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                         NUCLEAR POLICY
 
1 The Words None Dare Say: Nuclear War
2 US: Las Vegas SUN: Bogden suspects politics as reason for his ouster
3 [NYTr] CIA blunder 'prompted Korean nuclear race'
4 Guardian Unlimited: N. Korea Delegation Arrives in Calif. 
5 Guardian Unlimited: NKorea Reiterates Denuclearization Pledge 
6 Digital Chosunilbo: U.S. Admits Doubts Over N.Korean Uranium Program
7 Digital Chosunilbo: N.Korea Denounces GNP Despite Seoul's Pleas
8 Korea Times: US May Have Inflated N. Korea Allegations
9 AFP: US now uncertain about North Korean uranium program - 
10 US: [NYTr] US Picks Design for New Nuclear Warheads
11 Guardian Unlimited: Analysis: U.S. Intel on Nukes in Doubt
12 BBC NEWS: US may be 'undermining' Pakistan
13 US: OpEd News: New Nuclear Warheads for Bush
14 US: Public Citizen: Public Citizen Urges Congress to Curb Executive 
15 US: Guardian Unlimited: Govt. Picks Design for Nuclear Warhead 
16 Sydney Morning Herald: Green energy be dammed - 
17 UPI: Outside View: Rice cuts no ice in Moscow
18 UPI: India, Pakistan OK nuke safeguards
19 ITAR-TASS: Lavrov on Middle East nuke-free zone and NPT membership
 
                         NUCLEAR REACTORS
 
20 Guardian Unlimited: Czech Nuclear Plant Leak Deemed Harmless 
21 US: Deseret News: N-power is the answer
22 US: NRC: NRC Returns Perry to Regular Oversight
23 Platts: Nuclear is "absolutely needed" in the future UK energy mix: 
24 Bangkok Post: Nuclear power plant panel to be set up
25 Sofia Echo: BULGARIA'S KOZLODUY NPP AMONG MOST DANGEROUS POWER PLANT
26 US: Carlsbad Current-Argus: Lasting impressions
27 US: Hamilton Spectator: Nuclear power environmentally friendly, cost
28 Bridgwater Mercury: Council Clear Up Nuclear Confusion 
29 US: Quad-Cities: Q-C nuke plant Unit 2, down for 2 days, back in ser
30 IHT: Alstom wins €150 million nuclear plant contract in Mexico -
31 Prague Daily Monitor: Radioactive water leak in Temelin plant - 
32 Business Report: Nuclear plants are vulnerable to human error
33 Prague Daily Monitor: Austrian chancellor addresses Czech PM over Te
34 US: Mid-Hudson News Network: Rockland lawmakers call for closure of 
35 FPON: Earthlife Anti-Nuclear In Energy Debate
36 The Australian: First look at new nuke reactor's uranium core 
 
                          NUCLEAR SECURITY
 
37 US: Dallas Morning News: U.S. unprepared for nuclear terror attack, 
38 US: Dallas Morning News: Chuck Bloom: Talk radio shock jocks almost 
 
                          NUCLEAR SAFETY
 
39 US: FR: DHHS: Contamination investigation of Monsanto employees in O
40 US: Journal News: Westchester to get more radiation-protection pills
41 US: FR: DHHS: contamination of General Atomics Workers in La Jolla C
42 US: Long Beach Beachcomber: Douglas Park a Health Risk?
43 US: KRNV.com: Government to Seek Dismissal of Lawsuit on 'Divine Str
44 US: Rocky Mountain News: Salazar introduces bill to help ailing Rock
 
                         NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE
 
45 LVN: Letter: NEW OPTIONS PROPOSED FOR YUCCA MOUNTAIN SITE
46 Pahrump Valley Times: Rurals concerned about Mina route (Yucca)
47 DAILY YOMIURI: N-waste site search chance for debate 
48 The Hindu: Re-processing rights of Plutonium crucial: BARC
49 Independent: Britain gets nuclear waste warning from energy chiefs
50 US: Salt Lake Tribune: Nuclear waste: Huntsman dodged responsibility
51 US: Salt Lake Tribune: State may get sued over nuclear waste law
52 US: Ruidoso News: Nuclear plan powers debate (GNEP project near Rosw
53 US: Ruidoso News: Waters: Reprocessing's time has come
54 US: Ruidoso News: Radioactive Roswell not good for Ruidoso
55 US: The State: To dump, or not to dump?
56 US: UPI: Analysis: Demand to stress uranium supply
57 US: lamonitor.com: LA scopes nuclear power plan
58 US: Daily Utah Chronicle: Our governor is a coward - Opinion
59 UK: Times and Star: Recycling waste must be safe
60 Times and Star: Radioactive leak alarms ignored
61 Times and Star: More time to query recycling plant
 
                           PEACE
 
 
                        US DEPT. OF ENERGY
 
62 [NukeNet] Press Rel: RRW design chosen
63 Lodi News: Lawrence Livermore Laboratory to offer tours of its bomb 
64 Hanford News: Astronomers fret about fate of observatory
65 Hanford News: State panel warned about effort to license nuclear dum
66 Hanford News: Soviet-era nuclear material is a target for smugglers 
67 Tri-City Herald: EPA official: Realism needed at Hanford
68 Hanford News: EPA official: Realism needed at Hanford - New regional
*****************************************************************
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                         FULL NEWS STORIES
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 1 The Words None Dare Say: Nuclear War
 
Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 23:54:16 -0600 (CST)


1st March 2007
Information Clearing House
www.ichblog.eu

The Words None Dare Say: Nuclear War
 
By 

George Lakoff

 
"The elimination of Natanz would be a major setback for Iran's nuclear
ambitions, but the conventional weapons in the American arsenal could not
insure the destruction of facilities under seventy-five feet of earth and
rock, especially if they are reinforced with concrete."-Seymour Hersh, The
New Yorker, April 17, 2006 

"The second concern is that if an underground laboratory is deeply buried,
that can also confound conventional weapons. But the depth of the Natanz
facility - reports place the ceiling roughly 30 feet underground - is not
prohibitive. The American GBU-28 weapon - the so-called bunker buster - can
pierce about 23 feet of concrete and 100 feet of soil. Unless the cover over
the Natanz lab is almost entirely rock, bunker busters should be able to
reach it. That said, some chance remains that a single strike would fail."
-Michael Levi, New York Times, April 18, 2006

A familiar means of denying a reality is to refuse to use the words that
describe that reality. A common form of propaganda is to keep reality from
being described.

In such circumstances, silence and euphemism are forms of complicity both in
propaganda and in the denial of reality. And the media, as well as the major
presidential candidates, are now complicit.

The stories in the major media suggest that an attack against Iran is a real
possibility and that the Natanz nuclear development site is the number one
target. As the above quotes from two of our best sources note, military
experts say that conventional "bunker-busters" such as the GBU-28 might be
able to destroy the Natanz facility, especially with repeated bombings. On
the other hand, they also say such iterated use of conventional weapons
might not work, e.g., if the rock and earth above the facility becomes
liquefied. On that supposition, a "low yield" "tactical" nuclear weapon,
say, the B61-11, might be needed.

If the Bush administration, for example, were to insist on a sure "success,"
then the "attack" would constitute nuclear war. The words in boldface are
nuclear war, that's right, nuclear war - a first strike nuclear war.

We don't know what exactly is being planned - conventional GBU-28s or
nuclear B61-11s. And that is the point. Discussion needs to be open. Nuclear
war is not a minor matter.

The Euphemism

As early as August 13, 2005, Bush, in Jerusalem, was asked what would happen
if diplomacy failed to persuade Iran to halt its nuclear program. Bush
replied, "All options are on the table." On April 18, the day after the
appearance of Seymour Hersh's New Yorker report on the administration's
preparations for a nuclear war against Iran, President Bush held a news
conference. He was asked,

"Sir, when you talk about Iran, and you talk about how you have diplomatic
efforts, you also say all options are on the table. Does that include the
possibility of a nuclear strike? Is that something that your administration
will plan for?" 

He replied,

"All options are on the table."

The President never actually said the forbidden words "nuclear war," but he
appeared to tacitly acknowledge the preparations - without further
discussion.

Vice-President Dick Cheney, speaking in Australia last week, backed up the
President.

"We worked with the European community and the United Nations to put
together a set of policies to persuade the Iranians to give up their
aspirations and resolve the matter peacefully, and that is still our
preference. But I've also made the point, and the president has made the
point, that all options are on the table."

Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain, on FOX News, August 14, 2005,
said the same.

"For us to say that the Iranians can do whatever they want to do and we
won't under any circumstances exercise a military option would be for them
to have a license to do whatever they want to do ... So I think the
president's comment that we won't take anything off the table was entirely
appropriate."

But it's not just Republicans. Democratic Presidential candidate John
Edwards, in a speech in Herzliyah, Israel, echoed Bush.

"To ensure that Iran never gets nuclear weapons, we need to keep ALL options
on the table. Let me reiterate - ALL options must remain on the table."

Although, Edwards has said, when asked about this statement, that he prefers
peaceful solutions and direct negotiations with Iran, he has nonetheless
repeated the "all options on the table" position - making clear that he
would consider starting a preventive nuclear war, but without using the
fateful words.

Hillary Clinton, at an AIPAC dinner in New York, said,

"We cannot, we should not, we must not, permit Iran to build or acquire
nuclear weapons, and in dealing with this threat, as I have said for a very
long time, no option can be taken off the table."

Translation: Nuclear weapons can be used to prevent the spread of nuclear
weapons.

Barack Obama, asked on 60 Minutes about using military force to prevent Iran
from developing nuclear weapons, began a discussion of his preference for
diplomacy by responding, "I think we should keep all options on the table."

Bush, Cheney, McCain, Edwards, Clinton, and Obama all say indirectly that
they seriously consider starting a preventive nuclear war, but will not
engage in a public discussion of what that would mean. That contributes to a
general denial, and the press is going along with it by a corresponding
refusal to use the words.

If the consequences of nuclear war are not discussed openly, the war may
happen without an appreciation of the consequences and without the public
having a chance to stop it. Our job is to open that discussion.

Of course, there is a rationale for the euphemism: To scare our adversaries
by making them think that we are crazy enough to do what we hint at, while
not raising a public outcry. That is what happened in the lead up to the
Iraq War, and the disaster of that war tells us why we must have such a
discussion about Iran. Presidential candidates go along, not wanting to be
thought of as interfering in on-going indirect diplomacy. That may be the
conventional wisdom for candidates, but an informed, concerned public must
say what candidates are advised not to say.

More Euphemisms

The euphemisms used include "tactical," "small," "mini-," and "low yield"
nuclear weapons. "Tactical" contrasts with "strategic"; it refers to
tactics, relatively low-level choices made in carrying out an overall
strategy, but which don't affect the grand strategy. But the use of any
nuclear weapons would be anything but "tactical." It would be a major world
event - in Vladimir Putin's words, "lowering the threshold for the use of
nuclear weapons," making the use of more powerful nuclear weapons more
likely and setting off a new arms race. The use of the word "tactical"
operates to lessen their importance, to distract from the fact that their
very use would constitute a nuclear war.

What is "low yield"? Perhaps the "smallest" tactical nuclear weapon we have
is the B61-11, which has a dial-a-yield feature: it can yield "only" 0.3
kilotons, but can be set to yield up to 170 kilotons. The power of the
Hiroshima bomb was 15 kilotons. That is, a "small" bomb can yield more than
10 times the explosive power of the Hiroshima bomb. The B61-11 dropped from
40,000 feet would dig a hole 20 feet deep and then explode, send shock waves
downward, leave a huge crater, and spread radiation widely. The idea that it
would explode underground and be harmless to those above ground is false -
and, anyway, an underground release of radiation would threaten ground water
and aquifers for a long time and over a wide distance.

To use words such as "low yield" or "small" or "mini-" nuclear weapon is
like speaking of being a little bit pregnant. Nuclear war is nuclear war! It
crosses the moral line.

Any discussion of roadside canister bombs made in Iran justifying an attack
on Iran should be put in perspective: Little canister bombs (EFPs -
explosively formed projectiles) that shoot a small hot metal ball at a
humvee or tank versus nuclear war.

Incidentally, the administration may be focusing on the canister bombs
because it seeks to claim that the Authorization for Use of Military Force
Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 permits the use of military force against
Iran based on its interference in Iraq. In that case, no further
authorization by Congress would be needed for an attack on Iran.

The journalistic point is clear. Journalists and political leaders should
not talk about an "attack." They should use the words that describe what is
really at stake: nuclear war - in boldface.

Then there is the scale of the proposed attack. Military reports leaking out
suggest a huge (mostly or entirely non-nuclear) airstrike on as many as
10,000 targets - a "shock and awe" attack that would destroy Iran's
infrastructure the way the U.S. bombing destroyed Iraq's infrastructure. The
targets would not just be "military targets." As Dan Plesch reports in the
New Statesman, February 19, 2007, such an attack would wipe out Iran's
military, business, and political infrastructure. Not just nuclear
installations, missile launching sites, tanks, and ammunition dumps, but
also airports, rail lines, highways, bridges, ports, communications centers,
power grids, industrial centers, hospitals, public buildings, and even the
homes of political leaders. That is what was attacked in Iraq: the "critical
infrastructure." It is not just military in the traditional sense. It leaves
a nation in rubble, and leads to death, maiming, disease, joblessness,
impoverishment, starvation, mass refugees, lawlessness, rape, and
incalculable pain and suffering. That is what the options appear to be "on
the table." Is nation destruction what the American people have in mind when
they acquiesce without discussion to an "attack"? Is nuclear war what the
American people have in mind? An informed public must ask and the media must
ask. The words must be used.

Even if the attack were limited to nuclear installations, starting a nuclear
war with Iran would have terrible consequences - and not just for Iranians.
First, it would strengthen the hand of the Islamic fundamentalists - exactly
the opposite of the effect U.S. planners would want. It would be viewed as
yet another major attack on Islam. Fundamentalist Islam is a revenge
culture. If you want to recruit fundamentalist Islamists all over the world
to become violent jihadists, this is the best way to do it. America would
become a world pariah. Any idea of the U.S. as a peaceful nation would be
destroyed. Moreover, you don't work against the spread of nuclear weapons by
using those weapons. That will just make countries all over the world want
nuclear weaponry all the more. Trying to stop nuclear proliferation through
nuclear war is self-defeating.

As Einstein said, "You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war."

Why would the Bush administration do it? Here is what conservative
strategist William Kristol wrote last summer during Israel's war with
Hezbollah.

"For while Syria and Iran are enemies of Israel, they are also enemies of
the United States. We have done a poor job of standing up to them and
weakening them. They are now testing us more boldly than one would have
thought possible a few years ago. Weakness is provocative. We have been too
weak, and have allowed ourselves to be perceived as weak.

The right response is renewed strength -- in supporting the governments of
Iraq and Afghanistan, in standing with Israel, and in pursuing regime change
in Syria and Iran. For that matter, we might consider countering this act of
Iranian aggression with a military strike against Iranian nuclear
facilities. Why wait? Does anyone think a nuclear Iran can be contained?
That the current regime will negotiate in good faith? It would be easier to
act sooner rather than later. Yes, there would be repercussions -- and they
would be healthy ones, showing a strong America that has rejected further
appeasement."

-Willam Kristol, Weekly Standard 7/24/06

"Renewed strength" is just the Bush strategy in Iraq. At a time when the
Iraqi people want us to leave, when our national elections show that most
Americans want our troops out, when 60% of Iraqis think it all right to kill
Americans, Bush wants to escalate. Why? Because he is weak in America.
Because he needs to show more "strength." Because if he knocks out the
Iranian nuclear facilities, he can claim at least one "victory." Starting a
nuclear war with Iran would really put us in a worldwide war with
fundamentalist Islam. It would make real the terrorist threat he has been
claiming since 9/11. It would create more fear - real fear - in America. And
he believes, with much reason, that fear tends to make Americans vote for
saber-rattling conservatives.

Kristol's neoconservative view that "weakness is provocative" is echoed in
Iran, but by the other side. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was quoted in The New York
Times of February 24, 2007 as having "vowed anew to continue enriching
uranium, saying, 'If we show weakness in front of the enemies, they will
increase their expectations.'" If both sides refuse to back off for fear of
showing weakness, then prospects for conflict are real, despite the repeated
analyses, like that of The Economist that the use of nuclear weapons against
Iran would be politically and morally impossible. As one unnamed
administration official has said (The New York Times, February 24, 2007),
"No one has defined where the red line is that we cannot let the Iranians
step over."

What we are seeing now is the conservative message machine preparing the
country to accept the ideas of a nuclear war and nation destruction against
Iran. The technique used is the "slippery slope." It is done by degrees.
Like the proverbial frog in the pot of water - if the heat is turned up
slowly the frog gets used to the heat and eventually boils to death - the
American public is getting gradually acclimated to the idea of war with
Iran.

* First, describe Iran as evil - part of the axis of evil. An inherently
evil person will inevitably do evil things and can't be negotiated with. An
entire evil nation is a threat to other nations.
* Second, describe Iran's leader as a "Hitler" who is inherently "evil" and
cannot be reasoned with. Refuse to negotiate with him.
* Then repeat the lie that Iran is on the verge of having nuclear weapons -
weapons of mass destruction. IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei says
they are at best many years away.
* Call nuclear development "an existential threat" - a threat to our very
existence.
* Then suggest a single "surgical" "attack" on Natanz and make it seem
acceptable.
* Then find a reason to call the attack "self-defense" - or better
protection for our troops from the EFPs, or single-shot canister bombs.
* Claim, without proof and without anyone even taking responsibility for the
claim, that the Iranian government at its highest level is supplying deadly
weapons to Shiite militias attacking our troops, while not mentioning the
fact that Saudi Arabia is helping Sunni insurgents attacking our troops.
* Give "protecting our troops" as a reason for attacking Iran without
getting new authorization from Congress. Claim that the old authorization
for attacking Iraq implied doing "whatever is necessary to protect our
troops" from Iranian intervention in Iraq.
* Argue that de-escalation in Iraq would "bleed" our troops, "weaken"
America, and lead to defeat. This sets up escalation as a winning policy, if
not in Iraq then in Iran.
* Get the press to go along with each step.
* Never mention the words "preventive nuclear war" or "national
destruction." When asked, say, "All options are on the table." Keep the
issue of nuclear war and its consequences from being seriously discussed by
the national media.
* Intimidate Democratic presidential candidates into agreeing, without using
the words, that nuclear war should be "on the table." This makes nuclear war
and nation destruction bipartisan and even more acceptable. 

Progressives managed to blunt the "surge" idea by telling the truth about
"escalation." Nuclear war against Iran and nation destruction constitute the
ultimate escalation.

The time has come to stop the attempt to make a nuclear war against Iran
palatable to the American public. We do not believe that most Americans want
to start a nuclear war or to impose nation destruction on the people of
Iran. They might, though, be willing to support a tit-for-tat "surgical"
"attack" on Natanz in retaliation for small canister bombs and to end Iran's
early nuclear capacity.

It is time for America's journalists and political leaders to put two and
two together, and ask the fateful question: Is the Bush administration
seriously preparing for nuclear war and nation destruction? If the
conventional GBU-28s will do the job, then why not take nuclear war off the
table in the name of controlling the spread of nuclear weapons? If GBU-28s
won't do the job, then it is all the more important to have that discussion.

This should not be a distraction from Iraq. The general issue is escalation
as a policy, both in Iraq and in Iran. They are linked issues, not separate
issues. We have learned from Iraq what lack of public scrutiny does.

George Lakoff is a Senior Fellow at the Rockridge Institute. Lakoff is
Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. 

======

http://www.ichblog.eu/content/view/752/1/

======
*****************************************************************
 2 Las Vegas SUN: Bogden suspects politics as reason for his ouster

Today: March 02, 2007 at 7:8:58 PST

By Sam Skolnik &ltsam.skolnik@lasvegassun.com&gt, Las Vegas Sun
Las Vegas Sun

Ousted U.S. Attorney Daniel Bogden said Thursday that he suspects he
was fired for political reasons.

Speaking one day after being forced from office, Bogden said he
placed a half-dozen phone calls to high-ranking Justice Department
officials in Washington after being told on Dec. 7 that he had to
step down.

Those officials told him that "my performance, and that of my
office, was not the reason," he said in a telephone interview from
his home. "I suspected it was political at that point," Bogden said.

The last official he spoke with told him that the decision was
reached at the highest levels of the Justice Department.

"I can speculate as to different ideas," he said, "but I've never
been given a definite answer."

But Bogden would not elaborate Thursday, or name the Justice
officials with whom he had spoken.

Bogden is one of seven U.S. attorneys, most from Western states, who
are being forced from office for reasons the Bush administration
will not disclose.

U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president. Nonetheless,
congressional Democrats have argued that the administration targeted
prosecutors who were aggressively pursuing white-collar crime or
crimes involving Republican lawmakers.

Democrats in the House and the Senate have called for hearings into
the dismissals.

Bogden disclosed Thursday that he received a letter Tuesday asking
him to testify at a hearing next Tuesday before the House Judiciary
Committee's subcommittee on commercial and administrative law.

The subject: House Resolution 580, a measure that would limit
"interim" U.S. attorneys appointed by the U.S. attorney general to
serving no more than 120 days.

The House bill Bogden was asked to address would modify a USA
Patriot Act provision that authorizes the attorney general to
appoint interim U.S. attorneys for indefinite periods.

Critics contend that the little-noticed provision was installed to
allow the White House to sidestep congressional confirmation
hearings for the U.S. attorneys.

Bogden said he declined to appear voluntarily, but added that he
will appear if compelled to by subpoena. (He told the Sun in an
earlier interview that as a longtime Justice Department employee, he
wound find it difficult to testify.)

Although the Justice Department named interim replacements for most
of the departing U.S. attorneys before they left office, that has
not happened in Nevada.

Late Wednesday, however, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Steven Myhre
received a call from a Justice Department official asking him to
serve, starting Thursday, as acting U.S. attorney for Nevada, said
Natalie Collins, a spokeswoman for the office. Myhre agreed to take
the post, she said.

Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse did not return two
calls to his Washington office Thursday.

Bogden, and presumably the other fired U.S. attorneys, could end up
being asked to testify before both the Senate and House. Sen. Dianne
Feinstein, D-Calif., has said that she would likely subpoena them to
appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Although a Justice Department official testified before a Senate
committee that the firings were made because of poor job
performance, Bogden had plenty of reason to believe otherwise.

Over a five-day period in March 2003, a team of Justice Department
officials conducted an evaluation of the office's workings, its
leadership and its relationships with other federal agencies such as
the FBI.

"The overall evaluation was very positive," the report said.

Indeed, the report concluded that Bogden and his top assistants were
respected by the other attorneys in the office and by federal
agencies in Nevada, and that the office enjoyed "an excellent
reputation and excellent relations" with all levels of the federal
judiciary. Sam Skolnik can be reached at 474-7406 or at
sam.skolnik@lasvegassun.com.

All contents copyright 2005 Las Vegas SUN, Inc.
*****************************************************************
 3 [NYTr] CIA blunder 'prompted Korean nuclear race'
 
Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 19:07:43 -0600 (CST)


Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit
 
sent by Simon McGuinness

[Proven wrong about Iraq, now shown to have been wrong about North Korea
.. but right about Iran?  Unlikely.  -SMcG]

The Independentr - 02 March 2007 
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2318711.ece

CIA blunder 'prompted Korean nuclear race' 

By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles 

The United States appears to have made a major intelligence blunder over
North Korea's nuclear weapons programme, one that may have exacerbated
tensions with Pyongyang over the past four years and goaded Kim Jong-Il
into pressing ahead with last October's live nuclear test, intelligence
and Bush administration officials have said. 

The blunder does not concern the plutonium-based bomb technology that
North Korea used in its test and has clearly been developing for
decades. Rather it concerns the assessment, in a Central Intelligence
Agency report to Congress in November 2002, that North Korea was also
pursuing a parallel uranium enrichment programme capable of providing
the raw material for two or more nuclear weapons a year, starting
"mid-decade".

That prompted the US to cut off oil supplies to Pyongyang, to which
North Korea responded by throwing out international weapons inspectors
and ratcheting up its plutonium bomb programme.

But now many intelligence officials doubt whether the North Koreans have
a viable uranium enrichment programme, and administration officials have
begun wondering if they could not have handled the North Korean crisis
much more smartly if they had been in less of a hurry to get
confrontational.

On Tuesday, a veteran intelligence official called Joseph DeTrani told a
Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that the government's certainty
about the programme's existence was only at "the mid-confidence level",
agency-speak meaning the information is not fully corroborated and some
officials hold other views.

On Wednesday, the Director of National Intelligence declassified a
report on North Korea which stated: "The degree of progress towards
producing enriched uranium remains unknown."

Non-government weapons experts including David Kay and David Albright -
both veterans of the Iraq intelligence fiasco - see such statements as
the beginning of a full retraction and an admission that the CIA and
other agencies jumped to conclusions based on insufficient evidence.

"The evidence doesn't support the extrapolation," Mr Albright, now
president of the private Institute for Science and International
Security in Washington, told The New York Times. "The extrapolation went
too far."

The extrapolation was based, principally, on seemingly solid evidence
that North Korea obtained about 20 centrifuges for the production of
enriched uranium from Abdul Qadeer Khan, the "father" of Pakistan's atom
bomb, in 2000. When it transpired that North Korea was also buying
aluminium tubes - not unlike the aluminium tubes so widely mentioned in
connection with Iraq's (non-existent) nuclear programme - the CIA and
the Bush administration saw a "smoking gun" that convinced them the
enriched uranium programme was up and running.

Mr Albright said the aluminium tubes were relatively weak and were not
suitable for mass-producing centrifuges for a bomb programme as the US
government suspected. The tubes the North Koreans bought were "very easy
to get and not controlled" by global export agencies because they were
regarded as largely harmless.

So the best assessment now seems to be that the North Koreans were
stalled in their ambitions for lack of raw materials. "The
administration appears to have made a very costly decision that has
resulted in a fourfold increase in the nuclear weapons of North Korea,"
Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a members of the Armed Services
Committee, said. "If that was based in part on mixing up North Korea's
ambitions with their accomplishments, it's important."

The apparent blunder is likely to renew questions about the reliability
and the political slanting of US intelligence that emerged after the
2003 invasion of Iraq, and the failure to find any sort of biological,
chemical and nuclear weapons programmes the Bush administration talked
about in justifying its pre-emptive war.

A similar debate about weapons intelligence and politics is raging over
Iran, as the Bush administration ratchets up its rhetoric against
Tehran, and the Democrat-controlled Congress worries that he is planning
another war in the Middle East.

The North Korean case is different, not least because it is the
administration itself which seems to be doing the back-pedalling. That
may be linked to North Korea's agreement to readmit weapons inspectors.
The Bush administration may prefer to sow doubts about its assessments
now rather than face greater embarrassment later. 
       
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 4 Guardian Unlimited: N. Korea Delegation Arrives in Calif. 

From the Associated Press

Friday March 2, 2007 12:31 AM

AP Photo TOK802

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - A small delegation of North Koreans arrived 
in the United States on Thursday ahead of disarmament talks in 
New York, but the lead negotiator, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye 
Gwan, was not seen among them.

  Kim either did not travel with his fellow countrymen, or 
bypassed the dozens of journalists waiting as they passed through 
a commercial airline terminal at San Francisco International 
Airport.

  Some of the North Koreans appeared bewildered by the 
photographers and reporters who shouted questions at them in 
Korean. They did not answer.

  One woman who greeted the delegation handed a member flowers. 
She told Associated Press Television News later that she hoped 
the upcoming talks would bring peace so she can again visit her 
homeland.

 The group was hustled into limousines and left with a police 
escort.

  Kim and U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill are 
to meet Monday and Tuesday in New York to discuss first steps 
toward establishing normal ties after decades of hostility that 
followed the 1950-53 Korean War.

       Kim was to meet privately Thursday with non-governmental 
organizations in California, according to the State Department.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
*****************************************************************
 5 Guardian Unlimited: NKorea Reiterates Denuclearization Pledge 

From the Associated Press

Friday March 2, 2007 6:46 AM

AP Photo SEL810

By BURT HERMAN

Associated Press Writer

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - North Korea 's No. 2 leader reiterated 
Thursday his country's pledge to abandon its nuclear weapons, 
while the impoverished nation's push for a resumption of aid was 
blocked at its first high-level talks with South Korea since 
conducting an atomic test.

 Kim Yong Nam said ``the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula 
is the dying wish'' of the country's founding president, Kim Il 
Sung, the father of current leader Kim Jong Il.

    North Korea ``will make efforts to realize it,'' he told 
South Korean Unification Minister Lee Jae-joung in Pyongyang, the 
North's capital.

  Lee pressed for North Korea to follow through on its 
breakthrough Feb. 13 agreement with the U.S. and four other 
countries to shut down its sole operating nuclear reactor in 60 
days, and to eventually dismantle all its atomic programs.

   ``It is important to make efforts to ensure that South and 
North Korea cooperate and six countries each assume their 
responsibilities,'' Lee said.

   Kim Yong Nam also called for the two Koreas to work together 
to reunify the peninsula, which was divided after World War II 
and remains officially at war since the 1950-53 Korean War ended 
in a cease-fire, not a peace treaty.

  On Friday, South Korea refused to immediately restore aid to 
North Korea until it makes progress on dismantling its nuclear 
weapons program.

   In a final agreement, the North reiterated its commitment to 
the international pact where reached earlier this month. The two 
Koreas ``agreed to make joint efforts for a smooth 
implementation'' of the nuclear agreement in a final statement 
issued after the talks.

   Also Friday, the two sides agreed to resume reunions of 
families split across their border.

  A South Korean official said on condition of anonymity due to 
the sensitivity of the ongoing talks that reunions over a video 
link will be held this month, with face-to-face meetings set for 
May.

   The reunions are a highly emotional issue between the North 
and South as many of those hoping to see relatives are elderly 
and running out of time to see their families. Millions of 
Koreans were separated following the division of the Korean 
peninsula in 1945 and the 1950-53 Korean War.

   The North had been expected to agree this week to restarting 
the reunions, which were put on hold last year after the missile 
tests.

  South Korea has been one of the North's main aid sources since 
the two nations held their first and only summit in 2000. This 
week's meetings are the 20th Cabinet-level talks since then.

  But South Korea halted rice and fertilizer shipments to the 
North after it test-fired a barrage of missiles last July, and 
relations worsened following North Korea's Oct. 9 underground 
nuclear test.

    The provocations were the most serious challenge yet to South 
Korea's ``sunshine'' policy of engagement with its longtime foe, 
which has been criticized by conservatives for helping prop up 
the North's totalitarian regime without requiring reforms or 
disarmament.

 The sides will hold meetings on economic cooperation to discuss 
aid in late April - after the deadline for the North to close its 
reactor.

    Earlier over dinner, the North's main negotiator at the 
talks, Senior Cabinet Councilor Kwon Ho Ung, said ``a wide road 
will be opened for the drastic development of North-South 
relations'' if certain measures are implemented. He did not 
specify them.

  Last month's six-nation nuclear agreement has raised hopes it 
will foster a relaxation of regional tensions, since the deal 
also provides for North Korea to hold talks to normalize ties 
with Japan and the United States, both of which are scheduled to 
begin next week.

