***************************************************************** 04/21/06 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 14.95 ***************************************************************** RADBULL IS PRODUCED BY THE ABALONE ALLIANCE CLEARINGHOUSE ***************************************************************** Send News Stories to news@energy-net.org with title on subject line and first line of body NUCLEAR POLICY 1 US: [NYTr] Bush Ignored Accurate Intel on Iraq WMD: ex-CIA Agent 2 IRAN: To nuke or not to nuke: Bush decides 3 [NYTr] Iran: Ayatollah Kashani Hails Economic Value of Nukes 4 [NYTr] Russia Rejects US Appeal on Iran 5 [NYTr] Russia: Want Iran Sanctions? Show Us PROOF 6 [NYTr] IRAN: To nuke or not to nuke - Bush decides 7 [NYTr] Russia toughens opposition to UN sanctions on Iran 8 Reuters: Russia must freeze arms deals with Iran, says U.S. 9 IRNA: Ahani: Diplomacy, talks only way to resolve nuclear dossier - 10 AFP: No Iran sanctions talk -- for now - Russia 11 AFP: US urges ban on military sales to Iran 12 AFP: Russia-US split on Iran deepens as Moscow rejects sanctions wit 13 IRNA: Malaysian FM urges honoring Iran's nuclear right 14 IRNA: Ayat. Kashani: Iranian nation is steadfast in peaceful nuclear 15 Guardian Unlimited: Russia: Proof Needed for Iran Sanctions 16 REDIFF: Moratorium on nuclear testing vital to N-deal - US 17 US: Bangor Daily News: A step toward Maine's clean energy future - 18 Deccan Herald: US not to insist on new nuke commitments from India - 19 Guardian Unlimited: Bush Talks Tough in China Trade Fights NUCLEAR REACTORS 20 Wildlife defies Chernobyl radiation 21 [NYTr] Wildlife defies Chernobyl radiation 22 US: North South Brunswick Sentinel: What's the evacuationplan? There 23 London Tims: Chernobyl hero remembers the men who saved Europe - 24 Sydney Morning Herald: State turns its back on heroes of the clean-u 25 Sydney Morning Herald: The nuclear cloud that still hangs over Chern 26 ForUm :: European Commission actions since the Chernobyl Disaster 27 EUPolitix.com: EU faith in nuclear based on misleading report 28 BBC NEWS: Chernobyl voices: Igor Komissarenko 29 BBC: Council knocks back nuclear 30 US: PoughkeepsieJournal.com: More nukes or no nukes? State's energy 31 NPR: Chernobyl Copes with Fallout, 20 Years Later 32 Mos News: Radiation Leaking Through Crumbling Chernobyl Shelter 33 US: Vermont Guardian: Coalition: VY based models on cracked Illinois 34 Reuters: Nuclear's rise 20 yrs after Chernobyl 35 US: NRC: Technical Specification Improvement To Revise Diesel Fuel O 36 US: NRC: Entergy Nuclear Operations, Inc.; Vermont Yankee Nuclear Po 37 ITAR-TASS: Third reactor of Smolensk NPP switched out for basics rep 38 ITAR-TASS: Russian ombudsman says Chernobyl victims still face probl 39 US: wcco.com: Project Energy: The Future Of Nuclear Power 40 US: North Jersey Media Group: Oyster Creek showdown 41 NPR: 'Voices of Chernobyl': Survivors' Stories 42 Belfast Telegraph: Council rejects nuclear power 43 icNorthWales: Shutting N-plant would be disaster 44 SNA: Belene Nuke Talks to Start in Bulgaria 45 Deutsche Welle: Chernobyl "Liquidators" Still Fight Oblivion NUCLEAR SECURITY NUCLEAR SAFETY 46 US: [NukeNet] Rokkasho active tests: updates on new developments 47 US: Las Vegas SUN: Indian tribe, downwinders ask court to stop 48 US: Cavalier Daily: A radioactive issue NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE 49 ForUm: No safe technology for construction of the nuclear waste 50 RIA Novosti: Russia to process spent nuclear fuel, return it to Uzbe 51 BBC: Inquiry into nuclear flask 52 US: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Cleanup for Molycorp costs firm $475,00 53 US: APP.COM: TOPIC OF THE DAY: Nuclear waste | 54 US: AR: Explosives firm to pay $8 million to clean up contaminated s 55 US: Madison Courier: Last big JPG contract deeded; cleanup nears end 56 News & Star: Nuclear flask falls off Sellafield lorry 57 News & Star: Thorp still closed a year after shutdown for leak 58 News & Star: Selleafield terror warning 59 Pahrump Valley Times: $100 MILLION IN REPAIRS - Upgrades needed at Y PEACE US DEPT. OF ENERGY 60 DOE: DOE Gasoline Price Watch Website and Hotline 61 DOE: DOE Strategic Petroleum Reserve Contractor Receives the Baldrig 62 Platts: DOE's Spurgeon sees himself as nuclear energy's 'chief sales 63 Hanford News: Closure Hanford donates to museum 64 Hanford News: Hanford budget likely to improve 65 DOE: Environmental Management Site-Specific Advisory Board, Oak Ridg 66 Paducah Sun: DOE cleanup to employ 400 at job’s start 67 Cańon City Daily Record: Rocky Flats visitors could receive warning 68 Knox News: SNS is refused Y-12 heavy water ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** FULL NEWS STORIES ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** 1 [NYTr] Bush Ignored Accurate Intel on Iraq WMD: ex-CIA Agent Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2006 18:55:50 -0500 (CDT) Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit Reuters via Yahoo - Apr 21, 2006 http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060421/pl_nm/iraq_intelligence_cia_dc Ex-CIA agent says WMD intelligence ignored WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The CIA had evidence Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction six months before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion but was ignored by a White House intent on ousting Saddam Hussein, a former senior CIA official said according to CBS. Tyler Drumheller, who headed CIA covert operations in Europe during the run-up to the Iraq war, said intelligence opposing administration claims of a WMD threat came from a top Iraqi official who provided the U.S. spy agency with other credible information. The source "told us that there were no active weapons of mass destruction programs," Drumheller said in a CBS interview to be aired on Sunday on the network's news magazine, "60 Minutes." "The (White House) group that was dealing with preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they were no longer interested," he was quoted as saying in interview excerpts released by CBS on Friday. "We said: 'Well, what about the intel?' And they said: 'Well, this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change'," added Drumheller, whose CIA operation was assigned the task of debriefing the Iraqi official. He was the latest former U.S. official to accuse the White House of setting an early course toward war in Iraq and ignoring intelligence that conflicted with its aim. CBS said the CIA's intelligence source was former Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri and that former CIA Director George Tenet delivered the information personally to President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top White House officials in September 2002. They rebuffed the CIA three days later. "The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy," the former CIA agent told CBS. U.S. allegations that Saddam had WMD and posed a threat to international security was a main justification for the March 2003 invasion. A 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, to which the CIA was a major contributor, concluded that prewar Iraq had an active nuclear program and a huge stockpile of unconventional weapons. No such weapons have been found, however, and U.S. assertions that they existed are now regarded as a hugely damaging intelligence failure. But Drumheller, co-author of a forthcoming book entitled "On the Brink: How the White House Has Compromised American Intelligence," rejects the notion of an intelligence failure. "It just sticks in my craw every time I hear them say it's an intelligence failure," he told CBS. "This was a policy failure." * ================================================================ .NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems . Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us . .339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org .List Archives: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/ .Subscribe: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr ================================================================ ***************************************************************** 2 IRAN: To nuke or not to nuke: Bush decides Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2006 21:22:36 -0500 (CDT) April 17, 2006 New Statesman www.newstatesman.com To nuke or not to nuke: Bush decides There will be an attack; that much is already assumed in Washington. Whether it should be nuclear is a matter of intense debate. The verdict may depend upon the wild card of the president's Messianic complex. by Andrew Stephen So the Third World War is imminent and the madman in the White House bunker is about to nuke Iran. That, at least, is the message from the veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker. The American media, however, seem far less concerned than the British: on the morning the story was making headlines in the UK, Iran did not even make the front pages of the Washington Post or New York Times. "Military fantasies on Iran", a New York Times editorial sniffed on 11 April. So who is right? Is this news or not? It depends on your point of departure. This may surprise people in Britain, but Washington is already working from the assumption that the US will launch some form of conventional-weapon attack on Iran during this presidency. That much is not news here. Indeed, the Bush administration is assuming that when that attack happens it will have the support of Britain and Australia. Nuclear weapons, however, are another matter. Whether they might be used against Iran is a critical issue in the struggle under way between foreign-policy pragmatists and ideological zealots. Washington is divided between these two camps, of which the former is by far the bigger. It consists of sensible people inside the administration itself, the State Department, CIA, Pentagon and the powerful think-tanks, and its numbers are growing exponentially as the president's incompetence becomes undeniable to all but the most fanatical. Every day brings more defections. Even Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, has fallen out with Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, and is on the verge of abandoning the ideological ship - just as Colin Powell did in private over Iraq, but not publicly until it was far too late. The second Washington faction is tiny, but unstable and dangerous. It consists of a tiny handful of people. Only last month, after watching the German film Downfall, I wrote of the White House as a bunker, because that is what it is like: Bush, Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, attended by a dwindling band of neoconservatives, sit in their bunker, increasingly detached from reality, still insisting on viewing the world and plotting its course as they choose to do, unhindered by inconvenient realities. (American readers: I am not saying that Bush is like Hitler, but referring to the bunker mentality.) The first faction overwhelmingly agrees with the British, French and German view that Iran must be isolated diplomatically rather than militarily, and it is solidly behind the tough UN Security Council statement of 29 March on Iran. Its members are terrified, however, that in the meantime the madmen in the bunker will lose it completely. Jack Straw is echoing their view when he says it is "completely nuts" to think that the United States is contemplating a pre-emptive nuclear strike; his conduit into the Bush administration is the increasingly marginalised Rice - in effect now a member of faction number one. The second faction ... well, who can peer into the mind of George W Bush? I doubt if the 43rd president himself knows whether the US will launch nuclear missiles at Iran. (It would be reassuring, by the way, to add that the Democrats comprise a third influential faction, except that these days they barely figure on Washington's political map.) The uncertainties leave a vacuum between pessimists and optimists. There are many, including people at the United Nations, who believe that Bush can and will press the nuclear button. Yet a clear majority in Washington believes that an all-powerful establishment, from the might of the top brass at the Pentagon to the consensus wisdom of practically every senior politician, will prevail against even an out-of-control president. We cannot be totally confident that Sy Hersh has got it completely right, either. The 69-year-old reporter is rightly admired for his countless scoops, from the My Lai massacre in 1968 to the Abu Ghraib outrages 35 years later. But he has also made mistakes: he had to write a 3,000-word retraction for the New York Times in 1981 after getting the Pinochet coup in Chile hopelessly wrong, and in 1997 he was fooled by faked documents purporting to tell all about the relationship between JFK and Marilyn Monroe. Yet perhaps most pertinent in this context is that Hersh is close to Israeli intelligence. Disinformation from Mossad fuelled the US neo-cons' miscalculations over Iraq, and Israel has a clear interest in persuading Bush to strike first against a country that threatens to be a nuclear rival in the Middle East. It could be provoking the ideological struggle in Washington in the hope that the publicity itself might prove self-fulfilling. There are two main areas where I, too, disagree with Hersh's interpretation. First, he makes much of the United States already having covert agents in Iran. But who could be surprised by that? The US, after all, has covert agents operating in London, Paris and Rome, and it has been interfering in Iran's internal affairs for decades. Second, Hersh provides highly plausible detail about US contingency plans for using nuclear missiles on Iranian sites such as the uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz. My information, differing slightly from his, is that the Joint Chiefs of Staff did present the White House with a strategy to nuke Iran - but with the strong recommendation that it should not be carried out. That such a strategy existed, moreover, should be no surprise, as drawing up such things - contingency planning - is one of the things the Pentagon exists to do. I e-mailed a senior defence and intelligence analyst friend here about just this point, and will quote his reply verbatim because it precisely conveys the mindset inside the Pentagon: "The Defence Department commonly works up plans for all kinds of contingencies. The Department would not be doing its duty if it were not examining all kinds of contingency plans. Only a tiny minority of the Department's contingency plans ever become the basis for action. Plans are even done on occasion not because they are going to be used, but to demonstrate that certain ideas are impractical or unwise, or to show ourselves we are thoroughly prepared to prevail in a designated contingency. In my opinion, this news is a tempest in a pot of tea." Then I asked a former senior nuclear strategist with Nato about the practicalities of the US launching nuclear strikes against 400 separate sites, most of them underground, in Iran. His answer was blunt. "The only nuclear weapon that might penetrate a little before exploding is the B-61 bomb", he said. "If you penetrate a bunker, you create a Chernobyl. The fallout would spread all over the Middle East and who knows where else." There were too many targets, the Shias and Hezbollah would make Iraq even more hellish than it is, and the price of oil would immediately rise to more than $100 a barrel. So that, one would assume, settles it. Here are two experts who know as much as anybody in the world about nuclear weapons as tactical deterrents, and they make the idea seem insane. But the second man, now safely out of Nato and the Pentagon, also said darkly that the Bush administration's denials over Iran sound horribly like its pre-2003 denials over Iraq. There are midterm elections coming up in November, he noted, and, although not all military men are right-wing hawks, not by any means, "Bush is a jackass who needs to prove his manhood". Here we come full circle, back to the struggle being fought in Washington. The dominant view, including from the Pentagon, is that nuclear strikes against Iran would be disastrous, militarily and politically. Yet there remains the terrifying wild card of what Hersh so rightly calls Bush's Messianic complex. It is a sign of how dangerous the situation has become that the current focus on the possibility of a nuclear attack actually makes the prospect of a conventional strike seem like a soft option. Inside the bunker, Rumsfeld has already written off Rice (and, in effect, Straw), dismissing her admission that the Bush administration has made thousands of mistakes in Iraq. "I don't know what she was talking about, to be perfectly honest", he said, adding that her comments probably reflected "a lack of understanding ... of what warfare is about". She's only a woman, you see, and one now tainted irrevocably by all those commies in the State Department. But he-men like himself and Bush and Cheney are made of sterner stuff, ready to nuke the world if they have to do that to save it, whatever the wimps outside the bunker may say. Whether the increasingly united Washington establishment will let those hunkering down in the bunker prevail is a different matter. -------------- http://www.newstatesman.com/200604170004 ------------ ***************************************************************** 3 [NYTr] Iran: Ayatollah Kashani Hails Economic Value of Nukes Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2006 23:09:10 -0500 (CDT) Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit Prensa Latina, Havana http://www.plenglish.com Iran: Ayatollah Kashani Hails Economic Value of Nukes Teheran, Apr 21 (Prensa Latina) Ayatollah Mohammad Emami Kashani said at Friday prayers that independence has boosted Iran's efforts to master nuclear technology as fossil fuels near exhaustion. The Imam said that non-nuclear countries will need assistance, under the Non Proliferation Treaty, to access this fuel and called those in possession not to develop weapons. He lashed out at some countries' double standard toward Iran and nuclear affairs, warning that "we cannot allow foreigners to decide our future and overpower us." The ayatollah also denounced the world's silence on proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, "particularly by the Zionist regime (Israel)." The Imam called on the International Atomic Energy Agency and the UN Security Council "to be wise and rely on democracy and justice to defeat Western provocation." hr/ccs/emw/vc * ================================================================ .NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems . Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us . .339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org .List Archives: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/ .Subscribe: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr ================================================================ ***************************************************************** 4 [NYTr] Russia Rejects US Appeal on Iran Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2006 00:00:31 -0500 (CDT) Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit The Washington Post - Apr 22, 2006 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/21/AR2006042101750_pf.html Russia Rejects U.S. Appeal on Iran Disputed Sale of Missile System to Proceed, Moscow Says By Bradley Graham Washington Post Staff Writer The United States appealed anew to Russia yesterday to stop the sale of air-defense missile systems to Iran, but Moscow reiterated its intention to proceed with the deal. The public dispute underscored the considerable difficulty still confronting the Bush administration as it looks for ways to intensify international pressure on Iran to abandon its nuclear program. At a news conference in Washington yesterday, the State Department's third-highest-ranking officer, R. Nicholas Burns, said the time has come for countries "to use their leverage with Iran" and halt exports of weapons and nuclear-related technologies. He singled out the sale of 29 Tor-M1 air-defense missile systems to Iran under a $700 million contract announced by Russia in December. "We hope and we trust that that deal will not go forward, because this is not time for business as usual with the Iranian government," said Burns, the undersecretary of state for political affairs. Burns made the same appeal earlier in the week during a visit to Moscow, and he acknowledged yesterday that the Kremlin had already rejected it. Indeed, hours before Burns spoke, a senior Russian official was quoted by the Itar-Tass news agency making clear his government's determination to follow through with the delivery of the weapons, which the Russians stress are defensive in nature. "There are no circumstances that would obstruct fulfillment of our obligations in military-technical cooperation with Iran," said Nikolai Spassky, the deputy head of the Kremlin's Security Council. "This goes for all the obligations we have made, including the commitment to provide Iran with Tor-M1 air defense systems." In raising the case again yesterday, Burns said the aim was to show that the United States has no intention of dropping it. In addition to refusing to give up the weapons sale, Russia this week rejected a U.S. call to end cooperation in the construction of a nuclear power plant in Bushehr, southern Iran. The Russians say the plant has no relation to any Iranian effort to develop weapons. Iran insists that its entire nuclear program is aimed at producing energy, not arms. Despite the U.S.-Russian tensions, Burns played down the international divisions over what to do about Iran's nuclear ambitions. After Iran's announcement last week that it had begun the enrichment of uranium, Burns said he detected a "change in atmosphere" and a new "sense of urgency" among the major world powers during his discussions about Iran this week in Moscow with officials representing not only Russia but also China, Britain, France and Germany. "We all agreed that while we're willing to support efforts to see civil nuclear power made available to the Iranian people, none of us are willing to see a nuclear weapons capability produced," Burns said. At the same time, Burns acknowledged a lack of agreement on "the specific tactical way forward." With diplomacy now centered in the U.N. Security Council, council members are due to receive on April 28 a report on Iran's nuclear activities from the International Atomic Energy Agency. The United States, along with Britain and France, expect the report to open the way to U.N. sanctions against Iran. But Russia appeared to harden its opposition to sanctions yesterday. A foreign ministry spokesman in Moscow said such measures should be considered only if "concrete facts" emerge that Iran's nuclear program is not exclusively for peaceful purposes. Burns said a meeting of senior political officers from the Security Council's five permanent members -- the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France -- has been scheduled May 2 to consider the next diplomatic moves against Iran. In addition, he said, the leaders of the Group of Eight industrialized nations intend to focus on Iran during their July summit. But given the potential for continued stalemate, Burns raised the possibility that some nations might act against Iran without waiting for a Security Council agreement. "It's not beyond the realm of the possible that at some point in the future, a group of countries could get together, if the Security Council is not able to act, to take collective economic action or collective action on sanctions," he said. "That's important, because those that might prevent the Security Council from acting effectively need to understand that the international community has to find a way, and will find a way, to express our displeasure with the Iranians." Joining Burns at the news conference yesterday, Robert Joseph, the State Department's arms control chief, sought to underscore a sense of urgency. He said the Iranians "have put both feet on the accelerator" toward developing nuclear weapons. He expressed particular concern that Iran's announcement about enriched uranium signals that it is acquiring the capability of running centrifuges over a sustained period of time. "We are very close to that point of no return," which will enable Iran to make nuclear weapons, Joseph said. On Thursday, the administration's director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, called Iran's enrichment claims "troublesome." But, in a talk at the National Press Club, he added that Iran is "a number of years off . . . probably the next decade" before it would have enough fissile material for a weapon, and that "we need to keep this in perspective." ) 2006 The Washington Post Company * ================================================================ .NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems . Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us . .339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org .List Archives: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/ .Subscribe: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr ================================================================ ***************************************************************** 5 [NYTr] Russia: Want Iran Sanctions? Show Us PROOF Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2006 00:00:55 -0500 (CDT) Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit China Daily - Apr 22, 2006 http://english.people.com.cn/200604/22/eng20060422_260366.html 'Proof needed' before Iran sanctions Hardening its opposition to sanctions against Iran, Russia said on Friday that only proof that the Islamic Republic was seeking atom bombs could justify consideration of such measures by the UN Security Council. The council is awaiting a report on April 28 from the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on whether Teheran is meeting its demands for a halt to uranium enrichment and answers queries about its nuclear programme. The United States, Britain and France want the Security Council to weigh sanctions if, as widely expected, IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei concludes Iran has not met UN demands. But according to RIA Novosti news agency, an Iranian envoy to the IAEA said on Friday that his country was willing to "fully continue" the co-operation with the UN nuclear watchdog. Russia made it clear that it would not view such non-compliance on its own as justifying punitive measures. "We will only be able to talk about sanctions after we have concrete facts confirming that Iran is not exclusively involved in peaceful nuclear activities," Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin said, Itar-Tass news agency reported. Iran says its nuclear work aims only to produce electricity, not bombs. Senior cleric Ayatollah Mohammad Emami Kashani told Friday prayer worshippers ElBaradei and the IAEA had singled out Iran's quest for technology, while ignoring a nuclear-armed Israel. "Israel has got nuclear warheads and it is proliferating them constantly and you do not ask them why," Kashani said. Russia rejected on Friday a US call for it to scrap a planned missile sale to Iran, a day after rebuffing Washington's suggestion that it halt work on Iran's first atomic power plant. "There are no circumstances which would get in the way of us carrying out our commitments in the field of military co-operation with Iran," Nikolai Spassky, deputy head of Russia's National Security Council, was quoted by Tass as saying. "That includes ... our commitment to supply Tor systems to Iran," he said, referring to tactical surface-to-air missiles. Bush has vowed to stop Iran getting nuclear weapons and has refused to rule out military options if diplomacy fails. Worries about the nuclear standoff helped drive oil to record highs this week. Prices fell nearly US$1 on Friday on profit-taking by fund investors, but held above US$72 a barrel. 'Real' oil price However, Iran's president said on Friday that his country was looking at ways to help protect poor states from the impact of surging oil prices, while rich countries should pay what he called the "real price." Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was reiterating Iran's position on prices that have charged to record levels, partly on the back of worries that Iran's dispute with the West over its nuclear programme could disrupt Iranian crude supplies. Ahmadinejad said earlier this week that oil prices had not reached their "real value" yet, suggesting they should rise further. He did not specify an appropriate level. "There is a fund in OPEC, and the Oil Ministry and Foreign Ministry are in talks to see whether this OPEC fund has the capacity (to support poor countries)," Ahmadinejad said when asked about his plans to set up an assistance fund. "If so, then we will strengthen this fund and find a formula to protect poor and weak countries not to be harmed because of the crude price hike," he told reporters while touring an oil industry exhibition. "But those rich and industrial countries that have billions of dollars in income should pay the real price for their crude oil," he added. He did not give details about the financing mechanism to protect poor countries, but the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries already has a fund to promote development. Iranian lawmakers have previously said that a price of US$100 or more for a barrel of oil was an appropriate level. Source: China Daily * ================================================================ .NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems . Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us . .339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org .List Archives: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/ .Subscribe: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr ================================================================ ***************************************************************** 6 [NYTr] IRAN: To nuke or not to nuke - Bush decides Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2006 01:44:02 -0400 (EDT) Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit New Statesman - Apr 17, 2006 http://www.newstatesman.com/200604170004 To nuke or not to nuke: Bush decides There will be an attack; that much is already assumed in Washington. Whether it should be nuclear is a matter of intense debate. The verdict may depend upon the wild card of the president's Messianic complex. by Andrew Stephen So the Third World War is imminent and the madman in the White House bunker is about to nuke Iran. That, at least, is the message from the veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker. The American media, however, seem far less concerned than the British: on the morning the story was making headlines in the UK, Iran did not even make the front pages of the Washington Post or New York Times. "Military fantasies on Iran", a New York Times editorial sniffed on 11 April. So who is right? Is this news or not? It depends on your point of departure. This may surprise people in Britain, but Washington is already working from the assumption that the US will launch some form of conventional-weapon attack on Iran during this presidency. That much is not news here. Indeed, the Bush administration is assuming that when that attack happens it will have the support of Britain and Australia. Nuclear weapons, however, are another matter. Whether they might be used against Iran is a critical issue in the struggle under way between foreign-policy pragmatists and ideological zealots. Washington is divided between these two camps, of which the former is by far the bigger. It consists of sensible people inside the administration itself, the State Department, CIA, Pentagon and the powerful think-tanks, and its numbers are growing exponentially as the president's incompetence becomes undeniable to all but the most fanatical. Every day brings more defections. Even Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, has fallen out with Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, and is on the verge of abandoning the ideological ship - just as Colin Powell did in private over Iraq, but not publicly until it was far too late. The second Washington faction is tiny, but unstable and dangerous. It consists of a tiny handful of people. Only last month, after watching the German film Downfall, I wrote of the White House as a bunker, because that is what it is like: Bush, Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, attended by a dwindling band of neoconservatives, sit in their bunker, increasingly detached from reality, still insisting on viewing the world and plotting its course as they choose to do, unhindered by inconvenient realities. (American readers: I am not saying that Bush is like Hitler, but referring to the bunker mentality.) The first faction overwhelmingly agrees with the British, French and German view that Iran must be isolated diplomatically rather than militarily, and it is solidly behind the tough UN Security Council statement of 29 March on Iran. Its members are terrified, however, that in the meantime the madmen in the bunker will lose it completely. Jack Straw is echoing their view when he says it is "completely nuts" to think that the United States is contemplating a pre-emptive nuclear strike; his conduit into the Bush administration is the increasingly marginalised Rice - in effect now a member of faction number one. The second faction ... well, who can peer into the mind of George W Bush? I doubt if the 43rd president himself knows whether the US will launch nuclear missiles at Iran. (It would be reassuring, by the way, to add that the Democrats comprise a third influential faction, except that these days they barely figure on Washington's political map.) The uncertainties leave a vacuum between pessimists and optimists. There are many, including people at the United Nations, who believe that Bush can and will press the nuclear button. Yet a clear majority in Washington believes that an all-powerful establishment, from the might of the top brass at the Pentagon to the consensus wisdom of practically every senior politician, will prevail against even an out-of-control president. We cannot be totally confident that Sy Hersh has got it completely right, either. The 69-year-old reporter is rightly admired for his countless scoops, from the My Lai massacre in 1968 to the Abu Ghraib outrages 35 years later. But he has also made mistakes: he had to write a 3,000-word retraction for the New York Times in 1981 after getting the Pinochet coup in Chile hopelessly wrong, and in 1997 he was fooled by faked documents purporting to tell all about the relationship between JFK and Marilyn Monroe. Yet perhaps most pertinent in this context is that Hersh is close to Israeli intelligence. Disinformation from Mossad fuelled the US neo-cons' miscalculations over Iraq, and Israel has a clear interest in persuading Bush to strike first against a country that threatens to be a nuclear rival in the Middle East. It could be provoking the ideological struggle in Washington in the hope that the publicity itself might prove self-fulfilling. There are two main areas where I, too, disagree with Hersh's interpretation. First, he makes much of the United States already having covert agents in Iran. But who could be surprised by that? The US, after all, has covert agents operating in London, Paris and Rome, and it has been interfering in Iran's internal affairs for decades. Second, Hersh provides highly plausible detail about US contingency plans for using nuclear missiles on Iranian sites such as the uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz. My information, differing slightly from his, is that the Joint Chiefs of Staff did present the White House with a strategy to nuke Iran - but with the strong recommendation that it should not be carried out. That such a strategy existed, moreover, should be no surprise, as drawing up such things - contingency planning - is one of the things the Pentagon exists to do. I e-mailed a senior defence and intelligence analyst friend here about just this point, and will quote his reply verbatim because it precisely conveys the mindset inside the Pentagon: "The Defence Department commonly works up plans for all kinds of contingencies. The Department would not be doing its duty if it were not examining all kinds of contingency plans. Only a tiny minority of the Department's contingency plans ever become the basis for action. Plans are even done on occasion not because they are going to be used, but to demonstrate that certain ideas are impractical or unwise, or to show ourselves we are thoroughly prepared to prevail in a designated contingency. In my opinion, this news is a tempest in a pot of tea." Then I asked a former senior nuclear strategist with Nato about the practicalities of the US launching nuclear strikes against 400 separate sites, most of them underground, in Iran. His answer was blunt. "The only nuclear weapon that might penetrate a little before exploding is the B-61 bomb", he said. "If you penetrate a bunker, you create a Chernobyl. The fallout would spread all over the Middle East and who knows where else." There were too many targets, the Shias and Hezbollah would make Iraq even more hellish than it is, and the price of oil would immediately rise to more than $100 a barrel. So that, one would assume, settles it. Here are two experts who know as much as anybody in the world about nuclear weapons as tactical deterrents, and they make the idea seem insane. But the second man, now safely out of Nato and the Pentagon, also said darkly that the Bush administration's denials over Iran sound horribly like its pre-2003 denials over Iraq. There are midterm elections coming up in November, he noted, and, although not all military men are right-wing hawks, not by any means, "Bush is a jackass who needs to prove his manhood". Here we come full circle, back to the struggle being fought in Washington. The dominant view, including from the Pentagon, is that nuclear strikes against Iran would be disastrous, militarily and politically. Yet there remains the terrifying wild card of what Hersh so rightly calls Bush's Messianic complex. It is a sign of how dangerous the situation has become that the current focus on the possibility of a nuclear attack actually makes the prospect of a conventional strike seem like a soft option. Inside the bunker, Rumsfeld has already written off Rice (and, in effect, Straw), dismissing her admission that the Bush administration has made thousands of mistakes in Iraq. "I don't know what she was talking about, to be perfectly honest", he said, adding that her comments probably reflected "a lack of understanding ... of what warfare is about". She's only a woman, you see, and one now tainted irrevocably by all those commies in the State Department. But he-men like himself and Bush and Cheney are made of sterner stuff, ready to nuke the world if they have to do that to save it, whatever the wimps outside the bunker may say. Whether the increasingly united Washington establishment will let those hunkering down in the bunker prevail is a different matter. * ================================================================ .NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems . Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us . .339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org .List Archives: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/ .Subscribe: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr ================================================================ ***************************************************************** 7 [NYTr] Russia toughens opposition to UN sanctions on Iran Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2006 10:52:53 -0500 (CDT) X-Spam-check: no - Relay From Host Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit Reuters - Apr 21, 2006 http://today.reuters.com/misc/PrinterFriendlyPopup.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2006-04-21T105842Z_01_L21382784_RTRUKOC_0_US-NUCLEAR-IRAN.xml Russia toughens opposition to UN sanctions on Iran By Alireza Ronaghi TEHRAN (Reuters) - Hardening its opposition to sanctions against Iran, Russia said on Friday only proof that the Islamic Republic was seeking atom bombs could justify consideration of such measures by the U.N. Security Council. The council is awaiting a report on April 28 from the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on whether Tehran is meeting its demands for a halt to uranium enrichment and answers to queries about its nuclear program. The United States, Britain and France want the Security Council to weigh sanctions if, as widely expected, IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei concludes Iran has not met U.N. demands. But Russia made clear that it would not view such non-compliance on its own as justifying punitive measures. "We will only be able to talk about sanctions after we have concrete facts confirming that Iran is not exclusively involved in peaceful nuclear activities," Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin said, Itar-Tass news agency reported. Iran says its nuclear work aims only to produce electricity, not bombs. But it has hidden parts of its program in the past, and its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has heightened world concern by saying Israel should be "wiped off the map". Senior cleric Ayatollah Mohammad Emami Kashani told Friday prayer worshippers ElBaradei and the IAEA had singled out Iran's quest for technology, while ignoring a nuclear-armed Israel. "Israel has got nuclear warheads and it is proliferating them constantly and you do not ask them why," Kashani said. He also criticized the Security Council for failing to live up to its name. "You are establishing security for the wolves and predators rather than for the sheep," the cleric declared. Iran had said an IAEA team led by Olli Heinonen, deputy director-general for nuclear safeguards, would arrive on Friday, but diplomats said they had been told Heinonen would not go. A Vienna-based EU diplomat said Iran had not responded to requests for more cooperation. There was no point in Heinonen going to Tehran "if he's just going to get stonewalled". "DEBACLE IN MOSCOW" The diplomat said it was not clear if any senior aides to Heinonen would go to Iran as had been expected. A diplomat from another Western state also said he was informed Heinonen had canceled. IAEA officials refused to comment. A diplomat familiar with IAEA dealings with Iran said the trip had been clouded by what he said was the hard line taken by Iranian negotiators who met EU officials in Moscow on Wednesday. "It was a debacle in Moscow, and the Iranians are acting empowered," the diplomat said. No consensus on sanctions emerged when the council's five permanent members -- Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States -- plus Germany held talks in Moscow this week. Iran's deputy chief nuclear negotiator Javad Vaeedi met officials of Britain, France and Germany in Moscow after those talks, but there was no breakthrough, a British diplomat said. Vaeedi arrived in Vienna late on Thursday, Iran's student news agency ISNA reported. There was no immediate confirmation. Last week Iran defied U.N. and IAEA demands by announcing it had enriched uranium to the level needed in power stations and that it would push for industrial-scale fuel production. Russia -- a veto-holder on the Security Council -- has long argued that sanctions might not persuade Iran to change course, but it has not before spelled out the level of evidence it would need to consider such measures. President Bush, meeting Chinese President Hu Jintao in Washington on Thursday, did not appear to have persuaded him to allow tougher steps in the Security Council. Hu repeated Beijing's calls for a negotiated solution. Russia rejected on Friday a U.S. call for it to scrap a planned missile sale to Iran, a day after rebuffing Washington's suggestion that it halt work on Iran's first atomic power plant. "There are no circumstances which would get in the way of us carrying out our commitments in the field of military cooperation with Iran," Nikolai Spassky, deputy head of Russia's National Security Council, was quoted by Tass as saying. "That includes ... our commitment to supply Tor systems to Iran," he said, referring to tactical surface-to-air missiles. Bush has vowed to stop Iran getting nuclear weapons and has refused to rule out military options if diplomacy fails. Worries about the nuclear standoff helped drive oil to record highs this week. Prices fell nearly $1 on Friday on profit-taking by fund investors, but held above $72 a barrel. (Additional reporting by Christian Lowe in Moscow and Mark Heinrich in Vienna) ) Reuters 2006. * ================================================================ .NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems . Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us . .339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org .List Archives: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/ .Subscribe: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr ================================================================ ***************************************************************** 8 Reuters: Russia must freeze arms deals with Iran, says U.S. Fri 21 Apr 2006 12:30 PM ET WASHINGTON, April 21 (Reuters) - Russia must stop any arms deals with Iran and other nations must bar the sale of dual-use technologies to Tehran to put pressure on Iran to abandon its nuclear program, a senior U.S. official said on Friday "It's time for countries to use their leverage against Iran," said senior State Department official Nicholas Burns, adding: "We think its very important that countries like Russia freeze any arms sales planned for Iran." Washington wants Moscow to cancel the planned sale to Iran of Tor tactical surface-to-air missiles. Moscow and Tehran say they are for defensive purposes. "We hope and we trust that that deal will not go forward," said Burns of the Tor deal. Burns, who met in Moscow this week with officials from Russia, China, Germany, France and Britain to plan strategy against Iran, said nations must pressure Iran individually as well as work collectively at the U.N. Security Council. He said there was a "sense of urgency" among nations to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, especially after it announced last week it had begun the enrichment of uranium. A meeting among political directors from the six countries is expected to take place in Paris on May 2 and the group would try then to reach an agreement on what diplomatic action to take next against Iran, Burns said. In addition, he said the Group of Eight industrialized nations would focus on Iran at their July summit. Russia strongly opposes the use of sanctions against Iran and has also rejected a call from the United States, which has long maintained its own trade embargo on Iran, to halt work on the Islamic Republic's Bushehr nuclear power station. Russia's state atomic energy agency is contracted to help Iran build the $1 billion reactor. (NUCLEAR-IRAN-USA, Reporting by Sue Pleming, editing by Frances Kerry; email: sue.pleming@Reuters.com)) © Reuters 2006. All Rights Reserved. [ border=] ***************************************************************** 9 IRNA: Ahani: Diplomacy, talks only way to resolve nuclear dossier - Brussels, April 20, IRNA Belgium-Iran-Ahani Iran's ambassador to Brussels, Ali Ahani met the new head of the foreign relations committee of the Belgian parliament, Hendrick Daems, and discussed the progress in bilateral Belgo-Iranian ties. At the meeting, the two sides underlined the importance of expanding cooperation, exchange of parliamentary delegations and continuation of contacts between the parliamentarians of both countries, Iranian embassy sources told IRNA. Ahani stressed that although Iran is ready to defend its national interests, the Islamic Republic poses no threat to any country and is playing a positive role to preserve peace and security in the region. Referring to the nuclear issue, Ahani underlined that peaceful nuclear technology is the natural right of Iran and others who have signed the NPT. "Negotiations and diplomacy are the only way to resolve Iran's nuclear dossier," said the Iranian envoy. On his part, Daems underlined the necessity for correct information on developments in Iran and he welcomed direct contacts between the parliaments and also the upcoming visit of an Iranian parliament delegation to Belgium. ***************************************************************** 10 AFP: No Iran sanctions talk -- for now - Russia Fri Apr 21, 4:32 AM ET MOSCOW (AFP) - Russia repeated it was opposed to discussion of sanctions to keep Iran" /> Iran's nuclear program in check until it had seen hard evidence that Tehran was pursuing nuclear weapons. "Sanctions can be discussed only when there are concrete facts showing that Tehran's nuclear activity is not exclusively peaceful," Russian foreign ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin told reporters here. "At the present time, the concerns of the international community over the Iranian nuclear program cannot be eased through sanctions and use of force," Kamynin said. Russia, which is helping Iran build its first nuclear power station, has consistently maintained that only the International Atomic Energy Agency" /> International Atomic Energy Agency(IAEA) can verify whether Tehran's nuclear program is confined strictly to civilian purposes. IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei is to tell the UN Security Council next Friday whether his agency can make that verification with certainty. The United States accuses Iran of trying to develop nuclear weapons under cover of its civilian nuclear program, a charge Iran denies. On Thursday US intelligence chief John Negroponte said Iran's resumption of uranium enrichment was "troublesome" but the country was still years away from having enough fissile material to make a nuclear weapon. Negroponte expressed concern both about Iran's claim to have resumed uranium enrichment with a cascade of 164 centrifuges in Natanz and extreme statements made by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. "The developments in Iran -- clearly they're troublesome," he said in response to questions after a speech to the National Press Club. "By the same token, our assessment at the moment is that even though we believe that Iran is determined to acquire or obtain a nuclear weapon, that we believe that it is still a number of years off before they are likely to have enough fissile material to assemble into, or to put into a nuclear weapon; perhaps into the next decade," he said. "So I think it's important that this issue be kept in perspective," he said. Copyright © 2006 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved. The ***************************************************************** 11 AFP: US urges ban on military sales to Iran Fri Apr 21, 4:14 PM ET WASHINGTON (AFP) - The United States, acknowledging the tough task it faces to slap UN sanctions on Iran" /> Iran, urged an embargo on military sales to Tehran for its suspected bid to develop nuclear weapons. With Russia and China putting up fierce resistance to punitive measures against the Iranians, US Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns stepped up the call for countries to act individually outside the UN framework. "There are a lot of countries that trade with Iran that have billion-dollar trade relationships and they ought to begin to rethink those commercial trade relationships," he told a news briefing here. "There are a lot of countries that allow the export of dual-use technologies, and the position of the United States is that should be prohibited. All countries should refrain from military sales and arm sales." Burns, undersecretary for political affairs and the number three official in the State Department, singled out Russia's plans to sell Iran 29 TOR M1 mobile surface-to-air missile defence systems. "We hope and we trust that that deal will not go forward because this is not time for business as usual with the Iranian government," he said. Robert Joseph, undersecretary of state for arms control, said he toured the Gulf last week and held talks with regional officials on a variety of other possible measures against Iran. Among them were efforts to intercept the transfer of sensitive materials and technologies, a crackdown on front companies and bank accounts used to aid Tehran, and greater cooperation in missile defense. Burns spoke after holding meetings earlier this week with counterparts from Russia, China, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Canada that produced no consensus on possible UN sanctions. The UN Security Council has given the Islamic republic until next Friday to halt its uranium-enrichment activities but has not laid out any consequences if it refused to comply. The United States is pressing for a threat of UN sanctions such as freezes on the assets of Iranian leaders or travel restrictions. Yet Burns recognized the outcome was far from certain. "The diplomacy here is very challenging. It is likely to extend some time into the future," he said. "I can't predict where the Security Council will be a month from today." "It's also important for countries to know that, if for any reason the Security Council can't succeed, there will be an effort made, and there are avenues available to us to apply the kind of pressure that we need to apply." Burns said political directors of the UN Security Council's five permanent members -- the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France -- would likely meet May 2 in Paris to thrash out a strategy. He said Iran would also be "the leading issue" when foreign ministers of the Group of Eight industrialized powers meet in Moscow in June, and G-8 leaders hold their summit in St. Petersburg the following month. The United States has been ratcheting up its diplomatic effort against Tehran since Iran announced on April 11 it had taken a major step forward in its nuclear program by enriching small amounts of uranium. Joseph said the Iranians were "very close" to a point of no return in the West's ability to curb their march towards mastery of the sensitive nuclear fuel cycle. "It's fair to say, I believe, that the Iranians have put both feet on the accelerator," Joseph said. "They're moving very quickly to establish new realities on the ground associated with their nuclear program." He said he had little reason to doubt the Iranians' claim they had converted enough uranium for 110 tons of UF-6 gas for enrichment in centrifuges, and this would mean they had accumulated sufficient material for more than 10 bombs. Tehran's assertion it was able to operate a cascade of 164 centrifuges and enrich uranium to 3.5 percent would mean they were "well on your way" to producing industrial-size volumes of weapons-grade material, Joseph said. Iran, which insists its nuclear program is strictly for peaceful purposes, has announced plans to install 3,000 centrifuges within a year and ultimately run some 54,000 centrifuges. Copyright © 2006 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved. The ***************************************************************** 12 AFP: Russia-US split on Iran deepens as Moscow rejects sanctions without proof - Fri Apr 21, 11:32 AM ET MOSCOW (AFP) - Russia said it would not discuss sanctions on Iran" /> until it had proof supporting US allegations that Tehran was hiding a nuclear arms program, dealing a blow to US efforts to forge a united international stance against Iran. Moscow also said it was "categorically" opposed to the use of force to keep Iran's nuclear program in check and vowed it would pursue plans to sell sophisticated conventional weapons systems to Tehran despite US objections. "Sanctions can be discussed only when there are concrete facts showing that Tehran's nuclear activity is not exclusively peaceful," Russian foreign ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin told reporters. Another official, deputy foreign minister Sergei Kislyak, said: "We are categorically against use of force on this question and all our work will be based on this," according to news agencies. That comment came two days after US President George W. Bush" /> refused to rule out military action against Iran, saying that "all options are on the table." The deputy head of Russia's security council said Moscow saw no reason to halt conventional weapons deals with Iran as sought by the United States as long as the International Atomic Energy Agency" /> (IAEA) was investigating Iran's nuclear ambitions. IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei was to report on that investigation to the UN Security Council by April 28. "There are no circumstances that raise obstacles to fulfillment of our obligations in military technical cooperation with Iran," Spassky was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying. "This means fulfilling all obligations, including obligations on delivery to Iran of the Tor-M1 air defense system," Spassky said. That was a direct response to a call Wednesday by US Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns for Moscow to cancel the Tor-M1 deal, signed in December and reported to be worth 700 million dollars. "No country should sell arms to a regime like that," Burns told reporters Wednesday. "It would be logical for that arms sale not to go forward." Spassky admitted Russia, which is helping Iran build its first nuclear power station, had questions about aspects of Iran's nuclear work. He issued a stern call on Tehran to work with the IAEA to answer those questions to the world's satisfaction and said Iran "must fulfill a range of additional obligations" to do so. Russia's proposal to enrich uranium for Iran to use as nuclear fuel however remained on the table and should be considered a way of "assisting" Iran until all questions about its nuclear intentions were cleared up, he said. "At the end of this period, Iran can return to its full rights in the nuclear energy sphere," Spassky said. He said Moscow however believed that "there is still a chance, a normal, solid chance, for a peaceful diplomatic resolution of the Iranian nuclear problem." The United States accuses Iran of hiding a nuclear weapons program behind its atomic energy work, a charge Tehran denies. Washington, backed by its European allies, has been pushing for quick and firm action to curb Iran's nuclear work, but Russia and China are resisting this push. Top diplomats from the UN Security Council permanent members held talks in Moscow on the Iran impasse on Tuesday. They agreed Tehran's nuclear work was a worry, but remained divided on tactics to address it, officials from the participating countries said. Iran's ambassador to the UN's nuclear watchdog meanwhile said that Tehran was ready for "full" cooperation with that agency and was prepared to answer all questions about its nuclear program. "Iran plans to continue its full cooperation with the IAEA. We are ready to eliminate all outstanding doubts about our nuclear dossier," the envoy, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, was quoted by news agencies as saying in a speech to participants at a security conference in Moscow. Soltanieh's comments came a day after a senior UN nuclear inspector put off a trip to Iran in what diplomats in Vienna said was a clear sign that Tehran is failing to give the UN atomic agency key concessions it demands. The Iranian envoy said that Tehran had been conducting nuclear energy research for more than 30 years. "It is our right to continue research under IAEA control," Soltanieh said. "The United States and Europe have no right to demand from us an immediate halt to our research, which is strictly for peaceful ends." Recommend It: Not at All Somewhat Copyright © 2006 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved. The ***************************************************************** 13 IRNA: Malaysian FM urges honoring Iran's nuclear right Kuala Lumpur, April 21, IRNA Iran-Malaysia-Nuclear Malaysia's foreign affairs minister Syed Hamid Albar said on Friday that all countries should honor Tehran's rights for peaceful use of nuclear technology. In a meeting with Iranian ambassador to Malaysia Mehdi Khandaqabadi, Albar hoped that Iran's nuclear issue will be settled through the International Atomic Energy Agency. Khandaqabadi expressed pleasure over expansion of relations between Iran and Malaysia. He briefed Albar on latest developments in Iran's peaceful nuclear energy. The two sides also underlined high level of bilateral ties and agreed to form a joint commission this summer for all-out expansion of the two-way ties. ***************************************************************** 14 IRNA: Ayat. Kashani: Iranian nation is steadfast in peaceful nuclear energy - Tehran, April 21, IRNA Iran-Prayers-Kashani Substitute Friday prayers leader of Tehran Ayatollah Mohammad Emami Kashani said on Friday that Iranian nation is steadfast in the peaceful and scientific nuclear activity. "Nuclear energy in Iran is a scientific and peaceful activity, being of high significance for the nation," Ayatollah Kashani said while delivering his second Friday prayers sermon to large groups of worshipers at Tehran University campus. Ayatollah Kashani criticized double-standards in Iran's nuclear issue. "As far as Iran's peaceful nuclear activities are concerned, the world people say something, while the arrogance mouthpieces say something else," said the Ayatollah. He said, "The arrogance suppose that what they say is a reflection of the world people's words." He went on to say that certain international fora have turned into White House's decision making room. "In these fora, decisions are made against nations," he added. Elsewhere in his address, the major cleric said independence has been one of the pivots of Iran's endeavors to master peaceful nuclear technology. He said the energy source will be needed once oil is finished. "According to Supreme Leader of Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, they (the Westerners) want formation of a bank, called the fuel bank, in the Middle East in order to say that any country demanding fuel should get it from us (the West)," said Ayatollah Kashani, adding, "This is a kind of captivity," he added. The Ayatollah said the call by the West means exploiting and colonizing nations. "You cannot let a foreigner decide your fate and dominate you; and this is what our fathers and mothers were entangled with," he added. Highlighting the economic importance of nuclear energy, Emami Kashani said, "The energy will play a high economic role for us in future, furthermore, any compromise on the issue will question the scientific prestige and reputation of universities, and students as well as valuable potential of Iranians." Somewhere in his address, Emami Kashani said that based on the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the countries lacking any nuclear energy should be helped to gain access to it and those having such a technology should not develop nuclear arms. The major cleric also questioned the world silence against manufacturers of nuclear weapons, especially the Zionist regime. He advised the IAEA and the UN Security Council to act wisely, behave based on democracy and justice and defy provocations of the West. To the end of his remarks, Ayatollah Kashani called on Iraqi Shiites and Sunnis to set aside differences. ***************************************************************** 15 Guardian Unlimited: Russia: Proof Needed for Iran Sanctions From the Associated Press [UP] Friday April 21, 2006 10:16 AM MOSCOW (AP) - Russia's Foreign Ministry said Friday the U.N. Security Council cannot consider levying sanctions against Iran until it's proven Tehran's nuclear program is not exclusively for peaceful purposes, a Russian news agency reported. Russian officials had said previously that they were awaiting an April 28 report by the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog, Mohamed ElBaradei, before deciding Moscow's position on further steps to resolve the Iran crisis. But Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin said Friday that ``one can speak of sanctions only after the appearance of concrete facts proving that Iran is not engaged exclusively in peaceful nuclear activities,'' the ITAR-Tass news agency reported. Tehran insists its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, but the United States and some of its allies suspect Iran is trying to develop weapons. The United States and Europe are pressing for sanctions against Iran, a step Russia and China have so far opposed. Kamynin's statement followed Moscow's rejection Thursday of a U.S. call to end cooperation in constructing a $800 million nuclear power plant in Bushehr, southern Iran. Kamynin said the plant had no relation to Iran's work in uranium enrichment. ``The adoption of a commitment on ending cooperation with this or that state in some sphere lies exclusively in the competence of the U.N. Security Council,'' he said in a statement Thursday. ``Up to now, the Security Council has taken no decision on ending cooperation with Iran in nuclear energy.'' Every country ``has the right to decide with whom and how it should cooperate,'' Kamynin said, adding that the Bushehr project was ``under the full control'' of the U.N. nuclear watchdog - the International Atomic Energy Agency. U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns told reporters Wednesday in Moscow that the United States had called on countries to end all nuclear cooperation with Iran, including work on the Bushehr plant. He also said countries should stop all arms exports to Iran; Russia is supplying Iran with sophisticated air defense missiles. Burns said such action would send a message to Tehran that its behavior meant it would no longer be ``business as usual.'' Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006 ***************************************************************** 16 REDIFF: Moratorium on nuclear testing vital to N-deal - US Aziz Haniffa in Washington, DC | April 21, 2006 09:43 IST The Bush administration has said that as far as the United States is concerned, India's public moratorium on further nuclear weapons testing is the linchpin of the US-India civilian nuclear agreement. Following India's rejection on April 17 - after it was leaked that the preliminary draft of the bilateral civilian nuclear cooperation agreement called for a cap on nuclear testing, warning that cooperation would be immediately suspended if India were to detonate a nuclear explosive device - Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs Richard Boucher said, "We all understand that India has a moratorium on nuclear testing and has made a public commitment itself, based on its own decision to continue that moratorium on nuclear testing."  Thus, Boucher, the Bush administration's point man for South Asia noted during an interaction with the media on April 20, "That's very important to us and others who look forward to cooperating with India in the area of civilian nuclear power and we look for that to continue and that's one of the basis on which we are establishing the new cooperation." He added, "So it's not surprising to find that encoded in various forms in documents we write and statements we make. But it was India's decision to do that just as the major nuclear powers themselves have decided not to test." Asked if there was any pressure by the US to cajole India into making that commitment contained in the bilateral agreement, also known as the 123 Agreement, being negotiated, Boucher reiterated that 'you see that in the draft law(introduced in Congress) and elsewhere, the Indian decision to have a moratorium on nuclear testing is one of the basis on which we can undertake this civilian nuclear cooperation'. + Why Rice is right Immediately after this provision contained in the draft agreement handed over to Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran by the US when he visited last month for discussions on the deal were leaked in New Delhi, External Affairs Ministry spokesman Navtej Sarna said, "In preliminary discussions on these elements, India has already conveyed to the US that such a provision has no place in the proposed bilateral agreement and that India is bound only by what is contained in the July 18 Joint Statement, that is, continuing its commitment to a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing." The Bharatiya Janata Party and other members of the Opposition have alleged that this is Washington's modus operandi to commit India to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty through the back-door. Boucher, asked by rediff India Abroad if the bilateral agreement that some members of Congress have said they would like to look at along with India's negotiated safeguards with the International Atomic Energy Agency before they make up their mind on which way to vote on the proposed nuclear deal could start unraveling in the wake of this new hiccup, said, "We do think it's a fairly straight-forward process." "It's going to be something that we have to negotiate, we have to discuss. We are not going to discuss it through the press or in public.We are not going to start posturing based on positions ascribed to us or pieces of paper that may have been leaked," he said, and added, "We look forward to hearing from the Indian government and sitting down with them to negotiate." + 'We were prepared to walk away from the nuclear agreement' Boucher said he had 'no precise timing' on when an Indian team would be coming to Washington to negotiate this bilateral agreement, which has been described as a 'very technical agreement', which the chief US interlocutor, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns, had earlier predicted would be a shoo-in and a mere formality.  Boucher said the US were 'certainly ready to do that (negotiate the agreement) pretty soon, but I'll have to hear from the Indians', and 'we'll sit down and negotiate with them'. However, he acknowledged, "Obviously, we don't have the exact same position on the text. We have to talk about it, but that's a normal part of diplomatic life. We look forward to doing it. So I don't see it as overly complicated, although  one has to remember you have to negotiate the agreement and then we have to go through the whole process here with our Congress to get it approved. So it's important that when we ask our senators and Congressmen to vote on this civilian nuclear arrangement, that they understand not just sort of the overall picture but they also understand what some of the other pieces are." "And so, as India proceeds with its talks with the IAEA on the safeguards agreement, as we proceed with India on the bilateral agreement, we hope these things will move forward and we will be able to keep our Congress well informed so that they understand where the different pieces are as they proceed with their work on their piece," he added. Complete coverage: The India-US nuclear tango Copyright © 2006 Rediff.com India Limited. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 17 Bangor Daily News: A step toward Maine's clean energy future - Bangornews.com Staff Friday, April 21, 2006 - Bangor Daily News << Back By Steve Ward and Matthew Davis Maine creates more than half of its electricity from fossil fuels, at our peril. We also use heating oil and natural gas to heat our homes and businesses. In addition to creating air and global warming pollution, these resources are finite and are not found in Maine. Fortunately, Maine has abundant sources of renewable energy and energy-efficiency resources that we have only begun to tap. Wind, solar, clean biomass and low-impact hydro-energy sources are renewable, create negligible environmental damage and could supply Maine with its future energy demand. Already, dirty energy causes massive, largely undocumented costs to public health, the environment and tourism industry. Summertime smog chokes the breath of residents and visitors alike, contributing to Maine attaining the highest rate of childhood and adult asthma in the region. Haze drastically cuts the visibility at Acadia National Park and other recreational and tourism destinations. Mercury contamination makes Maine's fish unsafe to eat for children and women of child-bearing age, and threatens the long-term health of loons and other wildlife. Additionally, nuclear waste is still stored in insecure, non-permanent facilities at the decommissioned Maine Yankee nuclear plant site. Oil, coal, gas, or nuclear power will not lead us toward a clean energy future - and the social and environmental costs of continuing on that path are unreasonable. Meanwhile, Maine wastes more energy than it needs to and passes up consumer savings in the process. According to studies by several academic and expert organizations (including the Public Advocate Office), Maine has captured only one-fifth of the achievable energy efficiency that could be achieved through various programs, standards and incentives. In fact, we could flatten and reduce electric demand over the next 10 years by tapping into all of our achievable energy efficiency. Besides the environmental benefits of trimming energy use, the kilowatt that we don't use is two to three times cheaper than the kilowatt generated by dirty power plants or renewable power projects. Maine's reliance on dirty energy sources has started to take a direct financial toll on the residents and businesses of the state. As supplies of fossil fuels get tighter, and infrastructure and political problems get worse in parts of the world where fossil fuels are located and processed, fossil fuel supplies get more costly. The cost to heat households and businesses has spiked for both of the past two winters, while the cost of residential Standard Offer electricity has increased at 15 percent and 25 percent in March 2005 and March 2006. The only thing that kept Maine from having serious energy problems this year (as Texas currently is experiencing) was an abnormally warm winter. Fortunately, Gov. Baldacci and members of the Legislature's Utilities and Energy Committee have grasped the problem and taken steps to move Maine in a better direction. The Utilities and Energy Committee recently gave its unanimous approval to legislation that would help reduce Maine's reliance on fossil fuel-generated electricity and overall electricity demand. The bill, LD 2041, would put energy-efficiency programs on an equal footing with power plants and set a goal of 10 percent new renewable energy by 2017, among other energy policies. This bill deserves to be passed by the full Legislature. LD 2041 would take meaningful steps toward promoting energy efficiency and renewable energy. Specifically, it would authorize the Public Utilities Commission to treat energy efficiency as a resource for meeting Standard Offer supply. In other words, instead of negotiating with a power plant to produce a specified amount of power to satisfy demand, an energy supplier would negotiate with Efficiency Maine or other efficiency programs to save a specified amount of power to reduce demand. The bill also sets a goal of Maine generating 10 percent more new renewable energy generation by 2017 and authorized the PUC to order the utilities to buy electricity in long term contracts from renewable energy capacity resources in order to meet the 10 percent goal. It would further prioritize energy efficiency and renewables by authorizing the PUC to direct Maine's two largest utilities to enter into long-term contracts in order to address capacity adequacy. The bill sets priorities for long-term contracts with energy-capacity resources in the following order of priority: new energy conservation or energy-efficiency resources, new renewable energy capacity, new energy capacity with no net emission of greenhouse gases, and - finally - capacity from any other energy-generation source. This is a timely bill that deserves to be speedily approved by the Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Baldacci. The PUC should follow through with implementation of this legislation. Elected officials also should promote further efforts to reduce the amount of energy we waste and increase the amount of clean energy we produce from renewable sources in our state. Moving Maine toward a clean energy future will avoid environmental damage, diminish public health consequences, lower consumer energy prices and reduce our reliance on imported fuel. Steve Ward is the Maine Public Advocate. Matthew Davis is an advocate for Environment Maine. 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. ***************************************************************** 18 Deccan Herald: US not to insist on new nuke commitments from India - Friday, April 21, 2006 Washington, UNI : US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia Richard Boucher has said that India has voluntarily imposed a moratorium on carrying out nuclear tests and the United States expects that position to hold and continue. He, however, made it clear that the Bush administration would not insist on any new comitments in this regard. Replying to reporters questions on the issue yesterday he said, ''We all know India has a moratorium on nuclear testing. And it has made a public commitment based on its own decision to continue that moratorium. I think that is very important to us and others who look forward to cooperating with India in the area of civilian nuclear power. '' Commenting on India's decision on not testing the nuclear power Mr Boucher said ''But it was India s decision just as major nuclear powers themselves have decided not to test. It is on the basis of Indiabs decision that we have undertaken this civil nuclear cooperation.'' He dismissed speculation that his recent remarks had created a controversy, saying that ''some people misread my remarks and distorted questions and on that basis created a mini storm in a mini tea-cup.'' Boucher said ''I think it is important to remember that this is going to be a civilian nuclear deal which entails Indiaas cooperation on the civilian side. It in no way promotes, supports, or encourages further developments on the military side.'' He also went on to explain that ''it has long been the position of the United States that we think all parties in the region need to think about strategic stability. We welcome the discussions that the Indians and Pakistanis have had on that subject. We have had our own discussion with all parties on the question of regional strategic stability in the region and we think that it is worth pursuing.'' The Assistant Secretary also said that the bilateral agreement between India and the US now under discussions ''is a really very straight forward process and it is going to be something we have to negotiate we have to discuss and of course we are not going to discuss through the press or public or based on pieces of paper that has been leaked.'' ''We look forward to negotiations with the Indian government directly,'' he added. 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 ***************************************************************** 19 Guardian Unlimited: Bush Talks Tough in China Trade Fights From the Associated Press [UP] Friday April 21, 2006 10:01 AM AP Photo WHGH125 By MARTIN CRUTSINGER AP Economics Writer WASHINGTON (AP) - Once again, President Bush had a difficult time wresting concessions from Chinese President Hu Jintao. And for good reason. Bush may be the leader of the world's only superpower, but when he talks to the Chinese, it's like discussing an overdue loan with his banker. There's not much leverage. The summit on Thursday was Hu's first visit to the White House since he became China's top leader three years ago. But he and Bush have met five times in just the past year, including a trip Bush made to Beijing in November. At each of those meetings, the list of U.S. trade demands has been the same: China must stop unfairly depressing the value of its currency to gain trade advantages; it must halt rampant copyright piracy that is costing American companies billions of dollars in lost sales, and it must open its markets wider to U.S. exports. The urgency of those demands has grown as America's trade deficit with China has soared; the trade imbalance hit another all-time high last year of $202 billion. That deficit, which represented more than one-fourth of America's record imbalance with the world in 2005, has sparked growing unrest on Capitol Hill and prompted a spate of bills to penalize China unless it halts trade practices that critics blame for contributing to the loss of nearly 3 million manufacturing jobs since Bush took office in 2001. With an eye toward the November congressional elections, the Bush administration has stepped up its own rhetoric. But so far the tough talk has produced few results. Hu's comments during his half-day summit with Bush failed to go farther than promises he has made before. The biggest disappointment came in the area where the administration had once held the highest hopes, that China would commit to moving faster to allow its currency to rise in value against the dollar. A weaker dollar against the yuan would make American goods more competitive against Chinese products. But the blunt reality is that the Bush administration has little leverage to make China do more. Since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, the United States can no longer threaten to impose unilateral sanctions as the Clinton administration threatened to do in the mid-1990s in a copyright piracy fight of that era. The United States can bring WTO cases against China as it did last month in a dispute over auto parts. But on currency manipulation - the area that promises to make the biggest difference in reducing America's trade imbalance - experts say the United States would have slim chances of prevailing before the WTO, in part because no country has faced those charges before. Members of Congress are pushing legislation that would slam all Chinese goods with penalty tariffs of 27.5 percent if China does not move faster to allow its currency to rise in value. But such a draconian measure would basically penalize American consumers who have grown to like the low prices offered by a flood of Chinese imports of clothes, athletic shoes, toys and televisions. ``It's very easy to talk about limiting imports of bedding or shoes or whatever, but once you do it and prices shoot up, then you will get a backlash,'' said Gary Hufbauer, a trade economist at the Institute for International Economics, a Washington think tank. Such an action could also spark a trade war, with China retaliating against U.S. exporters, either directly by winning a WTO case that the U.S. tariffs violate WTO rules or more subtly by making sure that U.S. companies like Boeing Co. don't get the next big round of contracts. Bush was also in the delicate position during Hu's visit of trying to get trade concessions from China while at the same time seeking China's support on a wide range of foreign policy issues, including dealing with the nuclear ambitious of Iran and North Korea. And then there is the issue of China's vast holdings of U.S. assets. The massive trade deficits the United States has run up with China has meant the transfer of billions of dollars into Chinese hands. That money is used to buy U.S. Treasury securities and other assets. The deficits have gotten so huge, that China's holdings have ballooned. China is now the second largest holder of U.S. government debt, with $265.2 billion in Treasury securities, and its total foreign reserves have just surpassed Japan's to become the largest in the world. The willingness of the Chinese to hold that debt has helped to keep U.S. interest rates low, which has been a boon to American home buyers and other borrowers. But if for some reason the Chinese suddenly reversed policy and started dumping U.S. assets in favor of parking their reserves in other countries, that could have a serious impact on the U.S. economy by sending U.S. interest rates up sharply. The predicament of being in hock to China and other foreign countries was highlighted on the day of Hu's visit by an editorial cartoon in The Washington Post which showed Bush and Hu meeting. In the cartoon, Bush says, ``I'm the leader of the most prosperous and powerful nation in the world today.'' To which Hu responds, ``I'm the repo man.'' --- EDITOR'S NOTE - Martin Crutsinger has covered economics issues in Washington since 1984. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006 ***************************************************************** 20 Wildlife defies Chernobyl radiation Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2006 22:22:40 -0500 (CDT) BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk Wildlife defies Chernobyl radiation By Stephen Mulvey It contains some of the most contaminated land in the world, yet it has become a haven for wildlife - a nature reserve in all but name. The exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power station is teeming with life. As humans were evacuated from the area 20 years ago, animals moved in. Existing populations multiplied and species not seen for decades, such as the lynx and eagle owl, began to return. There are even tantalising footprints of a bear, an animal that has not trodden this part of Ukraine for centuries. "Animals don't seem to sense radiation and will occupy an area regardless of the radiation condition," says radioecologist Sergey Gaschak. "A lot of birds are nesting inside the sarcophagus," he adds, referring to the steel and concrete shield erected over the reactor that exploded in 1986. "Starlings, pigeons, swallows, redstart - I saw nests, and I found eggs." There may be plutonium in the zone, but there is no herbicide or pesticide, no industry, no traffic, and marshlands are no longer being drained. There is nothing to disturb the wild boar - said to have multiplied eightfold between 1986 and 1988 - except its similarly resurgent predator, the wolf. Inedible The picture was not quite so rosy in the first weeks and months after of the disaster, when radiation levels were much, much higher. Four square kilometres of pine forest in the immediate vicinity of the reactor went ginger brown and died, earning the name of the Red Forest. Some animals in the worst-hit areas also died or stopped reproducing. Mice embryos simply dissolved, while horses left on an island 6km from the power plant died when their thyroid glands disintegrated. Cattle on the same island were stunted due to thyroid damage, but the next generation were found to be surprisingly normal. Now it's typical for animals to be radioactive - too radioactive for humans to eat safely - but otherwise healthy. Adaptation There is a distinction to be made between animals which stay in one place, such as mice, and larger animals - elks, say - which move in and out of contaminated land as they range over large areas. The animals that wander widely end up with a lower dose of radiation than animals stuck in a radiation hotspot. But there are signs that these unfortunate creatures can adapt to their circumstances. Sergey Gaschak has experimented on mice in the Red Forest, parts of which are slowly growing back, albeit with stunted and misshapen trees. "We marked animals then recaptured them again much later," he says. "And we found they lived as long as animals in relatively clean areas." The next step was to take these other mice and put them in an enclosure in the Red Forest. "They felt not very well," Sergey says. "The distinction between the local and newcomer animals was very evident." Mutation In all his research, Sergey has only found one mouse with cancer-like symptoms. He has found ample evidence of DNA mutations, but nothing that affected the animals' physiology or reproductive ability. "Nothing with two heads," he says. Mary Mycio, author of Wormwood Forest, a natural history of the Chernobyl zone, points out that a mutant animal in the wild will usually die and be eaten before scientists can observe it. And in general, she notes, scientists study populations as a whole, and are not that interested in what happens to particular individuals. Nuclear guardian But she too argues that the benefits to wildlife of removing people from the zone, have far outweighed any harm from radiation. In her book she quotes the British scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock, who wrote approvingly in the Daily Telegraph in 2001 of the "unscheduled appearance" of wildlife at Chernobyl. He went on: "I have wondered if the small volumes of nuclear waste from power production should be stored in tropical forests and other habitats in need of a reliable guardian against their destruction by greedy developers". A large part of the Chernobyl zone within Belarus has already officially been turned into a nature reserve. Sergey Gaschak wants Ukraine to follow suit and to turn its 2,500 sq km of evacuated land into a reserve or national park. Unlike the Ukrainian Green Party, he is not bothered if the government goes ahead with plans to build a deep deposit in the zone for nuclear waste from all over the country. He says the eagle owl will not care two hoots. ZONE DWELLERS Reappeared: Lynx, eagle owl, great white egret, nesting swans, and possibly a bear Introduced: European bison, Przewalski's horse Booming mammals: Badger, beaver, boar, deer, elk, fox, hare, otter, raccoon dog, wolf Booming birds: Aquatic warbler, azure tit, black grouse, black stork, crane, white-tailed eagle = C BBC MMVI ======= http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/4923342.stm ======= ***************************************************************** 21 [NYTr] Wildlife defies Chernobyl radiation Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2006 01:45:44 -0400 (EDT) Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit BBC News - Apr 21, 2006 http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/4923342.stm Wildlife defies Chernobyl radiation By Stephen Mulvey It contains some of the most contaminated land in the world, yet it has become a haven for wildlife - a nature reserve in all but name. The exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power station is teeming with life. As humans were evacuated from the area 20 years ago, animals moved in. Existing populations multiplied and species not seen for decades, such as the lynx and eagle owl, began to return. There are even tantalising footprints of a bear, an animal that has not trodden this part of Ukraine for centuries. "Animals don't seem to sense radiation and will occupy an area regardless of the radiation condition," says radioecologist Sergey Gaschak. "A lot of birds are nesting inside the sarcophagus," he adds, referring to the steel and concrete shield erected over the reactor that exploded in 1986. "Starlings, pigeons, swallows, redstart - I saw nests, and I found eggs." There may be plutonium in the zone, but there is no herbicide or pesticide, no industry, no traffic, and marshlands are no longer being drained. There is nothing to disturb the wild boar - said to have multiplied eightfold between 1986 and 1988 - except its similarly resurgent predator, the wolf. Inedible The picture was not quite so rosy in the first weeks and months after of the disaster, when radiation levels were much, much higher. Four square kilometres of pine forest in the immediate vicinity of the reactor went ginger brown and died, earning the name of the Red Forest. Some animals in the worst-hit areas also died or stopped reproducing. Mice embryos simply dissolved, while horses left on an island 6km from the power plant died when their thyroid glands disintegrated. Cattle on the same island were stunted due to thyroid damage, but the next generation were found to be surprisingly normal. Now it's typical for animals to be radioactive - too radioactive for humans to eat safely - but otherwise healthy. Adaptation There is a distinction to be made between animals which stay in one place, such as mice, and larger animals - elks, say - which move in and out of contaminated land as they range over large areas. The animals that wander widely end up with a lower dose of radiation than animals stuck in a radiation hotspot. But there are signs that these unfortunate creatures can adapt to their circumstances. Sergey Gaschak has experimented on mice in the Red Forest, parts of which are slowly growing back, albeit with stunted and misshapen trees. "We marked animals then recaptured them again much later," he says. "And we found they lived as long as animals in relatively clean areas." The next step was to take these other mice and put them in an enclosure in the Red Forest. "They felt not very well," Sergey says. "The distinction between the local and newcomer animals was very evident." Mutation In all his research, Sergey has only found one mouse with cancer-like symptoms. He has found ample evidence of DNA mutations, but nothing that affected the animals' physiology or reproductive ability. "Nothing with two heads," he says. Mary Mycio, author of Wormwood Forest, a natural history of the Chernobyl zone, points out that a mutant animal in the wild will usually die and be eaten before scientists can observe it. And in general, she notes, scientists study populations as a whole, and are not that interested in what happens to particular individuals. Nuclear guardian But she too argues that the benefits to wildlife of removing people from the zone, have far outweighed any harm from radiation. In her book she quotes the British scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock, who wrote approvingly in the Daily Telegraph in 2001 of the "unscheduled appearance" of wildlife at Chernobyl. He went on: "I have wondered if the small volumes of nuclear waste from power production should be stored in tropical forests and other habitats in need of a reliable guardian against their destruction by greedy developers". A large part of the Chernobyl zone within Belarus has already officially been turned into a nature reserve. Sergey Gaschak wants Ukraine to follow suit and to turn its 2,500 sq km of evacuated land into a reserve or national park. Unlike the Ukrainian Green Party, he is not bothered if the government goes ahead with plans to build a deep deposit in the zone for nuclear waste from all over the country. He says the eagle owl will not care two hoots. ZONE DWELLERS Reappeared: Lynx, eagle owl, great white egret, nesting swans, and possibly a bear Introduced: European bison, Przewalski's horse Booming mammals: Badger, beaver, boar, deer, elk, fox, hare, otter, raccoon dog, wolf Booming birds:Aquatic warbler, azure tit, black grouse, black stork, crane, white-tailed eagle C BBC MMVI * ================================================================ .NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems . Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us . .339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org .List Archives: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/ .Subscribe: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr ================================================================ ***************************************************************** 22 North South Brunswick Sentinel: What's the evacuationplan? There is no plan North Brunswick, NJ Editorials April 20, 2006 Greg Bean About 20 years ago, it dawned on people in northern Massachusetts that if the Seabrook nuclear power plant near the border of that state and New Hampshire melted down, or if there were a bad hurricane or other disaster, people were pretty much S.O.L. because there was absolutely no evacuation plan. The Seabrook plant sits right on the ocean in the little town of the same name, an area serviced by a network of narrow roads and slightly larger highways that are congested on most normal days during the summer, but would be a nightmare if everyone tried to get out at once. Not only was there no overall emergency plan at the federal or state levels, there were no local plans in the 20 or so communities that surround Seabrook. I was working at a newspaper about two miles from the nuclear plant at the time and it was more than a little scary. On a light traffic day, it took me about 20 minutes to get out of Hampton Beach, where the office was, to the main highway heading south to my home in Massachusetts. But according to the experts, people would have to be notified within 15 minutes after an incident at the plant and be in the process of evacuating immediately to have much hope of survival. It wouldn't work, and everyone knew it. So the newspapers and environmental groups went loopy, demanding that someone come up with a better plan, one that included the participation of cops and emergency organizations in all the towns evacuees might pass through, and a better way of letting people know there was a problem in the first place, and what to do within the first minutes of trouble. Needless to say, it's almost impossible to come up with a plan like that, but they tried. And this week was the biennial test of the notification and evacuation plan, one that lots of people still call "crazy" because there's just no way the roads would handle the traffic, and officials are still - 20 years later - squabbling about which version of the plan should be followed. But at least they have a plan, even if it's a bad one. Which is more than you can say about New Jersey, where the cold, hard fact is that if there's a real emergency - a bad hurricane, a chemical spill, an accident at a nuclear plant, or some terrorist setting off a dirty bomb in New York City - it's gonna be every man for himself. Last week, a reporter for The Hub, one of the Greater Media Newspapers family that covers Red Bank and the shore area of Monmouth County (an area very similar to the area that would be endangered by a meltdown at Seabrook), tried to find out about the area's evacuation plan, if there was one. Here's what she discovered: + The coordinator of the county's Office of Emergency Management says the freeholders are trying to secure funding from the state for a study that will evaluate evacuation routes. + There are 76 little blue signs on various roadways (we had to look for a couple of days to find one for a photograph) directing evacuation route traffic. + There is a shelter plan set up where people can stop along the way stop for first aid or other emergency services (they did not provide a list of shelters). + People can turn on their radios for information (no specific frequencies were reported). + People should look on page 38 of the phone book for emergency information (there are no phone numbers or emergency radio frequencies listed in most books). + People should generally evacuate in a westerly direction, and anticipate traffic congestion. + It will take about 29 hours to evacuate Monmouth County (no word on surrounding counties). Man, I don't know about you, but I feel so much better now. At least I know who I can depend on if an emergency requiring evacuation arises, and it's the guy I see looking back at me in the mirror every morning when I shave. What our reporter learned is that in reality, there is no comprehensive plan, not even a "crazy" plan like the one they have for Seabrook. In 13 years of newspapering in this state, I can't recall a single press release from any emergency management agency that might tell people what to do or where to turn for help in a real crisis. There's been no communication from any town or government agency listing the locations of places that would be used as shelters in that crisis. There's never been a statement of where people can turn on their radio dials for up-to-date evacuation information. There's never been a discussion of which agencies would be in charge in that crisis, or how local police, fire and emergency services would dovetail their efforts into the overall plan. Who would be responsible for controlling traffic, for instance? Where would people shelter if they are unable to evacuate? Specifically, who evacuates the elderly, or those who don't drive? Is there a plan for mass transportation? What are the alternate routes if the major highways are jammed? Who sticks around to see that our homes aren't looted while we're gone? Maybe such plans exist, and I'm sure I'll hear from several emergency planners in the near future telling me that not only do the plans exist, they've been sitting on their desks for years. But if they do exist (which I very seriously doubt), the crisis management planners in this state have done the world's worst job of getting the message out. And if a real emergency arises around here, the chaos and congestion on the roads will make the evacuations of the Gulf Coast during Katrina and Rita look like 3 a.m. on Main Street, Milltown. We don't need an expensive study to evaluate evacuation routes and tell us that either, so the freeholders might as well save the money. In an emergency, here are five things that will help. Pray regularly. Have a family plan on where you'll meet if there's a crisis. Keep a couple of maps in the car with several alternate evacuation routes marked. Keep an emergency kit in the trunk of the car with water, flashlight, radio, batteries, first-aid supplies, snacks, etc. And leave early to avoid the rush. Gregory Bean is executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers. Coda ***************************************************************** 23 London Tims: Chernobyl hero remembers the men who saved Europe - World - Times Online thetimes.co.uk April 22, 2006 By Jeremy Page in Moscow 20 years on, the first firefighter at the scene says the human cost is being whitewashed Viktor Birkun says of his old colleagues: 'If they hadn't done what they did, the fire would have spread to Reactors 1, 2 and 3' (LUKE TCHALENKO) IT WAS 1.40am when Viktor Birkun woke to the sound of his doorbell ringing. He knew that something serious had happened as soon as he opened the door and saw one of his colleagues from the fire station. But it was only as they drove out of his home town of Pripyat, Ukraine, that he realised the scale of what is still considered the worst man-made disaster in history. Fourteen minutes earlier, at 1.26am on April 26, 1986 - 20 years to the day on Wednesday - Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear plant had exploded, releasing 100 times the radiation of the atomic bomb that had exploded over Hiroshima. "There was only the light from the fire - black and red flames and lumps of molten material everywhere," Mr Birkun said. "The reactor's roof had blown off, throwing asphalt, concrete and graphite upwards and outwards. Where the graphite landed it turned everything to lava." As the plant managers and technicians fled or frantically tried to contact Moscow, the firefighters rushed straight into the inferno. With only a cotton uniform to protect him, Mr Birkun drove his fire truck over the reactor's metal roof, now lying on the ground, and up to 15m (50ft) from Reactor 4. Using his bare hands he lowered the engine's siphon into the nearest cooling pool to suck up water for his colleagues as they battled 300 fires around the complex. Within seconds he began to feel the effects of the gamma rays that were bombarding his internal organs. He started vomiting about every 30 seconds. He grew dizzy and weak. After two hours he could not stand. Doctors later gave him a certificate indicating that he had received 260 ber (biological equivalents of roentgen), equivalent to 1,000 years of background radiation. But experts estimate that the radiation that he absorbed was even higher, and enough to cause acute radiation sickness (ARS). "I'm amazed he survived," Michael Repacholi, the top radiation expert at the World Health Organisation, said. "It was a hugely heroic effort, and I suspect anyone who understood how much radiation was there would never have gone in." Twenty years on Mr Birkun knows he is lucky to be alive and living in Moscow with his wife, Nadezhda, and his daughters, Lyudmila and Valentina. Of the 134 "liquidators" with a diagnosis of ARS, 28 died in 1986, including at least six firefighters. Mr Birkun, now 56, is proud of the sacrifice that his team made to reduce the cloud of smoke that spread radioactive particles across Europe and even as far as Japan. "These were the people who saved Europe," he said, fingering a black-and-white photograph of his former colleagues. "If they had not done what they did, the fire would have spread to Reactors 1, 2 and 3." But he and many others among the 600,000 liquidators who cleaned up Chernobyl are infuriated by what they see as official attempts to whitewash the human cost of the disaster. Last year the United Nations issued a report saying that the number of deaths caused by Chernobyl was fewer than 50 - far lower than previous estimates. The report by the UN's Chernobyl Forum said that the eventual number of radiation-related deaths among the 600,000 liquidators would be about 4,000. In the West the report has restarted a bitter debate over the dangers of the nuclear industry. Greenpeace, the environmental group, accused the UN this week of whitewashing the disaster. It issued its own report, based on statistics from Belarus, predicting that the number of terminal cancer cases caused directly by Chernobyl would be 93,000. And it extrapolated from demographic statistics that 200,000 people had already died of radiation-related illnesses in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Nuclear power is now far less controversial in those countries; Russia is planning to build 40 reactors by 2030. But the UN report has stimulated debate about how the governments of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus are compensating the victims of Chernobyl. Liquidators say they were promised cash rewards, free medical care, new flats and other perks when they finished clearing up the site and encasing the smouldering reactor core in a concrete "sarcophagus". But many say that they lost benefits after the Soviet Union's disintegration. Others, like Mr Birkun, were granted some compensation but lost out last year when the Russian Government replaced free medical care and other benefits with cash payments. President Vladimir Putin has paid tribute to the liquidators. This month he awarded medals to 18 of them. Russian officials, however, argue that the health problems caused by Chernobyl have been exaggerated. Igor Lingue, director of Russia's Institute of Nuclear Problems, said: "Compared with the radiation caused by Chernobyl, the other factors triggered by the accident such as psychological stress, the disruption of their lives and financial losses proved to be greater problems for the population." Leonid Ostapenko, a radiologist who heads the Centre of Medical Rehabilitation of Chernobyl Invalids, said that it was impossible to tell if Chernobyl veterans' illnesses stemmed from the accident. "It's possible only to count people who died of ARS. There are many others who had a small dose of radiation, and their problems are like ordinary illnesses. How do you tell if someone died from natural illness or radiation?" Mr Birkun is a case in point. He was rescued by colleagues, taken to a clinic in Pripyat and flown to Clinical Hospital No 6 in Moscow. He was released after five months but has checks there twice a year. He has diabetes, cataracts, heart problems, nervous disorders and dozens of other ailments. Now retired, he is entitled to a pension and other state benefits totalling 5,500 roubles (œ110) a month. He is claiming an extra 10,000 roubles a month in compensation from his former employer, the Interior Ministry. But the ministry is disputing his claim. For Mr Birkun, the consequences of Chernobyl are far from over. "Back then nobody was thinking about rewards," he said. "All I could think about was that my daughters were at home and the town asleep." DISASTER BY NUMBERS 300,000 people were evacuated from the surrounding area. An initial containment effort used helicopters to drop bags of sand, boron and lead on to the reactor. These were then covered in a concrete sarcophagus. 20 days after the accident the temperature of the core was 270C (518F). Some Welsh sheep farms still have their meat subjected to radiation inspections, because of the fallout. 100,000 Number of years for which the reactor core will remain dangerous. sponsorship in Times Online, The Times and The Sunday Times. Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Ltd. ***************************************************************** 24 Sydney Morning Herald: State turns its back on heroes of the clean-up smh.com.au April 22, 2006 MOSCOW: At Vadim Korastilev's office in south-west Moscow, he shows me a magazine. "You may find it a little depressing," he says with a grim smile. A random page reveals rows of black-and-white portrait photographs of young men and women dressed in suits or military or police uniforms. In captions under each photo are names and dates of birth and death, then "Liquidator, 1986". "They are the heroes, and victims, of Chernobyl," says Mr Korastilev, who runs a charity that advocates the rights of the some 300,000 Russians who took part in the Chernobyl clean-up, the so-called "liquidators". Soviet authorities mobilised up to 1 million police, soldiers, firemen, scientists and doctors to contain the accident and clean up the disaster zone. One group of conscript soldiers was ordered to pull a metal cover over the wreckage of the reactor, where nuclear fuel lay smouldering in the open. During the minutes spent there, they received lethal radiation doses, and all died in hospital in agony days later. Thousands who received smaller doses are slowly dying. In the Ukrainian capital, Tamara Leonidivna is a woman in her 40s who manages a fund for Chernobyl survivors. "In 1987-88, 40,000 evacuees and liquidators and their families came to this part of Kiev to live. Only 22,000 remain," she says. About 10 per cent had moved away, but the rest died, usually of rare cancerous diseases or ones that normally strike the elderly. In Russia, sweeping changes in the social security system implemented last year severely curtailed state benefits, including those paid to the 300,000 "invalids" of Chernobyl. "Before, we received pensions, free apartment rental, free public transport, paid-for trips to health sanitariums, and fully paid medical expenses," Mr Korastilev says. "Now we must pay for our apartments and trips on public transport. Pensions are the same, our health sanitariums have been cut, and not all medicines are free. And now, if we need operations, that is not free now also." The most severely disabled receive about 7000 roubles ($340) a month from the state, the least disabled 3000 roubles. Benjamin Seeder Morning Herald 2006-04-22 Copyright © 2006. The Sydney Morning Herald. info@mosnews.com Copyright © 2004 MOSNEWS.COM ***************************************************************** 33 Vermont Guardian: Coalition: VY based models on cracked Illinois steam dryer By Kathryn Casa | Vermont Guardian Posted April 21, 2006 BRATTLEBORO Vermont Yankee has based its uprate calculations on a model that is flawed, and the power increase should be mitigated or stopped because it poses a danger to the public, according to a citizens group. In a motion filed with federal regulators yesterday, the New England Coalition asked the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board the quasi-independent panel within the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that addresses safety concerns to hear a new motion, or contention, when the panel meets later this year to hear other safety concerns related to the Vermont Yankee extended power uprate. On March 2, NRC staff approved a 20 percent power increase at Vermont Yankee, to be implemented in graduated, closely monitored increments because of concerns about excessive vibration. Operators and regulators were worried about the plants steam dryer, the equipment that removes water droplets from steam before it enters the turbines, after inspections revealed dozens of hairline cracks on the dryer. The power ascension began on March 4, but has been stopped twice due to irregular acoustic noises registered by a monitor on a main steam line. VY is currently operating at 12.5 percent over its original design capacity. Similar vibration problems have occurred at other boiling water reactors, including both Quad Cities units in Illinois. In May 2005, the dryer on Quad Cities Unit 2 became the first replacement on a commercial reactor in the United States. However, during the most recent refueling outage at that plant, a five-foot crack was discovered in the new equipment. The steam dryers for both Quad Cities units were replaced because of cracking concerns caused by acoustic loading and vibration from operation at extended power uprate power levels. The replacement dryers were designed and constructed to be more robust and resistant to cracking than the previous steam dryers, according to an NRC report. In its new contention, the NEC says this failure indicates that the technical basis for ascension power testing at the Entergy Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station, largely based on the Quad Cities model and methodology, is flawed and cannot reliably predict steam dryer durability or performance under EPU conditions. Because a cracked or fractured steam dryer can result in an accident, prevent mitigation of an accident, or increase the consequences of an accident, with a major catastrophic effects on public health and safety, and because Vermont Yankee is proceeding in an unknown condition, the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, (ASLB) must not permit Vermont Yankee to operate at the EPU conditions until such time as it can be definitively demonstrated that the ascension power testing program at Vermont Yankee has not been invalidated by the experience at Quad Cities. Citing NRC regulations, the coalition notes that the NRC must not approve any changes to a plant license that could significantly increase the consequences or the likelihood of an accident. The coalition contends that given the steam dryer problem, neither the NRC nor Entergy, the company that owns Vermont Yankee can demonstrate reasonable assurance of public health and safety, nor satisfy license commitments, while continuing to rely on failed Quad Cities 2 modeling and methodology to monitor Vermont Yankee steam dryer performance. Vermont Yankee did not respond to questions about the steam dryer or the latest contention. The coalition cites Joram Hopenfeld, a nuclear engineer and NECs expert witness before the ASLB, as saying the ascension power testing program at Vermont Yankee cannot predict steam dryer performance to a reasonable degree of accuracy. Loose parts from a failed steam dryer can create a hazard to reactor operation and interfere with the function of safety related components, according to Hopenfeld. Therefore, continued operation of VY at extended power uprate creates an undetermined, but potentially significant risk to public health and safety, Hopenfeld states. The Quad Cities steam dryer was subjected to state-of-the-art acoustic modeling and analysis, he continues. The NRC was assured time and time again that the analysis was conservative and that the steam line gauge measurements would preclude any possibility that the loads on the dryer would exceed their design limits, he states in the contention. NEC is seeking either an order from the board requiring more thorough steam dryer analysis, installation of a replacement steam dryer specifically designed to withstand increased uprate-level vibration, or a reversal of the NRCs uprate approval. The ASLB has not yet indicated whether it will hear the coalitions newest contention. The board has agreed to hear two safety concerns filed earlier by the NEC and two filed by the state. Those hearings are set for this summer and fall. | | Northern Vermont: PO Box 335, Winooski, VT 05404 Southern Vermont: 139 Main Street, Suite 702, Brattleboro, VT 05301 Contact: 802.861.4880 (ph) | 802.861.6388 (fax) | 877.231.5382 (toll-free) ©2005 Vermont Guardian | Visit us: www.vermontguardian.com This document can be located online: www.vermontguardian.com/local/042006/CoalitionContention.shtml ***************************************************************** 34 Reuters: Nuclear's rise 20 yrs after Chernobyl Fri 21 Apr 2006 6:07 AM ET -- Reuters is running a series of features this week on the rise of atomic energy two decades after the world's worst nuclear accident, and the related standing of alternative energy sources in a power-hungry world grappling with global warming. Nuclear power appears to have defied those who predicted the 1986 Chernobyl disaster would sound the industry's death knell. Although attitudes vary widely across the world, several nations are looking to increase capacity or build their first nuclear plants as governments seek "clean" energy to cut reliance on costly oil and fight global warming. The nuclear industry boasts it has zero carbon emissions but opponents say it is costly and dangerous, arguing that renewable energy sources are safer and more efficient. In this series of in depth reports from correspondents across the world, we look at why nuclear power's star is rising, why this worries some people, what the most popular alternative energy sources are, and where they are being used. Stories ran at 0100 GMT on Thursday and Friday, with a piece from China on its nuclear expansion moving at 0939 on Friday. © Reuters 2006. All Rights Reserved. [ border=] ***************************************************************** 35 NRC: Technical Specification Improvement To Revise Diesel Fuel Oil FR Doc E6-6001 [Federal Register: April 21, 2006 (Volume 71, Number 77)] [Notices] [Page 20735-20736] From the Federal Register Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr21ap06-102] Testing Program Using the Consolidated Line Item Improvement Process AGENCY: Nuclear Regulatory Commission. ACTION: Notice of availability. SUMMARY: Notice is hereby given that the staff of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has prepared a model Application related to changes to the Diesel Fuel Oil Testing Programs. The changes relocate references to specific American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) standards for fuel oil testing to licensee-controlled documents and adds alternate criteria to the ``clear and bright'' acceptance test for new fuel oil. The NRC staff has also prepared a model safety evaluation (SE) and no significant hazards consideration (NSHC) determination relating to this matter. The purpose of these models is to permit the NRC to efficiently process amendments that propose to adopt the associated changes into plant-specific technical specifications (TS). Licensees of nuclear power reactors to which the models apply could request amendments confirming the applicability of the SE and NSHC determination to their reactors. DATES: The NRC staff issued a Federal Register Notice (71 FR 9179, February 22, 2006) that provided a model SE and a model NSHC determination relating to changes to the Diesel Fuel Oil Testing Programs. The NRC staff hereby announces that the model SE and NSHC determination may be referenced in plant-specific applications to adopt the changes. The staff has posted a model application on the NRC Web site to assist licensees in using the consolidated line item improvement process (CLIIP) to revise TS Diesel Fuel Oil Testing Programs. The NRC staff can most efficiently consider applications based upon the model application if the application is submitted within one year of this Federal Register Notice. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Peter C. Hearn, Mail Stop: O12H2, Division of Inspection and Regional Support, Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC 20555- 0001, telephone 301-415-1189. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Regulatory Issue Summary 2000-06, ``Consolidated Line Item Improvement Process for Adopting Standard Technical Specification Changes for Power Reactors,'' was issued on March 20, 2000. The CLIIP includes an opportunity for the public to comment on proposed changes to operating licenses, including the technical specifications (TS), after a preliminary assessment by the NRC staff and a finding that the change will likely be offered for adoption by licensees. The CLIIP directs the NRC staff to evaluate any comments received for a proposed generic change to operating licenses and to either reconsider the change or to proceed with announcing the availability of the change for proposed adoption by licensees. Those licensees opting to apply for the subject change to operating licenses are responsible for reviewing the NRC staff's evaluation, referencing the applicable technical justifications, and providing any necessary plant-specific information. Each amendment application made in response to the notice of availability will be processed and noticed in accordance with applicable rules and NRC procedures. This notice involves changes to the Diesel Fuel Oil Testing Programs. Applicability: This proposed change to the standard technical specifications (STS) was submitted by the Technical Specifications Task Force (TSTF) in TSTF-374, ``Revision to TS 5.5.13 and Associated TS Bases for Diesel Fuel Oil,'' and is applicable to all nuclear power reactors. This proposal to modify technical specification requirements by the adoption of TSTF-374 is applicable to all licensees of Combustion Engineering, Babcock & Wilcox, Westinghouse Pressurized Water Reactors, and General Electric Boiling Water Reactors who have adopted or will adopt in conjunction with the change, technical specification requirements for a Bases control program consistent with the TS Bases Control Program described in Section 5.5 of the STS. Licensees that have not adopted requirements for a Bases control program by converting to the improved STS or by other means, are requested to include the requirements for a Bases control program consistent with the STS in their application for the change. The need for a Bases control program stems from the need for adequate regulatory control of some key elements of the proposal that are contained in the Bases upon adoption of TSTF-374. The staff is requesting that the Bases changes be included with the proposed license amendments consistent with the Bases in TSTF- 374. To ensure that the overall change, including the Bases, includes appropriate regulatory controls, the staff plans to condition the issuance of each license amendment on the licensee's incorporation of the changes into the Bases document and on requiring the licensee to control the changes in accordance with the Bases Control Program. To efficiently process the incoming license amendment applications, the NRC staff requests that each license applying for the changes addressed in TSTF-374 use the CLIIP to submit an application that adheres to the following model. Any deviations from the model application should be explained in the licensee's submittal. The CLIIP does not prevent licensees from requesting an alternate approach or proposing changes other than those proposed in TSTF-374. Variations from the approach recommended in this notice may, however, require additional [[Page 20736]] review by the NRC staff and may increase the time and resources needed for the review. Significant variations from the approach, or inclusion of additional changes to the license, will result in staff rejection of the submittal. Instead, licensees desiring significant variations and/ or additional changes should submit a LAR that does not claim to adopt TSTF-374. Public Notices: In a Federal Register Notice dated February 22, 2006 (71 FRN 9179), the NRC staff requested comment on the use of the CLIIP to process requests to adopt the TSTF-374 changes. In addition, there have been multiple notices published for plant-specific amendment requests to adopt changes similar to those described in this notice. The NRC staff's model SE and model application may be examined, and/or copied for a fee, at the NRC's Public Document Room, located at One White Flint North, 11555 Rockville Pike (first floor), Rockville, Maryland. Publicly available records are accessible electronically from the Agencywide Documents Access and Management System (ADAMS) Public Library component on the NRC Web site, (the Electronic Reading Room). The NRC staff received no responses following the notice published February 22, 2006 (71 FRN 9179), soliciting comments on the model SE and NSHC determination related to the TSTF-374 changes. The NRC staff finds that the previously published models remain appropriate references and has chosen not to republish the model SE and model NSHC determination in this notice. As described in the model application prepared by the NRC staff, licensees may reference in their plant- specific applications to adopt the TSTF-374 changes, the model SE, NSHC determination, and environmental assessment previously published in the Federal Register (71 FRN 9179); February 22, 2006). Dated at Rockville, Maryland, this 14th day of April 2006. For the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Thomas H. Boyce, Chief, Technical Specifications Branch, Division of Inspection and Regional Support, Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation. [FR Doc. E6-6001 Filed 4-20-06; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 7590-01-P ***************************************************************** 36 NRC: Entergy Nuclear Operations, Inc.; Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power FR Doc E6-6003 [Federal Register: April 21, 2006 (Volume 71, Number 77)] [Notices] [Page 20733-20735] From the Federal Register Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr21ap06-101] Station; Notice of Intent To Prepare an Environmental Impact Statement and Conduct Scoping Process Energy Nuclear Operations, Inc. (Entergy) has submitted an application for renewal of Facility Operating License No. DPR-28 for an additional 20 years of operation at the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station (VYNPS). VYNPS is located in the town of Vernon, Vermont, in Windham County on the west shore of the Connecticut River immediately upstream of the Vernon Hydroelectric Station. The operating license for VYNPS expires on March 21, 2012. The application for renewal, dated January 25, 2006, as supplemented by letter dated March 15, 2006, was submitted pursuant to Title 10 of the Code of Federal Regulations (10 CFR) Part 54. A notice of receipt and availability of the application, which included the environmental report (ER), was published in the Federal Register on February 6, 2006 (71 FR 6102). A notice of acceptance for docketing of the application for renewal of the facility operating license was published in the Federal Register on March 27, 2006, (71 FR 15220). The purpose of this notice is to inform the public that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) will be preparing an environmental impact statement (EIS) related to the review of the license renewal application and to provide the public an opportunity to participate in the environmental scoping process, as in defined in 10 CFR 51.29. In addition, as outlined in 36 CFR 800.8, ``Coordination with the National Environmental Policy Act,'' the NRC plans to coordinate compliance with Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act in meeting the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA). In accordance with 10 CFR 51.53(c) and 10 CFR 54.23, Entergy submitted the ER as part of the application. The ER was prepared pursuant to 10 CFR Part 51 and is publicly available at the NRC Public Document Room (PDR), located at One White Flint North, 11555 Rockville Pike, Rockville, Maryland, 20852, or from the NRC's Agencywide Documents Access and Management System (ADAMS). The ADAMS Public Electronic Reading Room is accessible at http://adamswebsearch.nrc.gov/dologin.htm. The Accession Number for the ER is ML060300086. Persons who do not have access to ADAMS, or who encounter problems in accessing the documents located in ADAMS, should contact the NRC's PDR reference http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/licensing/renewal/applicati ons/vermont-yankee.html. In addition, the In addition, the ER is available for public inspection near the VYNPS at the following four public libraries: Vernon Free Library, 567 Governor Hunt Rd, Vernon, VT 05354; Brooks Memorial Library, 224 Main Street, Brattleboro, VT 05301; Hinsdale Public Library, 122 Brattleboro Road, Hinsdale, NH, 03451; and Dickinson Memorial Library, 115 Main St, Northfield, MA 01360. [[Page 20734]] This notice advises the public that the NRC intends to gather the information necessary to prepare a plant-specific supplement to the Commission's ``Generic Environmental