***************************************************************** 06/03/07 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 15.130 ***************************************************************** 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 AFP: Iran says Madrid nuclear talks 'step forward' - 2 AFP: US urges stronger sanctions against Iran - 3 Putin: US Has Triggered New Arms Race 4 Hemscott: US seeks to reassure China on missile defence 5 Guardian Unlimited: Putin Warns on U.S. Missiles in Europe 6 Putin threatens to target Europe with missiles 7 AFP: Russia ups the stakes in US missile shield row - 8 RIA Novosti: Russia's foreign minister arrives in Seoul 9 London Tims: Putin raises spectre of nuclear war in 10 London Times: The atomic bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor 11 Reuters: Putin warns he will point missiles at Europe 12 Reuters: Missile shield ups chance of atomic conflict - Putin 13 Reuters: Cracks on climate as G8 leaders meet in Germany 14 Reuters: FACTBOX-Venue for G8 summit steeped in history 15 Reuters: FACTBOX-What happened at the last five G8 summits 16 Reuters: FACTBOX - What is the G8? 17 The Observer: Europe shivering in the new Cold War NUCLEAR REACTORS 18 YONHAP NEWS: S. Korea's first nuclear power reactor to go off-line, 19 The Age: PM's dire emissions-cut picture questioned - 20 Sydney Morning Herald: Nuclear push gains momentum - 21 Sydney Morning Herald: The 'R' word we didn't need - 22 The Age: Howard's pitch: you can trust me - 23 US: Dallas Morning News: Texas nuke plant deals gaining steam 24 Indiadaily.com: Major differences making nuclear deal 123 impossible 25 Times of India: Middle path, a solution to nuke issue - Pranab- 26 TheStar.com: Greenpeace fears a U.K. nuclear revival 27 Green Left - Brief: Forum sparks new anti-nuclear group 28 India E-News: No roadblocks in nuclear deal - Pranab 29 Herald Sun: Is Howard being fair dinkum? | 30 BBC NEWS: US-India nuclear deal talks fail 31 BBC NEWS: Australia PM pledges climate plan 32 US: PoughkeepsieJournal.com: Sewage wasn't radioactive, Entergy says 33 AU: Ninemsn: Nuclear stations to be banned in WA 34 Herald Sun: Change to nuke law? | 35 US: JOURNAL NEWS: New test shows no tritium sewer leak from Indian P 36 US: The Journal: Business group endorses Indian Point license renewa 37 US: Burlington Free Press: My Turn: Small state, big politics 38 Sunday Herald: Scottish Poweriberdrola To Spend 1 5bn On Conversion 39 Financial Express: N-deal: all eyes on Bush-PM meet 40 Reuters: Little progress in India-U.S. nuclear deal talks 41 Herald Sun: No emissions target yet 42 AFP: India, US edge closer to nuclear deal - 43 ITAR-TASS: First unit of Tianwan n-power plant enters commercial ser 44 US: Deccan Herald: Nuclear deal still on - Burns 45 Chennai Online News : Public hearing on n-plant interrupted 46 AU ABC: Labors green fanatics in denial, says Turnbull - 47 Deccan Herald: N-talks hit a dead end 48 Hindustan Times: The nuclear deal: not as easy as 1-2-3- 49 Hindustan Times: Issues at the heart of the proposed 123 Agreement- 50 Hindustan Times: Amorim wants civil nuclear cooperation with India- 51 Hindustan Times: The nuclear deal: not as easy as 1-2-3- 52 Hindustan Times: Condi Rice expected for final 123 talks 53 Edmonton Journal: Thinking more about energy 54 Courier-Life Publications: Chernobyl's dark legacy in Brooklyn 55 Comment is free: The great power struggle 56 Guardian Unlimited: Talks End Over U.S.-India Nuclear Deal NUCLEAR SECURITY 57 US: UPI: Radiation monitors due for U.S. ports NUCLEAR SAFETY 58 US: LA Daily News: Ports, borders to look for radiation NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE 59 Sydney Morning Herald: Nuke waste 'in hospital carpark' - 60 US: Sydney Morning Herald: Uranium explorers striking it rich - 61 Pahrump Valley Times: Dems show solid front against Yucca 62 SignOnSanDiego.com: Tunnel as tomb for radioactive waste hits wall 63 The Hindu: Stalemate on reprocessing issue 64 Las Vegas SUN: Yucca dump on back burner 65 BBC NEWS: Peers attack nuclear waste plans 66 ReviewJournal.com: Expert sees little concern with waste at Yucca 67 US: Daily News Journal: Radioactive waste should spur action on garb 68 Sunday Herald: Concern Over Incoherent Nuclear Waste Disposal Plan 69 UPI: Russian nuclear waste worries Norway 70 US: MHNN: No tritium from Indian Point in Buchanan sewage system 71 US: Tonawanda News: LANDFILL: Hackett Drive residents kicking up dir 72 US: The Murfreesboro Post: Citizen's group wants to ban radioactive 73 Guardian Unlimited: Peers attack nuclear waste plans PEACE US DEPT. OF ENERGY 74 SF New Mexican: U.S. Senate: For energy money, a 'run uphill' 75 Ventura County Star: Halaco: What went wrong? ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** FULL NEWS STORIES ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** 1 AFP: Iran says Madrid nuclear talks 'step forward' - Sunday June 3, 01:40 AM TEHRAN (AFP) - Iran's top nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani on Saturday described his talks talks in Madrid with EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana on Iran's nuclear program as a step forward. "My assessment form the Madrid negotiation is that it was a step forward in solving the nuclear issue," he said in an interview with the state news agency IRNA in Madrid. "This negotiation was better than the past, and I sense that Mr Solana was trying to reach an understanding, and this is a good method." He added, however, that "we should leave more judgement of the matter to future. "Iran is not seeking to buy time in its nuclear case, but it is ready to solve it this very day." Larijani and Solana met on Thursday, more than a month after their previous meeting in Ankara. Solana, negotiating on behalf of the United States and five other major powers dealing with the Iranian nuclear issue, is due to meet with Larijani again in the coming weeks. After two rounds of talks in Madrid, Larijani was quoted as saying Iran was ready to talk with the International Atomic Energy Agency about information access and cooperation. "Iran is ready to discuss outstanding questions with the agency which are linked to information access and cooperation with the agency," a spokeswoman for Solana said. Tehran's arch foe Washington said on Friday that is it seeking to impose more sanctions after failure of latest nuclear talks. The UN Security Council has already imposed two sets of financial and other sanctions on Iran over its refusal to suspend uranium enrichment work that many believe is a cover for developing nuclear weapons. Iran insists the program is aimed only at developing a civilian nuclear power industry for its ever growing population. Save to MyWebEmail storyPrintable view Copyright © 2007 Yahoo!7 Pty Limited. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 2 AFP: US urges stronger sanctions against Iran - Yahoo! Canada News Sat Jun 2, 1:10 PM SINGAPORE (AFP) - US Defence Secretary Robert Gates called on the international community Saturday to unite behind stronger sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program, warning that a military solution "is in no one's interest." "I think everybody in this room wants there to be a diplomatic solution to this problem. Having to take care of this problem militarily is in no one's interest," Gates told a conference here on security in Asia. "But it does put a premium on unanimity in the international community, and I would say especially in the UN Security Council, in terms of ratcheting up the pressure on the Iranians, not next year or the year after, right now," he said. Gates said the general view of US intelligence is that Iran will be in a position to develop a nuclear device sometime between 2010 and 2015. "There are those who believe that could happen much sooner, in late 2008 or 2009," he said. "The reality is that because of the way Iran has conducted its affairs, we really don't know." Iran denies it is working to acquire nuclear weapons, but has refused to halt a uranium enrichment program in defiance of UN sanctions. Talks in Madrid between Iranian and European Union officials failed to break an impasse over the program Friday, prompting the US State Department to say it would press for new sanctions. Gates said the sanctions should be severe enough to confront Iran with "serious trade-offs in terms of their economic wellbeing and their economic future for having nuclear weapons." Copyright © 2007 Yahoo! Canada Co. All Rights Reserved. Privacy ***************************************************************** 3 Putin: US Has Triggered New Arms Race Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2007 00:07:41 -0500 (CDT) Putin: US Has Triggered New Arms Race Go to Original Putin: US Has Triggered New Arms Race By Vladimir Isachenkov The Associated Press Thursday 31 May 2007 President Vladimir Putin said Thursday that tests of new Russian missiles were a response to the planned deployment of U.S. missile defense installations and other forces in Europe, suggesting Washington has triggered a new arms race. In a clear reference to the United States, he harshly criticized "imperialism" in global affairs and warned that Russia will strengthen its military potential to maintain a global strategic balance. "It wasn't us who initiated a new round of arms race," Putin said when asked about Russia's missile tests at a news conference after talks in the Kremlin with Greek President Karolos Papoulias. Putin described Tuesday's tests of a new ballistic missile capable of carrying multiple nuclear warheads and a new cruise missile as part of the Russian response to the planned deployment of new U.S. military bases and missile defense sites in ex-Soviet satellites in Central and Eastern Europe. He assailed the United States and other NATO members for failing to ratify an amended version of the 1990 Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty, which limits the deployment of heavy non-nuclear weapons around the continent. "We have signed and ratified the CFE and are fully implementing it. We have pulled out all our heavy weapons from the European part of Russia to (locations) behind the Ural Mountains and cut our military by 300,000 men," Putin said. "And what about our partners? They are filling Eastern Europe with new weapons. A new base in Bulgaria, another one in Romania, a (missile defense) site in Poland and a radar in the Czech Republic," he said. "What we are supposed to do? We can't just sit back and look at that." Putin and other Russian officials have repeatedly rejected U.S. assurances that the planned missile defense installations are meant to counter a potential threat from nations such as Iran and pose no danger to Russia. Putin reaffirmed his warning that Russia would opt out of the CFE treaty altogether if NATO nations fail to ratify its amended version. "Either you ratify the treaty and start observing it, or we will opt out of it," Putin said. In remarks clearly directed against Washington, Putin blasted those "who want to dictate their will to all others regardless of international norms and law." "It's dangerous and harmful," he added. "Norms of the international law were replaced with political expediency. We view it as diktat and imperialism." Russia this week initiated an international conference to be held in Austria in early June to discuss the situation around the CFE treaty. Putin described the tests of new missiles conducted by Russia on Tuesday as a necessary response to the Western action. "There is no reason to fear these actions by Russia, they aren't aggressive. It's merely a response to tough and unfounded unilateral actions by our partners," he said. "These actions are aimed at preserving a global balance." In one missile test Tuesday, a prototype of new Russia's intercontinental ballistic missile, called the RS-24, was fired from a mobile launcher at the Plesetsk launch site in northwestern Russia and its test warhead landed on target 3,400 miles away on the Far Eastern Kamchatka Peninsula, officials said. Russia's military also tested a new cruise missile based on the existing short-range Iskander missile. "We will keep modernizing our potential," Putin said. ***************************************************************** 4 Hemscott: US seeks to reassure China on missile defence SINGAPORE (XFN-ASIA) - US Defence Secretary Robert Gates offered China briefings on the US missile defence system to reassure them that it does not threaten China's nuclear deterrent. His remarks, at the end of a two-day conference on Asian security, followed a top Chinese general's criticism of defences being developed by the US and Japan to protect against North Korean missiles. 'I'm not sure why they are so worried,' Gates said. 'Just as with the Russians, we would be pleased to sit down with them and talk about the capabilities and technical characteristics of this system and its limitation. 'There may just not be a clear understanding on the part of the Chinese about what we have in mind can and cannot do,' he said. Lieutenant General Zhang Qinsheng, the chief of military intelligence of the People's Liberation Army, objected to the US-Japanese missile defence project in a speech Saturday at the Shangri-La Dialogue on regional security issues. Zhang's concerns echo those of Russia, which fiercely opposes US plans to deploy interceptor missiles in Poland and radar in the Czech Republic to protect against missiles from Iran. To overcome Moscow's opposition, Gates in April offered the Russians what he said was an unprecedented partnership in missile defence and inspections sites in Alaska and California. Asked whether the US would offer the same to China, Gates told reporters, 'I think if the Chinese were to express an interest in it we would certainly take it seriously.' He said the US system was designed to thwart limited attacks by rogue states or terrorists, not to defeat a large-scale threat of the kind posed by the long-range missile arsenals of Russia and China. 'So anything we can do to provide transparency on that point and help people understand the capabilities and characteristics of these systems, we're prepared to do it,' he said. jm/mc/rc Copyright 2007 Hemscott Group Limited. ***************************************************************** 5 Guardian Unlimited: Putin Warns on U.S. Missiles in Europe From the Associated Press Sunday June 3, 2007 8:01 PM By NICOLE WINFIELD Associated Press Writer ROME (AP) - Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that U.S. plans to build a missile defense system in Eastern Europe would force Moscow to target its weapons against Europe. The threat, in an interview published Sunday in Italy's Corriere della Sera and other foreign media, marked one of Putin's most strident statements to date against the U.S. plans and came just days before he is to join President Bush and other leaders at a Group of Eight summit in Germany. In the interview, Putin was asked whether the proposed missile defense shield would compel Moscow to direct its own missiles at locations and U.S. military sites in Europe, as during the Cold War. ``If the American nuclear potential grows in European territory, we have to give ourselves new targets in Europe,'' Putin said, according to Corriere. ``It is up to our military to define these targets, in addition to defining the choice between ballistic and cruise missiles.'' Russia has not overtly targeted Europe since agreeing after the fall of the Soviet Union not to direct missiles against specific countries, according to Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent military analyst based in Moscow. He added however, that that was simple technical matter, since a missile can be given a target within minutes. Previously, some Russian military officials have said Moscow could aim Russian weapons at Europe-based missile systems. Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek accused Russia on Sunday of misleading the public about the planned missile defense bases in the Czech Republic and Poland to hide Russia's internal problems. ``Russia needs an outside enemy to hide problems at home,'' Topolanek said. The White House had no comment Sunday on Putin's new warning, referring instead to the comments of National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, who was questioned Friday about the missile defense shield in advance of the G-8 summit. ``Of course the deployment that we're talking about in Europe is not about Russia at all,'' Hadley said. ``It's not aimed at Russia. ... It's a very limited capability about other states, like Iran, who are developing ballistic missiles and potentially the weapons of mass destruction that those missiles could deliver.'' The Polish president insisted the missile shield was purely ``to prevent attacks, neutralize their effects.'' ``But I don't wonder at Russian present tactics because the issue is whether the Russian state .... will regain influence or not,'' Poland's President Lech Kaczynski told Polish reporters in Rome. The United States made a formal request in January to place a radar base in a military area southwest of Prague, Czech Republic, and 10 interceptor missiles in neighboring Poland as part of plans for a missile defense shield that Washington says would protect against a potential threat from Iran. The U.S. plans have brought a strong reaction from Russia, which accuses the United States of threatening Russian territory and of trying to start a new arms race. Putin was interviewed Friday at his dacha by journalists from each of the G-8 countries, Corriere said. The three-day summit, Wednesday to Friday at the Baltic Sea resort of Heiligendamm, will bring together leaders of the United States, Britain, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Russia, and Japan. --- Associated Press writer Maria Danilova contributed to this report from Moscow. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007 ***************************************************************** 6 Putin threatens to target Europe with missiles Date: Sat, 2 Jun 2007 18:43:48 -0500 (CDT) Exclusive: Putin threatens to target Europe with missiles In an interview with the Globe and Mail, Russian President Vladimir Putin has threatened to target Europe with missiles, including potentially nuclear weapons, in a dramatic escalation of his Cold War-style showdown with the United States. Mr. Putin, in an interview at his summer residence outside Moscow, said he considers U.S. plans to build an eastern European anti-missile site to shoot down Iranian missiles a provocation aimed at Russia. He repeatedly described the anti-missile system as a part of the American "strategic nuclear potential," whose existence he said requires Russia to retaliate to maintain the global "strategic balance." Asked what he might do to retaliate, he said he would return Russia to the Cold War status where missiles were aimed at European targets. "It is obvious that if part of the strategic nuclear potential of the United States is located in Europe, and according to our military experts will be threatening us, we will have to respond," he said http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070602.wputin01/BNStory/ Int\ ernational/home ***************************************************************** 7 AFP: Russia ups the stakes in US missile shield row - Monday June 4, 11:24 AM MOSCOW (AFP) - Russia stepped up its Cold War rhetoric on Sunday with President Vladimir Putin warning it would point missiles at European targets if the US expands its nuclear defences near its borders. Together with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Putin upped the stakes in a war of words with Washington over US missile defence shield plans that have caused a sharp downward spiral in relations. "If the US nuclear potential extends across the European territory, we will get new targets in Europe," he said in an interview with newspapers from the Group of Eight industrialised nations. "It will then be up to our military experts to identify which targets will be aimed by ballistic missiles and which ones will be aimed by cruise missiles," he said. Lavrov, meanwhile, shrugged off American insistence that its plan to deploy missile defence hardware in Poland and the Czech Republic posed no threat, casting it as an attempt to encircle Russia militarily. The US plan "wonderfully fits the overall picture of American global anti-missile defence, which according to our analysis -- just look at the map -- is being deployed along Russia's perimeter, and also China's, incidentally." ADVERTISEMENT "If strategic components of the American arsenal appear in Europe near our borders, we are obliged to ... cut off potential threats from that deployment," Lavrov said in comments broadcast on the state-run television channel Vesti-24. After warning repeatedly that the US proposals would set off a new arms race, Moscow tested a new multi-warhead missile last week that Putin said was a direct response to US actions. The interview with Putin was due to be published on Monday but pre-released by Germany's Der Spiegel magazine. Putin and his peers are meeting for a three-day G8 summit which begins in Germany on Wednesday. "The anti-missile shield is part of a nuclear system that protects American territory. For the first time in history, elements of it are being moved to Europe," Putin said. "We want to re-balance the defence instruments with more efficient offensive equipment but we know that this could lead to a renewed arms race for which we are, however, not responsible." Tensions over the plan have contributed to sending relations between the two states to levels many analysts say haven't been seen since the Cold War. But in spite of the sharp words, Lavrov pointed to a previous avenue of Russian cooperation with the West on missile defence, saying: "It would be better to resume work within the framework of the NATO-Russia Council on creating theatre missile defence." Developing a missile defence system to protect deployed troops from missile attacks is one of several joint programmes by the NATO-Russia Council, and is scheduled to be completed by 2010. Washington says the central European shield, which foresees 10 missile interceptors in Poland and radar in the Czech Republic, would protect against potential threats from states such as Iran or North Korea. "The Cold War is over. I don't view Russia as an enemy and I've got a good relationship with Vladimir Putin and I intend to keep it that way," President George W. Bush told Bulgarian National Television (BNT) on Friday. But Putin, in the interview, rejected the claim that the missile defence was about Iran. "We are told that this defence system serves against Iranian missiles but no Iranian missile has such a capability. It therefore becomes evident that this concerns us, the Russians," Putin said. Save to MyWebEmail storyPrintable view Next article: Brazilian president in India to push ties Previous article: Sierra Leone helicopter crashes, 21 killed: airport official 7News Video Injuries and suspensions shake-up Origin Business backs emission targets: Garrett Landslide threatens Victorian home ? Government jumps in the polls ? Federer though to French quater-final » Most Viewed Stories 1. Canada forbids Aussie's kidney donation 2. Search for Vaughan's remains called off 3. Paris Hilton counts last days of freedom 4. PM defends Costello after negative poll 5. 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Send us feedback. ***************************************************************** 8 RIA Novosti: Russia's foreign minister arrives in Seoul 17:47 | 03/ 06/ 2007 SEOUL, June 3 (RIA Novosti) - Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov arrived Sunday in Seoul to hold talks with South Korean leaders and participate in Asian Cooperation Dialog. "The integration processes in the Asia-Pacific region are becoming a driving force of trade and economic development, and Russia is actively involved in them," Lavrov said in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk in Russia's Far East before his departure for South Korea. Lavrov's official program of stay in South Korea begins Monday with his participation in the Asian forum, while negotiations are scheduled for Tuesday, the Russian Foreign Ministry's information and press department said. The talks will focus on the North Korea nuclear program and the efforts to link Russia's Trans-Siberian railway with the trans-Korean railroad, the information and press department said. The Asian Cooperation Dialog forum unites 30 states and discusses the ways of cooperation between Asian countries in removing differences in their social and economic development, and also the region's pressing problems. RIA Novosti ***************************************************************** 9 London Tims: Putin raises spectre of nuclear war in June 4, 2007 Bronwen Maddox in Moscow President Putin has warned the US that its deployment of a new anti-missile network across Eastern Europe would prompt Russia to point its own missiles at European targets and could trigger nuclear war. In an exclusive interview with The Times, the Russian leader says: “It is obvious that if part of the strategic nuclear potential of the US is located in Europe and will be threatening us, we will have to respond. “This system of missile defence on one side and the absence of this system on the other . . . increases the possibility of unleashing a nuclear conflict.” Mr Putin expressed scepticism of this motive, arguing that “There are no such missiles – Iran does not have missiles with the range”. The US was insisting, he said, that the defence system was to be “installed for the protection from something that does not exist. Is it not sort of funny? It would be funny if it were not so sad.” He speculated that the US’s real motive was to provoke Russia’s retaliation and so “to avoid further closeness of Russia and Europe”. Mr Putin’s tough warning comes days before the start of the G8 meeting of the world’s most powerful industrialised economies. His uncompromising stand on America’s missile defence, Kosovo, Iran and climate change was partly blamed for the failure of last month’s summit between Russia and the European Union. Mr Putin had warm words for the “cordial reception” that Tony Blair had given him, and for Gordon Brown, “a high-class specialist”. But he offered little room for compromise on Britain’s request for the extradition of Andrei Lugovoy, the former intelligence officer, wanted on charges of the murder of dissident former agent Alexander Litvinenko by radioactive poisoning in London. “No matter from what angle we look at this problem, it’s all stupid, stupid nonsense”, he said of Britain’s extradition request. “I will not see any single positive component. It’s complete nonsense.” Russian authorities were investigating the case and if enough evidence were found, the case would “certainly be sent to court”, he said. In theory, he added, “there are possible circumstances” in which Russia would comply with the extradition “but it would require an amendment to the Constitution.” But Britain had not provided justification for such a dramatic move, he said. “If heads of British law enforcement agencies “did not know that the constitution prohibits the extradition of Russian citizens to foreign states then their competence is questionable” and “they should work for parliament or newspapers” because the request was at heart “only a political public relations step”. He also gave no quarter on the cases of Shell and BP, the British oil giants, who have recently seen the terms of their investments in Russia rewritten because of alleged breaches of their licences. Mr Putin insisted that he wants “cooperation not confrontation”, repeatedly blaming the US for its intransigence. But of all the potential clashes at the G8 meeting, which begins on Wednesday in Germany, it is his warnings on Russian retaliation to the US missile defence plans that are likely to cause the greatest friction. He called on “our American friends to rethink their decision” and warned that”We cannot be responsible for our reciprocal steps because it is not us who are initiating an arms race in Europe”. He added: “We will need to establish such systems which would be able to penetrate the [US] missile defence systems. . . What kind of means will be used to hit the targets that our military believe are potential threats – ballistic missiles, or cruise missiles, or some kind of new weapons system? Mr Putin threatened that in retaliation, Russia might stop complying with agreements to reduce conventional forces. “We have brought all our heavy weapons beyond the Urals and reduced our military forces by 300,000. But what do we have in return? we see that Eastern Europe is being filled with new equipment, two positions in Bulgaria and Romania, as well as radar in the Czech Republic, and missile systems in Poland. What is happening? Unilateral disarmament of Russia is happening.” Since the end of the 2nd World War, the US government has been involved in, triggered or instigated many wars, with huge costs in human lives, in its pursuit of world hegemony. The supposed checks-and-balances in the US political system aren't working to prevent such adventures - as witnessed by the capitulation of the Democrats and Republican Congress to Bush's Iraq War. Deployment of the supposedly defence shield is another US attempt at hegemony. Unfortunately, it will be innocent Europeans who will die in any nuclear or even conventional exchange, not Americans. Why can't the EU leaders see that they are just pawns of US neo-imperialism? The Eu and Russia should be strategic partners working to guarantee European peace. Instead, weak EU leaders are hoodwinked by Blair and Bush to do their bidding. It is a tragedy in the making. Wake up, please, before it is too late! The concerns of a nuclear power such as Russia must be addressed, not brushed off by snide remarks. Tony, Perth, Australia Would Bush allow Putin to stage radars and missiles within striking distance of the US? Say, in Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua? I seriously doubt it. The "star wars lite" technology doesn't work, and there's no credible or foreseeable threat from Iran that the proposed missile system could defend against. It is needlessly provocative at a time when we can least afford another enemy. windrider, Columbus, OH Remember the Cuba Crisis? America was correct in its action. Is Putin not so justified? Ron Barlow, Salisbury, Wilts Putin is right. smoothn00dle, brisbane, australia © Copyright 2007 Times Newspapers Ltd ***************************************************************** 10 London Times: The atomic bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor From The Sunday Times June 3, 2007 By William Langewiesche Reviewed by Rod Liddle Allen Lane £20 pp180 Nasty countries that want nuclear weapons badly enough will eventually get them, one way or another – and we’d better get used to the idea. On the other hand, the risk of a proper nuclear device (as opposed to a nuisance-value “dirty bomb”) being acquired by terrorists is comparatively small, despite our paranoia. These are the two main conclusions to be drawn from this rather depressing and slight book by William Langewiesche, one of America’s most celebrated investigative journalists. Slight, but I might add, pretty useful as a primer in Armageddon Studies. Langewiesche, a former pilot, presents a fairly convincing case to the effect that the stockpile of mouldering former Soviet nuclear-weapons materials has not found its way into the hands of Al-Qaeda and its allies – despite the fact that much of the highly enriched uranium can be found lying around in depositories that are about as secure as your garden shed. He takes us on a tour of one of the “closed” Russian nuclear cities in the southern Urals, where the lakes and rivers fizz with plutonium and almost every citizen is employed in the nuke business. For your aspirant terrorist, getting in, out and away with your chunk of radiation would be close to impossible, although not primarily as a result of the nuclear security measures imposed upon Russia and its former satellites and statelets by the west. Nor is it likely that your average Islamist terrorist, wandering the bazaars of, say, Istanbul or Islamabad, would be able to buy the stuff from renegade scientists on the make. How would the fissile material be exchanged without attracting a degree of avid interest from the indigenous security services, for example? I am less than convinced by Langewiesche’s reasoning here – he falls back on a sort of version of the Anthropic Principle to support his argument: the terrorist can’t do it because if they could do it they would have done it by now and they clearly haven’t. We are afforded a lengthy glimpse of AQ Khan, the scientist who delivered the nuclear bomb to Pakistan through the most industrious chicanery, buying the crucial parts either illegally or semi-legally from Holland, Switzerland and, with the greatest of ease, Germany. President Musharraf was eventually persuaded to shove Khan (a national hero) under house arrest for his role in flogging a sort of DIY bomb kit to Libya (which didn’t have a clue what to do with it). But as Langewiesche remarks of the investigation into Khan’s activities: “[it] was a cover-up and a sham – moreover of a sort only possible in a morally bankrupt and corrupt nation, where cowardly and illegitimate rulers, propped up by massive infusions of American dollars and dependent on their soldiers’ guns, suppress genuine inquiries because they would be implicated themselves”. Khan is still a hero in Pakistan, despite his televised apology to the nation in which he begged for forgiveness for having sold his country’s nuclear secrets to Colonel Gadaffi for a mess of pottage. But as Langewiesche notes, if a backward and broke Third World country such as Pakistan can acquire a nuclear bomb then anyone, absolutely anyone, can – as a former Soviet diplomat put it to the author, smiling wryly all the while, “even Hungary”. The upside is that these sorts of countries probably won’t be able to acquire many nuclear weapons and they probably won’t be sophisticated plutonium fusion devices that could wipe out the entire planet. (So, no mutually assured destruction, the shared terror that kept us safe during the cold war.) The downside is that they may just be all the more tempted to use them. Available at the Books First price of £18 (including p&p) on 0870 165 8585 © Copyright 2007 Times Newspapers Ltd ***************************************************************** 11 Reuters: Putin warns he will point missiles at Europe Sun Jun 3, 2007 5:17PM EDT By Oleg Shchedrov MOSCOW (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin said Russia would go back to its Cold War stance of aiming its missiles at Europe if Washington went ahead with a plan to build a missile defence shield near Russia's borders. In an interview released late on Sunday, Putin acknowledged that Russia's response risked reviving an arms race in Europe but said Moscow would not be responsible for the consequences because Washington had started the escalation. Putin made the tough statement before what is likely to be a frosty Group of Eight summit in Germany on June 6 where, among other world leaders, he will come face to face with U.S. President George W. Bush. Russia has not specifically targeted its missiles at Europe since the end of the Cold War but, asked if it might return to that if the U.S. missile shield plan went ahead, Putin said: "Of course we are returning to those times. "It is clear that if a part of the U.S. nuclear capability turns up in Europe, and, in the opinion of our military specialists, will threaten us, then we are forced to take corresponding steps in response." "What will those steps be? Naturally, we will have to have new targets in Europe." Russia's combative response to the U.S. missile shield has prompted comparisons with the Cold War. Putin has directed angry rhetoric at the White House, last week calling U.S. policy "imperialist". Russia has test-launched a new ballistic missile in a move it tied to the U.S. missile plans, and suspended its compliance with a treaty limiting the deployment of conventional forces near Russia's western borders. Continued... © Reuters 2007. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 12 Reuters: Missile shield ups chance of atomic conflict - Putin Sat Jun 2, 2007 11:42AM EDT BERLIN (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Saturday U.S. plans to install a missile defense system in Europe increased the chances of a nuclear conflict. Moscow is alarmed by U.S. plans to deploy parts of a global missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic and last week it tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile it said could ensure the country's security for the next 40 years. "The missile shield only creates the theoretical illusion that one is protected, but the possibility that a nuclear conflict is unleashed is actually greater," Putin told Germany's Der Spiegel magazine in an interview to be published on Sunday. Washington says it wants to avert attacks from "rogue states" such as Iran, which the West suspects of wanting to get an atomic bomb, but Russia sees a threat to its own security. "The strategic balance in the West is disturbed," said Putin, adding Russia had to create a system to counter U.S. weapons. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who hosts a summit of leaders of the Group of Eight industrialized nations next week, told Der Spiegel the U.S. systems were not directed against Russia but that Moscow should be involved in the project. "For me, involved means not only that you are informed but that you cooperate," she said. "You could, for example, try to make some technical components together, you could carry out tests very transparently and exchange data." Merkel also said the G8 summit would address another point of contention between the West and Russia -- Kosovo. Continued... © Reuters 2007. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 13 Reuters: Cracks on climate as G8 leaders meet in Germany 03 Jun 2007 10:01:25 GMT By Noah Barkin BERLIN, June 3 (Reuters) - Leaders from the world's major industrialised nations will try to paper over deep divisions on global warming and a range of foreign policy issues when they meet on the Baltic coast this week for a G8 summit. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, host of the annual Group of Eight meeting at the elegant Kempinski Grand Hotel in Heiligendamm, has been working for months to lay the foundation for a summit breakthrough in the fight against climate change. But her drive looks doomed after U.S. President George W. Bush announced his own climate strategy last week which rejects the approach to cutting greenhouse gases favoured by Merkel and other Europeans. Merkel at the weekend insisted that the United Nations, rather than individual countries or groups of countries, should take the lead in global efforts to combat climate change and acknowledged she was in for a tough summit. "We will wrestle with climate change until the very last minute," Merkel told Der Spiegel magazine. "You will see that there are differing opinions from the fact that some things might not be in the final document." In the absence of a climate consensus, the German hosts will be keen to shift the focus of the June 6-8 meeting to Africa. Hit by accusations they are not delivering on promises made at a summit in Scotland two years ago to help fight poverty on the continent, G8 countries are expected to reaffirm commitments to double development aid by 2010. The club -- made up of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States -- will also announce plans to increase funds for combating AIDS in Africa. But differences on major global issues may overshadow the areas of consensus, even if leaders avoid any public rows. Contentious foreign policy issues include U.S. plans to deploy a missile shield in central Europe and a push by the United States and Europe to grant effective independence to Kosovo, the breakaway Serbian province. Russian President Vladimir Putin is dead-set against both and his combative Cold War-style rhetoric in recent weeks had the German hosts worried about an ugly confrontation with Bush. Now that seems unlikely. Bush referred to Putin as a "friend" last week and invited him to his family home in Maine next month -- moves clearly intended to ease tensions. AGREE TO DISAGREE "On a lot of the big issues they will agree to disagree," said Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. "We should get through it without major confrontation, but that is partly because the Europeans realise changes to U.S. foreign and climate change policy won't come until there is a new president, so why rock the boat?" Bush, who made headlines at the 2006 summit in St. Petersburg by shocking Merkel with an impromptu backrub, is not due to leave office for another 1-1/2 years. But Heiligendamm will be the last G8 summit for Britain's Tony Blair and probably Putin, who has vowed to step down in the spring of next year. Newcomers include French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Informal meetings of the world's top industrial powers date back to 1975, when the G6 (Canada joined in 1976 and Russia in 1998) gathered in Rambouillet, France to coordinate economic policy following a global oil crisis and the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates. Now the club, which accounts for nearly two-thirds of the world's growth but only about one-eighth of its population, faces accusations of irrelevance and is under pressure to adapt to a shift in the global economic balance. In a nod to these concerns, Merkel has invited the leaders of Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa this year. The emergence of new economic powers is not all that has changed in the three decades since world leaders first met. As recently as 1999, when Germany hosted its last G8 summit, heads of government mixed with locals in the streets of Cologne. But the Sept. 11 attacks, clashes between anti-globalisation protesters and police at a 2001 summit in Genoa, and bombings in London during the 2005 summit changed all that. On Saturday, German police clashed with hundreds of protesters who set fire to cars, threw bottles and torched bins in the port of Rostock after a larger peaceful demonstration. Up to 16,000 German security personnel will be on duty for the three-day meeting and leaders will be sealed off from tens of thousands of demonstrators by a daunting 12-kilometre fence. http://www.alertnet.org ***************************************************************** 14 Reuters: FACTBOX-Venue for G8 summit steeped in history 03 Jun 2007 11:16:20 GMT June 3 (Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel is hosting the annual summit of Group of Eight leaders from Wednesday at Heiligendamm's Kempinski Grand Hotel. Here are some facts on the the venue for the summit. * The seaside resort Heiligendamm, situated on the Baltic Sea coast, is the oldest seaside spa in Germany. It is part of the town of Bad Doberan in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. * ORIGINS: -- Heiligendamm's history as a resort began in 1793, when, prompted by his physician, Professor Vogel of Rostock, Grand Duke Friedrich Franz I of Mecklenburg gave the go-ahead for developing Germany's first sea-bathing establishment near his summer residence of Doberan. -- The professor wanted to exploit the "indubitably established health-giving effects of sea-bathing in very many weaknesses and diseases of the body." This would now be possible at Heiligendamm. * THE 19th CENTURY: -- Between 1800 and 1870 an impressive complex of lodging-houses, bathing establishments and assembly rooms -- the "White Town by the Sea" -- sprang up. -- Inscribed on the outside of the Kurhaus, part of the Kempinski hotel and built between 1814 and 1816, are the words: "Heic te laetitia invitat post balnea sanum" ("Here happiness awaits you as you emerge healthy after bathing"). * A MODERN REVIVAL: -- Until the end of World War Two, it remained an exclusive resort though it has changed hands over the years. In 1948 sea-cures once again became available, and from 1957 to 1990 it was used as a sanatorium for the health service. -- Most of the historic buildings have been bought by an investor whose ambition is to restore its reputation as an elegant holiday destination. The classical buildings were renovated first, and in May 2003 the Kempinski Grand Hotel opened its doors. U.S. President George W. Bush stayed there during a July 2006 visit to Germany. * SECURITY: -- A 2.5-metre high steel fence, topped with razor wire, has been placed in a 14-km (nine miles) ring around Heiligendamm and police will control access through airport-style X-ray machines. To prevent anyone from tunneling beneath the fence, construction workers have rammed 50-cm long steel grating into the ground. Sources: Reuters/G8 website - http://www.g-8.de ***************************************************************** 15 Reuters: FACTBOX-What happened at the last five G8 summits 03 Jun 2007 11:14:09 GMT June 3 (Reuters) - Leaders from the world's major industrialised nations look set to square off on global warming and a range of foreign policy issues when they meet on the Baltic coast this week for a G8 summit. Here are some details of the last five G8 summits. CANADA - KANANASKIS - JUNE 2002: -- Participants agreed a $20 billion deal to stop extremist groups from getting hold of nuclear weapons, notably from stockpiles held in the former Soviet Union. -- In line with year-old promises, the leaders drew up a new development package for Africa, but the Africa Action Plan was criticised for offering a lot of advice and little cash. FRANCE - EVIAN - JUNE 2003: -- The G8 nations focused on the need to press ahead with structural reforms and greater flexibility in rich economies despite resistance, highlighted by public sector strikes, in host country France. -- They sought to draw a line under bitter transatlantic differences over the Iraq conflict, which half the G8 opposed, saying all now agreed the time had come to reconstruct Iraq. -- The summit was marred by violent demonstrations. UNITED STATES - SEA ISLAND, GEORGIA - JUNE 2004: -- The summit agreed to extend a debt relief programme for poor countries, but fell short of demands for a total write-off of loans owed by African nations to multilateral lending agencies. -- G8 leaders said they would extend the Highly Indebted Poor Countries initiative, under which poor states can write off some of their debt, for two years beyond its expiry in December 2004. -- They also stressed the need to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict as part of an initiative for political and economic reform in the broader Middle East. UNITED KINGDOM - GLENEAGLES - JULY 2005: -- Leaders of the G8 say they would boost aid spending on Africa. But aid agencies argue there is little new money in the pledge from the summit in Scotland and accused the leaders of delaying the increases. -- G8 leaders announced they would more than double aid to Africa by 2010, boosting spending by $25 billion a year from then. -- They also said G8 nations and other donors would increase total aid for all developing countries by about $50 billion a year by 2010. -- The G8 declared global warming required urgent action, but set no measurable targets for reducing the greenhouse gases that trigger it and thus contribute to climate change. RUSSIA - ST PETERSBURG - JULY 2006: -- Group of Eight leaders launched a fresh bid to pin down an elusive global trade pact, seeking a positive outcome to a summit was riven by discord over the Middle East. -- A formal agenda of energy security, combating infectious diseases and promoting education held little controversy and required no financial commitment by G8 members. -- Russia had to concede to European Union concerns over its conduct in energy markets to get agreement on energy security. But it did not bow to demands to ratify the Energy Charter, an international rulebook for oil and gas market activity. -- Assistance to Africa, put at the top of the 2005 summit by British Prime Minister Tony Blair but initially ignored by Russia for the 2006 meeting, also found its way onto the agenda. Sources: Reuters/G8 website: http://g-8.de/ http://www.alertnet.org ***************************************************************** 16 Reuters: FACTBOX - What is the G8? 03 Jun 2007 11:11:22 GMT June 3 (Reuters) - The G8 group of industrialised nations meets on Wednesday for their annual summit in the German resort of Heiligendamm. Germany assumed the G8 Presidency for 2007 having done so in 1978, 1985, 1992 and 1999. Here are some key facts on G8 and who is likely to attend. * WHAT IS THE G8? -- The G8 Group is an unofficial forum of the heads of the leading industrialised democracies: The G8 members are Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Japan, the United States, Canada (since 1976) and Russia (since 1998). The European Commission has also been represented in all the sessions since the Ottawa Summit in 1981. -- The first summit in France in 1975 was called to settle a dispute over currencies, but G7 meetings were soon expanded into an opportunity for world leaders to discuss broad economic policy matters. * RUSSIA: -- Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia gradually became increasingly involved in the G8 process between 1993 and 1998. The Group of Eight was finally constituted at the Birmingham Summit in 1998: Russia was now a member. -- At Kananaskis in 2002, the Heads of State and Government decided that Russia should assume the G8 Presidency for the first time in 2006. The first summit under a Russian presidency was held in St. Petersburg in July 2006. * WHAT DOES THE GROUP DO? -- The G8 meets to deal with the major economic and political issues facing members' domestic societies and the international community as a whole. -- Questions of macroeconomic management, international trade, and relations with developing countries, East-West economic relations, energy, and terrorism have also been of recurrent concern. -- More recently, employment and the Internet, transnational issues such as the environment, crime and drugs, and a host of political-security issues ranging from human rights through regional security to arms control have been discussed. * PARTICIPANTS: -- The heads of state or government of the G8 countries will take part. Chancellor Angela Merkel has also invited Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa to take part in the so-called Outreach Meetings in Heiligendamm. -- An outreach programme intends to involve ministers from Africa in the G8 Summit. Five founder members of the NEPAD Group -- Egypt, Algeria, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa -- will attend as will African Union president Ghana. Sources: Reuters/G8 Website. ***************************************************************** 17 The Observer: Europe shivering in the new Cold War Tensions are rising between Moscow and the West as the Russian giant flexes its muscles again in the old territories of the Soviet empire. In Estonia, one of deepest faultlines of the confrontation, the conflicts of the past are throwing a shadow over hopes for the future Jason Burke in Narva Sunday June 3, 2007 The Observer At the end of Europe yesterday afternoon, a man in a straw hat warmed up to go jogging, a father and teenage son in matching jeans and denim jackets shared a packet of cheap cigarettes, a small girl made sandcastles and two border guards strolled under the narrow single-span bridge over the swift-flowing Narva river. To their left lay Estonia, to their right, on the other bank, Russia. 'We are not too worried about politics here,' said one guard, fiddling with his holstered handgun. 'We prefer sitting drinking beer with friends on a bench in the sun.' Yet the bucolic scene and the border guard's insouciance seem increasingly out of place. For the slightly dilapidated, calm streets of Narva, Estonia's third largest city, are now at the centre of geopolitical tensions not seen in the region since the collapse of the Soviet Union nearly two decades ago. Some analysts are calling it 'the new Cold War'. The concern spreads far beyond Narva and the frontier. Estonia, known in Britain largely for the bars and pubs of its capital city, Tallinn, has been hit by riots linked to the tensions. New disputes pit states that emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet Union throughout much of Eastern Europe against their former overlords. And there is an international crisis setting Moscow against the European Union and against Washington. 'I suppose we are in the eye of the storm,' said Gregor Ivanov, a former factory worker, sitting on a bench in the sun on Narva's Puskini Street. 'It's a shame... everything was going so well.' The storm is large and potentially very dangerous. Locally, Russia is blamed for stoking riots in Tallinn last month in which one died and 153 were injured, for the roughing up of Estonian diplomats in Moscow and for a massive 'cyber-attack' on the infrastructure of the small Baltic state. According to Andres Kasekamp, director of Tallinn's Foreign Policy Institute, the Russian government is mounting a deliberate attempt to destabilise former Soviet republics. 'This strategy is intensifying as Moscow's attitude to the US, the UK and the EU becomes more aggressive and assertive,' Kasekamp said. 'They are seeing how far they can push us, the European Union, Nato, the Americans, everybody.' Some Estonians even fear Moscow may be searching for a casus belli. At the international level the Russian testing last week of an inter-continental ballistic missile led to an extraordinary diplomatic spat between the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice - who deplored Moscow's 'missile diplomacy' - and Russian President Vladimir Putin, who attacked American 'imperialism'. For the UK, already strained relations were put under new stress when the dispute with Moscow over the poisoning in London of Russian dissident and British citizen Alexander Litvinenko six months ago took another turn for the worse. Last week the prime suspect, whose extradition has been demanded by Britain and refused by Russia, surfaced on Wednesday in Moscow. Andrei Lugovoi told TV cameras that the British secret services were behind Litvinenko's murder. Then there are profound disagreements over the future of Kosovo and policy on Iran, a row over the rights of major British commercial investors to parts of the massive Siberian gasfields, harassment of British officials and diplomats in Moscow, and a series of apparently state-encouraged propaganda pieces in the Russian media against the West. Analysts are talking of relations between Moscow and London being at a 25-year low. 'This is a delayed confrontation between the Soviet past and the European future,' Igor Grazin, an Estonian MP, told The Observer. And his country, home to 1.3 million, is in the middle. Narva is 130 miles from Tallinn. There is a huge difference between the depressed north-eastern old industrial town and the booming Estonian capital with its stunning medieval architecture, new industries, strip clubs and groups of drunken British stag-nighters staggering through the narrow streets in fancy dress, football strip or matching T-shirts saying 'Well in in Tallinn 07' or 'The Tallinn Job'. It is at the gleaming new 9,000-seat Lillekula stadium on the outskirts of the capital that the England team will play their crucial qualifying European Cup match against Estonia on Wednesday night. The stadium is sold out. 'Of course, all the tickets have gone,' said Jan Sepp, a newspaper seller near to the ground. 'Beckham is coming.' In fact, the Los Angeles Galaxy's new star signing is not the only cause of the recent Estonian enthusiasm for football. As with so much in Estonia - such as the recent riots - the Baltic state's complex and painful history plays a part. For decades the favoured local sports were volleyball and basketball. There was no national team and soccer was identified with the Soviet Union and thus with repression and occupation. The result, analyst Kasekamp explained, was that, when Estonia formally won its independence from the collapsed USSR in 1991, football surged in popularity. Estonia's membership of the European Union, finalised three years ago, merely confirmed the trend. 'Now people look to the Premier League, the Italian teams, the European championship; soccer symbolises Europe and the new Estonian future,' Kasekamp told The Observer This turning towards the west is repeated in almost every field. The ruling coalition in Estonia, returned to power after elections in March, has continued the fiercely Thatcherite-Reaganite economics of its recent predecessors. A single flat income tax of 22 per cent, low business taxes and cheap, weak welfare provision have, government supporters claim, led to a spectacular annual economic growth of more than 10 per cent and negligible unemployment - outside the poorer industrial and agricultural areas. Even in and around relatively poorly off Narva, unemployment has dropped from 30 per cent 10 years ago to 8 per cent now - with a drop of 2 per cent in the past six months. Money is coming from the West too. The overwhelming majority of foreign investment originates in Finland and Sweden or Western Europe and less than a tenth of trade activity involves Russia. Huge numbers of Estonians now work in Finland, Ireland and, to a lesser extent, Britain. In foreign policy, Estonia tilts towards the Atlantic. Its tiny army has deployed troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, where one was wounded fighting alongside the British in the south last week. 'We are successful, democratic, economically liberal, pro-American, pro-EU. We are everything that the Russians are not,' said Raimo Poom, political editor of the major Esti Paevaleht newspaper. 'It's no wonder they don't like us.' For James Nixey, of Chatham House - the Royal Institute of International Affairs, based in London - Russia's recent broadside against Estonia is part of a wider vision of the region. 'It seems that Russia feels that those countries around it which are democratic and have liberal attitudes are a threat and those that are illiberal and autocratic are not,' he said last week. So Moscow's relations with Latvia and Lithuania, which joined the EU three years ago with Estonia, are frosty at best, those with Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan warm, and those with Alexander Lukashenko, the repressive leader of the former Soviet republic Belarus, depend on how vehemently anti-Western the latter's rhetoric at any given moment might be. Moscow, Nixey pointed out, similarly supported hardliners in Ukraine. Analysts and diplomats are working to decipher the logic behind Russia's hardening stance. The missile test last week was partly provoked by American plans to install an anti-missile defence system in Eastern Europe. 'The most explicit message from Moscow was that Russia is the main strategic partner for America,' said Thomas Gomart, of the French Institute of International Relations in Paris. 'It's a way of marginalising the Europeans and other emerging powers.' But domestic factors are also important. With parliamentary and presidential elections within the next year, Putin is playing to the crowd and strengthening the position of his possible successor, the Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov. 'To an extent it's theatre,' said one UK-based diplomat. 'And it is logical that Estonia has a key role.' Part of the reason is simple pride. Estonia was ruled by Russia throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Kadri Liik, director of Tallinn's International Centre for Defence Studies, said it was 'very difficult for Moscow to accept that a part of the former Russian empire is now part of the EU'. That resentment has recently crystallised around one issue: a memorial to Russian soldiers killed in the Second World War, known as 'The Bronze Soldier'. It was the relocation of the memorial from the centre of Tallinn to a military cemetery on the city's outskirts that provoked the riots last month. The riots were clearly orchestrated. The question is by whom and for what purpose. No one is sure of the answer. 'Reports that there were Russian state agencies involved in some capacity are credible,' said one Western diplomat in Tallinn. Others talk of SMS campaigns, secret networks, even money changing hands. Yet Moscow vehemently denies any involvement. But, even if there was some outside interference, the demonstrations around the memorial and the riots were a powerful reminder to Estonia's government not to forget the country's ethnic Russian minority. The road from Tallinn towards Narva follows the flat coastline of the Finnish Gulf, slicing through thick pine and birch forest, farmland and wide, empty marshes before reaching the open, windswept industrial heartland of the plains before the Russian frontier. Though some sections have been recently widened with some of the massive European structural aid now pouring into the country, along much of its length the road is little more than a rutted single carriageway running between the fields, old mines and historical memorials. The drive reveals Estonia's chequered history - and explains why feelings still run so high that the relocation of a statue can cause chaos. 'The statue is just a trigger, the issue has profound roots in recent and in ancient history,' said Nixey. After declaring its independence from Russia in 1918, Estonia was forcibly and bloodily incorporated into the USSR in 1940. A year later it was wrested from the Russians by the Germans. Just before Narva, war memorials and tombs line the Tallenberg Hills where German SS divisions held back a Russian onslaught for six months in 1944. Over the four and a half decades that followed, after a period of massive purges, violence and emigration, the Soviet Union ran Estonia with an iron grip, settling hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians in the small country, most of whom stayed after independence in 1991. Integrating this minority into a new Estonian nation has not been easy. Narva is considerably closer to St Petersburg, physically and culturally, than to Tallinn. 'This is a country in permanent transition,' said Professor Rein Raud, chancellor of Tallinn University. 'Its biggest challenge is to create political space for minorities and to engender loyalty to the Estonian state while allowing those that want it to maintain their traditions.' This bloody history explains why issues such as The Bronze Soldier can be so easily exploited. But though the Russian minority, concentrated in the northeast, is still poorer and less educated than most of the population and about 140,000 still do not speak enough Estonian to qualify for citizenship, the economic boom has meant that the chronic unemployment and hardship of the immediate post-communist time is almost gone. 'It's better now,' said 63-year-old Tamara Yevchenko, a flower seller in Tallinn. 'It's still tough, but it's better. Before, I wanted the USSR to come back, but now I am happy with the way things are.' And though HIV levels and drug use remain high and male life expectancy remains low, Grazin, one of seven MPs (out of 101) of Russian origin, plays down ethnic tension, dismissing recent claims by international human rights organisations of massive discrimination against Estonian Russians as exaggerated. 'There's work to do but a lot of progress has been made,' said one Western diplomat. Suggestions by others that the Russian minority should be 'sent home' are 'ludicrous', according to Poom. But even if this particularly problematic legacy of Estonia's bloody past is slowly being resolved, the drive to Narva exposes other dark elements of the past of a country that many like to paint simply as plucky, outnumbered democrats who have always stood up to brutal, conquering communists. The German soldiers resisting the Russians included many Estonians - and local police battalions guarded the forced labour camps where tens of thousands of Jews from all over Eastern Europe were worked to death. The process of coming to terms with that history continues. Last month a new synagogue opened in Tallinn, replacing those destroyed by the Nazis. At the new synagogue, near the docks in Tallinn, Chief Rabbi Shmuel Kot said antisemitism in the region was 'more or less' a thing of the past. 'I feel safer here than in London or Paris,' Kot said. 'I can't say for sure, because the Estonian way is to keep things hidden, but in general we feel safe.' But last week such confidence in an entirely untroubled future was not necessarily that widespread. On Wednesday the G8 nations will meet for three days of talks at the German Baltic Sea resort of Heiligendamm. Estonian leaders are looking to the EU nations present to make their anger at Putin's strong-arm tactics known. They may be disappointed. The leaders of the United States, Britain, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Russia and Japan will debate climate change, efforts to stop uranium enrichment by Iran, aid to Africa, currency exchange rates and global growth. Emerging economic powers such as China, Brazil and India are there as non-members. Diplomats hope that it will be a chance to calm angry tempers, not fuel fires. Foreign Office spokesmen were conciliatory last week. 'There are areas such as the rule of law and human rights where there is not a meeting of minds and we raise our concerns frankly with [the Russians] there,' said one. '[But] Russia has to be part of our policy... we have to engage.' For Liik, the Tallinn-based analyst, there is a longer-term concern. She says it is important to focus on the sentiments of 120 million Russians, not just the rhetoric of their leaders. 'Putin is telling the Russian people what they want to hear and doing what he thinks they want him to do. That says some very worrying things about Russian society and does not bode well for the future,' she said. 'What sort of a generation are coming through now who have been raised on all this aggressive, belligerent propaganda?' Few believe that the calm at the border crossing over the River Narva is anything but surface deep. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007 ***************************************************************** 18 YONHAP NEWS: S. Korea's first nuclear power reactor to go off-line, life extension sought 2007/06/03 22:42 KST SEOUL, June 3 (Yonhap) -- South Korea's first commercial nuclear reactors will go off-line this month after 30 years of power generation, the state-run operator said Sunday.    The Gori 1 reactor, located in Gijang, northen Busan, will be turned off on Saturday, but plans are underway to extend its operational life for 10 more years, the Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co. (KHNP) said.    It said engineers will thoroughly check the reactor and associated systems to determine if the overall facility can be safely turned on again.    The reactor that began experimental power generation on June 19, 1977, was built by Westinghouse Electric Co. Construction was financed by US$173.9 million in foreign capital and 71.7 billion won ($77.2 million) in local funds.    It was the largest civil engineering feat at the time and allowed South Korea to become the 21st country in the world to operate a nuclear reactor.    The 587 megawatt electrical (MWe) reactor generated a total of 114.7 billion kilowatts of electricity in the past three decades, equivalent to 900,000 tons of crude oil or 1.32 million tons of coal.    The KHNP said that while there were some minor mechanical problems in the 1990s, the reactors posted an average operational rate of 90.6 percent after 2000.    The Ministry of Science and Technology is in the process of determining if the reactor is safe for further operation. A decision on extending the life of the reactor is to be made late this year.    At present, South Korea operates 20 commercial reactors generating 40 percent of the country's electrical power supply. It plans to build more reactors by 2015 to meet growing energy needs.   (END) ***************************************************************** 19 The Age: PM's dire emissions-cut picture questioned - www.theage.com.au * Howard's pitch: you can trust me Katharine Murphy, Canberra June 4, 2007 A CLIMATE specialist has accused Prime Minister John Howard of exaggerating the impact of a medium-term cut in greenhouse gases when he committed yesterday to begin carbon trading by 2012. Mr Howard told the Liberal Party federal council meeting in Sydney he would accept the key recommendations of his high-level task group on emissions trading. He used the occasion to intensify his attack on Labor's more activist climate policy by highlighting work from his task group indicating a 20 per cent cut in emissions by 2020 would require drastic action, like shutting down Australia's coal-fired power sector and taking every car off the road. But John Connor, chief executive of the Climate Institute, said Mr Howard's take on the impact of a 20 per cent cut was "definitely an exaggeration" as it did not take into account relevant factors like developments internationally. "The 2020 stuff was more than a bit cheeky," Mr Connor told The Age last night. He said Australia had managed structural change in a lot of industries over the last 20 years without massive economic dislocation. Mr Howard's government would set a long-term emissions reduction target next year. But Mr Howard said Australia should not embrace any targets without fully understanding the costs. He said embracing a 20 per cent target, as he claimed Labor's environment spokesman Peter Garrett had done, would be a "recipe for a Garrett recession". In responding to his task group report, Mr Howard said his government would: ¦Begin a "cap-and-trade" scheme by 2012 and set a long-term emissions reduction target. ¦Design a trading scheme covering most of the economy, to last through the next century. ¦Ensure protection for heavy-emissions industries exposed to international competition. ¦Lead "internationally on climate change". Mr Howard said the new carbon market would sort out which energy sources could bring down emissions; and nuclear energy had to be part of the solution. The Business Council of Australia said industry now had certainty. But Jack Pezzey, from the Fenner school of environment and society at the Australian National University, said Mr Howard's response had failed to provide critical scheme details. Dr Pezzey said heavy polluters could be enticed before 2012 to increase emissions to maximise their allocation of free permits. Mr Howard sought to address this risk in his speech yesterday by saying companies that increased efforts to cut emissions before 2012 "will not be disadvantaged". Queensland Premier Peter Beattie yesterday pledged to cut his state's emissions by over 30 per cent by 2020 and Western Australian Premier Alan Carpenter said he would introduce bans on nuclear power plants. Victorian Deputy Premier John Thwaites accused Mr Howard of "squibbing" a long-term target. With PETER KER and AAP Copyright © 2007. The Age Company Ltd. ***************************************************************** 20 Sydney Morning Herald: Nuclear push gains momentum - www.smh.com.au Mark Davis and Mark Metherell June 4, 2007 THE Federal Government will consider dismantling legal barriers to the development of nuclear power before the election, the Minster for Industry, Ian Macfarlane, said yesterday. Mr Macfarlane said it would not be possible to cut greenhouse gas emissions enough to tackle climate change without the use of nuclear power. He said every significant economy in the Asia-Pacific region, except New Zealand, was looking at nuclear energy as a way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. "If you want a base-load, zero-emission safe technology that is already operating, then nuclear energy is the only one that can generate electricity and not emit," told Channel Ten. Mr Macfarlane said he was examining the changes needed to federal law to open the way for a domestic nuclear industry and would take recommendations to cabinet in September. The minister's comments indicate the Government will step up its pro-nuclear push before the election, which is expected to be dominated by environmental and energy policy. Labor supports expansion of uranium mining, subject to improved international safeguards to ensure Australian uranium is not diverted from civilian uses, but opposes local uranium enrichment or nuclear power on environmental and safety grounds. The Government's policy is to have a public debate on nuclear power. It argues nuclear power is likely to be a critical part of the solution to climate change by providing an energy source which does not emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The Prime Minister, John Howard, told the Liberal Party Federal Council meeting in Sydney yesterday that Australia should not pay higher energy costs than necessary to cut the emission of greenhouse gases. "Governments need to let the market sort out the most efficient means of lowering emissions with all low-emissions technologies on the table, and that of necessity must include nuclear power," Mr Howard said. Nuclear power is banned in Australia by two pieces of federal legislation. The Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act prohibits establishment of nuclear power plants, while the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Act provides that the industry regulator may not issue licences for nuclear power, uranium enrichment or fuel fabrication facilities. Mr Macfarlane said the Government's goal was to amend these acts so Australia could move further into the nuclear fuel cycle if the public accepted nuclear power. "Our default policy is to have a debate on nuclear energy on the basis that we don't see how you can put together a low-emission future without nuclear," he said. "But we want to engage the Australian people in this. This is a step forward that is very significant." He said the Federal Government would also look at whether it had legal powers to override the states if they opposed development of nuclear power. "You must deal with this issue of what do you do if Australia and its people say yes and some belligerent state premier, perhaps of either persuasion, says no." The West Australian Premier, Alan Carpenter, announced yesterday his government would legislate to prohibit nuclear power generation. Mr Macfarlane also said he had heard reports that at one hospital, nuclear medicine waste was being stored in a shipping container in the car park. He declined to name the hospital. Premiers were screaming about nuclear power, he said, and he questioned whether state governments had made appropriate arrangements to store nuclear waste. "Why are they frightening people by saying nuclear waste is so dangerous when they are not even storing it in a secure environment in some cases?" Mr Macfarlane asked. His spokeswoman later said the minister had not sought more details about the nuclear container because he did not have concerns about its safety. Previous reports of the insecure storage of nuclear medicine waste raised fears it could be plundered by terrorists for the manufacture of dirty bombs, conventional explosives tainted with radioactive material. A NSW Health spokeswoman said yesterday all public hospitals had to comply with radioactive waste management regulations and the department was not aware of any non-compliance. Copyright © 2007. The Sydney Morning Herald. ***************************************************************** 21 Sydney Morning Herald: The 'R' word we didn't need - www.smh.com.au Peter Hartcher Political Editor June 4, 2007 JOHN HOWARD has launched the Government's climate change fright line for the Federal election. He announced yesterday that the Government would embrace the recommendation of its emissions trading taskforce to launch a carbon emissions trading system by 2012. At the same time, the Prime Minister delivered the Big Scare. Labor's environment spokesman, Peter Garrett, Howard said yesterday, "wants a 20 per cent reduction in emissions from 1990 levels by 2020". "To meet such a target the emissions trading taskforce concluded that it would require, and I quote, 'replacing Australia's entire existing fossil fuel-fired electricity generation capacity with electricity from nuclear power, while at the same time removing all vehicles from our roads,' end of quote." He went on: "A 20 per cent cut from 1990 levels by 2020 would be the recipe for a Garrett recession. That is not a recession which Australia has to have." Surely Labor must be, as Malcolm Turnbull avowed yesterday, a "bunch of fanatics." Except that it is simply not so. First, it is not policy. Garrett floated the target when he was a backbencher, and Labor has since disavowed it. "It's clearly not Labor policy," Garrett said last night. Kevin Rudd's only stated target for carbon emissions is to cut them by 60 per cent by 2050. Second, Howard verballed the taskforce. The group reported that to achieve the 20 per cent cut would require a cut of 38 per cent from the levels currently projected to prevail in 2020. The report continues: "To illustrate the magnitude involved, this is equivalent to, for example" making the sort of shutdowns Howard cited. So even if Labor were to adopt such a target, it would not "require" any such thing. There would be many options available. Abatement policy, for instance. Aluminium smelters have already cut their total carbon emissions by 21 per cent from 1990 levels. And Australia's Co-operative Research Centre for carbon dioxide has said Australia could capture and bury 40 per cent of its carbon emissions within 15 years. The truth is that the "Garrett recession" is Howard scaremongering. As the head of Howard's department, Peter Shergold, head of the emissions taskforce, said, questioned about this scenario on Friday: "That's not going to happen, of course." Copyright © 2007. The Sydney Morning Herald. ***************************************************************** 22 The Age: Howard's pitch: you can trust me - www.theage.com.au Michelle Grattan and Misha Schubert June 4, 2007 Prime Minister John Howard acknowledges his audience at the Liberal party's federal council meeting in Sydney yesterday. Photo: Peter Morris JOHN Howard is flagging that he will make trust a central election issue as he seeks to counter Labor on climate change by pledging a national emissions trading scheme "built to last" for the rest of this century. But as Mr Howard rallies his party and returns to a successful theme of his 2004 campaign, senior ministers are having to scotch speculation the Liberals might need to think about a last-minute leadership change if the polls don't improve. In his keynote speech to the party's federal council, Mr Howard promised the emissions trading scheme would start no later than 2012. But a long-term target for cutting emissions, finally embraced by Mr Howard, will not be set until after the election. Mr Howard is painting the Government as responsible and moderate on climate change. He claims Labor could cause a recession by an aggressive policy. Declaring the scheme would involve momentous economic decisions, Mr Howard said: "The question I pose to the Australian people, quite directly, is this: who do you trust to take these vital decisions about our future? "Who do you trust to strike the right balance, so our firms and families can plan for the future with confidence? A government that has given Australia 11 unbroken years of prosperity ? (or) a party whose policy approach is steeped in recklessness?" Mr Howard has moved quickly to announce action after receiving, on Friday, the report of his government-business taskgroup on emissions trading. He said the Government would next year ? the timing recommended by the group ? set a long-term "aspirational goal" for emissions reduction. The trading scheme would be national and "as comprehensive as practicable". He said Australians should not have to pay higher energy costs than necessary to achieve emissions reductions. All low-emission technologies, including nuclear power, should be on the table in a market-based approach. Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane told Channel Ten the Government was looking at whether it could bring in legislation before the election to clear the way for a nuclear industry, and he would report to Cabinet in September. Mr Howard said Labor wanted to use a European approach "as if Australia were a small, densely populated nation with high winds somewhere east of Denmark". He said Labor environment spokesman Peter Garrett supported a 20 per cent reduction on 1990 emissions levels by 2020 ? "the recipe for a Garrett recession. This is not a recession which Australia has to have." Labor's official policy is for a 60 per cent reduction on 2000 levels by 2050. Reaction to Mr Howard's response to the task group was mixed. Business welcomed the clear policy signal, but Labor and green groups said his commitments were inadequate. "That's been Mr Howard's tricky, tricky approach right from the very beginning on so many issues," Labor's treasury spokesman Wayne Swan said. Mr Howard told the council this year's election would be the most difficult the party had faced in more than a decade. Ministers, bailed up by reporters at the council, dismissed weekend media speculation about leadership. Peter Costello ignored questions on the subject. Senate leader Nick Minchin said: "John Howard is our leader and he will lead us to the election." Communications Minister Helen Coonan said it was "definitely not" time for the party to contemplate a switch. "We're all 100 per cent behind the Prime Minister." Copyright © 2007. The Age Company Ltd. ***************************************************************** 23 Dallas Morning News: Texas nuke plant deals gaining steam 09:01 PM CDT on Saturday, June 2, 2007 By ELIZABETH SOUDER / The Dallas Morning News esouder@dallasnews.com Mitsui At a Tokyo restaurant, Japanese bankers treated American dealmakers to traditional fish and sake as they negotiated terms to build nuclear plants in Texas. The restaurant is loud on this March evening, full of families and college students, and it smells like the wide variety of fish on the menu. There's a sumo ring in the middle and a gift shop at the front that sells sumo key chains and pens and beach blankets. The Japanese bankers with Mitsui and Mizuho treat their American guests from NRG Energy and CPS Energy to platters of raw fish, bowls of boiling fish and lots of sake. The Americans want to buy two nuclear power plants from the Japanese conglomerate Hitachi, and the bankers want to help seal the deal. "We aren't in this as a science project. We want to build," said Steve Winn, head of development for NRG, a New Jersey company that's the second-largest power generation company in Texas. He leads the team that wants to spend about $5 billion to expand the South Texas Project. If the deal progresses without losing steam, NRG would be one of the first companies to build nuclear reactors in the U.S. in about 20 years, leading a revolution that could more than double the size of Texas' nuclear fleet in the next decade. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas is expecting new nuclear plants to keep the lights on, particularly after plans by TXU Corp. to build a huge fleet of coal plants were shot down by public protest about pollution and greenhouse gases. Also Online Map: Nuclear plants in Texas (.pdf) So far, many anti-coal activists favor nuclear power because it doesn't pollute or contribute to global warming. But already the anti-nuclear camp is gathering support, complaining about nuclear waste and security. "When you're looking at coal plants vs. nukes, it's sort of like quitting cigarettes and taking up crack," said Tom "Smitty" Smith, head of the Austin office of Public Citizen. And the various proposals for new reactors will test whether investors can build such big, expensive, long-term projects in a deregulated environment, where regulators no longer ensure generation companies turn a profit. The negotiators at the sumo restaurant are counting on government loan guarantees to help with the giant cost and risk of building nuclear reactors in Texas. Big in Texas Texas dominates the Nuclear Energy Institute's list of nearly 30 proposed nuclear plants in the U.S. Six are planned in Texas. Currently the state has four reactors. Power companies want to build nuclear plants in Texas because the state will need more juice in the next few years to keep up with population and economic growth. Nuclear plants produce huge amounts of cheap power consistently and reliably. And a nuclear generation company can sell that power at a relatively high rate on the Texas wholesale power market, which follows expensive natural gas prices. Plus, nuclear plants don't pollute or poof carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That puts nuclear companies in a nice position, should the U.S. government limit greenhouse gas emissions. NRG wants to build two reactors at the existing South Texas Project, co-owned by NRG, CPS and Austin Energy. STP has two existing reactors, and the new reactors, near Houston, could begin operating as early as 2015. Texas has two other reactors at Comanche Peak, near Glen Rose, owned by TXU. TXU would also like to double the size of its nuclear plant by adding two more reactors using Mitsubishi technology. Those reactors would begin operating between 2015 and 2020. Two companies, Amarillo Power and Exelon Energy, want to build nuclear plants at brand-new locations, known as "greenfield" sites. Exelon Corp., which operates the country's largest fleet of nuclear plants, plans to build one reactor in southeast Texas, south of Houston. The company hasn't named a site yet and hasn't decided on a technology. The plant would start operations in 2015 at the earliest, possibly a few years later. Amarillo Power, a private company started by developer George Chapman, plans a plant near Amarillo. The company is in talks with UniStar Nuclear, a partnership between Constellation Energy and French nuclear plant maker Areva Inc., to build and operate the plant. If the companies go ahead with the project, the plant could begin operating as early as 2016. The technologies Each company would probably use a slightly different technology made by a different vendor. But each technology follows the principle of using a standard plant design, pre-approved by federal regulators, to cut the time it takes to get an operating license and to build the plant. Only NRG has chosen a technology that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has pre-certified. The other technologies await certification. To jump-start the U.S. nuclear industry, the Department of Energy is offering to guarantee loans and to insure the companies against the risk of regulatory delays. As the department sets up the details of those programs, Texas power companies are stumping for rules that would work for a deregulated, build-at-your-own-risk market. Most experts agree that Texas will get more new nuclear plants if the government guarantees the loans. Without the guarantees, the state might not get any. That's a hot topic for the group at the sumo restaurant. The Americans are responsible for lobbying their government to offer more money for loan guarantees and to limit the time that each loan is guaranteed to the construction period. And the Japanese are to ask the government-owned Japan Bank for International Cooperation to offer loans to the project, making an exception to a rule that the bank may only support Japanese exports to developing countries. Neither government has definitively granted the requests. The past Texas might represent the future of nuclear, and it certainly represents the past. The most recent nuclear plant built in the U.S. is Comanche Peak, finished in 1993. The plant, owned by TXU, took 20 years to build and cost $11 billion, 12 times the initial estimate. The problem with the last generation of nuclear is that each plant was a custom design, made especially for the site and the operator. And often engineers changed the design during construction, further lengthening the projects. Since the U.S. took a break from starting work on new nuclear plants after an accident at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear plant in 1979, the industry has changed. Now vendors have cookie-cutter designs that they can erect much more quickly. And that means a better prediction of project costs. Consider the world's largest nuclear power plant, the Kashiwazaki Kariwa Nuclear Power Station on the shore of the Sea of Japan, northwest of Tokyo. The most recent of the seven reactors at the plant was completed in 1997 and took about five years to build. That reactor uses the same technology that NRG wants to use, the advanced boiling water reactor technology supplied by Hitachi. The Japanese technology conglomerate has developed a method of building nuclear plants by making big modules in a factory, shipping them to the plant site and bolting them together, sort of like a prefab building. The method has shaved years off the building time, and Hitachi engineers think they can build a plant even faster now. Several of the negotiators with NRG and CPS Energy at the sumo restaurant said they'd spent a day touring the giant nuclear facility, operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co. They laughed about the weird safety jumpsuits they had to wear to crawl around some inner areas of the plant – this wasn't the kind of plant tour given to schoolchildren on field trips. (The usual plant tour takes about an hour, and tour guides only ask people to change their shoes and wear plastic-soled slippers to go inside the reactor building. Most people only get to see the deep, spooky pool where long rods of spent fuel are stored and the platform on top of the reactor, which looks like a brightly lit roller rink that shakes a bit as the plant operates.) CPS, the San Antonio city-owned power company, hasn't yet decided whether to invest in the deal. Neither has Austin Energy, which owns part of the South Texas Project. But the Austin municipal utility hasn't sent any officials to Japan. "We're in the process of looking at that project. We have not made a final decision," said Austin Energy spokesman Ed Clark. He acknowledged that nuclear power is controversial among the power company's customers. "Let me say this," he added: "This is Austin." In my back yard? Nuclear power executives like to cite polls that show most Americans support nuclear power plants. But off the record, they question whether people would accept a nuclear reactor in their own neighborhood. So the real test of Texans' sentiment about nuclear power will come when Exelon announces a location for its plant. The company is considering sites south of Houston, where no nuclear plant exists, though people there are accustomed to refineries and other heavy industry. "We're also interested in Texas because the acceptance of nuclear in Texas, at least at this point, appears to be favorable, at least based on research we've done," said Thomas S. O'Neill, vice president of new development for Exelon. The companies point out that nuclear plants bring jobs to a community – and not just jobs to operate the plants themselves. Hitachi is looking for a plant to make parts for the South Texas Project expansion. NRG said it will need a place to train plant operators and is considering a partnership with a Texas university. Executives with each of the companies say they expect the government to have a solution for storing nuclear waste by the time their plants start creating it. These days, nuclear plants store spent fuel on site as Nevada lawmakers continue to block development of the Yucca Mountain Repository. So far, some of the most influential people who opposed the TXU coal plants are publicly supporting nuclear. "The issues of dealing with the spent fuel now appear, for most scientists and many environmentalists, to be less substantial than additional greenhouse gas emissions," said Houston Mayor Bill White, who along with Dallas Mayor Laura Miller campaigned against building traditional coal-fired plants. In speeches against coal pollution, Ms. Miller often suggested TXU consider nuclear. She liked to point out that she wears her Comanche Peak baseball cap while jogging each morning. And Container Store founder Garrett Boone supports nuclear. He's one of the founders of Texas Business for Clean Air, a group of high-profile business leaders that opposed the coal plants. "We very much feel that nuclear has to be a significant part of the energy mix. If one is truly serious about global warming, it is the only carbon-free alternative we have right now," he said. They've diverged from consumer advocate Public Citizen, a fellow anti-coal-pollution group. Mr. Smith, head of Public Citizen's Texas office, said nuclear waste is dangerous and the reactors are vulnerable to terrorists. "The dangers of nuclear power are so long-lived that it is not a risk that we should take when there are far cheaper alternatives that don't have the risks associated," he said. He added that each week, his office takes more calls from people worried about new nuclear plants in Texas. Now they're getting three or four calls a week. "It's reminiscent of the coal fight. First it was a trickle, then it was a torrent," he said. © 2007 The Dallas Morning News Co. ***************************************************************** 24 Indiadaily.com: Major differences making nuclear deal 123 impossible - Pranab downplays the issues Ratan Hazarika Jun. 3, 2007 The talks went nowhere. The deal is in sight but the parties are far apart. India and US are trying get married on the 123 nuke deal. It is a marriage of convenience between two suspecting parties. According to media release, a day after India and the US hit an impasse over their proposed nuclear cooperation agreement, External Affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee on Sunday said there was no ''roadblocks'' but certain issues needed to be resolved to seal the deal. Declining to give a time frame by when an agreement to operationallize the deal could be inked, Mukherjee also said there were some "legal constraints" for the US administration. "No, there are no roadblocks as such. Certain issues need to be resolved for which sincere efforts are going on," Mukherjee told reporters when asked about the fate of the deal on the sidelines of the conference of South Asia Free Media Association (SAFMA) here. ***************************************************************** 25 Times of India: Middle path, a solution to nuke issue - Pranab- 3 Jun, 2007 l 1613 hrs ISTlPTI SHIMLA: A day after India and the US hit an impasse over their proposed nuclear cooperation agreement, External Affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee on Sunday said there was no 'roadblocks' but certain issues needed to be resolved to seal the deal. Declining to give a time-frame by when an agreement to operationalise the deal could be inked, Mukherjee also said there were some "legal constraints" for the US administration. "No, there are no roadblocks as such. Certain issues need to be resolved for which sincere efforts are going on," Mukherjee told reporters when asked about the fate of the deal on the sidelines of the conference of South Asia Free Media Association (SAFMA) here. Identifying the "issues", Mukherjee said "We have committed to the Parliament that the nuclear agreement will be within the framework of July 18, 2005 agreement and March 2006 separation plan." "We are trying to resolve these questions," Mukherjee said while hoping that "It will be possible to arrive at a final agreement by reaching a middle path sooner." After three days of negotiations which ended in New Delhi on Saturday, India and the US moved "much closer" to an agreement but persisting "gaps" prevented a breakthrough. India said "some distance" was still to be traversed before the two sides could finalise the agreement. Copyright © 2007 Times Internet Limited. All rights reserved. For ***************************************************************** 26 TheStar.com: Greenpeace fears a U.K. nuclear revival Greenpeace fears a U.K. nuclear revival A place for Candu in Britain's energy queue LONDON–It's one thing for Canada's Candu technology to buy itself a seat at the table of the high-stakes poker game to build Britain's next nuclear reactors. It is quite another for Canada to win. The Atomic Energy of Canada Limited effort ranks "third, or possibly fourth" among international technology vendors lining up for pre-approval from U.K. nuclear regulators, according to University of Oxford economist Dieter Helm, an authority on British energy policy. "I would rank the French bid involving Areva and Westinghouse at the forefront, with the Canadians miles behind with the Japanese," Helm told the Star. "The Canadian effort has one advantage, however, in that they can point to a long-term existing relationship with British Energy." British Energy operates eight aging nuclear power plants, the oldest of which are widely regarded as favoured sites for new nuclear construction. Jun 02, 2007 04:30 AM Mitch Potter EUROPE BUREAU LONDON–You might expect the people of Greenpeace to be basking still in the afterglow of a rare court victory last February, when the environmental lobby's legal team delivered what seemed a fateful blow against British government plans to reinvigorate nuclear power in the United Kingdom. "Manifestly inadequate," "misleading," "radically wrong" – these were just a few of the pointed criticisms a High Court justice used in siding with Greenpeace against the Tony Blair government's attempt to consult the public on its plans to include a new fleet of nuclear plants in its answer to climate change. Barely three months later, the mood at Greenpeace is sombre, as piece by piece the elements of a British nuclear revival appear to be falling in place despite the judicial ruling that a new and more comprehensive public consultation must yet take place. The weak link in the public consultation process, Greenpeace officials admit, is the public itself, which opinion polls show drifting toward the nuclear answer as a reasonable solution to the question of harmful, heat-trapping emissions. "Either we take the nuclear option or the planet fries – that is more or less the British government's position. And they have sold it to the people quite effectively," said Ben Ayliffe, senior nuclear campaigner with Greenpeace U.K. "It is a strange situation because we took the government to court and we won. "Yet even though it is obliged to hold a full consultation on the pros and cons of nuclear power, it does seem once again almost as if everything has been prejudged, with a green light for a full new generation of nuclear plants." Elsewhere in London, a distinct nuclear bullishness is the prevailing mood as the industry's major players jockey for position in what is widely perceived to be a coming development boom. The new British government white paper on energy, released last week, and the government's subsequent decision on Wednesday to sell majority ownership of the U.K.'s key nuclear utility, British Energy, observers say, are both essential elements in positioning the marketplace for a building boom. "After spending the '70s, '80s and early '90s in a state of decline, we're now at a point where new build has a very real potential," said British Energy spokesperson Sue Fletcher. "We do need a fact-based debate. We welcome it. But the big issue for Britain is the timeline because we don't want to be at the back of the global queue. We could see a situation where there will be building in Finland, France, China all at the same time. The Australians, the Canadians, the Americans all are talking about building. "So never mind the fact that we need to get on with this for climate change and security/supply reasons. The other worry is there will be nobody to build it. There are only a certain amount of boilermakers in this industry." With a regulatory process and site preparation likely to take five years and construction itself another five after that, even the rosiest nuclear optimists expect no new power to come before 2016 at the earliest. Jerry Hopwood, vice-president of reactor development for Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., said 24,000 resumés passed through AECL's system in the past year alone as the Crown corporation recruits new graduates in anticipation of future needs. A future, Hopwood and his colleagues hope, that will include a place in the British market for Canadian Candu technology. "Over the years the industry was subject to so much criticism. We're certainly not blameless. We received wake-up calls and we had to grow up. We had to go through a bit of soul-searching and to ask ourselves, `Do we really believe in this?' "And now we've come out the other side saying, `Yes, we really do believe in it.' I think now – I hope – we've approaching a moment where more logical discussions start to happen. Not on whether nuclear is good or bad, but how to do it the right way," he said. "We notice also that anti-nuclear activists argue more these days about the economics of nuclear power, suggesting that plants take more time to plan and cost more," said Hopwood. "But in our work abroad, AECL has build six in a row on time and on budget. We're very proud of that." University of Oxford economist Dieter Helm, a frequent adviser to the U.K. government on energy issues, told the Star that Greenpeace itself is experiencing an identity crisis over the issue because "the organization was founded on anti-nuclear beginnings and now those instincts are in conflict to some extent" with part of the answer to the challenge of climate change. Yet in the wake of February's court ruling, Helm said the British government is being scrupulously careful not to overreach on its nuclear plans, however badly it might want to. "So for now the government and the industry are in a dance. But everyone understands the dance is going to lead to a new paradigm." Mitch Potter is the Star's Europe Bureau Chief. Contact him at mpotter@thestar.ca. © Copyright Toronto Star 1996-2007 | ***************************************************************** 27 Green Left - Brief: Forum sparks new anti-nuclear group Garry Walters, Port Macquarie 2 June 2007 On May 12, 400 people from the NSW mid-north coast packed the Kempsey Anglican Hall for a public meeting organised by the Macleay Nuclear Free Alliance (MNFA). With the theme ?Nuclear power ? not the answer to climate change?, the afternoon forum had as its featured speakers anti-nuclear campaigner Dr Helen Caldicott and NSW Greens MP John Kaye. Inspired by the forum, 20 residents of the Hastings area of the Port Macquarie-Hastings Shire met on May 26 at the Sea Acres Rainforest Centre, Port Macquarie, to initiate a Hastings Nuclear Free Alliance. It was decided to begin with monthly Saturday meetings. For more information about the HFNA, phone Philip on 0429 190 952. From: Australian News, Green Left Weekly issue #712 6 June 2007. From: Australian News GLW issue #712 - 6 June 2007: Authorised by K. Miller, 23 Abercrombie St, Chippendale, NSW. Site by Kiwa Systems ***************************************************************** 28 India E-News: No roadblocks in nuclear deal - Pranab India Sunday, June 03, 2007 From correspondents in Himachal Pradesh, India, 05:30 PM IST A day after India and the US completed talks on a civil nuclear cooperation pact without any apparent breakthrough, External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee Sunday said that although 'certain issues' needed to be resolved there were no 'roadblocks' in the ongoing negotiations to finalise a bilateral agreement. The minister, however, did not give a timeframe for finalising the agreement that would pave the way for the resumption of civil nuclear commerce between the two sides after a gap of nearly three decades. 'There is no roadblock in the ongoing Indo-US nuclear deal talks, but certain issues need to be resolved,' Mukherjee told reporters in an attempt to dispel the impression that the bilateral negotiations were floundering over the so-called 123 pact, named after Section 123 of the US Atomic Energy Act. 'Since we have committed to parliament in March this year, we would like to arrive at a certain consensus on this issue,' he said. 'There are certain legal constraints on the part of the US administration and we hope that the ongoing negotiations will resolve this. But we can't give a possible timeframe before the deal is final,' the minister said. Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon and US chief interlocutor for the nuclear deal Nicholas Burns concluded three days of talks Saturday - the fourth formal round between the two sides - to iron out differences over issues like India's insistence on its right to test a nuclear device and reprocess US-origin spent fuel, but could not reach a final agreement on these sticky points. Although both sides claimed to have made some progress, talks appeared to have hit an impasse mainly on account of the US' reluctance to accommodate India's demand for right to process spent fuel that is necessary for its indigenous three-stage nuclear energy programme. Differences over India's insistence on what it claims to be its sovereign right to test a nuclear device and demand for lifetime guarantees of nuclear fuel for reactors it would place under international safeguards also remain to be resolved decisively. The US is keen to insert a clause in the 123 pact that would entail the cessation of civil nuclear cooperation in the event of India testing a nuclear device - a condition that is simply not acceptable to New Delhi. With the talks deadlocked over these difficult issues, both sides are banking on a meeting between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and US President George Bush on the sidelines of the G8 summit in Germany later this week to resolve the differences. (Staff Writer, © IANS) Copyright 2005-2007 by India eNews - A Dark Blue Company. All rights reserved. Terms of Use ***************************************************************** 29 Herald Sun: Is Howard being fair dinkum? | NEWS.com.au | Jill Singer June 04, 2007 12:00am JILL Singer writes: How seriously does John Howard take climate change? Consider who he chooses to listen to on this issue so vital to our future. Until last year, the man John Howard appointed to advise him on science policy was Dr Robert Batterham. How confident can Australians be that he provided independent advice? At the same time that Dr Batterham was working as the PM's chief scientist, he was earning an estimated $700,000 a year as a director of Rio Tinto, a company with a huge vested interest in Australia's carbon policy. Taxpayers also fund the Commonwealth Government's Australian Greenhouse Office. Gwen Andrews was its chief executive for four years, including the period John Howard was meant to be deliberating whether to ratify Kyoto. According to Andrews, he did not ask her for a single briefing. Dr Graeme Pearman was for many years the head of the CSIRO's Division of Atmospheric Research and reveals that CSIRO scientists were gagged under pressure from the Government. They were not allowed to talk about the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But why does the Government want to skew evidence? And why do its supporters try to pull the wool over our eyes? Andrew MacIntyre from the Right-wing Institute of Public Affairs told ABC Radio why he was a climate-change sceptic. Like a host of other government supporters, he points to the anti-Kyoto Oregon Petition and claims that thousands of scientists signed it, all under the auspices of the prestigious US National Academy of Sciences. Not true. The petition was organised by Christian fundamentalists. Not all signatories were scientists. Geri Halliwell Phd was on the original petition, aka Ginger Spice. Many of those who did sign it say they regret doing so. More to the point, the National Academy of Sciences furiously refutes anything to do with it and declares it does not reflect the conclusions of expert reports of the academy. Why promote such discredited muck? Here's a clue. The IPA gets funding from the fossil-fuel industry. Clive Hamilton is executive director of The Australia Institute and has traced how a narrow section of Australian industry wields its influence over the Government. Hamilton's latest book, Scorcher: The Dirty Politics of Climate Change, recalls a conference held in Canberra in 1997 called Countdown to Kyoto and sponsored by ExxonMobil and the massive mining company Xstrata. Its aim was spelled out in a fundraising letter from Frontiers of Freedom to offer world leaders the tools to break with the Kyoto treaty. Frontiers of Freedom is a far-Right US think tank funded by ExxonMobil and tobacco companies and they have great sway over the Australian Government. Where is the evidence for this? Australia's delegation to negotiate Kyoto included fossil-fuel industry lobby groups, the only developed nation to do so. An equivalent would be appointing Tony Mokbel as the Government's adviser on criminal justice. It is known that greenhouse sceptics have direct access to the PM. As one told Hamilton, there is this arrangement where senior people can ring direct. Can access to the PM be that easy? Just remember that John Howard admitted that powerful Liberal mate Ron Walker rang him about setting up a nuclear power company. Great idea, Ron, is what the PM said he told his buddy before setting up another whitewash inquiry to endorse his position. Back to Scorcher: The Dirty Politics of Climate Change and the events of May 6, 2004, when John Howard convened a secret meeting of LETAG, the Lower Emissions Technology Group that consists of the CEOs of the major fossil fuels corporations. Those attending came from Rio Tinto, Edison Mission Energy, BHP Billiton, Alcoa, Energex, Origin Energy, Boral and Orica. The meeting was meant to be hush-hush, but notes were leaked that detailed Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane stressing the need for confidentiality because if the renewable industry found out there would be a huge outcry. Macfarlane referred to "us" and "them". "Us" is the Government and the fossil fuel industry and "them" is anyone involved in renewables. It gets worse. The PM was revealed to be worried about a review that recommended extending an investment scheme into renewable energy. Macfarlane explained the scheme was working too well and that investment in renewables was running ahead of plan. Clean energy without profits going to the Liberal Party's powerful mates? That would never do. But, there, in black and white, was the incontrovertible and inconvenient truth. The Australian Government is determined to protect the fossil fuel industry at the expense of the renewable sector. We might also note that in June 2004 an email was sent to major polluters from Rio Tinto's chief lobbyist, none other than Lyall Howard, the PM's nephew. Loyal Lyall advised leaders of the fossil fuel industries how to deliver key messages praising Uncle John Howard's energy statement. Note that Lyall Howard did this before the PM went public with the policy. He knew what most Australians did not and he knew it would deliver great news for polluters. The PM is currently trying to convince us he is on top of climate change and the development of an emissions trading scheme. What he is on top of is nurturing the interests of himself, his mates, family and powerful polluters. jsinger@bigblue.net.au. © Herald and Weekly Times. All times AEST (GMT + 10). ***************************************************************** 30 BBC NEWS: US-India nuclear deal talks fail Last Updated: Sunday, 3 June 2007, 01:14 GMT 02:14 UK India has pledged to open civilian nuclear sites to inspection The US and India have failed to resolve differences over a proposed landmark deal on nuclear co-operation after three days of negotiations in Delhi. Indian Foreign Minister Shiv Shankar Menon said the two sides had made considerable progress, but that there were still gaps to be covered. Under the deal, India would get access to US civilian nuclear technology if it opens its facilities to inspection. They also say it sends the wrong message to countries like Iran, whose nuclear ambitions Washington opposes. India has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). 