***************************************************************** 02/18/01 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 9.45 ***************************************************************** RADBULL IS PRODUCED BY THE ABALONE ALLIANCE CLEARINGHOUSE ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR POWER CONTENTS 1 WIPP Waste Analysis Change Backed 2 Plans to ship waste along I-20 underway 3 Nuclear plant finds support in Homestead 4 Despite Fear, Deregulation Leaves Nuclear Reactors Working Harder, Longer and 5 Toxic Utah: Mending toxic Utah 6 DPP lawmakers warn of confrontation 7 Lessons to learn from Rousseau 8 Russia's plan to import spent nuclear fuel is full of risk 9 No chance of new nuclear power plants here 10 Fire-damaged Edison reactor offline until May NUCLEAR WEAPONS CONTENTS 1 Bechtel holds hospital key 2 ATOMIC RESEARCH CASTS SHADOW ON TENNESSEE TOWN 3 Blind To Dangers 4 ORNL to produce plutonium-238 for space program 5 Editorial: MAKING THE CASE - Bush must keep cleanup moving 6 Auditor Knocks Nuke Security 7 Depleted Uranium: America's Military 'Gift' That Keeps on Giving 8 Navy To Investigate Sub Collision 9 Protesters says no to plutonium 10 Nuclear subs 'poisoned my family' cast shadow of cancer 11 The gall of the de Gaulle 12 Negligence charges surround radioactive storage in Gibraltar 13 Repression creeping back in Russia 14 DOE inspectors to visit lab to gauge NIF progress **************************************************************** ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR POWER ARTICLES ***************************************************************** 1 WIPP Waste Analysis Change Backed Saturday, February 17, 2001 Albuquerque Journal--> By Tania Soussan *Journal Staff Writer* Sen. Pete Domenici and Rep. Joe Skeen said Friday they support a controversial plan to change the way radioactive waste bound for an underground dump near Carlsbad is analyzed. Under the plan, many drums of waste would be "characterized" at a central facility at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Current rules require all drums to be checked to verify what is inside before they are shipped to WIPP. "I myself think it is a very good move," said Domenici, R-N.M. "We ought to pursue it." Domenici and Skeen, R-N.M., traveled to Carlsbad to talk about that plan and to endorse a separate proposal to create an underground physics laboratory at WIPP. The Department of Energy asked the New Mexico Environment Department last year to modify its permit for WIPP to allow the new centralized characterization facility. But it withdrew the request after several groups objected, saying the plan could allow dangerous materials not allowed to be stored at WIPP to end up there. Officials said that would not happen because some work still would be done to identify what is inside drums before they are shipped. WIPP manager Inés Triay said Friday the DOE can use new technologies similar to medical CAT scans to deal with the potential danger of opening drums at WIPP for visual inspection. Drums of waste from the handful of major sites that ship to WIPP would continue to be analyzed before being loaded on trucks. Drums from smaller sites would be brought to New Mexico only "after a certain work is done on them so they are safe and clean," Domenici said. He said it does not make sense to continue to do the full analysis of waste drums at more than a dozen sites around the country. "It's not either efficient or safe nor is there any environmental reason to do it," Domenici said. Officials have said the change would save taxpayer money and allow WIPP to operate at capacity. But Don Hancock of the Southwest Research and Information Center, an environmental group in Albuquerque, disagreed. He said analyzing waste after it arrives at WIPP is "a horrible idea" because prohibited materials like explosives, ignitables and liquids could end up in Carlsbad. "It's a recipe for disaster," Hancock said. "It's a recipe for serious environmental, public and worker health problems." Skeen said the plan would allow the Environment Department "to have a physical presence when the waste is being audited." "Both the DOE and the state of New Mexico would work hand-in-glove in fulfilling their responsibilities in a much more efficient and cost-effective manner," he said. "Just as important, the process would be safe." Copyright 2001 Albuquerque Journal ***************************************************************** 2 Plans to ship waste along I-20 underway *Web posted Sunday, February 18, 2001 By Brandon Haddock *Staff Writer* For more than 10 years, Orllynn Eaton's staff has taught emergency workers what to do if a truck carrying one of the most hazardous materials on Earth happens to crash in their neck of the woods. Mr. Eaton is manager of external emergency management for the Westinghouse Waste Isolation Division, which runs the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP, in New Mexico. The material in question is plutonium, a radioactive, carcinogenic metal stored in more than 55,000 barrels of waste at Savannah River Site. Soon, the federal nuclear-weapons site will begin sending the 55-gallon barrels by the truckload to the New Mexico plant, where they will be buried in a mine carved from ancient salt beds more than 2,000 feet underground. Supporters of the effort call it a milestone in nuclear cleanup, a chance to concentrate some of the nation's radioactive waste in a place where it is expected never to pose a threat to the public. Detractors call the mission unnecessary, and argue it endangers thousands of people who live along the shipping route - predominantly Interstate 20. ``It's not necessary, and it shouldn't be done,'' said Arjun Makhijani, the president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Maryland. ``The wastes that are being sent to WIPP are relatively safely stored where they are. ``WIPP is a political project. It's not a cleanup project. People along the way are being subjected to transportation risks for political reasons, not scientific reasons.'' Savannah River Site plans to make its first shipment of waste as early as March, and to complete eight to 12 shipments by January, said Dale Ormond, the U.S. Department of Energy's senior manager for the site's transuranic waste program. During the next 30 years, trucks will cart waste from the site more than 2,000 times, at an estimated cost of as much as $1.3 billion, Energy Department officials said. The waste is the site's radioactive leftovers - tools, rags, clothing and debris exposed to plutonium during nearly 40 years of Cold War operations. To prepare for the shipments, Mr. Eaton's staff has been training emergency workers along the route for 10 years, he said. More than 2,500 emergency workers have been trained in Georgia, including more than 1,000 in metro Atlanta alone, Mr. Eaton said. About 140 emergency workers have been trained in metro Augusta, and 100 more have been trained in South Carolina, he said. Westinghouse provides two courses: one for ``first responders'' such as firefighters, paramedics and law-enforcement officers; and another for ``on-scene commanders,'' the emergency-management officials who direct responses to a crash, Mr. Eaton said. Responders are trained in how to identify the material being shipped, how to read shipping papers provided with each shipment, and how to assess damage to the massive containers used to transport the waste, Mr. Eaton said. ``They are trained on how to appropriately know what they are facing and what steps to take,'' he said. Although traffic accidents have occurred during shipments of radioactive material, none has resulted in a death attributed to radiation exposure, Mr. Eaton said. ``We just don't want this stuff to get out,'' he said. Local emergency planners said their workers were prepared for the upcoming shipments. ``We've had training for the last 10 years,'' said Pam Tucker, the director of the Columbia County Emergency Management Agency. ``We've been trained and trained, and we keep waiting on those shipments.'' Local agencies will be notified when a shipment is coming through the area, Ms. Tucker said. Emergency agencies in Richmond and Columbia counties have equipment to monitor radiation levels if an accident were to occur, officials said. ``When you get this training, you see this for exactly what it is,'' Ms. Tucker said. ``You have confidence in how it's being done; you have confidence in the tracking of these vehicles, and plus you're getting a heads up on when they are coming through.'' But some observers don't share such confidence. ``These are probably the most dangerous gloves around,'' said Don Moniak, an Aiken resident and community organizer for the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League. ``If they were just gloves and waste, they would put them in a regular landfill. ``They are presenting this as a risk reduction effort, and it's not. The most dangerous materials at SRS will be the last to leave, and those are the remote-handled wastes. Until SRS stops producing waste, all they will be doing is moving it around.'' Reach Brandon Haddockat (706) 823-3409 . All contents © 1996 - 2001 *The Augusta Chronicle*. All rights ***************************************************************** 3 Nuclear plant finds support in Homestead By NICOLE OSTROW and ANTONIO FINS, Sun-Sentinel Web-posted: 10:24 p.m. Feb. 16, 2001 Angler Walter Campbell has a peculiar fishing hole in southern Biscayne Bay: the waters off the mangrove-lined shore not far from Turkey Point's two nuclear reactors. Campbell, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Florida City, said he doesn't think twice about eating the catches he snags from waters not far from concrete-and-iron dome-encased uranium cores. "I don't glow at night," he jokingly told federal regulators at a Nuclear Regulatory Commission hearing in December. Summing up much of the community's sentiment, Campbell told a reporter a month later that Turkey Point "is part of us, we don't worry about it." That's the message locals want to get across loud and clear as the Florida Power & Light Co. embarks on a process for NRC regulators to extend the life of the nuclear plant. A bevy of Homestead-area civic leaders and residents are on the power conglomerate's side. They include preachers and teachers, shopkeepers and hospital administrators, bankers and farmers. They worry about losing well-paying jobs and about the potential for California-like brownouts if the plant closes. That harmony worries nuclear activists. They say the local citizenry is not asking enough probing questions about age-related issues -- such as potentially brittle reactor vessels that are critical to preventing serious accidents. For example, the watchdogs say that years of radiation produced by the reactor core may have weakened the pressure vessel, a steel case that houses the uranium holding fuel rods. If a brittle vessel suffers a major crack or leak, it could set off a chain reaction, potentially r esulti ng in a radiation leak that could harm people and the environment. They also say that, with an $8 billion Everglades revitalization project planned, officials need to look carefully at the plant's effect on the environment -- and evacuation routes for residents if an emergency arises. They want regulators to explore these issues and to consider shutting down the plant. Turkey Point's operating licenses for its reactors expire in 2012 and 2013, and FPL is asking for a 20-year license extension. In 1972 and 1973, the two reactors received their original licenses for 40 years, a period determined not by their useful life, but rather by accounting conventions for writing off the costs of the assets over time. The NRC said it chose the 40-year license span for all nuclear plants based on the average life expectancy of a conventional fossil-fuel plant, not on engineering studies of nuclear reactors. The issues surrounding the reli censing of Turkey Point are playing out in other communities as the nation's base of nuclear power plants ages. Two other plants in Arkansas and Georgia are in the process of being relicensed. Two others have already gotten 20-year extensions -- one outside Baltimore and another in South Carolina -- without public opposition. Homestead comeback For Homestead, a community of 26,000 that has had more than its share of hard luck, nuclear power isn't th e bogeyman others see. After living next to the reactors without incident for decades, residents say they do not worry about a nuclear apocalypse, a Chernobyl or a serious radiation leak like what happened at one of Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island reactors on a summer day in 1979. "I have never heard anybody in this area have any kind of fears or reservations about safety concerns about the plant at Turkey Point," says Steve Garrison, who grows shrubs and palm tree s at the Almond Hill nursery just west of downtown Homestead. "I've been very content with having that plant there. It's been clean, and it has provided reasonably priced electricity for this area." It also provides 900 jobs and a $50 million payroll to a community that has weathered crises. The Homestead-Florida City community suffered through Hurricane Andrew nearly a decade ago. The citrus canker blight decimated its lime groves. It's also been dealt a series of manmade blows, such as free trade treaties that have opened the door to a flood of imported vegetables, which nearly wiped out the area's row croppers. Now the area is staging a comeback. A downtown redevelopment project has spruced up Homestead's main street with brick sidewalks, palm trees and Victorian street lamps. The arrival of superstores such as Wal-Mart suggest the growth of consumer spending and expansion of suburbia; a race car track and increased tourism to Everglades Natio nal Park mean more people and traffic flowing through the town. Corporate citizen FPL is a key piece of the local economic revival. Besides the salaries for Turkey Point workers, the plant pays $8 million in local taxes. Employees at Turkey Point donated $150,000 to the United Way last year, and the power company gave the local hospital $1,000 for its pediatric emergency room. Turkey Point has not always been a model power plant, though. Its two nuclear reactors str uggled in the 1980s with malfunctioning equipment and human errors that drew the intense scrutiny of anti-nuclear activists and fines from regulators. But over the past 10 years, the plant has operated largely without incident and since 1995 has been cited by the NRC as one of the nation's best-run nuclear plants. The two units produce 1,400 megawatts of power, enough to light up 250,000 homes. FPL's Bob Hovey, vice president of nuclear operations, said the plant i s in "excellent" condition and that a multitude of gauges and tests keep a close eye for trouble. And the town of Homestead stands squarely behind the power company. "My own personal opinion is that those concerns are just overblown," said Marlo Jacobsen, owner of Jacobsen's Antiques and Collectibles on Krome Avenue in downtown Homestead. "I pray they keep it going." "We can't afford another jolt," says his wife, Mildred, of the possibility Turk ey Point could close. "We didn't realize how many people were at the Air Force base until they stopped coming in." Major employer Mary Finlan, who worked on the base running the civilian entertainment club United Services Organization, said Homestead Air Force Base was Homestead's civic and economic lifeblood. The pilot training base employed 8,500 people, including 2,100 civilians. The base's payroll was about $152 million, and it is estimated to have had a $500 million impact on the greater Homestead economy. Finlan recalls when hurricane warnings went up on an August morning in 1992 and the military evacuated the base to Las Vegas. Hurricane Andrew then swept through with 140 mph winds, flattening 90 percent of the homes in Homestead and causing billions in losses in the region. Afterward, Finlan says wistfully, the Air Force never returned. "It was like a space alien movie and they were abducted," she reca lled. Overnight -- literally -- Homestead's population dropped by about 30 percent. After that, Finlan said, the local economy "fell on its face." Apartments emptied while restaurants, barber shops and the main street shops all lost customers and business. Finlan, who admits to being an antinuclear activist when she was in her 20s, now said she supports the nuclear power plant and does not want to see it close. In fact, with the Air Force base gone, Turkey Point now is the largest nongovernment employer in Homestead, and plant workers are threaded throughout the community. At the First Baptist Church of Florida City, many in the congregation know people who work at the plant. On Sundays, the congregation -- mostly older, many wearing cowboy boots -- listen to Campbell, 47, preach, play guitar and offer a how-to on personal salvation. A simple wooden cross at the altar overlooks the congregation, while an American flag hangs do wn one wall. In December, he spoke out in support of relicensing, declaring that the area "needs this industry." "They are part of our churches. They are part of our communities. They support everything from the pubs to the hospital," he said at the December hearing. "I live close enough (to