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NUCLEAR POLICY
1 BBC: Reid warns over 'Iranian' attacks
2 AFP: Britain issues new warning to Iran, Hezbollah
3 Xinhua: China, Iran to discuss development of bilateral ties: FM
4 IRNA: New atmosphere in nuclear talks
5 MNA: New atmosphere in nuclear talks
6 MNA: Iran’s statement on resumption of nuclear talks without preco
7 Korea Herald: U.S. faces challenges on 3 fronts
8 Interfax China: Kim Jong-il confirms renunciation of nuclear weapons
9 US: [NukeNet] Urge Congress to Stop Funding Dangerous Nuclear
10 US: Newsday.com: There's no rebottling the nuclear genie
11 US: Corvallis Gazette-Times: Workshop covers nuclear weapons
12 INTERVIEW: GWOT - Legal Nonsense
13 Times of India: Atoms For Peace-
14 BBC: Has the Green dream wilted?
15 AU ABC: MPs fail to support council nuclear-free zone call.
NUCLEAR REACTORS
16 GREENPEACE UK: Power to the people: decentralised energy not new nuc
17 US: Brattleboro Reformer: VY seeks 20-year extension
18 US: Arizona Republic: Problem with Palo Verde cooling system went un
19 US: Arizona Republic: Palo Verde now is completely off-line
20 US: NRC: NRC Announces Reappointment of Commissioner Edward McGaffig
21 US: Tallahassee Democrat: Governor advocates nuclear power
22 Buenos Aires Herald: Reacting to reactors
23 US: Bangor Daily News: Maine Yankee Lessons -
24 US: Boston Globe: NRC sets conditions for Vermont Yankee power incre
25 US: OA Online: Andrews eyes nuclear test reactor
26 Fort St. John: Fort St. John Ont. to spend over $2B on reactors
27 US: St. Petersburg Times: There's no reason nuclear power should cau
28 US: Desoto Sun Herald: When I say Nuclear, you say what?
NUCLEAR SECURITY
29 US: reviewjournal.com: Nevada site, other facilities lagging in secu
NUCLEAR SAFETY
30 [NYTr] Quake: Pakistan Nuclear Site "Undamaged"
31 US: NRC: Notice of Availability of Environmental Assessment and Find
32 US: Deccan Herald: How iodised is your lifestyle?
NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE
33 US: NRC: NRC Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste to Meet in New York
34 US: Bradenton Herald: Unknown menace
35 US: Bradenton Herald: Lockheed challenges case venue
36 US: San Luis Obispo Tribune: NRC's approval of Diablo waste facility
37 AU ABC: Nelson bill to thwart NT dump opposition
38 US: AU ABC: WA Govt under pressure to rethink uranium ban
39 US: NRC: Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste Meeting on Planning and
40 US: NRC: Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste; Notice of Meeting
41 AU ABC: 'Outraged' NT Govt promises nuclear waste dump fight
42 NEWS.com.au: Nuclear waste to travel SA roads -
43 NEWS.com.au: Nuclear war on waste plans
44 Pahrump Valley Times: Bechtel, DOE dinged in audit
45 NEWS.com.au: Government pushes nuke dump bill -
46 Deseret News: 2 Utah legislators tour proposed Yucca Mountain
PEACE
US DEPT. OF ENERGY
47 Rocky Mountain News: End of road at Flats
48 Rocky Mountain News: Defense opens on Flats
49 Rocky Mountain News: 'Infinitesimal' health risk
50 Rocky Mountain News: Key events in history of Rocky Flats
51 Rocky Mountain News: Nuke plant on prairie manufactures history
52 Rocky Mountain News: A falling-out over fallout
53 Las Vegas SUN: DOE audit: Security upgrades lagging at federal nucle
54 DOE: Environmental Management Site-Specific Advisory Board, Hanford
55 Tri-Valley Herald: Livermore's Superblock deemed OK
56 LongmontFYI: Flats cleanup nearly complete
57 PRN: Kaiser-Hill Announces Physical Completion of Rocky Flats Cleanu
58 Guardian Unlimited: $7B Cleanup at Rocky Flats Said Finished
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FULL NEWS STORIES
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1 BBC: Reid warns over 'Iranian' attacks
Last Updated: Thursday, 13 October 2005
[Protests in Basra]
There have been violent anti-British attacks in Iraq
Iranians could be playing "a risky game" by getting involved in
Iraq, Defence Secretary John Reid has warned.
Mr Reid said there was no conclusive proof implicating Tehran but
he believes Iranian elements are linked to insurgents attacking
UK troops in Iraq.
Mr Reid spoke after meeting EU defence ministers at RAF Lyneham
on Thursday.
Iran denies UK claims it is responsible for explosions that have
caused the deaths of all eight British soldiers killed in Iraq
this year.
'Not acceptable'
Mr Reid told reporters: "We believe that there are elements of
Iranian society - I put it no higher than that - who may well be
associated with the attacks on British troops."
"That is not acceptable. It is not something we can tolerate.
British troops will do everything necessary to defend themselves.
Anyone who is involved in this sort of thing is involved in a
risky game," he said.
UK defence sources have said specialist bomb-makers targeting
British troops in southern Iraq are being trained by an elite arm
of Iran's armed forces.
Speaking on Wednesday, Mr Straw said military action against
Iran's alleged nuclear ambitions was "inconceivable".
But he said it was not sensible to speculate about the tactics
British commanders could use against those targeting their
troops.
Prime Minister Tony Blair has said the evidence linked the
British soldier attacks either to Iran or its militant, Lebanese
allies Hezbollah, but added that officials could not be sure.
*****************************************************************
2 AFP: Britain issues new warning to Iran, Hezbollah
Thu Oct 13,11:40 AM ET
LYNEHAM, England (AFP) - Britain's Defence Secretary John Reid
has issued a new warning to Iran
" /> Iranand the militant group Hezbollah over a recent series
of bomb attacks on British troops in Iraq
" /> Iraq.
"The nature of these leads us to believe that they are
associated or originating with Hezbollah -- Hezbollah,
associated with, supported by the Iranians," he told reporters
on Thursday at Lyneham airbase in southwest England.
"That is not acceptable, it is not something we can tolerate,"
Reid said, and he underlined that British troops would
vigorously defend themselves.
"Anyone who is involved in this sort of thing is involved in a
risky game," he said at a press conference during a meeting of
European Union defence ministers.
But Reid stopped short of implicating the Iranian government.
"We believe that there are elements of Iranian society," he
said. "I have no evidence that would be conclusive that the
government of Iran is involved in this."
On Wednesday, The Sun newspaper cited a military source in
Basra, southern Iraq, where the bulk of Britain's 8,000 or so
troops are based, as saying Iran-linked roadside bombs had
already killed eight British soldiers.
"There is evidence the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is running
training packages for insurgents," the source said.
"They are in the form of 'train the trainer'. Up to 10 people at
a time are being taught how to make these new devices. They
return to Iraq and pass it onto another 50."
A week ago, a senior British official, briefing reporters
anonymously, had said that Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard had
supplied weapons technology to insurgents in neighbouring Iraq.
The official said it was possible Iran was trying to warn off
London over its demands Tehran abandon its controversial nuclear
programme.
"It would be entirely natural that they would want to send a
message: 'Don't mess with us,'" he said.
Iran totally rejects the suspicions.
Copyright © 2005 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
3 Xinhua: China, Iran to discuss development of bilateral ties: FM
www.xinhuanet.com
www.chinaview.cn 2005-10-13 19:40:11
BEIJING, Oct. 13 (Xinhuanet) -- China and Iran will discuss
the further development of bilateral ties during Iranian Foreign
Minister Manouchehr Mottaki's visit to China, said Chinese
Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan here Thursday.
Mottaki arrived here Thursday morning on a two-day official
visit as guest of Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing.
Kong said at the regular press conference that Chinese
leaders will meet Mottaki and the two foreign ministers will
hold talks. The two sides will focus on furthering bilateral
relations under the new circumstances and exchange views on
international and regional issues of common concern.
He said the Iranian nuclear issue will be another topic
betweenthe two sides and China holds a supportive attitude
toward the negotiations between Iran and the three European
countries.
China hopes all parties will properly settle the issue
within the framework of the International Atomic Energy Agency
through peaceful negotiations, especially about finding a
long-term solution, said Kong.
He said China hopes Iran, the European Union and other
parties concerned will break the deadlock with patience,
flexibility and concrete and pragmatic steps, and resume
dialogues, consultations and negotiations on this issue as early
as possible. Enditem
Copyright ©2003 Xinhua News Agency. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
4 IRNA: New atmosphere in nuclear talks
Tehran, Oct 13, IRNA
Iran-News Analysis-Nuclear
An English-language daily on Thursday wrote on Iran's peaceful
nuclear case, the role being played by the UN nuclear watchdog
and the EU3 in this regard and a legal procedure to resolve the
disagreement over the issue among the three mentioned sides.
Tuesday's statement by the Foreign Ministry calling for the
resumption of comprehensive talks without preconditions was part
of the active diplomacy expected from Iran in response to recent
signals by the three major European Union countries asking Iran
to open the path for talks, Tehran Times said in its editorial.
It (Iran) also stresses the need for the International Atomic
Energy Agency to change course from an unwise and politicized
approach and to return to a technical and legal procedure to
resolve the issue calmly, said the morning daily.
The move also illustrates Tehran's determination to employ all
technical, legal and political means to facilitate the
resolution of the current problem, the paper noted.
It should be noted that in the defense of Iran's national
rights in nuclear technology, there is no difference between the
recent foreign ministry statement and the one on August 8 which
announced Iran's rejection of the EU trio's unreasonable offer
of August 5 and the announcement on the resumption of work at
the Uranium Conversion Facility under the supervision of the
IAEA, the daily noted.
Iran issued the two statements to break the deadlock and give a
new boost to the negotiation process.
The paper went on to say that the results of the talks have so
far been inconclusive for Iran and the EU trio. It has become
clear that Iran's undeclared nuclear activities have been
peaceful and that Iran will not forego its rights as enumerated
in international nuclear treaties and, of course, favors talks.
On the other hand, after two years of talks the Europeans
proved that Iran's suspicions that they wanted to deny Iran its
right to possess the nuclear fuel cycle were true, according to
the daily.
The EU trio did not successfully respond to the international
challenge because they deferred to the United States 'demands
over the interests of the great and powerful European Union, a
move which led to differences between EU members and the
isolation of the trio during the recent meeting of the IAEA
Board of Governors, added the daily.
EU Foreign Policy Chief Javier Solana's walkout from the
Iran-EU talks and the recent announcement by the EU3 countries
that they are unified in their position are further proof of
this state of affairs.
The continuation of talks is essential and Iran has been a
pioneer in breaking the impasse in the talks by issuing this
declaration and through the presentation of President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad's nuclear initiative, according to which foreign
companies have been invited to participate in the production of
nuclear fuel in Iran, said the daily.
Although the recent remarks of the EU3 ambassadors to Tehran
contained streaks of greed, they have no other option other than
negotiation, wrote the daily.
On the other hand, in an unusual step, said the paper, Article
5 of the recent IAEA Board of Governors resolution on Iran's
nuclear program called on the Islamic Republic to return to the
negotiations.
The daily stressed that the failure of the West to reach a
consensus against Iran, the differences in the European Union,
and the recent changes on the Board of Governors have made
negotiations the best solution for all sides.
The conditions for the negotiations are also important. Iran
and the EU3 have preconditions for the talks. Iran is
emphasizing the need for cooperation and interaction and also
calling for a balanced approach to rights and responsibilities
based on international nuclear regulations, said Tehran Times.
However, although the EU3 ambassadors recently said that they
are prepared for negotiations without preconditions, they have
set preconditions by asking Iran to reconsider its rejection of
the September 24 resolution and to return to the terms of the
November 2004 Paris Agreement, the daily maintained.
So, how can the negotiations be successful? First of all, the
conditions of Iran and the EU3 are incompatible. But Iran's
stances are so reasonable that the involvement of any new
negotiating partner would cause the three European states to
moderate their intransigence.
The new round of negotiations needs new proposals and new
partners because at least we have had good experiences in this
regard. The new plan for the talks should include Iran's
conditions while eliminating the policies which are unrelated to
"the objective guarantee for peaceful activities," wrote the
paper in its analysis.
In addition, it should expand the role of the IAEA, ensure that
the two sides make every effort to be understanding, flexible,
and patient, and bring other influential countries into the
negotiations, the daily analyzed, adding the commitments should
be equal for both sides.
The paper underscored that national vigilance and diplomatic
and comprehensive support are also needed.
According to the daily, Iran is prepared to consider proposals,
like the one presented by South Africa, over a limited period,
on the condition that the EU3 signs agreements guaranteeing that
Iran's nuclear rights and capabilities will not be restricted.
Successful negotiations require new proposals and new partners.
In addition to the EU3, Iran should enlist other countries as
partners so that they can hold discussions with Iran as true
representatives of the international community, Tehran Times
concluded in today's editorial.
*****************************************************************
5 MNA: New atmosphere in nuclear talks
Tehran:08:27,2005/10/14
TEHRAN, Oct. 12 (MNA) -- Tuesday’s statement by the Foreign
Ministry calling for the resumption of comprehensive talks
without preconditions was part of the active diplomacy expected
from Iran in response to recent signals by the three major
European Union countries asking Iran to open the path for talks.
It also stresses the need for the International Atomic Energy
Agency to change course from an unwise and politicized approach
and to return to a technical and legal procedure to resolve the
issue calmly.
The move also illustrates Tehran’s determination to employ all
technical, legal, and political means to facilitate the
resolution of the current problem.
It should be noted that in the defense of Iran’s national
rights in nuclear technology, there is no difference between the
recent Foreign Ministry statement and the one on August 8 which
announced Iran’s rejection of the EU trio’s unreasonable
offer of August 5 and the announcement on the resumption of work
at the Isfahan Uranium Conversion Facility under the supervision
of the IAEA. Iran issued the two statements to break the deadlock
and give a new boost to the negotiation process.
The results of the talks have so far been inconclusive for Iran
and the EU trio. It has become clear that Iran’s undeclared
nuclear activities have been peaceful and that Iran will not
forego its rights as enumerated in international nuclear treaties
and, of course, favors talks.
On the other hand, after two years of talks the Europeans proved
that Iran’s suspicions that they wanted to deny Iran its right
to possess the nuclear fuel cycle were true.
The EU trio did not successfully respond to the international
challenge because they deferred to the United States’ demands
over the interests of the great and powerful European Union, a
move which led to differences between EU members and the
isolation of the trio during the recent meeting of the IAEA Board
of Governors. EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana’s walkout
from the Iran-EU talks and the recent announcement by the EU3
countries that they are unified in their position are further
proof of this state of affairs.
The continuation of talks is essential, and Iran has been a
pioneer in breaking the impasse in the talks by issuing this
declaration and through the presentation of President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad’s nuclear initiative, according to which foreign
companies have been invited to participate in the production of
nuclear fuel in Iran.
Although the recent remarks of the EU3 ambassadors to Tehran
contained streaks of greed, they have no other option other than
negotiation.
On the other hand, in an unusual step, Article 5 of the recent
IAEA Board of Governors resolution on Iran’s nuclear program
called on the Islamic Republic to return to the negotiations. The
failure of the West to reach a consensus against Iran, the
differences in the European Union, and the recent changes on the
Board of Governors have made negotiations the best solution for
all sides.
The conditions for the negotiations are also important. Iran and
the EU3 have preconditions for the talks. Iran is emphasizing the
need for cooperation and interaction and also calling for a
balanced approach to rights and responsibilities based on
international nuclear regulations. However, although the EU3
ambassadors recently said that they are prepared for negotiations
without preconditions, they have set preconditions by asking Iran
to reconsider its rejection of the September 24 resolution and to
return to the terms of the November 2004 Paris Agreement!
So, how can the negotiations be successful?
First of all, the conditions of Iran and the EU3 are
incompatible. But Iran’s stances are so reasonable that the
involvement of any new negotiating partner would cause the three
European states to moderate their intransigence.
The new round of negotiations needs new proposals and new
partners because at least we have had good experiences in this
regard. The new plan for the talks should include Iran’s
conditions while eliminating the policies which are unrelated to
“the objective guarantee for peaceful activities”. In
addition, it should expand the role of the IAEA, ensure that the
two sides make every effort to be understanding, flexible, and
patient, and bring other influential countries into the
negotiations. Also, the commitments should be equal for both
sides. National vigilance and diplomatic and comprehensive
support are also needed.
Iran is prepared to consider proposals, like the one presented by
South Africa, over a limited period, on the condition that the
EU3 signs agreements guaranteeing that Iran’s nuclear rights
and capabilities will not be restricted. Successful negotiations
require new proposals and new partners. In addition to the EU3,
Iran should enlist other countries as partners so that they can
hold discussions with Iran as true representatives of the
international community.
MS/RS End
MNA
Photo © 2003-2005 Mehr News Agency
*****************************************************************
6 MNA: Iran’s statement on resumption of nuclear talks without preconditions
:08:27,2005/10/14
2005/10/12
TEHRAN, Oct. 12 (MNA) -- In a statement issued late on Tuesday,
the Foreign Ministry officially announced that Iran is prepared
to restart talks on its nuclear program with all IAEA members,
including the European Union big three, without any
preconditions.
Following is the text of the statement:
Welcoming the efforts of Non-Aligned Movement states to prevent
a political confrontation on the issue of Iran’s nuclear
activities and with respect for the willingness of International
Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohamed ElBaradei and the
European Union to return to the path of interaction and
negotiations, the Islamic Republic of Iran announces its
readiness to hold talks with all member states of the agency,
including the three European countries, without any
preconditions, in line with efforts to uphold the right to
develop and possess the nuclear fuel cycle within the framework
of the agency’s charter, the NPT (nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty), and the Safeguards Agreement, while observing a
balanced approach to rights and commitments, in order to
strengthen mutual cooperation with the International Atomic
Energy Agency.
In the belief that complicated international issues can be
resolved, the Islamic Republic of Iran has continued its nuclear
negotiations with the three European states over the past two
years, and, as an ultimatum and for clarification, it offered
different countries the opportunity to participate in (its)
nuclear industry, which is the highest level of transparency,
but, unfortunately, the three European countries broke off the
nuclear talks.
Since it is essential to prevent deadlock in the path of
interaction, with the desire to build confidence about the
inalienable right of the Iranian nation to conduct peaceful
nuclear activities within the framework of the international
regulations on nuclear energy, the Islamic Republic of Iran
considers pursuing talks with the three European countries
useful and welcomes it, under the current circumstances.
MS/HG
End
MNA
© 2003-2005 Mehr News Agency
*****************************************************************
7 Korea Herald: U.S. faces challenges on 3 fronts
2005.10.14
Asia is one of most puzzling concerns, Paul Kennedy says
Comparing the world's power dynamics to a chessboard, renowned
historian Paul Kennedy said yesterday that America risks being
pushed aside if it does not address imminent challenges to its
current dominant position.
America has to deal with three fronts: terrorists threatening
national security, economic rivalries and declining cultural
power in terms of global reputation.
The status that America enjoys as the undeniable super-power
today may be on the decline, Kennedy suggested, as new economic
powers move onto the chessboard, Asia in particular.
"Asia is one of the most puzzling concerns," posing military and
economic challenges to the United States, he said. China and
India both have experienced rising gross domestic product, and
want to curb U.S. naval access to Asian seas.
Paul Kennedy
Goldman Sachs' long-term financial projections conclude that by
2050, the number one world economy would be China, with the
United States second and India catching up, he noted.
"China is the largest exporter in the world. American companies
are consuming Chinese and Indian goods and outsourcing to India
for cheaper services."
An empire's power can be measured in three areas, military,
economic and political, said Kennedy, a recognized expert on
empires. His bestselling book on the rise and demise of past
great empires from 1500 to the 21st century has been subject to
controversy and high acclaim, read widely by world leaders in
the center of power.
His critical assessment of his home country, eight years after
the publication of "The Rise and Fall of Great Empires,"
therefore stirred curious and rapt attention from the Korean
audience at the IGE/Samsung Electronics Global Business Forum in
the Lotte Hotel yesterday morning.
Kennedy came here to participate in The World Knowledge Forum,
held from Oct. 10 to 12. Often grouped with historians dubbed as
"declinist" who predict the downfall of U.S. hegemony, Kennedy
is a prolific writer, columnist of various syndicates, and
history professor at Yale University. He is the author and
editor of 15 including "The Rise ..." and "Preparing for the
Twenty-First Century."
On the military front, he said, the United States has an
"imperial overstretch" - military overspending without
adjustment of its national priorities and policies, a term he
coined in his book.
"There is an increasing mismatch between U.S. commitments and
ground forces carrying out those commitments," Kennedy said,
citing examples of U.S. troop deployments in Iraq, Afghanistan,
Germany and Haiti among others.
This is why, despite having the largest defense budget in the
world, equal to the total defense budgets of 191 countries,
America is still in danger from terrorism, which Kennedy termed
"asymmetrical warfare." As the military grows bigger, terrorists
will instead attack soft targets such as civilians and embassies
"because you can't hurt America in the conventional military
form."
To address military challenges, it is important to make a
careful assessment which areas in the world are significant for
U.S. strategic power. "I would try to identify areas that are
not first-class interests but should be helped by international
agencies," he said.
With regard to the deployment of U.S. troops in Korea, however,
Kennedy said there needs to be "calibrated and measured plans"
rather than instant withdrawal, after confirming a successful
inspection of nuclear weapons in North Korea.
On the economic front, the European Union and the "BRIC's" -
Brazil, Russia, India and China - have also emerged as new
contenders whose unified efforts and individual powers threaten
to overcome the U.S. economy, which suffers from overspending in
wars and federal deficits.
The EU, acting as a unilateral power and single economic bloc,
is able to use this advantage to check U.S. economic power.
Kennedy gave examples of the EU imposing a $650 million fine on
Microsoft, and threatening to increase tariffs on exports from
U.S. states in response to a U.S. bill proposing tariffs on
steel imports from the EU.
"The United States also faces federal deficits; wider in the
past four years with the war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Hurricane
Katrina relief. These are the largest deficits ever seen in the
world," he said, pointing out that the federal government omits
from its published deficit figures its spending in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
"Louis the 14th was very economical compared to President George
Bush," he commented.
On the cultural front, which once boasted global dominance with
blue jeans, MTV, and global corporations, America has lost its
"soft power," Kennedy said. He cited the war in Iraq,
Afghanistan and images of people struggling in the wake of
Hurricane Katrina as reasons for the waning image.
"The percentage of approval of U.S. policy and the United States
has gone down, down, down," he said, referring to figures from
The Pew Foundation, an international opinion poll.
To recover its declining international reputation, Kennedy
emphasized the importance of the United States practicing "the
politics of reassurance - assuring allies that you will not
misuse your power, and create international organizations and
instruments which can contain U.S. power," he said.
If he were a policymaker, he would strive to "work in a quiet
and reassuring way to let other states know that the U.S. wants
to be cooperative and multilateral," in other words, "a team
player," Kennedy said.
This would entail revising negative policies toward
international agreements such as the boycott of the Kyoto
Protocol and the International Criminal tribunal, he said.
In a question and answer session, Kennedy was asked, "Which
nation will replace America as the next super-power?"
Jokingly, he answered, "Ireland. It has beautiful scenery, kind
people, and pubs that open all night..."
(jkwon@heraldm.com)
By Kwon Ji-young
*****************************************************************
8 Interfax China: Kim Jong-il confirms renunciation of nuclear weapons program
Moscow. October 13. (Interfax) - North Korean leader Kim Jong-il
has confirmed the understandings reached at the fourth round of
six-sided talks to settle the nuclear problem on the Korean
peninsula, Russian Presidential Envoy to the Far Eastern federal
district Konstantin Pulikovsky told Interfax on Wednesday.
"I met Kim Jong-il and the North Korean leader clearly confirmed
his country''s renunciation of the development of nuclear
weapons," Pulikovsky said on his return from festivities marking
the 60th anniversary of the Korean Workers'' Party.
"Kim confirmed all the understandings reached at the six-nation
talks. In his opinion, one should already be speaking of the
implementation of these commitments by all sides," Pulikovsky
said.
Asked about Kim''s health the envoy said: "He looks perfect, he
is lively and joyful."
Practical aspects of economic cooperation between Russia and
North Korea were discussed during the visit, he said. "We
discussed projects in the coal and metal industries," he said.
2005-10-14 12:50:03
1991-2005 Interfax Information Service. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
9 [NukeNet] Urge Congress to Stop Funding Dangerous Nuclear
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2005 16:39:51 -0700
X-Temp-Whitephrase: YES Nuclear
X-Temp-Blocklink: YES http:// capwiz
X-Spamprobe: ham-extreme * 0.0001999 OK
NukeNet Anti-Nuclear Network (nukenet@energyjustice.net)
Urge Congress to Stop Funding
Dangerous Nuclear Energy + Weapons
From our friends at Alliance for Nuclear Accountability:
Please forward! The House / Senate Conference Committee is not likely to
complete work until the end of October or early November, providing more
time for grassroots action!