Impact Statement (GEIS) for License Renewal of Nuclear Plants,'' (NUREG-1437) related to the review of the application for renewal of the VYNPS operating license for an additional 20 years. Possible alternatives to the proposed action (license renewal) include no action and reasonable alternative energy sources. The NRC is required by 10 CFR 51.95 to prepare a supplement to the GEIS in connection with the renewal of an operating license. This notice is being published in accordance with NEPA and the NRC's regulations found in 10 CFR Part 51. The NRC will first conduct a scoping process for the supplement to the GEIS and, as soon as practicable thereafter, will prepare a draft supplement to the GEIS for public comment. Participation in the scoping process by members of the public and local, State, Tribal, and Federal government agencies is encouraged. The scoping process for the supplement to the GEIS will be used to accomplish the following: a. Define the proposed action which is to be the subject of the supplement to the GEIS. b. Determine the scope of the supplement to the GEIS and identify the significant issues to be analyzed in depth. c. Identify and eliminate from detailed study those issues that are peripheral or that are not significant. d. Identify any environmental assessments and other ElSs that are being or will be prepared that are related to, but are not part of, the scope of the supplement to the GEIS being considered. e. Identify other environmental review and consultation requirements related to the proposed action. f. Indicate the relationship between the timing of the preparation of the environmental analyses and the Commission's tentative planning and decision-making schedule. g. Identify any cooperating agencies and, as appropriate, allocate assignments for preparation and schedules for completing the supplement to the GEIS to the NRC and any cooperating agencies. h. Describe how the supplement to the GEIS will be prepared, and include any contractor assistance to be used. The NRC invites the following entities to participate in scoping: a. The applicant, Energy Nuclear Operations, Inc. b. Any Federal agency that has jurisdiction by law or special expertise with respect to any environmental impact involved, or that is authorized to develop and enforce relevant environmental standards. c. Affected State and local government agencies, including those authorized to develop and enforce relevant environmental standards. d. Any affected Indian tribe. e. Any person who requests or has requested an opportunity to participate in the scoping process. f. Any person who has petitioned or intends to petition for leave to intervene. In accordance with 10 CFR 51.26, the scoping process for an EIS may include a public scoping meeting to help identify significant issues related to a proposed activity and to determine the scope of issues to be addressed in an EIS. The NRC has decided to hold public meetings for the VYNPS license renewal supplement to the GEIS. The scoping meetings will be held at the Latchis Theatre, 50 Main Street, Brattleboro, Vermont 05301, on Wednesday, June 7, 2006. There will be two sessions to accommodate interested parties. The first session will convene at 1:30 p.m. and will continue until 4:30 p.m., as necessary. The second session will convene at 7 p.m. with a repeat of the overview portions of the meeting and will continue until 10 p.m., as necessary. Both meetings will be transcribed and will include: (1) An overview by the NRC staff of the NEPA environmental review process, the proposed scope of the supplement to the GEIS, and the proposed review schedule; and (2) the opportunity for interested government agencies, organizations, and individuals to submit comments or suggestions on the environmental issues or the proposed scope of the supplement to the GEIS. Additionally, the NRC staff will host informal discussions one hour prior to the start of each session at the same location. No formal comments on the proposed scope of the supplement to the GEIS will be accepted during the informal discussions. To be considered, comments must be provided either at the transcribed public meetings or in writing, as discussed below. Persons may register to attend or present oral comments at the meetings on the scope of the NEPA review by contacting the NRC Environmental Project Manager, Mr. Richard L. Emch, Jr., by telephone at 1-800-368-5642, extension 1590, or by e-mail to the NRC at RLE@nrc.gov no later than May 31, 2006. Members of the public may also register to speak at the meeting within 15 minutes of the start of each session. Individual oral comments may be limited by the time available, depending on the number of persons who register. Members of the public who have not registered may also have an opportunity to speak, if time permits. Public comments will be considered in the scoping process for the supplement to the GEIS. Mr. Emch will need to be contacted no later than May 24, 2006, if special equipment or accommodations are needed to attend or present information at the public meeting, so that the NRC staff can determine whether the request can be accommodated. In addition to the environmental scoping meeting described above, the NRC will hold an informal open house at the Quality Inn & Suites, 1380 Putney Road, Brattleboro, Vermont 05301, on Tuesday, June 6, 2006, from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m., as necessary. At the open house, NRC staff will be available to provide information about the environmental review process for license renewal of nuclear plants. During the open house, members of the public will have the opportunity to provide formal comments on the proposed scope of the supplement to the GEIS either verbally or in writing to a transcriptionist. Comments provided to the transcriptionist will be considered in the same manner as comments provided during the scoping meetings described above. No formal comments on the proposed scope of the supplement to the GEIS will be accepted at the open house during informal discussions. Members of the public may send written comments on the environmental scope of the VYNPS license renewal review to: Chief, Rules and Directives Branch, Division of Administrative Services, Office of Administration, Mailstop T-6D59, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC, 20555-0001, and should cite the publication date and page number of this Federal Register notice. Comments may also be delivered to the NRC, Room T-6D59, Two White Flint North, 11545 Rockville Pike, Rockville, Maryland, 20852, from 7:30 a.m. to 4:15 p.m. during Federal workdays. To be considered in the scoping process, written comments should be postmarked by June 23, 2006. Electronic comments may be sent by e-mail to the NRC at VermontYankeeEIS@nrc.gov, and should be sent no later than June 23, 2006, to be considered in the scoping process. Comments will be available electronically and accessible through ADAMS at http://adamswebsearch.nrc.gov/dologin.htm. Participation in the scoping process for the supplement to the GEIS does not [[Page 20735]] entitle participants to become parties to the proceeding to which the supplement to the GEIS relates. Notice of opportunity for a hearing regarding the renewal application was the subject of the aforementioned Federal Register notice (71 FR 15220). Matters related to participation in any hearing are outside the scope of matters to be discussed at this public meeting. At the conclusion of the scoping process, the NRC will prepare a concise summary of the determination and conclusions reached, including the significant issues identified, and will send a copy of the summary to each participant in the scoping process. The summary will also be available for inspection in ADAMS at http://adamswebsearch.nrc.gov/dologin.htm. The staff will then prepare and issue for comment the draft supplement to the GEIS, which will be the subject of separate notices and separate public meetings. Copies will be available for public inspection at the above-mentioned addresses, and one copy per request will be provided free of charge. After receipt and consideration of the comments, the NRC will prepare a final supplement to the GEIS, which will also be available for public inspection. Information about the proposed action, the supplement to the GEIS, and the scoping process may be obtained from Mr. Emch at the aforementioned telephone number or e-mail address. Dated at Rockville, Maryland, this 12th day of April 2006. For the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Rani Franovich, Branch Chief, Environmental Branch B, Division of License Renewal, Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation. [FR Doc. E6-6003 Filed 4-20-06; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 7590-01-P ***************************************************************** 37 ITAR-TASS: Third reactor of Smolensk NPP switched out for basics repairs 21.04.2006, 00.54 DESNOGORSK, Smolensk region, April 21 (Itar-Tass) - The third power-generating unit at the Smolensk nuclear power plant (NPP) has been disconnected from Russia’s integrated energy system early on Thursday for long-term planned repairs, an official at the Smolensk NPP said. The nuclear power plant has graphite-moderated water-cooled reactors RBMK-1000 using thermal neutrons. At present, the other two reactors of the nuclear power plant operate at normal capacity. “There has been no breach of safety at the plant’s units. The radiation at the station and on adjacent territories is normal,” the official said. Reactor No 3 went into operation on January 30,1990, the reactor No 2 - on May 31, 1985, and the reactor No 1 – late in December 1982. The Smolensk nuclear power plant is located in the south of the Smolensk region, 350 kilometers away from Moscow. This is one of the leading energy enterprises in the West of Russia. The Smolensk NPP contributes about 20 billion kilowatt/hours of electricity to the country’s energy system annually, which is one-seventh of the energy produced by the ten nuclear power plants of the country. The Smolensk NPP meets much of the electricity requirements in the Smolensk, Kaluga and Bryansk regions. Since the beginning of the year, the plant has produced over 5,917 million kilowatt/hours of electricity. © ITAR-TASS. All rights reserved. You undertake not to copy, ***************************************************************** 38 ITAR-TASS: Russian ombudsman says Chernobyl victims still face problems 21.04.2006, 04.01 MOSCOW, April 21 (Itar-Tass) -- Russian Commissioner for human rights Vladimir Lukin said victims of the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster continue to face problems twenty years after the fourth reactor of the plant exploded on April 26, 1986. “Although the government has increased social support to the people who suffered, a number of problems has not been resolved,” Lukin said in a statement on Thursday. That mostly concerns 250 thousand liquidators of the Chernobyl catastrophe. Among them every fifth person is an invalid who deserves special care, according to the ombudsman. He criticizes the recent replacement of social benefits with monetary payments, saying it provided no equal substitution. Lukin said over 25 thousand liquidators cannot receive proper housing, as subsidies provided in the form of housing certificates do not correspond to the market price of new apartments. Considerable additional finances have to be provided, according to him. The ombudsman is specifically concerned by the poor fulfillment of social legislation. Court judgments in favor of Chernobyl victims often remain unfulfilled because of a lack of federal budget financing. “That undermines the trust of citizens to the federal and regional authorities, promotes social tensions,” Lukin said. He also stressed that the regions affected by Chernobyl contamination “are up till now in very difficult conditions caused by damaged ecological infrastructure, the outflow of manpower, demographic problems”. “Many thousand people continue to live on radiation contaminated territories”, Lukin said. © ITAR-TASS. All rights reserved. You undertake not to copy, ***************************************************************** 39 wcco.com: Project Energy: The Future Of Nuclear Power [clock] Apr 20, 2006 11:49 pm US/Central (WCCO) On a clear spring morning, there is little to see at the Prairie Island Nuclear Power Plant near Red Wing, Minn. No toxic clouds of smoke. Only occasional puffs of water vapor. The Prairie Island plant and another up the Mississippi River at Monticello supply a third of Minnesota's electricity. That helps Xcel Energy rely less on coal than other utilities. "Fortunately in Minnesota, we have a portfolio, as you well know," Xcel CEO Richard Kelly said. "So we do have nuclear power, and we do have a very large wind component." A report prepared for the military by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers calls plants such as Prairie Island and Monticello "arguably our most reliable source of electricity." They have "the environmental advantage of no air pollution and no greenhouse gas emissions." But nuclear power has not always been discussed in such friendly environmental terms. Nearly 30 years ago, protesters marched across the country and in Minnesota chanting "no nukes" and demanding an end to nuclear power. "The industry knows it's not needed," a protester told a crowd in 1979. "They have a surplus of electricity already in their power pool that can service the cities and the surrounding area. That in fact, when Prairie Island is operating, it sells power out of state." An accident at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island triggered the protests. For five tense days that spring, engineers tried to diagnose the problem and debated whether to order evacuations. "The radiation levels at the site boundary are really only a tenth of the general emergency levels where we normally get concerned," a utility official told the media back then. But the plant was not operating normally. The risk of a meltdown was real. While plant officials said not to worry, Pennsylvania state officials told people to get out of town. Even though no one was killed or injured, Three Mile Island dealt a serious blow to nuclear energy. Today there are new plants on the drawing board, but they have yet to be built. Experts say the accident and the protests are not the only reason why that is the case. "Wall Street is afraid about putting themselves at financial risk, because we don't yet really know what to do with the nuclear waste," said J. Draken Hamilton of Minnesotans for an Energy Efficient Economy. Outside Prairie Island and other nuclear power plants, large steel casks hold radioactive nuclear waste. Xcel and other utilities want to store it in Nevada's Yucca Mountain. Heavy opposition has stalled that plan. In the meantime, Xcel wants permission to store more casks at its Monticello plant. Other countries are moving ahead despite the storage problems. France, with little access to fossil fuels, gets 78 percent of its electricity from nuclear power. Russia and the Ukraine, 20 years after the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident, continue to build new reactors. So do North Korea and Iran, but world leaders worry their true purpose is to build nuclear weapons. The risk of a terrorist attack in this country could ultimately slow the production of more reactors. The same government report that praises the reliability of nuclear power also warns it comes at "the cost of increased environmental and security risks." Hamilton says it is time to renew old debates. "I think once we get serious about fighting global warming, what we do is open up a big debate about what are the lower carbon sources of energy we need to transform society," Hamilton said. "Nuclear may or may not be one of them, but we need to start that debate in order to see." For the time being, Xcel Energy is seeking permits to operate both the Prairie Island and Monticello nuclear power plants well into the future. (© MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.) © MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. [ /] [ /] [ ***************************************************************** 40 North Jersey Media Group: Oyster Creek showdown [NorthJersey.com] Friday, April 21, 2006 By JOHN CURRAN ASSOCIATED PRESS LACEY TOWNSHIP -- Calling the nation's oldest operating nuclear plant an accident waiting to happen, critics urged federal regulators Thursday to look hard at the physical condition of the 36-year-old Oyster Creek facility before agreeing to renew its operating license. About 100 people -- many of them vocal opponents -- turned out for an update on the re-licensing process from representatives of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which must decide next year whether Oyster Creek will get approval to remain open past 2009. They turned what began as a dry recitation of the NRC's safety review into a charged confrontation in which regulators were accused of withholding data about the condition of the plant, which the opponents said should be shut down. "If this dinosaur blows, we all go with it," said lawyer Michele Donato, who represents a coalition of environmental groups fighting the re-licensing. "And I don't feel like doing that." Oyster Creek, which opened in 1969, is facing the expiration of its 40-year operating license and applied last summer for a 30-year extension. The plant, on Route 9 in Lacey Township, produces about 4 percent of the electricity distributed by the PJM power grid serving five mid-Atlantic states, according to owner Exelon Corp. Critics say the 636-megawatt plant has deteriorated with age and is no longer safe to operate, and that a population explosion in Ocean County during its lifetime has made emergency evacuation plans for the surrounding communities obsolete. "I'm not worried about the next 20 years," said Ed Frydendahl, 64, of Manchester Township. "I'm worried about the next two years." Pete Resler, a spokesman for Exelon who attended, said afterward that the criticism came from what he called a "vocal minority." Copyright © 2006 North Jersey Media Group Inc. ***************************************************************** 41 NPR: 'Voices of Chernobyl': Survivors' Stories Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of the Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich. We hear some of their stories: those living with illness and fear, and those sent in to clean up the mess and monitor the damage." /> + [An aerial view of the fourth reactor of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant] Vladimir Repik An aerial view of the fourth reactor of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant after its explosion is seen in this 1986 file photo. Remembering Chernobyl + April 21, 2006Chernobyl Copes with Fallout, 20 Years Later + April 21, 2006Covering the Chernobyl Crisis + April 21, 2006At Chernobyl, Building a Shelter for a Shelter [A month after the explosion, Chernobyl employees head off by bus to begin another day's work] Enlarge Kostin Igor A month after the explosion, Chernobyl employees head off by bus to work in a highly contaminated environment. Corbis Sygma All Things Considered, April 21, 2006 · Twenty years ago this month, a routine maintenance test at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in northern Ukraine veered wildly out of control. At 1:23 in the morning on April 26, 1986, there was a disastrous chain reaction in the core of reactor No.4. A power surge ruptured the uranium fuel rods, while a steam explosion created a huge fireball that blew the roof off the reactor. The resulting radioactive plume blanketed the nearby city of Pripyat. The cloud moved on to the north and west, contaminating land in neighboring Belarus, then moved across Eastern Europe and over Scandinavia. From the Soviets: utter silence. There was no word from the Kremlin that the worst nuclear accident in history was under way. Then monitoring stations in Scandinavia began reporting abnormally high levels of radioactivity. Finally, nearly three days after the explosion, the Soviet news agency TASS issued a brief statement acknowledging that an accident had occurred. The memories of survivors were collected for the 10th anniversary of the disaster in the book Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of the Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich. We hear some of their stories: those living with illness and fear, and those sent in to clean up the mess and monitor the damage. Excerpts: 'Voices from Chernobyl' by Svetlana Alexievich [Voices of Chernobyl cover] Prologue: A Solitary Human Voice Lyudmilla Ignatenko, wife of deceased fireman Vasily Ignatenko I'm sitting on my little chair next to him at night. At eight I say: "Vasenka, I'm going for a little walk." He opens his eyes and closes them, lets me go. I just walk to the dorm, go up to my room, lie down on the floor, I couldn't lie on the bed, everything hurt too much, when already the cleaning lady is knocking. "Go! Run to him! He's calling for you like mad!" That morning Tanya Kibenok pleaded with me: "Come to the cemetery, I can't go there alone." They were burying Vitya Kibenok and Volodya Pravik. They were friends of my Vasya. Our families were friends. There's a photo of us all in the building the day before the explosion. Our husbands are so handsome! And happy! It was the last day of that life. We were all so happy! I came back from the cemetery and called the nurse's post right away. "How is he?" "He died fifteen minutes ago." What? I was there all night. I was gone for three hours! I came up to the window and started shouting: "Why? Why?" I looked up at the sky and yelled. The whole building could hear me. They were afraid to come up to me. Then I came to: I'll see him one more time! Once more! I run down the stairs. He was still in his bio-chamber, they hadn't taken him away yet. His last words were "Lyusya! Lyusenka!" "She's just stepped away for a bit, she'll be right back," the nurse told him. He sighed and went quiet. I didn't leave him anymore after that. I escorted him all the way to the grave site. Although the thing I remember isn't the grave, it's the plastic bag. That bag. At the morgue they said, "Want to see what we'll dress him in?" I do! They dressed him up in formal wear, with his service cap. They couldn't get shoes on him because his feet had swelled up. They had to cut up the formal wear, too, because they couldn't get it on him, there wasn't a whole body to put it on. It was all -- wounds. The last two days in the hospital -- I'd lift his arm, and meanwhile the bone is shaking, just sort of dangling, the body has gone away from it. Pieces of his lungs, of his liver, were coming out of his mouth. He was choking on his internal organs. I'd wrap my hand in a bandage and put it in his mouth, take out all that stuff. It's impossible to talk about. It's impossible to write about. And even to live through. It was all mine. My love. They couldn't get a single pair of shoes to fit him. They buried him barefoot. Right before my eyes -- in his formal wear -- they put him in that cellophane bag of theirs and tied it up. And then they put this bag in the wooden coffin. And they tied the coffin with another bag. The plastic is transparent, but thick, like a tablecloth. And then they put all that into a zinc coffin. They squeezed it in. Only the cap didn't fit. Everyone came -- his parents, my parents. They bought black handkerchiefs in Moscow. The Extraordinary Commission met with us. They told everyone the same thing: it's impossible for us to give you the bodies of your husbands, your sons, they are very radioactive and will be buried in a Moscow cemetery in a special way. In sealed zinc caskets, under cement tiles. And you need to sign this document here. If anyone got indignant and wanted to take the coffin back home, they were told that the dead were now heroes, you see, and that they no longer belonged to their families. They were heroes of the State. They belonged to the State. We sat in the hearse. The relatives and some military people. A colonel and his regiment. They tell the regiment: "Await your orders!" We drive around Moscow for two or three hours, around the beltway. We're going back to Moscow again. They tell the regiment: "We're not allowing anyone into the cemetery. The cemetery's being attacked by foreign correspondents. Wait some more." The parents don't say anything. Mom has a black handkerchief. I sense I'm about to black out. "Why are they hiding my husband? He's -- what? A murderer? A criminal? Who are we burying?" My mom: "Quiet. Quiet, daughter." She's petting me on the head. The colonel calls in: "Let's enter the cemetery. The wife is getting hysterical." At the cemetery we were surrounded by soldiers. We had a convoy. And they were carrying the coffin. No one was allowed in. It was just us. They covered him with earth in a minute. "Faster! Faster!" the officer was yelling. They didn't even let me hug the coffin. And -- onto the bus. Everything on the sly. Right away they bought us plane tickets back home. For the next day. The whole time there was someone with us. He wouldn't even let us out of the dorm to buy some food for the trip. God forbid we might talk with someone -- especially me. As if I could talk by then. I couldn't even cry. When we were leaving, the woman on duty counted all the towels and all the sheets. She folded them right away and placed them in a polyethylene bag. They probably burnt them. We paid for the dormitory ourselves. For fourteen nights. It was a hospital for radiation poisoning. Fourteen nights. That's how long it takes a person to die. Monologue About Lies and Truths Sergei Sobolev, deputy head of the Executive Committee of the Shield of Chernobyl Association They've written dozens of books. Fat volumes, with commentaries. But the event is still beyond any philosophical description. Someone said to me, or maybe I read it, that the problem of Chernobyl presents itself first of all as a problem of self-understanding. That seemed right. I keep waiting for someone intelligent to explain it to me. The way they enlighten me about Stalin, Lenin, Bolshevism. Or the way they keep hammering away at their "Market! Market! Free market!" But we -- we who were raised in a world without Chernobyl, now live with Chernobyl. I'm actually a professional rocketeer, I specialize in rocket fuel. I served at Baikonur [a space launch center]. The programs, Kosmos, Interkosmos, those took up a large part of my life. It was a miraculous time! You give people the sky, the Arctic, the whole thing! You give them space! Every person in the Soviet Union went into space with Yuri Gagarin, they tore away from the earth with him. We all did! I'm still in love with him -- he was a wonderful Russian man, with that wonderful smile. Even his death seemed well-rehearsed. It was a miraculous time! For family reasons I moved to Belarus, finished my career here. When I came, I immersed myself into this Chernobylized space, it was a corrective to my sense of things. It was impossible to imagine anything like it, even though I'd always dealt with the most advanced technologies, with outer space technologies. It's hard even to explain -- it doesn't fit into the imagination -- it's -- [He thinks.] You know, a second ago I thought I'd caught it, a second ago -- it makes you want to philosophize. No matter who you talk to about Chernobyl, they all want to philosophize. But I'd rather tell you about my own work. What don't we do! We're building a church -- a Chernobyl church, in honor of the Icon of the Mother of God, we're dedicating it to "Punishment." We collect donations, visit the sick and dying. We write chronicles. We're creating a museum. I used to think that I, with my heart in the condition it's in, wouldn't be able to work at such a job. My first instructions were: "Here is money, divide it between thirty-five families, that is, between thirty-five widows." All the men had been liquidators. So you need to be fair. But how? One widow has a little girl who's sick, another widow has two children, and a third is sick herself, and she's renting her apartment, and yet another has four children. At night I'd wake up thinking, "How do I not cheat anyone?" I thought and calculated, calculated and thought. And I couldn't do it. We ended up just giving out the money equally, according to the list. But my real child is the museum: the Chernobyl Museum. [He is silent.] Sometimes I think that we'll have a funeral parlor here, not a museum. I serve on the funeral committee. This morning I haven't even taken off my coat when a woman comes in, she's crying, not even crying but yelling: "Take his medals and his certificates! Take all the benefits! Give me my husband!" She yelled a long time. And left his medals, his certificates. Well, they'll be in the museum, on display. People can look at them. But her cry, no one heard her cry but me, and when I put these certificates on display I'll remember it. Colonel Yaroshuk is dying now. He's a chemist-dosimetrist. He was healthy as a bull, now he's lying paralyzed. His wife turns him over like a pillow. She feeds him from a spoon. He has stones in his kidneys, they need to be shattered, but we don't have the money to pay for that kind of operation. We're paupers, we survive on what people give us. And the government behaves like a money lender, it's forgotten these people. When he dies, they'll name a street after him, or a school, or a military unit, but that's only after he dies. Colonel Yaroshuk. He walked through the Zone and marked the points of maximum radiation -- they exploited him in the fullest sense of the term, like he was a robot. And he understood this, but he went, he walked from the reactor itself and then out through all the sectors around the radius of radioactivity. On foot. With a dosimeter in his hand. He'd feel a "spot" and then walk around its borders, so he could put it on his map accurately. And what about the soldiers who worked on the roof of the reactor? Two hundred and ten military units were thrown at the liquidation of the fallout of the catastrophe, which equals about 340,000 military personnel. The ones cleaning the roof got it the worst. They had lead vests, but the radiation was coming from below, and they weren't protected there. They were wearing ordinary cheap imitation-leather boots. They spent about a minute and a half, two minutes on the roof each day, and then they were discharged, given a certificate and an award -- one hundred rubles. And then they disappeared to the vast peripheries of our motherland. On the roof they gathered fuel and graphite from the reactor, shards of concrete and metal. It took about twenty to thirty seconds to fill a wheelbarrow, and then another thirty seconds to throw the "garbage" off the roof. These special wheelbarrows weighed forty kilos just by themselves. So you can picture it: a lead vest, masks, the wheelbarrows, and insane speed. In the museum in Kiev they have a mold of graphite the size of a soldier's cap, they say that if it were real, it would weigh 16 kilos, that's how dense and heavy graphite is. The radio-controlled machines they used often failed to carry out commands or did the opposite of what they were supposed to do, because their electronics were disrupted by the high radiation. The most reliable "robots" were the soldiers. They were christened the "green robots" (by the color of their uniforms). Three thousand six hundred soldiers worked on the roof of the ruined reactor. They slept on the ground, they all tell of how in the beginning they were throwing straw on the ground in the tents -- and the straw was coming from stacks near the reactor. They were young guys. They're dying now too, but they understand that if it wasn't for them… These are people who came from a certain culture, the culture of the great achievement. They were a sacrifice. There was a moment when there existed the danger of a nuclear explosion, and they had to get the water out from under the reactor, so that a mixture of uranium and graphite wouldn't get into it -- with the water they would have formed a critical mass. The explosion would have been between three and five megatons. This would have meant that not only Kiev and Minsk, but