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08/03/02 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 10.197
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RADBULL IS PRODUCED BY THE ABALONE ALLIANCE CLEARINGHOUSE
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NUCLEAR POLICY
1 Cut-price nuclear plant a terror target, say Greens
2 The Russia-Iran connection
3 IAEA Schedules 70 Missions to Inspect Bushehr Nuclear Plant in 2002
4 Mystery Proposal Could Subjugate Minatom to Three Government Bodies
5 US: State looks to entice USEC -
6 Japan: 2nd man held for allegedly bribing nuclear watchdog
NUCLEAR REACTORS
7 IAEA Schedules 70 Missions to Inspect Bushehr Nuclear Plant in 2002
8 Fossil Fuel Plant to Replace Zheleznogorsk Plutonium Reactor May
NUCLEAR SAFETY
9 US: How much radiation?
10 US: New details on latest leukemia victim in northern Nevada*
11 US: Fallout: The Past Is Present
12 US: Anti-radiation drugs stockpiled in cities
NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE
13 US: Storing nuclear waste: Is the Pilgrim plant's 30-year-old method
14 US: N-waste setback for Utah*
NUCLEAR WEAPONS
15 Inside a nuclear ship
US DEPT. OF ENERGY
16 US DOE Chief Arrives in Moscow Under Shadow of Expanded Nuke Plans i
17 US DOE Chief Harshly Criticises Russia-Iran Nuclear Cooperation
18 Sen. Wayne Allard was told Rocky Flats cleanup will be closed by 200
19 Demonstrators head to Oak Ridge plant
OTHER NUCLEAR
20 OP: Mars and Venus: Together at last!
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FULL NEWS STORIES
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1 Cut-price nuclear plant a terror target, say Greens
Scotsman.com
Sat 3 Aug 2002
/Hamish Macdonell Scottish Political Editor/
BRITISH Energy is considering replacing two of Scotland?s ageing
nuclear power stations with cheaper models which could be
vulnerable to attack by terrorists, the Green Party warned
yesterday.
They claimed that attempts to cut costs by buying cheaper
reactors now for Hunterston B power station in Ayrshire and
Torness in East Lothian could lead to catastrophe in the future.
British Energy is considering options for the Hunterston B plant,
due to close in the next ten years. One option is a new power
station built around a Westinghouse AP1000 reactor.
However, the Greens published a report by the Dutch government
which concluded that the Westinghouse AP1000 did not meet the
country?s nuclear safety standards.
Robin Harper, the leader of the Scottish Green Party, said: "It
is simply outrageous that any consideration could be given to
siting these cut-price, prefabricated reactors in Scotland when
so many concerns have been voiced regarding their design and
safety standards. "
A British Energy spokesman said: "There are stringent safety
regulations for nuclear power stations , and they must be
approved by the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate."
BNFL Westinghouse denied the design of the AP1000 was flawed and
said it was safer than other nuclear reactors.
A spokesman for the energy minister, Brian Wilson, said talk of
new reactors at Hunterston or Torness was premature. He added:
"We are not aware of any detailed plans to build any new nuclear
reactors anywhere."
©2002 scotsman.com
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2 The Russia-Iran connection
BulletinWire | August 2, 2002
In the January/February 2001 /Bulletin/, Aluf Benn reported on
growing U.S. and Israeli concerns over the transfer of missile
and nuclear technology from Russia to Iran, where Moscow has an
$800 million contract to build a nuclear reactor. An Israeli
official asked Benn, "Why would Iran, one of the world?s largest
oil producers, need a nuclear power station?"
Now that official might be wondering why Iran needs multiple
nuclear power plants. In late July, Russia announced that it has
plans to build five other reactors in Iran?three more at Bushehr,
and two at Akhvaz.
?It's fair to say the White House was infuriated by that and
extremely surprised," a Bush official told the /Washington Post/
(July 29). The /Post/ also reported that some unnamed defense
officials are pushing for the destruction of the plant before it
receives any fuel. Both the United States and Israel worry that
Iran could be using the reactor as a cover for a nuclear weapons
program. The CIA says Iran is about seven years from having a
bomb; Israel says five. (Iran's Shihab-3 has a range of 1,300
kilometers, and it is thought to be developing a longer-range
missile.)
At a Moscow news conference yesterday, Energy Secretary Spencer
Abraham said that Iran was "aggressively pursuing nuclear
weapons" (N/ew York Times/, August 2). Iran, a Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty signatory, denies its nuclear program is
for anything other than peaceful purposes.
For its part, Russia, perhaps the only country that claims to
believe Teheran, has said that it will not allow Iran to
reprocess the spent fuel, which will be returned to Russia for
storage. The site at Bushehr would also be subject to inspections
by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
BulletinWire | August 1, 2002
A vote of confidence for the test ban treaty
When the U.S. Senate voted to reject the Comprehensive Test Ban
Treaty (CTBT) in October 1999, a principal argument voiced by
treaty opponents was that without testing the U.S. arsenal would
fall into disrepair and become unreliable.
Yesterday, a panel of experts convened by the National Academy of
Sciences reported that this argument is wrong. The panel?which
included former national lab directors, weapons designers,
physicists, and military experts?concluded that ?the United
States has the technical capabilities to maintain confidence in
the safety and reliability of its existing weapons stockpile
under the CTBT, provided that adequate resources are made
available.?
John Holdren, a physicist who chaired the panel, told the /New
York Times/ (August 1) that most of a nuclear weapon's 6,000
parts are non-nuclear components that can be examined without
undertaking nuclear tests. ?You can test the hell out of the
electronics. You can test the hell out of the high explosives.
You can test the hell out of the fusing. The only thing you can?t
test under the treaty is the nuclear subsystem itself.?
The panel also concluded that the creation of the International
Monitoring System, established by the treaty, makes it next to
impossible for a country to conduct clandestine nuclear
explosions.
*****************************************************************
3 IAEA Schedules 70 Missions to Inspect Bushehr Nuclear Plant in 2002
Description of Selected News
August 3, 2002
[TehranTimes Navigation]
All nations have the right to develop nuclear power to meet their
energy needs. Energy has many sources, but nuclear power is said
to be the cheapest, the cleanest and the most efficient. Of
course, in this highly competitive world, countries that have the
means and resources to develop nuclear power will choose to
exploit this energy resource in order to achieve economic
prosperity. Japan is a classic example.
Notwithstanding the fact that it has been a victim of the use of
atomic bombs, the country nevertheless avails of nuclear power
produced by a number of nuclear power plants inside the country.
The unavoidable fact is that the use of nuclear energy can never
be limited to certain countries.
The world is faced with dwindling fossil fuel supplies. The
increasing rate with which fossil fuels are burned to obtain
energy is making the world a dangerous place to live in.
Therefore, there is nothing "unnatural or unconventional" in Iran
trying to replace fossil fuels with nuclear energy resources.
Industrialized states and several Third World countries have
been using nuclear power for quite some time now. But what is
surprising is that there is no negative propaganda raised against
these countries for their use of nuclear energy as is the case
with the Islamic Republic.
The fact that the world's fossil fuel supplies are almost
running out will force countries to look for alternatives. Thanks
to modern technology, there are indeed alternatives, and nuclear
power is one. Necessity, convenience and the desire to achieve
faster development are the driving force of countries, including
Iran, in the search for energy sources. Countries, like Iran,
that intend to use nuclear power for peaceful purposes cannot,
therefore, be curtailed in this legitimate endeavor.
Iran has been completely open in its pursuit of nuclear energy
for peaceful purposes, and this fact has been confirmed time and
again by inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) who regularly inspect the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant
which Iran is building with Russian assistance.
Russia's announcement that it is ready to help build
half-a-dozen nuclear power plants for Iran has again triggered
widespread propaganda by enemies of the Islamic Republic that the
Bushehr nuclear power plant is part of a program to acquire or
develop weapons of mass destruction.
But, the truth is, the IAEA itself has repeatedly rejected such
propaganda with regular reports on its inspection trips to the
Bushehr Nnuclear Power Plant which is available to the
international community.
Hereunder is the full text of an interview TEHRAN TIMES
conducted with the chairman of the Majlis Energy Commission, Dr.
Hossein Afarideh: Q: Dr. Afarideh, as the Majlis Energy
Commission chairman and well informed on the activities of the
Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant, can you tell us what this project is
really for? A: Busher Nuclear Power Plant is designed to produce
electricity through fission. This is the common practice in all
nuclear plants of the world and we have long been expecting to
produce this kind of energy.
In fact, once the plant goes on line it will produce more than
30,000 megawatts of electricity that is three percent of Iran's
total electricity production. In Third World countries, nuclear
energy accounts for as much as eight percent of total electrical
power production. In developed countries, the figure is as high
as 70 percent.
Iran has placed special emphasis on making a variety of energy
resources available to the people and, considering the advantages
of nuclear energy, it has decided to exploit this energy resource
for its future energy needs.
Q: How would you evaluate the supervisory function of the IAEA
on the activities of the Bushehr power plant? A: The IAEA is
keeping a close watch on the activities of the Bushehr plant. The
agency has scheduled some 70 inspection missions in the current
year to check activities in the plant.
Each inspection team is composed of at least two people who are
closely informed of the construction process of the plant. Each
mission lasts for at least ten days and sometimes an inspection
team arrives at the site without prior notice.
Therefore, considering the great number of IAEA missions sent to
inspect the Bushehr power project, it would not be incorrect to
say that the inspectors have many opportunities to scrutinize the
activities of the power plant and no activity relating to the
project goes unchecked as the construction process is under
supervision all throughout the year.
Q: Considering the fact that there is almost an everyday
inspection of the activities at the plant by the IAEA, why are
certain countries accusing Iran of trying to acquire weapons of
mass destruction by making a reference to the Bushehr nuclear
power project? A: Countries that are making the accusation are
simply justifying their evil policies toward Iran and are
actually against the Islamic Republic acquiring technology to
advance itself. These countries have always been trying to
prevent Iran from progressing and, in fact, desire to see Iran
remain underdeveloped. However, they will never be able to block
progress by the Islamic Republic and prevent it from harnessing
its nuclear capability to produce a cheaper and more efficient
form of energy that will benefit the people.
The opposition of these countries to Iran's efforts to obtain
nuclear energy for peaceful purposes is unreasonable because
other world nations have already turned to nuclear power to
satisfy their energy requirements. These countries are basically
trying to distract world opinion from the fact that the Islamic
Republic is a peace-loving country and would have the world
believe that it is a threat to peace.
Q: Certain Western newspapers have recently spread rumors that
the Zionist regime is planning to attack the Bushehr nuclear
plant. What is the origin of these rumors? A: The Zionist media
is responsible for spreading these rumors. It is no surprise,
given the fact that the regime is Iran's arch foe and is insecure
in the region. In fact, it has always opposed Iran's every single
step towards development.
Israelis will never tolerate Iran achieving scientific and
technological progress.
But, as everybody knows, an attack on the Bushehr Power Plant is
easier said than done. The Zionists will never dare to do so.
Besides, the Zionist regime knows that the activities of the
plant are under IAEA continuous supervision and would never be
able to invoke international support if it does. Furthermore,
IAEA inspectors themselves have confirmed the peaceful purpose of
the plant and will never accept Western media propaganda.
Q: Dr. Afarideh, how is the Bushehr nuclear project progressing
and when do you think it will go on stream? A: The project is
currently running its scheduled course toward completion with
Russian experts already working on the installation procedure.
The project, by the way, will be finished in 2004.
[webmaster@tehrantimes.com]
*****************************************************************
4 Mystery Proposal Could Subjugate Minatom to Three Government Bodies
Section about reprocessing and spent nuclear fuel imports and
Russian nuclear industry in general.
Lawmakers say report had president's ‘full attention'
MOSCOW - Russian President Vladimir Putin is considering a
document delivered to him by Yabloko Party leader Grigory
Yavlinsky, outlining a plan that would subjugate the monolithic
Nuclear Power Ministry, or Minatom, to three government bodies,
stripping away the Stalinesque opacity that helped drive the arms
race and continues to shroud its civilian pursuits in secrecy.
Minatom's building — a masterpiece of Stalin architecture — may
soon be out for sale.
Charles Digges, 2002-07-30 17:41
The document — whose authorship officially remains a mystery —
was delivered to Putin on July 10 and deals in its opening with
an analysis of Russia's looming programme to import, store and
reprocess foreign radioactive waste. It contained suggestions
that last year's legislation allowing these waste imports be
amended to require the return of reprocessed waste to its country
of origin, something the current laws do not regulate.
But within the document, a copy of which was shown to Bellona
Web, was a long addendum to the president listing sweeping
reforms for Minatom — so sweeping in fact, that Minatom itself
would cease to exist and become little more than a small
government bureaucracy.
Among the suggestions were that Russia's nuclear energy monopoly
Rosenergoatom — which owns Russia's 10 nuclear power plants — be
handed over to the Ministry of Energy; that Minatom's nuclear
military industrial complex be given away to the Defence
Ministry; and that Minatom's fuel cycle study laboratories be
designated as a separate structure entirely and put under the
supervision of the Ministry for Industry, Science and Technology.
According to the Kremlin press office, the report has been given
to Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and Putin's chief of staff
Alexander Voloshin has been handed the mandate of assembling
experts for an official meeting on the topic. The Kremlin
spokesman also said that Minatom has received notice of the
proposal and has until August 1 to reply.
