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                    NUCLEAR POWER CONTENTS
 
 1  Keen to keep nuclear safety in her hands  
 2  BNFL: 'We're no Railtrack'
 3  NATIONAL NEWS: BNFL increases pressure for split 
 4  Slovakia: Legal shortcomings in deal with EBRD on nuclear 
 5  Dail to debate Sellafield legal challenge 
 6  Slovak company chosen to modernize Bohunice nuclear power 
 7  Austrian protesters against Czech nuclear power station block 
 8  Minatom forgets to inform President about spent fuel import  
 9  L.I. POL WOULD GO BALLISTIC ON OSAMA 
10  IAEA Daily Press Review     Date 2001-10-22 Number 202  
11  Atomic fallout used to determine age of wines
12  TVA mulls using surplus to adjust assets-WSJ
13  Iowa's 535-MW Duane Arnold nuke nearing restart
14  NUCLEAR POWER National Guard to begin securing Pilgrim plant 
15  Letter from Gov. Kenny C. Guinn to Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham re:
16  County irked with DOE's Yucca actions
17  Nuclear Power Plants -- The Infinitely Vulnerable Target
18  YMP: Crunchy on the outside, creamy in the middle

                    NUCLEAR WEAPONS CONTENTS
 
 1  The Ultimate Hatred Is Nuclear 
 2  Opinion: Nukes should be option in Afghanistan
 3  Bush and Putin to deny terrorists access to nuclear and 
 4  Secret Trove May Resolve 'Copenhagen' 
 5  Security at DOE nuclear facilities lax, study says
 6  Despite award-winning detector, ORNL team gets pittance in new DOE dollars
 7  Afghanistan: Nuclear Terrorism Poses Questionable Threat
 8  Training against terror / Nevada Test Site now boot camp for rescuers 
 9  Columbia River Corridor Phased Closure Contract Draft Request For 
10  Bechtel National to Eliminate Last SS-24 Nuclear ICBM Missile 
11  150 arrests at anti-nuclear demonstration  
12  SMU scientists to help monitor atmosphere for sound of nuclear 
13  Uranium seized in France could have made low- grade bomb - 
14  India may destroy Pak N-weapons: Report
15  Atomic bomb test site could get war role
16  2 Scientists Face Trial in Rocketdyne Explosion 

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                     NUCLEAR POWER ARTICLES
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 1 Keen to keep nuclear safety in her hands  

Thestar.com/

Oct. 22, 2001. 02:13 AM

Keen to keep nuclear safety in her hands Watchdog takes 
ultra-conservative approach to job

Peter Calamai SCIENCE REPORTER
                   
DAVE CHAN FOR THE TORONTO STAR

HOT SEAT: Linda Keen, Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission 
president, watches a medical particle accelerator at work. OTTAWA 
- The country's top nuclear safety watchdog says her job is to 
make sure everything is "safer than safe."

This ultra-conservative approach is serving Linda Keen well as 
the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) tightens up 
anti-terrorist security at 30 installations across Canada, 
focusing especially on five nuclear power stations - three in 
Ontario - and a research reactor at Chalk River, also in Ontario.

Keen, a 53-year-old career federal bureaucrat, took over the top 
job at the federal nuclear regulator in January, with no previous 
experience in atomic energy. In addition to the post-Sept. 11 
aftershocks, she's also had to direct commission work relicensing 
the older half of the Pickering station, overseeing the switch to 
private ownership for the Bruce station, approving high-radiation 
uranium mines in Saskatchewan and getting to the bottom of safety 
flaws in new reactors that make vital medical isotopes.

How Keen is doing after almost 10 months on the job depends on 
who is asked.

"It's been a steep learning curve but she's demonstrated her 
abilities as a very skilled administrator," said Richard Dicerni, 
executive vice-president of Ontario Power Generation (OPG), the 
successor to Ontario Hydro.

Dicerni said Keen asks common-sense questions about nuclear 
operations because she hasn't been an insider. "She brings a new 
set of eyes and a different perspective."

Irene Kock is less impressed. Kock heads the nuclear program of 
the Sierra Club and regularly petitions the nuclear safety 
commission to impose higher environmental, health and safety 
standards on OPG. "I think Linda Keen surrendered before she even 
went to the commission," said Kock. "The CNSC is one of those 
regulatory agencies that have been captured by the industries 
that they regulate."

Kock is far from the first person to suggest the federal safety 
regulator is too cozy with the nuclear industry. After public 
hearings, site visits and a consultant's report, a Senate 
committee in June wound up urging CNSC to maintain an "arm's 
length relationship" with utilities over crucial safety issues.

Linda Keen said the problem is more about perception than 
reality. The regulator needs experts familiar with the nuclear 
industry and there aren't many other places they could come from 
other than industry.

"I'm not going to be hiring people completely without 
experience," she said in a recent interview.

But to reassure the public that former industry people do 
maintain an arm's length relationship, Keen said she will make 
nuclear safety commission dealings even more "transparent" than 
at present. 

`I think Linda Keen surrendered before she even went to the 
commission'

Irene Kock Sierra Club nuclear program

"I document all meetings I have with the industry and I always 
have staff there," she said. 

One of these crucial industry-agency sessions took place Friday 
when Keen discussed tougher anti-terrorist measures with top 
officials of OPG, private nuclear station operator Bruce Power 
and Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. Also taking part were the 
utilities from Quebec and New Brunswick, which each operate a 
nuclear power station. 

The bulk of the regulator's work - and cause for the misgivings 
of critics - is far removed from such high-profile issues. Kock 
points to issues like the backlog in routine maintenance at 
Ontario's nuclear power stations, a problem that has dragged on 
for years despite sporadic prods from the safety commission. 

There are, in fact, two nuclear safety commissions and Linda Keen 
is in charge of both. One is the agency itself, a 
$54-million-a-year operation with a staff of 480, mostly at the 
Ottawa headquarters but also scattered across the country at 
nuclear reactors and at an office that watches over 
Saskatchewan's vast uranium mines. 

These federal employees make decisions without any public 
discussion on roughly 3,800 nuclear licences every year, from 
radioactive sources used to check welds to cancer irradiation 
apparatus. Keen is CEO of this bureaucratic operation.

A handful of licensing decisions, no more than 20 in most years, 
are made by a seven-member board appointed by cabinet to oversee 
the regulatory agency. Keen is the only full-time member of this 
group - also confusingly called the Canadian Nuclear Safety 
Commission - and chairs its monthly public sessions.

"The commission members are not specialists and they're not meant 
to be specialists," she said. "The staff's job is to provide that 
specialist advice and to be questioned on it just like everyone 
else."

Keen has a lot of experience questioning specialists. After an 
undergraduate degree in chemistry, she did graduate work in 
nutrition but decided she liked working with people more than 
slaving at a lab bench. Nutrition projects in Africa were 
followed by public service posts federally and provincially until 
she wound up in charge of the metals and minerals section of 
Natural Resources Canada.

"Asking good questions of scientists that yield quality results 
is what I'm responsible for," she said.

Keen has been known to put applicants, commission staff and 
intervenors on the spot, and also doesn't hesitate to shut down 
lines of questioning by part-time commissioners. Calgary lawyer 
Letha MacLachlan asked at a hearing if, after Sept. 11, CNSC 
staff still rated negligible the risk of a catastrophe at 
Pickering which caused severe radiation outside the plant. 

Keen jumped in and moved the session in camera after a partial 
answer in public.

Her approach to industry? "We're saying you develop your safety 
cultures, you develop your approach to how you ensure the safety 
of your reactors," she said. "And by the way, there are some key 
characteristics as a nuclear regulator that we think are very, 
very important for you to have as part of these considerations.

"These (characteristics) are the things we're going to measure. 
They are the things we're going to regulate and license." 

-2001. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All 
*****************************************************************
 2  BNFL: 'We're no Railtrack'

Business Day

by Ross Davies, Evening Standard

BRITISH Nuclear Fuels Limited has confirmed that it is 
technically insolvent, but denied that it is another Railtrack 
disaster waiting to happen.

A spokesman for BNFL chief executive Norman Askew said: 'BNFL is 
not going bankrupt, as one newspaper report suggests. We are 
technically insolvent, it is true, but we are in public ownership 
and there is more than enough income from nuclear waste 
processing to meet the wages and pay creditors for some years to 
come. We are not, and will not be, another Railtrack.'

BNFL is technically insolvent because its liabilities for 
cleaning up after the closure of nuclear plants and the disposal 
of nuclear waste are thought to be about £30bn and rising. 
Write-offs leave about £235m of shareholders' funds in the 
balance sheet. Turnover on reprocessing was £549m last year. 

BNFL is a Government-owned global concern, employing 16,000 in 
Britain. A new management team headed by chairman Hugh Collum and 
chief executive Askew expect a Government response before 
Christmas to their proposal-that the taxpayer carry the clean-up 
liabilities through a publicly-owned liabilities management 
authority (LMA). This will free BNFL to privatise once memory has 
faded of the 1999 scandal in which former management misled the 
public and Japanese customers by falsifying quality control 
logsheets. 

The Department of Trade and Industry confirmed a decision on the 
LMA could be forthcoming by Christmas from the Secretary of 
State, Patricia Hewitt, and her energy minister Brian Wilson. 
Assuming the decision goes BNFL's way, thus seeing off any 
possibility of another politically embarrassing funding row, the 
earliest BFNL could make a start on privatisation is likely to be 
2004. 

Many of BNFL's liabilities pre-date its formation in 1971, and 
some go back as far as the 1940s. 

The taxpayer's liabilities under the LMA would be at least twice 
as high as the £30bn or so that is down to BNFL, for there is as 
much again in the liabilities of the UK Atomic Authority and the 
Ministry of Defence. Nobody is sure what the clean-up is likely 
to cost the taxpayer, as it is rises each year. 

BNFL provides about 5% of English and Welsh electricity 
generation, and sees opportunities for growth in the US in 
designing, building and maintaining nuclear plants. There is 
renewed interest in nuclear power in the US due to energy 
shortages and global pressure to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. 

© Associated Newspapers Ltd., 22 October 2001
*****************************************************************
 3  NATIONAL NEWS: BNFL increases pressure for split 

Financial Times; Oct 22, 2001

By MATTHEW JONES and ROBERT SHRIMSLEY

British Nuclear Fuels is stepping up pressure on the government 
to split off its atomic liabilities into a publicly owned 
liabilities management authority that would fund long-term 
decommissioning and clean-up work. 

BNFL has been talking to ministers about the creation of an LMA 
for more than a year but wants an early resolution to the issue 
to allow it to focus on a possible privatisation of 49 per cent 
of the company. It believes the Railtrack debacle, in which the 
government was forced to appoint administrators earlier this 
month, could help its case by demonstrating that businesses 
requiring heavy long-term investment cannot be easily funded in 
the private sector. 

The LMA would be responsible for nuclear liabilities totalling 
about Pounds 60bn relating to BNFL, the UK Atomic Energy 
Authority and the Ministry of Defence. 

BNFL's specific share of the liabilities was about Pounds 24bn at 
the end of last year. 

Bankers said there was little chance of investors backing the 
partial flotation unless the liabilities were left with the 
government. Many of the liabilities relate to old plants and 
waste storage facilities built in the 1940s and 1950s. BNFL has 
admitted it is not certain of the extent of clean-up operations 
needed. 

One industry observer said: "Ministers are looking at this very 
carefully and do not want to make the same mistakes as were made 
with Railtrack. These liabilities are best kept in the public 
sector." 

An official from the Department of Trade and Industry confirmed 
the decision on the LMA could be made before the end of the year. 
However, BNFL believes the earliest it could proceed with the 
flotation is 2004 as it is still struggling to rebuild its image 
with international customers following a data falsification 
scandal in 1999. 

Additional reporting by Robert Shrimsley 

Copyright: The Financial Times Limited
*****************************************************************
 4  Slovakia: Legal shortcomings in deal with EBRD on nuclear 
plant reported 

BBC Monitoring Service - United Kingdom; Oct 22, 2001

Text of report in English by Slovak commercial news agency 
SITA web site 

Bratislava, 22 October: The legal department of the president's 
office found out that the draft agreement with the European Bank 
for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) to create an 
international fund for decommissioning the V-1 nuclear power 
station in Jaslovske Bohunice is at odds with the constitution. 

Deputy Prime Minister for Legislation Lubomir Fogas met on Monday 
[22 October] President Rudolf Schuster over fixing these parts. 
Fogas said that the agreement includes sections dealing with 
taxation of reimbursement and these need to be slightly adjusted 
to be in accord with Slovak laws. Fogas and Schuster clarified 
the situation for each other and Fogas says that Slovakia's 
negotiators in Brussels will be able to come to positive results, 
on the basis of his talks with the president. 

President Schuster says his main concern is that an imperfect 
agreement do not damage Slovakia and that our country do not have 
its hands tied in the future. 

Fogas and Schuster agreed that legislative cooperation between 
their offices is improving, especially in preparing agreements 
regarding president and president office. 

Source: SITA news agency web site, Bratislava, in English 1030 
gmt 22 Oct 01 

/BBC Monitoring/ © BBC. World Reporter All Material Subject to 
*****************************************************************
 5  Dail to debate Sellafield legal challenge 

Sunday Business Post - Ireland; Oct 21, 2001
BY STEPHEN MCMAHON

Dublin, Ireland, 21 October, 2001 The Da´il is to debate the 
government's proposed legal action against the British government 
over the opening of a MOX fuel production plant at the Sellafield 
nuclear facility in Cumbria. 

The Labour Party has tabled a motion for this week's business 
which criticises "the failure of the government to take assertive 
action to block the MOX plant". 

Emmet Stagg, Labour's spokesman on nuclear issues, is frustrated 
by the government's approach to the issue. "The current hyping of 
the government's position is a sure sign they have done their 
focus groups and realised this is an important issue. The 
government has certainly taken their eye off the ball over the 
last four years. They should have been constantly harassing the 
British government over the issue and opposing planning issues in 
British courts," he said. 

The attorney-general's office is currently considering all 
possible legal options. But legal sources contacted by The Sunday 
Business Post last week were highly sceptical about the 
government's ability to win a case against the British 
government, in either an EU or international court. 

The legal opinions point to the difficulties faced by the 
government in proving "damage or harm" against the British 
government. Recent environmental legislation is the best option, 
according to the legal experts, but is still considered a 
"long-shot". 

In the Da´il last week, Joe Jacob, the Minister of State with 
responsibility for nuclear safety, failed to add any specific 
information to the Taoiseach's earlier statement on the proposed 
legal action. "The Irish government is now finalising 
consideration of further legal options against Britain," he said. 

"I will neither pre-empt the government decision on the matter 
nor close off any of the appropriate legal avenues." He admitted, 
however, that any legal option could take up to "several years 
for hearings". 

Fianna Fa´il's 1997 election manifesto said the party would 
"vigorously pursue all avenues to have Sellafield shut". The 
party pledged support to a private case being taken by four Co 
Louth residents against British Nuclear Fuels Ltd (BNFL). The 
Irish government is listed as a co-defendant. The case dates back 
to 1994. 

