***************************************************************** 05/21/01 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 9.126 ***************************************************************** RADBULL IS PRODUCED BY THE ABALONE ALLIANCE CLEARINGHOUSE ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR POWER CONTENTS 1 DOE tracks water flow at Yucca 2 The Age: Vegas won't gamble on nuclear dump 3 Fallon cancer cluster a topic at Elko health fair 4 Dust-Control Effort Resumes at Tailings Site 5 Letter to Cheney calling for more nuclear fuel 6 Energy ‘scare tactics’ ripped 7 Back to the '60s 8 Reports of electricity shortage could be overstated 9 The answer is (nu)clear 10 Bush-Cheney Energy Plan: 11 Nevada Nuclear Dump Debated Again 12 TVA "ALIGNED" WITH BUSH'S ENERGY PLAN 13 Safest Path on Energy: More Nuclear Plants 14 Florida a hotbed for nuclear gauge thefts posted 15 Test zone: Britain's nuclear laboratory 16 International Nuclear Emergency Exercise to Be Held in France 17 Radioactive corner of Russia could grow more so under plan 18 Editorial: Get rid of subsidy for industry 19 Letter: Safe storage not a priority for Cheney 20 Remapping, budget highlight next-to-last week of Nevada XGR 21 Yucca opposition renewed as energy plan unfolds 22 Much of concern in energy policy 23 Legislature tackles divisive issues NUCLEAR WEAPONS CONTENTS 1 Opinion: Secretary Abraham should correct past wrongs on 2 Statements by Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham and Gen. John 3 Global Nuclear Workers Run From Smolensk to Red Square ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR POWER ARTICLES ***************************************************************** 1 DOE tracks water flow at Yucca Today: May 21, 2001 at 10:56:57 PDT Potential radiation seepage is studied By Mary Manning LAS VEGAS SUN Government scientists are analyzing results of experiments at Yucca Mountain that could show whether rock fractures allow ground water to move faster than expected through the site of a proposed nuclear waste repository. Water carrying radiation into the environment is a critical consideration in whether Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, can safely contain 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste. Yucca Mountain is the only site being studied to hold the commercial and defense radioactive waste. It must be found scientifically suitable to safely hold the material for 10,000 years to be approved. The Energy Department is charged with studying the site and would build the repository if it is approved. Scientists are concerned that if water drains into alcoves filled with buried nuclear waste, the water could corrode containers and release radioactivity into the environment. People live 12 miles southwest of the proposed repository in Amargosa Valley. Although the evidence in recent DOE reports suggests a fast pathway for water to flow, the critical information scientists are seeking is whether the water would transport radiation away from the repository. DOE testers poured water into Yucca Mountain at its surface, but analysis of the results is still under way. At a technical meeting earlier this month in Arlington, Va., Mark Peters of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico said that analysis of the water flows is not complete, but the findings should be ready by the end of the year. A December 1999 progress report said experiments indicate water flows faster through the fractured rock, which could disqualify Yucca Mountain as a repository if the Environmental Protection Agency issues a strict limit on radiation doses from ground water. The EPA has called for a limit of radiation released from waste stored at Yucca Mountain of 15 millirems per year, with a 4 millirem standard for ground water. A chest X-ray is roughly 5 millirems. That ground water limit is so strict, the DOE may be unable to meet it, which is why Nevada officials support it. Bush administration officials still are reviewing the standard. DOE scientists observed two examples of rapid water flows through the mountain, in 1996 and 1999, the progress report said. In an alcove at the north end of the 5-mile-long exploratory study tunnel, DOE scientists discovered water in 1996 that they believe came from a broken hose used during construction of the tunnel. As much as 10,000 gallons of water escaped, possibly widening fractures in the rock and causing the water to move faster, the report said. In a monthlong test in early 1999, scientists deliberately poured water equal to 12 inches of rainfall -- the amount expected during a glacial climatic period -- on top of the mountain. Scientists believe an Ice Age has almost no chance of occurring in the first 10,000 years the mountain must safely hold the waste. After that period, it is too uncertain to predict. The water went into an alcove, then escaped down one of three boreholes drilled into the alcove's side, moving 115 feet in a fracture in 15 days. In a previous test, the report noted, the water took 58 days to move that far. Scientists concluded that the water's speed was caused by a fracture in the rock, significant because such a crack offers a fast pathway for water to flow. The DOE said further studies are under way. Independent scientists from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board have been following studies of water moving inside the mountain. The NRC will license a repository at Yucca Mountain. NRC hydrologist James Winterle said the DOE scientists poured the water into the top layer of the mountain, while the repository would be built about 1,000 feet lower, in a third layer of volcanic ash. That top layer, called the Tiva Canyon formation, is cracked, he said. But the repository layer, the Topopah Spring tuff, is separated by what is called the Yucca Mountain-Pan Canyon layers, which absorb a lot of the water. "Think of it as very sponge-like," Winterle said of the middle layer. The top layer is built like a stack of bricks, allowing fast water flows through cracks, but the water is absorbed in the sponge underneath, he said. The DOE will have to prove to the NRC that this is the way Yucca Mountain works to protect public health and safety, NRC Executive Director Bill Reamer said. "The burden of proof is on the DOE." There are many steps the DOE needs to take between its current studies and a licensing hearing, Reamer said. If the DOE, the president and Congress decide to recommend the mountain as a repository, the NRC will review information before formal licensing hearings begin, he said. The technical review board, formed in 1988 as an independent scientific panel to oversee DOE's work, has also been waiting for DOE analysis to be completed. "We've been following the progress of that test, of course," board hydrologist David Diodato said of the DOE's study based on the 1996 flow. However, he said he had not seen the DOE's 1999 progress report, part of the basis for a final report on environmental impacts scheduled at the end of this year that will form the basis for a recommendation on Yucca Mountain to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham. Nevada's scientific experts are convinced that rain falling on the surface of Yucca Mountain would reach buried containers of high-level nuclear waste. Based on radiation from atomic bombs exploded in the Pacific Islands that DOE researchers discovered at the repository level inside Yucca Mountain, as well as other studies that show the container material proposed to bury the wastes can corrode in roughly two weeks, state scientists estimate the radiation will be in the environment in 1,250 years, said Bob Loux, executive director of the Nevada Agency on Nuclear Projects. The repository, to be considered scientifically sound, must contain the radioactivity for 10,000 years. However, the state's conclusion about radioactive water from the 1950s Pacific weapons tests seeping into Yucca Mountain is disputed by scientists at the Livermore National Laboratory in Northern California. Another theory that deep, hot water welled inside the mountain within the past 10,000 years has been put to rest by a team of scientists led by UNLV associate geoscience professor Jean Cline. All contents copyright 2001 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 2 The Age: Vegas won't gamble on nuclear dump By DAVID WASTELL WASHINGTON Monday 21 May 2001 The gambling tables and slot machines of Las Vegas have emerged as one of the biggest obstacles to the rapid expansion of nuclear power called for by US President George W. Bush in his review of America's energy needs. Residents are fighting plans to locate America's first underground nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, a stretch of volcanic rock 145 kilometres to the north-west, not far from the nuclear weapons testing ranges of the Nevada desert. They are backed by the casino and hotel industries, which complain that visitors to Las Vegas would not want to come if they thought they might be poisoned by nuclear waste. "People come to Las Vegas to gamble with their money, not their lives," one gaming industry source said. The result, paradoxically, is that one of the cornerstones of Mr Bush's plan to solve America's energy crisis is backed by many of the job-hungry trade unions that were his opponents during the election campaign, but opposed by normally reliable Republican allies in Nevada. Last week's government energy review left open the question of what to do with America's growing volume of nuclear waste, with 33,000tonnes already stored on the surface at the country's 103 nuclear power plants. For more than a decade, Washington's official policy has been to seek a long-term burial site for the waste. The government has carried out studies to establish how best to deal with the waste. There is growing pressure to begin shifting waste to Yucca Mountain - the only site being considered - on which the Department of Energy has already spent 14 years of research and $US7 billion ($A13 billion). The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is due to say this year whether it regards the site as safe. However, Nevada's mostly Republican politicians are determined to prevent the Bush administration from pressing ahead with the Yucca Mountain waste store. "If they need support on nuclear power, they won't get it from Nevada," Senator John Ensign said after the Bush energy review. Public opinion in Nevada, which has no nuclear power plants, is hostile to the waste depository. Copyright © The Age Company Ltd 2001. Any unauthorised use, ***************************************************************** 3 Fallon cancer cluster a topic at Elko health fair RGJ.com - *Staff reports* Reno Gazette-Journal Monday May 21st, 2001 The leukemia cluster involving 14 Fallon children will be among the topics discussed June 1 and 2 during the Holistic Health Fair 2001 in Elko. “We’ll be providing an open forum for all the experts to come together,” said Laurie Munson, the fair’s organizer. The fair is scheduled at the Elko Convention Center and experts in immunology, environmental toxicology, oncology and holistic modalities have been invited, she said. Munson said the fair is a vehicle for educating the public about health care practices and systems that haven’t been recognized by the mainstream medical community. She said educational booths and workshops will include such topics as herbal remedies, nutrition, kinesiology, Feng Shui and aura photography. Scheduled guest speakers are Corbin Harney, an American Indian environmental activist and author, and Leuren Moret, an environmental scientist from the Bay area. Munson said a panel discussion on the Fallon leukemia cluster is scheduled to be hosted by Dr. Gary Ridenour, a Fallon internist. Admission for the event is $6 for adults, $4 for seniors and free admission for children younger than 14. Details: Laurie Munson at (775) 747-4767. ©2001 Reno Gazette-Journal ***************************************************************** 4 Dust-Control Effort Resumes at Tailings Site The Salt Lake Tribune -- May 21, 2001* Landscape workers spray a mixture of grass seed and mulch on an Atlas tailings pile Tuesday as a soil-stabilization measure. (Franklin Seal) BY LISA CHURCH SPECIAL TO THE TRIBUNE MOAB -- The dust is finally starting to settle over the Atlas uranium mill tailings north of Moab. Work to seal the tailings was halted in January due to lack of money, but resumed Tuesday when a Grand Junction, Colo., contractor began to apply a sealing agent to bind the contaminated soil together in an attempt to prevent dust clouds -- a source of complaints from town residents. Crews from the company, W.D. Yards, also began applying a mix of native grass seed to terraced slopes along the edges of the tailings to prevent further erosion of the pile located on the banks of the Colorado River. The 13 million tons of tailings, spread over 130 acres, were created by Atlas Corp. which processed uranium at the site until the company closed the plant in 1984. Atlas filed for bankruptcy protection in 1998. Federal studies have concluded that up to 45,000 gallons a day in toxic waste is leaking into the river which is a source of culinary water for 25 million people down stream in Arizona, Nevada and California. A trust fund to stabilize the site was established as part of the bankruptcy proceedings and PricewaterhouseCoopers was selected as the trustee. Between September 2000 and January, trustee contractors moved 800,000 yards of soil, which had earlier been treated, from the sides of the tailings to its top so the pressure would force out water trapped in the pile through 17,000 "wicks" inserted into the mound. The soil was to be treated with a sealing agent, but work halted when funds in the trust ran dry, leaving untreated soil exposed to the wind which blew it into Moab. An agreement reached last week between PricewaterhouseCoopers, the remediation trustee, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Utah Department of Environmental Quality freed up $400,000 in federal funds owed the trustee. An additional $1 million provided by the Energy Department will complete the dust-control measures. The Department of Energy will take control of the site in September and is expected to move the pile away from the river. Department of Environmental Quality officials made controlling the dust a high priority because it contains high levels of fine particulates. "It's unacceptable to have dust clouds blowing off that pile," said DEQ Executive Director Diane Nielson. She said the trustee has also agreed, if time and funds permit, to place a dirt cover on the exposed center of the tailings pile and construct an evaporation pond to hold water being drained from the tailings. Loren Morton, a hydrogeologist with Environmental Quality, said his agency will step up monitoring of the site to ensure PricewaterhouseCoopers is getting the job done. "We'll take a wait-and-see attitude,'' Morton said. "They have their instructions and the goal is in sight. It's up to PricewaterhouseCoopers to go to work. This is long overdue." U.S. Rep. Chris Cannon said Tuesday further delays at the