***************************************************************** 04/08/07 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 15.82 ***************************************************************** 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 London Times: Deal or no hostage deal, Tehran shows it has the West 2 Daily Times: Suspension of nuclear activities not open to discussion 3 Daily Times: VIEW: Targeted sanctions won’t influence Iran —Ian Brem 4 Sunday Herald: When line of least resistance is best course of actio 5 Sunday Herald: Iran has shares in French nuclear facility 6 IRIB PERSIAN NEWS: Propaganda can not hide UK's mistake 7 Antiwar.com: More Mainstream Media Obfuscation - 8 Guardian Unlimited: Iranian: UK Can Help Mend Relations 9 washingtonpost.com: U.S. Allowed N. Korea Arms Sale - 10 Reuters: North Korea sells arms to Ethiopia with U.S. OK - NYT 11 Korea Times: Off the Record on HEU 12 AFP: US mission heads to North Korea amid nuclear advances 13 Guardian Unlimited: Richardson Arrives in N. Korea 14 US: GFT: Longtime Great Falls opponent of nuclear weaponry welcomes 15 US: Great Falls Tribune: Report: 50 missiles unneeded, could be pull 16 Daily Yomiuri: Time to consider a nuclear strategy for Japan 17 AFP: India to test long-range ballistic missile NUCLEAR REACTORS 18 US: [Radbull] ALERT!!! STOP AB 719 (No nukes in CAL) Sign onto below 19 The Hindu: Six imported mega nuclear plants for Jaitapur project 20 Daily Yomiuri: 'Power firms hid 10,000 problems' 21 US: FresnoBee.com: Conservatives warm to climate concerns 22 US: Tri-City Herald: Nuclear agency to review leak at Richland plant 23 US: DesMoinesRegister: Nuclear power key piece of puzzle 24 US: Palm Beach Post: Has nuke's time returned? 25 US: JOURNAL NEWS: Probe pending into nuke plant fire 26 US: An explosion and fire will turn up the heat on Indian Point plan 27 US: JOURNAL NEWS: Fire costs Indian Point its top safety rating 28 US: Rutland Herald: Vermont seeking a nuclear monitor 29 US: Rutland Herald: Inspectors check out emissions at Yankee 30 US: Indian Point fire stirs deep-seated fears 31 US: Star-News: Brunswick nuclear unit is back on line | 32 US: JOURNAL NEWS: Indian Point 3 may restart at low level 33 US: Star-News: Brunswick nuclear unit is back on line | 34 Sunday Herald: Response To Nuclear Accident Exercise Like Keystone K 35 US: The Advocate: On the hunt for radiation around Vermont Yankee 36 US: UPI: Scrutiny high for Indian Point nuke plant 37 UPI: Saudi Arabia may join nuclear club 38 Reuters: Nuclear industry bullish on S. Africa 39 US: Albuquerque Tribune: Editorial: Our next lofty mission: Curb glo 40 US: Gothamist: Indian Point of Concern 41 US: MHNN: NRC to take closer look at IP after transformer fire cause 42 US: wcbstv.com: Indian Point Reactor May Restart At Half-Power 43 US: WCAX: State lacks nuke engineer with Vermont Yankee set to refue 44 AU The Age: Limited scrutiny on nuclear projects - National - NUCLEAR SECURITY NUCLEAR SAFETY 45 The Hindu: China building 10 medical bases for nuclear radiation vic NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE 46 Las Vegas SUN: Editorial: A history of waste 47 US: London Times: Uranium price hits record, with further rises expe 48 US: Chillicothe Gazette: Piketon plant study topic for meetings 49 US: Herald Sun: Uranium price soars | 50 US: Telegraph: Uranium giant to fuel London | 51 barrow in furness: N-experts in Beaches Tests 52 Whitehaven News: Union fears private equity buy-out of Sellafield di 53 The Observer: Unions fear fission if BNFL project division is sold o PEACE 54 The Sunflower: eNewsletter of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation - US DEPT. OF ENERGY 55 Seattle Times: Resolving missed deadlines at Hanford is topic of tal 56 Yakima Herald Republic: DOE's reversal on Hanford stance is good sta 57 Tri-City Herald: Bill sets up state office 58 Rocky Mountain News: Cold War, hellish consequences 59 Inside Bay Area: 64 arrests at Livermore lab demonstration 60 Ventura County Star: Agencies' Field Lab cleanup criticized 61 lamonitor.com: CENSORED by the CIA ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** FULL NEWS STORIES ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** 1 London Times: Deal or no hostage deal, Tehran shows it has the West taped- From The Sunday Times April 8, 2007 Andrew Sullivan How do we deal with our conflicting feelings about Iran’s release of the 15 illegally captured British sailors and marines? The first thing, surely, is to acknowledge that conflicting feelings are perhaps the only legitimate thing to have. As an Englishman who has been settled in America for some time let me vent my first response: this was a national humiliation. You could see it on Tony Blair’s face: his recognition that he had been bested in global public relations by a psychopathic religious fanatic, and had been forced into what was at best a stand-off with an unscrupulous thug who is busy trying to help kill British soldiers in Iraq. The captives — subjected to physical threats — had little choice but to cooperate minimally with their captors. We could all have done without the Eurovision boy-band outfits the mullahs creepily put on them for show, but I don’t feel of a mood to condemn sailors and marines held captive by the Revolutionary Guards of an unstable theocracy. The question of why or how such painfully young, insufficiently armed recruits were deemed suitable for the front line in a global war remains in the air. The Royal Navy will have to answer a lot of questions in due course. But this was surely not its finest hour. What Nelson would have said at such a spectacle of incompetence followed by submission is unprintable in these pages. And yet I was also intensely relieved to see the stand-off resolved and the young hostages delivered home. Who in their right minds wouldn’t be? Their press conference underlined this relief. There’s always a lot of rhetoric, especially in America, about supporting the troops. But sometimes, that means understanding them as human beings and not merely as pawns. According to them, they were subjected to blindfolding, mock executions, stripped and told they were in line for up to seven years in an Iranian jail. I don’t know what I’d do in those circumstances. And yes, a lone boat of lightly armed sailors deciding to precipitate a full-scale war between the West and Iran might not have seemed the best idea at the time. In my book, they get a pass. But do the Blair government and Bush administration? One is naturally sceptical of the assertion that the release was accomplished, in Blair’s words, “without any deal, without any negotiation, without any side-agreement of any nature whatsoever”. But there is no obvious quid pro quo staring us in the face. Iran’s state-controlled media reported that an Iranian diplomat would now have access to the five Iranians arrested in Irbil — captives whose whereabouts bears close scrutiny in the weeks ahead. And an Iranian official, Jalal Sharafi, also detained in Iraq two months ago, was returned to Tehran last Tuesday. Hmm. In The Washington Post last Friday the very well connected neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer bragged that “American action is what got this unstuck”. Last week, Vice-President Dick Cheney told ABC News radio that he “did not know” if any deal was made. That is, to say the least, an interesting nonresponse to the question. Nonetheless, when Tehran and London both insist there was no deal, it’s going to be very hard to figure out if there really was one, and we may not know the full details for years. The impact of the event on the global war on terror, however, is still being felt and will continue to play out in the coming weeks. From the American perspective, the response has been, to my mind, revealing about the state of play at this juncture in the war. The first thing to say is that most Americans seemed indifferent to the crisis. By Friday it wasn’t even on the front pages any more. In my own canvassing of Washington elite opinion, I was struck by how many said they hadn’t taken enough notice to even form a view. This is a memo to Britain, in some respects. An authoritative neoconservative used the incident to berate British weakness and claim American credit for the resolution. Other Bush allies harrumphed at the alleged pusillanimity of their closest ally. The rest barely noticed. But there was another response as well. Americans in the centre of the debate about the war — those neither in the deadend Cheney-Bush camp nor in the antiwar extreme — saw something new in this incident. They saw actual, sophisticated, calm diplomacy. I don’t think anyone has any illusions about the nature of the regime in Tehran — it is a despicable, inhuman theocracy. But many Americans outside the Bush inner circle also grasp one other central fact: the Iraq debacle has profoundly weakened the leverage the United States has against Iran. If this incident had escalated to a casus belli — and seizure of another country’s military personnel is a classic departure point for hostilities if ever there was one — then the United States, to put it bluntly, is not ready for conflict. It is not at all clear whether bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities would actually do real damage to the nuclear potential of the country or whether it wouldn’t actually strengthen the elements of the Tehran regime we need to weaken. Moreover, if Tehran decided to ally with Shi’ite militias in waging war on American forces in Iraq, then Bush’s entire surge strategy would be swiftly overwhelmed by new, chaotic, sectarian violence. It’s also not clear what would happen to the American body politic if the United States had used this moment to launch an attack on Iran. My bet is that the country would hurtle towards a constitutional crisis, with Congress coming close to a veto-proof majority against a commander-in-chief at a time of war. The damage this would do to America internally and in the world at large would be immense. No sane person in the White House — and one hopes there are a few left — would take such a gamble. The plain, unfortunate truth is, then, that in this moment in time, the West had no real choice but to deal and put the best possible face on it. That goes for Washington as much as London. That’s how boxed in we are — a box of Bush’s making. The other hideous truth is that the United States could not aggressively invoke the Geneva conventions in this affair. The treatment of the British sailors and marines was a profound violation of Geneva: they were threatened with mock executions, paraded in front of the media and subjected to personal indignity. All of these acts violate the Geneva conventions. But the United States itself has done far worse in the war on terror, even in those areas of conflict, such as Iraq, where not even Donald Rumsfeld said Geneva did not apply. There is a memo with the president’s signature on it relaxing adherence to Geneva — and one he refuses to revoke. The incident revealed, with painful clarity, how severe the damage that Bush’s detainee policy has done to the long-term war of ideas against Islamism. And so an obvious lesson emerges: that military force against Iran is not a viable option for the foreseeable future, and that, at some point, some diplomatic attempt to deal with Tehran on a limited agenda may well be necessary. If Iraq had not been bungled, none of this would be the case. In fact, the entire rationale for democratising and liberating Iraq was to undermine the real threat, Iran. Instead, the reverse has happened: failure in Iraq has made Iran immensely stronger and even, thanks to Bush’s detention policies, nonplan for the occupation and awful public relations, robbed the West of the moral high ground. To any patriot, British or American, this is infuriating. To anyone who loathes Islamist dictatorship, it is demoralising. But it is the hard reality we now face. And the low-key, patient diplomacy that Britain showed last week may have prompted some Americans to think about what the near-future of this war will have to look like. It’s Easter, and one wants to hope for something better — but that’s as silver a lining as you’re likely to get for the time being. www.andrewsullivan.com Simon Jenkins is away Times Online, The Times and The Sunday Times. ***************************************************************** 2 Daily Times: Suspension of nuclear activities not open to discussion - Iran Leading News Resource of Pakistan Monday, April 09, 2007 * Ahmadinejad to visit Natanz nuclear facility, announce ‘good news’ TEHRAN: Iran said on Sunday that any suspension of sensitive nuclear activities was not open to discussion, the day before President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is expected to announce a major development on its atomic drive. “We will not discuss the legitimate rights of Iran,” foreign ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini told a news conference. “We can negotiate about the concerns of the different parties and the non-diversion of the Iranian nuclear programme,” said Hosseini, referring to Iran’s insistence that its atomic drive is peaceful.”We are doing nothing that is against the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and so there is no reason or logic for a suspension,” he said. Iran will not discuss its “obvious right” to master nuclear technology but is open to talks that could reassure the West that its atomic plans were not aimed at making bombs, said Hosseini. He also said that the Islamic Republic’s military was “totally prepared to defend the country and Iran is totally prepared for any possible military strike”. The United States, which believes Iran is trying to build an atomic bomb, has said it wants a diplomatic solution to the row over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions but has not ruled out military action if that route fails. Some diplomats speculate President Mahmoud Amadinejad could announce progress in expanding Iran’s nuclear fuel work on a visit to the Natanz uranium enrichment plant on Monday. Hosseini said Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, and European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana had been in contact over the dispute, which has prompted the United Nations to slap two rounds of sanctions on Iran. But he said Iran would not discuss its right as a member of the nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty to enrich uranium, a process which can be used to make fuel for power stations, or material for warheads if enriched to a high enough level. “The talks should have a purpose and Iran’s obvious right will not be discussed. We want talks without preconditions to remove ambiguities and to assure the other parties there will be no diversion (to military uses),” Hosseini said. The UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, says it has gaps in its knowledge about Iran’s plans that need to be filled before it can confirm they are peaceful. ‘Good news’: Ahmadinejad, accompanied by senior officials and journalists, will visit the Natanz plant in central Iran on Monday, the day on which he has said Iran will announce “good news” about its atomic plans. Asked what he might announce, Hosseini said: “If you wait 24 hours, you will all find out.” Iran’s Jam-e Jam newspaper wrote on Sunday that “tomorrow the installation and start up of 3,000 centrifuges and the injection of uranium hexafluoride (UF6) gas will be announced by the president.” UF6 gas is fed into centrifuges, which enrich the feedstock by spinning at high speeds. Jam-e Jam did not reveal a source for its report and Iranian officials could not immediately be reached for comment. agencies Daily Times - All Rights Reserved ***************************************************************** 3 Daily Times: VIEW: Targeted sanctions won’t influence Iran —Ian Bremmer Leading News Resource of Pakistan Sunday, April 08, 2007 Sanctions give lawmakers and diplomats plenty to talk about. But unless a sea change occurs in Iranian domestic politics, they will merely postpone the difficult, and increasingly likely, choice between military action and accepting a nuclear Iran Despite his bellicose rhetoric, George W Bush would very much like to avoid a choice between air strikes on Iranian nuclear sites and accepting a nuclear Iran. For the moment, administration officials are hoping that “targeted” sanctions aimed directly at Iran’s leadership will compel a compromise. The United Nations Security Council’s recent decision to tighten existing sanctions on Iran by prohibiting dealings with 15 individuals and 13 organisations aims at precisely that. But, while some within the US government argue that similar sanctions induced North Korea to compromise on its nuclear programme, there are several reasons why the same strategy is unlikely to work with Iran. First and foremost, targeted sanctions did not, in fact, really work with North Korea. The freeze on $25 million of the leadership’s assets held at Banco Delta Asia in Macau has certainly irritated the North Koreans. But the asset freeze did not prevent Kim Jong-Il from ordering a ballistic missile test last July or an underground nuclear test in October. Instead, North Korea’s willingness to resume negotiations partly reflects the Americans’ decision to stop insisting on the “complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement” of North Korea’s nuclear programme as a pre-condition for talks on normalising relations. The Bush administration has accepted that North Korea is a nuclear power and that outsiders can do little about it, so the United States has shifted its diplomatic stance from the hard-line Japanese approach to the more flexible and stability-oriented Chinese position. That shift is understandable. Given its simultaneous military commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, together with North Korea’s demonstrated nuclear capability, the Bush administration can’t credibly threaten Kim with force. Sanctions have rattled the North Korean leadership, but not nearly enough to compel them to surrender fully the nuclear programme, which is their ultimate guarantee of security. At the same time, the North Koreans’ willingness to make a deal also reflects China’s decision to put its foot down. China remains the only foreign power with any real leverage over Kim’s government. Exasperated by Kim’s refusal to ease international tensions, Chinese officials have made clear their refusal to protect and subsidise North Korea’s elite if it continues to push the US toward confrontation. The Chinese can’t force Kim to disarm fully, but they can persuade him to negotiate with a now more flexible US. As a result, the US and North Korea have agreed on a deal that differs from the Clinton-era “Agreed Framework,” mainly because North Korea now has a track record as both a deal breaker and a nuclear weapons state. Having returned to the bargaining table in a position of strength, North Korea now hopes to secure a compromise that frees up the leadership’s assets and brings new benefits that help buttress the regime a little longer. As long as the Chinese talk tough and the US remains willing to negotiate, the agreement may hold. But neither diplomatic stance is likely to continue indefinitely. In any case, none of this will help the Bush administration with Iran. No outside actor has the leverage with Iran that China has with North Korea, and even if the US offered Iran a more conciliatory approach, the Democratic-led Congress isn’t likely to follow suit. Buffeted by criticism that their position on the war in Iraq is incoherent and that they are soft on security threats, the Democrats appear determined to ratchet up pressure on Iran, favouring much broader sanctions than the Bush administration has proposed. For example, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos has introduced legislation that would extend the extra-territorial reach of US law to foreign governments’ export credit agencies, financial institutions, insurers, underwriters, and guarantors. It would bar foreign subsidiaries of US companies from investing more than $20 million in Iran’s energy sector, and would eliminate the president’s authority to waive these penalties. It would also designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist group and impose further limits on exports to the country’s civil aviation industry. Moreover, Republicans are getting in on the act. Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen has introduced legislation that would require US government pension funds, private pension funds, and mutual funds sold or distributed in the US to divest from companies that invest more than $20 million in Iran. Finally, just as Iran faces no China — an outside player with considerable domestic influence — North Korea faces no Israel, a neighbour that believes its security could depend on an act of military pre-emption. Israel does not want to take on Iran without US support and will maintain pressure on both Congress and the president to threaten Iran with every means at its disposal. The appeal of targeted sanctions against Iran is obvious: they are meant to help the administration avoid military action, which could create more problems than it solves. They allow the White House to argue that it means to undermine Iran’s leadership, not its people. They are also much more likely to win international support than sanctions that would remove Iran’s oil and gas supplies from the international marketplace. But the chances are slim that sanctions, whether targeted or otherwise, can undermine the consensus within Iran in favour of the nuclear programme. As in North Korea, a nuclear capability constitutes a powerful symbol of the country’s sovereignty and international clout — and would be the ultimate guarantee that America could never do there what it has done in Iraq. Sanctions give lawmakers and diplomats plenty to talk about. But unless a sea change occurs in Iranian domestic politics, they will merely postpone the difficult (and increasingly likely) choice between military action and accepting a nuclear Iran. —DT-PS Ian Bremmer is President of Eurasia Group, the global political risk consultancy, and author of The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall Daily Times - All Rights Reserved ***************************************************************** 4 Sunday Herald: When line of least resistance is best course of action Opinion: April 09, 2007 Est 1999 Scotland's award-winning independent By Iain Macwhirter On the hostage crisis that was more comic farce than high-stakes drama IT WAS a very British hostage crisis. We just can't take ourselves seriously any more as a nation at war, and the return of the British sailors and marines was pure Monty Python. In their appalling suits, clutching their goodie bags containing Iranian craft items, sweets and Sir Alex Ferguson's autobiography, the gallant 15 smiled and shook hands with their captors. Happy Easter bunnies. Apparently the ill-fitting tin flutes were the off-duty uniform of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, so in a very real sense the British detainees were being given a dressing-down. But since when has the Manchester United coach been seen as an icon for the Iranian mullahs? I think we should be told. Of course, things were tougher for the captives in Iran when they were off the television screens - kept in isolation and held at gunpoint - though there is no evidence they were ever actually mistreated. Some wish they had been. Armchair generals were distinctly unhappy about their compliant conduct; what the Daily Mail called the "grovelling acquiescence" of the 15 British naval personnel. Whatever happened to name, rank and serial number? Did they need to be quite so, well, co-operative? The odd black eye wouldn't have gone amiss. "They may deserve our pity," remarked the Mail columnist Max Hastings "but they do not command our respect". John Buchan was no doubt turning in his grave at the sight of Britons being so humbled. But servicemen and women aren't taught to resist anymore. Nobody seriously expects soldiers to sacrifice themselves to defend the dignity of the flag. All that Boy's Own stuff went out with Trevor Howard and the second world war. Modern marines are trained to do whatever is necessary to ensure survival in captivity, short - presumably - of releasing information which might endanger other British military personnel. They aren't really taught to fight either, especially in the navy, which hasn't been involved in any actual war since the Falklands conflict 25 years ago. In our gender-balanced, allergy-free, risk-averse Royal Navy, you are meant to spend your time looking at digital readouts from machines that go ping. Except when you get a little too close to disputed waters and you get lifted by an Iranian gunboat. I don't know whether the British patrol strayed into Iranian waters or not - the evidence suggests that they didn't. But they were getting rather close to a country with which we are engaged in a proxy war over Iranian support for the insurgents in Iraq. The Americans have been capturing Iranian nationals, so it should hardly have come as a surprise that the Iranians decided to lift a boatful of nearby Brits to even the score. And in propaganda terms, it went beautifully, consolidating president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's position domestically against his many critics and uniting the country against foreign "aggression". His unexpected release of the detainees was a stunning media coup worthy of Alastair Campbell himself. Tony Blair's initial bluster rapidly faded as the issue got lost in the United Nations, which couldn't decide whether this was an unprovoked act of aggression or an overzealous policing action by the Iranians. Hardly matters, now that Ahmadinejad has been allowed to display his magnanimity in the eyes of the world by "gifting" the personnel back to Britain. The Iranian leader was able to thumb his nose at the most powerful nations in the world for nearly a fortnight - making it look as if the infidels, for all their technological sophistication, were weak, decadent, cowardly even. WOULD Iranian revolutionary guards have behaved with such passivity? Would they have confessed so precipitately? Would they have laughed and joked with their captors and allowed themselves to be paraded like performing chimps on the world's media? Probably not. But, look, it's no bad thing that we behave differently from Islamist fanatics. Senseless martyrdom would have helped nobody. The British behaved as representatives of a peacekeeping force should behave, even if they were not really there keeping the peace. British diplomats went into action behind the scenes, keeping open the channels of communication, gently cajoling Tehran, trying to do a deal. Our foreign service is very good at this kind of thing - talking our way out of crisis rather than retaliating first. Imagine if it had been US marines who had been captured. We would probably be at war with Iran right now. The marines might well have fought back - though armed only with rifles, they wouldn't have got very far. But they would probably have offered some resistance, passive or otherwise. President George W Bush would immediately have threatened Tehran with air strikes. There are two battle groups in the Gulf right now, practising bombing runs against Iran's nuclear facilities, and the Guardian newspaper reported last week that the Americans had offered to buzz revolutionary guard positions during the crisis. You could almost hear Bush's disappointment when the affair ended peacefully. It may still come to war, anyway. Blair was quick to blame Tehran for the deaths of four British soldiers last week in Basra in an attack using an "Iranian-made bomb". It's not clear that the fighters who killed the British soldiers, two of whom were women, were actually from the militias supported by Iran. Nonetheless, there is little doubt that Iran has been supporting the Shias in Iraq and has been providing training and refuge for fighters and the firepower for the deadly improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Sabres will be rattled. But the whole affair has only underlined again how disastrous has been Anglo-American policy in the Middle East. By invading Iraq on a false pretext, the "coalition of the willing" only served to alienate moderate Arab opinion and encourage every extremist in the region to pile into Iraq to have a crack at the infidel. We gave the Ahmadinejads of the region their best platform from which to attack the West as neo-imperialists. We have lost the war in Iraq, and it is only a matter of time before the British and then the American troops are withdrawn. What Iran has done is position itself very favourably for the aftermath of the retreat. Ahmadinejad has defied the West and sent us packing. Exposed the emptiness of our military rhetoric, for when it comes down to it, they know, and we know they know, that we will not go to war with Iran. Bush might, but we won't be joining him. That was the message conveyed by last week's episode. We Brits aren't in the business of trying to remake the world in our image. We are too old and too wise a nation to have imperial ambitions, and we know the limits of force. Far better to laugh it off, as the British sailors did, smile and shake hands. Armchair generals may have been squirming in their seats at the sight of a British servicewoman paraded on television, wearing the hijab and chain-smoking. There has been much muttering about how this confirms that women should not be placed in the front line because they cannot expect to offer much in the way of resistance. But surely Leading Seaman Faye Turney's presence helped civilise the crisis and made the revolutionary guards behave. Perhaps there should be more women in the front line. Surely the lesson of this crisis is that it is best to humour excitable Islamists and do your best to make them behave decently. Contrast the peaceful outcome of this episode with the bloody end to the American hostage crisis in Iran in 1981. In its own way, the resolution of the latest crisis - like the deal done with North Korea over its nuclear weapons programme - was a kind of victory disguised as a humiliation. Better Monty Python than Quentin Tarantino. Posted by: Andy, Scotland on 4:45am Sun 8 Apr 07 The once 'Great Britain' is no more and without the cosy but unhealthy relationship with the US in recent years our position in the world would have been recognised for what it is. Once Blair has gone and the forthcoming adjustment in the political scene has taken place perhaps some sense will prevail and we may become a force for peace in the world instead of a small nation trying to act beyond its capabilities. I believe the young service people acted bravely in the circumstances and I am glad they are home safe. The once 'Great Britain' is no more and without the cosy but unhealthy relationship with the US in recent years our position in the world would have been recognised for what it is. Once Blair has gone and the forthcoming adjustment in the political scene has taken place perhaps some sense will prevail and we may become a force for peace in the world instead of a small nation trying to act beyond its capabilities. I believe the young service people acted bravely in the circumstances and I am glad they are home safe. Quote | Report this post Posted by: hamdy, Iraq on 8:46am Sun 8 Apr 07 the real desaster that result from knking Saddam down is that Iraq and the whole region including the British and American troops is under the revenge of the mean full of hatred Persian nature, over history the greediness and wish harm others is continued without reasons, this fact both Blair and bush tried to hide through this past 4 years, now Iran is a threat to the whole world and especially to this region