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02/05/01 ****     RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL)       **** VOL 9.33
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                    NUCLEAR POWER CONTENTS
 
 1  North Korea's Energy Woes Probed 
 2  Incidents of cancer clusters evident worldwide
 3  Officers win medal for averting Atomic Energy blast 
 4  Germany: New Nuclear Boss Stresses Pan-European Outlook
 5  Power plant stance may get Chen hurt
 6  WIPP route stirs concern in Dallas_
 7  AG Asks Domenici for WIPP Help
 8  Radioactivity sitting on runway
 9  With California engulfed in an energy crisis, people once again are
10  Chen tries to bridge DPP factionalism
11  Anti-nuclear activists still hope for delay of plant
12  Citizens Groups Planning to Expand Nuclear Protest
13  Russian fleet ready to ship Japan radioactive material
14  U.S. News: Do nuclear reactors have the juice? (2/12/01)
15  Fire Shuts Calif. Nuclear Reactor
16  Will WPPSS plants rise again?_ 
17  Plans call for easing restrictions on new power plants 
18  Taiwan Nears Accord on Nuclear Power
19  Authorities to Report on Progress Of Moab Uranium Tailings 
20  Nuclear waste rerouted past Scotland

                    NUCLEAR WEAPONS CONTENTS
 
 1  Toxic traces in ammo, U.S. says __
 2  Israeli Diamona nuclear reactor a threat to environment
 3  Bosnians Blame DU, War for Rise in Cancer 
 4  Unwelcome Exposure 
 5  Officials re-examine need for laser project __
 6  Moderator prepares for Faslane protest
 7  group of scientists removed half a cubic centimetre of radioactive 
 8  Officials discuss necessity for NIF at Livermore Lab __
 9  TAFT PRESSES ENERGY SECRETARY FOR PIKETON FUNDS 
10  Depleted Uranium paper to Royal Society

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                     NUCLEAR POWER ARTICLES
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 1 North Korea's Energy Woes Probed 
                                       
  Reuters  |  _AP_  |  ABCNEWS.com  |  eCountries  |  Photos  |  Canada  | 

_Saturday February 3 10:21 AM ET_
 
*By SANG-HUN CHOE, Associated Press Writer *

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - North Korea (news - web sites) has 
agreed to open itself up to South Korean (news - web sites) 
officials who will inspect its power industry before deciding 
whether to provide surplus electricity to the energy-starved 
communist nation, the Seoul government said Saturday.

Like food shortages, energy shortfalls in North Korea are severe. 
Power failures are common even in Pyongyang, the North's capital, 
and travelers have reported seeing public buildings and homes 
without heating and electricity during the country's frigid 
winter.

North Korea requested 500,000 kilowatts of electricity from South 
Korea in late December when they held high-level talks in 
Pyongyang dealing exclusively with economic cooperation. The 
meeting was an outgrowth of last June's historic summit in which 
the leaders of the two Koreas agreed to work together toward 
reconciliation.

The South has said it will consider the North's electricity 
request only after a joint survey of its energy shortages. The 
two Koreas exchanged agreements Saturday calling for the 
unprecedented joint field survey to begin within the month.

South Korean officials say most of the North's aging Russian-made 
power plants can now produce 2 million kilowatts a year, about a 
third of their original capacity.

In 1994, North Korea agreed to freeze its nuclear program. In 
return, the United States, Japan and South Korea are building two 
modern reactors in a rural village in the northeastern part of 
North Korea.

The light-water reactors will replace Soviet-designed 
graphite-moderated reactors, which experts say produce greater 
amounts of weapons-grade plutonium. Completion of the first 
reactor had been scheduled for 2003, but delays have pushed the 
date back several years.

Separate talks on other projects key to rapprochement on the 
divided Korean peninsula - building a cross-border railroad and 
highway, an industrial park in the North and a dam near the 
border - will begin either in February or March, Seoul's 
Unification Ministry said in a news release.

Besides economic exchanges, the two Koreas also are promoting 
humanitarian projects such as temporary reunions of families 
separated by the 1950-53 Korean War. They will hold another round 
of such reunions for 100 separated family members from each side 
Feb. 26-28, the third since the June summit. In the months since 
the June summit, the two Koreas have made more progress toward 
reconciliation than in the five decades since they were divided 
in 1945.

The Korean War ended without a peace treaty, and the border 
between North and South Korea remains closed, with about a 
million troops standing guard on each side.

Meanwhile, North Korea on Saturday accused Japan of stockpiling 
nuclear fuel to make atomic bombs.

Japanese officials say fuel rods produced by the Belgian company 
Belgonucleaire from plutonium reprocessed by France's state-owned 
nuclear group Cogema and shipped from France to Japan will be 
used to generate energy at a Japanese nuclear power plant.

But North Korea claimed in the state-run newspaper Minju Joson 
that Japan intends to use the fuel to build atomic weapons. The 
article was carried by the North's official foreign news outlet, 
KCNA, monitored in Seoul. 
 
  Copyright © 2001 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. 
*****************************************************************
 2  Incidents of cancer clusters evident worldwide
 
*Frank X. Mullen Jr.*
 Reno Gazette-Journal
 Monday January 29th, 2001
 

Cancer and leukemia clusters have sprung up all over the 
industrialized world during the last 50 years but epidemiologists 
say few of the cases can positively be linked with a contaminant.
 
Accidents are the most common cause of child deaths in the United 
States, but cancer is the second-largest killer of children, 
according to the National Cancer Institute and the National 
Childhood Cancer Foundation.
 
While some cases coincide with the presence of a known carcinogen 
in the drinking water or elsewhere in the environment, 

connections are hard to prove, scientists say.
 
Dr. Alexander Aledo, a leukemia specialist at New York 
Weill-Cornell Center in Manhattan, N.Y., said people are always 
wanting to pin the blame on something, but in the vast majority 
of cancer clusters the environmental causes — if they exist — 
remain unknown.
 
“Connections aren’t easily made,” he said.
 
Here’s a look at some high-profile cancer/leukemia cluster cases:
 
In Tom’s River, N.J., 103 children are part of the nation’s 
largest child cancer cluster. State environmental officials 
discovered 4,500 drums of toxic liquid had been dumped in a 
nearby landfill and at a local farm. Still, it’s difficult to 
prove the leukemia cases are directly caused by the pollutants.
 
In the Woburn, Mass., cancer cluster, made famous by the book and 
movie “A Civil Action,” 21 children contracted leukemia. The 

culprit was believed to be drinking water contaminated by a 
hazardous waste deep-injection well. Eight families got $400,000 
in the settlement of a civil suit that ended in 1986. Some 
scientists argue that the link between the contaminated wells and 
the leukemia patients was not strong enough to entirely explain 
the “excess” leukemia.
 
In La Hague, France, 27 cases of leukemia were diagnosed in 
people under 25 years of age between 1978 and 1993. The area is 
home to the world’s largest nuclear reprocessing facility. 
Scientists have made a case for radioactive contamination of the 
ocean and the sea animals and have found that victims who spent 
time at the beach or who ate seafood appeared more likely to 
contract leukemia.
 
In Britain in 1983, scientists began noticing a 10-scale increase 
in leukemia cases in the village of Seascale. The “Seascale 
Cluster,” as it became known, has been extensively studied by 
scientists. The village is near the Sellafield nuclear processing 
facility, but discharges from that plant seem to be too low to 

account for the increase in childhood leukemia, according to a 
1984 study. A second study, which remains controversial, links 
the fathers’ exposure to radiation before conception of children 
to childhood leukemia.
 
Another British researcher has suggested that when urban areas 
mix with people from rural communities — as happened in Seascale 
— exposure to viruses increase. That theory lends support to 
another British scientist’s idea that some unknown infection 
causes leukemia clusters.
 
Studies conducted after the Seascale Cluster investigations found 
a slight, but significant increase in leukemia in people under 
the age of 25 in the areas around 15 nuclear facilities in 
England and Wales.
 
A cancer cluster in the early 1990s in Hinkley, Calif., inspired 
the movie “Erin Brockovich.” In that case, Pacific Gas and 
Electric went to private arbitration with the 650 plaintiffs and 
paid $333 million. The case involved chromium from the utility 
*****************************************************************
 3  Officers win medal for averting Atomic Energy blast 

THE SUNDAY TIMES: NEWS 
_
  February 4 2001     BRITAIN  

*James Clark, Home Affairs Correspondent *

TWO army officers have been quietly awarded the George Medal for 
helping to avert an explosion at one of Britain's biggest nuclear 
and chemical research facilities. 

Managers at the Atomic Energy Authority (AEA) plant at Harwell, 
Oxfordshire, are now facing charges under health and safety 
legislation over the incident, which required the two bomb 
disposal experts to risk their lives. 

Local schoolchildren were removed from the area and a blast 
perimeter was set up after an experiment went wrong inside a 
laboratory codenamed Building 220 at the secure plant in 
September 1999. 

Unstable "silver compounds" built up in the lab, which is close 
to partially decommissioned nuclear reactors, radiochemical 
laboratories and waste stores. Senior managers at the 
government-owned AEA called in army bomb experts. Captains Justin 
Priestley and Richard Baker, of the Royal Logistic Corps, spent 
36 hours making the building safe. 

Their citation in December reveals that the explosive material 
was "an unstable explosive compound, liable to spontaneously 
detonate or explode if subjected to movement of any kind". 

To reduce the risk of explosion, nitric acid was introduced "very 
gradually" into the tank where silver compounds had formed. The 
citation notes the men's "great nerve, courage and total 
professionalism". 

The AEA called in the army because safety experts on the site 
advised bosses that the building could not "certainly" be made 
safe using the facilities provided at Harwell. After a detailed 
18-month investigation, the Health and Safety Executive issued a 
prosecution against Atomic Energy Authority Technology, part of 
the AEA, which is also in court as the safety authority for the 
Harwell site. 

Last night a spokesman for the AEA expressed its "disappointment" 
that charges had been brought after 18 months. "We are still 
looking at the large bundles of evidence they have sent us and 
will proceed from there," she said. There was no nuclear material 
inside Building 220 at the time. 

At the time the AEA said little about the dangers of the 
explosion, other than to apologise to local people who were 
evacuated. In a brief statement, it promised: "For the moment, we 
will still retain prudent control over the facility, which has 
been of concern. The events of the past two days will be studied 
carefully and any lessons learnt will be fed into future plans." 

One Royal Logistic Corps officer said yesterday: "Everyone is 
very proud of what Justin and Richard did. They were working in a 
difficult place and would have been in deep trouble had there 
been an explosion. We understand there's a court case, which we 
don't know too much about, but clearly it's our job to make these 
things safe regardless." 

Harwell occupies about 500 acres behind a perimeter fence guarded 
by the site's own police force. 

About 2,000 people work on what are described as "science and 
engineering" experiments for customers around the world. 

  Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd. This service is provided 
on Times
*****************************************************************
 4  Germany: New Nuclear Boss Stresses Pan-European Outlook
 
_*  2nd February 2001*_
 
*The new president of the German atomic forum says he believes 
the organisation can play a vital role in uniting supporters of 
nuclear power throughout Europe and beyond.* 

_ Gert Maichel, the chairman of RWE Power – Germany's largest 
power utility – told NucNet he also wants to encourage "new 
blood" to become involved in the work of the forum, as part of a 
general programme of internal development.
 
On the subject of the planned resumption of spent fuel and 
radwaste transports between France and Germany (see News of 1st 
February), Dr. Maichel pledged to hold the authorities to their 
commitments.
 
Dr. Maichel laid out the highlights of his agenda for the first 
12 months of his presidency in an interview with NucNet during 
this week´s annual winter meeting of the forum in Berlin.
 
"I would like to see us putting much more emphasis on European 
relations," he said.
 
"The enlargement of national European markets should also mean 
the development of closer relationships for those of us who are 
involved in the nuclear industry."
 
Dr. Maichel said that forging stronger relationships even in 
other German-speaking countries could produce clear benefits, but 
added that he also saw every reason to look further afield – both 
in Europe and beyond.
 
"I want the forum to be a sounding board for all those interested 
parties, because together we can make a stronger case for the 
industry."
 
He said the May meeting of the forum's governing body, the 
presidium, would address the issue of attracting younger members 
to build on the existing talents within the organisation.
 
The forum would also have to review the effect that ongoing 
mergers in the German nuclear industry were having on the forum's 
own membership ranks.
 
Going beyond internal issues, Dr. Maichel said the forum had to 
push the government into presenting its long-awaited draft atomic 
law, following the consensus agreement reached last year on the 
future of nuclear power in Germany.
 
"We have to make sure that there are no further bottlenecks that 
can stop the safe operation of our nuclear plants. We need the 
first transport (of spent fuel) to take place in the month of May 
at the latest."
 
He said he accepted it was "too early" to have detailed 
timetables and plans for spent fuel and radwaste returns, despite 
Wednesday's agreement between French and German leaders, but said 
the forum would watch the situation closely.
 
Dr. Maichel's appointment as chairman of the forum was announced 
at the opening session of the winter meeting in Berlin yesterday. 
He replaces Otto Majewski, who announced last month that he was 
resigning as deputy chairman of E.On Energie, the other main 
German power utility.
 
*****************************************************************
 5  Power plant stance may get Chen hurt

The Taipei Times Online: 2001-02-04
_Sunday, February 4th, 2001_   

POWERFUL ISSUE: The president is reportedly ready to continue the 
construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant, but analysts warn 
that doing so will risk a very strong reaction from within his 
own party

_By Joyce Huang_
STAFF REPORTER

To end the political struggle over the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant 
(®Ö¥|), President Chen Shui-bian (³¯¤ô«ó) is reported to be about 
to compromise and accept the opposition alliance's resolution to 
resume the plant's construction. But he may face the strongest 
backlash ever from within the DPP, observers said yesterday.

 Yao Chia-wen («À¹Å¤å), a senior advisor to the president, said 
that Chen had been in such difficulties that he had planned to 
reach out to former DPP chairman Lin Yi-hsiung (ªL¸q¶¯) for help 
at yesterday's gathering for the Association of Ilan County 
Residents in Taipei (©yÄõ¿¤®È¥_¦P¶m·|) but Lin did not attend the 
event.

 
  _"If the president and the premier fail to scrap [the plant], 
they do not necessarily violate the party's platform since they 
have both expressed their anti-nuclear stances." _ *Yao Chia-wen, 
a senior advisor to the president*  


 "Chen wanted to ask Lin to help him coordinate the different 
voices within the party," Yao said, "but based on my 
understanding of Lin's personality, I doubt he will come out and 
reconcile [the party's stance with Chen's policy]."

 Lin, nicknamed "the ascetic monk" (­W¦æ¼¨), who has been 
lobbying for support of his anti-nuclear ideals all over the 
country, saw the climax of his DPP chairmanship in Chen's winning 
last year's presidential election and the transfer of power 
during his tenure.

 Therefore, if Lin is willing once again to support Chen in his 
likely decision to restart the plant, the extent of any backlash 
on the part of DPP members may be reduced. Lin's absence 
yesterday, however, seemed to signal that he is choosing not to 
follow Chen's path this time.

 "Lin obviously was expressing his disapproval of Chen's possible 
final decision, according to messages released from the 
presidential office," DPP Legislator Hong Chi-chang (¬x©_©÷) 
said, adding that Chen needed a prestigious former chairman like 
Lin to secure his political position in the party.

 Hung added that he completely understood that Chen was eager to 
end the political controversy in order to consolidate power in 
his shaky administration, but he would disagree with Chen as to 
whether the president should compromise over the plant under 
pressure from the opposition alliance.

 "The DPP has reached a consensus of support for the Cabinet's 
decision to discontinue the plant's construction, so we should be 
consistent in safeguarding our vision even now that we are under 
great pressure," Hung added.

 Expressing his determination to see the plant scrapped, Lin 
recently wrote a personal letter to Premier Chang Chun-hsiung 
(±i«T¶¯), urging the government to stand up for the Cabinet's 
decision and support the party's long-held ideal of making Taiwan 
nuclear-free. 

DPP Secretary-General Wu Nai-jen (§d¤D¤¯) has even threatened to 
quit his post if the Cabinet reverses its decision.

 However desirable the goal of a nuclear-free country may be, 
Chen still has to face the political reality that he is powerless 
to achieve the goal given the fact that the DPP is a minority in 
the legislature. Moreover, former director of the DPP's 
department of culture and information, Sisy Chen (³¯¤åÓ}), once 
said that, judging from Chen's leadership style, she believed he 
was susceptible to a compromise on the plant.

 "Chen is anti-nuclear in nature, but he has never made any clear 
determination to scrap the plant," she said during a TV talk 
show.

 Whether the president will act on the opposition alliance's 
resolution remains unclear, but Chen faces not only opposition 
from within the DPP, but also the possibility of facing party 
discipline if he gives the go-ahead for the plant's resumption.

 Lin had previously proclaimed that any DPP government officials 
who supported the plant would be violating the party's platform. 
"The president should dismiss any DPP Cabinet members who support 
the plant," Lin said, while he was still DPP chairman. 

In response to Lin's remarks, the premier also promised to abide 
by the party's platform after he took office last October, 
saying: "I, as a DPP member, am not likely to make a decision 
that will violate the party's platform." 

Those words would appear to further tighten the trap in which the 
president and premier now find themselves.

 Yao, however, disagreed.

 "The plant's construction is a fait accompli. If the president 
and the premier fail to scrap it, they do not necessarily violate 
the party's platform since they have both expressed their 
anti-nuclear stances," Yao said, adding that he sympathized with 
the president's position.

 Yao remained pessimistic, however, adding that it seemed that 
the president could not find a solution to his predicament since 
many anti-nuclear activists from abroad have also threatened to 
come back to Taiwan and join the domestic protests if he should 
decide to continue the plant's construction.

 
This story has been viewed 335 times. 
 
Copyright © 1999, 2000, 2001 The Taipei Times. All rights 
reserved. 

*****************************************************************
 6  WIPP route stirs concern in Dallas_

      [Albuquerque Tribune: News]                                        

 _The Associated Press_

      DALLAS -- The route over which 35,000 tons of radioactive 
waste must be moved to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in 
Carlsbad has attracted the concern of anti-nuclear groups and 
officials in Dallas County.

     The start date for transporting the waste, contaminated by 
plutonium residue, is unknown because approval from the state of 
New Mexico is still pending.

     The plutonium -- leftovers from the production of Cold War 
bomb-grade plutonium -- is stored at four locations east of the 
Mississippi River.

     Federal government officials say it is safer to move the 
material to WIPP than to leave it in storage, but 
environmentalists and anti-nuclear activists disagree, saying 
they believe even the slightest risk of a release of plutonium in 
transportation is too much of a risk to public safety.

     It's an additional concern for some Dallas County officials, 
who long have viewed hazardous transports through their area as 
particularly dangerous because of I-20's lack of continuous 
service roads.

