***************************************************************** 10/05/07 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 15.234 ***************************************************************** 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 [southnews] Bush determined to confront Iran's nuclear ambitions NUCLEAR REACTORS 2 US: Brick Township Bulletin: Board's Oyster Creek decision due in la 3 Guardian Unlimited: Britain is no wonderland for energy firms, says 4 Guardian Unlimited: Government halts nuclear clean-up privatisation 5 US: Seattle PI: State's nuke plant chemically messy 6 Thenews.pl: Poland wants one third from Baltic States’ nuclear pro 7 Free Press: Eight European governments. say nuclear power is incompa 8 US: NRC: NRC Reviewing Decommissioning Plan for New Haven, Conn., Si 9 BBC NEWS: Clear-up at reactor 50 years on 10 US: toledoblade.com: Seeing justice served 11 US: baltimoresun.com: U.S. backs nuclear loans -- 12 US: Brattleboro Reformer: Sanders is right on VY 13 US: NRC: NRC Issues Fourth National Report for the Convention on Nuc 14 US: Brattleboro Reformer - VSNAP: Outside review needed at Yankee 15 Canada: THERECORD.COM: Why isn't nuclear energy an election issue? 16 Reuters: Romania plans to build second nuclear power plant 17 US: Reuters: PG&E Diablo Canyon 2 nuclear unit refuels 1Q 2008 18 US: Reuters: Dominion shuts Wisc. Kewaunee reactor for work | 19 Reuters: British Energy's Torness nuclear reactor restarts | 20 US: NRC: NRC Receives First Application in Nearly two Decades for Ne 21 US: Dothan Eagle: Farley suffers another shutdown 22 US: Madison Courier: Panel coming to Madison for JPG hearing 23 CBC News: Point Lepreau shutdown costing NB Power $1M a day 24 US: NRC: Speech - S-07-044 "An Emerging Fuel Cycle Renaissance?", NR 25 US: BostonHerald.com: Vt. Gov. wants to limit out of state comment o 26 US: NRC: NRC Advisory Committee on Medical Uses of Isotopes to Meet 27 US: NRC: NRC Establishes New Advisory Panel on Nuclear Licensing 28 US: NRC: Omaha Public Power District; Notice of Denial of Amendment NUCLEAR SECURITY NUCLEAR SAFETY 29 US: ReviewJournal.com: Help for test site workers hits snag 30 US: Herald News: Feds to rule on Blockson request 31 London Times: Fifty years on, the deadly legacy of Britain's worst n 32 US: NRC: Advisory Committee on the Medical Uses of Isotopes: Meeting 33 US: Newswise Medical News: Low Levels of Perchlorate Exposure are Sa 34 MCM: The Aishah Ali Interview With Geoscientist Leuren Moret - NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE 35 Las Vegas SUN: Energy Department proposes doubling size of Nevada nu 36 ReviewJournal.com: YUCCA MOUNTAIN: DOE: Enlarge repository 37 KOLO: Nevada Officials Deride Proposal To Double Size Of Nuclear Dum 38 IHT: Greenpeace activists board carrier, protesting nuclear waste sh 39 US: Alameda Sun: Point Contamination Not a Big Concern, Yet 40 US: NRC: NRC Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste and Materials to Me 41 North Queensland Register: It's official: NT dump site nominated for PEACE 42 Oct. 5, 1986: Israel's Secret Nuke Arsenal Exposed 43 Independent: Inside France's secret war - 44 Asia Times: India holds key in NATO's world view 45 US: The Boston Globe: A nuclear-free world - 46 AFP: US proposes common missile defense network with Russia, NATO - 47 SPIEGEL ONLINE: Defusing the Dangerous Legacy of the Korean War - US DEPT. OF ENERGY 48 Times-News: INL cleanup moves ahead 49 Tri-City Herald: Bechtel National faces $165,000 DOE fine for violat 50 Tri-City Herald: Energy Northwest fined for waste storage violations 51 Hanford News: Decision on ill Hanford workers to take time, panel sa 52 lamonitor.com: Scorpions in the bottle 53 OnlineAthens.com: Radiation levels up, but still safe at nuclear pla ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** FULL NEWS STORIES ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** 1 [southnews] Bush determined to confront Iran's nuclear ambitions Date: Sat, 6 Oct 2007 00:13:28 -0500 (CDT) US President George W Bush said he is determined to confront Iran's nuclear ambitions and warned that Tehran should not expect a more complacent attitude from his successor. Bush determined to confront Iran's nuclear ambitions From correspondents in Washington Agence France-Presse October 06, 2007 09:25am US President George W Bush said he is determined to confront Iran's nuclear ambitions and warned that Tehran should not expect a more complacent attitude from his successor. In an interview yesterday with the Al-Arabiya satellite network, Mr Bush said that he was determined to seek resolution of these issues through diplomatic means and that he will try to impose new sanctions that will force the Islamic state to renounce its uranium enrichment activities. "The Iranian regime must understand that I'm dedicated to the proposition that they should not continue their desire to enrich, as will be people that follow me in office," President Bush said. "There is universal concern about Iranian ambition here in America. This is not a party issue, an issue between one party or the other," he said. More tense relationships between Washington and Tehran have fuelled concerns that President Bush may decide to use force against the country before the end of his presidency. But Mr Bush dismissed reports that he had already ordered to prepare a military strike against Iran for January or February. "I would call that empty propaganda," he said. "And that kind of gossip is just what it is, it's gossip, it's baseless gossip." Iran denied charges that it had seeked nuclear weapons under cover of a civilian atomic energy program and has drawn UN sanctions for refusing to freeze its uranium enrichment, which can yield materials for a nuclear bomb. _________________________________________________________-- Beating the Drums for the Next War BY Scott Horton Harpers October 1, 2007 Last week brought heads of state and senior diplomats in number to New York for the opening of the General Assembly of the United Nations. It also brought President Bush and President Ahmadinejad to the podium. For the larger audience in the world community, however, one of the most important questions of the day remains whether the verbal blows traded between these two pugnacious leaders will turn in the fullness of time into bullets and bombs. And the sense of the best-informed was clear: yes. I spoke with a number of European diplomats who are keeping track of the issue, and I found a near uniform analysis. These diplomats believe that the United States will launch an air war on Iran, and that it will occur within the next six to eight months. I am therefore moving the hands of the Next War clock another minute closer to midnight and putting the likelihood of conflict at 70%. Its still not certain, and its still avertable, but at this point it has to be seen as conventional wisdom to say that America is headed for another war in the Islamic worldits fourth since Bush became president, if we include the proxy war in Lebanon. And this time it will be a war against a nation with vastly greater military resources, as well as a demonstrated ability to wield terrorism as a tacticIran. Lets take quick stock of the further indicators from the last week or so. Shifting Targets On Sunday, Sy Hershs latest piece appeared, offering a good take on the Bush Administrations changing plans for a war on Iran. The headline from the Hersh piece, called Shifting Targets, makes clear that the Pentagon has been called upon to redraft its plans for a war against Iran. These new plans are very close to those reported in the London quality press a few weeks ago: an aerial war with a somewhat narrower focus on specific units of the elite Republican Guard. Hershs piece is full of color, and after reading it I immediately understood why the European diplomats were so convinced that the decision to bomb Iran was all-but-final. Heres a key passage reflecting a series of discussions which give some flavor of the war spirit in the White House: the President told [Crocker] that he was thinking of hitting Iranian targets across the border and that the British were on board. At that point, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice interjected that there was a need to proceed carefully, because of the ongoing diplomatic track. Bush ended by instructing Crocker to tell Iran to stop interfering in Iraq or it would face American retribution. At a White House meeting with Cheney this summer, according to a former senior intelligence official, it was agreed that, if limited strikes on Iran were carried out, the Administration could fend off criticism by arguing that they were a defensive action to save soldiers in Iraq. If Democrats objected, the Administration could say, Bill Clinton did the same thing; he conducted limited strikes in Afghanistan, the Sudan, and in Baghdad to protect American lives. The former intelligence official added, There is a desperate effort by Cheney et al. to bring military action to Iran as soon as possible. Meanwhile, the politicians are saying, You cant do it, because every Republican is going to be defeated, and were only one fact from going over the cliff in Iraq. But Cheney doesnt give a rats ass about the Republican worries, and neither does the President. As we have noted before, the final order to proceed to hostilities has not issued. In all likelihood this would only happen in the immediate couple of days before bombing. However, the pace of preparations is quickening and the focus is becoming more and more apparent: there has been a significant increase in the tempo of attack planning. In mid-August, senior officials told reporters that the Administration intended to declare Irans Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist organization. And two former senior officials of the C.I.A. told me that, by late summer, the agency had increased the size and the authority of the Iranian Operations Group. (A spokesman for the agency said, The C.I.A. does not, as a rule, publicly discuss the relative size of its operational components.) Theyre moving everybody to the Iran desk, one recently retired C.I.A. official said. Theyre dragging in a lot of analysts and ramping up everything. Its just like the fall of 2002the months before the invasion of Iraq, when the Iraqi Operations Group became the most important in the agency. He added, The guys now running the Iranian program have limited direct experience with Iran. In the event of an attack, how will the Iranians react? They will react, and the Administration has not thought it all the way through. Hersh also finds a White House busily engaged in identifying the best casus belli: what precipitating event will best serve the Administrations war effort? Its been reported for some time that the White House has slowly reached a realization that the approach taken in the lead-up to the Iraq War will not work again. A National Intelligence Estimate dealing with the Iranian nuclear program has been all-but-final for some time; it has been held up. It would be reasonable conjecture at this point to say that it does not serve the interests of the war party. The alternative approach is simple: it is to say that Iranian weaponry and Iranian-trained terrorists are battling American soldiers in Iraq today. The death of some Americans in an attack involving a bomb linked to the Iranians could easily be taken as a pretext for war with Iran. The testimony provided by General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker seems to have been laying further foundation for this effort. The same can be said for the resolution proposed by Senators Lieberman and Kyle which was a thinly veiled effort to authorize the use of military force against Iran. The Democratic leadership succeeded in watering down this measure to eliminate its use as legal authority for a new war against Iran. A major question is whether Europeans will join America in a war against Iran. Comments from the Ilysie Palace have suggested both that France expects the war, and that France is moving towards a position that is far more supportive of the Americans. Thats still far from a promise that French bombers would join the Americans. The graver speculation now focuses on Britain, and indeed, some Bush Administration insiders are claiming that British forces will join in the effort, notwithstanding Gordon Browns efforts to put some distance between himself and Bush on security issues. Hersh reports that the situation between the U.S. and U.K. remains testy, and he cites a very revealing incident: Another recent incident, in Afghanistan, reflects the tension over intelligence. In July, the London Telegraph reported that what appeared to be an SA-7 shoulder-launched missile was fired at an American C-130 Hercules aircraft. The missile missed its mark. Months earlier, British commandos had intercepted a few truckloads of weapons, including one containing a working SA-7 missile, coming across the Iranian border. But there was no way of determining whether the missile fired at the C-130 had come from Iranespecially since SA-7s are available through black-market arms dealers. Vincent Cannistraro, a retired C.I.A. officer who has worked closely with his counterparts in Britain, added to the story: The Brits told me that they were afraid at first to tell us about the incidentin fear that Cheney would use it as a reason to attack Iran. The intelligence subsequently was forwarded, he said. The retired four-star general confirmed that British intelligence was worried about passing the information along. The Brits dont trust the Iranians, the retired general said, but they also dont trust Bush and Cheney. Of course that describes the attitude of most Americans as well these days. I Hate All Iranians Two key Bush Administration figures are busy grabbing headlines in Britain this weekend. Londons Mail on Sunday reports: British MPs visiting the Pentagon to discuss Americas stance on Iran and Iraq were shocked to be told by one of President Bushs senior women officials: I hate all Iranians. And she also accused Britain of dismantling the Anglo-US-led coalition in Iraq by pulling troops out of Basra too soon. The all-party group of MPs say Debra Cagan, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Coalition Affairs to Defence Secretary Robert Gates, made the comments this month. And the Guardian reports on remarks delivered by John Bolton, Bushs former ambassador to the United Nations, at a group meeting held in connection with the Tory conference: I dont think the use of military force is an attractive option, but I would tell you I dont know what the alternative is. Because life is about choices, I think we have to consider the use of military force. I think we have to look at a limited strike against their nuclear facilities. He added that any strike should be followed by an attempt to remove the source of the problem, Mr Ahmadinejad. If we were to strike Iran it should be accompanied by an effort at regime change The US once had the capability to engineer the clandestine overthrow of governments. I wish we could get it back. The fact that intelligence about Irans nuclear activity was partial should not be used as an excuse not to act, Mr Bolton insisted. Intelligence can be wrong in more than one direction. He asked how the British government would respond if terrorists exploded a nuclear device at home. Its only Manchester? Responding after theyre used is unacceptable. This all reflects just the sort of mature and sober analysis that Britons have come to expect from the key advisors of President Bush in the course of the last few years. NPod Strikes In the last week The Politico reported that Norman Podhoretz, a titan of the Neoconservative movement, had a secret, off-the-schedule meeting with President Bush and Karl Rove at which he decried the ridiculousness of diplomatic negotiations with Iran. The idea of diplomatic talks with Iran, he said, brought Rove and Bush to laughter. And today, Podhoretz announces that he thinks the decision has been made in concept to bomb Iran before Bush and Cheney exit Washington. In a CSPAN interview, Podhoretz states: I believe President Bush is going to order airstrikes [on Iran] before he leaves office. Because he has several times said at least twice to my knowledge that if we allow Iranians to acquire nuclear capabilities, 50 years from now, people will look back at us the way we look back at Munich and say how could they have let this happen? Freedom Watch Gets New Marching Orders Millions of right-wing dollars have been pumped into a mysterious new overnight wonder organization called Freedom Watch. Former White House press secretary Ari Fleisher plays a key role running it, though when interviewed he didnt even seem to know who the people in its very slick advertising were. But today we learn that Freedom Watchs propaganda volleys are being retargeted. Previously they were concentrated to support the Bush Administrations arguments for an extension of the Surge in Iraq. Now, it seems theyll be advocating the Next War. The New York Times reports: Although the group declined to identify the experts, several were invited from the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington research group with close ties to the White House. Some institute scholars have advocated a more confrontational policy to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, including keeping military action as an option. [] If Hitlers warnings were heeded when he wrote Mein Kampf, he could have been stopped, said Bradley Blakeman, 49, the president of Freedoms Watch and a former deputy assistant to Mr. Bush. Ahmadinejad is giving all the same kind of warning signs to us, and the region he wants the destruction of the United States and the destruction of Israel. The New Rollout Back at the end of August, Barney Rubin told us of word he got from a source suggesting that a week after Labor Day, the office of Vice President Cheney would be pushing a new product roll-out. It would involve the usual suspects and it would be a test-marketing of an air war against Iran. Were two weeks and a bit into that process. If you go back and sift through your newspapers, youll find that Rubins unnamed source clearly knew exactly what he was talking about. Indeed, what Ive summarized here is the tiniest fragment of the total rollout effort (I didnt even mention the Anti-Defamation Leagues program, and they actually even called it a rollout). Not only is it underway, Cheneys role as the coordinator has become increasingly transparent. As psy ops projects go, this one isnt terribly sophisticated. But no matter: the American media is just as easily suckered by this project as it was the last time. Just look at how the war party spun the broadcast media during the Ahmadinejad visit last week. The old adage is Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. America is well into the process of being fooled twice. http://harpers.org/archive/2007/10/hbc-90001319 The archives of South News can be found at http://southmovement.alphalink.com.au/southnews/ ***************************************************************** 2 Brick Township Bulletin: Board's Oyster Creek decision due in late fall Brick Township, NJ Front Page October 4, 2007 BY DANIELLE MEDINA and PATRICIA A. MILLER Correspondent and Staff Writer An advisory board for the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission will rule by late November on a contention that the drywell surrounding the reactor at the Oyster Creek nuclear plant is unsafe. The three judges of the Atomic Licensing and Safety Board listened to two days of testimony last week from experts from both AmerGen, the plant's owner, and a citizens' coalition that claims that portions of the drywell could be dangerously corroded and improperly monitored. "Whatever happens, the parties can then appeal to the commission [NRC] itself," said Neil A. Sheehan, an NRC spokesman. Lawyers and experts for both sides have until Oct. 10 to submit their written briefs, he said. "The parties have to wrap up their arguments, now that they have had a chance to present their cases before the judges," Sheehan said. The Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station on Route 9 in Lacey Township is the oldest nuclear plant in the country. AmerGen wants the plant to be relicensed for another 20 years. Oyster Creek went online in 1969. But the coalition - a group of six environmental organizations that vigorously opposes the relicensing - fought back and submitted a contention that AmerGen's monitoring of the drywell shell is insufficient and portions of the shell will not withstand another 20 years of operation. The ASLB hearings were held on Sept. 24 and Sept. 25 at the Ocean County Administration Building in Toms River. The ASLB's decision to hear the coalition's contention was a historic one. It was the first time in history that the advisory board agreed to hear a contention raised about a nuclear plant. Testimony on Sept. 25 focused on water sources that might corrode the drywell liner and the lifespan of the epoxy coating on the liner itself. Expert witnesses for AmerGen said that water is only present when the reactor needs to be refueled, an event that occurs every other year and lasts for about 26 days. The last time the reactor was filled with water was on Oct. 18, 2006, and it was emptied on Nov. 3, 2006. "There are no other operating conditions where water would be in the cavity," said Alex Polonsky, an attorney for Amer- Gen. AmerGen's experts testified that water no longer gets trapped inside the reactor since the sand, which held the water against the base of the shell and led to corrosion, was removed in 1992. But the citizens coalition contends there is water present even when the reactor isn't refueling. "They have found water in the upper drywell shell, but they cannot identify where it is coming from," said Brick resident Janet Tauro, a member of Grandmothers, Mothers and More for Nuclear Safety, one of the groups in the coalition. "They have never been able to address that, and as long as there is continual water, there is corrosion." AmerGen said that there is very little chance that the epoxy coating on the drywell liner, which is meant to protect the shell from corrosion, will fail. AmerGen experts testified that the epoxy's manufacturer expects the coating to maintain its integrity because of its environment. And if a failure of the coating were to occur, it would have done so in the first few years, after it was initially applied, they said. When corrosion was found in the lower level of the liner in 1992, the sand was removed, the drywell shell cleaned, and the epoxy coating was applied, they said. AmerGen plans to reapply the epoxy as part of its maintenance plan for the plant and inspect the liner and make any necessary repairs. Rudolf H. Hausler, the coalition's expert, said there were pinholes in the epoxy coating, which could eventually become corroded. "I think it is reasonable to postulate that pinholes can occur when the epoxy coating is applied," Hausler said. "Amer- Gen hasn't found pinholes because they haven't looked for them." But AmerGen experts maintained that the epoxy coating itself helps to prevent pinholes because it is made of solid material and does not contain any solvents, which are common causes of pinholes. The epoxy's gray color also makes it visually easy to spot rust spots, Amer- Gen said. Hausler also questioned whether the entire drywell line was coated with the epoxy. He specifically cited a gap region between a vent pipe and the shell that might be vulnerable to corrosion. AmerGen said that the sand bed region is completely coated down to the floor and that there isn't any sand in the gap area in question. The thickness of the drywell shell, which is designed to contain radiation in the event of an accident, has been called into question by critics of the plant who say it barely meets federal regulations. AmerGen maintains that its plan to measure the drywell shell once every four years is sufficient, while the citizens groups want measurements taken more than once per year. ASLB Judge E. Roy Hawkens said that the decision can be appealed to the NRC, and the NRC's decision can be further appealed to a federal appeals court and eventually to the U.S. Supreme Court. ***************************************************************** 3 Guardian Unlimited: Britain is no wonderland for energy firms, says Eon chief David Gow in Brussels and Terry Macalister Friday October 5, 2007 Wulf Bernotat, chief executive of Eon, Britain's second-largest energy producer and supplier, yesterday savaged the UK market and its regulator, Ofgem, for failing to ensure lower gas and electricity prices and the required investment in infrastructure networks. "The UK energy market is not the wonderland people claim it to be. I have some doubts whether one can take the UK market as a model for the rest of Europe," said Mr Bernotat. His comments were echoed by his counterpart in the UK, Paul Golby, who said the government was "running out of time" to put in place an energy policy that would meet its twin needs of energy security and lower carbon emissions. The chief executive of Eon UK said there was a desperate need for decisions to be taken on issues such as nuclear, carbon capture and the renewables obligation while he feared election talk could distract ministers even further. "Not much has happened over the summer and we really are running out of time in a number of different areas. I said some time ago that UK energy policy was like a book with a title but nothing inside it. Now we have a few chapter headings but no real details. We must fill in the blanks," he said. Eon's UK boss is worried that there could be further delays in a decision on a new generation of atomic power stations after the public consultation ends next week and says Britain needs to lead the European Union towards putting a new carbon trading regime in place. "It's very difficult for people like me trying to invest hundreds of millions of pounds. It is more an act of faith than anything else given you really do not know what the price of carbon is going to be in future." Mr Bernotat is heading a campaign against European commission plans to break up Eon and other big German energy groups by forcing them to sell off their transmission networks. He singled out Sir John Mogg, Ofgem chairman, as a main architect of the EU proposals to "expropriate" Eon and said they were based on a false and outdated analysis. "In the UK we have learned that if the regulator goes too far as it did for a number of years in just promoting the consumer interest and not putting enough into the stability of the grid and infrastructure, you end up with the situation that the grid is suffering. "You must allow grid operators to earn a decent profit to incentivise investment and that's only now happening. More investment in 'wiring Britain' is now taking place and you don't need ownership unbundling [break-up] for that." Mr Bernotat said UK retail energy prices were only lower than Germany's because the state took far fewer taxes. He said Eon was investing €3.5bn (£2.42bn) in transmission and distribution networks while National Grid Transco was investing only €2.2bn. Mr Golby believes the government cannot wait for a "magic bullet" to solve its problems. "We need a bit of nuclear, clean coal, gas and energy efficiency to solve both our problems and that of the wider global community such as China." Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007 ***************************************************************** 4 Guardian Unlimited: Government halts nuclear clean-up privatisation Questions over private sector role after tendering is suspended Terry Macalister Friday October 5, 2007 The government's policy of handing over the clean-up of atomic power stations to the private sector was in crisis last night after the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority put on ice a £3.8bn plan to outsource the dismantling of five "Magnox South" plants, including Sizewell A and Dungeness A. The setback follows industry speculation that the authority is to have its budget slashed in the government's forthcoming comprehensive spending review. A US firm, EnergySolutions, has been managing the reactors in the stations grouped under Magnox North and Magnox South since June. But the government originally planned to put the longer term clean-up of these plants out to a wider competitive tender. Industry experts said the programme had been unravelling over the past couple of months as private sector firms became increasingly disillusioned with the potential at Magnox South. "These are the first cracks in the competition process," said one consultant to the nuclear firms, and suggested it could lead to other projects being delayed. There has been talk of serious disagreements between the state-owned decommissioning authority and private companies over the price of the decommissioning contracts. Many have lost interest in opportunities in Britain. In a statement on its website, the authority said it had decided to hold back the questionnaire for companies interested in bidding for Magnox South. "Feedback from the Magnox South industry day and subsequent market engagement identified issues around the sequencing, scope and timing of the remaining competitions," it said. The authority said a pause in the process would enable it and the government to consider any lessons learned "and review the best way forward to ensure we have the optimum timing and scope of competitions for the NDA's remaining sites in order to attract the highest quality bidding teams to the competitive dialogue process." The authority has been successfully pressing ahead this year with a wider privatisation and decommissioning programme. In August it announced a preferred bidder to take over management of the low-level waste repository near Drigg, in Cumbria, from the state-owned company BNFL. Talks are also continuing with a number of potential partners over the future competitive tendering for control of the huge Sellafield site, also in Cumbria. The Magnox South reactors are at five power station sites: Berkeley, Bradwell, Dungeness A, Hinkley Point A and Sizewell A. Some decommissioning has been started. The decommissioning authority had been proposing an initial clean-up contract would run for five years with annual spending of £225m, but it has also said the licence could run for 17 years, giving a total value of £3.8bn. A statement released to coincide with an industry seminar on June 14 talked about the fee for the contract being related to the "annual spend, risk and opportunities and performance". An industry expert who asked not to be named said companies had entered earlier stages of the privatisation programme expecting profit margins of 10% to 15%. But the authority has since made clear it would be aiming at margins closer to 4%. It has been negotiating its budget for the next three years with the Treasury under the government's spending review and is believed to be facing a squeeze. The agency's chief executive, Ian Roxburgh, said the bidders should assume the annual budget for Magnox decommissioning would be £225m, but circumstances could raise or lower the figure. He cited "hazard reduction" as a reason cash could go elsewhere, which some have interpreted as a suggestion money might be transferred to Sellafield or Dounreay if necessary, once the five Magnox South plants had been safely defuelled. Bob Churchill, the authority's head of commercial, reiterated that it "reserved the right to reallocate funds to other [site licence companies]". He also warned clean-up costs could soar as contractors switched to other infrastructure projects such as the Olympic games or possibly the building of new nuclear power stations. Useful links British Energy Department of Trade and Industry British Nuclear Fuels Ltd Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Greenpeace Come Clean WMD awareness programme UK atomic energy authority National Radiological Protection Board Friends of the Earth World Nuclear Association World Nuclear Transport Institute Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007 ***************************************************************** 5 Seattle PI: State's nuke plant chemically messy Officials at Energy Northwest cringe a little when you say their nuclear plant is located at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. They seem to fear being tainted by the massive waste site's fouled reputation. Energy Northwest's Columbia Generating Station nuclear plant But when I got a press release this afternoon from the state Ecology Department announcing a $120,000 fine because of Energy Northwest's chemically messy ways, it sounded oddly Hanford-esque. (And for the uninitiated, Hanford is super polluted from waste spilled, dumped and leaked in the effort to build radioactive bombs.) From the release: During the six week inspection, Ecology and EPA found industrial chemicals and hazardous wastes improperly labeled and stored in old storage sheds, wastes left inside laboratory work stations, unreported spills of industrial chemicals, and chemical waste abandoned around both sites. In addition, serious concerns were identified with programs for training employees to safely handle hazardous waste materials.... "The improper storage of these hazardous materials is a serious violation," said Jane Hedges, Nuclear Waste Program Manager. "The unacceptable training of employees, the lack of reporting of spills of dangerous substances into the environment and the improper storage of waste escalated our concerns about lack of management and safety oversight at Energy Northwest." But perhaps the best part came with the response from Energy Northwest (which is, remember, the new name for Washington Public Power Supply System or WPPSS, a.k.a. "whoops"). From the Associated Press: Energy Northwest spokesman Brad Peck says the utility recognizes there are areas for improvement. No word on whether Energy Northwest will appeal the fine. Posted by Lisa Stiffler at October 4, 2007 5:38 p.m. Categories: Energy, Hanford, Toxics seattlepi.com serves about 1.7 million unique visitors Send comments to newmedia@seattlepi.com Send investigative tips to iteam@seattlepi.com ©1996-2007 Seattle Post-Intelligencer ***************************************************************** 6 Thenews.pl: Poland wants one third from Baltic States’ nuclear project - Created: Friday, October 5. 