***************************************************************** 04/18/01 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 9.95 ***************************************************************** RADBULL IS PRODUCED BY THE ABALONE ALLIANCE CLEARINGHOUSE ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR POWER CONTENTS 1 Amendment would add DOE waste to that allowed in proposed West Texas dump 2 Poll shows favor for nuclear power 3 Road Kill 4 NRC Announces Opportunity For Hearing on Proposed 5 Energy Task Force Envisions Long-Term Reliance on Nuclear Power 6 Bush Administration Solidly Behind Nuclear 7 Uranium Institute News Briefing 01.16 | 11 - 17 April 2001 8 Nuclear power is not safe 9 Norway's nuclear sewage used as fertiliser 10 Norwegian protesters in Sellafield waste pipe protest 11 Waste from Norway research nuke spewed into sewer 12 The Energy Fix 13 Sweden says may delay nuclear plant shutdown 14 EU TO WASTE 1.23 BILLION EURO FOR NUCLEAR RESEARCH 15 Duma approves spent nuclear fuel import bills 16 Yucca Mt: Timeline 17 Heartbreak Ridge 18 Report: Radioactivity found in Fallon wells 19 Report shows radioactivity in Fallon wells 20 Nuclear Waste Shipment Headed to St. Louis Area 21 Bad Business skewed politics NUCLEAR WEAPONS CONTENTS 1 Lab only nuclear facility to get raise 2 DOE set to receive new cash for laser 3 Backers battling for FFTF 4 Bibb says money isn't the problem at Y-12 5 Group Reports Litany of Irregularities in Plutonium Fuel Factory 6 Soviet era weapons leaking ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR POWER ARTICLES ***************************************************************** 1 Amendment would add DOE waste to that allowed in proposed West Texas dump Star-Telegram.Com | What Do You Want to Know? Updated: Tuesday, Apr. 17, 2001 at 22:51 CDT By The Associated Press AUSTIN -- An amendment approved Tuesday in the Senate Natural Resources Committee would allow the U.S. Department of Energy to ship low-level radioactive waste to a proposed dump in West Texas. Sen. Teel Bivins, R-Amarillo, pushed through the amendment to a proposal by Sen. Robert Duncan, R-Lubbock, that would set up a dump in agreement with a compact involving Texas, Maine and Vermont. "The reality of this issue is that a compact waste site is not economically viable on its own," Bivins said, explaining why his amendment added the federal agency. "You've got to have a greater waste stream." Bivins' amendment calls for the federal site to be separate, at least a quarter-mile, from the compact site. "The responsible thing to do is have a compact site," Duncan said. "Members will have to make a decision whether we actually need this federal waste to make the compact work. I believe we don't. There are those who believe we do." "We entered the compact many years ago for the purpose of limiting" the amount of waste, Duncan said. He said the amendment "opens the door to not limiting it." Bivins said his proposal allows the importation of low-level radioactive waste. Duncan said the amendment would allow hazardous waste and low-level radioactive waste. Bivins' amendment specifies that the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission would decide on limits for the federal waste, taking into consideration such factors as risk to humans and the environment. Bivins said the risk from the federal waste could be no greater than the risk from the compact waste. "The problem is that compact waste in many cases is very compact and pretty highly radioactive," Bivins said. He said "a great majority of the DOE waste is dirt that is very low in radioactivity." "My goal has been simply to provide a compact waste site because that takes care of all of our problems in Texas and it honors our commitment to Maine and Vermont," Duncan said. Duncan said he had made it clear to Bivins' office that he was concerned the amendment could interfere with getting the compact approved this year. Bivins said the issue isn't new. "This has been around for two sessions." The comittee passed Duncan's bill 4-0 and Bivins' amendment 3-1, with Duncan casting the only no vote. The bill's next move would be to the full Senate. Distributed by The Associated Press (AP) ***************************************************************** 2 Poll shows favor for nuclear power This story was published Tue, Apr 17, 2001 By The New York Times News Service WASHINGTON -- The Nuclear Energy Institute -- the Washington, D.C., advocacy organization for nuclear power -- embraced a Newsweek poll released Monday showing that 53 percent of Americans favor building nuclear power plants to help the United States meet its energy needs. Steve Kerekes, spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, said the poll, together with recent pro-nuclear statements by business leaders and government officials, shows a "resurgence" for nuclear power. About 39 percent of respondents in the Newsweek poll said they opposed building new nuclear power plants. The magazine didn't provide comparable historic polling data that would allow any shift in public opinion to be measured. However, Kerekes said the Newsweek poll was similar to Nuclear Energy Institute polls that he said show improved public attitudes toward nuclear energy. For example, an October 1999 poll sponsored by the institute showed 42 percent responded yes to the question "Should the United States definitely build new nuclear power plants?" By January 2001, 51 percent answered yes to the same question. Kerekes said a March poll -- conducted in the aftermath of power outages in California -- showed that 66 percent of respondents gave "yes" answers to the same question. "As people think about energy and energy solutions that are out there, nuclear is faring very well," he said. The shift in public opinion has come in the midst of what some government officials have described as an energy crisis. A group of 12 administration officials, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, are assessing the nation's energy policy and are expected to release its recommendations next month. Cheney is on record as favoring more nuclear power plants. "If you want to do something about carbon dioxide emissions, then you ought to build nuclear power plants, because they don't emit any," Cheney said last month on the MSNBC program *Hardball*. The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission has not licensed a new nuclear plant since 1978. Cheney said the nation should "go back and take another look" at nuclear power. Nuclear-powered plants produce 20 percent of the country's electricity, second only to coal. Any move to revitalize the nuclear power industry is likely to arouse heated opposition from environmental groups. "Switching from coal to nuclear power is like giving up cigarettes and taking up crack," the Sierra Club's global warming and energy Program Director Daniel Becker said. He said there were four major problems with relying on nuclear power plants for electricity: n Difficulty disposing of nuclear waste, which remains radioactive for thousands of years. n The risk that nuclear material would be diverted to build bombs. n Reactor accidents, such as those at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island in 1979 and the Soviet Union's Chernobyl plant in 1986. n Expense of building and maintaining plants. Kerekes acknowledged that disposal of radioactive waste still was an issue but argued plant safety is not a problem because of strict standards and licensing regulations. "There is a vocal minority in the USA that likes to scare people, but we have a sterling record of safety," he said. Copyright 2001 Tri-City Herald. ***************************************************************** 3 Road Kill Las Vegas Life- April 2001 April 2001 A Greenspun Publication By Chuck Twardy Maybe you've found yourself in a conversation like this lately: Someone brings up Yucca Mountain, and someone else--with must-I-worry exasperation--wonders why we can't just heave all that nuclear waste into space. Man on the moon and all that. Then someone--with must-I-explain forbearance--points out that the feds actually thought of that idea and dismissed it. Too impractical and expensive. And besides, another person adds, remember the Challenger? There's the clincher. Although some Nevadans no doubt wouldn't mind several tons of high-level nuclear waste showering over, say, Washington, D.C., you have to admit the prospect of that kind of accident rules out the space scenario. But if NASA, with its legion of doctorates, cannot ensure that the space program will be absolutely free of spectacular disasters, can the Department of Energy? More to the point, can a trucking company? For years, scientists at the Yucca Mountain Project and their critics have focused on the reliability of hydrology studies and other concerns related to entombing the nation's high-level nuclear waste. But there's been scant attention paid to how the waste will get there. Transportation issues are among the most urgent concerns in the Yucca Mountain process, and also, perhaps, the kernel of its undoing. Nevada sees itself alone and ignored as the repository site, but it could find allies in its lonely fight once other states face the prospect of those giant steel casks rolling along their interstates. Fred Dilger sees those trucks rolling into disasters ranging from irksome to catastrophic. The Clark County planner, who has spent much of his career pondering how nuclear materials move, finds it odd that the DOE has focused so little on the problem. "They threw the bulk of their effort onto the site because the site is something they have complete control over," says Dilger, previously a transportation analyst for the state. "It's my opinion that if they genuinely wanted to get this program implemented, they would have started with the transportation and then worked backward to the mountain." The DOE has not completely ignored transportation. About 130 pages of its roughly 1,400-page Draft Environmental Impact Statement, issued in 1999, deal with the projected impacts of shipping by combinations of barge, rail, legal-weight truck (less than 70,000 pounds) and heavy-haul truck. Its "mostly rail" scenario has shipments coming by freight train on a Union Pacific line. The shipments would either shift onto one of five new rail corridors the DOE would build or transfer onto "heavy-haul" trucks at an intermodal station, which would also need to be built. These would be mammoth, custom-built trailers--a 200-foot 24-wheeler in the DOE's diagram--necessitated by the larger cask used by rail cars. By Nevada regulation, these would travel only in daylight hours on weekdays, no more than 30 miles per hour. Two potential routes take them through Las Vegas, on Interstate 15 and the planned western and northern beltways, or from Caliente to Rachel or Tonopah and then south to Yucca Mountain. In any event, the DOE figures there will be five trains a week, 11,000 rail cars over 24 years. The legal-weight-truck scenario envisions about 50,000 shipments by tractor-trailers, hauling steel casks on flatbeds. They would enter Nevada from either the north or south on I-15, go through Las Vegas, then take U.S. 95 north to Yucca Mountain. The DOE has these trucks following the northern beltway, which it assumes will be ready by 2010. But it will not be built to beltway standards until 2025 or 2030, says Dilger, noting that "for at least half the program, they would have to go through the Spaghetti Bowl." That's six nuclear-placarded, armed-escorted trucks a day for 24 years, rumbling through the heart of the Valley. "Incident-free transportation is the expected norm for transportation of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste to the Yucca Mountain site," the draft EIS presumes, imagining a greater likelihood of fatalities from vehicle emissions than from radioactive contamination in the event of a severe accident. In 24 years, says the DOE, radiation exposure from truck shipments might tally 18 latent cancer deaths, 21 under the rail scenario. The DOE places the possibility of the "maximum reasonably foreseeable accident scenario," in which a cask splits open and radioactive material escapes, at 1 in 10 million annually. But imagine, for a moment. In January, a meat truck flipped over a Spaghetti Bowl ramp. What if a Yucca truck takes that plunge and, against all odds, its cask ruptures? Dilger pictures "a case where people get hauled out of their beds or homes, loaded onto school buses ... taken to some place in the desert where they're washed off and given new clothes, never see their home again because their home has to be bulldozed, [and] when they're done with the bulldozers those have to be thrown away too, because those are radioactive ..." And who cleans up? The Nuclear Waste Policy Act requires the DOE to "provide technical and financial assistance to states and tribes for training public safety officials." Using the DOE's computer model, the state has figured a decontamination cost of $1.4 billion per square mile. And that does not count the costs to the local economy. "People have a unique dread of nuclear materials," Dilger observes. The DOE and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which certifies the casks, are understandably proud that spent fuel has so far been shipped without accident. But Dilger figures that roughly 1.4 million shipment miles have accumulated between 1971 and 1990, mostly over short distances between reactors in the East. The average trip to Yucca Mountain would be four times longer, and 81 million shipment miles are planned over 24 years. The possibility of a catastrophe hinges on the casks that would carry the spent fuel rods and high-level waste. These large cylinders sandwich either lead or depleted uranium, both dense radiation barriers, between two layers of steel. They are made by several vendors and cost about $1 million each, according to NRC nuclear engineer Robert Lewis. A new generation of casks has been designed for Yucca Mountain, but it isn't known if they will be used, Lewis says. The NRC has conducted three major risk studies of casks since 1977, mostly through computer simulations. The casks have been found to sustain a 30-foot drop, a 30-minute fire, puncture by a bar and water immersion. A fourth test is being designed, incorporating concerns voiced in two rounds of public discussion, but Lewis says the NRC has yet to decide if it will test the truck or larger rail cask, and whether to build a full-scale model. The tests will subject the cask to "an accident we don't consider possible," and the NRC expects the tests will confirm the previous analyses. If they don't, will the NRC revise cask design? "Absolutely," Lewis says. But Craig Walton is not sanguine about the prospects. "They've downplayed the cask-design problem, the cask-testing problem and the transportation-risk problem ... virtually to trivialize them," says the UNLV philosophy professor and director of the school's Institute for Ethics & Policy Studies. "They've made it sound as if it were a very simple thing." Walton, who with a team from the institute prepared a report for Clark County on "environmental justice" issues in the DOE impact statement, finds the science of the entire project flawed. "There is no field of