     The first shipment of 9 tons of steel-encased transuranic 
waste will go to WIPP from the Department of Energy's Savannah 
River Site in Aiken, S.C. The truck will use I-20 to pass through 
Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and finally Texas, 
including southern Dallas and Tarrant counties.

     Over the next 34 years, federal officials hope to repeat the 
process 4,299 times from four eastern sites now used for storage.

     At WIPP the plutonium-contaminated clothes, tools, gloves 
and other toxic or radioactive materials will be taken 2,150 feet 
underground and entombed in rock-salt formations.

     Department of Energy officials say they do not expect any 
radiation to be released during any of the thousands of highway 
trips that will be made over the next 30 years. They note that 
none of the 141 shipments already received by WIPP has leaked any 
waste on other interstate highways.

     Dallas officials must be alerted when each of the waste 
transports leaves Louisiana and enters Texas. Capt. Benny Howard, 
hazardous materials coordinator for the Dallas Fire Department, 
said firefighters are prepared to handle any accident that 
involves a radiation release. He said he does not expect any such 
release, even if a truckload of radioactive waste is involved in 
a major traffic accident.

     Howard said most of the waste will have only a low level of 
radioactivity.

     Arjun Makhijani, president of the Maryland-based Institute 
for Energy and Environmental Research, said he believes the 
eastern wastes should be left at their existing storage sites in 
Illinois, Ohio, Tennessee and South Carolina.

     "Needless transportation should be avoided," said Dr. 
Makhijani, whose degrees are in physics and electrical 
engineering. 

© The Albuquerque Tribune. 
*****************************************************************
 7  AG Asks Domenici for WIPP Help

ABQjournal: 
 
_Friday, February 2, 2001 

Albuquerque Journal--> _By Tania Soussan_
 *Journal Staff Writer*

     New Mexico Attorney General Patricia Madrid made a 
preemptive strike Thursday to keep high-level nuclear waste out 
of the state.

     Madrid wrote to Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., asking him to 
help keep the Department of Energy from using its underground 
dump near Carlsbad to dispose of spent nuclear reactor fuel and 
high-level radioactive waste.

     The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant so far accepts only less 
dangerous wastes.

     New Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham must decide by June 
whether to recommend storage of high-level nuclear waste at an 
underground repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

     If the Bush administration decides against Yucca Mountain or 
Nevada opposes it, WIPP might be considered, Madrid said.

     "We have a new head of DOE, a new administration ... and we 
really don't know what their thoughts are on this issue," Madrid 
said.

     She cited a 1983 letter Domenici wrote to then-Gov. Toney 
Anaya. Domenici then opposed high-level waste going to WIPP.

     Domenici could not be reached for comment Thursday.

     Madrid expects Domenici will have the most influence with 
Abraham and President Bush, but plans to work with the entire 
delegation.

     "This state is already shouldering the burden of having the 
only nuclear waste dump in the country," Madrid said.

     Madrid's office also asked DOE for any documents that 
identify WIPP as a possible site for high-level radioactive 
waste.

     Also Thursday, Westinghouse TRU Solutions LLC took over 
operation of WIPP with a new management team.

     A separate division of Westinghouse had run WIPP since 1988. 
DOE awarded Westinghouse TRU Solutions a new $500 million, 
five-year contract last December.

     Henry F. "Hank" Herrera, president and general manager of 
Westinghouse TRU Solutions, will lead the new management team. 
Herrera is a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral and has more than 27 
years of nuclear operations and radioactive waste management 
experience.

     Meanwhile, DOE has asked the state Environment Department 
for a change to its permit for WIPP.

     DOE wants to use new quality control procedures for 
radiography of waste drums. Rather than opening and visually 
inspecting some of the drums, workers would use new technology 
similar to a CAT scan to analyze the contents of the drums.

     A public information meeting about the proposed permit 
modification will be from 6-8 p.m. March 6 at the Skeen-Whitlock 
Building, 4021 National Parks Highway, in Carlsbad. The state 
Environment Department also is accepting written comments.
     
For more information, go the WIPP Web page at call (800) 336-WIPP 
or Steve Zappe at the Environment Department in Santa Fe, (505) 
827-1560, extension 1013. Copyright Albuquerque Journal 
*****************************************************************
 8  Radioactivity sitting on runway

Sun Herald (Biloxi) | Page One
 
  Sunday, February 4, 2001 

 *Old planes' parts may be hazard* 

_By NAN PATTON EHRBRIGHT_ 
THE SUN HERALD 

BAY ST. LOUIS -It seemed simple: sell the four deteriorating 
Martin 404 twin-prop airplanes seized by the federal government 
that have sat on the north end of a runway at Stennis 
International Airport since late 1987 or early 1988.

 It became less simple when a Hancock County resident who studies 
radioactivity as a hobby found "hot" instruments on the planes.

 Opinions vary on whether the radioactivity is dangerous.

 State officials have told the Hancock County Port and Harbor 
Commission, which oversees the airport and Port Bienville 
Industrial Park, that radiation levels from radium paint on the 
planes are too low to worry about.

 Bob Goff, director of the state Department of Health in Jackson, 
sent a staff member to Stennis to do some measurements and take 
some samples in two of the planes.

 "They were below the exempt quantity specified in the 
regulations," he said. "I don't think you're going to see a 
particular health problem. You'd almost have to inhale a whole 
lot of dust before it became a problem."

 Even so, Goff said the department is encouraging airport 
director Bill Cotter to ask the federal agency that confiscated 
the planes to remove the radioactive material.

 Loren Setlow, from the Office of Radiation and Indoor Air at the 
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, D.C., said 
scientists today know more about the dangers of radium than they 
used to.

 "It's recognized as a hazardous substance," he said. "It's being 
dealt with as a waste. It's just something you don't want to 
sleep with or have in your back yard."*

 

*_Commission wants planes gone_

 

The planes have been a nuisance to the Port and Harbor Commission 
for some time.

 Activity at the airport continues to grow, with an increase in 
the number of cargo flights landing there and Navy SEALS using 
the airport for training. An instrument landing system is being 
installed, and lighting and runway improvements are being made.

 In mid-December, Anchor Services and Sales of Long Beach offered 
to remove two planes, then later agreed to take the other two.

 Danny Ladnier of Anchor said he wasn't sure what he would do 
with the planes.

 "I just bought them as an investment," he said.

 Phil Rosen, who operates Southern All Metals Recycling Inc. in 
Bay St. Louis also was interested in the planes.

 "You're looking at a lot of scrap aluminum there," he said.

 He chose not to bid after calling several customers.

 "The first one said he wouldn't be interested," Rosen said. "I 
called another broker. Same thing. Not interested. With the third 
broker, I asked why he wasn't interested. He said, 'Because we've 
found in the past that the old planes made in the '40s and '50s 
were radioactive.'"

 Rosen had Thomas Toups of Shoreline Park, who has several 
instruments that measure radioactivity, check the planes.

 Toups found radioactive material in two planes and is confident 
that the others are likewise contaminated because all are of the 
same vintage.

 "That would be a hazard if you were to dismantle them," Rosen 
said. "And you can't fly them out of there."

 "The concern I had was that if these things were scrapped and 
buried or crushed, you'd have a particulate hazard, and that can 
be hideously dangerous," Toups said. "It's probably a dozen times 
more dangerous than asbestos."*

 

*_What is radium?_

 

Uranium and radium are naturally occurring radioactive materials, 
which scientists call NORM. Uranium is the 48th most common 
element in Earth's crust. Radium is much rarer and is formed 
through the natural decay of uranium.

 Radium 226, typically used for illumination in aircraft 
instrumentation 40 to 50 years ago, has a half-life of 1,620 
years, while uranium 238 has a half-life of 4.5 billion years. In 
comparison, plutonium - used in atomic bombs - has a half-life of 
24,400 years. The shorter the half-life, the more radioactive a 
substance is.

 Here's what Toups found:

 Each plane has about 50 gauges and dozens of toggle switches. 
Some switches have radioactive, self-luminating tips; many of the 
gauges contain radioactive paint. The gamma radiation (similar to 
X-rays) produced by the cockpit instruments is strong enough to 
register on the aircraft's exterior with a sensitive detector.

 Some instruments have been vandalized and their glass crystals 
have been broken. On one, a significant alpha radiation surface 
rate of 50,000 counts per minute was determined.

 By way of comparison, an early vintage red Fiestaware piece - a 
type of dinnerware - with a radium paint glaze gives an alpha 
count of 2,000 counts per minute. Toups would not recommend that 
anyone eat from this type of plate, which was withdrawn from the 
market decades ago.*

 

*_Ingestion, inhalation are hazards_

 

Based on his studies, Toups said the greatest danger is the 
possible ingestion and inhalation hazard to workers or others who 
may unknowingly handle, disassemble or scrap these devices.

 "The injury this could cause cannot be overstated, and as these 
paints age and their pigments and binders are subjected to 
decades of irradiation and environmental influences, they may 
become more prone to crumble and create minute particles," he 
said.

 An alpha or beta emitter may lodge in the lung or other body 
tissue and continue to irradiate surrounding cells for decades, 
he said.

 Alpha particle radiation is estimated to be 10 to 20 times more 
dangerous than gamma or X-ray radiation.

 Toups noted that radioactive materials are all around us. Some 
homes have alarm clocks with radioactive material that were 
manufactured until the 1960s. Another example: A smoke detector 
has a radioactive emitter.

 Environmental activist Bruce Northridge of Waveland said he's 
not concerned that radioactivity from the planes will harm his 
child or children in his neighborhood.

 "What bothers me is that no one wants to take responsibility for 
advising a worker who comes in to remove planes that there's 
material in there that needs special care," Northridge said. "I 
would at least wear gloves and a mask and use a screwdriver 
instead of a hammer. The bottom line is, you don't want Joe Smith 
coming in with a hammer and saw and breaking them up."

 
[ height=] © 2001 Sun Herald. All rights reserved. Any copying, 
*****************************************************************
 9  With California engulfed in an energy crisis, people once again are
debating the merits of NUCLEAR POWER 
*February 03, 2001*

 _Is public opinion -- and perception -- changing?_ By William Brand
AVILA__

 Tucked away in a cove of the Pacific, visible only to passing 
ships and sailboats, the twin, 200-foot-high domes of Pacific Gas 
and Electric's Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant rise from the coastal 
hills. 

Through the energy crisis, the plant, which remains passionately 
controversial to many Californians, has steadily and safely 
cranked out 2,200 megawatts of electricity, enough to serve two 
million California residents. 

Nuclear power has provided 16 percent of the load during the 
crisis, supplied by Diablo Canyon and reactors in and out of 
state. There is a nuclear plant at San Onofre in Southern 
California and three Palo Verde reactors, which make up the 
nation's largest nuclear complex across the state line in 
Arizona. 

But nuclear plants have been decidedly out of fashion ever since 
the dramatic, partial meltdown of a reactor at Three Mile Island 
in Pennsylvania in 1978 and the core disaster at Chernobyl in the 
former Soviet Union in 1986, which spewed a radioactive cloud 
across northern Europe. 

There have been no nuclear plants built in the U.S. since 1978. 
Now, as California sinks further into the energy abyss -- there's 
new interest in this form of power generation. 

The answer is clear, Intel Chief Executive Officer Craig Barrett 
said bluntly as the first wintertime blackouts since World War II 
rolled across Northern California: "Nuclear power is the only 
answer, but it's not politically correct." 

In fact, some large energy companies quietly have been buying 
nuclear plants from smaller utilities -- often at rock-bottom 
prices -- and a nuclear industry task force is exploring the idea 
of building nuclear plants in the U.S. within the next five to 10 
years. 

Silicon Valley's power needs are growing nearly 12 percent 
annually -- three times the national average. Hundreds of 
thousands of jobs and billions of dollars depend on having a 
reliable source of power, says Carl Guardino, chief executive 
officer of Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group. 

"Without a stable source of power -- we can pull the plug on the 
California economy," Guardino said. "When the state had the first 
rolling blackout on June 14, it cost our members well over $100 
million in lost production time. Now it's happening again." 

Nuclear advocates believe there are some solid reasons why it's 
time once more to go nuclear. In 44 years since America's first 
commercial reactor, Shippingport, opened near Pittsburgh, Pa., 
the American nuclear industry has operated safely. The Three Mile 
Island meltdown was contained within the plant; no one was 
injured. In California, Diablo Canyon earns safety awards from 
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. 

Last month, the nation's 104 nuclear reactors in 31 states 
produced 22 percent of the electricity consumed in America. 

But Intel's Barrett is also right on the politics: Nuclear power 
isn't politically correct -- especially in California.

 _History of opposition_ 

This is a state where citizens in Sacramento voted in 1989 to 
dismantle the Sacramento Municipal Utility District's Rancho Seco 
nuclear plant. The plant was a duplicate of the Three Mile Island 
nuclear reactor. 

Environmental lawsuits triggered by earthquake fault discoveries 
delayed PG's Diablo Canyon reactors for a decade and helped 
escalate the price from the original estimate of $600 million to 
$5.8 billion. Even today, a committee appointed by the governor 
keeps watch on the plant. 

"China Syndrome," the knuckle-biting, 1979 potboiler movie about 
a near-meltdown of a nuclear power plant near Los Angeles, 
reflects the fears of nuclear plant opponents. 

Scientists explain that for a "China Syndrome" meltdown to the 
Earth's core to occur, all the water would have to be emptied 
from the reactor core instantly, so the nuclear material could 
melt the reactor containment vessel, then on down to China. 
Getting all that water out in a flash would be nearly impossible, 
scientists argue. 

But the very idea of a nuclear power plant in trouble evokes 
chills for many. "I think about nuclear power and I just 
shudder," says Jackie Cabasso of Western States Legal Foundation, 
an Oakland-based anti-nuclear group. "Nuclear power is an 
anachronism, an idea whose time has passed. 

"It's totally unacceptable for a lot of reasons -- the 
environmental dangers, the hazards created during mining, the 
disposal of nuclear waste," Cabasso said. "Even transporting 
radioactive material on our streets and highways causes 
concerns." 

Foes of nuclear energy, like Cabasso, point out that the same 
problems remain. What do we do with the waste, the radioactive 
residue of the nuclear process? How do we transport the waste? 
Stick it in trucks and haul it to somewhere remote? 

Right now, the radioactive portion of the long-closed Rancho Seco 
plant still sits in a pool of water on the site. Up on Humboldt 
Bay, a PG reactor, closed in 1976, houses its radioactive uranium 
rods as well. 

Last year, Berkeley citizens protested when Lawrence Berkeley 
National Laboratory transported a few gallons of mixed 
radioactive tritium waste from medical experiments through the 
streets on its way to a disposal site in Tennessee. 

Nuclear engineers and reactor operators reply that we've come a 
long way since Three Mile Island. There are more safety 
precautions and better training.

 _Moving forward_ 

While the nation still is sharply divided on the question, 
according to a recent poll, the newly de-regulated national 
energy companies are quietly developing a plan for a nuclear 
future. 

The Nuclear Energy Institute, a Washington-based industry 
organization, has created a task force that is working on a plan 
for new nuclear reactors in America in the next few years. 

"The task force is discussing various options," said the 
Institute's Mitch Singer. "But we predict that within the next 
five to 10 years, there will be new nuclear plants in this 
country," Singer said. 

"One of these days soon a company will be able to make a sound 
business case for a new nuclear plant," said Ted Marston of the 
Electric Power Research Institute. "There will be ample time for 
public comment, but eventually there will be new nuclear plants 
in the U.S." 

It may be possible, even in California, Marston says. "As people 
become more aware of the energy crisis, my neighbors are asking 
me about the possibility of new nuclear plants -- something they 
haven't asked me in 20 years," he says. 

Marston is not alone in seeing the shift. "In the nuclear 
industry, there's definitely been a change in mind-set about 
nuclear power," says Michael Letterer, deputy director of the 
University of California Energy Institute. 

"In the past, all people in the industry talked about was 
shortening nuclear plants' lifetimes and shutting them down 
early. Now, companies are buying nuclear power plants and there's 
new interest," Letterer said. 

However, Susan Holte, a mathematician at the federal Energy 
Research Administration in Washington D.C., said her agency still 
predicts a shrinking role for nuclear power in the next 20 years. 
While cost projections show a new nuclear plant could compete 
with other methods of electrical generation.

including oil and gas-fired generators, the complexities of 
building a nuclear plant, public fears and environmental concerns 
make it unlikely there will be new ones anytime soon, Holte said.

 _Debating the costs_ 

The nuclear energy industry disagrees, saying nuclear power is 
cheap, steady and nonpolluting. One coal-fired electricity 
generating plant near Richland, Wash., alone has emitted 1.6 
billion pounds of polluting sulphur dioxide in the last 16 years. 
A neighboring nuclear plant has emitted no pollutants, said Don 
McManman, of Energy Northwest. 

The nuclear industry estimates nuclear power now averages 3.5 
cents per kilowatt. But the California Energy Commission 
estimates that when all the costs of construction of nuclear 
power plants are factored in, nuclear power in California costs 
10.8 to 14.5 cents per kilowatt-hour to produce. Jeff Lewis of PG 
points out, for example, ratepayers have paid for Diablo Canyon 
much like they paid for hydro-dams. The cost today for juice from 
Diablo Canyon is 3.5 cents per kilowatt hour, Lewis said. 

By comparison, the best solar photovoltaic arrays cost 9 to 12.5 
cents per kilowatt hour. The state estimates the newest wind 
turbine installations can produce wind energy at a cost of about 
3.5 cents per kilowatt hour. 

Meanwhile, existing reactors have gotten new interest. One 
company, Exelon, created by the merger of Chicago-based 
Commonwealth Edison and Philadelphia Electric, owns 17 reactors 
in several states and is looking for more. Bechtel National and 
an energy company from the East have looked at the plans of a 
partially built nuclear power plant near Hanford, Wash., a 
spokesman for Energy Northwest, a consortium of 13 public power 
companies, said. 

"They haven't called us back," the spokesman said. Construction 
was halted on two plants in Washington in the 1980s as costs and 
environmental objections rose. The builder, Washington Public 
Power, defaulted on $2.2 billion in bonds. 

Unlike the old days, these new, deregulated energy companies are 
smart, says Jasmina Vujic, an associate professor of nuclear 
engineering at UC Berkeley. "They're paying as little as $10 
million each for nuclear plants. Now they're earning so much 
money that some of their investors have told us they're planning 
on building new nuclear plants." 

"At one time, 42 utility companies owned nuclear plants; within 
the next five years that's going to drop to about a dozen, maybe 
even as few as five," says EPRI's Marston. 

Marston sees the consolidation as positive. "These larger energy 
companies have made a commitment to nuclear power. They know how 
to deal with it. Sacramento Municipal Utility District, for 
example, did not have the know-how. It takes a real commitment to 
run one of these things." 

The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the last year has 
granted new 20-year operating permits to two reactors at Calvert 
Cliffs on Chesapeake Bay and three reactors at Duke Power's 
Oconee power station in South Carolina. Applications to extend 
the lives of more reactors are now pending. 