2007 Poland is not going to speed up the construction of power connections with Lithuania, until they are sure that the country receives one third of the power produced in a nuclear power station, situated at the now out of date Soviet built Ignalina plant in Lithuania, announced Poland’s Minister of Economy Piotr Woźniak during a joint conference of Baltic Sea states’ economy ministers in Vilnius. The conference concerned preparations to connect power systems of the Baltic Sea states with the European system. Lithuanian Minister of Economy Vytas Navickas said that without a Power Bridge with Poland his country is not able to join – in technical sense – in the uniform European power system. The Baltic Sea countries are to connect to it in 2015 and according to optimistic forecasts, the Power Bridge between Poland and Lithuania could be build as soon as in 2012. Polish Minister Woźniak, however, announced that if Poland will not get 1000-1200 megawatts from the new power plant in Ignalina, the construction of the Power Bridge could be delayed. Next week the International Energy Security Conference is to be held in Vilnius. During the summit it is being planned to sign an agreement on creating a company to construct the Power Bridge between the countries. The power plant in Ignalina is to be erected by 2015 in eastern Lithuania, near to an already existing unit, which produces 70 percent of Lithuanian electricity. Expected power of the plant is 3200 megawatts. It is to cost 5-6 billion Euros. At first the plant was to be built by energy companies from three Baltic States: Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, all of them having equal shares. Several months ago Poland was also asked to participate in the project. ***************************************************************** 7 Free Press: Eight European governments. say nuclear power is incompatible with sustainable development by Ministerial Statement - Vienna October 5, 2007 The Environment Ministers of Austria, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Latvia and Norway supported by Luxembourg and Iceland meet in Vienna today, in order to enhance cooperation and contribute further to the discussions on the role of nuclear power in the climate change and energy efficiency debates. The principal issues discussed were nuclear safety and security, the need for more and better information to be provided to countries neighbouring nuclear states; issues of transparency regarding nuclear projects, transparency regarding the true costs of nuclear power as well as alternatives to nuclear power and the need to ensure the development and provision of sustainable energy supplies and services. In their discussions, Ministers * Reaffirmed that it remains the sovereign right of each country to decide on its energy mix. * Reiterated that the inherent safety, environmental and proliferation risks associated with the nuclear energy option remain. * Emphasised their view that nuclear power is not compatible with the concept of sustainable development and that they are convinced that nuclear power does not provide a viable option to combat climate change. * Called upon all governments to ensure that all aspects of nuclear power, including its risks, are clearly articulated to their citizens, in order to enable a balanced and informed debate to take place. * Emphasised that the transboundary nature of the risks associated with nuclear power and their collective responsibility towards the health and environment of their citizens dictates that their interests and concerns are taken into account by nuclear states in relation to all nuclear projects and installations. * Underlined that nuclear and non-nuclear states should make full use of the pertinent provisions of European as well as international law, including the Euratom Treaty, regarding public participation and consultations with countries which are likely to be exposed to adverse transboundary impacts of nuclear installations or projects. Furthermore, nuclear countries were invited to jointly work on the improvement of such provisions. * Agreed to cooperate at regional and international level in order to secure the highest common safety standards for nuclear installations with due regard to the interests of all states. * Called on the EU to continue their work in the field of nuclear safety and to promote transparency, inter alia by encouraging the recently established High Level Group on Nuclear Safety and Waste Management to identify effective measures to support these goals. * Reemphasised their commitment to articulate their shared concerns regarding nuclear power and - once again - called upon nuclear countries to take decisive action on addressing the unresolved issues arising from the operation of nuclear facility namely, safety and security concerns, pollution risks, radioactive discharges, nuclear liability, waste and proliferation risks. * Voiced their concern that a global growth in nuclear power would severely increase proliferation risks, and called on the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to enhance its supporting role for national regulatory functions, including emergency preparedness, safety, facility and material security, and safeguards. * Underlined their conviction that an increase in energy saving and efficiency combined with a switch to renewable sources of energy as well as concerted efforts to reduce deforestation and to develop other environmentally sound non-nuclear low greenhouse gas technologies, is the more sustainable way to meet the climate and energy challenges we face. * Agreed that the Vienna meeting had been very productive and worthwhile, and that a further meeting of the Ministers and those of other interested States will take place in Italy in 2008. Weitere Informationen: Pressemitteilung vom 01.10.2007 [/pressemitteilungen/aktuelle_pressemitteilungen/pm/print/40059.php]: Umweltminister sehen in Atomenergie kein Mittel gegen den Klimawandel Source: http://www.bmu.de/english/international_environmental_policy/doc/40060 .php 01.10.2007, 15:20:19 © Bundesministerium für Umwelt, Naturschutz und Reaktorsicherheit (BMU)   The Columbus Free Press ***************************************************************** 8 NRC: NRC Reviewing Decommissioning Plan for New Haven, Conn., Site; Hearing Opportunity to be Offered News Release - Region I - 2007-052 - U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION Office of Public Affairs, Region I 475 Allendale Road, King of Prussia, Pa. 19406 www.nrc.gov CONTACT: Diane Screnci (610) 337-5330 Neil A. Sheehan (610) 337-5331 E-mail: opa1@nrc.gov The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is considering approval of a decommissioning plan for a former nuclear materials facility in New Haven, Conn. As part of that review process, an opportunity to request a hearing on the plan will be offered. United Nuclear Corp. (UNC) – Naval Products previously held an NRC license for its facilities in New Haven and Montville, Conn. UNC closed the New Haven facility in 1974, transferring the radioactive materials from that site to the Montville location. From 1973 through 1976, the New Haven site was decontaminated and decommissioned, with final radiological surveys finished in 1976. UNC’s license was amended in April 1976 to remove the New Haven facility. That action cleared the way for the site to be released for “unrestricted” use consistent with existing regulations and guidance at the time. After the Montville facility was decontaminated and decommissioned, the UNC license was terminated on June 8, 1994. In the early 1990s, the NRC initiated a program to ensure that past licenses had been terminated in accordance with the agency’s current release criteria for unrestricted use. (Current criteria require that members of the public should not be exposed to more than 25 millirems of radiation annually from a site released for unrestricted use. For comparison purposes, the average American is exposed to about 360 millirems of radiation each year from natural and manmade sources.) The NRC contracted with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to conduct that review. During the course of that evaluation, ORNL determined that UNC did not have sufficient documentation to verify the New Haven facility had been properly decontaminated prior to its release for unrestricted use. Subsequently, the NRC and Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education performed radiological surveys of the site in 1996 and found soil contaminated with uranium in excess of allowable levels. The residual radioactivity does not pose a threat to the health and safety of members of the public. UNC carried out additional studies of the site, performed further remediation work and then submitted a decommissioning plan to the NRC on June 7, 2005. A Final Status Survey Plan, which details the UNC testing to be performed to demonstrate that any radioactive material left on-site meets acceptable limits, was provided to the NRC in October 2006. Prior to approving the decommissioning plan, the NRC staff must complete a review of the proposal, including an environmental assessment. The review also entails the opportunity for any person whose interest may be affected by the action to request a hearing. Such a request must include specific contentions. A notice of opportunity to request a hearing will be published soon in the Federal Register. The deadline for requesting a hearing is 60 days after publication of the notice. A request for a hearing and a petition for leave to intervene must be filed with the Secretary of the Commission, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, D.C. 20555-0001, Attention: Rulemaking and Adjudications Staff. Requests may also be submitted by fax to (301) 415-1101 or e-mail to HEARINGDOCKET@nrc.gov. A copy should also be submitted to the NRC Office of General Counsel, by fax to (301) 415-3725 or e-mail to OGCMailCenter@nrc.gov. More information about the UNC decommissioning plan is available via the NRC’s electronic document system known as ADAMS (Agencywide Document Access and Management System) at: www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams.html . The ADAMS Accession Numbers for documents related to this matter are: ML051780083, ML051780088, ML051780091 and ML062910318. Help in accessing documents through the Reading Room is available by contacting the NRC’s Public Document Room at 800-397-4209 or by e-mail at pdr@nrc.gov. NRC news releases are available through a free listserv subscription at the following Web address: http://www.nrc.gov/public-involve/listserver.html. The NRC Home Page at www.nrc.gov also offers a Subscribe to News link in the News & Information menu. E-mail notifications are sent to subscribers when news releases are posted to NRC's Web Site. Friday, October 05, 2007 ***************************************************************** 9 BBC NEWS: Clear-up at reactor 50 years on Last Updated: Friday, 5 October 2007, 20:42 GMT 21:42 UK Part of the sealed off reactor to be decommissioned A sealed off area of a Cumbrian nuclear reactor is to be cleaned up - 50 years after being ravaged by fire. In October 1957, flames swept through a graphite cooler reactor at Windscale and a radioactive cloud was released. The reactor, which was unsalvageable, was buried in concrete and the sale of milk from nearby farms was banned. The fire burned for two days before it was brought under control and a second reactor on the site was also shut down and the site decontaminated. When the site was renamed Sellafield, new nuclear reactors were built. Cost of £500m Peter English has recently retired from Sellafield after working there for 50 years and recalls the day fire broke out. He said: "We arrived for work as normal to the apprentice workshop and it was only then that we discovered something was wrong. "The managers at the time told us to keep all the windows and doors shut and we were kept in the workshop the whole time." * BBC Copyright Notice ***************************************************************** 10 toledoblade.com: Seeing justice served Article published Friday, October 5, 2007 NORTHWEST Ohio did more than dodge a bullet when the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant was shut down in 2002, it avoided a potential nuclear disaster. And the best thing that could come out of the criminal trials of three former Davis-Besse workers would be a clearer picture of whether their bosses should have been sitting with them at the defense table. Former FirstEnergy employee David Geisen and contractor Rodney Cook are on trial in U.S. District Court in Toledo. They are accused of lying to the government in documents used by Toledo Edison's parent firm to argue against the Nuclear Regulatory Commission pulling the plug on the Ottawa County plant on Dec. 31, 2001, to fix a corroded reactor head. Former FirstEnergy employee Andrew Siemaszko will go on trial later on the same charges. The three face up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine each if they are convicted. FirstEnergy insisted in November, 2001, that the plant's nuclear reactor was safe but three months later it was discovered that leaking acid had come within a fraction of an inch of breaching the reactor's protective cap, which could have resulted in a serious nuclear accident. FirstEnergy was slapped with a record $33.5 million fine for withholding information about the safety hazard. In addition, replacement and repair of equipment cost the company more than $600 million and it spent millions more on replacement power as the plant was idled for two years. But none of the company's senior managers has been held personally to account because the Justice Department says it lacks evidence of criminal intent. Leaving aside the guilt of the three former Davis-Besse workers currently charged, we are at a loss to understand why they would decide on their own to fool federal regulators. What did they have to gain? Nothing that we can think of. Did they merely decide one day, in a fit Homer Simpsonesque logic, that they'd cover up evidence of corrosion on the reactor head? Doh! That's not convincing. This leaves to the possibility that the decision was made at a higher, even a senior level, and that these three underlings were either willingly complicit or went along to protect their careers. Whatever the result for these three, we hope the trials result in revelation of the truth about all of those who endangered northwest Ohio. © 2007 The Blade. By using this service, you accept the terms of our privacy statement and our visitor agreement. Please read them. The Toledo Blade Company, 541 N. Superior St., Toledo, OH 43660 , (419) 724-6000 ***************************************************************** 11 baltimoresun.com: U.S. backs nuclear loans -- Guarantee program still needs billions in funds from Congress; Constellation expected to benefit Control-room operator Eric Nehf watches instruments at Constellation Energy's nuclear plant in Southern Maryland. The utility is seeking to build another reactor at the site. (Sun photo by Lloyd Fox / August 17, 2007) By Paul Adams | Sun reporter October 5, 2007 The Energy Department approved giving federal loan guarantees to finance new nuclear plants yesterday, but the industry won't be able to take advantage until Congress approves billions more to fund the program - something that is not expected until at least 2009. Despite that delay, the decision could help Baltimore's Constellation Energy Group kick-start development of a new reactor it hopes to put adjacent to its Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant in Lusby. Constellation said the loan guarantees are essential to its plans to build a standardized series of advanced nuclear plants for itself and other utility buyers nationwide. The plants - at least six so far - are among about 30 new reactors proposed industrywide and would be among the first built in the U.S. in more than 30 years. The Energy Department's decision yesterday clears the way for billions of dollars in loan guarantees for a first wave of projects that include hydrogen fuel cell, biomass, solar and so-called "clean" coal plants. Congress approved the program in the 2005 energy bill to support environmentally friendly projects that might otherwise be unable to obtain financing from lenders because they are deemed risky. Constellation said the loan program announced yesterday would help it entice other utilities to buy new reactors from its UniStar Nuclear subsidiary. "I do believe the loan guarantee rulemaking we're seeing today could prove to be a significant watershed event ... that will bring many more parties out into the open to express interest," said Michael J. Wallace, executive vice president of Constellation Energy. Under the program, the government would back 100 percent of the amount borrowed, up to 80 percent of a project's total cost. New reactors are expected to cost about $4 billion or more to build. Constellation and others in the industry had criticized the Energy Department's original proposal to provide loan guarantees for about 72 percent of the amount borrowed. Key members of Congress complained that the 2005 energy bill intended for the Bush administration to support 100 percent of a project's debt, provided energy companies pledged to finance 20 percent with their own funds. The industry's complaint was backed by five Wall Street investment banks, who said new nuclear plants would be unlikely to win financing without a package of loan guarantees along the lines of what was approved yesterday. "At last, we now know that the program will proceed in a way consistent with our intent in the Energy Policy Act of 2005," said New Mexico Sen. Pete V. Domenici, the ranking Republican on the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman told industry officials at a nuclear power conference yesterday that he would seek increases in the 2009 federal budget for loan guarantees - enough to support seven to eight nuclear plants, the Associated Press reported. "That's a big positive for the industry," said Charles W. Whitney, an Atlanta attorney who specializes in energy issues. "It shows a major commitment by the U.S. government ... in support of all clean technology, including nuclear." Industry officials say the guarantees are needed because investors are reluctant to finance nuclear projects after the high-profile financial disasters in the late 1970s. One factor was the near meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in 1979. Cost overruns, regulatory delays and public opposition contributed to the cancellation of dozens of proposed reactors, nearly bankrupting some utilities and forcing the industry to write off billions of dollars in losses. Environmentalists and some consumer advocates oppose providing loan guarantees for nuclear plants on the grounds that it puts money in the hands of deep-pocketed corporations and fails to answer where nuclear waste will be stored. Some argue federal subsidies should be targeted only for new technologies, such as wind and solar, rather than an old technology like nuclear energy. But proponents see nuclear playing a critical role in efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions as part of the fight against global warming. Despite the high cost of construction, nuclear plants are also billed as a way to produce large amounts of power and stabilize electricity prices. "Nuclear energy also is essential to any credible program to prevent or avoid greenhouse gases, and it provides forward price stability in a volatile energy marketplace," said Frank L. "Skip" Bowman, president and chief executive of the Nuclear Energy Institute, in a statement. Constellation has been laying the groundwork for a nuclear revival for at least two years. The company secured $300 million in tax breaks from Calvert County if it builds a new reactor there at a cost estimated at $4 billion to $5 billion. It recently submitted the first 6,000 pages of its application for an operating license to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and plans to file the rest later this year. It is hoped that operations could begin by 2015. The Calvert Cliffs plant would be built by UniStar Nuclear, a joint venture between Constellation and Electricite de France SA, the state-owned energy monopoly. UniStar is working on applications for five other plants it hopes to build. One will go next to Constellation's Nine Mile Point plant near Oswego, N.Y. The four others will be built in Texas, Pennsylvania, Idaho and Missouri. paul.adams@baltsun.com Copyright © 2007, The Baltimore Sun ***************************************************************** 12 Brattleboro Reformer: Sanders is right on VY BRATTLEBORO, VT Reformer.com Friday, October 5 The image of collapsed sheet metal, splintered wood and water cascading from a huge broken pipe is one that Entergy Nuclear would like to see disappear. But that image, taken after the collapse of a 50-foot cooling tower at Vermont Yankee on Aug. 21, was blown up to poster size and displayed at Wednesday's hearing of the U.S. Senate's Subcommittee on Clean Air, Climate Change and Nuclear Energy. Entergy is trying to make the case to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the cooling tower collapse, and an emergency shutdown of the plant caused by a stuck steam valve on Aug. 30, have no bearing on Vermont Yankee's safety and should not be taken into account when the NRC considers extending the nuclear plant's license past 2012. All one has to do is look at that image of water gushing onto a pile of debris, and Entergy's argument falls apart. That has not stopped Entergy from trying to convince everyone that the 35-year-old reactor is perfectly safe and should be allowed to run until at least 2032. Sen. Bernard Sanders, I-Vt., showed NRC Chairman Dale Klein the image of the cooling tower collapse and asked, "If you were living in southern Vermont, or New Hampshire, or northern Massachusetts, would you have confidence in the NRC after this series of events?" "I would hope they have confidence in the NRC," Klein said. "They don't," replied Sanders. "How can you look at that photograph and say you're not concerned?" Because of the very real feeling that the NRC functions as a rubber stamp for the nuclear industry, Sanders has introduced legislation that would give states the right to ask for independent safety assessments at all of the nation's nuclear reactors. The NRC has dismissed this idea, saying that its oversight is superior to any independent safety assessment. Given the track record of the NRC and its well-documented laxity in enforcement of the rules, we would put our trust in an outsider's inspection. While the NRC is apparently seeking more information about the cooling tower collapse, as well as the inspection records for the towers, we would bet that Entergy will receive a slap of the wrist, a moderate fine, a brief period of increased NRC oversight and permission to keep the reactor open for another 20 years. Vermont Yankee has functioned safely for 35 years. Its employees have worked hard to keep it functioning safely. But there comes a point where aging machinery becomes too expensive to fix. That's why Maine Yankee in Wiscasset, Maine, and Yankee Rowe in Rowe, Mass., both were shut down. The cost of upgrading and maintaining the reactors cost more than the value of the electricity they produced. The economic equation for keeping Vermont Yankee open hasn't yet shifted in that direction. Entergy is making a nice profit running the reactor in Vernon. When the day comes that it is no longer profitable, they will shut it down. The question we have is, what will be the circumstances that prompt it and who will be stuck with the bill? We frankly do not trust Entergy nor the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to make decisions with the safety of this region in mind. Is Vermont Yankee safe? Let's bring in people without ties to the NRC and Entergy to look at the plant objectively and give us an answer. ***************************************************************** 13 NRC: NRC Issues Fourth National Report for the Convention on Nuclear Safety News Release - 2007-128 - U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION Office of Public Affairs Telephone: 301/415-8200 Washington, DC 20555-0001 E-mail: opa@nrc.gov www.nrc.gov The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has issued its “Fourth National Report for the Convention on Nuclear Safety.” The updated report demonstrates how the U.S. Government achieves and maintains a high level of nuclear safety worldwide by enhancing national measures and international cooperation, and by meeting the obligations of all the articles established by the Convention. This report addresses the issues identified in the peer-review of the third review meeting, discusses challenges and issues that have arisen since the third review meeting, discusses managing human capital, a major NRC focus area, and also discusses the NRC’s preparations for licensing new reactors. In addition, for the first time, the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations has provided input to the report explaining how the nuclear industry maintains and improves nuclear safety. The 2007 report, which updates a 2004 report, will be peer reviewed by parties to the convention. Every three years the countries participating in the convention must submit reports on their programs for peer review as an incentive to achieve the highest possible levels of safety. The Fourth National Report Review Meeting will be held in Vienna, Austria, in April 2008. The report will be available through NRC's Agencywide Documents Access and Management System (ADAMS), at http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams/web-based.html , using accession number ML07260091. For help in using ADAMS, call the NRC Public Document Room at 1-800-397-4209 or 301-415-4737. Copies of the report (NUREG-1650, Rev. 2) will also be available at the NRC’s Public Electronic Reading Room: http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/nuregs/ NRC news releases are available through a free listserv subscription at the following Web address: http://www.nrc.gov/public-involve/listserver.html. The NRC Home Page at www.nrc.gov also offers a Subscribe to News link in the News & Information menu. E-mail notifications are sent to subscribers when news releases are posted to NRC's Web Site. Thursday, October 04, 2007 ***************************************************************** 14 Brattleboro Reformer - VSNAP: Outside review needed at Yankee BRATTLEBORO, VT By BOB AUDETTE, Reformer Staff Friday, October 5 VERNON -- Vermonters are losing faith in Entergy's ability to safely operate Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. To bridge that credibility gap, said David O'Brien, the commissioner of Vermont's Department of Public Service, maybe Entergy should agree to an independent safety assessment, something it has resisted since it announced it wanted to extend the plant's operating license from 2012 to 2032. O'Brien was in Vernon, as chairman of a meeting of the Vermont State Nuclear Advisory Panel, to hear from Entergy about a recent cooling tower collapse and an automatic shutdown at the power plant. While others outside of Windham County may not have been previously concerned about Vermont Yankee's operation, said O'Brien, the cooling tower collapse and the automatic shutdown has prompted many of them to ask him a simple question. "If that can fail, what else can fail?" said O'Brien. "The average person looks at this sequence of events (and says) 'how can we have confidence in this plant or in Entergy if this is what's occurred?'" And it's not just the average Joe or Jane that's asking those questions, he said. "It just doesn't inspire my confidence and it doesn't inspire the governor's confidence." Entergy's usual answer that there is a process that is overseen by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is not sufficient, he said. "I don't think that quite cuts it. These concerns and questions have to be taken seriously. You can't just dismiss it away. You are going to have to find ways to convince us and other people that this is not what is to be expected at the plant." It's not just about reassuring the public, said state Sen. Mark MacDonald, D-Orange, a member of the advisory panel. "This is about whether the plant gets inspected the way it should be or if it gets inspected the way the owners want." Without an independent assessment, said state Rep. Sarah Edwards, P-Brattleboro, "it's going to be very difficult to increase our trust." Edwards is also a member of the advisory panel. "We did have an independent engineering assessment performed by the NRC," said John Dreyfuss, the plant's director of nuclear safety assurance. "It was rigorous and detailed. No issues of significance were identified." At its next meeting, which will be scheduled within the next 30 days, the panel will hear from Entergy on the difference, if any, between an independent safety assessment and the independent engineering assessment conducted by the NRC. "You could end the discussion if we could have an independent safety assessment," said Edwards. "If the company and the corporation really care about public trust, that is a surefire way to solve the problem." While the tower collapse was due to rotted wooden beams giving way, the real culprit in the accident was Entergy's cooling tower inspection and maintenance program, said David McElwee, senior liaison engineer for Vermont Yankee. "The preventative maintenance program was a contributing cause," said McElwee, and remote camera viewing used to inspect the interior of the towers was not sufficient. "A visual inspection where you can put your hands on the (support) columns is a better method of inspection." This didn't sit well with MacDonald. "What concerns me is a management that says a hands-on inspection is more valuable or effective than one from afar. (But) whenever this panel has voted for an independent safety assessment that would be hands on, they have said no." While the cooling towers were out of service for repairs, technicians conducted more in-depth inspections of both the east and west bank of cooling fans and replaced rotted wooden members but, admitted McElwee, "the inspection was not 100 percent." "It makes me wonder it the towers really are not the issue," said Edwards, or is the inadequate inspection program "a symptom of other things." "There were problems that were predicted long before this tower failure," she said. "Adding inspections is not enough if the basic structure was flawed in the first place." One question Entergy should be asking itself, said O'Brien, is "is this the right cooling tower for the long haul? Is this what you want to be tied to for an additional 20 years of operation?" "We are looking at all manner of options," said Dreyfuss. But, he added, "if you are able to maintain them properly, it's an absolutely acceptable approach to a cooling tower." So why not bring the 21 cooling cells up to the standard of the one cell that is designed to withstand earthquakes? asked O'Brien. "That would certainly be an option," said McElwee. "Following this incident, we will be taking a hard look at things like that," adding "there is a cost benefit tradeoff." Bob Audette can be reached at raudette@reformer.com or 802-254-2311, ext. 273. ***************************************************************** 15 Canada: THERECORD.COM: Why isn't nuclear energy an election issue? DAVE CAMPANELLA The most important and least discussed issue of the upcoming election is the province's energy crisis. If Ontario remains on its "business as usual" trajectory of energy use, demand will soon dangerously exceed supply. While the NDP