***************************************************************** 10/28/01 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 9.253 ***************************************************************** RADBULL IS PRODUCED BY THE ABALONE ALLIANCE CLEARINGHOUSE ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR POWER CONTENTS 1 5 LEADING LABS SAY NUCLEAR POWER CAN BE REPLACED ALMOST IMMEDIATELY 2 N-power is clean, safe 3 Atomic-waste load won't cross state for a while 4 No nuclear waste on rails until April 5 NPPD plan would boost capacity, and possibly rates 6 Multiple controls on nuke materials Lifting of Japanese 7 Government starts Sellafield legal action against Britain 8 Norway considers lawsuit against the Nuclear Kingdom 9 Armenian nuclear plant maintenance work on schedule 10 The nuclear waste import and public opposition 11 Environmental groups protest plans to transport spent nuclear 12 Russian atomic ministry: no plans to bury nuclear waste 13 NH urges purchase of nuke pill, just in case 14 Rethinking Security at San Onofre 15 Boston.com / Latest News / Northeast / Board welcomes participation in Yankee sale hearings 16 Japan holds nuclear accident drill - 17 Irish intervene in Sellafield row 18 Risk with a long half -life 19 UK: Shotgun security breach at Torness reactor 20 River shore cleanup cost uncertain 21 State Asks NRC to Consider Terrorist Threat to Proposed Waste 22 MP makes nuclear threat plea 23 Ireland challenges Sellafield plant 24 Papers warn of nuclear threat 25 Move could affect Yucca Mountain debate 26 NATIONAL NEWS: Dublin in legal move against UK over Sellafield 27 Nuclear reactor back online after speedy repair efforts 28 SDF, residents take part in radiation-leak drills 29 Two in hospital after radioactive accident 30 British Energy wants Canadian reactors 31 State may challenge approval of Yucca design guidelines 32 Plaintiffs, counsel approved in class action against USEC 33 Activists protest plans to transport imported nuclear waste along 34 Germany takes steps to block nuclear waste protests 35 THE REAL DANGER IS NUCLEAR . 36 Russia, Armenia discuss updating nuclear power plants 37 Ireland moves to stop UK nuclear plant 38 Catawba nuclear station stirs debate 39 Nukes out resolution proposed for warrant 40 Japan Holds 1st Nuclear Accident Drill Using Permanent Centre NUCLEAR WEAPONS CONTENTS 1 Star Wars: How the Future Was Shanghaied 2 A Chance to Avoid Nuclear Disaster 3 Russian investigators enter reactor compartment of Kursk 4 Russia's chief designer guarantees safety of Kursk reactor 5 Top-secret shutdown at Fermi 6 Stolen gauge contains uranium 7 Muslim Leader Who Was Once Labeled an Alarmist Is Suddenly a Sage 8 U.S.-Russia deal on shield, nuclear cuts could come soon, envoy says 9 'A five-star disaster for the world' 10 Bin Laden's nuclear threat 11 'Dirty' bomb could wipe out thousands 12 Nuclear safety of world is at stake, Blair tells troops 13 Nuclear trigger dealer arrested 14 Blair Warns Of Nuke Threat 15 Oak Ridge facility signs on to provide uranium tubes to UK 16 Fear of terror nuclear cache 17 Experts say Nevada not high on list of terrorist targets 18 Hanford budget still unresolved in Congress 19 Official: Fire Swept Through Kursk 20 Russian Official Shows Kursk Damage 21 Analysis: Bin Laden's 'nuclear threat' 22 Security official Ridge to tour test site 23 Japan discontinues measures taken in response to nuclear tests 24 Egypt presents two draft resolutions to UN committee on 25 THE mayor of Hiroshima called yesterday for an international 26 US plan to destroy Pakistan’s N-facilities if Pervez’s ousted 27 America wakes up to Osama's nuke dreams 28 U.S. Mulls Action on Nukes in Pakistan 29 Arrest of second Pak n-expert exposes jehadi bomb trail - 30 Every day, the case mounts against Saddam 31 Russian experts discuss Bin-Ladin's possible nuclear plot 32 Afghan DPs' influx worries Altaf - 33 Nuclear threat to Tier 'remote' 34 Security official Ridge to tour test site 35 Experts say Nevada not high on list of terrorist targets **************************************************************** ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR POWER ARTICLES ***************************************************************** 1 5 LEADING LABS SAY NUCLEAR POWER CAN BE REPLACED ALMOST IMMEDIATELY Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2001 01:27:31 -0400 http://ccnr.org/Lovins_figure_4.html & http://www.rmi.org Rocky Mountain Institute & Amory Lovins On Massive Energy Conservation THIS NEEDS SPECIFIC INVESTIAGTION & PUBLICITY: In America, despite all of the billions invested in it, nuclear power provides a mere fifth of the nation's electricity--far less than what five leading national laboratories say could be saved almost immediately with a national energy efficiency program, one that could unfold with most citizens never even noticing. Norm Cohen wrote: http://www.thenation.com/docPrint.mhtml?i=special& s=bivens20011024 -- ncohen12@home.com UNPLUG SALEM WEBSITE: http://www.unplugsalem.org/ COALITION FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE WEBSITE: -------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------ Printed from http://www.thenation.com © 2001 The Nation Company, L.P. Back to Web View -------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------ FEATURE STORY | Special Report Nuclear Power & Terrorism by MATT BIVENS Go to the website of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission ( www.nrc.gov), and you'll find an apology for how thin the information is there. On October 11 the website was closed; now bits and pieces are slowly re-emerging. Susan Gagner, an NRC press spokeswoman, says the site is being "scrubbed" of information that might be useful to terrorists. She said the NRC had been asked to take that action by "another government agency," but would not say which one. Another NRC spokesman told Reuters they were removing, for example, latitude and longitude coordinates of nuclear reactors, plant schematics and so on. Note that a full monthafter September 11, the NRC had to be toldto do this by someone else! Well, better late than never. As The Nation has reported, the terrorists who in 1993 bombed the World Trade Center trained beforehand at a remote site not thirty miles from Three Mile Island -- and afterward threatened to send 150 suicide bombers into America's nuclear plants. [See "Nuclear Safety," September 16]. Given that Al Qaeda terrorists active in America have been thinking about nuclear terrorism for eight years now, it seems likely that much of the NRC's now-secret information--assuming it was of interest and is not still obtainable on any AAA road map--was downloaded long ago. In any case, one needs minimal inspiration from the NRC website to brainstorm half-a-dozen ways a handful of motivated individuals could turn a nuclear power plant into an American Chernobyl. (Or forty-four Chernobyls. That's the sort of deadly radiation cloud New Scientist magazine predicts England and Ireland would see if a commercial jetliner plowed into the spent fuel pool of Britain's Sellafield plant. British Nuclear Fuels Ltd., Sellafield's parent company, called the report "irresponsible.") The 1986 fire at Chernobyl threw radiation across Ukraine, Belarus and much of Europe. The death-and-injury toll is a matter of debate; of 300 volunteer firefighters who immediately showed up to battle the six-day blaze, thirty-one were dead within the week. As the fire burned on, thousands more volunteers arrived, but estimates vary as to how many died how rapidly. The Ukrainian government this year estimated that more than 4,000 of those volunteer firefighters have since died a young death, and that more than 70,000 Ukrainians have been "disabled" by radiation sicknesses. The radiation has also created national sacrifice areas in Ukraine and Belarus, where hundreds of thousands deserted their homes in minutes, many of them never to return. Kiev has declared an area the size of the Netherlands unsuitable for agriculture; in neighboring Belarus, nearly a quarter of all farmland is contaminated, and the Health Ministry recorded a 161 percent increase in birth defects in babies born between 1986 and 1993. The World Health Organization says thousands of children have contracted or will contract thyroid cancer over the next decades, an ailment treatable with medication if caught early enough. US government action is being taken to defend some of America's 104 nuclear power plants from such a fate. National Guardsmen have been called out to patrol some reactors, and others along the Great Lakes are being watched by the Coast Guard. But the NRC remains tight-lipped and looks like a spectator--in public never moving from its initial September 11 "recommendation" that commercial nuclear plants adopt high-level security--while state governors, national security officials and Congressional critics drive the action. The NRC could demand or order instead of just recommending. But it has not done so--even when its recommendation looks to have been ignored. For example, it took well over a month after the World Trade Center fell--and weeks of complaints by citizens, media and politicians--before the Maine Yankee nuclear power plant could be bothered to post a guard and a gate at the road leading into its complex. Maine Yankee is being "decommissioned," but it's still home to an enormous pool of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel. A spokesman for Maine Yankee, Eric House, said that despite the complaints that the place looked like a ghost town, security has been there all along--just "focused" on the metal warehouse over the spent fuel pool. Some locals say they've heard there are armed men inside that building, but House would not comment on that. So there's no way for the public to know whether those armed men have increased in number since September 11; or whether they could handle five or ten or twenty armed kamikaze terrorists; or what they could do to prevent, say, a truck bomb from trundling through the open gate, parking next to the pool house and then making most of Maine uninhabitable after it blows up. NRC officials counter that there has been no "specific or credible" threat to Maine Yankee, or to any other American nuclear plant. Apparently they were waiting for delivery of an Osama-gram with a big hissing fuse attached. And apparently they finally received something like that on Wednesday, when the NRC announced that a "credible" threat had been made "very specifically" against Three Mile Island. (So just as someone called them to tell them to clean up their website, someone--the CIA? the terrorists?--called them to suggest they look to Three Mile Island.) No details were offered, but some Pennsylvania airports were closed for several hours. By Thursday, the threat was "no longer credible." There is nothing new in this lackadaisical approach to nuclear plant security. Daniel Hirsch of the Committee to Bridge the Gap--the gap in question being that between the public and the jargon-filled world of nuclear power--has recounted how he and others spent a dismaying fifteen years trying to get the NRC to insist on forcing the power plants it licenses simply to set up barriers to potential truck bombs. In 1982, after a suicide bomber killed 241 US Marines stationed in Lebanon, the NRC began to hear Hirsch's pleas, and to re-examine its 1970s-era security regulations for nuclear facilities. Those rules required that reactors be prepared for the following worst-case scenario: three lightly armed attackers moving together on foot, assisted by a fourth attacker inside the plant's work force. No cars, no planes, no grenades, no truck bombs, no gases, no multiple teams. According to a paper Hirsch wrote in the mid-1980s, NRC safeguards staff saw post-Lebanon truck bombs as a serious danger, and in 1984 publicized their intent to put out new rules. The NRC contracted with the Sandia National Laboratories to study the truck-bomb threat--and Sandia concluded that it was worse than all had feared. A reasonable-sized charge set back beyond even the protected area for most plants could cause "unacceptable damage." (In other words, it could rip things apart sufficiently to cause reactor safety systems to fail, radiological releases, etc.--the sort of thing that a 1982 US Congressional Committee study had just concluded might bring thousands of fatalities, millions of poisonings and billions of dollars in damages.) Oddly, Hirsch writes, two weeks after they got that terrifying Sandia research back, the NRC postponed all action on a new truck-bomb-defense ruling--"pending the results of research." If it's more dangerous than ever, why postpone? Hirsch writes that the NRC was taken aback at the cost to the industry of real security and plunged into a paralyzing internal debate. "As long as the proposed NRC truck-bomb rule involved only a few extra concrete barricades on-site, the cost to the licensees [nuclear power plants] would have been minimal and the political cost to the NRC acceptable," he wrote. "When research revealed that the problem was considerably more serious than previously thought and the solution therefore more expensive, the regulatory agency apparently felt it could not afford to require action proportionate to the problem." Other government agencies were all putting in truck-bomb-defense policies (at taxpayer expense); the NRC contented itself with studying truck-bomb-defense policies rather than requiring them. In 1993, nine years later, after talk of new rules had begun, a deranged man drove his station wagon through the gates of Three Mile Island, crashing it into the turbine building and disappearing for four hours. Weeks later, terrorists tied to Al Qaeda bombed the World Trade Center, and afterward wrote to the New York Times that they would send 150 suicide bombers against US nuclear targets. Suddenly Hirsch and others who had written about security weaknesses at nuclear plants--among them Paul Leventhal of the Nuclear Control Institute and Bennett Ramberg, author of Nuclear Power Plants as Weapons for the Enemy: An Unrecognized Military Peril--found their truck-bomb fears shared by Congress. Under pressure, the NRC and the industry built new truck-bomb defenses. But other concerns of Leventhal, Ramberg and Hirsch--for example, the danger of terrorists infiltrating a nuclear plant's work force -- were less satisfactorily handled. All three participated in a post-September 11 press conference in Washington to advocate, among other things, US military troops and antiaircraft weaponry posted at every nuclear facility. They also called for plant operators to aggressively recheck employee backgrounds, and for a government moratorium on plans to ship spent nuclear fuel to a central depository tentatively planned for Yucca Mountain, Nevada--a plan critics deride as "mobile Chernobyl." Is that really what it takes to protect nuclear plants? If so, then some see in this a logical conclusion, and new currency for an old argument: that nuclear power is incompatible with democratic freedoms. If one has to scrub the websites, polygraph the employees, call out the guard and shoot down civilian aircraft that stray too close--does that sound like the USA, or the USSR? And if it sounds too Soviet, then isn't it more sensible to just shut the nuclear plants down? The Belgian government thinks so, and promises a bill by December 2002 to phase out its seven nuclear power reactors. Germany has already inked such a deal, and plans to replace the lost energy capacity with offshore windmill parks. It's easier than one might think. In America, despite all of the billions invested in it, nuclear power provides a mere fifth of the nation's electricity--far less than what five leading national laboratories say could be saved almost immediately with a national energy efficiency program, one that could unfold with most citizens never even noticing. Given this logic, it's not hard to see why the industry would be in a state of denial about security: The very discussion is a lethal Pandora's box. Perhaps this is why a full month after September 11 the gates to Maine Yankee lay open, the NRC website was still packed with design schemata, and it was up to governors, not slow-moving NRC officials, to call out the guard. A clear-eyed discussion of how to defend these plants just might conclude that they are indefensible. -------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------ Back to Web View ***************************************************************** 2 N-power is clean, safe Deseret News Archives Friday, October 26, 2001 The churches in Utah deserve respect for not entering an opinion on the Goshutes' project to store spent nuclear fuel. Some have urged the churches to call this a moral issue when it is not. It is a safety issue that has been distorted beyond all reason. Environmentalists themselves used to praise nuclear power because it produces no air pollution, no water pollution and only a tiny volume (compared to coal ashes) of solid waste, which can easily be contained if science is allowed to do the job without political obstruction. The responsible and proper way to handle spent nuclear fuel is to reprocess it, removing the usable fuels (more than 97 percent) from the true waste (fission products). The true waste is then melted into glass (vitrified) and stored for only 300 years, by which time, it is less radioactive than the original lumps of uranium ore found in the desert. The only part that would have remained radioactive for more than 10,000 years is the fuel, which can be completely burned in reactors to provide us with clean, green, economical electricity. Radical environmentalists apparently seek to completely halt nuclear electricity production (20 percent of the U.S. total) by not allowing storage anywhere. That could give us an energy crisis and depression worse than what any terrorist could dream of. Steven C. Barrowes member, Scientists for Secure Waste Storage Salt Lake City © 2001 Deseret News Publishing Co. ***************************************************************** 3 Atomic-waste load won't cross state for a while Omaha.com Midlands» Today Published Saturday October 27, 2001 BY CHRISTOPHER BURBACH WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER A load of highly radioactive waste that was supposed to cross Nebraska this year by rail probably won't be shipped until at least April. Security concerns raised by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks initially led to suspensions of all federal nuclear-waste shipments, including 125 spent-fuel rods expected to move by rail from New York to Idaho. The route was to include Missouri, Nebraska and Wyoming. Now, the U.S. Department of Energy says, that fuel-rod shipment is being delayed not for security reasons, but for legal reasons having to do with shipping other nuclear waste out of Idaho. The shipment was scheduled to move on four railroads, including Union Pacific. U.P. spokesman John Bromley said the railroad was told the shipment was off until at least the spring. A reason was not given, he said. Weather will cause further delays. The casks containing the rods for shipping aren't certified to travel in temperatures below minus-10 degrees Fahrenheit. That means they won't be moved in the winter. The spent fuel rods were supposed to move by Oct. 31 from the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York to a reprocessing plant storage site in Idaho. The shipment was just about ready to go when the Sept. 11 attacks occurred, said John Chamberlain, a West Valley spokesman. The Department of Energy suspended shipments after the attacks, then again in early October, after the airstrikes in Afghanistan began. The postponements could mean the fuel rods won't be transported in 2002, for budgetary reasons, Chamberlain said. ©2001 Omaha World-Herald. All rights reserved. Copyright | ***************************************************************** 4 No nuclear waste on rails until April Journalstar.com: Nebraska Sunday, Oct. 28, 2001 The Associated Press Security concerns raised by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks will likely delay the rail shipment of nuclear waste across Nebraska. The U.S. Department of Energy said the load of highly radioactive waste probably will not be shipped until at least April. The terrorist attacks led to the suspension of all federal nuclear-waste shipments, including the load of 125 spent-fuel rods that was expected to move by rail from New York to Idaho. That load would have been shipped on a route that included Nebraska, Missouri and Wyoming. Weather also is playing a factor in the delay. The casks carrying the rods are not certified to travel in temperatures below minus 10 degrees, preventing their movement this winter. Copyright © 2001, Lincoln Journal Star. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 5 NPPD plan would boost capacity, and possibly rates Omaha.com Midlands» Today Published Saturday October 27, 2001 BY NANCY GAARDER WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER The Nebraska Public Power District, which supplies electricity to most of Nebraska, is considering a $1 billion plan that would increase its capacity by 23 percent. Over the next 10 years, the company would build three types of plants in keeping with its efforts to have a variety of power sources, said Marcia Cady, corporate communications manager. Those would be a wind-power farm, a natural gas-fired plant and a coal-fired plant. The utility has been looking for locations and drawing up cost estimates since the board gave its approval for the study this summer. Any final decisions would require another board vote. The expansion likely would mean higher rates for NPPD's customers. The utility serves 95,000 households and businesses directly and another 250,000 indirectly through local power companies that buy their electricity from NPPD. How much rates will go up, and when, hasn't been decided, Cady said. An 8 percent to 13 percent rate increase is scheduled to go into effect next year, pending final approval by the board. That increase is unrelated to expansion plans. It will be used primarily to pay for environmental improvements and expanded capacity at existing plants. Nebraska Public Power District Headquarters: Columbus, Neb. Supplies power to 91 of 93 counties in Nebraska. Current generating capacity: 2,800 megawatts. Proposed added capacity: 634 megawatts Under consideration: 2003 - Wind turbine farm would come on line. 5 megawatts capacity. Location, cost not set. 2005 - Gas-fired plant would come on line. 229 megawatts. Cost: $170 million. Site not selected. 2009 - Coal-fired plant would come on line. 400 megawatt facility. Cost $900 million. The expansion also would put NPPD in a better position to decommission the sometimes troubled Cooper Nuclear Station. Cady said NPPD is evaluating the nuclear power plant, and shutting it down is one option. No decisions have been made, she said. Cooper generates 800 megawatts of electricity. NPPD's current capacity is 2,800 megawatts. The expansion would add 634 megawatts. This would be the first major expansion by NPPD since 1982, when it finished work at the Gerald Gentleman Station power plant near Sutherland, Neb. Cady said the expansion was necessary to be prepared for the future and to hedge against unplanned outages as current facilities age. This week, local officials in the Grand Island area gave their OK for the coal-fired plant to be built on 1,800 acres at the former Cornhusker Army Ammunition Plant. The next step is for NPPD to evaluate the site and negotiate with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on a price. Sites for the gas-fired plant and wind farm still are under consideration. The company would build the wind farm first, then the gas plant and finally the coal-fired plant. The wind-power farm, while small, would approximately triple NPPD's current wind-power capacity. Although the coal-fired plant is the farthest off in terms of completion, it is the farthest along in terms of planning. The plant would employ 100 people and generate an annual payroll of $5 million, Cady said. The proposed Grand Island site is contaminated with residue from the explosives that were manufactured there. It is being cleaned under the federal Superfund program. Having the land cleaned up would be a condition of purchase, Cady said. NPPD is the state's largest generator of electricity. Most of its power is sold to dozens of smaller public power districts that then resell it to their customers. It will be up to those local companies to decide whether to pass on any rate increases. ©2001 Omaha World-Herald. All rights reserved. Copyright | Terms ***************************************************************** 6 Multiple controls on nuke materials Lifting of Japanese sanctions, European Parliament resolution hailed The Frontier Post From Peshawar Pakistan Naveed Miraj Updated on 10/27/2001 12:16:48 PM ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has welcomed the European Parliament resolution stressing the need for resolution of the longstanding Kashmir dispute. Briefing newsmen in Islamabad Friday, Foreign Office spokesman Mr. Riaz Mohammad Khan said this reflects the sentiments of the international community about solution of the problem. The European Parliament also urged the European Union to take initiative by offering its services as an honest broker to both Pakistan and India with a view to facilitating the process for resolution of the issue. Asked to comment on Mr. Colin Powell’s statement urging Pakistan and India to initiate a dialogue, the spokesman said Pakistan wants resumption of dialogue to address Kashmir and other issues. The spokesman also welcomed lifting of sanctions by Japan that were imposed following nuclear tests in 1998. He hoped the step would lead to normal transactions between the two countries in trade and economic cooperation. He said Pakistan has considerable trade with Japan and significant investments as well. Imposition of the sanctions were negative from our point of view. These were also unfair and unwarranted as Pakistan did not initiate the tests but had to respond to demonstrate its capability. He said Pakistani tests restored the strategic balance and contributed to stability in the region. He pointed out that had Pakistan not done so, this would have led to some miscalculations. Asked to comment on a mischievous foreign press report that some nuclear material found its way to Osama bin Ladin, the spokesman termed as absurd and part of a campaign to malign Pakistan. The spokesman categorically stated that Pakistan’s nuclear materials are under multi-layer custodial control. Pakistan has made unilateral commitment to the international community not to transfer sensitive technologies or materials to anyone. He said Pakistan’s record on this count is impeccable as these sensitive technologies and materials have been with us for over 15 years. To another question the spokesman said the Government is looking into the credentials of all NGOs who have been working inside Afghanistan. He said two retired nuclear scientists who are running a similar organization Ummah Tameer-e-Nau were asked some questions. He said Mr. Bashiruddin Mahmood and Mr. Abdul Majeed were not arrested or detained. He said we have great respect for our scientists and engineers who have done marvelous work in certain areas. The spokesman said the Special Envoy of the UN Secretary-General on Afghanistan. Mr. Lakhdar Brahimi is arriving in Islamabad tomorrow as part of UN efforts for a broad-based government in Afghanistan. He said the Dutch Prime Minister also visiting Pakistan tomorrow to discuss the Afghan situation. To another question the spokesman said Pakistan is not asking for any role in Afghanistan. Rather, it wanted a broad-based government representing all segments of Afghan population. He said Pakistan wants peace in Afghanistan so that three million refugee could go back to their homeland. He said imposition of any group would not resolve the problem there. To a question he said Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan was closed but vulnerable people like children, women and sick are allowed to enter Pakistan. He said Pakistan cannot afford to open the border as it would mean rush of up to seven and a half million displaced Afghans towards Pakistan. He said Pakistan, which is already bearing a burden of over three million refugees, cannot accept more. © Copyright 2001 The Frontier Post ***************************************************************** 7 Government starts Sellafield legal action against Britain online.ie : News The Irish Examiner 27 Oct 2001 By John Downing, Chief Political Correspondent THE Government last night confirmed it is taking legal action on three fronts to stop the controversial MOX reprocessing plant going ahead at Sellafield, 60 miles from Dublin. A spokesman said action has now been initiated in the EU Court of Justice and at United Nations' level, under the Convention on the Law of the Sea while a third move continues under the OSPAR arbitration process. The Government has also set up a special Cabinet steering committee to oversee all three legal processes. A spokesman said that the prospect of taking legal action in the British courts had been studied but had been ruled out. "The advice was that it was not the best action to take at the moment. Actions by one government against another, in the courts of the second government's jurisdiction, are not unknown. But they do face special practical difficulties," one official said. The Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, has several times declared his intention to take legal action since the controversial MOX decision was announced on October 3. A formal decision to go ahead with legal action was taken by the Government on Tuesday. The cabinet sub-committee will include the Taoiseach; Tánaiste, Mary Harney; Foreign Affairs Minister, Brian Cowen; Social Welfare Minister, Dermot Ahern, who represents Louth; and Junior Minister, Joe Jacob. The EU action will be taken before the Court of Justice in Luxembourg on the basis of the EU's atomic treaty, Euratom. The ongoing OSPAR arbitration system is dealing with a large number of north European countries concerned by nuclear issues. The MOX plant is designed to process nuclear fuel from uranium and plutonium and the material is imported from a large number of countries including Japan. EU and international lawyers say the British claims that they are helping to recycle and dispose one of the world's most noxious materials will feature prominently in the case for the defence. ***************************************************************** 8 Norway considers lawsuit against the Nuclear Kingdom In a radio debate broadcasted live, with Bellona, the newly appointed Norwegian minister for the environment, Børge Brende, said he intends to ask the attorney general and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs to clear out the possibilities of a legal case against Great Britain, in order to stop the radioactive discharges from Sellafield. Norwegian Minister of Environment Børge Brende Thomas Nilsen, Translated by Marte-Kine Sandengen, 2001-10-26 11:49 The two former environmental ministers, Siri Bjerke and Guro Fjellanger, were also actively engaged in the struggle to stop the discharges from Sellafield. Several pronouncements and resolutions from a Nordic perspective have been sent to the British in the last few years, but Mr. Brende's statements on Monday represent an all together new and more aggressive turn of the case from a Norwegian point of view. The discharges released from Sellafield represent a serious threat to Norway. Releases of the radioactive substance technetium-99 imperil our natural food source and are a threat to the Norwegian fishery industry, says Mr. Brende. The level of Technetium-99 has increased dramatically in Norwegian waters since the mid-1990s. Radioactivity is now measured as far north as Svalbard. Bellona takes samples from lobsters Bellona is particularly dismayed by the long-term consequences of the radioactive pollution. The British Nuclear Fuel Ltd. (BNFL), owning and operating the Sellafield plant, has applied for a licence to continue operations for several more years. Last weekend, Bellona brought its boat, S/S Kalinika, just outside Rogaland on the Norwegian west coast to measure the level of technetium-99 in lobsters. The radioactive substance technetium-99 has a half-life of 213,000 years, and consequently, the current discharges from Sellafield, which is lead by ocean streams northwards to the Norwegian coastline, will remain in the marine environment for thousands of generations to come. Intervention level of 1250 Bq/kg The analyses of the lobsters caught by Bellona during last weekend will be executed in cooperation with the Norwegian Radiation Protection Authorities (NRPA). The last time similar measurements were carried out was in December 1997. Every single day since 1997 Sellafield has discharged eight million litres of radioactive waste directly into the ocean. The EU intervention level for technetium-99 in lobster is set at 1250 Bq/kg. If the discharges are allowed to continue in the coming years, Bellona fears that this limit will be exceeded. If the level of techetium-99 in lobster and other seafood should exceed 1250 Bq/kg, there will be put a ban on these commodities, which in turn would imply major consequences for the fishery industry along the entire Norwegian coast. Norwegian fishery industry is seriously disquieted by the increased nuclear discharges. In a letter to the British Ministry for the Environment of August 14th this year, the Norwegian Fish Farmers Association (NFF) clearly expressed its worries. In the reply, the British environmental authorities stressed that the release of technetium-99 will cease in 2012. Ireland and Iceland Ireland is the nearest neighbour to the Sellafield site. The level of radioactivity measured in sea animals in