ACTION ALERT: Urge Congress to stop dangerous nuclear weapons and energy
programs
Call your Senators and Representative at 202-224-3121 and urge them to
contact the Chairmen of the Conference Committee, Senator Pete Domenici
(R-NM) & Representative David Hobson (R-OH)
SUMMARY: Congress could save taxpayers nearly a billion dollars by simply
agreeing to cuts already made in the House and Senate versions of the FY
2006 Energy & Water spending bill (H.R. 2419). The Chairmen of the
Conference Committee have the most power over what cuts or increases
survive in the final bill. Call your legislators and urge them to tell the
Chairmen to accept the House and Senate funding cuts to nuclear weapons and
energy programs while preserving the House increases to environmental
cleanup and nuclear warhead dismantlement.
TIMING: Valid for the month of October, 2005.
BACKGROUND
Differences between the House and Senate versions of the Energy & Water
spending bill must be worked out by a joint House-Senate Conference
Committee. With the deficit over $330 billion, it is imperative that
Congress approve the $1 billion in cuts to nuclear weapons and energy
programs that were adopted earlier this year.
Budget cuts that we support include:
* $85 million for the Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative, a dangerous and
expensive return to REPROCESSING nuclear waste.
* $74 million from the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository;
* $303 million for plutonium fuel fabrication (MOX), a commercial reactor
fuel;
* $7.6 million for a new plutonium bomb plant to mass-produce nuclear bomb
triggers;
* $4 million for research into a nuclear bunker buster that has the
potential of a million casualties but would be unable to penetrate many of
the deepest targets;
* $25 million to increase the readiness to resume underground nuclear testing;
* $146 million for constructing the National Ignition Facility for nuclear
weapons research;
Budget increases we support include:
* $115 million to dismantle nuclear warheads as pledged by the President
following the Moscow Treaty;
* $190 million to the environmental cleanup budget for sites to adhere to
legal obligations for cleanup of contamination from U.S. nuclear weapons
production.
Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, 202.544.0217
You can also send a letter to your members of congress by going to the
following links:
Nuclear Age Peace Foundation has posted the alert on Capwiz (which has
already generated over 1,000 messages) at:
http://capwiz.com/wagingpeace/mail/oneclick_compose/?alertid=8067771
Working Assets has posted a similar alert on its Act for Change site (which
has already generated over 11,650 messages) at
http://www.workingforchange.com/activism/action.cfm?itemid=19499
A postcard version of the alert is attached, which can be copied, cut and
distributed at local events. The alert is posted online at
http://www.ananuclear.org/action.html
See ANAs radioactive pork report at
http://www.ananuclear.org/topten2005.html
See sign-on letter from 44 national and local groups to Energy & Water
Conferees at
http://ananuclear.org/E%26Wletteroct305.html
_______________________________
This Alert originated with:
Jim Bridgman, Program Director
Alliance for Nuclear Accountability
322 4th Street, NE, WDC, 20002
202-544-0217 x3
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10 Newsday.com: There's no rebottling the nuclear genie
[James P. Pinkerton]
Sixty years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the specter of atomic
power hovers over us.
Nukes haunt our past, they loom large in our present, and they
are destined to loom even larger in our future - fueling our
industries, as well as our fears.
Two different Nobel Prizes just announced bespeak this nuclear
omnipresence.
Last week the Nobel Peace Prize went to Mohamed ElBaradei,
director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
ElBaradei, of course, became famous three years ago when he
disputed the Bush administration's claims about Iraqi weapons of
mass destruction. No doubt anti-Americanism helped inspire the
Nobel Committee to bestow the prize on him. But the committee
also stipulated that the prize was going to the IAEA as an
institution. And that's an endorsement for the agency's official
mandate: "to promote safe, secure and peaceful nuclear
technologies."
And on Monday the Nobel Prize in economics went to Thomas
Schelling and Robert Aumann, both of whom advanced "game theory"
- a math-based approach to clarifying the choices that
individuals and countries face - and applied it to a variety of
situations, most notably the use or nonuse of nuclear weapons.
Many people yearn, to be sure, for the abolition of the atomic
bomb, but harder heads agree that the best we can hope for is a
logical system of nuclear controls.
As for nuclear weapons, the logic is increasingly pretzelizing
- and proliferating. The U.S. seems destined to fail in its
effort to peacefully persuade North Korea and Iran from moving
ahead with their robust nuclear programs. Other countries, too,
are thought to be developing covert programs. From their point
of view, why shouldn't they? The only reason Pakistan, for
example, gets any respect around the world is because of its
huge atomic arsenal.
But in addition to military power, four other factors are
combining to push the planet in a more nuclear direction as an
alternative to continued dependence on fossil fuels. First and
most obvious is the concern over record-high oil prices, which
infuriates rich countries and further impoverishes poor
countries. Second, nations worry about their strategic
vulnerability, because so much oil flows through the war-wracked
Persian Gulf. Third, many countries fear pumping additional
money into, say, Saudi Arabia, so that the sheiks can pump
additional money into Islamic radicalism. And fourth, there's
the widespread sentiment that global warming is linked to
increased carbon dioxide emissions.
That's why nuclear power is on the verge of a big comeback.
China is planning for 60 new nuclear plants. Last month in New
York City Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called for
accelerating the use of nuclear power. In one of the few
instances in which an American official has had anything nice to
say about France, she noted the French get 80 percent of their
electricity from nukes - the figure for the U.S. is a paltry 20
percent.
Moreover, just Tuesday, Prime Minister Tony Blair urged his
fellow Britons to keep "an open mind" about nuclear power. Blair
has become increasingly skeptical about the political
feasibility of limits on CO2 emissions, as mandated by the Kyoto
Treaty, which expires in 2012. So nukes offer him a "third way"
between unworkable caps and unlimited CO2 output.
Still, the close connection between nuclear power and nuclear
weapons is a linkage that's yet to be broken. For now, nuclear
energy is the genie whose magic can be used either to create or
to destroy. Just as Arab fables are full of the paradoxical
consequences of being granted one's wish - for example, the
wisher gets eternal life but not eternal youth - so nukes seem
destined to be both promising and problematic.
The genie is out of the bottle. So even as some of the world's
finest minds are being rewarded for their efforts to harness it
for good, other fine but fearsome minds are eager to unleash it
for pure lethal evil.
James P. Pinkerton's e-mail address is pinkerto@ix.netcom.com.
Email: pinkerto@ix.netcom.com
Copyright 2005 Newsday Inc.
*****************************************************************
11 Corvallis Gazette-Times: Workshop covers nuclear weapons
[gazettetimes.com]
Last modified Wednesday, October 12, 2005 10:32 PM PDT
By the Gazette-Times
ALBANY — Ira Shorr, national field director of Physicians for
Social Responsibility, will conduct a two-hour workshop
Wednesday at Linn-Benton Community College as part of The
Nagasaki Project.
The workshop runs from noon to 2 p.m. in the College Center
Board Rooms, 6500 Pacific Blvd. S.W.
Shorr will explore topics including nuclear dangers, terrorism,
U.S. foreign policy, and citizen action.
This event is sponsored by the LBCC Institute for Peace and
Justice and is free.
For more information, contact Doug Clark at 917-4557 or
doug.clark@linnbenton.edu.
Subscribe now
Copyright © 2005 • Lee
*****************************************************************
12 INTERVIEW: GWOT - Legal Nonsense
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2005 16:40:05 -0700
X-Temp-Whitephrase: YES Nuclear
X-Spamprobe: ham-extreme * 0.0001068 OK
NukeNet Anti-Nuclear Network (nukenet@energyjustice.net)
Francis A. Boyle
Law Building
504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA
217-333-7954 (voice)
217-244-1478 (fax)
fboyle@law.uiuc.edu
(personal comments only)
-----Original Message-----
From: professors_for_peace@yahoogroups.com
[mailto:professors_for_peace@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Boyle, Francis
Sent: Thursday, October 13, 2005 9:14 AM
To: professors_for_peace@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [P_F_P] INTERVIEW: GWOT - Legal Nonsense
Francis A. Boyle
Law Building
504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA
217-333-7954 (voice)
217-244-1478 (fax)
fboyle@law.uiuc.edu
(personal comments only)
Legal Nonsense: The War on Terror and its Grave
Implications for National and International Law
An Interview with Prof. Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D.
In yOUR RECEnt interview with Bill O'Reilly, he said that we had
the right to roll into Afghanistan essentially (and simply) because bin
Laden is a bad guy, and the Afghans were not cooperating. Do you see
our refusal to make a traditional declaration of war against Afghanistan as
a matter of convenience? Does it get us off the hook, morally and legally,
from
having to obey the normal rules of how wars are conducted and declared
between one state and another?
FB: I think they had already planned to go to war against Afghanistan
beforehand, and it is abundantly clear from the so-called offer made by
President Bush to the Afghan government that it was not really made in
good faith. They were looking for a pretext, they got it, and they went to
war.
LID: Do you think they would have been caught off guard if Afghanistan
had given way on all their demands?
FB: It was reported on CounterPunch.org that they did, in fact, offer to
turn over bin Laden, but this offer was never followed up. It is clear that
bin Laden was a pretext, and 9/11 was a pretext. They needed a pretext to
go to war against Afghanistan and Iraq, and they created the conditions to
make it possible. It also seems to me that they knew the 9/11 attacks were
going to happen, but that's another story.
LID: Indeed. There's a lot about the mainstream story of 9/11 that doesn't
make sense, but that is, as you say, another story. What struck us, as all
this unfolded, was how non-traditional our approach to the whole thing
was. They could have made an argument to make a real declaration of war
25 thE EDitORs' glOss: Article I.8 of the Constitution gives Congress
the power to "constitute Tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court . . .
define and punish . . . Offenses against the Law of Nations . . . and make
Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water." But on November 13,
2001, President Bush issued a "Military Order" granting himself the power
to detain and try by "military commission" - for "violations of the laws
of war and other applicable laws" - anyone he determines is or was in al-
Qaeda, "engaged in, aided or abetted, or conspired to commit, [undefined]
acts of international terrorism," or "knowingly harbored one or more"
individuals in these categories. As the Order was developed, the usual
suspects (David Addington, vice president's counsel; John Yoo, Justice
Department lawyer; Timothy Flanigan, former deputy White House
counsel) overruled military, State, and Justice Department experts - who
wanted criminal or courts-martial proceedings for 9/11 and "war on terror"
(GWOT) suspects - because GWOT intelligence might be hard to
get if defense lawyers and due-process got in the way ("After Terror, a
Secret Rewriting of Military Law," New York Times, October 24, 2004).
The legality of so removing individuals from the criminal or military
justice system was challenged by attorneys on behalf of Salim Hamdan.
D. C. District Court Judge James Robertson stopped the commissions in
November 2004 (see pp. 480-2). The government appealed and pressed
ahead, an insider blaming Cheney for its intransigence (New York Times,
March 27, 2005: "Cheney is still driving a lot of this"). Meanwhile, some
of the commission's defense lawyers and even military prosecutors complained
of its "marginal" cases and "half-assed effort" (AFP, August 1, 2005).
But on July 15 - in spite of 17 "friend of the court" briefs on Hamdan's
side
from retired JAGs, generals, and admirals; a Constitutional historian at
the Library of Congress; and numerous international-, national-security-,
and military-law academics and lawyers - the government won a reversal
from a D. C. Appeals Court three-judge panel; it argued that the "Geneva
Convention cannot be judicially enforced."
One of the three judges met the President for an interview the day before,
and on July 20 he was nominated to the Supreme Court. It might be
coincidental that John Roberts was tapped for the Court five days after
he joined the decision that the President's "construction and application
of treaty provisions is entitled to great weight." Alternatively, Bruce
Shapiro, writing in The Nation (July 20, 2005), suggests that Roberts's
interview with the President was his oral exam, and the Hamdan decision
was the "essay question." Evidently he passed.
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[ 3 5 ]
legal nonsense
against Afghanistan, but it seems to us that this approach was intentionally
avoided.
FB: I think Bush did seek a declaration along the lines of what Roosevelt
got from Congress on December 8, 1941. The reason he sought it was that
it would have made him a constitutional dictator. Fortunately, Congress
did not give Bush a formal declaration of war, but he did try. Had he gotten
one all the provisions of the U.S. Code would have applied, which give the
President sweeping powers during a state of declared war.
LID: So you say "fortunately" because of the powers of the U.S. Code that
would have been granted to the President?
FB: The book Presidential Power by Arthur Miller explains how, with a
formal declaration of war by Congress, as happened in December 1941 and
also in WWI, the President essentially becomes a constitutional dictator.
He can pretty much do what he wants.
LID: That's interesting. Although there are negative ramifications for
how the prisoners are treated in an undeclared war, it sounds like one of
the "benefits" has been that at least we avoided having a dictatorship on
our
hands in America - or at least more of one than we currently suffer.
FB: It could have been a lot worse. Senator Byrd pointed out that the
authorization that the President did get was not a formal declaration of
war, but rather a limited authorization and subject to all the requirements
of the War Powers resolution. He was not given a blank check.
LID: Do you know how well he did in meeting any of those
requirements?
FB: Ha! That's a good one. The problem is that the President does not care.
He believes clearly that he is above the Constitution of the United States.
He has made it clear that he is not limited by anyone. But the fact remains
that it is up to Congress to enforce its own war powers. The Constitution,
Article I, Section 8, gives the power to Congress to go to war, not to the
President. It is up to Congress to enforce this in the first instance, and
ultimately for the American people to enforce this in default by Congress.
This is why I started my campaign for impeachment. I called Ramsey Clark
to discuss starting an impeachment campaign against the President over
the war in Afghanistan. He felt that the public support was not there at
that time, because the President had been very successful in brainwashing
the American people into supporting what he was doing. But, in August
2002 Cheney began making his speeches against Iraq and the situation
and atmosphere began to change. It appeared to be the same scenario they
had pursued in Gulf War I under Bush Senior.
LID: In following your impeachment efforts, we saw that you are waiting
on an equivalent to Congressman Henry B. Gonzalez (D-Tex.), who - I
think many Americans don't know this - worked with you to attempt an
impeachment of Bush 41 over the first Gulf War.
FB: We are pressuring Congress. We need one member of Congress to
propose a bill. Congressman Conyers did have a discussion on March 13,
2003, with 40 or 50 of his top advisors. He called Ramsey and me, inviting
us to state the case for putting in immediate bills of impeachment against
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft to try to head off the war. We did
the best we could. The merits were debated quite extensively. The people
there did not really disagree with us on the merits of impeachment
but rather on the political practicality. John Podesta was there on behalf
of the Democratic National Committee arguing that proposing a bill of
impeachment might hurt the Democratic candidate in 2004. That is where
we stand now. I think that advice was wrong. But I did not argue the point.
I just argued the constitutional merits of impeachment. No one really
disagreed
with that. They were merely concerned with how it would play out
in the November 2004 elections. Of course the Democrats were clobbered,
but Ramsey and I agreed before the election to push forward, and that is
what we are doing.
LID: Do you have any hopefuls in terms of the Congressional sponsorship
that you need?
FB: Any one of them could do it. It's up to the people to pressure their
representatives
to put one in. But with the offensive, the destruction, and the killing
in Fallujah - this is a crime against humanity. We have already lost some
1800 military people thanks to Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others. It seems
to me that we owe it to those fallen troops to file bills of impeachment,
and to
make it clear that we are going to try to hold these war criminals to
account
not only for the dead U.S. soldiers, but also for the more than 100,000 dead
Iraqis. If we do not act, this war is going to get well and truly out of
control.
General Shinseki publicly testified that we need several hundred thousand
troops to occupy Iraq. He has been proven right. The troops there are
sitting
ducks, and what we need to do is get our troops out of harms way.
[ 3 ]
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[ 3 ]
legal nonsense
LID: On another subject - but speaking of resisting war criminals and
their crimes - we understand that you were able to act as counsel for 28-
year-old former Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia, who was sentenced on May 21,
2004, to one year in prison for refusing to return to fight in Iraq.
FB: That's right. He was the first resister. He saw everything, and was
even asked to participate in the torture being conducted. He came back
home on leave and after much soul-searching realized he could not continue
in good conscience to participate in an illegal war. He filed for
conscientious
objector status as a result. He was court marshaled for desertion!
Though he was the first to do so, he is unlikely to be the last. The
Pentagon decided to make an example of him, to make a point to the rest
of the troops who are beginning to get very restless. He is, of course, a
hero, the first Amnesty-International-declared prisoner of conscience in
America linked to this war.
LID: A couple of thoughts on the legal background. We came across a
comment made by Dr. Elizabeth Wilmshurst in England, who as you know
resigned her post as deputy legal adviser to the Foreign & Commonwealth
Office in the U.K. over the illegality of the Iraq war. She said, "lawyers
hate
the phrase 'war on terror.'" Do you share that sentiment?
FB: If you see my book, Destroying World Order, there is a whole chapter
entitled "Preserving the Rule of Law in the War on International Terrorism."
It is mere propaganda, a slogan that the Bush people have come up with to
justify aggression, their own terrorism, war crimes, and torture elsewhere
round the world. There is no generally accepted definition of terrorism. In
practical terms, anyone who opposes what the U.S. does becomes "a
terrorist."
The USSR did much the same thing after they invaded Afghanistan.
Powerful governments as a rule call their opponents "terrorist," thereby
seeking some kind of "moral high ground."
LID: For the Soviets, Osama bin Laden would have been a "terrorist
extraordinaire" when he was involved in resisting their efforts to take over
Afghanistan. But now the shoe is on the other foot.
FB: Let's be clear about all this. Bin Laden is our guy. The Carter
administration,
as well as the Reagan people, worked hand-in-glove with bin
Laden and the CIA. That's where he and al-Qaeda came from! As long as
he was fighting the Soviet Union, he was "a freedom fighter," part of the
Mujahideen. But once these Islamic warriors turned against the U.S. and
its view of the world - assuming that they ever believed it - they became
"terrorists" overnight. These terms are devoid of any substance. They are
designed, quite simply, to squash dissent. We used to throw around the
term "Communist" a lot in the old days, even when the accused were very
far from being such. It was a convenient way of ridding oneself of problems
through the use of the smear technique.
LID: You mentioned that one of the real problems making this war on
terror so vague, so sweeping and so meaningless - to the point of allowing
it to encompass just about anything the Bushites want it to - is that all
the normal protections afforded to people on the opposite side of an armed
force can be twisted, manipulated, or just dispensed with.
FB: It's dehumanizing to Arabs, Blacks, Muslims, Asians, Coloreds. We
cannot forget the racist element of the war here, very much like Vietnam.
In Vietnam, we had to dehumanize them in order to kill them - so we
called them "gooks." Now instead of looking at these people as human
beings, with grievances and a cause that they have not made known to our
people but might like to, we call them "terrorists." We dehumanize them
in order to make it easier for the American people to do terrible things to
them that we otherwise would not be doing in all likelihood. I doubt
seriously
that we would be treating white Christians or white Jews this way.
These terrorists, as we call them, are throwaway people.
LID: Of course in Serbia and Kosovo, it was the other way around. It was
white Christians who were being attacked in another illegal and unjust war
for their alleged crimes against Muslims, never mind that the faction that
we supported were real terrorists, i.e., the KLA. In that light it simply
seems
like the terrorists are always whomever we've chosen to oppose in whatever
the conflict de jour is. Now speaking of Kosovo - just to digress for a
second
- our sense is that the legal background for the assault on Serbia was just
as
specious as that used in the war against Iraq.
FB: I agree with you. In fact, in that same book mentioned above there
is a chapter on humanitarian intervention in which I also condemn the
arguments used to justify the Serbia intervention.
LID: Now there may have been some argument that the Serbia bombing
was a "humanitarian effort" to protect Muslims and Kosovars, though we
would agree with you that it was an entirely bogus pretext. But that shows,
doesn't it, that we will pick up whatever flag is useful - "humanitarian
aid,"
"WMDs," "terrorism" - to accomplish our other aims?
[ 3 ]
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[ 3 9 ]
legal nonsense
FB: All of these wars, Afghanistan and Iraq - and our less well-known
military interventions elsewhere of late - have one thing in common: oil
and natural gas. That is what all this "imperial hubris" is about. We are
running out of these things, things so vital to our economy. The Pentagon
knows it, and so they are scrambling to get whatever oil and natural gas
they can find - whether it's in Central Asia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Columbia,
Jibouti, or the Suez Canal. They are now planning military intervention
on the west coast of Africa because oil and gas have been found there. If
you look at all they are doing - not what they are saying, but what they are
doing - they are deploying forces all over the world where there is oil and
gas to be had. There is no deployment, however urgent the situation, where
there is no oil and gas.
LID: Let's give some thought, if we may, to the Guantánamo detainees.
One thing that has struck us as problematic - and it goes all the way back
to 9/11 - is that, in the context of the "war on terror," Uncle Sam is
making
an informal declaration of war against irregular forces all over the globe.
Anyone with a gun who does not sympathize with the American way of
life, or the politics of the government, is automatically deemed "an enemy."
Correct us if we are wrong, but under the normal process of declaring war,
the opposing sides' troops are recognized as lawful combatants who are
guaranteed certain rights. Here, where we are picking a fight with all the
irregular forces of the world, they are immediately deprived of their rights
- or so it seems to us. It appears that much of the Geneva Conventions have
been set aside and that POW rights have effectively been ignored and nulli-
fied. If this is so, it seems to be the height of hypocrisy.
FB: It is most definitely the case. What that is going to do is react to the
disadvantage of our own men and women in the armed forces, because
what we have done is to send a message that we don't care about the Geneva
Convention - and that can only expose our armed forces to grave harm
and danger. Battle is bad enough, but if they get wounded or captured the
only protection our people have is the Geneva Convention. If we are now
saying we just don't care about any of this in Afghanistan, Iraq, Gitmo,
then there is no kind of protection for our armed forces. Even Secretary
of State Powell pointed this out in a memo to Bush. I regret to say you
will likely see outright savagery being inflicted on our armed forces - and
certainly to the extent that we are inflicting it on our opponents. The U.S.
Marine filmed shooting dead a wounded resistance fighter in a mosque
in Fallujah has set a dangerous precedent. It says, in effect, that if you
are
an Iraqi fighting the occupation and you are caught, you are likely to get
your head blown off. What hope, then, is there for wounded or captured
American troops in Iraqi hands?
LID: A lot of media coverage has been given to the tribunals in Gitmo,
variously
termed "Combatant Status Review Tribunals" and "Administrative
Review Boards" - not to mention the infamous military commissions
established
under the President's Military Order of November 13, 2001. The
heated discussion is all about whether or not these tribunals are sufficient
to provide for the rights of the detainees. Our sense is that they don't
come
close, because of clear obligations on the part of those doing the detaining
(i.e., us) to provide for a Geneva Article 5 tribunal, which passes a
judgment
on whether people should be held as POWs or not - and until those
tribunals are conducted, the detainees are supposed to be presumed to be
POWs and afforded POW rights. Something our government has conspicuously
not done.
FB: These kangaroo courts - I'm talking "military commissions" now
- were opposed by the professional military lawyers in the Judge Advocate
General's (JAG) office at the Pentagon. They were opposed by the
professional
international lawyers in the State Department. The only lawyers who
supported these kangaroo courts were right wing, war-mongering lawyers
that inhabited the office of White House counsel Alberto Gonzales - now
attorney general - and John Ashcroft at the Department of "Injustice." That
is to say, none of the professionals who know anything at all about human
rights or the laws of war. As I said, even the professional military lawyers
were against these courts. As you know, in late November 2004 the federal
district judge in Washington, D.C., struck the whole thing down, though
in July 2005 it was rehabilitated by an appeals court for the D.C. circuit
in a frankly ridiculous decision. Though in the district case - Hamdan v.
Rumsfeld - the judge applies the law as it should have been applied in the
first place.1
LID: What are the details of these recent decisions?
FB: The first decision simply struck down the kangaroo court procedure
down at Gitmo. That decision was then overturned on the basis that the
Geneva Conventions are not "self-executing," though honestly, what good
1. See the discussion of military commissions and related tribunals in
chapter 29 and its
postscripts, on pp. 443-489 of the present volume.-Ed.
[ 3 0 ]
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[ 3 1 ]
legal nonsense
is a right if it cannot be protected in the courts? When the Department of
Justice first made the appeal, they were probably hopeful that they'd get it
to the Supreme Court, which the Bushites control; now it looks like that
might happen, as the attorneys for Hamdan have themselves appealed. Do
remember, by the way, that it was the five Republican justices that gave the
presidency to Bush Jr. in 2000 to begin with, and started this whole
problem.
After that happened the Democrats were derelict in their duty by not
putting in Bills of Impeachment against those five Supreme Court Justices.
They rolled over and played dead, just as Gore and Kerry have done. What
good are they?
LID: On a side (but related) note, one of the pretexts we have heard that
was supposed to have justified our aggression in Afghanistan is the phrase,
"Afghanistan is a failed state." It appears everywhere in the political
literature
on the subject and it seems to say that, as a consequence, the norms
of international law between one sovereign State and another simply don't
apply. Would you say that is gibberish?
FB: Yes, it means nothing. It's just a category, a description, pulled out
of thin air and developed.
LID: The Afghans don't see things the way we do, so they can be dismissed
as a nonentity, right?