science, medical or other, that operates on the logic of Yucca Mountain," he says. The original error is the infamous "Screw Nevada" bill of 1987, which limited study to one site. Walton also is indignant that the DOE discounts human error. Even if all projections about the safety of the site or casks are valid, Walton says, "Human error still has to wash across the entire story. ... A thousand things could happen that are not part of the plan, and they don't factor that in." Under the truck scenario, six regional contractors would be selected and their trucks satellite-monitored. Residents of New Mexico lost faith in monitoring, however, when a truck carrying transuranic waste got lost there last year. A backup system caught the mistake, but the incident made the point about human error. The risks are greatest for Nevada and Las Vegas, Walton says. "You up the odds of the accident happening here, as compared to Seattle, or halfway between Bakersfield and San Francisco on Interstate 5 or halfway between Illinois and Salt Lake." Dilger has prepared a map, projecting shipments along the most direct routes, that illustrates that convergence. But it also shows other swaths of the country sliced by trucks. The DOE isn't scheduled to finalize its routes until 2006, but at least 45 states will see some traffic. Some of those states are slowly awakening to the reality. The Northeast holds the majority of the nation's Yucca-bound freight, and the Midwest dreads the prospect of waste-laden trucks and trains crisscrossing the plains. Last year, Missouri fended off a shipment of spent fuel that the DOE moved to Idaho, and opposition to future shipments became an issue in the Senate campaign won by the late Governor Mel Carnahan. The DOE also held hearings in several states through which high-level waste is likely to travel, providing opportunities for critics to surface in Ohio, Illinois and Nebraska. But so far they seem to stress sending it elsewhere, making "Screw thy neighbor" an adjunct of "Screw Nevada." Iowa's I-80 got the shipment that bypassed Missouri. The challenge for Nevada will be to unite the entire Midwest in opposition. "We here need to make those people more aware that they're a part of this," Walton says. "Certainly the people along I-80 and I-40 are a part of this story, like it or not." Congress forbids Dilger and his colleagues, who conduct their research on $1 million a year the federal government allots to Clark County to study Yucca Mountain, to build coalitions against the project. But Citizens Against Nuclear Waste in Nevada can. "That is an excellent idea," says Cheryl Lau, president of the public-private group formed in 1999. In the wake of NBC's The Atomic Train miniseries, Lau says, CANWIN contacted mayors and legislators in jurisdictions along prospective routes, trying to win allies. "Those allies will come on line anyway once the route negotiation starts, once people start to look at this," Dilger says. "If you want to choke it to death now, that is an alternative." All contents © 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 Las Vegas Sun, ***************************************************************** 4 NRC Announces Opportunity For Hearing on Proposed Press Release 2001 - 041 - [NRC Seal] *NRC NEWS*** U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION Office of Public Affairs Telephone: 301/415-8200 Washington, DC 20555-001 E-mail: opa@nrc.gov Web Site: http://www.nrc.gov/OPA NRC ANNOUNCES OPPORTUNITY FOR HEARING ON PROPOSED MIXED OXIDE FUEL FACILITY The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has announced an opportunity for interested persons to request a hearing on the proposed mixed oxide (MOX) fuel facility to be located on the Department of Energy's Savannah River site near Aiken, South Carolina. The agency recently received a construction authorization request for the facility. Requests for a hearing should be submitted by May 18. A Federal Register notice published today provides details on how to submit the requests. The Department of Energy is proposing to construct a MOX fuel plant through a contract with the consortium of Duke Engineering & Services, COGEMA Inc., and Stone & Webster (known as DCS). If NRC grants the license, DCS could build a MOX facility that would convert surplus weapons-grade plutonium, supplied by the Department of Energy, into fuel for use in a limited number of commercial nuclear reactors. Such use would render the plutonium essentially inaccessible and unattractive for weapons use. Commercial nuclear power plants currently use uranium as fuel; the mixed oxide fuel would be a combination of uranium and plutonium. A notice announcing receipt of the construction authorization request and the related environmental report was published in the Federal Register on March 7. Scoping meetings, which were announced separately, are being held this week in the vicinity of the proposed plant to invite public comment on the scope, or bounds, of the environmental impact statement. Interested individuals who wish to participate as a party in the hearing may file a written request by May 18 to the Secretary of the Commission, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC 20555-0001, Attention: Rulemakings and Adjudications staff. ***************************************************************** 5 Energy Task Force Envisions Long-Term Reliance on Nuclear Power Nuclear Energy Institute April 17, 2001An independent task force released a report April 12 that supports the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in its expeditious relicensing of nuclear plants. The task force was sponsored by the James Baker III Institute for Public Policy of Rice University and the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C. The body received input from nearly every segment of the energy communityproducers, consumers, environmentalists, national security experts and others. Nuclear energy should not be considered as an option, but as a necessity to supply electricity for the nation now and in the future, said Michel Halbouty, an energy policy advisor to former President Ronald Reagan and member of the task force. The report, entitled Strategic Energy Policy Challenges for the 21st Century, (www.bakerinstitute.org) takes a comprehensive look at what needs to be done to shape Americas future energy infrastructure. Taking into account nuclear energys contribution of 20 percent to the countrys electricity grid and the unprecedented capacity factors of more than 85 percent at nuclear power plants, the study said the importance of this significant baseload [energy source] has been reinforced by recent events in California. Because it creates energy through fission rather than by burning fuel, nuclear energy will garner even greater support because of increased concern about the impacts of emissions from fossil-fueled power plants, the report said. The task force offered specific suggestions on ways nuclear energy, as part of a diverse electricity portfolio, can help address the nations energy supply problems. These suggestions include: + Improve the investment climate for new nuclear power plant construction through NRC streamlining of licensing procedures and by resolving uncertainties related to electricity deregulation; + Sustain domestic uranium fuel supply through the next five years, with congressional intervention, if necessary; and + Reinvigorate education/training programs in nuclear science and technology. Of the nations 103 reactors, five have received 20-year license extensions from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. License renewal applications for another five reactors are pending before the NRC, and the owners of another 32 reactors are expected to apply for license renewal by 2005. As many as 3.6 million families in 18 states, plus the District of Columbia, risk having their energy cut off because of the effects of rapidly increasing energy costs, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association. During the 2000-2001 winter heating season, the number of households needing energy assistance is expected to reach nearly 5 million. (See www.neada.org.) Copyright © 2001 Nuclear Energy Institute. ***************************************************************** 6 Bush Administration Solidly Behind Nuclear Nuclear Energy Institute Apr. 12, 2001The Bush Administrations strategy for meeting the nations energy challenges includes a prominent role for nuclear energy. Vice President Dick Cheney, who is heading an interagency energy policy task force, is emphasizing the need for the increased use of nuclear energy to meet rising power demands as well as environmental considerations. On NBCs Meet the Press, on April 8, Cheney said that the U.S. must build a minimum of 65 power plants of average size each year to meet even the most conservative estimates of electricity growth in the next 20 years. About 90 percent of the planned construction of new power plants are natural gas, which is causing supply disruptions and price increases. Vice President Cheney emphasized the need for diversity in Americas energy portfolio and stated that some of those (new plants) ought to be nuclear. Cheney praised the nuclear industry for its safety record and also cited the need for new, emission-free nuclear plants to effectively combat global climate change. If you want to do something about carbon dioxide emissions, then you ought to build nuclear power plants, because they dont emit any carbon dioxide. And they dont emit greenhouse gases, Cheney said in a March appearance on MSNBCs Hardball. The White House energy task force includes the secretaries of Treasury, Commerce, Transportation, Energy, Agriculture and Interior, as well as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. It is expected to make its recommendations to the president in mid-May. Copyright © 2001 Nuclear Energy Institute. ***************************************************************** 7 Uranium Institute News Briefing 01.16 | 11 - 17 April 2001 A weekly summary of international news relevant to uranium and the nuclear energy industry. [NB01.16-1] Japan: Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) has been issued with a certificate from the Agency for Nuclear and Industrial Safety stating that its mixed oxide (MOX) fuel imports have passed safety inspection. The agency issued the certificate for the 28 containers of MOX fuel imported from the UK for use in TEPCO's Kashiwazaki-Kariwa-3 reactor. *(Japan Times Online, 14 April)* Meanwhile, TEPCO has delayed a decision on the use of MOX fuel at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa until June. *(Ux Weekly, 16 April, p5; see also News Briefing 01.13-6)* [NB01.16-2] Increases in funding for US commercial waste disposal and plutonium disposition programmes in fiscal year 2002 are being sought by the US Department of Energy (DOE), despite plans by the Bush Administration to cut department spending by US$700 million. The DOE has asked for US$445 million for nuclear waste disposal and US$233 million for US fissile materials disposition. The DOE's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management (OCRWM) is seeking US$355.5 million for Yucca Mountain site characterisation activities in fiscal 2002. The US$42.5 million increase will be used to complete the Site Recommendation Report. OCRWM also requested US$5.9 million for waste acceptance, storage and transportation activities. Meanwhile, the Office of Fissile Materials Disposition (MD) is seeking US$115 million for the MOX programme, US$59 million for the pit disassembly and conversion facility (PDCF) and programmatic support activities; and US$3 million to complete suspension of the plutonium immobilisation programme. The DOE also requested US$57 million to provide limited support for Russia's plutonium disposition programme. *(SpentFUEL, 16 April, p1; see also News Briefings 01.12-3 and 99.40-8)* [NB01.16-3] France: Framatome reported consolidated sales of 4.98 billion euro (US$4.38 billion) in fiscal 2000, up 18.5% compared with fiscal 1999. Consolidated operating profit jumped 55% in fiscal 2000 to 672 million euro (US$591 million). The company said it has 'clearly demonstrated its international scale', with 32% of sales in France, 26% in North America and 42% in the rest of the world. *(NucNet Business News, 37/01, 11 April; see also News Briefing 00.17-20)* [NB01.16-4] France: Cogema reported a 66% jump in profits for 2000, to 256 million euro (US$225 million). Consolidated revenue rose by 18% to 5.95 billion euro (US$5.24). Sales on international markets accounted for 45.3% of consolidated revenue, compared with 41.2% in 1999. Consolidated operating profit more than doubled in 2000, reaching 266 million euro (US$234.5 million), compared with 101 million euro (US$89.1 million) in 1999. *(SpentFUEL, 16 April, p3; see also News Briefing 00.17-20)* [NB01.16-5] Rio Tinto has placed a ten-year moratorium on plans to mine uranium at Jabiluka in Australia's Northern Territory. Sir Robert Wilson, speaking at the companies annual general meeting, said that no project would be started without the approval of the Northern Land Council and traditional landowners. *(Ux Weekly, 13 April, p3; see also News Briefing 01.07-2)* [NB01.16-6] US: Uranium Resources Inc (URI) has announced that it has completed a private placement of 26 million shares of common stock at US$0.08 per share. Money raised from this and an earlier equity infusion means that URI has the financial resources for both the restoration and operating needs of the company through the first quarter of 2003. *(Nuclear Market Review, 13 April, p2; see also News Briefing 00.21-5)* [NB01.16-7] Australia's Western Mining Corporation has reported uranium production of 1017 tonnes U3O8 (862 tU) from Olympic Dam during the first quarter 2001. *(Ux Weekly, 13 April, p3; see also News Briefing 01.08-3)* [NB01.16-8] Russia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgystan have prepared the paperwork behind a joint venture to mine and produce uranium from the Zarechnoye deposit in Kazakhstan. Initial hopes are for an annual output of 500 tonnes U3O8 (424 tU) rising to 1600 tonnes (1357 tU) when fully operational. *(Ux Weekly, 13 April, p4; see also News Briefing 00.51-2)* [NB01.16-9] The Indian Nuclear Power Corporation (NPC) plans to double its targeted annual capacity addition from 1000 MWe to 2000 MWe because of increased demand in the Indian economy. The Indian Atomic Energy Commission has taken the first steps towards building the Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR) at Kalpaakkam, which officials from the NPC hope will be ready by 2010. *(Hindu Online, 10/11 April; see also News Briefing 01.11-8)* [NB01.16-10] UK energy minister Peter Hain has announced that US$2.9 million will be made available to help Bulgaria and Lithuania close their Soviet-era reactors. The money is part of a US$120 million fund established by the UK government to help with a range of nuclear related issues in countries of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. *(Nuclear Market Review, 13 April, p2; see also News Briefing 99.07-7) * [NB01.16-11] US: The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is preparing to invest US$156.8 million in improving output from the