmerGen, Oyster Creek's corporate owner. Following the cancelation of the alert, the plant remained at "unusual event" status, the lowest of the classifications, until 7:55 a.m., while technicians removed the seaweed, inspected equipment and worked to return the plant to normal operation. Peter Resler, a spokesman for AmerGen, the plant's operator, said engineers in the plant's control room initiated the alert after a sudden reduction in water entering Oyster Creek's north intake vent was detected. The other primary intake, the south intake, was unaffected, he said. The water that comes into the plant is used to condense steam created by Oyster Creek's reactor. Without a sufficient amount of water coming in from the outside to cool the reactor, the reactor could not operate safely and could increase the risk of a radioactive release. Resler said a massive clump of algae and sea grass became lodged against the south intake's screen, a clump that plant operators believe ended up flowing freely in the plant's channels following thunderstorms Friday and early Saturday. "The operators took the appropriate action, reducing power and safely securing plant equipment," Bud Swenson, Oyster Creek vice president, said. "In certain generic terms, this was not an emergency, the operators followed their procedures to reduce power promptly and safely," Resler said. "The plant is in stable condition as we address the issues with grass. Once we're satisfied, we'll safely come up in power. There was never a risk to the plant or the public." Under normal circumstances, Resler said the plant operates at 100 percent. He said he could not say when it would again. The 630-megawatt plant, the oldest commercial nuclear power plant in the United States, was operating at about 50 percent power on Sunday, said Diane Screnci, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "Power ascension can take some time," Screnci said, who explained that inspectors from the NRC were evaluating what happened. Oyster Creek was not completely shut down because no other problems were detected, she said. "The plant is stable and has been stable and responded as designed and we'll continue to follow-up," Screnci said. Chief Jeff Thompson of the Ocean County Sheriff's Department said their communications center was notified of the event as NRC and plant procedures require, but no additional action was taken. "We were notified of a non-emergency event — this was notification only — about a low level on the intake. That's standard procedure," Thompson said. He said that the Sheriff's Department has a complete set of formal procedures in place for the worst-case scenario, which would involve evacuation or asking people to seek shelter indoors. According to the federal government, emergency conditions at nuclear plants span four classifications. Such conditions range from an emergency involving workers within the plant to an emergency involving residents around the plant site. The classifications are unusual event, alert, site area emergency and general emergency. The next emergency condition status after "alert" in the NRC's classification, is "site emergency," which means that small radiation could be released from the plant. "If there was a greater event or more action was necessary, we would open the office of emergency management and notify the state," Thompson said. Edith Gbur, president of Jersey Shore Nuclear Watch, an organization that wants to see Oyster Creek closed, said the incident underscores the need to replace its current cooling system with a cooling tower. A cooling tower at the plant has been proposed by state environmental officials as a way for AmerGen to meet new standards requiring that its cooling system kill fewer fish, clams and shrimp. Oyster Creek's license renewal is now pending with the NRC and would allow Oyster Creek to stay open for another 20 years beyond the end of its initial 40-year license, which expires in 2009. Plant owner AmerGen has until Sept. 7 to decide whether to build a cooling tower or restore about 3,500 acres of wetlands (a preliminary estimate) in the Barnegat Bay watershed, according to a state Department of Environmental Protection fact sheet. New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Bradley M. Campbell said he would prefer that AmerGen build a cooling tower. He cited "legitimate concerns" over whether restoration and other measures can "truly offset the impacts to fisheries and other resources" damaged by once-through systems, like the one at Oyster Creek. Oyster Creek has used its current system, known as an open-loop cooling system, since beginning operations in 1969. Thomas Thorpe, 65, of Berkeley, said alternative ways to cool the plant are needed, particularly in light of Saturday's incident. "I would have to say they're going in the right direction with the cooling towers, instead of using ocean water," Thorpe said. Erik Larsen: (609) 978-4582 or elarsen@app.com the Asbury Park Press Copyright © 2005 Asbury Park Press. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 30 Clarion-Ledger: Myths indicate nuclear power not best choice August 8, 2005 Four myths about nuclear power: + It's inexpensive. Since the 1950s, the nuclear industry has received billions in federal subsidies and will continue to do so under the new energy bill. Additional billions have been spent for the development of a national nuclear waste repository, which still does not exist. NuStart Energy Development LLC, a consortium of nuclear companies, will be subsidized by taxpayers for $260 million of a $520 million project that will benefit the industry. Also, the Mississippi Development Authority is preparing to offer incentives for Grand Gulf. These state incentives should be used to bring safe, high-paying jobs to Mississippi. While energy companies have profits in the billions, taxpayer dollars continue to be thrown away on a technology that after 50 years is still unable to compete in the marketplace without massive government handouts. Waste stored in state + It's clean and emission-free: While nuclear reactors do not produce the same emissions as coal-burning plants, replacing these plants with nuclear facilities only replaces one category of harmful material with another more deadly and longer lasting one. The issue of primary concern is the fact that Mississippi is now a nuclear waste repository. Twenty years of highly radioactive waste, some of which is deadly for tens of thousands of years, is stored above ground at Grand Gulf. Some 40,000-50,000 tons of radioactive waste is stored at the 103 reactors in this country and the industry continues to generate these long-lived wastes, making nuclear energy one of the filthiest of energy sources. + It's safe: No other type of electricity generation requires evacuation routes and while Grand Gulf has been in operation for 20 years, the hospital, sheriff's department, and Claiborne County officials continue to be concerned about their ability to handle a nuclear emergency. Current studies indicate increased cancers and infant mortality in the vicinity of nuclear plants; as nuclear plants continue to age, the danger of accidents increases. The Price Anderson Act limits the liability of the industry in the event of nuclear accidents. Try renewable sources + It's secure: The majority of the uranium used to fuel nuclear reactors is imported. While nuclear energy does not reduce emissions from automobiles, use of imported uranium positions us for the same problems we now experience with imported oil. Renewable resources such as wind, solar, and biomass are "home-grown." Two new reactors would make Grand Gulf a more desirable target for al-Qaida, which specifically considered nuclear plants for 9-11 attacks. The new reactor site is less than two miles from the Mississippi River. Ships and barges carry grain and other commodities to and from ports such as New Orleans. Contamination of the river could cripple this vital function, the fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico, and the tourism industry. While security has been increased since 9-11, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is still examining and rewriting procedures and standards for nuclear facility security. The industry says that nuclear should be part of our energy mix. It is a part  about 20 percent. Now is the time to bring clean, renewable sources of energy up to nuclear's percentage, compare costs and accident risks, and decide if we need more nuclear plants. Countries such as Germany are phasing out nuclear and turning to wind and solar sources of energy. The United States could and should do likewise. Ruth Pullen is an ecologist and retired programmer analyst. Her e-mail address is: nonewnukes@bellsouth.net Copyright ©2005 Clarionledger.com All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 31 Xinhua: Malaysia needs no nuclear energy as alternative: official www.xinhuanet.com www.chinaview.cn 2005-08-08 22:31:41 KUALA LUMPUR, Aug. 8 (Xinhuanet) -- Malaysia does not need nuclear energy as an alternative energy source despite the current increase in oil prices, a senior Malaysian official said Monday. Other energy resources in this country are still abundant and there is no need for Malaysia to seek alternatives, Deputy Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation Kong Cho Ha was quoted by the official Bernama news agency as saying. Malaysia's capacity to develop nuclear energy is limited in terms of technology and human resources and it will take up to 15 years to build a nuclear plant, Kong told reporters, adding that the uranium source is also limited in this country. Kong made the remarks after opening the five-day Forum for Nuclear Cooperation in Asia (FNCA) and Workshop on Reactor Utilization organized by the Malaysian Institute for Nuclear Technology Research (MINT) and the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Earlier, MINT Director-General Daud Mohamad said in his speech that the institute, in its move to promote the development and application of nuclear science and technology in Malaysia, set up the Reactor Interest Group (RIG) in 2001, which comprised researchers from local universities and other research institutes. However, Daud noted that MINT used this technique mainly for "neutron activation analysis" or to "determine the elemental contents in various samples such as soil, water, air, sediment and biological samples." Enditem Copyright ©2003 Xinhua News Agency. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 32 Newswise: The Ecological Effects of the Chernobyl Disaster Source: Ecological Society of America Released: Tue 26-Jul-2005, 14:50 ET Embargo expired: Mon 08-Aug-2005, 00:00 ET CHERNOBYL, ECOLOGY, RADIATION, RECOVERY, FITNESS, MUTATION RATES, FOREST Description Nearly 20 years ago Reactor number 4 at Chernobyl exploded, sending radiation across what is now the Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. In a session researchers will reveal how the environment has responded -- from genetic mutation rates, to plant and animal communities, to nutrient cycling. Organized Oral Session 7: β€œEcological effects of the Chernobyl disaster: Genes to ecosystems,” will take place Monday 8 August 2005, 1:30 - 5:00 PM in Meeting Room 510 A, Level 5, Palais des congrΓ¨s de MontrΓ©al. Nearly 20 years ago Reactor number 4 at Chernobyl exploded, sending radiation across a large region of what is now the Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Some 40 radionucleotides were released into the environment, including Strontium 90 (90Sr) and Cesium 137 (137Cs). Yet despite radiation levels dangerous to humans, most natural areas in the region have rebounded, and by ecological standards, are functioning normally. The session, organized by James Morris and Timothy Mousseau (University of South Carolina, US) will reveal how the environment has responded -- from genetic mutation rates, to plant and animal communities, to nutrient cycling. Sergey Gaschak (International Radioecology Laboratory, Ukraine) will open the session with his presentation, β€œDeterminants of levels of 90Sr and 137Cs in birds in Chernobyl.” Studying 228 birds of 23 different species captured in Chernobyl, Gaschak and colleagues from the University of South Carolina (US) and University Pierre et Marie Curie (France) measured the birds’ levels of radioactive strontium and radioactive cesium, comparing migrating populations with those that remain in the area, as well as examining age, sex, and nesting preferences to determine the amounts and types of radiation accumulating in the birds. In the presentation, Gaschak will discuss how quantities of 90Sr and 137Cs vary with feeding, nesting and migration habits. Timothy Mousseau will present β€œConsequences of radiation for reproduction and survival of barn swallows Hirundo rustica from Chernobyl.” Barn swallows are long-distance migratory birds, which nest across Europe, providing researchers with numerous populations to sample. Examining swallows from the Chernobyl region and Kanev, southeast of Kiev, Mousseau and his colleague, Anders Moller (Laboratorie de Parasitologie Evolutive, France), found reproductive success was significantly reduced for the Chernobyl-nesting birds. Survival rates, number of eggs laid, and overall body condition was lower, despite similar nesting and laying dates. The radio nucleotides in the area also filter into the soil, and from there into plants. Animals that consume these plants, including livestock, then take up the radionucleotides. Viktor Dolin (National Academy of Sciences, Kyiv, Ukraine) will discuss a newly described process of environmental self-cleaning in the talk, β€œBiogeochemical cycling of radionucleotide: Implications for the human food web.” Dolin calculated the rate of 137Cs and 90Srs moving through the environment, then used the data to determine an ecosystem’s ability to β€œclean” itself of excess radiation. Oleksander Orlov’s (Ukrainian Scientific Research Institute) presentation, β€œThe distribution and cycling of 137Cs in -forests of the Chernobyl exclusion zone,” will focus on 137Cs levels in three 50-year old Scotch Pine forests. Forest litter, moss, lichens, understory, macromycetes, and canopy 137Cs activity measurements will be described. Also working in these pine forests, Vadim Skripkin and colleagues from the Institute for Environmental Geochemistry, Ukraine, and the University of South Carolina will report their findings on the distribution of 14C in, β€œThe turnover of 14C carbon in forests of the Chernobyl exclusion zone.” The final presentation of the session, Ronald Chesser (Texas Tech University, US) will describe the distribution and effects of radiation doses that hit wildlife that were living in the area at the time of the accident, as well as how the populations recovered in the talk, β€œTemporal trends in radiation doses, survival, and recovery in wildlife populations at Chernobyl.” For more information about this session and other ESA-INTECOL Meeting activities, visit: . The theme of the meeting is β€œEcology at multiple scales,” and some 4,000 scientists are expected to attend. © 2005 Newswise. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 33 Reuters: Dominion Va. North Anna 2 nuke exits outage Mon Aug 8, 2005 7:41 AM ET (Adds NRC event report) NEW YORK, Aug 8 (Reuters) - Dominion Resources Inc.'s (D.N: Quote, Profile, Research) 917-megawatt North Anna 2 nuclear unit in Virginia exited an outage and ramped up to 74 percent of capacity by early Monday, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said in a report. On Aug. 5, the unit automatically tripped from full power likely due to a lightning strike. The Virginia-based company said in the report the shutdown was uncomplicated with all systems functioning as required. The shutdown of unit 2 did not affect the operation of unit 1, which the company was taking off line for maintenance work. The 1,842 MW North Anna station is located in Mineral in Louisa County about 50 miles northwest of Richmond, Virginia. There are two units at the station including the 925 MW unit 1 and the 917 MW unit 2. The adjacent unit 1, meanwhile, returned to full power by Monday. One MW powers about 800 homes, according to the North American average. Dominion operates the station for its owners, Dominion (88.4 percent) and Old Dominion Electric Co-op (11.6 percent). Dominion's subsidiaries own and operate more than 28,000 MW of generating capacity, market energy commodities, and transmit and distribute electricity and natural gas to more than five million customers in eight states. © Reuters 2005. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 34 Reuters: Progress shuts N.C. Brunswick nukes Mon Aug 8, 2005 7:35 AM ET NEW YORK, Aug 8 (Reuters) - Progress Energy Inc. (PGN.N: Quote, Profile, Research) shut both 872-megawatt units at the Brunswick nuclear power station in North Carolina on Aug. 6 due to a problem with the plant's emergency diesel generators, the company told the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in an event report. The North Carolina-based company said the station's technical specifications required the shutdown due to the potential failure of all four generators. On Aug. 5, the company determined the protective devices on one of the generator might be set too conservatively, causing the unit to trip during a test. All of the generators have the same protective devices with the same trip points. The company said it had to shut the reactors since it does not consider the generators operable and the station does not have enough emergency backup power without the generators available. Both units were operating at full power on Friday. The 1,683 MW Brunswick station is in Southport, North Carolina, about 160 miles south of Raleigh. There are two units at the station: the 872 MW unit 1 and the 811 MW unit 2. One MW powers about 800 homes, according to the North American average. Progress Energy operates the station for its owners Progress (81.7 percent) and North Carolina Eastern Municipal Power Agency (18.3 percent). Progress Energy's subsidiaries own and operate more than 24,000 MW of generating capacity and transmit and distribute electricity to more about 2.9 million customers in North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida. © Reuters 2005. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 35 Reuters: Grass buildup causes alert at N.J. Oyster Creek nuke Mon Aug 8, 2005 8:09 AM ET NEW YORK, Aug 8 (Reuters) - AmerGen Energy Co. declared an emergency alert at the 619-megawatt Oyster Creek nuclear power station in New Jersey on Aug. 6 when grass accumulated in the plant's intake, the company told the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in an event report. The grass, kicked up by a passing storm, reduced the amount of water the plant could pull in for cooling. The company reduced the reactor's power level to about 43 percent of capacity until operators were able to clear the grass and resume normal cooling water intake. The unit was back at full power by early Monday, the same as early Friday. The company downgraded the alert, the second lowest of four emergency classifications used by the NRC, after just a few minutes into an unusual event, which is the lowest emergency classification. The unusual event lasted less than four hours. The Oyster Creek station is located in Forked River in Ocean County, about 60 miles east of Philadelphia. One MW powers about 800 homes, according to the North American average. AmerGen is a subsidiary of Chicago-based energy company Exelon Corp. (EXC.N: Quote, Profile, Research). Exelon's unregulated Exelon Generation Co LLC subsidiary operates the station. Exelon's subsidiaries own and operate more than 38,000 MW of generating capacity, market energy commodities, and transmit and distribute electricity (5.1 million) and natural gas (460,000) to customers in Illinois and Pennsylvania. © Reuters 2005. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 36 Journal Star: Ameren Corp. and Commonwealth Edison agree to buy. PJStar.com - August 8, 2005 Illinois could benefit from tax credit's renewal with added jobs, dollars Monday, August 8, 2005 BY JESSICA L. ABERLE OF THE JOURNAL STAR Ameren Corp. and Commonwealth Edison agree to buy. Developers agree to expand and build. Federal legislators agree to subsidize. The state commerce commission agrees to require and regulate. Environmentalists agree the news is good. And all are talking about wind energy. Within the last few weeks, years of negotiations fell into place, positioning the wind industry to explode and bring some 8,000 jobs and $7 billion to the Illinois economy by 2012. "We've passed the point on if (wind energy) is a feasible technology," Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn told the Journal Star. "The question is how fast will Illinois join the rest of the country." Proponents of wind energy long have said an extension of the federal production tax credit (PTC) for developers and a renewable portfolio standard (RPS) for utilities could vault Illinois into the forefront of green energy producing states with 9,000 megawatts of potential wind energy production. Federal legislators approved a broad energy bill earlier last month that includes an extension of the PTC, offering millions of dollars in tax credits to developers through 2007. President Bush is expected to sign the bill today. On July 19, the Illinois Commerce Commission approved a voluntary RPS that calls for 2 percent of the state's energy supply to come from renewable sources by 2006, increasing each year to 8 percent by 2012. With about a dozen utility-scale wind projects in activedevelopment stages in Illinois and new interests growing daily since the ICC unanimously approved the governor's Renewable Energy Plan, developers of the giant wind machine farms are optimistic. Stefan Noe, president of Midwest Wind Energy and co-developer of the 50 megawatt Crescent Ridge wind project near Tiskilwa, said the incentives will push forward the planned second phase of the Bureau County installation before the close of 2007. "I do believe that the utilities will be buying some wind," Noe said. "I guess time will tell if they are as aggressive with that mandate, as are aggressive the goals set by the governor." Company support ComEd and Ameren, the state's two largest utility companies, both support the guidelines set forth by the RPS. Both companies have said they will submit public requests for proposals in a formal bidding process for the renewable energy by the middle of this month. "We support the governor's initiative," said Arlene Juracek, vice president for energy acquisition with ComEd. "We'll make a filing by mid August (to the ICC) on how we propose to purchase these resources and how we propose to achieve the cost recovery with them." Currently ComEd has about 100 megawatts of landfill methane generation in its energy supply portfolio, as well as a power purchase agreement for Crescent Ridge's 50 megawatts. But the company still will need to purchase more wind energy to meet the 2 percent renewable ICC requirement, of which 75 percent must come from wind. "We are currently soliciting requests for information from wind generators," Juracek said, adding that a request for proposals from wind developers will coincide with ComEd's Renewable Energy Plan filing with the ICC. ComEd hopes to secure the necessary power purchase agreements with wind generators before the end of the year. "We recognize that global warming is a serious concern and there are things we can all do to reduce the carbon impact on the environment," Juracek said. "One of the ways we can do that is by encouraging non-carbon generation ... like wind." Wind also can provide a long-term price hedge for customers in that wind operating costs are not subject to the same cost escalation as fossil fuels, Juracek said. "It is really important to get these contracts signed by the end of the year," so developers can take those contracts to the bank. It would be at least 2007 before consumers would see any impact on rates from the use of wind energy. "Investing in a wind farm is like locking in a fixed-rate mortgage," said Christine Real de Azua, spokeswoman for the American Wind Energy Association. "The big advantage is the stability of costs over time. The cost of natural gas is volatile and has been going up, and other fuels tend to go up." It costs between 3 cents and 7 cents per kilowatt hour to produce wind energy. Those figures compare to 4.8 cents to 5.5 cents per kilowatt hour for energy produced by coal; 3.9 cents to 20 cents per kilowatt hour for natural gas because of the volatile market; 5.1 cents to 11.3 cents per kilowatt hour for hydroelectric; and 11.1 cents to 14.5 cents per kilowatt hour by nuclear power, according to AWEA. While Ameren Corp. declined to confirm its efforts to solicit proposals from wind developers, spokesman Leigh Morris said the company has pledged to meet the ICC goals. "Our position on it is real short, simple and to the point. We believe the governor's plan will bring renewable energy resources to Illinois, and Ameren has pledged to take the necessary steps to implement the governor's sustainable energy plan." Morris said Ameren does have some renewable sources in its supply system in