"This proposal is obviously being taken very seriously," said the
Kremlin spokesman. But the spokesman could only hint at who
authored the text. "Ecologists, perhaps, Duma deputies interested
in that sort of thing — I will say no more," he said with a trace
of bitterness.
The authors of the report, who are known to Bellona Web but who
requested strict anonymity, described Minatom in the report as
"an archaic administration that has undergone no reform in many
years and is not capable of dealing with contemporary
conditions."
"As a result of this, it hatched new and complicated projects
that turn out to be calamities for the country," the report
continued.
A source close to the authors said the report was delivered to
Putin personally by Yavlinsky during a July 10 meeting between
the two. Yabloko Duma Deputy Sergei Mitrokhin, who has seen the
report, said in an interview with Bellona Web Tuesday that his
party, one of the few liberal factions in the Duma, "had followed
all of the proposals as they were being drawn up and we fully
support the document."
He said that the suggestions were getting "the president's full
attention" and that during a recent meeting with Duma faction
leaders, Putin had said that recent actions of Minatom were
"troubling" him.
"I think, therefore, we could be seeing some changes in the very
near future," Mitrokhin said.
It is too early to say what the break-up of Minatom would mean.
Press spokesmen for the Defence Ministry, the Ministry for
Industry, Science and Technology and the Ministry of Energy all
said this was the first they had heard of the plan.
The Defence Ministry spokesman even expressed alarm.
"Dismantling Minatom means accounting for weapons-grade plutonium
and uranium and turning it over to [the Defence Ministry]," he
said. "But I sincerely doubt Minatom has even half of that
material accounted for yet."
Nikolai Shingarev, head of Minatom's board for relations with
government agencies and information policy, was also caught
unawares by the news, but said that the policy changes relayed to
him by Bellona Web were "impossible."
"There are two big problems that only Minatom can take care of
and those are ecology and nuclear security," he said. "With
Minatom divided across several agencies, these problems will
never be solved."
He would comment no further on the report itself because he had
not seen it, but he did note that Minatom's brass had received
the requests promised by the Kremlin for a response to the
report's conclusions.
Mitrokhin said, however, that the changes cannot take place with
the speed of a "coup."
"This can't be handled abruptly like a U-turn," said Mitrokhin.
"Russia is a nuclear power and Minatom has been responsible for
all branches of that. Gradual changes will proceed with that in
mind."
But Mitrokhin agreed that, since its inception, Minatom has been
accountable to effectively no government agency, running a
virtual country of closed nuclear cites across Russia for weapons
development and fuel cycle experiments.
Then, last year, Minatom began leading a charge to abandon
legislation prohibiting the import of radioactive waste to
Russia, saying waste storage and reprocessing fees could net
Russia $20 billion over the next ten years. The plan would add
another 20,000 tonnes of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) to the 10,000
tonnes that Russia has already accumulated by itself.
The plan was a flop with Russian citizens, who organized a
petition drive and raised 2.5 million signatures, 500,000 more
than were needed to force the import question to a national
referendum. But the federal Central Election Commission cast
aside 800,000 of those signatures on "technical" reasons, some as
petty as "incorrect" street abbreviations listed by petition
signatories. At the same time, then Nuclear Minister Yevgeny
Adamov was coddling the Duma with so much cushy eleventh hour
lobbying that claims surfaced later that many deputies had been
bribed to pass the legislation.
Adamov's successor, Alexander Rumyantsev, is pursuing the import
programme with as much zeal as his predecessor, but — as was
shown at a recent press conference, where the minister
continually bumbled figures and referred to import customers
Minatom does not have — he is just as inclined to cloaking
Minatom's real plans from the public as the ministry's Stalin-era
founders were.
"This is the kind of thing that comes up in any conversation
about Minatom," said Mitrokhin. "This is something that has to
change."
Publisher: [bellona@bellona.no] , President:
[frederic@bellona.no] Information: [info@bellona.no] , Technical
contact: [webmaster@bellona.no] Telephone: +47 23 23 46 00
Telefax: +47 22 38 38 62 * P.O.Box 2141 Grunerlokka, 0505 Oslo,
Norway
*****************************************************************
5 State looks to entice USEC -
The Paducah Sun
Paducah, Kentucky
Saturday, August 03, 2002
Kentucky leaders are favoring an incentive package that would
include steps to ensure an earthquake threat does not shake
USEC's confidence in Paducah for a new plant.
By Joe Walker jwalker@paducahsun.com--270.575.8650
The state favors an incentive package including steps to ensure
that an earthquake threat does not thwart Paducah's chances of
landing a new uranium enrichment technology highly sensitive to
shaking, a local labor leader says. "We've received a positive
response not only from the governor but (Executive Cabinet
Secretary) Crit Luallen in that regard," said Leon Owens,
president of the local atomic workers' union. "There's a lot of
speculation that it's going to be what people call a showstopper,
but you can have seismic activity anywhere."
Gov. Paul Patton and Economic Development Commissioner J.R.
Wilhite said Friday in a visit to Paducah that the seismic issue
rests with plant operator USEC Inc. When asked, they did not
directly say whether the state would fund engineering studies or
other measures regarding Paducah's being over the New Madrid
Fault, an active earthquake zone.
"If this was a showstopper, USEC already would have taken us off
the list," Patton said. "USEC is evaluating that issue."
Patton called the $1 billion gas centrifuge plant, employing 500
to 600, "the crown jewel" of all Kentucky economic development
projects. Wilhite said the state will submit a preliminary
incentive package to USEC by the end of August and a final
proposal by the end of October. He would not reveal details
pending USEC review.
USEC has signed an agreement with the Department of Energy to
build a 50-job demonstration plant that would operate from 2004
until the larger, commercial plant is operational in the 2010-11
time frame. The agreement calls for building either or both of
the facilities at Paducah or near Portsmouth, Ohio. Eventually,
the commercial plant will replace the 1,500-employee Paducah
Gaseous Diffusion Plant, whose technology is expensive and
outdated.
"We want no doubt in their minds that we want both (facilities),"
Wilhite said.
He said USEC, in seeking proposals for the demonstration plant,
will evaluate the design and operating costs "of dealing with
different seismic factors" in Paducah and Portsmouth. The Ohio
community is not in an active earthquake zone and has a
mothballed centrifuge complex void of machinery.
"In our meetings yesterday (Thursday), USEC made it clear that
its decisions will be based on tangible factors and intangible
factors," Wilhite said. "... If seismic issues are a reality, in
preparing to make a business decision, USEC is going to determine
what that means to them."
Patton said Paducah's advantages are "a great labor force that
has a good working relationship with USEC" and a community highly
supportive of atomic energy.
"I believe that Paducah is far superior in those respects than
the alternate site," he said. "This will not be based on one
element. It will be based on a lot of elements."
Shaking is a critical problem for centrifuge because it uses tall
cylinders that spin at high speeds to separate useful and
non-useful isotopes of uranium for use in nuclear fuel. The union
and a local task force on which Owens serves want to know whether
the seismic threat at Paducah can be overcome and, if so, at what
cost.
In recent meetings with Patton's staff, Owens suggested the state
help fund an independent study to provide the answers and "make
up the difference" in USEC costs to build a quake-resistant
plant.
"That could be part of the state incentive package to USEC,
provided that the seismic concern is great enough," Owens said,
adding that the Frankfort delegation spoke favorably.
Owens said he has "no idea" what the cost of an engineering study
would be. Richard Miller, former Washington-based policy analyst
for the union, figures the cost at roughly $50,000.
"I don't think this is rocket science," said Miller, who now
works for the Government Accountability Project, a Washington
watchdog group.
Miller said it would cost Paducah about $25 million more than
Portsmouth for earthquake protection in building plants to
convert tens of thousands of cylinders of depleted uranium into
safer material. He said he bases that on talking with and
reviewing plans by bidders for the conversion plants, which would
not use gas centrifuge.
"Portsmouth is a much cheaper (conversion) plant to build than
Paducah because of the seismic hazards," Miller said. "That's the
only difference."
*****************************************************************
6 Japan: 2nd man held for allegedly bribing nuclear watchdog
official
japantoday
Friday, August 2, 2002 at 18:00 JST
TOKYO ?
The former president of a waste management firm was arrested
Friday on suspicion of bribing a government official to obtain
information on the business needs of the nuclear industry, police
said.
Osamu Ishikura, 52, former owner of the company based in Tsukuba,
Ibaraki Prefecture, turned himself in to authorities two days
after Toshiyuki Takahashi, 45, a deputy division chief at the
Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, was arrested Wednesday.
(Kyodo News)
Japan Today Discussion
*****************************************************************
7 IAEA Schedules 70 Missions to Inspect Bushehr Nuclear Plant in 2002
*August 3, 2002* News Content
TehranTimes
All nations have the right to develop nuclear power to meet their
energy needs. Energy has many sources, but nuclear power is said
to be the cheapest, the cleanest and the most efficient. Of
course, in this highly competitive world, countries that have the
means and resources to develop nuclear power will choose to
exploit this energy resource in order to achieve economic
prosperity. Japan is a classic example.
Notwithstanding the fact that it has been a victim of the use of
atomic bombs, the country nevertheless avails of nuclear power
produced by a number of nuclear power plants inside the country.
The unavoidable fact is that the use of nuclear energy can never
be limited to certain countries.
The world is faced with dwindling fossil fuel supplies. The
increasing rate with which fossil fuels are burned to obtain
energy is making the world a dangerous place to live in.
Therefore, there is nothing "unnatural or unconventional" in Iran
trying to replace fossil fuels with nuclear energy resources.
Industrialized states and several Third World countries have been
using nuclear power for quite some time now. But what is
surprising is that there is no negative propaganda raised against
these countries for their use of nuclear energy as is the case
with the Islamic Republic.
The fact that the world's fossil fuel supplies are almost running
out will force countries to look for alternatives. Thanks to
modern technology, there are indeed alternatives, and nuclear
power is one. Necessity, convenience and the desire to achieve
faster development are the driving force of countries, including
Iran, in the search for energy sources. Countries, like Iran,
that intend to use nuclear power for peaceful purposes cannot,
therefore, be curtailed in this legitimate endeavor.
Iran has been completely open in its pursuit of nuclear energy
for peaceful purposes, and this fact has been confirmed time and
again by inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) who regularly inspect the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant
which Iran is building with Russian assistance.
Russia's announcement that it is ready to help build half-a-dozen
nuclear power plants for Iran has again triggered widespread
propaganda by enemies of the Islamic Republic that the Bushehr
nuclear power plant is part of a program to acquire or develop
weapons of mass destruction.
But, the truth is, the IAEA itself has repeatedly rejected such
propaganda with regular reports on its inspection trips to the
Bushehr Nnuclear Power Plant which is available to the
international community.
Hereunder is the full text of an interview TEHRAN TIMES conducted
with the chairman of the Majlis Energy Commission, Dr. Hossein
Afarideh: Q: Dr. Afarideh, as the Majlis Energy Commission
chairman and well informed on the activities of the Bushehr
Nuclear Power Plant, can you tell us what this project is really
for? A: Busher Nuclear Power Plant is designed to produce
electricity through fission. This is the common practice in all
nuclear plants of the world and we have long been expecting to
produce this kind of energy.
In fact, once the plant goes on line it will produce more than
30,000 megawatts of electricity that is three percent of Iran's
total electricity production. In Third World countries, nuclear
energy accounts for as much as eight percent of total electrical
power production. In developed countries, the figure is as high
as 70 percent.
Iran has placed special emphasis on making a variety of energy
resources available to the people and, considering the advantages
of nuclear energy, it has decided to exploit this energy resource
for its future energy needs.
Q: How would you evaluate the supervisory function of the IAEA on
the activities of the Bushehr power plant? A: The IAEA is keeping
a close watch on the activities of the Bushehr plant. The agency
has scheduled some 70 inspection missions in the current year to
check activities in the plant.
Each inspection team is composed of at least two people who are
closely informed of the construction process of the plant. Each
mission lasts for at least ten days and sometimes an inspection
team arrives at the site without prior notice.
Therefore, considering the great number of IAEA missions sent to
inspect the Bushehr power project, it would not be incorrect to
say that the inspectors have many opportunities to scrutinize the
activities of the power plant and no activity relating to the
project goes unchecked as the construction process is under
supervision all throughout the year.
Q: Considering the fact that there is almost an everyday
inspection of the activities at the plant by the IAEA, why are
certain countries accusing Iran of trying to acquire weapons of
mass destruction by making a reference to the Bushehr nuclear
power project? A: Countries that are making the accusation are
simply justifying their evil policies toward Iran and are
actually against the Islamic Republic acquiring technology to
advance itself. These countries have always been trying to
prevent Iran from progressing and, in fact, desire to see Iran
remain underdeveloped. However, they will never be able to block
progress by the Islamic Republic and prevent it from harnessing
its nuclear capability to produce a cheaper and more efficient
form of energy that will benefit the people.
The opposition of these countries to Iran's efforts to obtain
nuclear energy for peaceful purposes is unreasonable because
other world nations have already turned to nuclear power to
satisfy their energy requirements. These countries are basically
trying to distract world opinion from the fact that the Islamic
Republic is a peace-loving country and would have the world
believe that it is a threat to peace.
Q: Certain Western newspapers have recently spread rumors that
the Zionist regime is planning to attack the Bushehr nuclear
plant. What is the origin of these rumors? A: The Zionist media
is responsible for spreading these rumors. It is no surprise,
given the fact that the regime is Iran's arch foe and is insecure
in the region. In fact, it has always opposed Iran's every single
step towards development.
Israelis will never tolerate Iran achieving scientific and
technological progress.
