***************************************************************** 4/09/01 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 9.88 ***************************************************************** RADBULL IS PRODUCED BY THE ABALONE ALLIANCE CLEARINGHOUSE ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR POWER CONTENTS 1 DOE gets extension, but only three years, on use of Yucca land 2 Bush Energy Plan Increases Reliance on Nuclear Power 3 Meet the Press transcript with Dick Cheney 4 Duma asked to pass Bill on N-waste import 5 Rumyantsev Backs Plan to Import Nuclear Fuel 6 Guarding Russia's nukes 7 California governor, utility trade blame 8 N-sludge may be heading to Utah 9 I-20 waste shipments not a threat Material safe for transport, 10 Nuclear Warning / Watchdogs eye Duke's salvage operation 11 Millstone's new owner a power in the industry 12 Residents Undergo Health Check Following 1999 Nuke Power Plant 13 Nuclear Waste Protested in Germany 14 Mill wants to recycle radioactive sludge 15 Radioactive waste safe for hauling, officials promise NUCLEAR WEAPONS CONTENTS 1 Anti-nukers stage annual protest at Tenn. weapons plant 2 30 cited in Y-12 protest 3 Y-12 emergency response exercise set Wednesday 4 ‘Foster Panel’ Critiques Nuclear Weapons Complex 5 Guard team prepares for terror attack 6 The Manhattan Project Mar & Apr 2001 Newsletter 7 A sound downwinder policy 8 Pictures of U.S. warplane found by bomb survivor 9 China set for underground nuclear test 10 Spy photos show Beijing set for underground test 11 The Balkans DU Cover-Up 12 ''Depleted Uranium in Iraq'' 13 Help for Nuclear Workers 14 Payments to ill nuclear workers may face delay 15 N.M. Winner in Budget Package 16 UK soldiers 'were nuclear guinea pigs ' 17 IAAP's sister plant has own trouble 18 Nuclear base protest arrests 19 Broken sub may leave Gibraltar in May 20 Bush Seeks Cut in State DOE Funds 21 Energy options would fall short 22 Nuclear Control Institute Calls on Nuclear Industry to Abandon ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR POWER ARTICLES ***************************************************************** 1 DOE gets extension, but only three years, on use of Yucca land April 09, 2001 By Mary Manning and Benjamin Grove LAS VEGAS SUN The Air Force has granted a three-year right-of-way extension to the Department of Energy to continue studies at the proposed nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain. The Air Force owns Yucca as part of its desert training range. Since 1980 the Air Force, in conjunction with the Bureau of Land Management, has granted the DOE permits for studies related to Yucca. The current seven-year permit was to expire Tuesday. DOE scientists and contractors have been analyzing the mountain since 1987, when Congress designated the site as the nation's only high-level radioactive waste burial ground. The DOE is scheduled later this year to report to Congress on whether it is safe to bury the waste inside the mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The waste is now stored at nuclear power plants and Department of Defense sites nationwide. If approved, Yucca could be completed by 2010, according to DOE estimates. The Air Force has typically granted the DOE seven-year permits, but this year granted only a three-year extension. The Air Force gave the DOE a shorter extension, pending the DOE's recommendation to Congress, Air Force spokeswoman Marriane Miclat said today. Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., said that decision was good news for Nevada officials who oppose burying waste at Yucca. Nevada officials have accused the DOE of bias toward completing the project even before studies prove that it is safe. The fact that the DOE is requesting another seven years of access to Yucca signals that the agency is predisposed to completing the project, said Gibbons, who had voiced his objection to the Air Force over the seven-year extension. "The request of the DOE to extend its access to land near Yucca Mountain shows, yet again, that the agency is relentlessly committed to creating a nuclear waste repository in Nevada," said Gibbons, a former Air Force combat pilot. "I am pleased the United States Air Force understood the importance of this matter and did not agree to a special permit deal." The Air Force has objected to Yucca's use as a nuclear waste site because it could interfere with fighter pilot training. All contents copyright 2001 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 2 Bush Energy Plan Increases Reliance on Nuclear Power WASHINGTON -- The White House is putting together an energy strategy that emphasizes nuclear power, increased drilling and pipeline construction for natural gas, and opening more land for electricity-generating plants, Monday's Wall Street Journal reported. Senior administration officials said the strategy is designed to relieve some of the pressure on the natural-gas industry. Most power plants currently in the planning stages are natural-gas driven, they note, which should boost demand for the fuel, elevate prices and make the U.S. vulnerable to supply disruptions. In response, the White House is looking for ways to increase the supply of natural gas by opening more land to drilling and encouraging pipeline construction. The White House review is being conducted by an interagency energy-policy task force led by Vice President Dick Cheney that includes the secretaries of treasury, commerce, transportation, energy, agriculture and interior, as well as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. The task force was set up in response to the continuing power crisis in California to develop a long-term energy strategy and plans to make its recommendations by mid-May. Administration officials said nuclear power should account for a higher percentage of U.S. electricity than the current level of 20%. But they haven't set a specific goal. On NBC's "Meet the Press" yesterday, Mr. Cheney said the U.S. must build 65 power plants annually and "some of those ought to be nuclear." The focus on nuclear power is sure to prompt stiff resistance because of widespread fear that nuclear power plants are unsafe and could release radiation into the atmosphere. The plants also produce radioactive wastes, some of which must be stored for thousands of years. Efforts to store the wastes invariably are met by opposition from local politicians, Republicans and Democrats alike, and from federal lawmakers. The emerging White House strategy is a departure both from the energy plan President Bush outlined during the campaign and from a strategy sketched in mid-March by Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham. The two plans had focused on expanding the supply of natural gas, including drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and barely mentioned nuclear power. Copyright 2001 Morningstar, ***************************************************************** 3 Meet the Press transcript with Dick Cheney Transcript for April 8 PLEASE CREDIT ANY QUOTES OR EXCERPTS FROM THIS NBC TELEVISION PROGRAM TO “NBC NEWS’ MEET THE PRESS.” GUESTS: Vice President DICK CHENEY Senator RICHARD SHELBY, (R-Ala.) Select Committee on Intelligence Senator JOHN EDWARDS, (D-N.C.) Intelligence Committee MODERATOR/PANELIST: Tim Russert - NBC News This is a rush transcript provided for the information and convenience of the press. Accuracy is not guaranteed. In case of doubt, please check with MEET THE PRESS - NBC NEWS (202)885-4598 (Sundays: (202)885-4200) MR. TIM RUSSERT: Our issues this Sunday: day eight of the standoff between the United States and China; 24 Americans still in custody. When will they come home? The Senate supports a tax bill, smaller than requested by the president. And: continuing controversy over George W. Bush and the environment. With us: the vice president of the United States, Dick Cheney. Then: the future of our relationship with China: trade, human rights, the Olympics, Taiwan and more. With us: two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee: the chairman, Republican Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, and Democratic Senator John Edwards of North Carolina. But first: joining us now, the number two man in the Bush administration, the vice president of the United States, Dick Cheney. Welcome. VICE PRES. DICK CHENEY: Good morning, Tim. MR. RUSSERT: When are the 24 Americans coming home? VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I hope fairly soon. We’re still engaged in a period of what I would call fairly intense diplomatic activity back and forth with the Chinese government. But things have gone reasonably well and hopefully it’ll be resolved soon. MR. RUSSERT: You say fairly soon. Days, weeks, months? VICE PRES. CHENEY: I don’t want to put a timetable on it. I think we’re clearly in a situation, and I hope the Chinese understand this as well, too, that every day that goes by without having it resolved raises the risk to the long-term relationship. They’re—clearly, a significant interest on the part of both nations of getting this resolved and not have it have a lasting impact. And we’re working hard to try to achieve that. MR. RUSSERT: The Chinese are demanding an “apology.” Will they get an apology from the United States? VICE PRES. CHENEY: The president’s made it clear that we regret the loss of the Chinese pilot as a result of this accident. The notion that we would apologize for being in international airspace, for example, isn’t something that we can accept. MR. RUSSERT: Do we have anything to apologize for? VICE PRES. CHENEY: No, we don’t believe we do. MR. RUSSERT: The pilot who crashed, the Chinese pilot, his wife has written a letter to President Bush saying, “You are a coward for not apologizing.” How does the president respond to that? VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, we understand that this probably is the most difficult moment ever in this woman’s life, and we clearly will respond at the appropriate time and in the appropriate fashion. MR. RUSSERT: Can we say we’re sorry? VICE PRES. CHENEY: We’ve said that we clearly do regret the loss of life, the fact that the incident happened at all. But again, the notion that somehow an apology is appropriate here we don’t think is accurate. MR. RUSSERT: Your fellow Republican, Henry Hyde, yesterday said these Americans should be considered hostages. Do you accept that? VICE PRES. CHENEY: No. MR. RUSSERT: Why not? VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, you’ve got to remember how this incident came about, Tim. Our folks were flying in international airspace. There was the accident, the collision between the Chinese aircraft and our aircraft. Our crew felt the only place they could land was in Chinese territory. They tried on the way down to take those steps that are required for that kind of incident, but nonetheless, they ended up landing on a Chinese airfield without the Chinese knowing they were coming. Needless to say, that created a bit of a flap. Now, we’re trying to resolve that and get the crew returned. But the idea that this is a hostage situation is something I wouldn’t accept. MR. RUSSERT: What would you call them? VICE PRES. CHENEY: Detainees, I think, was the word that was used. But they’re an American crew, we’ve had access to them, they’ve been in touch with their families through e-mail. So it’s the kind of situation where we think it will be resolved shortly and appropriately. And it’s very important here, as well, too, on both sides to avoid using hot-button words that would inflame the situation and make it more difficult to get a resolution. MR. RUSSERT: How successful was the American crew in destroying sensitive intelligence-gathering data and machinery and information before the Chinese boarded the plane? VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, we don’t know that and probably won’t until we get them back and are able to fully debrief them. There are procedures that are automatically a part of the operation of those kinds of aircraft, steps that the crew is to take when they think people that don’t have authorization are going to gain access to the aircraft. And they had some 20 minutes before they landed to execute those procedures. MR. RUSSERT: But we do know the Chinese boarded the plane and have been able to look at some of the intelligence-gathering information. VICE PRES. CHENEY: We have every reason to believe they boarded the airplane, sure. MR. RUSSERT: Have they been able to gain some of our intelligence equipment? VICE PRES. CHENEY: We don’t have any way to know. MR. RUSSERT: Criticism has begun, as you might expect, and this from conservative quarters. This is today’s Weekly Standard magazine, a conservative magazine: “A National Humiliation. The profound national humiliation that President Bush has brought upon the United States may be forgotten temporarily when the American aircrew, held captive in China as this magazine goes to press, return home. But when we finish celebrating, it will be time to assess the damage done, and the dangers invited, by the administration’s behavior.” A national humiliation. VICE PRES. CHENEY: No, absolutely not. It looks to me like Bill Kristol’s trying to sell magazines. I mean, that’s exactly the kind of approach that needs to be avoided. And the fact of the matter is, this president’s done a superb job of managing the situation. He’s got a good team working it. Some of our most experienced folks like Colin Powell and Rich Armitage over at State, Condi Rice at the NSC, Don Rumsfeld of Defense, and we’re moving forward to resolution of the matter. But for The Weekly Standard to make that kind of statement—from time to time, I disagree with what they produce; lots of times, I agree with them—but frankly, I think that’s one of the more disreputable commentaries I’ve seen in a long time. MR. RUSSERT: Trade—Henry Hyde, Republican, said that he’s always supported having trade with China, most favored nation status, if you will. He said when it comes before the Congress in June, this time he’s likely to oppose it. The American people have a similar view, and let me show you on our screen here, the latest poll data. Should U.S. move to restrict trade with China if the crew and plane are not returned? Yes, 74 percent; no, 19 percent. If China does not return our Americans soon, will they jeopardize having their most favored nation trade status revoked? VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, let me go back to something I said earlier, Tim, and simply state that it’s important to recognize that every day that goes by without resolution of this, it does lead to the possible risk, lasting damage, if you will, to the relationship between the United States and China. That’s not in our interest, that’s not in their interest, so we do need to get on with resolution as quickly as possible. I wouldn’t want to speculate on how the Congress, for example, might respond in the future. But clearly, up till now, I think Congress has been very supportive. They’ve gone along with the course the president wanted to pursue here, and hopefully, we’ll get this resolved shortly and then be able to get on with addressing some of those very important issues that do have to be addressed in the future. MR. RUSSERT: Could China host the 2008 Olympics if they’re behaving in such a way? VICE PRES. CHENEY: I don’t want to get into the business, Tim. I understand why you’ve got to ask those questions this morning. You’d like to make some news and my task this morning is... MR. RUSSERT: I’m seeking clarity... VICE PRES. CHENEY: ...to not make any news. MR. RUSSERT: ...conviction from the vice president of the United States. VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, we have a lot of conviction. The conviction right now is we’ll get this matter resolved in relatively short order and then we can get on with other aspects of the relationship. MR. RUSSERT: Could we call our ambassador? VICE PRES. CHENEY: I’m not going to speculate, no. MR. RUSSERT: Taiwan... VICE PRES. CHENEY: Yes, sir. MR. RUSSERT: ...on the president’s desk is whether or not to sell them destroyers with the Aegis radar maintenance management systems, if you would. Do we have any choice now but to supply that weaponry to Taiwan? VICE PRES. CHENEY: We will in the proper course of events. The president will make that decision about what specifically we need to go forward to Taiwan with in terms of providing for their security. And we have done that in the past. And that relationship will continue. Exactly what should be in the package, what’s required, that’s not yet been determined. MR. RUSSERT: But if we were not to go forward now, it would be perceived as a sign of weakness and blinking under Chinese pressure. VICE PRES. CHENEY: I expect we’ll make that decision in due course within the next few weeks. And the president will make the decision that’s required at that time. MR. RUSSERT: The Chinese have been beefing up their military around Taiwan. VICE PRES. CHENEY: That’s true. MR. RUSSERT: Is an attack by the Chinese upon Taiwan considered an attack on the United States? VICE PRES. CHENEY: We’ve made it clear that we will insist that whatever resolution ultimately occurs between the mainland and Taiwan must occur by peaceful means, that a resort to force here is not appropriate, nor warranted. And we don’t expect it to be resolved in that fashion. MR. RUSSERT: Would the United States come to the aid of Taiwan? VICE PRES. CHENEY: We’ve made it very clear that this needs to be resolved peacefully. Previously, in the last administration, when there were certain threats to Taiwan, the administration deployed naval vessels to the area. We have a long-standing relationship there that I think the Chinese government understands. And it’s important that we manage this relationship appropriately and try to avoid any conflict and hopefully we’ll be able to do that. MR. RUSSERT: Will surveillance flights continue? VICE PRES. CHENEY: Our process of flying a lot of places around the world, not just off China, is important. It’s important for us to know what’s going on out there. Lots of times information collected in this fashion can be reassuring, that the activities of another nation aren’t threatening. We have to invest a lot to maintain our intelligence capabilities. We have every right to operate in international waters, international airspace, and certainly I would expect that will continue. MR. RUSSERT: Have we had surveillance flights continue off the coast of China since this incident? VICE PRES. CHENEY: I can’t say, Tim. I don’t know. I haven’t checked recently. MR. RUSSERT: But you think they’re worth the risk. VICE PRES. CHENEY: We absolutely have to continue to exercise our rights. And it is a right to be in international space for whatever purpose. And if that includes a collection of intelligence, that’s appropriate. Others collect intelligence against us. It’s part of the relationship, if you will, among modern nations. And it’s important. MR. RUSSERT: The Chinese are demanding that those flights stop. We will not concede to that demand. VICE PRES. CHENEY: We’ve agreed that we’re prepared to discuss, obviously, these kinds of questions. But in terms of our right to be there, that is, in fact—that’s a given. And we will continue to operate as appropriate. MR. RUSSERT: Last year, the Chinese defense minister was talking about long-term relationships with the United States. And this is what he said, and it’s rather chilling: “...war is inevitable. We cannot avoid it. The issue is that the Chinese armed forces must control the initiative in this war. ...We must be prepared to fight for one year, two years, three years or even long.” Do you agree with that? VICE PRES. CHENEY: I’m not sure who he’s talking about having a war with. MR. RUSSERT: The United States. VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I haven’t seen that. That kind of statement I don’t think’s helpful on his part. Clearly, the United States has the wherewithal to defend our interests. We’re the world’s most powerful nation with the most powerful military. There’s no reason why the relationship with China has to come to armed conflict. Hopefully it won’t. MR. RUSSERT: During the campaign, then-Governor Bush took great pains to try to separate his China policy from that of President Clinton. This is what he said back in November of ’99: (Videotape, November 19, 1999): GOVERNOR GEORGE W. BUSH: All of these facts must be squarely faced. China is a competitor, not a strategic partner. (End videotape) MR. RUSSERT: Thursday he spoke before the newspaper editors and he updated with this: (Videotape, April 5, 2001): PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: China is a strategic partner — I mean, strategic competitor, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find areas in which we can partner. And the economy is a place where we can partner. (End videotape) MR. RUSSERT: Is China a competitor or a partner? VICE PRES. CHENEY: I think he said both times—he was clear—that he views them as a competitor, but that there are areas we ought to be able to work together. MR. RUSSERT: So they can be a partner. VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, we clearly do a lot of work in the economic area. There are other areas where we have cooperated in recent years. Korea, for example. And our approach to try to make sure that North Korea pursues a policy of restraint. There have been times in the past when we’ve collaborated with the Chinese. During the Gulf War, for example. They worked with us on U.N. Security Council resolutions. And so there have been times when we have worked together. There’s no reason in the world why that can’t continue to be the case. That doesn’t mean necessarily that we have the same relationship with them that we have with the British, which clearly is a special relationship, very close allies. But there’s no reason why. And certainly I’m sure it would be our hope and aspiration long term, that we can develop the kind of relationship with China that’s to the advantage of both nations. MR. RUSSERT: Are they closer to being an ally or an enemy? VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, we’re starting to parse words here now, Tim. I think the president stated it rather directly when he said they’re competitors, but there’s no reason why we can’t be partners on some issues. MR. RUSSERT: You have no doubt these Americans are coming home? VICE PRES. CHENEY: That’s correct. MR. RUSSERT: Do you think they’ll be investigated or put on trial? VICE PRES. CHENEY: I think we’re going to get this resolved very shortly. And as I say, right now, we’re continuing a period of intense diplomatic activity and look forward to getting it resolved soon. Again, with the caveat that each day that it goes on without resolution does raise the risk to the long-term relationship between the U.S. and China. MR. RUSSERT: There’s a hot line on the president’s desk in the Oval Office, or the Situation Room, with a direct line to the president of China. Why doesn’t he just pick that up and use it? VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, first of all, the president of China is in Latin America this week, not in China. MR. RUSSERT: I’m sure they can find him. VICE PRES. CHENEY: And we have approached it in what we think is the most effective and fruitful way to proceed. I think there is a lot of evidence the Chinese have not wanted to escalate this incident; the mere fact the president of China went on with his trip to Latin America in the midst of this. It’s being handled through normal diplomatic channels and that’s the best way for us to resolve it. MR. RUSSERT: Let me turn to domestic matters. The Bush $1.6 trillion tax cut was scaled down in Congress. This is the way it was reported, first by the Associated Press: “The Senate has handed a stinging defeat to the new Bush administration. It’s approved a budget that would reduce the president’s 10-year $1.6 trillion tax cut by about 25 percent. The vote was 65 to 35.” Reuters said, “In a show of force by Democrats, the evenly divided Senate Friday passed a budget outline for $1.2 trillion in tax cuts over 10 years, well below President Bush’s goal.” Were you defeated? VICE PRES. CHENEY: No, I don’t think so. Remember, where the Democrats were a year ago. They didn’t want any tax cut at all. And then they went to $250 billion. And then by Election Day, they raised it to $500 billion. After the election, it was $800 billion from Tom Daschle. And in January, they got up to about $900 billion. What’s finally emerged from the Senate House, $1.2 trillion. We have, through the House—our budget resolution passed virtually intact. The tax cut legislation already passed through the House and will now go to conference and we’ll end up with a tax cut fairly close to what the president originally asked for. And the only reason we got there is because he hung tough. And in the face of a lot of advice from pundits and commentators, and criticism from the other side, he, in fact, has gone out, developed a good package, campaigned across the breadth of the country on up, and now got most of it enacted by the Congress. So we will end up with the most significant tax cut in a generation for the American taxpayer, and that’s what’s important. MR. RUSSERT: Would you accept 1.2 if that’s the final number? VICE PRES. CHENEY: It’ll be more than 1.2. MR. RUSSERT: But you’d take 1.2 and proclaim victory. VICE PRES. CHENEY: I’m convinced it’ll be more than 1.2. And with all due respect, Tim, you haven’t got any votes in the Senate. You’re not the guy we should negotiate with. MR. RUSSERT: And you have one if there’s a tie... VICE PRES. CHENEY: And I have one if there’s a tie. MR. RUSSERT: ...as we’ve learned this week. VICE PRES. CHENEY: I did get to vote twice this week. I earned my pay. MR. RUSSERT: In order to afford the tax cut, Democrats are saying you’re going to have to limit growth in very important areas or even cut certain programs. This is how The New York Times reported it, Bush Budget Would Cut 3 Programs to Aid Children: “As part of his budget, President Bush intends next month to propose cuts in programs to provide child care, to prevent child abuse and to train doctors at children’s hospitals, administration officials said today. State officials contend that stable child care for low-income families had been a major ingredient of successful programs to move people from welfare to work. ...About 900,000 children are victims of abuse or neglect each year, federal data show, based on reports of cases investigated and confirmed by the states. ...The budget documents shed that Mr. Bush is planning to eliminate all the money, $20 million, that Congress provided for an ‘early learning fund’ to improve the quality of child care and education for children younger than 5.” What happened to no child left behind? VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, you’ve got to look at — with all due respect, The New York Times isn’t known for being friendly towards the administration priorities. We’ve got a lot of good priorities in there, significant increases in education funding, a lot of money in there for right to read for youngsters. So there’s significant increase in education funding. The biggest increases in the budget in percentage terms are in the Department of Education. A lot of the criticism that goes down is of programs that, for one reason or another, we’ve looked at and aren’t working, for example, or the money is not being used effectively. And we’ve gone in and tried to peel out the ineffective programs and fund the ones that we think will work. MR. RUSSERT: That education program, that’s a Ted Stevens, a Republican from Alaska, program that hasn’t even been tried yet. VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, Ted’s chairman of the Appropriations Committee. I’m sure we’ll hear from him on that subject. But it was the judgment of our folks at O.M.B. that, in fact, this program was ineffective and that we could take the funds out of there and spend it more effectively on behalf of children. MR. RUSSERT: Here’s another headline, Bush Budget on Health Care Would Cut Aid to Uninsured: “President Bush’s budget will propose deep cuts in a variety of health programs for people without health insurance, administration officials said today. Budget documents from the Department of Health and Human Services show that these programs, providing ‘health care access to the uninsured,’ would be reduced 86 percent, to $20 million, from $140 million in the current fiscal year.” VICE PRES. CHENEY: Now, this is a $140 million program, Tim, and the president has put forward in his package a tax credit to cover insurance for the uninsured of several billion dollars over the next few years. In other words, we’ve got a very specific proposal going forward with respect to providing coverage for the uninsured that is far bigger and have much broader effect than the program here. MR. RUSSERT: There was a vote to reduce the size of the tax cut and have money set aside for a prescription drug program for the elderly. You were involved in that and voted against it. Why? VICE PRES. CHENEY: In terms of — is this one of the tie votes? I’m sorry. I’m not — I cast two votes up there and we were involved in a lot of them. I don’t remember all of the votes. Basically what happens on the budget resolution is this sets overall ceilings. And what we did during the course of the budget resolution is to establish, for example, what the overall level of tax reduction ought to be and what the level of spending ought to be in other areas. But before any of that actually becomes law, it’s got to go back to the individual committees and they’ve got to go back to legislation. So whether or not the money that would go for a tax reduction would actually be spent for something else, that legislation up there this week didn’t do anything other than set broad ceilings. The actual authorizing legislation for that will have to come out of the committees as part of the reconciliation. MR. RUSSERT: Even your fellow Republicans are saying, “You cannot have the tax cut of the magnitude you’re talking about. Keep your commitment to increase defense spending, keep your commitment for prescription drugs and still limit spending at 4 percent.” VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well... MR. RUSSERT: Pete Domenici says it can’t happen. VICE PRES. CHENEY: No, I think it can happen, and if you look at the numbers, my guess is that we’re going to find that there’s probably more room in the budget even than we estimated, and we’ve got very conservative estimates that we based our forecast on. The president’s budget does, in fact, do all of those things. It pays down debt as fast as that debt comes due over the course of the next 10 years and also at the same time sets aside a significant contingency of several hundred million dollars to deal with these problems. Now, the Senate has significantly increased the spending ceilings in the discretionary area, but none of that becomes law until the appropriations bills get signed by the president, so we’ve got some opportunities there as well, too, to restrain the amount of spending in other areas that the Congress has voted for. MR. RUSSERT: AIDS in Africa — 13 million Africans have died of AIDS, 4 million children. Twenty-five more million have contracted the HIV virus. The life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa is approaching age 30. Senator Frist has taken to the Senate floor, saying “This is the worst health crisis facing the world since the bubonic plague 600 years ago in Europe. We need money, and we need money now—$200 billion, we need—$200 million, we need $500 million more next year.” Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard says that the United States has to come up with $1 billion a year for the next three years in order to buy drugs, to save, in effect, Africa. Will we do that? VICE PRES. CHENEY: I think we’re going to have a major initiative in this area. President Bush has talked with General Powell specifically about the AIDS efforts. General Powell is now working with Tommy Thompson over at HHS to put together a package. It’s not just a question of buying drugs. There are a lot of other issues involved. I mean, there’s a whole question of prevention and education that ultimately is going to be more important even than providing drugs for those who are already infected. And it is an area of great concern. The president agrees wholeheartedly this is a terrible tragedy for mankind, and the numbers are, as you suggest, when you think about literally millions and millions of people whose lives are now at risk because of the AIDS virus, we clearly have an obligation to help for humanitarian reasons, and we will. MR. RUSSERT: Will you support Senator Frist’s numbers, $200 million each year for five years? VICE PRES. CHENEY: I haven’t looked specifically at his proposal, but the administration will be very actively involved in this effort and we will support an initiative. MR. RUSSERT: Colin Powell says this is national security issue for the United States. Do you agree? VICE PRES. CHENEY: I think he’s right. Yeah. MR. RUSSERT: Let me turn to the environment, an important subject to you and to our country. This is a baseball card — and I’ll put it on the screen — given out the other night at the Milwaukee Brewers game: “George W. Bush for the Washington Fatcats, pitcher, rookie of the year. Who is George W. Bush pitching for, the people or the polluters?” And they refer to the following. This is an article in The Washington Post: “Democrats See Environment as a Bush Liability. In the past nine days, Bush renounced a campaign promise to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by power plants, rescinded a strict new standard for arsenic levels in drinking water, suspended new cleanup requirements for mining companies, and threatened to challenge a logging ban on 60 million acres of national forest.” Why would the president break his word on carbon dioxide ban and rescind a Clinton measure to reduce the level of arsenic in drinking water? VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, Tim, I don’t know how much time we’ve got left on this show, but I want a shot at this. On the Kyoto Treaty—this was the issue of carbon dioxide—that was dead before we arrived in Washington. All the president did was speak the truth about it. The fact is, Bill Clinton negotiated it, but then would not submit it to the Senate, because he knew it would be defeated. The Senate voted 95-to-nothing against the provisions of the Kyoto Treaty, the propositions embodied there, including a lot of the Democrats who are now criticizing us, actually voted against the measure themselves. The treaty wouldn’t go into effect until 55 nations had ratified it, and only one has ratified it to date, Romania. So Kyoto is already dead. We do care about global warming. It’s important that we move forward on that. The president set up a Cabinet committee dealing with that. We’ve had two sessions already. We’re reviewing all the evidence and all the science on it, and we will have a good, solid aggressive program to deal with the questions surrounding gas house emissions. But the fact is, if we go forward, you look at the arsenic deal, this was in one of the last minute regulations dumped out by the Clinton administration, along with pardons and other things that Bill Clinton dumped at the last minute. It takes the standard on arsenic from 50 parts per billion down to 10 parts per billion. The problem with that is that it’s not clear that science justifies that, and if you have a ceiling that’s too low, that can’t be justified, a lot of your small communities out there simply won’t comply with it, and a lot of them don’t have the money to comply with it. So then what happens is people go out and get their own sources of water. They’ll go out and drill their own wells, for example. And lots of times, they’ll end up with arsenic in the water that’s two or three times what the old standard ought to be. If it’s totally unrealistic, we’re going to see... MR. RUSSERT: Well, the new standard’s consistent with what Europe has adopted and what the World Health Organization has adopted. VICE PRES. CHENEY: No. But what we’ve done—and Christie Todd Whitman’ll go back and review this and look at the evidence and see whether or not, in fact, this is the right way for us to go. But you have to look at the practical consequences of some of these regulations, and some of them don’t make sense. The roadless area deal—they issued an order at the last minute that some 56 million acres in the West, public lands, and said there’ll be no roads on them. That, in effect, shuts down all kinds of activities that up till now have been perfectly legitimate in those areas. If you’re running cattle on the public lands or your timbering on the public lands, you have to have access to them. Road are important. What they did was use this as a back-door approach, again at the very last minute, to make decisions without consulting the local folks, without dealing with the governors and the county commissioners and the legislatures and all... MR. RUSSERT: Were they trying to box you in? VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I’m sure they probably were. But just because it generates a sexy headline, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t deserve serious treatment as a policy matter. And that’s the way it’ll be treated. MR. RUSSERT: You talk about expanding drilling in the Arctic Wild Refuge. Eight Republican senators, including Bob Smith, conservative Republican, chairman of the Environment Public Works Committee, are now opposed to it and said, “It’s dead.” Is it dead? VICE PRES. CHENEY: No, I don’t think it’s dead at all. Key fact to get across, the ANWAR — the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—19 million acres, roughly the size of South Carolina. The amount of land that needs to be disturbed on the surface to develop that resource, 2,000 acres, roughly half the size of Dulles Airport. The notion that somehow developing the resources in ANWAR requires some sort of vast despoiling of the environment up there is just garbage. It’s not true. MR. RUSSERT: But you don’t have the Republican chairman on your side. John Kerry says that he’ll filibuster. VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, we have to explain to the senators that we do, in fact, have to go forward in an environmentally sound fashion and develop our energy resources. Or we’re going to have rolling blackouts throughout the entire country. MR. RUSSERT: Speaking of rolling blackouts... VICE PRES. CHENEY: It’s important to deal with those issues, Tim. MR. RUSSERT: ...in California, the Democrats said yesterday the Bush administration is guilty of inaction and excuses and are going to hold you responsible for the rolling blackouts across California. VICE PRES. CHENEY: Let’s see, who’s in charge out in California now? Is it Gray Davis who recently said that California’s problem is basically of its own making. Who is in charge at the federal level for... MR. RUSSERT: With the Republican Legislature. VICE PRES. CHENEY: ...the last eight years? MR. RUSSERT: So it’s a California problem? VICE PRES. CHENEY: No, it’s not. We’ve, in fact, responded very aggressively to Governor Davis’ request. We’ve approved virtually every request he’s made in terms of speeding up the permitting process so they can get the permits they need. We have dealt as effectively as possible, much more effectively than the Clinton administration ever did. Separate and apart from that, of course, the president is the first one in a long time to put together a task force, which I chair now, to develop a national energy policy so that we can deal with these kinds of problems in the future. But for the Democrats to be making noises that somehow we’ve been in office now 10 weeks and the shortage of power in California is something we caused is just silly. MR. RUSSERT: Nuclear power. Twenty percent of our energy is now obtained from nuclear power. VICE PRES. CHENEY: Twenty percent of our electricity. MR. RUSSERT: Electricity... VICE PRES. CHENEY: Right. MR. RUSSERT: ...excuse me. Would you like to see that go up to 50 percent, 60 percent, 70 percent, 80 percent? VICE PRES. CHENEY: I would like to see it go up because I think it’s one of the ways to deal with this whole question of global warming, of greenhouse emissions. That if you go with nuclear power, you don’t have any carbon dioxide emissions. Now, we also know that the track record is, with respect to nuclear power plants, that they, in fact, can be operated very safely. It’s one of the safest industries around. MR. RUSSERT: What do you do with the nuclear waste? VICE PRES. CHENEY: There are ways to deal with the nuclear waste. Right now, it’s being stored on site. But that’s one of the major issues we’ll have to address in our report. MR. RUSSERT: Would you be willing to put it in Wyoming or Texas? VICE PRES. CHENEY: It’ll have to be put someplace. There have been a lot of studies done. This was an issue, frankly, that we dealt with when I was a freshman congressman 20 years ago, and it’s never been resolved. There have been a number of proposals out there, there’s been a lot of work done, but it’s not yet been resolved. If we’re going to go forward with nuclear power, we need to find a way to resolve it. MR. RUSSERT: Will we have a whole new program of developing nuclear power sponsored by the Bush administration. VICE PRES. CHENEY: The president hasn’t made a decision yet, but certainly his instructions to me are that this is one of the areas he wants us to look at in our task force. My views are that this is an important area for us. We need the bill, Tim; 65 new power plants a year in this country for the next 20 years at a minimum, maybe 90 plants a year. My own view is that some of those ought to be nuclear. And if they are, that that’s the environmentally sound way to go. MR. RUSSERT: Will the president sign the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill in its current form? VICE PRES. CHENEY: He said he would like to sign a campaign finance reform bill. He hasn’t seen yet what will emerge from the Congress. We’ve seen what the Senate’s done. He sent up his principles, his views. And the House has got to work... MR. RUSSERT: Do you like the Senate bill? VICE PRES. CHENEY: The president would like to be able to sign a campaign finance bill, but... MR. RUSSERT: You have no reservations about the Senate bill? VICE PRES. CHENEY: I do. And there are some other provisions that we’d like to see in there, but the process isn’t complete yet. We’ve got to see what ultimately emerges. And the president’s made it clear that the Congress should not assume he’s going to veto a bill. He’d like to sign a good bill. MR. RUSSERT: Florida, Florida, Florida. Here’s the headline: Newspaper’s Recount Shows Bush Prevailed In Florida Vote. VICE PRES. CHENEY: Gee, we won again, huh? MR. RUSSERT: Yeah. When you count all the dimples and hanging chads, Bush’s margin grows. Ironically, when you do what the Republicans wanted to do, simply count the ballots that had been clearly punched out, Al Gore ahead by three votes. VICE PRES. CHENEY: I see. Well, I don’t know. Do you suppose eight years now from, Tim, we’re still going to be talking about the Florida recount of 2000? MR. RUSSERT: Do you think? VICE PRES. CHENEY: I hope not. I think it’s been resolved. I think, you know, we won Election Night. We won the recounts. We won the manual recounts. Ultimately, of course, the Supreme Court had to make a decision. Now, all of these efforts under way to go back and sort of pray over the ballots one more time seem to produce the same result we got on Election Night. So I think the matter’s resolved, and we ought to get on with our business. MR. RUSSERT: The Republican Party platform said that Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House should be re-opened. Do you agree? VICE PRES. CHENEY: There are serious security questions relating to that issue. And the president’s agreed to take a look at it and review it, but it’s not an easy call. In fact, there are legitimate security concerns here that the Secret Service has. And we have to evaluate those as well as the desire of a lot of people to want to re-open it. MR. RUSSERT: When will there be a decision made? VICE PRES. CHENEY: I don’t know. If a time table’s been established, I’m not aware of it. MR. RUSSERT: About a month ago, you went into the hospital for a procedure for some blockage. How do you feel? VICE PRES. CHENEY: Good. MR. RUSSERT: Any need for any future procedures? VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, there may well be at some point. I can’t predict that. But, no, I feel good. I’ve been back with my doctors and done a checkup. They keep close tabs on me. I’ve actually got a doctor assigned to me full time, because of my role as vice president, a military doc. So the care’s about as good as it’s humanly possible to get. I feel good. I’m behaving myself, eating appropriately, losing weight. MR. RUSSERT: You’ve lost weight. VICE PRES. CHENEY: I have lost weight. And... MR. RUSSERT: Is Dick Cheney a green? Environmentalist green? VICE PRES. CHENEY: A green? A green? Well, I think I am a pretty good environmentalist. Now, the Sierra Club might not agree with that. One of the things I’m proudest of, Tim, when I was in Congress was passing legislation to put nearly a million acres in the... MR. RUSSERT: No. But you’re eating a lot of greens? VICE PRES. CHENEY: And I’m eating a lot of greens. MR. RUSSERT: You’re one of the few men in 2001 who was proud of knowing his butcher. Have you ended your relationship with your butcher? VICE PRES. CHENEY: Unfortunately, I have. No big juicy steaks. MR. RUSSERT: Mr. Vice President, we thank you for joining us. And we do hope that those men and women in China get home soon. VICE PRES. CHENEY: Absolutely. MR. RUSSERT: Thanks very much. Coming next, is China an enemy or an ally, a partner or a competitor? Joining us, two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Republican Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama and Democratic Senator John Edwards of North Carolina. They are next, right here on MEET THE PRESS. (Announcements) MR. RUSSERT: What should we do about China? Senators Richard Shelby and John Edwards after this very brief station break. (Announcements) MR. RUSSERT: And we are back. Senator Shelby, you are the chairman of the Intelligence Committee. Let me start with you. What does China risk the longer they hold onto our American air crew? SEN. RICHARD SHELBY, (R-AL): They risk a lot. They risk, first, goodwill. They risk a lot of mistrust with the American people, with the Congress. I think, myself, that we have to deal realistically with China, but China has nothing to gain, that I see, with this impasse. MR. RUSSERT: You have been a supporter of the most favored nation trade status with China. Henry Hyde, a fellow Republican, has voted for it in the past. He said yesterday, based on what is happening now, when that comes before Congress in June, he is inclined to vote against it and against China. How do you feel? SEN. SHELBY: Well, I would have to reconsider my situation. I have—from the beginning, I’ve been a big proponent of normal trade relations with China. I’ve been to China a number of times. I believe it’s important to engage China, but we’ve got to engage them realistically. And this is just not good business for China; it’s not good for us, it’s not good for them. And it’s inexplicable to me that this has lasted this long. MR. RUSSERT: Senator Edwards, could this damage trade relations with China, and would you reconsider your support? SEN. JOHN EDWARDS, (D-NC): Tim, China has a great deal at risk in this situation. That’s the reality. They have a great deal to gain from a positive relationship with the United States. And whether it’s trade, whether it’s the Olympics, whether it’s American investment in China. I mean, there’s a lot at stake for China. And I’m sure during the course of these negotiations our negotiators are making that clear to them. MR. RUSSERT: Should we apologize? SEN. EDWARDS: No. I think all of the evidence that we have available to us now indicates that we did nothing wrong. We were in international airspace. There was an accident. I think it’s the reasonable and thoughtful thing to do to investigate this accident and determine how it occurred and try to do what we can to make sure it doesn’t happen again. But based on the evidence we have right now, there’s no indication that we did anything wrong. MR. RUSSERT: Should we apologize? SEN. SHELBY: No. Absolutely not. But I believe that the administration, the secretary of State, Colin Powell, and the president have issued statements of regret. They regret that happened. They regret the loss of life. They regret the whole incident. But apology goes much farther than that and we shouldn’t do that. MR. RUSSERT: You are a Republican, but you’re also a political realist. Congress is in recess for about two weeks. How long does this administration have to get those Americans back before congresspeople begin taking to the floor and begin to criticize the administration? SEN. SHELBY: I’d say until we get back. Two weeks from now, Tim, a lot of the people in the House and the Senate will be going home. You showed the poll a few minutes ago of the concern by the American people, the hardening of the American people’s attitude toward China. I don’t think that’s good for our relationship with China. I wish that we could resolve this in the next 14 or 48 hours. Every hour, every day, every week this goes on does not bode well for a U.S.-Chinese relationship. MR. RUSSERT: Senator Edwards, as a Democrat, you know very well what happened to Jimmy Carter with his hostage crisis in Iran. How long do you think the administration has before Democrats start criticizing the president? SEN. EDWARDS: Tim, we support the president. I think it’s very important for the Chinese people to understand that we’re unified on this. I think the administration’s had a measured response to this situation. They’re focused on the most important thing, which is getting our servicemen and -women home safely while always keeping an eye on our long-term relationship with China. So I think what’s happening so far has made a great deal of sense, and we stand with the president on this. MR. RUSSERT: Does President Bush have any choice now but to sell those destroyers to Taiwan with the Aegis maintenance and radar equipment? SEN. EDWARDS: Well, the administration has said that these are independent issues, and I think the reality is we have a legal and moral obligation to Taiwan. There’ll be negotiations going on over the course of the next few weeks, as the vice president indicated, and I think they’ll make a judgment through that negotiation process about what we ought to do, which is exactly what they should do. MR. RUSSERT: Would you support such a transfer of equipment? SEN. EDWARDS: I think it depends entirely on the circumstances and the results of the negotiations. MR. RUSSERT: Senator Shelby? SEN. SHELBY: I agree with Senator Edwards. It does depend on the circumstances, but I believe every people, every group of people have a right to defend themselves. Vice President Cheney just a few minutes ago reiterated our position that we want any reunification of Taiwan and China to be done through peaceful means, not by force. MR. RUSSERT: Do you think the American people, however, if confronted with a Chinese attack on Taiwan, would consider it an attack on the United States and come to the defense of Taiwan? SEN. SHELBY: I don’t know how that would play out. That would be a decision that would have to be made first by the president and the secretary of Defense and then later, the Congress and whatever voices that came with it, but that’s supposition today. Let’s hope that never happens. MR. RUSSERT: Senator Edwards, the surveillance flights that were involved off the coast of China, how important are they? And are they worth the risk? Maybe we should rely on satellites and not put our crewmen at risk by going so close to the shores of China. SEN. EDWARDS: No, I think the truth of the matter is, Tim, that this is a normal thing that we do. It’s important to our intelligence gathering apparatus, and it’s something we do on a regular basis. The Chinese know we did it—know we do it. We were in international air space. We have a right to be there. They also have a right to monitor us. And I think that what we’ve been doing makes sense, and I think we should continue to do it. MR. RUSSERT: The Chinese said we must stop any future flights. SEN. EDWARDS: This is international air space. We have a legal right to be there, and I don’t think we should respond to those kind of demands. MR. RUSSERT: Senator Shelby? SEN. SHELBY: I totally agree with that. I hope we will not stop these flights. They are important. The word, I think... MR. RUSSERT: Are they worth the risk? SEN. SHELBY: I believe they’re worth the risk, and there shouldn’t be a real risk as long as we’re in international air space and we try hard to be there, and I believe we were there the other day. MR. RUSSERT: If the Chinese insist on demanding an apology, days go by, weeks go by, what should we say to them? Should we say, “We’ll oppose the Olympics for you in 2008? We’ll suspend trade would you? We’ll recall our ambassador?” How high do we ratchet this up? SEN. SHELBY: Well, I think that will first have to come from the administration. Right now, I believe that the president and his administration has handled this very well, but we need to bring it to a conclusion, to closure, and the president’s talked about this. We all support the president. We want this to—our 24 people to come home, come home peacefully. And we want to do trade with China, but not at any price. MR. RUSSERT: How patient should we be, Senator Edwards? Should we start putting down markers that if they’re not out in one week or two weeks, we are going to recall our ambassador, we are going to oppose the Olympics going to Beijing in 2008 and let the Chinese know there’s a price to pay for their delay? SEN. EDWARDS: Well, there is a price to pay. I mean, they have a great deal at stake here, and they — and I think they know that. MR. RUSSERT: Well, what is it? So far they haven’t seemed to recognize recognized it. SEN. EDWARDS: Well, I think they do recognize it. I think the reality is there’s some internal Chinese politics going on that’s a play here. But the bottom line is, I think it’s a mistake for us to set arbitrary deadlines, and we ought to support the administration in the negotiation process. It’s too sensitive a situation right now, Tim, for us to say that it needs to be Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday of this week, in the next two weeks. I think the administration will make a judgment based upon the progress of the negotiations. Remember, we’re not in that room. We don’t know how close they are to resolution. MR. RUSSERT: Bill Clinton said China was a partner, not a competitor. George Bush says they’re a competitor, not a partner. Where does John Edwards come down? SEN. EDWARDS: I think that China’s a competitor, and I think that we need to do our best to have a positive relationship with them. But everything we do with China, Tim, we need to do with our eyes wide open. They do things we don’t agree with. Their record on human rights, their proliferation activities—I mean, there are lots of things that—what they have been doing with our servicemen and women, in this case, by keeping them illegally. These are not good things and we don’t approve of them. So we always have to recognize that any dealings we have with China have to be conducted with our eyes completely wide open. MR. RUSSERT: Senator Shelby, as the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, they’ll hear about your comments this morning in Beijing. What loud message, soft message, deliberate message, would you want to send the Chinese government this morning? SEN. SHELBY: What I would say to them this morning is try to bring this to a resolution through diplomatic channels as the administration, as the Chinese have been trying to do and ratchet down the emotion on our side and their side, because if it gets out of hand, we’ve got problems and so do they. One thing that we have to remember, China is our competitor. We want them to be our competitor, but they could be an adversary someday. The incidents that we’re going through right now or have been, this incident, is probably one of many for the future. We have to look at China realistically. A lot of people haven’t. MR. RUSSERT: They risk being portrayed or believed to be an enemy by the American people with this kind of behavior. SEN. SHELBY: A lot of mistrust. Absolutely. And I think it’s not in China’s interest and it’s not in our interest. And that’s why we need desperately to solve this, and so do they, through diplomatic channels. MR. RUSSERT: Senator Edwards, let me turn to a domestic issue: The George Bush tax cut. He proposed $1.6 trillion; $1.2 trillion was supported by the Senate. Sixty-five senators voted for it, 15 Democrats, including you. SEN. EDWARDS: Yes. MR. RUSSERT: Why, as a Democrat, would you support a $1.2 trillion tax cut when 35 other Democrats all said, “That is way too big. We need the money for education, the environment and health care”? SEN. EDWARDS: Well, I’ve said all along, Tim, that I support a tax cut. And what I wanted to say with this vote is that we want to work with the administration to help solve the country’s problems and to take advantage of the opportunities that we have. But the one thing that happened this week is the president got a real dose of reality. He saw some very important things. Number one, while we care about tone, tone is