 The nuclear pact also calls for negotiations to finally 
establish a peace agreement between the Koreas.

  South Korea's President Roh Moo-hyun urged in a speech Thursday 
in Seoul that the agreement ``be successfully implemented so that 
a peace regime can be firmly established on the Korean 
peninsula.''

 Amid intense diplomacy to ensure the disarmament deal goes 
forward, the State Department's No. 2 diplomat, John Negroponte, 
arrived in Japan Thursday on the first stop of an Asian trip 
expected to focus on the North Korea issue. He will also visit 
South Korea and China.

 Meanwhile, South Korean Foreign Minister Song Min-soon left 
Thursday for Washington for talks with Secretary of State 
Condoleezza Rice on North Korea. He is also set to travel to 
Moscow.

                                 ---

   Associated Press reporters Kwang-tae Kim and Bo-mi Lim in 
Seoul contributed to this report.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
*****************************************************************
 6 Digital Chosunilbo: U.S. Admits Doubts Over N.Korean Uranium Program

Updated Mar.2,2007 11:16 KST

A newly declassified U.S. report shows the U.S. having doubts about
a uranium enrichment program it has for many years accused North
Korea of possessing. The Office of the Director of National
Intelligence on Wednesday declassified a portion of the most recent,
one-page update circulated to top national security officials about
the status of North Korea¡¯s uranium program. "The degree of
progress towards producing enriched uranium remains unknown," the
New York Times reported it as saying.

According to the daily, the U.S. government had "high confidence"
that North Korea bought centrifuges and aluminum tubes needed for
uranium enrichment and sought capacity for uranium enrichment. But
there is only ¡°moderate confidence¡± that the program continues and
doubts about how much progress the program has made.

Up until recently, the Bush administration maintained a hardline
policy, insisting that North Korea has a secret uranium enrichment
program. But now, U.S. intelligence officials are publicly admitting
to doubts. The result has been new questions about the Bush
administration¡¯s decision to confront North Korea in 2002, the
newspaper said.

The Washington Post also reported Tuesday that the Bush
administration backed down from its long-standing allegation that
North Korea has a covert uranium enrichment program, while several
experts admitted gaps in U.S. intelligence that sparked a crisis
over North Korea's nuclear ambition.

David A. Kay, a nuclear expert and former official who in 2003 and
2004 led the American hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,
said, "The leap of logic turned evidence of (North Korea's)
equipment purchases into 'a significant production capability.'" At
a hearing at the Senate Armed Services Committee held on Tuesday,
Joseph DeTrani, the intelligence official in charge of North Korean
affairs, said, "We still have confidence that (North Korea's highly
enriched uranium) program is in existence - at the mid-confidence
level. (That level) means the information is interpreted in various
ways, or we have alternative views,¡± the Post reported.

It is unclear why the new assessment is being published now. But
officials suggest the timing could be linked to North Korea¡¯s
recent agreement to reopen its doors to international nuclear
inspectors. As a result, the officials said, intelligence agencies
face the potential embarrassment that their assessment will, as in
the case of Iraq¡¯s weapons of mass destruction, be compared to what
is actually found there. "This may be preventative," one American
diplomat told the New York Times.

(englishnews@chosun.com )
*****************************************************************
 7 Digital Chosunilbo: N.Korea Denounces GNP Despite Seoul's Pleas

Updated Mar.2,2007 12:07 KST


North Korea resumed its attack on South Korea¡¯s conservative Grand
National Party on Thursday, only a day after the South Korean
delegation to inter-Korean ministerial talks asked Pyongyang to ease
off. The Rodong Shinmun, the Workers¡¯ Party daily, reported that
¡°ultra-conservative¡± forces including the GNP are desperate to win
the presidential election on South Korea late this year.
¡°Independence and democracy will be facilitated on South Korea and
inter-Korean relations will go smoothly if progressive forces win
the election. But if conservative forces take power, inter-Korean
relations will return to an era of confrontation,¡± the daily
warned. ¡°The South Korean people cannot sleep soundly for even for
a minute without defeating the pro-American conservative forces. The
South could lose everything achieved by the bloody sacrifice of its
people if it fails to prevent the conservatives from taking power.¡±

According to the Choson Sinbo, the mouthpiece of the pro-Pyongyang
General Association of Korean Residents in Japan or Chongryon, the
North in the first session of the ministerial talks called on the
South to abolish the National Security Law by the first half of this
year. It called the decades-old law ¡°an obstacle to national
unification.¡± The Choson Sinbo said abolition of the law was a
¡°practical task South Korea must put into action immediately.¡± It
was the first time North Korea, which effectively dictates what the
Choson Sinbo writes, has gone to the length of setting a deadline.

Unification Minister Lee Jae-joung, who headed the South Korean
delegation to the ministerial talks, on Wednesday urged Pyongyang to
stop commenting on the South Korean political situation and
denouncing specific South Korean political party or presidential
hopeful.

(englishnews@chosun.com )
*****************************************************************
 8 Korea Times: US May Have Inflated N. Korea Allegations

    Hankooki.com > The Korea Times > Nation

The United States, which used some false and exaggerated
intelligence to make its case for invading Iraq, may also have
inflated some of its allegations against North Korea to justify a
hard-line policy toward the Stalinist regime, according to American
news reports.

U.S. President Bush W. Bush claimed in 2002 that North Korea was
making highly enriched uranium (HEU) for nuclear weapons when there
was no intelligence that it was doing so.

Now there are new questions about the administration¡¯s assertions
that a bank in Macau knowingly laundered proceedings from North
Korean narcotics trafficking, cigarette smuggling and counterfeit
American currency, McClatchy Newspapers reported on Thursday.

An audit of the Banco Delta Asia¡¯s finances by accounting firm
Ernst & Young found no evidence that the bank had facilitated North
Korean money-laundering, either by circulating counterfeit U.S. bank
notes or by knowingly sheltering illicit earnings of the North
Korean government.

In a filing submitted to the Treasury Department last October,
Heller Ehrman LLP, the bank¡¯s New York law firm, reported that an
audit by the government of Macau also had found no evidence of
money-laundering.

The Treasury Department refused to discuss the findings of either
audit, as did the government of Macau and Ernst & Young.

``Taken together, the pronouncements raised questions about whether
the administration has been overstating its case against North
Korea, a heavily armed communist dictatorship that Bush included in
his `axis of evil¡¯ with Iran and Iraq under the late dictator
Saddam Hussein,¡¯¡¯ the report said.

The White House didn¡¯t respond immediately to a request for comment.

Opposition Democrats, in the meantime, said Thursday they will press
the Bush administration to explain the growing uncertainty
surrounding past US allegations about a secret North Korean uranium
enrichment program, according to the Associated Press.

The explosive U.S. accusations in 2002 led to a political standoff
with North Korea over its nuclear weapons program, but a US
intelligence official said Tuesday the United States is now less
certain about the uranium program¡¯s existence.

``We still have confidence that the program is in existence _ at the
mid-confidence level,¡¯¡¯ Joseph DeTrani, the North Korea mission
manager at the national intelligence director's office, told the
U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee.

Under U.S. intelligence definitions, that level ``means the
information is interpreted in various ways, we have alternative
views¡¯¡¯ or it is not fully corroborated, according to The New York
Times.

Democrats in Congress said the controversy harkens back to the
administration¡¯s past reliance on flawed intelligence, citing the
now discredited allegations that Saddam Hussein¡¯s Iraq was hiding
weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

jinryu@koreatimes.co.kr 03-02-2007 17:46
*****************************************************************
 9 AFP: US now uncertain about North Korean uranium program - 

Fri Mar 2, 3:45 AM ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Democrats vowed Thursday to press President 
George W. Bush's administration to explain growing uncertainty 
about US allegations of a secret North Korean uranium enrichment 
program.

The action comes as US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte
held talks Friday with Japanese leaders on a breakthrough nuclear
deal with North Korea.

Negroponte, on his first trip since taking his post, was starting an
Asian tour that will also take him to China and South Korea.

North Korea agreed in a six-nation pact on February 13 to shut a key
nuclear reactor in exchange for badly needed fuel aid.

The explosive US accusations in 2002 led to the political standoff
with North Korea over its nuclear weapons program, but a US
intelligence official said Tuesday the United States is now less
certain about the uranium program's existence.

"We still have confidence that the program is in existence -- at the
mid-confidence level," Joseph DeTrani, the North Korea mission
manager at the national intelligence director's office, told the US
Senate Armed Services Committee.

Under US intelligence definitions, that level "means the information
is interpreted in various ways, we have alternative views" or it is
not fully corroborated, according to The New York Times.

Democrats in Congress said the controversy harkens back to the
administration's past reliance on flawed intelligence, citing the
now-discredited allegations that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was hiding
weapons of mass destruction.

"This goes back to Iraq -- and goes back to Iran," Senate Majority
Leader Harry Reid (news, bio, voting record) told AFP. "It appears
that there are some who are saying that the intelligence -- even
with North Korea -- has been manipulated."

Democratic Senator Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record), the
chairman of the armed services committee, said Thursday a letter
would be sent to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and likely to
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, "with a series of questions" on
the matter.

"This is a very significant development potentially," Levin said.
"We want to get all the facts as we possibly can before we take any
steps beyond that, so the secretary will receive a letter with our
questions by Monday."

The top Republican on the armed services panel, Senator John Warner
(news, bio, voting record), said he also expected to sign the
letter, as the issue "should be clarified."

The US accusations in 2002 that North Korea was running a
clandestine uranium program, in addition to its declared
plutonium-based nuclear operation, led to the collapse of a 1994
denuclearization deal with the Stalinist regime.

North Korea, which last month agreed to scrap its nuclear program in
a landmark deal, has denied having a covert uranium enrichment
program.

The New York Times said two unnamed US administration officials
suggested that if Washington had harbored the same doubts when it
leveled the accusation in 2002 as it does now, the negotiating
strategy with North Korea might have been different.

The tit-for-tat actions that led to Pyongyang's atomic bomb test in
October could conceivably have been avoided, the Times said, citing
the officials.

"The question now is whether we would be in the position of having
to get the North Koreans to give up a sizable arsenal if this had
been handled differently," an unidentified senior administration
official was quoted as saying in the Times.

The White House referred questions to the intelligence community.

"We've said for a long time, North Korea is an opaque regime," White
House spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters.

"I'm sure the intelligence community continually tried to assess and
reassess and look at the information that they have," she said.

US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters Thursday
that North Korea admitted in 2002 to having a highly enriched
uranium program at the time, before then denying its existence.

He said Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf confirmed in his memoir
that the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, had
sold North Korea equipment for the program.

Pressed on whether Pyongyang purchased the equipment but did not get
an enrichment program running, McCormack also referred questions to
the intelligence agencies for an assessment of "where it stands
right now."

North Korea agreed at six-nation talks in Beijing last month to
scrap its nuclear program in exchange for economic aid and
diplomatic benefits.

Under the multi-phase February 13 agreement worked out at the talks
involving China, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the United States,
North Korea had 60 days to shut down its Yongbyon nuclear facility,
invite back international nuclear inspectors and declare all its
nuclear programs.

A high-ranking State Department official said Thursday that
Pyongyang need to make progress on its "abysmal" human rights record
before Washington would consider normalizing relations.

"We believe a discussion on human rights should take place prior to
a full normalization of relations," Jay Lefkowitz, special envoy for
human rights in North Korea, testified before the House Foreign
Affairs Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific and the Global Environment.

"Since my testimony last April, the North Korean government
regrettably has taken no significant steps to improve its abysmal
human rights record," he said.

A recently published UN report accused Pyongyang of crimes against
humanity, as more than 200,000 persons remain imprisoned in camps in
which more than 400,000 have perished in 30 years.

Copyright © 2007 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
 10 [NYTr] US Picks Design for New Nuclear Warheads
 
Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 19:08:09 -0600 (CST)


Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit
 
Earlier coverage:

US Reveals Newly Designed Nuclear Warheads (RHC, Jan 26, 2007)
http://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/Week-of-Mon-20070122/057585.html

The USA's New, Untested, Risky Hybrid Nukes (NY Times, Jan 8, 2007)
http://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/Week-of-Mon-20070108/055923.html

AP - Mar 2, 2007
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/N/NEW_WARHEAD?SITE=NMALJ&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

Govt. Picks Design for Nuclear Warhead

By H. JOSEF HEBERT
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration took a major step Friday
toward building a new generation of nuclear warheads, selecting a
design that is being touted as safer, more secure and more easily
maintained than today's arsenal.

A team of scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will
proceed with the weapons design with an anticipation that the first
warheads may be ready by 2012 as a replacement for Trident missiles on
submarines.

The new weapons program, which has received cautious support from
Congress, was immediately criticized by some nuclear nonproliferation
groups as evidence the government wants to expand nuclear weapons
production - not move toward eliminating the stockpile.

Critics also maintain that it sends the wrong signal around the world
by pushing a new warhead - although characterized as a replacement for
existing ones- at a time the United States is trying to curtail nuclear
weapons development in North Korea and Iran.

Some lawmakers agreed.

"The minute you begin to put more sophisticated warheads on the
existing fleet, you are essentially creating a new nuclear weapon. And
it's just a matter of time before other nation's do the same," said
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. "This could serve to encourage the very
proliferation we are trying to prevent."

Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Calif., chair of the House Armed Services
strategic forces subcommittee, expressed cautious support, but promised
"a long evaluation process" in Congress to assure the warhead will do
what is promised without future underground testing.

Nuclear underground tests have not been done since a ban in 1992.

"This is not about starting a new nuclear arms race," countered Thomas
P. D'Agostino, acting head of the DOE's National Nuclear Security
Administration, which oversees the nuclear weapons programs.

Steve Henry, deputy assistant to the secretary of defense for nuclear
matters, said the new design is hoped to lead to fewer warheads being
needed. He said it has not changed administration determination to
reduce the number of deployed warheads to fewer than 2,000 - the lowest
number since the 1950s.

There are believed to be about 6,000 warheads deployed and another
4,000 in reserve.

D'Agostino, briefing reporter on the design decision, said the intent
is to develop a safer, more secure warhead to assure increased
reliability without the need for underground nuclear tests.

He cautioned that the program remains in the early stages and that in
coming months the Livermore team will expand on its design work to give
a better estimate on overall costs, the scope of the program and a
schedule toward full-scale engineering and production.

The administration is asking for $119 million for the next fiscal year
for design work. The officials said they could not say how much the
program eventually will cost.

The so-called "reliable replacement warhead" has been the focus of a
yearlong, intense design competition between Livermore in California
and nuclear scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New
Mexico - the government's two premier nuclear weapons labs.

Both of the labs developed proposals and at one point there was
discussion to combine the designs into a single program. But that was
rejected and D'Agostino made clear Friday the program would be
Livermore's to develop.

The Livermore design was based on an existing warhead that reportedly
had been exploded in an underground test in the 1980s, although never
actually put into the stockpile. The Los Alamos design was based on a
totally fresh approach but without a history of actual testing.

It was this "very robust test pedigree" - as D'Agostino put it - that
gave Livermore the upper hand.

"It ... gave us the confidence ... to certify and go forward without
underground testing," he said, adding that without that assurance "we
were not going to go forward."

Congress authorized design work on the new warhead in 2005, but with a
stipulation that its primary goal be to assure the reliability of the
nuclear arsenal without resumption of bomb testing, and that it will
help in the consolidation of the Energy Department's nuclear weapons
complex.

Some lawmakers have also questioned whether the new warhead is needed,
especially in light of a recent finding that the plutonium in the
current warheads will last nearly 100 years, twice as long as
previously thought.

Some nuclear weapons critics warned the warhead could lead to an
increased likelihood of future testing, calling it a ploy to rebuild -
not dismantle - the nuclear weapons infrastructure.

"This is a first installment on a plan to develop and produce warheads
on an ongoing cyclical basis ... similar to what we had during the Cold
War," said Lisbeth Gronlund, a scientist at the Union of Concerned
Scientists, a nuclear nonproliferation advocacy group.

John Isaacs, executive director of the Center for Arms Control and
Nonproliferation, said there's no need for a new warhead when "the U.S.
nuclear stockpile, based on 50 years of research and over 1,000
underground nuclear tests, has been confirmed safe and reliable for at
least another half-century."

"The bottom line is we're returning to what we used to do in the Cold
War years. That's the message to the world," said Hans Kristensen,
director of the nuclear information project of the Federation of
American Scientists.

[Associated Press writer Scott Lindlaw in San Francisco contributed to
this story.]

) 2007 The Associated Press.

       
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*****************************************************************
 11 Guardian Unlimited: Analysis: U.S. Intel on Nukes in Doubt

From the Associated Press

Friday March 2, 2007 7:16 AM

By GEORGE JAHN

Associated Press Writer

VIENNA, Austria (AP) - New doubts are arising about the accuracy 
of U.S. intelligence on the nuclear programs in North Korea and 
Iran, only a few years after faulty warnings about weapons of 
mass destruction helped President Bush justify the invasion of 
Iraq.

        North Korea agreed earlier this month to dismantle its 
plutonium-producing nuclear facilities in exchange for economic 
aid and security assurances from the United States and four other 
world or regional powers. The pact successfully put aside for now 
the possibility of military action.

      But the Western standoff with Iran remains tense. The Bush 
administration says it won't rule out an attack if Tehran refuses 
to end its nuclear enrichment program.

  However, in both cases, U.S. intelligence is backing away from 
at least some of its once-strident pronouncements raising the 
tension level with Pyongyang and Tehran - along with Saddam 
Hussein's Iraq, members of Bush's ``axis of evil.''

  Just weeks after the Feb. 13 six-nation pact with North Korea, 
new U.S. statements suggest that Washington might have overstated 
a purported secret North Korean second-track nuclear program. The 
result was that it derailed what could have been a peaceful 
resolution to the North Korean issue more than four years ago.

     The U.S. alleged then that North Korea had a large-scale gas 
centrifuge plant for uranium enrichment - the same program Iran 
now is developing. The Bush administration used that information 
to scrap a plan developed under the Clinton administration to 
supply energy to the North in exchange for its pledge to mothball 
its plutonium program.

        Tensions rose and Pyongyang withdrew from the Nuclear 
Nonproliferation Treaty in January 2003, sparking the process 
that led to its test of an atomic weapon late last year.

     Now, however, Bush administration officials are toning down 
assertions that such a program had been developed. Intelligence 
official Joseph DeTrani, in testimony to the Senate Armed 
Services Committee, said Tuesday belief that such a program 
exists was now ``at the mid-confidence level.''

     The ``mid-confidence'' terminology means that analysts have 
differing views or credible information exists but has not been 
fully corroborated. That's a notable departure from the previous 
U.S. view of ``high confidence'' that the North was working on 
such activities.

  Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill said Wednesday 
that the U.S. knows that North Korea has bought equipment that 
could be used only for uranium enrichment. But he expressed 
uncertainty about the program's current state.

   ``How far they've gotten, whether they've actually been able 
to produce highly enriched uranium at this time - I mean these 
are issues that intelligence analysts grapple with,'' Hill told a 
hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. ``But what we 
know is they have made the purchases, and we need to have 
complete clarity on this program.''

    A U.S. government official, speaking on condition of 
anonymity because of the subject's sensitivity, said DeTrani was 
commenting on acquisitions for the program and not the program 
itself, and there was no change in the intelligence assessment. 
Varying degrees of certainty were always reflected in the CIA's 
judgment, the official said.

  The U.S. intelligence community found with ``high confidence'' 
in 2002 that North Korea obtained components that could be used 
to enrich uranium. However, there has always been less confidence 
in the analysis of what precisely North Korea planned to do with 
the components, the official said.

  It was a worst-case scenario when a CIA paper in 2002 stated 
that the plant ``could produce enough weapons-grade uranium for 
two or more nuclear weapons per year when fully operational - 
which could be as soon as mid-decade.''

  The next line of the paper highlighted the uncertainty, 
reminding readers that North Korea's nuclear program was ``a 
difficult intelligence collection target.''

    President Bush said at the time that Pyongyang was 
``enriching uranium, with the desire of developing a weapon.''

  Chief U.N nuclear inspector Mohamed ElBaradei has been invited 
to Pyongyang in mid-March for a visit expected to result in the 
return of his inspectors after a four-year hiatus.

  The U.S. intelligence record on Iran's nuclear activities also 
is being questioned.

   Several senior diplomats familiar with work of the 
Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, which ElBaradei 
heads, told The Associated Press that while U.S. intelligence 
helped reveal Iran's secret nuclear program in 2002, none of the 
information provided the U.N. nuclear watchdog by American spy 
agencies since then had led to meaningful leads. Still unproven 
is whether Tehran is using the cover of a nuclear power plant 
program to try to make atomic weapons.

  One of the diplomats - who, like others demanded anonymity 
because he was discussing confidential information - said that in 
the case of Iran, lack of good intelligence was due to ``no 
presence on the ground.'' Intelligence is increasingly scarce 
because ``the Iranians have tightened up on their operations'' 
since the 2002 revelations about their secret uranium enrichment 
program, he added.

     Broad assessments often hinge on detailed information about 
equipment, which can be difficult to prove.

  For North Korea, a key U.S. assertion that Pyongyang was trying 
to create an industrial-scale uranium enrichment program parallel 
to its plutonium operations was based on evidence that the North 
Koreans had purchased or were trying to buy thousands of highly 
machined aluminum tubes, he said. The CIA cited Iraqi purchases 
of such tubes to support its assertion about a purported nuclear 
weapons program under Saddam.

 A CIA fact sheet made public four years ago claimed ``clear 
evidence indicating that the North has begun constructing a 
centrifuge facility,'' and estimated it could produce material 
for at least two or more nuclear weapons a year by 2005.

  Former U.N. nuclear inspector David Albright, who recently 
visited Pyongyang and held talks on the North's nuclear program, 
does not question U.S. assertions that the North bought a few 
dozen centrifuges from the same Pakistani black market network 
that supplied Iran's program.

  ``However, a large centrifuge plant likely does not exist; 
perhaps it never did,'' says Albright in a report of his 
Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security 
that tracks the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs.

 The diplomat agreed, noting it made no sense for the 
energy-starved North - which is to get the equivalent of up to 1 
million tons of heavy fuel oil under the nuclear disarmament deal 
- to run such a program consuming record amounts of power at a 
time it was making good progress on its plutonium-based arms 
program.

                                 ---

  Associated Press writers Foster Klug in Washington and Burt 
Herman in Seoul, South Korea, contributed to this report.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
*****************************************************************
 12 BBC NEWS: US may be 'undermining' Pakistan

Friday, 2 March 2007, 19:05 GMT

By Shahzeb Jillani BBC News, Washington

Mr Durrani warned the US not to push too hard

Pakistan's ambassador to the US has warned that American pressure 
to do more in the war against terror could undermine President 
Musharraf.

He said the country could be destabilised as a result.

Ambassador Mehmud Ali Durrani told the BBC that recent US 
congressional threats to cut off military aid to Pakistan could 
create major problems.

Pressure growing

The ambassador's statement is an attempt to paint a doomsday
scenario for Pakistan if the US continues to step up pressure on
Pakistan's military leadership.

Pakistan has thousands of troops near the Afghan border


Pakistan is the only Muslim country armed with nuclear weapons and
the thought of "a destabilised Pakistan" where staunchly
anti-American Islamists could prevail over an apparently moderate
leader has long worried many in Washington.

Ever since President Musharraf signed a controversial peace deal
with the militants in North Waziristan last September, US pressure
has been steadily growing on Pakistan to act more decisively in
crushing the Taleban and al-Qaeda threat in its tribal areas.

Pakistan has been trying, rather unsuccessfully, to convince the
western world that the country is doing, and has done, all it can to
tackle the extremist threat.

'Frustration'

The Pakistani ambassador's statement reflects the frustration
Pakistani officials are experiencing on this front.

He told the BBC: "We are telling Americans that Pakistan is your
friend. We want to help you. Let's work together instead of exerting
undue pressure on us."

Mr Cheney met President Musharraf earlier this week

In January, the Democrat-controlled US House of Representatives
passed a measure effectively linking all future military sales to
the country's performance in the fighting the war on terror.

The proposed legislation is currently under consideration in the US
Senate.

The White House publicly says it values the co-operation from
President Musharraf and does not support putting new conditions on
the country.

* BBC Copyright
*****************************************************************
 13 OpEd News: New Nuclear Warheads for Bush

It was reported today that the Bush administration has decided to
move forward with their plans to 'refurbish' the existing nuclear
arsenal, designating the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in
California over the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico for
the project if it happens to get the funding from the, so-far,
reluctant Congress. The warheads are said to be destined for the
nation's 'sea-based' nuclear weapons as part of the Trident
submarine-launched ballistic missile system.

In September 2000, PNAC drafted a report entitled "Rebuilding
America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New
Century." The conservative foundation- funded report was authored by
Bill Kristol, John Bolton and others. The report called for: ". . .
significant, separate allocation of forces and budgetary resources
over the next two decades for missile defense," and claimed that,
despite the "residue of investments first made in the mid- and late
1980s, over the past decade, the pace of innovation within the
Pentagon had slowed measurably." Also that, "without the driving
challenge of the Soviet military threat, efforts at innovation had
lacked urgency."

The PNAC report asserted that "while long-range precision strikes
will certainly play an increasingly large role in U.S. military
operations, American forces must remain deployed abroad, in large
numbers for decades and that U.S. forces will continue to operate
many, if not most, of today's weapons systems for a decade or more."
The PNAC document encouraged the military to "develop and deploy
global missile defenses to defend the American homeland and American
allies, and to provide a secure basis for U.S. power projection
around the world."

The paper claimed that, "Potential rivals such as China were anxious
to exploit these technologies broadly, while adversaries like Iran,
Iraq and North Korea were rushing to develop ballistic missiles and
nuclear weapons as a deterrent to American intervention in regions
they sought to dominate. Also that, information and other new
technologies – as well as widespread technological and weapons
proliferation – were creating a 'dynamic' that might threaten
America's ability to exercise its 'dominant' military power."

In reference to the nation's nuclear forces, the PNAC document
asserted that, "In reconfiguring its nuclear force, the United
States also must counteract the effects of the proliferation of
ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction that may soon
allow lesser states to deter U.S. military action by threatening
U.S. allies and the American homeland itself."

"The (Clinton) administration's stewardship of the nation's
deterrent capability has been described by Congress as "erosion by
design," the group chided. The authors further warned that, "U.S.
nuclear force planning and related arms control policies must take
account of a larger set of variables than in the past, including the
growing number of small nuclear arsenals –from North Korea to
Pakistan to, perhaps soon, Iran and Iraq – and a modernized and
expanded Chinese nuclear force."

In addition, they counseled, "there may be a need to develop a new
family of nuclear weapons designed to address new sets of military
requirements, such as would be required in targeting the very deep
underground, hardened bunkers that are being built by many of our
potential adversaries."

The 2002 PNAC document is a mirrored synopsis of the Bush
administration's foreign policy today. President Bush is projecting
a domineering image of the United States around the world which has
provoked lesser equipped countries to desperate, unconventional
defenses; or resigned them to a humiliating surrender to our rape of
their lands, their resources and their communities.

Bush intends for there to be more conquest - like in Iraq - as the
United States exercises its military force around the world; our
mandate, our justification, presumably inherent in the mere
possession of our instruments of destruction.
Our folly is evident in the rejection of our ambitions by even the
closest of our allies, as we reject all entreaties to moderate our
manufactured mandate to conquer. Isolation is enveloping our nation
like the warming of the atmosphere and the creeping melt of our
planet's ancient glaciers. We are unleashing a new, unnecessary fear
between the nations of the world as we dissolve decades of firm
understandings about an America power which was to be guileless in
its unassailable defenses. The falseness of our diplomacy is
revealed in our scramble for 'useable', tactical nuclear missiles,
new weapons systems, and our new justifications for their use.

The PNAC 'Rebuilding America' report was used after the Sept. 11th
terrorist attacks to draft the 2002 document entitled "The National
Security Strategy of the United States," which for the first time in
the nation's history advocated "preemptive" attacks to prevent the
emergence of opponents the administration considered a threat to its
political and economic interests. It states that ". . . we will not
hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of
self-defense by acting preemptively against such terrorists, to
prevent them from doing harm against our people and our country."
And that, "To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our
adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively."

This military industry band of executives promoted the view, in and
outside of the White House that, " must be prepared to stop rogue
states and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten
or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and our
allies and friends. . . We must deter and defend against the threat
before it is unleashed."

Their strategy asserts that "The United States has long maintained
the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to
our national security. The greater the threat, the greater is the
risk of inaction - and the more compelling the case for taking
anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains
as to the time and place of the enemy's attack." So their plan is to
attack whomever, whenever they feel our security is threatened, no
matter if the nature and prevalence of the attack is uncertain. The
biggest threat to the World community is the proliferation of WMDs
here in the U.S., facilitated by a nest of former
military-industrial executives (military-industrial warriors) and
shareholders in the Defense department and throughout the Bush
administration.

The Bush administration's nuclear program is a shell game with their
ambitions hidden within Energy and Defense legislation, most under
the guise of research. Reuters, in October 2003, reported that the
Bush administration was proceeding with their plans to promote and
push for the expansion of the nation's nuclear arsenal with the
unveiling of an initiative produced by the 'Defense Science Board'.
The supporting document, named the "Future Strategic Strike Force",
outlines a reconfigured nuclear arsenal made up of smaller-scale
missiles which could be targeted at smaller countries and other
lower-scale targets. The report is a retreat from decades of
understanding that these destructive weapons were to be used as a
deterrent only; as a last resort.

Mohamed El Baradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy
Agency, had said as early as 2004 that U.S. development of new
nuclear weapons could hamper efforts to reach agreement with other
countries who might want to expand their nuclear programs; like Iran
and Pakistan, for example.

In September the Senate went along anyway with a White House push to
reduce the preparation time required for nuclear testing in Nevada;
clearing the way for a resumption of nuclear test explosions which
have been banned since 1992. It seeks to cut the time it would take
to restart testing nuclear weapons in the Nevada desert from three
years to two years. The Bush administration wants the period cut to
18 months.

Congress plans to build the first permanent U.S. nuclear waste
repository in the desert northwest of Las Vegas, scheduled to open
in 2010 and would hold up to 77,000 tons of radioactive waste. The
failed Energy bill that last emerged from Congress in 2004 would
have provided $580 million for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste
disposal project in 2004 - around $11 million less than Bush had
requested but far above a $425 million limit earlier endorsed by the
Senate.

The bill would have also provided $11 million for a new factory to
make plutonium "pits" for the next generation of nuclear weapons.
The last U.S. facility for manufacturing nuclear triggers closed in
1989. Democrats in Congress have been the slim thread which has held
back funds for these pernicious nuclear initiatives.

President Bush signed into law a Defense bill for 2004 which
included $9 billion in funding for research on the next generation
of nuclear weaponry.

"It's an important signal we're sending," President Bush remarked at
the signing of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal
Year 2004, "because, you see, the war on terror is different than
any war America has ever fought."

"Our enemies seek to inflict mass casualties, without fielding mass
armies," he cautioned. "They hide in the shadows, and they're often
hard to strike. The terrorists are cunning and ruthless and
dangerous, as the world saw on September the 11th, 2001. Yet these
killers are now facing the United States of America, and a great
coalition of responsible nations, and this threat to civilization
will be defeated."