"A hearing is expected either side of Christmas," said James 
MacGuill, the Louth residents' solicitor. The government has 
given the litigants GBP200,000 out of a GBP400,000 pool towards 
research costs only, and not the funding of the case. 

"We are very concerned that the government is using this new 
threat of legal action as a smokescreen to protect them from the 
electorate. They say things for political reasons which they have 
no plan to follow up on," said MacGuill. 

The government instigated a case in May against the British 
government in a court of arbitration under the conventions of 
OSPAR, an organisation for the protection of the marine 
environment in the north-east Atlantic. The government has 
alleged a breach of Article 9 of the convention, which relates to 
the release of information to the public. 

The case is currently being held up by the two governments' 
failure to agree on a neutral arbitrator to chair the hearings. 

"There is no possibility of enforcement action, but it is assumed 
that whichever government is found to be in breach of their 
obligations would rectify the issue," said Alan Simpson of OSPAR. 

The government is hoping to enlist the support of Nordic 
countries at a conference of environment ministers in Copenhagen 
on October 29-30. 

All Material Subject to Copyright
*****************************************************************
 6  Slovak company chosen to modernize Bohunice nuclear power 
station 

BBC Monitoring Service - United Kingdom; Oct 21, 2001

Bratislava, 21 October: The coordinator of the project to 
modernize two reactors of the V-2 block of Slovakia's Bohunice 
nuclear power plant (EBO) will be the local Nuclear Power 
Research Institute (VUJE), the electricity utility SE has 
announced. 

VUJE, based in Trnava 15km from the plant, will implement a 
project that includes renewing facilities and raising 
technical-economic parameters. Under SE plans, 11.2bn Slovak 
korunas will be spent on the block up to 2008, including 9.9bn 
korunas on modernization and 1.3bn korunas on operations... 

After modernization, V-2 should be able to operate until 2025, 
according to VUJE. 

[One dollar equals 48.63 Slovak korunas.] 

Source: TASR web site, Bratislava, in English 1619 gmt 21 Oct 01 

/BBC Monitoring/ © BBC. World Reporter All Material Subject to 
Copyright
*****************************************************************
 7  Austrian protesters against Czech nuclear power station block 
border crossing 

BBC Monitoring Service - United Kingdom; Oct 21, 2001

Wullowitz, Austria, 21 October: A group of about 100 Austrian 
opponents of the Czech nuclear power plant Temelin blocked the 
road some 100 metres from the Wullowitz-Dolni Dvoriste 
Austrian-Czech border crossing at 4:07 p.m. [1407 gmt] today. 

Their main aim is to prevent, due to Temelin, the closure of the 
energy chapter within the Czech Republic's EU entry talks. 

The protests are being passively watched by a few Austrian 
policemen... The activists ended the blockade after 80 minutes at 
5:20 p.m. [1520 gmt], after drivers of the cars waiting on the 
Czech side began to loudly express their dissatisfaction... 



Source: CTK news agency, Prague, in English 1431 gmt 21 Oct 01 

/BBC Monitoring/ © BBC.

World Reporter All Material Subject to Copyright
*****************************************************************
 8  Minatom forgets to inform President about spent fuel import  

The Russian Ministry of Nuclear Energy (Minatom) is actively 
promoting plans for large scale imports of spent nuclear fuel to 
Russia for storage or reprocessing. 

(St Petersburg:) Duma approved in second reading a bill, which 
allows spent fuel import. Minatom sends a train to Bulgaria to 
collect spent nuclear fuel without following the regulations set 
by previously approved laws.

President Putin said he would personally supervise each spent 
nuclear fuel import contract. photo: vesti.ru 

Rashid Alimov, 2001-10-22 17:31

The Ecodefence! envirogroup said that Tekhsnabexport, or TENEX, 
one of Minatom’s sub-units, is about to ship spent nuclear 
fuel from Bulgaria to Russia. 

A special train for transportation of spent nuclear fuel departed 
from Russia two weeks ago and now is waiting at the terminal of 
Bulgarian Kozlodoy nuclear power plant. 

According to the contract, signed by TENEX and Kozlodoy NPP in 
summer 2000, 41 tonnes of spent fuel would be brought to the 
Russian Chemical and Mining Combine in Krasnoyarsk-26. 

This will be the first shipment of spent nuclear fuel after 
President Putin signed bills, which legalised and structured the 
proceedings for storage of foreign nuclear waste in Russia. But 
will those regulations be followed? Most likely not. 

According to the information obtained by Ecodefence!, the head of 
the State Nuclear Regulatory (GAN), Yury Vishnevsky, sent a harsh 
letter to TENEX on October 16th, pointing out that such 
activities require an official licence. Moreover, the spent 
nuclear fuel bills stipulate that each shipment must receive 
proper environmental evaluation. Besides, TENEX must prove that a 
part of funds earned on the imports will be allotted to the 
remediation of contaminated areas in Russia, even if such 
programs have not been developed yet. 

There is no information whether TENEX answered to GAN. But the 
company has nothing to answer anyway. 

Signing the bills this summer, President Putin said that he would 
personally control each spent nuclear fuel import contract. Putin 
also said that he would establish an independent commission to 
evaluate such business. The commission was to be headed by Nobel 
prize winner physicist Zhorez Alferov. 

As of today, no commission has been set up, Putin most likely has 
not heard about the spent fuel coming from Bulgaria, whereas the 
remediation programs have not been written yet. 

Minatom's promises of huge revenues on the import operations 
(amounting to $20bn) are also fading away. Bulgaria is ready to 
pay $620 for one kilogram of spent nuclear fuel. Minatom used to 
say it would take not less than $1000 per kilo. 

            Bills approved by State Duma 

The Russian State Duma, the lower chamber of the Russian 
parliament, endorsed the spent nuclear fuel import bills in third 
reading on June 6th. The first bill legalises spent nuclear fuel 
import from other countries by amending art. 50 in the Russia's 
Environmental Protection Law in favour of spent fuel imports. The 
second bill sets frames for leasing of Russia's manufactured 
nuclear fuel abroad. While the third functioned more as an 
incentive for the Duma members and public in general, stipulating 
the remediation programs for radioactively contaminated areas.

The environmental groups, GAN and reasonable politicians in the 
Russian State Duma warned earlier against the import plans. But 
the warning calls were futile. Now Minatom has legalised its 
corporative business, which is under no independent control. The 
revenues of this business will be diverted to support post Soviet 
vast nuclear weaponry complex, which has been mostly useless 
after the cold war was over. Whereas the future generations will 
enjoy taking care of the hazardous waste for the coming thousand 
of years. 

Duma keeps approving

On Thursday, the State Duma passed the second reading of the Law 
On Environmental Protection. MPs almost unanimously voted for 
spent fuel imports to Russia and abolished governmental 
environment funds, transferring money back to the common budget. 

308 MPs voted for the bill, 36 voted against, and 99 did not cast 
their vote. Earlier the nuclear lobby, supported by Minatom made 
amendments to article 50 of the Law On Environmental Protection, 
allowing spent nuclear fuel imports to Russia. In June 2001, 
these amendments were signed by President Putin and came into 
force. But yesterday MPs had to consider the law as a whole, and 
that is why they returned to the controversial amendments to the 
article 50. The opponents of the spent fuel imports again tried 
to stop turning the country into an international nuclear 
dumpsite, but failed. The majority of the MPs did not want to 
vindicate themselves before their electorate. Polls say more than 
90% of Russians oppose the import of spent nuclear fuel. 

Challenging the bills

The liberal Yabloko party keeps on criticising the idea of 
nuclear imports. Yabloko faction proposed two new amendments to 
the article 50, at least to minimize the damage from Minatom's 
activity and to ban eternal storage of the imported spent fuel in 
Russia. Yabloko also suggested that all the waste generated 
during reprocessing of the foreign spent nuclear fuel and newly 
manufactured fuel should be returned to the country of origin. 
But the MPs refused to discuss Yabloko’s amendments and 
approved the article as it is.

Nuclear safety turns out to be particularly important issue in 
the wake of the terror acts in the US. "It’s a pity, the 
majority of the MPs don’t take the catastrophe in US as a 
warning... But the threat of nuclear terrorism is very actual in 
Russia, and becomes increasingly actual after the country has 
resolved to accept spent nuclear fuel from all over the world," 
Yabloko faction member Sergey Mitrokhin said. 

Referendum vs spent fuel, nuclear lobby vs referendum The bills 
favouring spent nuclear fuel imports, approved by the State Duma 
and signed by the President, may be abolished by a national vote. 
Yabloko is going to initiate it, supported by envirogroups. 

TENEX 

The joint stock company Tekhsnabexport (TENEX) was founded in 
1963 as a trade office within the USSR Ministry of External 
Trade. The main task of Tekhsnabexport was to export radioactive 
isotopes and rare metals to the East European and other 
countries. In 1968, Tekhsnabexport also began enriching uranium 
for export. In 1988, the company was transferred from the trade 
office to the Ministry of Atomic Energy. In 1989-90, 
Tekhsnabexport started to export natural uranium mined in Russia, 
as well as enriched uranium. In 1990, it shipped the first 12,000 
tons of natural uranium abroad. Today the main activity of TENEX 
focuses on implementation from the Russian side of the HEU-LEU 
contract, launched by the US administration with a view to 
control Russian nuclear materials. 


Last year, environmentalists tried to start the referendum, but 
the Central Electoral Committee said 0.6m of 2.5m of signatures 
collected were not valid. According to the Russian legislation, 
to start the referendum 2m signatures must be collected in a 
period of three months. 

But the Minatom lobby tries to prevent the coming vote. In early 
October, a group of little known MPs proposed bills, hampering 
citizens’ initiative for the referendum. 

Both bills are called “On the amendments and additions into 
the federal constitutional Law On the Referendum in 
Russia”. One of the amendments is that the questions, put 
forward for people's evaluation, should be approved by the upper 
and the lower chambers of the Russian parliament. That violates 
article 3 of the Russian Constitution, which stipulates that 
referendum is the “supreme and direct expression of 
people’s power”. Another amendment calls for that a 
group, who initiates a referendum, should be registered not in a 
centre of a federative subject, where the majority of the group 
lives, but in the Central Electoral Committee in Moscow. 

According to the legislation in force, the initiative group may 
collect signatures anywhere, but not in the places said 
specifically about. The third amendment stipulates, that the 
Central Electoral Committee will define the place for the 
collection of signatures on its own choice.

Publisher: Bellona Foundation, President: Frederic Hauge 
Information: info@bellona.no, Technical contact: 
webmaster@bellona.no Telephone: +47 23 23 46 00 Telefax: +47 22 
38 38 62  * P.O.Box 2141 Grunerlokka, 0505 Oslo, Norway
*****************************************************************
 9  L.I. POL WOULD GO BALLISTIC ON OSAMA 

 NYPOST.COM Regional News: 

By DAN KADISON
 
October 22, 2001                                                 --                             

As "a last resort," a Long Island congressman wants to send a 
message to Osama bin Laden and the Taliban - a radioactive 
message. 

Peter King (R-N.Y.) isn't discounting the idea of blowing up the 
terrorists with nukes. 

"I would never rule out tactical nuclear weapons if I thought 
they could do the job and if they were needed," the congressman 
told WABC Radio talk-show host Steve Malzberg yesterday morning. 

King's remarks almost echo the sentiment of Rep. Stephen Buyer 
(R-Ind.), an Army veteran who would back "the use of a small, 
tactical nuclear device" if the United States can prove bin Laden 
is connected with the spread of anthrax or any other biological 
agent. 

King said: "If the military people said we think certain chemical 
weapons are going to be used, we know where they are, and the 
only way we can stop their use is by using tactical nuclear 
weapons." 

King also went after the media on Malzberg's show, reports 
NewsMax.com. "This was part of a biological criminal 
investigation," King said. "We had no choice." 

NEW YORK POST is a registered trademark of NYP Holdings, Inc. 
NYPOST.COM,
*****************************************************************
 10  IAEA Daily Press Review     Date 2001-10-22 Number 202  

  1. Non-proliferation
Egypt renews its call for putting all nuclear installations in 
Middle East under IAEA Safeguards. After talks with         
President Bush, President Putin signals possible ABM revisions. 
Frustrating US, China reportedly balks at pact to      stem 
nuclear sales. Former UN arms inspector, Richard Butler, suggests 
that it is time to demand that Baghdad       allow resumption of 
UN inspections. (BBC; IHT; NYT; T - 20, 22/10) ABM; China; Egypt; 
IAEA; Iraq; Russian Federation; UN; United   States of America         
 
  2. Terrorism
 Tighter controls on stockpiles of tactical nuclear weapons and 
fissile material needed to prevent theft by terrorist   groups, 
UN Institute for Disarmament Research (Unidir) states in report. 
APEC leaders approve historic anti-terrorism accord as they ended 
biggest international gathering since recent terrorist attacks. 
NYT Op-Ed:    "The Ultimate Hatred is Nuclear" deals with 
prospect of terrorists having nuclear weapons. More on hypothesis  
that hijackers who forced fourth passenger jet to crash during 
attacks on US may have been intending to use it to        bomb 
Three Mile Island NPP. France fears kamikaze attacks against its 
numerous nuclear facilities: French forces         placed on 
maximum alert. (DAW; FT; HIN; NYT; ST - 19, 22/10) Asia; France; 
UN; United States of America; WORLDWIDE 

  3. Nuclear power
 Ukrainian national atomic generating company Enerhoatom will 
reportedly extend operational life span of        generating sets 
at Ukrainian NPPs by 10-15 years. Russian Atomic Energy Ministry 
to sign memorandum with India     on construction of two 
VVER-1000 LWRs. EU Enlargement Commissioner, Guenter Verheugen, 
says Temelin NPP      is no longer obstacle for Czech Republic's 
entry to EU as Czechs answered satisfactorily questions about 
plant's  safety. (DP; INT; K - 15, 20/10) India; Russian 
Federation; Ukraine 

  4. Radiation, health
 UN Scientific Committee on Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) 
releases 2001 report on hereditary effects of         radiation. 
Dr. Edward P. Radford, who energetically promoted higher estimate 
of cancer risk from radiation    exposure and whose position was 
eventually upheld, dies at 79. (NYT - 22/10) UN; United States of 
America 

  5. Energy, environment
 Guardian article: "Time to Go Public on Energy Debate: It's 
Nuclear Versus Renewables." Brazil searches for more    energy: 
Government planners say they see solution for energy crisis in 
heart of Amazon basin, where they     hope to harness its network 
of rivers into new source of power. Brazil; United Kingdom (G; 
NYT - 19, 21/10)                             

*****************************************************************
 11  Atomic fallout used to determine age of wines

ABC News - 

LOCAL NEWS : South Australia   
    
Fallout from Australia's atomic bomb tests in the 1950s is being 
used to accurately determine the age of wines.

The University of Adelaide has come up with a technique to carbon 
date wines - providing a new tool in combating wine fraud.

Dr Graham Jones from the Department of Horticulture, Viticulture 
and Oenology says large amounts of carbon-14 were released during 
atomic bomb testing which were absorbed by wine grapes at the 
time.

He says with the amount in the atmosphere decreasing each year, 
testing can reveal the exact year a wine was bottled.

But Dr Jones says the levels of carbon in the fruit is safe.