not substance. We care about civility, which the president’s talked about a great deal. But civility does not mean surrender. And we Democrats are not going to surrender our core ideals, including things like fiscal responsibility. MR. RUSSERT: Al Gore campaigned on a platform of a $500 billion tax cut. This is almost triple that. Senator Lieberman, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, all potential presidential candidates in 2004, voted against it, saying it was too big. Why did John Edwards, who some say may be seeking the presidency, choose to ally himself with a number pretty close to George Bush’s? SEN. EDWARDS: Well, actually it’s not pretty close to George Bush’s. I think that there are some fundamental principles that have to be met. First of all, recognizing that we’re just starting this process. We have to be able to pay down the debt. The size of the tax cut needs to be sensible. We need to make sure that Medicare and Social Security are protected. And the tax cut needs to be fair and equitable. So many of those things are yet unresolved, Tim, as you well know. As we go through this process, we will determine whether those various fundamental principles are, in fact, met. MR. RUSSERT: So you can afford a $1.2 trillion, $1.3 trillion tax cut and still do all the things in health-care and education and the environment that we’ve talked about? SEN. EDWARDS: I think it depends ultimately on the composition of the tax cut. We heard the vice president say earlier that he expects the tax cut to go up. That’s not a good thing. I think we’re at the upper limit of where this tax cut ought to be. But there are all these other issues, Tim, that are critically important. Is it going to include the marriage penalty? Is it going to include state tax relief? Who’s going to get the benefits of the tax cut? Is it going to be fair and equitable to the American people? And is Medicare and Social Security protected? I mean, these are very, very important issues that have not yet been determined. MR. RUSSERT: Senator Shelby, $1.2 trillion. Is that where it’s going to stay or is it going to go up to $1.6 trillion? SEN. SHELBY: I believe it will go up some. I don’t know if it’ll go to $1.6 trillion, but we will go into a conference with the House. I agree with Vice President Cheney. This was a Bush victory. I believe we’ll do better in conference and ultimately the Senate will put more money into a tax cut. MR. RUSSERT: As I mentioned to the vice president, eight Republicans have come out against the increased drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts has pledged a filibuster. People on the Senate side are saying, “This is dead.” Do you agree? SEN. SHELBY: I don’t believe it’s dead. I think there’s—those are serious threats, you know, when you have eight Republicans come out, but this is only a small part of Alaska. And if it has the promise that we think it has, as far as oil reserves there, I think we ought to drill and we ought to do it and we ought to protect the environment. I think we can do it all. MR. RUSSERT: Senator Edwards, is it dead? SEN. EDWARDS: Well, I don’t think we should drill in the ANWR. I think we do need a comprehensive environmental policy and energy policy. But let me say this, Tim, I do think we’re at a critical point in the president’s administration. I mean, he’s going to have to decide whether he wants to be a force for progress or to be an obstacle to progress. An example is the bill that Senator McCain and I have worked on for HMO reform, Patients Bill of Rights. I mean, our bill is supported by every health-care group in America and every consumer group in America. The only people who oppose it are the HMOs, the big HMOs. So the president’s going to have to decide, does he stand with the patients and the doctors and the American people, or does he stand with the big HMOs? I mean, these are very important questions that really affect people’s day to day lives. MR. RUSSERT: What did you think of Vice President Cheney’s comments about increasing nuclear power in the United States? SEN. EDWARDS: Well, I think that’s an option that should be on the table. I mean, we have to look at this thing comprehensively. There are lots of issues—lots of options that ought to be considered. And I think one of them is nuclear power. MR. RUSSERT: Nuclear power? SEN. SHELBY: Nuclear power’s a new member of the Energy Committee. I went on that committee because I believe this country needs desperately a comprehensive energy policy that Senator Edwards alluded to. We’ve got to have it. We’ve got to look at everything. MR. RUSSERT: Senator Edwards, my son was rooting against the Duke Blue Devils. SEN. EDWARDS: I knew this was coming. MR. RUSSERT: So he has to present this to you as part of his punishment against his co-venter. Now, are you for the Tarheels of North Carolina or for the Blue Devils of Duke? SEN. EDWARDS: Well, listen, Tim, I’m for any team from North Carolina that’s playing in the national championship, but... MR. RUSSERT: Well, I imagine. But who did you prefer in that game? SEN. EDWARDS: I’m not touching that one with a 10-foot pole. MR. RUSSERT: Congratulations to Duke and your home state of North Carolina. SEN. EDWARDS: Thank you very much. SEN. SHELBY: I’m from Alabama, but I was for Duke. MR. RUSSERT: Senator Shelby, Senator Edwards, thanks very much. SEN. SHELBY: Thank you. SEN. EDWARDS: Thanks. MR. RUSSERT: We’ll be right back after this. (Announcements) MR. RUSSERT: Start your day tomorrow on “Today” with Katie and Matt, then the “NBC Nightly News” with Tom Brokaw. That’s all for today. We’ll be back next week. If it’s Sunday, it’s MEET THE PRESS. ***************************************************************** 4 Duma asked to pass Bill on N-waste import The Indian Express: Top stories: Full story April 9, 2001 Moscow, April 8: A GROUP of top Russian scientists have asked the State Duma, the Lower House of Parliament, to pass the Bill for importing nuclear waste from western countries. Duma has already passed the Bill in first of the three readings, but unexpectedly removed it from the agenda of debate over second reading amid raging controversy, over the planned import of nuclear waste. ‘‘We are aware that it’s psychologically difficult for the country that has gone through the Chernobyl tragedy to give go-ahead to the imports of spent nuclear fuel from abroad even for temporary storing and recycling. But we are convinced that such a decision must be made without delay,’’ the scientists said. The group also included academicians Nikolai Laverov, Vladimir Fortov, Boris Myasoyedov, Yuri Zolotov, Oleg Favorsky and Robert Nigamatulin. The appeal comes after newly-appointed Atomic Energy Ministry Alexander Rumyantsev expressed support last week to the planned import of nuclear waste for reprocessing that cost the job of his predecessor Yevgeny Adamov. In his interview to the daily newspaper Izvestia, he said: ‘‘It will showcase Russia’s technological potential and pave the way for new projects. ‘‘If we want to sell this product to other countries, we must have a law that allows us to take back spent fuel rods,’’ Rumyantsev added. Adamov had supported the plan, enabling Russia to earn about $20 billion through import of 20,000 tonnes of nuclear waste. Environmentalist groups have opposed the project, saying it will have ‘‘grave consequences’’ for the environmental safety of the country. (Reuters) 2001: Indian Express Newspapers ***************************************************************** 5 Rumyantsev Backs Plan to Import Nuclear Fuel Apr. 9, 2001. Page 5 The Associated Press Newly appointed Nuclear Power Minister Alexander Rumyantsev spoke in support of a widely criticized plan to import spent nuclear fuel for reprocessing that helped cost the job of his predecessor, according to a recently published interview. "It will showcase Russia's technological potential and pave the way for new projects," Rumyantsev, who was appointed nuclear power minister late last month, was quoted by Izvestia on Friday as saying. He also said a law permitting the imports of nuclear material is essential for Russia's efforts to export nuclear fuel. "If we want to sell this product to other countries, we must have a law that allows us to take back spent fuel rods." The plan foresees importing about 20,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel over 20 years to Russia in special, armored train cars for reprocessing and long term storage. Rumyantsev's predecessor, Yevgeny Adamov, strongly advocated the project, saying that Russia stands to earn $20 billion. He promised to spend $7 billion of the proceeds to clean up radiation spills in Russia and upgrade safety at existing reactors. But environmentalists and other critics of the plan warned that it would turn Russia into a dumping ground for nuclear waste and accused Adamov of pursuing his own business interests in the deal. Adamov has denied the allegations. Critics also said that there would be no money left to clean up the environment after funds are spent to build and maintain storage facilities. Rumyantsev said the financial aspect of the plan needs more work. He also sought to allay critics' concerns that the ministry earnings from the deal could be misspent, saying that special panels would "track down every single dollar" of the proceeds. The State Duma approved the bill in the first of three readings last December. *© 2001 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may ***************************************************************** 6 Guarding Russia's nukes *Monday, April 9, 2001* UNTIL the incident with China took over the headlines, we heard a lot of high-level thunder between the United States and Russia over espionage and expulsions. And with old-fashioned Cold Warriors now in power on both sides, there is bound to be several of these blasts from the past in the next few years. But behind the gamesmanship of power politics lurks some serious business being done by both sides on the crucial issue of nuclear proliferation. For more than 10 years, Washington and Moscow have worked in partnership to safeguard Russia's nuclear materials. This has been a vital effort during a time of unprecedented social chaos and economic breakdown in the former Soviet Union. American and Russian officials have cooperated closely to ensure that the former Soviet nuclear arsenal -- and the expertise of its atomic scientists -- don't fall into the wrong hands. The Bush administration recently announced that it is launching a "comprehensive review" of these programs, with an eye to their cost-effectiveness. This is understandable. The United States has been spending about $760 million a year on the safeguarding effort. Somewhat troubling, however, is that the administration has proposed significant cuts in some of the programs even before the review has started. This could suggest that the administration has already made up its mind. At least some of the review would also seem to duplicate the efforts of a blue-ribbon, bipartisan commission that already completed a study of the programs. That panel, led by former Sen. Howard Baker, R-Tenn., urged a substantial increase in funding, including economic aid to Russian nuclear scientists. That aid has been cut by more than two-thirds in Mr. Bush's budget. The panel's report said the risk of Russian nuclear materials and expertise being obtained by terrorists or rogue states is still "significant and real." This is especially true in a devastated Russian economy where top nuclear scientists earn less than $50 a month. U.S. spending on the safeguard programs represents "a prudent investment in world security," the commission said. Certainly, the Bush administration should conduct its own review. But it should not be taking steps to cut the program before the study is done. It should also bear in mind that the effectiveness of such programs can't be measured in financial terms alone. Peace, security, and cooperation bring their own immeasurable rewards. LettersToTheEditor@northjersey.com. Copyright © 2001 North Jersey Media Group Inc. ***************************************************************** 7 California governor, utility trade blame [deseretnews.com] April 09, 2001 Deseret News wire reports LOS ANGELES — Gov. Gray Davis and Pacific Gas &Electric executives traded acrimonious barbs — but no solutions — as the state's largest utility headed into bankruptcy court claiming $9 billion in debts. On Sunday, Davis appeared on two nationally televised news programs to berate PG for awarding an estimated $50 million in bonuses and raises to about 6,000 midlevel managers and support staff on the eve of its filing for bankruptcy protection Friday. "Management at PG is just focused upon padding their own pockets, not in discharging their duty to serve their many customers in California," Davis said on ABC's "World News Tonight." Earlier, Davis had issued a statement saying PG "management is suffering from two afflictions: Denial and greed." In response, PG defended its employee bonus package and took a swipe at the governor. "Instead of focusing all his attention on solving the state's yearlong and ever-worsening energy crisis, the governor has launched a campaign-style attack on our company," a PG statement read. The rancor came at the start of a hectic week. A San Francisco bankruptcy judge was to hold PG's first bankruptcy hearing Monday or Tuesday to determine, among other priorities, which creditors will be paid and in what order. PG's bankruptcy filing also sent a shudder through corporate suites across the nation. Not only is the utility directly challenging the authority and power of regulators to set retail rates, but it is testing the reach of the federal bankruptcy judge overseeing a case unprecedented in its scope, industry experts and bankruptcy lawyers said. If the outcome of its case is that the utility can raise retail rates to cover its total energy costs — something it has not been able to do under California's flawed deregulation plan — it could tempt other utilities unhappy with how they are regulated to throw themselves at the mercy of a bankruptcy court. "I think this could have an enormous impact on other financially troubled utilities, here and in other states," said Howard Seife, head of the bankruptcy law practice at Chadbourne &Parke in New York. "If the commissions give them a hard time, then they have an option. They can file for bankruptcy and maybe get relief." But experts are divided about how much power Dennis Montali, the bankruptcy judge overseeing the case in San Francisco, can wield. First, there is little case history for Montali. Previous utility bankruptcies have dealt with different issues and paled in comparison with PG's troubles. The case is the largest investor-owned utility bankruptcy filing in history and the third-largest corporate bankruptcy ever. Second, industry experts say that any rate increases included in the utility's reorganization plan would have to be approved by the California Public Utilities Commission. David Wiggs, the former chairman of El Paso Electric in Texas, which filed for bankruptcy protection in 1992 and settled four years later, said he thought that the judge would not be able raise rates outright, "but he has a lot of room." El Paso had run up huge debts to pay for the construction of nuclear power plants, and the utility then wanted rate increases to pay off those investments. But during his company's bankruptcy proceedings, Wiggs said, lawyers argued constantly about what a rate increase actually was. Was a surcharge an increase? Could the judge approve a fee? "There were a lot of fights about what that meant," he said. But with Pacific Gas and Electric, the problem is not the result of debts caused by investments. Instead it needs cash just to pay for the everyday cost of power. "The tension then," Seife, the lawyer, said, "is, whose interest is paramount? The consumers' or the creditors'?" And that is where it gets tricky, said Steve Fleishman, a utility analyst at Merrill Lynch. "The first thing a judge does in a bankruptcy is match the revenue with the costs," Fleishman said. "That means he has to get the rates up and the costs down. But how he is going to do that no one knows." The judge, analysts say, has no authority over the fluctuating price of electricity charged by wholesale power sellers and marketers. Instead, Fleishman said, state officials will most likely put more pressure on Washington regulators to bring power generators and marketers, who have been chastised for overcharging the utilities and in some cases fined, in line. The judge will have to sort out which creditors get paid first. Most analysts think that the power generators will be first in line. But whether the money from any rate increases will be funneled to the state, which has been buying electricity on behalf of the troubled utilities, or to the utilities will be hotly debated in court. If the bankruptcy judge decides to side with utilities, that could jeopardize the state's already tenuous plan to issue as much as $14 billion in revenue bonds, which would be used to help cover the state's energy spending. The state's controller has warned that runaway costs are threatening the state's health. And the bankruptcy puts pressure on Southern California Edison, the state's second-largest utility, to follow the same route. Executives at Southern California Edison have said they will continue to negotiate with Gov. Gray Davis, but analysts questioned whether any deal would survive. Whatever the outcome, Pacific Gas and Electric will not be able to escape what it seems to be trying to avoid: a political solution. Davis and regulators will still play a role in resolving the broader energy crisis here despite critics who say they have failed miserably thus far. The judge, too, will have to negotiate over rate increases with the Public Utilities Commission, which will keep more than a watchful eye on the proceedings, when a plan is adopted. That is what happened at El Paso, said Wiggs, who, after four years of haggling, sat down with local politicians and the Texas Public Utilities Commission to work out a negotiated solution. "The only thing bankruptcy did was wear a lot of people down so they were more willing to make compromises," Wiggs said. "No one is going to like this," he said. "It is going to be expensive, and, in the end, you have to find a political solution anyway." (Pacific Gas and Electric has already paid its lawyers $1.5 million in connection with the bankruptcy filing, according to court documents filed Friday.) But that presents a challenge of its own. It is no secret to anyone involved in the negotiations that executives at Pacific Gas and Electric bristle at the mention of the utility commission. According to court records, the company's directors signed a resolution as early as Dec. 20, 2000, giving management the authority to file for bankruptcy. *Contributing: The Associated Press, New York Times News Service* © 2001 Deseret News Publishing Company ***************************************************************** 8 N-sludge may be heading to Utah [deseretnews.com] April 08, 2001 Sierra Club seeking to prevent delivery of up to 900 loads By Donna Kemp Spangler Deseret News staff writer As many as 900 tanker trucks laden with radioactive, lead-contaminated sludge may soon be making their way to a uranium mill in southeastern Utah, across I-70 and smack dab through a loophole in federal law that prevents any state regulation. International Uranium Corp. has petitioned the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission to "recycle" 17,750 tons of sludge from the Molycorp site in Mountain Pass, Calif. The company wants to extract small traces of uranium left over from five decades of bastnasite ore processing. The amount of uranium is so small — less than one-fifth of 1 percent — and the hazardous lead so great that environmentalists are crying foul. And state regulators are throwing up their hands in frustration. "We don't know what's in that stuff," said Moab resident Ken Sleight, with the Glen Canyon Group, a newly formed chapter of the Sierra Club. "It is amazing they can bring that stuff in our neighborhood without a public hearing." International Uranium has legally skirted state regulations on the disposal and transportation of such wastes under provisions in federal law that give the NRC, not the state, primacy in determining how the wastes are managed. The NRC has granted International Uranium's earlier requests to dispose of mill tailings, claiming "recycling" is exempt from state regulation. Utah regulators fought those earlier NRC decisions, and they lost. This time, the regulators are not openly opposing the International Uranium proposal, although they still have concerns. "We have learned there are times when it is appropriate to question amendment requests," said Bill Sinclair, director of the Utah Division of Radiation Control. "If we contested every one of them, we would be broke." The state's decision not to formally intervene has prompted the Sierra Club to petition the NRC for a hearing on the application. International Uranium officials say the controversy is much ado about nothing. The lead in the Molycorp sludge ponds is not any different than the lead left behind by the company's routine uranium ore processing, and that lead already fills its tailing piles. And those tailings piles are already tightly regulated by the NRC to meet health and safety standards, said William von Till, NRC project manager at the White Mesa Mill. He added that NRC and the Environmental Protection Agency are cooperating to make sure the transportation and storage of the materials are done "in such a way that human health and safety issues are not a concern." What has environmentalists riled up and state officials concerned is the sheer quantity of lead sulfide, a material that could be considered "hazardous" if disposed of in a waste dump but are not deemed hazardous by the NRC when radioactive materials are being recycled. One estimate placed the lead content at up to 12 percent, a figure the company disputes as way too high. The state has regulatory authority over hazardous wastes like lead but not when they are mixed with radioactive materials destined for recycling. That is the domain of the NRC and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, otherwise known as "RCRA." "I recognize clearly there are exemptions for recycling and other forms of reclamation, but in this particular context, when we are dealing with radioactive waste stream, the hazardous waste is not being recycled, and that's a concern," said Scott Anderson, manager of the Utah Division of Solid and Hazardous Waste. The state has long maintained that International Uranium is using the recycling provision in federal law to get around state regulation of waste disposal. The federal law says the wastes must be recycled primarily for their mineral content — uranium in the case of the materials bound for the Blanding mill. But the market price for uranium is next to nothing, and International Uranium is making its money not from the ore it extracts, but from the fees it gets for taking the tailings from cleanup sites around the country, state officials say. They call it a "sham disposal" because there is no economic incentive otherwise to process the uranium tailings. International Uranium takes issue with that characterization. "The intent of (federal law) is to encourage conservation and recovery of resources," said Michelle Rehmann, environmental manager for the Denver-based company. "We're reducing waste while recovering valuable resources," she added. Company President Ron Hochstein said the company is now looking at ways to extract the lead in the California sludge. The company assured Utahns the transportation of the waste on I-15, across I-70 and down U.S. 191 to Blanding is safe. The trucks' contents are all wrapped in heavy plastic — "like a burrito bag" — that prevent leakage or contamination, Rehmann said. Environmentalists are skeptical, but they know they face a daunting battle to stop the waste. The process is not set up to allow much public participation in NRC decisions. "The great irony of it all is that this is nasty stuff, but nobody can do anything about it but the NRC, and it never does anything right for the protection of the public," said Steve Erickson, an activist with the Citizen Education Project. *E-mail: donna@desnews.com* © 2001 Deseret News Publishing Company ***************************************************************** 9 I-20 waste shipments not a threat Material safe for transport, officials say ArlingtonNow - Home dallasnews.com - 04/07/2001 By PATRICK WASCOVICH / Arlington Morning News Truckloads of radioactive waste that will be shipped along Interstate 20 for decades to come will only contain low-grade hazardous materials, federal officials said Friday. Arlington and Grand Prairie officials said the announcement eases their concerns. "I was envisioning [nuclear reactor] fuel rods when I first heard about this," said Dr. Robert Cluck, an Arlington council member. The shipments will travel through his district. "Now that I've heard about what it is, I don't have the concern that I originally did." Grand Prairie's city manager also said he was relieved there will be no apparent danger when the planned 4,400 shipments travel through the area over the next 34 years. "We would assume that they would transport it carefully and safely," Tom Hart said. "But we still feel better hearing that it's low- grade waste." State officials have approved shipping low-grade nuclear waste from the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., said a project manager with the U.S. Department of Energy's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. The nuclear waste will be shipped to a new storage site 26 miles southeast of Carlsbad. "Workers at Savannah River have been walking past these drums for years," said Steve Zappe, pilot plant project manager. "The traditional worry or overstatement is, 'Good grief, I'm going to be nuked if I get near them.' That's not the case at all." The first nuclear waste shipment is tentatively scheduled to leave at noon May 8 and arrive by 3 a.m. May 10, he said. The travel plans include an overnight stop outside the Dallas-Fort Worth area in eastern Texas. To prepare for the shipments, New Mexico officials sent empty containers to the Savannah River site on Tuesday. The site is an underground storage facility that opened in the 1950s. The containers will be filled and hauled by trucks through South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and New Mexico. New Mexico officials approved the storage of the waste in solid formations of rock salt more than 2,100 feet below the earth's surface, Mr. Zappe said. Biodegradable materials such as plutonium-contaminated paper, cardboard, gloves and lab coats will be shipped west on I- 20 in sealed cylindrical, stainless steel containers, which are called Transuranic Package Transporter Model 2. "The shipments will be items of what the Department of Energy would say contains trace amounts of transuranic nuclides that are below an economic recovery level," Mr. Zappe said. "It's what is termed 'incidental contaminated materials.'" The I-20 route had been studied, surveyed and approved in a five-year process, said David Berry, a spokesman at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 6 office in Dallas. "Those routes are selected by the [U.S.] Nuclear Regulatory Commission," he said. "There's nothing of a regulatory scheme that is at issue. The waste is low-level materials contaminated over the years." "I feel confident that we have nothing to be afraid of," said Arlington Mayor Elzie Odom. "These will be constantly monitored. There is absolutely no threat at all to the citizens of Arlington or the traveling public." Each container will be loaded with 14 55-gallon drums of material configured in two stacks. Loaded, each double-walled stainless steel container can weigh nearly 9 tons. The trucks are designed to carry either a two- or three-drum load. Before being certified by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the cylindrical containers passed several tests. These included dropping them onto concrete from a height of 30 feet, exposing them to a temperature of 1,475 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes and dropping them more than 3 feet onto a steel spike. Council member Sheri Capehart, whose district includes part of the I-20 route, had suggested using rail to transport the shipments. Union Pacific Railroad has an east-west line in place from Marshall to El Paso, she said. An independent spur line west of Odessa goes into New Mexico. But Mr. Zappe said rail presents several problems, including potential delays in loading, shipping and arriving at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Federal regulations require the containers to be unsealed within 60 days, he