However, this is a posture usually reserved for nation-states who
initiate or sponsor terrorists. The devastating neighboring effect
of a potential nuclear engagement would contaminate innocent
millions with the resulting radioactive fallout, and would not deter
individuals with no known base of operations. Yet, this
administration, for the first time in our nation's history,
contemplates using nuclear weapons on countries which themselves
have no nuclear capability, or pose no nuclear threat.

Gen. Lee Butler, of the Strategic Air Command, along with former Air
Force Secretary Thomas Reed, and Col. Michael Wheeler, made a report
in 1991 which recommended the targeting of our nuclear weaponry at
"every reasonable adversary around the globe." The report warned of
nuclear weapons states which are likely to emerge." They were aided
in their pursuit by, John Deutch, President Clinton's choice for
Defense Secretary; Fred Iklé, former Deputy Defense Secretary,
associated with Jonathan Pollard; future CIA Director R. James
Woolsey; and Condoleezza Rice, who was on the National Security
Council Staff, 1989-1991.

The new nuke report recommended that U.S. nuclear weapons be
re-targeted, where U.S. forces faced conventional "impending
annihilation ... at remote places around the globe," according to
William M. Arkin and Robert S. Norris, in their criticism of the
report in the April 1992 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists ("Tiny Nukes").

At the same time, two Los Alamos (Lockheed) nuclear weapons
scientists, Thomas Dowler and Joseph Howard, published an article in
1991 in the Strategic Review, titled "Countering the Threat of the
Well-Armed Tyrant: A Modest Proposal for Smaller Nuclear Weapons."
They argued that, "The existing U.S. nuclear arsenal had no
deterrent effect on Saddam and is unlikely to deter a future tyrant."

They argued for "the development of new nuclear weapons of very low
yields, with destructive power proportional to the risks we will
face in the new world environment," and they specifically called for
the development and deployment of "micro-nukes" (with explosive
yield of 10 tons), "mini-nukes" (100 tons), and "tiny-nukes" (1
kiloton). Their justification for the smaller nuclear weapons was
their contention that no President would authorize the use of the
nuclear weapons in our present arsenal against Third World nations.
"It is precisely this doubt that leads us to argue for the
development of sub-kiloton weapons," they wrote.

In a White House document created in April 2000, "The United States
of America Meeting its Commitment to Article VI of the Treaty on the
Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons," the administration stated
that, "as the United States reduces the numbers of its nuclear
weapons, it is also transforming the means to build them." Over the
past decade, the United States has dramatically changed the role and
mission of its nuclear-weapon complex from weapon research,
development, testing, and production to weapon dismantlement,
conversion for commercial use, and stockpile stewardship.

That was his father's nuclear program. Bush Jr. wants bombs.

"The Bush administration has directed the military to prepare
contingency plans to use nuclear weapons against at least seven
countries, and to build new, smaller nuclear weapons for use in
certain battlefield situations," according to a classified Pentagon
report obtained by the Los Angeles Times. The 'secret' report, which
was provided to Congress on Jan. 8, 2004 says the Pentagon needs to
be prepared to use nuclear weapons against China, Russia, Iraq,
North Korea, Syria, Iran and Libya. It says the weapons could be
used in three types of situations: against targets able to withstand
non-nuclear attack, in retaliation for attack with nuclear
biological or chemical weapons, or in the event of 'surprising
military developments.'

The new National Institute for Public Policy's report, January 2001
report on the "rationale and requirements" for U.S. nuclear forces,
signed by then -Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, was being used
by the U.S. Strategic Command in the preparation of a nuclear war
plan. Three members of the study group that produced the NIPP report
- National Security Council members Stephen Hadley (assistant to
Condi Rice), Robert Joseph, and Stephen Cambone, a deputy
undersecretary of defense for policy - were and, still are directly
involved in implementing the Bush nuclear policy.

As reported by the World Policy Institute, the NIPP's report was
used as the model for the Bush administration's Nuclear Posture
Review, which advocated an expansion of the U.S. nuclear "hit list"
and the development of a new generation of "usable," lower-yield
nuclear weapons. Most observers do not believe, however, that the
new weapons can be developed without abandoning the
non-proliferation treaty and sparking a new and frightening
worldwide nuclear arms race.

Stephen Hadley, presently Bush's National Security Assistant
co-wrote a National institute for Public Policy paper portraying a
nuclear bunker-buster bomb as an ideal weapon against the nuclear,
chemical or biological weapons stockpiles of rouge nations such as
Iraq. "Under certain circumstances," the report said, "very severe
nuclear threats may be needed to deter any of these potential
adversaries."

The Energy Department plans to assemble teams at three U.S.
laboratories to begin constructing these new powerful "mini-nukes."
Work on preliminary designs for the weapons known as "Robust Nuclear
Earth Penetrators" would to begin first at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory in California and finalized at Los Alamos
National Laboratory in New Mexico. Today's report suggests that the
Livermore laboratory will take on the bulk of the work if approved.
Lawrence Livermore's scientists were slated to modify the existing
B83, a hydrogen bomb designed for the B-1 bomber, while those at Los
Alamos was to work on the B61, which already has been modified for
earth-penetrating use.

Bechtel will benefit directly from efforts to expand testing and
production of nuclear weapons. Bechtel is part of a partnership with
Lockheed Martin that runs the Nevada Test Site for the U.S. Bechtel
runs the Y-12 plant in Oak Ridge Tennessee, which makes critical
components for nuclear warheads; and it is involved in the
management of the Pantex nuclear weapons plant in Amarillo, Texas.
Bechtel's $1 billion-plus in annual contracts for "atomic energy
defense activities" are likely to grow substantially under the Bush
nuclear plan. In 2002 Bechtel earned $11.6 billion. The company has
built more than 40% of the United States' nuclear capacity and 50%
of nuclear power plants in the developing world. That's 150 nuclear
power plants.

Bechtel is also in charge of managing and cleaning up the toxic
nuclear waste at the 52 reactors at the Idaho nuclear test site from
our '50's nuclear program, as well as two million cubic feet of
transuranic waste buried on the site, such as plutonium-covered
shoes, gloves and other tools used at the nuclear lab in Rocky Flats.

Under the administration's original refurbishment proposal the
Lockheed Y-12 National Security Complex would refurbish the
secondary nuclear weapons; the Savannah River Tritium Facility would
supply the gas transfer systems; Sandia National Laboratory would
produce the neutron generators and certify all non nuclear
components; Pantex plant would serve as the central point for all
assembly and disassembly operations in support of the refurbishment
work; Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore would continue to certify
nuclear warhead design.

The weapons will be shipped to the Pantex plant to remove the
uranium and any parts which can be used in new weapons; then the
remaining parts will be shipped back to the plant for further
processing.

The National Policy Reviews's concept of a "New Triad" emphasizes
the importance of a "robust, responsive research and development,
and industrial base." The "old" triad is the combination of land,
sea, and air-based nuclear delivery vehicles that were developed
during the Cold War to offset a nuclear attack on America. The New
Triad calls for a "modern nuclear weapons complex," including
planning for a Modern Pit Facility, and new tritium production to
respond to what the administration claims are "new, unexpected, or
emerging threats" to U.S. national security.

The NPR also mandates the development of what they term a "credible,
realistic plan" for a "safe, secure, and reliable" stockpile.
Already, $40-50 million has been budgeted for the project. According
to the National Nuclear Security Admin.'s deputy administrator for
defense programs, Everet Beckner, the designers would work to modify
the weapons "to make them more powerful."

Beckner is a former Vice President of Lockheed. He served as the
chief executive of Lockheed Martin's division that helped run the
UK's Atomic Weapons Establishment, and is now charged with oversight
of the maintenance, development, and production of U.S. nuclear
warheads. Beckner testified to a Senate committee that, "It is clear
that if the nation continues to maintain a nuclear arsenal it will
need to make new nuclear pits at some point."

Most modern nuclear weapons depend on a plutonium pit as the
"primary" that begins the chain reaction resulting in a
thermonuclear explosion. A pit is a critical component of a nuclear
weapon and functions as a trigger to allow a modern nuclear weapon
to operate properly. The Department of Energy announced its intent
to begin an examination of several possible sites for a Modern Pit
Facility to produce plutonium pits for new and refurbished nuclear
weapons in September 2002.

The United States is the only nuclear power without the capability
to manufacture a plutonium pit. About three-fourths of the U.S.
surplus plutonium is relatively pure in the form of so-called pits,
which have been removed (and deactivated) from existing warheads.
The remaining fourth of the surplus was in the process pipeline,
mostly as plutonium residues, when processing was suddenly
discontinued. The Soviet government processed all of its material to
completion, so now all of the Russian surplus is in the form of pits
or its weapon-form equivalent.

The Foster Panel Report, also known as the FY2000 Report to Congress
of the Panel to Assess the Reliability, Safety, and Security of the
United States Nuclear Stockpile, found that it could take 15 years
from the point of developing a conceptual design for a pit facility
until the final construction of the facility is completed. The
report stated that, "If it is determined through the science-based
Stockpile Stewardship Program that one or more of our existing pit
designs is no longer reliable, and therefore is not certifiable, our
nuclear stockpile would, in effect, be unilaterally downsized below
a level which could maintain a strong nuclear deterrence."

That is the hook which supporters of an expanded nuclear program
will use to justify an abrogation of the treaty ban, and begin their
new-generation arms race. If they don't get their way - to fiddle
with and refurbish the existing nukes - they will argue that
deterrence is at risk; a preposterous notion, as our existing
arsenal is more than enough to blow us all to Pluto.

Meanwhile, the DOE requested $22 million for the MPF in its Fiscal
Year 2004 budget request and Congress funded the request in the
House and Senate versions of the Defense Authorization bill. But,
the House cut over half of the funding for the MPF citing the Bush
administration's failure to issue revised stockpile requirements
following the ratification of the Moscow Treaty.

Citing "classified analyses" the DOE claims it needs to have a new
pit facility capable of producing 125-500 pits per year. The DOE's
Notice of Intent for the MPF also states that one of the functions
for the facility will be to have the ability to produce new design
pits for new types of nuclear weapons. If new money is released, the
nuclear weapons laboratories are expected to refurbish the casings
on the existing nuclear B-61 and B-83 warheads, according to Energy
Department official Beckner, who testified before a Senate committee
in March. Beckner claims that both weapons have yields
"substantially higher than five kilotons," so he has determined that
the study will not violate a 1994 U.S. law prohibiting research on
"low-yield" nuclear weapons.

A version of the B-61, modified to strike hardened and deeply buried
targets, was added to the U.S. stockpile without nuclear testing in
1997. There is a serious question about the effectiveness of such a
weapon on underground bunkers, and there is a concern that the
neighboring effect of the radiation cloud would be devastating. A
nuclear strike on North Korea, for example, could generate deadly
radioactive fallout, poisoning nearby countries such as Japan or
Australia.

It is immoral and wrong for this administration to hide their
nuclear ambitions and proceed as if they had won the debate over the
acceptability of nuclear power, when in fact no such public debate
has occurred. The nuclear hawks are stepping out from behind their
Trojan Horses of nuclear space travel and 'safe', new nuclear fuels
and are revealing a frightening ambition to yoke the nation to a new
legacy of imperialism. President Bush has decided that America's
image around the globe is to be one of an oppressive nuclear bully
bent on world domination.

We should oppose any money for new research or construction which
would serve to refurbish or expand our existing supply of nuclear
weaponry. On the other hand, we should support provisions which
intend to dismantle such weaponry if the intention and result is for
the disposal of these harmful weapons and their radioactive waste in
a safe and effective manner.

In respect to all of these issues, I feel that all of the nuclear
ambitions of the Bush administration, both in defense and with
respect to energy production, are a foot in the door for those who
would expand our existing nuclear program and would draw our nation
into a new nuclear arm's race; exacerbating the problems of
proliferation; threatening the safety and the health of workers, the
community and the environment. They should be strongly resisted.

 

Ron Fullwood, is an activist from Columbia, Md. and the author of
the book 'Power of Mischief' : Military Industry Executives are
Making Bush Policy and the Country is Paying the Price

Copyright © OpEdNews, 2002-2007
*****************************************************************
 14 Public Citizen: Public Citizen Urges Congress to Curb Executive Branch Secrecy

Press Room - 

March 1, 2007

Testimony Details Illegality of Bush Administration’s Attempts to
Restrict Public Access to Presidential Records

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The Bush administration’s executive order to
restrict access to presidential records violates the letter and
spirit of the law and should be overridden by Congress, according to
testimony today by Public Citizen before a U.S. House of
Representatives subcommittee.

Scott Nelson, an attorney for Public Citizen, testified about the
impact of President Bush’s Executive Order 13233 on the Presidential
Records Act (PRA) before the Subcommittee on Information Policy,
Census and National Archives of the U.S. House Committee on
Oversight and Government.

Nelson detailed how Executive Order 13233, issued by President Bush
on Nov. 1, 2001, violates the PRA and exceeds the bounds of
legitimate protection of executive privilege. The PRA was enacted in
1978 to ensure permanent governmental control over presidential
records and to broaden public access to them. It allows a former
president the right to keep secret for up to 12 years limited types
of documents, such as those involving national security, an
individual’s right to privacy and trade secrets.

The PRA provides protection to properly classified information
dealing with national security even after the expiration of the
12-year restriction period. But the act allows the release after 12
years of presidential communications with senior advisers -
potentially falling under executive privilege - as long as they are
not covered by national security restrictions.

"The PRA is premised on the notion that the public is entitled to
access to historical presidential materials, subject only to defined
exceptions," said Nelson. "The Bush order reflects another model
entirely. It is an attempt to resurrect the pre-PRA regime in which
access to presidential materials was controlled by the former
presidents … It is bad policy and bad law."

Nelson identified several aspects of Bush’s order that are
unsupportable by law. The principal concern is that it requires the
National Archivist to withhold materials from the public whenever a
former president has asserted a claim of privilege, however
unfounded that claim may be and even if the incumbent president
disagrees with that claim. The order’s provision that constitutional
executive privilege may be asserted by a deceased or disabled former
president’s family or personal representative violates the intent of
PRA. Bush’s order also creates a de facto vice presidential
privilege, a previously unknown legal concept.

The order imposes huge burdens on the process of releasing documents
under the PRA by creating lengthy delays that frustrate the
legitimate needs of the public for timely access. It leaves the
burden on those who desire public access to challenge claims against
executive privilege in court. It also requires the public to show
some specific, demonstrable need for access to overcome privilege
even after the act’s 12-year restriction period has expired, a
restriction not applied to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
requests.

"It is a bad idea to give former presidents carte blanche authority
to direct the Archivist to withhold materials from the public," said
Nelson in his testimony. "Experience teaches time and again that,
given the chance, officials often err on the side of
over-withholding materials."

In December 2001, Public Citizen and a number of other organizations
and individuals filed suit against the National Archives and Records
Administration in the U.S. District Court for the District of
Columbia, seeking to prevent the Archivist from carrying out the
executive order. The lawsuit, American Historical Association v.
National Archives & Records Administration, No. 01-2447, remains
pending and is awaiting decision by the district court.

To read Nelson’s full testimony, click here.

###

*****************************************************************
 15 Guardian Unlimited: Govt. Picks Design for Nuclear Warhead 

From the Associated Press

Saturday March 3, 2007 12:01 AM

By H. JOSEF HEBERT

Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration took a major step 
Friday toward building a new generation of nuclear warheads, 
selecting a design that is being touted as safer, more secure and 
more easily maintained than today's arsenal.

   A team of scientists from Lawrence Livermore National 
Laboratory will proceed with the weapons design with an 
anticipation that the first warheads may be ready by 2012 as a 
replacement for Trident missiles on submarines.

  The new weapons program, which has received cautious support 
from Congress, was immediately criticized by some nuclear 
nonproliferation groups as evidence the government wants to 
expand nuclear weapons production - not move toward eliminating 
the stockpile.

   Critics also maintain that it sends the wrong signal around 
the world by pushing a new warhead - although characterized as a 
replacement for existing ones- at a time the United States is 
trying to curtail nuclear weapons development in North Korea and 
Iran.

                        Some lawmakers agreed.

   ``The minute you begin to put more sophisticated warheads on 
the existing fleet, you are essentially creating a new nuclear 
weapon. And it's just a matter of time before other nation's do 
the same,'' said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. ``This could 
serve to encourage the very proliferation we are trying to 
prevent.''

   Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Calif., chair of the House Armed 
Services strategic forces subcommittee, expressed cautious 
support, but promised ``a long evaluation process'' in Congress 
to assure the warhead will do what is promised without future 
underground testing.

  Nuclear underground tests have not been done since a ban in 
1992.

  ``This is not about starting a new nuclear arms race,'' 
countered Thomas P. D'Agostino, acting head of the DOE's National 
Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the nuclear 
weapons programs.

    Steve Henry, deputy assistant to the secretary of defense for 
nuclear matters, said the new design is hoped to lead to fewer 
warheads being needed. He said it has not changed administration 
determination to reduce the number of deployed warheads to fewer 
than 2,000 - the lowest number since the 1950s.

  There are believed to be about 6,000 warheads deployed and 
another 4,000 in reserve.

    D'Agostino, briefing reporter on the design decision, said 
the intent is to develop a safer, more secure warhead to assure 
increased reliability without the need for underground nuclear 
tests.

  He cautioned that the program remains in the early stages and 
that in coming months the Livermore team will expand on its 
design work to give a better estimate on overall costs, the scope 
of the program and a schedule toward full-scale engineering and 
production.

  The administration is asking for $119 million for the next 
fiscal year for design work. The officials said they could not 
say how much the program eventually will cost.

 The so-called ``reliable replacement warhead'' has been the 
focus of a yearlong, intense design competition between Livermore 
in California and nuclear scientists at the Los Alamos National 
Laboratory in New Mexico - the government's two premier nuclear 
weapons labs.

   Both of the labs developed proposals and at one point there 
was discussion to combine the designs into a single program. But 
that was rejected and D'Agostino made clear Friday the program 
would be Livermore's to develop.

      The Livermore design was based on an existing warhead that 
reportedly had been exploded in an underground test in the 1980s, 
although never actually put into the stockpile. The Los Alamos 
design was based on a totally fresh approach but without a 
history of actual testing.

  It was this ``very robust test pedigree'' - as D'Agostino put 
it - that gave Livermore the upper hand.

    ``It ... gave us the confidence ... to certify and go forward 
without underground testing,'' he said, adding that without that 
assurance ``we were not going to go forward.''

 Congress authorized design work on the new warhead in 2005, but 
with a stipulation that its primary goal be to assure the 
reliability of the nuclear arsenal without resumption of bomb 
testing, and that it will help in the consolidation of the Energy 
Department's nuclear weapons complex.

    Some lawmakers have also questioned whether the new warhead 
is needed, especially in light of a recent finding that the 
plutonium in the current warheads will last nearly 100 years, 
twice as long as previously thought.

   Some nuclear weapons critics warned the warhead could lead to 
an increased likelihood of future testing, calling it a ploy to 
rebuild - not dismantle - the nuclear weapons infrastructure.

    ``This is a first installment on a plan to develop and 
produce warheads on an ongoing cyclical basis ... similar to what 
we had during the Cold War,'' said Lisbeth Gronlund, a scientist 
at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nuclear nonproliferation 
advocacy group.

  John Isaacs, executive director of the Center for Arms Control 
and Nonproliferation, said there's no need for a new warhead when 
``the U.S. nuclear stockpile, based on 50 years of research and 
over 1,000 underground nuclear tests, has been confirmed safe and 
reliable for at least another half-century.''

  ``The bottom line is we're returning to what we used to do in 
the Cold War years. That's the message to the world,'' said Hans 
Kristensen, director of the nuclear information project of the 
Federation of American Scientists.

                                 ---

  Associated Press writer Scott Lindlaw in San Francisco 
contributed to this story.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
*****************************************************************
 16 Sydney Morning Herald: Green energy be dammed - 

www.smh.com.au

March 3, 2007

In the rush to promote nuclear power as a clean alternative, the 
pitfalls of uranium mining are being ignored, writes Wendy Frew.

Olympic Dam, 560 kilometres north-west of Adelaide, is a mine like
no other in Australia.

Hidden under South Australia's dusty red plains is a Tolkien-like
labyrinth of tunnels carrying monster trucks and an underground
train that transports hundreds of tonnes of minerals to the surface
every day.

Above ground, the copper, gold, silver and uranium gouged from
Australia's largest underground mine are processed in a mega
metallurgical complex that sprawls across the arid countryside.

The millions of tonnes of waste material - much of it radioactive -
piles up in giant open-air tailings dumps that can reach as high as
30 metres and cover hundreds of hectares of land.

Those who have seen the radioactive waste say it has the consistency
of powder, and as it dries, it takes on a range of colours from a
rusty red to sulphur yellow or salty white.

The mine consumes millions of litres of water every day and a huge
amount of fossil-fuel electricity. It generates an estimated 1
million tonnes of greenhouse gases every year, and has displaced
many square kilometres of native vegetation to make way for the
processing plants and tailings dumps.

The uranium is used to generate power in a nuclear reactor, power
that the Prime Minister, John Howard, says is "cleaner and greener
than just about any other form of energy".

But in the rush to embrace nuclear power as a way to combat climate
change, the damage uranium mining does to the environment seems to
have been all but forgotten.

Australia has some of the world's best and biggest uranium reserves
and the industry represents a rich seam of export dollars and
regional jobs. Mine operators are already gearing up to expand
existing mines, which will further boost outback economies in the
Northern Territory and South Australia. Supporters say expansion of
the industry would also mean a guaranteed long-term supply of fuel
for generating electricity should Australia ever decide to abandon
coal.

However, environmentalists and scientists say those benefits must be
weighed up against an industry that relies on a fuel that will
eventually run out; that generates toxic, long-lasting waste, both
when the ore is mined and when the yellow cake is processed; and
that contaminates water and soil.

"Any nuclear industry would be 20 years away," says the Australian
Conservation Foundation campaigner David Noonan.

"We don't see any reality in the attempt to get nuclear power up in
Australia but we are very worried about the expansion of the uranium
industry ? we would just become a quarry for the global nuclear
industry," he says.



Australia has three operating uranium mines: Olympic Dam and
Beverley in South Australia, and the Ranger mine in the Northern
Territory.

It is difficult to comprehend the scale and breadth of the
operations at Olympic Dam. The BHP-Billiton mine is open to
visitors, but in such an isolated location few Australians would
have taken the tour. Fewer still would have any inkling of what it
takes to get uranium out of the ground, the complex and expensive
task of managing the contaminated rock and water waste, and the
rehabilitation of the land that must be done after a mine has closed
down.

The massive mineral deposit 350 metres below the surface contains
the world's largest known uranium ore body and the world's
fourth-largest remaining copper deposit.

The mine's rock waste and coarse tailings are used as mine backfill.
Fine tailings material is dumped above ground in an area that covers
about 400 hectares.


According to BHP, radiation in the tailings is as low as reasonably
achievable and much less than levels considered acceptable, as
determined by international standards. The waste is extensively
monitored and the results reported on a regular basis to South
Australian Government regulators, it says.

BHP says it is still developing a final rehabilitation plan for the
tailings storage at the end of the mine's operational life.

Despite these assurances, the tailings dump is a major concern for
people such as Noonan.

In 1994, the then mine owner, Western Mining Corporation, revealed
that up to 5 million cubic metres of contaminated liquid had leaked
from the tailings dams, a potential threat to the quality of
groundwater immediately below the dams.

The industry's Uranium Information Centre says studies demonstrated
that the pollutants in the seepage were quickly adsorbed by clays
and limestone in the soil and rock under the tailings dams. Because
of the low permeability of the rock, there was "no potential harm to
the groundwater resource".

According to Ian Hore-Lacy, a spokesman for the Uranium Information
Centre, the tailings dumps don't represent a risk to workers or the
environment.

"If you have radioactive tailings then you just cover them with more
cover ? the level of radioactivity is negligible," he says.

"You could set up camp and live on top of them for a year and not
get any serious radioactivity, not that that is recommended."

But Noonan says the risks associated with tailings will only grow
because of BHP's $5 billion expansion plans for Olympic Dam.



The expansion, which is likely to see the underground mine converted
to an open pit, would be one of the biggest of its type in the world
and require the removal of a million tonnes of rock waste every day
for four years, according to the company.

The company will have to drill and blast its way down 350 metres
before it even reaches the ore body.

Friends of the Earth has estimated the expanded dam would probably
contain the largest uranium tailings repository on earth.

In a submission on the expansion plan's draft environmental impact
statement the organisation said the tailings storage facilities
would be so big they would be among the largest structures on earth.

"The main problem is that the integrity of the [facility] must
actually be guaranteed not for a mere 200 years, nor even for 1000
years ? we would need to reasonably assure containment of the
tailings for a minimum of 230,000-300,000 years," it wrote.

"This is five times as long as Aboriginal occupation of Australia,
which is in turn longer than any other human group has survived. It
is a period of time in which major climatic, and indeed, geological
changes can be expected to take place, not to mention changes in
land-use, population, etc."

Olympic Dam's expansion would also see the mine's current water use
surge from 35 megalitres a day (taken from the Great Artesian Basin
at no charge to the company). Another 120 megalitres per day will be
needed for the expansion, which would be produced by a desalination
plant the same size as the one planned for Sydney.

At the Ranger uranium mine in Kakadu National Park in the Northern
Territory, the issue is not too little water but too much.

After several days of record-breaking monsoonal rainfall, the mine's
operator, Rio Tinto's subsidiary Energy Resources Australia, stopped
mining on Tuesday. The processing plant was closed a day later.
Widespread flooding is also making it difficult to get into or out
of the mine and the nearby town of Jabiru.

As the Federal Government described it in 2005, "the operation of a
uranium mine and mill in a region which is World Heritage listed,
subject to seasonal extremes in rainfall typical of monsoonal
climates and which represents at least 40,000 years of habitation by
the Aboriginal people, provides many environmental challenges".

The Ranger lease covers 7860 hectares, of which about 500 hectares
are directly disturbed by mining.

"Water management at Ranger is seen as an intractable and growing
problem," says the Australian Conservation Foundation's Dave Sweeney.



"The area around the stockpiles, the processing facilities and the
tailings corridor [where slurry is piped from the mill to the
tailings dam] is a restricted-release zone and all the water that
falls in those areas has to be managed because it becomes
contaminated," Sweeney says.

Water is shunted around the site, from the pit after heavy rainfall,
through retention ponds and into the giant tailings dam. Ranger has
built a $25 million plant to help make sure all the water is treated.

Managing water is the No.1 issue for the mine, says an Energy
Resources Australia spokeswoman, Amanda Buckley. Much of the mine
operator's time and energy is expended coping with the large amount
of water onsite and driving in heavy rain represents a higher risk
to workers than exposure to radiation.

But Buckley says the company has invested heavily in water
infrastructure and the mine operates under the toughest regulations
in Australia.

"If you ask the technical people, they will say it is like other
kinds of mines, such as copper and nickel," says Buckley about the
environmental hazards at Ranger.

"You are digging the ore out with the same kind of equipment, all
the processes are the same. The difference is the radiation, but it
is not a very high level of risk [for workers]."

Buckley explains the mine often closes after heavy rainfall, but
this week's deluge posed no environmental issues.

The Uranium Information Centre's Hore-Lacy says Australian
regulations for uranium mine operations and worker safety are so
high you could never get a really harmful level of radioactivity. He
dismisses the 1994 tailings dam leakage at Olympic Dam as more an
engineering than an environmental issue.

Australian standards are high compared with many overseas mines,
says Dr Gavin Mudd, a uranium mining expert and lecturer in
engineering at Monash University.

"But we still cannot answer the fundamental questions about
rehabilitation [of land after mining ceases], and we still have
accidents. So, from a scientific point of view, it is still not good
enough."

The Rum Jungle uranium mine, which is about 64 kilometres south of
Darwin, is one example of how not to manage a site, critics say. At
Australia's first large-scale uranium mine, the dams, which were
meant to prevent acidic materials and heavy metals used in the
milling process from reaching rivers and streams, frequently
overflowed during the wet season. The environmental damage it caused
has still not being fully repaired since the mine was closed in 1971.

Mudd supports Energy Resource Australia's investment in a
sophisticated water treatment facility. But he says it is not
without its problems because of the nature of some of the highly
contaminated water it deals with. He is also concerned that tailings
being dumped back into an old mine pit could leach out because the
upper parts of the pit walls are permeable.

The academic, who has visited many existing and disused mines here
and overseas, remains sceptical about rehabilitating land after
uranium mining has ceased because of the industry's poor track
record so far.

"You need to keep an eye on the old uranium sites to see how they
are being rehabilitated and how water was used, so that you can draw
conclusions about current mines," he says.

"Give me 100 years and then let's see how good today's standards
are."

He says that because Ranger is planning to extend the life of the
mine out to 2011, more room will be needed for the tailings.

"Tailings dams are not cheap to build ? and it is going to be a huge
problem rehabilitating them."

Copyright © 2007. The Sydney Morning Herald.
*****************************************************************
 17 UPI: Outside View: Rice cuts no ice in Moscow

United Press International - Security & Terrorism - 

3/2/2007 10:43:00 AM -0500

By VIKTOR LITOVKIN UPI Outside View Commentator

MOSCOW, March 2 (UPI) -- U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
has expressed surprise at Moscow's sharp criticism of American plans
to deploy anti-ballistic-missile interceptors in Poland and
early-warning radars in the Czech Republic.

"The idea that we somehow surprised them [Russians] about missile
defense and then to go and say these things about Poland and the
Czech Republic, independent countries, NATO members, was, I think,
unnecessary and unwarranted," Rice said in a Feb. 25 interview on
Fox News. "When it comes to missile defense, no one would suggest --
anyone who knows anything about this would [not] suggest -- that
somehow 10 interceptors deployed in Poland are going to threaten the
thousands of warheads in the Russian deterrent. ...What we'd like to
do is to pursue with the Russians the missile defense cooperation
that we once talked about."

The "iron lady" of the State Department was speaking to an audience
that knows very little, if anything, about the issue.

Rice most likely knows that Kremlin officials have told their
Washington counterparts more than once that the deployment of
elements of a U.S. ABM system in Eastern Europe is unjustified.

The only credible argument in this case is that there is a desire on
the part of the Pentagon generals and their White House bosses to
inflict maximum damage on the Russian-American partnership, pit
Russia against its Western neighbors, and spur on the arms race.

This is exactly what Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov referred
to when he said Moscow was baffled by Washington's plans to deploy
ABM elements in Poland and the Czech Republic.

There are people in Moscow who know almost everything about the ABM
dispute. One of them is Col. Gen. Nikolai Solovtsov, commander of
the Strategic Missile Forces.

Solovtsov has said: "If Poland and the Czech Republic make the
decision (to accept a U.S. proposal to base 10 interceptor missiles
and a radar in their countries), Russia's Strategic Missile Forces
will aim its missiles at them."

Army General Yury Baluyevsky, chief of the Russian General Staff,
supported that statement. He had earlier said that such a move by
the United States would complicate bilateral relations, and that the
Poles should think about "what may fall on their heads [in the event
of a conflict]."