But, as everybody knows, an attack on the Bushehr Power Plant is
easier said than done. The Zionists will never dare to do so.
Besides, the Zionist regime knows that the activities of the
plant are under IAEA continuous supervision and would never be
able to invoke international support if it does. Furthermore,
IAEA inspectors themselves have confirmed the peaceful purpose of
the plant and will never accept Western media propaganda.
Q: Dr. Afarideh, how is the Bushehr nuclear project progressing
and when do you think it will go on stream? A: The project is
currently running its scheduled course toward completion with
Russian experts already working on the installation procedure.
The project, by the way, will be finished in 2004.
webmaster@tehrantimes.com
*****************************************************************
8 Fossil Fuel Plant to Replace Zheleznogorsk Plutonium Reactor May
Already Be Literal Fossil
Reprocessing at Zheleznogorsk
The Mining and Chemical Combine in Zheleznogorsk still operates
one of its three plutonium-producing reactors. This section also
delivers information on spent nuclear fuel handling and the
incomplete reprocessing plant RT-2.
SOSNOVOBORSK, CENTRAL SIBERIA - One hot morning in early July,
three brick masons, carrying clinking shoulder packs, showed up
for work at the Sosnovoborsk Heat and Electrical Central, known
by its Russian abbreviation as TETs.
Panorama view of the TETs. Idle crane is visible.
Charles Digges, 2002-07-30 12:13
But the three who turned up for work that day at the
half-constructed fossil fuel plant, located some 15 kilometres
from the Zheleznogorsk Mining and Chemical Combine, or GKhK, told
Bellona Web that they would be — and have been for months — the
only workers likely to be coming to work. Identifying themselves
only as "residents of Central Asia," they freely said they were
working without documents or contracts, and only vaguely knew
what kind of construction they were to be performing.
"Every couple of days, someone comes by and pays us in vodka and
a few roubles," said one worker — older than the other two —
explaining the clinking in his daypack.
"Then we set to work with bricks and mortar, building some sort
of wall, but we're not sure what it's for because we have no
design to follow."
The fossil fuel plant has been under construction for more than a
decade. But non-proliferation funding from the US Department of
Energy (DOE) is slated to complete the plant's construction in
order to supply heat and power to the closed nuclear city of
Zheleznogorsk, which has previously staved away the hard Siberian
freeze with a weapons-grade plutonium-producing reactor. But that
reactor is scheduled to be shut down in four years.
Pressures from Minatom
Zheleznogorsk background
Other reports from the area around Zheleznogorsk — the city
which is to host up to 80 tonnes of spent nuclear fuel.
[http://www.bellona.no/en/international/russia/nuke_industry/siberia/zheleznogo
rsk/index.html]
Last week, Zheleznogorsk received a visit by a cortege from the
Russia Nuclear Power Ministry, or Minatom, which included First
Deputy Nuclear Power Ministers Mikhail Solonin and Vladimir
Vinogradov. Vinogradov said Zheleznogorsk is "one of Minatom's
most problematic enterprises."
The problems, he said, according to the RIA news agency, stemmed
from the necessity of converting the production of the city,
closing down those workshops engaged in weapons production, while
maintaining the scientific viability of the combine.
Of equal importance, he said, was completing the construction of
the dry storage facility for spent nuclear fuel (SNF) at
Zheleznogorsk's RT-2 facility, leaving little eleventh-hour doubt
that controversial SNF imports will soon be apart of Russia's
nuclear landscape.
"This city will maintain its scientific value in the nuclear
community," Vinogradov said, according to Interfax news agency.
In order to make sure that was the case, he ordered the
administration of the Zheleznogorsk GKhK to have a report about
the next 20 years' development of Zheleznogorsk on his desk soon,
RIA reported.
Presumably, this development begins with the refurbishing of the
Sosnovoborsk TETs, with US DOE funding, as quickly as possible.
Pressures from the Americans
The option of building a brand new fossil fuel plant for
Zheleznogorsk, instead of refurbishing the old one has, according
to DOE officials, been discussed by the Russian side. But
according to Anatoly Mamaev, of Zheleznogorsk's Citizens' Centre
for Nuclear Non-Proliferation, "the time has long come, and
therefore this question [of where to build the fossil fuel plant]
has to be decided quickly — otherwise the Americans may not give
us the money."
"They have already warned us once," he told Bellona Web.
The most logical choice, therefore — for which a local
subcontractor, Glavspetsstroi, has already been picked, according
to news reports — is the half-constructed behemoth outside
Sosnovoborsk, located 15 kilometres from the closed nuclear city.
Why the hurry? Because the Zheleznogorsk plutonium reactor is
scheduled for shut-down by 2006 as part of a non-proliferation
agreement with the United States, which has already closed all
the 14 plutonium reactors of its own. Russia has two other
plutonium reactors, both located in Seversk, near Tomsk in
Central Siberia, and they too are scheduled to close in 2006.
Combined, these three reactors produce 1,500 kilograms of
weapons-grade plutonium a year. Seversk will also receive a
fossil fuel plant on the DOE tab.
But progress in the decade-long doldrums of economic reform at
the Sosnovoborsk plant has not been rapid, and the DOE has a
major task before it in jump-starting the effort.
The plants construction began in the mid 1980's in order to
provide power and heating backup to the nuclear city should
routine, or otherwise, shutdowns of the plutonium reactor plunge
the Siberian city into cold and darkness. Funding for the
construction, however, dried up altogether with the
disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, and since then
construction has been insignificant and intermittent.
Whose plant is it?
There is also confusion as to what government agency is
responsible for the Sosnovoborsk fossil fuel plant at present.
Charles Digges/Bellona
There is also confusion as to what government agency is
responsible for the Sosnovoborsk fossil fuel plant at present,
and who is paying the "salaries" of those three workers
interviewed by Bellona Web. A spokesman for the new
subcontractor, Glavspetsstroi, which has not yet begun work, said
they aren't paying the workers, and a spokesman for Bechtel, the
American construction firm which has been responsible for much of
US-led non-proliferation construction over the past decade also
said they were unaware of any work being performed at the plant.
But, according to environmental groups in Moscow and
Sosnovoborsk, the plant's construction is under Minatom's
purview, and the workers, as well as activists who have been
inside the facility, say warning signs, posted by Minatom, are to
be found throughout.
One Sosnovoborsk environmental activist — in fact Sosovoborsk's
only environmental activist, Yevgeny Spirin — insisted in an
interview with Bellona Web that the plant was under the control
of Minatom, which has been using it as a money laundering front
since the construction began.
"In the same amount of time and with the same amount of money it
has taken them to build a third of this TETs, you could have
built four fossil fuel plants for Zheleznogorsk," said Spirin.
"And there is no way to get information from Minatom about when
this plant will be complete, what ecological standards it will
adhere to — nothing."
But Nikolai Shingarev, head of Minatom's board for relations with
government agencies and information policy, said Spirin and
others were barking up the wrong tree and denied Minatom was
responsible for any current activities — modest though they may
be — at the plant. He told Bellona Web that Minatom made a
substantial investment in the fossil fuel plant, which was meant
to provide a substitute source of energy for the nuclear city
when construction began in the mid-1980s.
"It is impossible that this plant is ‘no one's responsibility,'"
said Shingarev. "That just doesn't happen — it is a government
facility. It's just a matter of figuring out which part of the
government answers for it." Shingarev also dismissed Spirin's
allegations of money laundering.
Mamaev said that many of the original costs of starting the
plant's construction came from Krasnoyarsk's regional budget —
presumably augmented by federal and Minatom funds mentioned by
Shingarev.
But Mamaev added that there were protracted squabbles during the
building of the plant as to who would get the profits from its
heating and electric revenues — Zheleznogorsk, the Krasnoyarsk
Regional administration, the then Ministry of Energy or the now
defunct Sredmash, the Soviet-era cover name for Minatom. This
impasse, according to Mamaev, also contributed to halting the
plant's construction and its current quasi-leaderless state.
Spirin said that he had approached the administrations of both
Zheleznogorsk and the Krasnoyarsk region in his search for
information about the plant, only to be pointed back to Minatom —
though he added none of the officials he spoke with were entirely
sure Minatom was the place to turn to.
Meanwhile, back at the TETs, the self-appointed spokesman for the
rag-tag group of workers said their workday ended when the vodka
ran out or it got too hot to continue. "It feels like working in
Soviet times," he said with a gold-toothed smile and entered the
restricted zone through a shabby gate to add another few
kilograms of mortar to the plant.
What the DOE is inheriting
Obviously, this is a work ethic the DOE intends to change in
2003, once it takes over the project of shutting down Russia's
three plutonium reactors and brings to bear part of the $49
million the US government has allocated out of its budget for the
"Elimination of Russian Weapons-Grade Plutonium Production" on
refurbishing the TETs plant. That project alone is estimated at
$14 million.
But aside from having to deal with the apparent confusion over
who is responsible for the plant, the DOE is also inheriting a
task that has languished in the arms of US Department of
Defence's Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) programme for ten
years.
The original plan, under the DOD-CTR approach, was to perform a
so-called core conversion on the reactors, a process that would
have converted them in such a way as to stop them from generating
volumes of weapons-grade plutonium. But according to former US
government officials, the CTR programme had neither competent
management nor sound science on its side.
All three of Russia's plutonium producing reactors — which are on
average 34 years old— are pioneers of the fatally flawed
Chernobyl-style RBMK-1000, which makes core conversion an
invitation to nuclear disaster. Because of this, the DOE could
also inherit another $75 million in unspent funds from the DOD's
failed core conversion project to spend toward the reactor
shut-down project next year, for a possible total of $124 million
in 2003.
Zheleznogorsk's reaction
Eduard Zavdugayev, head of public and external relations for
the Zheleznogork administration, addresses activists at an
anti-nuke camp near Krasnoyarsk.
Charles Digges/Bellona
The DOE may also face the ire of a town whose bread and butter
have just been fed to the birds. The loss of the reactor and the
radiochemical plants where the SNF from the reactor is
reprocessed into weapons-grade plutonium oxide, will, according
to the city administration's chief public relations officer,
Eduard Zavdugayev, "lead to changing patterns of employment," in
his town of 90,000, most of whom depend on some degree or another
on the Chemical Combine. "If our city had taken a vote last year
on whether to close down the reactor, more than 50 percent would
have voted no," fumed Zavdugayev to 60 members of an anti-nuke
protest camp, which was set up in early July near Zheleznogorsk.
"We have to shut down that reactor, and that reactor heats our
city, which means we need to build that TETs or freeze."
He added, however, that many Zheleznogorsk residents are against
the TETs not on the grounds of the employment insecurity it will
cause the closed city, but on environmental grounds as well.
"We have been reassured that the TETs will be built to modern
standards with all sorts of new technology, but the fact is that
it is a fossil fuel plant with smoke stacks, the pollution from
which will effect the environment," he told the camp
participants.
"So the next question is how will we live," Zavdugayev continued
bitterly. "There is at the moment no other source of heat or
power [besides the reactor]. Many of us are against closing it
down — further action lies in the hands of the authorities and
what they want."
The drive for SNF
But in a later interview with Bellona Web, Zavdugayev was far
more sanguine, and the change from his fiery attitude on the
public rostrum to his calm demeanour during a private
conversation can only be explained by one thing — the revenues
from SNF storage at Zheleznogorsk's RT-2 facility that have most
bureaucrats in the Krasnoyarsk region rubbing their hands.
"We don't see the closure of the reactor as a catastrophe or an
interruption of our way of life, but rather a shift in the
infrastructure of the city's mission," Zavdugayev said.
"Yes, the reactor will close, but we also will need highly
skilled nuclear scientists to monitor the proposed burial
facility for fissile waste," he said referring to the as yet
incomplete RT-2 temporary storage facility in Zheleznogorsk.
"We also need qualified reactor scientists — which we already
have — to monitor the reactor itself for the next 50 years, until
radiation levels subside to levels safe enough to dismantle it.
When viewed in that light — plus the SNF imports — the shut-down
of the reactor has gained us employment for decades."
RT-2
RT-2 reprocessing plant under never-ending construction.
Photo: Thomas Nilsen
Nuclear Minister Alexander Rumyantsev said at a recent press
conference that RT-2 will eventually hold 80 tonnes of fissile
waste. This, however, was at variance with other projections by
Minatom and Zheleznogorsk officials, who said the temporary SNF
storage facility will hold 33,000 tonnes.
Math errors aside, Minatom proposes to charge $1 billion for
2,000 tonnes of foreign SNF — which Rumyantsev said significantly
undercuts Russia's main competitors — that will remain in the
RT-2 dry cask storage while Minatom applies the proceeds of its
import fees to upgrading Russia's ailing reprocessing
infrastructure.
The storage of SNF will mean big cash dividends, both for
Zheleznogorsk, and the Krasnoyarsk region as a whole, and
administration will be paid several million dollars for hosting
the waste.
Zavdugayev even cited areas where the Zheleznogorsk economy could
grow — thanks precisely to the fossil fuel plant he not minutes
before denounced as ecologically unsound and a plague to the
people of his city.
"We are planning aerospace fuel experiments — like NASA's — with
plutonium and uranium as the reactor programme phases out," he
said. Minatom would not comment on these specific plans.
"There will be no lack of work for our brain power, but this is
something these ‘greens' just don't understand. They hear SNF and
plutonium, and alarm bells go off. Well, we already have some
3,000 tonnes of SNF in storage [at RT-2] and it poses a danger to
no one. No one."