said, and rail delivery couldn't guarantee that. "For years I've been telling other council members that we already have a hazardous waste corridor that runs through the southern heart of our city," said council member Wayne Ogle, whose district also includes part of the truck route. "It's a federal highway, so we don't have jurisdiction. But the number of accidents on I-20 concerns me," he said. Many materials found in garages, such as oil, are considered hazardous waste, Mr. Ogle pointed out. Still, he said he has concerns. "Things that are a real threat should be handled as such," he said. "As soon as there is a more southern route through a less-populated area, it should be used." *Staff writer Patrick Wascovich can be reached at pwascovich@dallasnews.comand 817-436-4231. * _The Arlington Morning News - Winner of the 1999 SNA award for ***************************************************************** 10 Nuclear Warning / Watchdogs eye Duke's salvage operation April 8, 2001 Robin Mills, a Washington, D.C., handyman, and Dick Sears, a Winston- Salem, N.C., professor, have little in common besides their mutual distrust of the company whose stock both own, Duke Energy Corp., and they say Californians should know why they're down on their investment. While Duke may serve its 396,000 shareholders well and have Wall Street's admiration, it's also a company, Mills and Sears say, that will openly defy the government on vital but costly air-pollution measures and move ahead with a risky nuclear program no other energy producer would touch. Duke, the third-largest U.S. utility, acquired three Pacific Gas and Electric Co. plants in 1998 and today accounts for about 5 percent of California's power. It plans to expand in the Golden State. In recent shareholder resolutions, Mills and Sears accused Duke of polluting the air by burning coal, and of jeopardizing the safety of millions in the Southeast by proceeding despite fierce opposition with a plan to convert plutonium warheads to nuclear fuel. Sears' antipollution resolution, introduced in November, came a month before the Environmental Protection Agency charged the company and others with numerous violations of the federal Clean Air Act. The pollution that Duke allegedly caused, the government said, was responsible for increased sickness and mortality from lung disorders among residents of the Southeastern United States. "I went to the emergency room twice last summer. I didn't know what was happening to me," said Nina Layton, 53, of Charlotte, N.C., where Duke is headquartered. "My asthma doctor said the coal-fired plants were one of the main culprits." Duke denied the federal charges, saying it will defend itself vigorously. Energy-industry watchdogs and concerned shareholders say that Duke warrants close scrutiny from California consumers, regulators and elected officials seeking solutions to the state's energy problems without eroding the high standards that have made it the nation's environmental pacesetter. Today, California may be an environmentally by-the-book state where new plants run by coal and nuclear sources -- which account for 98 percent of the fuel Duke uses nationwide, about equally divided -- are economically impractical or close to unthinkable, legally and politically. But no one can say how its energy needs will shape public opinion and government policy in the future. "If I were a resident of California, I wouldn't want to give a large economic interest in the state's energy market to them (Duke) because we know their policy: To fight pollution-control efforts," said David Hawkins, director of the air and energy program of the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, D.C. Coal-fired generation of electricity is legal in California, although environmental laws and the state's lack of coal pose costly obstacles. No nuclear plants have been licensed here since Diablo Canyon (near San Luis Obispo) in the early 1970s, but the technology remains attractive to the industry, despite debacles at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, because nuclear plants don't pose emissions problems common to fossil-fuel plants. According to Claudia Chandler, spokeswoman for the California Energy Commission, state law says no nuclear plants may be built until a safe way to dispose of nuclear waste is found. While there is no legal reason Duke couldn't build coal-fired facilities in California, the nuclear option is unlikely right now. That could change if the radioactive waste problem were solved or de-emphasized due to the need for more power. "The winds seem to be shifting politically. I'm sure they're considering their options," said Barbara Puklin Silverman, an energy analyst for Arnold &S. Bleichroeder of New York. DUKE CLAIMS TO OBEY RULES Company spokeswoman Cathy Roche said Duke will rely on natural gas to fuel three of its California plants (a fourth in Oakland's Inner Harbor runs on diesel). She dismissed attacks on Duke's plutonium project as the criticism of "a very small group of antinuclear activists who will go as far as they can to shut down that option." Roche said blame for air pollution in the Southeast should be laid on the auto industry, other industries and power plants in other states, particularly those in Tennessee. She pointed to honors Duke has won from financial publications and its consistently high customer-satisfaction ratings. "We do very tenaciously defend our record when we have complied with the rules," Roche said, with reference to Duke's reputation for litigiousness when challenged or resisted by regulators and private citizens -- a reputation that hasn't dimmed its luster on Wall Street. "The company has been one of the best-regarded builders and operators of power plants in the country and one of the early movers in the merchant energy business created through the deregulation," said Thomas Hamlin of First Union Securities in Richmond, Va. In recent months, Duke's stock has been selling in the low to mid-40s, near the top of its trading range -- and up more than 50 percent from last year. 'IT MAKES ME COUGH' Duke says California's environmental laws and other regulatory hurdles are why more than 25 percent of its generation capacity in the state frequently has been unavailable. Chief Executive Officer Richard Priory blames special- interest groups in California. He told the Winston-Salem Journal, hometown paper of one of North Carolina's polluted cities, "(I)n the Carolinas, we're committed to getting it right." But what's "right" for the Carolinas is far from clear. "It makes me cough a whole lot more, and coughing is what upsets my lungs," said Virginia Richardson of Winston-Salem, who lives near Duke's coal-fired Belews Creek plant, one of the company's dirtiest. Richardson, 70, has a chronic lung condition that gets worse, she said, when the plant is spewing emissions. "I notice smells in the area. Sometimes the air looks foggy, smoky or whatever. I come in the house," Richardson said. "It's the same stuff over and over, shortness of breath, I get tired, I get bad colds in the wintertime." Clay Ballantine, a physician at a large hospital in Asheville that serves 22 counties in western North Carolina, said that during the summer of 1999, one of the worst in local memory for pollution, he treated at least a half- dozen patients for severe respiratory problems. They later sold their second homes in the Blue Ridge Mountains and returned to their home states. A dozen other physicians on the staff treated similar numbers, he said. "The tourists come here thinking they'll get clean mountain air, and they end up with flareups of normally stable breathing problems they had before -- with severe asthma and emphysema," Ballantine said. "We're seeing more lung disease than when I came here four years ago," Ballantine added. "My opinion is the emissions from the coal-fired power plants are the main correctable variable." A study published in October tabulated the death and disease caused by air pollution from all sources, focusing in part on pollution from coal-fired plants such as Duke's. The study was conducted by a private consultant, Abt Associations of Cambridge, Mass., for Clear the Air, a joint project of the Clean Air Task Force, the National Environmental Trust and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund. Among its findings: -- California, which has relatively few coal, oil and diesel plants, ranked 46th in per capita deaths from power-plant pollution. North and South Carolina, where Duke's eight coal-fired plants are situated, ranked 6th and 7th, respectively. -- An estimated 1,800 North Carolinians die each year from power-plant pollution, compared with an estimated 259 in California, which has a population 4.2 times larger. -- Two North Carolina cities -- Charlotte and Greensboro -- rank among the nation's worst in annual incidence of deaths, asthma attacks and hospitalizations attributable to power-plant pollution. A third city, Asheville, has the nation's sixth-highest rate of deaths related to power plant pollution, the study found. Asheville Mayor Leni Sitnick said her tourism-dependent city faces economic doom unless the pollution problem is solved. COMPANY CRITICS SILENCED Sears' antipollution measure, proposed Nov. 10, never received a public hearing. Duke told him Feb. 19 that, with the approval of the Securities and Exchange Commission, it would refuse to put it before the annual shareholders' meeting in Charlotte on April 26. Mills' antinuclear resolution, opposed by Duke in repeated legal objections, expired during a two-year period and eventually was removed from the ballot, despite the support of thousands of shareholders, among them Peter Gill Wylie, great-grandson of one of the company's founders. In an interview, Wylie said that when Mills' antiplutonium measure failed a second time last year, he began to sell his large holdings of stock in the company. "It's very scary to me," Wylie said, "that if Duke makes one wrong step, not only would potentially millions of people be hurt, but the stock would be worthless." The dissident shareholders say there's a lesson for California in their experiences. "You have to be very careful with them. They're willing to use their lawyers wherever and whenever they need to," Mills said. 'ARROGANCE OF POWER' A 22,000-employee company with a global reach (it has done work in more than 50 countries), Duke is accustomed to having a free hand in North Carolina, political observers in the South say, because it has been a big employer (10, 128 people are on its payroll in the state) and liberal-spending political powerhouse there for decades. Bob Hull, research director for Democracy South, a Chapel Hill, N.C., watchdog group, said North Carolina's political culture has encouraged big businesses like Duke to assert themselves in ways not seen elsewhere. "Unlike other states that have found government a hindrance," Hull said, "North Carolina has had a hegemony of industrial, financial and agricultural interests that have used government as an engine. Duke has been a part of that for decades." As an example, critics point to Duke's pressure on then-Gov. Jim Hunt in October to lobby state officials to set a lower overall air-pollution standard than more than 11,000 residents said they wanted in hearings. Higher standards result in fewer pollution-related deaths, data show. In exchange for a weaker and less costly standard, Duke -- which had teamed up with the state's other large utility, Carolina Power &Light -- agreed to show restraint. It said it would not sue the state if the tougher standard was set aside. It got its way. Duke's Roche, backed by the chairman of the North Carolina Environmental Management Commission, David Moreau, denied allegations that the company pressured Hunt improperly. But environmental commissioner Bob Epting, a Chapel Hill, N.C., lawyer who voted against the lower standard, told local reporters that Hunt, Duke and CP had made a backdoor and backroom deal. Five months later, he's still angry. "It abused the dignity of the commission and spat in the face of the citizens," Epting told The Chronicle. "It reflects the arrogance of unfettered power, whether in the governor's office or the Duke presidential suite. "To the extent you permit that in California, Duke will do the same thing there," he added. "The people of California ought to be on the lookout. "There's never been anybody at Duke," Epting asserted, "who stood up and said, 'We're going to make the environment as important as our bottom line.' I don't know there ever will be." DUKE'S POLITICAL DONATIONS Duke has one of the two largest corporate political action committees in North Carolina; CP has the other. Together, they donated more than $1.5 million to candidates and measures in North Carolina between 1989 and 1998, and more than $100,000 to Hunt since 1990, including donations from executives and lobbyists, according to Democracy South. In California, Duke donated $14,000 on Aug. 3 to Gov. Gray Davis, state Sen. Debra Bowen, D-Marina del Rey, chair of the Senate Energy Committee, and to the Senate Democratic Leadership Fund. Duke also pumped money into a ballot measure in Morro Bay (San Luis Obispo County), where it plans a controversial plant modernization opposed by a group of local residents. The company spent nearly $13,000 in support of an initiative that called for approval of the project. It spent an additional $4, 300 backing state Sen. Jack O'Connell, D-Santa Barbara/San Luis Obispo, who endorsed it. O'Connell is a member of the state Senate Committee on Environmental Quality. The measure passed. "Morro Bay is a beautiful place to live," said resident Jack McCurdy, a founder of the anti-Duke Coastal Alliance, "but it's spoiled, having to live with Duke and the people they bought off." O'Connell said: "Any attempt to link any contribution to my position on the ballot measure is absurd and laughable. The project is sound. We're in an energy crisis. A clear majority in the community understands that." But McCurdy's group claims the plant, fueled by natural gas, will put an additional 76 tons of particulate matter into the air, an amount equivalent to more than 300 percent of all emissions produced each year by diesel buses in the Bay Area. Particulates are particles small enough to enter and lodge in the lungs. McCurdy said health hazards to children, who will be attending school close to the new facility, will increase, water quality will deteriorate and marine life will die. The bay is one of three California estuaries protected by the Clean Water Act's National Estuary Program. The Coastal Alliance calls the plant there now "a moral and ethical abomination" and contends Duke wants to make a bad situation significantly worse. "They have sought and pretty much succeeded in making Morro Bay a company town," said McCurdy, a retired Los Angeles Times reporter. With the assistance of Santa Barbara's Environmental Defense Center, a public-interest legal group, the Coastal Alliance plans to fight Duke's Morro Bay expansion project before the California Energy Commission as it proceeds through the review process this year. Duke says the Morro Bay project will meet all the requirements of state and federal law and use the best available technology to lower smog levels. 'A PUTRID HALO' Epting, the environmental commissioner, is a pilot who flies a small plane over the central part of North Carolina. "You can see an orangish-yellow plume that connects these plants. It's a putrid halo that sits over the top of Chapel Hill, Raleigh, Greensboro and Charlotte. That's what these companies give us," he said. But state regulators have not found much to complain about, at least with regard to Duke. Environmentalists say that's because they haven't looked hard enough. "Nobody here is doing anything about this," said Janet Zeller of the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League in Glendale Springs, N.C. North Carolina air-quality official Mike Aldrich contended that wasn't the case. "Sometimes they'll make you make them do it right," Aldrich said of Duke, "but they will do it right." The federal government's experience has been different. In December, the Justice Department took Duke to court on behalf of the EPA, which had failed to persuade the company to bring its eight coal-fired plants in the Carolinas into compliance with the Clean Air Act. The government charged Duke with more than 50 violations punishable by fines upward of $25,000 a day, saying the company had gone at least a decade without installing costly equipment to control power-plant emissions containing sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxides and particulates. While the suit's ultimate fate may be uncertain under the Bush administration, environmental groups and power company watchdogs in the Southeast see it as confirmation of what they have been saying for years. DUKE NUKE REBUKE Under a controversial federal program, Duke is the only energy company with a lucrative government contract (it comes with a $130 million credit) to dispose of plutonium, a byproduct of disarmament. Its partners in the contract are French energy company Cogema and a U.S. plutonium-facility contractor, Stone &Webster. The radioactive waste would be salvaged near Georgia's second-largest city, Augusta, at a secured 300-square-mile Energy Department site on the Savannah River in Aiken, S.C., from decommissioned plutonium warheads shipped from Amarillo, Texas. It would be mixed with uranium to form MOX, mixed oxide fuel, then used at Duke facilities close to Charlotte -- one of which, the McGuire Nuclear Station on Lake Norman, sits amid planned residential communities partly developed by a Duke-owned real estate company. Construction, under a contract with the federal Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Agency, is scheduled to begin in 2003; operations are expected to continue through 2022, when the lethal leftovers of the nuclear arms race have been consumed. Roche said the company has a good record on its nuclear operations and was invited to run the MOX program because the government has confidence in it. But critics call the project economically and environmentally risky, as well as a magnet for terrorists, because recycled plutonium can be converted back to weapons-grade materiel with relative ease. "It's going to be a fiasco," said Mills, the Duke shareholder, a onetime electrician on a nuclear submarine who inherited stock and uses it as a paper pulpit for his clean-energy views. "The question in California is: Will they expand by building nuclear?" Paul Gunter, director of the Reactor Watchdog Project for the Nuclear Information and Referral Service in Washington, D.C., predicted that as California continues to map out long-term plans to address its energy needs, nuclear-powered generation inevitably will be a focal point. Notwithstanding barriers to development now in place, he said, plutonium fuel and the substantial hazards that accompany nuclear energy may become major concerns in the state. Zeller of the Blue Ridge group said it's unlikely the Savannah River project, if completed, can be confined to the two North Carolina plants Duke says it now has in mind for MOX fuel. "It's absurd for anyone to believe this plutonium factory at Savannah River is for just those reactors," she said. "These are the first phase. Others will be slated for weapons-grade plutonium. Where? Nobody knows. Every state with a nuclear power plant better be interested." Duke Exerts Energy in Business and Politics -- About the company: Duke Energy is a multinational energy company composed of 14 operating units. It entered California July 1, 1998, with Duke Energy North America's purchase of 2,645 megawatts of production from PG. Duke generates 3,450 megawatts in Oakland, Moss Landing (Monterey County), Morro Bay (San Luis Obispo County) and Chula Vista (San Diego County), accounting for about 5 percent of the state's electricity. It plans to add 1, 560 megawatts at these plants, which run primarily on natural gas. The company employs about 22,000 people in more than 50 countries, including more than 1, 000 in California. -- Financial performance: It has $58 billion in assets. Revenue in 2000 was more than $49 billion, up 127 percent from 1999; earnings per share were a record $4.20, up 17 percent. It was the second-highest-ranking company for return on equity on the Dow Jones utility average in 2000. The stock is held by the top seven utilities mutual funds and given second-highest overall weighting in those funds, according to Morningstar of Chicago. By the end of 2000, shares were worth 70 percent more than when the year began. -- Political spending: DukePAC, the company's political action committee, more than tripled its donations to U.S. House and Senate candidates in the1999- 2000 election cycle, with House Republican candidates receiving $39,000 from Duke in 1997-98, more than twice as much as Democrats. Senate Republican hopefuls, including Matt Fong of California, got $2,500, compared with $1,750 donated to Democrats. During the next election, however, Duke's donations grew enormously. House Republicans received $93,875 and House Democrats $55,000; Senate Republicans received $33,000, Democrats $9,500. In California, Duke donated comparatively small amounts last summer to Gov. Gray Davis, state Senate Energy Committee Chairwoman Debra Bowen, D-Marina del Rey (Los Angeles County), and the Senate Democratic Leadership Fund. The company spent $126,394 on lobbying in Sacramento in 1999-2000. -- CEO compensation: CEO Richard Priory's 1999 pay package totaled more than $2 million; a salary increase, $1.9 million bonus and other compensation pushed it to $3.2 million in 2000. Both years exclude value of stock holdings, including options, which vary in value depending on market conditions. Priory exercised stock options and sold shares Nov. 1-2 that netted him more than $1 million. *Chronicle librarian Charles Malarkey contributed to this report. / E-mail Scott Winokur at swinokur@sfchronicle.com and Christian Berthelsen at cberthelsen@sfchronicle.com.* CA POWER CRUNCH ©2001 San Francisco Chronicle   Page B - 7 ***************************************************************** 11 Millstone's new owner a power in the industry Geoff Hausman] By Paul Choiniere Published on 4/8/2001 The word dominion is defined as “exercising control over a territory or sphere of influence.” It is an apt name for the company that is the new owner of Millstone Nuclear Power Station. Dominion is the largest gas and electric company in the United States. Headquartered in Richmond, Va., its dominion is concentrated in the country's Northeast quadrant, stretching from Illinois east to South Carolina and north to Maine. Twenty-five power plants stretching across this domain produce 21,000 megawatts of electricity. Nearly 8,000 miles of its gas transmission pipelines crisscross this region, with 17 natural gas storage facilities stretched across the Virginias, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York. Feeding these systems are Dominion's natural gas and oil reserves in the Gulf of Mexico, Michigan, Texas, Alabama and Louisiana. Dominion's total assets have grown from $17.5 billion in 1998 to more than $30 billion today. This massive growth and the diversity it has produced gives the company an opportunity to make money no matter what happens in the often fickle energy markets. “We'll sell gas directly when market conditions for gas sales are good,” said Thos. E. Capps, chairman, president and chief executive officer. “When demand for gas slackens and prices go down, we'll burn the gas in our power plants, put it on the wires, and sell the energy as electricity. Sometimes we'll use our storage system to store the gas and wait for a better sales day.” With its $1.3 billion purchase of Millstone from Northeast Utilities, a sale completed a week ago, Dominion obtained two operating reactors with the power to generate nearly 2,000 megawatts of electricity, about 11 percent of New England's power demand on an average day. Dominion is betting it can keep the Millstone plants operating safely and efficiently for years to come. The key to making the Millstone plants profitable will be avoiding the kind of prolonged shutdowns that plagued Millstone in the mid-1990s, according to David A. Christian, senior vice president and chief nuclear officer. Dominion will use the approach that has made its two nuclear power stations in Virginia — North Anna and Surry — industry leaders in performance and quality control. The Virginia plants have conducted refueling outages, the costliest routine operation a nuclear plant faces, in record times. The core philosophy, said Christian, is to carefully plan work, to identify small problems before they become big ones and to assure effective corrective actions are taken. Continued growth Already the largest combined gas and electric producer in the Midwest, Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions, Dominion shows no signs of slowing down. The company is known to be interested in buying the Seabrook Nuclear Power Station in New Hampshire and Vermont Yankee Nuclear Station, both expected to be sold over the next year. And Capps recently announced tentative plans to build three coal-fired power plants in Virginia and West Virginia at existing coal mines, eliminating transportation costs. “We have the largest capacity and the greatest ability to meet energy demands in a region that is home to 40 percent of the nation's demand for energy. If it was a separate nation it would have the world's second largest economy,” said Thomas F. Farrell 2nd, executive vice president and CEO of subsidiary Dominion Energy. Dominion traces its roots back to the Upper Appomattox Company, which beginning in the late 1700s provided navigation along the river of that name. Among the trustees were George Washington and James Madison. In the late 19th century the company moved into the power business when it acquired several hydroelectric plants on the river, adding a steam power plant in 1888. Through the years the company went through a succession of name changes, Virginia Railway and Power Company, operating streetcar lines, and then Virginia Electric and Power Co. Its first nuclear plants went into service in the 1970s. In 1980 the company again redefined itself to reflect its growth outside of Virginia, operating as both Virginia Power and North Carolina Power. In 1983 Dominion Resources Inc. was formed. In 2000 Dominion bought Consolidated Natural Gas, one of the largest gas and electric utilities with more than 4 million customers. That same year Dominion submitted the winning $1.3 billion bid for Millstone. Under a restructuring announced in March, Dominion now operates three principal business segments. Dominion Energy includes all its power plants, including Millstone, and manages energy trading and marketing. Dominion Exploration and Production consists of the company's gas and oil exploration operations. Dominion Delivery operates the retail electric and gas distribution systems. Stock holding up Dominion stock has not suffered during the current Wall Street decline. Rather, it is a safe and solid investment alternative in a volatile market, said Paul Fremont, a utility investment specialist with Jeffries &Co. in New York. This week the stock was trading at about $67, near its 52-week high. While Dominion's expansion program has been aggressive, it has not be reckless, said Fremont. “You look at a number of utility companies with ambitious growth targets, and Dominion is certainly among them,” he said. “They have shown a high probability of being able to meet those targets. It is not a high risk investment.” If company leaders make bad investments, they have a lot to lose. Under Capps' leadership, the board of directors has set “voluntary guidelines” urging all officers to own company shares three to eight times their base salaries, an obligation requiring most to borrow money. Capps last year purchased 10 times his annual salary in new shares. Employees collectively own 15.6 million shares. Capps calls that level of internal investment “a confidence vote straight from the pocketbook.” Big political donors The company is not shy about using its power in the political arena. Dominion and its subsidiary Virginia Power are two of the largest campaign contributors in Virginia, giving $582,000 in the last two legislative elections. The contributions came at a time when lawmakers there were debating and passing an electric industry deregulation law. Consumers groups have criticized the law as favoring the existing utilities and large industrial customers at the expense of residential users. Dominion and other utilities have said it closely follows good deregulation laws approved in other states. In Waterford, Dominion has already locked horns with local leaders. The town has assessed the plants at more than $2 billion, while Dominion contends they should be assessed at $907 