The Electric Power Research Institute expects all 104 American 
nuclear plants to obtain 20-year extensions. 

Since President Clinton took office in 1992, the federal 
government hasn't supported nuclear research. Clinton's fiscal 
2001 budget request included $452 million for renewable energy 
research and $40 million for nuclear energy. The nuclear industry 
hopes President Bush and the Republicans can change that.

 _A nuclear future?_ 

But some think more nuclear power indeed lies in America's 
future, and public sentiment against it may not be as strong as 
perceived. 

"Right now, we're on an energy roller coaster," said Geoffrey 
Rothwell, a Stanford economist who serves on a federal Department 
of Energy nuclear advisory committee . 

"The fact is that two-thirds of the country doesn't care where 
the power comes from," Rothwell said. "All they want is the 
lights to stay on." 

The most recent, nonpartisan, national poll -- taken in 1999 for 
the Associated Press -- showed 45 percent of Americans support 
using nuclear power to generate electricity, 31 percent opposed 
it and 23.2 percent said they didn't know. But in the West, the 
gap narrowed: 41.8 percent were favorable, 39.7 opposed. But 60.7 
percent of Americans thought nuclear plants are safer than they 
were 10 years ago. 

There's good reason for the change in public opinion, the 
University of California's Letterer believes. 

"Outside of Chernobyl, nuclear energy has been the cleanest 
energy source we have," he said. "Even including Chernobyl, if 
you look at health problems caused by pollution from all the 
conventional plants, nuclear doesn't look so bad," Letterer said. 

"The Department of Energy is beginning to fund research on 
nuclear plants that are safer, that have less risk of 
diversifying nuclear materials to weapons," he said. 

The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved new plant 
designs; it has streamlined the approval process, Singer said. 
"There's new interest in Congress for good reason," he said. 

But the idea of new nuclear plants points to a nagging, and still 
unsettled, problem, nuclear power foes say: What to do with 
nuclear waste? Marston, of EPRI, minimizes the problem. At this 
point, the feds have designated Yucca Mountain, in a remote part 
of Nevada, as the official nuclear depository. However, local 
opposition is growing. "Why should Nevada become the nation's 
nuclear dumping ground," opponents ask. 

Marston is philosophical. 

"At this point, we're burning only about 1 percent of the energy 
in the fuel we use; they're putting the rest in a repository. I 
suspect we'll end up recycling fuel and using more of that 
energy, so there's going to be less waste," he said. 

However, that would require an act of Congress. President Jimmy 
Carter banned recycling nuclear fuel in 1977, out of fears that 
reprocessed fuel could be diverted to weapons outside the U.S. 

The claims about increased safety are true, says UC's Letterer. 
In the decades since Three Mile Island, there have been many 
safety improvements, and there are two new, self-regulating 
organizations that have regulations with real teeth and as a 
result, all our nuclear power plants are much more safely 
operated and watched over today, he said.     

*****************************************************************
 10  Chen tries to bridge DPP factionalism

The Taipei Times Online: 2001-02-05
 
  _Monday, February 5th, 2001_   

INTERNAL WRANGLING: The president began trying to gain support 
from DPP leaders over resuming construction of the Fourth Nuclear 
Power Plant, but many anti-nuclear members showed little sign of 
being swayed

_By Lin Mei-chun_
STAFF REPORTER

President Chen Shui-bian (³¯¤ô«ó) struggled yesterday to ward off 
factional discord within the DPP and persuade party heavyweights 
to allow construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant to 
continue.

 During the past week, Chen's longstanding anti-nuclear stance 
has been sacrificed to make concessions toward the opposition's 
request, given the hostile political situation he is 
encountering. 

However, before Chen makes public his intention to agree to 
renewed construction, he has to first win support among the 
anti-nuclear hardliners within the DPP.

 _High-level visit

 _Yesterday the president made his first move to meet with former 
DPP chairman Lin Yi-hsiung (ªL¸q¶¯), who is strongly opposed to 
the plant, to discuss the political circumstances he is facing 
and report to Lin his possible decision to accept the resumption 
of the construction under a set of conditions. Lin declined to 
comment after the one-hour private meeting at Chen's house. Lin 
is not the only figure Chen needs to convince, as other 
anti-nuclear DPP members continued to voice their differing 
opinions. 

DPP Legislator and member of the New Century faction Chang 
Chun-hung (±i«T§»), another stanch anti-nuclear DPP heavyweight, 
yesterday said that the DPP would be judged [negatively] by 
history if it abandoned its anti-nuclear stance. 

"Anti-nuclear DPP members will stick to [their] position. If [we] 
were about to change, we would have done it a long time ago. Why 
wait until now?" Chang said.

 "If the Presidential Office and Executive Yuan agree to renew 
the project, it will be because they have to give in to the 
dominant opposition parties. But if publicly-elected 
representatives can accept such thinking, they would be evaluated 
by history because they should not tolerate [an action] which 
they know would hurt future generations."

 Opposition lawmakers are slated to meet today to discuss whether 
they will accept a "third option" proposal put forward by Chen on 
Friday. 

During a meeting between the speaker of the Legislative Yuan, 
Wang Jin-pyng (¤ýª÷¥­), and Premier Chang Chun-hsiung (±i«T¶¯) on 
Friday, Chen said that he was willing to accept, under specific 
conditions, the renewed construction of the project. 

Chen suggested that construction could continue as long as a new 
state energy law be devised with the purpose of building a 
"nuclear-free" nation and the goal of decommissioning all four 
nuclear power plants earlier than scheduled be set. The law would 
also restrict the construction of any additional nuclear power 
plants in the future.

 Another condition that Chen reportedly mentioned was that once 
the NT$123.8 billion budget for the project is exhausted, no 
additional budget would be given to the plant and the new 
legislature be left to decide the matter.

 Wang will meet with opposition lawmakers this morning to discuss 
the project and whether they will accept the "third option" 
proposed by the president. If opposition parties agree with 
Chen's suggestion, the Executive Yuan will organize provisional 
meetings soon to discuss how to implement the conditions of the 
proposed alternative.

 _Not optimistic

 _The outlook for today's meeting, however, was not very positive 
as opposition lawmakers continued to stick to their bottom line 
-- immediate resumption of the project.

 The newly elected secretary-general of the KMT legislative 
caucus, Cheng Yung-chin (¾G¥Ãª÷), emphatically said that the 
Executive Yuan had to abide by the resolution passed by the 
legislature last week and re-start the project right away.

 KMT Secretary-General Lin Feng-cheng (ªLÂ×¥¿) said that the 
DPP's disobedience regarding the legislature's decision was like 
"making use of the power of the minority to rape the majority."
 
This story has been viewed 808 times. 
 
Copyright © 1999, 2000, 2001 The Taipei Times. All rights 
reserved. 
*****************************************************************
 11  Anti-nuclear activists still hope for delay of plant

The Taipei Times Online: 2001-02-05
 
_By Chiu Yu-Tzu_
STAFF REPORTER

With an eye toward delaying further construction of the Fourth 
Nuclear Power Plant (®Ö¥|), anti-nuclear activists yesterday 
urged the Cabinet to review what they called administrative 
"defects" surrounding the project.

 Much of the focus is being placed on the 1991 approval of the 
plant's Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). Activists say the 
assessment is flawed; if the Cabinet were to order Taiwan Power 
Co (Taipower, ¥x¹q) to redo the EIA, the request would put on 
hold the nuclear plant's construction until Taipower complies 
with the order.

 "Redoing the EIA might be a way to prevent the resumption of 
construction," said Hsu Kuang-jung (®}¥ú»T), vice chairperson of 
the Taiwan Environmental Protection Union, yesterday.

 "We will ask the Executive Yuan to redo the EIA for the 
project," said Cheng Hsien-yu (¾G¥ý¯§), a member of the 
environmental union.

 Last week, Lin Jun-yi (ªL«T¸q), head of the Environmental 
Protection Administration, suggested that problems surrounding 
the plant's EIA could delay the project. 

Specifically, Lin said that the agency could, under the EIA Law, 
order Taipower to implement measures it originally agreed to as a 
part of the plant's 1991 EIA approval -- but has so far failed to 
carry out.

 For example, when the project's environmental impact assessment 
was conditionally approved that year, Taipower was to spell out 
in detail where the final disposal sites for the plant's 
radioactive waste would be located. To date, Taipower hasn't 
specified any location.

 If the Environmental Protection Administration orders Taipower 
to provide information on the disposal sites, the plant's 
construction could be delayed until Taipower complies with the 
request.

 Another example: The planned power output of the plant's two 
reactors was changed in 1991 from 1,000 megawatts to 1,350 
megawatts, but the impact assessment hasn't been updated to 
reflect that change.

 These and other problems with the plant's EIA could lead to 
delays for Taipower.

 Chen Hwei-syin (³¯´fÄÉ), a law professor at National Chengchi 
University, said yesterday that the Cabinet should also review 
other administrative defects surrounding the project.

 "According to the Administrative Procedure Law, which went into 
effect on the first of this year, Taipower should release 
documents [pertaining to the plant's construction], including 
documents between Taipower and its domestic and foreign 
contractors," Chen said.

 But Taipower has refused to do so, citing "commercial 
confidentiality," according to the activists.

 In highlighting procedural problems with the nuclear plant's 
construction, the activists also cited three 1999 censures the 
Control Yuan gave the former KMT Cabinet pertaining to the 
project.

 At the time, the Control Yuan pointed to improper procedures in 
the issuance of a construction license to Taipower; a less than 
comprehensive environmental impact assessment passed by the 
Atomic Energy Council; and the neglect of historic sites of the 
Aboriginal Katagalan culture where the plant is located.

 Environmentalists also vowed to soon reveal evidence of 
corruption surrounding the project.

 
This story has been viewed 260 times. 

Copyright © 1999, 2000, 2001 The Taipei Times. All rights 
reserved. 
*****************************************************************
 12          Citizens Groups Planning to Expand Nuclear Protest

F.A.Z. - English Version
 	 	 	 	 	 
[Frankfurter Allgemeine] 

BERLIN. Ignoring pleas from the country's anti-nuclear 
environment minister, citizens groups pledged over the weekend to 
launch a widespread protest against the return of German atomic 
waste from a reprocessing plant in France.

"We will not only block the last few kilometers of road. We will 
expand our protest this time throughout the total 56 kilometers 
(35 miles) of train track between Lüneburg and Gorleben," 
Wolfgang Ehmke, the leader of a citizens group, told the 
newspaper Bild am Sonntag. The transports from the La Hague 
facility to a temporary storage site in Gorleben, a town in Lower 
Saxony, are expected to resume this spring.

The possibility of the new shipments has also upset members of 
Alliance 90_The Greens. Environment Minister Jürgen Trittin of 
the Greens has urged nuclear opponents to allow the waste to be 
returned without incident, citing last summer's agreement to shut 
down Germany's 19 nuclear power plants in stages. In response, 
Kerstin Müller, coleader of the Greens' national parliamentary 
group, criticized Mr. Trittin. "It is hardly good form to dictate 
to grassroots members of the party when and where they may 
demonstrate," Ms. Müller said. *(dpa)* Feb. 4, 2001

 	
                  © Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 2000 All 
*****************************************************************
 13  Russian fleet ready to ship Japan radioactive material
 
[ITAR/TASS News Agency]   
  
_Summary:_        Russian sailors are ready to ship radioactive 
materials to Japan from western Europe, said Alexander Ushakov, 
deputy chief of the Transportation Ministry's northern seaway 
department.*   

  _Date:_      02/05/2001 06:21   

Story Filed: Monday, February 05, 2001 6:21 AM EST 

MOSCOW, February 5 (Itar-Tass) - Russian sailors are ready to 
ship radioactive materials to Japan from western Europe, said 
Alexander Ushakov, deputy chief of the Transportation Ministry's 
northern seaway department. 

He told Tass on Monday that Russia had enough ships to transport 
radioactive cargoes in the complex Arctic ice conditions. 

Japan has a long-term contract with Britain and France for them 
to reprocess radioactive waste from Japanese nuclear power 
plants. Plutonium extracted from spent fuel is mixed with uranium 
oxides to produce so-called mixed oxide fuel which is returned to 
Japan. The remaining radioactive waste is embedded in glass for 
burial. 

Britain and France return radioactive fuel and waste to Japan by 
armed convoys which go around Africa and South America or through 
the Panama Channel. Japan plans to reprocess in Europe a total of 
7,100 tonnes of spent fuel to retrieve about 30 tonnes of 
plutonium. 

Japanese experts think shipping radioactive materials by the 
northern route off Russia's Arctic coasts would make it shorter 
and safer from terrorist attack. 

Ushakov said "during the summer months, when the ice conditions 
are less dangerous, the radioactive materials could be shipped in 
a proper tare with all precautions to Japan." 

He said the "northern seaway in a sense is the safest for 
shipment of such cargoes." If forwarders took proper precautions, 
"there will be no problems with the deliveries", he said. 

However, a Russia-Japan inter-governmental accord was needed for 
Russia to handle the shipments, Ushakov said. 

lyu/mjs/gor 

(c) 1996-2001 ITAR-TASS. All rights reserved. 
*****************************************************************
 14  U.S. News: Do nuclear reactors have the juice? (2/12/01)
 		 	 	 		 		
[usnews.com]  **                                                                                                                                              
 				   					
POWER SURGE
 
SEATTLE– In the desert of south central Washington State sits a 
darkened nuclear reactor. It was partially built in the 1980s for 
more than $2 billion but abandoned to the sagebrush before it 
produced a single watt of electricity.
 

Citizens were stunned when some local utilities officials and a 
congressman suggested last month it might be time to go back to 
the future–to fire up this mothballed reactor, at a cost of 
several billion more dollars, to help ease the West's energy 
shortage.
 
_ Start me up._ The reactor's second life may never come, 
however; the state's governor, Gary Locke, has downplayed the 
idea as "not economical." Still, rising electric rates nationwide 
have renewed interest in a technology that seemed as dated as the 
Cold War.
 

In the Southeast, demand for power is so high that the Tennessee 
Valley Authority is considering restarting an Alabama nuclear 
plant that was closed for safety violations in 1985. In the 
Northeast, a handful of private power companies are on a nuclear 
buying spree, snapping up reactors that a few years ago were 
considered untouchable liabilities. And President Bush and Hill 
Republicans are circulating a proposed national energy policy 
that includes $60 million in tax credits for research on new 
reactor designs. If passed, it could pave the way for the 
construction of new multibillion-dollar reactors in the United 
States for the first time since 1978.
 

The reversal of fortune is due mostly to the skyrocketing price 
of natural gas, the fuel used in most new power plants. Meantime, 
the price of the uranium that powers nuclear plants has dropped 
20 percent. Suddenly, reactors are profitable. Washington State's 
lone working reactor was nearly scrapped in the mid-1990s because 
it was too costly to operate. This year, the plant, with a $200 
million budget, will put out an estimated $1.2 billion worth of 
electricity. Numbers like these have led two private companies, 
Entergy Nuclear of Mississippi and AmerGen of Pennsylvania, to 
purchase seven aging plants in the past year, with plans to buy 
two dozen more. 


Critics think the nuclear surge will be fleeting. Natural-gas 
prices will fall, they say, exposing nuclear power as an 
uneconomical technology with intractable safety and toxic waste 
problems. And there remains a lingering image problem. "If they 
do pick a site for a new plant somewhere in the U.S., they'd have 
a public revolution on their hands," says Christopher Flavin, 
president of the antinuclear Worldwatch Institute.
 

Of course, there hasn't been a major U.S. accident since Three 
Mile Island in 1979, and for the first time since then polling by 
industry shows a slim majority of Americans favoring the idea of 
building new reactors. The question now might be: How high must 
your electric bill go before you let a nuclear reactor in your 
neighborhood? -_Danny Westneat_ 

           © 2000 U.S.News & World Report Inc. All rights 
*****************************************************************
 15  Fire Shuts Calif. Nuclear Reactor

_Las Vegas SUN_
 
February 05, 2001 

 ASSOCIATED PRESS
 
SAN ONOFRE, Calif. (AP) -- A fire shut down a nuclear reactor at 
the San Onofre power plant just 12 hours after it had been 
restored to service, a utility spokesman said.

 The fire in an electrical switching room caused the reactor to 
shut down automatically Saturday afternoon. No radiation was 
released and no one was injured, said Ray Golden, a spokesman for 
Southern California Edison, the San Diego County plant's majority 
owner and operator.

 "Everything did as exactly as it was designed to," Golden said 
Sunday.

 A short in the plant's power supply may have sparked the fire, 
which damaged several large equipment cabinets and an outside 
transformer, he said. No damage estimate was immediately 
available.

 The blaze broke out 12 hours after operators powered up the 
reactor for the first time since it was taken off-line on Jan. 2 
for scheduled maintenance and refueling. The reactor was 
operating at 40 percent capacity.

 Firefighters extinguished the blaze in about 30 minutes.

 Repairs and inspections could keep the reactor off-line for 
several weeks or longer, which could compound California's 
ongoing electricity crisis, Golden said.

 A second reactor continues to produce electricity. At full 
power, each of the plant's reactors generates 1,120 megawatts, 
enough to power 1.1 million homes and businesses.

 The shutdown was classified an "unusual event," requiring plant 
operators to alert federal, state and local officials.
 
 Las Vegas SUN
*****************************************************************
 16  Will WPPSS plants rise again?_ 

            Copyright © 2001 The Seattle Times Company
 Local News : Monday, February 05, 2001 
By Ross Anderson

Seattle Times staff reporter **

When the lights and computer screens flicker around the Puget 
Sound area, listen closely to the east, where you're liable to 
hear a chorus of I-told-you-so's. 

Eastern Washington is entitled to say so. Nearly 20 years after 
Northwest utilities abandoned four of five planned nuclear 
plants, the region is suddenly groping for precious megawatts — 
precisely the crisis that had been predicted by nuclear 
proponents east of the mountains. 

It just took a little longer than they expected for regional 
electricity demand to outstrip supply. 

"Even one or two of those plants would have been a pretty good 
insurance policy for us now," says Vera Claussen, a longtime 
public-power official from Grant County. 

Claussen stops short of saying I told you so. "But you hear quite 
a bit of that around here these days." 

Even Gary Zarker, head of Seattle City Light, concedes that the 
regional energy crunch lends itself to the rethinking of the 
failed Northwest nuclear-power program. 

"I wouldn't have built five of those nukes," he says. "But one or 
two would be a big help these days." 

That's why two Eastern Washington lawmakers — State Rep. Larry 
Crouse, R-Spokane, and Sen. Bob Morton, R-Orient, Ferry County — 
are proposing that the Legislature take a look at the possibility 
of salvaging one of those abandoned projects, or building another 
one. 

"Nukes are a possibility," Crouse said last week. "They're widely 
used in Europe and Japan. They are clean, long-lasting and very 
effective." Power experts are more skeptical. It would take many 
years and billions of dollars to build a nuclear plant, they say. 
And there are still environmental issues. 