Atlas site will not be tolerated. "Getting the dust mitigation process in place took too long and was too chaotic,'' said Cannon. "In the future, if issues regarding the tailings pile are not resolved expeditiously, the proper oversight action will take place, be it congressional oversight hearings, [General Accounting Office] audits or any other measure that will facilitate resolution." Funds to pay for transfer of the tailings have not been authorized. The federal budget submitted to Congress by President Bush does not contain funding for the move, which is expected to take about 10 years at a cost of $330 million. But Cannon said he is confident funding will be secured. "The administration did not exclude Atlas from any list, they simply allotted funds for current [Department of Energy] projects without line-item requests,'' Cannon said. "I am extremely confident that Senator [Bob] Bennett can secure funding for Atlas in the Senate, that our bipartisan group can secure funding in the House and that we have the full support of the Bush administration and the Department of Energy." © Copyright 2001, The Salt Lake Tribune All material found on ***************************************************************** 5 Letter to Cheney calling for more nuclear fuel The Honorable Richard Cheney Vice President of the United States The Old Executive Office Building Washington, DC 20501 Dear Mr. Vice President: I am disturbed by early reports that the Energy Task Force recommendations fail to recognize the need to include a path forward for assuring that this country is capable of providing a reliable and economic source of nuclear fuel for commercial nuclear reactors. As you know, nuclear power is the second largest supplier of electricity generation in the country. Unfortunately, it is not unreasonable to expect that the U.S. could have an OPEC-like dependency on foreign sources of nuclear fuel supplies in the near future. To prevent such a situation, the U.S. needs to deploy cost competitive uranium enrichment technology or we will rely on foreign supplies to meet nearly one quarter of our electricity needs. There have been adverse consequences to the nation’s energy security as a result of the privatization of the United States Enrichment Corporation (USEC) in July 1998. USEC is the only domestic supplier of uranium enrichment services in the U.S. When it was privatized, USEC operated two gaseous diffusion plants located in Piketon, Ohio and Paducah, Kentucky. However, last June, USEC made the decision to cease operations at the Piketon Gaseous Diffusion Plant (GDP) ignoring the advice of the Departments of Energy and Treasury. The targeted date for turning the key to the "off position" is June 1, 2001. A Department of Energy report issued on January 19, 2001 describes the need for the U.S. "to be able to reliably meet the continuing demand for approximately 11 million separative work units (SWU) per year." However, the Paducah plant can only produce approximately 4.5 million SWU per year in an economic manner. The balance of requirements comes from 5.5 million SWU derived from blended down weapons grade uranium imported from Russia under the U.S.-Russia HEU Agreement and some European supplies. It is evident that the operation of a single enrichment plant in the country, coupled with a history of five interruptions in the delivery of enriched uranium under the Highly Enriched Uranium Purchase Agreement with Russia, raises questions about the vulnerability of the U.S. to a disruption in the supply of enriched uranium. This supply mix may change even further to the detriment of energy security. First, an August 2000 Nuclear Regulatory Commission report on USEC’s viability suggests that USEC is unlikely to enrich uranium profitably at the Paducah plant beyond 2003. Second, USEC is trying to expand U.S. dependency on Russian nuclear fuel supplies beyond the 5.5 million separative work units (SWU) that it imports each year as Executive Agent under the U.S.- Russia HEU Agreement. USEC has been proposing additional imports of commercial enriched uranium through Tenex, the Russian export agent. One interim solution to maintain insurance against nuclear fuel supply disruptions from Russia is through a cold standby operation for the Piketon, Ohio enrichment plant. I am pleased that Secretary Abraham has taken the steps to provide for cold standby through fiscal year 2002. However, this standby plan must be linked to deployment of cost-competitive technology, such as gas centrifuge technology, and must be extended until the new technology is fully deployed. I fear there has not been adequate attention given to what happens beyond fall 2002 and this is particularly troubling because the Department of Energy’s testimony before the Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee on March 27, 2001 indicates that after five or six years of cold standby there would be significant degradation to the Piketon plant. I am aware that the Europeans have competitive centrifuge technology, and I understand that the Oak Ridge National Laboratories have a plan to develop cost-competitive U.S.-origin centrifuge technology within a three year time period. However, at present, there is virtually no effort toward domestic self-sufficiency in enrichment services, no clear path forward for deployment from the private sector, and no government policy in effect to address the matter. Privatization has failed to deploy the advanced laser enrichment technology (AVLIS) that received nearly $2 billion in federal R&D. Indeed, two years have passed since USEC announced it was terminating the AVLIS Program and nothing has emerged to replace the WW-II era gaseous diffusion plants in the next decade. Indeed, USEC’s impaired credit ratings make it unlikely that they could obtain financing to deploy any technology. Given the short-term nature of the Administration’s cold standby plan and the absence of any long-term strategy to utilize the Piketon facility and deploy next generation enrichment technology, the plan for Piketon presently falls well-short of the commitment made by President Bush during the campaign. In an enclosed October 4, 2001 letter to Ohio Governor Bob Taft, then-Governor Bush expressed his concern about USEC’s decision to cease operations at the Piketon plant. He stated, "I am concerned that the closure of the Piketon site, which would leave only one uranium enrichment plant operational in the United States, would compromise our long-term national security interest in a continued safe supply of enriched uranium for our defense and energy needs." He further committed in that letter, "If I am elected President, my Administration will aggressively explore how the workforce and facilities at the Piketon site can continue to serve our national interest. I believe that our nation must continue to pursue research and development of new technologies for use in uranium enrichment." Release of the Energy Task Force report is the best opportunity for the Administration to follow through on its commitment to the Piketon community and our nation’s nuclear energy security. The need for a secure, domestic uranium enrichment supply is underscored by the fact that nuclear power is enjoying improved operating economics and increased average efficiency of reactors. Demand is likely to remain stable or grow, as approximately 40% of the domestic nuclear reactors are currently seeking license renewals. During a hearing on nuclear power before the Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee on March 27, 2001, there was discussion about building the next generation nuclear reactors in the not-so-distant future. These next generation reactors will require 8-10% U-235 enrichment, compared with the 4-5% levels required for the current generation of boiling water reactors. It is troubling that USEC is closing the Piketon facility which is the only U.S. enrichment plant that is licensed to enrich uranium to 10% assay, when there is a trend toward higher assay fuel. During the March 27, 2001 Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee hearing, testimony was offered which stated: "USEC utilized only about 29% of its nameplate GDP capacity in 2000, and over the next year will supply a majority of its customers needs from Russian and U.S. HEU blending." (Testimony of John R. Longenecker, former USEC official). Mr. Longenecker further states: "USEC is finding it more profitable to operate as a trader of blended HEU rather than as a primary producer. This approach appears to lead inevitably to USEC exiting the market as a primary producer. As a result, constructing replacement enrichment capacity in the U.S. should be the key focus for the decade ahead." In addition, during a June 8, 2000 hearing before the Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Power, testimony was submitted stating that the front end of the nuclear fuel cycle is endangered: "Since 1998, expenditures for uranium exploration and mine development have declined by 59%; three uranium processing facilities have closed during 1999 (two in Texas and one in Louisiana); employment in U.S. uranium exploration, mining, milling and process has decreased by almost 30%. Last year, production at ConverDyn, the sole remaining uranium converter in the U.S. was cut back by 25% and employment was reduced by over 12%." (Testimony of Mr. James Graham, President and CEO of ConverDyn). If this nation’s energy policy is going to place a greater emphasis on nuclear power, it must do so in a comprehensive fashion. An energy policy that ignores the reliability of the front end of the domestic nuclear fuel industry falls short of assuring needed energy security in this country. I urge you to carefully consider the needs of the entire nuclear fuel cycle as you prepare to issue your recommendations for a national energy strategy. I know you will agree that Americans would find it unwise and unacceptable to depend on foreign sources for the second largest supplier of U.S. electricity generation, nuclear power. Thank you for your attention to this important matter. Sincerely, Ted Strickland Member of Congress ***************************************************************** 6 Energy ‘scare tactics’ ripped May 20, 2001 N.H. grid has nothing to fear | Earlier stories By ROBERT M. COOK Staff Writer President George W. Bush’s plan to build new power plants rather than conserve energy is drawing criticism from New Hampshire energy experts for what they call its lack of environmental vision. While some say soaring gasoline prices and rolling blackouts in California point to an energy problem, others are not convinced. Richard Kennelly, energy project director at the Conservation Law Foundation in Boston, said Bush and Cheney want to exaggerate the nation’s energy woes. "It’s a scare tactic trying to get the public to believe there is a crisis, and so we better get more oil out of the Arctic," he said. Even those who agree there is an energy crisis don’t necessarily agree with Bush’s proposed solution. If passed by Congress, Bush’s plan would ease regulations on the building of power plants and gas refineries, create 38,000 miles of natural gas pipelines and open to oil and gas exploration the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and possibly other federal lands now off limit to drilling. It also includes $10 billion in tax incentives over 10 years for things like the purchase of new energy efficient vehicles, development of methane gas from landfills and installing solar panels. Some $1.5 billion in incentives would make it easier for utilities to sell nuclear plants. Many believe the Bush energy plan will increase oil and gas production at the expense of the environment, which may solve one problem but create a host of others. State Rep. Jeb Bradley, R-Wolfeboro, who chairs the House Science, Technology and Energy Committee and helped craft New Hampshire’s deregulation agreement, believes the Bush plan will be a hard sell. Instead of bringing more power plants on-line, Bradley believes a greater emphasis should be placed on making existing facilities more efficient. The government could set specific conservation targets for cars, buildings and appliances to decrease the amount of power they use. "By doing that, it would broaden support for the energy plan," Bradley said. For example, Bradley noted how Ford, Chrysler and General Motors recently agreed to look at making sport utility vehicles more efficient by increasing their average 20 miles per gallon by 25 percent over the next five years. While it may not be enough, Bradley sees that as a step in the right direction. He believes a more balanced approach between increased energy production and efficiency would be a much better solution. In his attempt to bridge the divide of the growing energy debate, President Bush has argued environmental conservation is compatible with increased oil, coal and nuclear energy development. "I can say with certainty to the American people that we can explore for precious fuels like natural gas in a way that does not harm our environment," Bush said after unveiling his energy plan in Iowa on Thursday. Mimi Becker is not convinced. As an associate professor of natural resources and environmental policy at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, Becker said the Bush energy plan raises several red flags. She wonders if the Bush administration will address the environmental ramifications if the plan is approved and more natural gas and coal-fired plants are put on a fast-track. "What are we going to be doing to our greenhouse gas emissions?" Becker said. "The most in your face thing that comes across to me is a blatant commitment to non-renewable fossil fuels." Pushing for more nuclear power when the nation has yet to solve the problem of nuclear waste also doesn’t make any sense to Becker. Like Bradley, she believes the Bush administration should focus on making current energy sources more efficient. For example, "when you transmit electricity across a power line, it leaks so you lose it," Becker said. She said an average of 14 to 28 percent of electricity transmitted across power lines never reaches its destination. If the Bush administration decided to improve the engineering and design of the transmission grid, the nation would not need all 1,300 to 1,900 power plants the report estimates must be built by 2020, Becker added. "I’m not convinced a real emphasis on coal-fired plants makes any sense at all," she said. Even if building these new power plants was the best solution, Becker said it usually takes six to seven years for a coal or gas-fired plant to go on-line and up to 15 years for a nuclear plant to produce energy. But what’s even worse for Becker is her belief the Bush administration will not make sure the new plants respect the environment. "There is a higher proportion of disaster pending in the proposal as a whole," she said. After seeing the nation struggle with the energy crisis in the 1970s, nuclear power and reclaiming the environment, Becker believes this plan and the thinking behind it have the potential to undo all of those lessons. "You can’t have one without the