the plant) that if they change a light bulb on the superstructure outside, I can't see the guy do it, but I can see the light being changed. I go to sleep every night … without one bit of concern." After a sermon one Sunday morning a month later, Campbell, his graying hair pulled neatly into a ponytail, said he is skeptical of environmentalists and antinuclear watchdogs, saying that it's not necessary to "save every frog." Others say they don't think much about the plant. "To be honest, I'm extremely busy with my restaurants," said Cesar Berrones, who has owned the Casita Tejas Mexican Restaurant on Krome Avenue for 14 years. "And I really haven't heard people talk much about it." Jim Riccio, a senior policy analyst with nuclear watchdog Public Citizen in Washington, D.C., said he understands the economics. The plants, he said, are an important part of the tax and job base. Still, he said, embracing Turkey Point for these reasons is "relatively shortsighted." Problems predicted Riccio and others say the older the plants get, the more suscepti ble they are to metal fatigue. So they want tests conducted to see if the welding on the pressure vessel -- the iron casing that houses the hot reactor core -- is still strong enough to hold radiation. If the pressure vessel were to give, he and others say, it could lead to a leak in the form of a radioactive cloud. "The reality is at some point that reactor is going to shut down," he said of concerns about jobs and the local economy. "We prefer that it shut down before it melts down." But FPL's Hovey said such fears are overblown. He said the reactor vessels are "sound." "There isn't any evidence of leakage," he said. "To my knowledge, we haven't seen any evidence of cracks or leakage on any of our vessels." Garrison at the Almond Tree nursery, which is nestled between downtown Homestead and the Everglades, said he is confident the plant can continue to operate safely. Closing it down, he said, will create substantial proble ms. "We need a reliable, inexpensive source of power," he said. "In the wintertime, when there's a freeze, our pumps have to work. If they don't work, we're going to lose our crops. Look at the situation in California. They are talking about revisiting a long dead nuclear project. We don't want to have to resurrect anything. We already have a viable plant here. We should keep it open." Garrison tells how he served on a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier during the Vi etnam War. The nuclear ships, he recalls, were much cleaner, more efficient and quieter than non-nuclear vessels. "Nuclear," he said, "is the way to go." Nicole Ostrow can be reached at nostrow@sun-sentinel.com or at 954-356-4667. Antonio Fins can be reached at afins@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4669. ***************************************************************** 4 Despite Fear, Deregulation Leaves Nuclear Reactors Working Harder, Longer and Safer February 18, 2001 By MATTHEW L. WALD PLYMOUTH, Mass. — Last year, technicians at the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station here found a problem they could not repair in a part of the electrical generator. They called General Electric, which built the part, but were told that that company's expert was moose hunting in Maine. In the old days, Pilgrim's managers would have notified their corporate parent, a Boston utility that did not operate any other reactors, and waited. But now Pilgrim is owned by the Entergy Corporation, a large power company with seven other nuclear plants, which is more eager — and able — to keep Pilgrim running. Entergy found a specialist at another of its reactors, River Bend, in St. Francisville, La., and put him and his test equipment on a company jet, flew him to the airport in Provincetown and took him to the plant. Boston Edison did not have a company jet, or, more important, another reactor to draw experts from. Entergy's dispatching the specialist is an example of a fundamental change that is coming to the way nuclear reactors are operated, one that regulators and safety advocates have feared for years. Until recently, the reactors were run by regulated utilities with little experience or aggressiveness in operations, and which make roughly the same amount of money whether the plants run poorly or well. Now, unregulated companies are buying and running the reactors, companies that satisfy shareholders and make money only if the plants run reliably and churn out as much electricity as possible. Nuclear plants generate more than one-fifth of the nation's electricity and have the potential for accidents that can cause widespread disruption. So the question arises, are higher production levels consistent with safety? The question is relevant in New Jersey, where Oyster Creek in Lacey Township was sold, and in Connecticut, where Millstone Point 2 and 3 in Waterford are being sold. In New York, Entergy, of Jackson, Miss., bought Indian Point 3, in Buchanan, and the James A. FitzPatrick reactor, in Scriba, Oswego County, from the New York Power Authority in November. By July, Entergy expects to close the sale of Indian Point 2 from Consolidated Edison. The two Indian Point plants are on the east bank of the Hudson River, 35 miles north of Manhattan. In legal filings, Entergy said it was counting on operating the two Indian Point plants far more regularly than the previous owners, enough to generate 85 percent of the electricity that would result from round-the- clock, 365-day operation, a measure called capacity factor. But in interviews, company officials say they are aiming for well over 90 percent. Consolidated Edison struggled for years to reach 75 percent; the Power Authority's record was even worse. Entergy's plans go further: the company will seek permission to raise the power output of each plant, and probably to extend their licenses beyond 40 years. And they may run better. Reactors bought by companies that specialize in nuclear operations show better performance, as measured by such safety yardsticks as the number of unplanned shutdowns and the number of hours when safety equipment is out of service. Seven years ago, the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission warned that deregulation was creating an "incentive to cut corners." But now, the commission's administrator for the region that includes Pilgrim and the Indian Point plants said that so far, this did not appear to be happening, and that fear of financial failure, counterintuitively, had been good for safety. "Most people have gotten the understanding if you do it right the first time, and you emphasize safety and managing things better, it has a positive effect on the bottom line," said Hubert J. Miller, the regional administrator. The commission has no interest in the profitability of the plants whose safety it regulates, he said, but has observed that smooth operations, with fewer component failures and fewer unplanned shutdowns, are elements of safety as well as reliability and profitability. Even the nuclear industry's best- informed critic, David Lochbaum, the specialist on reactors with the Union of Concerned Scientists, agreed that reactors owned by a company holding only one or 2 might run better as part of a chain of 20, and that reliable operation can be consistent with safety. "If you have good management, you can serve both masters," Mr. Lochbaum said. Companies that buy reactors may do a better job than the original owners, he said. While some people had the premise that "they're going to run these reactors until they melt down, take the decommissioning money and go somewhere else," he said, they may instead be trying "to protect their investment, which is good for public health and safety." "If you have a caretaker owner, a nonattentive parent, that company isn't generally going to do as well as someone whose inkling is that nuclear power is their business future," he said. Spencer Abraham, the federal energy secretary, said in an interview that if separate companies ran each of the nation's 103 operating nuclear plants, they might lack the expertise to do it well, but that companies that own multiple plants could pool expertise. Otherwise, he said, "at some plant, you're going to have the 103rd best person." Certainly the companies buying reactors voice similar philosophies. "As a result of deregulation, I think safety is going to be a bigger issue," said Donald C. Hintz, the president of Entergy, "because not having safety issues is the ticket to get in the game. You're not going to be able to run at all if you are not running by the highest levels of safety." Regulated utilities could spread their costs over captive ratepayers. But Mr. Hintz said in a telephone interview that for a company like his, with income only from the power it produces, it would be a greater financial risk to do "something stupid." "You can't afford to have a long shutdown; you'll never recover," he said. Not that his company walks on water; the Nuclear Regulatory Commission proposed fines of more than $500,000 against Entergy's reactors in the late 1990's, and complained that Arkansas Nuclear 1 had inadequately analyzed problems in a steam generator, the same flaw that felled Con Ed. But the company clearly has more nuclear expertise than the utilities it is buying from. Entergy pools its expertise; managers of its three reactors in the Northeast hold a conference call at 10:30 a.m. every Monday, Wednesday and Friday and confer frequently with the other plants as well, company executives say. Another company that is trying to specialize in reactors, Exelon, holds conference calls daily, and recently issued an annual report boasting that 8 of its 10 plants had capacity factors above 90 percent, with a reduction in low-level errors and incidents. The drive toward reducing errors and component failures seems evident here at Pilgrim, a 29-year-old reactor that Entergy has owned for a year and a half. Entergy did not have a tough act to follow; when the reactor shut down in the spring of 1986 because of a mechanical failure, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission ordered Boston Edison to keep it closed until management improved; that took until the end of 1988. In that sense, Pilgrim is not so different from the Indian Point plants, both of which have had shutdowns lasting for months. Entergy is not set up to endure such long closures, and does not plan to have them. Michael Bellamy, Entergy's vice president for the Pilgrim plant, said, "People understand they have to make a decision aimed at keeping us toward the center of the road, away from the shoulders." Operation is more conservative than it would have been under a regulated utility, which could survive a long shutdown, he said. Operators have had to briefly shut the Pilgrim reactor three times since Entergy bought it, and the company points to its responses in those cases as examples of how it will run Indian Point better than the previous owners did. On one of the occasions Pilgrim shut down, a warning light in the control room alerted operators to a low oil level in a pump that circulates water in the reactor. Engineers pondered the problem. Annoyingly, the light indicated only that the oil had fallen below a certain level, and did not tell them how much was left or whether the level was still declining. Fixing the leak or putting in more oil would require shutting the plant down for days, with a revenue loss of about $500,000 a day; perhaps they should just wait to see if the plant started vibrating, before shutting the reactor, and hope that it lasted until the next stop for refueling. But they decided that the pump might fail suddenly and trigger safety systems that would make the reactor shut down automatically, not a big risk but an undesirable outcome. So they stopped it, and then found that, in fact, the remaining oil would have lasted for months. Longtime employees say Boston Edison would have done the same, but probably not what Entergy did next: set to work on designing a bigger oil reservoir and a more sophisticated monitoring system, so that the plant never has to shut again because of a similar uncertainty. Mr. Bellamy is one of only three Entergy employees sent up to Pilgrim. The plant employs about 96 percent of the people who worked here under Boston Edison, although some of the holdovers are in different jobs now. Engineers at the plant are not entirely happy; they are trying to form a union, because they say they lost pension benefits in the transition. But several said operations had improved with the transition. "There are some benefits when we have a problem," said Paul D. Smith, who came to Pilgrim in 1969, three years before Boston Edison finished building it. "Now we all speak the same language, all the way to the top of the house." He noted that the entire corporate chain was now made up of nuclear specialists. Under the prior ownership, he said, "We were the only nuke in the house, and after it went to a certain level, it had to get translated." Mr. Smith and others said they feared that Pilgrim might have developed a problem that Boston Edison could not have addressed, and the plant would have closed. Entergy has five reactors in the South, plus Indian Point 3, FitzPatrick and Pilgrim; it plans to add Indian Point 2 and is a likely bidder on Vermont Yankee and possibly Seabrook. Seabrook, in Seabrook, N.H., and owned primarily by Northeast Utilities, a Connecticut company, would mark the ultimate reversal of the nuclear trend. It was built by 16 utilities, but could easily end up owned by a single company, as one of 16 or so reactors. Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company ***************************************************************** 5 Toxic Utah: Mending toxic Utah [deseretnews.com] Sunday, February 18, 2001 ['Image'] A layer of inversion hangs over the Salt Lake Valley. Despite the wintertime smog, "Utah's air has been much better the last 10 years than it was before that," says Bob Dalley, state director of air monitoring. [''] *Jeffrey D. Allred, Deseret News* As toxic as Utah's environment is, scientists are quick to point out that today's environment is better, in some cases far better, than it was two or three decades ago. And they point to myriad environmental laws, most passed in the mid-1970s over the objections of industry, that established then-unprecedented limits on pollution. Those laws have been tweaked over the years, but they remain hallmarks of a radical shift in policy toward the environment. "Personally, I believe most of the environmental legislation that passed, though I had concerns at the time, have proven workable," said U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch, who participated in those environmental debates as a novice lawmaker in the early 1970s. "The Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act are clear successes, and wilderness, too." But there have been failures, too. Superfund, the program designed to clean up the nation's worst environmental disasters, has helped lawyers more than the envi- ronment, insisted Hatch, R-Utah. And he's no fan of how the Endangered Species Act has been used to bludgeon private property owners. "By and large, I think our environmental legislation has been on the plus side," he said. Conservationists, while unified in their belief Congress hasn't done enough for the environment and has moved too slowly when it has, admit things are better than they were before passage of the 1970s laws. But many conservationists wonder what the future holds. They are suspicious a new Republican administration may be too sympathetic to industry, and those fears are heightened by conservatives in Congress pledging major revisions to laws that have been hallmarks of environmental protection. Voluntary compliance The administration of environmental laws generally falls to state regulators under cooperative "primacy" agreements that allow for local enforcement. Those agreements mandate that states must have laws at least as stringent as the federal laws, but they can have tougher laws if they so choose. ['Photo'] BYU professor C. Arden Pope, a national expert on air pollution, says the state should be doing more to battle smog. [''] *Jeffrey D. Allred, Deseret News* Utah's approach has been simply to follow the letter of the federal law. "We don't have any indication there is a need (for stricter standards)," said Dianne Nielson, executive director of the Utah Department of Environmental Quality. In recent years, Utah has taken a decidedly different approach to enforcement of environmental laws, one based largely on incentives that foster voluntary compliance. "The best way (to achieve better environmental results) may not be to pass new laws but to work with business and industry to voluntarily make changes," Nielson said. One example of that, she said, is a successful state program that is cleaning up sites contaminated with hazardous materials. Another example can be found at Magnesium Corp. of America's plant in remote Tooele County. Long labeled the nation's worst air polluter, according to the Environmental Protection Agency's Toxic Release Inventory, the company voluntarily plans to add a new "sealed cell" production unit that is much cleaner than its traditional production technology. In doing so, it will set the standard for magnesium