***************************************************************** 03/08/07 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 15.56 ***************************************************************** RADBULL IS PRODUCED BY THE ABALONE ALLIANCE CLEARINGHOUSE ***************************************************************** Send News Stories to news@energy-net.org with title on subject line and first line of body NUCLEAR POLICY 1 BBC NEWS: Climate talks 'key moment' for EU 2 Reuters: Russia, China, object to tough sanctions on Iran 3 UPI: Russia: Iran still owes for nuclear plant 4 US: [southnews] New US Bomb Could Jumpstart Nuclear Arms Race 5 The Hindu: Indo-US nuclear deal not to fuel arms race - Boucher 6 US: Guardian Unlimited: Air Force Scraps Stealth Missile Fleet 7 US: MWB: News media falling short in watchdog role, critics say 8 US: Las Vegas SUN: Democrats' hearings uncover motives 9 US: Tri-City Herald: Fired U.S. attorney wary of Hastings aide's cal 10 Guardian Unlimited: Activists mount Trident legal bid NUCLEAR REACTORS 11 Guardian Unlimited: Split on nuclear power threatens agreement on gl 12 Guardian Unlimited: Nuclear question splits EU climate talks 13 Sydney Morning Herald: Nuclear energy views 'changing quickly' - 14 HindustanTimes.com: India N-deal by year end, hopes US 15 HindustanTimes.com: US says N-deal with India not to fuel arms race 16 The Hindu: Punjab to try to have nuclear power plant - Manpreet 17 The Hindu: U.S. commercial nuclear team meets Kakodkar 18 US: DOE: Energy Praises the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Approval o 19 US: Baltimore Examiner: Group opposes third nuclear reactor - 20 US: Rutland Herald: Agency: Yankee nuclear plant 'safe' 21 US: toledoblade.com: Davis-Besse seeks looser oversight 22 London Times: Drax ponders move into nuclear power- 23 US: FR: NRC: In the Matter of Areva Np, Inc. Richland, WA and All Ot 24 US: FR: NRC: In the Matter of Areva NP, Inc., Lynchburg, Va, and All 25 US: Reuters: U.S. OKs early site permit for nuclear power plant 26 World Nuclear News: EU countries strive to keep nuclear on agenda 27 The Local: Swedes want to retain nuclear 28 Prague Daily Monitor: Leak at TemelĂ­n, Austria plans lawsuit - 29 Reuters: Chirac - EU renewables goal must include nuclear 30 New Book: 'War In Heaven' by Drs. Helen Caldicott and Craig Eisendra 31 The Australian: People 'more rational' about nuclear power 32 AU ABC: Switkowski says rushed green efforts pointless. 33 US: NewsBlaze: Department of Energy Praises the Nuclear Regulatory C 34 Guardian Unlimited: EU Leaders to Decide on Energy Strategy NUCLEAR SECURITY 35 BBC NEWS: Congo arrest over missing uranium 36 IRNA: Pakistan's top nuclear scientists in Taliban Custody - 37 US: New Yorker: Can the United States be made safe from nuclear terr 38 Guardian Unlimited: Congo Official Arrested in Uranium Sale NUCLEAR SAFETY 39 US: McClatchy Washington Bureau: Bush administration rejects purchas 40 US: ContraCostaTimes.com: Emissions worries sink lab's explosives pe 41 US: North County Times: Are energy needs worth kids' health? - 42 US: SF Chron: FRESNO / Mock nuke blast permit revoked / Bombs would 43 US: Chillicothe Gazette: Options for nuke workers 44 US: NAS: Project: Beryllium Alloy Exposures in Military Aerospace Ap 45 StarPhoenix: Uranium a cancer industry, anti-nuclear activist says 46 US: TomPaine.com: Whistling Freedom NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE 47 reviewjournal.com: Measure would speed licensing 48 Las Vegas SUN: Jon Ralston on how a planned nuke dump will affect 49 business.iafrica.com: business news Nuclear smelter process 'disturb 50 Dow Jones: UPDATE: DOE: Funds For Yucca Nuclear Waste Site Insuffici 51 US: KNDO/KNDU: Report Says Public Support Key to GNEP at Hanford 52 Whitehaven News: UK told to speed up hunt for nuclear waste store 53 Whitehaven News: Fluor have something to celebrate 54 Whitehaven News: Calder Hall contract awarded PEACE 55 BBC NEWS: Gorbachev attacks Trident plans US DEPT. OF ENERGY 56 Hanford News: Chromium may offer clue to leak 57 Hanford News: The Bush administration decides not to buy a drug to c 58 Recordnet.com: Lab's blast permit revoked 59 San Jose Mercury: San Joaquin air officials rescind permit for testi 60 NMBW: Domenici blasts funding levels for DOE cleanup at LANL - 61 Tracy Press: Bigger blasts nixed ... for now 62 Tracy Press: David stuns Goliath 63 lamonitor.com: Domenici: LANL clean-up funds declining 64 NEI Nuclear Notes: Nuclear Industry Welcomes Introduction Of 65 NAS: Project: Development and Implementation of a Cleanup Technology 66 NAS: Project: Review of DOE's Office of Nuclear Energy, Science & ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** FULL NEWS STORIES ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** 1 BBC NEWS: Climate talks 'key moment' for EU Last Updated: Thursday, 8 March 2007, 18:01 GMT Some countries are reluctant to switch from fossil fuel power plants The next few days could be a "defining moment for the EU" as its leaders consider tough new emissions targets, the EU Commission president says. Jose Manuel Barroso said the EU's credibility hung on its matching words with action to fight climate change. In Brussels, EU leaders are expected to commit to cutting carbon emissions by 20% by 2020 compared to 1990 levels. In the space of little over a year, climate change and what to do about it has shot to the top of the EU's agenda, says the BBC's Jonny Dymond in Brussels. Across Europe leaders have been stressing the urgency of action - but now they have to make good on all the talk, he says. Leadership Before the two-day summit opened on Thursday, Mr Barroso said: "Are we really credible or not? "We have been speaking about climate change; now we have an opportunity to take decisions that are really important, not only for Europe but for the rest of the world. "Only if we take the initiative are we able afterwards to engage the rest of the world," he added. "It's not just about Europe, it's also that we need the United States, we need China, we need India, we need others to come with us." The European Union is absolutely key to helping the world make the changes it must Al Gore Environmental activist Summit tests EU resolve Europe diary: Going green It is thought EU leaders may agree to a deeper cut of 30% in emissions by 2020 if other developed and emerging nations, notably the US, India and China, join in. How a 20% or 30% cut will be achieved is likely to be the focus of lively debate in Brussels. Poorer Eastern European countries, which are more dependent on heavy industry and carbon-heavy coal, say they will struggle to make the investment in wind farms and solar power necessary to meet the targets. A European Commission proposal - that 20% of EU energy consumption should be met by renewable sources by 2020 - is therefore thought less likely to be adopted at the two-day summit. France, which depends heavily on nuclear power, is opposed, saying that, too, should be considered a clean source of energy. EU leaders hope to limit the damage to the environment German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is chairing the talks, said she expected "very difficult negotiations". There is also likely to be tough talking over Mr Barroso's attempts to sharpen competition in the European energy market, by taking distribution out of the hands of big energy producers. "I believe that only with that separation we can create more choice for consumers [and] more attractive conditions for investment," Mr Barroso said. He said he knew that "unbundling" would be unpopular with "those who have some kind of dominant positions". * BBC Copyright Notice ***************************************************************** 2 Reuters: Russia, China, object to tough sanctions on Iran Thu Mar 8, 2007 8:10PM EST By Evelyn Leopold UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Russia and China have raised objections to nearly every Western proposal for new U.N. sanctions against Iran over its nuclear ambitions except a ban on arms exports, according to a working paper. The document, seen by Reuters on Thursday, shows some Russian and Chinese reservations about other proposals for a U.N. Security Council resolution. These include a mandatory travel ban, financial and trade restrictions and an expanded list of Iranian officials and firms whose assets would be frozen, such as those controlled by Iran's Revolutionary Guards and Iran's state-owned Bank Sepah, already under U.S. sanctions. In an effort to break the logjam, senior foreign policy officials from the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China held another telephone conference on Thursday, followed by a meeting of U.N. ambassadors late in the day. "We were just taking stock on where we are," said Alejandro Wolff, a U.S. ambassador, after the meeting. "There have been lots of conversations between capitals, so we wanted to compare notes, make sure everyone's on the same page." The new resolution is a follow-up to one adopted by the Security Council on December 23 that imposed trade sanctions on sensitive nuclear materials and technology and froze assets of key Iranians individuals, groups and businesses. Iran was required to suspend nuclear enrichment work, which can be used for peaceful purposes or to make a bomb, but Tehran has refused to do so. Continued... © Reuters 2007. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 3 UPI: Russia: Iran still owes for nuclear plant United Press International - Energy - 3/7/2007 3:28:00 PM -0500 MOSCOW, March 7 (UPI) -- Officials of the Russian firm building a nuclear plant in Iran say Tehran hasn't settled a payment dispute stalling the project. Iran's foreign minister said Wednesday the payment issues had been resolved. "According to the authorized bank, no funds had been received by the morning of March 7," said Yevgeniya Neimerovets, chief financial officer of Atomstroyexport, Russia's state-run nuclear export arm. "The Iranian side made its last payment Jan. 17," she said, adding work continues but is slowed by the missing payment. Meanwhile representatives of Iran's Atomic Energy Agency are in Moscow for talks with Atomstroyexport President Sergei Shmatko, RIA Novosti reports. "The main issue on today's agenda is the critical situation over nonpayment by the Iranian side and its influence on the commissioning schedule to make quick joint decisions," an Atomstroyexport spokesman said. Construction was to be finished this year, fuel delivered and the plant become operational. "We hope that Russia will resolve all remaining technical issues under its contract obligations, especially those related to cooling systems," said Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki. "The plant will be ready for operation as soon as the nuclear fuel is delivered." The $1 billion contract for the plant in Bushehr, Iran, was signed in 1995 for Russia to build Iran's first nuclear plant, but is being constructed now under the shadow of controversy over Iran's overall nuclear program. A U.S.-led coalition says Iran's goal includes building a nuclear bomb and the enrichment facility used for fuel for the plant is also for weapons means. Iran denies the accusation and says it has the sovereign right to a nuclear energy program, which Russia has publicly supported. But Moscow has warned Tehran to comply more with international inspectors looking into the nuclear controversy. © Copyright 2007 United Press International, Inc. All Rights ***************************************************************** 4 [southnews] New US Bomb Could Jumpstart Nuclear Arms Race Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2007 16:47:04 -0600 (CST) A U.S. plan to develop a new hydrogen bomb could spark production of new nuclear weapons by other countries, including several foes of the Bush administration, warn some of the nation's leading arms control and disarmament advocacy groups. Last Friday, the Department of Energy announced it was seeking to develop a new hydrogen bomb that would replace the existing W76 warhead now deployed on submarine-launched ballistic missiles. New US Bomb Could Jumpstart Nuclear Arms Race by Haider Rizvi (Inter Press Service) March 8, 2007 A U.S. plan to develop a new hydrogen bomb could spark production of new nuclear weapons by other countries, including several foes of the Bush administration, warn some of the nation's leading arms control and disarmament advocacy groups. Last Friday, the Department of Energy announced it was seeking to develop a new hydrogen bomb that would replace the existing W76 warhead now deployed on submarine-launched ballistic missiles. Many analysts say the Bush administration's plan would undermine international efforts to control the spread of nuclear arms and would provide justification to those countries currently suspected of trying to build such weapons. "It will not convince the Iranian Scylla, North Korean Charybdis, or any other less attention-grabbing nascent nuclear state that the U.S. is serious about dampening the political value of nuclear weapons in its security policy," says Travis Sharp, a research fellow at the Washington, DC-based Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. The Bush administration has justified the move by arguing that the condition of existing warheads essentially demands that a new hydrogen bomb be developed in the next two decades, but experts on nuclear weapons find this line of reasoning out of step with reality on the ground. "The administration claims [it] is necessary in order to maintain long-term confidence in the future stockpile," says John Isaacs, "but the fact is that the U.S. stockpile has been confirmed 'safe and reliable' for at least another half century," noting that the effectiveness of the existing stockpile is based on 50 years of research and over 1,000 underground nuclear tests. Other nuclear policy experts agree with Isaacs' view that the plan to build the new hydrogen bomb is unjustified. "The main reason for new nuclear weapons possible uncertainties about whether the specified projected yield of the existing weapons would remain precisely reliable was recently invalidated by both the national nuclear weapon labs scientists and independent experts," says Leonor Tomero, a non-proliferation policy expert at the Center. Last November, a study carried out by American weapons laboratories and reviewed by JASON, an independent government advisory body of nuclear scientists, revealed that plutonium pits (the cores that trigger nuclear weapons) remain viable for at least 90 years. "The concern was never that the existing weapons would not detonate," according to Tomero, "the concern was that the weapons would not detonate at their precise expected yield. Even that is no longer a valid concern now." Despite the end of the Cold War in 1991, the United States continues to possess thousands of nuclear weapons. In addition to the United States, other major powers that have built huge nuclear arsenals include Russia, Britain, France, and China. Currently the five countries combined have more than 36,000 nuclear warheads in their possession, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), a Sweden-based think tank. In addition to the declared nuclear powers, India, Pakistan, and Israel are also believed to be in possession of hundreds of nuclear weapons and at this point, unlike Iran, which has joined international agreements against the spread of nuclear weapons, none of them seems willing to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. As Iran continues to claim that it has no intention to build nuclear weapons, in response to Western criticisms and suspicions surrounding its nuclear program it often points out the presence of thousands of nuclear weapons in the possession of the United States. On Monday, a new report from a leading British scientist concluded that a military strike, rather than setting back Iran's nuclear program, could actually speed up the country's production of a nuclear weapon. "[It] would certainly lead to a fast-track program to develop a small number of nuclear devices as quickly as possible," said Dr. Frank Barry, the report's author, about the likely Iranian reaction to any U.S. military action. Sponsored by the Oxford Research Group, an independent charity based in Britain, the study concluded that if Iran was moving toward nuclear-weapon capacity, it was doing so "relatively slowly," with most estimates suggesting that no weapon would be produced within the next five years. In his report, Dr. Barry argued that it is "much more likely" that, following an attack, all resources would be focused on the manufacture of "one or two crude" devices. "This realignment of Iran's nuclear program towards a so-called 'crash program' could lead to a nuclear armed Iran within one or two years," he said. The report's conclusions were fully backed by Dr. Hans Blix, the former UN chief nuclear inspector and head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). "Armed attacks on Iran would very likely lead to the results they were meant to avoid the building of nuclear weapons in three years," Blix said in a foreword to the report. In addition to their concerns about the negative implications for non-proliferation, some critics in Washington, such as Isaacs, worry that the focus of George W. Bush's new nuclear policy could harm U.S. interests. "Costly warheads won't help the U.S. win the counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan," says Isaacs, "and non-state actors like al-Qaeda do not respond to classic Cold War state-to-state nuclear deterrence." For this fiscal year, Bush is seeking more than $118 million to fund development of the new nuclear weapons (also known as the Reliable Replacement Warhead program). Noting that Bush's request for the new weapons is almost five times greater than the amount he asked for last year, experts at the Center say costs are likely to go much higher as the new weapons program moves into the production phase between 2009 and 2012. Last Friday the Los Angeles Times reported that over the next two decades the cost of developing the new bomb might grow into the tens of billions of dollars. (OneWorld) (Inter Press Service) The archives of South News can be found at http://southmovement.alphalink.com.au/southnews/ ***************************************************************** 5 The Hindu: Indo-US nuclear deal not to fuel arms race - Boucher Thursday, March 8, 2007 : 0945 Hrs Washington, March 8 (PTI): Stressing on the importance of Indo-US civilian nuclear deal, a senior US official has assured lawmakers in his country that the agreement would not in any way fuel an arms race in South Asia. "I appreciate the effort the Congress put into passing the legislation. It was landmark legislation and, we think, very important, very well crafted in terms of letting the president and the prime minister move forward in a way that is prudent and in a way that meets their own expectations that they put down when they negotiated this," Assistant Secretary of South and Central Asia Richard Boucher told lawmakers at a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee yesterday. "There have been a lot of studies and a lot of statements -- you heard them all during the debate -- about what this would do for India's military programmes, whether it would do anything at all. I still believe it wouldn't; I don't think the incentives are there," he said. "As far as the potential for an arms race in the region, we've talked quite clearly to both India and Pakistan. Both of them tell us they don't want to see an arms race; they have no intention of starting one. And indeed, as you yourself noted, they're not only talking, they're making a lot of progress," the senior official added. "On the issue of military versus civilian, the essence of the deal was a separation between the two and a separation that can be maintained and will be maintained by the Indians based on their decisions and policy, but also in cooperation with some of these international agreements." Copyright © 2006, The Hindu. ***************************************************************** 6 Guardian Unlimited: Air Force Scraps Stealth Missile Fleet From the Associated Press Thursday March 8, 2007 3:16 AM By ROBERT BURNS AP Military Writer WASHINGTON (AP) - The Air Force said Wednesday it will retire the most modern cruise missile in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, a ``stealth'' weapon developed in the 1980s with the ability to evade detection by Soviet radars. Known as the Advanced Cruise Missile, the weapon is carried by the B-52 bomber and was designed to attack heavily defended sites. It is the most capable among a variety of air-launched nuclear weapons built during the Cold War that remain in the U.S. inventory even as the Pentagon is reducing its overall nuclear arms stockpile. The Air Force had said as recently as February 2006 that it expected to keep the missile active until 2030. If the retirement is carried out as planned, the Advanced Cruise Missile will be the first group of U.S. nuclear weapons to be scrapped since the last of the Air Force's 50 MX Peacekeeper land-based missiles was retired in September 2005. The decision to retire the Advanced Cruise Missile fleet has not been publicly announced. It was brought to light by Hans M. Kristensen, director of the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists. He noticed that funds for the program were cut in the Air Force budget request for 2008, and that no money is budgeted for it beyond 2008; when he inquired, the Air Force acknowledged the retirement decision. An Air Force spokeswoman, Maj. Morshe Araujo, confirmed it on Wednesday. She and other Air Force public affairs officials were unable to provide additional details, including the rationale for the decision. Araujo indicated that the rtion deal signed in Moscow in May 2002. The treaty does not require that any specific group of nuclear weapons be retired, only that the total number in the U.S. and Russian arsenals be cut to the prescribed range of 1,700-2,200. The Russians still have a nuclear-tipped cruise missile in active service, according to Robert S. Norris, an expert in American, Soviet and Chinese nuclear weapons. The decision to get rid of the Advanced Cruise Missile comes amid U.S. efforts to modernize what remains of the nuclear arsenal, even as it presses Iran and North Korea to abandon their nuclear programs. Last week the Bush administration took a major step 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. As a matter of policy the Defense Department does not confirm the location of nuclear weapons, but Kristensen and other private nuclear experts said the fleet of more than 400 Advanced Cruise Missiles is located at the only two B-52 bomber bases: Minot Air Force Base, N.D., and Barksdale Air Force Base, La. The Air Force originally planned to field 1,500 of the missiles, which were put on the drawing board in 1982 after U.S. officials determined that its predecessor, known as the AGM-86 air-launched cruise missile, which has no stealth capabilities, would soon be too easy to detect by air- and ground-based defenses. Kristensen said there are about 1,300 of the older air-launched nuclear cruise missiles still in the Air Force inventory. Norris, a nuclear weapons expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said it appears likely the Air Force will further shrink its inventory of air-launched nuclear weapons in the years ahead. He estimates that there are about 3,000 air-launched gravity bombs in the nuclear arsenal, based mostly in the United States. The other main element of the U.S. nuclear arsenal is the Navy's fleet of nuclear-armed Trident submarines. Norris estimates that the United States now has about 5,000 strategic nuclear weapons, including the Advance Cruise Missiles, so it will take further reductions to get down to the 1,700-2,200 level set by the 2002 treaty. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007 ***************************************************************** 7 MWB: News media falling short in watchdog role, critics say McClatchy Washington Bureau | 03/08/2007 | By Matt Stearns McClatchy Newspapers WASHINGTON - It was a big week for accountability in Washington. Military leaders had to explain to Congress how they let war veterans fester in moldy, roach-infested buildings at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was convicted on perjury and obstruction charges. But there's another Washington institution that many say needs an accountability moment: the news media. In both events, experts say, the country would have been better served if big news outlets had taken a more aggressive watchdog attitude. The Libby case especially illustrates that too many elite members of the media are more interested in cultivating Washington power brokers than in maintaining skeptical, independent and arms-length relationships with them, challenging their assertions and holding them to account for their failings. The consequences can be enormous: The country went to war in Iraq on false or exaggerated evidence trumpeted by anonymous sources through compliant media. And U.S. forces have been at war since 2001, but only in 2007 did the Walter Reed abuses come to light, as the elite media ignored earlier reports from smaller outlets, such as the online magazine Salon, rather than credit and build on them. "Unfortunately, the mainstream media was not paying attention," Celia Viggo Wexler, the vice president of the civic-reform group Common Cause, wrote in an opinion article this week. During the Libby trial, reporters for The New York Times, NBC News and other major news outlets testified about their willingness to grant Libby anonymity in exchange for listening as he spun stories intended to undermine the credibility of a Bush administration critic. To many Americans, it seemed to confirm that in Washington, big media names are sometimes partners in power with the officials they're supposed to be holding accountable. "You saw in the Libby trial an awful lot that, for a lot of people, probably looked suspect or messy," said Stephen Hess, a veteran student of press-government relations at the Brookings Institution, a center-left Washington research center. "This goes on all over town. The only difference is in this case the administration got a little sloppy, and the person they aimed their cannons at was protected by an act of Congress." That would be Valerie Plame, a former undercover CIA officer whose husband, Joseph Wilson, was the critic Libby tried to undermine. "These cozy relationships often involve some of the best reporters or best media outlets," said Ellen Shearer, a dean at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. "The question becomes not are they being used so much as what are the stories they're not writing because they're not stories that circle cares about. ... The cozy relationships can put blinders on." Limiting anonymous sources would help increase the media's accountability and public trust, said Tom Rosenstiel, the director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a nonpartisan group that monitors media performance. In the Libby case, reporters granted anonymity not to someone blowing the whistle on wrongdoing, but to a powerful official who sought to discredit a whistleblower. "Journalists need to be less passive in the way confidentiality is handed out," Rosenstiel said. "They need to make distinctions between coaxing a vulnerable and reluctant whistleblower versus a powerful political figure delivering a message." As for conditions at military hospitals, many of the horrors The Washington Post revealed last month have existed for years; Salon reported many of them as long ago as 2005. Mark Benjamin, who broke Salon's military hospital stories, started writing about the issue in 2003 for UPI, a struggling wire service. He said he thought the country was more willing to read negative stories about the war now and reporters were more willing to write them. But the way Washington news media work is also a factor. Even in the Internet age, two newspapers - The New York Times and The Washington Post - play a unique role in setting the nation's agenda. TV network news shows tend to follow their lead. So do newspaper editors across the country. Partly that reflects the strength of their organizations, but even more it reflects their singular audiences. Everyone in power in Washington reads The Post and The Times and reacts to what they report. That's why powerful political figures try to cultivate - or co-opt - their reporters. "It takes the big print outlets to get the attention of the TV news shows," said Wexler of Common Cause. "Then it explodes." Benjamin agreed that The Post's stories got noticed because "they're The Washington Post. ... When they do it, people pay attention." While The Post now gets credit for exposing the problems, critics lament that the media didn't investigate sooner. In part Wexler blames the big media's declining financial fortunes, which have forced many to cut staffs and shift resources to "feel-good" stories or "news you can use." "There is little incentive for reporters to go the extra mile and find good stories, stories they might not be able to report because they take too much time or they may rock too many boats, or are `too depressing' for the demographic the news outlet is seeking to court," Wexler wrote. Then there's that other criticism: Perhaps if more of the nation's elite journalists were less devoted to cultivating the powerful and more interested in exposing their failings, the public would be better served. To read more online about the news media's role in the Libby scandal, go to http://pewresearch.org/pubs/423/a-verdict-on-the-medias-verdict-on-the -libby-trial ***************************************************************** 8 Las Vegas SUN: Democrats' hearings uncover motives Photo: Former U.S. Attorneys David Iglesias, left, Daniel Bogden and Paul Charlton Today: March 08, 2007 at 7:15:26 PST Testimony on U.S. attorneys' firings By Lisa Mascaro Las Vegas Sun WASHINGTON - Democrats made the need for congressional oversight of the Bush administration a pillar of their campaign last year, and this week that oversight produced an unlikely result: Democrats presided over hearings that revealed motives inside Bush's Justice Department that had been kept from Republican lawmakers, including Nevada Sen. John Ensign. Ensign had said that Justice officials told him they were firing Daniel Bogden, U.S. attorney for Nevada, because of his performance. But congressional testimony Tuesday revealed otherwise. Indeed, House and Senate hearings into the firing of the eight U.S. attorneys by the Justice Department provided an odd spectacle in Washington - a Democratic Congress standing up for Republican-appointed prosecutors to determine why they had been fired by a Republican administration. Congressional scholar Norman Ornstein said the display directly illustrated the points made in a best-selling book he co-authored last year about how Congress was essentially broken because it was failing to provide vigorous checks on the executive branch's power. "It's the oversight, stupid," said Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "Oversight is the key to all of these issues as to whether you administer government well or falter into scandal." The word "unprecedented" was repeated throughout Tuesday's hearings. All sides agreed that U.S. attorneys serve at the will of the president, and can be removed at any time. President Bill Clinton dismissed all 93 attorneys upon taking office, Republicans note. But the Dec. 7 telephone calls to the U.S. attorneys, most of whom are from Western states, were highly unusual. The federal prosecutors were not given reasons for their sudden ousters, prompting wide speculation - particularly because most of them had been involved in public corruption cases that displeased the Bush administration as either too aggressive toward Republicans or not aggressive enough toward Democrats. Bogden testified before the House Judiciary Committee that he was told he was being fired because, with just two years left in Bush's term, the administration wanted "an opportunity to put others into those positions so they could build their resumes, get some experience as a United States attorney" so they would have a better chance to become federal judges or otherwise enhance their political futures. Ensign did not return phone calls from the Sun on Tuesday or Wednesday. He said during a conference call with reporters last month that he was told Bogden was let go because of his performance. Democrats have been pursuing the firings for weeks. In January, Senate Democrats asked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales about the dismissals. He insisted that he would "never, ever make a change in a U.S. attorney position for political reasons." His second in command testified the next month that all but the Arkansas attorney were fired for "performance-related reasons." Democrats then demanded the performance reviews, which were mostly positive. Did it really require a Democratic-controlled Congress to take on the issue? Republican Rep. Chris Cannon of Utah called Tuesday's hearing a "show trial" for political gains. Cannon said that if Republicans still had been in charge, they would have undertaken a staff investigation to clear up the clumsy way the Justice Department handled the situation. "We would have done the looking, but it would not have been this great show trial that I think fell flat," Cannon said. Republican Rep. Ric Keller of Florida said his party would have applied equal vigor to the issue. "We never treated the Justice officials with kid gloves when the Republicans were in control," Keller said. As evidence, Keller pointed to Republican questioning of former Attorney General John Ashcroft and other Bush administration officials about the U.S. Patriot Act and immigration. But Democrats doubt the Republicans would have pressed the issue. "None of those guys seemed frankly curious this thing had happened," said Jim Dau, spokesman for the subcommittee chairwoman, Rep. Linda Sanchez of California. Under Republican leadership, "oversight hearings were woefully lacking," Dau said. Ross Baker, who studies Congress at Rutgers University, said, "If the Republicans had been the majority party, it would have been covered up. The Democrats in the majority party are probably inflating it to much larger than its import. "It would have been smothered by the Republicans, and the Democrats are inflating it like the Goodyear blimp." Lisa Mascaro can be reached at (202) 662-7436 or at lisa.mascaro@lasvegassun.com. Photo: Former U.S. Attorneys David Iglesias, left, Daniel Bogden and Paul Charlton All contents copyright 2005 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 9 Tri-City Herald: Fired U.S. attorney wary of Hastings aide's call on '04 governor race Published Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 By Les Blumenthal, Marisa Taylor and Margaret Talev, Herald Washington, D.C., Bureau WASHINGTON - The fired U.S. attorney for Western Washington testified Tuesday that a former top aide to Rep. Doc Hastings called him in the weeks following the hotly contested 2004 Washington state governor's race to ask whether his office was going to investigate allegations of voter fraud. John McKay, one of eight U.S. attorneys fired by the Bush administration in December, said he found the call from Hastings aide Ed Cassidy "unusual and serious." But he said he cut the phone conversation off before Cassidy could veer into "improper or illegal territory." Though he chose his words carefully in speaking with reporters following an afternoon House hearing, McKay said he thought Cassidy was trying to step up the pressure on him to investigate possible election fraud. He said he believed Cassidy was calling on behalf of Hastings. "I knew immediately what he wanted," McKay said. My antennae were up. It was very dangerous territory. I considered the call the same as if it was from a member (of Congress)." Cassidy denied there was anything inappropriate about the phone call. In a statement, Cassidy described his call to McKay as a "routine effort to determine whether the allegations in the 2004 gubernatorial election were, or were not, being investigated by federal authorities." Hastings, a Pasco Republican, also defended Cassidy's phone call. "It was a simple inquiry and nothing more - and it was the only call to any federal official from my office on this subject either during or after the (election) recount ordeal," Hastings said in a statement. McKay's testimony, along with that of five other ousted U.S. attorneys, came as committees in the House and Senate began to probe the firings. For weeks, Justice Department officials have downplayed the firings as internal administrative decisions based on concerns about each of the attorney's performances. But Democrats have called the firings politically motivated. Hastings is the ranking Republican on the House Ethics Committee. Cassidy was his longtime chief of staff and his top aide on the Ethics Committee. Cassidy is now a senior adviser to House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio, offering advice on such things as ethics and election law. Cassidy attended the House hearing, listening to the testimony as he worked on his Blackberry. During a break, Cassidy told reporters he remains close to Hastings even though he no longer works for him. "We talk every day about one thing or another," Cassidy said. "Doc was the best man at my wedding." Democrat Chris Gregoire won the 2004 