and the Green party support alternative options, both the Liberals and Progressive Conservatives prefer the easy way out by continuing to rely on nuclear energy as a major source of our electricity. These pro-nuclear parties adhere to the view that nuclear is cost effective, reliable, and an environmentally friendly option to fight climate change. These claims are questionable. Calculations that show nuclear energy to be cheaper than alternatives rely on favourable assumptions regarding construction costs and performance rates, as well as omitting costs of handling nuclear waste and decommissioning reactors. Ontario's past offers more of the real-world experience. The actual costs of constructing Ontario's five existing nuclear reactors were, on average, 100 per cent over the original estimates, while their performance rates have been about half of what was expected, and unforeseen shutdowns meant increased reliance on coal plants. The $19.4 billion debt Ontario Hydro suffered, largely due to its nuclear investments, was then off-loaded on to consumers who continue to pay it off on every energy bill. Such results are not isolated to Ontario. Globally, most investors and governments have been avoiding the technology. Investment in new capacity has dropped off steadily since peaking in the 1980s, with more megawatts of wind power now being added worldwide than nuclear. The average age of the 442 reactors in operation in the world today now corresponds with the average age a reactor is shut down. An Massachusetts Institute of Technology study concluded that with current policies nuclear power "is just too expensive" and The Economist found that it is "too costly to matter" as a potential energy supply option. Because the full lifetime of a reactor, from initial planning to final decommission, could be over a century, committing to nuclear power for base load supply determines the future mix of the energy supply far into the future. As revealed by the 2003 blackout, nuclear plants have difficulty reacting to emergency shutdowns. The United States has suffered from 51 reactor shutdowns that have lasted for over a year. Additionally, a fire in a reactor after Japan's recent earthquake and the flooding of a reactor in India after the 2004 tsunami show that nuclear power is vulnerable, especially to increasingly erratic weather. Nuclear advocates often describe nuclear power as "green" because the fission reaction that takes place in a nuclear reactor releases no direct carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The Canadian Nuclear Association (CNA) claims that nuclear energy "emits no pollutants into the air." But life-cycle analysis, which includes emissions from relevant uranium activities and reactor construction, show that Canada's nuclear system releases between 468,000 and 594,000 tonnes of CO2 per year. In fact, so much energy is used during supporting processes that a recent study for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concludes a reactor built today is likely to consume more energy, mostly carbon-based, during its lifetime than it produces. That makes nuclear energy an inefficient investment to fight climate change. Uranium mining to fuel nuclear power in Canada is also responsible for 100,000 tonnes of radioactive tailings, the leftover sludge, 2.9 million tones of waste rock, and associated contamination of groundwater and surrounding environments. Nuclear reactors are huge water users, with the Darlington and Pickering facilities alone estimated to use 8.9 trillion litres per year. As well, they are sources of routine and accidental releases of radionuclides, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and hydrazine into the air. And "green" nuclear power also generates radioactive wastes including highly-toxic substances such as plutonium, which has a half-life of 24,300 years. As of 2003, 1.7 million used fuel bundles were in temporary storage in Canada, and that number is growing. More than 50 years after Canada decided to develop nuclear power there is no long-term management plan in place. Although burying the waste deep underground has been proposed by the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) and is the favoured response globally, no such facility yet exists anywhere in the world. Such facilities must be designed to last for approximately a million years and to secure the waste not only from the outside environment, but also from people who might use the material for weapons, or other destructive purposes. The NWMO estimates its proposal would cost $24 billion and take 300 years to be fully implemented. Moving the radioactive waste from temporary storage at the different reactors to a central storage site would require 50 truck trips per month, for 30 years. The potential for an accident or sabotage during transportation, with resulting health and environmental damage, makes the plan risky. But most of the risk is deflected to future generations, who must carry the burden of our generation's electricity generation in the form of hazardous waste. Better options exist. In order to ensure flexibility, many energy experts favour a diverse, decentralized energy supply combined with strong demand reduction and management programs. This is the "soft" path. Nuclear energy, in contrast, is heavily centralized, has long lead times and high capital costs, requires remote locations, and relies on projections of rising demand to justify expenditures. It epitomizes the inflexible "hard" path option. A sustainable energy future would be based on a diverse supply -- including wind, solar, geothermal, heat and power cogeneration, biomass, small hydro, natural gas, efficiency -- and demand management. A recent study by the Pembina Institute has shown that investing $18.2 billion in Ontario over 15 years could reduce projected energy demand by 41 per cent, and the vast majority of that cost would be recovered by consumers through energy savings. The same study found that those energy savings combined with wind, solar, biomass, hydro, could meet 79 per cent of Ontario's projected energy needs in 2020. With improved technology and lower costs, that percentage would continue to grow, leaving little room for the inflexibility of nuclear power. Institutions around the world are showing us how, with more aggressive and empowering policies. Spain has mandated solar PV and hot water heating in all new construction. California has set a target of a million solar roofs by 2017. And in Austria and Sweden over a quarter of energy is supplied through renewable sources. Germany has recently passed legislation requiring its public utilities to buy a fixed amount of renewable energy, with the aim of replacing at least 20 per cent of the supply by 2020. The costs of wind, solar, and geothermal systems have all dropped exponentially over the past few decades, with a corresponding rise in installed capacity, even in the face of receiving only a taste of the public subsidies given to nuclear power. Ontario is at a difficult juncture in its energy future. But that juncture represents an opportunity for a new direction. Instead of choosing what we know doesn't work, let's learn from other's successes and try something that does. Instead of choosing the easy way, let's choose the smart way. Dave Campanella is a recent graduate from University of Waterloo's environment and resource studies program . 160 King Street East, Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, N2G 4E5 519-894-2231 ***************************************************************** 16 Reuters: Romania plans to build second nuclear power plant Fri Oct 5, 2007 3:47pm BST CERNAVODA, Romania, Oct 5 (Reuters) - Romania plans to build a second nuclear power plant after the completion of two more reactors at its Cernavoda plant on the Danube river, Prime Minister Calin Tariceanu said on Friday. European Union newcomer Romania has set an Oct. 25 deadline to receive binding bids for the licence to build and operate Units 3 and 4 in Cernavoda, an investment estimated at 2.2 billion euros. Its first reactor went on stream in 1996 and accounts for about 10 percent of Romania's power generation. "After we complete units 3 and 4 we must continue to develop the nuclear system in Romania," Tariceanu told reporters in Cernavoda after the official opening of the the plant's second reactor. "We must already start to think about where we will have the next nuclear power plant in Romania," he said, adding the Black Sea state needed to ensure it was not dependent on oil and gas energy resources. With the second reactor entering commercial use on Friday, nuclear power will supply roughly 18 percent of total energy needs in Romania. Tariceanu also said the Cernavoda plant, which was initially designed to have five reactors, will stop at four due to "insufficient technical capacity." © Reuters 2007. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 17 Reuters: PG&E Diablo Canyon 2 nuclear unit refuels 1Q 2008 Fri Oct 5, 2007 12:14am BST LOS ANGELES, Oct 4 (Reuters) - PG&E's 1,087-megawatt nuclear Unit 2 at its Diablo Canyon plant in California will undergo a refueling and maintenance outage in the first quarter of 2008, the company said on Thursday. Specific timing for the outage was not given by PG&E. PG&E Corp (PCG.N: Quote, Profile, Research) subsidiary Pacific Gas and Electric Co owns and operates the nuclear power plant in San Luis Obispo County, between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The outage will last about two months rather than the customary month because PG&E will replace all four steam generators at the plant, which have been in place since it began operation in 1986. Unit 2 has a 40-year license from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission that expires in 2026. Unit 1 of similar size will remain in operation during the work on Unit 2. The last refueling at Unit 2 was in April 2006. The duration of operation between refuelings of the unit have been 19, 22, 20 and 18 months since 1999. The steam generators at pressurized water reactors need to be replaced because tubes degrade over time and to avoid having to plug the tubes, shutting down longer to replace them makes sense, said a PG&E spokesman. Unit 2 at full capacity is capable of powering about 770,000 average California homes. © Reuters 2007. All rights reserved. | Learn more about Reuters ***************************************************************** 18 Reuters: Dominion shuts Wisc. Kewaunee reactor for work | Fri Oct 5, 2007 2:53pm BST NEW YORK, Oct 5 (Reuters) - Dominion Resources Inc (D.N: Quote, Profile, Research) shut the 556-megawatt Kewaunee nuclear power station in Wisconsin to replace the hydrogen coolers on the main generator late Thursday, a spokesman for the plant said Friday. The spokesman could not say when the unit would likely return to service due to competitive reasons. Electricity traders guessed the unit would return within a week. The unit was operating at full power early Thursday. The Kewaunee station, which entered service in 1974, is located in Kewaunee in Kewaunee County about 30 miles from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Separately, Dominion said it plans to file for a 20-year extension of the plant's original 40-year operating license with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the second quarter of 2008. It usually takes the NRC about 22 months to make a decision on a license renewal without a hearing and about 30 months with a hearing. One MW powers about 800 homes in Wisconsin. Dominion, of Richmond, Virginia, owns and operates about 28,000 MW of generating capacity, markets energy commodities, and transmits and distributes electricity and natural gas to customers in 11 states. © Reuters 2007. All rights reserved. | Learn more about Reuters ***************************************************************** 19 Reuters: British Energy's Torness nuclear reactor restarts | Fri Oct 5, 2007 1:00pm EDT LONDON, Oct 5 (Reuters) - British Energy's (BGY.L: Quote, Profile, Research) Torness-1 nuclear power reactor restarted on Friday afternoon after planned work, while both units at its Hunterston nuclear plant on the other side of Scotland remained closed, the company said. "It's come back on following its statutory outage," the spokesman said of the reactor at the plant, situated on the east coast of Scotland near Edinburgh. It was stopped on July 27. The plant has two reactors with a total maximum capacity of 1,320 megawatts, British Energy said, higher than figures given by the National Grid website. The Hunterston nuclear power station on the west coast of Scotland remained closed after being shut down manually on Thursday following a control room power supply problem. A spokeswoman for British Energy said the electrical fault would probably be solved quickly and that the power station's two 485-megawatt reactors would be able to restart soon. "It's an internal power supply issue in the control room," she said. "At the moment there's nothing to indicate a long term problem." Boiler repairs kept the whole Hunterston plant closed throughout last winter and into spring. © Reuters2007All rights reserved ***************************************************************** 20 NRC: NRC Receives First Application in Nearly two Decades for New Uranium Recovery Operation News Release - 2007-129- U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION Office of Public Affairs Telephone: 301/415-8200 Washington, DC 20555-0001 E-mail: opa@nrc.gov www.nrc.gov The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has received an application from Energy Metals Corp. US to construct and operate an in-situ uranium recovery facility at Moore Ranch in Campbell County, Wyo. It is the first application for a new uranium recovery facility submitted to the NRC since 1988. The application, submitted Oct. 3, will soon be available on the NRC Web site at this address: http://www.nrc.gov/info-finder/materials/uranium/. The NRC staff is currently reviewing the application to determine whether it contains sufficient information to begin detailed environmental and safety reviews. If the application is deemed acceptable, the agency will formally docket it and publish a notice of opportunity to request an adjudicatory hearing. “In addition to the first applications for new reactors in decades, this application for a new uranium recovery facility is a further indicator that the nuclear renaissance is real,” NRC Chairman Dale E. Klein said. “The NRC is prepared to meet the challenge of conducting these license reviews in a timely and efficient manner.” Existing uranium recovery facilities have indicated interest in resuming and expanding operations, and based on projections from industry, the NRC is expecting at least 15 applications for new facilities – including in-situ operations and conventional uranium mills – over the next three years. Energy Metals Corp. US, based in Edmund, Okla., is a subsidiary of Energy Metals Corp. of Vancouver, British Columbia. In-situ recovery of uranium involves injecting a leaching agent, typically oxygen with sodium carbonate, through wells into underground ore to dissolve the uranium. The leach solution is pumped back to the surface and sent to a processing plant, where ion exchange is used to separate the uranium from the solution. The underground leaching of the uranium also frees other metals and minerals from the rock. Before operations begin at Moore Ranch, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, with the assistance of the state of Wyoming, must exempt the groundwater aquifer from Safe Drinking Water Act requirements. After uranium recovery ceases, Energy Metals Corp. US will be required to return the groundwater affected by operations to pre-operation background concentrations. Dr. Charles Miller (3rd from right), director of NRC’s Office of Federal and State Materials and Environmental Management Programs, receives the first uranium recovery license application in nearly two decades. With Dr. Miller are members of the team that will review the application. NRC news releases are available through a free listserv subscription at the following Web address: http://www.nrc.gov/public-involve/listserver.html. The NRC Home Page at www.nrc.gov also offers a Subscribe to News link in the News & Information menu. E-mail notifications are sent to subscribers when news releases are posted to NRC's Web Site. Friday, October 05, 2007 ***************************************************************** 21 Dothan Eagle: Farley suffers another shutdown dothaneagle.com Friday, Oct 05, 2007 - 06:05 AM By Lance Griffin A nuclear power unit at Farley Nuclear Plant remained off line Thursday after it suffered an automatic shutdown Wednesday afternoon. The automatic shutdown of Unit 2 appears to have been triggered by routine testing being done in the plant’s switch yard, according to Jeremy Pate, spokesman for Southern Company, which operates the plant. Pate said employees are currently trying to determine why the testing caused the unit to shut down. “All plant systems and equipment operated just as it should and all employees responded appropriately,” Pate said. The event was reported as required to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which classified it as “non- emergency.” Pate said Unit 1 is currently off line due to a scheduled refueling outage. Pate said he could not reveal when Unit 2 is scheduled to come on line again. The shutdown comes just two weeks after the NRC said Farley has had too many equipment failures. The NRC conducted a week-long inspection of the facility beginning Sept. 10, after two separate electrical breaker failures at the plant Sept. 4 and 5. No final report of the two earlier failures has been released. Dothan Eagle Copyright © 2007 Media General, Inc. All Rights Reserved ***************************************************************** 22 Madison Courier: Panel coming to Madison for JPG hearing 10/5/2007 3:00:00 PM Peggy Vlerebome Courier Staff Writer A federal panel will be in Madison the week of Oct. 22 to conduct a hearing about how the Army plans to go about collecting data for a study related to the depleted uranium left at Jefferson Proving Ground. The public will not be able to give testimony or present exhibits, but can attend the sessions of the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, which is part of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The first session will begin at 10:30 a.m. Monday, Oct. 22 at Madison City Hall. The hearing could last all week. Save the Valley environmental organization has raised a question that the licensing board has agreed can be addressed at the hearing. Richard Hill, president of Save the Valley, said Thursday that his group's witnesses will testify Monday, Oct. 22 and Tuesday, Oct. 23, and could be called back to testify later in the week or asked to submit written answers to questions. The licensing panel also will hear testimony and receive exhibits from the Army and from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff. Hill said the testimony will be extremely technical. The hearing will be about the adequacy of the Army's proposed field sampling plan. Save the Valley, which has been granted intervenor status, raised several objections to the way the Army plans to gather data for the study. The NRC and its licensing board will use the study in deciding whether to grant the Army's request for an alternative schedule for its decommissioning plan for JPG. The field sampling plan "is not properly designed to obtain all the verifiable data required," Save the Valley said in its contention. The data will be used to make computer models that Save the Valley said must be reliable and must accurately assess the effects of depleted uranium on "the meteorological, geological, hydrological, animal and human features specific to the JPG site and its surrounding area." The Army was required to get a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in order to test depleted uranium tank-penetration rounds at JPG from 1983 to 1994. The Army left about 77 tons of DU projectiles and fragments where they landed in a 2,080-acre area that now is fenced and posted with signs warning of radioactivity. Depleted uranium is what is left over from making fuel for nuclear power plants. It strengthens metal and is used for munitions that can pierce an enemy tank as well as for cladding U.S. tanks to protect them. Copyright 2007, The Madison Courier 310 Courier Square, Madison, IN 47250 (812) 265-3641 (800) 333-2885 All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, ***************************************************************** 23 CBC News: Point Lepreau shutdown costing NB Power $1M a day Last Updated: Friday, October 5, 2007 | 8:49 AM AT NB Power is pushing back the timeline for getting the Point Lepreau power plant up and running again. The only nuclear generating station in the Atlantic region was shut down on Sept. 25 after an instrumentation problem in the control system triggered the automatic safety system that shut down power generation. "It was a trip in the system, and our safety system came in and shut down the whole system as it is supposed to. That has been repaired and so again we're just working on some additional maintenance and do anticipate being back up in the middle of next week," said NB Power spokeswoman Heather MacLean. NB Power officials had said they hoped the plant would be up and running to generate electricity by this week. It is costing NB Power about $1 million each day Point Lepreau is shut down to generate replacement electricity, MacLean said. About CBC · About CBC News · About CBC.ca · ***************************************************************** 24 NRC: Speech - S-07-044 "An Emerging Fuel Cycle Renaissance?", NRC Chairman Dale E. Klein, Baker Center for Public Policy, October 4, 2007 OFFICE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS Office of Public Affairs Telephone: 301/415-8200 Washington, DC 20555-0001 E-mail: opa@nrc.gov Web Site: Public Affairs Web Site "An Emerging Fuel Cycle Renaissance?" Remarks Prepared for NRC Chairman Dale E. Klein Baker Center for Public Policy Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington DC October 4, 2007 Thank you. Before I begin my remarks, I want to mention that this is a somewhat somber time for us at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Two days ago, the Commission held a memorial ceremony for our late colleague, Ed McGaffigan who—as you may know—died on September 2, after a long battle with cancer. His wisdom and experience as the longest-serving commissioner in our agency’s history, will be greatly missed. But Ed himself would have told us that we shouldn’t take too much time before getting back to work. And the truth is, we have a lot of work to do. In fact, I think it can be safely said that the Nuclear Renaissance has officially begun. I don’t say that as an advocate for or against nuclear power. It is just a statement of fact, considering that last week the NRC received the first application for a new reactor license in thirty years. Over the next year and a half we expect about twenty more license applications. We knew this day was coming, and we have invested a great deal of thought, planning, and effort into getting ready. And we are ready. I’ve assured both industry and Congress that the NRC will not be a bottleneck; and I am confident that the plan we have in place will allow to us to perform timely, quality reviews with no compromise of safety. Having said that, I don’t mean to suggest that we don’t still have challenges ahead of us. For one thing, both industry and the NRC are feeling the effects of the aging nuclear workforce—which is happening just at the time the Nuclear Renaissance is unfolding. At the NRC, in one two-week pay period early this year, nearly 1,000 years of regulatory experience walked out of the agency due to retirements; and that included 560 years of technical experience. I have also been told that 75% of the workforce at the DOE National Labs will be eligible for retirement by 2010. On the industry side, I believe that NEI will soon publish its updated nuclear industry workforce survey. One finding which they have already released is this: roughly 35% of current utility personnel will be eligible for retirement within 5 years. This is not a crisis… yet. But it has the potential to become one. I should mention that the need for workforce development is not just limited to nuclear engineers, but also includes other engineering and scientific disciplines as well… not to mention the skilled craft workers such as electricians, welders, pipe-fitters, mechanics, electronics technicians, and others needed to construct and operate the plants. At the same time that we need to address that challenge, we are also facing another one. Because the growth of the nuclear industry was basically stalled for two decades in the U.S., there has been substantial progress in nuclear technology elsewhere in the world that we as regulators don’t really have experience with. Specifically, while the current fleet of light water reactors were designed and built in the analog electronics era, the next wave of reactors will likely move away from analog toward digital instrumentation & control. And that is just one of the challenges we face in the short-to-medium term. Over the long term we can anticipate even more radical technological changes, including advanced and innovative new reactors and fuel cycle facilities. As I think many of you already know, President Bush has outlined a plan for embracing these technologies in a way that expands the safe use of nuclear energy, while reducing the threat of nuclear proliferation, through his Global Nuclear Energy Partnership—or, GNEP. GNEP is intended to develop the systems, technologies, and policy regimes to allow recycling of used light water reactor fuel. It seeks to eliminate, to a large extent, the actinides in fast-burner reactors in a way that enhances proliferation resistance. The resulting waste streams are envisioned to have characteristics that would lessen the volume and thermal challenges for a geologic repository. This represents a substantial shift in the domestic approach to the back end of the fuel cycle. In fact, I think it even represents a major shift in the global approach to managing the fuel cycle. Of course, it remains to be seen whether GNEP will inaugurate what we might call a “Fuel Cycle Renaissance.” I am sure that Secretary Bodman will say more about GNEP when he delivers his remarks. So let me just mention what the development of GNEP will entail for the NRC. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission was a light-water reactor agency when it was formed; and we continue to be a light-water reactor agency today. But we know that a new day is coming. The transformation in nuclear power technology that we can see on the horizon represents an unprecedented opportunity for a new global effort to oversee the safety and security of new and innovative reactors, and other fuel cycle facilities. By working together, the international regulatory community can provide clear, concise, and internationally accepted guidance on safety and security requirements to the designers and architects of these new facilities. This will help ensure that safety and security are fully integrated into all aspects of a facility’s design and operational characteristics. To that end, I proposed a new initiative at the recent meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna for developing a multinational regulatory approach to licensing. This would be a cooperative international effort to delineate the regulatory design requirements for innovative reactors and other fuel cycle facilities. I believe that such an activity should be led by the regulators who oversee the design and development of nuclear power plants, with active participation from other national regulators, and in coordination with the IAEA and NEA. As I mentioned in Vienna, this is not a plan for imposing U.S. programs or standards on the world. We know that other nations have been leaders in developing new nuclear technology for at least the last two decades, and their experiences are important if we are to embark on a multinational regulatory framework. This is a suggestion for mutual collaboration—recognizing that each country is responsible for applying and enforcing those standards and requirements it determines to be necessary for safety and security. Of course, even if this effort is entirely successful, there are still other regulatory challenges we must confront. For instance, the NRC faces a monumental task in the review of a license application for a potential Yucca Mountain waste repository. Nevertheless, we stand ready to initiate this review when DOE submits its license application. Low-level waste issues may also present challenges in the future. Without adequate low-level waste disposal sites, this nation may be faced with the likelihood of even more interim storage sites… and possibly the curtailment of medical procedures and other activities that generate low-level waste. My fellow Commissioners and I believe this is something we may have to address in the near future. There are also issues involving what might be called the “front end” of the fuel cycle. When the price of uranium fell in the early 1980s, conventional uranium mining production in the United States dropped precipitously. Many conventional uranium mills ceased operations or closed permanently and began decommissioning and reclamation. There is currently one NRC-licensed conventional mill and two mills that have ceased operation but expect to resume operation in the future. There are six in-situ leach facilities that are operating or are licensed to operate. Based on discussion with the industry, the NRC expects a considerable increase in licensing activity, as many as 12 new applications, for both types of uranium recovery facilities in the foreseeable future. I don’t believe that I, or anyone else, can say for sure what other challenges might arise… but I think those are some of the major issues we will need to deal with. [PAUSE] Ladies and gentlemen, before I conclude, let me make one final observation. As I look out across this room, I must say I am amazed at the very high caliber of participants that the organizers of this conference have brought together. It reminds me of the story of when John F. Kennedy invited several dozen Nobel Prize winners to the White House for dinner and remarked, “Never has so much talent been assembled in one room since Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” By the same token, I am tempted to say that never has so much expertise on nuclear matters been gathered in one room since Admiral Rickover shared a beer with Albert Einstein. Surely, then, by leveraging this awesome collection of knowledge and talent… by joining forces—not only across agencies within the U.S. Government, but especially through constructive international cooperation—we can continue to assure sound oversight of the safety and security of nuclear power. ====================================================================== NRC speeches are available through a free list serve subscription at the following Web address: http://www.nrc.gov/public-involve/listserver.html. The NRC homepage at www.nrc.gov also offers a SUBSCRIBE link. E-mail notifications are sent to subscribers when speeches are posted to NRC's Web site. Privacy Policy | Site Disclaimer Friday, October 05, 2007 ***************************************************************** 25 BostonHerald.com: Vt. Gov. wants to limit out of state comment on nuke plant - By Associated Press Friday, October 5, 2007 - Added 13h ago MONTPELIER, Vt. - Gov. James Douglas says he doesn’t like the idea of a neighboring state being able to ask for an independent safety review of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant. "I think it is a precedent we need to be very wary of to empower the governor of another state to be involved in the regulatory practices" of a neighboring state, Douglas said. The comment came in response to a proposal by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., that would allow neighboring states to request an independent safety assessment at a nuclear plant. Douglas also labeled "presumptuous" Sanders’ recent comment that Vermonters have lost confidence in the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Vermont Yankee is located on the Connecticut River in the state’s southeast corner in Vernon. New Hampshire is within sight across the river from the plant site. The plant’s five-mile emergency evacuation zone extends into both New Hampshire and Massachusetts. If there were a nuclear plant in New Hampshire near the Vermont border "I would expect the governor of New Hampshire would feel the same as I do about public safety," — not wanting Vermont interfering in its efforts to regulate the plant, Douglas said. Both New Hampshire and Massachusetts frequently have been parties in regulatory proceedings before the NRC relating to Vermont Yankee in the past. Under Douglas, Vermont also has