the Irish Sea may be an indication on how the situation along the Norwegian coast will be like in some years. Ireland too, plans a legal action against the UK for their nuclear discharges. Mr. Brende also said he would contact his Nordic colleagues to discuss a possible lawsuit against the UK. The Icelandic minister for the environment, Siv Fridtleifsdottir, has at a number of occasions fronted Nordic protests against Sellafield. Copenhagen next Tuesday The Sellafield situation will already next Tuesday become an issue of discussion when Mr. Brende meets with his colleagues in a meeting of the Council of Minister's in Copenhagen next Tuesday. The Danish minister for the environment, Sven Auken, the host of the meeting, has also at former occasions suggested that the Nordic countries may have a legal basis for sanctions directed at the UK in order to stop the discharges of radioactivity. It is very likely that the Nordic ministers for the environment, after the meeting in Copenhagen, will bring up the Sellafield issue as a separate case in the EU Council of Ministers. Furthermore, the British minister for the environment, Michael Meacher, can probably expect to receive a private visit from the newly appointed Norwegian environmental minister, who has proclaimed Sellafield one of his most urgent and important issues. MOX fuel The minister for the environment, Børge Brende, does not only criticise Sellafield for the discharges of technetium-99, he says he is alarmed about the fact that the British environmental authorities have granted Sellafield a licence for commencing production at the MOX-plant. The controversial MOX fuel is a combination of plutonium and uranium and is intended used in non-military nuclear power plants. -- A plant like that must be considered a likely goal for terrorist attacks. That is also an important aspect of the Sellafield case, Mr. Brende said. Sellafield with major debt Sellafield has a major economical problem, and last weekend the Sunday Telegraph wrote that British Nuclear Fuels Ltd., the company owning Sellafield, is on the verge of bankruptcy. The cost of decommissioning and securing of the nuclear power plants alone, will amount to £34 billion in the next century. The MOX plant at Sellafield that recently received its production licence has lost out on several of their intended markets. For instance the Japanese side has expressed great scepticism concerning buying MOX fuel from the plant after it was made public that BNFL had falsified safety reports concerning the production of MOX fuel. Publisher: Bellona Foundation, President: Frederic Hauge Information: info@bellona.no, Technical contact: webmaster@bellona.no Telephone: +47 23 23 46 00 Telefax: +47 22 38 38 62 * P.O.Box 2141 Grunerlokka, 0505 Oslo, Norway ***************************************************************** 9 Armenian nuclear plant maintenance work on schedule BBC Monitoring Service - United Kingdom; Oct 26, 2001 Text of report by Armenian news agency Arminfo Yerevan, 25 October: Refuelling of the reactor and preparations of all major junctions at the Armenian nuclear power plant, is continuing. The press service of the Armenian Energy Ministry reports that work is being carried out on schedule. If there are no technical problems, experts say that the station will start supplying power within the next 10 days. Source: Arminfo, Yerevan, in Russian 0455 gmt 26 Oct 01 /BBC Monitoring/ © BBC. World Reporter All Material Subject to Copyright ***************************************************************** 10 The nuclear waste import and public opposition Russian environmentalists organize demonstrations along the Trans Siberian railroad. Meanwhile, State Duma hardliners become members of a new presidential commission on nuclear waste import. Atle Staalesen, 2001-10-26 19:40 Last week the Russian State Duma passed an amendment to the Law on Environment Protection, thereby removing the last roadblocks for massive import of nuclear waste. At the same time the environmental group Ecodefence! reported that railroad carriages, destined for Russia, where being loaded with Bulgarian spent nuclear fuel. By the end of 2002 a steady flow of special trains is supposed to arrive to Siberia. The proponents of the law stress that the import will be "important for the development of Russian industry and science." Their opponents, however, express their scepticism towards this theory. They also question the financial part of the project. Russian authorities believe the income from the spent nuclear fuel import will constitute at least $20 billion. Environmentalists believe the sum will be much smaller, and that it will not be used to the promised clean up of areas which are contaminated by the nuclear industry. A Duma member from Yabloko faction, Sergei Mitrokhin, describes the "magical" 20 billions as a "myth". He also believes that the Western governments now might end up abstaining from sending their waste to Russia, because they are afraid the long transport routes could expose the waste to possible "terrorist sabotage". Opposition Duma members have tried to reach a compromise with the parliamentary majority. Yabloko representatives presented a proposition suggesting that the waste be returned to the countries of its origin after reprocessing in Russia. The proposal was rejected by the Duma. So was the attempt to make Sergei Mitrokhin a member of a new presidential commission on nuclear waste import control. The commission, will instead have five Duma representatives, who are all in favour of the waste import. Moreover, they all have close ties with the nuclear power industry. Vladimir Grachev, Mikhail Zlikhanov and Peter Romanov all represent interests of the Ministry of Nuclear Energy in the Duma. Robert Nigmatulin is the brother of the deputy minister on nuclear energy. And Sergey Shashurin has a criminal record. A couple of years ago he tried to start up a business together with the Kurchatov Institute with the aim to import radioactive waste from Taiwan and store it at Sakhalin. There is a fierce public opposition against the import of nuclear waste. Three out of four Russians oppose the new law. On Wednesday a number of Russian environmental organizations held demonstrations in major cities along the Trans Siberian railroad. Leaflets handed out warned against the danger of an environmental catastrophe: "Look at the condition of our railroads: almost every week there are different accidents. When there is a train with nuclear waste coming, any accident may turn into a terrible environmental catastrophe, where thousands of people living along the Trans Siberian railroad would suffer!" The liberal Yabloko party insists there must be held a national vote. However, this might turn out to be easier said than done. Last year Russian environmental groups collected around 2.5 million signatures for a referendum, only to be stopped by the Central Electoral Committee, which declared 600,000 of them invalid. The organizations therefore did not get the required two million signatures. Also this year the initiators will face obstructions. Ten days after Yabloko announced its intention to organize a second collection of signatures, a group of Duma members suggested to change the very law about national referendums. 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 ***************************************************************** 11 Environmental groups protest plans to transport spent nuclear fuel to Russia through Ukraine KPnews.com -- News about Ukraine Category: NATION 26 Oct 2001 The Associated Press KYIV, Oct. 26 - A group of environmental organizations appealed Thursday to Ukraine's parliament and President Leonid Kuchma to halt plans to transport spent nuclear fuel from Bulgaria to Russia through Ukraine. A train carrying 41 metric tons (45.1 short tons) of spent nuclear fuel from a nuclear power plant in the Bulgarian town of Kozlodui is due to pass through Ukraine on its way to a Russian chemical plant. In an open letter to Kuchma and the parliament, five Russian environmental organizations said half of all nuclear fuel accidents, including radiation leaks from tanks, occur at during transportation. «At present, the movement of nuclear materials outside nuclear power plants creates the possibility for terrorist attacks,» they said in the appeal. The shipment was authorized by a 1997 agreement among Ukraine, Russia, Moldova and Bulgaria. The agreement alarmed legislators in Ukraine, Russia and Moldova, and caused an outcry among environmentalists. Russia has long imported spent fuel rods from Ukraine, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Hungary for reprocessing under a Soviet-era system, but a 1992 law prohibits the practice from being expanded. A new law passed this summer overturned that ban, and environmentalists fear Russia could be turned into a nuclear dump. Proponents of the plan maintain it is safe and say it could earn the country $20 billion over the next decade that could be spent on environmental clean-up efforts. On Wednesday, environmentalists in seven cities along Russia's Trans-Siberian railway protested plans to transport spent nuclear fuel along the route. © 2000 SputnikMedia.net ***************************************************************** 12 Russian atomic ministry: no plans to bury nuclear waste BBC Monitoring Service - United Kingdom; Oct 27, 2001 Text of report in English by Russian news agency ITAR-TASS Moscow, 26 October: The Russian Atomic Energy Ministry said in a statement today it had no plans for burying irradiated nuclear waste of either Russian or foreign origin. The ministry issued the statement in a reaction to media reports that quoted a certain group, Ekozashchita (Ecology Defence), as saying that work had been underway since 1998 to build a nuclear waste burial site some 25 to 30 km away from the Krasnoyarsk-26 nuclear centre. The ministry press-service confirmed that research had started on a granitoid geological platform, close to Krasnoyarsk-26, in 1992 to find areas for building reliable burials of radioactive waste. But the project envisioned that solidified radioactive products resulting from nuclear waste recycling would be buried there upon arrival from a new waste utilization facility in Siberia. The ministry stressed that the project had nothing to do with irradiated nuclear fuel. "It fully meets international standards for the use of stable geological formations for long-term storage of hazardous waste," the ministry said. Source: ITAR-TASS news agency, Moscow, in English 1418 gmt 26 Oct 01 /BBC Monitoring/ © BBC. World Reporter All Material Subject to Copyright ***************************************************************** 13 NH urges purchase of nuke pill, just in case The Union Leader & New Hampshire Sunday News October 28, 2001 By ROGER TALBOT Sunday News Staff The state has failed in its effort to motivate pharmacists to stock and promote a drug that protects the thyroid from the radioactive iodine released in a nuclear reactor disaster because the pill is readily available only to government agencies. Asked why they do not carry potassium iodide tablets, pharmacists leafed through drug catalogs to show that their wholesalers do not distribute the drug. They turned to their industry’s reference guide, “Drug Facts and Comparisons,” which lists Thyro-Block, a brand of potassium iodide recommended by the state, as a drug “available only to state and federal agencies.” Though the state and the manufacturer consider Thyro-Block an over-the-counter product, the reference book identifies it as a medication dispensed only when prescribed by a doctor. The state has done nothing to help pharmacists obtain KI, the chemical symbol for potassium iodide. Last week, despite the now important threat of sabotage that looms over the nation’s 103 nuclear power plants, state officials expressed little inclination to alter their hands-off policy on distribution of KI to New Hampshire residents who live near the Seabrook Station and Vermont Yankee nuclear power plants. There have been warnings going back to 1995 that terrorists had included nuclear power plants among their potential targets, based on testimony in the investigation of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The plant in Seabrook has often been described as impervious to even the direct impact of an exploding airplane, but no such claims have been made for the 27-year-old, 540-megawatt Vermont Yankee plant at Vernon, across the Connecticut River from Hinsdale. The state maintains a supply of KI, but its policy, which dates back to 1990 (the year the 1,150-megawatt Seabrook Station began commercial generation) limits distribution of the tablets during an emergency to those who would have to work in or near the nuclear plant and to “institutionalized individuals” — the prisoners, nursing home residents and hospital patients in nearby communities. Two years ago, a KI Policy Study Group concluded in its report to Gov. Jeanne Shaheen that it would be “inappropriate and ineffective” for government agencies to distribute potassium iodide tablets to the public for use in a nuclear plant emergency. The report suggested residents — especially those living within the 10-mile emergency planning zones around the two nuclear plants — consult with their doctors about the potential benefit of taking the drug shortly before or after exposure to radioactive iodine, a waste product of nuclear fission. KI works by saturating the thyroid with iodine. With the gland filled, it cannot absorb the radioactive iodine. KI can protect only the thyroid and only against radioactive iodine. Evacuation is the only protection against other radioactive materials that might be released to the atmosphere in a reactor accident. The committee recommended the state “encourage retail pharmaceutical outlets in New Hampshire to maintain supplies of KI for purchase by members of the public.” “This course of action best reflects the New Hampshire character and preference for individual choice,” the report said. James C. Van Dongen, spokesman for the state Office of Emergency Management, emphasized his agency has no objection to residents maintaining a personal supply of KI tablets — as long as they understand that taking the pill in a nuclear disaster emergency is not a substitute for evacuation. “The only problem is that people haven’t physically been able to lay their hands on it. . . . We’ve been trying for two years to get pharmacies to stock this stuff as a public service. . . . The silence has been deafening,” Van Dongen said. He said on Thursday that the OEM was writing to two companies — Carter-Wallace and Anbex — that manufacture KI tablets, sending them the names of pharmacies in southern New Hampshire in the hope that the companies will “communicate to the pharmacists” their desire to supply the stores with the pills. Last February — seven months before terrorists in commercial jetliners loaded with fuel brought down New York’s World Trade Center towers and set the Pentagon ablaze — the state had written to the pharmacists, asking their help in “a voluntary effort to make potassium iodide available to New Hampshire residents.” The letter, signed by Frank G. Case, president of the state Board of Pharmacy, and Woodbury P. Fogg, the emergency management director, said: “KI is currently only available through mail or telephone order or from the manufacturers’ websites. We do not believe that we can truly say that KI is available to anyone who wants it unless it is offered for sale in local pharmacies. We are asking pharmacies, particularly in the southern half of the state, to stock KI on an experimental basis and do some in-store promotion to let customers know it is available.” Jennifer Hicks is director of the Seacoast Anti-Pollution League, the organization whose lobbying effort led to the review of the state’s KI policy in 1999. On Friday, after telephoning pharmacies throughout the Seacoast Region and calling the state pharmacy board’s office in Concord, Hicks concluded: “There has been miscommunication here, a real disconnect between the state and the pharmacists.” While state officials told Hicks there are no obstacles to pharmacies obtaining KI, she found the drug was not for sale in any of the stores she called. “They all say they aren’t able to get KI from their suppliers so they can’t stock KI on their shelves,” Hicks said. (One pharmacist, at the Shop ‘N Save in Hampton, told her he expected to have some of the tablets by the weekend.) She found herself “coaching” the pharmacists, suggesting they could order through the Internet Web sites and the toll-free numbers of the two manufacturers of KI that the state lists as suppliers in the emergency preparedness brochures distributed annually to residents in the towns near Seabrook Station and the Vermont Yankee plant. “I don’t think the pharmacies have been given any real incentive to do this,” Hicks said. “We’re depending on a for-profit system to take care of a public health need.” “I’ll bet if you went into a pharmacy and asked for Thyro-Block, they wouldn’t have a clue about what you want,” said Michael J. Smith, chairman of the executive committee of the New Hampshire Pharmacists Association. Smith could find no listings for potassium iodide products in the catalogs of the wholesalers who supply his pharmacy in Ossipee. His drug reference guidebook described Thyro-Block as a brand of prescription drug sold only to government agencies. That, he said, would be enough to stymie his efforts to obtain it. “You have to have some sort of incentive to stock something like this. . . . It’s not something that I can remember any customer asking for,” Smith said. Said Pharmacist Association President Donald M. Messina: “As far as we’re concerned, right now, there is no potassium iodide available. . . . I checked the catalogues and I cannot come up with any potassium iodide tablets.” Like his colleagues, Roger Hebert, owner of Rice’s Pharmacy in Nashua, could not “find a mechanism” for doing what the state had asked since KI tablets were not commercially available to him. But Hebert decided about three weeks ago that he had to be prepared. He bought a quantity of powdered potassium iodide, enough to fashion about 1,000 capsules. “I don’t have a use for it. I just got it in case it was ever necessary to have,” Hebert said. “I ordered it as a precaution, but I would not dispense it without checking with the state health department and, obviously, the patient would need a prescription.” On Friday, after getting a call from a reporter, Paul Gillis of Ken’s Pharmacy in Manchester did a little research to see how he would go about purchasing KI. His wholesalers don’t have the tablets, so he telephoned Wallace Pharmaceuticals, the New Jersey based company that makes Thyro-Block. He was told Thyro-Block is an over-the-counter product available on the Internet, but not sold to drug wholesalers. At the state pharmacy board’s office, Gillis learned of a second source for KI: Anbex, a Florida company that sells its product to the public on the Internet. “It is an incongruous situation, isn’t it?” Gillis said of a drug that is available to him as a private citizen, but not as a pharmacist. “I don’t feel as though Ken will put this in our stock,” Gillis said. “If a patient can buy it on the Internet, it would seem strange to put it in the pharmacy.” Obtaining KI on the Internet can also be strange — a challenging walk through the survivalist-oriented on-line market — definitely not as easy as buying a bottle of pills at the drug store. On Friday, at Anbex, which has an address in North Palm Harbor, Fla., no one returned a message left on the telephone answering machine. The company’s Web site offers 14 individually wrapped tablets of KI for $14, including shipping — which can take up to 30 days. The Web site for KI4U sells a variety of radiation detection meters as well as Thyro-Block and Iosat. As of Oct. 25, the distributor was discouraging orders for KI pills. “We are sold out and do not have a firm restocking date,” the Web site said. Thyro-Block was available in a four-person pack for $168, or a 100-pack case for $560 on the Web site of the Utah-based Nitro-Pak Preparedness Center, which boasts that it sells, “Products that bring real peace-of-mind and security.” Among the items sold on the Nitro site: child-size gas masks, “medic” surgical kits, “knuckle mender” first aid kits, “civil defense” sanitation toilets and “solar” showers. Just a month ago, Wallace Pharmaceuticals was purchased by MedPointe Inc. “This is a new company with new management and the company is reevaluating its distribution policy with respect to Thyro-Block, as it is reevaluating the distribution policy for all of its drugs,” a MedPointe spokesman said on Friday. He confirmed that Thyro-Block is currently sold only to government agencies and through independent Internet distributors. It is not available to drug wholesalers who service pharmacies. “So far, our sense has been that that has been adequate, but we are open to review and discussion,” the MedPointe spokesman said. In Concord, however, OEM spokesman Van Dongen said, “I haven’t heard of anybody asking that (the state’s KI policy) be reviewed or changed.” And Pharmacy Board President Frank Case, who did not realize when he wrote to pharmacists in February that Thyro-Block was a product not available through drug wholesalers, admitted he was “dumbfounded at this point,” but doesn’t plan to request any changes in state policy. “It may be an issue we will have to ponder again, but it is not an issue I would put on the board’s agenda,” he said. The Union Leader. ***************************************************************** 14 Rethinking Security at San Onofre October 28, 2001 Talk about itE-mail storyPrint RESPONSE TO TERROR Rethinking Security at San Onofre Planning: Some of the anti-terror measures at other nuclear plants aren't in effect there. Edison says steps are sufficient; others say more should be done. By SEEMA MEHTA, TIMES STAFF WRITER The San Onofre nuclear power plant is one of the most visible--and potentially deadly--targets in Southern California, yet government officials haven't added some of the extra protections put in place at the nation's other nuclear facilities since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Southern California Edison has stepped up security at its plant south of San Clemente by adding more private, armed security guards. The California Highway Patrol and Coast Guard have beefed up patrols as well, and the plant is at its highest stage of alert. But measures taken by government agencies don't go as far there as some taken at nuclear plants in the northeastern United States and in Central California. In the Northeast, governors of New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts have called out the National Guard to protect nuclear power facilities in their states. Gov. Gray Davis has taken no similar steps at San Onofre or Diablo Canyon, which sits on California's Central Coast near San Luis Obispo. After Sept. 11, the local Coast Guard office barred boats from coming within a mile of Diablo Canyon--the state's only other operational nuclear plant. And CHP officers now guard that facility's entrance, where additional vehicle barriers have been erected. San Onofre, located just south of San Clemente, also sits at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, but Coast Guard officials said there was no need to restrict vessels, which can still come right to shore. Beachgoers still can walk the few hundred yards of sand strip between the plant and San Onofre State Beach, a popular surfing spot. Edison officials say their increased security is sufficient at San Onofre, which has two working 1,120-megawatt reactors. Moreover, industry officials say the chances of an attack on such a concrete- and steel-reinforced "hardened target" as a nuclear plant are slim. But they concede that the plants weren't built with attacks like those on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in mind. "The plant was never designed for the impact from a commercial airplane," said Ray Golden, Edison's spokesman for San Onofre, which is majority-owned and wholly operated by the private utility. "That does not mean we wouldn't withstand it." A threat earlier this month against the Three Mile Island plant near Harrisburg, Pa., has drawn even more attention to nuclear plant security. While the threat eventually was deemed "noncredible," it caused two nearby airports to temporarily shut down and military aircraft were ordered to patrol the sky above the plant, said Breck Henderson, spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Watchdog Group Sees a New Reason to Worry Nuclear safety activists in California worry about how safe San Onofre is in today's climate. "The consequences [would be] immense from an attack," said Daniel Hirsch, director of Committee to Bridge the Gap, a nuclear watchdog group based in Los Angeles. Hirsch also is former director of the Adlai Stevenson program on nuclear policy at UC Santa Cruz. Edison's Golden, however, said nuclear plants are designed and operated with possible terrorist attacks in mind. Security measures include extensive background checks on employees, restricted areas, intruder-alert systems and detectors for explosives and metal. Containment domes of steel-reinforced concrete as thick as seven feet and design features to protect against earthquakes also would minimize the risk of radiation release. The plant was designed to withstand truck bombs set off on the nearby San Diego Freeway or efforts of a small group of terrorists trying to enter the plant. After the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island accident in 1979, older plants were retrofitted and new plants coming online, such as San Onofre's units 2 and 3, were required to meet stricter standards to prevent or contain a meltdown. The Sept. 11 attacks have prompted the NRC to assess what would happen if an airplane crashed into a reactor, Henderson said. But he did not know when that mathematical computer modeling analysis would be completed. A different study at San Onofre in 1982--the last time such calculations were made--looked at what could happen in a worst-case disaster scenario. If one of the two working reactors failed, it could result in 27,000 deaths within a year of the accident, 18,000 additional long-term deaths from cancer and $186 billion in property damage. The study, by Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, was commissioned by the NRC. In such a scenario, it is assumed that everything that could go wrong does: The reactor would melt down, releasing a large amount of radiation; prevailing winds would carry that radiation to population centers, and there would be a severe rainstorm. The chance that these things could happen was believed to be one in a billion. An NRC official said at the time the study was released that there was a greater chance of a jumbo jet crashing into the Super Bowl than of a worst-case-scenario meltdown. These probability calculations, however, never included a terrorist attack on any nuclear reactor, said Mark Cunningham, chief of the risk analysis branch at the NRC. "We cannot exclude the possibility that we could have a fairly significant radiation release from the impact of a large commercial aircraft," he said. Jocelyn Mitchell, a senior technical advisor with the NRC, said that if the same calculations were done today, the results would probably be similar. But the death and injury toll could be far lower at San Onofre, according to Dana Powers, a senior scientist with Sandia, based on more recent reports of studies at other plants. Edison's Golden noted that the 19-year-old study assumed "no emergency planning." In an emergency, he said, residents within 10 miles of the plant would be evacuated, which "would dramatically affect those [casualty] numbers." Since Sept. 11, San Onofre and the nation's other 102 nuclear power plants have been on the highest stage of alert. That means armed security guards greet plant employees and visitors, public access to sensitive areas has been discontinued and technical information has been taken off the plant's Web site. Though Golden declined to give details, he said there is an increased security presence inside and outside the plant. Additionally, CHP officers are patrolling the San Diego Freeway more frequently, and rangers for the state Department of Parks and Recreation are patrolling the state park area. The U.S. Coast Guard has stepped up offshore patrols. Private security workers hired by Edison watch over the coastal property at the entrance, perimeter and from elevated guard towers. Many of the guards are retired police or military officers, Golden said. The NRC also stages commando-style drills, using a scenario of a small well-armed band of terrorists trying to sabotage critical plant operations. The last five-day drill at San Onofre, in late 2000, produced mixed results. Though no major problems were identified, the drill uncovered two weaknesses that represented a "credible impact on safety," according to the NRC summary of findings. Details of those findings have not been disclosed, however. Boats Forbidden Near Diablo Canyon At Diablo Canyon, the CHP and the Coast Guard have added more patrols. Boats are forbidden within one nautical mile of the plant. (A nautical mile is slightly longer than a standard mile.) Coast Guard Petty Officer Ted Ford in Morro Bay said his supervisors decided to create the restricted area as a precautionary measure after meeting with local, state and federal officials. That office is a branch of the Los Angeles division of the Coast Guard. San Onofre is under the jurisdiction of the Coast Guard division based in San Diego. Coast Guard Lt. j.g. Chris Lee of the San Diego base said that while his agency has stepped up patrols, it opted against putting a security zone in place. "Based on the assessment that we've done, it didn't appear to be necessary," he said, declining to elaborate. Coast Guard Lt. Ben Benson, also based in San Diego, said San Onofre is one of several sites, including Navy ships in the harbor and bridges and dams on the Colorado River, that are under close scrutiny by his office. Edison's Golden said San Onofre's private guards constantly monitor the air and the water. The NRC told plant officials that if guards see a suspicious plane, they should look at the tail markings and call the Federal Aviation Administration, which has placed no restrictions on flying above nuclear power plants. But Steven Dolley, research director of the Nuclear Control Institute, questioned the usefulness of that. "If you can see the number on the tail fin, you have half a second left. . . . That's obviously not sufficient." His Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit group, which advocates for increased nuclear safety, wants the government to install antiaircraft weaponry at nuclear power plants, including San Onofre. "No one can predict these attacks," Dolley said. "That's become apparent. If they can't predict them, we need to seriously consider the deployment of antiaircraft forces." Asked whether the NRC was considering such measures, Henderson said, "We're reconsidering our security issues from top to bottom. That's all I have to say." Dolley's group also has called on Gov. Davis to deploy the National Guard at both California nuclear power plants, noting the actions of East Coast governors. A Davis spokesman would say only that the governor has not ordered the National Guard to protect nuclear sites, but would not discuss whether he was considering such measures. Rep. Darrell E. Issa (R-Vista), whose district includes San Onofre, said deploying the National Guard would be an extreme waste of money, particularly since thousands of Marines are posted at nearby Camp Pendleton. In fact, the plant is bordered by the U.S. Marine base. Lt. Mamie Ward said the Marines are not involved in day-to-day security issues at the plant, but would be available if called. "They have their own security," she said of the Edison plant. For information about reprinting this article, go to http://www.lats.com/rights/register.htm *Copyright 2001 Los Angeles Times ***************************************************************** 15 Boston.com / Latest News / Northeast / Board welcomes participation in Yankee sale hearings Boston.com home Boston Globe Online SearchSERVICES Apartments Auctions Careers Cars MarketBasket Personals Real Estate Shopping Yellow PagesSECTIONS Arts&Entertainment Business digitalMASS Dining Education Health Movies MP3 Music Music Nation Northeast Personal Finance Sports Stock Quotes Traffic Travel Washington Weather World YourTownWHAT'S NEW Regional news All Northeast Massachusetts New Hampshire Rhode Island Maine Vermont Connecticut New York More wires Sports Business Technology Washington Nation World [ Send this story to a friend | Easy-print version ] Board welcomes participation in Yankee sale hearings By Associated Press, 10/27/2001 12:35 VERNON, Vt. (AP) State regulators say they plan to hear from a wide variety of people and groups before ruling on the proposed sale of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. The Public Service Board ruled Friday that it will accept its final arguments on April 29, 2002, instead of closing the case at the end of February, as Yankee's current owners sought. It also said it will consider arguments about safety and security issues, another topic that the Yankee owners did not want to be part of the debate over whether the Vernon plant should be sold to Entergy Nuclear. The board granted authority to participate in the hearings to everyone who requested, including anti-nuclear groups Citizens Awareness Network and the New England Coalition on Nuclear Pollution. And it refused to set limits on what issues are relevant to the sale. It said it would do so after further argument. ''They've allowed intervention and are willing to hear arguments on having the proceeding with sufficient size to the scope,'' said CAN attorney Jon Block. Among the issues CAN wants examined are the vulnerability of the reactor in the light of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, who should pay for improvements to make it safer, and the shutdown alternative. Vermont Yankee spokesman Rob Williams said Yankee was reviewing Friday's order. Yankee argued last week that safety and security issues are ''irrelevant to determining whether the proposed sale of the station to Entergy is in the general good of the state of Vermont.'' In addition to the anti-nuclear groups, the union that represents many Yankee employees was granted status, as were the towns of Vernon and Brattleboro and seven small municipal electric companies. Also granted intervener status was Conservation Law Foundation. The board said it would encourage the interveners to work together where possible, but wouldn't order it, as Yankee had asked. ''We recognize that public participation in board proceedings is beneficial to the board, other parties, and public interest,'' said the order. ''At this time, we do not exercise our authority ... to restrict the scope of the interventions, to mandate that parties coordinate, or to limit the examination of witnesses by parties that may have similar interests.'' [ Send this story to a friend | Easy-print version ] Save 50% on home delivery of The Boston Globe © Copyright 2001 Boston Globe Electronic Publishing Inc. | Advertise | Contact us | Privacy policy | ***************************************************************** 16 Japan holds nuclear accident drill - Japan Today Japan News - News - Saturday, October 27, 2001 at 20:00 JST TOMARI — Japan on Saturday conducted its first nuclear accident drill using a permanent emergency response center in Hokkaido, local antidisaster officials said. The drill involved a nuclear power plant in the northernmost prefecture and was the country's second nuclear preparation exercise under the Special Measures Law for Nuclear Accidents, which entered into force in June last year, they said. Saturday's drill was based on the premise of radiation from a reactor leaking outside, prompting the evacuation of residents, they said. (Kyodo News) ***************************************************************** 17 Irish intervene in Sellafield row Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Paul Brown, environment correspondent Saturday October 27, 2001 The Guardian In an unprecedented intervention in the affairs of another EU government the Irish have asked the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea to block the opening of the Sellafield plutonium fuel (MOX) plant in Cumbria by issuing an injunction. The action against the UK government follows frustration by the Irish at having their requests for a curb on Sellafield's activities ignored by Downing Street. In a statement yesterday Joe Jacob, the Irish minister for nuclear safety, said a cabinet sub-committee including the prime minister, Bertie Ahern, has been set up to try to stop the works being opened. Mr Jacob said: "Ireland has taken these proceedings because it considers that in taking steps to authorise the MOX plant, the UK has violated numerous provisions of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos) which are designed to protect the environment." He said the UK had failed to cooperate with Ireland by withholding information on the plant, not carried out a proper environmental assessment of carrying radioactive materials round the world and permitting new discharges of such materials into the Irish Sea. Further, he said, Ireland considers that the terrorist attacks of September 11 warrant a review of the security measures relating to the MOX plant. The government has requested the establishment of an international arbitration tribunal to resolve the dispute. As this will take some time Ireland will ask the international tribunal to order an immediate suspension of the order pending a decision of the Hamburg tribunal. The Foreign Office confirmed they had received the documents. Both Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth are taking action in the UK high court on November 8 asking the licence be revoked as illegal under European law. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001 ***************************************************************** 18 Risk with a long half -life Guardian Unlimited Observer | Business | Nuclear power Oliver Morgan Sunday October 28, 2001 The Observer With uncanny timing, British Nuclear Fuels, the atomic services group that the Government wants to part-privatise, pressed its case for its own £34 billion state bail-out last week. Plans for a PPP have been bedevilled - future BNFL revenues have been called into question after a scandal over reprocessed fuel data falsification which made customers nervous, and by the unreliability of first-generation Magnox power stations. There have also been difficulties with its nuclear clean-up business in the US, which highlighted the problem of controlling costs in decommissioning nuclear facilities. But the most crucial question hangs over BNFL's £34bn liabilities for decommissioning UK facilities. BNFL admits it is technically insolvent - its £34bn liabilities total more than its assets (£18.9bn in its 2000 accounts). Investors will be wary until this is resolved. Government sources indicate that plans to keep liabilities - old facilities - in the public sector and deal with them through a Liabilities Management Authority, are certain to be approved, while the remainder are sold. Sources suggest the risk of decommissioning costs rising would go to private operators. Contracts would be designed so that overruns would be capped - limiting public exposure - while savings on the £34bn would be available to contractors. This would prevent costs feeding back into BNFL's (ultimately the Government's) profit and loss account. In 2000 a revision of liabilities saw provisions soar and operating losses balloon from £242 million to £412m, but there has since been a net gain of £8m. This volatility causes BNFL planning problems. And there are broader problems. Investment will be needed over hundreds of years - adding to risk. Assuming these problems are resolved, City sources indicate that part of the remaining business could be attractive. One suggested splitting these up, allowing managers to focus on individual businesses. The prime asset is BNFL's fuel manufacture and reactor services business. With new nuclear plants a possibility, it could be well-placed. There is controversy over reprocessing operations - which contributed £150m last year. Sceptics believe shutting them down would be cheaper than keeping them open. But others stress that the two main facilities - the £2bn Thorp plant, and the new £460m Mox facility - have stable futures. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001 ***************************************************************** 19 UK: Shotgun security breach at Torness reactor Sunday Herald home Terrorist fears highlighted after staff blunder at nuclear plant By Rob Edwards Environment Editor In the past 10 days Scotland's newest nuclear power station has suffered two alarming and farcical blunders involving a security scare with a gun and an illegal spillage of radioactive waste, the Sunday Herald can reveal. The incidents at the Torness nuclear power station on the East Lothian coast have provoked disciplinary action, an internal inquiry and the threat of prosecution, as well as raising concerns about security and safety at the plant. 'It is rather embarrassing,' confessed a spokesman for British Energy, which runs the plant. In the first incident a security officer at the power station was caught with a private shotgun in the Torness car park. He was trying to sell it to another station worker, when he was apprehended by fellow security staff. Torness, like all nuclear installations in Britain, is on heightened alert because of the risk of terrorist reprisals for the war in Afghanistan. Security at nuclear plants has been urgently reviewed, and large blocks of concrete have been placed on the approach road to Torness to prevent vehicles from ramming their way through the plant's security fences. Scientists have warned that a terrorist attack on a nuclear plant could cause an accident worse than the explosion at Chernobyl in the Ukraine which spread a cloud of radioactivity over Europe in 1986. In the worst case scenario, radiation would make large areas uninhabitable and lead to hundreds of thousands of cancers in years to come. The two 12-year-old nuclear reactors at Torness create huge amounts of radioactivity by burning uranium to produce electricity. Their cores have to be isolated from the environment because they contain dozens of toxic radionuclides like plutonium -- the tiniest amounts can increase the risk of cancer if they come in contact with the body. Yet despite such fears, one of the men meant to guard Torness thought it would be a good idea to show his shotgun to a potential buyer in the station car park on October 18. 'It was an incredibly stupid thing to do,' said Bob Fenton from British Energy. It would have been wrong at any time, but it was especially silly when the country is worried about terrorist attacks, he argued. The man, who has not been named, is now facing disciplinary proceedings. Frank Barnaby, a nuclear scientist who used to work at the British nuclear bomb factory at Aldermaston in Berkshire, was shocked by the revelation. 'Nuclear power stations are a potential target for terrorists because of the large amount of radioactivity they contain,' he told the Sunday Herald. 'It is absolutely essential that all forms of security are of the highest possible quality. This kind of thing just shouldn't be allowed to happen.' Unfortunately, the incident at Torness is not the only case in which security has been compromised at nuclear plants in Scotland. A worker at British Energy's Hunterston nuclear power station on the Ayrshire coast was sacked two years ago after gun parts and ammunition were found on the site. In 1997, commandos from the Special Boat Service posing as terrorists took no more than a few minutes to break into the Dounreay nuclear plant in Caithness. Similar exercises in the US have suggested that half the country's nuclear plants could not repel an invasion by a group of lightly armed attackers. British Energy pointed out, however, that the security procedures had worked at Torness. The gun had not been brought into a secure area of the site and no ammunition had been present. In the second incident, 60 cubic metres of liquid radio active waste were wrongly discharged into the sea off Torness last Wednesday. Safety rules were broken and British Energy is likely to be prosecuted in the wake of an investigation being carried out by the government watchdog, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa). British Energy has admitted the discharge should not have been made in the way it was, and has launched an internal inquiry into what went wrong. The government's Nuclear Installations Inspectorate has also been informed. Water contaminated by radioactivity is pumped into three 'final delay tanks' in the active effluent treatment plant at Torness. Before the contents of each tank are discharged to the sea, they have to be checked to make sure that levels of radioactivity are within the permitted limits. On Wednesday one tank was checked as part of this process, but then the waste from a different tank was mistakenly swilled out to sea. This was in breach of the 1993 Radioactive Substances Act and the operating rules laid down in condition 23 of the plant's safety licence. British Energy's Bob Fenton accepted the discharge should not have occurred, but insisted that new procedures had already been put in place to prevent a recurrence. He said that it had not endangered human health or the environment. Stewart Prodger, spokesman for Sepa, confirmed that an 'unauthorised discharge' had been made from a waste tank at Torness on Wednesday. 'Residues from the tank concerned were tested and found to be within authorised limits,' he said. 'It is extremely unlikely this incident has had an adverse effect on the environment, though Sepa will continue its investigations.' Environmental groups reacted with outrage and disbelief to both incidents yesterday. The unmonitored discharge of radioactive waste was 'completely unacceptable', argued Dr Richard Dixon from Friends of the Earth Scotland. 'The industry may claim that it has cleaned up its act and that accidents are rare. But the problem with things nuclear is that when things go wrong, they really go wrong. The pollution which results is hazardous, long-lasting and usually spreads far and wide.' The presence of a gun in Torness car park was even more disturbing. 'Given recent events and the heightened security around such facilities, it simply beggars belief that a person would do something so daft,' said Dixon. 'As this is not the first incident with guns at Scottish nuclear facilities, one can only think that there are some people in the nuclear industry who just don't think their jobs are dangerous enough.' ©2001 smg sunday newspapers ltd. no.176088. all rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 20 River shore cleanup cost uncertain This story was published Fri, Oct 26, 2001 By John Stang Herald staff writer The Department of Energy tentatively believes that an accelerated plan to clean up Hanford's river shore will cost about $2.7 billion. That number comes from figures in a draft request for proposals that DOE unveiled a few days ago. But the draft request also noted that $2.7 billion figure could easily change after DOE receives bids on the contract for the bulk of Hanford's river shore cleanup by 2012. Bechtel Hanford's contract, which heavily focuses on cleanup along Hanford's Columbia River shore, will expire July 31, 2002. River shore cleanup traditionally accounts for slightly less than 10 percent of Hanford's overall cleanup budget each year. DOE's Richland office has proposed to speed up river shore cleanup significantly with the new, still developing contract. And DOE wants to hire one contractor to tackle this until the task is done. This plan has a couple of major question marks. No one knows yet how much the federal government will appropriate to Hanford's river shore cleanup in fiscal 2002, which is a key clue to DOE's long-term plans. And the $2.7 billion is a preliminary number that will likely be fine-tuned in 2002. After receiving feedback on its draft request, DOE expects to issue a final request for proposals by Jan. 23 and to award the contract three to six months later. This month's draft request divides the rivershore cleanup contract into two phases. The first phase's costs totaling $1.5 billion are more solid than DOE's estimates for the second phase, which total $1.2 billion and are more likely to change, according to DOE documents. A timetable has not been set yet for when the first phase ends and the second phase begins. DOE's draft request calls for demolishing plus cleaning and sealing areas around the D, DR, F and H reactors. And it calls for the cleanup and demolition of the huge 324 and 327 lab buildings in the 300 Area as well as 12 smaller 300 Area buildings. Overall, the first phase is supposed to finish work on four reactors, 31 buildings, 45 waste burial sites and 267 waste sites. The second phase is supposed to address the cleanup, demolition and sealing up of the complexes at the KE, KW and N reactors, plus the rest of the 300 Area. That supposedly translates to three reactors, 230 buildings, four waste burial sites and 255 waste sites. DOE's draft request for proposals calls for bidders to come up with their own estimates on what the first and second phases will cost. Then each bidder will propose target fees -- essentially its profits -- that DOE will pay for accomplishing work on time and on budget. That target fee cannot exceed 8 12 percent of a bidder's estimate for tackling the project. The eventual contract will also trim a bidder's fees -- again its profits -- if work goes over budget and falls behind schedule. Bechtel Hanford is eligible to bid on the new contract. But DOE is trying to get as many companies as possible to compete for the project. Copyright 2001 Tri-City Herald. All rights reserved. This ***************************************************************** 21 State Asks NRC to Consider Terrorist Threat to Proposed Waste Facility October 27, 2001 BY JUDY FAHYS THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE The state wants federal regulators to consider a disaster scenario that was unimaginable only last summer: the consequences of a passenger jet careening into nuclear-waste casks stored on a cement pad in Utah's West Desert. Lawyers for the state have not heard yet from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission about delaying the licensing proceedings for the proposed West Desert storage site. The lawyers also have asked the NRC's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board to add an in-depth review of the terrorism threat in light of the Sept. 11 attacks. "All we are asking is that it be studied," said Assistant Utah Attorney General Larry Jensen, who submitted the state's requests Oct. 10. "It never has been [studied] because it has never been considered a credible threat." For more than four years, the NRC board has been reviewing an application by a consortium of eight utility companies to store spent nuclear fuel on 125 acres leased from the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians. If granted, the application would allow 4,000 steel and concrete casks to be stored on a cement slab at the reservation, about 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. Before Sept. 11, the NRC viewed a foreign attack on American soil as being too unlikely to consider. "No NRC-licensed nuclear facility or activity has even been subjected to armed attack," the commissioners wrote in 1977. "And we have no evidence suggesting such an attack is likely." As a result, those seeking licenses for a nuclear facility only had to protect against an intrusion by "three well-armed, well-trained outside attackers, who might possess inside knowledge or assistance." The nuclear agency is now being peppered with requests to update its standards for nuclear plants, transportation systems and other atomic facilities. Even the NRC has recognized the need to rethink its standards. Immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, the agency halted cross-country shipments of high-level nuclear waste and put the nation's nuclear plants on high alert. Private Fuel Storage LLC, the utility consortium proposing the Skull Valley facility, filed a response to the state's request last week that maintains there is no reason to delay the license process or to include new requirements based on terrorist threats. "You do not have to make that kind of act of war a part of the design basis for a nuclear facility," said PFS spokeswoman Sue Martin. It's a principle that has been affirmed several times in the decades since opponents of Florida plants warned that Fidel Castro's Cuba might attack nuclear plants proposed for that state, Martin said. "If the regulations change, then we will have to go to the new requirements," she added. In the state's Oct. 10 requests to NRC, attorneys remind the federal agency of its mandate to protect the public health and safety. The attorneys also note that the storage casks proposed by PFS have only been designed to withstand a 1,475-degree fire for a few minutes and not the sort of heat caused by an hours-long fire of 1,850 degrees, as one might expect at the scene of a passenger airliner crash. "The horrific Sept. 11, 2001, attack on America demonstrates that a whole new level of terrorism and sabotage are now reasonably foreseeable," the state said in its letter to NRC. © Copyright 2001, The Salt Lake Tribune All material found on ***************************************************************** 22 MP makes nuclear threat plea BBC News | UK POLITICS | 26 October, 2001, [Announcement of US missile shield plans] America's missile shield plans were unveiled in May Britain should scrap support for America's proposed 'son of star wars' missile shield and concentrate instead on the threat from terrorists smuggling nuclear devices into the UK, a senior Labour MP has said. Malcolm Savidge, an expert on nuclear armament issues, said fears Osama Bin Laden may have obtained material for such a weapon showed missile shields were pointless. Neither Britain nor our US allies should squander time, effort or resources on dubious 'star wars' protection against the improbable and distant threat of missile attack Prime Minister Tony Blair, although not committing the UK to President George Bush's plan, has already said he does not agree with those who oppose it in principle. Yet it was "inconceivable" that a terrorist could build missiles or the sites needed to launch them without the west detecting them via satellite surveillance, said Mr Savidge. Therefore they were far more likely to resort to "surreptitious smuggling" to plant a nuclear device, said the MP for Aberdeen North and convenor of the all party parliamentary group on global security and non-proliferation. "Neither Britain nor our US allies should squander time, effort or resources on dubious 'star wars' protection against the improbable and distant threat of missile attack," Mr Savidge said. "Instead we should also be increasing rather than running down coastguards, customs and other border security." He also questioned the decision to approve nuclear processing at Sellafield, saying a hijacked plane could "create another Chernobyl". "The nuclear fuel, some of which would be transported round the world, could be turned into weapons," he added. ***************************************************************** 23 Ireland challenges Sellafield plant BBC News | ENGLAND | 26 October, 2001, [Sellafield ] Spent nuclear fuel is reprocessed at Sellafield Ireland has started legal action against the British Government's decision to give the go-ahead for the new MOX reprocessing plant at Sellafield. Dublin claims the decision to allow the mixed oxide fuel plant to be built on the Cumbrian coast broke international laws on sea pollution. And officials have expressed concern that they have received no information about a safety review at the site following the terror attacks on America. Ministers have demanded that the British Government voluntarily suspends the authorisation of the MOX plant by 9 November. Having fully exhausted all other avenues open to us to no avail, the legal proceedings as detailed above are now being pursued Joe Jacob, junior minister The Public Enterprise department in Ireland has called for an international tribunal to be set up to resolve the dispute. Meanwhile, a cabinet sub-committee, including Prime Minister Bertie Ahern and other senior cabinet ministers, has been set up to oversee the process. Joe Jacob, a junior minister in the department, set the deadline for Britain to suspend authorisation of the plant. A department statement said: "Ireland has taken these proceedings because it considers that in taking steps to authorise the MOX plant, the United Kingdom has violated numerous provisions of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). 'Immediate suspension' "Ireland considers that the United Kingdom has failed to co-operate with Ireland by withholding information on the MOX plant... "Has failed to carry out a proper environmental impact assessment of the MOX plant and transports of radioactive materials... "And considers that by permitting new discharges of radioactive materials into the Irish Sea the United Kingdom would violate its obligations to protect the marine environment." "Further, Ireland considers that the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 warrant, pursuant to UNCLOS, a wholesale review of the security measures relating to the proposed operation of the MOX plant and international movements of radioactive materials." The department called for the international arbitration tribunal to be set up, but recognised this may "take some time". Officials believe the MOX plant could be operational by November 23. [Protest ] Campaigners have protested against Sellafield "In the event that the United Kingdom does not voluntarily suspend the authorisation of the MOX plant, on November 9 Ireland will ask the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea to order an immediate suspension of the authorisation of the MOX plant and international transports, pending any decision of the arbitration panel." Mr Jacob added: "The Irish Government is determined to make every effort to stop the MOX plant becoming operational. "Having fully exhausted all other avenues open to us to no avail, the legal proceedings as detailed above are now being pursued." Environment groups have welcomed Ireland's plans to launch legal action. 'Environmental danger' Friends of the Earth spokesman Ian Wilmore said: "We welcome the Irish government's move. The MOX plant is a danger to the environment and to the Irish public as well as the British. "We are conducting our own judicial review case and we wish the Irish success with their action." Mark Johnston, Greenpeace's nuclear campaigner, said: "There's no case for opening it and every case for abandoning it." A spokesman for the British Foreign Office confirmed that officials had received documents informing them of the legal action. "We are studying the matter. We cannot comment further on these legal proceedings at this stage," he said. ***************************************************************** 24 Papers warn of nuclear threat BBC News | UK | 27 October, 2001, The possibility that Osama bin Laden could pose a nuclear threat in the future is examined by some of the papers. Under the stark headline, Get Him or He'll Nuke Us, The Mirror says Tony Blair has warned that Bin Laden must be stopped before he launches a nuclear strike. The paper reports that, speaking on British Forces radio, the Prime Minister said the terrorists could eventually use "chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons". The Times says Mr Blair added that unless the terrorists were stopped "...no corner of the world, particularly a place like Britain..." would be unaffected. The warning from Britain's most senior military commander that the war in Afghanistan could last up to four years, attracts much front-page attention. The words of the Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, are summed-up by the headline in the Daily Telegraph, Be Ready For A Long, Tough Battle. The Times says the American-led campaign in Afghanistan suffered its "darkest day" on Friday, with the execution of a leading anti-Taleban commander. The paper says the killing of Abdul Haq was one of a series of setbacks: it points out that US planes again struck a Red Cross warehouse in Kabul, and Taleban forces drove back Northern Alliance fighters from a key town in the north of Afghanistan. The Daily Express reports that hardline British Muslims who have gone off to fight for the Taleban, may be tried for treason. Colonel Bob Stewart -- the former commander of UN troops in Bosnia -- tells the paper that "traitors who fire on British troops should face maximum punishment". The Independent carries the story of Oliver Monfredi -- a medic at Leeds University, who was on a short placement in New York's central mortuary on the morning of 11 September. He tells the paper how he was asked to find distinguishing features on bodies, adding that "taking photos of a child from a victim's wallet was as low as it got". Mr Monfredi, 23, now plans a career in obstetrics rather than pathology, saying that he has "seen enough to last a lifetime". The Guardian leads on the resignation of the Catholic Archbishop of Cardiff, John Ward, who was accused of failing to act on warnings that two of his priests were abusing children. Describing his departure as a "sacking", the paper says the Pope took the "extraordinary step" of ordering his retirement. The European Commission is to investigate the sale of the television rights to Premier League football matches, according to the Financial Times. Finally, under the headline, Bananas, the Daily Mail tells the tale of John Kirkham, who ended up taking legal action after a local authority said his cab was the wrong shade of yellow. The problem arose when Derby City Council ordered cabbies to re-paint their vehicles and said Mr Kirkham's car was "too yellow". When he put up a sign in his vehicle calling the policy "bananas", the authority banned the poster. He took the council to court, where he was awarded £5,000. ***************************************************************** 25 Move could affect Yucca Mountain debate LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL: NEWS: Frank Murkowski Alaskan is top Republican on key Senate committee Sunday, October 28, 2001 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal Leading backer of nuclear repository seeking Alaska governorship By STEVE TETREAULT DONREY WASHINGTON BUREAU WASHINGTON -- The cast of players in the long-running nuclear waste debate on Capitol Hill could shift next year as Sen. Frank Murkowski, a leading backer of spent fuel burial in Nevada, has announced he is running for governor of Alaska. A 21-year Republican Senate veteran representing a Republican state, Murkowski was immediately tabbed as a strong favorite to win the 2002 gubernatorial election after he announced his candidacy on Oct. 22. If he loses, he can return to the Senate since his term does not expire until 2004. Murkowski, 68, is the top Republican on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. He was chairman for seven years until Republicans lost Senate control at the end of May. Although he would not leave Washington until late next year if he wins the governorship, speculation began immediately last week about how the change at the top of the energy committee will affect various issues. Throughout the late 1990s and into this year, Murkowski has been a key figure in congressional debates over nuclear waste storage at Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. He backed legislation to establish a temporary spent fuel repository at the Nevada Test Site, and tangled with the Clinton administration over which federal agency should be responsible for setting radiation standards for a Nevada repository. Most of his efforts to address the issue of nuclear waste piling up at power plants around the country were thwarted by opposition organized by Nevada's senators and Clinton administration officials, and he occasionally expressed frustration at the failure by Congress to push through a solution. Murkowski has argued a repository is needed for the government to honor its contract to take ownership of thousands of tons of spent fuel from nuclear utilities. Murkowski's attention this year has been dominated by his efforts to have Congress allow energy exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He's delivered more than a half dozen Senate speeches on the matter, and convenes news conferences weekly to promote the idea. Chased by reporters Thursday as he ran from a news conference on the Senate's lawn to an idling car waiting to take him to a White House meeting, Murkowski said he has not focused on how his campaign or anticipated departure from Congress may affect the nuclear waste issue. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Murkowski's absence won't change the debate over nuclear waste entombment. "The Yucca Mountain debate is not going to go away," he said. "Senator Murkowski is the ranking member of that committee but he's not the father of nuclear waste. The father of nuclear waste is the nuclear power industry, not him." Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., said there will be no shortage of replacements for leadership on the nuclear waste issue among lawmakers who favor sending spent fuel to a Nevada repository. "Murkowski certainly has been one of the stronger proponents, but with so many states (with nuclear plants), there will be people ready to take his place," Ensign said. "Maybe we should send him campaign contributions," Ensign joked. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., would take over as the top Republican on the Senate Energy Committee if Murkowski departs, and would become committee chairman if Republicans regain Senate control in the 2002 elections, an aide confirmed. Domenici, whose state is home to two government nuclear laboratories, is considered an expert on nuclear matters and also favors a Yucca Mountain repository. But Domenici also has expressed exasperation with the growing costs and lagging schedule of the Yucca Mountain program. In recent years, he has promoted federal research into accelerator transmutation, a process of neutralizing the radioactivity in nuclear waste that some believe could reduce the urgency to develop a repository. "We've been working pretty well with Domenici," Ensign said. "He believes in Yucca Mountain, but he also is a more reasonable voice." Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal, 1997 - 2001 ***************************************************************** 26 NATIONAL NEWS: Dublin in legal move against UK over Sellafield Financial Times; Oct 27, 2001 By MATTHEW JONES The Irish government and environmentalists have stepped up efforts to halt the start of plutonium fuel manufacturing at British Nuclear Fuels' Sellafield site in Cumbria. Dublin is furious about the decision this month to give the go-ahead to BNFL's Pounds 470m mixed-oxide plant. It believes the plant could be a target for terrorists, and is concerned about waste being discharged into the sea. Joe Jacob, the Irish minister responsible for nuclear safety, yesterday said Ireland had initiated legal proceedings against British ministers under the United Nations convention on the law of the sea. It has initiated international arbitration proceedings against the plant under the Ospar Convention, which aims to protect marine life in the north-east Atlantic, and is expected to challenge the plant in the European Court of Justice. In a separate development, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace said the High Court had agreed to a fast-track review of the UK government's decision. A hearing will be held on November 8 and 9 to decide whether it broke European law requiring the economic benefits of nuclear plants to outweigh the health and environmental impacts. An independent report commissioned by the UK government found that the plant would have a net economic benefit of more than Pounds 200m if opened, against a loss of Pounds 58m if permission were refused. But Greenpeace and FoE say this does not take into account the Pounds 470m already spent, which the government asked to be treated as a sunk cost. The plant will directly employ more than 300 people, and 1,800 jobs are indirectly linked to it. Copyright: The Financial Times Limited ***************************************************************** 27 Nuclear reactor back online after speedy repair efforts UNION-TRIBUNE October 27, 2001 SAN ONOFRE -- The Unit 2 reactor at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station has returned to full service after repairs to a component were completed several days early, a plant spokesman said. Southern California Edison Co., which operates the plant, shut down the reactor Oct. 13 to repair one of two moisture separator reheaters. The reactor was scheduled to be shut down through Nov. 1, but repairs were completed Thursday. The reheaters are designed to remove moisture from steam and then reheat it as it passes from high-to low-pressure turbines. Mechanical problems with one of the devices created an uneven flow of steam, a condition that can damage turbine blades. San Onofre's twin nuclear reactors generate about 2,254 megawatts of electricity, enough to serve some 2.75 million households. © Copyright 2001 Union-Tribune Publishing Co. ***************************************************************** 28 SDF, residents take part in radiation-leak drills Daily Yomiuri On-Line Yomiuri Shimbun Hundreds of Self-Defense Force personnel and local residents held an evacuation drill Thursday at the Global Nuclear Fuel Japan Co. in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture. It was the first exercise held at the company since the law concerning special measures against nuclear disasters went into effect last year. Concern about safety at nuclear facilities has increased since the terrorist attacks on the United States last month. The exercises, which involved the evacuation of residents and tests for radioactive exposure, tested the response of the off-site center that would be used as a base if a nuclear accident occurred. Under one scenario, a uranium-processing site was on fire and firefighters wearing antiradiation suits measured the amount of radiation and rescued a volunteer playing the role of an injured man. Copyright 2001 The Yomiuri Shimbun ***************************************************************** 29 Two in hospital after radioactive accident China Daily Print Edition October 26, 2001 (HU MEIDONG) Chemical reaction squads launched urgent containment measures and resolved an accident involving radioactive material in East China's Fujian Province. Two people were treated in hospital for fear of radiation after a container with radioactive material inside was accidentally smashed by salvage workers in a factory storehouse. The local environmental protection bureau revealed the radioactive material was Co60, a kind of hard silvery-white metal, that is potentially harmful but does not spread quickly in particle form. Officials said the two people hospitalized after the leak were from the city of Nanping but were not showing clear symptoms and were not considered to have been seriously harmed. They would receive check-ups twice a month during the following years. The accident occurred on Monday when two workers at a local salvage station broke a lead container in the storehouse of Nanping Forestry Machinery Factory. The lead container marked with the letters "UFK-213" was bought by the factory from Shanghai and designed to be used in a new project 10 years ago, officials said. But when the new project was halted the lead container was left in the storehouse. Experts pointed out the surface of the lead container had been corroded because of inadequate protection. The salvage workers regarded the container as waste metal and smashed it. Local government chiefs were notified as soon as staff of Nanping Forestry Machinery Factory found the lead container carrying Co60 was broken. The local environmental protection bureau sent teams dressed in anti-radiation uniforms to deal with the broken container and they reported that radiation in the storehouse was 10 times higher than usual. The storehouse is located on the remote outskirts of the city and far away from the factory workshop. No people live around the storehouse. Government chiefs confirmed no other people have suffered from radiation exposure. According to domestic laws, all disused radiation materials should be placed in an assigned storehouse. Officials are now investigating who were responsible for the accident. copyright 2001 by chinadaily.com.cn. all rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 30 British Energy wants Canadian reactors The Sunday Telegraph (UK Abstracts); Oct 28, 2001 Government-owned Canadian firm Atomic Energy of Canada Limited will this week finalise an agreement with British Energy to build seven or eight nuclear power stations in the UK costing around GBP1bn each. The nuclear power plants will replace the privatised electricity generator's advanced gas-cooled reactors, which are to cease operations by 2014. The deal is expected to fuel political controversy, given that British Energy has decided to choose AECL over its British rival, the state-owned company Westinghouse, a unit of British Nuclear Fuels Limited. It is also expected to exacerbate the already tense relations between BNFL and British Energy, which is keen to terminate a GBP300m-a-year contract to recycle spent fuel at a BNFL facility in Sellafield. Abstracted from: The Sunday Telegraph Copyright 2001: Financial Times Information. All rights ***************************************************************** 31 State may challenge approval of Yucca design guidelines Las Vegas SUN October 26, 2001 By Mary Manning Nevada officials are considering legal options over the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's approval of guidelines that allow the Department of Energy to begin designing a repository at Yucca Mountain, a state official said. State officials are upset that Nevada oversight experts had no chance to review the guidelines before the NRC approved them, said Joe Strolin, planning administrator for the Agency for Nuclear Projects. The NRC approved the DOE's guidelines for siting a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, but it is a single step in a long process, officials said. Agency for Nuclear Projects Executive Director Bob Loux met with NRC staff members in Washington on Sept. 27, but the commission had apparently approved the guidelines on Sept. 24 without public notice. Loux received a letter on Monday from NRC Chairman Richard Meserve saying the guidelines were approved last month. Strolin promised a fight. "They've got a long way to go, and there will be challenges at every step," he said. The NRC made public on Tuesday made its decision regarding the approved guidelines, but warned the DOE that any "substantive" changes to the design of a repository to contain 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste would require a second review, NRC spokeswoman Sue Gagner said. The NRC is reviewing all security rules in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, Gagner said. Public Citizen, an environmental watchdog group founded by Ralph Nader, called the NRC's action a "rubber stamp" in the process of approving the nuclear dump. "The DOE and NRC are collaborating to change the rules of the game and allow the ill-conceived Yucca Mountain Project to move forward," said Wenonah Hauter, director of Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program. All contents copyright 2001 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 32 Plaintiffs, counsel approved in class action against USEC By a Daily Record Legal Affairs Writer Bethesda-based USEC Inc., the country’s only supplier of enriched uranium for commercial power plants, lost a round in a federal securities fraud lawsuit this week. Over USEC’s objections, Senior U.S. District Judge Alexander Harvey II ruled for the plaintiffs on several motions designed to move the consolidated class action forward. Harvey rejected USEC’s motion to dismiss class claims and approved the selection of lead plaintiffs, lead counsel and the appointment of Baltimore lawyer Charles Piven as liaison counsel for the multidistrict litigation. Investors Howard Cohen and Myles Wren are appropriate class representatives, in part because their claims are the largest filed in the 10 consolidated suits pending against USEC, Harvey ruled. Cohen and Wren allege they lost more than $925,000 and $863,400, respectively, when shares in USEC dropped from an initial price of $14.25 per share to $4.5625 last October. The suits claim that USEC, its officers and underwriters painted far too rosy a picture in the prospectus for the July 1998 IPO. Specifically, the plaintiffs say USEC failed to disclose that the market for enriched uranium was in severe decline as the supply was increasing; that the company was locked into a contract to buy uranium from Russia at a fixed price, which soon would be higher than the resale price; and that a new process mentioned in the prospectus, which theoretically would slash its production costs, was not technologically feasible. The defendants argued that Cohen and Wren had not followed the procedures required by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (PSLRA) in seeking lead spot. The court acknowledged there were some typographical and clerical errors in the steps they had taken, but noted that these were remedied in a timely manner. Harvey also allowed the appointment of two law firms as lead counsel for the plaintiffs, New York-based Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes &Lerach, and Philadelphia-based Savett Frutkin Podell &Ryan. Nothing in PSLRA requires the plaintiffs to choose one firm as lead counsel, Harvey noted. “Dual lead counsel is particularly appropriate here since there are two groups of defendants, with each group being represented by separate law firms,” Harvey noted. According to court documents, USEC and its officers are represented by Skadden Arps Slate Meagher &Flom, while Cravath Swaine &Moore and Crowell &Moring represent underwriters Morgan Stanley Dean Witter &Co. Inc., Merrill Lynch &Co., Janney Montgomery Scott Inc., Lehman Brothers, Prudential Securities Inc., Salomon Smith Barney, and M.R. Beal and Co. Harvey’s opinion, posted on the court’s Web site yesterday, says USEC was created as a federally chartered corporation in 1992. In 1996, Congress ordered it to privatize itself by incorporating a nongovernmental corporation with which it would merge. Common stock in this private corporation was sold in the IPO, Harvey noted. The suits originally were brought last October in federal court for the Western District of Kentucky, where USEC processes the uranium. They were transferred to Maryland this year. Swords into plowshares Under the 1994 Megatons to Megawatts agreement between the United States and Russia, USEC is to purchase 500 metric tons of Russian warhead material for about $8 billion over a 20-year period. As of last month, USEC had converted 125 metric tons of Russian radioactive weapon material, equal to 5,000 nuclear warheads, into fuel. The company has says it has been hurt by foreign companies’ practice of selling enriched uranium at unfairly low prices. The Commerce Department in July proposed penalties against Eurodif, a French government-controlled supplier, and a British-based unit of Urenco. Shares in USEC closed yesterday at $6.52. In the last 52 weeks, the price has dropped as low as $3.875 a share and reached a high of $10.95 in May. The company released its quarterly earnings yesterday. It reported a first-quarter loss for fiscal 2002, but still expects earnings to be in the range of $35 million to $40 million for the year. It reported a net loss of $4.7 million, or 6 cents a share, compared with a profit of $4.6 million, or 6 cents a share, a year ago. The result was in line with guidance provided in August, it said. Revenue for the quarter totaled $300.5 million, compared with $226.8 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2001, the company said. ***************************************************************** 33 Activists protest plans to transport imported nuclear waste along Russia's Trans-Siberian railway - 10/26/2001 - ENN.com Friday, October 26, 2001 By Associated Press YEKATERINBURG, Russia — Environmentalists in seven cities along Russia's Trans-Siberian railway this week protested plans to transport spent nuclear fuel along the route. In the industrial city of Yekaterinburg in the Ural mountains, about 15 activists gathered at a railroad station in the center of the city and held signs reading, "No passage for nuclear waste!" Many said they were ready to lie down on the tracks if the shipments were sent through the city of 1.5 million. In July, President Vladimir Putin signed into law a controversial plan to allow the import of spent nuclear fuel for storage and reprocessing. Proponents of the plan argue Russia could earn US$20 billion over the next decade, importing some 20,000 metric tons (22,000 tons) of spent nuclear fuel. They say part of the money could be used to clean up existing nuclear pollution. But liberals and environmentalists fear it will turn the country into a nuclear dump. They also say that with Russia's crumbling infrastructure and weak government, importing radioactive materials would be inviting disaster. "Considering the lack of organization and the poor coordination of the responsible (government) services and the badly equipped security personnel, trains carrying spent nuclear fuel could be called 'mobile Chernobyls,'" Vladimir Slivyak, co-chairman of the Eco-Defense group, said at the protests. Writing in the popular daily Komsomolskaya Pravda, Aman Tuleyev, the governor of the Siberian region of Kemerovo, said Russia's law on importing spent fuel was flawed because it did not require the client countries to take back the recycled fuel and its byproducts. In addition to Yekaterinburg, protests were held at six other major stops along the Trans-Siberian. Copyright 2001, Associated Press ***************************************************************** 34 Germany takes steps to block nuclear waste protests Last updated: 27-10-01, 20:33 German authorities have announced measures to ban demonstrators from disrupting a controversial trainload of reprocessed nuclear fuel due to travel by rail and road from France to Germany. The shipment is expected to pass through Lueneburg in northern Germany on or around November 12 en route from the La Hague reprocessing centre in northwestern France to a storage facility at Gorleben in northern Germany. But authorities in Lueneburg announced this evening that between November 5th and 20th, demonstrations along the railway from the town to Dannenberg, which lies not far from Gorleben, would be kept 50 meters away from the tracks. Protests that have not been cleared by the police in the area will also be banned from November 3, prompting anti-nuclear militants to announce plans to take legal action to overturn the bans. Demonstrators have called for thousands to turn out to block the road and rail routes to be taken by the nuclear waste. AFP © 2001 The Irish Times/ireland.com ***************************************************************** 35 THE REAL DANGER IS NUCLEAR . TNR Online | The Big One by Gregg Easterbrook The Big One by Gregg Easterbrook Post date 11.25.01 | Issue date 11.05.01 Runs on gas masks in major cities. Arguments about the relative efficacy of Cipro versus doxycycline. The House of Representatives temporarily relocating. As the war on terrorism enters its second month, fear of flying is giving way to fear of opening the mail. Psychologically, it may be that society can only concentrate on one threat at a time. But if that's the case--anthrax letters notwithstanding--the focus is in the wrong place. Biological weapons are bad, but so far none has ever caused an epidemic or worked in war. And it is possible that none ever will: Biological agents are notoriously hard to culture and to disperse, while living things have gone through four billion years of evolution that render them resistant to runaway organisms. Having harmed only a few people thus far, the anthrax scare may tell us as much about bioterrorism's limitations as about its danger. There is, on the other hand, a weapon that we know can kill in vast numbers, because it already has: the bomb. If detonated in a major metropolitan area, a crude atomic weapon--of the sort that could be carried in a truck or SUV--could kill 100,000 people or more and render the vicinity uninhabitable for years. In Washington, D.C., such an attack would destroy democracy's seat and kill most of America's leaders. Enemies of the United States probably have the technical capacity to make atomic weapons and have definitely tried to obtain the materials necessary to build them. And we know that if they succeed, Cipro will be of no use whatsoever. The leading atomic threat is Iraq, which has been pursuing weapons of mass destruction throughout Saddam Hussein's ugly reign. Building atomic weapons essentially requires two things: engineering skill and a supply of plutonium or enriched uranium. Iraq appears to have the first and has made repeated efforts to obtain the second. A crude atomic bomb basically consists of conventional explosives timed to go off in such a way that two units of plutonium or enriched uranium slam together, creating a chain reaction. That takes mathematical and engineering knowledge, but the basic process is no longer secret. A 1998 report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace noted that several college students have designed apparently workable models of atomic bombs, using only information from open technical literature. (Nuclear fusion weapons or hydrogen bombs are far more powerful than atomic bombs--a single nuclear bomb might destroy all of Washington and kill millions--but also far more complex, and therefore probably beyond the reach of terrorists and rogue states. Most analysts believe that not even atomic powers India and Pakistan have built nuclear bombs.) According to the nonprofit Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, documents obtained from Iraq after the Gulf war included designs for at least two apparently workable atomic bombs--one weighing around a ton, and the other a little more than half a ton. The apparent goal was a bomb light enough to mount atop a Scud missile capable of striking Israel or Saudi Arabia. Currently Iraq has no missile able to reach the United States. But if Iraq could smuggle in the components, a half-ton bomb could be installed in an SUV, driven into Washington or Manhattan, parked, and detonated. What is not known is whether Iraq has the plutonium or enriched uranium to fuel its designs. But if Saddam lacks fissile material, it is not for lack of trying. His opening move was to build, near Baghdad, a "research" reactor whose true purpose was to generate fissile material for bombs. Israeli warplanes destroyed the reactor in 1981. (The UN general assembly "strongly condemn[ed]" Israel for bombing a "peaceful" facility.) At the time, Iraq had obtained about 250 tons of uranium but, due to the reactor's destruction, it could not enrich it into a form usable in atomic weapons. Saddam has not tried to build another reactor, perhaps because he assumes that if one were built, Israel would attack again. But he did begin exploring centrifuge technology. Centrifuges can enrich uranium without a reactor and can, in theory, operate in deep underground bunkers secure against Israeli bombs--and the prying electronic eyes of satellites. Whether Iraq currently has an enrichment centrifuge is unknown. Saddam effectively barred UN inspectors from access to Iraqi weapons research almost four years ago and, since 1998, no UN inspector has entered the country. In addition to producing fissile materials, Iraq may also have tried to buy them--in particular, from one of the former Soviet states. According to the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, the former Soviet states may contain as much as 20 tons of "surplus" plutonium and 500 tons of surplus highly enriched uranium--enough to fashion thousands of crude bombs. The international community has not pressured Russia for an inventory of its surplus bomb materials, so no one knows how much may be missing. The International Atomic Energy Agency has documented 16 thefts of fissile materials, but these are only cases in which the culprits have been caught. "Of what iceberg are we seeing the tip?" asks Matthew Bunn, a nuclear arms expert at Harvard. Given this, it is hardly encouraging that earlier this year the Bush administration proposed cutting $100 million from the program under which the United States provides advanced security at former Soviet nuclear weapons sites. Bush has also considered ending a nascent program under which the United States would pay Russia to render plutonium inutile for weapons use by burning it at atomic power plants. Though the program is not without controversy, the chance that some of this plutonium, unburned, could end up in the hands of someone like Saddam seems greater than the threat of Saddam making fissile materials himself. The Wisconsin Project estimates that Iraq is at least five years away from enriching enough uranium for an a-bomb, but could assemble one "within weeks" of obtaining the materials on the black market. Besides the fissile materials, Saddam has been trying to obtain the other components necessary to construct a bomb--sometimes with the help of our Western allies. Now that Iraq's oil export ban has been essentially lifted--the United Nations allowed Iraq to sell $17 billion worth of petroleum last year--Saddam has cash and has been spending it on the high-tech market. In 1998 Iraq ordered from a German company six lithotripsy devices, extremely expensive machines that treat kidney stones without surgery. Why did Iraq require lithotripsy when millions of its citizens lack basic antibiotics? Presumably because the lithotripter employs an incredibly high-speed switch modeled on the high-speed switches in atomic warheads. Justified as a medical purchase, Iraq obtained eight of the switches, one in each machine plus two spares. Initially Iraq ordered 120 spare switches, a figure totally unrelated to the normal operation of lithotripters, and one that should have made Saddam's real purpose unmistakably clear. The German company balked at the purchase order for 120 switches, but happily sold the eight. While iraq may be the state sponsor of terrorism most likely to develop atomic weapons, it is not the only one trying. Iran is completing construction of a Russian-designed reactor in the port city of Bushehr. The purpose is ostensibly peaceful energy production, but it could also be used to enrich uranium. In an overlooked statement released just a few days before the September 11 attacks, the CIA reported that Iran is actively trying to build atomic warheads. Israeli officials estimate that like Iraq, Iran is about five years away from being able to make an a-bomb. Lack of fissile materials seems to be Iran's main obstacle. Then, of course, there is Al Qaeda. Here as well, the primary obstacle is obtaining the fissile materials. And, here as well, they are trying. In testimony widely ignored at the time, Al Qaeda member Jamal al-Fadl said in federal court last winter that he had helped Osama bin Laden's operatives arrange meetings aimed at acquiring black market fissile materials, probably from former Soviet states. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that last spring a draft report on nuclear proliferation by the International Atomic Energy Agency said bin Laden's group was "actively seeking" an atomic bomb. If Al Qaeda or another terrorist group got its hands on plutonium or enriched uranium, it could do great harm even without the engineering skills necessary to build an a-bomb. A simpler "radiological device"--basically ground-up radioactive material entwined with explosives--would not flatten a city, but would spread so much fallout that thousands or tens of thousands would eventually die from radiation sickness. It is likely that more Hiroshima deaths--an estimated 100,000--resulted from eventual fallout sickness than from the blast itself. Health care has improved since Hiroshima, but there is nothing, like an antibiotic, for high radiation exposure: Physicians can only make you comfortable while you die. One reason Americans may not worry about the atomic threat is that we lived through a half-century of cold war nuclear standoff, and neither Washington nor Moscow pushed the button. But much of the reason was "mutually assured destruction"--the knowledge that if one side launched, it would also be hit. That logic might well prevent Saddam from directing an atomic bomb at the United States or Israel--because he would know that the counterstrike would be horrific beyond words. (It is believed that during the Gulf war, Washington warned Saddam that if he gassed coalition troops, the United States would go nuclear; Iraq put its chemical weapons away.) But Saddam might try to escape retaliation by transferring a bomb to some hard-to-trace third party--Al Qaeda or a similar group--for anonymous use against the United States or Israel. And nuclear deterrence may not work if the enemy can't be found--if the United States does not know what cave in Afghanistan bin Laden is hiding in, even nuclear warheads cannot kill him. More important, nuclear deterrence only obtains if the other side is rational. And many terrorists are not; they actively court death. Indeed there's an eerie sense that bin Laden is actually pleased that the United States is now bombing Afghanistan, because the ensuing civilian deaths might spark the general conflict between Islam and the West--and among Islamic countries themselves--that he desperately desires. An American nuclear attack, by Al Qaeda's grizzly logic, might be even better than an American conventional attack, since death would come by the millions. All of which leads to a series of deeply unpleasant choices. Should we begin bombing Iraq's weapons plants again--just in case one contains uranium enrichment centrifuges or other atomic hardware? Should Israel bomb Iran's reactor now, before it can make anything? If Iraq is creating atomic materials in a reinforced underground facility, should we use nuclear weapons to destroy the sites? (Nuclear force would be the only way to be sure.) If we learn of a terrorist bomb being stored in a sponsor nation such as Syria, should we attack? What if Pakistan--which has atomic weapons--fell to Taliban-like fundamentalists? Should we immediately attack Pakistani installations? In 1991 the first Bush administration let Saddam stay in power rather than extend the Gulf war. George H.W. Bush found it easier to postpone the tough choices and pretend that a nice-nice system of UN inspections would bring Iraq to heel. Through the 1990s, the Clinton administration similarly put off any meaningful action against bin Laden or Saddam, instead firing cruise missiles into empty buildings and watching as the Iraqi sanctions regime crumbled. But we know now--as we didn't before September 11--that our enemies will use whichever weapons they have at their disposal. And that means we must expend greater effort, take greater risk, and endure greater international condemnation to keep the ultimate weapon out of our enemies' hands. In retrospect, the United States was shockingly unprepared for the attack of September 11--simple security steps might have prevented a horror. If an atomic bomb someday explodes on American soil, in retrospect it may seem a thousand times more shocking that we did not take other steps while there was time. We can no longer say we were not warned. GREGG EASTERBROOK is a senior editor at TNR. Copyright 2001, The New Republic ***************************************************************** 36 Russia, Armenia discuss updating nuclear power plants [ITAR/TASS News Agency] Story Filed: Sunday, October 28, 2001 2:06 AM EST YEREVAN, Oct 28, 2001 (Itar-Tass via COMTEX) -- Representatives from the Russian Nuclear Energy Ministry, the Rosenergoatom company and chief engineers of all Russian nuclear power plants discussed on Saturday updating of power units at nuclear power plants and extension of their operation periods at a scientific conference which was held at the Armenian nuclear plant, Tass learnt from press secretary of the Armenian Energy Ministry Artak Kazaryan. The conference heard information on the operation of the Armenian nuclear plant which had been shut down in 1989 and restarted six years later. The station constantly takes measures to raise its safety level. Russian specialists were interested in storing of nuclear waste and fire security. Describing the results of operation of Russian nuclear power stations this year, Russian representatives noted that they operate under their designed capacities. In the opinion of specialists, it is possible to boost power generation considerably if periods of planned repairs of power units are cut. By Tigran Liloyan (c) 1996-2001 ITAR-TASS. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 37 Ireland moves to stop UK nuclear plant ireland.com - The Irish Times - IRELAND October 27, 2001 By Mark Brennock, Political Correspondent The Government has launched an international case against the United Kingdom claiming it has violated the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea by authorising the MOX nuclear fuel production plant at Sellafield. Announcing the move last night the Minister of State, Mr Joe Jacob, accused the British government of violating "numerous provisions" of the UN convention. It had failed in its obligations to consult Ireland, to assess the plant's impact on the environment and to protect the marine environment, he said. The Government formally served legal documents on the UK government on Thursday. The legal action follows years of reluctance to do so, despite long standing concerns over the operation of the Sellafield plant just 60 miles from Dublin. The change of attitude follows intense anger at the British decision this month to proceed with the new MOX (mixed oxide) fuel production plant, which would lead to the regular shipment of dangerous material through the Irish Sea. The heightened terrorist threat since September 11th also contributed to tipping the scales. The MOX plant is designed to process nuclear reactor fuel from uranium and plutonium imported from a large number of countries. The Government is seeking an injunction preventing the plant from starting operations, and a full hearing then to determine the plant's future. It hopes to obtain the injunction within a fortnight, unless Britain agrees to postpone activating the plant pending the full hearing, which would not reach a conclusion until the end of next year at the earliest. Lawyers representing Ireland will seek the injunction on November 9th in Hamburg, where the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea sits. Ireland yesterday nominated the Whewell Professor of International Law at Cambridge University, Prof James Crawford SC, as a member of the arbitration tribunal. Prof Crawford, an Australian, has been involved in many high profile international cases concerning marine and nuclear pollution matters. At the five-member arbitration tribunal, according to Mr Jacob, Ireland will accuse the UK of failing to take adequate measures to prevent pollution from the plant; to assess properly the risk of terrorist attack; to prepare a plan to respond to such an attack; to co-operate with Ireland and share information and to carry out a full environmental impact assessment. Ireland will seek a full environmental impact assessment, proof that the plant will bring no further radioactive pollution and an agreed British/Irish strategy to prevent terrorist attacks or to respond to any terrorist attacks The international action will take place in parallel with arbitration proceedings started in June in under the OSPAR convention, which are intended to obtain certain information on the MOX plant which the British government has refused to provide. The Government is also drafting papers with a view to taking a separate case against the UK in the European Court, claiming it is in breach of the Euratom Treaty. ***************************************************************** 38 Catawba nuclear station stirs debate Columbia, S.C. Saturday, October 27, 2001 FAQs | The Associated Press ROCK HILL -- Some residents near a nuclear power plant say the station adds to the county's economic growth. But some environmentalists warn the aging facility does not have a plan to process its nuclear fuel. Residents spoke at a public hearing this week held by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. In June, Duke Power Co. asked the NRC to renew the operating licenses for its Catawba nuclear station on Lake Wylie in South Carolina and its McGuire plant on Lake Norman in North Carolina. The 20-year extensions to the original 40-year licenses would keep them operating until the early 2040s. City and educational leaders of Clover, Rock Hill and York say the Catawba Nuclear Station is also a major partner in the county's educational success. But the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League says the license renewal process does not take into account Duke's plans to use mixed oxide fuel, or MOX, at the station in the future. The league on Tuesday filed a petition with the NRC to block the relicensing process. MOX is made by mixing uranium oxide and plutonium oxide from older nuclear weapons and placing the material in fuel rods. Duke officials said they intend to use MOX fuel by 2007 at both stations. Roger Hannah, a NRC spokesman, said any environmental issues relating to MOX use would negligible in the review process for the license extension. He also said even if the effects were great, they couldn't be addressed because Duke officials have not applied for permission to use MOX yet. The NRC also will do environmental studies of the plants' impacts on fish, water, human health and other issues in a report to be released during another public hearing in Rock Hill in June. ? Copyright 2001 The State-Record Company ***************************************************************** 39 Nukes out resolution proposed for warrant [The Lincoln County News - Online Edition] Oct 25, 2001 "Serving Maine and Lincoln County for Over a Century" Vol. 126-No. 43 Greg Foster In the wake of last week's "credible threat" against Three Mile Island, Wiscasset selectmen voted Tuesday to put on the warrant for the December special town meeting a resolution asking the federal government to take Maine Yankee's nuclear waste elsewhere. Selectmen have not set the date yet for the meeting. The board decided to send a message to the Congressional delegation, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Department of Energy informing them that the town wants the spent fuel and other high level waste sent to a safe location away from the area. "I think we should go beyond that," said Selectperson Judy Flanagan. She advised airing it at the upcoming gathering of area selectmen Nov. 14 in Nobleboro for a roundtable discussion at 6:30 p.m. The Lincoln County News is sponsoring the event. First Selectman Ben Rines said that the selectmen of Haddam, Conn. have been in contact with the local board inquiring what it is doing in response to the public's security concerns at Maine Yankee. Haddam has a power plant also in the process of decommissioning. Cindy Fischer asked if the board has advocated for the community to the state for National Guardsmen to be deployed at Maine Yankee until the waste goes. "I would think you would consider that a lot," she said. "Otherwise in the meantime we're like sitting ducks. We should make everything as secure as possible." "What do you of think of us requesting that?" Flanagan asked the board. "I don't think it would do any harm," Selectman Roy Barnes said. Rines agreed. "I don't mind calling them at the Governor's office and telling the Governor himself we would appreciate that," he said. The most current news from the Governor's office on Tuesday was that the Governor was not planning to have a National Guard presence at Maine Yankee at this point. Rines mentioned that the state has already paid about $80 million to have the waste removed. The federal government defaulted on its promise of providing a national repository for high-level nuclear waste from operating nuclear plants, as well as those in the process of decommissioning. A proposal is supposed to be ready for the President and Congress by the end of this year or the first of next year. The text of the proposed warrant reads as follows: "Resolved, we the citizens of Wiscasset, Maine, home to Maine Yankee Nuclear Power Plant, respectfully request that the federal government of the United States of America take immediate possession of the remaining nuclear waste at the Maine Yankee site and remove it to a safe and secure location." The spent nuclear fuel and other high level nuclear waste is currently stored in the spent fuel pool but is due soon to be placed in steel dry casks, which are transportable. The casks will go into the steel-lined concrete silos at the new storage installation on site until the waste is transported elsewhere. Lincoln County News PO Box 36, Damariscotta, ME 04543 Tel: 207.563.3171 http://lcnews.maine.com/2001-10-25/nukes_out.html rev 2001-10-25 ***************************************************************** 40 Japan Holds 1st Nuclear Accident Drill Using Permanent Centre WORLD NEWS October 27 , 2001 14:16PM TOMARI, Japan, Oct 27 (Oana-Kyodo-Bernama) -- Japan on Saturday conducted its first nuclear accident drill using a permanent emergency response centre in Hokkaido, local antidisaster officials said. The drill involved a nuclear power plant in the northernmost prefecture and was the country's second nuclear preparation exercise under the Special Measures Law for Nuclear Accidents, which entered into force in June last year, they said. The first drill was held in Shimane Prefecture in October last year. The law, which requires the government to conduct a comprehensive drill annually, was passed after Japan's worst nuclear accident in September 1999 at a nuclear fuel processing plant in Tokaimura, Ibaraki Prefecture. Saturday's drill was based on the premise of an accident at the Hokkaido Electric Power Co. plant in the village of Tomari in western Hokkaido, according to officials. It was assumed that coolant in the No. 1 reactor of the plant had leaked, damaging a pipe. Under the scenario, radiation from the reactor leaked outside, prompting the evacuation of residents, they said. About 80 entities including the central government, the Hokkaido prefectural government and Hokkaido Electric Power as well as some 2,400 people participated, cooperating on relaying information in the wake of the accident. At a crisis group within the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, a liaison conference involving the various ministries took place while a meeting was also held at the response centre. Due to the failure of the emergency core cooling system, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi declared a state of nuclear emergency in the drill. Koizumi held a teleconference to consult with a special task force led by him at the premier's residence and the response centre, which is located in the Hokkaido town of Kyowa, about two kilometers southeast of the power plant. The scenario involved an "off-site" risk in which people at the site and those nearby are in danger of being exposed to dangerous levels of radiation. -- Oana-Kyodo-Bernama ©2001 BERNAMA. All rights reserved. This material may not be ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARTICLES ***************************************************************** 1 Star Wars: How the Future Was Shanghaied Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2001 12:21:29 -0600 (CST) Star Wars: How the Future Was Shanghaied Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit The Guardian - Oct 26, 2001 http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4285550,00.html Analysis: How the Future Was Shanghaied Last weekend in China, the US and Russia reached an agreement on Star Wars - and nobody noticed by Simon Tisdall simon.tisdall@guardian.co.uk The silky, clown-like suits sported at photocalls by George Bush and Vladimir Putin at last weekend's Shanghai summit of Asian and Pacific nations were misleading. Behind the scenes, the US and Russian leaders were pursuing a deadly serious deal on America's national missile defence plans. This "understanding" could effectively end - before it really started - the debate on the biggest upheaval in global military strategy since the doctrine of mutual assured destruction evolved. Its implications may be much longer-lasting than the current obsession with international terrorism. Although Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, is playing down the prospect, a watershed announcement on NMD could come when Putin visits Washington and Bush's ranch at Crawford, Texas, next month. If all goes to plan, Russia will agree to "amendments" to the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty to allow expanded NMD testing to begin next spring. In return, the US will withdraw, for now at least, its threat to abrogate the ABM treaty unilaterally. For Bush the issue remains a simple one. He came to office pledged to build NMD to defend the US against the threat supposedly represented by "rogue states" such as North Korea, Iran, Libya and Iraq. The theory is that they could fire ballistic missiles at the US armed with chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons. Before September 11, Bush described this threat as the biggest single security challenge facing the US. The fact that this strategic analysis was proven emphatically - and disastrously - wrong by the attacks on New York and Washington has done nothing to change Bush's mind. The fact that some of those very same "rogue states", notably Iran, are being distinctly helpful in the "war on terrorism" has made no appreciable difference to administration thinking. Nor, it seems, has the obvious consideration that NMD could do nothing to prevent future September 11-style atrocities in the mainland US. Aware of his nation's heightened sensitivity to any kind of security threat, however far-fetched, Bush has seized the chance to fast-forward his NMD agenda. He knows, too, that Democrats in Congress previously opposed to NMD have been forced to swallow their misgivings in the current war atmosphere. "The events of September 11 make it clearer than ever that a cold war ABM treaty that prevents us from defending our people is outdated and, I believe, dangerous," Bush proclaimed in Shanghai. He described as essential "limited [missile] defences that are able to protect both our lands [the US and Russia] from political blackmail, from potential terrorist attack". For his part, Putin said in Shanghai that he and Bush "have an understanding that we can reach agreements". The Russian leader has been keen to avoid an outright US renunciation of the ABM treaty that he has frequently described as the cornerstone of bilateral military relations. But he has other powerful reasons for cutting a deal. One is his intention to win an accompanying commitment to slash both sides' arsenals of strategic warheads. The 1993 Start II agreement, although still not implemented, reduced stockpiles to 3,500 warheads apiece. The two sides are now discussing further, deeper cuts - a key objective for Russia which simply can no longer afford to maintain its nuclear strikeforce at current levels. Putin is trading on America's gratitude for his unexpected and practical support for the "war on terrorism" to attain a range of other aims. They include a big Russian say in the composition of any post-Taliban administration in Afghanistan; continuing, primary control of central Asia's oil; and an end to embarrassing public criticism of his domestic human rights record - especially his brutal suppression of Chechen separatists (whom he repeatedly links to al-Qaida). But most important of all to the Russian president is the creation of a new strategic relationship with the US that recognises and respects Russia's interests and aspirations, especially in Europe. Putin believes that Kremlin predecessors such as Boris Yeltsin failed to maintain Russia's status as a world player in the immediate post-communist years, exposing the country to repeated humiliations at the hands of international moneylenders such as the IMF. Despite his country's continuing economic weakness, and its vast military inferiority to the US, Putin's main ambition is to remedy that imbalance. He also worries, not completely without reason, about the rise of China to the east. To this end he seeks to create a new great power "triad" - the US, Europe and Russia; he wants the transformation of Nato into a more political organisation that Russia might one day join; he wants a closer relationship with an enlarging EU, and Russian membership of the World Trade Organisation; and he wants continued, increasing western and multilateral investment. In the event of NMD deployment, Putin is probably also looking for technology-sharing arrangements to help Russia build its own missile shield. Bush clearly hinted at this possibility in Shanghai. But what may be good for the US and Russia is not necessarily good for everybody else. The objections to NMD are unchanged. It remains an essentially reckless act of weapons proliferation. It may well provoke an international arms race as nuclear-armed countries such as China, India and Pakistan take countermeasures - and others, such as Iran - accelerate their nuclear weapons programmes. If it goes ahead, NMD will inevitably entangle third parties such as Britain. It will lead directly to the militarisation of space. And crucially, it will deflect attention and resources away from already faltering international efforts to curb the spread of biological and chemical weapons among non-nuclear states and groups. Putin's visit to the US will bear close scrutiny. For with all eyes on Osama bin Laden, the highly contentious military and geostrategic foundations of the 21st century are being laid - and hardly anybody is watching. ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytcov-10.27.01-03:39:22-10879 ***************************************************************** 2 A Chance to Avoid Nuclear Disaster October 28, 2001 By BRETT WAGNER, Brett Wagner is president of the California Center for Strategic Studies. He also serves as executive director of the Swords into Plowshares Project SANTA BARBARA -- The catastrophic terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 sent an urgent and long overdue wake-up call to America to take seriously the continuing efforts by terrorist groups to acquire nuclear weapons. Had any of the attacks involved a nuclear device, we might now be discussing tens of thousands of fatalities, millions of casualties and potential radiation victims, and trillions of dollars in collateral damage. We would also be discussing America's failure to take seriously Russia's longstanding offer to sell its enormous under-secured nuclear stockpiles--the most likely source of terrorist nuclear capability--to the U.S. for use as fuel in nuclear power plants and other peaceful purposes. Fortunately, a deal is in the works to secure Russia's "loose nukes" before they start slipping into terrorists' hands. When the Soviet Union was breaking apart 10 years ago, many Americans excitedly toasted the "end of the Cold War." Most Americans failed to ask a crucial question: Wasn't the impending collapse of a nuclear superpower's entire social, political and economic system cause for concern? A decade later, the discussion has definitively shifted from how much safer the world is now to how much more dangerous it has become. The collapse of the Soviet system has revealed a nuclear weapons infrastructure without reliable controls, protections or accountability. Some 700 to 800 tons of highly enriched uranium (HEU) and 150 to 200 tons of weapons-grade plutonium (WGP) are stored in makeshift warehouses protected by five-dollar combination locks. The government has no accounting system capable of keeping track of it all. It would only take 15 to 20 pounds of HEU, or an even smaller amount of WGP, to arm a device capable of leveling downtown Washington or lower Manhattan. The blueprints and non-nuclear components necessary to build crude but highly effective nuclear weapons are readily available. Small amounts of stolen or diverted Russian HEU and WGP have already been confiscated by European law enforcement from sellers looking for buyers. The U.S. currently lists more than a dozen rogue states and terrorist organizations, including Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda, that are looking for sellers. If any of them get their hands on enough material to arm a device, we won't be talking about a 30-minute warning--we may not get any warning at all. One could say we're already living on borrowed time. Against this backdrop of loose nukes, rogue states, arms traffickers, and terrorist groups flush with cash has emerged one of the greatest opportunities of the post-Cold War era: buying Russia's excess nukes. For several years, Russia has been hinting that it would be interested in selling its enormous stockpiles of excess weapons-grade uranium and plutonium to the United States for use as fuel in nuclear power plants. A deal was struck in 1993 by then-President Clinton and former Russian leader Boris N. Yeltsin for the United States to purchase all the uranium from the warheads Russia is dismantling in compliance with the Stategic Arms Reduction Treaties. Extending this agreement to include the rest of Russia's excess fissionable materials, including both HEU and WGP, would seem to be the next logical step in this process. Unfortunately, the idea has never caught fire on Capitol Hill, despite a relatively low $10-billion price tag. A group of international financiers has now come forward offering to underwrite the entire amount necessary to secure all of Russia's excess fissionable materials. The money would be raised in the form of independently issued, government-backed bonds. Just before Congress adjourned for its August recess, Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) introduced a bill that establishes a framework for how such a transaction might take place. Now Rep. Lois Capps (D-Santa Barbara) will introduce a bill on the House side in the next few days. Under the Domenici bill's provisions, the U.S. government would guarantee loans to Russia in increments of $20 million, up to $1 billion at any one time, accepting Moscow's nuclear materials as security. For each $20-million loan, Russia would place one metric ton of HEU and one metric ton of WGP under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards at a facility in Russia that is mutually acceptable to both Russia and the IAEA. As part of the deal, Russia would guarantee that the materials placed under IAEA safeguards would remain there indefinitely, meaning until they are transformed into nuclear fuel or otherwise permanently disposed of. Without unforeseen delays, this entire process could likely be completed within a decade. The current proposal is not without flaws. Among them, the bill currently sets an expiration date of Dec. 31, 2004, for extending new loans, failing to take into account the time frame necessary to complete the process under even optimal circumstances. And it puts a $1-billion cap on loans at any one time--an obvious potential roadblock that could bring the entire process to a halt should the Russians deliver the material to the IAEA-approved sites faster than it can be reprocessed and sold. Still, Domenici's bill is a giant step forward, and it provides a valuable foundation for what should become the first major nuclear-arms reduction agreement of the 21st century. Moreover, it represents a tremendous potential bargain for the American people, considering that international investors would be financing virtually the entire deal. The only significant cost to the U.S. taxpayer would be $10 million a year for the cost of administration in the U.S., and up to $15 million a year to help cover the expenses of the IAEA. This should appeal even to those members of Congress who are most reluctant to lend the Russians money for anything--even when their nuclear stockpiles are in jeopardy. If we let this opportunity slip away through inaction or partisanship, we will have no one to blame but ourselves when we run out of borrowed time. For information about reprinting this article, go to http://www.lats.com/rights/register.htm Copyright 2001 Los Angeles Times ***************************************************************** 3 Russian investigators enter reactor compartment of Kursk BBC Monitoring Service - United Kingdom; Oct 26, 2001 Investigators from the Russian Prosecutor-General's Office entered the reactor compartment of the Kursk nuclear submarine on Friday, the Russian news agency Interfax was told by the commander-in-chief of the Russian Navy, Fleet Admiral Vladimir Kuroyedov. "We have again been convinced that everything is as it should be in the compartment - there is no water, and the background radiation is within the norm," Kuroyedov said. Source: Interfax news agency, Moscow, in Russian 1200 gmt 26 Oct 01 /BBC Monitoring/ © BBC. World Reporter All Material Subject to ***************************************************************** 4 Russia's chief designer guarantees safety of Kursk reactor BBC Monitoring Service - United Kingdom; Oct 27, 2001 Text of report in English by Russian news agency ITAR-TASS Murmansk, 27 October: Safety of the Kursk submarine nuclear reactor is guaranteed, Russian chief designer of nuclear reactors Igor Serov said here on Saturday [27 October]. Specialists have opened the sixth section of the submarine and discovered water inside, Serov said. Gradual drying of the section is under way. Tests of the air and water from there have showed the radiation rate is normal. It is necessary only to fix some mechanisms and cut off cables. The work is proceeding as normal, Serov added. Source: ITAR-TASS news agency, Moscow, in English 1128 gmt 27 Oct 01 /BBC Monitoring/ © BBC. World Reporter All Material Subject to Copyright ***************************************************************** 5 Top-secret shutdown at Fermi Monroe Evening News By CHARLES SLAT Evening News staff writer October 28, 2001 Concerns over terrorism has dropped a shroud of secrecy over a routine refueling of the Fermi plant. Detroit Edison Co. will shut down its Fermi 2 nuclear power plant soon to add new nuclear fuel, but the relatively routine process is cloaked in secrecy due to continuing concerns about terrorism. Edison officials won't say precisely when the nuclear reactor will be idled, won't discuss the kind of work that will be done in addition to the refueling and are mum about the timetable for the work. It's a radical departure from past practice when the company freely discussed the details of refueling and maintenance and the extent to which the work has buoyed the local economy. Tight-lipped Edison officials say they're taking a cue from the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "It is consistent with the way the NRC is handling the situation," said Edison spokesman John J. Austerberry. "The specifics are really something we don't want to get into." Indeed, in recent days, the NRC has stripped its Web site of volumes of information about the nation's nuclear plants - everything from the daily operating status to specific plant designs and enforcement reports. The move is part of the fallout from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. After the attacks, the NRC ordered the nation's nuclear plants to be put on heightened security due to fears that terrorists might target one of the plants. Mr. Austerberry said Fermi 2 remains at high security status. Though the upcoming refueling work means about 1,000 contract workers from across the country will descend upon the plant in the days and weeks ahead, "there is an increased level of scrutiny" of those workers, Mr. Austerberry said. "Security throughout the plant - in all areas - is higher," he said. What is known is that the refueling and related work will take about a month and has a budget of $21 million. In addition to replenishing about a third of the fuel in the reactor, some testing, maintenance and operating improvements are planned. About 2,000 tasks are part of the work plan. Mr. Austerberry said late last week the reactor would be idled "within days," but declined to elaborate. Though reluctant to talk about the planned shutdown, Mr. Austerberry wasn't hesitant to tout the plant's recent operating record. "When we do shut down, we will have completed the most successful operating cycle in our history," he said. During nearly 519 operating days, it produced a record 14,248,000 megawatt hours, eclipsing the prior record of 13,868,150. Fermi 2 was licensed to operate in January, 1988, after a 20-year construction period that cost nearly $5 billion. Its early operating history was abysmal and it once was considered by federal regulators as one of the nation's worst plants. In recent years, it has operated relatively consistently at or near 100 percent power. ©Monroe Evening News 2001 ***************************************************************** 6 Stolen gauge contains uranium Sun-Sentinel: News Local By Christy McKerney Staff writer Posted October 28 2001 MIAMI · Be careful what you steal. You might go radioactive. Thieves who broke into a construction compound at 1950 W. 49th St. on Friday could get more than they bargained for. Among the booty: a portable nuclear density gauge containing uranium. The small amount of uranium isn't enough to make a weapon, Florida Department of Transportation spokesman David Rosemond said. But it could make someone sick. "As with anything that is radioactive, anyone who is not trained to handle it, it could harm them, but we're not talking about any major danger," Rosemond said. "We just want them to understand that they have something that could hurt them." Engineers insert nuclear density gauges into the ground to measure soil density on construction sites. Stealing the gauges isn't uncommon, because construction sites are popular targets for thieves, Rosemond said. This gauge is yellow, rectangular and measures 1 foot long, 8 inches high and 6 inches thick with a 1-inch steel rod and handle at the top. The gauge should be stored in a yellow plastic shipping case. Handlers have nothing to fear as long as the gauge stays in its case. A $500 reward is being offered for the return of the instrument, which was stolen from the Palmetto Expressway construction project at Northwest 103rd Street between midnight and 7 a.m. Friday. Plate compactors, electrical generators, concrete vibrators and a flatbed truck also were stolen. Anyone who finds the gauge should leave it alone and call 911. Copyright © 2001, South Florida Sun-Sentinel ***************************************************************** 7 Muslim Leader Who Was Once Labeled an Alarmist Is Suddenly a Sage October 28, 2001 THE CLERIC By LAURIE GOODSTEIN G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times Sheik Muhammad Hisham Kabbani on Tuesday at the microphone during a conference in Manhattan. Two years ago, an obscure Muslim spiritual leader named Sheik Muhammad Hisham Kabbani stepped to the microphone at the State Department and issued a chilling admonition to Americans to beware the Muslims in their midst. He warned that Islamic extremists had infiltrated the vast majority of American Muslim mosques and student and community groups, and that they had bought more than 20 nuclear warheads and were paying former Soviet scientists to break them into chips that could be carried in suitcases. "We want to tell people to be careful, that something major might hit quickly," he told a forum on Islam convened by the State Department. Now the sheik, who was denounced as a charlatan by nine major American Muslim organizations, is back in the spotlight as never before. He has appeared on CNN, "Today," MSNBC, NPR and more since the terrorist attacks, cast as the Muslim who dared to blow the whistle on his brethren. Two weeks ago, he briefed the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Uzbekistan, a country that has supported the United States in its war on Afghanistan and whose president has offered Sheik Kabbani a warm welcome. Sheik Kabbani's profile and motivations, in reality, are a complex intertwining of religious and political rivalries. Even experts and policy makers who admire him say he has undermined his message with hyperbolic claims about the influence of Islamic extremism in the United States. "He's a good guy and he does mean well," said Robert Seiple, ambassador at large for religious liberty in the Clinton administration and now president of the Institute for Global Engagement, in St. David's, Pa. "But his comments about 80 percent of the leadership of Islam in America being extremists are irresponsible and terribly unfortunate," Mr. Seiple said. "It just plays into the hands of those who would demonize and create division, and those knee- jerk types who see Islam as a monolith." Probably more than any other figure, Sheik Kabbani helped shape the view circulating among some American commentators and intellectuals that the problem within Islam can be attributed entirely to Wahhabism, the austere, fundamentalist brand of the faith practiced in Saudi Arabia. "Where he makes the mistake," said Sulayman Nyang, a professor of African and Islamic studies at Howard University, who serves on an advisory board for the sheik, "is he tries to lump together the Wahhabis with all the other Islamist groups. Not all of them are Wahhabis." Sheik Kabbani grew up in Lebanon, exposed to visiting Islamic luminaries in the home of his uncle, the grand mufti of Lebanon. As a boy, he traveled the Islamic world with a Sufi master, Sheik Muhammad Nazim Adil al-Haqqani, the namesake of the Naqshbandi-Haqqani order of Sufism, and married his daughter. Sufism is the mystical stream within Islam, and scholars say there are 40 to 60 major orders and 1,000 branches. The whirling dervishes from Turkey are Sufis. Sheik Kabbani's Sufi order emphasizes participation in politics and social issues, adherence to Islamic law and a strain of apocalypticism that, combined with his political analysis, stoked his dire predictions, said David Damrel, an expert in Islamic mysticism at Arizona State University. While well accepted and integrated in many parts of the Muslim world, Sufism has in some places been suppressed by the more legalistic, puritanical Islamic movements like Wahhabism, which has made inroads in the United States by building mosques and training teachers. They disapprove of Sufi practices like venerating holy men and making pilgrimages to the graves of saints. Uzbekistan is important to Sheik Kabbani's Sufi order because the founder of its parent Naqshbandi branch is buried there. Escaping the civil war in Lebanon in 1991, Sheik Kabbani was sent to the United States to spread the Naqshbandi-Haqqani order, already well established in places like Cyprus, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria and parts of South Asia. He has homes in Michigan and California and claims about 8,000 regular contributors and participants, 60,000 occasional students and 13 Islamic centers. He relates to his disciples like a guru. In an interview last week in New York, 17 students congregated in the room to hear him. A male student brought coffee; when Sheik Kabbani went to the restroom, another held his turban and another his cloak. Sheik Kabbani said that he stood by his claim in his State Department speech that 80 percent of American mosques had been taken over by extremists, because of the 114 mosques he first visited in the United States, "Ninety of them were mostly exposed, and I say exposed, to extreme or radical ideology," based on their speeches, books and board members. He said that a telltale sign of an extremist mosque was a focus on the Palestinian struggle. Sheik Kabbani said that American Muslim groups were dominated by Sufi-hating Wahhabis, and that when he tried to distribute pamphlets at the annual conference of the Islamic Society of North America, organizers called the police. They say he disrupted the conference by grabbing the microphone from a speaker. In 1998 he set up an office in Washington and named his organization the Islamic Supreme Council of America, whose grandiose title further inflamed other Muslim leaders. "He wanted to have a voice among the Muslim leaders," said Dr. Nyang, "so when American government talked to Muslims, the Sufis would have a voice, and he, Kabbani, will be the voice of the Sufis." His State Department speech was attended by Muslim leaders he branded extremists, and ended in shouting. His address had combined fact, like Osama bin Laden's merging with other terrorist groups, and broad suspicion, like, "If the nuclear atomic warheads reach these universities, you don't know what these students are going to do." Nine Muslim groups, including the Council on American Islamic Relations and the Muslim Students Association, signed a letter demanding "with heavy heart" a retraction and an apology. Death threats flew in both directions. Sheik Kabbani received F.B.I. protection. "With one talk he made every Muslim student in America suspect," said Hassan Hathout of the American Muslim Political Coordinating Council. After that, Sheik Kabbani received only a wary welcome in Washington until Sept. 11. But last week in New York, he represented Muslims alongside a rabbi from Israel, a Hindu from India and several Christian ministers at the closing news conference for the World Conference on Religion and Peace, a United Nations nongovernmental organization. "The Kabbani affair is the introduction into America of Middle Eastern sectarianism, and the hyperbolic rhetoric and interfratricidal struggles that go with that competition for attention from American leadership," said Dr. Nyang, whose grandfather was a famous Sufi. "America is a big magnifying mirror, and they compete for access to it, because it projects you internationally and makes you look big." Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company | Privacy Information ***************************************************************** 8 U.S.