_Rocky time in energy politics 

_Claussen's public service has spanned a tumultuous period of 
energy politics. For nearly 20 years, she has been a commissioner 
with the Grant County Public Utility District and with Energy 
Northwest, a consortium of public utilities that used to call 
itself the Washington Public Power Supply System: "WPPSS." 

During the last energy crisis, in the mid-1970s, WPPSS decided 
that the region's vast hydropower grid would not be able to keep 
up with demand, which was growing at about 7 percent per year. To 
fill the gap, it decided to build five nuclear plants — three on 
the Hanford nuclear reservation near the Tri-Cities and two at 
Satsop, Grays Harbor County. 

In the early 1980s, WPPSS collapsed amid huge cost overruns and 
double-digit interest rates. As electric rates rose, the region 
found ways to conserve, diminishing the need for more power 
plants. Northwest ratepayers were stuck with more than $7 billion 
in WPPSS debts. 

"I was never for building all five of those plants," Claussen 
recalls. "We shouldn't have started the last two. Everything went 
against us — bidding laws, interest rates and horrendous 
environmental regulations that drove up the costs." 

Eventually, four of the five projects were mothballed or 
abandoned. The one that was completed, now called Columbia 
Generating Station, produces an average of 1,150 megawatts of 
power — enough to light the city of Seattle. Meanwhile, the WPPSS 
acronym — often pronounced "whoops" — has become synonymous with 
public debacles, which explains why the system changed its name 
to Energy Northwest. 

_Crunch raises question 

_But this winter's energy crunch raises the question of whether 
the region should have built at least one more of those plants. 
Utility officials acknowledge that the 1,150 megawatts from the 
existing plant are crucial to keeping the lights burning around 
the region. When that plant unexpectedly shut down for a few days 
last summer, the Northwest teetered on the brink of rolling 
blackouts. 

Plant 1, whose concrete shell sits adjacent to the existing 
Richland plant, was about 65 percent complete when it was 
mothballed in 1982. 

It was maintained in that state for 12 years, at a cost of about 
$5 million per year, until the system decided to abandon it in 
1994. 

Meanwhile, only a few small gas-burning turbines have been added 
to the region's electricity grid during a decade in which energy 
demand has grown dramatically. 

"There have been lots of plans and announcements," Claussen says. 
"But nothing has come on line. 

"People talk about filling the gap with conservation, but 
conservation can only get you so far. We need more generation, 
but nobody wants to be the one to step forward and say: Let's 
build a plant NOW." 

That's beginning to change. There are plans for gas turbines from 
Whatcom County to Satsop and along the Columbia River, where 
there are major power lines to transmit power to Seattle and 
other major markets. 

But there are no plans for more nuclear plants. 

Vic Parrish, the chief executive at Energy Northwest, concedes 
that another nuclear plant would help the region through the 
winter, but he does not advocate trying to complete what he calls 
"Unit One." 

"We haven't done anything irreversible at Unit One," he says. 
"But we are in the process of cutting the place up. And it would 
be very, very expensive. I would guess $3 billion to $4 billion 
and four to five years." 

The region could build several small gas-turbine plants that 
would generate as much electricity for less money and in far less 
time, he adds. "And the need is now, so nuclear probably 
shouldn't be on the table." 

Rudi Bertschi, a Seattle energy consultant who chairs the 
executive board at Energy Northwest, agrees that nuclear power is 
not a solution. 

"Nuclear power remains tremendously expensive technology, with 
huge upfront costs. Natural gas is the opposite, with relatively 
low upfront costs but higher fuel costs." 

Over the short run, at least, gas turbines remain the technology 
of choice — along with renewed efforts at conservation driven by 
higher electricity rates, he says. 

_Lesson to be learned 

_Either way, the experts agree that the lesson to be learned from 
today's crisis is that the Northwest cannot afford to put all its 
energy eggs in one basket. 

For nearly a century, the region has depended on cheap, clean 
hydroelectric power from the Columbia and other rivers. But, much 
as the WPPSS planners predicted a generation ago, the region now 
needs far more power than its rivers can supply — particularly in 
a dry year. 

This year's shortage is aggravated by environmental regulations, 
which require utilities to spill water over dams to accommodate 
migrating salmon — water that otherwise would be used to generate 
precious megawatts. 

"Our projects are losing about 15 percent of their power 
production for fish, and nobody knows for sure if we're actually 
helping the fish that much," Claussen says. 

"I think people need to take a bigger view of the world. There's 
nothing wrong with being an environmentalist, but people in 
Seattle don't realize that most of their power comes from this 
side of the mountains. We need to take a more balanced view." 

Nuclear critics argue that it was financial mismanagement, not 
environmental laws, that led to the WPPSS disaster. 

"We're still trying to find a responsible way to deal with spent 
nuclear fuel," says Chuck Clarke, a former regional EPA director 
and adviser to the Seattle Mayor's Office. 

Parrish, of Energy Northwest, says the lesson is that the region 
needs to diversify its energy resources. Behind the WPPSS 
debacle, he says, was a legitimate effort to find new sources of 
energy, so the Northwest would be less dependent on wet winters 
and deep snowpacks to drive their hydroelectric dams. 

"We need some nuclear, some coal, oil, gas, conservation," he 
says. "Regions that have diverse energy portfolios are in a 
lower-risk situation." *Ross Anderson's phone number is 
206-464-2061; his e-mail address is randerson@seattletimes.com. 

*****************************************************************
 17  Plans call for easing restrictions on new power plants 

- 2001-02-05 - Puget Sound Business Journal (Seattle)
 
	
_George Erb_   Staff Writer                     

Public utility districts are hoping that the use of political 
power will make it easier to generate electrical power. 

With the support of the state's PUDs, lawmakers have introduced 
two bills in the state Legislature to lift a 20-year-old 
requirement that local governments ask voters for permission to 
finance large public power plants. 

Washington voters imposed the restriction with a citizens' 
initiative in 1981, when the Washington Public Power Supply 
System, a consortium of public utilities, was under fire for its 
ill-fated attempt to build five nuclear power plants. The project 
completed only one plant and was a financial debacle. 

The bills, SB 5292 and HB 1221, would require public votes only 
for nuclear power plants. As a result, local governments - 
chiefly public utility districts and cities - could build 
nonnuclear power plants without asking voters to authorize the 
financing. 

"It would lift a barrier, so communities that wish to build 
resources in order to dig ourselves out of this power crunch 
would be able to do so," said Tom Casey, a commissioner of the 
Grays Harbor Public Utility District in Aberdeen. 

The drive to lift the voting requirement has picked up some 
influential allies in the state Legislature. Both bills have 
bipartisan support. In the Senate, Majority Leader Sid Snyder has 
signed on to SB 5292, which already has enough votes to get out 
of its originating committee. 

Public-power advocates are also working on legislation that would 
lift a prohibition against public utility districts forming 
partnerships with private companies. One or more bills to that 
effect could be introduced within two weeks. 

Lifting those restrictions would make it easier for public 
utility districts to build power plants, either alone or in 
partnership with other public agencies, private utilities or 
companies that use lots of electricity, advocates say. 

"It's just one small piece of the puzzle," said Stu Trefry, 
government relations director for the Washington Public Utility 
District Association. "But I'm not sure we're going to get out of 
this mess without new generation. Creating a better environment 
for new generation is what this is all about." 

Public utility officials say their interest in building new power 
plants has increased with the price of electricity, which has 
soared in the past year. In most cases, the discussions have 
revolved around forming partnerships rather than a city or a 
utility district building a plant on its own. 

The Grays Harbor Public Utility District is actively seeking 
partners to build one or more power plants after it was forced to 
sell its 4 percent stake in a large generator in Centralia. The 
rural utility must now buy all of its power from the Bonneville 
Power Administration and other sources. 

The Snohomish County Public Utility District, one of the state's 
largest public utilities, is discussing the possibility of 
becoming a power-plant partner with a couple of parties, said Al 
Aldrich, the agency's government affairs director. 

The Everett-based utility isn't worried about running out of 
power because it buys its electricity from the BPA. What worries 
utility officials is the rising cost of power, with the BPA now 
buying 30 percent of its electricity on the volatile open market. 

"It's starting to look like the only way to have control over 
rising prices is to either own a generator or have long-term 
contracts," Aldrich said. "We all know we have to get new power 
supplies into the Northwest grid." 

Other public utilities are rumored to be considering power-plant 
construction. 

The situation has highlighted an old rivalry between public and 
private utilities. Both sectors are heavily regulated, but some 
officials at public utilities believe their private rivals are 
more nimble because they are not weighted down by the voting 
requirement. 

The competition between public and private utilities was on 
display last month, when Energy Northwest, formerly the 
Washington Public Power Supply System, sold a power-plant site at 
Satsop to Duke Energy North America. 

The company, a subsidiary of Duke Energy Corp. of Charlotte, 
N.C., wants to build a gas-fired power plant capable of 
generating 630 megawatts. Some public-power advocates were 
dismayed by the sale, arguing that the public utility had sold a 
prime site to a private competitor. 

Washington residents imposed the voting requirement on public 
power plants when voters passed Initiative 394 in 1981. Instead 
of explicitly requiring public votes on nuclear plants, the 
measure required votes on all public power plants capable of 
generating more than 250 megawatts. 

Construction of public power plants nearly ground to a halt. 
Public utility officials recall only one new public plant in 20 
years - a gas-turbine generator that Clark Public Utilities fired 
up in 1987. Today, the plant generates about 248 megawatts. 

Two decades of plentiful power supplies no doubt discouraged 
public utilities from building more power plants. But utility 
officials say the voting requirement also contributed to the long 
drought. 

Casey, the Grays Harbor PUD commissioner, has had a change of 
heart since getting involved in public power issues more than 20 
years ago. 

Casey, a cattle rancher, was introduced to public power as a 
spokesman for an anti-nuclear group that protested the WPPSS 
nuclear power plant at Satsop. When Initiative 394 qualified for 
the ballot, Casey campaigned for its passage. 

Later, he successfully ran for a seat on the Grays Harbor PUD 
commission. Over the years, he changed his mind about the role of 
public power and the effect of the initiative. In hindsight, 
Casey said, the initiative burdened public utilities and gave 
private power companies an unfair advantage. 

"We were aiming at the power plants that were being built by the 
supply system at the time," Casey said of the I-394 campaign. 
"I'm not particularly proud of my hand in doing this." 
			 
*Reach George Erb at 206-447-8505 ext. 116 or 
gerb@bizjournals.com.*
 			 
  [Get Copyright Clearance]     Copyright 2001 American City 
Business Journals Inc. Click for permission to reprint (PRC# 
1.1659.391491)
      
  Puget Sound Business Journal email: seattle@bizjournals.com  
*****************************************************************
 18  Taiwan Nears Accord on Nuclear Power
 
 _Las Vegas SUN_
February 05, 2001 
 ASSOCIATED PRESS
 
TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) -- The president's party backed off from its 
hard-line anti-nuclear stand Monday, saying it would not oppose 
restarting construction of a nuclear power plant, a lawmaker 
said.

 The government in October unilaterally canceled the $5.4 billion 
nuclear project, Taiwan's fourth, setting off months of 
squabbling between the government and opposition over scrapping 
the plant.

 The opposition, which controls parliament, passed a resolution 
last week demanding the government reinstate the project, which 
was approved by the legislature of the former Nationalist Party 
government. At one point, the dispute threatened to topple the 
government.

 David Chou, legislative leader for President Chen Shui-bian's 
Democratic Progressive Party, told reporters if the government 
decided to restart construction, the party will not oppose or 
support the decision.

 The party reversed its stand for the sake of political stability 
and economic growth, Chou said, noting that three opposition 
parties have a two-thirds majority in the legislature.

 Chou said the government could announce its final decision in a 
day or two.
 
                All contents copyright 2001 Las Vegas SUN, Inc.
*****************************************************************
 19  Authorities to Report on Progress Of Moab Uranium Tailings 
Cleanup
 
 **    *_Sunday_, February 4, 2001*   

    The cleanup of the former Atlas Corp. uranium mill tailings 
site will be the subject of a public meeting Wednesday in Moab. 

    The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission will update residents 
on the status of the cleanup. 

    Last year, President Clinton signed a bill directing the 
federal government to move the Atlas uranium mill tailings out of 
the Colorado River flood plain near Moab. 

    The tailings were produced by Atlas Corp.'s uranium mill that 
operated in the Moab area from 1956 until 1984. 

    Wednesday's meeting is at 7:30 p.m. at Grand County High 
School, 439 S. 400 East in Moab. 
    
  © Copyright 2001, The Salt Lake Tribune All material found on 
Utah OnLine is
*****************************************************************
 20  Nuclear waste rerouted past Scotland

Sunday Herald - www.sundayherald.com
 
_Executive urged to ban new plans for radioactive cargo routes_ 

Publication Date: Feb 4 2001

 Nuclear waste containing more radioactivity than 20 Chernobyls 
could be shipped around Scotland's coastline under plans being 
drawn up by the Russian government and Japanese power companies, 
the Sunday Herald can reveal. authorities, who fear an accident 
at sea could unleash a radioactive catastrophe, endangering 
wildlife and human health. They are urging the

 Although more than 50 countries have protested against cargos of 
highly British government and the Scottish Executive to ban the 
shipments. radio-active waste moving through their waters, no 
complaints have been made by either Westminster or the Scottish 
Executive. About half of the world's nuclear waste shipments come 
from the Sellafield reprocessing plant in Cumbria, run by the 
state-owned British Nuclear Fuels.

 "An accident involving a shipload of nuclear waste would be a 
total disaster and the consequences utterly appalling," said 
Scotland's Green MSP, Robin Harper. "It's unbelievable that 
nuclear companies are trying to circumvent the global outrage 
that has arisen over these scandalous shipments and route their 
toxic and highly dangerous cargos through Scottish waters."

 In a special Scottish parliament debate this week, Mr Harper 
will be pressing the enterprise minister, Wendy Alexander, to 
make a stronger commitment to producing power from clean energy 
sources such as wind, wave and solar power.

" It's time for the UK government and the Scottish Executive to 
make a choice. Do they take us down the safe path towards non- 
polluting renewable energies or the slippery slope of yet more 
dangerous high-level radioactive waste?" he added.

 Japan sends its burnt uranium fuel to Sellafield and a plant at 
La Hague in northern France to be reprocessed. More than 2700 
canisters of high-level radioactive waste extracted from the fuel 
are due to be returned to Japan within the next 15 years. But the 
waste remains toxic to life for hundreds of thousands of years.

 Since the 1970s nuclear shipments from Europe to Japan have all 
taken one of three routes: around South Africa and Australia; 
around South America and across the Pacific; or through the 
Panama canal. Countries along these routes have objected 
fiercely. Chile sent a naval ship and airplanes to monitor a 
shipment last month. But the Japanese Federation of Electric 
Power Companies (FEPCO) is negotiating with a state-owned Russian 
shipping company in Murmansk to open a new route through the 
Arctic (see graphic).

 The plan is to send a non-nuclear shipment to test the route 
this year and then to begin full-scale cargos in 2002. This would 
mean radioactive waste from Sellafield being taken through the 
North Channel between south west Scotland and Northern Ireland, 
within a few miles of the Mull of Kintyre, Islay, the Western 
Isles, Orkney and Shetland.

 There are likely to be at least 14 shipments of high-level 
waste, each containing almost twice the radioactivity released by 
the Chernobyl reactor accident in the Ukraine in 1986. If Europe 
wins more contracts with Japan, more than 25 tonnes of plutonium 
- enough for 5000 atomic bombs - could take the same route.

 Norway and Greenland, also affected by the new route, have 
protested about it but on Friday the Scottish Executive said it 
was an area of policy reserved for Westminster. It directed the 
Sunday Herald to the Department of Environment, Transport and the 
Regions, in London where a spokeswoman insisted there was no 
environmental risk.

 The Scottish National Party found the proposed shipments "very 
worrying" . "We will be protesting against someone else's nuclear 
waste being shipped around our coastline - especially since our 
position is that Scotland should look after its own waste," said 
Fiona McLeod, the Scottish depute shadow environment minister.

 And Ray Michie, the Liberal Democrat MP for Argyll and Bute 
said: "There is always the possibility that there could be an 
accident and we really cannot risk that happening to such a 
sensitive and beautiful environment as Argyll."

 Kimo, a Shetland-based environmental organisation representing 
100 coastal local authorities in eight northern European 
countries, also condemned the plans as "sheer madness". A Kimo 
spokesperson said: "This is a cynical attempt by the nuclear 
industry to reduce costs and attempt to remove these 
controversial shipments from the public glare."

 The 7000-mile Arctic route is shorter than the 17,000 miles 
around South Africa, 16,000 miles around South America and 12,000 
miles through the Panama canal. Russia is keen to open the Arctic 
route as it would enable its nuclear-powered ice-breaker fleet to 
earn foreign currency.

 "Scotland, already contaminated by plutonium reprocessing at 
Sellafield, does not deserve to have the additional threat of 
floating Chernobyls passing within tens of miles of its coast," 
said Shaun Burnie, an international anti-nuclear campaigner with 
Greenpeace. "If these plans are met with silence in Scotland they 
will become the route of choice, for an industry and government 
that has utter disregard for the environment and public health."

 British Nuclear Fuels, however, insisted it used "the safest 
ships" for nuclear transports, and said risks of accidents were 
very small. "We've no immediate plans to use the northern sea 
route for shipments of nuclear materials," said a spokesman. "But 
as a commercial operator we will always look at any route 
options, should they become available."                       
*****************************************************************
*****************************************************************
                     NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARTICLES
*****************************************************************
 1       __Toxic traces in ammo, U.S. says __

*February 03, 2001*

 LONDON -- The possibility that U.S. tank-piercing ammunition 
used in the Balkans wars contained more than just depleted 
uranium has prompted scientists to re-examine their skepticism 
about health risks to veterans. 

Experts' opinions that cancer cases reported by European veterans 
were not linked to depleted uranium assumed the material came 
from raw ore. But now the Pentagon says shells used in the 1999 
Kosovo conflict were tainted with traces of plutonium, neptunium 
and americium -- byproducts of nuclear reactors that are much 
more radioactive than depleted uranium. 

"If it has been through a reactor, it does change our idea on 
depleted uranium," said Dr. Michael Repacholi, the World Health 
Organization's radiation expert. "It all depends on the amounts." 

The main new concern, experts say, is plutonium, a highly toxic, 
radioactive metal. 

On Thursday, NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson reiterated 
NATO's position that Balkans peacekeepers have not been shown to 
suffer health damage from depleted uranium ammunition. U.S. 
officials have said the shells contained mere traces of 
plutonium, not enough to cause harm. 

But WHO experts asked the U.S. government this week to clarify 
exactly how much plutonium and other radioactive material was in 
the ammunition. Countries that sent peacekeepers to Bosnia and 
Kosovo have been looking for links between the depleted uranium 
ammunition and illnesses contracted by veterans. 