FB: Yes. In fact we were actually negotiating with the Taliban government
in Afghanistan during the Clinton administration about the construction
of a huge oil pipeline through their territory, and it appears that
Clinton was about to establish diplomatic relations with them.
LID: So, Afghanistan being a "failed state" did not impede that process!
FB: Not at all. All we cared about was getting into that Central Asian oil
field and raking in big money.
LID: On the legal question of one sovereign state versus another, many
commentators and public figures - Robin Cook, Kofi Annan, Elizabeth
Wilmshurst, and yourself to name but a few - have come out in black and
white saying the aggression against Iraq was illegal. This is also the
opinion
of some hundreds of international lawyers around the globe that have made
statements on various occasions.1 Even Richard Perle conceded that
international
law would have "gotten in the way" of the Iraq invasion, had it been
1. Vide supra, p. 368, note 2.-Ed.
obeyed. What this means, at least from our point of view, is that we deposed
by force of arms a legitimate government, recognized as such throughout the
world, and that consequently the government that was in place is still the
legitimate government at least de jure if not de facto. Do you agree?
FB: Yes. Under the laws of war as codified in U.S. Army Field Manual
2710, we did indeed depose the legitimate government of Iraq. The U.S.
and Britain are - still - what is known as the "belligerent occupants" of
Iraq. The so-called Allawi government was nothing more than a puppet
government. But the laws of war do not prohibit us from establishing a
puppet government if that is what we want as occupiers. Again, under the
above law, we are responsible for the behavior of that puppet government.
We have displaced the legitimate government of Iraq and have imposed a
puppet government - twice. What happens now depends on if and when
the belligerent occupation by the U.S. and U.K. ends, and if the Iraqi
people
themselves have an opportunity to reestablish their own government.
It's important to keep this in mind, despite all the talk about the transfer
of sovereignty, democracy, and elections. That's all nonsense. The
sovereignty
resides in the hands of the Iraqi people. They never lost it in the first
place. It was never ours to transfer. A belligerent occupant does not obtain
sovereignty. Sovereignty remains with people and with the state that is
occupied. We never had anything to transfer to Allawi. He remained at all
times the puppet head of a puppet government. The January 2005 elections
did nothing but establish another puppet government, no matter who did
or did not participate, and in what numbers.
LID: And any so-called trial of former members of the legitimate government
conducted under the auspices of this puppet government - particularly
if the occupying forces are still there - is very problematic as well.
FB: They are simply more kangaroo court proceedings. Clearly there
are procedures. Saddam is a prisoner of war. Prisoners of war under the
Third Geneva Convention can be tried for the commission of war crimes,
but they are subject to all the protections of the third Geneva Convention.
In this situation Saddam would be entitled to a trial in the form of a
courtmartial
under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Clearly he will not get
that. He will get a kangaroo summary procedure and then they will take
him out and kill him. Several of the so-called Iraqi human rights people
involved in setting up these kangaroo courts have already said as much.
Saddam will not get a fair trial. Of that there can be very little doubt.
[ 3 2 ]
boyle
LID: Are there any other important points of which we should be
aware?
FB: Before the start of the war against Iraq, President Putin of Russia
and Walter Cronkite both publicly stated that if Bush went to war against
Iraq, he could set off a third world war - and that is the situation we find
ourselves in now. This is an extremely volatile area of the world.
Two-thirds
of the world's energy resources are there - the very thing that we are going
after. That that is what we are doing is very clear to Russia, Europe,
China,
India, Pakistan. It's very clear we are going all out for the oil and the
gas
in order to control the future of the world's economy. The longer we, the
American people, let this go on, the more we risk a wider regional war that
could easily degenerate into a world war.
LID: Rumsfeld's favorite words for the Iraqi resistance is "extremist,"
"terrorist,"
etc. We assume there is no question that the Iraqis who are defending
themselves from occupation have every legitimate right to do so, regardless
of what outside influence there may or may not be in Iraq?
FB: This is clearly an illegal and criminal war being waged by Bush Jr.
and Tony Blair. So, of course, the Iraqi people have a right to resist an
illegal,
criminal war under international law. That's the danger in all of this.
Hitler got away with marching into Austria and Czechoslovakia, but then
he went into Poland and that led to the start of WWII. Here we have Bush
who has waged two wars now, in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is now threatening
Syria, Iran, and North Korea. We have a very similar situation here.
Either the current situation is brought under control, or they launch one
more aggressive war. That could start a chain reaction leading to a regional
war - and perhaps to another world war.
LID: Let's hope we can reverse the tide before that happens.
FB: I think we have to, and that is why Ramsey and I are pressing ahead
with impeachment. Remember, and this is very important, Nixon won a
landslide victory against McGovern in 1972. Massachusetts was against
him, but the rest of the country supported him. Yet he and Agnew were
out of office less than two years later. So, that is the scenario that I
think
we must pursue with respect to Messrs. Bush and Cheney.
www.informationclearinghouse.info
www.einswine.com
5 6
Francis A. Boyle
Law Building
504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA
217-333-7954 (voice)
217-244-1478 (fax)
fboyle@law.uiuc.edu
(personal comments only)
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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13 Times of India: Atoms For Peace-
S Z YAGHOUBI
[ WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2005 12:00:00 AM ]
Citibank NRI Offer
The nuclear question of Iran and the Indian vote at the IAEA
have led to a healthy debate among scholars, writers, experts,
high officials, former envoys and retired military men of India.
The opponents and the supporters of the issue have, to the same
extent, contributed to the discussion.
This is the manifestation of the real and ancient democracy of
India. I believe that the West Asian countries, which belong to
a single homeland, can take steps towards more cooperation and
convergence with each other and perhaps formation of an economic
bloc in future.
Under such conditions Asia will come closer to Caucasus, Russia
and Europe. The economies of the West Asian countries are almost
complementary, and with the presence of corridors including
energy, transportation, commerce, water and electricity, in
addition to their comparative advantages, they can contribute to
such a goal.
Iran looks at its ties with countries of the region from this
point of view. During the last 200 years, Iran has not only not
threatened or attacked any country but has itself been the
target of threats and occupation.
Attacks on Iran and occupation of some parts of it by Saddam,
which took place with the help of the West and some neighboring
countries, is the last in the series of these threats.
Foreign colonial powers, by taking advantage of the weaknesses
and domestic problems of neighbours, have disintegrated some of
these countries and maintained their political influence and
military presence in others till today.
Iran with a rich culture, internal stability and national
democracy is considered to be one of the most stable countries in
the region. Most of the problems arise from the influence and
expectations of foreign powers, according to whom world energy
security is provided by their presence and not the stability of
those countries.
Iran has always striven for freeing the Persian Gulf and the West
Asian region from tension, withdrawal of foreign forces from the
region, and expansion of democracy in these countries by their
people themselves and without any bloodshed and foreign
interference.
Iran is also opposed to the arms race among the countries of the
region who belong to the same family and from this point of view,
its military expenditure in relation to its population and status
is the lowest in the world. The Friendship Pact between Iran and
India was signed in 1951, during the height of the Cold War.
In spite of the critical global situation and though Iran and
India were placed in different blocs, the two countries were
still able to strengthen their cordial relations and sign three
important documents, known as the Tehran and New Delhi
Declarations and The Roadmap for Strategic Cooperation.
Copyright © 2005 Times Internet Limited. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
14 BBC: Has the Green dream wilted?
Last Updated: Thursday, 13 October 2005
By Sam Wilson BBC News
[Joschka Fischer of Germany's Green Party]
Europe's most famous Green politician is no longer in office
Only half a decade ago the future of Europe looked greener than
ever before.
Green parties were part of the governments of five European
countries, pushing the environment closer to the forefront of
policy-making.
"Some had the impression that a luminous sunflower was hanging in
the grey sky," wrote Juan Behrend, the former secretary general
of the Green federation in the European parliament.
But that era is now over.
With the cementing of a grand coalition in Germany this week,
Greens have lost their last toehold in western European
government, and their most recognisable figure, former German
Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, is out of office.
And this at a time, says Mr Behrend, when "the current climate is
asking for Green politics".
Having been ejected from government in Finland, France, Italy,
Belgium and now Germany, it would be no surprise if the Greens'
optimism, like the imaginary sunflower, had wilted.
"These are setbacks, clearly, in every case. Greens are not now
shaping policy," says Hubert Kleinert, once a German Green MP,
now a political scientist.
RISE OF THE GREENS
Greens were part o national governments in... Finland, 1995
Italy, 1996 France, 1997 Germany, 1998 Belgium, 1999
"During the last five years there have been more defeats than
victories. And I think this [German result] is the biggest one."
But Mr Behrend refuses to be downbeat.
He admits the German result is "a blow", but denies it shows
Green politics is in decline.
"Coming back to opposition is also an opportunity," he told the
BBC News website.
He points out that the Green movement was founded in local-level
activism, and its grassroots are still strong.
"We are expert at making opposition politics so I'm optimistic
we'll be able to articulate a very coherent Green policy," he
says.
Chris Rootes, professor of environmental politics at England's
University of Kent, agrees.
"Being out of government may liberate them - they were always
uncomfortable with a party [Gerhard Schroeder's SPD] with whom
they have a lot of differences," he says.
Divisive debate
The German Greens may have been leapfrogged by the liberal Free
Democrats and the new Left, but Prof Rootes points out that their
share of the vote fell only about 0.5%.
Greens have suffered across Europe, he suggests, only because
voters have turned against their socialist and social democratic
coalition allies "and [Greens] have thus far not been willing to
sustain right-wing governments".
Green politics a sustainability are not just post-materialistic
dreams Juan Behrend European Green Party co-ordinator
That ties their fortunes closely to the left, he says, as "it
does make the parties of the centre-left very dependent on the
Greens".
For Prof Kleinert, being out of power gives greens a chance to
rethink their allegiances, including the possibility of entering
coalitions with centre-right parties like Germany's CDU.
It could be a divisive debate, as "the feeling of the Greens'
leaders is surely more to the middle, but the feeling of the base
is more left-wing".
Ideas 'entrenched'
But other commentators say there is no need for Greens to panic.
They are part of Romano Prodi's left-wing alliance expected to
challenge hard in Italy's elections next year, and are likely to
form part of the left-wing bloc competing in France in 2007.
"Greens have shown they can be serious politicians, can hold
cabinet office and can be trusted, and these will count if their
time comes again," says Dr Neil Carter of the University of York.
[Greenpeace activists dressed as trees]
Green activists may have different political aims to the
leadership
But what about environmental policies? With no Green ministers
now at cabinet tables, or at EU ministerial meetings, will there
be no-one to push ecological considerations?
The Green Party in Germany was instrumental in forming that
country's policy of shutting down nuclear energy, and its huge
increase in the use of renewable energy. Are these achievements
now at risk?
Prof Rootes thinks not, as these ideas are now "entrenched" in
the political mainstream.
Mr Behrend says that people across Europe realise the importance
of environmental protection, and they will not allow any
political party to neglect that in its policy making.
"Green politics and sustainability are not just
post-materialistic dreams," he says. "They are hard politics that
we're going to have to face in the coming years."
*****************************************************************
15 AU ABC: MPs fail to support council nuclear-free zone call.
13/10/2005.
Last Update: Thursday, October 13, 2005. 10:25am (AEST)
Western Australian Opposition MPs have rejected calls for local
councils to declare themselves nuclear-free zones.
Albany MLA Peter Watson wants local governments to amend their
town planning schemes to prohibit nuclear activity.
His call is in response to the Liberal Party declaring its
support for uranium mining in WA.
The Liberal Member for Roe, Graham Jacobs, says his position on
nuclear-free zones depends on what Mr Watson's definition of
nuclear activity is.
"I would certainly oppose and reject any proposal to establish
a nuclear waste dump in Western Australia or the electorate of
Roe or anywhere else for that matter in Western Australia," he
said.
"So if that's the sort of nuclear activity he's talking about I
would oppose that. Now, if you're talking, though, about uranium
mining, that's another issue and that's not nuclear activity."
The Member for Stirling, the Nationals' Terry Redman, says he
will not be following Mr Watson's lead by asking other councils
in his electorate to declare themselves nuclear-free.
Mr Redman says it is important that there is a community debate
on uranium mining and nuclear activities.
"There's a whole heap of hype out there and there are a number
of people who are not informed about the real issues and I think
it's important that we do promote that to the community before
people make a decision on these sorts of things," he said.
© 2005 ABC| Privacy Policy
*****************************************************************
16 GREENPEACE UK: Power to the people: decentralised energy not new nuclear plants
With the pressure on from the nuclear lobby to build a series of
ten new reactors in the UK, the Environmental Audit Committee of
the House of Commons is holding an inquiry into future
electricity production in the UK. The inquiry,
Keeping the Lights On: Nuclear Power, Renewables and Climate
Change, is being seen by many as the preliminary to an expected
energy review in early 2006 which might result in proposals for
new nuclear power plants. In detailed evidence to the Committee,
Greenpeace has shown that a new reactor programme would:
+ be an expensive gamble on an untried and untested reactor
design which could experience generic technical failures that
disable the whole fleet;
+ add a massive 400% to the UK's stockpile of intensely hot and
highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel;
+ create 100,000 tonnes of depleted uranium waste as part of
reactor fuel processing;
+ take too long to build to reduce CO2 emissions in line with
the Government's 2020 target;
+ provide more targets for terrorists over the coming decades;
+ risk significant public opposition - for all the reason
listed above. Download part 1 of our submission to the
Environmental Audit Committee on these issues here (Adobe PDF
format).
Greenpeace has also submitted evidence on the alternative
measures that could be used to reduce CO2 emissions and provide
electricity, through renewable and rapidly progressing low-cost,
flexible decentralised energy systems.
Download part 2 of our submission to the Environmental Audit
Committee on these issues here (Adobe PDF format).
The Committee will hear oral evidence during October.
For information on nuclear power and climate change;
proliferation and civil and military nuclear technology;
decommissioning and clean up in the UK; and radioactive waste
issues, please visit the Greenpeace UK Nuclear homepage.
*****************************************************************
17 Brattleboro Reformer: VY seeks 20-year extension
October 13, 2005 Brattleboro, VT
By K. CECCAROSSI Reformer Staff
BRATTLEBORO -- Owners of Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant have
told federal regulators they will apply for a 20-year extension
on its operating license.
The news sets in motion a costly and meticulous approval
process that could take up to two years to complete, but might
not include much -- if any -- input from the people who would be
most affected by the change.
Last week, Entergy Nuclear told the Nuclear Regulatory Agency
to expect a formal application in January. Since Entergy bought
the plant in 2002, officials have discussed extending the
license for the 33-year-old reactor. It was just a matter of
when they would file.
The Nuclear Regulatory Agency maintains sole authority to
approve the request. A team of engineers will review the
environmental impact of a license extension and conduct an audit
on how well Entergy has maintained aging components of the
plant.
Nuclear watchdog groups, residents or state officials can ask
for a public hearing on the license extension, which would give
Vermonters a chance to weigh in on the issue.
But it's up to the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, a
quasi-judicial branch of the NRC, whether to grant a public
hearing. To pass muster with the board, would-be intervenors
must show they have serious concerns about the plant's extended
operation.
To date, 33 nuclear plants across the country have applied for
license extensions. The NRC has OK'd 31 of them and sent two
back for more review. Not a single application was brought to a
public hearing, according to Neil Sheehan, spokesman for the NRC.
Intervenors must provide concerns or contentions that are very
specific about plant safety; intervenors must also prove they
have good reason to be involved in the matter, he said.
"The NRC has raised the threshold so high for bringing issues
to the fore, it's almost impossible for intervention," said
Raymond Shadis, technical adviser for the nuclear watchdog group
New England Coalition.
The coalition will seek a public hearing on the license
extension. The plant has already shown signs of poor maintenance
and a deteriorating condition, Shadis said, pointing to the
April 2004 transformer fire and a July 2005 fire in the plant's
electrical yard. Both fires shut down Vermont Yankee and forced
the state's utilities to purchase power at higher costs on the
open market.
Vermont Yankee current 40-year license was issued in 1972.
About half the plant's 540-megawatt output goes to Vermont,
where it comprises about one-third of the state's power supply.
To apply for a license extension with the NRC, plant owners
must notify the agency well in advance so its small staff of
engineers can schedule the work.
In April 2003, Entergy reserved slots in January 2005 for
relicensing two of its plants. Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in
Plymouth, Mass., was identified as one. The other, until last
week, was unnamed.
Carl Crawford, a spokesman for Entergy, said there were no
other plants in Entergy's fleet competing with Vermont Yankee
for the second slot.
The Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station is almost identical to
Vermont Yankee in design; it began operating a few months after
the Vernon reactor.
Because of the similarities, Crawford said it made sense for
Entergy to pursue license extensions at both plants at the same
time to save on costs and resources for the company.
"There will be some efficiencies," he said.
But when Entergy applies for a license extension, Crawford
explained, there are always efficiencies. Where relicensing
applications have cost some plant owners between $12 million and
$15 million, Entergy has kept its costs between $10 million and
$12 million. In fact, Entergy has created a side business, where
it does relicensing work for other plants. Crawford said the
company has done about a dozen applications for its plants and
others.
"We do it cheaper," he said.
Entergy officials are not the only ones who have been making
plans for breathing more life in Vermont Yankee. When the
state's Public Service Board approved the plant's sale, it did
so with an eye on prolonged operation and designed provisions
that would give the state's ratepayers a bonus in the case of a
license extension.
Under a contract negotiated at the time of the plant's sale,
Green Mountain Power and Central Vermont Public Service Corp.
are paying between $42 and $45 per megawatt-hour, less than half
the current going rate in New England.
In the case of an extension, and increased profits for Entergy,
the sale agreement dictates that the state's utilities would
split evenly on any wholesale power contracts above $60 per
megawatt-hour, or 6 cents per kilowatt hour.
David O'Brien, commissioner of the state Department of Public
Service, said it was too early to say what position his
department would take on the proposed license extension.
But he did say if Entergy wins its extension, the state would
benefit financially.
Under that provision, the state would split evenly on any
wholesale power contracts above $60 per megawatt-hour, or 6
cents per kilowatt hour. On the New England market Tuesday,
power was selling for more than $100 per megawatt-hour, O'Brien
said.
The state has generally agreed with Entergy's requests, while
trying to extract some economic benefit for Vermont ratepayers.
The Department of Public Service supported Entergy's request to
increase its power output by 20 percent -- a request still
pending at the NRC.
This past spring, the Department of Public Service joined
Entergy in lobbying the Legislature for permission to store
high-level radioactive waste in dry casks at the plant on the
banks of the Connecticut River.
Entergy's application for dry cask storage is currently under
review by the state. Plant officials have said they designed a
dry cask storage site that could hold nuclear waste well beyond
2012, when the plant's current license is up.
Copyright ©1999-2005 New England Newspapers, Inc.,
*****************************************************************
18 Arizona Republic: Problem with Palo Verde cooling system went undetected for years
[azcentral.com]
By BOB CHRISTIE
Associated Press Writer
Oct. 13, 2005 04:16 PM
A potential problem with the emergency reactor core cooling
system at the nation's largest nuclear power plant went
undetected since it began producing power in 1986, the Nuclear
Regulatory Agency and the plant operator confirmed Thursday.
The issue was identified when engineers at the Palo Verde
Nuclear Generating Station did an analysis after NRC inspectors
raised questions at a detailed inspection early last week. The
NRC was following up to see if earlier cooling system problems
had been fixed.
The review showed the emergency cooling system may not operate
as expected to provide water to reactor cores after a small leak
in the reactor cooling lines, NRC spokesman Victor Dricks said.
The worst-case scenario of an emergency cooling system failure
is a meltdown of the reactor core and release of radioactivity
into the atmosphere. Plants have so many redundant systems,
however, that many other failures would have to occur before
that happened, nuclear experts said.
The design flaw put the plant outside of it licensing
guidelines and operator Arizona Public Service shut down the two
operating reactors immediately until a fix is put in place. The
third reactor in the complex 50 miles west of Phoenix was
already down for maintenance and refueling.
There's no estimate for when the plant will come back online.
Engineers are looking at reconfiguring the system or writing
new manual procedures to get around the problem, plant spokesman
Jim McDonald said. They also are rechecking their calculations
to see if the system may actually operate as expected.
The plant provides electricity for as many as 4 million
customers in California, Arizona, Texas and New Mexico served by
seven utility companies.
The power is cheaper than many other sources, but several power
companies say it is unclear if they'll need to raise rates to
recoup their losses.
The emergency cooling systems in each of the three units are
designed to replace water cooling the reactor cores in unusual
situations.
Earlier this year, the NRC fined the plant operator $50,000
because of another problem in a different part of the same
cooling system.
In the more recent case, pumps that provide emergency cooling
water may not sense that a storage tank is getting low on water
and switch to another source, Dricks said.
The fact the potential problem took so long to be discovered
should prompt the NRC to look at other plants and procedures,
said David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer for the Union of
Concerned Scientists, a nuclear watchdog group.
Lochbaum said the Palo Verde plant has been a "stellar"
performer until the past two years, when a series of problems
have cropped up.
"It's a fairly subtle problem, and it was a good catch by the
NRC," Lochbaum said of the current issue. "It just would have
been a great catch sooner."
---
On the Net:
APS: http://www.aps.com
Palo Verde nuclear plant at a glance
-Location: Wintersburg, Ariz., about 50 miles west of downtown
Phoenix.
-Design: Uranium-fueled, steam-electric nuclear plant using a
pressurized water reactor.
-Capacity: 3,812 megawatts from three 1,270 MW units.
-Construction: Began in 1976, first unit online in 1986. Third
and final unit running in 1988.
-Cost: $5.9 billion for construction and startup testing.
-Owners: Arizona Public Service, Salt River Project (Arizona),
El Paso Electric Co., Southern California Edison, Public Service
Co. of New Mexico, Southern California Public Power Authority,
Los Angeles Dept. of Water & Power.
-Of note: Palo Verde is the nation's largest nuclear plant
complex.
Source: Salt River Project
Copyright © 2005, azcentral.com. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
19 Arizona Republic: Palo Verde now is completely off-line
[azcentral.com]
Max Jarman
The Arizona Republic
Oct. 13, 2005 12:00 AM
The Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, 50 miles west of
downtown Phoenix, was idle Wednesday after two of its three
reactors were shut down because of safety concerns. A third unit
at the nation's largest nuclear power plant was taken off-line
Oct. 7 for refueling and repairs.
It's one of only a few times the plant has been completely
off-line during its 20-year history. There is no indication of
when it may be back in operation.
Palo Verde's three nuclear reactors can produce almost 4,000
megawatts of electricity, enough to light about 2 million homes.
Jim McDonald, a spokesman for plant operator Arizona Public
Service Co. said that the utility has ample power to serve its
customers and added that it is fortunate the problems were
discovered now rather than during the summer, when power demand
is at its peak.
The shutdown almost certainly will boost electricity prices as
utilities that count on relatively inexpensive Palo Verde
electricity have to purchase replacement power on the open
market or run higher-cost natural-gas generators.
Indeed, the price of wholesale electricity at the Palo Verde
trading hub on the Western power grid jumped 13 percent
Wednesday, to $105.73 per megawatt hour. In Arizona, utilities
can appeal to regulators to pass those costs along to
ratepayers.
It's the latest in a string of outages at Palo Verde this year
that have drawn regulatory concerns about the safety of the
plant and the potential cost of the shutdowns to ratepayers.
APS shut down the plant's two operating reactors late Tuesday
after it was unable to demonstrate to regulators that a key
safety system would perform as designed. The problem, which
involves an emergency system that cools the plant's nuclear
reactors after an accident, also affects the third unit being
refueled.
"It's not that the system wouldn't operate, it's that we
couldn't prove that it would," McDonald said. Given the
situation, conditions of APS's operating permit required the
units be shut down.
"There was no question they were going down," he said.
McDonald was unable to say when the two units would be
restarted. A restart would have to be cleared by the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission, and the safety issue would first have to
be resolved.
McDonald said the company is exploring several options that
could bring the units back on-line. The unit down for refueling
will be out for 10 to 12 weeks, he said.
While the accident the system is designed to mitigate has a low
probability of happening, NRC spokesman Victor Dricks said its
malfunction carries the potential for a significant safety
problem.
The NRC stepped up supervision of Palo Verde earlier this year
because of another problem with the plant's emergency reactor
cooling system. That resulted in a $50,000 fine.
While the agency has concerns about the operation of the plant,
the NRC does not believe it is being operated unsafely.
"We have full confidence that APS can operate safely," Dricks
said.
State regulators have other concerns. Arizona Corporation
Commission members are worried that ratepayers will be burdened
with the cost of the outages.
APS is allowed to recover the cost of buying or generating
electricity through a fuel adjuster, and SRP, although not
regulated by the commission, has a similar mechanism.
Arizona Public Service Co., which owns 29.5 percent of the
plant, said earlier that it would try to recover from ratepayers
$30 million in extra costs it incurred during previous outages.
McDonald said the utility would likely also seek to recover
expenses resulting from the recent shutdown.
With natural gas selling at record high prices because of
shortages caused by recent hurricanes, the cost of the outage
could be substantial.