other," she said of the environment and economic growth. "It’s not a trade-off, and I don’t think they understand it." Becker also questions why this Bush energy plan was put together from the top down instead of from the bottom up as the nation’s last energy policy was in the late 1970s. An energy policy should be discussed publicly by people with a broad range of expertise and values, Becker said. Such a process can help determine the shape of the problem and lead to the best short-term and long-term solutions to address it, she said. "They haven’t even released the names of the people who did the work (on the energy report)," Becker said. "If you’re going to get people’s trust you need to be as transparent as possible to show how you arrived at those recommendations." Others believe the Bush energy plan clearly represents an effort to reward the large corporations who helped the president win the White House. Former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger, now president of Common Cause, a non-profit, public interest watchdog group in Washington, said President Bush and many members of Congress benefited greatly from the $15.4 million of campaign contributions made by the oil and gas companies last year. He said electric utilities contributed $10.1 million and one company alone, Enron Corp., gave more than $1.4 million in 2000 and sponsored a major Republican Party fund-raiser. "It certainly raises questions about Vice President (Richard) Cheney’s contention that conservation is ‘not a basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy,’" Harshbarger said in a press release. * — The Associated Press contributed to this story Robert M. Cook can be reached at 742-4455, ext. 5394, or by © 2001 Geo. J. Foster Co. ***************************************************************** 7 Back to the '60s 2001-05-21 - Capital District Business Review (Albany) May 21, 2001 print edition Forget about those fads from the 1970s--fuzzy notions like conserving energy, or developing new technologies that use less energy or generate energy more efficiently. Dick Cheney has a plan--and it's a radical shift backward to the glory days of oil and gas consumption in this country, a fad from the '60s. Cheney, former head of a Texas oil-services company, is in charge of developing a national energy policy. He made his goal clear in a recent speech when he called efficiency a fad from the '70s: We must drill, we must dig, we must build power plants--including coal-fired and nuclear--at a rate of one a week for the next 20 years. It's the only legitimate solution, he insists. And he couldn't be more wrong. Yes we need new production. We'll need more fossil fuel plants and perhaps even a look at new nuclear technologies which, at least theoretically, are far less dangerous than existing systems. But we also must embrace conservation, efficiency and renewable energy technologies that really are the best long-term solutions. The Bush administration's bias toward energy consumption comes as no big surprise. The budget Bush submitted to Congress in April sharply curtailedspending by the Department of Energy on some promising new renewable technologies which could sharply and permanently reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. But the tone of Cheney's speech stunned many who expected a more balanced national energy policy. If anything good comes out of the California energy crisis, it will be a widespread--albeit financially provoked--drive toward conservation and efficiency. To have Cheney and other oil men pushing from the White House in the opposite direction is a serious setback. *--Sacramento Business Journal* ***************************************************************** 8 Reports of electricity shortage could be overstated [ ] Published Sunday, May 20, 2001 ST. PAUL (AP) -- The industry consortium that oversees the Upper Midwest' s supply of electricity has reported the region' s power deficit won' t be as bad by the end of the decade as it had earlier thought. " We' ve pushed out the point in time when we start impinging upon our 15 percent reserve capacity obligation, and it shows we' re not getting into it as deep in 2010, " said Gordon Pietsch, director of technical services for the St. Paul-based Mid-Continent Area Power Pool. The region' s electrical utilities are required to have a 15-percent reserve capacity at any given time, and MAPP had previously projected those utilities would be cutting into their reserve capacity by 5, 000 megawatts by the end of the decade. The revised figures show that they' ll cut into them by 3, 500 megawatts by 2010 -- -- the equivalent of 3 1/2 Prairie Island nuclear reactors. Pietsch said increased generating capacity from two new " peaking" plants, as well as some smaller generating plants, account for the new projections. They' re based on figures provided to MAPP by its member utility companies. While MAPP may have revised its projections, the Minnesota Department of Commerce hasn' t. " We' ve been saying all along that the projected shortfall is between 3, 000 and 5, 000 megawatts sometime between 2006 and the end of the decade, " said commerce department spokesman Bruce Gordon. " We don' t see any change." Copyright 2001 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This ***************************************************************** 9 The answer is (nu)clear *May 20, 2001* FOR 30 years, the environmental extremists have successfully blocked the further development of nuclear power in the United States. A small fraction of our energy needs is being met by nuclear power plants that were built before their propaganda machine got up to speed, and the nuclear power industry is managing to keep these existing plants in tip-top condition. But no new nuclear power plant has been built in the United States in decades. Now, however, as such politically important areas as California and New York City face "rolling blackouts" this summer, nuclear power is on the verge of making a spectacular comeback. It's high time. And the same is true of Taiwan, for the same reason. --->Comically enough, back in the '60s, when the environmentalists were just starting out on their crusade, their lawsuits against power plants fueled by coal and oil (those nasty polluters) always contained boilerplate language pointing out that, fortunately, reliance on coal and oil was unnecessary because a highly efficient source of energy -- nuclear power -- was available, which caused no pollution whatever. By the 1970s, however, the environmental lobbies had recalibrated their guns and added nuclear power to their list of targets. Their objection to nuclear power plants was, and still is, based on fanning fears that have no basis in reality. Most people understand nuclear power generation only very dimly and are suckers for horrific scenarios in which a nuclear power plant "explodes" (which is physically impossible) or suffers some sort of catastrophic meltdown in which radiation is spread far and wide around the countryside, causing a number of deaths that is limited only by the imaginations of the doom-peddlers. Actually, the only meltdown that ever occurred in an American nuclear power plant -- the accident at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pa. -- demonstrated the safety of American plants: The containing mechanisms worked exactly as they were designed to, and not a single life was lost. --->The truth is that the environmentalists have gotten away with bad-mouthing nuclear power because we were able to meet our energy needs with coal and oil (despite their noisy objections to both of these). But now the energy crunch is here with a vengeance, and, as Vice President Cheney pointed out in his recent speech on the crisis, we simply have no option but to look to nuclear power to help meet our growing needs. Perhaps the chief beauty of nuclear power is that it results in no polluting side effects whatever: no acid rain, and above all no carbon dioxide (and hence no contribution at all to the menace of greenhouse gases, with their alleged consequence, global warming). The radioactive wastes produced by a nuclear power plant are easily "vitrified," or converted into solid glass, which can then be safely buried in salt deposits that have been undisturbed for tens of millions of years. None of this, of course, mollifies the environmental extremists, because their hidden agenda calls for halting all of the immense wealth-producing economic processes that depend on growing supplies of energy. In part this agenda stems from nostalgia for a simpler, not to say primitive, lifestyle that could not possibly support the world's 6 billion people, and in part from a high-minded hatred of the supposedly evil corporations that generate the energy. But whatever their motive, the environmental extremists are going to lose the battle over the energy requirements of mankind. William Rusher is a Distinguished Fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy. NewsChoice.com ***************************************************************** 10 Bush-Cheney Energy Plan: *May 17, 2001* Public Citizen Plunder, Pollute, Price-Gouge and Profiteer WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Bush/Cheney energy plan released today rewards Big Oil and other large energy concerns for their campaign support of President Bush but short-changes consumers and the environment. If approved, the Bush plan would ensure an energy future marked by continued price-gouging, pollution, wasted taxpayer dollars and the continuing threat of a nuclear catastrophe. . While the plan features window-dressing that purports to promote renewable technologies and energy efficiency, the bulk of the report provides justifications for continuing and in most cases expanding reliance on dirty coal technology, unsafe nuclear power, risky oil drilling on public lands and increased federal powers over traditionally local energy infrastructure planning decisions. The Bush/Cheney solution to the alleged energy crisis is to provide incentives for expanded fossil and nuclear fuel development and related infrastructure additions as a solution to the high prices and short supplies facing consumers in domestic energy markets — and to employ an array of corporate welfare schemes to aid private business. By focusing most heavily on the supply side, the administration is missing an opportunity to build a future based on efficiency and clean technologies. "Rather than protecting consumers and promoting clean energy, the Bush administration is blatantly pandering to the coal, oil and nuclear industries by lavishing them with billions in taxpayer subsidies and proposing new federal transmission and power plant siting rules that squelch local control," said Public Citizen President Joan Claybrook. "Bush and Cheney want their buddies to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and anywhere else they can fit a drill rig, but it is the consumers who are getting drilled every time they go to the pumps and every time they get their electric bills," Claybrook said. "This plan does nothing to address that." State’s Rights be Damned: Bush/Cheney Plan Runs Roughshod Over Traditional Local Authority Claiming that price spikes across America’s electricity system were caused by inadequate generation and transmission construction, the administration seeks to suspend air quality standards for new power plants and give the federal government the authority to condemn property through eminent domain for the siting of transmission lines. Never mind that state and local authorities have, for the past 100 years, done a successful job of thoughtfully planning the construction of adequate generation and transmission capacity. In reality, electric utility deregulation has forced many states to cede regulatory control over power plants. The lack of government oversight has been replaced with uncompetitive markets controlled by a handful of energy companies. State and federal investigators have found these energy companies have deliberately price-gouged consumers by billions of dollars, and refunds have been ordered. Meanwhile, the largest energy corporations controlling electricity in California saw their after-tax profits soar 54 percent in 2000 to $7.75 billion. But the Bush plan does nothing to stop this profiteering. "Deregulation provides incentives for energy companies to inefficiently sell power to those customers willing to pay the most for electricity — wherever they may be located — rather than the way it used to be when utilities were required by law to charge reasonable rates and serve local customers first because energy is an essential commodity," said Tyson Slocum, an energy policy analyst for Public Citizen’s Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program. "The failed concept of deregulation has placed the strain on our nation’s generation and transmission system. Therefore, deregulation should be dismantled, not local siting laws or public health and environment standards." Nuclear — We Can’t Afford the Risk Contrary to sustainable energy goals, the Bush energy task force advocates increased nuclear generation and grants generous concessions to the nuclear industry, including recommendations for less stringent regulations, increased tax subsidies and promotion of new nuclear plants. Indeed, the report's assertion that nuclear power is a cost-effective source of electric generation is inaccurate. Factoring in capital costs, a 1998 OECD report cited the cost of nuclear power in the U.S. at $2,079 per kilowatt hour (kWe), compared to $1,200/kWe for coal-fired plants and $500/kWe for gas-fired plants. The high costs of decommissioning and waste management add to the economic inefficiencies of nuclear power. In addition, the last nuclear power plant commissioned in America took 23 years to build. "Nuclear power has never been economically viable without taxpayer subsidies," Claybrook said. "The administration should not be wasting money on a technology that is not sustainable in either economic or environmental terms. And even if it were, it would take half a generation to build a plant which still wouldn’t be safe." In addition, the unconvincing efforts to mask the persistent problem of nuclear power's most dangerous byproduct — high-level radioactive waste — represent an irresponsible waste of taxpayer dollars. "Reprocessing" waste to separate its constituent parts for partial reuse is expensive and poses serious environmental and proliferation concerns, and the process itself generates substantial quantities of radioactive waste. President Jimmy Carter issued an executive order banning the reprocessing of commercial high-level waste in 1979, and the Department of Energy in 1992 committed to phase out its reprocessing activities. "At this juncture, America needs forward-thinking policies for a sustainable energy future, not a regression to these dangerous and discredited technologies of the Cold War," Claybrook said. Accelerator transmutation — another nuclear waste technology favored in the report — is unproven technology involving similar risks and would be expensive to implement. A DOE report on transmutation