Sequoyah and Browns Ferry nuclear power plants. Directors hope to boost overall generation by up to 6% through upgrading turbines at both facilities. *(Ux Weekly, 13 April, p2)* [NB01.16-12] The Temelin reactor in the Czech Republic has been shown to be safe by an independent commission study. The study, which will form the basis for further discussion between the Czech and Austrian governments, strictly adheres to European directives on the use of nuclear power. *(Ux Weekly, 13 April, p4; see also News Briefing 00.51-9)* [NB01.16-13] Russia: The third VVER unit at Novovoronezh nuclear power plant has been shut down prior to work to extend the lifetime of the unit by up to fifteen years. *(NucNet News, 133/01, 17 April)* [NB01.16-14] Ukraine: Two units at the Rovno-2 and -3 were automatically shutdown on 11 April following a loss of external power. Diesel generators automatically started to support safety and emergency reactor cooling systems. The power failure was due the collapse of a crane, working on the construction site of Rovno-4, onto power lines. Rovno-1 is currently in outage for planned repairs. *(NucNet News, 130/01, 12 April)* Rovno-2 was reconnected to the grid on 13 April 2001. Rovno-3, however, is still being prepared for normal operation. The incident has provisionally been rated zero on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES). *(NucNet News, 134/01, 17 April)* [NB01.16-15] Iran: The first stage of the 1000 MWe Bushehr nuclear power plant will become operational, as scheduled, by early 2003, Sied Khalil Mousavi, head of the Public Relations Office of the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran announced. The plant is being built with Russian assistance. *(Tehran Times Online, 15 April; see also News Briefing 01.09-12)* [NB01.16-16] France: A rail shipment of German spent nuclear fuel arrived at Cogema's Valognes rail terminal near the La Hague reprocessing plant on 11 April. Despite isolated protests, the shipment of five casks of spent fuel elements from the Philippsburg, Biblis and Grafenrheinfeld nuclear power plants arrived less than three hours behind schedule. *(NucNet News, 128/01, 11 April; SpentFUEL, 16 April, p3; see also News Briefing 01.15-14)* [NB01.16-17] UK: British Nuclear Fuels plc (BNFL) is to process German nuclear waste at its Sellafield plant. Fuel rods from Neckarwestheim have already been cleared for transport and new authorisation for waste from the Biblis nuclear power plant was announced on April 12. *(Nuclear Market Review, 13 April, p2; see also News Briefing 01.04-16) * [NB01.16-18] Russia's Nuclear Power Minister, Alexander Rumyanstev, spoke in favour of Russia importing foreign irradiated nuclear fuel for reprocessing. The State Duma will debate on 18 April an amendment to a law on environmental protection that would allow a legislative possibility of spent fuel imports into Russia. *(Itar-Tass/Northern Light, 17 April; see also News Briefing 01.13-13)* [NB01.16-19] US: An independent task force set up to review future US energy needs has supported moves to 'streamline' licensing procedures to help encourage the construction of new nuclear power plants. The task force was sponsored by the James Baker III Institute for Public Policy of Rice University and the Washington DC-based Council on Foreign Relations. One of the task force members, Michel Halbouty, said nuclear power should be considered 'a necessity to supply electricity for now and in the future'. The full report - entitled 'Strategic Energy Policy Challenges for the 21st Century' - can be found at http://www.rice.edu/projects/baker. *(NucNet News, 132/01, 17 April; see also News Briefings 01.14-11 and 01.09-16)* [NB01.16-20] Australian environment minister, Senator Robert Hill, has said he believes the Kyoto Protocol is defunct without US involvement and that Australia had never planned to ratify the treaty ahead of the US. *(Associated Press, 16 April)* Australia is also failing to meet the targets set to reduce emissions to within 8% of 1990 levels as emissions are still growing (by 1.1% in 1999) making emissions overall 17.4% higher than in 1990. *(The Utility Forum, 17 April)* European ministers, however, are meeting in New York in an attempt to find a means of bringing the Bush Administration round to supporting the treaty. Further studies by a team of US scientists show how the world's oceans are being effected by the rising temperatures and that a rise of 10.4 degrees centigrade is possible over the next 100 years. *(Washington Post Online, 13 April; see also News Briefing 01.14-4)* [NB01.16-21] Jeffrey R Faul has been appointed Executive Vice President of NUKEM Inc, as of 5 April 2001. He was formerly Vice President - Trading, with responsibility for the company's trading operations on a worldwide basis. *(TESSAG/NUKEM, 12 April)* Previous News Briefing NB01.15 *Prepared by the Uranium Institute Information Service. All news and views are those of the publications cited.* ***************************************************************** 8 Nuclear power is not safe Montreal Gazette - Wednesday 18 April 2001 - Letter to the Editor In response to Fred Nagy (Letters, April 11), atomic power is not the panacea to meet the world's clean-energy needs. Here are three principal reasons against expanded use of radioactive electrical production: cost, longevity and safety. A nuclear generating facility carries a foreboding construction cost, not only in building the reactors but the containment and backup safety systems as well. The lifespan of the average reactor is 25 years. What use is a mothballed facility? It becomes a blight on the landscape. Its decommissioning and waste disposal contribute other costs, not to mention the risk of transporting radioactive materials. We have seen fail-safe systems go awry, with Chernobyl and Three Mile Island coming to mind. The consequences of such disasters occurring more frequently causes one to shudder. The alternatives to nuclear and fossil-fuel-burning electric plants lie in solar, wind, power-cell and point-of-demand geothermal energy. All are renewable resources, and easily built in urbanized areas without harm to the environment. There would be no need for extensive power lines that scar our green spaces and remain vulnerable to ice storms, sabotage and right-of-way conflicts. Long transmission cables also rob current, and lessen efficiency. As for nuclear energy: been there, done that. It's time to forge ahead to incorporate these new, environmentally safe technologies in order to fulfill our ever-increasing energy demands. W. Wayne Franks LaSalle Copyright © 2001 CanWest Interactive and The Montreal Gazette ***************************************************************** 9 Norway's nuclear sewage used as fertiliser BBC News | EUROPE | Tuesday, 17 April, 2001, Radioactive waste from a nuclear reactor in Norway has been wrongly fed into a town's sewage system for nine years, some of it ending up as farm fertiliser, officials revealed on Tuesday. The nuclear waste from the research plant was pumped into the sewers in Halden, south-east Norway, after what amounted to a plumbing mistake. The Norwegian Radiation Protection Authority (NRPA) said the waste water was wrongly linked to the sewage system when it should have been pumped straight into the sea. Norwegian Radiation Protection Authority But officials insist there has been no risk to human health - even though some of the sewage sludge was turned into fertiliser - as the nuclear material had only very low levels of radioactivity. Ecologists are demanding radiation tests for local farmers. "It is frightening that IFE has so little control over its emissions," said nuclear physicist Nils Boehmer of campaign group Bellona. The mistake was made in 1991 and was not rectified until 1999. It is frightening that IFE has so little control over its emissions Ecology campaign group Bellona NRPA scientist Sverre Hornkjoel said the contaminated water had been used to cool the 42-year-old reactor, operated by the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE). He blamed the mistake on council officials, but said the nuclear industry took final responsibility. "The municipality made the howler, but it is still IFE which is responsible," Mr Hornkjoel said. "In principle, this is a serious incident, but the emissions were very small." The plant at Halden is part of an international project to test fuel rods, run by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. IFE spokesman Viktor Wikstroem said the cooling water had undergone tests before leaving the reactor, and was below the safety limit. "Our annual emissions are 4,000 times lower than what you and I and everyone are exposed to each year," Mr Wikstroem said. ***************************************************************** 10 Norwegian protesters in Sellafield waste pipe protest Tuesday April 17, 05:59 PM Norwegian environmentalists are protesting against the release of radioactive waste into the Irish Sea. Activists from the Neptun Foundation anchored their former Coastguard vessel next to waste pipes from the Sellafield nuclear re-processing plant in Cumbria. They want to stop technetium-99 being pumped into the sea. The group says the radioactive isotope, a by-product of nuclear reprocessing, is posing a real threat to Scandinavian marine life. A spokeswoman for the Oslo-based organisation said, "We are taking some documentation of the discharge coming from the waste pipes and want to stop the discharge with a non-violent protest. The first traces of technetium-99 were found off Norway in 1996 and the levels have increased since then. We are becoming really concerned about the build-up in our ecosystem. There is no danger in eating Norway's fish or shellfish at the moment, but if these levels do not decline we are concerned they will be badly contaminated." Green Party spokesman Dr Chris Busby, a nuclear biologist, said studies he conducted for the Irish Government linked the discharge of radioactive waste with cancer on both sides of the Irish Sea. He said concentrated levels of technetium-99 had been found in lobster, and the substance could be inhaled after it was brought ashore on fine particles of silt. A spokeswoman for Sellafield said the nuclear plant had spent 750 million pounds on the treatment of waste in recent years and the amount of technetium-99 discharge would be reduced by 80pc in 2012. The radiation caused by the waste was "dwarfed" by that created by everyday activity, she said, adding, "The effect on people is non-existent. We would not be allowed to discharge it if we were having health effects on local people, let alone people thousands of miles away." Copyright © 2001 Doras. All rights reserved. Republication or ***************************************************************** 11 Waste from Norway research nuke spewed into sewer NORWAY: April 18, 2001 OSLO - Nuclear waste from a research reactor in Norway spewed into a city sewer for nine years after a pipeline mix-up, the Norwegian Radiation Protection Authority (NRPA) said yesterday. Some of the sewage sludge ended up as fertiliser spread on Norwegian farms near Halden, in southeast Norway. Officials said there had been no danger to human health from the low-level radioactive waste. Sverre Hornkjoel, an NRPA scientist, said cooling water from the 42-year-old reactor, operated by the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE), had ended up in the Halden sewers between 1991-1999 after the municipality tied the drainage to the city's sewerage system instead of leading it out to sea. "The municipality made the howler, but it is still IFE which is responsible," Hornkjoel said. "In principle, this is a serious incident, but the emissions were very small," he said. IFE spokesman Viktor Wikstroem said the cooling water had undergone tests before leaving the Halden reactor, part of an international project to test fuel rods for nuclear reactors, which showed emissions to be below the safety limit. "Our annual emissions are 4,000 times lower than what you and I and everyone are exposed to each year," Wikstroem said. "It is the municipality which made the error." Nuclear waste from the reactor's cooling water then ended up as sludge sold to farmers in the area who used it as fertiliser. The pipeline has now been correctly connected so that the waste ends up in the sea. "It is frightening that IFE has so little control over its emissions," said Nils Boehmer, a nuclear physicist with the ecological organisation Bellona. Boehmer said IFE was "cowardly" in trying to push the responsibility onto the municipality and should offer free radiation tests to farmers in the area rather than trying to play down what had happened. Norway has no nuclear power plants and no nuclear weapons. The Halden reactor is part of a research project run by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. REUTERS NEWS SERVICE ***************************************************************** 12 The Energy Fix Las Vegas Life- April 2001 April 2001 A Greenspun Publication The Hoover Dam sits between the old power of the industrial sublime and the terrifying power of the nuclear By William L. Fox One of Hoover Dam's 19 turbines The first glimpse you have of Hoover Dam when approaching it from Las Vegas has nothing to do with the cubic tonnage of concrete that makes up one of the largest and most gothic structures of the 20th century--it's the power lines bearing away 56 percent of the electricity generated by the dam across the desert to the Los Angeles Basin. This morning, I've made my way down to the foot of the dam and am staring upward at the transmission lines that rise from the gray generator buildings. Lifted up, out and away from potential short-circuiting on the rocks by cantilevered towers, the lines make visible the network of power--both electrical and political--that binds together the West. Hoover Dam is the supreme example of the industrial sublime in the American West. The natural sublime was often identified by 18th century Europeans with large-scale features that attracted attention because they were both beautiful and terrifying in the danger they represented. Things like eruptions of Mt. Vesuvius and the forbidding North Face of the Eiger in Switzerland. The industrial sublime implies a machine large enough to be a mesmerizing part of the landscape and powerful enough to kill you. At 726 feet tall, Hoover Dam can be terrifying, the curvaceous nightmare of an acrophobic. But when you get inside it and stand atop the pipes that carry water down through it to the generators, the presence of water is magnified until it feels like a deity that is only temporarily and voluntarily restrained. Water flows hourly into the generators at 40 mph, enough to turn the 200-ton shafts. When the river is in flood, the waters race over the spillways and through diversion tunnels at 120 mph--enough to do serious damage to any manmade structure during El Niño events. I have always been drawn to the dam, and given an opportunity to do so, would love to be a writer in residence there for a month, prowling its eight miles of narrow, dripping tunnels and getting beyond the statistics of power generation to feel the rhythm of the water in my hands. It's that mechanical syncopation, that hard-core