refineries. "That's why Magcorp is such a positive story for us," said Stephen Packham, DEQ toxicologist. "Their new cells are going to be so efficient, reduce chlorine emissions 90 to 95 percent." But rank-and-file regulators inside the department, while supportive of the voluntary programs, are nonetheless skeptical of a statewide regulatory system built too much around voluntary compliance with environmental law. Only rarely does DEQ impose civil penalties or fines for noncompliance. When it comes to filing the appropriate public disclosures or reporting dangerous leaks and spills, there are laws requiring industry to take certain actions. But who's to say if the law is ever followed? In most cases, "We rely on the honesty and goodwill of industry," said one DEQ scientist. "We could be doing a lot more." The air we breathe One area where the state could be doing more is air pollution, more specifically the fine particulates that seep deep into the lungs where they cause respiratory ailments, said Brigham Young University professor C. Arden Pope, a national expert on air pollution and its costs to public health and the economy. ['Photo'] Smog settles in layers over the Oquirrh Mountains. Utah's approach to enforcement of environmental laws is based largely on incentives that foster voluntary compliance among businesses and industries. [''] *Jeffrey D. Allred, Deseret News* "If Utah does as little as it can get away with, then I see it as a problem," Pope said. "If not, we'll continue to have this ugly pollution along the Wasatch Front, and it will get worse," he said. A pending U.S. Supreme Court decision, expected later this year, could allow the EPA to set tougher fine particulate standards for all states. Currently, the EPA requires state regulators to measure the fine particulate matter that causes poor visibility and threatens public health. The focus of the summer air pollution problem is ozone, a harmful chemical reaction caused mostly by car fumes and heat. In the winter, microscopic particulate matter known as "PM2.5" is a concern. But as bad as this winter has been and last summer was, "Utah's air has been much better the last 10 years than it was before that," insisted Bob Dalley, state director of air monitoring. "The last decade or so we've done a pretty good job," Pope agreed. "Things have improved, and the state deserves credit for it. But I don't think we can say we're done with it, that (the problem) is over." Dalley agrees, warning it will get worse in the years ahead. "Because of urban sprawl, increased population and the increased distance we drive, sometime within the next 10-year period the trend of improvement we see will have switched," he said. That predicted trend, which is not unique to Utah, is why state and federal regulators are pushing hard to promote cleaner-burning vehicles, more mass transit and cleaner industry. The years ahead portend major changes as more and more environmental mandates are passed down from Congress or from federal agencies like the EPA. Critics of mandates claim these changes will come with steep costs to consumers and taxpayers. For example, local governments are now grappling with how to comply with federal standards limiting the amount of polluted rainwater that is allowed into storm drains. And farmers, dairymen and feedlot operators are faced with tough restrictions on pollution from fertilizers and animal wastes that wash into local waterways. And recently, the Clinton administration approved new regulations that are expected to cut air pollution from heavy-duty trucks and buses by more than 90 percent over the next decade. The Bush administration has put those regulations on hold pending further review. But if the new federal standards are approved, it will require new large trucks and buses to meet stringent tailpipe emission limits and direct refiners to produce virtually sulfur-free diesel fuel. It is a standard not unlike the lead-free gasoline requirement implemented more than two decades ago for most motorists. And like the lead-free gas regulation, the new diesel rules come with plenty of grumbling, mostly from the trucking industry that warns increased costs will inevitably be passed along to consumers. But not everyone is crying the blues. Lynette Phillips, Utah Department of Transportation spokeswoman, said it's too early to tell exactly how the new legislation will affect the state. "If it does impact us, we'll have to deal with it," she said. "Anything that will help the environment, we're in favor of." It's a gas The diesel regulation could have positive effects beyond less sulfur in the air. The higher costs of the sulfur-free diesel fuel could prompt companies, especially those with large fleets of smaller trucks, to look more at converting to natural gas vehicles, a much cleaner energy source that remains in relative abundant supply. The state has aggressively used tax incentives to encourage businesses to convert their fleets to cleaner-burning fuels. A tax incentive law was amended in 1998 to allow for a $3,000 income tax credit on the purchase of new cleaner-burning fuel vehicles, and $2,500 for conversions. Several Utah businesses have converted their fleets, but the total number of vehicles burning compressed natural gas, propane or electricity remains comparatively small, only about 2,500. However, the potential is huge. Utah has the fourth-largest compressed natural gas infrastructure (primarily refilling stations) in the nation, and that has state environmental quality officials hopeful. They see the shift to natural gas vehicles as a critical element in the state's compliance with tougher standards imposed by the federal Clean Air Act. The state of Utah has already begun converting its own fleet of vehicles to compressed natural gas. Currently, 587 of the state's 6,697 light-duty vehicles are powered by natural gas, said Steve Saltzgiver, director of the Division of Fleet Services. With the exception of law enforcement vehicles, three-fourths of all replacement vehicles purchased by the state this budget year will burn alternative vehicles, part of the state's compliance with the federal Energy Policy Act. With all the progress being made, the trend toward cleaner vehicles has not yet moved into the marketplace or public consciousness. It is still extremely difficult to purchase a private car that burns natural gas. That example highlights a major complaint by Utah environmentalists: It simply isn't easy for average citizens to engage in environmentally sound practices. Even something as simple as voluntary recycling is difficult here given the cost of simply burying trash vs. recycling it. Making a difference Conservationists rue the fact that Utahns in general pay little attention to environmental concerns. And people invariably trust environmental and health officials to ensure the air is not dangerous, that the water they drink is not contaminated. They leave the tough fights to environmentalists, but they rarely get actively engaged themselves. Consequently, Utah's home-grown environmental movement languishes somewhere between indifference and ineffective. It is comprised of small single-focus groups usually consisting of a handful of dedicated volunteers without funding or political savvy. When it comes to fighting for state funding for health studies of cancer clusters or tougher state pollution standards, they typically find themselves no match for high-powered industry lobbyists. And Utah's pro-industry Legislature has been anything but sympathetic, they say. Proposals to encourage recycling through deposits on soft drinks or to require state agencies to use recycled materials have received chilly responses from lawmakers loath to impose any environmental mandates no matter how worthy. But that's not to say citizens haven't made a difference. It was citizen activists who led the battle for two decades to win compensation for victims of Cold War nuclear testing and uranium mining. Another group, Citizens Against Chlorine Contamination, recently hounded environmental regulators to do something about Magcorp's chlorine pollution. And members also pushed for dioxin testing at the Tooele County plant. With the EPA breathing down its smokestacks, the company relented. People can make a difference, said Chip Ward, a Grantsville activist who wrote about the Magcorp case in his book, "Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West." "People often wonder if they can made a difference against seemingly insurmountable odds," he said. "The Magcorp story illustrates that they can, and it underlines the powerful relationship between the vitality of a community's civic environment and the health of its natural environment. "Chalk one up for citizen activism. Commitment and determination pay, and winning feels good." But by and large, Utah's environmental voice has been scarcely a whisper. When it comes to battling for tougher environmental laws, Utah activists have typically joined with politically powerful allies like the Sierra Club. And the battlefield has typically been in Washington, D.C., not Utah. And the results have been national policies, not solutions to local problems. Chip Ward likens the public apathy toward environmental problems to the proverbial frog in a pan of boiling water. Add the frog to water already boiling and it will immediately jump out. Put the frog in cold water and then raise the heat to boiling and the frog will cook to death. Utahns, Ward says, are the frogs in a pan, and the water is getting hotter and hotter. *E-mail: spang@desnews.com; donna@desnews.com* © 2001 Deseret News Publishing Company ***************************************************************** 6 DPP lawmakers warn of confrontation The Taipei Times Online: 2001-02-18 Sunday, February 18th, 2001 STAFF WRITER DPP legislators said yesterday that failure to pass a law to legalize a referendum on the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant (®Ö¥|) project this December would only lead to more political confrontation. DPP legislators Lee Wen-chung (§õ¤å©¾), Cho Jung-tai (¨ôºa®õ) and Chen Chi-mai (³¯¨äÁÚ), want a referendum on whether to continue building the power plant to take place at the same time as the year-end elections for the Legislative Yuan and city and county chiefs. Their comments yesterday were also endorsed by independent legislator Eugene Jao (»¯¥Ã²M). "If the planned referendum doesn't have any legal effect, it will trigger even more political confrontation," Lee said. Reacting to a strong call from anti-nuclear groups and DPP politicians following the Executive Yuan's recent announcement of the resumption of the project, Premier Chang Chun-hsiung (±i«T¶¯) said on Friday the Executive Yuan was studying the possibility of holding a referendum in December. Chang admitted, however, that without a referendum law, the ballot would be nothing more than an opinion poll, which would not have any practical effect on changing the policy. Chang has expressed hope that the legislature will make enactment of a referendum law a priority so that an institutionalized measure to solve disputes over public policy will be established. Though the Constitution stipulates that the people are entitled to the right of referendum, a law governing the holding of referendums has never been passed. A primary reason for this is that the DPP's long-term attempt to promote the referendum law has been linked to its much-publicized goal of declaring independence for Taiwan as a result of a plebiscite. Addressing this concern, Lee said the DPP is willing to negotiate with opposition parties to set a restriction in the proposed law to exclude any referendums on issues relating to national sovereignty. As an alternative, the law could specifically prohibit any referendums on the independence and unification issues, while only allowing referendums on "changing the status quo" in the country, Lee said. In addition, the legislators suggested that the proposed law set a high threshold in terms of the qualifications to initiate a referendum and the turnout rate in the ballot, so as to prevent an abuse of the mechanism. Also, they said a referendum should be held along with an election to keep the costs involved low. They said they disagree with arguments by opposition parties that public policy already underway, such as that relating to the construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant, should be ineligible for a referendum. This story has been viewed 242 times. URL=[http://www.taipeitimes.com/news/2001/02/18/story/0000074169] Copyright © 1999, 2000, 2001 The Taipei Times. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 7 Lessons to learn from Rousseau The Taipei Times Online: 2001-02-18 February 18th, 2001 By Hsiao Hsiung-lin ¿½¶¯²O A major public policy dispute has broken out over the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant (®Ö¥|) and we can expect similar disputes in the future. After all, Taiwan's transition from authoritarianism to democracy took less than two decades. Unlike more advanced democracies, Taiwan did not go through an "enlightenment" period. But the ideas presented by French Enlightenment thinker Jean Jacques Rousseau in his major work *The Social Contract* can still shed some light on the nuclear plant issue. First of all, Rousseau thought citizens should be concerned about national affairs. "As soon as public service ceases to be citizens' chief business ... the State is not far from its fall," he said. The deputies of the people, therefore, are merely their stewards -- not their representatives -- because "sovereignty ... cannot be represented." "The people of England regard themselves as free; but they are grossly mistaken; they are free only during the election of members of parliament. As soon as the MPs are elected, the people become slaves," he said. Rousseau believed there is often a great difference between the "will of all" (volonte de tous) and the "general will" (volonte generale). The latter considers only the common interest, and is a "pure activity of the intellect." In contrast, the "will of all" takes private interest into account, and is no more than a sum of particular wills, according to Rousseau. Each person gives himself or herself to the supreme leadership of the "general will" in accordance with the social contract -- not to any individual or political party. When it comes to voting on public affairs, Rousseau said, "The more concert reigns in the assemblies ... the greater is the dominance of the general will. Conversely, long debates, dissensions and tumult proclaim the ascendancy of particular interests and the decline of the State." Also, the more important a public policy decision is, the more unanimity of opinion it requires. Rousseau's thought has had an impact on democratic politics in the US and Western Europe. Looking from Rousseau's perspective, the key point in the nuclear power plant dispute is not about whether the Legislative Yuan has the power to decide on the resumption of construction, or whether the Executive Yuan has the power to halt construction. Such an important public policy issue must be decided by the people's will, and the people have the obligation to be concerned about the issue and to decide the plant's fate. The people only abide by the "general will" -- not the "will of all." Obviously, the nuclear plant is a public policy issue related to Taiwan's long-term survival and development, and therefore should be debated until a majority of people agree. Only then will any decision represent the "general will." Otherwise, both the Executive Yuan's unilateral decision to scrap the plant, and the Legislative Yuan's decision to resume construction, will remain merely the "wills of all," none of which are decisions that the people should accept. If thedecision to build the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant is incorreect, then the Legislative Yuan's decision to resume construction can still be changed. If the policy of building the plant is correct, then the Executive Yuan can resume construction even if the Legislative Yuan's decision is interpreted as not legally binding. What the people are concerned about is this: if the ruling party believes its anti-nuclear policy is right, then why didn't it put any greater efforts into promoting its policy and winning over public support during its first six months in power before making the decision? In particular, why didn't it explain to the people in detail that there would be no power shortages without the plant, what alternatives were available, and how the aftermath of the scrapped construction would be handled? Would it be feasible to build the plant and then decommission the first, second and third nuclear power plants successively? Similarly, the people will also ask the opposition alliance: if its final goal is to build a nuclear-free nation, then why must it insist on building the plant? Is it because we have no other alternatives? If the plant is built, then how are we to handle the nuclear waste -- a major concern in the anti-nuclear camp? Also, recent tectonic changes around the world have triggered one major earthquake after another, including the recent quakes in Central America and India. Taiwan's 921 earthquake destroyed every single house around the epicenter. How are the people to evacuate if the epicenter of a future tremor happens to be near the plant? In 1996, China test-fired missiles into the sea off Keelung -- not too far from Kungliao, the site of the plant. What will happen if China fires missiles at the plant by mistake when cross-strait relations are tense? If US technology was not able to prevent the accidental missile attack on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, how can we be so sure about the accuracy of Chinese missiles? Nuclear plants are a controversial issue all over the world. Unlike the unification-independence dispute, this does not have to do with ethnic issues. The government should hold televised debates on the issue just like those during the presidential election campaign. Are the people of Taiwan free only during elections, as Rousseau put it? Do they become slaves as soon as the elections are over? Why do we only see "general wills" fighting over this issue -- why can't we see the "will of all?" Why is it that we are only seeing political struggles instead of political persuasion? *Hsiao Hsiung-lin is an associate professor at National Taipei University. * Translated by Francis Huang This story has been viewed 162 times. URL=[http://www.taipeitimes.com/news/2001/02/18/story/0000074202] Copyright © 1999, 2000, 2001 The Taipei Times. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 8 Russia's plan to import spent nuclear fuel is full of risk U.S. News: The nuclear wasteland *Russia's plan to import spent nuclear fuel risks making a bad situation worse* By Masha Gessen MUSLYUMOVO, RUSSIA–A man dressed in gray cotton-padded pants and jacket and a tatty rabbit hat lies on his stomach very still, pressing his face into a hole in the ice. A warm spring here means the Techa River never freezes, forcing fish to come up for air right in this spot, where he can grab them with his bare hands. Hearing two visitors come down from the road, the man gets up to look. "That's a Geiger counter," he says, noting the device they're carrying. "You looking for radiation? I heard it's all gone away." It has not. The Geiger counter gives a reading of 154 microrads per hour, roughly seven times the maximum safe dose of background radiation. When the snow melts away, background radiation in some places along the shore will measure over 1,000. The village of Muslyumovo is less than 50 miles from Mayak ("Beacon"), the world's oldest nuclear fuel reprocessing plant, which has been dumping liquid radioactive waste into the river since the late 1940s. Accidents regularly shake Mayak–at least five occurred in the 1990s–but the best-known one is the 1957 waste-container explosion, one of the worst nuclear disasters of all time. About 10,000 people were evacuated from the contaminated area that year, and tens of thousands more probably should have been. But a lethal combination of ignorance, poverty, and official indifference keeps people living on the land and feeding off it–with nightmarish consequences. Despite the alarming record of operational mishaps and regulatory laxness, the Ministry of Atomic Energy, or Minatom, wants authority to import thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel from power plants in Europe and Asia. The ministry envisions earning billions of dollars–money that could expand its already considerable political clout and finance construction of new nuclear power plants. The far-fetched plan, which calls for the construction of 40 new reactors in the next 20 years–an impossible undertaking even for a wealthy country–has proved popular with Russian officials, and the parliament is set to give its OK this month. Most of that spent nuclear fuel would end up at Mayak. Up until now, Russia has by and large banned such imports of spent nuclear fuel; the relatively little that it does import, along with domestic fuel, uses virtually all capacity at Mayak and the two other radioactive-waste storage facilities in Siberia. If the Minatom plan is approved, Mayak would reprocess some of the spent nuclear fuel, yielding plutonium. Next, the atomic energy ministry would construct a new nuclear power station next to the plant, employing a so-called breeder reactor, which both uses and extracts plutonium-based fuel. Ignoring public opinion. There's opposition from the Russian nuclear regulatory agency, the State Committee for Atomic Oversight (GAN). Minatom's response? It is pushing for legislation to curtail the powers of the safety agency, which environmental activists say is already exceedingly permissive. Minatom–and its allies in the parliament and the Kremlin–are prevailing in the face of opinion polls showing that 70 percent to 90 percent of Russians oppose importing radioactive waste. Last fall, environmentalists gathered 3 million signatures in support of holding a referendum–an unprecedented grass-roots success in a country where such organizing efforts are rare. But the Central Election Commission threw out just enough votes to quash the initiative. Complains former presidential adviser Alexei Yablokov, one of the organizers, "If we had collected 5 million signatures, they would just have thrown out that many more." In the villages around the Mayak plant, opposition often gives way to tired indifference. "We are worried about feeding our kids, and we really can't give much thought to all this radiation stuff," says Maria Akhmadeyeva, who teaches elementary school in Muslyumovo. "We are soaked with this nuclear stuff anyway," adds her colleague, Russian language teacher Guzal Yalalova. "I guess the region needs this new nuclear power plant," acknowledges Muslyumovo Mayor Gaynulla Kamalov. "But no one's promising us any of the benefits." Indeed, in the past, funds earmarked for residents of the contaminated region were consistently siphoned off. An early 1990s deal, in which the United States bought Russian plutonium, was supposed to provide $5.9 million for environmental relief in the region contaminated by Mayak; in fact, according to a General Accounting Office report, only $158,000 was used for the specified purpose: improvements in the local health center. And the medical diagnostic equipment that was purchased has proved a mixed blessing for residents, who still have little money to pay for treatment. Mayor Kamalov, 56, knows all about this: He has had to scrimp, save, and beg to pay for five operations for his now 3-year-old grandson, who was born with several tumors around his chest. Invisible peril. In this remote Ural Mountains region 1,000 miles east of Moscow, residents live with the bitter consequences of pollution they can neither see, nor taste, nor smell. Gilmenur Karimova recalls the day four years ago that her granddaughter Alina was born with severely deformed legs and five fingers missing. "We cried so much," she says. The family managed to pay for two operations that enabled Alina to walk, but they are terrified at the $600 per finger they have been quoted for the hands. Alina, who makes beautiful ballpoint-pen drawings of mermaids and her mother despite her handicap, believes her fingers will eventually grow out. The contamination is spreading. An underground reservoir of radioactive waste from Mayak is inching ever closer to a river that will carry it through the region to the Arctic Ocean. An aging dam that blocks the Techa River poses another danger, which GAN warns will grow if more spent fuel is brought to Mayak for reprocessing. But these are just the most immediate risks from the possible deregulation of the Russian nuclear industry. Other potential nuclear disasters: a dozen very old reactors, including six Chernobyl-type reactors and one reactor in the center of Moscow that happens to be the world's oldest. GAN has tried to shut down these monsters in the past, but Minatom has already said it plans to keep them going–and even to re-launch one Chernobyl-type reactor this spring. Minatom also hopes to build several fast-neutron breeder reactors, a technology opposed by the United States because it extracts plutonium that could be stolen to make black-market nuclear weapons. The Russians should have their own reasons to reconsider: The one existing Russian breeder reactor, at the Beloyarsk power plant, has had 26 accidents. But in Moscow, the issue seems more about political power and its benefits than about nuclear power. [Stephen Smith on the growth of George W. Bush] [I'm at peace. I know what I want to do] The Bellona Foundationprovides information on nuclear power © 2001 U.S.News &World Report Inc. All rights ***************************************************************** 9 No chance of new nuclear power plants here *February 17, 2001* GROWING concern over electricity and energy supplies has revived national interest in nuclear power plants, but not in California, home of the current crisis. Nuclear energy remains the pariah of power options in perhaps the most environmentally sensitive state in the union. We accept, use and appreciate what's here, but no suppliers are seriously considering adding to the four nuclear plants that now provide about 16 percent of our electricity. By comparison, 104 nuclear reactors in 31 states provide 22 percent of the nation's electricity. It is one of those never-say-never propositions. Californians aren't interested in more nuclear power, but you never know what the future might pose. We don't totally agree with Jackie Cabasso of the Western States Legal Foundation that, "Nuclear power is an anachronism, an idea whose time has passed." Like most seasoned Californians, however, we don't expect to see another nuclear plant built here in our lifetimes. Californians generally agree with only the back half of Intel CEO Craig Barrett's observation that, "Nuclear power is the only answer" to a reliable energy future, "but it's not politically correct." Power generators would have to dismiss all other alternatives for California before even broaching the topic. The reasons are obvious: Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Rancho Seco. Together they convinced us that meltdowns at nuclear plants are a formula for potential long-term human and environmental contamination. The cost of building more isn't worth the risk. Such attitudes aren't as strong everywhere. A report by ANG Newspapers science writer William Brand notes that an industry task force is exploring the possibility of building nuclear plants in the United States within a decade. Few have been constructed in the past two decades. In addition to the obvious need for more energy, factors supporting the push include the American nuclear power industry's relatively safe 44-year record and new technology that operators say makes such plants more reliable than ever before. It's an opinion that 61 percent of the public apparently accepts. Pacific Gas and Electric Co.'s Diablo Canyon reactors near San Luis Obispo regularly earn safety awards. Stanford economist Geoffrey Rothwell, a member of a federal Eneregy Department advisory committee, argues that "two-thirds of the country doesn't care where the power comes from. All they want is the lights to stay on." That may be true nationally, but is less true in California where studies indicate the population is more religiously anti-nuclear than most other states. The reasons are multiple: Environmental concerns are magnified by our state's propensity for earthquakes. Californians are uneasy about -- and sometimes openly object to -- radioactive materials being trucked or otherwise transported through towns, cities, neighborhoods and even the countryside. And what do we do with the nuclear waste such power plants generate? Californians don't want it stored near them and aren't keen on foisting it off on Nevada either. While it's true that nuclear plants don't emit the daily air pollutants that fossil-fuel facilities do, fear of long-term harm that radioactivity can do is greater than concern about accumulations of sulfur dioxide and other toxic particles. The reasoning goes: It only takes one nuclear meltdown. Given basic supply-and-demand lessons the current energy crisis has reminded us of, California can never completely eliminate the prospect of one day again building nuclear power plants. But it's clearly the last option as we struggle to expand our lagging supply of electricity to meet new demand. We are uncomfortable with potential environmental hazards and the still unanswered, overriding question of what to do with nuclear waste. Generators know better than to propose it. What California needs, of course, is a balanced, comprehensive energy plan that explores all options, adopts the best alternatives and rejects others. What we've seen so far -- from Gov. Gray to U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein to state Senate Leader John Burton (who supported deregulation in 1996) and other legislators -- has been little more than a series of tourniquets to help slow the immediate hemorrhaging. The fact that we still lack an honest-to-goodness, coherent plan that includes everything from conservation to developing new energy sources reflects an absence of leadership. The governor has been a busy man appointing people to what amounts to energy advice posts. He could have done that last summer when power problems hit Southern California and threatened to strike the rest of the state in short order. But Gray Davis didn't. Now we're all paying for his delay and looking for someone to hold accountable. ***************************************************************** 10 Fire-damaged Edison reactor offline until May *February 17, 2001* SAN ONOFRE, Calif. -- A nuclear reactor at the San Onofre power plant that was damaged by an electrical fire will be out of service at least through mid-May. The fire, which started in an electrical switching room, caused "extensive damage" to the turbine rotors, bearings and other components in one of the plant's two reactors, according to a report filed Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission by Southern California Edison. Publicly traded companies must report to the commission anything that could substantially affect future earnings. Southern California Edison is the majority owner of the San Onofre plant. The Feb. 3 fire caused the reactor to shut down automatically. No radiation was released and no one was injured. A second reactor continues to produce electricity. Edison expects the damaged unit will return to service sometime between mid-May and mid-June. The company will lose between $80 million and $100 million in revenue depending on when operations return to normal, according to the SEC filing. At full power, the plant in northern San Diego County generates 1,120 megawatts, enough to power 1.1 million homes and businesses. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARTICLES ***************************************************************** 1 Bechtel holds hospital key Pahrump Valley Times February 16, 2001 An open letter to Bechtel-SAIC, Bechtel-Johnson Controls, PMC Board, Nye County Commissioners, and citizens of Pahrump and environs: Bechtel-SAIC has been awarded a $3 billion contract for Yucca Mountain, located 50 miles from our much-needed Pahrump hospital. Bechtel-Johnson Controls has the contract for the Nevada Test Site, 30 miles from our much-needed Pahrump hospital. Bechtel needs to build our hospital to complete their mission. When both corporate Nevada Bechtels, the PMC board and the entire community put together a working, training, interim program that can grow with the needs of our populations, not only would it serve our geriatric and normal needs, but would specialize in the treatment of the health effects of radiation. We are all aware that 95 percent of the Nevada Test Site (1,370 square miles) needs to be cleaned up. We will be the beneficiaries of the cleanup of this enormous area. The commissioners have petitioned the state for water rights to supply 150,000 people expected to live in Pahrump within 50 years. The proposed Pahrump hospital, emergency services and their trained professionals will service Las Vegas, Indian Springs, Clark County, the entire Tonopah Test Range, Nevada Test Site, Beatty, Amargosa to Inyo County, which includes Death Valley National Monument, California and many smaller communities. The area encompasses approximately 3,400 square miles. We currently have enough population for two hospitals now. The Department of Health's Mark Hemmings has our demographics to reinforce this concept. We encourage the two Bechtels to emulate the Swiss Nestle Corporation, which backed the Nazi Regime in World War II and gave a $70 million hospital to Lausanne in 1950. Do you see the analogy? Fortunately for us, Bechtel's reputation always includes taking care of the population located around their companies. Local managers, perhaps Robert Chance and Ken Hess, can enhance their companies and their own personal reputations when they ante up the $100 million requested to put in our health care for today and the health care for the future. This is where the next wave of health care can come from. Don't you agree? Sally Devlin *©Pahrump Valley Times 2001* Copyright © 1995-2000 PowerAdz.com ***************************************************************** 2 ATOMIC RESEARCH CASTS SHADOW ON TENNESSEE TOWN *RESIDENTS SUE U. OF C., OTHERS FOR ILLNESSES* Chicago Tribune Traditional Version - Nation/World [Chicago Tribune] By J. Linn Allen Tribune Higher Education Writer *February 18, 