Points of "agreement"
If there is any common ground to be found between self-financed
activist like Spirin and a paid representative of the nuclear
industry like Zavdugayev, it is the potential for further
pollution from the TETs once it goes into operation.
Although Zavdugayev seemed to mention the potential pollution
from the TETs as a rhetorical tool to turn the tables on the
environmentalists, rather than an expression of actual concern
for the environment, Spirin raised this point in a later
interview.
"The TETs is being built on old plans with old methods and there
is a great risk that the area will be severely harmed by
pollution from the smoke stacks that will billow out a layer of
ash on the surrounding forests," he said.
"As for the DOE plan, anything is possible — if they refurbish
the plant to ecological standards, then I am for the plan. But I
don't think it will help us much if they stick to the old plant
blueprints, which they might do if they are concerned about the
2006 deadline."
Publisher: [bellona@bellona.no] , President:
[frederic@bellona.no] Information: [info@bellona.no] , Technical
contact: [webmaster@bellona.no] Telephone: +47 23 23 46 00
Telefax: +47 22 38 38 62 * P.O.Box 2141 Grunerlokka, 0505 Oslo,
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*****************************************************************
9 How much radiation?
Patriot Ledger at SouthofBoston.com
By The Patriot Ledger
The radioactivity of the spent-fuel assemblies stored at the
Pilgrim power station is 30 million curies.
What does that mean?
Like decibels, which measure the volume of sound, curies measure
the volume of radioactivity. More precisely, it is a measure of
ionizing radiation.
Neutrons striking an atomic nucleus release subatomic particles.
These disintegrations are what we measure as radiation.
A curie is the amount of radiation given off by one gram of
radium - ab out 37 million disintegrations a second.
Thirty million curies means 30 million times 37 million
disintegrations a second, which, even on the scale of nuclear
physics, is a big number.
The glow-in-the-dark watch dials popular a half-century ago used
12 dots of radium to mark the hours. They produced about three
one-thousandths of a curie of radiation.
The accident on March 28, 1979, at the Three Mile Island nuclear
power plant in Pennsylvania released about 50 curies into the a
ir.
Thirty million curies is roughly the amount of radiation in the
fallout released by all atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons
since 1945.
Estimates of between 50 million curies and 150 million curies
have been offered for the amount of radiation resulting from the
1986 explosion that tore apart the reactor at the Chernobyl
nuclear power plant in Ukraine and blew a hole in the roof of the
reactor building.
Copyright 2002 The Patriot Ledger
Transmitted Saturday, August
03, 2002
*****************************************************************
10 New details on latest leukemia victim in northern Nevada*
ASSOCIATED PRESS 8/2/2002 09:40 pm
The 16th victim of a baffling leukemia epidemic in northern
Nevada is a 2 1/2-year-old boy in a military family once
stationed at the Fallon Naval Air Station, officials said Friday.
The state Health Division, in releasing new details of the case
first confirmed July 28, also said the boy?s family lived in Navy
base housing while in Fallon.
The family will be interviewed as part of an ongoing probe into
the Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia cluster, state Epidemiologist
Randall Todd said, adding that results of testing by federal
agencies should be released in late summer or early fall.
Health officials have said that given an average rate of about
three childhood cases per 100,000 children, they?d normally
expect to see about one case every five years in the Fallon area,
which has a population of 26,000.
Of the confirmed childhood leukemia victims linked to Fallon
since 1997, two have died. Adam Jernee, 10, and Stephanie Sands,
21, died in 2001.
Scientists have been testing for potential environmental
contaminants since September 2001. Part of the probe involved a
jet fuel pipeline that serves Fallon NAS, where the Navy?s Top
Gun flight training is conducted.
In May, two federal agencies investigating the cancer cluster
ruled the pipeline out as a public health hazard. But scientists
from the University of Arizona continue to investigate jet fuel
as a possible cause of the leukemia.
In June, university researchers took core samples from trees
around Fallon. They also have taken tree samples in Sierra Vista,
Ariz., where seven children have been diagnosed with leukemia.
Like Fallon, Sierra Vista is home to a military airfield.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency?s National Health and
Environmental Effects Research Branch is due to begin a study in
August to determine whether long-term exposure to arsenic-tainted
drinking water has affected the health of Fallon-area residents.
Arsenic in the municipal water supply also has been tested at
about 100 parts per billion, well above the nationwide acceptable
arsenic standard of 10 ppb.
Fallon is due to begin treating its water for arsenic in 2003.
Copyright © 2002 The Reno Gazette-Journal
*****************************************************************
11 Fallout: The Past Is Present
The Nuclear Witnesses
*BY LISA DAVIS*
*Paul Trapani*
Historical documents show that Building 253 was a staging area for
equipment from a ship used in early nuclear tests.
Week of July 31, 2002
Frank Brinton peers out the car window and shakes his head.
Hunters Point Shipyard sure doesn't look like it did when he left
in 1973. For the nearly 30 years he spent here, the shipyard was
a buzz of people, cars, ships, and work. Now it appears desolate
and decrepit, except for the trucks driving around. Weeds have
consumed most of the pavement surrounding abandoned buildings
with broken windows and antique signs. Nonetheless, Brinton can
still navigate the cracking streets, noting who worked in this
building, what happened in that one; clearly, he's got a map of
the shipyard etched inside his head somewhere, particularly as
regards the south side of the base, where he spent a lot of his
time. In fact, he actually created that south side.
When Brinton started work here in 1945, the shipyard met the bay
next to Crisp Avenue, near the shipyard's south entrance. Brinton
and his co-workers slowly filled in the adjacent bay with rock
and soil from a hillside above the water's edge, sand from
somewhere down the coast, and shipyard trash. Decades of filling
later, the southern edge of the erstwhile naval base is now about
300 yards to the south, separated only by a narrow inlet from
Candlestick Park.
Brinton began work at Hunters Point as a civilian, newly released
from the Navy after World War II. His first job was driving a
bulldozer in what was then the dump, down on the southeastern tip
of the shipyard, close to where some of the Pacific fleet docked.
Just about everything discarded from the shipyard went into the
dump; Brinton or some other fellow had the job of pushing it into
a pile. At the end of most weekdays, the dump pile was set afire.
The following morning, he remembers, the charred remains were
pushed into the bay. That's just the way things were done back
then.
"The whole area along the waterfront we used for fill," he says.
"We had quite a big area ... we pretty much dumped wherever we
wanted to back then."
Brinton left bulldozer duty after he began coughing up blood, a
result, he believes, of breathing the smoke from those fires,
some of which almost certainly wafted over the nearby residential
neighborhood known as the Bayview. Waste was burned at the
shipyard until about 1960, he says, when people started to get
uneasy about environmental problems. ("When people like you
started writing about things like that," he kids.) Then the waste
handlers began burying everything.
By 1947, Brinton had become supervisor of public works, which
means that he was in charge of, among many other things, shipyard
waste disposal. During his career, there were four different dump
sites at the shipyard, the youngest of which is a now-infamous
46-acre landfill that caught fire two years ago and has been the
subject of constant controversy in environmental cleanup plans
for the decommissioned base.
"Everything came to the dump," he says.
Everything, Brinton explains, included whatever was left behind
by ships that came into port -- from food to clothing to
equipment -- and, from the shipyard operation itself, just about
anything used in 20th-century American industry: a whole lot of
lead-based paint, lead-containing batteries, plastic, wood,
paper, building materials, concrete, and asphalt. That's not to
mention railroad ties soaked with creosote, tons of tires, oil,
diesel fuel, asbestos, and a host of industrial chemicals that
were routinely used until the mid-1970s, and that now are known
to cause cancer.
Among the other interesting substances put in dumps or used as
shipyard fill over the years, Brinton says, were large amounts of
sandblast material -- the remains of attempts to scour ships
contaminated during atomic bomb tests in the South Pacific and,
later, other Navy vessels -- and the carcasses of mice, rats, and
other animals irradiated during nuclear research at a top-secret
laboratory located in the shipyard.
"If anybody had anything they didn't know what to do with, they
put it out in containers and it went into the dump," he says. "We
had trash pickup just like any other city. We had six different
trucks hauling from different places [plus a tank on wheels for
liquids]. All of it eventually went into the dump."
San Francisco has big plans for Frank Brinton's dump, along with
the rest of the former shipyard. The Navy-owned land is a federal
Superfund site and the subject of a decades-long environmental
cleanup project, the cost of which has already reached into the
hundreds of millions of dollars. City and Navy officials are
inking the final details of an agreement to transfer the first of
seven parcels of the 500-acre former shipyard to the San
Francisco Redevelopment Agency, which, in turn, plans to develop
the property into a mix of homes, offices, and retail,
entertainment, and open spaces.
But while federal and local representatives fine-tune the details
of how each piece of land might be transferred, the Navy still
has to come to terms with the environmental sins of the past.
Several key reports relating to the cleanup and transfer of
Hunters Point Shipyard were released early this year -- but they
lack key information that would, at least arguably, force the
Navy to institute a higher level of environmental cleanup than it
has planned.
Because Hunters Point was for more than two decades home to the
Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, the military's largest
applied nuclear research lab, one of those reports, focused on
radiological activities and substances, has been billed as
exhaustive. Known as a Historical Radiation Assessment
,
that report, released in late March, is based on information from
shipyard employees and documents that might shed light on how and
where radioactive substances were used at the base.
But the report, which Navy officials acknowledge is years late,
fails to document the complete history of radiological activities
and waste disposal at the shipyard. In compiling the assessment,
the Navy's Radiological Affairs Support Office did indeed look at
some records, and interview some former shipyard workers.
But the study is hardly definitive.
According to its report, the Navy apparently did not interview
anyone who worked at the shipyard before 1952, even though the
greatest carelessness in handling nuclear material at the Naval
Radiological Defense Laboratory almost certainly occurred in the
late 1940s, during the first years of the Cold War, when interest
in radiation was soaring and knowledge of the dangers of nuclear
material was minimal.
The Navy did not interview the people who carried out maintenance
at the base, and who would, potentially, know about what waste
went where.
The Navy did not ask anyone who worked outside the radiation lab
buildings what they did with waste.
The Navy did not contact the men who loaded or unloaded ships
that carried waste.
The Navy did not talk to Frank Brinton, the man who, for nearly
three decades, was in charge of a shipyard landfill that has long
been at the center of controversy over the oft-criticized cleanup
of Hunters Point.
*Fallout: The Past Is Present*
And the Navy did not talk to Richard Logan, a man who helped
remove the interior fixtures from an aircraft carrier irradiated
during atomic bomb tests and helped install them into buildings
on what was then the San Francisco Naval Shipyard at Hunters
Point.
During the height of the Cold War, Hunters Point Shipyard was
among the busiest Navy bases in the country, large enough to
handle any ship in the Navy's fleet. More than 7,000 military and
civilian employees worked there, keeping vessels repaired and
afloat.
In 1946, the United States detonated two 23-kiloton atomic bombs
over a fleet of target ships anchored near Bikini atoll in the
South Pacific Ocean. Many of the ships targeted in the Operation
Crossroads tests were towed back to Hunters Point Shipyard. Most
of the ships were too damaged and radioactive to reuse and were
eventually sunk -- but not before military scientists had a
chance to study and experiment with the early nuclear weapon
targets.
Those early studies gave birth to the Naval Radiological Defense
Laboratory, which grew on Hunters Point Shipyard until it
eventually included more than 600 civilian and military
scientists working with all branches of the military. For 23
years, the NRDL experimented with applied uses of radiation,
contaminating and decontaminating vessels, inanimate objects,
land, animals, and occasionally humans in the name of protecting
Americans' health and safety. Lab personnel participated in
virtually every nuclear test in the United States until 1969,
when operations shut down.
The shipyard closed its gates as an active military base in 1974.
The Navy began seriously addressing environmental problems at the
shipyard in the early 1990s, after the federal Environmental
Protection Agency added the property to the national list of
Superfund sites.
In 2000, after years of on-again-off-again negotiations, the city
of San Francisco and the U.S. Navy agreed on a method for
transferring the shipyard, in parcels, to city ownership. The
details were set out in a January 2001 agreement between Mayor
Willie Brown and Secretary of the Navy Gordon England. The San
Francisco Redevelopment Agency has planned a mixed-use community
on the bay-front property, which is to include 1,800 homes.
In May 2001, /SF Weekly/ reported, in the two opening parts of
the series "Fallout," that the Navy had, mostly owing to the
scientific ignorance of bygone eras, grossly mishandled
radioactive substances and other chemical waste at the property.
The series also revealed the Navy's failure to research and
disclose much of the radiological history of Hunters Point
Shipyard.
This spring, the Navy released a much-anticipated first draft of
its Historical Radiation Assessment, a report on radioactive
materials used and disposed of through the years at the shipyard.
According to its author, the Navy's Radiological Affairs Support
Office, the 634-page report took five years and more than $2
million to complete. The purpose of the document, of course, was
to identify areas that require special attention and cleanup
because of their radiation history; such an assessment is,
therefore, usually undertaken early in the environmental cleanup
of an area with a nuclear past.
At Hunters Point, however, the report was decades late in coming.
The Navy's contractors are working on the fifth stage of a
radiation cleanup plan -- meaning either that the contractors
will have to review all of their previous work in light of
information newly disclosed by the radiation assessment, or that
the report is essentially meaningless to the cleanup effort.
"The Navy realizes that the [Historical Radiation Assessment]
should have come out years before it did," explains Dave DeMars,
the Navy's lead remedial project manager at the shipyard. "It
literally took years to complete."
