***************************************************************** 10/23/01 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 9.249 ***************************************************************** RADBULL IS PRODUCED BY THE ABALONE ALLIANCE CLEARINGHOUSE ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR POWER CONTENTS 1 UN: Nuclear Power Alternative to Fossil Fuels, IAEA Director Informs 2 Terrorism using nuclear waste also to be punished: bill 3 Japan: Security to be stepped up at nuclear plants in Fukui 4 Damaging Sellafield report to be published 5 Germany's econ minister questions emission targets 6 Home News: EU report to renew calls for Sellafield action 7 Slovak mayors want to play part in decommissioning of nuclear 8 Slovakia: Legal shortcomings in deal with EBRD on nuclear plant 9 Chernobyl created record group of cancers 10 Senators dream of private nuclear power plants 11 Fragile stability, radical nuclear power 12 Conn. Governor: State Needs Protection 13 Nuke Plant War Games Alarmed Locals 14 Goshutes Take Battle Over Funds to Court 15 Chernobyl's cancer world record 16 'Sellafield time bomb' warning 17 Plenty of opposition at Yucca Mountain hearing - 18 Sellafield attack 'could be worse than Chernobyl' 19 NUCLEAR COMMISSION PUTS TRIMMED WEBSITE UP 20 EU demands better nuclear safety 21 Buy more reactors, Chrétien urges China 22 Concern of a nuclear fallout from Bush’s war against terrorism 23 NRC Staff Proposes $3,000 Fine Against the University of 24 IAEA Daily Press Review Date 2001-10-23 Number 203 25 After Sept. 11, a new push for nuclear pills 26 UK: Health Physicist Edward Radford dies (Polonium 210 exponent) 27 Ottawa Sun: Chinese silent on Candu attitude 28 Ailing ex-worker sues company 29 Greens organize a branch in Utah 30 Rowland wants 'security zone' around Millstone NUCLEAR WEAPONS CONTENTS 1 Pakistani leader rules out compromise on nuclear programme 2 Apocalypse now? Missing Russian nukes 3 Kursk scrapping to start in six months, says Russian deputy PM 4 Kursk breaks surface 5 Investigators Search Kursk 6 Joint Statement on Counterterrorism by the President of the 7 European Nuclear Industry Hit by Terrorism Fallout 8 Livermore lab security put on high alert 9 Costs up for DOE 'fixed price' contracts 10 Mystery barge on Melton Hill Lake 11 Accident results in Flats closure - 12 SRS maps plans for replacing plant 13 Study: security at DOE nuclear facilities lax 14 New Delhi slams speculation on N-site attack - **************************************************************** ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR POWER ARTICLES ***************************************************************** 1 UN: Nuclear Power Alternative to Fossil Fuels, IAEA Director Informs General Assembly; Following Introduction of Agency's Annual Report, Most Speakers Express Support for Non-Proliferation, Additional Npt Protocols -- Part 1 of 2 M2 Communications ( October 23, 2001 ) As global energy demand increased, along with a growing awareness of the need for sustainable development, nuclear power was the alternative to fossil fuels the Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) told the General Assembly this afternoon as it took up the Agency's annual report for the year 2000. The environmental consequences of burning fossil fuels had come to light, Mohamed Elbaradei continued as he introduced the report. At present, nuclear power supplied about one-sixth of global electricity. In the foreseeable future, it could provide electricity on a large scale with practically no greenhouse gas emissions. Views on the future of nuclear power, however, were still mixed because of safety and non-proliferation concerns. Still, he pointed out, a major portion of the Agency's work focused on other diverse applications for nuclear energy, including human health, water management, improving agricultural yields and protecting the environment. India's representative said there was no alternative to large-scale use of nuclear energy as a prerequisite for economic development if the global community were to bridge the energy divide. As nuclear power played an increasing role in meeting the world's energy needs, remaining concerns about nuclear-power generation must be eliminated. The solutions were technological, not only to address economical generation of nuclear power but also in questions of safety, sustainability, proliferation resistance and long-term waste management. Speaking on behalf of the European Union and associated States, Belgium's representative said the report indicated continued improvement in the area of nuclear safety as a result of the IAEA's initiatives. The Union would support the Technical Cooperation Programme with improved effectiveness for both recipients and donors. The Agency's rigour in assessing and selecting only those projects that met a range of precise criteria was commendable. Russia's representative said that ensuring cooperation in the peaceful use of atomic energy was a key role for the IAEA. He called for the launch of an international project on innovative nuclear reactors and nuclear fuel cycles, aimed at developing coordinated criteria for selecting new-generation technologies of promise. He said that would promote sustainable development, nuclear non-proliferation and environmental security. A number of speakers, notably the representatives of Japan and Australia, called on the Democratic People's Republic of Korea to live up to its international obligations with regard to nuclear power. Also speaking this afternoon were the representatives of Pakistan, Slovakia, Cuba, Egypt, Peru, Republic of Korea, Brazil and Argentina (in a joint statement), Czech Republic, Mexico, United States, Belarus and Ukraine. The representatives of Iraq and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea spoke in exercise of the right of reply. The Assembly will meet again at 10 a.m. on Friday, 26 October, when it is expected to elect members of the Economic and Social Council. Background The Assembly met this afternoon to take up the annual report of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The forty-fifth annual report of the IAEA for the calendar year 2000 (document A/56/313) is transmitted by a note of the Secretary-General affirming that the Agency's Director-General would report to the Assembly on major developments since the reporting period. The report itself recalls the goals set out as priorities in the Millennium Declaration and in which the Agency played a role. Those included peace, security and disarmament, development and the eradication of poverty, and protection of the environment. The Agency's work rests on the three "pillars" of technology, safety and verification for the purpose of catalyzing development and transferring peaceful nuclear technologies, building and maintaining a global nuclear safety regime, and preventing weapons proliferation. Technology The report states there were 438 operating nuclear-power reactors worldwide at the end of 2000. Over 30 countries were using nuclear power to produce electricity and six new power reactors had come on line. While no new plants were built in North America or Western Europe, the economics of existing nuclear-power plants had improved. Initiatives on nuclear fuel cycle and radioactive waste management included a symposium on uranium mining activities (Vienna, October). It was decided that public acceptance and confidence in solutions were critical with waste management. Investigations also continued into new energy production technologies reducing actinide generation and focusing on long-lived waste transmutation. Global climate change was another focus of technological activities for the agency in 2000, the report states. With the development and field testing of "Indicators for Sustainable Development", future prospects for energy technology depended increasingly on sustainability issues and not just economics or environmental impact. Some 25 projects were under development worldwide to devise innovative approaches for creating reactor types and fuel cycle designs that offered enhanced safety features and were proliferation resistant and economically competitive. Maintaining knowledge and expertise in the field had become of concern, the report continues. Most countries with advanced nuclear programmes reported decreased interest in the nuclear field, possibly due to a perception that the field offered poor career prospects. The Agency's remedial activities included coordinating cooperative training activities. It also focused on applying nuclear science in projects using radiation and isotope techniques to produce food, fight disease, manage water and protect the environment. Finally, the Agency focused on technology transfer and the critical need for freshwater management through isotope hydrology, to avert the severe shortage expected to affect two-thirds of the world population by the year 2025. Safety The report states that nuclear safety increased over the year in Central and Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Union as the Agency continued to provide nuclear safety review services and assistance to them and others. The Agency had also strengthened safety-related activities in response to concerns, including safety implications of decisions by Germany, Lithuania and Ukraine to close nuclear-power plants earlier than expected. The ageing of research nuclear reactors was also of concern. Beyond those two areas, the Agency reports on its activities regarding nuclear safety standards. That involves safety issues specific to other fuel cycle facilities, assistance to upgrade national radiation and waste safety infrastructures, and environmental assessments of radioactive residual materials, including a report to the General Assembly on radiological consequences of the Chernobyl accident. The Agency maintained international focus on safe management and transport of radioactive wastes and requested the Secretariat to develop internationally agreed radiological criteria for long-lived radionuclides in commodities, particularly foodstuffs and foods. Verification The year's seminal event in non-proliferation and disarmament was the May Review Conference of the 187 States Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). The final document reviewed the implementation and operation of the NPT from 1995 to 2000, outlining a framework for the next five years. To overcome a perceived stalemate in international arms control, States established objectives to stimulate implementation of the NPT, including practical steps for non-proliferation, nuclear disarmament, safeguards and export controls, peaceful nuclear cooperation, adherence and review. The Conference agreed to increase the transparency of nuclear-weapon States and to diminish the call for nuclear weapons in security policies. On related fronts, the report states the Agency had 224 safeguards agreements with 140 States as of 31 December 2000, affecting over 900 facilities. The Review Conference received the Agency's verification activities favourably, but the Secretariat developed a new action plan focused on cooperation between Member States to counteract the disappointing progress in adherence to safeguards agreements and protocols. States such as Peru, Japan, Kazakhstan and New Zealand developed activities with the Agency but there was little progress in establishing a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East. Other verification highlights were the integration of traditional measures with strengthening measures, remote monitoring and the signing by the United States and Russia of a bilateral "Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement" committing each party to withdrawing 34 tons of weapons-grade plutonium from weapons programmes. Work also continued on physical protection of nuclear material, including the combat of illicit trafficking through a programme of information exchange, assistance to regulatory bodies and training. Outreach and Management Activities During 2000, the Agency continued to engage both traditional and non-traditional partners. A January forum with representatives from the nuclear industry had reached broad consensus on the need to intensify efforts related to safety, innovation and public confidence. Public awareness activities were undertaken as senior management reached out to a wider audience in civil society, including the arms control, academic and think-tank communities. In the area of management, the main development was the convening of the Agency's fourth Senior Management Conference in January. It formalized the practical details of introducing a results-based approach to programming and budgeting. It also strengthened and extended the Secretariat's review of administrative practices. The report concludes that in its role of helping to achieve the global objectives of freedom from fear and want, the Agency had reinforced several of its mission principles during 2000. It had assisted developing countries to improve scientific, technological and regulatory capabilities. It had promoted a global safety culture and through its safeguards, had helped extend the non-proliferation regime and the environment conducive to nuclear disarmament and cooperation. MOHAMED ELBARADEI, Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said the main functions of the Agency were to bring about the development and transfer of peaceful nuclear technologies; to build and maintain a global nuclear safety regime; and to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons and ensure the security of nuclear material and facilities. The Agency had been at the forefront in efforts to protect against nuclear terrorism. It had encouraged States to make security an integral part of the management of their overall nuclear programmes. In addition, he said it was involved in programmes to ensure physical security, to help and respond to illicit trafficking of nuclear material and other radioactive sources; to promote the safety of nuclear facilities; to safeguard nuclear material against non-peaceful uses; and to respond to emergencies. In those areas, the Agency developed legal norms and guidelines, promoted international cooperation, provided expert advice, training and equipment and provided varying degrees of oversight. Concerning nuclear technology, he covered issues including nuclear power and non-power nuclear applications. He said that the rapid expansion in global energy demand -- and the growing awareness of the need for sustainable development -- had put increasing focus on the environmental consequences of burning fossil fuels. Nuclear power, which currently supplied about one-sixth of global electricity, was the principal alternative that could in the foreseeable future provide electricity on a large scale with practically no greenhouse gas emissions. Views on the future of nuclear power, however, were still mixed because of safety and non-proliferation concerns. For example, the United States' new energy policy gave an explicit endorsement to nuclear expansion, whereas Germany had concluded an agreement with the industry to phase out nuclear power. He also emphasized that a major portion of the Agency's work was focused on applications other than electricity generation, such as in the area of human health, water management, the improvement of agricultural yields and in environmental protection. On nuclear safety, he said that while safety was primarily a national responsibility, it was equally a legitimate international concern. Nuclear safety, like environmental practices, had implications that transcended national boundaries. In that context, he mentioned the establishment of international safety standards, safety in the management and disposal of spent fuel and radioactive waste, the Common Forum on Chernobyl, the assessment of the effects of depleted uranium and other challenges in nuclear safety. He stressed that the Agency's verification activities were designed to provide assurance that nuclear material and facilities were used exclusively for peaceful purposes. The Agency had been given broader authority by the international community to strengthen its verification ability as a result of the discovery of clandestine nuclear-weapons programmes in Iraq. For nearly three years, the Agency had not been in a position to implement its mandate in Iraq under United Nations Security Council resolution 687. As a result, it could not provide any assurance that Iraq was in compliance with its obligations. Since 1993, he said, the Agency had also been unable to fully implement its NPT safeguards agreement with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. He called upon that country to normalize its relations with the Agency, including of its membership. That would not only make for better interaction in the verification field, but would also enable the Agency to provide important safety advice and expertise related to the ongoing light-water reactor project. He also referred to the application of Agency safeguards in the Middle East, progress on trilateral and nuclear disarmament efforts, and general challenges in nuclear verification. B. S. PRAKASH (India) said that many industrialized countries with nuclear-power capabilities were witnessing electricity demand saturation, while many developing countries were unable to access nuclear power. In sharp contrast to that global scenario, the situation in some Asian countries, especially India, was vastly different. In those countries, there was a growing energy demand matched by significant industrialization already in place. Those Asian nations had acquired the necessary capability to pursue nuclear-power technology to meet their energy needs. If the global community wished to bridge the energy divide to its maximum extent, there was no alternative to large-scale utilization of nuclear energy as a prerequisite for economic development As nuclear power played an increasingly important role in meeting the world's energy needs, it was imperative to eliminate the remaining concerns about nuclear-power generation, he continued. Technological solutions were needed, not only to address economical generation of nuclear power but also the question of safety, sustainability, proliferation resistance and long-term waste management. There were currently several technological solutions which would simultaneously address all those issues. The IAEA's plan to launch the International Project on Innovative Nuclear Reactors and Fuel Cycles was worthy of strong support. Such programmes would contribute to greater nuclear-power generation and enhance safety worldwide with no fear of proliferation. He strongly recommended better budgetary support to such programmes, which simultaneously addressed the long-term objectives of IAEA programmes in nuclear energy, nuclear safety and safeguards. India was alert to the dangers of illicit trafficking in nuclear materials and other radioactive sources, especially since the terrorist strikes of 11 September, he said. Events since then had underlined the need for the international community to pool its efforts to counter the menace of global terrorism. He appreciated the efforts made by the IAEA for the past several years in cooperating with other States to prevent and combat illicit nuclear trafficking. His country had an elaborate domestic system adhering to the standards of physical protection recommended by the Agency, and had put in place a stringent system of export controls to rule out the illicit diversion of material, equipment or technology in the nuclear field. SHAMSHAD AHMAD (Pakistan) said that the world population had surpassed the six billion mark, yet one-third of that number, two billion people, lacked access to electricity. Energy demand could not be met by fossil fuels alone since that would impose an unacceptable burden on the environment. The massive development of hydro-power was one option. The only other proven and sustainable option was the use of nuclear energy. Opposition to nuclear power, despite its good safety record and environment-friendly character, was based on misunderstandings or else was a