race for governor, after three recounts, by 129 votes. McKay testified his office, after consulting with the Justice Department's Voting Rights Section, decided not convene a grand jury to investigate the election. "There was no evidence of criminal wrongdoing and nothing to take to the grand jury," McKay told the House Judiciary Committee's commercial and administrative law subcommittee. Even so, McKay said he was under enormous pressure from Washington state Republicans to investigate. McKay said he received a phone call from Cassidy in late December 2004 or in January 2005. McKay said he never had spoken to Cassidy previously, but he knew he was the top aide to the state's senior Republican. Cassidy asked McKay what his office was doing to investigate, and McKay said he responded by citing information already "publicly available." When Cassidy pressed, McKay said he told him to stop and the call ended. "This call was disconcerting to me," McKay said. McKay said he did not report the call to the Justice Department because he and his leading prosecutors decided the conversation ended before it "crossed the line." Federal law requires that U.S. attorneys report any improper contacts to the Justice Department. During the House hearing, William Moschella, principal assistant U.S. attorney general, said McKay was fired because of "policy differences" over a criminal information reporting system and his failure to aggressively appeal sentences that didn't meet federal sentencing guidelines. McKay said he was a leader in developing the criminal tracking system, adding that the Justice Department had been supportive. He said he never had heard about the differences over sentencing guidelines until Moschella's testimony. After the hearing, McKay said his handling of the 2004 gubernatorial race came back to haunt him when he was being interviewed about a federal judgeship by then White House Counsel Harriet Miers and others in her office. During the interview in August or September 2006, McKay said, he was asked - not by Miers - to explain criticism of how he had "mishandled" the governor's race investigation. McKay did not get the nomination for federal judge. He refused to speculate on whether it was a result of his decision not to investigate the governor's race. Cassidy said the phone call to McKay came after Hastings became chairman of the House Ethics Committee in February 2005, and he became Hastings' top aide on the committee. McKay had placed the timing of the phone call earlier, before Hastings became chairman. Hastings served as chairman until the Democrats regained control of the House in the 2006 election. Cassidy said he understood the "permissible limits" on his conversation with McKay, respected the "boundaries" and ended the conversation before they were breached. Hastings said if McKay found Cassidy's call troubling, he should have called him to complain. "Ed Cassidy's call and the conversation that took place were entirely appropriate," Hastings said. Hastings also indicated Tom McCabe of the Building Industry Association of Washington had contacted his office in July 2005 asking that he urge the White House to fire McKay. The congressman said he "flat out" refused to do so and Cassidy had told McCabe that in the "bluntest of terms." © 2007 Tri-City Herald, Associated Press & Other Wire Services ***************************************************************** 10 Guardian Unlimited: Activists mount Trident legal bid From Press Association Press Association Friday March 9, 2007 1:23 AM Peace activists say they are launching a legal challenge against the Government's plans to renew the Trident nuclear weapons system. Lawyers are set to seek a judicial review over the Government's White Paper on the issue, claiming that parts of it are "incorrect in law". Peacerights said it had obtained legal opinion from two barristers that the Government was wrong to state that keeping a nuclear deterrent was "fully consistent" with Britain's international obligations. It also said that the failure by the Government to carry out a proper public consultation was "itself unlawful". Another peace group, Nuclear Information Service, said it was now calling on ministers to accept the assessment or face a legal challenge in the courts. Phil Shiner of Public Interest Lawyers, solicitors for Nuclear Information Service, said: "The Government has completely misunderstood international law on two vitally important issues. The first is that replacing Trident would be a clear breach of its obligations under Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, including that it must move to disarm. "The second is that it can never threaten to use such a weapons system as it cannot discriminate between military objectives and civilians." He added that similar legal opinion had been issued by peace groups before the publication of the White Paper in December, but the Government had chosen to ignore it. Lawyers for the Government now have 14 days to reply to the latest legal challenge before the Nuclear Information Service seeks a judicial review, Mr Shiner said. This could then bring the case in front of the High Court within the next six weeks. MPs are due to debate and vote on the issue on March 14. Di McDonald, of Nuclear Information Service, said: "There has been no proper consultation on whether or not the UK needs nuclear weapons forever. The Government has no method of weighing the views of consultees, and is not reporting to Parliament on the results of a consultation. It is merely restating over and over again that it wants a new-generation nuclear weapons system. This view is at odds with the majority, and at odds with building a safer world." © Copyright Press Association Ltd 2007, All Rights Reserved. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007 ***************************************************************** 11 Guardian Unlimited: Split on nuclear power threatens agreement on global warming David Gow and Ian Traynor Friday March 9, 2007 A worker at the nuclear reactor factory in Chalon-sur-Saone, France. Nearly 80% of France’s power comes from nuclear plants. Photograph: Jacques Brinon/AP Divisions over nuclear power and renewable energy threatened to derail the EU's campaign to assume a global leadership role in the fight against climate change at the bloc's spring summit which began last night. Warning that "it is closer to five past midnight than five to midnight" for international measures to combat global warming, Germany's chancellor Angela Merkel, chairing the meeting, urged EU leaders to "deliver results for our grandchildren" by making Europe the world's first low-carbon economy via a unilateral 20% cut in its greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. But France, backed by several east European countries, insisted carbon-free nuclear power be included within the EU energy mix and rejected Ms Merkel's proposal to make a 20% target for renewable energy binding on all 27 members. At his swansong summit, the outgoing French president Jacques Chirac insisted that he would only agree to binding energy targets if nuclear power were included and proposed that 45% of the mix come from non-fossil fuel sources. France gets 80% of its power from nuclear power plants. Nuclear energy, according to draft summit conclusions, is a choice for individual EU countries but France won backing for its stance against binding renewable targets from nine other countries, including the Czechs and Poles,who believe they will damage their economic growth. Austria, Ireland, Sweden and Germany formally oppose atomic energy. Ms Merkel, backed by Tony Blair, wants the EU to commit itself to the 20% cut before the G8 summit in early June where other industrialised countries and emerging economies, such as China, will be pressed to agree a 30% global cut to succeed the Kyoto protocol. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007 ***************************************************************** 12 Guardian Unlimited: Nuclear question splits EU climate talks David Gow and Ian Traynor in Brussels Thursday March 8, 2007 Guardian Unlimited Deep divisions over nuclear power and renewable energy threatened to derail the EU's campaign to assume a global leadership in the fight against climate change at the 27-strong bloc's spring summit which began last night. Warning that "it is closer to five past midnight than five to midnight" for international measures to combat global warming, German chancellor Angela Merkel, chairing the meeting, urged EU leaders to "deliver results for our grandchildren" by making Europe the world's first low-carbon economy via a unilateral 20% cut in its greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. But France, backed by several east European countries, insisted that carbon-free nuclear power be included within the proposed EU energy mix and rejected Ms Merkel's proposal to make a 20% target for renewable energy binding on all 27 members. At his swansong summit outgoing French president Jacques Chirac insisted that he would only agree to binding energy targets if nuclear power were included and proposed that 45% of the mix come from non-fossil fuel sources. France gets 80% of its power from nuclear power plants. Nuclear energy, according to draft summit conclusions, is a choice for individual EU countries but France won backing for its stance against binding renewable targets from nine other countries, including the Czechs, Poles and other ex-communist countries which believe these will damage their economic growth. Austria, Ireland, Sweden and Germany are all formally opposed to atomic energy. Ernest-Antoine Seilličre, French head of BusinessEurope, the EU's main business lobby, told Ms Merkel: "As regards binding obligations on renewables, nobody has the foggiest idea of what the costs can be - the social or financial costs." But most EU leaders accept the Stern report's conclusions that failure to tackle climate change could plunge the world into its deepest recession since 1926. Ms Merkel, backed by Tony Blair, wants the EU to commit itself to the 20% cut before the G8 summit in early June where other industrialised countries, especially the US, and emerging economies, such as China, will be pressed to agree a 30% global cut in UN negotiations later this year on a replacement Kyoto protocol after 2012. But green campaigners, demanding a 25% renewables target and rejecting nuclear energy outright, accused the EU of double standards and insisted it adopt the 30% target forthwith. They said the EU would reach a 15% cut in CO2 emissions by 2012 because of the collapse of industry in its east European members and required just an extra 5% cut to hit its 2020 goal. "A leadership role, as Merkel demands, looks quite different," Greenpeace said. Useful links Europa (EU homepage) European parliament Council of the European Union European commission European court of justice EU committee of the regions European Economic and Social Committee Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007 ***************************************************************** 13 Sydney Morning Herald: Nuclear energy views 'changing quickly' - www.smh.com.au March 8, 2007 - 4:54PM The Australian public's view on nuclear energy is changing quickly, with most concerns now about commercial viability rather than emotion, nuclear inquiry head Dr Ziggy Switkowski says. His views complement the findings of a Newspoll which earlier this week revealed support for nuclear power had surged 10 percentage points to 45 per cent in four months, outstripping opposition, which had plummeted 10 points to 40 per cent. Dr Switkowski was appointed in June last year to head a committee of experts in various fields to look at the viability of a domestic nuclear industry for electricity generation. It heard many submissions and issued an interim report in December concluding that nuclear was a realistic alternative to meeting Australian energy demand in a carbon-constrained world. Dr Switkowski, who was last week appointed chairman of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, on Thursday said that, initially, most people had emotional issues regarding nuclear. "At the top of the list were concerns about the nature of management of nuclear waste," he told a conference on sustainable energy in Canberra. "Second was a concern about the possibility of a catastrophic accident, such as occurred at Chernobyl in 1986. "The third was a range of concerns about terrorism, illegal diversion of nuclear materials for weapons production, etcetera. "Today, when I address forums and talk to people, those concerns are still there, but they've been overtaken by other issues." Now, the biggest concern he heard was about nuclear power being too expensive," Dr Switkowski said. "Second is the challenge that 15 years out is too long. "The third is, if you are going to go to nuclear energy, where are you going to put the reactors. "To me that's an interesting shift, because the first set of concerns around waste and terrorism and proliferation and accidents, were concerns which were formed on the back of the nuclear industry in the 60s, 70s and 80s. "They were sincerely held, deeply felt, largely emotional concerns." Dr Switkowski said that, today, most people who had learnt more about the industry, had moved towards concerns which he characterised as being commercial. "If you are told that something is too expensive, the time-line is too long and the profitability of getting environmental approval for particular locations are unlikely, they're frankly the sort of issues that most business cases confront, and therefore are amenable to ration resolution. "Or, they might turn out to be overwhelming, in which case we won't have nuclear power." Dr Switkowski said a likely change in the Labor Party's attitude towards expanded uranium mining, at its national conference next month, held hopes for bipartisan support for nuclear generation. © 2007 AAP Brought to you by Copyright © 2007. The Sydney Morning Herald. ***************************************************************** 14 HindustanTimes.com: India N-deal by year end, hopes US Thursday, March 8, 2007|11:49 IST US hopeful India nuclear deal will be done by year end Indo-Asian News Service The US government is hopeful that the bilateral 123 agreement to implement the India-US civil nuclear deal may come up for final approval before the Congress before yearend. "Recent meetings with the Indian government give us reason to hope that the necessary steps can be completed this year," Richard A Boucher, assistant secretary of state for south and central Asian affairs, told a House panel on Wednesday. Progress is being registered on all the necessary key steps, "perhaps not as rapidly as we might desire, but in a manner that is consistent with the complexity and weight of the issues under consideration," he said at hearing of a foreign affairs subcommittee. "We look forward to working with India to fully implement this agreement," said Boucher, "We expect that cooperation in the civil nuclear arena, when it becomes a reality, will provide an impetus for heightened collaboration with India in many other areas." The remaining key steps include: completion of ongoing negotiations on a US-India agreement for peaceful nuclear cooperation, as required under the US Atomic Energy Act of 1954 as well as the enabling Hyde Act and approval of that agreement by the Congress. Also pending are negotiation of a safeguards agreement between India and the International Atomic Energy Agency that will be applicable to India's separated civil nuclear sector; and the achievement of a consensus in the Nuclear Suppliers Group to make an India-specific exception to the full-scope safeguards requirement of the Group's export guidelines. "Beyond the civil nuclear initiative, we are working to realise the President(George Bush)'s vision of a strategic relationship with one of the world's rising powers that addresses global and regional political and security challenges, encourages mutual economic growth and prosperity, and fosters constructive Indian engagement in international organisations," Boucher said. The two countries are deepening their security ties to undertake more complex joint military exercises, cultivate long-term partnerships between their defence industries, and enhance US and Indian interoperability in global peacekeeping operations. Over the near term, US is encouraging India to adopt a more constructive role in forging a compromise between developed and developing nations in the Doha Development Round negotiations, Boucher said. US is also encouraging the Government of India to open its higher education sector to US institutions and exploring ways of partnering with India on joint educational programmes for South and Central Asians. "As our relationship continues to develop, we likely will encounter areas where we do not share the same approach. But as countries linked by a deep commitment to freedom and democracy, we believe our strategic partnership will grow and deepen," Boucher said. Giving "A Regional Overview of South Asia", the official said there are few places more critical to US interests or in greater need of sustained US attention than South Asia. Washington's overarching aims in the region are to champion democracy and its foundations of education, information, and the rule of law; to facilitate the integration of South and Central Asia; to stop the flow of narcotics; and to bolster political and economic reform throughout the region, Boucher said. "Specifically, we need to win the war and secure development and democracy in Afghanistan; jump-start the Pakistan Frontier Strategy; establish a firm partnership with India, including completion of the US-India civil nuclear cooperation initiative; and advance the President's Freedom Agenda," he said. "Failure to achieve our goals could lead to increasing threats from regional terrorism, an explosion of narcotics trafficking and a succession of dangerous failed states," Boucher added. "To capitalise on the many opportunities and counteract the very real and immediate threats to this agenda, the Department of State will practice what Secretary Rice calls "transformational diplomacy," utilising traditional diplomacy as well as harnessing the regional and bilateral assistance tools Congress provides us to pursue these goals," he said. The US has important relationships with each country in South Asia and they have important relationships with one another, Boucher said. "We are working in close cooperation with our friends and partners to achieve important economic and trade linkages within the region. Our strategy includes collaboration with other donors, the private sector, and appropriate regional organizations in meeting our common regional integration goals." The US, he said, will participate in the upcoming summit meeting of South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation's (SAARC) in New Delhi following an invitation to join SAARC as an observer member "in recognition of our commitment to such home-grown efforts", Boucher said. Asia News © HT Media Ltd. 2007. India News ***************************************************************** 15 HindustanTimes.com: US says N-deal with India not to fuel arms race Thursday, March 8, 2007|18:26 IST Sridhar Krishnaswami (PTI) Allaying apprehensions, the US has said its civilian nuclear agreement with India provides no "incentives" to New Delhi's military programmes and will not in any way fuel an arms race in South Asia. "There have been a lot of studies and a lot of statements -- you heard them all during the debate -- about what this (nuclear deal) would do for India's military programmes, whether it would do anything at all. I still believe it wouldn't; I don't think the incentives are there," Assistant Secretary of South and Central Asia Richard Boucher told lawmakers at a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "As far as the potential for an arms race in the region, we've talked quite clearly to both India and Pakistan. Both of them tell us they don't want to see an arms race... they have no intention of starting one. And indeed, as you yourself noted, they're not only talking, they're making a lot of progress," the senior official added. Boucher asserted that India will maintain "separation" between its military and civilian nuclear programmes. "On the issue of military versus civilian, the essence of the deal was a separation between the two and a separation that can be maintained and will be maintained by the Indians based on their decisions and policy, but also in cooperation with some of these international agreements. "But indeed, there are a series of safeguards that will be negotiated between India and the International Atomic Energy Agency. That is one piece of the package that will be looked at, will be ready for the Congress to look at when we ask you to vote again on finalising the deal," he said. Asia News © HT Media Ltd. 2007. India News ***************************************************************** 16 The Hindu: Punjab to try to have nuclear power plant - Manpreet Thursday, March 8, 2007 : 1840 Hrs Jalandhar, March 8 (PTI): The SAD-BJP government in Punjab would make an effort to have a nuclear power plant in the state to overcome the power crisis, the Finance Minister Manpreet Singh Badal, said today. "We will make a bid to install the nuclear power plant in the state as it is the only alterative to meet the demand of power which has increased manifold in the recent years", Badal told reporters here. To a question that previous government rejected the idea of having a nuclear power plant in the border state due to security reasons, he said "I disagree with the idea of security risk. If the same can be installed in Fatehabad district of Haryana, which is very near Punjab, then why not in Punjab?". One of the main priorities of the state government would be to get sanction of nuclear power plant for the state, Badal said. About the status of power generation in the state, he said that currently a major chunk of power was being purchased from other states and the state was virtually having only one project of 500MW at Lehra Mohabbat in the pipeline. If efforts were not being made to generate more power, the power crisis in the state would further aggravate in the years to come. Copyright © 2006, The Hindu. ***************************************************************** 17 The Hindu: U.S. commercial nuclear team meets Kakodkar Friday, Mar 09, 2007 Special Correspondent MUMBAI: The commercial nuclear delegation of the U.S.-India Business Council met here on Thursday Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Anil Kakodkar and Chairman and Managing Director of the Nuclear Power Corporation of India S.K. Jain and discussed areas of nuclear supplies India could be interested in after the signing of the 123 Agreement. The Council Director for Policy Advocacy, Ted Jones, told reporters that the delegation was in India to explore the role the U.S. companies could play in India following the Agreement. Earlier, they had met several functionaries of the Union Government in New Delhi. The delegation that included Mr. Tim Richards, director of International Energy Policy of General Electric (GE) and chairman of the Council's working group on civilian nuclear energy also met executives of Larsen and Toubro and Anil Ambani group and discussed collaborations the American companies can have with the Indian companies. Later, Mr. Richards told reporters that his company could supply eight to ten light water reactors of 1000 to 1600 MW. Two designs He said that GE had two designs for reactors ? an updated version of the Tarapur reactors, which are supplied to Taiwan and Japan and an altogether new design. "But there are a number of issues between the two countries," he said, "which needed to be resolved for any concrete deal to take place." Mr. David Sloan, business development director of Nukem that supplies enriched uranium of Australian and South African origin, said that the U.S. did entire nuclear fuel cycle and it depended on the buyer what he needed. His company is looking forward to supplying nuclear fuel services including refuelling and management of spent fuel. Copyright © 2007, The Hindu. ***************************************************************** 18 DOE: Energy Praises the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Approval of the First United States Nuclear Plant Site in Over 30 Years March 8, 2007 WASHINGTON, DC – The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today commended the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's decision to approve the first-ever Early Site Permit (ESP) for the Exelon Generation Company's Clinton site, in central Illinois. This decision marks a major milestone in the President’s plan to expand the use of safe and clean nuclear power. As part of President Bush's Advanced Energy Initiative - which seeks to change the way we power this nation – nuclear power will play an increasingly important role as the demand for electricity grows worldwide. "Government's role is to create an environment in which clean energy can flourish, and I'm proud to say that we're helping doing just that. NRC approval of the Clinton Early Site Permit represents a major accomplishment in this Administration’s effort to address the barriers and stimulate deployment of new nuclear power plants in the United States," Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman said. "By demonstrating effectiveness and predictability in the licensing process, utilities will have the information they need to make sound business decisions that can lead to the construction of new nuclear power plants." This ESP approval culminates a four–year, cost-shared project with DOE and the Chicago-based Exelon Corporation, aimed at demonstrating the new and previously untested licensing process for locating new nuclear plants in the United States. Exelon submitted their ESP application, which includes a Site Safety Analysis Report, an Environmental Report, and an Emergency Plan to the NRC in September 2003. The NRC issued the Final Safety Evaluation Report in May 2006, the Final Environmental Impact Statement in July 2006, and the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB) hearings concluded in early November 2006. DOE has partnered with Exelon and two other companies, Entergy and Dominion Energy, since September 2002 to demonstrate the ESP process. This process was established by NRC in 1989 for utilities to complete the site and environmental evaluations before a decision is made to build a nuclear plant. Once issued, the ESP is valid for 20 years and can be used in conjunction with a subsequent combined Construction and Operating License application. A decision on the Entergy Grand Gulf ESP is expected within the month and later this year on Dominion’s North Anna ESP. Today's vote also supports DOE's Nuclear Power 2010 (NP 2010) program, a joint government/industry cost-shared effort to identify sites for new nuclear power plants; develop and bring to market advanced nuclear plant technologies; evaluate the business case for building new nuclear power plants and; demonstrate untested regulatory processes. President Bush's Fiscal Year (FY) 2008 budget requests $874.2M ($241M, 38.2% increase over the FY'07 request) for DOE's Office of Nuclear Energy. $114 million of that request ($60 million, 111% increase over the FY 2007 request) has been allocated for NP2010 to complete the remaining ESP demonstration projects and continue the New Nuclear Plant Licensing Demonstration projects. This funding will allow continued reactor designs and; implement further successful licensing interactions with industry to build new nuclear plants by 2009. For more information on NP 2010, visit: np2010.ne.doe.gov/. Media contact(s): Craig Stevens, (202) 586-4940 U.S. Department of Energy | 1000 Independence Ave., SW | Washington, DC 20585 1-800-dial-DOE | f/202-586-4403 ***************************************************************** 19 Baltimore Examiner: Group opposes third nuclear reactor - Examiner.com (AP File Photo) The Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant in Lusby, Md. Dave Carey, The Examiner Mar 8, 2007 12:00 AM (20 hrs ago) Current rank: # 76 of 16,485 articles BALTIMORE - Nuclear power already has a home in Maryland at Calvert Cliffs, but— if the Maryland Public Interest Research Group has its way — it won’t be welcoming any new neighbors. Maryland PIRG has formally announced its opposition to the possible development of a more than $2.5 million, 1,600 megawatt third reactor at the Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant. Part of its No New Nukes campaign, the group released the report “The High Cost of Nuclear Power: Why Maryland Can’t Afford a New Reactor,” citing numerous reasons why the group feels the project is not in the best interest of local residents. “From our perspective, there is no reason to invest in a dangerous and expensive form of energy,” said Johanna Neumann, a policy advocate with Maryland PIRG. Constellation Energy Group, the Baltimore-based power provider that owns the other two reactors, has yet to even submit a proposal for the construction of a third. “The governor is obviously committed to expanding alternative energy in the state of Maryland,” said Rick Abbruzzese, press secretary for the governor’s office. “But we are looking at Maryland PIRG’s report and have not formed any conclusion as of yet.” Tracy Imm, a spokeswoman for Constellation, indicated that the company is still very much in the research and evaluation stages, even noting that another Constellation-owned nuclear facility, Nine Mile Point, near Oswego, N.Y., is a possible destination for the addition of a reactor. Despite the federal government offering a total of $13 billion in nuclear power plant construction subsidies and around $300 million in tax breaks from Calvert County, Imm indicated that Constellation had yet to see any substantial offers from the state. “While it’s true that the federal and local government had put ahead financial incentives out there, nothing exists at the state level,” Imm said. “It’s too early even to figure out what the construction financing would look like, but we have made a commitment to go forward and look at things.” The Maryland PIRG report, released Tuesday, says that the 450 jobs the facility brings will cost taxpayers $750,000 to create each job, that 1,375 tons of radioactive waste created will pose as an attractive target for terrorists and that Calvert Cliffs has been fined for safety failures in the past by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Constellation told The Examiner that even if the company elects to pursue creating a new reactor, it would take at least three to five years to get construction approved. dcarey@baltimoreexaminer.com ***************************************************************** 20 Rutland Herald: Agency: Yankee nuclear plant 'safe' Rutland Vermont News & Information March 8, 2007 By Susan Smallheer Herald Staff BRATTLEBORO — The federal agency that regulates the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant has given the reactor good marks for its past year's performance. But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission also said the plant would be subject to an additional, special inspection later this year because of the problems the company had shipping low-level radioactive waste last year to a Pennsylvania facility. In that instance, the public wasn't exposed to the radioactivity, although workers potentially could have been exposed to additional radiation. "Overall, Vermont Yankee operated in a manner that preserved public health and safety and fully met all cornerstone objectives," wrote David Lew, director of the NRC's Division of Reactor Projects. Because the plant had received a lower mark in the area of public radiation safety, however, he said an additional inspection would be held. "The objective of the supplemental inspection is to provide assurance that Entergy understands the root causes and contributing causes of the finding," Lew added. Entergy Nuclear spokesman Robert Williams said Wednesday the company had already taken several steps to improve its handling of radioactive waste. "We're pleased with the positive report," Williams said. Those changes include better review of equipment shipped for disposal, and better sealing of such equipment prior to shipment. He said the better encapsulation "should prevent the movement of any metal particles during shipment." In addition, Williams said, Entergy will use "more robust" shipping containers for such materials, ones that shield radioactivity coming from the material. He said that the materials would now be shipped in a fully enclosed truck, rather than an open flatbed truck, which was the case in the shipment last year to a facility Susquehanna, Penn. that prompted the NRC reprimand. David O'Brien, the commissioner of the state Department of Public Service, couldn't be reached for comment Wednesday about the federal government's report on Yankee. Williams said Entergy shared the shipping changes it developed with the rest of the nuclear industry. The annual assessment covered the calendar year 2006. Contact Susan Smallheer at susan.smallheer@rutlandherald.com. © 2007 Rutland Herald ***************************************************************** 21 toledoblade.com: Davis-Besse seeks looser oversight Thursday, March 08, 2007 By TOM HENRY BLADE STAFF WRITER The Nuclear Regulatory Commission - a federal agency long accused of being too soft on the nuclear industry - is deliberating whether to back down from the No. 1 stipulation it gave FirstEnergy Corp. to resume operation of its Davis-Besse nuclear plant in March, 2004: Bringing in outside evaluators once a year. An NRC document released Tuesday shows FirstEnergy on Aug. 23 asked the agency to waive the remaining two years of the five-year requirement. The utility followed up its 48-page request with a seven-page supplement in January. "We are considering your request and plan to provide you with our decision in the near future," Eric Duncan, chief of an NRC reactor projects division branch for the agency's Midwest regional office, told the utility in a letter dated March 2. Jim Caldwell, the NRC's Midwest regional administrator, is expected to issue a decision within two weeks, Viktoria Mitlyng, a NRC spokesman, said yesterday. She noted a clause in the license amendment that allows the regional administrator to "relax or rescind" any of the restart stipulations upon demonstration by the utility of "good cause." "It's not about forgiving and forgetting. It's about reviewing the need for continued independent assessment," she said. The five-year requirement for independent assessments was inserted in the modification of Davis-Besse's operating license, which gave FirstEnergy authorization to restart the plant following a record two-year outage. The outage, which cost the utility $600 million, was caused by the near-rupture of Davis-Besse's reactor head and subsequently raised design and management issues. The NRC told FirstEnergy that the company must have independent assessments done at Davis-Besse in operations, safety culture, corrective action, and engineering annually for five years. FirstEnergy has operated Davis-Besse with no major issues over the last three years, although its Perry nuclear plant east of Cleveland just came out of more than two years of heightened oversight on March 2. The NRC also reprimanded the utility in 2006 for letting a contractor at its Beaver Valley nuclear complex in western Pennsylvania falsify inspection records. Mr. Duncan's correspondence was the cover letter of the NRC's most recent assessment of Davis-Besse. It concluded that Davis-Besse operated in the fourth quarter of 2006 "in a manner that preserved public health and safety and fully met all cornerstone objectives." FirstEnergy's turnaround at Davis-Besse was noted by NRC officials at a Jan. 24 meeting in Akron. At that meeting, FirstEnergy provided a self-assessment of its fleetwide performance at Davis-Besse and its other two operating nuclear sites, the Perry plant and Beaver Valley. But the stipulation for Davis-Besse's independent assessments was the No. 1 item listed in the plant's 2004 license amendment. "It's unbelievable the company would make that request, and it's just as unbelievable the NRC would even consider it," said David Lochbaum, nuclear safety engineer for the Union of Concerned Scientists and a former nuclear industry employee. "This is a company that's lucky to be operating nuclear power plants. Every chance they get, they lie. Davis-Besse wasn't an aberration." FirstEnergy was fined a record $33.5 million for the near-rupture of Davis-Besse's reactor head in 2002, a condition which the NRC has said was worsened by the utility's failure to provide complete and accurate information about the plant's status in the fall of 2001. If it had blown, radioactive steam would have formed in the containment building and given northern Ohio an event akin to the half-core meltdown of Three Mile Island Unit 2 in 1979 near Harrisburg, Pa. Some $28 million of FirstEnergy's fine was levied in January, 2006. The utility agreed to pay it following a criminal probe rather than defend itself against U.S. Department of Justice accusations of lying to the government. If the NRC waives the final two years of assessments, it will be the second time it has compromised following a major event at Davis-Besse. The first occurred after a potentially catastrophic loss of reactor coolant in 1985. The