million. Unless a settlement is reached, the dispute is headed for court with huge implications for town tax revenues. Dominion takes pride in its record of community service and has been the recipient of numerous philanthropic awards. Company officials said locally the plan to create programs to provide financial support for civic and charitable endeavors. Dominion also urges its workers to help in the community. In coming years there are expected to be fewer of those wokers at Millstone. Though, like Millstone, both Surry and North Anna have two operating reactors, they operate with smaller workforces. Dominion said it plans to follow up on NU's plan to trim the workforce at Millstone, now 1,700, to 1,100 over the next three to four years. It is prohibited from laying off any workers during its first year of ownership. In the long term Farrell said the company expects to meet the personnel reduction goals through attrition and without layoffs. Millstone employees will also have the opportunity to move to earn promotions at other Dominion facilities, he said. © 1998-2001 The Day Publishing Co. ***************************************************************** 12 Residents Undergo Health Check Following 1999 Nuke Power Plant Accident in Central Japan Sunday, April 08, 2001, updated at 17:40(GMT+8) Residents Undergo Health Check Following 1999 Nuke Power Plant Accident in Central Japan Over 140 residents underwent health examination Sunday near Tokaimura village in Ibaraki Prefecture in Central Japan, home to the 1999 nuclear power plant accident, Kyodo News Agency reported. The residents received cardiovascular checks and X-ray tests for cancer in addition to consultations with radiologists, it said. Together with two other health examinations later this month, a total of 300 residents are expected to undergo health checks sponsored by the central and prefectural governments, according to local officials. Some 340 residents underwent the first annual checks last Spring. More than 600 people, mainly employees of a uranium processing plant run by Japan Nuclear Fuel Conversion (JCO) Co. in Tokaimura, were exposed to radiation when a fire broke out at the plant in September 30, 1999. The accident occurred after workers poured an excessive amount of uranium solution into a processing tank with buckets, bypassing several required steps. Public prosecutors indicted six employees of JCO on charges of negligence after two of the workers at the plant died in December 1999 and April 2000, respectively, from radiation sickness Kyodo News Agency Copyright by People's Daily Online, all rights reserved | ***************************************************************** 13 Nuclear Waste Protested in Germany April 08, 2001 STUTTGART, Germany (AP) - About 900 people demonstrated at two sites in Germany on Sunday to protest expected shipments of spent nuclear fuel. Outside the Gorleben nuclear waste dump in northern Germany, about 400 people piled hundreds of sandbags at the entrance to the dump as a symbolic "radiation protection wall," police said. Another 500 people staged a peaceful demonstration in Philippsburg, site of a German nuclear plant. Anti-nuclear groups say the plant is one of three from which waste transports are scheduled to leave on Tuesday for a French reprocessing facility in La Hague. The French state-owned nuclear utility Cogema has said the waste should arrive in France on Wednesday. Germany sends spent nuclear fuel from its plants to France for reprocessing under contracts that oblige it to take back the waste. Last month, anti-nuclear demonstrators turned out by the thousands and caused an 18-hour delay as authorities returned a shipment of reprocessed waste to the Gorleben dump. Police mounted a huge operation to secure that convoy. Germany and France agreed to resume transports of nuclear waste after a three-year break imposed by the previous German government after radiation leaks were discovered in some containers. All contents copyright 2001 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 14 Mill wants to recycle radioactive sludge HarkTheHerald.com The Associated Press on Monday, April 09 SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- A uranium mill in southeastern Utah may soon be accepting 17,750 tons of radioactive, lead-contaminated sludge. International Uranium Corp. has petitioned the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission to recycle the sludgefrom the Molycorp site in Mountain Pass, Calif. The company wants to extract small traces of uranium left over from five decades of bastnasite ore processing. Environmentalists say the amount of uranium is so small -- less than one-fifth of 1 percent -- to justify shipping the hazardous material. "We don't know what's in that stuff," said Ken Sleight, with the Glen Canyon Group, a newly formed chapter of the Sierra Club. "It is amazing they can bring that stuff in our neighborhood without a public hearing." International Uranium has legally skirted state regulations on the disposal and transportation of such wastes under provisions in federal law that give the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, not the state, primacy in determining how the wastes are managed. The NRC has granted International Uranium's earlier requests to dispose of mill tailings, claiming recycling is exempt from state regulation. Utah regulators fought those earlier NRC decisions, and they lost. This time, the regulators are not openly opposing the International Uranium proposal. The state's decision not to formally intervene has prompted the Sierra Club to petition the NRC for a hearing on the application. This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page A3. © 2001 by HarkTheHerald.com HarkTheHerald.com is a product of ***************************************************************** 15 Radioactive waste safe for hauling, officials promise Amarillo Globe-News: Texas News: 04/09/01 The Associated Press ARLINGTON (AP) - Truckloads of radioactive waste that will be shipped along Interstate 20 will contain only low-grade hazardous materials, federal officials say. Arlington and Grand Prairie officials said Friday's announcement eases their concerns. "I was envisioning nuclear reactor fuel rods when I first heard about this," said Robert Cluck, an Arlington city council member. "Now that I've heard about what it is, I don't have the concern that I originally did." Grand Prairie's city manager also said in Sunday's editions of the Arlington Morning News he was relieved there will be no apparent danger when the planned 4,400 shipments travel through the area over the next 34 years. "We would assume that they would transport it carefully and safely," Tom Hart said. "But we still feel better hearing that it's low-grade waste." State officials have approved shipping low-grade nuclear waste to New Mexico from the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., said a project manager with the U.S. Department of Energy's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. The nuclear waste will be shipped to a new storage site 26 miles southeast of Carlsbad. "Workers at Savannah River have been walking past these drums for years," said Steve Zappe, pilot plant project manager. "The traditional worry or overstatement is, 'Good grief, I'm going to be nuked if I get near them.' That's not the case at all." www.amarillonet.com/copyright.html" ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARTICLES ***************************************************************** 1 Anti-nukers stage annual protest at Tenn. weapons plant KnoxNews.com - News - Latest National News *By BRYAN MITCHELL* *Scripps Howard News Service* *April 09, 2001* OAK RIDGE, Tenn. - hey came by the hundreds - in cars, station wagons and pickup trucks with license plates from as far away as Minnesota and Maine - to protest nuclear weapons. A mix of new wave hippies and intellectual dissidents demonstrated for three hours Sunday outside the perimeter of the Y-12 Nuclear Weapons Plant. After the singing and preaching and protesting ceased, about 25 shackled participants left the site in an Anderson County Sheriff's Department van. The event was the first act of a two-part annual production. The second will take place on Aug. 6, the anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Japan. Led by two men dressed in yellow robes and beating on drums, the crowd of 300 or so began the day by marching from a park in Oak Ridge to the Y-12 site. The crowd chanted and cheered as roughly a dozen speakers addressed the assembly. Meanwhile, across a set of railroad tracks and behind a 8-foot chain-link fence, about 25 to 30 security officials stood guard. "We understand that under the First Amendment they have a right to express their beliefs," Department of Energy spokesman Bill Wilburn said. "But we are obligated to protect this property." About two dozen protesters went beyond the "No-Cross" line - some carrying stuffed corpses, others awash in fake blood - and were quickly restrained and arrested. Christopher Starbuck, who traveled from his home in north Georgia to attend the protest, said, "We need to stop wasting all that energy making bombs." Doug Cox, who served four years in the military before turning his efforts against nuclear weapons, pointed out that the participation in the protest was up this year. "Someday they will listen to us and stop making such illogical weapons," Cox said. (Contact Bryan Mitchell of The Knoxville News-Sentinel in Tennessee at http://www.knoxnews.com.) Copyright © 1999-2000, The Knoxville News-Sentinel Co. All Rights ***************************************************************** 2 30 cited in Y-12 protest Oak Ridger Online --> Story last updated at 1:01 p.m. on Monday, April 9, 2001 by Paul Parson and Beverly Majors Oak Ridger staff Oak Ridge police officers Sunday cited 30 people in connection with a "peace demonstration" at the Y-12 National Security Complex. A goal of Sunday's demonstration was to bring awareness to the profits reaped by companies that run nuclear weapons facilities, event organizers said. Several participants were willing to get arrested in order to get this message heard. Most of the demonstration was held outside the perimeter of the plant, but police cited 21 people who went beyond a "no cross" zone. Those cited for trespassing and their addresses, as listed in police records, included: * Barbara P. Newcomb, 80, 457 Wilson Lane, Sewanee. * Gordon L. Maham, 84, 5582 Day Road, Cincinnati, Ohio. * Joanne Marie Robson, 54, 304 Van Buren Ave., Onro, Wis. * Brenda Sue Bell, 55, 224 Goddard Ave., Maryville. * Michelle E. Blau, 19, 14 Fairfield Place, Fort Thomas, Ky. * Joseph W. Blotz, 20, 4714 Ferris Ave., Madison, Wis. * Sandra L. Thornburgh, 33, 151 S. Village Dr., Americus, Ga. * Lori Beth Girshick, 47, 27 Crestwood Drive., Arden, N.C. * Monika Miller, 19, 821 Gulfwood Road, Knoxville. * Christopher Scott Irwin, 34, 512 Post Oak Lane, Knoxville. * Charlotte Mane Litjens, 18, 304 Van Buren Ave., Onro, Wis. * Gordon Devendorf, 19, 814 Orange St., Hudson, Wis. * Evan Christopher Krokowski, 19, 20 Lorreine Road, Madison, N.J. * Lisa K. McGregor, 35, 201 Alhambra Road. * Eric Terrence Johnson, 36, 108 Goddard Ave., Maryville. * Patrick Kelly Oneil, 37, 2407 W. Herman St., Music City, Tenn. * Elizabeth Ann Lentsch, 64, 10996 Apison Pike, Apison, Tenn. * Michael C. Phelan, 21, 225 McKinley Terr., Center Port, N.Y. * Seth Tristen Jensen, 22, 13648 W. Hafeman Road, Brodhead, Wis. * Anne Louise Hablas, 75, 2151 W. Center Ave., Jacksboro. * Ingrid Ann Olive, 40, 1742 Oakland Park, Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Trespassing is a violation of a city ordinance and these cases will be heard in Oak Ridge City Court. Two 17-year -old girls, one from Oshkosh, Wis., and the other from Maryville, were cited to Juvenile Court on juvenile petitions for trespassing. Six others were cited for impeding the flow of traffic because they lay down in the road. They were: * Geoffrey Lowthan Hennies, 35, 1324 Georgia Highway 495, Americus, Ga. * Lisa Beth Doscher, 24, 508 S. Main St., Hightstown, N.J. * Lauren MacKenzie Schmidt, 22, 55 San Juan Drive, Ponte Verde Beach, Fla. * Jessica Rist Hahn, 23, 2108 19th Ave. S., Nashville. * Shelley Lea Wascom, 41, 504 Old Lake City Highway, Lake City. * Laurence Joseph Coleman, 59, 1817 Rivershore Drive, Knoxville. Impeding the flow of traffic is a violation of a state law and these cases will be heard in General Sessions Court in Oak Ridge. A disorderly conduct charge was served against an unidentified man, who is listed on police reports as John Doe. He would not give police his name or address, said Police Lt. Jack Mansfield. Mansfield said John Doe cursed police officers and threw a plastic drink bottle at them. Because he had no identification and would not give his name, he is being held in the Anderson County jail. More than 300 people participated in Sunday's peace demonstration, event organizers said. Another protest is planned for Aug. 6, the anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Japan. All Contents ©Copyright* The Oak Ridger * ***************************************************************** 3 Y-12 emergency response exercise set Wednesday Oak Ridger Online --> Story last updated at 11:33 a.m. on Monday, April 9, 2001 from staff reports An emergency response exercise simulating the release of hazardous materials is scheduled for Wednesday at the Y-12 National Security Complex, officials said. The exercise is part of a series of "increasingly more complex exercises" that will culminate in May with a large-scale operation called Volunteer Response 2001, according to a press release from BWXT Y-12. BWXT Y-12 manages Y-12 for the Department of Energy. The emergency exercises are being conducted to ensure that the public, Y-12 employees and the environment would be protected in the event of an emergency on the Oak Ridge Reservation, the press release stated. On Wednesday, the public may observe officials performing environmental monitoring or sampling in addition to several emergency personnel simulating response activities, the press release stated. However, the exercise is not expected to disrupt traffic on state highways or city streets in and around Oak Ridge. Exercise participants will include DOE's Oak Ridge Operations office, the local office of the National Nuclear Security Administration, Bechtel Jacobs, BWXT Y-12, UT-Battelle and Wackenhut Services. Also participating will be representatives from the state of Tennessee, the city of Oak Ridge and Anderson, Roane, Knox and Loudon counties. During Wednesday's exercise, public warning sirens will not be sounded, the press release indicated. In the event of an actual emergency involving the release of airborne hazardous materials, the sounding of the warning sirens would alert people to take shelter indoors, to turn off ventilation systems and to tune to one of the local radio or television stations for more information. All Contents ©Copyright* The Oak Ridger * ***************************************************************** 4 ‘Foster Panel’ Critiques Nuclear Weapons Complex *Arms Control Today *April 2001 Philipp C. Bleek A congressionally established panel has said that there are potentially serious shortfalls in the nuclear weapons complex and in the stockpile stewardship effort, which is intended to preserve U.S. nuclear weapons in the absence of underground testing. The Panel to Assess the Reliability, Safety, and Security of the United States Nuclear Stockpile, known as the “Foster panel” after chairman and former Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Director John Foster, was established by the fiscal year 1999 National Defense Authorization Act to prepare three annual reports assessing the stockpile stewardship effort. The group’s February 1 report, the second of three, cites “funding shortfalls” and the lack of a “coherent strategy” as the most significant causes of “growing deficiencies in the nuclear weapons production complex,” continued “slippage” in reaching program milestones, and “unacceptably high risks to the completion of needed weapon refurbishments.” The group also says that recent security breaches have caused “deep morale and personnel problems” throughout the nuclear complex. The panel makes a series of targeted recommendations to remedy what it terms a “disturbing gap” between the declared policy that maintaining the stockpile is a “supreme national interest” and actions that have been taken in support of that policy. In its primary recommendation, the panel calls for enhancing the United States’ capability to produce fissile material cores for nuclear weapons, which would be required if serious defects were found in current weapons’ cores. The report also calls for the refurbishment of the nuclear weapons complex infrastructure, which it deemed would require an additional $300-500 million per year in funding. Fiscal Year 2001 infrastructure activities, including construction, repair, and maintenance, totaled about $1.6 billion. In addition, the panel states that a backlog of maintenance work amounting to $700-800 million must be dealt with. The panel concludes that there is an “urgent need for a coherent vision, comprehensive plan, and programmatic commitment” and warns, “Failure to meet these needs would virtually guarantee that, in the decades ahead, the nation would face a crisis in the weapons program.” Testifying at a March 13 Senate subcommittee hearing, National Nuclear Security Administration head General John Gordon emphasized that “we don’t need any more studies” and highlighted the fact that “every report, every study” has indicated that additional funding “approaching $500 million a year for at least the next ten years” is required to refurbish the nuclear weapons complex. ***************************************************************** 5 Guard team prepares for terror attack Honolulu Star-Bulletin Hawaii News [Starbulletin.com] Sunday, April 8, 2001 BY DENNIS ODA / STAR-BULLETIN Maj. Ed Toy's team rigorously trains for events he hopes will never happen here By Gregg K. Kakesako Star-Bulletin It's a nightmare local officials hope will never occur. Two occupants of an apartment building are found dead. There are no visible marks of trauma on the bodies. Other residents in the apartment complex where the bodies were found on the third floor had become mysteriously ill over the past week. Local Civil Defense, fire, police, health and other authorities are puzzled. Were the deaths attributable to acts of foreign or domestic terrorism? They declare the building to be a "hot zone," and the task of determining what type of contaminant -- anthrax, blister agent or nerve gas -- becomes the job of a recently created squad of anti-terrorism experts. Four unmarked vans and trucks pull up to the now-abandoned three-story building. Survey team expert Staff Sgt. Thomas Odoardi and other members of the 93rd Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Team don their brown protective suits, boots, gloves, air tanks and masks and enter the building dragging a cart with detection equipment. Once inside, the team breaks open jellybean-size ampuls to collect residue samples with cotton swabs. That task completed, the team then moves to a mobile decontamination site about 1,600 yards upwind of the "hot zone" where every soldier and piece of equipment is sprayed and scrubbed with soap and water. Once the decontamination process is completed, the samples are taken to a $400,000 mobile lab equipped to identify 85,000 different chemicals. To deal with biological agents, the lab has a Biosafety Level 4 glove box, a glass-enclosed area built to contain bacteria such as anthrax. It also can access the resources of the Centers for Disease Control, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and other agencies. You won't find any soft-drink machines in the Diamond Head Crater building housing the newest National Guard unit. One of the first things Hawaii Army National Guard Maj. Ed Toy did when he assumed command of the 93rd Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Team was not only take out all of the soft-drink vending machines -- usually a staple in Army installations -- but also remove another military standby: coffee. It wasn't because of religious beliefs, but more to prepare his team for the worst. "Caffeine, sugar and alcohol increase your pulse rate," said Toy, a former chemistry and Japanese teacher and wrestling coach at Kohala High School on the Big Island. "What I am trying to do is minimize physical stresses for my team." BY DENNIS ODA / STAR-BULLETIN After simulating a hazardous-chemical spill, Honolulu Fire Department personnel help Army Staff Sgt. Mathew Rotmark take off his protective gear. Toy leads Hawaii's newest team of specialists who are training for an event they hope will never occur: a chemical, nuclear or biological terrorist attack. Their mission is to assess the scope and severity of a terrorist attack by sampling suspected contaminants, then advising civil authorities on how to deal with them. His 21 counterterrorism specialists run at least 20 miles a week and must spend at least one hour a week working in special decontamination suits, where the temperature can be as much as 20 degrees hotter than outside the suits. "I lose anywhere from two to five pounds in this heat wearing that suit," said Toy. "It's like being in a bubble." The real decontamination outfits are sealed and can be used only once. For training purposes, team members don outfits made out of material similar to the blue tarps beach-goers use to ward off the sun. Toy said if he can get his team members thinking in terms of diet and fitness, "then they can concentrate on the technical duties they must perform while in the suits." Ten of these groups -- called Weapons of Mass Destruction Civilian Support Teams -- came on line around the country last year. The Hawaii team was among the 17 that were formed in the second phase at a cost of $3.5 million each, but it won't be operational for at least another year. Toy still needs to recruit a crucial element of the team, a medical doctor. But he has been able to fill the roster of the five cells -- operations, communications, medical, survey, and administrative and logistical support -- that make up the team. "It will take about two years to get certified," he said. There also are at least 600 to 900 hours of courses that team members must take, Toy said. "It's equivalent to going to graduate school." In 1996, Congress passed the Defense Against Weapons of Mass Destruction Act, which mandated increased domestic preparedness against terrorist attacks, especially those involving chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. The following year, the Pentagon integrated the National Guard with the effort, giving states control of the teams. That offset some questions about the military performing police duties, which would violate federal law. The genesis of Toy's team stems from the 1990s. Between 1993 and 1995 the World Trade Center in New York City was bombed, killing six and injuring more than 1,000; in Japan a religious sect released sarin nerve gas in a Tokyo subway, killing 12 and injuring 5,500; and in Oklahoma City, Timothy McVeigh bombed a federal government building, killing 168 and injuring hundreds. The first of the new National Guard teams began their training in 1998. National Guards were chosen because they are in every state and are controlled by local officials. But the effort has not been without its critics. A General Accounting Office report questioned the need for the teams, saying they may duplicate existing capabilities. The FBI and FEMA, which take the lead roles in domestic terrorist incidents, already have hazardous-material units trained for such responses. But defense officials have been quick to point out that the Guard teams fall under state control and can report to a scene before requests for federal help make it up the chain of command. The major task facing Toy as he builds the unit is to develop rapport with local police, fire, health, Civil Defense and other emergency agencies. Toy noted that the National Guard team would only advise the incident commander and not control the situation. To that end, Toy and his team spent all of last week at the old Barbers Point Naval Air Station going through various terrorism scenarios with paramedics, fire, police and military ordnance specialists to acquaint them with the capabilities of the civil support team. Fire Capt. Robert Butchart, who heads one of two Honolulu Fire Department hazardous-materials teams, said: "It's good to be broadening the number of trained personnel. These people have the expertise and equipment we don't have. We complement each other." Most of the focus of HFD's Hazmat crews has always been on industrial agents, Butchart said, not on nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. Toy acknowledged his task is still a major undertaking and that he only has 60 percent of the equipment he is supposed to have. Once his team is fully equipped, his next challenge will be to address the needs of neighbor island law enforcement and emergency teams. Gregg K. Kakesako can be reached by phone at 294-4075 or by e-mail at gkakesako@starbulletin.com. http://starbulletin.com ***************************************************************** 6 The Manhattan Project Mar & Apr 2001 Newsletter Volume II - Issue 2 This newsletter is sponsored by the Society for the Historical Preservation of the Manhattan Project (http:// and the Children of the Manhattan Project ( ) Topics covered in this issue: 01) Site Statistics 02) Site Renovation Completed 03) New Additions to the Site 04) Additions Planned Next 60 Days 05) Veteran Search & The Memorial Site 06) Quote of the Month 07) Question of the Month 08) Did You Know? 09) What’s Ahead – Long Term ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 01) Site Statistics... There are several measurements to the success of any given web site. The two primary ones are the number of "new" visitors to your site in any given month and the number of "page hits" your site has received. "Page hits" refers to the number of pages viewed by the visitors to the site. For instance, if you visited our site for the first time in February and viewed 5 different pages, our site would have received 5 "page hits". The below table will give you an idea of the growth: Month New Visitors Page Hits October 2000 330 811 January 2001 569 3,312 February 2001 951 6,688 March 2001 1,829 9,434 Anyway, our success has far exceeded our wildest dreams and has infused us with a tremendous incentive to further expand and enhance our web site. The interest is definitely there and we want to take this opportunity to thank you all for your support of our efforts. 02) Site Renovation Completed… We have completed the renovation of the “Children of the Manhattan Project” web site; . This renovation included completely re-writing the home page, adding a detailed site map, and changing close to 150 web pages over to a new format. Images have been “optimized” to decrease the amount of time that it takes to download to your browsers. In addition, close to 1,500 page links were changed. Please let us know if a link is not working properly or you are having any difficulty in accessing the site. 03) New Additions to the Site… We have begun our ambitious project to add loads of new content to the site. We are preparing a long term project plan and this will be included in our next newsletter. For this newsletter, we have added the following new content: · Women Pioneers in Science – This new section includes photos and biographies of eight outstanding women scientists whose work greatly impacted the successful outcome of the Manhattan Project. Although only two directly worked on the project, all made extraordinary achievements in nuclear science. Anyone interested in the history of atomic energy needs to read how these women overcame unbelievable obstacles to excel in their field. · New Dedication Page – J. Robert Oppenheimer – Anyone cognizant of the history of the Manhattan Project realizes few people could have achieved the success demonstrated by J. Robert Oppenheimer. Also, perhaps no one in American history was more maligned by his own government than J. Robert Oppenheimer. · “In the Shadow of Los Alamos – The Selected Writings of Edith Warner” – We have included an excerpt from the soon to be published book by Northern New Mexico’s own Patrick Burns. More on this in our next newsletter. 04) Site Additions & Enhancements – Next 60 Days… Several new additions and enhancements will be made to the web site in the next 60 days. Following is a tentative list of some of the more major ones planned: · Several new documents and photos relating to Los Alamos will be added. · Phase I of our Oak Ridge section will be implemented. · Our sister site, will be completely re-done with a new color scheme and content. · Our new Student and Instructor – Education section will be completed. · We will launch our new Message Board Community. 