[ABC News Audio] 

*****************************************************************
 12  TVA mulls using surplus to adjust assets-WSJ

[Reuters]   
    
Monday October 22, 9:37 am Eastern Time
 
NEW YORK, Oct 22 (Reuters) - The federal Tennessee Valley 
Authority (TVA) (NYSE: - news), acknowledging its unfinished 
nuclear power plants likely have a market value much less than 
the U.S. power company had estimated, is considering using $3.4 
billion in surpluses to write down the assets, The Wall Street 
Journal reported on Monday.

Utility executives recently told the Bush administration that 
they planned to use ``retained earnings'' amassed over several 
years of surpluses to adjust downward the value of unfinished 
plants in Alabama and Tennessee states, the newspaper said, 
quoting people familiar with the TVA.

The agency has invested billions of dollars in the plants but 
never completed them amid concerns over safety and the rising 
cost of its nuclear program. The Journal said TVA officials were 
expected to announce the write-down as soon as Wednesday at a 
board meeting. However, the executives have not indicated if they 
plan to try to sell the assets or hold on to them.

The TVA has amassed nearly $3.8 billion in retained earnings from 
operations over the years. Ordinarily, that income would be 
handed over to the U.S. Treasury, but federal law allows the TVA 
to retain the funds as long as it promises to plow them back into 
its business, the newspaper said.

Investor-owned utilities and regional interest groups have 
speculated that the TVA might one day raise customer rates to 
write down investments in the failed projects.

The Journal said the TVA officials are expected to argue that 
using retained earnings to adjust the overvalued assets is a 
sound use of its money and will not require a rate rise. 


   Copyright © 2001 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved. Privacy 
*****************************************************************
 13  Iowa's 535-MW Duane Arnold nuke nearing restart
                                        
    [Reuters]   

Monday October 22, 3:21 pm Eastern Time
 
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 22 (Reuters) - The operator of Alliant Energy 
Corp.'s (NYSE:LNT - news) 535-megawatt (MW) Duane Arnold nuclear 
unit in Iowa said Monday the unit was preparing to return to the 
grid, and added that it would begin posting an up-to-date 
operating status of all its nuclear units on its Web site.

``They completed the maintenance work. It (Duane Arnold) was in 
hot standby this morning and is preparing to return to service,'' 
said Maureen Brown, a spokeswoman for Nuclear Management Company 
(NMC), the plant's operator. She declined to comment on when 
Duane Arnold would be back on line, although some power traders 
said the unit, located in Palo, Iowa, was expected to return to 
the grid later Monday.

It was manually shut on Oct. 17 due to a faulty electrical system 
that supports important water circulation systems. Operators took 
advantage of the outage to complete maintenance on a pump seal 
that had been scheduled for late October. Duane Arnold's owners 
are Alliant's IES Utilities Inc. (70 percent), Central Iowa Power 
Co-op (20) and Corn Belt Power Co-op (10).

In addition to Alliant's nuclear reactors, the NMC operates the 
reactors of Wisconsin Energy Corp.'s (NYSE:WEC - news) Wisconsin 
Electric Power, Xcel Energy Inc. (NYSE:XEL - news), WPS Resources 
Corp.'s (NYSE:WPS - news) Wisconsin Public Service, and CMS 
Energy Corp.'s (NYSE:CMS - news) Consumers Energy.

In other news, Brown said on Monday the NMC had begun posting the 
operating status of its nuclear fleet on its Web site 
(www.nmcco.com) 24 hours a day. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission 
(NRC) halted indefinitely the publication of its nuclear power 
plant status report on Oct. 11, citing concerns that terror 
groups might try to use the data. It is among several U.S. 
agencies and departments that have pulled material off their Web 
sites as a precaution since the deadly Sept. 11 attacks on the 
Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

The NRC, which oversees operations of the nation's 103 nuclear 
power rectors, compiles a daily status report noting which plants 
are temporarily closed for maintenance, refueling or other work. 
The report is closely followed by electricity traders to gauge 
available power supplies in the country.

Brown said the NMC has informed the NRC of its new policy.

The NMC does not have the resources to field numerous calls 
received since the NRC stopping publishing its plant status data, 
and the new information does not contain sensitive information 
such as plant drawings, she said.

Like the previously available NRC plant status report, 
information on the NMC's Web site will only include a plant's 
current operating capacity, not estimated dates for when an 
outage begins or ends. 

   Copyright © 2001 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved. Privacy 
*****************************************************************
 14  NUCLEAR POWER National Guard to begin securing Pilgrim plant 
today 

By Ralph Ranalli, Globe Staff, 10/22/2001 

As National Guard troops take over perimeter security today at 
the Pilgrim nuclear power plant in Plymouth, officials are 
considering even more drastic measures, such as antiaircraft 
missiles and no-fly zones, to protect other atomic generators 
around New England. 

''We should look at them, absolutely,'' state Representative 
Vinny M. deMacedo said yesterday. 

''In light of [the terrorist attacks on] Sept. 11, the game has 
changed,'' said deMacedo, a Plymouth Republican. ''This is a 
nuclear power plant we're talking about. It's an asset to the 
community, but it's also a risk.'' 

For now, commercial jetliners in the Logan International Airport 
flight path will continue to fly over the Plymouth facility, 
despite the fact that specialists say it is unclear whether any 
of the country's 103 nuclear plants could withstand a direct hit 
of the kind that destroyed New York's World Trade Center and 
badly damaged the Pentagon. 

State Senator Therese Murray, a Democrat who lives near Pilgrim, 
has written letters to both the Federal Aviation Administration 
and the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission asking that airspace be 
restricted over the plant. US Representatives William Delahunt 
and Edward Markey have made similar requests, and Vermont 
Governor Howard Dean has called for a ban on flyovers at the 
Vermont Yankee plant in Vernon. 

Murray said FAA officials rejected her request, saying that if 
they banned flights over Pilgrim, they would have to mark the 
location of all of the country's nuclear plants on aviation maps, 
possibly aiding terrorists in planning assaults. 

Murray called that response ''frustrating,'' because information 
on virtually all US commercial nuclear facilities is easily 
obtainable through the Internet and other public sources. 

''To me, it's just bureaucratese, a way to say no,'' she said. 
State officials confirmed that the National Guard troops arriving 
at the station today in relief of state troopers will have their 
eyes on Pilgrim's perimeter, not on the skies. 

Murray said she was not overly worried that the soldiers will not 
be bringing antiaircraft equipment with them, since the plant is 
already situated close to several strategic air facilities on 
Cape Cod, including Otis Air National Guard Base in Falmouth and 
the PAVE PAWS radar station in Sagamore. 

''If you are going to have a nuclear plant, it's a decent place 
to have one,'' she said. 

Acting Governor Jane M. Swift ordered the National Guard deployed 
to Pilgim last week after requests by Murray, deMacedo, and other 
local officials, a spokesman said, not in response to any 
imminent danger. 

''There have been no threats at Pilgrim,'' press secretary James 
Borghesani said. ''But we are always willing to accommodate the 
requests of local officials whenever we can.'' 

In New Hampshire, a public advocacy group was urging the state to 
stockpile a pill that limits the body's intake of radiation, even 
as officials were declaring the Seabrook nuclear plant safe 
without National Guard troops or protection from the air. 

The Seacoast Anti-Pollution League said the state should be 
prepared with an adequate supply of potassium iodide pills in the 
unlikely event there was an attack on the Seabrook plant. 

But one of the five NRC commissioners last week defended the 
plant as ''not a soft target.'' 

''Seabrook Station is the most heavily defended industrial 
facility in the state of New Hampshire,'' Commissioner Jeffrey 
Merrifield told the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune. 

In Massachusetts, meanwhile, state Fire Marshal Stephen Coan said 
calls about another major public health concern, possible anthrax 
contamination, hit their lowest level since tainted mail was 
first discovered in Florida and New York two weeks ago. 

State officials fielded just eight calls for suspicious items 
yesterday, down from 60 or more on some days last week. 

''We hope that we will see another downturn [today] when people 
go back to work,'' Coan said. 

© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company. 
*****************************************************************
 15  Letter from Gov. Kenny C. Guinn to Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham re:

State of Nevada's comments in response to the Federal Register 
Notice of August 21, 2001, in which the Department of Energy 
(DOE) announced public hearings and solicited public comment with 
respect to the possible recommendation of Yucca Mountain for 
development as a high-level radioactive waste repository
 
OFFICE OF THE GOVERNOR
 One Hundred One North Carson Street
 Carson City, Nevada 89701
 
  KENNY C. GUINN Governor  

October 18, 2001
 
Hon. Spencer Abraham
 Secretary of Energy
 1000 Independence Avenue, SW
 Washington, DC 20585
 
Dear Secretary Abraham:
 
Please accept this letter as the State of Nevada's comments in 
response to the Federal Register Notice of August 21, 2001, in 
which the Department of Energy (DOE) announced public hearings 
and solicited public comment with respect to the possible 
recommendation of Yucca Mountain for development as a high-level 
radioactive waste repository. 

Nevada considers the current site recommendation process to be 
premature and inconsistent with the letter and spirit of the 
Nuclear Waste Policy Act (Act). The fact that critical 
information essential to evaluate and comment upon your 
consideration of Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste repository has 
not been made available to the public is a major impediment to 
meaningful public participation and renders the hearings and the 
entire site recommendation comment period meaningless. For 
example, the report that is to form the basis for any such 
recommendation, the Preliminary Site Suitability Evaluation 
Report, is itself based on site suitability guidelines that do 
not exist, while completely ignoring the current, legally binding 
regulations specifying criteria for determining site suitability. 
Moreover, the key report required by the Act that forms the basis 
by which DOE is to evaluate the potential impacts of the Yucca 
Mountain site on the State of Nevada and the nation, the Final 
Yucca Mountain Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) has not been 
made available to the public. 

How can I, as Governor, our state Legislature and the citizens of 
this state provide meaningful comment on the consideration of 
Yucca Mountain as a repository when documents critical to the 
site recommendation process have not been made available. 
Additionally, I believe it is impossible for you to make a sound 
decision on whether to recommend Yucca Mountain to President Bush 
when critical EPA radiation standards are being challenged in 
Federal Court by our state and the nuclear industry.
 
Section 114 of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act requires that DOE 
provide to me and the Legislature the final and complete site 
recommendation decision package it submits to you, that we have 
an opportunity to submit comments to you on the decision package, 
and that you respond to our comments prior to making any 
recommendation to President Bush. The Act further requires that 
my comments and those of the Legislature be included in any 
recommendation you submit to the President. 

In summary, the current site recommendation process and related 
hearings do not satisfy the requirements of Section 114 of the 
Act, and DOE's current schedule for making a recommendation to 
the President does not provide sufficient time for obtaining and 
responding to the views and comments of myself and the 
Legislature on the final site recommendation decision package. 
Moreover, for this process to be fair to the citizens of Nevada 
and the nation, I urge you to correct the errors which have been 
made throughout the site recommendation process and adhere to the 
letter and spirit of the Act by requiring DOE to produce the 
requisite documents and thereafter schedule a process that allows 
myself, the Legislature, and our citizens to provide meaningful 
comment on those documents. 
 
Sincerely, --/s/-- KENNY C. GUINN Governor
*****************************************************************
 16  County irked with DOE's Yucca actions
 
The Inyo Register
 
Thursday, October 4, 2001
 
Angered that DOE continues to ignore those closest to proposed 
site, Inyo's leaders issue harsh statement of record
 
By Darcy Ellis News Staff
 
Inyo County's governing body issued yet another statement 
yesterday to the Department of Energy expressing its continued 
dismay at the entity's public hearing process, despite the DOE 
having scheduled two public meetings on Yucca Mountain in 
Independence and Lone Pine.
 
The county's statement was to be read into the record yesterday 
by Andrew Remus on behalf of the Inyo County Board of Supervisors 
at the Independence field hearing meeting. The meeting was 
announced last Friday by the DOE and scheduled for 3-8 p.m. at 
the American Legion Hall.
 
The Lone Pine field hearing meeting has been set for 3-8 p.m. at 
Statham Hall. All of DOE's public hearings and field hearings are 
being held as part of a public comment period; which has been 
extended to Friday, Oct. 19, regarding Yucca Mountain's 
suitability as a site. for a nuclear waste repository.
 
In previous announcements, Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham 
has maintained that his efforts to ensure ample opportunity for 
the public to comment go above and beyond what is required by law 
and what was planned by previous administrations.
 
Remus, project coordinator for the Inyo County's Yucca Mountain 
assessment office has been at the forefront of the board's 
efforts to convince the DOE to hold a public hearing in Furnace 
Creek attended by Abraham. For weeks, no response was received 
from the letters sent to the DOE and the Secretary of Energy, 
despite them having the written support of Congressman Jerry 
Lewis and Senator Dianne Feinstein.
 
Then, on Friday, it was announced that 29 separate "field hearing 
meetings" would be held in every Nevada county and also in Inyo, 
as further testament to Abraham's efforts. to 'provide adequate 
comment opportunity, according to a DOE press release. According 
to Remus, the DOE's attempt to satisfy Inyo officials with the 
two meetings has failed, as the county's request for a Furnace 
Creek hearing has still been ignored.
 
"This attempt at a hearing falls woefully short of meeting the 
needs and expectations of Inyo County as stated clearly in the 
Board of Supervisors" letter to ... Abraham dated Sept. 4, 
2001,"reads an excerpt from the statement Remus was preparing to 
read at yesterday's meeting. "In that letter we requested a full 
public hearing on site suitability, attended by Secretary 
Abraham, at Furnace Creek in Death Valley National Park, the area 
potentially most negatively impacted from the operation of a 
repository at Yucca Mountain."
 
The statement goes on to indicate that holding field hearing 
meetings as opposed to fullfledged public hearings is an added 
insult.
 
"Instead of granting our request, the department has seen fit to 
ignore it and stage, with minimal notice and lead time, 'field 
hearings' which have none of the scope, scale or, exposure 
warranted of a hearing on a project the magnitude of the proposed 
repository" the statement reports, Congressman Lewis, 
incidentally, appears to have a different take on the 
Independence and Lone Pine meetings.
 
"I want to thank Secretary Abraham for understanding that the 
citizens of Inyo County face potential groundwater threats and 
hazardous materials spills on county roads from the Yucca 
Mountain Project," Lewis reported via press release. "I hope this 
will give the residents of our county an opportunity to present 
their concerns and ensure they are addressed."
 
According to Remus in a telephone conservation Wednesday morning, 
the DOE is most likely trying to speed up the comment process as 
best it can, since Abraham is expected to make a nuclear 
repository site recommendation to President, Bush sometime this 
month or next.
 
"I think they're in a hurry and `want to get the hearing process 
for site recommendation completed as soon as possible," he said, 
indicating that, unfortunately, Inyo residents, particularly 
those in Death Valley 17 miles from Yucca Mountain, are paying 
the price for expediency.
 
Also, he reported, several small field hearing meetings as 
opposed to actual public hearings mean smaller groups of 
residents commenting on the issue, and considerably less fanfare 
and problems like those that occurred at the Sept. 5 hearing in 
Las Vegas, which ran four hours over schedule and still left many 
without the chance to be heard.
 