simply because the (coalition) invade Iraq who is under survailance for 12 years and left Iran which is collecting weapons of mass distruction from 1988 especially from ex-Soviet republics. the real desaster that result from knking Saddam down is that Iraq and the whole region including the British and American troops is under the revenge of the mean full of hatred Persian nature, over history the greediness and wish harm others is continued without reasons, this fact both Blair and bush tried to hide through this past 4 years, now Iran is a threat to the whole world and especially to this region simply because the (coalition) invade Iraq who is under survailance for 12 years and left Iran which is collecting weapons of mass distruction from 1988 especially from ex-Soviet republics. Quote | Report this post Posted by: ratzo on 12:50pm Sun 8 Apr 07 "We Brits....are too old and too wise a nation..." Britain isn't a nation and even if it was its not very old ( - and wise? LOL). In 1907, bicentenary of the Treaty of Union, the only thing that was said in Scotland about the Union was that it wasn't fair that Scotland was now called England." But "We Brits" is right, Iain's just not spelt it correctly - its actually "wee Brits" - a cult it seems, of which he is proud to be a member. "We Brits....are too old and too wise a nation..." Britain isn't a nation and even if it was its not very old ( - and wise? LOL). In 1907, bicentenary of the Treaty of Union, the only thing that was said in Scotland about the Union was that it wasn't fair that Scotland was now called England." But "We Brits" is right, Iain's just not spelt it correctly - its actually "wee Brits" - a cult it seems, of which he is proud to be a member. Quote | Report this post Posted by: Vronsky on 10:33pm Sun 8 Apr 07 "I don't know whether the British patrol strayed into Iranian waters or not - the evidence suggests that they didn't." Territorial waters are not defined in that region, so what 'evidence' would that be, Iain? Check it out at http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/weblog.html. Scroll down at read it all. But I suppose it's always quicker and easier just to fling out the approved version: research takes time, and facts have a tiresome habit of contradicting the New Labour view, don't they? http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/weblog.html "I don't know whether the British patrol strayed into Iranian waters or not - the evidence suggests that they didn't." Territorial waters are not defined in that region, so what 'evidence' would that be, Iain? Check it out at http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/weblog.html. Scroll down at read it all. But I suppose it's always quicker and easier just to fling out the approved version: research takes time, and facts have a tiresome habit of contradicting the New Labour view, don't they? http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/weblog.html Quote | Report this post Posted by: Winnading on 10:44pm Sun 8 Apr 07 May 3rd Scottish elections just a weee reminder for the political journalists......in case you forgot they were on. P.S Iain how about a nice recipe for shortbread next week( ok maybe that's a bit too Scottish )maybe Empire biscuits then or roast beef and yorkshire pudding. May 3rd Scottish elections just a weee reminder for the political journalists......in case you forgot they were on. P.S Iain how about a nice recipe for shortbread next week( ok maybe that's a bit too Scottish )maybe Empire biscuits then or roast beef and yorkshire pudding. ©2007 newsquest (sunday herald) limited. all rights reserved ***************************************************************** 5 Sunday Herald: Iran has shares in French nuclear facility April 09, 2007 Est 1999 Scotland's award-winning independent By Rob Edwards, Environment Editor Eurodif holding shows ‘hypocrisy’ of non-proliferation treaty WESTERN GOVERNMENTS have been accused of "stunning hypocrisy" after it was revealed that Iran has a 10% stake in the world's largest uranium enrichment plant in France. All the time that Britain, France and the US have been pressing the Iranian government to cease enriching uranium, the Islamic republic has been reaping multimillion pound dividends from its shareholding in Eurodif, an international enrichment plant at Pierrelatte in southern France. Because of its involvement, Iran has also been learning more about the latest enrichment technology. It claims that it only wants to enrich uranium to improve its performance as a fuel in nuclear power stations, but Western nations are worried that it will be used to make nuclear bombs. Iran's stake in Eurodif has been exposed in a report written by a French nuclear expert for the Greens and the European Free Alliance in the European parliament. Documents confirming the connection have also been seen by the Sunday Herald. They show that in 2006, Reza Aghazadeh, Iran's vice-president and the president of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organisation, was replacing the Iranian representatives on the board of Sofidif, a joint French-Iranian company with a major stake in Eurodif. According to a meeting of Sofidif in June 2006, the purpose of the company was "to participate in the study, the realisation and the operation of uranium enrichment plants based on the French gaseous diffusion technique". Other papers show that in 2005 Sofidif's investment in Eurodif yielded Ł12 million in dividends. Eurodif, formed by France, Belgium and Spain in the 1970s and run by French nuclear company Cogema, enriches uranium for 100 reactors in France and worldwide. At the same time, Iran has been accused of breaching its obligations under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty by enriching uranium at a plant at Natanz in central Iran. Last week, the United Nations discussed moves to toughen sanctions against the country in an attempt to force it to shut the plant. Mycle Schneider, the Paris-based nuclear consultant who wrote the report for the MEPs, was shocked by what he discovered. "The continuous deep involvement of Iran in the world's largest multinational uranium enrichment plant in France is the perfect illustration of the stunning level of hypocrisy that has governed the non-proliferation treaty," he said. The point was reinforced by Dr David Lowry, a nuclear proliferation specialist based in Surrey. "The hypocrisy of France, as a nuclear technology supplier to Iran, ganging up on its customer client with the other self-appointed permanent bully-boy' members of the UN Security Council would be funny if it wasn't so serious," he said. Rebecca Harms, vice-president of the Green group in the European parliament, said: "It's time to stop pretending that there is a fundamental difference between the peaceful atom and nuclear weapons. It is not only operating uranium enrichment facilities that provide the basis for a nuclear weapons programme, it is nuclear technology and know-how that paves the way to the bomb." Schneider's report also exposes details of an extraordinary nuclear experiment run by the US in the 1960s. Two PhD students without any nuclear expertise were asked by a leading nuclear weapons laboratory in Berkeley, California, to design a nuclear bomb using publicly available sources. "The goal of the participants should be to design an explosive with a militarily significant yield," said a declassified US report from 1964. The project was known as the "Nth Country Experiment", as it was attempting to assess the risk of new countries developing nuclear weapons. It took the students concerned, Dave Dobson and Bob Selden, two and a half years to come up with a design. It was judged by scientists from the US nuclear weapons laboratories to be a credible and workable bomb. It would be too big to be fired on a missile, they concluded, though it could be delivered by plane or truck. The bibliography, compiled by the students from open sources, remains classified. ©2007 newsquest (sunday herald) limited. all rights reserved ***************************************************************** 6 IRIB PERSIAN NEWS: Propaganda can not hide UK's mistake 2007/04/07 Foreign Ministry Spokesman Sayed Mohammad-Ali Hosseini said on friday theatrical propaganda cannot conceal the mistake made by British military on violation of the Islamic Republic of Iran's territorial waters and their repeated illegal entry into the country. Hosseini made the remark in reaction to an interview scheduled by the British government for the 15 British marines who were released by IRI upon an announcement by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday. Referring to illogical methods used by the British government, he said, "immediate transfer of the marines to a military base, dictated instructions and coordination between the British and American media on simultaneous release of a purposeful press conference cannot damage the existing evidence and documents on violation of IRI's territories by the British military." In his Wednesday press conference, Ahmadinejad announced the release of the detained British marines who had illegally entered Iranian territorial waters on March 23, saying it was a present from the Iranian nation to the British people. Turning to the questionable approach of the British government, he said, "we regret that Blair's government, due to its unawareness of principles of Islamic culture and Iranian civilization, is unable to understand leniency offered by the Islamic Republic of Iran to the British marines." M/D Copyright 2004, All Rights Reserved By Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting News Network Sponsored By IRIB News Computer Center. E-Mail: Info@IRIBNEWS.ir ***************************************************************** 7 Antiwar.com: More Mainstream Media Obfuscation - by Gordon Prather April 7, 2007 On March 17, 2003, ten days after the Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency publicly reported to the UN Security Council that, "One, there is no indication of resumed nuclear activities in those buildings that were identified through the use of satellite imagery as being reconstructed or newly erected since 1998, nor any indication of nuclear-related prohibited activities at any inspected sites. "Second, there is no indication that Iraq has attempted to import uranium since 1990. "Three, there is no indication that Iraq has attempted to import aluminum tubes for use in centrifuge enrichment. Moreover, even had Iraq pursued such a plan, it would have encountered practical difficulties in manufacturing centrifuge out of the aluminum tubes in question." Henry Waxman, then the Ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, began formally requesting of Condi Rice, then Bush’s National Security Adviser, an explanation of the use, by President Bush and other top Administration officials, of "fabricated intelligence" to "justify" Bush’s exercise of the highly conditional authority Congress had provided under the Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq. That Resolution authorized Bush to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be "necessary" and appropriate in order to "defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq." We now know that Bush-Cheney came into office, intending to invade and occupy Iraq. But they needed an excuse and a rationale. The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon provided the excuse. But, in his final report before being forced to withdraw from Iraq by President Clinton at the end of 1998 Director-General ElBaradei had reported, "The verification activities have revealed no indications that Iraq had achieved its program objective of producing nuclear weapons or that Iraq had produced more than a few grams of weapon-usable nuclear material or had clandestinely acquired such material. "Furthermore, there are no indications that there remains in Iraq any physical capability for the production of weapon-usable nuclear material of any practical significance." But even more significantly, ElBaradei reported that "There were no indications of significant discrepancies between the technically coherent picture that had evolved of Iraq's clandestine nuclear weapons program and the information contained in Iraq's 'Full, Final, and Complete Declaration.'" Hence, as of January 1999, if any country in the world was certified to be nuke program free, it was Iraq. So, in December, 2001, Cheney and his Cabal began promoting within our intelligence community and with neo-crazy media sycophants two bits of 'intelligence' recently provided by "the intelligence service of a foreign government." One was that Saddam had recently attempted to buy specialized high-strength aluminum tubes, which Cheney and his Cabal insisted – despite the opinions of IAEA experts to the contrary – could only be used as rotors in uranium-enrichment gas centrifuges. The other was that Iraq had recently arranged to buy up to 500 tons of uranium oxide – "yellowcake" – from Niger. After nine months of concerted effort, Cheney and his Cabal managed to get both these highly controversial bits of "intelligence" incorporated into the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate of Iraq’s WMD capabilities. We now know that the already discredited Niger yellowcake intelligence was included only as a footnote, "for completeness." So, in early October, 2002, CIA Director George Tenet asked that a reference to the alleged purchase of yellowcake by Iraq be removed from a speech President Bush was to give on Oct. 7. Guess what happened next. The "documentation" for the arranged purchase of yellowcake by Iraq from Niger was delivered to the U.S. Embassy in Rome on Oct. 9. The next day, Congress approved the Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq. And Bush, Cheney and Condi Rice began referring to the Niger documents as proof that Saddam Hussein was reconstructing his nuclear weapons program and would have nukes to give terrorists within a year or less. So, the Security Council had ElBaradei and his IAEA inspectors go back in and conduct a total of 218 inspections at 141 sites, including 21 sites designated by Bush that the IAEA had never inspected before. Result? On March 7, 2003, ElBaradei told the Security Council, "After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapon program in Iraq." Ten days later, Waxman requested answers from Bush’s National Security Advisor. Two days after that, Bush invaded Iraq. Now, Waxman is Committee Chairman and is demanding answers to his many questions about that use. On cue, Peter Eisner of the Washington Post trots out a piece of "investigative journalism" that appears to absolve the White House. Eisner, who is evidently not much of an investigative reporter, implies that the Bush-Cheney White House first learned about the Niger documents shortly after October 9, 2002, when Elisabetta Burba, an investigative reporter for the Italian newsweekly Panorama, delivered them to the US Embassy in Rome. But, in 2005, on the eve indictments in the CIA-Plame affair – investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo posted this blockbuster exposé (part 1 and part 2) at La Repubblica magazine's Web site. "The military intervention in Iraq was justified by two revelations: Saddam Hussein attempted to acquire unprocessed uranium (yellowcake) in Niger for enrichment with centrifuges built with aluminum tubes imported from Europe. The fabricators of the twin hoaxes (there was never any trace in Iraq of unprocessed uranium or centrifuges) were the Italian government and Italian military intelligence. "They are the same two hoaxes that Judith Miller, the reporter who betrayed her newspaper, published (together with Michael Gordon) on September 8, 2002." According to Bonini and D'Avonzo, then Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi – who President Bush had asked for any "intelligence" the Italians had that might indicate Saddam Hussein was reconstructing his nuke programs – sent Nicolo Pollari, the Italian equivalent of our director of Central Intelligence, to meet with Stephen Hadley (then-deputy to then-National Security Advisor Condi Rice) in the White House on Sept. 9, 2002. Pollari later told the Italian Parliament's intelligence oversight committee that he told Hadley: "We had documentary proof of the acquisition by Iraq of uranium ore from a central African nation. We also know of an Iraqi attempt to purchase centrifuges for uranium enrichment from German and possibly Italian manufacturers." The same week that Pollari met with Hadley [Condi’s deputy], Berlusconi caused an article to be published in Panorama – a magazine Berlusconi owns – entitled "War With Iraq? It Has Already Begun," wherein the "intelligence" provided Hadley [Condi’s deputy] is "confirmed." Physicist James Gordon Prather has served as a policy implementing official for national security-related technical matters in the Federal Energy Agency, the Energy Research and Development Administration, the Department of Energy, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Department of the Army. Dr. Prather also served as legislative assistant for national security affairs to U.S. Sen. Henry Bellmon, R-Okla. -- ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee and member of the Senate Energy Committee and Appropriations Committee. Dr. Prather had earlier worked as a nuclear weapons physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico. without written permission is strictly prohibited. Copyright 2007 Antiwar.com ***************************************************************** 8 Guardian Unlimited: Iranian: UK Can Help Mend Relations From the Associated Press Saturday April 7, 2007 12:31 PM By JILL LAWLESS Associated Press Writer LONDON (AP) - Fifteen British sailors and marines freed from captivity in Tehran began two weeks' leave with their families Saturday, while Iran's ambassador to London urged Britain to help his nation mend relations with the international community. Ambassador Rasoul Movahedian told the Financial Times newspaper in an article published Saturday that Iran had ``showed our goodwill'' by freeing the Britons. ``Now it is up to the British government to proceed in a positive way,'' he was quoted as saying. ``We will welcome in general any steps that could defuse tensions in the region.'' The British mariners, captured in the Persian Gulf on March 23, were freed Wednesday by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who called their release a gift to Britain. Movahedian told the Financial Times that the release of the British crew was not connected to the fate of five Iranians held by U.S. forces in Iraq. U.S. officials said last week that Iran would be granted access to the detainees, but denied the decision was linked to the fate of British crew. Britain also has denied a link. But Movahedian indicated help from the British on the matter would be appreciated. ``If they want to be helpful and use their influence we will welcome that. ... We will welcome in general any steps that could defuse tensions in the region,'' he said. Movahedian called on Britain to use the resolution of the crisis as a chance to ``establish sensible lines of communication with Iran.'' He said ``the prime issue for Iran'' was recognition from the West of its right to a nuclear power program. The United States and allies, including Britain, fear Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program under cover of its civilian nuclear program. Iran denies this, insisting it seeks to use the program only for nuclear energy. Britain's Foreign Office had no immediate comment on the Iranian ambassador's remarks. A spokesman said officials ``will need time to assess the implication for diplomatic relations with Iran'' of the crew's accounts of their treatment in detention. The newspaper said Movahedian spoke before several crew members described Friday how they had been blindfolded, bound, kept in solitary confinement and subjected to psychological pressure during their captivity. On Saturday, the Vatican said that Pope Benedict XVI had written to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to intercede for the release of sailors. Vatican officials declined to give details about the letter, including when it was sent. The Vatican said the pope intervened for humanitarian reasons. The sailors said during their Friday press conference that they were coerced into saying they had been in Iranian waters when they were detained. ``All of us were kept in isolation. We were interrogated most nights and presented with two options. If we admitted that we'd strayed, we'd be on a plane to (Britain) pretty soon,'' said Lt. Felix Carman, who commanded the crew. ``If we didn't, we faced up to seven years in prison.'' Marine Joe Tindell said he believed one of his colleagues had been executed on the second day of the ordeal. The 21-year-old said the crew believed they were being taken to the British Embassy to be released, but were instead dumped in a holding facility. ``We had a blindfold and plastic cuffs, hands behind our backs, heads against the wall ... there were weapons cocking,'' Tindell told British Broadcasting Corp. radio. ``Someone said, I quote, 'Lads, lads I think we're going to get executed' ... someone was sick and as far as I was concerned he had just had his throat cut.'' Iran dismissed the news conference as propaganda - just as Britain had condemned the crew members' frequent appearances on Iranian TV during their captivity. The British crew was detained while patrolling for smugglers near the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab, a waterway that has long been a disputed dividing line between Iraq and Iran. Tehran says the crew was in Iranian waters. Britain insists its troops were in Iraqi waters working under a U.N. mandate. Prime Minister Tony Blair has insisted Britain did not negotiate for the sailors' release, and did not offer an apology for their alleged trespass into Iranian waters. Despite the resolution of the crisis, tensions in the Persian Gulf remain high. The U.S. has two aircraft carrier groups off Iran's coast, its largest show of force in the region since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The Guardian newspaper reported Saturday that the U.S. military offered to mount ``aggressive patrols'' over Iranian Revolutionary Guard bases after the sailors and marines were captured. The newspaper, which did not name its sources, said Britain had declined the offer and asked the U.S. to tone down its military activity in the Gulf. The Guardian said U.S. forces ``modified their exercises to make them less confrontational.'' The Foreign Office declined to comment on the report. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007 ***************************************************************** 9 washingtonpost.com: U.S. Allowed N. Korea Arms Sale - Shipment to Ethiopia May Have Violated U.N. Resolution By Glenn Kessler Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, April 8, 2007; Page A15 The United States did not act to prevent a recent shipment of arms from North Korea to Ethiopia, even though sketchy intelligence indicated the delivery might violate a U.N. Security Council resolution restricting North Korean arms sales, Bush administration officials said yesterday. The decision to let the shipment proceed was made by relatively low-level staffers, with little internal debate, and it was unknown to top policymakers involved in the campaign to punish Pyongyang for its test of a nuclear weapon last October, officials said. The January arms delivery occurred as Ethiopia was fighting Islamic militias in Somalia, aiding U.S. policies of combating religious extremists in the Horn of Africa. Intelligence reports indicated that the shipment included spare parts, including tank parts, officials said. Nevertheless, the cargo was not inspected, making it difficult to know whether it violated the U.N. resolution. The value of the shipment is also unclear. An interdiction of the shipment, delivered by a ship under the Ethiopian flag, was never seriously considered, officials said. Policy implications were not raised to Cabinet-level officials or even to those at the assistant-secretary level. The New York Times reported the arms shipment on its Web site yesterday. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack declined to comment on the report but said, "We are deeply committed to upholding and enforcing U.N. Security Council resolutions." Ethiopia and other African countries that rely on Soviet-era military equipment have long purchased inexpensive spare parts from North Korea. The United States has sought to persuade those countries to end their relationships with Pyongyang. After U.S. diplomats learned of the January shipment, Ethiopian officials pledged yet again to look for suppliers other than North Korea, U.S. officials said. The Bush administration has led a years-long campaign to choke off North Korea's access to hard currency by thwarting weapons sales and cracking down on its extensive counterfeiting operations. North Korea recently agreed to shut down its nuclear reactor, but only after the United States ended an investigation into a Macau bank linked to money laundering and counterfeiting operations. About $25 million in North Korea-linked bank accounts was frozen because of the probe, infuriating Pyongyang. © 2007 The Washington Post Company ***************************************************************** 10 Reuters: North Korea sells arms to Ethiopia with U.S. OK - NYT Sat Apr 7, 2007 4:47PM EDT NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Bush administration allowed Ethiopia to complete a secret arms purchase from North Korea in an apparent violation of a U.N. Security Council sanctions resolution passed months earlier over its nuclear test, The New York Times reported in Sunday editions. Citing unnamed U.S. officials from a number of agencies, the Times said the United States allowed the January arms delivery in part because Ethiopia was fighting Islamic militias in Somalia in an offensive that aided U.S. policies of combating religious extremists in the Horn of Africa. A spokesman for the State Department declined to comment on the specifics of the arms shipment, but said the United States was "deeply committed to upholding and enforcing U.N. Security Council resolutions," the newspaper reported. No response from the Ethiopian Embassy was available. Washington's former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, who helped push the resolution imposing sanctions on North Korea through the Security Council in October, said the United States should have told Ethiopia to send the weapons back. "I know they have been helpful in Somalia, but there is a nuclear weapons program in North Korea that is unhelpful for everybody worldwide," the Times quoted Bolton as saying. U.S. intelligence agencies reported in late January that an Ethiopian cargo ship that was probably carrying tank parts and other military equipment had left a North Korean port. The shipment's value was unclear, the Times said. After a brief debate in Washington, it was decided not to block the arms deal and to press Ethiopia not to make future purchases, according to the report. It was unclear if the United States ever reported the arms shipment to the Security Council, the Times said. But intelligence reports indicated that the cargo was likely to have included tank parts, leading at least some Pentagon officials to describe the shipment as a clear Security Council violation. Continued... © Reuters 2007. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 11 Korea Times: Off the Record on HEU Hankooki.com > The Korea Times > Opinion By Tong Kim As wire stories are reporting that a solution has been suggested for the transfer of frozen funds in a Macau bank to North Korea, public attention is being refocused on whether North Korea will fulfill its commitment to shutdown its nuclear facilities by April 14 in compliance with the February 13 agreement of the six party talks. Technically it should still be possible. A shut down means turning the switch off with appropriate safety measures. North Korean engineers at Yongbyun know how to do it for they did it before under the Agreed Framework. Sealing can be done in a matter of hours after the shut down. IAEA inspectors can be brought in a couple of days. North Koreans must realize that if it further delays carrying out its commitments, the nuclear negotiation will lose its momentum and it will likely turn off the other parties in the talks. As the crucial phase of ˇ°disablementˇ± in the February 13 agreement – during which the DPRK is also obliged to provide ˇ°a complete declaration of all nuclear programsˇ± – will come next, the highly enriched uranium (HEU) issue remains an unavoidable subject that must be addressed satisfactorily for the nuclear dismantlement talks to move forward. Skeptics of U.S. policy have raised questions with respect to the authenticity of U.S. information on the DPRKˇŻs uranium enrichment program, and others are still questioning whether the DPRK had actually acknowledged the existence of its HEU program at the October 4, 2002 meeting in Pyongyang between former assistant secretary of state James Kelly and DPRK first vice foreign minister Kang Suk Ju, during which I served as the interpreter for the U.S. delegation. In response to inquires from several news organizations, I have said that I believed then and still believe that the United States had irrefutable evidence to support the charges Mr. Kelly made concerning North KoreaˇŻs pursuit of a covert HEU program to develop nuclear weapons. I also said that after listening to KangˇŻs response at that meeting the U.S. delegation, including myself and two other members on the U.S. team who listened to Kang both in Korean and English interpretation provided by the North Korean side, concluded that Kang had acknowledged the U.S. charges laid out against the DPRK. My conclusion was not based on a single particular phrase or sentence but on the totality of KangˇŻs statements, -- including several revealing sentences of a blunt language and unreserved expressions, and their nuances, which all helped convince me of the foundation of his acknowledgment. To the best of my recollection, Mr. Kelly did not use the term HEU per se, but his description obviously referred to an HEU program since he said the DPRK was pursuing the uranium enrichment program to develop nuclear weapons. Contrary to initial press reports shortly after the meeting, the U.S. delegation had not ˇ°presented evidence to compel Kang to admit the program.ˇ± What the DPRK was told was the United States had clear and compelling information regarding PyongyangˇŻs uranium enrichment program. However, there was no discussion of the status of the HEU program. The DPRK officially denied its acknowledgement first through its foreign ministry statement broadcast over KCNA (Korean Central News Agency) on October 25, 2002, 21 days after the Kelly-Kang meeting and 10 days after KangˇŻs acknowledgement was reported in the press. The KCNAˇŻs English version stated, ˇ°the DPRK made it very clear to the special envoy of the U.S. president that the DPRK was entitled to possess not only nuclear weapons but any type of weapons more powerful than thatˇ¦ˇ± But its Korean said, ˇ°The DPRK was bound to have something more powerful than that.ˇ± ˇ°Thatˇ± in both English and Korean versions referred to the DPRKˇŻs uranium enrichment program, which was the main topic for KellyˇŻs meeting with Kang. The United States was convinced that the DPRK was pursuing such a program. The second official denial by the North came during the first round of six party talks in August 2003, when the head of the DPRK delegation, vice foreign minister Kim Young Il, said what Kang said to Kelly was ˇ°we are bound to have something more (powerful) than what is produced by way of uranium enrichment.