Stephen Conant, an analyst at Energy Security Analysis Inc. in
Wakefield, Mass., said that the current price of natural gas
used to fuel most power plants is unprecedented.
"All of a sudden, these Palo Verde outages are becoming
extremely expensive for ratepayers," Corporation Commissioner
Kris Mayes said.
She said the commission would scrutinize requests to recover
additional costs and that she may ask APS to come before the
panel to answer questions about the recent outages.
Salt River Project, which owns 17.5 percent of the plant,
estimates that Palo Verde shutdowns from March to August cost
the utility an additional $19.5 million.
SRP spokesman Scott Harelson said the costs have not been passed
on to consumers and are not part of a general 3.7 percent rate
increase that takes effect next month.
Bloomberg contributed to this article.
Copyright © 2005, azcentral.com. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
20 NRC: NRC Announces Reappointment of Commissioner Edward McGaffigan, Jr
News Release - 2005-14
U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION
Office of Public Affairs Telephone: 301/415-8200
Washington, DC 20555-0001 E-mail: opa@nrc.gov
No. 05-140 October 13, 2005
Commission yesterday by Chairman Nils. J. Diaz. His
reappointment by President Bush and confirmation by the Senate
brings the NRC to its full complement of five commissioners.
McGaffigans first term began Aug. 28, 1996. He was renominated
by President Clinton and confirmed by the Senate in May 2000,
and served an additional five years. His current term will
expire in June 2010.
Prior to his appointment to the Commission, from February 1983
to August 1996, he served as a legislative assistant, then
legislative director, and finally senior policy advisor to
Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM). McGaffigan supported the Senator's
work on defense policy, technology policy, personnel and
acquisition reform, and nonproliferation and export control
policy.
McGaffigan was a member of the Foreign Service from May 1976 to
February 1983. From 1981 to1983 he served as a senior policy
analyst and then assistant director in the White House Office of
Science and Technology Policy, where he oversaw international
scientific cooperation and export control matters. During much
of this time, he held a dual appointment on the staff of the
National Security Council.
Previously, Mr. McGaffigan carried out various assignments
within the State Department dealing with U.S.-Soviet relations
and politico-military issues. He was stationed as a science
attache in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow from July 1978 to April
1980, where he reported on Soviet energy and atomic energy
developments and managed bilateral science cooperation in those
and other areas.
Prior to joining the Foreign Service, McGaffigan worked on
evaluating Japanese science and technology at the RAND
Corporation in 1974 , and on strategic arms control issues at
the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1975.
McGaffigan holds a bachelor's degree in physics from Harvard
University. He also holds master's degrees in physics from
California Institute of Technology and public policy from
Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
Last revised Thursday, October 13, 2005
*****************************************************************
21 Tallahassee Democrat: Governor advocates nuclear power
10/13/2005 |
Clean-coal plants also get his OK THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Gov. Jeb Bush said Wednesday that Florida needs more nuclear
power and clean-coal energy and that state government should
consider storing gasoline because of its vulnerability to
hurricanes.
Bush said the series of hurricanes over the past 14 months
highlights the state's vulnerability on property insurance and
energy.
"It also means that we have to recognize that we have to
conserve a lot more than we have been," Bush said in a Rotary
Club speech. "And it means recognizing that all of the new
capacity in a fast-growing state can't be natural gas."
Bush said if Florida does not take action to increase energy
supplies and curb consumption, it will have a serious impact on
economic development because new businesses won't want to locate
here.
"My hope is that we will have a gasoline pipeline that would
provide more security as it relates to getting gasoline," he
said. "It may be that the state and local governments are going
to have to get into the storage of diesel fuel so that we can
guarantee supplies for first responders across the state."
Bush said a property-insurance crisis is looming not only for
Florida but for the whole country, noting it's time to begin
discussion of a national catastrophic fund that could be tapped
for massive losses from disasters like Hurricane Katrina.
"A fund that would allow for money to grow tax-free, providing a
national pool for catastrophic losses," Bush said.
*****************************************************************
22 Buenos Aires Herald: Reacting to reactors
Friday, October 14, 2005
HERALD STAFF
The media buzz over the request of Venezuelan President
Hugo Chávez for an Argentine nuclear reactor is probably the
last thing the government wanted just three weeks before hosting
the Americas Summit in Mar del Plata, especially with the
spotlight on the potential clash between Chávez and United
States President George W. Bush. The position of the United
States is not so much outright rejection as to insist that such
a transaction cannot be a simple bilateral decision but must
respect the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and other
international conventions (the point seems timely enough the
week after the International Atomic Energy Agency won the Nobel
Peace Prize in Vienna). The comment of Foreign Minister Rafael
Bielsa (once he had managed to deflect his attention from the
tight City electoral race and his participation in Tuesday
morning’s debate) assured respect for international treaties but
between the lines Argentina seems to be asking if there are not
double standards if the sale of an Argentine reactor to Lucas
Heights in Australia for nuclear medicine could find
international acceptance while there are objections to a sale to
Venezuela for the same purpose (and also oil-drilling in the
Orinoco). Yet the US response to the Venezuelan insistence that
the reactor is for peaceful purposes only would probably be:
"That’s what they all say."
As on so many fronts, Chávez could prove to be a paper tiger
here yet again even though his oil windfalls make him always
dangerous. Argentina probably lacks the technology to give him
the reactor he wants and even more the capital, thus making the
transaction necessarily multilateral rather than bilateral and
lessening US anxieties. Yet the combination of Venezuelan oil
wealth and the rogue scientists at large in the world make
Washington understandably apprehensive.
A nuclear reactor is such a long-term project that there is
absolutely no need for it to be a summit problem unless
President Néstor Kirchner wants it to be. Perhaps he does —
perhaps the idea is to engage in some pre-electoral posturing
with Chávez against the unloved Bush (not least to gain some
progressive City votes for Bielsa at the expense of frontrunner
Elisa Carrió), only to climb down hastily between the last week
of October and the start of November in order to avoid problems
at the summit. But Kirchner would probably be wiser to start
defusing the issue now before he finds himself playing with fire
or worse.
© Copyright 2000 - 2005 © S.A. The Buenos Aires Herald Ltd. All
rights reserved Política de Privacidad
*****************************************************************
23 Bangor Daily News: Maine Yankee Lessons -
Bangornews.com
Staff
Information about the rising costs of energy and how we as
Mainer's must deal with this issue">New
Blog: Focus on Energy
Thursday, October 13, 2005 -
With high fuel prices and fears about shortages of natural gas,
coupled with concerns over greenhouse gas emissions from
coal-fired plants, nuclear power is again being discussed as a
source of electricity. The Maine Yankee plant, where
decommissioning was certified as complete by the federal
government last week, can offer important lessons as the nuclear
industry, for the first time in years, seriously considers
building new reactors in the United States. One lesson is that
the federal government must fulfill its commitment to open a
repository for nuclear waste. A second is to be transparent to
the public.
Opened in 1972, Maine Yankee was licensed to operate until 2008.
In 1994, cracks were discovered in steam generator tubes in the
Wiscasset plant. The facility was shut down for a year while the
cracks were repaired. After more problems and an appearance on
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's list of the worst-run power
plants, the Maine Yankee board decided in 1997 to close the
facility.
The decommissioning of the plant was given final approval by the
NRC last week. That releases most of the land for redevelopment
but not 12 acres where radioactive fuel rods are stored. The
rods must be stored on-site because the federal government has
yet to open a repository for nuclear waste although the
country's electricity customers have paid billions of dollars
for such a facility. A repository was supposed to be open by
1998. Plagued by legal challenges and technical problems, a
storage facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, which was picked by
Congress in 2002 as the place to bury 77,000 tons of radioactive
material, is projected to open in 2012.
In the meantime, the country's most radioactive nuclear waste
will remain stored at sites in 39 states, including the
waterfront parcel in Wiscasset, which would be better suited to
development or a park rather than an off-limits waste dump.
With nuclear waste disposal moving at such a slow place, it may
be time to reconsider a ban on reprocessing nuclear waste,
something that is routinely done in Europe and Japan.
A second lesson from Maine Yankee
is that sharing as much information as possible with the public
makes for better operations and less fear among nearby
residents. Maine Yankee established a community advisory panel
(CAP) before beginning its decommissioning.
The panel, which included local scientists, government and
business representatives and an outspoken opponent of the plant,
helped keep local residents informed. A major benefit of the
CAP, according to a company hired to evaluate the Maine Yankee
decommissioning process, was that senior plant managers
routinely made presentations before the public and were expected
to answer questions in a manner understandable to lay members of
the public.
Having such a committee in place when a plant was operational
would
go along way toward easing public fears about nuclear power.
The United States needs sources of electricity other than
high-priced oil, limited natural gas and highly polluting coal.
Solar and wind may help, but nuclear energy is the only existing
source for large quantities of electricity. Waste and safety
hurdles must be cleared before the nuclear power industry grows.
Bangornews.com Staff
feedback@bangordailynews.net
Bangor Daily News PO Box 1329 491 Main Street Bangor, ME 04401
Switchboard: In-State Long Distance 1-800-432-7964 or
207-990-8000
©2005 All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
24 Boston Globe: NRC sets conditions for Vermont Yankee power increase -
Boston.com
Associated Press
By David Gram, Associated Press Writer | October 13, 2005
MONTPELIER, Vt. --The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has set a
series of conditions the owners of the Vermont Yankee plant must
meet before they are allowed to run the reactor harder and get
more power from it.
In a letter dated Wednesday, the NRC's director of the reactor
regulation, J.E. Dyer, wrote to Vermont Yankee owner Entergy
Nuclear that it had to accept the conditions by Monday if it
wanted the agency's review to continue on its proposal to
increase its power output by 20 percent, to 650 megawatts.
"They've (the NRC) just determined that, `Entergy, you have to
commit to these things in order to go on to the next step,'"
said William Sherman, nuclear engineer with the state Department
of Public Service.
Sherman said the state was "pretty happy," that the NRC appeared
to be close to finishing its nearly two-year review of Vermont
Yankee's request to boost power, adding that he believed that
the agency's review had been thorough.
The NRC said it expected its staff to issue a draft report,
called a safety evaluation, on Vermont Yankee's request by next
Friday, Oct. 21. A staff recommendation would go to an agency
panel called the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards for
its review. The NRC said that panel would come to Vermont for
two days in mid-November and conduct at least part of its
deliberations as an open process that would allow for comments
from the public.
A final ruling from the NRC likely would come in late winter,
Sherman said.
Vermont Yankee spokesman Larry Smith said the plant was
reviewing the NRC's letter and would withhold comment for now.
"We're pleased that the NRC process is moving forward," Smith
said. "We're reviewing the letter from the NRC and we will
provide our comments to them on Monday."
The NRC letter made clear that Monday would not be so much a
time for comment as to say a simple yes or no to the conditions
it had set. It said it wanted a supplement to Entergy's
application for the power boost "accepting the license
conditions and regulatory commitment proposed in the enclosure
to this letter. It should be noted, however, that your
acceptance does not constitute completion of the staff's review
of the ... application."
The main condition -- which took up three of four pages in an
attachment to Dyer's letter, concerned an issue that has dogged
Vermont Yankee since it applied for what industry and regulators
call an "extended power uprate" more than two years ago.
About the same time that Vermont Yankee owner Entergy Nuclear
made the proposal, other nuclear plants that had boosted their
power output were developing cracks in their steam dryers. The
steam dryer is equipment at the top of the reactor designed to
remove moisture from the steam made in the reactor before it
goes to the plant's turbines, which could be damaged by too-wet
steam.
The NRC laid out a detailed series of steam dryer stress gauge
readings Vermont Yankee must take and provide to the NRC as it
gradually increases the plant's power output.
As it reaches 105 percent, 110 percent, and 115 percent of its
current power output, plant personnel were directed to take
stress gauge readings and relay them to the NRC.
It said the plant "shall not increase power above each hold
point until 96 hours after the NRC project manager confirms
receipt of the (data)."
If the gauges show readings above agreed-upon levels, the power
increase must halt, the NRC said. "Entergy Nuclear Operations,
Inc. shall resolve the uncertainties in the steam dryer
analysis, document the continued structural integrity of the
steam dryer, and provide that documentation to the NRC staff by
facsimile or electronic transmission to the NRC project manager
prior to further increases in reactor power."
A second condition requires testing to determine that the
reactor can respond adequately if certain plant components fail.
NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said the agency's "staff has reached
the point where the only way they can feel completely
comfortable supporting this application is by imposing these"
conditions.[ /]
© Copyright 2005 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This
*****************************************************************
25 OA Online: Andrews eyes nuclear test reactor
Thursday, 13 October 2005
American Online c /o Odessa American 222 E. 4th Street P.O. Box
2952 Odessa, TX 79760
UTPB, General Atomics, Andrews officials discuss building
next-generation plant
By David J. Lee
UTPB and General Atomics are looking at a new type of nuclear
technology — one that could fuel both electricity and
transportation — and they’d like to put a reactor here in West
Texas.
University of Texas of the Permian Basin President David Watts
said San Diego-based General Atomics has developed the nuclear
program based on technology used overseas.
“It uses technology that has been adopted in China, Japan and is
under consideration for adoption in South Africa,” Watts said.
“The point is that the technology is inherently safe. It is a new
development in nuclear reactor technology.”
While still only in the discussion stage, Watts said UTPB and
General Atomics would like to develop a Very High Temperature
Test Nuclear Reactor.
“Since this technology has not been used anywhere in the United
States, we believe that the opportunity is ripe for the design
and construction of this Very High Temperature Test Reactor,”
Watts said. “We hope it will be sited in Andrews County.”
Andrews City Manager Glen Hackler said it doesn’t appear the city
or county is averse to that.
On Tuesday, UTPB officials presented the idea of the reactor, as
well as the possibility of putting it in Andrews, to the city,
county, economic development board and industrial base of the
West Texas community.
“After the meeting, I milled around with quite a few of the
people there, and the reaction I got was constantly favorable of
people from Andrews,” Hackler said. “I think it’s got a real
appeal from a conceptual standpoint.”
The concept of the Very High Temperature Test Nuclear Reactor is
one that could provide both electric energy and hydrogen fuel.
The reactor process also creates the sulfur-iodine technology for
hydrogen production.
“This technology, because of the high heat it generates, promises
to bring a variety of new economically powerful applications
here, such as production of cheap hydrogen,” Watts said. “This
technology may be the answer to the question of how do you have a
cheap and reliable source of hydrogen for a hydrogen-based
economy.”
Even more, the technology — which has been tested in Asian
countries — is inherently safe, Watts said.
“There is no risk of any kind of nuclear meltdown,” he said.
“It is a new technology, presently unlike anything used in the
United States for nuclear reactors.”
In a letter General Atomics Senior Vice President David Baldwin
wrote to Watts, Baldwin said a concept design, which is needed to
apply for grants, would cost about $3 million. The money would be
raised through grants and outside donations, he said. The cost of
the reactor would run about $100 million.
“It is anticipated that, once these facilities are built, they
would be operated by UTPB and/or its designees,” Baldwin wrote.
“The research faculty at UTPB will use this facility to not only
support the development of the (Next Generation Nuclear Plant)
but also energy research in cooperation with other national and
international organizations.”
Dr. James “Jim” Wright, project director for the nuclear
proposal, said a test plant in Andrews would pave the way for a
full-scale Next Generation Nuclear Plant elsewhere.
“The Very High Temperature Test Reactor to be built by UTPB and
General Atomics, we believe it is a logical technology stepping
stone to the Very High Temperature Reactor,” Wright said. “It
will be used to (a) test and verify many of the required
technologies, and (b) refine the nuclear fuel cycle, before they
are tried in the much more expensive Next Generation Nuclear
Plant.”
Meanwhile, Watts and Hackler both said the possibility of a
project is a long way off — Tuesday’s meeting was solely an
informational talk to get community reaction of the idea.
“They’re talking about trying a feasibility study in a year,”
Hackler said. “If that’s successful and there’s a general
receptiveness in our community, the timeline for the reactor is
five or six years.”
Watts said the university has long been interested in finding
alternative energy sources, which led to its relationship with
General Atomics.
“UTPB has been involved in energy research for some time and
began to explore the nuclear area and formed a partnership with
General Atomics, which has developed the technology we’re
interested in seeing applied in a test nuclear reactor,” Watts
said.
Hackler said Andrews officials were impressed with the
presentation Tuesday.
“For Andrews, having the UT system involved gives it great
credibility,” Hackler said. “General Atomics and their 50-year
history in nuclear technology and the nuclear research field
gives it great credibility.”
Watts said Andrews seemed like a logical choice.
“We believe that the city and county of Andrews — which has had a
substantial discussion over decades regarding the operation of
nuclear faculties such as Water Control Systems and Louisiana
Exploration Services, directly adjacent to Waste Control Systems
— would consider allowing this project to be sited in their
county,” Watts said.
Hackler said he would hope a test reactor would actually
eliminate some of the stigma Andrews has gotten with the nuclear
waste sites.
“We get the stigma that goes with being a nuclear waste landfill
site or waste disposal site,” he said. “It’d be nice to have the
prestige that comes with a major research-development,
world-class facility for nuclear energy right here in the Permian
Basin in our county.”
*****************************************************************
26 Fort St. John: Fort St. John Ont. to spend over $2B on reactors
canada.com network
Steve Erwin Canadian Press
October 13, 2005
TORONTO -- Two Ontario nuclear power units that have been idle
since the mid-1990s will be refurbished now that the province
has given final approval, sources said Thursday.
The Ontario government will announce next week it has approved a
deal to restart Units 1 and 2 of the Bruce generation station
near Kincardine off Lake Huron in southwestern Ontario, sources
told The Canadian Press.
It will cost Bruce Power, which runs the station, "well more"
than $2 billion for the restart, one source said.
A tentative deal between the two sides on the restart was
reached in March. Final cabinet approval was delayed, however,
as the province and Bruce Power worked out how much Bruce will
be paid for the power the units produce following the
refurbishment.
Bruce Power spokesman Steve Cannon said the public "will be
properly notified" when a final deal is approved.
And Donna Cansfield, who replaced Dwight Duncan this week as
energy minister in an abrupt cabinet shuffle, said "due
diligence" and legal wording of the Bruce deal is still being
worked out.
But sources insist an announcement is imminent.
Their restoration would return 1,500 megawatts of electricity to
Ontario's power grid -- enough to meet the annual needs of one
million homes.
However, any refurbishment of the two units at Bruce station,
which has six other units currently in operation, would take
several years to complete at a time when debates are raging
about Ontario's future energy supply.
New Democrat Leader Howard Hampton slammed the plan to invest in
"more expensive" nuclear power, which already supplies 45 per
cent of Ontario's energy, noting past cost overruns of
refurbishments.
"The reason we have a $20-billion debt in our nuclear system is
because of cost overruns at our nuclear plants," he told
reporters.
"I think before the province goes down the nuclear road, again,
there needs to be a full debate across the province."
Conservative Leader John Tory said he's in favour of the
refurbishment but is concerned the contract with Bruce will
force taxpayers to eventually foot the bill for the upgrade
through whatever rates Bruce signs with the province.
"I would want to see the deal that has been done between Bruce
and the taxpayers of Ontario before I said yes to that
particular deal," Tory said.
Premier Dalton McGuinty said his government is working to
address potential energy shortages. He slammed previous
governments for not making earlier investments.
"We are up against it when it comes to ensuring sufficient
supply ... it would have been nice had this work begun some 10
or 15 years ago," McGuinty told the legislature.
The province has to replace, renew or refurbish some 25,000
megawatts of supply in the next 15 years. The government says it
has advanced projects to provide another 9,000 megawatts over
the next five years.
Critics say that won't be enough to replace closed coal units,
and that nuclear reactors take years to come online. McGuinty
has said he'll look to build more nuclear reactors should the
Ontario Power Authority recommend that approach in a Dec. 1
report.
Greenpeace is concerned there hasn't been enough public nuclear
debate and plans to stage a protest Friday in front of the
Ontario legislature.
Dwight Duncan, the province's energy minister before he was
appointed finance minister this week, said in March that
restarting the two idle Bruce units would replace about 20 per
cent of the province's coal-fired generation.
The government wants to close all of its coal-fired plants by
2009.
© Canadian Press 2005
Copyright © CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest
MediaWorks Publications Inc.All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
27 St. Petersburg Times: There's no reason nuclear power should cause concern
Opinion
Letters to the Editor
Published October 13, 2005
Re: Drilling and nukes stir nary a worry, by Robert Trigaux,
Oct. 10.
I enjoyed Robert Trigaux's column because it brought forward a
fact that has been lost for several decades. Specifically, the
reason that there is no uproar over the idea of nuclear power is
that there shouldn't be any. The risks of nuclear power have
been shown to be overstated and, thus, unwarranted.
For the last several decades, the domestic nuclear power plants
in the United States have run safely; the Navy has run hundreds
of them safely for 50 years; the French have now got nearly
three-fourths of their power needs from nuclear energy and -
voila! - no one is glowing in the dark! The antinuclear nut
cakes have lost the battle to facts that were there all the
time. The sad part is that as a nation the United States is
three decades behind where it should be.
The idea that we need 12 miles around a nuclear power plant for
safety reasons is silly. The Navy has crews in submarines living
as close to a nuclear reactor as is humanly possible. There are
no problems with nuclear radiation.
An even more ironic twist to these notions is the fact that
nuclear power is being touted now as a solution to another
technical nonfact called global warming.
Who knows, we may stumble onto the idea that we should avail
ourselves of this cheap, clean, safe and plentiful source of
power. Is this a great country or what?
-- John J. Christman, Parrish
Don't look to nukes for power
Re: Second nuclear plant in the works, Oct. 4.
Nuclear power is the most expensive way to generate electricity
and more of the cost is shifting from the utilities to us
taxpayers. The article states that "the Energy Department [read
taxpayers] offered in some cases to pay up to half the cost of
applying for the required license, which can run into hundreds
of millions of dollars." The government [taxpayers] is already
paying for the storing of the contaminated materials plus the
cost of decommissioning the old nuclear plants.
The money proposed for this plant should be spent to install
solar panels systems on all Florida roofs so that the three
existing nuclear plants could be shut down. Any new power plant
should be coal fired and be designed for easy conversion to burn
hydrogen gas. The 2004 Department of Energy report said that
wind turbines are the best way to generate hydrogen. The August
issue of National Geographic describes a commercial five
megawatt wind turbine. The government [taxpayers] should
aggressively install wind turbines and solar systems. All that
is needed is for us to provide the political demand.
-- David Nicholson, Sun City Center
Why worry about the rich?
© 2005 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times 490 First
Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111
*****************************************************************
28 Desoto Sun Herald: When I say Nuclear, you say what?
10/13/05
/www.sun-herald.com
Bob Bowden column
Let's start with word association. When I say "nuclear," what
do you say?
How many of you said, "Power plant, the source of electrical
energy we must turn to as fossil-fuel supplies decline and
burning oil, natural gas or coal products becomes prohibitively
expensive"?
Okay. How of many of you said, "Bomb"?
Just as I thought. Nuclear power has an image problem.
Progress Energy Florida is going to have to clear more than a
few hurdles to build a planned nuclear power plant somewhere in
Central Florida. So far, four counties remain in the running:
Polk, Seminole, Osceola and Highlands.
If all the permits (and there are many) can be obtained in a
timely fashion, the plant could be serving electricity to vast
areas of the state a decade from now, according to Progress
chief executive Bill Habermeyer.
Progress already operates the nuclear generating plant at
Crystal River in Citrus County, opened in 1977. If this one is
built, it would be the first since Florida Power & Light opened
a second reactor at its St. Lucie nuclear complex near Fort
Pierce in 1983.
There's a third nuclear power plant at Turkey Point and these
three facilities now produce 15 percent of Florida's electricity.
The problem for Progress is the perception that a nuclear power
plant is a terrorist target ripe for bombing. The problem is
also a history that includes Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. No
matter that nuclear plants are safer than other types, all
things considered.
This might be a tough sale.
But it shouldn't be. The quicker our country can free itself
from dependency on foreign oil from unstable nations, the
better. Our own oil peak passed in the early 1970s. Since then,
the Middle East with all its volatile problems, and Venezuela
with its problems, have fed our oil appetite.
At this time, burning fossil fuels remains a viable way to
produce the energy our country demands. But oil hits its global
peak this Thanksgiving, after which demand will forever exceed
supply. Expect sporadic shortages and escalating prices.
We need to prepare now for a future without cheap oil.
Nuclear power (and some limited use of solar power) is the only
answer experts offer us as an oil alternative. And if we don't
start building needed facilities now, we'll face a crisis where
there literally isn't enough oil to produce the energy to build
the alternative energy plants.
Progress gets an "A" for its proposal. Now, let's see how the
company handles those who will say that we're all going to glow
in the dark, that the environment will be doomed, that cancers
will explode in 20 years, and that we might as well paint a
bull's-eye for Bin Laden on the ground.
And let's hear what alternatives the "not in my back yard"
folks propose as the clock ticks the end time of cheap oil.
0>© 2005 All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
29 reviewjournal.com: Nevada site, other facilities lagging in security update
Oct. 13, 2005
DOE inspector general criticizes nuclear weapons storage areas
By STEVE TETREAULT
STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU
WASHINGTON -- The Department of Energy has fallen behind
schedule to upgrade security at nuclear weapons sites, according
to inspections at the Nevada Test Site and other properties
outlined in a report issued Wednesday.