05) Veteran Search and the Memorial Site… We must not lose sight that our primary focus has always been and will continue to be the Manhattan Project Veteran. We have several initiatives started that should improve our success in locating veterans. If anyone has information on any of the following veterans, please contact us. a) Dr. Rose Mooney; Professor at Newcomb College then to Los Alamos b) Dr. Joseph Morris; Prof. at Tulane; then to Los Alamos c) Grover H. Catt; 509th Composite Group d) Dr. Arthur Hughes; Prof. at Washington Univ.; St. Louis e) Edward Robert Beckendorf; Probably Los Alamos f) John Frank Boling; Civilian employee; Oak Ridge g) Paul Gilham Lowe; With Manhattan Project; unsure location h) John Westerling; Chemical engineer; SED; Los Alamos 06) Quote of the Month... · Sometime in 1943, General Groves, while visiting the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory which was at work separating U235 by electromagnetic means, attempted to spur Ernest O. Lawrence (the director of the lab) on by saying to him, "You know, Doctor Lawrence, your reputation is at stake here". Later that evening over cocktails, Lawrence (who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1939) turned and said to Groves, "You know, General, my reputation has been made; but yours is at stake here." Groves did not respond. Story related by Edward Teller, who was present at meeting. 07) Question of the Month... First, the question from our last newsletter: One prominent member of the Manhattan Project was known "unofficially" as "His Nibs". Who was this person? We received only 2 replies. The correct answer: Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves This Month's Question: What was the MAUD Committee? 08) Did You Know?... Blacks who worked at Oak Ridge during the Manhattan Project years were forced to live separately from the “white” work force. They lived in an area known as the “Colored Hutment”. 09) Final Message… Again, we wish to thank all of you for your continued support and interest in preserving the historical importance of the Manhattan Project. We have over 250 on our e-mail list and are adding to it every month. We are always eager for new content for both our newsletter and web site. The interest amongst our young people is growing by leaps and bounds. Anything that you can contribute would be greatly appreciated.    Subscribe to manhattanproject_newsletter * * Powered by Send mail to with questions or comments about this web site. Copyright © Jan. 1, 2000, 2001; Society for the Historical Preservation of the Manhattan Project ***************************************************************** 7 A sound downwinder policy [deseretnews.com] Monday, April 09, 2001 Deseret News editorial President Bush, who advocates "compassionate conservatism," has just given a prime example of what it means. Under his proposed budget, Bush is recommending hundreds of millions of dollars to compensate sick uranium miners and those who have been exposed to radiation during nuclear bomb tests — known in Utah as the "downwinders." Bush believes the funding for the program should be mandatory so that those who have been harmed can count on getting the compensation they need as opposed to mere promises that they'll eventually get their money. Many are very ill and need the money now. Bush's proposal not only takes care of those who are waiting to receive compensation — according to government figures around 180 have been given IOUs — but it makes the compensation program an entitlement, thereby guaranteeing funding for the program in coming years. Currently, Congress has to authorize expenditures each year for funds that were first allocated under the Radiation and Exposure Act of 1990. This past year, due to bureaucratic mistakes, only $10.8 million was allocated for the claims. People who qualified for compensation began receiving letters from the government stating there wasn't enough money to fund the program, hence the large number of IOUs. Congress needs to approve that provision of the budget so that those who are entitled to compensation don't have to go through unnecessary periods of anxiety before they get their money. Eventually, of course, the entitlement will end as the generation of people affected by the government's radiation testing and mining program pass away. Utah's congressional delegation, particularly Sen. Orrin Hatch, is to be lauded for its ongoing support of those who have suffered from exposure to radiation. Under Hatch's leadership, certain types of cancer were added to the compensation eligibility list, and the qualification process was streamlined. A measure authored by Hatch last year added compensation for downwinders who developed lung, brain, colon, ovary, bladder of salivary gland cancers — types of cancers that previously were not included because research available in 1990 did not show strong links between the diseases and radiation. Subsequent studies have demonstrated such ties. What Bush is proposing involves more than compassion. Justice requires that the many men and women who put their lives at risk by either working for the government — as many uranium miners did — or who were innocent victims of atomic testing receive compensation. Bush's plan does that. Congress needs to make sure those who were exposed to radiation because of government policies receive compensation, not promises. © 2001 Deseret News Publishing Company ***************************************************************** 8 Pictures of U.S. warplane found by bomb survivor [The Japan Times Online] April 8, 2001 HIROSHIMA (Kyodo) A survivor of the August 1945 atomic bombing of this city has found 14 photos of the bomb and the plane that dropped it at the National Archives in the United States. The photos include one showing the interior of the bomb, called Little Boy, and others showing the bomb being loaded onto the Enola Gay and the plane taking off, Masaaki Tanabe, a 63-year-old film production company president said Friday. He found the photos March 30 during a search at the facility in the state of Maryland for materials to use in a film he is making that will depict Hiroshima before the bomb was dropped. He took copies of the photos to Japan. Officials at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum said the photos were a valuable discovery and added they were the first they had seen of the bomb's interior. Tanabe said he was upset when he found the photos because his parents and brother were killed shortly after they were taken. The U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and on Nagasaki three days later. By the end of 1945, around 135,000 people had died in Hiroshima and about 65,000 in Nagasaki as a result of the bombs. The Japan Times: Apr. 8, 2001 ***************************************************************** 9 China set for underground nuclear test UPI News Article: 9 April 2001 1:05 (ET) WASHINGTON, April 9 (UPI) -- China is preparing to conduct a small, underground nuclear test in the midst of a standoff with the United States over the detention of 24 American military personnel, The Washington Times reported Monday. The test preparations were detected two weeks ago at China's Lop Nur testing facility in western Xinjiang province, the newspaper said. They were based on U.S. spy satellite photographs that showed activity related to nuclear testing at one location of the testing site. A U.S. defense official said the testing activity at the current time is a sign that China's leader, President Jiang Zemin, may not be fully in control. "Some say Jiang is a moderate who wants good relations with the United States," the official said. "If that's the case, this test during a difficult period with the United States indicates he is not in control of China." One official said the underground blast could be another in a series of "subcritical" nuclear tests -- small explosions that do not produce an actual nuclear yield but are useful in weapons development and maintenance. However, other officials familiar with intelligence reports said the Chinese are known to have a covert testing program that relies on small, or low-yield, nuclear explosions. Although the test preparations were spotted before the showdown between China and the United States began, officials did not rule out a connection to China's stepped-up aggressive harassment of U.S. intelligence and plans for the test. China is opposing Bush administration plans for U.S. arms sales to Taiwan and plans for deployment of a national missile defense, and it has been engaged in a concerted effort to influence U.S. policies, said defense and intelligence officials. A test during the current standoff would signal China's growing nuclear power, officials told The Times. Copyright 2001 by United Press International. ***************************************************************** 10 Spy photos show Beijing set for underground test -- The Washington Times April 9, 2001 By Bill Gertz THE WASHINGTON TIMES China is preparing to conduct a small, underground nuclear test in the midst of a standoff with the United States over the detention of 24 American military personnel, The Washington Times has learned. U.S. intelligence officials said the EP-3E surveillance aircraft that collided with a Chinese interceptor jet April 1 was gathering electronic intelligence related to the impending test, along with other intelligence targets. The test preparations were detected two weeks ago at China's Lop Nur testing facility in western Xinjiang province. They were based on U.S. spy satellite photographs that showed activity related to nuclear testing at one location of the testing site. One official said the underground blast could be another in a series of "subcritical" nuclear tests — small explosions that do not produce an actual nuclear yield but are useful in weapons development and maintenance. However, other officials familiar with intelligence reports said the Chinese are known to have a covert testing program that relies on small, or low-yield, nuclear explosions. In 1996, China became a signatory to an international treaty banning all underground nuclear blasts. U.S. intelligence officials said suspicions about the secret Chinese nuclear testing program were confirmed after agents from Beijing purchased special nuclear containment equipment from Russia several years ago. The special equipment is known to be used in masking the seismic signatures of nuclear explosions — like the small blast China set off June 1999, days before a senior U.S. diplomat delivered an apology to Beijing for the mistaken bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, during the air war there. The timing of that test, which took place at Lop Nur, was viewed as an intentional signal from Beijing, which had cut off all military contacts with the United States and had begun vitriolic attacks on the United States in the government-controlled media. Although the test preparations were spotted before the showdown between China and the United States began, officials did not rule out a connection to China's stepped-up aggressive harassment of U.S. intelligence and plans for the test. China is opposing Bush administration plans for U.S. arms sales to Taiwan and plans for deployment of a national missile defense, and it has been engaged in a concerted effort to influence U.S. policies, said defense and intelligence officials. A test during the current standoff would signal China's growing nuclear power, said the officials. A U.S. defense official said the testing activity at the current time is a sign that China's leader, President Jiang Zemin, may not be fully in control. "Some say Jiang is a moderate who wants good relations with the United States," the official said. "If that's the case, this test during a difficult period with the United States indicates he is not in control of China." The EP-3E conducts signals intelligence operations that are aimed at collecting large amounts of communications and other electric signals. The aircraft left from Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, Japan, and flew south along the Chinese coast until its encounter with two Chinese interceptor jets near Hainan Island. The aircraft's sensitive listening equipment is capable of picking up communications thousands of miles inland, including any signals from Lop Nur, the main Chinese nuclear testing facility, intelligence officials said. The U.S. intelligence community also uses RC-135 reconnaissance flights and spy satellites to collect intelligence from Lop Nur. It also has "sniffer" aircraft that can detect any nuclear particles produced from nuclear tests after they take place. China in the past has used tests of its missiles and nuclear weapons as political signals to the United States. China is currently engaged in a major strategic weapons buildup. Last year, it conducted two flight tests of a new road-mobile long-range missile known as the DF-31. China also is building a longer-range missile known as the DF-41 and a new class of ballistic missile submarine that will be equipped with a naval version of the DF-31. China last conducted large-scale nuclear tests in 1996. It announced later that year it was agreeing to the international nuclear test ban known as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. U.S. intelligence agencies assessed the 1996 tests to be the first blasts of a new small warhead — believed based on the design of the W-88, the United States' most advanced small nuclear warhead, obtained through espionage. Although China signed the test ban treaty, it has not ratified it. The U.S. Senate rejected the pact in 1999. The State Department said at the time of the Senate debate that U.S. ratification of the treaty would "constrain" China's nuclear weapons modernization because any information on U.S. nuclear testing obtained by Chinese spies could not be used without first conducting nuclear tests. "China is not likely to rely on weapons incorporating information obtained through espionage without first conducting nuclear explosive tests," the department said in a 1999 fact sheet. The fact sheet also stated that China said when it signed the test ban treaty in 1996 that "it would continue to evaluate the safety and reliability of its nuclear weapons. . . . We believe that China has initiated such a program at its Lop Nur test site." China has refused to permit international monitoring at its nuclear weapons test facilities —a key reason Senate Republicans rejected the test ban treaty as unverifiable. Negotiators failed to include provisions in the treaty that would allow precise monitoring near Lop Nur. Despite the Senate's rejection of the treaty, the Bush administration is seeking $21 million for international monitoring of the defunct treaty, a sign treaty proponents are operating outside the control of administration political appointees. "It's the Clinton bureaucracy doing this, and it shows the Bush administration hasn't reined them in," said one U.S. official. The continued nuclear test efforts by China show "China could never be a reliable treaty partner" since it announced in 1996 that it would no longer test, this official said. All site contents copyright © 2001 News World Communications, Inc. ***************************************************************** 11 The Balkans DU Cover-Up - Robert James Parsons The Nation by ROBERT JAMES PARSONS April 9, 2001 Last November, when stories first appeared in the European press of deaths from leukemia among Italian soldiers who had served in the Balkans, alarm bells started ringing across the Continent. The leukemia was--and still is--believed by many independent experts to be caused by radiation from depleted uranium (DU) arms used in the Balkans during the war. Since most European countries are members of NATO, most of them have troops stationed in or near areas believed to be contaminated. In France, the February 2000 broadcast of a documentary about DU triggered a steadily increasing demand for more and better information. At the same time, reports were surfacing in Belgium of illness among that country's troops stationed in the Balkans. Early this year, Spain and Greece announced they will screen their soldiers for contamination, and Portugal has decided to remove its troops entirely from Kosovo. Country after country summoned US ambassadors or dispatched delegations to NATO headquarters in Brussels in search of more information about DU. But NATO--which in effect means the United States--has stuck to the Pentagon's oft-repeated refrain: If there is a problem, soldiers' health should certainly be studied, but it is impossible that DU is involved because its radiation is so low as to be utterly harmless. A major reason for Pentagon evasiveness is the almost 200,000 Gulf War vets apparently suffering from the variety of illnesses lumped together as Gulf War Syndrome who have filed claims against the VA for service-related illnesses. Three-quarters of that group are now classified by the VA as disabled, and almost 7,000 of the original total have died. In the case of contamination by Agent Orange in Vietnam, the Pentagon ended up admitting claims from anybody who had served in the theater after use of the defoliant had begun. If this were repeated in the case of Gulf War Syndrome, most of the almost 700,000 vets who served on the ground in the Persian Gulf would be eligible to press claims. Further, in addition to helping solve the serious problem of what to do with nuclear waste, DU weapons play a key role in the US military's concept of a "no loss" war. If such arms performed brilliantly against tanks in the Iraq war, they performed equally brilliantly against the Serbian regime's huge underground installations ("hardened targets" in military jargon) in Kosovo, where NATO has admitted to using some nine and a half tons of DU. Hence, far from planning to remove DU from its arsenal anytime soon, the Pentagon wants to increase its use. Thus, duly attentive to its own interests, the US government has consistently pressured its NATO allies and the UN--which has assumed responsibility for Kosovo--to keep the lid on DU contamination investigations (to the extent that such inquiries cannot be thwarted outright). Such pressure, however, has not stopped information from slowly leaking out, as evidenced by the French documentary and the reports from Belgium. But until the Italian government decided in December to launch an official inquiry into DU use in Kosovo, there was no general awareness of the danger among the European public. Significantly, Britain, whose government has long been at odds with its own veterans over Gulf War Syndrome and is the only country other than the United States to admit to using DU, has been a low-key but insistent supporter of the Pentagon line. Much, in fact, is already known about DU. Contrary to what the Pentagon keeps insisting, the "depleted" in the name depleted uranium does not indicate uranium bereft of all but weak, hence harmless, radiation. Rather, it is depleted of its contents of the uranium isotope U-235, which, because it is fissionable, is used for bombs and for fuel in nuclear reactors. What's left, U-238, is 40 percent less radioactive but still extremely dangerous. Anybody handling DU metal must wear clothing resistant to high-level radiation, hermetically sealed and equipped with a respirator. The Pentagon itself knows the dangers. On July 22, 1990, the US Army made public an exhaustive study of armor-piercing DU munitions (quoted in the Military Toxics Project's 2000 report "Don't Look, Don't Find"), which warned of respirable DU oxides, created during combat, that could cause cancer and kidney problems. It further warned that "following combat, the condition of the battlefield and the long-term health risks to natives and combat veterans may become issues in the acceptability of the continued use of DU kinetic energy penetrators for military applications." Nevertheless, since the Gulf War, the Pentagon has spent millions to convince the public--and especially Gulf War veterans--that radiation from DU is essentially harmless. In May 1999, during the Kosovo war, the UN arranged for representatives of all humanitarian aid agencies involved in the conflict to make an initial assessment of the overall situation in the field. However, the UN Environment Program's report, sounding the alarm on DU contamination, was not made public until it was leaked to this journalist by people within the organization who described themselves as exasperated with UNEP director Klaus Töpfer's willingness, as they saw it, to defer to US foreign policy. According to the sources, the pressure had come directly from Washington, presumably from the Pentagon, through UN headquarters in New York. The leaked report appeared on June 18, 1999, in two Swiss French-language dailies, Le Courrier and La Liberté. Later, at a UN press conference in Geneva, Töpfer denied suppressing the report. Reminded that it had been written up in the press, he said that was proof that it was public information. Another report, funded by the European Commission and published shortly after the war, made virtually no mention of depleted uranium. However, without identifying them, the report incorporated, verbatim, several paragraphs of the suppressed UNEP report. Under pressure to do something after the end of the war, UNEP set up a working party, the Balkans Task Force, to make a full report. Töpfer appointed Finland's former Environment Minister Pekka Haavisto to lead it. Haavisto was adamant that depleted uranium was part of the overall pollution picture and could not be left out of the inquiry. When the resulting report was released in October 1999, it was shorn of all but two of its seventy-two pages on DU. Throughout this period a procession of officials conspicuously uncritical of the US position on DU came to Geneva. These included Dennis McNamara, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees' special envoy to the Balkans, who stressed at a press conference on July 12, 1999, NATO's assurances that depleted uranium posed no problems. Dr. Keith Baverstock of the World Health Organization's regional office for Europe also insisted that there was absolutely no danger, though he added that depleted uranium could cause problems in a battle situation. And former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, now the UN Secretary General's special envoy to the Balkans, curtly stated that depleted uranium was a "nonissue." After news leaked that the Balkans Task Force had received a targets map from NATO, Töpfer called a meeting in Geneva on March 20, 2000, to consider how to deal with the leak, but on the same day, Le Courrier published the map. The next day Haavisto was allowed to present it to the Geneva media. Töpfer received a second, much more detailed, targets map in early July. Haavisto is said to have become aware of it only in September, at which time he pressed to send a mission as soon as possible into the field to investigate at least some of the target spots before winter set in. Töpfer's response was to postpone any mission until after the October 24 municipal elections in Kosovo, allegedly out of fear that if disquieting information got out it might trigger mass exoduses such as had occurred during the war, thus marring the "democratic" system the "humanitarian war" had created. The mission finally began its investigation in November. UNEP was far from alone in its timidity. As the world's highest instance of policy-setting in the area of public health and as a member of the UN system, the World Health Organization should have taken the lead in investigating DU. But the WHO is bound by an agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)--whose mandate boils down to promoting nuclear power--to obtain the agency's consent whenever it proposes to undertake anything pertaining to radiation and public health. (When questioned by telephone, David Kyd, spokesman for the IAEA, claimed that his agency's mandate did not allow it to investigate DU, adding that DU was, in any case, perfectly harmless.) Thus it is no surprise that the fact sheet on DU that the WHO announced as being in the works right after the end of the war was quietly canceled. A subsequent general study of DU due out in December 1999 has still not materialized, and a fact sheet hurriedly brought out this past January in response to the European public's outcry is vague, contradictory and at odds with current scientific knowledge about radiation and its effect on humans. When the Balkans Task Force undertook its initial 1999 Kosovo study, the IAEA did the measuring, and no radiation worthy of notice was found. The November 2000 field assessment mission by the Balkans Task Force, which has just reported its findings, further perpetuates the cover-up. Using WHO radiation safety standards designed for measuring a brief "one event" source of radiation conceived of as hitting the whole body, it concludes that there is no real problem. However, the greatest danger from DU comes from the uranium oxide dust created when the metal hits its target and can then be inhaled. The Swiss government, whose military now cooperates with NATO, paid for the project, and people from a lab run by the Swiss military were part of the team, significant because the lab has echoed the Pentagon in declaring that the whole DU issue is not worthy of discussion. (Switzerland, with a huge Kosovar population that acted like a magnet for refugees during the war, has its own reasons for downplaying the danger.) The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the chief coordinator of humanitarian relief during and immediately after the war, took the contamination threat seriously enough to launch its own inquiries and to issue a directive made available to Le Courrier in early 2000 by Deputy High Commissioner Frederick Barton. Among other things, it lays down rules for personnel in the field: No pregnant women are to be sent to Kosovo, those assigned there must be given the option of another post elsewhere and those ultimately sent must have a note in their file to facilitate any later compensation claims. Barton also made clear on several occasions that efforts had been made to warn the refugees as they were returning to Kosovo--efforts that he said had later been thwarted by the UN administration, by NATO and by the local Albanian political leaders. Others share this skepticism. Dr. Chris Busby, a low-radiation specialist, recently conducted his own field assessment, whose results were presented to Britain's Royal Society. In addition to finding radiation more than a hundred times higher than natural background levels near target sites, he has concluded that most of the uranium oxide particles are constantly being resuspended in the air, allowing them to be blown by the wind throughout the country and easily inhaled. For those long critical of US influence in European affairs, whether they are concerned with the Continent's military structure or simply a European identity with reduced US influence, the DU dispute is heaven-sent. The latest UN report, as well as a whitewash from the European Commission a week earlier, far from calming the storm, seem to have intensified mistrust. The extent to which such feelings affect EU public policy will depend on how long the European public keeps up its demand for a reliable explanation of what is behind the "nonissue" now known as Balkans War Syndrome. ***************************************************************** 12 ''Depleted Uranium in Iraq'' BRIDGES TO PALESTINE by; Damacio A. Lopez, Executive Director of IDUST Widdi Reception Hall Brooklyn, New York March 22, 2001 P.O. Box 1688 Bernalillo, New Mexico 87004 USA The International Depleted Uranium Study Team (IDUST) is a Non-governmental organization of over 150 researchers, activists, soldiers and scientists from over 30 countries demanding an immediate stop to the use of depleted uranium (DU) in military weapons. The United States (US) military has admitted to using an overall total of 315 tons of DU solid-core ammunition fired from air and ground units during the Gulf War in Iraq and Kuwait. What is Depleted Uranium? DU is the waste product left after natural uranium has gone through the enrichment process to separate the fissionable isotope U-235, which is used as fuel in nuclear reactors and to make nuclear weapons. The waste product "depleted uranium" or DU as it is sometimes called is a highly toxic heavy metal with a radioactive half-life of four and one-half billion years and has 60% the radioactivity of natural uranium which is pure uranium. Health Hazards of Depleted Uranium Military strategists claim that, the appeal of DU in weapons is its heavy weight and pyrophoric qualities, which cause it to burn like a cutting torch through steel when a DU penetrator strikes a hard target such as an armored tank. It is the pyrophoric quality that makes this material so devastating, the burning of DU creates radioactive dust of respirable size and thus it can be inhaled or ingested. Once in the body this radioactive and toxic material can have short and long term health effects, such as kidney problems, birth defects, neurological problems, cancers and death. A 1991 report by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (AEC) stated that the tank ammunition alone used in Iraq during the Gulf war would contain over 50,000 pounds of DU solid-core ammunition and this was enough radioactive material to cause 500,000 potential deaths. Extensive health studies have been conducted by Iraqi medical scientists on DU health effects on soldiers and civilians, these studies have revealed an alarming increase of radiation related diseases since 1991, cancers have risen throughout the country from five to ten time higher then before the Gulf War. These health studies and environmental studies are available for peer review from IDUST. Over 1,000 tomahawk cruse missiles which have been reported to contain DU have been used on Iraq since 1991. Recalculation of how much DU has been used against Iraq needs to be done since DU has been used in other weapons against Iraq. Where Did it All Begin? On October 30, 1943 the U.S. War Department proposed the "Use of Radioactive Materials as a Military Weapon, this 1974 declassified document to Brigadier General L. R. Groves emphasized two objectives against enemy personal. "1) As a terrain contaminating material, the radioactive product would be spread on the ground and would affect personnel. 