Illinois and Missouri, but that percentage is well below the required 2 percent by 2006. Excluding hydroelectric power, renewable sources account for less than 1 percent of the power supplied by Ameren in Illinois and Missouri, he said. "Ameren has long been a supporter of renewable energy resources, and this is just consistent with the position Ameren has had for a long time," Morris said. "We want to produce reliable power, safe power and clean power." Morris said cost recovery also influences Ameren's ability to buy wind power. "We have to absorb that higher cost," he said. "We're going to have to buy the power. And as I said, in the beginning it's going to take the construction of the wind farms and then they'll have to go operational. And until that happens there's no wind power to purchase." Plenty of wind power With 1,700 megawatts of wind energy installations in Illinois already under development and dozens of other projects proposed or under consideration, Hans Detweiler, deputy director for energy and recycling with the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, believes the utilities will have plenty of power to purchase. About 104 megawatts of wind energy-producing facilities are operating in Illinois. And even with all 9,000 megawatts constructed, turbines would occupy only 1.2 percent of Illinois' available (non-environmentally sensitive) land. The U.S. Department of Energy has said the 9,000 megawatts is likely an underestimate and increasing technology continues to raise the maximum potential. About 250 megawatts of energy is enough to power 100,000 Illinois homes annually. Developers have proposed the world's largest land-based wind turbine installation in McLean County with upwards of 260 giant windmills producing some 400 megawatts of energy. And Bob Crowell, director of business development for Houston-based Zilkha said he's pleased to see the incentives pass. "It's very good news, and although the RPS is a voluntary structure, the utilities, being Ameren and ComEd, seem to be very much on board with it. We are expecting requests for proposals." Crowell also echoed other developers in saying the extension of the federal tax credit was a requirement for the project to move forward. Crowell said construction on the first phase of the Zilkha project is slated to begin next spring and be completed before the end of 2006. With the extension of the production tax credit, Detweiler said the DCEO is expecting at least 2,000 megawatts of wind energy development by 2012. And Quinn said it will be in the utilities' best interest to arrange purchase agreements with those developers. "Just from the portfolio perspective, any utility company in America in the 21st century should want diversity of supply, and not put all your eggs in one basket," Quinn said, adding that currently Illinois gets only half of 1 percent of its energy from renewables. The remainder is split almost 50/50 coal and nuclear. Making it happen Quinn said the utilities that work on numerous issues with the ICC know how important the Renewable Energy Plan is to the commissioners. "I think it was made clear to them by each individual commissioner and the commission as a whole that this has to happen now." Also, Quinn said Illinois consumers, looking toward a deregulated market in 2007, also want the utilities to purchase renewable resources. "Sometimes to get the utilities to do the right thing you have to lean on them from a lot of different directions," said Quinn. "Outcome is the only way to evaluate ultimate success here. "I prefer a legislative mandate. I would prefer everything talked about so far to be in legislative form. But we had to do something to get this ball rolling." The Renewable Energy Plan also includes an energy efficiency portfolio that sets guidelines for increased efficiency. This goal specifies that utilities should reduce load growth by increasing percentages, starting with a 10 percent reduction for 2007-08 to a 25 percent reduction by 2015-17. John Moore, a senior attorney with the Environmental Law and Policy Center, said a lot of the wind industry growth in Illinois will depend on what the utilities actually do. "They're talking the talk, now they've got to walk that talk," Moore said. "I think Illinois will succeed, and Illinois will be a center for renewable energy - in the country actually. "All that remains is for the utilities to aggressively buy the wind power pursuant to the commerce commission's order." Illinois is among the leading states in the nation for capacity to produce wind energy. Moore and Quinn both said they'd like to see the utilities go beyond the 8 percent goal by 2012. "The success of the clean energy standard depends on the strength of the utilities' plan to buy wind power," Moore said. "This and the (production tax credit) are the two biggest factors that will move these wind farms toward completion and expansion." 2005 PEORIA JOURNAL STAR, INC. :: ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 1 News Plaza, Peoria, IL 61643 :: 1-309-686-3000 ***************************************************************** 37 AU ABC: Lucas Heights image stays on Google - 08/08/2005 Does this freely available image of the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor pose a security risk? (Image: Google) Australia's nuclear agency has decided to allow satellite images of its nuclear reactor to remain freely available on the web after originally saying it wanted them censored because of security concerns. Chief of operations at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation(ANSTO) Dr Ron Cameron says ANSTO has discussed the images of the Lucas Heights reactor with the Australian Security Intelligence Organisationand other Australian security agencies. The images can be accessed at the Google Earthwebsite. He says ANSTO contacted Google last week to discuss "where the technology might be going in the future" and discuss options such as blurring the images. But he now says ANSTO has decided the images are not a security risk. "At this stage we're not making any request for Google to censor these images or anything of that kind," he says The Google Earth service allows web users to zoom in on places of interest, including schools, houses, parks, train stations and nuclear reactors. But it has blanked out sensitive US sites like the White House. Cameron says ANSTO broached the possibility of blurring the images when it spoke to Google last week, but this was never discussed at a senior level. ANSTO had since decided no action is needed because of the poor quality of the pictures, which are already two years old. "Our view is that we've been aware of these images for some time and they're not of sufficient concern," he says. "We've since confirmed with our security agencies in government that they have no concerns at this stage so we won't be taking any action. "We're not asking Google to censor any of the images which are currently there." Mr Cameron denied ANSTO was doing a backflip because of negative publicity. Serious issues Roger Clarke, a visiting professor at the Australian National Universitywho specialises in the public policy implications of data surveillance technology, says ANSTO may have jumped the gun with its initial comments. He says the images of the Lucas Heights reactor are so poor that ANSTO made the right decision deciding not to press to have it censored. But Clarke says the episode raises serious issues and has implications for individual privacy, high-security jails and homes of the wealthy, as well as strategic sites. "We should pause and think about some of these things and work out whether there should be some levels of restraint placed at law. "We've got to say, 'hey Google, pause and have a think, you haven't got a single word about privacy anywhere there that we can see, don't you think you should think about privacy and security?' "I don't think any of us as members of the public should leap to the conclusion that absolutely everything should be absolutely open to the public all the time." Related Stories Smart surveillance has alarm bells ringing, News in Science 2 Aug 2005World flocks to web for London blast news, News in Science 8 Jul 2005Cyber-freedom under threat, says report, News in Science 23 Jun 2004 ***************************************************************** 38 The Effects of Nuclear Weapons by Russell D. Hoffman (1999) Date: Mon, 08 Aug 2005 14:39:20 -0700 version=3.0.4 X-Spam-filter-host: darwin.ctyme.com - http://www.junkemailfilter.com THE EFFECTS OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS By Russell D. Hoffman Copyright (c) 1999 A year ago this month (May, 1999), India surprised the CIA -- and nearly everyone else except, perhaps, Pakistan, who seems to have been nearly ready -- by setting off several underground nuclear explosions. Then Pakistan, claiming self-defense, followed suit. But what would actually happen if India and Pakistan had a nuclear exchange? Most people in India and in Pakistan (and in the U.S.) probably do not know that as many as 9 out of 10 people -- or more -- who die from a nuclear blast, do not die in the explosion itself. Most people probably think that if they die from a nuclear blast, they will simply see a flash and get quickly cooked. Those within approximately a six square mile area (for a 1 megaton blast) will indeed be close enough to "ground zero" to be killed by the gamma rays emitting from the blast itself. Ghostly shadows of these people will be formed on any concrete or stone that lies behind them, and they will be no more. They literally won't know what hit them, since they will be vaporized before the electrical signals from their sense organs can reach their brains. Of the many victims of a nuclear war, these are the luckiest ones, of course. Outside the circle where people will be instantly vaporized from the initial gamma radiation blast, the light from the explosion (which is many times hotter than the sun) is so bright that it will immediately and permanently blind every living thing, including farm animals (including cows, sacred or otherwise), pets, birds while in flight and not to mention peasants, Maharajah's, and Government officials -- and soldiers, of course. Whether their eyes are opened or closed. This will happen for perhaps 10 miles around in every direction (for a 1 megaton bomb) -- further for those who happen to be looking towards the blast at the moment of detonation. Even from fifty miles away, a 1 megaton blast will be many times brighter than the noonday sun. Those looking directly at the blast will have a large spot permanently burned into their retinas, where the light receptor cells will have been destroyed. The huge bright cloud being nearly instantly formed in front of them (made in part from those closer to the blast, who have already "become death"), will be the last clear image these people will see. Most people who will die from the nuclear explosion will not die in the initial gamma ray burst, nor in the multi-spectral heat blast (mostly X-ray and ultraviolet wavelengths) which will come about a tenth of a second after the gamma burst. Nor will the pressure wave which follows over the next few seconds do most of them in, though it will cause bleeding from every orifice. Nor even will most people be killed by the momentary high winds which accompany the pressure wave. These winds will reach velocities of hundreds of miles an hour near the epicenter of the blast, and will reach velocities of 70 miles per hour as far as 6 miles from the blast (for a 1 megaton bomb). The high winds and flying debris will cause shrapnel-type wounds and blunt-trauma injuries. Together, the pressure wave and the accompanying winds will do in quite a few, and damage most of the rest of the people (and animals, and structures) in a huge circle -- perhaps hundreds of square miles in area. Later, these people will begin to suffer from vomiting, skin rashes, and an intense unquenchable thirst as their hair falls out in clumps. Their skin will begin to peel off. This is because the internal molecular structure of the living cells within their bodies is breaking down, a result of the disruptive effects of the high radiation dose they received. All the animals will be similarly suffering. Since they have already received the dose, these effects will show up even if the people are immediately evacuated from the area -- hardly likely, since everything around will be destroyed and the country would be at war. But this will not concern them at this time: Their immediate threat after the gamma blast, heat blast, pressure wave and sudden fierce wind (first going in the direction of the pressure wave -- outwardly from the blast -- then a moment later, a somewhat weaker wind in the opposite direction), will be the firestorm which will quickly follow, with its intense heat and hurricane-force winds, all driving towards the center where the radioactive mushroom-shaped cloud will be rising, feeding it, enlarging it, and pushing it miles up into the sky. The cloud from a 1 megaton blast will reach nearly 10 miles across and equally high. Soon after forming, it will turn white because of water condensation around it and within it. In an hour or so, it will have largely dissipated, which means that its cargo of death can no longer be tracked visually. People will need to be evacuated from under the fallout, but they will have a hard time knowing where to go. Only for the first day or so will visible pieces of fallout appear on the ground, such as marble-sized chunks of radioactive debris and flea-sized dots of blackened particles. After that the descending debris from the radioactive cloud will become invisible and harder to track; the fallout will only be detectible with geiger counters carried by people in "moon suits". But all the moon suits will already be in use in the known affected area. Probably, no one will be tracking the cloud. One U.S. test in the South Pacific resulted in a cigar-shaped contamination area 340 miles long and up to 60 miles wide. It spread 20 miles *upwind* from the test site, and 320 miles downwind. Where exactly it goes all depends on the winds and the rains at the time. It is difficult to predict where the cloud will travel before it happens, and it is likewise difficult to track the cloud as it moves and dissipates around the globe. While underground testing is bad enough for the environment, a single large above-ground explosion is likely to result in measurable global increases of a whole spectrum of health effects. India or Pakistan will deny culpability for these deaths, of course. The responsible nations, including my own, always do. But the people who were affected by the blast itself will not be worrying about the fallout just yet. A 1 megaton nuclear bomb creates a firestorm that can cover 100 square miles. A 20 megaton blast's firestorm can cover nearly 2500 square miles. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were small cities, and by today's standards the bombs dropped on them were small bombs. The Allied firebombing of nearly 150 cities during World War Two in Germany and Japan seldom destroyed more than 25 square miles at a time, and each of those raids required upwards of 400 planes, and thousands of crewmembers going into harm's way. It was not done lightly. And, they did not leave a lingering legacy of lethal radioactive contamination. In the span of a lunch hour, one multi-warhead nuclear missile can destroy more cities than all the incendiary raids in history, and the only thing the combatant needs to do to carry off such a horror is to sit in air-conditioned comfort hundreds or even thousands of miles away, and push a button. He would barely have to interrupt his lunch. With automation, he wouldn't even have to do that! The perpetrator of this crime against humanity may never have seen his adversary. He only needs to be good at following the simplest of orders. A robot could do it. One would think, that ONLY a robot WOULD do it. Nuclear war is never anything less than genocide. The developing firestorm is what the survivors of the initial blast will be worrying about -- if they can think straight at all. Many will have become instantly "shell-shocked" -- incapacitated and unable to proceed. Many will simply go mad. Perhaps they are among the "lucky" ones, as well. The firestorm produces hurricane-force winds in a matter of minutes. The fire burns so hot that the asphalt in the streets begins to melt and then burn, even as people are trying to run across it, literally melting into the pavement themselves as they run. Victims, on fire, jump into rivers, only to catch fire again when they surface for air. Yet it is hard to see even these pitiable souls as the least lucky ones in a nuclear attack. For the survivors of the initial blast who do not then die in the firestorm that follows, many will die painfully over the next few weeks, often after a brief, hopeful period where they appear to be getting better. It might begin as a tingling sensation on the skin, or an itching, which starts shortly after the blast. These symptoms are signs that the body is starting to break down internally, at the molecular level. The insides of those who get a severe dose of gamma radiation, but manage to survive the other traumas, whose organs had once been well defined as lungs, liver, heart, intestines, etc., begin to resemble an undefined mass of bloody pulp. Within days, or perhaps weeks, the victim, usually bleeding painfully from every hole and pore in their body, at last dies and receives their final mercy. But this too will probably not be how most victims of a nuclear attack will die. A significant percentage, probably most, of the people who die from a nuclear attack will die much later, from the widespread release of radioactive material into the environment. These deaths will occur all over the world, for centuries to come. Scattered deaths, and pockets of higher mortality rates, will continue from cancer, leukemia, and other health effects, especially genetic damage to succeeding generations. Nuclear weapons do not recognize the end of a war, or signed peace treaties, or even the deaths of all the combatants. They simply keep on killing a percentage of whoever happens to inhale or ingest their deadly byproducts. Some deaths will occur hundreds and even thousands of miles away, because low levels of ionizing radiation are capable of causing the full spectrum of health effects, albeit at a lower rate within the population. Not to mention the radioactive runoff from the rivers and streams that flow through the blast area and the area under the radioactive mushroom cloud's drift. It may carry its deadly cargo for thousands of miles, raining a fallout of death only on some cities, and not on others. It will land upon nations which had not been involved in any way in India's dispute with Pakistan. These nations will be mighty hurt and mighty upset. Nuclear weapons do not recognize international borders. Finally, an atmospheric blast of a nuclear "device" creates an EMP (Electro-Magnetic Pulse) which can be as large as Pakistan or even India -- perhaps even larger than India and Pakistan together. The higher the altitude of the blast, the bigger the circle of damage will be from the EMP. This is a very serious concern for those of us in the high-tech industries, such as myself. The Electro-Magnetic Pulse will electrify all sorts of metallic structures that are not normally electrified except by the occasional short circuit or lightening strike. This will be a lot like the whole country getting struck by lightening all at the same time. As computer chips make better and better use of "real estate", using more and more delicate electronic circuits, the more tightly-packed transistors, capacitors, diodes and resistors become more and more vulnerable to the EMP which will be carried into the chips via the connecting wires. The Electro-Magnetic Pulse is one of the reasons above-ground testing was stopped. (The other reason was that it became impossible to deny that the radiation dispersed by the tests was killing people.) Pacemakers, for example, may stop working because of the "hit" from the EMP. It will be quite something to see people in a thousand mile radius of the epicenter of the blast (or further) who are using pacemakers, suddenly drop dead, and all the computers permanently go down and all the lights go out, all at the same time. And commercial and private aircraft will drop out of the sky, since their sensitive electronics and fly-by-wire systems are not very well shielded from the EMP. These planes will then not be available for evacuation purposes, nor will they be available to air-drop food, water, morphine and cyanide, all of which will be in great demand throughout the area. A year ago people were dancing in the streets over this in both India and Pakistan. Why? Home plumbing systems and most other plumbing systems are good examples of large metallic structures that will suddenly become electrified, destroying the motors, gauges, electronics, etc. which are attached to the plumbing systems. More and more pumping equipment is computer controlled nowadays for efficiency. Imbedded controllers are becoming prevalent but as they do, the potential damage from the Electro-Magnetic Pulse increases dramatically. Train tracks will also carry the charge, as well as telephone wiring. All these things will have a nearly simultaneous surge of energy sent through them, igniting gas containers such as fuel storage tanks, propane tanks, and so on. Whatever doesn't blow up will at least stop working. My country has lived under the Russian and Chinese threat of nuclear war for many decades now, and it is not a pleasant thought. This is nothing to dance about. There is no benefit to having, or using, nuclear weapons. I think the world would be a better place if we all stopped and said, "I will not be a part of this. I do not need these weapons, for I would never commit this sin against my own children, nor against my neighbor's children, nor against my enemy's children, nor even against my enemy. I choose not to be a part of this madness." There is a greater battle mankind must fight than against each other. Humanity's fight right now, is for humanity's general survival despite depleted and poorly used resources, environmental degradation (there is none greater than that from a nuclear explosion), dwindling effectiveness of antibiotics and other wonder drugs, an uneven distribution of available food, knowledge and wealth, and against weapons of mass destruction. America had three excuses for her previous use of nuclear weapons in war, which we plead every time it is mentioned. First, we claim that we did not understand back then (over 50 years ago) all the ways nuclear weapons damage the Earth and her living inhabitants. Second, we claim that there was a war going on, and that had we not used these weapons, perhaps a million soldiers would have died invading Japan instead. But this second excuse is weakened by the knowledge that Japan was at that time very near collapse anyway. She was without an air defense, a sea defense, she did not have advanced radar, she had lost all her good pilots, millions of soldiers were either dead, wounded, captured, or uselessly stuck on nameless islands in the middle of the Pacific, and towns in her homeland were being firebombed on almost a nightly basis. Our third excuse was that both Japan (and definitely Germany) were building their own nuclear weapons, and DEFINITELY would have used them against us had they succeeded in developing "the bomb" before the war ended. The war could not go on forever. We were, indeed, running out of time. Perhaps these excuses are insufficient, but India and Pakistan haven't even got them. India can, and therefore should, along with Pakistan, renounce nuclear weapons and the nuclear option. Perhaps her populace does not understand the full nature of the threat of nuclear weapons, and thus they are dancing in the streets, but I hope that her leaders do. However, I strongly suspect most of them are unaware of the things I have written about in this newsletter. Perhaps you, dear reader, will help me to educate them in this matter. Sincerely, Russell D. Hoffman Concerned Citizen Carlsbad, California The author is grateful for the assistance of Pamela Blockey-O'Brien and others in the research and preparation of this statement. Sources for more information about the effects of nuclear weapons: For more information on the Electromagnetic Pulse (which can also be created with non-nuclear weapons) you might start with a visit to this URL (which is, actually, specifically about non-nuclear EMP devices): ----- FROM: http://www.infowar.com/mil_c4i/mil_c4i8.html-ssi ----- Computers used in data processing systems, communications systems, displays, industrial control applications, including road and rail signalling, and those embedded in military equipment, such as signal processors, electronic flight controls and digital engine control systems, are all potentially vulnerable to the EMP effect. Other electronic devices and electrical equipment may also be destroyed by the EMP effect. Telecommunications equipment can be highly vulnerable, due to the presence of lengthy copper cables between devices. Receivers of