'Useful discussions' After the intensive talks with US Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, Mr Menon said the two sides had made "considerable progress" towards completing the proposed deal. NUCLEAR POWER IN INDIA India has 14 reactors in commercial operation and nine under construction Nuclear power supplies about 3% of India's electricity By 2050, nuclear power is expected to provide 25% of the country's electricity India has limited coal and uranium reserves Its huge thorium reserves - about 25% of the world's total - are expected to fuel its nuclear power programme long-term Source: Uranium Information Center Global nuclear powers "There are still issues where there are gaps," he said, but refused to give any specific details. "We are optimistic that we will make the deal." Mr Burns said the representatives had "useful discussions". "While there has been good co-operation, more work remains to be done," he said. "We look forward to a final agreement as it is indisputably in the interest of both governments." 'Infringement of sovereignty' The BBC's Sanjoy Majumder in Delhi says the key sticking points were the issue of reprocessing spent nuclear fuel and carrying out more nuclear tests. Washington is opposed to allowing India to undertake either, but the Indian government has said any restriction would be an infringement on its sovereignty. India also wants the United States to guarantee its supply of nuclear fuel, our correspondent says. The leaders of both countries are under considerable domestic pressure not to compromise, and with the US election approaching and the Indian government in the second half of its five-year term, time is running out for both administrations, our correspondent adds. * BBC Copyright Notice ***************************************************************** 31 BBC NEWS: Australia PM pledges climate plan Last Updated: Sunday, 3 June 2007, 12:08 GMT 13:08 UK Mr Howard said Australia would set limits on emissions Australian Prime Minister John Howard has announced a shift in policy on climate change, promising to set up a carbon trading scheme to cut pollution. Mr Howard said he would set a target next year for limiting greenhouse gas emissions and also pledged to put in place a carbon trading scheme by 2012. Australia is one of the worst polluters per head of population in the world. His announcement comes ahead of a national election later this year, in which Mr Howard will be seeking his fifth consecutive win. If we get this wrong it will do enormous damage to the economy John Howard The opposition Labor party, which has a strong lead in the opinion polls, has portrayed the government as dithering and backward-looking on global warming, reports the BBC's Phil Mercer in Sydney. Labor has pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 60% by 2050. Mr Howard does not plan to reveal his targets until next year, once the economic costs of carbon trading have been fully studied. "Implementing an emissions trading scheme and setting a long-term goal for reducing emissions will be the most momentous economic decision Australia will take in the next decade," Mr Howard told an annual meeting of his Liberal Party. "If we get this wrong it will do enormous damage to the economy, to jobs and to the economic well-being of ordinary Australians, especially low-income households." 'Better scheme' Australia and the US are the only major industrialised nations not to ratify the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Australian farmers have seen record droughts this year Mr Howard promised that Australia's carbon trading scheme would be better than those in place in Europe. Australia has recently seen record drought conditions, which have harmed economic growth and caused widespread despair among the farming community. Residents have been ordered to cut back on consumption and farm production has plummeted. Some experts believe that these parched conditions are the result of the world's hunger for fossil fuels, while others though see it as part of a natural cycle. * BBC Copyright Notice ***************************************************************** 32 PoughkeepsieJournal.com: Sewage wasn't radioactive, Entergy says Saturday, June 2, 2007 BUCHANAN - The lab results that showed radioactive tritium in sewage from the Indian Point nuclear power plants last month were incorrect "false positives" and follow-ups have determined that there is no contamination, the plants' owner said Friday. Entergy Nuclear also said it has found no tritium above normal levels at the sewage plant in Buchanan or anywhere else outside Indian Point property. When the positive result was announced May 9, there were fears some of the tritium-contaminated groundwater beneath Indian Point had somehow found its way into the pipes that lead to the Buchanan sewer system. Entergy said Friday its lab and an outside lab had reanalyzed the sewage sample that yielded the positive result and found no above-normal trace of tritium. The level of tritium originally reported was tiny - 8,000 picocuries per liter, while the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's standard for sewage is 10 million picocuries per liter. A picocurie is a measure of radiation. Copyright © 2007 PoughkeepsieJournal.com ***************************************************************** 33 AU: Ninemsn: Nuclear stations to be banned in WA Sunday Jun 3 15:24 AEST Nuclear power stations will be banned in Western Australia by legislation aimed at thwarting the prime minister's nuclear push, Premier Alan Carpenter says. Mr Carpenter announced the new legislation at the WA Labor Party state conference. The legislation will prohibit the construction or operation of a nuclear facility, the transportation of certain material to a nuclear facility site and the connection of nuclear generation works to electricity transmission or distribution systems. Mr Carpenter said new technology was the answer to climate change challenges not nuclear power. "We are confident that new technology, such as geothermal can be the future for this state," Mr Carpenter said. "I'm absolutely certain John Howard's nuclear future is not for WA. "I totally reject the argument that nuclear power is the Australian answer to the climate change challenge. "We don't have to turn to old technology to meet the climate change challenge." The announcement follows an admission by Victorian Premier Steve Bracks last week that the state is powerless to prevent a nuclear power plant being built on crown land. WA's new legislation will include a trigger to force a referendum if the commonwealth decides to override the state's anti-nuclear stance. "We hope it never gets that far but I'm absolutely certain that the WA people will say no," Mr Carpenter said. "It could be at the commonwealth's political peril if they ever proceeded with such a move." Kevin Rudd would help would replace the old ways of the Prime Minister with fresh ideas, Mr Carpenter says. "We can replace John Howard with Kevin Rudd," Mr Carpenter said. "We can get rid of John Howard." The WA premier called for Labor to unite and win the next election. ©AAP 2007 © 1997- 2007 ninemsn Pty Ltd - All rights reserved ***************************************************************** 34 Herald Sun: Change to nuke law? | NEWS.com.au | June 04, 2007 12:00am THE Federal Government is considering repealing laws that prevent a nuclear energy industry in Australia, according to Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane. Nuclear reactors would require changes to laws governing the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency. Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane said yesterday if Australia were to have a public education campaign it should also have the ability to put a nuclear industry in place. © Herald and Weekly Times. All times AEST (GMT + 10). ***************************************************************** 35 JOURNAL NEWS: New test shows no tritium sewer leak from Indian Point Saturday, June 2, 2007 By GREG CLARY BUCHANAN - New tests at Indian Point show that radioactive tritium is not leaking into the village sewer system and that earlier readings were incorrect, nuclear plant officials said yesterday. The possible infiltration of radioactive material into village pipes raised concerns last month as the plant continues to work to contain tritium and strontium-90 leaks first discovered in 2005 and 2006. Indian Point owner Entergy Nuclear Northeast has yet to receive any strontium-90 test results, but experts in and out of the company have said there is little likelihood of finding that isotope without finding spiked levels of tritium as well. "The false positives (found earlier) were most likely the result of interference due to some organic materials and chemicals commonly found in sanitary sewers," said Donald Mayer, the Indian Point official in charge of the groundwater contamination investigation. "When analyzing at very low levels, occasional false positives can occur." The Nuclear Regulatory Commission confirmed yesterday that Indian Point had reported those results, but the agency has collected its own samples and is awaiting the results. "We don't have any reason to doubt (Indian Point's) results," NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said. "But as always, we will verify their data." State health and environmental officials said yesterday that they expect to conduct their own tests as well in the near future, though they gave no specific date yesterday. Indian Point officials said that because of the intense public interest in the groundwater contamination problems since the leaks were discovered, they released the tritium information in early May, days after an on-site lab found the supposedly elevated tritium levels. The company's labs at Indian Point are not sufficiently equipped to filter out environmental factors that might have contributed to artificially higher readings, Mayer said, and Indian Point's tritium levels were undetectable when analyzed by an outside firm's lab with more sophisticated methods. Mayer said that the company collected more than a dozen sewage samples at different times and also tested Buchanan's treatment plant, and the presence of tritium was negligible. Buchanan Mayor Dan O'Neill had said when the May results became public that he was eager to see more testing done, and yesterday he was glad that happened. "I'm obviously relieved that there was no tritium and that the reading turned out to be a false positive," said O'Neill, who added that he had been called by Entergy with the news before the announcement. "No matter how insignificant the levels are, it's always better if there's no amount present." O'Neill said the environmental and health effects from nuclear power plants are minimal compared with plants that burn fossil fuels to create electricity. "But you still would rather never have any negative impacts, especially on the host community," he said. Lisa Rainwater, who heads Riverkeeper's campaign to close the nuclear plants, noted that the spring had been particularly busy for Indian Point. Since April 1, there have been unplanned shutdowns of the nuclear reactors, a lowered safety rating and new sirens that still were not working by a second federally imposed deadline of April 15. "It's one good piece of information to come out of Indian Point after weeks and weeks of bad," Rainwater said. "We hope they'll continue to routinely monitor the situation and test regularly in order to be sure the latest test is in fact accurate." Mayer said Indian Point plans to monitor the sewage flow for tritium on a monthly basis from now on and also will check for other isotopes if workers see the tritium levels rise. Reach Greg Clary at gclary@lohud.com or 914-696-8566. ====================================================================== As always, Lisa Rainwater misses entirely, the thousands of megawatts coming out of IPEC as very "good news" every second of every day, along with the near-billion dollars of financial uplift to the region, which has also been steadily pouring out of Indian Point as Ms. Rainwater pickets, makes erronious statements, issues negative viewpoints, and thus makes her usual overdrawn "contribution" to our local life. Moreover, the community of upstanding citizens manning Indian Point has been coaching little league baseball, mentoring young people, serving in our armed forces, and contributing to local charities, even contributing to Ms. Rainwater's rudderless Riverkeeper charity, as Corporate Entergy funds green initiatives with millions, freely given.(How many initiatives does Riverkeeper fund around here?) But this is not "good news" to Ms. Rainwater, she prefers her closed, isolated Public Relations bubble universe, and her increasingly irrelevant minority rant, to any view of how things really are around the Hudson Valley. (Ms. Rainwater lives in Washington Heights, Manhattan). Posted by: la_88 on Sat Jun 02, 2007 12:17 pm - Tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen with a half-life of 12 years. It is naturally produced in the upper atmosphere when cosmic rays strike air molecules and as a byproduct in nuclear reactors that produce electricity. Exposure to it and other radiation increases the risk of developing cancer. - Strontium 90 is a fission byproduct of uranium and plutonium, with a half-life of 29 years. Large amounts were produced in the 1950s and 1960s during atmospheric nuclear weapons tests. Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Copyright © 2007 The Journal News, a Gannett Co. Inc. newspaper serving Westchester, Rockland and Putnam Counties in New York. ***************************************************************** 36 The Journal: Business group endorses Indian Point license renewal Saturday, June 2, 2007 (Original publication: June 2, 2007) The Westchester County Association's board of directors has strongly endorsed Entergy Corp.'s license renewal application to operate its two Indian Point nuclear power plants in Buchanan. About 30 to 40 members of the 60-member board were on hand May 17 for a presentation by Larry Gottlieb, director of communications for Entergy Nuclear Northeast. The board, which had invited Gottlieb to speak, voted unanimously afterward to endorse the renewal. In a statement released afterward, board Chairman Stanley Freimuth said that the two power plants produce between 18 percent to 38 percent of the energy used in the region. "This meeting not only underscored the importance of nuclear energy in sustaining the area's economic vitality, but it also demonstrated that Entergy has made substantial investments to address safety and security issues," Freimuth said in the statement. Freimuth, board Co-Chairman Mark Rollins, and association President William M. Mooney Jr. could not be reached for comment. The power facility has had five unplanned shutdowns in 18 months and recently paid a $130,000 fine over problems related to its new emergency siren system. On Monday, a broken water valve at Indian Point 2 led to operators taking it off the state power grid while repairs were made. The recent problem hasn't appeared to change the association board's thinking on the license renewal, said Amy Allen, the group's managing director, advocacy and international business. "I can't speak for the whole board," Allen said, "but I haven't heard any clamor that we should rethink supporting it." The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is reviewing Entergy's application to extend the licenses for 20 years. The license for Indian Point 2 expires in 2013, and the license for Indian Point 3 expires in 2015.Developer to lay out first 50 penthouses, villas free Cappelli Enterprises, the developer building The Residences at The Ritz-Carlton in downtown White Plains, plans to offer free architectural services to the first 50 villa or penthouse buyers in the complex's tower 2. The architects will come up with plans to lay out a buyer's condominium the way the buyer wants. The residences in the tower will range from 1,100 to 2,900 square feet and sell for $727,000 to $8 million. Cappelli is building the 44-story building on Main Street.Barr to appeal Croatian court ruling Barr Pharmaceuticals Inc. said yesterday that it has strong grounds to appeal a decision handed down by a Croatian court against a subsidiary over a patent case. The decision by the Commercial Court in Zagreb required the subsidiary, Pliva, to pay $8 million to a number of former employees in connection with a process for producing Azithromycin, an antibiotic. The lawsuit was filed in August 2001; Barr acquired Pliva last October. Barr said it would not have to pay the judgment until the decision is affirmed on appeal. Barr has manufacturing and research operations in Pomona.Booksellers group starts new member site The American Booksellers Association in Tarrytown has launched a new member Web site, BookWeb.org. The association said the site offers users greatly improved navigation and content organization, a new Booksellers' Wiki and blog, and a fully redesigned online Book Buyer's Handbook, a guide to vendor's trade terms. Reported by Jerry Gleeson. Reach him at jgleeson@lohud.com or 914-694-5026. Copyright © 2007 The Journal News, a Gannett Co. Inc. newspaper serving Westchester, Rockland and Putnam Counties in New York. ***************************************************************** 37 Burlington Free Press: My Turn: Small state, big politics Opinion burlingtonfreepress.com | Burlington, Vermont Published: Saturday, June 2, 2007 By Rep. Judy Livingston It's hard to know who took the biggest beating this session, Vermont taxpayers or the U.S. Constitution. An overabundance of expensive political shenanigans and posturing for popular positions was brought on by certain members seeking higher office in 2008. The maneuvering started with seminars on global climate change. Experts were flown in to present long and redundant warnings -- to the state with the cleanest energy portfolio in the country -- us. Notwithstanding our ongoing efforts toward reducing carbon emissions and tightening building codes, the message we already know could have been delivered in a day instead of three weeks. The tandem scapegoat for the session, the U.S. Constitution, really took a thumping. A new version of an old campaign finance bill reared its head once again, revealing the determination of those who like incumbent insurance. Popular with voters, restricting campaign spending sounds great, but it seriously hampers new candidates from buying enough exposure to unseat an incumbent. Moreover, capping donations drives candidates to start running even earlier to gather more small donors, generating lengthier campaigns. Significantly, Vermont faced the U.S. Supreme Court only two years ago because of similar legislation. Assuming a real need for such severe restrictions, the justices asked how many cases of campaign fraud had been uncovered in Vermont. Our attorney general had to answer -- none. The new law was declared unconstitutional. This embarrassment cost taxpayers $2 million. Apparently, the 2007 Legislature seems to have no memory of that fiasco -- so we're taking another run at it. Politics at its worst can be said for the prescription drug bill that was swiftly brought to the House floor May 4. With the laudable intent of promoting generics, the bill takes aim at drug companies by suppressing marketing and sales to physicians. Following a U.S. District Court decision that struck down the New Hampshire prescription drug bill, again on constitutional grounds, the Health Care Committee continued on its ill-advised journey to bring forward a similar bill. ... Although the constitutionality of the bill is in question, and a lawsuit is inevitable, it was not reviewed by the Judiciary Committee and on it went. Another $2 million? Then what had started in the House as a popular energy-efficiency bill came back from the Senate with a retroactive 35 percent gross revenue tax on Vermont Yankee Nuclear. The source of most of our in-state power, non-polluting and cheap, Vermont Yankee had negotiated an agreement in 2005 and pledged $28 million to the state Clean Energy Fund in return for the right to store spent fuel in dry cask storage. This typical method of storing used fuel is the recommended Nuclear Regulatory Commission standard and the only choice available to all U.S. plants until the Yucca Mountain facility opens in Nevada. 2005's "permanent" deal with Vermont Yankee was thrown overboard by senators who saw a ready source of new dollars from Entergy, the out-of-state firm that owns the plant. The tax was viewed around the Statehouse as a nasty way to treat a power source environmentalists now embrace for its clean operation. Most regarded it as not-the-Vermont-way of doing things, sending a clear message to businesses that a deal is not a deal under the golden dome in Montpelier. No matter what one might think of nuclear energy, Vermonters will face higher electric rates in the future, not to mention a likely lawsuit. Another $2 million? None of the above topics is beyond the legislative sphere of concern and without these time-consuming distractions I believe there are real solutions to be found. Voters should know our Legislature costs $56,000 a day to listen, debate and get something done. These expensive, purely political exercises for press attention have not gone unnoticed by Vermonters who continue to be vocal about the need for tax relief and creative strategies. They see meager attention paid to their issues this year. They are right. Rep. Judy Livingston is a Republican representative from Manchester. Copyright ©2007 Burlingtonfreepress.com All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 38 Sunday Herald: Scottish Poweriberdrola To Spend 1 5bn On Conversion To Clean Coal Technology June 04, 2007 Est 1999 Scotland's award-winning independent newspaper By Antony Akilade, Deputy Business Editor Use of Fife facility could be extended by 40 years Comment SCOTTISH POWER-IBERDROLA has revealed further details of its ambitious plans to convert its Longannet power station in Fife to so-called clean coal technologies. The company intends to spend around £1.5 billion replacing Longannet's boilers and turbines with what are known as super-critical boilers. These burn coal at much higher temperatures and under much greater pressures and increase the efficiency of the process as a result. Renewing the turbines and boilers at Longannet could extend the life of the power station by another 40 years. Martin Sedgwick, head of asset management at Scottish Power, said: "The main plant at Longannet was designed in the late 1960s and the technology has moved on since then. "We're looking to refit the plant with the latest coal-fired technology. The aim is to increase the temperature and pressure of the steam in the turbines and improve the cycle efficiency from the current level of between 36% and 38% to around 45% to 47%. This will also decrease the amount of carbon emissions from the plant by 20%. The new plant is designed to last 25 years but so too was the old plant and it is still operational." "We are also spending £170m fitting flue gas desulphurisation technology at Longannet at the moment. This should reduce the amount of sulphur dioxide (SO2) being released into the atmosphere by 90%," added Sedgwick. The work is being carried out by Renfrew-based Doosan Babcock and Alstom Power of Rugby and should be complete by the end of 2008. A further £25m will be spent fitting technology that will reduce nitrogen dioxide (NO2) by between 20% and 30%. Sedgwick said: "Effectively once the work to replace the boilers is complete we will have a new plant." The power station will then be made carbon capture ready as the consortium working on the carbon dioxide (CO2) storage process await results from tests that evaluate the ability of the coal in the surrounding area to retain various waste gases. Scottish Power, in collaboration with BG Group, Royal Bank of Scotland and production and exploration company Composite Energy are spending around £300,000 to develop this process. The hope is that SO2, CO2 and NO2 can all be stored in coal seams surrounding the power station and that coalbed methane can be collected from the field and burnt at the station. Coalbed methane builds up over thousands of years within coal seams. The technology to exploit this resource is well-established in the US and Australia. In the US coalbed methane provides 10% of all domestic gas. Stirling-based Composite Energy holds a hydrocarbon licence in the Clackmannan coalfield in central Scotland, approximately 20 miles from both Glasgow and Edinburgh. The licence covers 120,000 acres with an estimated 1900 tonnes/acre ft of reserves. Test bore holes have already been dug in the area. Hoping to head off local objections to drilling rigs appearing in the area the company points out that it has had rigs carry out drilling for some time. One of the rigs sits close to the M9 motorway and is no bigger than a fire engine with turntable ladders. The rig has attracted little or no attention to date. If the process proves a success it could supply 10% of Scotland's menthane for the next 25 years. Keith Lough, chief executive of Composite Energy said: "The gas produced can be burnt at Longannet or alternatively could be sold to companies in the area which are high energy users such as the Grangemouth refinery." The former mine produced coal from above 2000ft. Below that depth water becomes a real problem. Scottish Power is also examining the feasibility of storing CO2 in saline aquifers under the Forth and the potential for storing the greenhouse gas in spent North Sea oil fields. Coal has recently shifted up the political agenda with the new first minister, Alex Salmond, giving his support last week to the construction of a new generation of coal-fired power stations as an alternative to nuclear energy. These stations would be backed by a revitalised coal sector with Salmond hoping that previously mothballed pits across the country could be reopened. The last deep coal mine in Scotland was at Longannet in Fife. The mine closed in March 2002 after 17 million gallons of water from the Forth poured into its workings. This ended 1000 years of coal mining in the area and 500 jobs were lost. ©2007 newsquest (sunday herald) limited. all rights reserved ***************************************************************** 39 Financial Express: N-deal: all eyes on Bush-PM meet Monday, June 04, 2007 HUMA SIDDIQUI NEW DELHI, JUNE 3: With India and the US failing to resolve differences over an American offer to share nuclear know-how and fuel during the three-day talks in New Delhi earlier this week, the focus has now shifted to the proposed meeting of Prime minister Manmohan Singh and US President George W Bush in Berlin for G-8 summit. Though both leaders are expected to give political push at the highest level to enable the negotiations on the complex 123 agreement to move forward, senior officials have said the issue of climate change is also expected to figure prominently in the meeting. In the backdrop of the latter’s remarks that India, along with China, produces most greenhouse gas emissions, New Delhi has raised serious objections to being solely blamed for affecting the environment. According to senior officials, Singh is expected to convey to Bush that greenhouse gas emissions in India were linked to its energy security. American critics, meanwhile, say the plan would spark a nuclear arms race in Asia by allowing India to use the extra nuclear fuel, which the deal would provide, to free up its domestic uranium for weapons. © 2007: Indian Express Newspapers (Mumbai) Ltd. All rights reserved ***************************************************************** 40 Reuters: Little progress in India-U.S. nuclear deal talks Sat Jun 2, 2007 12:32PM EDT By Y.P. Rajesh NEW DELHI (Reuters) - U.S. and Indian negotiators failed to achieve a breakthrough over a landmark nuclear energy agreement on Saturday but said they were much closer to ironing out differences which have threatened to scupper it. U.S. officials, led by Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns, held three days of talks with their Indian counterparts to close the deal, which has become a touchstone of the growing friendship between the two countries. Although they were unable to compromise on all the key differences that the deal has become bogged down with, they agreed to meet again but did not set dates. "There were several issues when we started this discussion, and we have managed to remove some from the table," Indian Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon told a news conference after the talks. "We still have a few issues left where there is some distance for us to travel," he said. "But ... as a result of the last three days of discussions, we have come much closer in our understanding of the issues that still divide." A statement from the U.S. embassy said that the two delegations had "useful discussions and made some progress". "While there has been good cooperation, more work remains to be done," it said. "We look forward to a final agreement as it is indisputably in the interest of both governments." The deal aims to allow sales of U.S. nuclear equipment and fuel to India, overturning a three-decade ban on such trade with New Delhi, which has not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and tested nuclear weapons. Continued... © Reuters 2007. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 41 Herald Sun: No emissions target yet NEWS.com.au | Gerard McManus June 04, 2007 12:00am THE Howard Government has baulked at setting a specific target for reducing polluting greenhouse gases until after the coming federal election. The decision has brought criticism from Labor and environment groups. Prime Minister John Howard said yesterday he would not name a goal for reducing emissions until next year, when economic modelling was done. "We must get this right," Mr Howard told the Liberal Party's federal council yesterday. "If we get this wrong, it will do enormous damage to our economy, to jobs and to the economic wellbeing of ordinary Australians, especially low-income households." Yet at the same time Mr Howard blasted Labor's long-term target of cutting emissions by 60 per cent of 1990 levels by 2050. The PM warned that this target would cause havoc with the Australian economy. Mr Howard said Labor environment spokesman Peter Garrett had also floated the prospect of cutting emissions even faster -- by 20 per cent of 1990 levels by the year 2020. To meet that target every coal power station would have to be replaced by a nuclear plant and every car taken off the roads, Mr Howard said, citing the Government's official independent report. Shadow treasurer Wayne Swan accused Mr Howard of being tricky. "If Mr Howard was really serious about climate change, he would be frank and tell the Australian people what his carbon reduction target is before the election," he said. Victorian Environment Minister John Thwaites said the Howard Government needed more urgency on the issue. It should start monitoring and reporting of major emitters by July 1 next year, he said. "After the last few years slamming the states for proposing an emissions trading plan, now John Howard has admitted he's wrong but he's still proposing further delays on real action on climate change," Mr Thwaites said. Responding to a long-awaited report on carbon emissions trading released last week, Mr Howard said yesterday his Government would bring in a "cap and trade" scheme within five years. Australian Greens Senator Bob Brown said the Prime Minister "simply doesn't understand climate change". The Climate Institute said Mr Howard's policy had no credibility without targets. © Herald and Weekly Times. All times AEST (GMT + 10). ***************************************************************** 42 AFP: India, US edge closer to nuclear deal - Sat Jun 2, 1:49 PM NEW DELHI (AFP) - India and the United States have moved closer to finalising a key civilian nuclear deal but gaps persist ahead of talks between their top leaders in Germany next week, officials said Saturday. "There were several issues still open when we started talks," Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon told reporters after three days of "intense" and "productive talks" with US chief negotiator Nicholas Burns. "We have come much closer in our understanding of the issues that divide us. We have managed to remove most of the issues from the table," Menon said. India and the United States are negotiating the fine print of a landmark atomic energy accord and the officials said a visit by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to New Delhi was also being worked out. The accord is intended to reverse three decades of US sanctions on nuclear trade with India, even though New Delhi has not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and tested nuclear weapons in 1998. Under the deal India is to separate nuclear facilities for civilian and military use and set up a regime of international inspections in return for technology and nuclear fuel supplies. But differences remain over New Delhi's demand for assurances that Washington would continue to supply fuel for its nuclear plants in the event of New Delhi conducting further nuclear weapons tests. India also wants no curbs on the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel. On Saturday, Menon confirmed that this was "one of the issues we are still discussing." "We are optimistic that we will make the deal," he added. Menon said Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh would follow up next week with US President George W. Bush during a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the meeting of the G8 group of industrialised nations in Germany. Secretary Rice would then visit New Delhi, Menon said. "The dates are towards the end of July, early August," he added. Menon's optimism on bridging differences was shared by Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee, the Press Trust of India news agency reported. "There is no question of a deadlock," Mukherjee said. "Things will come through." However, a statement from the US embassy in New Delhi said "more work remains to be done to complete arrangements that will permit a civil nuclear agreement to be finalised between the US and India. "We look forward to a final agreement as it is indisputably in the interest of both governments." Despite reporting "considerable progress," Menon admitted dates and a venue for the next meeting between the two sides had not been set. In Delhi, Burns called on premier Singh, Mukherjee and National Security Advisor M.K. Narayanan and exchanged views with senior opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party leaders Jaswant Singh and Brajesh Mishra. Copyright © 2007 Yahoo! Canada Co. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 43 ITAR-TASS: First unit of Tianwan n-power plant enters commercial service 02.06.2007, 17.54 MOSCOW, June 2 (Itar-Tass) - The first unit of the Tianwan nuclear power plant entered commercial service on Saturday, Atomstroiexport Moscow’ s office told Itar-Tass. According to the company, “Today an official document has been signed in Beijing to put into operation the first unit of the Tianwan nuclear power plant.” Russia has been developing cooperation with China to build two units of the Tianwan nuclear power plant for more than nine years. Atomstroiexport says, “The nuclear power plant began building after a general contract was signed to build the first units of the Tianwan nuclear power plant in compliance with the intergovernmental agreement on the construction of the nuclear facilities in China that was concluded by the two countries in 1992.” The company said the construction of this nuclear power plant in China on the base of Russia’s project and with the involvement of Russian specialists “was the first full-fledged order for Russia and the first project, which is being carried out under market conditions”. In May Atomstroiexport completed the 100-hour interrupted testing of the first power-generating unit at the Tianwan nuclear power plant the nominal capacity. Upgraded reactors VVER-1000 were installed at the plant. Atomstroiexport is Russia’s leading company, which implements intergovernmental agreements on the construction of nuclear facilities abroad. At present, this is the unique company in the world that is simultaneously building seven units of nuclear power plants in China, India, Iran and Bulgaria. © ITAR-TASS. All rights reserved. You undertake not to copy, store ***************************************************************** 44 Deccan Herald: Nuclear deal still on - Burns Saturday, June 2, 2007 Washington, IANS: Anytime you have an agreement this big and this ambitious, youre going to run into some technical issues that make progress a little more halting than youd like it to be. But we're still committed to its success, White House spokesman Tony Snow said. The United States has declared it is clearly committed to the landmark civil nuclear deal with India despite some delay due to technical issues. `Anytime you have an agreement this big and this ambitious, you're going to run into some technical issues that make progress a little more halting than you'd like it to be. But we're still committed to its success," White House spokesman Tony Snow said on Thursday. `I can't give you a sense on the final timing, but the government is clearly committed to it," he said when asked whether the implementing bilateral 123 Agreement would be finalised when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President George W Bush meet during the G-8 Summit in Germany next week. `We understand that the civil nuclear agreement not only is important, but it's also a template for dealing with other countries," Snow maintained. `One of the things we think is important for people to recognise... is you've got nuclear power, which is clean, you don't have greenhouse emissions. It offers an opportunity to give people the prospect of economic growth without the kind of pollution,' he added. Washington's key negotiator on the nuclear deal, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns is currently in New Delhi for talks with Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon to iron out remaining differences on the 123 agreement. Copyright 2007, The Printers (Mysore) Private Ltd., 75, M.G. Road, Post Box No 5331, Bangalore - 560001 Tel: +91 (80) 25880000 Fax No. +91 (80) 25880523 ***************************************************************** 45 Chennai Online News : Public hearing on n-plant interrupted Tirunelveli, June 3: A public hearing to elicit people's views on the expansion of the Koodankulam nuclear power plant was interrupted by slogan-shouting anti-nuclear groups and a section of fishermen here yesterday, officials said. The hearing was held at the Government College of Engineering when a group shouted slogans against the expansion programme. They demanded a Tamil translation of the project report and environment impact assessment report prepared by the National Environment Engineering Research Institute (NEERI). "That alone will help members of the public to understand the impending danger of the project," they said. When Collector G Prakash intervened and said the report was available on the website and in select places, about 1,000 persons, who had gathered at the site, shouted slogans. Praful Bidwai, columnist and co-founder of the Movement in India for Nuclear Disarmament (MIND) wanted to know how the Nuclear Thermal Power Corporation planned to dispose of the radioactive spent fuel generated by the reactors. He said the reactors would affect the environment and thousands of people living in and around the area. The delicate marine ecology also would be affected, he claimed. S K Agarwal, Director, Projects, NPCIL, answered questions raised by various anti-nuclear groups amid intermittent sloganeering by fishermen against the project. After explaining various safety measures, Agarwal said it was the safest project with all top-class security features for the spent fuel also. As police were present in large numbers, there was no problem. The minutes of the meeting would be sent to the state government and the Union government's Ministry of Forests and Environment, Prakash said. The minutes would be sent to the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control board also, and kept for public view at important places. The NEERI also had collected voluminous baseline data from the region so that comparison of any data in future would not be problem, he added. Prakash then said the public hearing was over. However, anti-nuclear groups claimed it was postponed to a later date and the genuine demands and concerns of the public had not been heard by officials. (Agencies) Published: Sunday, June 03, 2007 Copyright © 2007, Chennai Interactive Business Services (P) Ltd. All rights reserved. cibs@chennaionline.com - Copyright and Disclaimer - Privacy Policy ***************************************************************** 46 AU ABC: Labors green fanatics in denial, says Turnbull - Insiders - 03/06/2007: Australian Broadcasting Corporation Broadcast: 03/06/2007 Reporter: Barrie Cassidy Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull tells Insiders Labor is on a "fanatical, moralising" climate change campaign blind to the realities of global economics. Transcript BARRIE CASSIDY: We'll go straight to our program guest now, the Minister for Environment and Water Resources, Malcolm Turnbull, who arrived back in the country only yesterday from the Whaling Conference in Anchorage. And right now, he is gearing up for a day of debates at the Liberal Party's Federal Council Meeting in Sydney. And it's from there that he joins me now. Minister, good morning. MALCOLM TURNBULL, FEDERAL MINISTER FOR THE ENVIRONMENT: Good morning, Barrie. BARRIE CASSIDY: Minister, how do you plan to deal with this criticism that your Party is a johnny-come-lately on this issue of climate change? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, it's an absurd criticism, Barrie. Australia has been a world leader in responding to climate change. We set up the first greenhouse office in the world, we've led the world in energy efficiency measures, the phase-out of incandescent or inefficient lighting, we are leading the charge among developed nations in putting forestry on top of the climate change agenda with the Global Forestry Initiative. I mean, that's an enormously important initiative - the second largest source of emissions is from deforestation and that issue has been essentially ignored by Kyoto. Now, Australia is taking the lead in working with other countries and developing to put that back on the top of the agenda because it's something, like energy efficiency, that we can do now, where we can make significant reductions in emissions without new technology. So I reject that charge. Australia is leading. We are going to meet our Kyoto target and most developed countries won't. BARRIE CASSIDY: It was only last August that the Prime Minister said, "One country embracing emissions trading will do great damage to that country,” and yet that's precisely what you are about to do. What's changed? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, Barrie, the key thing with emissions trading is that you, or any emissions trading strategy, is that it's got to take into account the global perspective. And this scheme that is being proposed through the task group is very carefully designed to enable us to do that, to achieve domestic reductions but to do so in a way that doesn't crush our economy. And that's the big difference between us and Labor. You see, Labor are the real climate change deniers. They are denying the reality of climate change. When Peter Garrett debated me in the House a week or so ago on global warming, he did not mention the global perspective once in a 15 minute speech. Now, the fact is that if we were to follow Labor's agenda and have a target of a 60 per cent cut in emissions regardless of what the rest of the world does, regardless of the economic analysis, all that we will end up doing is that if the rest of the world does not follow suit, is exporting our emissions-intensive industries and the jobs. And so you lose the jobs, you lose the prosperity and the emissions go up into the atmosphere somewhere else. This phenomenon of carbon leakage is a vital one that Labor completely ignored... BARRIE CASSIDY: We'll get onto that 60 per cent point in a moment but as it stands, you're not proposing any fully functioning scheme until 2012, that's four-and-a-half years from this. This timetable does seem to lack a sense of urgency. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, with respect Barrie, that's not right. The task group proposes that trading would start in 2011 and there is a lot of preliminary work that has to be done, setting up a reliable emissions register, a national emissions register, a lot of planning to do. You see this is going to be a multi-billion-dollar exercise, there will be billions of dollars invested in these carbon credits, so yo+u have to get the measuring and the monitoring right. You've also go to remember, this will be the most comprehensive emissions trading scheme ever established anywhere in the world. It will include the sources of 75 per cent of Australia's emissions. That's nearly twice as much as the states are proposing to cover and it's much more than the Europeans are covering in their, I'm afraid to say, failed emissions trading scheme. Now, other countries I am sure will follow suit. But Australia has benefited from learning from the mistakes of others, and so the scheme we are going to put in place now will be a much better one than if we had set up a scheme five year ago, or six years ago, or whatever. So we have benefited from the errors of others and I don't say that in a harsh, critical way - often the first mover makes a lot of mistakes that the second movers and third movers can learn from. So that's where we are. We'll have a better scheme, we'll have the world's most comprehensive. BARRIE CASSIDY: But other would argue that if you'd put a scheme together earlier than this, then there would be less pain. MALCOLM TURNBULL: No, that's completely wrong Barrie, that is so wrong. Because you see if you impose a very high carbon price now, when the technology is not there to enable you to reduce your emissions, for example, if you impose a high carbon price now, and the alternatives, be they renewables or clean coal, although clean coal is not yet commercially developed, but if those renewables are more expensive than the carbon price, then all you are doing is putting on a large tax to no result. So you see, we've got to remember that while there are some things we can do now - and we are very focused on them, we are world leaders on them, energy efficiency, forestry - in the long term, what we're talking about is an enormous technological transformation. To achieve the reductions in the emissions that the world needs - and this is not just Australia, this is the whole world - the whole world needs by the middle of the century, we will have to have almost all of the world's electricity coming from zero or near-zero emission sources and almost all of our transport as well. We simply won't get there without it and so we're talking about it... BARRIE CASSIDY: You're saying you can achieve that by when? MALCOLM TURNBULL: I'm not saying we can achieve it. I'm saying you cannot get those reductions unless we do achieve it. Now, I'm confident because I'm a great optimist and I believe in technology that we will be able to do it by the middle of the century, but it is going to cost a lot of money and there are a lot of technologies that are yet to be fully developed. The point is that with a carbon price set up through an emissions-trading scheme, the critical price signal is not the immediate one, the short-term one, the spot price, it is the long-term one because people are making plans to build power stations and factories and energy-intensive industries which will have 25-, 30-year, 40-year life spans, so it's the long-term price, the forward price that matters and that's why again, you know, Labor doesn't understand climate change, they don't understand its global nature and they certainly don't understand anything about economics, which is why they cannot be trusted with such a grave economic challenge. BARRIE CASSIDY: It may be the long-term price that matters but wouldn't a short-term signal be of benefit to business? But at the moment, there's not a short-term signal because you're not spelling out a target? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Barrie, we are signalling that a scheme will be set up, the actual targets, and there will be a series of interim targets. What we will have is a long-term aspirational target and of course, we're working very closely with other countries to do that. You would have seen President Bush's announcement a day or so ago. We've been working very closely with the Americans and other like-minded countries on a strategy that can fast-track the stalled international process and get real reductions. Now, what we will have by next year is a global aspirational target but then in terms of emission reductions... BARRIE CASSIDY: But by next year though, that's beyond the next election. So you're not spelling out a target between now and the election but you reserve the right - in fact, you've already done it this morning - to criticise the Opposition's target? MALCOLM TURBULL: Because Barrie, it's completely unthought out. You see the criticism that we make of the Opposition's target is not that 60 per cent cut in emissions by the middle of the century is not a worthy thing to do if the whole world can do it, but if Australia commits itself to that, binds itself to that unilaterally, which is what Labor is proposing, that means that we could be imposing an enormously heavy cost on our industries. You see, if we have a massive carbon price on our energy-intensive industries and the countries with which we compete do not, all that will happen is that those industries will relocate offshore. The world will still have the same amount of emissions going up into the atmosphere but there won't be the jobs here. I mean take Garrett's proposal to have a 20 per cent cut in emissions by 2020... BARRIE CASSIDY: Which is the same submission that Canada is proposing. MALCOLM TURNBULL: The Canadians won't get there either. But what Garrett is proposing would mean that we would have to be the equivalent of replacing all of our coal-fired power stations with nuclear power stations or with some other form of zero-emission technology and taking all our cars off the road. Now that is completely unfeasible, everyone knows that. BARRIE CASSIDY: Is that going to happen in Canada, Minister, and how irresponsible are they to propose something similar? MALCOLM TURNBULL: I've discussed this very directly and in detail with the Canadian Environment Minister. They will not reach a target of that kind. What they are seeking to achieve, however, is big savings in terms of insulation and heating. See, Canada, because it's so cold, can, does have more available to it a lot of energy-efficiency measures that a country like Australia doesn't because plainly if you can reinsulate a lot of buildings so as to reduce your heating bill, you've got some low-hanging fruit there. But every country is different, Barrie, and the point I'm making really is that Labor has not thought any of this through. Now we are going through this methodically, carefully, we're sending the signals to business. Business has welcomed the task group report, it knows that there is going to be a price on carbon and they will start to plan and calculate a forward price. But we have to be very careful that we do not get into some sort of self-destructive orgy of moralising, which is what Labor is talking about. They're talking about setting targets, which will make them feel good but will devastate the economy if other nations do not follow suit. You see, the thing that you've got to remember is that global warming is a global problem. Labor just does not get it. They are in denial. They talk about doing things in Australia, which is fine, but if we do things in Australia which are not matched by other countries, we'll make no impact on global climate and we will devastate our own economy to no gain. We'll export the jobs and we'll export the emissions and that's what Labor's about. They have not thought this through. BARRIE CASSIDY: But I just wonder how credible it is, though, to portray Labor's policies to say as irresponsible and damaging. You don't put out a figure of your own and yet you portray your policy as relatively painless? MALCOLM TURNBULL: No, no, I don't think we've said it's painless at all. In fact, if you read the report, it says it's going to impose a very high cost. Barrie, even if the whole world suddenly was a snap of the fingers and the whole world decided to impose measures that would get us all on a track to a big reduction in emissions by mid-century - 50 per cent, 40 per cent, 60 per cent, name your figure - lets say we moved into a perfect theoretical world, it will still have a big cost for Australia because we are an energy-intensive country. We have industries that depend on cheap energy. I mean, there are a lot of jobs in Australia that are only here because of relatively cheap coal-fired energy. Now, as you put a higher price on that energy, you impact our economy. That's why it has to be done very carefully and the question for the Australian people is, are you going to trust a bunch of fanatics, which is really where Garrett and Rudd are at the moment? They are on a fanatical, moralising campaign, blind to the economics, blind to the reality, determined to prove they are greener than the greenest green and if you have policies based on that type of ideology, you may feel pure but you will be pure at the price of being very poor and what we are seeking to do is to achieve real results. That's why we're working internationally. President Bush's initiative, the global forestry initiative, AP6, these are all measures and changes that Australia is working with and contributing to. We are playing an effective role internationally. BARRIE CASSIDY: Minister, would you regard Arnold Schwarzenegger as a fanatic? He's proposing 80 per cent by 2050 in California, a Republican Government? MALCOLM TURBULL: I have great admiration for Governor Schwarzenegger but he has no idea how he will get that there. That is climate change Hollywood style. That is saying we're going to have these targets set way into the future, long after Governor Schwarzenegger... Now the reality is that that is in effect, as it is for any state, something of a gesture because, Barrie, California buys - California can draw a line around its boundaries and say, you know, "We have so much emission," but they buy a lot of their electricity from interstate. They buy electricity from another state which is emitting CO2 from the power station but they don't count that CO2 in their own emissions. See, this is the point about global warming. Consider this: natural gas, a vital part of the global mix because it results - you can produce electricity with lower emissions, so natural gas is good. Every time we export natural gas from Australia, we increase our emissions but if that gas is used to replace a coal-fired power station in China, it reduces China's emissions. And so, you know, again, one of the absurdities of Labor's policy is that it doesn't take into account the global nature of the problem. So yes, we have to act but we have to act in a way that respects our economy, that doesn't unduly or unfairly damage our economy and above all, engages in international action, and it's not on their agenda. BARRIE CASSIDY: Minister, this debate is creating some strange bedfellows, Peter Garrett and Arnold Schwarzenegger. We'll move on. Tomorrow, you and the Prime Minister will be meeting again with Steve Bracks on the $10 billion water plan. Is this a make-or-break meeting? MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, look, I wouldn't put it... I wouldn't put it as high as that. We are working very carefully with all of the states on the detail. I had a very detailed meeting with John Thwaites, the Victorian Water Minister, and his South Australian counterpart in Adelaide 10 days ago. We're just working through the detail, Barrie, identifying the differences, resolving them where we can so that we want to get it narrowed down to just a few big issues. Now, whether we can knock those over tomorrow I don't know but really, the best way to deal with this and this is the way the other three states are dealing with it and certainly the way I'm dealing with it, is to take a constructive approach. I had a meeting with premiers, as you know, back in February - we agreed on some principle, we agreed to draft some legislation which we've done, send it out for comment. We've had a lot of comments back, we've redrafted it, improved it, made changes, amendments here and there. This is a collaborative exercise; this is a vital issue for Australia. The Murray-Darling Basin needs a change in its governance. We cannot continue as we have done but we have to work constructively to ensure that we get to the right end. So we are very open-minded and very keen to negotiate, but I don't - you're not getting inflammatory rhetoric from me or indeed from the other states in the press. We're interested in outcomes and results, and that just comes from being very business-like. It's a long document, you just start it, you go through it, you knock off the barnacles one by one and then when there's a few big ones left, you've got to see if you can make a decision one way or the other. BARRIE CASSIDY: We're running out of time but on the whaling issue, not a lot of success obviously in Anchorage, not in the short term anyway. MALCOLM TURBULL: I don't think that's quite true. You've got to remember last year in St Kitts, the Japanese won by a bare majority a vote to resume commercial whaling. This year, the Japanese lost every vote. It was said in the media that Australia wasn't focused on whaling. Well, we proved the critics wrong. We had the numbers on the floor in a massive way. We engaged with the Japanese honestly, constructively, candidly. Now, they haven't taken humpbacks off their scientific whaling agenda yet. BARRIE CASSIDY: That's what I had in mind when I said not a lot of progress. MALCOLM TURNBULL: We'll see. I think it was a very, very bad conference for Japan. I think their huge dummy-spit at the end will not reflect well in Tokyo and I think the Japanese Government really has to sit back and ask itself, looking at the debacle that was Japan's outcome at the whaling conference and really say to themselves, "Can we continue to fly in the face of world opinion on this issue?" BARRIE CASSIDY: And can you use the APEC meeting to increase the pressure on the Japanese Prime Minister? MALCOLM TURNVULL: Well, we raise this at every level with Japan. We raise it at the Whaling Commission level, at a ministerial level and the Prime Minister's raised it with the Japanese prime ministers over the years. The thing we've got to be very careful about - and this is the subtlety - is that whaling is essentially a nationalistic issue in Japan, that's its support base. So the engagement with Japan has to be as a friend, it has to be candid, it has to be constructive. If you threaten Japan or if you go to the absurdity that Garrett and Rudd did of saying that they would send the Navy, in which of course would be unlawful to attack or you know board Japanese ships in international waters off Antarctica, which is what they were proposing - BARRIE CASSIDY: I don't think that's precisely what they were proposing. MALCOLM TURNBULL: No, Barrie, let me tell you. I have read their policy statement and it says that they believe they want Australian naval ships to intercept and board Japanese whalers in the waters off Antarctica. Now, they are international waters protected by the Antarctic treaty. So look, they got their international law wrong. It's just another example of them going off half-cocked. But the fact is, the more threatening you are to Japan, the more they dig their heels in. So engaging with Japan is something that has to be done constructively and in a non-aggressive way because otherwise it's counterproductive. BARRIE CASSIDY: Excusing them of a dummy-spit is not a constructive way to go, is it? MALCOLM TURNBULL: It's not accusing them of a dummy-spit. I think with the best will in the world, you know, their own mothers would recognise they'd done a dummy-spit. It was to stand up at the end of the conference and say, “That's it, we're threatening to pull out”. I mean, that is a dummy-spit on any view. BARRIE CASSIDY: OK. Look, more speculation in the media this morning, of the merits of Peter Costello assuming the leadership of the Liberal Party. What do you say to that kind of speculation? MALCOLM TURNBULL: John Howard has the complete confidence of the Liberal Party. He is the leader of the Liberal Party, he has got a proven track record of achievement as Prime Minister. The Australian people know that the prosperity, the security they've enjoyed for 11 years is in large measure to the leadership and the wisdom of John Howard and that's why he is the right man to lead us into this election, just as he was into the elections before. BARRIE CASSIDY: So there's still a measure of self belief within the party? MALCOLM TURNBULL: The party is very committed to the values that we embody. We are the party that has delivered the security, the prosperity, the good economic management that Australia's enjoyed over the last 11 years and we'll be asking the Australian people at the end of this year to entrust us with a further three years rather than risk that prosperity with a Labor Party whose economics, as in climate change as we've just been discussing, is based on ideology, not on sound economic management. These are very - this is a very dangerous option. Kevin Rudd is not thinking his policies through. He's under the control and the industrial side, under the control of union bosses on the one hand and on the climate change side, he's locking himself into a series of policies that will devastate vital Australian industries, and to no effect. That's the tragedy of it because his climate change policy will not just export jobs, it will export the emissions and achieve nothing globally. The climate change denier Barrie, is Kevin Rudd, aided and abetted by Peter Garrett. They don't understand this issue, they don't understand its complexity any more than they understand whaling. BARRIE CASSIDY: We're back where we started but we are out of time. Thanks for you time this morning. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Thanks. © 2007 ABC | Privacy Policy ***************************************************************** 47 Deccan Herald: N-talks hit a dead end Sunday, June 3, 2007 Knotty issues impediment From K Subrahmanya, DH News Service, New Delhi: After three days of protracted negotiations between Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon and US Under Secretary for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns, Menon said US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would visit India within the next few months for talks with External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee and other top political leaders in the country. The top official-level negotiations on the proposed Indo-US civil nuclear energy cooperation agreement virtually reached a dead end on Saturday as the two sides planned to refer “remaining” key contentious issues to the political leadership for resolution. After three days of protracted negotiations between Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon and US Under Secretary for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns, Menon said US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would visit India within the next few months for talks with External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee and other top political leaders in the country. Mukherjee, whom Burns had met on Friday over the 123 agreement, however, asserted that the talks had not deadlocked. “There is no question of a deadlock…things will come through…An agreement is to be reached at. As and when an agreement is finalised, you will come to know,” he told newsmen on Saturday. Much as there were expectations before Burns arrival here three days ago of clinching the so-called 123 agreement, Menon actually conceded at the end of the three-day negotiations that “there are some issues still left unresolved”. Briefing newsmen late on Saturday, he, however, would not go into any details about those unresolved issues. No joint appearance An indication about the lack of progress was available from the fact that Burns and Menon avoided a joint press appearance. Menon though attributed it Burns’ compulsion of catching a flight back. But he had time enough for a meeting with the Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh before his departure here. He said that the US side had accepted an invitation from Mukherjee for Rice to visit India within the next few months — probably at the earliest available date. And, as of now, there is no date for another round of Menon-Burns talks ahead of the proposed visit by Rice. The Foreign Secretary, however, claimed that his three-day negotiations with his US counterpart was “productive and very intensive” that helped them to resolve “some of the issues” while some others were left unresolved. Menon at the same time asserted that both the sides were determined to resolve the unresolved issues and clinch the deal at the earliest. “We have a political understanding to concluding the agreement” and it was only a matter of putting this political understanding into a legal language in the form of a proper agreement, he said. While it is well known that the talks have been stuck on such issues as India’s insistence on having the right to reprocess spent nuclear fuel and right to reasonable stockpile nuclear fuel for the life-span of future nuclear reactors built under the framework of the proposed agreement. Seemingly, these are not allowed under the Hyde Act enacted in the US Congress last December as the 123 agreement enabling law. Menon, responding to questions, said that the US side had clearly conveyed that the Hyde Act was not coming in the Administration’s way in fulfiling its obligations under the July 18, 2005 Bush-Singh joint statement as well as subsequent agreements reached between the two sides in this regard. As far as India was concerned, the 123 agreement would have to conform to the July 18 agreement and the various commitments made by the Prime Minister to Parliament, Menon said. However, the US assertions of Hyde Act not being an impediment would be tested only when it delivered the 123 agreement. The Bush-Singh duo would have an opportunity to review the situation during their expected meeting in Germany next week on the margins of the G-8 Summit. Copyright 2007, The Printers (Mysore) Private Ltd., 75, M.G. Road, Post Box No 5331, Bangalore - 560001 Tel: +91 (80) 25880000 Fax No. +91 (80) 25880523 ***************************************************************** 48 Hindustan Times: The nuclear deal: not as easy as 1-2-3- Gujjar leaders call for Delhi bandh today June 03, 2007 The next time you have a power cut, think why its happened and you might stumble upon the answer. As India grows, it needs more and more power to fuel households, public spaces and industries. Every Indian today consumes energy that is just over a fifth of the world average and about a fourteenth of that used by each citizen of the 30 industrialised nations making up the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. India’s supply is woefully short of its demand, and the demand itself would rise manifold in the coming years. That’s why US undersecretary Nicholas Burns’s visit and its pre-occupation with the 123 Agreement matter. Not all the energy needed can come from non-renewable sources like thermal power, which now accounts for more than 70 per cent of the supply. Damming rivers and water resources —which gets us roughly a fourth of our current supply — can cause deadly changes to the environment. Hence the option of renewable sources and nuclear power, which now accounts for a mere 3 per cent of the supply, cannot be ignored. The idea is to have close to 10 per cent of the supply from nuclear power in a decade or so. So energy security is the driving force behind the 123 Agreement (named after the clause in the US Atomic Energy Act), the India-specific waivers from the International Atomic Energy Agency, and cooperation with the Nuclear Suppliers Group that would have to be negotiated. For almost four decades — more than three of them under international sanctions — India’s atomic energy programme has not delivered on its civilian potential. This is one serious push to ensure that it comes close. The gains What does India gain if the India-US civil nuclear deal comes through? 1. It would be a major foreign policy coup. India would be the only country to have its nuclear weapons, not sign the Non-proliferation Treaty, and gain access to the nuclear fuel and technology from the nuclear ‘haves’. 2. It gets India out of the technological sanctions imposed by the international community after it first tested nuclear weapons in May 1974. 