Public hearings, by nature, are supposed to allow for many groups 
to communicate their views; and adequately report what occurred 
to those that could not attend, through widespread media coverage 
and the like, Remus continued, reporting that notice of the 
meetings was published in the Federal Register just yesterday.
 
Remus and the Board of Supervisors maintain that under the 
Nuclear Waste Policy Act, Inyo has every right to a fullfledged 
public hearing since it gets federal funding as an affected 
entity because of its proximity to the proposed repository, the 
fact that studies indicate Death Valley's groundwater will be 
contaminated if any waste leaks from Yucca Mountain and because 
the DOE is proposing to transport that waste on the highways 
through the southeast portions of Inyo.
 
"It is obvious that, besides being premature and inadequate, 
these hearings are a clear violation of the letter and intent of 
the NWPA," the county's statement further reads, explaining that 
neither Independence nor Lone Pine is in the "vicinity" of Yucca 
Mountain as required by law. "The field hearings are a poorly 
disguised attempt to placate concerned parties in our county, to 
avoid further high-profile debacles like the Sept. S site 
characterization hearing in Las Vegas, to enable DOE management 
to claim they have held public hearings in California and to 
expedite the review process ... to forward a positive 
recommendation on Yucca Mountain years ahead of completion of 
comprehensive scientific studies ... and before ... a 
transportation risk assessment..."
 
Until the proper environmental studies are completed and Inyo 
County is finally respected as an Affected Unit of Local 
Government and the most at-risk from a Yucca site, the county, 
the statement concludes, will pursue correction of the DOE's 
continued actions "by whatever means available."
 
For more information on the public hearing sessions,. or the 
Civilian Radioactive Waste Management Program, visit the Yucca 
Mountain website at www.ymp.govor call (800) 9673477.
*****************************************************************
 17  Nuclear Power Plants -- The Infinitely Vulnerable Target

Plastic | 

found here: Counterpunch
suggested by MAYORBOB
 posted by Joey (Plastic)on Saturday October 20, @02:35PM 
					 				   			
"All nuclear power plants have been on heightened states of alert 
since September 11th, a move which should come as no surprise to 
much of anyone," MAYORBOBwrites. "But, as this story, found at 
Counterpunchpoints out, even the highest state of alert leaves 
the power plants as highly immovable, vulnerable targets for 
determined terrorist attacks. And, as the story relates, it's not 
necessarily the crazies from al-Qaida that we have to fear from 
-- we have our own homegrown crazies who have tried to do damage 
in the past and probably would like to take another lick in the 
future. What brought this article home to me was that the FBI 
reported that there had been a 'credible' report of a planned 
attack on Three Mile Island the other night -- all air traffic in 
the Harrisburg area was shut down. The world has become an 
increasingly scary place."   

by Anonymous Visitor on Saturday October 20, @04:11PM EST 
(Comment #1) --> Nuke plant structures are designed to stop gamma 
rays, the second most penetrating EM radiation in existence, I'm 
pretty sure they can stop a goodly chunk of airplane aluminum 
coming in at moderate speeds. At least the German plants are 
tested to take an impact from a Tornado fighter jet coming in at 
full speed, with the biggest damage being a burn mark. Besides, 
I'd wager that the plants have some kind of defences in place - 
maybe not surface-to-air-missiles (but who knows?) but at least 
panzer traps on the ground to stop truck bombs, hell, maybe even 
mine fields for all I know. At the very least nuclear power is 
good in times of international crisis, since the fuel supplies 
can last for *years*. 

But none of this of course matters because we are dealing with 
NUKULEAR power that produces RADIASHUN, so all logic goes right 
out the window.
 			  
 Sunday October 21, @12:46AM EST
	 	   	
   I recently read a superior book entitled Lethal Arrogance: 
Human Fallibility and Dangerous Technologies by Lloyd Dumas that 
discussed this exact scenario, among others. It's incredibly 
disturbing- it's only a question of when, guys. 

The mock raids are bunk- the NRC wants to look good, so it makes 
sure facility X knows about Raid Y beforehand. The book describes 
credible seconarios where nuclear plants in America have defense 
perimeters small enough so a maximum-yield truck bomb could 
disable the place. A few initial bomb strikes followed by an 
armed assualt of 50 men, with the advantage of surprise, at 4 AM 
against a sleepy and green bunch of civilian security guards? Are 
we really sure that they wouldn't even be able to penetrate the 
permiter and detonate another device? 

Although this was a storage site for nerve gas, not a nuclear 
reactor, it's still a credible example... 

"During[U.S. Army] test intrusions, one group of men entered the 
most sensitive chemical area at the depot... another group 
commandeered 3 vechicles and drove around a secured area for 
hours... other test intruders let the air out of vehicle tires in 
which guards were sleeeping and left dummy dynamite sticks on the 
door of a chemical storage igloo..." 

"Then there were... real inflitrations. Several times guards 
discovered the tracks of motorcycles that appeard to have been 
shoved under outer fences and rode in unauthorized areas. 
Unidentified indivduals systematically slashed the tires of so 
many military vehicles that it was estimated it would have taken 
more than 4 hours for several men..." 

"All this would have an air of comedy about it if it weren't for 
the fact that these people were at the core of the protection 
system at a facility that stored enough nerve gas to kill every 
man, woman, and child on earth several times over...if there were 
any real grounds for believing that highly peculiar circumstances 
had conspired to create a situation at Tooele unique in time and 
place, it would still be frightening.. 

the list of incidents it goes on to report is mind-boggling, and 
it goes onto suggest that the security lapses reported are the 
bare minimum. Read the book or respond to this post for a few 
examples. 

I won't even go on to the arguments about accidents, passive 
negligence, and general risk.
 			  
by NaNon Saturday October 20, @10:15PM EST (Comment #3)   (Send a 
private note to NaN)                            (User #16861 
Info) -->                    

   ... is that nuclear reactors are like those bungee-jump cords: 
when they work, they are great, but if something goes wrong, they 
are big trouble. You can't be fooling around with these things 
folks. 

Security (of any type) is hard to do right. I'm sure that the 
people in charge of securing the nation's nuclear power plants 
can defended them from each scenario in their little handbook on 
attacks. The problem is that wackos these days appear to be 
thinking laterally and coming up with new attacks. A security 
force that stands still is little more than no security force.

 
If triangles had a God, he would have 3 sides. -Montesquieu 			  

  Copyright © 2000-2001 Automatic Media, Inc.   
*****************************************************************
 18  YMP: Crunchy on the outside, creamy in the middle

Pahrump Valley Times  

By:HENRY BREAN, Managing EditorOctober 19, 2001

"The more YMP meetings I attend, the more everybody's arguments 
begin to make sense."

At your average supermarket, there are at least 50 distinct 
varieties of breakfast cereal, but there are only two real 
choices when it comes to peanut butter.

You can smear the stuff on a dozen different kinds of bread or on 
crackers of every shape and size. You can dip into the jar with a 
bar of chocolate or a piece of celery. You can even lick the 
stuff off your lover if you want. But before you do any of that, 
you must make one simple choice: chunky or creamy?

There is no riding the peanut butter fence. In Washington, D.C., 
you can't throw a rock without hitting a conservative Democrat or 
a liberal Republican, but there are no moderates in the world of 
Skippy and Jif.

And like the growing disparity between the rich and the poor, 
it's unusual these days to even find peanut butter that is merely 
chunky or merely creamy. Now everything thing is super-this or 
extra-that. It either has the consistency of bisque or it can 
only be spread with the aid of powerful road construction 
equipment. The next logical step in the evolution is 
peanut-flavored half-n-half vs. a jar full of those peanut 
fragments you find at the bottom of a bowl of mixed nuts.

This, believe it or not, is a pretty fair analogy for last week's 
Yucca Mountain hearing in Pahrump.

If ever there was an issue that polarizes people, the plan to 
bury 77,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste in Nevada is it. 
The two sides are continuously moving further apart - call it 
super-for and extra-against - and yet somehow the middle ground 
continues to shrink.

Most of the people who went to the podium on Oct. 12 clearly hate 
the idea of building a repository inside what Las Vegas 
Review-Journal reporter Keith Rogers calls "Nye County's most 
famous volcanic-rock ridge." A few others talked about the 
project as if it might just save our lives.

The one thing that seemed to be stuck to roofs of everyone's 
mouths during the hearing - sorry, but peanut butter is my theme, 
and I'll be damned if I'll abandon it after just a few paragraphs 
- was the new threat of terrorism.

Maybe "new" is the wrong word. The subject of sabotage seemed to 
come up at least once at virtually every Yucca Mountain meeting I 
ever have attended (all 6 billion of them), but such comments 
were mostly humored or ignored, never lingered over.

Of course, that was then, this is now - Sept. 11, plus 38. Now 
everyone wants to talk about terrorism, as if the whole world has 
become one huge and enticing target. Perhaps it has. 

Regardless of where they stood on the issue of the repository, 
practically every member of the commenting public made at least 
some reference to terrorism. What was most entertaining was 
listening to people from both sides of the issue use the same 
information and the same speculation to support their very 
different points of view. No kidding. One person would stand up 
and argue that because of the threat of terrorism, the waste 
bound for the repository would never be safe. Then someone else 
would argue that because of the threat of terrorism, the waste 
would never be safe until it was placed in the repository.

As for my own stance on the issue, I have long argued that 
regardless of how any of us feel, Yucca Mountain will be built, 
so we might as well make it worth our while. But even I'll admit 
that grudging resignation hardly counts as an official stance.

The fact is my tastes run somewhere between creamy and chunky. 
And the more Yucca Mountain meetings I attend, the more 
everybody's arguments begin to make sense. (Well, everybody 
except the guy at last week's hearing who referred to Pahrump as 
the "retard capital of the country.")

When someone argues that waste shipments would provide enticing 
targets to terrorists, who could simply set up along the route 
somewhere and let the devastation come to them, I find myself 
nodding in agreement. When someone else argues that the waste - 
and the dozens of reactor sites at which it sits - already 
provides a much better target than a single repository at a 
secure federal site in the middle of nowhere ever could, I think, 
"Yeah, that's true, too."

Lucky for all of you, I'm not making this decision, although the 
people who are don't always inspire much confidence, either.

Ultimately, the choice of whether Yucca Mountain is picked as the 
nation's dumping ground will be made on Capitol Hill. After 
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham recommends it (and he will) and 
state officials respond with a notice of disapproval (trust me, 
they already have it written), it will be up to Congress to pass 
a joint resolution designating the site.

Nevada's congressional delegation will fight their guts out, and 
they might just score a few points thanks to Harry Reid and the 
sort of clout that comes standard issue with title of Senate 
Majority Whip. In the end, though, the resolution will pass, if 
only to justify all the time (almost 15 years) and all the money 
(as much as $8 billion by some accounts) that has been dumped 
into Yucca Mountain so far. The vote will be taken, and that will 
be that.

My hope is that when Yucca Mountain is designated for the 
repository, those who have hotly opposed it all these years - are 
they creamy or chunky? - won't simply go away. The critics will 
be every bit as important as the cheerleaders, perhaps more so, 
as we endeavor to build the safest repository possible. It is the 
people who hate this idea with all of their might who will raise 
the issues and the questions and the doomsday scenarios that 
might just save us all.

With any luck, all this endless argument will never end. After 
all, you can't make the perfect peanut butter without some cream 
and a handful of chunks.

Next week's topic: Too many packets of mixed fruit, not enough 
strawberry - using jelly to explain the hospital issue. 

©Pahrump Valley Times 2001 

Copyright © 1995 - 2001 PowerAdz.com LLC. All Rights Reserved. 
*****************************************************************
*****************************************************************
                     NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARTICLES
*****************************************************************
 1 The Ultimate Hatred Is Nuclear 

October 22, 2001 By BRUCE G. BLAIR ASHINGTON

Bioterrorism, like the anthrax threats currently rattling 
America, is horrific. But perhaps the ultimate horror in our 
newly uncertain world is the prospect of terrorists with nuclear 
weapons. There is no evidence that any terrorist has nuclear 
materials now, but the possibility is serious enough so that the 
government should be heightening security at home by monitoring 
foreign nations' weapons more closely and planning for military 
raids, if necessary, to keep weapons out of the wrong hands.

Sophisticated terrorists would be able to make an atomic bomb if 
they could get the necessary fissile materials — highly enriched 
uranium or plutonium. Huge quantities exist around the world. 
Detonated in Manhattan, a relatively small bomb — say 15 kilotons 
in yield, equivalent to the one used on Hiroshima — could 
immediately kill 100,000 and cause another 100,000 deaths in the 
lingering aftermath.

A terrorist wouldn't even need nuclear bomb materials to wreak 
nuclear havoc on a smaller scale: lethal radioactivity could spew 
out from a bomb made of nuclear waste and dynamite or from a 
nuclear power plant attacked by a hijacked plane or a truckload 
of explosives.

Our first line of defense against nuclear terrorism is at home. 
Security measures around nuclear power plants, like restrictions 
on how close planes may fly to them, are already being reviewed, 
and they should be strengthened as much as possible. But we 
should also immediately impose better inspection and security 
regimes at American seaports. Tens of thousands of cargo 
containers on ships arrive at American ports every day, and given 
the terrorist networks' extensive business ties around the world, 
the potential that one of those containers might carry a nuclear 
device is decidedly too high.

America's actual nuclear arsenal and its fissile materials are 
heavily guarded, but it's important to make sure security is just 
as tight abroad. There has been concern for years about the 
vulnerability of Russian bombs and bomb materials. More than 
1,000 tons of bomb-grade plutonium and uranium remain in the 
former Soviet Union, half stored in its raw form and half inside 
20,000 bombs. The United States is already working with Russia in 
a limited way to secure its nuclear materials and facilities by 
installing fences and surveillance sensors, but only half of the 
needed security improvements have been completed. Congress has 
been balking at continuing to finance this program with $1 
billion a year, while it actually should be spending more. Last 
year, Russia's top security officials urgently sought American 
help in shoring up security at nuclear weapons sites, but 
bureaucratic squabbling between the Defense and Energy 
Departments delayed and diluted the American response. In the 
end, the Russians got little of the help they had sought.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence 
Agency and other American security agencies should be working 
with Russian law enforcement not only against terrorists, but to 
help Russia eliminate organized crime, which could make big 
profits selling nuclear materials to willing buyers.

Even more pressing, given the American military campaign in 
Afghanistan and the angry protests by some Pakistanis against 
their country's cooperation, is ensuring the security of 
Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. Pakistan is estimated to have between 
30 and 50 partially disassembled atomic weapons, from 1 to 15 
kilotons in yield, stored at several locations 50 to 250 miles 
from Afghanistan. If the regime were destabilized or toppled, 
nuclear security would weaken. Moreover, there are radicals 
within the Pakistani government and military forces, and it is 
possible that insiders might collude to steal bombs and add them 
to the arsenal of Osama bin Laden or some other extremist. 
Pakistani weapons are believed to lack sophisticated locks that 
would prevent their unauthorized use.

Besides urging Pakistan to strengthen security where its weapons 
are stored and/or to disable its nuclear devices, the United 
States should be offering to help out by providing security 
equipment and guards. And regardless of the degree of cooperation 
between the two countries, American surveillance and intelligence 
efforts should be aimed at independently keeping track of the 
Pakistani arsenal.