estimates the costs of such a program at $280 billion. Clean Coal? Still the Dirtiest of Them All The administration also calls for taxpayer subsidies to encourage so-called "clean coal" technology. In addition to billions in tax breaks to private owners of coal-fired plants, Bush’s 2002 budget calls for an 813 percent increase in R&D funding (from $9 million to $82 million in 2002). But "clean coal" is still the dirtiest fuel around — far more polluting than natural gas. "Providing subsidies to the coal industry while slashing funding for actual ‘clean’ technologies, such as renewables, will unnecessarily subject millions of Americans to unhealthy levels of smog and mercury in our air," Claybrook said. Renewables and Energy Efficiency: Bush Ignores the Potential of Clean, Sustainable Power The energy policy put forward by the White House is not a reasonable or legitimate solution to America's short- or long-term energy needs. After having prepared the nation for a wholesale push for more dirty and dangerous energy sources, the administration has now moderated its rhetoric slightly and is disingenuously packaging the final plan as "green" and innovative. Perpetuating a self-fulfilling prophecy of continued fossil-fuel and nuclear reliance, the administration cynically says conservation and renewable energy sources can never become a substantial component of the country's energy mix and at the same time seeks to dramatically curtail funding for such technologies. Bush’s 2002 DOE budget slashes funding for hydrogen technology by 48.3 percent. Funding for biomass was cut 6.7 percent; geothermal research cut by 48.3 percent; fuel cell research slashed by 14.3 percent; and solar research cut by 53.7 percent. If the Bush administration were to make sustainable energy technologies a priority, existing technologies — such as wind, solar and some types of biomass — could become mainstream solutions to our long-term energy needs. Yet under the Bush/Cheney plan, these programs are cut, and technologies which have already proven to be dirty, dangerous and prohibitively expensive will get the lion's share of taxpayer subsidies. Cheney says the U.S. will need to build 1,300 new power plants by the year 2020. But that figure, based on a DOE report, assumes no change in current energy demand trends. According to the 2000 Interlaboratory Working Group on Energy-Efficient and Clean-Energy Technologies — a separate more recent working group reporting to the DOE — implementing comprehensive energy efficiency strategies would result in a demand reduction of 24 percent from the "business-as-usual" consumption rates that would otherwise be reached by 2020. This would reduce Cheney’s 1,300 number down to roughly 700. "Fully using existing renewable energy technologies — hydrogen fuel cell technology, wind turbines, photovoltaic modules, solar thermal and biomass — could increase generation by these renewable sources 75 percent by 2030," Slocum said. "This combination of demand reduction and increased usage of renewables would be enough to replace nuclear power by 2030." Stop the Price Gougers In March 2001, the Federal Trade Commission released a report (*Midwest Gasoline Price Investigation*) which had been mandated by Congress in response to high gasoline prices. The FTC reached a curious conclusion: While it claimed that no collusion had taken place, it found that "conscious (but independent) choices by industry participants" to intentionally withhold supplies resulted in artificially high prices. The report, however, could not publicly name the names of the companies it alleged to have caused price spikes, since federal law considered the information proprietary. If this nation were truly experiencing an energy crisis, then the oil and gas industry should be suffering along with consumers. But a Public Citizen analysis of the industry’s profits show it just had its most profitable year in history. The top 10 oil companies, which control 70 percent of the domestic oil refinery capacity and 88 percent of the domestic retail market, posted after-tax 2000 profits of $56.57 billion, a 104 percent increase from their previous record of nearly $28 billion in 1999. In the first three months of 2001, these same companies posted $16.8 billion in profits, a 27 percent increase from a year earlier. "The spate of mergers — Exxon-Mobil in November 1999, BP Amoco-Arco in April 2000, Chevron-Texaco in October 2000, Phillips-Tosco in February 2001, and Valero-Diamond Shamrock in May 2001 — has created uncompetitive markets," said Claybrook. "Rather than reward these companies by opening up sensitive public lands to drilling, consumers would be better served with stronger anti-trust laws and policies to promote competition, not consolidation." ***************************************************************** 11 Nevada Nuclear Dump Debated Again Today: May 21, 2001 at 10:30:22 PDT LAS VEGAS- Tourists in 1950s Las Vegas donned sunglasses to watch nuclear mushroom clouds over the horizon at the Nevada Test Site. Today, the city and state fear the prospect of trucks and railroad cars hauling radioactive waste past Las Vegas' glittering new gambling palaces to the Test Site. "One accident, no matter how minor, could create hysteria," the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce says in its stand against the federal government's proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. Last week, President Bush called for a national nuclear waste repository as part of his energy plan. Bush also called for licensing new reactors and speeding the re-licensing of existing plants to ease the nation's power woes. The president did not specifically name Yucca Mountain, but the reference sent shivers through the ranks of those fighting plans to store the nation's nuclear refuse 1,000 feet beneath a wind-swept ridge, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas on the western edge of the Test Site. "There should be no expansion of nuclear power until we have a way to dispose of the waste for years to come without harming the public," said Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen, a lobbying group opposed to the Yucca Mountain project. Since 1987, Yucca Mountain has been the only site studied to become the graveyard for the nation's 77,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive research waste. After $7 billion worth of study and testing, approval of the Energy Department project is at least a year away. The earliest the first load of waste could arrive is 2010. The project is expected to cost $58 billion over 100 years. But things are happening on many fronts. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is holding meetings this week in Las Vegas and the rural community of Pahrump to talk about a construction permit for the site. The Energy Department is taking public comment before forwarding its recommendation next year to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham. Abraham will make a recommendation to Bush. If Nevada opposes it, as expected, the decision will be sent to Congress. Meanwhile, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Public Works, has been holding up Bush administration nominations to environmental and public works posts until the Environmental Protection Agency sets radiation standards for the site. "Every nuclear power generator in the country has the ability to safely store the material on site," Reid spokesman David Cherry said Friday. "We're talking about shipping 77,000 tons of waste so deadly that a particle the size of a grain of sand can cause cancer." The city and state are usually conservative and business-friendly. They went for Bush in November. But few support the Yucca Mountain plan. And Nevada's entire four-member congressional delegation is against it. Dusty Las Vegas of 1950 had fewer than 25,000 residents. Today, there are 1.3 million people living in and around Las Vegas, the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the country. The city draws 30 million visitors a year to its casinos and other attractions. Most of the city's 125,000 hotel rooms are on the Las Vegas Strip, which looms over Interstate 15 and the Union Pacific Railroad main line to Yucca Mountain. Gov. Kenny Guinn, a Republican, is asking the Legislature to spend $5 million on an outside-the-state advertising campaign to block the dump. "That would allow us to tell other states the proposal includes sending nuclear waste by truck and train right past the schools and parks and homes of people in Colorado and Illinois and Utah," said Jack Finn, the governor's spokesman. Yucca Mountain Project: http://www.ymp.gov All contents copyright 2001 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 12 TVA "ALIGNED" WITH BUSH'S ENERGY PLAN [States News Service] Story Filed: Monday, May 21, 2001 11:02 AM EST WASHINGTON, May 17, 2001 (States News Service via COMTEX) -- Given his recent lobbying for the Tennessee Valley Authority to revive idle nuclear reactors in his district, Rep. Bud Cramer, D-Ala., was particularly "encouraged" by the national energy policy the White House released Thursday. "This is great news for North Alabama," Cramer said of the policy, which calls for the "safe expansion" of nuclear power to help ease the budding energy crisis. "I have been pushing for more investments to be made at Bellefonte and Browns Ferry for several years now." But that's not the only good news the policy brings for TVA, Cramer noted. Reading through the recommendations listed in that policy, the congressman remarked, "TVA has a role to play in all the areas (President) Bush highlighted today - nuclear, coal and even renewables like biomass." Indeed, TVA seems "aligned with the administration's plan" on several points, TVA Director Glenn McCullough, Jr. said. Part of Bush's plan to boost energy production is to encourage operators, such as TVA, to utilize new technology to increase power levels, or uprate, their nuclear reactors. McCullough said this is already underway at TVA. The authority is currently contracting with General Electric Co. to uprate two of its nuclear reactors at Browns Ferry near Athens in order to increase capacity by 250 megawatts, he said. Bush's plan also calls for 1,300 to 1,900 additional power plants in order to meet projected energy demand over the next twenty years. The policy goes on to say that since building new nuclear generators on existing sites "avoids many complex issues associated with building plants on new sites -- many sites across the country could host additional plants." While TVA has no specific plans at this time to build new reactors on existing sites, the authority is considering completing construction of a nuclear power plant at its Bellefonte site in Jackson County, as well as restarting its idle reactor at Browns Ferry, McCullough said. The Bellefonte site also spans 1,500 acres, providing plenty of room for future construction, he said. Of course, he added, TVA is "considering many options" at Bellefonte, including transforming the unfinished reactor into a fossil fuel-burning plant instead. Not everyone is encouraged by the idea of TVA and other operators boosting their nuclear power production, however. Environmental groups, such as the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, have repeatedly expressed their opposition to expansion of TVA's nuclear operations. In a recent statement, alliance president Ed Passerini said the possible restart of the idle reactor at Browns Ferry demonstrates "a disregard for the future" and "an ignorance of past failures" such as the meltdown at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island in 1979. Another group, the Safe Energy Communication Council, added that Bush's plan calls for a renewal of the Price-Anderson Act, which shields operators from liability greater than $9.5 billion in the event of a serious reactor accident. Concurring with statements included in Bush's plan, McCullough stressed that the nuclear power industry's safety record has significantly improved since the accident at Three Mile Island, and that advanced technology promises further safety improvements. Aside from nuclear power, TVA sees "great potential for renewables," including wind turbines and solar panels, which the authority is employing now throughout its service area, McCullough said. He added that TVA's also implemented "clean-coal" technology at its facilities, utilizing a selective catalytic reduction system and burning low-sulfur coal to cut emissions. Bush's plan proposes spending $6.3 billion over 10 years on further research and development of alternative energy sources, as well as $2 billion for clean-coal technology. By Chris Shott Copyright States News Service, all right reserved. ***************************************************************** 13 Safest Path on Energy: More Nuclear Plants May 21, 2001 More Nuclear Power Means More Risk (May 17, 2001) [T] o the Editor: Re "More Nuclear Power Means More Risk," by Paul Leventhal (Op- Ed, May 17): No member of the public has ever been injured by an accident at a nuclear energy plant in the Western world, including Three Mile Island. The circumstances that led to the Chernobyl disaster would not have been allowed here, and Russia and Ukraine now accept Western safety standards. The major energy problem we face is a scarcity of oil and gas combined with population growth and increased energy use in the third world, leading to a potential tripling of world energy use in the next 50 years. International hostilities can result, and the way to prevent them and to mitigate projected global warming is to substitute nuclear energy for fossil fuels. Mr. Leventhal's Nuclear Control Institute should work internationally to expand safe practices and use of nuclear energy.   BERTRAM WOLFE Monte Sereno, Calif., May 17, 2001 *The writer is a former head of General Electric's nuclear energy program.