ˇ± The third denial was made by another foreign ministry statement of October 18, 2003, which said ˇ°In order to protect our sovereignty from the increasing U.S. threat to crush us to death with nuclear weapons, we merely told him (Kelly) that ˇ°we were bound to have something more powerful than nuclear weapons.ˇ± Pyongyang has since consistently denied its initial acknowledgement by the logic that vice minister Kang did not exactly say, ˇ°We have an HEU nuclear weapons program.ˇ± But I am still convinced, judging from the totality of all relevant factors including a swift shift in position and attitude from the day before, that the DPRK had decided to let the U.S. delegation know that the DPRK had such a program and there would be more to come for the United States to deal with. In my view, Pyongyang made a big blunder in October 2002 by acknowledging its uranium enrichment program in the mistaken belief that such acknowledgement would induce the United States to negotiations to resolve a newly emerged HEU program as well as other issues of concern to the United States. Pyongyang was wrong if it had thought it could use the HEU program as leverage. On the other hand it is also possible that the DPRK, out of desperation having lost all of its hope for improving relations with the United States for security and economic benefits, conscious of the fact that it was designated as part of an axis of evil that could be ˇ°a target for preemptive U.S. attack, may have decided to prepare itself for the worst case scenario—and to confront and fight U.S. hostility up front. If this was the case, Pyongyang was giving up any chance of engagement. It appeared true that the administrationˇŻs policy toward the North hardened because of PyongyangˇŻs HEU program, but the hardening of policy had probably been set in motion irrespective and in advance of KangˇŻs admission. I remember that James Kelly, while serving as the top point man on North Korea, told a public audience that what the United States knew about the DPRKˇŻs HEU program was more important than who said what at that meeting. The DPRKˇŻs astonishing reaction to the U.S. charges at the time may also be seen in terms of the high expectation it had of the long waited visit of the American presidential envoy to Pyongyang, a year and a half after the inauguration of the first Bush administration and several months after the administrationˇŻs announced decision to reengage the DPRK, subsequent to the completion of a year-long North Korea policy review. Although Pyongyang had been getting mixed signals from Washington, it had not at all anticipated Washington to bring up the HEU issue. Even if Kang Suk Ju had denied North KoreaˇŻs HEU program, I doubt the ensuing course of U.S. policy would have been different, given the administrationˇŻs revulsion to the North Korean regime and the threatening security environment in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which raised scary concerns about any possibility of transferring weapons of mass destruction into the hands of terrorists. There are some critics of U.S. policy who are eager to accuse the Bush administration of having fabricated unfounded HEU information to use it as a pretext to refuse engaging the DPRK and who are inclined to interpret vice minister KangˇŻs acknowledgement as the justification for a turning point in WashingtonˇŻs North Korean policy. I strongly and totally reject these radical notions. Nothing would be further from the truth. The recent discussion by U.S. officials indicating that Washington does not know the scope or stage of development of North KoreaˇŻs uranium enrichment program is irrelevant to the validity of Jim KellyˇŻs exposition of 2002. He did not say the DPRK was producing HEU, but that it was pursuing an enrichment program to make nuclear weapons. If Washington had overplayed the HEU program, it would be ˇ°a self-inflicted sticking point for the United Statesˇ± -- as I said in one interview – because this question must be answered clearly by the second phase of the 2/13 implementation agreement. In the same context, the DPRK has an obligation as a minimum to explain what it has done with the HEU related equipment and material that the United States knows it has purchased. WhatˇŻs your take? Tong Kim is former senior interpreter at the U.S. State Department and now a research professor at Korea University and a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). The Korea Times welcomes our readers' contributions to Letters to the Editor and Thoughts of The Times. The article should be preferably submitted by e-mail to opinion@koreatimes.co.kr and not exceed 900 words. _ ED. 04-08-2007 17:52 ***************************************************************** 12 AFP: US mission heads to North Korea amid nuclear advances by P. Parameswaran Sat Apr 7, 5:55 PM ET WASHINGTON (AFP) - A high-level US delegation departed for Pyongyang on Saturday after Washington announced advances that could pave the way toward North Korea dismantling its nuclear weapons arsenal. A bipartisan team led by New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson left Santa Fe, New Mexico for a four-day trip at the invitation of North Korea to oversee the recovery of remains of US soldiers killed in the Korean War, officials said. The delegation, which was due to make a stop in Alaska later Saturday, is expected to be in Pyongyang late Sunday afternoon and is to stay for five days. The trip was announced last week, prior to a breakthrough on Friday that Washington said could allow for the transfer of 25 million dollars of allegedly illicit funds back to North Korea and subsequently advance nuclear talks. The Monetary Authority of Macau, a Chinese territory, froze the funds in September after Washington accused Banco Delta Asia of handling what it called illicit North Korean assets linked to money laundering, drug trafficking and counterfeit currency. US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said that Washington had identified "the technical pathway by which these funds may be returned" from Banco Delta Asia in Macau to Pyongyang. The United States had agreed to set the stage for the transfer in line with a February 13 accord achieved in six-nation nuclear talks, in which Pyongyang agreed to shut down its key nuclear facility within 60 days under an aid-for-disarmament package. North Korea has refused to close the Yongbyon nuclear reactor and refused to return to multilateral nuclear talks until it received the frozen money. The six-party talks were launched in 2003 aimed at ending the North's nuclear weapons ambitions. But they have been plagued by disputes, amid which Pyongyang shocked the world with its first atomic weapons test in October. North Korea has also agreed to admit UN nuclear inspectors to verify its closure of Yongbyon nuclear plant reactor in return for 50,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil under the first phase of the February 13 accord. The agreement requires the United States to consider removing Pyongyang from its list of state sponsors of terrorism as they move towards full diplomatic ties. McCormack said chief US nuclear envoy Christopher Hill would travel to northeast Asian capitals beginning this weekend in an apparent bid to reconvene talks among the United States, China, the two Koreas, Russia and Japan. Hill was to leave Washington on Sunday for Tokyo, and later head to Seoul and Beijing to also discuss a "timeline" for the second phase of North Korea's denuclearization program. Meanwhile the Richardson delegation, which includes National Security Council Director for Asia Victor Cha, will visit the border village of Panmunjom, on the cusp of the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas, where North Korea's Peoples Army are to transfer remains on Wednesday. The delegation is then to head to a US Army garrison in South Korea for a repatriation ceremony on Thursday in which the remains will be formally returned to US custody. More than 33,000 US troops died in the Korean War from 1950-1953, and about 8,100 are listed as missing. "Our objective is to try to see if we can get some remains of the very proud and honorable servicemen that perished in the Korean War. So if we get some remains back, it's a sign of progress in the relationship," said Richardson, a 2008 Democratic presidential hopeful. He has been to North Korea five times and hosted delegations from Pyongyang. Richardson, who also served as US ambassador to the United Nations, has had experience negotiating the release of hostages, US servicemen and political prisoners in North Korea, Iraq and Cuba. Most recently, he negotiated a 60-day ceasefire in war-torn Darfur following direct talks with rebel leaders and the president of Sudan. Copyright © 2007 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved. The ***************************************************************** 13 Guardian Unlimited: Richardson Arrives in N. Korea From the Associated Press Sunday April 8, 2007 11:01 AM By FOSTER KLUG Associated Press Writer PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) - U.S. presidential candidate Bill Richardson arrived Sunday in North Korea for a rare visit to the isolated country by a prominent American official. The trip, which has been endorsed by the Bush Administration, comes days before a crucial deadline in a recent nuclear disarmament accord. Richardson, the Democratic governor of New Mexico, said he had no intention of negotiating nuclear matters. The delegation he brings aims to recover the remains of U.S. servicemen killed during the Korean War. Still, he told The Associated Press on the flight to Pyongyang that the timing of the visit is important and will show North Korea the United States' good intentions, ahead of next Saturday's deadline for North Korea to shut down its main nuclear reactor. The North Koreans, he said, will understand the symbolism of a delegation that includes Anthony Principi, the former veteran affairs secretary for President Bush, and Victor Cha, a top adviser on North Korea. ``It could be the signal of an improved relationship,'' he said of the discussions to secure U.S. remains. ``The North Koreans always consider protocol very important. They like to be considered a major power in the region.'' Since the breakthrough Feb. 13 nuclear agreement, there has been little progress. The North has refused further negotiations due to the delayed transfer of $25 million in the regime's money frozen by Macau authorities after the U.S. blacklisted a bank in that Chinese administrative region in 2005 for allegedly helping Pyongyang launder money. Some worry the concerns could delay implementation of the disarmament agreement. The State Department said Friday that a hitch stalling the release of the funds had been resolved, potentially clearing the way for the disbursement of the money. No details were released on when or how the money would be transferred. Many details of Richardson's schedule in North Korea were unclear, even on the flight to Pyongyang. Richardson said he requested to meet with top North Korean leaders and to visit the North's sole operating nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, 55 miles north of Pyongyang. On Wednesday, the delegation plans to drive from Pyongyang to South Korea, hopefully with the U.S. remains. However, Richardson said the way the North typically operates made it difficult to predict how the trip would go. ``They never tell you the schedule until you arrive,'' said Richardson, on his sixth trip to North Korea. ``It's the nature of the regime. They want to keep you off-balance.'' Richardson has regularly made diplomatic trips, often on his own initiative, to a number of countries at odds with the United States. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007 ***************************************************************** 14 GFT: Longtime Great Falls opponent of nuclear weaponry welcomes reduction Great Falls Tribune - www.greatfallstribune.com - Great Falls, MT Sunday, April 8, 2007 By JO DEE BLACK Tribune Business Editor For years, Jim Humphrey's Easter tradition involved a trip to the gates of Malmstrom Air Force Base. He took part in an annual protest of the nuclear warheads under the base's command. "The protest started before we moved to Great Falls in 1985," said the local attorney. "We went because nuclear missiles and nuclear bombs were a part of the local economy not talked about. It was taboo then, and still is." Nuclear weapons should be phased out of the nation's armed forces because of their devastating destructive potential, he said. "Our country has to come to terms with the actual facts and think deeply about what detonation of a nuclear bomb does, and the moral dimensions of maintaining those weapons," he said. "They do not belong on this planet." Humphrey said he's not surprised by the Pentagon's announcement that Malmstrom's 564th Missile Squadron should be eliminated. "The life of those missiles is not indefinite," he said. He also isn't surprised that some, including Montana's congressional delegation, are pledging to fight the Pentagon's plan. "This isn't a Great Falls issue," he said. "We are concerned because our economy is tied to the base operations. This is a national issue." Humphrey said the United States should take the lead in banning nuclear weapons. "Of course that's taking a risk, but those really aren't weapons because you can't use those things," he said. The loss of 500 base jobs will be a hit if the squadron is shut down, Humphrey said, but Great Falls is better poised now to handle it than in the past. "My gut feeling is that we are moving toward more diversity in our economy," he said. "We've had some growth and stirrings, and that is great. There is a positive attitude in Great Falls about itself, which is good too." As the city has evolved, so too has the once-annual Easter protest. "I never looked forward to it," Humphrey said. "It was tense. There were police cars. Someone would trespass and get arrested. I never did, nor would I." The protest stopped after the Berlin Wall came down and interest dwindled. Then Malmstrom announced it would no longer allow the event. Now the group gathers on the banks of the Missouri River to commemorate Hiroshima Day on Aug. 6 instead. "It's a celebration of life, not a gloom fest," he said. "We are standing up for life." Reach Tribune Business Editor Jo Dee Black at jdblack@greatfal.gannett.com, or at 791-6502 or 800-438-6600. Copyright ©2007 The Great Falls Tribune. ***************************************************************** 15 Great Falls Tribune: Report: 50 missiles unneeded, could be pulled by mid-May www.greatfallstribune.com - Great Falls, MT Sunday, April 8, 2007 By PETER JOHNSON Tribune Staff Writer A recent Pentagon report concluded that 50 of Malmstrom Air Force Base's land-based missiles are not necessary to meet the nation's defense needs. The Air Force says it could begin pulling the missiles north of Great Falls by late May. Last year, the Quadrennial Review, a major study of the nation's defense assets and needs, recommended trimming the country's land-based nuclear missile fleet from 500 to 450 as a budget-cutting measure. Air Force and local officials readily agreed at the time that the most likely missile unit to be eliminated was Malmstrom Air Force Base's 564th Missile Squadron, located between Dutton and Shelby. One of Malmstrom's four squadrons, it is the only one of 10 squadrons at three western missile bases that still uses an internal communications system that combines cable and radio messages. As such, it requires separate training, personnel and equipment that cost extra money. Congressional delegations from five western states that have or repair missiles joined together last year to pass an amendment that delayed the missile removal until the Department of Defense justified the cuts. Congress asked the department to analyze whether trimming the land-based missile force by 10 percent would harm the nation's security and to explain how the military planned to keep modernizing the remaining missiles. The Air Force submitted the classified report to congressional defense committees on March 16, though it took nearly two weeks to filter out. By law there is a 30-day cooling-off period during which the missiles can't be touched, military and congressional officials said. So Congress had until April 15 to react to the report. However, Air Force officials told the Tribune that removal of the missiles "will begin no earlier than May 23." It's expected to take 18 months, they said. The Air Force refused to release the classified report, but summarized key components: The U.S. Strategic Command has determined that the 50 missiles are excess and that it can meet its deterrent requirements with 450 Minuteman III missiles. Reducing the Minuteman force by 10 percent "was judged to carry no additional risk to national security." The 564th was selected for elimination because it has "a unique weapons system design and requires one-of-kind operations in manning, training and logistics support." The Air Force does, and will continue to, modernize the Minuteman III forces to sustain 450 on-alert ICBMs with adequate spares. The 50 missiles removed from silos of the 564th will provide the Air Force with enough missiles for periodic testing needed to ensure reliability of the missile force through 2030. However, the current modernization programs are designed to keep the Minuteman viable only through 2020. Additional Air Force analysis is required to determine if the missile and ground systems themselves can be maintained though 2030, Air Force officials said. Originally published April 8, 2007 Print this article Email this to Copyright ©2007 The Great Falls Tribune. ***************************************************************** 16 Daily Yomiuri: Time to consider a nuclear strategy for Japan This is a curtain-raiser for discussion on Japan's possible nuclear strategy. Since the Abe Cabinet was installed last year, the issue of Japan's nuclearization has surfaced. However, the nation is still discussing a preliminary matter--whether the nation should be allowed to discuss nuclearization. For my part, I have so far hesitated to broach the subject partly because I believe Japan does not necessarily have to rush into going nuclear--which actually is the conclusion of this essay. Compounding my reluctance to raise the topic is the fact that the Cold War prompted many exceptionally talented people throughout the world to hammer out enormous volumes of highly sophisticated nuclear strategies. Against this backdrop, I thought it would take a long time for me to draw up a nuclear strategy for Japan--comprising both theoretical and practical approaches--which would stand up to criticism by future generations. In other words, I believed I had not yet prepared myself to tackle the matter. However, as I have to keep a close eye on international issues and conceive strategic solutions to them, I have retained a broad personal vision concerning the nation's future nuclear strategy. When I have a future opportunity to discuss this matter in full detail, or find someone else whom I can ask to do so, I am convinced my vision could help lay the groundwork for the country's nuclear strategy. Therefore, I would like to offer an introduction to this strategy in today's column. First of all, Japan's nuclear strategy must be discussed within the framework of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty. In Japan, some people advocate nuclearization as a way for Japan to avoid remaining "a tributary state of the United States," and instead becoming "a genuinely independent country." But this theory becomes pointless if the debate continues a step further. The idea of possessing a few atomic bombs does not offer a tangible strategy or scenario for making Japan completely independent of the United States. What is more, how can the security and prosperity of Japan and its people possibly be ensured by severing the alliance with the United States? Such a move would put Japan into limbo and sandwich it between the nuclear powers of China, Russia and the United States. We should regard this kind of theory as nothing but an expression of frustration on Japan's subsidiary position in international affairs. Those who advocate Japan's "independence" through nuclear armament should recognize that such a goal can only be manifested after the country recognizes the right to collective self-defense and assumes equal responsibility for security with the United States. Otherwise, it sounds as if a spoiled child is selfishly clamoring for his own car. === Stick to Japan-U.S. alliance The ultimate objective of Japan's national strategy is to defend itself and protect the security and prosperity of its people. Any theory on Japan's nuclearization must be discussed within the framework of the Japan-U.S. alliance, which has successfully attained this objective. The concept of security covers freedom and independence. It is absurd to advocate "independence" by simply puffing out one's chest and bragging to the United States. Japan would have been deprived of its freedom and independence if t he Soviet Union had invaded and occupied the country during the Cold War. If Japan yields to North Korea's threats, it will lose its freedom as a nation. The concept of security is relevant to such fundamental matters. Whenever a country thinks of nuclear armament, it must give due consideration to the impact it will have on its relations with the United States--the world's foremost nuclear power. Such an option taking a course similar to the nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Iran even in spite of opposition from the United States would prove devastating for Japan's national interests. As part of its global strategy, the United States acknowledges the nuclear armament of Britain, France, Israel and India. The cases of Britain and France, allies of the United States, are good precedents for Japan in its search for a nuclear strategy. It can be said that Britain's nuclear strategy has experienced almost no problems in connection with the United States. In fact, British scientists joined the Manhattan Project to develop atomic bombs during World War II, while British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower were on terms of mutual respect in and after the war. Behind the Anglo-American nuclear link is a century-long history of British diplomacy, which has continually placed priority on cooperation with the United States as a national policy. While having to overcome numerous vital issues, Britain has always provided the United States with unwavering support. This means that Britain's nuclear armament is based on there being no discrepancy between the two countries' nuclear strategies, when either of them were to be faced with an emergency critical enough for them to resort to a nuclear response. France, for its part, has pursued a nuclear strategy independent of the United States. Nonetheless, in the early 1980s, when the Soviet threat intensified in Europe, I personally heard certain U.S. military experts unofficially citing the French nuclear deterrent as a factor confusing the Kremlin's nuclear strategy. === Japan's N-deterrent marginal Let us assume that Japan possessed a nuclear deterrent similar to that of France. In this scenario, even if China launched an attack on the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, it would be inconceivable for the United States to retaliate with nuclear arms. However, Beijing may find it more difficult to gauge Japan's reaction to such an attack, because the Japanese government might be coerced into nuclear retaliation against China. It should be noted, however, that even France relies on the United States for the main part of its nuclear deterrence. In other words, France's own nuclear deterrent is merely marginal--though sufficient to concern a potential enemy. Even if Japan opted for nuclear armament, China may think Tokyo would not resort to a nuclear response if the Senkakus were attacked. In this case, Japan's nuclear deterrent would be even more marginal than France's. Regardless of its independent nuclear deterrent, France has been an ally of the United Nations within the framework of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, then French President Charles de Gaulle solidly supported the United States. In contrast, Japan was a half-hearted ally to the United States throughout the Cold War, with no collective self-defense. We have to acknowledge that the level of trust between Japan and the United States is different from that between France and the United States during the Cold War. === Use U.S.-U.K. alliance as model In conclusion, I think an ideal approach for Japan's nuclear armament--if this is the choice of the nation--would be to pursue the British example. In this connection, I believe Japan should lift the prohibition on collective self-defense to upgrade the Japan-U.S. alliance in line with the Anglo-American alliance, as clearly proposed by the Armitage report of October 2000, titled "The United States and Japan: Advancing Toward a Mature Partnership." Even if the upgrading of the bilateral alliance is realized, the strategic importance of Japan's nuclear armament will be a marginal issue. Considering the current situation--in which Washington says it would consider an attack on Japan as being an attack on the United States--Japan's own nuclear deterrent would become a more marginal issue. Rather, it may be meaningful for Tokyo to discuss Japan's nuclearization as a way of indirectly pressing the United States to continue its nuclear commitment to protect Japan, although such a diplomatic tactic is of a different nature from its nuclear strategy. In addition, if Japan reviews its three nonnuclear principles and allows the United States to bring nuclear weapons into the country, the U.S. nuclear commitment is likely to be enhanced, as in the case of the introduction into Europe of Pershing medium-range ballistic missiles in 1983. Finally, we should consider the sentiments of the Japanese people. If the Japan-U.S. alliance was to be upgraded to the level of the Anglo-American alliance, and the Japanese public overwhelmingly favored going nuclear, the United States would have to choose between ending the bilateral alliance with Japan and tolerating Japan's nuclear armament. In such a case, the United States might let Japan arm itself with nuclear weapons--as in the case of the Anglo-American relationship. As Japanese society remains strongly allergic to nuclear weapons, the chances of the Japanese public making such an about-face may be slim. Okazaki served as Japanese ambassador to Saudi Arabia and Thailand. He is currently a guest research fellow at the Yomiuri Research Institute. ) * The Daily Yomiuri Partners ***************************************************************** 17 AFP: India to test long-range ballistic missile Sun Apr 8, 5:02 AM ET NEW DELHI (AFP) - India will test its longest-range nuclear-capable missile this week, almost a year after an unsuccessful attempt of the same rocket system, a defence ministry spokesman said Sunday. "There are plans to conduct the test this week," the spokesman said, declining to give details. Preparations to test the 3,500-kilometre (2,710-mile) range Agni-III have been completed, the Press Trust of India reported, quoting unnamed defence sources. India first tested the missile last July, when the prototype veered off course after travelling vertically 12 kilometres (7.4 miles) and crashed into the sea without hitting its designated target. The failure was attributed to a snag in a strapped-on solid fuel booster rocket. The missile can be tipped with a one-tonne nuclear warhead and India intends it to become the most lethal guided weapon system in the national arsenal. It has two solid-fuel stages and has an overall diameter of 1.8 metres (six feet). The Agni is one of four missiles being developed by India's Defence Research and Development Organisation. Rivals Pakistan and India routinely conduct missile tests and give advance notice as part of a series of confidence-building measures designed to reduce the risk of accidental nuclear war. Copyright © 2007 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved. The ***************************************************************** 18 [Radbull] ALERT!!! STOP AB 719 (No nukes in CAL) Sign onto below letter by Tues. Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 01:29:21 -0500 (CDT) Please sign onto the below letter by sending a message to Rochelle Becker at beckers@thegrid.net Dear Chairwoman Hancock I(WE) am writing in opposition to AB 719, Assemblyman Devores bill to lift Californias ban on the siting of new nuclear plants in California. In 1976 our state had the foresight to question the federal governments ability to create a permanent and safe solution for long term storage of high-level radioactive waste. To undermine this protective legislation could have serious health and economic impacts to California residentson whose fragile and seismically active coasts radioactive waste continues to accumulate. AB 719 states that: (f) Current California law prohibits the permitting of any new commercial nuclear powerplants until an approved means of disposal of high-level nuclear waste becomes available. With federal efforts well underway to provide an approved means of high-level nuclear waste disposal, and given that timelines for nuclear powerplant design, permitting, construction, on line operation, and first refueling would likely be in excess of 10 years, by the time a powerplant would be ready for operation, an approved high-level nuclear waste disposal means will be available. The current ban, PRC 25524.2, which AB 719 seeks to overturn, states that there can be no new nuclear power plants sited in California until: (a) The commission (California Energy Commission) finds that there has been developed and that the United States through its authorized agency has approved and there exists a demonstrated technology or means for the disposal of high-level nuclear waste. As of this date, _none_ of those conditions have been met. The Federal government has been tryingfor a quarter of a centurysince the passage of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, to wrestle with the unwieldy problem of radioactive waste. When the author of AB 719 writes, With federal efforts well underway to provide an approved means of high-level nuclear waste disposal one wonders where the facts are to back up this assumption. The only solution on the table, the Yucca Mountain national repository, has been mired in scientific, administrative and political problems for decades. The Department of Energy has yet to even set a date on which it will submit its application for approval by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the NRC may be a long way from granting that application, as evidenced by these statements from the Las Vegas Review-Journal of January 23^rd , 2007: Ed McGaffigan, a veteran member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said Monday that the Yucca Mountain program is deeply flawed and that the Nevada nuclear waste site should be scrapped. "It may be time to stop digging, and it may be time to rethink," McGaffigan said in a critique of the Energy Department program as he prepares to retire from the five-member commission that regulates nuclear safety. "I think Yucca Mountain has been beset by bad law, bad regulatory policy, bad science policy, bad personnel policy, bad budget policy throughout its history," McGaffigan said. "Every time somebody has done something to try to speed things up, it has backfired. "Each year that passes, we are not going to get any closer to Yucca under the current circumstances," McGaffigan said. It is therefore, at this time, wholly inappropriate to consider lifting the moratorium on new nuclear power plants in California, as conditioned by PRC 25524.2. I (WE) urge that this bill, AB 719, be opposed and rejected. _______________________________________________ Radbull mailing list Radbull@energy-net.org http://mailman.ctyme.com/listinfo/radbull ***************************************************************** 19 The Hindu: Six imported mega nuclear plants for Jaitapur project Monday, April 9, 2007 : 0345 Hrs Mumbai, April 9 (PTI): Maharashtra will be the first state to get six imported mega atomic plants of at least 1,600 MW each for its Jaitapur nuclear power project in Ratnagiri district once the Indo-US civil nuclear deal comes through. Preparations are on in full swing by the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd (NPCIL) to receive the plants and all them will most likely be of the European Pressurised Water Reactor (EPR) type, a third generation design, said NPCIL Chairman and Managing Director S K Jain. EPRs were designed and developed by Framatome (Areva NP) and Electric de France in France and Siemens AG in Germany. Though initially the government had approved two units of 1,000 MW each for the Jaitapur plant, NPCIL is preparing a techno-economic evaluation report for EPRs of 1,600 MW too, Jain told PTI. The estimated investment for the proposed six units, the first of their kind both in terms of investment and size of the generating unit, is expected to be over Rs 50,000 crore, he said. NPCIL will contribute 30 per cent equity while the rest will be raised through various instruments, including multilateral loans and from markets, Jain said. The plant will be located at Madban village in Rajapur Taluka of Ratnagiri district and this was notified in the Maharashtra state government gazzette on January 12, 2006 on the basis of the Centre's sanction, he said. EPR reactors are currently under construction in Finland and France. Germany is yet begin their construction, Jain said. Copyright © 2006, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the ***************************************************************** 20 Daily Yomiuri: 'Power firms hid 10,000 problems' Utility firms have concealed problems or altered data at power plants more than 10,000 times, the Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan announced Thursday. Federation Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata reported the findings of an investigation to a Liberal Democratic Party investigation committee Thursday morning. Japan Atomic Power Co. and Electric Power Development Co., and 10 electric power companies, including Tokyo Electric Power Co., said in a report handed to the government last Friday that they concealed problems and altered data in 306 cases. However, the report was found to have counted the same type of irregularity at several companies as one instance, which led to the accuracy of the overall number being questioned. The federation reexamined the numbers after receiving a request from the LDP to more accurately count the number of irregularities. According to the new report, there were 450 irregularities at nuclear power plants, 1,200 in thermal power plants and 9,000 in hydroelectric power plants. * The Daily Yomiuri Partners ***************************************************************** 21 FresnoBee.com: Conservatives warm to climate concerns From dams to power plants, GOP suggests its own fixes. By E.J. Schultz / Bee Capitol Bureau 04/08/07 05:58:45 How popular is global warming as a political issue? So popular that even conservative state lawmakers are getting into the act, using the issue to sell everything from building dams and nuclear power plants to thinning forests. The arguments are simple enough: Higher temperatures reduce mountain snowpack, so more dams are needed to capture winter precipitation that falls as rain. Nuclear power plants produce few greenhouse gases, the leading cause of man-made warming. Forest fires, on the other hand, send plenty of gases into the air -- so why not encourage timber companies to clear more brush to reduce fire risk? Environmentalists, who are skeptical of the proposals, are peeved that the other side has stolen their issue. "Clearly these legislators are just dressing up their existing legislation with a thin veneer of a pretended concern about global warming," said Bill Magavern, senior representative for Sierra Club California. Republican lawmakers strongly opposed last year's landmark legislation to cut the state's greenhouse gases by 25% by 2020. They criticized the bill as a job-killer and primitive attempt at placing local controls on a global problem. Have they converted? Not necessarily, says Assembly Member Chuck DeVore, R-Irvine, author of the nuclear bill. "It's politics," he said. "If the [Democratic] leadership has said this is a problem ... then all I'm suggesting is maybe this is one of the solutions we should look at." That Republicans are now talking about climate change shows how far it has come, said GOP strategist Dan Schnur. "You can always tell that an issue has evolved when both parties start using it," he said. "They're not arguing about global warming anymore in the state Legislature. They're arguing about what issue it next influences." Without the backing of environmentalists, the Republican proposals will likely face an uphill fight in the Democratic-controlled Legislature. But if passed, the bills could have a major effect in the Valley. The Fresno area is being targeted for a new dam and nuclear power plant. And the region is home to a struggling timber industry. Here's a closer look at the legislation: Momentum builds behind nuclear plants DeVore's Assembly Bill 719 would lift a 31-year-old state ban on new nuclear power plants, clearing the way for a $4 billion plant proposed for Fresno by a group of prominent business leaders. He's titled the bill the "California Zero Carbon Dioxide Emission Electrical Generation Act of 2007." About 13% of the state's electricity supply comes from nuclear plants, including two in California -- San Onofre in Southern California and Diablo Canyon in San Luis Obispo County -- according to a report last year by the California Energy Commission. But a state law passed in 1976 prohibits the construction of more plants until the federal government finds a way to dispose of high-level nuclear waste. The most-discussed proposal is a repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. The project, opposed by Nevada officials, has stalled, however. The delays led the energy commission to say in its report that it "cannot conclude that the [federal government] will ever operate the permanent repository at Yucca Mountain." DeVore says that even if a plant were approved today, it would be at least 10 years before it's operational. So by keeping the ban in place, "other states will be the first in line to build new, modern, and highly safe nuclear power plants, delaying the availability of this large-scale and reliable source of zero carbon dioxide emission electricity," he says in the bill. Unlike plants that burn fossil fuels, nuclear plants emit few greenhouse gases. Such gases trap heat in the atmosphere, causing global warming, according to scientists. Nuclear watchdog groups say nuclear plants are too expensive, pointing to cost overruns that have plagued previous projects. Construction of the Diablo Canyon plant exceeded the $320 million estimate by more than $5 billion, according to the energy commission. Yet the emergence of global warming as a hot issue has given nuclear supporters some momentum. The 2005 Energy Bill passed by Congress includes federal loan guarantees for nuclear plant financing. Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, has said nuclear power should at least be on the table. But Rochelle Becker, executive director of the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility in San Luis Obispo, said DeVore is jumping the gun. "Lifting this ban," she said, "would be absolutely irresponsible" without a solution to disposal of nuclear waste. State moves to build more dams Gov. Schwarzenegger, whose drive against global warming has gained international attention, has not taken a position on the nuclear bill. But the governor has used climate change to push for more dams. His plan -- contained in Senate Bill 59 by Sen. Dave Cogdill, R-Modesto -- would put a $4 billion water bond on the 2008 ballot, including $2 billion for two dams. One dam is targeted for Temperance Flat, upstream of Friant Dam. The state Department of Water Resources predicts warming will result in a loss of at least a quarter of the state's snowmelt runoff by 2050. This has led the department to recommend more surface storage to capture winter rain that today falls as snow. "We are in desperate need to have more above-the-ground water storage," the governor said at a recent appearance at Friant Dam. Environmentalists, who prefer conservation and more ground-water storage, say the governor is misguided. The proposed site at Friant sits at the base of some of the highest mountains in the state. So even with rising temperatures, there will be plenty of snowpack at those higher elevations, said Barry Nelson, a senior analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council. "If you're going to build new storage to respond to climate change, probably the last place you'd build that storage is the southern Sierra," he said. Also, research suggests global warming will cause more evaporation, meaning less runoff from the state's rivers and streams, Nelson said. "You could be building a dam to capture water that won't be there in the future," he said. Dam supporters say global warming is just one of many reasons to build dams. The other main argument is that more water is needed for the state's growing population. "In reality," Cogdill said, "we just let too much [water] run into the ocean." Tweaking the timber laws Cogdill said he voted against last year's global warming legislation -- Assembly Bill 32 -- because he is skeptical that Californians can do much to reverse climate change: "To me, it's a big stretch to say that human beings can turn this around." But now that the bill is law, Cogdill is not afraid to propose his own solutions. His Senate Bill 572 would direct the state to consider emissions created by catastrophic wildfires as officials implement AB 32. Cogdill is still finalizing the bill's details but said it could allow timber companies to cut down more trees without going through extensive and costly environmental reviews. That would give loggers more of an incentive to clear the smaller brush that fuels forest fires, he said, and at the same time could help revive the region's long-struggling timber industry. "The whole thing could be a win-win," he said. Trees absorb carbon dioxide -- a greenhouse gas -- from the atmosphere. But when forests burn, gases are released, contributing to warming. Cogdill's argument rests on the belief that reducing devastating forest fires will cut carbon emissions. But forest management is a delicate art. Cutting down large trees can actually increase fire risk because "those are the fire-resilient trees," said Dave Jaramillo, fire protection coordinator of the Sierra Forest Legacy, an environmental coalition. When a forest burns, the amount of gases released depends on the intensity and size of a fire. But, in general, carbon dioxide emitted from forest fires pales in comparison to emissions from power plants, cars and airplanes, said Jim Randerson, a professor of earth system science at the University of California at Irvine, who studies fires and climate change. In California, for example, fossil fuel consumption by vehicles accounts for 41% of all greenhouse gas emissions, according to a report by Schwarzenegger's Climate Action Team. In general, loggers can remove trees of up to 18 inches in diameter without going through a rigorous review, as long as they remove brush to reduce fire risk. Cogdill's proposal would allow loggers to take bigger trees. (A bill by another lawmaker seeks to allow cutting of trees up to 24 inches.) "I'm not talking about going in and massively clear cutting," Cogdill said. "I'm talking about some tweaks to our law." The Sierra Club California hasn't taken a position on Cogdill's plan because it is still being developed. Paul Mason, a legislative representative with the group, said the devil is in the details. If you allow for too many exemptions, he said, you "undermine the logging review process." The reporter can be reached at eschultz@fresnobee.com or (916) 326-5541. * © Copyright 2007 The Fresno Bee ***************************************************************** 22 Tri-City Herald: Nuclear agency to review leak at Richland plant Published Saturday, April 7th, 2007 MARY HOPKIN HERALD STAFF WRITER Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff will meet with Areva NP staff Thursday to discuss violations discovered in October when there was a small hydrogen fluoride release at Areva's Richland facility. Roger Hannah, a spokesman for the Georgia-based commission, said the meeting is a routine part of an investigation and the incident was not major. "There has already been an investigation but this is an opportunity for them to tell their side of the story and for us to get information about the actions they have taken to remedy the situation," said Hannah. The incident occurred Oct. 23 at the plant, which produces fuel for nuclear power reactors. Two workers entered a process area inside the plant's dry conversion building, where uranium hexafluoride is heated in an autoclave to produce a gas that is then moved to a pressurized vessel. Steam and nitrogen are added to convert the gas to uranium oxide. The process produces a byproduct called hydrogen fluoride, a nonradioactive chemical that is collected and sold to the electronics industry, which uses it to etch computer chips. When the workers entered the building they detected an unusual odor and immediately left the process area, according to NRC reports. They reported to the first aid station and that evening one of the workers was admitted to the hospital. Although hydrogen fluoride is caustic, workers would have had to have been exposed to it for at least 30 minutes for there to be long-term health concerns. Air sample tests found elevated levels of hydrogen fluoride vapor near a line for the off-gas system but there was no indication of the release spreading beyond the immediate process area or to the environment, an NRC incident report said. Hannah said NRC staff is satisfied the company completed a thorough investigation and analysis of the event and has taken appropriate corrective actions, but inspectors identified apparent violations involved event reporting, inappropriate respiratory protection equipment and inadequate engineering and administrative controls for small hydrogen fluoride releases. Bob Link, manager of environmental health, safety and licensing for the plant, said the Richland office did three root cause analysis of the incident to prevent similar incidents and evaluated the response to the event. Link said the company has improved its protocols and procedures and added employee training and enhanced detection systems inside the plant. "We've also improved maintenance and inspection procedures," he said. The meeting between Areva and the NRC will begin at 8 a.m. in the NRC's Region 2 Office in Atlanta, Ga. and will be open to the public. Although the meeting is between Areva and the NRC, people attending the meeting will have an opportunity to ask questions of NRC staff at the end of the meeting. © 2007 Tri-City Herald, Associated Press & Other Wire Services ***************************************************************** 23 DesMoinesRegister: Nuclear power key piece of puzzle Home :: Opinion April 8, 2007 The energy plan introduced by Sen. John Edwards in Iowa recently is one of the fundamental tenets on which he proposes to run for president. While many principles of the plan are noble goals, the plan has a glaring omission. Edwards fails to mention a critical part of our electricity portfolio in the United States: the necessary role of nuclear energy. Nuclear energy is already providing 20 percent of our nation's electricity, and doing so without emitting any greenhouse gases. Nuclear energy accounts for 90 percent of all electric utility reductions in CO2 emissions since 1973, and provides 73 percent of this nation's emission-free electricity. Conservation must be one component of a long-term strategy, and America must invest heavily in developing renewable energy sources. Unfortunately these steps alone will not meet America's estimated 45 percent increase in electricity demand by 2030. We will need more baseload power, and a good place to start is with a proven form of clean electricity. If Edwards is serious about addressing climate change, then I would urge him to support the benefits a renewed focus on nuclear energy will bring to the United States and the world. - Christine Todd Whitman, co-chair, Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, Washington, D.C. Copyright © 2007, The Des Moines Register. ***************************************************************** 24 Palm Beach Post: Has nuke's time returned? By Kristi E. Swartz Palm Beach Post Staff Writer Sunday, April 08, 2007 Editor's note: This is the second in an occasional series examining alternative approaches to providing America's energy supply. Like skinny jeans, wedge heels and bubble skirts, nuclear power is making something of a comeback after being shunned for nearly three decades. A new plant hasn't been built in the United States since 1978, but electric companies now say nuclear power might be the best way for the nation to cut its dependence on volatile foreign sources of fossil fuels - primarily oil and natural gas - as well as scale back the carbon emissions that are believed to contribute to climate change. "Nuclear has a very important role to play in a carbon-constrained environment," said Lew Hay III, chief executive officer of FPL Group Inc. Subsidiary Florida Power & Light Co. operates four nuclear reactors in Florida and last week said it wants to build two more. But nuclear power has the same downsides it had 30 years ago. The country's nuclear industry slowed in the late 1970s as interest rates and inflation mounted, but things ground to a halt in 1979 after the accident at the Three Mile Island plant near Harrisburg, Pa. A series of mechanical failures caused the nuclear fuel pellets to melt. Seven years later, a steam explosion and fire at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, heightened fears and spread doubt about the future of such plants. In addition, the byproduct of nuclear fission is a dangerous waste that needs to be carefully stored. Congress has promised a national storage site at Nevada's Yucca Mountain, but the project has been stalled repeatedly by federal lawmakers, including Democratic Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, now the Senate's majority leader. Further, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks didn't instill any confidence in the plants' security, as more questions were raised about whether planes would be able to fly into any one of the nation's 103 operating reactors. "The only reason we're discussing reactors at this point is because of climate change," said Jim Riccio, nuclear policy analyst for Greenpeace. "That's what's given them the leg up. But it's only rhetorical." Adding megawatts One of the primary reasons utilities want to build more nuclear reactors is the massive amount of energy they provide. That's critical for FPL, which adds an average of 100,000 residential and business customers each year. It's just as important for the nation as a whole. The U.S. Energy Information Administration says the country's demand for power will soar 45 percent over the next 30 years, mostly because of the rapid increase in the number of electron-gobbling gadgets consumers plug in every day. "Given the demand they are facing and the overall demand increase through 2030, they know they have to build some baseload power," said Mitch Singer, spokesman for the Washington-based Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group. The federal government agrees. President Bush has created the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, which calls for new plants, the reprocessing of nuclear waste and a demonstration project that would use the reprocessed waste as fuel. The administration also has split the cost of siting three new reactors with Exelon Corp. of Chicago, Dominion Power of Richmond, Va., and Entergy Corp. of New Orleans. "We're trying to create an environment where we can have a nuclear renaissance," U.S. Department of Energy spokesman Craig Stevens said. "Nuclear is the only available baseload power generation we have that can meet the growing demand of energy technology around the world." FPL President Armando Olivera told the Florida Energy Commission in February that FPL thinks nuclear power is the best long-term strategy for the United States. It's also the cheapest fuel, costing the utility - and consumers - much less than natural gas and coal. FPL operates four nuclear reactors in South Florida - two at the St. Lucie Nuclear Plant on Hutchinson Island, and two at Turkey Point in Miami-Dade County - and said last week that Turkey Point is "one potential site" for one and perhaps two more reactors. Olivera wants to build more plants to the point that nuclear power makes up between 50 percent and 60 percent of FPL's fuel mix. Right now it makes up about 20 percent. Natural gas is at the 50 percent point, making FPL and its customers vulnerable to price fluctuations as well as supply shortages. Hay said last month he's a "big fan" of nuclear power, not least because of its potential to help the nation out of its energy-independence bind. In the next breath Hay acknowledged the negatives - what to do with the spent fuel rods and the possibility that reactors could be the target of terrorist attacks. And, for a utility, the major challenges are how long it takes for federal and state agencies to approve a plant - more than 10 years - and the billions of dollars it takes to build one. Still, "nuclear has to be a part of the solution," Hay said. Chief Development Officer Michael Leighton said that building two reactors at Turkey Point "makes more sense than one" but that the company has not committed to a type of reactor technology or any other specific plans. The last nuclear reactor to go online in the U.S. was Watts Bar I near Spring City, Tenn., which began supplying power in 1996. Construction on the Tennessee Valley Authority plant began in the early 1970s. There's a second reactor at Watts Bar, but TVA suspended its construction in 1988 because the demand for power was expected to slow, the company said. For the two decades after Three Mile Island, the nuclear industry suffered from a tainted safety record as well as an average of four or five unplanned outages each year, caused when something other than routine maintenance forces a utility to shut down a reactor for at least a couple of days. Regular shutdowns for maintenance and refueling typically take place once every year to 18 months. Now, those unplanned shutdowns average less than one a year, and the industry's Occupational Safety and Health Administration record is better than some manufacturing and service industries. "I think some people remember back in the early 1990s when our performance wasn't really that good, and the policymakers through the public didn't support nuclear," said Adrian Heymer, the Nuclear Energy Institute's senior director for new plant deployment. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission says FPL's safety performance at its two plants has been very good. "From the agency's perspective, there were some issues from a number of years ago, but the company addressed those issues, and currently the plants are meeting all of the NRC operations and guidelines," said Roger Hannah, a spokesman for the agency's Atlanta-based Region 2. In St. Lucie County, the homeowners association that governs Hutchinson Island considers FPL to be a "valued neighbor," said County Commissioner Charles Grande, who sat on the citizens advisory board when the reactors were being planned. He considers FPL to be a good operator of the nuclear plants and said having those plants creates good jobs as well as adds to the county's tax base. "They are a plus rather than a minus, which is a funny thing to say because, well, hey, you live next to a nuclear plant," Grande said. "Almost any way you look at it, they are a plus, and we are happy to have them here." Governments add incentives Federal and state governments are trying different incentives to encourage utilities to build nuclear plants and investors to finance them. In Florida, Virginia and the Carolinas, for example, utilities can now start recovering construction costs from consumers while the plant is being built instead of when it starts operating. The federal 2005 Energy Policy Act offers loan guarantees for nuclear and any low-emitting plant, allowing what's known as merchant power plants to be built with 80 percent of the financing being underwritten by the federal government. "If you do that, the debt service is substantially lower, and it's very attractive," Heymer at the Nuclear Energy Institute said. When it comes to nuclear plants, it's the money issue that riles some opponents the most. "Lots of companies are lining up to file license applications," said Geoff Fettus, senior project attorney with the Washington-based Natural Resources Defense Council. "They are getting in line for massive federal subsides." As part of the 2005 Energy Act, Congress set aside nearly $13 billion in subsidies for nuclear plants. The incentives include: Z Production tax credits. Z Paying for half of the cost it takes for utilities to get a license to build and operate the plant. Z Regulatory risk insurance, which allows utilities to recover money from customers even if there is a regulatory delay in securing the operating license. Fettus said he'd rather see that money go toward promoting renewable energy or energy efficiency so the plants don't have to be built at all. When it comes to nuclear, he said, there are too many problems with handling the waste and with safety and security to promote it with financial incentives. "We think subsidies for a mature, polluting industry aren't right," he said. Florida's fifth nuclear reactor, at Crystal River north of Tampa, is operated by St. Petersburg-based Progress Energy Florida. The company wants to build another reactor in nearby Levy County, and Progress spokeswoman Cherie Jacobs said things are turning more favorable for nuclear power. "The tide is changing," Jacobs said. "I think that people are realizing the impacts that power plants can have on the world we live in, namely environmental." Environmental groups such as Greenpeace aren't so sure. "The intractable opposition is because we have memories that extend beyond 10 minutes ago," said Riccio, the policy analyst. "The history of this industry is not one that engenders confidence, especially for investors." The future of nuclear power in the state and the nation might come down to the everyday person for whom the potential dangers might outweigh the risk. "Their inability to get rid of the spent fuel is what's the most frightening, and you just don't build something with no way to handle the spent fuel," said Helen Spivey, a former Florida House representative and co-chairwoman of the Save the Manatee Club. "Now you've got it, what are you going to do with it?" Spivey lives in Homosassa, 12 miles from the Crystal River nuclear plant. Copyright © 2007, The Palm Beach Post. All rights reserved. By using PalmBeachPost.com, you accept the terms of our visitor ***************************************************************** 25 JOURNAL NEWS: Probe pending into nuke plant fire Saturday, April 7, 2007 By BRUCE GOLDING BUCHANAN - The crippled Indian Point 3 atomic reactor may be turned back on at low power while workers assess the giant electrical transformer that burst into flames and led to an official downgrade of the aging plant's safety rating. A spokesman for plant owner Entergy Nuclear Northeast said contractors from the Siemens company were expected in the next few days to begin investigating the cause of Friday morning's explosion and fire about 50 feet from the Indian Point 3 containment dome. Spokesman Jim Steets said the problem had been traced to the middle bushing in the high-voltage transformer, which steps up electricity generated by the plant's turbine from 22 to 345 kilovolts. "What we'll concentrate on is determining whether the problem originated with that bushing or that there was a problem in the transformer that manifested in that bushing," he said. Federal and local officials said no radiation was released by the blaze. But it was led the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission to announce it would lower Indian Point 3's safety rating from "green" to "white," and send a special inspector to review the series of shutdowns. The plant's sister unit, Indian Point 2, was unaffected and remained at 100 percent capacity. Copyright © 2006 The Journal News, a Gannett Co. Inc. newspaper serving Westchester, Rockland and Putnam Counties in New York. ***************************************************************** 26 An explosion and fire will turn up the heat on Indian Point plants Saturday, April 7, 2007 Another day, another incident at Indian Point, where the drama yesterday was an explosion and fire in a transformer yard at the sprawling complex in Buchanan. The initial reports - explosion, fire, shutdown - were enough to scare the bejesus out of anybody living or working within 100 miles of the facility - or otherwise beyond the state of denial. What actually transpired was relatively minor, given the ghastly alternatives, but is sure to raise the hackles of those who are opposed to the plants' continued presence along the Hudson River. A spokeswoman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said the unplanned shutdown of Indian Point Reactor 3, the second such occurrence this week, will downgrade the plants' safety rating to white from green, the safest of four operational categories. The plants had two unplanned shutdowns in 2006. Also this week, Indian Point operators concluded another disappointing test of emergency sirens; neighbors who should have heard the test blasts complained they were undisturbed. The rating downgrade is hardly cause to erect "for sale" signs on front lawns, pack up moving vans and head south - fast. It does mean the plants are in for increased inspections; such should be welcomed even by those who maintain that an independent safety assessment of the facility is unwarranted. Foes of such an inquiry as a condition of relicensure, namely Indian Point, stand on shakier ground today. "Unfortunately, these things happen when you're making electricity," said Buchanan Mayor Dan O'Neill. "It could happen at any type of power plant. . . . This had nothing to do with nuclear power, it had to do with making electricity." Perhaps, but "me worry?" is a slogan for a cartoon. "Trust, but verify" makes a lot better sense. With all that is going on in the world today, the notion that the Nuclear Power Industry in the USA is THE threat to our comfort quotient is ludicrous. The Nuclear Power Industry, by far, spends more time and effort in its attention to detail and the operation of its plants in a safe and efficient manner than any other industry in this country. The people that run these plants and the engineers that oversee their operation and maintenance are dedicated to the honest identification of problems and the pursuit of safe operation. No other industry can even come close to these principles of business management. Their decisions are based