2001* OAK RIDGE, Tenn. Gently fingering his operation-scarred neck, Steve Heiser considered how his damaged health was seemingly linked to a war fought years before he was born. "They didn't only drop the atom bomb on Japan," he said, keeping up a smile even as his soft, twangy voice faltered. "It dropped here too, but it didn't explode--it just opened up." Shades of the past are rising from the rippling East Tennessee hills around the nuclear weapons and research complex in Oak Ridge, spreading out to Chicago and elsewhere around the country. Heiser, 49, who had his thyroid removed after being diagnosed with cancer about four years ago, is suing the University of Chicago and other contractors involved with the Oak Ridge operations that helped create the first atomic bombs and still continue today to work on weapons and do nuclear research. He is part of a new class action suit that claims contaminants released from the Oak Ridge plants--radioactive iodine in particular--sickened people in a broad area extending for miles around. A few miles away, Fannie Ball, 60, also a victim of thyroid cancer, wheezed as she spoke of noxious fogs settling on her neighborhood and of the strange smell of the creek where her children played. z Ball is suing the University of Chicago and other contractors in a separate action, claiming that racial discrimination caused African-Americans to be isolated in a section of Oak Ridge called Scarboro that was particularly exposed to contamination. The black community is nestled against a ridge that separates modest, squat homes from an atomic weapons plant, only a half mile away, that government documents say has poisoned the water and air in past years. Scarboro is closer than any other area of town to the factory. Along with the University of Chicago, the two class action suits, filed last month in federal court in Tennessee, target a roster of some of America's top corporations involved at Oak Ridge over the years. In some ways the suits seem to be a complaint against history itself--against World War II, against the atomic era, against the segregated society of the South half a century ago. But to the victims of disease, the issues are anything but abstract: They are sick, they blame the people who ran the complex, and, in Ball's words, they want "recognition and compensation." The suits stem in part from the Clinton administration's moves in recent years to open up the annals of the nation's nuclear weapons programs, long shrouded in secrecy. Recently the government released a list of sites--including the University of Chicago and other area locations--where workers on hush-hush projects may have been exposed to toxic and radioactive materials. The Oak Ridge suits are being filed largely in reaction to a federally underwritten Tennessee state study that came out last year, which itself was sparked by releases of data early in the Clinton years. The study said pollutants from the complex could well have caused abnormally high rates of cancer and other diseases, though there is no ironclad evidence to show that they did. A challenging case Winning the suits likely will be tough. Linking the plaintiffs' sicknesses directly to the Oak Ridge contamination will be difficult, and in any case, the defendants typically would have had clauses in their government contracts exempting them from liability. Oak Ridge has been a government-funded enterprise from the beginning. But the plaintiffs are represented by law firms around the country experienced in suits over radiation poisoning, and the attorneys are well aware of such contract clauses. The University of Chicago's involvement starts in the frantic months in the early 1940s when America was racing Nazi Germany to build the weapon that could determine the outcome of World War II. After scientists led by Enrico Fermi created the world's first controlled chain reaction in 1942 on the Hyde Park campus, the Army began a Herculean building program on a 59,000-acre site in Tennessee to construct facilities to produce enriched uranium and plutonium for the bomb. Two other centers for what was called the Manhattan Project were at Los Alamos, N.M., and Hanford, Wash. The Army persuaded a team of University of Chicago scientists to operate the first pilot plutonium plant at Oak Ridge, although the scientists would have preferred to do the work at what became Argonne National Laboratory near Lemont instead of in the backwoods 500 miles from their campus. Laboring day and night, the scientists and thousands of construction workers got the plant, called X-10, up and running in only nine months. It began producing plutonium from irradiated uranium in November 1943. At the plant's center was a graphite reactor, designed and operated by the University of Chicago team, that still stands today as an attraction for visitors to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The University of Chicago withdrew as the contract operator in 1945--about a month before the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan--and the management was taken over by Monsanto Corp., one of a series of operators at the Oak Ridge complex over the years. Though the university relinquished its oversight more than 55 years ago and contamination from the X-10 plant and two others (which the school didn't supervise) called K-25 and Y-12 has occurred over a long time, the institution is central to the case, contends one of the plaintiff's attorneys. "They committed the original sin," said George Barrett, a Nashville lawyer who has successfully sued Vanderbilt University in an unconnected case involving radiation poisoning. The university was in charge when the X-10 plant began running, and it was there when black workers were originally put in segregated compounds, Barrett said. There is little doubt that the Oak Ridge complex posed a possible health risk to its workers and area residents from the very beginning. The seven-year, $14 million study released last year by the Tennessee Department of Health stated flatly that "environmental contamination of the region by the U.S. government's industrial operations on the Oak Ridge Reservation has occurred since 1943." The study homes in on airborne radioactive iodine, intentionally released from X-10, and mercury from the Y-12 weapons plant as the substances most likely to have affected the health of people living around the complex. Radioactive iodine tends to concentrate in the thyroid gland, and the study concluded that up to 150 cases of thyroid cancer beyond the normal rate may have occurred because of the Oak Ridge pollution. There have been no epidemiological surveys to determine the actual number of cases that have occurred, however. In addition, the study estimated that 350,000 pounds of mercury were released from 1950 to 1982, mostly into a creek that runs through the Y-12 site and then ambles not far from the Scarboro community. A visible contamination Children from Scarboro as well as other areas used to swim and play at the creek during those years, residents say. The study said central nervous system and kidney damage could have resulted from that kind of exposure. It added that fish from waterways that the creek fed into could have damaged fetuses carried by women who ate significant amounts. The mercury so saturated the Scarboro area that residents almost treated it as part of the natural environment, they said. "The kids caught it in bottles, and you saw these little bubbles and beads and stuff," said R.L. Ayres, a 77-year-old Scarboro plaintiff who has lived there since the first houses were built in the early 1950s. Even today, Scarboro children get sick at an alarming rate. A 1998 survey by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found a third of the community's children have potentially severe respiratory problems. Some 13 percent have been diagnosed with asthma, compared with a national average of 7 percent. "Had we not been put over here, we'd have a better chance of not getting the first dose of everything," Ball said. Black workers who had been segregated in huts during the war were given the Scarboro area to live in starting in the early 1950s. It was located in a valley previously containing trailers for whites. The University of Chicago's policy is not to comment on pending litigation, but Alvin Weinberg, a Chicago scientist who led the design team for the first Oak Ridge reactor, called it "ridiculous" to connect the school with segregation of blacks. University scientists basically did what the government told them to do, said Weinberg, 85, who became director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory after the war and still lives in the town. "It was a Southern, segregated town, and the Army wasn't interested in social experiments," he said. In any case, no one at the time thought the area that became Scarboro would be contaminated, he said. "What they were mainly interested in was winning the ---damn war. That's something people lose sight of," he said. Both Ball and Heiser, however, said they appreciate the crucial work that went on at Oak Ridge but are angry at being kept in the dark about the risks for decades afterward. "Any of us would have worked for our country, because they needed us, but they could have told us after the war," Ball said. The lawsuits charge that the Oak Ridge managers failed to warn the public about the dangers of radioactive and other harmful emissions. The U.S. Department of Energy began to declassify information on the problem in the early 1990s, though contamination warnings were posted on waterways around Oak Ridge about 10 years before that. A `haunting' backdrop Heiser, who grew up about 10 miles east of Oak Ridge and has always lived in the area, said the plants were "always there, haunting everybody" because of vague fears about radiation. But when he was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 1997, he said he didn't make the connection because--unlike so many in surrounding counties--he hadn't worked there. The doctors asked him whether he ever had radiation treatments for acne or excessive dental X-rays, he said. It was only when the state study came out detailing risks from the radioactive iodine emissions that he came to believe Oak Ridge was responsible for the event that he said has changed his life and put him into "a different category." He is undergoing regular medical treatment, is weaker than he used to be and suffers sudden chills, he said. A mechanic who has been athletic all his life, he continues to play softball and basketball, "but I'm good for just so much. It's like a light switch going off," he said. His wife, Darlene, 46, a lifelong area resident who also is a party to the suit, said doctors say she has an enlarged thyroid, though she hasn't been diagnosed with cancer. In addition to money damages, their suit asks for an admission of wrongdoing, a public apology and a court-supervised fund to pay for medical and biological monitoring of people who may have been affected. It also seeks a fund for scientific research on the issues involved. Ball, who became disabled and stopped working at Oak Ridge in 1989, takes 14 pills a day for asthma and diabetes as well as her thyroid condition, and she said she has been tested for lung and bladder cancer. A Scarboro resident since 1954, she has a 42-year-old daughter who never worked at the Oak Ridge plants but who also has been diagnosed with thyroid problems, she said. She doesn't know much about the University of Chicago, whose supervision at Oak Ridge ended long before she got there, but she said she believes the finger should point somewhere for Scarboro's ills. "Whoever was here, whether it was Chicago or whoever, they should clean what they messed up." ***************************************************************** 3 Blind To Dangers ctnow.com By BARBARA NAGY The Hartford Courant February 18, 2001 When Quentin C. Kessel was a student in the 1950s, the promise of nuclear energy was absolutely amazing. Scientists working at a feverish pace during World War II had figured out in just three years how to split the atom. Ten years later, it seemed that nuclear fission was going to make electricity so cheap that there would be no reason to have meters on houses. Shown being launched in 1954, the Nautilus became the first vessel to make the historic voyage under the polar ice cap and reach the North Pole in 1958. Connecticut, like many other states, saw an opportunity in the 1950s and 1960s as the federal government looked for new military and peacetime uses for its perfect fuel. State leaders from Gov. Abraham Ribicoff to University of Connecticut President Homer Babbidge hoped to make Connecticut a center of nuclear research by winning jobs and research grants. There was one problem. The devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had made the danger of high doses of radiation horrifyingly clear. But no one in the early days of nuclear research understood the long-term effects of chronic low-level exposure on workers handling the uranium, plutonium and beryllium that the U.S. government was using to build its Cold War weapons inventory and develop commercial power plants. Standards for on-the-job exposure today are a tenth the levels of 1954. "We really had quite a cavalier attitude toward radioactivity at first," said Kessel, now a physics professor at UConn. With the U.S. Department of Energy announcing last month that it will compensate weapons industry workers for certain illnesses that may have been caused by workplace hazards, many of those people - and their families - are wondering what they may have been exposed to. Connecticut contractors played only a minor role in developing atomic bombs during World War II and the Cold War. At the government's request, several machine shops experimented with ways to shape radioactive metals such as uranium, which was used as a fuel to sustain nuclear reactions. "The government itself did not have the expertise or technology to take on a manufacturing enterprise of this size," said researcher Stephen Schwartz, so it turned to the machine shops that did. Hartford's Aetna Inc. also has a peculiar connection to the World War II atomic industry. It provided liability coverage for the sprawling plants in Oak Ridge, Tenn., that produced several components for both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. By the mid-1950s, Connecticut's role in the nuclear industry had grown substantially. Two of the state's largest military contractors were deeply involved in researching new uses for atomic power. In Groton, Mamie Eisenhower christened the world's first nuclear-powered submarine, the Nautilus, in 1954 at Electric Boat. At about the same time, Pratt &Whitney employees at the Connecticut Aircraft Nuclear Engine Laboratory in Middletown were starting to work on a jet engine that the Air Force hoped would let a bomber stay in the air for weeks on end. By 1955, 45 companies, universities and hospitals in the state were licensed to use radioactive materials, mostly for research and medical purposes. The Energy Department estimates that 600,000 people nationally worked at weapons plants during the Cold War, mostly at vast federal reservations in places such as Oak Ridge and Hanford, Wash. Those sites employed tens of thousands making new generations of atomic bombs and missiles. The government has so far identified 11 Connecticut companies that did weapons work, employing perhaps 10,000 people during the 1950s and 1960s. "Whether you like nuclear weapons or not, the people who worked in these facilities paid a very high price," said Schwartz, author of a Brookings Institution study on the history and cost of U.S. nuclear weapons development. "The Cold War ended, and people said, `Wow, we won without a shot being fired and nobody lost their lives,' " he said. "It's important that people recognize that we did pay a really terrible price in this country for the arms race." Hundreds of historical documents released by the Energy Department in the past few years suggest that workers often did not realize the danger they faced, or did not take it seriously: + Four workers at a beryllium-processing plant near Rochester, N.Y., died one month in 1943, apparently after they unknowingly handled ore that had been mixed with uranium. + Hanford workers, seemingly unconcerned, would dip their hands into a solution that removed a layer of skin when they couldn't get "clean," even with the most careful scrubbing. + At a plant in Middlesex, N.J., inspectors meticulously recorded how workers would not heed warnings about radioactivity - they even removed a protective window in a control room because they were hot. + In Miamisburg, Ohio, 27 of 149 operations workers at one plant who were tested in August 1948 were contaminated to the point that they had to be switched to other jobs. The Energy Department's compensation program is part of a larger effort to deal with the "cleanup" of the Cold War. It expands programs already in place for military personnel who were exposed to radiation, and for victims of radiation medical experiments - including sailors at the submarine base in Groton. But the program does not cover thousands of people who handled materials for Navy programs; those programs have always been separate from the Energy Department's other nuclear work. It also does not cover thousands