***************************************************************** 06/04/01 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 9.140 ***************************************************************** RADBULL IS PRODUCED BY THE ABALONE ALLIANCE CLEARINGHOUSE ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR POWER CONTENTS 1 Higher quake risk estimated for nuclear plant 2 House Energy Chair Says Nation Faces Crisis 3 Letter: EPA's radiation standard almost as bad as NRC's 4 Nuclear Comeback 5 Shoreham Afterthought 6 Aborted nuclear plant doesn't go to waste 7 Friends of the Coast, Maine Yankee Forge New Agreement 8 Taiwan fishermen protest shipment of generators to nuclear plant 9 There's more bad news on nuclear waste 10 Officials See No Cause for Alarm Over Active Faults 11 ECONOMICS OF BNFL'S PLUTONIUM MOX FUEL WORSE THAN 12 MONTHS AGO 12 AEA surges on hope of sell-offs 13 Tory environment manifesto 14 Arbat Traffic Stops for Waste Debate 15 RF ready to share fast reactor expertise with other states 16 Lavish funding, little in return sum up nuclear waste project 17 New Focus on an Old Nuclear Problem 18 Reprocessing Used Fuel 19 South Carolina objects to being dump site 20 Nuclear industry optimism on rise ... but dwindling number of NUCLEAR WEAPONS CONTENTS 1 Federal Court unsure of Maralinga victim's injuries 2 UPI News Article: Pakistan rejects nuclear reports 3 U.S., Kazakstan Talk of Plutonium Security 4 Flats workers' suit eyed 5 Meetings set to inform Ridgers about nuclear worker compensation ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR POWER ARTICLES ***************************************************************** 1 Higher quake risk estimated for nuclear plant Orange County Register - Top News Research finds potential danger. June 4, 2001 By GARY ROBBINS The Orange County Register The earthquake threat faced by the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station appears to be far higher than scientists estimated during a major review 20 years ago, a state report says. The California Coastal Commission says new research indicates that two types of faults located offshore of the seaside plant near San Clemente could rupture together, producing an earthquake in the magnitude 7.1 to 7.6 range. San Onofre's nuclear generators 2 and 3 were designed to withstand a 7.0 earthquake on the Newport-Inglewood-Rose Canyon strike-slip fault system, five miles offshore. Generator 1 is no longer operational. When units 2 and 3 were built in the 1980s, few scientists believed that the plant faced big danger from offshore thrust faults. But Harvard University researcher John Shaw, whose work is cited in the report, has used oil-industry data to produce unique images of the offshore Oceanside and Thirtymile Bank faults. He says the faults are active and that a break on the Oceanside fault could trigger movement on the Newport- Inglewood-Rose Canyon system. The coastal commission report says designing units 2 and 3 to withstand a 7.0 quake "may underestimate the seismic risk at the site." It adds that the research isn't sufficient to reverse the commission's June 13 plans to approve additional storage of spent nuclear fuel at San Onofre. The research "does not mean the facility is unsafe," the report says. "Although the design basis earthquake may have been undersized, the plant was engineered with very large margins of safety." The Orange County Register ocregister@link.freedom.com ***************************************************************** 2 House Energy Chair Says Nation Faces Crisis Sunday June 3 10:28 PM ET By Michael Depp NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - The chairman of the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee said on Sunday the entire United States was likely to face rolling blackouts like those already plaguing California unless swift action was taken to build new power plants and increase natural gas production. ``This country is very close (to), if not beginning to be in, an energy crisis,'' Rep. W.J. ``Billy'' Tauzin, a Louisiana Republican, told the annual meeting in New Orleans of the Edison Electric Institute, an association of investor-owned electric utilities. Tauzin said the nation's high-tech economy could come to a ''crunching stop'' without an expansion of energy infrastructure and argued that government-imposed price caps would not provide a solution to high electricity prices. ``This new economy is a gas guzzling economy,'' Tauzin said, citing an Energy Information Agency study that forecasts the United States will need 1,300 to 1,900 new power plants in the next 20 years to keep up with a projected 45 percent increase in electricity demand. Tauzin said energy conservation could be part of the overall solution but that top priority should be given to building new power plants and oil refineries. He also called for improvements in the transmission grid that carries power between states. ``We need to make sure that the new 21st century power system in our country has an interstate transmission system that works,'' he said, adding the government might have to exercise its power of eminent domain to achieve that goal. Clean coal technologies and domestic natural gas were also vital energy resources, Tauzin said, calling for new areas to be opened for oil and gas drilling in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. Some of the Republican congressman's arguments were echoed by Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, who said the nation should continue to pursue energy deregulation despite California's experiences but should also develop renewable forms of energy. Landrieu told the meeting she was an advocate of nuclear power and criticized incoming Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, a South Dakota Democrat, for saying Democrats would block the development of a nuclear waste storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. ``As a Democrat, I have to say I was disappointed in our new leader in his statements about Yucca Mountain and not being open to the fact that we do have to have a repository for spent nuclear fuel,'' she said. Copyright © 2001 Reuters Limited. All rights ***************************************************************** 3 Letter: EPA's radiation standard almost as bad as NRC's Today: June 04, 2001 at 9:19:17 PDT In the Sun's May 24 article, "EPA ombudsman pledges to examine radiation standards," it was reported that "Nevada officials and dump opponents support the EPA's standard, because it could disqualify a repository at Yucca Mountain." The Nuclear Information and Resource Service actually has very serious concerns with the EPA's proposed standards, as do almost all dump opponents who follow the absurd Byzantine regulatory issues closely. EPA's proposal would create a 12-mile buffer zone in an ill-conceived notion that dilution is the solution to radioactive pollution. Diluting radiation in the groundwater beneath Yucca Mountain is absurd, because it is already a source of drinking water for communities downstream in Amargosa Valley, and will remain so. The EPA proposal would also cut off any regulations at 10,000 years, while the waste will remain deadly for hundreds of thousands of years, and the Energy Department predicts peak radiation doses to the public would occur after 10,000 years. That means EPA knows the long-term danger and plans to do nothing about it. There are more bad parts of the EPA proposal, but these examples already show why dump opponents have significant problems with EPA's proposal. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the DOE merely have worse proposals than EPA's bad one. The nuclear power industry and its lobbyists are pressuring all the federal agencies involved to set weak standards for Yucca Mountain. KEVIN KAMPS, Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Washington, D.C. All contents © 1996 - 2001 Las Vegas Sun, Inc. ***************************************************************** 4 Nuclear Comeback The Salt Lake Tribune -- Utah's Statewide Newspaper June 04, 2001 Another View the The Washington Post For the nuclear power industry these are heady days. Spiking natural gas prices and power shortages in California have focused new attention on nuclear power's role in keeping the country's lights on. Behind the buzz are achievements worth recognizing. Though Three Mile Island and Chernobyl remain etched in public memory, the industry has built a solid safety record over the past decade. Nuclear generators' efficiency has increased to record levels, and nuclear plants now produce roughly one-fifth of the nation's electricity. The 103 plants operating in the United States crank out power without pumping carbon dioxide or smog-causing pollutants into the atmosphere. But significant questions remain, too, including what sort of subsidies would be required to make new plants economically viable, whether that money would be better invested in other carbon-free generating methods and how to address concerns about nuclear proliferation. A fundamental problem is what to do with the radioactive waste the plants generate. The federal government is more than a decade behind in its efforts to establish permanent underground storage for the toxic wastes: It agreed by law to begin accepting spent fuel in 1998, but the storage site proposed at Yucca Mountain, Nev., is still under study and even if approved won't be ready until at least 2010. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham's formal recommendation on whether the site should be developed is due later this year. The state of Nevada hotly opposes use of the Yucca Mountain site, as do many environmentalists. Opponents raise serious questions about how well the mountain would isolate the deadly waste over time; they also cite potential hazards involved in shipping spent fuel to the site from plants around the country. Meanwhile, radioactive waste continues to pile up at plants, which have been storing it safely but were never designed as permanent repositories. Some states, fearful of becoming de facto long-term disposal sites, have begun placing limits on expansion of fuel storage around nuclear plants. Roughly 40,000 metric tons of waste are now awaiting permanent disposal; 2,000 tons more are produced each year. At that rate it will take only 15 years to reach the limit of Yucca Mountain's planned capacity. With plants that were once expected to phase out now renewing their licenses, it's already time to think about a second long-term storage site. The nuclear industry says the disposal issue is a political problem, not a technical one. Maybe so; but it ought to be solved before new plants are built. © Copyright 2001, The Salt Lake Tribune All material found on ***************************************************************** 5 Shoreham Afterthought June 4, 2001 Power Politics: A Failed Energy Plan Catches Up to New York (June 1, 2001) [T] o the Editor: In California, there are huge problems caused by insufficient electricity and complaints of many billions of dollars in increased electricity costs. In New York (front page, June 1), there is a rush to avoid the same dilemma. Would the same decision have been made today about not opening the Shoreham nuclear power plant?   GILBERT J. BROWN Lowell, Mass., June 1, 2001 *The writer is a professor and coordinator of the Nuclear Engineering Program, University of Massachusetts at Lowell.* New York Times Newspaper. ***************************************************************** 6 Aborted nuclear plant doesn't go to waste - 2001-06-04 - Puget Sound Business Journal (Seattle) Todd Bishop Staff Writer Brand identity was no doubt the furthest thing from the minds of utility officials during construction of the mammoth cement structures that stand today on opposite sides of what was intended to be the Satsop Nuclear Power Plant. Yet the group now turning the Satsop site into a business park sees in the twin towers a pair of potent marketing icons. The towers, each nearly 500 feet tall, were built to cool the water that would have been used in conjunction with the plant's two nuclear reactors. The unfinished facility was mothballed in the mid-1980s and ultimately abandoned after the Washington Public Power Supply System defaulted on $2.25 billion in revenue bonds. It was, at the time, the largest such default in the nation's history. Others might have been tempted to gloss over that troubled past, but the Grays Harbor Public Development Authority is instead using the cooling towers to convey the unique nature of the business complex it is creating. The Satsop Development Park's logo includes an image of a cooling tower, and marketing materials boast that the structures can be seen from more than a hundred miles away. "We've embraced those as symbolic of the park, and they do, in fact, define who we are. They make this an interesting place," said Tami Garrow, the authority's CEO. The bond debacle "made us famous for reasons we'd like to forget," Garrow conceded, "but when you're marketing, you work with what you've got." What they've got, as it happens, is much more than a pair of cooling towers. The site, 30 miles west of Olympia, has an extraordinary infrastructure, primarily because it was originally designed to become a nuclear facility. Amenities include a fully functioning wastewater treatment plant and a water system with the rights to 14,000 gallons per day. The site's electrical system is also unusually strong, and the park benefits from its position at the intersection of two West Coast power grids. Also left behind were a number of unique structures, including a massive turbine building that still contains the pieces of the partially constructed nuclear plant. The development authority, which took ownership of the park in August 1999, is gradually selling off pieces of one of the nuclear facilities, known as Unit No. 5, using it as a source of revenue. (Operators of existing plants are able to use the pieces as spare parts.) The authority hopes to find a single buyer for all of Unit No. 3, which came much closer to completion before construction was halted. "We've had several people suggest we put it on eBay and see what happens," Garrow said. "Frankly, I'm not sure that's not an idea worth pursuing." Left when the equipment is gone will be a structure that could be configured to contain as much as 1 million square feet of space over eight floors. Ideally, Garrow would like to see the turbine building turned into an upscale office building. But a manufacturing use might be more realistic in the short term, she said. Many other structures on the site are already being used. The business park's primary office tenant is SafeHarbor Technology Corp., a provider of Internet-related customer support services. The company leases a total of 88,000 square feet in a newly constructed facility and a renovated building that was originally the construction offices for the nuclear plant. All told, about 15 tenants now occupy space throughout the business park. They include Boise Cascade Corp., which is constructing a large wood/plastic composite plant in one section of the Satsop site. The would-be nuclear plant's eastern cooling tower is operable, and Boise Cascade will use 1 percent of the tower's capacity in the operation of its own plant. The development authority has also renovated the former plant security building into a telecommunications facility available for use by the park's tenants and partially occupied by network and Internet service provider Techline Inc. The public development authority expects the remainder of the business park's 440 developable acres to be built out for a variety of uses over a number of years, depending primarily on the demand from developers and businesses. In preparation, Bellevue-based CollinsWoerman, formerly CNA Architecture, worked with the authority to create a master plan for the park. Osborne Construction Co. of Kirkland did restoration work. In addition to the existing buildings and infrastructure, factors working in the Satsop site's favor include its picturesque surroundings. Encircling the business park's developable land are 1,200 acres that were intended as a buffer for the nuclear plant and continue to be preserved for wildlife. The authority has also brought fiber-optic cabling to the site in an attempt to make the business complex more accommodating to technology companies. "This place is ripe to bring businesses in," said Michael Tracy, executive director of the Grays Harbor Economic Development Council. At the same time, the business park has a few hurdles to overcome in its attempt to attract occupants. Significant among them is its remote location. While some prospective tenants might raise concerns about the depth of the local work force, development officials say that shouldn't be a major problem. During a recent presentation, Tracy gave results of an audit showing a population of more than 216,000 and a work force of more than 94,000 within a 30-mile radius of the site. Tracy also pointed out a major upside: Minimal traffic. SafeHarbor, whose founders grew up in the area, has established a training program through which community members can gain the skills needed to become employees. Also, because its employees can't walk down the street to the gym or the corner deli, SafeHarbor's facilities include a workout room and a large cafeteria. Brian Sterling, SafeHarbor's CEO, acknowledged that some prospective customers have been initially skeptical upon learning about the distance of the company's facilities from an urban center, but he said any concerns are dispelled when they visit the site and see SafeHarbor's operations. SafeHarbor itself was initially worried about the potential impact of the Boise Cascade plant, but Sterling said recently that his company no longer sees the facility as a problem. "Boise Cascade has really gone the extra mile to prove that they're going to be a good neighbor," he said. Meanwhile, improvements to the park continue. This summer, the development authority expects to begin construction of a road that will serve as a "main street" through the business park. In addition, a number of ideas are being talked about for the hollow cooling tower on the west side of the nuclear plant. Suggestions include turning the tower into an amphitheater, a proposal that would be complicated by the structure's unusual acoustics. Because of the tower's shape, loud noises echo erratically within it. At the very least, Garrow said, the authority expects to turn the area around the cooling tower into a grassy park. In the meantime, some adventurous locals have conceived a use of their own for the tower, which can be scaled via a series of precarious steel stairways. "There are people in the community who like to brag about what they've done up there," Garrow said. "I don't really need to hear about some of that stuff." *Reach Todd Bishop at 206-447-8505 ext. 112 or tbishop@bizjournals.com. * [Get Copyright Clearance] Copyright 2001 American City Business Journals Inc. Click for permission to reprint (PRC# ***************************************************************** 7 Friends of the Coast, Maine Yankee Forge New Agreement Friends of the Coast Opposing Nuclear Pollution Post Office Box 98, Edgecomb, Maine 04556 June 4, 2001 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: FRIENDS of the COAST, MAINE YANKEE FORGE NEW AGREEMENT Contact: Anne D. Burt - 882-6848 Raymond Shadis - 882-7801 The Maine-based environmental group, Friends of the Coast- Opposing Nuclear Pollution announced today that tidal areas adjacent to the decommissioning Maine Yankee Atomic Power Station will be the subject of a focused radiological survey. Under the agreement, Friends of the Coast and Maine Yankee Atomic will work together to contract an independent survey of tidal areas which lie just outside of the plant's federally licensed site. The survey will target identifying and quantifying radioactive pollution deposited in tidal sediment during the Wiscasset reactor's twenty-four year history of operations. Also included in the study will be seaweed, salt-hay, and shellfish. The study will calculate potential radiation doses to a theoretical future resident of the site from the ingestion or use of marine resources from the Maine Yankee property shoreline. The areas that are named in the