subterranean beat, that it takes Big Engineering to make audible. This is a music that is unheard in California, although 23 percent of its electricity is generated by hydroelectric plants around the West, which transform the mechanical energy of falling water into the electric energy rising up the transmission lines. We turn on the lights in the kitchen, the computer in what used to be the dining room, the television, and we hear nothing but the whine of a small electric motor, or the forced humor of a nightly newscaster. We don't hear the water dropping through the Grand Canyon, through the dam, through the generators. I think if we heard that more often, we might think more about the true cost of electricity. I don't mean the inflation that Southern Californians have been struggling with these last few months in the throes of a deregulatory scheme gone bad. That's just a blip in public policy. I mean the long-term structural cost of unbridled, hence unintelligent, growth that drives us to construct cities that, house by house, are overly dependent on using too many resources. The kind of growth that, for instance, drives utility companies to build nuclear power plants. The Colorado River is a primary source of water and power for Southern California (as well as Arizona and Southern Nevada). But, as with the rivers of the Pacific Northwest and their hydroelectric plants, it's a limited and oversubscribed resource that cannot keep up with the growth of urbanization. The energy that it creates, along with all of the coal-fired power plants of the Southwest, such as the one at Laughlin, and all the dams of the Northwest, can't keep up with the demand for electricity, which makes the nuclear power industry very happy, indeed. The Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's lobbying organization in Washington, D.C., maintains that its members produce electricity at a cost lower than oil- and coal-fired plants, and with more reliability during times of energy shortages. They point out that reactors don't pollute the air, water or land, and that their waste is isolated from the environment. (They don't, however, mention what happens when there are accidents, such as at Chernobyl in 1986.) Right now it's politically easier to build nuclear reactors to generate electricity than it is hydroelectric dams. And President Bush, given his choices for the secretaries of Energy and Interior, doesn't seem inclined to underwrite alternative power sources, such as solar panels and wind turbines. The consumption of electricity in California, a state that tends to lead the country in terms of lifestyle trends, bodes ill for the rest of the country. Demand for electricity goes up, even at increasing risk to our health, and public policy under the Republicans foolishly seeks to cope only with regulating supply, not demand. The power grid encircling the West--and now I mean the political network that carries money from the nuclear industry into the pockets of politicians--will use public demand for more electricity as an excuse to pay back corporations with licenses for new reactors. In turn, that will mean more spent fuel rods, and increased pressure for the opening of Yucca Mountain. At Hoover Dam we can walk up to and touch the sources of the power--the water, the electricity, the political machinations--and relate to them on a human scale, which reminds us of how insignificant we are. Nuclear waste is terror without beauty, and there's nothing sublime about it. All contents © 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 Las Vegas Sun, ***************************************************************** 13 Sweden says may delay nuclear plant shutdown SWEDEN: April 18, 2001 STOCKHOLM - Sweden has said it may postpone the planned 2003 closure of a controversial nuclear reactor plant if alternative electricity supplies are not secured. Prime Minister Goran Persson said during the Easter holiday that the second reactor at the Barseback plant in southern Sweden would be shut down only once it was certain that the lost production could be replaced from other energy sources. "We don't want to prolong this by a single day but at the same time we are not going to put ourselves in a situation where we could get problems in case of a cold winter," Persson was quoted as saying by the Swedish daily Dagens Industri. Persson's spokeswoman Anna Hellsen confirmed the report yesterday. "This is what the Prime Minister said," she told Reuters, but declined to elaborate. The first Barseback reactor was closed in 1999 at a cost to the state of some 8.3 billion crowns ($809 million) and was part of a plan to phase out nuclear power. The government said last summer that the second Barseback reactor would be shut down in 2003. Barseback lies some 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) across the border from Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark, which has banned nuclear power. Persson was responding to Danish Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, who last week expressed concern that Sweden would not follow its aim to shut the reactor by 2003. REUTERS NEWS SERVICE ***************************************************************** 14 EU TO WASTE 1.23 BILLION EURO FOR NUCLEAR RESEARCH 12 April 2001 Brussels - Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth today attacked the new proposal for a European Council decision on the 6th Framework programme 2000-2006 "of the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) for research". The document proposes EUR 1.23 billion funding for nuclear projects: EUR 330 million for the Joint Research Centre's Euratom activities, EUR 150 million for the treatment and storage of nuclear waste, EUR 50 million for other Euratom activities, and EUR 700 million for nuclear fusion. Since 1991 no new nuclear reactor has been ordered in any EU country. Seven of the EU's 15 member states are non-nuclear, another 4 (Germany, Sweden, Belgium and the Netherlands) are in the process of phasing-out nuclear power. Tobias Muenchmeyer, Greenpeace nuclear expert: "EU countries are getting out of nuclear power. There is no need for more research in a technology which is dying out. EURO 530 million for nuclear power research is plainly a subsidy to Europe's increasingly desperate nuclear industry and blocks the pathway towards sustainable energy solutions." Another EUR 700 million is earmarked for "controlled thermonuclear fusion". Even the Euratom Scientific and Technical Committee (STC) admitted in a report last year that, "fusion is an energy option which has the potential to play a key role in a long-term perspective (>50 years) ...". Patricia Lorenz, energy campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe: "The commercial use of nuclear fusion is pure fantasy. Already 25 years ago the same people had predicted that in 50 years fusion would be a viable energy resource, but it seems like we are always 50 years away from fusion becoming economic. The European Council has to stop this waste of millions of taxpayers money." At EUR 1.23 billion, the proposed budget for 2002-2006 is about the same as the budget for the years 1998-2002 which, at EUR 1.26 billion was the largest EU nuclear research budget ever. Currently the European Commission is also considering a proposal to raise the ceiling for Euratom loans for Eastern European nuclear projects by another EUR 2 billion. Also the budgets for the Euratom Supply Agency as well as for the Euratom Safeguards Directorate are constantly growing. "The new budget proposal for nuclear research comes at a time when the cash-strapped nuclear industry is trying to squeeze out billions from the EU budget from all possible sides by referring to the most anachronistic Euratom treaty. The Euratom treaty is from another age and needs to be abandoned immediately.", said Patricia Lorenz. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT: - Patricia Lorenz +32 2 542 01 84 - Tobias Muenchmeyer +49 30 440 58 960 ***************************************************************** 15 Duma approves spent nuclear fuel import bills Today the Russian State Duma approved in the second reading import of spent nuclear fuel into the country. The date for the third reading is not set yet. Igor Kudrik , 2001-04-18 16:09 The State Duma, lower house of the Russian parliament, voted for amendments to the Law on Environmental Protection in favour of spent nuclear fuel imports in the second reading on Wednesday. The Duma also approved in the second reading amendments to the Law on Application of Nuclear Energy opening the way for Russia to lease nuclear fuel to other countries. 230 Duma members voted for the amendments, 116 cast their votes against, while 5 sustained. 226 votes were necessary for the amendments to pass. During the first reading 320 Duma members were in favour of the amendments. The most part of those who voted against represented the Yabloko and Union of Righteous forces factions in the parliament. Leader of liberal Yabloko party, Grigory Yavlinsky, said to press, he would fight to the end against nuclear bills approval in the third reading. According to the scheme developed by Minatom, Russia may earn up to $20 billion in 10 coming years by taking into the country around 20,000 tons of foreign spent nuclear fuel. Russia’s own spent nuclear fuel stock is estimated at 14,000 tons. Minatom says that around $7 billion will be used on recovering the radioactively contaminated areas. The rest of the funds will be spent on building up the infrastructure and on payments to the federal government. Minatom’s intentions regarding the fuel are uncertain. The known plans, however, suggest that the fuel will be stored for at least 50 years and then reprocessed to extract the raw material to manufacture fresh nuclear fuel. Minatom’s new head, Alexander Rumyantsev, said the project would help Russian nuclear industry survive. Minatom’s current major hard currency income comes from highly enriched uranium sales to the USA. But the new American administration considers amending the deal, thus depriving Minatom of almost 70% dollar profit. The spent fuel import project may compensate the losses, at least for the coming 10 years. Now the amendments will have to pass the third reading in the Duma. Then the Federation Council, the upper chamber of the Russian parliament, will evaluate them as well. The final judgement will come from the Russian President. Publisher: Bellona Foundation, President: Frederic Hauge Information: info@bellona.no, Technical contact: webmaster@bellona.no Telephone: +47 23 23 46 00 Telefax: +47 22 38 38 62 * P.O.Box 2141 Grunerlokka, 0505 Oslo, Norway ***************************************************************** 16 Timeline Las Vegas Life- April 2001 April 2001 A Greenspun Publication Feature Millions of years ago Yucca Mountain is formed by magma and ash from nearby volcanoes. Thousands of years ago Yucca is a sacred mountain to local tribal inhabitants. 1950 President Truman and the National Security Council select what will become known as the Nevada Test Site (NTS) for testing of nuclear weapons. 1951 An experimental reactor sponsored by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) generates the first electricity from nuclear power. 1954 Congress passes the Atomic Energy Act to promote the peaceful use of atomic energy with the understanding that disposal of the highly radioactive waste produced would be the responsibility of the federal government. 1956 The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) suggests permanent disposal of radioactive wastes from nuclear reactors in deep geologic repositories. 1957 The United States completes its first operable commercial nuclear reactor, Shippingport, an atomic power station near Pittsburgh. There will eventually be 112 of them (90 percent are east of the Mississippi River and none in Nevada). 1975 The Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) replaces AEC and searches 36 states, including Nevada, for buried salt deposits and federal nuclear facility sites suited to a permanent repository. 1976 to present More than 600 earthquakes of magnitude 2.5 or more occur within 50 miles of Yucca Mountain. 1980 The Department of Energy (DOE) replaces ERDA and selects "deep geologic" as the method for permanent disposal of commercial high-level nuclear waste. 1982 Congress passes the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which creates a site selection process, sets a schedule for disposal to begin in 1998, starts the Nuclear Waste Fund with fees paid by nuclear power plants, and requires repositories to be licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) using standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). 1983 The DOE names nine potential repository sites in six states: seven in salt deposits and two in volcanic rock deposits at federal nuclear facilities (including the NTS). 1983 Governor Bryan establishes by executive order the Nuclear Waste Project Office (NWPO). 1985 President Reagan determines that radioactive waste from nuclear weapons production will be disposed in a deep geologic repository, along with commercial high-level waste. 1985 NWPO is transformed to the independent Agency for Nuclear Projects, to be funded annually by Congress to protect the health, safety and welfare of Nevada's citizens. 1986 The DOE issues final environmental assessments and--confronted with strong resistance from north-central and northeastern states that have potentially acceptable granite sites--narrows the search to locations in Nevada, Texas and Washington. The DOE will select one, and indefinitely postpones seeking a second geographically distant site. 1987 Congress amends the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, passing the so-called "Screw Nevada" legislation: Yucca Mountain is designated the sole repository site to be "characterized"; studies of repository sites in granite are prohibited, and the search for a second repository site ends. For giving up its legal right to object to a repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada is offered payments of $10 million annually until the receipt of the first waste, $20 million at the time of first shipment and $20 million annually thereafter until the site is closed. 1987 Governor Bryan sends a letter to Congress refusing benefits, saying Nevada is not for sale. 1988 Clark County forms the Nuclear Waste Division. As an "affected unit of local government," it will receive annual funding from the DOE to review all Yucca Mountain programs, including site characterization and transportation. 1989 The secretary of energy develops a new strategy calling for waste storage to begin in 2003. 1990 The number of reactor units in the United States peaks at 112. 1991 Surface studies begin at Yucca Mountain; also, the American Nuclear Energy Council, an industry lobby (later the Nuclear Energy Institute), in conjunction with a local public relations effort, launches an $8.7 million "Nevada Initiative" media campaign to soften public resistance to the Yucca Mountain repository. Governor Miller calls it an "act of war." Ads are pulled the following year. 1992 A 5.6-magnitude earthquake is centered 12 miles from Yucca Mountain. 