who handled radioactive material for non-military programs. They can file claims under workers' compensation laws, but those laws have more stringent standards for proving that a health problem is work-related. Those standards can be hard to meet because proving a cause-effect relationship between an illness and exposure is difficult, Kessel said. "There's just no way to do it. No way to know it," he said. At best, scientists could do a massive study to establish a statistical correlation between working at a particular plant and having a certain health problem, Kessel said. But proving that the job caused the illness is nearly impossible. He suggests that people who think they were exposed - no matter whom they worked for - contact the Energy Department about the program. Workers could benefit from having their names on file in case the government expands the list. The extent of the hazard workers faced depends on the exposure and on the individual, Kessel said. Plutonium, for example, can go through the digestive tract with little damage, but inhaling dust from a machining operation is extremely hazardous because the lungs readily absorb the radioactivity. Few studies have been done on the effects of radiation exposure on workers at the large government reservations, and even less has been done on the health of people that worked for private contractors, such as those in Connecticut. According to a 1995 study by the General Accounting Office, researchers have been hampered by workplace records that lack detail, and sometimes provide conflicting information about how much radiation workers were exposed to. The Atomic Energy Commission concluded in a ground-breaking 1946 study that the problem of worker exposure was extensive because the number of people handling radioactive materials was growing rapidly, and because of the "undreamed of" hazards they faced. Safety analysts, the commission said, had to begin considering that a worker might handle radioactive materials through their lifetime, potentially for decades. According to the same report, "numerous" companies that worked in the initial stages of the weapons programs were not told about the hazards of the materials they were being asked to handle. That, in itself, was a hazard. "The fact that the worker in the subcontracing company could not be told of the hazards involved made impossible a rational approach to the protection problem from his point of view," the report said. According to the Energy Department, workers at some government sites were told of the dangers, but others weren't. Schwartz said workers on the large reservations were more likely to know about the hazards than workers at small private companies, such as those in Connecticut. To some extent, the problem continued into the Cold War. Schwartz suspects that even some company managers didn't know what they were working with. "There was great concern in Congress and elsewhere that the Russians were getting ahead of us," he said. The government was afraid that warnings would slow weapons development, which could jeopardize national security and raise the already high program costs. Workers, Schwartz said, asked few questions. "At that time, most people in the country unblinkingly obeyed the government," he said. Gennaro D'Auria, whose job at Bradley Field in the 1950s included monitoring radioactive fallout, said he trusted management and the government to keep him safe. "I figured they knew what they were doing," said D'Auria, who now lives in Manchester. Schwartz said workers at many smaller subcontractors only handled weapons material for short periods of time, which may have made them less aware of the danger. Gradually the work was concentrated at the government sites through the 1950s to save money, increase control and improve security, he said. Connecticut, though, saw an opportunity to build an industry around what Pratt and EB were doing. In 1951 the Atomic Energy Commission had contracts with 50 companies in the state. "In the rapidly developing field of atomic energy, opportunities galore face energetic and enterprising manufacturers and businessmen," The Courant editorialized in 1954. "This state has the resources to handle plants, for instance, that might process fuel elements or treat metals for use in new designs." That year, Plainfield tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Atomic Energy Commission to build a $348 million atom smasher in town, hoping to win the payroll and prestige a facility such as that could offer at the time. In 1956 an advisory committee recommended that the state build a research reactor that Ribicoff hoped could train physicists and maintain the state's position in the industry. The "way to make Connecticut first in atomic energy is to make Connecticut first in atomic education," the governor said in a speech that year to a manufacturing group. "The No. 1 bottleneck in atomic development is the lack of trained brainpower," he said. "Atomic progress desperately needs new ideas, new techniques and new solutions to unprecedented technical problems." Two years later, a mini-reactor was installed at the University of Connecticut. Then, in 1963, the legislature appropriated $500,000 to establish a nonprofit group that would organize a nuclear research center. The members included the state's "coordinator of atomic development activities." The advisory group for the center included Leslie Groves, a retired Army general and Darien resident who had been head of the Manhattan Project, which developed the bombs the United States dropped on Japan. Other states took similar steps. "Civic boosters saw this as a real boon to local economies," Schwartz said. The state did build a good base of contractors that supported the Navy effort at EB for decades, including UNC Naval Products in Montville, which processed fuel, and Combustion Engineering in Windsor, whose engineering and research center in Windsor included a reactor where crews trained. Connecticut may have had a bit more luck because one of its U.S. senators was Brien McMahon, nicknamed "the atomic senator." He was the first head of the Atomic Energy Commission, and a fervent supporter of nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Connecticut was also one of the first U.S. states to build a commercial nuclear reactor, something Combustion Engineering said was a factor in its decision to locate in Windsor. Still, competition for research grants was keen, Kessel said. And building an industry in relatively small Connecticut was hard when the most talented scientists wanted to be near the big government plants doing the exotic work. Enthusiasm for nuclear energy began to fade in the 1960s when a growing number of scientists questioned the effect of nuclear fallout from weapons tests on the environment. As early as 1960, the Air Force realized that the public would have trouble accepting a nuclear-powered aircraft such as the one Pratt was working on, a project that for some reason was given the code name "Project Halitosis." A secret report that year suggested that the government launch an aggressive public relations campaign to reassure people that the planes would be safe. Despite the questions, some of those who were involved in the early years of nuclear power still believe it has amazing potential. People not only such as Kessel, the UConn professor, but also Mortimer Glotzer of West Hartford, who went to work at Combustion Engineering in the late 1960s. Glotzer was incredulous when he showed up at work one day in the early 1980s and saw anti-nuclear protesters outside the plant. "Suddenly somebody discovered we were working with uranium up there," he scoffed. "More people die in coal mines than die in nuclear plants. I thought it was safe, properly run." Copyright © 2000 Myway Corp. ***************************************************************** 4 ORNL to produce plutonium-238 for space program February 18, 2001 By Frank Munger, News-Sentinel senior writer ORNL to produce plutonium-238 for space program OAK RIDGE -- Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been tabbed for a new role in the U.S. space program -- producing and processing plutonium-238 for power-generating systems aboard spacecraft -- but there's still the question of funding. In one of his last acts before leaving office last month, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson signed the record of decision for the program to re-establish a domestic source of the nuclear material for space exploration. The notice was published in the Jan. 26 Federal Register. For the past decade, the United States has supplied its needs by purchasing plutonium-238 from Russia. The current contract expires next year, and the existing U.S. inventory is expected to run out in 2005. Based on plans approved by the U.S. Department of Energy, ORNL's High Flux Isotope Reactor would share the role of producing the plutonium -- along with a DOE reactor in Idaho -- and other Oak Ridge facilities would be used to extract and purify the plutonium-238 after it comes out of the reactors. ORNL facilities also would be used to prepare the targets of neptunium-237, which are irradiated in reactors to create the plutonium isotopes. "We're very anxious and very enthused," said Bob Wham, program manager at ORNL's Radiochemical Engineering Development Center, where the plutonium processing would be conducted. Before that work can be done, however, the Oak Ridge lab must prepare two unused "hot cells" -- heavily shielded enclosures -- at REDC, which is adjacent to the High Flux Isotope Reactor. The project to equip and configure the facilities for the plutonium work is expected to cost up to $40 million, and that money has not yet been approved by Congress. In fact, it's not clear at this point whether any money for the project will be included in the Bush administration's initial budget proposal for fiscal 2002. That budget is to be submitted to Congress in early April. "We're crossing our fingers," Wham said. "There's a general sense that it will get support." No timetable for plutonium production has yet been set, but if the United States wants to have a domestic supply available in 2006, or thereabouts, then preparations would need to begin in the near future. Plutonium-238 is different from its highly fissionable nuclear sister, plutonium-239, which is used in nuclear weapons, but the two isotopes share the same dangers if ingested or, particularly, if inhaled. The radioactive material must be handled in sealed quarters to protect workers. Oak Ridge workers will use remote manipulators to process and purify the plutonium in the hot cells, which have concrete walls 41/2 feet thick. "The containment system is formidable," Gordon Michaels, the lab's nuclear technology chief, said recently. Plutonium-238, which has a half-life of 87.7 years, is the isotope of choice for space missions because of its heat-producing capabilities. Some configurations can reach temperatures of 1,000 degrees Celsius, according to a DOE information sheet. The plutonium role is expected to mean long-term work for about 70 people at ORNL. Michaels said it would help solidify the lab's nuclear mission and provide "an interesting and challenging scientific operation" for the staff. The plutonium work will not compete with existing research operations at the High Flux Isotope Reactor or interfere with other lab activities, officials said. After Oak Ridge workers have extracted and purified the plutonium, the nuclear material will be shipped to Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico -- where it will be formed into pellets used in the space power systems. The iridium cladding for the fuel pellets also is made at ORNL. That cladding is designed to protect the plutonium and keep it intact under almost any conditions, including a major explosion. Frank Munger may be reached at 865-482-9213 or twig1@knoxnews.infi.net. Copyright 2001 The Knoxville News-Sentinel Co. ***************************************************************** 5 Editorial: MAKING THE CASE - Bush must keep cleanup moving The Paducah Sun Sunday, February 18, 2001 Paducah, Kentucky If a recent news story is any indication, the bean counters in the Bush administration need a quick lesson in the history of federal nuclear facilities such as the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant. And while they're reviewing this history, which records the exposure of plant workers to radioactive materials and the government's reckless disposal of many tons of contaminated waste, perhaps they should work on identifying the difference between frivolous and essential government spending. We think money that is allocated to right a wrong the federal government committed — a wrong that damaged the environment and endangered the health of workers who put their trust in the government — falls into the latter category. But a story that appeared in the Wall Street Journal last week suggests some in the Bush administration have a different view. Administration budget officials have targeted the cleanup program at former nuclear weapons facilities for major cuts, the Journal said. This news isn't going down well with Congressman Ed Whitfield, who represents the First District, and Sens. Mitch McConnell and Jim Bunning. We feel certain that, if necessary, they will educate the Bush team on the long political struggle that finally produced federal action on the cleanup of the uranium enrichment plant in Paducah. In fairness, it should be stressed that the president has not yet released his proposed budget. We don't know whether or not his budget will recommend major reductions in funding for the Department of Energy. The Wall Street Journal reported that officials in Bush's budget office want to trim $1 billion from DOE's budget, with $400 million coming out of the cleanup program. According to the Journal, Spencer Abraham, the new energy secretary, opposes the cuts and wants to aggressively push the cleanup. If a debate is going on within the administration about DOE funding — and we're inclined to believe there is, given that the Journal is a highly credible source — the president would be wise to listen to his energy secretary, not his budget advisors. As a former U.S. senator, Abraham probably has gained a basic understanding of DOE's problems, most of which relate to credibility. The agency lost credibility here in Paducah because, over a period of many years, it failed to adequately protect enrichment plant workers and the environment from the hazardous by-products of the nuclear weapons program. Then DOE presided over a lackadaisical cleanup effort that went on for 12 years before a single drum of contaminated material was removed from the site. The agency's credibility problem was aggravated by a combination of extravagant promises and lack of follow-up from Abraham's predecessor, Bill Richardson. With Whitfield, McConnell, Bunning, community leaders, plant union officials and Gov. Paul Patton all pressing for action, DOE finally got the plant cleanup moving last year. As Whitfield and eight other congressional representatives noted in a letter sent to Abraham, the cleanup is now in a critical phase. The Bush administration needs to increase funding for the cleanup, not cut it. Otherwise, it may take several decades to repair the damage the federal government did in Paducah and other areas where nuclear weapons facilities were located. The federal government has a moral responsibility to these communities to deal with the plants' legacy of radioactive contamination. In our view, this is not optional spending — it's obligatory. On a less idealistic level, Kentucky's congressional delegation surely will remind Bush that he carried this state on his way to his razor-thin victory in the Electoral College. If Bush fails to follow through on DOE's commitment to the Paducah cleanup, he will suffer political consequences in western Kentucky. Administration officials should keep in mind, too, that this state's Democratic governor may decide to pursue a lawsuit to force the federal government to clean up the plant grounds. Gov. Patton threatened to use that option against the Clinton administration. If Bush and Congress don't produce the needed funds, Patton probably wouldn't hesitate — nor should he hesitate — to take the feds to court. Sen. McConnell says he wants to meet with Bush to discuss funding for the Paducah cleanup. We expect that McConnell will help the president avoid a serious misstep on an issue of great importance here and in other areas of the country where the federal government has failed to live up to its obligations as the overseer of the nuclear weapons program. ***************************************************************** 6 Auditor Knocks Nuke Security Saturday, February 17, 2001 Albuquerque Journal--> By Jennifer McKee *Journal Northern Bureau* SANTA FE — The nation's plutonium is far from secure, according to a fiery letter sent to the U.S. Department of Energy and many in Congress this week from a firm hired to double-check security at Los Alamos National Laboratory and other nuclear sites. Officials at both the Department of Energy and its Los Alamos lab decried the letter and questioned the credibility of its author — Ronald Timm, president of RETA Security of Lemont, Ill., a company that also sells security systems. Timm's