3. The deal will open India’s civilian nuclear sector to international cooperation, so that India can have the choice to buy the most efficient reactors, fuel and technology. 4. The end of sanctions would give greater access to ‘dual use’ nuclear technologies for medicine, weather forecasting, research and defence. 5. The deal would help reduce India’s dependence on fossil fuels, a great deal of which comes from abroad. 6. It would go some way in addressing India’s chronic energy shortages. The proven capability of several foreign players and NSG members to set up nuclear reactors would allow time-bound delivery of projects. The pains There are many pitfalls to this cooperation too. 1. Whether we like it or not, there will be foreign inspectors and much greater international scrutiny on India’s nuclear programme, exposing the sectoral strengths and weaknesses that have not been open to public scrutiny yet. 2. It will open up the nuclear scientific establishment to foreign competition, something many of our scientists are not happy about. 3. India’s risks were much lower when its nuclear programme was hermetically sealed. This deal will increase India’s vulnerability to international censure. There will, for instance, be a difference in the quality of sanctions imposed in 1998 and, say, in 2020 if India tests a weapon. 4. Many believe the deal will increase vulnerabilities in Indian foreign policy — say, on Iran or Myanmar. 5. The deal will bind India into components of an international nuclear order, such as the Wassenaar, the Australia group etc., that it has long resisted. 6. India’s technology export controls will have to be much stronger. So far, the Union government was the only player. Now they will have to allow private parties, making the need for controls much stricter. You tell us, do the benefits outweigh the costs? ***************************************************************** 49 Hindustan Times: Issues at the heart of the proposed 123 Agreement- Not as easy as 1-2-3 Pramit Pal Chaudhuri Washington, June 03, 2007 Even before the US negotiating team led by undersecretary of state for political affairs, Nicholas Burns, arrived in New Delhi, word was out that Washington was “optimistic†that the coming round of Indo-US talks would see final closure on the 123 Agreement. Says Anja Manuel, counsel at the lobby firm WilmerHale and a state department consultant, “Washington is optimistic. Hard compromises will have to be made, but such talks are expected to be complicated.†The deal’s prospects were always fair, but never definite. Four major areas of disagreement remained when Burns arrived. However, most observers in Washington and New Delhi agreed that the make-or-break issue was India’s insistence on the right to reprocess nuclear fuel. This is exactly what the US Congress — ultrasensitive to proliferation issues, with the Democrats back in power and Iran’s nuclear drive dominating headlines — will scrutinise most carefully when the final agreement comes for vote. “Although the civil nuclear legislation passed overwhelmingly in the US Senate and the House of Representatives, congressional members could still vote down the deal if the 123 agreement language goes outside the parameters of the Hyde Act,†warns Lisa Curtis, South Asia analyst at the Heritage Foundation. The (Henry J) Hyde Act authorised the 123 agreement negotiations. Bridging the reprocessing divide is what Burns’s negotiating team — which will include Mumbai-born foreign policy expert Ashley Tellis and chief technical negotiator Richard Stratford — sought to do with their Indian counterparts. Says Swadesh Chatterjee, head of the US-India Friendship Council, “The goal was to find a compromise that would allow Manmohan Singh and George W. Bush to go to the G-8 summit in Germany and close the deal.†The window of opportunity was so clearly defined that Burns had scheduled a family holiday two weeks hence before he arrived in India. There was urgency too. With the US presidential elections warming up earlier than expected, the clock has been ticking on the deal. “The ideal timing would be for the 123 to be finished in the next month or so,†says Teresita Schaffer, South Asia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Indian-American lobbyists say it would be best for the 123 to be finalised, and the IAEA safeguards agreement and the Nuclear Suppliers Group approval to be done by the end of the year. “There will be serious problems in getting this through Congress next year. The focus will solely be on presidential elections,†says Chatterjee. This could then see the deal held over until the next US election. However, Indian diplomats say a Democrat president could mean demands for a fissile material cut-off, or even the return of the test ban treaty. This is about two countries that have not dealt with each other in decades. “A lot of this was about educating each other,†says Manuel. Schaffer agrees, noting that India and the US have never had bilateral talks on such a strategically important nature since the 1978-79 Tarapore nuclear fuel negotiations. ***************************************************************** 50 Hindustan Times: Amorim wants civil nuclear cooperation with India- Brazil's president in India, business, energy top agenda June 03, 2007 Madhur Singh Brazil will seek "positive and pragmatic" steps towards civil nuclear cooperation with India, Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said on Friday. He added that Brazil would take a positive view of the Indo-US nuclear deal at the NSG. India and Brazil have been seeking enhanced cooperation in the field of energy security, especially in view of Brazil’s success with biofuels. “We have strong cooperation in the energy sector and are also looking at other sciences,†Amorim told reporters at a joint press conference with Minister of State for External Affairs Anand Sharma. A high-level delegation of Brazil’s National Nuclear Energy Commission will visit India to explore possibilities of cooperation. Brazil has among the largest uranium reserves in the world, and the success of the Indo-US nuclear deal would open up the large Indian market for Brazilian uranium. Later, while speaking at a business leaders’ meet, Amorim said Brazil will continue to be “unfailingly supportive†of India’s concerns over special products in the Doha round negotiations. However, he said, the WTO is indispensable as it is the only forum where developing countries can negotiate a fair deal with developed countries. “It is the only forum where there is a relative balance of forces," he said. Amorim also lent his support to an India-Mercosur-Sacu FTA, which was proposed at the IBSA meet in 2006, as a forum for South-South cooperation. Mercosur brings together almost all of South America with Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Paraguay as members and Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru as associate members. Sacu stands for the South African Customs Union and has South Africa, Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland as members. The FTA being talked about will cover the largest area in terms of GDP ($1.5 tr) and population (1.3bn). While Mercosur and Sacu have an RTA in place since 2004, India is in negotiations for an FTA with Sacu and with Mercosur. Amorim admitted that the India-Mercosur FTA has been held up because the Brazilian Congress has not ratified it, and said the issue would be resolved soon. India and Brazil have been forging a closer relationship bilaterally as well as in IBSA and at multilateral forums like the WTO. Brazil is India’s largest trading partner in Latin America, with bilateral trade standing at roughly $2.5bn in 2006. During his three-day visit to India, Amorim co-chaired the Indo-Brazil Joint Commission which laid the groundwork for the visit of Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in June 2007. ***************************************************************** 51 Hindustan Times: The nuclear deal: not as easy as 1-2-3- June 03, 2007 Nilova Roy Chaudhury, Hindustan Times The next time you have a power cut, think why its happened and you might stumble upon the answer. As India grows, it needs more and more power to fuel households, public spaces and industries. Every Indian today consumes energy that is just over a fifth of the world average and about a fourteenth of that used by each citizen of the 30 industrialised nations making up the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. India’s supply is woefully short of its demand, and the demand itself would rise manifold in the coming years. That’s why US undersecretary Nicholas Burns’s visit and its pre-occupation with the 123 Agreement matter. Not all the energy needed can come from non-renewable sources like thermal power, which now accounts for more than 70 per cent of the supply. Damming rivers and water resources —which gets us roughly a fourth of our current supply — can cause deadly changes to the environment. Hence the option of renewable sources and nuclear power, which now accounts for a mere 3 per cent of the supply, cannot be ignored. The idea is to have close to 10 per cent of the supply from nuclear power in a decade or so. So energy security is the driving force behind the 123 Agreement (named after the clause in the US Atomic Energy Act), the India-specific waivers from the International Atomic Energy Agency, and cooperation with the Nuclear Suppliers Group that would have to be negotiated. For almost four decades — more than three of them under international sanctions — India’s atomic energy programme has not delivered on its civilian potential. This is one serious push to ensure that it comes close. The gains What does India gain if the India-US civil nuclear deal comes through? 1. It would be a major foreign policy coup. India would be the only country to have its nuclear weapons, not sign the Non-proliferation Treaty, and gain access to the nuclear fuel and technology from the nuclear ‘haves’. 2. It gets India out of the technological sanctions imposed by the international community after it first tested nuclear weapons in May 1974. 3. The deal will open India’s civilian nuclear sector to international cooperation, so that India can have the choice to buy the most efficient reactors, fuel and technology. 4. The end of sanctions would give greater access to ‘dual use’ nuclear technologies for medicine, weather forecasting, research and defence. 5. The deal would help reduce India’s dependence on fossil fuels, a great deal of which comes from abroad. 6. It would go some way in addressing India’s chronic energy shortages. The proven capability of several foreign players and NSG members to set up nuclear reactors would allow time-bound delivery of projects. The pains There are many pitfalls to this cooperation too. 1. Whether we like it or not, there will be foreign inspectors and much greater international scrutiny on India’s nuclear programme, exposing the sectoral strengths and weaknesses that have not been open to public scrutiny yet. 2. It will open up the nuclear scientific establishment to foreign competition, something many of our scientists are not happy about. 3. India’s risks were much lower when its nuclear programme was hermetically sealed. This deal will increase India’s vulnerability to international censure. There will, for instance, be a difference in the quality of sanctions imposed in 1998 and, say, in 2020 if India tests a weapon. 4. Many believe the deal will increase vulnerabilities in Indian foreign policy — say, on Iran or Myanmar. 5. The deal will bind India into components of an international nuclear order, such as the Wassenaar, the Australia group etc., that it has long resisted. 6. India’s technology export controls will have to be much stronger. So far, the Union government was the only player. Now they will have to allow private parties, making the need for controls much stricter. You tell us, do the benefits outweigh the costs? ***************************************************************** 52 Hindustan Times: Condi Rice expected for final 123 talks Nilova Roy Chaudhury, Hindustan Times New Delhi, June 03, 2007 The India-US civil nuclear deal is on track. At the end of three days of intensive discussions, India and the United States have moved much closer towards an agreement to operationalise the bilateral civil nuclear deal. "We are optimistic that we will make the deal,†Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon told reporters on Saturday. “We have removed some of the issues that divided us off the table,†Menon said, “but we still have some distance to travel.†Hesitant to commit himself to a time frame within which the deal would be concluded, Menon said US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was expected to arrive in India towards the end of July, for what could probably be the clinching round of negotiations to seal the 123 Agreement. She has been invited by External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee. The issue of India’s right to reprocess spent fuel appears to have stayed on the table, though Menon declined to specify what contentious issues remain. "The issues are inter-related,†he said. "The US Administration has assured us that nothing in the Hyde Act prevents them from fulfilling their obligations of July 18, 2005, and March 2, 2006." US Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns, who concluded his three-day visit tonight with a call on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was a little less upbeat, speaking of having made some progress. In a statement Burns said,"while there has been good cooperation, more work remains to be done to complete arrangements that will permit a civil-nuclear agreement to be finalized between the United States and India." President George Bush will meet the Indian Prime Minister at Heiligendamm next week, Menon confirmed, though it was clear there would be no major announcements after that meeting. “We have a political understanding, which we have to translate into a legal agreement. We both have the will to bring it to a successful conclusion." ***************************************************************** 53 Edmonton Journal: Thinking more about energy canada.com where perspectives connect Published: Saturday, June 02, 2007 Canada is an important energy-producing country, but the patchwork of local, provincial and national directives that constitute this country's energy policy is hampering both the long-term potential of the energy sector and efforts to minimize its environmental impacts. That sums up a Conference Board of Canada report issued this week that calls on the Harper government to develop a comprehensive "white paper" that sets targets and standards from the wellhead to consumers. In its report, Canada's Energy Future: An Integrated Path, the business think-tank reviewed energy legislation, policies and plans, and sought the opinions of companies, organizations and governments active in Canada's energy sector. It concluded that Canadians need to look at the entire energy sector -- soup to nuts -- and examine how best to integrate all facets of energy production, from fossil fuels to hydropower, nuclear and emerging renewable power-generating technologies. It would also need to look at how these various industries work to the detriment or benefit of the economy as a whole, and at national efforts to curtail greenhouse gas emissions and smog. Such a discussion is a very good idea. Most Canadians have little understanding of the country's vast resources or of what it would take in terms of infrastructure to properly exploit them. Similarly, few people understand the complexities of the integrated North American electrical grid, the need for more refining capacity across the continent, or the inherent conflict between resource development and what it contributes to federal and provincial treasuries in royalties on the one hand and the environmental wishes of the public on the other. No one of right mind is advocating some form of National Energy Policy for the 21st century. That would be politically unpalatable at all levels. But that does not mean Canadians shouldn't be considering how we can best work together and find ways to make the most of our collective resources. Identifying synergies and opportunities is a far cry from a new N.E.P. The risk posed by unco-ordinated development, where industry successfully leverages regional differences to their advantage, is that all Canadians in all provinces could be shortchanged in the selling of these resources and be left with a significant environmental reckoning at the end. PROVOCATIVE QUESTIONS A key part of any national energy vision will have to consider whether Canada now has a compelling national interest in forging ahead with the long-debated, long-delayed Mackenzie Valley pipeline project. The uncertainty over whether and how the vast reserves of natural gas located in the Northwest Territories will be accessed is causing unnecessary difficulties to the long-term planning abilities of a wide variety of industries, especially in the West. Not since Judge Thomas Berger wrote his famously controversial Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland report 30 years ago has Canada genuinely addressed our future as a leading energy producer in the world. Berger's report was focused on the potential effects of a pipeline in the Mackenzie River valley, but it raised the bar for due diligence on the pros and cons of large-scale industrial projects, especially in the Far North. At the time, Berger recommended a 10-year moratorium on the project, citing concerns that the infrastructure needed to support a new "energy corridor" -- roads, airports, maintenance depots, even new towns -- would have a staggering impact on the landscape and the people, mainly aboriginal, who live there. Many of the hurdles that existed 30 years ago to the Mackenzie project have been eliminated and a consortium led by Imperial Oil appears ready to move ahead with the project. That's potentially very good news, especially if there is a compelling national interest in seeing it developed. But what is in the nation's best interest can only be determined through an open discussion that involves all stakeholders. As the world's eyes turn ever more northward in the hunt for new wealth, the Conference Board is right in saying the federal, provincial and territorial governments need to engage Canadians in a discussion about how to make the most of our yet-to-be-tapped resources. c The Edmonton Journal 2007 © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks ***************************************************************** 54 Courier-Life Publications: Chernobyl's dark legacy in Brooklyn By Mattlee Davis 06/02/2007 It began 21 years ago in the Ukraine and became known as the worst nuclear reactor disaster in history, but the effects of the Chernobyl nuclear accident have traveled world-wide and have made their way to Brooklyn?s doorstep. ?My specialty is thyroid surgery, and we started seeing people coming in who were from the Chernobyl area with thyroid problems,? said Daniel Branovan, M.D. of the NY Eye and Ear Infirmary in Manhattan. Branovan said there are between 150 and 200 thousand people in the NY metropolitan area who come from the affected region, and the ?cancer rates are going up and up,? he said. Even more troubling is the fact that ?about 60 percent of these people live in Brooklyn.? On April 26, 1986, at 1:23 a.m., a major steam explosion ? following a failed experiment ? tore through reactor four of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, releasing deadly radioactive material. ?When they wake you up at four in the morning, you know something is wrong,? said Edward Atbashyan, a former Soviet soldier who described the scene of the accident. Atbashyan was a designated driver who drove 30 of his fellow soldiers to the scene not knowing what to expect. ?We came there the next day at eight in the morning. When we came there we saw fire and smoke. The town was still sleeping. No one knew what happened,? he said. This was only the beginning of major problems. The nuclear meltdown provoked a radioactive cloud which flew over the surrounding countries of Russia, Belarus and a dozen others, forcing the evacuation of the nearby city of Pripyat and turning it into a ghost town to this day. According to Atbashyan, it was not until the beginning of the next week that it was determined that dangerous radioactive material had filled the air, land, and rivers, forcing the evacuation of Pripyat?s 50,000 residents. Atbashyan, who helped in the evacuation, said, ?Everybody was calling their families once they knew about the radiation. I called my parents and relatives and said leave Ukraine and get as far away as you can.? ?I saw some scary things. The trees were turning a rusty color. The people were told to take only three days supplies. But they never saw that place again.? With 31 deaths ? 28 resulting from radiation exposure ? and most being fire and rescue workers, over two decades later, the Chernobyl disaster has become known as a thing of the past -- until now. ?We have now medical effects of that disaster spread all around the world,? said Gideon Aronoff, president and CEO of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS). ?It?s not about public awareness. It?s viewed as a problem over there [in Russia] and not an American problem. New York is the largest grouping of former Soviets and Brooklyn is the heart of the Russian community in New York,? he added. In fact, when Atbashyan moved to Brooklyn ? to a neighborhood in Bensonhurst ? after marrying and having two kids in 1991, he noticed his blood tests changing dramatically. ?Every month was a completely different reading. My blood cells were out of range all the time. For treatment they gave me some liquid and wine, but a few of the soldiers were affected worse than me,? Atbashyan said, who now lives in Long Island and is thankful that his family was not affected. However, thyroid cancer ? a cancer of the butterfly-shaped thyroid gland under the Adam?s apple ? is the greatest known consequence of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. In fact, Branovan stated that scientists know from experience ? referring to the World War II bombing of Hiroshima ? that it takes about 20 years for to thyroid cancer to appear. ?Thyroid cancer is not something you get slowly over time. You get exposed to radiation once during Chernobyl and the rest doesn?t really matter,? he said. The same people who migrated to Brooklyn and other boroughs from Chernobyl have the same risk as those who chose to stay in the Ukraine, according to Branovan. ?The rates of cancer are going up over there [in the Ukraine] and the same thing must be happening here. What we need is a way of organizing,? he said. That is why Branovan, along with overseas experts and some colleges including Harvard, got together to launch a Chernobyl thyroid cancer screening initiative known as ?Project Chernobyl.? Their goal is to develop a center for information gathering, data management and medical service coordination for Chernobyl victims in the New York metro area. ?This project is not just intended for one ethnic group. It is intended for all victims of this terrible international disaster. We welcome all people who have suffered from this,? said Branovan. Assemblymembers Helene Weinstein and Alec Brook-Krasny along with Senator Marty Golden joined organizing members of the project on April 20 ? the 21st anniversary of the Chernobyl accident ? at United Nations Headquarters to announce the Assembly?s inclusion of $540,000 in the state budget for the initiative. ?This is a way for New York State to be able to provide the resources to purchase the equipment and to have an outreach to help citizens of the former Soviet Union, who have chosen New York as their home,? said Weinstein. The current funding can provide two teams to go into the communities, doctors? offices and community centers to reach out to victims. But Branovan is hopeful that more will come to fund eight to ten teams over the next few years to reach all 200,000 of the at-risk population. ?What is happening is a testament to the ability of the Russian-speaking community to have a voice in American government and to get together and fight on the behalf of the community,? said Brook-Krasny. If you are a victim of the Chernobyl Nuclear disaster call 888-426-1968 or visit www.projectchernobyl.org. ©Courier-Life Publications 2007 ***************************************************************** 55 Comment is free: The great power struggle guardian.co.uk/commentisfree > Tim Flannery It's all very well to hate windmills, but we need to find new ways to source energy, and we're running out of time to argue about it. Tim Flannery June 3, 2007 9:00 PM | Printable version Why are the English not the Dutch? Because they hate windmills, at least those new, sleek sexy types that generate wind power. I learned that today at Hay, where I was speaking about climate change. But with atmospheric CO2 equivalent at around 430ppm, and the threshold of dangerous climate change estimated to be around 450ppm, we don't have a lot of time to argue about it. So, how to convince the English to be more like the Dutch, and to love their windmills? First, they need to understand that windmills don't chop up many birds, especially if well-sited. If birds were the issue then cats would be banned rather than windmills. It would also help if people asked themselves the question of where they might get their power if not from windmills. Tidal power might work, but many people worry abouit the fate of places like the Severn estuary. Nuclear power might work, but that technology has many opponents, too. Perhaps I'd be more sympathetic to the wind protestors if they decided that they'd do withoput mains power. That way, we could side-step the thorny issue of how we generate our electricity. All our blogs from Hay are collected here. Guardian Books features the latest news from Hay, literary blogs and a daily podcast. del.icio.us | Digg it | Tailrank | Reddit | Newsvine | Now Public | Technorati This entry was tagged with the following keywords: environment climatechange windpower windturbines severnestuary nuclearpower Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007. Registered in England and Wales. No. 908396 Registered office: Number 1 Scott Place, Manchester M3 3GG ***************************************************************** 56 Guardian Unlimited: Talks End Over U.S.-India Nuclear Deal From the Associated Press Saturday June 2, 2007 5:46 PM By ASHOK SHARMA Associated Press Writer NEW DELHI (AP) - India and the United States failed to resolve differences over an American offer to share nuclear know-how and fuel, ending three days of negotiations Saturday that were intended to seal a deal seen as the cornerstone of an emerging partnership. One of the biggest sticking points has been India's displeasure with a clause that would let the United States halt cooperation if India tests a nuclear weapon. Some in India also fear the deal could limit the country's right to reprocess spent atomic fuel - a key step in making weapons-grade nuclear material - and thus hamper its weapons program. At the conclusion of talks with U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, India's top foreign ministry bureaucrat told reporters that the two sides have made ``considerable progress'' toward completing the deal. ``There are still issues where there are gaps,'' Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon said, but he refused to go into specific details. ``We are optimistic that we will make the deal,'' he said. In a statement issued later, Burns said the talks were useful but that ``more work remains to be done.'' No dates have been fixed for the next round of negotiations, Menon said. Earlier in the day, Burns met with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who is expected to discuss the nuclear deal with U.S. President George W. Bush when they meet on the sidelines of a G-8 summit in Germany next week. American critics, meanwhile, say the plan would spark a nuclear arms race in Asia by allowing India to use the extra nuclear fuel, which the deal would provide, to free up its domestic uranium for weapons. The nuclear deal, agreed to by Bush and Singh in July 2005, would let the U.S. ship nuclear fuel and know-how to India in exchange for safeguards and U.N. inspections at India's 14 civilian nuclear plants. Eight military plants would be off-limits. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007 ***************************************************************** 57 UPI: Radiation monitors due for U.S. ports United Press International - NewsTrack - Top News - Published: June 3, 2007 at 5:21 PM LOS ANGELES, June 3 (UPI) -- In an effort to stop nuclear devices from being smuggled into the United States, the government is set to install radiation monitors at ports nationwide. While the cautionary measure will begin in California, the Daily News of Los Angeles said Sunday, the "new generation" monitors will soon be installed at ports across the nation and along the border. Officials from the U.S. Domestic Nuclear Detection Office said the monitors ultimately will scan nearly all cargo entering the United States. "We have made tremendous improvements in looking for these types of materials," detection office official Vayl Oxford said. "I think that security at our borders is increasing every day and the likelihood of someone bringing in threatening materials is diminishing on a daily basis." Yet some have criticized the move, alleging the devices will be no better than monitors currently being used. The Daily News said those critics have called for more stringent measures to ensure border security. © Copyright 2007 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 58 LA Daily News: Ports, borders to look for radiation Federal government to install new devices BY TROY ANDERSON, Staff Writer Article Last Updated: 06/02/2007 08:39:44 PM PDT The federal government will begin installing "new generation" radiation monitors at ports and borders in California and across the country later this year in an effort to thwart the potential smuggling of nuclear devices into the United States. The stepped-up efforts come as U.S. Border Patrol agents will also be getting mobile radiation detectors to determine if people crossing the border illegally are carrying radioactive material. By the end of the year, nearly 100 percent of all cargo flowing through borders and seaports will be scanned for radioactive materials. "We have made tremendous improvements in looking for these types of materials," said Vayl Oxford, director of the U.S. Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, created two years ago by President George W. Bush to coordinate efforts to prevent nuclear terrorism. "I think that security at our borders is increasing every day and the likelihood of someone bringing in threatening materials is diminishing on a daily basis." Still, some elected officials and terrorism experts say more needs to be done. "How are we doing? Not too well," said Graham Allison, a nuclear terrorism expert and director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. "We're trying harder, but we're not succeeding." Allison has urged the government to work with other nations to stop the enrichment and processing of uranium and plutonium. "While there is currently no specific intelligence indicating when or where a nuclear attack might occur, it is the considered opinion of many that an attempt in the next decade is possible," said Jenny Burke, a spokeswoman for the Nuclear Detection Office. U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., also raised concerns at a congressional hearing last year that the "new generation" of radiation detectors are based on prototypes that the U.S. General Accounting Office said were no more effective than current devices and won't be fully deployed for years. Feinstein spokesman Scott Gerber said Friday the senator is concerned and recently asked for a progress report. Burke said the radiation detectors Feinstein was concerned about are no longer under consideration. The agency is assessing new technologies and is complying with congressional requirements that the devices provide "significant improvement in operational effectiveness over current generation systems," Burke said. The government currently has 85 fixed radiation detection monitors, which cost $100,000 each, at the nation's ports. That's in addition to 24 mobile radiation monitors at the Los Angeles-Long Beach port complex, which the Rand Corp. has ranked as one of the most likely targets of a potential attack. This summer, the Department of Homeland Security is expected to certify the "new generation" monitors, which cost $400,000 each. The government will begin installing the monitors later this year and expects to complete deployment at ports of entry by 2013. No date has been set to install the monitors at airports. Chris Bertelli, assistant deputy director of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Office of Homeland Security, said preventing nuclear terrorism is one of the governor's highest priorities. The governor has been writing letters to Congress urging federal lawmakers to fix the "broken immigration system," provide additional funding to increase border security and fill in border tunnels. The federal government plans to increase the number of Border Patrol agents from 13,500 now to 18,000 by the end of next year. "He has urged Congress to fund an additional 1,500 new agents this year and 6,000 more by 2008," Schwarzenegger spokeswoman Sabrina Lockhart said. troy.anderson@dailynews.com (213) 974-8985 ***************************************************************** 59 Sydney Morning Herald: Nuke waste 'in hospital carpark' - www.smh.com.au June 3, 2007 - 9:27AM One state is keeping nuclear waste in a shipping container parked in a hospital car park, Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane says. As the government steps up its campaign to push nuclear energy in Australia, the debate about nuclear waste has also stepped up. Mr Macfarlane said the states, which oppose housing a nuclear waste dump, needed to be frank about what they were doing with their waste. "I know each state health system has nuclear waste," Mr Macfarlane told Network Ten today. "Are they storing it, as it's suggested in one case, in a shipping container in the car park of their general hospital?" Mr Macfarlane refused to name the state or provide any further details on the allegation. "Why are they frightening people by saying nuclear waste is so dangerous when they are not even storing it in a secure environment in some cases." The government is almost certain to create a nuclear waste dump in the Northern Territory for low and medium level radioactive waste. This includes material such as needles, surgical gowns and other material used in the treatment of cancer. "Nuclear waste, these days, is an item which can be stored in a very secure manner," Mr Macfarlane said. Prime Minister John Howard is a keen supporter of the debate on nuclear energy and he has said nuclear power stations would be a good answer to the pollution problems of coal-fired power stations which currently provide Australia's electricity base load. AAP Copyright © 2007. The Sydney Morning Herald. ***************************************************************** 60 Sydney Morning Herald: Uranium explorers striking it rich - www.smh.com.au Jamie Freed June 4, 2007 THESE days a uranium explorer doesn't need any actual uranium in the ground for its float to be nearly four times oversubscribed. Take Fission Energy. The Tasman Resources spin-off had to turn down money when punters were willing to give it $11.5 million more than it was asking for in its $4 million offering. "We certainly are very popular," Fission executive chairman Greg Solomon said. Fission's tenements have received little, if any drilling in the past. And Mr Solomon admitted Fission's parent company hadn't yet found anything "mineable" since listing in 2001. But he said Tasman had done some joint venture deals and successfully spun off Fission and another company, coal-seam methane and hydrogen technology hopeful Eden Energy. It turns out Fission, Tasman and Eden have a lot in common. They share the same head office in Perth, the