tried to intervene in environmental controversies other states. The state sued unsuccessfully to block a test burn of tire-derived fuel at the International Paper mill on the New York shore of Lake Champlain. The state also has joined lawsuits aimed at reducing pollution from coal-burning power plants in the Midwest. Douglas said Vermont’s suit was unsuccessful, and sought to make a distinction between intervening in another state’s affairs through the courts versus by advocating passage of a new law in Congress. The governor acknowledged that recent problems at Vermont Yankee — including the collapse of a cooling tower and a sudden, automatic shutdown due to a valve problem, had shaken public confident in the plant. ——— Information from: The Times Argus, http://www.timesargus.com/ © Copyright 2007 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This ***************************************************************** 26 NRC: NRC Advisory Committee on Medical Uses of Isotopes to Meet Oct. 22-23 News Release - 2007-131 - U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION Office of Public Affairs Telephone: 301/415-8200 Washington, DC 20555-0001 E-mail: opa@nrc.gov www.nrc.gov The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Advisory Committee on Medical Uses of Isotopes will meet Oct. 22-23 to discuss several issues, including naturally-occurring and accelerator-produced radioactive material legislation, transition plan, and guidance; status of specialty board applications for NRC recognition; Y-90 microspheres guidance; training and experience implementation issues; recent security activities; potential changes to 10 CFR Part 35 on medical uses of byproduct material; licensing guidance for the Leksell Gamma-Knife® Perfexion™; and review of recent medical events. The public portion of the meeting will be on Monday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and on Tuesday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. A detailed agenda will be available athttp://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/acmui/agenda. The meeting will be held at NRC headquarters, Two White Flint North Building, Room T2B3, 11545 Rockville Pike, Rockville, Md. Questions from the public will be permitted at the discretion of the committee chairman. Any member of the public wishing to provide a written statement, or otherwise participate in the meeting, or requiring special services, should contact Ashley Tull, at 301-415-5294 or amt1@nrc.gov. All submittals must be received by Oct. 17, 2007, and must pertain to the topic on the agenda for the meeting. Minutes of the meeting will be available on or about Dec. 7, 2007. The transcript and written comments will be available for inspection on NRC’s Web site (www.nrc.gov NRC news releases are available through a free listserv subscription at the following Web address: http://www.nrc.gov/public-involve/listserver.html. The NRC Home Page at www.nrc.gov also offers a Subscribe to News link in the News & Information menu. E-mail notifications are sent to subscribers when news releases are posted to NRC's Web Site. Friday, October 05, 2007 ***************************************************************** 27 NRC: NRC Establishes New Advisory Panel on Nuclear Licensing Vulnerabilities News Release - 2007-132 - U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION Office of Public Affairs Telephone: 301/415-8200 Washington, DC 20555-0001 E-mail: opa@nrc.gov www.nrc.gov The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is establishing a special advisory panel to help identify vulnerabilities in the agency’s nuclear materials licensing program. The new panel, designated as the Independent External Review Panel to Identify Vulnerabilities in the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Material Licensing Program, is being created in response to criticism of the agency’s licensing process in three recent reports. The NRC’s Office of the Inspector General earlier this year recommended that the agency “convene an independent panel of experts external to the agency to identify agency vulnerabilities concerning NRC’s material licensing and tracking programs and validate the agency’s ongoing byproduct material security efforts.” In July, the U.S. Senate’s Homeland Security and Government Affairs Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations issued a staff report on “Dirty Bomb Vulnerabilities,” which identified an “apparent good-faith presumption that pervades the NRC licensing process,” and recommended that NRC staff physically inspect the premises of most materials license applicants before issuing a license. Also in July, the U.S. Government Accountability Office published a study in which investigators were able to apply for and obtain an NRC materials license for a dummy corporation. The NRC took immediate steps to address this issue and formed a task force to develop an action plan for further improvements in the materials licensing process. That task force recommended chartering the external review panel to identify any remaining weaknesses in the agency’s materials licensing process. The panel will assess the existing and potential security vulnerabilities related to NRC’s import, export, specific and general license programs. It is expected to develop an agenda and plan for the review, including an assessment of pre-licensing guidance, licensing procedures, the licensing process, possession limits on licenses, and license reviewer training and oversight. The panel will document each significant issue and propose recommended improvements. Some of its meetings will be public, while others will be closed to discuss security matters. NRC news releases are available through a free listserv subscription at the following Web address: http://www.nrc.gov/public-involve/listserver.html. The NRC Home Page at www.nrc.gov also offers a Subscribe to News link in the News & Information menu. E-mail notifications are sent to subscribers when news releases are posted to NRC's Web Site. Friday, October 05, 2007 ***************************************************************** 28 NRC: Omaha Public Power District; Notice of Denial of Amendment to Facility Operating License and Opportunity for Hearing FR Doc 07-4939 [Federal Register: October 5, 2007 (Volume 72, Number 193)] [Notices] [Page 57075-57076] From the Federal Register Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr05oc07-83] NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION [Docket No. 50-285] The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC or the Commission) has denied a request by Omaha Public Power District (the licensee), for an amendment to Renewed Facility Operating License No. DPR-40 issued to the licensee for operation of the Fort Calhoun Station, Unit No. 1, located in Washington County, Nebraska. Notice of Consideration of Issuance of this amendment was published in the Federal Register on April 26, 2005 (70 FR 21459). By letter dated March 31, 2005, the licensee requested an amendment to revise the Renewed Facility Operating License and Technical Specifications (TSs) to increase the license core power. Fort Calhoun Station, Unit No. 1, is currently licensed for a rated thermal power of 1500 megawatts thermal (MWt). Through the use of more accurate feedwater flow measurement equipment, approval was sought to increase this core power by 1.5 percent to 1522 MWt. The power uprate would be based on the use of the CROSSFLOWTM system for determination of main feedwater flow and the associated determination of reactor power through the performance of the power calorimetric currently required by the Fort Calhoun Station TSs. The OPPD license amendment request to increase core power is based on Westinghouse topical report CENPD-397-P-A, ``Improved Flow Measurement Accuracy Using Crossflow Ultrasonic Flow Measurement Technology,'' for new and future uses of the CROSSFLOW ultrasonic flow meter. The topical report provided several assessments with respect to that topical report to justify the power increase. Because the licensee's license amendment request is based on CENPD-397-P-A and the NRC staff has suspended its approval, as explained in the NRC staff's letter to Westinghouse dated September 26, 2007, of the use of this topical report in license amendment requests, the NRC staff has concluded that the licensee's request cannot be granted. The licensee was notified of the Commission's denial of the proposed change by a letter dated September 27, 2007. By 30 days from the date of publication of this notice in the Federal Register, the licensee may demand a hearing with respect to the denial described above. Any person whose interest may be affected by this proceeding may file a written petition for leave to intervene pursuant to the requirements of 10 CFR 2.309. A request for hearing or petition for leave to intervene must be filed with the Secretary of the Commission, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC 20555-0001 Attention: Rulemakings and Adjudications Staff, or may be delivered to the Commission's Public Document Room (PDR), located at One White Flint North, Public File Area O1 F21, 11555 Rockville Pike (first floor), Rockville, Maryland, by the above date. A request for hearing or petition for leave to intervene may also be transmitted directly to the Secretary of the Commission by means of facsimile transmission to 301-415-1101 or by e-mail to hearingdocket@nrc.gov. A copy of any petitions should also be sent to the Office of the General Counsel, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC 20555-0001. Copies of petitions may also be transmitted directly to the Office of the General Counsel by means of facsimile transmission to 301-415-3725 or by e-mail to OGCMailCenter@nrc.gov. A copy of any petitions should also be sent to James R. Curtiss, Esq., Winston & Strawn, 1700 K Street, NW., Washington, DC 20006-3817, Senior Counsel for the licensee. For further details with respect to this action, see (1) The application for amendment dated March 31, 2005, and (2) the Commission's letter to the licensee dated September 27, 2007. Documents may be examined, and/or copied for a fee, at the NRC's PDR, located at One White Flint North, Public File Area O1 F21, 11555 Rockville Pike (first floor), Rockville, Maryland, and will be accessible electronically through the Agencywide Documents Access and Management System's (ADAMS) Public Electronic Reading Room link at the NRC Web site http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams.html. Persons who do not have access to ADAMS or who encounter problems in accessing documents located in ADAMS should contact the NRC PDR Reference staff by telephone at 1-800-397-4209, 301-415-4737, or by e-mail to pdr@nrc.gov. Dated at Rockville, Maryland, this 27th day of September 2007. [[Page 57076]] For the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Timothy J. McGinty, Acting Director, Division of Operating Reactor Licensing Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation. [FR Doc. 07-4939 Filed 10-4-07; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 7590-01-M ***************************************************************** 29 ReviewJournal.com: Help for test site workers hits snag Oct. 05, 2007 Amendment aimed to streamline compensation By STEVE TETREAULT STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU WASHINGTON -- Workers who got sick from the jobs they held decades ago at the Nevada Test Site will have to continue waiting for help with medical benefits. The Senate passed a 2008 defense bill on Monday but did not take up an amendment that would have streamlined compensation for former workers at the weapons site who contracted cancer and other debilitating diseases, or their survivors. The amendment by Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., would have offered special status to most people who worked at the site between 1951 and 1993, and who believe their illnesses were tied to exposures to toxic or radioactive materials. "We didn't get it on," Reid confirmed Thursday. "We'll keep working on it. There are other vehicles, and we will keep pushing." The government currently grants "special exposure cohort" status to former workers who spent more than 250 eight-hour working days at the test site between 1951 and 1962, the period when atmospheric nuclear tests were conducted there. Those workers qualify for $150,000 payments and medical costs. Other workers carry the burden of proof to document their sicknesses were tied to their former jobs. That threshold is difficult to meet, because many radiation exposure records were not preserved and need to be reconstructed. John Funk, a former test site carpenter who has several cancers and myeloproliferative, a chronic bone marrow disorder, expressed disappointment. Funk complained Congress's response to the plight of the test site workers has been uneven. The issue "is going nowhere," said Funk, whose compensation claims were denied after dose reconstructions indicated his cancers more than likely were not caused by exposure to radiation at his job. It was unclear what happened to Reid's amendment. Reid said Thursday it ran into resistance but did not elaborate. One Senate official who monitored the defense bill said it appeared the amendment fell victim to a technical challenge of some kind. Reid's next move will be to work with Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., who is planning a hearing later this month on the health concerns of former energy workers, Reid spokesman Jon Summers said. "Senator Reid is hopeful that after Sen. Kennedy holds his hearing that his staff will begin the process of reviewing the legislation and make changes to the program," Summers said. Charles D Saunders wrote on October 05, 2007 03:15 PM: I have just a few things to say and this may shock some of those people that say the sick workers just suck it up and keep going. One fact that in the time that I have worked on one of these Plants is that DOE Would rather spend Billions and Billions of your and mine tax dollars to fight to keep from paying out just a billion to those that had Cancers that have ruined their lives. Now why would waste all those Billions when it would be cheaper on our pocket, but they have hundreds of Thousands people paid $100,00.00+ a year to fight those that are sick. By the way this has been going on for 6 years on this issue at least, and you can figure where all those Billions come from, now why would waste all that money when they could help the sick and it would cost billions less! You figure their reasoning for wasteing our tax dollars this way. I have worked for the government for most of my working career and seen this same thing done over and over during my career in the Government. I have never ever figured the reasoning for them to waste your and my tax dollar, I guess that they love to waste Dollars that don't belong to them but someone else. I can never tell you of any kind of reasoning for this kind of stupid reasoning, and oh yes, then none would have ever went public at all. Would you care to explain it? Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal, 1997 - 2007 ***************************************************************** 30 Herald News: Feds to rule on Blockson request HeraldNewsOnline.com Member of the Sun-Times News Group URANIUM EXPOSURE October 5, 2007 By BOB OKON Staff writer NAPERVILLE -- Former Blockson Chemical Co. workers and their survivors could find out by spring if they qualify as a group for government compensation provided to Cold War workers from nuclear weapons facilities. The government program is aimed at compensating workers who suffered illnesses related to exposure to radiation and other hazards at nuclear weapons plants during the Cold War. Wanda Munn, a member of the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health, discussed the timetable for a decision Thursday at a meeting the board held in Naperville. Munn's comments and discussion of the Blockson case were brief and part of a three-day advisory board meeting, which concludes today at the Holiday Inn Select in Naperville. Munn said that she expects an advisory board recommendation in January on a petition that would grant compensation for many workers at Blockson from 1951 to 1962. The advisory board's recommendation would be reviewed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, who would have 30 days to OK or reject it. Congress then would have 30 days to review the secretary's recommendation before a decision is final. The advisory board is reviewing a petition for what is called Special Exposure Cohort, a provision in the government program that basically provides class status to groups of employees at nuclear weapons plants. The advisory board is an arm of the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program, which was created in 2000 to provide compensation for workers whose illnesses could be linked to exposure to harmful conditions at nuclear weapons facilities. At least 116 Blockson workers or survivors have applied for the compensation, which totals $150,000 plus medical bills. The Blockson plant, which no longer exists, primarily made detergent. But it also extracted uranium from phosphate rock, and that uranium was used by the government for nuclear weapons. One comment made during the meeting in Naperville came from Robert Stephan, a representative from Sen. Barack Obama's office. Stephan argued against the use of data from other facilities to determine probable conditions at the Blockson plant. Government analysts have been using such data at similar facilities to determine conditions at places like Blockson, where there was a lack of data depicting worker exposure to radiation. Stephan said that while the methodology may have a scientific basis, it "doesn't pass the smell test" for Blockson workers and their survivors. Bob Okon can be reached at (815) 729-6046 or bokon@scn1.com © Copyright 2007 Sun-Times News Group ***************************************************************** 31 London Times: Fifty years on, the deadly legacy of Britain's worst nuclear accident October 5, 2007 A near-catastrophic fire left the reactor core encased in concrete. Physicists are now preparing to tackle the remains Russell Jenkins On the 50th anniversary of Britain’s worst nuclear accident, physicists believe that they have a workable plan to dismantle the damaged core of the Windscale Pile 1 reactor. The dirty relic of an early nuclear age has remained entombed behind its concrete bioshield since fire raged for two days in October 1957, threatening catastrophe and sending a plume of fallout over the North of England, south to London and across the sea to the Netherlands and Scandinavia. Workers wielded sledgehammers and scaffolding poles at the charge face to dislodge uranium fuel rods and isotope cartridges to isolate the blaze and prevent “thermal runaway”. Video provided by endoscopic probes sent along the narrow fuel channels have enabled physicists to study for the first time what the fire left behind. They reveal a strange, almost lunar landscape of concertinaed fuel boats, some reduced to ash, others with their aluminium fins still intact but jammed into their hiding places by brute force. There is yellow uranium, melted aluminium and a small mountain of irradiated shards and dust. In the words of one physicist, the core is still home to a whole radio nuclide inventory, primarily caesium137 and cobalt60. But the pictures have reinforced the team’s optimism that the structure is stable enough to tackle head-on without submerging the 50ft core (15m) under water or encasing it inside a giant bubble of inert gas. It means that the UKAEA can press ahead with plans to begin extracting the 15 tonnes of damaged fuel rods, dismantling the 2,000-tonne graphite core piece-by-piece and return Pile 1 back to a brownfield site. The £500 million project is likely to take until 2020. The bleak nuclear archaeology that constitutes Britain’s first foray into a nuclear future would still be instantly recognisable to that capable postwar generation. The blower house, which used to pump air into the reactor building, is now an office block but the pile beneath its ugly but instantly familiar 400ft bulbous chimney is unchanged. The building is still housed in its 1940s utilitarian shell. It is a dark and uncomfortable place. The pile cap, 80ft from the ground, can be reached only by the same rickety staircase that Vic Goodwin, the trainee graduate on the charge face that day, used to check the inspection holes. The charge face, where the fuel rods were once inserted manually, still has the power to impress with its cathedral-like proportions, an altar to an earlier, more confident nuclear age. Windscale Pile 1, built in a frenzied three-year period, provided the plutonium that powered Britain’s first A-bomb test, code-named Hurricane, which was detonated in the Monte Bello Islands, northwest of Australia. At the same time engineers in the Windscale control room began noticing disturbingly abnormal temperature rises in the core, so-called Wigner energy, raising concerns that the fuel and isotope cartridges could burst and lead to “thermal runaway”. Initially, they solved the problem by gently heating the graphite core, a process known as annealing. In October 1957 engineers shut down the reactor for its ninth annealing process. When the first heating fizzled out, they tried again but the process released so much energy that it began overheating. At about 4.30pm on Thursday, October 10, glowing fuel was noted in about 150 channels. For two days the fire burned inside the reactor core before, at the risk of an explosion, they doused it with water directly from the charge face and shut off the air-cooling system. The fire was put out, but not before two radioactive plumes escaped through the chimney. The first was blown over South Lancashire and Yorkshire, reaching London and Belgium that Friday evening. It was detected in Frankfurt 24 hours later, and the Netherlands and Scandinavia the next day. Contemporary newspaper reports of the incident appear, in hindsight, absurdly stiff. The Times reported that, according to Dr A. S. Mclean, chief medical officer, only a few employees had been contaminated and in most cases washing with soap and water was sufficient to cleanse them. But at the charge face, there had been a very real sense of urgency. Dick Sexton, the pile project leader from the US, said: “They tried really hard to push all the fuel out at one time using sledgehammers and fork-lift trucks. These guys were Cold War warriors. They were thinking that what they were doing was patriotic.” Windscale Pile 1 remained the benchmark for nuclear near-catastrophe until Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, ushering in a new regulatory era with the birth of the National Radiological Protection Board and other supervisory bodies. The popular images, derived from the newsreels of the day, are of churns being upended over drains after concern about the presence of iodine131 led to a six-week ban on milk from farms within a 200-mile radius of the reactor. But the fallout contained longer-lasting poisons, which have since been blamed for hundreds of cancers. Nobody in the UKAEA will celebrate the 50th anniversary, but there is a hope that this symbol of nuclear’s troubled birth will soon disappear from the landscape. There is also fresh optimism that cracking the most toxic problem posed by decommissioning in Britain sends out a powerful message at a time when the Government is due to take the next step over a new generation of nuclear power generators. © Copyright 2007 Times Newspapers Ltd. ***************************************************************** 32 NRC: Advisory Committee on the Medical Uses of Isotopes: Meeting Notice FR Doc E7-19685 [Federal Register: October 5, 2007 (Volume 72, Number 193)] [Notices] [Page 57077-57078] From the Federal Register Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr05oc07-85] NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION AGENCY: U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. ACTION: Notice of meeting. SUMMARY: NRC will convene a meeting of the Advisory Committee on the Medical Uses of Isotopes (ACMUI) October 22-23, 2007. A sample of agenda items to be discussed during the public session includes: (1) NARM legislation, transition plan, and guidance; (2) status of specialty board applications for NRC recognition; (3) Y-90 microspheres guidance; (4) training and experience implementation issues; (4) recent security activities; (5) potential changes to 10 CFR Part 35; (6) licensing guidance for the Leksell Gamma-Knife[reg] PerfexionTM; and (7) review of recent medical events. A copy of the agenda will be available at http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/acmui/agenda or by e-mailing Ms. Ashley M. Tull at the contact information below. Purpose: Discuss issues related to 10 CFR Part 35 Medical Use of Byproduct Material. Date and Time for Closed Sessions: October 22, 2007, from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. This session will be closed so that NRC staff and ACMUI can discuss Committee business, which may include: Ethics training, personnel information, and other internal NRC issues. Date and Time for Open Sessions: October 22, 2007, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and October 23, 2007, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Address for Public Meeting: U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Two White Flint North Building, Room T2B3, 11545 Rockville Pike, Rockville, Maryland 20852. Public Participation: Any member of the public who wishes to participate in [[Page 57078]] the meeting should contact Ms. Tull using the information below. Contact Information: Ashley M. Tull, e-mail: amt1@nrc.gov, telephone: (301) 415-5294 or (918) 488-0552. Conduct of the Meeting Leon S. Malmud, M.D., will chair the meeting. Dr. Malmud will conduct the meeting in a manner that will facilitate the orderly conduct of business. The following procedures apply to public participation in the meeting: 1. Persons who wish to provide a written statement should submit an electronic copy to Ms. Tull at the contact information listed above. All submittals must be received by October 17, 2007, and must pertain to the topic on the agenda for the meeting. 2. Questions and comments from members of the public will be permitted during the meeting, at the discretion of the Chairman. 3. The transcript and written comments will be available for inspection on NRC's web site (http://www.nrc.gov) and at the NRC Public Document Room, 11555 Rockville Pike, Rockville, MD 20852-2738, telephone (800) 397-4209, on or about January 23, 2008. Minutes of the meeting will be available on or about December 7, 2007. 4. Persons who require special services, such as those for the hearing impaired, should notify Ms. Tull of their planned attendance. This meeting will be held in accordance with the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, as amended (primarily Section 161a); the Federal Advisory Committee Act (5 U.S.C. App); and the Commission's regulations in Title 10, U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, part 7. Dated at Rockville, Maryland this 1st day of October 2007. J. Samuel Walker, Acting Secretary of the Commission. [FR Doc. E7-19685 Filed 10-4-07; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 7590-01-P ***************************************************************** 33 Newswise Medical News: Low Levels of Perchlorate Exposure are Safe for Pregnant Women Source: American Thyroid Association Released: Fri 05-Oct-2007, Embargo expired: Fri 05-Oct-2007, 07:00 ET Newswise — Despite great concerns that small amounts of ingested perchlorate—a chemical which is ever-present in the environment—decreases thyroid function among individuals, it has no effect on the thyroid function of women in early pregnancy, including those with a low-iodine diet, according to a new study being presented on Saturday, Oct. 6, at the 78th Annual Meeting of the American Thyroid Association (ATA) in New York. Thyroid hormone is critical for the neurodevelopment of a fetus—particularly in the first trimester of pregnancy—and requires the mother to receive an adequate intake of iodine. These findings are in contrast to last year’s report from the Center For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which reported that perchlorate exposure, (assessed by the small amount of perchlorate found in the urine in the United States population), slightly decreased thyroid function in women with a low iodine diet, but not in men or in women with a normal iodine diet. “In a large study of first-trimester pregnant women, which is a potentially vulnerable population, we found no effect of environmental perchlorate exposure on thyroid function, even though the amount of perchlorate in the urine was similar to that found in the U.S. population and about seventy percent of the women were mildly iodine deficient,†said Elizabeth N. Pearce, M.D., lead author of the study and assistant professor of medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine in Boston. Perchlorate is both a naturally occurring and man-made chemical, which is present in very small amounts in a wide variety of foodstuffs and drinking water. Most of the perchlorate manufactured in the United States is used as the primary ingredient of solid rocket propellant. The chemical has brought concern to communities and physicians, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) because in higher amounts, perchlorate decreases the entry of iodine into the thyroid gland. It can disrupt how the thyroid functions because iodine is an essential component of thyroid hormones. Impairment of thyroid function in expectant mothers may affect the fetus and newborn, resulting in behavioral changes, delayed development, and decreased learning capability. The large cohort study involved 396 women in Europe during their first trimester of pregnancy. The results do not support the findings previously reported in the U.S. that similar levels of perchlorate exposure increase serum TSH and lower serum T4 in women with urine iodine concentrations <100 μg/L. These findings suggest that the concerns aired by other investigators who have reported thyroid function test alterations associated with perchlorate intake may not be justified. © 2007 Newswise. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 34 MCM: The Aishah Ali Interview With Geoscientist Leuren Moret - Madame Chair Magazine (Malaysia) v.VIII 1aug2007 [More by Leuren Moret] Ever since she knew about the devastating effects of radiation and depleted uranium pollution on the world as a result of nuclear weapons, geoscientist Leuren Moret has been on a crusade to stop wars and weapons testing. The War Crimes Conference and Exhibition held at the Putra World Trade Centre in Kuala Lumpur recently was eye-opening and conscience-raising in its condemnation of the atrocities of war. During the three-day event, attendees gained insight into the horrors of past conflicts and the impending threat to our future if wars continue. Among the many impassioned pledges was a move to establish a War Crimes Tribunal in Malaysia this year and try US President George Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Australian Prime Minister John Howard for their roles in initiating the illegal Iraq war. The Kuala Lumpur Initiative to Criminalise War is a global movement introduced several years ago by Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, former Prime Minister of Malaysia. The February War Crimes Conference is the most recent of the annual events organised by the Perdana Global Peace Forum. The event fielded distinguished speakers who shared their expertise and showcased a number of war victims from Iraq and Palestine who gave a human face to the grim discourse with their heartrending testimonies. Among the eloquent speakers was geoscientist and international radiation specialist Leuren Moret, who gave a startling revelation about the effects of radiation and how our global environment has been contaminated from atomic bomb testing since 1945 to the present, and how this pollution has sharply increased since the US introduced depleted uranium (DU) weapons to the battlefields for the first time with the 1991 Gulf War. This, she says, has caused a world epidemic of cancer, diabetes, neuro-muscular diseases, chronic fatigue syndrome, diseases of the heart and brain and infertility. A US nuclear weapons lab whistle blower, Moret has spoken in 46 countries as she feels it is her obligation to share the devastating results of her research, which she began after working at two nuclear weapons laboratories in California from the 1970s to 1991. What she has to say will not only shock, but also answer the question we have always asked: why are so many people suffering from cancer and unexplained diseases of the heart, brain and nervous system these days? ====================================================================== Aishah Ali: Your talk was scary. Can I ask you to elaborate on the effects of radiation and DU on our health? First of all what is your role at this conference? Leuren Moret: My role is to introduce the radiation issue as a world war crime. It is extremely important for Malaysians to know because particles from radiation and DU are everywhere in the air. We drink the same water, we breathe the same air and we eat food from soils that may have been contaminated. That's why the pollution of the environment and the atmosphere is so important for the future of humanity and it is directly affecting public health here in Malaysia. 