Baluyevsky has expressed disappointment with the U.S. plans in a
recent interview with the state-owned newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta.

"We are worried over the consequences of ballistic-missile
intercepts close to the Russian border, or even over Russian
territory," the general said. "That is quite probable, as it is
nearly impossible to completely destroy a ballistic missile armed
with weapons of mass destruction, in particular nuclear weapons,
without [negative] consequences for the atmosphere and land surface."

He added: "The Czech Republic and Poland probably want to protect
their distant ally so much that they are prepared to tolerate a
shower of dangerous debris. However, Russians have the right to ask
why they should be made a hostage to that situation. Why should
those who are not guilty of anything be forced to clean up the
consequences?"

"We cannot regard the deployment of an ABM facility close to the
Russian border as a friendly move by the United States and its
eastern European NATO allies," Baluyevsky said. "In my view, the
buildup of military capability close to the Russian border cannot
strengthen European security."

Russian-U.S. missile defense cooperation is being hindered by the
Bush administration. It does not want to give Russia technical
information on certain structural elements of the ABM system, which
makes cooperation impossible.

American officials have hurried to comment on the concern expressed
by Russian generals over the unfriendly moves of the United States.
By turning the generals' words inside out, they have concluded that
after the threat made by the commander of the Strategic Missile
Forces and the chief of the General Staff -- although it was not a
threat but a warning -- Warsaw and Prague simply must agree to
accept the U.S. ABM system.

One cannot stop wondering at politicians' talent for juggling words
and notions, applying double standards, and even deceiving the
public, as in the case of "Iraq's weapons of mass destruction," used
as a pretext for invading that country.

(Viktor Litovkin is a military correspondent for the RIA Novosti
news agency. This article is reprinted by permission of RIA Novosti.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and
do not necessarily represent the opinions of the RIA Novosti
editorial board.)


(United Press International's "Outside View"
*****************************************************************
 18 UPI: India, Pakistan OK nuke safeguards

United Press International - NewsTrack - 

Published: March 2, 2007 at 1:04 PM

NEW DELHI, March 2 (UPI) -- Nuclear neighbors India and Pakistan 
have taken steps to avoid an accidental or unauthorized nuclear 
confrontation, a report says.


The Indian Cabinet Committee on Security, chaired by Prime 
Minister Manmohan Singh, reached a low-risk agreement with 
Pakistan Thursday, the Times of India reported. It is expected to 
be signed next week.


Included are provisions to establish "reliable and redundant" 
command and control systems with hotline communications across 
the border, both at political and military levels.


The United States has been pushing for such an agreement after 
war between India and Pakistan seemed imminent in 2002.

© Copyright 2007United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
*****************************************************************
 19 ITAR-TASS: Lavrov on Middle East nuke-free zone and NPT membership

02.03.2007, 13.56

MOSCOW, March 2 (Itar-Tass) - Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov
said on Friday that a zone free of weapons of mass destruction in
the Middle East can be created only if all countries of the region,
including Israel, become members of the Treaty on the
Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and bring all related
activity under IAEA control.

The foreign minister said Russia’s stance is invariable – it
believes Israel must join the NPT, while all Arab states must join
the convention to ban chemical weapons.

Russia supports “the idea of having in the Middle East a zone free
of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons,” Lavrov
said in an interview with the Syrian news agency SANA.

Such zone “meets long-term national interests of region’s
countries,” he stressed. “It could become a major step towards the
strengthening of international peace and security, and the
accomplishment of a goal of nuclear disarmament proclaimed in
Article 6 of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear
Weapons,” the top Russian diplomat emphasized.

He said “nuclear weapons, if used in the Middle East or any other
part of the globe, will inevitably turn into a tragedy not only for
the countries against which they will be aimed, but for their
neighbours as well”.

Lavrov believes that serious collective work in that sphere can be
launched only if the process of a full-scale Arab-Israeli settlement
is resumed.

Discussions on parameters of the zone “must be organized on the
basis acceptable for all interested parties,” he said. Lavrov
believes “the Arms Control and Regional Security Working Group could
become a useful structure for that”.

“It experts once managed to reach serious progress in the
development of regional principles, main directions and aims of
control over armaments and measures of security in the Middle East,”
he said.

© ITAR-TASS. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
 20 Guardian Unlimited: Czech Nuclear Plant Leak Deemed Harmless 

From the Associated Press

Friday March 2, 2007 4:46 AM

PRAGUE, Czech Republic (AP) - More than 500 gallons of 
radioactive water leaked at a nuclear power plant, but did not 
contaminate the environment, an official said Thursday.

  The water leaked early Tuesday at the Temelin plant's first 
unit, which is currently shut down for fuel replacement, plant 
spokesman Milan Nebesar said.

 ``The water went to a special tank through a special ... system 
and none of it leaked to the environment,'' Nebesar said. He said 
that an open valve caused the leak.

        The plant's second unit was running at full capacity.

 Nebesar said the plant's management has informed Czech and 
Austrian authorities about the leak.

  Austrian officials expressed surprise and anger over the delay 
in getting word of the mishap, which occurred while Chancellor 
Alfred Gusenbauer was on an official visit to Prague.

  Environment Minister Josef Proell lodged a formal protest with 
his Czech counterparts Thursday, insisting the Czech government 
explain ``why it took more than 50 hours before Austria was 
informed'' of the accident, said his spokesman, Daniel Kapp.

 The Czech Republic and Austria have been at odds for years over 
the plant, located only 35 miles from the Austrian border. 
Austrian environmentalists have demanded the plant closed because 
of security concerns. Czech authorities insist it is safe.

    Construction of the plant's two 1,000-megawatt units, based 
on Russian designs, started in the 1980s. The reactors were later 
upgraded with U.S. technology, but have remained controversial 
because of frequent malfunctions.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
*****************************************************************
 21 Deseret News: N-power is the answer

Friday, March 2, 2007

      Stop! Enough already! The age of nuclear power is here. It is
not going away. And the sooner we embrace and expand that energy
source, the better off we will be.

      Our food supply, housing and transportation systems are now
dependent upon oil, but the world's oil supplies lie largely in the
hands of admitted or potential enemies. Should those sources
disappear, the American system could quickly experience duress,
poverty and even starvation.
      The hysteria ? institutionalized and fed by politicians and
journalists ? regarding a nuclear waste "bogey man" has become
exaggerated beyond reason. If our society can place a man on the
moon, it can safely store spent nuclear rods. Or should we remove
gasoline from the market because of occasional explosions at filling
stations?

Lillian Gardiner
Provo

© 2007 Deseret News Publishing Company
*****************************************************************
 22 NRC: NRC Returns Perry to Regular Oversight

News Release - Region III - 2007-004 - 

U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION Office of Public Affairs, 
Region III 2443 Warrenville Road, Lisle, IL 60532 www.nrc.gov

CONTACT:  E-mail: opa3@nrc.gov


The Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff has determined that the 
Perry Nuclear Power Plant has taken sufficient corrective actions 
to allow its return to routine agency oversight as of March 2. 
The plant, operated by FirstEnergy, was placed under the 
heightened NRC oversight in August 2004.

    The plant, located in Perry, Ohio, was placed under 
heightened oversight as a result of three &ldquo;white&rdquo; 
findings, involving equipment failures of low to moderate safety 
significance.

      The three findings involved safety system problems and the 
utility&rsquo;s failures to properly analyze and correct these 
problems to prevent recurrence. (For more detail, see NRC press 
release III-04-044, &ldquo;NRC to Increase Regulatory Oversight 
of Perry,&rdquo; of Aug. 12, 2004.)

    Even though the utility took actions to correct the equipment 
problems shortly after discovery, the NRC did not consider two of 
the &ldquo;white&rdquo; issues fully resolved because of the 
underlying problems of human performance and problem 
identification and resolution that remained to be addressed.

  NRC inspection findings are evaluated using a four-level scale 
of safety significance, ranging from &ldquo;green&rdquo; for a 
finding of minor significance, through &ldquo;white&rdquo; and 
&ldquo;yellow&rdquo; to &ldquo;red,&rdquo; for a finding of high 
safety significance.

 When the number of findings and their importance to safety 
increase, the NRC increases its oversight. This results in such 
actions as more frequent and more in-depth inspections and more 
frequent public meetings during which plant managers have to 
report on the status of corrective actions and answer questions 
from the NRC.

   As a result of increased oversight at Perry, the NRC performed 
a broad, in-depth inspection from January 2005 to May 2005. The 
inspection looked at the causes of safety-related equipment 
problems, at the adequacy of existing programs used to identify, 
evaluate, and correct performance issues, and at other areas of 
plant operation that could be affected by similar causes. The 
inspection also reviewed the Perry Performance Improvement 
Initiative developed by the utility to improve plant performance.

  The inspection showed that the plant was operating safely and 
that its programs were adequate. However, the inspection did 
identify deficiencies in the areas of corrective actions and 
human performance.

    Following the inspection, the utility revised its Performance 
Improvement Initiative to address the NRC&rsquo;s findings and 
observations. The utility committed to make substantial and 
sustained improvements in four areas: human performance, 
corrective action program implementation, maintenance procedure 
adequacy, and emergency preparedness. In September 2005, the NRC 
issued a Confirmatory Action Letter which documented these 
commitments and the NRC&rsquo;s plans to conduct additional 
inspections to monitor the utility&rsquo;s progress in 
accomplishing their stated goals. The letter also stated that 
Perry would remain under increased oversight until the NRC finds 
demonstrated improved performance in the four areas listed above.

    The NRC spent nearly 2000 hours on supplemental inspections 
in addition to regular oversight activities to make sure that the 
plant had taken sufficient corrective actions to resolve the 
long-standing &ldquo;white&rdquo; findings and that substantial 
improvements have been made in the areas of human performance and 
problem identification and resolution.

 Based on NRC inspections and assessments, the Agency concluded 
that the utility&rsquo;s corrective actions have been sufficient 
to return the Perry plant to regular oversight.

      &ldquo;Perry has continued to operate safely and staff and 
management worked over the past two and a half years to improve 
plant performance,&rdquo; said NRC Regional Administrator James 
Caldwell. &ldquo;We recognize their efforts and expect the 
utility not only to sustain the positive changes they had made 
but also to continue to improve.&rdquo;

    All documents related to this issue will be available from 
the Region III Office of Public Affairs or from the 
agency&rsquo;s online document library at: 
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams/web-based.html

      NRC news releases are available through a free list server 
subscription at the following Web address: 
http://www.nrc.gov/public-involve/listserver.html. The NRC Home 
Page at www.nrc.gov also offers a Subscribe to News link in the 
News & Information menu. E-mail notifications are sent to 
subscribers when news releases are posted to NRC's Web Site.




                   Privacy Policy | Site Disclaimer Friday, March 
02, 2007

*****************************************************************
 23 Platts: Nuclear is "absolutely needed" in the future UK energy mix: IEA

London (Platts)--2Mar2007

Nuclear is "absolutely needed" in the future UK energy mix, International 
Energy Agency Executive Director Claude Mandil told a London press conference 
March 1. He presented the IEA's in-depth review of UK energy policy at a 
Department of Trade and Industry briefing, during which he warned the UK 
government about becoming too dependent on gas. New energy supply investments 
this past year have focused on gas-fired generation, something the UK
government should monitor, he said. All options should remain open for
potential developers of power stations to use other fuels, including nuclear,
renewables and coal, he said. Mandil said that the UK's planning and licensing
system is also proving a "significant barrier" to energy infrastructure
developments, something that could "become a risk to security of supply." He
described the UK government's energy review as "a significant step in the
right direction on these matters."


Copyright © 2007 - Platts, All Rights Reserved
 



*****************************************************************
 24 Bangkok Post: Nuclear power plant panel to be set up

(BangkokPost.com, Agencies) - National Energy Policy Council Friday
agreed to set up a committee to study the possibility of building a
nuclear power plant in Thailand, Energy Minister Piyasvasti Amranand
said.

Mr Piyasvasti said it would take about seven years for the committee
to study the issue and decide whether Thailand should set up a
nuclear power plant.

He added that the study of the setting up of nuclear power plant as
an alternative to fuel power generation should begin soon because of
the limited fuel supply.

"It's necessary that we have an alternative," Mr Piyasavasti told
reporters. "If we study about it now, we can have the nuclear power
plant in the next 13 years."

Among the options under the draft power development plan for
2007-2021 is building nuclear power plants with a combined capacity
of 5,000 megawatts to supply electricity starting 2020 and 2021.
Other new power plants would use coal and natural gas as fuel.

The National Energy Policy Council also approved in principle the
draft energy business act, a new law governing electricity and
natural gas businesses and which will enhance transparency in the
energy sector, he said.

The Council of State will review the law before it is forwarded to
the Cabinet for approval and the National Legislative Assembly for
final approval.

© Copyright The Post Publishing Public Co., Ltd. 2006
*****************************************************************
 25 Sofia Echo: BULGARIA'S KOZLODUY NPP AMONG MOST DANGEROUS POWER PLANTS IN EUROPE-
GERMAN MEDIA - Bulgaria Abroad news

09:05 Fri 02 Mar 2007

Courtesy of Economy and Energy Ministry

Bulgaria’s Kozloduy nuclear power plant (NPP) has been among the
most dangerous ones in Europe for ages.

Failures often occurred in its reactors and Bulgaria and foreign
ecologist used to call for the plant’s closure, German newspaper
Handelsblatt said.

Bulgaria agreed to switch off four of the units of the six-reactor
NPP under EU pressure. The last two units will probably continue
functioning until 2010.

Kozloduy plays an important role in meeting the power needs of
Bulgaria and the region, Handelsblatt said. Albania suffered the
most from the unit closure as the country lost 40 per cent of its
electricity supply and is experiencing its most severe energy crisis
after the end of the communist rule.

Electricity supply in Macedonia, Kosovo and Montenegro decreased by
30 per cent. Greece will probably suffer energy crisis in the summer.

Bulgaria’s Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev seemed more inclined to
keep the units closed, Handelsblatt said, while other ministers
lobbied abroad for the reactors’ revival.

Economy and Energy Minister Roumen Ovcharov requested
re-consideration from the European Commission (EC). The EC’s answer
was negative, but the commission seemed to be ready for a discussion
on electricity supply on the Balkans.

An agreement for the setting up of energy community in Southeastern
Europe, signed in 2005, will be the basis for discussion,
Handelsblatt said. The lack of financial and technical means, as
well as political initiative, hinders the contract implementation.

© 2001-2007, Sofia Echo Media Ltd. Web development and design by
Webfactory Bulgaria
*****************************************************************
 26 Carlsbad Current-Argus: Lasting impressions

The Current-Argus

Article Launched: 03/01/2007 09:13:51 PM MST

When the Department of Energy first put together its lineup of
scoping meetings for potential Global Nuclear Energy Partnership
locations, Carlsbad wasn't even on the list.

Why? Because the Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance, a partnership between
Carlsbad, Hobbs, Eddy and Lea counties, has selected a spot halfway
between Carlsbad and Hobbs that happens to be in Lea County and so
Hobbs, not Carlsbad, was selected for the meeting.

The site is one of 11 potential locations for a nuclear reprocessing
facility and an advanced burner reactor.

Members of the partnership have been careful to include residents of
both counties in everything, so having a meeting in Hobbs only was
deemed unacceptable to some officials, notably Carlsbad Mayor Bob
Forrest. Strings were likely yanked, not pulled, and a community
hearing in Carlsbad was added to the list.

The end result, of course, was a packed house at Tuesday's meeting
in Carlsbad, with a list of speakers likely far more extensive than
the turnout in most other interested communities. And so Carlsbad's
sterling reputation for carrying off a good showing for federal
hearings remains firmly intact.

Well over 200 people attended the meeting. Roughly 50 locals went on
the record to proclaim southeastern New Mexico as the ideal 
location for GNEP, and for more or less all things nuclear. An 
observer from a less pro-nuclear community may have been a bit 
baffled at first, but he or she would have eventually found the 
whole thing to be rather inspiring and even endearing.

Of course, Mayor Forrest bounded onto the stage while waving a
newspaper and speaking in his traditional run-on-sentence burst of
enthusiasm; it was standard fare by the city's most ardent
cheerleader.

Commissioner Janell Whitlock, the very personification of grace,
outlined the community's developments over the past few decades.

Political rivals, who often won't agree about the color of the sky,
put aside their differences to praise the Waste Isolation Pilot
Plant. Scientists from diverse corners of the globe like Poland,
Iran and Korea all noted that our area is ideally suited for nuclear
facilities. And one mother teared up as she read a letter on her
daughter's behalf.

The thing is, this wasn't just blind cheerleader optimism. These
were scientists and experts with decades of experience. This was
energy and optimism brought forth through knowledge. It was indeed
dÃ©jÃ  vu all over again, as Carlsbad residents, turned out in full
force as enthusiastic as ever.

But perhaps the most telling aspect of this meeting, in terms of the
content of our community's character, was revealed when Gene
Harbaugh stood to speak. He looked out to the audience and said
sternly, "This will be new material."

He was probably outnumbered 200 to 1, but he had the courage and
character to step forward and speak against nuclear energy. Everyone
politely listened.

People like Harbaugh people willing to take and express an unpopular
stance are to be applauded. After all, it can hardly be called a
public discourse if everyone agrees down to the slightest detail. To
live in such a community, and to be part of a society where people
like Harbaugh have the opportunity to speak, is a fact worth
celebrating. For, even in an enlightened age, the vast bulk of
humanity across the planet live without such a freedom and right.

This public comment session certainly isn't the only component of
the site selection process, but it's hard to believe that Tuesday's
turnout and sentiment didn't leave another lasting impression on
Department of Energy officials.

Certainly, it left a positive and hopeful impression on us.


Copyright Â© 2005 Carlsbad Current Argus, a MediaNews Group
Newspaper.
*****************************************************************
 27 Hamilton Spectator: Nuclear power environmentally friendly, cost competitive

The Hamilton Spectator
(Mar 2, 2007)

Re: 'Abandon those expensive nuclear dreams' (Letter, Feb. 22)

In attacking the refurbishment and building of nuclear power 
stations on the basis that they cost too much, the letter writer, 
a wind power advocate, has failed to mention that per unit of 
power delivered (kilowatt hours), all lifetime costs included, 
nuclear costs the same as wind power.

Nuclear power is safe, environmentally friendly, cost competitive 
and part of the balanced energy mix that will power Ontario into 
our future.

-- Brent Williams, Kincardine, Canadian national representative, 
North American Young Generation In Nuclear

Legal Notice: Contents copyright 1991-2006, The Hamilton Spectator.
All rights reserved. Distribution, transmission or republication of


*****************************************************************
 28 Bridgwater Mercury: Council Clear Up Nuclear Confusion 

By Helen Rossiter

Comment

WEST Somerset Council has this week clarified its position on
nuclear power, after it was claimed the authority had agreed to
oppose the building of a new power station at Hinkley Point.

Local anti-nuclear group Stop Hinkley had welcomed findings released
by Nuclear Free Local Authorities, which suggested the council had
endorsed an anti-nuclear policy last April, as part of a Local
Development Plan.

Campaigners celebrated the news, predicting that West Somerset's
opposition to the scheme would prevent the Government from bypassing
a public enquiry into the building of Hinkley C.

They said the decision "will be a set back" to Hinkley B owner
British Energy who is currently in talks about sharing the £2billion
construction cost for a new power station on the site.

"West Somerset Council does not have a policy that states it will
oppose the construction of a new nuclear power station at Hinkley
Point if it is to replace Hinkley A or B, providing it does not
exceed their (A & B's) generating capacity."
West Somerset Council spokesman, Stacey Beaumont


But council spokesman, Stacey Beaumont, said although the council's
Local Plan Policy does say it opposes further nuclear development,
this does not include the replacement of existing stations once they
have been de-commissioned.

She said: "The Local Plan Policy EN/5 states the council will resist
the development of further nuclear power generation capacity at
Hinkley Point.

"However, the policy does allow for the site's nuclear power
generation capacity to be replaced. "West Somerset Council does not
have a policy that states it will oppose the construction of a new
nuclear power station at Hinkley Point if it is to replace Hinkley A
or B, providing it does not exceed their (A & B's) generating
capacity."

Stop Hinkley also claimed the anti-nuclear policy had been signed
off without publicity.

West Somerset Council say the decision to adopt the Local Plan was
taken by members of all parties in public at a full council meeting,
before which it was subject to four states of public consultation
and public enquiry.

This week's debate comes just week's after Greenpeace won a High
Court bid to force ministers to rethink their programme to build a
new generation of nuclear power stations.

2:38pm Friday 2nd March 2007Print&nbsp  Email this story   Add
Comment
Newsquest Media Group
A Gannett Company
*****************************************************************
 29 Quad-Cities: Q-C nuke plant Unit 2, down for 2 days, back in service

Posted Online: March 2, 2007

Unit 2 at the Quad Cities Nuclear Power Plant near Cordova is back
in service after being shut down Wednesday because of problems in
the condenser system.

In an 'event notification' to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,
plant operators said Unit 2 was 'scrammed' at 1:20 a.m. Wednesday
'due to decreasing condenser vacuum.' The notification said 'all
systems responded properly' when the shut-down occurred.

An investigation is under way to determine the cause of the problem
in the condenser system, which according to an NRC explanation
'contains thousands of tubes carrying cool water, which causes the
steam to condense back to water. The water is collected in the
condenser and pumped back to be reheated'

Unit 2, running at 96 percent of its 867-megawatt capacitiy when the
shut-down occurred, was back at 71 percent of capacity today,
according to the NRC's daily reactor-status report. Unit 1 remained
in full operation throughout the Unit 2 outage.

The Quad-Cities station is 75 percent owned by Exelon and 25 percent
owned by Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s MidAmerican Energy Co.

Copyright © 2007 Moline Dispatch Publishing Company, LLC, All Rights
*****************************************************************
 30 IHT: Alstom wins €150 million nuclear plant contract in Mexico -

International Herald Tribune

The Associated Press

Published: March 2, 2007

PARIS: French power generation company Alstom SA said Friday it 
won a €470 million (US$621 million) contract in combination with 
Spanish utility Iberdrola to modernize the Laguna Verde nuclear 
power plant in Mexico's Veracruz state.

Alstom's share of the contract is worth about €150 million 
(US$198.2 million), the company said in a statement.

The French company will fit two steam turbines and supply new 
generators.



Copyright © 2007 the International Herald Tribune All rights
reserved     


*****************************************************************
 31 Prague Daily Monitor: Radioactive water leak in Temelin plant - 

Friday, 2 March 2007 / Not logged in

prepared by Prague Daily Monitor editorial staff / published 2 March
2007

This is a Plus article. Access is free for now, but from Monday 12
March you will need a Plus subscription to read it. Please consider
subscribing to support the Prague Daily Monitor.

Approximately 2,000 litres of radioactive water leaked from the
Block 1 of the TemelÃ­n nuclear power station Tuesday, but the plant
only reported the accident yesterday. Plant spokesperson Milan
NebesÃ¡Å™ said the health of employees was not under threat. The
Austrian Environment Ministry expressed concern that it was only
informed 50 hours after the accident.


Prague Daily Monitor


copyright 2007 monitor ce media services s.r.o. | all rights reserved
*****************************************************************
 32 Business Report: Nuclear plants are vulnerable to human error

     OPINION/ ANALYSIS

    March 1, 2007

    Tim Anderson, in his letter "Nuclear stations: French oui, 
Russia nyet" (Business report, February 28), may be correct about 
the preference for a French-built nuclear power station.

    However, this is not the issue. It is essential to have the 
highest standards of design and construction, but the real issue 
is that the next South African nuclear station should not be 
built at Koeberg, which is so close to Cape Town.

    The siting of Koeberg was based on poor judgment and it 
should not be replicated by additional reactors, let alone 
experimental pebble bed reactors. Issues such as the proximity of 
a seismically active fault to Koeberg can be designed for, but 
human error cannot be eliminated. Recent experiences have clearly 
shown this.

    Nuclear power stations will always be vulnerable to human 
error and should therefore be sited away from a heavily populated 
area, especially one such as Cape Town, that would be largely cut 
off from escape by a nuclear accident.

    The extra cost of bringing power lines from a remote area, 
such as the west coast of the Northern Cape, is minimal, relative 
to the cost of a nuclear accident at Cape Town.


    R van der Vlugt Kalk Bay

    ©2007 Business Report & Independent Online (Pty) Ltd. All rights
    reserved.
*****************************************************************
 33 Prague Daily Monitor: Austrian chancellor addresses Czech PM over Temelin - 

Friday, 2 March 2007 / Not logged in

by Prague Daily Monitor/CTK / published 2 March 2007

Vienna/Prague, March 1 (CTK) - The Austrian news agency APA reported
that Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer today telephoned Czech
Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek to express his disappointment at
Topolanek's failure to inform him on the latest difficulties in the
operation of the Temelin nuclear power plant during his Tuesday
visit to Prague.

APA referred to the information from Gusenbauer's spokesman Stefan
Poettler.

Topolanek dismissed the criticism through his spokesman Martin
Schmarcz.

Some 2,000 litres of slightly radioactive water leaked out in the
first unit of the Temelin nuclear power station on Tuesday but the
information about the leak was only released to the public on
Thursday.

The leak, caused by a loose tap, occurred in a hermetically closed
room in a controlled zone and had not threatened the health of the
plant's staff.

According to Poettler, Gusenbauer told Topolanek in the telephone
conversation that that was not his idea of the "open and friendly
talks." He pointed to the importance of the commitment to provide
information that was not observed in this case.

Topolanek today rejected Gusenbauer's criticism. Topolanek said that
the latest incident was proof that the agreement from Melk on the
exchange of information on Temelin functions really well.

"Nowhere in the world nuclear power stations provide information on
such events. Under the agreement from Melk that stipulates
above-standard methods of passing the information on Temelin we are
obliged to provide information also in such cases within 72 hours.
We met this obligation within 48 hours," Topolanek said in a
statement his spokesman Schmarcz gave CTK.

"We consider it positive that the heads of the two governments are
capable to personally discuss even such an event that is not an
accident and that does not affect people's safety, and to clarify
everything," Topolanek said.

"This event is not a thing that the prime minister should deal with.
The prime minister learnt about it at the same moment when the
Austrian side was informed," Schmarcz said.

"The world has gone crazy if the prime ministers deal with a leaking
tap," chairwoman of the Czech State Nuclear Safety Authority (SUJB)
Dana Drabova said.

She said that the tense situation was caused by the fact that the
Czech Republic pledged in the Melk agreement also inform Austria
about such events that occurred at Temelin on Tuesday night. There
are similar leaks at other nuclear power plants but they usually do
not inform about them," she said.

"This shows how above-standard the agreement is and our observance
of it leads to such tense situations," Drabova said.

In the Melk agreement from 2001 the Czech Republic pledged to
provide Austria with up-to-date information on Temelin and upgrade
its safety in exchange for Austria's not blocking its then EU
accession negotiations and preventing further blockades of borders
by anti-atom opponents.

The more than two-day delay with which Czechs informed Austria about
the accident has provoked a wave of resentment in Austria.

Upper Austrian opponents of Temelin from the Atomstopp association
accused Prague of hiding the information and Austrian Environment
Minister Josef Proell allegedly said he was planning sending a
written complaint to the Czech Republic.

Alexander Van der Bellen, chairman of the Austrian Greens, even said
at a press conference in Vienna today that if Prague really did not
inform the chancellor about the latest complications at Temelin
during his Tuesday's visit to Prague it "would have been an almost
hostile act on the part of Czechs."

However, according to certain opinions expressed in the Czech
Republic, water that leaked at Temelin was less radioactive than a
standard mineral spring.

Topolanek and Gusenbauer agreed in Prague on Tuesday on the
establishment of a joint Czech-Austrian parliamentary commission on
Temelin.

However, Austrian anti-nuclear activists said after the visit that
it was "totally disappointing" and produced no results and they
would therefore continue blocking the joint border in protest
against Temelin.

The disputes over the operation of the nuclear power plant in
Temelin have burdened Czech-Austrian relations. Some Austrian and
Czech environmental organisations consider Temelin, situated about
60 km from the Austrian border, dangerous.

This story copyright 2007 CTK Czech News Agency
The Prague Daily Monitor and Monitor CE are not responsible for its
content.


copyright 2007 monitor ce media services s.r.o. | all rights reserved
*****************************************************************
 34 Mid-Hudson News Network: Rockland lawmakers call for closure of Indian Point

Covering the Hudson to the Catskills!

Friday, March 2, 2007

New City &ndash; Two Rockland County legislative leaders Thursday 
called for the closing of the Indian Point nuclear power plants.

      This latest opposition comes from Legislator Connie Coker, 
chairwoman of the Environmental Committee, and Legislature 
Chairwoman Harriet Cornell. 

   &ldquo;We are living in the shadow of a ticking time bomb and 
we must shut off the clock,&rdquo; said Coker. &ldquo;Many of us 
have been concerned about radioactive leaks, industrial 
accidents, and terrorist acts.&rdquo; Coker said the danger 
became &ldquo;more graphic&rdquo; when an emotionally disturbed 
Indian Point employee, who was on paid leave, killed his wife and 
daughter and then committed suicide.  &ldquo;I was horrified at 
this murderous act and then began to contemplate what he could 
have done to our community as an employee at the nuclear power 
plant.  The danger is just too great.&rdquo;

   She also pointed to a reported cracked rod at the Indian Point 
2 reactor and a shutdown of the plant most recently on February 
28.

  &ldquo;It has long been clear that we cannot count on the 
federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission as a watchdog on behalf of 
the public,&rdquo; said Cornell. 

  HEAR today's news on MidHudsonRadio.com, the Hudson Valley's 
only Internet radio news report.
*****************************************************************
 35 FPON: Earthlife Anti-Nuclear In Energy Debate

Free Press of Namibia

Friday, March 2, 2007 - Web posted at 9:11:52 GMT

IT is laudable that Namibians engage in public debates on nuclear 
energy, triggered off by the statement recently made by the 
Permanent Secretary of Mines and Energy, Mr Joseph Iitha, that 
nuclear energy is considered as one of the many options to 
generate power.

 It is of course right to make a decision after all options have 
been investigated.

   I for my part am quite sure that Government will come up with 
a responsible choice and this will not be generation of nuclear 
power in Namibia.

     The article "Namibia opts for nuclear power" featured in The 
Namibian on 11th January 2007 challenged Earthlife Namibia to 
start an e-mail discussion encouraging Namibians to express their 
view on the issue.

 We received very interesting comments which I want to share with 
the interested reader.

             This letter is a compilation of the debate.

 For easier reading I separate the comments with bullets, whereby 
the order is purely by chance.

   However, some comments we received don't feature here because 
of repetition.

   Especially renewable energy and the unsolved problem of 
nuclear waste disposal was mentioned many times.

   * Having uranium ore is hardly an argument in favour of 
nuclear energy production.

  It would probably damage Namibia's "pristine" environmental 
image too which would have to be incorporated into any cost 
benefit analysis.

  * From a perspective of human's lack of commitment into 
renewable energy, the only alternative to fossil fuels will be 
nuclear.

                        Considering greed etc.

  I do not foresee humans living on re-energy before all 
(including uranium) the earth has is depleted.