A wave of fear swept across Europe and beyond after Italy 
announced it was screening its soldiers because 30 Balkans 
veterans had become ill, including five who died of leukemia. 

As a result, scores of countries began testing soldiers for 
radiation poisoning. 

U.N. environmental experts are examining radiation levels at 
sites targeted by NATO in the Balkans and NATO has set up a 
special committee to investigate claims of a link. The WHO 
expects to start new studies in the next six months. "Minds have 
to be kept open on this," said Malcolm Grimson, a radiation 
expert at London's Imperial College of Medicine. "We're in a 
different ballpark here than where we were when we thought we 
were dealing with depleted uranium from the ground. You have to 
do all your calculations again." 

Experts must first establish whether cancers are more common than 
normal among troops before they go on to investigate why. So far, 
there is no confirmed increase in cancer rates, said WHO's 
Repacholi. 

Lung cancer is the main danger from the radiation, but experts 
say it is far too early for that to surface. It takes several 
decades for lung cancer to develop from radiation exposure. 

It is just about possible for leukemia cases to start showing up 
two years after exposure to radiation, but they are less likely 
to occur than lung cancer and it would take a massive dose, 
experts say. "You would die of suffocation before you could 
inhale enough of the dust to cause cancer, and even then there's 
a low probability of cancer," Repacholi said. 

That opinion is based largely on studies of survivors of the 
atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he said. Leukemias 
started to appear there after two or three years. 

Depleted uranium mainly contains alpha rays, which are far less 
toxic than the gamma rays produced by atomic bombs. 

Among the Japanese bomb survivors, "there's virtually no place 
where you get leukemia from something less than gamma radiation," 
Repacholi said. Plutonium releases gamma rays, but some 
scientists believe that while the revelation that the ammunition 
was tainted raises new concern, it doesn't raise enormous 
concern. 

"I can't imagine anyone in Kosovo got exposed to anything 
remotely like," the radiation produced by the bombs in Japan, 
said leukemia expert Mel Greaves, a professor of cellular biology 
at the Institute of Cancer Research in London. "It's entirely 
related to dose." 

That's why WHO officials need to know exactly how tainted the 
ammunition was. When uranium is extracted from the ground, it is 
made up mostly of three forms, or isotopes. Two of them, 
uranium-234 and uranium-235, are highly radioactive and are 
capable of generating a nuclear explosion or nuclear power, while 
the other, uranium-238, is not. 

The isotopes are separated so that only the uranium-234 and 
uranium-235 are put into nuclear processing plants. What is left 
over is pure depleted uranium-238, which is about half as 
radioactive as natural uranium. That is what is used to fortify 
airplanes and make ammunition. 

Uranium that goes through a nuclear processing plant splits into 
several substances, including depleted uranium-238, plutonium and 
other radioactive wastes. If the elements are not separated 
properly, the depleted uranium can be contaminated. 

It is unclear where the depleted uranium in the Kosovo weapons 
came from.    
*****************************************************************
 2  Israeli Diamona nuclear reactor a threat to environment
 
_ArabicNews.Com_
               
 _*Palestine, Environment, 2/3/2001*
 
The official in charge of the environment in the Palestinian 
territories Youssef Abu Safeyah has warned against a real 
environment catastrophe that might take place at any moment as a 
result of nuclear radiation leaking from the old Israeli nuclear 
reactor at " Diamona" in Negev.

 In an interview with the BBC on Friday, Abu Safeyah added that 
the Palestinian Authority has reports and maps which prove that 
there are nuclear radiation leak from Diamona reactor because of 
its building and ailing walls.

 He said that a memorandum submitted to this effect to the UN 
office in Jordan, warning the Palestinian Authority and the 
Jordanian authorities from an environmental catastrophe if this 
reactor will not be closed, noting that the damages will be 
extended to include natural life and water in the Palestinian 
territories and also Jordan.

 However, the Palestinian authorities has been repeatedly 
complained against the environment pollution in the Palestinian 
territories as a result of the smokes and the remains and toxic 
of the Israeli factories. These Israeli wastes pour in the rivers 
or dumped in the Palestinian territories.
 
_Previous Stories:_ U.S. lawyers question military aid for Israel 
2/2/2001 Israel confiscates houses in Khan Younis, confrontations 
continue 2/2/2001 Israel Must Cooperate with US-Led Commission of 
Inquiry 1/27/2001
       

Copyright © 2000 Arabic News .com . All Rights Reserved. Send 
*****************************************************************
 3  Bosnians Blame DU, War for Rise in Cancer 
                                       
_Saturday February 3 9:41 PM ET_
 
By Daria Sito-Sucic

KASINDO, Bosnia (Reuters) - ``Something is going on here which 
was not happening before,'' says a doctor at a remote and 
decrepit hospital in what is called Serb Sarajevo.

Slavko Zdrale, director of the Kasindo hospital at the 
Serb-controlled outskirts of the Bosnian capital, says the health 
of Bosnian Serbs has been significantly threatened by depleted 
uranium (DU).

``We have exact indicators according to which the number of 
cancer patients has increased at least 2.5 times in this area 
compared to the war period and the first two years after the 
war,'' Zdrale said.

He was referring to a period between 1992 and 1997, during which 
four cases of leukemia were registered at the hospital.

Over the past three years, 18 people, including a 4-year-old 
child, have died from the disease, Zdrale said.

NATO (news - web sites) has been criticized for using 
armor-piercing shells in the Balkans, which some ailing soldiers 
and anti-nuclear campaigners say have caused cancer.

The alliance and the United States, whose aircraft fired some 
40,000 DU shells during the 1999 air raids against Yugoslavia and 
earlier in Bosnia in 1994-95, deny there is any link between the 
use of DU-ammunition and cancer. Zdrale disagrees.

``Our analyzes indicate that there is a causal link to the use of 
munitions containing depleted uranium,'' he said.

Post-war Bosnia is divided into the Serb republic and the 
Muslim-Croat federation.

The hospital in Kasindo has become a major center providing 
medical care for up to 100,000 people from central and eastern 
parts of the Serb republic since the 1992-95 war ended.

According to Zdrale, an increased number of cancer patients have 
been observed in these areas which include sites hit during the 
NATO air attacks on Bosnian Serb military positions.

His claim is based on the rise of at least 2.5 times in the 
number of cancer patients, most of whom come from areas hit by 
the DU-munition, and on the fact that many of them are younger 
people.

``We are concerned about the toxic effect. The metals are in the 
ground, water and food are now affected by toxic dust,'' he 
added.

But Zdrale said that the hospital staff were cautious about the 
data, bearing in mind a high level of migration and imprecise 
figures on the area's population.

_Muslim Doctors Cautious_

In Sarajevo, doctors seem reluctant to link the illness to the 
use of DU munitions even though figures presented by the main 
clinic have shown a significant increase in the number of cancer 
patients in recent years.

However, Ismet Gavrankapetanovic, the head of the bone surgery 
clinic of the Sarajevo University medical center, said his team 
had noticed an increase in the number of cancer patients, 
particularly children, two years ago.

``I did not know what were the reasons for this. We could only 
express our suspicions,'' Gavrankapetanovic said.

But even without depleted uranium there were enough factors that 
could account for the rise of cancer in Sarajevo and elsewhere in 
Bosnia, he said.

``If 2 million grenades fell on Sarajevo during its siege, there 
must have been heavy metals there, including uranium.'' Heavy 
metals are genotoxic, causing mutation of the DNA that might 
create conditions conducive to cancer,'' he added.

Among other factors that might have contributed to a 
deteriorating health situation, Gavrankapetanovic mentioned poor 
nutrition during the city's 43-month siege by Bosnian Serb forces 
as well as daily stress, fear, lack of water and electricity and 
the use of medicine well past its shelf life.

Gavrankapetanovic said that separate figures from different parts 
of Bosnia would be no more than ``speculation'' until a 
recognized state institution for cancer research began to compile 
data for the whole country.

``I absolutely oppose any abuse of this information for political 
or any purposes other than the treatment of patients,'' he said. 
``In order to conduct real statistical analysis, you have to have 
a state institute for cancer. It is an essential. I think Bosnia 
is the only country in the world without it.''

Health is among those sectors that are exclusively under control 
of Bosnia's two separate entity governments, and there is no 
state-level health policy. Even though Serb and Muslim doctors 
differ in their views of causes which may have led to the 
increase in cancer across the country, they agree that it is 
there.

Zdrale said that cases of leukemia and cancer of the digestive 
organs were most frequent in the whole range of what he called an 
``eruption'' of different types of cancer.

Both he and Gavrankapetanovic agreed on the need for Western 
assistance in order to diagnose the illness at an early stage.

``We are not able to conduct such tests nor do we have equipment 
for it,'' Zdrale said. 

  Copyright © 2001 ., and Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
 4  Unwelcome Exposure 

ctnow.com 

_By SUSAN E. KINSMAN
The Hartford Courant _
February 04, 2001 

Alfred L. Lavoie of Manchester thought himself "lucky." The 
Korean War veteran and his new wife were struggling in 1958 when 
Al landed a job at the Connecticut Aircraft Nuclear Engine Lab in 
Middletown. 

Work at the high-security facility - where a classified 
nuclear-powered jet engine was being developed - not only paid 
well, $1.90 an hour, it also included benefits. 

But Lavoie's job - cleaning, plating and heat-treating parts, 
some of them labeled radioactive - may have left him with more 
than memories. 

Project sites in Connecticut

  The 11 sites in Connecticut identified to date by the federal 
Department of Energy as places where radioactive materials or the 
toxic metal beryllium were used in projects related to nuclear 
weapons production include: 

+ American Chain and Cable Co., Bridgeport 

+ Anaconda American Brass Co., Waterbury 

+ Bridgeport Brass Co., Bridgeport 

+ Combustion Engineering, Windsor 

+ Dorr Corp., Stamford 

+ Connecticut Aircraft Nuclear Engine Laboratory, Middletown 

+ Fenn Manufacturing Co., Newington (formerly of Hartford) 

+ New England Lime Co., North Canaan 

+ Seymour Specialty Wire, Seymour 

+ Sperry Products, Danbury 

+ Torrington Co., Torrington Workers who think they may have been 
exposed or who have more information about these or other sites 
should call the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Worker 
Advocacy, at 1-877-447-9756.   

  


Lavoie, 67, suspects that his exposure to radiation and other 
toxic materials during his six years at CANEL contributed to his 
developing Hodgkin's disease, a cancer of the lymphatic system. 

Lavoie is among thousands of workers - or their survivors - who 
have contacted the federal Department of Energy in recent weeks, 
looking for answers and compensation. The agency could not say 
how many are from Connecticut. 

"I feel myself and many other people are entitled" to 
compensation, Lavoie said. But he may have to make the case. 
Hodgkin's disease is not one of the cancers specifically linked 
to radiation exposure that are eligible for compensation. 

Lavoie's cancer is in remission, but he lost his spleen to the 
disease and has limited lung function. An allergic reaction to 
chemotherapy also damaged his shoulders and hips, requiring 
surgeries to replace them with artificial joints. 

Lavoie said he called the Energy Department because he worked at 
CANEL, a facility built and operated by the Atomic Energy 
Commission - the forerunner to the Energy Department. Pratt 
&Whitney, a division of United Aircraft, now United Technologies 
Corp., was a major subcontractor. 

When the lab closed in 1964, Pratt acquired the property. The 
buildings were closed and torn down in the late 1980s and early 
1990s, and the site was decontaminated. Pratt's 
part-manufacturing, engine assembly and testing facility now 
stands on the site. 

CANEL is one of 11 workplaces in Connecticut - and more than 300 
nationwide - identified by the Energy Department as places where 
radioactive materials and the toxic metal beryllium were used in 
government projects related to nuclear weapons production. 

After decades of secrecy about the weapons projects and the 
materials to which workers were exposed, the federal government 
is willing to make that information public, and to pay 
compensation. 

The Energy Department is responsible for regulatory oversight of 
the health and safety of workers at Energy Department facilities 
covered by the federal Atomic Energy Act. 

"These workers, most of whom were employees of private 
contractors, faithfully served the nation during the Cold War 
and, in doing so, faced risks to their health," then Energy 
Secretary Bill Richardson said in a letter to Congress earlier 
this month. 

"In many instances, state programs do not adequately address the 
needs of these workers when they incur certain occupational 
illnesses," Richardson wrote. 

The Energy Employees Occupational Illnesses Compensation Act, 
passed last year, will pay medical benefits and a lump sum of 
$150,000 to workers who contracted a cancer caused by radiation, 
beryllium disease or chronic silicosis while working for the 
Energy Department or its contractors on nuclear weapons projects. 

Employees or their survivors are eligible if the employee's 
cancer was at least "as likely as not" related to their 
employment, based on guidelines that are being developed. The 
factors to be considered are the employee's radiation dose, or 
reconstruction of that dose, the type of cancer and other 
health-related activities. 

The covered cancers include bone cancer, leukemia (other than 
chronic lymphocytic) lung cancer (with some exceptions), multiple 
myeloma, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and primary cancer of the 
thyroid, male breast, female breast, esophagus, stomach, pharynx, 
small intestine, pancreas, bile ducts, gall bladder, salivary 
gland, urinary bladder, brain, colon, ovary and liver (with 
certain exceptions). 

The plan creates a presumption in favor of paying benefits to 
workers. The standard is lower than that of most federal and 
state workers' compensation programs, which require workers to 
prove their illness is "more probable than not" the result of 
their workplace exposure. 

Workers such as Lavoie, who suffer from other cancers, could 
still make a case with the Energy Department for benefits. 

Changes pending before Congress this year would give workers the 
option of choosing lost wages in lieu of the lump sum payment. 

The department acknowledges that its list of work sites may be 
incomplete and that additional workplaces and eligible employees 
could be added later. Earlier government lists of nuclear 
licensees identified more than two dozen companies, as well as a 
number of hospitals and universities in Connecticut where nuclear 
isotopes were being used. 

And former workers, or their survivors, have told The Courant 
about other locations in the state where government weapons work 
was conducted, and where beryllium and radioactive materials were 
used. 

But that does not mean they will be eligible for compensation. 
The act specifically excludes an entire class of weapons workers 
- those involved in the Naval nuclear propulsion program - at the 
Pentagon's insistence. Naval nuclear propulsion is a joint 
program of the Energy Department and the Navy, responsible for 
the design, testing, construction and operation of nuclear 
propulsion systems for surface warships and submarines. The 
Department of Energy also produced highly enriched uranium for 
the Navy at its nuclear weapons complex facilities. 

The Navy disagrees with the lower level of proof required by the 
Energy Department and says it would establish an expensive 
precedent if it adopted the same standard. 

Nor does the act cover all types of cancer, only those forms 
linked to radiation exposure. Nor will it cover workers whose 
health problems stem from exposure to toxic chemicals in the 
workplace, rather than radiation, even if the workers were 
exposed while working on the weapons projects. 

Richard Miller, a Massachusetts lawyer and former union lobbyist 
for the act, said that where sick workers are concerned, the 
distinctions are arbitrary. 

"This carve-out was clearly a function of responding to 
opposition. We were not going to jeopardize the whole bill over 
that," Miller said." "It's really about budgeters making 
decisions about who's in and who's out." 

Lavoie was 53 in 1988 when he was first diagnosed with Hodgkin's 
disease, roughly 20 years after he left CANEL to work in heat 
treating at Pratt's engine plant in East Hartford. He came back 
several years later to work as a security guard for Pratt in East 
Hartford, but has since left the company. "Many times I handled 
materials that had little radiation stickers," Lavoie said. "All 
the parts that came back from the test cells came to my 
department. We cleaned them out and flushed the tubes with acids 
and alkalies." The cleaned parts were wrapped in paper or 
plastic. 

Lavoie wore goggles, rubber gloves and a badge that changed color 
when exposed to radiation. "I know they changed it a few times 
for me," Lavoie said, but he was never told about his exposure. 

He also wore white cotton gloves while handling cleaned parts - 
to protect them from fingerprints, he said, rather than to shield 
his hands. "Being young at the time, I didn't pay no mind to it," 
Lavoie said. Lavoie's story of a hard worker who never questioned 
his employer or the government, even when faced with known 
hazards, is by no means unique. 

Stephen Stone, 53, of Windsor, was diagnosed a year ago with lung 
cancer. Stone is a former heavy smoker, but suspects that other 
factors were at work in his disease - the radioactive dust he 
believes he inhaled while working for Combustion Engineering in 
Windsor in the naval reactors division. 

The company designed nuclear reactors for submarines and operated 
a submarine training simulator at the site, but did not make 
weapons there. It was 1966 and Stone, right out of high school, 
was working days at Combustion and going to college at night. 

"I was a handyman. I was sent to wherever they needed help," 
Stone said. One of his jobs, he said, was washing down the walls 
of a building that were contaminated with radiation after the 
refueling of the nuclear reactor of the full-size submarine 
simulator. 

"We did it every day, five days a week, for the better part of 
the summer," Stone said. They used water and rags to wash the 
walls from ceiling to floor. Stone wore protective clothing: a 
one-piece jump suit, gloves and boots taped at the wrists and 
ankles, and a hood. But nothing covered his face, no respirator 
and no dust mask. 

The workers did wear radiation badges, or dosimeters, to measure 
their external exposure. Those badges were collected and reviewed 
daily by the company's health physics department. "There was 
never a situation where we were told not to work" because of 
overexposure, Stone said. 

But until 1989, radiation doses from radioactive materials 
inhaled or ingested by workers were not calculated or included in 
the Energy Department's worker dose records. 

"The radiation levels were not that high, but I'm worried I 
inhaled it," Stone said. "There are a lot of questions out 
there." 

Fenn Machinery Co., formerly of Hartford and now of Newington, 
makes metal-forming equipment and helicopter parts. During the 
1950s, the company was involved in the experimental shaping of 
uranium materials. 

Sally Judd of East Hartford said her father, George Popik, was a 
machinist at Fenn and worked with uranium and beryllium. 

Popik was employed at Fenn from the early 1950s until his 
retirement in 1985, Judd said. He died in 1995 at 77 from lung 
cancer that also spread to his bones. The Energy Department said 
it would contact her in July about her claim over her father's 
cancer. 

But that wasn't the only problem. Judd remembers that while he 
worked at Fenn, "my father's hands from below the elbow to the 
fingertips were always raw and peeling," she said. "He would come 
home from work, soak them in ice water, cover the skin with 
Vaseline and sleep in white cotton gloves. 

"I don't remember when he contracted it, but he was sick for many 
years. He was in a lot of pain and discomfort," she said. "Not 
even the doctors knew what it was." 

Judd recalls her father as being a "very private person" who did 
not discuss his illness or his work. But he was very concerned 
about his family's safety, building a 10-foot square cinderblock 
bomb shelter in the basement of their East Hartford home in the 
early 1960s. 