NRC proposed a $900,000 fine, then settled for $450,000 after listening to pleas from Toledo Edison officials who were operating Davis-Besse at the time. The NRC, which grew out of the old Atomic Energy Commission, has been the subject of controversial investigations over the years. Former U.S. Sen. John Glenn, while chairman of the Senate's Committee on Governmental Affairs in 1987, introduced a bill that ultimately led to the creation of the NRC's Office of Inspector General. Mr. Glenn said at the time he was doing so because the NRC is "supposed to be a watchdog, not a lapdog." Late that year, a House subcommittee issued a report that accused the agency of failing to keep an arm's length relationship from the industry it was assigned to regulate. Contact Tom Henry at: thenry@theblade.com or 419-724-6079. © 2006 The Blade. By using this service, you accept the terms of The Toledo Blade Company, 541 N. Superior St., Toledo, OH 43660 , (419) 724-6000 ***************************************************************** 22 London Times: Drax ponders move into nuclear power- March 09, 2007 Steve Hawkes Drax, the owner of Europe's biggest coal-fired power station, yesterday said it may consider a role in Britain's nuclear future as it raised shareholder dividends for the year to nearly Ł500 million. Dorothy Thompson, the chief executive, signalled that while there were no immediate plans, Drax may decide to go nuclear after the Government’s forthcoming energy review if the option was “value-added for the business”. “We are alert to serious opportunities and remain aware of developments in the market,” she said. “Nuclear falls under that statement.” Experts believe that at least six new nuclear plants will be needed as existing facilities are decommissioned over the next two decades. Foreign power-houses such as EDF, RWE and E.ON are all believed to be circling. Analysts said that while Drax was unlikely to be interested in building new plants, its expertise could be of interest to potential investors looking for a joint venture. Lakis Athanasiou, analyst at Collins Stewart, said: “Don’t rule Drax out in terms of technical capability, but their priority is augmenting returns at their existing power station.” Ms Thompson said that Drax had been approached about potential alliances but insiders insisted these were over far smaller, environmental projects. Drax has enjoyed a dramatic revival since a brush with bankruptcy four years ago when AEP, its former American owner, withdrew financial support. Annual results yesterday confirmed its recovery with record electricity prices helping pretax profits to soar 140 per cent to Ł634 million last year. Revenue climbed 49 per cent to nearly Ł1.4 billion. Shareholders will pick up a special dividend of 32.9p per share, worth Ł121 million, on top of a final payout of 9.1p per share. It means investors have been awarded Ł497 million for 2006-07. Drax said that it would continue to hand back the bulk of its profits, but confirmed plans to “go green”. It will invest Ł67 million in a co-firing project that will see biomass replace 10 per cent of the coal burnt at its North Yorkshire plant. Reaching the 10 per cent target by 2009 will save 2 million tonnes of carbon emissions a year, equal to the output of 460 wind turbines. The company wants to use olive cake from Spain and Greece alongside huge amounts of energy crops, such as elephant grass and short-rotation coppice, if the Government relaxes caps on biomass as a renewable source. Drax is already spending Ł100 million to improve the efficiency of its turbines in an effort to reduce the energy lost during the burning process. Ms Thompson said that she hoped the initiatives would win over an environmental lobby that has long targeted Drax for being the biggest single source of carbon emissions in the UK. More than 600 eco-protesters tried to shut the plant down last August in a mass demonstration. Ms Thompson told The Times: “I have a very strong hope that they will not return this year and that they will find a different way to raise their issues. “The issues are very real, it is something we and others should be working on, but we didn’t think the protest itself last August was responsible and it put people at risk.” Yesterday’s results showed carbon emissions at Drax rose to 22.7 million tonnes in 2006 from 21 million the year before. Reaction times The present – Britain’s current nuclear fleet supplies 19 per cent of electricity demand – British Energy owns gas-cooled reactors at Hinkley Point, Dungeness, Heasham, Hunterston, Torness and Hartlepool and a pressurised-water reactor at Sizewell – The Government owns Magnox nuclear power stations that are near the end of their workable lives The future – Electricité de France, which owns the largest nuclear power generator in Europe, has expressed interest in developing nuclear power in the UK &Areva, Sunday Times ***************************************************************** 23 FR: NRC: In the Matter of Areva Np, Inc. Richland, WA and All Others Who Doc E7-4158 [Federal Register: March 8, 2007 (Volume 72, Number 45)] [Notices] [Page 10564-10567] From the Federal Register Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr08mr07-110] NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION [Docket No.: 70-1257; License No. SNM-1227; EA-06-231] Seek or Obtain Access to Safeguards Information; Described Herein: Order Imposing Fingerprinting and Criminal History Check Requirements for Access to Safeguards Information (Effective Immediately) I AREVA NP, Inc., Richland, (AREVA NP--Richland) is the holder of Special Nuclear Material License No. SNM-1227 issued by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory (NRC) pursuant to 10 CFR Part 70. AREVA NP--Richland is authorized, by its license, to receive, possess, and transfer byproduct, source material, and special nuclear material in accordance with the Atomic Energy Act (AEA) of 1954, as amended, and 10 CFR Part 70. On August 8, 2005, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (EPAct) was enacted. Section 652 of the EPAct amended Section 149 of the AEA to require fingerprinting and a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) identification and criminal history records check of any person who is to be permitted to have access to Safeguards Information (SGI).\1\ The NRC's implementation of this requirement cannot await the completion of the SGI rulemaking, which is underway, because the EPAct fingerprinting and criminal history check requirements for access to SGI were immediately effective on enactment of the EPAct. Although the EPAct permits the Commission, by rule, to except certain categories of individuals from the fingerprinting requirement, which the Commission has done [see 10 CFR 73.59, 71 Federal Register 33989 (June 13, 2006)], it is unlikely that licensee employees are excepted from the fingerprinting requirement by the ``fingerprinting relief'' rule. Individuals relieved from fingerprinting and criminal history checks under the relief rule include: Federal, State, and local officials and law enforcement personnel; Agreement State Inspectors who conduct security inspections on behalf of the NRC; members of Congress and certain employees of members of Congress or Congressional Committees, and representatives of the International [[Page 10565]] Atomic Energy Agency or certain foreign government organizations. In addition, individuals who have had a favorably-decided U.S. Government criminal history check within the last five (5) years, and individuals who have active federal security clearances (provided in either case that they make available the appropriate documentation), have satisfied the EPAct fingerprinting requirement and need not be fingerprinted again. Therefore, in accordance with Section 149 of the AEA, as amended by the EPAct, the Commission is imposing additional requirements for access to SGI, as set forth by this Order, so that affected licensees can obtain and grant access to SGI. This Order also imposes requirements for access to SGI by any person,\2\ from any person, whether or not they are a licensee, applicant, or certificate holder of the Commission or an Agreement State. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- \1\ Safeguards Information is a form of sensitive, unclassified, security-related information that the Commission has the authority to designate and protect under Section 147 of the AEA. \2\ Person means (1) any individual, corporation, partnership, firm, association, trust, estate, public or private institution, group, government agency other than the Commission or the Department of Energy, except that the Department of Energy shall be considered a person with respect to those facilities of the Department of Energy specified in Section 202 of the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 (88 Stat. 1244), any State or any political subdivision of, or any political entity within a State, any foreign government or nation or any political subdivision of any such government or nation, or other entity; and (2) any legal successor, representative, agent, or agency of the foregoing. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subsequent to the terrorist events of September 11, 2001, the NRC issued Orders requiring certain entities to implement Additional Security Measures or Interim Compensatory Measures for certain radioactive materials. The requirements imposed by these Orders, and certain measures that licensees have developed to comply with the Orders, were designated by the NRC as SGI. For some materials licensees, the storage and handling requirements for the SGI have been modified from the existing 10 CFR Part 73 SGI requirements for reactors and fuel cycle facilities that require a higher level of protection; such SGI is designated as Safeguards Information-Modified Handling (SGI-M). However, the information subject to the SGI-M handling and protection requirements is SGI, and licensees and other persons who seek or obtain access to such SGI are subject to this Order. II The Commission has broad statutory authority to protect and prohibit the unauthorized disclosure of SGI. Section 147 of the AEA grants the Commission explicit authority to issue such Orders as necessary to prohibit the unauthorized disclosure of SGI. Furthermore, Section 652 of the EPAct amended Section 149 of the AEA to require fingerprinting and an FBI identification and a criminal history records check of each individual who seeks access to SGI. In addition, as required by existing Orders, which remain in effect, no person may have access to SGI unless the person has an established need-to-know and satisfies the trustworthiness and reliability requirements of those Orders. To provide assurance that AREVA NP--Richland is implementing appropriate measures to comply with the fingerprinting and criminal history check requirements for access to SGI, AREVA NP--Richland shall implement the requirements of this Order. In addition, pursuant to 10 CFR 2.202, I find that in light of the common defense and security matters identified above, which warrant the issuance of this Order, the public health, safety, and interest require that this Order be effective immediately. III Accordingly, pursuant to Sections 53, 62, 63, 81, 147, 149, 161b, 161i, 161o, 182 and 186 of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, as amended, and the Commission's regulations in 10 CFR 2.202, 10 CFR Part 30, 10 CFR Part 40, 10 CFR Part 70, and 10 CFR Part 73, it is hereby ordered, effective immediately, AREVA NP--Richland and all other persons who seek or obtain access to safeguards information described herein shall comply with the requirements set forth in this order. A. 1. No person may have access to SGI unless that person has a need-to-know the SGI, has been fingerprinted, has a favorably-decided FBI identification and criminal history records check, and satisfies all other applicable requirements for access to SGI. Fingerprinting and the FBI identification and criminal history records check are not required, however, for any person who is relieved from that requirement by 10 CFR 73.59 [71 Federal Register 33989 (June 13, 2006)], or who has had a favorably-decided U.S. Government criminal history check within the last five (5) years, or who has an active federal security clearance, provided in each case that the appropriate documentation is made available to AREVA NP--Richland's NRC-approved reviewing official. 2. No person may have access to any SGI if the NRC, when making an SGI determination for a nominated reviewing official, has determined, based on fingerprinting and an FBI identification and criminal history records check, that the person may not have access to SGI. B. No person may provide SGI to any other person except in accordance with Condition III.A. above. Prior to providing SGI to any person, a copy of this Order shall be provided to that person. C. AREVA NP--Richland shall comply with the following requirements: 1. AREVA NP--Richland shall, within twenty (20) days of the date of this Order, establish and maintain a fingerprinting program that meets the requirements of the Attachment to this Order. 2. AREVA NP--Richland shall, within twenty (20) days of the date of this Order, submit the fingerprints of one (1) individual who currently has access to SGI, in accordance with the previously-issued NRC Orders, who continues to need access to SGI, and whom AREVA NP--Richland nominates as the ``reviewing official'' for determining access to SGI by other individuals. The NRC will determine whether this individual (or any subsequent reviewing official) may have access to SGI and, therefore, will be permitted to serve as AREVEA NP--Richland's reviewing official.\3\ AREVA NP--Richland may, at the same time, or later, submit the fingerprints of other individuals to whom AREVA NP-- Richland seeks to grant access to SGI. Fingerprints shall be submitted and reviewed in accordance with the procedures described in the Attachment to this Order. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- \3\ The NRC's determination of this individual's access to SGI, in accordance with the process described in Enclosure 3 to the transmittal letter of this Order, is an administrative determination that is outside the scope of this Order. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3. AREVA NP--Richland may allow any individual who currently has access to SGI in accordance with the previously-issued NRC Orders to continue to have access to previously-designated SGI without being fingerprinted, pending a decision by the NRC-approved reviewing official (based on fingerprinting, an FBI criminal history records check and a trustworthiness and reliability determination) that the individual may continue to have access to SGI. AREVA NP--Richland shall make determinations on continued access to SGI within ninety (90) days of the date of this Order, in part on the results of the fingerprinting and criminal history check, for those individuals who were previously granted access to SGI before the issuance of this Order. 4. AREVA NP--Richland shall, in writing, within twenty (20) days of the [[Page 10566]] date of this Order, notify the Commission: (1) If it is unable to comply with any of the requirements described in the Order, including the Attachment; or (2) if compliance with any of the requirements is unnecessary in its specific circumstances. The notification shall provide AREVA NP--Richland's justification for seeking relief from, or variation of, any specific requirement. AREVA NP--Richland responses to C.1., C.2., C.3., and C.4. above shall be submitted to the Director, Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC 20555. In addition, licensee responses shall be marked as ``Security-Related Information--Withhold Under 10 CFR. 2.390.'' The Director, Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards, may, in writing, relax or rescind any of the above conditions on demonstration of good cause by AREVA NP--Richland. IV In accordance with 10 CFR 2.202, AREVA NP--Richland must, and any other person adversely affected by this Order may, submit an answer to this Order, and may request a hearing regarding this Order, within twenty (20) days of the date of this Order. Where good cause is shown, consideration will be given to extending the time to request a hearing. A request for an extension of time in which to submit an answer or request a hearing must be made in writing to the Director, Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC 20555, and include a statement of good cause for the extension. The answer may consent to this Order. Unless the answer consents to this Order, the answer shall, in writing and under oath or affirmation, specifically set forth the matters of fact and law by which AREVA NP--Richland, or other entities adversely affected, rely, and the reasons as to why the Order should not have been issued. Any answer or request for a hearing shall be submitted to the Secretary, Office of the Secretary, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, ATTN: Rulemakings and Adjudications Staff, Washington, DC 20555. Copies shall also be sent to the Director, Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC 20555, to the Assistant General Counsel for Materials Litigation and Enforcement at the same address, and to AREVA NP--Richland if the answer or hearing request is by an entity other than AREVA NP-- Richland. Because of possible delays in delivery of mail to United States Government offices, it is requested that answers and requests for hearing be transmitted to the Secretary of the Commission, either by means of facsimile transmission to 301-415-1101, or via e-mail to hearingdocket@nrc.gov, and also to the Office of the General Counsel, either by means of facsimile transmission to 301-415-3725, or via e- mail to OGCMailCenter@nrc.gov. If an entity other than AREVA NP-- Richland requests a hearing, that entity shall set forth with particularity the manner in which its interest is adversely affected by this Order and shall address the criteria set forth in 10 CFR 2.309. If a hearing is requested by AREVA NP--Richland or a person whose interest is adversely affected, the Commission will issue an Order designating the time and place of any hearing. If a hearing is held, the issue to be considered at such hearing shall be whether this Order should be sustained. Pursuant to 10 CFR 2.202(c)(2)(i), AREVA NP--Richland may, in addition to demanding a hearing, at the time the answer is filed, or sooner, move that the presiding officer set aside the immediate effectiveness of the Order on the grounds that the Order, including the need for immediate effectiveness, is not based on adequate evidence, but on mere suspicion, unfounded allegations, or error. In the absence of any request for hearing, or written approval of an extension of time in which to request a hearing, the provisions as specified above in Section III shall be final twenty (20) days from the date of this Order without further order or proceedings. If an extension of time for requesting a hearing has been approved, the provisions as specified above in Section III shall be final when the extension expires if a hearing request has not been received. An Answer or a Request for Hearing Shall Not Stay the Immediate Effectiveness of this Order. Dated at Rockville, Maryland, this 1st day of March 2007. For The Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Jack R. Strosnider, Director Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards. Attachment 1--Requirements for Fingerprinting and Criminal History Records Checks of Individuals When Licensee's Reviewing Official is Determining Access to Safeguards Information General Requirements Licensees shall comply with the requirements of this attachment. A. 1. Each licensee subject to the provisions of this attachment shall fingerprint each individual who is seeking or permitted access to Safeguards Information (SGI). The licensee shall review and use the information received from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and ensure that the provisions contained in the subject Order and this attachment are satisfied. 2. The licensee shall notify each affected individual that the fingerprints will be used to secure a review of his/her criminal history record and inform the individual of the procedures for revising the record or including an explanation in the record, as specified in the ``Right to Correct and Complete Information'' section of this attachment. 3. Fingerprints need not be taken if an employed individual (e.g., a licensee employee, contractor, manufacturer, or supplier) is relieved from the fingerprinting requirement by 10 CFR 73.59, has had a favorably-decided U.S. Government criminal history records check within the last five (5) years, or has an active federal security clearance. Written confirmation from the Agency/employer which granted the federal security clearance or reviewed the criminal history records check must be provided. The licensee must retain this documentation for a period of three (3) years from the date the individual no longer requires access to SGI associated with the licensee's activities. 4. All fingerprints obtained by the licensee, pursuant to this Order, must be submitted to the Commission for transmission to the FBI. 5. The licensee shall review the information received from the FBI and consider it in conjunction with the trustworthy and reliability established by the previous SGI Protection Order, dated November 5, 2004, when making a determination to grant access to SGI to individuals who have a need-to-know. 6. The licensee shall use any information obtained as part of a criminal history records check solely for the purpose of determining an individual's suitability for access to SGI. 7. The licensee shall document the basis for its determination whether to grant access to SGI. B. The licensee shall notify the NRC of any desired change in reviewing officials. The NRC will determine whether the individual nominated as the new reviewing official may have access to SGI based on a previously-obtained, or new criminal history check and, therefore, will be permitted to serve as the licensee's reviewing official. Prohibitions A licensee shall not base a final determination to deny an individual access to SGI solely on the basis of information received from the FBI involving: An arrest more than one (1) year old for which there is no information of the disposition of the case, or an arrest that resulted in dismissal of the charge or an acquittal. A licensee shall not use information received from a criminal history check obtained pursuant to this Order in a manner that would infringe upon the rights of any individual under the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, nor shall the licensee use the information in any way which would discriminate among [[Page 10567]] individuals on the basis of race, religion, national origin, sex, or age. Procedures for Processing Fingerprint Checks For the purpose of complying with this Order, licensees shall, using an appropriate method listed in 10 CFR 73.4, submit to the NRC's Division of Facilities and Security, Mail Stop T-6E46, one completed, legible standard fingerprint card (Form FD-258, ORIMDNRCOOOZ) or, where practicable, other fingerprint records for each individual seeking access to SGI, to the Director of the Division of Facilities and Security, marked for the attention of the Division's Criminal History Check Section. Copies of these forms may be obtained by writing to the Office of Information Services, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC 20555-0001, by calling (301) 415-5877, or by e-mail to forms@nrc.gov. Practicable alternative formats are set forth in 10 CFR 73.4. The licensee shall establish procedures to ensure that the quality of the fingerprints taken results in minimizing the rejection rate of fingerprint cards due to illegible or incomplete cards. The NRC will review submitted fingerprint cards for completeness. Any Form FD-258 fingerprint record containing omissions or evident errors will be returned to the licensee for corrections. The fee for processing fingerprint checks includes one re-submission if the initial submission is returned by the FBI because the fingerprint impressions cannot be classified. The one free re-submission must have the FBI Transaction Control Number reflected on the re-submission. If additional submissions are necessary, they will be treated as initial submittals and will require a second payment of the processing fee. Fees for processing fingerprint checks are due upon application. Licensees shall submit payment with the application for processing fingerprints by corporate check, certified check, cashier's check, money order, or electronic payment, made payable to ``U.S. NRC.'' [For guidance on making electronic payments, contact the Facilities Security Branch, Division of Facilities and Security, at (301) 415- 7404]. Combined payment for multiple applications is acceptable. The application fee (currently $27) is the sum of the user fee charged by the FBI for each fingerprint card or other fingerprint records submitted by the NRC on behalf of a licensee, and an NRC processing fee, which covers administrative costs associated with the NRC handling of licensee fingerprint submissions. The Commission will directly notify licensees who are subject to this regulation of any fee changes. The Commission will forward, to the submitting licensee, all data received from the FBI as a result of the licensee's application(s) for criminal history records checks, including the FBI fingerprint record. Right to Correct and Complete Information Prior to any final adverse determination, the licensee shall make available, to the individual the contents of any criminal records obtained from the FBI for the purpose of assuring correct and complete information. Written confirmation by the individual of receipt of this notification must be maintained by the licensee for a period of one (1) year from the date of the notification. If, after reviewing the record, an individual believes that it is incorrect or incomplete in any respect and wishes to change, correct, or update the alleged deficiency, or to explain any matter in the record, the individual may initiate challenge procedures. These procedures include either direct application by the individual challenging the record to the agency (i.e., law enforcement agency) that contributed the questioned information, or direct challenge as to the accuracy or completeness of any entry on the criminal history record to the Assistant Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Identification Division, Washington, DC 20537-9700 (as set forth in 28 CFR 16.30 through 16.34). In the latter case, the FBI forwards the challenge to the agency that submitted the data and requests that agency to verify or correct the challenged entry. Upon receipt of an official communication directly from the agency that contributed the original information, the FBI Identification Division makes any changes necessary in accordance with the information supplied by that agency. The licensee must provide at least ten (10) days for an individual to initiate an action challenging the results of an FBI criminal history records check after the record is made available for his/her review. The licensee may make a final SGI access determination based upon the criminal history record only upon receipt of the FBI's ultimate confirmation or correction of the record. Upon a final adverse determination on access to SGI, the licensee shall provide the individual its documented basis for denial. Access to SGI shall not be granted to an individual during the review process. Protection of Information 1. Each licensee who obtains a criminal history record on an individual pursuant to this Order shall establish and maintain a system of files and procedures for protecting the record and the personal information from unauthorized disclosure. 2. The licensee may not disclose the record or personal information collected and maintained to persons other than the subject individual, his/her representative, or to those who have a need to access the information in performing assigned duties in the process of determining access to Safeguards Information. No individual authorized to have access to the information may re- disseminate the information to any other individual who does not have a need-to-know. 3. The personal information obtained on an individual from a criminal history record check may be transferred to another licensee if the licensee holding the criminal history record check receives the individual's written request to re-disseminate the information contained in his/her file, and the gaining licensee verifies information such as the individual's name, date of birth, social security number, sex, and other applicable physical characteristics for identification purposes. 4. The licensee shall make criminal history records, obtained under this section, available for examination by an authorized representative of the NRC to determine compliance with the regulations and laws. 5. The licensee shall retain all fingerprint and criminal history records received from the FBI, or a copy if the individual's file has been transferred, for three (3) years after termination of employment or determination of access to SGI (whether access was approved or denied). After the required three (3) year period, these documents shall be destroyed by a method that will prevent reconstruction of the information in whole or in part. [FR Doc. E7-4158 Filed 3-7-07; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 7590-01-P ***************************************************************** 24 FR: NRC: In the Matter of Areva NP, Inc., Lynchburg, Va, and All Others Doc E7-4159 [Federal Register: March 8, 2007 (Volume 72, Number 45)] [Notices] [Page 10567-10570] From the Federal Register Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr08mr07-111] NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION [EA-06-231; Docket No. 70-1201; License No. SNM-1168] Who Seek or Obtain Access to Safeguards Information Described Herein; Order Imposing Fingerprinting and Criminal History Check Requirements for Access to Safeguards Information (Effective Immediately) I AREVA NP, Inc., Lynchburg, (AREVA NP--Lynchburg) is the holder of Special Nuclear Material License No. SNM-1168, issued by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory (NRC) pursuant to 10 CFR Part 70. AREVA NP-- Lynchburg is authorized, by its license, to receive, possess, and transfer byproduct, source material, and special nuclear material in accordance with the Atomic Energy Act (AEA) of 1954, as amended, and 10 CFR Part 70. On August 8, 2005, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (EPAct) was enacted. Section 652 of the EPAct, amended Section 149 of the AEA to require fingerprinting and a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) identification and criminal history records check of any person who is to be permitted to have access to Safeguards Information (SGI).\1\ The NRC's implementation of this requirement cannot await the completion of the SGI rulemaking, which is underway, because the EPAct fingerprinting and criminal history check requirements for access to SGI were immediately effective on enactment of the EPAct. Although the EPAct permits the Commission, by rule, to except certain categories of individuals from the fingerprinting [[Page 10568]] requirement, which the Commission has done [see 10 CFR 73.59, 71 FR 33989 (June 13, 2006)], it is unlikely that licensee employees are excepted from the fingerprinting requirement by the ``fingerprinting relief'' rule. Individuals relieved from fingerprinting and criminal history checks under the relief rule include: Federal, State, and local officials and law enforcement personnel; Agreement State Inspectors who conduct security inspections on behalf of the NRC; members of Congress and certain employees of members of Congress or Congressional Committees, and representatives of the International Atomic Energy Agency or certain foreign government organizations. In addition, individuals who have had a favorably-decided U.S. Government criminal history check within the last five (5) years, and individuals who have active federal security clearances (provided in either case that they make available the appropriate documentation), have satisfied the EPAct fingerprinting requirement and need not be fingerprinted again. Therefore, in accordance with Section 149 of the AEA, as amended by the EPAct, the Commission is imposing additional requirements for access to SGI, as set forth by this Order, so that affected licensees can obtain and grant access to SGI. This Order also imposes requirements for access to SGI by any person,\2\ from any person, whether or not they are a licensee, applicant, or certificate holder of the Commission or an Agreement State. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- \1\ Safeguards Information is a form of sensitive, unclassified, security-related information that the Commission has the authority to designate and protect under Section 147 of the AEA. \2\ Person means (1) any individual, corporation, partnership, firm, association, trust, estate, public or private institution, group, government agency other than the Commission or the Department of Energy, except that the Department of Energy shall be considered a person with respect to those facilities of the Department of Energy specified in Section 202 of the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 (88 Stat. 1244), any State or any political subdivision of, or any political entity within a State, any foreign government or nation or any political subdivision of any such government or nation, or other entity; and (2) any legal successor, representative, agent, or agency of the foregoing. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subsequent to the terrorist events of September 11, 2001, the NRC issued Orders requiring certain entities to implement Additional Security Measures or Interim Compensatory Measures for certain radioactive materials. The requirements imposed by these Orders, and certain measures that licensees have developed to comply with the Orders, were designated by the NRC as SGI. For some materials licensees, the storage and handling requirements for the SGI have been modified from the existing 10 CFR Part 73 SGI requirements for reactors and fuel cycle facilities that require a higher level of protection; such SGI is designated as Safeguards Information-Modified Handling (SGI-M). However, the information subject to the SGI-M handling and protection requirements is SGI, and licensees and other persons who seek or obtain access to such SGI are subject to this Order. II The Commission has broad statutory authority to protect and prohibit the unauthorized disclosure of SGI. Section 147 of the AEA grants the Commission explicit authority to issue such Orders, as necessary, to prohibit the unauthorized disclosure of SGI. Furthermore, Section 652 of the EPAct, amended Section 149 of the AEA to require fingerprinting and an FBI identification and a criminal history records check of each individual who seeks access to SGI. In addition, as required by existing Orders, which remain in effect, no person may have access to SGI unless the person has an established need-to-know and satisfies the trustworthiness and reliability requirements of those Orders. To provide assurance that AREVA NP--Lynchburg is implementing appropriate measures to comply with the fingerprinting and criminal history check requirements for access to SGI, AREVA NP--Lynchburg shall implement the requirements of this Order. In addition, pursuant to 10 CFR 2.202, I find that in light of the common defense and security matters identified above, which warrant the issuance of this Order, the public health, safety, and interest require that this Order be effective immediately. III Accordingly, pursuant to Sections 53, 62, 63, 81, 147, 149, 161b, 161i, 161o, 182 and 186 of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, as amended, and the Commission's regulations in 10 CFR 2.202, 10 CFR part 30, 10 CFR part 40, 10 CFR part 70, and 10 CFR part 73, it is hereby ordered, effective immediately, Areva NP--Lynchburg and all other persons who seek or obtain access to safeguards information described herein shall comply with the requirements set forth in this order. A.1. No person may have access to SGI unless that person has a need-to-know the SGI, has been fingerprinted, has a favorably-decided FBI identification and criminal history records check, and satisfies all other applicable requirements for access to SGI. Fingerprinting and the FBI identification and criminal history records check are not required, however, for any person who is relieved from that requirement by 10 CFR 73.59 [71 FR 33989 (June 13, 2006)], or who has had a favorably-decided U.S. Government criminal history check within the last five (5) years, or who has an active federal security clearance, provided in each case that the appropriate documentation is made available to AREVA NP--Lynchburg's NRC-approved reviewing official. 2. No person may have access to SGI if the NRC, when making a SGI access determination for a nominated reviewing official, has determined, based on fingerprinting and an FBI identification and criminal history records check, that the person may not have access to SGI. B. No person may provide SGI to any other person except in accordance with Condition III.A. above. Prior to providing SGI to any person, a copy of this Order shall be provided to that person. C. AREVA NP--Lynchburg shall comply with the following requirements: 1. AREVA NP--Lynchburg shall, within twenty (20) days of the date of this Order, establish and maintain a fingerprinting program that meets the requirements of the Attachment to this Order. 