***************************************************************** 07/07/02 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 10.173 ***************************************************************** RADBULL IS PRODUCED BY THE ABALONE ALLIANCE CLEARINGHOUSE ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR POLICY 1 Report: U.S. Pushes for Inspectors NUCLEAR REACTORS 2 US: Officials want security strategy. NUCLEAR SAFETY 3 US: Comparing 'Dirty Bomb' cancer risk to Hiroshima bomb damage. 4 US: Nuclear terror: A nightmarish threat returns NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE 5 US: Secretary Abraham’s attitude different from Sen. Abraham’s 6 US: Duel of TV ads precedes Senate vote on Nevada nuclear waste site 7 US: Experts debate water safety of Yucca Mountain storage plan 8 US: Plants ponder storage until Yucca opens 9 US: Waste storage issue could shut Prairie Island 10 US: Transport of nuclear waste concerns park officials 11 US: COUNT ON IT 12 US: Yucca's Rate of Water SeepageIs Unknown Factor in Waste Plan 13 Nuclear protest boats leave Sydney 14 Govt's support of nuclear shipment 'short-sighted': MP 15 US: Benton Harbor toxic site cleanup is uncertain 16 US: Area roads could carry nuke waste 17 AU: Plan Will Put Nuclear Waste on the Road 18 US: Atomic tomb 19 US: Yucca: Nuclear cargo 20 Australian protest fleet sets sail to intercept nuclear shipment. 21 US: Where would N-waste go if Yucca plans are killed? 22 US: GOP to force action on nuclear waste repository 23 US: Track troubles: Number of train derailments rises in recent year NUCLEAR WEAPONS 24 Musharraf's "de-nuclearization" plan 25 US: Brookings beware: Strobe's light is dim -- 26 US: Ambitious Nuclear Arms Pact Faces a Senate Examination 27 Iraq Fails to OK U.N. Inspections US DEPT. OF ENERGY OTHER NUCLEAR 28 SCIENCE : PROJECT ORION: THE TRUE STORY OF THE ATOMIC SPACESHIP ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** FULL NEWS STORIES ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** 1 Report: U.S. Pushes for Inspectors Las Vegas SUN Today: July 07, 2002 at 4:10:03 PDT BAGHDAD, Iraq- Washington is pushing for the return of U.N. arms inspectors to Iraq to ensure there are no weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein's army could use in the event of a U.S. strike, a leading daily said Sunday. The Americans "are endeavoring to double-check these myths - do they (weapons) exist or not," said a front-page editorial in Babil, the newspaper owned by Saddam's eldest son Odai. "If they exist, as they (the Americans) think they do, they will dismantle them so that they can start their aggression on Iraq," the newspaper wrote. "Once they enter the country and accomplish their objective, they will launch their aggression within 15 days or a month." The editorial came two days after the United Nations failed to convince Iraq to allow the return of weapons inspectors to Baghdad after two days of negotiations in Vienna. Babel claimed that the United States has deployed military advisers and American special forces in neighboring Jordan to take part in an attack against Iraq. "This means that the Jordanians are bringing an oil-coated stick close to a burning fire," the paper wrote in an apparent warning to the Jordanians. Jordan has denied those claims. The United States has warned Saddam he faces unspecified consequences if he does not allow the return of the inspectors, who left ahead of 1998 allied airstrikes launched to punish Iraq for blocking inspections. Iraq has been under U.N. sanctions since it invaded Kuwait in 1990. The sanctions can be lifted only when inspectors certify that Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons are destroyed, along with the long-range missiles that could deliver them. All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 2 Officials want security strategy. John J. Fialka The Wall Street Journal July 07, 2002 Ken Blaze/News-Herald A construction worker begins work on a new security building at the Perry Nuclear Power Plant. Behind the fence signs of new construction can barely be seen. In any other area of Northeast Ohio, a construction crew hard at work wouldn't make a resident blink. But the fence is 12 feet high and has barbed wire along the top. The men guarding it are armed with M-16s. And the site where the construction is taking place is 1,200 acres in North Perry Village where the Perry Nuclear Power Plant stands. FirstEnergy Corp., the Akron-based company that owns the plant, has started construction on a new permanent security building. The company has posted signs along Lake Erie, warning boaters and fisherman they aren't welcome. It also has stepped up patrol in the wooded areas that surround the fenced-in area of the facility to alert hunters or other interested parties not to trespass. These signs, and stepped-up patrols and protection are among the ad hoc measures owners of the 103 commercial nuclear-power reactors operating in the United States have been forced to take to deal with the threat of terrorist attacks since Sept. 11. They have hired more guards and moved security devices and patrols out beyond their usual perimeters. They have bought tons of so-called Jersey barriers, or large cement curbs, to keep vehicles from ramming through fences and gates. They have installed portable lights and cut down trees to give guards better firing angles. The federal government has made broad changes in the way it monitors air travelers and polices its borders. But there is no unified plan to improve security at nuclear power plants, which provide 20 percent of the country's electricity and could unleash far-reaching safety and health problems if damaged. Instead, there are disagreements about nearly every aspect of nuclear plant security. The Nuclear Energy Institute, which represents the industry, says it is better protected than most of the nation's commercial infrastructure. The industry is resisting efforts to federalize the security force at plants. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which regulates the industry, wants to upgrade plant security, but it needs help from Congress, where there are deep, partisan splits over legal changes that might help. The White House's Office of Homeland Defense is studying the matter, but it doesn't expect to have a plan until October. Seeking answers Some basic questions about the government's role in safeguarding these sensitive sites remain unanswered. "Where are the lines?" asks Roy P. Zimmerman, director of the NRC's Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response, set up in April. "Where is it that the utility has responsibility, and where is ... the responsibility for various levels of government?" Tom Ridge, head of President Bush's Homeland Security Office, said recently that he plans to give the president a "national strategy" on how to deal with the security vulnerabilities of U.S. industries this month and a more-detailed plan later. An official in Ridge's office explained that the more-detailed plan expected by October will give plant owners a better sense of what they should do and what government help to expect at various points in a new four-stage terrorist alert system the office is developing. The plants remain on the high-alert status set by the NRC after Sept. 11. Amid the debates, nuclear plant owners are working with the NRC to wrestle with such questions as: What is the real vulnerability of nuclear plants? How does the industry deal with local laws that limit the use of weapons? What type of attack might terrorists mount, and what size force would be needed to deal with it? Some of the answers are unsettling. Failing grades Peter Stockton, a former security analyst for the Energy Department who works for the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington, D.C., advocacy group, recalls an NRC exercise several years ago in which a team playing enemy attackers got into a nuclear facility, planted mock explosives and left without being detected. David N. Orrik, a former Navy SEAL who runs such tests for the NRC, recently told a House Commerce subcommittee that in 81 tests the NRC has staged since 1991, attackers in 37 got to parts of the plant where a real act of sabotage could have led "in many cases to a probable radioactive release." He said the industry's 46 percent failure rate hadn't improved before Sept. 11. The tests were canceled after that date because they would have interfered with the high-alert status of the guards. "The facts speak for themselves," said Sen. Majority Whip Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat. "You're talking about a 50 percent failure rate." Despite the poor showing nationally by other nuclear facilities, the 1,320-megawatt Perry Nuclear Power Plant passed the mock test with flying colors in 2001. During the drill, mock terrorists didn't get close to damaging any sensitive equipment that could potentially cause radioactive material to be released. Todd M. Schneider, spokesman for FirstEnergy, said the fact Perry was one of the few to pass the test shows how strong the security is. "We can't talk about specifics but the plant is safe and secure," he said. "We continue to be on high alert and make improvements that enhance our security." Richard A. Meserve, the NRC's chairman, says the results of the agency's tests overstate the failure rate because the attackers have far more knowledge of a plant's defenses than a real attacking force would. The tests, he said, also don't take into account many actions that plant engineers can take to nullify or minimize the results of an act of sabotage. For example, officials at nuclear plants say they could minimize the damage from some types of attack by performing a "scram," which shuts down the reactors within five seconds. Rules and other issues The NRC acknowledges that different rules and laws across the nation are hobbling efforts to ensure uniform protection for plants. The commission has long worried that differing laws in the 31 states that have nuclear plants weaken guards' ability to use their weapons. At most plants, local laws prevent the use of automatic weapons and shoot-to-kill policies that the mostly private-sector guards have at nuclear-weapons facilities run by the Department of Energy. In some states, there could be criminal liability if guards shoot to protect private property. In a few states, laws limit guards' firepower to pistols and shotguns. At Perry, there are no restrictions for guards' ability to use their firearms, Schneider said. Some companies also interpret the same laws in different ways. Victor Gilinsky, a former NRC commissioner who began exploring nuclear security in the 1970s, recalls visiting a facility at that time where its owner handed out cards reminding guards of their liability if they shoot an intruder. At another, he recalls, the thrust of the training appeared to be "shoot anything that moves." NRC regulators began asking Congress for a uniform federal shoot-to-kill law 15 years ago, with little response from Capitol Hill. The possibility of aerial attacks raises other defensive problems. Nuclear plants are designed to provide protection against violent storms, earthquakes, equipment malfunctions, operator error and even the crashes of small aircraft. But the NRC fears that their massive containment domes may not be strong enough to withstand the impact of large, fuel-laden airliners such as those used by the hijackers at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The NRC's Meserve says the agency has begun a major study of the issue, the details of which are secret. Several times since Sept. 11, U.S. forces have responded to threats of an air attack - which proved to be unfounded - by scrambling fighter aircraft. But the Pentagon has rejected requests made by some outside groups that anti-aircraft guns be installed near every reactor, Meserve said, and the proposal doesn't interest the NRC either. "It raised very serious command-and-control problems," Meserve said. A facility would need a decision to fire within minutes, too short a time to get a consensus from the White House on shooting down an airliner. Other problems include the danger of accidental misfiring and the possibility that anti-aircraft weapons might not deflect a large plane as it nears the plant. The most fundamental disagreement is over the NRC regulation called the "design basis threat" - the designation of the size and potency of attacks that plants should be prepared to thwart. The design basis threat drives nearly every security measure at nuclear power plants, from the size of weapons, gates, locks and fortifications. The exact numbers are secret, but according to industry and government officials, the pre-Sept. 11 threat was considered to be a few attackers equipped with grenades, explosives, automatic weapons and an insider's knowledge of the plant's defenses. The threat also included a truck bomb carried by a sport-utility vehicle. A new threat assessment, which the NRC has described to power plant owners in secret orders and advisories, hasn't been fully spelled out yet, but it probably will involve a larger numbers of attackers, the possibility of multiple attacks against one plant and a larger truck bomb, Meserve says. Reid and Rep. Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, want to go further and require the NRC to specify a new threat that assumes at least 20 attackers with weapons and training comparable to U.S. Special Forces, with "at least one nuclear engineer" and an insider who has intimate knowledge of the defenses of the plant. The lawmakers argue that the Sept. 11 attacks show terrorists could have those capabilities. Edward McGaffigan Jr., one of the NRC's five commissioners, says some of this is political hyperbole coming from people who want to see nuclear power plants shut down. "The nuclear industry, for better or worse, is held to a higher standard, and I think we accept that, but it shouldn't be held to an impossible standard," he said. He argues that defending against the Reid-Markey "threat" would necessitate a force of 11,000 to ensure round-the-clock protection at each of 64 sites where there are power reactors (some sites have more than one reactor). There also is a legislative impasse over how to beef up the guard force. The industry and Republicans favor bills that simply correct the differences in how guards can use their guns. But those proposals have been overtaken by Democratic efforts led by Reid and Markey to federalize and enlarge the guard force to cope with the larger threat these legislators fear. Gilinsky, the former NRC commissioner, responds that guarding plants "is a complicated thing to which there is no easy answer." He worries that a sudden enlargement of the guard force could be needlessly expensive and even dangerous if it shifted the focus of the plant managers and the NRC from running nuclear power plants safely to managing a large new security bureaucracy. Stumbling blocks Aggravating the tension, industry officials complain that their two main congressional antagonists begin with an antinuclear bias. During the past two decades, Markey has been the nuclear industry's most frequent critic in Congress. Reid is leading a campaign to prevent the industry from moving nuclear waste to a federal repository in his home state of Nevada. Another Democrat, Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York, is pushing to expand the circle of territory the federal government might have evacuated in a nuclear crisis to a radius of 50 miles from the current 10 miles. What if? It's hard to estimate the likely death toll from a nuclear plant accident because of the large number of variables and the small number of precedents. The most serious U.S. accident, that at Three Mile Island, Pa., in 1979, involved no fatalities. The radioactive release from the facility in Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986, caused the deaths of more than 30 workers and radiation injuries to more than 100 others. It required the evacuation and relocation of 116,000 people. About 1,800 cases of thyroid cancer have been found in children who were exposed at the time of the accident. The U.S. nuclear industry has been lobbying Congress against federalizing the guard force, using a series of newspaper advertisements showing beefy guards carrying semi-automatic rifles. "Tough enough? You bet," says one of the ads. At Peach Bottom Nuclear power station, 65 miles southwest of Philadelphia, the guards like that image. Posters of the ads hang on a wall of the guard room, where ex-Marine Jeff Johnson and the others sit. The guards are employees of Wackenhut Corp., hired by the operator of the plant, Exelon Corp. They are paid close to the industry's average, about $35,000 a year, plus overtime when they are on high alert. Their line of defense begins with outside patrols, then double fences topped with razor wire. Those are backed with a variety of intrusion detectors, including TV cameras monitored from two separate locations. In their training, Johnson and the other guards here learn that a skilled terrorist group using explosives could blast through the fence in seconds. Their response, reinforced by the daily "chess" games, is to quickly gauge the nature of the attack, then to rush to defensive positions. In mock firefights four times a year, opposing teams of guards test their skills using plastic rifles that make squeaking noises and softball-size plastic grenades accompanied by simulated explosions. During such exercises, the plant brings in an extra shift, called a "shadow force," that engages in the mock battle while the regular shift guards the plant. Guards sometimes "shoot" from behind mobile barriers designed to stop bullets, and use wire-mesh screens that can be pulled out from walls to stop grenades lobbed at them by the attackers. "Delay is the name of the game," says Wayne A. Trump, manager of security at Peach Bottom. "We fall back, protect and call in outside help." News-Herald Staff Writer Dino DiSanto contributed to this story. /©The News-Herald 2002/ Copyright © 1995 - 2002 PowerOne Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 3 Comparing 'Dirty Bomb' cancer risk to Hiroshima bomb damage. The News Tribune - Tacoma, WA [Tribnet.com] Peril of 'dirty bomb' mainly from fallout David Westphal; News Tribune Washington Bureau WASHINGTON - It's entirely possible that no one would die from the explosion of a so-called "dirty bomb" in one of the nation's major cities. There might not even be any injuries. No mushroom cloud, no intense heat, no crushing winds would accompany such a bomb. In some respects, then, Americans' worries about a dirty bomb explosion may be overdone. Compared to a nuclear blast, the combination of conventional explosives and a radiological element would do little immediate harm. And yet, scientists say such a bomb still could become a potent weapon of terror because, as a result of its radioactive fallout, people exposed over time could have a slightly higher risk of dying from cancer. And no one knows whether people who live or work in a contaminated area would put up with that higher risk. The result of a dirty bomb explosion, then, likely would be an urgent and emotional debate over what to do if a potentially large and valuable section of a city or region became contaminated at levels exceeding current health standards. Abandon it? Clean it up in a huge operation that could take years? Or simply re-inhabit it? Even tiny amounts of radioactive substances, efficiently detonated, could cause extensive contamination, according to scientists who have studied the issue. Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, raised the possibility of lowering the health standards at a recent Senate hearing. But he acknowledged that Americans might not go along with it. Government officials, he said, would have "great difficulty in convincing the public that (a city) could be re-inhabited." Whatever the outcome, experts say, the explosion of a dirty bomb in a major city likely would result in serious economic and psychological harm. "There would be billions of dollars of economic damage," said Steven Koonin, provost of the California Institute of Technology. Terrorism experts all the more fear a dirty bomb because the required ingredients - ordinary explosives and an off-the-shelf radiological element - are so plentiful. Low-level radiological materials are used in everything from food irradiation to medical equipment. Henry C. Kelly, president of the Federation of American Scientists, described several scenarios in which a dirty bomb might cripple the cities of Washington and New York. For example, he said a bomb containing a small amount of cesium - similar to that contained in a medical gauge found recently at a steel reprocessing plant in North Carolina - could contaminate a 40-square-block area of Washington, including the Capitol, the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress. The fallout produced by the bomb would exceed federal health guidelines in all of that area and, unless the rules were waived, decontamination or demolition of the buildings would be required. Decontamination would be so costly and overwhelming, scientists say, that demolition might be the only practical alternative. "If such an event were to take place in a city like New York," said Kelley, "it would result in losses of potentially trillions of dollars." In a more ominous example, Kelly said a rod of cobalt, taken from a food irradiation plant and exploded at the base of Manhattan, could produce damaging fallout throughout all of New York City and well into Connecticut. And yet, the cancer death rate from continued habitation would increase in most of these areas by only 1 person per 100,000 - a minuscule addition to the existing cancer mortality rate of 20,000 per 100,000 people. The huge area over which fallout might occur suggests that government's only practical choice would be to encourage citizens to stay put and live with these slightly higher odds. (Published 12:30AM, July 7th, 2002) Tacoma News, Inc. 1950 South State Street, Tacoma, Washington 98405 253-597-8742 Fax Machines: Newsroom, 253-597-8274 Advertising, 253-597-8764 Send comments to the [webmaster@tribnet.com] at [webmaster@tribnet.com] . ***************************************************************** 4 Nuclear terror: A nightmarish threat returns The News Tribune - Tacoma, WA [Tribnet.com] David Westphal; News Tribune Washington Bureau WASHINGTON - Four decades after American schoolchildren hid under their desks, practicing for the day when an atomic bomb might fall nearby, the nuclear threat is back. The magnitude is different from the all-out nuclear exchange that threatened to kill hundreds of millions during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Yet the horrific prospect of a mushroom cloud rising above a major American city has returned. Once again, the government is starting to prepare the country for a possible nuclear attack - this time not by missile-rich Russia but by militants looking for a single bomb to explode in the United States. "People have asked whether we should worry now about a nuclear explosion happening in the U.S.," said Gary Milhollin, one of the world's top experts on nuclear weapons. "The answer is yes." Although it is far from clear that any group will gain access to a nuclear weapon anytime soon, experts say a calamitous atomic blast, detonated by a terrorist group and claiming tens or hundreds of thousands of lives, is within the realm of possibility. And some say the government needs to do more to prepare the public for the aftermath of such an explosion. "The clock is ticking," former defense secretary William Cohen told a Senate hearing earlier this year. "It is one minute before midnight. And every moment that we hesitate ... we come closer to that kind of Armageddon that we all want to avoid." Asked about his biggest worry among all the threats the United States faces, homeland security adviser Tom Ridge responded in one word: "nuclear." The new threat packs an emotional punch, in part because many Americans thought this was one nightmare - which reached a crescendo with the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 - that had been all but buried with the ending of the Cold War. Then came Sept. 11. Vice Adm. Thomas R. Wilson, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, says the importance of the suicide attacks on the United States is that they "showed the way" for groups that want to destroy the country. From their perspective, he said, "the only thing wrong with those attacks is that they didn't go far enough." Opening the door wider to the possibility of an attack, he says, is the absence of the deterrent that helped keep U.S. and Russian missiles in their silos for 50 years - the near certainty that neither country could destroy the other without also destroying itself. That principle of mutually assured destruction doesn't work with a small militant group, says Wilson. "Non-state adversaries are not likely to be deterred by our overwhelming military superiority," he said. That doesn't mean nuclear weapons are the most probable means of any future attacks by anti-U.S. militants. Many analysts say groups wishing to harm the nation more likely would turn to chemical or biological agents, or to a so-called "dirty bomb" that uses conventional explosives to spread fallout from radiological materials. Others say the difficulty of producing or obtaining a nuclear warhead is so high that a successful detonation is unlikely. Yet the government's biggest nightmare is that, somehow, a group like al-Qaida would succeed in its explicit quest to secure a nuclear weapon and that its explosion could cause serious economic or political chaos. According to the Washington Post, Bush ordered his national security team last October to make the prevention of nuclear terrorism its top priority. Some experts say the country needs to act more aggressively on those fears and ramp up planning for a possible a nuclear attack - not only by disrupting militant groups abroad but by implementing a response plan at home. "We tend not to think about the consequences," said Harry C. Vantine, a counter-terrorism expert at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, "because it's not a very pleasant thing to think about. "The effects are tremendous, and loss of life is just enormous," he said in recent testimony to Congress. "We really have to think about that. ... There have to be emergency plans in place. There have to be decontamination procedures exercised and embedded." Henry Kelly, president of the Federation of American Scientists, says the government needs to move quickly to place radiation detectors at entry points, as well as near bridges and tunnels and other vulnerable facilities. So far, Bush, Ridge and other top administration officials have been reluctant to say much about the nuclear threat. Doing so, of course, could dramatically raise American anxieties at a time when no one really knows whether a nuclear attack is likely at home or how it ranks in comparison to other threats. Still, at least some parts of government do appear to be acting on the nuclear menace. Congress has instructed its staff to identify alternative meeting places if the Capitol were to be destroyed or become uninhabitable because of radiation. Wall Street has also stepped up its contingency planning, with the New York Stock Exchange identifying at least three temporary trading floors distant from Lower Manhattan. While it's impossible to predict a precise scenario in which the United States would find itself under nuclear attack, history provides a disquieting model: the August 1945 nuclear bombs dropped by the United States over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. President Truman's decision to deploy the bombs, developed in a frantic, $2 billion national program to win a global nuclear race, remains an emotional point of contention in the United States. Yet there is little dispute about what the bombs wrought: a maelstrom of heat, pressure, wind and radiation such as the planet had never seen. Those close to the center of the explosion were instantly incinerated. At Hiroshima, the 15-kiloton bomb "Little Boy," dropped by the crew of the Enola Gay on Aug. 6, 1945, killed as many as 200,000 either from the bomb's blast or the longer-term effects of radiation, according to some estimates. At the heart of the explosion, temperatures rose into the thousands of degrees, and wind approached 1,000 miles per hour. Three days later, an even larger bomb, the 22-kiloton "Fat Man," was dropped over Nagasaki. Despite the bomb's larger size, the casualty toll was somewhat lower because the contours of the hilly city absorbed some of the blast. Five days after the Nagasaki explosion, Japan surrendered. Today's modern nuclear weapons are many times more potent than those 1945 bombs. But even if militants constructed their own crude bomb, the results could be devastating. A recent report to Congress declared that a nuclear engineer graduate "with an orange-sized lump of plutonium ... could fashion a nuclear device that would fit in a van and would destroy every building in the Wall street financial area and would level Lower Manhattan." Is this sort of doomsday scenario inevitable? Not at all, say some arms control experts. Joseph Cirincione, who heads the non-proliferation section of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says the overwhelming arms trend of recent decades has been the world's shedding of weapons - not just nuclear but biological and chemical as well. "Compare this new threat to the global war we worried about for the last 40 years," he said. "We had predictions of a nuclear exchange with hundreds of millions dead in the Soviet Union, Europe and the United States. We worried that 20, 25, 30 nations might acquire nuclear weapons." What has happened instead, he says, is a steep decline in the number of nuclear weapons. "Can you put the nuclear genie back in the bottle?" he asked. "Absolutely. Arguably, we're most of the way there." Also working against the theory that a nuclear explosion is inevitable is the reality that making a nuclear bomb remains an immense challenge. Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, says creating a nuclear bomb requires advanced scientific know-how, hard-to-obtain fissile material and hard-to-manufacture machine tools. "It's almost impossible to do it without state sponsorship, and it's pretty difficult to hide," he said. Even states like Iraq and Iran have had extreme difficulty coming up with a single atomic bomb. The easiest bet for a terrorist group, many experts say, is to acquire a bomb, or its essential elements, from a government's existing stockpile. Even that, they say, would be exceptionally difficult. But not unattainable. "The bottom line here is it's hard, but it is far, far, far, far, far from impossible," said Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "There is a bazaar out there. ... The American people should understand people are attempting to purchase these weapons." President Bush is particularly worried that Iraq, which had come close to attaining nuclear capability prior to the 1991 Persian Gulf War, might produce an atomic bomb or two and make them available to militant groups. But policy-makers are also concerned about already available nukes. The overwhelming focus is Russia, which ended the Cold War as owner of the world's largest nuclear stockpile and now is struggling to find the resources to keep the weapons secure. Although the Russians have made significant progress in recent years, U.S. government officials and nuclear experts fear their security controls are still too lax. Constantine Menges, a scholar at the Hudson Institute, says there's a simple explanation why militant groups haven't already obtained a nuclear weapon from one source or another. "It is only through divine providence," he says. NEXT: Could a nuke get loose in Russia? (Published 12:30AM, July 7th, 2002) Division of The News Tribune © 2002 Tacoma News, Inc. 1950 South State Street, Tacoma, Washington 98405 253-597-8742 Fax Machines: Newsroom, 253-597-8274 Advertising, 253-597-8764 Send comments to the Webmaster [webmaster@tribnet.com] at webmaster@tribnet.com [webmaster@tribnet.com] . - - - - - - - - - ***************************************************************** 5 Secretary Abraham’s attitude different from Sen. Abraham’s July 7, 2002 [online@rgj.com] RENO GAZETTE-JOURNAL Little wins could add up in Nevada’s fight to keep nuclear waste out of Yucca Mountain First, it was word that Yucca Mountain can’t store all of the nation’s high-level nuclear waste; some will remain stored at other sites, denting arguments that security requires all waste be stored in a central location. Then, last week, two more senators announced they would vote “no” on Yucca Mountain. Then, a letter Spencer Abraham wrote in 1998 — when he was a senator from Michigan — surfaced. In it, Abraham raised concerns he shared with local leaders about plans for shipping nuclear waste to Canada via Michigan, and warned that failing to involve local communities in the process of planning transportation routes would be “irresponsible and offensive.” Abraham’s words as a Michigan senator echo the feelings of many Nevadans regarding the Yucca Mountain issue. Dump opponents also call his letter validation of their argument for greater community involvement in discussions on the safety of transporting nuclear waste. As Department of Energy chief today, Abraham says there will be plenty of time for community input once Yucca Mountain is approved. As a Senator, Abraham warned that the public must be involved early in the process, calling for hearings before the environmental assessments began. The Senate could take up the Yucca Mountain issue this week, and though Sens. Harry Reid and John Ensign have made progress in getting 51 votes to defeat the proposal, they admit they’re not there yet. Perhaps these little wins will help get them there. © Copyright Reno Gazette-Journal, a [http://www.gannett.com] Newspaper. ***************************************************************** 6 Duel of TV ads precedes Senate vote on Nevada nuclear waste site [startribune.com] Greg Gordon Star Tribune Published Jul 6, 2002 WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Images of a truck carrying a huge cask of nuclear waste flash across the TV screen as the narrator voices a foreboding message. "The government admits that nuclear accidents are inevitable" if the nation's high-level radioactive waste is hauled to a Nevada mountain, actor Ed Begley Jr. pronounces in the 30-second ad. "What if it happened . . . while our children were getting out of school or playing soccer?" Environmental groups and the state of Nevada say their ad has spurred thousands of people to phone, e-mail or write Capitol Hill before next week's expected Senate vote on legislation clearing the way for Nevada's Yucca Mountain to serve as a permanent disposal site for the waste. The nuclear power industry and its business allies have countered with their own ads heading into the vote that could have broad implications for the future of nuclear power in America. One industry ad being broadcast in Minnesota says that $7 billion in studies over two decades have established Yucca as "the safest place to store America's nuclear waste," now scattered at 131 sites in 39 states. The dueling ads are just one element of the fight over legislation to let the Energy Department seek a Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) license for Yucca. Both sides have assembled coalitions and retained lobbyists to sway undecided senators, including Minnesota Democrats Paul Wellstone and Mark Dayton. John O'Donnell, the chief federal lobbyist for Twin Cities-based Xcel Energy, said the stakes are "as large as stakes can be" for the utility that provides most of Minnesota's electricity, 20 percent of it from two nuclear plants. Xcel's Prairie Island plant near Red Wing is due in 2007 to exhaust its storage space for spent nuclear fuel and, absent a solution, could be forced to close the twin reactors prematurely. "Let's just say that we don't want to think about this thing not passing," O'Donnell said, noting that company representatives "have probably talked with half of the Senate about the importance of this issue." Extraordinary power The Senate vote could mark the final congressional act in a lengthy and tangled process laid out in the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, whose authors contemplated an uproar from any state picked as host of the repository. Under the 1982 law, and 1987 amendments that named Yucca as the potential site to be studied first, Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn got an extraordinary power. He was allowed to "veto" President Bush's decision last February to allow the Energy Department to seek a license for Yucca. In vetoing the decision on April 8, Guinn contended that it was not based on sound science. The law also gave Congress 90 legislative days to override the governor's veto. The House voted to do so overwhelmingly in May. The Senate has until July 25 to act. But even though the Senate voted 65-34 in the industry's favor in the last Yucca-related vote, in May 2000, and although dozens of senators are under pressure from constituents to get the waste out of their states, industry lobbyists aren't overconfident. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the assistant majority leader, has been using his clout and friendships to galvanize the opposition, and Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., has refused to bring the measure to the floor. Sen. Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, who has championed the industry's cause, plans to take the unusual step of trying to force a vote without Daschle's consent. Reid said that Yucca foes could have their best chance in a procedural vote on whether to consider the resolution, because many Republicans are also leery of setting a precedent of bypassing the majority leaders. "The two Minnesota votes are very important," Reid said of Wellstone and Dayton, who have said they want waste removed from Prairie Island but worry about the risks of thousands of cross-country truck and rail shipments. Environmentalists and the state of Nevada have increasingly sought to focus the debate on transportation risks -- with some success. In recent days, Democratic Sens. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan and Jean Carnahan of Missouri said that they would vote against the resolution, expressing concern about shipments through their states. Sen. James Jeffords, the independent from Vermont, shifted his position to neutral. Nevada, through a "Transportation Safety Coalition" that unites it with environmental groups, has purchased nearly $1 million in ads targeting wavering senators, particularly those whose states would face heavy nuclear waste traffic. Its ads have run in Vermont, Utah, Wyoming, Iowa, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Missouri. Physicians for Social Responsibility is spending $500,000 on anti-Yucca ads in half a dozen states. The Washington-based Environmental Working Group has set up an Internet site that invites people to plug in their address and see how close they live to a possible waste route. The group also has used a computer model from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California to show the effects of theoretical nuclear accidents. For example, the group projects that a rail car collision northwest of Minneapolis would kill 669 people. Airing ads The nuclear industry has responded aggressively. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whose members include nuclear utilities, declared last month that it was "pulling out all the stops" with radio ads in 14 states, including Minnesota. William Kovacs, the chamber's vice president for regulatory affairs, said his umbrella group is spending "a lot of money," but declined to say how much. Also airing ads over the last week has been the Alliance for Sound Nuclear Policy, which says it represents 20 groups. It shares office space with and gets much of its funding from the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the industry's lobbying arm. NEI spokesman Steve Kerekes, citing the industry's record of shipping nuclear waste safely for more than 30 years, dismissed the environmentalists' scenarios as "divorced from reality." Nuclear utilities, which operate 103 reactors at 64 sites, have given millions of dollars in campaign donations in the last couple of years. Xcel employees and the company's political action committee have given nearly $400,000 since 1999, including at least $10,500 to Wellstone's Republican challenger this fall, former St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman, who has endorsed the Yucca plan. Nuclear utilities across the country have given Coleman at least another $50,000. Among those lobbying for the industry are former Democratic Sen. Geraldine Ferraro of New York, John Sununu, a former New Hampshire governor who was President Ronald Reagan's chief of staff, and former Sen. Bennett Johnston, a Louisiana Democrat who championed the Yucca project while chairing the Senate Energy Committee. Nevada's lobbyists include a former NRC commissioner, a former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board and a former Senate parliamentarian. The vote marks a key juncture in the struggle between the nuclear industry, seeking a waste solution that would give it new life, and environmental groups that want to do away with nuclear power. Ten nuclear power plants have already won NRC approval to extend their 40-year operating licenses, and a favorable vote on the resolution would make it easier for another three dozen to extend licenses -- among them Xcel's plants. Andrea Kiepe, an organizer for the Minnesota Clean Water Action Alliance, denounces the industry as "old, failing, dirty and hazardous." The alliance has been displaying a true-to-scale, inflatable nuclear waste cask and urging its 50,000 members to weigh in with Wellstone and Dayton. Industry ads dismiss the environmentalists as "extremists." Officials at Xcel and other nuclear utilities cite the industry's record as a pollution-free source of electricity that reduces U.S. reliance on imported oil. Whatever the Senate vote, industry officials and environmental groups predict years of court battles before the issue is settled. Nevada has sued to challenge the manner in which the Energy Department found Yucca "suitable" for a permanent waste repository. Xcel and other utilities have filed breach-of-contract suits over the government's failure to keep promises in the early 1980s to begin taking industry waste by 1998. -- Greg Gordon is at ggordon@mcclatchydc.com [ggordon@mcclatchydc.com] . Return to top© Copyright 2002 Star Tribune. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 7 Experts debate water safety of Yucca Mountain storage plan KR Washington Bureau | 07/06/2002 | [http://www.ohio.com] [The Beacon Journal] By SETH BORENSTEIN Knight Ridder Newspapers [Scientists don't agree on whether the mountainous storage locker will be watertight. Chuck Kennedy, KRT] YUCCA MOUNTAIN, Nev. - The same drops of water that balance life and death in the Nevada desert also could determine the fate of the federal government's plan to store the nation's nuclear waste here. On July 9, the U.S. Senate will open debate on whether to approve President Bush's choice of Yucca Mountain as the nation's dump site for 154 million pounds of radioactive nuclear waste. Nevada objects, but the House of Representatives already has approved Bush's $58 billion plan, and if the Senate agrees, it will become law. This is one of the biggest decisions any Congress will make. The waste will remain lethally radioactive for millions of years. If Congress approves, the deadly material will start being stored at Yucca Mountain, in the desert about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, in about 10 years. It will be expected to remain there for tens of thousands of years. So far, the hottest political debate about Yucca has focused on the potential dangers of shipping the nuclear waste across the country versus the risks of leaving it where it is now, in temporary storage sites within a two-hour drive of 165 million Americans. But scientists say more important is what will happen to the radioactive material once it is put inside Yucca and left there for thousands of years. The key scientific question is, is this mountainous storage locker watertight? If it is, no problem. If it isn't, radioactive contamination could dribble out slowly and, over the long term, disastrously contaminate the surrounding landscape. Scientists don't agree on the answer. Many government scientists insist that they know enough about how water drips and slowly seeps inside Yucca Mountain, formed by a volcano millions of years ago. They believe the storage plan is perfectly safe. But that is not good enough for some other scientists, who cite tests proving that water seeped inside the mountain more rapidly than government computers initially estimated. They say there are too many unanswered questions about Yucca Mountain to go forward now. "Everybody still has questions," said Kevin Crowley, a geologist who is director of the National Academy of Sciences' Radioactive Waste Management Board. Even government panels including the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, the General Accounting Office and the National Academy of Sciences still have dozens of outstanding technical concerns. In light of those unanswered questions, there is no scientific consensus on whether to proceed with the Yucca Mountain plan, Crowley said, but there also are no scientific "showstoppers" that flatly rule it out, either. Here's how Yucca Mountain is supposed to work. Containers of radioactive waste - 90 percent of it from commercial nuclear reactors, the rest from federal weapons work - would be buried in tunnels 800 feet below the surface of the 4,946-foot mountain, but still hundreds of feet above the water table. The surrounding desert gets only about 6 inches of rainfall each year. The water usually evaporates in the high heat before seeping underground, according to Michael Voegele, chief scientist for the federal contractor that is building the proposed waste dump. The water that does seep into the ground is taken up by scarce plant roots, stopped by numerous layers of impermeable rocks, and sucked up by other types or rock - presumably all before it gets into the planned waste area. In the storage area deep in the heart of the mountain, the waste will be inside containers made of a strong, special metal alloy, and there will be titanium drip shields over them. In addition, the site features rocks that both absorb and serve as barriers to contain any contaminated water, Voegele said. "This is what our country said we're going to do," Voegele said as he stared through a window deep inside Yucca Mountain at nine mock nuclear waste containers heated to 394 degrees Fahrenheit for four years as a test. "This will work." But if it doesn't, opponents fear, over thousands of years - or tens of thousands - water would hit the waste, corrode the containers, become radioactive and travel into the water table below. Then it could taint the water supply serving remote neighbors: Today they include a gas station, a legal brothel and a dairy ranch; 10,000 years from now, who knows who might be exposed? Eventually, critics say, the contaminated water could end up on the surface of Death Valley. "Our approach may finally be OK, but it requires a considerable amount of pretty solid science to support the decision. It's not a slam dunk," said Rod Ewing, a nuclear engineering professor at the University of Michigan. He has studied Yucca Mountain, written peer-reviewed research on it and is on the National Academy of Sciences board that reviews nuclear waste issues. "It is not obvious that it's a good approach to me." Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and the nuclear power industry say that starting Yucca now would remove nuclear waste from 131 storage sites in 39 states. They cite terror threats and a 20-year-old federal promise to take the waste away from power plants. But freshly used nuclear fuel rods must cool for five years after being removed from reactors, so even after Yucca is operating, active nuclear power plants will still have waste on site. Nothing is perfect, but Yucca is as good as it's going to get, said Ike Winograd, a hydrologist for the U.S. Geological Survey who two decades ago originated the idea of storing waste above the water table in a place like Yucca Mountain. "Yucca Mountain has been a compromise between leaving it at the surface where it is accessible and putting it thousands of feet below the surface where it cannot be retrieved," Winograd said. "The site has many redundancies, but can anyone prove that it can be safe for 10,000 years? Of course not. If the public requires certitude, 100 percent certitude, then neither Yucca Mountain or anything else we do in the environmental arena will pass." Technically, Yucca Mountain is supposed to start accepting waste in 2010, but officials concede it's not likely to open until 2015. Once it opened, it would accept waste for at least 24 years. The dump probably would be monitored for 300 years before being sealed off. Federal law requires the design to ensure safety for 10,000 years, but the radioactive material inside would remain dangerous for millions of years, Voegele conceded. Voegele bases his confidence in Yucca on his faith in computer models that processed worst-case scenarios, and on his knowledge of geology, physics and chemistry. They all tell him that Yucca is safe, he said. But years of tests have found that Yucca Mountain "turns out to be less dry than anticipated," said Michigan's Ewing. That means "the geology is not capable of keeping the waste where you put it," said geologist Steve Frishman, the scientific policy adviser behind Nevada's opposition. Originally, the Department of Energy didn't think water would flow quickly in Yucca Mountain. The agency's computer models said it wouldn't. Then, about eight years ago, Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist June Fabryka-Martin found evidence of fast-moving water that surprised Energy Department scientists and made them rethink their computer models. Fabryka-Martin found traces of chlorine-36 in water deep inside Yucca. That isotope is a marker from atmospheric nuclear tests in the 1950s. That meant that water ran from the surface deep into the mountain through cracks in a matter of decades. That is "a hell of a lot faster than they thought originally," said Alison Macfarlane, co-director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Yucca Mountain Project. "It means that water in the future, especially if it gets wetter with global warming ... could get there." Fabryka-Martin's work "helped us wake up to what the water is really like, but still the mountain is a really dry place," said Abe Van Luik, an Energy Department geochemist and policy adviser. Yucca computer models now take into account the tiny cracks, measuring only fractions of an inch, that funnel the water. While some water might drip onto the waste containers in the distant future, he said, it wouldn't lead to contamination in the water table. Besides, Voegele said, the waste will be stored in areas where there are no obvious cracks. But what if future earthquakes form cracks that steer water right into the waste, asked Nevada's Frishman. Even though government scientists say the geology of Yucca would do the main job of protecting the nuclear waste, they would add man-made redundant protection layers. Waste containers are made of a special, corrosion-resistant metal alloy consisting of nickel, chromium, molybdenum and tungsten. Around them would be drip shields made of super-strong titanium. But even this alloy does corrode and crack at extremely high temperatures and acidity levels, according to tests paid for by the state of Nevada, said chemistry professor Aaron Barkatt of Catholic University in Washington, D.C. Voegele contends that Barkatt's test conditions were not realistic. Barkatt said his staff took realistic conditions and intensified them to simulate in only a few months what could happen over 10,000 years. Barkatt also said that, under realistic temperatures and conditions, water containing fluoride eventually eats through titanium. But government officials contend that, though there is fluoride in Yucca Mountain water, by the time it got to the titanium, it would be strained out of the water. Another controversial issue is that Yucca Mountain is in an earthquake and volcano zone. In June, a 4.4 temblor was centered 11 miles away but couldn't be felt inside Yucca Mountain. A 5.6 earthquake - more than 10 times stronger - shook the same place in 1992. The earthquakes struck where one of the youngest volcanoes in America, only 80,000 years old, sits. Nevada's Frishman and volcano experts worry that a volcano might rise right through Yucca Mountain and spew the waste out. They also worry that a new volcano could create new paths for water to douse the waste. Voegele said volcanic activity seems to be heading away from Yucca Mountain, not toward it; Frishman disagrees. A special panel of volcano experts is looking into the issue and will report to the Department of Energy and the National Academy of Sciences. Confronting so many questions, some scientists say there is no hurry. Nuclear waste can stay in above-ground dry storage casks for at least 100 years while researchers answer questions or find a better site. "I don't think we know whether it's safe or not," Macfarlane said. "This is a premature decision on the part of the government." Voegele said his office still must answer scientific questions, but he has confidence that the answers will show Yucca to be safe. However, for Energy Secretary Abraham, who is not a scientist, the case is already closed. "The Department has engaged in over 20 years of scientific and technical investigation of the suitability of the Yucca Mountain site," Abraham wrote in February in recommending the Nevada mountain as the nation's waste repository. "The results of this extensive investigation and external technical reviews of this body of scientific work give me confidence for the conclusion, based on sound scientific principles, that a repository at Yucca Mountain will be able to protect the health and safety of the public." Others say that the real scientific deadline is probably two or three years from now, when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission decides whether to license Yucca as a waste dump. They say the technical questions will be answered by then. In the end, it will come back to water. Right now there's not enough water to serve the people working at Yucca because of a legal trap set 10 years ago by the state of Nevada. The state shut off the federal government's well water drilling permit in April, saying the permit was issued only to determine whether Yucca would be a good site for nuclear waste. That process ended in February when Abraham said yes to Yucca, Nevada ruled. So now all flush toilets at Yucca are shut down, and drinking water is lugged in. "Everything's about water," Voegele said atop the dry mountain. "Just like it is in the desert." ***************************************************************** 8 Plants ponder storage until Yucca opens KRT Wire | 07/06/2002 | [http://www.ohio.com] [The Beacon Journal] BY SETH BORENSTEIN Knight Ridder Newspapers [Two of 15 dry casks filled with spent nuclear fuel rods sit on a pad at the Prairie Island Nuclear Plant in Minnesota. The first casks were loaded May 11, 1995. Jay Reiter, KRT] More photos WELCH, Minn. - - Later this year, the 28-year-old Prairie Island nuclear power plant here will fill a 40-foot tall white storage tube with dry nuclear waste, and that will be it for its chief storage method. Under state law, the plant cannot store any more waste that way and will have to shut down its two reactors as early as 2007 unless the owners can find some other way to dispose of the radioactive residue of electricity generation. Eventually, many of the 103 nuclear reactors in the United States could face a similar fate. For the nuclear industry, Prairie Island is Exhibit A in its case for turning Yucca Mountain, Nev., into the nation's nuclear-waste storage dump. The alternatives to storing it in at a central federal facility range from intriguing plans to bury it in Sweden and Finland to shooting it into space. On July 9, the Senate is expected to open debate on whether to approve the Bush administration's proposal to make Yucca Mountain that central facility. If the Senate approves, Yucca Mountain will be expected to hold the lethal material for at least 10,000 years. The House of Representatives voted yes on May 8. Whatever the Senate decides, Prairie Island will have to find some alternative waste-storage plan, at least temporarily, because Yucca Mountain will not