deliberate pretext to deny the technology to developing countries. Pakistan was keen to make increasingly large use of nuclear power to meet its future electricity requirements. In order to diversify the country's power generation system and reduce its dependence on energy imports, increasing utilization of nuclear power was a desirable option for Pakistan. A high-profile "safety culture" was an indispensable component of any successful nuclear-power programme. He added that the IAEA was playing an important role in safety-related issues. To ensure requisite safety controls, his Government had, earlier this year, set up the Pakistan Nuclear Regulatory Authority, which had been given the responsibility for controlling, regulating and supervising all matters related to nuclear safety and radiation protection. It was important that safety-related technical cooperation be strengthened amongst all IAEA member countries. He hoped that the IAEA would play a more proactive role in convincing the advanced countries of the need for liberal transfer of safety-related technology and equipment to developing countries. Pakistan had always emphasized the need and importance of the IAEA's safeguards, he said. By enacting legislation for effective nuclear export controls last year and acceding to the International Convention on Physical Protection of Nuclear Materials, Pakistan had clearly demonstrated its resolve to carry out its obligations and responsibility in that regard. He stressed that Pakistan's track record in adhering to IAEA safeguards had been immaculate. He concluded by saying that while the Agency's positive role in promoting technical cooperation was acknowledged, it was important for IAEA's credibility to promote peaceful uses of the atom and maintain focus on its technical promotional character. He expected the Agency to follow a balanced and non-discriminatory approach in providing access to nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, particularly to developing States. STEPHANE DE LOECKER (Belgium), speaking on behalf of the European Union and associated States, said he was well aware of the difficult financial context in which the Agency needed to carry out its important tasks. If was of concern that many States were failing to pay their contributions to the regular budget. The Agency's initiatives to adapt by maximizing effectiveness were bound to bear fruit. The European Union considered it a priority for the Agency to limit the number of projects it undertook, on the "less but better" principle. Also important was to achieve the flexibility to transfer resources between sectoral programmes when needed, and to focus on activities with the greatest potential impact. All the Agency's tasks were important and useful, but particular attention should be given to the guarantee programme, which gave absolute assurance that nuclear activities and cooperation could not be diverted from exclusively peaceful applications. In that context, he continued, another concern was the growing imbalance between expenditures on statutory activities related to the non-proliferation guarantee, and the resources Members were willing to allocate for that purpose as part of the regular budget. States should remember that the NPT conferred responsibilities regarding compliance, which in turn necessitated essential activities the Agency was obliged to meet with resources in the interests of the international community. The Agency's work in implementing safeguard agreements was welcome, as reflected in the report. Also, the work on integrating safeguards should lead to reducing inspection efforts in countries that had met the criteria. Noting the Agency's initiatives on safety, he said the report revealed a continued general improvement in that area. The Agency's activities toward development of peaceful uses for nuclear energy were particularly welcome. The Union would continue to support the Technical Cooperation Programme. The Agency had improved effectiveness for both recipients and donors, particularly with its rigorous selection of only those projects that met a range of precise criteria. The resolution Australia was expected to present would be welcome. YOSHIYUKI MOTOMURA (Japan) said his country -- the only one to have suffered a nuclear attack and one that had long been committed to the peaceful use of nuclear energy -- was determined to use its wealth of experience for the greater benefit of humankind. It attached the highest priority to safety and security in utilizing nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. Japan had actively promoted the peaceful use of nuclear energy as a stable energy source in the course of its economic development, because it was heavily dependent on imported oil and because nuclear energy had enormous merit from the perspective of global environmental considerations. It would make its use of plutonium transparent. In the light of the present international situation, enhancement of the nuclear non-proliferation regime was one of the most important issues, with strengthening the NPT regime the most realistic option. In June, Japan had organized the International Symposium for Further Reinforcement of IAEA Safeguards in the Asia-Pacific Region, which had deepened the understanding among participants on the issue of universalization of the Additional Protocol. He hoped the IAEA would organize similar events for other regions. He urged the IAEA secretariat to accelerate its work on substantiating the concept of Integrated Safeguards. He supported programmes and activities of the IAEA which were conducive to preventing acts of terrorism. From the perspective of maintaining peace and security in Northeast Asia, the role of the IAEA in the context of suspected nuclear-weapons development by North Korea was a serious one. Japan would continue to actively support the efforts made by the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO) to implement the Light-Water Reactor Project smoothly. He urged the Democratic People's Republic of Korea to improve its relations with the IAEA and to comply, promptly and completely, with its obligations under the safeguard agreement. (C)1994-2001 M2 Communications Ltd ***************************************************************** 2 Terrorism using nuclear waste also to be punished: bill KYODO NEWS TOKYO, Oct. 23, Kyodo - A bill to be submitted to the Diet later this month will make the use of any type of nuclear fuel substance and nuclear waste in ways that endanger people and assets punishable offenses, government sources said Tuesday. The amendment to the law regulating nuclear reactors is part of a package of domestic legislation aimed at paving the way for Japan to ratify the 1997 United Nations Convention on the Suppression of Terrorist Bombings following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States. The bill, which also includes amendments to six other laws, will be submitted to the Diet on Oct. 30, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe said at a board meeting of the House of Representatives Committee on Rules and Administration earlier in the day. The law regulating nuclear reactors currently stipulates punishment only for those who put people or assets in danger using specified nuclear fuel substances that emit high energy, such as uranium and thorium. The bill would extend penalties to improper use of all nuclear substances and nuclear waste. The law concerning the prevention of radiation hazards will also be amended, to subject those who endanger assets, not just people as currently stipulated, to prison terms of up to 10 years, the sources said. In order to ratify the U.N. convention, countries are obliged to stipulate in domestic legislation that placing deadly devices including explosives, toxic chemical substances and biological agents in public areas, is a crime and subject to punishment. Among the other laws to be amended by the bill are the law banning chemical weapons and the law concerning the treaty banning biological weapons, according to the sources. The bill stipulates that those who use biological and toxic weapons would face life imprisonment or imprisonment of at least two years or more or a fine of up to 10 million yen, and those who disperse biological agents or toxic substances would face a prison term of up to 10 years or a fine of up to 5 million yen, the sources said. For chemical weapons, those who disperse toxic substances or substances that are equally toxic would face a prison term of up to 10 years or a fine of up to 5 million yen, they said. 2001 Kyodo News (c) Established 1945. ***************************************************************** 3 Japan: Security to be stepped up at nuclear plants in Fukui Prefecture BBC Monitoring Service - United Kingdom; Oct 23, 2001 Text of report in English by Japanese news agency Kyodo Fukui, Japan, 23 October: The Fukui prefectural police said Tuesday [23 October] additional measures to strengthen security at all 15 of the prefecture's nuclear power plants will be implemented in the following days as a precautionary measure against terrorist attacks. Police officials said a prefectural police task force will be established Wednesday to counter terrorism and some 150 riot policemen are scheduled to be deployed Thursday. Security both inside and around the power plants will be upgraded to a 24-hour system, they added. The new measures follow the creation of a prefectural police department on 8 October to deal with security at nuclear power plants which includes patrolling the plants' perimeters and tightening checks on the identity of power plant visitors. Source: Kyodo News Service, Tokyo, in English 0923 gmt 23 Oct 01 /BBC Monitoring/ © BBC. World Reporter All Material Subject to ***************************************************************** 4 Damaging Sellafield report to be published online.ie 23 Oct 2001 A new report will be published today confirming that Sellafield Nuclear Processing Plant is vulnerable to a terrorist attack. The EU Science and Technological wing has said an accident in Sellafield could be more explosive than the one at Chernobyl in 1986. Ireland would be left exposed to nuclear fallout following any such incident. ***************************************************************** 5 Germany's econ minister questions emission targets Planet Ark Environmental News: GERMANY: October 23, 2001 BERLIN - German Economics Minister Werner Mueller yesterday warned against ambitious national climate targets, calling them a potential burden on the economy and security of energy supply. The ministry commissioned a study on the previous government's target reduction in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 40 percent on 1990 levels by 2020, which the junior coalition Green Party supports a return to. The ministry originally wanted to publish its energy report at the beginning of September, but the German media said this was postponed because Mueller had cast doubt over the government's climate goals. To reach the 40 percent reduction goals, Mueller said Germany would have to almost fully do without coal-fired power production, while its planned phase out of nuclear energy by 2020 would lead to a longer-term dependence on oil and gas. "That 40 percent reduction scenario shows that considerably higher costs for the national economy are to be expected," Mueller said. The minister pointed to the fact that Germany had made clear reductions in its CO2 emissions, while other European countries had increased theirs. Strict emissions targets made manufacturing more expensive in Germany than elsewhere in Europe and threatened the country with competitive disadvantage, Mueller said, adding that Germany's climate policy should be exported. The German government wants to cut its share of CO2 emissions by 25 percent on 1990 levels by 2005, but according to reports, Mueller believes that only a 16-percent reduction is possible. An economics ministry spokesman said that the energy report would be presented in November, while a state secretary group in the chancellery is working in parallel on parameters for so-called sustainable development. REUTERS NEWS SERVICE ***************************************************************** 6 Home News: EU report to renew calls for Sellafield action Irish Times; Oct 22, 2001 BY ELAINE EDWARDS Calls for the Government to take legal action to close Sellafield will be renewed this week following the leaking of an EU report which claims an accident at the plant could cause greater damage than the Chernobyl explosion. The calls come as the EU Commission prepares today to make a statement to the EU Parliament on the safety of nuclear installations and on the future of air travel in the wake of September 11th. The report, prepared prior to the US attacks, anticipates radiation leaks due to 'acts of malice', including an air crash or act of sabotage. The environmental group, Wise Paris, which prepared the report for the EU's Scientific and Technological Option Assessment (STOA) committee, has since called for the installation of anti-aircraft batteries to protect Sellafield as a matter of urgency. 'The long-term consequences of a release from the Sellafield HLW tanks could be much greater than the consequences of the Chernobyl accident, due to the large amounts of caesium-137 and other radioisotopes in the Sellafield tanks,' the report says. It also claims that some emissions from Sellafield have caused the release of radiation doses in excess of the recommended EU levels. The report, Possible Toxic Effects from the Nuclear Reprocessing Plants at Sellafield (UK) and Cap de la Hague (France), says that influences such as human error, equipment failure, earthquakes or acts of malice could initiate a sequence of events that releases a substantial amount of radioactive material into the environment. Green MEP Ms Nuala Ahern expressed concern that tomorrow's meeting of STOA, to discuss whether to publish the report, is to be held in camera. She will raise the issue before the European Parliament in Strasbourg today. Some members of the parliament questioned the independence of the report, according to Ms Ahern. It had, however, since been assessed by a team of scientists and these concerns had been rebutted, she said. Wise (World Information Service on Energy), which has a number of offices in Europe, is a campaigning organisation against the nuclear industry. Ms Ahern said information in the report which suggested that aspects of the Sellafield plant are in breach of EU law was immediately 'actionable' by the Irish Government. The report claims the UK authorities have not complied with their responsibilities under the Euratom Treaty and that the European Commission has never effectively used its rights to inspect the plant. Ms Ahern said it was 'very disturbing' that tomorrow's meeting of the STOA would not be open to the public or the media. 'I would be very worried if any decision was taken behind closed doors on this report,' she said. Meanwhile, the Labour party has tabled a Dail motion deploring the failure of the Government to take 'assertive preventative action' to block the decommissioning of the MOX plant at Sellafield. The 10-point motion also condemns the British authorities for sanctioning the commissioning of the plant. It urges that further legal action be taken under the Euratom Treaty at European Court level, under the Ospar convention and under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Labour spokesman on Public Enterprise, Mr Emmet Stagg, said the 'feeble response' of the Government to the MOX decision showed it had 'little or no idea' what to do. All Material Subject to Copyright ***************************************************************** 7 Slovak mayors want to play part in decommissioning of nuclear plant BBC Monitoring Service - United Kingdom; Oct 23, 2001 Jaslovske Bohunice, 22 October: Representatives of 110 towns and villages near the Jaslovske Bohunice nuclear plant called on the Slovak government to establish an independent corporation for the plant's operation and gradual decommissioning. The municipalities would like to become part-owners of new company... According to the mayors, no government has come up with a policy providing "guarantees for a reliable solution for the end of the fuel cycle or economic aspects of the decommissioning of the nuclear facilities after the completion of the production stage of the operation". The mayors also demand the free transfer of 15 per cent of Slovak Gas (SPP) shares to the ownership of Slovak municipalities. They say it should be a compensation for the limits to using the municipalities' immovables that are encumbered by the placement of SPP pipelines and distribution facilities. Source: TASR web site, Bratislava, in English 1939 gmt 22 Oct 01 /BBC Monitoring/ © BBC. World Reporter All Material Subject to ***************************************************************** 8 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 ***************************************************************** 9 Chernobyl created record group of cancers Ananova - Scientists say the Chernobyl nuclear disaster has made medical history by accounting for almost 2,000 cases of thyroid cancer. Experts meeting in Portugal have been told this is the largest group of human cancers associated with a known cause on a known date. The number of cancer casualties from the world's worst nuclear accident, which occurred in the Ukrainian city 15 years ago, is still rising. Professor Dillwyn Williams, of the Strangeways Research Laboratory, Cambridge University, told the European cancer conference (ECCO 11) in Lisbon: "Four years after the accident, an excess of thyroid cancers was noted among children who had been exposed to fall-out from the disaster. That increase has continued and new cases are still being seen in those who were children at the time of the accident." External radiation is the only well-established cause of cancer of the thyroid gland. Following radiation exposure, the elevated risk of thyroid cancer appears to continue throughout life, the meeting was told. But there was some evidence that the risk may be highest 15 to 19 years after exposure. In the accident, the Chernobyl-4 reactor released radioactive isotopes of iodine as well as caesium and other radioactive material. Radioactive iodine significantly increases the risk of thyroid cancer in people under 20, since it accumulates in the gland. Prof Williams added: "Exposure to isotopes of iodine gives the thyroid over 1,000 times the average dose to the rest of the body. "The particular sensitivity of children to thyroid cancer after radiation exposure can be linked to a combination of a higher thyroid dose and the biology of thyroid growth - which falls to a very low level in adult life. Few of the patients with thyroid cancer have died, but help is still needed." Story filed: 12:26 Tuesday 23rd October 2001 Copyright © 2001 Ananova Ltd ***************************************************************** 10 Senators dream of private nuclear power plants The Federation faction of Russian senators supports granting private companies the right to own nuclear power units. Rashid Alimov, 2001-10-23 16:11 According to NTV and RIA "News", the idea was voiced at the round-table discussion on Monday, and labelled as main news of the day at the Federation faction’s Internet site. The Federation faction comprises a great majority of the senators. The head of the group is Valery Goreglyad, Sakhalin county representative, who is said to be the most likely candidate to succeed the speaker's office in the Federation Council, the upper chamber of the Russian parliament. Goreglyad claims that granting private companies the right to own nuclear power units will facilitate investments into the building of NPPs, especially the low-powered ones. In Goreglyad's view, nuclear materials as a subject of exchange relations, would raise investment opportunities for the nuclear energy industry. If nuclear materials were a property of Russian private companies, beneficial conditions for the leasing, contrary to selling, of fuel elements would be generated. Russian plants would be able to export nuclear fuel without transferring the ownership of the property to a foreigner. "As a result spent nuclear fuel, which is a very valuable product for countries who are able to reprocess it, and a great problem for those, who aren't, would remain as Russian property," said Goreglyad. Anyway, according to the legislation in force, Russia is currently bound to accept that nuclear fuel of Russian origin is spent at foreign NPPs. Spent fuel contains uranium-238 and thorium, which are used in free nuclear reactors, which in turn is the basis of the new generation of NPPs, Goreglayd says. Earlier however, during the readings of the amendments favouring spent fuel imports to Russia, Goreglyad estimated the current situation in the nuclear industry as follows: "The current situation in Russia is very difficult, and obviously we don't have enough internal resources for reprocessing the nuclear waste already at hand… We may end up drowning in our own waste. This problem needs to be closely monitored." These words, however, did not hamper the Federation faction headed by Goreglyad, in refraining from discussing the amendments, which in fact indicates their approval. Without being discussed in the Federation Council, the amendments were handed over to the President's desk and signed. Goreglyad claims that the liberalisation of the property rights for owning nuclear materials and plants should cause a dramatic reinforcement of the state authorities control, rather than a weakening. One may assume however that the control reinforcement spoken of will be similar to the "personal control" on spent fuel imports promised by President Putin. Whereupon last week, such imports from Bulgaria were announced to be carried out in the nearest future, without Minatom having co-ordinated this with anybody. In the end of September, the question of a possible change of property status of NPPs was already touched upon. A plan actively supported by the Leningrad county governor stipulates that an underground NPP will be built in the county, based on joint stock financing. The Central Krylov Research Institute designed the plan. "According to the Russian legislation, a NPP may be built based on joint stock financials, but only the state can own a nuclear power plant," deputy minister for Nuclear Energy, Valery Lebedev, said at the time. But Alexander Agapov, the head of the safety department of Minatom, did not agree with the deputy minister, and said that the idea of a joint stock nuclear plant leaves the nuclear power plant operation to the will of any private person. 