on the most conservative of operating principles and integrity. It is very unfortunate that those who publicly discredit the industry are the least informed, technically and otherwise, and most fearful of what they don't understand, which is technology in general. The media has perpetuated the negative mystique and has done the general public a terrible disservice. The media takes every opportunity to make headlines that generate controversy and thus money for the themselves. If only they were as honest and upstanding as the members of the Nuclear Power Industry. Copyright © 2006 The Journal News, a Gannett Co. Inc. newspaper serving Westchester, Rockland and Putnam Counties in New York. ***************************************************************** 27 JOURNAL NEWS: Fire costs Indian Point its top safety rating Saturday, April 7, 2007 By BRUCE GOLDING AND LEN MANIACE BUCHANAN - The Indian Point 3 nuclear power plant faces increased government scrutiny after an explosion and fire sent black smoke spewing from a giant electrical transformer and unexpectedly shut down the atomic reactor for the second time in four days. Federal and local officials said no radiation was released and there was never a threat to the public. But yesterday morning's incident brought the number of unplanned shutdowns at the aging plant to four since July. As a result, the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission will downgrade its safety rating to "white" from "green," the safest of four operating categories, a spokeswoman said. Flames erupted about 11:11 a.m. after an electrical fault crippled one of the plant's two outdoor transformers, located about 50 feet from the containment dome, said Jim Steets, a spokesman for plant owner Entergy Nuclear Northeast. Automatic systems shut down the reactor and sprayed foam on the flames, he said. A five-member company fire brigade reported the blaze extinguished within 10 minutes. "There was not even a momentary threat to the reactor in any way," Steets said. Indian Point opponents seized on the event to renew calls for an independent safety review of the controversial power station, which has been plagued by problems in recent years. Entergy has said it will apply this month for 20-year license renewals for both Indian Point 3 and its older sister plant, Indian Point 2. "Today, as always, we are told by Entergy and the NRC that there is no danger to the public health," Rep. John Hall, D-Dutchess County, said in a prepared statement. "Their credibility is, to put it kindly, insufficient to reassure us when 8 percent of the population of the entire United States lives within the 50-mile radius of this plant." A dispute also developed over the amount of time Entergy took to notify government officials about the fire. According to the NRC, Entergy declared an "unusual event" - the lowest of four emergency classifications - at 11:43 a.m. and ended it at 12:47 p.m. "The delay in declaring this an unusual event is totally unsatisfactory," said county Legislator Tom Abinanti, D-Greenburgh. "This is clearly an unacceptable time period." Steets said, "My understanding is the notification was timely" under federal regulations. "It's a rather technical requirement," Steets said. "The primary consideration, of course, is dealing with the event." At the time of the fire, Indian Point 3 was operating at about 90 percent of capacity after an unplanned, 24-hour shutdown that began Tuesday because of a problem with the steam generators. Before that shutdown, the plant had been online since Saturday after a scheduled 24-day refueling. The plant, which went online 31 years ago this week, also had two unplanned shutdowns last year. Steets said it was unclear how long the plant would remain offline. The fault that caused the fire was traced to a "bus," or electrical interface, in the middle portion of the transformer, although the exact cause was unknown, Steets said. Entergy has a spare transformer on site, but may be able to repair the unit, which is as big as a midsize box truck. The transformer increases the 22 kilovolts of electricity produced by the plant's turbine to 345 kilovolts, Steets said. David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, said transformer fires were not an uncommon problem. "They don't happen every day ... but they happen across the fleet of 103 operating reactors about six or eight times a year," he said. NRC spokeswoman Diane Screnci said Indian Point 3's safety rating would be lowered within a week because of yesterday's shutdown. A "green" rating means "very low safety significance," while "white" means "low to moderate safety significance." The lowered rating also means a special inspector will visit the plant to review operations within the next few months, she said. "Typically, this type of inspection is an inspector following up for about 40 hours," she said. "It's looking at all the shutdowns, to make sure that the company is understanding the root causes and taking appropriate corrective action." Entergy was not required to sound its emergency sirens because the plant's neighbors did not need to do anything in response to the incident, Screnci said. The sirens signal residents to tune in an Emergency Alert System broadcast for information. On Monday, 123 of the 150 new emergency-warning sirens failed to operate during a test. The new sirens are required to be ready by April 15. The existing system remains in use until then. Buchanan Mayor Dan O'Neill said he was not alarmed by yesterday's fire and was satisfied with Entergy's response. "Unfortunately, these things happen when you're making electricity," he said. "It could happen at any type of power plant. ... This had nothing to do with nuclear power, it had to do with making electricity." Many in Buchanan, where the plants have been a major presence and taxpayer for more than 40 years, seemed to take the incident in stride. "The fact that it shut down when there was the slightest question - that's what's supposed to happen," said Sandra Arasim of Buchanan, who stopped for lunch at the nearby Palace Deli and Pizza. "If it didn't shut down automatically, then I would worry." Kevin Tandy, a 42-year-old village resident, agreed. "I've spent almost my entire life here and I'm not worried," he said. "I know a lot of people who work there, and they say it's safe. We support it." Staff writers Liz Anderson, Greg Clary and Nicole Neroulias contributed to this report. Reach Bruce Golding at bgolding@lohud.com or 914-694-5102. Ricky Flores/The Journal News Security personnel gather outside a gate at Indian Point after a report of an explosion in a power transformer yesterday near Indian Point 3, forcing shutdown of the plant's reactor. Federal officials say no radiation was released in the incident, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has said it will downgrade the nuclear plant's safety rating as a result of this and other recent incidents. Copyright © 2006 The Journal News, a Gannett Co. Inc. newspaper serving Westchester, Rockland and Putnam Counties in New York. ***************************************************************** 28 Rutland Herald: Vermont seeking a nuclear monitor Rutland Vermont News & Information April 7, 2007 By Susan Smallheer Herald Staff MONTPELIER - With Vermont Yankee's regular refueling and maintenance shutdown looming later this month, Vermont is without its eyes and ears at the state's only nuclear power plant. The state is having a hard time finding a replacement for longtime State Nuclear Engineer William Sherman, who held what one state official described as "one of the most important jobs in the state." It is seeking approval to increase the engineer's pay to lure job candidates. Sherman retired from state government at the end of February after serving Vermont as state nuclear engineer for almost 16 years. He moved out of state and has gone into the ministry full time. David O'Brien, commissioner of the Department of Public Service, said the state was unable to hire someone in the first round of interviews, in part because of the pay. O'Brien said the job "requires a unique set of skills," working for government but having experience in the nuclear power field. "We think this is a unique position in state government and I think the state nuclear engineer has to be one of the most important jobs in the state," O'Brien said. "We were very fortunate with Bill. He was from the industry and he had the right frame of mind and the right values. We were spoiled," O'Brien said. "We've looked at some candidates, but we're going to start a new round," O'Brien said. "I have a lot of confidence in Bill and Bill had the governor's confidence as well." Entergy Nuclear is seeking both federal and state approval to extend its operating license by 20 years. It has draft approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The company also is building a high-level radioactive waste storage facility this summer next to the reactor, and it plans to transfer 35-year-old fuel into concrete and steel casks for the first time. Additionally, the upcoming shutdown is the first since the plant began operating at a 20 percent higher rate of power, and several key components are being inspected at the state's request. O'Brien said the nuclear engineer was one of the key positions in government. "I'd like to have someone sooner, but we've got to find a qualified candidate," O'Brien said. He said he had ruled out hiring anyone who worked for Vermont Yankee because of conflicts of interest. He said the state would make inquiries and advertise in trade journals. Ed Anthes, a spokesman for Nuclear Free Vermont, a grassroots group based in Brattleboro, said it is outrageous the state hasn't been able to find someone to replace Sherman. Sherman gave his notice in the fall, and Anthes said Vermont has had adequate time to find someone. "It's very troubling that the state has no oversight at Vermont Yankee. The nuclear engineer is the only person who can go in there and poke around," Anthes said. "There shouldn't be any gap in monitoring that reactor." "I wish him well," Anthes said of Sherman. "But it's critically important that there be somebody who can be trusted and has the best interests of the state down there." Anthes said he hoped the Douglas administration would hire someone who would be "truly independent ... not subject to political considerations coming out of the governor's office," so all Vermonters had trust in what the state nuclear engineer is saying. Richard Smith, deputy commissioner of the Department of Public Service, and Sarah Hofmann, director of public advocacy at the department, said Sherman's duties at Vermont Yankee had been assumed by others for the time being. Smith said the department was asking the Agency of Human Resources to increase the pay for the engineer, but he said he didn't know how much of a salary increase was possible. The position is pay grade 25, which ranges between $20 and $30.75 an hour. The engineer is eligible for overtime. "We are asking Human Resources to look at the reasons for increasing the pay grade," Smith said. He said the state was seeking a pay increase of several grades. "The Agency of Human Resources needs to review it and we have to find it in our budget," Smith said. It is not a new position, so it doesn't have to go to the Legislature for approval, he said. Hofmann said Sherman's direct boss, Hans Mertens, who is chief engineer for the Department of Public Service, had been going to the plant on occasion, filling in for Sherman. "We're still getting our daily call from the plant," said Hofmann, who has taken over Sherman's work on storage of high-level radioactive waste. "I'm also taking some of the long range fuel pool density issues," she said. Contact Susan Smallheer at susan.smallheer@rutlandherald.com © 2007 Rutland Herald ***************************************************************** 29 Rutland Herald: Inspectors check out emissions at Yankee Rutland Vermont News & Information April 8, 2007 By DAVID GRAM The Associated Press VERNON — The ground is squishy underfoot as Bill Irwin and Dave Truesdell make their way along the edge of a cornfield, just outside Vermont Yankee nuclear plant. Every 50 yards or so, they stop at a small, black mesh cylinder attached to a post, pull out two black squares from it and replace them with new ones. They are dosimeters, which measure gamma radiation emitted by the plant. It's all in a day's work, in the name of nuclear safety — a continuing effort by Vermont Yankee and the state Health Department to measure radiation emitted by the plant. Irwin is radiological health chief for the Vermont Department of Health. Truesdell is a chemistry technician with Vermont Yankee. Four times a year, they take a two-day tour of Windham County, collecting the dosimeters, which will be sent to a lab for testing, and replacing them with fresh ones. Irwin, 50, who is based in Burlington, likes the role he plays in protecting public health and doesn't worry about risk to himself. "Policemen are exposed to a lot more crime than the average person," he said. Just how much radiation is being emitted by Vermont Yankee has been a bone of contention recently. The Health Department reported that the plant had exceeded the state limit of 20 milirems per year in 2004. Vermont Yankee disagreed, and the two agreed to bring in a consultant to study the issue. Last month, Oak Ridge Associated Universities reported that the state limit most likely had not been exceeded. It urged Vermont to take a broader sample — especially of background radiation in outlying areas of Windham County — to provide a better comparison to measurements taken just outside the plant's fence. Irwin said the state has been expanding its sampling. The monitoring effort around Vermont Yankee is looking for ionizing radiation, a cancer-causing byproduct of splitting atoms. Irwin joined the state Health Department in 2005, after stints working in radiation safety at the Seabrook nuclear plant in New Hampshire and in laboratories at the Massachusetts Institute and Harvard. He tries to minimize his exposure, since no radiation exposure is completely safe. Irwin and Truesdell start their tour in outlying areas of Windham County, checking stations to get background readings against which measurements nearer to the nuclear plant can be compared. There are stops along roadsides, parking lots, even the roof of the District Court building in Brattleboro. Last Tuesday, they began their day inside Vermont Yankee, later moving to the neighborhood just outside the fence and stopping in and around the Vernon Elementary School. The school has a couple of special measuring tools. In a metal box about the size and shape of a dollhouse, the men checked a charcoal filter that samples air for vapors like Iodine 131 and a paper filter that checks for particles like Cesium 137. Both are radioactive isotopes; measurements taken from the filters could be used to check exposure in a nuclear accident, Irwin said. Inside the school, a box the size of a toaster oven sits on a shelf in the anteroom to the principal's office. It takes real-time measurements and would sound an alarm if radiation levels became elevated. People who've had a range of medical treatments involving X-rays or scans can set it off. It's happened two or three times in the last 15 years, said Chris Nesbitt, the school's administrative assistant. "The first time it scared us," she said. "There were people over here from the plant (Vermont Yankee) immediately." A visitor to the school had triggered the alarm. "She was really mortified," Nesbitt said. Irwin said he, his wife and two children don't worry much about his radiation exposure. He said government and industry have made significant progress in reducing radiation emissions. He said residents around Vermont Yankee should share his level of confidence. "This is a hazard that among all other hazards people can be exposed to — chemical, biological — that is perhaps the best researched and analyzed and is also the best measured and monitored in the environment," he said. "And the power plants themselves, as well as other users of radiation, are among the most highly regulated" of all industries. © 2007 Rutland Herald ***************************************************************** 30 Indian Point fire stirs deep-seated fears Saturday, April 7, 2007 For about 10 minutes yesterday morning, I wondered how much I still wanted to be a journalist. We had just received a report in the newsroom about an explosion at the Indian Point nuclear power complex, and all I could think of doing was driving south away from the story. Here is part of a frightening text message that came across one beeper: "Buchanan explosion. Indian Point nuclear power plant." Was this a nuclear accident, the one you fear with a power plant only 25 miles away? Had it finally come? This wasn't how I felt on Sept. 11, 2001. That morning I left my apartment in New York City and got onto the Major Deegan Expressway before I realized the World Trade Center had been hit. Without any hesitation, I turned back and headed for Lower Manhattan along with the firetrucks. I knew the country could be under attack, but I wasn't afraid. If I thought about it at all, I was sure I would be able to flee whatever came at me. Not yesterday. Had radiation already been released? Which way was the wind blowing? Would it be better to stay in the building or run now? Near me, some of my colleagues were rummaging for potassium iodide pills, the so-called KI pills that would protect their thyroids from radioactive iodine. My drawer was empty of pills. I had brought mine home and so they were in my bathroom cabinet and of no use to me. Others with more forethought had theirs at hand. One woman wasn't giving any up, not even to a reporter going to the scene. She wasn't sure how many pills she would need, plus she momentarily thought of volunteering to cover for the story herself. She was braver than I. Over the years, The Journal News has written extensively about evacuation routes should there be a serious accident at the plants. In that moment, I realized I had read none of them. I had no idea which way I was supposed to go. Almost six years after the hijacked planes brought down the World Trade Center I still had not made plans for an emergency despite all the exhortations to be prepared. Then again, if you listen to the evacuation critics, it probably didn't matter. They predict traffic jams on Route 9 as thousands try to leave. They doubt an orderly evacuation is possible. In the end, of course, the explosion was a fire in a transformer yard outside the nuclear area of Indian Point 3. The fire forced the plant to shut down automatically but no radiation was released, officials said. The transformer yard is across a street from the plant. The Indian Point plants, which are owned by Entergy Nuclear Northeast, had already had a bad week. On Monday, 123 of 150 new emergency sirens failed to operate; on Tuesday, a water pump malfunction closed Indian Point 3 for nearly a day. It had already been closed for 24 days for scheduled refueling and maintenance. Yesterday's shutdown will degrade the plants' safety rating to white from green, the safest of four operational categories, said Diane Screnci, a spokeswoman for the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission. By the afternoon, legislators across the Lower Hudson Valley were calling for an independent study of the plants' safety before they are relicensed for another 20 years. "As always, we are told by Entergy and the (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) that there is no danger to the public health," U.S. Rep. John Hall, the Democrat who represents northern Westchester, Putnam and parts of Rockland counties, said in a statement. "Their credibility is, to put it kindly, insufficient to reassure us when 8 percent of the population of the entire United States lives with the 50-mile radius of this plant." He was joined by others from Congress, and yesterday, I couldn't help but agree. Westchester County Executive Andrew Spano also is urging an independent study - and, as he has said before, he wants the plant shut down. "This is just one more reason why," said his spokeswoman, Susan Tolchin. "We're happy that there was no threat and we're happy that there was nobody hurt, but why did it happen? They need to find out the cause of that. But the fact remains that it's an aging plant and it shouldn't be here." Amen. Within minutes of learning it had been a fire at Indian Point, the newsroom returned to normal. Reporters turned back to their computers. On to other disasters. A group of tourists from Dobbs Ferry had been on the cruise ship that sank in the Aegean Sea. They really had been in danger. But still ... maybe I should pay more attention to those nuclear power plants on the Hudson River. Reach Noreen O'Donnell at nodonnel@lohud.com or 914-694-5017. Copyright © 2006 The Journal News, a Gannett Co. Inc. newspaper serving Westchester, Rockland and Putnam Counties in New York. ***************************************************************** 31 Star-News: Brunswick nuclear unit is back on line | StarNewsOnline.com | | Wilmington, NC Published April 07. 2007 Unit 1 at the Brunswick Nuclear Plant near Southport resumed electricity production Friday after an unplanned shutdown that began earlier in the week, Progress Energy spokesman Francis McComas said. A technical issue with an emergency diesel generator at the facility caused the reactor shutdown. Brunswick Unit 2 is currently offline for scheduled refueling, and generator testing in relation to Unit 2 led operators to take Unit 1 off the power grid, McComas said. Unit 1 should be at full power output by today, McComas said. Meanwhile, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission continues a review of problems associated with another of the four emergency generators at the plant site. A conference with Progress Energy officials Thursday at NRC regional headquarters in Atlanta centered on the "repeat failure" of a bearing on the generator and the implementation of effective follow-up procedures, the NRC said. The NRC determined that the generator issue is of "low to moderate" safety significance. A decision about possible enforcement action is pending. - Ken Little ***************************************************************** 32 JOURNAL NEWS: Indian Point 3 may restart at low level Sunday, April 8, 2007 By BRUCE GOLDING BUCHANAN - The crippled Indian Point 3 nuclear reactor may be turned back on at low power while workers assess the giant electrical transformer that burst into flames and led to an official downgrade of the aging plant's safety rating. A spokesman for plant owner Entergy Nuclear Northeast said contractors from the Siemens company were expected in the next few days to begin investigating the cause of Friday's explosion and fire about 50 feet from the Indian Point 3 containment dome. Spokesman Jim Steets said the problem had been traced to the middle bushing in the high-voltage transformer, which steps up electricity generated by the plant's turbine from 22 to 345 kilovolts. "What we'll concentrate on is determining whether the problem originated with that bushing or that there was a problem in the transformer that manifested in that bushing," he said. Federal and local officials said no radiation was released by the blaze. But it triggered an automatic trip of the plant's reactor, marking the second unplanned shutdown in a week and the fourth since July. That led the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission to announce it would lower Indian Point 3's safety rating from "green" to "white," and send a special inspector to review the series of shutdowns. The plant's sister unit, Indian Point 2, was unaffected and remained at 100 percent capacity. Steets said it was "very likely" the company would replace Indian Point 3's damaged transformer - one of two serving the plant - with a spare unit already on-site. He added that Entergy was considering restarting the reactor with only one transformer. He said the plant could go to about 50 percent of capacity with a single transformer. Each unit is about the size of a mid-size box truck. The Indian Point plants each produce about 1,000 megawatts of electricity at full capacity; together they fill between 20 percent and 40 percent of the metropolitan region's energy demands, according to Entergy. The company has said it will apply this month for 20-year extensions of the plants' operating licenses, which were granted in the 1970s. Friday's incident led several elected officials - including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., and Rep. John Hall, D-Dutchess County - to renew their calls for an independent safety review as part of the relicensing process. A business group, the New York Affordable Reliable Electricity Alliance, yesterday responded with a statement saying there was "no more reason today for a so-called independent safety assessment than there was yesterday or a year before yesterday." "The regular multitude of safety checks, assessments, and reviews are already conducted at Indian Point by independent experts," Jim Knubel, a former chief nuclear officer at Indian Point, said in a prepared statement. "A proposed independent safety assessment is merely a political distraction promoted by anti-nuclear interests who want to see the plants shut down, and would be redundant and a waste of public resources." Reach Bruce Golding at bgolding@lohud.com or 914-694-5012. Any enterprise that handles hot, hard, heavy, or electrified stuff is going to have this kind of problem on a fairly regular basis. It says nothing about safety, its just a normal consequence of producing 345KV electricity. (There are thousands of transformer fires every year). What speaks to safety, is Entergy's ability to handle the incident with its usual aplomb, put out the fire rapidly and professionally , have a spare transformer on hand ready to go, and get the unit back at half power ---all before the weekend is over. That really ought to be the news story here. Remember: a news story is just a news story. Agendists try to use news stories as warnings of imminent catastrophic danger, and they are not. When Indian Point had ice on its intake , over 2000 news feeds were blurted out over the wire within 2 hours, all hinting at some great danger. There was no danger at all, just an automatic knee-jerk news story, using the buzzword "nuclear" to seem more important than it really was. Indian Point is not only safe, it is very famous, so you hear about it every couple of days. It is also very well run, because your electricity is unaffected by Friday's mishap, as you might well have noticed. As far as danger--- people driving while drunk, or while using cell phones pose a much greater danger to us all than anything that could ever happen at Indian Point. (But that's not "News") Posted by: la_88 on Sun Apr 08, 2007 6:53 am Copyright © 2006 The Journal News, a Gannett Co. Inc. newspaper serving Westchester, Rockland and Putnam Counties in New York. ***************************************************************** 33 Star-News: Brunswick nuclear unit is back on line | StarNewsOnline.com | Wilmington, NC Published April 07. 