 Would it not be in everybody's interest to do as much research 
into nuclear energy and safety as possible? Just imagine that we 
run out of fossil fuels and then all the industrial nations 
switch over to the old unsafe nuclear power stations.

   * The raw material uranium is mined in Namibia by foreign 
mining companies having contracts of delivery with foreign 
customers.

   In general the calculated lifetime of local uranium mines is 
15 years.

  It takes long to get the infrastructure for uranium enrichment 
in place, build the nuclear power plant and train the right 
people.

    By the time all this has been achieved Namibia needs to 
import uranium oxide for a high price.

 * What would be worse: nuclear power generation or Epupa? * 
Namibia needs an energy strategic plan into which role players 
can feed their input.

 It seems as if the decision makers are handling things a bit ad 
hoc at the moment.

                   * The uranium boom is temporary.

   When all the new production starts up globally, there will be 
an excess in the market, prices will start dropping and the 
marginal mines will start closing again.

 Namibia has a chance of becoming an African leader in wave, wind 
and solar, which it can never do with nuclear, because even if it 
imports a reactor it will become dependent on foreign 
technicians, loans and companies like Eskom - which means that 
the problem complained of, dependency on SA, will not necessary 
go away.

 * It's scary but I'm not surprised given what is happening in 
South Africa and the assumption about expanded markets for 
uranium.

  We have to keep reminding the government that Namibia has 
abundant sun and wind!...and keep educating the public and 
publishing the figures on costs and benefits of renewable energy 
and the dangers of nuclear energy.

 * Nuclear power requires such high technological capacity and 
skills that it is extremely doubtful if Namibia would ever be in 
a position to mobilize the manpower to operate and maintain a 
nuclear power plant.

 I am of the opinion that the decision by Government is indeed a 
long term vision, but the decision at least creates the 
opportunity for Namibia to start developing its assets towards 
achieving such a vision.

  The decision is therefore a step in the right direction, 
provided that the thrust to create human capacity is directed 
properly.

 * The bottom line for all these options is the economy of scale 
and the cost of the energy.

  It is a pity the article does not state what power is costing 
the Namibian consumer at present in order to compare costs.

 Any power supplied at 35c/kWh plus is very expensive and not 
really affordable.

     The Namibian demand is small and the units cost is therefore 
understandable very high.

  To produce and sell more units, the unit cost can be reduced, 
but Namibia would need a large anchor consumer like the RSA that 
requires thousands of MW (presently 40 000 MW in the RSA) and not 
a measly 500 MW like Namibia.

  Economics and capacity would therefore dictate any future 
outcomes of whatever is contemplated.

       * All forms of power generation and distribution create 
environmental problems to a greater or lesser extent.

 Many of the forms of power generation that seem to cause the 
lowest impact are unreliable, inefficient, expensive and new - 
the technologies have not yet been fully tested under production 
conditions.

   One of the worst forms of power generation under present 
global conditions is the suite of generators that contribute to 
climate change - undoubtedly one of the most serious 
environmental issues that this planet has ever faced.

  I don't believe that it is in the interests of the environment 
for environmental organizations to adopt positions of being 
either pro or anti nuclear energy.

  I believe that the situation will differ from country to 
country, depending on the options that different countries have.

 Within this context, I further believe that a rational 
assessment of the pros and cons of all the available options 
should be carried out in Namibia, in an open and transparent way, 
taking into account all the important variables, both 
socio-economic and environmental.

 * Great - despite the refuse it is still one of the 
environmentally cleanest sources of high-output power, with no 
contribution to global warming, which affects especially our 
rangelands and thus farmers and thousands of poor rural people as 
well! Look at the broader picture and its benefits! * 
Technological expertise is the most important issue in nuclear 
energy production.

  Namibia could deal with the technology of renewable energy, a 
good example is Gobabeb.

    But technology for a nuclear power plant is a different 
story.

    * The Wildlife Society of Namibia (WLSN) supports sustainable 
development and the sustainable utilisation of resources, 
including the sustainable generation and use of energy.

   The WLSN can not support either uranium mining or nuclear 
power generation, because the environmental damages and inherent 
risks involved (some of which are extremely long-lasting) 
outweigh the short-term benefits of power supply.

  Most especially the created nuclear waste poses an extremely 
high risk which remains undiminished for periods of time far 
beyond human planning capabilities.

  The only other major use of uranium, for the creation of 
weapons, can not be supported in any way either.

   The WLSN therefore does not support any utilisation of 
uranium.

     I do not want to comment on the above, it speaks for itself.

 Only one small remark: please dear reader, while making up your 
own opinion regarding nuclear power generation in Namibia (YES or 
NO), weigh up the short-term benefits against the long-term 
consequences and think about the many future generations burdened 
with the nuclear waste.

 Bertchen Kohrs Earthlife Namibia 

 ?  Earthlife Anti-Nuclear In Energy Debate ?  

Material on this site copyright The Free Press Of Namibia (Pty) 
Ltd PO Box 20783 - Windhoek - 42 John Meinert Street Tel: +264 
(61) 279600 - Fax: +264 (61) 279602

*****************************************************************
 36 The Australian: First look at new nuke reactor's uranium core 

* March 03, 2007

* Joseph Kerr

* March 03, 2007

OPAL is all clean lines, reinforced glass and concrete, but
Australian scientists have already warmed to her.


She is Australia's new nuclear reactor, and this is the first
picture - a bird's-eye view of the uranium core - ahead of the
official opening next month of the $400million facility at Lucas
Heights in Sydney.

The Weekend Australian was given special access to OPAL - Open Pool
Australian Light-water reactor - after agreeing to strict security
guidelines about the photographs that could be published.

The uranium core is covered by 13m of cooling water. In the picture,
safety officers are shown performing one of their regular checks on
radiation levels.

The opening of the new reactor comes amid a debate about Australia's
nuclear future, with the Government continuing to push for a move
towards domestic nuclear power to help slow climate change, while
support among Labor for restrictions on new uranium mines is
crumbling.

The new OPAL reactor replaces its 1950s-era predecessor, HIFAR, or
Hi Flux Australian Reactor, the workhorse that was shut down in
January.

OPAL will be able to produce four times as many radioisotopes for
medical treatments and lift the amount of silicon irradiation that
can be done for the semiconductor industry.

The Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation sold more
than $20 million worth of radioisotopes in 2004-05.

ANSTO chief of operations Ron Cameron said OPAL was already luring
expatriate scientists home.


*****************************************************************
 37 Dallas Morning News: U.S. unprepared for nuclear terror attack, experts say

| News for Dallas, Texas | Washington/Politics

12:44 AM CST on Friday, March 2, 2007

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON – Although the Bush administration has warned repeatedly
about the threat of a terrorist nuclear attack and spent more than
$300 billion to protect the homeland, the government remains
ill-prepared to respond to a nuclear catastrophe.

Experts and government documents suggest that, absent a major
preparedness push, the U.S. response to a mushroom cloud could be
worse than the debacle after Hurricane Katrina, possibly
contributing to civil disorder and costing thousands of lives.

"The United States is unprepared to mitigate the consequences of a
nuclear attack," Pentagon analyst John Brinkerhoff concluded in a
July 31, 2005, draft of a confidential memo to the Joint Chiefs of
Staff. "We were unable to find any group or office with a coherent
approach to this very important aspect of homeland security. ...

"This is a bad situation. The threat of a nuclear attack is real,
and action is needed now to learn how to deal with one."

Col. Jill Morgenthaler, Illinois' director of homeland security,
said there's a "disconnect" between President Bush's and Vice
President Dick Cheney's nuclear threat talk and the administration's
actions.

"I don't see money being focused on actual response and mitigation
to a nuclear threat," she said.

Interviews by McClatchy Newspapers with more than 15 radiation and
emergency preparedness experts and a review of internal documents
revealed:

–The government has yet to launch an educational program, akin to
the Cold War-era civil defense campaign promoting fallout shelters,
to teach Americans how to shield themselves from radiation,
especially from the fallout plume, which could deposit deadly
particles up to 100 miles from ground zero.

–Analysts estimate that as many as 300,000 emergency workers would
be needed after a nuclear attack, but predict that the radiation
would scare many of them away from the disaster site.

–Hospital emergency rooms wouldn't be able to handle the surge of
people who were irradiated or the many more who feared they were.

–Medical teams would have to improvise to treat what could be tens
of thousands of burn victims because most cities have only one or
two available burn-unit beds. Cham Dallas, director of the
University of Georgia's Center for Mass Destruction Defense, called
the predicament "the worst link in our health care wall."

–Several drugs are in development and one is especially promising,
but the government hasn't acquired any significant new medicine to
counteract radiation's devastating effects on victims' blood-forming
bone marrow.

Over the last three years, several federal agencies have taken some
steps in nuclear disaster planning. The Department of Health and
Human Services has drawn up "playbooks" for a range of attack
scenarios and created a Web site to instruct emergency responders in
treating radiation victims.

The Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is
geared to use real-time weather data, within minutes of a bombing,
to create a computer model that charts the likely path of a
radioactive fallout plume so that the government can warn affected
people to take shelter or evacuate. The government also has modeled
likely effects in blast zones.

Capt. Ann Knebel, the U.S. Public Health Service's deputy
preparedness chief, said her agency is using the models to
understand how many people in different zones would suffer from
blast injuries, burns or radiation sickness "and to begin to match
our resources to the types of injuries."

No matter how great the government's response, a nuclear bomb's toll
would be staggering.

The government's National Planning Scenario, which isn't public,
projects that a relatively small, improvised 10-kiloton bomb could
kill hundreds of thousands of people in a medium-sized city and
cause hundreds of billions of dollars in economic losses.

The document, last updated in April 2005, projects that a bomb
denoted at ground level in Washington, D.C., would kill as many as
204,600 people, including many government officials, and would
injure or sicken 90,800. Another 24,580 victims would die of
radiation-related cancer in ensuing years. Radioactive debris would
contaminate a 3,000-square-mile area, requiring years-long cleanup,
it said.

Brinkerhoff, author of the confidential memo for the Joint Chiefs,
estimated that nearly 300,000 National Guardsmen, military
reservists and civil emergency personnel would be needed to rescue,
decontaminate, process and manage the 1.5 million evacuees.

The job would include cordoning off the blast zone and manning a
200-mile perimeter around the fallout area to process and
decontaminate victims, to turn others away from the danger and to
maintain order. Brinkerhoff estimated that the military would need
to provide 140,000 of the 300,000 responders, but doubted that the
Pentagon would have that many. And the Public Health Service's
Knebel cited studies suggesting that the "fear factor" would reduce
civil emergency responders by more than 30 percent.

Planning for an attack seems to evoke a sense of resignation among
some officials.

"We are concerned about the catastrophic threats and are trying to
improve our abilities for disasters," said Gerald Parker, a deputy
assistant secretary in Health and Human Services' new Office of
Preparedness and Response. "But you have to look at what's pragmatic
as well."

© 2007 The Dallas Morning News Co.
*****************************************************************
 38 Dallas Morning News: Chuck Bloom: Talk radio shock jocks almost have us scared stupid

| News for Dallas, Texas | Collin County Opinions

08:52 AM CST on Friday, March 2, 2007

My sleep habits are such that I often awaken before the sun rises.
In an attempt to return to Dreamland and avoid any blinding
artificial light, I slip on a pair of headphones to my Walkman and
dial up any news or talk station in the wee hours (music tends to
stimulate me, not put me back to sleep).

I've never been a talk radio fan; it's too populated by the kind of
reactionary nut jobs who will, and do, say anything to garner
ratings and listeners. Unless I pay to upgrade to satellite radio,
I'm stuck with the free airwaves in North Texas, and on the AM dial,
the choice is between slim and none. Even the FM stations offer
little in the way of anything past juvenile-slacker entertainment;
not appropriate for anyone who has a modicum of intelligence.

Since the airwaves are dominated by right-wing "personalities" (to
the point of absurdity and total exclusion of alternative voices),
it is difficult to discriminate the truth from blow-hard fiction.
All too often these "independent" thinkers mouth the exact same
talking points, as if previously scripted and read on the air at the
same moment in time. It makes one wonder who is actually pulling
their strings ... or microphone cords, in this case.

The latest trend is to hear that the U.S. is in imminent danger of
being destroyed by nuclear terrorism, unless we give up a few of our
liberties for a while. Hey, who needs the right to freely assemble,
to say (or print) what you wish as long as it doesn't harm anyone
else and to worship without government interference?

Too many of these men and women are engrossed in their 24-Jack Bauer
scenario, conveniently forgetting that it's fiction. That television
show scripted one possible scenario – for dramatic effect – to go
with previous seasons of mass germ warfare, political assassination
and two other threats of detonation of dirty bombs (one earlier
explosion happened in the desert).

I can only shake my head in utter wonderment and sadness when I hear
one of these hosts actually utter these words, "What good are our
rights when you're dead?" Moments like these signify how our
political discourse has reached the lower depths. Give up our
Constitutional rights? You must be kidding.

Without each and every individual guaranteed right, established by
law and protected by battle, this would not be the United States of
America. I don't know what it would be, but I certainly know it
would not be the nation to which I pledge allegiance.

When we, as a nation, decide to abdicate any of our rights, the
country and our precious constitution will be harmed beyond repair.
You just cannot "temporarily suspend" rights anymore than a woman
can be "slightly pregnant." Once the armor is breached, all else is
lost.

What would you tell the families of all the soldiers who died in
every conflict (and not just the current state of affairs)? They
gave their lives to maintain all our rights – not just a selected
few.

"Will it take losing an American city before we, as a nation, wake
up?" the hosts ask. Frankly, we lost a U.S. city – it was New
Orleans. And it wasn't a terrorist who did the trick, but Mother
Nature's nasty daughter, Katrina. We have seen the response, or lack
of it, to that.

Here's a truth that we all seem to forget: This country is simply
too big and too populated to completely protect each and every day.
Our local authorities do their best and have succeeded for the most
part (9/11 being the worst exception). Most of our tragedy and loss
of life comes from natural disasters, and there's very little that
can prevent such calamities.

However, fooling around with the Constitution is not the method by
which we can best protect ourselves.

I choose to live in the state of Texas; I don't live in the state of
fear. That means I don't surrender any of my rights – no matter what.



Chuck Bloom is a former Collin County columnist-editor and a
frequent contributor to Collin County Opinions. You can reach him at
chuckbloom@hotmail.com, or through his Web site at
http://chuckbloom.blogspot.com.





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*****************************************************************
 39 FR: DHHS: Contamination investigation of Monsanto employees in Ohio

Doc 07-947

[Federal Register: March 2, 2007 (Volume 72, Number 41)] 
[Notices] [Page 9536-9537] From the Federal Register Online via 
GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr02mr07-49]                         

DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES

National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health; 
Designation of a Class of Employees for Addition to the Special 
Exposure Cohort

AGENCY: National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), 
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

ACTION: Notice.

SUMMARY: The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) gives notice 
of a decision to designate a class of employees at the Monsanto 
Chemical Company in Dayton, Ohio, as an addition to the Special 
Exposure Cohort (SEC) under the Energy Employees Occupational Illness 
Compensation Program Act of 2000. On February 16, 2007, the Secretary 
of HHS designated the following class of employees as an addition to 
the SEC:

Atomic Weapons Employer (AWE) employees who were monitored or should 
have been monitored for exposure to ionizing radiation while working 
at Monsanto Chemical Company Units I, III, or IV in Dayton, Ohio, 
for a number of work days aggregating at least 250 work days during 
the period from January 1, 1943, through December 31, 1949, or in 
combination with work days within the parameters established for one 
or more other classes of employees in the Special Exposure Cohort.

    This designation will become effective on March 18, 2007, unless 
Congress provides otherwise prior to the effective date. After this 
effective date, HHS will publish a notice in the Federal Register 
reporting the addition of this class to the SEC or the result of any 
provision by Congress regarding the decision by HHS to add the class to 
the SEC.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Larry Elliott, Director, Office of 
Compensation Analysis and Support, National Institute for Occupational 
Safety and Health (NIOSH), 4676 Columbia Parkway, MS C-46, Cincinnati, 
OH 45226, Telephone 513-533-6800 (this is not a toll-free number). 
Information requests can also be submitted by e-mail to OCAS@CDC.GOV.

[[Page 9537]]

    Dated: February 23, 2007.
John Howard,
Director, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
[FR Doc. 07-947 Filed 3-1-07; 8:45 am]

BILLING CODE 4160-17-M


*****************************************************************
 40 Journal News: Westchester to get more radiation-protection pills

(Original publication: March 2, 2007)

WHITE PLAINS - Westchester County officials expect to receive a new
supply of potassium iodide (KI) this month to distribute to schools,
municipalities and others within the 10-mile evacuation radius of
the Indian Point nuclear plants.

The new batch will replace doses of KI that the county distributed
in 2002, which are due to expire at the end of this month.

KI can be taken during a radiological release to protect the thyroid
from taking up radiation. When a person takes the KI pills, their
thyroid is saturated with non-radioactive iodide and helps to
protect them from thyroid cancer.

"Potassium iodide is not a panacea," Westchester County Executive
Andrew Spano said. "The best way to protect your family is to listen
for directions from the county, which could include taking shelter,
evacuating or taking KI."

Food and Drug Administration has cited several studies have shown
that KI can remain effective long after the expiration date, county
officials said.

    Copyright 2006 The Journal News, a Gannett Co. Inc. newspaper
  serving Westchester, Rockland and Putnam Counties in New York. Use
  of this site signifies your agreement to the Terms of Service and
                Privacy Policy, updated June 7, 2005.
*****************************************************************
 41 FR: DHHS: contamination of General Atomics Workers in La Jolla Ca.

Doc 07-948

[Federal Register: March 2, 2007 (Volume 72, Number 41)] 
[Notices] [Page 9536] From the Federal Register Online via GPO 
Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr02mr07-48]                         

DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES

National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health; 
Designation of a Class of Employees for Addition to the Special 
Exposure Cohort

AGENCY: National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), 
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

ACTION: Notice.

SUMMARY: The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) gives notice 
of a decision to designate a class of employees at General Atomics in 
La Jolla, California, as an addition to the Special Exposure Cohort 
(SEC) under the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation 
Program Act of 2000. On February 16, 2007, the Secretary of HHS 
designated the following class of employees as an addition to the SEC:

Atomic Weapons Employer (AWE) employees who were monitored or should 
have been monitored for exposure to ionizing radiation while working 
at the General Atomics facility in La Jolla, California at the 
following locations: Science Laboratories A, B, and C (Building 2); 
Experimental Building (Building 9); Maintenance (Building 10); 
Service Building (Building 11); Buildings 21 and 22; Hot Cell 
Facility (Building 23); Waste Yard (Buildings 25 and 26); 
Experimental Area (Buildings 27 and 27-1); LINAC Complex (Building 
30); HTGR-TCF (Building 31); Fusion Building (Building 33); Fusion 
Doublet III (Building 34); SV-A (Building 37); SV-B (Building 39); 
and SV-D (no building number) for a number of work days aggregating 
at least 250 work days from January 1, 1960, through December 31, 
1969, or in combination with work days within the parameters 
established for one or more other classes of employees in the 
Special Exposure Cohort.

    This designation will become effective on March 18, 2007, unless 
Congress provides otherwise prior to the effective date. After this 
effective date, HHS will publish a notice in the Federal Register 
reporting the addition of this class to the SEC or the result of any 
provision by Congress regarding the decision by HHS to add the class to 
the SEC.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Larry Elliott, Director, Office of 
Compensation Analysis and Support, National Institute for Occupational 
Safety and Health (NIOSH), 4676 Columbia Parkway, MS C-46, Cincinnati, 
OH 45226, Telephone 513-533-6800 (this is not a toll-free number). 
Information requests can also be submitted by e-mail to OCAS@CDC.GOV.

    Dated: February 23, 2007.
John Howard,
Director, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
[FR Doc. 07-948 Filed 3-1-07; 8:45 am]

BILLING CODE 4160-17-M


*****************************************************************
 42 Long Beach Beachcomber: Douglas Park a Health Risk?

News and Views of the East Long Beach Area

 Volume XV   Number 5   March 2, 2007

by : Kirt Ramirez

by: Kirt Ramirez

I have a story to tell.

For five years I have tried to get other news outlets to report 
on what I'm about to tell you, but have been unsuccessful.

I would like to thank Beachcomber Publisher Jay Beeler for 
letting me go through with this, even though it is unorthodox for 
a journalist to tell his own story in the first person.

The details I will present here have been thoroughly documented. 
My story has two parts and contains information that has never 
been reported in the media before, until now. This story involves 
uranium poisoning and the former Boeing C-1 facility near 
Lakewood Blvd. and Conant St. I'm about to share with you what I 
stumbled upon in 2002, facts I believe you have a right to know.

In order to explain my uranium story, I must first share a 
separate story detailing my personal history, which will 
ultimately lead to my uranium discovery. This sequence is for a 
reason. The story is unusual and complicated and cannot be 
briefly summarized, as it includes safety issues unknown to the 
general public.

I grew up in Cypress. I was physically healthy for most of my 
childhood. But during my early teenage years, I slowly became 
ill. I couldn't concentrate, I started stuttering, my hair and 
eyebrows began falling out, and I suffered from extreme fatigue 
and depression. I became introverted and started twitching and 
having muscle spasms.

Doctors documented these symptoms but could not offer an 
explanation. My health progressively got worse during the mid 
1990s. I was diagnosed with heart and liver problems. My skin 
developed a yellow tint and I was hospitalized many times for 
depression.

My symptoms could not be explained as just mental or physical 
problems. Something was happening to my body that my several 
doctors could not explain. I tried to go to college, but failed 
since I couldn't concentrate on my studies. I couldn't hold a 
job. I got severe migraines and became weaker. By age 19 in 1995, 
I was extremely ill and moved in with my aunt in Los Alamitos.

I eventually gave up on my doctors and mainstream medicine 
altogether out of frustration. My doctors weren't helping me. The 
drugs they prescribed to treat my symptoms only made me worse 
through the many side effects. I always felt deep inside that 
something else was causing my symptoms and I wanted to find out 
what it was.

Finally An Answer

After doing some research in 1997, I found a medical doctor who 
appeared on a "best of the best" list. This doctor specialized in 
environmental medicine, metabolic medicine, preventive medicine 
and clinical nutrition. He was an Air force captain and a 1959 
MIT biology graduate.
My aunt financed some of the costs of seeing him, since my 
insurance did not pay for "alternative" treatments. During my 
initial 45 minute visit, I knew this was the right doctor for me. 
He was thorough, interested, focused and honest.

During the exam, he looked in my mouth and noticed nearly every 
tooth was filled with "silver" amalgam dental material. He said 
my symptoms matched that of mercury poisoning. It is now well 
known that amalgam material contains 50 percent mercury and that 
the element can leach out and be absorbed by the body.

As a fellow of the American Academy of Environmental Medicine and 
a diplomat of the International Board of Environmental Medicine, 
my doctor ordered that lab work be performed immediately to test 
for heavy metals.

This testing of toxic metals was performed by Doctor's Data Inc. 
in Chicago, where my medical specimen was sent via FedEx. This 
lab analyzed 15 different elements regarded as toxic, including 
mercury, antimony, arsenic, bismuth, cadmium and uranium. 
Doctor's Data is a CLIA certified lab, so precise, that their 
tests are used regularly in court cases.

When the results came back, my doctor was right. I had mercury 
poisoning. At age 21 in Jan. 1998, my lab work showed a very high 
level of mercury. The test's reference range for mercury was "5" 
and below, meaning any result over "5" is toxic. My result for 
mercury was "22." In addition, the lab attached a discussion and 
bibliography for mercury, since my level was so high.

I also had an elevated level of cadmium, but other metals, 
including uranium, were well below the reference range limit. I 
started a medical treatment regimen in Jan. 1998 for heavy metal 
poisoning.

My doctor recommended I remove the source of mercury and have all 
of my 22 amalgam dental fillings removed and replaced with a 
non-toxic material for strong medical indications.

Meanwhile, the American Dental Association admits that mercury 
leaks out of this material. But they still claim that not enough 
is leaked to cause "significant" health problems. This is a huge 
controversy in the US, but most dentists still use mercury 
amalgam as of this writing.
Many books have been written on this topic, some linking mercury 
from fillings to diseases, such as Alzheimer's and multiple 
sclerosis.

The Los Angeles Times reported in its Monday, Oct. 25, 1999 
edition that Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Germany, England and 
Canada have recommended dentists use material other than mercury, 
especially in children and pregnant women.

I have a folder thick with health reports, newspaper clippings, 
environmental documents and studies that I have gathered over the 
past 10 years. I surely believe in the toxic nature of amalgam 
fillings.

Mercury attacks the nervous system and symptoms can include 
introversion, shyness, timidity, depression and apathy, according 
to medical journals. Mercury in small doses of only a few parts 
per million can damage the brain and spinal cord, liver, kidneys 
and thyroid, according to biology.

I went back to the dentist who originally placed mercury in my 
teeth and asked him to remove the fillings. He did, and replaced 
them with a white composite resin.

It then took from Jan. 1998 to Aug. 1999 to detoxify from mercury 
using the very best in chelating drugs. I had regular Doctor's 
Data tests performed to check my levels of metals.

By Aug. 1999, mercury was no longer an issue. The detoxification 
treatments had brought the mercury and cadmium down to normal. 
And other metals, such as uranium, were still well below the 
reference range limit. Thus, I was pronounced "clean," and could 
now move on with my life.

I already felt like a new person and my doctor documented my 
rapid recovery and return to good health. My family and friends 
were amazed at my new healthy appearance and complimented me.

The Boeing Experience

Now comes the second part to my story. After being "clean" of 
metals, I left Orange County and moved to Long Beach. A friend 
living in a camper near Long Beach City College invited me to 
live with him, rent free, while attending the college.

I considered it exciting to move to Long Beach and took him up on 
that offer. I was in my early 20's and thought of it as a camping 
adventure. We parked the camper on Lew Davis St., near the 
college and Boeing. But that didn't last very long.

A police officer one day told us to move the camper someplace 
else. So my friend and I found a spot on Conant St., near 
Lakewood Blvd., where about 20 other campers were parked. The 
majority of people living there were Boeing employees who had 
residences far away, worked in Long Beach during the week, but 
then went home on the weekend. Our camper blended right in and no 
one from Boeing ever asked us to leave.

For around three years (1999-2002), I lived in a camper on Conant 
and attended LBCC. Because I was done with my former medical 
doctor and treatments, I had no medical follow-ups for mercury 
during that time. But my health slowly began to deteriorate 
again, and by the third year of living near Boeing, I was very 
sick.

I lost hair, became depressed, started twitching again and always 
felt tired. My stuttering returned and my eyes were swollen. It 
got to a point where I often cut classes because I was so tired.

I went to a doctor for a physical examination, and found that I 
had a very low white blood cell count. In fact, it was not even 
in the reference range, it was so low. This never happened to me 
before. My body temperature was low and I felt and looked awful.

I thought maybe the mercury had returned. Thus, I had another 
Doctor's Data test performed for heavy metals, since it had been 
three years since my last fecal elements test was performed in 
1999.

The results shocked me. This time, the mercury did not return, 
but uranium suddenly became an issue. My uranium level in 1999 
was 0.059, which is normal and well below the 0.12 reference 
range limit for uranium. But after moving to Boeing and being 
retested in 2002 with the same fecal metals test used by the same 
lab in 1999, my result was 0.367. Uranium stood out from all the 
rest of the metals tested and stretched into the 95th percentile 
column, and Doctor's Data attached a discussion on uranium, since 
my level was so high. I was diagnosed with uranium poisoning in 
April 2002.

I have since consulted with other doctors in the area and had the 
same tests performed, and they all correlated. My doctors did not 
know what to do, as this is rare. One of my doctors called a 
colleague of his, who has been a toxicologist for over 50 years, 
and even he did not know how to treat uranium poisoning.

I believe I got poisoned from living near Boeing for three years. 
These tests don't lie. They reveal what my living environment 
exposed me to. For more information on fecal metal tests, visit 
www.DoctorsData.com.

I have since contacted officials at state, local, county and 
federal levels about this matter, but despite repeated calls, 
they were unresponsive.

I came across a Press-Telegram article from May 20, 1992 
discussing McDonnell Douglas, now Boeing. The opening paragraph 
read, "Emissions from McDonnell Douglas operations in Long Beach 
and three other Southland cities are exposing hundreds of 
thousands of residents to an increased risk of cancer, the state 
Attorney General's office alleges in a lawsuit filed in Los 
Angeles."

Boeing has acknowledged using depleted uranium at the former C-1 
facility until 1992, in balanced weights for aircraft 
manufacturing. But depleted uranium is no longer used or stored 
at that site, according to Boeing and state officials.

Scientific literature says depleted uranium can cause cancer and 
has a half-life of 4.5 billion years.
The County of Los Angeles Department of Health Services said in a 
letter dated Mar. 23, 2006: "The possession and use of depleted 
uranium counterweights is exempt from our regulatory control when 
installed in, or stored or handled in connection with 
installation in or removal from, aircraft, rockets, projectiles, 
or missiles, if each counterweight has been manufactured by an 
appropriately licensed manufacturer."

And the Long Beach Health Dept. isn't quite sure how to address 
this matter. "We may not be able to do anything about it. We do 
have jurisdiction for hazardous materials, but this case seems 
beyond us. But I'll talk to my superior. It's not something that 
we do everyday," said Long Beach Hazardous Waste Operations 
Officer Nelson Kerr on Feb. 23, 2007.

Meanwhile, the Department of Transportation Federal Aviation 
Administration said in a Dec. 20, 1984 advisory:
"For many years, aircraft manufacturers have used "depleted" 
uranium to balance ailerons, rudders, and elevators on certain 
jet aircraft and rotor blades on certain helicopters. Uranium is 
1 « times as dense as lead [sic more dense than lead] and is the 
heaviest naturally occurring metal. According to a 1983 McDonnell 
Douglas Customer Service First Quarter publication, only 
"depleted" uranium is used, which means it has been processed to 
remove most of its uranium 235, the most highly radioactive form 
used in nuclear power plants.

"The remaining uranium 238 emits only low level alpha radiation. 
While the depleted uranium normally poses no danger, it is to be 
handled with caution. The main hazard associated with depleted 
uranium is the harmful effect the material could have if it 
enters the body. If particles are inhaled or digested, they can 
be chemically toxic and cause a significant and long lasting 
irradiation of internal tissue. Depleted uranium is slightly 
radioactive."

Douglas Park Safe?

Now Boeing wants to build homes only footsteps from where I used 
to live in a camper.

I told my story to Boeing in person in 2002 and an officer made 
copies of my lab work and personal information. He said someone 
would call me. But for five years, no one called.

In addition, I called a Boeing environmental spokesman in 2002 
and asked him what chemicals mainly exist around the C-1 plant. 
He told me naphthalene (an ingredient found in moth balls). But 
when I mentioned uranium, he hung up the telephone on me.

I recently told Boeing my story again Feb. 23, 2007. I spoke with 
Ron Fornitor, Boeing safety and health and environmental affairs, 
but he wouldn't discuss the matter. "As you probably wouldn't be 
surprised, I can't comment." He said a lawyer would contact me.