2. AREVA NP--Lynchburg shall, within twenty (20) days of the date of this Order, submit the fingerprints of one (1) individual who currently has access to SGI, in accordance with the previously-issued NRC Orders, who continues to need access to SGI, and whom AREVA NP-- Lynchburg nominates as the ``reviewing official'' for determining access to SGI by other individuals. The NRC will determine whether this individual (or any subsequent reviewing official) may have access to SGI and, therefore, will be permitted to serve as AREVEA NP-- Lynchburg's reviewing official.\3\ AREVA NP--Lynchburg may, at the same time, or later, submit the fingerprints of other individuals to whom AREVA NP--Lynchburg seeks to grant access to SGI. Fingerprints shall be submitted and reviewed in accordance with the procedures described in the Attachment to this Order. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- \3\ The NRC's determination of this individual's access to SGI, in accordance with the process described in Enclosure 3 to the transmittal letter of this Order, is an administrative determination that is outside the scope of this Order. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3. AREVA NP--Lynchburg may allow any individual who currently has access to SGI, in accordance with the previously-issued NRC Orders, to continue to have access to previously-designated SGI without being fingerprinted, pending a decision by the [[Page 10569]] NRC-approved reviewing official (based on fingerprinting, an FBI criminal history records check and a trustworthiness and reliability determination) that the individual may continue to have access to SGI. AREVA NP--Lynchburg shall make determinations on continued access to SGI, within ninety (90) days of the date of this Order, in part on the results of the fingerprinting and criminal history check, for those individuals who were previously granted access to SGI before the issuance of this Order. 4. AREVA NP--Lynchburg shall, in writing, within twenty (20) days of the date of this Order, notify the Commission: (1) if it is unable to comply with any of the requirements described in the Order, including the Attachment; or (2) if compliance with any of the requirements is unnecessary in its specific circumstances. The notification shall provide AREVA NP--Lynchburg's justification for seeking relief from, or variation of, any specific requirement. AREVA NP--Lynchburg responses to C.1., C.2., C.3., and C.4. above shall be submitted to the Director, Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC 20555. In addition, licensee responses shall be marked as ``Security- Related Information--Withhold Under 10 CFR. 2.390.'' The Director, Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards, may, in writing, relax or rescind any of the above conditions on demonstration of good cause by AREVA NP--Lynchburg. IV In accordance with 10 CFR 2.202, AREVA NP--Lynchburg must, and any other person adversely affected by this Order may, submit an answer to this Order, and may request a hearing regarding this Order, within twenty (20) days of the date of this Order. Where good cause is shown, consideration will be given to extending the time to request a hearing. A request for an extension of time in which to submit an answer, or request a hearing must be made in writing to the Director, Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC 20555, and include a statement of good cause for the extension. The answer may consent to this Order. Unless the answer consents to this Order, the answer shall, in writing and under oath or affirmation, specifically set forth the matters of fact and law by which AREVA NP--Lynchburg, or other entities adversely affected, rely, and the reasons as to why the Order should not have been issued. Any answer or request for a hearing shall be submitted to the Secretary, Office of the Secretary, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, ATTN: Rulemakings and Adjudications Staff, Washington, DC 20555. Copies shall also be sent to the Director, Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC 20555, to the Assistant General Counsel for Materials Litigation and Enforcement at the same address, and to AREVA NP--Lynchburg if the answer or hearing request is by a person other than AREVA NP-- Lynchburg. Because of possible delays in delivery of mail to United States Government offices, it is requested that answers and requests for hearing be transmitted to the Secretary of the Commission, either by means of facsimile transmission to 301-415-1101, or via e-mail to hearingdocket@nrc.gov, and also to the Office of the General Counsel, either by means of facsimile transmission to 301-415-3725, or via e- mail to OGCMailCenter@nrc.gov. If an entity other than AREVA NP-- Lynchburg requests a hearing, that entity shall set forth with particularity the manner in which its interest is adversely affected by this Order and shall address the criteria set forth in 10 CFR 2.309. If a hearing is requested by AREVA NP--Lynchburg or a person whose interest is adversely affected, the Commission will issue an Order designating the time and place of any hearing. If a hearing is held, the issue to be considered at such hearing shall be whether this Order should be sustained. Pursuant to 10 CFR 2.202(c)(2)(i), AREVA NP--Lynchburg may, in addition to demanding a hearing, at the time the answer is filed, or sooner, move that the presiding officer set aside the immediate effectiveness of the Order on the grounds that the Order, including the need for immediate effectiveness, is not based on adequate evidence, but on mere suspicion, unfounded allegations, or error. In the absence of any request for hearing, or written approval of an extension of time in which to request a hearing, the provisions as specified above in Section III shall be final twenty (20) days from the date of this Order without further order or proceedings. If an extension of time for requesting a hearing has been approved, the provisions as specified above in Section III, shall be final when the extension expires if a hearing request has not been received. An answer or a request for hearing shall not stay the immediate effectiveness of this order. Dated at Rockville, Maryland, this 1st day of March 2007. For the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Jack R. Strosnider, Director, Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards. Attachment 1--Requirements for Fingerprinting and Criminal History Records Checks of Individuals When Licensee's Reviewing Official Is Determining Access to Safeguards Information General Requirements Licensees shall comply with the requirements of this attachment. A.1. Each licensee subject to the provisions of this attachment shall fingerprint each individual who is seeking or permitted access to Safeguards Information (SGI). The licensee shall review and use the information received from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and ensure that the provisions contained in the subject Order and this attachment are satisfied. 2. The licensee shall notify each affected individual that the fingerprints will be used to secure a review of his/her criminal history record and inform the individual of the procedures for revising the record or including an explanation in the record, as specified in the ``Right to Correct and Complete Information'' section of this attachment. 3. Fingerprints need not be taken if an employed individual (e.g., a licensee employee, contractor, manufacturer, or supplier) is relieved from the fingerprinting requirement by 10 CFR 73.59, has had a favorably-decided U.S. Government criminal history records check within the last five (5) years, or has an active federal security clearance. Written confirmation from the Agency/employer which granted the federal security clearance or reviewed the criminal history records check must be provided. The licensee must retain this documentation for a period of three (3) years from the date the individual no longer requires access to SGI associated with the licensee's activities. 4. All fingerprints obtained by the licensee, pursuant to this Order, must be submitted to the Commission for transmission to the FBI. 5. The licensee shall review the information received from the FBI and consider it in conjunction with the trustworthy and reliability established by the previous SGI Protection Order, dated November 5, 2004, when making a determination to grant access to SGI to individuals who have a need-to-know. 6. The licensee shall use any information obtained as part of a criminal history records check solely for the purpose of determining an individual's suitability for access to SGI. 7. The licensee shall document the basis for its determination whether to grant access to SGI. B. The licensee shall notify the NRC of any desired change in reviewing officials. The NRC will determine whether the individual nominated as the new reviewing official may have access to SGI based on a previously-obtained, or new criminal history check and, therefore, will be permitted to serve as the licensee's reviewing official. [[Page 10570]] Prohibitions A licensee shall not base a final determination to deny an individual access to SGI solely on the basis of information received from the FBI involving: an arrest more than one (1) year old for which there is no information of the disposition of the case, or an arrest that resulted in dismissal of the charge or an acquittal. A licensee shall not use information received from a criminal history check obtained pursuant to this Order in a manner that would infringe upon the rights of any individual under the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, nor shall the licensee use the information in any way which would discriminate among individuals on the basis of race, religion, national origin, sex, or age. Procedures for Processing Fingerprint Checks For the purpose of complying with this Order, licensees shall, using an appropriate method listed in 10 CFR 73.4, submit to the NRC's Division of Facilities and Security, Mail Stop T-6E46, one completed, legible standard fingerprint card (Form FD-258, ORIMDNRCOOOZ) or, where practicable, other fingerprint records for each individual seeking access to SGI, to the Director of the Division of Facilities and Security, marked for the attention of the Division's Criminal History Check Section. Copies of these forms may be obtained by writing to the Office of Information Services, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC 20555-0001, by calling (301) 415-5877, or by e-mail to forms@nrc.gov. Practicable alternative formats are set forth in 10 CFR 73.4. The licensee shall establish procedures to ensure that the quality of the fingerprints taken results in minimizing the rejection rate of fingerprint cards due to illegible or incomplete cards. The NRC will review submitted fingerprint cards for completeness. Any Form FD-258 fingerprint record containing omissions or evident errors will be returned to the licensee for corrections. The fee for processing fingerprint checks includes one re-submission if the initial submission is returned by the FBI because the fingerprint impressions cannot be classified. The one free re-submission must have the FBI Transaction Control Number reflected on the re-submission. If additional submissions are necessary, they will be treated as initial submittals and will require a second payment of the processing fee. Fees for processing fingerprint checks are due upon application. Licensees shall submit payment with the application for processing fingerprints by corporate check, certified check, cashier's check, money order, or electronic payment, made payable to ``U.S. NRC.'' [For guidance on making electronic payments, contact the Facilities Security Branch, Division of Facilities and Security, at (301) 415- 7404]. Combined payment for multiple applications is acceptable. The application fee (currently $27) is the sum of the user fee charged by the FBI for each fingerprint card or other fingerprint records submitted by the NRC on behalf of a licensee, and an NRC processing fee, which covers administrative costs associated with the NRC handling of licensee fingerprint submissions. The Commission will directly notify licensees who are subject to this regulation of any fee changes. The Commission will forward, to the submitting licensee, all data received from the FBI as a result of the licensee's application(s) for criminal history records checks, including the FBI fingerprint record. Right To Correct and Complete Information Prior to any final adverse determination, the licensee shall make available, to the individual the contents of any criminal records obtained from the FBI for the purpose of assuring correct and complete information. Written confirmation by the individual of receipt of this notification must be maintained by the licensee for a period of one (1) year from the date of the notification. If, after reviewing the record, an individual believes that it is incorrect or incomplete in any respect and wishes to change, correct, or update the alleged deficiency, or to explain any matter in the record, the individual may initiate challenge procedures. These procedures include either direct application by the individual challenging the record to the agency (i.e., law enforcement agency) that contributed the questioned information, or direct challenge as to the accuracy or completeness of any entry on the criminal history record to the Assistant Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Identification Division, Washington, DC 20537-9700 (as set forth in 28 CFR 16.30 through 16.34). In the latter case, the FBI forwards the challenge to the agency that submitted the data and requests that agency to verify or correct the challenged entry. Upon receipt of an official communication directly from the agency that contributed the original information, the FBI Identification Division makes any changes necessary in accordance with the information supplied by that agency. The licensee must provide at least ten (10) days for an individual to initiate an action challenging the results of an FBI criminal history records check after the record is made available for his/her review. The licensee may make a final SGI access determination based upon the criminal history record only upon receipt of the FBI's ultimate confirmation or correction of the record. Upon a final adverse determination on access to SGI, the licensee shall provide the individual its documented basis for denial. Access to SGI shall not be granted to an individual during the review process. Protection of Information 1. Each licensee who obtains a criminal history record on an individual pursuant to this Order shall establish and maintain a system of files and procedures for protecting the record and the personal information from unauthorized disclosure. 2. The licensee may not disclose the record or personal information collected and maintained to persons other than the subject individual, his/her representative, or to those who have a need to access the information in performing assigned duties in the process of determining access to Safeguards Information. No individual authorized to have access to the information may re- disseminate the information to any other individual who does not have a need-to-know. 3. The personal information obtained on an individual from a criminal history record check may be transferred to another licensee if the licensee holding the criminal history record check receives the individual's written request to re-disseminate the information contained in his/her file, and the gaining licensee verifies information such as the individual's name, date of birth, social security number, sex, and other applicable physical characteristics for identification purposes. 4. The licensee shall make criminal history records, obtained under this section, available for examination by an authorized representative of the NRC to determine compliance with the regulations and laws. 5. The licensee shall retain all fingerprint and criminal history records received from the FBI, or a copy if the individual's file has been transferred, for three (3) years after termination of employment or determination of access to SGI (whether access was approved or denied). After the required three (3) year period, these documents shall be destroyed by a method that will prevent reconstruction of the information in whole or in part. [FR Doc. E7-4159 Filed 3-7-07; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 7590-01-P ***************************************************************** 25 Reuters: U.S. OKs early site permit for nuclear power plant Thu Mar 8, 2007 2:06PM EST By Tom Doggett WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved on Thursday the first site in over 30 years that could eventually house a new nuclear power plant, but the United States is still far away from breaking ground on any new reactors. The NRC's action clears the location for a new nuclear reactor but does not yet approve building a specific reactor. Exelon Corp., which sought the agency's first-ever early site permit in September 2003, would have up to 20 years to seek a license from the NRC to build and operate a reactor at the company's Clinton, Illinois, site, where it already has one nuclear reactor generating electricity. The decision is a step toward the Bush administration's goal to expand nuclear power to meet growing U.S. electricity demand. Many energy experts also say the U.S. will need more nuclear reactors to replace coal-fired generating plants that emit greenhouse gas emissions linked to global warming. Exelon has no plans in the short term to build another reactor at the site, a company spokeswoman said. It would take the NRC about 24 months to review and approve any Exelon request to construct a new reactor at the Clinton location, an agency spokesman said. Agency staff will officially issue the early site permit for the Clinton location in about 10 days. Continued... © Reuters 2007. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 26 World Nuclear News: EU countries strive to keep nuclear on agenda 08 March 2007 European Union (EU) leaders remain divided over plans to tackle climate change as they gather for the spring meeting of the European Council in Brussels. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, who will chair the talks as current president of the EU, wants EU action to lead the way for other nations in the battle against global warming. On the agenda is the Energy Policy for Europe action plan, which aims to contribute to the three central objectives of EU energy policy: security of supply, competitiveness and environmental sustainability. Under the sustainability banner, the Council will be called upon to set 'ambitious targets' for carbon dioxide emissions reductions and renewable energy development. However leaders remain split over plans for renewable energy to contribute a mandatory 20% of overall EU energy use by 2020. Renewables currently stand at around 6.4% of EU primary energy use. France and Finland are both calling for the renewables focus to be matched by equal interest in promoting nuclear energy, and France has proposed a 'non-carbon and low-carbon' energy target to include nuclear and new-generation cleaner coal power stations. Other countries opposing the mandatory renewables targets include recent newcomers to the EU. Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria all rely on coal use and say they do not have the resources to invest in expensive renewable energy. The UK is supporting the 20% renewables target. Less contentious is the call for a unilateral cut of 20% in EU greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 compared to 1990 levels. The plan could even see a 30% cut if a post-Kyoto climate change deal including the USA and other major global polluters is struck. Further information Council of the European Union WNA’s Sustainable Energy information paper WNA’s Global Warming – Policy responses information paper ***************************************************************** 27 The Local: Swedes want to retain nuclear Published: 8th March 2007 09:59 CET Online: http://www.thelocal.se/6626/ Swedes continue to favour the retention of nuclear power, despite a series of highly-publicized safety alerts at the nation's power plants. Only 17 percent want to decommission the plants compared to 43 percent who want to keep using existing power stations until the end of their natural lives and 32 percent who want to expand nuclear power. The proportion of people in favour of keeping nuclear power is barely changed since a similar poll last summer. The poll was conducted by the Sifo institute on behalf of Sveriges Radio. Political scientist Professor Sören Holmberg, who has studied Swedish opinion on the nuclear issue for 40 years, said it would take a lot to change Swedes' views: "The Swedish people are among the most nuclear power-friendly in the world," he said. TT/The Local (news@thelocal.se The Local © The Local Europe AB 2007 News from Sweden in English ***************************************************************** 28 Prague Daily Monitor: Leak at TemelĂ­n, Austria plans lawsuit - by Prague Daily Monitor/CTK / published 8 March 2007 CTK Austria plans to sue the Czech Republic over repeated accidents at the TemelĂ­n plant. About 1,100 litres of slightly radioactive water leaked in the first unit of the TemelĂ­n nuclear power station that is currently shut down, TemelĂ­n spokesman Milan Nebesář told ÄŚTK yesterday. The event occurred during a pressure test on Tuesday afternoon and did not threaten the health of employees and the environment, he said. He added the slightly radioactive water flew into a special container prepared in advance. The accident comes as neighbouring Austria is planning an international lawsuit against the power station. "The test fulfilled its task, since it detected a leak in the equipment before it was put in operation. The Austrian side was informed about the event exactly as had been agreed," said Nebesář. This was the second water leak in TemelĂ­n in a week. On Tuesday last week, the power station reported a leak of 2,000 litres of slightly radioactive water. Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer was visiting the Czech Republic at that time. Gusenbauer later said he was very angry at the Czech government for a failure to inform him about the defect during his visit. But the Czech side insisted it acted in accord with the Melk Agreement, which says it must report similar defects to Austria within 72 hours. However, Vienna perceives the recurrent leaks as a serious reason to doubt the safety culture at TemelĂ­n, APA reported yesterday. The case confirms that Austrian criticism of TemelĂ­n is justified, Austrian Environment Ministry spokesman Daniel Knapp said. TemelĂ­n's first unit has been out of operation since the end of January for fuel replacement. Czech State Authority for Nuclear Safety head Dana Drábová said the shutdown would be at least 10-14 days longer than planned because of the latest defect. "Nothing has happened in terms of safety today. But in a way, it is unacceptable. A leak occurs every time the unit is to be relaunched. I will have a serious talk about it with the power station's director," Drábová told ÄŚTK. Monika Wittingerová from the South Bohemian Mothers civic association said about 1,500 litres of radioactive water had leaked in the first unit of the power station. APA corrected the amount later on. TemelĂ­n chief executive VladimĂ­r Hlavinka told ÄŚTK that he would draw relevant conclusions after it is clear who is to blame for the problems, be it an individual or an organisation. Hlavinka said he spoke with Drábová for about an hour on how to approach such problems in the future. "It is necessary to start taking more stringent steps, such as sanctions," Hlavinka said. South-Bohemian non-governmental associations criticise above all the benevolence of the SĂšJB, whose task is to oversee the plant's operation. The latest incident is reportedly the eighth time since 2001 that slightly radioactive water has leaked in TemelĂ­n . "We think that the nuclear authority should proceed more strictly," said Hana Gabrielová from the Calla association. "It should use its power to levy a sufficiently high fine on the operator [of the plant] so that it is motivated to secure measures that would prevent such incidents from occurring again," Gabrielová said. This story copyright 2007 CTK Czech News Agency The Prague Daily Monitor and Monitor CE are not responsible for its content. Receive the Prague Daily Monitor in your inbox each weekday morning. copyright 2007 monitor ce media services s.r.o. | all rights reserved ***************************************************************** 29 Reuters: Chirac - EU renewables goal must include nuclear 08 Mar 2007 19:07:09 GMT Source: Reuters BRUSSELS, March 8 (Reuters) - Any binding European Union target for renewable energy sources must take account of the role of nuclear power and clean coal in national energy mixes, French President Jacques Chirac said on Thursday. In comments at an EU summit on climate change and energy policy, relayed by French officials, Chirac said it would be "more coherent" to set a target for low-carbon energy than the binding objective for renewables such as wind, solar and hydro-electric power sought by the European Commission. "At the very least, the burden sharing on renewables must take account of the place of low-carbon energy -- nuclear and clean coal -- in our national energy choices," he said. ***************************************************************** 30 New Book: 'War In Heaven' by Drs. Helen Caldicott and Craig Eisendrath 2007-03-08 19:15:52 - COLLEGE PARK, Md., March 8 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In "War in Heaven," a Nobel Prize-nominated peace activist and a former U.S. foreign service officer (who helped write the Outer Space Treaty of 1967) look at the history of military uses of space and the current plans for "weaponizing the heavens," including kinetic, laser, nuclear bombardment, and anti-satellite weapons. Contrary to the claims of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that the United States faces a "space Pearl Harbor," Caldicott and Eisendrath show that the United States itself is today the principal obstruction to passage of an international treaty banning weapons from outer space. At a time when plans to build and deploy space weapons are on the administration's agenda but only just becoming known to the general public, this book will help launch a national discussion of a critical issue. Caldicott and Eisendrath are both available for interviews about the book throughout the spring. Speaking engagements include: -- Regina, Canada - March 6, 2007 at University of Regina -- Saskatoon, Canada - March 7, 2007 at 304 3rd Avenue North -- Baltimore, MD - March 14, 2007 12 noon - Community College of Baltimore County - Essex Campus -- Washington, DC - March 18, 2007 at 6:30 p.m. - Busboys & Poets -- Chicago, IL - March 21 & 22, 2007 at Loyola University -- Washington, DC - March 28, 2007 at Beyond Nuclear Weapons Conference at the National Press Club More information about all engagements is available at http://www.nuclearpolicy.org/ or by calling 202/822-9800. "War In Heaven" is being published by the New Press in New York. It retails for $23.95. To arrange an interview with Dr. Caldicott or Dr. Eisendrath in conjunction with these events or the new book, "War In Heaven," contact Julie R. Enszer, executive director of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, at 202-822-9800. Source: Nuclear Policy Research Institute © PRNewswire ***************************************************************** 31 The Australian: People 'more rational' about nuclear power * March 08, 2007 This story is from our news.com.au network Source: AAP People 'more rational' about nuclear power * By Denis Peters THE public's view on nuclear energy is changing quickly, with most concerns now about commercial viability rather than emotion, nuclear inquiry head Dr Ziggy Switkowski says. His views complement the findings of a Newspoll which earlier this week revealed support for nuclear power had surged 10 percentage points to 45 per cent in four months, outstripping opposition, which had plummeted 10 points to 40 per cent. Dr Switkowski was appointed in June last year to head a committee of experts in various fields to look at the viability of a domestic nuclear industry for electricity generation. It heard many submissions and issued an interim report in December concluding that nuclear was a realistic alternative to meeting Australian energy demand in a carbon-constrained world. Dr Switkowski, who was last week appointed chairman of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, today said that, initially, most people had emotional issues regarding nuclear. "At the top of the list were concerns about the nature of management of nuclear waste," he told a conference on sustainable energy in Canberra. "Second was a concern about the possibility of a catastrophic accident, such as occurred at Chernobyl in 1986. "The third was a range of concerns about terrorism, illegal diversion of nuclear materials for weapons production, etcetera. "Today, when I address forums and talk to people, those concerns are still there, but they've been overtaken by other issues." Now, the biggest concern he heard was about nuclear power being too expensive," Dr Switkowski said. "Second is the challenge that 15 years out is too long. "The third is, if you are going to go to nuclear energy, where are you going to put the reactors. "To me that's an interesting shift, because the first set of concerns around waste and terrorism and proliferation and accidents, were concerns which were formed on the back of the nuclear industry in the 60s, 70s and 80s. "They were sincerely held, deeply felt, largely emotional concerns." Dr Switkowski said that, today, most people who had learnt more about the industry, had moved towards concerns which he characterised as being commercial. "If you are told that something is too expensive, the time-line is too long and the profitability of getting environmental approval for particular locations are unlikely, they're frankly the sort of issues that most business cases confront, and therefore are amenable to ration resolution. "Or, they might turn out to be overwhelming, in which case we won't have nuclear power." Dr Switkowski said a likely change in the Labor Party's attitude towards expanded uranium mining, at its national conference next month, held hopes for bipartisan support for nuclear generation. © The Australian ***************************************************************** 32 AU ABC: Switkowski says rushed green efforts pointless. 08/03/2007. ABC News Online Ziggy Switkowski says Australia is hostage to global warming, not national warming. (File photo) (ABC) The head of the nation's major nuclear science organisation says that there is nothing Australia can do as a whole to make a difference to climate change. Ziggy Switkowski, the newly appointed head of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), led an inquiry last year into the possibility of replacing coal and gas with nuclear power. Dr Switkowski has told a business council forum in Canberra that current discussions about how the country could become greener would have little impact. "Australia is hostage to global warming, not to national warming," he said. "Arguably nothing Australia does at a local level will make any difference to our climate." He says that climate change happens slowly and any decisions need to be carefully considered. "The reality is climate change occurs over long periods of time, and it's much more important in my mind that we set the direction right so that we arrive at the right spot in the middle of the century than to do a whole lot of things at the moment because it makes us somehow or other feel that we are making a contribution," he said. Meanwhile, Dr Switkowski says insurance companies could easily include nuclear insurance in their policies. The Greens say any future nuclear power plant owners need to be legally responsible for radiation damage to private property, given that standard nuclear exclusion clauses exist in every insurance policy. However, in the event of more nuclear reactors, Dr Switkowski says there is no need for concern. "Happily there is no history of accident and claims in this industry, aside from the two that are well known, but that doesn't mean there hasn't been a lot of work into formulating a framework to handle such an event," he said. "I don't see that we're going to be pressed to invent something here." © 2007 ABC | Privacy Policy ***************************************************************** 33 NewsBlaze: Department of Energy Praises the Nuclear Regulatory Commission The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) of energy today commended the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's decision to approve the first-ever Early Site Permit (ESP) for the Exelon Generation Company's Clinton site, in central Illinois. This decision marks a major milestone in the President's plan to expand the use of safe and clean nuclear power. As part of President Bush's Advanced Energy Initiative - which seeks to change the way we power this nation - nuclear power will play an increasingly important role as the demand for electricity grows worldwide. "Government's role is to create an environment in which clean energy can flourish, and I'm proud to say that we're helping doing just that. NRC approval of the Clinton Early Site Permit represents a major accomplishment in this Administration's effort to address the barriers and stimulate deployment of new nuclear power plants in the United States," Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman said. "By demonstrating effectiveness and predictability in the licensing process, utilities will have the information they need to make sound business decisions that can lead to the construction of new nuclear power plants." This ESP approval culminates a four-year, cost-shared project with DOE and the Chicago-based Exelon Corporation, aimed at demonstrating the new and previously untested licensing process for locating new nuclear plants in the United States. Exelon submitted their ESP application, which includes a Site Safety Analysis Report, an Environmental Report, and an Emergency Plan to the NRC in September 2003. The NRC issued the Final Safety Evaluation Report in May 2006, the Final Environmental Impact Statement in July 2006, and the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB) hearings concluded in early November 2006. DOE has partnered with Exelon and two other companies, Entergy and Dominion Energy, since September 2002 to demonstrate the ESP process. This process was established by NRC in 1989 for utilities to complete the site and environmental evaluations before a decision is made to build a nuclear plant. Once issued, the ESP is valid for 20 years and can be used in conjunction with a subsequent combined Construction and Operating License application. A decision on the Entergy Grand Gulf ESP is expected within the month and later this year on Dominion's North Anna ESP. Today's vote also supports DOE's Nuclear Power 2010 (NP 2010) program, a joint government/industry cost-shared effort to identify sites for new nuclear power plants; develop and bring to market advanced nuclear plant technologies; evaluate the business case for building new nuclear power plants and; demonstrate untested regulatory processes. President Bush's Fiscal Year (FY) 2008 budget requests $874.2M ($241M, 38.2% increase over the FY'07 request) for DOE's Office of Nuclear Energy. $114 million of that request ($60 million, 111% increase over the FY 2007 request) has been allocated for NP2010 to complete the remaining ESP demonstration projects and continue the New Nuclear Plant Licensing Demonstration projects. This funding will allow continued reactor designs and; implement further successful licensing interactions with industry to build new nuclear plants by 2009. For more information on NP 2010, visit: np2010.ne.doe.gov/. Source: U.S. Department of Energy judythpiazza@gmail.com Copyright © 2007, NewsBlaze, Daily News ***************************************************************** 34 Guardian Unlimited: EU Leaders to Decide on Energy Strategy From the Associated Press Thursday March 8, 2007 11:01 AM By CONSTANT BRAND Associated Press Writer BRUSSELS, Belgium - German Chancellor Angela Merkel will push her European Union counterparts to go green on energy at summit talks Thursday, urging them to adopt tough measures needed to fight global warming and reduce Europe's dependence on oil imports. Merkel, who is leading the two-day meeting, is keen to get the 27-nation EU to adopt new rules to boost the use of less-polluting, renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and hydro power. She wants the EU to set a global standard, to pressure the United States, Russia and others to follow Europe's new pro-environment agenda. ``Europe has set its own important step, and now others like the USA, China, India and the large developing countries must follow,'' Merkel said late Wednesday. ``Europe has 15 percent of worldwide emissions, and the trend is to reduce it, so we also need other countries.'' The EU leaders are set to agree to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by the year 2020 from 1990 levels, a first step in Europe's ambitious strategy to fight global warming. They are also set to develop energy ties with central Asian countries to reduce their dependency on Russian oil and gas. However, many EU nations are loathe to live up to proposed commitments to switch from fossil fuels like cheap coal to more costly renewable sources, arguing that it will add costs and hurt economic growth. They are also at loggerheads over whether to replace 10 percent of transport fuel with biofuels by 2020. Germany, Britain and Italy are pushing hard for a binding 20 percent renewables target by 2020, but France and many eastern European nations are against it, fearing they could lose the right to draw from cheaper sources such as coal or nuclear power plants. European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and Merkel were holding talks with business and union leaders ahead of the start of the summit to go over the EU's new strategy to set up a low-carbon economy to counter climate change, specifics of which are now up for debate. Merkel said Thursday that measures against climate change should be ``moved forward with determination and binding'' targets, but that she expected ``very difficult negotiations.'' ``Europe wants to be in a leading role. People outside of Europe are looking at us,'' Merkel said. The summit talks also will focus on drafting a declaration to mark the EU's 50th birthday party planned for March 24-25 in Berlin, but reaching unity may be difficult as many nations have topics they do not want mentioned. Foreign ministers are to debate efforts to bring stability to Iraq as well as Iran's standoff with the West over its nuclear program. Somalia and Lebanon also will be discussed. British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Wednesday he will press EU counterparts to bolster their troop contributions to NATO's mission in Afghanistan. A summit deal on energy will help Merkel put pressure on other Group of Eight industrialized nations to take action on the environment at a G-8 gathering she will host in June. Germany wants the EU summit to set a global challenge to the U.S., Canada, Russia, Japan and other G-8 nations to agree on deep emissions cuts. The EU leaders are set to back a goal to cut carbon dioxide releases and keep the average global temperature increase under 2 degrees Celsius, saying they will agree on a 30 percent cut below 1990 levels if other major polluters join them. According to a draft agreement, they will aim to go even further in the future - with cuts of 60 percent to 80 percent by 2050. The EU also wants the United Sates to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol, which requires industrial nations to cut their global-warming gases by an average 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. The major economies of the EU have committed to an 8 percent cut. Washington however, has argued that Kyoto would do serious harm to the American economy, adding such cuts should also apply to new Asian rivals China and India. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007 ***************************************************************** 35 BBC NEWS: Congo arrest over missing uranium Last Updated: Thursday, 8 March 2007, 11:32 GMT Enriched uranium is used for nuclear power generation and weapons The Democratic Republic of Congo's top atomic energy official is being held over allegations of uranium smuggling. Atomic energy centre director Fortunat Lumu and an aide have been questioned since their arrest on Tuesday. A large quantity of uranium is reported to have gone missing in recent years, although state prosecutor Tshimanga Mukeba did not reveal any figures. DR Congo's daily newspaper Le Phare reported that more than 100 bars of uranium as well as an unknown quantity of uranium contained in helmet-shaped cases, had disappeared from the nuclear centre in Kinshasa as part of a vast trafficking of the material going back years. But the BBC's Kinshasa correspondent, Arnaud Zajtman, says that as of yet, no evidence has been made public to support the allegations made by the newspaper. Creation of centre Uranium is the basic raw material of both civilian and military nuclear programmes. A mine in Congo's southern province of Katanga supplied the uranium that was used in the atomic bombs that were dropped by the Americans on the Japanese town of Hiroshima in 1945. To thank and reward Congo, the Americans funded the creation of Congo's nuclear centre in 1958. It was established on the university campus and only for research purpose. But in the late 1970s, a bar of uranium disappeared from the centre, raising concern about security at the site. Moreover, the site of the centre is facing some erosion problems. And people fear a landslide that could lead to a wider disaster, our reporter says. In recent years, the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency has visited the centre and security was believed to have improved. Last year, a partnership was also signed between Congo's atomic energy centre and British company Brinkley Mining, aiming at prospecting for uranium deposits in the Congo. * BBC Copyright Notice ***************************************************************** 36 IRNA: Pakistan's top nuclear scientists in Taliban Custody - New Delhi, March 8, IRNA India-Pak-Nuclear Scientist Two top nuclear scientists of Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) are currently in Taliban custody. The two were working at PAEC's facility in North West Frontier Province (NWFP). The two scientists were kidnapped about six months ago. To avoid international embarrassment Pakistan Government has kept this information under wraps, said an Indian private news channel "Zee News". According to information available with Zee News, nuclear scientists have been kidnapped by Taliban at the behest of Al-Qaeda. Further investigations reveal that Al-Qaeda may be using the expertise of the scientists to produce nuclear bombs. The two scientists are reportedly being held somewhere in Waziristan, near Afghanistan border. In January this year Pakistan security agencies had foiled another attempt by Taliban militia to kidnap nuclear scientists. Earlier, incidents of Taliban militia stealing uranium in NWFP have already been reported. PAEC also has a uranium mining facility in NWFP. With repeated Al Qaeda threats to the US, news of kidnapping of nuclear scientists will increase pressure on Pakistan to attack terrorist camps. ***************************************************************** 37 New Yorker: Can the United States be made safe from nuclear terrorism? A Reporter at Large: The Unthinkable: Reporting & Essays: by Steve Coll March 12, 2007 It's thought that there are some fifty-four thousand licensed batches of radioactive materials in the U.S. that could be used in a dirty bomb. In October, 2005, a radiation sensor at the Port of Colombo, in Sri Lanka, signalled that the contents of an outbound shipping container included radioactive material. The port’s surveillance system, installed with funds from the National Nuclear Security Administration, an agency within the Department of Energy, wasn’t yet in place, so the container was loaded and sent to sea before it could be identified. After American and Sri Lankan inspectors hurriedly checked camera images at the port, they concluded that the suspect crate might be on any one of five ships—two of which were steaming toward New York. Sri Lanka is a locus of guerrilla war and arms smuggling. It is not far from Pakistan, which possesses nuclear arms, is a haven for Al Qaeda, and has a poor record of nuclear security. The radiation-emitting container presented at least the theoretical danger of a “pariah ship,” Vayl Oxford, the director of the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, said. It seemed plausible, if unlikely, that Al Qaeda or rogue Pakistani generals might load a bomb onto a cargo vessel. Within days, American satellites located the five suspect ships and intelligence analysts scrutinized their manifests; a team at the National Security Council took charge. One ship, it learned, was bound for Canada, and another for Hamburg, Germany. The White House decided to call in its atomic-bomb squad, known as NEST, the Nuclear Emergency Support Team—scientists who are trained to search for nuclear weapons. One team flew to Canada and a second to Europe, where it intercepted one of the ships at sea before it could reach Hamburg. They found nothing. The United States Coast Guard stopped the two New York-bound ships in territorial waters, about ten miles offshore; from that distance, if there was a nuclear weapon on board a detonation would cause relatively little harm. Scientists boarded the vessels, shouldering diagnostic equipment, but these ships, too, turned out to be clean; as it happened, the offending vessel was on an Asian route, and its cargo was scrap metal mixed with radioactive materials that had been dumped improperly. The entire episode, which was not disclosed to the public, lasted about two weeks. This sometimes nerve-racking exercise resulted in no more than the disposal of some radioactive waste. It was also the first major defensive maneuver triggered by a shield that the United States is attempting to build as a defense against a clandestine nuclear attack. The idea, in essence, is to envelop the country in rings of radiation detectors and connect these sensors to military and police command centers, which would then respond to unexplained movements of nuclear material. The project, comparable in ambition to ballistic-missile defense, is the first of its kind in the atomic age. The plan has already attracted criticism from some scientists and defense strategists, primarily because, as with missile defense, the project promises to be expensive and would require leaps of ingenuity to overcome technical problems presented by the laws of physics. Still, with little public discussion this “layered defense,” as it is described by its proponents, is being deployed. The federal government has distributed more than fifteen hundred radiation detectors to overseas ports and border crossings, as well as to America’s northern and southern borders, domestic seaports, Coast Guard ships, airports, railways, mail facilities, and even some highway truck stops. More detectors are being distributed each month. NEST and the Federal Bureau of Investigation maintain a permanent team to respond to events in Washington and along the Northeast Corridor; a second team trained to dismantle nuclear weapons is based in Albuquerque, and eight other teams able to diagnose radioactive materials operate on continuous alert elsewhere in the country. Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, NEST teams have been deployed about twice a year because of specific threats reported by intelligence agencies, including at least two instances, apart from the Sri Lankan episode, where they boarded a ship approaching the United States. NEST units also discreetly screen vehicles, buildings, and people at designated events such as political conventions and the recent N.B.A. All-Star Game, in Las Vegas. In the United States alone, the sensors generate more than a thousand radiation alarms on an average day, all of which must be investigated. The world, it turns out, is awash in uncontrolled radioactive materials. Most are harmless, but a few are dangerous, and many detectors are still too crude to distinguish among different types of radiation; they ring just as loudly if they locate nuclear-bomb material or contaminated steel or, for that matter, bananas, which emit radiation from the isotope potassium-40. So far, the result has been a cacophony of false alarms, which, in most cases, are caused by naturally occurring radiation that has found its way from soil or rock into manufactured products such as ceramic tiles. In addition, people who have recently received medical treatments with radioactive isotopes such as thorium can set off the detectors. At baseball’s All-Star Game in Detroit in 2005, unobserved NEST scientists screened tens of thousands of fans entering the stadium, and their sensors rang just once—reacting to the former Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham, who was radioactive from a recent doctor’s visit. Detritus from nuclear commerce that has slipped through American and international regulatory systems is another periodic source of alarms, and one that has proved to be a greater cause of concern. Virtually none of the loose material detected so far would be useful to a terrorist seeking to build a fission weapon—a bomb of the sort that was dropped on Hiroshima. A disquieting fraction of it, however, might be useful for what the American defense bureaucracy calls a “radioactive dispersal device,” more commonly known as a dirty bomb. There is recent evidence, too, that Al Qaeda-inspired radicals are pursuing such a weapon. Illustration: JOHN RITTER The term "dirty bomb" can refer to a wide variety of devices, but generally it describes one that would use a conventional explosive such as dynamite to release radioactive material into the air. The initial explosion and its subsequent plume might kill or sicken a dozen or perhaps as many as a few hundred people, depending on such factors as wind and the bomb-maker's skill. If the weapon was particularly well made, employing one of the most potent and long-lived types of radioactive materials that are used in medicine and in the food industry, it might also cause considerable economic damage-perhaps rendering a number of city blocks uninhabitable. Radioactive ground contamination cannot easily be scrubbed away, so it might be necessary to tear down scores of buildings and cart the rubble to disposal sites. It's easy to imagine what the impact of such an attack would be if the contaminated area was, say, a quarter of the East Village, or the Seventh Arrondissement of Paris. Charles Ferguson is a former nuclear submarine officer trained in physics; he left the Navy for a career in security studies and is currently a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2003, he co-wrote an unclassified report titled "Commercial Radioactive Sources: Surveying the Security Risks." About two years later, F.B.I. agents working on an international terrorism case asked to meet with him. They brought a document showing that some of his report had been downloaded onto the computer of a British citizen named Dhiren Barot, a Hindu who had converted to Islam. Barot, it turned out, had been communicating with Al Qaeda about a plan to detonate a dirty bomb in Britain, and he had used a highlighting pen on a printout of Ferguson's study while conducting his research. The report described how large amounts of certain commercial radioactive materials might pose a danger to a terrorist who tried to handle them. "This seems to have worried him," Ferguson told me, referring to Barot, "so he decided to look at smoke detectors." Some detectors contain slivers of americium-241; the isotope's constant emission of radiation creates a chemical process that screens for smoke. Barot informed his Al Qaeda handlers that he was thinking about buying ten thousand smoke detectors to make his bomb. In fact, to make a device that would be even remotely effective, Ferguson said, he would have had to buy more than a million. "Either his reading comprehension was poor or he was evading the assignment," Ferguson told me. In Britain, last October, Barot pleaded guilty to terrorism-related charges. Barot appears to have been only marginally more competent than Jose Padilla, the hapless American convert to Islam who travelled to Pakistan, met with Al Qaeda leaders, and then flew to the United States, where he was arrested amid great fanfare, in June 2002. John Ashcroft, then the Attorney General, held a press conference in which he accused Padilla of "exploring a plan" to build a dirty bomb, charges that were later omitted from an indictment against him. The Barot and Padilla cases raise a strategic question-whether it is worth setting up an expensive, imperfect system whose effectiveness would be greatest against slow-witted terrorists. The Bush Administration is now spending about four hundred million dollars annually on radiation-detector research, but nuclear physicists who have studied the technology disagree about how discriminating these sensors might become. One point on which everyone agrees, however, is that, of all the potentially dangerous radioactive isotopes, it will always be most difficult to detect highly enriched uranium-235, one of the two materials, along with plutonium, used to make fission weapons. Unless it is being compressed to explode, highly enriched uranium is a low-energy isotope that does not emit much radioactivity-it is "dull," in the lexicon employed by scientists in the field. This makes it relatively easy to shield inside lead casing, or to mask by surrounding it with brighter isotopes. Plutonium, by comparison, is fairly bright, and many of the most dangerous isotopes that could be used in dirty bombs, such as cesium 137 and cobalt 60, are brighter still. Radiation sensors, then, will always be more effective against a Dhiren Barot than against, say, the Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, a metallurgist who has spent many years studying fission weapons and highly enriched uranium, as well as the challenges of international smuggling. It is common, in defense studies, to evaluate an adversary on the basis of capability and intent. Pakistan has a nuclear-weapons capability, but its government, however fragile it may be, is presumed to have no hostile intentions toward the United States. Al Qaeda, on the other hand, has demonstrated hostile intentions but has little known nuclear capability. Osama bin Laden has declared that the acquisition of nuclear weapons is a religious duty, and it is well documented that he tried to buy uranium during the mid-nineteen-nineties while he was living in Sudan. (Like many other would-be purchasers of black-market nuclear material, he apparently fell victim to a scam.) After September 11th, bin Laden met with Pakistani nuclear scientists to discuss weapons issues. More recently, Al Qaeda-inspired radicals have sought nuclear materials. "We know they have a significant appetite and they have been searching for different materials, in different venues, for the past several years," Vahid Majidi, an assistant director of the F.B.I., who is in charge of the bureau's newly formed weapons-of-mass-destruction directorate, told me. "The question becomes our vigilance and their ability to execute." Last September, the Nuclear Threat Initiative posted a translation of a message that appeared on the Web and was attributed to Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. The speaker called for experts in "chemistry, physics, electronics, media and all other sciences, especially nuclear scientists and explosives experts." He continued, "We are in dire need of you.. The field of jihad can satisfy your scientific ambitions, and the large American bases are good places to test your unconventional weapons, whether biological or dirty, as they call them." The available evidence, then, suggests that while jihadi leaders might like to acquire a proper fission weapon, their pragmatic plans seem to run to dirty bombs-a more plausible ambition. Among other things, the international nuclear black market holds more promise for dirty-bomb builders than for those who are interested in fission weapons. In all the cases of nuclear smuggling reported to the International Atomic Energy Agency since the collapse of the Soviet Union, none have involved significant amounts of fissionable materials. (There have been at least two cases in which a seller possessing small amounts of highly enriched uranium promised that he could get much more but was arrested before the claim could be tested; the most recent of these occurred in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, in 2006.) By comparison, the I.A.E.A. has recorded about three dozen black-market smuggling incidents through 2004 involving radiological isotopes in quantities that would be useful for a destructive dirty bomb, according to European diplomats who have analyzed the records. It would not be simple to build a damaging device with these materials. Still, Peter Zimmerman, who served as the chief scientist of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 2001 to 2003, said, "I think there are Al Qaeda people who, given finely divided material, could think of very creative and malicious ways to use it. Why hasn't it happened? The answer is we've been lucky." The Bush Administration has not assigned the same urgency to the dirty-bomb threat that it has to the threat of a terrorist attack using a fission weapon. Fred Ikl‚, who served as the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy in the Reagan Administration and has consulted on homeland-defense matters for the Bush Administration, told me that he and his colleagues have been considerably more concerned about a full-blown nuclear-weapons conspiracy, which would have the potential to trigger a worldwide economic depression and force millions of Americans to flee major cities. By contrast, even the worst dirty-bomb event, Ikl‚ said, would be less than "a Katrina." Last year, analysts at the Department of Homeland Security divided the threat of a weapon-of-mass-destruction attack against the United States into two categories, "catastrophic" and "limited," according to Maureen I. McCarthy, a senior adviser in the department's intelligence and analysis office. A catastrophic attack, in this taxonomy, would cause ten thousand or more casualties and fifty billion to a hundred billion dollars in economic damage, and would produce a "major global policy shift," McCarthy said last November, at an intelligence symposium. A limited attack might produce a hundred to a thousand casualties and would be confined to a single region, although it might also have "global political consequences." The D.H.S. intelligence analysts placed a fission-weapon attack, the use of some biological agents, and an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease in the catastrophic category (the latter in part because it might require the closure of national borders for up to ninety days). Dirty bombs fell into the limited category. From the very beginning, fear of a fission bomb and its consequences has influenced American thinking about the costs and benefits of possible defenses against nuclear terrorism. * from the issue * cartoon bank * e-mail this The Washington office of Los Alamos National Laboratory is in a modern building on the south side of the Mall, near a busy hotel. Richard Wagner has a spacious office on the second floor, which he has filled with color photographs of nature scenes. He is seventy years old, a trim man with a white mustache and a calm, precise demeanor. Wagner is a physicist who entered the field of nuclear weapons during the nineteen-sixties. He rose to become the deputy director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and, for five years during the Reagan Administration, served as the Pentagon's principal civilian adviser on nuclear weapons. He chaired an intelligence advisory board at the Pentagon during the Clinton years. At that time, he undertook the first of three studies on how the United States might erect a defense against a nuclear sneak attack. As much as anyone, Wagner is convinced of the need to employ radiation sensors in a national shield. Wagner recalled, when I visited him on a recent wintry afternoon, that his interest in nuclear terrorism began during the early nineteen-seventies, when an F.B.I. agent arrived at Livermore carrying an extortion note. The F.B.I. man wanted to know if the threat, which involved a plan to blow up a nuclear device, was plausible. It was not, as it happened, but the incident, and several others like it during that period, got Wagner and a colleague at Livermore, Bill Nelson, thinking about what they would have done if they ever faced a serious case. The subject had received remarkably little attention. In 1946, Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who supervised the building of the first atom bombs, told Congress that three or four men "could destroy New York" by sneaking a nuclear weapon into the city. When a senator asked how such a weapon, smuggled in a crate or a suitcase, could be detected, Oppenheimer replied, "With a screwdriver." It was not until the early seventies that the issue was revived inside the defense bureaucracy-stimulated, in part, by the publication of John McPhee's "The Curve of Binding Energy," which drew on interviews with the theoretical physicist Theodore B. Taylor, an innovator in nuclear-weapons design. Taylor spoke about the possibility that an individual, perhaps an American citizen, could build a fission bomb. In one striking passage, he holds a sliver of metallic uranium-235 in his hands as he speculates, "If ten per cent of this were fissioned, it would be enough to knock down the World Trade Center." As a result of these warnings, Wagner recalled, "the government was getting more sensitive to the possibility that this might happen." At the time, the dominant fear was that a bomb-builder would issue an extortion demand; the government would then have to find him in a hurry and dismantle his weapon. "Our job was to search, and then, if we ever found anything, do something safe with it," Wagner said. "It was the threat object that was fixed, and we were moving. And the idea of it being the other way around, the threat object moving toward the U.S. or around the U.S., and the detectors being fixed, which is part of the current paradigm-I don't remember that as being much in our thinking." To address such possibilities, Wagner helped to create NEST. Wagner returned to the subject as part of a 1996 Summer Study sponsored by the Pentagon. The Soviet Union had collapsed, and black-market smuggling of nuclear materials had become an acute concern in the Clinton Administration. This time, Wagner was influenced by Fred Ikl‚, who has adapted some of Ted Taylor's concerns during the post-Cold War period. (In 2006, Ikl‚ published a book entitled "Annihilation from Within: The Ultimate Threat to Nations.") Ikl‚'s work, Wagner said, made him aware that a plausible attacker might be a terrorist group or a nation-state acting by covert means; the threat now, therefore, "was not just a nut, but it was part of a strategic sea change." Wagner presented his ideas for a national-defense system to Defense Secretary William Cohen. He proposed an approach based on linked, computerized, intelligent radiation sensors-a system that would involve a very large number of detectors. A version of this concept had been secretly tested in North Las Vegas, where scientists drove through webs of linked sensors with a radioactive device; each time one pinged, the computers would analyze an accumulating portrait of the trajectory of the radioactive device. Cohen said he feared that the system would run afoul of the Posse Comitatus Act, which limits the military's intervention in domestic security. Jamie Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general who had become a Pentagon adviser, disagreed, but Cohen replied, as Wagner recalled it, " `Well, it may not be illegal, but, man, it would be bad politics for D.O.D. to be seen to be getting ready to go out there and mess around in the U.S., in the states.' And Jamie said, `Think what the politics would be like the morning after the explosion.' And, literally, Bill Cohen-I mean, good guy, I thought, a good Secretary of Defense-just couldn't say anything more.. And so nothing happened." An aide to Cohen said that he did not recall the discussion. In March of 2002, Wagner was appointed to lead a new Defense Department task force on the same subject. Its members interviewed more than seventy scientists and analysts at the C.I.A., the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the national nuclear-weapons laboratories. Wagner and his colleagues chose "to concentrate almost exclusively on the nuclear-explosive threat," treating dirty bombs as a "lesser-included case," according to the final report, which was published in June of 2004. "A very rough estimate for civil detector deployments for all layers in the United States and overseas-along roads, at ports and airports, around and within cities, etc.-is one hundred thousand to four hundred thousand detectors," the report states. Depending on the model chosen, the cost of that many detectors would easily exceed ten billion dollars. * from the issue * cartoon bank * e-mail this Wagner recommended an ambitious research program to address the problem of detecting highly enriched uranium; he foresaw a system that would be close to foolproof against a sophisticated attacker, perhaps one who had access to the resources of a hostile government. The task force acknowledged that even the best radiation-sensor system imaginable would be vulnerable to creative enemies, but added that "over the course of history, defenses that are far from perfect have played vital strategic roles." Wagner told me that his faith in radiation-detection technology derives in part from the progress that has been made in cosmic-ray and particle physics. "Today, if you're looking for a neutrino from a pulsar in the next galaxy," he said, a scientist "can detect one event per year and reject the millions of background events." The goal of new defense research, he continued, should be to bring "advanced technologies out of the academic community" and learn how to apply them at border posts and truck stops. It should be possible, Wagner said, by way of example, to detect the dull signature of highly enriched uranium by spraying out other kinds of radiation, perhaps from an aircraft, and then search for an echo, roughly the way sonar works-an approach that's likely to create health problems for civilian populations. Even if that difficulty could not be overcome, he continued, such technology could be useful in enemy territory if it was necessary to do a quick search for hidden nuclear bombs. Indeed, Fred Ikl‚ told me that the Pentagon is now conducting this sort of research. Wagner presented his grand plan to Donald Rumsfeld, then the Secretary of Defense, in early June, 2004. Ronald Reagan, the political father of ballistic-missile defense, had just died, and Rumsfeld, who was enthusiastic about Wagner's ideas, said that he would begin discussing the plan with Cabinet members when he saw them at Reagan's funeral. With support from Vice-President Dick Cheney, five months later the White House approved the idea, and the Department of Homeland Security decided to roll out detectors immediately, even though research into the more difficult problems of radiation sensing had barely begun. Because there was nothing else available, the department initially bought commercial machines of the type used, for example, by American steel mills to prevent contaminated scrap from entering their facilities. To Wagner's disappointment, the number and sophistication of these sensors fell considerably short of what had been envisioned. From Hadrian's Wall to the Maginot Line to ballistic-missile defense, Emperors and Presidents have often preferred dramatic defensive innovations, even implausible ones, to incremental improvements. Radiation sensing is, of course, a passive defense, similar to a fence. Missile defense, by contrast, may be destabilizing, because it encourages states that hold missiles to improve their arsenals. Widespread radiation detection might prompt terrorists and criminals to improve their smuggling techniques, but it cannot, in itself, change the military balance. Jeffrey Lewis, a nonproliferation specialist at the New America Foundation, said that radiation sensors had probably attracted support within the Bush Administration because they appeal to the instincts of defense thinkers who want to act boldly in the world but are also, at heart, isolationists. "You don't have to go mess with the difficult diplomacy of getting the Pakistanis to secure their material if you can ring the country with interceptors, or ring the country with detectors," he said. "Even if it's ineffective, it's something that we can do entirely ourselves-that's just really appealing to these guys." Critics of Wagner's ideas say that he is too optimistic about the long-term potential of sensor technology, and that heavy spending on detectors will divert resources from the more important work of securing or eliminating dangerous nuclear materials-plutonium, highly enriched uranium, and dirty-bomb components. There are, for example, roughly a hundred and thirty-five civilian research reactors worldwide, including a number in the United States, that continue to use highly enriched uranium; some of these facilities have worrisome security. Sensors will never be effective enough against smuggled highly enriched uranium to justify the cost, Thomas Cochran, the director of the nuclear program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, argues. And while detectors might be more effective against dirty-bomb isotopes, Cochran says, the risks don't justify the expenditures. "That's not to say you should do nothing, but most of these things are going to be caught by good intelligence and not by the borders," Cochran said. He believes that the country would be much safer much faster if the federal government would concentrate on the painstaking challenge of reducing the number of nuclear weapons and materials at home and abroad. Bush Administration officials I spoke with said that they are already spending more than one billion dollars each year to secure nuclear materials in Russia and elsewhere. "Obviously, the very first thing you want to do is make sure that nuclear warheads and special nuclear material within known facilities is secure," William Tobey, who oversees nonproliferation programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration, said. "But work is either under way or complete at all such facilities that we've been allowed access to in Russia. So, then, once you've got that work under way, you want to make sure that if, for some reason, your systems are not perfect-and our systems are human, so they're likely not to be perfect-that you've got another way of managing the problem. And that becomes detection at borders." * from the issue * cartoon bank * e-mail this The defense bureaucracy that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have built seems to gravitate toward military men and others who share Cheney's sense that the terrorist attacks of September 11th were transformational. Joseph Krol, who oversees NEST, for example, is a retired rear admiral who was in charge of Navy operations at the Pentagon when American Airlines Flight 77 struck the building; twenty-eight men and women under his command died that day. "The idea of a nuclear event is a low-probability event, but we have taken it seriously, to the extent that we have developed a real capability," he told me. "You could look at it and say, `Well, maybe you're spending a little too much money on this low-probability event.' But the outcomes of such an event are so disastrous that it's worth our attention." On September 9, 2004, a division of Halliburton dispatched from Russia to Houston, via air freight, a diagnostic tool used in oil fields which contained eighteen and a half curies of americium-241. (A curie is a measure of radioactivity.) That much americium, a Department of Energy official said, "would make a pretty nasty dirty bomb." The tool passed through Amsterdam and Luxembourg and then cleared Customs at John F. Kennedy International Airport on October 9th, where it was supposed to be picked up by a freight company and sent on to Houston. But the shipment disappeared. Nobody at Halliburton, which relied in part on outside shipping contractors, noticed that it was missing until February 7th. Halliburton's Radiation Safety officer contacted the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's operations center the following day. The F.B.I. immediately sent agents to search for the missing tool, according to documents and statements later obtained by the staff of Representative Edward J. Markey, of Massachusetts. By using surveillance-camera footage at Kennedy, the agents tracked the shipment to a warehouse outside Boston, where the americium had been trucked by mistake and set aside. A subsequent N.R.C. inspection of Halliburton found that workers in the company's shipping department were "often unaware of the specifics of the routing of each shipment" of radioactive materials. The Bush Administration's fixation on radiation sensors has not been accompanied by a comparably ambitious drive to fund, for example, increased inspections of companies that hold commercial nuclear material that could be used to build dirty bombs, and, as a result, the country's regulatory system in this area remains strikingly weak. For decades, the purpose of government regulation of trade in portable nuclear materials was to protect workers and the public from the effects of accidental exposure to radiation; much of the day-to-day responsibility rested on compliance by private businesses. Until September 11th, the possibility that a terrorist might mount an attack using commercial radioactive isotopes received very little attention. In 2002, after it had become clear that Al Qaeda or