1993 The DOE begins grading work on the Exploratory Studies Facility (ESF) at Yucca, and the DOE develops a new "Program Approach," which calls for the development of a multipurpose container for waste storage, transport and possibly disposal; waste acceptance is scheduled to begin in 2010. 1994 Portal entrance to the ESF is constructed and tunneling into Yucca Mountain begins. Critics say this is being done for use as a repository, not a study area. 1995 A boring machine (pictured) makes progress into Yucca Mountain with five miles of tunnels for the study area to be completed by 1996. Congress does not fully fund the DOE's Program Approach. Therefore interim storage plans are terminated and a "viability assessment" will be given to Congress in 1998. Site suitability determination is slated for 2001, license to be applied for in 2002 and operations to begin in 2010. 1996 Bills are pending in Congress to develop an interim storage site at the NTS in 1998. President Clinton vows to veto such a bill. 1996 Scientists discover chlorine remnants from atmospheric nuclear testing in Yucca Mountain rocks, indicating water had seeped to the level of the proposed repository within 50 years. 1997 The eight-year thermal testing process begins at Yucca Mountain; bills for interim storage of spent fuel at NTS are again introduced. Clinton again says he will veto. 1998 The DOE fails to meet its deadline for interim waste acceptance. Lawsuits are filed by states and the nuclear industry. The DOE declares Yucca Mountain site "viable." The DOE estimates program cost through fiscal year '98 is $3 billion. 1999 The DOE reports that studies on transmutation of nuclear waste to reduce toxicity [a possible alternative to the dump] indicate the process would cost $280 billion and take 117 years to complete. Congress appropriates $6 million for further studies. 8/1999 DOE releases 1,400-page statement, finding no "potential environmental impacts that would be a basis for not proceeding with the proposed action." 2/2000 Las Vegas City Council passes an ordinance banning nuclear waste transport on city streets. Mayor Goodman says, "Why doesn't this go to a Third World country?" 2/2000 Nevada State Engineer Michael Turnipseed denies a DOE request to draw 140 million gallons of water per year for building the repository. The DOE's temporary water rights permit for "exploratory studies" is set to expire in March 2002. The 25-foot-wide portal at the mouth of Yucca Mountain may one day welcome the nation's high-level nuclear waste. 4/2000 Clinton vetoes a bill that would make it easier to license the Yucca Mountain facility and allow storage to begin in 2007. His concern is that the role of the EPA in setting standards would be too limited. 8/2000 Experiments conducted by Nevada scientists show that the storage cask material (C-22 alloy) designed to last 10,000 years is susceptible to cracking and corrosion; NRC experts determine as many as 10 volcanic eruptions could occur at the repository site in 10,000 years. 9/2000 U.S. District Court rules the DOE cannot sue in federal courts on the issue that arises out of state water law; the DOE explores importing out-of-state water. Governor Guinn proposes legislation banning the importation of water, punishable by a fine of $1 million per gallon. 12/2000 Guinn threatens to sue the DOE after a report alleges the DOE and the nuclear industry are preparing a public report that would recommend Yucca Mountain, an act that would violate a federal law prohibiting the DOE from taking sides during site selection. Late 2000 Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects director says the DOE's delay in identifying routes for the transport of nuclear waste is a deliberate decision to avoid public outcry in other states. Mayor Goodman says, "We're not going to let this stuff come through here without a fight. I'll stand in front of them, arrest them and have them prosecuted." 2001 The Clark County Nuclear Waste Division analyzes possible heavy-haul routes and risks in preparation for a suit against the DOE. 2001 The EPA announces its proposed standards for the Yucca Mountain repository, setting the annual radiation exposure limit at 15 millirem, lower than the 25 recommended by the NRC, while establishing a standard of 4 millirem for groundwater beneath Yucca Mountain. 2001 The DOE investigates allegations of collusion among the nuclear power industry, itself and its contractors to promote Yucca Mountain. Senator Reid will hold hearings on the matter following the report. The investigation likely will delay the DOE's recommendation on Yucca's suitability, scheduled for June 2001. Late 2001 The DOE may release the final Environmental Impact Statement; if Yucca Mountain is found suitable for a permanent waste repository, President Bush may recommend it to Congress. Nevada has the right to submit a "Notice of Disapproval." If it does, Congress could override this by a simple majority of both houses. 2002 If the site is approved, the DOE applies to the NRC for a license to construct and operate the repository. 2005 Construction begins; thermal testing is completed. 2006 The DOE designates heavy-haul routes for delivering nuclear waste to Yucca. 2007 Receipt of waste at Yucca Mountain begins. 2009 Construction on the repository is completed. 2010 Waste emplacement begins. 2033 Waste emplacement ends. 2083 The earliest date that the repository would be sealed. Hundreds of years hence Most radionuclides will decay to insignificant levels. Thousands of years hence Radioactive lifetime of 50 tons of buried plutonium ends. Millions of years hence Radioactive lifetime of buried Neptunium ends. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SOURCES: The state of Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects; Department of Energy; City of Las Vegas; Clark County Nuclear Waste Division; Eureka County Yucca Mountain Information Office; Las Vegas Sun; Las Vegas Review-Journal. All contents © 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 Las Vegas Sun, ***************************************************************** 17 Heartbreak Ridge Las Vegas Life- April 2001 April 2001 A Greenspun Publication Editor's Note Out of the mounds of information we processed for this month's Yucca Mountain package, one little side note surprised me most. None of us--photographers, designers, editors, writers--had ever actually seen Nevada's most talked-about land formation. How could such a notorious subject, one in the news for more than a decade, not have a face? We gathered some photographs of the site for our edification as well as to illustrate the main story--we're assuming that most of you haven't seen Yucca either. Having finally taken a look at the mountain, my first thought was that it is, well, not very majestic. In fact, Yucca Mountain is not even very mountainous; it's more of a barren ridge. My second thought was that, due to its unspectacular nature (not to mention its less than song-inspiring name), Yucca would be a tough place to defend--you wouldn't use any of the images you're about to see in a PR campaign to fight our toxic fate. And let there be no doubt, we will have to viciously defend our ugly mountain. Politics have failed. Science has failed. The system has failed. Now it's you and me against a faceless enemy that is, at best, apathetic about some anonymous ridge in the Nevada desert. How do we prepare for that? As a start, we hope our stories accomplish two things: * Pull the Yucca Mountain saga together in succinct, analytical fashion. Our mission within the mission is to explain how such a bad idea managed to get this far, and William L. Fox's conclusions (Page 50), such as "half-assed science" that led to only one site being studied, should appall you. * Point out which road the Yucca controversy will head down next (Page 56). We've evidently won the nation's nuclear-waste suppository contest, despite such obvious flaws as the site being just 90 miles from the nation's fastest-growing city, in a state that doesn't produce any nuclear waste, with an economy where image is everything. Reluctantly putting all that behind us, the question now is, what will the people back East say when they find out that trucks will be hauling the most toxic substances ever known through their communities to get it to that ugly ridge out West? Novelist Lee Barnes wrote a few lines a couple of years ago in this magazine (July 1999) that neatly captured the outside mind-set in this situation. He was discussing the "selection" of the Nevada desert as the dumping grounds for the nation's nuclear waste with some of those Easterners. They were like, "Well, where else would you put such a thing?" Lee replied: "Vermont." They were appalled. Picture that. Phil Hagen 990-2440 hagen@vegas.com All contents © 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 Las Vegas Sun, ***************************************************************** 18 Report: Radioactivity found in Fallon wells April 18, 2001 SUN STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS RENO -- A federal report shows ground water used for drinking in the Fallon area contains radioactive minerals that exceeded federal standards in 31 of 73 wells tested in the early 1990s, the Reno Gazette-Journal reported today. State and federal officials said they neglected to consider the U.S. Geological Survey report in their investigation of a cluster of 12 childhood leukemia cases diagnosed in Fallon over the past few years. The report has surfaced only because a former USGS director thought the information would be important to the investigation and wondered why it hadn't been considered, the newspaper said. Assemblywoman Marcia de Braga, D-Fallon, learned about the report Tuesday and was outraged that it hadn't been brought up sooner. "This could turn out to be significant in terms of the leukemia cluster," she said. "Clearly, radiation is one of the listed causes of leukemia. The researchers need to follow up on the radiation levels in the wells." The significance of the ground water radiation is not clear, investigators said. It will be examined as one of many environmental factors, including agricultural chemicals, jet fuel from the nearby Navy base and other pollutants to be investigated. The Geological Survey report, released in 1994, showed the shallow and intermediate ground water used for drinking water in the rural areas of the Carson Desert contained high amounts of naturally occurring uranium and radioactivity. The city's municipal water supply, which serves about a third of the Fallon's population of about 8,300, comes from deeper wells that don't contain dissolved uranium, state and federal officials said. Radiation is one of the few known triggers of leukemia, said researchers. In the Fallon area, 12 children have been diagnosed with the same type of acute lymphocytic leukemia since 1997, 11 of in the last two years. Last year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency set uranium standards for drinking water at 30 micrograms per liter. The 1994 USGS report shows one shallow well logging 310 micrograms per liter and another shallow well measuring 210 micrograms per liter. The EPA standards do not go into effect until December 2003, EPA senior environmental scientist Jon Merkle said. "That is very surprising that such a recent report took so long to pop up," Merkle said. The federal uranium limits only apply to municipal drinking water sources, but exposure risks from any source are the same, he said. "The health risks are the same whether your family is getting water from a public well or a private well," Merkle said. The USGS report also showed radioactivity levels - presumably from the dissolved uranium - exceeded EPA standards in nine of 56 wells in the shallow or intermediate aquifer, the newspaper said. Dr. Randy Todd, state epidemiologist, said he was unaware of the USGS report until a meeting with state and federal health and environmental officials Tuesday. USGS officials said the report was distributed to state and local officials in 1994 and didn't get much attention at the time. "I guess it was on a shelf someplace," Todd said. The report and ground water radiation levels never came up during the three-day Legislative hearing in February or the U.S. Senate hearing on the leukemia cluster last week, deBraga said. John Nowlin, the former USGS director in Reno, said he called the Reno office two weeks ago to ask about the 1994 report. "There was no big hue and cry when the report was released in 1994, before the uranium standard for drinking water was adopted," he told the newspaper. "I knew it had been distributed and discussed back then, but I wondered why it hadn't been mentioned lately." Todd said the USGS report will be significant in the state's testing of nine private wells used or formerly used by the families in the leukemia cluster. He said those wells are being tested for all contaminants mentioned in the state's clean water law, including uranium and radioactivity. State health and environmental officials met Tuesday with officials of the USGS, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. The officials exchanged information and began to plan a joint state-federal probe of the disease cases and possible causes, Todd said. "There are a number of agencies whose data might be useful in this," he said. "We have to sift through all the information and come up with protocols for environmental and biological sampling in the area." Sun reporter Mary Manning contributed to this story. All contents copyright 2001 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 19 Report shows radioactivity in Fallon wells RGJ.com - *Frank X. Mullen Jr.