letter, sent Monday, said that accidental "nuclear detonation or explosion" or the possible theft of "special nuclear materials" is possible and has been outlined in several earlier studies. The special nuclear materials are principally the radioactive ingredients needed to make a nuclear bomb, such as plutonium. The letter also says the DOE has minimized similar warnings and has failed to fix problems for years. "The tone of Mr. Timm's letter speaks volumes about its credibility," said James Rickman, a lab spokesman. "The laboratory has multiple, robust security measures in place that are more than adequate to protect special nuclear materials from all credible threats." Joe Davis, a DOE spokesman in Washington, D.C., said Timm earlier sent a similar letter to the department's investigative arm and that all his concerns were checked out. "We're going to conduct a review of the letter to make sure there's nothing new," Davis said. "We believe most of these matters have been addressed." The letter was addressed to new Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and forwarded to 19 members of Congress, an official with the General Accounting Office, two high-ranking DOE officials and a government watchdog group, the Project on Government Oversight. U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., was among those the letter was addressed to while Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., and Rep. Tom Udall, D-N.M., were not. According to the letter, Timm alerted the DOE to his concerns earlier, but the department responded with an inadequate investigation that "minimized the problem." "Terrorists have a ready supply of Special Nuclear Materials already existing and available within our borders," the letter reads. "The DOE has avoided addressing this serious fact for the past eight years." The letter specifically mentioned Los Alamos National Lab and the defunct nuclear weapon factory at Rocky Flats, Colo. Timm told the Journal that the DOE usually fixes its security problems when someone points them out but does nothing to upgrade the bureaucratic sluggishness and lack of accountability that creates the security problems in the first place. "If (DOE efforts) at fixing things had been successful, we wouldn't be at risk anymore," he said. "The department has been reactive." In addition to auditing DOE sites, RETA security also sells security systems — including a "sticky foam" designed to foil would-be intruders — and has audited security systems for more than 200 schools in Illinois. Since 1997, RETA has been hired to review the so-called site plans every part of the DOE complex writes every year, Timm said. The plans outline what sensitive materials the places keep and how they're stored, transported and might be defended. Timm's job is to make sure the sites are telling the truth and living up to the department's own standards. Los Alamos is not, Timm said. "It's been a litany of problems," he said, declining to offer details. "That site is almost comic, although tragedy would probably be a better word for it." He suggests the DOE "lock down" or cease all work with nuclear materials until it has a better handle on its security. But according to Steven Aftergood, head of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, the public may not know whom to believe in this disagreement. Obviously, DOE and Los Alamos officials want to put the best spin on the situation they can, he said. But Timm, who relies on DOE contracts to make a living, has a reason to put his own spin on things. "He's a security consultant who has an interest in increasing the flow of dollars," Aftergood said. Still, if Timm's allegations are true, Aftergood said, then the nation's nuclear situation is "a little troubling." 2001 Albuquerque Journal ***************************************************************** 7 Depleted Uranium: America's Military 'Gift' That Keeps on Giving Sunday, February 18, 2001 By DAN FAHEY BOSTON--Despite scant coverage in the U.S. media, a controversy over depleted-uranium ammunition used in the Gulf and Balkan wars has been raging in Europe. Several governments that provided troops for these conflicts fear that a rash of unexplained illnesses in veterans--including hemorrhaging, tumors and cancers--may have been caused by ammunition fired by U.S. warplanes. Germany, Italy, Norway and the European Parliament have called for a moratorium on using the ammunition, while the World Health Organization has announced plans for a study of civilians in Kosovo and Iraq who may have been exposed. Last week, Pekka Haavisto, the head of the United Nations' investigation of depleted uranium, warned of the necessity to "closely follow the state of health" of those exposed to the ammunition in the Balkans. Questions abound: Is there a causal link between depleted uranium and serious illnesses? What constitutes dangerous levels of exposure? How many soldiers and civilians have been exposed? How much plutonium is there in the ammunition? One thing is certain: The Pentagon has inflamed the controversy by withholding information and stonewalling investigations. It is likely to remain a major headache for the Bush administration, especially for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Depleted uranium is a chemically toxic heavy metal that emits low-level alpha radiation. It is used in armor-piercing ammunition because it is extremely dense and pyrophoric, which enables it to punch and burn its way through hard targets such as tanks. But depleted uranium also contaminates the impact area with a fine depleted-uranium dust that presents a health hazard if inhaled in sufficient quantities. In the aftermath of the Gulf War, research on rats conducted by the military's Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute found that depleted uranium's chemical toxicity--not its radioactivity--may cause immune system damage and central nervous system problems and may contribute to the development of certain cancers. Dr. David McClain, the military's top depleted-uranium researcher, told a presidential committee investigating Gulf War illnesses in 1999 that "strong evidence exists to support [a] detailed study of potential DU carcinogenicity." A separate Army-funded study conducted by the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute in Albuquerque, N.M., found that depleted uranium caused cancer when implanted in laboratory animals. While Fletcher Hahn, a senior scientist at Lovelace, cautioned about applying the findings to human beings, he also called the study "a warning flag that says we shouldn't ignore this." Despite the military's own research, however, in recent weeks Pentagon spokesmen have dismissed concerns about depleted uranium as unscientific hysteria and propaganda. For example, Army Col. Eric Daxon recently attributed concerns about depleted uranium to "a purposeful disinformation campaign" by the Iraqi government. Yet, the Army anticipated the current controversy even before the war against Iraq. A July 1990 report from the U.S. Army Armament, Munitions and Chemical Command predicted 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 [ammunition] for military applications." The report added that depleted uranium is "linked to cancer when exposures are internal." Six months after the Army's prescient report, U.S. and coalition fighting forces charged into Kuwait and Iraq, oblivious to the hazards of the 320 tons of depleted-uranium ammunition shot by U.S. tanks and aircraft. When thousands of veterans reported myriad health problems after the war, a series of federal investigations queried the Defense Department about its use of depleted uranium. In each case, the Army Surgeon General's office asserted that only 35 veterans had been exposed, a number so small that it did not justify further research.   Through Congressional inquiry and the determined work of Gulf War veterans' advocates, however, the Pentagon was forced to dramatically increase its estimates of the number of veterans exposed to depleted uranium. In January 1998, the Pentagon's Office of the Special Assistant for Gulf War Illnesses made a long-overdue admission: "Combat troops or those carrying out support functions generally did not know that DU contaminated equipment such as enemy vehicles struck by DU rounds required special handling. The failure to properly disseminate such information to troops at all levels may have resulted in thousands of unnecessary exposures." The Pentagon's figure of "thousands" tells us little about the effects of depleted uranium on these veterans. Unfortunately, until 1998 the Department of Veterans Affairs accepted the Pentagon's original number and examined only 33 veterans exposed to depleted uranium. Some of these veterans continued to excrete depleted uranium in their semen and urine six years after the war. Several have mild central nervous system problems. The VA removed a bone tumor from one veteran who was wounded by DU shrapnel. In the absence of an epidemiological study of a larger number of exposed veterans, however, no firm conclusions about the role of depleted uranium can be drawn. Unfortunately, the lack of candor has continued even after Kosovo. When the war ended, a United Nations task force asked NATO to identify areas contaminated with depleted uranium so that peacekeepers, civilians and relief workers might be warned about the potential hazard. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization inexplicably refused to comply with the request. In February 2000, eight months after the war, NATO finally confirmed that U.S. jets had released the equivalent of 10 tons of depleted uranium in Kosovo and Serbia. Another seven months passed before NATO disclosed the 112 locations of contamination. But it wasn't until last month--19 months after the bombing stopped--that NATO finally posted warning signs at the sites. From all accounts, peacekeepers, civilians and relief workers in Kosovo were surprised to learn about depleted-uranium contamination in their midst. There, as in Iraq, children had long been playing on destroyed equipment. In addition, adults had scavenged destroyed equipment for usable parts and scrap metal. European outrage increased when the U.N. disclosed that some depleted-uranium ammunition used in Kosovo contains plutonium and other highly radioactive elements. Pentagon spokesmen asserted that the amounts of plutonium in the ammunition are extremely low, but they have failed to publicly disclose the levels of plutonium in ammunition shot in Kosovo, Bosnia, Iraq and Kuwait and on training ranges in Japan, Germany, Puerto Rico and the United States. The Pentagon's history of withholding information about depleted uranium has fueled suspicions among many of our allies. Rumsfeld should try a new approach: ordering full disclosure of all information and complete cooperation with international investigations. - - - Dan Fahey, Who Attends the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, Is a Navy Veteran and Former Board Member of the National Gulf War Resource Center Copyright 2001 Los Angeles Times ***************************************************************** 8 Navy To Investigate Sub Collision Las Vegas SUN: February 18, 2001 ASSOCIATED PRESS HONOLULU (AP) -- Japanese family members examined videotape of the sunken ship Ehime Maru sitting upright on the ocean floor as a top U.S. Navy official announced a high-level investigation into why a U.S. submarine surfaced directly underneath it, leaving nine of their relatives missing. The videotape, taken by robot submersibles, shows the exterior of the fishing vessel seemingly in pristine condition, with no signs of the nine men and boys who have been missing since Feb. 9 when the USS Greeneville collided with the ship during an emergency surfacing drill. Damage to the bottom of the boat was not visible because of the downward angle of the video, taken 2,033 feet below the ocean surface, Coast Guard spokesman Lt. Greg Fondran said Saturday. Relatives have demanded answers as to why the 360-foot nuclear-powered submarine stationed two civilians at key controls during the emergency drill. As the 6,900-ton submarine surfaced, its rudder superstructure knifed through the hull of the 500-ton Ehime Maru, which sank within minutes. Twenty-six survivors were plucked from the waters near Pearl Harbor. The remaining nine crew and passengers are missing and presumed dead. "The court of inquiry will provide a full and open accounting for the American and Japanese people," Adm. Thomas Fargo, commander of the Pacific Fleet, said during a news conference Saturday. Fargo said the Navy expected to convene the inquiry -- the Navy's highest form of administrative investigation -- at Pearl Harbor on Thursday. The hearing could result in a recommendation for courts-martial of the USS Greeneville's officers, Fargo said. The submarine's commander, executive officer and officer of the deck have been named parties to the inquiry. Three Navy flag officers will make up the court, Fargo said. A flag officer of the Japanese Maritime Self-defense Force will be invited to participate as an adviser. "The seriousness in which I view this tragic accident is reflected in the level of investigation and the seniority of the court members," Fargo said. The submarine's commander, Cmdr. Scott Waddle, was reassigned to a staff position after the incident. The other two officers named were Lt. Cmdr. Gerald K. Pfeifer and Lt.j.g. Michael J. Coen. "The families have been a great concern of ours throughout this past week," said Fargo. "I've got a great empathy for the Japanese people and their families and we'll do everything in our power to make sure we have a full accounting on this accident and take care of their needs here in Hawaii." As for the families' demand for an apology from Waddle, the admiral noted that because Waddle's actions are under investigation "there are legal implications, I think, with respect to that. It will certainly be his judgment." Adm. Dennis Blair, commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Command, offered the apologies of the U.S. government when he met with Seishiro Eto, Japan's senior vice minister for foreign affairs, on Saturday, said command spokeswoman Army Lt. Col. Christy Samuels. Anguished family members and the Japanese government have called for the ship's recovery, an operation experts say would be difficult and expensive. Whether the Ehime Maru is in a condition that would allow it to be raised intact could not be determined from the videos taken Saturday, said Jon Yoshishige, a spokesman for the Pacific Fleet. The Coast Guard has extended its search for bodies through the holiday weekend. U.S. Pacific Fleet: www.cpf.navy.mil. All contents copyright 2001 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 9 Protesters says no to plutonium New Zealand Herald Online - Newspaper - IRN Breaking News 18.02.2001 12:00 A flotilla of ships is preparing to leave the Bay of Islands at midday today to protest as two boats carrying plutonium fuel pass through the Tasman Sea. The plutonium ships are travelling from France to Japan but must avoid both New Zealand and Australian economic waters. Crewman on board flotilla ship Siome , Dr Tony Atkinson says the ships will chain together and stretch across the ocean. He says they will spread out up to 17-kilometres apart to cross over the fuel boats path. Dr Atkinson says the flotilla ships leave today following a blessing from local Maori, politicians and public. He says the crews are hoping their protest will lead people to ask why. Dr Tony Atkinson says the reason they are sailing to protest is to alert people to the danger the ships pose to this country as they pass through. He says it is a symbolic protest and participants are hoping people will at least ask why it is being done. Bulletin supplied by IRN Limited © 2001 IRN Limited. Headlines • Interim injunction issued against Prebble over People's Bank ©Copyright 2001, NZ Herald ***************************************************************** 10 Nuclear subs 'poisoned my family' cast shadow of cancer Guardian Unlimited Observer | UK News | Family struck by double tragedy demands inquiry as Trident contractor plans to release more radiation Paul Harris Sunday February 18, 2001 The Observer The first time anyone knew something was wrong was when Lorraine Kelly felt a lump on her husband Paul's stomach. She persuaded him to see a doctor. The diagnosis was cancer. Three years later he died, aged 47, and now his brother, Peter Kelly, is going to the High Court for answers. He also wants to know why his daughter, Sarah, developed cancer when she was eight. He believes the cause of his family's tragedy lies just yards from his home where the nuclear submarines dock at Plymouth's Devonport naval base. Paul had worked for months as a roofer in the site, sometimes carrying out projects within the submarine compound. Sarah grew up in its shadow, in one of the tightly packed streets that nestle right up to the docks. 'I don't want anything else to happen to my family,' Peter Kelly said. 