To guard against the worst possibility — Pakistani weapons in the 
hands of our enemies — America should have plans ready to provide 
security without Pakistan's permission, if emergency 
circumstances dictate, and even to take Pakistan's weapons out of 
the country if the need arises. Special operations forces in the 
region should be kept on high alert for quick, covert incursions 
to disable or even relocate the weapons to prevent their capture 
by unauthorized people. Nuclear emergency search teams, which are 
trained in bomb detection and dismantling, should be ready to 
accompany such military operations. The teams, some from Nellis 
Air Force Base in Nevada, know the basic design of Pakistani 
weapons from defectors' reports and could devise disabling 
procedures on the spot.
 
An even better idea might be to get American and Russian 
military-civilian bomb response teams together to conduct search 
and disable missions in Central Asia — and perhaps in Russia 
itself in an emergency. The mutual benefits would be 
considerable, and joint operations to protect everyone against 
nuclear terror could have lasting positive effects on future 
United States- Russian cooperation. Obviously, the elimination of 
nuclear weapons would not eliminate terrorism. But just as 
obviously, the need for nuclear safety and security has never 
been clearer.

Bruce G. Blair is president of the Center for Defense Information

r
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
*****************************************************************
 2  Opinion: Nukes should be option in Afghanistan
NewsMax.com: 

With Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com Staff 
For the story behind the story... 

Sunday, Oct. 21, 2001 10:24 a.m. EDT

Rep. King: Nukes Should Be an Option in Afghanistan New York 
Congressman Peter King said Sunday that the U.S. shouldn't rule 
out the use of tactical nuclear weapons to stop Osama bin Laden 
and Afghanistan's Taliban government from using chemical weapons 
against American troops.

"I would never rule out tactical nuclear weapons if I thought 
they could do the job and if they were needed," King told WABC 
Radio's Steve Malzberg. The conservative Republican said going 
nuclear is "a question of military necessity."

"If the military people said that we think that certain chemical 
weapons are going to be used, we know where they are and the only 
way we can stop their use is by using tactical nuclear weapons -- 
obviously we have to use them," King told Malzberg.

The New York congressman warned that going nuclear "should always 
be a last resort," then added: "But having said that, our 
national security has to come first if that is what would be 
necessary to stop the use of chemical weapons."

King is the second member of Congress to voice support for the 
nuclear option. 

On Thursday, Indiana Republican Stephen Buyer told an Indiana 
television station that if the United States can prove a causal 
link between the recent spate of anthrax-contaminated letters and 
bin Laden's organization, "I would support the use of a limited 
precision tactical nuclear device."

"When there are hardened caves that go back a half a mile," Buyer 
said, "don't send in Special Forces to sweep. We'd be naive to 
think biotoxins are not in there. Put in tactical nuclear devices 
and close these caves for a thousand years." 

King also complained to Malzberg that House Speaker Dennis 
Hastert was double-crossed on Thursday when Senate Majority 
Leader Tom Daschle first agreed to close the Senate, then 
reversed course.

"I was really disgusted by it. ... The fact is that the House 
leadership, Democrat and Republican, were specifically requested 
by the police and by the medical officers to close down our 
office building so they could conduct a full sweep. 

This was part of a biochemical criminal investigation," King told 
Malzberg. "We had no choice. We had to do it." King said that, 
contrary to media reports, the Senate also evacuated its offices 
but Senators were able to use back-up facilities that House 
members don't have. "These guys get secret hideaway offices in 
the Capitol building and that's where they went. We didn't have 
that luxury of going there."

King excoriated the media for painting House members as cowards, 
telling Malzberg, "As far as I know, Tom Brokaw still hasn't 
moved back into his office at 30 Rock." Last week Brokaw's 
assistant opened an anthrax-laden letter that investigators 
believe came from the same source that targeted Congress.

The New York Republican also commented on Sen. Hillary Clinton 
getting booed at Saturday night's Twin Towers benefit concert 
staged by Paul McCartney at New York's Madison Square Garden.

"That wasn't exactly a vote of confidence," King told Malzberg. 

"I would bet a lot of those people who were booing were 
registered Democrats, they were Reagan Democrats. ... It shows 
that people like Hillary Clinton and other Democrats are never 
going to be accepted by the real working people of this city and 
state." Read Steve Malzberg's NewsMax column at 
www.newsmax.com/malzberg. 

NewsMax.com Privacy Statement 
*****************************************************************
 3  Bush and Putin to deny terrorists access to nuclear and 
biological arms 

online.ie : News

The Irish Examiner 22 Oct 2001 

RUSSIA and the United States pledged yesterday to prevent 
nuclear, biological and chemical weapons being used for terrorism 
and to stop money funding those involved. In a joint statement 
released after US President George W Bush and Russian President 
Vladimir Putin held more than an hour of talks, the two nations 
said they would co-operate in many fields in the anti-terrorism 
fight.

The statement also urged the formation of a coalition government 
in Afghanistan, the target of three weeks of US air strikes and 
at least one ground operation.

The coalition should include groups that would bring stability, 
the statement said.

"The presidents of the two countries are fully resolved to 
increase co-operation in the fight against new terrorist threats 
in the nuclear, chemical and biological fields, as well as in the 
field of computers," said the statement, released by the Kremlin 
after the leaders held a news conference in Shanghai.

Mr Bush and Mr Putin came together after participating in a 
weekend summit of leaders from the Asia Pacific Economic 
Co-operation (APEC) grouping.

APEC leaders issued an unprecedented anti-terrorism statement. 
However, the Russian-United States declaration went much further. 
"They agreed to increase bilateral and multi-lateral actions to 
prevent the export and distribution of nuclear, chemical and 
biological materials, the technology connected with them and the 
means for their delivery...," the US-Russian statement said. With 
an anthrax scare sweeping the United States in the wake of the 
launch of the strikes on Afghanistan, the issue of biological and 
chemical warfare has been on the minds of many.

However, it is not clear who is sending letters containing 
anthrax spores in the United States. Mr Bush has said there is no 
firm evidence linking them with Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born 
militant accused of the September 11 suicide attacks on 
Washington and New York. Anthrax is potentially deadly bacteria 
that can be used in germ warfare.

The two leaders said they would strike at the roots of groups 
involved in terrorism by choking off their funding. "The 
presidents agreed that the networks of financing, communications, 
organisational and technological support of terrorist 
organisations should be destroyed," it said, calling on other 
nations to help the United States and Russia in this endeavour.

Russia, a signatory to the international chemical weapons 
convention, has said nations which do not sign the pact are 
promoting terrorism.

Russia itself has the biggest stockpile of chemical weapons, 
inherited from the Soviet Union. It aims to destroy its 40,000 
tonnes of chemical warfare agents by 2012. Russian officials say 
the United States has around 32,000 tonnes of chemical weapons.
*****************************************************************
 4  Secret Trove May Resolve 'Copenhagen' 

October 20, 2001
By JAMES GLANZ

After more than half a century, historians and scientists still 
cannot agree on why the Nazis were never able to develop an 
atomic bomb, or on why the leader of their bomb program, the 
physicist Werner Heisenberg, visited his old mentor Niels Bohr in 
occupied Denmark in 1941.

The uncertainty about that meeting is at the center of the award- 
winning Broadway play "Copenhagen," by the British playwright 
Michael Frayn. Now, partly as a result of the attention generated 
by the play's success last year, the Bohr family plans to release 
previously unpublished, and largely undisclosed, documents by 
Bohr about the meeting, including a strongly worded letter he 
wrote to Heisenberg about it but never sent. 

Historians who have seen the letter hint that it suggests that 
Heisenberg was not quite the hero the play made him out to be. 
But they refuse to provide further details until the formal 
release, expected before the end of this year.

The uncertainty of the play, and the historical record, revolves 
around competing explanations for why Heisenberg went to 
Copenhagen for the meeting. Was he trying to pump Bohr for 
information about the Allied bomb program? Or did Heisenberg want 
to assure Bohr that he would stop the Nazi bomb program if Allied 
scientists agreed not to build one either?

Whatever Heisenberg said, Bohr was so shaken by the meeting that 
he never spoke publicly about it after the war. The answer to 
that question could shed light on why Heisenberg, one of 
history's greatest physicists, winner of the 1932 Nobel prize in 
physics and author of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, never 
succeeded in building atomic weapons for Hitler.

"Copenhagen" leaves those questions unresolved by what Heisenberg 
calls, in the last line of the play, "that final core of 
uncertainty at the heart of things." Also left open is whether 
Heisenberg sabotaged the bomb program, as some historians have 
maintained, or tried his best for Germany and simply did not 
succeed.

But at a conference on the play last month in Copenhagen, the 
Bohr family unexpectedly announced that it would release 11 
unpublished documents written by Bohr about the meeting. Those 
documents include what is said to be an angry letter that Bohr, 
who fled Denmark in 1943 and joined the Manhattan Project in the 
United States, wrote to Heisenberg after the war but never sent.

"The Bohr family has come to regard speculation about the content 
of this material as more harmful than its actual release," said 
Dr. Finn Aaserud, director of the Niels Bohr Archive in 
Copenhagen, who is a spokesman for the family. He said the 
release would probably take place by year's end. 

The existence of that letter became generally known only last 
year at a conference on the play held at the Graduate Center of 
the City University of New York. There, Dr. Gerald Holton, an 
emeritus professor of physics and of history of science at 
Harvard, revealed that the Bohr family asked him and two others, 
now dead, to look at the letter in the 1980's and make 
recommendations on how to deal with it.

"We were all three of us astounded by the letter," Dr. Holton 
said in an interview, adding that the others were Abraham Pais, a 
physicist and historian, and McGeorge Bundy, an adviser to 
Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

Dr. Holton, who urged the family to preserve the document for 
history, said he would not reveal its precise contents before the 
impending release. But he speculated that the usually soft-spoken 
Bohr had decided not to send the letter because of its stiff 
language.

The letter contains "the missing part of the whole story," Dr. 
Holton said elliptically. The documents may be the last way to 
learn more about the meeting, since Bohr died in 1962 and 
Heisenberg in 1976. Mr. Frayn has said his play was inspired by 
"Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb," a 1993 
book by the journalist Thomas Powers, who maintained that 
Heisenberg threw the bomb program off course so that Hitler would 
not have atomic weapons.

In an interview, Mr. Powers said he believed Heisenberg traveled 
to Copenhagen to offer a quid pro quo: German scientists would 
not build a bomb if Allied scientists did not, either. "It was a 
crazy idea but a brilliant idea," Mr. Powers said.

Others are angered by the play and by Mr. Powers's book, saying 
that Heisenberg's attempt to play down his efforts for Hitler 
after the war may have been what upset Bohr.

"If you sup with the devil, you'd better have a long spoon," said 
Dr. Jeremy Bernstein, a theoretical physicist and author of 
"Hitler's Uranium Club," a 2001 book on secret recordings of 
Heisenberg and other members of the bomb program. "Those people 
collaborated with a vile regime."

Mr. Frayn said in an interview that he was well aware that some 
historians already believed there was no uncertainty at all about 
why Heisenberg went to Copenhagen.

"The only thing that reassures me slightly is when they then go 
on to say exactly the explanation they're certain of," Mr. Frayn 
said, "and it turns out to be mostly different from the 
explanation that somebody else is certain of."

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company | Privacy Information  
*****************************************************************
 5  Security at DOE nuclear facilities lax, study says

KnoxNews: Sci/tech
 		 		
By LES BLUMENTHAL
 
        Over the past several years, mock terrorist attacks on 
Department of Energy nuclear facilities, including some led by 
Navy SEALs, have succeeded more than half of the time, according 
to a new study by a watchdog group that warned the department 
urgently needed to improve its security forces. 

        The eight-month study, based on reports from more than a 
dozen whistleblowers and unclassified documents, was undergoing 
its final edit when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center 
and the Pentagon on Sept. 11. 

        Energy Department officials have said security at DOE 
sites has been beefed up since the attacks, though they decline 
to provide any details. 

        But a spokesman for the Project on Government Oversight, 
said the study's conclusion - that the department's weapons 
complex was vulnerable to terrorist attack - was as valid now as 
before Sept. 11. 

        "These problems don't get fixed overnight," said Eric 
Miller, a spokesman for the non-partisan, non-profit Washington, 
D.C., group that since 1981 has kept an eye on government 
departments and agencies. "We believe these sites are still 
vulnerable." 

        In one force-on-force drill, the study said Navy SEALs 
were able to make a hole in a chain-link fence surrounding the 
department's Rocky Flats complex near Denver and steal enough 
plutonium to build several nuclear bombs. The SEALs, the Navy's 
elite commando force, were discovered only as they we leaving. 

        During one drill at Los Alamos, mock terrorists gained 
control of sufficient nuclear materials that if detonated would 
have endangered major parts of New Mexico, Colorado and other 
downwind areas. 

        During another exercise at Los Alamos, U.S. Army Special 
Forces, using a Home Depot garden cart, were able to steal enough 
weapons grade uranium to construct numerous nuclear weapons. 

        The study also found that in six of seven exercises in 
late 1998, forces from the department's Transportation Security 
Division failed to protect the nuclear cargo they were guarding 
because they had "inadequate weapons and insufficient numbers, as 
well as poorly conceived tactics." The Transportation Security 
Division moves nuclear weapons, along with weapons-grade 
plutonium and uranium, from one department site to another using 
public highways. 

        While the study said the department had addressed the 
vulnerabilities found in the mock attacks, problems persist. 

        "New as well as recurring vulnerabilities continue to 
plague DOE's nuclear security program," the study said. 

        As the Cold War wound down, the study said, the number of 
security forces at the department's weapons sites have been cut 
by 40 percent, from 5,640 in 1992 to about 3,500 today, while the 
inventory of weapons-grade material has increased by 30 percent. 

        "The increase has resulted from the dismantling of 
nuclear weapons and the receipt of nuclear materials from the 
former Soviet Union," the study said. "During the same time the 
threat of terrorism has increased." 

        "An issue that exacerbates security problems is the age 
of these sites and the decay of infrastructure," the study said. 
"Oak Ridge, Savannah River, Hanford and Los Alamos, for example, 
were all built for the Manhattan Project in the 1940s. The 
isolated location of these sites made sense at the time for 
safety and security reasons. Now, population growth and more 
mobility have made a number of the sites extremely difficult to 
protect." 

        Charlene Pugh, a spokeswoman for the department's 
National Nuclear Security Administration, declined to comment on 
the study's findings. Pugh added, however, that since Sept. 11 
security has been increased. 

        The study said the best way to avoid problems would be to 
consolidate all the nuclear materials at several more easily 
protected sites, such as an underground munitions storage complex 
at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico or the highly secure 
Device Assembly Facility at the Nevada test site. 

        The study also suggested an independent agency outside 
DOE be created to 

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.) October 21, 2001  

The Knoxville News-Sentinel Co. All Rights Reserved. 
*****************************************************************
 6  Despite award-winning detector, ORNL team gets pittance in new DOE dollars

KnoxNews: Sci/tech

By Frank Munger

Wayne Griest is pleased and proud of his team's work at Oak Ridge 
National Laboratory, but a little bit of anger kept riding to the 
surface during an interview last week. 