be ready to receive waste for at least 10 years, and Prairie Island will run out of storage space by 2007. The plant has room to stash the waste in its temporary, wet-storage pool for the next five years. These are Prairie Island's major options: + Ship it to an Indian tribe in Utah that hopes to open a nuclear waste dump if it can win federal permission. + Persuade Minnesota to allow it to store more waste than current law permits. + Get the federal government to haul it away to some other storage site. Scott Northard, Prairie Island's director of engineering, recalls that the federal government promised 20 years ago to take the nuclear industry's waste off its hands. He's still waiting. However, the government does take used nuclear material from developing countries, such as Colombia, in an effort to prevent bomb-grade nuclear material from getting into the wrong hands. It stores most of it at Savannah River in South Carolina. "If we forfeited title of this stuff to Saddam Hussein, they'd be here tomorrow," Northard said, not entirely facetiously. Owners of the nation's other 101 nuclear reactors have more time to figure out where to store their radioactive waste if Yucca Mountain is blocked, and a few more options, although experts say none is ideal: The main options are: + Ship the waste to a private site 27 miles west of Tooele, Utah. A consortium of eight utility companies has reached agreement with the Goshute Indian tribe to store 44,000 tons of waste there, if the federal government approves. + Keep storing dry nuclear waste in sealed and hardened containers above ground in tight security. Scientists say these can easily last 100 years. Critics of the Yucca Mountain plan cite this option when arguing that there is no urgency to create a long-term nuclear-waste dump. + Recycle the nuclear waste as reactor fuel. However, the United States banned this option nearly a quarter-century ago to prevent the bomb-grade radioactive material from becoming available to potential enemies. + Launch the waste into space or shoot it into the sun. But shooting 77,000 tons of waste out of Earth's atmosphere would be very expensive. And a rocket explosion could scatter radioactive waste around Earth. + Store the waste below the water table instead of above it, as at Yucca Mountain. Sweden and Finland plan to do this, encasing their nuclear waste in rustproof copper, which doesn't react with water. The copper containers would be buried in granite or shale. But critics warn that such a site could become a prime source of mining sometime in the future. They also say that such a below-water-table site would be difficult to check and repair. + Speed up the waste's decay by accelerating its nuclear-reaction rate. This could make the waste safe and stable much sooner - perhaps even in a matter of decades rather than the 10,000 years or longer that natural decay requires. But these processes remain experimental and would be very expensive. + In the end, scientific experts say that politicians will have to make a tough choice among imperfect options and bury the waste somewhere, somehow. And no place is free of threats from water seepage, earthquakes, volcanoes, sinkholes, mining or other potential threats to nuclear-waste stability over thousands of years, notes Temple University environmental geology professor Laura Toran. "You're going to have to pick the lesser of evils," she said. ***************************************************************** 9 Waste storage issue could shut Prairie Island Pioneer Press | 07/07/2002 | [http://www.twincities.com] BY SETH BORENSTEIN Washington Bureau WELCH, Minn. — Later this year, the 28-year-old Prairie Island nuclear power plant will fill a 40-foot-tall white storage tube with dry nuclear waste. That will be the last storage tube allowed at the site, which means the power plant may have to close its two reactors as soon as 2007. Prairie Island, 28 miles southeast of the Twin Cities, could be the first nuclear power plant to close because of its inability to dispose of nuclear waste. The same threat eventually will menace 103 nuclear reactors nationwide if a federal plan to store the waste permanently inside Yucca Mountain, 100 miles north of Las Vegas, is not approved by Congress. Minnesota law limits how much radioactive waste can be stored at Prairie Island, and Yucca won't be ready to receive any for at least 10 years, so Xcel Energy, the plant's owner, is exploring alternative storage sites. The major options: Ship it to an Indian tribe in Utah that hopes to open a waste dump if it gets federal permission; persuade the Minnesota Legislature to allow Xcel to store more waste than current limits permit; or get the federal government to take it away to some other storage site. Any potential solution is going to present problems, said Kevin Crowley, director of the National Academy of Sciences' board on radioactive waste management. "There's no perfect solution. There's no best solution," he said. Two oft-cited options are potentially among the most dangerous and expensive. One is to recycle the nuclear waste as reactor fuel, but the U.S. banned that practice for fear that the radioactive material, which could be used to make bombs, might fall into the wrong hands. A second option — launching the waste into space, or shooting it into the sun — would be extremely costly and could scatter tons of radioactive waste around Earth if a rocket were to explode inside the atmosphere. Power plants today store dry nuclear waste in sealed hardened containers above ground in tight security. Scientists say these can easily last 100 years. Critics cite that assertion in arguing there is no urgency to commit to Yucca as the nation's permanent nuclear-waste repository. Scott Northard, Prairie Island's engineering director, recalls that the federal government promised 20 years ago to take the nuclear industry's waste off its hands. He's still waiting. Meanwhile, Northard said, Xcel Energy has begun charging customers for the cost of decommissioning the Prairie Island plant in 2007 in case the storage problem forces the plant's closure. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham argues that the current storage system, with "nuclear waste stranded in temporary storage locations at 131 sites in 39 states," presents both environmental and security risks. However, even if Yucca Mountain becomes the nation's central nuclear-waste storage site, the nation's power plants will still store waste on-site because the material must cool on location for five years before transport to Yucca. The U.S. government plans to store the nuclear waste in a dry mountain above the water table and try to prevent water from reaching it. Sweden and Finland, by contrast, plan to put their waste deep below the water table in a site surrounded by granite or shale and encased in rustproof copper, which doesn't react with water. Ike Winograd, a U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist who first came up with America's dry-storage concept, said below-water locations would be so deep they would be hard to check, and repair, if needed. Yucca Mountain is more accessible to such work, he contends. Another popular alternative to Yucca among some experts is to accelerate the waste's decay by speeding its nuclear reaction rate, which could make it safe and stable much sooner. But such processes remain experimental and would be very expensive. In the final analysis, even opponents of Yucca Mountain concede that burying the waste somewhere is the best idea. The question is where. No place is free of water, earthquakes, volcanoes, sinkholes and mining — all threats to the stability of radioactive waste intended to be stored for tens of thousands of years — said Temple University environmental geology professor Laura Toran. "You're going to have to pick the lesser of evils," she said. About TwinCities.com ***************************************************************** 10 Transport of nuclear waste concerns park officials Bradenton Herald | 07/07/2002 | [http://www.bradenton.com] Florida ASSOCIATED PRESS BISCAYNE NATIONAL PARK - A proposal to transfer nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain, Nev., has raised concerns at Biscayne National Park, which sits along one of the possible transport routes. More than 100 barges would cross the park to haul their radioactive cargo from the Turkey Point nuclear power plant to the Port of Miami, under a scenario prepared by the U.S. Department of Energy. From the port, the nuclear fuel casks would be loaded onto trains for the trip through Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties west to Yucca Mountain. "The potential impacts to the park are not only the small probability of a nuclear accident, but the high probability of potential impacts from the number and types of barges that would travel through the very shallow bay," Biscayne Superintendent Linda Canzanelli wrote this week to supervisors in the National Park Service. The Senate plans to decide soon on the proposal to bury the waste in the mountain. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham has said the wastes - mostly used reactor fuel - can be shipped safely to Nevada. Once there, he has said the material will be more secure than at dozens of reactor sites in 31 states where it is being stored now. The transportation plans would be developed during the next few years, with the first shipments taking place around 2010. But Biscayne's managers worry the proposal could harm the habitat. The 173,000-acre park includes coral reefs, islands and mangrove coastlines in the southern half of Biscayne Bay near Miami. During their 20-mile trip through the park, the barges would cross through extensive seagrass beds that provide important habitats for manatees, sea turtles and juvenile fish, said Monika Mayr, assistant superintendent. Biscayne's managers worry that a barge or escort vessel could run aground in the shallow bay, damaging sensitive marine habitats. In her memo, Canzanelli expressed concern about "the disruption to park visitors when the nuclear waste is traveling through the park, and restrictions on park personnel being able to travel in the park to perform their jobs." About 800 metric tons of nuclear waste are stored in pools at Turkey Point. The casks of nuclear waste would be sent by truck or rail over many years. Trains are preferred because they would require fewer trips. Under the train scenario, nuclear waste from the St. Lucie County plant would be shipped by barge to Port Everglades, where it would be loaded onto trains. The Turkey Point waste could be trucked to a railhead. Or it could be sent by barge across Biscayne National Park to the Port of Miami. The barge trips would take place over several years. Between 104 and 175 barges would cross the park, under scenarios outlined in an environmental impact statement prepared by the Department of Energy. An Energy Department spokesman did not immediately return a phone call on Saturday. Rachel Scott, spokeswoman for Florida Power & Light, which supports the plan, said the shipments will be handled with great care and only after careful study of the routes. Private shipping companies will probably do the work, she said. "All of these shipments will be done with very strict safety and security criteria," she said. "The Department of Energy will be working with state and federal emergency management agencies to coordinate it." ***************************************************************** 11 COUNT ON IT The Salt Lake Tribune -- Sunday, July 7, 2002 Nuclear waste will pass within 5 miles of the following landmarks if the U.S. Senate approves plans to go forward developing Yucca Mountain, Nev., as a waste site: LDS Temple.......... Salt Lake City Disneyland .......... Anaheim, Calif. Liberty Bell .......... Philadelphia Gateway Arch .......... St. Louis Rock and Roll Hall of Fame .......... Cleveland Invesco Field .......... Denver Staples Center .......... Los Angeles Sears Tower .......... Chicago Joe Lewis Arena .......... Detroit The Alamo .......... San Antonio 2,408 The average number of trucks (or 448 trains) carrying nuclear waste expected to pass through Utah each year for the next 38 years. Source: Environmental Working Group © Copyright 2002, The Salt Lake Tribune ***************************************************************** 12 Yucca's Rate of Water SeepageIs Unknown Factor in Waste Plan The Salt Lake Tribune -- Sunday, July 7, 2002 BY H. JOSEF HEBERT THE ASSOCIATED PRESS AMARGOSA VALLEY, Nev. -- In this desert where government scientists want to entomb the country's nuclear waste, nothing is harder to find than water. Yet one answer to whether tons of radioactive waste can be kept here safely for thousands of years centers on just that -- water. The irony does not escape Michael Voegele as he scans the arid landscape from atop Yucca Mountain, a ridge of volcanic rock under which the Bush administration wants to bury 77,000 tons of waste accumulating at nuclear power reactors in 31 states. "All we're studying here is ways water can get through this mountain. That's the whole issue. Everything is about water," says Voegele, who has worked on the Yucca project for two decades and now is its chief scientist. On average 3 inches to 6 inches of rain falls here annually, but this year the mountain has not seen a drop. Voegele pours some water on a rock. In minutes it evaporates in the desert heat and wind that whips across the mountaintop. But 1,400 feet below, the seemingly dry volcanic tuff created 12 million years ago contains enough moisture -- and some say enough cracks through which water could travel -- to raise uncertainty over whether the waste will be safely contained thousands of years from now. Questions over the movement of water through the rocks, or whether seeping water might cause waste canisters to corrode, are unresolved -- even as the $58 billion Yucca project approaches a critical political test this week in the Senate. Nevada, which sees itself as the nation's nuclear dumping ground, objects to the plan but the House has already endorsed it. In a tunnel deep inside the mountain, scientists have taken hundreds of rock samples over the years. One scientist, June Fabryka-Martin, a scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, reported in 1996 a