'I want to know if we are safe or not.' Kelly has launched a legal fight to have a public hearing held into the environmental risks of the work that goes on at Devonport's nuclear dock and a plan to increase radioactive discharges.His case is expected to be heard within the next three months. DML, a company that is going to refit the Trident nuclear submarines, wants to boost the amount of tritium released into the River Tamar by 700 per cent and into the atmosphere as steam by 500 per cent. Tritium is radioactive water used as a coolant in submarines' reactors. DML has also applied for permission to emit radioactive carbon-14 and argon-41. Company officials insist their plans are safe and that levels of radiation would be indistinguishable from natural background radiation. 'We take our environmental and public health responsibilities very seriously indeed,' a DML spokesman said. But some scientists have concerns. Tritium's radiation passes easily into the human body because it is carried by water molecules. Also known as 'heavy water', it was used in the Seventies to make luminous exit signs and phone dials, but was banned because it was thought to be too dangerous. Tritium radiation fixes firmly to chemicals in human cells, including DNA, by a process called organic bonding. This can then disrupt a cell when it replicates, leading to mutations, which in turn can lead to cancer. With a half-life of 12 years, tritium could build up in the Tamar estuary and eventually enter the human food chain. Most of the tritium released at Devonport is piped directly into the river in an area rich in wrecks and sealife and popular with diving clubs. Another possible concern is tritium fog, condensing from effluent released by the docks into the air. Tritium has a higher freezing point than water and so could condense into a fine mist indistinguishable from normal fog. Concerns about the possible risks for pregnant women, whose foetuses may be vulnerable to tritium radiation, were raised by Dr Ian Fairlie, a radiation biologist who works as an independent consultant. 'I would advise all pregnant women not to be near the docks when the emissions are taking place. I don't think that is an unreasonable request at all.' DML, however, insists the risks are small. Tritium can be produced naturally from cosmic rays reacting with the atmosphere. DML also says its proposed emissions are within government safety guidelines. 'We are being as careful as we can,' a spokesman said. But critics point out it was only two years ago that DML discovered it had unknowingly been producing radioactive carbon-14 as a waste prod uct. Carbon-14 can be dangerous if ingested. DML's parent company, Brown and Root, paid $750 million after being sued for mismanaging a nuclear construction project in Texas. Residents and environmentalists are concerned that Plymouth is becoming a nuclear dumping ground for the whole country. As well as becoming the sole British yard for refitting Trident submarines, Devonport is also to become a future site for storing up to 26 nuclear reactors from submarines going out of service. The council has put an emergency radiation leak plan on its website which reads like a throwback to the Cold War. It advises people to stay indoors and take iodine tablets to thwart the effects of radiation. A special plan, called DevPubSafe, has been developed for those living in and around the docks. The local primary school nearest the naval base, Barne Barton, has an annual nuclear emergency drill. Certainly Sarah Kelly, now aged 20, is afraid. After five years of chemotherapy her thyroid cancer went into remission, though she still has to have annual checks. She is concerned for her young son, Harry, born on the day Paul Kelly died. 'You just worry about it all the time now. You can't go swimming in the river or walking down the streets without wondering what exactly you might be breathing in,' she said. paul.harris@observer.co.uk Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001 ***************************************************************** 11 The gall of the de Gaulle U.S. News: (2/26/01) [usnews.com] ** *A French aircraft carrier is beset by problems* By Eduardo Cue PARIS–It was supposed to exemplify French military might and prestige in the 21st century. Instead, Europe's first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier has become a costly embarrassment. Fourteen years after construction first began and four years after it was originally scheduled to enter service, the mighty Charles de Gaulle sits immobilized in the southern French port of Toulon, a victim of numerous defects and perhaps even sabotage. Said a Navy spokesman: "We don't have any luck at all with this ship." The latest, most serious incident occurred during sea tests, when the $2.7 billion, 40,000-ton carrier began to shake badly. Divers found that a blade had broken off one of two 19-ton propellers; experts concluded that the propellers suffered from excessive metal stress due to a design meant to compensate for the fact that the ship was underpowered. As a parliamentary investigation began, a suspicious fire destroyed the computers in the offices of the company that designed the propellers. Previously, the ship suffered other difficulties, including a cooling system failure and abnormal vibrations caused by faulty rudders. Further, the flight deck had to be extended to handle the three American E-2C Hawkeye early-warning aircraft the government bought at the last minute. The Charles de Gaulle, with a crew of 1,950, was built to replace two much older carriers, the decommissioned Clemenceau and the Foch, which was sold to Brazil. Now, France is left without a single operating aircraft carrier for the first time since World War II. [Stephen Smith on the growth of George W. Bush] [I'm at peace. I know what I want to do] © 2001 U.S.News &World Report Inc. All rights ***************************************************************** 12 Negligence charges surround radioactive storage in Gibraltar Agence France-Presse ALGECIRAS, Spain (February 17, 2001 3:46 p.m. EST http://www.nandotimes.com) - Gibraltar and the British Defense Ministry were accused of negligence on Saturday in their handling of radioactive waste from a disabled British nuclear submarine. HMS Tireless limped into Gibraltar -- a British dependent territory -- in May after a coolant leak was discovered in the vessel's reactor while it was in the Mediterranean. Patricio Gonzalez, the mayor of nearby Algeciras in southern Spain said contaminated water and solid waste was being stored on the quayside of the port without any proper safety guarantees. The British authorities have said the repair work to a leaking coolant tube is expected to be completed by the end of March or April. It is then due to return to Britain under its own power. Britain has already insisted the repair process poses no danger. The defense ministry said previously that repair techniques will be identical to those used on another nuclear submarine, the HMS Torbay, which is currently being repaired in Devonport, England. The ship's presence has revived latent Spanish resentment over Britain's presence in Gibraltar, which was captured by an Anglo-Dutch force in 1704 and ceded to the British crown under the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713. There have been large demonstrations against the sub repair work by up to 60,000 Spanish people living near the territory. ***************************************************************** 13 Repression creeping back in Russia The Sunday Times: News Review: February 18 2001 NEWS REVIEW Elena Bonner, widow of the dissident Andrei Sakharov, says repression is creeping back* *Soviet shadows : Elena Bonner, above, who grew up under Stalin and saw her mother sent to a labour camp, believes Russia is still tainted by totalitarianism * Living a big lie in Putin's new Russia I was educated in Soviet schools, where courses in the history of the Communist party were obligatory. Later at medical school I studied philosophy (naturally Marxist-Leninist) and political economy. I did not ask myself whether there was so much as a grain of truth in them. Once I passed the exams, without which I could not graduate and become a doctor, I forgot everything I'd learnt. I had become a person without an intelligible view of the world. My generation lived and grew up in an atmosphere of total fear, often without realising it. There were 23 pupils in my class, and 11 had parents who had been arrested. Stalin's death and the fall of totalitarianism did not lead to the disappearance of this fear. It seemed to become part of our genetic structure, passed on to subsequent generations. I am not speaking of state ideology - we don't have one now and we don't need one - but of the absence of moral criteria and the ability to distinguish truth from lies, good from evil. Today total state terror seems impossible, but we lived, and continue to live, in a state of lies. The great lie calls Russia a democratic state. The barely created election procedures were violated during the elections in Chechnya, which took place during the first Chechen war, and again in Yeltsin's 1996 election victory - which was decided largely by money and not the will of the voters. Then came the appointment of Putin as Yeltsin's heir, as if Russia were a monarchy. The vertical regime constructed by President Putin - dividing Russia into okrugs, headed by presidential appointees, standardising the constitutions of the national republics, changing the way the upper house of the federal assembly is formed and limiting its functions - is presented as a way to bring order to the Russian state. But these transformations are turning multinational Russia from a federal state into a strictly centralised and unified one. *Putin: what democracy? At the same time, people from the security establishment - the KGB-FSB and the army - are being appointed to top government posts, reinforcing their influence on the entire life of the country. There have also been a series of arrests and court trials - among them the case of the American businessman Edmond Pope and that of the navy captain Alexander Nikitin, who were both accused of spying - that smack of lawlessness. And yet not a single political murder of recent years (and there have been more than a few) has been completely resolved. Another dangerous phenomenon, permeated with lies, is the expansion of state control over the media, under the cover of punishing financial violations and fighting corruption. While the state is destroying some holding companies and trusts that managed publications and television stations, it is creating, under its own control, others more powerful and even more corrupt. The world knows about the government's attempts to take over national television, but few people have heard about what is happening to the media in outlying regions of the country, where similar attempts have often ended in violence. It looks as though in a short time there will be no truly free and independent television stations or other mass media in Russia. But the greatest disaster and shame of the new Russia are the two Chechen wars and the genocide of the Chechen people. The wars were preceded by widespread anti-Chechen propaganda and lies. After many years of use in the Soviet Union and Russia of *chuchmek,* a derogatory term for all non-Slavic people, a new ethnic label came into being: "person of Caucasian nationality", used not only in the streets by the "masses", but in official documents. I realise that I am speaking dangerous words. But the war has taken the lives of more than 100,000 civilians, Russian soldiers and Chechen fighters. It is impossible not to mention the bloody bombings and continuing killings of Chechens, as well as the detention camps, the uncounted dead children, women and old people, the thousands of refugees dying of cold and starvation under open skies and in tents. If this is not genocide, then what is it? With these two wars Russia has lost its newborn democracy. It is intolerable how many lies and falsehoods have been poured into the minds of people during these wars. The same goes for industrial and other catastrophes (the nuclear reactor explosion at Chernobyl, the earthquake at Neftegorsk, the loss of the Kursk submarine). At the same time we continually hear official lies in Russian daily life, reminiscent of the lies in the Soviet Union. The truth can hardly stand up to the impact of so many lies. A young man once said to me of the Prague Spring: "That was when the Czechs attacked us." Brought up on lies, a society cannot mature. It is an adolescent society, with all the characteristics of adolescence portrayed by William Golding in Lord of the Flies: needing a leader and his imitators, being aggressive and quick to take offence, simultaneously lying and trusting. Those who sensed the falseness of Soviet society intuitively fled the lies of the humanities and took up concrete professions, becoming engineers, doctors, musicians. When it became possible, many emigrated. My mother, a party worker, went back to study architecture in 1933. It did not save her from the terror. Arrested in 1937, she designed barracks for prisoners and then, with her camp inmates, she built them. With the fall of the totalitarian regime - with Stalin's death, Khrushchev's speech and the emergence of the liberals of the 1960s - came the era of the dissidents. Among them were disproportionately large numbers of physicists, mathematicians, engineers and biologists, and almost no historians or philosophers. But the dissidents were only a a few hundred people in a country that then extended over one sixth of the planet. But the clarity of their vision gave them the strength to reject lies and preserved their self-respect without which there is no respect for others and for life in general. Why do so few people have it? People speak of conscience. But it seems that conscience is the supreme existential value for only a very few people and, as we see from history, it is easily shrugged off. In the preamble to his draft for a Soviet constitution, Andrei Sakharov wrote: "The goal of the peoples of the USSR and its government is a happy life, full of meaning, material and spiritual freedom, well-being and peace." I do not know the goals of Russia's government today. But in the decades after Sakharov, Russia's people have not increased their happiness, even though he did everything humanly possible to put the country on the path leading to that goal. *This is an edited version of a speech given at the Hannah Arendt awards in Germany *© New York Review of Books 2001 Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd. This service is provided on Times ***************************************************************** 14 DOE inspectors to visit lab to gauge NIF progress Team will assess budget and schedule goals *February 17, 2001* By Glenn Roberts Jr. STAFF WRITER LIVERMORE -- An internal review team, assembled by the Energy Department, will visit Lawrence Livermore Laboratory from Feb. 27 to March 2 to determine whether a massive laser project is meeting its schedule and budget goals. Livermore Lab's National Ignition Facility laser project has suffered from management and technical problems that set it back by about six years and sent it over budget by an estimated $1 billion. The review is part of an Energy Department effort to comply with congressional requirements for various reviews and assurances on the project. If NIF managers do not comply with these orders, Congress could withhold $69.1 million from the project, which would cost an estimated $3.5-4 billion Bernard Pleau, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, a semi-independent security agency within the Energy Department, said Friday that the review team will consist of 25 members, all of them federal employees or employees at Energy Department labs. None of the members is from Livermore Lab or directly affiliated with the NIF project, he said. Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas F. Gioconda, acting deputy administrator for defense programs, selected the review team in early January, Pleau said. "They were chosen for their particular expertise in the areas being reviewed," he said. The review will help "determine if the project has been meeting milestones," he said. It is a follow-up to an August examination of the project, which included about 40 reviewers, 20 observers and about 30 support staff. Kathy Carlson, manager of the Energy Department's Nevada Operations Office, led the August study and will also lead this follow-up study. And like the previous review, "not any of it is open to the press or public," Pleau said. Energy Department and Livermore Lab officials insist that the August review was independent, though most of the members of the team were directly employed by the Energy Department or its labs. Two nuclear watchdog groups, the national Natural Resources Defense Council and Livermore-based Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment, claimed in a November lawsuit that the Energy Department's August review of NIF was biased and violated federal openness laws. The groups also filed for a court injunction on Feb. 1 to stop Energy Department officials from using the August review team's report to validate the NIF project. A report will be prepared by the new review team but "it is not planned to be released," Pleau said. ***************************************************************** 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: *****************************************************************