all varieties are particularly sensitive to EMP, as the highly sensitive miniature high frequency transistors and diodes in such equipment are easily destroyed by exposure to high voltage electrical transients. Therefore radar and electronic warfare equipment, satellite, microwave, UHF, VHF, HF and low band communications equipment and television equipment are all potentially vulnerable to the EMP effect. It is significant that modern military platforms are densely packed with electronic equipment, and unless these platforms are well hardened, an EMP device can substantially reduce their function or render them unusable. ----- END OF CLIP ----- Information on INFOWAR web site is available from: Infowar.Com & Interpact, Inc. WebWarrior@Infowar.Com Voice: 727-556-0833 Fax: 727-556-0834 For a photo of the famous wooden-trestle electromagnetic pulse (EMP) simulator at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico (with a B-52 bomber sitting on top of it): http://www.brook.edu/FP/projects/nucwcost/trestle.htm Visit the Federation of American Scientists' web site for a more detailed discussion of the effect of nuclear weapons: http://www.fas.org/nuke/hew/Nwfaq/Nfaq5.html In 1962 the Department of the Air Force produced Air Force Pamphlet No. 136-1-3, by order of the Secretary of the Air Force Curtis E. LeMay. Titled The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, it was published by the United States Atomic Energy Commission in April of that year and was a revision of the 1957 edition of the same title. In the forward by Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission Glenn T. Seaborg, we are told, "There is a need for widespread public understanding of the best information available on the effects of nuclear weapons. The purpose of this book is to present as accurately as possible, within the limits of national security, a comprehensive summary of this information." In other words, fiction wherever they thought it necessary. However, there are several interesting statements to readers: ----- FROM "THE EFFECTS OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS" ---- From Paragraph 11.197: "...in the great majority of cases, mutations have deleterious effects of some kind." Paragraph 11.218: "Hemorrhage is a common phenomenon after radiation exposure because the megakaryocytes, from which the blood platelets necessary for clotting are formed, are destroyed and the platelets are not replenished. If hemorrhage occurs in vital centers, death can result. Often the hemorrhages are so widespread that severe anemia and death are the consequences." Paragraph 11.219: "The loss of the epithelial coverings of tissues, together with the loss of white cells and antibodies, lowers the resistance of the body to bacterial and viral invasion. if death does not take place in the first few days after a large dose of radiation, bacterial invasion of the blood stream usually occurs and the patient dies of infection. Often such infections are caused by bacteria which, under normal circumstances, are harmless." U. S. Government photos: Cover of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, 1962, U.S. Gov't Printing Office First Thermonuclear Explosion, November 1st, 1952, Eniwetok Proving Grounds (color photograph) Title Page from The Effects of Nuclear Weapons Page 49: Figure 2.49: Late stage of the condensation cloud in an air burst over water Page 105: Figure 3.06: Variation of pressure with time at a fixed location and effect of a blast wave passing over a structure. (Note position of dog in each frame.) Page 568: Figure 11.51: The patient's skin is burned in a pattern corresponding to the dark portions of a kimono worn at the time of the explosion. Page 591: Table 11.111: Summary of clinical effects of acute ionizing radiation. (NOTE: this page misrepresents the dangers!) Page 630: Figure 12.08: Idealized ranges for effects of air burst with the heights of burst optimized to give the maximum range for each individual effect. This essay was originally published in the STOP CASSINI newsletter #123 ************************************************* ** THE ANIMATED SOFTWARE COMPANY ** Russell D. Hoffman, Owner and Chief Programmer ** P.O. Box 1936, Carlsbad CA 92018-1936 ** (800) 551-2726 ** (760) 720-7261 ** Fax: (760) 720-7394 ** Visit the world's most eclectic web site: ** http://www.animatedsoftware.com ************************************************* IF YOU RECEIVED THIS EMAIL IN ERROR AND/OR DO NOT WISH TO RECEIVE ANY MORE EMAILS FROM US FOR ANY REASON, PLEASE CONTACT RUSSELL HOFFMAN AT: rhoffman@animatedsoftware.com MailTo:rhoffman@animatedsoftware.com?Subject=Unsubscribe-me-please . Please be sure that "Unsubscribe-me-please" appears in the subject line. ***************************************************************** 39 NRC: National Source Tracking of Sealed Sources; Meeting FR Doc 05-15661 [Federal Register: August 8, 2005 (Volume 70, Number 151)] [Proposed Rules] [Page 45571] From the Federal Register Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr08au05-20] AGENCY: Nuclear Regulatory Commission. ACTION: Notice of meeting. SUMMARY: The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has published a proposed rule on National Source Tracking of Sealed Sources for public comment (70 FR 43646; July 28, 2005). The public comment period runs from July 28 thru October 11, 2005. As part of the public comment process, the NRC plans to hold two transcribed public meetings to solicit comments on the proposed rule. During the comment period, comments may also be mailed to the NRC or submitted via fax or e-mail. The meetings are open to the public and all interested parties may attend. The first meeting will be held at the NRC in Rockville, MD. The second meeting will be held at the offices of the Texas Department of State Health Services in Houston, TX. DATES: August 29, 2005, from 9 a.m.--3 p.m. in Rockville, MD, and September 20, 2005, from 12:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. in Houston, TX. ADDRESSES: The August 29 meeting will be held at the NRC Auditorium, Two White Flint North, 11545 Rockville Pike, Rockville, MD. The September 20 meeting will be held at the offices of the Texas Department of State Health Services--Elias Ramirez State Office Building, 5425 Polk Street, Rooms 4B-4E, Houston, Texas. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Merri Horn, telephone (301) 415-8126, e-mail, mlh1@nrc.gov; Julie Ward, telephone (301) 415-5061, e-mail jaw2@nrc.gov; or Ikeda King, telephone (301) 415-7278, e-mail ijk@nrc.gov of the Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC 20555-0001. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The purpose of these meetings is to obtain stakeholder comments on the National Source Tracking Proposed Rule. The proposed rule would require licensees to report certain transactions involving certain sealed sources of concern to the National Source Tracking System. These transactions would include manufacture, transfer, receipt, or disposal of the nationally tracked source. The proposed rule would also require each licensee to provide its initial inventory of nationally tracked sources to the National Source Tracking System and annually verify and reconcile the information in the system with the licensee's actual inventory. In addition, the proposed rule would require manufacturers to assign a unique serial number to each nationally tracked source. The proposed rule is available on NRC's rulemaking Web site: http://ruleforum.llnl.gov. Agenda: Welcome--10 minutes; NRC staff presentation on Rule Requirements--20 minutes; Public Comment--remainder. There will also be a poster board session on the transaction forms. To ensure that everyone who wishes has the chance to comment, we may impose a time limit on speakers. Attendees are requested to notify Julie Ward, telephone (301) 415- 5061, e-mail jaw2@nrc.gov or Ikeda King, telephone (301) 415-7278, e- mail ijk@nrc.gov to preregister for the meetings. You will be able to register at the meetings, as well. Dated at Rockville, Maryland, this 2nd day of August, 2005. For the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Charles L. Miller, Director, Division of Industrial and Medical Nuclear Safety, Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards. [FR Doc. 05-15661 Filed 8-5-05; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 7590-01-P ***************************************************************** 40 Las Vegas SUN: Doctor describes effects of radiation on unborn Photo: Corbin Harney beats a drum during a sunrise ceremony Today: August 08, 2005 at 9:41:16 PDT Yamazaki was chief physician at Nagasaki after blast By Mary Manning LAS VEGAS SUN Even 60 years after the August days when the United States dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities to end World War II, the tension continues over President Harry Truman's decision to bomb and the future of nuclear weapons. Dr. James Yamazaki, who was the chief physician of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission that visited Nagasaki after World War II, spoke Saturday about his research on radiation's effects on the unborn and others exposed to the atomic blast in Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945. Between 500 and 800 babies were born in Nagasaki within six months after the bomb exploded, Yamazaki told more than 100 people during a lecture Saturday at the Atomic Testing Museum at 755 E. Flamingo Road at Swenson Avenue. He said those within 2,200 yards of the bomb who survived both bomb and birth had smaller than normal body frames and mental retardation. But 43 percent of the pregnancies ended in death when mothers miscarried, bore stillborn fetuses or babies died shortly after birth, he said. His findings led him to make stopping further harm from nuclear weapons attacks or experiments a life-long mission to . As a first step in preventing any more nuclear attacks in the world, the public needs to engage in a broad discussion on human impacts, he said. "That is one reason for this meeting," Yamazaki said. The pediatrician said he disagreed with the Bush administration and any of its plans for developing larger nuclear weapons. But not everyone attending the lecture agreed with Yamazaki. Using the atomic bomb on Japan helped end the war, World War II B-29 pilot Leonard Carpi said to Yamazaki. "There were millions of people who would have died" in combat if the bombs had not been dropped, Carpi said. "The Japanese warlords were not willing to give up. A lot of young people would not be here today if we had invaded." Yamazaki paused and looked at the veteran war pilot. "I do appreciate what you are saying," he said. "The problem for you and me is how we can prevent it. "Those coming after us, especially the children, are the ones we have to be concerned about." Dr. Jeffrey Klein, a retired oncologist who directs a hospice in Thousand Oaks, Calif., agreed with Yamazaki. "It should never happen again," Klein said, noting that peaceful resolution instead of going to war is necessary for avoiding future nuclear conflicts. Much of what is known about the effects of radiation was learned from the work Yamazaki and others started in Nagasaki. Before departing for Japan in 1949, Yamazaki had been schooled in some possible radiation effects by Dr. Stafford Warren, chief medical director for the Atomic Energy Commission, precursor to the Energy Department. The little amount of radiation information that was available to the public at that time fit on a 3-by-5-inch card that Warren gave Yamazaki. "Some consequences might not be known until we had completed careful observations of the survivors over their entire lifetimes," Warren had told Yamazaki. He said blood sampled from 500 people is still being studied for genetic defects. "We just don't know the extent yet," Yamazaki said. Although he had served as a combat surgeon at the Battle of the Bulge and was captured by the Germans, Yamazaki said he was not prepared for what he witnessed in Nagasaki. Yamazaki first learned of the human dimensions of the Nagasaki bomb from the city's chief of police, who described how a police patrol ventured over a ridge after seeing a blinding white light and how the industrial area of the city had been engulfed in flames. Thousands appeared dead. Survivors ran in panic, many with flaming shreds of clothing, flesh hanging from their frames. The police chief told Yamazaki about how students sitting at a long lab table in a concrete building died instantly, without injury or burn, at the Nagasaki University Medical School, a quarter-mile east of the blast. Four years later Yamazaki saw a mass of glass made from microscopic slides inside the lab that had fused together from the atomic blast. There was nothing left of students who had been in wooden classrooms, however. They evaporated without a trace in the blast and firestorm. Yamazaki also asked his audience to ponder this question: What if the 9/11 terrorist attacks had been nuclear? The Brooklyn Bridge is one mile away from where the World Trade Center stood, he said. "It would have been demolished. "In fact, all large cities in the world would be vulnerable to such an attack," he said. After the lecture, a gray-haired woman waited in line for Yamazaki to sign a copy of his book, "Children of the Atomic Bomb: An American Physician's Memoir of Nagasaki, Hiroshima and the Marshall Islands." She told him she had lived 1.7 miles from the center of the Nagasaki blast and remembers a neighbor's child crying and clinging to her mother's leg. "We couldn't take her because we didn't know where we were going ourselves," said the woman, who refused to give more than her first name, Nobuko. She said she never saw the little girl again. Photo: Corbin Harney beats a drum during a sunrise ceremony Las Vegas SUN main page All contents copyright 2005 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 41 Guardian Unlimited: After the bomb Michael Newman, a lecturer in peace and conflict studies at London Metropolitan University, was in Japan to mark the 60th anniversary of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima. Here he reflects on the experience and the affect the bomb had on the country, then and now Monday August 8, 2005 This week I sat with a group of students from Europe, Asia, the US and the Middle East listening to a survivor of the Hiroshima nuclear bombing recount his experiences of 60 years ago. Everyone was moved to tears as he explained the horrific deaths of his family and how, even now, he dreams of the mother he lost as a nine-year-old boy. This was perhaps the most powerful moment in an intensive international summer school on Hiroshima and peace, which I have been attending with three students who taking the peace and conflict studies degree at London Metropolitan University. What has this summer school, which ended with attendance at the 60th anniversary commemoration event at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, meant for me, a lecturer in peace and conflict studies? It has been wide-ranging, informative, and stimulating - a tribute to Hiroshima City University and the Hiroshima Peace Institute who have organised it. I have learned much from experts here on issues that are less well known in the UK, including Islam in south-east Asia, and the contemporary Korean situation, which will strengthen my own teaching. Yet far more important has been the experience of location and history - being in Japan at this time, with its complex relationships between past, present and future. It is almost impossible to be in Hiroshima without rekindling the conviction that nuclear weapons are a monstrous evil that must be eliminated. In Europe we may have grown complacent about this, with the ending of the cold war. In Hiroshima the urgency of nuclear disarmament is as great as ever, and there are numerous visual reminders of this. Yet if being the victims of the A-bomb of 1945 has made the people of Hiroshima campaigners for world peace, history has also made the Japanese experience far more complex. For, of course, Japan was also a ruthlessly aggressive power in the second world war, and this is a problem that still confronts contemporary society. For China and the Korean peninsula, the Japanese have been seen as colonialists rather than victims, and the living impact of this historical experience was brought into the summer school. In a poignant moment a South Korean student explained how his parents constantly recalled Japanese brutality, while he would rather move on. Moving on is not so easy, for it also depends on the way in which the Japanese deal with their history. The nationalist right has always wanted to concentrate purely on Japan's plight as a victim and while we were at the summer school, some districts in Tokyo adopted a revisionist history textbook skating over the country's war crimes and thereby reinforcing the anger in China and Korea. But history is also present in a still more potent form. The postwar settlement incorporated pacifism into the Japanese state, but now the prime minister wants to revise this article of the constitution and a referendum is to be held on the issue. For many people, particularly the younger generation, it seems clear that Japan can only be a "normal" country if it has its own national defence policy, particularly as China has nuclear weapons and North Korea is believed to be developing them. But this is not how its neighbours see it; nor is it the view of the Hiroshima survivors, for whom peace and nuclear disarmament are the imperative messages of the 1945 bombing. And so the Hiroshima commemoration on Saturday was the most potent possible combination of location and living history, with universal significance. The way in which Japan ultimately combines its unique history of nuclear holocaust with normalisation will have significance far beyond its borders. This is not just an Asian problem. No US president has ever visited Hiroshima and reflected on its meaning. It is important for students, teachers and, above all, political leaders to be prepared to understand this unique conjuncture of time and place. · Michael Newman is a professor in the department of law, governance and international relations at London Metropolitan University [UP] Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005 ***************************************************************** 42 [NukeNet] Water standard for radioactivity unsafe (Yucca) Date: Mon, 08 Aug 2005 14:39:51 -0700 autolearn=ham version=3.0.4 X-Spam-filter-host: darwin.ctyme.com - http://www.junkemailfilter.com NukeNet Anti-Nuclear Network (nukenet@energyjustice.net) http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2005/Aug-03-Wed-2005/news/26988224.html Group: Water standard for radioactivity unsafe Nevada officials ponder report's implications for planned Yucca Mountain waste site By STEVE TETREAULT STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU WASHINGTON -- The government is underestimating the health risks from the presence of radioactive particles in drinking water, an environmental science group said in a report it plans to release today. Nevada officials who have seen the report said it could focus new attention on the safety of groundwater near the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. Advances in science have clarified the dangers of long-lived radioactive particles like plutonium and neptunium that could travel in water where the government conducted atomic bomb activities, the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research said. Such particles concentrate in the bones and deliver doses far higher than previously estimated, according to the institute's analysis. The institute urged the Environmental Protection Agency to set new standards that the group said would protect human health better. The present EPA standard for plutonium in drinking water, 15 picocuries per liter, is one hundred times too high, said Arjun Makhijani, institute president and report author. The standard was set in 1976, he said. Makhijani said Tuesday that public water supplies are not in danger. Even with tougher standards, "public water systems are not at present contaminated at or near the requested (maximum limit)," the study said. The more practical effect of the new standards, Makhijani said, would be to guide the Energy Department's cleanup of former nuclear weapons sites. The study recommended that the department pay for a set of baseline water samples drawn near sites that have plutonium waste or soil contamination. The sites could include the Savannah River, which divides Georgia and South Carolina, the Columbia River in Washington and Oregon, and the Snake River aquifer in southern Idaho. Makhijani urged the EPA to use his recommendations in a review of drinking water standards scheduled for next year. The agency did not respond to a request for comment on the report. Groundwater standards for the proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain are based on the EPA's safety levels for drinking water, Nevada officials said Tuesday. If the EPA were to adopt a tighter drinking water standard for radioactive particles, "it could make it harder for the repository to meet the standard over the long term," said Joe Egan, the state's nuclear waste lawyer. _______________________________________________________________________ Subscribe/Unsubscribe Here: http://www.energyjustice.net/nukenet/ Change your settings or access the archives at: http://energyjustice.net/mailman/listinfo/nukenet_energyjustice.net ***************************************************************** 43 [NukeNet] Aus. Uranium Mining; Sweden to use leaking THORP Date: Mon, 08 Aug 2005 14:39:53 -0700 version=3.0.4 X-Spam-filter-host: darwin.ctyme.com - http://www.junkemailfilter.com NukeNet Anti-Nuclear Network (nukenet@energyjustice.net) http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200508/s1431258.htm Last Update: Friday, August 5, 2005. 3:00pm (AEST) Qld stands by uranium mining opposition The Queensland Government says there will be no change to its long-standing opposition to uranium mining and processing in Queensland. The Commonwealth yesterday announced it is taking control of uranium mining in the Northern Territory. The Federal Government has the power to approve mines under the self-government rules for the Territory. A spokesman for Queensland's Natural Resources Minister Henry Palaszczuk says it does not have the same authority over Queensland. He says Queensland's emphasis remains on its abundance of cheap coal and new, cleaner coal burning technologies. "There is over 45,000 tonnes of known uranium deposits in Queensland, most of which is in the hands of two Canadian resource companies, Laramide Resources and Maple Minerals, while the rest is controlled by Australian companies, Georgetown Mining and Summit Resources," he said. ========================================================================================= http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/cumbria/4745145.stm Nuclear staff suspended over leak A senior manager has been disciplined and another is facing action after a leak at the Sellafield nuclear plant. The pair were suspended in April at the time of the leak at the plant's Thorp reprocessing complex, but details have only just emerged. The action was taken after acid containing 20 tonnes of uranium and 160kg of plutonium leaked from a pipe. One of the managers has now returned to work, while the other remains suspended pending a disciplinary hearing. 'Significant deficiencies' A statement issued by Sellafield operator British Nuclear Group, said: "Two senior managers in Thorp were suspended in relation to the discovery of dissolver liquor in the plant's feed clarification cell. "One has been through disciplinary process and has now returned to work. "The outcome of the process is between the company and the individual and it is not considered appropriate to comment further. "The second individual remains suspended pending the disciplinary hearing." In June an investigation into the leak by the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII) found "significant deficiencies". It ordered improvements, which must be introduced by October. Work at the Thorp complex was halted when the leak, which could have occurred as long ago as August 2004, was discovered in April. ========================================================================================= http://www.bellona.no/en/energy/nuclear/sellafield/39273.html Sweden plan to send spent nuclear fuel to Sellafield In a surprising move Swedish company Studsvik-SVAFO have announced the first Swedish plans, for more than 20 years, to ship spent nuclear fuel to British Sellafield plant for reprocessing. Norwegian authorities have announced protests against the transport. Erik Martiniussen, 2005-08-04 13:33 In contrast to the established Swedish policy, Swedish company Studsvik-SVAFO is now planing to send spent nuclear fuel to British plant Sellafield for reprocessing. The spent fuel origin from the first Swedish reactor, R1, which was in operation in Stockholm from 1954 to 1970. The plans involve shipping a load of 4,7 tonnes of metallic uranium to Sellafield. The reprocessing will generate a total volume of 1600 litres of highly active waste, which will be shipped back to Sweden for final disposal. The fuel also contains 1.1 kilogram of plutonium, which will be converted into Mixed Oxide Fuel (MOX), and sent back to Sweden. First load for 20 years Even though the amounts of material, which are involved, are small, the plans are considered politically controversial. In the 1980's the Swedish government subsequently reversed its spent fuel policy of reprocessing in favour of the direct disposal of its spent nuclear fuel. If the new plans are materialised the spent fuel will be the first Swedish load to reach British shores for more than 20 years. 