* Reno Gazette-Journal Wednesday April 18th, 2001 Ground water used for drinking in the Fallon area contains radioactive minerals that exceeded federal standards in 31 of 73 wells tested in the early 1990s, according to a federal report obtained by the Reno Gazette-Journal. State and federal officials said they neglected to consider the U.S. Geological Survey report in their wide-ranging investigation of a cluster of 12 childhood leukemia cases diagnosed in Fallon since 1999. The report has surfaced only because a former USGS director thought the information would be important to the investigation and wondered why it hadn’t been considered. Assemblywoman Marcia deBraga, D-Fallon, learned about the report Tuesday and was outraged that it hadn’t been brought up sooner. “This could turn out to be significant in terms of the leukemia cluster,” she said. “Clearly, radiation is one of the listed causes of leukemia. The researchers need to follow up on the radiation levels in the wells.” The Geological Survey report, released in 1994, showed the shallow and intermediate ground water used for drinking water in the rural areas of the Carson Desert contained high amounts of uranium and radioactivity. “Dissolved uranium concentrations appear to be high enough to account for the observed gross-alpha activities,” the report stated. Gross-alpha is a measurement of radioactivity. The city’s municipal water supply, which serves about a third of the city’s population of 8,300 people, comes from deeper wells that don’t contain dissolved uranium, state and federal officials said. Radiation is one of the few known triggers of leukemia, according to researchers. In the Fallon area, 12 children have been diagnosed with the same type of leukemia since 1997, 11 of them in the last two years. The report says the radiation is naturally occurring. The uranium in the ground water has nothing to do with an underground atomic bomb test conducted 28 miles from Fallon in 1960. Scientists from the Reno-based Desert Research Institute have said that radioactive elements left in the ground from that test don’t come anywhere near the town. Dr. Randy Todd, state epidemiologist, said he was unaware of the USGS report until a meeting with state and federal health and environmental officials on Tuesday. USGS officials said the report was distributed to state and local officials in 1994 and didn’t get much attention at the time. “I guess it was on a shelf someplace,” Todd said. DeBraga said the radiation report and ground water radiation levels never came up during the three-day Legislative hearing in February or the U.S. Senate hearing on the leukemia cluster last week. “It’s frustrating that this report sits around since 1994 and nobody is aware of it,” deBraga said. “What’s the point in doing all these studies if the information doesn’t lead to anything else being done?” John Nowlin, the former USGS director in Reno, said Tuesday he called the Reno office two weeks ago to ask about the 1994 report. “There was no big hue and cry when the report was released in 1994, before the uranium standard for drinking water was adopted,” he said. “I knew it had been distributed and discussed back then, but I wondered why it hadn’t been mentioned lately (in the leukemia investigation). “I guess it didn’t stay in people’s minds for long.” Todd said the USGS report will be significant in the state’s testing of nine private wells used or formerly used by the families in the leukemia cluster. He said those wells are being tested for all contaminants mentioned in the state’s clean water law, including uranium and radioactivity. He said state health and environmental officials met Tuesday with officials of the USGS, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. The officials exchanged information and began to plan a joint state-federal probe of the disease cases and possible causes, he said. “There are a number of agencies whose data might be useful in this (case),” Todd said. “We have to sift through all the information and come up with protocols for environmental and biological sampling in the area.” Some of the biological samples will come from families in the leukemia cluster and from other Fallon-area residents, he said. Todd said the significance of the ground water radiation is not clear. He said it will be examined as one of many environmental factors, including agricultural chemicals, jet fuel from the nearby Navy base and other pollutants to be investigated. The USGS report found naturally-occurring uranium and radioactivity in wells bored into the shallow and intermediate aquifers in Churchill County, which has a population of 26,000 people including Fallon residents. An aquifer is an underground lake. The wells are used for agricultural or drinking water, USGS officials said. The uranium in the ground water comes from the Sierra Nevada and other mountain ranges. It migrates to the desert basin as sediments in the Carson River and its tributaries. It has been collecting in the Carson River Basin for millions of years, the USGS report said. The municipal water supply comes from four wells that tap the basalt aquifer, which is found at 400 or 500 feet below the surface. The USGS researchers and city tests showed no radioactivity in that ground water. “It has been zero in those city wells,” said Larry White, Fallon city engineer. “The basalt aquifer is very deep and it’s insulated from anything that might get into the water from the surface.” That’s not the case with the 4,500 wells drilled into the shallower aquifers in Churchill County. Those wells don’t come under federal clean water testing requirements and the well owners can test them or not. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last year set uranium standards for drinking water at 30 micrograms per liter. The 1994 USGS report shows one shallow well logging 310 micrograms per liter and another shallow well measuring at 210 micrograms per liter. The report also showed radioactivity levels — presumably from the dissolved uranium — above EPA standards in nine of 56 wells in the shallow or intermediate aquifer. Michelle Moustakas, an environmental engineer with the EPA in San Francisco, said the federal standards are based on extensive studies, models and risk analysis. “It’s not just guesswork,” she said. “It relates to health risks.” The USGS program that produced the Carson Basin ground water report, called the National Water Quality Assessment Program, is listed to be slashed by 30 percent under President Bush’s proposed federal budget. Federal officials said another USGS check of the Carson Basin wells is scheduled for next year, but may not take place if the program is cut back. Radiation Fact Sheet o Children are known to be more radiosensitive than adults. Analysis of Hiroshima atomic bomb victims showed a higher incidence of cancers among those who were exposed to the radiation blast as children. Occupational exposure to radiation has also been linked to cancer, including leukemia. o Radiation risk to embryos is higher than to children, which in turn is higher than to adults. The increased sensitivity of children to radiation-induced cancers may be caused by their rapidly dividing cells and higher breathing rates, researchers said. o Dr. Ronald Rosen of the University of Nevada School of Medicine told members of a Legislative committee investigating the Fallon leukemia cluster that studies have linked some leukemia cases to prenatal exposure to radiation. Sources: Reno Gazette-Journal research, EPA, Nevada Legislature ***************************************************************** 20 Nuclear Waste Shipment Headed to St. Louis Area By Leisa Zigman Special trucks to travel to Idaho sometime this summer (KSDK) A large shipment of high level radioactive nuclear waste will go through Illinois and Missouri sometime this summer. The U.S. Department of Energy says three specially constructed container trucks will carry the radioactive cargo. The transport date is top secret but the route is from southern Illinois on Interstate 64 and into Missouri on Interstates 255, 270 and 70. I-70 will take the trucks west across Missouri through Kansas City. The shipment, from Heidelburg, Germany, is to move sometime between May 1 and September 1. The 42 used fuel rods, recovered from European nuclear power plants, are being taken to a Storage facility in Idaho. This will be the first foreign shipment but more are likely. Missouri Governor Bob Holden has asked the secretary of energy re-route the shipment around Missouri. Senator Jean Carnahan says there are legitimate safety concerns especially because of construction on I-70 and the potential for accidents. Senator Kitt Bond says as long as safety measures are in place, and the government insists they are, he has no problem with the policy 4/17/01 8:20 AM ***************************************************************** 21 Bad Business skewed politics Las Vegas Life- April 2001 April 2001 A Greenspun Publication By William L. Fox The tunnel is immense, 25 feet in diameter, large enough to drive a train into with room to spare. And it's loud. Air ducts as big around as a car exchange 350,000 cubic feet of air per minute throughout the five - mile - long tunnel. We enter its mouth wearing earplugs to prevent hearing loss from the vibrations of pumps, generators, a man-hauling miner's train and all of their echoes. Yucca Mountain is not a pretty project. The north portal of the tunnel is surrounded by prefab buildings and industrial hangers, as well as enormous heaps of fist-size rocks, the pulverized detritus created by a boring machine that looks as if it could chew through an entire city. The site hardly has the brute charisma of Hoover Dam, much less that of the Three Gorges Dam being built on China's Yangtze River, the world's largest construction project. But walking down the tunnel toward the planned repository for America's nuclear high-level waste (HLW), there's no mistaking the fact that you're in one of the world's mega engineering projects. It's a bit obvious, as we walk 500 feet down the tunnel to a side alcove, where I'll be briefed on the design of the repository, that a sign should sit above the cavernous mouth: "All hope abandon, ye who enter here." For this is the court of last refuse, where we will likely bury the most toxic substance mankind has ever encountered: radioactive waste that contains plutonium, as well as 500 other less deadly isotopic sisters. Serious business this, which is why three representatives of the Department of Energy project are accompanying me on a tour of Yucca Mountain, the undistinguished ridge that sits just inside the Nevada Test Site, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Bob Lupton, a burly ex-Marine colonel with a master's degree in information management, is erect in carriage, courtly of speech and well-versed in the military and political histories of Western civilization. The 25-foot-wide portal at the mouth of Yucca Mountain may one day welcome the nation's high-level nuclear waste. Ron Linden, the hydrologist assigned to explain Yucca Mountain to me, is shorter, bearded and has walked over and mapped much of the geology. "Yucca Mountain is probably the most studied piece of real estate on the planet," he says, "so much so, in fact, that there's no one alive who knows it all." Leading us into the tunnel is Jim Niggemeyer, a senior engineer whose friendly patter contains a tone of regret; he may have to retire before the repository opens. You can tell it's a privilege for these men to work on such a large and critical endeavor, and they wince when I question the language Jim uses, which is full of phrases such as "scientific precision" and "the best science." "We've projected out the weather that will occur here for the next 10,000 years," Jim proclaims, "and we know with scientific accuracy that the average rainfall will double. We've taken that into account by adding a curved drip shield to the design that will divert any groundwater away from the canisters." I shake my head. "I can't believe the language you're using. The science you're talking about is modeled through statistics--you can say that it's probable, that's what the average might be, but you don't know for sure." I leave unsaid what would happen if there were an anomalous spike in El Niño patterns that lasted for as long as a century, which could turn much of the state into a puddle larger than Rhode Island. It's happened within the last 10,000 years. How would you predict the flow of groundwater then? Could you guarantee it wouldn't pass through the repository, breach the site's various defenses and bear away radioactive materials? Of course not. Is such a weather event likely? No. If it happened, would water seep down through cracks into the repository? Absolutely. In one experiment, the scientists dumped 63,000 gallons of water atop a concentrated patch of the ridge; some of it made it to the repository in less than 60 days. Would an extended wet period create a catastrophe? Nobody knows. And that's the naked crux of the matter. Jim resumes his talk in a more moderate vein. These are men I admire, people who have developed painstaking expertise over decades in logistics, geology and mining engineering. They know their stuff and they believe in the necessity not only to build the repository, but to do so as safely as humanly possible for a time period in the future about equidistant to that in the past when humans first crossed the Bering Strait and came into North America. After Jim finishes his spiel, we board the man train that's come to take us down to the rock face where the storage tunnels (called "drifts") will be excavated. Ron, Bob and Jim answer every question I can think of with a barrage of facts, figures and the wondrous enthusiasm of kids building dams in the mud. That image means I should back up for a moment. ABOUT 20 PERCENT OF AMERICA'S ELECTRICITY is generated by more than 100 nuclear power plants, where clusters of 12- to 15-foot-long fuel rods filled with enriched uranium pellets are inserted into reactors to achieve critical mass, creating a chain reaction. The uranium atoms split, releasing heat that boils water piped around the reactor; the resulting steam powers turbines to make electricity. The rods become progressively more radioactive during this process, however, and after three years or so must be removed when they get too hot. The first nuclear reaction was created in Chicago in December 1942, and the first commercial reactor started up in America in 1957. Spent fuel, which has been accumulating ever since, is classified as HLW: It comprises only one percent of nuclear waste in the country but contains 95 percent of the radiation. The rods have been stored first in pools of water to keep them cool, and then increasingly above ground in temporary facilities good for only a few dozen years. Miles of power cords and air ducts line the guts of Yucca Mountain, where the DOE is in the midst of an eight-year thermal testing experiment. These storage solutions are potentially prone to failure, theft and terrorism, and all of them sit next to bodies of water or atop water-rich soils. The storage space--spread over 77 sites in 35 states--is also expensive and in short supply. So Congress, under mounting pressure from the nuclear industry and after studying alternative methods of disposal (dumping it into the ocean, launching it into space), in 1982 directed the DOE to study sites for the geologically deep burial of the high-level waste. But--and most importantly--keeping nuclear waste near populated areas has stalled the growth of the industry. No one wants plutonium in their back yard, a fact exploited by environmental groups. The industry reasons that, if you get the waste out of sight, therefore out of mind, the objections to new plants--and relicensing existing ones--will subside. Originally, repository sites in nine states were considered, then narrowed to Deaf Smith County in Texas, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington and Yucca Mountain. The Hanford and Texas sites are near significant water sources, and a plume of radioactive contamination is already moving toward the Columbia River from a waste-burial site at Hanford. Allen Benson, the director of institutional affairs for the DOE at Yucca Mountain, told me this morning before leaving Las Vegas that "there's no such thing as a 'best' site, but of the three, it's better" than the other two. Science may dictate that Yucca Mountain is, indeed, the preferable site, but it's going to be hard to tell because, in 1987, Congress ordered the DOE to study only Yucca Mountain--despite the presence of active earthquake faults within the ridge and a nearby dormant volcano field. And despite the fact that one of the fundamentals of good science is making valid comparisons. Science aside, the other two states had larger, more powerful congressional delegations than Nevada, hence the "Screw Nevada Bill." It's too early to predict whether 70,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste and 7,000 tons of military nuclear waste will start passing through Las Vegas in 2010--the target date for opening Yucca Mountain. But the election of energy businessman George W. Bush to the White House and his subsequent naming of nuclear-friendly officials to head the departments of Energy and Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency have certainly increased the odds in favor of it. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, as a U.S. senator, co-authored a bill to store the waste temporarily above ground at the Nevada Test Site, a move predicated on the opening of Yucca Mountain. How much waste are we talking about? Right now it's accumulating at roughly 2,000 metric tons per year and totals more than 40,000. That's a football field covered 12 feet deep. The $58 billion Yucca Mountain facility has been designed to hold almost twice that. What about this waste inspires such dread in us? Plutonium is the most toxic element on Earth; a microscopic speck one one-hundredth the size of a grain of salt, if inhaled, can be more than your bone marrow will tolerate, causing, among other problems, various kinds of fatal leukemias. It's that toxic for 10,000 years before tailing off toward harmlessness. The repository will hold the radiological equivalent of more than 2 million nuclear detonations the size of the Hiroshima bomb. That's trillions of potential doses, enough to kill every mammal on Earth if it got out. Plutonium isn't the only radionuclide in the waste, but one of a family of harmful isotopes that have already been proven to migrate through groundwater, to be released in gases through fractures in rock, and to be blown as dust in the wind. In essence, then, the waste is virtually invisible, has the ability to sneak up through the water pipes and can poison us incurably for at least 333 human generations. THE TRAIN THAT PICKS US UP AFTER THE briefing takes us down the imperceptibly sloping tunnel, passing only the occasional worker examining the sides of the tunnel, which in spots are so fractured that they're held in place with reinforcing materials. We ride mostly in silence until we've gone two miles and are about 1,000 feet beneath the surface, where we round the first curve at the bottom of the giant U-shaped tunnel. We won't go any farther, but to my right is the face of the rock where the actual repository drifts will begin, 18-foot-wide holes a mile long that will be drilled 260 feet apart to disperse the heat of the decaying isotopes, still encased in their rods, which will be placed in sealed canisters to sit underneath the curved water shield. When finished, Yucca Mountain will be honeycombed with 100 miles of tunnels. .Miles of air ducts line the guts of Yucca Mountain, where the DOE is in the midst of an eight-year thermal testing experiment. Reboarding the small train, we go back up the line to where a smaller drift branches off and downward. Massive power cables, more ventilation ducts. Around a corner at the end of the offshoot stands a thick wall behind which enormous electric heaters are baking the rock to an even 386 degrees. I look through an immensely thick porthole at the experiment, the heat discernible to my face. Think Dante's Inferno with gauges. The engineers are three years into an eight-year test of how the heat from the stored waste will cook the rock and redirect the flow of liquid through it. So far the results are within the predictions: The water turns to steam, hits fractures and drops vertically. This is what they want to hear, since it means the water and any possible contaminants won't percolate up and out as gas or mix with surface water. And the flow downward is slow enough, they believe, to fall within the rate demanded by the EPA. The idea is that, if subsistence farmers 10,000 years from now were using the local aquifer to irrigate crops and water livestock, they would ingest less radiation per year than they'd get from two dental x-rays. THE TOUR IS IMPRESSIVE. THE SCIENTISTS and engineers are earnest about what they're doing, convinced they can use existing technology to contain HLW for a long time--and that the engineering will continue to improve, which is why they're discussing keeping the doors of the facility open for up to 300 years. The redesigned groundwater shield that Jim Niggemeyer was describing is one such improvement. Radiation is basically chaotic movement at the atomic level, and it disorders atoms around it. That's why the canisters that hold the waste will come apart sometime between 300 and 1,000 years. Diverting groundwater from the decaying canisters seems a good idea. The plan is to make sure at least 200 meters of earthen material sit on top of any given point of the repository. Originally they were going to seal Yucca Mountain after only 50 years; now they want to observe the three centuries it will take the waste to pass through its maximum heat phase, as well as leave open the possibility that new methods for dealing with it can be deployed. And they want to watch the water. We leave Jim at the mouth of the tunnel, and the rest of us head uphill on a dirt road to eat lunch atop the ridge. Once there, the air is so clear, the view so unobstructed, that we can see the east face of Mount Whitney standing above the Owens Valley, about 100 miles to the west. The contrast between one of the country's most scenic wonders and the topic under discussion doesn't go unnoticed among us. I ask about terrorism. Ron, our military tactician who has studied such matters, fields the question. "Why bother with nuclear waste? If you want to create an incident, the release of biological agents in urban environments is easier to handle and much more effective." Fair enough. How about creating a "threat environment" sufficient to scare away plunderers or unwary miners in the far future? No one has a firm grasp on that, although the idea of creating some kind of Rosetta stone in several languages has been discussed, along with scary sculptures. AS WE DRIVE BACK TO LAS VEGAS DOWN U.S. Highway 95, one of the probable routes the waste convoys would use as they creep along at 20 miles per hour, I can't help but be impressed. Not only with the devotion these people bring to the project, their conviction that they can come up with reasonable and prudent ways to store the plutonium until it is relatively harmless--but also how they're being shortchanged. The problem with Yucca Mountain isn't that it's being investigated as a repository, but that it's the only site. This is half-assed science that will give us only half-truths. They can cook the rocks all they want, but without performing the same experiment at different sites, they have no way to gauge how effective the volcanic tuff here will be in containing heated groundwater flow, to name just one example. What's behind the incomplete science at Yucca Mountain is not just politics, but a bad business plan. The utility companies never have been willing to acknowledge to the public and their shareholders the real costs of nuclear power, which are decommissioning the reactors and handling the waste. They put off those costs into some imaginary accounting category that sat far over the short-term profit horizon, and thus off the page as far as they were concerned. When the costs became inescapable, in the grand American tradition of independent entrepreneurship, they turned to the government for a bailout, in this case the cheapest and fastest way to get spent fuel out of sight and out of mind. Yucca Mountain shouldn't even be an issue at this stage in the history of the planet. And make no mistake: This isn't just a problem for Las Vegas. The DOE admits there will be transportation accidents, and although they're hoping that, by the time they occur, someone will have invented a leak-proof and indestructible shipping container, it's entirely likely that many of the 45 states and 30 tribal jurisdictions through which the shipments would pass will sue to stop them. The real problem is that plutonium, no matter where it's handled, tends to get out of hand, as the federal government has found much to its dismay at both the Hanford site, where plutonium is manufactured, and at the Rocky Flats facility outside Denver, where it's made into triggers for nuclear weapons. At Hanford, 67 of the 177 concrete-and-steel containers storing 54 million gallons of HLW have failed, contaminating the groundwater under at least 85 square miles. The cleanup costs are estimated at $40 billion and climbing. At Rocky Flats, where several tons of plutonium are stored, the stuff is also migrating off-site. Every country that has nuclear waste is sending its engineers to Yucca Mountain to see if they should copy its design. If it's flawed, the planetary problem with plutonium will be multiplied beyond imagining. Permanent underground storage at this stage is not the only solution available. The technology to embed HLW in a stable ceramic compound for hundreds of years above ground already exists, for example, and is being improved annually. Deploying such temporary storage would afford scientists time to study multiple repository sites and storage methods. Think the current $58 billion is enough to spend on an HLW facility? A nuclear spill on a freeway in Downtown Las Vegas reportedly could cost $30 billion to clean up. As usual, haste makes waste, as the vernacular would define bad business planning. Congress might spend the money up front to investigate all of the alternatives--including Yucca Mountain--over a century. What's that compared to 10,000 years? The scientists are willing and able to do the work; they've proven that at Yucca Mountain. Good start. Now do the other half of it. And in the meantime, for the sake of the planet, don't go shuffling plutonium all around the country as if the landscape were a gameboard. And, given the size of the planet and the laws of probability, don't put it in a site that isn't at all likely to be the best place for it. All contents © 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 Las Vegas Sun, Inc. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARTICLES ***************************************************************** 1 Lab only nuclear facility to get raise Other nuclear sites face DOE cutbacks *April 17, 2001* By Glenn Roberts Jr. STAFF WRITER Lawrence Livermore Laboratory is the only nuclear lab with an Energy Department-recommended budget increase for 2002, according to preliminary estimates. While department officials are requesting that Livermore Lab's annual budget rise from $1.08 billion to $1.11 billion in 2002, the budgets for the other nuclear weapons labs are proposed to shrink a collective $277.14 million. Los Alamos Laboratory of New Mexico, with a current year budget of $1.68 billion, has a proposed 2002 budget of $1.41 billion. Sandia National Laboratories, with labs in Livermore and New Mexico, will drop from $1.48 billion to $1.14 billion in 2002 under the proposal. Regional decrease The regional Energy Department office in Oakland has a proposed budget decrease of $44.5 million, from $379.5 million this year to $335 million in 2002, the department Office of the Chief Financial Officer reported. That department office oversees operations at Livermore Lab, Lawrence Berkeley Lab and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center at Stanford University. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., whose state is home to two nuclear labs, said in a statement that the budget is deficient for weapons labs in New Mexico.' Real needs' "I am ready, willing and able to again show everyone that the needs within the nuclear weapons complex are very real and deserving of more funding," Domenici said. "This is only the start of the process, and what we finally agree on this summer and fall will not be a mirror-image of the administration's April budget request," he said. Domenici has co-sponsored legislation this year that would add about $900 million to Energy Department weapons and nonproliferation programs in 2002. The Energy Department budget request calls for an increase of about $91.5 million in 2002 for nuclear weapons work at Livermore Lab, from $813.1 million this year to $904.6 million. Money for Livermore Lab programs intended to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, which includes cooperative efforts in Russia, would drop from $124.3 million this year to $71.4 million in 2002 if the department's budget request is approved. Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Alamo, whose district includes Livermore Lab and Sandia lab in Livermore, has protested cuts in spending for these nonproliferation programs. Energy Department officials are requesting a $21.3 million cut in nonproliferation work at Sandia labs and a $3.6 million cut in those programs at Los Alamos Lab. Also, the budget request calls for a $46.9 million increase in spending for weapons work at Sandia labs in 2002 and a $21.3 million decrease in weapons spending at Los Alamos Lab, according to the department's preliminary budget numbers. And under the budget request, environmental restoration and waste management activities would decline by about $12.6 million at Livermore Lab, about $9.9 million at Sandia labs and about $16.7 million at Los Alamos Lab. The department's requested 2002 budget for Berkeley Lab is $271.2 million, or about $26.1 million less than the current-year budget. The proposed budget would increase spending at Stanford's accelerator center by about $7.8 million in 2002. ***************************************************************** 2 DOE set to receive new cash for laser $69.1 million may be available by today *April 17, 2001* By Glenn Roberts Jr. STAFF WRITER An extra $69.1 million for a massive laser project at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory could be released as soon as today, a spokesman for an Energy Department nuclear security agency said Monday. The money was held up by Congress pending the delivery of a status report on the National Ignition Facility laser project. Requested by Congress last year, the report included a preferred path to completion for the project and a complete assessment on whether NIF is meeting cost and schedule goals. With an estimated price tag of $3.5 billion to $4 billion, NIF is about $1 billion over budget and six years behind schedule, according to federal estimates. Department officials submitted the report to Congress on April 6, minus a five-year budget plan on weapons activities that was also part of the congressional request. Those budget numbers, officials said in the report, would be finalized following a presidential review of the weapons program, though the review is expected to last several months, perhaps concluding in the early summer. On Friday, John A. Gordon, administrator for the department's National Nuclear Security Administration, sent additional information to Congress that included budget estimates for weapons activities through the 2006 budget year. The estimates say that Energy Department spending on nuclear weapons activities will increase about 15 percent over the next five years, from about $5 billion to $5.76 billion. The