"We can sure feel the urgency," Griest said in response to 
questions about research in the wake of recent terrorist attacks, 
"but it hasn't translated into funding dollars." 

Griest heads ORNL's program that develops advanced detectors for 
chemical and biological warfare agents, and he's rightly proud of 
the Block II Chemical Biological Mass Spectrometer. 

The Block II is the first integrated instrument to detect both 
chemical and biological agents. The ORNL device was honored with 
an R 100 Award as one of the year's top inventions. 

A California company is now manufacturing 14 "pre-production" 
units for the U.S. Army, which will use them to certify 
capabilities in the field and make last-minute changes before 
sanctioning full-scale production. 

The Block II is the culmination of a five-year, $45 million 
research effort sponsored by the Army. 

But there's more to be done, improvements to be made. New and 
better detectors will be needed to meet the challenge of 
terrorist threats not yet faced. Griest said research programs 
already are in place at ORNL to develop the next generation of 
chem-bio detectors, but the Oak Ridge effort is being stymied by 
politics within the U.S. Department of Energy. 

"We've got a workable device and we have the technology to take 
it to the next level to vastly improve its capabilities," Griest 
said. 

Nonetheless, Oak Ridge was virtually left out of a "huge plus-up" 
in congressional funding for DOE's Chem-Bio Non-Proliferation 
Program, he said. "There is $63 million in their plus-up, and do 
you know how much Oak Ridge gets? $2 million. It's all going to 
the Western labs." 

He pointed the finger at Los Alamos and Sandia National 
Laboratories in New Mexico and Lawrence Livermore National 
Laboratory in California. 

"They're making like bandits in the program," Griest said. 

This, of course, is a familiar Oak Ridge refrain. 

For decades, scientists and administrators at ORNL have 
complained about a not-so-level playing field among the 
government's national laboratories. The Western labs, with deep 
roots in the nuclear weapons program, have long exerted a 
powerful pull on funding sources in Washington. That apparently 
is no different today, even in the post-Cold War era. 

But now is not a good time to be playing favorites with federal 
research dollars, Griest said. 

"Petty politics is not in the interest of the country," he said. 

One can't help but notice the warning signs during a visit to 
ORNL's Chem-Bio Facility. They're everywhere. 

But just outside the closet-sized lab where tests are conducted 
with chemical warfare agents, there is a curious row of three 
pouches on the wall. Each pouch contains cylinders numbered "1" 
and "2." 

"Those are nerve-agent antidotes," Griest said, when asked about 
the unusual wall hangings. 

They are there as an emergency precaution, as required by the 
U.S. Army. If an Oak Ridge scientist were severely exposed to the 
nerve agent, he or she would take the injections - 1, then 2. 

"Considering the small volumes, the dilute solutions that we 
have, I doubt if we'll ever have use for them," Griest said. 

In fact, if the Oak Ridge lab ever had an incident in which there 
was such an exposure, the facility probably would be closed 
forever, he said. 

"We pride ourselves on no accidents, no spills, no incidents," 
Griest said. "We just do our work." 

Senior writer Frank Munger can be reached at 482-9213 or by 
e-mail at twig1@knoxnews.infi.net. This weekly column on science 
and technology also is available on our Web site at 
http://www.knoxnews.com/science/munger/. 

*****************************************************************
 7  Afghanistan: Nuclear Terrorism Poses Questionable Threat
 
 By Tony Wesolowsky

 Has suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda network 
acquired the materials necessary to construct a nuclear device? 
The U.S. government accuses bin Laden of trying for years to do 
just that. A U.S. federal indictment charges that Al-Qaeda tried 
to buy bomb-making components as early as 1993. Others believe 
Al-Qaeda has attempted to buy ready-made nuclear warheads on the 
black market. How realistic is it to think that terrorists 
possess a nuclear capability?

 Prague, 19 October 2001 (RFE/RL) -- In 1998, members of Osama 
bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network approached separatist rebels in 
Russia's breakaway republic of Chechnya. Al-Qaeda offered the 
rebels $30 million and two tons of drugs. In return, Al-Qaeda 
would receive 20 nuclear warheads the Chechen rebels had captured 
from Russian military installations. The deal was never 
consummated. Russia's Federal Security Bureau, or FSB, reportedly 
foiled the plan.

 This chilling tale is recounted by Friedrich Steinhausler, an 
arms control expert who is now at Stanford University's Center 
for Security and Cooperation in the U.S. state of California. The 
story, Steinhausler says, doesn't end there.

 He says European security authorities are now investigating 
alleged attempts by Russian organized criminal groups to sell 
radioactive materials to Al-Qaeda earlier this year: "The current 
situation is best described by the attempts to involve Russian 
organized crime in acquiring radioactive material. And such 
negotiations between representatives of Al-Qaeda and a prominent 
member of the Russian mafia supposedly have taken place [in 2001] 
in Spain in Europe, and this event is being investigated by 
several European security organizations."

 Steinhausler says the first serious attempt by Al-Qaeda to 
acquire nuclear materials took place in 1993. According to 
Steinhausler, the go-between for bin Laden was a Sudanese man, 
Jamel Ahmed Al-Fadl, who described himself as a former aid to bin 
Laden. Al-Fadl now lives with his wife and children in the U.S. 
under the federal witness protection program. "The result of 
multiple clandestine meetings with middlemen between Al-Fadl, 
representative of Al-Qaeda, resulted in a meeting with a former 
Sudanese military officer who offered fissile material supposedly 
contained in a container 60 to 90 centimeters long with multiple 
writings on it, among them, reportedly, the words 'South 
Africa,'" Steinhausler says.

 Steinhausler says Al-Fadl received $10,000 for his intermediary 
role, but it is not clear whether the uranium purchase ever 
occurred.

 In 1994, police in Prague arrested three men carrying almost 3 
kilograms of highly enriched uranium, which was allegedly 
smuggled out of the former Soviet Union. Steinhausler says this 
nuclear heist is believed to have been organized by a web of 
mafia groups operating in the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Belarus, 
Ukraine, and Germany and may also have been tied to bin Laden.

 And while Steinhausler says the 1998 nuclear smuggling operation 
in Chechnya was broken up by the Russian FSB, others aren't so 
sure. A report published earlier this year in 
Geostrategy-Direct.com newsletter -- edited by "Washington Times" 
reporters Bill Gertz and Robert Morton -- claimed that bin's 
Laden's possession of nuclear devices is no longer in doubt. The 
report says Russian intelligence sources believe bin Laden has a 
handful of tactical nuclear weapons received from Chechen rebels 
who raided Russian nuclear installations.

 As late as 1991, more than 50,000 nuclear devices were scattered 
over 500 sites in the former Soviet republics and in Eastern 
Europe. Most analysts say Russia has made great strides toward 
consolidating most of them and removing nuclear weapons from 
unstable parts of the country, such as the north Caucasus, but 
fears persist. Economic collapse has meant little funding to 
maintain and protect nuclear facilities. Employees at Russian 
nuclear installations are often poorly paid.

 The Japanese Aum Shirinkyo cult, the architects of a deadly 
nerve-gas attack in the Tokyo subway in 1995, are believed to 
have attempted to buy a nuclear warhead on the Russian black 
market. A Moscow news report ["Literaturnaya Gazeta"] claimed 
that the extremist Palestinian group Islamic Jihad, shortly after 
the collapse of the Soviet Union, sent a letter to the Federal 
Nuclear Research Center offering to buy a single atomic weapon.

 And Rensselaer Lee at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in 
Washington, D.C., says Russian managers at top-secret defense 
plants offered plutonium for sale to visiting scientists. Lee -- 
the author of "Smuggling Armageddon: The Nuclear Black Market in 
the Former Soviet Union and Europe" -- says the Russian Foreign 
Intelligence Service reportedly masterminded the delivery of 
almost a pound of plutonium oxide from Moscow to Munich in August 
1994.

 Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent Moscow-based defense analyst, 
scoffs at reports that Osama bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda network 
have tried to acquire nuclear materials in Russia: "All 
investigations for the last 10 years and all reports of possible 
loose Russian nukes turned out to be unsubstantiated. There are 
many [such stories]."

 Felgenhauer says that if Al-Qaeda does, indeed, possess nuclear 
materials, they most likely came from Pakistan, the only country 
that recognizes Afghanistan's ruling Taliban, which has been 
sheltering bin Laden.

 David Kyd is a spokesman for the International Atomic Energy 
Agency, the UN-affiliated nuclear watchdog group. Kyd points out 
that even if Al-Qaeda did acquire nuclear material, building a 
bomb would be extremely difficult.

 "Could you build one? Well, that's a very challenging and 
expensive and time-consuming proposition. You need 8 kilograms of 
plutonium or 25 kilograms of highly enriched uranium. That's a 
large quantity, not easy to come by."

 He says terrorists are more likely to opt for chemical or 
biological weapons: "I think I would be more tempted by quicker, 
simpler, cheaper, safer options, like chemical or biological. 
Chemicals, for instance, are easy to come by -- and substances 
that are banal [harmless], when combined, can have a devastating 
effect -- psychologically and also for public health. So I'm not 
sure if nuclear or radiological weapons -- that is, things that 
are radioactive but not fissile, like plutonium and highly 
enriched uranium -- I'm not sure they're on the top of a 
terrorist's list."

 But terrorists groups may not have completely ruled out the 
nuclear option. As of September 1999, the International Atomic 
Energy Agency has recorded more than 150 reports of illegal 
trafficking of nuclear material. Agency spokesman Kyd says: 
"Since 1999, there have been over 150 cases -- confirmed cases -- 
of seizures of radioactive materials on the black market. Of 
those -- and that's somewhat reassuring, but not totally -- six 
have involved nuclear weapon-grade material. In other words, 
highly enriched uranium or plutonium."

 According to Kyd, of the six serious cases, five occurred in the 
former Soviet bloc, including Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Latvia, and 
along the Bulgarian-Romanian border. In April 2000, Georgian 
police seized several hundred reactor-fuel pellets containing a 
total of 920 grams of enriched uranium.

 For years, officials in the U.S. and elsewhere have been warning 
that terrorist groups may some day acquire weapons capable of 
great devastation -- biological, chemical, or nuclear. In 1998, 
former CIA Director John Deutch and other officials in the 
Clinton administration warned that "catastrophic terrorism has 
moved from far-fetched horror to a contingency that could happen 
next month."

 After the events of 11 September, little seems far-fetched 
anymore.
 
   © 1995-2001 Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, Inc., All 
Rights Reserved. http://www.rferl.org 
*****************************************************************
 8  Training against terror / Nevada Test Site now boot camp for rescuers 

Monday, October 22, 2001 
  
Mercury, Nev. -- This rugged desert landscape, scarred by decades 
of bomb testing during the Cold War, is poised to once again 
become a wartime training ground - - this time in America's new 
battle against terrorism. 

Here, fake bad guys blow up a tanker truck full of nuclear waste 
or dump deadly bacteria into sewer systems. In planned scenarios, 
police officers, firefighters and emergency medical personnel 
from around the country learn how best to respond to catastrophic 
acts that aren't that unimaginable anymore. The isolated Nevada 
Test Site -- where 300-foot-wide craters mark the spots scorched 
by the 928 bombs exploded here between 1951 and 1992 -- has for 
the past two years quietly served as a boot camp for the fire, 
police and medical personnel who become the front line seconds 
after a terrorist attack. 

Now, plans to greatly expand the program are under way as 
federal, state and local officials realize their defenses are 
woefully underfunded and undertrained. 

"The Cold War is over, but we now have a new war to unfortunately 
deal with. That's why we're here," said Jim Barrett, a senior 
adviser at the test site who manages anti-terrorism programs. 

Even in the Bay Area, where natural disasters like the Loma 
Prieta earthquake and the Oakland hills fire prompted the state 
and local governments to beef up their emergency preparedness 
programs, officials admit they need more help in readying for an 
assault on a target like the Golden Gate Bridge or an oil 
refinery. 

Those terrifying scenarios are dissected every day on U.S. 
Department of Energy land in Nevada through a course with an 
inauspicious name: Weapons of Mass Destruction Terrorism Response 
Domestic Preparedness Program. 

Last week two armed terrorists seized control of a nuclear power 
plant, taking hostages. As a police sniper gunned down one of the 
perpetrators, a SWAT team blew open a door to the plant and 
stormed the building. 

Just as the second terrorist was captured and the hostages were 
secured, a bomb went off, sending smoke spewing from the building 
and raising concerns that radiation was spilling into the air. A 
hazardous materials team -- dressed in fully insulated moon suits 
-- responded with inflatable decontamination showers. 

Program trainers like to throw new problems into the mix as 
situations unfold, said James Sudderth, a former member of the 
U.S. Army's elite Delta Force who now helps run the program. 

"We want to drive the stress level up here, so that they're 
prepared to work under intense pressure when it's real," he said. 

Graduates of the program say the emphasis on realism is crucial. 

"Every 15 to 20 minutes something new happened, and we had to 
handle the news media. It was as realistic as you could get," 
said Bob Navarro, chief of special operations for the San 
Francisco Fire Department, who attended the program earlier this 
year. 

About 90 minutes northwest of Las Vegas, the Nevada Test Site is 
1,350 square miles of parched earth. 

The remains of the U.S. military's nuclear testing program are 
intermixed with low-growing creosote brush and jagged mountain 
ranges. Bits and pieces of debris from bombs dropped by air or 
detonated underground can be spotted like seashells on a beach. 

About 1,500 people representing fire department hazardous 
materials teams, police bomb squad units and emergency services 
managers have come here for training in the past two years. 

The program's teachers know what they're talking about: Along 
with Sudderth, they're ex-Navy Seals and military officers, as 
well as the former Las Vegas fire chief and a longtime captain 
with the New York Police Department. Also on staff is a Russian 
doctor who worked in Chernobyl after the nuclear meltdown there. 

Students work with high-tech gizmos that can detect radiation 
levels or determine whether a substance is pepper spray or sarin 
gas. Local first responders aren't the only ones who have visited 
the test site for training. 

In one frighteningly prescient project developed earlier this 
year, teachers here built a simulated anthrax lab and challenged 
federal anti- terrorism officers to sleuth around the site, 
determine what was being produced inside and disable the 
operation. 

"These are scenarios that we've been thinking about for years," 
said John Spahn, who oversees the hazardous materials program. 
"Now they're coming true." That reality is likely to launch a 
once obscure program into the spotlight. 

In the weeks after the worst terrorist attack in the country's 
history, Nevada Sen. Harry Reid has proposed creating the 
National Center for Counterterrorism here. Reid, a Democrat, has 
talked with the Bush administration about increasing funding at 
the site from $7 million annually to more than $60 million. 

Reid has pitched his plan directly to U.S. Secretary of Energy 
Spencer Abraham, whose department oversees the site. 

"What we envision is a Top Gun for first responders," said Reid 
spokesman Nathan Naylor, referring to the U.S. Navy's famed 
school for fighter pilots. San Francisco has benefited from some 
federal funds aimed at preparing cities for terrorism, and the 
city does have a terrorism task force that includes the fire 
department's hazardous materials team, the police department's 
bomb squad and public health toxicology officials. The task force 
has developed specific strategies for what to do if likely 
targets are struck. 