1982 was the last year Swedish nuclear fuel was shipped to Britain for reprocessing. If everything goes as Studsvik-SVAFO expects the fuel will be shipped to Sellafield during the summer of 2007, and reprocessed in the 40 years old Magnox reprocessing plant, also known as the B205-plant, at Sellafield. The Magnox reprocessing plant is the one of the two reprocessing plants at Sellafield, which pollutes the most. There are plans to close it down in 2012. The Swedish authorities are expected to make a decision regarding the transport this August. At the moment the fuel are stored at the Swedish research institute Studsvik, near the town of Nykφping. The Sellafield plant Together with Norwegian authorities Bellona was working for several years to stop the controversial discharges of radioactive technetium-99 (Tc-99) from Sellafield, a nuclide with a half-life of 213.000 years. The work was crowned with success in April 2004 when the operator of the plant, British Nuclear Group (BNG), decided to start cleaning out the material from the discharges. But even though Tc-99 now is cleaned out, the plant is still polluting the Irish Sea with radioactive materials, such as small amounts of plutonium, Cesium-137 and Cobolt-60. These are all artificial and toxic radioactive isotopes, with a rather long half-life. Most of the pollution descends from the Magnox reprocessing plant. It is the Environmental Foundation Bellona, which have brought the Swedish reprocessing plans to light. Even though the North Sea countries have worked together in the OSPAR-process for several years, to stop the radioactive discharge form Sellafield, the Swedes haven't lifted on finger to inform the Norwegians about their intentions. In a letter to the Bellona Foundation the Swedish Nuclear Power Inspectorate (SKI) have written that it is no longer necessary to retrieve governmental permission to ship Swedish fuel to Sellafield. Spent Nuclear fuels from Swedish nuclear power plants are currently stored at the central interim storage at the Oskarshamn nuclear power plant. Anyway the old fuel, from the R1 reactor, is such a type that it is more difficult to store, and deposit than ordinary fuel, made of uranium dioxide (UO2). The fuel is of a metallic form, very similar to British Magnox fuel, and corrodes easily in contact with water. That's the reason why Studsvik-SVAFO has proposed to reprocess the fuel in Sellafield. Norwegian protests It exists though several alternative method's to treat the fuel. One alternative is to use a dry storage option, awaiting the development of a national treatment solution. Such alternatives have been considered by SKB International Consultants, but their report is being held back by the Swedish authorities as a Swedish business secret. A letter from the Bellona Foundation informed the Norwegian government about the Swedish plan yesterday. Norwegian Minister of the Environment, Knut Arild Hareide, told Norwegian press last night that he had strong objections against the Swedes shipping fuel to Sellafield, and said he would bring the case up with the Swedish Minister of the Environment. _______________________________________________________________________ Subscribe/Unsubscribe Here: http://www.energyjustice.net/nukenet/ Change your settings or access the archives at: http://energyjustice.net/mailman/listinfo/nukenet_energyjustice.net ***************************************************************** 44 Bradenton Herald: FPL's nuclear waste probed | 08/08/2005 | ASSOCIATED PRESS MIAMI - One of Florida's biggest electric utilities mistakenly sent a shipment of nuclear waste to a farm pasture, a spokeswoman acknowledged Sunday, but documents filed in two lawsuits appear to show it also sent the waste to sewage treatment plants and other unknown locations. The New York Times reported in Sunday's editions that the internal documents and government records suggest Florida Power & Light made numerous shipments from its nuclear power plant in St. Lucie County to multiple locations in the 1970s and early '80s. The level of contamination is a point of contention between the company and the parents of two children afflicted with cancer who sued FPL. Company spokeswoman Rachel Scott said Sunday that the utility disclosed a mistaken shipment to Florida health and environmental officials and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the early 1980s and that it cleaned up the waste. The contaminated materials were sent to a farm field that was licensed by the state for nonradioactive sludge disposal, Scott said. "It was contaminated with extremely low radiation levels," Scott said in a telephone interview. "It was comparable to a normal background radiation level. We were told by regulatory agencies that it was not an issue." Scott said Sunday that claims being made by the plaintiffs' lawyer have been disregarded by courts in the past. "Their attorneys are latching onto an incident that occurred 23 years ago," Scott said. "These children weren't born until a decade after the incident occurred." The two lawsuits are scheduled to go to trial early next year. One was filed by the parents of Zachary Finestone, an 11-year-old who was diagnosed with cancer in March 2000, and the other was filed by the parents of Ashton Lowe, who had brain cancer when he died at age 13 in May 2001. According to the documents cited in the lawsuits, the Times said, plant workers used a sink to wash contaminated mops, rags and other materials, believing the drain was connected to the plant's radioactive waste system. However, the drain went into a sanitary sewage system, Scott acknowledged. The contaminants were hauled away with sewage sludge, and at one point the plant was shipping materials that were 10 times as radioactive to regular landfills as what it was shipping to low-level waste dumps, according to documents cited by the plaintiffs. One state document refers to daily sludge being taken to an unknown site, the plaintiffs say. The lawsuits also say records show the St. Lucie power plant's fuel was leaking radioactive fission products, like strontium and cesium, into the reactor cooling water and contaminating the plant. Scott countered that claim Sunday, saying there has "never been any indication of any increase in radiation above normal background levels" at the St. Lucie County plant. The parents' lawyer, Nancy La Vista, said she planned to argue that tests of the two boys' baby teeth showed abnormally high levels of radioactive strontium. Many people have strontium in their bones that was created from atmospheric nuclear testing, Scott said. However, La Vista told the Times: "These kids were all born after Chernobyl, after Three Mile Island, and after atmospheric testing." A call to La Vista's law office, seeking additional comment, was not immediately returned Sunday. ***************************************************************** 45 AU ABC: NT Govt to fight new uranium mines (ACST)Monday, 8 August 2005. 20:05 (AEDT)Monday, 8 August 2005. Northern Territory Chief Minister Clare Martin has indicated the Government will fight any proposal for a new uranium mine. The Federal Government last week assumed control for approving new uranium mines in the Northern Territory. Ms Martin refused the Commonwealth's offer to be involved in the approval process, arguing that federal legislation overrode the Territory's. Ms Martin now says Labor policy dictates that no uranium mines should go ahead, including one being negotiated for Koongarra in Kakadu National Park. "We have a policy of no new uranium mines and that's Labor policy throughout the country," she said. "When it was specifically put to me, 'what would you think about a mine like Koongarra?', I mean I think that's absurd. "I think to put a mine in the heart of Kakadu and stand on top of Nourlangie Rock, look out over the wetlands and see a great big open pit mine, I think that's ridiculous." [ more news ] ***************************************************************** 46 BBC: SA farmer's joy at uranium find Last Updated: Monday, 8 August, 2005 A poor South African farmer has spoken of his delight after uranium was found on his family's land, turning them into instant millionaires. "We were overwhelmed. It is going to change our lives," Solomon Ngondo, 67, told the BBC. A few months ago, Mr Ngondo was tending his sheep and goats in the stony semi-desert of the Western Cape. His family bought the land in 2001 under a scheme designed to help those disadvantaged during the apartheid era. The family had invested their life savings and gone into debt to buy the farm near Beaufort West. Now they have sold the mineral rights to the land to an international company for 20m rand ($3m). Future investment They do not have electricity or running water, but Mr Ngondo said they will get electricity before too long. He said he wanted to remain on the land and would use the uranium windfall to buy farm machinery. "We are going to invest and improve the farm," he said. "I grew up with this lifestyle." The first time he suspected there may be something valuable on his land was when one of his neighbours came round and offered to buy it. He declined and shortly afterwards, a lawyer came and informed him London-based firm Urenco had discovered uranium in the area. ***************************************************************** 47 The Herald: Terrorist risk over nuclear waste ‘ignored’ Web Issue 2328 August 08 2005 DAVID ROSS, Highland Correspondent August 08 2005 THE likelihood of a terror attack on stockpiles of nuclear waste is being ignored by the government's advisory body despite the London bombings and the 9/11 atrocity, two senior scientists warn today. One has resigned in protest from the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management, accusing it of endangering public safety around storage facilities such as Dounreay or Faslane by ignoring scientific expertise. Professor David Ball, professor of risk management at Middlesex University, and John Large, a leading independent nuclear consultant, say the committee has been turning a blind eye to the threat, and that the only research commissioned is naive and "DIY-like". The professor, who quit in June, said: "If a plane was crashed into some nuclear storage site, vast eras of land could become uninhabitable. Yet we were not supposed to think about that when we were considering the options of above or below ground storage/disposal." In April Dr Keith Baverstock, former head of radiation protection at the World Health Organisation and the committee's only health expert, was sacked after he attacked it as dysfunctional and amateurish. The latest critical comments emerge on the day the first man accused of the failed July 21 attacks in London is to appear in court. Next year, the committee will advise the government what to do with the waste from decades of military and nuclear power activities. This consists of around 2000 cubic metres of high-level radioactive waste and 75,000 at intermediate-level. It is stored at nuclear facilities around the UK, such as Dounreay. Professor Ball said: "I personally put it to the chairman on at least three occasions that terrorism was an issue, that had to be considered in selecting options and three times he said it is not our job. "When the committee had its first meeting, two years had already elapsed since 9/11, time enough to learn the full importance of the terrorist threat. "The July 7 attack should sound a wake-up call to those responsible for deciding what to do with Britain's nuclear waste. But they have been playing around with it in a very amateurish fashion and all the time the British public are exposed to the higher risk." Mr Large said he had done a lot of work on terrorism and understood the professor's concerns. Of the committee's specification for research on terror, he said: "They were allowing five days. That's barely enough time to even do a proper Google internet search." He said it was "was very naive and clumsy . . . a bit like a poorly rendered DIY job." He added that he was asked to look at "ludicrous propositions" like disposing of the waste in outer space or in the ice-cap "rather than taking the golden opportunity to do some fundamental work on how we build the threat of terrorism into the safety case for the nuclear industry". David Alston, chairman of Highland Council's community planning committee, said: "The potential threat from terrorism makes an interim and secure solution much more urgent." Gordon MacKerron, the committee chairman, said protecting the waste had been a key issue since 2003 and security had been widely discussed, including with councils and at public meetings in Faslane and Dounreay. "A panel of expert scientists and regulators have now been specifically charged with as-sessing . . . protection against security threats." Copyright © Newsquest (Herald & Times) Limited. All Rights ***************************************************************** 48 Las Vegas SUN: Editorial: Another Yucca danger Today: August 08, 2005 at 8:53:11 PDT LAS VEGAS SUN In June 2002 the Energy Department received from its top contractor, Bechtel SAIC Co., a classified report titled, "Identification of Aircraft Hazards." The document was declassified a year later, after the Sun's Washington reporter, Benjamin Grove, heard about it and requested a copy. The report concerned Yucca Mountain's proximity to Nellis Air Force Range. At the time, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which will eventually rule on whether Yucca is safe for licensing, was studying the document's contents. "Clearly this is a relevant issue," a top NRC analyst told Grove. Last week the NRC released its conclusions about armed Nellis warplanes training so close to the nation's proposed dump for high-level nuclear waste. It said the Energy Department, in planning for Yucca Mountain, failed to properly consider risk factors involving Nellis and its training flights. It did not accurately count the number of plane crashes in the vicinity of Yucca during the last decade, nor did it consider the possibilities associated with stray ordnance striking the waste facility, the NRC concluded. The Energy Department put a positive spin on the report, saying that it will work with NRC officials and provide them "with enough information to fully allay their concerns." The bottom line, though, is that the department has been building a facility to contain the world's deadliest material for over a decade, and never concerned itself with hazards from Nellis' planes. That doesn't exactly allay our concerns. All contents copyright 2005 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 49 MSNBC.com: Plant might enrich locals - Albuquerque - By Dennis Domrzalski New Mexico Business Weekly Louisiana Energy Services is looking for a few good New Mexico contractors. It has about $400 million worth of work to bid out. If all goes as planned, by this time next year LES will be breaking ground on a $1.4 billion, 800,000 square-foot National Enrichment Facility uranium enrichment plant in Lea County in southeastern New Mexico. About $400 million of that money will be used on actual construction, and LES officials want New Mexico businesses to know that if they think they can do the work, they need to start preparing now. Because by early 2006, the company expects to begin soliciting bids for the work, and it is looking to hire as many local companies as possible. "We are on schedule for receiving a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) by the end of the first quarter or early in the second quarter of 2006," says LES Vice President of Communications and Government Relations Marshall Cohen. "Once that happens we have just a couple of steps to get private debt financing, and we are looking at breaking ground in August 2006. We have made a strong commitment that we want New Mexico companies. And the companies, no matter how big or how small, should not feel that they will be excluded, because there is a wide spectrum of jobs." Once that ground is turned, construction will continue through 2013 at the site five miles east of Eunice. The project will be the largest construction project in the state at the time, employing about 400 construction workers for several years. The plant will use thousands of gas centrifuges to enrich uranium, or make it more concentrated, so it can be fabricated into fuel rods for the 102 nuclear power plants in the U.S. Those plants supply about 20 percent of the nation's electric supply. LES will let three major contracts for the building's shell and for the electrical and mechanical work. In turn, those contractors will select hundreds of subcontractors, says LES Vice President and New Mexico Project Manager Mike Lynch. Most of the work will be standard construction, but some of it will be specialized, and Lynch has been scouting southeastern New Mexico looking for small companies that have the expertise to handle the jobs. For instance, LES will need more than 25,000 three-foot by three-foot by 18-inch concrete blocks on which to mount the centrifuges. "The blocks are made to very tight tolerances. We have a European supplier (who has manufactured the blocks for similar plants in Europe), and they are happy to partner with a local company to begin working on casting the blocks," Lynch says. The facility will also need 250,000 threaded metal pins that will have to be machined. It will have thousands of miles of aluminum pipes, and so LES will need aluminum, as well as stainless steel welders, Lynch says. "We will need aluminum and stainless steel welders on-site. Aluminum pipe welding is a specialty and we will need the best welders to be qualified and to maintain the qualifications," Lynch says. "I'm looking for workshops that can produce subassemblies away from the site and bring them to the site and do the welding to put them in place." The project is so big that the lighting contract alone will probably go to 20 firms. "We will have a factory of almost a million square feet, and so we will need all of the normal, standard construction materials multiplied by some big factor," Lynch says. The search to find New Mexico companies that would be able to do the work has already begun, Lynch says. "It's mixed. We are finding a lot of contractors that are used to doing oil and gas work," Lynch says. "And although oil and gas technology is not actually a part of what we will be doing, some companies have given us some insight and have expressed an interest in diversifying. I'm finding it encouraging." LES has hired Nuclear Technology Solutions of Cherryhill, New Jersey, as its architect, but it has let no other contracts, Cohen says. Most of the project's funding will come from LES's partners: Urenco, Westinghouse Electric Company LLC, Duke Power, Entergy and Exelon, Cohen says. The project must also get approval from the New Mexico Environment Department. Critics have raised concerns about the storage of depleted uranium on the site, and LES has been working with Gov. Bill Richardson's and the New Mexico Attorney General's office to clarify environmental standards. "We have come to an agreement with the state on a number of issues that the governor and the attorney general and the Environment Department have raised," Cohen says. "We have a settlement agreement that has been signed that limits the storage of byproduct on the site. It has been six or seven months in negotiations, and it is a good agreement." Cohen says that any companies that want to learn more about the project should call Contract Manager John Lowther at 505-944-0194. MSNBC.com ***************************************************************** 50 NEWS.com.au: Couple face nuke dump in backyard August 08, 2005 From: AAP A NORTHERN Territory couple have discovered they face the prospect of a nuclear waste dump in the middle of their backyard after the Government shortlisted their property for the controversial site. Barry and Valerie Utley, hard-working cattle farmers, had hoped to one day be able to retire on their idyllic 230 square kilometre patch of paradise 40km south of Katherine. But their dreams were shattered when the federal Government recently announced their home had been selected as one of three proposed sites for a national nuclear waste dump. Fisher's Ridge, a five square kilometre patch of defence land, is in the middle of the Utley's Yeltu Park Station property. It is just eight kilometres from their house, surrounded by their grazing 650 head of cattle which they export to Indonesia and Malaysia. The other two sites are in Central Australia, at Mt Everard and Harts Range. "We have been very happy here, we just love this place," Mrs Utley said of her home for the past six years. "It happened very suddenly." Mrs Utley said the couple were unaware of the news until a neighbour rang them and told them there was an article in the paper. "We were very taken aback by that," she said. "We fall a bit behind the news if we don't have a radio on or we don't have time to watch TV." Officials from Canberra contacted them a few days later, although they were unaware Fisher's Ridge lay in the middle of their property until they visited the site. "They apologised about not letting us know before the press release," Mr Utley said. "They couldn't find our address or our phone number, or something. "They didn't know it was on our property. They had thought the site was adjacent to our property. "When they saw the map they realised it was smack bang in the middle." The Utleys have a list of worries about the proposed dump, not least the poorly maintained gravel track to the site, which runs through their property. They also fear no-one will want their cattle if they graze near the dump site, located near the King River, which feeds into one of the NT's major river systems. "We are not very happy at all. It's only understandable isn't it?," Mrs Utley said. "You just don't really know how it's going to affect us really in the future. "They say it's perfectly safe, that there's no way it will upset our lives in any way, but you don't know the unforeseen sometimes - it's such a pristine environment." The couple face an anxious wait until November next year before they learn if the nation's nuclear waste is headed their way. ***************************************************************** 51 AU ABC: Gulf residents warn of opposition to uranium mines. 