2007 Unit 1 at the Brunswick Nuclear Plant near Southport resumed electricity production Friday after an unplanned shutdown that began earlier in the week, Progress Energy spokesman Francis McComas said. A technical issue with an emergency diesel generator at the facility caused the reactor shutdown. Brunswick Unit 2 is currently offline for scheduled refueling, and generator testing in relation to Unit 2 led operators to take Unit 1 off the power grid, McComas said. Unit 1 should be at full power output by today, McComas said. Meanwhile, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission continues a review of problems associated with another of the four emergency generators at the plant site. A conference with Progress Energy officials Thursday at NRC regional headquarters in Atlanta centered on the "repeat failure" of a bearing on the generator and the implementation of effective follow-up procedures, the NRC said. The NRC determined that the generator issue is of "low to moderate" safety significance. A decision about possible enforcement action is pending. - Ken Little ***************************************************************** 34 Sunday Herald: Response To Nuclear Accident Exercise Like Keystone Kops April 09, 2007 Est 1999 Scotland's award-winning independent Comment SERIOUS FLAWS have been exposed in Scotland's arrangements for responding to a nuclear accident, with a secret Scottish Executive memo obtained by the Sunday Herald revealing a series of problems during an emergency exercise at the Torness nuclear power station in 2003. Critics have compared the mishaps to the Keystone Kops, the group of incompetent policemen from the silent film era. But the Scottish Executive has angrily dismissed the criticisms, insisting Scotland was now better prepared. An emergency exercise, codenamed Yeti, tested the response to a major leak of radioactivity from the Torness nuclear plant on October 30, 2003. It involved 18 public sector agencies, along with the company that runs the East Lothian plant, British Energy. After a prolonged investigation, the Executive was forced by the Scottish Information Commissioner, Kevin Dunion, to release an official post-mortem report of the exercise. The document, marked "restricted management", made a series of damning criticisms. It complained that the original notification of the accident to the Executive was a voicemail, containing no names or contact numbers. It took an hour and 20 minutes for the message to reach the correct Executive staff. Officials also "found it extremely difficult to obtain any factual information about the incident, the extent of the contamination, and the contingency measures being advised", and there was a delay of nearly five hours until enough information was available to brief ministers and the media. The memo added that Executive officials had difficulty believing what they were being told by the government's technical adviser, Mike Weightman of the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate. His reassurance that the contamination was not serious "appeared inconsistent" with advice from the Food Standards Agency, and with plans to close the A1 and the east coast rail line, and evacuate the local population. Weightman and the Executive also clashed over the wording of a proposed ministerial statement. The memo revealed a rash of communication problems within the Executive, including an out-of-date directory, a failed telephone connection and a problem accepting encrypted data. None of the fax machines seemed to work, it said, and when a laptop crashed there was "no means of exchanging written information". Many of the problems were centred on the Scottish Executive Emergency Room (SEER) in St Andrew's House, Edinburgh, which is used to co-ordinate the government's response to emergencies. SEER has played an important role in events including the G8 summit in Gleneagles in 2005 and the heightened terrorist alert that led to the tightening of airport security last August. David Stevenson, the Glasgow Labour councillor who chairs the Scottish group of nuclear-free local authorities, compared Exercise Yeti to the Keystone Kops. "There needs to be radical improvement to these slapdash emergency planning exercises," he added. "This raises serious questions about how we would respond in a real accident, emergency or terrorist attack." Duncan McLaren, the chief executive of Friends of the Earth Scotland, described the effectiveness of the emergency response as "woeful", adding: "Those seeking election in May must realise that the only way to eliminate the risk from nuclear power stations is not build them in the first place." A spokesman for the Executive said it was "galling" to be asked about an exercise four years ago. It was "invidious" to suggest that it was relevant to today's situation, he argued. "The whole point is to learn from them. In fact, we would be worried if they didn't throw up problems," the spokesman said. He added that through ongoing exercises the Executive aimed to "improve the situation and upgrade resilience". ©2007 newsquest (sunday herald) limited. all rights reserved ***************************************************************** 35 The Advocate: On the hunt for radiation around Vermont Yankee Associated Press Published April 7 2007 VERNON, Vt. -- The ground is squishy underfoot as Bill Irwin and Dave Truesdell make their way along the edge of a cornfield, just outside Vermont Yankee nuclear plant. Every 50 yards or so, they stop at a small, black mesh cylinder attached to a post, pull out two black squares from it and replace them with new ones. They are dosimeters, which measure gamma radiation emitted by the plant. It's all in a day's work, in the name of nuclear safety - a continuing effort by Vermont Yankee and the state Health Department to measure radiation emitted by the plant. Irwin is radiological health chief for the Vermont Department of Health. Truesdell is a chemistry technician with Vermont Yankee. Four times a year, they take a two-day tour of Windham County, collecting the dosimeters, which will be sent to a lab for testing, and replacing them with fresh ones. Irwin, 50, who is based in Burlington, likes the role he plays in protecting public health and doesn't worry about risk to himself. "Policemen are exposed to a lot more crime than the average person," he said. Just how much radiation is being emitted by Vermont Yankee has been a bone of contention recently. The Health Department reported that the plant had exceeded the state limit of 20 milirems per year in 2004. Vermont Yankee disagreed, and the two agreed to bring in a consultant to study the issue. Last month, Oak Ridge Associated Universities reported that the state limit most likely had not been exceeded. It urged Vermont to take a broader sample - especially of background radiation in outlying areas of Windham County - to provide a better comparison to measurements taken just outside the plant's fence. Irwin said the state has been expanding its sampling. The monitoring effort around Vermont Yankee is looking for ionizing radiation, a cancer-causing byproduct of splitting atoms. Irwin joined the state Health Department in 2005, after stints working in radiation safety at the Seabrook nuclear plant in New Hampshire and in laboratories at the Massachusetts Institute and Harvard. He tries to minimize his exposure, since no radiation exposure is completely safe. Irwin and Truesdell start their tour in outlying areas of Windham County, checking stations to get background readings against which measurements nearer to the nuclear plant can be compared. There are stops along roadsides, parking lots, even the roof of the District Court building in Brattleboro. Last Tuesday, they began their day inside Vermont Yankee, later moving to the neighborhood just outside the fence and stopping in and around the Vernon Elementary School. The school has a couple of special measuring tools. In a metal box about the size and shape of a dollhouse, the men checked a charcoal filter that samples air for vapors like Iodine 131 and a paper filter that checks for particles like Cesium 137. Both are radioactive isotopes; measurements taken from the filters could be used to check exposure in a nuclear accident, Irwin said. Inside the school, a box the size of a toaster oven sits on a shelf in the anteroom to the principal's office. It takes real-time measurements and would sound an alarm if radiation levels became elevated. People who've had a range of medical treatments involving X-rays or scans can set it off. It's happened two or three times in the last 15 years, said Chris Nesbitt, the school's administrative assistant. "The first time it scared us," she said. "There were people over here from the plant (Vermont Yankee) immediately." A visitor to the school had triggered the alarm. "She was really mortified," Nesbitt said. Irwin said he, his wife and two children don't worry much about his radiation exposure. He said government and industry have made significant progress in reducing radiation emissions. He said residents around Vermont Yankee should share his level of confidence. "This is a hazard that among all other hazards people can be exposed to - chemical, biological - that is perhaps the best researched and analyzed and is also the best measured and monitored in the environment," he said. "And the power plants themselves, as well as other users of radiation, are among the most highly regulated" of all industries. © 2007, Southern Connecticut Newspapers, Inc. ***************************************************************** 36 UPI: Scrutiny high for Indian Point nuke plant United Press International - NewsTrack - Top News - Published: April 7, 2007 at 12:25 PM WASHINGTON, April 7 (UPI) -- Regulators downgraded the safety assessment of the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant in New York after a transformer fire that forced a shutdown. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Friday it would be conducting extra inspections of the Rockland County plant that provides about 10 percent of the state's electricity. No radiation was released in the Friday morning incident, which involved the Unit 3 reactor of the facility. Plant operator Entergy told The New York Times that the "booms" heard by area residents were likely caused by the automatic expulsion of excess steam. The incident occurred at a time when Entergy is seeking a 40-year extension of the Unit 2 and 3 operating license. Unit 1 is in mothballs. © Copyright 2007 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 37 UPI: Saudi Arabia may join nuclear club United Press International - NewsTrack - Top News - Published: April 9, 2006 at 7:40 PM DOHA, April 9 (UPI) -- Kuwaiti researcher Abdullah al-Nufaisi told a seminar in Doha, Qatar, that Saudi Arabia is preparing a nuclear program, the Middle East Newsline reported. He said Saudi scientists were urging the government to launch a nuclear project, but had not yet received approval from the ruling family. Riyadh denies any intention to establish a nuclear energy program, but Gulf sources told the Middle East Newsline Saudi officials have been discussing a nuclear research and development program -- and that the program would be aided by Pakistan and other Riyadh allies. "Saudi Arabia will not watch as its neighbors develop nuclear weapons," a Gulf source said. "It's a matter of time until a Saudi nuclear program begins." © Copyright 2007 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 38 Reuters: Nuclear industry bullish on S. Africa United Press International - NewsTrack - Business - Published: April 7, 2007 at 3:59 PM JOHANNESBURG, April 7 (UPI) -- South Africa's plan to build a nuclear power plant has sparked interest among the world's nuclear-power companies. A Johannesburg newspaper, The Independent, reported Saturday that major players from Russia, the United States and Europe have been making overtures to South Africa for a piece of the project. South Africa announced last fall it planned to build a conventional nuclear plant; however, the project has been proceeding slowly. The U.S. company Westinghouse, which is owned by Japan's Toshiba, has already formed an alliance with PBMR Pty Ltd. to develop so-called pebble bed reactor technology. Russia has struck a uranium-mining deal with South African companies. Although worldwide the nuclear industry is thriving, South Africa's program has come under criticism from environmentalists, who argue the cost of nuclear power coupled with the nation's electric grid monopoly makes nukes a bad deal for the public. © Copyright 2007 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 39 Albuquerque Tribune: Editorial: Our next lofty mission: Curb global warming Editorial : When the United States faced a global economic and national security threat from communism in the 1950s, we didn't debate whether it was real, whether it was Republican or a Democratic mission to counter it, or whether we should put off acting because it might cost money to fight it. We all rolled up our nonpartisan American sleeves, went to work as a nation, built the greatest military, economic and political society in history, and we seized the highest ground - the moon. The fabled Apollo program, in which we exceeded President Kennedy's challenge to put men on the moon within a decade, may well have been our greatest moment. We will never know what might have happened in the showdown with communist Soviet Union - which also eyed the high ground - had we not achieved that lofty goal and shown all people what a great, free democracy can do when it is united in purpose and goal. But along with that achievement came an unexpected bonus. Through the eyes of our astronauts, including New Mexican Harrison Schmitt, and through the cameras they used on the moon, we saw spaceship Earth in all its beauty and fragility, lighted by the sun just over the lunar horizon. Indeed, while our race to space may have been driven by national security considerations, among the greatest benefits has been our new ability to see and analyze Earth from outside its protective atmosphere. Those studies, and thousands more here on the planet, have shown unequivocally that Earth is in trouble. It has a fever. And, scientists agree, we human beings have caused it and are continuing to drive it higher through our carbon emissions from fossil-fuel power plants and internal combustion engines. Like the glass panes of a greenhouse, this increased carbon in the atmosphere traps significantly more of the sun's energy and heat, raising the global temperature. But you knew that. We all know that. Scientists have been telling us that for the better part of four decades. We didn't need former Vice President Al Gore to do his popular documentary - "An Inconvenient Truth," about global warming - and win an Academy Award to know that. We didn't need a dozen prominent American companies and utilities, including Public Service Company of New Mexico, saying we need to reduce emissions to address climate change to know that. We didn't need another scientific conference in Brussels this week showing data on global warming as a "highway to extinction" to know that. We didn't even need the scientists at that conference to complain loudly that special interests - the fossil fuel industries and certain governments that heavily embrace them - were trying to manipulate science to minimize the threat to know that. Yet, what has this great nation done about that? We have allowed our political and industrial leaders to ignore or distort the science and bury their heads in the sand and do nothing - absolutely nothing - while the fever rises, because acting will have serious economic, political and social consequences. That's as irresponsible as a parent deciding to watch more TV rather than deal with a child's 102-degree fever, because it's inconvenient, and it's going to cost some money to see a doctor. The potential implications are frightening: • Melting polar ice caps and glaciers. • Rising sea levels that will flood coastal areas where most of the U.S. and global population lives. • Shifting agricultural lands that could severely affect our ability to feed a still growing population. • More severe weather extremes, including hurricanes and tornadoes, with associated increases in the severity of flooding. • The probable extinction of species unable to cope with dramatic changes in their environments in a relatively short span. • The possible emergence of new diseases as tropical ecosystems expand. No, scientists cannot absolutely say with certainty exactly what will or will not happen. But increasingly they see a big picture that is dark and ever-darkening. And many are becoming impatient with the failure of the world's leading governments, including ours, to do much of anything about it. Clearly there are many nations, industries and companies with vested interests in maintaining the status quo. So here's what we're going to do to counter them, because we must. We, as people who have long-standing reputation for global leadership, are going to take the initiative by demanding that our government act now against the global threat of climate change. We will lead the world - asking Europe, Russia, China, Japan and India to lead with us - in finding the best solutions to the problem, including green cars and trucks, alternative power generation from wind and solar, and safer nuclear energy. We will demand that the White House and Congress collaboratively adopt the equivalent of an Apollo program - the best and the brightest working on global warming from all sides, with sufficient money to make a difference. This may require widespread national and personal sacrifice. But it also will generate new economies, industries and jobs - not to mention that warm and fuzzy feeling we get when we know we're doing the right thing. Our American way of life is at risk - more so than it is by any threat posed by any nation on the planet or all the terrorists acting in concert against us at once. To realize this is to understand that global warming knows no political boundaries or ideologies. It will devastate without regard to national borders, political parties, gender, race, creed or species. But we can do something. After all, we put men on the moon. And you know what they always say: "If they can put men on the moon, why can't they - in this case - reduce emissions from cars, trucks and power plants?" The answer is obvious. We can. We should. We must. This site does not necessarily agree with posted comments, they are the sole responsibility of the person posting them. Readers will be banned for posting defamatory, obscene, abusive, threatening or an invasion of privacy comments. Read our privacy agreement. Posted by sambo4 on April 7, 2007 at 12:47 p.m. (Suggest removal) Why is it that those who believe so strongly in global warming are convinced that the discussion is over. It's far from over. Global warming as an accepted science is still a theory. And as far as I can discern, an unproven theory. In fact, if you do a google search for "global warming CO2 emissions experiment", the very first return has the headline: "An Experiment that Hints we are Wrong on Climate Change". What it appears to me that we have is a scientific consensus that agrees that the theory of global warming makes sense. We also had a populist consensus in history that believed that the world was flat and that the sun revolved around the earth. The layman's problem that I personally have with the whole theory of global warming is that the whole thing is based on the temperature of the sun being a thermostatically controlled energy source. It's a wild fire and just like a wild fire, I'm sure that it's energy output is constantly in flux. Do any of the papers on global warming discuss this and what types of variations in the sun's energy output are normal? Furthermore, to support my thought about the sun, do a google search for "mars polar ice caps melting" and see what comes up. What do Mars and the earth have in common? They both receive energy from the sun. So if Mars is showing signs of warming right along side the earth, what can the reason possibly be? My layman's guess is that they are both seeing increased energy from the sun. Can anybody dispute this possibility? Posted by agreenwo on April 7, 2007 at 11:41 p.m. (Suggest removal) If global warming is as bad as the hysteria surrounding it then it is already too late to do anything about it. We would be better off planning how to survive the coming chaos than wasting time trying to stop the enviable. The reality is when people are cold and hungry they will burn the forests to keep warm and eat endanger species with relish to end their hunger. That is the way of our species. It is also the way of our species to sacrifice and suffer for the something greater than ourselves. Unfortunately, most of what is left of Western Civilization has become too corrupt and narcissistic. This is not the 1950s and 1960s that the editors allude to. The society of today has very little in common with the people who fought communism in the 1950s and put a person on the moon in the early 1960s. Those people believed in America and were willing to sacrifice for their country. Take Algore for example. He thinks he can continue to live his extravagant lifestyle by purchasing carbon credits and then claim he is doing something. He expects others to sacrifice but not himself, his family or his wealthy friends. He is no example. He is a charlatan. How can anyone expect Americans to come together for anything? We are in the middle of a culture war. At one time our American identity united us as people. That unity exists no more thanks to extreme divisions among Americans. On one-side is the Traditionalists who are believe in America and on the other side are Progressives who I believe loathe the history, traditions and culture of the Untied States. I think we as a people are well beyond the point where we can put aside our differences. The world in general is not going to do very much about global warming because no nation, particularly China, is going to give up their edge. If business is constrained by draconian laws based on global warming the factories or whatever will be moved lock stock and barrel to China or India or anywhere else where laws are not restrictive. It is already being done today. How much cooperation there is there between nations particularly within the UN? The answer is not much. China, the EU, Russia, Japan etc are competitors who will use any treaties to their advantage and our disadvantage. Let them handle their own problems. If global warming is as bad as the hysteria we would be wasting precious time and resources that would be better spent at home. If global warming is as bad as the hysteria it will be impossible to save the world. If we do anything we should prepare to save ourselves. Americans may not be willing to save a world that seems to have unjustly demonized us but they may be willing to save themselves. © 2007 The Albuquerque Tribune ***************************************************************** 40 Gothamist: Indian Point of Concern Editor: Jen Chung Publisher: Jake Dobkin 92.3's Homophobic Radio Hosts Bash New York Band (34) April 7, 2007 Yesterday's fire at the Indian Point nuclear power plant occurred in a transformer yard and away from the plant's nuclear area, but klaxons sounding at a nuclear facility have a way of putting people on edge. Transformers are the component of our electric power infrastructure that makes electricity suitable for transmission over the grid. When a fire broke out amidst the transformers used by Indian Point 3, the plant automatically shut down as by design. The other reactor, Indian Point 2, continued functioning normally. Groups like Indian Point Safe Energy Coalition (IPSEC) feel that it is folly to operate a nuclear facility so close to such a densely populated area (Indian Point is about 40 miles from Manhattan). By all accounts, emergency systems at Indian Point 3 appeared to function properly Friday, but it is worth noting that the plant just had an unplanned shutdown on Tuesday, April 4th, when workers manually shut down Indian Point 3 after noticing a problem with a steam generator. This occurred only a few days after the reactor came back online last Saturday, following a 24-day scheduled shutdown to replace fuel rods. A news account earlier this week regarding the unscheduled shutdown Tuesday discussed the implications: Sheehan said the plant's latest event puts it at the limit for shutdowns per 7,000 hours of critical operation. One more shutdown before the end of June would likely push its operating rating from green to white, the second-best safety rating. It would then seem to follow that Indian Point is now at that second-best safety rating status, after yesterday's shutdown. Update: The New York Times did report that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission downgraded Indian Point's safety rating Friday. The commission acted on Friday because it was the plant’s fourth shutdown since last July 1. The national average is fewer than one unplanned shutdown per reactor per year. “We’re going to get rigorously attacked by our opponents,” Mr. Steets said. (AP Photo/Craig Ruttle) This was very werd with out telling us in the news [1] Posted by: Matthew Bryan Oakley | April 7, 2007 10:09 AM In the 1960s, ConEd wanted to put a nuclear plant in Queens "only two miles from Rockefeller Center!" [2] Posted by: Toby | April 7, 2007 1:09 PM After all the fat, pregnant, but unusable alternatives are exhausted, somewhere around 2023, with nations once thought to be "below us"... like Iran and North Korea.... powering their countries with nuclear generators, and with sixty members in the nuclear club, instead of six, the truth will dawn that the West no longer dictates world policy, that billions formerly disenfranchised by ignorance, chauvinism, and Western Mercantile power wishing to live as if in Scarsdale or Beverly Hills, even while not leaving Asia, have had their way with us.... our children will play a long hard game of catchup, with the "New First World".... China, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran certainly, perhaps Brazil And Black South Africa, and their kids will ask to be sent to Brazil to attend college, or Iran, where the lights stay on 24 hrs, 7 days per week, not like in the USA, where civil anarchy, ethnic discord, and pandemic power blackouts make the once proud nation a loser's catchall. And all this will happen because such a fine lens, applied to anything in life, will prevent its use by one means or another, even if its use be sorely needed in the end. Those not so critical, not so longing for total ease, will simply take center stage, by default. [3] Posted by: John | April 7, 2007 6:48 PM 2003-2007 Gothamist LLC. All rights reserved. We use MovableType. ***************************************************************** 41 MHNN: NRC to take closer look at IP after transformer fire causes shutdown of unit 3 April 7-8, 2007 Copyright © 2007 Mid-Hudson News Network, a division of Statewide Hall: "... yet another example ..." Buchanan – A brief fire in the Indian Point 3 transformer yard Friday morning caused the shutdown of the unit 3 plant and led to a declaration of a notice of unusual event at about 11:45 a.m. The plant’s fire brigade extinguished the fire and about an hour later, the notice of unusual event was terminated. The plant was shut down and in stable condition. There was no release of radiation to the environment as a result of the event, Entergy officials said. There were no injuries and all safety systems are operable. The transformer that failed carries electricity from the main generator to the electrical grid. This is the fourth unplanned shutdown of unit 3 since July and will result in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission conducting additional inspections at the unit, said spokeswoman Diane Screnci. “What the inspection will look at is whether they are appropriately following up on the unplanned shutdowns and taking the appropriate corrective action,” she said. Based on Friday’s event, “there was no danger to public health and safety. We believe this plant is operated safely, however also believe that based on this performance indicator, we need to take a closer look.” Congressman John Hall said this fourth unplanned shutdown is another example of the need to keep a closer eye on the plants. “This is yet another example of why we need an objective analysis, an independent safety assessment, before a relicensing of Indian Point can go forward. Hall said that assurances of plant safety by Entergy and the NRC are “insufficient.” Rockland County Executive C. Scott Vanderhoef, meanwhile, said while counties are supposed to be notified of incidents 15 minutes after they occur, it was much longer and not until Stony Point Police called the county fire control center when a resident called them to report heavy smoke coming from the plant. HEAR today's news on MidHudsonRadio.com, the Hudson Valley's only Internet radio news report. ***************************************************************** 42 wcbstv.com: Indian Point Reactor May Restart At Half-Power Apr 8, 2007 10:39 am US/Eastern (CBS/AP) BUCHANAN, N.Y. A nuclear power reactor north of New York City might restart at low power after a fire in a transformer forced a shut-down. That's according to a spokesman for the operators of the Indian Point 3 reactor. The plant has two transformers, and he says it could run at half-capacity with just one. The reactor is facing tighter inspections after Friday's fire, though the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says there was no release of radiation, and no harm to public health and safety. The fire was outside the nuclear area. It was Indian Point 3's fourth unplanned shut-down since July, and the second in a week. A water pump malfunction closed the plant down from 4 a.m. Tuesday to 1 a.m. Wednesday. The fire didn't affect the site's other working nuclear reactor, called Indian Point 2. © MMVII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 43 WCAX: State lacks nuke engineer with Vermont Yankee set to refuel o WCAX-TV 2006 EEO Report MONTPELIER, Vt. -- The state has no nuclear engineer at a time when the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant is set to shut down for its regular refueling. The state's engineer regularly consults with officials at the Vernon plant. State officials say they haven't been able to attract a replacement for William Sherman, who retired in February, partly because they can't offer enough money. Public Service Commissioner David O'Brien said no qualified candidate emerged from the first round of interviews. "We think this is a unique position in state government and I think the state nuclear engineer has to be one of the most important jobs in the state," O'Brien said. "We were very fortunate with Bill. He was from the industry and he had the right frame of mind and the right values. We were spoiled," O'Brien said. Since Sherman retired other officials have been filling in, said Sarah Hofmann, director of public advocacy at the Department of Public Service. Deputy Commissioner of Public Service Richard Smith said the department was asking the Agency of Human Resources to increase the pay for the nuclear engineer. Currently, the position is pay grade 25, which ranges between $20 and $30.75 an hour and is eligible for overtime "We are asking Human Resources to look at the reasons for increasing the pay grade," Smith said. He said the state was seeking a pay increase of several grades. Ed Anthes, a spokesman for Nuclear Free Vermont, said Sherman gave his notice in the fall and the state should have had plenty of time to find a replacement. "It's very troubling that the state has no oversight at Vermont Yankee. The nuclear engineer is the only person who can go in there and poke around," Anthes said. "There shouldn't be any gap in monitoring that reactor." ___ Information from: Rutland Herald, http://www.rutlandherald.com/ Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. All content © Copyright 2001 - 2007 WorldNow and WCAX. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 44 AU The Age: Limited scrutiny on nuclear projects - National - www.theage.com.au Katharine Murphy, Canberra April 9, 2007 CONTROVERSIAL nuclear facilities, such as waste dumps and uranium mines, can be approved by the Federal Government with only limited scrutiny, according to a respected lawyer. Stephen Keim, SC, who acts in environmental and planning matters, says nuclear "actions", including waste dumps and new mines, can be given a green light through "conservation agreements" between the minister and the business proposing the development. The agreements proposed under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act are much less transparent than a normal environmental impact assessment, Mr Keim says. "The use of conservation agreements for this process seems particularly unsuitable and particularly lacking in safeguards, public input and transparency," Mr Keim says in an advice for the Wilderness Society. The advice that it is now easier for Canberra to approve nuclear facilities comes as former mining executive Hugh Morgan has flagged an internationally owned nuclear waste repository being built in remote country in South and Western Australia. Imogen Zethoven, nuclear campaign co-ordinator for the Wilderness Society, said: "After 50 years of the global nuclear industry, there is no safe, proven method of disposing of high-level nuclear waste." * Copyright © 2007. The Age Company Ltd. ***************************************************************** 45 The Hindu: China building 10 medical bases for nuclear radiation victims Sunday, April 8, 2007 : 0400 Hrs Beijing, April 8. (PTI): China is building over 10 medical bases capable of providing first aid to victims of nuclear radiation, the Government has announced. China is building at least ten medical bases across the country which could provide emergency care for people exposed to nuclear radiation, Vice Health Minister Wang Longde said in reply to a question raised by a netizen about how the Government would protect the public in case of a nuclear crisis. Taking part in an interview with netizens on the Government's website, Wang told the public that nuclear energy is highly efficient but also dangerous. The Central Government has stepped up monitoring of firms in the country that use nuclear material. Sites used by companies that handle nuclear material should be in areas that have the least impact on the surroundings and should be vetted by health departments before construction begins, he added. The Governments at all levels should be fully aware of what to do in the case of a nuclear accident or leakage occurs and should have emergency plans to protect civilians in case of a nuclear accident, Wang said. Energy-hungry China is currently in the process of establishing more nuclear power stations to fuel its double-digit economic growth. Copyright © 2006, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the ***************************************************************** 46 Las Vegas SUN: Editorial: A history of waste Today: April 08, 2007 at 8:28:42 PDT Bush wants 'no strings attached,' but billions appropriated for Iraq are missing Federal audits show the government has lost track of billions of dollars appropriated for Iraq reconstruction and military projects. Fraud and mismanagement are blamed. And as USA Today reported last week, even a company hired to account for such losses has failed to fulfill its obligations. Reviewer Management International of New York was hired by a U.S. contracting office in Baghdad to track more than $7.3 billion in lost Iraqi reconstruction funding and create a database that would help investigators track fraud. Stuart Bowen, Iraq reconstruction special investigator, had recommended developing such a database in the wake of an $8.6 million bid-rigging scheme in Iraq, USA Today reports. Nearly two years later, RMI has failed to provide the database for which the government paid $1.5 million. A report released by Bowen's office at the end of January says RMI wasn't able to provide the database because it wasn't given adequate instructions until the end of its contract period, USA Today reports. That is just the most recently revealed example in the history of poor management and outright fraud in the federal government's contracts with private entities , which have been hired to do everything from rebuilding Iraqi infrastructure to providing U.S. soldiers' meals. Bowen's investigators also have discovered that U.S. officials lost track of $8.8 billion in Iraqi oil proceeds that had been transferred to Iraq's U.S.