* New York Times Newspaper. ***************************************************************** 14 Florida a hotbed for nuclear gauge thefts posted 05/20/01 By CHRIS GRIER chris.grier@herald-trib.com Jon Hull had no idea the bright yellow box stolen from his engineering firm was such a hot item. On July 27, someone went to the house of one of his employees, near Tampa, and made off with a heavy crate chained to the bed of his pickup. Inside was a $5,000 tool called a moisture/density gauge. “The guy knew what he was taking, and he really wanted to get his hands on it, I think,” Hull said. “He had to cut those chains to get it.” Used all over the world by construction and asphalt companies, the gauges measure the density of the ground where roads, buildings and parking lots are planned. The problem is, they contain some tiny but potentially dangerous parts – small pieces of the radioactive isotopes cesium-137 and americium-241. “They are certainly hazardous, and that’s why they’re tightly controlled,” said Victor Dricks, a spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which licenses the gauges and tracks their use. Despite the fact that the gauges are little-known outside the construction business, thefts such as the one at Hull’s business aren’t rare at all. And if the gauge hasn’t shown up by now, it probably never will, if NRC records are an indication. NRC reports from 1985 show that so-called “nuclear gauges” have been stolen by the score, sometimes two, three or four at a time, and the pace has accelerated in recent years. The gauges are stolen most often in Florida, where state radiation-control officials theorize that a year-round construction season puts more of the devices in use — and therefore, in front of thieves. Thefts in Florida account for 15 percent of all the gauge thefts reported to the NRC, records show. Despite reports to the police, the Florida Department of Radiation Control, the NRC — and the posting of a $500 reward — Hull’s gauge still hasn’t turned up. “We’re keeping our fingers crossed,” Hull said. “We’re a pretty big company, so the loss is way below our insurance deductible.” Typically, state radiation officials urge gauge owners to advertise the hazardous nature of their stolen devices in a local newspaper. Hull did that. But if public notices about the devices’ radiation hazards don’t convince thieves to return the gauges — or dump them by curbs or trash bins, which has happened — they’re usually gone for good. Nationwide, there have been 155 instances since 1985 in which the gauges were stolen, meaning that there are enough unaccounted pieces of cesium-137 and americium-241 floating around to irradiate and sicken thousands of people. As far as radioisotopes go, cesium-137 and americium-241 aren’t all that dangerous. They can’t, for example, be used to make a bomb. Americium-241 is commonly used in household smoke detectors. Cesium-137 sources killed a man and prompted the evacuation of a village in Estonia in the 1980s, and killed several people in Goiania, Brazil, in 1987, but those incidents involved much larger amounts than is found in a nuclear gauge. NRC officials also say there has never been a report of anyone being harmed by a nuclear gauge in the United States. But if inadvertently exposed from their tungsten shielding, those tiny quantities of cesium and americium could, over time, make someone sick, cause them genetic damage or burn them. “I wouldn’t want to carry it around in my pocket,” said Jerry Eakin, an environmental manager with the state health department’s Bureau of Radiation Control. Tracking the gauges While the hazards are clear, the fate of stolen devices isn’t. Radiation officials in Florida, Texas and Arizona, the three states that account for a third of the thefts, say they’ve heard the devices are sold in Mexico, where the tracking of the gauges is far more lax than in the United States. In Texas, state Bureau of Radiation Control investigator Jim Ogden has been trying to track the cause of the thefts for years, since a rash of them began in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in 1999. “They’re going after every kind of gauge they can get their hands on,” Ogden said. “They’re stealing them left and right. Most of them are cut out of the truck beds, evidently, with a pair of bolt cutters.” Every time there’s a theft, Ogden sends a notice, as required, to the NRC. But he also sends notices to the companies licensed to use the devices, in part to warn them to keep a closer eye on them. In 1999, he sent a notice after an incident in which a group of men, thought by Texas authorities to be Mexicans, tried to steal a gauge. One man acted as a lookout, witnesses told Ogden’s agency, as the others backed the car up to a truck near a loading dock. After Ogden sent a notice about that incident around the state, he said, “all the licensees I talked to soon after that said, ‘Yep, they’ve been here already, we’ve seen ’em.’” Fred Brown, NRC section chief of the agency’s division of industrial and medical nuclear safety, which regulates and tracks nuclear gauges, said he has heard similar stories from state officials. But neither the NRC nor the FBI, Brown said, has opened a case on the thieves seen in Texas. In February, the NRC established a working group with its counterparts in Mexico and Canada. One of the items to be discussed, Brown said, is tighter tracking of nuclear gauges across borders: “This is something we’re starting to pay close attention to.” The NRC has been aware of a theft problem at least since Jan. 15, 1998, when it issued a public notice alerting owners to a string of 33 thefts from February 1996 through August 1997. But the NRC, which tracks the devices, and the FBI, which the NRC asked last year to look into the thefts, still can’t say for sure where the stolen gauges go. “It’s a pattern we’ve started to notice,” said Dricks, of the NRC, “but we don’t know why. There are thousands of these things licensed for use.” A ‘hot’ item NRC reports show the thefts break down into two types. In many cases, the gauges are clearly targeted, stolen from truck beds outside gas stations, fast food restaurants and grocery stores, sometimes with a window of only a few minutes. Often, they’re cut loose from chains or steel cables. But in other cases, the thieves may not even know what they have. In cases where the gauges turn up, it often has been after the owner has advertised that the gauges contain radioactive materials. “When someone reads what the thing is, they don’t want it,” Ogden said. “And surprise, surprise, they dump it somewhere.” That happened in Tampa, for example, when a thief stole a gauge in June 2000 and then dumped it, damaged, on a bike path in a veterans cemetery in Tampa five months later. It also happened in Gainesville in October 1998, after a thief stole a gauge chained to the back of a Florida Department of Transportation truck. Two weeks later, a group of children found FDOT’s gauge in a nearby creek. NRC reports tell of gauges being left on curbs, thrown in Dumpsters or found in junk yards. Dricks offers one theory: “Sometimes people will take whatever’s not tied down.” An industry necessity Though it may seem odd that everyday tools contain radioactive parts, they're actually quite common. Moisture/density gauges are just one type. Flow gauges and fill-level gauges, used in the brewing and bottling industries, quickly and accurately determine liquid levels in containers. They also use cesium and americium, as well as other isotopes such as cobalt-60 and strontium-90. Radiographic cameras help engineers test the integrity of buildings and ensure that pipe welds and airplane parts don’t contain hidden cracks. Even some glow-in-the-dark exit signs contain tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen. Used correctly, kept in good repair and disposed of properly, such gauges and signs are safe and make some industrial processes and engineering jobs quicker and cheaper. “These things pay for themselves in about 1,000 hours,” said Larry McMichael of HTS Inc., a Houston engineering consulting firm that uses the gauges daily and lost one to thieves in February 2000. “Shooting densities,” as it’s called, is a 60-second process in which the gauge’s user drills a hole, plunges the cesium probe into the ground, and takes a reading on the gauge’s screen. In most construction projects, it’s a requirement that the disturbed earth — whether under a road bed or a building footer — be nearly as compacted as before the digging began. The idea is to prevent buildings and roads from settling, cracking or leaning. The gauges make quick work of those measurements, and that work pays well. In Houston, where a building boom is under way, the standard city rate to rent such gauges from a contractor like HTS is $32 to $34 per hour. HTS, like many firms, also charges a “gauge fee,” which, in his firm’s case, amounts to $5.50 per hour. “They’re a guaranteed money-maker,” McMichael said. “If the NRC were to take my license tomorrow, I’d go belly up.” Keeping close tabs The gauge thefts are as bizarre as they are frequent. In March 2000, for example, a gauge in Arlington, Texas, was stolen twice in one day. The unit was first swiped while its operator was having a discussion with a co-worker 100 feet away. Then a passerby found the gauge, now damaged, a few blocks away. He tried, unsuccessfully, to sell it to a nearby equipment rental business. In August 2000, a missing gauge in a garbage truck set off a radiation monitor as the truck rolled into the entrance of a landfill near Dallas. Texas radiation officials tracing the truck’s route found that gauge in the Dumpster of an apartment complex in Seagoville, Texas. The gauge’s serial number showed it had been stolen in Mesquite, Texas, seven months earlier. Florida has had its share of strange thefts, too. The Florida Department of Transportation lost four gauges in three separate incidents. In addition to the gauge that turned up in a Gainesville creek, thieves took two gauges from an FDOT cargo container in Miami in July 1999. A Miami city police officer found one of the two gauges three days later in a trash bin on Second Avenue in Miami. The second is still missing. In FDOT's most recent gauge theft, on Jan. 8, a thief drove off in a bright orange FDOT van that happened to have a gauge inside. In August 1997, a gauge chained to the back of a pick-up was stolen at a Miami job site. It was found seven months later on the side of the road, intact and in its case, near a recycling business. In interviews, radiation officials in Florida, Texas and Arizona have said they've reminded their licensees to keep a tighter watch on gauges under their control. Bill Passetti, Florida’s bureau chief of radiation control, said the state’s roughly 400 licensees have been sent notices reminding them to keep their gauges locked. Florida also has adopted a set of “model procedures, Passetti said, for handling the type of sealed sources contained in nuclear gauges. On Feb. 15, said the NRC's Brown, the agency adopted stiffer rules for “loss of control” events. In short, it will levy hefty fines against gauge owners whose gauges are stolen through carelessness. That, Brown said, will ensure that the nation’s thousands of gauge owners will “have a vested interest in not losing them. But Ogden of the Bureau of Radiation Control doubts whether anything the states or the federal government does inside the United States will squash an illicit market for the gauges outside the country. Without closer tracking outside U.S. borders, Ogden said, “who knows whether it’ll ever slow down. Events last week bear him out. In Miami on Tuesday, a Wingerter Laboratories Inc. employee on his way from a job site to the office ducked into his house for a few minutes. When he came out, his truck was missing. So was the gauge inside. Police found the truck the next afternoon. The gauge is still missing. It was the second nuclear gauge stolen in Miami this month. www.newscoast.com ***************************************************************** 15 Test zone: Britain's nuclear laboratory New Zealand News - NZ - HMNZS Pukaki sailed through fallout for 23 hours in 1958. exposure to nuclear fallout in the Pacific, MATHEW DEARNALEY looks at why Britain chose our side of the world for its tests. Maralinga was Britain's "atomic city" in the parched South Australian outback. Australia allowed its former colonial master to use the desolate Aboriginal tribal grounds to explode nuclear bombs. Radioactive wastes were spewed over thousands of square kilometres. New Zealand was given a ringside seat, sending five military officers to join an elite team in what Britain clearly intended as trials to see if troops and other conventional military assets could operate in a nuclear theatre. Britain felt under tremendous pressure to produce a nuclear deterrent. It is hard now to conceive how dangerous the world seemed by the early 1950s, with the Berlin airlift fresh in mind and the Korean War threatening to escalate. The United States had shut Britain out of its nuclear programme after dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to bring the Second World War to an end, and there was panic in Whitehall when Russia blasted its way into the nuclear age in 1949. British scientists, with a handful of New Zealanders, had been intimately involved in atomic weapons development with the United States and Canada during the war. But the United States passed a law in 1946 making it illegal for Americans to provide nuclear information to other countries, and would not allow Britain to use its Nevada or Marshall Islands test grounds. Britain was desperate to become a nuclear power to retain its place among the world's decision-makers. Its hunt for a testing site extended to the farthest reaches of the empire. It has now emerged that New Zealand turned down a British request in 1955 to explode a hydrogen bomb in the Kermadec Islands, 1000km northeast of Auckland, now part of a huge marine reserve. Previously classified documents recorded British Prime Minister Anthony Eden telling his New Zealand counterpart, Sidney Holland, that he was disappointed "you did not feel able to help us." But Britain encountered no such resistance from Australia's Robert Menzies, who did not even consult his cabinet in his eagerness to allow a bomb test in the uninhabited Monte Bello Islands, just off his country's northwest coast, in 1952. Eleven other nuclear bombs were detonated in Australian territory up to 1957, including two more at Monte Bello and nine in South Australia, where Britain has admitted using military officers including five New Zealanders as test subjects. New Zealand's main nuclear involvement was in 1957 and 1958, however, when 551 crew members of the frigates Pukaki and Rotoiti observed massive hydrogen-bomb explosions in Britain's nine-bomb Grapple series around Christmas Island in the mid-Pacific. Where and when were bomb tests carried out? Maralinga was just one of three Australian sites for atmospheric nuclear tests, hosting seven atomic blasts in 1956 and 1957. But Britain continued using it until 1963 for nearly 600 so-called "minor tests," such as trying to find out how plutonium performs in above-ground explosions, the main source of contamination which critics say could linger for 250,000 years or more. Maralinga is at the western end of South Australia, near the beginning of the Nullarbor Plain and the transcontinental Adelaide-to-Perth railway. Britain's first test was in 1952 at an island in the Monte Bello group off what is now the northwestern iron-ore port of Dampier. Although there were enormous logistical and meteorological problems conducting tests there, Britain returned in 1956 for two large explosions it feared Australians would not accept on the mainland. Two tests were also conducted in 1953 at Emu Field, about 1200km northwest of Adelaide in the Great Victoria Desert. Monte Bello was chosen for the bigger bangs as Britain rushed to prepare Christmas and Malden Islands for its first hydrogen bombs, against mounting international opposition. Christmas Island - now named Kiritimati - lies just north of the Equator, while Malden is about 200km to the southeast. Three bombs were exploded over Malden in 1957 and six over Christmas Island the year after, before Britain wound up its atmospheric testing programme. What did the Australian public think? They