1 have been reading about increased infertility in Malaysia, which is part of the global trend. AA: Why us? We are so far away from the war zones. LM: These tiny radioactive particles are all over the world in two weeks. When a nuclear bomb explodes or when a DU weapon burns, it produces radioactive poison gas. Uranium when it burns is hotter than the sun and it forms extremely tiny particles. These particles stay in the air until rain or snow removes them and they contaminate our soil and water. Areas where there is high rainfall such as Hawaii, or the coastal areas in Southeast Asia, have much higher levels of radiation rained out into the local environment. Of course, this damages all living things, not just humans. AA: How do they get into our body and damage our health? LM: You know why people smoke opium? When you inhale the smoke, it gets into your bloodstream very fast. If it's eaten, it goes through your digestive system. But if you inhale or inject it into your blood veins, it goes all over your body. What happens is, the tiny particles in the lungs go into your bloodstream and your bloodstream goes everywhere in your body — to your bones, brain, even contaminating your hair. It has devastating effects. The first is the heavy-metal chemical effect. You know how lead and mercury are very toxic? Uranium is also a toxic chemical. The metal reaction will give your body horrible rashes and allergies. Another is the radioactive effect where nuclear particles disturb the cells. Our cells communicate with one another but what happens is the radiation damages the signals and cells start to malfunction. The third and most serious effect of DU is the nanoparticle or "particulate" effect. Because the suspended DU particles which travel around the world are so tiny, they disturb the signalling and information flow in the cell processes and functions of the body. You get what is called chronic diseases like chronic fatigue syndrome where people get tired all the time, that's from radiation damage; or obesity which is caused by damage to the information flow in the cell; or neuro-muscular diseases like multiple-sclerosis where people are unable to walk because their nervous systems are damaged. DU is a systemic poison which causes a web of diseases that cascade into many illnesses AA: What exactly is DU? LM: DU is radioactive trash from the atomic weapons project and the nuclear power industry. It is a radioactive metal and occurs in three isotopes (forms of a chemical element differing in their atomic weight) — Uranium 238, Uranium 235 and Uranium 234. They all behave the same chemically because they have the same number of electrons in the outer shell, but they are slightly different in mass. The isotope that scientists want is Uranium 235 because it will explode in nuclear bombs like the Hiroshima bomb. Today they mine the uranium and take 0.5 per cent out of U235 from the ore to make into nuclear reactor fuel. The rest is trash. It's called depleted uranium or DU because they have removed the half per cent of U235. It's a bomb tester's term. It does not mean it is depleted in radiation. It is depleted in U235 because the vital half a per cent has been extracted. AA: But it is still dangerous? LM: Of course! This is in huge junk piles stored in drums in solid metal at the Department of Energy sites in the US. The US is using thousands of tons of DU in dirty bombs, dirty missiles and dirty bullets all over the Middle East and Central Asia. We're importing it from Canada, Belgium and South Africa. It is very profitable and so investment firms invest in corporations manufacturing DU weapons because they may get as much as a 35 per cent return annually on the investment. We have to take the profit out of war in order to end this global, permanent war economy, which is destroying the earth. Fortunately the Belgian Parliament has just passed a law abolishing all DU weapons manufacturing, testing, storage and sales. It is the first country in the world to do this. This is extremely significant because Belgium was exporting DU weapons to the US; it is the headquarters of NATO and the seat of the European Parliament. AA: When I visited Iraq before the war, I saw babies in hospitals dying of leukaemia. Would that have been from DU exposure? LM: Yes, the DNA is damaged but the babies were also exposed while in their mothers' wombs. So they were born with birth defects, underweight and not healthy There are also babies born without eyes. It is an extremely rare birth defect called anophthalmia and it ranges widely from case to case in 20,000-40,000 live births. But recently a doctor in Jordan reported 12 such cases in Iraqi babies and children. These babies are born alive but their eyes are not developed. Eyes in the foetus are formed in the first month, so in such cases, particles of DU in the mother's body interfere with the development of the baby. AA: So this means the risks are more when you live in the war zones? LM: Jordan's next door to Iraq and so is Israel. So it is like living on the battlefield. That is why DU weapons are illegal firstly, they are radioactive weapons, which make them illegal. Secondly, they arc illegal because they travel off the battlefield and poison the whole world with an invisible, silent, tasteless, radioactive gas, like Chernobyl (Russia) did. Thirdly they continue to act long after the battle is over, 4.5 billion years is the half-life of' DU. The fourth factor which makes them illegal under international law is that they kill and maim inhumanely not only enemy soldiers, but our own soldiers, civilians and all living things. This makes them completely illegal Weapons of Mass Destruction. AA: You also mentioned some astounding figures on rising cases of diabetes and cancer. LM : Yes, the World Health Organisation announced in April 2003 that cancer will increase globally by 50 per cent by 2020, and diabetes will increase from 30 million cases globally to 230 million cases over the next 20 years. There is a global epidemic of lung cancer now and a huge increase in diabetes cases, which can only be explained by a global environmental event such as global pollution of the atmosphere with DU. AA: Wouldn't the soldiers sent to the Gulf War suffer even more? LM: Yes, we have a 55 per cent disability rate for those who served in the Gulf region. They didn't have to be in the battlefield, they were just in the region and yet half of them have DU poisoning. They have DU in their bodies, in their semen and they contaminate their wives and partners and cause babies to be born with birth defects. There was a photo essay in Life magazine recently on children and babies of the first Gulf War veterans. It's titled "The Tiny Victims of Desert Storm ". It shows horribly disfigured (post-Gulf War I) babies playing with their normal siblings, who were born before their fathers went to war. These babies don't have legs, some don't have arms or they have hands coming out of their shoulders. The same has happened in many Iraqi, Afghan, Yugoslav babies. It will soon begin happening in Israel to new babies exposed to the DU particles drifting into Israel after the July 2006 Israeli attack on Lebanon with thousands of American DU bombs. Already there are large increases reported by Israeli doctors in northern Israel, where the rainfall is highest in Israel. It's very simple. You cannot use nuclear weapons without nuking yourself. In fact, Israeli soldiers were advised that if they wanted to have children, to leave their sperm in sperm banks before they went to Lebanon in the July attacks. AA: What about people living close to nuclear power plants or nuclear bomb-testing sites? LM: Many studies have shown that children's health has suffered as has that of living species like fish. I was part of a group studying the level of radiation in the teeth of children living around nuclear power plants in the US, England and Japan. We collected baby teeth and measured the radiation. Then we went to the children's cancer hospital and got the baby teeth from children living in the same area who were suffering from cancer. They had twice as much radiation in the baby teeth. And as the radiation levels go up and down each year, the cancer rates go up and down exactly following the radiation level in the baby teeth. So, people who live around nuclear power plants do not have healthy children. Adults also suffer rare cancers, chronic fatigue, thyroid problems and are giving birth to unhealthy and brain-damaged babies. I call nuclear technologies "the death of birth". AA: What happens to living species close to bomb testing sites? LM: There are severe effects on all living things near a nuclear bomb testing site, but low-level radiation exposure on the other side of the world also has very severe effects. For example, the DU causes a drop in the fishing catch in the ocean. A study showed a drop to 50 per cent of the fishing catch over the North Atlantic during bomb testing. As soon as the US, Russia and England signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, fishing catch recovered from one million tons to four million tons in four years. But in the Pacific the fishing catch has declined by 65 per cent since 1970 and never recovered because some countries — India, Pakistan, China and France continued bomb-testing. AA: So you've been around the world talking about this? Why did you decide on such a crusade? LM: (Laughs) I thought I was going to be a mother, cook, sew and have a totally normal life. But once you work in a nuclear weapons laboratory it's like joining the Mafia. You can let go of them but they cannot let go of you. I just learned the hard way that radiation is forever. I didn't know anything about radiation before. I'm a geologist and a geoscientist uses radiation to determine the age of the rocks. I measure the radioactive isotopes or minerals in rocks to determine the age of the rock and formation of the mountain range. "Then I went to work at two nuclear weapons laboratories. At the Lawrence Berkeley Lab I studied how magmas are created, and what happens when volcanoes erupt and how the ash and dust go all over the world. That helped me to understand how nuclear weapons and the fallout, rainout or snowout can go all the way around the world because it becomes a component of atmospheric dust. Millions of tons of atmospheric dust each year are transported all around the world with a lot of "hitchhikers" like fungi, bacteria, viruses and of course, radioactive isotopes. That was interesting to me because I have been working so many years with atmospheric dust! AA: Did you leave the job? LM: I wanted to travel and look for adventure. Then I came back in 1984 and had my daughter, Zephyr. To support her, I worked at the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Laboratory in California. I was working on the Yucca Mountains project, an ongoing project for the last I5 years to find a suitable repository to store nuclear waste from the nuclear weapons, nuclear power plant and the DU programmes. Even though they spent over US$3 billion of taxpayers' money, the government wasn't able to build a repository. Instead I observed extensive science and contractor fraud on the most important public works project in the history of the US. In fact, the radioactive pollution and the secrecy of the nuclear weapons programmes in the end will destroy all of the nuclear superpowers. That's because there is another greater superpower, and that is the superpower of public opinion. AA: So you became a whistle blower? LM: Yes, in I991. I became completely disillusioned with science in the United States because I discovered in those two years at Livermore that most scientists are "prostitutes" for the military or corporations. I remember standing in my laboratory in 1991, looking out of the window, and I said I didn't want to be a science prostitute anymore. I packed everything into my car, drove out the gate and said 'I'M OUT OF JAIL. OH, THIS FEELS WONDERFUL!' AA: Did they try to stop you? LM: No, but little did I know that when you step over that line, that invisible line, and you go against the nuclear power programme, you get tangled in the politics of radiation. I was completely devastated by the retaliation by the University of California and the Livermore lab. They bankrupted me, they broke into my house, my car, they kidnapped my daughter when she was I3 and I didn't see her until she was I8. They try to run whistleblowers off the road and they have killed some. They did everything to intimidate and frighten me. All I can say is that when the going gets tough the tough get going. I learned to be much stronger and I'm lucky to be alive. The best thing of all is that I lost all of my fear. Now they are afraid of' me. AA: You are an inspiration! LM: What really changed my life was my first trip to Japan in 2000. I was invited to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Atomic and Hydrogen Bomb Conference and in those two Peace Museums I saw the truth about the horrors of nuclear weapons. (In 1945 the uranium bomb named "Little Boy" was dropped on Hiroshima. A few clays later "Fat Man", a plutonium bomb, was dropped on Nagasaki.) In the Hiroshima museum there are pictures of the people with their skin dripping from them and the shadows of the people on the stone walls and on the steps where people were sitting when they were vapourised by the effects of the bomb. It was astounding to see that. I was okay until I was standing under the model of "Little Boy", the bomb they dropped in Hiroshima. Because I was a nuclear weapons laboratory whistle blower, I had all the cameras in my face and did so many television and newspaper interviews. Then in the Hiroshima Peace Museum I looked up and saw "Little Boy". I felt so terrible because I knew that scientists like me had made that possible. I started to cry and I could not stop. That was the moment when I decided that I had to spend the rest of my life educating the public about the terrible health impact of nuclear technologies. I could not do anything more important as a mother, a scientist and a Pacifist. And then a miracle happened, after seven years of constant research and speaking out all over the world. Tun Dr Mahathir invited me to the War Crimes Conference in Kuala Lumpur because he believes that radiation is the most important issue today. Of course, he and his wife are both medical doctors, so they could understand how devastating radiation can be to biological systems. He is the first world leader to take up the radiation issue. Wouldn't it be nice if Malaysia was the country that saved the world? I think we should work very hard to support Tun Dr Mahathir's Kuala Lumpur Initiative to Criminalise War. We really have no other choice. The home page of this website is www.mindfully.org ***************************************************************** 35 Las Vegas SUN: Energy Department proposes doubling size of Nevada nuclear dump Today: October 05, 2007 at 13:0:7 PDT By KEN RITTER Associated Press Writer LAS VEGAS (AP) - The Department of Energy is proposing doubling the size of a national nuclear waste repository it plans to build deep below an ancient volcanic ridge in the Nevada desert. Citing ongoing production of waste at nuclear power plants around the country, the Energy Department has revealed plans to entomb almost 150,000 tons of highly radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain. Nevada's senators and a state official said Friday they doubted Congress would revise a law that caps the Yucca Mountain project at 77,000 tons of radioactive waste, and will balk at a price tag that now tops $77 billion. "If they think they are going to get more money for an irresponsible plan to ship nuclear waste across the country and into Nevada's backyard, they're dreaming," Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid said. Bob Loux, head of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects and the state's chief anti-Yucca administrator, branded an environmental study outlining the proposal as "invalid and likely illegal." He said it went beyond Congressional authorization under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, and sought exemptions from transportation regulations and hazardous waste laws. The release of the environmental study, which triggers a 90-day public comment period, came as the Energy Department ramps up efforts to meet a self-imposed June 30 deadline to submit an application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to operate the repository in tunnels 1,000 feet below the desert surface. On Thursday, project chief Edward F. "Ward" Sproat III, in testimony before the House Budget Committee, raised the projected cost of the project to more than $77 billion, or about 35 percent more than the $57.5 billion the Energy Department projected in 2001. Energy Department spokesman Allen Benson in Las Vegas said the revised figure reflected an "update" of an environmental study that Congress relied upon in 2002 when it picked the site 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas to bury the nation's commercial, military and research nuclear waste. "It reflects the new repository design," Benson said, calling it "prudent and wise" to analyze a larger repository to contain waste being generated by 121 reactors in 39 states. The federal government is mandated by law to dispose of the nation's nuclear waste, and the Energy Department was supposed to open the Nevada site by 1998. But the Yucca Mountain project has been slowed by lawsuits, quality control concerns and funding shortfalls. Project officials have pushed back the target date for opening to 2017 or later. Nevada's congressional delegation is united in opposition to the project, and Tory Mazzola, spokesman for Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., called passage of any bill increasing the storage limit "unlikely." "This is just another example of DOE's attempt to move this project forward, but objective observers aren't so sure," Mazzola said. The environmental study makes crucial projections on radiation emissions, and airs plans for transporting and burying waste that scientists say will remain radioactive for millions of years. The study predicts "no adverse health effects to individuals" from radiation levels of up to 0.24 millirem per year measured 11 miles from the site for the first 10,000 years and no more than 2.3 millirem per year after 10,000 years. By comparison, a chest X-ray exposes a patient to 10 millirem while a mammogram results in a 30 millirem exposure. The projected emissions would be well below a standard proposed by the federal Environmental Protection Agency after a federal court in 2004 threw out an earlier radiation standard. The study calls for utilities operating nuclear power plants to be responsible for loading and sealing waste "transport, aging and disposal" canisters at sites in 39 states around the country. The canisters would be shipped by rail and remain sealed during handling and entombment at Yucca Mountain. Another environmental study issued Thursday identifies the so-called "Caliente Corridor" as the preferred route across Nevada for the Energy Department to build a railroad to the Yucca Mountain site. --- On the Net: U.S. Department of Energy, http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/ All contents © 1996 - 2007 Las Vegas Sun, Inc. ***************************************************************** 36 ReviewJournal.com: YUCCA MOUNTAIN: DOE: Enlarge repository Oct. 05, 2007 Agency studies nearly doubling nuclear waste capacity By STEVE TETREAULT STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU WASHINGTON -- Nevadans who fear the Yucca Mountain Project now might have twice as much to worry about. The Department of Energy is almost doubling the size of the proposed repository as it completes new environmental studies and long-term cost estimates of burying nuclear waste in Nevada. The department late Thursday issued a draft study that the project's director said analyzes the potential environmental effects of a repository built to hold up to 135,000 metric tons of used nuclear fuel and other highly radioactive waste. Further, DOE is finalizing long-range cost estimates for Yucca Mountain on the assumption it could be expanded at some point, project Director Ward Sproat said. The repository project's price tag could total in the range of $77 billion, a 35 percent increase from a 2001 estimate. The department's actions laying groundwork for a possible expansion at Yucca Mountain opened a new flash point of opposition in Nevada. State leaders argue nuclear waste burial is unsafe, and they do not want a repository of any size, let alone one that could be almost twice as large as originally planned. "Doubling the size of Yucca Mountain will only double the danger," said Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev. "This is not a bad dream; it's a nightmare." A federal law passed in 1982 set the Yucca Mountain capacity at 70,000 metric tons. But while the project has been delayed for years, commercial power plants have gotten life extensions and are generating waste at a rate of 2,000 metric tons per year. With the waste already waiting for disposal at 121 locations, that means a Yucca repository effectively would be "full" long before it might open in the next decade or two. Sproat said 135,000 metric tons is estimated as the entire waste output of nuclear plants through their operating lives. The Energy Department has asked Congress to pass a bill that would remove the 70,000 metric ton cap at Yucca Mountain, but it has drawn little interest from lawmakers. DOE also is preparing a report on whether the government should consider building a second repository. The Electric Power Research Institute, an arm of the utility industry, said in a study completed in June that the repository could be redesigned to hold at least 260,000 metric tons of waste and up to 570,000 metric tons with additional site characterization. "Additional drifts can be successfully excavated, loaded and cooled during a 50-year retrievability period such as the capacity of Yucca Mountain can be increased by at least a factor of three," said the study, which was overseen by John Kessler, Electric Power Research Institute manager of high-level waste and spent fuel. Sproat said Thursday he anticipates charges that the Energy Department is being presumptuous in examining issues related to an expanded Yucca repository. "People will absolutely say that, but we don't have any other basis to do anything else," Sproat said. If DOE limited itself to preparations for a 70,000 metric ton facility, policymakers "would ask me, what about everything else?" "I am probably in a no-win situation, but I like the way we are going," Sproat said. The project director said that DOE still plans by the end of June 2008 to seek a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a 70,000 metric ton facility. If Congress were to lift the cap, DOE would move forward at that point, he said. Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., said DOE is setting the stage to push Congress to enlarge the Nevada site. "Once they convince themselves the science is safe, they will use that as an argument to expand," he said. At a congressional hearing Thursday, Porter argued that Congress should move in the opposite direction and end the project. When it was conceived in 1982, Sony had just come up with the portable CD player, cell phones and the Internet did not exist, and the top-selling record was "Thriller" by Michael Jackson, he said. "In 25 years, we have studied a hole in the ground to death," Porter said. "We have spent 10 billion to 11 billion dollars but have not moved one inch on the playing field." Bob Loux, director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, said the state will evaluate the legality of the department's actions. "I think it certainly calls into question the validity of the environmental impact statement if they are doing an analysis for a scenario that is illegal under federal law," Loux said. "The only way they could be directed to do this is to amend the Nuclear Waste Policy Act," the 1982 law. But another observer said room appears to exist in another law, the National Environmental Policy Act, for what the department is doing. "I think in the world of NEPA, you are supposed to identify reasonably foreseeable increases in scope," said Brian O'Connell, nuclear waste adviser at the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. "If you err on the side of a larger impact, you can always scale back." Contact Stephens Washington Bureau Chief Steve Tetreault at stetreault@stephensmedia.com or (202) 783-1760. Links powered by inform.com David wrote on October 05, 2007 03:20 PM: Why is it a state that produces no nuclear waste is slated for the left over waste from other states? Also why is there already low level contaminated items (from Washington State)already in storage at Yucca Mountain when the repository isn't open yet? Joel E. wrote on October 05, 2007 03:02 PM: It sounds scary.. it is not scary. And if that area was ever compromised by water, it would be a reflection of the whole Sierra Nevada range falling into the sea. We need something however. We need a Atomic Energy Commission regulatory board that would have the power to remove any operation that did not comply with regulations. The power to put people in jail if they feel the regs are not serious. Both inspectors and operators should face obligatory sentencing for not following the rules. Joel E. wrote on October 05, 2007 03:02 PM: It sounds scary.. it is not scary. And if that area was ever compromised by water, it would be a reflection of the whole Sierra Nevada range falling into the sea. We need something however. We need a Atomic Energy Commission regulatory board that would have the power to remove any operation that did not comply with regulations. The power to put people in jail if they feel the regs are not serious. Both inspectors and operators should face obligatory sentencing for not following the rules. Dwight R Luerssen wrote on October 05, 2007 01:44 PM: I wish to make it known to the RJ and to others in government that many Nevadians are FOR the Yucca repository! I've visited the site and I perceive that moving forward is safe and will reward our state with large sums of income for our residences. A repository is NOT a DUMP! It is a safe place to store worthwhile items that will/might one day be recovered for other use. I dislike the excessively negative "spin" the RJ presents, or allows others to present in their one sided point-of-view. Dwight R Luerssen wrote on October 05, 2007 01:44 PM: I wish to make it known to the RJ and to others in government that many Nevadians are FOR the Yucca repository! I've visited the site and I perceive that moving forward is safe and will reward our state with large sums of income for our residences. A repository is NOT a DUMP! It is a safe place to store worthwhile items that will/might one day be recovered for other use. I dislike the excessively negative "spin" the RJ presents, or allows others to present in their one sided point-of-view. MrR0ng wrote on October 05, 2007 10:22 AM: Hmm, we can either keep all of the nuclear waste where it is right now, out in the open, under very little security or monitoring, or we can put it into this highly secure and monitored environment. If you knew where the nuclear waste was right now, you would be clamoring for this thing to be open. apdp wrote on October 05, 2007 09:12 AM: There is nothing wrong with the Yucca Mtn project. It is a good idea to store waste, develop an area of nuclear research and get on with the 21st century. The idea is sound, the waste will be secure and not at over 100+ sites across the US. The terrorist can now take their pick of targets. Wake up to the future, build the project and lead the world in nuclear research. PS Bob Jack, being from Scal does not mean crap, just tells me you were dumb enough to live there for some time. Doug wrote on October 05, 2007 08:11 AM: What about the ground fault and the sound science? Why doesn't the DOE make an offer to Mexico that they can't refuse.We would be killing two birds with one stone.We would be offering jobs to Mexico that we don't want in Nevada,and possibly giving a person a reason for not becoming an illeagle immigrant.It's a win, win situation.Being that the Mexican government is meddling in our affairs, "W" ought to jump right on this and become a real hero. Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal, 1997 - 2007 ***************************************************************** 37 KOLO: Nevada Officials Deride Proposal To Double Size Of Nuclear Dump Save Southern Nevada News Oct 05, 2007 Nevada officials say they doubt Congress will let the federal Energy Department double the size of the nuclear waste repository it plans to build in the Nevada desert. The agency released a draft environmental study on the proposal to increase from 77,000 tons to almost 150,000 tons the amount of radioactive waste that would be entombed at Yucca Mountain. Meanwhile, the project chief is telling Congress that the cost of the Yucca project could top $77 billion -- or 35 percent more than the $57.5 billion estimated in 2001. Nevada is fighting the plan. Senator Harry Reid says the Energy Department must be dreaming. And Nevada's chief anti-Yucca administrator says the proposal is -- quote -- "invalid and likely illegal." An Energy Department spokesman says planners needed to update the plan to account for waste still being generated at 121 reactors in 39 states. Gray Television Group, Inc. - Copyright © 2002-2007 - Designed and ***************************************************************** 38 IHT: Greenpeace activists board carrier, protesting nuclear waste shipment - International Herald Tribune The Associated Press Published: October 5, 2007 STOCKHOLM, Sweden: Three Greenpeace activists boarded the Atlantic Osprey carrier Friday as it was making its way to Sellafield in England with a shipment of Swedish nuclear waste for reprocessing. Fifteen activists met the ship in four inflatable boats as it passed west of the Danish island of Bornholm, and urged the ship to return to Sweden, Greenpeace spokeswoman Martina Kruger said. The three activists who climbed onto the ship were taken into custody by police and brought to land for questioning, Swedish news agency TT reported. The ship left Studsvik in Sweden on Thursday, carrying 4.8 metric tons (5.3 tons) of spent nuclear fuel, including 1.2 kilograms (2.65 pounds) of plutonium for reprocessing at the Sellafield plant in northwest England. Once it has been treated in Sellafield, it will be returned to Sweden for final storage. Greenpeace claims the Sellafield shipment is illegal and that the nuclear waste can be reprocessed in Sweden. In a statement, Greenpeace campaigner Tarjei Haaland said the shipment broke Swedish radiation protection laws "and undermines 20 years of Swedish environmental policy not to reprocess spent nuclear fuel." Government spokeswoman Marit Ragnarsson said the shipment destined for Sellafield was a "special case" since the nuclear waste comes from a research reactor and cannot be reprocessed anywhere but in the Sellafield plant. "This is the only possibility," she said. Copyright © 2007 the International Herald Tribune All rights reserved ***************************************************************** 39 Alameda Sun: Point Contamination Not a Big Concern, Yet Written by Marc Albert Published: Friday, 05 October 2007 Despite a lengthy report outlining a laundry list of radiological and toxic waste dumped in various locations at the former Naval Air Station Alameda, developers remain optimistic that problems aren't insurmountable. Despite a lengthy report outlining a laundry list of radiological and toxic waste dumped in various locations at the former Naval Air Station Alameda, developers remain optimistic that problems aren't insurmountable. "We are still very early in the process," said Joe Aguirre, a spokesman for SunCal Companies, the developer selected to oversee reuse of the decommissioned base. Aguirre said the firm would know more once various studies are completed. The Navy has not issued an estimate of how much it would cost, or how long it would take to decontaminate the sprawling 2,000-acre base. The Navy declined to return calls or e-mails seeking that information. Dot Lofstrom, senior engineering geologist for the California Department of Toxic Substances Control, said most of the radium from IR 1 has been removed. Lofstrom said officials project the point clean-up would be completed in 2017. [The Navy is] "not always forthcoming with the information about the contamination and the clean up," said City Councilman Frank Matarrese who also serves on a base reuse committee. "Originally, when we started talking about conveyance, the Navy was talking about conveying the whole base, now they are only talking about phase one and phase two," he said. The first phase of redeveloping the base won't involve the most contaminated sites. Instead, former housing sites for sailors will be redeveloped. According to a report issued by the Navy in June, contamination at the former base is extensive. The report, entitled Final Historical Radiological Assessment Volume II, Alameda Naval Air Station use of General Radioactive Materials 1941-2005 estimates "that between 15,000 and 200,000 tons of assorted refuse and debris including scrap metal, waste oil, aircraft engines, radioactive wastes, solvents, paint ... asbestos, pesticides, mercury, and construction debris have been disposed of [at the 78-acre dump site IR 1]." The report also notes that radioactive waste, including metal and wooden workbenches and "dial stripping sludge" were buried in a 50-foot long unlined trench. IR1 is just one of several dump sites on the former base. Radium was used primarily to make aircraft instruments glow in the dark. Both Building 400 and Building 5 housed radium workshops. "The disposal of liquid radium waste from Building 400 second floor has resulted in internal contamination of both sanitary drain system piping and storm drain piping exiting the building on the north side. About 100 feet of sanitary drain piping from Building 400 is contaminated," according to the report. The NAS Alameda, which was once the homeport for four nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, was also involved in the decontamination of aircraft engines and various other objects irradiated in atmospheric atomic tests. "The military was interested in determining what was needed to decontaminate aircraft following these tests ... the location of the engine disassembly and decontamination is not known." According to the report, the engines were likely contaminated with plutonium-239, strontium-90 and cesium-137. Mayor Beverly Johnson said she recalls hearing clean-up estimates of around $500 million at one time. However, estimates are not always accurate. For example, officials initially claimed that a new Bay Bridge could be built for $900 million. The cost for the Oakland to Yerba Buena Island span has ballooned to $6.3 billion. The base clean-up potentially has more uncertainty than constructing a bridge. "I think the Navy was really caught by surprise by the extent of the contamination and the cost of the clean up ... I really believe that they thought that these base closures would be a break-even for them, and it's not," Matarrese said. An existing jogging track, which is conceptually planned to be upgraded into a recreational path, surrounds IR Site 2. According to the report, IR 2 contains: infectious wastes, laboratory wastes asbestos, tear gas, mercury, explosives, radium, strontium-90 and "suspected radioactive thorium glass." According to the report, a "Time Critical Removal Action is in progress in Site 2." A worker employed by a warehousing company in a building adjacent to Building 400, said she was aware that the site had environmental issues, but had no knowledge of radiological contamination. The employee did not want her name used. She said she had observed people doing testing which she termed "freaky," but said they were not wearing protective gear, so she was not particularly alarmed. Contact Marc Albert at malbert@alamedasun.com ©2006, Alameda Sun. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 40 NRC: NRC Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste and Materials to Meet in Rockville, Maryland, October 16-18 News Release - 2007-130 - U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION Office of Public Affairs Telephone: 301/415-8200 Washington, DC 20555-0001 E-mail: opa@nrc.gov www.nrc.gov The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste and Materials (ACNWM) will meet Oct. 16-18 in Rockville, Md., to discuss, among other items, overview and development of seismic regulations, current seismic design requirements for nuclear power plants and mixed oxide fuel fabrication facilities, and pre-closure seismic design requirements for the proposed Yucca Mountain high-level radioactive waste repository. In addition, the committee will be briefed by staff from the Office of Federal and State Materials and Environmental Management Programs on decommissioning plans for the Mallinckrodt Chemical, Inc. site in St. Louis, Mo. The ACNWM reports to and advises the Commission on all aspects of nuclear waste and materials management. The meeting will be held in Room T-2B3 of the agency's Two White Flint North building, at 11545 Rockville Pike. Tuesday’s session will run from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., Wednesday’s session will run from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Thursday’s session will run from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Anyone requiring the use of video teleconferencing to observe the meeting should contact Theron Brown at 301-415-8066 to ensure availability. A complete agenda is available on the NRC's Web site at http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/acnw/agenda/2007 NRC news releases are available through a free listserv subscription at the following Web address: http://www.nrc.gov/public-involve/listserver.html. The NRC Home Page at www.nrc.gov also offers a Subscribe to News link in the News & Information menu. E-mail notifications are sent to subscribers when news releases are posted to NRC's Web Site. Friday, October 05, 2007 ***************************************************************** 41 North Queensland Register: It's official: NT dump site nominated for nuclear waste Tennant and District Times nqr.farmonline.com.au 05 October 2007 THE Federal Government has officially accepted the nomination of Muckaty as a potential site for its proposed nuclear waste dump. There are now four Northern Territory sites which will be assessed for suitability including Harts Range, Mount Everard and Fishers Ridge. Muckaty, a former cattle station which is now Aboriginal land, 120 km north of Tennant Creek, was nominated by the Northern Land Council in May despite opposition from many of the traditional owners. The deal is worth an estimated $12 million. Federal Science Minister Julie Bishop is now waiting for scientific assessments of the area which will house storage of low and medium grade nuclear waste. The reports, which would determine the suitability of the site are expected to assess the physical and biological environments. An announcement on which of the four sites would be selected for the dump is expected next year. Already legislation has been passed preventing third party legal challenges to nomination of land by land councils and Prime Minister John Howard has refused to consider a referendum on the matter despite a call from the NT Parliament. The Arid Lands Environment Centre's Beyond Nuclear Initiative spokesperson, Natalie Wasley condemned the decision announced last Thursday. She said the government had either been misled or was being disingenuous about the consultation and consent behind the Muckaty nomination. "Many of the traditional owners are opposed to the nomination of their land," she said. "The Northern Land Council nominated the site on behalf of the traditional owners but there is definitely not agreement from the entire Muckaty mob. "Since Muckaty was raised as a place of interest last April, traditional owners from all of the family groups associated with the area have written to Ms Bishop and the NLC numerous times registering opposition to hosting radioactive waste. "So when the Minister now says all affected Aboriginal people have had the chance to express opposition she is essentially saying their concerns have been disregarded. "Further Ms Bishop has not responded to invitations to come to the Northern Territory and meet the people who will be affected by her decision, however this is an issue of extreme national importance and the Minister should hear directly from traditional owners, people from nearby stations and communities and Tennant Creek." Chief Minister Clare Martin also condemned the decision. "This has been a flawed process from the start and just continues the arrogant approach of the Commonwealth Government," she said. "All along we've said the sensible thing to do would be to pick the most suitable site in Australia based on a strict scientific process. "Instead the Federal Government has selected a site in the Northern Territory because it's the most convenient . "Now it will try and prove it's suitable. "The process is totally back-to-front." Ms Martin said the Federal Government has ridden roughshod over the Territory on this issue and that it should back-off. Source: Tennant & District Times, NT Copyright © 2007. Rural Press Limited ***************************************************************** 42 Oct. 5, 1986: Israel's Secret Nuke Arsenal Exposed Date: Fri, 5 Oct 2007 10:34:44 -0500 (CDT) October 5th 2007 Wired News www.wired.com ----- Oct. 5, 1986: Israel's Secret Nuke Arsenal Exposed By Tony Long 1986: The existence of Israel's secret nuclear weapons program is revealed by a former nuclear-plant technician, whose story is published by The Sunday Times of London. Israel has never acknowledged possessing nuclear weapons, although most defense experts believe the Jewish state has been developing nuclear warheads since the 1960s at its Dimona Nuclear Research Center in the Negev Desert. Official Israeli policy is to be deliberately vague on the subject. There was nothing vague about what Mordechai Vanunu told the Times, however. The former army sergeant became critical of Israeli policies and left the country after being laid off as a technician at the Negev facility. While living in Australia he met a Times reporter and told him, in detail, about what was going on out in the desert. Vanunu -- who changed his name to John Crossman and converted to Christianity after leaving Israel -- accompanied the reporter to London and gave the paper around 60 photographs he had taken secretly while working at Negev. The photographs showed, among other things, the plutonium spheres used to trigger nuclear warheads. After thoroughly fact-checking Vanunu's account, the Times broke the story on Oct. 5. Israel, tipped that the Times had the goods, abducted Vanunu in Rome (after luring him there from London, so as not to incur the wrath of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher by nabbing him on British soil) five days before the newspaper published the story. He was drugged by Mossad agents and shipped back to Israel on a freighter. A secret court convicted Vanunu on charges of treason and espionage and sentenced him to 18 years. He was released from prison, where he'd spent up to 10 years in solitary confinement, on April 21, 2004. Vanunu remains a thorn in Israel's side, continuing to attack the nuclear program as well as Israel's treatment of its Arab minority. ======== http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/10/dayintech_1005 ======== ***************************************************************** 43 Independent: Inside France's secret war - By Johann Hari in Birao, Central African Republic Published: 05 October 2007 On the battlefield - Birao I am standing now on its latest battlefield, looking out over abandoned mud streets streaked with ash. The city of Birao is empty and echoing, for the first time in 200 years. All around are miles of burned and abandoned homes, with the odd starved child scampering through the wreckage. What were all these buildings? On one faded green sign it says Ministry of Justice, on a structure reduced to a charcoal husk. In the market square, the people who have returned are selling a few scarce supplies – rice and manioc, the local yeasty staple food – and talking quietly. At the edges of the town, there are African soldiers armed and trained by the French, lolling behind sandbags, with machine guns jutting nervously at passers-by. They are singing weary nationalist anthems and dreaming of home. To get here, you have to travel for eight hours on a weekly UN flight that carries eight passengers at most, and then ride on the back of a rusting flat-top truck for an hour along ravaged and broken roads. It is hard to know when you have arrived, because you are greeted only by emptiness and silence. What has happened here? Sitting amid the mud and dust and sorrow, I find Mahmoud, one of the 10 per cent of Birao's residents who have returned to the rubble. He is a thin-faced 45-year-old farmer, and explains, in a low, slow voice, how his home town came to this. "I woke up for morning prayers on 4 March and there was gunfire everywhere. We were very frightened so we stayed in the house and hoped it would stop. But then in the early afternoon my brother's children came running to our house, screaming and crying. They told us the Forcés Armées Centrafricanes [Faca – the army trained and equipped by the French, on behalf of their friendly neighbourhood strongman, President François Bozize] had gone into their house. They wouldn't calm down and explain. So I ran there, and I saw my brother on the floor outside, dead. His wife explained they had forced their way in and rounded him up, along with three men who lived nearby. They took them out on to the street and shot them one by one in the head." Mahmoud's friend, Idris, lived nearby, and feared he, too, would be shot. He says now: "We could see the villages burning and the children were screaming and really scared, so we ran two kilometres out into the jungle. From there we could see our whole city on fire. We fled along the river and stayed out there. We ate fish, but there weren't many. Some days we couldn't catch anything and we starved. The children were so terrified. Still, when they hear a loud noise, they think there are guns coming and they start shaking." Idris looks off into the distance and continues: "On the fourth day, we saw the French planes come. They each had six rockets that they fired. The explosions were loud. We don't know what they were targeting, or why. Then the French soldiers arrived." A military truck filled with French soldiers rumbles by not long after, its tanned troops wearing designer sunglasses and a "why am I here?" anxiety. As Mahmoud and Idris talk it gets dark, and a suffocating blackness and silence falls on the city. There is no electricity and no moonlight. They explain in this blackness that the French-backed troops began firing and the French military began bombing in March for one reason: the desperate locals had begun to rise up against President Bozize, because he had done nothing for them. People here were tired of the fact that "there are no schools, no hospitals, and no roads". "We are completely isolated," they explain. "When it rains, we are cut off from the world because the roads turn to mud. We have nothing. All the rebels were asking was for government help." As I stumble around Birao, I hear this every time: the rebels were simply begging for government help for the hungry, abandoned people. Even the bemused French soldiers and the Bozize lackeys sent to the area admit this privately. Yet the French response was with bombs against the rebels' pick-up points. Why? What is there here that they want? I look out towards the jungle and realise many of Birao's residents are still hiding out there, risking the wild beasts. In the similarly burned-out areas in the north-west, I drive out into the jungle with Unicef and find these clusters of starving families scattered everywhere. In one cleared patch, I find a group of four men with their wives and mothers, clearing an area of ground with their bare hands where they will try to plant peanuts. They are living in handmade huts and set traps to catch mice to eat. Ariette Nulguhom is cradling her eight-month-old grandson with his distended little belly and praying he will survive another night. She tells me: "He's been sick for a long time. We tried to get him to a nurse but there aren't any. We think it is malaria but there is no medicine here. We don't know what will happen... We are all weak and feverish. We're exhausted because we work all day, every day. I have not eaten for days now." When they left behind their houses, they left behind access to clean water, electricity, and medicine. When the Faca burned those homes, they burned away the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries for these families, too. This is a forgotten corner of a forgotten country. Birao lies and dies in the far north-east of the Central African Republic. CAR itself has a population of just 3.8 million, spread across a territory bigger than Britain's, landlocked at the exact geographical heart of Africa. It is the least-reported country on earth. Even the fact that 212,000 people have been driven out of their homes in this war doesn't register on the global radar. In Birao, I realise I am too close to the immediate horror to find the deeper explanations for this war. I only begin to uncover the origins of this story when I stumble across a very rare find in the CAR – an old man. A country of children - Paoua In the CAR, you have beaten the odds if you live to be 42. There are times when this seems like a country of children, swarming around with guns and hardened laughs, without an adult in sight. So when I see Zolo Bartholemew limping past the wreckage of another burned-out town – this time in the distant north-west, outside the city of Paoua – he seems like a mirage. He has no teeth and a creased face, and when I ask, he does not know his age. But he remembers. He remembers the tail-end of the first time the French were here – and why. "I watched my parents forced to work in the fields when I was a child," he says in Sango, the local language. "When they got tired, they were whipped and beaten and made to go faster. It was constantly like this." The French flag was first hoisted in the heart of Africa on 3 October 1880, seizing the right bank of the Congo for the cause of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité – for the white man. The territory was swiftly divided up between French corporations, who were given the right effectively to enslave the people, like Zolo's parents, and force them to harvest its rubber. This rubber was processed into car tyres for sale in Paris and London and New York. A French missionary called Father Daigre described what he saw: " It is common to meet long files of prisoners, naked and in a pitiful state, being dragged along by a rope round their necks. They are famished, sick, and fall down like flies. The really ill and the little children are left in the villages to die of starvation. The people least affected often killed the dying, for food." Zolo nods when I mention this. "When the whites were here, we suffered even more," he says. "They forced us to work. We were slaves." One horrified French administrator wrote in the 1920s that the locals reacted to being enslaved by the corporations by becoming "a troglodyte, subsisting wretchedly on roots until he starves to death, rather than accept these terrible burdens". Areas that had "only a few months ago been rich, populous and firmly established in large villages" became, he wrote, "wasteland, sown with dilapidated villages and deserted plantations". But in the 1950s, men like Zolo rose and refused to be enslaved. "We followed Boganda," he says. Barthélemy Boganda was born in a Central African village near here in 1910, and, as a child, he saw his mother beaten to death by the guards in charge of gathering rubber for a French corporation. He rose steadily through the Catholic priesthood, married a French woman, and, quite suddenly, became the leader of the CAR's pro-democracy movement. He would begin his speeches to the French by introducing himself as the son of a polygamous cannibal, and then lecture them on the values of the French Revolution with a fluency that left them stunned and shamed. He crafted a vision of a democratic Africa beyond tribe, beyond race and beyond colonialism. He was passionate about the need for a plurality of political parties, a free press, and human rights. He rhapsodised about his vision of a United States of Africa, linking together the countries of Central Africa into a USA Mk II. "And they killed him," Zolo says, shaking his head and kicking at the earth beneath his feet. On 29 March 1959, not long after the French era of direct rule had ended, President Boganda's plane was blasted out of the air. The French press reported that there had been "suspicious materials " found in the remains of the fuselage – but on the orders of the French government, the local investigation was abandoned. The French installed the dictator David Dacko in his place. He swiftly shut down Boganda's democratic reforms, brought back many French corporations, and reintroduced their old system of forced labour, rebranding it "village work". French rule over the CAR – the whippings Zolo remembers – did not end with "independence". It simply mutated, into a new and slippery form, and it is at the root of the current war. But the clues to this lie far to the west, in the capital city. " Nothing happens in this country without somebody pulling a lever in Paris," a taxi driver tells me as I leave to travel to Bangui at the bottom of the country, driving through clouds of red-dust and past swarms of street-children. I have an appointment with an underground figure in the opposition to keep. A tortured president - Bangui Bangui looks like a city that rose with a heave from the jungle a century ago, and has been sighing back into it ever since. Every building appears to be rusting away, and great eruptions of vegetation are shoving the homes and shops aside, reaching for the sky. On corner after corner there are huge, hideous caricature-statues of black people, showing them as thick-lipped and kinky-haired, giving the city the ambience of a Ku Klux Klan garage sale. Every few hours, the power supply dies, and the city stammers to a halt. People dawdle in the streets, playing cards and wiping away their sweat with the back of their wrists. It is during one of these blackouts that I arrive at the office of a leader of the opposition with a delegation from the British campaigning group Waging Peace. His office is above a parade of shops, and it is a simple room filled with African carvings and pictures of past and faded glories. He walks towards us in a green suit, and – although he does not say it – we all know he is taking a huge risk by meeting us secretly like this. Last year, 40 political figures who criticised the government of President Bozize were tossed into jail and tortured. " They tried to kill my son. They are trying to assassinate me," he says, with a matter-of-fact shrug. He gives the long, horrible details. I cannot repeat them here because they would identify him – and become a death sentence. "The country is in a dire situation," he says. "We have been described by the magazine Foreign Policy as one of the worst failed states in the world, after Iraq and Afghanistan." He says the CAR is now " a total and ferocious dictatorship" under the absolute command of Bozize. The roots of the wars in the north-east and north-west are, he says, simple. "Local people in these regions are rebelling against the government, because the government provides them with nothing. There are no services. There aren't even roads. So the rebels rise up to get attention – and the government retaliates by rampaging through the area, killing civillians and burning homes." So who is this Francois Bozize, and why are the French supporting him with batallions and bombs? I telephone the vast presidential palace to meet the man who stares out from behind a smartly-trimmed moustache in the pictures hanging on every wall, and the President's press officer eventually gets back to me. "Call me back, I am running out of credit on my mobile phone," he snaps. Then he promises a meeting with the President, but finds mysterious "complications" that lead him to cancel every time. There are rumours across Bangui that Bozize is becoming ever-more paranoid and locked down, employing food tasters to check for poison before every meal and refusing to meet strangers. So I look instead to the few scraps of independent journalism that survive here for clues as to who this French love-child really is. Le Citoyen is distributed on rough photocopied paper every day and sold on street corners for a few pennies – but it is one of the bastions of Central Africa's remaining freedoms. Its editor Maka Obossokotte has a neat grey beard, square cheekbones, and balls of steel. He has been jailed for criticising the President and his cronies more than once, but he insists I quote him on-the-record and by name. "In jail, you were given rotten fish to eat. I got gout. The toilets..." he shakes his head. "It is hell." He says he knows now that "it is very likely somebody from the presidential clan will kill me... Every morning when I wake up, I think there are three beds I could end up in tonight. Back here at home, the hospital, or the morgue." But he says: "I will not be afraid. It is when you are afraid that you lose." Sitting in a delicious cloud of smoke, puffing away on high-tar cigarettes, Maka talks me through the President's biography. He was born in nearby Gabon, the son of a police officer from the CAR. He wasn't smart at school, but he managed to get a coveted job as bodyguard to Jean-Bedel Bokassa, one of the vicious dictators flattered and fawned over by the French. Bokassa was famously mad, declaring himself "Emperor of the CAR", eating the leader of the opposition, and opening fire on a group of children who were protesting for help to buy their school uniforms. Bozize carried Bokassa's cane and his bag, and, Maka explains: "It was through watching him that Bozize got his taste for power." The "Emperor" promoted him to the rank of general. After a while, Bokassa's foaming madness made him an unreliable servant of the French, so they backed a coup against him. Bozize left to study at the Ecole Spécial Militaire de Saint-Cyr in France, and returned only to stage a farcical coup attempt of his own. In 1982, he seized control of one of the national radio stations and announced that he was now President. Everybody laughed; Bozize fled. A few years later he was deported back to Bangui to be punished. "They tortured him," Maka says. "They pissed in his mouth, they broke his ribs, they really mistreated him for three years." Eventually, they let him go back to France for medical treatment – and the French government swiftly began to build him up as an alternative president, in case their current pick became too disobedient and got ideas of his own. From being a poor man, Bozize suddenly had the money to run a huge presidential campaign. He ran, and he lost. So in October 2002, he paid for a vast private mercenary army (you might wonder – with whose money?) to invade the CAR from neighbouring Chad, depose the sitting president and install himself as the supreme ruler. Since then, he has "won" a disputed election he arranged for himself and bathed in French approbation. "France sees the CAR as a colony," Maka says. "The presidents are selected by France, not elected by the people. The presidents do not serve the interests of this country; they serve the interests of France." He lists the French corporations who use the CAR as a base to grab Central African resources. This French behaviour is, he reasons, at the root of the wars currently ripping apart the north of the country. Whoever becomes president knows his power flows down from Paris, not up from the people – so he has no incentive to build support by developing the country. Rebellions become inevitable, and the president crushes them with the house-burnings and French bombs I learned about in Birao. "The country will only be able to develop when France stops putting in place these dictators and the people choose," Maka adds, stubbing out his cigarette into an overflowing ashtray. "The CAR will only progress when the president is scared of his people, not the French." Into rebel country - Bossangoa I am driving now through the skin-sizzling heat of Bossangoa, the home-town of Bozize – and the last outpost of his power before you stumble into bandit-and-rebel territory. The Marie Celeste villages stretch for miles once more. Silence. Walls eaten by fire. Dead towns. In the houses there are smashed pots, abandoned as their residents fled Bozize's marauding murderers. I find a stray shoe sitting alone in one. In another village, the bell that calls children to school is still hanging from a tree, forgotten. On the blackboard is the final lesson, still there: a map of the CAR in chalk. But then, after an hour of driving beyond Bossangoa into the jungle, there are signs of life. In yet another burned village, there are 20 young men, all sweat and Kalashnikovs. We pull up, and realise we are in an unexpected rebel camp. The boys' leader strolls toward us – an elder, at the age of 24 – and shakes our hands. He explains they are part of the rebel Army for the Restoration of the Republic and Democracy (French acronym APRD), who have taken this area. His "troops" are dressed oddly. One is swearing ski glasses and a ski hat, in a place as far from a ski slope as any on earth. Another is wearing nothing but bright red swimming trunks, and half a dozen strings of bullets around his neck. He is wearing a single woman's flip-flop, silver and glittering in the sun. They explain they are not allowed to make statements – only their leader can do that – but they are eager to have their photographs taken. As soon as I agree, they contort themselves into wild poses. They stick bullets in their mouths, flex their muscles and screw their faces into a fake rage, like they are recreating a Rambo poster. The baby-faced soldier in the corner, they tell me casually, is 13. They look like teenagers on any street corner anywhere in the world, playing at being rebels. Except these are real rebels, with real guns. A 13-year-old with a gun is a comic sight – until he points it towards you and smiles strangely. Why, I ask, did you join the rebellion? "Bozize killed my father, my mother and my brother," their leader steps forward to say, in a low voice. He peels up his vest and shows an angry scar where he says he was bayoneted. "They thought I was dead, so they left me." I ask what the rebels want. "We want peace, we want schools, we want roads," the leader says. Most of them nod. Do you want power? "That's up to God. We want roads and schools." With that, we drive away, and they cheerfully wave their guns in our direction. I follow the trail of burned homes up to Paoua, a town at the top of the north-west – and I am sitting now on a bench with the man who ordered so many to be torched. A lieutenant of the Garde Présidentiel (GP) is chewing gum in the sun, behind barbed wire and sleeping security guards. The GP is the jagged spike of the country's military accountable only to President Bozize – his own private militia. When you see them approach on the streets, with their wild eyes and ready guns, pulses surge and spines stiffen. In the market-square in Paoua, a GP "officer" put a gun to the head of a Médecins sans Frontières doctor and told him: " We will do what they did in Rwanda." And I am making small talk with one of its bosses. He is wearing long shining purple robes and a white fez, and he tells us haltingly that he will be interviewed, yes, but we cannot use his name. He is young – 33 – with hunched shoulders. His bodyguard is a muscled ripple of anxiety, and he watches every move we make, as if ready to pounce. So, lieutenant, why do you think people join the rebels and fight against you? He makes eye contact only with his bodyguard. "I don't know." Chew, chew. Why do you think people are so scared of the GP here? " There have been a few undisciplined elements, but we have dealt with them." Chew, chew, chew. So it is only undisciplined soldiers who burn all these thousands upon thousands of homes? You don't order them to? "If they burn homes, we deal with them." How have you dealt with them? "We use discipline." He stops leaning and sits up. Really? How many people have you disciplined? When? His bodyguard doesn't like this question; he glares at me. "I had an officer who went to the market when he was not supposed to. I disciplined him." That's it? "We have disciplined." That's not what people in the villages say, I comment. They are terrified. " Show me the villages. I will show you how we have done good." After we drive away from his compound, we meet up with two pale, disturbed workers from the Italian charity Coopi. They explain that as the lieutenant was assuring us his forces are disciplined, a GP officer drove up on a motorbike and waved a gun in their faces. At every one of these scenes, the question keeps coming back: why? Why are