its followers might be seeking radioactive material, the N.R.C. and the Department of Energy formed a task force of physicists and engineers to study precisely what kinds, in what amounts, might be used effectively for dirty bombs. The I.A.E.A. conducted a similar study. The scientists who participated struggled with questions of bomb engineering and malicious intent which they had never before considered; among other things, they had to decide what level of skill could reasonably be attributed to an attacker. Edward McGaffigan, a commissioner at the N.R.C., said they assumed that they would be dealing with someone who knew some science- "Not super-smart, but certainly well above Jose Padilla." The result, in 2003, was a new system for identifying which materials were truly dangerous. The final official list contains only fifteen risky isotopes. (Other commercial isotopes, such as polonium, which was employed in London last autumn to murder the former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, can kill individuals or small groups but cannot cause damaging long-term ground contamination; these materials are not classified as a security risk.) Because of their widespread availability and their potency, the isotopes of greatest concern are cesium, cobalt, and americium. There are, for example, several hundred irradiation machines in the United States that employ large amounts of cobalt and cesium, and thousands more of these machines are scattered around the world under light control-Ethiopia has at least one, and Ukraine has at least a hundred. Investigators in Markey's office, searching the Web, found one such machine, with its entire stockpile of cobalt, available for free, provided that a customer would haul the material away; the machine was in Lebanon. In the United States, between 1994 and 2005, the N.R.C. recorded sixty-one domestic cases of stolen or lost isotopes in amounts that would clearly be useful to someone making a dirty bomb, although the majority of these involved iridium-192, which loses its potency fairly quickly. It is not clear whether the commission's records describe all or even most of the problem cases. Among other things, the N.R.C.'s records of materials that entered the American marketplace before 1994 are generally unreliable. Problematic batches from earlier eras are missing. Some are associated with the bizarre case of the Gammator, a nineteen-sixties-era research contraption filled with dangerous amounts of cesium that was distributed by the Atomic Energy Commission to schools, hospitals, and private firms to promote nuclear understanding. Several Gammators sent to New York and New Jersey, as well as other places, have never been found. There is continued demand for isotopes that can attack cancer cells, sterilize medical or industrial instruments, or efficiently detect cracks in critical metal structures, such as oil pipelines, in remote locations. In the United States, there are now about fifty-four thousand licensed batches of radioactive materials that could be used in a dirty bomb, according to the N.R.C. The N.R.C. recently issued classified orders to American licensees-hospitals, clinics, universities, and corporations-instructing them to improve on-site security, but the commission lacks the budget to follow up with frequent inspections. Most of the N.R.C.'s revenue comes from fees extracted from nuclear utilities and businesses, not from Congress, and the nuclear industry lobbies heavily to keep its payments down. Under the country's patchwork system of state and federal regulation, most companies that hold dangerous commercial materials are inspected not by the N.R.C. but by thirty-four "Agreement" states, which have varying priorities and often inadequate resources. In December, 2005, investigators with the Government Accountability Office, who were testing the reliability of the country's radiation-detector system, successfully imported at simultaneous crossings on the Canadian and Mexican borders a dangerous quantity of dirty-bomb material by using false license and freight documents. Radiation sensors rang, but Customs officials did not question the validity of the import papers and, acting on their own discretion, allowed the material to go through. Even today, some of the states that are supposed to help Customs check such license records do not staff their operations centers around the clock. * from the issue * cartoon bank * e-mail this Companies and hospitals with large amounts of cobalt and cesium have no easy way to dispose of these substances if they cut back on a line of research or go out of business. "There is absolutely no way to dispose of that material commercially-I think that's a real problem," said Julia Whitworth, who leads a project at Los Alamos National Laboratory to recover and secure these "orphaned sources." In the past three years, Los Alamos has collected about five hundred large batches of cobalt, an indication of how many unwanted units of this substance are around. Licenses granted each year by the N.R.C. only exacerbate the problem, because the federal government has never built adequate disposal sites. Some companies just dump this material illegally or inadvertently. So much discarded radioactive material courses through the country's scrap-metal piles that steel companies face a serious risk of contaminating their plants and workers by accidentally melting hot junk. There have been thirty-five such accidents in the United States since 1982; cleanup costs can run as high as twenty-four million dollars per event, according to John Wittenborn, an attorney who represents the steel industry. The rules governing commercial materials make up the small print in the Federal Register. In America since September 11th, the political rewards and the big budgets have gone not to those who want to emphasize stricter regulations but to those who promise to catch terrorists in the act. The Domestic Nuclear Detection Office has a new-car smell. Its growing staff-about two hundred scientists, F.B.I. agents, military officers, and other officials-recently moved to larger quarters, a granite-and-glass building six blocks from the White House. Vayl Oxford, the director, who was appointed by President Bush, is a 1974 graduate of West Point. He is a mandarin in the national-security bureaucracy who wields influence by accumulating knowledge about complex, classified government operations, but whose role is largely invisible to the public. Oxford retired from the military in 1992; since then he has worked in the nuclear-weapons field, in such fictional-sounding divisions of the Pentagon as the Defense Special Weapons Agency. For a time, he studied the blast effects of nuclear bombs, and later, during the Clinton Administration, he worked on what he described as "the offensive aspects of counter-proliferation," meaning that he helped to evaluate weapons that could destroy an adversary's chemical, biological, or nuclear facilities. Oxford speaks in the clipped vernacular of his specialty; he refers to fission bombs and dirty bombs together as "rad-nuke," and to the problem of chemical and biological weapons as "chem-bio." Explaining his thinking after September 11th, he said, "We always thought that the rad-nuke issue was a prevention issue, as opposed to chem-bio, which is a lot about how fast and how effectively you can respond to an attack." We met recently in his office, where the model of a jet fighter on which he once worked is prominently displayed. He told me that his mandate from the White House has been "to develop what we called `a global nuclear-detection architecture.' " Oxford said that he sees threats from varied enemies, actual and hypothetical. "You've got the influence of A. Q. Khan-that, in my mind, is pretty devastating," he said. "I worry about the fragility of a government in Pakistan. What happens to its arsenal? I worry about weird uses of North Korean weapons, as opposed to a ballistic-missile attack that is easily attributable.. A lot of people think that at D.H.S. all we're focussed on is Al Qaeda. That's not here. This is looking at the nuclear threat from a broader perspective, and trying to figure out how to deal with it." To confront the threat of a dirty-bomb attack, Oxford favors an improved system for real-time tracking of all commercial nuclear materials in the United States, perhaps using tags that can be monitored by satellite. His office is urging manufacturers of large commercial sources to fortify their machines against attack, and he would like to see some materials replaced with less risky alternatives. Such campaigning has added a new degree of urgency to the Bush Administration's assessment of the threat. Later this year, the federal government will hold its annual, classified exercise involving top officials (known as TOP-OFF), in which these officials rehearse responses to a major disaster scenario. This year's scenario, an official familiar with the planning told me, will posit three simultaneous dirty-bomb explosions. Radiation detectors paid for by the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office currently screen about ninety per cent of cargo entering the United States from Canada and Mexico, as well as a similar percentage of private cars and trucks; they are also used to check about ninety per cent of incoming shipping containers. Oxford said that he plans to oversee the installation of enough detectors to screen ninety-eight per cent of imported maritime cargo by the end of the year. Creative terrorists, like drug smugglers, might then try to enter with small boats, or sneak across the land border, he said. Therefore, he is also trying to develop a more mobile system of radiation sensors on Coast Guard vessels, and at interior locations such as weigh stations, bridges, and tunnels. Oxford is promoting the next generation of sensor, called the Advanced Spectroscopic Portal, which has been undergoing tests in New York and at the Nevada Test Site. This machine can distinguish bananas from cesium, but it will be no more sensitive than current detectors in its ability to locate highly enriched uranium, a Department of Energy official involved with the detection program said. * from the issue * cartoon bank * e-mail this Finding highly enriched uranium is "a really hard problem," Oxford conceded. Customs inspectors already use imaging equipment to scan for unusual shielding inside some shipping containers, but his office is supporting research to investigate more mobile and effective systems. "We agree that solving this through passive systems alone is not sufficient," Oxford said. He compared the challenge to that undertaken during fifty years of research to support anti-submarine warfare during the Cold War. There, too, the challenge, he said, was to "extract unique signatures out of a very cluttered environment. It's not just the detector itself but the software algorithm and the signals-processing" that make such a system more or less effective. Even crude or faulty sensor systems might expose a sophisticated attacker, Oxford said. "I don't think it's ever possible to provide a hundred-per-cent shield; I don't think ballistic-missile defense ever believed that they would be able to do that. I think that every step and every defensive layer that we put in complicates an adversary's plan to be able to do this, and gives us other opportunities, to use other means.to try to identify that something may be planned." Fifteen years ago, many feared that a nuclear weapon might be bought or stolen by terrorists in the former Soviet Union. The country had large stockpiles of fission weapons and highly enriched uranium that were, in some cases, so poorly inventoried that nobody could say for sure how much material existed. Although Russia's resurgent security police and years of investment in nuclear security by the United States and other countries have reduced the dangers, international organized-crime networks still thrive in Russia and the smaller countries on its southern rim. The A. Q. Khan case has led some in the American defense bureaucracy to conclude that Pakistan is now a greater problem than Russia. India has large amounts of fissile material at civilian facilities and is a site of recurring, violent terrorist conspiracies. North Korea's dictator, Kim Jong Il, has a record of kidnapping and other erratic acts. A gloomy mind can readily devise plausible scenarios for nuclear terrorism in which any of these places might be a source of weapons or materials. As for potential targets, Al Qaeda's long-standing interest in New York, and its status as the largest seaport on the East Coast, has made the city, along with Washington, D.C., the focus of continual attention by the federal government since September 11th. Building a fission weapon, or even detonating a stolen one, would be a challenging task for conspirators who didn't have a government's budget and infrastructure behind them, but people who are knowledgeable about nuclear weapons believe that it can be done. The most difficult aspect of such a project is acquiring a sufficient amount of highly enriched uranium or plutonium; the engineering work required to make a crude bomb could likely be mastered by a group of scientists-perhaps as few as a dozen. To prove the point, in a recent article in Foreign Policy Jeffrey Lewis and Peter Zimmerman described a hypothetical terrorist plan to build a basic fission weapon on a hundred-and-fifty-acre ranch in a remote area of the United States. Their imaginary budget was ten million dollars, their team would consist of nineteen people, and they found that they could buy many of the parts required over the Internet. Their scheme was inspired by the more ambitious plans of the Japanese terrorist cult Aum Shinrikyo, which explored uranium mining in Australia during the nineteen-nineties before mounting a sarin-gas attack on the Tokyo subway. Any of these cases, however, would require a successful plan to move contraband nuclear materials across international borders; as with the movement of terrorists themselves, borders offer a relatively uncomplicated chance of detection. This ancient principle of defense, more than faith in the technology of radiation sensing, may explain the support that the Bush Administration's detector program has attracted so far. In the meantime, America's radiation-sensing system is, at least for now, detecting radioactive briefcase clasps, manhole covers, and chafing dishes. These are among the contaminated products caught by detectors recently at border crossings; in New York's seaports alone, there have been twenty such cases. On a recent morning when I visited a sensor outpost at the Port of Newark, four young Customs officers with pistols strapped to their belts huddled in a booth filled with computers as trucks rumbled through a line of radiation portals, which are shaped like metallic archways. The officers had joined Customs thinking that they would mainly battle narcotics traffickers; now they spend most of their time on terrorism issues, and they know more about isotopes than some high-school physics teachers do. Each time an alert in their booth sounds, a polite, calm computer voice speaks to them, as it did when I stopped by: "Gamma alert, lane six." This happens more than two hundred times per day at the Port of New York and New Jersey. The officers checked the driver's papers, scanned the truck's sides with a handheld isotope identifier, consulted their computer screens, and within minutes announced their conclusion: denture cleaners, potassium-40. They spoke in the bored, slightly sardonic tone common among police officers, as if they were reviewing a burglar's jimmying techniques. At some point, perhaps after the expenditure of a great amount of money, it will probably be cops like these, and not scientists or defense theorists, who decide where radiation detection should rank on the long and diverse list of counterterrorism techniques. The Department of Homeland Security recently announced an initiative to experiment with the installation of radiation detection at some bridges, tunnels, roadways, and waterways leading into Manhattan; later, the department hopes to surround other cities. The N.Y.P.D. fears that the sensors might prove to be too costly and would generate too many false alarms. Nearly three hundred thousand cars and trucks cross the George Washington Bridge in both directions on an average day; without an efficient way to process radiation alerts, a single convoy of banana trucks could jam up traffic for hours. "There are a lot of possible concerns that could surface with it," Raymond Kelly, the N.Y.P.D.'s commissioner, told me. Yet, he said, "we see this as something certainly worth trying." Kelly wants to deploy rings of sensors fifty miles or more from New York, so there would be a better chance of spotting an incoming device. In February, he held talks with his counterparts in Connecticut and New Jersey. Still, Kelly said, the entire project remains "very conceptual in nature." ***************************************************************** 38 Guardian Unlimited: Congo Official Arrested in Uranium Sale From the Associated Press Thursday March 8, 2007 2:46 AM By EDDY ISANGO Associated Press Writer KINSHASA, Congo (AP) - The head of Congo's atomic energy commission has been arrested on suspicion of illegally selling uranium found in the Central African mineral giant, officials said Wednesday. Fortunat Lumu, the director of the country's only nuclear center, and one of his aides were arrested Tuesday ``because they were accused of having illicitly sold a quantity of uranium,'' Attorney General Tshimanga Mukendi said. Mukendi refused to give information on the amount of uranium or the alleged buyer, saying those details were part of an investigation. He added only that they were accused of orchestrating illicit contracts to produce and sell uranium. National police representative Michel Kanka confirmed the arrest, but also refused to give details. In August, Congo's government emphatically denied a report in The Sunday Times of London that a uranium shipment left its territory in 2005 bound for Iran, saying the dangerous element was tightly controlled by international agencies. Officials declined to say if there was any connection between the arrest and the alleged 2005 shipment. The Sunday Times said the uranium was suspected of being extracted illegally from Congo's southeastern Shinkolobwe mine, which was closed in 1961. Uranium can be used to breed plutonium, which is used both in nuclear warheads and as fuel for nuclear reactors. Lumu, as head of Congo's small nuclear reactor built for research just before Congo's 1960 independence, would likely have had access to the uranium, but it was unclear if in any large quantities. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007 ***************************************************************** 39 McClatchy Washington Bureau: Bush administration rejects purchase of radiation drug 03/07/2007 | By Greg Gordon McClatchy Newspapers Handout via Hollis-Eden Pharmaceuticals/MCT In another setback for the government's troubled BioShield program, the Bush administration on Wednesday withdrew a proposal to buy a pioneering drug to treat up to 100,000 radiation victims in the event of a nuclear or "dirty bomb" attack. WASHINGTON - In another setback to the government's efforts to defend against nuclear or radiological weapons, the Bush administration on Wednesday halted plans to buy a pioneering drug to treat victims of a potential attack. Department of Health and Human Services officials said that no available product met the government's requirements. The agency had debated for more than a year whether to award a contract for enough medicine to treat up to 100,000 people to a California biotech company. The company says its drug protects bone marrow, the vital blood-forming tissue that's most susceptible to radiation. The controversial decision drew criticism from members of Congress and was yet another stumble for the Project BioShield program, which was created to stockpile drugs that could limit casualties in a biological, chemical, radiological or nuclear attack. It also leaves the government with an emergency stockpile of outdated anti-radiation drugs, even as Bush administration officials warn of the mounting threat of a nuclear or "dirty bomb" attack. In postponing a decision three times since last summer, HHS officials had expressed concerns that the drug, developed by military researchers and licensed to San Diego-based Hollis-Eden Pharmaceuticals Inc., must be administered within four hours of radiation exposure. That could limit its use against acute radiation syndrome, the officials said, because first responders are unlikely to be able to reach most victims in a nuclear blast zone for at least 24 hours. The company, which has lobbied Washington aggressively, argued that the drug could be deployed strategically to overcome the time limit. Instead, the government will rewrite its criteria and open a new round of bidding. HHS spokesman Bill Hall said he couldn't discuss why the Hollis-Eden drug was rejected or whether others were considered, calling such information "sensitive" and "proprietary." "We determined after very rigorous scientific and technical review that no competing product out there met our requirements," he said. "That doesn't change our commitment for purchasing products for all types of radiological and nuclear threats." Richard Hollis, Hollis-Eden's chairman and chief executive officer, expressed shock at the decision. "We've been told all along that we were in the competitive range," he said, adding that the company had "met and exceeded" the proposal's requirements. "In October, we were told we were moving towards a final proposal and award." Wednesday's decision is the latest setback for Project BioShield, whose mission is to spend $5.6 billion over 10 years to build a stockpile of medicines in the event that terrorists unleash a biological, chemical, radiological or nuclear attack. Last December, the agency canceled an $877 million contract with VaxGen Inc. to develop a new vaccine to protect people who inhale deadly anthrax germs because the company had missed performance milestones. To date, the BioShield program has spent nearly $800 million on drugs for biological threats and $27.6 million on radiation treatments. At least two senior members of Congress greeted Wednesday's decision with deep concern. "It seems as though HHS has dropped the ball," said Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. He said a committee panel would hold a hearing on the issue next month. Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., who as chairman of the House Government Reform Committee called Hollis to testify last year, considers it "unacceptable that we continue to lack medical countermeasures to radiation poisoning," spokesman Brian McNicoll said. The decision was a major blow to Hollis-Eden, a small biotech firm that was coaxed into spending more than $85 million to pursue the contract by military researchers who developed the drug after searching for anti-radiation medicine for more than 30 years. Defenders of the drug, which Hollis-Eden planned to market as Neumune, argued that it requires no refrigeration and could be deployed in advance so it would be readily accessible to emergency responders. They said it could be used for hundreds of thousands of people fleeing radioactive fallout stretching 200 miles or more. People potentially exposed to radiation from a dirty bomb, in which conventional explosives would spread radiation in a section of a city, or from an accident or terrorist attack at a nuclear power plant might be able to scurry out of the hot zone for quick treatment, they argued. Gerard Wagemaker, a world-renowned bone marrow expert at the Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, who's consulted for the company, said the drug would save a "a very small percentage of the population" in the outer ring of a nuclear blast zone. Those who got the heaviest radiation doses, he said, would die from damage to their gastrointestinal tracts and brains or from skin burns. But he called the drug, which still needs to clear pivotal safety trials to win Food and Drug Administration approval, a "potential breakthrough." Neumune, which requires five daily injections, is one of only two compounds shown in animal studies to regenerate life-sustaining bone-marrow stem cells, and the other drug has shown adverse effects. Radiation kills white blood cells, which are the body's main defense in fighting infections, and platelets, the clotting component in blood that prevents a person from unchecked internal bleeding. Neumune, derived from a naturally occurring steroid hormone, was shown in monkey studies to promote the growth of both white blood cells and platelets. ***************************************************************** 40 ContraCostaTimes.com: Emissions worries sink lab's explosives permits 03/08/2007 | TRACY: Site 300 had expanded permission for detonations, but residents' fears of nuclear fallout led to their retraction By Betsy Mason CONTRA COSTA TIMES Permits for high explosives tests planned for Livermore Lab's Site 300 were canceled Tuesday by the San Joaquin Air Pollution Control District. In November, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory was given permission to expand testing at the site near Tracy from the equivalent of 1,000 pounds of TNT per year to 8,000 pounds annually and up to 350 pounds in a single day. The Pollution Control District canceled the permits "out of an abundance of caution," said Seyed Sadredin, the district's executive director. "The lab did not disclose that there were radioactive emissions associated with this process," Sadredin said. "We've decided, given the community concern, it warrants additional review." While the tests would not involve nuclear explosions, they could contain small amounts of depleted uranium. Releases into the air from the tests would be well below regulatory levels for radioactive materials and particulate matter, said lab spokeswoman Lynda Seaver. The lab had three 350-pound outdoor tests planned over the next 18 months related to the Department of Energy's Stockpile Stewardship program to maintain the nation's nuclear weapons. The tests would help scientists understand the effects of aging on the explosives used to detonate nuclear weapons. "This is national security work," Seaver said. Tracy resident Bob Sarvey, owner of Sarvey Shoes, had filed an appeal when he learned of the new permits. He said he acted out of concern about radioactive fallout from the blasts as well as the noise level and the potential for broken windows and cracked plaster in Tracy buildings. "I live not far from the site," Sarvey said. "I didn't want them shooting depleted uranium all over town." Seaver said the lab would reapply for the permits and provide whatever additional environmental documents were needed. "We're confident that whatever is holding this up will be resolved," she said. Sadredin said if the lab reapplies for the permits, the agency would do a full risk analysis related to the radioactive material. "I want to take a close look at it as opposed to relying on the lab's characterization of it," Sadredin said. Site 300 is located on the Alameda-San Joaquin county line. It is 17 miles east of Livermore and nine miles west of Tracy. Betsy Mason covers science and the national laboratories. Reach her at bmason@cctimes.com ***************************************************************** 41 North County Times: Are energy needs worth kids' health? - Last modified Wednesday, March 7, 2007 7:09 PM PST By: ROCHELLE BECKER - Commentary: Is our choice of energy generation increasing cancer risks for our children? Connections between radiation, gene mutation and cancer have been studied extensively for decades. In 2006, the EPA, National Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences confirmed that the risk of cancer for females due to radioactive sources exceeds the risk for males by 37.5 percent and is significantly more pronounced in children. Multigenerational risks are also involved because ova are formed while females are in utero -- a nightmare for today's parents raising children in a world with higher radiation levels and a society with exponentially increasing health costs for preventable cancers. Radioactive byproducts of nuclear generation can cause cancer. This was acknowledged at a recent forum of the League of Women Voters in San Diego, where a Southern California Edison spokesperson's solution was to "find a cure for cancer; then nuclear power will not be a risk." This mind-set reinforces the myth that nuclear power is the only large-scale solution to global warming. The deadly byproduct of high-level radioactive waste is simply dismissed. No country has a permanent solution to the safe disposal of highly radioactive waste. The temporary solutions of reprocessing and digging holes for waste storage have diverted billions of taxpayer dollars from funding a real solution. The responsible answer is to phase out sources of increasing radiation until a permanent safe solution exists -- not merely rely on promises of "trust us, an answer is forthcoming." A radioactive leak discovered last summer at the San Onofre Nuclear Plant was one of the seven sites with tritium leaks that have drifted offsite of nuclear facilities. One gram of tritium (approximately the weight of a quarter teaspoon of salt) in water will contaminate almost 500 billion gallons of water up to the current drinking water limit of 20,000 picocuries per liter set by the EPA. Yet a spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees safety at nuclear plants, sought to downplay the public relations fallout from this rash of tritium leak discoveries by stating: "A person could drink 130 gallons of the most radioactive water found under the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station last week and still have no cause for health concern." Protect our children -- your children and grandchildren. Please call, e-mail or write a letter to Gov. Schwarzenegger -- at (916) 445-2841; State Capitol, Sacramento, CA 95814; and http://www.govmail.ca.gov -- to express your concern that license renewals for California's reactors to produce hundreds of tons of additional radioactive waste must be disallowed until the Energy Commission's study on full costs, benefits and risks of relying on aging nuclear plants is complete, adopted and all recommendations are implemented. Encourage our governor to continue to support a truly clean energy future with the vision to make our state the poster child for the state, nation and world. Finally, we invite you to become involved in the efforts of the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility (www.a4nr.org) to phase out the production of highly radioactive waste that will be left on our coast long after the last kilowatt is generated. -- Pacific Beach resident Rochelle Becker is executive director of the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility. Comments On This Story Nick wrote on March 08, 2007 8:24 AM:"Oh yeah, San Onofre is causing cancer in all of our kids. Give me a break. I'm sure that all the crap parents are feeding their kids have nothing to do with it. Let's see, soda's and junk food in school vending machines, fast food, and all the preservatives in the junk you are buying at the grovery store, there's your problem. people need to pull their heads out and feed their children properly. Maybe then you wouldn't see so many fat and obese kids and the the child diabetes rate might actually go down. When I was a kid, there were only a few overweight kids in school, now it seems to be the norm. Read the label people, the real culprit is HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP. 15 years ago, the food industry rarely used this stuff. Now. it's in about 85 % of the things you eat and drink. Take responsibility for your kids and yourselves, and stop blaming others. If they would have built A few more Nuclear power plants and Desalination plants 20 years ago, Souther California wouldn't be in the dire straights it's in today. Of course, the millions and millions of ILLEGAL immigrants in California aren't doing anything but helping to drain what little resources we have left. Use your heads people." Ron wrote on March 08, 2007 10:22 AM:"This is a tragic example of fear mongering. In the minds of these enviro-socialists, there aren't any good sources of energy. Even the wind power, or hydro, or solar they seem to promote, they fight from being implemented. The Sierra Club claims wind turbines kill birds and ruins scenic views. They fight placement of new hydro-electric sites claiming they ruin existing nesting grounds, or other animal life. My basic point is: They want you to go back to horses and buggy's. That is what they want in a nut shell. " Add Your Comments or Letter to the Editor First name only. Comments including last names, contact addresses, email addresses or phone numbers will be deleted. All comments are screened before they appear online, so please keep them brief. Comments reflect the views of those commenting and not necessarily those of the North County Times or its staff writers. Click here to view additional comment policies. NOTE: To limit spam, we now require verification of a code to post comments to archived stories. webmaster@nctimes.com © 1997-2007 North County Times ? Lee Enterprises editor@nctimes.com ***************************************************************** 42 SF Chron: FRESNO / Mock nuke blast permit revoked / Bombs would contain radioactive material Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer Thursday, March 8, 2007 The San Joaquin Air Pollution Control District landed a blow to the federal government's efforts to test its nuclear weapons arsenal by rescinding its decision to allow the lab to blow up radioactive 350-pound bombs in an open field near Tracy. The tests, planned for an open field off Interstate 580 in the Altamont Hills, were to be part of a multibillion-dollar U.S. effort to simulate full-scale nuclear weapons blasts to determine the reliability of the nation's nuclear arsenal. Three tests were to be conducted over the next 18 months on Site 300, a 7,000-acre site owned by the lab, but lab officials didn't fully disclose everything that was to be involved -- that the explosions would contain a radioactive material called depleted uranium. "They did not tell us they had radioactive emissions (in the explosives)," agency executive director Seyed Sadredin told The Chronicle. "I'm not saying they tried to hide it. They did not think it (the radioactivity) was significant." Lab officials said they had not formally decided how to react to the agency's rescinding of the permit. Lawrence Livermore Lab spokesman David Schwoegler defended the failure of lab officials to mention the radioactivity in the original permit application. "Generally, depleted uranium is not considered radioactive because its radioactivity level is so low as to be equal to or below background level," he said. "It is in the ballast of every sailboat and jetliner in commercial use." The agency's decision, announced to lab officials and local activists Tuesday afternoon, was made public Wednesday. Because the United States stopped testing real nuclear bombs in 1992, it has no direct way to ensure the reliability of the nuclear weapons arsenal. By detonating bombs using depleted uranium to simulate the fissionable plutonium that gives nuclear explosions their kick, officials can determine how well components of aging nuclear weapons are weathering the vicissitudes of time. Sadredin praised local residents who brought the lab's failure to mention the radioactivity issue to his attention. "I want to commend the people in the community that took the time and brought this to our attention and made us take another careful look at this," Sadredin said. A leading activist is Bob Sarvey, 20-year operator of Sarvey Shoes in Tracy. Many years ago, he told The Chronicle, a blast at Site 300 caused a long-distance shock wave that shattered a window in his home. "Fortunately, my baby girl wasn't in front of the window" at the time, he recalled. The rescinding was welcomed Wednesday as a "major victory. ... If these huge explosions had been allowed to go forward, the hills, nearby waterways, the workers and the surrounding community would have all been put at risk," said a statement from attorney Loulena Miles of Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment. E-mail Keay Davidson at kdavidson@sfchronicle.com. This article appeared on page B - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle ***************************************************************** 43 Chillicothe Gazette: Options for nuke workers www.chillicothegazette.com - Chillicothe, OH Thursday, March 8, 2007 Home nursing service available to those who qualify for program By ASHLEY LYKINS Gazette Staff Writer PIKETON -Employees of Professional Case Management said they just want former workers of nuclear and beryllium facilities with job-related diseases to know they have an option. Professional Case Management, an enrolled medical provider with the Department of Labor, offers in-home nursing services to workers who qualify for the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program. "We want to try to keep you out of the hospital and out of the nursing home," said Ron Elmlinger, vice president of clinical outreach and former weapons officer on a nuclear submarine in the Navy. "We want you to maintain the highest optimum