The test site had not completed all the upgrades scheduled for
2004 and for this year, such as new building designs to reduce
potential vulnerabilities and train guards, and the hiring of
additional guards, DOE inspector general auditors said.
In the meantime, the Nevada installation has increased its use
of overtime by 39 percent to meet new requirements for an
expanded guard force, according to the audit. An earlier report
raised questions about "excessive overtime" by DOE guards.
Inspectors said they found similar conditions at other weapons
sites run by the National Nuclear Security Administration, the
DOE branch that manages the nuclear weapons complex.
Managers at the sites had suspended or reduced guard training
and performance testing to ensure that personnel were available
for mission duties, auditors said.
"It is critical that sites maintain momentum toward meeting the
... requirements in order to protect national security assets
and operations," the 18-page report concluded.
As a result of delays, it said, the sites will have to
implement, in one year, about 87 percent of the security plans
to meet a schedule milestone of next October.
The complex is being given a growing role to safeguard nuclear
materials transferred from weapons laboratories elsewhere.
Previous reports had described security lapses at the Nevada
installation. An inspector general audit in February reported on
two employees who brought unauthorized handguns onto the site.
Earlier, Energy Department officials acknowledged that security
guards had performed poorly during a mock terrorist attack in
August 2004.
The department is weighing a contract extension for longtime
test site security contractor Wackenhut Services Inc.
Inspectors also visited the Sandia National Laboratories in New
Mexico, the Pantex Plant in Texas and the Y-12 National Security
Complex in Tennessee between August 2004 and August 2005.
The Office of Secure Transportation, which oversees nuclear
materials shipping and has an operations center in Albuquerque,
N.M., also was audited.
Glenn Podonsky, director of the DOE Office of Security and
Safety Performance Assurance, agreed in a letter to Inspector
General Gregory Friedman that progress was "slower than
expected."
Another DOE official, Michael Kane, said the delays occurred
because the security upgrade blueprints were not completed in
time to be included in the department's budgets for 2004 and
2005.
In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the
Department of Energy updated its "design basis threat"
requirements to defend sites where nuclear materials are stored,
including the test site.
Security directors were told to incorporate new technologies
into their operations, such as thermal imaging, laser detection,
Doppler radar and remote sensing equipment.
Moves to install those items have been delayed, auditors said.
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal, 1997 - 2005
Stephens Media GroupPrivacy Statement
*****************************************************************
30 [NYTr] Quake: Pakistan Nuclear Site "Undamaged"
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2005 11:13:21 -0500 (CDT)
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
[The question no one in the mainstream press bothered to ask... Of
course, we're told, there's "No Danger."]
The Irish Times - Oct 12, 2005
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/world/2005/1012/2578259245FR12NUCLEARPLANT.html
Fears over nuclear arms site close to epicentre
by Rahul Bedi in New Delhi
PAKISTAN: Pakistan yesterday said its main nuclear weapons facility at
Kahuta, only 74kms from the epicentre of the weekend earthquake that
devastated northern Kashmir, was undamaged.
"There is no danger to our nuclear installations and weapons from
earthquakes," Pakistan's military spokesman, Maj Gen Shaukat Sultan,
said.
However, Maj Gen Sultan was unable to confirm if the Khan Research
Laboratories at Kahuta, adjoining the capital, Islamabad, could
withstand the strongest earthquakes.
Khan Research Laboratories is Pakistan's main nuclear weapons facility
and an emerging development centre for strategic long-range missiles.
Pakistan's primary nuclear fission production facility is also in
Kahuta, employing gas centrifuge enrichment technology to produce highly
enriched uranium. Kahuta is not operated under International Atomic
Energy Agency safeguards but successive Pakistani governments have
promised that the classified and well-guarded facility is secure.
However, nuclear expert Pervez Hoodbhoy, professor of physics at
Islamabad's Quaid-i-Azam University, said an earthquake could pose a
threat to Pakistan's nuclear facilities.
Prof Hoodbhoy, an ardent anti-nuclear weapons activist, said that
Chasma, the Chinese-built nuclear facility around 400kms southwest of
Islamabad, could prove "dangerous" in the event of a severe earthquake.
"Chashma is in a seismic zone and if an earthquake is centred close to
it there could be loss of radioactive material leading to a
Chernobyl-like situation," Prof Hoodbhoy warned.
According to the US Geological Survey the exact location of the
epicentre of the earthquake that measured 7.6 on the Richter scale was
between longitude 34.40 degrees north and latitude 73.56 degrees east.
Kahuta's co-ordinates are 33.35 degrees north and 75.22 degrees east,
raising the distinct possibility of it being in the earthquake's "first
impact zone," experts said.
"Kahuta's safety is a matter of concern," a senior Indian military
official and nuclear analyst who declined to be identified said.
Further clarifications are needed to ensure it has escaped damage, he
added.
Indian government officials, meanwhile, declined to comment on the
status of their own nuclear arsenal, but official sources said no
strategic weapons had been deployed anywhere near the border with
Pakistan.
India's Nuclear Power Corporation said it had "not received any reports
of any damage" to any of its facilities.
Some of India's power plants withstood a giant earthquake in western
Gujarat state, including some atomic facilities, in the affected
province in January 2001, the corporation said.
Pakistan conducted six underground nuclear weapons tests in May 1998, a
fortnight after neighbouring rival India had conducted five.
A year later both countries were engaged in bitter border clashes in the
hotly disputed Kashmir region, which is claimed by both sides, that
lasted 11 weeks.
A "nuclear shadow" hung over the skirmish in which 1,200 soldiers died.
In 2002 the two countries once again came close to the brink of war,
during which both sides rattled the "nuclear sabre," leading most
foreigners, including diplomats and businessmen, to leave Delhi and
Islamabad.
) The Irish Times
*
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31 NRC: Notice of Availability of Environmental Assessment and Finding
FR Doc E5-5597
[Federal Register: October 13, 2005 (Volume 70, Number 197)]
[Notices] [Page 59779-59780] From the Federal Register Online via
GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr13oc05-135]
of No Significant Impact for License Amendment for Purdue Pharma,
L.P.'s Facility in Cranbury, NJ AGENCY: Nuclear Regulatory
Commission.
ACTION: Notice of availability.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Betsy Ullrich, Commercial and R
Branch, Division of Nuclear Materials Safety, Region I, 475
Allendale Road, King of Prussia, Pennsylvania 19406, telephone
(610) 337-5040, fax (610) 337-5269; or by e-mail: exu@nrc.gov.
SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: I. Introduction The Nuclear Regulatory
Commission (NRC) is considering issuing a license amendment to
Purdue Pharma, L.P. for Materials License No. 29- 30698-01, to
authorize release of its facility in Edgewater, New Jersey, for
unrestricted use. NRC has prepared an Environmental Assessment
(EA) in support of this action in accordance with the
requirements of 10 CFR part 51. Based on the EA, the NRC has
concluded that a Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) is
appropriate.
II. EA Summary The purpose of the proposed action is to authorize
the release of two sections of the licensee's Cranbury, New
Jersey, facility for unrestricted use. Purdue Pharma, L.P. was
authorized by NRC from 2002 to use radioactive materials for
research and development purposes at the site. On April 21, 2005,
Purdue Pharma, L.P. requested that NRC release two sections of
the facility for unrestricted use.
Purdue Pharma, L.P. has conducted surveys of the two sections of
the facility and provided information to the NRC to demonstrate
that the site meets the license termination criteria in subpart E
of 10 CFR part 20 for unrestricted use.
The NRC staff has prepared an EA in support of the license
amendment. The two sections of the facility were remediated and
surveyed prior to the licensee requesting the license amendment.
The NRC staff has reviewed the information and final status
survey submitted by Purdue Pharma, L.P. Based on its review, the
staff has determined that there are no additional remediation
activities
[[Page 59780]] necessary to complete the proposed action.
Therefore, the staff considered the impact of the residual
radioactivity at the facility and concluded that since the
residual radioactivity meets the requirements in subpart E of 10
CFR part 20, a Finding of No Significant Impact is appropriate.
III. Finding of No Significant Impact The staff has prepared the
EA (summarized above) in support of the license amendment to
terminate the license and release the facility for unrestricted
use. The NRC staff has evaluated Purdue Pharma, L.P.'s request
and the results of the surveys and has concluded that the
completed action complies with the criteria in Subpart E of 10
CFR part 20. The staff has found that the radiological
environmental impacts from the action are bounded by the impacts
evaluated by NUREG-1496, Volumes 1-3, ``Generic Environmental
Impact Statement in Support of Rulemaking on Radiological
Criteria for License Termination of NRC- Licensed Facilities''
(ML042310492, ML042320379, and ML042330385). Additionally, no
non-radiological or cumulative impacts were identified. On the
basis of the EA, the NRC has concluded that the environmental
impacts from the action are expected to be insignificant and has
determined not to prepare an environmental impact statement for
the action.
IV. Further Information Documents related to this action,
including the application for the license amendment and
supporting documentation, are available electronically at the
NRC's Electronic Reading Room at
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams.html. From this site, you can
access the NRC's Agencywide Document Access and Management System
(ADAMS), which provides text and image files of NRC's public
documents. The ADAMS accession numbers for the documents related
to this Notice are: Environmental Assessment Related to an
Amendment of U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Materials License
No. 29-30698-01, Issued to Purdue Pharma, L.P. (ML052780150), the
Purdue Pharma, L.P. letter dated April 21, 2005 (ML052590192) and
the Purdue Pharma, L.P. letter dated June 30, 2005 (ML052590186).
Persons who do not have access to ADAMS or who encounter problems
in accessing the documents located in ADAMS, should contact the
NRC PDR Reference staff by telephone at (800) 397- 4209 or (301)
415-4737, or by e-mail to pdr@nrc.gov. Documents related to
operations conducted under this license not specifically
referenced in this Notice may not be electronically available
and/or may not be publicly available. Persons who have an
interest in reviewing these documents should submit a request to
NRC under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Instructions for
submitting a FOIA request can be found on the NRC's Web site at
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/foia/foia-privacy.html .
Dated at King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, this 5th of October,
2005.
For the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
James P. Dwyer, Chief, Commercial and R Branch, Division of
Nuclear Materials Safety, Region I.
[FR Doc. E5-5597 Filed 10-12-05; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 7590-01-P
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32 Deccan Herald: How iodised is your lifestyle?
Iodine is more important than we think, forming the regulatory
hormones for metabolism and brain functioning, say Dr T K Sabeer
and Dr A Bhattacharyya
Iodine is grayish-black in colour and is a trace mineral
necessary for thyroid gland function and development. The oceans
are the most important source of natural iodine. Iodine in the
oceans enters the air from sea spray. Once in the air, iodine
can enter the soil or land on vegetation. Plants that grow in
the soil take it up.
Most of the iodine that enters our body comes from the food we
eat. The iodine that leaves our body each day is usually
replaced by the iodine that we take in. Lobster, milk,
mushrooms, nutritional yeast, bread, oysters, canned salmon,
salted nuts and seeds, saltwater fish like cod, haddock, and
herring, sea salt, seaweed, shrimp and table salt are rich
sources of iodine.
Iodine is necessary to form thyroid hormones, which regulate the
bodys metabolism. It also promotes normal cell function, keeps
skin hair and nails healthy and is important for overall growth
and development. Iodine is also added to food, such as table
salt, to ensure that people have enough iodine in their bodies
to assist the formation of essential thyroid hormones. Iodine
also helps eliminate toxins. Radioactive iodine is used in the
treatment of hyperthyroidism.
IDD (Iodine Deficiency Disorder) affects over 740 million
people, 13% of the worlds population. IDD preys on poor,
pregnant women and preschool children. Until recently, iodine
deficiency was the worlds most prevalent cause of brain damage.
Today, we are on the verge of eliminating it. As developing
nations are making the shift to iodized salt, their rates of
iodine deficiency and diseases associated with it are declining.
Excessive consumption of cabbage, cauliflower and radish can
cause iodine deficiency. These foods contain a substance that
reacts with iodine and makes it unsuitable for absorption.
The amount of iodine present in the body of an adult is
estimated to be about 25 milligrams. Most of it is concentrated
in the thyroid gland, where it is stored as thyroglobulin. About
30 percent is removed by the thyroid gland for the synthesis of
the thyroid hormone, thyroxine, and the rest is excreted by the
kidneys.
These hormones play a major role in regulating growth and
development of the body, and influence the maturation of the
reproductive system. Iodine helps regulate efficient burning of
calories and preventing excess calories from being stored as
more fat than the body needs. It maintains the energy level of
the body and helps keep the skin, teeth, nails and hair strong
and healthy.
Children are more sensitive to the harmful toxic effects of
iodine than adults because their thyroid glands are still
growing and its tissues are more easily harmed by radioactive
iodine. Babies and children need iodine to form thyroid hormones
for growth and health. If they have too much iodine in their
bodies, they may develop an enlarged thyroid gland (goiter),
which may not produce enough thyroxine for normal growth. Also,
serious iodine deficiency during pregnancy may result in
stillbirths, abortions and congenital abnormalities such as
cretinism, an irreversible form of mental retardation. The mild
symptoms of iodine deficiency range from feelings of frustration
and anxiety to depression. Physical symptoms of hypothyroidism
include dry, scaly skin, constipation, fatigue, unusual weight
gain, goiters, impaired thyroid operation, decreased fertility,
increased rate of stillbirth, and growth abnormalities.
Because iodine cannot be stored for a long while in the body,
tiny amounts must be consumed regularly, but food grown in
iodine-poor soil will not provide sufficient dietary iodine.
Most people, however, are able to meet their iodine requirements
by eating seafood, seaweed, iodized salts and plants grown in
iodine-rich soil.
Toxicity is only caused from excess iodine supplements, not food
sources. Irregular heartbeat, confusion, breathing difficulties,
swollen neck and black stools may result. Small amounts of
radioactive iodine can enter air from nuclear power plants which
process uranium and plutonium. Larger amounts have been released
to the air from accidents at nuclear power plants and from
nuclear bombs. People are almost never exposed to radioactive
iodine, unless they work in a place where radioactive iodine is
used or if their doctors give it to them. Radioactive iodine is
also used in certain medical tests and treatments.
IODINE FACT FILE
Following are the recommended daily allowances for
iodine:
* Infants 40-50 micrograms
* Children
One to three years 70 micrograms
Four to six years 90 micrograms
Seven to 10 years 120 micrograms
11 + years 150 micrograms
* Pregnant women 175 micrograms
* Lactating women 200 micrograms
* Adult men & women 100-200 micrograms
Copyright 2005, The Printers (Mysore) Private Ltd., 75, M.G.
Road, Post Box No 5331, Bangalore - 560001
Tel: +91 (80) 25880000 Fax No. +91 (80) 25880523
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33 NRC: NRC Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste to Meet in New York on Oct. 19-20
News Release - 2005-13
U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION
Office of Public Affairs Telephone: 301/415-8200
Washington, DC 20555-0001 E-mail: opa@nrc.gov
No. 05-139 October 13, 2005
Nuclear Waste (ACNW) will meet Oct. 19-20 in Ellicottville,
N.Y., to discuss the application of the Commissions final policy
statement on decommissioning criteria for the West Valley
Demonstration Project, a complex decommissioning site. The ACNW
will be briefed by staff members of the NRC and the Department
of Energy, as well as from the New York State Energy Research
and Development Authority. Other state organizations and local
stakeholders may also participate.
The committee reports to and advises the Commission on all
aspects of nuclear waste management.
The public meeting will be held in the Fairway Room at the Inn
at Holiday Valley, 6081 Route 219, Holiday Valley Road. The
Wednesday meeting will run from 8:30 a.m. to 5:15 p.m. and time
has been set aside for comments from the audience. The Thursday
meeting will run from 10 a.m. to noon.
Oral or written views may be presented by members of the public.
Those wishing to make oral statements should notify Sharon
Steele, at 301-415-6805. The full agenda is available on
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/acnw/agenda/2005/.
Last revised Thursday, October 13, 2005
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34 Bradenton Herald: Unknown menace
| 10/13/2005 |
Tallevast plume must be fully defined
Just how big is the plume of contamination underneath Tallevast?
That has been the big unknown from the start of this pollution
scandal as each new phase of testing has expanded the scale of
the contamination. From an initial assessment of a few acres
on-site of the former American Beryllium Co. plant on Tallevast
Road, the known plume has expanded to 50 acres, then 131 acres.
And now it appears that even that substantial swath of real
estate does not define the extent of the potentially deadly
plume that residents of the Tallevast community have lived on
for years. Data analyses by the two primary regulatory agencies
supervising the pollution cleanup plan say gaps in the test data
may have caused the site owner, Lockheed Martin Corp., to
miscalculate the breadth and depth of the plume of toxins. The
state Department of Environmental Protection reached that
conclusion last week, and the federal Environmental Protection
Agency confirmed the finding two days later. The bottom line:
More tests are needed.
This confirms the conclusions last month of an independent
scientist commissioned by The Herald to review Lockheed Martin's
data and cleanup plan. Wilma Subra, an award-winning expert on
pollution sites and their remediation, told The Herald almost a
month ago that Lockheed's data falls short of defining the plume
and instead raises more questions about how and where the plume
is migrating.
Her findings gave a chilling picture of the threat, not just to
Tallevast but to areas beyond that community's traditional
borders, including land owned by Sarasota-Bradenton
International Airport.
"No, this is not a small plume," Subra told Herald reporter
Donna Wright. "It is a dangerous plume. It is very deep in some
places and very shallow in other areas, and it is under a
residential neighborhood."
Most worrisome is Subra's belief that there are multiple sources
of the plume, beyond the original disclosure that cracks in
settling ponds' concrete liner allowed water contaminated with
trichloroethylene to seep into into the soil and, ultimately,
the groundwater. She suggests testing at two other potential
contamination sources, including one on airport golf course
property. Certainly it is premature to be considering a cleanup
plan, which Lockheed Martin would like to do to limit its
liability. Indeed, if there were more than one pollution source,
Lockheed could mitigate its liability, demanding that other
present or former landowners in the area be brought into the
picture.
The new doubts about the plume's dimensions also renew the
question of relocating Tallevast residents whose properties are
affected. Subra suggests that tests of toxic vapors rising from
contaminated soil were invalid because when the tests were
taken, residents' wells had been shut down to protect their
health and pumping affects movement of the plume. New tests with
water systems turned on in affected homes could produce higher
vapor readings, Subra contends.
At least two elected officials have publicly called for
relocating the residents. County Commissioner Amy Stein and
state Rep. Bill Galvano have both urged the relocation of the
Tallevast community, some 238 people by one estimate. But
obviously with the plume's extent and possible additional
sources of it still up in the air, a mass relocation would be
premature. More extensive test wells, especially in suspect
areas dismissed by Lockheed in the northwest section of the
community, must be drilled. Subra suggests a "picket fence" of
wells 25 to 50 feet apart is needed to accurately define the
plume.
We understand that Lockheed is not responsible for causing the
contamination. But it is responsible for remedying it. That will
be costly, but it can't be shortchanged. The area will never
have value unless the entire contaminated area is defined and
cleaned up. Most importantly, the focus of this effort must stay
on protecting human health, not trying to limit corporate
liability.
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35 Bradenton Herald: Lockheed challenges case venue
| 10/13/2005 |
DONNA WRIGHT
Herald Staff Writer
MANATEE - Lockheed Martin Corp. has fired its first salvo in the
legal battle over a plume of toxic waste under residents' homes
in Tallevast.
The defense giant has petitioned for the negligence complaint
filed by 254 Tallevast residents to be moved from state court to
federal court even though Lockheed has yet to be served the
suit.
Moreover, Lockheed claims it has no responsibility for
residents' alleged property damage or illnesses because the work
performed at the former Loral American Beryllium Co. plant, 1600
Tallevast Road, was done for the federal government.
The old beryllium plant has been identified as the source of a
plume that is now known to cover more than 130 acres.
Lockheed acquired the Tallevast plant in a corporate buyout of
Loral in 1996. Lockheed has since sold the facility to BECSD
LLC, a Florida holding company affiliated with WPI Inc., a
cable-manufacturing firm located in New Jersey.
Because the contamination was discovered during its period of
ownership, Lockheed has assumed responsibility for cleaning up
the toxic mess in Tallevast.
Lockheed's motion to move the case was filed in the U.S.
District Court in Tampa on Friday by L. Norman Vaughan-Birch of
Kirk-Pinkerton in Sarasota.
In their negligence suit, Tallevast residents claim the toxic
plume has damaged property values and caused residents emotional
distress.
Ed Cottingham of Charleston, S.C., the lead attorney for the
Tallevast legal team, took Lockheed's first legal move in
stride.
"It's what we expected," Cottingham said. "We will just move
forward."
Tallevast's attorneys are now preparing a response to try to
keep the complaint in the 12th Circuit Court, said Laura Ward,
president of Family Oriented Community United Strong, which
represents residents' interests.
A federal judge will determine if Lockheed can have the case
moved to federal court.
Ward speculated that Lockheed wants a federal judge to hear the
case because federal courts will be more sympathetic to big
business.
The residents, Ward said, want the complaint heard in state
court by a jury of their peers.
"It's hard for the little man to fight in federal court," said
Ward.
Vaughan-Birch did not return The Herald's phone calls for
comment.
In the petition, he argues that the case belongs in federal
court because four of the five named defendants in the suit are
located outside of Florida.
The complaint names:
• Lockheed Martin, based in Maryland.
• Loral Corp., which owned and operated the beryllium plant
between 1961 and 1996 and ceased to exist when it was purchased
by Lockheed in 1996.
• WPI Sarasota Division Inc., the cable-manufacturing firm now
operating the facility.
• Wire Pro Inc., the parent company of WPI, based in
Pennsylvania.
• BECSD, a Florida limited-liability company and current owner
of the plant, based in New Jersey.
The suit indicates that other unknown defendants could be added
later.
Vaughan-Birch alleges that WPI Sarasota Division was included in
the suit solely for the purpose of depriving the other
defendants access of a federal forum.
The federal government approved the work done at the plant by
Loral and was aware of the risks it presented, Vaughan-Birch
said in his petition.
Lockheed Martin, therefore, is not responsible for all damage
caused by the plume, the petition says.
In their suit filed by St. Petersburg attorney Bruce H. Denson,
a member of the Tallevast legal team, residents claim that
Lockheed knew for several years that their community was
polluted by toxic and potential cancer-causing chemicals and
metals and did not nothing to notify residents of the danger.
In its petition to move the suit to federal court, Lockheed
claims that it is entitled to raise a separate and additional
federal defense of sovereign immunity because Loral was a
government contractor acting at the direction of federal
agencies.
Lockheed Martin is entitled to raise the defense of derivative
sovereign immunity, the petition says, because the work done at
at the Loral plant was performed under the direction of federal
energy and defense officials.
"If the government had performed these acts," the petition says,
"it would be immune from suit."
Therefore, the same defense is available to Lockheed Martin, the
defense giant's attorney argues.
Denson recently told The Herald that the Tallevast legal team
has not yet served the complaint because more plaintiffs, as
well as defendants, may be named.
Tallevast attorneys have 120 days after the filing of the
complaint to modify the complaint and notify defendants of the
legal action against them.
Wanda Washington, vice president of FOCUS, hopes the suit stays
in the 12th Circuit.
"State court is a more friendly court," said Washington.
"Federal court is not the people's court."
Lockheed Martin spokeswoman Meredith Rouse Davis could not be
reached Wednesday for comment.
Donna Wright, health and social services reporter, can be
reached at 745-7049 or at .
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36 San Luis Obispo Tribune: NRC's approval of Diablo waste facility to be challenged in court
10/13/2005 |
SLO Mothers for Peace and others say agency didn't consider some
effects of a terrorist attack
By David Sneed
The Tribune
A federal court of appeals in San Francisco will hear oral
arguments Monday in a case challenging an aboveground storage
facility for high-level radioactive waste at Diablo Canyon
nuclear power plant.
The case challenges a decision by the federal Nuclear Regulatory
Commission to approve the project without considering the
environmental effects of a terrorist attack. Monday's arguments
before a three-judge panel in San Francisco will be the first in
the case since it was filed in March 2004.
The agency found that the prospect of a terrorist attack is so
speculative that it could not realistically perform an analysis
of its effects. The nuclear industry and federal regulators
argue that spent-fuel storage facilities are robust and heavily
guarded.
If successful, the lawsuit would require the NRC to hold
hearings into what additional security upgrades might be needed
at the plant. A decision is likely months away.
The San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace, Sierra Club and former
county Supervisor Pig Pinard sued the commission. California,
Washington, Utah and Massachusetts as well as San Luis Obispo
County have filed briefs in support of the lawsuit.
Pacific Gas and Electric Co. recently began construction of the
facility. It will consist of a thick concrete pad upon which
will be mounted large steel and concrete canisters containing
the used but still highly radioactive uranium fuel assemblies.