2) As a gas warfare instrument, the material would be ground into particles of microscopic size to form dust and smoke and distributed by a ground-fired projectile, land vehicle, or aerial bombs. In this form it would be inhaled by personnel". The objective being to irradiate the "enemy" forces, the general population, flora and fauna. Today DU is been used as ammunition, casing for bombs, shielding on tanks, counter weights/nose cone and ground penatrators on missiles, fragments in cluster bombs, fragments in anti-personnel mines and in other weapons. The objective of the General Grove letter of 1943 has come to fruition. Europe During my DU presentations in Europe this past winter many people would ask, "How is it possible that 70% of Americans polled agree with the most recent United States and United Kingdom bombing of Iraq?" My answer to them was; Many Americans believe that life is just a matter of personnel survival in a meaningless and unfriendly world, so it makes perfect sense to them to focus all their energy at living as comfortably as possible and seeing to it that their children get the same opportunity, regardless of what happens to others as a result. On the other hand, it is worth remembering that the 30% who disagree with the bombing is a substantial margin; and that this minority might become a majority were it not for the negative influence of the mass media which keeps people misinformed on this issue. William Blum author of, "Killing Hope", says in respond to the same question, "It's the same reason the great majority of them support almost any foreign adventure of their government they've been taught very carefully since childhood that their government means well in their dealings with other countries, that our intentions are honorable, etc. It's the same with any other population -- Americans aren't necessarily more brain washable and wrapped up in their personal lives than other people, but in any society, the powers-that-be can inculcate the majority with almost any beliefs they want. It is easier for them to do it in the US because the daily press and TV are less independent than in other countries. Just look at the British press -- almost every day they carry stories which question US actions abroad, but which don't make the US media." Radiation Readings South of Basra, Iraq On January 17, 2001, air exposure measurements were taken in southern Iraq, some 150 km south of Basra on the DMZ road to Saudi Arabia. Readings of a 30mm intact projectile found in the field recorded exposure rates of 2,100-2,450 counts/minute while background exposure rates of 7-21 counts/minute were measured in six control areas away from the destroyed targets where the projectile was found. (See Appendix A for the Complete Report.) The study team to Basra consisted of myself (See Appendix E Measurements in Iraq Desert); and Ramsay Clark, former US Attorney General and founder of the International Action Center (IAC).This new evidence suggests that DU projectiles may have contained at least traces of enriched uranium waste which contain the isotope U-236 which is not found in depleted uranium, nuclear waste also contains plutonium which is 200,000 times more radioactive than uranium and the radio toxicity is one million times higher. Laboratory tests of the projectile found in Iraq must be made before further conclusions can be drawn. A recent United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) study in Kosovo found traces of enriched uranium waste in the fragments of 30mm projectiles. In Peace News July 26, 1995, "Britain & Israel's Bombs" by Mike Holderness. in reference to 40 tons of DU sold by Britain to Israel, "It is produced as a by-product of uranium enriched or by reprocessing spent fuel from a reactor". Five months later in the Life Magazine issue of November, 1995, "Did exposure to depleted uranium cause illness" again describing DU, "Gulf War: shells jacketed with depleted uranium, a waste product from nuclear reactors". Is it possible that the waste streams from the enrichment process and nuclear reactors have been mixed and called "depleted uranium"? What is Next? DU is on the way out, e.g., the navy has stopped ordering DU ammunition and will be using tungsten. Reparation, medical care to civilians and soldiers and clean-up of contaminated countries must begin immediately. The following is a listing of countries now believed to possess weapons containing DU or have been contaminated by them: Argentina, Austria, Australia, Belgium, Bahrain, Bolivia, Bosnia, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Colombia, Croatia, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Iran, Iraq, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kuwait, Luxembourg, Morocco, Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Oman, Portugal, Panama, Pakistan, Poland, Puerto Rico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, South Korea, Sudan, Taiwan, Turkey, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States and Yugoslavia. DU is the suspected cause of the deaths of many soldiers who have served in the Balkan wars. This DU issue threatens the stability of NATO. Weapons containing DU are considered illegal under international laws governing weapons of war. Weapons must meet these four criteria under existing international humanitarian and human rights law in armed conflict; 1) weapons must be able to be limited in effect to the field of battle(the territorial limitation), 2) weapons must be limited in effect to the time period of the armed conflict (the temporal limitation), 3) weapons must not be unduly inhumane (the humanity limitation), 4) weapons must not unduly damage the environment (the environmental limitation). Weapons that contain DU are inherently illegal under this criteria. A resolution on weapons of mass destruction which includes DU is now before the United Nations Human Rights Sub-commission in Geneva Switzerland. What Can People Do? Ask your political representative and environment department to help implement clean-up plans, epidemiological studies and put a stop the testing and development of DU in your area. Ask your public television station to show more independent coverage of the DU issue. Ask them to show documentaries such as "Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq" by John Pilger and the French documentary, "The Invisible War: Depleted Uranium and the Politics of Radiation" by Martin Meissonni. See Appendix B for address The issue of whether one's country has weapons containing DU can be approached from two directions: by asking about both cause and effect. "Cause" means asking whether your country's military possesses munitions that contain DU. And if they do possess them, "Effect" means asking whether they are testing them on weapon ranges that they control. DU can be detected on these firing ranges by soil and water tests and with radiation instruments. Also, are there increased incidence of cancers and other radiation and heavy metals health effects in the local populations? 1 Ask the military if they possess munitions that contain DU? Ask weapons manufacturers if they produce weapons containing DU? Send a copy of your requests to your local representatives and the media. 2 Try approaching old friends from the armed forces. 3 Use the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. 4 Take soil and water samples and other material (e.g. portable parts of tanks used as targets, projectiles and fragments) from practice ranges, and battlefields, take soil samples from areas hit by missiles and other weapons such as cluster bombs. 5. Seek out epidemiologists for help. 6. Seek out laboratory backups, geologists and other scientists who will test and analyze soil and water samples and locate radiation instruments that detect alpha radiation. See Appendix C for description of the German made MR 9511 ABX-Alert. *Appendix A. Complete Report On January 17, 2001, 20 air exposure measurements were taken in southern Iraq, some 150 km south of Basra on the DMZ road to Saudi Arabia. Findings are listed below: 1. In Study Area 1, six readings of entry and exit holes on destroyed armored tanks were taken. Exposure rates of 60-120 counts/minute were recorded. 2. In Study Area 2, four readings of entry and exit holes on destroyed armored tanks were taken. Exposure rates of 500-1,945 counts/minute were recorded. 3. Four readings of a single 30mm intact projectile were taken. Exposure rates of 2,100-2,450 counts/minute were recorded. 4. Background exposure rates of 7-21 counts/minute were measured in six control areas away from the destroyed targets. These results indicate the presence of both low and high level radiological pollution: Low level: radioactive waste of DU (U-238), which is a by-product/waste of the enrichment process that recover the U-235 for nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. High level: enriched uranium waste from nuclear reactors where U-235 is used also contains U-236, and plutonium which are not found in DU. US Air Force A-10 aircraft fired 940,000 30mm rounds of DU during combat in Iraq in 1991. When a DU penetrator strikes a target, up to 70% of the penetrator oxidizes into fumes and cigarette ash-like dust. The US military has admitted to using an overall total of 315 tons of DU for solid-core ammunition used during the Gulf War. The radiation instrument used was a German-made hand-held MR 9511 ABX-Alert, manufactured by Muller Lehrtechnik. Registers alpha, beta and gamma radiation. *Appendix B Addresses "Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq" by John Pilger P.O. Box 149 Oley, PA 19647 USA Ph #1-800-543-3764 E-mail . "The Invisible War: Depleted Uranium and the Politics of Radiation" by Martin Meissonni -.80 Rue De La Croix - Nivert - 75015 Paris - Tel. 01 40 45 47 00 E-mail About the author; Damacio A. Lopez is the Executive Director of the International Depleted Uranium Study Team (IDUST). He has researched depleted uranium issues since 1985 and had authored and Co-authored many respected works, including; "Friendly Fire, the Link Between Depleted Uranium Munitions and Human Health Risk," 1994, "Uranium Battlefields Home and Abroad: Depleted Uranium Use by the U.S. Department of Defense." 1993 and "Progress on the Persian Gulf War Illness.Reality and Hypotheses," 1995, published by the International Journal of Occupational Medicine and Toxicology. ***************************************************************** 13 Help for Nuclear Workers washingtonpost.com: Sunday, April 8, 2001; Page B06 LATE LAST YEAR Congress agreed to compensate workers who became ill from exposure to toxic substances in the plants that built nuclear weapons. The action was overdue. For too many years the government had resisted claims from workers who through the Cold War built and tested the nuclear arsenal. It seemed justice was at last on the way. But now questions have popped up over implementation. Congress put $60 million into the Labor Department's budget to set up the program, which will provide lump-sum payments and medical benefits for covered workers. President Clinton signed an executive order to get work underway, putting Labor in charge. Now Labor Secretary Elaine Chao wants to move the effort to the Justice Department, which administers an older program that provides lump-sum payments to people who were involved in uranium mining or exposed to radiation from nuclear tests. Secretary Chao argued that another nuclear compensation program would be duplicative and that building expertise at Labor to handle the claims would cause delays. This jurisdictional fight was waged last year and settled the right way. Justice has been handling one-time payments and processing many fewer each year than are expected under the new program. Labor is best placed to administer ongoing medical claims, as it already does for the black lung program and federal employees' compensation program, among others. Everybody involved, including Secretary Chao, says the only concern is how to best take care of affected workers. The way to do that is stop playing hot potato with this program and get on with it. © 2001 The Washington Post Company ***************************************************************** 14 Payments to ill nuclear workers may face delay courier-journal.com » The Courier-Journal » Louisville, KY » Local and April 8, 2001 Possible program transfer to Justice causes concern By JAMES R. CARROLL, The Courier-Journal + A C-J in-depth look: The Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant WASHINGTON -- Uranium plant workers seeking payment for job-related illnesses may face frustrating delays if their newly won compensation plan is tied to a Justice Department program for uranium miners, the miners say. Uranium miners in four Western states have complained about slow reviews of claims and even longer waits for checks under an 11-year-old compensation program created for them and operated by the Justice Department. But Labor Secretary Elaine Chao cited the program last month when she proposed shifting the new effort to help uranium plant workers in Kentucky and elsewhere from her Labor Department to Justice. She argued that Labor is not properly equipped to handle the work. Barring action by Congress, where a bill was submitted last week to keep the program under Labor's oversight, the White House could decide as early as this week where to place the program. Uranium miners say the Justice Department can't keep up with their claims. "We're really frustrated by this bureaucratic process the Department of Justice has," said Phil Harrison, a liaison for former uranium miners in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah. Harrison said the comparatively small program under which miners, many of them members of the Navajo Nation, seek claims would be swamped by the new program for current and former Department of Energy nuclear-plant workers. "They can't handle the miners' claims . . . and now, here comes the DOE workers? It's going to be a big problem," he said. Instead, the miners want their program moved to Chao's Labor Department. FORMER WORKERS at Kentucky's Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, where uranium was processed for nuclear weapons during the Cold War, also are concerned about delays if Chao gets her way. "All of these fellas are getting older, and they're going to be six-foot under" before any checks are written, said Leora Dallas, whose husband, Charles, worked at the Paducah plant for almost 27 years. Charles Dallas, 85, is blind, partially deaf and has spots on his lungs, skin cancer and asbestosis. He attributes his health problems to the work he did on various types of uranium-processing machinery. "If it was out there, I was exposed to it," he said. The Dallases want Labor to keep the new program, as does Corinne Whitehead, president of the Western Kentucky environmental group Coalition for Health Concerns. "I hope they stick with the designation Congress made originally," said Whitehead, whose brother-in-law, Russell Ray, is an ill former plant worker at Paducah. The Labor Department has 14,000 employees assigned to handle a variety of compensation programs. In fiscal year 1999, the department received 166,544 new worker-compensation claims, plus 15,926 claims under a program for longshoremen. In addition, the agency paid out 57,000 monthly benefit checks to victims of black-lung disease. An estimated 3,000 to 4,000 uranium-plant workers would be eligible for benefits under the new program. IN CONTRAST, the Justice Department has reviewed about 6,000 claims from uranium miners since the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act was passed in 1990, and 3,328 claims have been paid, with payments totaling $246.4 million, said Justice Department spokesman Charles Miller. Justice, which has 19 people running the RECA program, is processing applications "as quickly as can be done," Miller said. He said the average time for a decision is 237 days from the date a claim is filed. Justice operates nothing else similar to the RECA program. By law, a decision on a claim is supposed to take no longer than a year. But Harrison said he has seen cases stretch three and four years before a claim is paid. "People are dying right now before they see their claims," he said, speaking from a hospital bed in Albuquerque, N.M., where he recently received a kidney from his sister. He worked briefly in the uranium mines and believes his kidney disease was caused by exposure to uranium dust. Last December, then-President Clinton issued an executive order putting the uranium plant workers' program under Labor. Congress subsequently endorsed the decision by giving $60 million to the department to set it up. As recently as January, Chao responded in writing to questions from her Senate confirmation hearing by saying she saw no problem for Labor making the regulatory deadlines to begin the compensation program. "The Department of Labor is currently capable of completing these regulations by May 31, 2001, and administering them through existing agencies without creating new mechanisms within the Office of the Secretary," she wrote. By early March, however, the effort to move the program to Justice had started. On March 9, in a letter to Mitch Daniels Jr., director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, Chao said administering medical benefits under the new program "would be an expanded role." Referring to the Justice Department program, Chao said that for her department "to create a new infrastructure when DOJ already has the tools to effectively implement and administer this program is duplicative." Stuart Roy, spokesman for Chao, was unavailable yesterday. CHAO'S SHIFT surprised -- and in some cases infuriated -- members of Congress who fought to set up the program for DOE workers. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., wrote the secretary a bluntly worded letter on March 27 saying she misunderstood the program and its legislative history and had made "inaccurate" statements about the Justice Department's capabilities. Pointing to Chao's assurances in January that Labor was ready to take the program, Bingaman said, "I have been communicating to concerned New Mexicans that implementation of this program was proceeding on schedule. Your subsequent actions now leave me puzzled as to how I should view future assurances provided in confirmation hearings by other nominees for the department." On Friday, Bingaman said he was assured by the White House that the program would not go to Justice. But the White House congressional liaison with whom Bingaman met, Nicholas Calio, told The Courier-Journal that no decision has been reached on the transfer. Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn. and one of the creators of the program for DOE workers, has urged Chao to reconsider. "This new program," he wrote Chao on March 20, "is not, and was never intended to be, an apology payment" like the program for uranium miners. "Instead, it is a workers' compensation system for a distinct group of federal employees and federal-contractor employees who were directed by the federal government to undertake activities that the government has now acknowledged placed those workers in harm's way," Thompson said. Thompson said those who created the new program "believe that the Department of Labor is uniquely suited to administer the energy employees' program because it has vast experience in helping injured workers and a network of regional offices across the country where DOL-claims personnel administer payments for injuries, illnesses and medical benefits related to the workplace." IN CONTRAST, a bipartisan group of House members said last week that the Justice Department has little staff and no regional offices to handle a program like the one for DOE workers. Even the Justice Department is on record as saying it is not the right agency for the job. Deputy Associate Attorney General Richard Jerome told a House panel in September there were dramatic differences between RECA's one-time payment and the larger program to pay medical benefits that change over time. Rep. Ed Whitfield, a Kentucky Republican whose 1st District includes the Paducah plant, was among a number of House members who appealed to Chao last week to reverse course and introduced the bill to keep the program under Labor. Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., also has told Chao he objects to the move. But fellow Kentucky Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, a key figure in winning approval of the DOE program, has not taken a position. He is in an awkward position: He is Chao's husband. Miller said the Justice Department expects an increase in RECA claims because Congress last year expanded the program to include uranium millers and uranium-mine transportation workers. That expansion could swell new claimants to more than 11,000, he said. But Congress has yet to come up with money for the new groups of claimants. The $10.8 million appropriated for the RECA program this year is going only to uranium miners. People in the newer categories are getting IOUs, Miller said. So far, that number is at 179. Copyright 2001 The Courier-Journal. ***************************************************************** 15 N.M. Winner in Budget Package ABQjournal: Michael Coleman NewsLibrary Archive of Michael Coleman (1995-present) Saturday, April 7, 2001 N.M. Winner in Budget Package Albuquerque Journal--> Michael Coleman--> By Michael Coleman *Journal Washington Bureau* WASHINGTON — Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., couldn't seem to quit smiling on Friday after the Senate approved a budget resolution that paves the way for a $1.28 trillion tax cut and numerous projects in New Mexico. Domenici, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, steered the budget to final passage Friday after five days of floor debate. He said the final budget resolution contains tax relief for all Americans and important protections for New Mexico. "Most of the major programs in New Mexico — Social Security, Medicare, education and national defense, including the labs — are pretty well taken of," Domenici said in an interview after the vote. He said his job this year was "much harder" than usual because of the 50-50 Senate split, but he praised the 65-35 vote as unusually bipartisan. Last year, the Senate approved the budget resolution on a 51-45 vote. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., voted against the resolution on Friday. He said the budget contained some good provisions for New Mexico, but he voted against it because he thought the tax cut is too large and will consume money needed for child health insurance and public education. "It will keep us from doing what we need to do to expand health-care coverage for the uninsured," Bingaman said in an interview. "It also will constrain our ability to do what we should in education." The budget resolution is a broad spending blueprint and does not lock in appropriation levels. Congressional appropriators will begin to attach specific price tags to federal programs in the coming months. President Bush will release his budget Monday. Some New Mexico-related items contained in the resolution approved by the Senate on Friday include: * $6.1 billion for nuclear weapons maintenance at the Department of Energy labs at Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories; * $3.2 billion for civilian science research at DOE labs; * $5.1 billion for the National Science Foundation, a $674 million increase over the current year budget. The NSF is integral to the Very Large Array and other space-related programs in New Mexico; * $710 million to compensate uranium miners made sick by their work on behalf of the federal government during the Cold War; * $30 million to compensate New Mexico counties that face lost tax revenues because of federal land ownership in those counties; * $4 billion for the federal low-income heating assistance program. Copyright Albuquerque Journal ***************************************************************** 16 UK soldiers 'were nuclear guinea pigs ' Sunday Herald - www.sundayherald.com By Rob Edwards Publication Date: Apr 8 2001 New evidence of experiments in which British servicemen had to crawl through radioactive contamination from nuclear explosions to test the effectiveness of protective clothing has discredited the government's oft-repeated insistence that people were never used as radiological guinea pigs. The revelation has emerged as governments in Britain and New Zealand come under renewed legal pressure from veterans who believe that the radiation they were exposed to during nuclear tests in the 1950s and 60s made them sick. New court challenges for compensation have just been launched in both countries. "They think that just because they write on official headed paper we will believe everything they say," said Sheila Gray, secretary of the British Nuclear Tests Veterans Association. "But when we dig deeper and find out for ourselves we discover that they do not always tell the truth. They cover up the truth." The Ministry of Defence has always maintained that any experiments that were done on the effects of nuclear explosions on humans used lifelike dummies instead of real people. This line was heavily relied upon in 1997 by lawyers defending the MoD in the European Court of Human Rights against compensation claims from veterans. It was repeated in January this year in a response to the Veterans Association from defence minister Lewis Moonie. "I must first reject your contention that nuclear test veterans are victims of nuclear weapons," said the Kirkcaldy Labour MP. "The implication in your statement is that those who participated in the UK's atmos pheric nuclear tests programme were deliberately exposed to ionising radiation, which is simply not the case." But now the Sunday Herald has uncovered evidence that casts serious doubt on the assertion. Two dozen soldiers were asked to drive, march or crawl through a fall-out zone three days after a nuclear explosion in the Australian desert in 1956. "The object," according to an official account, "was to discover what types of clothing would give the best protection against radioactive contamination in conditions of warfare." The story has surfaced because in February Sue Rabbitt Roff, a radiation researcher at Dundee University's Centre for Medical Education, came across a reference to "clothing trials" in a military memo from an Australian government archive. The memo said that people who took part in these trials had been exposed to radiation during nuclear tests. Roff thought that this contradicted the MoD's denials that men had been used as guinea pigs. "I was in the court in 1997 when the government denied using humans [in] studies of the effects of radiation," said Roff. "In fact the government said it would be 'an act of indefensible callousness to have done so'." The Australian document confirms that servicemen did suffer radiation exposure in the clothing trails, argues Roff. "This was perhaps a necessary part of Cold War defence but to deny that such experiments happened is to demean the role of the servicemen and to deny their claim to the duty of care owed by governments." When the Sunday Herald queried the MoD about the trials, it made contact with the Australian government and