Despite the time and resources devoted to researching the
shipyard's radiation history, the Navy's report is curiously less
than rigorous in many ways. For example, only eight former
shipyard employees were interviewed for the report, none of whom
worked there earlier than 1952. All of those interviewed worked
inside the NRDL, most of them either as scientists or in
management positions.
To be sure, these men all held important jobs in their day, but
their positions seem to have little bearing on a question that
Frank Brinton asks with unintentional understatement: "What would
they know about what happened to the garbage?"
According to their own report, Navy researchers did not interview
anyone who actually handled waste at the shipyard; nor did they
speak with anyone who handled radioactive waste sent out to be
dumped at sea (a process that ended in 1970).
The Navy did not speak with anyone who loaded or unloaded ships,
installed, removed, or repaired equipment, operated machinery, or
performed any other job in the yard on a regular basis, and who
might therefore have actually witnessed waste-handling.
In a written answer to /SF Weekly/'s questions about the report,
Navy radiological officials explained their methods this way:
"Finding personnel to interview for the [Historical Radiation
Assessment] has proven to be one of our biggest challenges. Most
personnel who managed operations using [general radiation
materials] at Hunters Point Shipyard in the 1940s to 1950s are no
longer living or have limited memory of the operations."
No doubt many people who worked at the shipyard in the years
immediately following World War II have died, but the U.S. Navy
certainly has mastered challenges more difficult than finding
former employees whose addresses are in government files and
computers. Most of the civilian employees of the shipyard served
at one point or another in the military; if still alive, they
receive pension checks and health care services from the
government. A crowd of people who worked at Hunters Point gathers
annually for a reunion lunch in South San Francisco; in recent
years, 150 to 200 people have attended, and many of them have
connections to the shipyard dating back to the 1940s. The group
maintains a roster. For that matter, most of the people on the
roster are listed in the phone book.
But the failure to find people who worked with shipyard waste is
not the only apparent incongruity in the report.
The Historical Radiation Assessment lists several locations at
the shipyard as having been cleaned of radiation, or never having
contained nuclear materials. But some of those "clean" locations
are also scheduled in the report to be resurveyed for possible
radiological contamination -- a happenstance that has caught the
attention of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the San
Francisco Department of Public Health. In reviewing the Navy's
report, both agencies noted, with some puzzlement, that several
supposedly clean buildings are scheduled for resurvey without any
apparent explanation.
"Where there is good evidence that radiation materials were used,
we've gone back to make sure that emissions in those areas are
clean," DeMars explains. "We're being very conservative about
going back over these buildings."
But it may be difficult to be conservative where the Navy report
is, apparently, simply wrong. Consider shipyard Building 821, for
instance, which the Navy contends was used only as an X-ray
facility, and never contained radiation sources. Nonetheless,
Navy contractors resurveyed the building and removed cesium, a
cancer-causing radioactive material, from a drainpipe.
On the other hand, some potentially hazardous sites aren't
reflected in the study's findings, because they apparently
weren't investigated.
In "Fallout," /SF Weekly/ reported that, according to historical
documents contained in the National Archives, the shipyard's
Building 539 was used to store radioisotopes until at least 1956,
and Building 354 was used in the early 1950s for "high level NRDL
projects." Neither building is mentioned in the Historical
Radiation Assessment.
The Navy does not have records on all of the former buildings
used by the NRDL, explains Vincent DeInnocentiis, health
physicist for the Navy's Radiological Affairs Support Office.
Many of those buildings have been torn down, he says, in which
case Navy officials attempt to find and survey the former area
where the building most likely existed. Also, DeInnocentiis says,
there are typographical errors in some of the old records, and
building numbers are simply wrong. Despite these potentially
permanent gaps in information, Navy officials have no plans to
survey areas outside those in which their research indicates
radiological materials may have been stored or used.
----
In a manner of speaking, Frank Brinton knows where the bodies are
buried at Hunters Point Shipyard. Indeed, the largest shipyard on
the West Coast presented him with some odd disposal challenges
over the years ... including dead animals irradiated at a nuclear
research laboratory located on the base.
NRDL scientists experimented on thousands of animals during their
research into the effects of radiation on living organisms. The
Navy's Historical Radiation Assessment, citing an official 1969
NRDL report, says irradiated animals were disposed of with great
care. To wit:
"Radioactive carcasses of small animals used in irradiation
studies were contained in plastic bags with formaldehyde and
placed in 20-gallon cans for disposal in accordance with [Atomic
Energy Commission] regulations. When bags containing carcasses
were added to drums of waste for disposal, the bags were
punctured and sand was added to fill voids and cover all
carcasses. Larger animals were disposed of in concrete casks."
By Brinton's account, the process was less ... orderly.
In the early years, Brinton says, most of the mice and rats used
in NRDL experiments were simply put into the shipyard dump. As
operations grew, the Navy contracted with an outside firm to
remove most of the bigger animals used in the lab. (Scientists
irradiated animals as large as horses and cows.) Nonetheless,
even in later years, Brinton remembers getting called
periodically to dispose of irradiated animal carcasses from the
lab.
"It always seemed to be just at quitting time," he muses. "And,
in those days, there wasn't overtime. So I just did it myself."
Brinton says he would hop on a loader, pick up the carcasses, and
bury them wherever there was an open spot, mostly along Spear
Avenue, between an older dump and the newer landfill.
As the radiation lab grew and began to move into larger quarters,
Brinton and his men tore down some of the old buildings it had
occupied, which were located near where a San Francisco Police
Department building now stands. The construction debris from
those buildings went to the shipyard dump.
At one point, while San Francisco built Candlestick Park, Frank
Brinton also built a baseball field ... atop an old dump site.
Then the Navy erected a big concrete building to house single
enlisted men ... on top of an old dump site. (The building is
still standing, on the south side of the shipyard.)
The Navy's Historical Radiation Assessment doesn't mention the
nuclear dumping Brinton describes.
Or the daily burning of shipyard refuse.
Or the daily deposits of burnt refuse into San Francisco Bay.
---
Richard Logan lives outside of Sacramento with his wife,
Patricia, whom he met at Hunters Point Shipyard. They fondly
remember a time when Hunters Point was among the busiest yards on
the West Coast, and everyone pulled together to get the Navy's
business done. Logan grew up on Alvarado Street in San Francisco
and graduated from Mission High School. He served in the Navy
during World War II and again during the Korean War, and worked
as a civilian at Hunters Point until he retired in 1973.
During his 23 years at Hunters Point Shipyard, Logan worked in a
lot of buildings. Between 1946 and 1951, Logan was a shop planner
at the yard, which meant that he connected equipment and people
to particular jobs.
He vividly remembers the /USS Independence/, a 10,000-ton
aircraft carrier that came back to San Francisco after Operation
Crossroads. The ship was so badly damaged in the Bikini tests,
and so hot with radiation, that it had to be scuttled.
Logan remembers the /Independence/ because he was involved in the
removal of equipment from the ship, a process that took place in
front of Building 253, while the ship was berthed between Dry
Docks 3 and 4, on the east side of the shipyard. The equipment,
he says, was reused throughout the yard.
"There was all kinds of stuff that came off that ship, and they
weren't throwing it away," Logan says. His late brother-in-law, a
rigger at the shipyard, worked on unloading most of the contents
of the ship, Logan says.
Logan supervised one project in particular: the removal of the
telephone switchboard from the /USS Independence/ so it could be
installed on the second floor of Building 253. The switchboard
and associated telephones and wiring became known as the "Blue
Bell System" and connected electrical and other workshops
throughout the shipyard. The system's equipment was installed
around Hunters Point Shipyard, Logan says.
"Whatever equipment was required to make it work came off the
ship," Logan says. "This was a good, practical deal -- if it were
safe. But I don't think they knew what was safe back then."
Logan remembers that the ground floor of Building 253 -- which
resembles a garage -- was used as a staging area where the
fixtures taken from the /Independence/ were stored until they
were used somewhere else on the shipyard. In fact, early NRDL
records show that the building was used to store equipment and
other lab items that were ready for disposal but were "too hot"
to mix with regular salvage.
The Navy's Historical Radiation Assessment, however, doesn't
mention anything about reusing parts of the /Independence/. As
for Building 253, the report states that the fifth floor may be
contaminated because it housed optical and gauge repair shops,
and that the sixth floor housed a room where the radiation lab
used some materials to calibrate instruments.
"The only [radiation-related materials] used and stored in the
instrument calibration room were sealed check sources," the
report states, adding that no contamination was found in a 1974
survey. Still, the building is designated for rescreening against
new radiological criteria.
DeInnocentiis, the Navy's health physicist, confirms that,
indeed, Navy personnel did use equipment from target ships
returned from Bikini throughout shipyard buildings, even though
that use was not included in the Navy's historical assessment.
The equipment, he says, was cleared before it was removed from
the ships in the late 1940s.
Historical documents obtained from the National Archives clearly
show that radiation testing in the wake of Operation Crossroads
was unthinkably lax by today's standards, thanks to a void of
scientific knowledge about the effects of radiation and a severe
lack of adequate monitoring equipment. Today, there is no way to
know where all of the fixtures or equipment from the Bikini
nuclear tests ended up at Hunters Point.
---
Certainly, environmental problems at Hunters Point Shipyard are
not limited to radiation. They're not even limited to things that
happened on land.
Part of the environmental cleanup project concerns an area of the
shipyard known as Parcel F, 450 acres of offshore sediment
surrounding the former shipyard. In April, Navy officials
released the results of a study done by their contractors to
evaluate offshore sediments around the bay edge of the shipyard.
The report is the fourth such study done in attempts to determine
appropriate cleanup measures for the parcel. And, again, the
recent report seems remarkably incomplete.
The highest chemical pollution in Parcel F, according to the
report, was found in an area to the south of the shipyard, near
the landfill. The Navy concluded that carcinogenic chemicals
known as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) -- once widely used in
industrial settings, particularly in lubricants and coolants --
were found at unacceptably high levels in certain parts of the
sediment, and therefore would be cleaned up.
But regulators from state and federal agencies were highly
critical of the overall methodology in the report -- and its
tendency to make pollution disappear in the statistics.
In their report, Navy contractors considered only the portion of
the Navy's underwater real estate closest to the shipyard
property, something that regulators reportedly reluctantly agreed
to a few years ago. (Navy officials have argued that San
Francisco Bay is so contaminated by other polluters that the
Navy's area, even after being cleaned, is likely to become
tainted by sources outside Navy control.) Then, the Navy used a
method of determining pollution levels that, basically, relied on
mathematical combinations of test results, rather than
considering the results individually.
The outcome of this combination all but excluded contamination
from metals like copper and mercury, and showed that only one
area of sediment around the shipyard -- the area near the South
Basin -- warranted further evaluation for cleanup, essentially
eliminating the Navy's responsibility for the rest of Parcel F.
Regulators were scathing in their responses.
In official comments on the Navy report, EPA officials said they
believe that evidence from testing the sediment "clearly shows
unacceptable risk" in at least four areas around the base
property. In his response to the Navy's study, Ned Black,
regional ecologist/microbiologist for the federal Environmental
Protection Agency, wrote: "Sadly, the Navy has chosen to produce
a study ... which is little more than an elaborate but poor
excuse to avoid the Navy's responsibility as a trustee and under
[Superfund law] to protect the environment on and adjacent to
Navy property."
The regulators also noted that the Navy had not addressed what,
if any, ecological risk there might be from exposure to
radioisotopes. "We don't like it if things are simply not
mentioned," Black told /SF Weekly/. "We like things spelled out.
Omitting things doesn't sit well with us."
Lee Saunders, the Navy's environmental public affairs officer,
refused to comment on either the Parcel F study or the EPA's
charges, saying that it was "too premature" in the process to
address those matters.
--
The schedule for transferring the various parcels of Hunters
Point Shipyard to San Francisco ownership has changed so many
times that, in practical terms, it doesn't really exist anymore.
The project is stuck in a sort of limbo, awaiting resolution of
myriad environmental problems.
Among those problems is an odd and complicated argument about how
much of Mother Nature the Navy has a responsibility to clean up.
For example: Long ago, when the shipyard was busy and expanding
like gangbusters, the Navy sheared off part of a hill above
Hunters Point and spread it around to fill in low spots in the
shipyard. The soil from the hill contains high levels of
manganese, a metal that can cause mental and emotional
disturbances in humans.
Navy officials argue that the manganese is naturally occurring,
and therefore not something they have to clean up. The California
Department of Toxic Substance and Control believes that when the
Navy altered what was in nature -- by breaking it up and
spreading it around -- the Navy took on the responsibility for
the results, one of which happens to be manganese contamination.
Complicating matters are the city's hopes to build the crown
jewel of the Hunters Point redevelopment project, the Bayview
Hunters Point Center for Arts and Technology (BAYCAT), a
nonprofit arts-based vocational training program, in one of the
areas most contaminated by manganese.
The two governmental entities have basically reached a standstill
on the issue. Talks are scheduled to resume on the situation in
September.
In the meantime, attorneys representing the Navy and the city,
along with various representatives of City Hall, Bayview
activists, and Arc Ecology, a San Francisco environmental
watchdog organization, continue to work on an acceptable
agreement to transfer Parcel A, a former Navy housing area
considered to be the cleanest part of the shipyard, and the rules
by which the rest of shipyard property will be transferred. This
agreement will allow the city to accept or reject each parcel of
land after the regulators sign off that the property has been
adequately cleaned.