discovery that altered the scientific debate over Yucca Mountain's suitability as a nuclear waste repository. In minute amounts of water along several rock faults, including one about 900 feet below the surface and close to the area where the waste would be kept, Fabryka-Martin found traces of radioactive c hlorine-36, a byproduct of nuclear bomb testing. It showed, she said, water had to have migrated from the surface within the past 50 years, evidence moisture was moving much faster than expected. Project scientists "are about evenly divided" over whether the c hlorine-36 came from nuclear testing or naturally from the rock, says Voegele. In either case, he said, "we are assuming the presence of fast pathways" for water through the mountain. To compensate, engineers altered the proposed repository design with greater reliance on man-made barriers to contain the waste, instead of depending simply on the geology of the mountain as originally envisioned. That has triggered another scientific dispute -- how "hot" should the repository be? As used reactor fuel decays, it gives off intense heat, as much as 360 degrees Fahrenheit. Some scientists believe heat is not a problem and will drive moisture out of the rock. Others argue if the surrounding rocks get too hot, the storage casks could be damaged. Deep beneath the mountain, Voegele makes clear his preference for keeping the waste "screaming hot" and says a lengthy test program has proven that heat will drive moisture away from the wastes. © Copyright 2002, The Salt Lake Tribune ***************************************************************** 13 Nuclear protest boats leave Sydney theage.com.au, Breaking News SYDNEY|Published: Sunday July 7, 4:05 PM A Dutch sailor and his three-year-old son set sail from Sydney to join a flotilla of yachts protesting against a ship carrying nuclear material from Japan to Great Britain. Dutchman Inigo Wijnen and his son Joshua are aboard The Love of Gaia, one of two boats which sailed for the Timor Sea from Lavender Bay. The other yacht, Kailea is lead by Andy Wition. The yachts will sail to international waters in the Tasman Sea to join a group of vessels and up to 50 people from Australia and New Zealand protesting against a ship transporting nuclear material. Two armed merchantmen, the Pacific Pintail loaded with plutonium mixed oxide and its escort the Pacific Teal, left the Japanese port of Takahama on its two-month journey late last week. According to the website nuclearfreeflotilla.org, the Pintail is carrying the first of 80 shipments of plutonium expected to pass between New Zealand and Australia. The plutonium, originally from Britain, was shipped to Japan in 1999 to be refined into nuclear energy. The fuel was found to be falsely manufactured, and the Japanese government ordered it to be returned to the United Kingdom, the website said. Mr Wijnen said the two-week protest mission was his first and he hoped to have an impact on the passage of the ships. "We will probably see the ship in the next week or so and we want to show our protest against nuclear shipments," he said from The Love of Gaia." NSW Upper House Greens MP Ian Cohen said the departures were part of a wider protest against the shipment of dangerous and toxic materials. Copyright © 2002 John Fairfax Holdings Ltd. All rights ***************************************************************** 14 Govt's support of nuclear shipment 'short-sighted': MP ABC Australia News - 08/07/02 : [Australian Broadcasting Corporation Online] A yacht heads out to protest against the nuclear shipment Anti-nuclear campaigners claim the Australian Government is showing a disregard for its neighbours by supporting the international nuclear industry. Twelve yachts from Australia, New Zealand and Vanuatu are on their way to the Pacific to intercept a shipment of plutonium making its way from Japan to Britain this week. The Prime Minister of New Zealand, Helen Clark, is opposed to the shipment moving through the region and farewelled seven protest boats that left Auckland this morning. At a farewell in Sydney for the three Australian yachts in the fleet, New South Wales Greens MP Ian Cohen accused the Federal Government of short-sightedness in not opposing the transport route. "We've got the Howard Government once again with its head in the sand, realising that it has got a vested interest in this transport," he said. "We're going to end this type of industrial blackmail to the planet and stop this ridiculous transport of that poison cargo from one end of the earth to the other." © 2002 Australian Broadcasting Corporation ***************************************************************** 15 Benton Harbor toxic site cleanup is uncertain SouthBendTribune.com: July 6, 2002 By EDDY OKADA GREEN Tribune Correspondent BENTON HARBOR -- Candidates and residents gathered Friday, upset and uncertain about the Bush administration's recent decision delaying financing of a federal program designed to clean up 33 toxic waste sites in 18 states. Standing on a bridge arching over the Paw Paw River, Scott Elliott joined several others in a news conference on the bridge overlooking one of the sites that will be affected by those cuts. On the banks of the river where Potawatomi Indians once camped sits the abandoned Aircraft Components factory, located on 671 North Shore Drive in Benton Township. The company once sold glow-in-the-dark aircraft components until going out of business. The paint used to make the World War II-era gauges glow in the dark, however, contained a radioactive and cancer-causing agent, radium-226, according to the federal Environmental Protection Agency and Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. Going out of business in the early 1990s, the owners left behind thousands of dials and gauges. The radioactive dust and flakes chipping off the parts contaminated the 17-acre property, which is located near residential areas. In 1997, cleanup began at the factory under the Superfund program, a federal initiative using polluting industries' tax dollars to decontaminate dozens of seriously toxic sites across the nation. The Department of Defense, Elliott said, had promised to finish cleaning up Aircraft Components, but in light of the recent cuts, cleanup efforts seem to be at a standstill. "There was an absolute commitment from the Department of Defense to get this finally cleaned up this year, and now they've pulled the funding on it," said Elliott, Democratic candidate for state representative for the 79th District. U.S. Rep. David Bonior of Mount Clemens confirmed that Aircraft Components' cleanup will be delayed this year because of budget shortfalls. In a statement, Bonior, a candidate for governor, said the site has leeched radium into the Paw Paw River. About $3.5 million is needed to finish the current phase of the cleanup, and an additional $3.5 million is needed to complete secondary cleanup efforts, Bonior said. Elliott said the financial cuts meant a setback for area redevelopment projects and the arts district. Work at the Benton Township site began in 1997. The EPA used to charge fees to polluting industries to pay for future cleanup efforts, providing money for the Superfund program, but that is no longer the case. President Bush's recent proposal, Elliott said, would shift the cost of cleaning up toxic sites to the government's general accounts, thus putting the burden on all taxpayers. "There was an absolute signed and sealed commitment to do this, and everything -- the public's health, to the Edgewater Project, and downtown Benton Harbor redevelopment project and arts district -- depends on it," Elliott said. Contact the southbendtribune.com Web staff Copyright © 1994-2002 South Bend Tribune [http://www.southbendtribune.com/copyright.html] ***************************************************************** 16 Area roads could carry nuke waste LancasterOnline.com Sunday, July 7 By Jon Rutter [jrutter@lnpnews.com] Sunday News Staff Writer A major vote in Senate this week High level waste from nuclear power plants might be coming to a highway or railroad near you, according to a government watchdog organization in Washington, D.C. Tap the Environmental Working Group Web site www.MapScience.org and plug in your street address and zip code to find out how near. Residents of Denver and Reamstown, for example, live within a mile of one proposed corridor, the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Routes 74 in York County and 95 south of the Lancaster County line in Maryland are two more nearby roads the government might use to channel waste to its proposed long-term storage facility at Yucca Mountain, Nev. The Norfolk Southern rail line along the Susquehanna River in western Lancaster County has been cited as a possible link to ship waste north from the Calvert Cliffs plant in Maryland but was not included on the Web site. The Senate is expected to vote this week on whether to override Nevada's opposition to the Yucca Mountain project. Nuclear power critics say a decision is premature because the government has not yet developed a plan to adequately store the waste and protect dangerous materials from accidents and terror attacks. The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission says it directed nuclear licensees to beef up transportation safeguards after September 11. The commission is reviewing proposals for additional security. NRC spokeswoman Sue Gagner said shipments of spent nuclear fuel in reinforced steel casks will substantially increase if Congress approves Yucca Mountain. According to published reports, the government plans up to 100,000 cross-country shipments through 44 states over the next 31 1/2 years. Eric Epstein, coordinator of the watchdog group Three Mile Island Alert in Harrisburg, noted that local communities have contended with the transportation issue since the 1980s when damaged Three Mile Island reactor core materials were moved to Idaho. The shipments to Yucca Mountain probably would not begin for eight or 10 years. But with spent fuel continuing to accumulate at the nation's 65 nuclear power plants, the disposal problem is growing increasingly urgent. Even if all nuclear plants were shut down tomorrow, Epstein said, "The reality is that the waste exists. We have to confront this." “ The controversial Yucca Mountain plan has galvanized a melting pot of critics, including Nevada Governor Kenny Guinn, Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Sierra Club, which is airing commercials urging viewers to contact elected officials and ask them to oppose Yucca Mountain. Still missing in action, environmentalists say, is public discussion of the nuclear waste transportation issue. That's the reason for MapScience.com, said Environmental Working Group spokesman Jon Corsiglia. "This information is all available from the Department of Energy but it's included in Appendix J of a 5,000-page document." Corsiglia said his group linked 20,000 route segments culled from DOE documents to zip codes from across the country. "Our map definitely provides a user-friendly tool," according to Corsiglia, who said the site has been "very well used" since its June 11 debut. "It's one of those tools that when the public realizes it's out there, they're hungry to get on it." The maps are color coded to show relative degrees of contamination should there be an accident along one of the proposed routes. Red bands show one-mile-wide swaths to the side of each corridor. Orange and yellow bands extend two and five miles out, respectively. Corsiglia said any accident violent enough to crack the seal of a nuclear fuel cask would release radioactive cesium. "As this cloud goes through," he said, "it deposits radiation on soil and surfaces" and elevates cancer risks over time. "There's a plume that goes out about one mile and folks in that region would be exposed to (the equivalent of) 100 to 500 X-rays," given typical wind and weather conditions. People living five miles away would be exposed to a dose equal to 10 to 100 X-rays, Corsiglia said. Though many of the nation's nuclear power stations lie east of the Mississippi River, he added, some western communities would experience a greater volume of traffic as shippers funnel waste to Yucca Mountain via a limited number of routes. "In Lancaster," he said, "you're sort of far enough east" that each corridor would handle only the waste from one or two plants. But that's scant consolation for environmentalists, who say the government's long-term storage plan has many flaws. "Even after Yucca Mountain is filled to capacity," Corsiglia said, commercial power plants will continue to generate thousands of tons of high-level radioactive waste annually. And while individual plants were never intended to become permanent waste storage sites, Epstein said, the government's previous collection sites have all leaked. Any plan to consolidate buried waste in a safe spot is "a cruel joke," he asserted. "Clearly, this type of material has to be monitored indefinitely above ground." For others, the big worry is terrorism. According to a recent New York Times Magazine article, trucks and railroad cars carrying nuclear waste may be vulnerable to terrorists with armor-piercing weapons. The recently foiled plot of American thug Jose Padilla to detonate a "dirty" radioactive bomb in an American city has raised public awareness of nuclear terrorism, Corsiglia said, but "I'd be more worried about human error." The nuclear industry and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission downplay the dangers of transporting radioactive fuel, noting that more than 3,000 shipments have been completed over the past three decades. "There has been no release" of radioactive materials, said Gagner, who noted that armed guards have long accompanied such shipments through population centers. "Since 9-11," she said, "we have sent out a number of advisories to nuclear plants and other licensees for additional security measures that they should take." Those measures are confidential. So are the paths of shipments, Gagner said --until after the fact. The U.S. Department of Energy is still determining how it will route future shipments, according to Joe Delcambre of the U.S. Department of Transportation in Washington, D.C. "To our knowledge, they haven't really identified specific routes yet or the