same executive chairman, the same legal counsel and some of the same non-executive directors. It has proven a solid money-spinner for Mr Solomon, a partner in Perth law firm Solomon Brothers who serves as executive chairman of all three companies. Mr Solomon last year received $242,726 in cash, salary, commissions and superannuation from Eden and another $117,175 from Tasman. Combined with his initial annual salary of $180,000 plus superannuation listed in the Fission prospectus, he could receive more than $540,000 this year. Mr Solomon's brother, Doug, is a partner in the law firm and also receives fees for serving as a non-executive director of all three companies. Solomon Brothers received $50,000 for preparing the Fission prospectus and it has received legal fees from Tasman and Eden. Additionally, Princebrook, a company in which both brothers have an interest, last year received $275,811 in management and administration fees from Tasman and Eden. And the brothers have millions of shares and options in Tasman and Eden. Mr Solomon told the Herald his compensation seemed fair given he worked more than 90 hours a week and spent nine months of the year travelling for his roles at Eden and Tasman. He added he could handle the additional workload at Fission because he was hiring more support staff. "I'm an executive chairman," Mr Solomon said. "I'm not doing all of the hands-on work." In a report last month Far East Capital analyst Warwick Grigor noted Tasman had a portfolio of uranium exploration projects in South Australia, but "none of them have shown anything other than a generally prospective environment". "Tasman is one of a large field of grassroots explorers with a market capitalisation that is greater than it would be without the inclusion of uranium and the prospective [Fission] spin-off," he said. Copyright © 2007. The Sydney Morning Herald. ***************************************************************** 61 Pahrump Valley Times: Dems show solid front against Yucca Jun. 01, 2007 LAS VEGAS -- According to the deputy executive director of the Democratic Party of Nevada, supporters of the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Repository Mountain need not look toward the party's presidential hopefuls for any support. Democratic presidential candidates, many of whom are visiting Nevada this week or next, are united in opposition to plans for dumping nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain, as well as to a bill that was recently introduced in the U.S. Senate to speed up development of the nuclear waste dump, reported Kirsten Searer. Meanwhile, she added, "Many of the Republican presidential candidates remain silent on the issue or, like Sen. John McCain, openly declare their support for storing the nation's nuclear waste just 90 miles from Las Vegas." "The first question presidential candidates visiting Nevada should answer is this: Will you pledge to stop a dangerous nuclear waste dump from coming to Nevada?" said Democratic Party Chairman Jill Derby. "Democratic candidates join Sen. Reid - who has led the fight against Yucca Mountain - in working to stop Yucca Mountain and the dangerous bill introduced last week in the U.S. Senate to speed up the project. It appears Republican candidates don't put that sort of value on our safety in Nevada." The Democratic candidates and where they stand: Sen. Joe Biden: "I oppose Yucca Mountain. There are serious questions about the impact of using it as a repository of radioactive waste. The bottom line is that radioactive waste should be safely stored or recycled near the plants that generate it -- we shouldn't be hauling it all over the country. I agree with (Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.) that our focus on resolving this issue should be on science -- research and development of technology that allows plants to recycle waste or doesn't create that kind waste in the first place. "Just as Senator Reid is opposed to this new legislation to speed up the licensing process on Yucca Mountain, my position has not wavered and I would not support it either." Sen. Hillary Clinton: "I have long opposed storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain. This latest attempt to push forward development of the project is particularly reckless, as it aims to increase spending and begin construction on the site prior to license approval. There are far too many unanswered questions about both the geology of the site and integrity of the science to support the decision to store waste at Yucca at all -- let alone to justify accelerating the site's development. "Continued attempts to push this misguided project forward are both disappointing and irresponsible. As President, I will work with the scientific community to examine all options for safe, secure storage of nuclear waste as part of a comprehensive national energy policy." Sen. Chris Dodd: "I am disappointed by recent efforts to advance the development of the Yucca mountain project. I oppose licensing a repository at Yucca Mountain based on serious security and safety concerns. Rather than accelerating development, we should use this time to urgently increase funding for research into new environmentally friendly long-term solutions that provide for safe storage and disposal of nuclear waste." Sen. Barack Obama: "I want every Nevadan to know that I have always opposed using Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste repository ... After spending billions of dollars on the Yucca Mountain Project, there are still significant questions about whether nuclear waste can be safely stored there. I believe a better short-term solution is to store nuclear waste on-site at the reactors where it is produced, or at a designated facility in the state where it is produced, until we find a safe, long-term disposal solution that is based on sound science." Gov. Bill Richardson: "The legislation proposed (May 23) by Senators Domenici and Craig threatens millions of Americans. For more than 20 years, in Congress and as Secretary of Energy, I have opposed the Yucca Mountain project. This decision must be based on science, not politics, and the latest scientific studies show that Yucca Mountain is unsuitable for high-level nuclear waste storage. We need to protect the health and safety of Nevadans, and I am proud to stand with Harry Reid in opposing this legislation and urge the Senate to put a quick end to this proposal." webmaster@pahrumpvalleytimes.com Copyright © Pahrump Valley Times, 1997 - ***************************************************************** 62 SignOnSanDiego.com: Tunnel as tomb for radioactive waste hits wall The Union-Tribune Next 18 months key in nuclear energy debate centered on Nev. site By Dana Wilkie COPLEY NEWS SERVICE June 3, 2007 YUCCA MOUNTAIN, Nev. – From the 4,950-foot crest of Yucca Mountain, the valley below is a spectacular sweep of desert landscape – ringed by the Funeral and Chocolate mountain ranges, colored by blue-gray sage and pocked by red-and-black cones that represent the area's last gasps of volcanic activity. Associated Press A worker drove a train out of a 5-mile tunnel carved through Nevada's Yucca Mountain in this 2006 photo. Standing here, it's difficult to believe that 400 yards below one's feet lies a 5-mile tunnel carved out of the mountain's limestone – a tunnel that may one day hold the nation's spent nuclear fuel and is crucial to President Bush's plan to diversify the country's energy portfolio and address the international clamor to fight global warming. What happens with this cavelike corridor in the coming 18 months could, in the view of some, determine whether nuclear energy will blossom as an alternative to carbon-based electricity generation, or whether the decades-long effort to build a burial spot for high-level radioactive waste at the Yucca Mountain Project will sputter and perhaps die. “Opening Yucca Mountain is regarded as very important by the U.S. nuclear industry to its renaissance,” said Allison Macfarlane, a George Mason University expert on Yucca. “Each time they (in the federal government) say they need more time, I think the overall impression is that the repository is that much further in trouble.” For decades, leading scientists have disagreed so starkly about the Nevada site's geology, hydrology and seismology that one wonders if they're talking about the same place. Their disagreements likely reflect the difficulty of accurately predicting what will happen thousands of years from now to the radioactive waste buried at this first-of-its-kind repository. The Yucca project is two decades behind schedule, utilities have sued the federal government to take the waste off their hands, and the Bush administration is seeking electricity sources that aren't culprits in global warming. The U.S. Department of Energy is scrambling to prepare a license application for Yucca, which it hopes to give the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission next summer. After that, the decision whether to proceed with Yucca's construction will lie with five regulators largely sympathetic to Bush's plan for a resurgence of nuclear power, which depends on a place to store highly radioactive byproducts that could remain dangerous for many thousands of years. If the department can't submit the license application by next summer, there are fears that the Yucca repository could suffer a fatal blow. “They're very concerned about actually getting this application done in time for 2008,” said Jon Summers, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who vows to kill the Yucca project. “If they don't get it done by 2008, the project may not happen.” Macfarlane isn't convinced the project would die, but she agrees that more delays won't be good news for utilities banking on Yucca's opening as they prepare to build 27 reactor units. “Limited storage capacity, the federal government's legal obligation to take possession of used fuel, and the need to dispose of high-level defense waste require a deep geologic repository at some point in the future,” said Trish Conrad, spokeswoman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's main trade group. The two-hour drive from Las Vegas to Yucca begins at the southern tip of Nevada and moves northwest – up U.S. Highway 95, deep into the sage-and creosote-bush-splattered Amargosa Desert and briefly through the Nevada Test Site, a Rhode Island-size expanse marred by craters from military bombs. The turnoff toward Yucca comes after a lonely corner with an “all nude” Kingdom Gentleman's Club. From there, it's 45 minutes along barren roads and gravelly switchbacks to Yucca's crest, where one gets a 360-degree view of the surrounding valley and some appreciation for the area's isolation. Below one's feet lies the tunnel, hewn by the “Yucca Mucker,” a 720-ton, cylinder-shaped contraption that cuts rock at a rate of 18 feet per hour. It took the Yucca Mucker from summer 1994 to spring 1997 to carve the tunnel, whose innards are now reinforced by steel rails. Although the dump's projected 2017 opening date is already two decades behind schedule, activity at Yucca is in a lull – thanks to a recent $50 million funding cut engineered by Reid. A work force of 180 has been slashed by two-thirds as the Energy Department funnels resources into preparing the license application. During the decade since the tunnel was carved, engineers have been conducting tests to ascertain how long steel-packaged nuclear fuel can safely remain in the 2,000 acres of burial space that would lie along 42 fingerlike extensions off this tunnel. For instance, to simulate the heat generated by spent fuel – which resembles a bunch of hard, black marbles – engineers have subjected the couch-length steel canisters to 400-degree temperatures, hot enough to cook a turkey. “This is not liquid oozing from barrels,” said Michael Voegele, once Yucca's senior engineer and now an Energy Department consultant. “It's metals, ceramics and plastics, not green goop.” While some in the scientific community believe the steel containers may last a couple of thousand years, Bob Loux – director of the Nevada Agency on Nuclear Projects – thinks the standard should be hundreds of thousands of years, as some radioactive elements can remain dangerous that long. “We don't believe any metal will last longer than 500 years underground at Yucca Mountain,” Loux said. In cool, cavelike alcoves branching off the tunnel, engineers have drilled holes in the rock walls and installed a drip system to study how water moves through the mountain. They've imagined that about 8½ miles away lives a “reasonably maximally exposed individual” – someone who draws all drinking, cooking and bathing water from a desert well. They calculate how long it might take for radionuclides – atoms with unstable nuclei – to escape their steel canisters, migrate through Yucca's rock, find their way to groundwater and move to where this hypothetical person lives. These tests demonstrate that radionuclides could show up in drinking water in 50 years or less, and that water in the rocks contains lead, arsenic, mercury and other substances that might eat away at canisters, Loux said. Allen Benson, spokesman for the Yucca Mountain Project, said the tests show that the earliest that radionuclides might get into groundwater is 50 years, but that the latest is 600,000 years. In fact, he said, neither extreme is probable, and it's more likely that radionuclides would migrate to groundwater after several thousand years. Even then, the Energy Department goal is to ensure that radioactivity is so diluted it poses no human or environmental danger. “(Loux's) position is that absolutely no radionuclides can ever be released from the repository,” said Benson, noting that it's not unusual for water to contain trace amounts of lead, arsenic or mercury. “All (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) regulations dealing with pollutants recognize that it is impossible to guarantee that no pollutants will ever be released from any disposal facility.” Critics say an earthquake could damage the canisters and allow radioactive releases, that the site has 33 earthquake faults, and that a magnitude-5.9 quake in 1992 destroyed buildings at the Yucca Mountain Project. Benson said the 1992 quake only broke windows at one building, while consultant Voegele noted that boulders teetering along mountain ridges have stood there thousands of years. “There's not been enough shaking in this valley in the past 500,000 years to dislodge” them, said Voegele, turning his face toward the desert valley and sighing. “I used to hope my son wouldn't have to work on this project. Now I'm just hoping my grandchildren won't.” © Copyright 2007 Union-Tribune Publishing Co. ? A Copley Newspaper ***************************************************************** 63 The Hindu: Stalemate on reprocessing issue Sunday, Jun 03, 2007 Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon briefs the media in New Delhi on Saturday. ? Photo: Rajeev Bhatt NEW DELHI: After three straight days of hardnosed negotiations over their proposed nuclear cooperation agreement, India and the United States have hit an impasse with no real progress registered on the major issues separating them. Though some minor questions have been cleared up, senior Indian officials familiar with the course of the negotiations told The Hindu that a "stalemate" was reached late Friday night on several issues ? including the right to reprocess spent fuel produced by any imported reactor ? and that Saturday's discussions could not resolve matters. Indian officials declined to characterise the situation as a "deadlock" and said more time was needed. "But if there are no reprocessing consent rights, then we simply can't proceed," said an official, referring to the process ? integral to India's indigenous civil nuclear programme ? of converting the spent fuel produced by a nuclear reactor into fresh fuel for use in a fast breeder reactor. Officials also sense a certain hardening of the American position on reprocessing since the past few meetings on the `123 agreement'. "Whatever reprocessing we wish to do with imported fuel or reactors would be under international safeguards but the U.S. side is simply unwilling to accept our right to reprocess," said an official, blaming the "non-proliferation lobby" in Washington for the impasse. At a press conference on Saturday evening, Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon confirmed that reprocessing rights was one of the issues still under discussion but declined to elaborate on any specifics. Striking a positive tone, he described the three days of discussions with the U.S. team led by Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns as "intensive, productive and constructive" but said the two sides "still have some distance to travel." Flanked by S. Jaishankar of the Ministry of External Affairs and R.B. Grover of the Department of Atomic Energy ? both key members of the Indian negotiating team ? Mr. Menon said that of the several issues which were still open "we have managed to remove some but some still remain." India's goal, he said, is "to reach [a 123] agreement which fully reflects the July 18, 2005 and March 2, 2006 agreements, as well as the Prime Minister's statement in Parliament." A separate statement issued by the U.S. embassy on Saturday night said that India and the U.S. had made "some progress" on the 123 but "more work remains to be done to complete arrangements that will permit a civil nuclear agreement to be finalised." Though no dates have been fixed for the next round of talks, Mr. Menon said both sides "need a little time to think over what we've done over the past few days." He said India did not believe in setting dates or deadlines but expressed his confidence that an agreement would eventually be clinched. "All told, [Mr. Burns's visit] has been positive and useful. This has taken us some way forward towards our goal ? a 123 agreement which reflects in legal terms what our leaders have already agreed to." Mr. Menon said the reason he and Mr. Burns did not address a joint press conference was because the U.S. Under Secretary had a flight to catch. When Mr. Burns arrived in Delhi three days ago, however, Indian officials had planned to end his visit with a joint press conference. Before his departure, Mr. Burns paid a courtesy call on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Mr. Menon also said that External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee had extended an invitation to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to visit India. Copyright © 2007, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the ***************************************************************** 64 Las Vegas SUN: Yucca dump on back burner WEEK IN REVIEW: WASHINGTON, D.C. Photos: Yucca Mountain | Sen. Pete Domenici Today: June 03, 2007 at 7:11:44 PDT By Lisa Mascaro Las Vegas Sun WASHINGTON - In these days of nearly $4 a gallon gasoline and global warming, Yucca Mountain is finding it difficult to get some face time in Congress. Look what happened when longtime nuclear advocate Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., introduced legislation recently to begin storing nuclear waste in Nevada as soon as 2010 - at the earliest seven years before the proposed nuclear waste dump would open at Yucca. The bill got more attention from the Democratic presidential contenders stumping in Nevada than it did on Capitol Hill - and it was hardly the kind of attention Domenici wanted. Other energy issues are more pressing for the chairman of the Senate's Energy and Natural Resources Committee, New Mexico Sen. Jeff Bingaman, a Democrat who is not inclined to schedule a hearing on the Yucca bill anytime soon. Bingaman and other Senate Democrats want to roll out a sweeping energy package this month to tackle such vast issues as higher fuel efficiency for cars, renewable energy investment and international energy diplomacy. After that, they're on to climate change legislation. Yucca, as of now, is sitting on the bench. Bingaman is focused on legislation he thinks will pass in this Congress, spokesman Bill Wicker said. What Wicker means is that Bingaman is not likely to take up legislation that generates about as much opposition from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid as would a bill to outlaw casino gambling. "I don't think Harry Reid is the only person who has a problem with Yucca Mountain," Wicker continued. "With many of the other energy problems our nation has right now ¦ it's probably a middle priority, not a top priority." Everyone knew Reid would be an obstacle. But in many ways Yucca Mountain has become a parochial issue, one Nevadans know deeply but the rest of the country seems to care about only from time to time. Sure, the presidential contenders are talking about their positions on Yucca. Democrats are mostly opposed, while Republicans aren't quite saying, with the exception of Sen. John McCain, who supports it. But do comments about Yucca that the candidates make in Las Vegas stay in Las Vegas? Do the candidates broadcast their opposition when shaking hands in New Hampshire? Maybe Yucca will rise again to the national stage as the 2008 campaigns unfold and the Energy Department approaches its June 2008 deadline to submit a license application for the repository. Nuclear power is bound to enter the congressional debate as Democrats bring energy bills to the floor in the coming weeks. Some believe nuclear energy provides an answer to global warming as a cleaner source than coal-fired electric power plants. The day Domenici's bill was introduced, energy executives were meeting at the annual Nuclear Energy Institute conference in Miami, where the chief executive of Exelon Corp., the nation's largest operator of nuclear power plants, said the delay of Yucca Mountain until at least 2017 means the nation needs a federal site (or sites) to store the waste temporarily. Unfortunately for them, Domenici's legislation puts that temporary storage site right outside Reid's back door. (The bill also would provide the Energy Department with the tools it needs to get the Yucca project back on track, including access to cash and land, precisely the assist Nevada's congressional delegation vows to fight.) Even Domenici lowered the expectations, recognizing as he announced the legislation that "this bill faces long odds." Lisa Mascaro can be reached at (202) 662-7436 or at lisa.mascaro@lasvegassun.com. All contents copyright 2005 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 65 BBC NEWS: Peers attack nuclear waste plans Last Updated: Saturday, 2 June 2007, 23:20 GMT 00:20 UK Peers said the disposal of waste needed to be democratically accountable Government plans to dispose of nuclear waste have been attacked as "incoherent and opaque" by a committee of peers. The House of Lords science and technology committee said it had "serious concerns" about how the removal of waste will be overseen. Chairman Lord Broers attacked Whitehall plans for an advisory body instead of a statutory commission. 'Expert scrutiny' The committee insisted the government should set up an independent group answerable to parliament to oversee the disposal of radioactive waste. It is now time to appoint a truly independent, democratically accountable body Lord Broers And it attacked ministers for moving with "unseemly haste" towards selecting potential sites. The government accepted most of the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM) recommendations for phased deep repository of radioactive material in July 2006. But it rejected proposals for a statutory Nuclear Waste Management Commission with direct accountability to MPs to oversee the process and implement the programme. Instead it went for a "new CoRWM" with advisory powers. The peers' report - entitled Radioactive Waste Management: An Update - said any oversight body needed "clearer lines of accountability and independent, expert scrutiny". Lord Broers said: "We have serious concerns about the way the government are moving forward with the Managing Radioactive Waste Safely programme. "The proposals they have announced so far have been incoherent and confusing. "If the government want people to be confident about the safety of nuclear energy and the disposal of nuclear waste, it is now time to appoint a truly independent, democratically accountable body to oversee the whole process." The committee also urged the government to find out which areas were geologically appropriate for deep repositories for geological reasons, before looking at which communities would be prepared to host them. * BBC Copyright Notice ***************************************************************** 66 ReviewJournal.com: Expert sees little concern with waste at Yucca Jun. 02, 2007 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal Still, he doesn't see need for repository there By KEITH ROGERS REVIEW-JOURNAL Radioactive waste in Yucca Mountain is third on Frank von Hippel's list of nuclear fears, behind threats posed by nuclear weapons and safety of power reactors. "The danger with radioactive waste doesn't register that much unless you do something totally irresponsible," said von Hippel, a theoretical physicist who directs Princeton University's Center for Science and Global Security. Von Hippel discussed the issue Friday at a University of Nevada, Las Vegas symposium where he delivered the keynote address, "When nuclear fears come into conflict: Fears of radioactive waste vs. the fear of nuclear-weapon proliferation." He said the United States should store highly radioactive spent fuel in dry casks on concrete pads until better solutions to the problem surface. "The accident or terrorism risk for fuel in dry cask storage is orders of magnitude less than from fuel in reactors or storage pools at operating nuclear power plants," he said. Von Hippel, who was assistant director for national security in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in 1993 and 1994, said he doesn't agree with the nuclear industry's stance that there's a pressing need for a repository at Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. "I'm not anti-nuclear, but I'm anti-pro-nuclear," he told attendees of the International Symposium on Technology and Society. Nevertheless, he said there eventually will be a need for geologic disposal of highly radioactive waste in some repository, but not necessarily one in Nevada. "A geologic process is not a bad idea," he said after the symposium. "But the process was corrupt in imposing this on Nevada." While other countries such as France and Russia have reprocessed waste, there's a security risk involved with how easily the plutonium that has been separated from radioactive remnants could be obtained and fashioned into a nuclear bomb by a rogue nation or militant group. "That's my beef with reprocessing," said von Hippel, who played a major role in programs with Russia to increase its security of special nuclear weapons materials. On the waste issue, he concluded that the not-in-my-backyard mind-set is "an extremely powerful force and can drive governments to crazy and dangerous policies." The terrorism risk in transporting spent nuclear fuel assemblies to a repository have been "over-exaggerated," he said. Even if a transportation cask has been breached by an armor-piercing explosive or weapon, a relatively small amount of radioactive powder would come out but wouldn't catch fire. "It would be dwarfed by a chlorine tank accident," he said. Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal, 1997 - 2007 Stephens Media, LLC Privacy Statement ***************************************************************** 67 Daily News Journal: Radioactive waste should spur action on garbage issues www.dnj.com - If anything good is coming out of the fact that low-level radiation has been buried for years at Middle Point Landfill, it is the groundswell of public efforts to protect the environment. Citizens to End Nuclear Dumping in Tennessee, led by Murfreesboro resident Kathleen Ferris, is banding together to stop the disposal of low-level radioactive waste, not only at the private landfill between Walter Hill and north Murfreesboro but at facilities across Tennessee. This grass-roots work should spur the County Commission and other local government to action to assure people they are safe and renew focus on garbage and landfill issues for future generations. Middle Point is one of four sites in Tennessee where low-level radioactive materials can be dumped under a state program that was enacted in the early 1990s. Rutherford County residents found out about the low-level radioactive waste in May when a nuclear watchdog group published a report critical of the state practices. Officials with the state Department of Environment and Conservation said they never held a public hearing on the issue in the early 1990s because they didn't feel the "special" waste endangered area residents. That's not a good enough explanation to satisfy this newly formed group, and it shouldn't be for local government, either. Amid the frustration and anger, U.S. Rep. Bart Gordon, D-Murfreesboro, asked the Environmental Protection Agency to conduct tests on the East Fork of Stones River, which runs by the landfill, as well as other environmental aspects of the facility. EPA, however, says it trusts the state to monitor the water and the landfill. State hearings and testing will help rebuild trust, but local entities must take action as well. Murfreesboro Water and Sewer Department is conducting tests on the water supply to see if radioactive material being buried there is affecting the water. The city's water treatment plant is upstream from the landfill, and its reservoir, the Walter Hill Dam, is downstream from the mountain of garbage. Water and Sewer Director Joe Kirchner said last week the water is safe for drinking and that testing conducted in 2003 found radioactive material to be lower than detectable levels. We hope the most recent samples will come back with good results as well. But we have to wonder about the future of the landfill, as well as the future of solid waste in Rutherford County as a whole. BFI (Allied Waste) received approval to expand early last year, possibly adding up to 20 years to its life. What happens, though, when it runs out of space? Rutherford County has no other options for handling garbage. The County Commission bought the former Guy James farm on Halls Hill Pike, specifically to have a backup site for a landfill, but sold it to MTSU, leaving the county with no insurance. That means we'll either have to hope for another Middle Point expansion, pay to truck our garbage to an out-of-county facility or find another site in Rutherford County to bury garbage. We don't know if Middle Point will be an option, and the second two possibilities will be extremely expensive. This revelation about low-level radioactive waste at Middle Point is spurring residents to action. It should also be the catalyst for the county to decide how to handle garbage now and for the next 50 years. Originally published June 3, 2007 Print this article Email this to a Copyright ©2007 The Daily News Journal. All rights reserved. Users ***************************************************************** 68 Sunday Herald: Concern Over Incoherent Nuclear Waste Disposal Plan June 04, 2007 Est 1999 Scotland's award-winning independent newspaper By Rob Edwards, Environment Editor Report cites lack of confidence in Whitehall GOVERNMENT PROPOSALS for dealing with radioactive waste were today branded "incoherent and opaque" in a scathing report by a committee of peers. The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee voiced "serious concerns" about the government's handling of the issue and warned the public does not have enough confidence in politicians to accept any nuclear waste scheme driven wholly from Whitehall. The committee urged the government to set up an independent body, answerable to parliament, to oversee the disposal of nuclear waste in geological repositories deep beneath the ground. And it warned that ministers were moving with "unseemly haste" towards selecting possible sites for waste disposal. Phased disposal in a deep geological repository was recommended by the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM) in its report in July 2006. The government - which is hoping to embark on a new wave of nuclear power station development to plug anticipated gaps in Britain's energy supplies - accepted most of CoRWM's recommendations. But it watered down proposals for the oversight of the disposal process, opting for a "new CoRWM" with advisory powers, rather than a statutory Nuclear Waste Management Commission with direct accountability to MPs and overall responsibility for implementing the programme, as preferred by the Lords committee. Today's report - entitled Radioactive Waste Management: An Update - branded the government's preferred institutional framework "incoherent and opaque". The report added: "The government must acknowledge these deficiencies and seek to rectify them by establishing clearer lines of accountability and independent, expert scrutiny." Committee chairman Lord Broers said: "We have serious concerns about the way the government are moving forward with the Managing Radioactive Waste Safely programme. "The decisions we take now on radioactive waste will affect future generations for thousands of years. The government's stop-start approach creates the impression that these decisions are being driven by short-term energy policy goals, rather than by careful and impartial consideration of the scientific and practical realities. The proposals they have announced so far have been incoherent and confusing. "If the government want people to be confident about the safety of nuclear energy and the disposal of nuclear waste, it is now time to appoint a truly independent, democratically accountable body to oversee the whole process. "People don't have enough confidence in politicians or the government to support any scheme on nuclear waste that is controlled from Whitehall. Only an independent, accountable and expert body will be able to convince people nationally and locally to sign up to the programme." Today's committee report also raised concerns about the government's procedures for selecting sites for the disposal of waste. CoRWM's report proposed a "participative process" under which communities would agree to accept repositories in their areas in return for packagesof state assistance to improve local well-being. But the Lords committee today insisted it was vital to begin by screening out areas which are inappropriate for deep repositories for geological reasons, before looking at socio-economic criteria and the willingness of communities to host them. Any other approach risks fuelling suspicions that sites are being chosen for political, rather than scientific reasons, warned the committee. Any suggestion that particular areas are being targeted for disposal sites would inevitably lead to "anxiety among local communities". In an earlier report on radioactive waste management in 1999, the committee called for "steady and measured" progress on an issue which would have knock-on effects for millennia to come. But today, its report said: "Instead, we have had years of procrastination followed by what now appears to be unseemly haste. This is not the way to inspire public confidence." Publication of a government consultation document on disposal should be delayed until an independent body has been put in place to scrutinise the programme, the committee said. Posted by: donald anderson, glasgow on 6:02am Sun 3 Jun 07 I thought the plan was to dump nuclear waste in Scotland, as did former Energy Minister, Tony Benn. Remember what happened to Willie MacRae. who stopped them dumping N waste in Mulwacher and Glen Etive? I thought the plan was to dump nuclear waste in Scotland, as did former Energy Minister, Tony Benn. Remember what happened to Willie MacRae. who stopped them dumping N waste in Mulwacher and Glen Etive? ©2007 newsquest (sunday herald) limited. all rights reserved ***************************************************************** 69 UPI: Russian nuclear waste worries Norway United Press International - NewsTrack - Science - Published: June 1, 2007 at 11:26 PM OSLO, Norway, June 1 (UPI) -- Norwegian officials are worried about the safety of a giant nuclear waste facility near the Norwegian border with Russia. The Aftenposten newspaper said research indicates