From a portable toilet to medical supplies, the shelter was 
stocked with everything the family of six would need for three 
months. 

"He used to say, `We're going to be safe. We're going to be able 
to live, and you don't have anything to worry about,' " Judd 
said. 

Wayne Ferguson's father worked at Fenn, too - from 1951 until 
1970, when he died of a rare cancer at 48. 

William J. Ferguson Jr. of New Britain, a handsome Army veteran 
of World War II, was a lathe operator who worked with beryllium 
on numerous government contracts involving helicopter parts and 
components for Minuteman missiles, his son said. 

"He got sick after I got out of the service," Ferguson said. "At 
first we thought it was the flu, but it kept coming back." 

It was a form of leukemia that attacks red blood cells. It killed 
him the same year. 

"He couldn't breathe. He simply didn't have enough red blood 
cells," Ferguson said. "He was a pretty healthy guy until the 
last year of his life." 

Ferguson persuaded his mother to have an autopsy performed, and 
the results confirmed leukemia as the killer. He still has the 
doctor's report. William and Lois Ferguson had five children. 
Wayne, the eldest, was 23 when William was buried. Jane, the 
youngest, was 7. 

Lois Ferguson went back to work to support her family, and later 
remarried. She is now 75. 

Ferguson doesn't know whether his father was ever told about the 
risks he faced on the job, or whether the government or his 
employer deliberately kept the information from him and other 
workers. 

"It's very discouraging. I think that's one of the reasons people 
don't trust the government," Ferguson said. 

He has applied to the Energy Department for compensation on the 
family's behalf. "They offered $150,000. Big deal. It doesn't 
begin to compensate for what my two brothers, my two sisters and 
I went through without a dad. And my mom." 

"We felt kind of cheated that my dad died so young," Ferguson 
said.

©2001 MyWay Corp.
*****************************************************************
 5  Officials re-examine need for laser project __

_Congress asks for possible alternatives _

*February 03, 2001*
 _By Glenn Roberts Jr.
STAFF WRITER _

LIVERMORE -- Energy Department and nuclear lab officials held 
classified meetings at Sandia lab in Livermore this week to 
discuss the need for a laser project at Lawrence Livermore 
Laboratory, a lab spokeswoman said Friday. The office of Brig. 
Gen. Thomas F. Gioconda, Energy Department deputy for military 
applications, reportedly organized the meetings, held Wednesday, 
Thursday and Friday. 

Congress ordered a report detailing the need for a costly laser 
project at Livermore Lab and calling for possible alternatives to 
the project. The National Ignition Facility project at Livermore 
Lab, under construction since 1997, has been the subject of 
numerous reviews after technical and management problems were 
revealed to the public in August 1999, months after the problems 
were discovered. 

Lab and Energy Department officials did not reveal project 
problems because they felt the problems could be corrected 
internally, officials have said. The truth about the problems was 
also reportedly withheld for months from then-Energy Secretary 
Bill Richardson. 

Federal officials expect the project will cost between $3.5 
billion and $4 billion, including related research and 
development, and it will not be completed until 2008. The project 
is an estimated $1 billion over budget and six years behind 
schedule. 

NIF is a nuclear weapons tool that is planned to fire 192 
ultraviolet laser beams at BB-size pellets of radioactive fuel, 
creating small thermonuclear blasts that mimic hydrogen-bomb 
explosions. 

In September 2000 Congress agreed to provide additional money for 
the project while setting a series of guidelines. 

Congress ordered project managers to complete regular budget and 
schedule reviews and to prepare a study "that includes 
conclusions as to whether the full-scale NIF is required in order 
to maintain the safety and reliability to the current nuclear 
weapons stockpile." 

This study is also supposed to gauge whether an alternative 
system to NIF "could achieve the objective of maintaining the 
safety and reliability of current nuclear weapons stockpile." 

Susan Houghton, a Livermore Lab spokeswoman, said the set of 
meetings this week gathered information that will be used for 
that study. 

"Congress wanted to take a look at how NIF fit into the overall 
stockpile stewardship picture," Houghton said. 

Lisa Cutler, an Energy Department spokeswoman, said the meetings 
were designed to help prepare some of the findings that will be 
included in the report to Congress. 

Cutler said she could not comment further about the meetings 
because they were classified. No information was available about 
the group's agenda or membership, or the outcome of the meetings, 
she said. 

Stockpile stewardship is an Energy Department program to test the 
reliability of the aging U.S. nuclear arsenal using computer 
simulations, X-ray machines and other tools. NIF has been 
referred to in past years as a cornerstone in this program. 

Representatives from Livermore, Sandia -- which has labs in 
Livermore and Albuquerque, N.M. -- and Los Alamos in New Mexico 
attended the event. Officials at Sandia lab and Los Alamos lab 
declined to discuss the meeting. Houghton said Hermann Grunder, 
director at Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, Ill., was 
also among the attendees. Grunder is a former director of general 
science at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.     

*****************************************************************
 6  Moderator prepares for Faslane protest

Scotland on Sunday Online - Scotland's biggest selling quality 
Sunday newspaper
 
  04 February 2001   

 By Stephen Fraser

Scotland’s most senior Protestant churchman backs 30 ministers in 
pledge to join sitdown protest at nuclear base 

THE MODERATOR of the Church of Scotland is to risk arrest by 
demonstrating against nuclear weapons in an attempted blockade of 
the Faslane naval base. 

The Right Reverend Andrew McLellan, the most senior Protestant 
churchman in Scotland, will make the highly-symbolic statement of 
support for anti-nuclear protesters as the first moderator in 
recent years to support a radical example of direct political 
action. 

Around 30 other ministers are planning to force police to arrest 
them by joining a sitdown protest outside both entrances of the 
base in eight days time. 

While the Kirk insists McLellan will not "intentionally break the 
law", friends say he is prepared to become the first moderator in 
the Church’s history to be arrested if all those attending are 
detained. 

Last year, 185 people were arrested at a similar event, including 
Glasgow MSP Tommy Sheridan, who subsequently served five days in 
jail after being convicted on charges of breach of the peace and 
resisting arrest. 

Strathclyde Police has insisted that McLellan will receive no 
special favours, saying its officers will arrest anyone 
obstructing access to the base irrespective of their identity. 

McLellan’s decision to join the demonstration comes amid growing 
agitation within the Church for it to take a more aggressive 
stance on issues of morality, partly in response to the high 
public profile of Cardinal Thomas Winning, the leader of the 
Scottish Catholic Church. 

McLellan this weekend refused to discuss how he intends to 
participate in the blockade on Wednesday, nor why he has decided 
to attend the event. However, a colleague said: "He is a very 
strong-minded individual when it comes to politics and his 
beliefs and he is not afraid to do dramatic things to make a 
political point." 

A spokeswoman for the Church of Scotland would say only: "He has 
said he will not intentionally break the law." 

Reverend John Harvey, from Greenock, said 30 ministers were 
intentionally planning to break the law by joining the blockade, 
and added he would have to be dragged away by police. 

"I believe the use or threatened use of nuclear weapons is 
counter to God’s will for his people and I think it is right to 
actually physically do something as well as use words to oppose 
nuclear weapons," he said. 

Sheridan, who also plans to risk arrest again by blocking the 
road, welcomed the moderator’s support. "I’m not surprised he 
will be there, because ministers believe in humanity and nuclear 
weapons threaten humanity’s future," he said. 

"I am glad he will be there, but I won’t call on him to actually 
provoke arrest: that is a decision for individuals to make for 
themselves." 

David Mackenzie, from the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear 
Disarmament, also said he would not urge the moderator to court 
arrest. "Some people have commitments which mean they can’t allow 
themselves to be arrested. It is an individual’s choice as to how 
far they go. I would say having the moderator present is a 
tremendous encouragement in itself," he added. 

Four submarines armed with Trident nuclear missiles are berthed 
at Faslane, five miles north of Helensburgh. A base spokesman 
said: "We have had demonstrations before and the base has never 
been closed. We are aware of this event and have taken 
counter-measures to ensure our operations will continue 
unaffected, and our staff can get into the base to go about their 
legitimate business." 

McLellan, who took up his post last year, has previously been 
scathing in criticising conditions in Scotland’s prisons and 
outspoken in criticising the continuing existence of poverty in 
Scotland. 

Officially, the Kirk denies suggestions of an increased 
willingness to speak out, but McLellan has had a higher profile 
than previous holders of the post. 

His activism over social issues also comes as the Kirk debates 
extending the moderatorial term from the current one year tenure 
to counter the perceived advantage held by the Catholic Church in 
having a high-profile leader in Cardinal Winning. 

Rosemary Goring, editor of the Church’s house magazine, Life and 
Work, said there was strong resistance to the idea of the 
moderator taking on a real leadership position, but added : "The 
more modern-minded elements within the church recognise they have 
to reach people who read papers but don’t go to church and may 
see that elevation as no bad thing." 

sfraser@scotlandonsunday.com 

*****************************************************************
 7  group of scientists removed half a cubic centimetre of radioactive 

The Hellenic Radio (ERA): News in English, 01-02-05
 
From: The Hellenic Radio (ERA) <www.ert.gr/>
 
/-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NEWS IN ENGLISH ERA 5. THE VOICE OF GREECE 
5/2/2001 9:28:42 ðì 

 A suitably equipped group of scientists of the Greek Committee 
of Nuclear Energy removed about half a cubic centimetre of 
radioactive soil from Forest Kouris at Asvestochori, Thessaloniki 
last Saturday. 

It should be noted that a number of plutonium slabs were also 
removed from Asvestochori last week. Inhabitants of Asvestochori 
demonstrated yesterday, while members of the Greek Communist 
party went on with a symbolic sit-in of a barracks in Sindos. 

The Hellenic Radio (ERA): News in English Directory - Previous Article - Next
Article   									 

 All Rights Reserved. Contact us at: hrnet@hri.org
         HTML by the HR-Net Group / Hellenic Resources Institute, Inc.
         eraen2html v1.01 run on Monday, 5 February 2001 - 8:03:18 UTC 

*****************************************************************
 8  Officials discuss necessity for NIF at Livermore Lab __

*February 04, 2001*
 _By Glenn Roberts Jr.
STAFF WRITER _

LIVERMORE -- Energy Department and nuclear lab officials held 
classified meetings at Sandia lab in Livermore this week to 
discuss the need for a laser project at Lawrence Livermore 
Laboratory, a lab spokeswoman said Friday. The office of Brig. 
Gen. Thomas F. Gioconda, Energy Department deputy for military 
applications, reportedly organized the meetings, which took place 
on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. 

Congress ordered a report detailing the need for a costly laser 
project at Livermore Lab and calling for possible alternatives to 
the laser project. The National Ignition Facility project at 
Livermore Lab, under construction since 1997, has been the 
subject of numerous reviews after technical and management 
problems were revealed to the public in August 1999, months after 
the problems were discovered. 

Lab and Energy Department officials did not reveal project 
problems because they felt the problems could be corrected 
internally, officials have said. The truth about the problems was 
also reportedly withheld for months from then-Energy Secretary 
Bill Richardson. 

Federal officials expect the project will cost between $3.5-4 
billion including related research and development, and it will 
not be completed until 2008. The project is an estimated $1 
billion over budget and six years behind schedule. 

NIF is a nuclear weapons tool that is planned to fire 192 
ultra-violet laser beams at BB-size pellets of radioactive fuel, 
creating small thermonuclear blasts that mimic hydrogen-bomb 
explosions. 

In September 2000, Congress agreed to provide additional money 
for the project while setting a series of guidelines. 

Congress ordered project managers to complete regular budget and 
schedule reviews and to prepare a study "that includes 
conclusions as to whether the full-scale NIF is required in order 
to maintain the safety and reliability to the current nuclear 
weapons stockpile." 

This study is also supposed to gauge whether an alternative 
system to NIF "could achieve the objective of maintaining the 
safety and reliability of current nuclear weapons stockpile." 

Susan Houghton, a Livermore Lab spokeswoman, said the set of 
meetings held this week gathered information that will be used 
for that study. "Congress wanted to take a look at how NIF fit 
into the overall stockpile stewardship picture," Houghton said. 

Lisa Cutler, an Energy Department spokeswoman, said the meeting 
was designed to help prepare some of the findings that will be 
included in the report to Congress. 

Cutler said she couldn't comment further about the meetings 
because they were classified. No information was available about 
the group's agenda, the membership of the group, or the outcome 
of the meetings, she said. 

Stockpile stewardship is an Energy Department program to test the 
reliability of the aging U.S. nuclear arsenal using computer 
simulations, X-ray machines and other tools. NIF has been 
referred to in past years as a cornerstone in this program. 

Representatives from Livermore, Sandia -- which has labs in 
Livermore and Albuquerque, N.M. -- and Los Alamos in New Mexico 
attended the event. Officials at Sandia lab and Los Alamos lab 
declined to discuss the meeting. Houghton said Hermann Grunder, 
director at Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, Ill., was 
also among the attendees. Grunder is a former director of general 
science at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. 


Glenn Roberts Jr. is the science and national laboratories 
reporter for the Tri-Valley Herald. He can be reached at (925) 
416-4813, or by e-mail at groberts@angnewspapers.com     <IMG
*****************************************************************
 9  TAFT PRESSES ENERGY SECRETARY FOR PIKETON FUNDS 

OFFICE OF THE GOVERNOR BOB TAFT OFFICE OF COMMUNICATIONS 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
 Friday, February 02, 2001_ 
                                       
           *Governor Asks Abraham to Release Funds Before March 1* _

COLUMBUS  Governor Bob Taft continues his efforts to prevent the 
shutdown of the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion plant in Piketon, by 
asking US Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham for a timely decision 
on the release of $161 million in privatization funds  before 
USECs expected March 1 decision on the plants future. 

In his letter, which follows one Taft sent last week, the 
Governor reiterated his support for the previous Department of 
Energy decision to spend a total of $630 million to maintain the 
plant on cold standby, and to develop a new centrifuge technology 
at the plant.

USEC will make its decision by March 1 as to whether they will 
begin taking steps to shut down the plant, Taft wrote. The loss 
of both the remaining 1,400 jobs and the highly skilled workforce 
at the Piketon plant will deal a devastating blow to the entire 
regional economy in Southern Ohio. 

In his letter, Taft noted that legal counsel at both the 
Department of Energy and the federal Office of Management and 
Budget have concluded that $630 million in previously committed 
funds can be used for cold standby and advanced research 
technology at Piketon. That includes the $161 million in funds 
that has been held back for Abrahams review during the 
transition between presidential administrations.

Taft noted that the decision to close Piketon would have 
irrevocable consequences, not only because of the jobs lost, but 
also from a national security standpoint of being reliant on 
foreign energy sources.

The Governor has also written U.S. Senator Pete Domenici and U.S. 
Rep. Billy Tauzin, who chair congressional energy committees, 
asking for their assistance in securing the release of funds to 
properly prepare the plant for standby operations. Governor Taft 
has been working with Senators Mike DeWine and George V. 
Voinovich, and U.S. Reps. Rob Portman and Ted Strickland in 
pressing the case for Piketon.
 
  + Taft's Letter to Department of Energy Secretary Spencer 
Abraham + Taft's Letter to The Honorable Pete Domenici, Chairman, 
Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee + Taft's 
Letter to The Honorable Billy Tauzin, Chairman, Energy and 
Commerce Committee 

  
      
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 10  Depleted Uranium paper to Royal Society
 
Science on Trial: 

On the Biological Effects and Health Risks

 following Exposure to Aerosols produced by the use of Depleted 
Uranium Weapons 

Chris Busby PhD Invited Presentation to the Royal Society London, 
July 19th 2000 

Also given in part to the International Conference against 
Depleted Uranium Manchester, 4th –5th November 2000 

Occasional Paper 2000/11 Aberystwyth: Green Audit October 2000 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

__1.    Science on Trial: the Health Effects of Low Level 
Radiation_ 

_The Royal Society Committee on Depleted Uranium has been set up, 
as I understand it, to evaluate the health risks associated with 
the battlefield use by the military of the armour-piercing 
penetrators manufactured from this material. The question of the 
possible risks to the health of those who were exposed to it has 
now arrived at the door of this august body, the Royal Society. 
This is because it has sequentially passed through the stages of 
being addressed by several other less grand committees of experts 
whose job it is to know about these things, but who have all 
answered the question in a way that is not believable, given the 
real world data, what we might hesitantly label 'the facts'. The 
facts are that veterans of the recent Iraqi war have been 
suffering from a mysterious ailment called 'Gulf War Syndrome' 
which has all the indications of a consequence of chemical or 
radiation poisoning. The cancer rate in particular has sharply 
increased in this group of people suggesting exposure of the 
soldiers to a mutagen, or carcinogen. In addition, the population 
of Iraq in the areas where DU weapons were used seems to be 
suffering a similar fate, but in these territories also there 
have been reported increases in childhood cancer and malformation 
rates, again indication of a mutagen source. 

It is now generally conceded that about 350 tonnes of Depleted 
Uranium was used in the war and that sub-micron diameter oxide 
particles became dispersed in the areas that were bombed or 
strafed. Uranium is known to be a radiation hazard, and radiation 
exposure is a known cause of all the effects observed in the 
veterans and the children of Iraq. These facts taken together 
suggest that the exposure to DU may be the main cause or one of 
the causes of the observed effects. I will not argue further for 
the existence of Gulf War Syndrome, or the Iraqi cancer effects 
in this presentation. 

        The argument marshalled against this suggestion is that 
Depleted Uranium is not considered to be a serious radiation 
hazard since it is so weakly radioactive owing to its long 
half-life and the fact that its alpha emissions have a very short 
range. It is argued that on the basis of the 'known relationship 
between radiation dose and subsequent cancer' the exposure to DU 
suffered by the Gulf War veterans, or the Iraqi children, cannot 
have been sufficiently high to be a cause of cancer or mutagenic 
illness. This is familiar territory to any scientist who has 
looked into the area of the health risks of exposure to man-made 
radioactivity: similar arguments are routinely advanced to 
exonerate radiation as a cause of childhood cancer and leukemia 
clusters near nuclear reprocessing sites like Sellafield, 
Dounreay and La Hague, increases in infant mortality and cancer 
in populations exposed to weapons fallout and fallout from 
nuclear accidents, cancer increases in nuclear workers and their 
children, and whole ranges of observations and experience which 
to most people seem clear evidence of causation. For us, 
therefore, the questions about Depleted Uranium, are the latest 
in a long series of questions about the health effects of low 
level radiation [Busby, 1995]. 

        In the time I have available I want to address four main 
areas which inform this debate. I will begin by firing my largest 
cannon. I will show that recent incontrovertible evidence defines 
the existence of a very large error in the presently accepted 
model for the health consequences of exposure to low-level 
man-made radioactivity, and that therefore this same model which 
underpins the presently accepted assessment of harm from Depleted 
Uranium, is likely to be similarly flawed. I am tempted to leave 
it at that. However, it is of some interest to the public, I 
feel, and should be to the Royal Society, to ask how such a state 
of affairs could have come about. So I will look and ask if the 
Scientific Method has been properly used in the assessment of 
risk from exposure to low-level radiation. We will discover that 
it has not. Third, I will outline one mechanism which explains 
how this may have occurred. Finally I will briefly review some of 
the evidence from the studies of my group which support this new 
model and show how it applies to the Depleted Uranium 
controversy. 