eventually confirmed that "contaminated clothing trials" involving 24 men wearing three different types of protective clothing from an "Indoctrinee Force" of over 250 British, Australian and New Zealand officers and civilians had taken place. "Officers moved in groups through a fall-out area three days after the detonation," said an account provided by the ministry. A spokesman , however, insisted that the men were not guinea pigs. "They were told of the purpose of the experiment and were closely monitored to ensure [they were not] exposed to dangerous levels of radiation." This will not satisfy the veterans. "These tests were horrendous. They blow apart the idea that there were no tests done on individuals," responded Ian Greenhalgh, a Wigan-based lawyer who represents more than 20 veterans. "This is another example where there have been consistent denials and then admissions . How m uch remains to be uncovered?" Although the MoD success fully defended itself in Strasbourg, it is now facing another legal action from the widow of a pilot who flew through a mushroom cloud from a nuclear test in 1958. Shirley Denson, whose husband, Eric, committed suicide after suffering from years of depression, has just won legal aid to sue the government. Three New Zealander veterans of British tests have also launched a multi-million pound claim for damages against the New Zealand government, claiming that radiation gave them, their children and their grandchildren diseases and disabilities. In one respect at least the MoD may be right, admitted the British Veterans Association's Sheila Gray. "The men were not proper guinea pigs because they were not tested afterwards. They were sacrificial lambs ." ***************************************************************** 17 IAAP's sister plant has own trouble The Hawk Eye Newspaper April 8, 2001 By Dennis J. Carroll The Hawk Eye • EPA cleanup under way at Missouri munitions plant. INDEPENDENCE, MO. -- The recent discovery of chunks of depleted uranium at a firing site at the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant in Middletown, as troubling as it might be for some, pales in comparison to the DU cleanup problem at the IAAP's sister munitions plant near here. For years, depleted uranium has been the material of choice both in the construction of tanks and other armored vehicles and in the weapons used to destroy them. Although in Europe, where civilian and military authorities are wrestling with the perceived threat of depleted uranium scattered across the battlefields of the Balkans, little has been made of the DU mess existing in scattered sites across the United States. One of the problems on American soil, although apparently relatively minor, is at the IAAP, where chunks of depleted uranium recently were discovered at a test-firing site used by the now shuttered Atomic Energy Commission. The AEC assembled atomic weapons there for about 25 years, during which it test-fired components of the weapons. Thousands of pounds of depleted uranium were used in the tests. It recently was discovered that the AEC did not clean up its operation there as well as had been thought. Army officials and state regulators do not consider the IAAP's problem to be an immediate health threat. Army uranium experts say tests of airborne depleted uranium show it does not spread well by air because of its density. Mike Styvaert of the Army's Operations Support Command in Rock Island, Ill., says DU is so heavy that a gallon of it would weigh about 150 pounds -- compared to 8 pounds for a gallon of milk. Depleted uranium tends to stay where it lands, Styvaert said. He said DU is not dangerous to human health unless it is somehow ingested into the body either through an open wound or by inhaling DU dust. The Army and the Department of Energy currently are assessing the extent of the DU contamination at IAAP, what should be done about it and who should pay for cleaning it up. The Iowa plant also still uses depleted uranium in the manufacturing of 120-mm armor-piercing anti-tank shells --Êshells used in the Gulf war. However, the Iowa plant's problem with DU is minor compared to the DU cleanup under way at the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant near Independence, Mo. Both plants operate under the authority of the Army's Operations Support Command in Rock Island. Although Army officials and environmental regulators at the Lake City plant insist that neighbors have nothing to worry about, former workers and the neighbors themselves are not so sure. 'I know too much. I saw too much," said Linda Lucas, who worked at the plant from 1982 to 1993 and doubts the reassurances from regulators and plant officials. Kirby Ferguson, who farms near the plant, says his own research on the Internet has caused him to doubt the official stance that the DU would not pose a threat if it were simply cleaned up and shipped to a disposal site. "From what I have found on the Net, moving it without concern for dust would be more dangerous than just leaving it set ... From what I understand, you could encase it in concrete and it would be no harm to anybody," Ferguson said. State regulators insist Lake City's DU problem is the least of the environmental threats at the Lake City plant. "The EPA doesn't believe that people are being exposed to depleted uranium from Lake City at the present," said Scott Marquess, the EPA's project manager at both Middletown and Lake City. Lake City, which manufactures small caliber munitions for the Army under a contract with ATK Alliant Techsystems based in Minneapolis is also a Superfund cleanup site overseen by the EPA. On-site contaminants also include large amounts of lead, solvents and metals. In the early 1960s, Lake City munitions crews manufactured 75,000 rounds of a 20 mm depleted uranium component, the XM101 "spotter round," and test-fired 1,500 of them. The spotter round would later be mounted on a bazooka-like tactical nuclear weapon known as the Davey Crockett, which the Army fielded from 1961 to the early 1970s. "It was a real hands-on nuclear weapon," according to Garth Anderson, an LCAAP environmental official. As part of the Davy Crockett, the spotter round was fired first to pinpoint the spot to be hit by the 20-ton nuclear round, Anderson said. He said the Davy Crockett was never used in combat and was taken out of the Army's nuclear arsenal in the early 1970s. Plant officials also say they manufactured but never tested a DU weapons component known as a "penetrator" round, that was assembled elsewhere. In the mid-1970s, the plant also "demilitarized" 44,000 of the spotter rounds by firing them into sandtrap bunkers. Since the early 1990s, when the 4,000 acre plant was designated a Superfund cleanup site overseen by the EPA, the plant has been trying to cleanup the resulting DU mess. Besides the buildings where the DU rounds were manufactured, the plant also is dealing with 30,000 cubic yards of DU-contaminated soil from the test firings and the demilitarizing operations. The Hawk Eye 800 S. Main St., Burlington Iowa 52601 319-754-8461 Front Desk · 319-754-6824 FAX · 1-800-397-1708 Toll Free ***************************************************************** 18 Nuclear base protest arrests BBC News | SCOTLAND | April, 2001, 12:14 GMT 13:14 UK Protesters tried to cut through the fence Sixteen people have been arrested at a demonstration outside the Trident nuclear submarine base at Faslane on the Clyde. Around 100 demonstrators were campaigning against a High Court judgment which ruled that Britain's nuclear deterrent was not illegal. Some protesters made attempts to cut their way through the perimeter fences at the submarine base. A spokesman for campaign group Trident Ploughshares said the action was proof that the anti-nuclear movement was determined to bring an end to the weapons despite the legal setback. [Campaign poster] The campaigners say Trident is illegal He said: "The message is that we are undeterred and are back with direct action. Our campaign will not stop until nuclear weapons are removed." Three High Court judges ruled last week in the Court of Session in Edinburgh that nuclear weapons were not illegal. The ruling followed the acquittal of three women peace campaigners in October 1999 of damaging a laboratory in an area of the Trident nuclear submarine installation at the Clyde naval base. Greenock Sheriff Margaret Gimblett had accepted the women's argument that nuclear weapons were illegal under international law and that they had a right to commit crimes to prevent their use or deployment. But Lords Prosser, Kirkwood and Penrose, ruled against her judgment. Sheridan address Eleven people were arrested after staging a protest against the ruling at the Scottish Parliament on Thursday. Anti-nuclear campaign and Scottish Socialist MSP Tommy Sheridan addressed the Faslane campaigners. Mr Sheridan served five days in prison in December for non-payment of a fine relating to a protest at the base last year. He was also arrested in February this year along with other prominent politicians and church leaders. In total, 379 people were arrested. ***************************************************************** 19 Broken sub may leave Gibraltar in May BBC Online - Devon - News - 6 April 2001 Stranded: HMS Tireless has been moored in Gibraltar since the leak in its reactor system was discovered last May The Devonport-based submarine HMS Tireless could leave Gibraltar in a matter of weeks. She'll have been stranded there for a year after she headed into port after developing a fault in her nuclear reactor cooling system. Spanish radio has reported that the sub will now leave Gibraltar at the beginning of May. The report says one more test is needed on Tireless before she can leave. [Tireless protests] Some Protests: Several demonstrations were held by Gibraltar residents about repairs to the submarine on the Rock HMS Tireless' stay in Gibraltar has not been without controversy. Local protesters were worried about the safety of her repairs while the British Government insisted there was no cause for concern. Following the Tireless fault checks were carried out on all the Swiftsure and Trafalgar class submarines - with six others found to have a similar defect. ***************************************************************** 20 Bush Seeks Cut in State DOE Funds Monday, April 9, 2001 Albuquerque Journal--> Michael Coleman--> By Michael Coleman *Journal Washington Bureau* WASHINGTON — President Bush wants to cut Energy Department spending in New Mexico and reduce the overall budget for the Department of the Interior, according to congressional and administration sources. The proposed cuts are outlined in the president's budget proposal, which is scheduled for release today. According to the office of Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., Bush will recommend spending about $3.1 billion on DOE projects in New Mexico next year — $312 million less than the government is spending this year. The budget also suggests a $9.95 billion budget for the Department of Interior, $345 million less than current-year spending. However, the Interior budget contains $2.2 billion for the Bureau of Indian Affairs — an increase of $66 million — with a sizable chunk of that earmarked for Indian schools in New Mexico. The president's spending plan for nuclear-weapons programs at the DOE is skimpy and will need to be increased, Domenici said. "The department has been shortchanged in (nuclear) cleanup, stockpile stewardship, nonproliferation programs and the major new programs to rebuild old and decrepit buildings," Domenici said in a telephone interview Sunday. Domenici, a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said he will work to get more money for the DOE. "Before we are finished, we will take care of the Department of Energy," he said. The budget proposal is just that — a proposal. Congressional appropriators will work in the coming months to put exact price tags on each government program, and then Bush either will sign or veto the congressional budget plan. Some of the proposals in the president's DOE budget include: * $1.4 billion for Los Alamos National Laboratory, a decrease of $281 million from current-year spending. The proposal includes $36 million to finish building the Nonproliferation and National Security Center at LANL. * $1.1 billion for Sandia National Laboratories, a $3 million decrease from current-year spending. * $5.3 billion for stockpile stewardship, the cutting-edge science of maintaining the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile. This is $230 million more than is being spent this year. The work is conducted at both the Los Alamos and Sandia labs as well as at the Lawrence Livermore lab in California. * $774 million on so-called nonproliferation programs, which help prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and technology to rogue nations. This would be a $100 million decrease from current-year spending on the program. President Bush's proposal would hold overall federal spending increases to 4 percent. But Domenici said that, while Congress needs to work hard to limit spending, the final congressional budget proposal inevitably will go beyond a 4 percent increase. "We can't hold to a 4 percent increase with this amount of dissatisfaction (with the president's spending proposals) among senators on both sides of the aisle," Domenici said. BIA schools would benefit Domenici, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said he hadn't seen all of the numbers from Bush's Interior Department budget proposal, so he declined to comment on them in-depth. The Interior Department oversees the Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation and the National Park Service and is responsible for managing federal lands, much of which are concentrated in the West, including New Mexico. The Bureau of Indian Affairs budget proposal includes six new schools, including $42.7 million for two in New Mexico — a new Santa Fe Indian School complex and a new dormitory at the Fort Wingate Elementary School in McKinley County, according to the administration. And it includes $36.8 million in repairs and improvements to seven other New Mexico BIA schools. In a telephone interview, Interior Secretary Gale Norton said Bush plans to replace seven more schools next year and repair even more. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, another branch of the Interior Department, provides education, law enforcement, social services and resource management to the nation's federally recognized Indian tribes, including 22 tribes in New Mexico. Under Bush's budget proposal, the 24 original buildings at Santa Fe Indian School, some of which are more than 100 years old, would be preserved, placed on the National Register of Historic Places and transferred to the All Indian Pueblo Council. A new $23.2 million boarding school would be built on the campus, northwest of the new gymnasium. "That school was classified as the most dangerous school in New Mexico," Norton said. "That certainly seems like a good reason to replace it." Bush, in a discussion with tribal representatives in Mesilla last August, promised new Indian schools and a commitment to Indian education. He said he would spend $929 million to repair and rebuild Indian schools in his first year in office, according to one pueblo governor who attended the meeting. The president's first budget falls short of that amount but includes money for a number of New Mexico schools in disrepair. The budget also includes $4.8 million for repairs to the Jicarilla dormitory and repairs to six schools on the Navajo Reservation, $4.7 million for the Beclabito Day School, $2.8 million for the Bread Springs Day School, $5.5 million for the Mariano Lake Community School, $10.8 million for the Navajo Preparatory School in Farmington, $3.8 million for the Ramah dormitory, and $4.4 million for the To'hajiilee Day School. "The pressure is on to get those dilapidated schools repaired or rebuilt as quickly as possible," Domenici said. "This is a very good (budgetary) add-on." Water projects targeted, too The budget also contains $18.7 million for Bureau of Reclamation water projects in New Mexico, including $600,000 for a Middle Rio Grande flood control project stretching from Bernalillo to Belen, according to Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M. Bush's budget contains $7 million — a staggering 600 percent increase — for New Mexico's share of the Land and Water Conservation Fund for resource conservation. The budget wording also expands the way the money can be used for wildlife habitat, open space and parks and recreation, Norton said. "This is especially important for a state like New Mexico," Norton said. The U.S. Department of Education would get the biggest percentage increase of any federal department, 11.5 percent. New Mexico would reap $411 million in education funds, according to the administration. Copyright Albuquerque Journal ***************************************************************** 21 Energy options would fall short Tri-City Herald Online exclusive: This story was published 4/9/2001 By Herald staff writer OLYMPIA -- The hallmark energy measures state lawmakers are spending the most time pursuing won't do squat to work Washington out of the power crisis. Analysts largely agree lobbying for wholesale price caps while delivering tax breaks and relaxed permitting processes to power plant builders will do little to stabilize energy prices or spur the construction of new generating stations. In the meantime, the most pressing and politically divisive issues involving how the Northwest's wealth of coveted hydroelectric power is divvied up are being largely ignored. Legislators and Gov. Gary Locke have made little or no attempt to weigh in on whether each of the three Bonneville Power Administration customer groups -- public utilities, private utilities and large industrial users -- are getting too much or too little. There's been little discussion about what strategies the four Northwest states should use to protect the agency from congressional powers wanting it sold off. Further, there's been no talk of helping develop the cohesive West Coast market power plant builders yearn for. While Washington's political elite attacks federal and state government seeking policy reform, dicey debates over issues that will better shape the future of the region are taking place in politically hazardous arenas lawmakers dare not enter. Some doubt there's much the state could do to rewind its unraveled energy outlook if it wanted to. "It's really too late," said Rudi Bertschi, an energy consultant and executive board chairman of Energy Northwest, which operates the nuclear power plant north of Richland. Incentives inadequate When Locke rolled out his modest energy plan in January it immediately was assailed by critics who said it didn't go far enough. His plan was heavy on incentives for more conservation and new environmentally friendly power plants, such as wind farms. A recent analysis by the Northwest Power Planning Council, which oversees fish recovery and electric reliability efforts in the region, suggests the states can't do much more than that. But critics wanted more. Republicans, declaring conservation alone won't bail the Northwest out of the power pinch, immediately demanded a series of other actions, most notably tax incentives for power plant builders and a more streamlined permitting process. In its analysis, the planning council indicated the permitting processes in the Northwest are not to blame for what until recently had been a lull in power plant construction. To the contrary, enough power plants to supply an additional 2,500 megawatts are expected to come online by winter of 2003, suggesting the Northwest permitting processes haven't failed at all. Further, there are permits already issued for proposed generating stations that would generate 2,600 megawatts at sites where construction has yet to begin. The real impediments to construction, the study finds, include delays in getting equipment, for which there are long lines several years long. Also included are developers inability to secure contracts with potential buyers, which are needed to get the projects financed. And not all of the sites are ideally situated in locations where there is adequate transmission capability to serve both the Northwest and Southwest markets -- a crucial factor. Further, power plant builders face an inconsistent West Coast market that is difficult to build marketing strategies around, Watson said. With California's restructuring efforts in disarray, Oregon mulling delaying implementation of its watered-down reforms and Washington and Idaho steadfastly opposing deregulating at all, there's not much developers can count on for the long haul. "Uncertainty is the enemy of the developer," Watson said. Even some developers agree the permitting processes aren't as broken as others suggest. Newport Northwest's Robert Kahn, which has proposed to build a gas-fired power plant near Wallula, called Washington's permitting process "cumbersome but workable." Offering tax breaks isn't the answer, either, analysts say. Who needs it when there's millions to be made selling power into what today is a lucrative market, asks Gary Saleba, a Bellevue-based energy consultant. "Anything the states can do with regards to tax cuts is so overwhelmed by the market," Watson said. When Kurt Humphrey of Cogentrix introduced plans in the Tri-Cities to build a gas-fired plant at Benton County's Mercer Ranch, he was confident the company would do so with or without any tax break. "I have nothing to do with what the Legislature is doing right now," he said in January. As for the price caps Locke has spent so much time pursuing, they would only limit how much power marketers bid into markets, says Mike Warwick, who advises governments on energy issues for the Battelle Memorial Institute. An expensive array of unregulated side dealing would keep prices high. "They sound good politically but technically they don't work," Saleba said of price caps. Divisive issues put off More important than what lawmakers are working on are the issues they aren't giving attention to. This summer, the BPA will cement plans for new power sales contracts scheduled to take effect Oct. 1. For the past two years, potential buyers have squabbled over who should get how much of the comparatively cheap energy. The turf battles were renewed when Bonneville announced it had committed to sell 3,000 average megawatts more than it has available. That has driven up costs for everyone as the agency scrambles to secure enough power to deliver while making arrangements to effectively buy many of the region's aluminum plants off its system by 2006. Though state governments are not directly involved in those debates other than as regulators for private utilities, nothing stops them from applying the kind of political pressure the aluminum companies used to get their allotment upped. "Right now, it's difficult to take the time to pick this up," said Rep. Larry Crouse, a Spokane Valley Republican and Co-Chairman of the House Technology, Telecommunications and Energy Committee. "We're busy on things we actually do have control of." Dave Danner, who advises the governor on energy issues, said Locke has kept abreast of developments but isn't about to step in to pass judgment on whether someone is getting too much or too little. "Typically, a politician has trouble picking a side in that fight," Saleba said, noting lawmakers have constituents on all sides of the debate. Locke has come closest to tackling the issue by proposing to give tax breaks to Bonneville's large industrial customers, mostly aluminum companies, if they build their own power plants, reducing demand on the federal hydro system. But that plan hasn't been approved in the House or Senate. Locke and key legislators briefly focused their attention on how best to preserve the benefits of the federal hydro system for the Northwest when they met with lawmakers from Oregon, Idaho and Montana in February. A major hurdle appeared to have been cleared when Oregon lawmakers indicated they will not seek a greater share of Bonneville power before agreeing to any plan the region may try to sell to Congress to retain the benefits collectively. But though Locke adviser Bob Nichols said staffers for the governors continue to talk, lawmakers haven't since muttered a word about the issue. In the meantime, some among the California congressional delegation and others have questioned whether their state should be guaranteed a share of the cheap energy Bonneville sells. "We need to come to grips with who should benefit from that," said Warwick, who believes the region needs to settle all its own turf battles soon. "It's not a decision you can put off. Not having a united front in Washington, D.C., is absolutely fatal." Sen. Bob Morton, an Orient Republican and one of the leading voices on energy matters in the Senate, said it will have to wait until after the session is over. Lawmakers are too busy worrying about budgets, roads, primary elections and such for now. "We don't have any time," he said. Back to top stories Copyright 2000 Tri-City Herald. All rights reserved. This ***************************************************************** 22 Nuclear Control Institute Calls on Nuclear Industry to Abandon Use Of Plutonium, Highly Enriched Uranium Monday April 9, 8:07 am Eastern Time Press Release *SOURCE: Nuclear Control Institute* WASHINGTON, April 9 /PRNewswire/ -- The Nuclear Control Institute today called on the nuclear industry to either abandon the use of plutonium and highly enriched uranium or be prepared to phase out nuclear power altogether. Speaking at NCI's 20th anniversary conference at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, NCI President Paul Leventhal said: ``There may be an irreducible proliferation risk associated with nuclear power, a risk serious enough to consider abandoning our commitment to nuclear power.'' Leventhal said: ``If the nuclear industry refuses to end its love affair with plutonium, then the world may well be better off without nuclear power, and should look to alternative sources of energy and to energy conservation and efficiency measures. There is an abundance of cheap, non-weapons usable uranium available, so plutonium and highly enriched uranium are unnecessary,'' Leventhal said. Leventhal said that NCI's opposition to civilian use of plutonium and highly enriched uranium does not mean that the organization is anti-nuclear. ``We have worked for 20 years to de-link nuclear power and nuclear weapons by questioning the use of plutonium produced in nuclear power reactors and by seeking a halt in commerce in plutonium as well as bomb-grade uranium. The issue is more critical today than at any time in the past 20 years.'' NCI convened today's conference -- ``Nuclear Power and the Spread of Nuclear Weapons'' -- to underscore the connection that exists between nuclear power and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The conference took place amid growing concerns over the nation's electricity-supply shortages, the threat of global warming and the threat of nuclear proliferation. Some have argued that nuclear power provides an answer to the perceived energy crisis and the threat of global warning. NCI's Leventhal took strong exception to this argument. Among those addressing today's conference were U.S. Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA); former U.S. Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary; Ambassador Robert Gallucci, Dean of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service and diplomatic troubleshooter on North Korean, Iraqi and Iranian nuclear weapons issues; Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of ``The Making of the Atomic Bomb;'' and Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, advocate for the ``soft energy'' path energy of conservation and energy efficiency rather than nuclear power. Today's full conference program is available at www.nci.org/conference.htm. About the Nuclear Control Institute Founded in 1981, the Nuclear Control Institute (NCI) is an independent research and advocacy center specializing in problems of nuclear proliferation. Non-partisan and non-profit, NCI monitors nuclear activities worldwide and pursues strategies to halt the spread and reverse the growth of nuclear weapons. NCI focuses in particular on the urgency of eliminating atom-bomb materials -- plutonium and highly enriched uranium -- from civilian nuclear power and research programs. Further information about NCI is available on the organization's Web site, www.nci.org. *SOURCE: Nuclear Control Institute* Copyright © 2001 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved. Privacy ***************************************************************** NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: *****************************************************************