that enormous tanks holding discarded submarine fuel rods in Andreeva Bay could explode at any time. A new report from Rosatom, the Russian government's nuclear agency, shows there is a grave danger that the stockpile can explode, creating fallout that could exceed that of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the newspaper said. "In the best case a small, limited explosion in just one of the stored rods can lead to radioactive contamination in a 3-mile radius," activist Aleksandr Nikitin of environmental group Bellona told Aftenposten. "In the worst case, such a single explosion could cause the entire tank facility to explode." Nikitin said "significantly greater" pressure on Russia is needed to fix the situation. © Copyright 2007 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 70 MHNN: No tritium from Indian Point in Buchanan sewage system June 2-3, 2007 Copyright © 2007 Mid-Hudson News Network, a division of Statewide Buchanan -- Entergy has notified local public officials and federal and local regulators and health agencies that possible indications of tritium in the sewer lines at Indian Point reported in early May have proven to be incorrect. At the time, Entergy said sampling for tritium at extremely low levels, as is being done in the sampling program at Indian Point, could sometimes lead to “false positives,” but that Entergy would pursue verifying the validity of the sampling and investigate the possible sources, said company spokesman James Steets. “We have since been able to determine that those were false positives that we reported and through additional sampling that we did and more detailed analysis, as well as various inspections and efforts taken onsite to identify possible sources of this tritium, we were able to determine in the last couple of days that there was no tritium in the sewage at all,” he said. Entergy workers also inspected potential sources inside the plants that could have provided a pathway for the tritium. An examination of plant drawings and physical infrastructure inspections showed there is no pathway for the radioactive materials to get off site through the sewage system. Tritium is a low energy-emitting radioactive isotope found naturally in the environment and a byproduct of the fission process in commercial nuclear reactors. No tritium has been seen above background levels in any of the numerous samples taken outside of the Indian Point property, including the Buchanan sewage treatment plant and other nearby properties. HEAR today's news on MidHudsonRadio.com, the Hudson Valley's only Internet radio news report. ***************************************************************** 71 Tonawanda News: LANDFILL: Hackett Drive residents kicking up dirt Published: June 03, 2007 12:51 am Officials say problem is fixed By Dan Miner/minerd@gnnewspaper.com The Tonawanda News Dirt at the Town of Tonawanda landfill was moved improperly all Thursday and then Friday morning, officials from both a state agency and the company helping to cap the landfill said Friday. But only safe piles were disturbed during the process, said Dennis Weiss, an environmental engineer with the state Department of Conservation. The piles were roughly 60 yards from the backyard of Hackett Drive homes. Still, that explanation didn’t satisfy nearby city residents and members of the grassroots organization Clean Up Riverview’s Environment, who said the area could have americium, a radioactive material. They also said the lack of water kicked dirt up into the air and onto their property. “This is just all the good stuff we as homeowners have to deal with on Hackett Drive (which borders the landfill),” CURE co-chair and Hackett Drive resident Chris Thomas said. Cap Hoffmann, who lives at 35 Hackett Drive, and his daughter Joyce Hogenkamp, called around 1 p.m. Friday to complain that water was not being sprayed at the digging to keep dirt down. They said the DEC told them during a May 8 meeting attended by about 100 people the dust would be kept down. Later, Weiss and EnSol Inc. supervisor Jim Daigler held an impromptu meeting with Thomas, Hogenkamp, Hoffmann to try and explain the situation. EnSol is the company hired by the Town of Tonawanda to close the landfill to the DEC’s specifications. Currently, all parties are waiting on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers final record of decision to cap the landfill for good. On Thursday, the water truck was not working, and on Friday, a machine operator was dropping dirt too high, Daigler said. The truck is now working, and the machine operator will drop his dirt lower to the ground from now on. “This morning there were dust problems,” Weiss said Friday. “But from this afternoon it was under control, and we just want to make sure it stays that way.” The dust wasn’t the only issue brought up during the brief meeting between city residents and Weiss and Daigler. A pool of standing water has Hogenkamp and her father worried about West Nile Virus. Weiss admitted that after conferring with his hydrologist he has no explanation of where the water came from, especially considering the lack of rain recently. Also, it’s clear by ATV tracks, property damage and observations from his workers that children and teenagers going on the landfill grounds, despite fences and no trespassing signs. That is especially worrisome considering the construction equipment and possible health risks associated with materials being kicked up by digging, Hogenkamp said. About a month ago, EnSol machinery sustained about $65,000 in damage, and now has to keep equipment in barbed-wire, videotaped grounds to make sure they’re not damaged again, Daigler said. Contact reporter Dan Miner at 693-1000, ext. 115. © 2007, Tonawanda News 435 River Road; North Tonawanda, NY 14120 Phone: (716) 693-1000 Fax: (716) 693-0124 Email news tips and comments ***************************************************************** 72 The Murfreesboro Post: Citizen's group wants to ban radioactive waste on login), Mon, Jun 4, 2007, 00:57 CST, 66 Readers BY MICHELLE WILLARD Post staff writer A concerned group of Rutherford County citizens has banded together to stop the dumping of low-level radioactive waste at Middle Point landfill and throughout Tennessee. “This is a great risk to the citizens, not only of Rutherford County but all of Tennessee,” said Kathleen Ferris, a founder of Citizens to End Nuclear Dumping In Tennessee (ENDIT). The group has started an on-line petition to inform the public about the hazards of radioactive waste. They also want to mobilize the residents of Rutherford County and Tennessee against the disposal of low-level radioactive waste in the state. Area residents and county officials learned for the first time in mid-May that low-level radioactive waste had been dumped at Middle Point for the past 20 years with no public notification. “We’re hoping that with enough protest we can get officials to end this,” Ferris said. “My mother used to say, ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way’.” However, all change must occur at the state level, because of the contract between the county and Middle Point. The contract prohibits the county from enacting “any laws or regulations mandating requirements for operation of the Middle Point landfill more stringent than required by federal or State law.” Rep. Donna Rowland said that the Rutherford County government could always renegotiate their contract to ban the dumping of radioactive materials. “In order for that to happen the state would have to give us the authority back,” said Jack Black, county commissioner for the district encompassing the landfill. “I guess we could ask (to renegotiate), but it’s all up to the state to give us authority over it.” “The county can use its persuasive ability and those discussions have begun to take place,” Rutherford County Mayor Ernest Burgess said. “(But,) it doesn’t appear that we could renegotiate that contract in any way, shape, form or fashion.” So, any change would have to occur on the state level, there is little the county government can do to stop it. And state law says that it’s legal to dump low-level radioactive waste into commercial landfills. “I am definitely looking to help to citizens of Rutherford County and Tennessee to end this and see what I can do on the state level to resolve this issue,” said Rowland, who is also researching the topic and options for changing state law. Officials with Tennessee’s Department of Environment and Conservation continue to assert the Bulk Survey for Release (BSFR) program’s safety. It allows for licensed commercial Tennessee landfills to dispose of low-level radioactive waste from across the country. “There are currently four licensees in Tennessee authorized to conduct the BSFR program. …,” said Dana Coleman, communications director with TDEC. “Nuclear power plants or other entities with low-level radioactive material may send their waste to one of the four licensees.” One of which is Middle Point landfill. “Naturally occurring radioactivity is found in nature and materials all around us, so very low-level radioactive material is being disposed of everywhere, all the time,” Coleman stressed. Moreover, Michigan has decommissioned the Big Rock Point nuclear power plant and released the land to be reused, Coleman said. “This property is safe for unrestricted public use at 25 millirems (of radiation), and as you know the BSFR program guidelines specify that BSFR waste cannot contribute a dose of more than one millirem per year to any member of the public,” Coleman said. These assurances don’t calm the nerves of Citizens to ENDIT. “We’ve been called by a young lady named Betsy Allgood, who is terribly concerned about the welfare of her children,” Ferris said. And more research into the effects of radiation needs to be done, before she believes it is safe, she added. “The community deserves to have clear and accurate information from the state of Tennessee. The state is saying that it is safe but they need affirmation of that,” Burgess said. “While state officials are assuring me that Middle Point poses no danger, the EPA will provide an objective opinion regarding the state’s efforts to ensure the landfill’s safety and its effects on the land, air, and water in Rutherford County,” U.S. Rep. Bart Gordon said. Test samples for radioactivity were taken from the landfill following WSMV’s May 14 report on the BSFR and results should be available in the coming weeks, Gordon said in a press release. “If the EPA says it’s not safe, the state would immediately stop it. (But), the state continues to say that it is a safe practice,” Burgess said. No matter what the results or the state say, Citizens to ENDIT still hope to change the laws enabling this to occur, Ferris said. “Certainly the Department of Environment and Conservation considers outreach and response to public concerns a priority and this issue is no exception,” Coleman said. TDEC has heard the public’s outrage and plans to hold a public forum on the issue to share details on the program and allow the public to voice concerns, but no concrete date has been set, Coleman said. Rowland is also looking into ways to assure the public of their safety. “At this point, I can’t introduce any new legislation this session,” Rowland said. “We still need to do more research into the issue before anything can be done at the state level.” However, all this governmental activity is not going to stop Citizens to ENDIT from soldiering on. “It seems conclusive to me that this is something that we need to be active about,” Ferris said. The petition can be found on the Web: www.CitizenstoENDIT.org. Member Opinions: By: rt260a on 6/3/07 hang the b------s that llowed the dumping. if takes an uprising to get it done lets do it. reid thomson By: Jeff8462 on 6/3/07 put boxes of low level radiation at various locations around town and see how fast our county and city officials react, after all it's safe right? 615-869-0800 | online@murfreesboropost.com | 630 Broadmore Blvd. Suite 120, P.O. 10008, Murfreesboro, TN 37129 ***************************************************************** 73 Guardian Unlimited: Peers attack nuclear waste plans Press Association Sunday June 3, 2007 12:43 AM Government proposals for dealing with radioactive waste have been branded "incoherent and opaque" in a scathing report by a committee of peers. The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee voiced "serious concerns" about the Government's handling of the issue and warned the public does not have enough confidence in politicians to accept any nuclear waste scheme driven wholly from Whitehall. The committee urged the Government to set up an independent body, answerable to Parliament, to oversee the disposal of nuclear waste in geological repositories deep beneath the ground. And it warned ministers were moving with "unseemly haste" towards selecting possible sites for waste disposal. Phased disposal in a deep geological repository was recommended by the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM) in its report in July 2006. The Government - which is hoping to embark on a new wave of nuclear power station development to plug anticipated gaps in Britain's energy supplies - accepted most of CoRWM's recommendations. But it watered down proposals for the oversight of the disposal process, opting for a "new CoWRM" with advisory powers, rather than a statutory Nuclear Waste Management Commission with direct accountability to MPs and overall responsibility for implementing the programme, as preferred by the Lords committee. The report - entitled Radioactive Waste Management: An Update - branded the Government's preferred institutional framework "incoherent and opaque". And it said: "The Government must acknowledge these deficiencies and seek to rectify them by establishing clearer lines of accountability and independent, expert scrutiny." Committee chairman Lord Broers said: "We have serious concerns about the way the Government is moving forward with the Managing Radioactive Waste Safely programme. © Copyright Press Association Ltd 2007, All Rights Reserved. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007 ***************************************************************** 74 SF New Mexican: U.S. Senate: For energy money, a 'run uphill' By ANDY LENDERMAN | The New Mexican June 2, 2007 Senior senator getting money for energy will be 'run uphill' New Mexico’s senior senator had a big reminder for the state on Friday: He no longer chairs the Senate subcommittee that writes the U.S. Department of Energy’s budget and sends billions here from Washington. “That little committee, which spends only $32 billion in the whole country, ... it’s the one that spends all the money on New Mexico — all the laboratory, all the Department of Energy, including ... defense energy,” U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., said in an interview Friday with The New Mexican. The Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development helped send $4.4 billion to New Mexico in fiscal 2006. In contrast, the state’s entire budget was about $4.7 billion that year. U.S. Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., took over the subcommittee after Democrats won control of Congress in the 2006 midterm election. Domenici explained the subcommittee appropriates money, and the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which he formerly chaired, writes policy. “Anytime you have anything done for New Mexico that comes out of (this committee) is not out of the Domenici-Bingaman bill; it’s out of the, what now is going to be — what’s our new chairman’s name? Yeah. Dorgan.” Domenici said Dorgan has visited the national laboratories in New Mexico with him. “He’s chairman; it just means he has one vote more,” Domenici said. “That’s what elections do. People wonder ... whether elections count. You can cite this one — that we now don’t have Pete in a chairman’s role there. We’ve got to run uphill.” Domenici has cited his concern in the past about the lab budgets, much of which comes from the National Nuclear Security Administration. “The NNSA budgets are not growing, and I’m hoping to avoid deep cuts to the security mission by Congress,” he said in an interview last month. On Friday, Domenici was in Santa Fe wrapping up an active week of statewide appearances that also included visits to Albuquerque, Española, Taos and Las Vegas. Domenici has been in the Senate for six terms, since 1972, and says he will be running for a seventh term in 2008. “I am doing this all over again,” he said. “I am going to run.” Domenici’s job approval rating, as tracked by Survey USA, was at 52 percent from May 11-13, down from 68 percent in November. However, his spokesman has said the senator is not concerned about the poll, and professional pollsters don’t take it seriously. Domenici added: “I do have some exciting things to do, and the reason I’m running is because it’s fun. ... If I can stay ... on the right issues, ... it will be a fun last six years.” Contact Andy Lenderman at 995-3827 or alenderman@sfnewmexican.com. ***************************************************************** 75 Ventura County Star: Halaco: What went wrong? Ormond Beach smelter spewed corrosive brew for decades as owners beat back efforts by regulators and neighbors to make them stop By Scott Hadly (Contact) Sunday, June 3, 2007 The Halaco Files Visit our Halaco Web site for more information including videos that cover the history, cleanup and the reactions of those who live near and worked at Halaco; an interactive graphic that details site hot spots; an interactive timeline; an interactive graphic showing the dangerous elements found at the site and their possible effects on the body; documents from inspections, complaints, legal actions and more; a slide show of past and present images; an archive of Halaco-related stories; and links to numerous resources. VenturaCountyStar.com/halaco » DAY 1 * Halaco: What went wrong? * Costly cleanup process has many steps * Halaco's history * About this series DAY 2 * Future of Halaco's mountainous mess is unceretain * Dirty, dangerous job for workers Gary Moss felt the soot in his throat before he saw the blue cloud descend on the back lot like a heavy fog. His eyes burned. His fillings hurt. His co-workers gasped for air as the pungent metallic tang assaulted their noses and throats. "It was unlike anything I'd ever smelled," said Moss, his dark skin wrinkled from a life of working outside. That day on the job in 1970 at Western Kraft, a paper recycling plant near Ormond Beach, was Moss' introduction to neighboring Halaco Engineering. "It was usually worse at night," said Moss, a maintenance mechanic at what is now Weyerhaeuser, which is across McWane Road from the silent Halaco smelters. Like many people who lived or worked in that part of town, his first whiff of the sprawling, beat-up magnesium and aluminum recycling plant was overpowering. As officials with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency consider including the bankrupt metals recycling plant on a list of hazardous Superfund cleanup sites, some of those people are looking back at the years of seeming inaction and wondering what took so long. The reason Halaco operated for 40 years is that the company followed the law and wasn't polluting, said Dave Gable, the former general manager. Photo by Jason Redmond "They kept doing this stuff for all that time and nobody ever did anything to stop them," says GaryMoss, who has worked near the Halaco plant for more than 30 years. "Magnesium is the least harmful of any metals," said Gable, pointing out that the 710,000 cubic yards of waste at the site is primarily magnesium oxide. "Have you ever heard of milk of magnesia?" The active ingredient in the over-the-counter heartburn medicine is magnesium hydroxide, while Halaco's waste pile is primarily magnesium oxide. Gable is correct when he says magnesium oxide is mostly harmless, but the other constituents in the waste pile are anything but benign, according to federal officials. Along with magnesium, the pile contains arsenic, barium, beryllium, cadmium, chromium, copper, mercury, lead and zinc. And laced in the melange of metals is an undetermined amount of low-level radiation. Part of what will happen in coming years is to determine in more detail what is in the pile, what sort of threat it poses, and who will pay to clean it up. Meanwhile, Halaco's rusty, graffiti-covered corrugated-metal-and-concrete buildings remain. Built atop the old Oxnard city dump, the company's cavernous bag house, where the smoke was sent through filters, smelter building and squat offices cover a vast uneven cement slab. Across the narrow gray water of the Oxnard Industrial Drain looms the four-story high, 28-acre slag heap, containing enough waste to fill the Rose Bowl twice. The almost 40-acre property is in the industrial corner on the southern edge of Oxnard, where Perkins Road dead-ends at Ormond Beach. Within a mile are the ocean, wetlands, a few dozen industrial operations, Oxnard's sewer plant, farm fields, beachside condos and several thousand people living in the working-class neighborhoods near Hueneme Road. "I couldn't understand it," said Moss, wearing dirty white coveralls one day after work. "They kept doing this stuff for all that time and nobody ever did anything to stop them." Signs of decay For almost 40 years, Moss and hundreds of others complained about what spewed from Halaco's smokestacks or out of its pipes and into its settling pond, around which a gray mound of waste slowly grew. No plants lived on that pile. Kids soon wore crisscrossing trails into the lifeless gray dust, where they would trek on hunts for old bottles or ride bikes. Along with the metallic smell, Halaco would pump out brutal whiffs of ammonia or hydrochloric acid. Periodically, a thick blue, gray or even purple cloud would drift from Halaco's little smokestack and creep low to the earth, raining gray flakes in its path that corroded any paint or metal in its way, according to people who worked there and various agency reports. Sometimes when the emissions interacted with moisture in the air a chemical reaction would occur, creating a white cloud of ammonia or acid. At Oxnard's nearby sewage treatment plant, employees said Halaco's fumes had pitted the metal on the side of the flagpole that faces the smelters. "I cannot name a smell more acrid," said Katie Greenstreet, a boisterous, silver-haired woman with a raspy voice. "It was like if you're not a cigarette smoker and you go into a room with a bunch of smokers, and your throat, eyes and lungs burn. It was like that, but a thousand times worse. You'd just go ahhhhhhhh' and run in the house and slam the door." Greenstreet, who lives in the Surfside condominiums at Hueneme Beach near Halaco's smelters, was among the people who complained to whomever would listen. She and her neighbors signed petitions, took notes on what they saw and even manned picket lines with signs that said, "Halaco, You Stink." "I think that somebody dropped the ball, and I checked and it wasn't my job," Greenstreet said. "But it's like anything, you have to make noise to get the government to pay attention. It just took a while a long while." When the company pulled up stakes and declared bankruptcy three years ago, many were not surprised that taxpayers might end up paying for the cleanup. Kesa Ryono and her daughter Dharma Murphy, 10, at Hueneme Beach near their home. Ryono is one of many people in neighboring condominiums who worked to stop Halaco from polluting. Kesa Ryono, 44, a single mother of two, worked for years to draw attention to the problems created by the company. "I knew they'd declare bankruptcy," Ryono said. "You could just tell by looking at the plant that they weren't putting any money into it. I didn't have any hope that they'd stay and do the right thing." Pickleweed and pollution Halaco changed its operation little during the four decades it was open in Oxnard. The company melted tens of millions of aluminum cans, magnesium aircraft parts, engine parts and borings from metal fabricators. The kind of pollution it created in the 1960s was the same kind of pollution it created until it closed its doors in 2004, reports by several regulatory agencies show. Throughout its existence, more than a dozen government departments nipped at Halaco's tail. None ever brought the company to heel, but it wasn't for lack of trying. The Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board's file on Halaco has more than 40,000 pages of reports, memos, letters and records of attempted enforcement actions. The EPA's files are equally voluminous. There are also boxes of dusty files at the Ventura County Air Pollution Control District, Oxnard Fire Department, Ventura County Environmental Health Department, state Department of Fish and Game, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, state Department of Toxic Substance Control and state Coastal Commission. "There is a pendulum that swings back and forth between working with people (at a business) to get them into compliance and using enforcement," said Jonathan Bishop, executive officer for the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board. "Looking back, I think we went too far in the direction of working with them (Halaco)." When the agencies tried to be more aggressive, Halaco sued. In 1979, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers tried to stop Halaco from dumping waste into what it called a wetland on the north end of Halaco's property. Art Fine, the company's attorney and son of its co-founder, Les Fine, sued. The agency dropped the effort, and stopped referring to it as a wetland. Two years later, the California Department of Toxic Substance Control found the company's waste exceeded state limits for copper and zinc. Fine sued again. The department responded by exempting Halaco from the limits on copper and stopped referring to the company's waste as "hazardous." When the California Coastal Commission argued in the early 1980s that Halaco needed a permit to operate in the coastal zone, Fine sued again. The case went to the state Supreme Court, where Halaco won. In 2001, David Nahai, chairman of the Regional Water Quality Control Board, marveled at Halaco's litigiousness, telling Fine, "You said that during the last decade, you've (Halaco has) been subject to investigation and inquiry and criticism and even worse by a number of agencies and by a number of governmental entities. Wouldn't it be easier to comply?" Several government officials attribute the company's ability to continue its operations to Art Fine's skill in the courtroom. Ventura Deputy District Attorney Mitch Disney, who successfully prosecuted the company for violating air pollution rules in 2003, said Fine was always well-prepared and often knew the regulations better than the regulators. But another attorney, Daniel Cooper, who is representing the Environmental Defense Center and Santa Barbara Channelkeeper in a civil suit against Halaco, said Fine was "lucky." Fine said his success had little to do with skill or luck. "We weren't violating any laws and regulations that applied, and we demonstrated that in court, whether it was against the EPA or the Department of Toxic Substance Control," he said. Halaco's problems with government agencies had more to do with changing times, said Marvin Burns, an attorney now representing 92-year-old Clarence Haack, company co-founder. The company started operating before the state's passage of the Coastal Act, before the federal Clean Air Act, the federal Clean Water Act, and the federal Endangered Species Act. And not all of Halaco's neighbors had problems with the plant. Jim Measures, personnel director for the paper recycling company when it was owned by a different company, said Halaco wasn't so bad. "I'm not a doctor or a scientist so I couldn't tell you if the fumes were dangerous," said Measures. "I'm a glass-half-full kind of guy. I don't buy into that conspiracy stuff." But the company couldn't win over everyone and the persistent complaints began when Halaco started its operations and didn't end until the company closed. A history of problems As far back as the mid-1950s, when the company was in Gardena, Halaco had problems. The Los Angeles County's Industrial Waste Division told Halaco in 1955 that its wastewater loaded with ammonia and a long list of metallic oxides couldn't be discharged into local waterways. Just as it did in Oxnard, the company had permits to recycle magnesium alloyed with radioactive thorium. But, according to a 1997 Nuclear Regulatory Commission document, Halaco didn't dispose of the waste properly and likely contaminated the Gardena Harbor dump in the late 1950s. Halaco moved to Oxnard because of complaints by neighbors in Gardena, according to court records. Company officials thought the Perkins Road site would allow them to dump Halaco's waste in the ocean and be far enough away from people to avoid problems. But problems with the company emerged here as soon as the Halaco began operations. Records show that neighbors complained of fumes throughout the 1960s. It wasn't just fumes, either. In a 1970 study, state biologists placed fish in water taken from the canal next to the plant. The fish died in 10 minutes. Halaco challenged the study, arguing that the ammonia that presumably caused the toxicity came from nearby farm fields. The Regional Water Quality Control Board stopped the company from dumping its wastewater directly into the Oxnard Industrial Drain in the 1970s. To deal with its waste, the company began pumping it into a settling pond where the water would evaporate, leaving solids that were scooped out and added to a growing pile of dust-like waste. In a 1981 EPA survey, crews noticed that "freshly deposited solids ... were observed to produce heat, emit crackling sounds, and produce gases." The stuff smelled of ammonia and remained hot and "reactive" for up to half a year. When the EPA attempted to stop Halaco from dumping the waste, the company sued and succeeded in getting the federal agency to back off. Despite those early studies, the Regional Water Quality Control Board sent a letter to Halaco in the mid-1980s, noting that its waste was essentially "inert." Ten years later, the board reversed itself and said the waste contained "hazardous substances." Halaco's studies stated that the waste was a "harmless product and demonstrates a remarkable lack of toxicity." In the mid-1980s, a lab hired by Halaco went so far as to rub the waste on shaved rabbits and feed it to rats to show it had no ill effects. Co-founder Les Fine referred to the waste as "salts and dirt." Five years ago, Dave Gable, the former general manager, said that radiation in the pile was of such a low level that a person "could have slept on a sheet of it all of your life and not had a problem." Neighborhood fixture Halaco's waste pile was right next to wetlands, a football field away from the beach and a few blocks from the neighborhood where Mike Johnson grew up. As kids in the 1970s, he and his friends used to play there. "The Halaco site had been a city dump beforehand so we'd find all kinds of old jars and glass bottles," said Johnson, who works on a tugboat at the Port of Hueneme. Sometimes the boys would come across chunks of metal or pots of slag hissing and crackling as they cooled in what Halaco workers referred to as "the boneyard," just north of the waste pile. As Johnson got older, he started surfing in front of Halaco. Surfers would run across the waste pile or wade through the mucky lagoon next to the plant to get to the beach. At home, Halaco's presence could be felt when the wind blew in the right direction. "It was a pretty nasty," said Johnson, who said as a kid he would get two or three bad bouts of bronchitis each year. When Halaco ran its massive silo-sized tumblers to wash the chunks of scrap metal and dirt-like leftovers from previous smelting, thuds would echo through South Oxnard. It sounded like a huge dryer into which someone had dropped bowling balls, said David Swingler, who lives about two miles from the plant. Swingler, a father of 10 who started taking long walks in the 1990s as therapy for a back problem, was quickly drawn to the mound. He noticed all sorts of debris when walking along the edge of the mound. "Hundreds and hundreds of automobile engine parts, door handles little pieces of machines," he said. "Millions of broken bits of everything." Once he walked along the top of the pile, smelling what he thought was muriatic acid. What he saw astounded him: a lake in the middle of the pile off of which wafted fog. "It smelled acidic and I walked through the fog without breathing, but halfway through it my eyes started burning," he said. "I thought, Whoa, that's a whole pond of acid there.' " About 20 minutes later the skin on one arm and the side of his face where the fog had hit burned and were red, he said. Over a 15-year period from 1989 to 2004, the Ventura County Air Pollution Control District received 322 complaints concerning Halaco. The company consistently was the target of more air nuisance complaints than any other county business, said Keith Duvall, manager for compliance and engineering for the district. Looking back now, Mike Johnson said he isn't surprised by how Halaco operated. "It's a testament to big money," Johnson said. "There's a whole lot back then that could have been done. But frankly we were from a lower economic class, a working-class neighborhood, and there were more pressing concerns." The Halaco series Today: Halaco Engineering operated at Ormond Beach for 40 years despite years of complaints from neighbors. Monday: The EPA has stepped in to figure out how to clean up a mountain of contaminated waste. Also, former employees, like Gary Howe, right, were not surprised the company closed. About this series After the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recommended including the site of the shuttered Halaco Engineering company smelting operation on a list of Superfund hazardous waste cleanup sites in January, Ventura County Star Staff Writer Scott Hadly began digging into what led to the contamination at the south Oxnard property. He spent five months combing through court documents and thousands of pages of local, state and federal enforcement files. He contacted more than 100 people, including former employees, government regulators, attorneys and neighbors of the old metals recycling company. About 50 of those individuals were interviewed for these stories. Hadly details how the company fended off regulators for 40 years, which frustrated some people who lived and worked near the plant. Comments Posted by Ventura22 on June 3, 2007 at 1:25 p.m. (Suggest removal) Looks like the former owner/operators of that place were nothiong more than pathological liars. I'd love to see them rounded up and forced to live on that site with all that contamination...along with their attorneys. They took advatage of the lower class residents nearby who didn't have the resources to fight them. These operators are some of the worst kind of criminals alive and are nothing short of mailcious, predatory and evil-minded. They knew good and well what they were doing was wrong and harmful and crafted clever ways to LIE their asses out of trouble every time!! Why the hell aren't these animals in prison??? The community as a whole knew what was going on out there but couldn't stop it. They tried and complained but it either fell onto deaf ears or was never followed-up on. The government agencies had a legal and moral responsibility to stop this but once again, our fine agencies let another businesss operate and violate all sorts of laws. They shirked their duties to stop it out of fear of lawyers, or just plain laziness(they'd have to actually work harder and do their job well to defeat this monster). This is a purely disgusting and disgraceful reflection upon the governing agencies that had jurisdiction over this place. There were laws that could have stopped this mess from happening way back then but they weren't enforced. If this issue doesn't make you feel anger and disgust, you have to be blind, deaf and dumb. This is outright sickening. The people need to demand better out of our government at ALL levels. Time for us to quit settling for less. © 2007 Ventura County Star ***************************************************************** 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: *****************************************************************