08/08/2005. ABC News Online The Carpentaria Land Council says it will not tolerate uranium mining in Queensland's gulf country. The Federal Government has seized control of uranium mining in the Northern Territory. The land council's Murrandoo Yanner has urged the State Government to resist any such move in Queensland because the risks to the environment and people's health are too great. He says the local people would not shy away from reacting as they did during the dispute with Pasminco over a zinc mine in the area, when 100 Indigenous people spent nine days protesting on the site. "I would take far greater steps. That's what I'm warning John Howard and anyone else," he said. "The leather gloves were used on Century. We're using knuckle-dusters when it comes to uranium mining. "We will not take a backward step. We will only go forwards on it." ***************************************************************** 52 Pincher Creek Echo: Nuclear appeal Pincher Creek, AB August 9, 2005 Pincher Creek, AB T0K 1W0 Phone: (403) 627-3252 Fax: (403) 627-3949 By Sean O’Connor Tuesday August 09, 2005Pincher Creek Echo — An Alberta mining company has been exploring for uranium deposits just east of Pincher Creek and along the Waterton River. Firestone Ventures Inc, an Edmonton based junior mining corporation, received permits back in March to begin exploratory drilling and surface sampling of about 100,000 hectares of land around Pincher Creek and Cardston. Firestone president, Lori Walton says that the discovery of potentially large amounts of Uranium has spurred a claims-staking rush in Alberta and down south along the U.S. Rocky Mountain range. The company made their stake after a prospector brought to their attention the discovery of sandstone-based uranium deposits in the region. Firestone says that samples were collected in 1981 that showed more than 2,000 parts per million of uranium and there were also traces of molybdenum and vanadium. The Alberta Sun Uranium Project is located just east of Pincher Creek between the town and the Piikani reserve. There are two other uranium exploratory permits located along the Waterton River and south of Cardston Other companies and individuals have made similar stakes spanning between Okotoks and Montana. Firestone says if they decide to mine, their methods of uranium extraction will be different from traditional mining methods where large open pit mining is performed posing a tremendous risk to the surrounding environment. Walton says that the world’s 440 nuclear reactors are running out of mined uranium and are resorting to acquiring the radioactive material from stockpiles and weapons. This is the first time the Firestone Corporation has done exploration of uranium. The company has gold properties in B.C. and the Yukon. The company also mines copper and zinc. Canada is the world’s leading uranium producer totaling about one-third of total world output, according to Natural Resources Canada. Canada’s active uranium mines are in Saskatchewan. Cybersaver Newspaper Advertising © 2005 Pincher Creek Echo ***************************************************************** 53 Hiroshima A-Bomb 60th anniversary Date: Mon, 08 Aug 2005 14:35:20 -0700 version=3.0.4 X-Spam-filter-host: darwin.ctyme.com - http://www.junkemailfilter.com Hiroshima A-Bomb 60th anniversary submitted by Carol Wolman http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2005-08-05T231947Z_01_MCC583967_RTRUKOC_0_JAPAN-HIROSHIMA.xml Thousands mark Hiroshima A-bomb 60th anniversary Sat Aug 6, 2005 12:19 AM BST By George Nishiyama HIROSHIMA, Japan (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of people from around the world gathered in Hiroshima on Saturday to mark the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of the city and to renew calls for the abolition of nuclear arms... Under a blazing summer sun, survivors and families of victims assembled at the Peace Memorial Park near "ground zero", the spot where the bomb detonated on the morning of August 6, 1945, killing thousands and levelling the city... At 8:15 a.m., the time when the U.S. B-29 warplane Enola Gay dropped the bomb, people at the park and throughout the city observed a minute's silence in memory of those who perished. Bells at temples and churches rang and passengers on the streetcars that run throughout the city bowed their heads in remembrance of the dead, including those incinerated by the bomb 60 years ago while riding the streetcars... "This August 6 ... is a time of inheritance, of awakening, and of commitment, in which we inherit the commitment of the bomb victims to the abolition of nuclear weapons and realisation of genuine world peace," Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba told the gathering. Akiba said in his Peace Declaration that the five established nuclear powers -- the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China -- as well as India, Pakistan and North Korea were "jeopardising human survival". Referring to moves to revise the pacifist constitution that Japan adopted after the war, Akiba said it was an obligation of the present generation to uphold the principle "thou shalt not kill". "The Japanese constitution, which embodies this axiom forever as the sovereign will of a nation, should be a guiding light for the world in the 21st century," he said.... May the Prince of Peace come soon. Daniel 7: 14And receive dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve Him: His dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and His kingdom that which shall not be destroyed. Carol S. Wolman. MD is a psychiatrist and lifelong peace activist. She hosts http://groups.yahoo.com/group/peacemakersBiblestudy/ email: cwolman@mcn.org ---------- 56979.jpg 56995.jpg noscript.gif Attachment Converted: 56979.jpg: 00000001,1543b6ff,00000000,00000000 Attachment Converted: 56995.jpg: 00000001,1543b700,00000000,00000000 Attachment Converted: noscript.gif: 00000001,1543b701,00000000,00000000 ***************************************************************** 54 [NYTr] Hiroshima tells nuclear club: stop risking the world Date: Mon, 8 Aug 2005 13:22:20 -0500 (CDT) autolearn=ham version=3.0.4 X-Spam-filter-host: pascal.ctyme.com - http://www.junkemailfilter.com Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit sent by Simon McGuinness The Independent - 07 August 2005 http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article304302.ece Hiroshima tells the 'nuclear club' to stop jeopardising the world At the site of the world's first atomic attack, thousands remember the 240,000 killed amid emotional calls for peace By David McNeill in Hiroshima Tens of thousands of people from around the world gathered in Hiroshima yesterday to renew calls for the abolition of nuclear arms on the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of the city. Under a blazing summer sun, survivors and families of victims assembled at the Peace Memorial Park near the spot where the bomb detonated on 6 August 1945, killing thousands and levelling the city. The anniversary came as regional powers met in Beijing to urge North Korea to give up its nuclear programme, seen by Tokyo as a threat and one of the reasons behind calls within Japan to strengthen its defence and seek closer military ties with the US. At 8.15am, the time when the US B-29 warplane Enola Gay dropped the bomb, people at the park and throughout the city observed a minute's silence in memory of those who perished. Bells at temples and churches rang and passengers on the trams that run across the city bowed their heads in remembrance. The Hiroshima bomb unleashed a mix of shock waves, heat rays and radiation that killed thousands instantly. By the end of 1945, the toll had risen to some 140,000 out of an estimated population of 350,000. Now, after years of illness, the official death toll from Little Boy stands at 242,437 and rising. On 9 August, three days after the Hiroshima attack, another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Tadatoshi Akiba, the Mayor of Hiroshima, told the gathering that the five established nuclear powers - the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China - as well as India, Pakistan and North Korea were "jeopardising human survival". The members of the "nuclear club" were "ignoring the majority voices of the people and governments of the world", he said, before adding another 5,375 names to the Peace Park cenotaph. He appealed for the United Nations to work towards the "elimination of nuclear weapons by 2020". Near the iconic A-Bomb Dome, which was 600 metres from the blast's epicentre, a group of elderly anti-war campaigners from across the world appealed for a nuclear-free planet. Children released floating lanterns on to the Motoyasu river to pray for victims of the bomb. On stage in the Peace Park, a statement read out on behalf of the Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan, said the world must work to prevent a "cascade of nuclear proliferation". A speech by Japan's Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, expressed hope that "Hiroshima will continue to be the symbol of global peace". The speech angered a small group of Japanese anarchists. "Down with this fake peace ceremony!" shouted one, as they scuffled with police who tried to prevent them distributing leaflets. One of the anarchists explained: "Koizumi is Bush's lapdog and he should go home. He has no right to be here talking about peace." The anarchists were escorted away from the Dome by riot police. In the old Bank of Japan building, one of a handful to survive the blast, Yoshimichi Ishimaru screened Steven Spielberg's film Empire of the Sun. "The flash that the young hero sees of the bomb symbolises the start of a terrible new world. The level of destruction destroys everyone, regardless of which side we are on. That is what we have to learn," said Ishimaru, the child of survivors, or "hibakusha". The hibakusha, whose average age is now 72, know their time for teaching is limited. "We come here every year to try to bring an end to this horror," says Michiko Yamaoka, who was badly disfigured in the blast. "I hope the world is listening." MEMORIES OF A SCENE FROM HELL 'I pray nobody will experience it again' Sixty years ago, Tsunao Tsuboi was, like thousands of survivors of the world's first nuclear attack, wandering this shattered city in search of water. "People had eyeballs dangling out of their sockets and skin hanging from bones," he says, describing the scene as a living hell. Hiroshima had been known as the City of Water when the bomb nicknamed Little Boy detonated in a piercing blue sky at 8.15am on 6 August 1945. It caused a searing fireball that left him burnt so badly he later fell into a month-long coma. "When I came to, the war was over. I thought it was a trick." Today he is an 80-year-old man with cancer and burn scars across his body and face, but happy to be alive among the estimated 55,000 people commemorating the bomb victims in Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park. "Every year I come to pray that nobody else will have to experience what we did," he says. "I pray that the world will abandon these weapons for ever." A fellow survivor, or hibakusha, Isao Aratani, says he has come to pay respects to his dead schoolfriends, more than two-thirds of whom died in the explosion. He remembers a "thunderous boom" and being thrown to the ground by a blast of "yellow heat". Later he saw enraged locals beating the body of a downed US pilot that had been strapped to a bridge near the centre of the city. "Some people continued to lash the body even after the soldier was dead." Tens of thousands of people from around the world gathered in Hiroshima yesterday to renew calls for the abolition of nuclear arms on the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of the city. Under a blazing summer sun, survivors and families of victims assembled at the Peace Memorial Park near the spot where the bomb detonated on 6 August 1945, killing thousands and levelling the city. The anniversary came as regional powers met in Beijing to urge North Korea to give up its nuclear programme, seen by Tokyo as a threat and one of the reasons behind calls within Japan to strengthen its defence and seek closer military ties with the US. At 8.15am, the time when the US B-29 warplane Enola Gaydropped the bomb, people at the park and throughout the city observed a minute's silence in memory of those who perished. Bells at temples and churches rang and passengers on the trams that run across the city bowed their heads in remembrance. The Hiroshima bomb unleashed a mix of shock waves, heat rays and radiation that killed thousands instantly. By the end of 1945, the toll had risen to some 140,000 out of an estimated population of 350,000. Now, after years of illness, the official death toll from Little Boy stands at 242,437 and rising. On 9 August, three days after the Hiroshima attack, another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Tadatoshi Akiba, the Mayor of Hiroshima, told the gathering that the five established nuclear powers - the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China - as well as India, Pakistan and North Korea were "jeopardising human survival". The members of the "nuclear club" were "ignoring the majority voices of the people and governments of the world", he said, before adding another 5,375 names to the Peace Park cenotaph. He appealed for the United Nations to work towards the "elimination of nuclear weapons by 2020". Near the iconic A-Bomb Dome, which was 600 metres from the blast's epicentre, a group of elderly anti-war campaigners from across the world appealed for a nuclear-free planet. Children released floating lanterns on to the Motoyasu river to pray for victims of the bomb. On stage in the Peace Park, a statement read out on behalf of the Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan, said the world must work to prevent a "cascade of nuclear proliferation". A speech by Japan's Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, expressed hope that "Hiroshima will continue to be the symbol of global peace". The speech angered a small group of Japanese anarchists. "Down with this fake peace ceremony!" shouted one, as they scuffled with police who tried to prevent them distributing leaflets. One of the anarchists explained: "Koizumi is Bush's lapdog and he should go home. He has no right to be here talking about peace." The anarchists were escorted away from the Dome by riot police. In the old Bank of Japan building, one of a handful to survive the blast, Yoshimichi Ishimaru screened Steven Spielberg's film Empire of the Sun. "The flash that the young hero sees of the bomb symbolises the start of a terrible new world. The level of destruction destroys everyone, regardless of which side we are on. That is what we have to learn," said Ishimaru, the child of survivors, or "hibakusha". The hibakusha, whose average age is now 72, know their time for teaching is limited. "We come here every year to try to bring an end to this horror," says Michiko Yamaoka, who was badly disfigured in the blast. "I hope the world is listening." MEMORIES OF A SCENE FROM HELL 'I pray nobody will experience it again' Sixty years ago, Tsunao Tsuboi was, like thousands of survivors of the world's first nuclear attack, wandering this shattered city in search of water. "People had eyeballs dangling out of their sockets and skin hanging from bones," he says, describing the scene as a living hell. Hiroshima had been known as the City of Water when the bomb nicknamed Little Boy detonated in a piercing blue sky at 8.15am on 6 August 1945. It caused a searing fireball that left him burnt so badly he later fell into a month-long coma. "When I came to, the war was over. I thought it was a trick." Today he is an 80-year-old man with cancer and burn scars across his body and face, but happy to be alive among the estimated 55,000 people commemorating the bomb victims in Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park. "Every year I come to pray that nobody else will have to experience what we did," he says. "I pray that the world will abandon these weapons for ever." A fellow survivor, or hibakusha, Isao Aratani, says he has come to pay respects to his dead schoolfriends, more than two-thirds of whom died in the explosion. He remembers a "thunderous boom" and being thrown to the ground by a blast of "yellow heat". Later he saw enraged locals beating the body of a downed US pilot that had been strapped to a bridge near the centre of the city. "Some people continued to lash the body even after the soldier was dead." * ================================================================ .NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems . Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us . .339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org .List Archives: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/ .Subscribe: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr ================================================================ ***************************************************************** 55 [NYTr] We must act now to prevent another Hiroshima - or worse Date: Mon, 8 Aug 2005 13:22:20 -0500 (CDT) WHITE_PHRASE autolearn=ham version=3.0.4 X-Spam-filter-host: pascal.ctyme.com - http://www.junkemailfilter.com Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit sent by Simon McGuinness The Independent - 06 August 2005 http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article303965.ece We must act now to prevent another Hiroshima - or worse The explosions in London are a reminder of how the cycle of attack and response could escalate by Noam Chomsky This month's anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki prompts only the most sombre reflection and most fervent hope that the horror may never be repeated. In the subsequent 60 years, those bombings have haunted the world's imagination but not so much as to curb the development and spread of infinitely more lethal weapons of mass destruction. A related concern, discussed in technical literature well before 11 September 2001, is that nuclear weapons may sooner or later fall into the hands of terrorist groups. The recent explosions and casualties in London are yet another reminder of how the cycle of attack and response could escalate, unpredictably, even to a point horrifically worse than Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The world's reigning power accords itself the right to wage war at will, under a doctrine of "anticipatory self-defence" that covers any contingency it chooses. The means of destruction are to be unlimited. US military expenditures approximate those of the rest of the world combined, while arms sales by 38 North American companies (one in Canada) account for more than 60 per cent of the world total (which has risen 25 per cent since 2002). There have been efforts to strengthen the thin thread on which survival hangs. The most important is the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), which came into force in 1970. The regular five-year review conference of the NPT took place at the United Nations in May. The NPT has been facing collapse, primarily because of the failure of the nuclear states to live up to their obligation under Article VI to pursue "good faith" efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons. The United States has led the way in refusal to abide by the Article VI obligations. Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, emphasises that "reluctance by one party to fulfil its obligations breeds reluctance in others". President Jimmy Carter blasted the United States as "the major culprit in this erosion of the NPT. While claiming to be protecting the world from proliferation threats in Iraq, Libya, Iran and North Korea, American leaders not only have abandoned existing treaty restraints but also have asserted plans to test and develop new weapons, including anti-ballistic missiles, the earth-penetrating 'bunker buster' and perhaps some new 'small' bombs. They also have abandoned past pledges and now threaten first use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states". The thread has almost snapped in the years since Hiroshima, repeatedly. The best known case was the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, "the most dangerous moment in human history", as Arthur Schlesinger, historian and former adviser to President John F Kennedy, observed in October 2002 at a retrospective conference in Havana. The world "came within a hair's breadth of nuclear disaster", recalls Robert McNamara, Kennedy's defence secretary, who also attended the retrospective. In the May-June issue of the magazine Foreign Policy, he accompanies this reminder with a renewed warning of "apocalypse soon". McNamara regards "current US nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary and dreadfully dangerous", creating "unacceptable risks to other nations and to our own", both the risk of "accidental or inadvertent nuclear launch", which is "unacceptably high", and of nuclear attack by terrorists. McNamara endorses the judgement of William Perry, President Bill Clinton's defence secretary, that "there is a greater than 50 per cent probability of a nuclear strike on US targets within a decade". Similar judgements are commonly expressed by prominent strategic analysts. In his book Nuclear Terrorism, the Harvard international relations specialist Graham Allison reports the "consensus in the national security community" (of which he has been a part) that a "dirty bomb" attack is "inevitable", and an attack with a nuclear weapon highly likely, if fissionable materials - the essential ingredient - are not retrieved and secured. Allison reviews the partial success of efforts to do so since the early 1990s, under the initiatives of Senator Sam Nunn and Senator Richard Lugar, and the setback to these programmes from the first days of the Bush administration, paralysed by what Senator Joseph Biden called "ideological idiocy". The Washington leadership has put aside non-proliferation programmes and devoted its energies and resources to driving the country to war by extraordinary deceit, then trying to manage the catastrophe it created in Iraq. The threat and use of violence is stimulating nuclear proliferation along with jihadi terrorism. A high-level review of the "war on terror" two years after the invasion "focused on how to deal with the rise of a new generation of terrorists, schooled in Iraq over the past couple of years", Susan B Glasser reported in The Washington Post. "Top government officials are increasingly turning their attention to anticipate what one called 'the bleed out' of hundreds or thousands of Iraq-trained jihadists back to their home countries throughout the Middle East and Western Europe. 'It's a new piece of a new equation,' a former senior Bush administration official said. 'If you don't know who they are in Iraq, how are you going to locate them in Istanbul or London?'" Peter Bergen, a US terrorism specialist, says in The Boston Globe that "the President is right that Iraq is a main front in the war on terrorism, but this is a front we created". Shortly after the London bombing, Chatham House, Britain's premier foreign affairs institution, released a study drawing the obvious conclusion - denied with outrage by the Government - that "the UK is at particular risk because it is the closest ally of the United States, has deployed armed forces in the military campaigns to topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and in Iraq ... [and is] a pillion passenger" of American policy, sitting behind the driver of the motorcycle. The probability of apocalypse soon cannot be realistically estimated, but it is surely too high for any sane person to contemplate with equanimity. While speculation is pointless, reaction to the threat of another Hiroshima is definitely not. On the contrary, it is urgent, particularly in the United States, because of Washington's primary role in accelerating the race to destruction by extending its historically unique military dominance, and in the UK, which goes along with it as its closest ally. [The author is a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author, most recently, of Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance.] * ================================================================ .NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems . Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us . .339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org .List Archives: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/ .Subscribe: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr ================================================================ ***************************************************************** 56 [NYTr] For the 60th Anniversary of Hiroshima/Nagasaki Date: Mon, 8 Aug 2005 13:22:39 -0500 (CDT) autolearn=ham version=3.0.4 X-Spam-filter-host: pascal.ctyme.com - http://www.junkemailfilter.com Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit sent by Doctress Neutopia http://www.lovolution.net Total War or Total Disarmament? by Doctress Neutopia August 6, 1945 Hiroshima, 100,000 dead. The bomber named the plane after his mother, Enola Gay. Icon of mother and son unleashed the power of the sun on civilians populations. US military leaders didn't want the war in Asia to end until their new weapon was used. After all, they had just spent $2 billion to develop the ultimate weapon and needed a human testing ground for their investment. Filled with revenge for attacking Pearl Harbor, with the bomb exploded they could show the Soviet Union its new imperialistic megaton muscle. Truman lied when he announced the first atomic bomb target was not a city, but a military base. He must have known bombing civilian populations was against the Geneva convention. The bomb was the total weapon for a total war. It was America's final solution. For decades, US government censored film footage of the land that it killed on that sunny day. The land of the free didn't want the world public to see what their Little Boy had done. How different were suffering images from Auschwitz than from images of Hiroshima? Both represented crimes against humanity. And so begun the Cold War against the USSR that put nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert. America became the first World Empire founded on thousand of nuclear bombs. It became a rich nation even though it failed to provide all citizens with health care, education, and housing, becoming the world's largest proliferater of nuclear weapons. If only these weapons were buried with the ashes of the candle corpses glowing eternally in the dark. If only the wisdom of Albert Einstein was heeded and a supranational organization formed to protect the world from splitting atoms! The possibility of poisonous mushrooms clouds still haunt our barbaric world. Depleted uranium weapons contaminate children in the Middle East. Iraqi mothers birth children whose heads look like a jellyfish. Sub critical nuclear testing continues to develop suitcase weapons in hopes of sending Iran back to the Stone Age. Consciousness of evil vaporize! We don't want you any more! Our creative energy is non-nuclear. It says no to any kind of war! Isn't it time now to move beyond the Nuclear Age? Isn't it time to end the nuclear tyranny in Outer Space? Isn't it time to use the sun's power in a positive way, to use our solar energy to build a global sustainable culture where world peace reigns? The destruction of our sacred flesh and bones by radioactive corruption is against the love force that evolved beautiful life on this holy garden. War Gods on Gaia, your bombs are like volcanic eruptions, tidal waves that can kill hundreds of thousands of people. Will humanity learn to control the Poison Fire before there is another World War? Will we learn to love the planet before this artificial consciousness melts the eyeballs of both those who can and cannot see, before it releases fireballs that blinds the bumblebees? Madonna mind, there is no ascension for believers in a species who goes extinct! If your religion is universal love, then I demand you to prove it! Disarm this Christian nuclear nation state! Be a leader of Lovolution. Turn the other cheek! Create a yoga environment of inner peace. Isn't this the Neutopian dream? If you are sincere in conquering terrorism, then dismantle your terrorist weapons. It wasn't Saddam Hussein who possessed weapons of mass destruction. It was you! You invaded Iraq for oil so that you could continue your greedy lifestyle dependent on the filthy automobile. Look in the mirror and see beyond the falsehood of your patriotic smiling grin. Then you will find the kernel of truth that bombs are no protection from the enemy of ignorance within. copyright 2005 Doctress Neutopia August 8, 2005 Tucson, AZ 85705 * ================================================================ .NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems . Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us . .339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org .List Archives: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/ .Subscribe: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr ================================================================ ***************************************************************** 57 [NYTr] Cuba Fights Nuclear Weapons at World Conference Date: Mon, 8 Aug 2005 13:22:37 -0500 (CDT) autolearn=ham version=3.0.4 X-Spam-filter-host: pascal.ctyme.com - http://www.junkemailfilter.com Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit Agencia Cubana de Noticias (AIN) http://www.ain.cubaweb.cu Cuba Fights Nuclear Weapons at World Conference Havana, Aug 8 (AIN) A Cuban delegation led by Basilio Gutierrez, vice president of Cuban Friendship Institute, is participating in the 2005 World Conference against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, in Hiroshima, Japan. The forum, organized by the pacifist organization Gensuikyo, began August 2 in Hiroshima and now continues its sessions in Nagasaki through August 9 in remembrance of the 60th anniversary of the bombardment of those Japanese cities. Over 10,000 Japanese citizens and 300 guests from over 30 countries are discussing a plan of action for the total elimination of nuclear weapons. Addressing the meeting, the head of the Cuban delegation pointed out the criminal and terrorist nature of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the Truman administration. Gutierrez, who co-chaired the opening ceremony, also called for unity among progressive forces and organizations for world peace and to fight terrorism, war and nuclear weapons. AGH * ================================================================ .NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems . Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us . .339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org .List Archives: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/ .Subscribe: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr ================================================================ ***************************************************************** 58 Guardian Unlimited: Nagasaki to Mark A-Bombing Anniversary From the Associated Press [UP] Monday August 8, 2005 9:01 PM AP Photo XITS103 By ERIC TALMADGE Associated Press Writer NAGASAKI, Japan (AP) - When the cloudy sky lit up in a sudden flash at 11:02 a.m., Aug. 9, 1945, two Catholic priests were hearing confessions inside Urakami Cathedral and 30 faithful were inside. Everyone in the church died and the statues around them turned black. Of the church's 12,000 parishioners throughout the city, 8,500 were killed that morning. Just after sunrise Tuesday, however, the cathedral will once again be full for a special Mass in remembrance of the atomic bomb attack on this city that left more than 80,000 dead and hastened the end of World War II 60 years ago. ``War is about killing,'' said Isamu Hirano, the head priest. ``We must never forgive that.'' While this scenic, southern Japanese port city has seen a striking recovery, with tourists filling its shopping arcades and its streets bustling like those of any other city of its size, at Urakami church time has yet to heal the wounds of the attack. About 6,000 people were to join the main ceremony Tuesday at Nagasaki's Peace Memorial Park, where a moment of silence was to be observed, followed by speeches from the mayor and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. Outside of the park, there are other reminders of the anniversary of an attack that some Nagasaki residents complain has been unfairly eclipsed by the death and destruction witnessed days earlier in Hiroshima. Throughout the worst-hit parts of town, on each of the several cenotaphs - monuments for people whose remains are elsewhere or have never been recovered - were draped with thousands of colorful paper cranes, which are believed to ease the pain of the dead. On the eve of the anniversary, a steady stream of tourists also flowed into Nagasaki's A-bomb museum, where horrific reminders of the attack cover the walls; a broken clock with its twisted hands stopped at the instant of the blast, photos of the dead or the burned. In sharp contrast with the museum at the controversial Yasukuni war shrine in Tokyo, which has been widely criticized as one-sided in favor of Japan's wartime leadership, the Nagasaki museum is careful to place the attack firmly in its historical context. Visitors see a timeline of Japan's own military adventures, and exhibits note Tokyo's alliance with Nazi Germany. The final hall is taken up by appeals for the abolition of all nuclear weapons. Even so, the mere scale of the devastation is what strikes most visitors the hardest. ``It's just mind-boggling that a single bomb could wipe out this city,'' tourist Naoto Otake said as he stood before a full-scale model of Fat Man - the nickname given to the bomb - at the museum. The bomb stood about 10 feet tall and weighed 4.5 tons. The attack on Nagasaki almost never happened. Three days after the Enola Gay dropped the ``Little Boy'' bomb on Hiroshima, killing at least 140,000 in the world's first atomic bomb attack, another bomber took off to deliver the second A-bomb to the nearby city of Kokura. When the plane arrived, it found a city hidden under a thick cover of smoke. The plane circled three times, then changed course for Nagasaki, where it also encountered thick clouds. With dwindling fuel, the pilot nearly turned around - but then the clouds broke. Other than the many small monuments around town, few signs of the devastation remain. Today, Nagasaki, which has a population of about 420,000, has become a popular tourist destination known for its Chinatown, one of the largest in Japan, and its vaguely European flair. Its history is equally cosmopolitan. For about 200 years, until Japan opened its doors to the outside world in 1859, it was the only Japanese city open to foreign trade. But residents say its tragedy has been overshadowed by Hiroshima. Last week, some 55,000 people swarmed to that city's Peace Memorial Park to mark the 60th anniversary of the attack. ``Our city is always in the shadow of Hiroshima,'' said Ritsuko Yamasaki, who sells ice cream cones at the blast site, marked by a simple monolith in a small, dusty park. Yamasaki, a 70-year-old Nagasaki native, escaped the bombing because she had been evacuated to a nearby town. ``Look at this,'' she said, pointing to the marker. ``Tourists come here and ask me, `Where is the monument?' Hiroshima's is so much bigger. We need something like that, too.'' Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005 ***************************************************************** 59 DOE: Environmental Management Site-Specific Advisory Board, Paducah FR Doc 05-15600 [Federal Register: August 8, 2005 (Volume 70, Number 151)] [Notices] [Page 45716-45717] From the Federal Register Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr08au05-87] AGENCY: Department of Energy (DOE). ACTION: Notice of open meeting. SUMMARY: This notice announces a meeting of the Environmental Management Site-Specific Advisory Board (EMSSAB), Paducah. The Federal Advisory Committee Act (Pub. L. 92-463, 86 Stat. 770) requires that public notice of this meeting be announced in the Federal Register. DATES: Thursday, August 18, 2005, 5:30 p.m.-9 p.m. ADDRESSES: 111 Memorial Drive, Barkley Centre, Paducah, Kentucky 42001. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: William E. Murphie, Deputy Designated Federal Officer, Department of Energy Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office, 1017 Majestic Drive, Suite 200, Lexington, Kentucky 40513, (859) 219-4001. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Purpose of the Board: The purpose of the Board is to make recommendations to DOE in the areas of environmental restoration, waste management and related activities. Tentative Agenda: 5:30 p.m. Informal Discussion 6 p.m. Call to Order Introductions Review of Agenda Approval of July Minutes 6:05 p.m. Deputy Designated Federal Officer's Comments 6:25 p.m. Federal Coordinator's Comments 6:30 p.m. Ex-officios' Comments 6:40 p.m. Public Comments and Questions 6:50 p.m. Task Forces/Presentations, Overview of Swift and Staley Inc.--Steve Polston Waste Disposition Task Force Long Range Strategy/Stewardship Task Force --DUF6 Project Overview Community Outreach Task Force 7:50 p.m. Public Comments and Questions 8 p.m. Break 8:10 p.m. Administrative Issues Review of Workplan Review of Next Agenda 8:20 p.m. Review of Action Items 8:25 p.m. Subcommittee Reports Executive Committee 8:40 p.m. Final Comments 9 p.m. Adjourn Public Participation: The meeting is open to the public. Written statements may be filed with the Board either before or after the meeting. Individuals who wish to make oral statements pertaining to agenda items should contact David Dollins at the address listed below or by telephone at (270) 441-6819. Requests must be received five days prior to the meeting and reasonable provision will be made to include the presentation in the agenda. The Deputy Designated Federal Officer is empowered to conduct the meeting in a fashion that will facilitate the orderly conduct of business. Individuals wishing to make public comment will be provided a maximum of five minutes to present their comments. This notice is being published less than 15 days before the date of the meeting due to programmatic issues that had to be resolved. Minutes: The minutes of this meeting will be available for public review and copying at the Department of Energy's Freedom of Information Public Reading Room, 1E-190, Forrestal Building, 1000 Independence Avenue, SW., Washington, DC 20585 between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., Monday- Friday, except Federal holidays. Minutes will also be available at the Department of Energy's Environmental Information Center and Reading Room at 115 Memorial Drive, Barkley Centre, Paducah, Kentucky between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., on Monday thru Friday or by writing to David Dollins, Department of Energy, Paducah Site Office, Post Office Box 1410, MS- 103, Paducah, Kentucky 42001 or by calling him at (270) 441-6819. [[Page 45717]] Issued at Washington, DC on August 2, 2005. R. Samuel, Deputy Advisory Committee Management Officer. [FR Doc. 05-15600 Filed 8-5-05; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 6450-01-P ***************************************************************** 60 KnoxNews: Sands Of Time (Oak Ridge during WWII) Citizens of Oak Ridge describe life in the Secret City during World War II By FRANK MUNGER, munger@knews.com August 7, 2005 It's hard to believe anything so big could be so secret. A storm of construction, driven by the fervor of war and tapping every resource the U.S. government could muster or finagle, transformed three East Tennessee valleys into the state's fifth-largest city within a matter of months. Yet, the city didn't have a name, at least not officially, or appear on any map. Industrial complexes of extraordinary proportions, including a mile-long building in the shape of a "U," rose from forest and farmland, and tens of thousands of workers reported to work each day. Yet, few of them knew they were working on the deadliest bomb anyone ever imagined. Oak Ridge — or Clinton Engineer Works as it was known during World War II — was an odd and amazing place. The people who lived or worked there, who survived the mud and the dust, who shared a camp with thousands of strangers and made new best friends, will never forget those times. Here are some of their memories. Making molasses Betty Maskewitz and her husband, Mendel, came to work in Oak Ridge in the summer of 1944. It was a quick decision. At the time, both were working in the defense industry in Utah, having been married a year earlier in an orthodox synagogue in Salt Lake City. They decided to visit friends in Oak Ridge on the way to new jobs at a military base in Ohio. When they passed through a heavily guarded gate and arrived on a hilltop overlooking the place, they were overwhelmed by the hive of activity below. Maskewitz recalled: "The valley was absolutely teeming. There was a little boy standing near the road, and I asked him, 'Do you know what they make here?' And he said, 'Molasses.' Even the kids were stuck with the secrecy of the city." The young couple knew something very important to the war was taking place in this Tennessee city that wasn't on any map. Even though they didn't know what it was, they wanted to be a part of it. "Remember, we're Jews, and we knew from refugees who had managed to get out of the cauldron of Europe that things for people were very, very bad, so we had a passion to help the war effort. To this day, I still can feel the passion of those years. We worked across the nation at the very beginning, even before America was into it, trying to push toward some help — for Europe especially." Betty Maskewitz, now 87, grew up as Betty Forbes in a fundamentalist Christian family with roots in Tennessee and North Carolina. She rebelled against all the talk of sinning, turned agnostic, and then converted to Judaism while a teenager studying at Berea College in Kentucky. In Oak Ridge, she took a wartime job as a teacher at Elm Grove Elementary School. Her group was called the sixth grade, but the philosophy put in place by Dr. Alden Blankenship — the innovative superintendent — was to teach every child at his or her level. So, in actuality, she taught students from third grade to senior in high school. "These kids came from schools all over — some good, bad and indifferent." Mendel Maskewitz was rejected for military service because of a hearing problem and other issues, but he had made a wartime impact installing and repairing radar systems up and down the east coast. In Oak Ridge, he took a job working on the calutrons at Y-12. In the privacy of their home on Warrior Circle, the couple would discuss the war and Oak Ridge and what they thought was happening. "We would whisper in the night to each other little tidbits of information that we picked up," she said. "We had a belief in research. We knew that certainly, no matter what the product was here in Oak Ridge, it was directed toward the war effort." Their beliefs, of course, proved true. 'Connie — it's a bomb' He's almost 97 years old, but Connie Bolling clearly remembers the day they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. The news was announced on the loudspeaker at the Beta-3 building, where he was working the evening shift at Y-12. Many of the workers — including the "calutron girls" who he supervised in a control room — just walked off the job and went outside to join the gathering throng. "Everybody just quit work when they heard it. They didn't even clock out. They just left the machines running when they found out they'd dropped the bomb," Bolling said. "Everybody went over to Jackson Square." He said he joined the celebration a little later after he had shut down the machines in his area and made sure everything was OK. Bolling was a math teacher at a little school in southwestern Virginia when Tennessee Eastman recruited him to work in Oak Ridge. "They grabbed us teachers pretty fast," he said. That was 1943, and Bolling stayed in a barracks and trained at a pilot facility while workers finished building the uranium-enrichment facilities at Y-12. There were good times and excitement aplenty, but Bolling remembers being scared by all the secrecy. He said he learned the ultimate secret in the summer of 1945, not long before the A-bombs were dropped on Japan. Bolling said he was talking with a friend of his in a bathroom at Beta-3, and the discussion turned to the Oak Ridge role in the war. "My friend, he was some sort of scientist and he knew about the test (at Alamogordo, N.M.). Well, he looked all around that bathroom to make sure nobody else was there, and he said, 'Connie — it's a bomb. Atomic bomb.' " Bolling's response? "I almost fainted." Different secrets "If you had a jug of whiskey and a car, you were in like Flynn," 90-year-old Robert Winkel said of the war years in Oak Ridge. Motor vehicles, of course, weren't being produced for personal use, and local counties — Anderson, Roane and Knox — were dry, meaning liquor was hard to acquire, even if one had the cash. According to Winkel and others, Oakdale, a tiny town up in Morgan County, was a popular place to buy whiskey. Chattanooga was another option. There also was a river barge in Knoxville where illicit liquor could be had. But buying it and smuggling it into the government's nuclear project were two different enterprises, with the latter being the most difficult. Military police manned every gate, and all cars were subject to search for guns, liquor and other banned goods. Winkel worked for Union Carbide, and his war job was to meet with construction contractors at K-25 and to certify that each building unit, as it was completed, was safe for operation. He had a friend at Carbide with the perfect vehicle for sneaking alcohol into Oak Ridge. It was a station wagon — sort of an early hybrid — that could operate on charcoal when gasoline wasn't available. A charcoal boiler was situated where a backseat normally would be, and there was a stack up the roof. When the car was running on charcoal that boiler got very hot, and guards who chose to inspect it soon found that out, Winkel said. After that, they wouldn't bother, he said. So, when the station wagon switched over to run on gasoline, the boiler was cool, open and available to be a liquor storehouse, he said. "It could hold two or three cases of whiskey," Winkel said. Claims to fame When they dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Harold Cofer had bragging rights — sort of. He was a sailor in the Pacific at the time, but earlier in the war he had lived in Oak Ridge with his parents and gone to school there. All of his fellow sailors, of course, peppered Cofer with questions, wanting to know what he knew about the bomb. Cofer didn't waste the opportunity. He bluffed his way and told the boys in the Philippines that he knew all about the atomic bomb and Oak Ridge's role in the project. "That was a big lie," the 78-year-old said, recounting the moment with a laugh. "I knew nothing. But it was the topic of conversation for some time about me being from Oak Ridge." In July 1944, Cofer moved with his parents from Chattanooga to the new city under construction in Oak Ridge. His father went to work at Y-12, his mother worked at the schools, and young Cofer entered his final year of high school. "It was an interesting experience because all of the students there were from somewhere else," he said. School didn't last long, however. Cofer was chomping at the bit to join the war effort, so after going to classes from September to December, he opted to join the Navy. "I talked to the people at the school and they told me to go ahead, they'd make sure I got my diploma," he said. "I was afraid the war was gonna get over before I could get in." The sailor came back to Oak Ridge in 1946 and went to work at Y-12 as an electrician. Among his early duties was working on a project to reclaim the massive amount of silver — about 15,000 tons — that had been borrowed for the magnetic processes that separated isotopes of uranium. With a wartime shortage of copper, Y-12, had used valuable silver instead, but returned it to Fort Knox after the war. Cofer has a claim to fame he thinks few people, if anyone, can match. He went to Oak Ridge High School, his kids and grandkids went to the same school, and now his great grandchildren are going to school there. Chemistry of champagne Bill Wilcox was feeling sorry for himself as the holidays neared in 1943. The native of Allentown, Pa., was stuck in his Oak Ridge, far from his family. He missed the usual Christmas tidings. Wilcox had been recruited to the Manhattan Project as soon as he graduated from Washington &Lee University in Virginia. He and dozens of other graduating chemists and chemical engineers were hustled to Eastman Kodak's operations in Rochester, N.Y., where they immersed themselves in a crash course in uranium chemistry — something that wasn't being taught at any university. The Rochester gang was preparing for work at Y-12, where they would purify uranium and change its chemical form as required for enrichment. The Oak Ridge chemical labs were still under construction, so the young men spent the summer of '43 in Rochester, studying and getting to know each other. By the time they arrived in Oak Ridge, moved into M3 (the third dormitory built), and got their job assignments, the young men had become fast friends. Every day was a new experience. Work was tough and demanding, urgent and evolving. Time away from the plants was just as exciting. Everybody kept up with the latest war reports, via radio, newsreels and newspapers, but there was a lot of socializing, too. Women outnumbered men three to one, and Oak Ridge was flooded with young adults, many of them single. The mix was volatile. As Christmas approached, however, Wilcox and his buddies found themselves all alone in the dorm. "All the girls we knew were Tennessee girls, and they had disappeared — gone home," Wilcox recalled. "We were from all over the U.S. and couldn't go home. There was nothing to do but the usual junk." The Christmas cheer returned when one of the Rochester gang produced a bottle of champagne he had smuggled into town. Wilcox said the only adult beverage served in Oak Ridge was "near beer" with 3.2 percent alcohol. "You had to drink tons of it, and you'd end up with kidney problems before you ever got to feeling pretty good," Wilcox said. With a bottle of bubbly in hand, about six of the chemists gathered around the water cooler in the dorm's front room. There weren't any glasses, so they decided to use the cone-shaped paper cups. Being chemists, perhaps they should have known better. As the first cone was filled and prepared for a toast, it quickly became apparent that the alcohol was going to undo the glue holding the paper wrap together. There was no choice but to throw down shots of champagne as quickly as they were poured. Chug a lug, and Merry Christmas. Tired but proud 5 a.m., Nov. 4, 1943. At this salient moment, as the Graphite Reactor "went critical" for the first time, there were whoops and hollers from an Oak Ridge team pushing the boundaries of nuclear history. John Gillette just wanted to go to bed. Gillette had reason to be tired. On the graveyard shift, he had loaded more than a ton of 8-inch uranium fuel slugs, clad with aluminum, into ports of the reactor's massive face. All told, about 25 tons of uranium were placed in the nuclear "pile." "The loading operation had started the previous morning, and there were two groups doing the loading. We worked about 12 hours," he said. Successful operation at the Oak Ridge pilot facility allowed Manhattan Project authorities to proceed with the plutonium-production reactors at Hanford, Wash. Even the laid-back Gillette acknowledged his pride of accomplishment. "Everybody felt good about it that was present," he said of the predawn operation in 1943. "We were glad that it performed as it was supposed to, and it proved a point that you could do something better than they did at the University of Chicago (the first controlled nuclear reaction at Stagg Field 11 months earlier)." 