agreement are Bailey Point to an agreed on terminus south of the Ferry Landing, Bailey Cove, and the shoreline of Eaton Farm to Young's Point. Friends of the Coast and Maine Yankee expect to seek a survey contractor later this year with the actual survey work planned for 2003. Raymond Shadis of Edgecomb, spokesman and negotiator for Friends of the Coast, said the survey will be timed to follow the final large volume (potentially-radioactive) liquid and airborne releases from plant demolition activities, including reactor containment and spent fuel pool demolition. The survey will be linked to a previously agreed upon marine sediment survey, which is intended to identify and plot reactor-derived radionuclides deposited on the bottom of the Sheepscot River estuary. Both environmentalists and the company agree that the surveys are unlikely to trace contamination levels that are comparable to on site clean-up standards. The survey agreement comes at the end of an eleven-month period of technical review for Maine Yankee Atomic's Revised License Termination Plan. The plan, several hundred pages in length, was withdrawn for revision in order to reflect Maine's new, strict radiological clean-up standards and a previous agreement with Friends of the Coast that abandoned plans to bury radiologically contaminated demolition debris on the waterfront site. In July a Nuclear Regulatory Commission Safety and Licensing Board Judge approved a delay in proceedings in order to facilitate the plan's revision and give an opportunity for Maine Yankee to address the concerns of License Termination Plan intervenors. Both the State of Maine and Friends of the Coast intervened just one year ago following the plan's original public presentation last May. Shadis said, "The agreement is an alternative to litigating the issue before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is both costly and uncertain. In the rare and unlikely event of a complete victory in the NRC's court, we would only succeed in adding red-tape to the project while achieving less for the environment." "Maine Yankee has entered into this deal, in part, in order to pro actively address community concerns, whereas NRC won't even confirm if our Maine site clean-up standards are being met" he added. Maine Yankee's Revised License Termination Plan was submitted to the NRC on June 1st. Maine Yankee has committed to working with the State of Maine and Friends of the Coast on remaining technical issues. All parties have agreed to ask the Atomic Safety and Licensing to hold any further proceedings in abeyance for ten weeks. At that time it is expected that a schedule will be set to submit any remaining issues the parties may wish to litigate. Friends of the Coast is a tax exempt 501(c)3 organization. FMI - Friends of the Coast, Post Office Box 76, Edgecomb, Maine 04556 - 207-82-6000 Raymond Shadis, Post Office Box 76, Edgecomb, Maine 04556 (207) 882-7801 e-mail - shadis@ime.net ***************************************************************** 8 Taiwan fishermen protest shipment of generators to nuclear plant [AFX News - Asia] Story Filed: Monday, June 04, 2001 6:33 AM EST TAIPEI, Jun 04, 2001 (AFX-Asia via COMTEX) -- Local fishermen tried to use some 60 fishing boats to block the shipment of two generators to the site of a controversial nuclear power plant being built in northern Taiwan, an unidentified official said. The fishermen ended the protest only after state-run Taiwan Power Co (Taipower) agreed to further negotiations on compensation for alleged damaged caused to a fishing ground as a result of the project, the official said. The fishermen have alleged that the construction of a pier for the 5.6 bln usd power plant has polluted the fishing ground they have been operating for generations. Taipower had previously agreed to pay the fishermen 200 mln twd in compensation. sy/zr Copyright 2001. AFX News Ltd. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 9 There's more bad news on nuclear waste *Monday, June 4, 2001* SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD A red flag has gone up that should give the Bush administration serious pause in its cheerful embrace of nuclear energy. The confused history of this nation's unsuccessful attempts to cope with its huge storehouse of highly radioactive nuclear waste became even more so last week. That's because the Department of Energy official who wrote the policy that resulted in all disposal bets being placed on a deep repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev., said in an unsolicited letter to the Bush administration that the repository should be scrapped. The administration has said it wants it built. W. Kenneth Davis, undersecretary of energy for the Reagan administration between 1981 and 1983, told the Las Vegas Sun newspaper that Yucca Mountain "was never intended to store spent nuclear fuel and I can't find out who made that decision. For some 20 years I have wondered how that happened." Davis said that in the early1980s, DOE officials envisioned storing the spent fuel in two "temporary" regional facilities where it could be stored for 300 years and would be reprocessed for use in commercial nuclear reactors. But reprocessing, which is done by other countries, is illegal in the United States due to fears of creating weapons-grade plutonium that might fall into terrorists' hands. Reprocessing, which the Bush administration also favors, has other problems. Even though much -- but not all -- of the plutonium is removed for reuse as fuel, it creates even larger volumes of complex chemical and radioactive wastes. And it does not remove many other long-lived radioactive wastes. That means some sort of long-term disposal would still be needed. Congress in 1987 amended the Nuclear Policy Act to make Yucca Mountain the sole site for study as a permanent, rather than temporary, repository; Hanford until then was among finalists for that dubious honor. At the time, "temporary" above- ground monitored retrieval facilities in various locations across the nation also were under discussion as an imperfect but somewhat more sensible alternative. The idea was that the wastes not only could be watched but could be retrieved for reuse or for repackaging if something went wrong. But, Davis said, "Congress changed the act to get a permanent repository built before monitored retrievable storage sites." That appears likely to prove a mistake. He predicted last week that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which must license the facility, will never approve it due to technical difficulties such as seepage of radioactive water or airborne radiation. By law, the repository must safely store the deadly fuel for 10,000 years. He also cited Nevada's strong opposition to the project -- angry state officials have vowed not to grant the federal facility any water -- as well as the political difficulties inherent in moving 77,000 tons of highly radioactive spent fuel across the country from more than a hundred locations to the site for burial. If Davis' common-sense prediction that Yucca Mountain is unlicensable proves correct, the Bush administration would be well advised to take another look at above-ground monitored retrievable storage for spent nuclear fuel and bomb-production wastes. And until the disposal problem is solved, any talk of building more nuclear reactors to produce even more of these hellishly expensive, hellishly dangerous wastes is pure folly. [Seattle Post-Intelligencer] 101 Elliott Ave. W. Seattle, WA 98119 (206) 448-8000 ***************************************************************** 10 Officials See No Cause for Alarm Over Active Faults Digital Chosunilbo (English Edition) : Daily News in English About Korea 06/04(Mon)17:10 Following the news that suspected active faults have been found 5km from the Wolseong nuclear power facility, Choi Wui-chan, a senior researcher at the Korea Institute Of Geoscience and Mineral Resources (KIGAM), held a news conference at the Ministry of Science and Technology Monday and said that full scale surveys of these geological phenomenon on the Korean peninsula only began in 1995. Choi said that the selection of sites for nuclear plants used geological data provided by foreign companies, and that the first Korean survey was of Kulop Island in 1995 when a feasibility study of using it as a nuclear waste dump was conducted. He added as a result of finding faults on the island, surveys of existing nuclear facilities were conducted. Officials at MOST and KEPCO said that the selection of sites for the plants was completed in the 1980s when there were no signs of active faults detected, and so that is why they had not conducted a survey. However, Professor Lee Ki-hwa of Seoul National University (SNU) said that there was no place on earth where there were no active faults, and that in 1300 there had been a huge earthquake at Weolseong. He continued a geological survey was a prerequisite before constructing a nuclear power plant. Choi, who was responsible for the survey said that the possibility of the faults near Weolseong being active was 50% and that their size was 150m, half of the 300m limit to halt building. However, Park Kwan-soon also with KIGAM said that the faults could be longer than 150m and further surveying is required. (Cha Byong-hak, swany@chosun.com) Copyright (c)1995-2001, DIGITAL CHOSUN All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 11 ECONOMICS OF BNFL'S PLUTONIUM MOX FUEL WORSE THAN 12 MONTHS AGO WARNS REPORT AS UK GOVERNMENT CONSIDERS LICENSING NEW MOX PLANT 4 June 2001 LONDON - A new report submitted to the British government warns that the economic prospects for British Nuclear Fuels' (BNFL) plutonium MOX fuel business has further declined in the last 12 months. The report concludes that estimated future income for the Sellafield MOX Plant (SMP) has declined as a result of a fall in expected prices, as well as an increase in actual and expected operating costs. In addition BNFL's relationship with its key potential customers in Japan has not recovered from the 1999-2000 falsification scandal. The report was written by economist Dr Mike Sadnicki for Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace UK, and was submitted as evidence to the UK Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) consultation process on the licensing of BNFL's SMP. The report was completed before citizens in a local referendum, held in Japan last week, voted to oppose the loading of MOX fuel in a reactor operated by Tokyo Electric Power Company. Following the referendum executives from the company agreed to abandon plans to load MOX fuel this year. The main findings in this latest assessment of the BNFL's MOX business are: · Poor commercial prospects for MOX fuel mean that separated plutonium will continue to have no commercial value; · BNFL have significantly increased the amount they are seeking to "write-off" for the SMP from £300 million in 1999, to £462 million in 2000; · An additional £113 million is to be paid by BNFL to Kansai Electric and to cover transportation costs for the return of the falsified MOX fuel shipped to Japan in 1999; · In the last 18 months there has been a dramatic increase in estimated operating costs, up to 30%, following the commencement of uranium commissioning; · Transport costs of tens of millions of dollars for potential Japanese clients are a further disincentive for business with BNFL; · Estimated decommissioning costs for the SMP have increased substantially from £50 million in 1999, to £92 million in 2001, with the prospect of further increases likely; · Reprocessing and MOX fuel is not economically viable in the face of far cheaper alternatives such as dry storage of spent fuel and conventional uranium fuel. "BNFL's prospects are even worse today than they were last year. Even before their MOX plant is opened their operating costs have risen by tens of millions," said Shaun Burnie of Greenpeace International. "The economic case they put forward to justify the licensing of the SMP is deeply flawed. This report is as much a warning to BNFL's overseas clients as it is to the British government - BNFL's MOX is an economic nonsense." As a consequence of a flawed public consultation process and the acceptance by the UK government of BNFL's demand to write-off construction and operational costs to November 2000, Friends of the Earth (UK) backed by Greenpeace have filed a legal action against the UK government seeking a judicial review. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT: For further information: Shaun Burnie: +44 12257 814 288 Notes to editors: The Sadnicki report can be obtained at www.britishnuclearfuels.com, a Greenpeace established website intended to provide the information that BNFL refuses to disclose. ***************************************************************** 12 AEA surges on hope of sell-offs *by Robert Lea, Evening Standard* INVESTORS in the privatised nuclear clean-up company AEA Technology are back on the roller-coaster. AEA shares leapt more than 16% on news that it is close to selling nearly £200m worth of businesses and returning cash to shareholders. The shares have crashed twice in the past nine months after profit warnings but perked up in April when the company admitted takeover bidders were circling. AEA said it had rejected offers for the group as a whole as inadequate and instead was slimming-down its operations to concentrate on railway technology, based on the old British Rail research centre, and environmental technology, which includes monitoring air quality for the Government. In addition, AEA said, it has secured a buyer for nuclear decommissioning business, which last year had profits of £2.3m on turnover of £43m. The buyer is Nukem Nuclear, a division of the giant German utility RWE, which is paying £17.2m in cash and assuming £6.5m in debt. The group expects to receive about another £170m from the sales of its other nuclear technology businesses and its Hyprotech engineering software company. The shares, at 482p last autumn, rose 64p to 285p. © Associated Newspapers Ltd., 04 June 2001 Terms and Conditions ***************************************************************** 13 Tory environment manifesto FRIENDS OF THE EARTH: [M2 Communications Ltd.] Story Filed: Monday, June 04, 2001 4:22 AM EST Jun 04, 2001 (M2 PRESSWIRE via COMTEX) -- The Tory green manifesto is an important step forward from the main manifesto that was heavily criticised by FOE as the least It contains some good ideas and targets, including * "We will meet all the UK's international obligations - including the OSPAR agreement to prevent pollution to the North-East Atlantic". This would meet FOE's camopaign objective to phase out all radioactive discharges to the sea by 2020. * A moratorium on the commercial planting of GM crops * "No irreplacable Sites of Special Scientic Interest will be built over by the public sector". * A recycling target of 50 per cent of all household waste by 2020, and a recycling service for every household. * "Conservatives will instead create a green, low tax regime that recognises environmental costs, using tax incentives to promote green behaviour and new technology." * New money from the landfill tax credit scheme to fund recycling service for doorstep recycling. * "Increased support for farmers wishing to convert to organic methods through redirecting the Rural Development Regulation seeking our share of a redistribution of the tobacco subsidies paid under CAP". * "Conservatives favour a strengthened Freedom of Information Bill." "We will ensure the 1998 Aarhus Convention is properly implemented with as few get-out clauses as possible." * "We will seek voluntary agreements with the industry to phase out any substances found to be hazardous, and replace them with safer substitutes. These agreements will lead to statutory controls if self regulations fails." * A warm homes commitment, However, key flaws remain. Cutting fuel tax will inevitably lead to more traffic. Although the Tories promise that cleaner fuels and engines will help pollution, they won't reduce noise congestion, or carbon dioxide emissions. The Tory Party remains in thrall to motorists. It was surely absurd for the Tories to release this document so late. Some people have even already voted (postal votes started earlier this week). But the document leaves Labour as the only party to have utterly failed to set aside time for the environment in their morning press Conferences or major campaign speeches. FOE Executive Director Charles Secrett said: The Tories have now taken a step in the green direction. But why did they wait until so late in the campaign? And why are they still in hock to the motoring lobby, although there is no evidence that this has shifted any votes in their direction? This election campaign will still be remembered as one in which both major parties failed to deal in any serious way with the environmental challenges that Britain now faces." M2 Communications Ltd disclaims all liability for information provided within M2 PressWIRE. Data supplied by named party/parties. Further information on M2 PressWIRE can be obtained at http://www.presswire.neton the world wide web. Inquiries to info@m2.com. Copyright 1994-2001 M2 COMMUNICATIONS LTD ***************************************************************** 14 Arbat Traffic Stops for Waste Debate Monday, Jun. 4, 2001. Page 3 By Ana Uzelac Staff Writer Yavlinsky, left, debating the proposed importation of spent nuclear fuel with Rumyantsev on Arbat on Sunday afternoon. Nuclear Power Minister Alexander Rumyantsev showed up at a downtown restaurant Sunday for a cup of tea, a slice of cake and a debate with Yabloko head Grigory Yavlinsky on a controversial plan to import spent nuclear fuel. Yavlinsky and Rumyantsev were guests of the "Bender Show" on Ekho Moskvy radio, which is broadcast live from a restaurant on Arbat and named after Ostap Bender, the charming con-man hero of the classic 1920s novel "Twelve Chairs." Cracking jokes and assisting in the writing of a silly poem about nuclear waste, an unrelenting Rumyantsev maintained that earning billions of dollars by importing spent nuclear fuel was the only way for Russia to clean up areas contaminated by nuclear tests and storage leaks. The State Duma in April passed on second reading a bill that would allow the import of about 20,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel during the next 40 years, a plan its authors say would earn $20 billion. The Yabloko party is the loudest opponent of the bill. Dressed casually, Yavlinsky and Rumyantsev jovially debated the bill on a sunny afternoon in the middle of the street surrounded by cameras and a crowd of about 50 onlookers. The debate lasted a short 10 minutes and was dominated by journalists, who didn't give Muscovites a chance to ask any questions. Ekho Moskvy journalists presented the men with the results of an informal street poll taken on Arbat hours earlier that showed 62 of the 67 pedestrians surveyed had voted against the import of nuclear waste. "But I am also against importing nuclear waste," Rumyantsev said, playing with semantics. "Only, we're not planning to import waste. We'll be importing spent nuclear fuel." "Of course, we can call it spent nuclear fuel," Yavlinsky replied. "But the countries that will be sending it to us call it waste." Yavlinsky criticized the authors of the bill for not taking into consideration the poor state of Russia's railroads and nuclear plants, which would need to be used for transporting and reprocessing the fuel. He called for the bill to be suspended before it gets to the third reading and for a referendum to be conducted on the issue. A date for the third hearing has not yet been set. National opinion polls show that 90 percent of Russians are against the import of spent fuel. An earlier attempt by a group of environmental organizations to call for a referendum failed when the Central Elections Commission threw out just enough of the 2.6 million signatures to invalidate the appeal. Yavlinsky also said that the bill in its current form presents a fertile ground for corruption and that the money earned by importing fuel would end up in politicians' pockets rather than in programs for the cleanup of areas contaminated with radiation, as the ministry envisions. "Today's Russia is not ready for such an