didn't have much say at first, according to Australian Institute of Criminology research director Peter Grabosky in the book Wayward Governance: Illegality and its Control in the Public Sector. Prime Minister Menzies waited until after the 1951 federal elections before telling Australians that atomic weapons were to be tested on their territory. He had earlier agreed in principle to a British request to blasts at the Monte Bello Islands, without leaving any record of having consulted cabinet colleagues. Britain tried to keep the lid on concerns about the exposure of Australian airmen to high levels of radioactivity from flying through nuclear clouds above the 1953 Emu Field explosions, by letting Australia set up a safety monitoring committee. Although the committee had a right to veto the timing of any further tests, members complained that they were given almost no information on which to base safety assessments. The New Zealand Nuclear Test Veterans' Association even has a 1955 memo from Britain's chief atomic scientist, Sir William Penney, suggesting that Australians be given only small and degraded pieces of contaminated air filter samples if they asked for any. Public anger mounted with the second and third tests off Monte Bello in 1956, after wind changes blew fallout inland, instead of out to sea. It was a public relations disaster. After banner newspaper headlines warning of radioactive clouds headed across Australia, an opinion poll two months later found 60 per cent of Australians opposed to the tests. A British ship which had sailed through an atomic cloud to find out how it and its crew would fare was barred from landing at Fremantle and forced to sail to Singapore to be decontaminated. How was Britain able to go on exploding bombs in Australia for so long? Australian politicians, notably Supply Minister Howard Beale, tried to douse public fears. He did, however, make several blunders, according to British journalists Denys Blakeway and Sue Lloyd-Roberts in their 1985 book on an Australian Royal Commission into the tests, Fields of Fire, a translation of the Aboriginal name Maralinga. Britain's initial response to Beale's efforts was to offer Australia the services of an experienced press officer. But members of the Australian safety committee were also keen to be seen flexing their muscle, calling for a more comprehensive air-sampling system. They had to admit, however, that it would be impossible to stop fallout from Maralinga drifting across half of Australia. Beale, in one last pitch for public support, called Maralinga "a challenge to Australian men to show that the pioneering spirit of their forefathers ... is still the driving force of achievement." "England has the bomb and the know-how. We have the open spaces, much technical skill and a great willingness to help the Motherland. Between us, we shall build the defence of the free world, and make historic advances in harnessing the forces of nature." There were no such sentiments years later when the royal commissioner Justice James McClelland arrived in London in 1985 to open hearings in an inquiry which he had taken the year before to the outback. He accused Britain of bending over backwards to avoid responsibility for the environmental mess and ill-health it had left, and later branded Menzies a "lickspittle of the British" who bent to their every wish. When Britain realised Australian hospitality was running out, it decided to move its tests to Christmas Island. It invited New Zealand and Fijian servicemen rather than Australians to observe those. What mess did the British leave in Australia, and what have they done about it? Britain has consistently refused to acknowledge responsibility for health defects among the more than 15,000 Australian servicemen, 550 New Zealanders and 22,000 Britons involved in conducting or monitoring bomb tests. In 1968, it signed an agreement with Australia purportedly releasing it from all legal liabilities and responsibilities. Its stance may have to change soon if New Zealand veterans, with financial help already received from our Government, decide in coming weeks whether they have sufficient ground for a class lawsuit against the British Government. Britain did give Australia £20 million ($67.5 million) as a supposed full and final settlement to clean up the test sites in the wake of the royal commission. But Australia had to foot the rest of a $134 million bill for Maralinga alone, while acknowledging that some of the land may be uninhabitable for generations. Three hundred thousand cubic metres of plutonium-contaminated soil and other debris has been buried, but Aborigines to whom much of the former 3000 sq km bombing range has been returned are prohibited from camping on 120 sq km of it. There have also been attempts to bury radioactive material left on the Monte Bello Islands, but Australian nuclear veterans' leader Max Kimber told the Herald that recent cyclones had uncovered much of it. Mr Kimber is bitter that his members, unlike New Zealand test veterans, are unable even to receive war pensions for medical ills ranging from skin diseases to leukaemia. What sort of radiation exposure was there? Denys Blakeway and Sue Lloyd-Roberts acknowledge that servicemen were on the whole kept reasonably protected from high-level radiation, but point out that low-level radiation has since emerged as a potential cause of cancers and other diseases. Scottish researcher Sue Rabbitt Roff found 45 cases of the rare bone-marrow cancer multiple myeloma among 2000 veterans whose records she studied in 1999. This was 10 times the incidence among the general population, and 32 of the veterans had already died. A Massey University high-tech microscope specialist, Liz Nickless, is preparing to travel to Scotland to study latest techniques in radiobiological analysis before returning to examine the chromosomes of New Zealand veterans from blood samples. Her expedition is supported by the test veterans' association from a $200,000 Government grant for legal and medical research, with the Cancer Society and Royal Society paying her travel and accommodation. The grant followed information given to the Government by association research officer Ruth McKenzie two years ago that only 209 of 475 children born to New Zealand servicemen who witnessed the Christmas and Madden Island blasts were "alive and well." Veterans' wives and partners had also suffered 145 miscarriages and 18 still births, she told a Government inquiry. Two of the five New Zealand veterans exposed to radiation on the ground at Maralinga suffered skin problems, but their families are not sure whether these were caused by two explosions they witnessed from distances of 3.2km and 8km. Another New Zealander, the late Flight Lieutenant Charles Verry, worked at several test sites as a Royal Air Force helicopter pilot and his family wonder whether radiation may be linked to his death from a heart attack at 46. The British journalists say the highest exposures were suffered by nomadic Aborigines, who could not read warning signs and in some cases camped in highly radioactive craters. Various Aborigines complained to the royal commission of a "black mist" which they said descended on them in the desert, causing vomiting, diarrhoea and, in some cases, death. Widespread radiation from nuclear fallout was a particular problem in Australia because most of the explosions were near the ground, but it is still not clear just how much radiation fell on Australians from the sky. Radiation from Christmas Island was more likely to have been blown high into the stratosphere, although New Zealand veterans' leader Roy Sefton sees this as little comfort for Pukaki crew ordered to sail beneath a nuclear cloud for 23 hours. What would have happened to the fallout once it reached the stratosphere? It could have ended up circling the globe for months or even years before coming down to earth in rain with long-life radioisotopes such as iodine 131 and strontium 90, which are particularly dangerous to humans if they enter the food chain. The United States Government estimates that the global fallout from a one-megaton nuclear explosion, the size of most of those at Christmas and Malden Islands, would eventually cause 200 to 2000 cancer deaths if occurring in the Northern Hemisphere. Although concern about fallout prompted Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union to stop most nuclear testing in 1958, it took the international community led by New Zealand and Australia until 1975 to drive French tests underground at Mururoa Atoll. www.nzherald.co.nz/defence ©Copyright 2001, NZ Herald ***************************************************************** 16 International Nuclear Emergency Exercise to Be Held in France [Xinhua News Agency] Story Filed: Monday, May 21, 2001 12:29 PM EST GENEVA, May 21, 2001 (Xinhua via COMTEX) -- An extensive international nuclear emergency exercise will be held on May 22-23 based on a French national exercise at the Gravelines nuclear power plant located in the north of France, according to a news release issued by the World Health Organization (WHO) here Monday. This exercise will involve a simulated incident at a fictitious unit on Gravelines site with the possibility of an environmental impact. Participates will decide on measures to protect the public based on actual weather conditions at the time of the exercise. The news release reported that 54 countries and six international organizations including the European Commission (EC), WHO and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA will jointly participate in the exercise. Each country may follow its own actual national emergency response plans and procedures, using their own emergency response centers. According to the WHO officials, the main objectives of the exercise are to test existing national and international procedures and arrangements for responding to a nuclear emergency, coordinate the release of information, and assess the effectiveness of advisory and decision-making mechanisms. Copyright 2001 XINHUA NEWS AGENCY ***************************************************************** 17 Radioactive corner of Russia could grow more so under plan By David Filipov, Globe Staff, 5/21/2001 USLYUMOVO, Russia - The Techa River, the main source of water for this Ural Mountains farming community, flows through ground zero of one of the most contaminated places in the world. It is a living reminder of a legacy of devastating nuclear accidents, careless handling of highly toxic radioactive waste, and official coverups that have earned the Chelyabinsk Region the epithet ''the blackest spot on earth.'' Now, Russia is moving toward a scheme to raise cash by accepting other countries' spent nuclear fuel for storage and reprocessing here, and people are worried that their already badly contaminated homeland will be transformed into a nuclear dump for the rest of the world. Under the plan, which won preliminary approval from Parliament last month, Russia would earn up to $20 billion over 10 years by importing 22,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel. Part of the income would be used to improve the safety of Russian nuclear facilities and clean up contaminated sites such as Muslyumovo. Shipments may already have started. Greenpeace activists in St. Petersburg said this month that up to 20 trainloads emitting large amounts of radiation had passed through the city since January. The environmentalist organization alleged that the trains were carrying spent nuclear fuel from Germany. Russian atomic energy officials declined to comment. Government officials and scientists from Russia's nuclear energy industry say they have the technology to safely store and dispose of the spent nuclear fuel rods that Russia would import under the plan. But people here fear the plan will only make their plight worse. It is easy to see why. Because the Chelyabinsk region is home to Mayak, the only functioning plant in Russia that can reprocess nuclear fuel, and one of only three storage facilities, people here assume that their region will receive at least some of the waste. Radioactive rivers, lakes, forests, and fields bear silent witness to the mess left over from the Mayak nuclear plant's five decades of producing weapons-grade plutonium for the Soviet nuclear arsenal. For years, the Mayak plant dumped its nuclear waste into the Techa River. In 1957, an explosion at the plant's storage facilities spread deadly waste over hundreds of villages. In 1967, a windstorm carried radioactive dust from a dried-out lake over more towns and villages. Because Mayak made nuclear weapons, the Soviet government classified all the plant's activities, and accidents, as state secrets. Even as they evacuated tens of thousands of villagers and killed herds of livestock, authorities for decades hid the true nature of the health risk from the people who live here. Now, environmentalists say, the contamination is eight times greater in the area around Chelyabinsk than the radioactive fallout that spread across Europe from the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. Mayak, unable to afford a safe disposal system, continues to dump radioactive waste into a nearby lake even as it tries to clean up from previous accidents, said Yevgeny Ryzhkov, the plant's spokesman. Ryzhkov said that Mayak could start implementing safer disposal practices as soon as money starts coming in from reprocessing nuclear waste from elsewhere. ''As soon as we get more spent nuclear fuel to reprocess, we will thrive,'' Ryzhkov said. Mayak and government officials no longer cover up the extent of the pollution. They are happy to talk about it, because they are certain that with money from reprocessing, they can fix the problem. The public is not exactly convinced. ''Since there were accidents before, people are not at all sure'' that accidents will not recur, said Alexander Akleyev, head doctor at the Chelyabinsk-based Ural Research Center for Radiation Medicine, which monitors radiation-related illness. ''No one explained why the people were evacuated and the cattle killed. No one believes anyone would explain if something went wrong again.'' An estimated 1.5 million people have been exposed to the radiation. The cost in illness and death is harder to measure. Ecologists say thousands of people have been affected by radiation sickness, and health officials report 40 percent more leukemia cases in the region than in the rest of Russia. But the true human toll will probably remain a secret, owing to the 40-year coverup by Soviet authorities. All locals can do is to guess at what makes them ill. Every day, the people of Muslyumovo, a town of 4,500, lead their cows around what is left of a barbed wire fence that runs along the banks of the Techa River to let the animals graze in the seemingly fertile grass at the water's edge. Children play on the riverbank and fish from a bridge. Everything here emits up to 250 microrems per hour, or four times the maximum radiation that scientists consider safe. Since 1995, villagers have received a monthly pension worth $8 for ''living on contaminated territory.'' The fence is the only visible