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 Menu ***************************************************************** 11 Fragile stability, radical nuclear power Lawrence Journal-World: Oct 23, 2001 7:02 pm By Jack Anderson and Douglas Cohn Tuesday, October 23, 2001 Washington — A coalition to defeat terrorism is a delicate diplomatic dance. Two of the Bush administration's most critical partners, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, risk the stability of their own governments when they link too closely with the United States. Mideast experts believe that Osama bin Laden's primary goal is to replace these moderate Muslim governments with rigid, Taliban-like religious rule. Islamic radicals find a willing audience in countries with a huge demographic bulge of young people who lack jobs and education and who are receptive to a message of revolution. A generation ago, similar forces were at work in Iran. The clash between modernization and a growing religious fundamentalism led to the collapse of the Shah, America's close ally. The hostage crisis that followed paralyzed Jimmy Carter's presidency and contributed to his reelection defeat. After more than 20 years of estrangement from the religious governments that succeeded the Shah's secular regime, the United States is only now making the first tentative moves toward establishing a relationship with Iran. Leaders in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia worry that the same wave of anger that overturned the Shah could topple them. Pakistan is the administration's most immediate worry. General Pervez Musharraf has the power to keep popular unrest in check for a period of time. But if the war bogs down in Afghanistan and he is too closely identified with the United States, his authority could be threatened. The nightmare scenario would be a coup that unseats Musharraf and allows Pakistan's nuclear facilities to fall into the hands of Islamic radicals. Pakistan is a nuclear power, and if it drifted into anarchy and chaos, the prospect of a cataclysmic conflagration with neighboring India, another nuclear power, looms. The two countries are historic rivals and have clashed repeatedly over the disputed territory of Kashmir, which foreign policy experts have long regarded as the most likely place in the world to spark a nuclear war. The Bush administration has close ties to Saudi Arabia, where American troops have remained visible since the Gulf War, patrolling the desert. Bin Laden was born in Saudi Arabia, and his extended family is prominent in the business and political community there. Although he has been officially disowned and his passport has been revoked, various Saudi charities are widely seen as front groups for his activities. These groups allow wealthy Saudi sympathizers to funnel money to bin Laden while the government looks the other way. In exchange, bin Laden wreaks havoc on other regimes and countries while giving his expatriate government what amounts to a free pass. The United States has made its own deal with the devil. The politicians talk about spreading U.S. values and ideals, but ignore, rather than condemn, the Saudi government for repressing its people. One reason there is so much vitriol in the Arab press is that it provides an outlet for anger that otherwise cannot be expressed against its own government. Given a choice between a despotic ruling family and a popular movement of religious zealots, the United States prefers the former. The Saudis have surge capacity, meaning that if other oil-rich states, such as Iraq, should suddenly decide to cut oil supplies, the Saudis could make up the difference for American consumers. Because the Saudis have such power over the U.S. economy, policy-makers have been willing to turn a blind eye to the ruling family's violations of human rights in exchange for the Saudi government's being a responsible partner in providing oil. We have seen this story before. The paroxysm of religion that now threatens to seize Pakistan and Saudi Arabia has reached exhaustion in Iran, which seems to be moving toward a more secular, pro-Western government. But it has taken a generation to get there — time that the West can no longer afford. — Political correspondent Eleanor Clift contributed to this column. Copyright © 2001, the Lawrence Journal-World. All rights ***************************************************************** 12 Conn. Governor: State Needs Protection Las Vegas SUN Today: October 23, 2001 at 4:55:21 PDT HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) - Gov. John G. Rowland says southeastern Connecticut is so packed with military, industrial and nuclear sites that it needs federal protection against potential terrorist attacks. Rowland said Monday he that would ask federal Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, who is in charge of the Federal Aviation Administration and the Coast Guard, to create a "special security zone" in the region. The governor specifically is requesting surveillance of air traffic near the Millstone Power Station, home to two working nuclear reactors and one that has been shut down, and increased marine patrols by the Coast Guard. The security zone also would provide protection to such potential targets as the U.S. submarine base, the Electric Boat shipyard, Pfizer pharmaceutical, the Coast Guard Academy and Plum Island, where scientists study some of the world's most infectious animal viruses. The governor repeated that he won't be sending National Guard troops to guard Millstone, even though governors in New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts and Vermont have ordered the Guard to patrol plants in those states. "If Millstone or a pharmaceutical company lacked presence outside, then hire security guards or hire state police," Rowland said. NEW YORK (AP) - Recent ground strikes by Army Rangers and other special forces that hit a residence of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar were a positive development for how American efforts in Afghanistan could be viewed globally, a leading lawmaker said. "It demonstrates to the entire world that we're willing to risk American lives, that we have the capability to risk them and succeed," Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., said after a speech Monday at the Council on Foreign Relations. While taking pains to emphasize he was not second-guessing President Bush, and praising him for the job he has done so far, Biden questioned how much longer the air strikes against the Taliban government in Afghanistan should continue. "The longer the bombing goes on, the more susceptible we are to criticism, justified and unjustified, in the Islamic world," said Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "I think the American public is prepared for a long siege, I think the American public is prepared for American losses," Biden said. AIRWAY HEIGHTS, Wash. (AP) - State prison inmates and guards donated more than $8,000 to assist with Red Cross relief efforts for victims of the terrorist attacks. Inmates at the Airway Heights Corrections Center contributed nearly $3,500 of the amount from their personal accounts. "This is a very significant donation when you consider that inmates earn anywhere from 40 cents to $1 per hour in their jobs at the institution ...," said Kaye Adkins, regional administrator for the Department of Corrections. Staff and offenders at the Eleanor Chase House work release center held a car wash and raised an additional $500, she said. All contents copyright 2001 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 13 Nuke Plant War Games Alarmed Locals Las Vegas SUN Today: October 23, 2001 at 7:20:26 PDT RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) - A special operations mock attack on a nuclear power plant just days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks alarmed officials in two states because the military didn't notify them. The unannounced exercise included soldiers rappelling from helicopters and small arms fire around the Duke Energy Co.'s Catawba Nuclear Power Plant at York, S.C. A Duke Energy spokesman said Monday the company still doesn't know what was going on. "We were not part of an exercise and there was no contact made with the station," said Joseph Maher. Fighter jets from Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina were scrambled to check out reports of an assault on the North Carolina-South Carolina state line, The News &Observer in Raleigh reported Tuesday. Later that night, the North Carolina Division of Emergency Management's command center in Raleigh received unconfirmed information that it had been a U.S. military special forces operation, according to a report made available Monday. The Department of Defense apparently forgot to advise regional authorities of the exercise, North Carolina emergency management reported. "This could have been a catastrophic event," the emergency management report said. Word of the exercise began about 8 p.m. Sept. 15, when people called Rock Hill police to say four or five helicopters were flying low near Interstate 77, following the Catawba River north toward the nuclear power plant. City police officers saw the aircraft in the distance but couldn't identify them, police Capt. Charles Cabaness said. The county's emergency operations center couldn't reach the helicopters on any radio channel, and learned that air traffic controllers at Charlotte-Douglas International Airport couldn't reach them, either. By midnight, eight state and federal agencies, including the FBI, had been notified and were looking into the scare. Carolina Power &Light security personnel also monitored the situation, concerned that there might be security breaches at other nuclear plants. Duke and CP have nuclear plants in both states. By 5 a.m., FBI agents told local officials they had determined the power plant was not under attack, according to the report. Maj. Gary Kolb, a spokesman for the U.S. Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, said the helicopters were not from that base or involved in any exercise there. He said Army special forces normally notify regional civilian authorities ahead of any urban training. Some law enforcement and emergency management officials are concerned about not being notified, especially on the heels of the attacks in New York and Washington. "It wasn't a good time for the military to do whatever they were doing," said Cotton Howell, York County's emergency management director. "Their timing was real bad." All contents copyright 2001 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 14 Goshutes Take Battle Over Funds to Court The Salt Lake Tribune -- Tuesday, October 23, 2001 BY BRENT ISRAELSEN The power struggle between two warring factions of the tiny Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians has landed in U.S. District Court. The tribe's embattled leadership sued three Utah banks last week over a purported withdrawal of funds by tribal opposition members who presented the banks with a "court order" from an American Indian group not recognized by the federal government. Leon Bear, who has been tribal chairman since 1996 but is fighting off a coup attempt, alleges that someone earlier this month unlawfully withdrew about $367,000 from tribal bank accounts and caused another tribal bank account to be frozen. In the lawsuit, Bear and two of his associates claim that Brighton Bank and Zions First National Bank released $325,000 and $42,000, respectively, to unauthorized individuals. Bank One is accused of refusing Bear and his associates access to the tribal account. The lawsuit is the latest round in an internal dispute over who is in charge of the tribe, which under Bear's leadership has vied to become a national repository for thousands of tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste. The waste project is opposed by most Utah politicians, led by Gov. Mike Leavitt, and by some tribal members. The unauthorized individuals who allegedly withdrew tribal money are not specifically named in the lawsuit. Marlinda Moon, Sammy Blackbear and Miranda Wash, who claim to have been chosen to head the tribe during a special election Sept. 22, obtained an "order" from the "First Federal District Court" of the "'Nato Indian Nation" declaring them the duly elected leaders of the tribe. Nato is an acronym for "North American Tribal Organization," an umbrella group that purports to represent Indians of all tribes. The umbrella group is not officially recognized by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs as having jurisdiction over any Indian affairs. The Nato order -- signed by Henry Clayton, who calls himself the "presiding judge" of Nato's "Ministry of Justice" -- directs that all tribal assets be surrendered to Moon, Blackbear and Wash. Clayton, who lists a Provo address and telephone number on his documents, did not return a phone call Monday. Representatives for Zions and Brighton declined to comment. A spokeswoman for Bank One in Louisiana could not be reached for comment. Bear has refused to recognize the validity of the Sept. 22 election or the legitimacy of the Nato Indian Nation. Earlier this month, after Clayton tried to serve Bear a summons to appear in a Nato court hearing, Bear sent a scathing letter to Clayton, calling his actions "an anarchist attempt . . . to undermine the legitimate government of the Skull Valley Band of Goshutes." As for the tribe's money, Scott York, attorney for Bear, said he does not know whether it will be recovered. Duncan Steadman, a Payson attorney who represents Goshutes opposed to Bear, said he knows nothing about the money. However, Steadman acknowledged he was present when Clayton held a hearing in a Provo public library room to issue the Nato court order that declared Moon, Blackbear and Wash as new tribal leaders. Steadman said he also was present when members of the self-proclaimed new tribal executive council presented Clayton's order to a Brighton Bank teller. He said he saw no money change hands. Steadman last year received some state money for assisting dissident Goshutes in their opposition to the nuclear waste dump favored by Bear. © Copyright 2001, The Salt Lake Tribune All material found on ***************************************************************** 15 Chernobyl's cancer world record BBC News | EUROPEAN CANCER CONFERENCE | 23 October, 2001, The Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster affected millions The nuclear disaster at Chernobyl has produced the biggest group of cancers ever from a single incident, according to UK and US scientists. Almost 2,000 cases of thyroid cancer have resulted from the reactor explosion at the Ukrainian power station 15 years ago. The elevated risk of thyroid cancer appears to continue throughout life Dr Elaine Ron Researchers predict that the number of cancers is sure to rise further in years to come. Another study suggests that workers who were sent in to try to clean up the plant following the explosion are at a significantly increased risk of lung cancer. All of them had evidence of inhaled radioactive dust in their lungs. Estimates suggest that the reactor fire at Chernobyl released large quantities of radiactive isotopes of iodine into the environment. Children need iodine during their development, and it is taken up by the thyroid gland, so this is where the radioactive material accumulated, and delivered a highly concentrated dose to the tissues there. Thyroid cancer following exposure of this sort may take time to develop. Treatable illness Dr Elaine Ron, from the US National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, said: "The elevated risk of thyroid cancer appears to continue throughout life, but there is some indication that the risk may be highest 15 to 19 years after exposure." Fortunately, thyroid cancer is a very treatable disease, so few of the 2,000 who have developed it as a result of Chernobyl have died. Professor Dillwyn Williams, from the Strangeways Research Laboratory at Cambridge University, said: "Few of the patients have died, but help is still needed. "Exposure to isotopes of iodine give the thyroid more than 1,000 times the average dose to the rest of the body." Children, he said, were particularly sensitive because the gland was still growing. Five million exposed It is thought that as many as five million people were exposed to some sort of health hazard following the Chernobyl disaster. The latest Russian research, carried out by Victor Chizhikov at the Institute of Pulmonology in Moscow, followed reports of chronic respiratory problems among clean-up workers. It looked for molecular abnormalities in the lung lining of more than 40 of these workers which might indicate an increased risk of lung cancer. One type of abnormality was found in more than 60% of the volunteers, and just under a quarter had another. The majority of the group were smokers, but Mr Chizhikov said they represented a "distinct spectrum of molecular alterations" and a "high risk" of lung cancer. ***************************************************************** 16 'Sellafield time bomb' warning BBC News | UK POLITICS | 23 October, 2001, [Sellafield nuclear waste disposal plant] Security at nuclear plants is being reviewed The US terror attacks have made the Sellafield nuclear waste disposal plant a "ticking time bomb", the Green Party is claiming as it presses for the site to close. Green Party MEPs made the closure call during a European Parliament debate, arguing that no nuclear plant could withstand the kind of attacks seen in New York. Operations like reprocessing at Sellafield simply could not withstand such an attack without devastating consequences Caroline Lucas Green MEP Both Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern and Sinn Fein have already called for Sellafield in Cumbria to be shut because of terror fears and environmental worries. French defence officials have already tightened security around Europe's largest nuclear processing plant, at La Hague in North West France. Security not disclosed A Department for Trade and Industry (DTI) spokesman said the government did not disclose what security measures were in place at nuclear sites. Stringent security measures were used at all nuclear sites and were constantly under review, he said. [Caroline Lucas, Green MEP] Lucas has given a stark risk warning Those were being reviewed again in the wake of the 11 September atrocities by industry regulators the Office for Civil Nuclear Security and the Health and Safety Executive. The Greens say the UK must follow the French in putting anti-aircraft defences around nuclear plants and start urgent talks on closing all nuclear facilities as soon as possible. Green MEP Caroline Lucas said: "After 11 September, all nuclear facilities must be shut down as rapidly as possible. New threats "Operations like reprocessing at Sellafield were never constructed with a terrorist attack in mind, and simply could not withstand such an attack without devastating consequences." Dr Lucas said 44 times as much radioactivity as the Chernobyl disaster would be released if a plane crashed into one of the key structures at Sellafield. Her party also wants the government to withhold the operating licence of the new mixed oxide (Mox) fuel facility at Sellafield until there is analysis is published on how it could withstand an attack. While the Greens went further than others in their call for action, MEPs of all political colours argued in the European Parliament for stricter safety measures at nuclear plants. 