Environmentalists and sympathetic state attorneys general think
the agency should do more to protect the dry cask facilities as
well as nuclear plants' spent-fuel pools. Mothers for Peace
members will hold a press conference at 8 a.m. Monday on the
steps of the federal courthouse in San Francisco to discuss
their three-year effort to oppose the facility, said Jill ZamEk,
Mothers for Peace spokeswoman.
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37 AU ABC: Nelson bill to thwart NT dump opposition
Thursday, 13 October 2005. 11:00 (AEST)Thursday, 13 October
NT law side-stepped: Dr Nelson says the bill will clear up
doubts about building a dump.Insiders
Federal Science Minister Brendan Nelson has introduced
legislation into Parliament that would make the Northern
Territory Government's opposition to a nuclear waste dump
irrelevant.
The Federal Government has nominated three sites in the
Territory for the waste dump.
Two are in central Australia while the third is about 40
kilometres from Katherine.
The Martin Government has indicated it could take High Court
action to stop the dump going ahead.
But Dr Nelson has told Parliament the bill will remove any
doubts about the Commonwealth's right to put the nuclear waste
facility in the Territory.
The federal Labor Member for Lingiari, Warren Snowdon, has been
ejected from Parliament during debate on the legislation.
Mr Snowdon says the legislation is an abuse of power by the
Federal Government.
*****************************************************************
38 AU ABC: WA Govt under pressure to rethink uranium ban
(AEDT)Thursday, 13 October 2005. 09:05 (AWST)
Western Australia's leading mining group is keeping the
pressure on the Labor State Government to overturn its ban on
uranium mining.
Several million dollars was wiped off the share prices of
uranium companies with South Australian tenements after that
State Government decided to block new uranium mines until 2010.
The Chamber of Minerals and Energy's David Parker says the WA
Government needs to consider the impact of its opposition to
uranium mining on the overall industry.
"We believe from a chamber perspective that the ban on uranium
mining is at odds with the Government's aim of maximising the
state's resources reserves and creates a high level of sovereign
risk for investors holding exploration and mining leases," he
said.
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39 NRC: Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste Meeting on Planning and
FR Doc E5-5595
[Federal Register: October 13, 2005 (Volume 70, Number 197)]
[Notices] [Page 59780] From the Federal Register Online via GPO
Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr13oc05-136]
Procedures; Notice of Meeting The Advisory Committee on Nuclear
Waste (ACNW) will hold a Planning and Procedures meeting on
October 20, 2005, in the Fairway Room at the Inn at Holiday
Valley, 6081 Route 219, Holiday Valley Road, Ellicottville, New
York. The entire meeting will be open to public attendance, with
the exception of a portion that may be closed pursuant to 5
U.S.C. 552b(c)(2) and (6) to discuss organizational and personnel
matters that relate solely to internal personnel rules and
practices of ACNW, and information the release of which would
constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.
The agenda for the subject meeting shall be as follows: Thursday,
October 20, 2005, 8 a.m.-9:30 a.m. The Committee will discuss
proposed ACNW activities and related matters. The purpose of this
meeting is to gather information, analyze relevant issues and
facts, and formulate proposed positions and actions, as
appropriate, for deliberation by the full Committee.
Members of the public desiring to provide oral statements and/or
written comments should notify the Designated Federal Official,
Ms. Sharon A. Steele (Telephone: (301) 415-6805) between 8:30
a.m. and 5:15 p.m. (ET) five days prior to the meeting, if
possible, so that appropriate arrangements can be made.
Electronic recordings will be permitted only during those
portions of the meeting that are open to the public.
Further information regarding this meeting can be obtained by
contacting the Designated Federal Official between 8:30 a.m. and
5:15 p.m. (ET). Persons planning to attend this meeting are urged
to contact the above named individual at least two working days
prior to the meeting to be advised of any potential changes in
the agenda.
Dated: October 6, 2005.
Michael L. Scott, Branch Chief, ACRS/ACNW.
[FR Doc. E5-5595 Filed 10-12-05; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 7590-01-P
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40 NRC: Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste; Notice of Meeting
FR Doc E5-5596
[Federal Register: October 13, 2005 (Volume 70, Number 197)]
[Notices] [Page 59780-59781] From the Federal Register Online via
GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr13oc05-137]
The Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste (ACNW) will hold its
164th meeting on October 19-20, 2005, in the Fairway Room at the
Inn at Holiday Valley, 6081 Route 219, Holiday Valley Road,
Ellicottville, New York.
The schedule for this meeting is as follows: Wednesday, October
19, 2005 The ACNW will hold a working group meeting to discuss
the application of the Commission's Final Policy Statement on
Decommissioning Criteria for the West Valley Demonstration
Project (WVDP) a complex decommissioning site. Participants will
include the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) staff, the
Department of Energy (DOE), the New York State Energy Research
and Development Authority (NYSERDA), as well as other federal and
state organizations and local stakeholders.
8:30 a.m.-8:45 a.m.: Introduction, Purpose and Goals (Open)--The
Committee's Chairman and Working Group Chairman will discuss the
purpose and goals of this working group meeting.
8:45 a.m.-9:15 a.m.: Roles and Responsibilities (Open)--The
Committee will hear presentations by and hold discussions with
representatives of involved agencies (NRC, DOE, NYSERDA and
others) regarding their roles and responsibilities in the WVDP.
Additionally, the NRC staff will discuss the WVDP Act and NRC's
Final Policy Statement on the Decommissioning Criteria for the
WVDP.
9:15 a.m.-10:30 a.m.: NRC's Performance Assessment Methodology
(Open)--The Committee will hear presentations by and hold
discussions with representatives of the NRC staff on models and
methodology used in their
[[Page 59781]] performance assessment for the WVDP site.
10:45 a.m.-11:45 a.m.: DOE's Performance Assessment Methodology
(Open)--The Committee will hear presentations by and hold
discussions with representatives of the DOE on models and
methodology used in their performance assessment for the WVDP
site.
11:45 a.m.-12:15 p.m: General Roundtable Discussion of
Performance Assessment Methodologies (Open)--The Committee will
discuss the two performance assessments presented earlier by the
NRC and DOE.
12:15 p.m.-12:30 p.m.: Comments From Meeting Attendees on the
Morning Session (Open)--The Committee will hear comments from the
audience/public.
2 p.m.-3:30 p.m.: Current WVDP Site Status and Ongoing
Dismantlement and Decommissioning Activities (Open)--The
Committee will hear presentations by and hold discussions with
representatives of the DOE on the current WVDP site status.
3:30 p.m.-4 p.m.: General Roundtable Discussion of Site Status
(Open)--The Committee and its invited experts will discuss
current WVDP site status.
4:15 p.m.-4:45 p.m.: Opportunity for Comments from the Audience/
Public (Open)--The Committee will hear comments from the
audience/ public.
4:45 p.m.-5:15 p.m.: General Discussion of Presentations (Open)--
The Committee will have a general discussion on the path forward
on the WVDP. The Committee will consider writing a report on the
day's session and future ACNW meetings on the WVDP.
Thursday, October 20, 2005 The ACNW will discuss proposed letter
reports and other miscellaneous matters.
10 a.m.-11:30 a.m.: Consideration of Proposed ACNW Reports
(Open)-- The Committee will discuss proposed reports based on
reviews from this and previous meetings.
11:30 a.m.-12 Noon: Miscellaneous (Open)--The Committee will
discuss matters related to the conduct of ACNW activities and
specific issues that were not completed during previous meetings,
as time and availability of information permit. Discussions may
include future Committee meetings.
Procedures for the conduct of and participation in ACNW meetings
were published in the Federal Register on October 18, 2004 (69 FR
61416). In accordance with these procedures, oral or written
statements may be presented by members of the public. Electronic
recordings will be permitted only during those portions of the
meeting that are open to the public. Persons desiring to make
oral statements should notify Ms. Sharon A. Steele, (Telephone
(301) 415-6805), between 8:30 a.m. and 5:15 p.m. ET, as far in
advance as practicable so that appropriate arrangements can be
made to schedule the necessary time during the meeting for such
statements. Use of still, motion picture, and television cameras
during this meeting will be limited to selected portions of the
meeting as determined by the ACNW Chairman.
Information regarding the time to be set aside for taking
pictures may be obtained by contacting the ACNW office prior to
the meeting. In view of the possibility that the schedule for
ACNW meetings may be adjusted by the Chairman as necessary to
facilitate the conduct of the meeting, persons planning to attend
should notify Ms. Steele as to their particular needs.
Further information regarding topics to be discussed, whether the
meeting has been canceled or rescheduled, the Chairman's ruling
on requests for the opportunity to present oral statements and
the time allotted, therefore can be obtained by contacting Ms.
Steele. ACNW meeting agenda, meeting transcripts, and letter
reports are available through the NRC Public Document Room (PDR)
at pdr@nrc.gov, or by calling the PDR at 1-800-397-4209, or from
the Publicly Available Records System component of NRC's document
system (ADAMS) which is accessible from the NRC Web site at
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams.html or
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/ (ACRS &
collections/ (ACRS & ACNW Mtg schedules/agendas).
Dated: October 6, 2005.
Andrew L. Bates, Advisory Committee Management Officer.
[FR Doc. E5-5596 Filed 10-12-05; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 7590-01-P
*****************************************************************
41 AU ABC: 'Outraged' NT Govt promises nuclear waste dump fight
Thursday, 13 October 2005, 15:16:39 AEST
The Northern Territory Government has warned it will continue to
fight any moves to build a nuclear waste dump in the Territory.
The Chief Minister made the commitment, despite new federal
legislation that will override any Territory laws aimed at
stopping a dump being built in the NT.
Federal Science Minister Brendan Nelson introduced legislation
this morning that would make the Territory Government's
opposition to the dump irrelevant.
The Chief Minister, Clare Martin, has expressed outrage over the
Federal Government's move, saying it shows a lack of respect for
Territory rights.
"Territorians are very tough," she said.
"We will fight and we will use people power, we will use all the
ability we have to influence the vote in the Senate and I put
senators now on warning.
"I'll be there, I'll be talking and so will a lot of
Territorians."
Protests
The federal Labor Party says residents will have to take matters
into their own hands if they are to stop the Commonwealth
building a nuclear waste dump in the Territory.
The Territory Government had indicated it might take High Court
action to stop the nuclear waste dump going ahead but Dr Nelson
says this legislation will prevent any delaying tactics.
"Recent statements from the Northern Territory Government
reinforce the need for this legislation," he said.
The Labor Member for Lingiari, Warren Snowdon says the bill is
outrageous and is encouraging individuals to make a stand.
"The first day a bulldozer moves onto one of these sites, I'll
be there," he said.
Mr Snowdon was ejected from Parliament for interjecting during
debate on the legislation today.
He says he is sickened that the legislation will set aside
heritage and environmental protection laws.
And he says the Government's claim that medical treatment will
be endangered if the dump does not go ahead, is wrong.
"The scientists at Lucas Heights have admitted at public
meetings at Alice Springs that they could keep the stuff at
Lucas Heights," he said.
"And it's just wrong, it's just plain wrong to say that it's
necessary to have one of these waste sites in the Northern
Territory as a repository for Australia's nuclear waste."
'Disgraceful'
The Central Land Council (CLC) says the Territory's two federal
Country Liberal Party (CLP) politicians have abandoned their
constituents by failing to oppose plans for a nuclear waste dump.
The CLC's director David Ross says the Federal Government was to
meet Arrernte traditional owners of one proposed dump site next
week.
But Mr Ross says the Government's plan for legislation
preventing a High Court appeal obliterates any pretence that the
traditional owners' views will be considered.
"I say it's contemptuous, it's disgraceful," he said.
"What do the rest of the people in the Northern Territory got to
say about this?
"And they don't necessarily have to be the traditional owners of
these particular areas. I mean if these people can do this, what
else can they do to people in the Northern Territory?"
The CLP leader has expressed her opposition to the Federal
Government's move.
But Jodeen Carney has again said she will not press her two
federal CLP colleagues to cross the floor and vote against any
legislation about the nuclear waste facility.
"I know that Dave Tollner and Nigel Scullion have been fighting
the good fight as best they possibly can but I say again,
'Either the CLP members sit in the Federal Parliament as
independents or they sit with the Coalition'.
"They sit with the Coalition to deliver benefits to Territorians.
"However, in politics sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose."
'Undemocratic'
The Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) says it is appalled
at the Federal Government legislation.
The ACF says it is a heavy-handed and undemocratic move.
"It overrides any laws or concerns about land use, environmental
consequences, heritage values, regulations, Indigenous issues,"
said a spokesperson.
"It overrides and extinguishes native title rights and
interests.
"And it removes people's rights and recourse to law and
procedural fairness."
Health
Senator Scullion, meanwhile, says Australia will have a Third
World health system if a nuclear waste facility is not built
soon.
He says he is confident Territorians will support the dump once
they realise the health of all Australians is at risk.
"If we don't have a site that is clear of any impediments by
April then by December 2006 Australia will not get access to
radio pharmaceuticals that are essential to the early diagnosis
of cancer and to deal with many cardiovascular issues in
Australia," he said.
The ACF's Dave Sweeney says Senator Scullion's argument is
offensive.
"That's one of the most mischievous, one of the most misleading,
and one of the most contemptuous comments I've heard in
Australian public life," he said.
"To say that a nuclear dump in the Northern Territory is
essential so that kiddies with cancer can get access to nuclear
medicine is emotional blackmail, it's completely wrong."
*****************************************************************
42 NEWS.com.au: Nuclear waste to travel SA roads -
PHILLIP COOREY
October 14, 2005
NUCLEAR waste from Lucas Heights would be trucked along SA roads
to a new dump in the Northern Territory, under Federal
Government legislation tabled in Parliament yesterday. SA
Environment Minister John Hill said yesterday he was unhappy
with the prospect, but conceded there was "not much we can do".
The Bills, introduced by Science Minister Brendan Nelson, seek
to finally bury the controversial issue by overriding all state
and territory rights, as well as those of local Aborigines and
environmental groups.
After first unsuccessfully trying to establish a dump in SA's
Outback, the Federal Government said recently it would put the
dump on Northern Territory Commonwealth land. The dump, to be
built at one of three sites under consideration, would take
low-level waste generated by hospitals and laboratories, as well
as high-level waste including reprocessed fuel rods from Lucas
Heights and parts of the current reactor.
Only Commonwealth waste would be buried at the site.
Legislation provides for transporting the waste by road and sea.
Waste trucked from Sydney would most likely pass though
Peterborough, Port Augusta and Coober Pedy on its way to the NT.
Dr Nelson said yesterday successive governments had tried to
responsibly store waste. Mr Hill said statistics showed there
would be accidents transporting the waste.
Federal Labor MP Warren Snowdon was thrown out of Parliament
yesterday for his loud objections as the Bill was introduced.
The Australian Conservation Foundation said the Government had
undertaken an arrogant course of action. Search for
SitemapCopyright 2005 News Limited. All times
*****************************************************************
43 NEWS.com.au: Nuclear war on waste plans
By Phillip Coorey and Nigel Adlam
October 14, 2005
NUCLEAR waste from Lucas Heights would be trucked along South
Australia's roads to a new dump in the Northern Territory, under
Federal Government legislation tabled in Parliament yesterday.
SA Environment Minister John Hill said yesterday while he was
unhappy with the prospect he said not much could be done.
But the NT Government vowed it would fight the move if the
legislation is passed by the Senate.
The Bills, introduced by Science Minister Brendan Nelson, seek
to override all state and territory rights, as well as those of
local Aborigines and environmental groups.
After first unsuccessfully trying to establish a dump in SA's
outback, the Federal Government said recently it would put the
dump on NT Commonwealth land.
The dump, to be built at one of three sites under consideration,
would take low-level waste generated by hospitals and
laboratories, as well as high-level waste including reprocessed
fuel rods from Lucas Heights and parts of the current reactor.
If the law is passed in the Senate, a nuclear waste depository
would be built on Commonwealth land near Alice Springs or
Katherine within five years.
Legislation provides for transporting the waste by road and sea
and only Commonwealth waste would be buried at the site.
Waste trucked from Sydney would most likely pass though
Peterborough, Port Augusta and Coober Pedy on its way to the NT.
Dr Nelson said yesterday successive governments had tried to
responsibly store waste. Mr Hill said statistics showed there
would be accidents transporting the waste.
NT Chief Minister Clare Martin said the move was the worst-ever
Federal attack on Territory rights - worse than the overthrow of
the Rights of the Terminally Ill Act in 1997.
But her Government stopped short of announcing an expensive
legal challenge.
Ms Martin said the Territory was being forced to take the
nuclear facility because it was not a state.
"The Federal Government is doing this to us because it can,"
she said. Labor said it hoped CLP Senator Nigel Scullion would
cross the floor and vote against the plan.
Ms Martin said the Senator had publicly said he would vote
against the Bill.
Senator Scullion last night denied this. This was despite saying
in August: "I'm out on this now - I'll cross the floor." But
last night Senator Scullion said he had only supported a Labor
motion calling on Prime Minister John Howard to honour an
election promise not to build the facility in the NT.
"I've never said I would vote against it," he said.
Territory Opposition Leader Jodeen Carney said the CLP supported
the call for scrapping Federal laws.
"One thing Territorians don't like is Canberra opposing their
will," Ms Carney said.
One of the Territory's two Independent parliamentarians said the
Territory Government had only itself to blame for the problem.
Gerry Wood, the Member for Nelson, accused the Territory
Government of engaging in a political charade to cover "its lack
of leadership".
NT Health Minister Peter Toyne said the Lucas Heights reactor
in Sydney could produce medical isotopes for 30 years.
"It's shameful to use cancer patients as pawns in this grubby
political game," Mr Toyne said.
Federal Labor MP Warren Snowdon was thrown out of Parliament
yesterday for his loud objections as the Bill was introduced.
The Australian Conservation Foundation said the Government had
undertaken an arrogant course of action.
From The Advertiser and the Northern Territory News
SitemapCopyright 2005 News Limited. All times
*****************************************************************
44 Pahrump Valley Times: Bechtel, DOE dinged in audit
October12, 2005
By STEVE TETREAULT PVT WASHINGTON BUREAU
WASHINGTON - The Department of Energy paid incentive fees to
Yucca Mountain management contractor Bechtel SAIC for work that
was found to be late or unacceptable, government auditors said
in a report Thursday.
The firm was awarded payments by the Office of Civilian
Radioactive Waste Management "even though Bechtel delivered poor
quality work and missed deadlines," according to the Energy
Department inspector general.
The inspector general challenged $3.99 million out of $43.4
million in incentives for work performed on the proposed Nevada
nuclear waste repository between February 2001 and September
2004.
"The total costs of inappropriate incentive fees cannot be
determined," the audit report said.
The payments questioned by auditors included $2 million
associated with work Bechtel performed on a key license
application for the Yucca repository.
The findings are the latest blow on the nuclear waste project,
which is years behind schedule and faces continued legal,
political and technical challenges.
Nevada-based critics of the Yucca Mountain project seized on the
audit.
Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., called on Bechtel SAIC to give
back the challenged funds and for the Department of Energy to
cease awarding "bonuses"
"I can't understand how DOE could not ask for the money back,"
Berkley said. "If a bank accidentally gave you money that is not
in your account, you must return it. Same thing here, except
Bechtel knew about it. This is a rip-off pure and simple."
The audit illustrates shoddy DOE management, Sens. Harry Reid,
D-Nev., and John Ensign, R-Nev., said in a joint statement.
"To pay out millions upon millions of dollars in bonuses for
incomplete work, poor performance, and unacceptable products is
the height of government waste and mismanagement," Rep. Jim
Gibbons, D-Nev., said.
Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., said similar activity in the private
sector would be a firing offense, "no questions asked."
Paul Golan, the principal deputy director of the Yucca project,
said he accepted the audit findings.
"I will use this report to develop a comprehensive corrective
action plan that will provide clearer and more objective
performance standards," he said in a letter responding to the
audit.
A DOE spokesman declined to comment further.
Jason Bohne, a spokesman for Bechtel-SAIC in Las Vegas, said
the audit was being reviewed.
"We stand by the work we have performed under the contract,"
Bohne said. "We take the report seriously and will review it
carefully."
The incentives were written into the Bechtel-SAIC contract,
which was valued at about $3.2 billion for five years.
Bechtel SAIC and the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste
Management, which operates the Yucca program, signed a "cost
plus incentive fee," contract, an arrangement designed to reward
companies for meeting goals and performing work to required
quality levels.
The contractor also was offered an additional "super stretch
incentive fee" if it would complete pre-license application
technical documents ahead of schedule.
The contract contained opportunities for Bechtel to earn $50.9
million in "performance based incentives" in its early years.
Auditors concluded, though, that DOE managers failed to identify
acceptable quality levels or specify how the contractor's
performance would be measured.
There were also no procedures to adjust the fees when deadlines
were missed, the report said.
The investigators challenged incentives that DOE paid in cases
where Bechtel needed additional time to correct poor quality
work and where work scope was reduced due to poor performance.
As an example, auditors said DOE paid most of a $17.7 million
incentive fee for work on documents supporting the Yucca
Mountain site recommendation in December 2001 even though
Bechtel needed additional time to correct inconsistencies.
The extra work resulted in a 22-day delay, auditors said. DOE
paid all but $125,786 of the incentive fee, they said, while
stating the delay "was due to events beyond the contractor's
control."
For comment or questions, please e-mail
webmaster@pahrumpvalleytimes.com
Copyright © Pahrump Valley Times, 1997 - 2005
*****************************************************************
45 NEWS.com.au: Government pushes nuke dump bill -
From: AAP
By Max Blenkin
October 13, 2005
THE Federal Government moved today to build a nuclear waste dump
in the Northern Territory, introducing legislation to head off
any challenge from governments, indigenous owners or green
groups. That sparked immediate outrage, with NT Labor MP Warren
Snowdon ejected from Parliament for a succession of heated
interjections as Science Minister Brendan Nelson introduced the
two bills.
NT Chief Minister Clare Martin described the legislation as
outrageous for over-riding the rights of territorians.
The NT Parliament immediately moved a resolution condemning the
removal of any ability to scrutinise, review or appeal the dump
proposal.
Federal Opposition deputy leader Jenny Macklin said this was a
draconian act by an arrogant government that could not give a
toss about the Australian community.
Australian Democrats leader Lyn Allison accused the government
of resorting to bully-boy tactics while Greens Senator Christine
Milne said it demonstrated complete contempt for the democratic
process.
The Central Land Council said the legislation showed outrageous
disregard for the views of territorians including Arrernte
traditional owners who already clearly and loudly said no.
But Dr Nelson said this was only necessary because of the
attitude of state and territory governments, which all agreed on
the need for a repository for low and intermediate level nuclear
waste, as long as it was not in their backyards.
Radioactive waste is now stored at more than 100 sites around
Australia, including hospitals, factories, universities and
defence facilities.
Much of it originates from medical isotopes produced at Lucas
Heights, Sydney, and used for cancer treatment.
Under the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Bill 2005
and the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management (Related
Amendment) Bill 2005, the Commonwealth will overturn a NT law
specifically introduced to torpedo the plan.
It will also bar any challenges under the Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act and the Environmental
Protection and Biodioversity Conservation Act.
Another section allows the Commonwealth to acquire or
extinguish any remaining interests in the chosen site. Yet
another allows the Commonwealth to overcome any state or
territory measures aimed at restricting transport of waste along
their roads.
However, Dr Nelson said there would be no cutting of corners on
safety or regulatory scrutiny, stipulating that all processes
under relevant environmental, nuclear safety and proliferation
safeguards must be complied with.
Dr Nelson said the aim was to put beyond doubt commonwealth
powers to establishment the waste dump.
He said successive Labor and Coalition governments had sought
to make responsible arrangements for dealing with waste produced
by commonwealth agencies.
In 1992 Labor energy minister Simon Crean launched an inquiry
to find a suitable site for a national repository. That process
ended last year with the South Australian government taking
court action to oppose use of the preferred site at Woomera.
The government then abandoned the national waste dump plan and
announced a search for its own site, leaving states and
territories to make their own arrangements.
However, the Government has offered the NT Government use of
the new facility for storage of its own waste, including 16
cubic metres at Darwin Hospital.
Dr Nelson said a detailed site selection process would be
undertaken over the next year to assess which of the three sites
was most suitable.
They are at Fishers Ridge, 43km south-east of Katherine, Harts
Range, 100km north-east of Alice Springs and Mt Everard, 27km
north-west of Alice Springs. All are on defence land.
Dr Nelson said it was envisaged the site would become
operational in 2011. Search for more stories on this
2005 News Limited. All times
*****************************************************************
46 Deseret News: 2 Utah legislators tour proposed Yucca Mountain
nuclear site
[deseretnews.com]
Thursday, October 13, 2005
If radioactive waste can be stored safely, why move it, they ask
By Joe Bauman
Deseret Morning News
An argument often advanced for sending spent nuclear fuel rods to
the West for disposal or storage is a very good reason to keep
them where they are, say two members of the state House of
Representatives.
Rep. Greg Curtis, R-Sandy, speaker of the House, and Rep.
Stephen H. Urquhart, R-St. George, majority whip, say officials
maintain that the highly radioactive rods can be safely
contained for a long time in dry casks.
"If that's the case, why not just cask them . . . and
leave them where they're at?" Curtis asked.