Boeing spokesman Glen Golightley called me on Feb. 28 (the first 
person from Boeing to ever call me) and said Boeing is within 
regulations. "What are you expecting from us?" he asked. "I'm not 
sure why you're calling."

I will continue this story in the next issue of the Beachcomber.

Beachcomber
5199 E. Pacific Coast Hwy., Suite 608
Long Beach, CA 90804-3364 Post Office Box 15679
Long Beach, CA 90815-0679

editor@longbeachcomber.com      

© 2002 - 2007 Beeler &amp; Associates All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
 43 KRNV.com: Government to Seek Dismissal of Lawsuit on 'Divine Strake' Test

The government will seek dismissal of the lawsuit that blocked plans
for a non-nuclear explosion that would have sent a mushroom-shaped
dust cloud high over the Nevada desert.

That's what a Justice Department lawyer told a federal judge today
in Las Vegas.

But a lawyer representing an American Indian tribe and "downwinders"
in Utah and Nevada who sued to stop the "Divine Strake" blast says
opponents fear the government will simply scale down plans and mount
smaller experiments.

Federal Judge Lloyd George kept the case open -- with another
conference set for April 30th.

The federal government last week canceled the 700-ton explosion at
the Nevada Test Site.

(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)


 All content © Copyright 2001 - 2007 WorldNow and KRNV. All Rights
Reserved.


*****************************************************************
 44 Rocky Mountain News: Salazar introduces bill to help ailing Rocky Flats workers

By Laura Frank, Rocky Mountain News

March 2, 2007

Colorado's Cold War bomb makers would have an easier time getting
compensation for work-related illnesses under a bill introduced by
U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar, who accused the government of "foot-dragging,
obstruction and neglect" in the matter.

Salazar's legislation, which mirrors bills introduced by Congressmen
Mark Udall and Ed Perlmutter, both Colorado Democrats, would
essentially cut the red tape that has denied or delayed benefits to
many workers at Rocky Flats.

"Across five decades, the patriotic men and women of Rocky Flats
served their country producing plutonium, one of the most dangerous
substances in the world, and crafting it into the triggers for
America's nuclear arsenal," Salazar said in a written statement.

"Washington owes them an enormous debt of gratitude. But instead, it
has shown them the back of its hand."

Both Salazar and Udall have introduced similar legislation in the
past. Both bills died. But this year, Rocky Flats worker advocate
Terrie Barrie hopes things might be different.

"It would be so wonderful" to have Congress take action, said
Barrie, whose husband George, a former Flats mechanic, has
documented plutonium exposure and suffers numerous ailments.

He and scores of other workers who have cancers and other ailments
they believe are linked to on-the-job exposures have been trying to
get medical and financial help for years.

In 2000, after decades of denial, the federal government for the
first time acknowledged nuclear weapons workers across the nation
had been harmed by contact with plutonium, chemicals and other toxic
and radioactive substances.

Congress set up a compensation program for workers with certain
ailments, agreeing to pay $150,000 plus medical costs to those who
qualify.

But since then, many Rocky Flats workers have found their exposure
records are missing or inaccurate. As a result, documenting their
exposures - one requirement of the compensation program - has proved
to be a nearly impossible hurdle.

Two years ago, the union representing the workers asked the federal
government to declare the Rocky Flats workers part of a "special
exposure cohort," which means they wouldn't have to prove their
individual exposures. Instead, it would be assumed that any worker
in a certain area at a certain time would have been dangerously
exposed and therefore compensated.

A petition for such status is among 14 pending before the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services.

Ten other weapons sites have received that designation because their
exposure records were not reliable enough.

Determining if the Rocky Flats records were reliable enough to
reconstruct workers' toxic doses - a process that was supposed to
take a matter of months - has dragged on for two years with no
decision.

The legislation in both the House and Senate would grant that
"special exposure cohort" status to Rocky Flats.

Site Map | Photo Reprints | Corrections 2006 © The E.W. Scripps Co.
*****************************************************************
 45 LVN: Letter: NEW OPTIONS PROPOSED FOR YUCCA MOUNTAIN SITE

Lahontan Valley News and Fallon Eagle Standard - Opinion

March 2, 2007

Last night we probably all learned that the feds are now looking at
a northern route(s) that will put nuclear waste rolling on rail
through our back yards.

The first reaction is probably NIMBY, but let's consider a few
things!

The nation NEEDS a single place to put this stuff in an era of
terrorist bombers, etc.

Right now, this stuff is stored under questionable security
conditions all over the nation in many locations that are too spread
out to monitor and safeguard effectively.

The feds owe us on this one!

The federal government needs to pay us all for this, as we're not
only doing the nation a favor, but we are assuming a certain amount
of risk as well.

I have no doubt that each and every shipment would be under the
highest security escorts, as well as moving about as fast as the
trains in Fallon go!

The folks that worry about leaks and 100,000-year half lives are
missing the point - probably in less than 20 years, the scientists
will find a use for this stuff, and all of a sudden the nation will
be awash in the world's hottest new commodity.

Just as Alaskans enjoy a fat dividend check each year from oil, so
should each and every taxpaying Nevadan whose county is affected by
either storage or transport of this stuff.

If bin Laden can be safely stored deep inside an Afghan mountain,
perhaps other types of waste can be too!

Joseph L. Pettegrew

Churchill County

Lahontan Valley News and Fallon Eagle Standard - 562 North Maine
Street - Fallon, NV 89406
*****************************************************************
 46 Pahrump Valley Times: Rurals concerned about Mina route (Yucca)

Mar. 02, 2007

YUCCA RAIL

OVERSIGHT CHIEF NOT PLEASED WITH PACE OF PLANNING

By DAVID BAKER SPECIAL TO THE PVT

CARSON CITY -- Nevada's rural counties are not happy with the
proposed Mina alternative rail route to Yucca Mountain, and
yesterday the director of the Esmeralda County Repository Oversight
Program made their stance clear during a session of the Nevada
Commission on Nuclear projects here.

Ed Mueller addressed the commission, chaired by Richard H. Bryan,
and spoke out on behalf of Esmeralda, Nye, Mineral and Churchill
counties and addressed the possible effects of the proposed Mina
Rail Corridor alternative to the Caliente route.

"The announcement of the Mina rail alternative spur to serve the
proposed Yucca Mountain project was largely unexpected," Mueller
said. "Unlike the Caliente rail alternative and its many variations
which have been studied for more than 20 years by the Department of
Energy, the Mina Rail alternative has not undergone a similar
scrutiny."

Mueller added, "Based on recent audits by the DOE Inspector
General's office and guidance given by the DOE internal legal
counsel, oversight funding has not been used for any type of impact
assessment activities related to the Mina route.

"DOE is working under a fairly aggressive schedule to complete its
required environmental analysis in time for the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission license submittal not later than June 2008. As
communities affected by this new proposal, we are working hard to
understand the full compliment of potential impacts."

Several routes are detailed in a Bechtel rail corridor study. All
originate at the same point and pass through the Walker Indian
reservation to the greater Hawthorne area. The proposed rail spur
will continue on to the Luning, Mina and Sodaville areas. It will
then proceed southwest to Rhodes Salt Marsh, and Redlich Pass,
before crossing into Esmeralda County.

The rail spur will proceed to Blair Junction, where a split in the
Mina Spur is indicated. The first alternative proposed route will
travel southwest across Highway 265 then to Clayton Valley, where it
will end in Bonnie Claire Interface. The second possible route will
be from Blair Junction southeast, crossing Highways 95 and 6
intersection, to Montezuma Valley, through to Goldfield and once
again ending up at the Bonnie Claire switch yard before crossing
into Nye County.

From Lida Junction the proposed spur will continue straight on to
the Yucca Mountain Project.

Mueller, said in regards to the spur, "If a rail option is selected
and ultimately constructed for the proposed Yucca Mountain Project,
termination of such a line at the repository would provide limited
secondary use." Muller continued, "As a practical matter, the
prospects of a single purpose dead-end rail spur to Yucca Mountain
only amplifies the negative elements associated with the project and
the Mina Rail alternative."

According to the Bechtel study, numerous problems regarding
endangered species may be involved in the rail route.

In addition, the Bechtel study says that any dry creek bed, dry lake
and or naturally occurring wetlands could be filled in for the
proposed rail bed. Multiple springs, groups of springs and or wells
are less than a quarter of a mile from the proposed rail spur; some
are as close as 500 feet from the rail line.

The study also address several right-of-way issues. One of which
will be a 1,000 foot wide to either side of the proposed spur on BLM
lands. Right-of-way widths across Native American lands will have to
be determined with the Native Nations and the Bureau of Indian
Affairs.

"If a rail spur is to be built," Mueller said, "DOE needs to
thoroughly examine and be open to the concept of shared (common
carrier) rail use. Furthermore, a through going rail line to
southern main lines, instead of a dead-end spur, can potentially
provide some level of offsetting mitigation's to areas most
impacted. A through-going rail line has the potential to eliminate
waste shipments in the Las Vegas Valley."

In 2005 dollars, for 255 miles of proposed rail, the construction
cost at a minimum would run $1,596,255,000, according to the Bechtel
study, or for the second rail construction option of 256 miles,
$1,585,790,000.

Mueller pointed out the limits of oversight.

"Our (oversight) ability to influence whether or not Yucca Mountain
will be built and a rail line constructed is limited to
non-existent. We do, however, have the responsibility to ensure
transportation occurs in a safe manner and that the transportation
mode has the potential to serve our respective county interests."

The study further cites a number of prehistoric sites in the Tonopah
area, some which are eligible or potentially eligible for inclusion
in the National Registry of Historical Places.

In addition, Steward's Western Shoshone Village, at the south edge
of Oasis Mountain, the Beatty Wash Petroglyphs, and Black Cone,
which has been identified on visits by ethnographers and Native
Americans as a place of religious significance or power, could
potentially be affected.

The Mina corridor passes near known historic graves including a
Chinese grave and the historic cemetery at Millers town site.

"Historically," Mueller said, "Nevada's rural communities have
shouldered the burden for the Department of Energy's activities
while the positive elements have largely accrued to Nevada's urban
communities. This appears to be the case with the Yucca Mountain
project with the site being planned for Nye County, and Nevada's
rural communities slated for the waste shipment routes.

"Until such time as the Nuclear Waste Policy Act is rescinded or the
money stops flowing, Yucca Mountain is not going away. As rural
counties potentially affected by an uncertain outcome, we will
continue to pursue activities and outcomes that contribute to the
health, safety and well being of our citizens with regard to this
issue until it is resolved one way or another. To do any different
would be irresponsible."

webmaster@pahrumpvalleytimes.com
Copyright © Pahrump Valley Times, 1997 -
*****************************************************************
 47 DAILY YOMIURI: N-waste site search chance for debate 

: Editorial : 

Toyocho, a small town in Kochi Prefecture, has applied to become a
candidate for the disposal of high level radioactive waste that
comes from nuclear power generation.

Since late 2002, the Nuclear Waste Management Organization of Japan,
set up by the government and power industry, has been accepting
applications from local governments to be designated as an
inspection district, which would allow them to be considered as a
possible waste site. Toyocho is the first municipality that has
applied for the position.

We believe this issue provides us an opportunity for constructive
discussion on the problems associated with nuclear power generation.

It is not just the residents of Toyocho who are complaining about
the decision. Neighboring towns in Kochi and Tokushima prefectures
have railed against the move, saying, "Don't ask for waste from
nuclear power stations," or demanding that the environment be
protected.

But more than anything else, it is important that we calmly discuss
the necessity for and safety of such a disposal site.

===

Cautious process

The level of waste in question, many experts say, is of no
significant danger when handled appropriately.

It is radioactive material generated when spent nuclear fuel from
power stations has been chemically treated and vitrified. Because of
the high temperature of the waste, it is to be cooled for 30 to 50
years at storage facilities before being buried at least 300 meters
underground.

If this plan were to be derailed, it would become impossible to
reprocess spent nuclear fuel in Japan. This would result in the
suspension of the country's nuclear power generation, which provides
30 percent of the nation's power needs.

Because of this, the selection of disposal sites is of great
importance for maintaining the nation's energy supply.

Of course, sites must be carefully selected and public confidence
must be gained. It is for this reason a strict, three-step procedure
has been defined.

The process begins with a two-year investigation that includes
inspecting earthquake records and other data on stratal problems in
the candidate area. The next step is a four-year-investigation that
will focus on the area's geology and will include drilling surveys.
For the final step, an experimental burial facility will be
constructed and placed underground to provide researchers with much
more detailed data. For each step, the government's permission is
required, as is the municipality's consent.

===

Financial temptation

At the moment, Toyocho is not yet trying to become a disposal site,
but merely offering itself as a potential candidate. Even if the
first stage of the inspection moves ahead, there would be no
construction and nature in the area will go undisturbed.

Speaking about the town's application, Mayor Yasuoki Tashima said,
"This a good chance for a small town to contribute to a national
project."

Tashima has said he would continue to look into what priority waste
disposal sites are given in the nation's energy policy and the
nuclear fuel cycle, as well as safety issues. He also said he
intended to carry out a referendum before entering the final stage.

Once the inspection process begins, the town and neighboring
communities will receive 1 billion yen in grants annually.
Commenting on this, Kochi Gov. Daijiro Hashimoto compared the
subsidies to "the government flashing money in a municipalities'
face."

However, there are a number of nuclear facilities that have
subsidies attached. This is because the people of Japan share the
burden in certain sectors.

If this policy should not be allowed, The nation's energy policy
will not stand. This problem must be considered from a broad point
of view, and not be opposed merely for the sake of opposing.



(From The Yomiuri Shimbun, March 3, 2007)

The Daily Yomiuri, The Yomiuri Shimbun
*****************************************************************
 48 The Hindu: Re-processing rights of Plutonium crucial: BARC

Friday, March 2, 2007 : 1425 Hrs

 Mumbai

Mumbai, March 2 (PTI): Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) has 
said that reprocessing rights of plutonium was crucial as it 
would help in dealing with problems of proliferation as well as 
nuclear waste.

Present nuclear power plants utilise only 0.7 per cent of uranium 
and the remaining 99.3 per cent is the spent fuel Plutonium, 
which remains highly radioactive for over 10,000 years in the 
storage. This Plutonium can be reprocessed to generate power.

It was this consideration that led India to take up a three-stage 
nuclear power programme where in the Stage II - fast breeder 
programme - uses the spent fuel from pressurised heavy water 
reactor (thermal).

The fast breeder reactor which uses highly radioactive plutonium 
generates manageable waste and most plutonium is converted into 
useful energy, said BARC Director, Dr S Banerjee, said.

It was this reason that India has been insisting on right to 
re-process in the current Indo-US civilian nuclear deal.

If plutonium is not re-processed, "then we will be doing 
injustice to mother earth by storing highly radioactive spent 
fuel in underground water storage."

That is, plutonium which is a proliferation material is made into 
an almost non-proliferating one. This process is known as the 
"closed" nuclear fuel cycle and has been adopted by a number of 
countries, the United Kingdom, Japan and France among them. 

Copyright © 2006, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination
*****************************************************************
 49 Independent: Britain gets nuclear waste warning from energy chiefs

By Michael Harrison, Business Editor

Published: 02 March 2007

Britain must not go ahead with a new generation of nuclear power
stations until it has a "clear and robust" plan in place for dealing
with the twin problems of decommissioning and waste treatment, the
world's leading energy body warned yesterday.

The International Energy Agency also said that any new nuclear
programme must be funded entirely from the private sector, without
any government subsidy or market intervention.

In its latest review of UK energy policy, the agency said that it
supported the building of new nuclear stations as an important part
of the country's future energy mix. However, it added that the
Government's current proposals for dealing with issues such as
planning and construction, long-term waste management and guidance
for potential financial backers were "too vague to provide the
required certainty".

Ministers have pledged to address this in the forthcoming energy
White Paper. The document had been due to be published in the next
fortnight but has been delayed until May after the environmental
campaign group Greenpeace succeeded in a High Court action claiming
that the Government had failed to consult properly last year on the
twin issues of financing a new nuclear programme and waste
management.

Introducing the IEA report, Claude Mandil, the agency's executive
director, said: "The spent-fuel issue is the most critical one for
nuclear. It will not develop if there is not a credible and
satisfactory answer to the management of spent fuel and one which is
convincing for the public."

At present, most low-level waste is disposed of at the state-owned
Drigg depository in Cumbria while intermediate-level waste is stored
on site. But the report says that Britain must move rapidly to
select and implement a comprehensive national policy for radioactive
waste disposal. To this end, it is "essential" that the Government
puts in place schemes to ensure that adequate funds are available to
cover decommissioning and waste disposal. These funds should come
from either the industry itself or electricity consumers.

Mr Mandil said the agency was against any form of subsidy to enable
new nuclear stations to be built because it increased uncertainty.
But he said he was in favour of the idea of nuclear plant developers
agreeing long-term supply contracts to ensure that their costs were
covered, as was now happening with the construction of new capacity
in Finland.

Lord Truscott, the UK energy minister, said there would be no
subsidy, levy, nuclear obligation or market intervention to help
launch a new nuclear programme. "Our position is unchanged. New
nuclear will have to stand on its own feet. It will be for private
business to make its own decisions on investing and for industry to
decide whether it is viable. It will operate within the market as it
stands."

Despite the minister's insistence that there will be no government
intervention, many energy experts believe there will need to be some
form of aid or guarantee to kick-start a new nuclear programme. Some
observers even believe there will have to be some form of indemnity
given to station builders to underwrite their costs should a future
government reverse nuclear policy.

Elsewhere, the agency largely gave the UK a glowing report, saying
its policies for supporting investment in new plant and energy
efficiency were working well. However, it sounded a note of caution
about the UK's growing dependence on gas, saying options should be
kept open for the use of other fuels.

© 2007 Independent News and Media Limited
*****************************************************************
 50 Salt Lake Tribune: Nuclear waste: Huntsman dodged responsibility by
not vetoing bill

Tribune Editorial

Article Last Updated: 03/01/2007 08:32:07 PM MST

Gov. Jon Huntsman took a powder on EnergySolutions' plan to pile
low-level nuclear waste higher and deeper at its dump in Tooele
County. By allowing SB155 to become law without his signature, the
state's chief executive essentially dodged responsibility.

    He should have vetoed the bill.

    Both houses of the Legislature had passed it by two-thirds
margins, so they might have had the votes to override his veto
easily. He should have forced their hand.

    In a statement that accompanied his non-signing, the governor
explained that he would allow the bill to become law because, in
part, he bought EnergySolutions' argument that this bill was a
technical clarification of current practice. The company has argued
that a 1990 version of the law had grandfathered the dump, exempting
it from approval by the Legislature and governor when it seeks to
expand capacity within its existing boundaries. This provision had
been left out by mistake when the law was rewritten in 2005, the
company argued, and SB155 simply restored it.

    But in the next sentence of his statement, the governor said he
was concerned not with the legislation but with the impact of the
nuclear industry on Utah. That impact has been the overriding point
all along. Utah should not be signaling that it will easily accept
greater quantities of nuclear waste for permanent storage.

    Huntsman said he takes seriously his
"responsibility to ensure that our state will not become the dumping
ground for other states' nuclear waste." To that end, he will seek a
cap on waste sent to Utah by 39 other states under a federal compact.

    We applaud that effort. But by talking out of both sides of his
mouth, the governor weakened his message.

Â© Copyright 2007, The Salt Lake Tribune.
*****************************************************************
 51 Salt Lake Tribune: State may get sued over nuclear waste law

EnergySolutions

An executive says the law is unconstitutional

The Salt Lake Tribune

Article Last Updated: 03/02/2007 01:05:46 AM MST

A waste-industry executive said he's planning to sue the state over
a new law that removed the authority of elected leaders over the
EnergySolutions radioactive waste site in Tooele County.

   Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. let SB155 go into effect without his
signature on Tuesday. The measure codifies the way regulators have
dealt with the mile-square landfill since it began accepting
low-level radioactive and hazardous waste 19 years ago.

   But Charles Judd says the law is unconstitutional because it
helps create and protect a monopoly at the expense of other
companies in the same industry.

    ?It's obvious that this is an unfair piece of legislation,? said
Judd, who served as president for the radioactive waste company for
several years.

   ?The truth is, they broke the law, and now they want to change
the law to benefit one company.?

    EnergySolutions declined to comment on the impending lawsuit. So
did Dianne Nielson, director of the Utah Department of Environmental
Quality. ?Until there's a suit, I cannot respond,? she said.

    Nielson's agency has sided with EnergySolutions over the past
year, while Judd and other critics challenged the state on its
refusal to apply a certain provision of the law to the 
mile-square disposal site. The provision says if a waste facility 
wants to grow by 50 percent or more, it must get approval from 
local elected officials, the Legislature and the governor, as 
well as regulators.

   The EnergySolutions site has received more than 80 license
amendments that incrementally allowed it to take more types and
larger volumes of waste, but it has never been required to get
legislative and gubernatorial approval.

    An expansion request now underway, which would allow the site to
pile waste 83 feet high rather than the current 45-feet allowed,
prompted comments from 666 people. But enactment of SB155
effectively invalidates the legal challenge many of them raised.

    fahys@sltrib.com

Â© Copyright 2007, The Salt Lake Tribune.
*****************************************************************
 52 Ruidoso News: Nuclear plan powers debate (GNEP project near Roswell)

Alamogordo Daily News Carlsbad Current-Argus Deming Headlight El 
Paso Times Farmington Daily Times Las Cruces Sun-News Silver City 
Sun-News Missile Ranger

Deanna Cheney For the Ruidoso News

Article Launched: 03/01/2007 09:41:55 PM MST

A film crew, right, was among those interested in Tuesday's hearing
on a proposed nuclear facility near Roswell.

ROSWELL - A plan to store nuclear waste on lands owned by the
Mescalero Apache Tribe opposed and aborted in 1995 resurfaced this
week in Roswell under the standard of President George Bush's Global
Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP).

Tuesday, some 250 residents of Roswell and neighboring communities
gathered to voice their opinion of the government's nuclear
management plan, currently funded in its research phase at $405
million.

If approved, Triassic Park, a 480-acre privately run hazardous waste
facility located east of Roswell, stands to not only store spent
fuel from nuclear plants but reprocess that fuel for secondary use
in this country and in others.

Since 1957, when the first nuclear reactor was built in the U.S.,
more than 30,000 metric tons of spent fuel have been accumulated and
sits idle, treated as waste rather than a resource. Meanwhile,
demand for electricity generated in nuclear plants is expected to
double by 2030.

Public sentiment

"Mary," a resident of Roswell, said what brought her to the GNEP
hearing was the term "global partnership."

"I want to know if this is something that is global, who is global
and what kind of influence is 'global' going to have on me," she
said. "I'd also like to hear more about where this nuclear waste 
is supposed to be coming from and where it will go to when it is 
'recycled.' "

Like Mary, Sara Keithly expressed concern that the presentation
given by DOE officials was "too general." She asked why nuclear
waste, currently held in temporary conditions at nuclear plants,
can't be stored permanently near those plants rather than
transported great distances for storage or reprocessing. She also
wanted to know how much water would be needed to operate a
reprocessing plant and how natural water sources might be made
vulnerable to the radioactive sludge that is produced in
reprocessing.

On the heels of DOE Deputy Assistant Secretary Dennis Black's
assertion that, in the era of 9/11, the U.S. must "become more
energy independent" by seeking alternate processes, Keithly asked,
"If it's about our independence, why would we sell the recycled fuel
to other countries?"

Black said a key initiative of GNEP services is to discourage
"nations from pursuing uranium enrichment and reprocessing programs
of their own" by providing them with nuclear fuel and reactor
services.

Don Hancock, a representative with the Southwest Re-search &
Information Center, had a different take. As he sees it, "GNEP will
only encourage countries that don't trust us to pursue these things
in spite of us." He said the state and country is better off putting
its millions into other sources of energy like solar and wind
generated electricity which, he says, have the added bonus of being
"cheap and clean."

His position is backed by U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM),
chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, and Victor Blair, a local,
self-styled "mercenary and trouble-maker."

Blair, a former resident of Alto and of Hagerman, chastised Black
for "withholding from his audience the fact that nuclear waste
carries with it radioactivity. He said processing nuclear waste does
not produce greenhouse gasses but he didn't talk about its other
affects."

Blair added that people in Lincoln and Chaves counties need not be
concerned about the prospect of nuclear waste headed to Roswell "if
they think they are immune to the hazards associated with such waste.

"If the president's global nuclear energy plan passes and Triassic
Park is the site selected, nuclear waste from south of the border
could be transported along Highway 70 in Mexican trucks right
through Ruidoso," he contends.

Blair referred to Dale Gandy and Bill Marley, local ranchers and
owners of Triassic Park, as "lying sons of bitches who cheated the
public out of knowing what their plans were with nuclear waste from
the beginning.

"When they were trying to get licensing to open the park they told
the people in meetings they would never accept any product that
contained any type of carcinogen," Blair told the Ruidoso News.
"Look at them now."

Former Roswell mayor Tom Jennings also questions long-term intent
and said he is opposed to more hazardous materials being brought to
southeastern New Mexico. He said the public was told in the 1980s
the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad would never seek to
store high-level waste in the area, and yet, currently is.

According to Susan Scott, communications manager for WIPP, WIPP does
not store high-level waste of any sort, including nuclear waste, and
is prohibited by law from doing so. WIPP disposes of transuranic
wastes generated by the United States' defense program.

Roswell is one of 11 communities in the country vying for GNEP
contracts for nuclear waste storage and/or recycling, and is one of
two in the state. Hobbs, also located in southeastern New Mexico, is
the other contender. In addition, Los Alamos, located in northern
New Mexico, is seeking a related government contract for the
proposed nuclear waste reprocessing research center.

Irrespective of where plants and storage facilities might be built
or where one lives, Ermundo Orosco, a resident of Chaves County and
former director of economic development for Carlsbad, told the
hearing the issue is so significant "it is incumbent upon everyone
to be informed and actively involved in the decision-making process."

What goes around...

Unlike power plants that burn fossil fuels (coal and oil) to
generate electricity, nuclear plants split atoms to release energy.
Byproducts of that fuel become unusable when they complete an
operating cycle but remain radioactive. As proposed, a reprocessing
center would collect spent nuclear fuel and separate from it
decaying components to produce new fuel rods. The technology, thus
far, has been demonstrated only in laboratories.

Bill Pope, a former Public Regulatory Commission member, a 44-year
veteran of electric utility business and homeowner in Roswell and
Alto, said he supports GNEP for energy, economic and environmental
reasons.

"We all watched Sunday night when our former vice-president won an
award for his film on global warming," Pope said. "It's here and
this is a way to deal with it."

Roswell Mayor Sam LaGrone, an owner of LaGrone Funeral Home in
Roswell and Ruidoso, noted, "Our reliance on foreign oil is
dangerous."

LaGrone echoed the position of area bankers and business owners who
said a storage and reprocessing plant would generate thousands of
new jobs and stimulate the economy, while not contributing to
warming.

"This is the biggest thing that has happened, or can happen, since
Walker Air Force Base closed in 1969," oilman Edward David said.

At the hearing, letters of support for the project were read into
the record from State Senators Rod Adair and Gay Kernan; State
Representatives Dan Foley, Nora Espinoza, Candy Spence Ezzell and
Keith Gardner; and from U.S. Congressman Steve Pearce, all of whom
are Republican.

Kenneth Barry, chief executive officer of Roswell National Bank and
a member of the Chaves County Development Foundation (CCDF), said a
telephone poll conducted Monday among 2,400 residents of Roswell
revealed that 56.9 percent of the people surveyed support the
Gandy-Marley site or believe the project merits additional study.

Further public opinion on the matter is under solicitation by DOE
through April 4. Interested persons can email comments to
GNEP-PEIS@-nuclear.energy.gov., fax (toll free) at 866-645-7807, or
call (toll free) 866-645-7803.

Mescalero

Unlike Roswell, which is working within the careful strategies of
GNEP, the Mescalero Apache Tribe 12 years ago contacted nuclear
power companies directly to try and work out a $25 million-a-year
deal to store nuclear waste.

Among others, tribal member Rufina Marie Laws, founder of Humans
Against Nuclear Waste Dumps, argued radioactive waste "is one of the
most lethal substances on Earth. It causes cancer, genetic mutation
and death."

Joan Bailey Zagone, then director of the Ruidoso Valley Chamber of
Commerce, also protested in 1995.

"If they had an accident out there we would be right in the
radiation's path," Zagone said.

Proponents of nuclear waste storage and recycling say both are safe
and necessary. Bob Donnell, executive director of CCDF, said
Triassic Park may be an ideal place to store and possibly reprocess
nuclear waste "because of its remoteness and low potential of water
contamination."

Layers of impermeable rock are located beneath the site, he said,
citing additional safety standards that would be adopted by plant
operators.

Marley said, "Our family moved here in the late-1870s and we don't
plan on moving. We have no intention of building anything in the
area that is unsafe."

Copyright Â© 2006 Ruidoso News, a MediaNews Group Newspaper.

*****************************************************************
 53 Ruidoso News: Waters: Reprocessing's time has come

Deanna Cheney For the Ruidoso News

Article Launched: 03/01/2007 09:42:26 PM MST

RUIDOSO DOWNS - Should Roswell be selected as a site for storage of
nuclear waste or the reprocessing thereof, communities located along
Highway 70 in Lincoln and Otero County could benefit financially.

John Waters, Ruidoso Downs city manager, said the federal government
generally awards funds for construction of safer roads and bypasses
needed in the transportation of hazardous materials.

While acting as the Environment Services Manager for the City of
Carlsbad during the permitting of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant
(WIPP) there, Waters said he found government agencies to be highly
conscientious regarding safety and preparedness.

"I don't think anyone in Lincoln County has experience dealing with
nuclear materials and the possibility of related accidents so,
hopefully, there would be some money accompanying any agreement," he
said.

"As public managers, you always want to make sure your people are
prepared."

Waters said the reprocessing of nuclear waste is a great idea whose
time has come.

"Nuclear waste has a shelf life of thousands of years. Rather than
have it sitting around for all those years and possibly floating
into the hands of terrorists, reprocessing is a way we can put it
back to work for us.

"It can't be used to make wind chimes, so why not make energy of 
it."

The proven record of WIPP and the state's overall nuclear 
expertise were two of the primary reasons given for locating a 
nuclear storage and reprocessing plant in New Mexico, DOE 
officials said.

Copyright Â© 2006 Ruidoso News, a MediaNews Group Newspaper.
*****************************************************************
 54 Ruidoso News: Radioactive Roswell not good for Ruidoso

The tourist industry tends to avoid nuclear dumps

Article Launched: 03/01/2007 09:43:37 PM MST

It's the same old come-on. Whenever an industry with "issues" woos a
community, proponents are reduced to justifying its existence
through the promise of job creation.

So it is with the spectre of Triassic Park, a proposed 480-acre
privately run hazardous waste facility that would store and
reprocess nuclear waste east of Roswell.

Lest we forget, nuclear waste is radioactive. It's a killer. And the
nuclear power energy industry is not without a history of
"accidents."

In fact, Triassic's "model," a reprocessing site in England called
Sellafield, experienced a spillage in April 2005 of 83,000 liters of
acid containing uranium and plutonium - a fact that Roswell Mayor
Sam LaGrone and Bob Donnell, director of the Chaves County
Development Foundation, conveniently neglected to relay to a public
hearing on Triassic Tuesday.