level of health. If you worked at the plant and you're sick, it doesn't mean you don't have the opportunity to live life." There are two programs, Part B and Part E, available for workers who are part of the program, according to Professional Case Management. Part B is for both these types of employees who worked at a Department of Energy facility, such as the uranium enrichment plant in Piketon, and became sick with cancer from radiation, or those who worked at a beryllium-processing location and became ill with chronic beryllium disease. The former workers must prove to the government there is at least a 50 percent probability their cancer was caused from radiation exposure, which is calculated with a computer model. There are 22 types of cancer that can result from radiation. The latter workers simply have to take a blood test, which will tell whether they are allergic to beryllium; if so, it means they may acquire chronic beryllium disease and can receive free, lifelong observation but no financial payment. Workers who have the disease are eligible for benefits. Employees who qualify for Part B advantages can receive $150,000 and free medical benefits. Part E comes in for workers who didn't qualify under Part B; it is determined whether the illness resulted from radiation or other toxins, such as benzene, in the place of employment. If it is, the applicant can receive up to $250,000, depending on the amount of impairment and lost wages, and free health care for the disease. Workers at Energy Department facilities who have been awarded money from Part B can also apply for Part E. Employees of the Piketon plant also can qualify in another category: Special Exposure Cohort. The category was established for nuclear weapons employees who worked for at least 250 days before 1992 in either the Piketon plant, Paducah, Ky. or Oak Ridge, Tenn. plants, as well as at other U.S. plants at different times. If the employee obtained one of the 22 types of cancer caused by radiation, he or she automatically qualifies for benefits. There is "not a good history at these sites," said Elmlinger, describing the low level of monitoring of radiation exposure by workers in the past. "It was such a dirty facility." Those eligible through the program qualify for free in-home nursing through Professional Case Management, which many qualified employees and even area doctors haven't known about, said Tim Lerew, regional vice president of community relations. "Doctors now in southern Ohio are getting the message and writing the orders," he said. While in-home care can be provided for the diagnosis listed on the medical card given to recipients, with approval from a physician and the Labor Department, area nurses can care for other ailments. "If you see your health slipping, we want you to get ahold of us because we want to get the process started," said Elmlinger, noting the large amount of time the process can take. Two Chillicothe registered nurses work with Professional Case Management to provide care to residents. "You might not be sick now, but you may be later," said Karol Specht, one of the nurses. "It's important to start the process now." The nationwide health care service currently sees about 10 patients in Ohio, and they are all in Scioto, Pike and Jackson counties. There is one pending in Ross County, said Lerew. "It's building," said Tammy Hopper, another nurse, adding patients are reassured by the fact she and Specht are local nurses. "It's growing as the word gets out." The company also stresses patient advocacy, which Elmlinger said involves pointing patients in the right direction. "The main thing is we advise them," he said. "These are Cold War warriors and veterans." While the Piketon meeting, conducted at the Comfort Inn Conference Center, was the group's third in the area, Elmlinger said the service will always come back to raise awareness. "This area has such a need," he said. "We're just trying to get the word out." (Lykins can be reached at 772-9376 or via e-mail at anlykins@nncogannett.com) Ron Elmlinger, vice president of clinical outreach at Professional Case Management, explains the importance of knowing in-home health care is available to qualified workers who have a job-related illness from working in a nuclear or beryllium processing facility . For more information about Professional Case Management or the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program, call (888) 886-2281 or visit www.procasemanagement.com Copyright ©2007 Chillicothe Gazette ***************************************************************** 44 NAS: Project: Beryllium Alloy Exposures in Military Aerospace Applications PIN: BEST-K-05-03-A RSO: Martel, Susan Project Scope An ad hoc committee under the oversight of the standing Committee on Toxicology (COT) will conduct this study. In its first report, the committee will provide an independent review of the toxicologic, epidemiologic, and other relevant data on beryllium. The committee will also review carcinogenic and non-carcinogenic effects. In its second report, the committee will estimate chronic inhalation exposure levels for military personnel and civilian contractor workers that are unlikely to produce adverse health effects. The committee will provide carcinogenic risk estimates for various inhalation exposure levels. The committee will consider genetic susceptibility among worker subpopulations. If sufficient data are available, the committee will evaluate whether beryllium-alloy exposure levels should be different than those of other forms of beryllium because of differences in particle size. The committee will identify specific tests for workers surveillance and biomonitoring. The committee will also comment on the utility of the beryllium lymphocyte proliferation test (BeLPT). Specifically the committee will determine (1) the value of the borderline or a true positive test in predicting CBD, (2) its utility in worker's surveillance, (3) further follow up tests for workers with positive BeLPT (thin slice CT bronchoscopy, biopsy, etc.), (4) the likelihood of developing CBD after a true positive test, and (5) a standardized methodology to achieve consistent test results from different laboratories. The committee will evaluate whether there are more suitable tests that would have more accuracy as screening or surveillance tools. The committee will also identify data gaps relevant to risk assessment of beryllium alloys and make recommendations for further research. The project is sponsored by the U.S. Air Force. Start date: September 29, 2006. The first report will be issued in 12 months, and the final report in approximately 24 months. Project duration: 24 months Provide FEEDBACK on this project. Contact the Public Access Records Office to make an inquiry or to schedule an appointment to view project materials available to the public. Committee Membership Meetings Meeting 1 - 02/05/2007 Reports Reports having no URL can be seen at the Public Access Records Office Email: info@nas.edu ***************************************************************** 45 StarPhoenix: Uranium a cancer industry, anti-nuclear activist says Sask. largest uranium-producing region in world Jeremy Warren, The StarPhoenix Published: Thursday, March 08, 2007 Uranium mining is a cancer industry and the development of mines in northern Saskatchewan should stop, world-renowned anti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott told a Saskatoon audience on Wednesday night. Caldicott spoke to a near-capacity crowd at the Third Avenue United Church, which can seat about 1,100 people. The free event was sponsored by the Coalition for a Clean Green Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan has one of the world's largest deposits of high-quality uranium and is currently the largest uranium-producing region in the world, accounting for about 30 per cent of annual world uranium production, according to the provincial government. "We're in the belly of the beast," Caldicott said. "You're responsible for the nuclear weapons." About 88 per cent of the uranium shipped from Saskatchewan goes to global markets. The value of mineral sales for uranium in 2001 was $562 million, according to the province. "You have to close those uranium mines," Caldicott repeated throughout her speech, which was often followed by applause from the audience. Caldicott is co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, which was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The Australian pediatrician has spent the last 35 years fighting against the nuclear industry and has received 19 honorary doctoral degrees. She is the president of the Washingtonbased Nuclear Policy Research Institute and the Smithsonian Institute has named her one of the most infl uencial women of the 20th century. Uranium mining in Saskatchewan has become a hot topic of debate since Premier Lorne Calvert visited France, a major consumer of nuclear power, late last year and discussed the possibility of building a uranium refinery in the province. An October Sigma Analytics poll said three-quarters of Saskatchewan residents supported construction of uranium refining facilities in the province. A clear majority of respondents also said in they would support a nuclear reactor to generate electricity in the province. jjwarren@sp.canwest.com © The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon) 2007 © 2006 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks ***************************************************************** 46 TomPaine.com: Whistling Freedom March 08, 2007 Tom Devine is the Government Accountability Project's legal director. Effective congressional oversight requires safe channels for the flow of information. That means protecting whistleblowers, those who exercise freedom of speech when it counts, to challenge abuses of power that betray the public trust. They are the lifeblood for any credible anti-corruption campaign. Their rights will determine whether oversight uncovers the tip or the iceberg.  Last month, the House Government Reform Committee lived up to its name, unanimously approving legislation to replace the discredited Whistleblower Protection Act (WPA) with a gold standard for federal employee free speech rights. House leaders have promised an imminent floor vote to deliver on their commitment for government ethics reform. There is no time for the Senate to delay catching up. Over the next two years, every crucial political battle could depend on learning the truth from whistleblowers, so there is no excuse for delay with this reform. Active voters get it. A February Democracy Corps survey found 79 percent of regular voters more likely to support a Congress that passes “a strong whistleblower law to protect government employees from retribution if they report waste or corruption.” This was second in importance to them only to ensuring that the bureaucracy spends money on what it was approved for, instead of itself. Whistleblowers are poised to bear witness as the public’s eyes and ears about issues vital to our families, our bank accounts, and our national security. Look what they’ve accomplished without rights: * FDA scientist Dr. David Graham successfully exposed the dangers of the painkiller Vioxx, which caused over 50,000 fatal heart attacks in the United States. * NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen refused to cooperate with censorship of warnings about global warming, namely that we have a short window in which to change business as usual, or suffer serious and unpredictable consequences. The country heard the wakeup call. * Gary Aguirre’s case exposed the SEC’s possible vulnerability to massive corruption involving hedge funds, a vulnerability that could create a new wave of financial victims.  * A host of national security whistleblowers, modern Paul Reveres, have made a record of pre-9/11 warnings that were systematically ignored. They keep warning to this day: Inside the bureaucracy, few lessons have been learned.  Quick congressional action is imperative. Until that happens, they are defenseless. The severity of retaliatory acts by supervisors corresponds directly to how greatly they feel threatened. That translates to unprecedented peril over the next two years for whistleblowers who report wrongdoing to Congress. The law is currently professional suicide for federal employees. The WPA has become a trap that sustains secrecy enforced by repression, rubberstamping any retaliation whistleblowers challenge. Its paper rights are worthless, due to discredited enforcement channels. Since 2003, whistleblowers’ track record at administrative hearings is 0-33 for decisions on the merits. Judicial appeals are limited to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, a specialty court whose pro-government bias mirrors FISA’s on domestic surveillance. It has ruled against whistleblowers in 178 out of 180 decisions on the merits since Congress strengthened the law in 1994. Ironically, the free speech law has become the best reason why some 500,000 federal employees annually look the other way or remain silent observers after witnessing government lawlessness or waste. By contrast, corporate whistleblowers have access to jury trials in federal court to enforce their rights. After years of hearings, the current House reform bill restores the law’s original boundaries, in the process erasing the federal impact from last year’s Garcetti v. Ceballos Supreme Court decision that stripped government employees of all free speech rights while doing their jobs. It extends seamless, “best practices” whistleblower protection to all taxpayer-financed employees and finally provides normal access to court to enforce their rights From 2002 to 2006 Senate and House committees unanimously approved a legislative fix six times—and each time the effort was silently killed when congressional leadership refused to schedule floor votes. Last summer, Senate champions secured unanimous approval by attaching a modest version to the defense authorization bill. After White House objections, however, it vanished in the back rooms of a joint House-Senate committee. There is little work left for the new leadership—besides scheduling votes. This issue will be a test to see if new leadership is serious about reform. If they are, in a few months those who defend the public will have a fair chance to defend themselves. © 2007 TomPaine.com ( A Project of The Institute for America's ***************************************************************** 47 reviewjournal.com: Measure would speed licensing Mar. 07, 2007 Nevadans counter Yucca Mountain bill STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU WASHINGTON -- Shortly after the Department of Energy resurrected legislation Tuesday to speed the licensing of a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada's senators countered with their own bill to keep the waste at reactors where it is produced. "I don't have an exact number, but I'm betting it's at least 60 percent of the work we're doing this year ... we are redoing work that's been done before," said Ward Sproat, director of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management. Sproat blamed the need for the work on "management behaviors" creating a "willingness to put up with less than adequate quality; willingness to -- when issues are raised -- just let them sit, hope they go away." A new management team is working on the license application, which should be submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by June 30, 2008, Sproat said. But Sproat said the goal of opening a Yucca Mountain repository by 2017 will slip if Congress does not approve the department's bill. It would do the following: ? Give the department greater access to the nuclear waste fund, which totals about $19.5 billion, Sproat said. ? Permanently withdraw from public use the land at and surrounding Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. ? Remove the storage limit of 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain. Unless the storage limit is removed, Sproat said, he will have to ask Congress next year to approve a second nuclear waste repository to hold spent fuel that will be generated by the nation's nuclear power reactors and by additional plants that are on the drawing board. Congress approved $100 million less for Yucca Mountain this year than the Bush administration requested, Sproat said. The lower figure will not affect the license application, but it will delay engineering on a rail line to the repository. The Environmental Protection Agency's standards for radiation exposure from the repository are expected soon. But when the standards are released, Sproat expects another lawsuit, which will last "three or four years." Within the next three weeks, Sproat said he hopes to release figures on the total construction costs of the Yucca Mountain project. Nevada senators, who have battled the Energy Department over Yucca Mountain, unveiled their counter-measure later in the day. It would make the federal government responsible for monitoring the nuclear waste at reactor sites across the country. Sens. John Ensign, R-Nev., and Harry Reid, D-Nev., dismissed the Bush administration's Yucca Mountain bill. Ensign said the bill is "dead on arrival," and Reid described its chances as "pretty slim." Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., who is running for president and has an eye on winning Nevada's early Democratic caucus, also weighed in with a statement, which described the measure as "misguided policy." Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., called the bill "a last-ditch effort to try and bring this project back from the brink of total collapse." Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal, 1997 - 2007 Stephens Media | Privacy Statement ***************************************************************** 48 Las Vegas SUN: Jon Ralston on how a planned nuke dump will affect the presidential wannabes March 07, 2007 For a dead project, Yucca Mountain sure has lots of life. Or so it would seem from this week's developments, with the Department of Energy announcing new legislation designed to revivify the nuclear waste dump and the congressional delegation essentially responding that the DOE is propping up a corpse. So is this the administration's version of "Weekend With Bernie" or should the delegation be worried that this sequel, like the "Friday the 13th" series, is far from the last? Although I am convinced most Nevadans hardly think about the repository anymore, with all the peregrinations the project has traveled since "Screw Nevada I" two decades ago, I find it interesting this announcement comes one day after a leading contender for the GOP nomination, Arizona Sen. John McCain, expressed unabashed support for Yucca Mountain. And the impact on the presidential race in Nevada - perhaps on both sides as some Democratic hopefuls have mixed records at best - cannot be ignored, especially if the contest is relatively close here. The DOE's new bill is an exemplar of overkill - perhaps appropriate for a project presumed dead. Calling Yucca Mountain "critical to the nation's current and future energy and national security needs," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman unfurled the legislation that would eliminate a current cap on waste, accelerate the Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing procedures and in Orwellian DOEspeak "consolidate duplicative environmental reviews." Time for a whole new round of fornicating metaphors, my dear delegation. Or you could just attack the Bush administration and declare Yucca Mountain dead - again. Fulminateth Sen. Harry Reid: "This is just the department's latest attempt to breathe life into this dying beast and it will fail. As Senate majority leader I will continue to leverage my leadership position to prevent the dump from ever being built." Decryeth Rep. Shelley Berkley: "The Bush administration has renewed its attack on Nevada, and their goal is simple: Open Yucca Mountain at any cost." Later Tuesday, Reid and Sen. John Ensign announced a bill to obviate the need for the dump with on-site storage. See, it's dead. Reid's use of the word "leverage" is interesting and should be determinative as to Yucca's fate - while he is majority leader, that is. And the irony there is that Ensign, as head of the GOP Senate committee, is duty-bound to unseat his fellow Nevadan and put someone in control who is more likely to keep Yucca Mountain alive. Even a GOP leader of the Senate - and, less likely, one in the House - would be somewhat irrelevant if a president were elected who was opposed to the project. All of the candidates visiting our very important state will claim to be strong on the issue, but their words will mostly be hollow. And McCain's interviews over the weekend in Utah will be even more difficult than retreating from his Iraq position. The Deseret News ran a piece headlined, "McCain tells Utahns he backs nuclear storage" and recounted how the senator embarrassed Gov. Jon Huntsman, a dump opponent, by mocking transportation issues. "Oh, you have to travel through states ... I am for Yucca Mountain. I'm for storage facilities. It's a lot better than sitting outside power plants all over America," McCain told the newspaper, then added, "I don't mean to be sarcastic. I apologize. But I believe we can transport waste safely." No need to apologize until you get here, Senator. Maybe Nevadans don't care too much about the dump issue anymore. But that kind of enthusiasm for the project can't be helpful here in our very important state. I wouldn't be surprised to see Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney try to exploit those remarks when they visit. On the Democratic side, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson has portrayed himself as a friend of the state on Yucca. But as DOE secretary, he did nothing to stop the project and also dismissed transportation concerns. John Edwards has voted for the project, too, but Reid got his mind right later in his Senate term. Contrast that with Sen. Hillary Clinton, who saw an opportunity and jumped on Tuesday's developments to reiterate how she has "long opposed" the dump. This illustrates the point that is all too obvious despite all the funereal pronouncements by Reid, Berkley, et al. Yucca Mountain is not dead and will not be buried until an alternative is approved by Congress and the president. The DOE knows that and hence breathed new life into the project this week. Jon Ralston hosts the news discussion program "Face to Face With Jon Ralston" on Las Vegas ONE and publishes the daily e-mail newsletter "RalstonFlash.com." His column for the Las Vegas Sun appears Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Ralston can be reached at 870-7997 or at ralston@vegas.com. All contents copyright 2005 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 49 business.iafrica.com: business news Nuclear smelter process 'disturbing' Thu, 08 Mar 2007 AFP Concerned groups first found out about a report on a proposed nuclear waste smelter plant at Pelindaba, a day before the deadline for comments was due, the Pelindaba Working Group said on Wednesday. Spokesperson for the group, Dominique Gilbert, said it was when environmental group Earthlife Africa enquired about the progress on the Environmental Impact Assessment that it was told the report was completed and the deadline for comment on it was on Thursday. "This is a diabolical distortion of a public participation process intended to protect us and to provide a 'fair' chance for every individual to interact in these processes," she said. Refused to give info Mashile Phalane form Earthlife Africa told Sapa an official flatly refused to give him any information about the smelter. "They said they were not in position to divulge anything, and arrogantly told me to use legal means to get the information that I wanted, because I was not going to get anything from the department," said Phalane. "This shows arrogance on the part of the department and their behaviour shows they are not willing to involve the public in EIA processes on any nuclear projects," he added. Legal advice He said they were trying to get some legal advice on the matter, but feared that it was too late. The Nuclear Energy Corporation of SA (Necsa) in 2001 mooted a smelter to process radioactive metal on site at Pelindaba, and commercialising the smelter once its primary aim has been achieved. Neither Blessing Manale, the department's chief director for communications, or Environmental Affairs and Tourism Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk's spokesperson Riaan Aucamp could be reached for comment. Sapa Copyright © 2002-2005 iafrica.com, a division of Metropolis* - a ***************************************************************** 50 Dow Jones: UPDATE: DOE: Funds For Yucca Nuclear Waste Site Insufficient WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- Current funding levels from the U.S. Congress are insufficient to meet the mounting costs of building the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste depository in Nevada, a senior Department of Energy official told a Senate panel Wednesday. "Funding at current levels in future years will not be adequate to support design and the necessary concurrent capital purchases for repository construction, the transportation infrastructure, and the transportation and disposal casks," Director for Civilian Radioactive Waste Management Edward Sproat told the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water. "Sustained funding well above the current and historic levels will be required if the repository to be built," Sproat said. Congress approved $444.5 million for fiscal year 2007, $100 million less than the DOE requested. Lack of funding - with rising expected costs - is likely to have an impact on the scheduled opening date of 2017, Sproat said. While not critical to the program in FY2008, "it will have serious consequences in FY2009 and beyond," the director said. He also said that although the department was evaluating the impact of the lower-than-expected funding levels for this year, "it is likely but not yet certain that we will not be able to meet our best achievable schedule for opening the repository by March 2017," with at least a one-year slip likely. Sproat recommended to the committee that Congress allow the DOE access to interest from the $19.5 billion Nuclear Waste Fund as discretionary funding. It currently doesn't have this access. He later told reporters that there was sufficient funding from the interest from the fund - if Congress approved DOE access - to pay for construction for all but four to five years of peak construction activity. The fund was created to pay for a nuclear waste depository. Generators of high-level nuclear waste must pay a fee into the fund for every kilowatt hour of generation. Ranking committee member Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., said he thought the proposal to give the DOE access to the interest from the fund was worth consideration. Sproat said the department should meet the schedule to submit an application for the Yucca Mountain project by mid-2008. He said that for every year of delayed opening of the Yucca Mountain depository beyond 2017, it would increase potential liabilities to contract holders who have paid into the Nuclear Waste Fund by around $500 million. That is in addition to the estimated current liability of around $7 billion because the department didn't begin the removal of spent nuclear fuel in 1998. In February, U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said costs for the Yucca Mountain nuclear repository are likely to rise because of ongoing litigation and other delays in getting the program approved. Costs for construction of the facilities, including the transportation infrastructure, will reach $20 billion alone, up from the previously estimated $ 12-$13 billion, Bodman said. Furthermore, he said a previous estimate for an entire life-cycle cost of $58 billion is also considered outdated. The DOE said it would be able to produce a more accurate cost estimate once an application for the Yucca Mountain project is approved. Another top DOE official also said last month thatthe facility wouldn't likely become operational until around 2020, three years later than the planned 2017 opening date. But approval of the repository is in doubt because of objections from a growing grass-roots campaign, environmentalists and lawmakers. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is a key critic of the administration's plan to open the permanent waste site about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. He and other federal lawmakers have promised to block the plan. Subcommittee Chairman Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., said he hadn't yet decided whether he would support the Yucca Mountain project or seek to block it as Reid plans. "It's too early," he said, "these are really significant choices we have to make." Sproat also told the committee and reporters at the hearing that the DOE was considering the Mina Corridor railroad route to the depository as a less expensive alternative to the Caliente Corridor. He said the Mina route through a Native American reservation would be around $ 1 billion cheaper than the $2 billion Caliente route. The Mina Corridor was originally favored as a shorter and more feasible route, but the Walker River Paiute tribe told the DOE in the 1990s they wouldn't allow access, said a DOE official who declined to be named. The Paiute tribe last year wrote a letter to the DOE saying they would allow a study of the route. -By Ian Talley, Dow Jones Newswires; (202) 862-9285; ian.talley@dowjones.com (END) Dow Jones Newswires 03-07-071944ET Copyright (c) 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. ***************************************************************** 51 KNDO/KNDU: Report Says Public Support Key to GNEP at Hanford Tri-Cities, Yakima, WA | Public Support of Hanford Will Affect DOE's Decision PASCO, Wash.- Just days until a public meeting, and a new report shows that public support for the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership may be the telling factor in which sites the Energy Department chooses. One of the major factors the Department of Energy will weigh when they make a final siting decision is how the surrounding public supports the project. Hanford is one of eleven sites being looked at nationally. Supporters say it already has many of the necessary resources to get things like a fast-reactor going, more than other proposed sites, but if the public doesn't show support, DOE probably wouldn't choose it. "It is the issue, it is the issue, and I think what department of energy is going to do is they're going to take a report card and go out to different sites, take a reading about participation," said GNEP would study ways to reuse spent nuclear fuel and possibly restart FFTF to research and possibly produce medical isotopes. A public meeting is scheduled for Tuesday March 13 at the Red Lion in Pasco. Report Says Public Support Key to GNEP at Hanford Just days until a public meeting, and a new report shows that public support for the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership may be the telling factor in which sites the Energy Department chooses. All content © Copyright 2000 - 2007 WorldNow and KNDO/KNDU. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 52 Whitehaven News: UK told to speed up hunt for nuclear waste store Published on 08/03/2007 THE International Energy Agency has warned Britain that it has to speed up its hunt for a solution to the storage of nuclear waste. The UK must catch up with countries such as Finland and France in solving its nuclear waste problem if it is to succeed in building a new generation of nuclear plants, the International Energy Agency, the developed country’s energy watchdog, said last week. Claude Mandil, executive director of the IEA, said: “Nuclear will not be developed if there is not a credible, satisfactory answer to nuclear waste.” Mr Mandil said that to balance the UK’s sources of power, “we think that nuclear has to be a part of the mix.” However, he added that winning public support would be critical, saying “You never in any country in the world have nuclear power against public opinion.” The government had been due to publish a white paper in May that could give a green light for new nuclear power plants. But the issue has become clouded after Greenpeace won a court ruling that the consultation on the energy white paper had been flawed. *Meanwhile homeowners across the UK have snapped up all the £½ million a month in grant aid for wind turbines. www.whitehaven-news.co.uk/digitalcopy ***************************************************************** 53 Whitehaven News: Fluor have something to celebrate Published on 08/03/2007 THE TEXAN multinational that hopes to win the contract for Sellafield was celebrating last week. Fluor Limited, the UK operating arm of Fluor Corporation celebrated the company’s 50th anniversary of continuous operations in the United Kingdom. A formal celebration to mark the occasion was held in London. Fluor Limited has four offices including one at Westlakes. The company employs nearly 2,000 people in the UK. Since opening its first UK office in the late 1950s, Fluor Limited has provided a base for projects in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. “Fluor’s history here in the UK began with only a handful of people in a small office in Hyde Park. From that humble beginning, we’ve been able to grow and expand because of the great clients we’ve been able to work with and because of our exceptional employees,” said Fluor’s chairman and CEO Alan Boeckmann. “Over the years, our work here has included some of the largest and most high-profile engineering and construction projects in the world which we have completed successfully while demonstrating Fluor’s strong tradition of safety and contribution to the communities in which we work. We look forward to adding to that history in the decades to come. Today, Fluor’s portfolio of projects is our strongest and most diverse ever during our 50 year history,” said Patrick Flaherty, managing director of Fluor Limited. “We are proud to be able to serve a large number of clients in diverse business sectors including: energy and chemicals; power; nuclear decommissioning; manufacturing and life sciences; transportation and telecommunications to name a few.” www.whitehaven-news.co.uk/digitalcopy ***************************************************************** 54 Whitehaven News: Calder Hall contract awarded Published on 08/03/2007 THE pilot contract to decommission a heat exchanger at the Calder Hall nuclear reactor has been awarded to NUKEM Ltd. They have won the Calder Hall Heat Exchanger Deplanting Pilot Project, at a value of approximately ÂŁ4M. This project is directly in support of the Nuclear Decommissioning & Major Project Group at Sellafield. The Calder Hall Heat Exchanger Deplanting Pilot Project covers the removal and lay down of two heat exchanger vessels including all of the associated pre-works and preparations. Work will involve geo-technical surveys and testing; civil mechanical and electrical works; demolition; vessel deplanting; preparation of the vessel lay down area, and transport and safestore of the vessel. reproduction, just like the printed copy at www.whitehaven-news.co.uk/digitalcopy ***************************************************************** 55 BBC NEWS: Gorbachev attacks Trident plans Last Updated: Thursday, 8 March 2007, 12:21 GMT Mr Gorbachev is 'astonished' by UK's nuclear policy Ex-president of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev has joined calls for Tony Blair to abandon plans to replace Britain's Trident nuclear missiles. He accused Mr Blair of ignoring the spirit of the treaties which ended the Cold War nuclear stand-off. In a letter to The Times, he said the "responsible course of action" would be to delay a decision until the next non-proliferation talks in 2010. The crucial commons vote will be on whether to acquire a new generation of nuclear submarines and Trident missiles, maintaining the deterrent into the middle of the century. The government is expected to win support for replacing Trident, with Conservative backing. Talks The Liberal Democrats, who also favour delaying a decision on replacing Trident, will vote against renewing the government's policy. At the weekend, Lib Dem leader Sir Menzies Campbell saw off a challenge from unilateralists in his own party at its spring conference in Harrogate. Sir Menzies favours halving the number of warheads stockpiled by the UK but delaying a decision on replacing them until 2014 in order to give the UK leverage in non-proliferation talks. Mr Gorbachev, whose glasnost, or openness, policy was credited with hastening the end of the Cold War, and the break-up of the Soviet Union, also urged the British government to delay a decision on Trident. In his letter to The Times, Mr Gorbachev pointed to a warning by the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, that many countries were already reluctant to ratify an additional protocol to the Non-Proliferation Treaty imposing more effective nuclear controls. "Under such circumstances the UK government's rush to deploy nuclear missiles whose service life would extend until 2050 is, to say the least, astonishing," he wrote. He went on: "The Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons commits the nuclear powers to effective measures of nuclear disarmament. * BBC Copyright Notice ***************************************************************** 56 Hanford News: Chromium may offer clue to leak This story was published Thursday, March 8th, 2007 Annette Cary, Herald staff writer Hanford workers have discovered by far the largest concentration yet of chromium polluting the ground water near the Columbia River. And that's a good thing. Several projects are under way to stop the chemical contamination from reaching the Columbia River near the D and DR reactors along the river. But the key to long-term cleanup will be figuring out where the contamination is getting into the ground water and eliminating the source. The spike in contamination near a former chromium transfer station may be an important clue. "We know we're at least close to one major source," said Mike Thompson, ground water geologist for the Department of Energy. "If we can find the source, we can clean it up." More than half of $10 million of a 2006 congressional earmark for ground water technology and cleanup projects at Hanford is being spent to solve problems with chromium that was used to prevent corrosion in the cooling systems of reactors producing plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons program. That included $650 million to see if the source of contamination could be identified near the D and DR reactors, which have the largest chromium plume near the Columbia River. Despite a decade of pumping out contaminated water there and treating chromium within the ground to turn it into a less-harmful form, there has not been a significant decrease in chromium contamination. DOE officials believe it's because somewhere in the several square miles around the reactors, chromium is getting into the ground water as fast as it is being removed from the water closer to the river. The areas near the reactors and between the reactors and the river are dotted with wells where water samples are taken. Some of those samples have been contaminated at 1,000 parts per billion of chromium . The drinking water standard is 100 parts per billion, and because the chemical is harmful to fish, including salmon that spawn in the Columbia, the limit for water in the river gravel beds is 10 parts per billion. Under the DOE project to narrow down the location of the potential source or sources of the contamination, contractor Fluor Hanford has begun to drill seven new wells about 105 feet deep. The first well found water with 758 parts per billion. The second found 465 parts per billion. The third well hit the jackpot. It found water so contaminated that it had a yellow tint and measured 10,580 parts per billion. That could mean "we've found the good stuff and can get it out of the ground," said John Price, manager for environmental restoration for the state Department of Ecology, one of Hanford's regulators. Four more wells could be drilled within the next few weeks to further identify the source of the contamination. The well with the high reading was drilled near a transfer station where chromium was emptied from railroad tanker trucks to be diluted and used. The area around the reactors is crossed with pipes that carried the chromium to the reactors. While a spill near the transfer station could be a major source of contamination, the contamination also could be coming from somewhere beneath a pipe or another source farther inland because the ground water moves toward the river. Data from the seven wells will be collected for six months. In addition, data are available from existing wells and are being collected from beneath pipes by Washington Closure Hanford, which is cleaning up the reactor area. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will analyze the data to come up with the most likely areas for contamination sources, and more wells could be drilled to confirm the locations. Work should be started on cleaning up the potential source in 18 months, said Briant Charboneau, DOE ground water remediation project director. © 2007 Tri-City Herald. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed ***************************************************************** 57 Hanford News: The Bush administration decides not to buy a drug to combat radiation damage from a nuclear terrorist attack This story was published Thursday, March 8th, 2007 By Greg Gordon, McClatchy Newspapers WASHINGTON -In another setback to the government's efforts to defend against nuclear or radiological weapons, the Bush administration on Wednesday halted plans to buy a pioneering drug to treat victims of a potential attack. Department of Health and Human Services officials said that no available product met the government's requirements. The agency had debated for more than a year whether to award a contract for enough medicine to treat up to 100,000 people to a California biotech company. The company says its drug protects bone marrow, the vital blood-forming tissue that's most susceptible to radiation. The controversial decision drew criticism from members of Congress and was yet another stumble for the Project BioShield program, which was created to stockpile drugs that could limit casualties in a biological, chemical, radiological or nuclear attack. It also leaves the government with an emergency stockpile of outdated anti-radiation drugs, even as Bush administration officials warn of the mounting threat of a nuclear or "dirty bomb" attack. In postponing a decision three times since last summer, HHS officials had expressed concerns that the drug, developed by military researchers and licensed to San Diego-based Hollis-Eden Pharmaceuticals Inc., must be administered within four hours of radiation exposure. That could limit its use against acute radiation syndrome, the officials said, because first responders are unlikely to be able to reach most victims in a nuclear blast zone for at least 24 hours. The company, which has lobbied Washington aggressively, argued that the drug could be deployed strategically to overcome the time limit. Instead, the government will rewrite its criteria and open a new round of bidding. HHS spokesman Bill Hall said he couldn't discuss why the Hollis-Eden drug was rejected or whether others were considered, calling such information "sensitive" and "proprietary." "We determined after very rigorous scientific and technical review that no competing product out there met our requirements," he said. "That doesn't change our commitment for purchasing products for all types of radiological and nuclear threats." Richard Hollis, Hollis-Eden's chairman and chief executive officer, expressed shock at the decision. "We've been told all along that we were in the competitive range," he said, adding that the company had "met and exceeded" the proposal's requirements. "In October, we were told we were moving towards a final proposal and award." Wednesday's decision is the latest setback for Project BioShield, whose mission is to spend $5.6 billion over 10 years to build a stockpile of medicines in the event that terrorists unleash a biological, chemical, radiological or nuclear attack. Last December, the agency canceled an $877 million contract with VaxGen Inc. to develop a new vaccine to protect people who inhale deadly anthrax germs because the company had missed performance milestones. To date, the BioShield program has spent nearly $800 million on drugs for biological threats and $27.6 million on radiation treatments. At least two senior members of Congress greeted Wednesday's decision with deep concern. "It seems as though HHS has dropped the ball," said Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. He said a committee panel would hold a hearing on the issue next month. Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., who as chairman of the House Government Reform Committee called Hollis to testify last year, considers it "unacceptable that we continue to lack medical countermeasures to radiation poisoning," spokesman Brian McNicoll said. The decision was a major blow to Hollis-Eden, a small biotech firm that was coaxed into spending more than $85 million to pursue the contract by military researchers who developed the drug after searching for anti-radiation medicine for more than 30 years. Defenders of the drug, which Hollis-Eden planned to market as Neumune, argued that it requires no refrigeration and could be deployed in advance so it would be readily accessible to emergency responders. They said it could be used for hundreds of thousands of people fleeing radioactive fallout stretching 200 miles or more. People potentially exposed to radiation from a dirty bomb, in which conventional explosives would spread radiation in a section of a city, or from an accident or terrorist attack at a nuclear power plant might be able to scurry out of the hot zone for quick treatment, they argued. Gerard Wagemaker, a world-renowned bone marrow expert at the Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, who's consulted for the company, said the drug would save a "a very small percentage of the population" in the outer ring of a nuclear blast zone. Those who got the heaviest radiation doses, he said, would die from damage to their gastrointestinal tracts and brains or from skin burns. But he called the drug, which still needs to clear pivotal safety trials to win Food and Drug Administration approval, a "potential breakthrough." Neumune, which requires five daily injections, is one of only two compounds shown in animal studies to regenerate life-sustaining bone-marrow stem cells, and the other drug has shown adverse effects. Radiation kills white blood cells, which are the body's main defense in fighting infections, and platelets, the clotting component in blood that prevents a person from unchecked internal bleeding. Neumune, derived from a naturally occurring steroid hormone, was shown in monkey studies to promote the growth of both white blood cells and platelets. © 2007 Tri-City Herald. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 58 Recordnet.com: Lab's blast permit revoked Thursday March 8, 2007 - S.J. air district wants chance to review studies By Jake Armstrong Record Staff Writer TRACY - Air pollution regulators Tuesday revoked a permit allowing Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to more than triple the amount of explosives used in outdoor blasts at a high-explosives test range southwest of Tracy. Staff at the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District learned of environmental studies on the laboratory's test range, known as Site 300, and canceled the permit so those documents can be reviewed, said Catherine Redmond, an attorney for the district. The permit, approved in December, gave the lab the OK to increase the amount of explosives in tests from 100 pounds to 350 pounds a day with an annual limit of 8,000 pounds a year. Tracy shoe store owner and activist Bob Sarvey appealed the permit, saying the district did not properly consider the environmental impacts of increasing the size of explosions at Site 300 - a Superfund cleanup site - under the California Environmental Quality Act. Redmond said district staff learned of the environmental reports while researching Sarvey's claims and revoked the permit ahead of an appeal hearing Wednesday. "We just wanted to have a chance to review them," Redmond said, adding the lab will need to reapply for a permit. The district was unaware of several environmental impact reports and a site-wide environmental study, which lab officials have made available, Redmond said. Site 300 is contaminated with depleted uranium and tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen, and is adjacent to the proposed 5,500-home Tracy Hills development. In a written statement, Sarvey said he appealed the permit because the lab sought a quick approval on the larger blasts without informing the public of any possible health risks. The laboratory did not publicly announce it was seeking bigger blasts, but officials have said radioactive materials, such as depleted uranium, and sounds above 126 decibels do not reach beyond the fence line of the 11-square-mile facility. Revoking the permit is an abrupt turnaround from the district's position a month ago, when staff recommended a hearing board allow the permit to stand since the district does not have jurisdiction over the California Environmental Quality Act, only particulate matter and emissions. Three tests using from 300 to 350 pounds of explosives were planned at Site 300 through mid-2008. None of those tests have occurred, according to Lynda Seaver, a laboratory spokeswoman. She said the lab will reapply for the permit. Contact reporter Jake Armstrong at (209) 833-1141 or jarmstrong@recordnet.com. Reader Reaction These discussions and our forums are not moderated. We rely on users to police themselves, and flag inappropriate comments and behavior. You need not be registered to report abuse. In accordance with our Terms of Service, we reserve the right to remove any post at any time for any reason, and will restrict access of registered users who repeatedly violate our terms. Click here if you wish to report inappropriate comments or behavior. *Posts do not appear immediately. Copyright © 1998 - 2007 ONI Stockton, Inc., All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 59 San Jose Mercury: San Joaquin air officials rescind permit for testing nukes The Associated Press Article Launched: 03/07/2007 09:49:18 PM PST TRACY, Calif.- San Joaquin Valley air officials rescinded its decision to allow the federal government to test its nuclear weapons arsenal in the Altamont Hills after they learned the bombs would have radioactive material. The San Joaquin Air Pollution Control District initially granted a permit to the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory to test the 350-pound bombs on Site 300, a 7,000-acre open field owned by the lab off Interstate 580 near Tracy. But air officials changed course when they learned that the tests would involve depleted uranium. "They did not tell us they had radioactive emissions (in the explosives)," agency executive director Seyed Sadredin told the San Francisco Chronicle. "I'm not saying they tried to hide it. They did not think it (the radioactivity) was significant." Sadredin said the agency found out about the radioactivity after local residents who brought it to his attention. Lawrence Livermore lab spokesman David Schwoegler defended lab officials' decision not to mention the use of depleted uranium in the original permit application. "Generally, depleted uranium is not considered radioactive because its radioactivity level is so low as to be equal to or below background level," he said. "It is in the ballast of every sailboat and jetliner in commercial use." Schwoegler said lab officials have not decided how to respond to the agency's decision, which was made public Wednesday. The planned tests, which were to be conducted over the next 18 months, would have simulated full-scale nuclear weapons blasts. Because the U.S. halted testing of real nuclear bombs in 1992, officials have used depleted uranium to determine how well the nuclear weapons are holding up with age. "If these huge explosions had been allowed to go forward, the hills, nearby waterways, the workers and the surrounding community would have all been put at risk," Loulena Miles, staff attorney for Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment, said in a statement praising the agency's decision. ——— Information from: San Francisco Chronicle, http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle Copyright 2007 San Jose Mercury News ***************************************************************** 60 NMBW: Domenici blasts funding levels for DOE cleanup at LANL - New Mexico Business Weekly: 2:53 PM MST Thursday, March 8, 2007 U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-NM, criticized the decline in Department of Energy funding for environmental cleanup activities, saying it is adding billions of dollars to the cost of cleaning contaminated sites at places such as Los Alamos National Laboratory. Domenici, the ranking Republican on the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee, says the DOE's attempt to prioritize cleanups is pushing back completion dates on existing cleanup obligations. The FY2008 budget request for DOE environmental management cleanup is $5.6 billion, down from $7.3 billion in FY2005. However, the life-cycle cost of cleanup has increased $50 billion over the $173 billion baseline set in 2005, according to Domenici's office. LANL represents about $664 million of that increase. DOE entered into a consent agreement with the state of New Mexico two years ago for cleanup at the LANL site by 2015. Domenici says the current rate of funding could mean that deadline will be delayed by two years. The FY2008 budget recommends $140 million for LANL environmental management activities, which is equal to 2007 funding levels, but less than what LANL needs, he says. Contact the Editor Need Assistance? More Latest News © 2006 American City Business Journals, Inc. and its licensors. ***************************************************************** 61 Tracy Press: Bigger blasts nixed ... for now Niko Kyriakou Thursday, 08 March 2007 A local board has put the brakes on bigger bomb tests at Site 300. By Niko Kyriakou An appeal by local activist Robert Sarvey convinced air pollution regulators to revoke a permit that would have allowed Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to increase the size of explosive tests at Site 300 southwest of Tracy. "The pollution control district did the right thing to protect the health and safety of the citizens of Tracy," said Sarvey. Lawrence Livermore obtained a permit last November to detonate 350 pounds of TNT per day and up to 8,000 pounds per year — up from a previous 100-pound per day and a 1,000-pound per year limit. But the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District revoked that permit Tuesday after reviewing an appeal filed in December by Sarvey, owner of a local shoe store. Sarvey’s appeal questioned whether the Lab’s explosives tests, which sometimes use radioactive materials like depleted uranium and tritium, truly abide by state environmental laws. San Joaquin Air Pollution Control District Director Seyed Sadredin says the permits will remain invalid until his agency has reviewed whether the radioactive emissions, left out of the lab’s permit application, endanger local people. “They (the Lab) did not quantify the emissions or describe the radioactive emissions on their application,” said Sadredin. “We have to quantify those emissions and plug them into a risk assessment analysis and a sophisticated computer model to see the effect of emissions on people downwind.” So far, the district has only looked into the health impacts of nonradioactive toxic materials and fine dust released in the test blasts. Lawrence Livermore maintains that its tests abide by all state and federal laws. It argues radioactive materials were absent from its permit application because those substances fall under the federal jurisdiction of the Environmental Protection Agency. Sadredin said this is a question he plans to probe, but that some local regulations certainly apply to the Lab. “We do have a general nuisance rule that says you cannot release any emission that exposes health risk to population, vegetation or physical structures,” he said. “Our regulations do apply to federal facilities; it’s a question whether (the California Environmental Quality Act) would apply, or a federal requirement.” Sarvey says that the act requires the district to evaluate the risks of any “heavy metal” pollutants. He says the lab’s use of depleted uranium, which is not only slightly radioactive but also a heavy metal — which can cause neurological damage if accumulated inside the body in sufficient amounts — means that it is covered by the state’s environmental law. Sarvey insists that air regulators investigate the combined effects of heavy metals, particulate matter and radioactive emissions from the Site 300 outdoor explosive tests. “Any type of chemicals have synergistic effects,” said Sarvey. “When you combine them, they are more deadly together than when they are separate.” To contact reporter Niko Kyriakou, call 830-4274, or e-mail This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it written by David Hardesty , March 08, 2007 Poor title for this article. Not nixed, placed on hold until they can investigate the matter further. And if this local board determines there isn't a problem will that satisfy everyone? Care to place any bets? ***************************************************************** 62 Tracy Press: David stuns Goliath March 8, 2007 Tracy, CA Niko Kyriakou/Tracy Press Thursday, 08 March 2007 Shoe store owner Bob Sarvey won an appeal when regulators revoked a permit for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to test bigger bombs in Site 300. By Niko Kyriakou Press file photo - VICTORIOUS:Local activist and shoe store owner Bob Sarvey shows a map of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Site 300 to the Tracy Tomorrow and Beyond committee in October during discussions about a proposed bio-lab. Sarvey’s work against increased outdoor bomb testing at Site 300 has resulted in the lab’s air pollution permit to be rescinded. Local activist Robert Sarvey has convinced air pollution regulators to pull the permit allowing Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s to increase the size of outdoor test explosions conducted at Site 300 southwest of Tracy. Anti-nuclear weapons groups applauded the news. “Those explosions were a very credible threat to the people and the environment,” said Loulena Miles, staff attorney for Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment. “This is a major victory for the community because there will be opportunity for public comment and even a hearing.” Last November, the lab obtained permits to detonate up to 350 pounds of TNT per day and up to 8,000 pounds per year at Site 300 — exceeding a previous limit of 100 pounds per day and 1,000 pounds per year. Tracy's City Council also voted 3-1 in February to support the lab's plan to increase the size of its outdoor explosions, with Councilwoman Irene Sundberg in dissent. Mayor Brent Ives did not vote because he works at the lab. But the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District revoked the new permit Tuesday after reviewing an appeal filed by Sarvey, owner of a local shoe store. Sarvey’s appeal tipped off the district that the lab’s tests sometimes involve radioactive materials like depleted uranium and tritium — something the lab had not reported. “(The lab) did not quantify the emissions or describe the radioactive emissions on their application,” said Seyed Sadredin, director of the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District. “Out of caution, we are rescinding the permit.” But the lab argues radioactive materials were absent from its permit application because those substances fall under the jurisdiction of the Environmental Protection Agency and not the county’s air pollution control district. The lab insists that its explosives tests abide by all state and federal laws. Sadredin said he was not sure whether California’s Environmental Quality Act had jurisdiction over the radioactive pollution produced by Site 300. “It’s a question whether CEQA would apply, or federal requirements,” he said. But Sarvey says the state’s environmental quality act does cover Site 300. The act mandates the lead regulator agency, in this case the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District, to investigate all health-related pollutants, including radioactive ones, he said. Once the air pollution district finds out just how much radioactive material is exploded at Site 300 — information the lab said it would gladly provide — the district will do a health study. The district will seek outside help to do the analysis as it rarely deals with radioactive materials, Sadredin said. Initially, the air district only looked into the health impacts of nonradioactive toxic materials and fine dust released in the test blasts, which it deemed were within legal limits. If regulators find in their new study that the radioactive pollutants pose a human health risk, the lab may decide to “scale down how much (radioactive) material they want to burn or use in explosions,” Sadredin said. Tri-Valley CAREs believes the radioactive tests pose health risks to the local community, especially people who will live in Tracy Hills, a 5,500-home development planned to be built about a mile from the Site 300 boundary. Houses may not be built there until 2012. AKT Development, which is building Tracy Hills, also appealed the lab’s permit allowing bigger blasts but later dropped that appeal. Representatives from AKT could not be reached for comment. Tri-Valley CAREs claims the radioactive blasts also threaten endangered species living in Site 300, including the California tiger salamander, the alameda whipsnake and California red-legged frog. Lawrence Livermore spokeswoman Linda Seaver said the lab “is confident that when all is said and done, we will get the permit.” But activists like Sarvey want the federal government to move its radioactive materials tests far away from Tracy, something that may be a serious problem for the lab. Last week, the lab announced it had won an ongoing competition with Los Alamos Laboratories in New Mexico to design a submarine nuclear warhead for the Department of Energy — the first new nuke the U.S. will have built in more than 10 years. Sarvey and other activists hypothesize that the lab’s request to enlarge explosives testing is tied to its recently won federal contract. “I haven’t seen any concrete evidence to say that, but it really does seem to make sense that their request to increase the size of outdoor bomb testing is linked to the new-age bomb,” said Loulena Miles, staff attorney for Tri-Valley CAREs. Seaver said there was no connection between the two projects. Activists worry that the new nuclear development is not only a danger locally but could damage efforts to persuade Iran and North Korea to scale down their nuclear technologies. Congress has approved $88 million to research the new ballistic nuclear weapon, but money to pay for its development has yet to be approved. Marylia Kelley, executive director of Tri-Valley CAREs, says the lab’s new contract is part of a wider plan put forth by the DOE to rebuild the entire federal arsenal of 10,000 nuclear warheads at a rate of 125 a year. To contact reporter Niko Kyriakou, call 830-4274, or e-mail This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it Comments (8) ***************************************************************** 63 lamonitor.com: Domenici: LANL clean-up funds declining The Online News Source for Los Alamos MONITOR STAFF REPORT Sen. Pete Domenici renewed his complaints about the Department of Energy's meager cleanup budget for this year. The U.S. Department of Energy has steadily reduced money for environmental cleanup, adding billions of dollars to the final cost of cleaning up contaminated sites - including $660 million more at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Domenici said Thursday. The department is setting cleanup priorities based on risk to fit its budget constraints, but "the erosion of funding is undermining the department's existing cleanup obligations and will push back completion dates," the New Mexico Republican said. The DOE "needs to set budget baselines that match our cleanup goals and then deliver on these commitments year after year," said Domenici, ranking Republican on the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations subcommittee. The subcommittee on Wednesday reviewed next year's budget requests for the DOE Office of Environmental Management and Office of Civilian Nuclear Waste, which oversee environmental cleanup and run such programs as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant at Carlsbad. The Energy Department is seeking $5.6 billion for cleanup under the Office of Environmental Management, nearly 25 percent below the FY 2005 budget of $7.3 billion. At the same time, Domenici said, the department says cleanup costs have increased $50 billion over the $173 billion baseline set in 2005. Los Alamos represents $664 million of that increase, he said. Next year's budget seeks $140 million for Los Alamos environmental management activities, about equal to this year's funding. The lab two years ago signed a consent agreement with the state of New Mexico to clean up Los Alamos sites by 2015. Domenici said the lab cannot meet that deadline at the current rate of funding. ''Cleanup at Los Alamos is a casualty of this reduction,'' he said. Domenici also expressed skepticism over testimony that increased efficiency could finish the lab's cleanup in an adequate time. "Increased efficiencies are not the sole answer, and a $140 million request for FY2008 is unsustainable when we know that is far short of the $283 million to keep in compliance this year," he said. © 2003 Los Alamos Monitor All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 64 NEI Nuclear Notes: Nuclear Industry Welcomes Introduction Of Legislation to Manage Used Nuclear Fuel Wednesday, March 07, 2007 The following is a statement by NEI Senior Vice President for Governmental Affairs, Alex Flint regarding the U.S. DOE's submission to Congress yesterday of the “Nuclear Fuel Management and Disposal Act: The nuclear energy industry is pleased that the Bush Administration has sent legislation to Congress to facilitate implementation of the federal government’s used nuclear fuel management program. We view this legislation as additional evidence that the administration continues its support for nuclear energy as an essential part of a diverse energy portfolio for our nation. “This legislation addresses one of the three key foundational pieces of the integrated used fuel management strategy that the industry has embraced to protect the environment in an era of expanded use of nuclear energy. In addition to the planned Yucca Mountain disposal facility that is the focus of this legislation, the industry advocates research and development and demonstration projects to recycle nuclear fuel, along with interim storage of used nuclear fuel until commercial-scale recycling technologies or permanent disposal – or both – are available. “As Congress considers this legislation, the Department of Energy should continue to take the steps necessary to submit a license application for the repository to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by June 2008. Timely submittal of the application does not hinge upon legislative action. “The nuclear energy industry will work with the administration and Congress to ensure that the federal obligation to remove used nuclear fuel from reactor sites is met as soon as possible. For more than 20 years, electricity customers have paid funds through their monthly electricity bills into the federal Nuclear Waste Fund specifically for the development of a geologic repository for used nuclear fuel. This legislation will help the government meet its obligation to the American people while being a good environmental steward.” Labels: Department of Energy, Nuclear Energy, nuclear power, Yucca Mountain posted by Eric McErlain @ 10:22 AM 0 comments links to this post    ***************************************************************** 65 NAS: Project: Development and Implementation of a Cleanup Technology Roadmap for DOE's Office of Environmental Management PIN: NRSB-O-06-03-A RSO: Crowley, Kevin Subject/Focus Area: Environmental Issue Project Scope A National Academies committee will provide technical and strategic advice to the DOE-EM's Office of Engineering and Technology to support the development and implementation of its cleanup technology roadmap. Specifically, the study will identify: o Principal science and technology gaps and their priorities for the cleanup program based on previous National Academies reports, updated and extended to reflect current site conditions and EM priorities and input form key external groups, such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, Environmental Protection Agency, and state regulatory agencies. o Strategic opportunities to leverage research and development from other DOE programs (e.g., in the Office of Science, Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, and the National Nuclear Security Administration), other federal agencies (e.g., Department of Defense, Environmental Protection Agency), universities, and the private sector. o Core capabilities at the national laboratories that will be needed to address EM's long-term, high-risk cleanup challenges, especially at the four laboratories located at the large DOE sites (Idaho National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and Savannah River National Laboratory). o The infrastructure at these national laboratories and at EM sites that should be maintained to support research, development, and bench and pilot scale demonstrations of technologies for the EM cleanup program, especially in radiochemistry. The committee will provide findings and recommendations, as appropriate, to EM on maintenance of core capabilities and infrastructure at national laboratories and EM sites to address its long-term, high-risk cleanup challenges. Project Duration: 16 months Provide FEEDBACK on this project. Contact the Public Access Records Office to make an inquiry or to schedule an appointment to view project materials available to the public. Committee Membership Meetings Meeting 1 - 03/12/2007 Reports Reports having no URL can be seen at the Public Access Records Office Email: info@nas.edu ***************************************************************** 66 NAS: Project: Review of DOE's Office of Nuclear Energy, Science & Technology Research & Development Program PIN: BEES-J-05-01-A RSO: Offutt, Martin Subject/Focus Area: Energy and Energy Conservation; Engineering Project Scope The committee will undertake a comprehensive, independent evaluation of DOE's nuclear energy (NE) program's goals and plans, and validate the process of establishing program priorities and oversight (including the method for determining the relative distribution of budgetary resources). The evaluation will result in a comprehensive and detailed set of policy and research recommendations and associated priorities (including performance targets and metrics) for an integrated agenda of research activities that can best advance NE's fundamental mission of securing nuclear energy as a viable, long-term commercial energy option to provide diversity in energy supply. The review will also include the relationship of the research program to the Idaho Facilities Management program. In conducting the evaluation of the R&D program, the committee will: (1) Review the technical goals and timetables for government and industry R&D efforts in the various technical areas (e.g., Nuclear Power 2010; Generation IV; Hydrogen Initiative; Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative); (2) Review the R&D directions and progress in various parts of the program and their relevance to meeting the goals of the R&D program; (3) Review the overall balance and adequacy of the R&D program in light of the objectives and schedules in the major technology areas, and whether efforts in various technical areas are at an appropriate level, should be expanded, reduced, or eliminated; (4) Identify, if appropriate, new and promising technologies not included in the DOE portfolio that the DOE could meaningfully advance to meet the goals of the program; (5) Examine and comment, as necessary, on the appropriate federal role in the various technical areas; (6) Examine and comment on the commercial implications of each major part of the R&D portfolio and what each element needs to contribute to the commercial adoption of the technology; (7) Examine and comment on NE's strategy for accomplishing its goals, which would include such issues as: (a) program management and organization; (b) the process of setting milestones, research directions and making Go/No Go decisions; (c) collaborative activities with other parts of the government or private sector; (d) the integration of major activities in each program into a plan and associated schedule; (e) integration and associated schedule and milestones of the various major programs across DOE-NE; (f) consistency of the budget, schedule and scope for selected major activities; (g) risk identification and assessment and mitigation activities; and (h) other topics that the committee finds important to comment on related to the success of the program to meet its technical goals. (8) Comment on the relationship of the R&D program to the Idaho Facilities Management program. The committee will write a report documenting its findings and recommendations. The project is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy. The approximate start date for the project is April 24, 2006. A report will be issued at the end of the project in approximately 18 months. Project Duration: 18 months Provide FEEDBACK on this project. Contact the Public Access Records Office to make an inquiry or to schedule an appointment to view project materials available to the public. Committee Membership Meetings Meeting 1 - 08/24/2006 Meeting 2 - 10/17/2006 Meeting 3 - 11/08/2006 Meeting 4 - 01/09/2007 Meeting 5 - 03/08/2007 Reports having no URL can be seen at the Public Access Records Office Email: info@nas.edu ***************************************************************** NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: *****************************************************************