'D' house girls "Oh, great day in the morning, we had parties," Earline Banic said, recalling her wartime years. She and a girlfriend came to Oak Ridge in early 1945 after graduating from Winthrop College in South Carolina. If you crank up the big band music, Banic will crank up the Oak Ridge memories. Forget the mud and the mess, the long lines and product shortages. She remembers the good times. Banic, then Earline Smith, lived in a "D" house with five other single women during the wartime project. They all held jobs, of course, and took turns cleaning house and cooking dinner. "It was interesting. These were people we did not know, but we became best friends," Banic said. When men came courting, the housemates would roll up the rugs and dance and dance some more. It was innocent fun, Banic emphasized, but romance was definitely in the air. "When one of the girls would marry and move out, another girl would move in," Banic said. By the time she married George Banic, in 1947, she was the 13th resident of the house on Venus Road to find a husband in Oak Ridge. Two things to tell Dr. Lewis Preston, a pediatrician, came to Oak Ridge in 1944 as part of the Army Medical Corps, and he set up practice at the 150-bed military hospital. More than 60 years later, he's still seeing patients in Oak Ridge, some of whom are the grandkids of the children he saw during World War II. "There were eight pediatricians here, and I'm the only one who stayed after the war," the Preston said. "I liked East Tennessee." The native Texan got his medical degree at Baylor College of Medicine and did his pediatric training at the Mayo Clinic. Soon thereafter, he was inducted into the Army and sent to Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania for officers training. Medical officers selected for work in the Manhattan Engineer District all had training at Mayo or the University of Minnesota because the Army wanted to set up "the same kind of clinical arrangement" in Oak Ridge, Preston said. Despite supply shortages in wartime, the hospital was well equipped and never left wanting, according to Preston. "It was a most unusual town, of course," he said. "There was a fence around this area with about 80,000 people." Many of the 88-year-old doctor's wartime memories are about the secrecy. "We had some great scientists, and when we would see them in the office they were under assumed names," Preston said. "They didn't want the enemy to know what type of scientists were here." Once, while attending a party at a Knoxville pediatrician's home, the fellow physician called Preston to a back room for a private conversation." "What's going on over there?" the doctor asked, referring to the wartime project. Preston looked at his friend and replied, "I'm going to tell you two things. One, I don't know, and two, if I did I couldn't tell you because of the Espionage Act." The Knoxville doctor said he was sure Oak Ridgers must be dumbest people in the world because nobody seemed to know anything. 'You better be quiet' On Aug. 6, 1945, Harvey Kite told his mother-in-law to shut up. Coming home from the night shift at Y-12, the chemist hadn't heard any news reports, so he was shocked when his wife's mother started talking about an atomic bomb. "You better be quiet," Kite told her, fearful that she was violating the code of secrecy enforced throughout the project. Because of his job, he had some idea of what the Oak Ridge work was all about. "If you're a chemist and you're working with uranium, you knew to a certain extent," the 83-year-old said. "We didn't know everything." Seven years earlier, in a freshman English class at Carson-Newman College, Kite had written a term paper on atomic energy. "I needed to write something my professor didn't know anything about," he said. Kite figured that would deflect attention from his weak writing skills. After college, Kite worked at explosives factories in Allentown, Pa., and Sandusky, Ohio, before returning to his native East Tennessee to work at Y-12, where he was involved in recycling materials in the second stage of uranium enrichment. Making the connection In mid-1944, Paul R. Vanstrum went to lunch with a Union Carbide personnel officer in New York City. Vanstrum was being assigned to a position in the World War II Manhattan Project. "We were at some restaurant on Broadway near Columbia University, and he said, 'You might know some of the people who are working on the project. Dr. Al Nier is here from (the University of) Minnesota.' " The professor's name immediately struck a chord with Vanstrum, a Minnesota engineering grad, who responded, "Yes, I had him for physics when he first isolated some uranium-235." The stunned look on the Union Carbide official's face immediately told Vanstrum what the wartime project was about. "He just about slid under the table," Vanstrum said, laughing at the memory. "Those were words you just weren't supposed to use. It was obvious when he changed the conversation, and it was apparent right off what the connection was. So I knew even before I got in the front door." Vanstrum was assigned to K-25 in Oak Ridge, where his team used mass spectrometers — referred to as line recorders — to analyze any in-leakage into the plant's air-tight gaseous diffusion equipment. He said he felt privileged to work on the project, despite what many perceived to be primitive facilities and difficult wartime conditions. "We knew the importance of the work, and I felt fortunate, really, to be in Oak Ridge instead of maybe marching in the Army overseas," Vanstrum said. In the bullpen Gladys Wimberly Evans was having a soft drink in the U Like It CafA(C) in Sweetwater when she got her first inkling of Oak Ridge. A bunch of guys with muddy boots were eating at the counter, and the impetuous 20-year-old moved to a stool nearby so she could listen to their conversation. "I heard them say the words Black Oak Ridge," Evans recalled, although she had no idea at the time where that was. "I figured that's where they were working." At the time, she was a clerk at Wright Hardware. Among her duties was keeping up with pictures of hometown soldier boys in the storefront window. She also had the difficult job of returning pictures to those who had lost their loved ones. "That became quite traumatic," she said. "I wanted to do more for the war effort." When she later learned about hiring in Oak Ridge, she applied. That was the spring of 1944. She met her future husband of 53 years, George Evans, while at the training center. "They called it the bullpen," she said of the place where workers went while waiting on their security clearances to come through. Gladys Wimberly and George Evans both worked at Y-12 during the war, and he later became the plant's longtime security director. The hambone principle Danger: fluorine. Julius "Jay" Foster, a 24-year-old chemical engineer with a degree from Princeton, was among those brought to East Tennessee in 1944 to help start up K-25 — the last of the three Oak Ridge plants to achieve operational status. The mile-long, U-shaped plant was loaded with equipment to process uranium hexafluoride in a gaseous form. Foster's job was to prime K-25's steel processing equipment with fluorine gas and nitrogen to stabilize conditions and minimize future reactions when UF6 was introduced into the air-tight system. "Fluorine is a very, very reactive chemical," Foster said. "It's a halogen gas, which means humans cannot tolerate it. One whiff and you'll keel over." The operator of the fluorine plant at K-25 wanted to make sure that the startup workers, including Foster, appreciated the potential hazards. In order to demonstrate the danger, the operator disappeared momentarily and came back with a big greasy hambone in his hand. He stood in front of the fluorine tank, opened a value and then stuck the hambone there. The fluorine reacted chemically with the fat, producing a rolling ball of fire. After the gasps and groans had settled down, the fluorine plant operator told the assemblage: "You're not so different from a hambone. So observe the precautions that we give you." Information and revelation People came together for work on the atomic bomb, but they came from many places with different backgrounds. L.W. "Andy" Anderson, a Kansas native, was working in New Jersey before he signed on with Union Carbide. He was dispatched to Oak Ridge after six months of training at Columbia University in New York. The chemical engineer helped with startup operations at the K-25 uranium-enrichment facility. "One of the things I remember during construction was it was all open on the top floor," Anderson said. "Every day at lunch construction came to a stop. You'd be in one building and people would be singing gospel songs and right next to it there'd be a craps game going on." When operations got started, K-25's security sometimes got in the way of training, Anderson said. "We couldn't train them properly because we couldn't tell them what they were doing," he said. "There were just a limited number of people who knew what was going on, so we'd have to say, 'On that gauge, when that needle turns to the right, you turn this knob to the left.' But you couldn't tell them why." If anybody pushed for information, Anderson said his response was, "This is war. We can't tell you exactly, but you'll be proud of what you're doing." That was mostly true, but Anderson said there were varied reactions when the super bomb was dropped and Oak Ridge's role was revealed. "We had a lot of scared people. I was busy, but, of course, we did get the word out," he said. "I understand some people just went out the gate because they were so frightened." 'I'll Be Seeing You' At war's end, 20-year-old Lillie Hickman was nominated for "Miss Atomic Bomb" — a beauty pageant that celebrated Oak Ridge's role in the Manhattan Project and the bevy of beauties who worked there. She had pictures made in swim attire, along with the other contestants, but her days in the pageant were numbered. Before the evening gown photos could be taken, Woody Allred, her sailor boyfriend, returned from war duty in the Philippines, and they ran off and got married in Middlesboro, Ky. It was a great decision, obviously, because she's been Lillie Allred for the past 60 years. Anytime she hears the song, "I'll Be Seeing You," Allred thinks of Oak Ridge and the war years. "That's my favorite. I loved the big band music, the dances," she said. "It was clean fun, good times, not any rowdy stuff." After she got married, Allred quit her job at Y-12, where she'd spent a couple of years as a chemical operator, scraping bits of uranium from plates removed from the calutrons. Before leaving town, she took her new husband to the Canteen — where they danced and drank Coca-Cola — to meet the guys and gals she'd befriended during the war years. "I wanted them to see what a good-looking guy I had," she said. Mrs. Ransom's rules Joanne Gailar chuckles at the briefing she received upon reporting to work in Oak Ridge. "Women had a different orientation than men," she said. Gailar arrived as a 20-year-old newlywed from New Orleans. Her soldier husband, Ralph Levey, was a member of the Special Engineering Attachment, and they both went to work K-25. Before starting her clerical job, Gailar underwent two weeks of training and received a pamphlet, "Between Us Girls and the Gatepost." She and the other women also had a session with a Mrs. Ransom, who dispensed the project protocol and motherly advice. That advice included: be industrious on the job, have the proper decorum, and dress appropriately. According to Gailar, those tidbits translated to: don't get "beautified" too often, don't flirt on the job, and no midriffs or short dresses. "They didn't listen much to Mrs. Ransom. They flirted like crazy," Gailar said, recalling the bevy of young single women who worked as control-panel operators at K-25. 'I wasn't a star' At 6-foot-9, Joe Dykstra was too tall to be a soldier or a sailor, but Uncle Sam had a place for him in East Tennessee. The government put his brains to use developing fluorine cells and fluorocarbon chemicals for the gaseous diffusion operation at K-25. The chemist's lanky frame came in handy, too, as he played center on the K-25 basketball team, and that was a bigger deal than folks might think. "There really wasn't much recreation, and, gosh, those gyms were full every night. It was fairly good basketball," Dykstra recalled. Indeed, he had played ball at Grinnell College in Kansas, and his teammates also had college experience. Ray Koetski (Wake Forest), George Hull (Ohio State) and Ford Whipple (Michigan) also played on the K-25 team, which won the city league three years running. "Each of the team had two or three who had played in college," said Dykstra, whose brother, Bob, played in the early NBA. "I wasn't a star. I was just a great big awkward slow guy." The games were spirited, competitive and sometimes pretty rough. "We were playing the doctors one night and I got hit in the mouth and he broke off a tooth," Dykstra said. "He said, 'Don't worry. Just come by tomorrow and I'll take care of it.' I did, and he pulled the root of the tooth out." 'I think we're making a bomb' Oak Ridge security had more layers than a stack cake. There were background checks, of course, and that was just a beginning. Workers were monitored day and night, as much as was possible on such a broad scale. Guards and gates and barbed-wire fences were a part of the scenery. People were constantly warned to keep their mouths shut. Workers with access to classified information or particularly sensitive areas faced even greater scrutiny. Rubye Payne McCloud worked for Fred Staley, a manager in the chemical department, where uranium was processed and purified for use in the bomb. McCloud typed memos and letters that included coded information on how the Y-12 work was progressing. About once a year, she walked down to the plant's medical office to be hooked up for a polygraph test. Under normal circumstances, that would be a brow-sweating task. In wartime conditions, while working on a secret government project, it was a scary ordeal. During one such encounter, the examiner threw McCloud for a complete loop by asking her what she ate for breakfast. "I couldn't remember, and the scale went all the way off, and I think they had to start all over again," she recalled with a laugh. "I knew I hadn't done anything wrong, but that just kind of threw me off." Toward the end of the war, in a private moment, McCloud's boss asked her if she knew what they were working on at Y-12. She replied, "I think we're making a bomb, but I don't know what kind." He just walked away without saying a word. Roller-skating around the clock A wartime recruiter told Kathy Collins that the dormitories at Oak Ridge would be just like those she and her fellow students enjoyed at Winthrop College in Rockhill, S.C. "That was just as far from the truth as you could ever come," said Collins, the former Kathy Clark. In June 1944, she moved into WV-26, a dorm in the West Village. Nearby was a popular roller rink, which, like most facilities at the huge government encampment, operated around the clock. Collins said she went to bed every night listening to the rink's organ music. "That was my lullaby," she joked. She later joined with some other young women to rent a "D" house, for $90 a month. "It made social life easier," she said, recalling the crowded front parlor at her dorm. What didn't change was the tedium of work. Her job at Y-12 was to type information onto little cards. "I don't know where they went or where they came from," Collins said. The information pertained to materials being kept in warehouses, she said. "I've often wondered what became of those cards, if they ended up in a garbage pile or stashed away somewhere." The work didn't seem particularly worthwhile, which is partly why she left in 1945 to visit California with a friend and to take a job with the Red Cross. Much to Collins' surprise, her resignation raised the ire of a personnel official at Y-12. "She was not pleased," Collins said. "I don't know why. But I didn't think we were going to lose the war because I wasn't here typing up those little cards." Mixing chemicals in little round bottles Unlike many, Florence Bunch Worthington doesn't have fond memories of wartime work in Oak Ridge. She remembers standing at the side of a curvy gravel road in Coalfield, hot and dusty, sleepy and tired, waiting on a bus to take her and her daddy to work. The bus ran from Oneida down through Morgan County, with stops all along the way to pick up workers, and sometimes — by the time it got to Coalfield — there weren't any seats left and Worthington had to stand. "It wasn't any fun," she said. Worthington worked at Y-12, in the chemical department, along with her father, Joseph Walter Bunch. "I mixed those chemicals together in little round bottles," she said. "I let a spill get out once, and I was sent up to the hospital ... It was my fault. I had just had a year of chemistry at UT was the reason I was put in that." Worthington also had two sisters who worked in Oak Ridge during the Manhattan Project, and everybody lived in a busy little house built by their father. "I had to work three shifts. It was OK when I worked the day shift, but when I worked the night shift and tried to sleep in the day it was awful hard. Our house just had four rooms and it was so hot and all." She had a teacher's certificate and wanted to teach, but her Oak Ride bosses wouldn't give her permission to teach and continue work. So, on the advice of others, she left her job to teach school on Windrock Mountain. She didn't get a certificate for her work on the A-bomb, and she regrets her decision to this day. "It was the ruination of my life," Worthington said. Welcome to Oak Ridge James S. Cole was a top turret B-17 engineer in the Air Force, leaving Biloxi, Miss., on his way overseas in 1945. "I got pulled off the train, and the next thing I know I'm in Knoxville with a telephone number," Cole, now 87, said. "I called that number and an old beat-up Army Chevy shows up at the station and took me to the F Barracks ... Soon I'm doing pretty highly classified stuff." Welcome to Oak Ridge. Cole was part of the Special Engineering Detachment, a group of military guys with some college experience or technical training, who were called upon to provide needed manpower at K-25. "It was kind of interesting because the people here were from all over the United States, so many really brilliant people," he said. Curiosity at bay The mysteries of Oak Ridge went beyond the ultra-secret work on atomic bombs. Agnes Johnson Houser, who came to work in October 1943, remembers a murder in Richmond Hall that never got reported — at least not in any public way. "This girl was strangled to death in the dormitory. Someone said her ex-boyfriend did it. But there was no news reported. We never heard what happened," she said. As was typical of the wartime project in East Tennessee, folks kept their curiosity at bay and simply went about their business. But Houser recalls that the dorm incident "put the quietus on your social life for awhile. It made you real cautious, a little uneasy." A choice of store-bought food The food may not have been great, but it was always available. The project's oversized cafeteria was open around the clock to accommodate shift workers coming and going to the Oak Ridge plants. Memories of the place vary. Agnes Johnson Houser was a country girl who grew up in the Seven Islands community of Knox County, and she was dazzled by the food choices. She was accustomed to eating whatever was grown on the farm. Having dishes like spaghetti and macaroni and cheese was a delightful change. "It was fascinating to have a choice of store-bought food, especially during the war," she said. Others, however, grew weary of cafeteria food. "The main meal was usually spaghetti, and when you have it so often you kind of get tired of it," said Lillie Allred. "For years (after the war), I could hardly stand to look at it." Houser said she learned to eat her eggs "over easy." "A friend of mine who had worked and lived in lots of places told me never, ever get scrambled eggs in a restaurant like that," she said. That's because a bad egg can still be scrambled, but it can't be done over easy, she said. An easy way to go fishing "Hot was hot. There wasn't any air-conditioning," Ilene Cash said. Cash was talking about the summer bus rides from Lake City to Oak Ridge, where she worked as an operator at Y-12. "When we were on a swing shift, there was a lot of sleeping going on," said Cash, who was 19 years old at the time. Thousands of workers commuted to the plants during the war years, some by choice, some by necessity. Military personnel stationed in Oak Ridge were placed in barracks, but there were no quarters available for married G.I.s to live with their wives. So, Army couples often commuted from out of town. Cove Lake in Campbell County was a popular spot. "We lived at the Cove Lake Inn," Joanne Gailar recalled. Both she and her husband, Ralph Levey, who was with the Special Engineering Detachment, rode a bus to K-25. "The town of Oak Ridge was very strange," Gailar said. "We had to wait in line for buses, had to wait in line for everything. But there was entertainment ... Sometimes we'd stay in town on Saturday and go to dances and take the late bus back Cove Lake." During the war years, bus rides were free for project workers, and many took advantage of the transportation. For Joe Dykstra, it was an easy way to go fishing. Armed with his rod and tackle box, Dykstra would take a bus to Norris or Watts Bar Lakes or, occasionally, down to Lenoir City to fish below Fort Loudon Dam. "The buses ran everywhere. You could go down to the lake and you knew about the time the work buses would be coming back. All you had to do was get alongside the road, and they'd stop and pick you up," Dykstra said. "I don't think many other people did that, but I liked to fish." Getting workers where they could Workers were in short supply during the Manhattan Project, especially late in the war when K-25 — the last of the three Oak Ridge plants — was starting up. Desperate times called for desperate measures. "Y-12 was started, and the lab was running, and anybody within a 60-mile range who could breathe and walk had a job," said Robert Winkel, who was hired by Union Carbide in New York to work with the different vendors building K-25. "We had to go wherever we could to find workers." Before embarking to Oak Ridge, Winkel received an order from John Maroone, an industrial specialist who had been loaned to Union Carbide from his position at Ford Motor Co. Winkel was told to go to Bridgeport, Conn., and rent three buses. Using a government voucher, Winkel got the buses and — following instructions — had them parked in front of a DuPont plant that was being shut down in Bridgeport. Once there, Union Carbide stationed four recruiters on each bus and as the DuPont workers exited the plant, they were intercepted. Instead of being transferred to another DuPont plant, they were recruited for the project in Tennessee. "They stole about 100 people before the War Manpower Office shut them down," Winkel said. 'Everything you needed was here' Love on wheels. Robert "Red" Lynch, 78, met Helen Davis, his future wife, at the skating rink. "He was an excellent skater, I had somebody to hang onto," she said of her husband of 59 years. Both of the teen-agers worked at Millers department store in wartime Oak Ridge. He drove a furniture truck. She worked in the book department. Red Lynch said it's difficult to describe the wartime construction scene in Oak Ridge. "It was just like going out here in the middle of a great, great big field and start doing what you wanted to do. You had to watch where you were going because there was a new hole somewhere every day. If you went somewhere and came back, there's no telling how many houses they built while you were gone. It's hard to believe but it happened," he said. Red and Helen Lynch came to Oak Ridge with their parents. He was from Cookeville. She was from Chattanooga. Wartime wasn't easy, but not so bad either, the Lynches said. "Everything you needed was here," he said. "It might not have been the best, but it was enough, and it was cheap." Millers was well stocked with goods of all types. "It was a big department store," she said. If something wasn't available, the Oak Ridge store would get it from the Knoxville store in a day or two, she said. Celebrating in the street When Marie Cardwell came to Y-12 in February 1945, her job was to record details of the government's evolving nuclear project. "It was breaking new ground," said Cardwell, who would serve for more than 40 years as the plant's document librarian. "We programmed the information that was coming in so fast from different contractors." The library also was generating records of the uranium-enrichment work at Y-12 "We were just taking a ruler and making lines in books and recording the necessary information, giving the report number and its classification. Everything was handled carefully, and everybody was very, very dedicated," Cardwell said. Cardwell and her husband, Art, were sweethearts at Halls High School in Knox County, and she traveled with him for eight months after he joined the Navy and underwent training at various U.S. stations. When he was dispatched to the Pacific, she came back home and got her job in Oak Ridge. His ship was hit by a suicide bomber toward the of the war, and he was headed home when the first A-bomb was dropped on Japan. Cardwell was at work in Y-12's Building 9735 when the news was announced. "We all started screaming," she said. In her haste, she left the plant holding an envelope with a red seal that had "secret" and "restricted data" stamped on it. "We were marching down the street, and I was carrying that envelope. We just celebrated there on the street," Cardwell said. Fortunately, the classified information had been removed. She was just carrying an empty envelope. It was quite a run Reuben McCord, a young chemist out of Erskine College in South Carolina, needed a travel agent during World War II. In various defense roles, he worked in Oklahoma, Indiana, Illinois, Washington State, Kansas and, of course, Tennessee, where he helped with the startup of Oak Ridge's Graphite Reactor. After the war was over, he got called into the military and sent to Japan. It was quite a run. While working on the Manhattan Project in Chicago, prior to coming to Oak Ridge, he got to rub shoulders with some of the nation's nuclear pioneers — Enrico Fermi, E.O. Lawrence and Glenn Seaborg. "Imagine a little old peon like me to get to associate occasionally with people like that," he said, recalling his time at the Metallurgical Lab at the University of Chicago. "I was just a lowly chemist working around all these brains." He remembers one time when his crew drew the ire of Fermi during a loading operation. Instead of carefully placing the "chunks" of uranium, workers decided it would be quicker to push them through a hole with a rod and let them fall where they might. "There were sparks going everywhere," McCord said. "Fermi chewed us out for that." McCord was among 11 guys sent from Chicago to Oak Ridge in May '43 to help with things there. Four of them rented a house in the Burlington part of Knoxville and commuted to work in a car provided by the nuclear lab. "You didn't tell anybody what you did in Oak Ridge. The people in Knoxville learned not to ask," he said. His first job in Oak Ridge was to check the purity of graphite blocks being used in the reactor. He worked for a group of physicists and soon after the reactor began operations, he was transferred to Hanford, Wash., where the production reactors would put the lessons learned in Oak Ridge to work in making plutonium for Fat Man, the A-bomb dropped on Nagasaki. In 1947, McCord returned to Oak Ridge and worked at the lab for 41 years. He's now 84 years old. 