_2. The Chernobyl Infants_ I was trained as a chemist. As a 
chemist, I could stand before you and mix a clear solution of the 
indicator, phenolphthalein and a clear solution of the base, 
sodium hydroxide to produce a startling red colour. I cannot hold 
up a child and mix it with low level radiation to produce 
leukemia. A very close experiment to this has, however, been 
recently described and you should be aware of this. It shows, 
without any doubt, that the concerns of those who argued, either 
emotionally, or illogically, or with good scientific arguments, 
that low-level radiation was killing people near nuclear sites, 
were correct. 

        Following the Chernobyl accident in 1986, in five 
different countries, the cohort of children who were exposed in 
their mother's womb to radioisotopes from the releases suffered 
an excess risk of developing leukemia in their first year of 
life. This 'infant leukemia' cohort effect was first reported in 
Scotland [Gibson et al, 1988], and then in Greece [Petridou et 
al, 1996], in the United States [Mangano, 1997] and in Germany 
[Michaelis, et al. 1997]. We first reported increases in 
childhood leukemia in Wales and Scotland following the Chernobyl 
accident in 1996 [Bramhall, 1996] but more recently examined the 
specific infant leukemia cohort in Wales and Scotland [Busby and 
Scott Cato 2000]. 

Unlike the earlier researchers, who merely showed the existence 
of a significant rise in infant leukemia, we decided to examine 
the relationship between the observed numbers of cases and those 
predicted by the present radiation risk model. This was an 
invaluable opportunity since the specificity of the cohort 
enabled us to argue that the effect could only be a consequence 
of the exposure to the Chernobyl fallout. There could be no 
alternative explanation, like the 'population mixing hypothesis' 
advanced to explain away the Sellafield childhood leukemia 
cluster. However implausible such theories may be, they have 
acquired popularity, and their proponents status, as a 
consequence of their utility to the nuclear lobby. However, 
'though population mixing may occur at Sellafield, it cannot 
occur in the womb. 

Because the National Radiological Protection Board had measured 
and assessed the doses to the populations of Wales and Scotland 
and because they themselves had also published risk factors for 
radiogenic leukemia based on ICRP models it was a simple matter 
to compare their predictions with the observations and test the 
contemporary risk model. The method simply assumed that infants 
born in the periods 1980-85 and 1990-92 were unexposed, and 
defined the Poisson expectation of numbers of infant leukemia 
cases in the children who were in utero over the 18 month period 
following the Chernobyl fallout. This 18 month period was chosen 
because it was shown that the in utero dose was due to 
radioactive isotopes which were ingested or inhaled by the 
mothers and that whole-body monitoring had shown that this 
material remained in the bodies of the mothers until Spring 1987 
because silage cut in the Summer of 1986 had been stored and fed 
to the cattle in the following winter. The result was startling. 
First, there was a statistically significant 3.8-fold excess of 
infant leukemia in the combined Wales and Scotland cohort (p = 
0.0002). Second, the leukemia yield in the exposed 'in utero' 
cohort was about 100 times the yield predicted by the model. 
Table 1 compares the effect in the three main studies. In passing 
it should be noted that this number, 100, is very close to the 
error required to explain the Sellafield childhood leukemia 
cluster. __


  _ _     _Wales and Scotland_     _Germany_     _Greece_ 
_Exposed cohort B_ Size            156,600         928,649         
163,337 Cases           12      12      35 Rate            7.7             
3.8             7.3 _unexposed cohort A+C_ Size            
835,200         5,630,789       1,112,566 Cases           18      
143             31 Rate            2.15            2.54            
2.8 Risk ratio B/A+C        3.6             1.5             2.6 
p-value (poisson)       0.0002          0.015           0.0025 
Estimated dose microSv          88      150             650   

__ At this stage we must close another denial exit. It should be 
noted that the possibility of the effect being due to chance may 
be obtained by multiplying the p-values for the null hypothesis 
that the effect was due to chance in each of the separate 
countries and studies to give an overall p-value less than 
0.0000000001. Thus it was not a chance occurrence: it was a 
consequence of the exposure to low-level radiation from 
Chernobyl. I am sorry to have to keep banging the gong but I want 
you to be quite clear about this point. 

And since the World Health Organization has given approximate 
exposure levels in Greece, Germany and the United States, it was 
also possible to examine the leukemia yield in the infant 
'exposed cohort' reported by the several other studies and 
establish a dose response relationship. This is shown in Fig 1. 
It is a curious shape and goes up, down and up again, and this 
shape should be noted. _____[figure 1. dose-response relationship 
post-Chernobyl infant leukaemia  (17 KB)]   _____

_Fig. 1._ dose-response relationship between exposure to the 
infants who were in utero at the time of the Chernobyl fallout, 
and the subsequent risk of leukaemia. 

_Horizontal axis = dose (mSv): vertical axis = leukaemia risk 
Data points from left:- United States, England, Scotland, Wales, 
Germany, Greece _

I will return to the shape of this curve below, but first I must 
ask how it is that some fifty years after the atom bomb, and 
following a huge amount of research into the subject, we can have 
discovered such a huge error in the science of radiation risk. To 
understand the answer, we must look at the scientific method a 
little more closely. 

_3. Radiation Risk and Scientific Method _

The classical exposition of the scientific, or inductive method 
(originally due to William of Occam) is what is now called Mill's 
Canons, the two most important of which are: _        The *Canon 
of Agreement *which states that whatever there is in common 
between the antecedent conditions of a phenomenon can be supposed 
to be the cause, or related to the cause, of the phenomenon. 

        The *Canon of Difference *which states that the 
differences in the conditions under which an effect occurs and 
those under which it does not must be the cause or related to the 
cause of that effect. _  In addition, the method relies upon the 
*Principle of Accumulation *which states that scientific 
knowledge grows additively by the discovery of independent laws, 
and the *Principle of Instance Confirmation*, that the degree of 
belief in the truth of a law is proportional to the number of 
favourable instances of the law. Finally to the methods of 
inductive reasoning we should add considerations of *plausibility 
of mechanism*. 

These are the basic methods of science [Mill, 1879; Harre, 1985; 
Papineau, 1996]   

 Let us first define our question. It is this. What are the 
health consequences of exposure to novel internal radioisotopes 
at whole organ dose levels below 2mSv? Because we are looking at 
battlefield DU, we should add that in this case, although the 
element is 'natural', the exposure is novel, and due to internal 
sub-micron Uranium Oxide particles embedded in tissue. Although 
risks from exposure to high levels of ionizing radiation are 
generally accepted, since they are fairly immediate and graphic, 
the situation with regard to low-level exposure is curious. There 
are now two mutually exclusive models describing the health 
consequences of exposure to low-level radiation. There is a 
nuclear establishment one, which is that which is presently used 
to set legislation on exposures and argue that DU is safe, and a 
radical one, which is espoused by the anti-nuclear movement and 
its associated scientists. I show these two models schematically 
in Fig 2. __


  _study group_     _Type of exposure_     _Analytical approach_ 
_Resulting model_ A-bomb survivors        High dose External 
Acute             Physics Averaging Theoretical Mathematical 
Reductionist Simplistic _Deductive_       Linear No Threshold 
(Low risk) Nuclear site leukaemia clusters (e.g. Sellafield) 
Irish Sea coast effect Chernobyl infants Minisatellite mutations 
Weapons fallout cancers DU Gulf veterans Iraqi children            
Internal Chronic Isotopic          Biology Epidemiology Empirical 
_Inductive_       Biphasic cell response (High risk)   

__ _Fig. 2. Mutually Exclusive Radiation Risk Models_      

        The two models arise from two different scientific 
methods. The conventional model is a physics-based one because it 
was developed by physicists prior to the discovery of DNA. Like 
all such models it is mathematical, reductionist and simplistic, 
but because of this is of great descriptive utility. Its 
quantities, dose, are average energy per unit volume or dE/dV and 
in its application, the volumes used are greater than 1kg. Thus 
it would not distinguish between the average energy transferred 
to a person warming themselves in front of a fire and a person 
eating a red hot coal. In its application to the problem at hand, 
the internal, low-level, isotopic or particulate exposure, it has 
been used entirely deductively. The basis of this application is 
that the cancer and leukemia yield has been determined following 
the external acute high-dose irradiation by gamma rays of a large 
number of Japanese inhabitants of the town of Hiroshima. 
Following this, arguments based on averaging have been used 
(quite spuriously) to maintain that there is a simple linear 
relationship (in the low-dose region) between dose and cancer 
yield. This Linear No Threshold (LNT) assumption enables easy 
calculations to be made of the cancer yield of any given external 
irradiation. By comparison, the radical model shown in Fig.2 
arises from an inductive process. There have been many 
observations of anomalously high levels of cancer and leukemia in 
populations living near nuclear sites, especially those where the 
measurements show that there is contamination from man-made 
radioisotopes, e.g. reprocessing plants. In addition, populations 
who have been exposed to man-made radioisotopes from global 
weapons tests, downwinders living near nuclear weapon test sites 
and those exposed to these materials because of accidents (like 
the Chernobyl infant leukemia cohort) or because of work in the 
nuclear industry or military. A review of these findings is 
available [Busby, 1995] and a more recent literature review of 
studies showing these effects is published by the Low Level 
Radiation Campaign [LLRC, 2000]. In addition, the radical model 
is based on biological considerations and considers each type of 
exposure according to its cellular radiation track structure in 
space and in time. It is not, therefore, possible to employ this 
model to predict risks from 'radiation dose' to 'populations' but 
only from microscopically described doses from specific isotopes 
or particles whose decay fractionations are considered to 
interact with cells which themselves respond biologically to the 
insults and may be in various stages of their biological 
development. The dose-response relationship following from this 
kind of analysis might be expected to be quite complex. 

These models are at war: which one is correct? What 
considerations can we use to choose? 

The answer is that the conventional LNT model must be rejected 
because it is not scientific. Its conclusions are based on 
deductive reasoning. It falsely uses data from one set of 
conditions, high-level, acute, external exposure to model 
low-level, chronic, internal exposure. It is scientifically 
bankrupt, and were it not for political considerations, would 
have been rejected long ago. On the other hand, it should be 
clear that the radical model conforms to all the requirements of 
the scientific method listed above. Man-made radioisotopes, often 
in the form of 'hot particles' are common contaminants to the 
areas near nuclear sites where there are cancer and leukemia 
clusters, and to the downwinders, and to the fallout-exposed 
populations. This satisfies the *Canon of Agreement*. The 
contingency analysis tables with control populations for such 
studies show that the *Canon of Difference *is also satisfied: 
people living in more remote regions than the downwinders show 
lower levels of illness. We must by now also have some faith in a 
*Principle of Instance Confirmation*, since so many studies have 
shown that increases in cancer and leukemia follow these exposure 
regimes at low dose. Indeed, the Gulf War Syndrome, might be 
considered as such an instance confirmation. We are left only 
with 'Plausibility of Mechanism', which I will address below. 
Before I turn to the mechanistic arguments I will try to throw 
some light on how such a state of affairs continues to go 
unchallenged by quoting from an eminent and past member of the 
Royal Society, the Nobel-prize winner, Chemist and Economist 
Michael Polanyi. 

Polanyi, was interested in the scientific method, and in 
scientists: his writings pre-dated the Science War philosophers 
like Kuhn and more recently Latour. He was aware that at any 
time, the scientific world view might be completely wrong. For as 
Montaigne wrote: _      

*      Since a wise man may be wrong, or a hundred men, or 
several Nations, and since even human nature, as we know it, goes 
wrong for several centuries on this matter or on that, how can we 
be certain that it occasionally stops going wrong and that in 
this century it is not mistaken?* 

(Montaigne 1533-92, The Essays) _        In asking how we know 
anything at all and how we build up a picture of the 'real world' 
Polanyi saw many similarities between scientists and primitive 
witch-doctors like the Azande who had been studied by the 
anthropologist Evans Pritchard who wrote: _      

* They reason excellently in the idiom of their beliefs, but they 
cannot reason outside, or against their beliefs, because they 
have no other idiom in which to express their thoughts. The 
contradiction between experience and one mystical notion is 
explained by reference to other mystical notions. 

E. Evans Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the 
Azande, 1937 *_ For the scientific world view, Polanyi concluded: 

*_     [For] the stability of the naturalistic system we 
currently accept, instead, rests on the same logical structure as 
Azande witchcraft beliefs. Any contradiction between a particular 
scientific notion and the facts of experience will be explained 
by other scientific notions. There is a ready reserve of possible 
scientific hypotheses available to explain any conceivable event. 
Secured by its circularity and defended by its epicyclical 
reserves science may deny or at least cast aside as of no 
scientific interest, whole ranges of experience which to the 
unscientific mind appear both massive and vital. 

* M. Polanyi FRS, Personal Knowledge, 1958 _               The 
Royal Society committee is invited to apply these considerations 
to the responses which followed the discovery by Yorkshire TV of 
the childhood leukemia cluster near Sellafield, and bear them in 
mind whilst deliberating the effects of DU. 

_4. Mechanistic Considerations _

_*Averaging Dose_* I want to look more closely at the averaging 
model and its predictions at low dose. It is essentially what 
used to be called a colligative model: the dE/dM formulation of 
dose requires that energy transferred from absorption of the 
consequence of a radioactive disintegration is averaged over the 
target site, usually the whole body or organ. Whatever lip 
service is made to considerations of what is now called 
'microdosimetry', close examination of calculations done to 
establish risk near nuclear sites shows this to be the case. The 
document NRPB R-276, *Risk of Leukemia and other Cancers in 
Seascale from All Sources of Radiation *published in 1995 is a 
good example. In this document, doses to the lymphatic system 
were calculated by modelling it as 'liver, lung, kidney, spleen, 
pancreas, uterus and intestines'. A physiologist would not 
recognise this list as the 'lymphatic system', so why was it 
used? The answer is that breathing introduces the particles of 
plutonium that exist in the air near Sellafield into the lungs of 
the children who live there. From the lungs, these particles are 
scavenged to the two small tracheobronchial lymph nodes which 
have a combined mass of perhaps one gram. If NRPB had divided dE 
by 1 gram, the resultant dose to this part of the lymphatic 
system would have been extremely high. Given that this organ has 
been identified as a source of lymphoma and leukemia in animals, 
this sounds very like the cause of the Sellafield leukemia 
cluster. But dilution of the plutonium decay energies into the 
whole mass of guts used for dM reduces the 'dose' to an 
acceptable small level. This process, incidentally, is very 
relevant to the DU exposures. 

        Figure 3 (pending)shows a phantom used by ICRP to 
calculate doses from external radiation fields. This is the model 
that is presently used to calculate internal doses. Of course, in 
the low dose region, cells are either hit or not hit, so the cell 
dose is very different from the tissue dose. Nevertheless, the 
model is valid as a means of establishing a quantity, 'dose' 
which can be correlated with some health consequence like cancer, 
so long as each cell in the body, or target region, has an 
equivalent probability of being hit (or more properly intercepted 
by a track). Dudley Goodhead, a member of the Royal Society 
depleted Uranium panel, has written of the low-dose region 
[Goodhead, 1988]: _       

*Most situations of practical interest are characterised by cells 
receiving occasional single tracks well separated in time from 
any other tracks which may impinge on the same cell. From Natural 
Background, there is, on average, about one track per year 
through each cell nucleus. Therefore it is highly unlikely that 
there will be multiple tracks in short times ( _  It is these 
(essentially external irradiation) considerations that enable the 
model to assume the linear dose response relationship that is the 
basis for radiation risk. But there are two situations of 
practical interest that Goodhead's arguments do not address. The 
first is that a cell's response to radiation damage is not 
constant over its lifespan: cells are very sensitive to radiation 
when they are in their repair and replication cycle. The second 
is that for internal radionuclide decays, either from sequential 
emitters or from 'hot particles' the microscopic local radiation 
flux, or energy density, may be very high, even though the 
average dose may be low. For internal exposure, these are common 
situations. Here the concept of 'dose' no longer applies and the 
conventional model breaks down. I will address these in turn. 

_*Cellular responses to radiation: the Burlakova dose response _* 
It has been known from almost the beginning of the radiation age 
that rapidly replicating cells are more sensitive to radiation 
damage [Bergonie and Tribondeau, 1906]. Indeed, this is the basis 
of radiotherapy for cancer where it is the rapidly proliferating 
cancer cells that are preferentially destroyed. Most cells in a 
living organism are in a non-replication mode, sometimes labelled 
G0. These cells are contributing to the organism as part of the 
normal living process and do not need to replicate unless there 
is some signal requiring this, perhaps because of tissue growth, 
damage or senescence. Throughout the growth and lifespan of 
individual organisms, there is a constant need for cellular 
replication, and therefore there are always some small proportion 
of cells which will be replicating: the magnitude will naturally 
depend upon the type of cell. When cells receive the signal to 
move out of stasis or G0, they undertake a fixed sequence of DNA 
repair and replication, labelled G0-G1-S-G2-M, with various 
identifiable check points through the sequence which ends in 
replication M or Mitosis. The period of the repair replication 
sequence is about 10 to 15 hours and the sensitivity of 
replicating cells to damage including fixed mutation is extremely 
high at some points during this sequence. This has been known for 
some time: Fig 4 shows the results of early experiments on 
Chinese hamster cells indicating up to 600-fold variation in the 
cell radiation sensitivity over the whole cycle. [Morton and 
Sinclair, 1966] ____[figure 4. Variation in radiation sensitivity 
32KB)]   ____

_Fig. 4._ Variation in sensitivity to radiation of Chinese 
hamster ovary cells over the cell cycle in vitro (Sinclair and 
Morton 1966)

 _Horizontal axis_: time in hours; _Vertical axis_: Vertical axis 
is fraction of cells surviving the radiation. -- _Upper line_: 
660 rads; _lower line_: 1000 rads 

If we display this response variation on a scale that shows the 
normal cell lifespan in the organism, rather than just over the 
cell cycle in vitro, the window of opportunity for cell mutation 
at high sensitivity becomes apparent Fig 5. ____[figure 5. 10 
hour repair replication window (10 KB)]   ____

_Fig. 5._ Displaying the 10 hour repair replication 
high-sensitivity window in terms of normal cell lifespan in the 
living organism 

        So the picture of isotropic dose to equivalent cells, the 
'bag of water' phantom model outlined by Goodhead has to be 
reviewed. Perhaps 1 percent of these cells are actively dividing 
and are in repair replication sequences that we will assume, for 
argument, are 600 times more sensitive to being 'hit' by a track. 
What would we expect the dose-response to look like? Well as the 
dose was increased from zero, the sensitive cells would begin to 
be damaged and a proportion of these hits would result in fixing 
a mutation and increasing the possibility of cancer. As the dose 
increased further, eventually this rise in response would peak as 
these sensitive cells were killed. The mutation yield would then 
begin to fall. However, at some point, the insensitive G0 cells 
would begin to be damaged and the whole process would begin 
again, with a rise in cancer. Ultimately there would be a second 
fall, but this level of exposure would probably result in the 
death of the organism (although such considerations have been 
used to explain an observed fall-off in effect from alpha 
emitters at high dose). So the dose response would look like that 
in Fig 6. _____[figure 6 Biphasic dose:response(18 KB)]   _____

_Fig. 6._ Predicted dose-response relationship for mutation in an 
organism made up of two sub-classes of cell sensitivities: high 
sensitivity replicating cells and low sensitivity quiescent 
cells. Sensitive sub-class cells are first mutated (to the left 
of the dotted line)and then killed as dose is increased (right of 
the dotted line). 