the French providing military support and training for these militia? The French government says it is in the CAR because it signed a military agreement back in the 1970s to protect the country from external aggression. The rebellions in the north are, they say, supported by Sudan – so this counts. Mes amis, we are protecting a democratically elected President from a tyrannical and genocidal neighbour. But I couldn't find anyone in the CAR – not a single person, not even the most pro-French – who thought Sudan had anything to do with the rebels. So I arrange to meet up in Bangui with Louise Roland-Gosselin, an Anglo-French director of the group Waging Peace, who has been studying the Central African Republic. "The policies here in the CAR are part of a much bigger approach by France towards Africa," she says. "We call this system 'Franceafrique', and it was set up by Charles de Gaulle to replace the former colonial system. There is clear continuity from the imperial system to the present day." The motives for this war are, Roland-Gosselin says, drenched in dollars and euros and uranium. "The overarching goal is to take African resources and funnel them towards French corporations," she says. "The CAR itself is a base from which the French can access resources all over Africa. That is why it is so important. They use it to keep the oil flowing to French companies in Chad, the resources flowing from Congo, and so on. And of course, the country itself has valuable resources. CAR has a lot of uranium, which the French badly need because they are so dependent on nuclear power. At the moment they get their uranium from Niger, but the CAR is their back-up plan." So this is, in part, a war for nuclear power? " Yes, but also a lot of this money has been funnelled, through corruption, straight back into the French political process. Say somebody needs a road built here in the CAR. The French government will insist on a French company – and the French company back home donates a lot to the 'right' French political party." This neo-imperial war reached its psychotic apogee in 1994, when the French government used the CAR as a base to fund and fuel the Rwandan genocide, the most bloody since the death of Adolf Hitler. Vincent Mounie is a leading figure in Sur Vie, a French organisation monitoring its government's actions in Africa. He explains: "The French were totally complicit in the genocide. There were French troops there before, during and after the genocide, backing the most extreme Hutu forces as they murdered the Tutsis. You know the identity cards that divided the Rwandan population into Hutus and Tutsis in preparation for the slaughter? They were printed in Paris." The French military base in Bangui had to be abandoned in 1996 after it was burned down by enraged locals, tired of the French ramming tyrants down their national gullet. Today the old base is overgrown, and the French military has shifted to new camps in Birao. But I stare at it now. The French planes that backed the Rwandan holocaust left from here. President François Mitterrand began his career supporting one genocidal force, and he ended it supporting another. As a young man he rose through the ranks of the Hitler-hugging Vichy regime, only quitting and joining the Resistance when it became obvious the democrats would win. He then became nominally a Socialist and, finally, President – when at last genocide entered his life again. The French government had long seen the Hutu nationalists in Rwanda as Their Men, the people most friendly to French demands for military and corporate access. So when, starting in 1989, the Tutsi refugees who had been driven out decades before started to demand their right to return to their homes, the French were furious. Mitterrand saw this Tutsi rights movement as a creation of the CIA, designed to displace a pro-French regime and replace it with a buddy of Uncle Sam. His own aides told him there was no evidence of a link to the CIA – but he refused to listen. He announced that the Tutsis were a "Khmer Noir" , an evil anti-French force, and began to rapidly build up the Hutu Power forces to fight back. In just four years, starting in 1990, the French buffed up the Hutu nationalist military forces in Rwanda from 10,000 to more than 40,000. The moderate forces within Rwanda began desperately trying to broker a power-sharing agreement between the two sides, "And the French government deliberately destroyed any attempt at a peace deal," Mounie says. Then the hacking up of Tutsi men, women and children began. Mitterrand extended bigger loans to the Hutus, which they used to buy more weapons and ammunition. He publicly mocked anyone who talked about a Hutu-led genocide. Then, when the international outrage became so great even Mitterrand could not ignore it, the French announced they would send in a military force to stop the killing. "It was France's last lie, and the most cruel," Mounie adds. "Even at this point, Mitterrand's real aim was to recapture Kigali and restore the Hutus to power." In Birao today, many of the soldiers patrolling the city are veterans of this "rescue operation". I am sipping sweet tea in one of the local bigwig's ramshackle houses when a group of local soldiers on patrol arrive. They are working-class men from the Paris and Lyons banlieues, and in the course of the small talk, they admit that they were in Rwanda – and they are still traumatised by what they were ordered to do by Mitterrand and his men. " Children would bring us the severed heads of their parents and scream for help," one says, "but our orders were not to help them." A year after the holocaust ended, Mitterrand told an aide: "Nobody in France cares about the genocide." These disturbed soldiers, sitting in the waning sunlight, show the old cynic was wrong, at least, about that. Mother, do not beat us - Bangui In the red-dusted heart of Bangui, there is a rusting, collapsing metaphor for this war – and where it is going. On one side of the road is the vast stadium the French government built for Bokassa in the 1970s, so he could crown himself Emperor of Central Africa and Lord of All He Surveyed. It is falling down now, a dangerous wreck. Opposite, there is a gleaming new sports stadium with plush seating and marble floors. It was built by the Chinese. France is only one slice of this new great game, this global scramble for Africa's resources. Every swaggering world power – the US, Britain, China – is grabbing Africa's remaining riches now, shunting aside democracy and human rights to get to them. But even the Chinese dictators remember to toss some of the loose change from the riches they have pillaged to Bangui. The French have long since given up even on that. They come only with bullets and bombs. As I prepare to leave the CAR, I am told by senior French and African sources that Paris could be getting ready to ditch President Bozize. Like a string of Central African dictators before him, he has been tugging too hard on the French leash, imagining he is the independent ruler of an independent country. He has decided to nationalise some of the energy companies operating here, including the French mega-corporations Total and ELF. " If he wants the French to crush his rebellions and keep him in power, he has to do what they say," my source says. Bozize is trying to deal with this pre-emptively, by offering the rebel leaders a place in his cabinet. As I drive past his presidential palace for the last time, I wonder if the paranoia that kept me from meeting him was justified all along. But as my plane finally propels me away from this place, one CAR voice – angry, crazed – seems to follow me. In the jungles around Paoua, I was taken to the entrance to a remote burned-out village to meet Laurent Djim-Woei, the spokesman for the rebels in the north-west. He is a man talked about in awe by his followers – and his enemies. A group of young men greeted us. They were carrying spears alongside their ski hats and scars. Silently, they beckoned us to follow them through more charcoal villages and dense foliage and beyond. Eventually we reached a clearing. Laurent was dressed in stained combat gear. He had a big smile that was marred by the absence of almost all his teeth. There were three cellphones hanging from his neck. He led an inspection of his rag-tag forces for our benefit, getting them to stand to attention and yelling hoarse orders at them in Sango. Then Laurent told us to sit down and embarked on a rambling, barely comprehensible lecture. There were only a few of us in a silent jungle, but he looked beyond us and boomed, like he was addressing a stadium full of supporters. The CAR needs " a guard dog" to "bark about justice" and not "the kind of dog that leads you, which we have had in the past", he said. It is the first of a string of odd metaphors. I kept trying to draw him back to specifics: what does he want? He would only use abstract nouns – justice, peace – but then occasionally he voiced his grievances succinctly, before they were doused in metaphor and burned into incomprehensibility again: " Bozize is burning our villages. A country shouldn't burn its own country's villages. It is like a mother and a child, a mother does not burn her child, it would be madness." His eyes danced nervously around the jungle as we spoke, as if he was waiting for a raid. "France is the mother of Central Africa, and we are the child," he said, oddly picking up the old racist metaphor and making it his own. " The French must now change sides and support us, not Bozize. The French are our parents, we want them to be good parents." This is a sentiment that kept cropping up in the rubble of France's interventions – an appeal to the French to suddenly become a benevolent mother, acting on the side of good, despite all the evidence. France and the CAR are, it strikes me at last, locked in a sick embrace. The French crave the riches offered by this lush, hungry patch of Africa, and the people of Central Africa pine for a deus ex machina to enter stage right and resolve their internal disputes with raw force. : Independent.co.uk © 2007 Independent News and Media Limited ***************************************************************** 44 Asia Times: India holds key in NATO's world view Oct 6, 2007 By M K Bhadrakumar Summing up the 10-year ties between Russia and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a Russian military analyst wrote, "Relations between the two are a marriage of convenience, where husband and wife live together, often socialize with others as a couple, and show every sign of respect for each other. "At the same time, they sleep in different rooms, and have separate households and personal expenses. Each side is primarily pursuing its interests, and although the couple is formally married, they cannot be called a real family." A portrait of arranged marriages wouldn't unduly perturb Indians. But it would be a sobering thought for Delhi how shockingly brief Russia's dalliance with NATO turned out to be when it rubbed against the realities of life. As NATO steps up its courtship of India, Delhi too will have to think about the kind of relationship it desires. Not surprisingly, when Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee and NATO secretary general Jaap de Hoof Scheffer met in New York on September 28, both sides chose to keep their landmark 45-minute meeting on a low key. Washington genuinely seeks a NATO-India partnership. As NATO retools for the 21st century for new missions in Africa and South Asia, and as it advances across the Middle East toward the Indian Ocean, looking for global partnerships (numbering 20 at present), India inevitably figures in its agenda. This became starkly evident last month. NATO exercises in the Indian Ocean There was something very poignant about the NATO naval force making its historic visit to the Indian Ocean last month. The NATO maritime mission involved ships from six member countries, which set sail from Europe on July 30. The 12,500 nautical mile route involved circumnavigating Africa. Though they could have taken a direct route via the Suez Canal, they preferred to come hugging the west coast of Africa and on to the Niger Delta, gingerly rounding the Horn of Africa - just as the first Portuguese and Dutch ships came to India's Malabar Coast in the 15th century. Ships from Portugal, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Canada and the United States, forming NATO's so-called Standing Naval Maritime Group, one of four such groups of the Western alliance, undertook the two-month mission. After making port in Cape Town, the ships entered the Indian Ocean in the first week of September and conducted exercises off the coast of Somalia, and arrived in the Seychelles for a four-day port visit from September 14-18. They re-entered the Mediterranean via the Red Sea last week. A NATO announcement said the deployment in the Indian Ocean aimed to "demonstrate the alliance's continuing ability to respond to emerging crisis situations on a global scale and foster close links with regional navies and other maritime organizations". Scheffer said, "Maritime security, ensuring the safe passage of shipping and supporting a coordinated international approach to protect energy supplies are high priorities for NATO." NATO's global partnerships The initiative follows NATO's summit meeting in Riga, Latvia, in November last year, where the focus was on the alliance's switch to a global strategy, concentrating on operations outside its traditional zone of responsibility, responding to global challenges and international security and stability. As the newly appointed US ambassador to NATO, Victoria Nuland, said in the runup to the Riga summit, the "post-Cold War honeymoon" is over and NATO needs to develop capabilities "wherever and whenever they may arise". "NATO must be the place where we talk about all the issues affecting our future - the Middle East, Iraq, North Korea, China, Iran, just to name a few," she added. The NATO mission to the Indian Ocean has been undertaken hardly six months ahead of the April 2008 summit meeting of NATO in Bucharest, Romania, where the agenda is expected to be the alliance's further enlargement as well as strengthening its capacity and its reach to undertake missions with partners around the globe. The emphasis is, to quote Daniel Fried, the US assistant secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs, from testimony in the House Committee on Foreign Affairs in Washington in July, "in action in key operations in the world ... [since] it is the greatest security instrument of the trans-Atlantic democratic community to deal with security challenges today and tomorrow". He listed these security challenges facing NATO as including violent extremism, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, failed states, cyber attacks and insecurity of energy resources. Africa calling The so-called global challenges are in one way or the other evident in many of the countries of the Indian Ocean region, which, therefore, becomes a theater of priority for the alliance. But that's not the whole picture. The leitmotif of the renewed scramble for Africa by Western powers is largely to be traced to the growing Chinese challenge to Western dominance over Africa and the requirement to protect oil. Almost 15% of the US's oil imports come from Africa. NATO's future role in the Indian Ocean forms part of a well-thought Western strategy. NATO's naval mission to the Indian Ocean in September coincided with another major initiative by Washington. The newly created Africa Command (AFRICOM) of the US military, reflecting the long-term strategic value of Africa, is poised to begin its initial operations in October. The newly appointed AFRICOM commander, General William E "Kip" Ward, has stressed the "need for close coordination" with NATO. Indeed, since July 2005, NATO has provided air transport for peacekeeping forces in Darfur. But Ward anticipates a deeper and vastly expanded NATO involvement in Africa. He said last week, "AFRICOM could assist NATO efforts on the African continent by ensuring close coordination of US contributions and capabilities to NATO operations and training. NATO is uniquely suited to allow AFRICOM access to European interests and capabilities and experience on the African continent ... AFRICOM can provide logistical support to NATO, professional military training and engagement in conjunction with and other security operation and outreach efforts." AFRICOM's "command tasks" are profound. As a senior US official put it, they are not about "searching for militants in lawless or ungoverned areas" or about "chasing terrorists around Africa"; rather, they include among other things "conducting region-wide security operations" and "if necessary, conducting military operations". Significantly, on September 20, Washington pressed ahead with a resolution in the United Nations Security Council on Afghanistan with a new element - the US-led coalition's Operation Enduring Freedom maritime interception component. Russia pointed out that such a blanket provision giving the right of maritime interception did not appear in any of the previous Security Council resolutions on Afghanistan or any conflict situation for that matter. Russia sought clarification, and proposed that instead of blanket permission, the resolution should "reflect the imperative observance of international law and national legislation in carrying out any actions involving interception of ships in the Indian Ocean's waters". However, Russian concerns were ignored and the US pressed for a vote. The new provision effectively gives the US-led coalition in Afghanistan the right to intercept and board vessels suspected of carrying arms or reinforcements for terror groups that operate in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border areas. It serves the purpose of legitimizing NATO's future maritime activities in the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea - an ominous development against the background of the US's standoff with Iran. NATO in the Asia-Pacific At the same time, NATO's Mediterranean Dialogue (1995) and the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative or ICI (2004) have already brought the alliance from the eastern Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf region. The NATO presence in the Persian Gulf took a solid footing when Saudi Arabia became an ICI partner in January. The alliance is now set to consider a formal link-up with the Gulf Cooperation Council comprising Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. In comparison, the Indian Ocean region remains a "vacuum" for NATO, though it has made headway in the Asia-Pacific region. Of course, NATO gives the spin that the issue is not how far it can or should go, but how to enable the alliance to act wherever its collective security interests are at stake. It insists that it is not "pushing into Asia or the Pacific region", but countries such as Japan, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea have displayed an interest in working with NATO, and the alliance has welcomed this. Unlike with NATO's Gulf and the Middle Eastern partners, which are all authoritarian regimes, the alliance prides itself as sharing "common values" with its partners in the Asia-Pacific. Here, NATO's refrain is "common values and common security threats". It is easy to see that such exclusivity is intended to keep out China. During a visit to NATO headquarters in Brussels in January, the first by a Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe summed up the paradigm: "Japan and NATO are partners. We have in common such fundamental values as freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law. It is only natural that we cooperate in protecting and promoting those values. My government is committed to reinforcing the stability and prosperity of the world based on the fundamental values I have just mentioned. For its part, NATO is widening the circle of freedom through an expansion of membership and partnerships." Significantly, in the same speech, Abe referred to "some uncertainties surrounding China", such as its defense expenditure and its "continued lack of transparency", and the need for Japan and NATO, therefore, to "pay close attention to the future of this nation". From Japan's perspective, a joint security agenda with NATO would include Asian nuclear non-proliferation (North Korea and Myanmar), prevention of a cross-strait conflict between China and Taiwan, and balancing the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in which China and Russia play a lead role. Involving NATO in northeast Asia's security problems and ensuring a credible deterrence against China through increased partnership with NATO would be Japan's optimal aim. Through its robust partnership with NATO, Tokyo hopes to ensure that a coalition composed of partners who share basic democratic values takes place in the Asia-Pacific. Japan defines it as an active coalition for maintaining global security, comprising countries that subscribe to Euro-Atlantic values. Such an approach would leave NATO to form an association with China, but that would remain an affiliation system, like Russia's, for the limited purpose of engagement and confidence-building. Japan's partnership with NATO runs parallel to its three-way defense cooperation with the US and Australia. In March, Japan and Australia signed a groundbreaking defense pact with Australia. Tokyo and Washington have already begun installing a missile shield in Japan. In April, officials from Japan, the US and Australia agreed to study a plan for a joint missile system. Progress on this front has been rapid. Alongside, NATO has also veered round to the view that the US's long-range missile defense system doesn't upset strategic balance. More important, NATO is open to the idea of "bolting together" with the US system its own national short- and mid-range missile defense systems. Though the missile shield is projected as a defensive system, China doesn't see it that way. As a Chinese scholar, Jin Linbo of the China Institute of International Studies, put it, "We [China] cannot regard it as a defensive system just because that's what it is called. Since ancient times both spears and shields have been regarded as weapons in Chinese culture - because shields can make spears useless." China sees the joint US-Japan-Australia missile shield as focused on curbing it. Bridging the Indian Ocean For any security system in the Asia-Pacific (US, Japan and Australia), India remains the prize catch. Equally, without India, NATO's partnerships in the Indian Ocean region would remain inherently weak. Abe, during his recent visit to India, invited India to become part of a coalition of Asian democracies. Thus, India was involved in naval exercises with the US, Japan and Australia last month in the Bay of Bengal. Billed as the "Malabar" exercise, it was similar in scope to the "Talisman Saber" in June between the US and Australia (with Japan as an observer), which involved 20,000 US troops and 7,500 Australian forces, backed by an aircraft carrier, 10 US ships, 20 Australian ships and 125 aircraft. Both "Malabar" and "Talisman Saber" maintained the pretence that they were intended against sea piracy, drug trafficking and for coordinating disaster relief and humanitarian efforts. But they were largely seen as templates of a collective security system in the making, under US leadership. Japan is pressing India to enter into a defense cooperation framework with it - a memorandum of understanding at the very least. The outgoing Japanese ambassador to India said recently, "Military-to-military exchanges [with India] are very much advanced ... It is time to prepare some framework to cover all the ingredients. That is the intention of both governments." India has taken part in the past year in a strategic dialogue format with the US, Japan and Australia. Another round of this is due soon. Japan is pushing for raising the level of this interaction to ministerial level. Simultaneously, the US is also pressing for the "inter-operability" of its armed forces with India's. Sustained efforts in this direction by both sides are evident. In the past five years, for instance, more than half of the military exercises held by India with foreign armed forces have been with the US. Of course, "inter-operability" with the US armed forces would enable India to partake of the US's plans for missile defense systems. NATO woos India Thus, a matrix is developing. As far as Delhi is concerned, at the root of it lies the problem that India is unable to come to terms with China's phenomenal rise. The talk in Tokyo and Canberra that they do not want a "unipolar" situation emerging on Asia's strategic chessboard easily finds resonance in Delhi. The meeting between the Indian foreign minister and the NATO secretary general in New York last week should be viewed against a huge backdrop rather than the limited canvas of Afghanistan. The NATO-India consultation has so far remained unpublicized at the official level. Delhi has traditionally lacked a "bloc mentality" and Indian public opinion largely militates against the idea. Any pronounced gravitation toward an "Asian NATO" form of collective security will inevitably affect India's relations with China. (India shares Australia's predicament on this score.) Therefore, India has to perform some very tricky rope acts in the period ahead. In a major speech during a visit to Thailand on September 14, Mukherjee stressed, "The India-China partnership is an important determinant for regional and global peace and development, and for Asia's emergence as the political and economic center of the new international order." Three days later, addressing the strategic community in Seoul, the minister underlined the importance of a "truly integrated Asian economy that will draw on the economic potential of India and China". Expressing confidence that India's "strategic and cooperative partnership [with China] will mature and steadily develop", he added, "Sensitivity to mutual aspirations is the underpinning for building confidence and trust. There is enough space and opportunity for both of us to grow and develop." The challenge for Indian diplomacy will be to convincingly interpret the implications of its "strategic partnership" with the US. The perception is growing, and is incrementally gaining credibility, that India is aligning with a US-led security system in Asia. Clearly, the request by the NATO secretary general to call on the Indian foreign minister wouldn't have been made without Washington's nod. M K Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for over 29 years, with postings including India's ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-1998) and to Turkey (1998-2001). © Copyright 1999 - 2007 Asia Times Online (Holdings), Ltd. Head Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East, Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau: 11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110 ***************************************************************** 45 The Boston Globe: A nuclear-free world - Ivo Daalder and John Holum By Ivo Daalder and John Holum | October 5, 2007 SHOULD THE United States aim to achieve a world free of all nuclear weapons? In one sense, the question is trivial - nuclear disarmament has been a stated aim of the United States since the dawn of the nuclear age. And the United States also committed to working toward this end when it signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968. But in another sense, the question is fundamental. Although successive administrations (at least until the current one) have mouthed the words affirming this objective, few have actually made this commitment an organizing principle of their nuclear weapons policies. That may be about to change. Earlier this week, Senator Barack Obama pledged that as president he would say: "America seeks a world in which there are no nuclear weapons." Former senator John Edwards has also pledged to lead an international effort to eliminate nuclear weapons, as has New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson. And it isn't just presidential candidates who are talking about a nuclear-free world. So are former statesmen like Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Bill Perry, and Sam Nunn. Writing in The Wall Street Journal last January, they urged that the United States set the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons, and proposed specific actions to that end. Nearly 20 years after the Cold War ended, the time has come to make a concerted effort to verifiably rid the world of all nuclear weapons. The United States must start by recognizing that the threats it confronts have changed and so, consequently, has the role and purpose of our nuclear weapons. During the Cold War we worried about the possibility, however small, of a disarming bolt-out-of-the-blue attack on our nuclear forces. That is no longer a realistic possibility. We also confronted a superior conventional foe in Europe and elsewhere that we sought to deter by threatening nuclear escalation. Today, our overwhelming conventional forces can defeat any nation, anywhere on earth. Tomorrow's nuclear threats are different. They are that unstable regimes or, worse, nihilistic terrorists get their hands on a bomb and use it. This threat is becoming more real as nuclear technology and materials spread around the world. The first order of business must be to ensure that all the nuclear weapons and materials in Russia and elsewhere are safe and secure. While recognizing the threat of loose nukes and materials, this administration has done far too little to make sure this happens. The next administration must do better. The second order of business, though, is to reduce the salience of nuclear weapons in order to ease the road to their elimination. The only reason the United States should maintain nuclear weapons is because others have them. There cannot be another purpose. We don't need them to deter a non-nuclear attack on ourselves or our allies; our conventional forces can deal with those contingencies. We certainly don't need them to attack some far-away or deeply buried targets, because there isn't a target whose destruction is worth breaking the 62-year-old taboo against using a single nuclear weapon. Given this limited role for nuclear weapons, there is much that the United States can do to lift the dark nuclear shadow over the world. It can sharply reduce its nuclear stockpile to 1,000 weapons or less, if Russia agrees to go down to the same level. It can eliminate tactical nuclear weapons to underscore that it understands that a nuclear weapon is a nuclear weapon, no matter its size, yield, range, or mode of delivery. It can agree never to produce highly enriched uranium and plutonium for weapons purposes, and accept the need for intrusive verification if other states agree to end such production as well. It can commit never again to test a nuclear device, and ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. If the United States were to do all these things, it would make clear, to our citizens and the world, that it is serious about tackling the nuclear danger. It would reestablish the nation as the leader of the global nuclear nonproliferation movement. Above all, it would make the world a much safer place. Ivo Daalder is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. John Holum led the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in the Clinton administration. © Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company. ***************************************************************** 46 AFP: US proposes common missile defense network with Russia, NATO - Fri Oct 5, 2:16 PM ET WASHINGTON (AFP) - The United States on Friday proposed a common network of missile defense systems with Russia and NATO to allay Moscow's concerns over a planned US missile defence system in central Europe. "The answer is we and the Russians and NATO or the NATO-Russia Council work together to produce a common system or common network of systems which would benefit everyone's security and also address Russian security concerns," Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried said. "If they are part of the system, they can be much more confident that it is not directed against them," he said, speaking ahead of talks next week between US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates with their opposite numbers in Moscow on October 12. They will meet Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Defense Secretary Anatoly Serdyukov in the wake of stalled negotiations earlier this month between the two sides in Paris on America's planned missile defense system. The proposed system in central Europe is a source of long-running friction between the two former Cold War enemies. Washington claims the system would protect against "rogue states" such as Iran and wants to build a radar tracking base in the Czech Republic and house interceptor missiles in Poland. Moscow has said the system would create a "new Berlin wall," and President Vladimir Putin has suggested siting it in