The city cannot accept Parcel A until regulators say it's clean.
Regulators won't sign off until the Navy takes care of problems
in areas adjacent to Parcel A -- including the migration of
methane gas out of a shipyard landfill (see "Burning Mad," Page
17). "The main focus for the conveyance agreement is the notion
that we have to make sure that the adjacency issues are taken
care of," says Jesse Blout, development director at the Mayor's
Office of Business and Economic Development. "If we're going to
accept and start developing property, we need to make sure that
there aren't any lingering questions about risk."
Navy officials seem to have a different view of the situation.
"What is really holding up Parcel A is the conveyance agreement.
Once that agreement is negotiated, then the Parcel A conveyance
can go forward," says Foreman, the Navy's base closure and
environmental coordinator.
After years of stalled negotiations, there has arguably been an
increase in the exchange of information concerning the transfer
of the shipyard to civilian control during the past several
months. Higher-ranking military brass are now at the negotiating
table, and Bayview community activists, with the help of Arc
Ecology and other organizations, have become more assertive.
Still, no matter how badly the city of San Francisco wants to
take control of the shipyard and make it into a 500-acre,
mixed-use, bay-front development, the property can't be
transferred until the Navy cleans it up.
And it will be difficult for the Navy to convince anyone that the
property is clean until it can say, with some authority, what
pollutants existed there. Supposedly definitive reports that are
internally inconsistent, that don't match the memories of people
who worked on the shipyard every day for decades, and that
attempt to obscure reality with statistics are unlikely to be
viewed as authoritative, by people in or out of the government.
The U.S. Navy's biggest problem at the former San Francisco Naval
Shipyard at Hunters Point is one of credibility. The Navy has
repeatedly failed to tell city officials, environmental
regulators, and, perhaps most important, area residents about
environmental hazards on the property.
One of the biggest revelations in the Historical Radiation
Assessment the Navy released this year is a three-page list of
109 radioactive substances -- from those whose effects last only
seconds to those that remain poisonous for thousands of years --
used at Hunters Point Shipyard. And that alone highlights a
massive betrayal of trust: In the nearly three decades since the
Navy left the shipyard, and during at least a decade of
environmental cleanup, such an exhaustive list had never been
produced.
sfweekly.com originally published: July 31, 2002
*****************************************************************
12 Anti-radiation drugs stockpiled in cities
Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian |
Jamie Wilson
Saturday August 3, 2002
[http://www.guardian.co.uk]
Anti-radiation drugs have been stockpiled around the country as a
precaution against a possible nuclear attack by terrorists, it
emerged yesterday.
Potassium Iodate tablets, which are normally only kept near
nuclear power stations, have been moved to secret locations
across Britain since September 11.
The government has also established detailed plans for responding
to major incidents involving radiation, including regular
exercises to test responses to a nuclear incident.
A spokesman for the Department of Health yesterday confirmed the
stockpiling of the tablets near the UK's largest cities, but
dismissed reports that it had been done as because of fears of a
so called "dirty bomb", in which conventional explosives are used
to scatter radioactive particles.
"We have always maintained stocks of potassium iodine tablets in
the UK - sensibly concentrated in areas surrounding nuclear power
stations," he said.
"Following September 11 and a wide review of supplies needed to
counter any terrorist threat we increased the supply of tablets.
These additional stockpiles are distributed around the country so
that the public could be protected against radioactive iodine
poisoning in the event of a wider incident." But the spokesman
said that the tablets, which protect the thyroid, the part of the
body most vulnerable to radiation, would help only against the
release of radioactive iodine. A "dirty bomb", he said, would be
much more likely to be made from plutonium or cobalt, against
which there is simply no protection.
The tablets, he suggested, were more likely to be used in the
event of an attack on a atomic power station or some other
nuclear facility.
The spokesman also dismissed reports that the tablets were being
stored in hospitals. "We cannot discuss the number or locations
of the supplies as that would compromise national security, but
they are certainly not held in hospitals," he said.
The preparations emerged in a parliamentary written answer by the
health minister, John Hutton. "The government has established
detailed plans for responding to major incidents involving
radiation," he said.
"Cross-departmental contingency plans are in place and regular
exercises test responses to a nuclear incident. Careful
consideration has been given to the practicalities of
distributing potassium iodate tablets and arrangements for
distributing these tablets have been tested in recent exercises."
[UP]
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
*****************************************************************
13 Storing nuclear waste: Is the Pilgrim plant's 30-year-old method
of neutralizing spent fuel rods the safest way to go?
Copyright TownNews.com(C)
The Patriot Ledger at SouthofBoston.com
The pool in Pilgrim nuclear plant's primary reactor
building holds 2,200 "used" fuel rods totaling more than a
million pounds of radioactive material.
Greg Derr/The Patriot Ledger
By JOHN R. PARADISE
The Patriot Ledger
There are 2,200 of them, each weighing about 500 pounds.
They have been accumulating for 30 years, and are stored on racks
in a pool of water 20 feet wide, 30 feet long and 38 feet deep.
And they are deadly dangerous, with well over a million pounds
of intensely radioactive, potentially lethal material from the
reactor core at the Pilgrim nuclear power station in Plymouth.
They are the fuel assemblies, bundles of thin, hollow rods
filled with jellybean-size pellets of enri ched uranium, and for
three decades they have helped provide electricity to homes and
offices throughout the region.
Starting in 2010, if all goes as planned, spent fuel produced
from Pilgrim and 130 other nuclear sites across the country will
be shipped to the nation's first repository for high-level
nuclear waste, inside Yucca Mountain in the desert north of Las
Vegas. After more than a decade of debate, Congress and President
Bush authorized the full development of the Yucca Mountain fa
cility last month.
In the meantime, however, debate continues locally and nationally
about the safest short-term solution for storing the spent fuel
rods that now are being held at reactors in 34 states. The threat
of terrorism added new urgency to the discussion.
Entergy Nuclear Generation Co., which owns the Pilgrim plant, and
the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission say that the water storage
pool inside the hardened reactor building in Plymouth is as safe
as any system now used for stor ing the spent fuel rods, which
contain small quantities of plutonium and radioactive isotopes
that will be dangerous for thousands of years.
Opponents say each day the fuel rods remain in the pool is
potentially a catastrophe and are urging the expenditure of tens
of millions to store the bundled fuel rods another way - in
thick metal casks outside the reactor building.
Of the 26 operating nuclear power reactors in the Northeast
region - New England, New York, New Jersey and Penns ylvania -
six now use dry cask storage, according to the NRC.
30 years and counting
It was Dec. 9, 1972, that commercial operations began at the
Pilgrim plant, which can generate up to 670 megawatts of
electricity. For 30 years, neutrons have been splitting atoms of
uranium in the fuel rods, releasing energy that heats water and
produces steam to drive the mammoth turbines at the plant and
produce about 10 percent of the state's electricity.
Nationwide, nuclear power prod uced 19.8 percent of all
electricity.
Inside the Pilgrim plant's primary reactor building, just 15 feet
from the top edge of the reactor itself, is the large,
steel-lined concrete pool containing three decades worth of spent
fuel rod assemblies.
The assemblies, about 638 tons of them, are stored in racks
suspended near the bottom of a water-filled pool. The filtered
water cools the rods. The hydrogen atoms in the water, relatively
large on the atomic scale, stifle gamma rays emanating fr om the
spent fuel, protecting workers inside the building from the
deadly radioactivity.
Next spring, workers at Pilgrim will power down the reactor, as
they do every two years, and use a crane to remove the oldest
third of the 580 fuel assemblies inside the reactor core. They
will be replaced with a fresh batch of fuel-rod assemblies
shipped in from a manufacturing plant in Wilmington, N.C.
The old assemblies, containing hundreds of isotopes including
radioactive iodine, cesium and radi oactive cobalt, will be
transported underwater to the storage pool where they will join
the 2,200 assemblies now in storage there.
The NRC says that there has never been a serious accidental
threat at a pool storage facility like the one at Pilgrim.
It is the most common storage method in use in United States
today, the NRC says. The only other NRC-approved storage method
involves placing 60 fuel-rod assemblies, which have spent three
to five years cooling in the storage pool, into large cement and
steel storage casks located outside the plant on concrete slabs.
It cost about $20 million upfront to build a 20- to 30-ton
dry cask storage facility, according to the Nuclear Energy
Institute, an industry organization.
Critics cite crowded pools
Critics of the operation at the Pilgrim plant contend that adding
more spent fuel rods to what they consider an already overcrowded
storage pool is dangerous.
‘‘The pool was originally built as a te mporary storage site for
880 assemblies,'' said Mary Lampert of Duxbury,
president of Massachusetts Citizens for Safe Energy.
‘‘If the pool ever sprang a leak, its intended design allowed
enough room between the rods for air to flow between them,
keeping them from melting down or catching fire. That was with
880 in there. Now we have 2,200 and counting. If the pool ever
lost its water, there's no room for air to circulate. We
wouldn't stand a chance.''
NRC sc ientists and plant officials argue that it is extremely
unlikely that the pool could ever lose water. ‘‘It was built in a
way that makes loss of water highly improbable,'' said
plant spokesman David Tarantino.
‘‘Its walls are five-feet-thick reinforced concrete. Its floor is
five-feet-thick reinforced concrete. It has a half-inch-thick
stainless steel liner. It's in a building that has
2½-feet-thick concrete walls. It's all constantly being
monitored.''
Neil Sheehan, a spokesman for the NRC, said the commission agrees
with that assessment. ‘‘Storage pools are very robust
structures,'' he said. ‘‘They've been built to
withstand all sorts of disasters - hurricane winds, snowstorms,
earthquakes. In more than 30 years, as long as we've had
nuclear plants in the United States, we've never had an
instance where a problem with a storage pool ever challenged the
integrity of the fuel rods. We've never even come
close.''
Sheehan said Lampert's statement about the design capacity
of the pool is true. ‘‘Yes, the pools were designed to hold only
a limited number of fuel assemblies. The plan back then was to
let them cool down for a few years in the pools and then ship
them off and have the old pellets reprocessed for use in nuclear
weapons. The Carter administration put an end to that plan. Since
then, the power plants have had to hold onto their assemblies
until a long-term storage solution could be found.''
Furthermore, plants ‘‘have to prove to us that they have the
capacity to keep the rods cool and stop any fission criticality
from taking place,'' Sheehan said. Plymouth is
currently permitted to keep up to 3,859 assemblies in its pool.
‘‘Even if a pool did spring a leak, all of the pool's
systems are redundant. More water can be added and workers can
even make the pool colder,'' Sheehan said. ‘‘In an
extreme case, the plant workers can even use fire hoses to keep
water in the pool until the problem is fixed. In any event, a
leak would likely be slow - barring a huge explosion - taking
hours or even days to even empty out a small faction of the water
in the pool. ''
Alternative storage
Nationwide, about 20 dry-cask storage facilities are now in use,
including the permanently shut-down Yankee power plant in Rowe in
western Massachusetts. Another one is to go into use this
month at the permanently shut-down Maine Yankee plant in
Wiscasset, Maine, and ground is being cleared now for one at the
permanently shut-down Haddam Neck plant in central
Connecticut.''
‘‘It's a purely passive method of storage,'' said
Sheehan. ‘‘There's no pumps or valves. That's why
we're seeing more and more plants moving in this
direction.''
David Lochbaum is a nuclear safety engineer who worked 17 years
in the industry before going to work for the Union of Concerned
Scientists, a nuclear energy and environmental advocacy group.
Lochbaum said dry storage is preferable to long-term pool storage
for several reasons.
‘‘First of all, it removes the threat of human or equipment
error,'' he said. ‘‘It also divides a power
plant's total stockpile of rod assemblies into smaller
bundles, making the stockpile less susceptible to a terrorist
attack.''
‘‘If something happened to one or two of the casks, then
you're talking about a few dozen rods. If some thing
happened to the storage pool, you're talking about 2,000
rods. That's a big difference,'' Lochbaum said.
Asked if the Pilgrim plant would consider switching to the dry
cask method, Tarantino said it is unlikely. ‘‘At least not until
our pool is full,'' he said.
Counting on Yucca
Tarantino said Pilgrim's storage pool has enough room for
another decade of fuel assemblies. ‘‘By then,'' he
said, ‘‘what we're hearing is th at Yucca Mountain will be
up and running.''
‘‘About 90 percent of the waste coming to Yucca will be in the
form of spent fuel from the nation's 103 commercial
reactors. The other 10 percent of the waste will be from military
facilities,'' said Department of Energy spokesman Joe
Davis.
‘‘Nuclear power plants like the Pilgrim plant were never designed
to store this material for long periods of time, no one is
arguing that point,'' Davis said. ‘‘DOE believes the
best long-term solution for handling this high-level material is
geological disposition. We've been pursuing Yucca Mountain
for that reason. It makes the best sense for security reasons and
for environmental reasons. This place will be built to protect
this material, underground, for thousands and thousands of
years.''
Yucca Mountain could begin accepting nuclear waste as early as
2010.
But Safe Energy's Lampert said 2010 is a long way away.
‘‘There are still a lot of roadblocks in the way for
Yucca,'' she said. ‘‘In the meantime, let's deal
with today's problem. Let's get those old fuel rods
into dry storage before something happens to them.''
What about a huge explosion? Are today's power plants built
to sustain a terrorist attack? The impact of a shoulder-fired
missile? A jetliner?
‘‘No way,'' Lampert said. ‘‘You saw what happened to
the World Trade Center towers.''
