***************************************************************** 02/03/02 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 10.29 ***************************************************************** RADBULL IS PRODUCED BY THE ABALONE ALLIANCE CLEARINGHOUSE ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR POLICY 1 US: Object Lesson in Nuclear Threat Waits in a Forest 2 N-detectors for customs 3 US: Walker's World: What Bush really meant 4 US: Nuke plants could lose federal backup insurance 5 UK: AEA moves closer in disposal programme 6 UK: More losses likely at British Energy 7 US: Push on for more public power 8 Waste hitch threatens Trident refit 9 US: Senator to set hearing on nuclear plants 10 US: Hearing on nuclear fuel OK'd 11 US: Terrorists threat risks nuclear plant insurance 12 US: FBI Issues Website Warning 13 Japan: Power industry considers joining forces to reduce costs 14 US: Pumping up nuclear security 15 Another regional headache for US? Russian n-reactor set for Myanmar NUCLEAR REACTORS 16 US: Nuclear power plants set reliability, output records in 2001, NE 17 US: Nuclear plants alerted to terrorist threat 18 Chernobyl: A doctor's personal reinvention 19 US: People close to a reactor feel safe 20 US: Maine Yankee cites personnel issues in firing contractor 21 US: San Onofre Prepared, Despite Threats 22 US: Nebraska nuclear plants at high security 23 US: Towns to hold nonbinding vote on Vermont Yankee's future NUCLEAR SAFETY 24 US: Assessing Threat At Nuclear Plants 25 US: Attack on nuclear plant would be catastrophic 26 US: State may take feds’ free nuke pills 27 US: Thompson: Millions of Doses for Radioactive Fallout 28 PI: Across the Nation# Toxics spread in South feared 29 AU: Schools fail safety tests 30 US: Radiation exposure estimates reevaluated 31 US: Pataki focuses on N-power plant security 32 Russia: Nuclear experts on risky Georgian mission 33 US: Safeguard America's Nuclear Plants, Senators Urge 34 US: Call for fed nuke security renewed 35 US: Editorials: Nuke Scare Mushrooms 36 US: Anti-Radiation Pills Sell Out Near Indian Point 37 US: Pataki calls for federal review of emergency planning at nuke si 38 US: Town Reacts To Nuclear Threat NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE 39 Japan: Water leaks from nuclear-waste reprocessing plant pool - 40 Dubai: Symposium on dangers of nuclear waste 41 UK: Health fears over Dounreay plan to ship nuclear waste to England 42 UK: Revealed: radiation transport accidents doubled in past 10 years 43 US: Court Approves Nuclear-Waste Storage Site in New London, Conn., 44 US: Nuclear Waste, R.I.P 45 US: DOE proposal to mix tailings with other mining wastes 46 Waiting For Nukes 47 US: Letters: Nevada's Yucca... 48 US: Yucca Letters: Spent fuel, not 'waste' 49 US: Yucca Letters: Secure storage 50 Symposium on dangers of nuclear waste in UAE NUCLEAR WEAPONS 51 Scientists to explain why Kursk sank 52 US: Sen. Reid: Lab anti-terrorism contributions endless 53 Nuclear sub to go on display 54 US: Bush budget assigns $9.4 billion for war on terror 55 Powell Offers Reassurance to South Korea 56 US: U.S. Repeats Warnings on Terrorism 57 US: Bush Sees Big Rise in Military Budget for Next 5 Years 58 Japan, Russia Pledge Cooperation Over Antiterrorism 59 US: Documentary features Cold War codebreakers and atomic spies 60 AU: The atomic test cover-ups: a 'jackpot' must have a pay-out 61 AU: Veteran alleges N-tests cover-up US DEPT. OF ENERGY 62 Lab director: Use funds to fight war, not diseases 63 Los Alamos director defends lab security 64 Hanford helping Tri-Cities weather nationwide recession 65 DOE to seek $6.7 billion 66 Hanford to move radioactive barrels to safer location 67 Consortium to examine occupational, environmental health issues in a 68 DOE's project raises doubts OTHER NUCLEAR 69 NASA to Seek Nuclear-Powered Spaceflight Alternatives 70 IAEA Daily Press Review Date 2002-02-01 Number 17 ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** FULL NEWS STORIES ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** 1 Object Lesson in Nuclear Threat Waits in a Forest February 1, 2002 By AARON ZITNER, TIMES STAFF WRITER WASHINGTON -- As three woodcutters hiked in December through the back country of the former Soviet republic of Georgia, they were drawn to a pair of objects lying in a pool of melted snow. The men dragged the strangely warm items back to their camp to help ward off the frosty weather. At least, that is the story pieced together by the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, which says the devices are the highly radioactive remains of a former Soviet communications system. Now the agency is trying to send a team into the snowy woods to recover the items, which sickened the men and are thought to contain strontium-90. Bad weather foiled a recovery attempt last month. The agency expects to try again Sunday. Experts say strontium-90 cannot set off a nuclear explosion, but terrorists could attach it to conventional explosives to spread radioactivity. Smugglers in recent years have attempted to buy radioactive material from former Soviet installations on the black market. In fact, some experts say the Soviets placed hundreds of strontium-90 devices throughout their former republics, using them as batteries for radars or communications relay stations in remote areas. Clay Moltz, a Russia specialist at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, said the devices also were used to power coastal lighthouses. Material Is 'Very Dangerous Stuff' "I'd say there are hundreds, but not hundreds of hundreds," Moltz said. "It's something of a concern, and it's really irresponsible of the Russian and post-Soviet nuclear authorities not to have gathered them in. It's a hazard to the population and could be used by terrorists to spread panic." John Holdren, a physicist who leads Harvard University's Program on Science, Technology and Public Policy, said strontium-90 is "certainly very dangerous stuff." But he noted that industrial and medical equipment often contains material that is even more radioactive and also poses disposal problems. The woodcutters found the radioactive items on Dec. 2, said Melissa Fleming, a spokeswoman for the atomic energy agency. "They made the mistake of bringing them toward their campsite and using them as a type of heat source," Fleming said, "lying close to them and exposing themselves to very large doses of radiation." She said the men became sick a few hours later and went to a hospital. Doctors there sent them to a hospital in Tbilisi, the nation's capital. Soon afterward, Georgian officials asked for help from the international atomic agency, a United Nations organization devoted to safeguarding nuclear material. Fleming said the canisters, about 15 centimeters tall and 10 centimeters wide, were left lying exposed in a patch of remote woods about 400 kilometers northwest of Tbilisi, near the breakaway region of Abkhazia. Two agency workers, from Brazil and Britain, are training a local team to make another attempt to recover the canisters, possibly on Sunday, Fleming said. Among other things, the team has prepared a lead container to hold the dangerous material. News of the agency's work was first reported among Western media Thursday by the journal Science. Russia May Not Have Adequate Records The atomic agency believes the canisters contain strontium-90 because their description is similar to those of other radioactive canisters found in the region, Fleming said. Scott Parrish, a researcher with the Monterey Institute, said Georgian officials had asked for more cooperation from Russia in locating radioactive materials from the Soviet era. "I'm not sure the Russians kept good enough records to tell them everything," he said. Parrish said he had seen Russian press reports claiming that the devices found by the woodcutters had been used to power communications equipment as part of a series of hydroelectric projects. According to the reports, he said, the men had broken a concrete shell around the radioactive material, then melted a protective lead casing to make bullets for their hunting rifles. "I wouldn't want to downplay this too much," Parrish said, "but there are many cases around the world each year of missing or improper disposal of radioactive sources like this. Unless there's good evidence that some terrorist group is after these particular sources, I'm not sure I would attribute particular importance to any one incident." Improperly stored radioactive waste has proven to be a health hazard in many parts of the world. Times staff writer Greg Miller contributed to this report. Copyright 2002 Los Angeles Times ***************************************************************** 2 N-detectors for customs February 2, 2002 Military to be called if radiation is discovered By MARIA McCLINTOCK and STEPHANIE RUBEC -- Sun Media OTTAWA -- Some 600 customs officers are being outfitted with radiation detection equipment to protect them from exposure to nuclear attacks, Sun Media has learned. Customs union president Serge Charette said he was briefed about the new security measures yesterday by intelligence officers assigned to the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency. The department of national defence is lending the equipment to customs officers and training them to use it. In the event that an incident occurs, the military will be called in, Charette said. "Some of the intelligence that's been gathered as a result of the war in Afghanistan indicates that there's a possibility the terrorists might attempt to send a nuclear device using containers," said Charette. Starting next week, customs officers posted at the ports of Montreal, Halifax and Vancouver will be the first to receive the equipment. Customs officers at other seaports and airports will get the equipment in the next month. 'A NUKE IN A BOX' Last week, U.S. Customs commissioner Robert Bonner said he wants to put American customs agents in foreign ports, including Vancouver and Halifax, to guard against terrorists who might attempt to smuggle weapons of mass destruction in shipping containers -- "a nuke in a box" -- into Canada. U.S. Customs inspectors are already in Canada screening airline passengers headed for their country. The concept of putting U.S. border guards at Canadian border points was part of a "Smart Borders" deal signed by Deputy PM John Manley and U.S. Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge last month. That measure and a plan to fast-track commercial trucks through the Canada-U.S. border is a top priority when Manley meets with Ridge again this weekend in New York. Manley said he's had a tough time pushing the issue forward, but he's "optimistic." "I know it's a tough nut to crack," he said before leaving for New York yesterday. Manley said new advancements in technology such as electronically-sealed containers and hi-tech ID cards should quash criticisms of the plan. Both Ridge and Manley have pledged to work out 30 border security issues, including pre-screening commercial traffic, by summer. Copyright © 2002, Canoe, a division of Netgraphe Inc.All rights ***************************************************************** 3 Walker's World: What Bush really meant Zawya.com WASHINGTON, Feb 03, 2002 (United Press International via COMTEX) -- So far, President George W. Bush has avoided the dreaded Watergate question as the Washington wolves circle around the limping remnants of Enron. We have not heard the inquisitorial demand -- "What did the President know and when did he know it?" Instead, Washington and most of the other world capitals are asking what may come to be known as the Axis of Evil question -- "What did the President mean and when does he start bombing?" Bush's grouping of Iraq, Iran and North Korea into the "Axis of Evil" -- as states who would not be permitted by the United States to acquire weapons of mass destruction -- may have heartened his Congressional audience. It certainly inspired a lot of applause. But it deeply alarmed America's allies and enemies alike. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said he was sure Bush didn't mean it. French President Jacques Chirac said France did not see things quite that way. NATO secretary general George Robertson said if the President had any supportive evidence to show the NATO allies that linked any of those three states to the terror attacks of 9/11, then NATO would be eager to study it. Britain's Tony Blair said the American President was quite right -- but then Britain always does, at least in public. The last time any American president made this much global fuss with a single phrase that contained the word Evil was when Ronald Reagan spoke of the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire. Since Reagan was still seen as something of a cowboy, not yet housetrained by the elegant diplomats of the State Department, the phrase inspired great nervousness. The prospect of a pre-emptive nuclear strike deeply alarmed the Soviet leadership, and many allies. Since Reagan had also joked that "the bombing starts in 5 minutes" over a microphone that happened to be open, their nervousness can be understood. And yet within five years, Reagan was welcoming Mikhail Gorbachev in the White House, kissing babies in Red Square, and offering at the Reykjavik summit to draft a treaty that would scrap all nuclear weapons on both sides. Even before Gorbachev got into the Kremlin, and while the evil old empire's evil old leadership was still in place, Reagan welcomed Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko into the Oval Office to talk some turkey and prepare a summit. Reagan's Evil Empire was a rhetorical marker, rather than a policy statement about his intentions towards the Soviet Union. It was a phrase designed for his domestic audience, and for his own conservative and anti-Soviet constituency, while also putting the Soviets on notice that the old 1970s days of detente were over. It was a presidential speech that was not a presidential statement; rhetoric rather than reality. The question now is whether the Axis of Evil was anything more than a speechwriter's flourish, a bold assertion that would calm the hawks in the administration, and buy time for the White House to work out what it can and cannot, do about Iran, Iraq and North Korea. Since everything becomes an acronym in Washington, we might as well start calling them the INKs. Possibly Bush didn't really mean it. With 48 hours or his State of the Union message, (and with howls of outrage emanating from Japan and South Korea) Bush was talking of the possibility of dialogue with both Iran and North Korea. So perhaps the Axis shrinks to the familiar old squeaky wheel of Iraq, who don't even rate dialogue. It was always clear that the Bush Presidency Mark II was determined to complete the unfinished business in Baghdad of the Bush Presidency Mark I. Not only for Daddy Bush, but for veterans of the Gulf War like Dick Cheney and Colin Powell, the return match with Saddam Hussein is a deeply personal matter. And as Bush the son reminded British prime minister Tony Blair, he will never forget that Saddam Hussein tried to assassinate his father. What we heard in the 'Axis of Evil' speech was a bargaining chip. By appearing to threaten three targets, Bush can appear to make a reasonable compromise with his allies by conceding that he will settle for one. One can almost hear the negotiation in the Oval Office -- "If I let Iran off the hook, will you back me in going after Iraq?" (The French may need the sweetener of a guarantee that any future Iraqi regime will honor the deals France's Total-Elf-Fina oil group has signed with the Saddam Hussein regime.) This interpretation, that Bush is bidding for three targets but will settle for one, is one way to make sense of the otherwise strange inclusion of North Korea in the Axis of Evil. It makes a magnificent bargaining chip with Japan, who along with South Korea is the country most nervous of North Korea's potential for menace. It may even be possible to persuade China to abstain in any United Nations debate on Iraq, in return for dropping North Korea from the target list. Of course, it is entirely possible that all this is far too Machiavellian, and that Bush is a simple cowboy, who means what he says and is prepared to act upon it. That's what people used to think about Reagan. And how useful that turned out to be. By MARTIN WALKER, UPI Chief International Correspondent Copyright 2002 by United Press International. Copyright © 2002 Zawya.com Ltd. All rights reserved. Please read ***************************************************************** 4 Nuke plants could lose federal backup insurance Caller.com: Politics By RYAN ALESSI Behind every nuclear plant is a big insurance policy. For 45 years, the U.S. government has volunteered to be responsible for any damages totaling more than $9.5 billion in the event of a nuclear accident. No incident - not even the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island - has even approached that level. Now, the Senate is considering ending the federal insurance provision, which Congress first approved in 1957 in the Price-Anderson Act. With terrorist threats haunting U.S. nuclear power plants, the nuclear community fears that no company would consider building new nuclear electricity plants without the insurance cushion. Discontinuing Price-Anderson would not affect existing plants. But insurance companies and the industry would be responsible for all damages caused by new power plants. Price-Anderson, which Congress passed when the nuclear industry was still in its infancy, was intended to allay the fears of investors who thought nuclear power was risky. It also assured compensation to everyone whose property or health was affected by an accident. If a nuclear plant had an accident today - such as a terrorist attack that caused nuclear fuel to leak - the insurance companies for the plant are responsible for up to $200 million in damages. Beyond that, other nuclear plants back up each other up to $9.5 billion. That breaks down to at most $88 million each for the nation's 106 nuclear power reactors. If that's still not enough, Congress must find a way to pay the rest of the damages, which could mean taxpayer money. Some in Congress, however, think the provision is nothing more than an extra subsidy to an industry that is, by nature, dangerous. "I ask you, can you think of another industry that has enjoyed this kind of protection?" Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., asked William Kane of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission at a Jan. 23 Senate hearing. Reid, whose state is home to the proposed nuclear waste dump site at Yucca Mountain, says the nuclear industry has matured over the last 50 years and no longer needs the same types of coverage afforded by Price-Anderson. On the other side, many Republicans view the insurance as "fundamental to maintaining and expanding nuclear power," as Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, puts it. "If it's not broken, why fix it," adds Mitch Singer, spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group in Washington. "If it's worked and continued to work, there's no reason Congress should not act and re-enact the legislation." In Price-Anderson's 45 years, nuclear insurance companies have paid only $170 million in damages. Of that, $70 million was spent to cover legal costs and reimbursement of people displaced from their homes after the 1979 partial meltdown at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island plant. With the government again warning this week that nuclear power plants make for juicy terrorist targets, the industry faces a steeper fight. Last year, premiums for nuclear plants went up 30 percent, squelching hopes that cleaner nuclear safety records over the last few years would help lower insurance payments. "The events of Sept. 11," said John Quattrocchi, a senior vice president of the American Nuclear Insurers, "will make it much more difficult to achieve that goal." (Contact Ryan Alessi at AlessiR(at)shns.com or online at http://www.shns.com) ***************************************************************** 5 UK: AEA moves closer in disposal programme Scottish business news - updated throughout the day - Business a.m. by Philip Howard [feedback@businessam.co.uk] Last update: 09:33, Feb 01, 2002 SCIENCE and engineering group AEA Technology today showed it was moving closer to selling its engineering software and nuclear science businesses. The former state-run Atomic Energy Authority said it had received "a number of expressions of interest" for Hyprotech, the software business, and expects to select a short-list of bidders soon. Disposal of its nuclear science arm, based near Didcot in Oxfordshire, is at an advanced stage, it said, although any agreement will be subject to regulatory approval. AEA is overhauling its business to exit the nuclear industry and concentrate on its core rail and environment divisions. The group suffered a setback in October with the sale of Hyprotech, when post 11 September a potential buyer sought to revise original terms of the deal. AEA subsequently reopened talks with other parties to sell the business, which is based in Calgary, Canada and has an office in Didcot. Under its restructuring plans, AEA also plans to return surplus funds to shareholders and said today it intends to seek shareholder approval at its AGM in July for a rolling share buyback scheme. It also today boosted its environmental business with the acquisition of the outstanding interest in North American firm Kinectrics for £5.9m. For the last two and a half years, AEA has had a management contract with the company and a 5% stake in the firm. It is buying it from US electricity firm Ontario Power Generation. Copyright © Businessam.co.uk 2002 ***************************************************************** 6 UK: More losses likely at British Energy Guardian Unlimited Falling output counters nuclear generator's curb on costs Geoff Gibbs Saturday February 2, 2002 British Energy, the nuclear power generator, shocked the market yesterday with a warning that output from its loss-making UK plants will fall below expectations next year. The company, which has had to fall back on a strong performance from North American investments in order to cut its losses, said an increase in plant shutdowns during 2002-2003 will reduce UK output for the year to 67 terawatt hours from the 69twh that had been anticipated. The company's eight UK plants account for about 22% of the country's electricity production. The output warning, delivered at an investor conference, overshadowed forecasts of a reduction in the company's unit costs and gave a nasty jolt to the share price yesterday. The company said it expected to achieve a running rate unit cost "approaching" its target of 1.6p per kilowatt hour by the end of next year and to remain at about that figure the following year when output is expected to recover to 70twh. Predictions of lower unit costs failed to impress the market and BE shares dropped 4.46% to 241.25p just before the close as the City digested what, in effect, amounted to a profit warning. "It's not looking good all round for British Energy," said Bruce Bromley, utilities analyst at brokers Credit Lyonnais Securities. "This is going to extend the UK losses. We are already fairly bearish about the company so I don't think we are going to have to pull our numbers back." British Energy reported a £17m loss for the first half of this year in the face of a 10% fall in UK electricity prices. However, results were considerably better than the £56m loss seen a year earlier thanks to a strong first time contribution from the Bruce Power nuclear generating business in Canada and continued good results from BE's joint venture company in the US. The nuclear generator, on tenterhooks for the official results of the government's much leaked energy review, has meanwhile unveiled plans to spend £31m over the next two years on improvements to its UK plants. According to the environmental pressure group Greenpeace, the energy review leaves the door open for a wave of new nuclear power stations. Campaigners said this week that a leaked draft summary of the review did not rule out the building of nuclear plants. It claimed about a dozen could be developed with government help in the form of tax breaks and relaxed planning laws. [UP] Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002 ***************************************************************** 7 Push on for more public power This story was published Fri, Feb 1, 2002 By Chris Mulick Herald staff writer OLYMPIA -- Energy Northwest is back in the Legislature trying to overturn a 1982 initiative that was born of the consortium's failed attempt to build five nuclear power plants. Initiative 394, approved by a 58 percent margin, requires voter approval before a public utility or group of public utilities builds any plant larger than 250 megawatts. No one has ever put it to the test, so all new large-scale power plants being built in the Northwest are owned by for-profit companies. "If public power doesn't own its own generating facilities, the at-cost energy that is derived from the region will be minimized," said Jim Rowland, a lobbyist for the 16-member public power consortium. Energy Northwest, which operates the Columbia Generating Station north of Richland -- the only one of its nuclear projects to be finished -- has been the leading voice in calling for public utilities to build their own plants. That's partly because the organization wants to expand its role as a power plant operator. The utility also operates a small hydroelectric facility at Packwood and is running another project that generates electricity from landfill gas in Klickitat County. It also is building a wind farm south of the Tri-Cities, a solar power project on the nuclear site and is involved in testing new technologies. With the recent power crunch having subsided, the industry is beginning to analyze ways to prepare for the next time power is in short supply. Energy Northwest believes public utilities should do their part to head it off by building their own plants. But in recent history, utilities have been more comfortable signing long-term power sales contracts with privately owned generating stations. The Benton and Franklin public utility districts, for example, are contracting to buy power from Frederickson Power's plant near Tacoma. Since utilities pay the companies a profit margin in return for taking financial risks in building new facilities, the megawatts generated aren't "power at cost," which public utilities have prided themselves in providing. Energy Northwest still is smarting after being snubbed by public power when the consortium sought partners to build a generating station at its Satsop site west of Olympia. Duke Energy North America, a privately owned independent power producer, stepped up and the 630-megawatt project is expected to be finished in 14 to 16 months. Duke is free to sell the power wherever it wants to the highest bidder. "Public power could have very well owned this facility and sold (its power) for at least cost," Rowland said. The problem, in part, would have been the initiative. Backers of House Bill 1221 and Senate Bill 5292, which would remove the public vote requirement on all projects except nuclear plants, say it's too difficult to get contractors lined up and financing in place when a deal is contingent on a vote. The proposal actually has passed on three different occasions in the Senate, only to get hung up in the House. Some lawmakers are squeamish about overturning an initiative. Back to oppose the bill is Seattle's Steve Zemke, who led the initiative campaign two decades ago. In testimony this week, he compared the former Washington Public Power Supply System to Enron Corp., the once-mighty energy trader that has plunged into bankruptcy. "I hope you would be very wary of anything Energy Northwest brings to you," Zemke told the House Technology, Telecommunications and Energy Committee. "Do you want to trust these guys with what they're saying?" He also criticized public power for never testing the initiative by putting a power project to a vote. "Energy Northwest is not your father's WPPSS," retorted Stu Trefry, a lobbyist for the Washington Public Utility District Association. "It is an entirely different organization." "After 20 years, it's time to take a look at it," Richland Rep. Jerome Delvin, prime sponsor of the House bill, said of the initiative. "Some people want to live in the past. It's time to give some leeway to public utilities so they can do some projects." Copyright 2002 Tri-City Herald. All rights reserved. This ***************************************************************** 8 Waste hitch threatens Trident refit BBC News | ENGLAND | Friday, 1 February, 2002, [HMS Vanguard launch] HMS Vanguard is en route to dry dock at Devonport The European Commission (EC) has questioned the legality of increasing radioactive discharges from Devonport naval dockyard in Plymouth. The challenge could delay the yard's first Trident submarine refit, due to begin within days. It is also understood the UK government has yet to approve a decision to allow a 500% increase in radioactive tritium into the River Tamar - the boundary between Devon and Cornwall. The tritium builds up in the nuclear reactors of submarines and is purged during overhauls. [Greenpeace and Vanguard] Greenpeace confronted HMS Vanguard off Florida But the Trident-armed Vanguard submarines build up far more tritium than the Trafalgar-class vessels that have been refitted at Plymouth. The Environment Agency agreed to allow the dockyard operating company, DML, to increase emissions, but the final approval rests with the UK government. The agency said the amount of radiation involved was lower than existed naturally in the area, and was well within national limits. As part of the consent, DML was ordered to reduce all radioactive emissions by cutting back on the amount of cobalt discharged. But the pressure group Campaign Against Nuclear Storage And Radiation, representing people living on both sides of the Tamar, said the river was being poisoned. Legal doubt Green Party MEPs have raised objections with the EC. The EC has written to the UK government to ensure the consent complied with European legislation. [Building Trident sub] Trident submarines were built at Devonport It has received no response but is continuing to investigate. The Environment Agency said normal rules did not apply because the refits were a military operation. A large police operation is planned for the arrival of the port's first Trident-armed Vanguard class submarine. HMS Vanguard was expected from Sunday onwards. A protest by about 500 anti-nuclear and environmental campaigners will begin at Devonport Park at noon on Sunday. Shore guard Police leave has been cancelled, with between 200 and 300 officers assigned to line the shore to prevent anyone entering the water to reach the 150-feet submarine. Police at Faslane, where the submarines are based, have given advice about protests, and the Special Branch has been consulted about the risk of terrorism. [Devonport Dockyard ] Campaigners oppose tritium emissions at Devonport HMS Vanguard will not be carrying its 16 Trident missiles. Neighbouring police forces have been alerted so more resources can be brought in if needed. Chief Superintendent Steve Pearce said: "This is a major operation for Devon and Cornwall Constabulary. "Our role is to enable life to go on and ensure the safety of the general public and the protesters we anticipate coming here." Devonport beat Scotland's Rosyth dockyard to the £5bn refit contract in 1993, but is more than a year behind schedule and £180m over budget in preparing for the