But the fire department's Navarro, who heads the task force, said 
more was needed. 

"We're 98 percent planned, 75 percent trained and about 35 
percent equipped, " he said, noting a giant wish list of supplies 
he'd like to have, including more portable decontamination 
showers and better communications systems. 

Other Bay Area emergency services managers echoed Navarro, saying 
they had some plans for terrorist attacks, some equipment and 
some training, but not enough. For that, a Nevada desert that 
took a beating for its country during the Cold War may find a 
bigger use again. 

©2001 San Francisco Chronicle   Page A - 1 
*****************************************************************
 9  Columbia River Corridor Phased Closure Contract Draft Request For 
Proposals Now Available

energy.gov - Headquarters' Press Release

RELEASE DATE: October 19, 2001                                                  [Print Friendly Version]

PG is Key Participant --->       

WASHINGTON, DC - The draft Request for Proposals (RFP) for the 
acquisition of a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Phased Closure 
Contract to accelerate restoration work along the Columbia River 
at the Hanford Site is now available. The DOE Richland Operations 
Office (DOE-RL) announced its availability today in the Federal 
Business Opportunities publication (www.fedbizopps.gov). 

"This is a critical step in our strategy to accelerate cleanup 
along the river and dramatically shrink the Hanford Site 
operational area by 2012," said Secretary of Energy Spencer 
Abraham. "This action also demonstrates that Hanford has risen to 
the challenge of getting the job of cleanup done sooner and in a 
more cost effective manner – which is good for the environment, 
good for the community and good for taxpayers." 

The draft RFP includes several unique features: 
	
  + Pays significant fees with potential for substantially more 
work, commensurate with assumption of risks and superior 
performance;         

  + Makes the work scope, including business roles, as clear as 
possible;       

  + Takes steps to make it easier and more predictable to do work 
at Hanford;   

  + Incorporates the opportunity and time for offerors to fully 
understand what they are getting into;  

  + Includes selection criteria that emphasize project management 
skills, key personnel, planned corporate involvement in the 
project and contractor assumption of risk, rather than specific 
DOE experience;        

  + Reduces the need for personnel with existing Hanford River 
Corridor cleanup experience for bid preparation; and     

  + Actively seeks ideas on how to better utilize commercial best 
practices in order to stimulate offerors who may not currently be 
involved in Hanford cleanup or are not doing business with the 
department, but who have successful experience with other 
agencies or Superfund cleanups. 

The work associated with the Columbia River Corridor Closure 
Contract includes interim safe storage or "cocooning" of six 
former plutonium production reactors, demolition of associated 
reactor structures, remediation of waste sites and demolition of 
aging buildings in Hanford's 100 and 300 Areas. 

A copy of the draft RFP along with associated questions and 
answers is available at www.hanford.gov/procure/solicit/rcc/and 
in the Hanford Reading Room at http://reading-room.pnl.gov/. 
DOE-RL is inviting comments on the draft RFP through November 14, 
2001. 

DOE-RL intends to issue the final RFP on January 23, 2002 and to 
award the contract no later than October 1, 2002. Media Contact:  
Thomas Welch, 202/ 586-5806 Release No. R-01-182 
*****************************************************************
 10  Bechtel National to Eliminate Last SS-24 Nuclear ICBM Missile 
Silo Site In The Ukraine
                                        
Monday October 22, 1:04 pm Eastern Time
Press Release

SOURCE: Bechtel National, Inc. Bechtel National to Eliminate Last 
SS-24 Nuclear ICBM Missile Silo Site In The Ukraine
 
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 22 /PRNewswire/ -- Bechtel National, Inc. 
(BNI) will dismantle and eliminate the last remaining SS-24 
Nuclear Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) Silo Site in 
Ukraine on October 30, marking the end in another chapter of the 
Cold War. The elimination of this facility will take place in 
Pervomaysk, Ukraine, located approximately 400 kilometers south 
of the capital, Kiev.

This historic event is part of the Cooperative Threat Reduction 
(CTR) Program mission to convert former active military sites to 
sunflower fields and forests. The CTR Program is performed under 
the direction of the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Defense 
Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), and the Ukraine Ministry of 
Defense under the terms of the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks 
Treaty.

BNI was awarded the SS-24 ICBM dismantlement contract in June 
1998. Under the contract BNI was responsible for removal of the 
missiles from their silos, defueling and partially neutralizing 
them, repairing and maintaining a variety of infrastructure and 
special handling equipment, transporting the missiles to transfer 
stations, loading them onto special railway cars, and 
transporting quantities of liquid rocket fuel and oxidizers.

Among the types of missile facilities destroyed at the Pervomaysk 
site are hardened launch control silos; several administration 
buildings; standby power, refrigeration, and security 
installations; fuel and underground water storage tanks; security 
fences; connecting tunnels, and a variety of buried utility 
components.

In keeping with Bechtel's ``zero accident'' policy, the BNI 
Ukraine CTR Project Team and its Ukrainian Subcontractor 
personnel have worked over 7.6 million safe job hours to date 
under BNI's management. The BNI Ukraine CTR Project Team invested 
many years to develop a safety program and train its on-site 
Ukrainian Subcontractors workforce.

``We are excited to be part of such a historic event and are 
proud of our continued involvement in the CTR Program,'' said BNI 
President Tom Hash. A September 2002 completion date is scheduled 
for the technical site restoration activities for the last two 
remaining SS-24 Missile Regiments in Pervomaysk, which each 
include 16 SS-24 missile silos and one launch control silo. These 
sites will be then transferred by the Ukraine MoD to the local 
Ukraine Oblast authorities where they will be used for either 
agricultural or forestation purposes.

Bechtel Work History In The Ukraine:

Some of BNI's prior projects in the former Soviet Union include 
the dismantlement of 130 missile silos of the SS-19 type, also in 
the Ukraine; a chemical weapons destruction program in Russia; 
the construction of a storage facility for a stockpile of fissile 
material formerly contained in Russia's nuclear arsenal; the 
design and construction of a testing and training center to 
support security upgrades at 123 nuclear weapons storage sites in 
Russia; and a logistical support assignment that involved a 
variety of CTR facilities in the Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, 
and Russia. Currently, BNI also is involved in an effort to clean 
up, decommission, and stabilize the damaged Unit 4 reactor 
building of the Ukraine's Chornobyl nuclear power station. 
SOURCE: Bechtel National, Inc. 

   Copyright © 2001 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved. Privacy 
*****************************************************************
 11    150 arrests at anti-nuclear demonstration  

Ananova - 

One hundred and fifty protesters have been arrested as 
anti-nuclear activists attempt to blockade Britain's largest 
trident submarine port.
 
The leader of the Scottish Socialist Party, Tommy Sheridan, was 
among the first to be led away outside the Faslane Naval Base on 
the Clyde.
 
SNP MSP Lloyd Quinan, Irish Green MEP Patricia McKenna and two 
Church of Scotland ministers have also been led away by police.
 
As he was arrested, Mr Sheridan said: "We would much rather the 
police officers were deployed in more socially useful work this 
morning.
 
"Nuclear weapons have no place in the 21st century. We should be 
channeling resources towards pensioners, the homeless and 
fighting the war against poverty which are a scar on Scottish 
society."
 
He added: "No-one at this demonstration has acted in anything 
other than a peaceful fashion.
 
"We are here to campaign in peace and can't understand why we are 
subjected to mass arrests."
 
The protest's organisers said their cause had been given 
"additional sharpness" by the September 11 terrorist attacks on 
the United States and the bombing of Afghanistan.
 
Brian Quail, joint secretary of CND Scotland, said: "We could be 
on the brink of a civil war in Pakistan and who knows what's 
going to happen in Afghanistan? So really, this demonstration has 
come at a very poignant time.
 
"No matter what happens, we will continue to vehemently oppose 
these barbaric and inhumane weapons of mass destruction."
 
Story filed: 13:18 Monday 22nd October 2001 RELATED STORIES: + 
Parliament protester found guilty 16:39 Monday 27th August 2001 + 
Woman denies Scottish parliament protest charge 14:40 Monday 27th 
August 2001 + More related stories CHECK FOR MORE ON: + Crime + 
Protests + Nuclear weapons + Politics + UK NEWS BY EMAIL AND WAP 
ON: + Law and order INTERACTIVE: + E-mail this story to a friend


                  Copyright © 2001 Ananova Ltd Terms and 
*****************************************************************
 12  SMU scientists to help monitor atmosphere for sound of nuclear 
blasts 

The Dallas Morning News: Science
 
  Listen up: 


10/22/2001 
By ALEXANDRA WITZE / The Dallas Morning News 

In the struggle for international security, scientists are 
turning an ear to the skies. 

A new collection of electronic ears is cropping up around the 
world. The devices listen to the air for doomsday reverberations 
 the low-frequency sound waves generated by nuclear explosions, 
among other phenomena. Dallas scientists will help use this new 
global array to monitor atomic explosions. The listening 
technique, which was popular in the 1950s and 1960s, is 
undergoing a renaissance as 60 new stations are installed around 
the planet. Southern Methodist University is building two of the 
stations, on Wake and Midway islands in the Pacific Ocean. 

Listening for the low-frequency sounds, called infrasound, may be 
the best way to detect a nuclear bomb exploding in the 
atmosphere, scientists think. 

"For the first time ever, we're putting these listening posts 
worldwide," says Michael Hedlin, an infrasound researcher who is 
installing two of the new stations. 

Their function is to listen for secret nuclear tests, but they 
may also pick up other atmospheric happenings. One new infrasound 
station in Manitoba, Canada, even heard the acoustic rumbles 
created when the World Trade Center towers collapsed Sept. 11. 

"We're just in the early stages of listening to the atmosphere 
and learning what we can hear from it," says Dr. Hedlin, of the 
Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. 

The array, built to detect humanity's greatest menace, may also 
reveal nature's acoustical beauty. At infrasound frequencies, 
hurricanes rumble across the ocean, tornadoes cry out at birth, 
and meteors wail through the skies. This roaring cacophony lies 
just below the level of human hearing. 

The official goal of the stations is to monitor the Comprehensive 
Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, whose enforcement depends on 
ratification by all 44 nuclear nations that helped draw it up. So 
far, only 31 of the nations have done so, with the United States 
and China being prominent exceptions. Still, scientists are 
moving ahead with plans to monitor the treaty. 

Toward that goal, four separate networks are being set up 
worldwide. The seismic network  for which SMU also runs two 
stations  listens to the ground for shaking caused by an 
underground explosion. The infrasound network will try to detect 
atmospheric blasts. The hydroacoustic network, made of underwater 
microphones, will listen for blasts in the ocean or on small 
islands. And the radionuclide stations will look for telltale 
chemical residues left by a nuclear explosion. 

The system is meant to keep countries honest about their nuclear 
weapon capabilities. 

"It's not perfect, but it's a deterrent," says Brian Stump, an 
SMU geophysicist and expert on the treaty. 

As the atomic age dawned in the 1940s, the United States set up 
the first seismic and infrasound networks to monitor the Soviet 
Union. In 1949, those infrasound stations picked up the first 
Soviet atomic blast. The network even detected infrasound that 
traveled around the world several times after a 1961 Soviet test. 

Infrasound can travel thousands of miles because it is not 
absorbed by the atmosphere as readily as higher frequency sounds. 
Sound waves below 20 hertz are considered infrasound; humans can 
hear between roughly 20 hertz and 20,000 hertz. 

After nuclear testing moved underground in the early 1960s, there 
was little point in listening to the air. Funding and interest in 
infrasound withered. 

"It was a very lonely field," says Alfred Bedard of the National 
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colo. 

Still, Dr. Bedard continued to listen for infrasound, looking for 
ways to predict tornadoes or to automatically shut mountain roads 
in case of an avalanche. He even translated some of the 
subaudible frequencies into audible levels. A meteor, he says, 
sounds like a swish; an avalanche like a squeaky door. 

"You hear whistles and chirps and whoops," he says. "It was 
unbelievably fascinating." 

Meanwhile, SMU researchers led by Eugene Herrin set up their own 
infrasound array near McKinney, but the project faded for a lack 
of new technologies and interest. 

By the early 1990s, arms-reduction experts were beginning to 
worry again about above-ground testing. In 1996, the United 
Nations adopted the worldwide ban on testing, and scientists 
began talking about different ways to monitor it. 

The United States, which could see atmospheric blasts with its 
spy satellites, didn't want to share that data, says Henry Bass, 
head of the consortium that is installing the U.S. stations. So 
international officials agreed to set up the new $100 million 
infrasound array. 

U.S. participation "is our way of showing we were aboveboard," 
says Dr. Bass, director of the National Center for Physical 
Acoustics at the University of Mississippi. 

The United States is responsible for eight stations on U.S. 
territory, plus a handful of "orphan" stations on places like 
Ascension Island. Each can cost $500,000 to $2 million to build, 
depending on how remote the site is. The United States pays about 
half the cost of the stations on its territory, says Dr. Bass, 
while the Vienna-based Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty 
Organization pays the rest. 

Two U.S. stations, in Hawaii and in the California desert, are 
already running. One U.S.-managed station in Antarctica should be 
ready by January, and two in Alaska and in Washington by next 
summer. A second Antarctic station run by the United States may 
take several more years, because the equipment must be placed on 
an island in a bay that is frozen most of the time. 

SMU's work on the Wake and Midway island stations is in the early 
stages. The Midway station should be finished by the end of 2002, 
and the Wake station by the summer of 2003, says Paul Golden, 
director of SMU's Geophysical Research Program. 

The SMU group has already tested infrasound at sites in West 
Texas and Nevada. The West Texas infrasound array detected a 
notable meteorite that fell in Monahans in 1998, and the pipeline 
explosion that killed 11 people in southeastern New Mexico last 
August, says Dr. Herrin. 

Dr. Herrin is studying ways to filter out wind noise at the 
infrasound stations. Meanwhile, Dr. Stump studies how to 
discriminate between mining explosions and nuclear blasts. 
Outside the nuclear-test-ban program, his team has set up 
stations across the American Southwest, plus a station at the 
northern edge of South Korea  officially to listen for mining 
blasts and natural seismicity. 

Discriminating between sources of infrasound is one of the 
project's biggest challenges. 

Man-made sources include rocket launches and the space shuttle. 
But "nature is much better at producing these low-frequency 
sounds than we are," says Dr. Bedard. Natural sources include 
storms, meteors, volcanoes, avalanches, earthquakes, and animals 
such as elephants talking to each other. 

Dr. Bedard's array, along with several others, caught the sound 
of a meteor exploding over the Pacific Ocean on April 23, plus 
another such explosion in August 2000. By monitoring the rates at 
which such large meteors hit the atmosphere, Dr. Bedard says, 
scientists can better understand how frequently Earth is pelted 
with space rocks. Ten meteors may hit the atmosphere every year 
with the power of a 1-kiloton nuclear blast, estimates suggest. 

So although the new infrasound array was set up for political 
purposes, scientists will also benefit, says Dr. Bass. Never 
before have researchers had such a worldwide flood of infrasound 
data. "It has tremendous scientific value," he says. 