-led provisional government. Federal officials have spent close to $400 billion in taxpayer money on Iraq reconstruction efforts alone and have lost track of large portions of it. It is no wonder that Congress now balks at throwing billions more at President Bush's failing war, with, as Bush demanded, "no strings attached." All contents copyright 2005 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 47 London Times: Uranium price hits record, with further rises expected- April 9, 2007 Paul Larter in Brisbane A shortage of uranium is pushing up the metal’s price to record levels and underpinning a surge in the value of Australian and Canadian companies that mine uranium oxide used to create fuel for nuclear power stations. The price has surged to almost US$100 a pound for the first time in a generation, soaring 78 per cent during the past six months as production delays buoy the cost of the commodity. Analysts have been forced to revise upwards their forecasts, with some forward measures suggesting that prices will reach $125 a pound this year and $140 a pound in 2008. The spot price has hit $95 a pound, its highest since the 1970s, rising 45 per cent from three months ago and almost 80 per cent from the level of six months ago. It was below $10 in 2002. The surging price is fuelling a boom in the market valuations of junior Australian and Canadian uranium companies, which have risen 122 per cent and 75 per cent, respectively, during the past year, according to Resource Capital Research. * Utilities say hedge funds to blame John Wilson, the managing director of the uranium analyst, said that forward indicators were continuing to strengthen. “At some point it will pull back to a fundamental level. How much further it will go is not entirely clear,” he said. Significant upward pressure has been building since October, when flooding at Cigar Lake in Canada, the world’s biggest undeveloped high-grade uranium deposit, delayed production by two years until 2010 in an already tight market. Energy Resources, of Australia, a subsidiary of Rio Tinto, provided a further squeeze last month when it declared force majeure on some contracts after heavy rains at Ranger, the world’s second-biggest uranium mine. The company cut production expectations for next year by up to 35 per cent. Analysts at Macquarie, RBC Capital Markets and Goldman Sachs JBWere all predict that uranium prices will hit $100 a pound this year. Max Layton, an analyst for Macquarie Bank, said: “Macquarie believes the bull market will continue for the next one or two years, at least.” He said that a shortage of mine supply would sustain pressure on the market over that period, citing the example of ERA’s problems at Ranger: “The problems at the Ranger mine alone will leave the market much tighter in 2008. Where’s that 1,400 tonnes of uranium going to come from?” The World Nuclear Association says that restocking by utilities, speculation by hedge funds and buying for new reactors are also applying pressure. It expects 48 new nuclear power reactors to be operating by 2013, principally in China, India and Russia. Miners in Australia, which holds 40 per cent of known uranium reserves, are poised for a further boost. The federal Labor Party is widely expected this month to drop a policy that effectively prevents the development of new mines. Conversely, BHP, which owns the world’s biggest uranium resource, at Olympic Dam in South Australia, will not benefit from higher prices. Not only is it committed until 2010 to legacy contracts that pay less than $20 a pound, but also it has been forced to buy high-priced third-party uranium to meet the terms of some of its contracts. Times Online, The Times and The Sunday Times. ***************************************************************** 48 Chillicothe Gazette: Piketon plant study topic for meetings www.chillicothegazette.com - Chillicothe, OH Sunday, April 8, 2007 Portsmouth and Chillicothe to host public meetings The Gazette Staff Two public meetings will take place next week for residents both to learn about the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership and ask questions of the group striving to bring it here. The Southern Ohio Nuclear Integration Cooperative, which is doing a detailed siting study to determine whether Piketon would be appropriate for the nuclear facilities, will be at the Plumbers and Pipefitters Hall in Portsmouth from 6 to 9 p.m. Monday. The facility is on Gallia Street. The next day at the same time, a similar meeting will take place at Ohio University-Chillicothe's Shoemaker Center. SONIC was one of 11 sites awarded a grant to do the study. If Piketon is chosen to host GNEP facilities, nuclear waste from all over the nation, and perhaps the world, would come to the site to be recycled and reprocessed. The material would be separated into its reusable and waste components, which would generate electricity while minimizing permanent nuclear waste. Additionally, GNEP aims to prevent proliferation by allowing nuclear-capable countries, such as the U.S. and France, to provide reprocessing services to other countries that agree not to pursue their own programs. The purpose of the meetings is to make community members aware of the siting study and get their opinions, according to material from SONIC. Information obtained in the study could be used in the Department of Energy's Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement, which will consider alternatives to GNEP facilities and processes, as well as effects on the environments. Originally published April 8, 2007 Print this article Email this to More material concerning GNEP and SONIC's study is available on its Web site at www.safesonic.net Copyright ©2007 Chillicothe Gazette All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 49 Herald Sun: Uranium price soars | NEWS.com.au | Mandi Zonneveldt April 09, 2007 12:00am THE price of uranium has smashed through $US100 a pound as supplies of the nuclear fuel become more scarce. The uranium spot price soared $US18 last week to $US113 a pound -- the largest single jump since NUEXCO began reporting uranium prices in 1968. Uranium does not trade on an open market like other commodities. Buyers and sellers negotiate contracts privately and prices are published by independent market consultants. The new benchmark, reported by consultants TradeTech, formerly NUEXCO, was set by an auction in the United States last Wednesday for 100,000 pounds of yellowcake. The bidding came as Australian uranium producer Energy Resources of Australia warned that wet weather would hamper its production for at least a year. In its newsletter published on Friday, TradeTech said ERA's announcement contributed to the huge price rise last week. The US-based consultancy said utilities looking for large amounts of uranium for near-term delivery and continued interest from speculators and hedge funds had also helped push the price up. The uranium price has increased 57 per cent since the beginning of this year alone, and is up more than 170 per cent in the past 12 months. Resource Capital Research recently predicted the price of yellowcake would touch $US125 a pound this year and rise as high as $US140 a pound in 2008. Australian uranium producers have missed out on much of the upside of the uranium boom because most of their uranium is sold under long-term contracts that are only partially influenced by the spot price. However, BHP Billiton has begun talking to potential customers about an expansion at its Olympic Dam mine that would triple its uranium output. Paladin Resources is also well placed to cash in on recent rises, having just commissioned the world's first new uranium mine in 15 years in Namibia. The company is close to moving on a second project in Malawi. The uranium boom has pushed the value of listed explorers in Australia up 23 per cent in the past three months, according to RCR, and up 122 per cent in the past year. The exploration industry is keenly awaiting the outcome of debate at the Labor Party's national conference this month, with the ALP expected to end its opposition to new uranium mines in Australia. © Herald and Weekly Times. All times AEST (GMT + 10). ***************************************************************** 50 Telegraph: Uranium giant to fuel London | Monday 9 April 2007 By Sylvia Pfeifer, Sunday Telegraph Last Updated: 12:00am BST 08/04/2007 British punters will soon be able to play the uranium market by investing in the world's second-largest public uranium producer. Shareholders of Aim-listed UrAsia Energy approved the company's $3.8bn (Ł1.9bn) reverse takeover of SXR Uranium One, another Canadian group, late last week. The combined company, to be called Uranium One, will be listed on London's junior Aim market, as well as on the Toronto and Johannesburg stock exchanges. With a pro-forma market value of around $5.5bn, the new company will be the world's second--largest public uranium producer after Cameco Corporation of Canada, as well as a borderline contender to get into the blue-chip FTSE100 index. The new board, which will be led by Neal Froneman, currently the CEO of SXR Uranium, plans to move the company from Aim to London's main list within the next 12 months. A US listing on the New York Stock Exchange is also likely in the longer term. Phillip Shirvington, currently the chief executive of UrAsia Energy, is staying on as a board member of the new company and will also oversee the development of projects that will be coming on stream over the next 12-24 months. He will also be directly involved in managing the relations between Uranium One and the Kazakh government. The new company will be a globally diversified, low-cost uranium producer with assets in Kazakhstan, South Africa, Australia, the US and Canada. By 2008 it is expected to have five producing assets; its production will be 7m pounds in 2008, rising to 11m pounds by 2012. Its Dominion uranium project in South Africa is one of the largest undeveloped uranium deposits. It also produces about 2.6m ounces of gold as a byproduct. The deal is expected to kick off further consolidation in the uranium sector. Last month UraMin, another Aim-listed company, announced a private placement of 52m shares to raise $226m. Soaring prices of uranium have fuelled investor appetite in the sector. Uranium prices have increased eight-fold over the past three years. Three years ago there were no dedicated uranium mining companies listed in London; now there are several. Last month analysts at RBC Dominion Securities, the Canadian bank, said they forecast the average price for 2007 to reach $100 a pound, its highest since the 1980s and up from its current level of $95 a pound. One of the reasons behind the soaring price has been the expected renaissance of nuclear power. In Britain, the Government is expected to give the green light to the building of new nuclear power stations later this year. Other reasons for the price increase are an imbalance between supply and demand, as well as the entry of speculative buyers into the market. Hedge funds have become active investors in recent months. © Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2007. | Terms ***************************************************************** 51 barrow in furness: N-experts in Beaches Tests Published on 07/04/2007 RADIOACTIVITY tests are to be carried out on beaches in Cumbria. The coastline near Sellafield is to be monitored. Increased testing was introduced after a particle of radioactive material was found at Braystones beach in 2003. British Nuclear Group, which operates the nuclear plant, said the next phase of testing would be at beaches between Drigg and St Bees. The Environment Agency has made extra monitoring a requirement. The work is expected to be completed by March next year. A Sellafield spokeswoman said: “We just want people in the affected areas to be aware there will be increased activity with vehicles mounted with monitoring equipment being used in the tests.” Representatives from British Nuclear Group are to attend parish council meetings in April and May to ensure people are kept fully aware of what is being done. ***************************************************************** 52 Whitehaven News: Union fears private equity buy-out of Sellafield division Published on 07/04/2007 A LEADING trades union has voiced fears for nuclear safety if a private equity firm is allowed to buy Sellafield's key project services division. The Amicus union has written to the Department of Trade and Industry and to the finance director of BNFL amid rumours that Barclays Capital is likely to bid for the division, which employs more than 700 people and looks after the equipment monitoring radiation safety and security for the Sellafield reprocessing centre, the old Magnox nuclear reactors. Dougie Rooney, the union’s national energy officer, said: “We are extremely concerned that the sale, which includes the maintenance of instrumentation which controls radiation, security and safety, may be purchased by a private equity company. We believe that this would be disastrous, undermining the safety of the site and result in BNFL being forced to make excessive payments for services which otherwise would have remained in-house.” The Times newspaper has reported that the union has asked the DTI to force BNFL to divulge the names of everyone who has expressed an interest in project services. Amicus believes that some parts of project services’ work would also be neglected by a buyer that did not have a strong track record in nuclear management. View this story and the latest newspaper in full digital reproduction, just like the printed copy at www.whitehaven-news.co.uk/digitalcopy ***************************************************************** 53 The Observer: Unions fear fission if BNFL project division is sold off Oliver Morgan Sunday April 8, 2007 The Observer Nuclear group BNFL is facing opposition from unions over the proposed sale of its project management arm - which manages the decommissioning of nuclear sites - warning that it could end up in the hands of a private equity group. BNFL's adviser, Rothschilds, has received a number of offers for British Nuclear Group Project Services, including some from private equity funds. Dougie Rooney, Amicus national officer covering the nuclear industry, has written to BNFL finance director John Edwards stating: 'It would appear that a private equity/venture capital company could well purchase the business, and our union is opposed to that taking place because we feel it would simply lead to asset stripping, with the taxpayer being "ripped off".' The union is also concerned that the BNGPS, which employs some 730 people, bundles together several businesses, some of which should not be sold off. Rothschilds has solicited bids from potential industrial and private equity buyers. However, it is unclear whether BNFL would itself favour a sale to a private equity group. It believes BNGPS has significant opportunities in decommissioning work in the UK as well as in central and eastern Europe. It is already doing clean-up work on Russia's nuclear naval fleet. Special report The nuclear industry Useful links British Energy Department of Trade and Industry British Nuclear Fuels Ltd Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Greenpeace Come Clean WMD awareness programme UK atomic energy authority National Radiological Protection Board Friends of the Earth World Nuclear Association World Nuclear Transport Institute Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007 ***************************************************************** 54 The Sunflower: eNewsletter of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation - Issue 117 - April 2007 The Sunflower is a monthly e-newsletter providing educational information on nuclear weapons abolition and other issues relating to global security. Help us spread the word and forward this to a friend. Visit www.wagingpeace.org/donate to help sustain this valuable resource by making a donation. To receive our free monthly e-newsletter subscribe at www.wagingpeace.org/subscribe * Perspectives o Speech to the Organization of American States by David Krieger o The ABCs of Nuclear Disarmament by Alice Slater * Nuclear Proliferation o British Government Approves New Nuclear Weapons * Nuclear Energy and Waste o US to Help Build Vietnamese Nuclear Power Plant o Department of Energy Holds Reprocessing Hearings o DOE Receives Fine for Poor Oversight * Nuclear Insanity o State to Blame for LANL Cleanup Delays * Resources o Handbook of Peace and Conflict Studies o Conventional Warheads for Long-Range Ballistic Missiles: Background and Issues for Congress * Foundation Activities o Panel on “Nuclear Weapons and the Human Future” o Washington, DC Think Outside the Bomb Conference o Middle-East Peace Forum o Non-Proliferation Treaty PrepCom to Meet in Vienna o World Future Council to Hold Inaugural Meeting o Youth Empowerment Initiative Concert * Quotes Perspectives Speech to the Organization of American States by David Krieger It is a great honor to celebrate with you the 40th anniversary year of the Treaty of Tlatelolco, officially called the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean. This Treaty was a great achievement, and has served your region well. Many years ago, I had the pleasure of knowing and working with Alfonso Garcia Robles, the great Mexican diplomat who was so instrumental in creating this treaty. For his vision and commitment, he shared the 1982 Nobel Peace Prize with Swedish diplomat Alva Myrdal. The Treaty of Tlatelolco paved the way and was a model for other Nuclear Weapon Free Zones – those in the South Pacific, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Central Asia. Today, virtually the entirety of the southern hemisphere is covered by Nuclear Weapon Free Zones. Latin America and the Caribbean led the way in this important achievement. Click here to read more: www.wagingpeace.org/articles/2007/03/15_kreiger_org_amer_states.htm. The ABCs of Nuclear Disarmament by Alice Slater The chilling announcement that our government is preparing to replace our entire nuclear arsenal with new hydrogen bombs comes on the heels of a call for nuclear abolition by no less a peace activist than Henry Kissinger, joined by old cold warriors Sam Nunn, George Schultz, and William Perry in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial. We’ve been pushing our luck for more than 60 years since the first and only two atomic bombs to be used in war were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 214,000 people in the initial days, and causing numerous cases of cancers, mutations and birth defects in their radioactive aftermath, new incidences of which are still being documented today. During these sixty years of the Nuclear Age, every site worldwide, involved in the mining, milling, production and fabrication of uranium, for either war or for “peace,” has left a lethal legacy of radioactive waste, illness, and damage to our very genetic heritage. Bomb and reactor-created plutonium stays toxic for more than 250,000 years and we still haven’t figured out how to safely contain it. Click here to read more: www.wagingpeace.org/articles/2007/03/14_slater_ABCs_of_Nuc_Disarm.ht m. Nuclear Proliferation British Government Approves New Nuclear Weapons On 14 March, Great Britain approved funding for a new generation of nuclear weapons. After a six hour debate, the House of Commons voted 409 to 161 in favor of a $40 billion program that will replace Britain’s existing submarine-based Trident nuclear missiles. In protest of the decision, three low ranking ministerial aids from the Labor Party resigned from their jobs declaring, “We must lead the world in campaigning for the eradication of the nuclear threat, and we must lead by example.” The vote caused a rare fracture in the Labor Party and 90 members voted against the program, arguing that a reinvestment in Britain’s nuclear weapon’s stockpile will make it harder to convince countries like North Korea and Iran not to further pursue nuclear weapons. Prime Minister Tony Blair argued that disarming Britain’s nuclear weapons arsenal, which is the smallest of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, would do nothing to improve efforts towards multilateral nuclear disarmament. The Labor Party has traditionally been committed to unilateral nuclear disarmament. Although Prime Minister Blair has declared this decision was not irreversible, it was a huge blow to disarmament efforts in Great Britain. It was the first time the British government had voted on whether to remain a nuclear power. This has practically guaranteed that Britain will retain its nuclear arsenal until at least 2045. Patrick O’Donoghue, the Roman Catholic bishop of Lancaster, said: “In my judgment the U.K.’s continued possession of nuclear weapons is no longer simply maintaining the ‘balance of terror,’ but fueling the development of new nuclear weapons systems around the world.” Source: Cowell, Alan, “Despite Labor Revolt, Blair Wins Vote on Nuclear Deterrent,” International Herald Tribune, 15 March 2007. For more information go to: www.basicint.org/nuclear/beyondtrident/greenpaper.pdf Nuclear Energy and Waste US to Help Build Vietnamese Nuclear Power Plant On Monday, 20 March, the United States pledged to help Vietnam build a nuclear power plant if the country agreed not to use weapons grade uranium in its test reactor. Seen by the Bush administration as an advancement in non-proliferation efforts, the US has promised to help Vietnam with its energy needs. The Administration says that this will ensure that Vietnam does not produce nuclear weapons. This would be the first nuclear power plant in Vietnam. The US and Vietnam have also agreed to convert a Soviet-built research reactor from a high enriched to a low enriched uranium reactor. According to a source that spoke on the condition of anonymity, “We’ve had a lot of broad-based discussions about various nuclear issues and providing assistance and cooperation to the Vietnamese, but there is no formal agreement at this point.” Source: “US to Help Build Vietnam’s First Nuclear Plant,” Associated Press, 20 March 2007. Department of Energy Holds Reprocessing Hearings On Monday, 19 March, the Department of Energy (DOE) held the last of its series of public hearings regarding its proposed plan to resume reprocessing nuclear fuel in the United States. The hearings, which are required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), were forums for citizens to publicly comment on the Bush administration’s proposed Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) program. Many of those in attendance were opposed to the program. Nickolas Roth, Director of the NAPF Washington, DC office and a member of the Think Outside the Bomb National Youth Network, stated “The youth of America do not want reprocessing to resume in the United States. This is a dirty, dangerous and expensive initiative by the Bush administration.” The other hearings across the country have focused on what sites should be selected for new GNEP plants. In Piketon, Ohio there have been several meetings held on the possibility of building a nuclear reprocessing plant at the already existing Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion plant. Among the 300 who attended was Ohio Governor Ted Strickland, who said in a statement that there was not enough information publicly available on whether the state should house a GNEP plant. He also had concerns about the environmental risks and how monitoring would be conducted. GNEP is the Bush administration’s $200 billion attempt at addressing the growing problem of nuclear waste around the world. Under the program, nuclear waste would be brought to the United States for reprocessing and sent back to other countries as nuclear fuel. Proponents of the program see this as a non-proliferation effort intended to prevent other countries from building their own reprocessing facilities. However, there are many concerns that this will, in fact, increase the likelihood of weapons grade nuclear material falling into the wrong hands. Source: Barron, Jeff, “Details Revealed on Nuke Recycling,” Portsmouth Daily Times, 20 March 2007. DOE Receives Fine for Poor Oversight On 28 March, the Hanford nuclear reservation received a massive fine due to poor oversight and performance problems. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a fine for $1.14 million, the largest fine it has ever issued. “It is significant, but so are the issues,” said Nick Ceto, EPA Hanford project manager. “Continued missteps at one of the country’s most complex and difficult cleanup sites cannot — and will not — be tolerated,” Elin Miller, the EPA regional administrator, said in a statement. The fine includes $835,000 for failure to correctly perform compaction testing from June 2005 through early January 2007, when one employee falsified testing results. The remaining $305,000 was assessed because of problems monitoring and using a system to pump water that was collected and drained from the upper liner of the double-lined landfill. The Hanford site, one of the most polluted areas in the United States, is a Superfund cleanup site being monitored by the EPA. Source: Cary, Annette, “DOE Fined $1.14 Million,” Tri-City Herald, 28 March 2007. Nuclear Insanity State to Blame for LANL Cleanup Delays On 17 March, a former Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) employee published an article in the Albuquerque Journal blaming the state of New Mexico for long delays in cleaning up lab related pollution. Charlie Nylander, who formerly was the head of LANL’s groundwater protection program, said that the state’s Environmental Department required the lab to submit, among other things, reports on contamination investigation and cleanup plans, but failed to act on the submitted reports. According to Nylander, this backlog kept LANL from moving ahead with the cleanup work. While Nylander said that it is not entirely the fault of the state, “it’s a lot more of a two-way street than the average citizen realizes.” A LANL spokesman said that Nylander’s views did not necessarily reflect those of the institution. This most recent debate highlights increasing disparity between the federal nuclear weapons lab and state regulators. In 2005, the State of New Mexico signed an agreement with LANL to clean hundreds of sites across the lab. The state has already fined LANL $240,000 for non-compliance. New Mexico’s Environment Secretary, Ron Curry, stated, “The (Environment) Department can always do better, period. But for us to assume equal, or even a small portion of the responsibility (for cleanup delays), I would completely disagree. It’s the mentality of the culture at the lab that does not want to share information and share it on a timely basis.” Source: Arnold, John, “LANL Delays Blamed on State,” Albuquerque Journal, 17 March 2007. Resources Handbook of Peace and Conflict Studies This new major Handbook provides a cutting-edge transdisciplinary overview of the main issues, debates, state-of-the-art methods and key concepts in peace and conflict studies today. The volume is divided into four sections, which include understanding and transforming conflict, creating peace, supporting peace, and peace across the disciplines. It includes an article on International Law by Foundation Chair Richard Falk, and an article on Nuclear Disarmament by Foundation President David Krieger. To order the Handbook, visit the Routledge website at: www.routledge.com. Conventional Warheads for Long-Range Ballistic Missiles: Background and Issues for Congress This Congressional Research Service report for Congress provides an overview of the administration’s rationale for the possible deployment of conventional warheads on long-range ballistic missiles. It then reviews the Air Force and Navy efforts to develop these systems. It summarizes Congressional reaction to these proposals, then provides a more detailed account of the issues raised by these concepts and programs. www.fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/RL33067.pdf Foundation Activities Panel on “Nuclear Weapons and the Human Future” Monday, 16 April, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation is co-sponsoring a panel, “Nuclear Weapons and the Human Future.” The evening will begin with a presentation by Foundation President David Krieger. Following the presentation, panelists will address the evening’s topic and field questions. Panelists will include: Foundation Senior Vice President Frank Kelly; and Lecturer Emeritus, UC Santa Barbara Nandini Iyer. The event will take place at the Faulkner Gallery in the Santa Barbara Public Library from 7:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Washington, DC Think Outside the Bomb Conference On 21 April, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation will be hosting a Think Outside the Bomb Conference in Washington, DC at American University’s Kay Chapel. Over 100 students from all over the east coast will be attending a day-long conference featuring some of the nation’s top experts on nuclear issues. To receive more information or attend, go to www.ThinkoutsidetheBomb.org or email the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Washington, DC Office Director, Nickolas Roth, at nroth@napf.org. Middle-East Peace Forum The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation is co-sponsoring a forum on Middle-East peace, Saturday, 28 April. The forum is entitled “Palestine and Israel – A Search for Common Ground.” The featured speaker will be Afif Safieh, scholar, diplomat and head of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s mission to the United States. The forum will be held at the Garvin Theater, Santa Barbara City College, 1:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. Non-Proliferation Treaty PrepCom to Meet in Vienna The Preparatory Committee for the review of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) will be meeting in Vienna, Austria. Foundation President David Krieger; Washington, DC Director Nickolas Roth and New York Representative Alice Slater will be representing the NAPF at the meeting. This meeting, which will be held at the beginning of May, will consider statements, working papers, and reports in preparation for the 2010 NPT Review Conference. NGOs like the NAPF play an important role in bringing the perspectives of civil society to this intergovernmental meeting. World Future Council to Hold Inaugural Meeting Foundation President and World Future Council (WFC) member, David Krieger, will attend the WFC inaugural meeting in Hamburg’s Town Hall in May 2007. The WFC’s vision is for a global council made up of wise elders, thinkers, pioneers, and young leaders. It was born out of a frustration with global politics and its apparent inability to take the necessary steps to secure our common future. The meeting will be the public launch of the WFC’s first campaign with the mission to clearly define climate stabilization as a fundamental necessity and human responsibility for a more just, peaceful and sustainable world for future generations. Youth Empowerment Initiative Concert The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Youth Empowerment Initiative is holding a concert, “No Nukes! No Wars!” on 25 May. The concert will be held at Earl Warren Showgrounds and will feature local and regional acts, including headliner Radioactive. For more information about the lineup and how to buy tickets, visit the NAPF Youth Empowerment website: www.wagingpeace.org/youth. Quotes “In my judgment, legacy weapons are safe enough, especially in view of their reduced numbers and the lack of airborne alert. Surety improvements in the RRW are sound but not absolute, and the vulnerability of legacy weapons must be placed in context with other means for acquiring weapon-usable material. In any case, legacy weapons are going to be with us for a long time and whatever surety improvements can be incorporated into the handling facilities, if not into the weapons themselves, should be justified and pursued, if cost-effective.” - - Dr. Richard L. Garwin, testimony from the House Energy and Water Development Subcommittee “It took a Manhattan Project to create the bomb.