operation," he said. "Not with nonexistent systems of control, not with our banking system, nor with our bureaucracy." Rumyantsev agreed that the bill passed in the second reading does not guarantee transparency or public control over the way the money earned by imports would be spent. "But I am giving my word that I will keep everything transparent," Rumyantsev said. After the debate, Yavlinsky and Rumyantsev continued their conversation in private at a coffee table on the restaurant's terrace. Outside, volunteers dressed in T-shirts with radiation danger signs and gas masks pretended to collect nuclear waste and a group dressed in white jackets swept the street in a mock demonstration of how Russia would have to clean up radiation if the bill is passed. ***************************************************************** 15 RF ready to share fast reactor expertise with other states [ITAR/TASS News Agency] Story Filed: Monday, June 04, 2001 12:50 PM EST MOSCOW, Jun 04, 2001 (Itar-Tass via COMTEX) -- Russia is ready to share its knowledge regarding fast reactors and closed fuel cycle with interested countries under an international innovation project launched by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Atomic Energy Ministry experts said after their trip to Mexico, Argentina and Brazil. The purpose of the trip was to explain President Vladimir Putin's initiative of energy support for sustainable development of humankind, radical resolution of non-proliferation problems and environmental rehabilitation. The initiative was put forth at the Millennium Summit on September 6, 2000. During the trip, the Russian experts discussed bilateral cooperation in the peaceful use of atomic energy, plans of cooperation in various research and design projects, the Foreign Ministry said in statement transmitted to Itar-Tass on Monday. The Latin American partners showed increased interest in looking for new perfect atomic energy technologies and using them to increase energy resources, strengthen the non-proliferation reform, resolve the problem of radioactive waste and ensure the safety and competitiveness of nuclear power plants. By Natalia Lenskaya (c) 1996-2001 ITAR-TASS. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 16 Lavish funding, little in return sum up nuclear waste project - 2001-06-04 - Houston Business Journal Energy Beat Lavish funding, little in return sum up nuclear waste project Monica Perin Nuclear energy is in the U.S. spotlight again after having been a pretty much dead issue for 25 years. In the ongoing dialogue about what many consider to be a national energy crisis, the role of nuclear power is back on the front burner. The Bush administration's recently released energy policy advocates nuclear power as part of the nation's energy mix. But the energy task force acknowledges that it still hasn't figured out what to do with nuclear waste, which has an active lifetime of thousands of years. So, apparently, does the government-funded industry of figuring out what to do with nuclear waste. For 20 years, the U.S. Department of Energy has been "studying" a place called Yucca Mountain near Las Vegas, where the DOE was originally scheduled to build a nuclear waste repository by Jan. 31, 1998. That directive was passed by Congress in the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act. Since then, DOE has spent $6.8 billion and no repository is in sight. At the same time, there is still no agreement on whether Yucca Mountain is even a suitable site or not. Meanwhile, 40,000 tons of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel rods are being stored in temporary facilities at scores of commercial power plants across the country, including in Texas. The Yucca Mountain project has provided employment for armies of scientists, engineers and support staff, who have spent the past two decades studying, re-studying, and studying some more. The same big contractors have gone through the revolving doors of DOE contracts at Yucca Mountain. SAIC, Bechtel and TRW have played musical chairs as lead contractors since 1988, when SAIC and Bechtel won the first contract. The nuclear fuel waste repository at Yucca Mountain has provided a lifetime career for some workers, with no concrete results. Keith Lobo left a good job with a Houston engineering firm in the late 1980s to accept a job offer on the Yucca Mountain project. He went with the expectation of being involved in the engineering design and construction of the facility. The only thing built was a five-mile tunnel to facilitate taking core samples out of the mountain and studying its geology. "The project for the last 10 to 12 years has been a science project, not a building project," says Lobo. "They had a $600 million budget when I came and about 800 to 900 employees. That escalated to about 2,400-2,500. At one time we had 26 contractors on the project." A disenchanted Lobo moved on to other employment in 1998. "I left because I felt it was a retirement haven for well-educated people on government subsidies," he says. "There's no risk, they just do studies and analyze and document, and next year someone else comes in and does a new batch of tests." Lobo also questions the DOE's role at Yucca Mountain. "DOE supposedly is managing the project, but they don't have the foggiest idea how to run a project," he says. "They hired TRW and called them a management and operations contractor, but you have to have a facility to manage and operate." Picking a defense contractor like TRW was a mistake, Lobo says. "TRW never produced the kind of work or moved the project ahead the way they should have, considering the amount of money spent," Lobo says. Last November, TRW was replaced by SAIC and Bechtel, which were awarded a $3 billion contract by DOE to do essentially the same job they contracted to do back in 1988. In January, an investigation was begun into allegations that "gross mismanagement" by DOE at Yucca Mountain has resulted in delays and huge cost overruns. In 1995, the total cost of the project was estimated at $36 billion. Last December, the estimate was over $58 billion. And independent estimates range up to $75 billion. The money being spent at Yucca Mountain comes from the Nuclear Waste Fund established by Congress in 1982. The nation's electric consumers have been paying one-tenth of a cent per kilowatt hour of electricity produced by nuclear plants. Meanwhile, the nation's nuclear power plants are running out of storage space for spent fuel. The water-filled storage pools that have been used as temporary storage facilities were only designed to last until 1998 -- the year Yucca Mountain was supposed to be operational. A shortage of storage space at the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in California has led operator Pacific Gas &Electric to seek permission from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build a temporary above-ground storage facility for spent nuclear fuel. Illinois has 13 nuclear power plants that are running out of storage space. Republican House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois says the on-site storage facilities being used are potential terrorist targets. Last year, DOE awarded a $217 million contract to Foster Wheeler Environmental Corp. to design, construct and operate a facility in Idaho to provide interim storage for 55 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from federal nuclear facilities. With the meter still running, the question of what to do with nuclear waste -- and Yucca Mountain -- now sits in the lap of the Bush Administration. And the Bush bureaucrats, like their predecessors, are setting more new deadlines for more reports, evaluations and recommendations. "They've studied it enough. They need to either build it or shut it down. It's a boondoggle," says Lobo. *mperin@bizjournals.com · 713-960-5910* 2001 American City Business Journals Inc. ***************************************************************** 17 New Focus on an Old Nuclear Problem June 4, 2001 By MATTHEW L. WALD Keith Meyers/The New York Times The pool used to store spent fuel at the Peach Bottom nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. The pool is full, as are others at plants around the country, because the Energy Department has not provided storage space. Keith Meyers/The New York Times Paul R. Rau, an engineer at the Peach Bottom plant, in front of the storage area, built under his supervision, that houses casks of spent fuel. [P] EACH BOTTOM, Pa., June 1 — The nuclear plant here split its first atom in December 1973. Both halves are still here. So is all the other fuel that the twin Peach Bottom reactors have used in almost three decades of making electricity. The same is true at more than 120 other nuclear power plants around the country, even though nearly 20 years ago their owners signed a contract with the federal government for the Department of Energy to take the fuel to Nevada for burial, beginning in January 1998. What to do with used nuclear fuel is a technical and political conundrum that is getting new attention as the Bush administration pushes for a greater role for nuclear power, while Senate Democrats say they will not agree to the longstanding plan to bury the waste at the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada. The problem will only grow as reactors built years ago seek license renewals to keep running for many more decades. Next month, the owners of the Peach Bottom power plant will apply to extend its operating license from the once standard 40 years to 60. Recognizing the storage problem, in the last few months Peach Bottom has set itself up to store its fuel on site for decades to come. "We never intended that Peach Bottom become a temporary storage site for used fuel," said James P. Malone, vice president for nuclear fuels at Exelon, the company that runs Peach Bottom's two reactors and 15 others around the country. But Yucca Mountain, the federal government's proposed site for permanent storage, was never a sure thing and is about to become even less so when Nevada's senior senator, Harry Reid, a longtime opponent of the project, becomes assistant majority leader. An engineer here who