work. ***************************************************************** 9 Senator to set hearing on nuclear plants Saturday, February 02, 2002 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal Reid focuses on safety By STEVE TETREAULT STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU WASHINGTON -- Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Friday he plans to convene a classified Senate hearing on nuclear plant safety following persistent reports that nuclear utilities might be targeted by terrorists. Reid, chairman of a nuclear regulation subcommittee, did not say when the hearing will be held or who would be called as witnesses, although it is likely that top officials from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would be among those asked to testify. Along with co-sponsors, Reid said he planned to act swiftly to move legislation to reinforce security at the nation's 103 nuclear reactors. He said the nation took notice when President Bush said during his State of the Union speech Tuesday that diagrams of U.S. nuclear plants had been found in Afghanistan. Also, the government last week alerted nuclear plants that terrorists might be planning an attack on a reactor, although officials have since questioned whether the information that prompted the alert was reliable. "If that's the case, our nation has been given a second chance to act in response to this terrifying information," Reid said. "We may not get a third chance." Reid's legislation, co-sponsored with Sens. James Jeffords, I-Vt., Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., and Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., calls for increased security at commercial nuclear plants and spent fuel storage facilities. Among other things, it establishes a federal security force for nuclear plants. That idea is opposed by the nuclear industry and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, both of which have defended the quality of private guards already in place. Reid commented as he was wrapping up a two-day tour of the government's nuclear laboratories in New Mexico. He said it was his first trip to the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Sandia National laboratories, where research on nuclear weapons culminates in experiments carried out at the Nevada Test Site. Reid said at Los Alamos he examined the $49 million Atlas pulsed power machine, a testing device being prepared to be moved to the test site. He also had a brief presentation on research being conducted there on nuclear waste transmutation, a process that some believe may relieve the need for a large geologic repository in Nevada. "We give billions of dollars to these labs," he said. "It was a real eye-opener to see what goes on. For example, I saw an engine for a car smaller than a hair on your head." Following briefings a the labs, Reid said he had "minimal concerns" about security of the nuclear weapons stockpile and nuclear materials utilized at the government facilities. A report last fall by a watchdog group, the Project on Government Oversight, detailed instances where security failed tests at Los Alamos and at the Rocky Flats nuclear reservation in Colorado. Security at the government labs "are being tested all the time to see if they meet standards," Reid said. "At times there are things that could be done better, but I have no concern." The oversight report also suggested that stockpiled nuclear weapons and nuclear materials should be consolidated at the Device Assembly Facility, a huge and largely unused hillside bunker at the Nevada Test Site. Reid said that would not be practical because nuclear materials are used in ongoing experiments at the labs. webmaster@lvrj.com Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal, 1997 - ***************************************************************** 10 Hearing on nuclear fuel OK'd Charlotte Observer | 02/01/2002 | BRUCE HENDERSON Staff Writer A federal panel has granted a formal hearing on a claim that using surplus bomb material to fuel the Charlotte area's two nuclear power plants would be unsafe. The ruling came as Duke Power tries to extend the licenses of the Catawba and McGuire nuclear plants by 20 years, allowing them to operate into the 2040s. An Atomic Safety and Licensing Board agreed to hear testimony on two claims, including the one involving the plants' fuel, that were raised by anti-nuclear groups. If the board agrees with them, both issues would have to be evaluated as part of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's decision on whether to extend the plant licenses. The board, a panel of three judges appointed by the NRC, had never before granted such a hearing in a license renewal case. No hearing date has been set. Duke has until Monday to appeal the ruling granting a hearing. "We're looking at our options," said spokesman Tom Shiel. The Nuclear Information and Resource Service contends that Duke's plan to fuel the plants in part with surplus weapons plutonium beginning in 2007, could accelerate aging of the plants' reactors and make a bad accident worse. Duke says use of the mixed-oxide fuel, which is part of the government's effort to dispose of surplus bomb material, would be safe but should be considered separately from license renewal. A licensing-board hearing also has been granted to opponents challenging construction of the facility that would produce the fuel, at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C. Duke has said it won't seek approval to use the fuel until 2003 or 2004. The board also will hear a second claim, raised by the Nuclear Information and Resource Service and the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, that Catawba and McGuire are vulnerable to loss of electric power. Without power, the plants wouldn't be able to pump water that cools the reactors. The groups say the unusual design of Catawba and McGuire make them less able to withstand such an accident. The NRC has said the plants can operate safely. The licensing board denied a hearing on other claims by the two groups, but asked that the nuclear commission consider a claim that potential terrorist threats to the plants should be scrutinized. Four of the nation's 77 nuclear power plants, including Duke's Oconee plant in northwestern South Carolina, already have been granted license extensions. Bruce Henderson: (704) 358-5051; bhenderson@charlotteobserver.com [bhenderson@charlotteobserver.com] . ***************************************************************** 11 Terrorists threat risks nuclear plant insurance Sunday, February 3, 2002 The Detroit News. Congress considers ending provision that makes U.S. responsible for damages By Ryan Alessi / Scripps Howard News Service WASHINGTON -- Behind every nuclear plant is a big insurance policy. For 45 years, the U.S. government has volunteered to be responsible for any damages totaling more than $9.5 billion in the event of a nuclear accident. No incident -- not even the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island -- has even approached that level. Now, the Senate is considering ending the federal insurance provision, which Congress first approved in 1957 in the Price-Anderson Act. With terrorist threats haunting U.S. nuclear power plants, the nuclear community fears that no company would consider building new nuclear electricity plants without the insurance cushion. Discontinuing Price-Anderson would not affect existing plants. But insurance companies and the industry would be responsible for all damages caused by new power plants. Price-Anderson, which Congress passed when the nuclear industry was still in its infancy, was intended to allay the fears of investors who thought nuclear power was risky. It also assured compensation to everyone whose property or health was affected by an accident. If a nuclear plant had an accident today -- such as a terrorist attack that caused nuclear fuel to leak -- the insurance companies for the plant are responsible for up to $200 million in damages. Beyond that, other nuclear plants back up each other up to $9.5 billion. That breaks down to at most $88 million each for the nation's 106 nuclear power reactors. If that's still not enough, Congress must find a way to pay the rest of the damages, which could mean taxpayer money. Some in Congress, however, think the provision is nothing more than an extra subsidy to an industry that is, by nature, dangerous. "I ask you, can you think of another industry that has enjoyed this kind of protection?" Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., asked William Kane of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission at a Jan. 23 Senate hearing. Reid, whose state is home to the proposed nuclear waste dump site at Yucca Mountain, says the nuclear industry has matured over the last 50 years and no longer needs the same types of coverage afforded by Price-Anderson. On the other side, many Republicans view the insurance as "fundamental to maintaining and expanding nuclear power," as Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, puts it. "If it's not broken, why fix it," adds Mitch Singer, spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group in Washington. "If it's worked and continued to work, there's no reason Congress should not act and re-enact the legislation." In Price-Anderson's 45 years, nuclear insurance companies have paid only $170 million in damages. Of that, $70 million was spent to cover legal costs and reimbursement of people displaced from their homes after the 1979 partial meltdown at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island plant. With the government again warning last week that nuclear power plants make for juicy terrorist targets, the industry faces a steeper fight. Last year, premiums for nuclear plants went up 30 percent, squelching hopes that cleaner nuclear safety records over the last few years would help lower insurance payments. "The events of Sept. 11," said John Quattrocchi, a senior vice-president of the American Nuclear Insurers, "will make it much more difficult to achieve that goal." ***************************************************************** 12 FBI Issues Website Warning Hartford Courant Saturday February 02 07:16 AM EST By MAURICE TIMOTHY REIDY The FBI (news [http://rd.yahoo.com/DailyNews/manual/*http://search.news.yahoo.com/search/news? p=%22FBI%22&c=&n=20&yn=c&c=news&cs=nw] - web sites [http://rd.yahoo.com/DailyNews/manual/*http://dir.yahoo.com/Government/U_S__Gove rnment/Executive_Branch/Departments_and_Agencies/Department_of_Justice__DOJ_/Fed eral_Bureau_of_Investigation__FBI_/] ) has issued a warning to towns and cities nationwide that terrorists might be using their websites to obtain information on potential targets, such as energy plants, reservoirs, dams and gas facilities. No specific threats have been made, but the FBI has advised municipal leaders to remain vigilant. "This is a general, non-specific alert," said Joseph Pulaski, the administrator for the state's emergency response commission. "It gives a heads-up that there is some information out there that might be observed by potential terrorists." The warning, which comes amid renewed threats to the nation's nuclear plants, is part of a national drive to remove potentially dangerous information from public websites. Full story at ctnow.com Copyright © 2002 Yahoo! Inc., and the ***************************************************************** 13 Japan: Power industry considers joining forces to reduce costs Asahi Shimbun [http://www.asahi.com/] JAPANESE The Asahi Shimbun Fierce competition resulting from liberalization of the electric power industry is driving electricity suppliers to seek reduced costs by joining forces on inspections and repairs to nuclear power plants, industry sources say. Insiders expect the move will save as much as 100 billion yen from the current costs of between 200 billion and 300 billion yen a year. One proposal under consideration involves setting up an independent center for inspections and repairs. The center would consist of experts loaned from electric power companies and heavy electric equipment makers. Such a move could lead to an industry-wide reorganization uniting nuclear power plants that are currently repaired and inspected by the companies that own them. Nine electric power companies-not including Okinawa Electric Power Co.-and the Japan Atomic Power Co. operate Japan's 52 commercial nuclear reactors, including the Onagawa Nuclear Power Plant Unit 3 in Miyagi Prefecture, which began operating Wednesday. Routine inspections are conducted at nuclear plants once every 13 months and last for about two months. Electric power companies in the Hokuriku, Hokkaido and Chugoku regions that own only one or two nuclear plants each have been seeking to reduce inspection costs. The proposal to set up a joint inspection center was included in an internal document compiled by a subcommittee of the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum Inc., an assembly of electric power companies and heavy electric equipment manufacturers. According to the proposal, inspection and repair personnel will be loaned from electric power companies and heavy electric equipment manufacturers. In addition, technicians trained to handle radioactive contamination and other specialized work will be registered at the center to meet the demands of companies who need them. Another proposal is to establish several centers offering specialized services depending on the characteristics of individual plants, such as whether they use pressurized water reactors or boiling water reactors. Yet another proposal calls for a team of experts from Tokyo Electric Power Co. and other larger companies to perform repairs on behalf of smaller companies. The proposals have been induced by cutthroat competition resulting from liberalization in the industry, which could make a major dent in the price competitiveness of nuclear power plants. Nuclear power plants in the United States, for instance, operate with about half the personnel at Japanese plants. While Japanese industry officials eventually hope to reduce costs, companies will face huge challenges along the way. One issue involves how to deal with the smaller local subcontractors that are currently employed in the inspection and repair process as part of a government initiative to support regions where nuclear power plants are located. Another crucial issue concerns how to ensure that nuclear power plants are safe. According to the document compiled by the subcommittee of the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum, a single plant in Japan is run by 1,000 employees during normal operations, and around 2,000 during the peak inspection period. But a single plant in the United States normally operates with only 500 employees and between 800 and 1,000 workers during inspections. The duration of inspections also differs, taking 65 to 76 days in Japan, compared with 19 to 48 days in the United States. In particular, the multi-layered subcontracting system used by Japanese power companies and heavy electric equipment manufacturers pushes up costs. According to the subcommittee's findings, about 40 percent of Japanese inspection personnel do indirect managerial jobs, rather than actual repairs and inspections. The companies plan to raise the proportion of direct repairs and inspections, industry sources said. But the vertical subcontracting system is designed, in part, to ensure employment of local companies situated in areas where many nuclear plants are located. If the plan for an independent inspection center goes through, it could hurt rural employment, since loaned experts from member companies would take away jobs from local workers. Another bid to lower costs could involve the electric power industry asking for government assistance to simplify inspections, the sources said. [Copyright Asahi Shimbun. ***************************************************************** 14 Pumping up nuclear security Augusta Georgia: Web posted Saturday, February 2, 2002 Scripps Howard News Service WASHINGTON - The director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory isn't worried that U.S. military commandos got hold of a garden cart full of weapons-grade uranium during a 1997 security drill. He said his forces would simply have chased them down a steep canyon wall. "I don't know where those guys were going to go," said John Browne, head of the New Mexico installation that gave birth to the atomic bomb 57 years ago. "We feel that the level of security is adequate and up to the challenges that we have been asked to defend," Browne said after an appearance this week at the National Press Club to promote increased federal spending for research into the physical sciences. Navy SEALs and other elite commando units have tested and successfully breached security procedures at several sensitive facilities containing nuclear materials, according to disclosures made last week by Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass. The congressman said mock terrorists used a garden cart to transport enough uranium from Los Alamos for "numerous" nuclear warheads. Browne conceded that the security drill occurred at the Los Alamos lab's TA18 facility that allows scientists to observe how radioactive materials approach critical mass. "It is the only such facility in the country that allows the study of criticality," he said. But the director took issue with any suggestion that the exercise demonstrated that terrorists could have successfully removed weapons-grade uranium from the area around the lab. "To say they got away with material in a garden cart, well, the fact was that the exercise had ended. We had armed men in HUMVEEs (small military transport vehicles) ready to pursue if that had been necessary." Had the commandos tried to escape, Browne said, they would have been chased by security units down a boxed canyon with steep rock walls. Markey also disclosed that Navy SEALs broke into the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons production plant near Denver and could have stolen enough material to produce several nuclear weapons. Sens. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., and Harry Reid, D-Nev., concluded a two-day tour of the Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories on Friday, where they observed antiterrorist preparations and research. Sandia is also in New Mexico. "I was very troubled to learn that blueprints of American nuclear plants had been found in Afghanistan," Reid said. "Clearly we must re-evaluate all of our nation's potential vulnerabilities. I hope we will get a firsthand look at what our nation is doing to keep al Qaeda's finger off the nuclear trigger." The senators were accompanied by John Gordon, undersecretary for nuclear security and administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration in the Department of Energy. "In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, it is more important than ever that key leaders in Washington are aware of all that our labs do, both for stockpile stewardship and in the areas of anti- and counterterrorism," Bingaman said. Domenici said the federal government remains committed to the mission of the New Mexican labs. "The Bush administration will request significant new funding in its budget for the labs, reflecting their importance and their new responsibilities that will evolve from the war on terrorism," he said. 1996 - 2002 The Augusta Chronicle. ***************************************************************** 15 Another regional headache for US? Russian n-reactor set for Myanmar [http://www.indian-express.com] Sunday, February 03, 2002 PALLAVA BAGLA NEW DELHI, FEBRUARY 2: INDIA may soon have to reckon with another nuclear neighbour. The military regime of Myanmar is all set to acquire its first nuclear reactor from Russia, the ground-breaking ceremony for this was scheduled last week. According to a report in the latest issue of the US journal Science, the reactor is being installed at a military complex in the central province of Magway, the region that has the richest uranium deposits in Myanmar. The 10-MW reactor is being imported ostensibly to produce medical isotopes and to study the feasibility of mass-producing nuclear energy in Myanmar. The report says the Myanmar government confirmed to the United Nations that more than 200 of its scientists and technicians have received nuclear training in Russia in recent months. An American Defence official has told Science that Washington is worried that the reactor could increase the threat of radioactive material falling into the hands of terrorists. A team from Vienna’s International Atomic Energy Agency visited Myanmar and said the country’s radiation-protection infrastructure was ‘‘not meeting the expected standards.’’ © 2001: Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd. All rights reserved ***************************************************************** 16 Nuclear power plants set reliability, output records in 2001, NEI tells Wall Street Electric Light & Power - NEW YORK, NY, Feb. 1, 2002 -- Invigorated by another year of record operating performance, the U.S. nuclear energy industry believes its prospects for future growth are as good or better than ever, industry executives told Wall Street financial analysts today. Although final performance figures are not yet available, preliminary estimates for 2001 show that the nation's 103 nuclear power plants set an electricity production record for the third straight year, increasing their output 1-2 percent to about 762 billion kilowatt-hours (kwh). The plants' average capacity factor--a measure of efficiency--reached a record high for the fourth straight year, climbing 1 percent to approximately 91 percent in 2001. "The outstanding performance achieved in recent years by the highly skilled men and women throughout our industry clearly is sustainable," Nuclear Energy Institute President and Chief Executive Officer Joe Colvin said at a briefing at the Drake Swissotel. "Given the record output and reliability, it is no surprise that the cost of electricity produced at nuclear power plants continues to drop. Average production costs in 2000 were 1.74 cents per kilowatt-hour, and total cost, including capital costs, was about 2.25 cents per kilowatt-hour--the envy of other electricity sources." Beyond their ability to reliably produce large amounts of competitively priced electricity, nuclear power plants have several other desirable, valuable attributes, Colvin said. "Nuclear power plants provide a high degree of forward price stability, an attribute with significant value in a volatile commodity market. Nuclear plants also have clean-air compliance value. As an industry, we are working to capture the monetary value of this attribute." With support from the Bush Administration and nuclear-related provisions included in major energy bills introduced by Republicans and Democrats in Congress, nuclear energy is receiving strong bipartisan political support, Colvin said. "The political leadership at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue clearly recognizes that nuclear power plants provide more than safe, reliable, low-cost electricity. They recognize that these plants are a valuable strategic asset. They enhance our energy security. They contribute to the fuel and technology diversity that is the bedrock strength of our electricity supply system. And, with the smallest environmental `footprint' of any source of bulk electricity, they are essential to meeting the nation's environmental goals," Colvin said. Nuclear power plants supply electricity to one of every five homes and businesses in the United States. The Nuclear Energy Institute is the nuclear energy industry's Washington-based policy organization. This news release and additional information about the nuclear energy are available at http://www.nei.org. ***************************************************************** 17 Nuclear plants alerted to terrorist threat This story was published Fri, Feb 1, 2002 By The Associated Press and the Herald staff WASHINGTON -- Acting on a tip from an al-Qaida operative, the government alerted nuclear power plants last week that terrorists may be planning an attack on a power reactor using a hijacked commercial airliner. The alert, a copy of which was obtained Thursday by The Associated Press, said "the attack was already planned" and three people "already on the ground" were trying to recruit non-Arabs to take part. Government officials emphasized the FBI has not been able to determine whether the threat is legitimate or a ruse. As a precaution, however, operators of all 103 power reactors in 31 states were alerted. The Columbia Generating Station north of Richland was mentioned specifically but only because an FBI agent had contacted officials at the plant ahead of time to relay similar information. Energy Northwest spokesman Don McManman said the public power consortium notified the Nuclear Regulatory Commission it had been contacted by the FBI, as is protocol. The NRC chose to include that information in its memo, adding that it was unclear whether other plants also would be contacted. The alert stemmed from information obtained during questioning of an "al-Qaida senior operative" in mid-January, prompting the FBI to issue a warning to its field offices, said one government source, who spoke on condition of not being identified. On Jan 23, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission followed up with an advisory to all of its plant licensees entitled "Update on threat environment -- commercial aircraft." The advisory said the al-Qaida operative had told the FBI "there would be a second airline attack" in the United States and "the plan is to fly a commercial aircraft into a nuclear power plant chosen by the team on the ground." The advisory continued: "The attack was already planned and three individuals were on the ground ... recruiting non-Arabs to take part in the attack." "The plan included diverting the mission to any tall building if a military aircraft intercepts the plane," the advisory said. Security at nuclear power plants was increased immediately after the New York and Washington, D.C., attacks, although federal and industry officials have acknowledged an attack using a commercial airliner as a missile has never been specifically addressed. NRC spokesman William Beecher said the agency would have no comment. "We do not discuss the details of any of our (security) advisories," Beecher said. He said that since the Sept. 11 attacks more than 20 advisories have been sent involving potential threats. Beecher said the nation's nuclear power plants have remained "on the highest level of alert" since the Sept. 11 attacks. Security at Columbia has remained on its highest "noncombatant" level. Motorists also are being stopped at a checkpoint a mile away from the plant. Everyone must have a proper badge including photo identification or an escort to pass. U.S. Rep. Bernard Sanders of Vermont, an independent, called the latest threat, although not corroborated, "frightening" because it demonstrates that an attack on a nuclear reactor "is something that al-Qaida is thinking about." "This raises to a very high level the need to substantially increase security at nuclear power plants," said Sanders, calling as a first step creation of no-fly zones around all commercial reactors. NRC officials and power industry executives have emphasized that nuclear reactors are hardened structures, protected by a thick steel and concrete containment building and redundant safety equipment. Still, NRC Chairman Richard Meserve acknowledged in a recent speech that he could not say with assurance what the consequences would be "if a large, airliner, fully loaded with jet fuel ... crashed into a nuclear power plant." Since Sept. 11, scientists and engineers at several government research laboratories have begun tests to try to determine whether an aircraft could adequately penetrate a reactor's concrete containment and cause a release of radioactive material. Studies at the Los Alamos lab in the early 1990s suggested that a commercial jet aircraft would probably not be able to penetrate sufficiently to cause a radioactive release. But another study in the 1980s suggested a jet might penetrate and if even a small amount of fuel ignited, it could cause a fire and possibly an explosion, releasing radioactivity. Copyright 2002 Tri-City Herald. All rights reserved. This ***************************************************************** 18 Chernobyl: A doctor's personal reinvention Daily Yomiuri On-Line Ishida Kakuya Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer When Akira Sugenoya saw a large U-shaped keloidal scar on a girl's pale neck during his first visit to the Minsk Thyroid Oncology Center in Minsk, he felt an emotional response close to anger. As he viewed the ear-to-ear scar that resulted from an operation to extract a thyroid gland tumor, Sugenoya, an expert on autoimmune diseases of the thyroid gland, couldn't stop himself from contemplating how the girl would feel when she reached adulthood. Sugenoya knew his experience of using the latest medical techniques could have been put to use to significantly reduce the severity of the scarring he could see. On another visit to the center, during one of seven study trips to Belarus between 1991 and 1995, Sugenoya recalls seeing a little girl in her best Sunday clothes waiting in one of the building's corridors for a checkup. Although it had taken a whole day for her parents to bring her to the center, the girl looked happy and cheerful as she showed off a brand-new pink ribbon in her hair, oblivious to the seriousness of her condition. As he glanced at the gloomy faces of the girl's parents, Sugenoya reflected on her future and the fact she would be subjected to constant examinations for the rest of her life. These images, which are forever etched on Sugenoya's consciousness, triggered his decision to quit his post as assistant professor at Shinshu University's medical department in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, in late 1995 after a career there stretching back 25 years. Sugenoya then accepted a volunteer position at the national medical center in Minsk, which had been looking for technical assistance to deal with the slew of diseases related to the April 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident in the adjacent Ukraine. Sugenoya started up a training program in surgical techniques for doctors at the center in January 1996. He also set up a scheme for procuring medical equipment supplies from abroad. "The first thing that occurred to me after deciding to go to Belarus was how long I would be able to spend there with my severance pay of about 10 million yen," said Sugenoya, who is now head of the Nagano prefectural health department. Considering the local cost of living, he calculated that he could afford to stay there for five years by limiting his monthly spending to 150,000 yen. His wife Hiroko, a pediatrician, financially supported the family during his absence. "Although he told me of his decision quite abruptly, I wasn't really surprised by it," she said. Reflecting on his lengthy stay in Belarus, Sugenoya said, "It was an act of reinventing myself and finding my identity. I don't regret what I did in Belarus because it provided me with a rich legacy of experience, regardless of wealth and honor, that will supply with me energy for the rest of my life." === Chernobyl's aftermath lives on About 15 years have passed since Chernobyl, the world's worst nuclear accident. During this time it seems that international concern for the plight of those living in the area around Chernobyl has dissipated. The aftereffects of the accident, however, have not faded so rapidly. This is particularly true in the case of children who were exposed to the radioactivity