Azerbaijan instead. Kremlin also threatened to re-deploy nuclear missiles if the US forges ahead with the project. Fried, who is in charge of European and Eurasian Affairs in the State Department, said Russian plans to share the Gabar radar station in Azerbaijan or a radar site in southern Russia opened up a possibility of having "genuinely collaborative efforts on missile defense directed at common problems. "We would like to see the whole question opened up as it were with everything on the table -- what NATO is doing, what US, Poles and Czechs may be doing, what Russia is prepared to offer. "So, this is a very far reaching proposal by the Russians which I hope would have some very good potential areas of cooperation," he said. Copyright © 2007 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 47 SPIEGEL ONLINE: Defusing the Dangerous Legacy of the Korean War - The World from Berlin: October 05, 2007 The two Koreas, democratic South and totalitarian North, have agreed to pursue a peace treaty 54 years after the end of the Korean War. Pyongyang has also announced its intention to disable its nuclear facilities and hold arms talks with Washington, but German commentators wonder if Kim Jong Il means business. AP South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun, left, toasts with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il after declaring a joint reconciliation pact. The leaders of North and South Korea agreed on Thursday to pursue a peace treaty 54 years after the Korean War ended in an armistice. North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il and South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun issued a joint declaration at the end of their three-day summit in Pyongyang in which they pledged to end the decades-long standoff. The two countries agreed to establish a new economic zone on North Korea's west coast and to further intensify economic ties between the countries, which have developed rapidly over the last ten years. The meeting, only the second ever between the leaders of the two Koreas, is intended to pave the way for six-nation talks "for the solution of the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula." South Korea sent special envoys on Friday to the United States, China, Japan and Russia to brief them on this week's summit. Earlier this week North Korea agreed to hold arms talks with Washington on the issue of its nuclear program. Establishing a peace treaty would require the participation of the US and China, who also fought in the 1950-53 Korean War. US President George W. Bush has already indicated he is willing to formally end the war but only after Pyongyang's complete nuclear disarmament. On Friday, Germany's commentators took stock of the summit and pondered if peace has finally come to the Korean peninsula. SPIEGEL ONLINE writes: "The two sides have not come one bit closer when it comes to the important questions: Under what circumstances, if at all, will North Korea's Kim Jong Il abandon his nuclear bombs? It is estimated that he has 40 to 50 kilograms of plutonium which could produce up to 10 bombs. Pyongyang has already announced that it will open up all nuclear facilities by the end of the year, but will not release information on the bombs." "North Korea could become a normal trading partner, and be allowed credit at the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. But that doesn't mean that Washington and Pyongyang won't maneuver each other into a Catch-22. The US position could be: 'He has to give up the bombs and then we can talk about diplomatic relations and a peace treaty.' And Pyongyang might say: 'First we'll sign a peace treaty then we will negotiate about the bombs." "Kim has agreed to the Beijing nuclear deal because he is obviously in over his head: His people have been starving for years, last month he had to relax the strict state-run economy and with it control over the population. There is a steady flow of unsettling information coming into the country from China. The regime needs urgent help from the outside." "Has the Korean peninsula become safer? Only a tiny bit, if at all." Financial Times Deutschland writes: "Kim Jong Il and Roh Moo-hyun are not the puppets of their protectors in Beijing and Washington. But it is these powers who will have to guarantee any security arrangement in the future. The only way to fundamentally disarm or even end the Cold War in Korea is if China and the US agree on the arrangements on the peninsula." "The good news is that the prospects are better now than they have been in half a century ... The governments in Beijing and Washington seem to be interested in defusing the dangerous legacy of Korea. And the ideological conflict that was fought there is long over." "There are limits to the willingness to compromise on both sides. China will not allow the Kim dictatorship to collapse or North Korea to fall out of its zone of influence. ... Bush has made clear that he will only agree to a peace agreement if North Korea ends its nuclear program." The conservative newspaper Die Welt writes: "Just like the earlier German policy of détente, the Korean 'Sunshine Diplomacy' is based on baby steps. ... But a rapid reunification is unlikely. If one wants to compare Germany to Korea, then the two states are now where the two Germanys were in the 1960s just after the Berlin Wall went up. It will still take some time. And more important than détente is the abandonment of North Korea's nuclear power stations. The Americans will monitor the dismantling of the nuclear facilities. If this is carried out in earnest, then the world will have one less danger to worry about. Everything else will follow." The center-right Frankurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes: "It remains to be seen who will profit from this arranged cooperation and whether the rulers in Pyongyang will use the misery of their people to ensure they stay in power." "The most important question remains: To what extent can the Stalinist regime open up the country without endangering its authority? The South Koreans will be happy to use every opportunity to make contact with their countrymen in the North. Meanwhile, to the extent they are allowed to, the people in the North will see every opportunity for economic cooperation as an existential improvement. No one can predict if this will lead to developments that could put pressure on the regime. Kim Jong Il will certainly try to prevent this and will want to use the controlled opening up of the country to stabilize his power. His apparatus of control is still functioning." The center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung writes: "A statement of intention towards peace is clearly not peace -- and distant visions can sometimes be unproductive. One has to expect setbacks. And the two Koreas cannot conclude peace without the US and China. But this summit has opened a new chapter. Cooperation will be intensified on many levels, and lasting ties will be formed. It could even lay the groundwork for a Korean community. A sudden reunification would carry too many risks. It is, therefore, correct that Roh speaks about reconciliation and common prosperity." The left-leaning Die Tageszeitung writes: "The South Koreans have deliberately invested billions in the North in recent years ... in the hope that this will help to create better living conditions for the people across the border. This approach is very controversial in the South. If the opposition wins in December elections, the money will not flow so generously. But the South Koreans know that the beggar king Kim needs it urgently -- also in order to become less dependent on China." "The big increase in aid and investment that Kim and North Korea need will only come after an agreement with Washington. Bush is now prepared to reach a deal, unlike at the beginning of his presidency. ... The latest accord is a small step in that direction. But like earlier agreements, this one can still easily be torpedoed by either side. Both Kim and Bush are playing for time, in the hope that the other gives in first. The path to peace in Korea will remain a rocky one." -- Siobhán Dowling, 1 p.m. CET © SPIEGEL ONLINE 2007 ***************************************************************** 48 Times-News: INL cleanup moves ahead Magicvalley.com, Twin Falls, ID Friday, October 05, 2007 Next phase ready for public comment later this month By Matt Christensen Times-News writer Officials at the U.S. Department of Energy and a firm hired to clean up nuclear waste at the Idaho National Laboratory say a proposal for the next phase of the decades-long project could be ready for public comment later this month. Crews are slated to focus their efforts on buried waste in the next phase, which will include removal of thousands of barrels of underground nuclear sludge. Depending on the nature of the waste, it will be shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., or stored in pits at the INL site, said Robert Iotti, president and chief executive officer of CH2M-WG Idaho, the company contracted to remove the waste. The cleanup effort has been ongoing for nearly 20 years, when the INL site was declared a Superfund location by the federal government in the late 1980s. In 1996, the state reached an agreement with the DOE that required the feds to remove liquid waste from the site. Since then, the cleanup project has met nearly all the incremental deadlines on time, said Elizabeth Sellers, a DOE manager. "We are doing our commitment," she said, "which is getting waste out of the state of Idaho." The project is still a long way from complete. The final deadline is set for 2035. Waste cleanup is complicated, difficult and meticulous. Years of research and studies are required before phases can begin. Besides technical hang ups, crews have been slowed by owls nesting in site buildings and Indian tribes scouring the area for cultural artifacts. An informational meeting regarding the proposal has been scheduled from 6 to 8 p.m. Nov. 14 at the College of Southern Idaho. Matt Christensen can be reached at 735-3243 or at matt.christensen@lee.net. Peter Rickards (id:PeterRickards) wrote on Oct 5, 2007 12:58 AM: " The video is very funny, in a comedic-zen way. Badda Boom Baadda Bing, as the Sopranos say, "We gotch'yer clean for ya, right here!" Geez, Elizabeth Sellers forgot to mention the court case, where the INL has delayed true clean up of "ALL" the buried plutonium, that y'all promised Idaho to remove! In court they have been very "Clinton-esque" about what the word "all" means, haven't they? The bottom line is that the MAIN THREAT to our water supply, the billions of buried plutonium particles, is still there, and INL has NO plans to remove it all, as they promised. A little of the "clean up" has gone to WIPP. but most has been dumped onsite, over our water supply, in a flood zone, at the new ICDF, or the Idaho Consolidated Disposal Facility. INL, with the pro-nuke politicians permission, are simply re-burying billions of plutonium particles, now Clintonesquely labeled as "low level" waste, and leaving billions more buried where it was dumped. It is possible to contain ALL the plutonium safely, but you are in a hurry to claim clean up is a done deal, to make people more accepting of your future projects, like the plutonium-238 production clustering. Not only is your proposed plutonium production project deadly, and clustered around a safety flawed ATR building, but it will also open new plutonium particle dumps onsite, according to the Impact Statement. Folks can visit www.yellowstonenuclearfree.com to check on the documents of safety flaws at ATR in their lawsuit. It would be nice if our Attorney General and INL watchdog/lapdog led or joined this lawsuit, but they take money from nuclear businesses to look the other way...Peter " Copyright © 2006, Lee Publications Inc. Magicvalley.com is an on-line division of the Times-News, published daily at 132 W. Fairfield St., Twin Falls, Idaho 83301 by Lee Publications, Inc., a subsidiary of Lee Enterprises. ***************************************************************** 49 Tri-City Herald: Bechtel National faces $165,000 DOE fine for violations of nuclear quality regulations Published Friday, October 5th, 2007 ANNETTE CARY, HERALD STAFF WRITER The Department of Energy plans to fine Bechtel National $165,000 for violations of nuclear quality regulations to ensure safe operations of the vitrification plant. If left uncorrected, the problems could have affected the operation of the $12.2 billion plant, according to DOE. The plant is being built to turn millions of gallons of radioactive waste into a stable glass form. Slow identification of quality issues will become more serious as the plant design and construction moves forward, DOE warned. None of the problems, which occurred from 2001 to February 2006, required work to be redone. Instead, many of the issues raised by DOE were problems with procedures. The procedures are meant to ensure that materials and equipment used to build the vitrification plant meet the high quality standards set for a plant handling high-level radioactive waste. Parts of the plant, called black cells, will become so radioactively hot as soon as operations start that humans cannot enter them again to make repairs or solve problems. In some cases Bechtel was slow to identify problems, wrote Arnold Guevara, director of the DOE Office of Health, Safety and Security's Office of Enforcement, in a letter to Bechtel project director Bill Elkins. A Bechtel employee pointed out problems with radiation shielding at openings where pipes enter black cells in January 2005 but Bechtel failed to perform a full investigation until the end of the year, Guevara said. In another case, Bechtel employees were too inexperienced or lacked the training to fully consider nuclear quality issues when they made decisions, Guevara said. "The consequence of the untimely identification of quality problems will be magnified as the waste treatment plant design and construction moves forward and is accelerated, where possible," he warned. A good effort to train staff was made during the 20 months that construction was halted on key portions of the plant to resolve technical issues, Guevara said. Construction on the High Level Waste and Pretreatment facilities resumed last month. "However, DOE remains concerned that you sustain these improvements once construction resumes," Guevara said. "We also expect that you and your staff will properly balance safety and quality with construction cost and schedule pressures." The largest portion of the fine, $96,250, will be for problems in documenting how Bechtel determined what quality standards equipment and supplies needed to meet. In one case the decision appeared to be based on the cost to purchase shielded glass windows for the Analytical Laboratory from a supplier who only was approved to meet commercial grade standards, the report said. A supplier qualified to meet nuclear grade standards was available. About $55,000 of the fine will be related to design problems in 2004 with openings, called joggles, for pipes entering black cells. They jog to prevent the shine of radiation outside the cells. But a shield plate, a concrete and steel barrier, also may be needed to prevent radiation shine. Bechtel improperly issued a design change notice to remove the shield plates from joggles not already installed, according to DOE. The notice was developed by a recent college graduate who did not understand the intricacies of the design and limitations of the supporting calculations to the design change, according to DOE. The accuracy of the notice was checked by a person who also was too inexperienced to identify problems. The fine will include $13,750 for problems from March 2004 to January 2006 that occurred when supplies of equipment or materials were not checked thoroughly to make sure they met requirements. Examples included equipment that Bechtel accepted that had been produced without the required type of weld testing and nine hatches that did not meet design requirements. Bechtel has 30 days to respond to DOE before it issues the fine. The fine would be larger, but DOE reduced it because Bechtel has taken steps to improve quality assurance and prevent problems from occurring again. It also got credit for reporting the problems to DOE and performing a rigorous analysis of the problems, according to DOE. However, DOE criticized Bechtel for the length of time it took to understand certain problems and develop solutions that not only fixed immediate problems but also prevented future problems. "I accept this as a fair criticism," said Bechtel's Elkins in a memo to employees Thursday when the fine was announced. But he also said he was proud of the steps Bechtel has taken over the last two years to improve its nuclear safety and quality program at the vitrification plant. "We have our priorities straight and we understand the expectations," he said. The fine will be the second for problems meeting nuclear quality standards for about the same time period. In spring 2006, DOE fined Bechtel $198,000 for other quality problems between May 2002 and September 2005. © 2007 Tri-City Herald, Associated Press & Other Wire Services ***************************************************************** 50 Tri-City Herald: Energy Northwest fined for waste storage violations Published Friday, October 5th, 2007 CHRIS MULICK, HERALD OLYMPIA BUREAU The state Department of Ecology smacked Energy Northwest with a $120,000 fine Thursday for "serious and chronic dangerous and mixed waste management deficiencies" over "many years" involving non-nuclear industrial materials. The numerous failings to properly label and store common wastes -- including solvents, paint, oil, cleaners and other materials -- did not lead to any known accidents or injuries at the nuclear Columbia Generating Station and one of two nearby plants that never was finished. But the state agency is most concerned about a training program Energy Northwest acknowledges is deficient. "It just wasn't specific enough," said Ron Skinnarland, manager of Ecology's Waste Management section. "People wouldn't be able to do their jobs based on that." Energy Northwest believes the fine, the third largest this year by Ecology, is excessive because there were no injuries or major environmental impacts. It is considering an appeal. Spokesman Brad Peck described the array of violations the state found during an inspection in July and August as a "litany of lower-level issues with varying degrees of potential for harm" and agreed training is the real issue. "I'm not suggesting for a minute we are lily-white," he said. "We have some work to do." The inspection found "abandoned dangerous wastes," unlabeled chemical wastes, waste management activities being performed by untrained workers, poor record-keeping and spills that weren't reported to the agency. Similar findings were noted after inspections in 2000 and 2005. The latest inspection found training consisted of "self-paced" computer training and reading assignments, not classroom or on-the-job training state rules require. The agency cited environmental services staff hired in May who were handling wastes in June before finishing the required training in August. And one required course was taught by a worker not qualified to do so. Among the discoveries, inspectors found two containers of unusable chemical material in an environmental lab that hadn't been touched in 10 years. In another instance, inspectors found small containers of wastes that were up to 20 years old. Also found were soil samples from unreported oil spills, drums and buckets containing unknown and unlabeled liquids, and an unreported diesel spill that occurred over a two-month period and contaminated soil in an area eight feet wide and six feet deep. Skinnarland said it wasn't clear workers knew how to handle and manage wastes properly. "When we asked questions, we didn't get clear answers," he said. Peck said training programs already are being rewritten, and wastes and other materials are being better labeled. He said the inspection "greatly increased attention to the problems that were not front of mind. We were not aware of this extent of training deficiency." © 2007 Tri-City Herald, Associated Press & Other Wire Services ***************************************************************** 51 Hanford News: Decision on ill Hanford workers to take time, panel says This story was published Friday, October 5th, 2007 Annette Cary, Herald staff writer A federal advisory board began considering a recommendation Thursday to ease requirements for compensating ill Hanford workers. However, members warned that the matter is so complicated that a decision will not be made quickly. The Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health is considering petitions asking that Hanford workers from 1946 to 1990 who develop any of a wide range of cancers be automatically paid $150,000 in compensation. Now the possible radiation dose from Hanford work is estimated for each ill worker. They only receive the compensation and medical coverage if the government determines there was at least a 50 percent chance Hanford radiation caused the cancer. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH, also has reviewed the petitions and recommended only workers in certain specialized isotope programs from 1946 to 1990 receive the automatic compensation. Adequate monitoring for radiation was not done in certain years of those programs to allow good estimates of how much radiation individual workers received, according to the NIOSH review. But it found that for the majority of workers, radiation doses can be estimated using records from individual monitoring and field radiation reports and looking at the radiation doses other workers in the area received. The advisory board, meeting in Naperville, Ill., said it would have a contractor, Sanford Cohen & Associates, review the NIOSH report. There also may be some additional discussions with Hanford workers, and some recently discovered historical records may provide some information that should be considered. "We have to realize this will not be a quick process to resolve the full evaluation," said board member James Melius, who is chairman of a working group on Hanford issues. The evaluation of petitions prepared by NIOSH has numerous problems, said Rosemary Hoyt, of Lyle, the daughter of a Hanford worker who died of cancer. She filed one of the petitions being considered, which was combined with a second petition. "Monitoring records were falsified," she said. "Supervisors coerced employees to change records or be sent home without pay." In other cases, records were manipulated by workers who wanted to get more overtime pay but would have been restricted if their monitor's radiation reading already was high, she said. Records also are not accurate because of problems with monitoring methods, she said. Some workers wore monitors under layers of clothes that could shield the monitors from some types of radiation, she said. The NIOSH report found that adequate monitoring was not done for certain workers in the 300 Area just north of Richland who may have been exposed to thorium from September 1946 through 1959. Thorium was being prepared in the 300 Area for irradiation to produce uranium 233 to see if it could be used in nuclear weapons in place of plutonium. NIOSH also found that inadequate monitoring for americium was done in areas of the Plutonium Finishing Plant used for a program to recover americium for use in the nation's space program. Inadequate monitoring was done from 1949 through 1968, NIOSH said. Earlier this year the board agreed with another NIOSH report. It said that inadequate monitoring was done when DuPont operated the site in the World War II years through August 1946. Michael Leavitt, secretary of Health and Human Services, has agreed and sent an order to Congress recommending automatic compensation for ill workers from the DuPont years. That decision is expected to become final this month and be sent to the Department of Labor to implement new rules. © 2007 Tri-City Herald. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 52 lamonitor.com: Scorpions in the bottle The Online News Source for Los Alamos Renowned historian presents themes from his new book on the quest for military supremacy ROGER SNODGRASS Monitor Assistant Editor The author of one of the gospels of the nuclear age came to Los Alamos Thursday to talk about the Cold War's perilous arms race and opportunities to end it. Richard Rhodes, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction for his definitive history, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" (1986), spoke to employees at Los Alamos National Laboratory in a Director's Colloquium, a series of talks that began during the Manhattan Project. Rhodes' new book, "Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race," the third in a planned quartet, has just been published. Honoring an old relationship, he is beginning a book tour in the community where the atom bomb was born. The subject of his second book, "Dark Sun: the Making of the Hydrogen Bomb," documented the roots and technological realization of the even more powerful thermonuclear weapon. By 1949, Niels Bohr had already recognized "a completely new situation that can't be resolved by war." The term "arsenals of folly," describes the two superpowers' vast military build-up of hydrogen bombs mated to multiple means of delivery, from short, medium and intercontinental ballistic missiles to nuclear submarines and long-range bombers. Toward the end of the book, Rhodes refers to a powerful description by the lab's founding director Robert Oppenheimer. "We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life," Oppenheimer wrote in 1953 in a passage in Foreign Affairs, quoted by Rhodes. From Chernobyl to Reykjavik Rhodes' method is to distill key moments in history, connecting the dots and relating the causes, rhythms and consequences of major events. Increasingly, beginning with his second book, Rhodes said, his focus has been more about policy and less about technology. Brushes with unleashed violence, like the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, for example, did not lead to resolution, the author relates, but rather to deep humiliation in Moscow that helped spark an all-out competition. The Soviet Union's exhaustive effort to catch up was largely matched by America's resolve not to lose any of its lead. The book begins with the Chernobyl disaster in April 1986, a turning point in Soviet and nuclear history and prelude to the Reykjavik summit in Iceland in October that year. "Government secrecy, risky design and human error, all contributed to the explosion and burnout of Reactor Number Four at Chernobyl, in Northern Ukraine," as Rhodes described it. "Millions of Soviet citizens learned that the state had lied to them and was powerless to protect them. Mikhail Gorbachev took away a deep sense of the unlimited destructiveness of nuclear war." On the American side, the year 1986 began with the Challenger disaster, the loss of a space shuttle and its crew, and a devastating psychological blow for the nation. Rhodes wrote that, although unacknowledged, it was evidence "of the great risk of relying on complicated technological systems - like SDI (the anti-ballistic missile program of the Strategic Defense Initiative ) would have to be - to protect the nation against nuclear attack." The meeting between Ronald Reagan, the former lifeguard from the Midwest and Mikhail Gorbachev, the farmer's son from the southern Soviet province of Stavropol, is pondered in depth in Rhodes' new book. While Reykjavik seemed to collapse over the question of space-based weapons, it actually led to what would become an important new step the following year, the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The summit came as close as the world has yet to come to a commitment to eliminate nuclear weapons. "I don't know when we'll ever have another chance like this," Reagan said. "I don't know either," Gorbachev said. In his talk Rhodes went beyond the time frame of his new book to renewed efforts to revive global disarmament, now in response to terrorism and a new cycle of nuclear proliferation. The Hoover Plan A widely discussed manifesto appeared in The Wall Street Journal Jan. 4, signed by George Schultz (Reagan's Secretary of State and an architect of the Reykjavik summit), William J. Perry (Clinton's Secretary of Defense), Henry Kissinger (Nixon's Secretary of Defense) and former Sen. Sam Nunn. Nuclear deterrence is still relevant, they wrote, "but reliance on nuclear weapons for this purpose is becoming increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective." The authors asked, "What will it take to rekindle the vision shared by Reagan and Mr. Gorbachev?" The essence of their idea, Rhodes said, is that the president would go to the United Nations and say, "We have many nuclear weapons. We are prepared to give them up if the rest of you are as well." The Schultz-Perry-Kissinger-Nunn proposal, also called the Hoover Plan, has been endorsed by many others. Based in part on a revitalization of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, the proposal will be the subject of further talks and papers at the Hoover Institution at Stanford this month. Asked by a laboratory employee what he would do about Iran, Rhodes said it has been a common pattern in global nuclear politics, "starting with China, to describe new nuclear powers as being ruled by madmen bent on the destruction of the world." The lab's role in a world ruled by the new ethic, he added in answer to another question, would involve bringing transparency, accountability and technological control to the process, so the world could keep track "down to the grams" of its tons of nuclear materials. © 2003 Los Alamos Monitor All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 53 OnlineAthens.com: Radiation levels up, but still safe at nuclear plant 10/05/07 Savannah River Site By Rob Pavey | Morris News Service | Story updated at 9:41 PM on Thursday, October 4, 2007 Radiation exposure levels at the Savannah River Site increased slightly in 2006 due to a major cleanup project, but still remained well below standards, according to the site's annual environmental report released this week. Overall, the U.S. Energy Department's 310-square-mile nuclear material processing facility near Aiken, S.C., was characterized as "exemplary" in environmental compliance during 2006, and its operations continued to result in minimal radiation impact to the off-site public. The report, written by the Washington Savannah River Co.'s Environmental Services Section, notes that the largest radiation dose a "maximally exposed individual" could have received from SRS operations in 2006 was estimated to be 0.20 millirem - higher than the 2005 figure of 0.13 millirem, but still far less than 1 percent of the energy department's all-pathway dose standard of 100 millirem per year. Jim Heffner, SRS manager of environmental permitting and monitoring, said the report and its public health calculations are made with the site's neighbors in mind. When calculating exposures, scientists use a "maximally exposed individual," who is a theoretical person who spends 24 hours a day wherever the air is worst at the site's boundary, and who drinks two liters of water daily and eats food grown with water from the site. "We know nobody actually does all those things, but if we take the worst assumptions across the board and it still doesn't add up to a risk, then we know the real people are always going to be OK," Heffner said. The slight increase in exposure levels was due to a cleanup at the site's Separations Area that involved the removal and transportation of large amounts of soil that - according to calculations - could have released small amounts of radioactive materials. During 2006, the site received two Notices of Violation from its primary regulator - the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control. Neither resulted in a penalty or fine. "This report shows that the site's radioactive and chemical discharges to air and water were below regulatory standards for environmental protection and public health protection during 2006," Jeff Allison, the energy department's Savannah River Operations Office manager, said in a news release. "It also shows that the site's air and water quality met appropriate standards, and the radiation dose caused by SRS discharges was smaller than natural background doses or safety-based dose standards," Allison said. SRS environmental reports have been produced for more than 50 years. Copies are distributed to government officials, universities, public libraries, environmental and civic groups, news media, SRS employees and various interested individuals. Published in the Athens Banner-Herald on 100507 © 2007 | OnlineAthens • Athens Banner-Herald • Morris ***************************************************************** 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: *****************************************************************