The NRC won't speculate on those questions, or what would
happen to fuel rods should such an event take place.
‘‘We've been working with laboratories across the country
since Sept. 11 studying that very question,'' Sheehan
said. ‘‘We're still running computer models. I can't
give you an answer yet.''
Copyright 2002 The Patriot Ledger
Transmitted Saturday,
August 03, 2002
The Patriot Ledger, 400 Crown Colony Drive P.O. Box 699159,
Quincy, MA 02269-9159 Phone: (617) 786-7000
*****************************************************************
14 N-waste setback for Utah*
deseretnews.com
Opinion
Saturday, August 3, 2002
*Deseret News editorial*
Federal judge Tena Campbell's ruling this week on Utah's
efforts to keep nuclear waste off the Goshute Reservation is
difficult to argue with. The final decision, as she said, rests
with the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the state
would have to appeal that ruling to the courts, if and when the
time comes that the NRC votes to inflict the state with these
dangerous spent fuel rods.
And yet the ruling has one extremely vexing aspect to it.
Indian tribes have sovereign rights on their reservations. But
what happens when a reservation exercises its rights in such a
way that it causes danger to people outside the tribal lands? By
storing 40,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste above ground a
scant 40 miles from Salt Lake City, the tribe would indeed be
creating a potential hazard to the people around them. In
addition, they would harm the state's reputation. Utah ought to
be known as much more than a dumping ground for waste no one else
wants, but it feels a sense of helplessness against the system.
The state could breathe easier if it knew the NRC would
take all factors into account, including the state's interests.
But that would be wishful thinking, at best. To solve this
problem, Utah will have to rely on the clout and political skill
of its congressional delegation.
At the urging of Gov. Mike Leavitt, the Legislature passed
laws that banned spent nuclear fuel in the state, required the
Goshute facility, run by a consortium known as Private Fuel
Storage, to post a $150 billion bond and imposed a $10,000 fine
on anyone who provided services to the facility. These were
desperate measures, part of the Leavitt's whatever-it-takes
philosophy for keeping nuclear waste out. But they were noble
efforts. Campbell struck them all down as she ruled that the
state can't keep nuclear waste out because of safety concerns.
Leavitt has vowed to appeal.
In the meantime, the only sure way to keep hot nuclear
waste out of Utah is to get the federal government to reject it.
Rep. Jim Hansen's plan to turn land around the site into
protected wilderness has some merit, but it may not have the
support it needs to become law. Other proposals may face tough
sledding in a Congress that recently voted to put a permanent
nuclear repository in Nevada.
This is different from Yucca Mountain. Here, the spent fuel
rods would be stored above ground and close to the city. In
Nevada, they will be stored under a mountain far from any
population center. The trick is in getting the right people to
understand that.
© 2002 Deseret News Publishing Company
*****************************************************************
15 Inside a nuclear ship
BBC NEWS | Programmes | Breakfast |
[Breakfast] Saturday, 3 August, 2002, 07:19 GMT 08:19 UK
It's a month since two British Nuclear Fuels ships, the Pacific
Teal and the Pacific Pintail, set sail from Japan and headed for
Britain amidst protests and criticism.
Carrying cargoes of nuclear fuel rods, they're due to arrive at
Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria early next month, from where the
nuclear fuel on board will be taken to Sellafield.
Protest groups say that a flotilla of dozens of boats will meet
the ships once they approach the Irish Sea. Our correspondent
James Helm has been to see the ships' sister vessel in port at
Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria.
From the outside The Pacific Crane looks like any other cargo
vessel. But this ship carries nuclear fuel and its two armed
sister ships, currently sailing round the world, are heading for
Britain and a storm of protest. Inside the vessel, we were shown
the hold where nuclear material is stored. The steel walls are
double thickness.
Like this ship, the others each have two engines, plus weapons
and security teams on board in case of attack.
British Nuclear Fuels Ltd insist their ships are safe and secure
but many environmental campaigners aren't convinced.
They're promising protests once the vessels approach UK and Irish
waters. There have already been demonstrations the ships sailed
from Japan and again in Australian waters.
The ships' cargo is mixed Uranium and Plutonium Oxide - so called
MOX. Environmentalists claim there is enough on board to make 50
nuclear weapons. Greenpeace says the cargo is dangerous and could
be a target for terrorists. The fuel will eventually come to
Sellafield, which has a new MOX reprocessing plan
Officials there are keen to calm fears. Jack Allen, the head of
the MOX plant at Sellafield says:
"The Plutonium in MOX is encapsulated in a ceramic form which is
very safe. And the transport we are using is very high security
and well done." The Irish Environment Minister Martin Cullen
disagrees. He's disturbed by the level of risk attached to the
whole operation.
"Any of us, no matter where we live will be deeply concerned
about the possibility of something going wrong with one of these
shipments, given what the cargo is on board and the potential
damage to the environment and human life."
*****************************************************************
16 US DOE Chief Arrives in Moscow Under Shadow of Expanded Nuke Plans in Iran
International Co-operation
Section on Russia's nuclear industry international co-operation
and exports of Russian nuclear technology.
MOSCOW - A high power delegation of American energy officials
arrived here Tuesday evening for talks with their Russian
counterparts about a $20 billion deal to keep Soviet-era nuclear
material safe from extremists, but those talks will take place
under the cloud of Moscow's recently publicized plans to build
five more reactors in Iran.
Charles Digges, 2002-07-31 10:53
This visit by US Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and
Undersecretary of State John Bolton was planned before Friday's
announcement by the Russian government of a 10-year plan to
dramatically expand ties with Iran beyond its existing contract
to complete a nuclear reactor for a power plant located in the
Persian Gulf city of Bushehr.
In a document approved by Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov last
Wednesday — but withheld from the press until Friday — Russia
plans to build two more reactors for Bushehr and three in the
city of Ahvaz, located 100 kilometres from the Iraqi border.
Discussions of the plan are sure to dominate initial talks,
scheduled for Wednesday, between Russian Nuclear Minister
Alexander Rumyantsev and Secretary Abraham, officials here said.
Originally, the two were to speak about the results of a joint
US-Russian group addressing the problem of surplus stocks of
weapons plutonium and high-enriched uranium (HEU) as well as
issues related to spent nuclear fuel (SNF).
Washington has branded Iran as part of the "axis of evil" because
of suspicions that it would use civilian nuclear schemes to
develop atomic weapons. Israel views the Bushehr facility as a
threat to its security, though Israeli experts rule out a
military strike any time soon.
However, after mulling the issue over the weekend, the US White
House played down the Russia-Iran blueprint prior to Abraham and
Bolton's visit, even though the Bushehr facility was a major bone
of contention at a Moscow summit in May.
Russian President Vladimir Putin's stalwart support of the US
"war on terrorism" after the September 11 attacks on New York
City's World Trade Centre and the Pentagon prompted unparalleled
bilateral security cooperation, a new — though widely criticized
— nuclear arms reduction treaty, and talk of greater trade, and
earned Russia a permanent place in the elite G8 club of
industrialized nations.
A kink in plans for aid
G8 leaders promised at their June summit in Canada some $20
billion over the next 10 years to help Russia dismantle weapons
of mass destruction, part of a campaign to prevent terrorists
from obtaining raw materials for a nuclear bomb.
But Moscow's relations with Tehran, which include increased sales
of potent Russian conventional weapons and work on oil and gas
projects, could complicate efforts to put the landmark programme
into effect.
Influential US analysts this month sought to neutralize the row
by proposing Washington accept Moscow's closer collaboration with
Tehran in exchange for tougher verification of Iranian nuclear
projects.
That included restricting future reactor construction to Bushehr,
Iran's acceptance of intrusive inspections, giving up other
nuclear activities and repatriating spent fuel to Russia.
"The problem here is [that] the West, and specifically the United
States, has used too much black paint on Iran with the ‘axis of
evil', so now they have to downplay this picture to be able to
start thinking constructively," said Boris Makarenko, deputy
director of Moscow's Centre for Political Technologies.
"What we really want to know is how big the differences are and
whether both sides will allow this divisive issue to spoil their
relationship or whether they will be wise enough to continue
[their negotiations] and not pay undue attention to this issue."
Other meetings for Secretary Abraham and Undersecretary of State
Bolton are scheduled with Yuri Koptev, one of Russia's top
missile experts, and Industry Minister Ilya Klebanov, whose brief
includes the defence sector. Reactor "cooperation"
Part of that $20 billion in G8 aid will doubtless flow towards
the MOX plutonium disposition plan, which according to insiders,
has hit snags on the Russian side that could set it back as far
as two years.
The precise hold-up, according to informed sources, is whether
MOX fuel disposition will take place at the Urals Mayak Facility
or Siberia's Zheleznogorsk Mining and Chemical Combine, where
underground tunnels assure greater safety. MOX is a fuel mixture
of plutonium and uranium oxides, which — when burned in fast
neutron reactors — destroys the weapons potential of the
plutonium.
But there has also been embarrassing public confusion between the
US Department of Energy (DOE) and Russia's Nuclear Ministry
(Minatom), regarding the reactors that this fuel would be burned
in.
Minatom officials said Rumyantsev and Abraham are likely to
address Russia's BREST fast neutron reactor proposal, a plan that
exists only in Minatom blueprints. The reactor supposedly has the
capability of destroying weapons-grade plutonium when the
plutonium is burned as MOX fuel.
Minatom officials have been pressing the BREST programme with
such vigour that last week, Alexander Shanaurov, chief engineer
at the Beloyarsk Nuclear Power Plant (BAES), which already has
one BN-600 fast neutron reactor and is seen as a candidate for
the BREST project, announced, prematurely, that the US DOE had
approved plans to build a BREST reactor at BAES.
The announcement was refuted by officials at the US Embassy,
reached by Bellona Web — just as it was last month by US
Undersecretary of Energy Linton Brooks.
"We signed an agreement about the disposition of plutonium by
burning it in reactors, but there is nothing in that plan about
using the BREST reactor to do so," a US Embassy official told
Bellona Web.
Implementing the 'Moscow treaty'
Bolton met Tuesday with Deputy Foreign Minister Georgy Mamedov
as part of regular talks on nuclear arms cuts and proliferation
issues, the Associated Press reported.
At a May summit, Putin and Bush signed a treaty to slash US and
Russian nuclear arsenals by two-thirds, and the Group of Eight
nations last month offered up to $20 billion over 10 years to
secure Russia's stockpile of nuclear, biological and chemical
weapons.
On Sunday, Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov said no specific
mechanism or timetable has been set for implementing the Moscow
Treaty, which calls for each country to cut its nuclear arsenal
to 1,700 to 2,200 warheads by 2012, from the 6,000 each is now
allowed.
"We still have to decide how that should be done and when,"
Ivanov was quoted by Interfax as saying.
Last week, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he was
confident Russia would make the reduction but that US officials
want greater access to information about its nuclear weapons
programs. He said Russia has a "very secretive approach to a
great deal of things," AP reported.
Ivanov said the criticism was unwarranted, Interfax said.
Publisher: Bellona Foundation [bellona@bellona.no] , President:
Frederic Hauge [frederic@bellona.no] Information: info@bellona.no
[info@bellona.no] , Technical contact: webmaster@bellona.no
[webmaster@bellona.no] Telephone: +47 23 23 46 00 Telefax: +47 22
38 38 62 * P.O.Box 2141 Grunerlokka, 0505 Oslo, Norway
*****************************************************************
17 US DOE Chief Harshly Criticises Russia-Iran Nuclear Cooperation
Section on Russia's nuclear industry international co-operation
and exports of Russian nuclear technology.
MOSCOW - US Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham delivered a
strong rebuke Thursday to Russia's plans to expand nuclear
cooperation with Iran, asserting that Tehran is actively building
nuclear weapons and pursuing access to rocket technology,
presumably under the guise of Russian assistance to the country's
civilian atomic energy program.
Charles Digges, 2002-08-01 21:41
Abraham's remarks — which came a day after a closed-door meeting
among Russia's Nuclear Minister Alexander Rumyantsev, and
Undersecretary of State John Bolton, who deals with arms control
issues — exposed a what could become a deep rift between the
anti-terror coalition that was formed between Russia after Sept.
11.
At the press conference, Abraham focused much of his concern on
Russia's surprise announcement Friday of a 10-year plan for
cooperation with Iran, which includes the building of five more
nuclear reactors in that country — two at the hotly disputed
Bushehr plant and three more in Ahvaz, 65 kilometres from the
Iraqi border.
"Clearly the extension of Russian nuclear cooperation with Iran
remains an issue of utmost concern to us," US Department of
Energy, or DOE, chief Abraham told reporters in Moscow after
several days of talks with top Russian officials on energy
cooperation.
"We consistently urge Russia to cease all nuclear cooperation
with Iran, including its assistance to the reactor in Bushehr,"
he said.
Though Abraham's visit to Moscow had been scheduled for months,
and had a different agenda, he said to an aide that Russia's
announcement of the new Iranian construction project quickly
became the priority of his visit, a US Officials said.
Russian and Iranian officials have repeatedly argued that the
Bushehr facility — and any more reactors that may be springing up
over the next decade — is for peaceful, power generating purposes
only.
But the existing $800 million deal in Bushehr has been a sticking
point in Russian-American relations for years because US
officials and non-proliferation groups fear the cooperation could
help Iran develop nuclear weapons. Russia maintains that the aid
only serves civilian purposes and that the construction is under
international control.
US officials and non-proliferation experts have additionally
begged the question as to why Iran, a nation so rich in its own
natural resources would need a nuclear reactor — to say nothing
of five — and received no satisfactory answer.