Coupled with a charge that Triassic's owners misled the public about
their true intentions for the park, a pattern of deceit emerges.

There are also unanswered questions about the impact on precious
water resources and other safety issues regarding terrorism and
transportation; how about trucks, maybe from Mexico, hauling waste
through Lincoln County on U.S 70?

In a state blessed by wind and sun, New Mexico's wide-open spaces 
are now a dumping ground for the Bush Administration's Stone Age 
energy policies: a coal-fired power plant in the Four Corners the 
Navajos don't want; oil and gas drilling on the ecologically 
sensitive Otero Mesa opposed by the governor and a coalition of 
citizens; and now this, to go along with Eunice and WIPP, 70 
miles down the road in Carlsbad.

This is the best Chaves development officials can do? This is their
vision, their best shot for economic growth?

Forget UFOs. Here's the slogan: "Visit Radioactive Roswell. Our
future is glowing."


Copyright Â© 2006 Ruidoso News, a MediaNews Group Newspaper.
*****************************************************************
 55 The State: To dump, or not to dump?

03/01/2007 

That is the question as key legislators tour Barnwell County landfill

By SAMMY FRETWELL

sfretwell@thestate.com

LINDSAY SEMPLE/LSEMPLE@THESTATE.COM

During the ride to the landfill, Chem-Nuclear lobbyist Jason
Puhlasky passes out information to Rep. William Witherspoon, left,
Rep. Harold Mitchell and Keith Sloan, chairman of the Barnwell
County Council.

More photos

SNELLING — Through the window of a small van Wednesday, key state
lawmakers and environmentalists got their first look at a landfill
stuffed with the nation’s low-level nuclear garbage.

Concrete boxes of radioactive waste stood neatly in an open trench.
Huge cranes were poised to lift more atomic refuse into the pit from
a flatbed truck. Parts of nuclear reactors lay on their sides,
sealed and awaiting soil and plastic to cover them.

It all looked safe to Rep. W.D. “Bill” Witherspoon, R-Horry, who
chairs the House Agriculture, Natural Resources and Environmental
Affairs Committee.

While environmentalists remained unconvinced, the first-hand view
reinforced his opinion the landfill should remain open to help
Barnwell County and the state economically.

“If this place closed up, it would certainly hurt the town of
Snelling,” Witherspoon said, adding that if more people could see
the site “ they’d have a different perception.”

Wednesday’s landfill tour was organized by Energy Solutions Inc.,
the nuclear services company that wants to keep the dump open beyond
next year’s scheduled closure to much of the nation.

A bill introduced by Witherspoon would allow the landfill to remain
open to the entire country another 15 years. Under current state
law, only South Carolina, New Jersey and Connecticut will have
access after July 1, 2008.

Witherspoon’s committee will hold a hearing Tuesday, and he said he
expects an overflow crowd.

As part of its effort to keep the landfill open, Energy Solutions
rented a bus for the 18-member committee, bought box lunches and
hauled legislators from Columbia to Barnwell County.

About 60 people, many of whom drove to Barnwell County, toured the
site in vans. The visit initially was intended for legislators only,
but Energy Solutions invited conservation groups and others after
criticism last week. Because a quorum of the House committee was
invited, it constituted a public meeting and anyone was allowed to
attend.

The bus trip included a presentation by company officials about the
landfill’s safety record and the revenues it generates annually for
the state. The landfill produces about $2 million each year for
Barnwell County, Energy Solutions said, adding that since 1995 the
landfill has generated $430 million for public education in South
Carolina.

Legislators and others riding the bus also were given a letter from
a nearby church praising the landfill operation.

When the bus arrived at the 36-year-old landfill, local officials
lined up to greet the visitors.

“We ask for your help,” Snelling Mayor Tim Moore said. The landfill
“is good for us and good for our community. Snelling is not a dump.
This is a well-operated disposal facility.”

Rep. Nelson Hardwick, R-Horry, said the state should keep the
235-acre landfill open to low-level nuclear waste.

Low-level nuclear waste ranges from lightly contaminated hospitals
gowns to more heavily radioactive reactor parts.

Rep. Joan Brady, R-Richland, said she was surprised that the
trenches were shallow and that nuclear waste is exposed to rain for
long periods of time before the pits are filled with soil and
covered with plastic.

“This is very different than what I thought. I would have thought
the trenches were deeper,” Brady said. “There was not as much
security as I would have expected either.”

Others who rode the bus to Barnwell, including environmentalists who
were invited at the last minute, questioned why the landfill does
not have a synthetic liner beneath the waste. The company said it
was unnecessary.

However, the landfill leaked into groundwater during the 1970s and
radioactive tritium trailed off site.

“I’d like to have heard more of the bad side of the story because I
know there is one,” said University of South Carolina student
Kirsten Coleman, an organizer with the S.C. Alliance for Sustainable
Campuses and Communities. “I don’t want to bring in more nuclear
waste.”

Reach Fretwell at (803) 771-8537.

KEY house COMMITTEE

Agriculture, Natural Resources and Environmental Affairs Committee

Members: 18

Importance: The panel receives most environmental bills that will be
introduced in the House.

The panel’s approval is a major step in getting many environmental
bills and regulations through the Legislature. If a bill passes the
committee,, it goes to the House for consideration. If it’s voted
down,, that generally kills it..

Legislation it considered: To allow building pools farther onto the
beach; to extend bear-hunting season; to limit bridges to salt-marsh
islands; to ease restrictions on large chicken farms; and to
restrict duck hunting out of season.

It will consider: A bill to keep the state’s low-level nuclear waste
landfill open to the nation beyond 2008.

Chairman: Longtime Rep. W.D. “Bill” Witherspoon, R-Horry

*****************************************************************
 56 UPI: Analysis: Demand to stress uranium supply

United Press International - Energy - 

3/2/2007 6:25:00 PM -0500

By BEN LANDO UPI Energy Correspondent

WASHINGTON, March 2 (UPI) -- The high price of oil and natural gas,
and the emissions of both -- plus coal -- sparking new mainstream
concerns about climate change, has fueled a global nuclear power
renaissance. Whether there's enough uranium to fuel the reactors,
however, isn't guaranteed.

  About 435 nuclear reactors operate in 30 countries. The
International Atomic Energy Agency expects another 30 in the next 15
years. Those reactors -- including 103 in the United States --
consume about 180 million pounds of uranium a year; worldwide
production of uranium is about 100 million pounds.

The global uranium market began with the buildup of nuclear weapons,
from which the nuclear energy industry sprang. But the enrichment
process operated under a market controlled by governments because of
proliferation concerns.

  "Prices went up quite high in the mid-70s, during the previous
energy crisis, and the government enrichment contracts artificially
inflated demand and you had a pretty big build up of inventories,"
said Jeff Combs, president of The Ux Consulting Co., a Roswell,
Ga.-based uranium analyst.

  Since the 1970s, the nuclear industry has worked off the
inventory, which was increased beginning in the middle of last
decade when weapons-grade uranium was blended down, Combs said. "The
net effect of that is it really depressed prices for quite a long
period of time. We're talking about 20 years."

 High inventories and low prices, in turn, stymied exploration and
production. "People were acting like there was an infinite
supply...prices were below $10 and people were thinking it was going
to stay there," Combs noted.

"Then in relatively short order you had a couple things happen this
decade -- you have inventories running out and then you had the
growth in nuclear power, especially in the Eastern part of the world
led by Russia and China," Combs said. "And since past prices really
didn't reflect the future scarcity of supply, price has shot up
quite a bit. And you have a situation now where production is sort
of struggling to catch up with world demand," which could lead to a
supply problem.

  "The price even this decade has gone up from under $10 a pound to
now we're at $85 a pound. In the 90s it would fluctuate around $10 a
pound and in the 80s it was somewhat higher than that, in the
teens," Combs said.

  "Over the next 20 years, I think a lot of what happens to price
has to do with how much nuclear expands. We see prices going up more
over the next several years just because supply is so tight. Once
some of these new production centers come on line it should take
some of the pressure off, and prices will go back down," Combs said.

The U.S. nuclear industry's trade arm, the Nuclear Energy Institute,
wrote in a January policy brief that there are enough uranium
deposits to fuel current and future nuclear power needs. High prices
will spur new investment and a stronger market, the report said.

  "I think one of the wild cards is if you had a major disruption in
one of the major sources of uranium production," such as the flood
in October of the Cigar Lake mine in Saskatchewan, Canada, which
delayed for at least this year delivery of uranium of one of the
world's largest deposits. 

  "That's taken 18 million pounds out of the equation for awhile,"
Combs said.  "If there are problems with expanding production, this
will mean that certain rates of nuclear power growth can't be
sustained, at least not initially.  Ultimately, there's enough
uranium in the ground to support a considerable growth in nuclear
power, the issue now is how quickly production can be ramped up."

The United States, once the global uranium mining leader, produced
only 2.7 million pounds in 2005, according to the Energy Information
Administration, the data arm of the U.S. Energy Department. U.S.
utilities purchased about 65.5 million pounds of foreign uranium.

  Most uranium production comes from "a handful of mega production
centers," the vast majority in Canada, Australia and Kazakhstan (the
latter "might end up being the largest uranium producer in the
world," Combs said, because of "a very ambitious expansion program"
that has China, Russia, Japan and Indian markets excited.)

The U.S. Congress and President Bush have been pushing for more
nuclear plants to be built, offering incentives in major energy
legislation two years ago. Energy demand is increasing while nuclear
plants currently make up only 20 percent of the current energy mix.

A new reactor in the United States hasn't been licensed since 1978
and the last one came online in 1996. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory
Commission expects applications for more than 30 reactors in the
next half decade.

But if they're built -- and that's a big if, considering historic
opposition and the $3 billion to $4 billion price tag -- they'll be
competing with even more nuclear plants around the world for a
uranium supply that's currently tight to handle the demand.

(Comments to energy@upi.com)

© Copyright 2007 United Press International, Inc. All Rights
Reserved.
*****************************************************************
 57 lamonitor.com: LA scopes nuclear power plan

The Online News Source for Los Alamos

ROGER SNODGRASS Monitor Assistant Editor

There was little common ground to be found at a scoping session
Thursday night on the Global Nuclear Energy Initiative sponsored by
the Department of Energy and the Bush administration.

For the most part, retired laboratory employees saw the plan to
process spent fuel rods for nuclear fuel as an obvious and
long-awaited antidote to fossil fuels and energy dependence.

On the other side, nuclear watchdogs and activists saw the plan as a
vague, risky and deeply flawed regression to a technology that was
discarded 30 years ago.

Los Alamos is under consideration, along with six other DOE sites,
as the location for an advanced fuel cycle research facility, that
would serve as a research and development center involved in an
international collaboration with researchers, industry and
government to develop fuels for the program and improve the fuel
cycle technology.

About 80 people attended the presentation at the Hilltop House, some
to make formal comments on the proposed Programmatic Environmental
Impact Statement (PEIS), a requirement for major federal actions
that might significantly impact the environment.

Although a number of current laboratory employees were present, none
expressed an opinion in the public discussion.

DOE's rationale began with an assessment of the world's growing
demand for electric energy, and the assumption that nuclear energy
rightly managed is the only "emission-free" energy source that can
meet the need.

Richard Black, a senior official in the Office of Nuclear Energy,
who gave the opening presentation on behalf of DOE, said worldwide
demand for electricity would approximately double by the year 2030
and that the U.S. was pursuing a variety of energy sources that
would "improve the environment and enhance our nation's energy
security."

To do that means solving several related technical issues, he said,
in order to foster expansion of nuclear energy, safeguard nuclear
material against proliferation risks and reduce the volume, heat and
radiological longevity of spent fuel waste for permanent disposal in
a geological repository.

In order to encourage developing countries to develop safe nuclear
energy sources, GNEP proposes an "orderly" system within which the
U.S. would supply enriched fuels and a "cradle to grave" fuel
service to minimize proliferation risks and help solve international
waste problems.

Getting from here to there will require solving a number of
interrelated technical issues that GNEP is trying to address.

The GNEP strategic plan acknowledges that the program faces "both
technological and political risks," but asserts that there are
greater risks without GNEP.

The unsolved problem of a growing inventory of spent fuel must be
solved, for example, or it will "plague the government from a
liability standpoint, and impede growth in both the nuclear
electricity industry and energy security," DOE's plan states. Unless
the reprocessing formula is solved, "nuclear growth will likely be
widespread and allow the continued accumulation of separated
plutonium for decades that could be misused by rogue statues."

Several proponents said they were members of the Los Alamos
Education Group, including William Stratton, a retired physicist and
long-time nuclear energy advocate.

He said that developing "a truly long-term source of energy will be
expensive," but he said "many billions have been spent at Yucca
Mountain (the unfinished repository in Nevada), and there is no end
in sight."

Glen Graves, another member of LAEG, worked on critical assemblies,
nuclear rocket propulsion and as a science advisor in the White
House. He held up a roll of 40 nickels that he said represented the
volume of transmuted nuclear fuel that would supply the energy needs
for the lifetime of a single individual, while the total waste from
that supply "would fit in a soda can."

Cheryl Rofer, the lone dissenting laboratory retiree, holds a patent
in reprocessing technology, but said the U.S. has lost its expertise
in the area of civilian reprocessing.

Among other concerns, she said that the U.S. has lost its
credibility as a world leader by ignoring world opinion in its
attack on Iraq.

"It is in a poor position to lead a global partnership with such
sensitive ramifications as provision of nuclear fuel to other
countries. No country will easily entrust its energy security to
another," she added.

Among nuclear activists, Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group,
said the proposal was a fantasy, based on unreal economic,
environmental and security assumptions. He said, "It is not just a
plan for energy or climate but for an entire society."

He called for a continuation of the debate in Los Alamos and said he
would be happy to arrange it.

"We're all on the same side, working on really hard problems," he
said. "We need the expertise of people who understand this."

From Los Alamos, the scoping process moves on to Paducah, Ky., and
Piketon, Ohio, then to the northwestern U.S., before ending in
Washington, D.C. on March 19.

© 2003 Los Alamos Monitor All Rights Reserved.
*****************************************************************
 58 Daily Utah Chronicle: Our governor is a coward - Opinion

By: Nicholas Pappas

Issue date: 3/2/07 Section: Opinion

First, congratulations. Thousands stood up and tore down Divine
Strake. If you've never heard of Divine Strake, I'll sum it up for
you. It's a toy for big boys to play with, like an M-80, except
roughly a million times bigger. Oh, and it also causes cancer. The
government would like to tell you it was risk-free, but it's been
wrong before. Ask the downwinders who received radiation badges and
lower life expectancies in the '50s. It's a good feeling knowing
common men and women can still raise their voices and make a
difference.

Second, you win some and you lose some. On Feb. 27, while students
at the U enjoyed a day off, so did Gov. Jon Huntsman. Given the
option to either veto or sign Senate Bill 155, Huntsman chose to
whistle, turn his head and slide it down the line.

SB 155 restores an exemption for EnergySolutions, allowing it to
avoid asking the governor or Legislature for permission to pile
waste higher on sections of its square-mile landfill. Gov. Huntsman
called it a "technical clarification." I understand. It seems like a
lot of busy work to ask those who represent us their opinions on the
matter.

Protesters voiced their concerns. Picket lines formed at the new
EnergySolutions Arena and more than a thousand calls were made. But
it wasn't enough. Our legislators formed a simple math equation:
1,000 calls Arena and more than a thousand calls were made. But it
wasn't enough. Our legislators formed a simple math equation: 1,000
calls < $189,020 in political donations. That doesn't even include
the Jazz tickets.

Gov. Huntsman is a coward. He stated clearly when he was elected
that he would never allow a bill to pass without a signature or
veto. So much for conviction. By taking away the right to intercede,
he has weakened his ability and the ability of governors down the
line to do anything about EnergySolutions in the future. Since 1988,
regulators have amended the company's license to take more and
different kinds of waste 80 times. When will it end? As hotter waste
is transported, it only increases the possibility of accidents
occurring during transport.

Of greater immediate concern is Gov. Huntsman's apathy and lies. He
has already begun a PR campaign, proclaiming, "I take very seriously
my responsibility to ensure that our state will not become the
dumping ground of other states' nuclear waste. I remain committed to
fighting increased volumes of waste." Perhaps a more important
statement would have been vetoing the bill, but I wasn't elected
governor--nor given contributions for future campaigns.

I think we could all learn a valuable lesson from our governor. If
you hate your job, instead of working hard or quitting, clock in and
do nothing. If your baby begins crying in a movie theater, instead
of taking the baby out or letting it continue, just move a few rows
away and pretend it's not yours. If you don't agree with every
aspect of your religion, instead of being completely faithful or
agnostic, go to church on Sundays, Wendover on Fridays and watch
R-rated movies with the naughty words edited out.

Gov. Jon Huntsman had the opportunity to take a stand. He did
nothing.

Thanks for nothing, Governor.

posted 3/02/07 @ 11:34 AM EST

The Daily Utah Chronicle 200 S Central Campus Dr #236 Salt Lake 
City UT 84112 801-581-NEWS 

© 2006 The Daily Utah Chronicle
*****************************************************************
 59 UK: Times and Star: Recycling waste must be safe

Published on 02/03/2007

WHILST we all agree to minimising and recycling waste wherever
possible, it must be done with due regard to the safety and least
possible health risks to the people who live and work nearby.

With this in mind, Studsvik say they have conducted a detailed study
of the Lillyhall area, taking the decontamination factory into
account and have considered a 2km radius around their proposed
nuclear facilities to be a sufficient area for their purposes.

Studsvik say in paragraph 2.4 of their planning application document
to Cumbria County Council, regarding â€œlocal human receptorsâ€ (I
assume this means people), that they have done a detailed search and
only 10 people live or are affected by their proposal in the case of
a serious nuclear contamination incident.

A 2km radius takes in the whole of High Harrington along Scaw Road,
the estates such as Seadown Drive, Kipling Avenue, Woodville Way,
Cromwell Avenue, Marlborough Avenue, Harringdale, to name but a few.

This 2km area includes all the houses that formerly belonged to High
Duty Alloys at Distington, the houses at Distington Toll Bar and the
ones on part of Barfs Road, Distington.

It also includes all the houses on Hunday including the large
prestigious Hunday Manor Hotel, Branthwaite Residential Home on
Branthwaite Road and the Westlands Hotel.

In includes Woodlands residential home beside the ambulance station
at Distington and the Cumbria County Council School for people with
learning difficulties on the adjoining site, the childrenâ€™s
nursery opposite Woodlands Home and houses at Distingtonâ€™s main
ambulance station, which are now privately owned, plus various
houses and bungalows near the Crematorium at Distington are all in
this area, plus houses at Wythmoor.

There are various farms and there are new offices on the new
business park overlooking the golf course with many people working
all day at Eddie Stobartâ€™s warehouse and Historical Collections
plc.

Oily Johnnieâ€™s pub and Gale Brow garden centre and Gale Brow
house, Windscales, all have people living and working there
permanently too.

From the text 2.4 â€œLocal Human Receptorsâ€, Studsvik only managed
to find Gale House after a â€œdetailed searchâ€ with an occupancy
of â€œ10â€ people!

As there are many hundreds of houses on the Scaw Road estates alone,
how do Studsvik arrive at a figure of 10 â€œlocal human receptorsâ€
that may be affected in the event of a worst case scenario, a
nuclear radiation incident? No mention is made of Lillyhall college.

A serious concern about this proposed development is that cardboard
and crisp packets for the food industry are made locally and are a
massive part of the local economy and much of this production is
stored at Lillyhall, and dust from shotblasting and any nuclear
leak, however small, could affect many hundreds of jobs.

KEITH THOMAS

Workington



ON BEHALF of the Marr and Simpson families, we would like to thank
Workington British Legion, DJ Entertainments, all the artists and
everyone who attended and donated prizes for our charity night held
last month.

We raised more than Â£2,300, which will be split between the West
Cumberland Hospital's children's cancer day care unit and the
Hensingham unit for the disabled.

Thank you also to Mark McCleavey, who raised Â£820 by doing the
Cumbrian Run for us, and all the people who supported him, our niece
Pauline and husband David, also Jacky who raised Â£142.39 in their
Corporation Road newsagents, and customers who supported them.

On the night, our boys, Bare Essentals, raised Â£112 on their trays
and thanks to Jimmy Daly, who did the raffle for us.

Finally, a big thank you to everyone who has supported us now and
over the years. Without you all there would be no charity nights.

LYNN AND RONNIE MARR

Wesley Court

Workington



JUST a few words to honour a fine lady and a good teacher - our Miss
Ivy Benn, who was our teacher and headmistress at Victoria Secondary
Modern Girls' School during the 50s and 60s.

Miss Benn got us girls into the swimming baths in Workington town
several times a week, taught us to appreciate our national parks and
heritage, taught us the quality of life and saved me from the
factories when I left school, with advice from my art teacher,
getting me into the Carlisle Collage of Art, which has been and will
be a joy to me all my life.

She taught us English and Religion and was very inspiring.

I'm sure I am not alone when I say â€œThank you Miss Benn" from all
the pupils of Victoria Girls School who you took under your wing and
taught to the utmost best of your ability.

We appreciated and respected you. Looking back, I now see how much
your feminine stamina achieved. To me you will always be a leader of
women.

Goodbye dear friend. I'll miss your tiny, tidy hand writing and your
lovely letters from home.

EDITH G NILSBERG (WRIGHT)

Horten

Norway



THE Higham Hall bond-buying scheme is appealing, but it wonâ€™t hide
our surrender to avarice.

It feels like a shotgun wedding. If the sale of this building goes
ahead, the only winner will be greed, the no-win no-fee lawyers,
feeding on the lucre of 10 years back-pay - the result of union
demands and civil servant ineptitude.

Whether Higham Hall is purchased by friend or foe, it will not stop
the avalanche that threatens to sweep away the tax and rate revenues
entrusted to our councils to maintain services, which are just as
important as equal pay settlements.

The gold-diggers are after us. We can run (and buy bonds) but we
canâ€™t hide! What is so frustrating is how everyone articulates and
justifies their actions; they all absolve themselves from guilt; the
lawyers, the claimants, the unions and county councillors.

The most important player of all, Joe Public, is the
soon-to-become-victim in this share-out of the spoils, he being the
only resource our capitulating councils can fall back on, so weâ€™d
better get ready for â€œpicking up the tabâ€, because if this ship
goes down fatter brown envelopes are coming our way.

Robin Hood, eat your heart out, the poor are robbing the poor!
Before these lawyers are finished our cash-strapped councils will be
so red-faced and so in the red theyâ€™ll be coming at us with
begging bowls instead of rate increases.

There is a simple solution to this mess. The equal-pay campaigners
deserve to be congratulated, but should be disallowed long-winded
retrospective compensation; how good a cause is it that brings
bankruptcy to our councils and penury hardship to thousands of
fellow overworked and underpaid ratepayers who are made to suffer
for the few?

Give the justified campaigner a little reward, a statutory amount,
but donâ€™t give us all a five-year headache in return.

It is perhaps a little trite but true to say - money isnâ€™t
everything. When the daffodils burst into colour, and warm spring
sunshine restores our sanity, we will remind ourselves of the things
that really matter, hope for another year to breathe the precious
breath of life, priceless things like children and grandchildren,
good health, good conscience, and the most elusive and best gift of
all - contentment.

RAYMOND HALL

Isel Road

Cockermouth



RECENT coverage of a number of issues, road charging, climate change
and increasing traffic congestion with the associated road safety
dangers, illustrate the real need to have an effective public
transport system.

Many bus services in our area are funded and organised by the county
council. For the above reasons and the most efficient use of our
hard earned council tax payments, it is imperative that those
services meet the needs of the populations they serve.

At the moment the bus journey between Cockermouth and Maryport is a
45 minute endurance test (likened by one passenger to riding a
camel!) which runs every two hours. This is to cover a distance of
six miles between the towns.

Is this the worst journey in West Cumbria? It takes 45 minutes and
an uncomfortable route to accommodate two villages in which very few
residents use the service.

Were the bus to run hourly, the running, costs would be similar and
the increased use would boost revenue.

Residents in the two towns and Dearham would have easy, frequent
access to work, school, leisure, health and social opportunities.
Tourists to the area would have the option of leaving cars and
making the journey by bus.

A petition has been circulating requesting that this service is
upgraded to an hourly one. It will be presented to the Allerdale
Area Committee meeting on March 6.

Please contact your local county councillor and request that they
support this much needed improvement to services.

DIANNE STANDEN

Allerdale LA21 travel representative.

High Street

Maryport



DO NOT be misled by Jill Perryâ€™s letter (Times & Star, February
16) stating that the UK has installed over two gigawatts of wind
energy sufficient to meet the needs of 1.1 million households.

The emphasis is on the word â€œinstalledâ€ which means that, in
theory, if the wind speed remains constant and hard enough for 24
hours every day it would supply that many homes.

The truth is far from this. The vagaries of the weather mean that
those 1.1 million households will only receive sufficient power from
wind energy for a quarter of that time.

For the rest of the time, those homes would be lucky if they could
light up a 40 watt bulb.

This is why wind energy needs constant back-up from conventional
power stations, but as you cannot switch coal or nuclear on and off,
the back-up must come from gas turbines, thus increasing the use of
natural gas.

Trying to cut carbon emissions is a game of one step forward, two
steps back, and you need look no further than air travel to see this.

One Boeing 747 air liner will release around 500 tonnes of Co2
during a 24-hour flight period. If it can run at full power, a large
50 mega watt wind farm will make in Co2 only half the amount over 24
hours.

The aviation industry is undergoing massive expansion, most notably
in China. The amount of savings on global Co2 emissions that wind
energy will make is minute.

We, as energy consumers, are paying for the inefficiency of wind
energy via tax on electricity. The wind energy company gets paid
whether it produces power or not.

Because of this madness, large parts of Cumbria are going to be
smothered in wind turbines.

MALCOLM MULLETT

High Longthwaite

Wigton



MARCH 18 is the date for that marvellous institution the Workington
to Keswick Charity Walk.

This year's beneficiaries are the coronary care unit at the West
Cumberland Hospital, its breast care cancer care centre, and the
West Cumbria chronic obstructive pulmonary disease team.

All worthy local charities in much need of urgent funds.

With Pride in West Cumbria in mind this unique event, taking place
for the 30th time, demonstrates how wonderful local people will put
themselves to an enormous amount of effort to organise such a big
event without any consideration for themselves and every penny
raised goes to the good causes.

About 125 people took part last year and raised around Â£10,000!

ABE LISTER

Cockermouth



I AM sure your correspondent Councillor Francis (letters, February
2) would agree that in a civilised society people outside glass
houses shouldnâ€™t throw stones.

Perhaps he would also agree with me that a self-proclaimed â€œleft
wingerâ€ who used their membership of a political party to advance
personal ambitions, failed in that post, joined another political
party and then supported a coalition even further to the right,
could be called a hypocrite.

I speak, of course, hypothetically, for surely such behaviour in a
democratic society is too laughable to contemplate.

B WILSON

Uldale Road

Stainburn

Workington



PROFOUND thanks to the Good Samaritan who came to my aid after a
fall in Cockermouth on Saturday, February 9, and telephoned
relatives on my behalf.

He talked to me until they arrived. His kindness was deeply
appreciated.

ANN GEORGE

Allonby






View this story and the latest newspaper in full digital
reproduction, just like the printed copy at
www.timesandstar.co.uk/digitalcopy
Other stories from this category that may interest you:

A lesson in manners

Anti-racist group is students on an ego trip

Seacroft must continue

Discomfort is not a reason for prejudice

Supporting â€˜one council, one vision, once voiceâ€™

Get the facts right on cityâ€™s windfarm

Shame for planned sell-off of Higham Hall

Private centres not needed in exemplary NHS

Let's keep our existing hospital

Location critical for new hospital


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 60 Times and Star: Radioactive leak alarms ignored

Published on 02/03/2007

A PROBE into a leak of 83,000 litres of radioactive acid at
Sellafield has heavily criticised management at the site.

The plantâ€™s Thorp facility was shut down in April 2005 after the
acid, containing uranium and plutonium, escaped from a broken pipe.
No-one was injured and no radiation escaped.

A Health and Safety Executive report into the incident said
significant failings had included staff ignoring alarms.

Operator British Nuclear Group was fined Â£500,000 last year after
it pleaded guilty to breaching aspects of the Nuclear Installations
Act 1965.

In a 28-page report, the executive made 55 recommendations and
actions for company improvements.

The report said a number of failures in management meant the leak
was undetected for eight months.

It highlighted a lack of a â€œquestioning attitudeâ€ or
â€œchallenge cultureâ€ at the company.

The review said: â€œAn underlying cause was the culture within the
plant that condoned the ignoring of alarms, the non-compliance with
some key operating instructions, and safety-related equipment, which
was not kept in effective working order for some time, so this
became the norm.â€

The first indication of a leak was on August 24 2004 when 50 grams
of uranium was detected following a sample test.

But the full extent of the leak was finally uncovered on April 14
and Thorp was shut down four days later and remains closed.

A spokesman for British Nuclear Group said the company had
implemented a large number of improvements to its operating regime.

He added: â€œThe incident was regrettable and clearly should not
have occurred in the first place.

â€œThe company appreciates that mistakes were made which led to the
leak and enhancements to workforce training, operating instructions
and responses to alarms have been made.â€

*****************************************************************
 61 Times and Star: More time to query recycling plant

Published on 02/03/2007

A PARISH council has been given more time to react over plans for a
radioactive waste recycling plant.

Studsvik UKâ€™s proposed plant on Joseph Noble Road, at Lillyhall
would decontaminate metal from the nuclear industry and create 30
jobs.

It has already attracted opposition from businesses on the
industrial estate.

The deadline for submissions is today but Dean Parish Council has
been given time to compile detailed population figures near the site.

Studsvikâ€™s application to Cumbria County Council says only two
places - Distington Community School and Gale House at Winscales -
have been found in a detailed search for â€˜human habitationâ€™ in
the area two kilometres from the site.

The parish council says that a two kilometre radius takes in
hundreds of houses in High Harrington and Distington. It also
includes houses at Hunday, including the Hunday Manor Hotel, the
Branthwaite and Woodlands homes for the elderly, Lakes College West
Cumbria and many other farms, houses, bungalows and factories.

Metalwork company Alan Dawson Associates, said that the Studsvik
plant would threaten its plans to offer Britainâ€™s first foundation
degree in art and architectural metalwork.

Alan Dawson said: â€œThe students would be spending the bulk of
their time working in our workshop but may decide not to come and
study for a degree at Lillyhall if they find they could be working
alongside a nuclear decontamination site.â€

â€œWeâ€™re expecting interest from a wide field; nationally and
internationally."

*****************************************************************
 62 [NukeNet] Press Rel: RRW design chosen
 
Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2007 15:32:37 -0800


<x-flowed>


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	[NukeNet] Press Rel: RRW design chosen
Date: 	Fri, 2 Mar 2007 11:31:12 -0800
From: 	Marylia Kelley <marylia@earthlink.net>
To: 	marylia@earthlink.net



NukeNet Anti-Nuclear Network (nukenet@energyjustice.net)

The NNSA release, just posted, gives the Releable Replacement Warhead
design lead to Livermore Lab and Sandia.