is now deeply involved in waste storage, Paul R. Rau, said that when he first went to work for the company that runs Peach Bottom 23 years ago, "I would never have thought about it." But the neat grid of 3,819 spaces at the bottom of a pool where the plant stores its spent fuel has steadily filled with fuel rods. So at this 620-acre site on the banks of the Susquehanna River, just north of the Maryland state line, Mr. Rau has built enough storage space to handle waste far beyond the expected lifetime of the reactors. The company built what looks like an exercise yard at a prison, a concrete pad two to three feet thick, surrounded by floodlights, motion detectors and two dozen cameras, with a double row of 10-foot fences topped with concertina wire. On the pad, which is the size of a football field, the company installed four casks last summer, each 18 feet high and 8 feet in diameter, each weighing 90 tons and holding 24 tons of spent fuel. This summer the company will add five more; eventually the total could reach 72, and even after that, the pad could be expanded. The casks, which could also be used for shipping, are designed to last at least 40 years. They are filled with inert gas to prevent corrosion, and require no mechanical cooling systems; David J. Foss, an engineer here who supervised their loading, said maintenance consisted mostly of inspecting them and sweeping the leaves off the pad. Peach Bottom's approach is typical. For now, the 103 operating power reactors around the country store their wastes in spent-fuel pools like the ones here, 40 feet on a side and 40 feet deep, designed to withstand earthquakes and filled with purified water. Since the fuel rods still generate heat, even years after being removed from a reactor, the water is needed to prevent meltdown. It also provides radiation shielding. But the pool requires additional systems: heat exchangers to keep the water from boiling away, and filtration systems to pick out the radioactive material that builds up in the water. Over the long term, corrosion and cooling are concerns. The Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's main trade association, says there are already 16 reactor sites with dry cask storage, and an additional 20 that will run out of space in their spent-fuel pools by the end of 2004 and will probably need such storage. Nearly all will need it by 2010. But it costs more than $1 million for enough casks to store a year's worth of fuel for one reactor. So Peach Bottom's operator, at the time the parent company of the Philadelphia Electric Power Company, was one of 12 utilities to sue the Energy Department to recoup its costs after the 1998 deadline; Peach Bottom, like other reactors, had been paying the government a tenth of a cent per kilowatt-hour generated, in exchange for a government promise, now broken, to take the fuel. Peach Bottom settled, with the department agreeing that the plant could skip payments equal to the price of the casks. But this has not placated Exelon, which is highly likely to be a builder of new plants if any are ever ordered in this country. The company, like other utilities, would like the waste problem solved first. The cask storage sites have created a political role reversal: the companies that build them hate them, and the people who want to phase out nuclear plants see them as bolstering their argument. The companies are eager to empty them and have the Energy Department move the fuel, preferably to a federal burial site, but at a minimum to a centralized above-ground repository — probably looking much like the one here, only bigger. For the companies, the casks are a reminder of an unresolved problem. But opponents are happy to emphasize that the problem is unsolvable, and that the waste should stay in its containers, right where it is, a reminder in five dozen locations that there is no permanent repository. Their goal is to convince the public that the reactors should stop producing waste — in other words, that they should stop operating. "Their ulterior motive is to say that there is no solution," said Marvin S. Fertel, senior vice president at the Nuclear Energy Institute. But storing the fuel in casks is "not a pressing problem," said Dr. Arjun Makhijani, the president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, a nonprofit group often critical of the Energy Department. Assuming proper regulation, Dr. Makhijani said, cask storage is quite safe, probably safer than Yucca. "So long as the reactors are operating — and this is not a plug for relicensing — the waste should be stored on site," he said. Dr. Makhijani and others say that the government has proved unable to deal with its own nuclear wastes, from weapons production, and should not be trusted to find a burial spot that will stay essentially intact for 10,000 years. But other scientists like burial, and the industry contends that Congress will, too. "If you don't vote for it, the waste stays in your state for 40 or 50 years," Mr. Fertel said. Under the language of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, any senator can introduce a motion to approve the project, and the Senate must then take up the matter. When the reactors now operating were designed, mostly in the 1960's, the builders assumed that reactors would store their wastes for only a few years before they were reprocessed for further use. One reprocessing plant ran for a few years in the 1960's, in West Valley, N.Y., but was a technical and financial failure. When Jimmy Carter was president, he barred a second plant, in Illinois, from opening. The Bush administration's energy report raises the possibility of reviving reprocessing, but experts say that technology's prospects are highly uncertain. Even if Yucca Mountain opens, it is too small; under the 1982 law it is supposed to accept 77,000 tons of civilian and military wastes, but the civilian wastes alone will come to more than that, partly because of license renewals, which were not anticipated in 1982. The industry hopes that by the time this becomes a problem, Nevadans will see the economic benefits of the repository and support a change in the law to accept more waste. But the other possibilities are lengthy storage in casks and the search for a second site, which no one wants to undertake. The New York Times Newspaper. ***************************************************************** 18 Reprocessing Used Fuel June 4, 2001 By MATTHEW L. WALD New Focus on an Old Nuclear Problem (June 4, 2001) [W] ASHINGTON, June 3 — Is it really waste? For years, nuclear engineers have argued that used fuel should be "reprocessed" to extract the uranium fuel that was not consumed and the plutonium that was produced in the reactor. In the early days of nuclear power, when uranium was scarce and expensive, they argued (wrongly, it turns out) that this would save money. Now they say it would simplify disposal, by removing the elements that last the longest and feeding them back through a reactor, where they would be converted into shorter- lived radioactive materials. The idea has surfaced again in the Bush-Cheney energy plan, which calls for research on a new form of reprocessing called pyroprocessing. Opponents say the idea was put in the report as a sop to the Nevadans who oppose Yucca Mountain as a burial ground for waste; supporters say it is a realistic option. Pyroprocessing was tested at the Argonne National Laboratory's Idaho test station, where researchers chopped up used fuel and ran electric currents through the mixture. With the right electrode and the right voltage, uranium will migrate to the electrode, along with plutonium, neptunium and lawrencium, the so- called transuranic family of elements found at the bottom of the atomic chart. The transuranics are created in reactors by adding neutrons to uranium. While they take thousands of years to lose radioactivity, most of the fission products, which are the fragments of split uranium atoms, take hundreds. But the transuranics are not good fuel for the existing generation of reactors, because of the neutrons used to sustain a chain reaction in them. In existing designs, those neutrons are slowed to a speed where they are more likely to split uranium atoms, but that speed is too low to break up the transuranics. Pryroprocessing might be technically feasible, but experts say it would require hundreds of newly designed reactors to use the resulting fuel. 2001 The New York Times Company ***************************************************************** 19 South Carolina objects to being dump site Rocky Mountain News: Local By Berny Morson, News Staff Writer South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges wants assurances that his state won't become the permanent home for plutonium from Rocky Flats. Rocky Flats this month will send its first shipment of weapons-grade plutonium to the U.S. Energy Department's Savannah River Site in South Carolina. All of the plutonium will be out of Rocky Flats in 16 months as part of the plan to clean up the the defunct nuclear weapons plant by 2006. Hodges does not oppose the plutonium coming into South Carolina, but he wants assurances from the Energy Department that the highly radioactive material will eventually be moved out. Hodges hinted in a recent interview with The New York Times that the state police could halt Rocky Flats shipments at the border unless the Energy Department comes up with a plan to remove the plutonium. Hodges' spokeswoman downplayed the remark, saying the governor has "no plans at this time to physically stop a shipment to South Carolina." The Rocky Flats cleanup was delayed in the late 1990s when New Mexico officials objected to the burial of low-level waste near Carlsbad in the southern part of the state. Colorado and South Carolina congressional delegations are in discussions about the plutonium shipments, said Sean Conway, a spokesman for U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard. The controversy won't delay the startup of the plutonium shipments, said Jeremy Karpatkin, the Rocky Flats spokesman. "We're shipping the stuff," Karpatkin said. "What Savannah then does with it is a separate issue." Plans devised