resulting from the accident. Most of the victims today are children born in and around 1986 who are suffering from thyroid cancer. According to Sugenoya, the thyroid gland is an organ that produces growth hormones using inorganic iodine. Although such iodine is found in abundance in seaweed, the landlocked people of Belarus already suffer from a chronic lack of iodine in their regular diet. Under such circumstances, the body quickly absorbs iodine present in the air even if it is a product of radioactive contamination. When Sugenoya made tours to remote areas of the country to give local residents free thyroid gland checkups, he often heard the same comment: "At that time, the Soviet Union tried to conceal the accident. It wasn't until after May Day that we were informed of the accident. Due to this delay, the effect on children was much larger (than it need have been)." According to Sugenoya, the number of patients with thyroid cancer aged 14 or younger in Belarus increased from seven (in 1976 to 1985) to 424 (in 1986 to 1995). The figure for adults during the same period grew from 1,254 to 3,438. "Not all these patients are victims of the accident. But, the number of cases detected among children born after the accident was only four as of the end of 1996. So, most of these child patients were born before the accident," Sugenoya said. "A detailed follow-up investigation is necessary." It was really by chance that Sugenoya became interested in victims of the nuclear accident. Although he remembered the accident itself, he did not recall exactly when and how it happened or even where Chernobyl was. This ambivalence changed, however, after he saw a local news program in Matsumoto in January 1991. The show featured a local nongovernmental organization in Matsumoto that had started providing medical assistance to victims living in areas around Chernobyl contaminated with radioactivity. The news also mentioned that the limited number of doctors in the country could not cope with the situation of infant thyroid cancer patients there. About this time Sugenoya started to wonder whether his life was missing some important aspect. Although he had a sense of fulfillment at the university hospital where he could focus on specific research in a safe and stable environment, he also felt that more and more of his time was being spent on research papers and training younger doctors rather than on performing actual clinical work. "I felt that my working life had drifted far from the model of my father, a practitioner who rode a motorcycle to visit patients all year round in the countryside of the Shinshu region," he said. "I'd spent too much time on research and too little with actual patients." When Sugenoya was 23, his mother died and during the funeral service for her he was told by his aunt that his mother had consulted a fortune-teller about his future. The fortune-teller apparently told his mother that he would die when he was 43. "I was 43 when the nuclear accident occurred. I have to accept it as 'fate' that I've been so deeply involved in activities (dealing with the aftermath of the accident)," he said. Suspicion of philanthropy When Sugenoya started working at the Minsk Thyroid Oncology Center, some of the doctors had difficulty understanding why he had come all the way from Japan at his own expense after quitting a steady job and life in Japan. Once he showed them new techniques for conducting many of the operations at the center, however, they viewed him in a totally different light. Sugenoya showed them that instead of cutting horizontally through neck muscle, vertical cuts avoided the problem of excessive scarring. He often held lectures in advanced techniques for young doctors. "They are dedicated and hungry to absorb new information. Although this information can be readily obtained in Western countries, it's not so easy to do so in Belarus," he said, adding that he enjoyed attending parties where he could spend time chatting with doctors over a stiff vodka. Sugenoya gradually obtained the confidence of his coworkers. "Generally speaking, the people there are very proud, I was careful to avoid hurting their pride and to always adopt a conciliatory attitude," he said. When the going got tough, he always recalled his personal maxim "never hastily or overeagerly, but steadily and within one's ability." His largest concern was the poor standard of medical equipment at the center. Even scalpels were old and blunt. The situation was almost the same at the Gomel State Cancer Center in Gomel, where he moved to in June 1999 to assist victims unable to go to the capital for treatment. As his activities gained increasing publicity, a group of Japanese individuals founded the Chernobyl Medical Fund in July 1997 to help his work. Through the NGO, he procured medical equipment, ranging from operation instruments to expensive subsonic diagnosis equipment. Considering the chronic inflation of the local economy, however, Sugenoya had difficulty dissuading young talented doctors (whose salaries were less than 100 dollars a month) from changing to totally different jobs, such as those in medical equipment sales, that offered higher wages. While such factors were indeed depressing, he also found sources of hope. For example, some children who he operated on spoke optimistically to him about their desire to become doctors and nurses. In September 2000, Sugenoya lifted in his arms a pretty baby born to a woman who was still a girl at the time he operated on her for cancer. "The baby provides hope for the couple. When I saw their expressions of joy, I more or less decided it was time to put an end to my stay in Belarus," he said. The NGO recently established an office in Minsk with a full-time Japanese staff member able to handle Japanese visitors who come to inspect the aftereffects of the nuclear accident. The NGO has also planned exchange programs between children in Japan and Belarus and invited a highly popular local dance troupe "Pareskaya Zorachika" to perform in Japan. This summer Sugenoya plans to hold in Nagano Prefecture an English discussion session among Japanese high school students and high school students invited from Belarus. Sugenoya returned from Belarus to Matsumoto in June and started working in December as medical director of the prefectural government. He is now busy drafting a future health and medical program for local residents starting in 2003, a post he accepted from Nagano Gov. Yasuo Tanaka, who was impressed by Sugenoya's activities in Belarus. Although he intends to return to the clinical front-line in the future, he wants to focus now on his new brief, which he believes will benefit local residents. "But, if it's not clear what I'm trying to do, of course, I'll quit the post," he said. Sugenoya often introduces his lectures for younger people in Japan with the following words: "I don't want you to become part of an elite that can only think on paper. I want you to work for others in a more practical way." Copyright 2002 The Yomiuri Shimbun ***************************************************************** 19 People close to a reactor feel safe Saturday, February 2, 2002 By LAURA FASBACH Staff Writer BUCHANAN, N.Y. -- Burgers are the favorite at Johnny Rits sports bar, just a beer bottle's throw from the entrance to the Indian Point nuclear plant in this blue-collar Hudson River village 35 miles north of Manhattan. But two years ago, when one of the plant's generator pipes burst, the shingle-sided watering hole became better known for owner Johnny Ritornato's sense of humor and a sign outside advertising "Nuclear fried chicken." So it should come as no surprise that the beer sipping lunch crowd at Johnny's was unfazed by a new terror warning when earlier this week federal officials told the country's 103 nuclear power plants to be on the alert. For all the protests and scrutiny that the 240-acre nuclear complex has received over the years -- critics of its operations have had a field day since Sept. 11 -- this community of 2,100 residents has coexisted with the plant for more than half a century and not worried too much. The village seal is a sign of the plant's acceptance. It shows the symbol for nuclear energy -- three intersecting ellipses next to a chisel shattering an atom. This makes sense financially. Over the years, the plant's owners -- past and current -- have given sizable checks to the village to build a new community center and purchase land for parks. "It's part of the community," said Jack Garrett, whose father was an ironworker and helped build the plant in 1959. "People want all the modern conveniences, but they don't want to take the risk of having them." Ritornato, who bought his business across the street from Indian Point in 1965 and has seen many a protester outside the window, said the plant has done more good than harm. "It creates jobs and keeps the cost of power down," he said. He added that he has always had faith in the security of Indian Point -- and still does. "It's not like a Three Mile Island." At a news conference in White Plains on Friday, Gov. George Pataki took a cautious approach, asking the federal government to review standards for emergency planning at nuclear power plants. Pataki also called for the stockpiling of potassium iodide, a drug that has been shown to fight some effects of radiation poisoning. In Sparkey's Barbershop and outside the post office -- in the heart of Buchanan -- residents are fatalistic. "No matter where you go, we're all sitting on a keg of dynamite," said Hank Crawford, who gives $8 haircuts at his family business. "The only people who complain about Indian Point live 50 miles away, and they come up here and make trouble." Joann Boos, who lives a block from the plant, said she moved to the area from Rockland County a year and a half ago. Although she had worried about her proximity to the plant at first, her husband assured her they would be fine. "I feel safer now than I ever did," Boos said, explaining that she takes comfort in the National Guardsmen and state police who have been stationed outside the plant since Sept. 11. The governor's call for a review of disaster planning came as the state signed an annual letter to the Federal Emergency Management Agency stating that the counties around the nuclear plants had completed updates of their emergency plans. The county plans call for the evacuation of residents within 10 miles of the plants. Critics had urged the state not to approve the county plans. They said the existing evacuation procedures can't work, because they would put too many people on too few roads. Skeptics doubt that bus drivers assigned to evacuate schoolchildren would enter contaminated areas, as required, and that parents would stay out. Buchanan Mayor Alfred Donahue, a Republican who has lived in the village since 1964, said he doesn't think the plan will ever be needed. "If I thought that plant wasn't safe, I'd be out there leading the protests," Donahue said. This report contains material from the Associated Press. Staff Writer Laura Fasbach's e-mail address is fasbach@northjersey.com Copyright © 2002 North Jersey Media Group Inc. ***************************************************************** 20 Maine Yankee cites personnel issues in firing contractor By Associated Press, 2/1/2002 14:29 WISCASSET, Maine (AP) Maine Yankee is terminating its agreement with a contractor responsible for the shuttered nuclear power plant's radiological protection program. Maine Yankee cited ''inconsistent management practices'' unrelated to safety issues as the factor behind its decision to dismiss Radiological Services Inc. The contract ends March 31. ''The problems with RSI had to do with the way they managed their people, a human resources problem,'' spokesman Eric Howes said. ''Their management practices were inconsistent, and the effects of that were becoming too distracting to everyone else on site.'' RSI, which is based in New London, Conn., was responsible for overseeing the disposal of waste from the site. About 85 RSI employees work at Maine Yankee. They will be allowed to reapply for their jobs. Managers will become Maine Yankee employees, Howes said. Another contractor, Bartlett Nuclear of Massachusetts, will be responsible for the technicians, and the professional positions will be contracted through TRS Staffing Solutions of New Hampshire. Maine Yankee has been in charge of the decommissioning since Stone &Webster, the Boston-based contractor charged with overseeing the decommissioning, went bankrupt in 2000. Stone &Webster was the primary contractor when Maine Yankee was built in 1972. The decommissioning is intended to make the 800-acre property suitable for other uses, including recreational and business development. The plant closed in 1997. ***************************************************************** 21 San Onofre Prepared, Despite Threats TheSanDiegoChannel.com - Rumsfeld Reveals Threats To Nation's Nuclear Plants Updated: 8:34 a.m. PST February 1, 2002 SAN DIEGO -- Responding to word of previously undisclosed threats against U.S. targets, operators at the San Onofre nuclear plant said that the facility is well-prepared to ward off or survive any terrorist attack. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld revealed Thursday that information has been received about potential threats to the nation's nuclear plants, dams and water-supply systems. Terrorists might try to crash an airplane into a nuclear power plant, according to an advisory sent to all 103 nuclear facilities in the United States. "We received a communication from the (Nuclear Regulatory Commission), but its contents are confidential," said Ray Golden of Southern California Edison, which operates the two fission reactors at San Onofre. "We've had numerous advisories from the NRC since Sept. 11. This is not the first." The plant has been at its highest level of alert since Sept. 11, he said. Tighter security could only be possible if the plant received a specific, credible threat, he added. "We would be able to survive any terrorist attack and we could thwart any terrorist attack," Golden said. The seaside San Onofre plant has its own highly trained security force, with 80 percent of its members having law enforcement or military backgrounds, he said. The plant also has steel-reinforced containment walls, 4-7 feet thick, housing the reactors and redundant cooling and power systems. A study done after the Sept. 11 attacks showed the power plant could withstand the impact of a commercial airliner. "We could survive without a release of radiation," he said. Even in a worst-case scenario, it is not possible for the plant's nuclear cores to explode, Golden said, adding that the worst that could happen would be the release of radioactive gases. At the adjacent Camp Pendleton Marine Base, military officials have said they would consider any attack on the San Onofre plant as an attack on the U.S. Marines and they would respond accordingly. Nonetheless, Golden said additional security guards soon will be hired. Copyright 2002 by TheSanDiegoChannel.com ***************************************************************** 22 Nebraska nuclear plants at high security Journalstar.com: Nebraska Sunday, Feb. 3, 2002 The Associated Press Nebraska's two nuclear power plants are taking recent terrorism warnings seriously and continue to operate with the highest level of security possible, utility officials said Friday. Federal authorities recently warned of a terrorist threat after documents found in Afghanistan and information from captured al-Qaida members indicated terrorists have studied U.S. nuclear power plants as possible targets. The Omaha Public Power District's plant at Fort Calhoun and the Nebraska Public Power District's plant near Brownville have been operating on a heightened state of alert since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. "We are working very closely with local authorities and remain on alert," said Mike Jones, OPPD spokesman. The utilities said they have taken steps to ensure the security of their plants - including the presence of armed guards and road blocks. The air space above both plants also is restricted. Last week, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission sent an advisory to all operators of U.S. power reactors that an al-Qaida member had told the FBI that a plan was in the works to hijack a jetliner and fly it into a nuclear power plant. Copyright © 2002, Lincoln Journal Star. All rights reserved. 926 P Street Lincoln NE 68508 402 475-4200 feedback@journalstar.com ***************************************************************** 23 Towns to hold nonbinding vote on Vermont Yankee's future By Associated Press, 2/1/2002 16:54 BRATTLEBORO, Vt. (AP) Nine towns in southeastern Vermont will hold a nonbinding resolution on Town Meeting Day calling for the shutdown of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. If it passes, the resolution would send an expression of public sentiment to legislators and state officials. Organizers garnered about 900 signatures to get the resolution on the warnings for town meeting in Newfane, Putney, Dummerston, Brattleboro, Marlboro, Townshend, Brookline, Guilford, and Westminster. ''We're hoping to galvanize people and do somewhat of a campaign to solidify the issues,'' said Putney musician Emily Peyton, who led a loosely knit group of residents in developing and circulating the petition. Peyton said a number of financial and safety concerns have led her to oppose Yankee's continued operation. She's concerned about the spent fuel on site in Vernon that currently has no other home, and that Vermont Yankee is nearly 30 years old. Both she and another petitioner, Gary Sachs, questioned the viability of the company that hopes to buy the plant, Entergy Nuclear. ''My hope is that the sale does not go through,'' said Sachs, who said he has opposed nuclear power since 1979. ''My hope is that the plant is found to be unsafe and that the plant is shut down at the earliest possible date, thus decreasing the risk to all of us.'' Vermont Yankee spokesman Brian Cosgrove predicted that the resolution will fail. ''I think most people in this area know that Vermont Yankee provides a third of Vermont's electricity,'' said Cosgrove, noting that Vermont Yankee does not generate greenhouse gases. The company also employs 625 people, and contributed $65 million annually to the local economy, he added. ''I think that they'll vote accordingly,'' he said. ***************************************************************** 24 Assessing Threat At Nuclear Plants Newsday.com - Experts find terror vulnerabilities By Thomas Frank WASHINGTON BUREAU February 3, 2002 Washington - Packed with highly radioactive pellets, thousands of pencil-thin poles stand in three enclosed pools 12 miles north of Montauk on the Connecticut coast. More than 100 similar pools brim with radiation across the country, including three in Westchester, and they store a combined total of 40,000 tons of used nuclear fuel. "It's the single largest concentration of radioactivity on the planet," said Robert Alvarez, a former Energy Department adviser on national security who warns that the pools now represent something else: an inviting target for terrorists flying small planes that could smash through the metal roofs covering many of the pools. President George W. Bush's warning Tuesday that "diagrams of American nuclear power plants" were found in Afghanistan - and that "our war against terror is only beginning" - has given new life to smoldering fears of a terrorist attack on one of the country's 103 nuclear power plants. "The vulnerability is that the security defenses are basically 1960s era and the threat level is now 21st century," said David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental group. "No one thought of a water or airborne attack. Sept. 11 shows that's not a good assumption." Federal regulations, for example, do not require nuclear plants to withstand a jetliner crash or to prepare for an attack by more than three outsiders and one inside accomplice. "They've been looking at a Homer Simpson scenario rather than a bin Laden scenario," Alvarez said. Richard Meserve, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said in a Jan. 17 speech, "There have been no specific credible threats of a terrorist attack on nuclear power plants." However, many nuclear experts and officials say a large terrorist group could take over a nuclear power plant and trigger a meltdown or wreck the fuel-storage system to unleash radioactivity. Tests of nuclear plant security - which the cash-starved NRC conducts just once every eight years - have revealed "significant weakness" 47 percent of the time, according to the NRC. Fears about a hijacked jet crashing into a nuclear plant were given credence by an October 2000 NRC report showing that roughly half the commercial airplanes in use could penetrate concrete walls surrounding fuel-storage pools. Nuclear plants have been on their highest state of alert since Sept. 11, as the NRC undertakes a "top-to-bottom review" of security regulations. The Coast Guard is barring boats from approaching nuclear plants, though it has curbed patrols of the plants. National Guard troops, omnipresent at nuclear plants throughout the fall, also have been pulled back, though at plants such as Millstone, on the Connecticut coast north of Montauk, the private security force has been increased. The NRC and nuclear plant owners are resisting more dramatic measures, such as making security guards federal employees, which they say would hamper security and overwhelm regulators. Nuclear plants, they say, are safe. Layers of steel and concrete measuring up to 14 feet thick protect the reactor core, where uranium is split. Armed guards are positioned throughout each plant. And security systems have backups and redundancies to prevent malfunction and intrusion. "There are a lot of places that have minimal security as opposed to the high level of security that they have at nuclear stations," said Texas A&M University nuclear engineering professor John Poston, a member of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements. But the effects of a nuclear-plant attack could be devastating. A 1997 Brookhaven National Lab study said radiation released by a fire in a fuel-storage pool could cause $59 billion in damages, render an area nearly the size of Hempstead and North Hempstead towns uninhabitable and cause up to 28,000 cancer fatalities, though it is not clear over what time period. Even nuclear officials concede that fuel pools are not so fortified. "I'm not going to say they have invulnerable roofs because that wouldn't be the case," said Pete Hyde, a spokesman for Millstone owner Dominion Resources Inc. of Virginia. But he said the buildings are very small targets for an air attack. The New York area faces a particularly severe threat, local officials say, because the Indian Point nuclear complex - 24 miles from New York City in Westchester - is located near more people than any other nuclear reactor in the country. "The chances of either a terrorist attack or accident at Indian Point are small, but the consequences are awful and enormous," said Assemb. Richard Brodsky (D-Hartsdale), who, since Sept. 11, has joined numerous officials and citizens calling for a temporary plant shutdown until safety risks are evaluated. Although New York State public security director James Kallstrom said in December that the plant is "extremely safe," Brodsky and others worry that the evacuation plan, approved Friday by Gov. George Pataki, could leave children stranded at schools and motorists jammed in traffic. Larry Gottlieb, a spokesman for Indian Point owner Entergy Nuclear Northeast, said those scenarios would not happen, but Brodsky vowed to fight on as the plan goes before the Federal Emergency Management Agency: "This has turned from an anti-nuclear-activist issue to a soccer-mom issue." Long Island anti-nuclear activists are challenging as unsafe a plan by Dominion Resources to more than double the amount of spent nuclear fuel stored in one of three nuclear-fuel pools at the Millstone complex. That situation is becoming increasingly common as plants across the country pack more and more rods into pools that were originally envisioned as temporary facilities where the 13-foot-long zirconium tubes could cool off for a few years under 30 feet of water. The federal government has faced extraordinary delays in a 20-year-old plan to build a central storage site and now hopes to have a facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada open by 2010 at the earliest. "The pools are now jammed wall to wall with spent fuel in a high-density configuration," which increases radiation in the pool, said Gordon Johnson, a Cambridge, Mass., nuclear expert who has helped anti-nuclear groups. "If a pool lost water, it's more likely it would catch fire." In its legal challenge, an East Hampton-based group called Standing for Truth About Radiation says the NRC should no longer ignore the possibility of a terrorist attack in deciding whether expansions or new nuclear plants will harm the environment. "The NRC's long-standing position has been that since it's not possible to quantify the probability of a terrorist attack, it's not necessary to examine the consequences of an attack or to mitigate the consequences," said STAR attorney Diane Curran of Washington. Although the NRC has vowed to review its safety requirements, skeptics in Congress, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), are pushing legislation that would require regulators to set new standards that take into account the Sept. 11 attacks. Heightened nuclear plant security could cost plant operators millions of dollars, which they might have difficulty finding or reluctance paying in a world of deregulated electricity markets, experts said. The alternative is for the federal government to continue to assume responsibility for protecting against major attacks. But that strategy has risks. "They assume the CIA and FBI would be able to figure out if a plant was being targeted, and then the National Guard would be dispatched," said Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists. "But what Sept. 11 showed us is we may not have advanced warning." Copyright © 2002, Newsday, Inc. ***************************************************************** 25 Attack on nuclear plant would be catastrophic The Herald News Content Sunday 3 February, 2002 MICHAEL W. FREEMAN, Herald News Staff Reporter It reads like the plot of a Hollywood disaster movie: Terrorists take aim at the nation's nuclear power plants, causing destruction that sends hazardous radiation seeping into the atmosphere. But this Hollywood-style scenario looked scarier and more realistic last week, when the federal government cautioned the nation's plants that al-Qaida terrorists could be planning an attack on a reactor using a hijacked commercial airplane. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission sent an advisory to all its plant licensees on Jan. 23. Security at the plants had already been increased shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. Those stations, of course, include the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant in Plymouth, a 670-megawatt nuclear power generation facility that got its operating license in 1972. The plant went on high security alert shortly after Sept. 11, and town officials called for a federal takeover of the plant's security, including a no-fly zone and one-mile coastal restriction around the plant. Still, the question remains just how vulnerable a plant like Pilgrim is to a terrorist air attack. ABC News even broadcast live outside the plant on Friday, reporting on the federal government's reaction to the risk. State Rep. David B. Sullivan, D-Fall River, who serves on the Legislature's Public Safety Committee, said ground security is very strong at Pilgrim. "It's not just the National Guard members that have been added to it -- and they're pretty sophisticated -- but private security as well," Sullivan said. But he cautioned that it's impossible to determine how to prevent an attack like the one that struck the World Trade Center. "What do you do about terrorist attacks from the air?" he asked. "I don't know the answer to that. September 11 already demonstrated our vulnerability to that kind of attack." John Freeman of Fall River is a retired nuclear engineer who worked for the Boston firm of Stone & Webster, designing plants that could withstand earthquakes. He said the on-target collision of a plane into a plant like Pilgrim would be catastrophic. "It all depends what kind of damage took place inside," he said. "If all the piping remained intact, they could shut the plant down." If the pipes were severed and radiation leaked out, "You would have a serious problem," he said. However, Freeman said using a plane to take down a plant is harder than it sounds. For one thing, Pilgrim is not a large target like the World Trade Center was. "There are no-fly zones there," he said. "You can't fly a plane, a commercial airliner, over a nuclear plant." A commercial jet carrying thousands of pounds of fuel would have the potential to do considerable damage to the plant, he said, but added, "It would have to be a direct hit. At a nuclear plant, the container building is three and a half feet of reinforced concrete. It's not something that's easy to penetrate. If it was a direct hit -- if the nose of the jet went right into it -- it would penetrate. But it's tough to make a direct hit, since a plane can be 75 feet tall." Sullivan said the general public should remain confident that safety officials understand the threat and are doing everything possible to minimize it. "I think we just have to be ready, and understand these guys would go to any length to hurt this country," he said. Dr. Richard A. Meserve, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, spoke about this threat on Jan. 17 at the National Press Club in Washington. While saying there have been no "specific credible threats of a terrorist attack on nuclear power plants," he acknowledged there was information that al-Qaida "considers nuclear facilities as potential terrorist targets." But the plants "are not 'soft' targets," he added. "The plants are among the most formidable structures in existence and they are guarded by well-trained and well-armed security forces." Michael W. Freeman may be reached at mfreeman@heraldnews.com. ©The Herald News 2002 ***************************************************************** 26 State may take feds’ free nuke pills The Union Leader & New Hampshire Sunday News - 03-Feb-02 - View Article By ROGER TALBOT Sunday News Staff New Hampshire officials are reviewing their policy on radiation-blocking potassium iodide in light of the federal government’s offer to give KI tablets to states willing to stockpile the drug near nuclear power plants. Up to now the state has refused to be involved in the stockpiling of potassium iodide for distribution to the public in the event that radiation leaking from Seabrook Station or Vermont Yankee required evacuation from communities near those nuclear power plants. State officials have advised people interested in having the non-prescription drug on hand to buy it themselves. But the commercial airliners that terrorists piloted into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11 altered perceptions on the potential for disaster at nuclear reactors. Last week came renewed warnings from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld of evidence that the al-Qaida terrorist network has contemplated crashing an airplane into a U.S. nuclear power facility. Just before Christmas, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced its plan to buy $800,000 worth of KI (the chemical symbol for potassium