1% of cells are actively dividing and 200 - 600 times more 
radiosensitive than non-dividing cells. 

_Horizontal axis = dose: vertical axis = effect_ This type of 
response was shown to occur in several experiments by Burlakova, 
although she gave a different explanation for it, involving a 
combination of increasing damage and induced repair curves. She 
showed that such an effect can be seen by plotting the results of 
a large number of separate radiation and leukemia studies, a 
graph reproduced in Fig 7. ____[figure 7. PENDING ( KB)]   ____

_Fig. 7._ Leukaemia deaths per 105 person years depending on the 
dose of radiation. Many different studies plotted (Copied from 
Burlakova et al. 1996) 

        The results of animal studies on beagle dogs and mice 
also show these biphasic effects in the low-dose region [Busby, 
1995] . Referring back to the Azande scientists for a moment, it 
is quite easy to see how such a result might be interpreted as 
'hormesis', the radiation-is-good-for-you concept advanced by the 
nuclear lobby and its scientists. All that is necessary is to 
plot the biphasic response but leave out the first zero point. 
The deductive conclusions from high-dose experiments could not be 
squared with the possibility of such variation in this low dose 
region so either the points were interpreted as scatter or they 
were forced into a hormesis dip by leaving out the lowest dose 
responses as outliers. 

Note that this type of biphasic curve is seen in the Chernobyl 
infant studies collected together in Fig 1.     

_*The Second Event Theory _*

There is large variation in sensitivity over the cell lifespan. 
Although naturally dividing cells may accidentally receive a 
'hit', this process can be modelled by averaging over large 
masses of tissue, even if the dose response curve is not linear, 
as thought. However, unplanned cell division, preceded by DNA 
repair can be forced by a sub-lethal damaging radiation track: 
this is one of the signals which push the cell out of G0 into the 
repair replication sequence. It follows that two hits, separated 
by about eight hours, can generate a high sensitivity cell and 
then hit this same cell a second time in its sensitive phase. 
This idea, the 'Second Event Theory' is described and supporting 
evidence advanced in Busby 1995 and its mathematical description 
has been approached slightly differently in Busby 2000. It has 
been the subject of some dispute by NRPB [Cox and Edwards, 2000, 
Busby, 2000a] Very recently, developments in micro techniques 
have enabled some new evidence that supports the two hit idea to 
emerge. Miller et al., [1999] in a consideration of Radon 
exposure risks, have been able to show that the measured 
oncogenicity from exactly one alpha particle hit per cell is 
significantly lower than for a Poisson distributed mean of one 
alpha particle hit per cell. The authors argue that this implies 
that cells traversed by two alpha particles or more contribute 
most of the risk of mutation, i.e. single hits are not the cause 
of cancer. 

There are two types of internal exposure for which there would be 
expected to be an enhancement of risk from this Second Event 
source. The first, due to sequentially decaying radioisotopes 
like Strontium-90 has been discussed in Busby 1995, Cox and 
Edwards, 2000 and Busby, 2000. Following an initial decay from an 
Sr-90 atom bound to a chromosome, the second decay from the 
daughter, Yttrium-90, whose half-life is 64hrs can hit the same 
cell in the induced replication sequence with a probability that 
is simple to calculate. The same dose from external radiation has 
a vanishingly small chance of effecting the same process. The 
second type of Second Event exposure, referred to in Busby 2000a, 
is from micron or sub-micron sized 'hot particles'. If lodged in 
tissue, these will decay again and again increasing the 
probability of multiple hits to the same cell inside the 10 hour 
repair replication period. It is this process that is relevant to 
the Depleted Uranium problem. 

_*Second Events from DU particles. _*

The US Defence Department commissioned research into the levels 
of Uranium Oxide particulates produced by the impact of Abrams 
M1A1 Tank ammunition at the Nevada test site in 1986 [USBRL 
1986]. The impact on armour of Depleted uranium penetrators 
results in about 80% conversion to Uranium Oxides UO2 and U3O8 in 
the form of ceramic particles of diameters in the micron region. 
These aerosol particles are very mobile and can clearly be 
inhaled. In this regard the hazard is of a similar nature to that 
from the Plutonium oxide particles resuspended from Sellafield 
discharges to the Irish Sea which were considered as a possible 
cause of the Sellafield leukemia cluster by COMARE and NRPB and 
referred to earlier where it was recorded that the ICRP66 models 
used to estimate doses did so by diluting the particles energy 
into large masses of tissue.         

 For particles below 1 micron diameter, self absorption of the 
alpha particle decays may be considered second order and the dose 
to tissue in the range of these alpha decays calculated. Table 2 
shows the calculated doses in spheres of tissue within the 
30micron range of the alpha decays. __

_Table of doses to sphere of tissue 30 micron radius by one 
particle of U3O8 of various diameters _7 


  Particle diameter microns     Particle volume cm3     Mass 
U308(g)     Mass U238(g)     Activity of particle (Bq)     Hits 
/day(dose mSv) Hits/year(annual dose mSv) 0.2     4.2 x 10-15     
3.6 x 10-14     3.06 x 10-14     3.8 x 10-10     3.3 x 10-5 (3.96 
x 10-3mSv)     0.012 (1.44mSv) 0.5     6.5 x 10-14     5.6 x 
10-13     4.8 x 10-13     5.9 x 10-9     5.1 x 10-4 (0.06mSv)     
0.186 (21.9mSv) 1     5.2 x 10-13     4.3 x 10-12     3.7 x 10-12     
8.8 x 10-8     7.6 x 10-3 (0.91mSv)     2.77 (332mSv) 2     4 x 
10-12     3.5 x 10-11     2.9 x 10-11     3.6 x 10-7     0.031 
(3.72mSv)     11.32 (1358mSv) 5     6.5 x 10-11     5.6 x 10-10     
4.75 x 10-10     5.9 x 10-6     0.51 (60mSv)     186 (21900mSv)   

__ Assumptions: Uranium Oxide (238U] is in the form U308 (density 
= 8.6); specific activity of 238U = 12.43 MBq/Kg; Alpha decay 
energy = 4.45MeV; Alpha range = 30 microns. 

Relative Biological Effectiveness factor for Alphas = 20 (from 
ICRP) has been used to convert dose in Grays to effective dose in 
Sieverts. Also tabulated is the number of hits per day to this 
sphere of tissue. The table shows that for particles as small as 
0.2 microns diameter, average annual alpha dose to the 
(lymphatic) tissue surrounding the particles is about the same as 
the total annual average background dose of 2mSv. For larger 
particles the dose rapidly increases. Between 0.5 and 5 microns, 
Second Event processes are stochastically likely. This is shown 
by Fig 8 where the number of hits per day is plotted against the 
particle diameter. ____[figure 8. U particle local doses (17 KB)] 

_Fig. 8._ Uranium particle doses to local cell volume: number of 
hits per day to cell volume from particles of U308 of different 
diameters. _Horizontal axis = U308 particle diameter in microns: 
vertical axis = hits per day_ light line is number of hits after 
allowing for the self absorption of energy within the particle 
itself ____    These 'hot particle' processes have been known 
about for a long time: Fig 9 shows a radiographic photomicrograph 
of a plutonium oxide 'hot particle' in lung tissue. Overlapping 
tracks can be seen. ____[figure 9. alpha star photomicrograph 
(93KB)]   ____

_Fig. 9._ Photomicrograph of Plutonium Oxide particle of about 2 
microns by 6 microns trapped in lung tissue. Note the alpha star. 
(Original photo: Robert de Tredici) 

_*Energy density and risk _*

The consequence of aggregating decays into a small sphere around 
a 'hot particle' is, of course, that the number of different 
cells capable of being hit elsewhere is necessarily reduced: we 
have converted a number of tracks well separated to the same 
number of tracks close together. If all tracks carry the same 
risk of mutation in cells in the track, i.e. all hits are 
equivalent, then there should be no hazard enhancement. The 
hazard enhancement proposed arises not from some 'hot coal' type 
of energy concentration process but from the fact that cells may 
be triggered into a sensitive repair replication sequence which 
carries a very high sensitivity weighting. It may, of course be 
true that there would be other reasons why concentrated 
irradiation of a small cluster of cells could produce unstable 
cell replication or cell communication fields such as those 
recently proposed by Sonnenschein and Sato [1999] and this itself 
may lead to a tumour promotion advantage but this is another 
matter. 

_*Beta emissions from DU _*

Before collecting together these considerations there is one 
further matter which may have been overlooked in the case of DU. 
Uranium-238 is an alpha emitter but depleted Uranium is also a 
beta emitter: indeed in the solid form the two beta-emitting 
daughter isotopes, Thorium-234 (beta; 0.26MeV, 24 days) and 
Protoactinium-234 (beta 0.23MeV, 6,75 hrs) are in equilibrium 
with the parent after 20 weeks. These beta emissions are the main 
radiological hazard in handling the bulk material. In Iraq, I 
recently measured 24,000 counts per second at the surface of a 
stray A-10 30mm penetrator which was just lying on the ground. 
This represented a dose of about 1mSv/hour to the hands of anyone 
holding the penetrator. However, most of the beta (and alpha) 
decays were absorbed inside the bulk material, and only surface 
disintegrations were emerging to be absorbed in the scintillation 
counter head. 

The equilibrium beta activity of DU is about 24MBq/kg. But most 
of this energy is absorbed in the bulk material: oxidation of the 
material on impact to produce some 1014 1 micron diameter Uranium 
Oxide spheres per kilogram would enable all of the decay energy 
to be potentially available for human exposure. The enhancement 
of efficiency in release of beta radiation is thus about 
1000-fold. 

_*Environmental Mobility of the DU particles _*

In order to define the population at risk, it is necessary to 
know the fate of the Uranium particles subsequent to impact. At 
the Nevada test site, the atmospheric concentration at 100m from 
impact exceeded the UK NRPB Generalized Derived Limit for Uranium 
in Air by a factor of about 5 [Busby 1999]. Dietz has reviewed 
data which establishes that DU particles are able to travel at 
least 100km from their impact source [Dietz, 1997]. I recently 
made measurements of alpha radiation levels in Iraq in three 
areas, the southern battleground near tanks destroyed by DU fire, 
the same area remote from the tanks, the town of Al Basrah and 
the city of Baghdad. Results showed that the alpha activity in 
the battleground area was more than five times higher than in 
Basrah and ten times higher that in Baghdad. In addition, and 
remarkably, levels on the surface of the ground near the damaged 
tanks did not generally show high levels of alpha or beta signal 
from Uranium and its daughters except in the case of one tank 
where a yellow contaminant, probably UO3, showed high levels of 
beta activity. In addition, the insides of tank turrets which had 
radioactive holes in them from A10 hits, did not show high levels 
of beta or alpha activity. The generally higher alpha levels in 
the whole area, coupled with these observations suggest that the 
Uranium particles has been efficiently dispersed by some 
mechanism. I believe that this mechanism is the repulsion of 
charged particles by themselves and by the earths permanent 
electric field of 150V/m. I have argued elsewhere that this 
effect operates in the Kennet Valley near the Atomic Weapons 
plant at Aldermaston and results in the preferential 
concentration of charged radioative particles near electrostatic 
discontinuities between strata with different conductivity 
[Busby, 1997] . A similar effect near high voltage power lines 
was recently found by Henshaw et al. [1999]. 

_*Conclusions on Mechanism       _*

Thus we can conclude that the external bag-of-water model is not 
an accurate representation of the kind of processes that occur at 
the cellular level and that the physics based descriptions do not 
apply to internal irradiation. The Uranium Oxide particles are 
capable of travelling very large distances [Deitz, 1997]. They 
may then be inhaled and will become trapped in the lymphatic 
sytem where they may be transported to any part of the body. Here 
they may cause sequential moderate dose irradiation of local 
tissue volumes where the risk of mutation is far higher than is 
suggested by the LNT and average dose models. The enhancement of 
mutation efficiency that follows from exposure to inhaled Uranium 
oxide hot particles is capable of explaining what might be 
thought of by Michael Polanyi's Azande scientists as 'anomalous 
responses to low dose exposure'. We are not, however, reduced to 
looking only at the Gulf War Syndrome and the Iraqi children for 
supporting evidence. There are other indicators, and our 
springboard for these is the 1983 observation of a childhood 
leukaemia cluster at Sellafield. In the last four years Green 
Audit been funded by the government of the Republic of Ireland to 
study cancer incidence close to the Irish sea. The study has used 
both Wales Cancer Registry and Irish Cancer Registry data to 
examine and explain variations in cancer risk with distance from 
the sea. The results of this work will be published elsewhere but 
since they cast considerable light on the DU problem, some of the 
findings will be briefly reviewed here. 

_5. Sea coast cancer risks and resuspended hot particles._ 

         In three separate investigations between 1997 and 2000, 
Green Audit discovered profound and statistically significant 
evidence of excess risk of cancer incidence and mortality in 
coastal populations in Wales, Ireland and Somerset. The excess 
risk has been found for most of the cancer types and sites and in 
the following data: _       Incidence data for small areas in 
Wales from Wales Cancer Registry from 1974-89 

Incidence data for small areas of Ireland from the Irish National 
Cancer Registry for 1994-1996. 

Mortality data for census wards in Somerset from the Office for 
National Statistics for 1995-1998 _       

In each area the trend with distance from the sea shows a sharp 
rise in the group of people living within 800m of the sea coast. 
It is driven by proximity to areas of intertidal sediment known 
to be contaminated with radioisotopes from Sellafield discharges. 
In the case of the Somerset study, which was investigated as a 
hypothesis test the drying, offshore, mud bank, known as the 
Steart Flats, was contaminated by historic releases from the 
adjacent Nuclear Power site at Hinkley Point. As one example of 
the type of result found, the all malignancy relative risk for 
populations of all ages in Wales from 1974-89 is shown plotted 
against distance from the Irish Sea in Fig 10. ____[figure 10. 
Irish Sea effect (18 KB)]   ____

_Fig. 10._ All malignancy incidence relative risk (base 
population England plus Wales 1979) for populations of Mid and 
North Wales 1974 - 1989 all ages by distance from the Irish Sea 
in km. (LOESS fit) _Horizontal axis = distance from sea in Km.: 
vertical axis = Relative Risk_ Note the sharp rise in risk near 
the coast. Sufficient evidence has now accumulated from these 
studies to support the hypothesis that this cancer risk is a 
consequence of an exposure route involving inhalation of 
resuspended radioisotopes, particularly Plutonium Oxide 
particles. The trend in concentration of Plutonium with distance 
from the sea in Cumbria has been established and is shown in Fig 
11. ____[figure 11.(20 KB)]   ____

_Fig. 11._ Inland penetration of Plutonium in air and seaspray 
(Eakins and Lally)

 _Horizontal axis_ = Distance downwind from sea (Km): _vertical 
axis (upper figure)_ = Relative concentration of 239,240Pu in air 
(pCi m3): _lower figure _Concentration of 239,240Pu (pCi g-1Na)_ 
The radioactivity is brought inland by seaspray scavenging 
mechanisms which are quite well understood: indeed, the ocean is 
the source of about 30% of all PM10 particles in the UK. It is 
therefore not surprising that NRPB workers found Plutonium in the 
tracheobronchial lymph nodes of autopsy specimens from all over 
the UK in proportion to their distance from the west coast, 
particularly Cumbria [Popplewell, 1986]. Table 3 shows some 
results of these studies, which were, incidentally, omitted from 
the considerations in the COMARE report on the Sellafield 
leukemia cluster. Nor is it surprising that Plutonium is found in 
children's teeth in the UK at levels which reflect a similar 
trend with distance from the Irish Sea [Priest et al, 1996] __


  _Tissue_ (post mortem)     _Cumbrian workers_ (Figures given 
for each of three cadavers in mBq/Kg Pu)     _Cumbrian public 
_(mBq/Kg Pu. Figure in brackets is number of cadavers)     
_Public elsewhere _ (mBq/Kg Pu. Figure in brackets is number of 
cadavers) _Rib_     130 360 94     9 (10)     6 (43) _Femur_     
132 250 100 5.4 (11)     3.6 (35) _Lung_     940 1140 120     6.8 
(11)     1.9 (47) _Tracheo-bronchial lymph nodes_     450 73,300 
1600     35 (12)     10 (37)   

__ _Table 3. Plutonium in autopsy specimens from UK _(Popplewell 
NRPB) Pu in various organs at post mortem from members of the 
public and from occupationally exposed workers living in Cumbria 
(mBq/Kg) 

_6. Overall Conclusions_ 

The Gulf War Syndrome and the increases in cancer and congenital 
effects in Iraqi populations are merely more and recent evidence 
of the serious error in the way in which the health consequences 
of ionizing radiation exposures are presently modelled. They do 
not stand alone as some sort of curiosity which needs special 
examination and complex explanations. Polanyi's Azande scientists 
might have to find some special explanation here: perhaps their 
Oracle would tell them that the problem must be that the Gulf War 
veterans had been given many injections to protect against gas 
attacks by the evil dictator. But then they would have to have 
another explanation for the Iraqi children who did not receive 
such injections. So their problems have to be something else, 
perhaps the oil well fires. But then, what about the children in 
the north, who were also bombed but there was no oil? Perhaps, in 
that case, it was a demon: population mixing. Or maybe there is 
no increase in illness and the evil Iraqis have made it all up. 
Quick! Despatch a team from IARC in Lyon to discover that the 
Iraq Cancer Registry only has a 286 computer (this happened). Ah! 
That must be it. A computer problem. And so forth. In this 
affair, it is not DU that is on trial. Science itself is On 
Trial, and the Royal Society is On Trial. If this committee 
follows the Azande method of deliberation, the credibility of the 
Royal Society will be finished. Because, following the Azande 
Scientific Oracle advice on BSE, Global Warming, Sellafield, 
Mobile Phones and GM crops, it would take very little for people 
to revert entirely to believing the evidence of their own senses 
and the advice of their own instincts in areas that to their 
*unscientific minds appear both massive and vital. *

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