estimates were sent to Sen. Pete V. Domenici, R-N.M., who serves as chairman of the Energy and Water Development appropriations committee. The Energy Department's weapons program, known as the Stockpile Stewardship Program, is intended to ensure the safety, reliability and effectiveness of nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal. Under the tentative five-year spending plan, the energy Department "would be required to restructure the NIF and other elements of the (Stockpile Stewardship Program" if program requirements remain the same, Gordon states in the addendum. But the NIF budget is being considered in the weapons program review, Gordon said, and "any changes resulting from the review will be transmitted to Congress as a part of the final plan." NewsChoice.com ***************************************************************** 3 Backers battling for FFTF This story was published Tue, Apr 17, 2001 By Annette Cary Herald staff writer Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham has said he needs to see that circumstance or information has changed if he is to reconsider the Clinton administration's decision to shut down Hanford's Fast Flux Test Facility. Supporters of restarting the reactor have that new information -- a January report prepared for the Department of Energy by an independent panel appointed to advise the agency on nuclear issues, said Suzanne Heaston of Citizens for Medical Isotopes. Heaston spoke Monday at a gathering of about 100 Tri-City area leaders in medicine, science, business, local government and labor and cancer patients in Kennewick. They gathered to sign a resolution to Abraham. "We are at a critical juncture where we can get the secretary of Energy to put off the decision," she said. The January report of the executive committee of the Nuclear Energy Research Advisory Committee said DOE's "infrastructure has been in a near free fall," and cited the closure of the High Flux Beam Reactor at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the potential closure of FFTF. FFTF was built in the 1970s to test fuels for a government breeder-reactor program. But the breeder reactor program was abandoned as the federal government decided it had misjudged the nation's electricity needs. The Hanford reactor has been on standby, without a mission, since 1992. Supporters are proposing it now be used to produce isotopes for medicine, industry and government and to do research for nuclear power plants. The resolution signed Monday asks Abraham to suspend for a year the decision to permanently shut down the reactor. Once sodium is drained from the reactor's cooling system, it cannot be restarted. The resolution also asks DOE to formally request proposals for use of the reactor. In its decision to shut down the reactor, the Clinton administration said it did not have enough commitments from industry, government and foreign interests to justify restarting FFTF. "They never issued a request for proposals, which is a more formal way of saying, 'Do we really need this machine?' " Heaston said. The resolution also outlines the need supporters see for medical isotopes that could be produced at FFTF. More than 90 percent of isotopes used in the United States are imported. Radioactive isotopes are widely used in medicine, including for diagnostic tests of one in three U.S. hospital patients. Demand is growing not just for isotopes used for diagnosis, but also for isotopes used in new ways to treat cancer. Many of the cancer treatments being researched have fewer side effects than more conventional treatments such as chemotherapy because they can specifically target cancerous cells with less harm to healthy cells. Opponents of restarting the reactor want Hanford to focus exclusively on cleaning up the nuclear site, which was used to produce plutonium for bombs in World War II and the Cold War. Now, DOE is operating no reactors at the site. Copyright 2001 Tri-City Herald. All rights reserved. This ***************************************************************** 4 Bibb says money isn't the problem at Y-12 April 18, 2001 By Frank Munger News-Sentinel senior writer There hasn't been much information available in Oak Ridge about the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant, particularly the budget for 2002, so I placed a telephone call to North Carolina. What? On the surface that doesn't make much sense, but I figured Dr. Bill Bibb, a retired Energy Department official who lives on the Carolina coast, might have some information on Y-12 and maybe a few opinions, too. He did and, as it turned out, he was not reluctant to share them. Bibb oversaw Y-12 operations when he headed DOE's defense programs in Oak Ridge and for a time held a key defense post at agency headquarters in Washington. After leaving federal service, he founded Citizens for National Security, an advocacy group that includes many weapons-manufacturing experts formerly on the Y-12 payroll. The budget looks pretty good, according to Bibb, who traveled to Washington last week to meet with friends and do a little intelligence gathering. He has been a supporter of the National Nuclear Security Administration, a semi-independent agency within DOE that was created a year ago to manage the nuclear weapons program. "I think the NNSA is committed to providing funding for these (production) plants over and above what I think any of us had originally hoped for. By that, I mean the NNSA has clearly recognized there is an infrastructure problem. You can't ignore maintenance and infrastructure," he said. Unfortunately, Bibb said, the nuclear weapons complex has deteriorated in the post-Cold War era. "When we suddenly had this great 'peace dividend,' it was like, 'Let's cut back on staff, cut back on maintenance. We'll probably never need it again.' Well, hello! It doesn't take a rocket scientist to think that nuclear weapons need to be rebuilt now and again, refurbished." Bibb is worried about the declining numbers of experienced technical staff within the weapons complex. "What are you going to do when a lot of your graybeards walk out the door? You can't recruit these kinds of things," he said. Bibb suggests that the precision associated with manufacturing warheads is something that requires years of on-the-job training. He said skilled craftsmen have arrived at Y-12 over the years, fully confident of their abilities, only to find themselves totally unprepared for the machining standards in place at the Oak Ridge complex. "The talent that's required is just unbelievable," he said. Bibb said it looks like the Oak Ridge Centers for Manufacturing Technology at Y-12 is not receiving the kind of support that's needed. The ORCMT was created a decade ago to facilitate the transfer of technologies from the nuclear weapons program to U.S. businesses, particularly those in the state and region. Besides helping industry solve manufacturing problems, the Oak Ridge centers were supposed to help keep key personnel available for weapons work. The plant's "work for others" program, involving projects for the military and other federal agencies, also seems to have lost priority and momentum, he said. While money for modernization of Oak Ridge facilities appears to be ready and available in Washington, Bibb said there apparently are some problems in putting this money to work. "I'm not as concerned with the funding as I am with the commitment by BWXT Y-12 to get on with the job," he said. "Y-12, I think, has gotten satisfactory funding, adequate funding. Now the issue is: Can the new contractor utilize it effectively? That's the big question in my mind, and I would say the jury is still out." BWXT is the new contractor in Oak Ridge, replacing Lockheed Martin last November as manager of Y-12, and Bibb said he's disappointed with what's he seen so far and what's he heard from informed officials within the weapons complex. "When Martin Marietta came to town (in 1984, succeeding Union Carbide), we saw a lot of early-on accomplishment. We saw new people pumped up. All I'm seeing right now is the same old, same old. I don't have that warm and fuzzy feeling. "We're supposed to be choosing (contractors) who are the best and brightest. I don't see Bechtel (one of the corporate partners in BWXT Y-12) shipping in some of their world-class project managers. It's these kinds of things that worry me, not the money. One of the worst things in the world is if you get the money and don't know what to do with it .... I don't see all these new things that BWXT said when they won the contract." While expressing disappointment with BWXT's performance to date, Bibb also put the needle to the National Nuclear Security Administration's leadership. He credited the NNSA with pushing for refurbishment of aging facilities, but Bibb said the new agency should have done a lot more in a year's time. He suggested that a bloated organizational chart is no way to make people accountable. "I think you're going to see some frustration on The Hill" regarding the NNSA's lack of progress, he said. Senior Writer Frank Munger covers the Department of Energy for the News-Sentinel. He can be reached at 865-482-9213 or at twig1@knoxnews.infi.net. This column is also available on the Web at www.knoxnews.com/editorsview/munger/ ***************************************************************** 5 Group Reports Litany of Irregularities in Plutonium Fuel Factory License Application and Review Environmental News Network - ENN Direct From Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League Tuesday, April 17, 2001 GLENDALE SPRINGS, NC — GROUP REPORTS LITANY OF IRREGULARITIES IN PLUTONIUM FUEL FACTORY LICENSE APPLICATION AND REVIEW Today, the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League (BREDL) released documents challenging the plutonium fuel factory proposed for the Department of Energy's (DOE) Savannah River Site (SRS) near Aiken, South Carolina. In a letter written to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), BREDL contends that the Duke Cogema Stone and Webster (DCS) plutonium factory license application is fatally flawed and should be rejected. The group also contends that DOE must complete a supplemental Environmental Impact Statement. BREDL maintains its position that the plutonium fuel project is unnecessary and dangerous, and advocates reallocating the hundreds of millions of dollars to restore funding for plutonium storage and immobilization. "The Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission are allowing a dishonest use of U.S. nuclear nonproliferation funding to subsidize a physical and regulatory plutonium fuel infrastructure in the U.S. and Russia," said BREDL Community Organizer Don Moniak of Aiken, South Carolina. DOE's Response on Previously Unreported Radioactive Waste is Inadequate This past January BREDL called upon DOE to halt the plutonium fuel facility project because of the massive estimated increase in liquid radioactive waste generation during plutonium purification operations and the failure of the contractor, Duke Cogema Stone and Webster (DCS) to formulate a plan for treating and disposing of the waste. In response to BREDL's letter documenting this radical, expensive, and dangerous change, DOE officials reported that it "anticipates a number of changes" of this magnitude during the design phase of the project. (http://www.bredl.org/sapc/SEIS_request011001.htm) "So far, DOE is overlooking the contractual obligation Duke, Cogema, Stone and Webster has to manage all radioactive waste, and NRC is simply looking the other way," commented Lou Zeller of BREDL's Glendale Springs, North Carolina office. NRC Failed to Respond to License Application Deficiencies Last month BREDL requested that the NRC reject DCS' Construction Authorization Request, citing some of the following concerns: DCS is attempting to evade NRC oversight of the radioactive waste management; DCS justified its failure to submit an emergency management plan by claiming that the public radiation dose during a major accident would be within regulatory limits--even though the regulatory limits are 5-6 times greater than the average annual "background" radiation dose; DCS based its application on the environmental compliance history of Savannah River Site, not on its own environmental record; The plutonium fuel factory has no licensed customers for its product; DCS submitted a financial report to the NRC for Fiscal Year 1999 but has yet to submit a financial report for Fiscal year 2000. Although the NRC wrote to BREDL on March 28 that "a response is under preparation which will be forwarded to you shortly," no response has been forthcoming. Representatives from BREDL will be available for media interviews at the NRC's public meetings being held this week: April 17 from 5-7 p.m. at the North Augusta Community Center, 496 Brookside Avenue, North Augusta, SC; April 18 from 5-7 p.m. at the Georgia Coastal Center, 305 Martin Luther King Boulevard, Savannah, GA. For more information, contact: Don Moniak Community Organizer Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League (803) 644-6953 ***************************************************************** 6 Soviet era weapons leaking NUCLEAR and biological weapons leaking from the old Soviet war machine could end up in the hands of terror groups, a terrorism expert has warned. Professor Paul Wilkinson told the Edinburgh International Science Festival that changes since the cold war had made it more likely terrorists would get access to weapons of mass destruction, and developed nations would have to face the possibility of being targeted by these nuclear bombs or chemical weapons. Terror groups were no longer willing to settle for supplies of Kalashnikov rifles and Semtex explosives, according to Professor Wilkinson, of the centre for the study of terrorism and political violence at Central Lancashire University. He said the problems in Russia meant nuclear, chemical and biological secrets were now on sale to the highest bidder. Many terror groups had the potential to fund the construction and delivery of their own nuclear or chemical weapons of mass destruction. "It would be wrong to elevate this threat out of proportion as conventional weapons are still much more widely used, but we cannot ignore it." He claimed US statistics on terror groups were unreliable because the American State Department focused on the kinds of international terrorism which would affect their own interests, whereas the vast majority of activity was domestic. He said more than half of the world's countries suffered some form of domestic or international terrorism every year with more than 40 affected by serious activity at any one time. The trend was towards larger incidents, killing more people in each attack, and this "makes it easier for terrorists to cross the threshold into using weapons of mass destruction". The professor also said terror groups were turning to organised crime to finance their activities, leading to the recent spate of Mafia killings in Sicily, and warned London was increasingly becoming a base for them to organise and fund activities. *- April 16* ***************************************************************** 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: *****************************************************************