iodide) and make a gift of the drug to states that wanted to include the pill in their nuclear emergency evacuation and sheltering plans. KI works by saturating the thyroid with iodine. With the gland filled, it cannot absorb the cancer-causing radioactive iodine a breached reactor would release into the atmosphere. KI can protect only the thyroid and only against radioactive iodine. Evacuation is the only protection against other radioactive materials that might be present in a reactor disaster. On Friday, the NRC accepted a bid from Anbex, a small company headquartered in Palm Harbor, Fla., that individually foil wraps its 130-milligram Iosat potassium iodide tablets, extending the drug’s shelf life for at least 15 years, according to Bruce W. Rodin, the company’s vice president. Rodin said his was one of only two bids submitted for the contract. Anbex will supply six million tablets, with the first two million to be delivered to the federal agency within a month. “My hunch is that this (NRC supply) is going to get subscribed to quickly,” Rodin said of what he expects will be requests from many states for the pills. “Especially with the information we’ve heard in the last couple of days about the plans they found in the caves of Afghanistan for attacking nuclear power plants. I think that may shake people up a bit.” New Hampshire officials began to “revisit the state’s KI policy” after the NRC made its offer in December, according to state Fire Marshal Donald P. Bliss, who chaired Gov. Jeanne Shaheen’s Commission on Preparedness and Security. The commission delivered its report in late November and, since Woodbury Fogg, the director of the Office of Emergency Management, resigned unexpectedly in early December, Bliss has served as acting director of that agency. Bliss said a “task group,” with representatives from the governor’s office, OEM and the Department of Health and Human Services, has been reviewing the KI question. “There are a number of logistical issues to be addressed to make it work properly and make it available and we would have to submit a plan (to the federal government). . . . We’re probably going to have an announcement early next week on what the plan is,” Bliss said on Friday. KI has long been of interest to the Seacoast Anti-Pollution League. The league, which is opposed to nuclear power, lobbied three years ago for the state to review its KI policy and it has renewed that effort in recent weeks. Field Director Jennifer Hicks said she has talked both with state legislators and state health officials, and Bliss recently met with members of the league’s board of directors. “We emphasized to Mr. Bliss that we want the state, as soon as possible, to request these pills and set up a program where the pills would be accessible in schools and at evacuation receiving areas and be made available for anybody who wants them in their homes,” Hicks said. “We are supportive of having KI available for all residents in the emergency planning zone and we believe the EPZ is a bit unrealistic because, if Seabrook blows, its radioactive cloud is going to go well beyond 10 miles of the plant,” Hicks said. If New Hampshire were to ask the NRC for a supply of KI, it would follow the lead set by Massachusetts three weeks ago. Massachusetts — Maryland has filed a similar request — sought enough KI to provide two pills for every person in the 17 communities within its borders that lie within the 10-mile emergency planning zones for the Seabrook, Vermont Yankee and Pilgrim nuclear power plants. “Based upon our estimates of the total population in these three EPZs, including seasonal transients and double counting schoolchildren, we are requesting 660,000 KI tablets,” said a Jan. 8 letter to the NRC signed by the Massachusetts health and emergency management directors. New Hampshire has maintained a small 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. About three years ago a KI Policy Study Group reviewed the issue and concluded in its report to Gov. Shaheen that it would be “inappropriate and ineffective” for government agencies to distribute potassium iodide tablets to the public during a nuclear plant emergency. Instead, the state, in the evacuation brochures and calendars distributed to residents in the emergency planning zones, suggested those interested in buying KI should contact the two manufacturers who sell the drug over the Internet. The state also tried to enlist pharmacists to stock KI as an over-the-counter drug. That effort failed, in part because potassium iodide is not readily available from the drug wholesalers that do business with the state’s independent and chain pharmacies. Anbex Vice President Rodin said on Friday that he has yet to follow through on a plan he had last November to mail samples of his Iosat pill to pharmacies throughout New Hampshire, in hopes they would place orders. “We got so busy that we never did do that,” he said. To date, only three pharmacies in the state — those at the Shop ’N Save markets in Hampton and Dover and the CVS store in Seabrook — stock Iosat, Rodin said. He described the frenzied pattern of mail-order sales to individuals and families that has developed since Sept. 11 as newspapers around the country have published stories about KI. “After your story (Nov. 4, 2001), there was a flurry of activity from New Hampshire. Then there was an article in Boston and there was a flurry of activity from there. And the same happened in Washington, St. Petersburg, Baltimore. Wherever a story appears, the flurry follows for two or three weeks and then it fades,” he said. Rodin noted that though the emphasis has been on having potassium iodide pills available to people who live in the communities near the country’s 103 nuclear power plants, the accident at the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine on April 26, 1986, underscored the potential value of KI for everyone. Wind-borne radioactive iodine can travel great distances before it settles back to earth. “After Chernobyl, the medical problems occurred 30 to 300 miles away and those problems were thyroid-cancer related,” Rodin said. “If you evacuate the people in the 10-mile EPZ, you would have to evacuate them 300 miles to be safe. So, what about the people who live in the area from 11 miles to 300 miles from the plant? We’re talking about hordes of people and huge logistical and supply problems.” Rodin said Chernobyl showed that thyroid problems are “the most likely” widespread medical consequence of a radioactive release from a nuclear plant accident. “The only way to avoid that disaster is to have potassium iodide widely available,” he said. ***************************************************************** 27 Thompson: Millions of Doses for Radioactive Fallout NewsMax.com: Inside Cover Story Saturday, February 2, 2002 11:46 PM EST Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson told Fox News Channel Saturday that while hundreds of U.S. health officials stand by in case of an attack in Super Bowl city New Orleans, the government has already taken steps to protect against a nuclear attack. Thompson said the U.S. government has recently stockpiled "millions of doses" of potassium iodide in case of a nuclear attack. Thompson's remarks come in the wake of revelations that terrorists may have been planning a 9-11 type jet plane attack on a nuclear power plant. The release of radioactive fallout from a plant, or even the explosion of a primitive, easy-to-make dirty nuclear device, could cause heavy casualties. Most of the loss of life in such an attack would likely be caused from radioactive fallout. Fallout includes radioactive iodine, which can be carried hundreds of miles upwind from a release point, and which enters people's bloodstreams. Once in the body, the radioactive iodine can be absorbed by the human thyroid -- a potential cause of sickness and death. By immediately taking potassium iodide, however, a person can saturate their thyroid with non-radioactive iodide, blocking absorption of radioactive material. Thompson noted that the U.S. government has already moved supplies in the vicinity of potential nuclear danger spots. He noted that only a short time exists after the release of fallout, and said individuals in some case would only have minutes to begin taking potassioum iodide. Despite the critical need for this substance, he encouraged citizens not to stockpile it themselves. Earlier this year, NewsMax broke the story that the U.S. had no civilian stockpiles of the critical substance in case of a nuclear attack. Thompson said he is less worried about a nuclear attack than a new wave of biological or chemical attacks. Thompson said "the weakest link" in America's homeland defense was the food supply. He said terrorists could access the nation's food supply and contaminate food with biological and chemical weapons. NewsMax.com Privacy Statement ***************************************************************** 28 PI: Across the Nation# Toxics spread in South feared Philippine Daily Inquirer; Feb 1, 2002 BY TONETTE OREJAS, PDI CENTRAL LUZON DESK CLARK SPECIAL ECONOMIC ZONE-The highly toxic and radioactive anti-tank weapon, depleted uranium (DU), would most likely be used by the United States military during the Balikatan 02-1 in Mindanao, the People's Task Force for Bases Cleanup warned. The task force aired this warning amid what it called "secrecy" on what the US forces really brought in for the exercises involving 660 soldiers in Basilan and Zamboanga City. The war exercises started Thursday. "There is no guarantee that DU will not be used," Myrla Baldonado, PTFBC executive director, said in a statement sent by electronic mail to the INQUIRER on Wednesday. The DU is actually a bullet that, when ignited, forms fine particles of radioactive dust, she said. She noted that if inhaled or swallowed, the DU could lead to cancers that may affect the lungs, kidney and liver. It also causes congenital abnormalities or genetic damage. The use of the DU, according to Baldonado, was "very possible" because the weapon was widely used during the Gulf War. It has been also used as a training weapon in Okinawa in Japan and Vieques in Puerto Rico. Baldonado said the US Special Forces more likely tested these in Subic in Zambales, which, like Clark in Pampanga, is considered by the PTFBC a toxic-contaminated military base. Since 1995, the group has monitored nearly 150 deaths, mostly among children living at the borders of the bases from ailments believed linked to exposures to toxic wastes. Citing more information from the US-based research and advocacy group Military Toxics Project (MTP), Baldonado said the DU was blamed for the birth of several babies with no heads and with abnormally large heads and short limbs. Many others have various types of birth deformities. But with or without the DU, Baldonado said even practice ammunition, like bullets, bombs, shells, missiles and grenades, also posed "grave threats" to the health of residents, to the environment and even to Filipino and American soldiers engaged in the Balikatan exercise. "Whether it's for joint training, combat or a prelude to basing, these ammunition have immediate and long-term impacts, especially on the children," she warned. The MTP said practice ammunition "contain or utilize smoke cartridges, fuses, primers, igniter charges, propellants, incendiary components, and/or tracers-all of which may contain hazardous components." The MTP has listed 25 potential hazardous chemicals contained in practice ammunition. It said the chemicals' health effects included anemia, blurred vision, swelling, itching, pain, infertility in males and females, central nervous system disorder, impaired male productive function, personality behavioral changes and induced formation of tumors. "The arsenal and sophisticated weapons of the US are actually a poisonous venom on the Filipino people," Baldonado said. She also scored the American military for its "double standard," saying that in the US, the military is asked to present first a study of an area before it is allowed to use it as a training ground. The Philippine government, she lamented, has also allowed more exercises, and this time with bigger contingent, without holding environmental impact studies on areas where the training exercises are held since 1990 when the Visiting Forces Agreement was ratified by the Senate. "If the Philippine government would not hear of the sovereignty issue or finds it all too abstract to understand, can it at least defend the lives of the residents, their health and their environment against this toxic monster that is the war games?" Baldonado asked. World Reporter ***************************************************************** 29 AU: Schools fail safety tests news.com.au - 03 February 2002 A SPECIAL report has condemned safety levels in government schools, with the Department of Education Training and Employment failing an occupational health and safety audit. DETE faces heavy fines over failure to meet standards aimed at keeping staff and students safe. This is despite the standards being based on 1996 levels, unlike every other government authority which is expected to meet upgraded 1998 standards. The report – kept secret by the department despite requests to release it – details a litany of dangerous practices and labels it the `worst possible overall result'. Dangerous practices, which the report warns could lead to injury or death, include: Storing poisons and oxidising chemicals together. Unsafe storage of radioactive isotopes. Fire evacuations where people gather where a gas cylinder could explode. While the WorkCover evaluation only covered 12 government schools, it used these as a sample to check the effectiveness of system-wide procedures. The report, leaked in the final week of a close-fought election campaign, has been rejected by the Education Department which says its own audits show all schools should meet the necessary standards. The audit reported on five OH areas: hazard identification, policy, management commitment, training and consultation. It gave DETE an overall zero mark. It needed a score of three to pass. The audit was revised to give a score of one – still a failure – although a WorkCover board report says the upgrade was an effort to get improvements rather than remain bogged in discussions over details. Subsequent relations between WorkCover and DETE soured to a point WorkCover officials ordered staff to suspend contact with the department until the arguments were resolved. The original audit by WorkCover was presented in July, 2001, as part of a check of self-insured agencies exempt from the WorkCover scheme. These have to achieve Level 3 ranking of the 1998 WorkCover performance standards, although changes within DETE means it is still on the 1996 standards. The report notes the result is `particularly disturbing given that DETE had three years longer to reach the required level (than other departments).' "The fact management commitment and hazard identification are both still at Level 0 indicated there has been no real concerted effort by the department to improve OH levels," the original report stated. Both of these were upgraded to Level 1 a month later in the revised report. The WorkCover report notes many of the problems are due to lack of resources. Private firms can lose their self-insured status in such audits, but government agencies are largely immune, forcing WorkCover to create a new category of offenders to encourage improvements in schools. This saw DETE facing fines of $72,000 a year unless improvements were made, rising to $180,000 this week and future fines of more than $1 million. Australian IT [http://australianit.com.au] . ***************************************************************** 30 Radiation exposure estimates reevaluated News 2-1-02 Tribal members may have received bigger doses than previously thought, study says By JENNIFER HEMMINGSEN of the East Oregonian MISSION — A study shows local Native Americans were exposed to more Hanford site radiation than previously thought, but tribal officials don’t know if the results will lead to any action. Risk Assessment Corporation scientist Dr. Helen Grogan directed the study that reevaluated earlier estimates of radioactive releases from the Hanford site from 1944 to 1972. In a meeting last week, she told tribal representatives the earlier study underestimated Native American fish consumption — the primary means of radioactive material transmission. “We concluded that the assumptions that were made in the HEDR project for the final dose findings ... did not adequately reflect the more traditional lifestyle of the Native Americans,” Grogan said. Columbia Basin tribes, including the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indians, ate more fish and more parts of the fish than was assumed by the earlier study, Grogan found. “Not that the risks that we are calculating are much higher, but if you are going to go back and look more closely, Native American consumption is something you should look at,” she said. The Centers for Disease Control Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry asked for the Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction Project review because it wanted to know if current medical monitoring of exposed populations was adequate, Grogan said. Her report didn’t include policy recommendations. There may be negative health impacts from the radiation — scores of diseases are associated with release of radioactive nucleotides — but the effects of Hanford radiation on CTUIR people are not documented, said Brian Boltz, public health educator at the Yellowhawk Health Center. “We’re a pretty healthy society out here,” Boltz said. “We’re not suffering from any odd diseases.” Boltz contracts with the ATSDR and represents the Tribes on the Inter-Tribal Council for Hanford Health Projects. He attended last week’s meeting, now he’s reading the report. It is significant the HEDR study underestimated tribal radiation exposure, he said. Health officials could use the information to start a public awareness campaign about diseases associated with radiation exposure, or request Yellowhawk doctors get special training in diagnosing those diseases. Umatilla Chief Bill Burke also represented the Tribes at last week’s meeting, but said he wasn’t sure the report’s findings will lead to any action. “They’ve studied this and studied this, and yet nothing has come and said, ‘this is what we need to do,’” Burke said. “Granted, there was a lot of work done. I’ve got to say the work was pretty well done, but it’s just another study.” People on the reservation have been concerned about Hanford radiation for a long time, at least since they were listed as an affected Indian tribe in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, Burke said. CTUIR leaders still are in discussions with the facility over transporting waste through reservation land to a Nevada disposal site. “The greatest transmission of radionucleides in the Columbia River is through ingestion of fish, and the Indians and people that fished in the Columbia River ... are all concerned,” he said. “If it doesn’t do anything but collect dust on a shelf, that’s about what it’s worth,” Burke said. RAC’s draft study is undergoing review by the National Academy of Sciences. Grogan said researchers may have to make revisions before submitting it to ATFDR, but won’t significantly alter their findings. [http://www.eoni.com/] | East Oregonian ***************************************************************** 31 Pataki focuses on N-power plant security Buffalo News - WHITE PLAINS - Gov. George E. Pataki asked the federal government Friday to review emergency plans for nuclear power plants, taking into account the threat of terrorism and starting with Indian Point in the New York City suburbs. He also requested a stockpile of potassium iodide, a drug that has been shown to fight some effects of radiation poisoning. "Everything changed on Sept. 11," the governor said at a news conference. "What was adequate Sept. 10 may not be adequate Sept. 12." At the same time, Rep. Nita Lowey called for the decommissioning of the two Indian Point plants, saying they present "an unacceptable risk to the safety and security of the New York metropolitan area." The Democratic congresswoman, who represents most of Westchester County, joins dozens of local officials and activists who have demanded that the plants in Buchanan be shut down at least temporarily because of the threat of an airborne terrorist attack like the one that brought down the World Trade Center. Many say the existing evacuation plan for the area around the plants is nearly useless. Pataki, a Republican, said the Federal Emergency Management Agency had last certified emergency planning at Indian Point in 1996. He asked that the plans be "completely reassessed to see if they meet the new reality." President Bush said Tuesday that diagrams of American nuclear power plants had been found by U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Copyright © 1999 - 2002 The Buffalo NewsTM ***************************************************************** 32 Nuclear experts on risky Georgian mission BBC News | EUROPE | 1 February, 2002, [Radioactive analysts in protective suits] The IAEA will also train a local team on how to retrieve devices The United Nations' nuclear agency has sent a team of experts to the former Soviet republic of Georgia to help recover two deadly radioactive devices and transport them to safety. The cylinders may be small, but they are extremely radioactive Lothar Wedekind IAEA The cylinders, which are believed to have been left over from a Soviet-era generator, were discovered by three men gathering wood from a forest in December in Georgia's breakaway region of Abkhazia. Seeing the objects had melted the surrounding snow, the men dragged them back to their camp for warmth. Initial exposure to the cylinders' high levels of the radioactive element, strontium-90, left the men nauseous, and within a week they were suffering from radiation burns. One of them is now in a very serious condition, and may be transferred to a specialist hospital in France. "The cylinders may be small, but they are extremely radioactive," said Lothar Wedekind, spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). "It's crucial that they are removed to a safe place as soon as possible," he told BBC News Online. Dirty bomb The IAEA's team will haul heavy protective shields to the area and encase the cylinders, which measure about 10cm by 15cm. They will then transport them to the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, if the weather permits. [Tbilisi ] International experts will discuss the find in Tbilisi Russian, US and French experts are then due to meet in Tbilisi on Monday to discuss the find, and what to do with it. They are also expected to examine what can be done to track down other discarded nuclear material in Georgia. Since the 11 September attacks against the United States, fears have mounted that discarded nuclear material could be used to make a so-called "dirty-bomb", a crude device nonetheless capable of spreading high levels of toxic radiation. "This is a threat we have to take very seriously, particularly given the fact that there is likely to be more such material in Georgia," said Mr Wedekind. The cylinders are not the first ageing nuclear devices to be discovered in Georgia. Three years ago, a fisherman found one in a river-bed which also contained large amounts of strontium-90. ***************************************************************** 33 Safeguard America's Nuclear Plants, Senators Urge Environment News Service: ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico, February 1, 2002 (ENS) - "Nuclear reactors in the United States are poorly protected against a coordinated assault from suicidal terrorists, warned Nevada Senator Harry Reid on Friday after receiving briefings on the status of America’s nuclear stockpile and on terrorist attempts to create nuclear devices. "This must change. We must ensure that a nuclear reactor on our soil is never turned against Americans as a weapon of terror," he vowed. The briefings served as a prelude to Monday's release of President George W. Bush's FY 2003 budget request. [Reid] Senator Harry Reid of Nevada (Photo courtesy Office of the Senator) Speaking at the Sandia National Laboratory, Senator Reid, a Democrat who serves as the assistant majority leader, announced that he and Senators Jim Jeffords of Vermont, Hillary Clinton of New York and Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut would act swiftly to reinforce security at the nation’s 103 nuclear reactors. The senators are urging speedy passage of the Nuclear Security Act of 2001 they introduced last November. The bill requires the [http://www.nrc.gov] (NRC) to revise within 90 days the standard against which facilities must be able to defend, known as the "design basis threat," to reflect more realistic threat scenarios including the terrorist attacks of September 11. Companion legislation has been introduced in the House of Representatives. The senators’ announcement comes just after President Bush informed the nation in his State of the Union Address Tuesday of ongoing terrorist plans to attack American nuclear reactors, saying that diagrams of American nuclear plants had been found in Afghanistan. [reactor] One NRC study found that a catastrophic meltdown of the Indian Point 3 reactor in New York could lead to more than 200,000 deaths (Photo courtesy [http://www.nypa.gov/] ) The President said, "We have found diagrams of American nuclear power plants and public water facilities, detailed instructions for making chemical weapons, surveillance maps of American cities, and thorough descriptions of landmarks in America and throughout the world." Jeffords said the most recent threats point up the urgent need to strengthen security at the nuclear plants. "We are living in a changed world, one that requires us to look at the darkest scenarios and plan accordingly," he said. "We must do everything within our means to ensure that our nuclear power plants are safe and secure. Our nation demands it and deserves nothing else." [Jeffords] Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont (Photo courtesy Office of the Senator) An Independent, Jeffords chairs the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, which has jurisdiction over the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Senators Reid, Clinton and Lieberman are members of the committee which recently launched a series of hearings to address security needs at nuclear power facilities. The senators traveled to Los Alamos National Laboratory on Thursday, and Sandia National Laboratory on Friday to review the security of the U.S. nuclear stockpile and be briefed on American efforts in the global fight against weapons of mass destruction, stopping the spread of nuclear weapons, and safeguarding former Soviet Union nuclear material. Joining Reid in briefings at the Los Alamos and Sandia Labs were New Mexico Senators Pete Domenici, a Republican who is ranking member of the Appropriations Sub-Committee on Energy and Water Development, and Jeff Bingaman, a Democrat who chairs the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, as well as John Gordon, undersecretary for nuclear security and administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Domenici said the lab tours represent a bipartisan show of confidence in the capabilities of the national lab facilities and the New Mexicans who work there. Domenici said President Bush is expected to request $6.2 billion for that National Nuclear Security Administration's stockpile stewardship program – a $400 million increase over current funding. [Domenici] Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico (Photo courtesy [http://www.lanl.gov] ) Domenici said the briefings will solidify the bipartisan cooperation he and Senator Reid have demonstrated for years on the Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee funds the Energy Department, NNSA and the national laboratories. “There is much our nation can and must do to keep nuclear material out of the hands of terrorists,” said Senator Reid. As chairman of the Appropriations Sub-Committee on Energy and Water Development, Senator Reid oversees funding for the Department of Energy and the National Laboratory program. Warnings of potential air and ground attacks were issued to nuclear reactor operators by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission earlier this year. The FBI has said that threats against America's nuclear plants might have been recycled from old reports. "If that is the case, then our nation has been given a second chance to act in response to this terrifying information. We may not get a third chance," Reid cautioned. “The latest warning from the administration that our nation's nuclear power plants have been targeted by Al Quaeda terrorists makes clear that this is no longer a hypothetical scenario,” said Senator Clinton. “It is a very real threat to America's security. Given the urgency of these threats, we are calling on Congress to act immediately to pass our nuclear security bill. NRC depends on Congress for clear direction on this issue." "Tragically," she said, "it took the horrific events of September 11th and a string of ensuing security breaches for our nation to federalize security at our nation's airports. It should not take another tragedy before we take action to increase security at our nation's nuclear power plants.” The Nuclear Security Act of 2001 requires the comprehensive assessment of the design, operation, and physical protection of all sensitive nuclear facilities by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission within 180 days. Based on the outcomes of these assessments, plant specific security plans will be developed within six months and implemented within 18 months. The bill federalizes security at sensitive nuclear facilities through the establishment of a federal nuclear security force within the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Members of the force would be required to meet strict qualification standards, background checks, training requirements, and proficiency reviews. The force would be in place in less than a year after the bill becomes law. [reactor] Maine Yankee nuclear power plant (Photo courtesy NRC) The bill requires security evaluations at sensitive nuclear facilities no less than once every two years. These evaluations would include force-on-force exercises that simulate air, water, and land assaults conducted by a mock terrorist team established within the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission had been conducting similar evaluations once every six to eight years, and was planning to allow the industry to conduct these evaluations themselves. The bill requires the NRC to request the deployment of the National Guard and the Coast Guard, and to request the restriction of air space, in the case of a state of war or national emergency. Under this legislation emergency response exercises would have to be conducted with federal, state and local emergency response personnel within 50 miles of a sensitive nuclear facility no less than once every three years. These exercises will be used to evaluate overall response capabilities and the effectiveness of emergency response plans, including evacuation plans. The bill establishes sufficient stockpiles of potassium iodide tablets within 50 miles of sensitive nuclear facilities and ensures that locally tailored distribution plans for the potassium iodide are in place. Potassium iodide has been proven to minimize the effects of radiation exposure when taken in a timely manner. © Environment News Service (ENS) 2001. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 34 Call for fed nuke security renewed Las Vegas SUN February 01, 2002 By Benjamin Grove WASHINGTON -- Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., has seized news reports that terrorists may be plotting to fly an airplane into a nuclear reactor and renewed his call for Congress to federalize security guards at nuclear power plants. The FBI and White House Office of Homeland Security on Thursday confirmed reports that a single captured al Qaida soldier told U.S. officials of the scheme being hatched by three terrorists who are in the United States. Officials stressed that the report is sketchy and cannot be confirmed. But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Jan. 23 issued an advisory about the alleged plot to the owners of the nation's 103 nuclear reactors. It was the 20th security warning issued by the NRC since Sept. 11. In a related event, President Bush this week announced in his State of the Union address that diagrams of U.S. plants had been found in Afghanistan. Nuclear plants are operating at the highest level of security, NRC spokeswoman Beth Hayden said. Plant operators, who do not release detailed information about security forces at each plant, have stressed that their armed guards are highly trained. Many guards have law enforcement and military backgrounds, say officials for the Nuclear Energy Institute, a top industry lobby group. Plant owners strongly oppose legislation aimed at putting plant security officers under the federal jurisdiction of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as proposed by Reid. "What are you going to gain?" NEI executive vice president Angelina Howard asked in a recent interview. Industry leaders say plant security officers are already an elite force. They say federalizing security will only put a bureaucracy in charge in the case of an emergency, instead of on-site plant managers. Industry leaders also said a nuclear reactor is a tiny target for an airplane -- one-eighth as tall as the World Trade Center and far narrower than the Pentagon. Multiple concrete and steel barriers protect reactor cores, although it is not known if anything could protect a reactor from a commercial jetliner. Reid points to security tests in which commandos in mock raids have gained access to plants. Nuclear industry officials say the commandos have never gotten to a point where they could damage a reactor core. But Reid is adamant that his bill would ensure better-trained guards and will make plants safer from all kinds of attacks. Reid, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, plans to push the issue toward the top of the Senate agenda. "There is much our nation can and must do to keep nuclear material out of the hands of terrorists," Reid said. "Unfortunately nuclear reactors in the United States are poorly protected against a coordinated assault from suicidal terrorists. This must change." Reid's written statement was released after he toured toured Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico, which is partly responsible for monitoring the nation's nuclear stockpile. Lab officials briefed Reid on terrorist attempts to construct and obtain nuclear devices. Reid's bill would also call for new plant site security plans and increased security at each plant. It's not clear if lawmakers will embrace Reid's legislation in the face of significant industry opposition. A similar bill has been introduced in the House. "Our nation can't afford to have anything less than the best-trained professionals guarding our nuclear plants," Reid, flanked by Sens. James Jeffords, I-Vt., Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., said at a press conference in November. The Associated Press contributed to this report. All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 35 Editorials: Nuke Scare Mushrooms New York Daily News Online It is the stuff of nightmares. American intelligence has information suggesting that Al Qaeda is planning attacks on nuclear power plants in the U.S. — most probably, suicide strikes like those against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Hijacked planes plummeting from the sky. And the potential hijackers may already be here, hibernating in terrorist sleeper cells. Despite reassurances by some officials, it's still not certain that reactor containment buildings would survive a direct hit by a jetliner. Especially one full of fuel. And even the Nuclear Regulatory Commission admits that the facilities fail mock terrorist-attack drills 50% of the time. Then there's the possibility of truck bombs. Or a boat full of explosives floating up to one of these plants. Not sufficiently frightened yet? James Kallstrom, Gov. Pataki's security chief, thinks that armed terrorists could storm the gates of a nuclear power plant and take it over. If Kallstrom, a former FBI honcho, sees this danger as real, so should Washington. His boss, the governor, is 100% correct in asking the feds to conduct a nationwide review of emergency plans for all plants. And he wants the Indian Point facility, just 35 miles north of Manhattan, to be first on the list. Other countries have acted in self-defense. France has begun installing surface-to-air missiles at its nuclear sites. But even after Sept. 11, the U.S. has been maddeningly slow to respond to this threat. It can start with Congress passing the bill, co-sponsored by Sen. Hillary Clinton, that would federalize security at the country's 103 nuke plants. These must be protected by professional law enforcement personnel, not private contractors. For its part, the Federal Aviation Administration should reimpose the no-fly zones that were in place over nuclear plants for about a week in November. That ban applied to private planes only. Rep. Benjamin Gilman, whose district includes Indian Point, properly argues that all planes should be kept at least 10 miles away. And in case the unthinkable happens, it makes sense for states with nuclear power plants to stock up on potassium iodide, a medicine that prevents the thyroid gland from storing radioactive material. Wisely, Pataki has requested large supplies of the drug from Washington. These are all very scary notions. But they are part of the war-footing world in which we now live. Al Qaeda's cavemen want nothing more than to drive Western civilization back into the Stone Age. America must use all its resources to make sure that the script written by Osama Bin Laden does not become reality. Hayden's Concerto When the state Board of Regents picks a new chancellor from its ranks, he or she must continue down the path of high educational standards set by Carl Hayden, who will retire next month. For seven years, Hayden led his 15 fellow Regents in efforts to improve achievement from kindergarten through college, of students and teachers. He deserves the heartfelt thanks of all New Yorkers. The Regents — who are essentially appointed by the Assembly — must name as Hayden's replacement someone who will maintain the pace and the push for better schools. And they must resist any efforts by legislators to back away from the quest. The chancellor's retirement will bring to three the vacancies on the board. It's up to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver to ensure that standards are the priority of the individuals named to all three seats. Hayden spent his entire tenure as chancellor in pursuit of excellence. Within months of his 1995 appointment, he brought in Richard Mills as education commissioner. The pair went straight to work, and their efforts improved education across the spectrum. Among other things: They wiped out the dumbed-down Regents Competency Test and required that every high school student take and pass the more rigorous Regents exams. They ejected the board and the president of Adelphi University when the Long Island school was being used as a piggy bank. They cracked down on City University for producing teachers who couldn't pass state licensing tests. They put scores of failing public schools on an official watch list and closed the most abysmal. And they instituted tests to properly measure achievement. Much has been accomplished in the past seven years. Too much to let things slip back to the old days, the old ways. A lawyer from upstate Elmira who served out of a sense of duty, and for no salary, Hayden reinvigorated the Board of Regents and turned a sleepy 18th-century institution into a vital force for the 21st. It must remain so. It must continue to move forward. For the sake of every school child in the state. You can e-mail the Daily News editors at voicers@edit.nydailynews.com [voicers@edit.nydailynews.com] Please include your full name, address and phone number. The Daily News reserves the right to edit letters. The shorter the letter, the better the chance it will be used. Original Publication Date: 2/3/02 ***************************************************************** 36 Anti-Radiation Pills Sell Out Near Indian Point Newsday.com - By Kathleen Kerr Staff Writer February 1, 2002 Little white pills of potassium iodide, which stave off radiation sickness, sold out Friday at a pharmacy near the Indian Point nuclear plant, one of the few stores in the tri-state area that carry them. After Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned Thursday of the threat of a terrorist attack on a nuclear plant, residents flooded the Westchester County pharmacy with requests for the pills, costing $14 for a two-supply. Indian Point, in the village of Buchanan about 30 miles north of midtown Manhattan, overlooks the Hudson River — a target for attacks by land, water and air. Dozens of people flooded the Healthy Choice Apothecary in Chappaqua with requests for potassium iodide pills, believed to ward off radiation-induced thyroid cancer. The store is one of just a few in the tri-state area that carry the over-the-counter medication. But scientists say the danger isn’t confined to Westchester. Depending on weather and wind drift, an attack on Indian Point could send radiation wafting towards the city, Long Island or New Jersey. Some city residents already have contacted the Chappaqua store to stock up on the pills. “Today I ran out,” Jacques Saisselin, manager of the apothecary, said of his supply. “We got between 25 and 50 requests today.” Meanwhile, a Yorktown woman said she plans to move to Tarrytown, south of the 10-mile evacuation zone surrounding Indian Point. People within the 10-mile radius are in the most danger. “We had plans to downsize anyway,” said Ellen Sander. “One of the things I wanted when we decided to move was I wouldn’t stay in the evacuation zone.” A radiation leak can be small, as contained leaks at Indian Point have been, or large and calamitous, as the incident at the Chernobyl plant in the then-Soviet Union. Large leak can contaminate the water supply and plant life. Still, real estate agent Monique Van Grinsven, who works for Houlihan Lawrence in Croton-on-Hudson, said home sales have remained brisk. Most homeowner’s insurance excludes damage that results from a nuclear accident or bomb. “Our homeowner’s policies exclude nuclear hazards, including radiation and radiation hazard,” said State Farm Insurance spokeswoman Allison Bertsche. “It could theoretically wipe out the funds of the entire industry.” Linda Puglisi, supervisor of the Town of Cortlandt which includes Buchanan and Indian Point, said state and federal officials need to do more. “We need constant, continual protection around the plant,” Puglisi said. “They have the National Guard and internal security at just a couple of entry points.” State security czar James Kallstrom said recently the plant’s protection against a terrorist threat is “robust.” Late Friday, Edward F. Jacoby Jr., director of the state’s Emergency Management Office, announced plans to review safety and emergency planning at New York’s nuclear plants. Jacoby has asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to provide 1.2 million doses of potassium iodide for residents near the state’s three nuclear plants. Copyright © 2002, Newsday, Inc. ***************************************************************** 37 Pataki calls for federal review of emergency planning at nuke sites By Jim Fitzgerald, Associated Press, 2/1/2002 18:23 WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. (AP) Gov. George Pataki asked the federal government on Friday to review emergency plans for nuclear power plants, taking into account the threat of terrorism and starting with Indian Point in the New York City suburbs. He also requested a stockpile of potassium iodide, a drug that has been shown to fight some effects of radiation poisoning. ''Everything changed on Sept. 11,'' the governor said at a news conference. ''What was adequate Sept. 10 may not be adequate Sept. 12.'' At the same time, Rep. Nita Lowey called for the decommissioning of the two Indian Point plants, saying they present ''an unacceptable risk to the safety and security of the New York metropolitan area.'' The Democratic congresswoman, who represents most of Westchester County, joins dozens of local officials and activists who have demanded that the plants in Buchanan be shut down at least temporarily because of the threat of an airborne terrorist attack like the one that brought down the World Trade Center. Many say the existing evacuation plan for the area around the plants is nearly useless. Pataki, a Republican, said the Federal Emergency Management Agency had last certified emergency planning at Indian Point in 1996. He asked that the plans be ''completely reassessed to see if they meet the new reality.'' President Bush said Tuesday that diagrams of American nuclear power plants had been found by U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Last week, the federal government alerted nuclear plants that terrorists may be planning an attack using a hijacked commercial airliner. Pataki said, however, ''We have no specific threats, no warnings or indications against any facility or target in New York State and that includes Indian Point. They are all generic warnings.'' Edward F. Jacoby Jr., director of the state Emergency Management Office, said his office was asking FEMA and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for comprehensive reviews at Indian Point 2 and 3, Nine Mile 1 and 2 near Oswego and the Ginna nuclear station near Rochester. Pataki suggested that the review be done nationwide, but ''We want them to start with Indian Point because this is the nuclear power plant in a very environmentally sensitive area but more important an area with millions of people.'' The state asked the NRC for 1.2 million tablets of potassium iodide for residents around the three nuclear sites. The chemical, known as KI, has been shown to offer some protection from radiation illness, especially in children, and the NRC has been offering it to states. Pataki said the drug would be kept ''in appropriate locations within the radius'' of the nuclear plants. The governor's call for a review came as the state signed off on an annual letter to FEMA stating that the counties around the nuclear plants had completed updates of their emergency plans, which include the evacuation of residents within 10 miles of the plants. Around Indian Point, 35 miles north of midtown Manhattan, activists and some local officials had been imploring the state not to approve the evacuation plan. They say it cannot work because there are too many people and too few roads. Many find it unlikely that bus drivers assigned to take schoolchildren out of a contaminated area would really venture in, or that parents would follow instructions to stay out of the area and let the government evacuate their children. Alex Matthiessen, who leads the Riverkeeper environmental group, said he was disappointed that Pataki had signed off on the plan but was encouraged by his request for a review. ''It's a positive sign, and I applaud him for it,'' Matthiessen said. ''My concern is for the ability of FEMA and the NRC to conduct a truly independent review. I encourage the governor to call on them to conduct it in full view of the public.'' Pataki said Tom Ridge, the homeland security chief, told him the federal review ''was an excellent suggestion'' and would have his office work on it. The governor said FEMA Director Joe Allbaugh ''is very supportive.'' ***************************************************************** 38 Town Reacts To Nuclear Threat Saturday February 02 07:16 AM EST By Kathleen Kerr Little white pills of potassium iodide, which stave off radiation sickness, sold out Friday at a pharmacy near the Indian Point nuclear plant, one of the few stores in the tri-state area that carries them. After Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned Thursday of the threat of terrorist attacks on the nation's nuclear plants, residents flooded the Westchester County pharmacy with requests for the pills, costing $14 for a two-week supply. Indian Point, overlooking the Hudson River in the village of Buchanan, about 30 miles north of midtown Manhattan, could be a target for an attack by land, water or air. Dozens of people flooded the Healthy Choice Apothecary in Chappaqua with requests for the over-the-counter pills, which can ward off radiation-induced thyroid cancer. Copyright © 2002 Yahoo! Inc., and ***************************************************************** 39 Water leaks from nuclear-waste reprocessing plant pool - Japan Today Japan News - News - Saturday, February 2, 2002 at 10:30 JST AOMORI — Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd said Friday it has confirmed that water containing radioactive materials has been leaking from a storage pool at its nuclear-waste reprocessing facility in Rokkasho village, Aomori Prefecture. But while some 5,000 liters of water has leaked so far, the water is being reprocessed by a disposal facility for radioactive liquid waste and no threat to the environment is seen, the company said. (Kyodo News) ***************************************************************** 40 Dubai: Symposium on dangers of nuclear waste GN Online: Saturday, February 02, 2002 Abu Dhabi |By A Staff Reporter | 02-02-2002 A two-day symposium on the dangers of nuclear waste and weapons of mass destruction will be held next week at the Zayed Centre for Coordination and Follow-Up. Held under the patronage of the Arab League, the symposium, on February 5 and 6, will be in line with the centre's general directive for a united Arab strategic vision to defend contemporary challenges faced by Arab nations. The meet will call for an intensive Arab effort under the umbrella of the Arab League, and prepare an introductory paper for the seventh conference, 'Review of nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament treaty', to be held in 2005. The centre, in a recent published study 'Threats of Israel Nuclear Armament on Arab National Security and Environment', warns against the danger posed by Israeli nuclear weapons threatening Arab national security and environment. It has been reported, the study said, that the nuclear explosion in Naqab desert and the Gulf of Aqaba are contaminating Arab national security and the environment. In a previous study entitled 'Israeli Nuclear Weapons: Reality and illusions', the centre explained the development of Israeli nuclear power and various biological chemical and nuclear installations. It also called on Arab and Islamic communities to bridge the gap between Israeli's nuclear development programme and the lack of an Arab one in this field. The participants at the symposium will be Mohammed Zakaria Ismail, Assistant Secretary General of Foreign Affairs at the Arab League; Ambassador Mohammed Subeih, Palestinian permanent representative of the Arab League; Dr Fawzi Hussain Hamad, Member of the Counsellor Committee for Nuclear Energy at the International Atomic Energy Agency; Dr Gen. Zakaria Hussain Ahmed, Professor of Strategic Sciences and senior advisor Arab Academy for Science and Technology; and Dr Mohmoud Saeed Abdul Dhaher, expert in political and strategical affairs. ***************************************************************** 41 Health fears over Dounreay plan to ship nuclear waste to England Sunday Herald home Proposal to move 40 tonnes of deadly material coincides with shocking report on rise in radiation transport accidents By Rob Edwards Environment Editor MORE than 40 tonnes of deadly radioactive waste are due to be shipped from Dounreay on the north coast of Scotland to the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria over the next 10 years . The waste from a defunct reactor is full of plutonium, a highly toxic metal used as the explosive in atomic bombs. Because of the risk of terrorist attack, the precise amounts of plutonium involved and details of its transportation will be kept secret. But the plan is to take the plutonium from Dounreay by road, rail or sea to be separated at the old Magnox reprocessing plant at Sellafield before it closes in 2012. This has infuriated local authorities and environmentalists, who oppose the transport and reprocessing because of the dangers they pose to public health. Lorraine Mann of Scotland Against Nuclear Dumping says reprocessing radioactive waste at Sellafield shifts the problem south instead of solving it: 'It simply means that the population of the west coast of Scotland is going to suffer the risks posed by radioactive pollution instead of the population of the north and northeast coasts of Scotland.' Reprocessing was a bad way of dealing with the waste, and Scotland should not export it to England, she argues. 'I'm quite happy for it to be stored at Dounreay. It is the Highlands' responsibility to look after the waste.' The waste consists of 44 tonnes of 'breeder' fuel that was wrapped around the core of the Dounreay fast reactor, a prototype which was shut down in 1977. Eleven tonnes have been removed and put in storage nearby, but 33 tonnes are still trapped in the reactor vessel. A thousand fuel rods will have to be cut out by remote-controlled vehicles because the steel rack that holds them has been distorted by radiation. Engineers also have to drain the reactor of 57 tonnes of sodium and potassium coolant, which has been badly contaminated with radioactivity. Before they begin any of this work, £4 million is being spent on installing new power, ventilation and monitoring systems around the 47-year-old reactor. The aim of the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) is to start extracting the fuel and sending it to Sellafield from 2007. In addition, the UKAEA is this spring planning to ask for permission to start transporting thousands of cubic metres of low-level radioactive waste from Dounreay to the nuclear dump at Drigg, near Sellafield. This means either a train-load every month or a lorry-load every fortnight for the next five to 10 years. 'The future restoration of the Dounreay site will require the transport of significant quantities of material to other facilities and obviously Sellafield will have a major role,' Dounreay spokesman Colin Punler told the Sunday Herald. 'Our aim is to remove as much of the material from the site as possible to allow it to be decommissioned.' Discussions were under way between Dounreay, Sellafield and the nuclear bomb factory at Aldermaston in Berkshire to find a UK-wide solution for the disposal of the many 'exotic' nuclear materials at each site. But Punler denied that transporting radioactive waste to Sellafield was dangerous. He said: 'Every time you transport material there is a potential risk but strict preparations are taken to guard against that risk. We've been moving material to and from Dounreay for nearly 50 years without incident. The simple fact is that we cannot decommission the site without removing the material.' Shipping nuclear waste around Scotland will face concerted opposition, however. 'The UKAEA should drop these plans now, and get on with developing monitorable and retrievable storage at Dounreay,' says Glasgow councillor David Stevenson, convenor of Scotland's alliance of 12 anti-nuclear councils. 'Scottish nuclear-free local authorities will vigorously oppose the transport of any nuclear waste from Dounreay to Sellafield, whether by sea or by road the length of Scotland.' ©2002 smg sunday newspapers ltd. no.176088. all rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 42 Revealed: radiation transport accidents doubled in past 10 years Sunday Herald home By Rob Edwards A NEW government report reveals there were 38 reported accidents involving the movement of radioactive materials by rail, road and air in the UK during 2000, compared to 19 in 1990. In 2000 there was a derailment, a road crash, a theft and a series of instances where radiation packages which were faulty, mislabelled or damaged. In 10 instances containers were contaminated in excess of safe limits. Local authorities and environ mental groups say health is being jeopardised, and that the number of radioactive shipments should be reduced. Radioactive materials are moved for many reasons. Spent fuel is regularly sent by rail from nuclear power stations to Sellafield in Cumbria to be reprocessed and stored. Radiation sources used in hospitals and factories are often moved from one facility to another. According to the government's National Radiological Protection Board, which produced the report, t he highest proportion of accidents in 2000 involved contamination associated with fuel flasks from nuclear stations. Radioactivity on the outside of six flasks and on four rail wagons was found to breach internationally recommended levels. Shipping documents were incorrect or absent in seven cases, radioactive material was wrongly transported as refuse or scrap in four, and packages were damaged in three incidents. The NRPB put the increased number of accidents down to a greater volume of traffic and more efficient reporting of incidents, and admitted it was 'very unlikely' that people received significant doses of radiation in any of the incidents. But Glasgow councillor David Stevenson, convener of the 12-strong group of Scottish nuclear-free local authorities, was not reassured. ' All areas are affected by nuclear transport,' he said. 'Any increase in incidents is of serious concern for public safety. There needs to be far more public overseeing of these transports .' Greenpeace accused nuclear operators of gambling with public safety. 'Movements of nuclear waste by train are almost always completely pointless and represent a mobile terrorist target,' said a spokesman. 'Transport workers and members of the public should not be needlessly exposed to radiation -- there is no such thing as a safe dose. ' T he NRPB report does not say exactly when or where any of the accidents happened, but a spokesman said 'certainly some' took place in Scotland. The Sunday Herald revealed in November that military nuclear materials were regularly taken by road through 21 local authorities in Scotland. In September we reported that the maximum speed of trains carrying radioactive waste was due to increase from 45mph to 60mph. www.shipping.dtlr.gov.uk/trm/ 2000review/ ©2002 smg sunday newspapers ltd. no.176088. all rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 43 Court Approves Nuclear-Waste Storage Site in New London, Conn., Area Izaskun E. Larraneta , The Day, New London, Conn. Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News ( February 02, 2002 ) Jan. 31--HADDAM--A federal court judge approved an agreement Tuesday that allows Connecticut Yankee Atomic Power Co. to build a spent nuclear-fuel storage complex the size of a football field on residential land in Haddam Neck. The settlement, which would create the state's first community-sanctioned storage facility, puts an end to a lawsuit filed by Connecticut Yankee that charged the town with illegally preventing it from storing the spent nuclear waste at the best possible site on its property. The town's selectmen had voted 2-1 on Jan. 23 to grant Connecticut Yankee a building permit to construct the facility at its preferred site. The company and the town were facing a Feb. 6 deadline to reach an agreement. If they couldn't, a federal judge would have decided the issue. After the judge signed the agreement on Tuesday, the town issued a building permit that allows the nuclear facility to start construction of a $40 million dry-cask storage complex on 15 acres. Construction is expected to take 10 months. The plant has been closed since 1996. The resolution came days after two local residents, former state Sen. Ed Munster and Ed Schwing, asked Attorney General Richard Blumenthal to review and, if necessary, rescind the deal with Connecticut Yankee before it was approved in court. "This is an attempt to get ahead of the attorney general before he reviewed the whole process," said Munster. "Storage of nuclear waste outside the area presently being used by the power plant into a residential area would in fact spoil another piece of land." Blumenthal said his office normally does not have authority over land-use issues but would still look into the matter. "We have fought in the past on the town's side against the efforts of Connecticut Yankee to override local zoning," said Blumenthal. "We have interest in the issue. We will examine it very closely." The agreement approved by U.S. District Judge Alan Nevas requires the company to pay the town $13 million over the next 10 years. The agreement also requires that Connecticut Yankee store only its spent nuclear waste at the site. The federal government, however, is not bound by those conditions and could order that outside fuel be stored there. "The most important issue for Connecticut Yankee is that the fueled is stored in the safest way," said Kelley Smith, a spokeswoman for the utility. "We recognize the town of Haddam never wanted to store this fuel. We are glad this issue is finally resolved and look forward to trying to get the government to get the fuel out of there." Schwing said selectmen overstepped their authority and tried to circumvent a unanimous Planning and Zoning Commission vote. The commission opposed Connecticut Yankee's proposal to build the nuclear waste storage facility outside the footprint, or specific area, of the decommissioned plant. "There are concerns with allowing Connecticut Yankee to build the first storage facility in the state in our town," said Schwing. "We don't want them to think that we are condoning the storage of high-level nuclear waste in a residential area." The town in 1962 allowed Connecticut Yankee to operate within a certain portion of the property. The agreement did not address what would happen to the spent fuel. The utility company proposed to place the spent fuel in a storage facility outside of its footprint but within its 500-acre property. Local historian Douglas Jones said that he was concerned with the plan, especially since part of the Connecticut Yankee property was the home of Venture Smith, a 17th-century black slave who bought his freedom and became one of East Haddam's leading citizens. Smith was an African prince who was kidnapped and sold into slavery. He eventually bought his freedom, and then that of his wife and three children. He owned land in Stonington and Long Island in addition to land on the Connecticut Yankee site. Remnants of his home have disintegrated but the foundation remains and undiscovered artifacts may still be on the land, Jones said. "His story is not widely known, but it is as great as the story of the Amistad," he said. "It's a shame that a land associated with a historical figure will be known for its nuclear waste. You wouldn't put a nuclear waste site next to Monticello or Mark Twain's house, but this decision shows the marginalization of the contributions that African-Americans and people of color made to the community and country." Keith Ainsworth, a selectman who voted in favor of the agreement, defended the board's action. "The biggest outrage is that the town of Haddam should have never been put in this position," said Ainsworth. "The Department of Energy was supposed to take title of the fuel and remove it from the CY site. We were placed in this position, and we made the best of it. The town of Waterford should learn a lesson on what Haddam went through." Waterford has another 25 years before Millstone Nuclear Power Station will have to store its spent fuel. It could, however, become an issue for the town if there is no national depository for the waste. The U.S. Department of Energy has recommended that Yucca Mountain in Nevada serve as the site for a nuclear waste dump. Ainsworth said that the Board of Selectmen, under town charter, has the right to settle lawsuits. "We did this because it was in the best interest of the town," said Ainsworth. "The vast majority of people in the town of Haddam are relieved that we took the action that we took." Selectman Phil Pessina also voted in favor of the agreement. First Selectman Tony Bondi voted against it, saying he did not believe a federal judge had the right to meddle or impose any order on the town's zoning regulations. "I feel we were intimidated," said Bondi. "The decision was fear-driven. If we went to trial, we would have had a better opportunity to prove our case." http://www.theday.com (c) 2002, The Day, New London, Conn. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune ***************************************************************** 44 Nuclear Waste, R.I.P Newsday.com - EDITORIAL It needs to go somewhere safe at last, and Yucca Mountain looks like the only valid choice. February 2, 2002 It's time for the United States government to choose between two risky options for storing - though not disposing of - highly radioactive waste from the nation's nuclear plants. So which would be more dangerous: Hauling spent fuel from reactors in 36 states to Nevada, as Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham recommends, and entombing the nasty stuff in Yucca Mountain, where Abraham says it could safely remain for 10,000 years or more? Or allowing the waste - about 40,000 metric tons of it by now, and increasing by 5 percent a year - to go on accumulating at 72 different plants while the Energy Department tackles a host of unanswered questions and everyone hopes a more agreeable alternative will turn up? Right now the first option appears the less dismal, if only because a single site in a vast desert should be easier to guard against possible terrorist attacks than 72 plants in more populated areas. But even this judgment is provisional; opponents point out that trucking nuclear waste across the country would present countless opportunities for terrorism. The next decision is up to President George W. Bush, and the meter is running: A federal appeals court ruled four years ago that the plant owners are entitled to unspecified damages because the government missed its own deadline for opening a waste repository. Bush is expected to side with Abraham, his energy secretary. But Nevada's governor can and will veto the Yucca Mountain plan. And though the Republican House seems likely to override him - what member wants nuclear waste anywhere near his or her district? - the Senate's No. 2 Democrat, Nevada's Harry Reid, will be fighting to uphold a veto. And the leader of the Democrats' precarious Senate majority, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, will be backing him up. No matter how the voting goes, nobody expects a Yucca Mountain repository to open before 2010. Court action by Nevada could hold it up even longer. In the meantime, we can all hope a better alternative does turn up. Copyright © 2002, Newsday, Inc. ***************************************************************** 45 DOE proposal to mix tailings with other mining wastes The Salt Lake Tribune -- State of the State Saturday, February 2, 2002 GRAND Summo Minerals Corp., has submitted a proposal to the U.S. Department of Energy to haul contaminated tailings from a site on the banks of the Colorado River outside Moab and mix them with tailings the company produces at a copper mine it operates in Lisbon Valley, 50 miles southeast of the town. Tailings are residue separated in the preparation of ores. The Department of Energy is trying to decide what to do with tailings from the processing of uranium ore by Atlas Corp. and left on the banks of the river by the company, which has filed bankruptcy. Summo would haul away the tailings using the "road train" trucking method, which has proven effective in Australia. The "road trains" would consist of three or four trailers behind a single tractor. The DOE has expressed concern about increased truck traffic on U.S. 191. -- The Times-Independent o © Copyright 2002, The Salt Lake Tribune ***************************************************************** 46 Waiting For Nukes After five years in limbo, a fuel-treatment plant at Sellafield’s nuclear complex is at last going online. The problems it faces are worse than ever By William Underhill NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL Feb. 11 issue — Patience is an important virtue if you work in the nuclear-power industry, as Jack Allen knows. Five years ago his company, British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL), finished building a brand-new, state-of-the-art plant that would recycle radioactive material for reuse in nuclear reactors. But it never opened. Politicians dithered over whether it would ever make money, or whether the public would accept the grand opening of a new venture at Sellafield, the target of anti-nuclear protests for more than 25 years. This latest addition to Sellafield’s sprawling nuclear-power facilities, which include a power-generating reactor and a reprocessing plant that extracts plutonium from spent nuclear fuel, would provide 400 much-needed jobs to Britain’s northwest coast. Authorities weighed their decision with painstaking thoroughness, hearing 9,000 arguments for and against. Are jobs the only good reason to turn on the new Sellafield plant? In an industry rife with sensitive issues, the plant raises a particularly tricky one: what can be done with plutonium, a byproduct of nuclear reactors and dismantled nuclear weapons? The new plant offers an alternative to long-term storage: it blends the plutonium with uranium and produces pellets of “mixed oxide fuel,” or Mox, which can fuel other reactors. To its proponents, the Mox plant is a tidy solution: rather than stockpile plutonium, a key ingredient in nuclear weapons that terrorists and rogue nations covet, why not turn it into a more benign fuel for power plants? Detractors say making Mox presents its own security risks, and it’s too costly besides. Despite the pains authorities took to mollify the public, the plant has attracted a flurry of protests. “Plutonium is an embarrassment for the whole industry,” says Greenpeace campaigner Mark Johnston. “Mox is just a way they can sweep it under the carpet for a decade or so.” On its face, the case for Mox appears sound. Britain has long imported spent nuclear fuels from countries including Germany, Switzerland and Japan for reprocessing—separating it into plutonium, uranium and some leftover waste. While these countries ponder how to use or dispose of these materials, they continue to accumulate at Sellafield. Now Sellafield can offer to return the material in a handy form for fuel. The Mox plant takes the reprocessed plutonium and uranium, dries it, pulverizes it and compresses it into ceramic pellets. Plutonium is only 5 percent of Mox by volume, but it packs a wallop—one gram contains as much energy as two tons of coal. “This is a naturally occurring material and virtually free,” says Allen. “By returning the fuel to our customers as Mox, we are closing the loop.” The Bush administration this month announced that it favors converting plutonium from dismantled warheads to Mox, and Russia is headed down the same route. The technology is proven—France, Europe’s cheerleader for nuclear power, is a keen supporter—and reliable. Says John Rich of the World Nuclear Association: “This has to be an excellent way to destroy plutonium from cold-war nuclear arsenals while getting the benefits of vast amounts of clean energy.” The opponents of the new Mox plant aren’t easily convinced. BNFL is one of Britain’s least-popular companies, and it has enemies abroad as well. The 1,000-acre Sellafield site stands right beside the Irish Sea on a bleak patch of England’s coast. For the last 16 years the Irish government has been campaigning hard against its radioactive discharges into the sea, especially from the reprocessing plant. The opening of the Mox plant will not only add to the discharges, say the Irish, it poses extra security risks as well. Determined to see Sellafield closed, Ireland is now pursuing its case before international tribunals with support from Norway and other Nordic countries whose waters are also affected. Sellafield’s biggest problem may be economic. In the early, heady years of nuclear power, planners feared a shortage of uranium. One response was the attempt to develop “fast breeder” reactors, which produced a great deal of plutonium as a byproduct, but which could never meet efficiency targets. These days uranium is cheap and plentiful— much cheaper even than Mox. Energy markets are competitive: “why would a utility want to use a fuel that’s expensive?” says Martin Forwood of CORE, a local group that’s fought for the closure of Sellafield. He reckons that the only Mox customers will be such countries as Germany and Switzerland that are bound by long-term contracts to take home their reprocessed waste. Japan is the biggest potential market for Sellafield’s Mox—and the biggest source of worry. The Japanese have been leery of Sellafield since 1999, when workers at its pilot Mox plant were found to have faked quality-control data concerning a trial run converting nuclear material from Japan into Mox. A government report later blasted Sellafield for systematic management failures and threatened to close parts of the site. Even the most optimistic bean counters don’t think the Mox plant will come close to recouping its .470 million start-up costs. The current concern over terrorists isn’t likely to make things any easier for the Mox advocates. The Mox plant would send more plutonium-rich materials to and from Britain via rail and ship. Mindful of the risks, BNFL uses armored ships with a squad of police aboard for the six-week trip to Japan. “In the current world situation it seems crazy to be spreading plutonium around,” says Frank Barnaby of the Oxford Research Group, which opposes nuclear proliferation. Since the Mox plant would consume Sellafield’s stocks of plutonium at a slow pace, it’s not even a particularly good way of passing the plutonium buck. Given the political realities of nuclear-materials disposal, that may be good enough. © 2002 Newsweek, Inc. ***************************************************************** 47 Letters: Nevada's Yucca... [newsobserver.com, Raleigh, NC] SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2002 Regarding the Jan. 26 People's Forum letter headlined "Nevada's Yucca Mountain: an ideal storage site": The letter-writer, the chief nuclear officer at Progress Energy, asserts that "Studies have shown Yucca Mountain to be an ideal site." That is just untrue. The "science" is currently being called inadequate and/or incomplete by the General Accounting Office, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board and several international peer review panels. The question is not if the repository will release its contents, but when. Nevadans were promised, when Yucca Mountain was singled out as the only site to be studied, that if it could not meet all rules and regulations, it would be dropped from consideration. When the nuclear industry complains about the long time and huge amounts of money involved in the studies, perhaps they are forgetting the time and energy spent in changing the rules to be applied in determining the suitability of this site. Under the old rules the site could be disqualified if certain conditions were present -- no longer. Nevada is the third most earthquake-prone state, following Alaska and California. In 1992 an earthquake caused extensive damage to the Yucca Mountain field operation center. And the aquifer beneath the mountain is the water source for the state's largest dairy and for a farming community. Assuming that there are no plans to pull the plug on CP's nuclear power reactors, any waste that leaves your area will just be replaced. Yucca Mountain will never be the only place for high-level nuclear waste -- it would only be an additional place. Nevadans will not accept this decision. Judy Treichel Executive Director Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force Las Vegas ***************************************************************** 48 Yucca Letters: Spent fuel, not 'waste' [newsobserver.com, Raleigh, NC] SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2002 Your Jan. 24 editorial on Yucca Mountain and disposition of spent nuclear nuclear fuel showed a serious gap in understanding the technology and issues involved and/or lack of integrity, or both. First off, there are no "dumps" involved. That is a pejorative term that leaves the reader with a picture of mounds of randomly scattered trash and garbage with maybe wisps of smoke here and there. Nothing could be further from the truth. Whether in a pool or in dry storage at the reactor site, the spent fuel is in orderly arrays, under safe and secure conditions. At Yucca Mountain, or wherever, this would be even more so the case. There is no such thing as high-level waste in the commercial (i.e., nuclear plant operators) sector. You and your reporters indiscriminately refer to spent fuel as high-level waste. That's inaccurate and confusing. The stuff in storage at commercial nuclear plants is by definition spent nuclear fuel. It consists of pellets of uranium contained in metal cladding to form rods. These rods are assembled into clusters to form fuel assemblies (or bundles). These assemblies, when used up, are stored in water or in casks on the land surface. High-level waste is the stuff resulting from reprocessing irradiated targets or production fuel to recover uranium and plutonium. It is found only in the federal government sector, most prominently at Hanford, Wash., but also elsewhere. This high-level waste will probably be vitrified and eventually go into Yucca Mountain along with the spent nuclear fuel (inside special containers). Yucca is a well-engineered facility. It remains to be determined if all Nuclear Regulatory Commission and other regulatory requirements can be satisfied. If I were you I would be more than a little embarrassed to write so erroneously about the subject. It shouldn't be that hard to get better up to speed. Anyone who thinks wind and solar can make a significant contribution to U.S. industrial energy needs any time soon and maybe ever is foolish. DAVID BAILEY Aberdeen ***************************************************************** 49 Yucca Letters: Secure storage [newsobserver.com, Raleigh, NC] SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2002 I read the Jan. 26 People's Forum letter from C.S. Hinnant, chief nuclear officer at Progress Energy, about the selection of Yucca Mountain in Nevada as a permanent nuclear waste storage site. Unfortunately he failed to deal with the reality of the situation and continued the politics of smoke and mirrors that became apparent due to the combined negligence of the airline industry and the federal government on Sept. 11. Hinnant stated that "Progress Energy has been safely storing nuclear fuel at four plants" and that "Studies have shown Yucca Mountain to be an ideal site." The first statement ignores the fact that storing the nuclear waste in water creates a terrorist target that could result in a fuel rod fire at the Shearon Harris plant that would devastate this area, and fails to address the proven dry cask storage technology that would mitigate this concern. After all, one of the arguments for Yucca Mountain is that pond storage is risky. Furthermore, stating that Yucca Mountain is an ideal choice ignores the concerns of earthquakes and the real possibilities of contaminating water supplies. It is time for the nuclear industry to abandon its P.T. Barnum approach to public relations and deal with real science that addresses the evident weaknesses. Sept. 11 should have taught us that we need to deal with the issues and get the job of homeland security under way. William Delamar Raleigh ***************************************************************** 50 Symposium on dangers of nuclear waste in UAE United Arab Emirate [http://www.middleeastwire.com/uae] Posted Saturday February 2, 2002 - 07:44:28 AM EST Abu Dhabi - A two-day symposium on the dangers of nuclear waste and weapons of mass destruction will be held at the Zayed Centre for Coordination and Follow-Up. Held under the patronage of the Arab League, the symposium, on February 5 and 6, will be in line with the centre's general directive for a united Arab strategic vision to defend contemporary challenges faced by Arab nations, according to a report in "Gulf News." The meet will call for an intensive Arab effort under the umbrella of the Arab League, and prepare an introductory paper for the seventh conference, 'Review of nuclear non- proliferation and disarmament treaty', to be held in 2005. The centre, in a recent published study 'Threats of Israel Nuclear Armament on Arab National Security and Environment', warns against the danger posed by Israeli nuclear weapons threatening Arab national security and environment. © 2001 The Emirates News Agency (WAM). This news item is ***************************************************************** 51 Scientists to explain why Kursk sank Hoover's Online UK - February 3, 2002 4:05am Source: Interfax, February 01, 2002 GATCHINA (Leningrad region). Feb 1 (Interfax) - Scientists from the Central Scientific Research Center Prometei are planning to explain why the nuclear-powered submarine Kursk sank. Prometei chief Igor Gorynin, who is also a member of Russia's Academy of Sciences, told Interfax on Friday that "scientists are gradually making sense of what happened, but the final conclusion about the real cause of the submarine's sinking can be made only after the remnants of the first Kursk compartment have been raised." [RU ASIA EUROPE EMRG NEWS] az rm <> Copyright © 2002 Financial Times Limited - All Rights Reserved ***************************************************************** 52 Sen. Reid: Lab anti-terrorism contributions endless Las Vegas SUN February 01, 2002 ALBUQUERQUE (AP) - The contribution of the nation's laboratories to the war against terrorism could be endless, according to the No. 2 Democrat in the U.S. Senate and New Mexico's senior Republican senator. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nevada, along with Sens. Pete Domenici and Jeff Bingaman, took a whirlwind tour Friday of Sandia National Laboratories. "I learned of many, many things that are being done," Reid said during a news conference. "The things that are being done here are so important to the state of Nevada, the state of New Mexico, our country and the world." The senators were briefed on the lab's efforts to safeguard the former Soviet Union's nuclear material as well as its role in protecting the nation from terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Sandia developed a decontamination foam that has been used to neutralize anthrax spores at government buildings in Washington D.C. Testing at the lab showed the foam would kill or neutralize virtually any bioterrorism weapon known. Scientists also have developed an "electronic sniffer" that can detect solvents in groundwater and soil. The device is being developed further, possibly to detect other substances. The lab is also working on technology that would determine where structures are vulnerable and develop construction standards so that buildings can better withstand assaults. That particular research is somewhat comforting to Reid, chairman of a Senate appropriations subcommittee for energy and water. "We had a threat yesterday (Thursday) that was made public that al-Qaida has targeted in very specific ways nuclear reactors around the country. I was concerned yesterday," Reid said. But after visiting Sandia, the senator learned that researchers were "certainly way ahead of where I thought we were." The bipartisan group of senators agreed that making the labs a budget priority would boost homeland defense. "I think the threat and the actual destruction that took place on Sept. 11 is going to make it easier for us to get money for some of the programs that are certainly necessary," Reid said. Soon after the terrorist attacks, Domenici said Sandia began an inventory of technology that could help the country protect itself. "It was an amazing inventory and they can do much, much more," he said. The senators visited Los Alamos National Laboratory on Thursday. The visits originally were scheduled for Sept. 14, but were canceled after the attacks. On Friday, Bingaman and Domenici also were on hand for the official opening of the new headquarters for coordinating the Defense Department's high energy laser research. The office will serve as a national hub for laser research and development. On the Net: Sandia National Laboratories: http://www.sandia.gov [http://www.sandia.gov] Los Alamos National Laboratory: http://www.lanl.gov [http://www.lanl.gov] All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 53 Nuclear sub to go on display BBC News | ENGLAND | Thursday, 6 December, 2001, [Royal Navy's Courageous in port at Plymouth] Courageous has been defueled and de-equipped A decommissioned nuclear submarine which served in the Falklands war is going on public display at a Royal Navy base in Devon. Courageous, a 285-ft 3,500-tonne submarine, was taken out of commission in 1992. The Navy plans to display the vessel starting in spring 2002 as part of the development of the visitors' centre at its naval base in Plymouth. Base commander Commodore Ric Cheadle said: "We want to take the mystery out of how a nuclear-powered submarine works, and let the public see for themselves how safe they are and to learn about how we maintain and operate them. Guided tours "Putting Courageous on display is in line with our plans to expand the visitors' centre and the naval base museum to make us more accessible to the general public." [Control panel inside the submarine Courageous] Visitors will be able to tour the submarine The Navy said guided tours will be available aboard Courageous, which was built by Vickers Shipyard in Barrow and launched in 1970. The submarine was based in Faslane, Scotland, and arrived in Devonport in 1993 following decommissioning. The Navy said the vessel has been defuelled and de-equipped, which means the reactor core has been removed and the cooling circuit emptied. Commodore Cheadle said they are aiming to have the submarine open and available for members of the public to visit during next year. ***************************************************************** 54 Bush budget assigns $9.4 billion for war on terror Star Telegram | 02/02/2002 | [http://www.star-telegram.com/energy] By ALAN FRAM Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON - President Bush's new Pentagon budget assigns $9.4 billion to battle terrorism while boosting funds for buying weapons and providing better pay and benefits for the troops, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. The papers provide the first detailed look at Bush's $379.3 billion Defense Department request for the 2003 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1. He will send his overall $2.13 trillion budget to Congress on Monday. Spurred by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Bush and administration officials have said defense, domestic security and the economy will be the spending plan's top three priorities, with many other programs enduring cuts or much smaller rates of growth. "The budget fulfills President Bush's pledge to win the war against terrorism, defend America and its people, improve quality of life for our men and women in uniform and accelerate a bold transformation of the U.S. military to counter 21st century threats," one document says. The budget calls for an increase of $45 billion, or 13.5 percent, over this year's Defense Department total. Bush announced a $48 billion increase last week, but the budget documents use the smaller figure because of bookkeeping changes involving some retirement costs. Bush envisions the Pentagon's budget growing gradually to $451.4 billion in 2007, according to the documents. When past years' defense budgets are adjusted for inflation, the biggest ever was under President Reagan in 1985, $451.8 billion. Overall, the documents say, Bush would spend $396.1 billion for defense next year. The extra $16.8 billion is for defense programs outside the Pentagon, mostly the Energy Department's nuclear weapons budget. Along with the rest of his budget, Bush's defense proposal will be considered by Congress in coming months. But with a war against terror under way and troops in Afghanistan, lawmakers of both parties are sure to support healthy defense increases this year, even as deficits return. "We support every penny that's necessary to fight terrorism at home and abroad," said Thomas Kahn, Democratic staff director of the House Budget Committee. Even so, some congressional officials have privately criticized Bush's proposed increase as providing less than the numbers would make it appear. They say that after taking into account inflation, improvements to the ailing military health-care system and a $10 billion contingency fund that Bush is proposing to cover military operations, little is left to strengthen war-fighting capabilities. According to the documents, Bush's proposal includes $3 billion for counterterrorism programs, force protection and domestic security; $1.2 billion to continue combat air patrols over the United States; and extra money for communications, munitions and other items. The president also wants $68.7 billion for buying weapons and other equipment, up from the roughly $60 billion spent this year. The budget also requests $53.9 billion for research and development, nearly 10 percent above this year's total. It includes $7.8 billion for national missile defense research and testing procurement, plus $815 million for development of space-based sensors that can detect missile launches. That is about equal to this year's amount. The documents say Bush also is proposing: + A 4.1 percent increase in basic military pay, with possible additional raises for some officers. Troops got a 5 percent raise this year. + A cut in troops' out-of-pocket costs for private housing, from 11.3 percent to 7.5 percent. + Extra spending for costs of training and for the increased operations the services have performed since additional troops were deployed after the Sept. 11 attacks. The budget documents also claim about $9 billion in savings from unspecified "management improvements" and changes in acquisition procedures. In other details obtained by the AP, Bush's budget will propose: + A $1 billion increase, to $11.35 billion, for grants to states for school districts that have many low-income students. Bolstering the Title I education program was one focus of the school-improvement bill Congress passed last year. + $8.5 billion in grants to states for education for handicapped children, $1 billion more than was provided this year. [http://www.knightridderdigital.com/about/about.htm] ***************************************************************** 55 Powell Offers Reassurance to South Korea (washingtonpost.com) U.S. Remains Willing to Hold Talks With North, Seoul Counterpart Is Told By Peter Slevin Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, February 2, 2002; Page A19 Three days after President Bush declared North Korea part of an "axis of evil" developing weapons of mass destruction, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell tried to reassure South Korea yesterday that the United States remains willing to hold talks with the Stalinist government in Pyongyang. In a meeting with his South Korean counterpart, Han Seung Soo, in New York, Powell sought to ease South Korean concerns that the president's remarks could destabilize the Korean peninsula, but he did not back away from Bush's assertion that North Korea poses a threat to international security, according to a State Department spokesman. Powell said there would be no preconditions for talks and urged North Korea to remove troops and artillery from the fortified border with South Korea as a goodwill gesture, the official said. President Bush said in Washington that the Pyongyang government should withdraw conventional weapons and halt arms exports. "We would be more than happy to enter a dialogue with them, if that be the case," Bush said. Bush's strong words about North Korea in his State of the Union address Tuesday -- which came three weeks before he makes his first trip to South Korea -- surprised diplomats and Korea specialists and rattled a South Korean government committed to an opening to the North. In the speech, Bush charged that North Korea, along with Iraq and Iran, was seeking to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. "I'm coming to believe that the administration is not open to negotiation, which raises the question, what does one do about these problems if you don't even explore the diplomatic option," said Robert Gallucci, who negotiated a nuclear agreement with North Korea. "What I was surprised about was the 'axis' language and the willingness to make any diplomatic approach more problematic at this point." The Bush administration has been drafting what national security adviser Condoleezza Rice this week called a "road map for reciprocal steps" with North Korea. Senior diplomats met in late January in Seoul with their South Korean and Japanese partners to design a policy, just days before Bush's State of the Union remarks. On the day of Bush's address, some administration officials suggested that a resumption of negotiations with North Korea was on track. A former senior State Department official, briefed on Korean matters by a National Security Council staff member, left the White House satisfied that progress would be made by Washington, Tokyo and Seoul with Pyongyang. "I was shocked to hear what the president said about North Korea," this former official said. Two days after the speech, when the "axis of evil" formulation was getting headlines around the world, Powell counseled his senior staff to say nothing that would take the edge off the president's remarks. "We'd gotten up in the morning to read the newspapers with everybody all over the place," one State Department official said. Powell "said the president of the United States gave a State of the Union address that we will support." The official maintained that Bush's criticism of Pyongyang, which the president has renewed for three days since, could "galvanize people to say, 'This is important.' We'll meet anytime, anyplace, without preconditions, but they've refused so far." This is the second time in a year that the White House has found itself under fire for its Korea policy. After the Clinton administration pursued negotiations that took Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright to North Korea, the Bush administration suspended high-level talks while it undertook a policy review. In June, when the administration finished its review and sought talks on weapons programs and nuclear proliferation, it was North Korea that balked. One Asia expert said the North Koreans "never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity," adding that South Korean President Kim Dae Jung's commitment to his "Sunshine Policy" opening to the North makes it harder for Bush to get tough with Pyongyang. Another Asia specialist said the president misfired this week at a time when the State Department felt it was nursing relations with South Korea back to solid ground. "The president will clearly want to use this trip in February to provide greater clarity," said Kurt Campbell, a Pentagon official in the Clinton administration. "The biggest concern is our allies in Asia, Japan and South Korea, who I think were surprised by both the tone of this section of the speech and its substance." In the last six months, North Korea has continued to buy raw materials and components for its ballistic missile production facilities, particularly through firms based in China, according to an unclassified CIA report to Congress made public Wednesday. At the same time, the report said, "Pyongyang continued its attempts to procure technology worldwide that could have applications in its nuclear program." North Korea signed an agreement in 1994 under which it promised to end efforts to develop nuclear weapons, although U.S. intelligence has reported in the past that the country had enough plutonium for one or two bombs. During the first half of 2001, according to the report, North Korea continued to export ballistic missile equipment to countries in the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa. Staff writer Walter Pincus contributed to this report. © 2002 The Washington Post Company ***************************************************************** 56 U.S. Repeats Warnings on Terrorism ( washingtonpost.com) Bush Urges Other Nations To 'Get Their House in Order' By Karen DeYoung and Dana Milbank Washington Post Staff Writers Friday, February 1, 2002; Page A01 With President Bush in the lead, the administration yesterday toughened its warnings to Iraq, Iran and North Korea, brushing off angry responses from the targets of its rhetoric even while seeking to clarify its policy for U.S. allies. Those three nations and any others that develop weapons of mass destruction, sponsor terrorists or both "don't hold the values we hold dear" and are on a "watch list," Bush told a cheering crowd of Republican supporters in Atlanta. "People say, what does that mean? It means they better get their house in order, is what it means. It means they better respect the rule of law. It means they better not try to terrorize America and our friends and allies, or the justice of this nation will be served on them as well," Bush said. In background conversations with reporters and in public statements, senior administration officials tried to add more texture and nuance to his words, in response to queries from allied governments and media around the world. While underscoring the president's seriousness of purpose and the fact that no option has been ruled out, aides offered assurances that Bush was not signaling imminent military action. The three named countries "have a choice to make -- to abandon the course they now pursue," White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said in a speech to conservative activists meeting in Arlington. Aides traveling with Bush referred to that speech when asked for elaboration of the president's remarks. "As the president said, we must not and we will not wait on events while dangers gather," Rice continued, "and we will use every tool at our disposal to meet this grave global threat." In listing those tools, Rice made no mention of offensive military action, but said the administration "will work to strengthen nonproliferation regimes and export controls. We will use our new and budding relationship with Russia to redouble our efforts to prevent the leakage of dangerous materials and technologies. And we will move ahead with a missile defense system that can do the job, unconstrained by the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty." Officials acknowledged that these are not new activities or policy positions. Rather, they said, Bush hopes to galvanize the world into moving more forcefully on them lest military action be left as the only alternative. His audience, officials said, is not only the three countries he has called the "axis of evil," but also Russia and China, which the administration has charged sell the means to produce and deliver weapons of mass destruction, and those U.S. allies that might still be squeamish about the eventual need for expanded military action in the war on terrorism. Officials said the administration wants to impress Russia, in particular, with its seriousness in talks about that country's technology sales to Iran. The discussions have borne little fruit so far. Bush has brought up his concern about weapons exports to Iran and Iraq in conversations with China, but officials said there has been little movement. Two Chinese companies were banned last week from doing business in the United States after they allegedly delivered to Iran equipment and technology for producing biological or chemical weapons. "The president is calling on the world, on our friends and our allies, to join us in preventing these regimes from developing and deploying these weapons, either directly or through stateless terrorist surrogates," Rice said. "This is a serious matter and it requires a serious response." In a news briefing dominated yesterday with questions about Bush's intentions, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the president had always attached high priority to the issue of nonproliferation. Many of the governments and countries seeking clarification "are familiar with the various initiatives we have taken and are taking in this regard," Boucher said. As the closest U.S. partner in the anti-terrorism coalition, Britain yesterday was supportive but nonspecific. "We share the profound concern of the United States administration . . . and the need for firm action to be taken in respect to that terrorism," said Foreign Secretary Jack Straw after a visit with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. "It's for other European nations to express their own views." Another European diplomat, who asked not to be named, said Bush's speech was "perceived in Europe and beyond as a combative, wartime speech, and very shrewd domestic policy. . . . The rationale seems to be to find a way to make his mission -- the fight against terrorism, a very noble fight -- consistent with his religion, which is missile defense." In interviews before departing late yesterday afternoon for Washington and a meeting with Bush, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder declined to comment on the speech, telling one interviewer that "at present, we are especially focused . . . on Afghanistan." He said discussion about future targets was theoretical. Jordan's King Abdullah, stopping in Washington on his way to the World Economic Forum in New York, demurred when asked by "CBS Morning News" whether he agreed with Bush's assessment of the three rogue nations. His government, he said, has always thought that "dialogue is the way to go and not armed conflict." In New Delhi, an Indian foreign ministry spokesman said Bush's view of Iran, at least, was "not the way we look at it." In Beijing, foreign ministry spokesman Kong Quan said of the "axis of evil" reference that "the Chinese side does not advocate using this kind of language in international relations." The administration has charged that Iraq and Iran are well along in the production of chemical or biological weapons -- perhaps both -- and the acquisition of ballistic missile technology to deliver it, and warned that they may be tempted to pass them along to terrorist organizations. Both countries yesterday repeated earlier denunciations of Bush's speech. North Korea, which Rice called "the world's number one merchant for ballistic missiles, open for business with anyone, no matter how malign the buyer's intentions," responded yesterday for the first time. It said the United States had "pushed the situation to the brink of war after throwing away even the mask of dialogue and negotiations." Bush's two-day tour of the Southeast was intended to promote a new initiative encouraging volunteerism and national service. But much of his message was focused on the terrorism war. Facing supporters at his arrival at an airport hangar in Daytona Beach, Fla., Wednesday night, Bush used the word "evil" 10 times in his speech. "I like to kind of tease the enemy: They must have been watching too much daytime TV," he said. "They thought we would cower in the face of terror. And my, my, are they wrong." "The security of the United States of America is my most important job," Bush said in Atlanta yesterday, in justifying his proposed $48 billion increase in the 2003 defense budget. "And I take it seriously. . . . The number one priority of my budget is the defense of the United States of America." In his own speech on the budget, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday that the United States could face terrorist action "vastly more deadly" than the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington, particularly from terrorists with ballistic missiles armed with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons that could kill thousands. "The best, and in some cases, the only defense is a good offense," Rumsfeld said at the National Defense University. "The real concern at the present time," he said, "is the nexus between terrorist networks and terrorist states that have weapons of mass destruction. . . . Let there be no doubt: There is that nexus." Milbank reported from Atlanta. © 2002 The Washington Post Company ***************************************************************** 57 Bush Sees Big Rise in Military Budget for Next 5 Years Yahoo! News - Sat Feb 2, 8:57 AM ET By JAMES DAO [http://www.nytimes.com] WASHINGTON, Feb. 1 In a military buildup rivaling that of the Reagan era, the Bush administration will call for increasing the Pentagon's yearly budget by $120 billion over the next five years, to $451 billion in 2007, according to Defense Department documents. By the end of the five-year period, spending to buy weapons and other military supplies alone would swell to $99 billion a year from $61 billion this year. Spending on personnel, operations and research programs would also grow, but not as fast. Mr. Bush's proposal would spend about a quarter of a trillion dollars more on the military over the next five years than if the Pentagon budget simply increased at the rate of inflation. That growth would come at the same time that Mr. Bush's tax cut, worth $1.35 trillion over 10 years, gradually phases in. Details of Mr. Bush's proposal are to be presented formally to Congress on Monday, but the documents describing the proposal began to circulate in Washington today and their details were provided by industry and Congressional officials. Mr. Bush has already said that he would propose a $48 billion increase in Pentagon spending for next year alone, pumping money into building new fighter jets and high-tech munitions, raising troop pay and expanding health care benefits. The increase over current Pentagon spending would be about 12 percent, the largest such increase in 20 years. But spending growth of that magnitude, if approved by Congress, would also create a ripple effect that would probably lock the Pentagon into major budget increases for many years as more big-ticket weapons reach the assembly line and entitlement programs like health care for military personnel expand, military experts said. Indeed, Mr. Bush's plan would increase Pentagon spending by about 30 percent through 2007, a pace that is only somewhat slower than President Ronald Reagan's military buildup between 1981 and 1985, the largest ever during peace time. "By historical standards, this is a big increase," said Steven Kosiak, a budget analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an organization in Washington that studies military policy. Though the combination of tax cuts and increased military spending would likely aggravate the budget deficit and create pressure on Congress to restrain domestic spending, many senior Democrats on Capitol Hill said they expected to support Mr. Bush's plan as long as the war on terrorism continues. Those Democrats and their aides contend that with Mr. Bush's approval rating at above 80 percent, and with public support for the war running high, opposing military spending would be a political blunder. "The president will get largely what he asks for in this area," said Senator Kent Conrad, a Democrat from North Dakota who is chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. "We're at war, and when the president asks for additional resources for national defense, he generally gets it." Representative Ike Skelton, a Missouri Democrat who is the ranking minority member on the House Armed Services Committee, said the Pentagon budget "will pass at the size the president has asked for," though he said Congress might try to shift money around within the president's proposal. "The question is not whether it's the right amount of money," Mr. Skelton said. "The question is how do you spend it. The priority has to be taking care of the troops and their families, because they are the basis of our quality military." Under the plan Mr. Bush will present to Congress on Monday, Pentagon spending would rise to $379 billion next year. The plan also calls for spending $16.8 billion on Department of Energy programs, principally maintaining the nuclear stockpile, bringing total military spending to $396 billion. In a proposal that has caught bipartisan attention on Capitol Hill, Mr. Bush has also called for creating a $10 billion contingency fund for the war on terrorism, which would allow him to spend money on military operations without seeking prior approval from Congress. Congress historically has resisted efforts by presidents to usurp the power of purse, and senior lawmakers in both parties have expressed skepticism about Mr. Bush's contingency fund proposal. Senator Conrad called the contingency fund "highly questionable." He said that Congress historically has opposed giving the president "a pool of money that's not for any designated purpose." But aides to several senior Democrats said that rather than trying to eliminate the contingency fund, Congress might simply allocate the $10 billion to other military programs, particularly ones that directly benefit their districts. Though some of the proposed $48 billion increase next year would help pay for the war in Afghanistan, most of it would go toward improving pay and benefits for troops, rebuilding equipment and reversing what Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld has called the Pentagon's "procurement holiday," which followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. The part of the budget dedicated to buying weapons and supplies would increase by $7.6 billion, to $68.7 billion, an amount that was considered disappointing by some military contractors. By comparison, President Reagan raised procurement spending by more than $20 billion between 1981 and 1982, as measured by inflation-adjusted dollars. Still, Mr. Bush's plan pleased many senior military officers. It would provide $475 million for the Crusader mobile howitzer and $910 million for the Comanche reconnaissance helicopter, Army programs that last year were considered in grave danger of being killed. The plan also calls for spending $5.2 billion, a $1.3 billion increase, to buy 23 F-22 Raptor stealth fighter jets, the Air Force's top budget priority. And it proposes to nearly double spending on a surveillance satellite system, known as Space Based Infrared Systems-High, to $815 million. The program, which will be an important component of a missile defense shield, has been over budget and behind schedule. The plan proposes keeping research and development on missile defense level at about $8 billion. The budget proposes to sharply increase spending on a number of programs that Mr. Rumsfeld contends would "transform" the military into a more lethal, light and agile force. It would spend $1 billion to develop or speed up production of unpiloted aircraft, including the Predator and Global Hawk, which helped spot targets in Afghanistan. The proposal would also allocate $1 billion to begin refurbishing four Trident submarines so that they can fire conventional Tomahawk cruise missiles rather than nuclear-tipped missiles. Military planners say the plan would greatly increase the Navy's ability to strike in-land targets with great precision. The plan calls for spending $1.1 billion to expand production of laser- and satellite-guided bombs, which were the weapons of choice in Afghanistan. But the procurement budget did not grow as much as many military officers and military contracts had hoped, largely because of sharply rising costs for entitlement programs and maintenance operations. As has already been mandated by Congress, the budget would increase military base pay by 4.1 percent and improve off-base housing allowances. And health care spending would rise sharply to pay for a new program that extends military health care benefits to retired career military personnel. One part of the procurement budget that has already generated disappointment is the shipbuilding account, which calls for building five ships next year, including $2.6 billion for a DDG-51 destroyer and $2.4 billion for a Virginia-class submarine. Advocates of shipbuilding on Capitol Hill say the Navy needs to build eight or more ships a year to prevent the fleet from falling much below its current level of about 310 ships. ***************************************************************** 58 Japan, Russia Pledge Cooperation Over Antiterrorism Xinhuanet 2002-02-02 17:17:49 TOKYO, February 2 (Xinhuanet) -- Japan and Russia issued a joint statement Saturday pledging bilateral cooperation in the fight against international terrorism. The two sides promised to continue close cooperation to prevent terrorists from obtaining materials and technology for weapons of mass destruction, said the statement, signed by Japanese Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi and the visiting Russian counterpart Igor Ivanov after their meeting Saturday afternoon. They agreed to take necessary steps in line with the U.N. Charter and other documents based on international law to counter terrorism, the statement said. The two foreign ministers also expressed their intentions to take "appropriate domestic steps" to prevent the outflow of materials and technology related to nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, it said. ¡¡¡¡Japan and Russia also confirmed the importance of bilateral investigative cooperation in detaining and pressing criminal charges against those who prepare or conduct terrorist acts, the statement said. The two countries stressed their support for immediate completion of preparations for concluding a comprehensive ban on terrorism and a treaty on preventing nuclear terrorism as well as for their prompt adoption, it noted. ¡¡¡¡The statement also called on the United Nations and the international community to help rebuild the war-ravaged Afghanistan. Enditem Copyright © 2000 Xinhua News Agency. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 59 Documentary features Cold War codebreakers and atomic spies By Robert O'Neill, Associated Press, 2/1/2002 17:12 BOSTON (AP) Theodore Hall was a brilliant young man. He was admitted to Harvard University at age 16, and two years later became the youngest physicist to work on America's ultra-secret project to develop a nuclear bomb. He was equally precocious in another field. By the time he was 19, he was spying for the Soviet Union. Hall and other spies, as well as the codebreakers who uncovered them, are the subject of the NOVA documentary series' ''Secrets, Lies &Atomic Spies.'' The program focuses on the VENONA project, which managed to crack the Soviets' ''unbreakable'' code, and the spies it uncovered deep in the most sensitive reaches of America's government and military. Hall, who provided the Soviets with key information on the atomic bomb's firing mechanism, never served a day in prison as authorities did not want to expose the codebreaking project by using it in Hall's prosecution, according to the documentary. He died of cancer in 1999 after a long career as a biophysics researcher at Cambridge University. In an interview recorded two years before his death, Hall said he hoped giving the Soviets the secrets would create a more balanced world. ''I felt that it was important that somebody should go tell Stalin,'' he told a visiting scholar. ''And that this should be done sooner rather than later so that it would not be a threat ... but developing a pathway towards a better more harmonious world.'' ''It was a humanitarian act, his motive was a humanitarian motive. Now if you want to call that sort of thing treason, go right ahead,'' Hall's widow, Joan Hall, tells the program makers in her first television interview. The VENONA project, which remained secret for nearly 50 years, was the result of a lucky breakthrough in what was otherwise a flawless Soviet encryption method. By using random numbers taken from a pad used just once, only the recipient, with the only other copy of the pad, could translate the message. The opening for American codebreakers came when they found repetitions in the cables, allowing them the small toehold they needed to begin deciphering them. It took years for the project to yield the identities of Hall, and fellow Los Alamos scientist Klaus Fuchs, as well as countless other highly placed Soviet spies. (The Soviets were tipped off to the VENONA project's existence, aptly enough, by a spy working there.) Hall first contacted Soviet agents in New York in 1944, while on a trip there to celebrate his 19th birthday. By the time he was identified in 1949 he was working in Chicago, and his days as a spy apparently long since over. The FBI questioned him, but he never broke, leaving them without the crucial additional evidence they needed. Fuchs, who was arrested while working in Britain in the early 1950s, admitted handing the Soviets vital information on the bomb. He served nine years in prison. The documentary also points to evidence that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for leading a Soviet atomic spy ring, despite evidence from intercepted messages that their role in obtaining nuclear secrets was greatly exaggerated and maybe, in Ethel's case, nonexistent. The deciphered cables did not assign Ethel Rosenberg a code name, and specifically said she was incapable of conspiratorial work signs she was not an agent, the documentary says. They also showed that while Julius Rosenberg was an active Soviet spy in other fields, he did not provide valuable information on nuclear technology. The Rosenberg's son, Michael Meeropol, 58, interviewed for the program, says he is not sure how much of the codebreakers' work is authentic. But Meeropol, who teaches economics at Western New England College in Springfield, says if the cables are true they show the government knew the Rosenbergs were not responsible for divulging atomic secrets. ''... (Authorities) created the story of (Julius Rosenberg) being a kingpin having stolen the secret of the atom bomb allegedly, took his wife as a hostage, put a gun to her head and told him, 'Talk or we'll not only kill you, we'll kill her,''' he says. ''And when he wouldn't talk, they murdered her in cold blood.'' The show is scheduled to be aired Tuesday at 8 p.m. EST on PBS. ***************************************************************** 60 AU: The atomic test cover-ups: a 'jackpot' must have a pay-out The Age: By LARRY SCHWARTZ Sunday 3 February 2002 Norman Geschke has found time in retirement to tinker with glass-domed, ornate antique clocks. He winds up one and a soldier parades on a turret, a train crosses a bridge, a windmill turns. He is 77 and it is almost eight years since he stepped aside after a lengthy stint as state ombudsman. The wrong Mr Geschke now hopes to see put right is the damage done when he was a RAAF bomber pilot sent out to track a mushroom cloud over outback Australia during British atomic tests in the early 1950s. He was moved to call for a "factual, independent inquiry" into the testing after reading a recent report in The Sunday Age on a criminal investigation by British police on the lawfulness of an order to another pilot who subsequently committed suicide, to fly through a mushroom cloud after a test at Christmas Island in 1958. Five years before that, Mr Geschke had piloted a heavy bomber in a similar mission after testing at Emu Field, South Australia. Cancer has claimed the lives of at least two and possibly a third in the crew of the Lincoln he flew out from Richmond air base in Queensland on October 16, 1953. He does not know if exposure to radiation was responsible for the skin cancer that has afflicted him for years. Mr Geschke says an inquiry is long overdue before the further deaths of affected servicemen might enable governments to "again escape responsibility through procrastination and deviousness". Among more than 16,000 Australian Defence Force members and civilians the Department of Veteran Affairs says participated in tests between 1952 and 1963, he was 29, married with two children, when the first of two bombs was detonated in Operation Totem at Emu Field. After waiting anxiously for several hours until the last 20 minutes of his rostered time on duty at Richmond the following day, he and his crew "happened to win the jackpot" and were called on to take the Lincoln up to track the cloud's progress towards Townsville, with metal canisters to sample the air and equipment to measure radioactivity. At the time, it was a welcome relief from tedium. "There was a competition among us as to who would do this flight," Mr Geschke says. "We were anxious to get up and fly." They received no special warnings when briefed before departure in a bomber he fondly remembers as "a gentle aircraft" on what was to be another routine flight. They wore only flimsy flying suits, no protective gear. No one had any inkling there might be awful consequences to the "jackpot" mission. Others were not so oblivious to the risks. An American B-29 pilot he met had taken part in earlier US tests and spoke of "a dirty cloud". American pilots, he later learnt, "went on to full oxygen so they weren't breathing any atmosphere at all". British scientists also used protective equipment. Mr Geschke and his crew, however, had not only been kept ignorant of the dangers but had no special medical check-ups after they returned to base. One man had carried contaminated canisters bare-handed from the aircraft. "There's a danger in war from the enemy," Mr Geschke says, "but you're not expecting to be put in danger by your own side are you?" It was not until crews from Woomera, also involved in the operation, were recalled from leave and contaminated aircraft grounded that suspicions were raised. "My argument is that with a lot of these things, it is absolute irresponsibility and negligence to put people into situations that can unnecessarily influence their lives," says Mr Geschke, who also cites the harmful effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam and untested inoculations and the effects of depleted uranium in weapons in the Gulf War in the same category of irresponsibility. As federal chairman of the Regular Defence Forces Welfare Association (1974 to 1979) and Victorian ombudsman (1980 to 1994), he had been sought out by families of others involved. Air force friends caught up in the same exercises had succumbed to intestinal cancer and cancer of the oesophagus. "A number of families came to me to raise the case to see what they could do about it," he says. "Not that I was a guru or anything like that, but just to guide them. "A lot of them in the early stages had great fights on their hands to try to establish that they had suffered because of the atomic trials. The difficulty was how to prove it. The incidents were there. But they (the British government) wouldn't recognise it." He says the catalyst for him to go public after so long was the action of Shirley Denson, widow of a British pilot ordered to fly his plane repeatedly through a mushroom cloud after tests on Christmas Island in the late 1950s. She initiated a police investigation into whether it was legal to send Eric Denson and his crew through the cloud, in a case some say could open the way for claims from Australian, New Zealand and British servicemen exposed to radiation fallout. The testing in Australia was conducted at three sites: the Monte Bello islands off the coast of Western Australia, Emu Field and Maralinga in South Australia. Mr Geschke estimates the cloud he flew through was drifting northward across the continent at 24kmh, but it had dissipated since the explosion at Emu Field on 15 October 1953, the day before Mr Geschke's was the second of two aircraft sent up to record its progress and the extent of radioactivity. The first had "misplotted the cloud by some considerable distance", he says. Mr Geschke recalls his flight set off late with a crew of eight: himself, a co-pilot, navigator, wireless operator and rear-gunner along with three others to monitor radioactivity. They encountered the cloud at dusk and spent about three hours tracking it, turning again and again whenever radioactivity readings stopped. The light had gone and the horizon barely visible, let alone the cloud, when he switched on the radar "for some reason - there's no great moment to it - (and) got a lot of flashing on the screen which I'd never seen before". All eyes were on the screen. No one could account for the piercing beeps and green lights. One of the crew had previously devised a secret code to alert a colleague on the ground in the operations room at Richmond to the radioactivity they found, but it was 10 times the reading from the mushroom cloud they expected and the secret code proved inadequate to the task. "The British covered it up," Mr Geschke says. "At the time it was going on, I asked a few questions. We couldn't get any answers. They said, `Oh no. It's all in hand and everything will be all right'." He quit the air force in 1971 and says the consequences of his role in the atomic testing are "an annoyance", he still has other memories of times in a cockpit. "You'd fly a Lincoln for eight or nine hours and you'd come down and you couldn't hear anyone," he says. "That was known as the Lincoln Deaf Syndrome." Then there was the time he all but "wrecked" one in a thunderstorm over Newcastle. "The batteries (and) the first-aid gear came adrift. We really got knocked around. But we lived through it. We got back." On another flight, an engine failed at 2000 feet en route from Singapore to Darwin and he and his crew decided to ditch excess fuel. "It's a simple operation. You pull a lever, press a button and the fuel ditches through two things called donkeys' doodles, which are tubes that come out of the wing through the tank and throw it well clear." Only one tube was released, the other flooded the aircraft. "My feet were covered in bloody petrol. "I had to close down the second engine to stop the hydraulic pumps. We sat in our parachutes and turned off our radio and everything else and flew around until we got rid of all the petrol." Mr Geschke will not forget his unwitting role in the "jackpot" mission across the outback sky in 1953. "It was an ordinary, average flight," he recalls. "There was nothing that I could say was untoward. I think the crew would have said the same." Almost 50 years on, he thinks back to the deaths and the dying and the continuing disregard for the hazards to servicemen and women and others