'Reassessment needed' Conservative MEP Giles Chichester, a party industry spokesman, said: "The events of 11 September call for a reassessment of the risks of attacks on installations that we previously regarded as secure." The Home Office says protecting the UK's key facilities and utilities in the wake of the attacks has been discussed by the government's Civil Contengencies Committee. Earlier this month Home Secretary David Blunkett said: "We are doing everything we can be doing not only to protect potential high profile targets but also essential services." Bertie Ahern has accused Tony Blair of timing the announcement that the Mox operation would open, made at the start of October, to coincide with the aftermath of the US attacks. The risk from the site was "unacceptably increased" by the decision, he claimed, branding Sellafield the biggest threat to Ireland's environment. ***************************************************************** 17 Plenty of opposition at Yucca Mountain hearing - Friday, October 19, 2001 - Las Vegas View Neighborhood Newspapers By MARK WAITE VIEW STAFF WRITER A mistrust of the federal government reverberated through many of the comments made by residents at a public hearing at the Pahrump Community Center last Friday on the suitability of Yucca Mountain as a repository for 70,000 metric tons of high-level nuclear waste. However, some scientists spoke about finding uses for nuclear waste if the project is inevitable. While the vast majority of the 61 five-minute speeches over a public comment period were against the proposal, Pahrump Town Board Vice Chairwoman Mary Wilson read a statement on behalf of the Pahrump Nuclear Waste and Environmental Advisory Board asking for more compensation for Nye County if the project is approved. The attack on the U.S. Department of Energy began with a statement by Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn, read by Pahrump Town Board Chairman Tim Leavitt. Yucca Mountain is "an issue that is paramount to the health and safety of Nevadans," Guinn's statement read. "Nevada's fight to keep nuclear waste from coming to Yucca Mountain has been going on for 20 years." Guinn said the public hearing to determine the site suitability of Yucca Mountain is being conducted before the final environmental impact statement has been completed. "This is not the way we do business in Nevada," the governor wrote. "I'm very disappointed you have disregarded all my office's recommendations and decided to hold these hearings prematurely." Guinn said it wasn't long ago the DOE was telling people nuclear testing was safe, but hydrogen bomb testing at Yucca Flats caused innocent Americans to die. "I'm talking about generations of Americans wiped out fighting cancer, awaiting word of admission (of guilt)," the governor said. Andrew Remus, representing the Inyo County Board of Supervisors, across the California state line, asked U.S. Secretary of the Interior Spencer Abraham to attend a meeting in Furnace Creek. In adding to Guinn's comments, Remus said, "the current hearings are premature, inadequate and in violation of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act." However, Wilson's statement, representing an advisory board of scientists with more than 100 combined years of experience in the nuclear field, simply asked the DOE and its contractors "not to be blinded by the lights of Las Vegas" in awarding contracts. "Yucca Mountain, as well as the Nevada Test Site, is located in Nye County. It is the communities of Nye County that will have to assume the liabilities if Yucca Mountain is selected. Yet it is Las Vegas that reaps an overwhelming majority of the financial benefits," Wilson said. "A year and a half ago, I was assured by DOE officials that Nye County communities would be given consideration in the form of support contracts. However there has been little or no progress on this front." The DOE should work directly with the communities for Payment Equal to Taxes, Wilson said. Nye County received $30 million in PETT funds from 1994-98 and another $38 million for a four-year period after that. Wilson suggested a surcharge of $10 per pound on nuclear waste brought into the state, adding the DOE could fund an accelerator facility at the Nevada Test Site. Wilson's statement said there is a need for a permanent water sampling and monitoring program; the casks used to ship the waste need to be tested to the breaking point and there needs to be an assurance drivers have been through a thorough background check in light of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. The DOE should also look into methods of recycling nuclear waste and transmutation, she said. "The billions of dollars already spent and the lack of studying any other site certainly points to Yucca Mountain as the probable choice," Wilson said. "Personally I don't want this next door to me, but if it's going to be forced on me, then I want a say in what happens and I want compensation for risks imposed on me, whether those risks are enormous or minuscule." Denis Beller, a consultant for the Harry Reid Center for Environmental Studies and co-author of a book on the need for nuclear power, said there is a global lack of electricity. He stressed the need for clean, reliable, affordable, environmentally-safe electricity. "We are in the midst of a nuclear renaissance," Beller said. "Southern Nevada, led by the university in Las Vegas, can take take this opportunity to become the world leader in insuring the safe, economical and environmental management of used nuclear fuel." While Nevadans were trying to keep the nuclear waste out of the state, Doreen Hagen, a member of the Prairie Island Tribal Council in southeastern Minnesota said her tribe of 550 members lives closer to a nuclear power plant and nuclear waste storage site than anyone, less than 600 yards away. "Currently 10 above ground, dry-cask storage units of highly radioactive nuclear waste sit just outside of our reservation boundaries. Seven more casks will be filled within the next few years. And we fear that the state of Minnesota will allow Xcel Energy to store another 31 casks outside of our reservation due to the absence of a national repository," Hagen said. "It has been more than two years since the federal government was obligated by law to begin removing nuclear waste from Prairie Island and the nation's other nuclear power plants." "We believe that storing nuclear waste in a remote, militarily secure location, in a facility designed for permanent storage, is a better solution than leaving it where it sits, virtually unguarded and only yards away from a vulnerable community with limited evacuation routes," she said. Pahrump activist Sally Devlin said she's actually talking about two Yucca Mountains, a reference to the belief a second nuclear dump will be built when Yucca Mountain is filled up in 28 years. "The state of Nevada is totally unprepared for anything nuclear," Devlin said, adding the only 24-hour agency that can respond to accidents is the Nevada Highway Patrol. Bill Green, a 17-year Pahrump resident, decried the lack of federal support for nuclear workers who are sick. Veterans of Vietnam and Desert Storm also suffered health problems, he said. "I'd like to know if these casks were tested against these hand-held rocket launchers that the Afghans are using?" Green asked. Art Solie of Pahrump said the immediate danger is transporting the waste. But he added, "the problems will occur later as leakage occurs." John Weisser, a member of the Pahrump Public Lands advisory board, pointed to failures like the O ring on the Challenger space shuttle. "These things have half lives of 10,000 years," Weisser said of nuclear waste. "One oops and Southern Nevada can be effectively gone." He added, "You're going to transport stuff right to where the terrorists want it." But Pahrump resident Art Ball, a hazardous material and radiological consultant, said there is a greater danger of terrorists attacking nuclear waste at more than 100 interim storage sites around the country. "Combining this with the desperate need Nye County has for PETT and PILT (payment in lieu of taxes) money, I say let's put it away and put it away now," Ball said. "Leaving it where it is now is inviting disaster and I think we found that out a month ago." Tracy Thiessen reminded the DOE about the "downwinders" in Southern Utah who suffered health effects from atomic bomb blasts. "I remember above-ground testing. The DOE told us how safe it was. Anybody want to go to St. George to ask them?" "Consider not only the geological aspect of Yucca Mountain as a repository, but the human aspect as well," Nye County Health Nurse Maureen Budahl said. "Much of Nye County is still considered frontier by federal standards, especially as it relates to health and health care issues and services. It is imperative that DOE must be prepared to assist in building the infrastructure in our communities." Nye County can respond to nine classes of hazardous material accidents, but she said, "The lack of infrastructure, roads and hospital access could potentially limit the success of our emergency response." Pahrump resident Janet Toy said Nevada has the third-highest number of earthquakes in the country. She pointed out Yucca Mountain is made of tuft -- volcanic ash, which isn't very stable. "We want to live here healthy. We don't want to be another Love Canal," Toy said. A couple of speakers were resigned to the fact Yucca Mountain will be a nuclear waste dump. Paul Willis said Nye County residents are "the acceptable risks" if something goes wrong. "I don't have faith in my government because it's coming," Willis said. "There's not anything we can do to stop them." "The United States government is not accountable to the United States citizens," Janet Errett said. "This nuclear repository they propose to put at Yucca Mountain is based on political science not sound scientific data." "I'm saddened to see they haven't looked at other sites to find a site that's more safe," Errett said. "Whether we want it or not, it seems that this site will be a reality." ***************************************************************** 18 Sellafield attack 'could be worse than Chernobyl' Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Paul Brown, environment correspondent Tuesday October 23, 2001 An EU report says an accident at Britain's Sellafield nuclear plant could cause greater damage than the Chernobyl explosion in Ukraine in 1986. The report, leaked on the same day that MEPs in Strasbourg discussed safety at nuclear sites following the September 11 attacks, paints a harrowing picture of the disaster which could follow an accident in the high level waste tanks at the Cumbrian reprocessing plant. Fears that the waste problem was worsening have led to the nuclear installations inspectorate temporarily closing the reprocessing works last month. The inspectorate has frequently warned British Nuclear Fuels, which operates the plants, it could not allow the situation to continue with 1,550 cubic metres of high level liquid waste remaining untreated. The report, compiled for the EU by environmental group Wise Paris before September 11, said events that could trigger an atmospheric release of high level radioactive waste at the plant included explosions and air crashes. "The long term consequences of a release from the Sellafield high level waste tanks could be much greater than the consequences of the Chernobyl accident due to the large amounts of caesium-137 and other radioisotopes in the tanks," it said. The Chernobyl nuclear accident exposed 5m Europeans to increased levels of radiation. Hundreds of children in Russia and the Ukraine have cancer as a result. The report said some emissions from Sellafield had contained radiation in excess of levels recommended both by the EU and under the Ospar convention for the protection of the marine environment in the northeast Atlantic. Britain's decision this month to expand Sellafield with the commissioning of a mixed oxide (MOX) plant provoked protest in Ireland, which has long campaigned for the closure of facilities there. The Irish government has launched legal proceedings under EU law, and is considering a claim under the United Nations convention on law of the sea. Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace have also launched a case against the government but in the UK high court. A spokeswoman for the Irish government department with responsibility for nuclear matters said it had not yet obtained a copy of the report. "However, if media reports prove to have substance then it further justifies the Irish government's legal action against the British authorities," she said. The report, Possible toxic effects from the nuclear reprocessing plants at Sell afield (UK) and Cap de la Hague (France), compiled for the EU's scientific and technological assessment committee, has not been published. The committee is expected to meet in Strasbourg today to hear independent views before making a decision on whether to release it. Irish Green party MEP Nuala Ahern said the closed nature of the meeting was highly irregular. "I'm going to stand up in the [European] parliament and say I have a copy, I believe it should be released to members and anyone who wants it I'm prepared to give it to them," she said. In the parliament in Strasbourg yesterday, Green MEP Caroline Lucas called for anti-aircraft measures, no-fly and offshore exclusion zones to be established at nuclear power stations and reprocessing facilities in the EU, particularly at Sellafield and La Hague. Dr Lucas said: "After September 11, all nuclear facilities must be shut down as rapidly as possible. Operations like reprocessing at Sellafield were never constructed with a terrorist attack in mind... "If a plane crashed into ... Sellafield, it has been calculated that it would release 44 times as much radioactivity as the Chernobyl disaster, and could cause more than 2m cancers," she said. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001 ***************************************************************** 19 NUCLEAR COMMISSION PUTS TRIMMED WEBSITE UP Environment News Service: AmeriScan: October 22, 2001 AmeriScan: October 22, 2001 * * * WASHINGTON, DC, October 22, 2001 (ENS) - The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) website is back up, though in a far sparer form than existed before the September 11 terrorist attacks. The website, which was closed down last week, was restored with a limited amount of information. "Taking down the agency website was a precaution to make sure it did not contain information that could be helpful to terrorists," the NRC says in a statement on the pared down site. "As the agency's review continues, other information and documents deemed non-sensitive will be added to the site." So far, the site allows access only to the agency's mission statement, news releases, information about employment, public meetings and rulemaking, and details on how to report safety concerns - including threats of terrorist activities. Before the September 11 terrorist attacks, information on exact locations of nuclear power plants, design and construction information, and contingency plans for nuclear accidents were all available on the site. The website carried information on the background of all U.S. nuclear power plants and other facilities regulated by the NRC. A great deal of background information on individual plants, their security problems, and various design issues, could have been used in planning attacks on nuclear facilities, the NRC feared. "In support of our mission to protect public health and safety, the NRC is performing a review of all material on our site," the NRC states. "In the interim, only select content will be available. We appreciate your patience and understanding during these difficult times." ***************************************************************** 20 EU demands better nuclear safety (10/23/2001) (Agencies) Fearful of terrorist attacks, European parliamentarians of all political colours on Monday demanded stricter safety measures at EU nuclear plants and vulnerable industrial operations. The call comes after a leaked European Union report said an accident at Britain's Sellafield nuclear plant could cause damage than the 1986 explosion at Chernobyl in Ukraine. "The events of September 11 call for a reassessment of the risks of attacks on installations that we previously regarded as secure," Giles Bryan Chichester, a member of the European Parliament's conservative group, told the assembly. "Special attention needs to be given to nuclear plants. I hope member states will cooperate," Eryl Margaret McNally, from the European socialists, said in Parliament. The Green Party went as far as calling for the outright closure of nuclear plants, saying such structures could not withstand the impact of a small commercial plane. On September 11, two hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center causing its landmark twin towers to collapse. "No nuclear plants anywhere could withstand the kind of terrorist attacks that we saw in New York on September 11," Nuala Ahern, from the Greens, said in a statement just before the parliamentary discussions. "The only way we can all be safe from such terrorist attacks is to close down all nuclear power plants starting with those that have already had an extended life and are ageing and dangerous." The European Commission said in a statement to Parliament that EU governments have already stepped up measures to protect their nuclear plants. But it admitted more needed to be done at other potentially dangerous targets such as chemical and natural gas plants. In the United States, the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania was temporarily placed on high alert last week after a report from intelligence officials of a threat to the installation. The threat was later dismissed. Several European parliamentarians said safety measures needed to be stepped up in a whole range of areas seen as vulnerable to the malice of terrorists. They sketched an apocalyptic scenario in which threats might come to European citizens from several fronts, ranging from polluted water supplies to attacks on chemical plants or on ships carrying flammable materials. The parliamentarians also highlighted the need to tighten security measures in all countries seeking to join the EU, many of which have Communist-era nuclear plants that do not meet EU standards. Copyright 2001 By chinadaily.com.cn. All rights ***************************************************************** 21 Buy more reactors, Chrétien urges China October 23, 2001 Buy more reactors, Chrétien urges China Visits controversial plant Ian Jack National Post (Jean) Chrétien QINSHAN, China - Jean Chrétien, the Prime Minister, pushed the Chinese government to buy more Canadian-built nuclear power plants during a visit yesterday to a controversial generating complex near Shanghai. The Qinshan facility is the subject of a long-running court case pitting the Sierra Club, an environmental group, against the federal government over the lack of an independent environmental assessment of the project. Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL) signed a contract to build two CANDU reactors in 1996, with the first due to start operating in February, 2003. Mr. Chrétien told an audience of plant workers and dignitaries, including China's Science Minister, that the deal was supposed to be the start of a major building program for the Chinese. "When I signed the official contract in 1996, the Prime Minister and I at that time agreed that if this project was to be a success, it was to open up the door for many more in years to come because the need for clean energy will be tremendous in the great republic of China," he said. "As it is going to be done on budget, on time, I am sure that the government of China will appreciate the good collaboration and hopefully will sign many more." The Crown corporation has had a tough time making sales in recent years as world opinion turned against the industry, most recently losing a bid in Turkey when that government decided to walk away from plans to build nuclear plants. AECL has sold reactors to only two other countries in the past decade, South Korea and Romania. The plant visit was followed by a trip to a school run by AECL for the children of its Canadian employees, where Mr. Chrétien was serenaded with a song titled The Space Hero in Dreamland and peppered with questions from the students. He said what he liked best about being Prime Minister is "to win an election," and the law he is proudest of passing is the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Mr. Chrétien was the minister of justice when the Charter, an initiative of Pierre Trudeau, then prime minister, became law. Mr. Chrétien, who spent almost as much time answering the children's questions as he did with reporters during the entire six-day trip to China, faced one question he is used to hearing at home: When will he retire? "I don't know. It might be a long time," he said, adding when he does, "I will spend time with my family and be involved in the society helping people one way or another. I hope I can be helpful." The visits came a day after the annual conference of Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation leaders ended in Shanghai. Mr. Chrétien is to return to Canada today. Copyright © 2001 National Post Online | Privacy Policy | Corrections ***************************************************************** 22 Concern of a nuclear fallout from Bush’s war against terrorism [The Daily Star on line] Pressuring Pakistan into us coalition may be perilous Widespread anti-US sentiment in Islamic world’s only nuclear power raises concerns about whose finger is on the nuclear trigger Ed Blanche Special to The Daily Star The last time the Americans got rough with Osama bin Laden, when Bill Clinton fired a no-warning broadside of 70 Tomahawk cruise missiles at the Saudi renegade’s training camps in Afghanistan in August 1998, Washington had the foresight to send General Joseph Ralston, then deputy chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to Islamabad so that when the missiles streaked in over Pakistan he was able to assure Pakistan’s leaders that it wasn’t a sneak pre-emptive attack by India. That’s how jumpy things are in that part of the world, even without the global convulsions triggered by the suicide attacks against the United States. The political fallout in the Middle East ­ which in geostrategic terms now embraces South and Central Asia ­ from a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would be immense and dangerous. If Ralston hadn’t, in the words of one US official, been in Islamabad “hand-holding” the Pakistani leadership to keep them calm, the Tomahawks fired from US warships in the Arabian Sea could conceivably have triggered a nuclear exchange between the two long-time enemies on the subcontinent. In that respect, not a lot has changed in the intervening three years ­ indeed, the conflict over divided Kashmir has intensified. This time around, in the aftermath of the apocalyptic terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the Americans have pressured Pakistan’s military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, into joining the coalition against bin Laden and global terrorism, an enterprise fraught with peril for the Middle East. Given the widespread anti-US sentiment in Islamic Pakistan, that could spell trouble for Musharraf, the worst-case scenario being an uprising against him which could leave the country’s nuclear arsenal in the hands of Islamic militants. Already, hard-line Muslim clerics in Pakistan are calling for a jihad against the US in support of bin Laden. Pakistan is the Islamic world’s only nuclear power. Experts estimate that it has enough material for 20-30 warheads, although they doubt whether these have been tested enough for use in combat. India could have 40-50. The experts believe that Pakistan could be closer to weaponization ­ marrying a nuclear device to a delivery system, such as aircraft or missiles ­ because of its close ties to China. The tit-for-tat nuclear tests by India and Pakistan in May 1998, and the fears of a nuclear arms race in South Asia it engendered, rekindled a deep sense of frustration among the Arabs and Iran over their impotence in the face of Israel’s nuclear arsenal. Those tests left Israel as the only state universally believed to have such an arsenal but which has never acknowledged that it does. Israel is believed to have 100-200 nuclear weapons ­ aerial bombs, missile warheads and mines. It has persistently refused to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which has been signed by most of the world. It rejects inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency and other safeguards. In the eyes of many arms control experts, it has by example encouraged the spread of nuclear weapons. The Indian and Pakistani tests illuminated a chilling fact of life in the post-Cold War era: the greatest danger of atomic conflict is from the growing list of nuclear powers, and those aspiring to that status, in the Middle East and Asia. That includes Saddam Hussein’s clandestine program which has not been subject to any scrutiny since UN weapons inspection teams were withdrawn nearly three years ago in December 1998. Russia, which has become Iran’s main source of arms, is building Iran’s first nuclear reactor outside the northern Gulf port of Bushehr and a second is reported to be planned. On Oct. 17, Russia’s deputy nuclear energy minister, Yevgeny Reshetnikov, said Moscow has provided Tehran with a feasibility study for yet another reactor and noted that Iran has been talking of three more without specifying any locations. The Americans have long sought to pressure Moscow into abandoning construction of the $800 million Bushehr reactor, claiming Tehran will use the technology to develop nuclear weapons. But both Russia and Iran say the plant will be used to generate power and will be under regular international inspection. Nonetheless, the Israelis and the Americans believe that it is now just a matter of time before Iran does have nuclear weapons along with the ballistic missiles to carry them. The guiding theory of non-proliferation efforts has been that the more states which acquire nuclear weapons, the more likely someone is to use them. But the lesson from the Indian and Pakistani tests in 1998, which took intelligence services the world over by surprise, is that any country with the basic scientific and technological infrastructure required to produce a nuclear weapon decides to do so, no one can stop it. There have been persistent reports that Israel, fostered to a considerable degree over the years by the Central Intelligence Agency, has clandestinely aided India in its nuclear arms quest since the mid-1970s. There have been several exchanges of nuclear and missile scientists over the past two decades. Dr. A. J. P. Abdul Karam, head of India’s Defense Research and Development Organization who is closely involved with New Delhi’s nuclear and missile programs, visited Israel at least twice in 1996-97. The defense and intelligence links between the two countries have been accelerating since Israel signed the Oslo Accords with the Palestinians in 1993 and opened diplomatic relations with New Delhi. India’s prime minister, A. B. Vajpayee, is said to be enthusiastic about forging strong military links with Israel, much as Turkey has. After the 1998 tests, there were fears that Muslim Pakistan would help Muslim Iran in its alleged drive to acquire or develop nuclear weapons that would challenge Israel’s monopoly. But as far as is known, that has not happened, in part because of Pakistan’s support for, and Iran’s opposition to, the Taleban. Pakistan no longer backs the Taleban but, at least while Musharraf remains in power and becomes dependent on the Americans, it is unlikely to change its policy regarding Iran. But Pakistan also has strong links with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council states. It is unlikely that Islamabad would risk alienating its new benefactors in Washington by sharing nuclear technology with other Muslim states. But, again, that is contingent on Musharraf staying in power as Asia and the Middle East both face profound uncertainties in the months ahead. Copyright© 2000 The Daily Star. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 23 NRC Staff Proposes $3,000 Fine Against the University of Missouri-columbia for Violating Regulations Region III -- 2001 - 047 -- UNITED STATES NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION OFFICE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS, REGION III 801 Warrenville Road, Lisle IL 60532 No. III-01-047 October 23, 2001 CONTACT: Jan Strasma (630)829-9663/e-mail: rjs2@nrc.gov Pam Alloway-Mueller (630)829-9662/e-mail: pla@nrc.gov The Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff has proposed a $3,000 fine against the University of Missouri-Columbia in Columbia, Missouri, for violating NRC regulations associated with employee protection requirements. An NRC investigation found that a former research scientist at the University of Missouri Research Reactor (MURR) was given an oral warning after he talked to a Department of Energy official about the level of commercial activity done at the university's research reactor. The scientist was told that he was "not authorized to discuss MURR management, priorities, etc. with any government (state or federal) officials." The NRC staff found that this statement would prohibit, restrict and discourage the scientist from raising safety concerns. "This violation is of concern to the NRC because of a similar violation which was identified by the NRC in 1994...involving discrimination against employees for raising safety issues at MURR," said David B. Matthews, Director of the NRC's Division of Regulatory Improvement Programs. "The NRC is concerned that lasting corrective actions be implemented to ensure that safety questions are freely raised and addressed at MURR." As a result of a second NRC investigation, the NRC staff concluded that MURR management had created a potential chilling effect on employees reporting safety concerns. The NRC earlier this year required the university to assess the freedom university employees have to report problems without fear of retaliation, and to assess its corrective actions program. In issuing the $3,000 fine, the NRC staff noted that the university had taken a number of additional corrective actions including establishing an ombudsman program to receive safety concerns. The university has until November 21, 2001, to pay the fine or protest it. If the fine is protested and subsequently imposed by the NRC staff, the university may request a hearing. ***************************************************************** 24 IAEA Daily Press Review Date 2001-10-23 Number 203 1. Non-proliferation EC wants EU's Council of Ministers to back its challenge to Pakistan's reservation to Article 2, paragraph 2 of the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material. More on ABM Treaty: American Secretary of State, Colin Powell, suggests that Russian officials might be prepared to take more flexible approach in talks over future of treaty. US says that despite Pakistan's co-operation to fight against terrorism, Washington continues to be concerned about Islamabad's nuclear proliferation. (BBC; FT; HT; IHT; R - 23/10) ABM; IAEA; Pakistan; Russian Federation; United States of America 2. Terrorism US officials reassure that country's NPPs are safe from attack. Sources close to UK Government confirm that contingency measures to protect nuclear installations from terrorist attack have been tightened in light of September 11 attacks. (ABC; FT - 22/10) United Kingdom; United States of America 3. Nuclear power More on Temelin NPP: head of Austrian Social Democrat MPs calls on Chancellor Schuessel to publish immediately letter from EU commissioner Guenter Verheugen saying he considered doubts about plant's safety eliminated. NRC says that several US NPPs have requested permission for 10 percent power upgrade at existing reactors to meet future electricity market demand. India and Russia likely to sign much-awaited multi-billion dollar contract for the construction of Kudankulam NPP. Representatives of 110 towns and villages near Bohunice NPP call on Slovak Government to establish independent corporation for plant's operation and gradual decommissioning; legal shortcomings in deal with EBRD on NPP closure reported. IHT editorial calls for measured reassessment of US energy strategy. (BBC; DP; IHT; R - 22, 23/10) Austria; Czech Republic; EBRD; IAEA; India; Russian Federation; Slovakia; United States of America 4. Radiation, health EU body report says an accident at Britain's Sellafield could cause greater damage than Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986. Anti-cancer vaccines may prevent hundreds of thousands of cancer cases every year, according to leading German expert. Russia develops world's first comprehensive radiation scanner. (BBC; G - 23/10) Germany; Russian Federation; United Kingdom 5. Radwaste, fuel Specific talks on import of nuclear waste into Russia cannot possibly start before third quarter of 2002, First Deputy Atomic Energy Minister Valentin announces. (INT - 23/10) Russian Federation 6. Miscellaneous NRC says it will act "expeditiously" in deciding whether to resume publication of agency's daily NPP status report. Interview with Iraqi scientist, Khidhir Hamza, who alleges he was deceptively persuaded to return to Iraq, where for over 20 years he was forced to work at developing atomic weapon. Team of investigators led by Russian Prosecutor General preparing to enter wreck of "Kursk" submarine for first time. BNFL reportedly faces long-term nuclear clean-up costs estimated to be as much as £34bn. (BBC; CNN; R; TEL - 23/10) Iraq; Russian Federation; United Kingdom; United States of America ***************************************************************** 25 After Sept. 11, a new push for nuclear pills Tuesday, October 23, 2001 By JOHN McELHENNY Associated Press Writer BOSTON (AP) — Mary Lampert keeps one of the tiny white potassium iodide pills in her medicine cabinet and another in the glove compartment of her car. When you live seven miles across a stretch of open water from Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station, the state’s only active nuclear power plant, you can’t be too safe, Lampert says. Potassium iodide is touted by some as a way to protect people near nuclear power plants in the event of an accident or attack, and Lampert says such fears have only increased since Sept. 11. "The terrorist doesn’t make an announcement ahead of time, ‘We are going to attack the nuclear power plant,"’ said Lampert, who lives in Duxbury. "How long would it take the radioactive iodine to make it across to my house? In less than an hour, it’s here." State lawmakers on Tuesday will consider a bill that would require state health officials to make hundreds of thousands of potassium iodide pills available to people living and working within 10 miles of nuclear plants. The bill would apply to an estimated 112,000 people who live or work near Pilgrim Station in Plymouth, but also 85,000 Massachusetts residents near the nuclear plant in Seabrook, N.H., and 28,000 Massachusetts residents near Vermont Yankee, just over the border in Vernon, Vt. David Tarantino, spokesman for Entergy, which owns Pilgrim Station, said the potassium iodide debate is a public health matter, and plant officials would abide by whatever state officials decide. But Tarantino said the plant is well-guarded by a private security force that is trained to protect it from truck bombs, waterborne threats or other terrorist plots. About 20 National Guard troops are also helping secure the plant. Tarantino said Lampert, who has highlighted concerns about the plant for nearly a decade, is irresponsibly scaring people at a time when the public is already jumpy. "While we appreciate Mary’s efforts, she has no knowledge to speak about security here," said Tarantino. "This is not the time for Mrs. Lampert to spread fear." Potassium iodide, if taken shortly after exposure to radiation, blocks the thyroid gland’s intake of radioactive iodine, providing protection against thyroid cancer and other diseases. It proved effective in preventing thyroid cancer among adults and children in the path of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, but officials in Massachusetts have worried that stockpiling the pills would make people less likely to evacuate in the event of a nuclear emergency. "We believe that evacuation is the most important initial act in the event of an accident," said Suzanne Condon, assistant commissioner for environmental health for the Department of Public Health. Condon said if an accident were to occur, potassium iodide would effectively protect people from less than 1 percent of the gaseous emissions. Still, the DPH last week sent a letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission asking for more information about the feasibility of distributing potassium iodide on a wider basis, Condon said. In order to become law, the proposal to be aired on Tuesday must pass the House and Senate and be signed by the governor. The state already stockpiles potassium iodide, also known as KI, for emergency workers and institutionalized individuals such as prisoners and nursing home patients. And the Town of Duxbury last year approved $5,000 to buy enough potassium iodide for each of the town’s 3,700 schoolchildren, and another 20,220 for town residents and visitors. The pills, which are about one-fourth the size of an aspirin, are available at the town’s shelters and schools. The youngest children get containers of water and packets of applesauce to go with their pills. On the Net: Massachusetts Department of Public Health: http://www.state.ma.us/dph Massachusetts Coalition to Stockpile KI: http://www.gotKI.com © 2001 Geo. J. Foster Co. ***************************************************************** 26 UK: Health Physicist Edward Radford dies (Polonium 210 exponent) Tuesday, October 23, 2001 London -- Dr. Edward Radford, who energetically promoted a higher estimate of the cancer risk from radiation exposure and whose position was eventually upheld, died Oct. 12 in Haslemere, England. He was 79. Dr. Radford was chairman of a committee of the National Academy of Sciences that released an initial report in 1979 indicating that one-half of 1 percent of Americans would develop cancer from manufactured sources of radiation like power plants and X-rays. The report, widely expected because it was released shortly after the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, came in for sharp criticism by some members of the group that prepared it, the Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation. The split in the 21-member panel was so bitter and public that the academy withdrew the report and the next year issued a revised paper that essentially halved the estimated risk, a conclusion that Dr. Radford rejected. He argued for a model showing that there was a risk, albeit small, even at the lowest levels of exposure, while his opponents favored a model that found there was a threshold below which there was no harm. The committee's conclusions were important to the nuclear industry because they were used by the Environmental Protection Agency to update its radiation protection standards. One committee member said of Dr. Radford, "If the guideline levels were reduced the way he wants them, there wouldn't be any nuclear industry at all." Since then, Dr. Radford's ideas have been upheld by many other scientific bodies that study radiation, said Dr. Evan Douple, director of the Board of Radiation Effects Research at the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Radford was also known for his research on cigarettes, particularly studies in the 1960s finding that radioactive polonium 210 was present in tobacco and made its way into the lungs of smokers. The concentration was high enough, he and his colleagues said, that the radioactivity could be a contributing factor in lung cancer. He also developed a kind of chart called a nomogram that was widely used by anesthesiologists to calculate the proper mixture of oxygen and anesthetic in the days before computers, said Vilma Hunt, a retired professor of environmental science at Penn State. Edward Parish Radford, who was known as Ted, was born in Springfield, Mass., and graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned his medical degree at Harvard University in 1946. He was in the Air Force from 1947 to 1949. One of his duties was to measure radiation levels at flight altitudes soon after atomic bomb tests in the South Pacific. He held research positions at the Harvard School of Public Health, DuPont, the University of Cincinnati and Johns Hopkins University, and was the chairman of the department of environmental medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health from 1979 to 1983. He then focused on consulting in legal cases about the health effects of radiation and toxic chemicals. ©2001 San Francisco Chronicle   Page C - 2 ***************************************************************** 27 Ottawa Sun: Chinese silent on Candu attitude Tuesday, October 23, 2001 By ANNE DAWSON, Parliamentary Bureau Chief QINSHAN, CHINA -- Prime Minister Jean Chretien used a visit to a lawsuit-plagued nuclear plant yesterday to shill for more Candu reactor sales in China. Chretien's government has pumped billions into Canada's ailing nuclear energy industry despite sagging sales in recent years due to safety and environmental concerns. "The project of the Qinshan Candu reactor will be remembered for years ... as it's going to be done on budget and on time," Chretien told several hundred employees of the Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. Candu project, which is under construction in this city two hours southwest of Shanghai. "I'm sure that the government of China will appreciate the government collaboration and hopefully will sign many more (Candu reactor deals)." But while several senior Chinese government officials were on hand for Chretien's plug, they gave no indication yesterday they were looking at future buys. Canada provided China with a $1.5-billion loan to buy the reactors, which are now the subject of a fierce legal battle brought by the Sierra Club. FULL ASSESSMENT The environmental watchdog has taken the feds to court for its failure to provide a full environmental assessment of AECL's 1996 sale of the reactors to China. Chretien approved an exemption of a full assessment because it would have delayed making it the focus of his Team Canada mission to China in 1996. Although AECL and the Chinese government conducted a significantly scaled-down version of an environmental review, there was no public input and the results were never made public. The case has dragged on for four years, but Chretien's high-profile visit to the site and the nearby Maple Village compound in which the 400 Canadian families who work there reside, suggests he hardly takes it seriously. AECL's senior vice-president Gary Kugler insisted the case has nothing to do with slow sales. He said Chretien's visit will help sales because it will assure skeptics nuclear energy is safe. Chretien refused to answer questions. PLAYED FOR SUCKERS Kugler also defended the bare-bones environmental assessment as adequate, saying Canadians have no reason to worry. That's because AECL, as a Crown corporation, ensured professionals carried it out properly, he said. Sierra spokesman Dave Martin told Sun Media yesterday the China deal is a "gigantic economic loss" for Canada. "The Chinese played the Canadian government for suckers and bargained down the price (beyond profit)," said Martin, who says it's time to "pull the plug" on AECL subsidies. He demanded to know why, if Chretien is so convinced nuclear energy is safe and efficient, he doesn't allow for a full environmental assessment of the project. Previous story: Investigators check role of money exchangers Next story: Feds to foot G-8 tab 2001, Canoe Limited Partnership. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 28 Ailing ex-worker sues company Deseret News Archives, Monday, October 22, 2001 By Rob Rogers Deseret News staff writer OGDEN -- Handling waste products from Western Zirconium has made a disposal-company employee sick, he alleges in a lawsuit against the company. Western Zirconium in Ogden is one of only two companies in the United States that makes a zirconium treatment for nuclear fuel rods. Western Zirconium produces tons of zirconium-based waste every year that has to be moved off-site and disposed of. Ex-Waste Management Inc. employee Steven Clark has filed a lawsuit in 2nd District Court in hopes of pulling the curtain on Western Zirconium and two other Ogden companies, Barnes Aerospace and FMC-Jetway Systems. Clark alleges the companies are storing hazardous waste illegally and posing a public health risk. He has quit his job and has been diagnosed with an inflammatory lung disease that his doctor says is caused by inhaling zirconium particles. Western Zirconium's parent company, Westinghouse, isn't commenting on the lawsuit. A spokesman for the company said it has a long-standing policy of not commenting on pending litigation. Clark, as an employee of Waste Management, regularly picked up and dumped solid waste from Western Zirconium, Barnes Aerospace and FMC-Jetway Systems. Dust kicked up by the moving of these materials was laced with zirconium, Clark said. Workers from Utah Division of Solid and Hazardous Waste have inspected Western Zirconium's site and found plenty of zirconium dust. But they haven't found anything illegal. Zirconium as a dust waste byproduct isn't considered hazardous, said Brad Maulding, manager of the Hazardous Waste Facilities section of the Utah Division of Solid and Hazardous Waste. Maulding did say that just because something isn't classified as hazardous doesn't mean it's safe. "If you breathe in too much rock dust or inhale gas fumes," he said, you might get sick. The Utah Department of Transportation, however, does list zirconium as a hazardous material. UDOT requires vehicles that transport the metal to hang a "hazmat" sign indicating that zirconium is being transported. The Environmental Protection Agency, in a report filed in February, listed Western Zirconium as the fourth-largest polluter in Utah. Among the pollutants listed, the EPA cited nitrate compounds, ammonia and chlorine. Because zirconium isn't considered hazardous, it wasn't listed. The nitrate, ammonia and chlorine discharges are within legal limits set by the EPA, so Western Zirconium is not considered an illegal polluter. Barnes Aerospace and FMC-Jetway Systems do not produce any kind of zirconium or zirconium byproduct at their Ogden plants, said Allan Moore, an environmental program manager in the Hazardous Waste Management section of the Utah Division of Solid and Hazardous Waste. Clark contacted Moore a year and a half ago and filed a complaint with the Utah Division of Solid and Hazardous Waste. Moore said he sent a team to investigate, but it found nothing illegal. E-MAIL: rrogers@desnews.com © 2001 Deseret News Publishing Co. ***************************************************************** 29 Greens organize a branch in Utah Deseret News Archives Sunday, October 21, 2001 Party members elect officers, discuss platform By Kersten Swinyard, Deseret News staff writer The grass-roots organization that put Ralph Nader on national presidential ballots last year organized a branch of the Green Party in Utah Saturday, meeting to elect officers and discuss party platforms, bylaws and fund-raising. Penny Archibald-Stone and Rob Morrison were elected co-spokespeople for its Salt Lake area coordinating council, Linda Parsons was elected secretary, Andy Schoenberg treasurer and David Orr local liaison. Some 40 people attended the conference at the Jubilee Center in Salt Lake City. Green Party members hailed from Logan to Moab, with the bulk coming from Salt Lake City. Platform developers wanted to include Utah-specific issues and exclude certain redundancies, said Amy Hines, a Green Party representative. For instance, Utah's platform includes information on the Goshute Indian Tribe and the proposal to store nuclear waste on its reservation. Dean Myerson, political coordinator for the national Green Party, spoke to the group about national issues, and Chip Ward gave the keynote speech about nuclear waste storage and disposal in Utah. Ward is the author of "Canaries on the Rim." As party members shuffled through organizational housekeeping, they discussed the merits and drawbacks of democracy. In particular, some members said the electoral system may not be the best route for bringing about change. "We are a political party whose goals cannot be accomplished through the elective process," said Giles Larsen, a Green Party volunteer. "We want fundamental changes in the dominant ideologies. "Don't underestimate what five, 10 or 15 people can accomplish over the long run," Larsen told the group. "You can have a serious effect in your communities. There's always something to do." E-mail: kswinyard@desnews.com © 2001 Deseret News Publishing Co. ***************************************************************** 30 Rowland wants 'security zone' around Millstone The Middletown Press By DAVE COLLINS, Associated Press WriterOctober 23, 2001 HARTFORD, Conn. -- If the federal government approves the request of Gov. John G. Rowland, air traffic controllers will soon begin monitoring the air space around the Millstone Nuclear Power Station while marine patrols guard the plant from the Long Island Sound. Rowland is asking federal Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, who is in charge of the Federal Aviation Administration and the Coast Guard, to create a "special security zone" in southeastern Connecticut. Millstone, like nuclear plants nationwide, has been on its highest state of alert since Sept. 11. The plant is employing armed guards from a private security company, but officials won't discuss what specifically they have done to increase security. "We have a number of safety systems in place to protect the public's health and safety," said Millstone spokesman Ken Holt. On Monday the governor said that "the greatest threat in that area is from the air and from the sea." According to FAA spokeswoman Arlene Salac, aircraft are currently restricted from lingering near nuclear plants such as Millstone, but are not restricted from flying over them. Experts continue to debate what would happen if a plane crashed into the nuclear containment dome of a plant such as Millstone. Most nuclear power plants were built during the 1960s and 1970s, and like the World Trade Center, they were designed to withstand only accidental impacts from the smaller aircraft widely used at the time, said David Kyd, a spokesman for the Austria-based International Atomic Energy Agency. The containment structure surrounding Millstone's reactor coolant system includes a 1/4-inch steel liner surrounded by 2.5 feet to 4.5 feet of reinforced concrete, according Millstone's emergency planning pamphlet that was distributed to area residents. U.S. Rep. Rob Simmons, R-2nd District, who was to review security precautions with Millstone officials Tuesday, said the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has already crashed an F-16 jet into a structure similar to a containment dome. He said there was no substantial damage. Simmons said he is more concerned about land-based attacks. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit group that claims it is neither for nor against nuclear energy, the NRC performed 11 mock attacks on nuclear plants in the United States in 1990 and 1991, and six times the intruders were able to reach equipment needed to prevent meltdowns. The governor repeated Monday that he will not be sending National Guard troops to guard Millstone, even though governors in New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts and Vermont have ordered the Guard to patrol plants in those states. Security guards or state police can adequately protect the plant from the ground, Rowland said. Paul Eccard, first selectman of Waterford, said he is confident that the current review of security measures throughout the region will lead to the adequate protection of the public. He agreed with Rowland's call for a special security zone near Millstone. "I think that we need to do all the things we can do to prevent an attack and a disaster, then we need to go about living our lives," Eccard said. "I think you need to behave with all the alertness and care that you can, but I also don't think it's healthy or wise to live in fear or cowering of events that may not come to pass," he added. ©The Middletown Press 2001 Copyright © 1995 - 2001 PowerAdz.com LLC. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARTICLES ***************************************************************** 1 Pakistani leader rules out compromise on nuclear programme BBC Monitoring Service - United Kingdom; Oct 23, 2001 Pakistani President Gen Pervez Musharraf said on Tuesday that Pakistan's strategic assets were the cornerstone of national security and ruled out making any compromises on the country's nuclear programme, Radio Pakistan reported. Dismissing speculation about the vulnerability of strategic assets, he said he had reassured world leaders that the country's strategic capability was "fully safeguarded" and there existed "no possibility whatsoever" of its falling into the wrong hands. Musharraf was speaking in Rawalpindi at a special session of the National Command Authority, the highest controlling authority of Pakistan's nuclear assets. The meeting was also attended by the Pakistani foreign minister, interior minister and chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Committee, the radio said. Source: Radio Pakistan, Islamabad, in English 1300 gmt 23 Oct 01 /BBC Monitoring/ © BBC. World Reporter All Material Subject to ***************************************************************** 2 Apocalypse now? Missing Russian nukes The Times TUESDAY OCTOBER 23 2001 Reportage BY GILES WHITTELL Dozens of Russia's nuclear weapons are missing. There is clear evidence that Osama bin Laden's agents have been scouring the world to buy or steal such devices in order to attack the West. Our correspondent investigates how near they may be to succeeding When Ahmed Salama Mabruk was arrested three years ago in Baku, in Azerbaijan, no one in the West could confirm what he claimed to know. Some still doubt him, but no one now dares to say that he was lying. Mabruk was personal assistant to Ayman Zawahiri, the bespectacled lieutenant to Osama bin Laden who is now thought to have masterminded the September attacks on New York and Washington. When Azerbaijani security forces confiscated Mabruk’s laptop they were able to download from it a mine of information about the structure of the al-Qaeda network. He was extradited to Egypt and is now serving a 25-year sentence for planning terrorist activities there, but during his trial he had a chance to exchange a few words in his Cairo courtroom with Mohammed Salah, a reporter with the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper. “I asked him if al-Qaeda had obtained nuclear weapons and he told me that both al-Qaeda and Islamic Jihad had done so with the help of several different countries,” says Salah. “He said that bin Laden had told his men not to use them except when ordered to.” Salah was sceptical at first. “But now,” he says, “I believe everything.” Another story that is also suddenly credible comes from Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, who travelled to Khartoum, the Sudan capital, in 1993, with $1.5 million (£1 million) and orders from bin Laden to buy South African weapons-grade uranium. He says he made contact with a Sudanese Army officer offering the fuel for sale in a 3ft steel cylinder. Al-Fadl was paid $10,000 for his efforts before being removed from the negotiations. Three years later al-Fadl walked into an American embassy in Africa and turned himself in. He is now the FBI’s most valuable source on bin Laden, its al-Qaeda supergrass, with secret accommodation and a new identity as a member of the bureau’s Witness Protection Programme. He says he doesn’t know if the uranium deal went through. In fact there has been no confirmation of nuclear weapons or nuclear material falling into bin Laden’s hands — nor any firm statement that he has failed to obtain them. But the deeper you look into this information vacuum, which US taxpayers increasingly consider a poor return on their $30 billion-a-year investment in foreign intelligence, the more worrying it becomes. Bin Laden has said that it is his duty to seek weapons of mass destruction, and the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) in Vienna has confirmed hundreds of instances of nuclear smuggling since the collapse of the Soviet Union. They litter the map of Eurasia and implicate a gallery of crooks, usually offering small amounts of non-weapons-grade material to buyers with even less knowledge of nuclear physics than themselves. A group of Georgian Customs officers treated in 1997 for deep brown leg wounds provides a case in point. They had confiscated several phials of highly radioactive caesium and pocketed it in the hope of finding a buyer. Instead they found that the caesium, which cannot be used in bombs, ate into their flesh. The following year, according to an Afghan refugee from Mazar-i Sharif now living in London, an entire family fell ill when a smuggler buried a large quantity of what was believed to be uranium in their garden. “Some of them were paralysed from the waist down and all the vegetation in their garden died,” the refugee says. “The uranium probably came from Taliqan or Kunduz province, near the border.” F or most of the 1990s the international community persuaded itself that nuclear smuggling on a larger scale than this was easy to detect and probably not happening. Western leaders are now having to assume the reverse: that only the clowns got caught. “They are probably the tip of the iceberg,” says Dr