sign that something is wrong with the river. It is also a fitting symbol of the belated, futile attempts of Soviet, and later, Russian authorities to protect people from the radiation. Soviet authorities put up the fence in the early 1950s to prevent people from using the water. But it was not until 1989 that they began to tell people that in the late 40s and early 50s, in the early years of the nuclear weapons program, Mayak dumped toxic waste into the Techa, contaminating the riverbed with strontium 90 and cesium 137. Even as her cattle graze along the Techa, Nurzhigan Galipova, 75, speaks calmly of the three of her 11 children who died - two of leukemia, one of heart failure - ''from the river,'' she said. A 1998 regional government study found that illnesses in school-aged children in the area around the Techa were several times more frequent than in uncontaminated areas. Recognizing the danger, the Soviet government in the 1950s moved people out of 12 other villages along the river. But Muslyumovo was too big to relocate, said Svetlana Kostina, a researcher on radiation and environmental issues for the Chelyabinsk governor's office. Now there is no place else for Galipova and other local farmers to go. A new government program to relocate them to safer areas is moving slowly; there is no money to build new housing. There is nothing to do but eke out a living selling the milk and dairy products of cows that drink the radioactive water and feed off the radioactive floodplains of the Techa. ''We have to eat, we have to live,'' said Saifetdin Gainitdinov, another Muslyumovo resident, who gets a monthly pension of $1.25 as compensation for his exposure to radiation. ''We've been living like this for years. Why stop now?'' Gainitdinov said five of his neighbors died of radiation-related illnesses. Akleyev, at the research center, said as many as 31,000 people received large doses of radiation from the river. As they age, the likelihood of cancer increases. ''Even today, a part of the population is getting radiation because of irradiated food products, such as milk from cows who drink the water,'' Akleyev said. ''Strontium 90 moves up the food chain. People get it after drinking the milk, and it goes to their bones.'' Locals also acknowledge selling the fish they catch, though regional officials play down that threat. ''Strontium 90 goes to the bones,'' said Sergei Sofin, a spokesman for the governor's office. ''It's not like anyone eats the bones of a fish.'' No one knows how many people have been affected by radiation. Mayak's 1957 explosion sent a toxic cloud billowing over hundreds of miles of farmland, engulfing more than 200 towns and villages and exposing more than 270,000 people to lethal doses of radiation. Over the next two years, authorities relocated about 10,700 residents of the most polluted areas, tore down their houses, and ordered the soil plowed under. Officials never told people why they were being moved, nor did they prepare those who did the cleanup work for the risks of radioactive fallout. Nurislan Gubaidullin, 62, wore ordinary work clothes when he spent the summer of 1958 plowing the polluted areas with his tractor. He only found out that he was doing something special when authorities set up guard posts in the area. It was only in 1989, after the public debate about Chernobyl made it possible to discuss nuclear accidents, that doctors told him the constant pain he feels in his legs was probably caused by the high dose of radiation he received during the cleanup. ''I have a bouquet of illnesses,'' Gubaidullin said. ''They say that I might lose both my legs.'' Gubaidullin said his son and daughter both suffer from heart problems he now attributes to the radiation. His wife died of cancer several years ago. So did her brother, sister, and niece. ''We've got a bad environment here,'' he said. ''That's why we are all ill.'' This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 5/21/2001. © Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company. ***************************************************************** 18 Editorial: Get rid of subsidy for industry Today: May 21, 2001 at 9:11:28 PDT The nuclear power industry keeps reminding us how safe it is to operate its power plants. It sure seems curious then that President Bush's energy plan is recommending the renewal of a law that limits the industry's liability from a nuclear accident. Without this government protection, nuclear power's supporters say, the development of more nuclear power plants in this nation could be severely curtailed. But if there is concern about the potential liability from an accident at a nuclear power plant, doesn't that say something troubling about how safe this energy source truly is? As Sun reporters Benjamin Grove and Mary Manning noted in a Friday story, the Price-Anderson Act (first approved in 1957) protects nuclear power plant companies from having to pay astronomical accident insurance premiums. The law does so by capping liability policies at $200 million per reactor. It's not just environmentalists who don't want to see the Price-Anderson Act renewed. For instance, Taxpayers for Common Sense also will urge Congress not to renew the subsidy. "There are a lot of conservatives in Congress who believe the free market needs to work when it comes to energy policy," said the group's spokesman, Keith Ashdown. It is amazing that the federal government doesn't mind providing what is, in effect, a subsidy for nuclear power, a technology that produces man's deadliest waste. And it is 77,000 tons of that nuclear waste, by the way, that the federal government wants to bury in Nevada's Yucca Mountain. Yet at the same time the government is reticent to provide appropriate levels of tax credits and other incentives to allow for more use of truly clean energy sources such as wind, solar and geothermal. Talk about hypocrisy. Vice President Dick Cheney, a strong supporter of nuclear power who chaired the president's task force on energy policy, told Reuters news service that the Price-Anderson Act needs to be renewed. Otherwise, Cheney said, "nobody's going to invest in (new) nuclear power plants." But Congress should stop propping up nuclear power plants and let the industry provide for itself. All contents copyright 2001 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 19 Letter: Safe storage not a priority for Cheney Today: May 21, 2001 at 9:11:28 PDT The statement made by Vice President Dick Cheney that the French have been storing the waste safely and in an environmentally sound way is not true. The French reprocess all the waste, ending up with materials with a life of a million years that are dumped into the Atlantic Ocean. Cheney has not addressed the transportation of the waste to the disposal site. The Energy Department estimates that it will take at least 25 trucks a week traveling on our highways for 24 years to move the high-level nuclear waste from reactors to Yucca Mountain. When the people of these areas are made aware of this fact, I doubt if a statement from Cheney that it is "safe" will be sufficient. Cheney should be supporting fuel cells powered by hydrogen. The expansion of this technology would allow the placement of the electrical energy source next to the user of the power. This would decrease the dependence on the national grid system, reduce the need for fossil fuels, and have no carbon dioxide emission or waste. I doubt if the White House will support this method, as it is not compatible with the petroleum and nuclear industry. LOU DEBOTTARI, Carson City All contents copyright 2001 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 20 Remapping, budget highlight next-to-last week of Nevada XGR CARSON Monday, May 21, 2001 By BRENDAN RILEY Associated Press Writer Nevada lawmakers start the second-to-last full week of their 120-day session today - facing a batch of complex issues ranging from reapportionment to balancing the state budget. Republicans are expected to have their reapportionment plan ready for introduction in the state Senate. The Democrats' rival plan already is moving through the Legislature. There are major differences between the two plans for the shape of the Legislature, Nevada's congressional districts and the districts for university regents and state Board of Education members - and they're supposed to have those differences resolved by next Friday. Also today, the state Division of Health will give the Assembly Natural Resources, Agriculture and Mining Committee an update on a leukemia epidemic linked to Fallon. Fourteen cases of childhood leukemia have been confirmed, and the division is looking into an unconfirmed 15th case. Senate Commerce and Labor will take up Assembly Bill 349, a bill creating an energy assistance fund for poor and fixed-income Nevadans; and AB133, a construction-defect measure. Senate Taxation will review a bill taking half the vehicle privilege taxes now going to local governments in larger Nevada counties to fund teacher salary increases. AB457 recommends local governments recoup the lost revenue by raising property taxes. Assembly Education will review SB127, to let Nevada's school districts use class-size reduction money to establish 22-to-1 pupil-teacher ratios through the fifth grade. The measure would expand a program that now goes to the third grade. But the current program caps class size at 16 and 19 students per teacher. And Assembly Health and Human Services will review SB367 which provides activities to prevent or delay early sexual activity and reduce the rate of pregnancies among unmarried teen-age girls in Nevada. On Tuesday, Assembly Ways and Means and Senate Finance members will meet jointly for their first attempt to resolve differences over the $3.85 billion spending plan they've been reviewing for several months. Also Tuesday, Senate Judiciary discusses a late-developing tax plan that would help erase a $121.5 million budget shortage and fund raises for Nevada's public school teachers. The plan calls for a $500 franchise fee that would be collected mainly from out-of-state firms that are incorporated in Nevada. But it's being revised following complaints that many small Nevada companies could face higher taxes under the plan. Also on Tuesday, Senate Transportation will discuss several resolutions dealing with the issue of possible nuclear waste storage at Nevada's Yucca Mountain. And Assembly Elections, Procedures and Ethics considers a proposal for a major study on the death penalty in Nevada. Lawmakers have rejected another plan to impose a moratorium on capital punishment pending completion of the study. Wednesday's meetings include money committees on more budget-closing activity and discussion of bills with fiscal impacts, including SB366, a proposed a court program for mentally ill offenders. Senate Government Affairs is scheduled to discuss reapportionment and redistricting, along with a proposed constitutional change to allow for limited annual legislative sessions. More budget hearings are scheduled for Thursday; and Assembly Elections, Procedures and Ethics considers plans for redrawing the lines for university regent and state Board of Education districts. *Copyright tahoe.com. Materials contained within this site may ***************************************************************** 21 Yucca opposition renewed as energy plan unfolds *By Ken Ritter* ASSOCIATED PRESS Monday May 21st, 2001 LAS VEGAS — Tourists in 1950s Las Vegas donned sunglasses to watch nuclear mushroom clouds over the horizon at the Nevada Test Site 90 miles away. Today, the city and state fear the idea of trucks and railroad cars hauling radioactive waste back to a corner of the Test Site — past glittering new gambling palaces and a relic from that 1950s era, the “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign. Dusty Las Vegas of 1950 had fewer than 25,000 residents. In 1980, two years before a nuclear waste disposal site selection process began, the Las Vegas Valley had 165,000 people. The state had 800,000. Today, Nevada has nearly 2 million residents — including 1.3 million in and around Las Vegas, the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the country. The city draws 30 million visitors a year. Most of the city’s 125,000 hotel rooms are on the Las Vegas Strip, looming over Interstate 15 and the Union Pacific Railroad main line to Yucca Mountain. “One accident, no matter how minor, could create hysteria,” the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce says in its official position against the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. That opposition gained momentum this week after President Bush called for a national nuclear waste repository as part of his federal energy plan. Bush also called for licensing new nuclear power reactors and speeding the re-licensing of existing plants to ease the nation’s power woes. The president didn’t specifically name Yucca Mountain, but the reference sent shivers through the ranks of those fighting plans to store all the nation’s nuclear refuse deep beneath a wind-swept ridge at the edge of the Test Site northwest of Las Vegas. “I think we are reaching critical mass,” said Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen, a lobbying group on the forefront of the fight against the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. “There should be no expansion of nuclear power until we have a way to dispose of the waste for years to come without harming the public,” she said. Since 1987, Yucca Mountain has been the only site studied to become the geologic graveyard for the nation’s 77,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive research waste. “We’re getting a lot of attention right now with the unveiling of the president’s national energy policy and the subject of nuclear energy,” Gayle Fisher, Department of Energy spokeswoman for the Yucca Mountain project, said Friday. After $7 billion worth of study and site testing, approval is at least a year away. The earliest the first load of nuclear waste could arrive is 2010. The project is expected to cost $58 billion over 100 years. Decision-making will be at a crucial point this summer, with developments on many fronts. The DOE is taking public comment on federal environmental and site suitability studies before forwarding its recommendation next year to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham. Abraham will make a recommendation to Bush. If Nevada opposes it, as expected, the decision will be sent to Congress for debate and a vote. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is holding hearings next week in Las Vegas and the rural community of Pahrump on a construction permit for the site. The Department of Justice last Monday asked the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco to order Nevada to grant the site water rights. Meanwhile, U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Public Works, has been holding up Bush administration nominations to environmental and public works posts until the Environmental Protection Agency sets radiation standards for the site. The four-member Nevada congressional delegation is united and active in opposition to the Yucca Mountain nuclear dump. “We don’t think we ought to start generating more nuclear waste until we have ways to deal with nuclear waste we have,” Reid spokesman David Cherry said Friday. “Every nuclear power generator in the country has the ability to safely store the material onsite,” Cherry said. “We’re talking about shipping 77,000 tons of waste so deadly that a particle the size of a grain of sand can cause cancer.” The city and state are usually conservative and business-friendly. They went for Bush-Cheney in the November election. But few support the Yucca Mountain plan. “No matter what face you attempt to put on it,” Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman said, “Yucca Mountain is bad for Las Vegas, bad for Nevada and bad for the nation.” Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn, a Republican, is asking the Nevada Legislature to spend $5 million on an outside-the-state advertising campaign to block the dump. The measure has yet to pass, but prospects are good. “That would allow us to tell other states the proposal includes sending nuclear waste by truck and train right past the schools and parks and homes of people in Colorado and Illinois and Utah,” said Jack Finn, the governor’s spokesman. Robert Loux, director of Nevada’s state Agency for Nuclear Projects, said 43 states would be affected by the transport of nuclear waste to Nevada. “Transportation is the Achilles heel of the project,” Loux said. “When we ask people in St. Louis, Omaha, Missouri or Indiana if they’ve thought about accidents and property values, they generally start calling their congressional representatives.” ©2001 Reno Gazette-Journal ***************************************************************** 22 Much of concern in energy policy Reno Gazette-Journal Monday May 21st, 2001 The recommendations of President Bush’s national energy task force, chaired by Vice President Dick Cheney, were predictable, and so was the reaction. Business groups quickly praised the task force report after it was released on Thursday; environmental groups just as quickly criticized it. California officials complained that it failed to deal with the immediate problems that state faces with rising prices and short supplies. And in Nevada, there was concern — with good reason — that the administration planned to push ahead with the plan for a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain despite the opposition of most of the state. Yet the report was pure Bush-Cheney. Cheney prepared us well for the recommendations a couple of weeks ago when he said that conservation might be morally praiseworthy but it is not energy policy. And so we have the beginnings of a plan that relies heavily on the ex-oilmen’s philosophy that we can drill and mine our way out of an energy crisis, regardless of the cost or damage to the environment. Meanwhile, the few proposals for federal government participation in the search for alternative, renewal fuels are overwhelmed by the call for more oil, more coal and, most disturbing, more nuclear power. Such a simple measure as increasing the fuel-efficiency (CAFE) standards for light trucks (which include minivans and SUVs), which was championed by former Nevada Sen. Richard Bryan and is now pushed by Sen. Harry Reid, is ignored. Bush and Cheney seemingly have learned nothing from history. Having expected pretty much what we got does not ease the disappointment, however. Although he must surely know that it faces considerable opposition in the Congress, including from some members of his own party, Cheney and his panel recommended drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and easing restrictions on other public lands. If Bush decides to force the issue, he will have to go to the mat for a policy that promises short-term relief, at best, for low oil supplies on the West Coast. The task force also threw down the gauntlet for Nevada’s congressional delegation by calling for another run at nuclear power, including pursuit of a permanent high-level nuclear waste repository (the report does suggest that we also take another look at reprocessing spent fuel). The report doesn’t specifically mention Yucca Mountain, but it seems certain that there will be a concerted effort to get that site open, despite continued opposition in Nevada. It is also disappointing that the report offered no hope of short-term relief to the beleaguered West, where California’s energy shortage and skyrocketing prices threaten to derail the economy of the entire region. A recommendation that the administration work with the National Governors Association on “region-specific energy concerns” is as close as Bush comes. In short, there appears to be little recognition that energy is anything more than a temporary supply-side problem. The report seems to say: Let the big energy companies solve the problem. That’s pretty much what Bush and Cheney said during the campaign, and in this instance, they have kept their campaign promises. We may all pay a high price for their consistency. ©2001 Reno Gazette-Journal ***************************************************************** 23 Legislature tackles divisive issues [Las Vegas Review-Journal] Monday, May 21, 2001 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal State budget, redistricting among tough topics By BRENDAN RILEY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Nevada lawmakers start the next-to-last week of their 120-day session today facing complex issues ranging from redistricting to balancing the budget. Republicans are expected to have their redistricting plan ready for introduction in the state Senate. The Democrats' plan already is moving through the Legislature. The two plans contain major differences in the shape of the Legislature, Nevada's congressional districts and the districts for university regents and state Board of Education members -- and lawmakers are supposed to have those differences resolved by the end of next week. Also today, the state Division of Health will give the Assembly Natural Resources, Agriculture and Mining Committee an update on a leukemia epidemic linked to Fallon. Fourteen cases of childhood leukemia were confirmed. The Senate Commerce and Labor Committee will take up Assembly Bill 349, which creates an energy assistance fund for poor and fixed-income Nevadans, and AB133, dealing with construction defects. The Senate Taxation Committee will review a bill taking half the vehicle privilege taxes going to local governments in larger Nevada counties to fund teacher salary increases. AB457 recommends that local governments recoup the lost revenue by raising property taxes. The Assembly Education Committee will review Senate Bill 127, which lets Nevada's school districts use class-size reduction money to establish 22-1 pupil-teacher ratios through the fifth grade. The measure would expand a program that now goes to the third grade. The current program caps class size at 16 and 19 students per teacher. The Assembly Health and Human Services Committee will review SB367, which provides activities to prevent or delay early sexual activity and reduce the rate of pregnancies among unmarried teen-age girls in Nevada. Tuesday, Assembly Ways and Means and Senate Finance Committee members will meet in their first attempt to resolve differences over a $3.85 billion spending plan they have been reviewing. Also Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will discuss a late-developing tax plan that would help erase a $121.5 million budget shortage and raises funds for teachers. The plan calls for a $500 franchise fee that would be collected mainly from out-of-state firms that are incorporated in Nevada. It is being revised because of complaints that many small Nevada companies could face higher taxes. The Senate Transportation Committee will discuss several resolutions dealing with possible nuclear waste storage at Yucca Mountain. The Assembly Elections, Procedures and Ethics Committee will consider a proposal for a major study on the death penalty in Nevada. Lawmakers have rejected another plan to impose a moratorium on capital punishment pending completion of the study. Wednesday's meetings include money committees on more budget-closing activity and discussion of bills with fiscal impacts, including SB366, a proposed a court program for mentally ill offenders. The Senate Government Affairs Committee is scheduled to discuss reapportionment and redistricting, along with a proposed constitutional change to allow for limited annual legislative sessions. This story is located at: http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/2001/May-21-Mon-2001/news/16136763.html ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARTICLES ***************************************************************** 1 Opinion: Secretary Abraham should correct past wrongs on recycling Oak Ridger Online --> Story last updated at 11:48 a.m. on Monday, May 21, 2001 When Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham comes to Oak Ridge next month, he really ought to use the occasion to right a very wrong decision made by the previous administration and its then-Energy Secretary Bill Richardson. Secretary Richardson, for reasons which curiously appeared to have far more to do with politics than science, suspended large-scale recycling of contaminated metals in Oak Ridge. The metals recycling project was a viable means of returning to the market large quantities of metals which had been contaminated by radioactivity. The Gore campaign was confronted with the dual dilemma of environmental extremists on the one hand who oppose anything and everything nuclear, and on the other the political risks inherent in laying off workers in an election year. So it chose the only "safe" course: to do nothing. It suspended the resale of recycled metals in favor of storing them, and thus kept the workers employed. Now the political Ping-Pong continues, with 100 of those workers at last losing their jobs under the Bush administration's apparent disdain for environmental cleanup programs, too many of which are admittedly too costly for the meager return on benefits. But the metals recycling program deserves a closer look, because the benefits do so clearly seem to outweigh the costs. The Bush administration has demonstrated a healthy unwillingness to doing things simply because that is the way they were done before. It has reversed decisions of the previous administration even where energy and the environment are concerned. To continue that proud tradition would mean to reconsider the politics of old that has played out on metals recycling; to make, that is, an informed decision based on real science. All Contents ©Copyright* The Oak Ridger * ***************************************************************** 2 Statements by Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham and Gen. John Gordon, Administrator, National Nuclear Security Administration on the Appointment of John McTague as Vice President for Laboratory Management for the University of California energy.gov - Headquarters' Press Release RELEASE DATE: May 17, 2001 [Print Friendly Version] *Says Ever Freer Trade is Not Just Desirable, It is Essential* Secretary Abraham: "The new contracts with the University of California for operating Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California established a new position of Vice President for Laboratory Management. This new position consolidates accountability for the UC labs, including Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in one office. Such a position requires an individual with great depth in management and science. "John McTague has years of very practical, high level management experience in science and technology, both in government and industry. It is important that the University continue on the track of closer lab management and oversight that began with the latest contracts, and John is an excellent choice to guide that process." Under Secretary Gordon: "John McTague has an unusually strong background for the wide variety of challenges demanded by this job. I am pleased that the University of California continues to meet its contractual commitments, which NNSA negotiated with UC last winter. The UC-managed laboratories provide great scientific value to the nation. "The world class science contributed by these labs is at the core of maintenance of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile. That is why we want to ensure that UC elevates its performance in laboratory management and operations to the same level of exceptional performance realized in its science and technology mission. John McTague will lead a new Laboratory Senior Management Council that will review progress, chart current and future initiatives, and review best business and operational practices. This will ensure integrated management of the labs. I look forward to working with him to achieve these goals." Media Contact: Lisa Cutler, DOE, 202/586-5806 Tracy Loughead, NNSA, 505/845-6202 Release No. R-01-075 ***************************************************************** 3 Global Nuclear Workers Run From Smolensk to Red Square May. 21, 2001. Page 5 By Kevin O'Flynn Staff Writer It's not easy being "greenies." More than 300 people who work in the nuclear industry took part in a 370-kilometer marathon Friday and Saturday in a bid to show the world that they are normal, healthy people who just happen to spend their days next to radioactive uranium. "They call us greenies," complained Ivan Gradobitov, deputy head of the Russian nuclear energy and industry workers union, describing the attitude of the general public. "They think it's harmful. … Vodka's harmful. It just depends on the dose." The marathon, the sixth of its kind, saw nuclear workers from 12 countries, including European countries and the United States, run from the Smolensk power station to the slopes of Red Square. Most participants ran in hour-long legs and rested in between on buses. "We are starting to say to people: 'Look, we don't have three ears or four legs. We look normal because we are normal," said Andre Maisseu, a Frenchman who is the technical director of the La Hague reprocessing plant. The annual marathon, which took place last year in Germany, is organized by the World Union of Nuclear Power Workers. "It's to show the world that we're not mutants, we're healthy muzhiki," said Sergei Yegorshin, a nuclear scientist. The event was an added chance for Nuclear Power Minister Alexander Rumyantsev to promote his ministry's plan to import spent nuclear fuel for reprocessing, which has met with strong opposition from environmentalists. "We need to convince them of the facts," said Rumyantsev, who met the runners on Red Square. "The Greens say they want to recycle everything except fuel. It's crazy," said Maisseu. "If something happens, it happens to us. It's us and our friends who will pay the price. We're not crazy. We are on the front line." TheMoscowTimes.com" ***************************************************************** 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: *****************************************************************