The central issue, however, is not merely which weapons lab's RRW design is
chosen, or whether it will become a hybrid design, but rather whether
developing and building new nuclear weapons is appropriate or necessary. It
is neither. The RRW program will boost the weapons lab budgets over the
next decade, but to the severe detriment of U.S. and world security. The
RRW program threatens the viability of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
and of the underlying international non-proliferation regime. Thus, today
is a sad day for global security. Our government is sending a signal that
will increase international proliferation pressures and increase the
nuclear danger.

Locally, in Livermmore, I expect that the award of the RRW design will be
used by some weaponeers to argue against the prompt removal of Livermore
Lab's plutonium stockpile -- which is vulnerable each and every day to a
terrorist attack or catastrophic release due to a major earthquake.

Read on for more.... --Marylia Kelley

Alliance for Nuclear Accountability

A national network of organizations working to address issues of
nuclear weapons production and waste cleanup

for further information, contact:
Susan Gordon: (206) 853-6399
or local contacts listed at end of advisory, inlcuding
Marylia Kelley, Tri-Valley CAREs, Livermore, CA.

for immediate release, Friday, March 2, 2007

New Nuclear Warhead Design Selected: Making the Worst of a Bad Situation

The Bush Administration's selection of a  "mix-and-match" design for a
controversial, new generation of U.S. nuclear warheads reflects  a choice
of politics over responsibility -- according to a network of watchdog
organizations. The Alliance for Nuclear Accountability (ANA) said that the
attempt to merge elements of competing proposals from the Los Alamos and
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories for the Reliable Replacement
Warhead (RRW)  will result in a more complicated design that violates
Congress' intent for the program, as well as international law. 


Separate teams at Los Alamos and Livermore submitted designs for the RRW,
the first U.S. nuclear warhead to be produced after the Cold War.  Even
before being combined, both labs' designs overstepped the basic principles
of the RRW program by incorporating concepts and technology which increase
the likelihood of nuclear testing, according to ANA.


 "This mix-and-match design is in conflict with Congress' original intent
for the RRW program as a less expensive, simple replacement warhead that
could be deployed without explosive testing and that would facilitate
reductions in the current nuclear stockpile," said ANA director Susan
Gordon.  "Instead of continuing to pollute the environment with dangerous
radioactive research projects, waste taxpayer money on unnecessary
weapons, and threaten other nations with nuclear attack, let s take a step
back and have a debate about what America gets >from its nuclear arsenal
and what we want to do with it in the future."


Choosing even one design is an awful idea.  We simply don't need new
warheads.  But to combine both designs makes a bad situation even worse."
said Marylia Kelley, Executive Director of Tri-Valley CAREs.


"Combining these two misguided RRW designs points to a political decision
designed to bring yet more funding to both Los Alamos and Livermore. This
is a new low in radioactive pork politics," added Jay Coghlan, Director of
Nuclear Watch of New Mexico.  "The Bush Administration wants to appease
both labs by directing taxpayers' dollars toward a jumble of unneeded and
unproven new nuclear weapons while damaging global nonproliferation efforts
under the Non-Proliferation Treaty."


The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the semi-autonomous
nuclear weapons agency within DOE, has spent over $10 billion in the last
decade to certify the reliability of the stockpile, yet it claims a lack of
"reliability" as the justification for more spending on new nuclear weapons
and facilities.  The RRW has become the centerpiece of the Energy
Department's  Complex 2030,  a $150 billion overhaul of the entire U.S.
nuclear weapons complex.


The Alliance for Nuclear Accountability is a network of 35 grassroots and
national organizations, representing the concerns of communities downwind
and downstream from U.S. nuclear weapons complex sites. These groups have
been working together for two decades to clean up the environmental legacy
of nuclear weapons production and stop new nuclear weapons programs.

Local Contacts:

Marylia Kelley, Executive Director, Tri-Valley Communities Against a
Radioactive Environment, Livermore, CA   (925) 443-7148

Jay Coghlan, Executive Director, Nuclear Watch of New Mexico
Santa Fe, NM   (505) 989-7342, cell: (505) 920-7118

Ralph Hutchison, Director, Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance
Oak Ridge, TN   (865) 483-8202


For more information:
"The Reliable Replacement Warhead Program: A Slippery Slope to New Nuclear
Weapons," by Dr. Robert Civiak, former examiner from the Office of
Management and Budget, specializing in DOE Stockpile Stewardship programs.
At http://www.trivalleycares.org/TVC_RRW_FNL.pdf

-30-

 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


Seattle Office: 1914 North 34th St., Suite 407, Seattle, WA 98103  (206)
547-3175; fax: (206) 547-7158


Washington, DC Office: 322 4th Street NE, Washington, DC 20002  (202)
544-0217; fax: (202) 544-6143


<http://www.ananuclear.org>www.ananuclear.org


 


 


 

Marylia Kelley,
Executive Director

Tri-Valley CAREs
2582 Old First Street
Livermore, CA  94551

Ph: (925) 443-7148
Fx: (925) 443-0177
Web: www.trivalleycares.org
Email: marylia@trivalleycares.org or marylia@earthlink.net



_______________________________________________________________________
Subscribe/Unsubscribe Here: http://www.energyjustice.net/nukenet/
Change your settings or access the archives at:
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*****************************************************************
 63 Lodi News: Lawrence Livermore Laboratory to offer tours of its bomb test-range,
Site 300

Lodinews.com

By Niko Kyriakou San Joaquin News Service

Last updated: Friday, Mar 02, 2007 - 06:38:37 am PST
Comments(1)

Starting today, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will offer 
tours of its bomb test-range, Site 300, which is just outside 
Tracy.

The 2-hour trip through Site 300 starts with a presentation of the
work done at the lab and a history of the test site. Visitors, who
must be 18 years old or older, will then be bused along a network of
roads that pass by the places munitions are made and stored. They
also get to see where the bombs are exploded.

Site 300 is authorized to test 200 bombs a year that include
radioactive materials such as depleted uranium and tritium, but no
bombs will be blown up on tour days, a lab spokeswoman said.

Visitors will see an outdoor testing location as well as an
indoor-explosion arena.

The two-story-high Contained Firing Facility has 6-foot walls of
reinforced steel and concrete and is used to test bombs of up to 120
pounds.

Site 300 is also a Superfund site — which means it is on a
government watch list as a heavily polluted area — and tourists will
be shown the lab's toxic waste cleanup operation.

Seaver said people on the tour might also glimpse some wildlife.

"Site 300 is home to quite a bit of diverse California wildlife and
protected species," Seaver said. "It's not uncommon to see deer and
coyotes running around."

The laboratory has long offered tours of its main facility in
Livermore, but this is the first time that Site 300 will offer
regular public tours.

Asked why the 52-year-old site is starting tours now, Seaver said,
"It seemed like the time was right."

Site 300 is the subject of a heated debate in the Tracy community.

Lawrence Livermore recently asked the San Joaquin Valley Air
Pollution Control District to permit test blasts at Site 300 as
large as 350 pounds, up from the previous 100-pound limit.

Earlier this month, a proposal to build a laboratory at the site
that would test incurable biological agents was met with resistance
by the Tracy City Council.

Contact reporter Niko Kyriakou at niko@tracypress.com.

First published: Friday, March 2, 2007

125 N. Church St. P.O. Box 1360 Lodi, CA 95241 (209) 369-2761 
Fax: (209) 369-1084 * Map (209) 369-7035

*****************************************************************
 64 Hanford News: Astronomers fret about fate of observatory

This story was published Thursday, March 1st, 2007

By Annette Cary, Herald staff writer

Mid-Columbia astronomers are worried the final management plan 
for the Hanford Reach National Monument could call for tearing 
down one of the highest quality telescopes available for public 
use in the Northwest.

The draft plan looks at six alternatives for managing the site, 
including three that call for the Rattlesnake Mountain 
Observatory to be removed along with old military buildings on 
the mountain.

The draft alternative preferred by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,
which manages the monument, is not one that calls for tearing down
the observatory. But there is no guarantee that alternative, either
as it is written now or with changes, will be adopted as the final
management plan.

"I am certain Fish and Wildlife does not want to endanger a $600,000
community resource," said Roy Gephart, president of the organization
that owns the observatory. In 2005 Battelle donated the telescope
and the dome that houses it to the Alliance for the Advancement of
Science Through Astronomy.

Battelle Memorial Institute built the observatory in 1971 using
private money for astronomical research. Its 0.8-meter Cassegrain
telescope remains the largest telescope in the state, according to
the American Astronomical Society.

The local alliance has been operating and managing the observatory
since 1996 and has used $200,000 in donations to refurbish the
telescope and dome.

Its goal has been to make the telescope available for education and
it also uses it for fundraising for groups ranging from the
Mid-Columbia Symphony to Kennewick General Hospital.

Although the local alliance owns the observatory, it sits on
Department of Energy land in the buffer zone of the Hanford nuclear
reservation that is managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

As Fish and Wildlife prepares the first management plan for the new
monument, which includes Rattlesnake Mountain, it's required to look
at all reasonable alternatives, said Greg Hughes, monument project
manager. Its goal is to balance public use with protection of
wildlife.

Much of Rattlesnake Mountain has been largely untouched by humans
since it became part of the security area around the nuclear
reservation during World War II, and public access is expected to
remain limited.

The area remains culturally important to tribes who historically
have used the mountain and it also is used for natural habitat
research.

Fish and Wildlife would like to at least reduce the human imprint on
the mountain. All draft management alternatives call for tearing
down old unused military buildings. However, some structures are
likely to remain, such as emergency communication towers.

The top of the mountain is reached through a steep and winding
one-lane road that must be entered through a locked gate. The
astronomy alliance and Fish and Wildlife agree that the road is not
suitable for public traffic such as school buses.

The astronomy alliance takes small groups of visitors to the
observatory about six times a year. That includes visits auctioned
off to raise money for community groups. It would not plan to
increase those visits to more than about twice a month when the
weather is good, Gephart said.

But the alliance believes there are opportunities to help students
at all levels by using computers for remote access to allow students
to see through the eye of the telescope.

All systems in the telescope are computerized to eventually allow
the telescope to be operated from off the site.

The telescope could become an increasingly valuable asset to the
community as it works to make the Tri-Cities a destination for
higher education with a four-year university, a Department of Energy
national laboratory and a strong technical and scientific business
community, Gephart said.

No decision has been made on the management of the national monument
during the next 15 years, Hughes emphasizes. However, now is the
time for people to let Fish and Wildlife know what they like and
dislike about the proposed alternatives, he said.

&copy 2007 Tri-City Herald. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
 65 Hanford News: State panel warned about effort to license nuclear dump in Nevada

This story was published Thursday, March 1st, 2007

By Brendan Riley, Associated Press Writer

CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) - A Nevada panel fighting a proposed Yucca 
Mountain dump for nuclear waste was told Wednesday that project 
backers face big obstacles but are still seeking approval of the 
dump and of rail shipping routes - including one through downtown 
Reno and Sparks.

The warning to the Nevada Commission on Nuclear Projects prompted 
its chairman, Richard Bryan, a former state governor and U.S. 
senator, to say, "This is no time to sit back and assume 
everything will unfold ... in our favor."

Bob Halstead, a transportation adviser to the commission, said rail
shipments through the Reno-Sparks area would have a huge impact on
commercial and residential properties near the route - possibly
lowering their combined value by well over $1 billion.

Asked after the commission meeting why Nevada must press its fight
against the dump, Halstead said, "We've driven a stake through this
vampire's heart three or four times - and each time he stands up and
says, 'Yucca Mountain."'

Halstead added that while U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid,
D-Nev., has promised to block the Department of Energy's Yucca
Mountain project, which already has cost at least $9 billion, Nevada
remains the No. 1 target because no other states want to take
high-level radioactive waste.

Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said Feb. 5 that the DOE will prepare
an application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license
for the dump, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, by June 2008.
President Bush has asked Congress for nearly $500 million to allow
completion of the application.

Originally scheduled to open in 1998, the dump has been set back
repeatedly by lawsuits, money shortfalls and scientific
controversies. The DOE's current best-case opening date for the
dump, which would hold 77,000 tons of waste, is 2017.

In his remarks to the commission, Halstead said some trains from
waste-producing power plants would run on tracks parallel to
Interstate 80 in northern Nevada, coming from the east and the west.
Trains from the west would run through downtown Reno and Sparks.

The trains would then run south to Yucca Mountain along a route near
U.S. 95, which goes through several rural towns including Schurz,
Hawthorne, Mina, Tonopah and Goldfield. Halstead said the DOE's
estimated cost of upgrading rail routes and laying new track is $1.6
billion - but he termed that "a made-up number."

Also speaking at the commission meeting was Sparks City Manager
Shaun Carey, who said the DOE rejected a request for a hearing on
the rail route. He said the route is of particular concern for his
city, since it's home to a major rail operations yard.

Bob Loux, head of the state's Agency for Nuclear Projects, said it
looks like the DOE wants to "deliberately keep people in northern
Nevada out of the process."

DOE spokesman Allen Benson said a preliminary hearing on rail routes
was held at the University of Nevada, Reno in late November, adding,
"I don't know much closer we could get to Sparks City Hall." He said
additional hearings will be held in northern Nevada in the future.

"We're years away from routes," he added. "We haven't settled on any
routes. Our focus is on completing and submitting the licensing
application."

Benson also said the federal government has been hauling nuclear
waste by truck for half a century with no problems, and "we're quite
confident we can continue our safety record."

Benson said waste headed for Yucca Mountain would be in solid form
and security guards would accompany the trains, which would run
about twice a week over a 24-year period.

&copy 2007 Tri-City Herald. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
 66 Hanford News: Soviet-era nuclear material is a target for smugglers willing to
sell to anyone

This story was published Thursday, March 1st, 2007

By Alex Rodriguez, Chicago Tribune By Alex Rodriguez, Chicago Tribune

YEREVAN, Armenia - Jobless for two years, Gagik Tovmasyan 
believed escape from poverty lay in a cardboard box on his 
kitchen floor.

Inside the box, a blue, lead-lined vessel held the right type and
amount of radioactive cesium to make a "dirty bomb." The material
was given to him by an unemployed Armenian Catholic priest who
promised a cut if Tovmasyan could find a buyer.

He found one in 2004, but the man turned out to be an undercover
agent. Tovmasyan spent a year behind bars on a charge of illegally
storing and trying to sell 4 grams of cesium-137.

Today the chain-smoking Armenian cabdriver says his actions amounted
to simple survival. "That's just the way it was back then," said
Tovmasyan, 48, who insisted he had no idea of the danger the
material presented. "I was selling all my belongings just to get by."

At a time when the U.S. is grappling with the specter of nuclear
weapons in North Korea and Iran, security experts warn that a vast
supply of radioactive materials - enough to make hundreds of
so-called dirty bombs - lies virtually unprotected in former Soviet
military bases and ruined factories.

Desperately poor scavengers looking for scrap metal already have
raided many of those sites, fueling an ever-growing concern in the
war on terrorism.

There were 662 confirmed cases of radioactive materials smuggling
around the world from 1993 to 2004, according to the International
Atomic Energy Agency. More than 400 involved substances that could
be used to make a dirty bomb, a weapon that would spew radioactivity
across a broad area. Experts say even these alarming numbers do not
reflect the magnitude of the smuggling.

The risk has grown despite tens of millions of dollars spent by the
United States to provide radiation detection equipment and security
training in former Soviet republics. Tracking how the money is spent
by opaque, often-corrupt governments has proved especially difficult.

The problem is wider in scope than often acknowledged, and the
stakes are enormous: It takes only a few grams of a deadly
radioactive substance such as cesium-137 or strontium-90 to make a
dirty bomb.

Along Russia's barren, jagged coastline on the Barents Sea, enough
strontium-90 to make hundreds of dirty bombs can be found in dozens
of unguarded lighthouses and navigational beacons. In Semipalatinsk
in eastern Kazakhstan, once the site of Soviet nuclear weapons
testing, scavengers routinely slip through breaches in tunnels where
poorly secured strontium-90, cesium-137, plutonium and uranium waste
is stored alongside scrap metal, the site's director says.

In the small mountainous republic of Georgia, the director of a
former Soviet laboratory in the breakaway province of Abkhazia says
separatist leaders have prevented IAEA inspectors from adequately
surveying the institute, where stockpiles of uranium, cesium-137,
strontium-90 and other radioactive materials cannot be accounted for.

Many former Soviet republics do a poor job of maintaining reliable
inventories of radioactive material, according to Lyudmila Zaitseva,
a radioactive materials trafficking researcher at the University of
Salzburg in Austria. Former Soviet borders are porous, and
corruption is rife at border guard posts.

When it comes to protecting radioactive materials, the countries
that once made up the Soviet Union are "the weakest and most
dangerous link in the whole chain," said Igor Khripunov, a
U.S.-based expert in nuclear and radioactive materials security at
the University of Georgia.

Zaitseva and her research colleague Friedrich Steinhausler, who log
radioactive materials trafficking cases into a database at the
University of Salzburg, estimate that roughly 3 of every 5 cases of
radioactive materials smuggling go undetected. "I am far more
concerned with what we don't see than with what we see,"
Steinhausler said.

The U.S. government has been slow to gird its ports and border
checkpoints with enough detection capability to prevent smuggled
radioactive materials from entering the country. In December 2005,
congressional investigators smuggled enough cesium-137 across U.S.
checkpoints on the Canadian and Mexican borders to produce two dirty
bombs, according to a 2006 Government Accountability Office report.

Testifying before a Senate homeland security subcommittee in March,
GAO officials said they doubted that the Department of Homeland
Security could hit its deadline of placing more than 3,000 radiation
detectors at border crossings, seaports and mail facilities by 2009.
It was likelier, said the GAO's Eugene Aloise, that the department
would not finish until 2014.

"Four and a half years after Sept. 11, and less than 40 percent of
our seaports have basic radiation equipment," said Sen. Norm
Coleman, R-Minn., the subcommittee chairman at the time during a
congressional hearing last March. "This is a massive blind spot."

No one has ever detonated a dirty bomb, but terrorists have made it
clear they have the means and desire to do so.

In November 1995, Chechen separatists buried a canister of
cesium-137 under the snow in Moscow's Izmailovo Park and told a
Russian television network where to find it. Last year, a British
court sentenced Dhiren Barot, a London resident linked to al-Qaida,
to 40 years in prison for planning a series of terrorist attacks in
London and the U.S. that would have included a dirty bomb.

In the dense stands of birch and pine in Russia's far north, special
generators used to power lighthouses represent one of the most
vulnerable sources of material. Radioisotope Thermoelectric
Generators create electricity through the decay of strontium-90. A
single RTG can house enough strontium-90 for 40 dirty bombs.

Russia has more than 600 RTGs scattered across its 11 time zones.
Lighthouses and navigational beacons equipped with them are largely
unguarded, at times lacking even a chain-link fence for protection.

In the Murmansk and Arkhangelsk regions along the Barents coastline,
scrap metal hunters have broken into six RTGs in recent years, said
Vladimir Kozlovsky, a local official involved in a Russian-Norwegian
project to replace the aging RTGs with safer technology.

In March, scrap metal hunters broke into a deserted military base
above the Arctic Circle and ripped apart four RTGs, according to
Bellona, a Norwegian environmental watchdog organization.

While there are no reports of strontium being taken from an RTG, the
scavenging highlights the risks.

Radioactive materials transported in Russia by rail are also
alarmingly vulnerable.

Last year Greenpeace activists staked out a train depot in a village
near St. Petersburg, Russia, to monitor trainloads of uranium from
Western Europe that had been stopping on their way to Siberia for
disposal.

"There were no police, no guards, no armed personnel around," said
Greenpeace activist Georgy Timofeyev. "The first time we noticed
this in May, we called authorities. They said, 'If there aren't any
guards, then there's no danger.'

"But anyone can walk up and open them because there are no serious
locks on the containers," Timofeyev said.

Greenpeace activists say Russian authorities confirmed that the
shipments were being handled by Izotop, a state-owned nuclear
materials transport company. The firm handles roughly 50,000 tons of
nuclear material shipped through St. Petersburg each year, according
to Bellona. Izotop officials declined to comment.

In Kazakhstan, once a hub for Soviet nuclear production and research
because of its remoteness in the steppes of Central Asia, vast
networks of tunnels and boreholes used for nuclear weapons testing
pose a unique problem.

For four decades, the treeless stretches of scrub outside
Semipalatinsk in eastern Kazakhstan served as the Soviet Union's
ground zero. The Soviet military machine conducted 458 nuclear
weapons tests at the 7,200-square mile site. Most of the blasts
occurred in 181 iron-lined tunnels a half-mile below the ground, or
in the site's 60 boreholes.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Kazakhstan
relinquished its entire nuclear arsenal and sealed Semipalatinsk's
tunnels and boreholes with concrete.

Those seals have failed to deter impoverished Kazakhs, who fashion
propane tanks into makeshift bombs to blast their way into the
tunnels. Their quarry is scrap metal, but local authorities worry
that the vast amounts of strontium, cesium, plutonium and uranium
waste still inside the tunnels could attract those intent on
building a dirty bomb.

"Anyone who wants to make a dirty bomb can target by-products of the
blasts," said Kayrat Kadyrzhanov, director general of the Kazakhstan
National Nuclear Center, which oversees the site. "When test blasts
were done, not all of the particles burned out. Even taking soil
samples would be of value to a terrorist or rogue state.

"When people get into the tunnels, we assume it's for iron. But
that's our assumption," Kadyrzhanov said.

The U.S. government has given Kazakhstan more than $20 million to
seal up tunnel and borehole entrances, Kadyrzhanov said, "but the
problem is still there." Kazakh authorities deploy only four patrol
teams-made up of a local police officer, a radiation detector
specialist and a driver - to cover 181 tunnels and a tract of steppe
the size of New Jersey.

"The scrap hunters are well-equipped," Kadyrzhanov said. "They've
got cell phones and warn each other about approaching patrols."

Radioactive flotsam left behind by the Soviets in Georgia is just as
worrisome. Canisters of cesium-137 and other radioactive materials
have been routinely found at abandoned military bases, research
laboratories - even in farmhouses, according to nuclear safety
specialists with the Georgian government.

Last summer, inspectors found cesium-137 amid a pile of nuts and
bolts in a soap container at a farmer's house in the village of
Likhauri.

"We came across many cases where radioactive material was found in
the street, in a forest, or in fields," said Grigol Basilia, a
scientist with Georgia's Nuclear Radiation Safety Service.

Georgia's biggest worry is the rebellious province of Abkhazia on
the Black Sea coast, where a separatist government defies Tbilisi
with the political and military backing of Russia.

Abkhazia is home to the Sukhumi Institute of Physics and Technology,
or SIPT, founded in 1945 as a cog in the effort to build the Soviet
Union's first atomic bomb. In 1992, civil war broke out in Abkhazia.
Abkhaz separatists drove out Georgian troops in a year of fighting
that claimed 17,000 lives. Georgian scientists at the institute
fled, leaving the laboratory and its storehouse of uranium,
plutonium and other radioactive materials in the hands of Abkhaz
separatists.

Today, those Georgian scientists have no control over the fate of
SIPT's deadly array of radioactive substances. Guram Bokuchava, the
institute's director, operates out of a small office in downtown
Tbilisi, not knowing how those materials are guarded or even how
much are left.

In 2002, when IAEA inspectors flew to Sukhumi to check on uranium
stored at the institute, Abkhaz authorities would not let them
inspect the storage site, Bokuchava said.

"It's not known how much uranium is there," Bokuchava said. "And
it's not known how much cesium-137 and strontium-90 is there. Of
course, we're concerned about what happened to these materials ...
but the Abkhaz side is not giving any information about this."

Georgia also continues to be a major transit nation for radioactive
materials smugglers. In the most recent case, Oleg Khinsagov, a
50-year-old Russian trader, was caught trying to smuggle 100 grams
of highly enriched uranium through Georgia last year. He was
convicted of nuclear materials trafficking and sentenced to 8 1/2
years in prison. Georgian authorities believe the uranium originated
in Russia.

Khinsagov fits the profile of the opportunistic radioactive
materials smuggler working the Caucasus region: He was a simple
trader, with no criminal background and no known connections to
organized crime or terrorists.

Tovmasyan, the Armenian cabdriver, and the other men arrested with
him fit the same profile.

The man who gave Tovmasyan the cesium, Asokhik Aristakesyan, was a
priest and also unemployed, said Vahe Papoyan, an investigator with
the Armenian National Security Service. So was another man who tried
to sell the cesium, Sarkis Mikaelyan, a jobless economist. They each
were convicted and also sentenced to a year in jail

"Especially in countries with low standards of living," Khripunov
said, "people can be very enterprising."

The U.S. has aggressively tried to shore up border checkpoints in
Georgia and other former Soviet republics to stem the flow of
radioactive materials smuggling. From 1994 to 2005, Washington spent
$178 million to provide radiation detection equipment for border
posts in 36 countries, many of them former Soviet nations.

A March 2006 GAO report acknowledged that the new equipment helps,
but the bigger challenge is corruption.

"Border guards often don't know what they're dealing with," Zaitseva
said. "They're bribed to switch off their detection equipment. They
don't know what's being smuggled, and they really don't care."

---

(c) 2007, Chicago Tribune.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

*****************************************************************
 67 Tri-City Herald: EPA official: Realism needed at Hanford

Published Friday, March 2nd, 2007

ANNETTE CARY HERALD STAFF WRITER

Hanford leaders and regulators need to take a realistic look at what
needs to be accomplished at the nuclear reservation and what can be
done, the Environmental Protection Agency's new regional
administrator said.

Elin Miller made her first visit to Hanford on Wednesday after being
appointed regional administrator for the Pacific Northwest and
Alaska in October. She toured the site and met with Department of
Energy leaders, cleanup contractors and tribal leaders.

The magnitude of federal dollars spent at Hanford -- around $2
billion annually -- and continuing issues at the site made a visit a
priority, she said.

"We need to make sure we're getting the most from the investment
from a human health and environment standpoint," she said.

DOE has missed legally binding deadlines for cleaning radioactive
waste out of underground tanks and has fallen up to eight years
behind schedule to meet a legal deadline to open the vitrification
plant to treat the waste. In addition, Hanford workers continue to
struggle to meet revised deadlines for removing radioactive sludge
at the K Basins and questions have been raised about operations of
Hanford's landfill for low-level radioactive waste in recent months.

The site also is linked to one of EPA's priorities, protecting the
Columbia River, she said. About 80 square miles of ground water at
the site are contaminated with radioactive or hazardous chemical
waste.

Washington state, which regulates the site in cooperation with EPA,
has emphasized that getting the vitrification plant built and the
underground tanks emptied of 53 million gallons of waste is the key
to Hanford cleanup.

But EPA takes a more holistic approach to the site. Among its
concerns is a more aggressive push to start cleaning up ground water.

Until visiting, Miller said she didn't fully appreciate the enormity
of the 586-square-mile site -- where plutonium once was made for the
nation's nuclear weapons program -- and the complexity of the
cleanup, she said.

A realistic look is needed to determine how long the site will take
to clean up, its cost and how the cleanup best can be completed, she
said. That could include another look at the Tri-Party Agreement,
given DOE's problems meeting milestones.

Keith Klein, the retiring manager of DOE's Hanford Richland
Operations Office, has said that the administration's proposed 2008
budget likely is not enough to keep all projects on schedule to meet
Tri-Party Agreement milestones in 2008 and beyond.

It's a time when leadership at Hanford is changing, Miller pointed
out. The other DOE Hanford manager, Roy Schepens, also retired this
week and DOE has started the process to seek bids for work now done
by two of DOE's four major contractors at the site.

Miller most recently was president and chief executive officer of
Arysta Life Science North America and Astrualasia, and agricultural
chemical company based in Tokyo.

From 1996 to 2004 she was an executive at Dow Chemical, overseeing
the company's public affairs, global pest management and Asia
Pacific operations.

She also has experience in public service as the director of the
California Department of Conservation and the chief deputy director
of the California Department of Pesticide Regulation at California
EPA.

&copy 2007 Tri-City Herald, Associated Press & Other Wire Services
*****************************************************************
 68 Hanford News: EPA official: Realism needed at Hanford - New regional 
administrator makes first visit in new post

This story was published Friday, March 2nd, 2007

By Annette Cary, Herald staff writer By Annette Cary, Herald staff
writer By Annette Cary, Herald staff writer

Hanford leaders and regulators need to take a realistic look at 
what needs to be accomplished at the nuclear reservation and what 
can be done, the Environmental Protection Agency's new regional 
administrator said.

Elin Miller made her first visit to Hanford on Wednesday after 
being appointed regional administrator for the Pacific Northwest 
and Alaska in October. She toured the site and met with 
Department of Energy leaders, cleanup contractors and tribal 
leaders.

The magnitude of federal dollars spent at Hanford - around $2
billion annually - and continuing issues at the site made a visit a
priority, she said.

"We need to make sure we're getting the most from the investment
from a human health and environment standpoint," she said.

DOE has missed legally binding deadlines for cleaning radioactive
waste out of underground tanks and has fallen up to eight years
behind schedule to meet a legal deadline to open the vitrification
plant to treat the waste. In addition, Hanford workers continue to
struggle to meet revised deadlines for removing radioactive sludge
at the K Basins and questions have been raised about operations of
Hanford's landfill for low-level radioactive waste in recent months.

The site also is linked to one of EPA's priorities, protecting the
Columbia River, she said. About 80 square miles of ground water at
the site are contaminated with radioactive or hazardous chemical
waste.

Washington state, which regulates the site in cooperation with EPA,
has emphasized that getting the vitrification plant built and the
underground tanks emptied of 53 million gallons of waste is the key
to Hanford cleanup.

But EPA takes a more holistic approach to the site. Among its
concerns is a more aggressive push to start cleaning up ground water.

Until visiting, Miller said she didn'tfully appreciate the enormity
of the586-square-mile site - where plutonium once was made for the
nation's nuclear weapons program - and the complexity of the
cleanup, she said.

A realistic look is needed to determine how long the site will take
to clean up, its cost and how the cleanup best can be completed, she
said. That could include another look at the Tri-Party Agreement,
given DOE's problems meeting milestones.

Keith Klein, the retiring manager of DOE's Hanford Richland
Operations Office, has said that the administration's proposed 2008
budget likely is not enough to keep all projects on schedule to meet
Tri-Party Agreement milestones in 2008 and beyond.

It's a time when leadership at Hanford is changing, Miller pointed
out. The other DOE Hanford manager, Roy Schepens, also retired this
week and DOE has started the process to seek bids for work now done
by two of DOE'sfour major contractors at the site.

Miller most recently was president and chief executive officer of
Arysta Life Science North America and Astrualasia, and agricultural
chemical company based in Tokyo.

From 1996 to 2004 she was an executive at Dow Chemical, overseeing
the company's public affairs, global pest management and Asia
Pacific operations.

She also has experience in public service as the director of the
California Department of Conservation and the chief deputy director
of the California Department of Pesticide Regulation at California
EPA.

&copy 2007 Tri-City Herald. All rights reserved.
    
*****************************************************************

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have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for 
non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more 
information go to: 
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