a large part of Europe would have been uninhabitable. Can you imagine it? A European catastrophe. So here was the task: who would dive in there and open the bolt on the safety valve? They promised them a car, an apartment, a dacha, aid for their families until the end of time. They searched for volunteers. And they found them! The boys dove, many times, and they opened that bolt, and the unit was given 7000 rubles. They forgot about the cars and apartments they promised -- but that's not why they dove! Not for the material, least of all for the material promises. [Becomes upset.] Those people don't exist anymore, just the documents in our museum, with their names. But what if they hadn't done it? In terms of our readiness for self-sacrifice, we have no equals. Now do you understand how I see our museum? In that urn there is some land from Chernobyl. A handful. And there's a miner's helmet. Also from there. Some farmer's equipment from the Zone. We can't let the dosimeters in here -- we're glowing! But everything here needs to be real. No plaster casts. People need to believe us. And they'll only believe the real thing, because there are too many lies around Chernobyl. There were and there are still. They've even grown funds and commercial structures… Since you're writing this book, you need to have a look at some unique video footage. We're gathering it little by little. It's not a chronicle of Chernobyl, no, they wouldn't let anyone film that, it was forbidden. If anyone did manage to record any of it, the authorities immediately took the film and returned it ruined. We don't have a chronicle of how they evacuated people, how they moved out the livestock. They didn't allow anyone to fi lm the tragedy, only the heroics. There are some Chernobyl photo albums now, but how many video and photo cameras were broken! People were dragged through the bureaucracy. It required a lot of courage to tell the truth about Chernobyl. It still does. Believe me! But you need to see this footage: the blackened faces of the firemen, like graphite. And their eyes? These are the eyes of people who already know that they're leaving us. There's one fragment showing the legs of a woman who the morning after the catastrophe went to work on her plot of land next to the atomic station. She's walking on grass covered with dew. Her legs remind you of a grate, everything's with holes up to the knees. You need to see this if you're writing this book. Monologue About What We Didn't Know: Death Can Be So Beautiful 152-154 Nadezhda Petrovna Vygovskaya, evacuee from the town of Pripyat At first, the question was, Who's to blame? But then, when we learned more, we started thinking, What should we do? How do we save ourselves? After coming to terms with the fact that this would not be for one year or for two, but for many generations, we began to look back, turning the pages. It happened late Friday night. That morning no one suspected anything. I sent my son to school, my husband went to the barber's. I'm preparing lunch when my husband comes back. "There's some sort of fire at the nuclear plant," he says. "They're saying we are not to turn off the radio." I forgot to say that we lived in Pripyat, near the reactor. I can still see the bright-crimson glow, it was like the reactor was glowing. This wasn't any ordinary fire, it was some sort of shining. It was pretty. I'd never seen anything like it in the movies. That evening everyone spilled out onto their balconies, and those who didn't have them went to friends' houses. We were on the ninth floor, we had a great view. People brought their kids out, picked them up, said, "Look! Remember!" And these were people who worked at the reactor -- engineers, workers, physics instructors. They stood in the black dust, talking, breathing, wondering at it. People came from all around on their cars and their bikes to have a look. We didn't know that death could be so beautiful. Though I wouldn't say that it had no smell -- it wasn't a spring or an autumn smell, but something else, and it wasn't the smell of earth. My throat tickled, and tears came to my eyes. I didn't sleep all night, and I heard the neighbors walking around upstairs, also not sleeping. They were carrying stuff around, banging things, maybe they were packing their belongings. I fought off my headache with Citramon tablets. In the morning I woke up and looked around and I remember feeling -- this isn't something I made up later, I thought it right then -- something isn't right, something has changed forever. At eight that morning there were already military people on the streets in gas masks. When we saw them on the streets, with all the military vehicles, we didn't grow frightened -- on the contrary, it calmed us down. Since the army has come to our aid, everything will be fine. We didn't understand then that the peaceful atom could kill, that man is helpless before the laws of physics. All day on the radio they were telling people to prepare for an evacuation: they'd take us away for three days, wash everything, check it over. The kids were told to take their school books. Still, my husband put our documents and our wedding photos into his briefcase. The only thing I took was a gauze kerchief in case the weather turned bad. From the very first I felt that we were Chernobylites, that we were already a separate people. Our bus stopped overnight in a village; people slept on the floor in a school, others in a club. There was nowhere to go. One woman invited us to sleep at her house. "Come," she said, "I'll put down some linen for you. I feel bad for your boy." Her friend started dragging her away from us. "Are you crazy? They're contaminated!" When we settled in Mogilev and our son started school, he came back the very first day in tears. They put him next to a girl who said she didn't want to sit with him, he was radioactive. Our son was in the fourth grade, and he was the only one from Chernobyl in the class. The other kids were afraid of him, they called him "Shiny." His childhood had ended so early. As we were leaving Pripyat there was an army column heading back in the other direction. There were so many military vehicles, that's when I grew frightened. But I couldn't shake the feeling that this was all happening to someone else. I was crying, looking for food, sleeping, hugging my son, calming him down, but inside, this constant sense that I was just an observer. In Kiev they gave us some money, but we couldn't buy anything: hundreds of thousands of people had been uprooted and they'd bought everything up and eaten everything. Many had heart attacks and strokes, right there at the train stations, on the buses. I was saved by my mother. She'd lived a long time and had lost everything more than once. The first time was in the 1930s, they took her cow, her horse, her house. The second time, there'd been a fi re, the only thing she'd saved was me. Now she said, "We have to get through it. After all, we're alive." I remember one thing: we're on the bus, everyone's crying. A man up front is yelling at his wife. "I can't believe you'd be so stupid! Everyone else brought their things, and all we've got are these three-liter bottles!" The wife had decided that since they were taking the bus, she might as well bring some empty pickling bottles for her mother, who was on the way. They had these big bulging sacks next to their seats, we kept tripping over them the whole way to Kiev, and that's what they came to Kiev with. Now I sing in the church choir. I read the Bible. I go to church -- it's the only place they talk about eternal life. They comfort a person. You won't hear those words anywhere else, and you so want to hear them. I often dream that I'm riding through sunny Pripyat with my son. It's a ghost town now. But we're riding through and looking at the roses, there were many roses in Pripyat, large bushes with roses. I was young. My son was little. I loved him. And in the dream I've forgotten all the fears, as if I were just a spectator the whole time. Monologue About Taking Measurements Marat Filippovich Kokhanov, former chief engineer of the Institute for Nuclear Energy of the Belarussian Academy of Sciences Already by the end of May, about a month after the accident, we began receiving, for testing, products from the thirty-kilometer zone. The institute worked round the clock, like it was a military institute. At the time we were the only ones in Belarus with the specialists and the equipment for the job. They brought us the insides of domestic and undomesticated animals. We checked the milk. After the first tests it became clear that what we were receiving couldn't properly be called meat -- it was radioactive byproducts. Within the zone the herds were taken care of in shifts -- the shepherds would come and go, the milkmaids were brought in for milking only. The milk factories carried out the government plan. We checked the milk. It wasn't milk, it was a radioactive byproduct. For a long time after that we used dry milk powder and cans of condensed and concentrated milk from the Rogachev milk factory in our lectures as examples of a standard radiation source. And in the meantime, they were being sold in the stores. When people saw that the milk was from Rogachev and stopped buying it, there suddenly appeared cans of milk without labels. I don't think it was because they ran out of paper. On my first trip to the Zone I measured a background radiation level of five to six times higher in the forest than on the roads or the fields. But high doses were everywhere. The tractors were running, the farmers were digging on their plots. In a few villages we measured the thyroid activity for adults and children. It was one hundred, sometimes two and three hundred times the allowable dosage. There was a woman in our group, a radiologist. She became hysterical when she saw that children were sitting in a sandbox and playing. We checked breast milk -- it was radioactive. We went into the stores -- as in a lot of village stores, they had the clothes and the food right next to each other: suits and dresses, and nearby salami and margarine. They're lying there in the open, they're not even covered with cellophane. We take the salami, we take an egg -- we make a roentgen image -- this isn't food, it's a radioactive byproduct. We see a woman on a bench near her house, breastfeeding her child -- her milk has cesium in it -- she's the Chernobyl Madonna. We asked our supervisors, What do we do? How should we be? They said: "Take your measurements. Watch television." On television Gorbachev was calming people: "We've taken immediate measures." I believed it. I'd worked as an engineer for twenty years, I was well-acquainted with the laws of physics. I knew that everything living should leave that place, if only for a while. But we conscientiously took our measurements and watched the television. We were used to believing. I'm from the postwar generation, I grew up with this belief, this faith. Where did it come from? We'd won that terrible war. The whole world was grateful to us then. So here's the answer to your question: why did we keep silent knowing what we knew? Why didn't we go out onto the square and yell the truth? We compiled our reports, we put together explanatory notes. But we kept quiet and carried out our orders without a murmur because of Party discipline. I was a Communist. I don't remember that any of our colleagues refused to go work in the Zone. Not because they were afraid of losing their Party membership, but because they had faith. They had faith that we lived well and fairly, that for us man was the highest thing, the measure of all things. The collapse of this faith in a lot of people eventually led to heart attacks and suicides. A bullet to the heart, as in the case of Professor [Valery] Legasov [head of the commissioned Chernobyl investigation who actually hanged himself in 1988, on the two-year anniversary of the explosion], because when you lose that faith, you are no longer a participant, you're an also-ran, you have no reason to exist. That's how I understood his suicide, as a sort of sign. Monologue About a Damaged Child Nadezhda Afanasyevna Burakova, resident of the village of Khoyniki The other day my daughter said to me: "Mom, if I give birth to a damaged child, I'm still going to love him." Can you imagine that? She's in the tenth grade, and she already has such thoughts. Her friends, too, they all think about it. Some acquaintances of ours recently gave birth to a son, their first. They're a young, handsome pair. And their boy has a mouth that stretches to his ears and no ears. I don't visit them like I used to, but my daughter doesn't mind, she looks in on them all the time. She wants to go there, maybe just to see, or maybe to try it on. We could have left, but my husband and I thought about it and decided not to. We're afraid to. Here, we're all Chernobylites. We're not afraid of one another, and if someone gives you an apple or a cucumber from their garden, you take it and eat it, you don't hide it shamefully in your pocket, your purse, and then throw it out. We all share the same memories. We have the same fate. Anywhere else, we're foreign, we're lepers. Everyone is used to the words, "Chernobylites," "Chernobyl children," "Chernobyl refugees." But you don't know anything about us. You're afraid of us. You probably wouldn't let us out of here if you had your way, you'd put up a police cordon, that would calm you down. [Stops.] Don't try to tell me it's not like that. I lived through it. In those first days… I took my daughter and ran off to Minsk, to my sister. My own sister didn't let us into her home, she had a little baby she was breast-feeding. Can you imagine that? We slept at the train station. I had crazy thoughts. Where should we go? Maybe we should kill ourselves so as not to suffer? That was just in the first days. Everyone started imagining horrible diseases, unimaginable diseases. And I'm a doctor. I can only guess at what other people were thinking. Now I look at my kids: wherever they go, they'll feel like strangers. My daughter spent a summer at pioneer camp, the other kids were afraid to touch her. "She's a Chernobyl rabbit. She glows in the dark." They made her go into the yard at night so they could see if she was glowing. People talk about the war, the war generation, they compare us to them. But those people were happy! They won the war! It gave them a very strong life-energy, as we say now, it gave them a really strong motivation to survive and keep going. They weren't afraid of anything, they wanted to live, learn, have kids. Whereas us? We're afraid of everything. We're afraid for our children, and for our grandchildren, who don't exist yet. They don't exist, and we're already afraid. People smile less, they sing less at holidays. The landscape changes, because instead of fields the forest rises up again, but the national character changes too. Everyone's depressed. It's a feeling of doom. Chernobyl is a metaphor, a symbol. And it's changed our everyday life, and our thinking. Sometimes I think it'd be better if you didn't write about us. Then people wouldn't be so afraid. No one talks about cancer in the home of a person who's sick with it. And if someone is in jail with a life sentence, no one mentions that, either. Excerpted from Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich. Copyright (c) 1997, 2006 by Svetlana Alexievich. Preface and translation copyright (c) 2005 by Keith Gessen. Published in 2006 by Picador, LLC. All rights reserved. Visitors to this website are warned that this work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce this material in any manner or medium must be secured from Picador, LLC. ***************************************************************** 42 Belfast Telegraph: Council rejects nuclear power Heads in sand, says advocate By Geraldine Mulholland 21 April 2006 A Londonderry businessman today accused people of burying their heads in the sand after failing to convince Derry City Council that a nuclear power station should be built in the city. Councillors opposed the scheme at a meeting yesterday despite claims it would create hundreds of jobs and bring millions of pounds into the local economy. Robert Andrews remains adamant that nuclear power is the only way forward in terms of energy as well as providing an economic future for the North West. He claimed those opposing a nuclear facility would be equally resistant to the siting of any renewable energy sources, such as wind farms, close to their homes. Mr Andrews said: "People are burying their heads in the sand with a 'not in our backyard' mentality, but something urgently needs to be done. It is all very well backing renewable energy and not nuclear power but are they going to cut off the interconnector between Ireland and Wales because 25% of the energy in GB comes from nuclear power? "The lights are going to go out in Ireland so I am going to keep trying to get nuclear power. When the figures come out, people in Larne, Carrickfergus, Ballymena and Ballymoney will look at this as a terrific opportunity. Mr Andrews' proposals, outlined at a meeting of the council's development committee, also included the siting of a Centre of Excellence for Nuclear Medical Science in Derry. He also put forward plans for a 14,000-20,000 seater stadium to be built on the Fort George site, accommodating soccer, rugby and GAA as well as outdoor events such as concerts. He further suggested a prison for low-risk inmates be built somewhere in the Waterside, towards Dungiven. Both Sinn Fein and the SDLP spoke out vehemently against a local nuclear power plant and were applauded by a number of anti-nuclear protesters who attended the meeting. Rural councillor Thomas Conway said he could see no support for a prison in his area, while Sean Carr suggested a stadium should be erected in the city but not at Fort George. Chairwoman Helen Quigley said the proposals for the stadium and prison would be discussed further with strategic planning groups but Deputy Town Clerk John Meehan reiterated the council's nuclear-free stance. © 2006 Independent News and Media (NI) a division of Independent News &media (UK) Ltd ***************************************************************** 43 icNorthWales: Shutting N-plant would be disaster Apr 21 2006 By David Greenwood, Daily Post [Wylfa nuclear power plant ] A GROUP of Welsh local councils were slammed last night for opposing a bid to extend Wylfa nuclear power station's life on Anglesey by two years. The Nuclear Free Local Authorities Forum in Wales, comprising 10 councils, including three in North Wales - Denbighshire, Flintshire and Gwyn-edd - have called for investment in "green" energy.. Forum chiefs claim efforts to keep Wylfa, which is due to shutdown in 2010, are unrealistic. But last night Anglesey council leaders, battling to avoid "economic meltdown" on the island, hit out at the authorities, part of a network of 80 councils across the UK and Ireland campaigning to reduce nuclear hazards. Council leader William J Williams said: "It is obvious they don't depend on nuclear industry for their economic well-being. "We have had a nuclear station for over 30 hears and the existence of Wylfa is linked to the future of Angle-sey Aluminium, another of our top employers. "We are in real danger of losing both over the next few years, which would be a total disaster, leading to job losses of more than 1,500. "As far as Wylfa is concerned, we are looking for breathing space and if the government decides to build more nuclear stations in future then we think we have the perfect site at Wylfa," said Mr Williams.. But responding to the govern-ment's energy review, the NFLA has called for investment in renewable energy and energy conservation to meet future energy needs. It opposes any further extension to the life of the Wylfa nuclear power station because they say the age of the plant has raised question marks over safety issues. The NFLA is critical of claims the plant is needed to secure energy supplies to Anglesey Aluminium. The forum believes non-nuclear technologies provide a better way to safeguard the economy and jobs. Gwynedd councillor Gwen Griffith, vice-chairman of NFLA Wales Forum, said: "The Welsh Assembly's view that Wales could be a global showcase for clean energy developments and energy conservation is an exciting vision, but one which will require decisive action and clear targets if it is to become a reality. "Keeping nuclear power alive would divert scarce resources from investment in green energy, such as cogeneration, renewables, and energy efficiency. Copyright and Trade Mark Notice © owned by or licensed to Trinity Mirror Plc 2006 ***************************************************************** 44 SNA: Belene Nuke Talks to Start in Bulgaria » SNA Business: 21 April 2006, Friday. Bulgaria's National Electricity Company (NEC) will start the negotiations for the design, construction and commissioning of Units 1 and 2 of the Belene Nuclear Power Plant on April 25. The two successful initial bidders - Russian Atomstroyexport and the Czech Skoda Alliance consortium will be invited to discuss all technical issues, media reported. All additional questions that hadn't been cleared up so far will also be mulled at. Once all technical and contractual issues have been clarified, NEC and the two companies will start talking money. novinite.com Forum Google Tourism Business All Rights Reserved © Novinite Ltd., 2001-2006 - Copyright Bulgaria news Novinite.com (Sofia News Agency - www.sofianewsagency.com) is unique with being a real time news provider in English that informs its readers about the latest Bulgarian news. The editorial staff also publishes a daily online newspaper "Sofia Morning News." Novinite.com (Sofia News Agency - www.sofianewsagency.com) and Sofia Morning News publish ***************************************************************** 45 Deutsche Welle: Chernobyl "Liquidators" Still Fight Oblivion 21.04.2006 DW-World.de [The remaining liquidators have faced two decades of physical and psychological illness] Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: The remaining liquidators have faced two decades of physical and psychological illness Once the heroes of a nation, the first people to enter the Chernobyl power plant after Block 4 exploded 20 years ago are fighting for medical care after being forgotten since the breakup of the Soviet Union. Twenty years ago, Yury Bertov won what was considered a losing gamble: He survived being on the front lines of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster clean-up. Bertov was a 35-year-old chief engineer at the Chernobyl plant, working a few hundred meters from reactor number four when it exploded in the early morning hours on April 26, 1986, releasing enormous amounts of radiation. The people who were there that night still recall with pride and nostalgia that they didn't panic, didn't run, and that when the time came, they behaved like real Soviet heroes. "That night, no one fled," said Mykola Bondarenko, who was a 29-year-old engineer at the time. "We all knew the risks, but we all stayed." The two men were in the front lines of "liquidators" -- some 600,000 soldiers, firemen and civilians who were deployed over the next four years to clean up after the disaster. [A memorial honors the first to try to contain the disaster] Bildunterschrift: A memorial honors the first to try to contain the disaster "Remember that bluish glow, it was so beautiful," Bertov murmured. "And the flash," Bondarenko added. "Just like in a camera. What a dose we must have had!" Cars and housing promised the first to clean up after disaster As members of "liquidators of the first group," the ones most severely affected, Bertov was promised lifetime medical care and handsome financial compensation, even a car -- an extravagance ordinary Soviet citizens usually had to wait for several years for, in the unlikely event they could scrape together enough money for the purchase. "Back then, we were still considered heroes," he said. Bertov did receive a Zaporozhets sedan and 2,500 rubles, the equivalent of an average yearly salary, as well as housing in a new neighborhood on Kiev's outskirts where "liquidators" and other Chernobyl victims were provided accommodation. But that is where the compensation ended. Health care left to former Soviet states Five years after the accident, the prospects of receiving any more became dim with the breakup of the Soviet Union. In place of a single superpower with central planning, victims of the accident were now dependent for their care on three separate governments whose economies were in shambles -- Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. [About 1,000 people still work at the Chernobyl power plant] Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: About 1,000 people still work at the Chernobyl power plant Today Bertov is living through what he calls his "second Chernobyl" -- trying to get the some 12,000 dollars (9,724 euros) in unpaid pension payments the state owes him, a small fortune equivalent to nearly six average annual salaries in today's Ukraine. "My friends are dying, one after another," he said. "The last one left us two weeks ago. I don't know if I'll have the strength to keep fighting." Like most "liquidators," Bertov has faced both physical and psychological illness over the past two decades. His medical chart has included everything from irradiation to heart disease, bronchitis, gastritis, extreme fatigue, difficulties with focusing. Specialists say all are consequences of the accident. Public indifference for a "lost generation" "They are a lost generation," said Galina Rumyantseva, of the Serbsky Psychiatric Institute in Moscow, who has closely worked with the Chernobyl clean-up workers. Among the most difficult issues faced by men like Bertov and Bondarenko is the indifference that the authorities and the population at large in Ukraine show today to people who faced the nuclear power plant's bluish glow. "It's difficult to battle both sickness and oblivion," Bertov said. [Many in the public have forgotten the people affected by radiation] Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Many in the public have forgotten the people affected by radiation Today Bertov and Bondarenko live in the same part of the Troeshchina district on Kiev's outskirts that was built for "liquidators" and other victims of the Chernobyl disaster. Nearby is a cemetery, where the residents are usually buried. It is steadily filling up. On the 20th anniversary of the accident, the two men will walk over to the cemetery to pay respects to their friends buried there, knowing that they too will rest there. DW staff (sms) / AFP DW-WORLD: "Every Type of Reactor Poses a Threat" The remaining Soviet-era Chernobyl-type nuclear reactors are especially dangerous but aren't the only risk when it comes to atomic power plants, Helmut Hirsch, physicist and consultant on nuclear safety told DW-WORLD.DE. (April 20, 2006) + DW-WORLD: Greenpeace Questions Official Chernobyl Casualty Figures In a report released Tuesday, environmental organization Greenpeace said the consequences of the Chernobyl reactor disaster are being played down. The number of victims will far surpass official figures, it said. (April 18, 2006) + DW-WORLD: Nuclear Energy Causes Heated Debate in Europe Nuclear power has the reputation of being inexpensive and safe. But critics point out that this energy form has many disadvantages, too. The environmental implications also need to be considered. (April 6, 2006) Your Comments + Feedback: Should the liquidators' health be left in the hand of the former Soviet states or should other nations also support them? Send us your comments and please include your name and country in your reply. 1. © 2006 Deutsche Welle ***************************************************************** 46 [NukeNet] Rokkasho active tests: updates on new developments Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2006 20:24:33 -0700 NukeNet Anti-Nuclear Network (nukenet@energyjustice.net) The following page has been added to CNIC's English web site. "Rokkasho Active Tests: where are they up to and what problems have they encountered?" http://cnic.jp/english/topics/cycle/rokkasho/activetests.html The tests commenced on March 31st, so there isn't much information on the page yet, but we intend to update the page when there are any significant developments. Philip White Citizens' Nuclear Information Center 3F Kotobuki Bdg, 1-58-15, Higashi-Nakano, Nakano-ku, Tokyo 164-0003 Phone: 81-3-5330-9520 Fax: 81-3-5330-9530 http://cnic.jp/english/ cnic@nifty.com _______________________________________________________________________ Subscribe/Unsubscribe Here: http://www.energyjustice.net/nukenet/ Change your settings or access the archives at: http://energyjustice.net/mailman/listinfo/nukenet_energyjustice.net ***************************************************************** 47 Las Vegas SUN: Indian tribe, downwinders ask court to stop Nevada desert blast April 20, 2006 By KEN RITTER ASSOCIATED PRESS LAS VEGAS (AP) - Members of an Indian tribe and two nuclear fallout "downwinders" are asking a federal court to halt plans for a huge non-nuclear explosion that is expected to generate a mushroom cloud over the Nevada desert in June. "This is a worst nightmare come true for downwinders," said Robert Hager, a Reno-based lawyer representing four members of the Nevada-based Western Shoshone tribe and two residents of Utah. He said the June 2 detonation of a 700-ton ammonium nitrate and fuel oil bomb at the Nevada Test Site would kick up radioactive fallout left from nuclear weapons tests conducted from 1951 to 1992. Test site and federal officials have said the blast, some 280 times larger than the ammonium nitrate and fuel oil bomb that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, should not disturb surface contamination at the Test Site. The 21-page request for a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction predicts a 10,000-foot mushroom cloud, and calls the blast a "clear and present danger" to the health of people living to the east, or downwind of the vast Nevada Test Site. The document names as defendants Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Linton Brooks and James Tegnelia, the directors of two federal agencies planning the test. Defense Department, National Nuclear Security Administration and Defense Threat Reduction Agency officials each declined comment Thursday, saying they had not immediately seen the court documents submitted to U.S. District Court in Las Vegas. The court filing claims the test, dubbed "Divine Strake," would irreparably desecrate land the Western Shoshone tribe has never acknowledged turning over to the U.S. The two "downwinder" plaintiffs, Peter Litster and Stephen Erickson, live in Salt Lake City, Utah, Hager said. Thomas Wasson and Sharon Wasson, two of the four members of the Winnemucca Indian Colony of northern Nevada, live in Susanville, Calif. Plaintiff Judy Rojo lives in Winnemucca and Elverine Castro lives in Los Angeles, Hager said. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency has said the blast will help design a weapon to penetrate hardened and deeply buried targets. The National Nuclear Security Administration, which operates the vast Nevada Test Site north of Las Vegas, has said the Divine Strake explosion will be at least 1 1/2 miles from the nearest underground nuclear test, and three miles from the nearest ground-zero areas of known radioactive contamination from aboveground tests. The long-term effect of radioactive fallout from atmospheric nuclear tests in the 1950s and early 1960s has long been debated. Studies have produced conflicting conclusions as to whether fallout caused increased incidences of particular types of cancer in the residents living downwind in parts of Nevada, Utah and Arizona. The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990 provides for compassionate payments to downwinders who contracted certain cancers and other serious diseases. All contents copyright 2005 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 48 Cavalier Daily: A radioactive issue Opinion Daniel Colbert, Cavalier Daily Opinion Columnist ANYONE familiar with the anarchist punk band Anti-Flag would be confused to see the group standing next to a member of Congress, promoting a common goal. On March 24th, that was exactly the scene as Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wa., announced the start of an online petition aimed at convincing Congress to pass his bill insisting that the government investigate the harmful effects of depleted uranium munitions used by American troops. His bill is a much-needed start towards ending a policy that may be seriously affecting the health of civilians and American soldiers. Depleted uranium is used in bullets and shells because it is a very heavy metal and can penetrate most armaments. These munitions have been used in both Iraq wars, the Kosovo conflict and in training in Puerto Rico. It is created as a byproduct of nuclear reactions and was, according to McDermott, "simply being thrown away" until the military found a great place to dispose of it -- other countries! In truth there are only three sites in the United States capable of handling depleted uranium. As Chemistry Prof. Carl Trindle noted, "it wouldn't be something you'd want in a landfill." Once a depleted uranium-coated bullet hits its target, the uranium becomes a mist which may be inhaled. What is not inhaled settles onto the ground and enters the groundwater. According to Trindle, it then has long-term effects that include heavy metal poisoning and minor radiation risks. On Friday, Northern Arizona released a study showing that depleted uranium may damage DNA. In Iraq, depleted uranium deposits have already had effects on the population, including a 600 percent increase in both leukemia rates in children and birth defect rates, according to McDermott. While depleted uranium is not a violation of international treaties, because its radioactive and toxic properties are not its intended means of inflicting damage, Major Doug Rokke, a Ph.D. in health physics and an eyewitness of the harm done by depleted uranium in the Gulf War, still declared "it's a crime against humanity to use uranium munitions in a war." Rokke was asked by the military to ensure that depleted uranium was not harmful. He is now an outspoken critic of the policy, and has insisted that "uranium munitions must be banned from the planet, for eternity." Depleted uranium, like land mines, continues to kill long after the war is over. In the case of Iraq, depleted uranium is harming the very people who the United States claims to be helping. According to Iraqi doctors with whom McDermott spoke, Iraqi mothers no longer ask if a newborn is a boy or a girl; they ask if it is normal. If the military truly aims to spread democracy and prosperity to the nations in which it carries out operations, it should stop dumping poisonous, radioactive material into those nations' environments. In addition to damaging civilian populations, depleted uranium may have harmful effects on American soldiers themselves. American soldiers are exposed to depleted uranium by inhaling uranium dust immediately after a strike or through friendly fire incidents. One would think that the military would encourage further research into possible unintended effects of its munitions on its own soldiers, but it has, in fact, thwarted such efforts, insisting in the face overwhelming evidence to the contrary that depleted uranium is harmless. Moreover, the fact that the House Subcommittee on Military Personnel has taken so long to approve this bill is worrisome. Specifically, the bill seems to have had trouble gaining support from the Republican Party. Of the 39 co-sponsors of the bill, only one is a Republican. This fact shows the hypocrisy present within the Republican Party. Why is the party which opposes abortion not opposing a policy which has harmful effects on fetuses? Moreover, why does the party which claims to support the military refuse to question a policy which may be slowly killing American soldiers? It is clear that the Republicans will not allow concerns about the health of civilians and military personnel to interfere with a more effective way of killing. In order to prevent the bill's death in the subcommittee, McDermott has joined with Anti-Flag to launch an online petition and letter-writing campaign, aimed at convincing members of Congress to co-sponsor the bill. Three Virginian legislators -- Thelma Drake, Jo Ann Davis and Randy Forbes -- are members of the House Committee on Armed Forces and can therefore have a more direct effect upon the bill. Every American who cares about the safety of our troops and innocent civilians should let the legislature know that releasing poisonous, radioactive material into another nation's environment without researching its effects is unacceptable. Congress should take the next step as soon as possible and ban the use of depleted uranium. Saddam may not have had any, but there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- and they're being fired from American guns. Daniel Colbert's column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at dcolbert@cavalierdaily.com. Copyright 1995-2006 The Cavalier Daily | Contact Us ***************************************************************** 49 ForUm: No safe technology for construction of the nuclear waste depository in Ukraine News / 21 April 2006 | 12:16 No safe technology for construction of the nuclear waste depository in Ukraine Ukraine currently does not have at its disposal secure construction technology of nuclear waste depository (NWD). The Chairman of the State Committee for Nuclear Management Olena Mykolaichuk revealed it to the journalists. According to her words, the launch of the object had been scheduled on August 2005 but later on the proposed technologies appeared to be unsafe. “We are open for proposals; lots of money was invested in the object,” noted Mykolaichuk. According to data, over $100 million have already invested in the project and it needs another $50-60 million. She expects the construction to be completed by 2010. Touching upon terms of exploitation, Mykolaichuk stressed that the time limits for release of the power-generating unit #4 were expired four years ago. The situation is rather critical because the time limit for project exploitation of generating unit #1 will have been expired in 2007 and the generating unit #2 – in 2008, the Chairman said. As a reminder, on April 26 the world will commemorate the 20th Anniversary of Chernobyl disaster. In the wake of it the European scientists urge the European Parliament to conduct an independent investigation of Chernobyl aftermath. They allege that the International Atomic Energy Agency underestimates the seriousness of the situation and the real consequences of the catastrophe. Related links: OSCE committed to economic and environmental issues, says Secretary General at Chernobyl anniversary conference Paolo Coelho recalls Chernobyl Yushchenko to have talks with G-7 about Chernobyl Ukravtodor delegation to visit Chernobyl zone Chernobyl aftermath 20 years ago Ukraine’s Vice-PM on Chernobyl "Chernobyl Children" and "Chernobyl 2005" exhibitions in Spain Chernobyl is destined to be ecologically safe system EBRD discussed the Chernobyl Shelter project Chernobyl Impact Less Than Feared Zhvania: New Chernobyl shelter facility to cost ˆ1.09 bln Tarasuk: 20 years of Chernobyl did not benefit the situation Vacation excursion to Chernobyl Sarcophagus of Chernobyl nuclear power plant is being ruined Comments Stupid Question? (15:07 | 21 April,2006) Chernobyl is now untenable for thousands of years anyway. Would it be feasible to convert this site into a waste depository and so do the world a favour? Or is this a stupid question? Dr. T (15:43 | 21 April,2006) Yes, this is a stupid question. I do not think that there is anybody in Ukraine who would think about "doing the world a favour." Ivanovich (17:46 | 21 April,2006) SQ - It isn't a stupid question. And it wouldn't be a "favor", it would be a service for which Ukraine would be well paid. Also you are right in that it would be a way to offset the already existing loss of use for the Chernobyl area. Chernobyl presents Ukraine with obvious challenges, but also with unique opportunities to develop nuclear clean-up technologies which will be needed as nuclear power inevitably grows more promnent. However, Dr.T is correct that it is politically unpopular. Volodymyr (18:00 | 21 April,2006) Ivanovich, as usual, very well postulated. Yorga (19:09 | 21 April,2006) Let's look at the whole picture. Right now I understand Ukraine pays a substatial amount to Russia to remove nuclear waste, recylce it then buy it back as fuel. If nuclear power is the wave of the future would it not be wise, prudent and economical to process this material in Ukraine? The issue is not should we do it, but how can we do it effectively and safely. Chornobil might be to irradiated to do this safely. VTl (19:52 | 21 April,2006) Why should we put even more radioactive waste on our soil? Ukraine need to clean up Chernobyl, not keep it messed up forever. The world can store their nuclear waste on their own soil and keep it there. yorga (20:41 | 21 April,2006) Cleaning up Chornbil and spent nuclear fuels are two totally separate issues. I don't think anybody questions the need to clean up Chornobil. The question is how to do what's possible safely. The nuclear fuel is another matter. As long as Ukraine uses nuclear reactors the problem of spent fuel is there. Right now there is no plan to deal with it exceot send it to Russia, a very unwise situation. VTL (22:14 | 21 April,2006) Yes, we should refine our own spent nuclear biproducts, but don't take other countries waste on our soil Vic (04:23 | 22 April,2006) Yes Yorga cleaning up Chernobyl is partly possible but disposing of nuclear waste for safe storage is another question. Fusing nuclear waste in glass and storing in inactive undergrond geological sites is about the best method. The problem with chernobyl while it is possible to clean up the surface surrounds no one quite knows how to remove the melted nuclear core safely without disturbing it and leading to all sorts of new problems and recontamination -hence the sagophagus. Add new comment Name: Comment: characters left News 21 April 2006 17:43 La Strada helps strayed children in Ukraine 17:23 Ukraine's Naftogaz threatens default, accuses Finance Ministry 17:10 European Commission actions since the Chernobyl Disaster 16:53 The USA reported its actions since the Chornobyl Disaster 16:17 Aivazovsky has been awarded a title “Honorary Crimea citizen” posthumously 15:50 Donbassaero renews its airpark 15:30 Ukraine invites Niyazov to Kyiv 15:10 CIS ministers decline to discuss 1930s "genocide" against Ukraine 15:03 The syngas production in Ukraine 14:38 Orthodox believers celebrate Good Friday 14:00 Ukraine likely not to be influenced by the EU visa fee increase 13:16 Ukraine will not cancel the decision on Transdniestrian loads 13:05 Ukraine's Defence Ministry represents the National Program for Armament and Equipment Development 12:16 No safe technology for construction of the nuclear waste depository in Ukraine 11:54 OSCE committed to economic and environmental issues, says Secretary General at Chernobyl anniversary conference All news Editorial staff:english@for-ua.com All rights are reserved by © LTD. Inter-Media, ForUm 2001-2006 ***************************************************************** 50 RIA Novosti: Russia to process spent nuclear fuel, return it to Uzbekistan 21/ 04/ 2006 MOSCOW, April 21 (RIA Novosti) - Russia has completed the removal of spent nuclear fuel from Uzbekistan for processing at its nuclear facilities, a spokesman for the Russian nuclear agency said Friday. "Under a Russian-American intergovernmental agreement, which obliges Russia to process its nuclear fuel from research reactors in other countries, the waste after processing the Uzbek nuclear fuel [in Russia] will be returned back to Uzbekistan," said Sergei Novikov, a spokesman for the Russian Federal Agency for Nuclear Power. Russia started to transport spent nuclear fuel from Uzbekistan in January this year and completed the last delivery April 19, Novikov said. Under the Russian-American agreement, signed on May 27, 2004, Russia has already delivered spent nuclear fuel from Serbia, Montenegro, Romania, Bulgaria, Latvia, the Czech Republic and Libya. © 2005 RIA Novosti ***************************************************************** 51 BBC: Inquiry into nuclear flask Last Updated: Friday, 21 April 2006 [Sellafield] The cargo was being transported to Sellafield in Cumbria A nuclear flask containing plutonium-contaminated material fell off the side of a wagon at Sellafield. The container from the waste depository at nearby Drigg was taken to the Cumbria site by rail and fell as it was transferred to a trailer on Thursday. The Sellafield Site Emergency Control Centre was set up as a precaution. British Nuclear Group (BNG) said there was no release of radioactivity during the incident and no-one was hurt. The container was later recovered. BNG said in a statement that an investigation had been launched into how it happened. ***************************************************************** 52 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Cleanup for Molycorp costs firm $475,000 Friday, April 21, 2006 By David Templeton, A Colorado company will pay a $250,000 fine for contaminating groundwater and $225,000 in state oversight costs as Phase III of its low-level radiation cleanup project resumes on its Canton, Washington County, property. The state Department of Environmental Protection yesterday announced the fine and fee against Molycorp Inc. on the same day the Englewood, Colo., company announced it would resume cleanup later this month. Under a consent order and agreement, Molycorp has agreed to pump and treat contaminated groundwater and storm water, then discharge it into Chartiers Creek, where three water-sampling stations will confirm that remediation is working. Molycorp will be required to ship any recovered radioactive material to a licensed out-of-state disposal facility, DEP officials said. "By taking strong actions in this case, we are telling corporations that they must take responsibility for past practices that harm the environment," DEP Southwest Regional Director Kenneth Bowman said in a news release. Molycorp produced metallurgical products, including molybdenum used to harden steel, from 1923 to 1991, with limited production from 1996 until 2001 when production ceased for good. Under a U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission permit, the company produced some products by extracting metals from ore containing radioactive thorium and uranium. During years of production, slag containing low-level radioactive contaminants was buried on site and wastewater containing high levels of soluble molybdenum contaminated groundwater. Molycorp also has agreed to remove coal tar on the site -- the by-product of early 19th century gas plant operations before the company acquired the property. The cleanup project will take 21/2 years. Molycorp has been negotiating a cleanup plan with state and federal officials for years, so the $475,000 fine and fee assessment came as no surprise, Molycorp's project manager Jack Wright said. "We agreed upon a figure to cover past sins, but in the meantime, the DEP passed new discharge standards for molybdenum," he said, noting that the company can no longer comply with the stricter regulations. "There is no effective way to remove molybdenum from water" at lower levels of contamination. The next phase of cleanup will focus on low-level radiological contamination of thorium and uranium on 12 of the site's 72 acres. Coal tar will be removed from another eight acres. A sewer main must be relocated and an on-site wastewater treatment system must be built. Crews also must install sheet piling along areas of Chartiers Creek to protect the creek and prevent water from entering excavated areas. One block of Caldwell Avenue between Green Street and Weirich Avenue will be closed for two years, beginning June 12, while crews excavate contaminated soil as deep as 12 feet. The first phase of the cleanup project was completed in 2001 with the removal and off-site disposal of 10,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil from the property. During the second phase completed in 2002, buildings on the property were demolished and further testing was completed. DEP officials said Molycorp's goal is to decontaminate the property so its NRC license can be terminated. The state will deposit the $475,000 into the Clean Water Fund for use in improving water quality. Mr. Wright said Molycorp has not disclosed the cost of the project, except to say it is very costly. The company is a subsidiary of the Pittsburg and Midway Coal Mining Co., which is a subsidiary of Chevron. (David Templeton can be reached at dtempleton@post-gazette.comor 724-746-8652. ) Copyright ©1997-2006 PG Publishing Co., Inc. All Rights ***************************************************************** 53 APP.COM: TOPIC OF THE DAY: Nuclear waste | Asbury Park Press Online Issues:Friday, April 21, 2006 It's evident that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will grant Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station its 20-year operating license extension. Continued improvements must be made. The nuclear power industry is the only energy-producing technology that takes responsibility for all of its wastes. Nuclear energy is far more cost-effective and produces a very small amount of waste compared to fossil-fuel electrical generation. One issue of great concern is the storage of the highest level of radiological waste, the spent fuel rods. They are stored at Oyster Creek as well as at every nuclear reactor in the country. Although permanent storage is planned by the U.S. government at Yucca Mountain, Nev., protest and other delays could postpone its anticipated 2012 opening. The radioactivity of all nuclear waste decays with time. This waste has what is called a half-life, the time it takes for half of its radioactive atoms to decay. After 40 to 50 years, the spent fuel rod assembly's radioactivity has fallen to only one thousandth of the radioactive isotopes that are processed. They should be treated as a valuable fuel source. In France, China, Japan, India, Russia, Germany and the United Kingdom, they recover and recycle spent fuel into new, usable fuel rods, reducing the volume of nuclear waste by introducing less new uranium. In America, it should be mandated that spent fuel rods be reprocessed before encapsulated in Pyrex glass and stainless steel containers and considered unequivocally waste. A facility can be constructed at Oyster Creek and at many of the nuclear reactors throughout the United States to achieve this goal of reprocessing, thus reducing the amount of spent fuel to be transported to Yucca Mountain. It would behoove the federal government to help fund such an effort. We seem to be falling behind in the world of technology and with our infrastructure. If you're not the lead dog, the view is always the same. John McKelvey BRICK Copyright © 2006 Asbury Park Press. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 54 AR: Explosives firm to pay $8 million to clean up contaminated site [azcentral.com] Christine L. Romero The Arizona Republic Apr. 21, 2006 12:00 PM A major lawsuit involving groundwater contamination in Goodyear has been settled for more than $8 million. The government sued Crane Co. about two years ago saying the company should assume more responsibility in cleaning up toxic chemicals at the Phoenix-Goodyear Airport North Superfund site. Under the terms of the settlement, Unidynamics/Phoenix Inc. and its parent company, Crane Co., are required to continue current cleanup of the site and conduct supplemental site investigation and future cleanup. The company will pay $6.7 million in past costs and all future oversight costs, in addition to an extra $500,000 in penalties. Cleanup on this site has been under way for more than a decade. "We are ensuring prompt cleanup of the site's soil and groundwater contamination that continues to threaten valuable drinking water resources," said Wayne Nastri, regional administrator for the Pacific Southwest region of the Enviromental Protection Agency. Part of the settlement will go toward helping assess and possibly redevelop abandoned properties in Goodyear left in the wake of Crane, Nastri said. The EPA and U.S. Department of Justice filed the suit against Crane in U.S. District Court and have been negotiating with the firm for close to two years. A local attorney for Crane, Roger Ferland, said negotiations continue in a lawsuit that Crane filed against the government. He declined further comment. Crane alleges in its suit that the government should take more responsibility for the cleanup because the groundwater contamination occurred when Crane was doing work on behalf of the government. Crane made and tested explosives for the Defense Department from 1963 to 1993 in Goodyear and left hazardous waste that seeped into the area's groundwater. The former Crane/Unidynamics site is part of the federal government's Superfund program. Legal woes aside, the area's water and air are still considered safe, according to government tests. Goodyear resident Diane Krone said this is an important step in the process. "They are actually admitting some liability on some of these things," said Krone, a member of the superfund community advisory committee. "That's a huge step to me. Before, they had a real good plan of keeping things floating forever." Earlier this year, Goodyear also settled a U.S. District Court lawsuit with Crane. The city got nearly $2 million in a settlement to help pay for extra costs related to the problem. The recent lawsuit included $500,000 in penalties as a result of Crane's "failure" to comply with two EPA orders that were given in 1990 and 1993 requiring site cleanup, according to EPA officials. The company continued some cleanup mandated in the orders, but the EPA said it basically wasn't enough, so it was forced to spend more money and do parts of the cleanup. The Phoenix-Goodyear Airport North Superfund site is part of a larger area superfund. The entire site made it on the federal Superfund list in 1983 after the Arizona Department of Health Services found hazardous substances in local water-supply wells. In the late 1990s, perchlorate, a common chemical used in rocket fuel, was found in Southwest Valley wells and was added as a concern for the north site. Crane is only responsible for the northern portion. The southern portion of the superfund site was affected by the work of the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., which manufactured and maintained airplanes in the area from the 1940s through the 1980s. Cleanup in Goodyear Tire's former land is going well and is much further along than the other site, officials said. Reach the reporter at Christine.romero@arizonarepublic.comor (602) 444-4140. Copyright © 2006, azcentral.com. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 55 Madison Courier: Last big JPG contract deeded; cleanup nears end /www.madisoncourier.com 4/20/2006 3:00:00 PM Peggy Vlerebome Courier Staff Writer The last big piece of land at Jefferson Proving Ground has been transferred to private ownership and the last environmental cleanup will begin this summer. What will remain to be done at the former Army munitions testing site for the most part will be several years of testing and monitoring for signs of depleted uranium that remains from 10 years of testing radioactive materials. That will involve the Army and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The public’s role is largely done. The JPG Restoration Advisory Board met for about 20 minutes Wednesday night in what could have been its next-to-last meeting. Whether to disband or meet occasionally will be decided at the next scheduled meeting Nov. 1. The advisory board is made up of representatives of the public as well as agencies that have worked on environmental issues at JPG for more than a decade, such as the Indiana Department of Environmental Management. Paul Cloud, who is in charge of environmental cleanup at JPG for the Army, updated the handful of advisory board members who attended. The deed for the land known as the Northeast Area, which is 465 acres with 39 buildings, was transferred Feb. 10 to Jefferson County resident Dean Ford, who was the high bidder to buy most of JPG south of the firing line. The northern 50,000 acres, about half of JPG, is a wildlife refuge. The Northeast Area is between Woodfill and Ordnance roads. The only other topic on the agenda for the advisory board meeting was an update on cleanup. This summer, crews will remove dirt contaminated with toxic metals from propellants that were burned in an open area. The dirt will be replaced with new dirt. The contaminated dirt will be taken to a landfill that is licensed to accept it, Cloud said. Last year, Cloud and advisory board co-chairman Richard Hill, president of Save the Valley environmental group, agreed that depleted uranium was not a topic that an advisory board was allowed to discuss because it is considered a health issue, not an environmental issue. When the government closed military bases, restoration advisory boards were set up and the topics they could address were specified. Cloud and Hill said depleted uranium wasn’t among them. As a result, DU has not been talked about at advisory board meetings since then, leaving little for the board to talk about. The meetings, which formerly were held quarterly and were sometimes lengthy, were reduced to twice-a-year updates by Cloud. Although depleted uranium contains heavy metals, no government agency regulates metals or has set levels of amounts that are safe. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission only deals with the radioactivity. Hill said after the meeting Wednesday that if Army monitoring found that DU was leaving the site, then there would be a question of whether toxic heavy metals were, too. But there has been no evidence yet that DU is leaving the site in water or the air. The Army is working with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on what the Army’s long-term responsibility at JPG will be, if anything. The Army is conducting tests and monitoring, the results of which the NRC will use to determine whether the Army’s license to possess depleted uranium at JPG should be canceled, or continued with some level of responsibility for monitoring. The NRC has said that when the matter reaches a decision point, it expects to have three public meetings in the area, one in each county that JPG is in. Those meetings could be at least five years away. The Restoration Advisory Board meeting Nov. 1 will be at 7 p.m. at the Madison-Jefferson County Public Library. Copyright 2006, The Madison Courier 310 Courier Square, Madison, IN 47250 (812) 265-3641 (800) 333-2885 ***************************************************************** 56 News & Star: Nuclear flask falls off Sellafield lorry Published on 21/04/2006 A NUCLEAR flask carrying plutonium-contaminated material fell off the side of a wagon at Sellafield yesterday. It is the second time in less than three weeks that British Nuclear Group has had trouble with its nuclear transports - a Sellafield train was derailed at Barrow Docks at the end of March. The Sellafield Site Emergency Control Centre was set up as a precautionary measure following yesterday’s incident, which happened just after noon. Sellafield Station Gate had to be closed and site traffic was diverted via the site’s main, north and Calder gates. British Nuclear Group has stressed that there was no release of radioactivity during yesterday’s incident and no-one was hurt. The stainless steel waste package container was carrying plutonium-contaminated material which had been recovered from the low level waste repository at Drigg, It was being taken to Sellafield to be stored on the site. It was transported to the site by rail and was being transferred by forklift truck to a road trailer when it slipped and fell. A BNG spokeswoman said yesterday that they do not know yet exactly how it came to slip from the side of the wagon but an investigation has been launched. The container remained intact and work is now underway to recover it. An investigation was launched at the end of last month after a Sellafield train was derailed at Barrow docks. The incident, which involved a locomotive and a rail wagon, happened during a low-speed shunting operation at BNG’s Barrow Marine Terminal at Ramsden Dock. The derailment happened during a test run while BNG gears up to return high-level nuclear waste from Sellafield to its overseas customers. The wagon was not carrying any radioactive material.Martin Forwood, from Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment, said nuclear transports are risky and fears it is only a matter of time before a radioactive disaster happens. * An inquiry into nuclear waste transport is to be carried out after a lorry drove through Cumbria to Sellafield emitting a radioactive beam which could kill in two hours. It was only through “pure good fortune” that nobody was exposed to the deadly radiation which was up to 1,000 times above danger levels. ***************************************************************** 57 News & Star: Thorp still closed a year after shutdown for leak Published on 21/04/2006 [Ready to reopen in summer? The Thorp plant at Sellafield which was shut down last year following a radiation leak ] Ready to reopen in summer? The Thorp plant at Sellafield which was shut down last year following a radiation leak By Andrea Thompson SELLAFIELD’S Ł1.8 billion flagship reprocessing plant Thorp remains closed one year on from being shut down following the discovery of a massive radiation leak. The Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII) gave British Nuclear Group (BNG), which runs Sellafield, 49 recommendations and actions to complete before it can reopen the troubled plant. BNG said yesterday that it is gearing up to get Thorp operational again and has completed almost all of the 18 recommendations from its own Board of Inquiry report, published at the end of June. A spokeswoman said: “Our current planning assumption is that the plant will restart this summer once all the necessary permissions have been obtained. “The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority has stated that it expects to restart Thorp subject to approval from the NII and the NDA Board.” Thorp was closed this time last year when it was discovered that 83 cubic metres of radioactive liquor had escaped into a contained cell. Shadow trade secretary David Willets said at the time that it was a failure “worthy of Homer Simpson” – the inept nuclear plant worker from the TV cartoon series The Simpsons. BNG had hoped to reopen Thorp last December but this had to be put back. The spokeswoman added: “We have now submitted the safety case to the NII for its approval. “This details our preferred option for operating the plant and the necessary safety improvements. We are now very close to completing all the necessary physical modifications to the plant.” The affected tank will be isolated and although Thorp’s daily throughput will be reduced by only using the unaffected tank, BNG says it is confident the plant will still hit the necessary throughput rates and fulfil customers’ reprocessing contracts. An extensive internal review is also being carried out to satisfy BNG that it has completed all necessary before Thorp is restarted. All of the workers who were deployed to other areas on site following the shutdown are now back in their positions. BNG has enhanced its focus on nuclear safety and drafted in the World Association of Nuclear Operators to help deliver analytical and decision-making tools and techniques to the workforce. Additional camera equipment has also been installed in Thorp, where the leak was discovered by a CCTV camera on April 19 last year. Anti-nuclear campaigner Martin Forwood of Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment (CORE) does not believe Thorp will reopen this summer as planned. He said: “Given the complexity of the technical and regulatory hurdles still to negotiate, particularly the work to repair the plant's damaged cell, the NDA’s projection of summer 2006 appears highly unlikely to be