Urquhart and Curtis on Tuesday toured Yucca Mountain,
Nev., where the federal government intends to permanently
dispose of 70,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel and high-level
radioactive waste, mostly generated by power plants throughout
the country.
The two were in Nevada with other members of the
High-Level Radioactive Waste Working Group, part of the National
Conference of State Legislatures. According to the conference,
attendees included state senators, representatives and delegates
from 17 states.
The tour "reconfirmed to me that Utah should not be
supporting Yucca Mountain" as a repository, Urquhart said in a
telephone interview.
More than 90 percent of the radioactive material in spent
fuel rods is theoretically reusable, he said, and in 50 years,
science may have progressed to the point where this material can
be safely reprocessed and reused.
According to a final environmental impact statement,
trucks, rail or both may be used to move the material. If mostly
trucks were used, about 53,000 shipments would travel on
interstate highways over a 24-year period. If the choice is
mostly rail, 9,000 to 10,000 rail cars would be sent to Yucca
Mountain during the period.
Northern rail routes to the repository site would be
through Elko, Carlin, Battle Mountain and Reno, Nev., according
to the environmental statement.
Trucks would pass through Salt Lake City. "I-15, the
closest interstate highway to the proposed repository, travels
through Salt Lake City, Utah, to southern California, passing
through Las Vegas," according to the statement.
Moving the nuclear waste is a huge concern to Urquhart.
Things can go wrong while material is shipped, he noted, adding,
"No one suggests that we only buckle our seat belts if we plan
on getting in an accident. . . . Accidents can happen in
transportation."
The Utahns said they were surprised how far the Yucca
Mountain repository is from completion, after the expenditure of
billions of dollars.
"Right now, it's just a big tunnel, a big hole, and I've
seen tunnels before," Urquhart said. The tunnel is impressively
long, maybe four or five miles. But little has been done to
develop the project physically beyond that, other than "some
little alcoves where they are conducting some experiments."
He said he understands that nuclear waste storage is an
extremely complex problem, "and we do have to deal with it some
way. They've put some serious science into this. But at the end
of the day, I think the West is being stuck with it because of
politics. I don't understand why Western politicians would be
willing to play door mat to that."
© 2005 Deseret News Publishing Company [ /]
*****************************************************************
47 Rocky Mountain News: End of road at Flats
Dennis Schroeder © News
U.S. Rep. Mark Udall visits Rocky Flats Wednesday and called the
cleanup a "success story." The land is to become an animal
refuge. "We've traded weapons for wildlife . . . bombs for
birds," Udall said.
Dennis Schroeder © News
The final truckload of low level radioactive materials to be
shipped out of Rocky Flats is taken from the site Friday.
Government contractor Kaiser-Hill has spent a decade cleaning up
the 6,200-acre former weapons plant. Now the Energy Department
is expected to spend months verifying that the work was done
properly. Rocky Flats is the first nuclear weapons plant in the
world to be cleaned up and demolished. "No one had ever done
this," said John Corsi of Kaiser-Hill.
Inspections under way; weapons plant to revert to prairie
By Todd Hartman And Kevin Vaughan, Rocky Mountain News
October 13, 2005
The storied Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant, an icon of the
Cold War, a famed target of peace activists and an economic
powerhouse for the metro area, has vanished from its 50-year
perch on the high prairie northwest of Denver.
Crews with Kaiser-Hill Co., the government contractor that spent
a decade scouring the 6,200-acre site of everything from
buildings to plutonium-laced dirt, were conducting final
inspections Wednesday in preparation for formal completion of
the cleanup, expected any day.
The announcement will trigger a review of the work and
continuing monitoring of the site, which is to become a wildlife
refuge. Still, concern over whether the property will ever be
safe for humans and animals is sure to linger.
The demolition, removal and decontamination work marks the end
of a federal complex once home to 800 buildings, named streets,
power lines and bomb-making factories where workers churned out
critical components for tens of thousands of the weapons that
fueled America's Cold War with the Soviet Union.
Now, almost nothing remains. Prairie or newly seeded soil cover
the entire property, with a few one-lane dirt roads left for
future access by environmental regulators and U.S. Fish and
Wildlife workers, who will eventually manage much of the land as
a refuge.
"We've traded weapons for wildlife . . . bombs for birds," said
Democratic U.S. Rep. Mark Udall, who paid his respects to the
emptied site Wednesday with a visit.
Udall, whose district includes Rocky Flats, called the cleanup a
"success story across the board," a description not discouraged
by Kaiser-Hill, which turned what the Department of Energy once
figured to be a $36 billion, 70-year cleanup, into a $7 billion,
decade-long affair.
All told, Kaiser-Hill will earn a fee in the range of $550
million to $600 million for its work, numbers that are based, in
part, on beating a December 2006 deadline.
Born in secrecy in 1951, Rocky Flats began processing
radioactive elements the following year and building nuclear
weapons in 1954 in a heavily guarded compound 16 miles northwest
of downtown Denver.
Production at Rocky Flats ended in 1989 after a government raid
and amid ongoing environmental and safety concerns.
While Rocky Flats has long been lauded as crucial in winning the
Cold War - and its thousands of workers hailed as factory-bound
soldiers working on a different kind of front line - others have
portrayed the place in a darker light.
The legacy of Rocky Flats, critics say, is the creation of
plutonium triggers still sitting in nuclear weapons poised for
use, "weapons of mass destruction, enough to more than wipe out
all human life on the planet," said LeRoy Moore, a peace
activist who has followed events at the site since 1978.
Still, Rocky Flats today holds a distinction that no other
facility like it can claim: It is the first nuclear weapons
plant in the world that has been cleaned up and demolished.
"No one had ever done this," said Kaiser-Hill's John Corsi.
Using many of the same workers who had once built bombs,
Kaiser-Hill trucked nuclear waste to 10 storage sites in other
states. It tore down buildings, hauled out dirt and replanted
native grasses.
And now it is poised to pronounce the job done.
That will launch the next phase of the cleanup: A months-long
process of verifying that the work was done properly.
That effort will be carried out by the Department of Energy.
Rocky Flats stats
• 6,200: Acres, including a 400-acre industrial zone, where
bomb-making took place
• 800: Structures in the now-dismantled industrial zone
• 5: Number of large, heavily contaminated plutonium processing
facilities, covering more than 1 million square feet
• 600,000 cubic meters: Amount of radioactive and hazardous
waste removed from the site, enough to fill a string of rail
cars 90 miles long
• 30,000 liters: Amount of plutonium and enriched uranium
solutions stored in tanks and piping before cleanup began
• 512,000 tons: Amount of miscellaneous waste, such as asphalt,
wood and concrete, for disposal in regular landfills
• 21 tons: Amount of "weapons-grade nuclear material," much of
it improperly stored, before the cleanup began
• $36 billion: Original estimate of cleanup cost
• 70 years: Original estimate for length of cleanup
• $7 billion: Actual cost of cleanup
• 10 years: Actual length of cleanupSource: Kaiser-Hill Co.
hartmant@rockymountainnews.com or 303-892-5048 and
vaughank@rockymountainnews.com or 303-892-5019
© Rocky Mountain News
*****************************************************************
48 Rocky Mountain News: Defense opens on Flats
Mistakes at plant not intentional, says lawyer for companies
By Karen Abbott, Rocky Mountain News
October 13, 2005
The true story of Rocky Flats isn't the easy stuff of Hollywood
movies, a lawyer for the companies told a federal jury
Wednesday.
Instead, it's a complicated saga of two companies working on
weapons crucial to the national defense, said David Bernick of
Chicago, attorney for Dow Chemical Co. and Rockwell
International Corp.
The two companies operated the nuclear weapons plant 16 miles
northwest of downtown Denver for 37 years.
"Nobody's going to say that a perfect job was done at Rocky
Flats," Bernick said. "But nobody was sitting there playing with
other people's lives and playing with other people's safety."
Bernick disputed the story of "government secrecy, hazardous
materials, uncaring corporations, innocent victims," presented
Tuesday by plaintiffs' lawyers in the $500 million class-action
lawsuit.
He said releases of radioactive plutonium from the Rocky Flats
site amounted to half the size of a dime, spread over a
16-square-mile neighborhood, and exposed neighborhood residents
to a radiation dose of less than 0.2 millirems.
A radiation dose of that magnitude translates to a cancer risk
of less than one case in each one million people, Bernick said.
By contrast, he said, the risk of cancer from exposure to
second-hand smoke is about one case in a thousand people.
Bernick said Dow and Rockwell did their best to safely handle
and store radioactive plutonium, other radioactive materials and
other dangerous substances.
But officials and employees of the two companies were forced to
balance safety efforts with other demands - especially meeting
national defense needs for nuclear weapons during the Cold War,
Bernick said.
"The impact of this mission can never, ever be overestimated,"
Bernick said. "It was in their hearts. It was in their souls. It
drove them in all respects."
Along the way, weapons designs, safety and environmental
regulations and the work actually done at Rocky Flats changed,
he said.
Besides using difficult technology to make nuclear bomb parts,
Dow had other responsibilities including security, production
requirements, labor relations and meeting the budget, Bernick
said.
After a 1957 fire, plant operators added more than a million
tons of wood-product and Plexiglass shielding to protect workers
in the event of another fire, Bernick said. The materials were
chosen because they could be installed quickly, he added.
Heat monitors were placed under gloveboxes where highly
flammable nuclear materials were handled, according to Bernick.
But another fire broke out in 1969 after the heat monitor
beneath one glovebox failed to detect burning plutonium in a
storage cabinet inside the glovebox, Bernick said. The bottom of
the cabinet was covered with wood-product shielding, which
inadvertently shielded the heat of the fire from being detected
by the monitor, he said.
"Was it a problem, a mistake?" Bernick said. "Yes."
"It was something that happened when they were trying to do two
things at once, which was to very quickly put all the shielding
in and at the same time have a fire protection system," he said.
"And just this one flaw, one vulnerability, led to this big, big
fire."
He said the Atomic Energy Commission - now the U.S. Energy
Department - sharply criticized fire safety measures at Rocky
Flats after the 1969 fire, but AEC inspectors had approved the
measures just months before the fire broke out.
"This facility was not up to snuff, but it was not up to snuff
not because people were asleep at the switch," Bernick said. "It
was a complicated balancing situation."
The trial, expected to last nearly to Christmas, will resume
Friday before Colorado U.S. District Judge John Kane.
abbottk@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5188
2005 © Rocky Mountain News
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49 Rocky Mountain News: 'Infinitesimal' health risk
Rep. Mark Udall, D-Colo., and officials from municipalities
around the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant tour the
southern buffer zone at the defunct plant Monday. Udall is
introducing a bill in Congress to keep the buffer zone as open
space. A spokesman for the cleanup contractor, Kaiser-Hill, said
the majority of the site, including the buffer zone, has
plutonium levels closer to background levels found in everyday
life, a risk "far less" than one in a million for cancer.
Experts say Flats is safe, but critics remain unconvinced
By Todd Hartman, Rocky Mountain News
October 13, 2005
The Rocky Flats bomb factory is gone, erased in a 10-year effort
even critics concede represents an extraordinarily efficient
environmental cleanup job.
But little souvenirs have been left behind, all invisible to the
naked eye: scattered atoms of plutonium, subterranean solvent
plumes, contaminated groundwater and buried foundations -
leftovers of the toxic workshops devoted for decades to making
nuclear weapons.
Even so, a wide array of experts, including the Department of
Energy and a citizen board overseeing the cleanup, insist the
freshly scrubbed 6,200-acre site is safe.
Critics remain unconvinced.
Rocky Flats is to become a wildlife refuge. Amid tallgrass
prairie along the foothills of Jefferson and Boulder counties,
families presumably will someday stroll. They'll see deer,
songbirds and prairie dogs ramble on property once patrolled by
gun-toting guards and sectioned off with foreboding fences of
mesh and barbed wire.
But the perception that Rocky Flats is still dangerous could
prove a larger hurdle to overcome than any remnants of the
environmental hazards that once made the plant a genuine threat
to the community, said several people who've followed the
cleanup.
"It won't prevent me" from visiting, said Steve Gunderson, a top
Colorado state environmental regulator who supervised much of
the site's closure. "I have had my children visit during a
family day a few years ago . . . I look forward to the day I can
hike the trails around Rocky Flats."
Even the roughly 400-acre industrial area, where 800 buildings
devoted to the mission of making nuclear bombs were clustered,
poses infinitesimal risk, regulators and other officials say.
But that section won't be included in the wildlife refuge - not
because it's dangerous but because the Department of Energy
doesn't want the public to accidentally or intentionally
interfere with monitoring equipment in place to track the
contamination that does remain on site.
The closure "is primarily designed to protect the (cleanup) from
people, not to protect people from (cleanup)," said David
Abelson, executive director of the Rocky Flats Coalition of
Local Governments, a watchdog group of cities and counties that
surround the site.
Plutonium levels in soil were the focus of much of the cleanup
debate.
In the end, a citizens' board, local governments and regulators
agreed to require levels no higher than 50 picocuries per gram -
or 50 trillionths of a curie per gram - in the first three feet
of soil.
Those levels reflect a statistical model based on a person
likely to get the most exposure to the soil at Rocky Flats - a
future wildlife refuge worker spending 40 hours a week at the
site for 50 weeks a year. Such an exposure, regulators said,
creates a 1 in 200,000 chance of contracting cancer.
But even that calculation is conservative, said John Corsi, a
spokesman for the cleanup contractor, Kaiser- Hill.
That's because the vast majority of the site, including the
massive buffer zone surrounding the former industrial core, has
plutonium levels closer to background levels found in everyday
life.
Even assuming every acre of the site had levels of 50 picocuries
per gram, the health risk is virtually nil, Corsi said, as it
would expose the refuge worker to the equivalent of two
millirems of radiation. A person is exposed to six millirems
flying from Los Angeles to New York and back, he said.
That also means a future visitor will have a risk "far less"
than one in a million for cancer, Corsi said.
"It is an infinitesimal risk compared to the other sources of
radiation we're exposed to on a daily basis," Abelson said.
"Those are the facts," Abelson said. "How people interpret the
fact, well, that's a different matter."
Victor Holm, a longtime chairman of the Citizens' Advisory Board
that has overseen and endorsed Kaiser-Hill's cleanup plans, said
that other toxins at Rocky Flats, including more mundane
contaminants such as solvents that contaminated groundwater, are
actually of greater potential risk.
"It's hard to get anyone excited about that," Holm said.
He believes people seize on radioactive contaminants because of
the "terrible consequences" of nuclear war.
But not everyone is as reassured about the safety of Rocky
Flats.
Some activists, including a former FBI agent who led a 1989 raid
on Rocky Flats, searching for evidence of environmental crimes,
maintain past operators of the plant engaged in illegal dumping
that wasn't thoroughly investigated by the government.
Though Rockwell, a former operator of the plant, admitted 10
environmental crimes and paid an $18.5 million fine as part of a
plea agreement in 1992, activists say not all of the pollution
was discovered and that the DOE has relied on false reports to
conclude some parts of the site are clean.
Government officials say that's not so. Still, the claims won't
seem to go away.
This week, a long-delayed trial opened in federal court pitting
neighbors of the site against former site operators. Plaintiffs
say Rocky Flats cut their property values and exposed them to
health risks - claims defendants vigorously dispute.
Peace activist LeRoy Moore, who has spoken out against Rocky
Flats since 1978, commended the cleanup, calling it "a hard job"
and "a big step forward (that has made) the site a whole lot
safer than it used to be."
But, Moore said, that doesn't mean it's safe. He's convinced the
public needs to know more about exposures to low doses of
radiation. He cited a recent study from the National Academy of
Sciences that he said concluded there is no such thing as a safe
dose of radiation.
"I hear from people near and far who are quite surprised at
turning Rocky Flats into a playground, where people can hike and
bike and ride horses," Moore said.
"I can only imagine they're doing it because they want us to
believe it's OK, but it's an unwise thing to do. It would be
better to retain it as open space and not allow people to go
onto it, and continue to look more closely at" risks.
2005 © Rocky Mountain News
*****************************************************************
50 Rocky Mountain News: Key events in history of Rocky Flats
October 13, 2005
1950s
• Early 1951: The Atomic Energy Commission decides to build a
nuclear weapons plant in Colorado. Possible sites include the
Rocky Mountain Arsenal northeast of Denver and a high plateau
near the foothills known as the Rocky Flats.
• March 23, 1951: The Atomic Energy Commission unveils plans
for a $45 million plant in the Rocky Flats area northwest of
Denver. Officials emphasize that the plant would not be used to
manufacture atom bombs. Dow Chemical Co. is named the the
primary contractor. Officials initially offer landowners $18 an
acre as "just compensation." The landowners balk at the price,
and four years later are awarded $56 an acre.
• May 8, 1951: Boulder Mayor J. Perry Bartlett and Boulder
Chamber of Commerce President Frank S. Henderson ride a
bulldozer as it churns through the first plot of earth,
officially marking the beginning of construction.
• February 1952: The first radioactive shipments arrive at Rocky
Flats.
• May 1953: Plutonium processing begins in Building 771.
• Sept. 12, 1957: A fire starts spontaneously in an exhaust
filter system in Building 771. A spokesman for the Atomic Energy
Commission tells reporters that tests indicated "no spread of
radioactive contamination of consequence." Damage is estimated
at $818,600.
1960s
• Jan. 23, 1967: Workers open what they call the "Jelly
Factory," where waste liquids are filtered and then mixed into a
gel for long-term storage. The process is developed after an
estimated 5,000 gallons of plutonium-tainted solvents had leaked
into the ground.
• May 11, 1969: Shortly after 2 p.m., a fire breaks out in
building 776-777, used to manufacture nuclear bombs. The blaze
burns for 5 1/2 hours. Although the public was told little about
the blaze, it's clear from government documents that the fire
posed a significant risk of a Chernobyl-type disaster. Damage is
estimated at $26.5 million.
1970s
• Jan. 25, 1970: In the first of many protests, Boulder peace
activists march on Rocky Flats.
• May 24, 1973: The Colorado health department discovers the
radioactive material tritium in Walnut Creek, a tributary of
Broomfield's Great Western Reservoir.
• Nov. 21, 1974: Rockwell International replaces Dow as Rocky
Flats operator.
• April 29, 1979: More than 9,000 people descend on Rocky Flats
to protest U.S. nuclear weapons policy. Among the more than 300
people arrested is Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst
who leaked the Pentagon Papers, classified documents on the
Vietnam War.
1980s
• Oct. 15, 1983: Thousands of protesters surround Rocky Flats,
linking arms along vast stretches of its perimeter.
• June 6, 1989: Seventy-five FBI agents, Environmental
Protection Agency officials and federal prosecutors raid Rocky
Flats. They shut down operations while they investigate
allegations that workers concealed environmental contamination,
filed false environmental reports and improperly disposed of
hazardous waste.
• June 28, 1989: A federal judge decides to impanel a special
grand jury to investigate alleged environmental crimes at Rocky
Flats.
• Sept. 28, 1989: Rocky Flats is added to a list of highly
polluted sites eligible for Superfund cleanup money.
• Nov. 13, 1989: Officials halt plutonium operations for safety
reasons. They never resume.
1990s
• Jan. 1, 1990: EG takes over operation from Rockwell
International.
• Jan. 28, 1992: President George H.W. Bush, declaring in his
State of the Union speech that the United States won the Cold
War, announces an end to production of the W-88 nuclear missile
used on Trident submarines. The announcement sounds the death
knell for Rocky Flats.
• Feb. 19, 1992: Grand jurors write a highly critical 75-page
report calling for the plant to be permanently closed. It
alleges that Department of Energy "political appointees continue
to direct and endorse the course of conduct at the plant in
violation of environmental laws." The grand jury also votes to
indict officials at Rockwell, EG, and the U.S. Department of
Energy, but then-U.S. Attorney Mike Norton refuses to sign the
indictments.
• June 1, 1992: Rockwell, in a plea deal that resolves the grand
jury investigation, admits 10 federal environmental
waste-storage crimes and is fined $18.5 million. In return, the
U.S. attorney's office states that the most sensational charges
against Rockwell — midnight burning of waste, willful dumping of
chemicals into creeks, secret experimental medical labs — did
not occur.
• Sept. 26, 1992: A federal judge rules that the report from the
grand jury will not be made public.
• April 4, 1995: Kaiser-Hill Inc. wins contract to coordinate
Rocky Flats cleanup.
• Aug. 1, 1996: Grand jurors file suit in federal court, seeking
permission to break the silence required of them by the law in
order to testify before Congress.
• Aug. 7, 1997: Energy Secretary Federico Peńa targets 2006 for
completion of cleanup.
2000s
• Dec. 28, 2001: President Bush signs into law a measure
designating Rocky Flats a wildlife refuge.
• March 12, 2004: Colorado U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch
refuses to let grand jurors break silence.
• Oct. 7, 2005: Last shipment of radioactive waste leaves Rocky
Flats, bound for a dump in Utah.
• Oct. 11, 2005: A federal court begins hearing a 15-year-old
lawsuit by Rocky Flats neighbors. They allege mishandled toxic
substances at the plant diminished their property values and
their rights under the law to use and enjoy what they owned.
Sources: Rocky Mountain News Files; Kaiser-Hill Co.; Len
Ackland'S Making A Real Killing: Rocky Flats And The Nuclear
West; West ...
2005 © Rocky Mountain News
*****************************************************************
51 Rocky Mountain News: Nuke plant on prairie manufactures history
By Kevin Vaughan, Rocky Mountain News
October 13, 2005
It rose from a rock-strewn mesa at the foot of the Rocky
Mountains, shrouded in secrecy and barbed wire - a concrete city
where workers in funny-looking suits and thick rubber gloves
carried out top-secret work.
For five decades, it stood on the high ground that gave it a name
- the Rocky Flats - even as it was buffeted by jittery neighbors
with safety questions, by protesters, by politicians.
Within its carefully guarded perimeter fences, an army of
scientists and engineers took metals with exotic names -
plutonium, uranium, beryllium - and fashioned weapons designed
to obliterate life on Earth.
It was a factory, pure and simple, a steel and concrete city
that churned out thousands of nuclear bombs used as the triggers
in the most lethal weapons ever made by man. And now, 15 years
after the last bomb left Rocky Flats, it has been swept from the
earth in the biggest environmental cleanup of its kind.
"It's all gone," said former Congressman David Skaggs, who
called for the plant's closure in 1989. "There's almost a
wistfulness in saying that - that's what we wanted to have
happen, but it's an odd feeling."
Beginnings in 1951
On a Friday morning in March 1951, reporters were summoned to
the Mayflower Hotel on the edge of downtown. There, in an
announcement carried out almost simultaneously with others in
Los Alamos, N.M., and Washington, D.C., officials of the Atomic
Energy Commission unveiled plans for a $45 million plant in the
Rocky Flats area between Boulder and Golden.
They were attracted by an ample and educated work force and a
strong housing market. And it was a political victory for
Colorado's powerful Democratic senator, the late Edwin "Big Ed"
Johnson, and the late Republican Sen. Eugene Millikin.
The feds on hand that day were cryptic about the plant's
ultimate mission.
But within two years, the plant was processing plutonium. And by
1954, it was making nuclear bombs.
As the years passed, Rocky Flats grew. The four original
production buildings were surrounded by hundreds of other
structures. The plant had its own fire department and hospital.
What went on there was a closely guarded secret.
"It was an era where national security was something that was
accepted by virtually everyone without question," said Len
Ackland, a University of Colorado professor and the author of
the book, Making a Real Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear
West.
A 1957 blaze that erupted in Building 771 caused an estimated
$818,600 in damage and released radioactive waste into the air.
But the 10-paragraph story on the fire that ran on page 46 of
the next morning's Rocky Mountain News didn't raise the specter
of radioactive danger.
On May 11, 1969, a much larger fire ripped through a plutonium
processing building, causing $26.5 million in damage and spewing
radioactive smoke into the air. Though plant officials assured
reporters that no one had been injured and nothing outside the
building had been contaminated, the blaze marked the beginning
of the end of secrecy about Rocky Flats.
Within a year, the first of many protests was organized outside
the plant's gate.
The next two decades saw a different climate around the
perimeter of Rocky Flats.
Protesters frequently gathered at the gates or blocked the
railroad spur leading to the plant. Neighbors worried about
whether the two creeks running through the site - Walnut and
Woman - were carrying radioactive contamination into their
drinking water supplies. New questions arose about the dangers
being faced by Rocky Flats workers.
And the public came to understand what was being built at Rocky
Flats: nuclear bombs. Called "pits," they were complete weapons
that lacked only the conventional charge to detonate them. They
were sometimes euphemistically referred to as "triggers" because
they became components used to detonate much larger nuclear
weapons.
At its height, the plant employed 6,000. Over its lifetime -
which mirrored the Cold War with the Soviet Union - Rocky Flats
workers turned out 70,000 pits.
John Mermigas walked into the plant for the first time on March
7, 1983.
He took a job at the plant working in what was known as
"plutonium recovery" - the chemical process of gathering usable
plutonium from waste, retired weapons or production residue.
"Back then, everything was on a need-to-know basis, so there
were all these pieces of the puzzle that finally ended up as a
nuclear weapon," Mermigas said. "But you were only privy to the
pieces of the puzzle you needed to do your job."