in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf and many other places, and insists it is time to bring governments to account, to gather all the documentation collated since the US dropped the first atomic bomb used in warfare on Hiroshima in 1945. He warns that authorities cannot console themselves with belated financial compensation alone. "My view is that this should never have bloody happened in the first place and that it should be recorded as an act of irresponsibility and negligence," he says. Copyright © The Age Company Ltd 2002. ***************************************************************** 61 AU: Veteran alleges N-tests cover-up The Age: By GARY HUGHES and LARRY SCHWARTZ Sunday 3 February 2002 [Norman Geschke] Norman Geschke: "Secrecy is an indefensible excuse." Former Victorian ombudsman and retired RAAF officer Norman Geschke has called for an independent inquiry into atomic tests in Australia during the 1950s, in which he played a key role. Mr Geschke told The Sunday Age he believed a deliberate cover-up had been mounted to hide the "negligence and irresponsibility" that led to defence staff unnecessarily suffering radiation exposure. Mr Geschke piloted one of 12 Lincoln heavy bombers used to monitor the spread of radiation across central Australia after the Operation Totem atomic blast at Emu Field, near Maralinga in South Australia, in October 1953. Two of his five-man crew have since died of cancer. Mr Geschke, who retired in 1994 after 13 years as ombudsman, also suffers from skin cancer. He and his crew spent about three hours flying through a large cloud of drifting radiation on October 16, 1953 - the day after the first Emu Field test. Radiation levels were 10 times higher than expected. Mr Geschke, who retired from the RAAF in 1971 with the rank of group captain, said he had decided to break his 50-year silence because "time is running out" for ex-servicemen suffering ill health. Flight crews were not warned of the risks of radiation, nor were they given protective clothing, he said. They breathed normal air contaminated with radioactive particles rather than bottled oxygen, and wore their contaminated flying suits for days following the tests. The Lincoln crews flew for about a month before the aircraft were tested. Nine of the 12 were found to be contaminated. Four were so radioactive that they were immediately taken out of service. But the crews were never tested, Mr Geschke said. A total of 12 major atomic tests were carried out in Australia between 1952-57. The Department of Veterans' Affairs has compiled a nominal roll of 16,716 members of the Defence Force and civilians who were involved in the tests and is studying cancer rates to see if there is a link to radiation exposure. Mr Geschke said cancers began appearing among flight crews during the 1960s and '70s. He is aware of at least six deaths. "Irrespective of what governments may say, some of the troops were guinea pigs for the trials," he said. "Other troops and aircrews were unnecessarily exposed to radiation. Secrecy is an indefensible excuse used to cover up incompetence and irresponsibility." Mr Geschke said it appeared that the government was attempting to delay an investigation until most of those involved had died. [http://www.theage.com.au] Copyright © The Age Company Ltd 2002. ***************************************************************** 62 Lab director: Use funds to fight war, not diseases Tri-Valley Herald Saturday, February 02, 2002 - 2:57:02 AM MST Concentrating dollars on medical research 'dangerously lopsided' By Lisa Friedman WASHINGTON BUREAU Saturday, February 02, 2002 - -->WASHINGTON -- The government should invest less money fighting diseases and more helping the scientific community fight the war against terrorism, Los Alamos National Laboratory Director John C. Browne said Thursday. Calling a funding tradition that gives the National Institute of Health half of all federal research dollars "dangerously lopsided," Browne called on Congress to significantly increase laboratory spending over the coming decade. "Our country does not have a strong enough relationship with our scientific community," Browne told the National Press Club, adding, "If we make these investments it will pay off well beyond the war against terrorism." Browne did not specify how much more he hopes to gain in the fiscal 2003 budget the administration plans on releasing Monday. He said increases are needed to help Los Alamos and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory hone surveillance systems to detect stolen nuclear material, develop controls against biological and chemical agents and create better systems to collect data about terrorist activities. "One of our biggest dangers is that we will become complacent and not invest in the long-term," he said. "What if the next terrorist attack doesn't happen for another decade? Are we ready to sustain this effort? How do we sustain a sporadic but intense fight?" Arms control advocates said they were suspicious of Browne's call for dollars, charging it could lead to the creation of new nuclear weapons. "A lot of what is presented as counterproliferation funding actually is dual use. It involves developing weapons design concepts, purportedly to understand what the other side might be doing," said Jacqueline Cabasso, executive director of the anti-nuclear group Western States Legal Foundation, based in Oakland. The University of California manages both Los Alamos and Livermore labs. The nation's third nuclear design laboratory in Sandia, N.M., is operated by Lockheed Martin. ©1999-2001 by MediaNews Group, Inc. and ANG Newspapers ***************************************************************** 63 Los Alamos director defends lab security Albuquerque Tribune Online By Thomas Hargrove Tribune Reporter WASHINGTON - The director of Los Alamos National Laboratory defended security measures at his facility following disclosures that U.S. military commandos gained access to weapons grade uranium during a 1997 emergency preparedness drill. "We feel that the level of security is adequate and up to the challenges that we have been asked to defend," John Browne said after an appearance at the National Press Club on Thursday to promote increased federal spending for research into the physical sciences. Navy SEALs and other elite commando units have tested and successfully breached security procedures at several sensitive installations containing nuclear materials, according to disclosures made last week by Rep. Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat. The congressman said mock terrorists used a garden cart to transport enough uranium for "numerous" nuclear warheads. Browne conceded that the security drill occurred at the Los Alamos lab's Technical Area 18 facility, an installation which allows scientists to observe how radioactive materials approach critical mass. "It is the only such facility in the country that allows the study of criticality," he said. But the director took issue with any suggestion that the exercise demonstrated that terrorists could have successfully removed weapons-grade uranium from the area around the lab. "To say they got away with material in a garden cart, well, the fact was that the exercise had ended. We had armed men in HumVees (small military transport vehicles) ready to pursue if that had been necessary." Had the commandos tried to escape, Browne said, they would have been chased by security units down a boxed canyon with steep rock walls. "I don't know where those guys were going to go," he said. Markey also disclosed that Navy SEALs broke into the Rocky Flats nuclear production plant in Colorado and could have stolen enough materials to produce several nuclear weapons. New Mexican senators Pete Domenici and Jeff Bingaman and Senate Assistant Majority Leader, Nevada Democrat Harry Reid, today are scheduled to conclude a two-day tour of Los Alamos and Sandia national labs to observe anti-terrorist preparations and research. "I was very troubled to learn that blueprints of American nuclear plants had been found in Afghanistan. Clearly we must re-evaluate all of our nation's potential vulnerabilities," Reid said. "I hope we will get a first hand look at what our nation is doing to keep al-Qaida's finger off the nuclear trigger." The senators are accompanied by John Gordon, undersecretary for nuclear security and administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration within the Department of Energy. "In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, it is more important than ever that key leaders in Washington are aware of all that our labs do, both for stockpile stewardship and in the areas of anti- and counter-terrorism," said Bingaman, a Silver City Democrat. Domenici, an Albuquerque Republican, said the federal government remains committed to the mission of the New Mexican labs. "The Bush administration will request significant new funding in its budget for the labs, reflecting their importance and their new responsibilities that will evolve from the war on terrorism," he said. © The Albuquerque Tribune. ***************************************************************** 64 Hanford helping Tri-Cities weather nationwide recession This story was published Fri, Feb 1, 2002 By John Stang Herald staff writer The Tri-City area is weathering the nationwide recession well, speakers said Thursday at a regional economic forum. "Before September, we were the fastest growing economy in Washington. After September, we were the only growing economy in Washington," said Dean Schau, a state regional economist based in the Tri-Cities. Schau was among several speakers to address 275 people during the annual forum sponsored by the Tri-City Industrial Development Council. Hanford is by far the area's biggest breadwinner, providing 15 percent of Tri-City jobs and 35 percent of its payroll, said Schau and Keith Klein, the Department of Energy's Hanford manager. Agriculture is a strong but distant second in providing jobs and wages for the area, Schau said. But, he noted, the area is weak in traditional manufacturing jobs outside those two fields. Bremerton is the only area in the state with a weaker traditional manufacturing base than the Tri-Cities, he said. Other economic snapshots from Thursday's forum included: -- Hanford's cleanup efforts are mostly meeting or exceeding their timetables, said Klein and Harry Boston, manager of DOE's Office of River Protection. Moving the basins' nuclear fuel, removing contaminated soil from the Columbia River's shoreline and shipping wastes to New Mexico are ahead of schedule. Right now, construction of Hanford's waste glassification complex is ramping up, expecting to employ about 4,000 people from 2003 to 2005, before construction workers are laid off in 2006 and 2007. Meanwhile, the nonglassification part of Hanford is expected to stay steady at about 11,000 jobs through 2006 before declining slightly by 2011. -- Food processing in the Tri-Cities area accounts for roughly 3,400 jobs with an annual payroll of about $112 million. By comparison, Hanford -- minus the glassification project and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory -- paid roughly $440 million in wages in 2000. Wineries in Benton, Franklin and Walla Walla counties employed 452 people in 2000 with a payroll of $12.8 million. -- The Northwest has dodged much of the doom-and-gloom predicted for the electricity market, said Jim Sanders, general manager of the Benton County Public Utility District. A year ago, the region faced skyrocketing natural gas and wholesale power costs, plus a major drought. The temporary shutdown of much of the electricity-guzzling aluminum industry plus Tri-City area power conservation measures helped the region deal with last year's power woes, Sanders said. Meanwhile, wholesale power and natural gas prices have dropped to more manageable levels. -- Tourism dollars have increased dramatically in the Tri-Cities since 1991, said Kris Watkins, president of the Tri-Cities Visitor & Convention Bureau. Spending by Tri-City visitors grew from $142 million in 1991 to $226 million in 2000, Watkins said. In 1991, 2,720 people were directly employed in tourism-related jobs generating a $38 million payroll. That grew to 4,090 jobs and a $57 million payroll in 2000. Tri-City hotel rooms increased from 2,135 in 1991 to 2,949 in 2000. Copyright 2002 Tri-City Herald. All rights reserved. This ***************************************************************** 65 DOE to seek $6.7 billion This story was published Fri, Feb 1, 2002 By John Stang Herald staff writer The Department of Energy plans to request $6.7 billion for nationwide cleanup of its sites in 2003, about the same that was appropriated for 2002, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said Thursday. That $6.7 billion includes $800 million to be allocated solely to DOE sites that come up in realistic accelerations of their cleanup projects. He did not say which DOE sites would be eligible for the $800 million. What will that mean for Hanford in fiscal 2003? No one can venture a guess until Monday. That's when DOE will release details of its fiscal 2003 budget request to Congress and details of its review of all its cleanup programs to find ways to improve them. Abraham announced the figures at a Thursday news conference at DOE's site at Fernald, Ohio. The Herald listened to the conference by telephone. Since last spring, DOE has conducted a "top-to-bottom review" to try to trim $100 billion and 30 years from an estimated $300 billion and 70 years scheduled to finish cleaning up all of its contaminated Cold War production sites. "The price tag is staggering. But that didn't bother me as much as the 70 years," Abraham said. DOE's fiscal 2003 budget request is the first time the agency will try to put the review's conclusions into action. Abraham said DOE's cleanup budget request will be divided into two parts, $5.9 billion to be allocated to its cleanup sites in the traditional manner and $800 million for an "Expedited Cleanup Account." The $800 million would be allocated to DOE sites that come up with new and faster cleanup schedules, Abraham said. DOE calculated that $800 million would cover the unnamed sites where it believes cleanup can be speeded up. If more than $800 million is needed, Abraham said that account would be expanded. "Under the model outlined today, it is my expectation that not only will (Hanford) receive full funding, but that the goal is to accelerate cleanup even more," said U.S. Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash. Also, any DOE site with an acceptable accelerated cleanup plan would get those budget figures locked in through 2008 to ensure adequate follow-through, Abraham said. That measure addresses a longtime complaint in Hanford circles about the year-by-year budget uncertainties hurting long-range plans. Harry Boston, manager of DOE's Office of River Protection in charge of Hanford's tank wastes, expects that the ORP will be one of the field offices covered by the $800 million acceleration fund but did not know for sure. Keith Klein, DOE's Hanford manager, said the Richland office, which covers the rest of the site's cleanup, is eligible for allocations from that $800 million. Boston, Klein and Mike Wilson, manager of the Washington Department of Ecology's nuclear waste program, believe Hanford has an inside track on getting some of that $800 million. That's because the state and DOE have the Tri-Party Agreement in place and have spent the past few months negotiating ways to speed up cleanup. One example is DOE's Richland office's proposal to accelerate cleanup along the Columbia River. No one can tell what this concept means for Hanford until DOE unveils its initial dollar allocations on Monday, said Wilson, Todd Martin, chairman of the Hanford Advisory Board, and aides to Hastings and U.S. Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, both D-Wash. Also, they need to know more about how the $800 million fund works, including how and how fast field sites can apply for and receive money, they said. On Thursday, Boston and Klein said Washington, D.C., had not told them yet how much DOE's headquarters will request for their field offices. And so far, DOE has not said what the minimal amount of money is needed to meet all of Hanford's legal cleanup obligations in 2003. The most likely minimal figure for Hanford is $1.8 billion -- essentially assuming 2003's budget needs match 2002's budget requirements. A year ago, Abraham requested $5.9 billion for DOE's nationwide cleanup efforts in 2002, despite DOE's own calculations that $6.7 billion was needed. Congress overruled the administration and eventually appropriated $6.7 billion for 2002. The questions is: What would happen if one DOE site with an accelerated cleanup plan gains a bigger share from a level $6.7 billion DOE cleanup budget? Would another DOE site face a budget cut to pay for the extra money going to an accelerated project? Hastings aide Todd Young said Abraham's Thursday speech included the possibility that he might seek extra money above $6.7 billion to prevent that scenario from happening. Copyright 2002 Tri-City Herald. All rights reserved. This ***************************************************************** 66 Hanford to move radioactive barrels to safer location This story was published Fri, Feb 1, 2002 By John Stang Herald staff writer Hundreds of barrels of radioactive uranium and oil just north of the 300 Area will be moved to a safer site in central Hanford. Bechtel Hanford Inc. recently awarded a $3.9 million contract to Federal Engineers & Constructors and Thompson Mechanical Inc. to move those barrels and contaminated debris from Hanford's 618-4 and 618-5 burial grounds. The 618-4 site is three miles north of Richland and has been a high-profile Hanford headache since 1998. In 2000, Hanford's massive range fire came within a few hundred feet of about 300 exposed barrels holding uranium chips and oil in the 618-4 site. It was the closest the fire came to burning radioactive materials. The barrels were discovered during routine excavation work in 1998, stopping cleanup efforts there until Hanford's experts could figure out what to do. The 618-4 site holds about 1,500 barrels of uranium chips, including the 300 dug up before work was stopped. The barrels are filled with oil to prevent the uranium from spontaneously catching fire. The 618-5 burial ground is near the 618-4 site. Bechtel is unsure what is buried in the 618-5 site, but speculates it could hold barrels of wastes similar to those found in the 618-4 site, said Bechtel spokesman Todd Nelson. Federal Engineers and Thompson Mechanical are supposed to finish moving the barrels and other contaminate materials to a huge central Hanford landfill by July 2003. There, the barrels will be stored temporarily on concrete pads until Hanford figures out how to deal with the mixed hazardous and radioactive wastes inside them, Nelson said. The 618-4 and 618-5 sites are a few hundred feet from the Columbia River, which prompts their move to central Hanford. "We, along with our joint venture partner, Thompson Mechanical Inc., look forward to successful completion of the project and making an impact on Hanford cleanup," said Dick French, Federal Engineers' president. French is the former president of a former major Hanford contractor Kaiser Engineers Hanford Co. and former manager of the Department of Energy's Office of River Protection. He founded Federal Engineers last March. Copyright 2002 Tri-City Herald. All rights reserved. This ***************************************************************** 67 Consortium to examine occupational, environmental health issues in area 01/28/02 Amarillo Globe-News: Local News: The Amarillo Metal Trades Council from Pantex and researchers from an institute that specializes in occupational and environmental health have formed the Amarillo Health Consortium, a group that will examine occupational and environmental health issues in the Amarillo area. The consortium will provide education and assistance to Amarillo workers and their families about occupational and environmental diseases. The main source of funding for the consortium will be grants received from the Energy Department and federal agencies, according to a news release from the consortium. The Metal Trades Council, an affiliate of the AFL-CIO, is a collective bargaining agent for the Pantex Plant. The Rammazzini Institute is a multinational consortium of researchers and educators who specialize in occupational and environmental health. Frank George, president of the Metal Trades Council is board chairman and chief executive officer. David Pompa, a representative of the local machinists union, is president and chief operating officer. Dr. Arthur Frank, professor of occupational and environmental medicine at the University of Texas Health Center at Tyler, is medical director. Sarah Dworzack Ray, a training specialist and local educator, is secretary-treasurer. The national liaison officer is Michael Flynn, director of safety and health for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. Community representatives on the board are Randy Braidfoot, an executive of Amarillo's Asset Planning Group; Jackie A. Fox, representative for registered nurses at the Amarillo Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center; and Jo Ann Cruz Perez, a representative of Amarillo's Catholic Family Service. BWXT Pantex management is represented by Larrie Trent, manager of environmental, safety and health. BWXT Pantex employees on the board include Union Safety Officer Sofia De Los Santos, Donny Perry and Liz Rodriguez. For more information about the board, contact Pompa at 383-9002 or write the Amarillo Health Consortium at P.O. Box 50536, Amarillo, TX 79159. Privacy Statement | © 1996-2002 Amarillo Globe-News ***************************************************************** 68 DOE's project raises doubts Augusta Georgia: Metro: 02/02/02 Web posted Saturday, February 2, 2002 By Brandon Haddock [bhaddock@augustachronicle.com] Staff Writer The U.S. Department of Energy will release its proposed budget for fiscal 2003 on Monday. The U.S. Department of Energy says it has a new plan for faster, cheaper cleanup of polluted nuclear-weapons installations such as the Savannah River Site. The question, some nuclear watchdogs warn, is what the federal agency considers "clean." "It sounds like the way they want to accelerate cleanup is by doing less cleanup in many places," said Bob Schaeffer of the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability. "If I clean every other window in my office, I can do it faster." The plan, unveiled Thursday by U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, would create an $800 million "expedited cleanup account" to speed cleanup of polluted sites. But to get to the money, sites and their environmental regulators would have to reach cleanup agreements with the Energy Department - and, in some cases, renegotiate existing cleanup agreements. The stipulation caused Mr. Schaeffer to call the new account "a bribe" to get states such as South Carolina to lower cleanup requirements. "Our goal isn't more dollars, but getting the work done," Mr. Schaeffer said. "Where there are binding cleanup agreements, that is the legal obligation of the United States." The Energy Department's top environmental official, Assistant Energy Secretary Jessie Roberson, said Friday that the plan is not intended to lower cleanup standards or entice states to reconsider agreements. Instead, it will allow the Energy Department to address the most pressing environmental issues at SRS and other sites, she said. "We need to have a strong, committed and working relationship with the regulators and the states to address what everybody identifies as the most important problems first," Ms. Roberson told reporters during a teleconference. But Ms. Roberson acknowledged that the Energy Department will seek to revisit some agreements. The agreements sometimes are based on "processes" and not "results," she said. "We may be asking for some milestones to be refocused in that vein," she said. When asked how much of the $800 million SRS could receive, Ms. Roberson replied that "it depends on the agreements that we reach." She said she anticipated little problem in negotiating with South Carolina. "What we're proposing to do is exactly what the regulators and the state have been asking us to do. I think we have a great working relationship with the state of South Carolina, and I'm excited. I can't wait to get down there and talk to them." South Carolina officials won't see the new plan until Monday, when it is unveiled with the Energy Department's budget proposal for fiscal year 2003, said Cortney Owings, spokeswoman for South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges. But the state wants to ensure that the $800 million is new federal money, not money subtracted from the overall budgets of SRS and other sites, Ms. Owings said. That concern is shared by some local SRS supporters. "If that's additional money that's over and above what's needed to meet the basic needs at the site, I think it's great and long overdue," said Ernest S. Chaput, the special projects coordinator for the Aiken-Edgefield Economic Development Partnership. "As usual, the devil is in the details." Reach Brandon Haddock at (706) 823-3409 or bhaddock@augustachronicle.com [bhaddock@augustachronicle.com] . 1996 - 2002 The Augusta Chronicle. ***************************************************************** 69 NASA to Seek Nuclear-Powered Spaceflight Alternatives Date: Sun, 03 Feb 2002 06:26:54 -0800 http://space.com/news/nasa_nuclear_020201.html NASA to Seek Nuclear-Powered Spaceflight Alternatives By Leonard David Senior Space Writer 01 February 2002 Next week, NASA will request funding for development of a space nuclear reactor. For the first time in a decade, the space agency is seeking funds to proceed with developing the power source, seen as critical to move forward on future space exploration initiatives. According to http://www.space.com SPACE.com sources, for numbers of months, NASA, the Department of Energy, as well as the Defense Department, have discussed ways to restart a multi-faceted space nuclear power program. The Bush White House is seeking to rekindle work in this area, an initiative that could have a dramatic ripple effect in blueprinting future robotic and human missions to Mars, establishing a lunar base, explore Jupiter's ice-covered satellite, Europa, as well as open up for exploration other outer planet destinations. According to Steven Aftergood, an analyst at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, D.C., "there is no question that space nuclear power could dramatically enhance the possibilities for space exploration." Among other things, he told SPACE.com, a space reactor would make it possible to undertake a multi-decade mission beyond our solar system. "I think that would be 'uplifting' in more ways than one and I hope to see it happen in my lifetime," Aftergood said. Boom-and-bust pattern Space nuclear reactor technology has followed a boom-and-bust pattern of development since the 1950s, Aftergood said. The U.S. launched one space reactor in 1965, a 500-Watt system that operated for 43 days and which remains in orbit. The last U.S. space reactor development program, a joint NASA-Defense Department effort known as the SP-100, was terminated ten years ago following the expenditure of nearly half a billion dollars. Between 1967 and 1988, the former Soviet Union hurled spaceward some 30 reactors. The U.S. has launched some two-dozen spacecraft utilizing plutonium-powered electrical generators -- which are not reactors -- that produce a low level of electricity. For instance, the devices energize such spacecraft as the Galileo probe now exploring Jupiter, the Ulysses probe's exploration of the Sun, and the Cassini mission, now trekking outward to Saturn. Given a funding go-ahead, the Pluto-Kuiper Belt mission will rely on a nuclear power source. Outer planet exploration using advanced radioisotope electric propulsion has recently been evaluated by teams at the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, as well as The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. In a recent co-authored technical paper, lead author, Steve Oleson of NASA Glenn, said a radioisotope power source for small electrically powered orbiter spacecraft makes possible missions to Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. While a reactor-powered system would provide quicker trip times and more science payload mass and power, radioisotope electric propulsion (REP) alleviates the need for a reactor and large launch vehicles. The use of space nuclear reactors, Aftergood said, is dictated whenever moderate levels of electrical power -- tens of kilowatts or more -- are required in space over an extended period of time. Burden of proof The NASA nuclear effort is a two-sided coin, Aftergood said. "By the same token, space reactors could also be used to power space weapons and other military systems in orbit, attracting the opposition of some arms control advocates and environmentalists." "Certainly there will be public acceptance issues. The burden of proof will be on the government to show that safety risks have been minimized to an acceptable degree. Even so, some people will be categorically opposed. But considering the other news of the day, an old fashioned controversy about space nuclear power would come as a relief right about now," Aftergood said. Funding the program will be a more immediate challenge, particularly as the country enters a new period of deficit spending, he said. ©1999 - 2002 SPACE.com, inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. You can read our privacy statement and terms of service Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space PO Box 90083 Gainesville, FL. 32607 (352) 337-9274 http://www.space4peace.org globalnet@mindspring.com ***************************************************************** 70 IAEA Daily Press Review Date 2002-02-01 Number 17 1. Non-proliferation Head of IAEA team says Iraq co-operated fully with Agency's routine annual inspection. CIA report claims that DPRK has not ceased its nuclear weapons programme despite 1994 USA/DPRK Agreed Framework. (CNN; NYT; UNW - 1/2) Dem. P.R. of Korea; IAEA; Iraq; United States of America 2. IAEA Numerous reports on team of experts sent by IAEA to help recover two radioactive sources found in Republic of Georgia's breakaway province of Abkhazia and transport them to safety. (NBC; NYT; R; T - 1/2) Georgia; IAEA 3. Illicit trafficking Report on increase of illicit trafficking. (CHI - 31/1) WORLDWIDE 4. Terrorism US NRC warns that nation's 103 NPPs could be a target of an airline attack. (CNN; R - 31/1) United States of America 5. Nuclear power French Finance Minister calls for energy diversification with "solid nuclear base." Electricity consumption in Finland reportedly grew by 3% in 2001, with nuclear power meeting almost 27% of country's total electricity needs. (NUC - 31/1) Finland; France 6. Radiation, health More on debate on benefits of mammography. (TIME - 27/1) United States of America 7. Nuclear technology Controversy in US following complaints from Senate offices that staffers suffered health problems after handling mail that was irradiated to kill possible anthrax. (AP; R - 31/1) United States of America 8. Miscellaneous In its first public reaction to being called part of an "axis of evil,'' DPRK says President Bush's pronouncement was little short of a declaration of war. (AP - 31/1) Dem. P.R. of Korea; United States of America ***************************************************************** 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: *****************************************************************