met, by at least six months and extending Thorp’s closure to two years or more.” ***************************************************************** 58 News & Star: Selleafield terror warning Published on 21/04/2006 A successful terrorist plot to crash a hijacked airliner into Sellafield could lead to hundreds of thousands of cancer deaths across the British Isles, experts warned today. Nuclear physicist from the Oxford Research Group think-tank, Dr Frank Barnaby, said a September 11-style terrorist attack would cause 210,000 deaths for every one of Sellafield’s 14 tanks used to store high-level radioactive waste. The terrifying scenario was outlined in a report submitted to the Government’s review of Britain’s energy policy. Dr Barnaby said it would be “grossly irresponsible” of the Government to expand nuclear power and thus extend the risk of nuclear terrorism. He based his death toll estimate on public information about the amount of the caesium-137 radioisotope stored at the Cumbria plant, compared with the amounts of the same isotope released by the Chernobyl disaster and its subsequent fatalities. The report said: “Scaling up the calculated Sellafield release to the Chernobyl accident suggests that a terrorist attack on the high-level waste tanks could result worldwide in about 210,000 fatal cancers per tank. “Depending on the strength and direction of the winds at the time of the release of the radioactivity, these deaths will occur in the United Kingdom, Ireland and parts of Europe and perhaps even further afield. “If a terrorist attack used a commercial jet airliner more than one tank may be involved.” He concluded that the decision to build new nuclear reactors would “considerably enhance” the risk of proliferating nuclear weapons to other countries and to terrorists. “In today’s world, in which fundamentalist terrorists are active and likely to become more active, to increase the risk of nuclear terrorism is, to say the least, grossly irresponsible,” he said. Dr Barnaby has formerly worked at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, been director of the the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and held professorships at the Free University of Amsterdam and the University of Minnesota. He said more than one tank at Sellafield would be likely to be destroyed in a commercial airliner hijack. “The crash would create an enormous fireball which would vaporise everything,” he said. “If we concentrate on caesium-137 – the most dangerous to human health – it would go up in the fireball and blow downwind.” Sellafield has 21 water-cooled tanks used to store fission products from the two sites’ reprocessing plants, said the report, but seven are normally kept in reserve in case one of the others needs to be emptied. The report also raised the possibility of terrorists attacking a reactor or spent fuel pond by: :: Crashing a light aircraft or truck filled with high explosives into the facilities; :: Attacking it with missiles, artillery or small arms; :: Sabotaging from inside by using infiltrators, perhaps by draining coolant from the reactor core as happened at the Three Mile Island partial meltdown in the US in 1979; :: Attacking power lines carrying electricity into the plant. It added: “The buildings containing the spent fuel ponds are less well protected than the reactor and are, therefore, more attractive targets than the reactor building.” The Department for Trade and Industry’s energy review is due to report to Prime Minister Tony Blair in the summer. But some anti-nuclear campaigners fear Mr Blair has already decided to commit Britain to a new generation of nuclear power. In January, a Greenpeace campaign film depicted terrorists crashing a passenger plane into a nuclear power station The 45-second video showed a family on a beach when a plane screams over them and smashes into Sizewell nuclear plant. It then warns: “Do we really want more nuclear power stations? Tell Tony Blair nuclear power is not the answer to climate change.” British Nuclear Fuels said it would not dignify the video with a full response, and condemned the film as “distasteful”. ***************************************************************** 59 Pahrump Valley Times: $100 MILLION IN REPAIRS - Upgrades needed at Yucca April 21, 2006 OLD BUILDINGS NEED SOME ATTENTION TO BE USEFUL AGAIN WASHINGTON - The Energy Department is planning about $100 million in repairs, new buildings and roads, a fire station and other improvements at the site of planned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump, a department official said Wednesday. The planned upgrades - to facilities used by the 225 full-time employees who work at the dump site 50 miles northwest of Pahrump, 20 miles east of Beatty and north of Amargosa Valley, respectively - are needed to repair equipment and buildings that have fallen into disrepair or were never completed because of budget shortages, said Scott Wade, director of DOE's office of repository development in Las Vegas. As the opening date of the project has been delayed, structures intended to be temporary have remained in use longer than planned, he said. ``We lack some of the basic emergency response capabilities, fire and such,'' Wade told a meeting of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's advisory committee on nuclear waste. ``Decisions were made not to complete some of the original design for those onsite structures,'' Wade said. ``It was probably poor decisions that were made.'' A fire in February burned down a trailer at the dump entrance - one of about 120 temporary structures in place, Wade told committee members. The fire, caused by a heating system malfunction, occurred during a weekend and had burned out by the time workers found it, but it underscored the need for better emergency response. The closest fire engine is 45 minutes away, in Mercury. In a presentation to the advisory committee, Wade outlined plans to: €improve underground systems in the eight miles of tunnels at the dump site, including better fire detection and lighting systems; €build a new guard house at the start of the road to Yucca Mountain; €add a new or better access road; €construct permanent warehouses to replace temporary structures; €improve power generation, communications, and cement production facilities; €build a fire station that can house a six-person crew, at a cost of $4 million to $8 million. He said the underground plans already have been approved but some of the aboveground work needs environmental reviews. Some $45 million in the 2006 budget could go to the plans. If the Energy Department gets a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build the dump, new facilities will be required to support construction of the dump itself. DOE plans to apply for the NRC license in 2008 and hopes to open the dump by 2020 _ two decades late. Yucca Mountain is supposed to hold 77,000 tons or more of nuclear waste. For comment or questions, please e-mail Copyright © Pahrump Valley Times, 1997 - 2006 ***************************************************************** 60 DOE: DOE Gasoline Price Watch Website and Hotline April 20, 2006 [Fuel Pump] WASHINGTON, DC  Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman today is reminding consumers about the Department of Energys (DOE) gasoline price reporting system. Consumers can report activity at local gasoline filling stations that they believe may constitute gouging or price fixing by visiting . There are many legitimate factors influencing the price consumers are paying at the pump, including growing demand, the high price of crude oil, the lingering effects of last summers hurricanes on our refining sector and the regular transition of fuel blends as we head into the summer, said Secretary Bodman. And while the majority of local merchants are fair and honest people, there may be some people looking to take advantage of consumers in this high price environment. By reporting suspicious activity, consumers can help us send a message that illegal activity wont be tolerated and bad actors will be held accountable. Price gouging, price fixing, and other forms of collusion by suppliers or retailers may violate federal or state law, and may be subject to prosecution by federal or state enforcement authorities. Last year, nearly 35,000 people reported gasoline prices to the Department of Energys web site and hotline. All complaints registered with DOE are collated and transmitted to the Federal Trade Commission, the U.S. Department of Justice, and individual State Attorneys General for investigation and prosecution where appropriate. In addition to reporting suspicious behavior, consumers can take a number of steps to save money by increasing the mileage they get from a gallon of gas. Some of these steps include: 1. Slow down. Each 5 miles per hour an individual drives over 60 is like paying an additional $0.15 per gallon for gasoline. Aggressive driving including speeding, rapid acceleration and braking is not only unsafe but also wastes fuel. 2. Keep your car properly maintained and running smoothly. Tune-ups, clean air filters, properly maintained tires, and using the appropriate grade of oil for your vehicle can help you save money at the pump. 3. Use your engine wisely. Avoid excessive idling and use cruise control and overdrive gears for better fuel mileage. 4. Be smart about driving. Group errands together to reduce unnecessary trips, join a carpool, or use mass transit if available. In some places, telecommuting may be a possibility. 5. Keep your car light. Too often cars become long-term storage facilities for sporting equipment or household items. Consumers who do not have access to the Internet can report suspicious activity by calling 1-800-244-3301. Media contact(s): Craig Stevens, (202) 586-4940 [ ] U.S. Department of Energy | 1000 Independence Ave., SW | Washington, DC 20585 1-800-dial-DOE | f/202-586-4403 | ***************************************************************** 61 DOE: DOE Strategic Petroleum Reserve Contractor Receives the Baldrige Award April 19, 2006 Vice President Cheney Presents DOE contractor with the nations highest Presidential honor for performance excellence and quality achievement [Vice President Cheney speaking at the award ceremony] WASHINGTON, DC  Vice President Richard Cheney today presented DynMcDermott Petroleum Operations Company, operator of the U.S. Department of Energys (DOE) Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), with the 2005 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. The Baldrige award is the nations highest Presidential honor for performance excellence and quality achievement and is presented annually to organizations that distinguish themselves through management excellence and continuous improvement to stakeholders. DynMcDermott is the first government contractor to receive the Baldrige National Quality Award. The companys noteworthy work as the manager of the SPR was particularly noticed during the 2005 hurricane season, when the company worked to maintain the nations crude oil supply despite tumultuous conditions and hard hits to their facilities. I congratulate DynMcDermott on receiving the Baldrige Award and commend them for their excellent service to the Department of Energy and the American people, particularly in the wake of the personal and national crisis of last years hurricane season. Their dedication and hard work was an important component of our nations response, Secretary Bodman said. Headquartered in New Orleans, DynMcDermott operates the four Strategic Petroleum Reserve crude oil storage sites located along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Texas. Together, these sites store approximately 700 million barrels of crude oil in underground salt domes. [Mr. McGough accepts the award] DynMcDermott was among 64 applicants for the 2005 Baldrige awards. Applicants were evaluated by an independent board of examiners in seven areas: leadership; strategic planning; customer and market focus; measurement, analysis and knowledge management; human resource focus; process management; and results. The evaluation process includes extensive review and finalists are visited by teams of examiners to clarify questions and verify information in the applications. The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, named after the 26th Secretary of Commerce, was established by Congress in 1987 to promote excellence in the organizational performance of U.S. businesses, educational organizations, and health care organizations. Honorees for the 2005 award were announced by President George W. Bush and Commerce Secretary Carlos Guitierrez on November 22, 2005. The other 2005 Baldrige award winners are: + Sunny Fresh Foods, Inc., Monticello, MN (manufacturing) + Park Place Lexus, Plano, TX (small business) + Richland College, Dallas, TX (education) + Jenks Public Schools, Jenks, OK (education) + Bronson Methodist Hospital, Kalamazoo, MI (health care) Further information on the Baldrige Award and the 2005 recipients is available at www.baldrige.nist.gov. Media contact(s): Craig Stevens, (202) 586-4940 [ ] U.S. Department of Energy | 1000 Independence Ave., SW | Washington, DC 20585 1-800-dial-DOE | f/202-586-4403 | ***************************************************************** 62 Platts: DOE's Spurgeon sees himself as nuclear energy's 'chief salesman' Washington (Platts)--20Apr2006 The US nuclear industry has "atrophied a bit" and the Department of Energy needs to work more with nuclear utilities and the industry to reinvigorate it, Dennis Spurgeon, DOE's new assistant secretary for nuclear energy, said during a meeting today with reporters. "If we're successful, we have a pretty good opportunity to finish what they started," Spurgeon said, pointing out the conference room mural showing President Dwight Eisenhower delivering his 1953 "Atoms for Peace" speech at the United Nations. "I believe that we have a historic opportunity to pursue the nuclear dream that was once there and make it a reality," he said. Spurgeon said he viewed himself as "the chief salesman for nuclear energy" and called an order for a new power reactor in the US his top priority. Spurgeon added that he believed US is "fairly close" to seeing that happen. No new reactors have been ordered and built in the US since the 1970s. For more information, take a trial to Platts Nucleonics Week at http://nucweek.platts.com. Copyright © 2006 - Platts, All Rights Reserved [The McGraw-Hill Companies] ***************************************************************** 63 Hanford News: Closure Hanford donates to museum This story was published Thursday, April 20th, 2006 By the Herald staff Washington Closure Hanford has donated $1,000 to the B Reactor Museum Association, which is working to preserve the world's first full-scale production reactor as a museum. Washington Closure, the new river corridor contractor, appreciates the museum association's support in providing guides for reactor tours, said Pat Pettiette, Washington Closure president. Until the Department of Energy determines the future for B Reactor, which produced plutonium from 1944 to 1968, Washington Closure is keeping the reactor in a safe and clean condition. © 2006 Tri-City Herald. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 64 Hanford News: Hanford budget likely to improve This story was published Thursday, April 20th, 2006 By Annette Cary, Herald staff writer A visiting congressman predicted Congress will approve more money for the vitrification plant at Hanford in the next budget year than is available this year to design and build the plant. Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, toured Hanford on Tuesday and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory on Wednesday at the invitation of Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash. Simpson is a member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, which writes the annual spending bill for Hanford and the national laboratory. He also has a Department of Energy nuclear site in his home district, the Idaho Cleanup Project, formerly called the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory. But that didn't stop him from being struck by the size of Hanford and the scope of its cleanup projects. The 586-square-mile nuclear reservation was used to produce plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons program. One of the most pressing problems at Hanford is treating 53 million gallons of radioactive and hazardous chemical waste held in underground tanks. The Idaho site also has waste tanks, but they hold about 1 million gallons of waste. The Savannah River, S.C., site has more waste, but its tank waste is more uniform than the Hanford waste, which holds radioactive waste from several different processing systems. This year Congress set the budget for the vitrification plant, which will treat the tank waste, at $526 million. That's down from $690 million, the amount on which planning for the plant was based. This year's budget should be better, Simpson said. The appropriations subcommittee does not know how much money it will have to divide among all projects. But DOE has recommended that the vitrification plant receive $690 million in the next fiscal year, while last year it recommended $626 million. That amount then was reduced to shift money to Gulf hurricane relief amid growing concerns about management and technical problems at the plant and a rapidly increasing cost. "I think there is more accountability and transparency," for the project now, Simpson said. DOE ordered an expert independent review of the technology to be used at the plant, which found no problems that could not be fixed. It's also released more information on costs at the plant, which have increased from $5.8 billion at the start of 2005 to a preliminary estimate of about $11 billion currently. "In reality, we shouldn't be surprised to a large degree," Simpson said. The original cost estimate was too low and this is a "pioneer project" unlike any vitrification plant built before in size and scope, he said. What sounds like rancor in Congress as the plant's problems are discussed is part of its oversight role, he said. The subcommittee's job is "holding feet to the fire," he said. As congressional committees have discussed problems at the vitrification plant, comparisons have been made to the Rocky Flats, Colo., site, where cleanup was completed last year on its 385-acre industrial area and the buffer zone that made up the rest of the site. "It's fundamentally a different problem here than at Rocky Flats," Simpson said, adding that substantial amounts of waste at Rocky Flats were shipped to Idaho. Hanford is clearly larger than any other cleanup site in the nation, Hastings said. And it's also had successes during the years when DOE was accelerating cleanup in Colorado, he said. A decade ago, there was no plan on what to do with decaying fuel left in the concrete cooling basins attached to the K reactors, Hastings said. But since then all fuel has been removed from the K Basins and most of the radioactive sludge has been removed from the most contaminated basin. Six years ago, the plan to clean up Hanford along the Columbia River to shrink the contaminated area to central Hanford and reduce overhead costs was only an idea. Now a river corridor contract has been awarded and initial reports indicate cleanup work is proceeding faster than expected, Hastings said. © 2006 Tri-City Herald. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 65 DOE: Environmental Management Site-Specific Advisory Board, Oak Ridge FR Doc E6-6017 [Federal Register: April 21, 2006 (Volume 71, Number 77)] [Notices] [Page 20655] From the Federal Register Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr21ap06-45] Reservation AGENCY: Department of Energy. ACTION: Notice of open meeting. SUMMARY: This notice announces a meeting of the Environmental Management Site-Specific Advisory Board (EM SSAB), Oak Ridge Reservation. The Federal Advisory Committee Act (Pub. L. No. 92-463, 86 Stat. 770) requires that public notice of this meeting be announced in the Federal Register. DATES: Wednesday, May 10, 2006, 6 p.m. ADDRESSES: DOE Information Center, 475 Oak Ridge Turnpike, Oak Ridge, Tennessee. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Pat Halsey, Federal Coordinator, Department of Energy Oak Ridge Operations Office, P.O. Box 2001, EM-90, Oak Ridge, TN 37831. Phone (865) 576-4025; Fax (865) 576-5333 or e- mail: or check the Web site at . 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: Update on the Oak Ridge Environmental Management Program. Public Participation: The meeting is open to the public. Written statements may be filed with the Board either before or after the meeting. Individuals who wish to make oral statements pertaining to the agenda item should contact Pat Halsey at the address or telephone number listed above. Requests must be received five days prior to the meeting and reasonable provision will be made to include the presentation in the agenda. The 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: Minutes of this meeting will be available for public review and copying at the Department of Energy's Information Center at 475 Oak Ridge Turnpike, Oak Ridge, TN, between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, or by writing to Pat Halsey, Department of Energy, Oak Ridge Operations Office, P.O. Box 2001, EM-90, Oak Ridge, TN 37831, or by calling her at (865) 576-4025. Issued at Washington, DC, on April 18, 2006. Rachel M. Samuel, Deputy Advisory Committee Management Officer. [FR Doc. E6-6017 Filed 4-20-06; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 6450-01-P ***************************************************************** 66 Paducah Sun: DOE cleanup to employ 400 at job’s start Paducah, Kentucky Paducah Remediation Services will employ about 150 fewer people than its predecessors. By Joe Walker jwalker@paducahsun.com 270.575.8656 Friday, April 21, 2006 Paducah Remediation Services will start cleanup work Monday at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant with 400 full-time employees, a reduction of about 150 from predecessor Bechtel Jacobs and its 26 subcontractors. Out of the 400, the firm has hired 100 of 123 so-called “grandfathered workers who were employed by Lockheed Martin Corp. when it was replaced by Bechtel Jacobs in 1998, PRS spokeswoman Yvette Cantrell said. Those workers have carried the same basic health and pension plans throughout the transition. Some longtime, experienced workers have complained to the Sun about getting inferior job offers or no offers, and being replaced by people “off the street. Cantrell responded that “only a handful of administrative people from Oak Ridge, Tenn., have been brought in, and the rest of the employees have come from the existing Paducah work force. Cantrell also dismissed claims that PRS is cutting jobs because it substantially underbid its work. She said the $192 million contract is for just under 3 1/2 years, reflecting more than 18 months of work done by Bechtel Jacobs during a protracted bidding process to select a successor. A previous 4 1/2-year, $303 million contract was awarded to North Wind Paducah Cleanup Co., but several other bidders balked. Their protests were dismissed with DOEŽs agreement to rebid the work last summer, resulting in the PRS contract. “As far as PRS is concerned, we bid the dollars associated with what it would take to do the scope of work, Cantrell said. Another concern expressed by workers is that PRS has hired too few workers — particularly in the areas of radiation protection and health physics — to maintain health and safety standards. Cantrell said the reduction in employees is largely because PRS is doing all the work, compared with Bechtel JacobsŽ subcontracting about 90 percent of it to other firms. “This is a self-performing contract, so basically what you do is cut out several layers of oversight management, she said. Energy Department spokeswoman Megan Barnett said DOE ensured that the PRS contract gave considerable preferential hiring to existing workers. She also said the reduced value of the contract reflected work already done by Bechtel Jacobs. Rep. Ed Whitfield, who last fall spearheaded legislation to protect cleanup worker pensions and health insurance, said Thursday that he had not been told what the final job numbers would be. “My primary responsibility is to secure funding for the cleanup efforts, he said. “Congress has consistently appropriated funds above and beyond the administrationŽs request, and I will continue to do my part to ensure that the cleanup proceeds on schedule. Neither PRS nor DOE had advised Sen. Jim Bunning of the number of jobs to be retained, said Mike Reynard, BunningŽs press secretary. Sen. Mitch McConnell said Tuesday that he was unaware of some workersŽ claims about unfair job cuts. ***************************************************************** 67 Cańon City Daily Record: Rocky Flats visitors could receive warning Cańon City and the Greater Royal Gorge Region Publish Date: 4/21/2006 John Fryar Daily Record Denver Bureau DENVER — Visitors to the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge would have to be warned they may be exposing themselves to radioactive residues and other hazardous materials, under a proposed state law that got initial House approval on Thursday. House Bill 1389 is Walsh Democratic Rep. Wes McKinley’s second annual attempt to require signs and handouts to alerting people of the potential dangers he contends linger at the former nuclear weapons site, once its conversion to a wildlife refuge is complete. McKinley was foreman of a federal grand jury that in 1992 recommended indicting private and federal officials over contamination at Rocky Flats. Prosecutors, however, settled the case with plea bargains. HB1389 would require signs at all entrances to the refuge to advise the public that “some contamination may remain in the soil and ground water.” Written pamphlets or audio recordings would have to be made available to give would-be visitors a lengthy set of statements about the plant’s history, the cleanup effort, and the possibility that “radioactive and hazardous materials are invisible to the naked eye and may be carried home in dirt on shoes and belong-ings.” Those materials would also have to state that “in light of the scientific uncertainties and the controversies about risk, members of the public considering a visit to Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge should de-cide for themselves whether the risks are acceptable to them and their families.” Several House members, objected to the content and validity of the statements McKinley is seeking to require on the signs and in the handout materials. Arvada Republican Rep. Bill Crane, saying that Rocky Flats is “in my back yard.” and said the materials and signs would have a long-term impact on the area. Crane sought unsuccessfully to amend McKinley’s bill to give the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and a consortium of Rocky Flats’ neighboring local governments a hand in drafting the messages to be disseminated on the entry signs and any handout materials. Lakewood Republican Rep. Matt Knoedler sided with Crane, saying, “Let the experts write it, not the state Legislature.” But Louisville Democratic Rep. Paul Weissmann scoffed at the idea of allowing area city governments have a say in crafting the visitor advisories. Rocky Flats-area local officials would prefer signs and pamphlets “that say ‘Bring your blanket and your Kentucky Fried Chicken and your guitar and have a good afternoon,’ ” Weissmann said. McKinley’s HB1389 must be approved in one more House vote before advancing to consideration in the Senate. Last year, a McKinley bill proposing “to protect the personal safety of visitors” to the Rocky Flats Wildlife Refuge died in the House Appropriations Committee before it could be considered by the full House. All contents Copyright © 2005 The Cańon City Daily Record. All ***************************************************************** 68 Knox News: SNS is refused Y-12 heavy water Obtaining 20 tons may require foreign vendor By FRANK MUNGER, munger@knews.com April 21, 2006 OAK RIDGE - The government's stockpile of high-purity heavy water resides at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge, but officials at the nearby Spallation Neutron Source may have to shop outside the country to acquire the 20 tons they need for research operations. The National Nuclear Security Administration rejected the SNS request for heavy water, saying the Y-12 inventory is only for national-security missions. "Y-12 is unable to make this material available as this would reduce the heavy-water reserve," said Steven Wyatt, a federal spokesman at the warhead plant. Heavy water - also known as deuterium oxide - is needed for "defense-related programs" and "military applications" at Y-12 and for operations at the National Ignition Facility in California, Wyatt said. NIF is a laser facility that does experiments for the weapons program. Wyatt said the amount of heavy water stored at Y-12 is classified information. He said it is kept "in a vault-type room" within the plant's protected area. He declined to specify how the material is used at the Oak Ridge plant, although some of Y-12's warhead work involves lithium deuteride. Thom Mason, director of the Spallation Neutron Source, said SNS officials had anticipated getting the heavy water for free from the government's strategic stockpile - much like SNS earlier acquired 40,000 pounds of mercury from Y-12 for use as a target for neutron generation. After the request was rejected, the U.S. Department of Energy put through a request for additional funding to buy the heavy water, but Mason said SNS officials must wait until the 2007 budget is approved before starting the procurement process. "Assuming that happens, then we would want to get it as soon as possible," Mason said. "It takes awhile to do a major procurement." The heavy water added about $8 million to the SNS funding request for next year, he said. SNS officials plan to use heavy water in cooling loops around the research facility's mercury target, which will be zapped with pulses of a high-energy proton beam to produce zillions of neutrons for science experiments. Mason said regular light water currently is loaded into those cooling loops and will be used during startup activities over the next couple of months and during the early operations at the Oak Ridge complex. The problem with light water is that it absorbs neutrons, stealing 10 to 15 percent away from the source, and that's why SNS officials want to substitute heavy water at some point to maximize the efficiency. "From a cooling standpoint, it doesn't matter, but (heavy water) gives better neutron intensity," Mason said. Heavy water has chemical and physical properties similar to light water. The hydrogen atoms in the water are of the heavy isotope deuterium - another form of hydrogen with a neutron in the nucleus. There typically are restrictions on the sale and movement of heavy water because of its potential use in production of nuclear weapons. Using heavy water in a nuclear reactor can enable production of plutonium using natural uranium as fuel instead of enriched uranium. There is no domestic production of heavy water in the United States, although Mason said there are U.S. companies that can provide relatively small quantities of it obtained from other sources. Getting 20 tons may require purchase from a foreign source, such as Canada, India, Russia or Argentina. "We would just do a procurement. Anyone can bid," Mason said. He noted, however, that a purchase from a foreign vendor must meet criteria outlined in the Buy America Act. Wyatt said DOE's Savannah River Site in South Carolina has an inventory of heavy water leftover from past operations there and is looking to get rid of it. "However, we understand (it) doesn't meet the purity requirements for the Spallation Neutron Source and thus would have to be processed," he said. Senior writer Frank Munger may be reached at 865-342-6329. © 2006 - Knoxville News Sentinel ***************************************************************** NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. 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