Laurie Mylroie, a US academic who claims that the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing was almost certainly masterminded by Iraq, and who insists that President Saddam Hussein was likewise behind the September 11 attacks. “If Russian organised-crime groups with good contacts and resources got involved in this, you might never hear about it,” says Gary Milhollin, of the Wisconsin Project, a Washington anti-proliferation think-tank. “You tend to pick up the amateurs, not the pros.” Before September 11 such talk might have been alarmist. Now it is a sane reminder of the most sobering reality of the post-Soviet world order. What was the world’s largest nuclear power, with between 15,000 and 40,000 nuclear weapons and enough fissile material for 40,000 more, has spent the past decade staggering under the pressure of rampant corruption and criminality with its nuclear stockpile ill-guarded, compared with America’s. And vulnerable, above all, to the thousands of scientists who built it, but now earn on average $50 a month. The result is what one of Washington’s more moderate non-proliferation experts calls “a nuclear K-Mart”. Russia’s intercontinental ballistic missiles are not for sale. They are so central to Moscow’s vision of itself as a world power that they remain almost as secure and secret as in the Cold War. But a black market has existed since before the Soviet collapse for a wide range of lesser nuclear assets — from battlefield weapons to “suitcase nukes” built for Soviet special forces and low-grade radioactive material that could be packed with conventional explosives to make the most basic poor-man’s atom bomb. In the worst scenario, impossible to rule out with no UN weapons inspectors left in Iraq, Saddam could already have acquired enough fissile material for a warhead and mounted it atop a Soviet-built Scud missile. In the early 1990s the smugglers’ preferred routes led west out of Russia and Ukraine to Eastern Europe and Germany. In 1994, a German police sting at Frankfurt airport led to the arrest of a Colombian in transit from Moscow with a consignment of plutonium in his suitcase, and the smugglers’ focus shifted towards the Caucasus and Central Asia. There are few wilder or more porous frontiers than the 3,000-mile fence along the southern fringe of the former Soviet Union. It starts on the Black Sea near Batumi, winds along the spine of the Caucasus and continues through scorching deserts to the Pamirs and the Tien Shan, interrupted only by the Caspian. In the middle of it, Uzbek-istan’s short border with Afghanistan has been closed for the past four years. Otherwise all bets are off. I have interviewed Chechens in Georgia’s spectacular Pankisi Gorge who walk unhindered over the high passes of the Caucasus in and out of their war-torn homeland when the snows allow. Not far to the east, customs checks on trains from southern Russia to Azerbaijan are entirely avoidable with bribes. In the high Pamirs you can drive for hours along Tajikistan’s border with the Vakhan Corridor in northeastern Afghanistan and see hardly a soul. I t is no surprise to learn from the IAEA that in September 1998 police arrested eight people in Turkey and seized 10lb of uranium 235, destination unknown; nor that two men were arrested trying to sell plutonium in the remote Kyrgyz border town of Kara Balta the following year; nor that 4lb of highly enriched uranium was found less than three months ago packed into a glass jar in neat discs the size of ice hockey pucks in an hotel room in the Georgian Black Sea port of Batumi. The list is merely a sample of what is known. It does not include police and media reports based on personal testimony, such as one in the Arabic Al-Watan news magazine in early 1999 claiming that bin Laden had pulled off a huge deal for 20 Russian nuclear warheads obtained for him by the Chechen mafia in exchange for $30 million in cash and two tons of opium. It does not include the FBI’s ongoing operation against a Pakistani intelligence agent with close ties to bin Laden identified as Mohammed Abbas, who placed an order with an undercover US agent posing as an arms dealer for six nuclear switches and a quantity of plutonium after announcing over lunch in New York that he meant to “kill all Americans”. None of this, at any rate, came as a surprise to the CIA. “Bin Laden has been trying to get his hands on enriched uranium for seven or eight years,” Robert Wolsey, the agency’s former director, told reporters a week after the September 11 attacks. Why, then, did the world’s only superpower not do more to stop him? It is a question that torments America, but answers are already emerging. On the one hand the US intelligence community was hamstrung by internal turf wars, bureaucratic regulation and limits on what it could do to protect Russia’s nuclear stockpile because of Russia’s security interests and the risk of losing its own agents — a scenario considered unacceptable in the “risk-averse” post-Cold War era. Even more seriously, the CIA appears to have relied too heavily on the assumption that bin Laden could not have nuclear weapons since building and maintaining them takes huge political will and the resources of a nation state. Experts are now saying that this was a false assumption on several counts. The first dates from 1997, when General Aleksandr Lebed, then head of Russia’s national security council, dropped a bombshell by declaring that dozens, possibly hundreds, of suitcase-sized nuclear weapons built in the 1970s were unaccounted for and were “a potentially perfect weapon for nuclear terrorism and blackmail”. Lebed was blackballed by the Russian military establishment and thrown off a commission set up to investigate his allegations. Russian nuclear officials ridiculed them, but the following month Lebed named the weapons as the RA-115 and the RA-115-01 (an underwater variant), each weighing roughly 30 kilograms. Aleksei Yablokov, a former environmental adviser to President Yeltsin, said that 84 out of a total of 132 were missing. At a conference in Berlin, Lebed said he believed that most of them had been stationed in border areas no longer within Russia. He warned one of his detractors, the then Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin: “Sleep, Viktor Stepanovich, and you just might not wake up.” Lebed is now running for a second term as governor of Krasnoyarsk and has refused all interview requests since the attacks. However, a former Western diplomat who travels frequently to Central Asia confirmed last week that the suitcase-sized weapons almost certainly exist. “It’s very plausible that a device has been smuggled out and even to Afghanistan,” he adds. “Osama bin Laden is as possible a recipient as Saddam Hussein.” Compact nuclear weapons offer terrorists an easy answer to the question “Why build when you can buy?” Pakistan’s rush to build an estimated 120 nuclear warheads has given bin Laden yet another option — theft. President Musharraf insists that his nuclear arsenal is safe, but the US considers the risk of Pakistani warheads falling into the wrong hands so great given the number of Taleban sympathisers in his ISI intelligence service that it has offered to fly in perimeter security for the country’s nuclear bases and install fail-safe mechanisms on its weapons to prevent them being detonated. So far Musharraf has declined the offer. Pakistan and the West must therefore hope that bin Laden has failed in all his attempts to buy nuclear weapons and material. But even if he has, the risk of nuclear terrorism remains real and serious, thanks to Saddam. T he Iraqi dictator nearly bankrupted his country trying to build nuclear weapons before the arrival of UN inspectors in the wake of the Gulf War. This has not stopped him trying again since their departure. The proof, or the closest thing to it, is in the form of a strange order placed with the Siemens electronics giant by the Iraqi Government in 1998 for six lithotripter devices designed to break up kidney stones with highpowered shock waves. As medical machinery the lithotripters were not covered by UN sanctions. Each used a precision electronic switch, and Iraq ordered an extra 120 of these. As Gary Milhollin of the Wisconsin Project wrote in The New Yorker: “Iraq’s strange hankering for this particular spare part becomes less mysterious when one reflects that the switch in question has another use: it can trigger an atomic bomb.” Former UN weapons inspectors in Iraq believed in 1999 that Saddam already had the components for three nuclear weapons, each needing 32 electronic switches. Whether he has obtained enough fuel for them is one of the critical questions driving the debate in Washington on whether to expand the war on terror to Iraq. Another is whether Saddam sponsored the September attacks. Hawks in the Bush administration have been scouring the globe for an Iraqi link that would justify finishing the job begun by Operation Desert Storm in 1991, and they may have found it: earlier this month the Czech Foreign Minister, Jan Kavan, flew to Washington with documents showing that Mohammed Atta, the pilot of the first jet to hit the World Trade Centre, visited the Iraqi embassy in Prague for meetings with its consul last year. “Why would they meet?” asks Laurie Mylroie, whose work on Iraqi-sponsored terrorism has a close following among those in the Bush White House pushing for a broad offensive against Iraq. “To have a cup of tea?” Asked how scared we should be of the possibility of an Iraqi-manufactured nuclear weapon detonating as the conflict unfolds, Dr Mylroie replies: “Scared is not the right word. This is war. It’s like the Second World War. People have to make the right decisions; if they make the wrong decisions tens or hundreds of thousands could die.” Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd. This service is provided on ***************************************************************** 3 Kursk scrapping to start in six months, says Russian deputy PM BBC Monitoring Service - United Kingdom; Oct 23, 2001 Text of report in English by Russian news agency ITAR-TASS Moscow, 23 October: The disposal of the Kursk nuclear-powered submarine will start in six months, Ilya Klebanov, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Science, Industry and Technology, told the press today. Before that ammunition and equipment will be dismantled from the Kursk, Klebanov said. The examination of the doomed submarine will not shed light on any new reasons for the tragedy, he noted. "It will take up to three days to drain water from the Kursk," Klebanov said. Representatives of the Prosecutor-General's Office will be the first to start working on board the Kursk. Radiation experts will continue doing their job, too. Source: ITAR-TASS news agency, Moscow, in English 1442 gmt 23 Oct 01 /BBC Monitoring/ © BBC. World Reporter All Material Subject to ***************************************************************** 4 Kursk breaks surface (Murmansk:) The operation on draining the dock and recovering the Kursk has begun. The radiation level remains normal, the Northern fleet representatives report. Victor Khabarov, 2001-10-23 17:23 Barge Giant-4 with pontoons left the floating dock PD-50 at the shipyard in Roslyakovo, Murmansk region. After leaving the dock the six tugboats led the barge to Belokamenka bay, where Giant-4 anchored. Then operation on draining the dock of the water and recovering the Kursk has begun. On October 23rd, at 2 p.m., the Kursk was approximately 2,5 meters above the surface, and the submarine’s tower is visible. The investigation team led by the general prosecutor Vladimir Ustinov set to board of the submarine. The radiation control specialists checked the radiation levels before, which are reported to be normal. The investigators and the specialists of the radiation and chemical control will start examining the Kursk from the 9th compartment, where 11 bodies of the submariners are expected to be recovered. It is necessary to drain the submarine of the water and open the hatch of the 9th compartment in order to get into the compartment. Vladimir Ustinov assured the journalists that the causes of the Kursk catastrophe will be revealed and publicised . ”No secret will be made for the press. The only exception will be made for the military and state secret”, the general prosecutor said. Vladimir Ustinov promised to provide maximum transparency and all the information, which ”we will receive in the course of the investigation” he added. 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 ***************************************************************** 5 Investigators Search Kursk Las Vegas SUN Today: October 23, 2001 at 7:35:29 PDT MOSCOW- Russia's top prosecutor led investigators Tuesday onto the deck of the nuclear submarine Kursk, hoping to find new clues to what caused the vessel to explode and sink more than a year ago. Crew members on the barge that lifted the submarine from the Barents Sea floor and towed it to a floating dock in Roslyakovo, near the Arctic port Murmansk, lowered wreaths into the water to honor the Kursk's 118 dead. The Giant-4 barge then headed away as the Kursk was raised to the point where its conning tower, with its shattered glass windows and red Russian eagle seal, could be seen above water. With the Kursk fully out of the water, Prosecutor-General Vladimir Ustinov, top Navy officials and a team of about 40 investigators observed a moment of silence before stepping onto the submarine's deck. The first on board was Lt. Gleb Liachin, the son of Kursk's late captain Gennady Liachin. "What we did is called examining the site," Ustinov said later. Investigators who enter the vessel will have to wear gas masks, since toxic gases have built up in the submarine during its 14 months at the bottom of the sea following its sinking during naval maneuvers in August 2000, ITAR-Tass news agency reported. Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov, who is responsible for the Kursk salvage operation, said that it would take up to three days to dry out the submarine for an internal inspection, the Interfax news agency reported. He dampened expectations of what the investigation could reveal, saying "nothing new will be found in the raised submarine" that could help "in understanding the causes of the Kursk catastrophe," Interfax reported. Many Russian and foreign experts have said the initial explosion was sparked by an internal malfunction, but government officials say the Kursk may have collided with another vessel or World War II mine. The submarine was raised and towed to shore in a risky, complicated operation that cost the Russian government some $65 million. The submarine's shattered first compartment, where the torpedoes were located and which may contain vital clues to the cause of the disaster, was cut off and left at the bottom of the sea for collection next year, if possible. Klebanov said that the plan to lift the first compartment would be ready by the end of November, Interfax reported. Russian officials have said the Navy would handle the operation on its own, but Klebanov said foreign companies might be asked to take part as they did in the lifting of the submarine. On the Net: http://www.kursk141.org http://www.kursksalvage.com All contents copyright 2001 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 6 Joint Statement on Counterterrorism by the President of the United States and the President of Russia For Immediate Release Office of the Press Secretary October 21, 2001 Shanghai, October 21, 2001 The President of the United States and the President of Russia categorically reject and resolutely condemn terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, regardless of motive. The Presidents stress that the barbaric act of terrorism committed in the United States on September 11, 2001 represents a crime against all humanity. The Presidents note that terrorism threatens not only the security of the United States and Russia, but also that of the entire international community, as well as international peace and security. They believe that terrorism poses a direct threat to the rule of law and to human rights and democratic values. It has no foundation in any religion, national or cultural traditions, and it only uses them as a cover for its criminal goals. The Presidents agree that every effort must be undertaken to bring the perpetrators to justice, while protecting the rights and welfare of civilians. They stress that the fight against terrorism requires the unity of the entire international community to counter new challenges and threats on the basis of international law and the full use of the United Nations and other international organizations. The Presidents call for all states to join a sustained global coalition to defeat international terrorism. Nations must make use of diplomatic, political, law enforcement, financial, intelligence, and military means to root out terrorists and their sponsors and bring them to justice. The Presidents emphasize that the current situation in Afghanistan is a direct consequence of the policies pursued by the Taliban, which turned that country into an international center of terrorism and extremism. They reaffirm that the United States and Russia are ready to cooperate closely with the United Nations to promote a post-conflict settlement in Afghanistan that would provide for the formation of a representative, broad-based government capable of ensuring the restoration of a peaceful Afghanistan that maintains good relations with countries of the region and beyond it. The leaders of the two countries view U.S.-Russian cooperation as a critical element in the global effort against terrorism. They reaffirm their personal commitment and that of their two countries to fight this deadly challenge through active cooperation and coordination, both bilaterally and within the framework of international institutions. The Presidents note with satisfaction the fruitful cooperation between the United States and Russia in the United Nations and the UN Security Council, in the NATO-Russia Permanent Joint Council, and in the G-8. They also instruct their governments to reinforce bilateral cooperation throughout the U.S.