…We need a new Manhattan Project to stop the bomb — a comprehensive program to secure all nuclear weapons and all weapons-usable material, worldwide.” - - Presidential Candidate Bill Richardson “It seems to me pretty self-evident we should have quite a mature discussion about whether this is the contemporary weaponry to deal with the contemporary threat or whether this is a hangover from a previous epoch.” - - British Labor Party lawmaker Jon Cruddas Editorial Team David Krieger Andrew Culp Nickolas Roth Vicki Stevenson ***************************************************************** 55 Seattle Times: Resolving missed deadlines at Hanford is topic of talks Saturday, April 7, 2007 - Page updated at 02:01 AM By The Associated Press RICHLAND — Hoping to find some middle ground, state officials will enter high-level negotiations next month with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) over missed deadlines for cleaning up the Hanford nuclear reservation. "It doesn't mean we've ruled out going to court, but before we do that, we will see if we can negotiate an agreement," state Assistant Attorney General Andy Fitz told the Tri-City Herald in a story published Friday. Officials, including Attorney General Rob McKenna and Department of Ecology Director Jay Manning, will begin negotiations May 29 with James Rispoli, the Energy Department's assistant secretary for environmental management. The basis for the talks is the so-called Tri-Party Agreement signed by representatives of the Energy Department, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the state in 1989. The landmark agreement set enforceable cleanup milestones for Hanford. Neither the state nor EPA is ready to discuss specific proposals for the negotiations. Among the state's concerns: The delay in constructing a $12.2 billion vitrification plant to treat some of Hanford's worst radioactive and chemical wastes. The plant may not open until ', eight years past a legal deadline. McKenna said negotiating to resolve the missed deadlines is a middle option that recognizes the Energy Department's budgetary and technical limits. The department spends about $2 billion a year on Hanford cleanup projects. Copyright © 2007 The Seattle Times Company ***************************************************************** 56 Yakima Herald Republic: DOE's reversal on Hanford stance is good start Published on Sunday, April 8, 2007 The Yakama Nation has reason to be pleased. Certainly, the announcement last week that the federal government will begin assessing possible damage to natural resources caused by plutonium production at the Hanford nuclear reservation couldn't have come at a better time. We hope this reversal by the Department of Energy will put the twin process of cleaning up Hanford's radioactive waste and reclaiming the land on a faster track. It may even put on hold the endless trips to federal courthouses by an ever-lengthening line of litigants that has included the Yakama Nation and the states of Washington and Oregon. While pleased with this recent decision by the federal government, officials with the Yakama Nation say they are still keeping a wary eye on the proceedings. The Yakama Nation has much to gain, and as they argue, so do we all. The tribe has treaty rights to fish, hunt game and harvest roots and berries in the Hanford area. And by ensuring a better, more thorough cleanup within the 586-square-mile federal reserve, both Indians and non-Indians will benefit, Yakama leaders argue. Much work, though, still needs to be done at Hanford, long regarded as the nation's most contaminated nuclear site. It's there that scientists developed the atomic bomb in the 1940s as part of the nation's top-secret Manhattan Project. Cleanup crews continue siphoning out high-level radiation and hazardous chemicals from Hanford's tank farms, which still hold 53 million gallons of this contaminated brew. The radioactive waste is being moved from 149 leak-prone single-shell tanks to newer double-shell containers. The process is slow, costly and complex. And, of course, controversial. Yakama tribal leaders say contamination of the nearby Columbia River has led to diminished salmon populations in the past 50 years. Adding to the claims of damage was a report last fall by a Seattle-based environmental group noting that perhaps billions of cubic yards of solid and diluted liquid waste have leaked into the river and groundwater. DOE has denied these assertions, and not so long ago argued in court that any assessment of damage to the environment would have to wait until completion of the full cleanup -- most recently estimated to have an $11.3 billion price tag and an end-date of no earlier than 2017. This stance undoubtedly contributed to the Yakama Nation's decision in 2002 to file a lawsuit demanding the Department of Energy, which oversees the Hanford cleanup, restore soil, plant and animal life and water quality damaged by the radioactive waste. Three other Columbia River tribes -- Nez Perce, Umatilla and Warm Springs -- later joined in the federal suit, along with the states of Washington and Oregon. In 2004, a federal judge even ordered the tribes and the DOE into mediation, but the federal government refused. But, with last Tuesday's announcement, the agency has changed its tune. Of course, it will come at a cost. The assessment of environmental damage could add another $100 million to the price tag, Yakama officials estimate. But pairing the cleanup work with the damage assessment may also bring welcome savings since reclamation work, instead of being done much later, could take place in tandem with the waste removal. Another intended consequence could be fewer lawsuits. With the interested parties now meeting together, restoring the Hanford area may actually move forward instead of being slowed down by further legal haggling. * Members of the Yakima Herald-Republic editorial board are Michael Shepard, Sarah Jenkins and Bill Lee. © 2007 - Yakima Herald-Republic - www.yakimaherald.com ***************************************************************** 57 Tri-City Herald: Bill sets up state office Published Saturday, April 7th, 2007 CHRIS MULICK HERALD OLYMPIA BUREAU OLYMPIA -- State lawmakers are poised to approve a bill setting up a small state office that could help workers for Hanford and hundreds of other self-insured employers process their workers' compensation claims. The measure hasn't been studied in detail in the Tri-Cities but it's drawn strong opposition from Richland Republican Reps. Shirley Hankins and Larry Haler, largely because Hanford watchdog Heart of America Northwest supports it. "Why does Heart of America want to be in this?" Hankins asked Friday afternoon. Different versions of the labor-backed Senate Bill 5053 have passed in both chambers on near party-line votes and differences still must be resolved before the bill is sent to Gov. Chris Gregoire. The bill would create an office of the ombudsman for employees of self-insured companies to serve as their advocate in processing workers' compensation claims. There are hundreds of large companies in Washington that are self-insured, meaning they have the financial wherewithal to provide benefits for workers who are injured or who become ill from job-related activities. Smaller companies are insured through the state. Origins of the bill date back to a 1998 study by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Committee that recommended the office be created before self-insuring companies are given broader authority to manage their claims. The ombudsman, under a contract with the governor, would provide information to injured workers, act as their advocate, investigate complaints and refer complaints to the Department of Labor and Industries. Self-insured employers would cover costs of the office through annual assessments. "This will give workers an office that can help work them through problems and delays in the system," said Bob Cooper, a lobbyist for Heart of America. Labor interests testified for the bill in the Senate and it didn't gain much notice. Heart of America joined a labor lobbyist in testifying for the bill in the House two weeks ago. That was relayed in a Republican caucus meeting Wednesday evening, shortly before a floor vote, and Hankins and Haler went on the offensive in floor speeches, asking that Hanford activity be carved out of the bill. In separate interviews Friday, they outlined a litany of potential concerns. Haler said the bill raises more questions about the state meddling in federal affairs, that it adds bureaucracy to the workers' compensation system and he raised concerns about who Gov. Chris Gregoire would choose to serve as ombudsman. "It will more than likely be one of her friends at Heart of America," Haler said. Hankins is worried the bill would somehow put the state on the hook for paying for workers' compensation benefits. But mostly, Hankins and Haler appear alarmed by Heart of America's support. Both are suspicious the watchdog group will reap a financial benefit. "Heart of America is slowly creeping into different sections of Hanford employment," Hankins said. Cooper said the bill is nothing more than a self-insurance measure that happens to affect Hanford workers, among others, that Heart of America chose to testify on. "We didn't instigate this bill," Cooper said. "We just chimed in." Carl Adrian, president of the Tri-City Development Council, said he was just alerted to the bill Friday and hadn't had a chance to read it. © 2007 Tri-City Herald, Associated Press & Other Wire Services ***************************************************************** 58 Rocky Mountain News: Cold War, hellish consequences Ex-nuke weapons workers caught in medical crossfire Barry Gutierrez © The Rocky Harold Hinton, 76, gets an insulin shot from his full-time nurse at his Cortez home. Hinton - as a young man he ground up uranium ore that became the feedstock for atomic bombs at a plant in Utah - fears he may lose his around- the-clock health care because the Department of Labor wants to reduce it. By Laura Frank, Rocky Mountain News April 7, 2007 Harold Hinton is dying. He is slowly suffocating from incurable lung disease that the government acknowledges is linked to his work making nuclear bomb fuel during the Cold War. Hinton, of Cortez, is eligible for medical care through a federal program designed to compensate ill nuclear weapons workers who weren't fully warned by the government of the dangers they faced. His physician said Hinton needed around-the-clock nursing care at his home in southwestern Colorado, but a government worker reduced the doctor's orders to eight hours a day. Hinton is not alone, says the president of a Denver-based company that provides nursing care to Hinton and about 60 other former nuclear weapons workers across the country. The U.S. Department of Labor is disregarding doctors' orders and approving less care than doctors say is medically necessary, said Greg Austin, president of Professional Case Management. Department officials have also called family members and doctors, pressuring both to agree to lower levels of care, he said. Labor Department officials said they are simply trying to be good stewards of public funds while getting ill workers the help they need. Assistant Deputy Labor Secretary Shelby Hallmark, who oversees the program, said Professional Case Management is pressuring doctors to prescribe 24-hour home nursing care when less costly care would do. "I think what's going on here is (PCM) wants to maximize cash flow," Hallmark said, adding that he has referred PCM's cases to the Labor Department's Office of Inspector General for review. Austin says the Labor Department's decisions are dangerous. "If we do what the Department of Labor says instead of what the doctors say, literally, lives could be put at risk," he said. Crying himself to sleep PCM has served more than 100 ill weapons workers in 11 states during the past five years. The total bill for those five years has approached $30 million, Hallmark said. Austin said Labor Department officials have created such an "adversarial culture" toward ill workers that it is affecting workers' already fragile health. The company is considering assisting some patients with a class-action lawsuit against the Labor Department. The suit would ask a judge to stop officials from ignoring medical directives. Verna Keaton, of Ohio, said her husband, Addison, cried himself to sleep Wednesday night after learning that the Labor Department was trying to take away the nursing care that keeps him home with his wife of 44 years. Addison Keaton is dying of cancer that the government says was caused by exposure to radioactive uranium at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Portsmouth, Ohio. His colon cancer has spread to his lungs, heart and esophagus. On Wednesday, a Labor Department doctor called Addison Keaton's doctor to question his home health-care order, Verna Keaton said. Unbeknownst to the Keatons, the government doctor had already contacted a hospice-care company, which would be less expensive than full-time nursing care, to open a case on Addison Keaton. "I think they want him to hurry up and die because it's costing them too much money," said Verna Keaton. "How can a doctor in Washington, D.C., determine what kind of help my husband needs?" She said the Labor Department doctor was relying on reports from case managers without medical degrees. "I don't know what's going to happen next because I haven't gotten hold of DOL to answer my questions," she said. "They won't return my calls." The Labor Department runs the program that Congress created in 2001 to compensate nuclear weapons workers whose toxic exposures made them ill, including those from the now-defunct Rocky Flats weapons plant northwest of Denver. The program includes coverage of medical bills for illnesses linked to those exposures. The Labor Department and the White House have come under fire recently from the ill, their advocates and several federal lawmakers. The critics say recently released internal communications show the Bush administration has been more concerned about containing costs than helping the ill workers, whom they call Cold War veterans. "These brave Americans are suffering, and in some cases, dying, because of the hazardous service they performed for their country," said U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., who heads the congressional committee with oversight of the Labor Department program. "These people deserve better, and I will work with my colleagues in Congress to ensure that they receive the benefits that they were promised." Producing yellowcake As a young man during the Cold War, Harold Hinton ground up uranium ore and moved it from one chemical solution to another until it was a fine yellow powder that became the feedstock for atomic bombs. His bosses at the mill just over the Colorado border in Utah told him the radioactive ore was safe. His only protective gear was a hard hat, as he toiled at the mill, coming home covered in yellow uranium dust. The product of the mill - uranium 308, or yellowcake as it was known for its appearance - was shipped to nuclear facilities at Oak Ridge, Tenn., and later to Portsmouth. Hinton knew that Portsmouth workers such as Addison Keaton were turning the yellowcake into fuel for atomic bombs. But he and his fellow workers didn't know the yellowcake itself was radioactive. "We were never warned," he said. Oak Ridge workers recalled being told in the 1950s that yellowcake was safe enough to eat. "Remember, at that time, they were trying real hard to get the warheads on the missiles," Hinton said. "They needed it real bad to protect the nation." In 1986, two decades after he left the mill, Hinton began having trouble breathing. The radioactive uranium dust had scarred his lungs. He developed pulmonary fibrosis, a disease with no cure and no effective treatment. "I have anywhere from six months to two or three years (to live)," Hinton said. "To me, believe me, (the home health care) is a godsend. I have thanked God for it many times." On the last Friday of February, Hinton's doctor was ready to discharge him from the hospital after a particularly severe episode of breathing difficulty. But there was no one to care for Hinton once he got home. His wife is on oxygen and struggles to care for their son's children, a teenager and a disabled 21-year-old. The Hintons' son is in a Tulsa, Okla., hospital fighting lung cancer. Harold Hinton believes his wife's and son's lung problems resulted from contamination he brought home from the uranium mill. At the request of Professional Case Management, Hinton's doctor delayed his discharge until the next Monday in hopes of getting quick approval for Hinton's home care. But the Department of Labor took two weeks to approve the care and reduced the order to eight hours a day instead of the 24 hours ordered by the doctor. E-mail and voice-mail messages provided by PCM indicate a case manager in Denver made the decision to offer less care without consulting Hinton's doctor. Dr. Leonard Cain, Hinton's doctor in Cortez, said ordering 24-hour nursing care is not an easy decision. "It's complicated," Cain said. "If I put a home-health aide (instead of a nurse) in the home and the patient has a medical need during the night, that can't be handled by a home-health aide." Such aides, known as certified nursing assistants, are qualified to help patients bathe or move from a bed to a chair, PCM's Austin said. But they legally cannot administer medications, draw blood, change oxygen levels or do many other things that these patients might require at any time. "Yes, this program covers more than Medicare or some other social safety net," Austin said. "But this isn't a social program - it's a compensation program. These workers' illnesses were caused by their work for this country. They can never get their health back, but they can get some relief and be with their families until they pass away." Caught in the middle As a doctor, Cain said he feels caught between Professional Case Management advocating for patient care and the Labor Department trying to save money. "I'm going to err on the side of providing the most care for the patient," Cain said. "This level of care is not provided to anyone else in our health-care system. But (the law creating the workers' compensation program) says we're going to provide this level of care for these people who need it." Cain said he resents being put in the middle. "There should be negotiation and communication on this," he said. PCM's Austin agreed, saying his company has requested that the Labor Department participate in discussing patients' care with health professionals. "They have said they are not interested," Austin said. Hallmark said he was not aware that PCM had asked the Labor Department to participate in patient case conferences. However, he said, PCM complained when the department talked directly with the physicians. Austin said PCM nurses should always be involved in decisions because they see the patients more than their doctors do. Meanwhile, PCM has been providing full-time nursing care to Hinton since Feb. 26 with no guarantee of payment. "There would be a huge liability for us if we didn't do what the doctor ordered," Austin said. "But we can't afford to do that forever." How it happened At the height of the Cold War, thousands of Americans were busy at urgent work they couldn't discuss with their neighbors: building atomic bombs for the arms race with the Soviet Union. At the Rocky Flats plant northwest of Denver - and at scores of other sites across the nation - workers were exposed daily to myriad poisons. Radiation. Exotic heavy metals. Chemicals in uncommon variety and quantity. The government routinely withheld information about the risk workers faced. Records of exposures were often incomplete; others were later destroyed. Today, more than 60,000 former nuclear weapons workers are ill and believe that their ailments are linked to their Cold War work. The government denied almost all such links until 2000. The next year, Congress created a compensation program to give lump-sum payments and medical coverage to workers whose illnesses were likely caused by workplace exposures. frankl@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5091 Site Map | Photo Reprints | Corrections 2007 © The E.W. Scripps Co. ***************************************************************** 59 Inside Bay Area: 64 arrests at Livermore lab demonstration Article Launched: 04/07/2007 02:42:46 AM PDT LIVERMORE ? Sixty-two adults and two juveniles were arrested Friday morning at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory during the annual Good Friday nuclear weapons protest. About 220 people, including 10 children and one hula dancer, participated in the peaceful march down Vasco Road from the Patterson Pass Road intersection to the lab's east gate entrance. Rev. Michael Yoshii of Buena Vista United Methodist Church in Alameda led a prayer service before the procession to the lab. The tradition of sunrise Good Friday protests began at the lab in 1981. Each Good Friday, several hundred people from secular and religious groups gather at the lab gates to hear speeches and to pray for peace. The protest is nonviolent, but many choose to be arrested by lining up at the lab gate and remaining there after being ordered to disperse. © 2000-2006 ANG Newspapers | Privacy Policy ***************************************************************** 60 Ventura County Star: Agencies' Field Lab cleanup criticized State senator says plans 'hasty,' introduces bill By Teresa Rochester, trochester@VenturaCountyStar.com April 8, 2007 Along with proposing the accelerated cleanup of two facilities contaminated with radiation at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, the U.S. Department of Energy is trying a new tack: soliciting input from the public and state and federal agencies. The shift is rooted in a 12-year-old agreement between the DOE and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which DOE officials say is just now being implemented after years of cleanup at the Field Laboratory, a 2,850-acre former rocket engine test site in the hills south of Simi Valley. It was also home to several nuclear reactors, one of which had a partial meltdown in 1959. The 1995 agreement between the two entities calls for public input and for the DOE to follow EPA guidelines on the cleanup. There have been years of tension between the DOE and EPA over cleanup standards at the Field Laboratory. For just as long, local observers have called on the DOE to adhere to the standards set by the EPA and follow the agreement. The abrupt application of the longstanding agreement has left observers skeptical that the DOE will clean the site to the standard they want. It also triggered the introduction of state legislation and prompted a state senator to hold a briefing on the site last week. "The cleanup standards they are using for the two facilities are the same as the miserable standards they used for the rest of the site," said Dan Hirsch, with the nuclear watchdog group Committee to Bridge the Gap. "This is a cynical sleight of hand to walk away from their cleanup obligations." State Sen. Sheila Kuehl, D-Santa Monica, introduced SB990 in late February, which would require the site to be cleaned to the highest standards set by the EPA before its owners, Boeing Co., can sell or lease the land, which has been tapped as a future site for homes. At a briefing she held in Calabasas on Thursday, Kuehl called the DOE's newest cleanup plans "hasty," and she criticized the EPA for what she described as signing off on DOE's insufficient cleanup plans. Thomas Johnson Jr., the DOE's project manager for the radiation cleanup at the Field Laboratory, said implementing the agreement "varies by site as to when they actually start using the process." The agreement was put into effect at the Field Laboratory in late 2006 and early 2007. Hirsch, however, laid out a different scenario. Speaking before Kuehl's panel Thursday, he accused the DOE of breaking a promise to follow EPA cleanup guidelines in 2003. The same year, the DOE pulled out of an agreement to let EPA conduct a multiyear radiation survey at the Field Laboratory. Bill Taylor, a spokesman for the DOE, said he could not speak about the survey because it is part of a pending lawsuit. Taylor also disputed Kuehl's claims that the coming cleanup is being done hastily. "DOE is as stringent on safety as it comes," Taylor said. "We've brought the right people and resources to bear and to clean it up." ?Those comments still stand' Hirsch's group, along with other environmental groups and the city of Los Angeles, sued the DOE for not upholding the agreement and for violating federal law. EPA officials have submitted comments on the DOE's plans, and, Johnson said, the DOE has incorporated nearly all of the comments. On Thursday, an EPA official balked at the suggestion the agency was approving insufficient cleanup plans. The agency was asked only to comment on the plans, and it did so, said Jeff Scott, the EPA's Waste Division director. EPA thanked DOE for allowing it to comment on the current cleanup but reiterated a stance it took in 2003 regarding the DOE's overall cleanup approach at the Field Laboratory. The EPA wrote to the DOE four years ago that further study, using more sensitive and specific measurements were needed at the site so it could be considered "adequately examined for unrestricted use." The letter also stated that, given the need for more data on radioactive contamination at the site, the EPA did not believe that DOE's standards would "satisfy standards for unrestricted land use." "Those comments still stand," John Beach, an EPA environmental scientist, said Monday. End of radiation cleanup nears Johnson said the department will clean the two facilities to a standard acceptable for land zoned for suburban residential use. Hirsch argued Thursday that the land should be cleaned to the higher standard required for rural and agricultural land. The goal is to bring cumulative cancer risk from exposure to radiological contaminants in the soil from 1 cancer in 10,000 people to 1 cancer in 1 million people. The coming projects will mark the beginning of the end of radiation cleanup at the site. Two facilities will be decontaminated and demolished. The first is Building 4024. There were 10 reactors at the site, and the partial meltdown occurred at one of them. The public comment period for cleanup of Building 4024 will conclude Monday. No additional public hearings are scheduled; the last was held Feb. 21. The second cleanup project is the Radioactive Material Handling Facility. The DOE will hold a public meeting from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. April 17 at the Grande Vista Hotel, 999 Enchanted Way, Simi Valley. 2006 © The E.W. Scripps Co. Ventura County Star subscription services Users of this site are subject to our Privacy Policy and User Agreement Contact VenturaCountyStar.com ***************************************************************** 61 lamonitor.com: CENSORED by the CIA The Online News Source for Los Alamos Author's info on China test site banned ROGER SNODGRASS Monitor Assistant Editor Danny Stillman has been waiting a little more than seven years to hear if his book on the birth of the Chinese nuclear weapons program could be published. Last week, he heard that the answer is no - not if he wants to keep the good parts in it. "I'm just not going to go through it," he said Thursday from his home in White Rock. For 13 years, Stillman ran the intelligence unit at Los Alamos National Laboratory. From 1990 to 1999, according to court records, Stillman made nine trips to China. Four of them were made after he retired in 1993. But the one that got shot down was a few days at the Chinese test site in northwestern China in 1990. "DOE approved the whole thing," he said. But after approving the manuscript, officials at the Department of Energy sent it along to the Central Intelligence Agency - and there was the rub. In October 2000, according to the court documents, the CIA and two other intelligence organizations said they did not want any part of the book published. After Stillman filed his lawsuit in June 2001, the agencies narrowed their classification. After the judgment, Stillman wonders why the CIA was even involved. "DOE gave it to the bureau and there was nothing they would hold it up on," he said, adding that he never worked for the CIA. "Not once did they debrief me," he said. "I offered to tell them what I saw, they never took me up on it." He believes DOE should have classification authority regarding nuclear weapons design and testing details. In a paper written for a talk at MIT in 2001, as his book underwent a lengthy security review by the government, Stillman said its purpose was "to record for historical purposes my unique travels and experiences in China during the last few years of China's underground nuclear testing." The book took up other themes, but his visits to secret Chinese nuclear weapons facilities in Beijing, Shanghai and other locations around the country, including the nuclear test site in Malan, as well as his discussions with Chinese nuclear weapons designers, gave him a unique perspective across the breadth of Chinese weapons development. "More Americans have walked on the moon than on China's nuclear weapons test site," he wrote in 2001. "The information I received was remarkably detailed and it was provided without any apparent reservation. My hosts told me of their methods, achievements, failures and future plans." Last week, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., dismissed Stillman's challenge to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense, about "23 passages" of the manuscript they claimed to be classified. Asked about the material that was purged, he wrote in an e-mail recently, "'Twenty-three passages' is a clever way to make it sound like a trivial part of the manuscript is to be deleted, but it involves about 15 percent of the total text." The 23 passages turned out to be 76 out of the 506 pages of the manuscript, Stillman said, that described three-and-one-half days touring the Chinese nuclear weapons test site (16-and-a-half years ago), with details about purposes of their program and technical information about measurements and yields. Stillman insisted that those 76 pages are the most interesting information he gained from his trips to China. In justifying dismissal of Stillman's complaint, Judge Emmet G. Sullivan wrote that the agreements he signed while employed by LANL "contain incredibly broad language," requiring him to protect classified information during and after employment. In determining that material in Stillman's manuscript was properly classified, the judge reviewed the material himself "in camera" (closed court) and cited precedents that defer to the CIA in making judgments about classification decisions. After a career in intelligence, Stillman is still cautious and circumspect and clearly would prefer not to call attention to himself. "I've still got other trips to write up," Stillman said Thursday. "I went to Russia and Kazakhstan. I went everywhere in the nuclear world." © 2003 Los Alamos Monitor All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: *****************************************************************