'We had secret numbers' Ed Bailey was a counter. He counted atoms of U-235. "We worked around the clock, seven days a week," Bailey said of his work at K-25, where he reported on Valentines Day, 1945. "We were doing isotopic analysis." In the counting lab, Bailey and his fellow workers used various radiation detectors to determine the enrichment — the percentage of U-235, the fissionable isotope — in the uranium product. "We had secret numbers. We always coded our numbers," he said. Bailey got his chemical engineering degree from Ohio State and actually received his diploma while en route to Camp Hood for infantry basic. Oddly enough, he was sent back to Ohio State for additional training before being assigned to Oak Ridge. "We got on a train in Columbus (Ohio) in the slush and snow and got off in Knoxville in a bright sunny day," Bailey, 81, recalled. "We got on an olive drab school bus, and they brought us out here." A-bomb humor Gladys Owens, one of the "calutron girls" in the Beta-3 operation at Y-12, had no idea what she was doing during the war project. She just did what she was told and turned the knobs at her cubicle in the control room, keeping the readings at a prescribed level. After the war was over and she learned about the uranium-enrichment operation and its role in the bomb project, Owens discussed her feelings with a supervisor at the Oak Ridge plant. "One little mistake here, and I could have ended up on the moon," she said. To which he responded, "Ma'am, that would only have been your first stop." 'It was just doing a job' The military sent Forrest Waldrop to Oak Ridge, and — like so many others — he had no idea why. "How they chose which people to send to Oak Ridge and which ones to send to active Army units I haven't any idea," said Waldrop, who turns 84 later this month. Waldrop had done basic training at Camp Seibert near Gadsden, Ala., and was sent to Georgia Tech in the Army's Specialized Training Program. He had about two years of junior college behind him, and he took courses at Georgia Tech for about a year before he and a group of other men were sent to Oak Ridge in early 1944. "People were talking when we were getting ready to ship out, and I think 'Manhattan' was mentioned. But nobody really had any notion of where it was we were going." He was in Oak Ridge for six weeks, essentially doing nothing, until he was assigned to a job at Y-12, Waldrop said. He worked in the uranium recovery operations. "There was nothing scary about it," he said. "There was nothing particularly urgent. It was just doing a job. It was like going to work anyplace else. You went to work in the morning and you did the job and you came home in the evening. Nothing unusual." Misadventure with happy ending For many of the young participants in the Manhattan Project, it was an adventure of a lifetime. After being recruited for an Oak Ridge job in June 1944, Kathy Collins took a bus from her hometown, Cheraw, S.C. — the self-proclaimed "prettiest town in Dixie" — to Knoxville. She had a reservation at the Andrew Johnson Hotel, and she got into a car at the bus station, thinking it was a cab. "It's a miracle I'm alive. It wasn't a cab, just some prowler. I just assumed it was a cab, but I was too young and dumb to be afraid or anything." Whatever his original intentions, the stranger ended up letting Collins out of his car. She figured he got scared off when she kept mentioning that a government car was supposed to pick her up the next day. "That probably saved me," she said. 'A hillbilly with muddy boots' Jay Foster, a Princeton grad, quickly realized that the war project in Tennessee was nothing like the Ivy League. "The atmosphere ... it was different," Foster said. "But I always enjoyed Oak Ridge, even from day one, because of the kind of folks you had and the commitment to what was going on." At first there was no place for him to bring his wife, so Foster stayed in a dormitory. He remembers his time there: "It was a rather austere existence. There were several wings of rooms, with two beds in a room. I lived in a room there for about three months. Nobody was in the other bed many times, but every once in a while I'd go home and there'd be somebody in the other bed sleeping. A lot of times it'd be a hillbilly with muddy boots. Most of the guys who showed up never stayed. It was kind of an interesting collection." Copyright 2005, Knoxville News-Sentinel Co. ***************************************************************** 61 The State: S.C. has work to do in hydrogen fuel field 08/08/2 Reports say state must work harder, lure businesses if it wants to lead By JAMES T. HAMMOND and C. GRANT JACKSON Staff Writers Despite its substantial research assets, South Carolina faces significant hurdles to achieve its ambition as a leader in commercial hydrogen fuel production, two new reports warn. To succeed, the reports say, South Carolina must: • Attract hydrogen-related businesses with tax cuts and other incentives • Nail down a federal commitment to subsidize a new commercial nuclear reactor at the Savannah River Site • Designate lead laboratories in specific areas of hydrogen fuel research In a report, Capitalizing on the States R Assets, Concurrent Technologies Corp. seeks to create a sense of urgency about the assets South Carolina lacks. No. 1 among its concerns was the lack of hydrogen-related businesses necessary to make the leap from laboratory to job-creating machine. Concurrent Technologies is a major national defense contractor, headquartered in Pennsylvania, with offices in Columbia, Greenville and Aiken. The study was commissioned by the S.C. Hydrogen Coalition and the S.C. Energy Office. Meanwhile, an analysis of South Carolina by ICF Consulting reached similar conclusions. South Carolina has not yet created the base of dedicated Next Energy companies  or the policy environment to support them  that other states have, the consultants said. ICF of Fairfax, Va., was hired by the S.C. Next Energy Initiative, a private, academic and government collaboration to develop a 20-year plan for development of the hydrogen and fuel cell industry economy in the state. Next Energy is chaired by Harris Pastides, vice president for research at USC, and Larry Wilson, a Columbia entrepreneur and venture capitalist. Pastides agreed attracting hydrogen businesses should be a top priority. California and some other states are ahead of South Carolina today in their hydrogen business creation, he said. While South Carolinas hydrogen research is Top 10, the states hydrogen business culture is not, Pastides said. We need incentives to help businesses move here, he said. Clare Morris, director of marketing and communications for the state Department of Commerce, said the states economic development arm has not yet addressed the issue of incentives for hydrogen businesses. But Morris said she is working to incorporate promotion of hydrogen business in next years state marketing plan. And she said a staff member of the Savannah River National Laboratory is on loan to the Department of Commerce for a year to help develop a hydrogen strategy. Joel Sawyer, spokesman for Gov. Mark Sanford, said the governor supports the efforts of the Department of Commerce, the universities and Savannah River National Laboratory to create jobs through hydrogen fuel research. Next Energy began as a Columbia-focused effort launched by Mayor Bob Coble but quickly shifted to statewide emphasis. The Next Energy plan is to roll out in early October. While Next Energy is looking long term, five to 10 years, the Concurrent Technologies report looks short term to offer a set of initiatives that can be undertaken in the next 24-36 months. ICF Consultants and Concurrent Technologies agree on several key points, chief among them that the state does not yet have the entrepreneurial class to turn pure research into job-creating businesses. Without access to this management talent, much of the intellectual property generated by South Carolinas hydrogen-related R activities will migrate to other regions, Concurrent Technologies Corp. said in its report. South Carolina cannot wait to begin building hydrogen economy-related programs, the report states. Unless the state gains a foothold during todays research and development phase, other more aggressive states will gain a competitive edge as the hydrogen economy begins to grow. The ICF analysis points out that South Carolina has been especially lax in developing state policies to support Next Energy development. South Carolinas investment is small when compared with the money allocated by other states that are implementing hydrogen economy initiatives. No state money has been specifically earmarked for hydrogen research. However, $90 million has been set aside for endowed university chairs and up to $220 million for research facilities. Some of that money will go to hydrogen research. Ohio plans to spend $103 million over three years on fuel cell initiatives, and Michigan has committed $56 million to promote hydrogen industries. To accomplish the states goals, the reports say South Carolina should designate lead laboratories on specific areas of hydrogen research involving Clemson University, the University of South Carolina, South Carolina State University and the Savannah River National Laboratory. Naming a lead agency could embroil the states political leadership in traditional institutional rivalries. But Pastides said those points of potential friction already have been worked out among the players. USC will focus on fuel cell development, Clemson on applying research to transportation, and Savannah River National Laboratory on challenges associated with hydrogen storage, he said. The state also should set as its No. 1 priority securing the billion-dollar-plus federal investment to ensure the next nuclear reactor is located at SRS. That will require the united support of the states congressional delegation, the report states. In the next two decades, the commercial-scale reactor probably will be the single largest hydrogen economy investment in the United States. SRS would be an ideal location for a commercial, as well as a prototype reactor, the Concurrent Technologies report said. U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett, R-S.C., who represents the Aiken area, recently said he is confident South Carolina will be a finalist to be the site for the next nuclear reactor being planned by NuStart, a consortium that includes Duke Energy, Progress Energy and Southern Co. Barrett said he thinks it is extremely likely the reactor ultimately will be built at SRS. Concurrent Technologies said S.C. leaders should seek proposals for a nuclear energy park at the Savannah River Site to host commercial nuclear power plants capable of producing electricity, as well as hydrogen for the new hydrogen economy. And South Carolina should get behind a group of 17 Southeastern universities, including USC and Clemson, to win Department of Energy funding for a high-temperature research reactor at SRS, the report states. Hydrogen is the most common element on earth, but isolating it for use as fuel requires significant energy resources. Most hydrogen industry is near natural gas and coal generating facilities, which South Carolina lacks. Reach Hammond at (803) 771-8474 or jhammond@thestate.com. Reach Jackson at (803) 771-8376 or gjackson@thestate.com. TheStateOnline ***************************************************************** 62 SPI: Hanford's A-bomb builders focus on the lives they saved [seattlepi.com] Seattle Post-Intelligencer Monday, August 8, 2005 Few knew what they were working on -- until the 'Fat Man' leveled Nagasaki By ATHIMA CHANSANCHAI SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER RICHLAND -- No one at Hanford Engineer Works knew they were making history. There were signs, but all told them to keep quiet. They were told they were serving their country and furthering the war effort. But they were curious. Why were they -- thousands of men and women -- converting an isolated Central Washington farming community into a bustling industrial complex, virtually overnight? Where were trucks and railcars filled with tons of precious steel and aluminum going? Why did they have to wear radiation meters? What was so top secret? [Nagasaki] [Zoom] Jackie Johnston / Special to the P-I A look at Nagasaki, Japan, after the atomic bomb was dropped on the city Aug. 9, 1945. The answer came on Aug. 6, 1945. With the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, the people of Hanford and Richland finally discovered what they had been working on for two years: the Manhattan Project's atomic bombs. Later, those workers would find out it was their "Fat Man" bomb that devastated Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945. Both bombs led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people through the initial blasts and subsequent radiation. On Aug. 14, 1945, headlines in a Richland newspaper blared: "PEACE! OUR BOMB CLINCHED IT!" in announcing the Japanese surrender. Employees of the Hanford Engineer Works believed -- and still believe -- the end of the war justified the means. As part of the massive work force that made up the world's first plutonium producing plant, they carried the firm conviction that hundreds of thousands more would have perished had the bombs not been detonated. They also faced the stigma of being labeled as warmongers, or worse. "It scared us to think of what we had made," said Larry Denton, 80 of Kennewick, about four hours east of Seattle. "Everyone was dubious as to whether it should have been done. But when you piece together all the American lives that would have been lost if we hadn't dropped the second bomb, I feel like it was worth it." [Larry Denton] [Zoom] Jackie Johnston / P-I Larry Denton holds up a photo of himself and fellow Hanford workers taken sometime around 1945. Denton was 18 when he followed his father -- a World War I Marine -- to Hanford to work on the project in September 1943. The younger Denton was 4F and denied military service. His older brother was stationed in England with the Air Corps; buddies from high school were also fighting abroad. The Idaho lumberjack started as a shipping clerk at Hanford, sharing a tent with three other men. He retired in 1987 as a manager of maintenance surveillance of all the reactors. "I was destined to find something else where I could be used," Denton said. Denton and his co-workers lived in a world in which the war was the No.1 priority. Rationing limited food and gas, newsreels played in-between feature films and it seemed like everyone had a loved one fighting Axis troops halfway across the globe or knew a boy who hadn't come home. By August 1945, more than 400,000 U.S. soldiers had been killed. Patriotism was so strong that all 51,000 workers at Hanford donated a day's wages -- $300,000 -- to purchase the aptly named "Day's Pay" B-17 Seattle-built bomber for the war effort. While the country celebrated the end of the war in Europe with V-E Day on May 8, 1945, reminders of the combat raging in the Pacific were everywhere. Pearl Harbor had become lodged in the American psyche. Returning soldiers brought home stories of Japanese kamikaze pilots, hand-to-hand combat in the Pacific islands and the Bataan Death March. Hard-fought victories at Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima came at the cost of thousands of American lives, while stories circulated about how Japanese soldiers and civilians chose suicide rather than surrender. The idea that U.S. forces might have to invade Japan gained momentum. Under these conditions, Hanford support for President Truman's decision was nearly unanimous. "They regret that Pearl Harbor was attacked. They regret that Hitler and Tojo and Mussolini came to power and ruined their youthful times by pulling them into war, absences from home, terror and exhaustion. They regret that they had to learn to kill, and to be thrust into terrible situations in combat and in manufacturing armaments," said Michele Gerber, a Richland-based historian and president of the B Reactor Museum Association, which is trying to preserve the world's first nuclear reactor in Hanford. "But the bombings they do not regret. They believe that the bombings ended all of this horror." The U.S. government contracted DuPont to oversee the Hanford project, so employees came from all over the country, many of them employed by DuPont or its subsidiaries. Hanford appealed to them because of the steady work (many still felt the sting of the Depression), plentiful subsidized meals, cheap housing and the chance to contribute to the war effort. The average age of the mostly male work force was 40 and those with families found the living camp at Hanford and the burgeoning town of Richland provided for all their needs: schools, all kinds of stores, post offices, fire stations, dog pounds, barber/beauty shops and even movie theaters. Secrecy was sacrosanct. Signs posted throughout the facilities urged workers to shush. Husbands did not talk to their wives about work. Undercover agents looked out for loose lips. Most of the workers were isolated in their specific tasks; few could conceive of all the elements that went into building the atomic bomb. But Roger Rohrbacher, 85, of Kennewick, said hints were all over the place. As a chemist and physicist -- jokingly called "peons with Ph.D's" -- he probably had an advantage over others. He noticed restricted supplies like aluminum and steel pouring into Hanford, and the presence of uranium was a dead giveaway. [Dee McCullough] [Zoom] Jackie Johnston / Special to the P-I Dee McCullough looks through a scrapbook of photos from recent visits to Hanford, where he worked in World War II. Dee McCullough, 91, of Richland was fixing radios and movie projectors when he got to Hanford in January 1944. The Utah native was 30, a father of three and told his choice was either the Manhattan Project or the Army. He became an instrument technician, installing and testing meters that measured neutron flux. He remembers wearing "pencils" -- radiation detectors. Later, he assisted the initial startup of B Reactor with Enrico Fermi, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and the leader of one of the Manhattan Project teams whose experiments led to in the first controlled nuclear chain reaction. "Some people criticize us for making the bomb and killing so many people, but they don't realize how many people we saved," McCullough said. "Armies were ready to go to Japan." Hanford's role in ending the war remains part of local lore in Richland and the surrounding area, where being "Proud of the Cloud" is a common saying and alums from Richland High School bristle at changing the school's mascot: The Bombers. Shirley Gilson Schiller (Bomber class of 1947) of Tacoma was 14 when she followed her parents to Hanford. "We were really thrilled and happy to hear the war was over, but it was a terrible way to end it. We felt bad about that, but we rejoiced that more of our own people didn't have to die." Virginia Miller, 74, of Richland (Bomber '49) still beams with pride when she talks about her father, Harry Miller, a works engineer who arrived in Hanford in 1943. Miller said the children of those Hanford workers were always aware of their shared heritage. "I'm very proud of living in history," Miller said. "We were making history." BUILDING THE BOMB + Hanford Engineer Works (1943-45) Construction completed over 30 months at a cost of $230 million. 554 buildings spread over 640 square miles; 158 miles of railroad. 51,000 workers (only 4,000 women); seven-day workweeks. In one meal, employees consumed 2,500 pounds of pot roast; 18,000 pork chops; 900 pies; and 5,000 heads of lettuce. Three reactors built, including B Reactor, the world's first full-scale nuclear reactor. [fat man] [Zoom] AP "Fat Man" bomb For more information: www.b-reactor.orgor www.hanford.gov/doe/history/?history=manhattan + "Fat Man" bomb detonated at Nagasaki Aug. 9, 1945 Weight: more than 10,000 pounds; a similar bomb is shown above. It was an implosion type of bomb with a plutonium core about the size of a tennis ball surrounded by more than 5,000 pounds of high explosives. Equivalent to a little more than 20,000 tons of TNT. P-I reporter Athima Chansanchai can be reached at 206-448-8041 or athimachansanchai@seattlepi.com. [Seattle Post-Intelligencer] 101 Elliott Ave. W. Seattle, WA 98119 (206) 448-8000 Send comments to newmedia@seattlepi.com ©1996-2005 Seattle Post-Intelligencer ***************************************************************** 63 lamonitor.com: North Wind opens office in Los Alamos The Online News Source for Los Alamos North Wind Inc., a company that focuses on environmental remediation, environmental engineering and the support functions required to provide services in its local areas, has opened a new office in Los Alamos. The new office is the company's second in New Mexico and its 20th in the United States. Its other New Mexico office is in Las Cruces. Pete Maggiore is the head of the new office in Los Alamos and he is currently the only full-time employee. The office has an ongoing project with the Department of Energy in which North Wind designs and constructs a landfill cap at the airport, Maggiore said. Maggiore said he is excited about the new job, and he said the establishment of North Wind in Los Alamos will provide new opportunities for the area and the company, as well as for Maggiore. "My diverse background - technical work in hydrogeology and management work for the state - makes for a good combination for North Wind," Maggiore said. He served as the Secretary of Environment for the state of New Mexico from 1998-2002, during which time chaired the New Mexico Water Quality Control Commission and served as vice chairman of the New Mexico Mining Commission. During the past two-and-a-half years, Maggiore supplied technical, regulatory and environmental policy support to the U.S. Department of Energy assistant secretary for Environmental Management. While providing policy support, he performed regulatory assessments and analysis for DOE sites across the complex. Maggiore also served as a technical consultant and reviewer of documents prepared for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. In addition, Maggiore served as a senior consultant to the DOE Office of Civilian and Radioactive Waste Management, where he was responsible for analyzing waste certification requirements associated with waste acceptance criteria for the Yucca Mountain Repository. Maggiore has a master's degree in geology and he has more than 22 years of experience in environmental management, hydrogeology and geology. The Los Alamos office has been open since Aug. 1 at 1460 Trinity Drive, Suite B. The office phone number is 661-4290. © 2003 Los Alamos Monitor All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: *****************************************************************