-Russia deal on shield, nuclear cuts could come soon, envoy says Chicago Tribune | October 28, 2001 Associated Press Published October 27, 2001 MOSCOW -- The United States and Russia could reach a breakthrough agreement within three weeks on American plans for a missile defense shield and on slashing nuclear weapons stocks, the U.S. ambassador to Russia said Friday. The meeting last weekend between President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Shanghai "opened the way for a possible agreement, perhaps even as early as Putin's visit to the United States, on issues relating to strategic offensive and defensive arms," Ambassador Alexander Vershbow said here. Putin is to travel to Washington and Texas Nov. 12-15 for a summit with Bush that is certain to tackle the missile defense dispute, the key thorn in relations in recent years. Vershbow's statement in an online news conference came the day after U.S. defense officials said they were delaying three missile tracking tests that might have violated a 1972 treaty banning nationwide missile defenses. The announcement marked the first time Washington has allowed concerns about the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to slow its missile defense project, and was seen as a gesture to the Russians that would give Bush room to maneuver during the summit. The ambassador did not elaborate on what kind of agreement could be reached. He said the Shanghai talks "gave further impulse to the extraordinary transformation in the relationship." Washington has long said it needs a defense against long-range ballistic missiles, while Moscow says abandoning the ABM Treaty would prompt a new arms race. An agreement could come in the form of amendments to the treaty that would allow the testing the United States wants to conduct. Prospects for an agreement looked dim until recently. But Putin's strong support for the U.S.-led anti-terrorism campaign in Afghanistan has given a powerful boost to relations. Vershbow insisted that an agreement on strategic arms should not be seen as political payment for Moscow's support for the anti-terrorism campaign, but said the overall improvement of relations "will pay very big dividends" for Russia. Many in Russia's political elite have urged Putin to exact concessions from the West, such as debt relief or a halt to NATO expansion to include former Soviet states. "I'm optimistic that Russian relations with NATO may be more satisfactorily resolved as a result of this cooperation," Vershbow said without elaborating. On the economic front, he said, "Investors will increasingly see Russia as a country in which America can place its trust." Copyright © 2001, Chicago Tribune ***************************************************************** 9 'A five-star disaster for the world' The Times FRIDAY OCTOBER 26 2001 BY GILES WHITTELL IT IS a potential nuclear smuggling route that has terrified the West since Pakistan detonated its first nuclear weapon three years ago. Bomb-making materials stolen from any of Pakistan’s 11 nuclear sites would have to cross just one ill-guarded border to be delivered to Osama bin Laden. The report in The Times today of components for a nuclear weapon reaching bin Laden via Pakistan suggests this worst fear in the war on terror may have been realised. If proven, it would be “a five-star disaster for the world”, one of America’s leading non-proliferation experts said last night. It would also focus international attention on two Pakistani nuclear scientists arrested this week, and on an alleged Pakistani intelligence agent whom US undercover agents heard say he wanted to “kill all Americans”. Pakistan has between 30 and 120 nuclear weapons, built with components smuggled from Germany and The Netherlands in the 1980s. President Musharraf has declined US offers of increased “perimeter security” for his research reactors and nuclear storage sites, insisting they are completely safe, but other sources tell a different story. The Pakistani connection to bin Laden’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons came to the FBI’s attention two years ago. Raja Ghulam Abbas, linked by the US to both bin Laden and Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency, met an FBI informer for lunch at a Manhattan restaurant within view of the World Trade Centre, and told him he wanted the twin towers “reduced to rubble”. Allowed to return to Pakistan, Abbas later placed an order with an undercover agent from the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, according to American court papers, for 500 Stinger missiles and six nuclear switches needed to trigger a chain reaction. The switches were not sent, but the British claim that bin Laden has obtained materials for a bomb remains all too plausible. Abbas is still at large and the ISI’s sympathies for the Taleban and bin Laden are well-known. Fears that similar views may have weakened security in Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme deepened this week with the arrests of Bashir uddin Mahmood and Chaudry Abdul Majid, two former senior officials in the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, who were being questioned yesterday about their support for the Taleban. “This is horrible,” Gary Milhollin, director of the Washington-based Wisconsin Project, an anti-proliferation think-tank, said of the latest intelligence on bin Laden’s nuclear potential. “If this is true it means Pakistan is a proliferator to America’s worst enemy.” Mr Milhollin cautioned that it would be much harder for bin Laden to obtain fissile material than the components needed to detonate it: 16 kilograms of highly enriched uranium (HEU) or roughly five kilograms of plutonium are the minimum needed for a nuclear weapon and Pakistan has a system to account for its nuclear material “down to the last gram”, he said. However, the International Atomic Energy Agency has recorded hundreds of confirmed cases of attempted nuclear smuggling via Germany, Bulgaria, Turkey, Georgia and Central Asia. In the latest smuggling incident, four pounds of HEU was confiscated from an hotel room in the Georgian resort town of Batumi less than three months ago. Since the September attacks, Ivan Ivanov, a Bulgarian businessman, has claimed that bin Laden approached him in Pakistan in April with an order for nuclear fuel from Bulgaria’s Kosloduj research reactor. Experts said it was impossible to rule out bin Laden acquiring the components for nuclear weapons from rogue elements in Pakistan, while accumulating the fuel from the global nuclear black market. Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd. This service is provided ***************************************************************** 10 Bin Laden's nuclear threat The Times FRIDAY OCTOBER 26 2001 BY PHILIP WEBSTER AND ROLAND WATSON OSAMA BIN LADEN and his al-Qaeda network have acquired nuclear materials for possible use in their terrorism war against the West, intelligence sources have disclosed. The Western sources say that the suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks on America does not have the capability to mount a nuclear attack but fear he would do so if he could. They believe that he obtained the materials illegally from Pakistan, which has a nuclear capability. The knowledge that bin Laden has components for a nuclear weapons device in his arsenal is believed to lie behind the regular warnings from President Bush and Tony Blair that he would commit worse atrocities than the suicide assaults on New York and Washington if he were able to. They may also explain the speed with which the decision was taken to go after bin Laden and his terrorist network, even if that meant toppling the Taleban regime in Afghanistan first. The disclosure comes as MPs prepare to learn today the details of British troops earmarked for deployment to Afghanistan. They will include a commando group of about 1,000 Royal Marines, currently on exercise in Oman, as well as a large contingent of special forces and specialist support units. The force will be based on ships that have also been participating in the huge tri-Service exercise. They are expected to include the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious, stripped of her Harrier jets so she can be used as a platform for helicopters, or HMS Ocean, a dedicated helicopter carrier, two anti-aircraft destroyers to protect the carrier, the assault ship HMS Fearless, and two Royal Fleet Auxiliary support vessels. Yesterday Mr Blair sought to reassure Muslim leaders that the military action in Afghanistan should be over as quickly as possible. He told the Islamic Response to Terrorism Conference in North London: “I hope you understand that what is important is that we make sure at the same time we take the action necessary now in order to hold to account those who committed the actions of September 11.” There has been clear evidence for several years that bin Laden’s agents have been trying to buy, steal or smuggle nuclear systems in order to attack the West. He has said that it was his “religious duty” to seek to acquire chemical, biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction. An informed source has told The Times that bin Laden appeared to have amassed a “terrifying” range of weapons although he was insistent that he did not have the capacity to launch a nuclear attack. Intelligence sources, however, have voiced concerns about bin Laden obtaining radioactive material for a “dirty bomb”. Rather than being used in an atomic weapon, the material would be dispersed in a way that would seriously contaminate a small area. In an urban environment hundreds of people could die and thousands more be exposed to radiation poisoning. In 1993 a senior bin Laden operative, Jamal al-Fadi, met a Sudanese military commander in Khartoum to try to negotiate the sale of a cylinder of enriched South African uranium for a black market price of $1.5 million (£1.2 million). A separate al-Qaeda attempt to buy weapons-grade nuclear material through the Russian mafia was foiled in Prague when several kilograms of highly enriched uranium were seized, according to a German TV report last week. Earlier this week two former government nuclear scientists in Pakistan were detained amid fears about their links with the Taleban. Bashir uddin Mahmood was project director in Pakistan’s nuclear programme before its 1998 tests. Since retiring from the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission three years ago, he ran a group which carried out relief work in Afghanistan, and was known to be supportive of the Taleban. Chaudry Abdul Majid was a director of the commission in 1999. Intelligence officials have long been aware of the potential for contraband uranium to be turned into an atomic “suitcase bomb”. An easier outcome is a radiological weapon — a conventional weapon with a radioactive core — which has the ability to contaminate large areas. George Tenet, Director of the CIA, told the Senate Intelligence Committee last year that bin Laden was trying to obtain nuclear materials. However, some are convinced bin Laden already has a nuclear capability. According to a book about the terrorist leader, The Man Who Declared War on America, Chechen rebels facilitated the sale of nuclear suitcase bombs in the late 1990s from a range of former Soviet republics including Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Russia. Quoting Russian and Arab intelligence sources, the author, Yossef Bodansky, says that bin Laden’s go-betweens paid the Chechens $30 million in cash and gave them two tonnes of heroin with a Western street value of up to $700 million for a number of bombs. In 1998 bin Laden issued a statement entitled “The Nuclear Bomb of Islam”, which said: “It is the duty of Muslims to prepare as much force as possible to terrorise the enemies of God.” Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd. This service is provided ***************************************************************** 11 'Dirty' bomb could wipe out thousands The Times OCTOBER 26 2001 NIGEL HAWKES ON BIN LADEN'S SECRET WEAPON NUCLEAR terrorism, the ultimate nightmare, could come in many forms, say experts who have studied the possibilities. The least likely of all is the explosion of a nuclear warhead, although there are thousands in the world. To achieve that, a terrorist group would either need to acquire a complete warhead from one of the current nuclear weapons powers, or the material and the know-how to make its own. While neither is impossible, they do not make much sense from a terrorist’s point of view. Much simpler, and equally terrifying, would be to create a dirty bomb from nuclear waste material and conventional explosives. Setting it off in a city would spew lethal radioactivity over a considerable distance, causing many casualties and rendering whole neighbourhoods uninhabitable. Bruce Blair, president of the Centre for Defence Information in Washington DC, estimated in a recent report that a dynamite-laden casket of spent fuel from a nuclear power station, detonated in Manhattan at noon, might kill 2,000 people and leave many thousands more with radiation poisoning. It is quite possible that bin Laden’s terrorist organisation already possesses the material for this kind of “nuclear bomb”. Earlier this year customs officers on the border between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan seized ten canisters of radioactive material bound allegedly for Quetta in Pakistan. Some have suggested that their true destination was bin Laden. Real nuclear weapons are a very different proposition. There are several possible sources from which bin Laden might have acquired one: Pakistan, the former Soviet Union, or, just possibly, Iraq. Pakistan has about three dozen nuclear weapons, all based on highly enriched uranium. But experts such as George Perkovich of the W. Alton Jones Foundation in Charlottsville, Virginia, believes that the fissile cores are kept apart from the warheads, which contain the electronics needed to detonate them. Unless bin Laden had enormous help from supporters within the Pakistan nuclear organisations it would have been impossible to obtain both components and re-unite them. One without the other would not be much use. All a nuclear weapon requires to detonate, technically, is a critical mass of either highly enriched uranium or plutonium and a source of neutrons to start the chain reaction. But in practice, engineering a successful nuclear weapon is a lot harder than this. Simply hurling two sub-critical masses of uranium together would be likely to produce more of a fizzle than a bang. True, plenty of accounts of nuclear weapons that are publicly available provide more details of how to make them, but experts still believe that this is beyond the capabilities of bin Laden. Such a primitive bomb would be too large for easy transport. It would be much better, from bin Laden’s point of view, to acquire a complete bomb, miniaturised to the size of a small refrigerator. The Soviet Union is said to have made several hundred such “suitcase” weapons, each capable of a one-kiloton explosion — though the Russians deny it. Since the Soviet Union broke up there have been many reports of such weapons going missing. Russian General Aleksandr Lebed has testified to the US Congress that 84 of the devices cannot be accounted for. Mr Blair says the consensus among Western experts is that, while Russia may be unable to account for them all, the chances are they have been dismantled and are in storage somewhere, and it is the paperwork needed to trace them that has gone missing. A suitcase bomb, should bin Laden’s group be able to transport and detonate it, would cause thousands of casualties. But the most plausible hypothesis is that bin Laden’s bomb, if it exists, consists of nuclear waste wrapped around plastic explosive. That is quite frightening enough. Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd. This service is provided ***************************************************************** 12 Nuclear safety of world is at stake, Blair tells troops The Times OCTOBER 27 2001 BY PHILIP WEBSTER, POLITICAL EDITOR TONY BLAIR gave a warning yesterday of the ultimate threat of nuclear attack from Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network unless it was destroyed. Speaking on British Forces Radio as Britain’s contribution to the ground conflict in Afghanistan was being disclosed, Mr Blair said that the campaign was essential to protect national security and civilised values. It was a fight worth undertaking because of what was at stake. “If these terrorists who killed over 6,000 people in America are allowed to carry on building up their terrorist network, possibly acquiring chemical, biological, even nuclear weapons of mass destruction, our world will be an insecure, unsafe place and there will be no corner of the world — particularly not a place like Britain — that will be untouched by that,” he said. “So we have to carry out the necessary action to close that terrorist network down and to bring to account those that perpetrated September 11.” Mr Blair was speaking the day after intelligence sources disclosed that bin Laden has acquired nuclear material to use in his terrorist war against the West. The sources, quoted by The Times, said that it was believed that he had not yet secured the capability to mount a nuclear attack, but that was his eventual aim. Downing Street officials said that obtaining materials did not mean that bin Laden was able to develop them into bombs. However, sources admitted that the fear of bin Laden becoming a nuclear threat to the world lay behind the constant warnings from President Bush and Mr Blair about the need to stop him before he did more — and possibly worse — damage. Mr Blair said that committing British forces to the campaign was a “huge responsibility” and he paid tribute to their “service, courage and bravery”. “Of course it is a huge responsibility that we only take in circumstances where we believe there is no other alternative. It is a huge responsibility to commit our Armed Forces but in my view it is justified in circumstances where our people are at risk,” he said. “From the very time that this terrible act on September 11 took place, when literally thousands of innocent people were killed, it has been obvious that we have to stop the terrorist network that perpetrated the attacks. If we don’t then our own people here in Britain are at risk, people around the world are at risk, and there is no doubt that if this terrorist network isn’t stopped it will commit even worse outrages.” The Prime Minister refused to be drawn on the exact nature of any operations in which British Armed Forces might be involved but said that the objectives remained the destruction of al-Qaeda and the “removal and disablement” of the Taleban. “Obviously, to do that, we have achieved a certain amount through airpower. There will be operations that we can also mount in support of that in Afghanistan,” he said. “The exact nature of those things though, I am afraid I can’t discuss.” Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd. This service is provided ***************************************************************** 13 Nuclear trigger dealer arrested The Times JULY 25 2001 FROM SAM KILEY IN JERUSALEM AND MICHAEL EVANS IN WASHINGTON ISRAEL is facing the possibility of embarrassing new scrutiny of its unconfirmed nuclear weapons programme after the arrest in Spain of an American arms dealer who has been on the run for 16 years. He had been charged with selling 850 Krytron nuclear triggers to the Israelis. Richard Smith, 71, has been a fugitive from the United States since he jumped $100,000 (£68,500) bail and fled from Los Angeles before being brought to trial on 30 charges of arms trafficking and forged documents. He left with his wife on a yacht. The American citizen was arrested by police in Málaga two weeks ago. He had been living in Spain since 1985. The US State Department would not comment on the case but confirmed that officials were aware of the arrest. Sources indicated that it was now up to the Spanish High Court to rule whether there was a case for extraditing Mr Smith to America. He is expected to be taken to Madrid while his extradition is considered. When Mr Smith was arrested in May 1985, Israel said that the Krytron triggers were for the pharmaceutical industry. But the special microswitches are also a vital part in the mechanism of exploding an atomic weapon and are banned for export to any country. After Mr Smith disappeared, Israel returned several unused Krytron switches and claimed the others had not been used for nuclear purposes. Mr Smith, an electronics engineer, ran a business in Los Angeles which manufactured Krytron microchips. One of his customers was the Nasa space agency. Between 1980 and 1982 he is said to have forged documents that enabled him to export the chips illegally to Israel for unspecified sums. Israel’s unofficial nuclear weapons programme at the secret underground facility at Demona was first divulged by Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli technician, to The Sunday Times in the 1980s. He was convicted of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment after being lured from London to Rome by Israeli agents. Vanunu was held in solitary confinement until March 1998. If Mr Smith is extradited to America, there are fears in Israel that he will expose the network of sympathetic companies that have helped the Israeli nuclear programme over the years. US Intelligence believes that Israel has up to 100 nuclear weapons, some of which are alleged to have been made with nuclear fuel diverted illegally by Israeli agents in the US. The case of Mr Smith is one of several that have caused friction between the US and Israel. Jonathan Pollard, a civilian US Navy intelligence analyst, spied for Israel in the 1980s, passing secret information to an Israeli intelligence officer, Colonel Aviem Sella. Pollard was given a life sentence. A spokesman for the national police in Málaga, southern Spain, said: “In 1985 Los Angeles authorities filed an international warrant for Mr Smith’s arrest and extradition. We’re complying with that request. The case has been transferred to the High Court.” It was not clear why the Spanish police had taken action only two weeks ago, 16 years after the original request. Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd. This service is provided ***************************************************************** 14 Blair Warns Of Nuke Threat Headline news from Sky News - Witness the event Tony Blair has defended his deployment of troops to Afghanistan, warning Osama bin Laden may use nuclear weapons unless stopped. The Prime Minister delivered a pep talk in an address on British Forces radio, arguing the commitment of ground troops was essential to defend national security and civilised values around the world. 'Huge responsibility' "It is only in circumstances where I believe it is absolutely essential that we commit British forces", Mr Blair said. "I do believe that this is a fight worth undertaking because of what is at stake in the world," he said. Committing British forces to the campaign was a "huge responsibility" but he believed it was justified, the Prime Minister said. Future attacks The Allies had to carry out the necessary action to close the terrorist network down and to bring those who had committed the September 11 atrocities to justice, he said. "If we don't then our own people here in Britain are at risk, people around the world are at risk...from even worse outrages in the future," he said. The Prime Minister would not comment on what operations British forces might be involved in but said the objectives remained the destruction of al Qaeda and the "removal and disablement" of the Taliban. Last Modified: 17:18 UK, Friday October 26, 2001 © 2001 BSkyB | Privacy Statement | Terms and Conditions ***************************************************************** 15 Oak Ridge facility signs on to provide uranium tubes to UK By Frank Munger, News-Sentinel senior writer OAK RIDGE - Manufacturing Sciences Corp., a subsidiary of BNFL Inc., has signed an eight-year agreement to manufacture tubes from depleted uranium for nuclear operations in the United Kingdom. The agreement is valued at $3 million a year. BNFL Inc. is the American subsidiary of British Nuclear Fuels, which needs the uranium tubes for nuclear fuel reprocessing operations at its Sellafield Plant near Seascale. Manufacturing Sciences, which specializes in the processing of depleted uranium, previously manufactured and transported about 70,000 of the tubes to the Sellafield Plant. The new agreement guarantees the future supply, officials said. According to information provided by Manufacturing Sciences Corp., the company will use its inventory of depleted uranium acquired earlier from the U.S. government's uranium-enrichment facilities. The uranium will be cast into ingots and then rolled into sheets at the MSC facility in Oak Ridge. "Once the uranium sheet reaches final thickness, it will be formed into 24-inch-long tubes with specially designed ends,'' the MSC statement said. Manufacturing Sciences last year closed its radioactive metal recycling center after the U.S. Department of Energy placed a moratorium on commercial processing of metals from its facilities at Oak Ridge and elsewhere. MSC's Oak Ridge facility still employs about 35 people, and Timothy Waddell, the manager of business development and administration, said the company is focusing now on manufacturing missions. Waddell said the company has added work that involves rolling and processing of nonradioactive specialty metals. The Oak Ridge plant currently has only one shift, but Waddell said the company hopes to add a second shift over the next year or so. Frank Munger can be reached at 865-482-9213 or twig1@knoxnews.infi.net. Copyright 2001 The Knoxville News-Sentinel Co. ***************************************************************** 16 Fear of terror nuclear cache The Courier Mail: 27 October 2001 Christine Middap in London TERROR leader Osama bin Laden has illegally obtained nuclear weapons materials, intelligence sources have claimed. Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda organisation is believed to have acquired some nuclear materials from Pakistan, but it does not have the capability to deliver a nuclear weapon. Unnamed Western intelligence officials have told a number of British media outlets that knowledge of bin Laden's nuclear threat prompted the warnings from President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair that bin Laden could commit worse atrocities than the September 11 terrorism attacks. The Times newspaper said an "informed source" had claimed that bin Laden appeared to have amasseda "terrifying" range of weapons. Although he does not have a complete nuclear warhead, there are concerns that bin Laden may have the materials to launch a small-scale "dirty bomb" which uses radioactive material to contaminate a small, but potentially densely populated area. The claims follow news this week that two top nuclear experts in Pakistan have been detained for questioning over alleged links with Afghanistan's ruling Taliban. Sultan Bashiru-Din Mehmood, a pioneer member of Pakistan's nuclear program who has worked for a relief agency on rehabilitation projects in Afghanistan, and a friend have been detained by intelligence agents in Pakistan. They are being questioned about whether they have any links with Afghan figures including Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. © 2001 Queensland Newspapers ***************************************************************** 17 Experts say Nevada not high on list of terrorist targets By Frank X. Mullen Jr. Reno Gazette-Journal Saturday October 27th, 2001 While the nation wonders where terrorists will strike next, local terrorism experts and emergency management officials say Nevada isn’t a target-rich environment for more mayhem. “I don’t think Nevada is real high on the terrorists’ hit parade,” said Leonard Weinberg, professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a nationally recognized terrorism expert. “We have some obvious potential targets, such as Hoover Dam and Las Vegas, so it can’t be ruled out, but I wouldn’t think they would be high on a list.” But that doesn’t mean our guard is down, state and local officials said. They said Nevada agencies — including governments in Washoe County, Carson City and Douglas County — have been planning responses to terrorism for the last two years. They said the preparation has only accelerated since the Sept. 11 attacks. “I think we are as prepared as we can be,” said Frank Siracusa, emergency management chief with the state Emergency Operations Center in Carson City. “We’ve done a lot of planning in the last two years and we’re one of the few states that have completed a risks-and-vulnerability study and sent it to the Department of Justice and the Office of Homeland Security.” He said the plan includes responses to attacks by weapons of mass destruction, including bombs and bioterrorism. Local responders would be the first line of defense, he said, and the state agencies would provide support. Although Nevada has many potential targets, such as the Nevada Test Site, military bases like Fallon Naval Air Station, and munitions storage areas such as Hawthorne Depot, those high-profile bases aren’t very attractive to terrorists, Weinberg said. “They tend to avoid places where people can shoot back at them,” he said. * * * * * South a bigger target If there is an attack in Nevada, Clark County would be a likely target, Weinberg said. In addition, some of the terrorists who hijacked the planes in the Sept. 11 attacks met in Las Vegas shortly before their suicide mission. “What the significance of the terrorists’ meeting there is, I don’t know,” he said. “I hope they weren’t casing the joint. “But just looking at the terrorists’ philosophy, they tend to blame the entertainment industry for what they see as low morals (in America). Entertainment is Las Vegas.” Vegas in the crosshairs isn’t a new idea. Two years ago, the city was among 110 potential terrorism targets listed in a federal report. While the city is prepared for a hotel fire or a plane crash, more needs to be done to protect the area from a terrorist attack, Clark County officials told the Associated Press a week after Sept. 11. Members of the Clark County Local Emergency Planning Committee said doctors need training in biological and chemical warfare, emergency communications must be protected from computer hackers and vaccinations must be immediately accessible after a biological attack. That planning and preparation is ongoing, they said. Siracusa said local agencies all over the state, including Clark County, have been planning and training to be ready for anything. “Now it’s going on at an accelerated rate,” he said. “Can we ever be totally ready? No one can be. But we’re working together and avoiding turf battles and we’ve been dealing with these issues.” * * * * * Hoover Dam is solid Experts said the Hoover Dam ranked among the top five targets in the West for Cold War-style long-range missile attacks, but they said complete structural failure probably wouldn’t follow a hit by an airliner or the impact of a truck bomb. Unlike hollow high-rise buildings constructed of steel and concrete such as the World Trade Center, the Hoover Dam is made of solid layers of concrete. It is 726 feet tall, 45 feet wide across the top, 660 feet wide at the bottom and weighs 6.6 million tons. Even so, shortly after Sept. 11, the concrete structure was closed to all traffic and visitors. Passenger traffic on U.S. Highway 93 across the dam has resumed, but commercial vehicles and trucks with trailers continue to be detoured. “Have things changed? Yes, definitely. We are going to have to define things anew from this point forward,” Bob Andrews, Clark County Emergency Management director, told the Associated Press. “The emergency management system needs to focus more on our communities and our residents in ways we never considered before.” Mike Myers, coordinator of the federally funded Metropolitan Medical Response System in Clark County, told the Las Vegas Review Journal shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks that the regional medical program is designed to handle a chemical, biological or nuclear attack producing as many as 10,000 victims. Whether a chemical release on the Strip, an airplane into a building, a biological attack, or a bomb in downtown, “the Metropolitan Medical Response System is ready to handle it,” he said. © Reno Gazette-Journal ***************************************************************** 18 Hanford budget still unresolved in Congress This story was published Fri, Oct 26, 2001 By John Stang Herald staff writer U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., will be on the joint Senate-House committee that will nail down what Congress wants to spend on Hanford's environmental cleanup in fiscal 2002. Other than that, Hanford's 2002 budget picture is just as hazy as it was a month ago. Congress wants to appropriate slightly more than $1.8 billion to Hanford for fiscal 2002, which began Oct. 1. The Bush administration has not provided a clue yet on if it will agree to anything more than the $1.4 billion it proposed for Hanford last spring. Todd Webster, Murray's press aide, said the House and Senate will likely meet in the next week or two to hammer out the slight differences over their proposed 2002 Hanford budgets. The Bush administration wants to make cuts in 13 appropriation bills that have more or less been passed by Congress. One of those is the water and energy appropriations bill, which includes the Department of Energy's and Hanford's nuclear cleanup money. But the administration has not yet provided Congress with figures on what it wants to cut in those bills. Webster said those figures might materialize within two weeks. Since the Senate and House pushed for a Hanford budget of more than $1.8 billion, the federal financial climate has changed substantially. Those changes include the new war on terrorism, a sluggish national economy and a shrinking Social Security budget surplus. Copyright 2001 Tri-City Herald. All rights reserved. This ***************************************************************** 19 Official: Fire Swept Through Kursk Las Vegas SUN October 27, 2001 MOSCOW- A searing fire spread swiftly through the Kursk after the explosions that sank the nuclear submarine last year, leaving sailors who were not killed quickly to die of carbon monoxide poisoning, Russia's chief prosecutor said Saturday. Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov told a news conference in the northern port of Murmansk on Saturday that the submarine was completely flooded eight hours after the blasts that sent it to the bottom of the Barents Sea on Aug, 12, 2000, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported. Ustinov is leading a team investigating the portion of the Kursk's wrecked hull that was lifted in a salvage operation and towed to dry dock in Roslyakovo, near Murmansk. He said 19 bodies have been found inside the sub since it was lifted, and seven of those have been identified, the Interfax news agency reported. Divers pulled 12 bodies from the submerged wreckage last year. Adm. Vladimir Kuroyedov, the Russian Navy commander, said that at the request of relatives, the bodies will be taken to their home towns, and a farewell ceremony "will be conducted with full military honors," Interfax reported. Russian officials have said most of the Kursk's 118 sailors were killed by powerful explosions that sank the submarine during naval exercises in August 2000. However, at least 23 survived the crash for hours in the stern compartments, according to letters found by divers. Ustinov said sailors not killed by the blasts and fire died from carbon monoxide poisoning, including those trapped in the stern compartments. Kuroyedov said the operation to remove the submarine's 22 Granit cruise missiles will begin next week. "At the moment, intensive preparations for unloading the missiles are underway," he said in an interview with Interfax. The bulk of the Kursk was raised from the Barents Sea floor on Oct. 8 in a $65 million salvage operation performed by the Dutch consortium Mammoet-Smit International. The mangled forward compartment, where the Kursk's torpedoes were located, was left on the bottom of the sea out of concern that it could break off and destabilize the lifting operation. All contents copyright 2001 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 20 Russian Official Shows Kursk Damage Las Vegas SUN October 27, 2001 MOSCOW- Charred and rusting cavities littered with torn metal shards are all that remain of the compartments where commanders and most of the crew of the Kursk were stationed when explosions sank the nuclear submarine, investigators said Saturday. "What happened inside these compartments was hell," said Russian Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov, who presented a seven-minute film shot by investigators inside the portion of the Kursk lifted from the Barents Sea floor and hauled into dry dock this month. "Everything is littered with equipment that was destroyed in the explosion," Ustinov said. "The strong alloys from which these compartments are built were simply ripped apart." In one part of the film, shown on Russian television, the camera focuses on the spot where the Kursk's periscope once stood - now a surreally twisted column of metal. "The explosion ... wiped out everything here," Ustinov said. The chief prosecutor is leading a team investigating the wrecked submarine that sank during naval exercises on Aug. 12, 2000, killing all 118 crewmen. He said the Kursk's commanders and most of its crew were killed in the front compartments as two powerful explosions in the bow sent the mighty submarine to the sea bottom. "In the 135 seconds that passed between the first and the second explosions, they did not even have time to put on lifesaving equipment," Ustinov said. "But even if this equipment had been put on, there was everything here - an explosion and fire - so nothing could have survived." The fire spread rapidly after the blasts and raised temperatures inside the Kursk above 14,000 degrees, Ustinov said at a separate news conference in Murmansk. Thirty-two bodies have been removed from the wreckage since it was brought to Roslyakovo, a port near Murmansk, the Russian Navy's press service said late Saturday in a report cited by the Interfax news agency. Ustinov had said earlier in the day that 19 bodies had been found and 17 of them removed. Seven were identified, he said. Adm. Vladimir Kuroyedov, the Russian Navy's commander, said that at the request of relatives, the bodies will be transported to their hometowns and will be remembered in a farewell ceremony "with full military honors," the Interfax news agency reported. Officials have said they believe the bodies of most of the crewmen were destroyed in the explosions and fire, and they doubt they will find more than 40 bodies in the eight compartments that were lifted. The submarine had nine compartments, but the mangled bow was left undersea. The bodies found so far have been in the stern compartments, where letters found by divers who recovered 12 bodies from the sunken vessel a year ago indicated that at least 23 sailors survived for hours after the explosions. "We are finding the bodies of the dead, and the main cause of death is suffocation," Ustinov said. He said experts believe the submarine was completely flooded within eight hours at the most - but that most ran out of breathable air before they could drown. "Those who think there was a possibility of saving our sailors should know that there was no such possibility," he said, echoing other officials who contended, amid criticism of the sluggish rescue effort, that nobody could have been saved. Ustinov said the compartment housing the submarine's nuclear reactors withstood the blasts despite their force, and was only flooded by water coming through air vents and other openings. The reactors and the vessel's 22 cruise missiles are to be removed. The cause of the disaster remains unknown. Russian officials have focused on the possibility that a torpedo misfired and exploded inside or near the Kursk during the exercise, but some say they believe it was struck by a foreign submarine or hit a World War II mine. All contents copyright 2001 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 21 Analysis: Bin Laden's 'nuclear threat' BBC News | SOUTH ASIA | 26 October, 2001, [Plutonium from Russia] Nuclear material can be used in "dirty bombs" By BBC News Online's Natalie Malinarich Osama Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network may have acquired nuclear materials, according to the Western intelligence sources quoted in the British media. Although it is widely believed that al-Qaeda does not have the capability to build a conventional atomic bomb, experts fear that the radioactive material could be used in a so-called "dirty bomb" - a device to spread radioactive material. These so-called dirty weapons have never been used before. [Osama Bin Laden] Bin Laden does not have the technology to build a bomb Radiation could be scattered from the top of a building, by detonating explosives wrapped with the radioactive material or by piloting an aircraft into a nuclear reactor. Thousands could be exposesd, causing both short- and long-term deaths and rendering areas uninhabitable for years. Shopping for uranium Bin Laden and his associates have long been accused of trying to acquire nuclear material. Pakistan has an early nuclear programme and its highly enriched uranium would be very precious to it. It would not have enough to spare John Large, nuclear consultant A close Bin Laden associate was charged by the US of trying to buy a cylinder of South African uranium in Sudan. A letter alleged to have been written by Bin Laden and seized in London three years ago, called on Muslim nations to acquire nuclear weapons. "We call for the Muslim brothers to imitate Pakistan as to the possession of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons," says the letter dated May 1998. It is not know where Osama Bin Laden may have got his nuclear materials - if he has them - is not known, but fingers are pointing to ex-Soviet republics or Pakistan. [Pakistan Nuclear Science and Technology Centre] Pakistan says its nuclear materials are "in safe hands" Pakistan has denied the accusations and insists that its nuclear assets are in safe hands. John Large, an independent nuclear consultant, also says Pakistan is an unlikely source. "Pakistan has an early nuclear programme and its highly-enriched uranium would be very precious to it. It would not have enough to spare, even if it wanted to," he says. No nuclear competence John Large thinks that Bin Laden probably does have enriched uranium bought in a former Soviet republic, possibly Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan. "Unfortunately, he is in the right place at the right time. That area of the world is the worst place in terms of possible proliferation," he said. A nuclear bomb is difficult to manufacture and requires a lot of industrial infrastructure, materials, machines and tools John Large "With the break up of the Soviet Union there were many leaks, typically about 30 cases of smuggling of nuclear materials a year. It is like an open sieve. You get a superpower like the Soviet Union break up and of course its materials will come out." The Washington-based Center for Defense Information (CDI) warns that there is still a long way to go to bring Russian nuclear security up to international standards. However, experts insist that al-Qaeda does not have the technical competence to build a nuclear weapon. "It is difficult to think of a sub-national group doing it without the help of a nuclear state," says John Large. "A nuclear bomb is difficult to manufacture and requires a lot of industrial infrastructure, materials, machines and tools. It also takes a long time to develop the capability." Israel, for example, took about 15 years to achieve nuclear status. But not being able to build an atomic bomb does not mean that radioactive materials cannot be used to cause extensive damage, as many specialists have warned. Dirty weapons Weapons involving radioactive materials can take many forms. [Testing levels of radioactivity near Chernobyl] A "dirty bomb" could leave areas uninhabitable for years The most accessible for any terrorist is a radiological dispersion bomb, says the CDI. This "dirty bomb" consists of waste by-products from nuclear reactors, wrapped in conventional explosives. On detonation the dirty bomb would spew deadly radioactive materials into the environment. According to some experts, it would be sufficient to explode an old X-ray machine containing cobalt 60 to produce radiation poisoning. Another feared possibility is the spread of radioactive particles. Elements such as caesium, cobalt, plutonium or uranium can be oxidised into respirable-sized particles and then dispersed in the environment. The particles would settle as dust, and be very difficult to detect and clean up, leaving areas uninhabitable. Thousands of people could suffer short- and long-term effects from the inhalation of radioactive material. But experts say the ultimate dirty bomb is a nuclear power station which could serve as a target for a terrorist attack. Crashing an aircraft into the cooling pool that holds the spent fuel, could have a devastating effect on the nearby population and environment. Recognising the threat, the French military has stationed surface-to-air missiles at key nuclear processing sites in western France as a precaution against airborne suicide attacks and both the UK and US governments have said security measures are being reviewed. ***************************************************************** 22 Security official Ridge to tour test site [Las Vegas Review-Journal] Saturday, October 27, 2001 DONREY WASHINGTON BUREAU WASHINGTON -- Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge has accepted an invitation to tour the Nevada Test Site, which Sen. Harry Reid continues to promote as a possible major counterterrorism training center. The Nevada Democrat said Ridge expressed interest in visiting the test site in an unrelated White House meeting Thursday attended by top congressional and executive branch officials. "He talked about doing it soon," Reid said Friday. "I don't know when." At a White House ceremony Friday where President Bush signed into law an anti-terrorism bill, Reid said he pushed his plan to CIA Director George Tenet. The Nevada senator has proposed the government spend about $60 million to develop a National Center for Combatting Terrorism at the test site. In letters to President Bush and decision-makers within the administration, Reid has said the 1,375-square-mile Nevada range, one of the largest restricted access areas in the country, could be used to train police, fire and rescue workers on responding to chemical, biological and nuclear attacks. Some training programs already are operated at the test site, including classified sessions for government responders to possible nuclear terrorism. Congress has appropriated $7 million and $10 million annually over the past two years for test site counterterrorism training, not including funding from "black book" or secret accounts. Reid said an Energy Department spending bill that Congress is close to finishing will contain a substantial increase for counterterrorism programs at the test site. Reid, who has been negotiating the legislation as chairman of the energy and water subcommittee, declined to say how much the bill will contain. Meetings also are ongoing elsewhere within the government. On Friday, officials from the Energy Department's Nevada Operations Office and Bechtel Nevada, the test site's managing contractor, were scheduled to discuss the proposal, but details of the session were not immediately available. This story is located at: http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/2001/Oct-27-Sat-2001/news/17320025.html ***************************************************************** 23 Japan discontinues measures taken in response to nuclear tests The Frontier Post From Peshawar Pakistan Updated on 10/27/2001 12:16:48 PM ISLAMBAD (PPI): The Government of Japan has decided to discontinue the measures that it took on May 13, 14 and 29 in 1998, in response to the nuclear tests conducted by India and Pakistan.The measures were consisted of the freezing of grant aid to new projects, except emergency and humanitarian aid and Grant Assistance for Grassroots Projects, freezing of yen loans for new projects and cautiously examining the loan programmes to the two countries by multinational development banks. Yasuo Fukuda, Chief Cabinet Secretary, made the announcement. He said this decision was taken based, inter alia, on the following considerations, as Japan has repeatedly expressed its position to both India and Pakistan regarding nuclear disarmament and proliferation issues. Consequently, both India and Pakistan have been maintaining their moratoria on further nuclear tests for the past three years and declaring their intention to continue to do so. Furthermore, both countries have stated that they will ensure strict controls on nuclear and missile related goods and technologies. To that extent, Japans measures have obtained due achievement. He said Japan highly values the efforts by the two countries to contribute to strengthening the international coalition against terrorism. It is vitally important that Pakistan remains stable and cooperative with the international society in this combat against terrorism. In this context, Japan recognizes the genuine need to support Pakistan, particularly in view of Pakistan’s difficult domestic situation. Following the decision to discontinue the measures, Japan will examine specific plans of Official Development Assistance with regard to both countries. Japan will continue to urge both India and Pakistan to make progress in the field of nuclear non-proliferation, including the signing of the CTBT. It was also announced that the Government of Japan was looking forward to the visit of Shaukat Aziz, Minister of Finance of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, to Japan as the Special Envoy of President Musharraf from 31 October to 3 November. © Copyright 2001 The Frontier Post ***************************************************************** 24 Egypt presents two draft resolutions to UN committee on nuclear-free Mideast Egypt-Regional, Politics, 10/27/2001 As part of Egypt's sustained efforts to spare the Middle East the dangers of a non-conventional war, its delegation at the UN presented two draft resolutions to the Disarmament and International Security Committee on the subject. Egyptian Ambassador to the UN Ahmed Abul Gheit Wednesday night said the first draft pertains to the establishment of a Middle East nuclear-free zone that primarily aims at the elimination of the danger of the spread of nuclear weapons in the region. The second runs along the same lines of President Hosni Mubarak's initiative of 1990 on the establishment of a nuclear free zone and his call in 1998 to hold an international conference to cleanse the world of all weapons of mass destruction, he added. The current international conditions necessitate the adoption of actual steps for the establishment of a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East, which will promote the security and stability of all states in the region and provide a step towards securing a just and comprehensive peace in the Middle East, he said. Meanwhile, Abul Gheit said the repercussion of terrorist attacks against Washington and New York on the Americans would continue for a long time. Abul Gheit told Al-Ahram that Egypt, raised the idea of holding an international conference on terrorism combat. Copyright © 1995-2001 Arabic News.com, All Rights ***************************************************************** 25 THE mayor of Hiroshima called yesterday for an international crime tribunal to try the terrorists behind the September 11 atrocities in the United States. Dr Tadatoshi Akiba, who was speaking at a conference in Glasgow, also endorsed the UN secretary general's appeal for the abolition of nuclear weapons at a time of great instability in Central Asia. Dr Akiba, who was born in 1942, said the people of Hiroshima had watched the events of September 11 with horror, disbelief, anger and frustration. "Any catastrophe overlaps with their experience of August 6, 1945." He said many people were afraid the war in Afghanistan would lead to the use of nuclear weapons. Dr Akiba advocated the setting up of a legal system to resolve such conflicts so that the world would never again be brought to the nuclear brink. He said: "We are not saying we should talk to the Taliban, although maybe talking to them would be necessary. This is a crime, however, and criminals ought to be caught and brought to justice. "That, however, should be done in a judicial system. We should create a world mechanism to handle a situation like this. It's not too late. If the world does not have a perfect system yet, I think an occasion like this calls for a further effort and modelling an international criminal tribunal on what happened in Yugoslavia." Dr Akiba said the abolition of nuclear weapons remained urgent. "That is the foremost goal that Hiroshima has, but it can't be done in isolation." - Oct 26th ***************************************************************** 26 US plan to destroy Pakistan’s N-facilities if Pervez’s ousted Oct 27 2001 POLITICS WASHINGTON PRESIDENT George Bush is consulting senior leaders on plans to neutralise Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities if the Pervez Musharraf regime collapses, a senior US lawmaker has indicated. Joe Biden, chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, strongly hinted this at a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Biden was asked about an article in The New York Times on the need to render Pakistani nuclear weapons ineffective if the Musharraf regime falls. Biden (Democrat) replied: “Those discussions are underway with the Democratic Congress and the Republican members of Congress and the president on setting those priorities.” There have been strong protests from fundamentalist groups in Pakistan against Musharraf’s decision to back the US war against Afghanistan. This has given rise to questions about a threat to the military regime and the possibility of Pakistan’s nuclear facilities falling into the hands of religious groups. Biden said: “The question is, the President (Bush) has an internal dilemma he has to overcome first. He (Bush) is focusing on first things first, but then he has to deal with ... and I’m going to get in trouble for saying this ... but he has to deal with what has not gone away. There is, for lack of a better phrase, still a Rumsfeld-Powell split on how they look at the world, and how they look at these very issues that you’ve stated here.” Biden indicated a split between Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell with the suggestion that Rumsfeld, a known hawk, supported such a plan in Pakistan while Powell opposed it. Biden, who said he had been in close consultations with Bush, also set out his views on US relations with India and Pakistan. “I think there has to be a clear understanding, both in Delhi and Islamabad, that we are interested, we are looking and we are watching. Secondly, I think a message should be delivered very strongly to the Indians — do not attempt to take advantage of the circumstances at this moment, it’s against your interests across the board.” But finally, he said, “we have to make clear to the Pakistanis that, notwithstanding the fact we need you very much right now, you are in a position where if you are going to continue to foment the terror that does exist in Kashmir, then you are operating against your own near term interests, because that very viper can turn on you.” Kashmir will become central to resolving tensions between India and Pakistan, he said. “The truth of the matter is, the whole world is looking at their problem now in Kashmir, not just us, the spotlight is on and the consequences for how they will be treated relative to all other nations in the world is very much up in the air right now, and they should be made constantly aware of how tenuous the circumstance is for both of them. In this case, particularly India, in my view, particularly India.” Replying to a question on relations with India after the US had been seen to be moving close to the country before September 11, Biden said: “I think that was then, and it’s almost still that way now. And let me explain what I mean by that. “I may be mistaken, and I may be a bit cynical, but I think the initial, quote, tilt toward India was related to Beijing more than it was to Pakistan or anything else. And I think that the relationship with Beijing was going south very rapidly.” Biden said “there is a desire in the administration to actually, genuinely (have) better relations with India. I think it is an absolute essential element of American foreign policy that that be done. And part of that is simply engaging ... engaging them and treating them like what they are. They will not (in) too long be the largest, most populous nation in the world. They are a democracy, as flawed as you may think it is. They are someone with whom we should and must have a much, much, much better relationship and understanding.” The whole world has changed for India in recent years, Biden said. “It has changed not only when the wall came down, and when their protector evaporated, it changed now as the relationship with China begins to mature, and they’re going to have some great difficulty internally figuring out how to deal with that. “But we should be engaged at the highest level on a daily basis, literally with India. So I don’t think the administration is jettisoning India, but I think they’re beginning to look at India in a different way, not as cynically as just a card to have been played against Beijing.” (IANS) [Previous]    [Next]   Copyright © 2000 Indian Times ***************************************************************** 27 America wakes up to Osama's nuke dreams Oct 28 2001 Chidanand Rajghatta / Times News Network WASHINGTON ALARM bells are clanging in the US and other western establishments over reports that Osama bin Laden may have acquired or developed crude atom bombs with help from renegade Pakistani nuclear scientists. Accounts of bin Laden's pursuit of nuclear weapons has been in the air for some time, but they acquired an added urgency this week following the arrest in Islamabad of two retired Pakistani nuclear scientists whose activities in Afghanistan were being scrutinised by western intelligence agencies. The scientists were reportedly taken into custody for questioning by Pakistani authorities at Washington's behest. According to reports from Islamabad, the two scientists -- Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Chaudhury Abdul Majid -- have been "detained for questioning" by Pakistani authorities. Proliferation experts in Washington say Mahmood and Majid are experts on plutonium technology. Mahmood is known for his contribution in setting up Pakistan's first "unsafeguarded" plutonium reactor in Khushab in central Pakistan. Majid is one of the few Pakistani scientists who had been trained at a plutonium facility in Belgium in the 1960s. Majid worked with Mahmood for years, and they were both senior scientists in the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission. Mahmood, who was project director of Pakistan's nuclear programme before its 1998 tests, reportedly resigned in protest against Pakistan considering signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Majid, who went on to become Director of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, retired last year. Following their exit from the Pakistani nuclear establishment, the duo set up a non-governmental organisation for relief work and investment in Afghanistan. The NGO had close ties with the Taliban. The links had drawn the attention of US intelligence agencies that in turn alerted the Musharraf regime, which has been doing its best in recent months to convince Washington that its nuclear assets are safe. bin Laden's pursuit of nuclear weapons has been fairly well-chronicled. As early as 1993, a senior bin Laden operative, Jamal al-Fadi, reportedly met a Sudanese military commander in Khartoum to negotiate the sale of a cylinder of enriched South African uranium. His operatives also tried to buy nuclear material through the Russian mafia and suitcase nuclear bombs through Chechen rebels. The reports led the CIA Director George Tenet to publicly sound the alarm at a Senate hearing last year. The role of Pakistani scientists has been less clear, although US experts have speculated about links between Islamabad and the Iraqi nuclear program. In Islamabad on Friday, Pakistani spokesman Major General Rashid Qureshi said "authorities were only investigating Mahmood for his links with the Taliban through his relief agency, and not over concerns he may have passed on any government nuclear secrets." But American analysts, shaken by the WTC carnage and the bio-terrorism attack, are less sure. "Available information suggests that, despite official statements to the contrary, the Pakistani government may not have full confidence in the security of its nuclear arsenal. Statements by the Pakistani Foreign Ministry that 'our [nuclear] assets are 100 percent secure, under multiple custody' are untested and lack credibility," experts at the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, a thinktank that tracks nuclear proliferation, said in a threat assessment of Pakistan's nuclear weapons. Aside the possibility of bin Laden having acquired a suitcase nuclear device, experts here are fairly certain that he does not have the wherewithal to manufacture a full-fledged nuclear weapon. At best, he may be able to make a "dirty bomb," an improvised device that could be exploded to scatter radioactive plutonium without the fission that is involved in a full-scale nuclear weapon. "The construction of a crude plutonium separation plant is easier than is often understood. The detained Pakistani scientists could have provided critical information and insights that would help Al Qaeda build a simple plutonium separation facility in Afghanistan," the ISIS said in a statement. According to the London Times, British intelligence services are investigating a claim by a Bulgarian businessman that he was approached earlier this year by a middleman for bin Laden seeking to obtain spent nuclear fuel rods from the Kozlodui nuclear power plant in Bulgaria. The businessman was invited to Pakistan, where he was led to a secret location. A Pakistani scientist who described himself as a chemical engineer offered to pay $200,000 to help set up an environmental firm to buy nuclear waste. It was not immediately clear if the scientist was one of the two detained men. In fact, the Times, quoting western intelligence sources, reported on Friday that Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network have already illegally acquired nuclear materials from Pakistan for possible use in their terrorism war against the West. "The knowledge that bin Laden has components for a nuclear weapons device is believed to lie behind the regular warnings from President Bush and Tony Blair that he would commit worse atrocities than the suicide assaults on New York and Washington if he were able to," The Times reported. "They may also explain the speed with which the decision was taken to go after bin Laden and his terrorist network, even if that meant toppling the Taleban regime in Afghanistan first," the paper added. What is lending credence to the nuclear attack theory is the steady scaling up of strikes on American interests, starting with smaller kidnappings and bombings in the middle-east and Africa to the WTC catastrophe and the biological weapons attack. There is a inevitable sense here that the next blow could be a chemical or nuclear strike. [Previous]    [Next]   Indian Times ***************************************************************** 28 U.S. Mulls Action on Nukes in Pakistan New York Daily News Online By BRIAN KATES Daily News Staff Writer Worried by unrest in Pakistan, the Pentagon has explored plans to dispatch an elite unit into the country to disarm its nuclear arsenal, according to a published report. The unit — trained to ferret out and disarm nuclear weapons — operates under Pentagon control with CIA assistance, Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh writes in the upcoming issue of the New Yorker magazine. Pakistan, a key ally in the U.S. war against Afghanistan, is thought to have at least 24 nuclear warheads. Torn by widespread pro-Taliban rioting and a deadly dispute with India over Kashmir, the Muslim nation is growing increasingly unstable — raising concerns about a possible overthrow of its leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. The article says South Asia experts in the U.S. "have doubts about Musharraf's ability to maintain control over the military and its nuclear arsenal in the event of a coup attempt." The administration also has expanded the pool of terrorists who could be targeted for assassination by the CIA, the Washington Post reported today. President Bush and his advisers have concluded that the U.S. has the legal authority to have known terrorists — not just Osama Bin Laden — snuffed out, even outside of Afghanistan, the Post said. In another report, the Post says Pakistan had arrested and turned over to American custody a Yemeni microbiology student wanted in connection with the bombing of the Navy destroyer Cole. Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, 27, was turned over to U.S. authorities — bypassing normal extradition and deportation proceedings — as part of a broad investigation of Bin Laden's Al Qaeda terror network, the Post quoted unidentified Pakistan officials as saying. With News Wire Services Original Publication Date: 10/28/01 ***************************************************************** 29 Arrest of second Pak n-expert exposes jehadi bomb trail - [26/10/2001] - Hindustantimes.com Friday, October 26, 2001 HTC and Agencies (Islamabad/Moscow, October 25) There is now a nuclear dimension to the Afghan war. A second retired Pakistani atomic scientist was picked up by Islamabad on Tuesday night on the suspicion that he was developing a nuclear device for Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. The arrests followed tip-offs by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation to the Pakistani authorities. Sultan Bashiruddin Mehmood and Abdul Majeed, both scientists who had retired from the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC), were picked up after the FBI provided evidence of their links to jehadi outfits. The Pakistan Interior Minister, Moinuddin Haidar, said on Thursday that Bashiruddin was being taken into "protective custody." Military spokesman, Rashid Qureshi, only said the scientist was being questioned. After retirement, Bashiruddin had formed an NGO called Ummah Tameer-e-Nau (Reconstruction of the Muslim Ummah). This NGO was affiliated to the Al Rasheed Trust, an organisation banned for its links with Al-Qaeda network. The NGO was one of the few allowed by Mullah Muhammad Omar to carry out relief work in Afghanistan. Majeed was the chief engineer of PAEC until last year. Pakistani press reports said he had been trying to get a hold of supplies of plutonium and enriched uranium to send to the Taliban. Bashiruddin was with the PAEC for 35 years. He held many senior positions, including director of the Kahuta Enrichment Project. He was also one of the designers of the Khusab nuclear plant in Punjab. He took early retirement in 1998 to protest moves by the then Nawaz Sharif government to sign the CTBT, a treaty he strongly opposed. Bashiruddin founded Ummah Tameer-e-Nau after vowing to rebuild Afghanistan. Most of its membership consisted of nuclear scientists and military officers. Bashiruddin's Islamic fervour was well known, catching even the attention of Mullah Omar. The Taliban gave him permission to conclude business agreements on their behalf. This strengthened suspicions that Bashiruddin's NGO was looking for nuclear hardware for Kabul. He and Majeed had been under investigation by a joint US-Pakistani intelligence team. The West is reportedly also concerned about A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb. Khan resigned as head of the country's nuclear programme in March this year. Because he had publicly expressed sympathy for the jehad movement, it was rumoured he was joining the fundamentalists. The detention of the two scientists follows statements by Pakistani officials, including President Pervez Musharraf, that the country's nuclear installations and assets were secure. There have been persistent rumours Bin Laden has sought weapons of mass destruction —chemical, biological and nuclear. Pakistan is increasingly seen as a possible source of such weaponry for the Taliban or Bin Laden. One reason is the large number of scientists employed by its nuclear programme. The other is the creeping popularity of the fundamentalist cause among educated, urban Pakistanis. In the past, the most likely source was one of the "loose nukes" scattered about the ex-Soviet Union. Seven years ago, Russian agents stopped a planeload of Russian nuclear scientists heading off to North Korea. Says Michael Krepon of the Henry Stimson Centre in Washington, which does research on nuclear security, "It is easy to get fissionable material, but difficult to make a bomb." He points out the Taliban could just mix nuclear material with RDX. This would not produce an atomic explosion. But, say other experts, the very knowledge Kabul has weapons-grade nuclear material could deter US bombing as Washington would have to fear a terrorist strike that could leave nuclear contaminants. Osama’s chain reaction * Bin Laden has spent $3 million since 1996 to acquire Soviet-made nuclear suitcase bombs. * Vladimir Orlov of the Pir Centre, a nuclear security think tank in Moscow, says one Central Asian atomic bomb expert works for Bin Laden. * US intelligence reports say Bin Laden's agents tried buying nukes, chemical weapons from Russian mafia groups post September 11. hindustantimes.com ***************************************************************** 30 Every day, the case mounts against Saddam news.telegraph.co.uk - Monday 29 October 2001 Jessica Berry traces the secret contacts between Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda henchmen and the Baghdad regime since the September 11 outrage THE room was full and the speeches under way when the various representatives began a resounding chant of "Allah Akhbar!" - God is great - but it was the banners that gave the strongest indication that this was no ordinary conference. They adorned the walls and set the mood in no uncertain terms: "Down with America", "Down with Israel". The annual terrorist recruitment conference in Baghdad was under way. It was just three weeks before the September 11 suicide attacks on America, and members of the world's most-wanted international terrorist groups were waiting impatiently to deliver their speeches. On the dais, beside a row of their intelligence officers, Taha Ramadan and Izzet Douri, the Iraqi vice-presidents, were seated. Before them were more than 100 Islamic terrorists, each holding a leaflet listing the groups represented. It read like a CIA document. Members of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda group sat side by side with those from Gamaa al Islamiya from Egypt, Jund Al Islam, an Iraqi-based terror group consisting mainly of Afghan Arabs, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad from the West Bank and Gaza. Less notable Islamic terror groups from Bangladesh, Sudan, the Philippines and Somalia were also there. Names of individuals were not given for security reasons. Many had journeyed for several days to be present. A twice-weekly ferry from the United Arab Emirates to the Iraqi port of Basra had brought some, while others had travelled by land through Syria and Jordan. All carried fake identities. For the first time in the conference's five-year history, its convenor, Saddam Hussein, had decided to invite only extremist elements. The former Algerian president and conference regular, Ben Bella, who is regarded as a moderate in Iraqi circles, was not invited. Saddam, still furious at British and American attempts to impose new sanctions on Iraq, used the August 19 meeting as an opportunity to find terrorists willing to exercise their lethal skills to foment unrest from the West Bank to Asia. He needed Muslims to unite in a common cause to protest against the regime's treatment by the West. To this end, as the ruckus emanated from the main convention suite, Iraqi intelligence officers got down to the real business in the back rooms. Here, they were hard at work recruiting potential terrorists and pinpointing potential targets for attack. Since the conference, Western intelligence officers estimate that 6,000 volunteers have been recruited to Iraq's "cause". "What really counts," one officer says, "is not what happens during the conferences. It is what happens before and after and on the sidelines that matters." The revelation that Saddam convened a terrorist recruitment conference shortly before the attacks on Manhattan and the Pentagon heightens suspicions that the Iraqi dictator helped carry out the September 11 and anthrax attacks. It will no doubt be of interest to James Woolsey, the former CIA director who last week, in reference to Iraq and its possible links, said it was vital that America should "look under that rock". It also lends support to the belief of Richard Spertzel, a former United Nations weapons inspector, that the anthrax attacks were not homegrown. "It has to be someone with an existing biological programme," he told The Telegraph last night. "These are Russia, Syria, Iran and Libya. Top of my list, though, is Iraq. There are known associations with intelligence personnel and al-Qaeda. Also they have the capability, and the know-how." Mr Spertzel added that he and other inspectors, who were expelled from Iraq in 1998, were able only to destroy items specifically identified with Iraq's past programme. He said: "Some of the items that we had to exclude, we subsequently found had anthrax made in them. Furthermore, from October 1996 we had virtually no support from the UN security council. Nothing has been accomplished since then, except playing footsie with the Iraqis." Reports yesterday appeared to back up Mr Spertzel's hunch, when American media revealed that the letter sent to Tom Daschle, the Senate Majority leader, contained traces of betonite. If it is confirmed that the potent additive has only ever been used by Iraq, as is believed, Timothy Trevan, another UN weapons inspector, said: "It means to me that Iraq becomes the prime suspect as the source of the anthrax used in these letters." What needs no verification is that Saddam still has biological weapons capability. Only this month he took the precaution of moving much of his biological weapons industry to underground bunkers in the north and west of the country, concealed and protected from any allied air strikes. Neither is it a secret that Saddam has a long track record of hosting and recruiting terrorists. The 6,000 men who volunteered two months ago are now, according to intelligence officials, undergoing rigorous training in the arts of explosives and guerrilla warfare. It is understood that some of the men recruited in August are attending two of Iraq's most sophisticated camps at al Safar and al Habaniya, both beside expansive lakes. A Western intelligence official said: "These are not just places where you learn how to use a bomb or suchlike. Here, they are even taught underwater swimming, communications and how to use sophisticated eavesdropping equipment." Such "schools" for budding terrorists have a long pedigree, stretching back to the 1970s, when Iraq became the refuge of Carlos the Jackal. At that time, it was also home to the more extreme Palestinian terror groups, such as Abu Nidal and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which has now claimed responsibility for the October 17 assassination of Rehavam Ze'evi, the Israeli tourism minister. It was also in the early 1970s that Saddam began to have expansionist dreams of extending Iraq's borders. In 1973, he formed the Al Hassan Ibn Al Haithem Institute, which was responsible for two programmes: nuclear energy and the manufacture of toxins and poison gases. It was the forerunner to the Military Industrialisation organisation which now develops weapons of mass destruction. It was built with funds gained from the rise in oil prices after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. If that war provided the necessary finance, it was the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s that provided the trigger for the birth of Islamic terror. Saddam needed support to fight Iran and he needed a new tactic. In the previous decade, terror groups had been mainly Arab. In order to compete with the Islamisation of Iran after the 1979 revolution, Saddam needed to follow suit. The first of the many Islamic terrorist groups to move to Iraq in the 1980s was the Mujahideen Helk, which was dismayed by events in Iran and vowed to fight. Not content with recruiting from only Middle Eastern organisations, Saddam also explored Muslim Africa for possibilities. He began to provide extensive funding for groups in Somalia, Zanzibar and Sudan, as well as for those nearer home in Syria. Much of the finance, again, came from his oil revenues. Two decades on, American newspaper reports last week quoted an Iraqi former intelligence officer, now in Turkey, recounting details of "Islamicists" training in a suburb of Baghdad in the arts of hijacking and assassination last year. Which brings us back to the August conference in Baghdad, where Saddam's 20 years' experience in training and recruiting terrorists was much in evidence: for him, they have become an art form. While Mr Woolsey studies the implications of this summer's three-day event, the Bush administration is closely examining Saddam's deadly game of espionage, notably the dispatching of his senior intelligence officials to meet abroad with members of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network. Farouk Hijazi, a senior intelligence officer and Iraq's ambassador to Turkey, is known to have met bin Laden in 1998 in Afghanistan. Before his appointment as ambassador, Hijazi was given the role of establishing links with Islamic movements. "His appointment to Turkey," said one Western diplomat, "simply gave him more room to operate." Further suspicions were raised this week when Czech officials confirmed that Mohammed Atta, believed to be the hijacker flying the first plane to hit the World Trade Centre, met Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim al Ani, an Iraqi intelligence officer posing as an Iraqi diplomat, in Prague, who was later expelled for "engaging in activities beyond his diplomatic duties". Now The Telegraph can reveal that similar meetings have taken place since September 11. Just one week after the attacks, Mohammed Nouri, a colonel in Iraqi intelligence, travelled to Bangkok. "He went in a great rush," says a Western intelligence officer. "We know he met an al-Qaeda representative, though we are not sure what else he has been up to." Four days later, on September 24, Brigadier Abdul Khader Majid took three senior intelligence officers with him to Bangladesh, a week before the country's general elections. "We know for certain that Iraq was instrumental in some of the worst violence ahead of the elections there," says the intelligence officer. "That includes paying recruits to organise anti-Western riots, to flare up Islamic tensions. They know that the more the Muslim world protests against the Western coalition's attacks on Afghanistan, the less likely the coalition will find support to risk attacking Iraq. It would only flare Muslim tensions even more." Similar street riots took place at the same time in Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur. A week after Majid's successful mission, Lt Col Qassim made one of the Baghdad regime's most important trips since September 11. He took four junior intelligence officers to Pakistan on October 5, where they, too, met members of al-Qaeda. "The visit was an essential intelligence-sharing mission," the Western intelligence officer said. There is no doubt that Iraq has been involved in terrorism in the past. President Bush must now decide whether the evidence of Iraqi terrorist links in recent weeks still passes merely as circumstantial. As Mr Woolsey warned last week: "This war began with the direct and immediate murder of thousands of Americans, and, if we find that we have a reasonable target along with Osama bin Laden in the government of Iraq, we must wage this war quickly. We must wage it powerfully. We must wage it cleverly. And we must wage it ruthlessly." © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited2001. ***************************************************************** 31 Russian experts discuss Bin-Ladin's possible nuclear plot BBC Monitoring Service - United Kingdom; Oct 28, 2001 Text of report by Russian Centre TV on 27 October [Presenter Aleksey Pushkov] As you see, Bin-Ladin could obtain a nuclear charge from many sources [reference to the previous item about nuclear potential of Pakistan, India, Iran and Israel]. However, the Western press is given to think that, in case Bin-Ladin really possesses nuclear weapons, he got them from Russia rather than from Islamic countries. See Aleksey Dubnov video report for details. [Correspondent] While, according to some information, the Pentagon does not rule out precise nuclear strikes on Bin-Ladin's bases, press articles began to appear more and more often saying that the Terrorist Number One already has a nuclear device, at least a primitive one. US intelligence says that Bin-Ladin and his people have been hunting for a nuclear bomb for a long time. They said more than once that the search for weapons of mass destruction was their duty. Moreover, experts say that it is not so difficult to produce a home-made nuclear device. [Vladimir Belous, captioned as leading research worker of the Institute of International Economy and International Relations under the Russian Academy of Sciences and Doctor of Military Sciences] I would give just one simple example. In 1975 a university student in America assembled a nuclear device using only information from open sources. Experts examined it and said that, if the device was staffed with a fissile material, it could explode and cause serious damage. Now foreign press is trying to prove that, if Al-Quidah really possesses a nuclear device, it must be of Soviet origin. In particular, `The Times' has said that Bin-Ladin's accomplices are trying to buy a portable nuclear device, namely a so-called nuclear rucksack allegedly created by Soviet specialists in the 1970s. It weighs just 30 kg and consists of silver-zinc accumulators, a nuclear charge and a starting source of neutrons. [Well-known Russian military commander and politician, now Krasnoyarsk Territory governor] Aleksandr Lebed was the first to say that such rucksacks could exist. In 1997, being a secretary of the [Russian] Security Council, he claimed that dozens or even hundreds of portable A-bombs had gone missing in early 1990s. The newspaper [`The Times'] said that Gen Lebed had even named the weapon systems: RA-115 and RA-115-01. Meanwhile, all this was refuted long ago not only by Russian but also by foreign experts. Even [well-known Russian environmentalist] academician [Aleksey] Yablokov, who once supported Lebed, later acknowledged that this was impossible. Another source of nuclear terrorism might be illegal purchase of radioactive materials. `The Times' says that the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna confirmed hundreds of cases of nuclear smuggling after the collapse of the USSR and draws a conclusion that, if a nuclear black market really existed in the Soviet Union and in Russia, than radioactive materials could have been bought by Bin-Ladin. However, such market could exist in Iran, Iraq or some other country. There are even more audacious theories. The Arab magazine Al-Watan joins in the hysteria. It went as far that said that Bin-Ladin had struck a big deal in the beginning of 1999. The Chechen mafia allegedly obtained for him no less than 20 nuclear warheads for 30m dollars and two tonnes of opium. However, it appears that foreign media that accuse us are guided by a simple assumption: if somebody has something and somebody else wants this, that second one always gets what he wants. Experts are laughing at this, because in early 1990s all [Russian] tactical nuclear weapons were evacuated deep inside Russia and placed to storage dumps managed by the Russian Defence Ministry. [Belous] When this procedure was over, it was clearly and officially stated that no nuclear charges had been stolen, lost anywhere or sold, as some politicians claimed. If this had happened, today we would be well aware of this. It could not lay somewhere for such a long time not being used. In this case it would lose its combat capabilities. It must be stored under certain strictly determined conditions. [Correspondent] Meanwhile, no complex nuclear device is necessary to disseminate panic, fear and chaos. [Ivan Safranchuk, captioned as head of the Russian bureau of the centre for military information, interviewed in his office] An explosion of some usual explosive substance mixed with radioactive materials would be enough. There would be no chain reaction. There would be no A-bomb or H-bomb, just a conventional bomb in which some radioactive materials are used, but for the public opinion, for the population this would be a nuclear explosion. [Pavel Felgengauer, captioned as independent military expert] If this had happened in Manhattan, a certain part of Manhattan would become a deserted area for 1,000 years, like the town of Pripyat in the Chernobyl zone [in Ukraine]. We tried to clean up Pripyat, but it is practically impossible to clean up a modern city from radioactive dust. It is impossible to find all grains of sand hidden somewhere. It would be impossible to live there. [Correspondent] Finally, experts say that another hijacked plane may be targeted at a nuclear facility. In this case the consequences would be even more tragic than those of the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York. [broadcast at 1613 gmt; video shows archive footage of Islamic fighters; the interior of physics labs; experts commenting] Source: Centre TV, Moscow, in Russian 1600 gmt 27 Oct 01 /BBC Monitoring/ © BBC. World Reporter All Material Subject to ***************************************************************** 32 Afghan DPs' influx worries Altaf - DAWN - National; 29 October, 2001 Bureau Report THATTA, Oct 28: Muttahida Qaumi Movement chief Altaf Hussain has warned if the establishment continued its step- motherly treatment towards smaller provinces, the possibility could not be ruled out that the geography of Sindh province could change on the future global map. He was talking to a gathering of intellectuals, writers and people from different walks of life, on phone here at Thatta press club on Sunday. MQM chief said that he did not feel shy in apologising to Sindhi brothers and added that Sindhis should identify their common enemy. He said that he was worried about the rapid influx of Afghan refugees who were under a planning being diverted towards the Sindh to convert the old and new Sindhis into minority, so they both now should join their hands in getting rid of the crisis. He was surprised that the fundamentalists were seen ruling the streets by brandishing their guns in the name of protest against USA but none of them had so far been implicated in any case but JSQM chief Basheer Khan Qureshi had been implicated in number of fictitious cases for raising his voice for the rights of his fatherland. He said that under a conspiracy pro-Taliban protest procession were being taken out in Sindh and Balochistan and asked why the religious forces were not staging such a massive street power against the USA in the provincial headquarter of Punjab at Lahore. Responding to the participants' questions he said he was willing to come back to his country but feared to be murdered before landing at Karachi airport. © The DAWN Group of Newspapers, 2001 ***************************************************************** 33 Nuclear threat to Tier 'remote' Pressconnects.com | 10/28/01 TopStories October 28, 2001 Plans in place to respond to possible attack The TRIGA nuclear reactor at Cornell University glows from Cerenkov radiation. The phenomenon is caused when charged particles passing through water reach speeds faster than the speed of light. The core is at the bottom of a 25-foot deep, 21,000-gallon pool of purified water. BILL WARREN / Gannett News Service Kenan Unlu, right, director of the Ward Center for Nuclear Studies at Cornell University, sits by the nuclear reactor with postdoctoral research associate Purushottam Dokhale. BILL WARREN / Gannett News Service BY DOM YANCHUNAS Press &Sun-Bulletin BINGHAMTON -- While officials tighten security to prevent terrorism on airplanes and in government buildings and mail rooms, they have also been working to protect a more volatile target: nuclear plants. Although the Southern Tier has no nuclear facilities, emergency officials say the region still could feel the effects of an atomic incident. There are eight nuclear plants within about a 150-mile radius of Binghamton. Broome County Emergency Services Director Michael F. Aswad said the county has a plan to protect residents and monitor the environment if an unforeseen disaster causes radiation to escape from a nuclear facility and reach the Binghamton area. "Conceivably, we could be in the path of that -- depending on the atmospheric conditions and wind velocity and wind direction and the size of the plume," Aswad said. But, he calls a terrorist attack on a nuclear power plant a "far-out chance" and "highly unlikely." The nearest radioactive facility to Broome County is the Ward Center for Nuclear Sciences, a research laboratory with a small 500-kilowatt reactor at Cornell University in Ithaca, about 40 miles from Binghamton. The closest nuclear power plant is the PPL Susquehanna facility near Berwick, Pa. -- about 60 miles south. Federal and state officials have said a terrorist attack at a nuclear facility is extremely unlikely because it would be almost impossible to penetrate the layers of concrete and steel that surround radioactive fuel. Officially, though, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said the threat from something like a jetliner collision has not been tested and is unknown. Donald L. Maurer, a spokesman for the New York State Emergency Management Office, said the notion that someone could penetrate a nuclear plant is almost crazy. "We realize that these are landmarks that are well-defined, and we're taking precautions to protect them," Maurer said. "You might be able to blow up an administrative building, but nuclear fuel rods are wrapped in metal and they are inside a humongously thick metal vessel" surrounded by more layers of metal and brick buildings. "To come up with a scenario that's going to crack these things is really bordering on hallucination," he said. U.S. and Canadian officials instructed nuclear power plants to increase security after Sept. 11 by controlling access to entrances, screening workers and adding safeguards against theft of uranium and "vehicle penetration" by suicide bombers. National Guard troops are stationed at New York nuclear plants under orders from Gov. George E. Pataki. Radiation from a nuclear accident can cause mass casualties, contaminate soil and water, and cause organ failure, infections and cancer in those who initially survive. The Cambridge, Mass.-based Union of Concerned Scientists said operators of nuclear plants should protect the facilities against aircraft, boat and truck attacks and secure plant emergency systems so they can't be disabled by an inside saboteur. Kenan Unlu, director of Cornell's Ward Center, said federal regulators distributed an order to tighten security just five or 10 minutes after the second hijacked plane struck the World Trade Center. "We increased surveillance," Unlu said. "We're controlling access to the building, and we have to watch the doors and who is coming and going. We don't see any problems." The possibility of an accident affecting the Southern Tier is not inconceivable. Aswad said Broome County was put on alert to monitor its air for radiation during the 1979 Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania. Nuclear disaster plans provide for the most intense evacuations within 10 miles of a plant, Maurer said. In a zone 10 to 50 miles from a plant, health and agriculture officials monitor the air, water, soil and farm products such as fruit and milk. Evacuations could be ordered if the plume poses enough of a threat, Maurer said. Depending on conditions, those measures could be implemented beyond the 50-mile radius. Aswad said emergency officials can alert residents to stay indoors, close windows and shut off air conditioners until the plume passes. Or buses could be summoned to evacuate residents if their area is under radiation threat. Aswad said people would be moved to different emergency shelters depending on where the radioactivity is and isn't. Generally, they would escape to an area away from the path along which the wind would carry the radiation. Ironically, the terrorist attacks could prolong the life of the reactor at Cornell's Ward Center. University trustees voted in May to close the reactor, though it will remain open at least until June 2002 while research is being phased out, Unlu said. Defenders of having a nuclear research facility on the campus continue their battle to keep the reactor, and post-Sept. 11 federal rules have jeopardized the planned shutdown date. The Ward reactor has been open since 1962, but Cornell ended its nuclear science and engineering degree program in 1995. © 2001 Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin ***************************************************************** 34 Security official Ridge to tour test site Saturday, October 27, 2001 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal DONREY WASHINGTON BUREAU WASHINGTON -- Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge has accepted an invitation to tour the Nevada Test Site, which Sen. Harry Reid continues to promote as a possible major counterterrorism training center. The Nevada Democrat said Ridge expressed interest in visiting the test site in an unrelated White House meeting Thursday attended by top congressional and executive branch officials. "He talked about doing it soon," Reid said Friday. "I don't know when." At a White House ceremony Friday where President Bush signed into law an anti-terrorism bill, Reid said he pushed his plan to CIA Director George Tenet. The Nevada senator has proposed the government spend about $60 million to develop a National Center for Combatting Terrorism at the test site. In letters to President Bush and decision-makers within the administration, Reid has said the 1,375-square-mile Nevada range, one of the largest restricted access areas in the country, could be used to train police, fire and rescue workers on responding to chemical, biological and nuclear attacks. Some training programs already are operated at the test site, including classified sessions for government responders to possible nuclear terrorism. Congress has appropriated $7 million and $10 million annually over the past two years for test site counterterrorism training, not including funding from "black book" or secret accounts. Reid said an Energy Department spending bill that Congress is close to finishing will contain a substantial increase for counterterrorism programs at the test site. Reid, who has been negotiating the legislation as chairman of the energy and water subcommittee, declined to say how much the bill will contain. Meetings also are ongoing elsewhere within the government. On Friday, officials from the Energy Department's Nevada Operations Office and Bechtel Nevada, the test site's managing contractor, were scheduled to discuss the proposal, but details of the session were not immediately available. This story is located at: http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/2001/Oct-27-Sat-2001/news/17320025.html ***************************************************************** 35 Experts say Nevada not high on list of terrorist targets RGJ.com - By Frank X. Mullen Jr. Reno Gazette-Journal Saturday October 27th, 2001 While the nation wonders where terrorists will strike next, local terrorism experts and emergency management officials say Nevada isn’t a target-rich environment for more mayhem. “I don’t think Nevada is real high on the terrorists’ hit parade,” said Leonard Weinberg, professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a nationally recognized terrorism expert. “We have some obvious potential targets, such as Hoover Dam and Las Vegas, so it can’t be ruled out, but I wouldn’t think they would be high on a list.” But that doesn’t mean our guard is down, state and local officials said. They said Nevada agencies — including governments in Washoe County, Carson City and Douglas County — have been planning responses to terrorism for the last two years. They said the preparation has only accelerated since the Sept. 11 attacks. “I think we are as prepared as we can be,” said Frank Siracusa, emergency management chief with the state Emergency Operations Center in Carson City. “We’ve done a lot of planning in the last two years and we’re one of the few states that have completed a risks-and-vulnerability study and sent it to the Department of Justice and the Office of Homeland Security.” He said the plan includes responses to attacks by weapons of mass destruction, including bombs and bioterrorism. Local responders would be the first line of defense, he said, and the state agencies would provide support. Although Nevada has many potential targets, such as the Nevada Test Site, military bases like Fallon Naval Air Station, and munitions storage areas such as Hawthorne Depot, those high-profile bases aren’t very attractive to terrorists, Weinberg said. “They tend to avoid places where people can shoot back at them,” he said. * * * * * South a bigger target If there is an attack in Nevada, Clark County would be a likely target, Weinberg said. In addition, some of the terrorists who hijacked the planes in the Sept. 11 attacks met in Las Vegas shortly before their suicide mission. “What the significance of the terrorists’ meeting there is, I don’t know,” he said. “I hope they weren’t casing the joint. “But just looking at the terrorists’ philosophy, they tend to blame the entertainment industry for what they see as low morals (in America). Entertainment is Las Vegas.” Vegas in the crosshairs isn’t a new idea. Two years ago, the city was among 110 potential terrorism targets listed in a federal report. While the city is prepared for a hotel fire or a plane crash, more needs to be done to protect the area from a terrorist attack, Clark County officials told the Associated Press a week after Sept. 11. Members of the Clark County Local Emergency Planning Committee said doctors need training in biological and chemical warfare, emergency communications must be protected from computer hackers and vaccinations must be immediately accessible after a biological attack. That planning and preparation is ongoing, they said. Siracusa said local agencies all over the state, including Clark County, have been planning and training to be ready for anything. “Now it’s going on at an accelerated rate,” he said. “Can we ever be totally ready? No one can be. But we’re working together and avoiding turf battles and we’ve been dealing with these issues.” * * * * * Hoover Dam is solid Experts said the Hoover Dam ranked among the top five targets in the West for Cold War-style long-range missile attacks, but they said complete structural failure probably wouldn’t follow a hit by an airliner or the impact of a truck bomb. Unlike hollow high-rise buildings constructed of steel and concrete such as the World Trade Center, the Hoover Dam is made of solid layers of concrete. It is 726 feet tall, 45 feet wide across the top, 660 feet wide at the bottom and weighs 6.6 million tons. Even so, shortly after Sept. 11, the concrete structure was closed to all traffic and visitors. Passenger traffic on U.S. Highway 93 across the dam has resumed, but commercial vehicles and trucks with trailers continue to be detoured. “Have things changed? Yes, definitely. We are going to have to define things anew from this point forward,” Bob Andrews, Clark County Emergency Management director, told the Associated Press. “The emergency management system needs to focus more on our communities and our residents in ways we never considered before.” Mike Myers, coordinator of the federally funded Metropolitan Medical Response System in Clark County, told the Las Vegas Review Journal shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks that the regional medical program is designed to handle a chemical, biological or nuclear attack producing as many as 10,000 victims. Whether a chemical release on the Strip, an airplane into a building, a biological attack, or a bomb in downtown, “the Metropolitan Medical Response System is ready to handle it,” he said. © Reno Gazette-Journal ***************************************************************** 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: *****************************************************************