under the Clinton administration call for the plutonium either to be turned into reactor fuel or encased in glass for shipment to a burial site. Hodges, a Democrat, began questioning the shipments in April after the Bush administration's draft budget showed cuts in the programs for converting the plutonium. "Now the concern is that the current Energy secretary is breaking a commitment that was made to South Carolina," said Cortney Owings, Hodges' spokeswoman. "Under this commitment, South Carolina would not be the final storage or disposal site for any nuclear waste. We would more or less be the middleman." But Joe Davis, a spokesman for the Energy Department, said the agency hasn't abandoned that plan. "We're going to have a clear strategy of moving stuff in and out of South Carolina," Davis said. In the New York Times interview, Hodges recalled a threat by former Idaho Gov. Cecil Andrus to call out state police to stop a waste shipment from Rocky Flats. "We have troopers in South Carolina, too," Hodges said. Contact Berny Morson at (303) 892-5072 or morsonb@RockyMountainNews.com. June 4, 2001 ***************************************************************** 20 Nuclear industry optimism on rise ... but dwindling number of university reactors raises concern June 4, 2001 By Frank Munger News-Sentinel senior writer It's not a scientific measure by any stretch, but I can gauge the optimism in the nuclear industry by the number of press releases I receive from the Nuclear Energy Institute, and lately those have arrived with unusual regularity. Optimism is running high. Indeed, some advocates believe the power crisis in California may jump-start the industry, attracting public support for nuclear in a way that other, much-publicized issues -- such as global climate change -- have not. The nuclear industry also sees a friend in the White House. The Bush administration's early overtures, including an energy strategy that prominently includes the nuclear option, have been received enthusiastically. "The White House rightly has recognized that nuclear energy plays an essential role in helping our nation achieve its economic and environmental goals," said Joe Colvin, president and chief executive officer of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's policy pusher in Washington. "The administration's support for nuclear power as a proven energy technology that protects our air quality is a tremendously positive development for our nation. Among other things, it sends an important message to Wall Street and to young people considering careers in the engineering field that national policy at the highest level envisions continuing and even greater reliance on nuclear power as part of our long-term energy strategy." It's interesting that the NEI touted the message being sent to young people considering nuclear careers, because those same people are receiving other messages -- not all of them positive, either. For instance, Cornell University announced that it will shut down its 500-kilowatt research reactor and phase out all activities at the university's Ward Center for Nuclear Sciences. The reactor's operating license is due to expire next year, and a top official said the university could not continue spending the money needed for the nuclear research facility. "The reactor has far too little use," Vice Provost Robert Richardson said in a release. "There is small change that the demand will increase significantly in the next decade. Possession of nuclear fuel is a liability to the university." The Cornell decision, of course, mirrors ones made at universities across the nation in recent decades. The number of nuclear reactors on campus has declined dramatically, with the U.S. total now somewhere in the range of 26 -- and most of those are tiny facilities with limited capabilities. "It's a great concern to us," said James Lake, current president of the American Nuclear Society and an associate director at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory. Lake was in Oak Ridge recently to visit ORNL and speak to the local chapter of the American Nuclear Society. He said the universities reactors are important educational and research tools, which are needed to prepare a new generation of nuclear experts. The problems range from lack of government support to universities doing a poor job of identifying potential users among their faculty, Lake said. "The government should be putting money into reactors to support operations, upgrade control systems and maybe put some advanced research instrumentation ... so that these tools are well-equipped," Lake said. Why is this a government responsibility? "Because they serve a national need," Lake said. "They're training scientists and researchers that are valuable national assets." Jim Roberto, an associate director at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, said the reactors -- even small ones -- are expensive to maintain and are complex from a regulatory standpoint. Even though the student training is valuable, some universities simply don't want the hassle, he said. "That's unfortunate," Roberto said. "With computers, you can do a lot of simulation, but you still need hands-on experience." John Gilligan, associate dean of engineering at North Carolina State University, calls the demise of research reactors and nuclear engineering departments "a slow strangulation." N.C. State is one of two universities in the South to host a research reactor. The other is the University of Florida. "It's a fight every year to keep the reactor going and relevant and modernized," Gilligan said. He said North Carolina State is trying to upgrade its 1-megawatt reactor with an ultra-cold neutron source to enhance the experiments. If so, that will complement the research activities at big facilities at ORNL, including the High Flux Isotope Reactor and the Spallation Neutron Source now under construction. Gilligan bemoans the lack of federal support for university reactors. Even if proposed legislation is passed in Congress supporting a series of nuclear centers, that could have a negative impact on those universities left out in the cold, he said. "There's always a problem." Lee Riedinger, deputy director of ORNL, said there's always a tendency for funding agencies to want to put their money into the biggest and best facilities -- including those at national laboratories. "It's hard for universities to compete," said Riedinger, who headed the University of Tennessee's Physics Department before coming to ORNL, "but we have to ensure that we maintain that capability." Senior writer Frank Munger can be reached at 482-9213 or by e-mail at twig1@knoxnews.infi.net. This weekly column on science and technology also is available on our Web site at http://www.knoxnews.com/science/munger/. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARTICLES ***************************************************************** 1 Federal Court unsure of Maralinga victim's injuries ABC News - 4 Jun 2001 The Commonwealth has asked lawyers for a man suing for psychological injury over nuclear testing at Maralinga to state more precisely the damage they say he suffered. Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) mechanic Barrie Dinnison fears poor health throughout his later life is the result of having suffered radiation contamination. Mr Dinnison was 19 in 1957 when he served at Maralinga. In that time there were three nuclear blasts, the third, which Mr Dinnison observed from a distance of nine miles, was twice the power of the Hiroshima blast. The Commonwealth has told the Federal Court in Sydney it is not clear if Mr Dinnison is suing for nervous shock, psychological damage from ongoing exposure or damage which developed afterwards. His counsel, John Graves SC, replied Mr Dinnison's observation of the third blast induced stress upon his psyche and he left Maralinga with a small voice of doubt about whether he was contaminated and 12 years later his health started to go wrong. border="0"> © 2001 Australian Broadcasting Corporation ***************************************************************** 2 UPI News Article: Pakistan rejects nuclear reports 3 June 2001 10:46 (ET) By AAMIR SHAH ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, June 3 (UPI) -- Pakistan has rejected British newspapers reports, which said that the United States is concerned that Pakistan can provide information about manufacturing of nuclear weapons to North Korea. A spokesman of the Pakistan Foreign Office has described the reports as baseless. The Financial times has quoted the American Deputy Secretary of Defense Richard Armitage as saying that some people in Pakistan's nuclear facilities are involved in transferring equipment for nuclear weapons to other countries. Former Chief of Army Staff, General Mirza Aslam Beg termed the allegations as absolutely absurd and unfounded. He said it is nothing but malicious intent on America's part. He said that the United States has been persistently criticizing Pakistan's nuclear program ever since Pakistan stared efforts to achieve the nuclear capability. All the U.S. wants is to some how put an end to our nuclear programme but it is impossible he maintained. He said in 1989, when Benazir Bhutto was in power, Pakistan decided to develop its nuclear programme in a controlled manner because it had already achieved its main objective. Under the said policy Pakistan limited its capability with respect to stockpiling and decided not to export the nuclear technology to any other country he added. The former army chief said Pakistan has been adhering firmly to that policy ever since. He said "I think it is inappropriate and unjust for the U.S. to issue the sort of statement it did recently." -- Copyright 2001 by United Press International. -- ***************************************************************** 3 U.S., Kazakstan Talk of Plutonium Security Source: Wall Street Journal Abstracts U.S and Kazak officials are considering how to best go about transporting 3.3 tons of weapons-grade plutonium from the Caspian Sea port of Aktau too a more secure facility. Officials worried that leaving the plutonium where it was created by a Soviet