-Russia Working Group on countering terrorist and other threats emanating from Afghanistan. The Presidents agree that the financial, communications, and logistics networks of terrorist organizations must be destroyed. They call upon all nations without exception to take measures to block access of terrorist organizations to financial resources, to enhance law enforcement tools to combat terrorism, and to strengthen procedures to stop the transit of terrorists and their material within and between countries. They stress the importance of speedy ratification and implementation of existing international counterterrorism conventions. The two Presidents are resolved to advance cooperation in combating new terrorist threats: nuclear, chemical and biological, as well as those in cyberspace. They agreed to enhance bilateral and multilateral action to stem the export and proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological materials, related technologies, and delivery systems as a critical component of the battle to defeat international terrorism. ***************************************************************** 7 European Nuclear Industry Hit by Terrorism Fallout Environment News Service: LONDON, United Kingdom, October 22, 2001 (ENS) - Europe's nuclear energy industry is proving to be a victim of September's terrorist attacks in the United States. A rising fear of massive radioactive releases is galvanizing the anti-nuclear movement and raising new questions about the sector's long term future. First in the firing line are the nuclear fuel reprocessing plants at Sellafield in Britain and La Hague in France, following alarming estimates of potential radioactive releases in the case of an aircraft collision similar to those on September 11. According to a report by consultancy Wise-Paris released late last month, the potential release of caesium-137 from La Hague's irradiated fuel cooling ponds is 60 times the amount released in the 1986 Chernobyl accident in Ukraine. This month, Britain's "New Scientist" magazine reported the potential caesium release from Sellafield at 44 times that released from Chernobyl. These dire forecasts were taken up in a debate in the European parliament today, with Irish Green MEP Nuala Ahern calling for "no fly zones" to be established around both plants. "Nuclear plants are a ticking time bomb in our midst and the only logical response is to close them all down and end this terrible threat," she argued. [Cogema] Government owned French nuclear fuel reprocessing plant Cogema at Cap de la Hague, a peninsula jutting into the English Channel. (Photo courtesy Cogema) In a statement September 19, Cogema said that, "A permanent overflight ban is in force at the site. Considering its geographical position, the French armed forces would have time to intervene if any breach of this ban were suspected." Cogema tried to reassure the public that no plane could deliberately crash into the facility's irradiated fuel storage pools by explaining, "The structures are partially built under ground, and the pools occupy a small area in relation to the total area of the installations around them. It would thus be impossible for an airplane to crash vertically into a pool." Even strongly pro-nuclear European states have had their nerve tested by the realization that reprocessing and other nuclear plants could be terrorist targets. The French government last week said that anti-aircraft missile batteries are to be stationed at La Hague. In Germany, the effect has been to cement or even speed up the ongoing nuclear phase-out program, culminating in media reports this weekend that Economic Minister Werner Mueller has called on power firms to phase out their oldest stations ahead of schedule. This follows a pledge by Environment Minister Juergen Trittin to order nuclear plant closures in case of a credible threat of attack. The new sense of insecurity has pervaded protests from the Irish government and UK environmental groups over the British government's decision to license a new plutonium fuel manufacturing plant. Austrian protests against the Temelin nuclear power station in neighboring Czech Republic have also been given new wings just as the plant is moving towards full power for the first time. Only the nuclear industry itself appears oblivious to the sands shifting under its feet, with European association Foratom continuing to focus its arguments on nuclear's potential to avoid greenhouse gas emissions at a conference in Brussels earlier this month. Nuclear power plants are in operation in eight out of the 15 nations of the European Union and generate about 35 percent of the EU’s electricity. This nuclear share rises to at least 50 percent during off-peak periods, as nuclear plants are mainly used for generating baseload electricity. A number of countries in Central and Eastern Europe, in line for EU membership, also rely heavily on nuclear generated electricity. ***************************************************************** 8 Livermore lab security put on high alert Published Tuesday, October 23, 2001 + Armed guards, barricades are added to protect against possible aerial assaults By Brian Anderson CONTRA COSTA TIMES LIVERMORE -- They are potential terrorist targets. Low-profile but obviously apparent. They are in the Tri-Valley's back yard. Home to the brains behind America's brawn, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and its neighbor Sandia/California Laboratory are in the midst of a country in conflict. Like the nation's subways, office buildings and power plants, the labs have ramped up security since the Sept. 11 attacks. Barricades have severed surface-street routes around the labs. Heavily armed guards have replaced weaponless watchmen. Eagle eyes have supplanted random checks. "I think what's changed is that something probably considered unlikely or hard to conceive of happened," said Dennis Fisher, associate director of Lawrence Livermore's safety, security and environmental protection department. The Sept. 11 attacks "changed the landscape." In fact, one of the most obvious security alterations at Lawrence Livermore is the landscape itself. High security has been pushed farther from the center since the East Coast attacks, creating a greater barrier for unwanted visitors, Fisher said. What has been built, Fisher said, is a layered system of protection that tightens with each step closer to the "Superblock," where the lab's plutonium and other weapon-fueling chemicals are stored. As the lab's nucleus, the Superblock and its conspicuous cargo are the facility's greatest priorities. Rows of fencing surround the square block's perimeter, making it appear more like a prison than a place of science. There are armed guards and watchtowers, sensors and devices, most of them impossible to see and therefore classified, said lab spokesman David Schwoegler. But propped up from the edges are giant poles connected to canvassing nets that cannot be missed. "It is hardened," Schwoegler said, eyeballing the Superblock, "to protect against an aerial assault." At Sandia, parking lots have been restricted, badges are inspected more carefully, suspicious packages and people are reported and everyone is in a heightened state of awareness, said spokeswoman Nancy Garcia. At work at Lawrence Livermore are four SWAT teams trained to battle attackers and handle assaults in defense gear that includes full hazardous materials "moon suits." Entry points once staffed by unarmed guards are now teeming with heavily outfitted security officers. Wearing black uniforms, bulletproof vests, carrying sidearms and modified machine guns, the officers are equipped to withstand a prolonged firefight. "Everything is 100 percent," said Loid Shipp, a security official at a Livermore lab post during a recent visit. Still, there is the potential for failure, according to a report released earlier this month by a watchdog group. The Project on Government Oversight report showed that U.S. Navy SEALS invaded a Colorado nuclear production facility and removed "enough material to make multiple nuclear weapons" during one mock raid. At Sandia's Los Alamos lab, according to the report, attackers in a staged event dodged security long enough to craft makeshift nuclear weapons. Marylia Kelley, executive director of local anti-nuclear group Tri-Valley CAREs, said lab officials have long been told to better examine the possibility of aerial assaults. "It is conceivable that the plutonium facility would be a target," Kelley said. "We think this is a very serious issue and that the government should safeguard the community." Kelley added that the area's explosive population growth in the past half-century has highlighted the dangers of the lab calling Livermore home. "This is a highly populated area and homes and apartment buildings are being built right up to the gates of the lab," she said. "It may have been remote back in the 1950s, but it isn't remote any more." Reach Brian Anderson at 925-847-2184 or banderson2@cctimes.com. ***************************************************************** 9 Costs up for DOE 'fixed price' contracts Oak Ridger Online --> Story last updated at 10:26 a.m. on Tuesday, October 23, 2001 by Paul Parson Oak Ridger staff Cost increases arose in several fixed-price contracts, including two Oak Ridge deals, that were supposed to save the Department of Energy money in its cleanup efforts, according to a recently released audit. Since October 1994, DOE's Office of Environmental Management has awarded 14 fixed-price contracts, each with award values exceeding $500,000, for environmental cleanup activities including the construction and operation of waste treatment facilities. The fixed-price deals were supposed to reduce costs and expedite cleanup. However, the DOE Inspector General's office recently reviewed 11 of the fixed-price contracts that the Energy Department estimated would save it approximately $1.7 billion. The Inspector General's audit disclosed that at least $160 million of the anticipated cost savings associated with nine of these contracts were not likely to be fully realized. "We found that the department had not consistently developed comparable and supportable cost comparisons, and officials, in several cases, chose to award fixed-price contracts where uncertainties associated with the work increased the risk of cost increases," the audit states. In a prepared statement included in the audit, DOE disagreed with some of the conclusions of the document, but the agency did agree to take corrective actions. The audit identified actual and potential cost increases with five of the 11 contracts reviewed, including one held by BNFL Inc. in Oak Ridge. Increases of $52 million were likely for BNFL Inc.'s $263 million contract to decontaminate and decommission three buildings at the Oak Ridge K-25 site over a period of six years. At least $42 million of this is associated with two suspensions on the release of potentially contaminated metals that prevent BNFL from selling nickel and other metals recovered from the cleanup effort on the open market. "Further, cost increases were possible on this contract because the contractor had submitted two certified claims against the department totaling approximately $30 million for fire protection improvements and material quantity adjustments," the audit states. "Both of these claims asserted that additional work was needed that was not called for in the original contract." In addition, the audit states DOE did not consider significant uncertainties in calculating cost savings for this contract. The scope of work for the three buildings had never before been attempted, and the buildings to be cleared had not been fully characterized. These uncertainties increased the risk of cost increases as work progressed. Another Oak Ridge contract with a potential cost increase involves Decon and Recovery Services. The company was awarded a $10 million fixed-price contract in November 1997 to clean up Building K-1420, which formerly housed a uranium-recovery operation. Although the contract was increased to $13 million after additional work was added, Decon and Recovery Services suspended work on this project in December 2000 because of rising costs associated with the project. "An agreement has been reached with the contractor that will close the existing contract after approximately 90 percent completion of work and payment of $11.8 million," the audit states. "The remaining 10 percent of the work will be completed under a new contract. Management believes that the project will be completed at a cost close to the $13 million. However, there may be additional costs associated with the contract closure, the new contract, and with the delay in project completion." All Contents ©Copyright The Oak Ridger ***************************************************************** 10 Mystery barge on Melton Hill Lake Oak Ridger Online --> Story last updated at 10:36 a.m. on Tuesday, October 23, 2001 Officials load a barge at Melton Hill Lake with equipment that will be shipped via water to a nuclear power plant in Taiwan. The Oak Ridge company Senior Flexonics Pathway is working on the project through a contract with General Electric. The barge, at left, arrived in Oak Ridge last Thursday and is expected to leave this Thursday, if not sooner. All Contents ©Copyright The Oak Ridger ***************************************************************** 11 Accident results in Flats closure - 2001-10-22 - The Denver Business Journal Cathy Proctor Business Journal Staff Reporter Cleanup at Rocky Flats was shut down for several days after a worker released a possibly cancer-causing gas into the ventilation system of a building complex on Oct. 10. Five people reported feeling nausea and dizziness and were taken to the on-site medical clinic, said officials at Kaiser-Hill, the cleanup contractor for the Superfund site owned by the Department of Energy. They were treated and released the same day, said Gary Voorheis, deputy director of safety, engineering and quality programs for Kaiser-Hill. An additional 22 people chose to be checked out by doctors and have blood tests at the clinic, Voorheis said. "The doctor indicated with a small, brief exposure to the small amount of gas released that there should be no lasting health effects," Voorheis said. The incident occurred when a chemist was checking the contents of several small gas canisters, about the size of an aerosol can, prior to turning the building over to Kaiser-Hill's decontamination and decommissioning teams, Voorheis said. The canisters were opened without authorization and without proper safety procedures, such as a special venting unit, in place, said Bill Badger, a spokesman for Kaiser-Hill. The worker was unaware that 80 percent of the ventilation system in the buildings, numbers 776 and 777, used recirculated air -- sending the gas throughout the buildings, Voorheis said. The gas did not vent into the air outside the buildings, he said. Kaiser-Hill ordered a site-wide "safety pause" on Oct. 12, in which all work is halted until safety procedures are reviewed. The contractor and the DOE also launched investigations into the incident. Karen Lutz, a spokeswoman for DOE, identified the gases released as butene, iso-butylene and 1,3-butadiene. All are a form of butane, found in cigarette lighters, Lutz said. A U.S. Department of Health and Human Services background sheet on 1,3-butadiene says chemical "may reasonably be anticipated to be a carcinogen." Voorheis said a preliminary investigation indicated that 1,3-butadiene was released, but was unsure about other gases involved in the incident. Cleanup work began resuming on Tuesday, Oct. 16, Badger said. Isolated "safety pauses" are not unusual, Voorheis said, adding that a site-wide shutdown may occur once or twice a year. ***************************************************************** 12 SRS maps plans for replacing plant Web posted Tuesday, October 23, 2001 By Brandon Haddock Staff Writer Savannah River Site officials will use a variety of methods to replace a failed $489 million plant at the federal nuclear-weapons installation. Besides building a solvent extraction plant that could cost as much as $1 billion, the U.S. Department of Energy will develop additional, smaller plants to do the work of the shuttered In-Tank Precipitation Facility, a site official said Monday at a meeting in Augusta. ''The goal is to disposition the high-level waste as quickly as we can," Charles E. Anderson, an Energy Department assistant manager at SRS, told members of the site's Citizens Advisory Board. The new plants will be used to treat about 34 million gallons of a salty, highly radioactive solution containing cesium. The waste currently is stored in 49 underground tanks at SRS. The In-Tank plant was supposed to treat the waste, but it was closed in January 1998 because engineers could not prevent benzene from building up inside its tanks. Benzene is flammable and is suspected to cause cancer. By using more than one method to treat the waste, the Energy Department will have a backup should the solvent-extraction plant fail, Mr. Anderson said. The department also will be able to treat the waste more quickly and free up tank space for wastes generated by ongoing site operations, Mr. Anderson said. Using additional methods will make it easier to treat wastes that contain both cesium and volatile organic compounds, Mr. Anderson said. ''It may be that one of those technologies deals with those problems better than trying to expand or build a solvent-extraction plant to do it all," Mr. Anderson said. Reach Brandon Haddock at (706) 823-3409 or bhaddock@augustachronicle.com. All contents ©1996 - 2001 The Augusta Chronicle. All rights ***************************************************************** 13 Study: security at DOE nuclear facilities lax Web posted Tuesday, October 23, 2001 McClatchy Newspapers/Scripps Howard News Service WASHINGTON - 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. All contents ©1996 - 2001 The Augusta Chronicle. All rights ***************************************************************** 14 New Delhi slams speculation on N-site attack - DAWN - Top Stories; 23 October, By Jawed Naqvi NEW DELHI, Oct 22: India poured scorn on Monday on a Washington Post report which speculates a pre-emptive strike by New Delhi on Pakistan's nuclear sites in case Islamabad's arsenal look like falling into the hands of Muslim militants. A senior Indian analyst said the speculation of a pre-emptive strike against Pakistan seemed to have a mischievous intent of masking a possible plan by any of the other interested powers to carry out the attack, should the opportunity or the need arise. "I would not like to comment on that," Indian foreign ministry spokesperson Nirupama Rao said, reacting to the Washington Post report. "I would only like to say, as far nuclear confidence-building between the two countries is concerned, you are aware that India had made a proposal prior to the Agra summit for the resumption of talks between officials of the two sides and at the experts level on nuclear confidence building. That is really the direction in which we see this whole process of building peace and stability in our region. That is our approach." Former foreign secretary J.N Dixit told Dawn that the speculation was "pure badmashi", adding that the two countries had signed a pact in 1988 against attacking each other's nuclear facilities. "The treaty was ratified in 1992. So this report is obviously masking some other possible intention. Who knows how many people might want to take out Pakistan's nuclear capability and blame it on India." Dixit said it could also be America's way of dissuading India from launching a conventional attack across the border into Pakistan. Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee had offered to then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif a pact against first use of nuclear strike during their bilateral meeting in Colombo on the margins of the 1998 SAARC summit, but Islamabad had wanted to expand it into a non-aggression pact. The Lahore Declaration of February 1999 addresses the issue even more cogently. It recognises that "the nuclear dimension of the security environment of the two countries adds to their responsibility for avoidance of conflict between the two countries." The pact also committed both countries to "take immediate steps for reducing the risk of accidental or unauthorised use of nuclear weapons and discuss concepts and doctrines with a view to elaborating measures for confidence building in the nuclear and conventional fields, aimed at prevention of conflict." The Washington Post story speculates on some worrying possibilities in the American mission in Afghanistan including the worry that terrorists could hit back at Pakistan. "The prospect of Pakistan being taken over by Islamic extremists is especially worrisome because it possesses nuclear weapons," The Post said. "The betting among military strategists is that India, another nuclear power, would not stand idly by, if it appeared that the Pakistani nuclear arsenal were about to fall into the hands of extremists." It said a pre-emptive action by India to destroy Pakistan's nuclear stockpile could provoke a new war on the subcontinent. The Post added that the US military has conducted more than 25 war games involving a confrontation between a nuclear-armed India and Pakistan. "Each has resulted in nuclear war," it quoted retired Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner as saying. He is an expert on strategic games. "Having both the United States and India fighting Muslims would play into the hands of Osama bin Laden," the Washington Post said quoting a warning by Mackubin Owens, a strategist at the Naval War College in Newport. "He could point out once again that this is the new crusade," Owens said. © The DAWN Group of Newspapers, 2001 ***************************************************************** NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: *****************************************************************