"We're being given the opportunity to hold in our hands a tool 
that nobody has imagined before."File --> FILE --> The world's 
first atomic blast: New Mexico, 1945 --> 
*****************************************************************
 13  Uranium seized in France could have made low- grade bomb - 

October 22, 2001
 
Posted: 10:14 PM (Manila Time) | October 21, 2001
Agence France-Presse
 		 		 			
PARIS - French authorities confirmed that five grams of Uranium 
235 seized in Paris in July are highly radioactive and could have 
been used to produce a low-grade bomb, according to experts cited 
by a French newspaper on Sunday. 

An expert report recently presented to Judge Francoise 
Travaillot, a French investigative judge, and cited in the weekly 
publication Journal du Dimanche, said the material was "a highly 
radioactive substance... of Russian origin." 

While the uranium was not of a high enough quality to manufacture 
a proper nuclear bomb, it could have been use to make what 
experts call a "dirty bomb", a radioactive expolsive device that 
would not provoke extensive material damages but was meant to 
contaminate and pollute. 

After extensive analysis by the experts, police authorities said 
they believed the Uranium 235 was likely to have come from the 
Ukraine, according to the newspaper. 

In recent years, suspected radioactive material has been seized 
by police authorities in several European countries, including 
Turkey and France. 

While in most cases the seized samples have turned out to be 
innocuous substances or low-grade radioactive materials which 
could not be used to produce nuclear weapons, EU authorities are 
increasingly worried about the possible use by terrorist 
organizations of nuclear material smuggled out of the former 
Soviet republics. 

According to the report presented to the French authorities, the 
uranium seized in Paris had been stolen from a research 
laboratory or a dismantling center for nuclear submarines. 

A French national and two people from Cameroon were arrested by 
the Financial Research and Investigation Brigade (BRIF) in the 
course of the investigation.

	  ©2001 www.inq7.net all rights reserved   
*****************************************************************
 14  India may destroy Pak N-weapons: Report

rediff.com US edition: 

  October 22, 2001 

United States military strategists believe that India may seek to 
destroy Pakistani nuclear arsenal if it appeared that the 
stockpile was about to fall into the hands of terrorists. 

"India, another nuclear power, would not stand idly by, if it 
appeared that the Pakistani nuclear arsenal was about to fall 
into the hands of extremist," The Washington Post quoted the 
strategists as saying. 

They said India might seek to destroy Pakistan's nuclear 
stockpile by a pre-emptive action, which could provoke a new war 
in the subcontinent. 

The US military had conducted more than 25 war games involving a 
confrontation between India and Pakistan, and each had resulted 
in a nuclear war, Air Force Colonel (retd) Sam Gardiner, an 
expert on strategic games, was quoted as saying. 

The next step that worried experts, said the Post, was the 
regional effect of turmoil in Pakistan. If the Pakistan 
government fell, other Muslim governments friendly to the US, 
such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, might follow suit, the experts 
said. 

Harlan Ullman, a defence analyst at the Centre for Strategic and 
International Studies, a non-governmental think-tank, said the 
ultimate nightmare "is a pan-Islamic regime that possesses both 
oil and nuclear weapons". 

PTI 
*****************************************************************
 15  Atomic bomb test site could get war role

Chicago Tribune | 

Nevada senator wants to create training center

By V. Dion Haynes
Tribune national correspondent
Published October 22, 2001

MERCURY, Nev. -- On a remote site the size of Rhode Island in a 
desert previously used for atomic bomb testing, some federal 
officials envision constructing mock office buildings, factories, 
houses and subways--and then blowing some of them up.

They want to send into the rubble firefighters and police 
officers, who would have to face chemical or biological agents in 
their struggle to find victims.

The urban rescue operation is the centerpiece of a proposal in 
Congress to turn the Nevada Test Site into the National Center 
for Combating Terrorism.

About 1,200 recovery workers train at the test site every year. 
But Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is seeking $60 million in federal 
money to establish a center where experts could research and 
develop technology to better detect biological and chemical 
agents and where thousands more rescuers from across the country 
could train for disasters caused by weapons of mass destruction.

Known as the place where atmospheric nuclear explosions sent huge 
mushroom clouds billowing into the sky during the Cold War, the 
test site offers trainees a big advantage: It is a remote, 
polluted area and the only place in the country where the 
emission of radiation and chemical agents for training exercises 
are allowed.

"Like training for a sports game, you play like you practice," 
said Nathan Naylor, Reid's spokesman. "If you don't have the 
training, you're not going to be able to go out on the field and 
win."

John Spahn, program manager for the Hazmat Spill Center at the 
site, said: "After a trainee has been in this environment for a 
few hours, it's no longer training--it's real."

Surrounded by mountains on a 1,370-square-mile area scattered 
with cactus and sagebrush, the Nevada Test Site was the scene of 
nearly 1,000 underground and atmospheric explosions from the 
1950s to the '80s. Vestiges of the past remain: Craters from the 
detonations, large enough to drive a vehicle through, are carved 
into the ground. Wooden bleachers on which reporters witnessed 
the blasts five decades ago are rotting in the sun. Some Quonset 
huts that once housed thousands of employees who worked at the 
site are used for offices.

In 1992, President George Bush signed a moratorium on nuclear 
testing. Since then, Department of Energy officials, noting that 
only trace amounts remain of radiation from the atomic 
experiments, have marketed the site as a place where chemical 
companies could test hazardous materials, military officials 
could set off explosives and police and fire departments could 
hone their rescue skills.

Responding to a flood of calls from rescue workers who suddenly 
felt ill-prepared in the wake of the terrorist attacks and 
anthrax threats, Reid is urging President Bush to sign an 
executive order increasing the training center's budget six-fold.

To promote the proposal, federal officials last week led 
reporters on a rare tour through the test site and demonstrated a 
training exercise.

Using two abandoned five-story aluminum tanks that once served as 
fueling stations for an experimental nuclear ramjet, training 
leaders set up a mock terrorist attack on a chemical plant.

An explosion caused a release of "hazardous" chemicals at the 
factory. Police and rescue workers stormed the building, 
apprehending a suspect and treating victims.

For the purposes of the demonstration no chemicals were used. But 
officials said low levels of hazardous materials are emitted in 
training exercises to help trainees adapt to real-life 
conditions.

"When they're going through the experiment we put them in an 
environment with psychological and physical stresses. The stress 
causes the students to really produce," said Curt Wargo, a former 
captain in the New York Police Department and now senior 
operating specialist for the training program.

"Police departments don't always have training facilities, and 
those that do are not as realistic as this one where you deal 
with real contaminants," he added. "Students always want to deal 
with the real thing."

Because the proposal for the expanded counterterrorism center is 
in the conceptual stage, officials at the Department of Energy 
and National Nuclear Security Administration are seeking feedback 
from police, firefighters and emergency medical technicians 
across the country on what they want to see.

Officials say that most are interested in training in a World 
Trade Center scenario, wading through rubble, smoke and hazardous 
materials. Under federal law, the test site is authorized to emit 
hazardous materials as part of an effort to improve emergency 
planning.

"We have a permit under the Clean Air Act that allows the 
facility to release 150 toxic chemicals into the environment. Our 
own limit is that we don't release chemicals that have residual 
effects," said James Barrett, senior adviser for national 
security in the National Nuclear Security Administration.

"We wouldn't release [the nerve gas] sarin, but we can release a 
chemical with the same properties as sarin," Barrett added. 
"We're the only site in the country that the government allows to 
do this."

Test site officials displayed a range of high-tech instruments 
that rescuers use to detect radiation and chemical contaminants. 
No reliable portable equipment is available for anthrax and 
biological agents, but test site officials say they hope the 
counterterrorism center would be used by researchers to develop 
such a device.

Moreover, they want researchers to go a step further, developing 
"smart" buildings that could respond on their own to threats.

"Smart compounds could be used to immunize a building and 
detector systems would allow it to respond to a threat that 
occurred inside," Barrett said. "This could involve the release 
of compounds to counteract the release of chemicals or biological 
threats in the building."

Under the plan the new center would intensify its curricula and 
training methods.

Rather than enroll individual rescuers, officials said, the idea 
would be to train police and fire departments collectively as a 
unit.

"Sen. Reid has heard time and time again that police and 
firefighters are ill-prepared to handle an industrial chemical 
spill, let alone an intentional chemical or biological attack," 
Naylor said.

"He wants them to train together because they will have to work 
hand in hand in a disaster."


Copyright © 2001, Chicago Tribune 

*****************************************************************
 16  2 Scientists Face Trial in Rocketdyne Explosion 

October 22, 2001 

Environment: The pair are accused of illegally burning chemical 
waste, resulting in a blast that killed two workers at the field 
lab in 1994.

By JEAN GUCCIONE, TIMES STAFF WRITER

Seven years ago, at a field laboratory on a rugged plateau in the 
Simi Hills of Ventura County, five Rocketdyne employees were 
burning rocket propellants when the chemicals exploded, killing 
two scientists and burning a technician.

At the time, company officials said the men were preparing to 
conduct the third of five experiments testing the shock waves 
emitted when the chemical mixture burns.

But federal prosecutors dispute its scientific value, saying the 
employees were merely disposing of hazardous waste by burning it, 
a once-common practice banned in 1989. This week, prosecutors 
will ask a jury in Riverside to convict scientists Joseph E. 
Flanagan, 60, of Stanwood, Wash., and Edgar R. Wilson, 65, of 
Chatsworth of illegally burning chemical waste at the Santa 
Susana Field Laboratory, just west of Chatsworth, on July 21 and 
July 26 in 1994, the day of the deadly blast.

Flanagan also is charged with illegal hazardous waste storage.

As director of Rocketdyne's Chemical Technology Group, Flanagan 
supervised the five men involved in the incident--including 
Wilson and James F. Weber, the group's hazardous waste 
coordinator. Flanagan was not present at the time of the 
accident.

Like Flanagan, Weber, 51, of Moorpark was charged with three 
felonies related to the illegal storage and treatment of 
hazardous waste at the lab. He pleaded guilty in August to 
illegally storing explosive materials, a misdemeanor, and he 
faces up to a year in prison.

If convicted, Flanagan and Wilson, a former sheriff's 
deputy-turned lab technician, face up to five years in prison on 
each count and a $250,000 fine.

The three employees were indicted by a federal grand jury in 
1999, three years after Rockwell International Corp.'s Rocketdyne 
Division pleaded guilty to three felony counts of mishandling 
hazardous chemicals in the same incident and paid a $6.5-million 
fine, the largest penalty ever assessed in California at the 
time.

Although the case stems from the fatal explosion, no one is 
charged in the deaths of Otto K. Heiney, 53, of Canoga Park, and 
Larry A. Pugh, 51, of Thousand Oaks. Jurors will not even be told 
the alleged environmental crimes resulted in the fatalities.

Instead, the two-month trial will focus on whether the chemicals 
that Heiney and Pugh burned were part of legitimate scientific 
research or illegal waste disposal.

To win, prosecutors must do more than prove the materials were 
illegally stored and treated at the lab, violating the Federal 
Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.

"We have to prove knowledge," said Assistant U.S. Atty. William 
Carter, chief of the environmental crimes section.

'If It Is Not Waste, There Is No Crime'

Both defendants have denied the charges. They say they believed 
Heiney and Pugh were conducting actual research, in part, because 
the chemical mixtures used cost hundreds of dollars a pound and 
were being tested at other labs with government contracts.

"If it is not waste, there is no crime," said criminal defense 
lawyer Leonard Sharenow, who represents Wilson. He drew a 
distinction between waste and excess materials.

Unlike many illegal disposal cases, the chemicals burned at the 
Santa Susana lab were not sludge or another easily identifiable 
waste product, he argued.

But the prosecutor said the so-called "tests" offered none of the 
usual evidence of serious scientific work, such as data 
collection.

"These things don't resemble any kind of test anyone that I have 
talked to in this business is familiar with," Carter said in June 
2000.

He argued that the burns were identical to those Rocketdyne once 
legally used to get rid of chemical waste. Except the company's 
permit for burning such waste had expired.

In a key ruling for the prosecution, U.S. District Judge Robert 
J. Timlin will permit Heiney's widow to testify about her 
husband's growing frustration with "stupid environmental rules."

During the months before his death, Heiney confided to his wife, 
Judy, about how the lab could "get around" such rules, according 
to court documents.

As part of her statement to federal investigators, Judy Heiney 
said her husband would not have disposed of the chemicals without 
Flanagan's approval.

But Flanagan told a Rocketdyne lawyer in 1995 that Heiney had 
asked him if he could conduct some experiments by burning 
unnecessary materials for a research paper he was preparing, 
court documents show. Flanagan told the lawyer that he knew about 
the burning and believed it was for legitimate scientific 
purposes.

Wilson also believed he was participating in authentic scientific 
research, Sharenow said.

Because of the top-secret government research at the lab, 
technicians like Wilson did not question procedure, Sharenow 
added.

Rocketdyne Paid $600,000 Fine

The lab, opened in 1947 by Rocketdyne's predecessor, North 
American Aviation, is synonymous with decades of far-reaching 
government and defense work. Engineers at the field lab, known 
internally as "Santa Sue," have developed rocket engines for 
early nuclear missiles and every U.S. manned space mission from 
Mercury to the space shuttle.

Despite its prestigious mission, prosecutors say the field lab 
had a history of problems in properly disposing of chemical 
waste.

In 1990, Rocketdyne paid a $600,000 fine to the California 
Department of Toxic Substances Control for burning more scrap 
chemicals at its burn pit than its permit allowed, prosecutors 
said.

At least three former Rocketdyne employees will testify that they 
illegally burned waste or knew of other burnings at the lab.

According to court documents, another employee, Bertram Moy, told 
federal investigators that Flanagan once instructed him between 
1990 and 1992 to get rid of excessive hazardous material by 
"running a test" on it. He said he filled a bucket with waste 
chemicals and burned it, using a process he called a "bucket 
test."

Another worker said he and Wilson burned hazardous waste in a 
30-gallon drum in 1994.

Despite their admissions, neither Moy nor the other worker was 
charged.

In contrast to its earlier statements, Rocketdyne in its plea 
bargain admitted that at least one of its employees was illegally 
getting rid of waste when the deadly explosion occurred.

But Timlin excluded those statements after the defense lawyers 
argued that they were irrelevant. Corporations often make 
business decisions when faced with a criminal prosecution, 
Flanagan's attorney, John D. Vandevelde, wrote in a motion.

In this case, Rocketdyne could have lost billions of dollars in 
government contracts and jeopardized its 1996 sale to Boeing Co., 
now based in Chicago, the motion notes.

Such interests, however, did not cloud the decision by the 
California Division of Occupational Safety and Health to fine 
Rocketdyne $202,500 for violating state worker-safety rules and 
for failing to notify the agency where and when the explosives 
were being used.

Cal/OSHA's 1996 report called the tests "a disguise for 
destroying waste explosive materials" and concluded the 
scientists were illegally disposing of 160 pounds of waste, a 
little at a time. 

For information about reprinting this article, go to 
http://www.lats.com/rights/register.htm 

Copyright 2001 Los Angeles Times 
    
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