breeder reactor called BN-350 would expose it to the possibility of theft. Considering that the location is particularly exposed to Iran and that the plutonium is enough to constructs hundreds of nuclear weapons, the officials decided to move it. The U.S. asked Kazakstan last month if it could help in transporting the material to a safer location. Kazak and U.S. officials are moving the plutonium to a secure storage facility at the former nuclear test facility at Semipalatinsk. The transport of the plutonium is the second major joint mission between the U.S. and Kazakstan following the breakdown of the former Soviet Union. For additional information refer to *The Wall Street Journal* or go to http://www.wsj.com. *Copyright © 2001 by Northern Light Technology Inc. All rights ***************************************************************** 4 Flats workers' suit eyed Denver Post.com Trial tests claim of beryllium exposure By Denver Post Staff Writer -> Monday, June 04, 2001 - Dave Norgard lives every day with the fear of ending up tethered to an oxygen tank, choking to get every breath. Worse yet, he could die. Feds provide compensation A trial starting today on behalf of Rocky Flats workers suffering from a debilitating lung disease is not the only action putting a spotlight on the sick workers. The trial in Jefferson County is getting underway just as the federal government begins work on compensating nuclear-weapons workers exposed to beryllium. Congress passed legislation last year allowing workers to receive up to $150,000 each and medical coverage for cancer and other diseases they contracted while working at Energy Department facilities or for its contractors. As of April, 119 Rocky Flats employees have been diagnosed with chronic beryllium disease and another 184 have been "sensitized" to the metal. Some 10 percent of those sensitized could end up with the disease, said Karen Lutz, a Rocky Flats spokeswoman. Nationwide, 165 workers in the government nuclear-weapons complex have the disease, she said. Spouses and relatives of deceased workers also are eligible for the benefits, potentially opening up the program to an estimated 2,000 Coloradans, Lutz said. The U.S. Labor Department will administer the program with the help of the Energy Department. Workers can call a toll-free number with questions, 866-888-3322. Applications for benefits can also be obtained on the Internet at. If workers lose their suit in court, it's unclear whether they will be able to receive the federal compensation, labor officials and attorneys have said. The Jefferson County lawsuit could be significant because documents released in that case could make it easier for workers to assemble and file claims under the act, union officials said. The daily worry drove him into a depression that required medication. "I was getting suicidal there. My family was getting pretty worried about it," Norgard said. The 45-year-old is one of hundreds of workers across the country who has chronic beryllium disease, a lung ailment contracted by working amid particles and the dust of beryllium. Many of those who are sick worked in the country's nuclear-weapons facilities, where the lightweight but strong metal was highly prized. And most of the disease's victims worked at Rocky Flats, the former nuclear-weapons plant near Arvada. Norgard will be closely watching a trial starting today in Jefferson County District Court involving some of those stricken Rocky Flats workers. He may come here from his Michigan home to attend the four-week trial. His daughter and son live in the Denver area. He knows that it's a case that could gain national prominence for several reasons. It will be the first time a jury reviews documents showing what the federal government and the world's leading beryllium supplier knew about what was happening to workers, according to union officials, attorneys and others. "I would like to think that the average man and woman on the street and the working individual will be able to see the significance (of the documents). We are talking about something similar to what happened to (cigarette) smokers," Norgard said. "To not know something (is harmful) and to try to do the best to find out is one thing. But to know something (is harmful) and to carry on as if nothing has happened is something else." Fifty Rocky Flats workers are suing Brush Wellman Inc., a Cleveland-based company that is the world's leading supplier of beryllium. The company shipped beryllium to Rocky Flats, where workers fashioned the metal. The Jefferson County case will involve an initial four workers and their wives. The lawsuit alleges that Brush has always known that workers could contract the lung disease, even from the most minute exposure. Moreover, it claims Brush and the federal government conspired to keep secret information that the federal safety standard for beryllium dust in the workplace didn't protect workers. The workers are seeking unspecified monetary damages. The Jefferson County case also will be the first trial involving employees from a federal nuclear facility. The outcome could set the tone for other federal workers who have sued, one attorney in the case said. The company maintains it has done nothing wrong and actually has worked hard to research the problem and help workers. "We intend to defend (ourselves) vigorously," said Patrick Carpenter, a Brush Wellman spokesman. Across the country, the company faces 71 lawsuits involving 192 plaintiffs, Carpenter said. While some of the company's documents and declassified federal reports have been part of other lawsuits, those cases have not yet come before a jury. The metal also has gained favor outside the defense industry, showing up in parts for cars, cellphones, computers, bicycles, dental work and golf clubs. As many as 800,000 employees in a variety of industries could be working with the metal, according to the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The federal safety standard, known as the "taxicab standard" because it was set during a conversation among officials in a taxicab more than 50 years ago, remains in place today. The federal government is considering lowering the standard, and a new one could be proposed in December. Norgard had worked in one of Brush's plants for just a month when he experienced a full-body rash and skin ulcers. He heads the National Advocates for Beryllium Education and Reform and is also suing the company. "The fact that the company won't fess up is one of the hardest things to deal with," he said. Attorneys on both sides of the Jefferson County case declined to comment, and the workers who have waited five years for the trial to begin also were told by their attorneys to not comment. The internal company documents and declassified government material introduced in the case indicate: The company knew as early as 1951 that workers were becoming sick when exposed to beryllium levels below the federal safety standard. The federal government allowed Brush to censor medical documents for years. For example, a report from Brush's medical director, concluding that beryllium was one of the "most deadly (elements) known to mankind," was censored. Brush was allowed to change a 1972 government report to make false conclusions about those who had contracted the disease. The report ultimately concluded the federal safety standard protected workers. Plaintiffs plan to use admissions by Bill Richardson, energy secretary under President Clinton, that the government colluded with Brush Wellman to keep beryllium flowing to the defense industry, sacrificing workers' health. As for conspiring with the government, Brush says that could hardly be true. The company notes that when the federal government set the safety standard on dust exposure in 1949, it warned that it was only a "tentative" standard and that it might not protect all workers. The company also cites several government documents, including 1984 and 1986 reports by two federal agencies, warning that not all people will be protected by the federal standard. "The fact that there were questions about the protectiveness of the existing standard for exposure to airborne concentrations of beryllium was certainly no secret," one company court brief said. ***************************************************************** 5 Meetings set to inform Ridgers about nuclear worker compensation plan Oak Ridger Online --> Story last updated at 12:07 p.m. on Monday, June 4, 2001 by Paul Parson Oak Ridger staff An overview of how the compensation plan for job-sickened nuclear employees works will be the topic of meetings scheduled later this month in Oak Ridge. One of the items expected to be discussed at the June 26-27 meetings is how to fill out claims forms for the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act. A resource center where employees can file claims is anticipated to open in Oak Ridge in July. The compensation plan offers $150,000 plus lifetime medical benefits to workers whose health was ruined by Cold War-era exposure to radiation, silica or beryllium. Congress gave the Department of Labor a $60.4 million appropriation to set up the compensation program because it was viewed as the government's expert on occupational illness and compensation programs. Earlier this year, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao voiced dissatisfaction about running the program. She changed her mind about doing so shortly after 10 House members introduced a bill to force the Labor Department to run the program. Since then, the Labor Department has published proposed regulations for governing the plan and recently launched a toll-free number, 1-866-888-3322, that affected workers can call with questions about the compensation program. The Oak Ridge meetings are scheduled for June 26-27 at the American Museum of Science and Energy. Tentative times for the meeting are 1 and 7 p.m. both days. To verify the times of the meetings, call Walter Perry with the Department of Energy at 576-0885. ***************************************************************** 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: *****************************************************************