But the five new reactors were not the only worry for the United
States. "[Iran is] aggressively pursuing nuclear weapons as well
as weapons of mass destruction," said Abraham at the press
conference.
Russian nuclear officials have pledged to sign a formal agreement
later this year to bring the spent nuclear fuel from Bushehr back
to Russia for reprocessing to avoid any proliferation risks — but
one insider at the Nuclear Ministry, Minatom, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity, said progress on this agreement is slow.
Abraham refrained from detailed commentary at Thursday's press
conference, saying that the question "has been passed the highest
possible levels, Presidents Vladimir Putin and George Bush."
But he did signal that Washington did not want the disagreement
to derail a $20 billion pledge signed by G8 leaders earlier this
month to help Russia dismantle its weapons of mass destruction.
"Our main goal is to address challenges in the area of
proliferation. Those problems have to be addressed regardless of
the circumstances, and I expect this will be a successful
program," Abraham said.
Jeanne Lopatto, Abraham's spokeswoman, reached by Bellona Web
Thursday, played down the provocative nature of her boss'
remarks, saying: "I don't think we made any news here — he was
just reiterating a position that has been held for a long time —
he didn't raise any new questions."
Other DOE officials reached by Bellona Web refused to comment on
Abraham's speech.
But Alexander Pikayev of the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, could not recall a time when an American official had made
such strong statements on Iran from a public rostrum in Russia.
"The Iranians are after the bomb, of course, but this is the
first time an American politician has made such a forceful
connection between that programme and Russia help — he didn't
beat around the Bush, so to speak," he told Bellona Web.
A spokesman for the Iranian embassy in Moscow Thursday reiterated
that his county's nuclear cooperation with Russia is for peaceful
purposes and was enraged by the suggestion that Russia's
cooperation was otherwise.
Aside from the five new reactors, last Friday's Kremlin
announcement of cooperation with Iran also envisions Russian help
to explore Iranian oil fields, launch satellites and build
passenger jets and conventional power plants.
A Russian expert on Iran, Radzhab Safarov, told Bellona Web
Thursday he expected portions of the programme might be watered
down before final approval — in part because of pressure from the
West and pro-Western officials in Russia.
Iran, meanwhile, sounded a defiant note. A commentary in the
state-controlled Tehran Times, an English-language newspaper,
said Iran's government would respond in kind to any military
action against the Bushehr plant.
"Iran will definitely not sit by idly if its nuclear
installations are attacked," the paper said, defending the
project as intended for civilian power needs. "It is a matter of
national pride and security." The Washington Times newspaper
reported in May that Iran had placed batteries of US-made Hawk
surface-to-air missiles around the Bushehr installation.
Nikolai Shingarev, head of Minatom's board of relations with
government agencies and information policy said that — aside from
the Iran issue — the Rumyantsev—Abraham meeting also included a
discussion of a US—Russian report on proliferation resistant
reactors, which included references to Minatom's long-dreamt-of
fast neutron BREST reactor.
"What sort of reactor will be selected for this requires the
signature of the two presidents," he said. "Whether the BREST
reactor is considered is up to [Russian President Vladimir]
Putin."
Another hot issue — imports to Russia of spent fuel over which
the United States maintains consent rights — was not discussed,
according to Shingarev.
Publisher: Bellona Foundation [bellona@bellona.no] , President:
Frederic Hauge [frederic@bellona.no] Information: info@bellona.no
[info@bellona.no] , Technical contact: webmaster@bellona.no
[webmaster@bellona.no] Telephone: +47 23 23 46 00 Telefax: +47 22
38 38 62 * P.O.Box 2141 Grunerlokka, 0505 Oslo, Norway
*****************************************************************
18 Sen. Wayne Allard was told Rocky Flats cleanup will be closed by 2006.
Rocky Mountain News: State
Waste removal begins
at Flats Plutonium heads to S.C.; shipments likely through '03
By M.E Sprengelmeyer And Berny Morson, Rocky Mountain News
August 3, 2002
The Department of Energy has begun moving weapons-grade plutonium
out of Rocky Flats, a major step in the plan to clean up the
defunct nuclear weapons plant by 2006.
The radioactive material is headed for the Energy Department's
Savannah River Site in South Carolina, where it will be converted
to nuclear reactor fuel.
Energy Department officials assured U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard during
a briefing Friday that all of the plutonium will be out of
Colorado by the end of 2003, the target that must be met for the
plant to close on schedule.
"This is great news for Rocky Flats, the workers and the
surrounding communities," Allard said in a prepared statement.
"The Department of Energy is demonstrating the administration's
commitment to keep the Rocky Flats cleanup and closure on track
for 2006."
For security reasons, plutonium movements are closely guarded
secrets. But during a National Academy of Sciences meeting this
week, an Energy Department official flashed an overhead slide
that said, "Shipment of plutonium to Savannah River under way."
Allard was called to Energy Department headquarters Friday
morning, after the story was reported in a South Carolina
newspaper.
He was briefed by Dr. Everett Beckner, director of defense
programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration, and
Paul Golan, a deputy to Jesse Roberson, assistant secretary for
Environmental Management. Golan and Roberson are former Rocky
Flats officials.
"All I can tell you is shipments have begun," said Sean Conway,
Allard's spokesman.
Energy Department spokesman Joe Davis said he couldn't comment on
the shipments. But, he said, the program to convert the plutonium
to reactor fuel is "moving forward."
The shipments were delayed for months by South Carolina Gov. Jim
Hodges, who objected to storing the material in the Palmetto
State without assurances it would one day be removed.
A federal judge rejected Hodges's arguments in June and ordered
him not to interfere with the shipments.
The case is still before a federal appeals court in Virginia, but
the judges declined to issue an injunction delaying the shipments
while the matter is under review.
A spokeswoman for Hodges could not be reached Friday.
The Energy Department was free to begin shipping the estimated 6
tons of plutonium on June 22. It is not known when the trucks
began rolling or how much has been transported.
The Energy Department has agreed to brief Allard monthly, Conway
said.
morsonb@RockymountainNews.com or (303) 892-5072
2002 © The E.W. Scripps Co.
*****************************************************************
19 Demonstrators head to Oak Ridge plant
KnoxNews: Local
Afghan Journal
News-Sentinel photo by Michael Patrick
Amina Inoue, from Japan, walks with Brother Gyoshi Utsumi and
about ten others along Oak Ridge Highway on Friday. Utsumi, a
Buddhist monk from Atlanta, started the Peace Pilgrimage in 1998.
Participants of various ages and backgrounds plan to arrive for a
rally near the Y-12 nuclear-weapon plant on Sunday.
Peace Pilgrimage on way
By Rachel Kovac, News-Sentinel staff writer
August 3, 2002
Lois Baker has been walking since Sunday. She's walking to
protest nuclear weapons, she's walking to promote peace, and
she's walking for future generations.
"I'm walking for my great grandchildren," Baker said. The
80-year-old Houston, Texas, resident is part of the Peace
Pilgrimage to Oak Ridge.
The pilgrimage began in Atlanta on July 13, though Baker began
the walk in Dillsboro, Tenn. A trek begun by Brother Gyoshu
Utsumi, a Buddhist monk from Atlanta, in 1998, it aims to promote
peace and oppose production of nuclear weapons at Oak Ridge's
Y-12 plant.
Baker, who heard about the walk through friends, has been
involved in the peace movement since World War II.
"I became so disenchanted with war," she said. "War is a stupid
way of solving problems."
Baker is the oldest member of the walking group that ranges from
10 to 15 members depending on the day. People have joined the
group at various points in the trip and dropped off as well.
Liana Johannaber is the youngest. Only 18, Johannaber began the
walk in Atlanta.
"I feel like it is a very important time in our country and world
to get involved in social and political issues," Johannaber said.
"We're right on the edge of self-destruction."
Johannaber said they are walking to make a change occur. But she
does get tired. The group rests every three miles but walks
between 12 and 20 miles a day.
When Johannaber gets tired she said she thinks of all those
suffering in the world. She also chants a mantra, like many of
the others. The Buddhist mantra has no literal translation from
Japanese to English. It is to be interpreted by the individual.
Though Johannaber and Baker say they interpret the mantra very
differently, they agree that the walk is part of their patriotic
duty.
"It's my obligation as a citizen of this country and as a human
being to do everything I can to make a difference," Johannaber
said.
"Patriotism is speaking the truth as we see it," Baker added.
The walkers also will take part in the Hiroshima Day Activities
in Oak Ridge. At 10 a.m. Sunday they will lead the march from the
Alvin K. Bissell Park to the Y-12 plant. The march is to be
followed by a rally.
Rachel Kovac may be reached at 865-342-6322 or kovacr@knews.com.
Copyright 2002 The Knoxville News-Sentinel Co.
*****************************************************************
20 OP: Mars and Venus: Together at last!
SATURDAY AUGUST 3 2002
© 2002 WorldNetDaily.com
A couple of months ago, Mars and Venus were closely aligned ?
indeed, almost indistinguishable to the naked eye. On the issue
of nuclear power plants in Iran, warhawks and peaceniks are
similarly aligned.
How did that come about?
First, recall that you need more than a few pounds of fissile
material ? for example, plutonium-239 ? to make a nuke. A
material that is merely fissionable ? for example, plutonium-240
? won't do.
Pu-239 is produced in reactors specifically designed and operated
for that purpose.
But, some plutonium is inevitably produced ? including Pu-239 and
Pu-240 ? when uranium fuel is burned in a light-water nuclear
power plant. After 3 years in a typical "high-burnup" plant, a
ton of uranium fuel ? originally containing 66 pounds of U-235 ?
contains about 16 pounds of unburned U-235 and about 18 pounds of
"commercial-grade" plutonium.
The uranium and plutonium ? especially the fissile material ?
remaining in the spent fuel is usually recovered and recycled.
Peacenik groups, such as Greenpeace, keep trying to prevent
everyone from recycling unburned uranium and plutonium.
Why? Greenpeace and the peaceniks claim that it would be easy for
a nation-state to make nukes from the recovered commercial-grade
plutonium. Furthermore, they claim that some nation-states would
then give nukes to terrorists.
No way, Jose!
Greenpeace to the contrary, it is not easy to make a nuke from
modern commercial-grade plutonium. Contrary to what Hazel O'Leary
claims, the U.S. did not construct and successfully test such a
nuke back in 1962. How could we have? Commercial power plants
were not operated in a high "burn-up" mode back then, as they are
today. The plutonium recovered from that fuel would have been
nearer weapons-grade than commercial-grade.
And, so far as we know, no nation-state has ever given nukes to
anyone. The U.S. hasn't. The Russians haven't. Even the
Pakistanis haven't ? so far.
In fact, in hearings held this week by the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee on the impending invasion of Iraq, there was
widespread ? and somewhat surprising ? agreement by the "experts"
on Islamic states that if Saddam were ever able to somehow
acquire a nuke or two, he would jealously guard them. He wouldn't
give them to anybody. Might even keep them in his basement.
Several experts even went so far as to say that if the Iraqis,
themselves, had a chance to acquire nukes ? with or without
Saddam in power ? they would take it. That is, it isn't just
Saddam that wants nukes. Iraq, itself, is a nuke-state wannabe.
The Israelis are convinced that Iran is, too.
Iran is ? as is Iraq ? a nuke have-not signatory to the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty. In return for promising on a stack of
Korans to forego acquiring nukes, Iran is perfectly entitled to
acquire anything nuclear that is not nuke-enabling. The Shah
contracted to have nuclear power plants built in Iran. Why? With
oil coming out of various orifices, the Shah certainly didn't
need the energy. It was apparently a prestige thing.
With the fall of the Shah, construction ceased. The Mullahs have
made several attempts to get Western companies to resume
construction, but the U.S. has managed to prevent it. But now,
the Russians have contracted to not only finish that
construction, but to build a total of six light-water nuclear
power plants in Iran.
The Russians will build the plants and lease Russian fuel
elements to the Iranians, to be returned to Russia after a few
years for storage and eventual recycling. Hence, the Iranians
will never have an opportunity to chemically reprocess the spent
fuel and recover the commercial-grade plutonium.
No matter. It's enough for the Israelis that the Iranians even
want to be a nuke-power. The Israelis ? who preemptively
destroyed the French-built Osiraq reactor in Iraq back in 1981,
killing at least one Frenchman ? are reportedly planning to
preemptively destroy the Russian-built Bushehr power plant. This
will, of course, infuriate the Russians and maybe even kill a few
of them.
That's apparently fine with our warhawks, who typically endorse
anything the Israelis want to do. So the warhawks have adopted
the Greenpeace battle cry: "The Bushehr power plant has to be
destroyed ? otherwise the Iranians will make nukes and give them
to terrorists!"
It's ridiculous, of course, but that's their story and they're
sticking to it.
--
/Physicist James Gordon Prather has served as a policy
implementing official for national security-related technical
matters in the Federal Energy Agency, the Energy Research and
Development Administration, the Department of Energy, the Office
of the Secretary of Defense and the Department of the Army. Dr.
Prather also served as legislative assistant for national
security affairs to U.S. Sen. Henry Bellmon, R-Okla. -- ranking
member of the Senate Budget Committee and member of the Senate
Energy Committee and Appropriations Committee. Dr. Prather had
earlier worked as a nuclear weapons physicist at Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory in California and Sandia National
Laboratory in New Mexico./
© 2002 WorldNetDaily.com, Inc.
*****************************************************************
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