Still, he considered the moral implications of his work: That if
he did his job correctly, he was helping build bombs that could
annihilate entire cities.
"I believe it was something that was necessary," he said. "It's
a necessary evil, I guess."
He wasn't alone.
"We looked at it as part of the national defense, part of the
Cold War," said Frank Gibbs, who went to work at Rocky Flats in
June 1984, right after graduating from the Colorado School of
Mines with a degree in metallurgy.
It was a good job, even if Gibbs never told anyone where he
worked, never wore his badge when he was off the property.
In 1989, after decades of dodging safety questions, work at
Rocky Flats was abruptly halted.
First, a swarm of FBI and Environmental Protection Agency
investigators raided the plant amid charges of illegal waste
disposal. And then bomb-making was stopped amid safety concerns.
The next few years brought uncertainty that ended the night of
Jan. 28, 1992, when President George H.W. Bush announced the end
of the W-88 missile program.
It was the death knell for Rocky Flats.
Over the next few years, a new question emerged: Now what?
The answer - close it and clean it up - was almost unthinkable
to some, given the size of the complex and the amount of
contamination. Indeed, the job was originally envisioned as a
70-year, $36 billion task.
Kaiser-Hill Co., the contractor chosen to oversee the first
decontamination and demolition of a nuclear weapons plant in the
world, turned to the same workers who had for decades built
bombs.
Two of those who returned were Mermigas and Gibbs.
Wednesday was Mermigas' last day on the site.
"I just can't even believe it," he said.
Kaiser-Hill is expected to announce any day that it has
completed the cleanup.
Gibbs is cleaning out his office this week, ready to say goodbye
to Rocky Flats 21 years after he first went to work there.
"If you'd asked me in '95 if we'd have the gate closed and be
looking at 'greenfield,' I'd have said, 'No way.' "
The core area, 385 acres, will probably be closed to the public
forever. Nearly 6,000 acres that made up the north and south
buffer zones will become a wildlife refuge, the result of
legislation passed in 2001 by U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard, a
Republican, and U.S. Rep. Mark Udall, a Democrat.
A visit to Rocky Flats now reveals a landscape not much
different from the one that greeted the early construction
workers who flooded into the site more than a half-century ago.
Freshly moved dirt. Primitive gravel roads. A glimpse of the
Denver skyline in the distance.
In one area, native grasses planted several years ago stand a
foot tall. In another area, new seed and straw cover the ground,
waiting for the water and time.
Here and there, trees dot the landscape. Down in a ravine, a
small solar panel - which powers an underground monitoring
station - is the only evidence that the area had once been home
to a major manufacturing operation.
Cold War won
Rocky Flats was a product of its time: born in the
anti-communist fervor of the post-World War II era, thriving
through the Cold War, fighting for survival as Americans came to
better understand environmental dangers and crumbling after the
fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet
Union.
For the men and women who worked there, the work done at Rocky
Flats helped win the Cold War.
"I think it played a very, very important role during a time in
our country when, sadly enough, we were required to spend a lot
of money . . . to provide a product hopefully we were never
going to use," Mermigas said.
That's a feeling that Skaggs, the former congressman,
understands.
"Many thousands of men and women did an awful lot of hard and
dangerous work out there for important national defense issues,
and they deserve our thanks for all they did," he said. "Whether
you agreed with our nuclear defense policy at the time, you
still have to honor that work."
It's not that simple to Ackland, the CU professor.
There is the health of the former plant employees - a recent
government report estimated that it will cost $2.5 billion to
provide benefits to Rocky Flats workers over the next
quarter-century. There is the ongoing question of radioactive
and hazardous contamination at the site, and there are long-term
monitoring costs.
"To me," Ackland said, "all of that pales to the legacy of the
fact that the community participated in the manufacture of
weapons of mass destruction."
And while Rocky Flats is gone, the bombs built here live on in
the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
"That's Rocky Flats' legacy now - all those warheads," said
former U.S. Sen. Timothy Wirth. "That's a pretty sober note, but
Rocky Flats was a pretty sober place."
2005 © Rocky Mountain News
*****************************************************************
52 Rocky Mountain News: A falling-out over fallout
Experts say Flats is safe, but critics remain unconvinced
By Todd Hartman, Rocky Mountain News
October 13, 2005
The Rocky Flats bomb factory is gone, erased in a 10-year effort
even critics concede represents an extraordinarily efficient
environmental cleanup job.
But little souvenirs have been left behind, all invisible to the
naked eye: scattered atoms of plutonium, subterranean solvent
plumes, contaminated groundwater and buried foundations -
leftovers of the toxic workshops devoted for decades to making
nuclear weapons.
Even so, a wide array of experts, including the Department of
Energy and a citizen board overseeing the cleanup, insist the
freshly scrubbed 6,200-acre site is safe.
Critics remain unconvinced.
Rocky Flats is to become a wildlife refuge. Amid tallgrass
prairie along the foothills of Jefferson and Boulder counties,
families presumably will someday stroll. They'll see deer,
songbirds and prairie dogs ramble on property once patrolled by
gun-toting guards and sectioned off with foreboding fences of
mesh and barbed wire.
But the perception that Rocky Flats is still dangerous could
prove a larger hurdle to overcome than any remnants of the
environmental hazards that once made the plant a genuine threat
to the community, said several people who've followed the
cleanup.
"It won't prevent me" from visiting, said Steve Gunderson, a top
Colorado state environmental regulator who supervised much of
the site's closure. "I have had my children visit during a
family day a few years ago . . . I look forward to the day I can
hike the trails around Rocky Flats."
Even the roughly 400-acre industrial area, where 800 buildings
devoted to the mission of making nuclear bombs were clustered,
poses infinitesimal risk, regulators and other officials say.
But that section won't be included in the wildlife refuge - not
because it's dangerous but because the Department of Energy
doesn't want the public to accidentally or intentionally
interfere with monitoring equipment in place to track the
contamination that does remain on site.
The closure "is primarily designed to protect the (cleanup) from
people, not to protect people from the (cleanup)," said David
Abelson, executive director of the Rocky Flats Coalition of
Local Governments, a watchdog group of cities and counties that
surround the site.
Plutonium levels in soil were the focus of much of the cleanup
debate.
In the end, a citizens' board, local governments and regulators
agreed to require levels no higher than 50 picocuries per gram -
or 50 trillionths of a curie per gram - in the first three feet
of soil.
Those levels reflect a statistical model based on a person
likely to get the most exposure to the soil at Rocky Flats - a
future wildlife refuge worker spending 40 hours a week at the
site for 50 weeks a year. Such an exposure, regulators said,
creates a 1 in 200,000 chance of contracting cancer.
But even that calculation is conservative, said John Corsi, a
spokesman for the cleanup contractor, Kaiser- Hill.
That's because the vast majority of the site, including the
massive buffer zone surrounding the former industrial core, has
plutonium levels closer to background levels found in everyday
life.
Even assuming every acre of the site had levels of 50 picocuries
per gram, the health risk is virtually nil, Corsi said, as it
would expose the refuge worker to the equivalent of two
millirems of radiation. A person is exposed to six millirems
flying from Los Angeles to New York and back, he said.
That also means a future visitor will have a risk "far less"
than one in a million for cancer, Corsi said.
"It is an infinitesimal risk compared to the other sources of
radiation we're exposed to on a daily basis," Abelson said.
"Those are the facts," Abelson said. "How people interpret the
fact, well, that's a different matter."
Victor Holm, a longtime chairman of the Citizens' Advisory Board
that has overseen and endorsed Kaiser-Hill's cleanup plans, said
that other toxins at Rocky Flats, including more mundane
contaminants such as solvents that contaminated groundwater, are
actually of greater potential risk.
"It's hard to get anyone excited about that," Holm said.
He believes people seize on radioactive contaminants because of
the "terrible consequences" of nuclear war.
But not everyone is as reassured about the safety of Rocky
Flats.
Some activists, including a former FBI agent who led a 1989 raid
on Rocky Flats, searching for evidence of environmental crimes,
maintain past operators of the plant engaged in illegal dumping
that wasn't thoroughly investigated by the government.
Though Rockwell, a former operator of the plant, admitted 10
environmental crimes and paid an $18.5 million fine as part of a
plea agreement in 1992, activists say not all of the pollution
was discovered and that the DOE has relied on false reports to
conclude some parts of the site are clean.
Government officials say that's not so. Still, the claims won't
seem to go away.
This week, a long-delayed trial opened in federal court pitting
neighbors of the site against former site operators. Plaintiffs
say Rocky Flats cut their property values and exposed them to
health risks - claims defendants vigorously dispute.
Peace activist LeRoy Moore, who has spoken out against Rocky
Flats since 1978, commended the cleanup, calling it "a hard job"
and "a big step forward (that has made) the site a whole lot
safer than it used to be."
But, Moore said, that doesn't mean it's safe. He's convinced the
public needs to know more about exposures to low doses of
radiation. He cited a recent study from the National Academy of
Sciences that he said concluded there is no such thing as a safe
dose of radiation.
"I hear from people near and far who are quite surprised at
turning Rocky Flats into a playground, where people can hike and
bike and ride horses," Moore said.
"I can only imagine they're doing it because they want us to
believe it's OK, but it's an unwise thing to do. It would be
better to retain it as open space and not allow people to go
onto it, and continue to look more closely at" risks.
2005 © Rocky Mountain News
*****************************************************************
53 Las Vegas SUN: DOE audit: Security upgrades lagging at federal nuclear sites
Today: October 13, 2005 at 14:58:39 PDT
ASSOCIATED PRESS
LAS VEGAS (AP) - Security upgrades ordered in 2003 are behind
schedule at nuclear weapons installations, including the Nevada
Test Site, the Energy Department's inspector general said.
Meanwhile, guards at National Nuclear Security Administration
sites are working too much overtime, which can erode security
effectiveness, inspector general auditors said in a new report.
The 18-page report made public Wednesday in Washington, D.C.,
said upgrading security is critical to protecting nuclear
weapons and material that could be used to make them.
An official with the NNSA - the Energy Department branch that
manages the nuclear weapons complex - said Thursday the agency
already was addressing issues in the audit.
"The things that have been identified in the report with respect
to the Nevada Test Site are nothing new to us," said Kevin
Rhorer, an NNSA spokesman in North Las Vegas. "They have been
reported before. We are taking steps to address and correct
them."
Auditors found similar conditions between August 2004 and August
2005 at NNSA sites, including Sandia National Laboratories in
New Mexico, the Pantex Plant in Texas and the Y-12 National
Security Complex in Tennessee, as well as the Office of Secure
Transportation, which oversees nuclear materials shipping from
Albuquerque, N.M.
Due to security concerns, the report did not link findings and
sites, Inspector General Gregory Friedman said in his cover
letter to Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman.
The report said about 87 percent of security plans due to be in
place by next October have yet to be implemented, including the
hiring of additional guards, new building designs and training.
It said systems including thermal imaging, laser detection,
ground surveillance, Doppler radar, remote cameras and sensing
equipment had not been procured.
Previous reports have described security lapses at the Nevada
Test Site, including an inspector general report in February
about two employees who brought unauthorized handguns onto the
site, and earlier accounts of security guards performing poorly
during a mock terrorist attack in August 2004.
The Energy Department is preparing to announce whether it will
renew a five-year contract with Wackenhut Services Inc. for
security at the vast test site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The current contract expires Dec. 31.
On the Net:
Energy Department Inspector General report:
http://www.ig.doe.gov/pdf/ig-0705.pdf
Nevada Test Site: http://www.nv.doe.gov/nts
All contents copyright 2005 Las Vegas SUN, Inc.
*****************************************************************
54 DOE: Environmental Management Site-Specific Advisory Board, Hanford
FR Doc 05-20507
[Federal Register: October 13, 2005 (Volume 70, Number 197)]
[Notices] [Page 59737] From the Federal Register Online via GPO
Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr13oc05-68]
AGENCY: Department of Energy.
ACTION: Notice of open meeting.
SUMMARY: This notice announces a meeting of the Environmental
Management Site-Specific Advisory Board (EMSSAB), Hanford. The
Federal Advisory Committee Act (Pub. L. No. 92-463, 86 Stat. 770)
requires that public notice of this meeting be announced in the
Federal Register.
DATES: Thursday, November 3, 2005, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Friday, November
4, 2005, 8:30 a.m.-4 p.m.
ADDRESSES: University Tower Hotel, 4507 Brooklyn Avenue NE.,
Seattle, Washington 98105, Phone Number: (206) 634-2000, Fax
Number: (206) 545- 2103.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Yvonne Sherman, Public
Involvement Program Manager, Department of Energy Richland
Operations Office, 825 Jadwin, MSIN A7-75, Richland, WA, 99352;
Phone: (509) 376-6216; Fax: (509) 376-1563.
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: Advice on Hanford's Bulk Vitrification Project.
Government Accountability Office's report dealing with DOE's
contracting issues.
Hanford Advisory Board (HAB) public speaker availability process.
Panel discussion with University of Washington faculty involved
in Hanford research.
HAB values for prioritization of cleanup work.
Tank waste issues discussion.
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 Yvonne Sherman's office
at the address or telephone number listed above. Requests must be
received five days prior to the meeting and reasonable provision
will be made to include the presentation in the agenda. The
Deputy Designated Federal Officer is empowered to conduct the
meeting in a fashion that will facilitate the orderly conduct of
business. Individuals wishing to make public comment will be
provided a maximum of five minutes to present their comments.
Minutes: The minutes of this meeting will be available for public
review and copying at the U.S. 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 by writing to Erik Olds, Department of Energy
Richland Operations Office, 825 Jadwin, MSIN A7-75, Richland, WA
99352, or by calling him at (509) 376-1563.
Issued at Washington, DC, on October 6, 2005.
Carol Matthews, Acting Advisory Committee Management Officer.
[FR Doc. 05-20507 Filed 10-12-05; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 6450-01-P
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55 Tri-Valley Herald: Livermore's Superblock deemed OK
Article Last Updated: 10/13/2005 02:48:16 AM
After spending $3 million on upgrades, lab scientist resumes
plutonium experiments
By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER
With a nod from federal overseers, scientists are resuming
plutonium experiments and small-scale manufacturing at Lawrence
Livermore lab's Superblock, one of the nation's two secret,
fortress-like labs for handling weapons-grade plutonium.
It took months of safety studies by two separate teams of
experts, but recently they concluded that Superblock was ready
for workers to start handling plutonium again inside its
fortified rooms.
"We are dedicated to operating a safe and secure facility," said
Livermore's weapons chief, Bruce Goodwin. "We all live in this
area, and I am personally committed to that."
After criticism from a federal nuclear-safety board, Goodwin
halted most work at Superblock in January and directed workers
to study safety deficiencies that had developed over recent
decades.
Lab officials ended up spending close to $3 million on the
effort, much of it on hiring new nuclear-safety engineers to
scrutinize the building's central nerve systems of alarms,
sprinklers, ventilation and backup power.
Plutonium metal can spontaneously ignite in air, and an
earthquake, terrorist attack or accident poses a risk of
releasing cancer-causing plutonium into neighborhoods nearby.
That classifies Superblock as a "high-hazard" facility, and all
of its safety systems work together to preventsuch a release.
In the last decade, workers have performed millions of dollars
in repairs to the 1960s-vintage building and installed new
safety features. But a little-known agency full of nuclear-safety
engineers — the Defense Facilities Safety Board — found the lab
hadn't documented some of them and so didn't know how well they
would work together in an emergency.
Engineers now have pored over virtually every inch of the pipes,
valves and wiring that makes up Superblock's safety net. They
replaced some valves and alarms and repaired some seismic
braces.
They've tested the fire suppression system to ensure enough
pressure reaches the farthest sprinklers in the building.
They've rewritten many of the rules for day-to-day handling of
plutonium and other radioactive materials.
Two teams of safety and operations experts from the lab and the
National Nuclear Security Administration, the nuclear weapons
arm of the U.S. Department of Energy, studied the facility
closely to see whether it was ready to resume work.
Last week, NNSA's chief overseer for Livermore, Camille Yuan-Soo
Hoo, gave a green light to Livermore to restart plutonium
operations on a limited basis.
"This is an important milestone on the path to full resumption
of activities," said John Belluardo, an NNSA spokesman. "It will
be several more months until all the corrective actions are
completed."
Until then, Superblock will operate with sharply reduced limits
on the amount of plutonium allowed in its pressure-controlled
labs, generally about a fourth of the materials limits allowed
before work was suspended.
One of the biggest jobs remaining is something called the
"designated safety analysis," a massive study of the work done
inside Superblock and prescriptions for lowering the risk of an
accident.
Federal safety overseers found that Livermore's previous versions
improperly assumed Superblock would contain virtually all of its
plutonium even if some of its safety systems failed.
The new study assumes the safety systems are crucial for
containment. When the study is complete, NNSA will consider
easing the materials limit and allowing more work.
Full electronic documentation of Superblock's safety systems
could take a few years to complete, but the NNSA has indicated
to lab officials that the agency will try to spend an additional
$6 million a year on that and other safety-related projects at
Superblock.
The safety work remains important, Goodwin said, even in light of
several proposals to close Superblock and consolidate all of the
nation's plutonium work in a new, underground bunker complex,
proposed for remote, federally held desert in Nevada or Idaho.
Construction of such a facility is years away and will be
expensive, Goodwin said.
"The soonest you could think about consolidating plutonium
activities out of Livermore would be 2015," he said. "And you
can't slack off on your safety or stop operating the building
until all the plutonium is gone."
Tri-Valley Herald All Rights Reserved
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56 LongmontFYI: Flats cleanup nearly complete
www.longmontfyi.com
Publish Date: 10/13/2005
Rep. Mark Udall speaks to reporters at Rocky Flats on Wednesday
afternoon after touring the former nuclear weapons production
site. Cleanup contractor Kaiser-Hill plans to declare its work at
the site finished in a few days. Workers shipped out the last
trainload of radioactive waste last week and tore up the railroad
tracks a few days later. Times-Call/Brad Turner
Flats cleanup nearly complete
Crews turned ‘bombs into birds,’ congressman says
By Brad Turner
The Daily Times-Call
ROCKY FLATS — Rep. Mark Udall marveled at Rocky Flats’ open
hillsides during a site tour Wednesday, as contractors at the
former nuclear weapons production plant prepared to declare the
property’s cleanup finished.
Cleanup crews have leveled nearly 150 buildings at the site
since 1995, opening up miles of rolling prairie and 360-degree
views.
“You had a remarkable metamorphosis out here over the last 10
years,” the Democratic congressman said after an hourlong drive
around the site south of Boulder. “For all intents and purposes,
the goal has been reached. ... We truly turned bombs into birds,
weapons into wildlife.”
Kaiser-Hill, the company managing the site’s $7 billion
decontamination, may officially declare the decade-long cleanup
complete by the end of the week, company spokesman John Corsi
said. Workers shipped out the last trainload of radioactive
waste last week and tore up the railroad tracks a few days later.
The recent discovery of hot spots near the most contaminated
area in the industrial site was a concern, but the cleanup has
been handled competently and openly, Udall said.
“We’ll continue to make sure the Department of Energy follows
through,” he said. “We have every right to remain vigilant.”
Udall used the visit to plug the conversion of the 6,500-acre
site, which made explosive plutonium cores for nuclear weapons
during the Cold War, to a wildlife refuge with public access.
The former industrial site — between 1,000 and 1,500 acres —
will remain off-limits.
“It’s a remarkable view,” Udall said. “You have a feeling of
big, Western skies. This is where the prairie meets the
mountains.”
He commended the plant’s longtime employees, who processed
plutonium in the Cold War but ultimately “worked themselves out
of a job” by working to decontaminate the site since the plant
shut down in 1989.
A few remaining Kaiser-Hill employees spent Wednesday doing
last-minute reseeding work around the former industrial site,
Department of Energy spokesman John Rampe said.
Brad Turner can be reached at 720-494-5420, or by e-mail at
bturner@times-call.com.
News and Information from Longmont and Northern Colorado
All contents Copyright © 2005 Daily Times-Call. All rights
*****************************************************************
57 PRN: Kaiser-Hill Announces Physical Completion of Rocky Flats Cleanup
Thursday 13 October 2005, 18:44 GMT
GOLDEN, Colorado, October 13 /PRNewswire/ -- Kaiser-Hill, a
joint venture of CH2M HILL and Kaiser Group Holdings, Inc., has
successfully completed the physical work to clean up and close
Rocky Flats, per the terms of its contract with the U.S.
Department of Energy (DOE).
The Rocky Flats Site near Denver, Colorado produced plutonium
and enriched uranium "triggers" for nuclear weapons from 1952
until 1989. Every nuclear weapon in the current U.S. arsenal
contains triggers produced at Rocky Flats. Kaiser-Hill's cleanup
effort began in 1995.
Today's announcement represents the culmination of a ten year
effort to complete the largest, most complex environmental
cleanup project in United States history and converts an
environmental liability into a community asset. Rocky Flats is
also the first large nuclear weapons facility to be
decommissioned and closed anywhere in the world. The site will
become a national wildlife refuge.
Kaiser-Hill President and CEO Nancy Tuor emphasized her
appreciation for DOE's leadership and management of the
innovative contract. The contract arrangement motivated
industry-leading safety performance and technical innovation
that helped shave more than 60 years and US$30 billion off
initial estimates of the cleanup.
"The safe accelerated closure of Rocky Flats is a tribute to the
tireless efforts of our dedicated and immensely talented
workforce," said Tuor. "This is the same workforce that helped
win the Cold War and then demonstrated great flexibility and
skill by transitioning to a world-class nuclear decommissioning
workforce. These workers, in partnership with community leaders,
elected officials, regulators and many other committed
individuals have delivered this historic accomplishment for the
people of Colorado and the U.S. Government."
The Rocky Flats Closure Project was an enormous undertaking. To
complete its mission, Kaiser-Hill:
- Removed more than 21 tons of weapons-useable nuclear
materials
- Decontaminated and demolished 800 structures, comprising
more than
3 million square feet
- Drained 30,000 liters of plutonium solutions
- Size reduced and removed more than 1,450 contaminated
production glove
boxes and 700 tanks
- Stabilized and packaged 100 tons of high-content plutonium
residue
- Performed environmental cleanup actions at 130 sites
- Dispositioned millions of classified items and excess
property
- Safely shipped more than 600,000 cubic meters of
radioactive waste --
enough to fill a string of railcars 90 miles long
The Department of Energy will now review Kaiser-Hill's
declaration of physical completion. This process, required by
the closure contract, will proceed over the next several weeks.
Final acceptance of the work is the next step in the transition
of the site to the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge.
About Rocky Flats
Rocky Flats is a Department of Energy-owned cleanup and closure
site operated by Kaiser-Hill Company under an accelerated
closure contract. The Rocky Flats mission included special
nuclear material management and shipment, nuclear deactivation
and decommissioning, waste management and shipment,
environmental cleanup and site closure. When cleanup is
complete, the site will be transitioned to a National Wildlife
Refuge managed by the US Fish & Wildlife Service.
Contact: John Corsi, +1-303-966-6526
Distributed by PR Newswire on behalf of Kaiser-Hill
PR Newswire Europe Ltd.
*****************************************************************
58 Guardian Unlimited: $7B Cleanup at Rocky Flats Said Finished
From the Associated Press
[UP]
Thursday October 13, 2005 7:16 PM
By DAN ELLIOTT
Associated Press Writer
DENVER (AP) - The contractor hired to clean up the former Rocky
Flats nuclear weapons plant declared the $7 billion, 10-year
project completed Thursday, a major milestone in the conversion
of the site to a wildlife refuge.
Kaiser-Hill Co. said it was proud of the effort to ``complete
the largest, most complex environmental cleanup project in
United States history.''
However, it could be months before the site on the rolling
plains northwest of Denver is opened to the public, because
federal regulators must certify it as safe.
The Energy Department has 90 days to accept the project and can
ask Kaiser-Hill to address any concerns. After that, the
Environmental Protection Agency and state officials must verify
that the work meets various guidelines.
Rocky Flats made plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons until
1992, when it was shut down because of safety concerns and the
end of the Cold War. The core plant, covering nearly 400 acres
inside a 6,000-acre buffer zone, once contained 800 buildings.
More than 2,000 truckloads of waste from Rocky Flats were
shipped to a repository near Carlsbad, N.M., and at least 1,900
containers of plutonium were sent to the Savannah River nuclear
weapons installation in South Carolina.
In all, more than 21 tons of weapons-useable nuclear material
were removed, Kaiser-Hill said.
Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., pronounced Rocky Flats ``the best
example of a nuclear cleanup success story ever.''
Parts of the site will eventually be opened to the public as a
federal wildlife refuge, but some areas where the contamination
was worst will remain off-limits.
``As a result of everyone's hard work, Rocky Flats will now
become a jewel of open space to be enjoyed in perpetuity,'' said
Rep. Bob Beauprez, R-Colo.
Rep. Mark Udall, D-Colo., toured the site Wednesday and said
nothing remained of the weapons plant. ``We are, in sum, much
safer than we were, and I say that as someone who lives just
three miles from the site,'' the congressman said.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
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