method of transportation to be preferred, by rail or by truck." Randall Gockley, the county's emergency management coordinator, has seen a video showing a cask pass a test train crash with flying colors. But it's going to take more than that for officials to determine whether they're comfortable with regular shipments through the area. Security and response capability should be consistent along the entire corridor, Gockley said. "Definitely if Lancaster County would be one of the routes chosen we would have to take a hard look." Updated: 07/07/02 15:13 ©2001 Lancaster Newspapers, Inc. ***************************************************************** 17 AU: Plan Will Put Nuclear Waste on the Road ABCNEWS.com : July 6, 2002 [Yucca Mountain] A railcar travels along a five-mile long tunnel beneath Yucca Mountain. If approved, the government will eventually store 77,000 tons of nuclear waste here. (ABCNEWS.com) Waste Land Should Nuclear Waste Be Moved to a Central Facility? By Barry Serafin [ABCNEWS.com] July 6 — The U.S. Senate is expected to vote next week on a controversial issue that has been simmering for decades and that will affect the country for decades more — radioactive waste. And a new ingredient has been added to the long-running debate: terrorism. High-level radioactive waste is currently stored at 131 sites in 39 states. The question is: What to do with it? More than 100 of the sites are nuclear power plants, where the waste is kept in the form of spent fuel. Special steel-lined pools were supposed to hold it for a few years until it could be moved to a permanent storage facility. Instead, it has been collecting at these sites for decades. Twenty years ago, the government came up with a proposed answer: Geologic disposal — the waste would be buried far underground at a secure facility. Several sites were initially considered. But, in 1987, congress narrowed it down to just one: Yucca Mountain, a barren ridge about 100 miles from Las Vegas. Nevada Says It's Already Done Its Duty Not surprisingly, that has been a very unpopular idea in Nevada, which worries about its image and its crucial tourism industry. And after many years playing host to nuclear tests, state officials feel Nevada has done its duty. The Bush administration and the nuclear-power industry lobbied hard for the proposed Yucca Mountain facility. And in the wake of Sept. 11, both sides have pounced on the threat of terrorism to support their case. "It is in our interest to consolidate as much of the waste as possible in one place so we can better protect it. I just think prudence demands that," says Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham. "In our judgment, Yucca Mountain is the ideal place." Neither the administration nor the nuclear-power industry argues the spent fuel is unsafe where it is now, but both say it would be "safer" at Yucca Mountain. Nuclear Waste on the Move Nevada officials from both political parties, however, have focused their arguments less on the site and more on how the waste would get there. The federal government's plan, they say, would create tempting targets for terrorists because it would mean hundreds of truck and train shipments of radioactive waste moving across the country every year, for a quarter of a century. "We know that evil people have been looking for targets of opportunity," says Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev. "We're talking about 100,000 dirty bombs." The government has not chosen transportation routes yet. But the waste shipments would likely pass near and, in some cases, through major cities such as Atlanta, Los Angeles and Chicago. According to some estimates, the routes could cross 45 states. Does Shipping Plan Amount to 'Russian Roulette'? Jim Hall, former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, says the risk of accidents or terrorism along shipping routes amounts to "Russian roulette." "The government has not been forthcoming with the American people that there has not been a risk assessment, a transportation plan," says Hall, now a paid consultant to the state of Nevada. Abraham says radioactive material has been safely transported for years and that shipments to Yucca Mountain would be carried out "under very secured and secret conditions." But Hall and other critics say there should be extensive tests of the containers that would be used to transport the waste. Abraham acknowledges that the "casks," as they are called, might have to be beefed-up. That, he says, will be up to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to determine. The mayors of some cities along likely shipping routes are not reassured. "We're being lied to now when we are being told that this can be done safely," says Salt Lake City Mayor Ross Anderson. "They absolutely do not know that." Earthquakes, Water Contamination Are Risks In addition to transportation, there are still unresolved issues about the site itself. Yucca Mountain is a remote location on the edge of the Nevada Nuclear Test Site, where the U.S. military has tested weapons for half a century. The plan calls for waste to be buried 1,000 feet underground and the government has already spent $4 billion carving out a five-mile long tunnel there. Abraham calls the site "the best in the country in terms of homeland security." Opponents note that there are earthquake zones in the area: "Earthquakes can shake the hell out of this repository," says Sen. Reid. And environmental groups raise another concern: Over time, water could seep through fractures in the rock, allowing radioactivity to escape to groundwater below. Scientists studying the site for the Energy Department say they have not found any problem serious enough to threaten the facility, which is supposed to prevent the escape of radioactivity for 10,000 years. Senate Likely to Approve Plan In the coming days, the arguments will shift to the U.S. Senate. The debate promises to be lively, but the vote is expected to go the administration's way, giving a green light to the Yucca Mountain plan. The governors of a number of states that have nuclear power plants have been lobbying for the plan. They want the waste moved out of their jurisdictions. If the underground storage project proceeds, it will still need to licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and it would not open for business until at least 2010. It would then take in radioactive waste for the next 24 years — 77,000 tons of it, the legal limit for the site. But there's a catch. During that time, nuclear power plants would still be producing more waste — thousands of additional tons of it — and there will not be anywhere to put it. The government could designate a second site to bury it, but that's not likely. It is more likely that they would amend the law, keep moving waste across the country and spend billions more carving out additional space to bury it beneath Yucca Mountain. Copyright © 2002 ABCNEWS Internet Ventures. ***************************************************************** 18 Atomic tomb HOME * Special Report: Paying for Power Sunday, July 07, 2002 By BOB IVRY Staff Writer A Yucca Mountain Project worker operating a rail car that runs the five-mile route into and back out of the remote Nevada mountain. (JAMES W. ANNESS/THE RECORD) Here on Yucca Mountain, in the most rugged landscape on the continent, the sun beats so steady and strong that the desert seems drowned with light and drained of sound. Down in the hole, the din is deafening, and the sun-stained desert gives way to a gray world of whirling dust. The most dangerous trash ever created will clatter into this noisy darkness down a nearly imperceptible slope on narrow-gauge rails. A mile and a half into the mountain, and 1,000 feet beneath the desert, it will stop. Here, where the stench of diesel overpowers the sweet scent of desert sage, robots will pack 73 miles of tunnels with radioactive waste. And there the lethal garbage will sit, barring calamity or stunning technological advance, for the rest of time. Folks are fond of calling Yucca Mountain the greatest civil engineering project in human history - vaster than the pyramids of Egypt or the Panama Canal. Actually, it is hell. Deep under Yucca Mountain, 77,000 tons of nuclear waste from 131 sites in 39 states will be buried for as long as it stays dangerous - at least 10,000 years. By law, radioactive waste is the responsibility of the federal government, which recognizes that something must be done about the waste piling up around the country, especially on the densely populated East Coast - detritus from nuclear power plants, plutonium residue from weapons manufacture, and fuel from nuclear submarines. Administration officials, citing 20 years of scientific analysis that cost $6.7 billion, say the remote location 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas and the security provided by the Nevada Test Site, which surrounds it on three sides, make Yucca Mountain an ideal graveyard for nuclear waste. "Yucca Mountain was the answer this country chose" to solve the nuclear waste problem, says Michael Voegele, the project's chief science officer. "It's the right thing to do." To many, Yucca Mountain is the best choice. But it is far from a perfect choice. Getting the waste to Nevada, in some minds, risks devastating accident or terror attack as it moves across the country on highways and rail lines. Shipments from New York's Indian Point nuclear plant would be trucked across North Jersey, and the waste from the state's own four plants would travel through Newark or along the Garden State Parkway and New Jersey Turnpike. The mountain itself, surrounded by dormant volcanoes and subject to earthquakes, raises concerns about safety through the ages. And from the moment it opens, 2010 at the earliest, the Yucca site will already be too small to hold all the spent fuel piling up at commercial reactors, which generate 2,000 tons of waste every year. Nevertheless, the House of Representatives gave its go-ahead in May, and the Senate is expected to decide on the project as soon as this week - over the objections of 80 percent of Nevada residents. The nuclear industry, growing impatient for a solution, left little to chance as it looked toward this year's votes. In 2000, nuclear utilities gave $13.6 million to candidates for national office - their largest donation, $290,000, going to the Bush-Cheney campaign. This year, the industry has distributed an additional $250,000, mostly to Republican candidates. Should Yucca Mountain get a thumbs down, the federal government - specifically the Energy Department - will have to find another way to dispose of spent fuel. Even if it is approved, an estimated 49,500 tons of waste will remain at reactors after the Yucca respository is filled. "The claims that Yucca Mountain reduces the threat of terrorism by eliminating waste at the 131 sites in favor of one site is a lie," Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., told Congress in April. "Yucca Mountain will not reduce the threat of terrorism at operating reactors. It adds one more site to protect." Voegele doesn't talk much about terrorism. For 21 years - since it was just a gleam in a geologist's eye - the Yucca Mountain Project has been Voegele's life. He's the chief science officer for Bechtel SAIC, Yucca's building and engineering contractor. Recently, however, with Yucca Mountain's future hanging in the balance, Voegele, a chubby, affable man with a seemingly limitless ability to answer any and all questions about Yucca's Exploratory Studies Facility, has been drafted to lead tours for politicians and reporters. Bouncing along in a tour van on a dirt road to Yucca's eastern slope, Voegele is asked about the facility's security. His answer, uncharacteristically, is a grimace of impatience. "The stuff will be buried 1,000 feet down," Voegele says. "We're in the middle of nowhere, surrounded on three sides by the Nevada Test Site." Supporters say Yucca is the safest place to protect radioactive waste from terrorists because it's rimmed by the highly secure nuclear testing grounds, the airspace is already restricted and patrolled from the nearby Nellis Air Force Base, and Wackenhut security guards staff the gates. Add a landscape so harsh nothing grows taller than three feet, and Yucca is fortified against attack, they say. But critics say the waste itself is vulnerable - on thousands of rail and road shipments planned to cross the country over 38 years. The radioactive material is not explosive, but it could be stolen or used to make so-called dirty bombs. Nightmare scenarios need not be invented, anti-Yucca activists say. Although transportation casks have been put through a series of rigorous trials - including a thorough toasting at 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit - critics say last summer's Baltimore tunnel fire burned hot enough to damage casks and release radioactive material. Just last month, three Union Pacific trains were involved in a fiery collision near North Platte, Neb. About 80 percent of Yucca Mountain's estimated 9,700 rail shipments would run on that track. In New Jersey, waste from the Indian Point power plants in Westchester County, N.Y., may be trucked on Interstates 287 and 80, or carried down the Hudson River by barge to Jersey City for a train ride west. Spent fuel from the Oyster Creek, Hope Creek, and Salem reactors in South Jersey - which supply 49 percent of the state's electricity - will be hauled on the Garden State Parkway and New Jersey Turnpike, or taken by barge to the Port of Newark for rail shipment. Nevadans are using transportation as a tactic to persuade the rest of the country to oppose the repository. "Yucca Mountain is not safe and it is not suitable, and we will expose the Department of Energy's dirty little secrets about Yucca Mountain," Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn said in April. "The Yucca Mountain decision was made without any analysis of the transportation risks to the 123 million Americans in states through which this dangerous waste will travel." Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham counters that "over the last 30 years, there have been over 2,700 shipments of spent nuclear fuel." In that time, "shipments have traveled over 100 million miles - more than the distance from here to the sun - with no accidents causing a fatality or harmful release of radioactive material." Energy Department and nuclear industry officials play down transportation risks, saying that since the shipments wouldn't start before 2010 at the earliest, no details have even been considered. Instead, they tout Yucca Mountain's remote location as a deterrent to terrorists. "Yucca Mountain is perfect," says Harry Kaiser, president of PSEG Nuclear, which runs New Jersey's three Salem County reactors. "There's nothing out there." While Michael Voegele puts a happy face on Yucca Mountain for official visitors, Ian Zabarte dedicates his days to giving what he calls "the people's tour." Zabarte is secretary of state of the 15,000-member Western Shoshone Nation. Its top diplomat. If nuclear shipments come to Yucca Mountain, Zabarte says he'll do anything to stop them. "Non-native people can always leave," Zabarte says. "They came from someplace else, they can go someplace else again. Radiation has a deeper impact on native people. There are accounts of Shoshone people on mountaintops surrounded by water. That was 10,000 years ago. If you make our land uninhabitable, I don't know how you can replace that." Zabarte, a slender man of 37 with a waist-length ponytail, quotes from the 1863 Ruby Valley Treaty between the Shoshone and the U.S. government. It provided for "peace and friendship," gave Americans safe passage through Shoshone territory, and allowed the United States to mine metals essential to fighting the Civil War. Nothing about ceding land. On a rough road leading to the western slope of Yucca Mountain, Zabarte waves his arm to indicate a bleak landscape covered in a nubby carpet of rocks, creosote, and sage so dry it's silver. "As far as the eye can see, this is Shoshone country," he says. Paiute Mesa, on the eastern slope of Yucca Mountain, used to be where Shoshone elders sent young men into the desert to prove themselves. Now that land is off limits to Zabarte's people - it's part of the Nevada Test Site and pocked with enormous craters, where more than a thousand nuclear weapons were detonated from 1945 to 1992. Zabarte breaks out a map. Newe Segobia, the Shoshones' name for their territory, encompasses most of eastern Nevada, California's Death Valley, and a wedge of southern Idaho. It's desolate land, home to gold mines, ghost towns - and the Test Site's nuclear proving grounds. Zabarte lost a cousin to leukemia at age 11. "He'd be the same age I am now," Zabarte says. An uncle died of esophageal cancer at age 36. "When you lose one good person in a small community, it has a ripple effect," he says. Radiation is notoriously difficult to prove as a cancer cause, and Zabarte's relatives, living on the Duckwater Reservation north of the Test Site, were denied compensation. Zabarte has a three-room house across the highway from the Test Site, 40 miles southeast of Yucca Mountain, as the crow flies. He's had his drinking water tested. It tastes distinctly of metal, but it's not contaminated. "People think that genocide of the Indians is a thing of the past," Zabarte says. "It's not. It's pervasive and it's ongoing. The Nevada Test Site kills Indians. Yucca Mountain will kill Indians." Forty miles northwest from Ian Zabarte's house, on the sun-baked crest of Yucca Mountain, Voegele counts volcanoes. He sees five from the top of the bluff, small cones of red earth sprouting from the surrounding brown. A sixth is hidden behind a ridge. Voegele says he's unconcerned. Scientists have calculated the chance of any of them erupting in the next 10,000 years at 1 in 70 million per year. Likewise, although a 4.4-magnitude earthquake hit the Yucca region last month, Voegele says it caused no damage. "An earthquake is like an ocean wave," Voegele says. "You only feel it on the surface." Volcanic eruptions and earthquakes are far from the project's most pressing problems, Voegele says. Ironically, in this desert, the worry is water. Too much of it. "The real issue about Yucca Mountain is, can the water get through?" Voegele says. With Yucca Mountain, scientists opted for a "geological" repository - meaning the bad stuff gets buried - after considering a variety of sci-fi-sounding alternatives: rocketing the waste into space, burying it beneath the sea or under the polar ice cap, isolating it on a remote island, or reducing its volume through a recycling process called transmutation. If Yucca gets the go-ahead, 73 miles of tunnels will be dug in the rock 1,000 feet below the mountain's surface. Waste from nuclear reactors will arrive in bundles of slender, hollow zirconium alloy rods 15 feet long stuffed with ceramic pellets irradiated with uranium. Residue from the manufacture of nuclear weapons will make up less than 10 percent of Yucca's deposits. Two-thirds of it is liquid waste that's been combined with glass for easier handling, a process called vitrification. The other third is spent fuel from Navy submarines, so highly classified it may require armed naval guards stationed at the mouth of the tunnels. The waste will be held in canisters made of alloy 22, a special corrosion-resistant mixture of chromium, nickel, and other metals. The canisters, whose design dimensions haven't yet been approved, will be loaded end to end in a series of tunnels that, at 15 feet in diameter, will also accommodate monitoring equipment and, possibly, drip shields made of titanium. The shields provide added protection against moisture, but their cost can add billions to a total budget that's already considered much too low at $31.3 billion. Water can potentially play havoc. It can seep through cracks to corrode the canisters holding the waste - even, given the vast amount of time involved, canisters made of alloy 22. Once a canister is eaten through, radionuclides, the catch-all term for radioactive material, can flow with the seeping water 1,000 feet down to the groundwater, which could then poison people, plants, and animals. The rogues gallery of radionuclides found in spent reactor fuel include cesium, strontium, uranium, neptunium, and plutonium. Far above the caverns and the groundwater, Voegele pours a few ounces of water from a plastic bottle onto a slab of exposed rock - volcanic tuff, formed by a series of eruptions and cooling millions of years ago. The stuff of Yucca Mountain. The Yucca region gets a scant 4 to 7 inches of rain annually, and most of it either evaporates or gets slurped up by thirsty plant life. It takes only 10 minutes for Voegele's puddle of water to evaporate without a trace. To geologists, Yucca Mountain's volcanic tuff has two major advantages. Its fractures, which carry the water underground, are not continuous, meaning that cracks that go straight down are rare. And the tuff between the disposal area and the groundwater is rich in zeolites, minerals that absorb certain radionuclides. What could be better than a mountain made of rock that doesn't let water through easily, and that absorbs the bad stuff before it can seep downward? Hold on, Voegele says. For a look at what can go wrong, he dons a hard hat for the rail trip into the tunnel. Twenty-five feet above, on the ceiling of the shaft, fans hum, creating a breeze that flows through ducts 5 feet in diameter. The tunnel is 10 to 20 degrees cooler than the desert's 105 degrees. The diesel-powered train makes the Yucca Mountain tunnel smell a lot like the Lincoln Tunnel. Eleven minutes and a mile and a half from the south portal, the tunnel reaches its lowest point - 1,000 feet below the surface. It's here, where the nuclear tombs will be carved, that Yucca Mountain's secret is revealed: The rock is 10 percent water. "It's not as dry as it looks," Voegele says. Studies show that alloy 22 is most likely to corrode at 190 to 240 degrees. So scientists have devised two methods to protect the canisters. One, called cold storage, would mean ventilating the storage tunnels so that the temperature stays below 190 degrees. The other, hot storage, calls for letting the canisters heat up naturally, due to decaying radioactive materials inside, to about 360 degrees. The water in the surrounding rock boils away, and, theoretically at least, stays away for good. "I prefer the hot method. This system wants to be hot," Voegele says. "But you can make a good argument either way. It all depends on what's preferred by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission," the agency that oversees and licenses work at Yucca. Ten thousand years is a long time, and scientists can't vouch for the integrity of canisters or the stability of radionuclides for that long. Plans call for the repository to be sealed 50 years after the last canister is installed in its bowels, with monitoring to continue indefinitely after that. Voegele, however, favors keeping the doors open so scientists can keep an eye on things for 300 years. After that time, he says, 99.9 percent of the radioactive content of spent fuel will have decayed. Still, he cautions, that 0.1 percent is "a lot of nasty stuff." The nastiest: man-made neptunium. "In a worst-case scenario, that's the element that's most likely to get out," Voegele says. "If neptunium gets into the drinking water, it's trouble." That trouble, in the form of cancer-causing contamination, will never reach Las Vegas, 90 miles away, according to the Energy Department's full-color promotional guide to Yucca Mountain. "It is geologically impossible," the guide says. Instead, contaminated water would flow to the Death Valley hydrological basin, which is "isolated from the aquifer systems of Las Vegas." Forgive Ed Goedhart if his sigh of relief is a sarcastic one. Goedhart is manager of the Ponderosa Dairy, the largest dairy farm in Nevada. Founded in 1992, it produces 43,000 gallons of milk a day for customers from Arizona to Washington State. In otherwise bleak Amargosa Valley, in otherwise lackluster Nye County, Ponderosa is a big employer with a planned expansion this fall. Ponderosa gets all its water from the Death Valley hydrological basin. "The Department of Energy says Amargosa Valley is uninhabited, so I guess I'm an uninhabitant of Amargosa Valley," says Goedhart, a slope-shouldered man dressed in shorts and baseball cap, as his blue heeler, Deeogee, jumps playfully around him. Goedhart is a staunch Republican; he's been a delegate to the state GOP convention twice. But Goedhart's president has disappointed him. After Bush came to Nevada during the 2000 campaign and promised that "sound science, not politics" would determine his decision on a waste site - what most Nevadans took to mean opposition to Yucca Mountain - Goedhart felt betrayed when, on Feb. 15, Bush gave it his stamp of approval. "King George can kiss off Nevada's three electoral votes in the next election," Goedhart says. Goedhart can't help but cast the controversy as a states' rights issue - another example of the federal government trampling on Nevada. Many Nevadans feel that the rest of the country is happy to view their state as a wasteland, relieved to have a dumping ground many miles from their back yards. But even sparsely populated Nye County is far from empty. Between 1980 and 2000, its population rose 259 percent, from 9,048 to 32,485. And with 98 percent of Nye County's 18,200 square miles controlled by the federal government, depriving the country's third-largest county of tax revenue, Goedhart complains that private enterprise and local rule haven't been given a chance. His own private enterprise is what concerns Goedhart most. "I'm fearful that if Yucca Mountain comes to be, our proximity puts a negative cloud over products raised in the valley," Goedhart says. "Of course, there'll be no contamination for years and years. But it's the perception that could hurt business." Asked if there's anyone in Amargosa Valley who favors Yucca Mountain, Goedhart smiles. He points north up the highway, the opposite direction from the parched peaks that separate his slice of green from Death Valley. "There's a fellow up there," he says. At Nevada Joe's, motorists can fill their tanks, stock up on "alien jerky" - a tourist come-on that plays off nearby Area 51, the corner of the Test Site where extraterrestrials are rumored to be the object of study - or dally next door at the Cherry Patch, the local brothel. Nevada Joe's is the closest business to Yucca Mountain, and it's frequented by its employees for both business and pleasure. "Nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain? Be as safe here as anywhere else," says Earl Thomas, assistant manager of Nevada Joe's and the Cherry Patch. "I'm sure it'll be good for business. Especially for the Cherry Patch. Already is, as a matter of fact." Bob Ivry's e-mail address is ivry@northjersey.com TOMORROW: 80 percent of Nevadans oppose a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, but others are already counting dollars and jobs. 4141202 Copyright © 2002 North Jersey Media Group Inc. Copyright Infringement Notice ***************************************************************** 19 Yucca: Nuclear cargo [St. Petersburg Times Online: Opinion: Editorials and Letters] [http://www.tampabay.com/] A Times Editorial Florida's senators will soon vote on a plan that calls for hundreds of shipments of deadly nuclear waste to pass through populous areas of our state. © St. Petersburg Times published July 7, 2002 Imagine trucks, railroad cars and barges loaded with containers of the deadliest nuclear waste making hundreds of trips through the state of Florida. That is the image Florida's U.S. senators, Bob Graham and Bill Nelson, should keep in mind when they vote on a plan to ship tons of waste from nuclear power plants to a repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Nevada vetoed the plan earlier this year, but Congress can override that veto. The House did so in May, and the Senate is likely to take up the issue this week or next. There are good reasons to distrust the repository plan, including the threat it poses to the residents of Las Vegas, 90 miles away. But at least the Energy Department has put some effort into studying the underground storage site. It has provided Americans almost no useful information on how the waste material will be delivered from reactors in 39 states to Nevada. What we do know is that the waste material is so deadly that unshielded it would kill a person 3 feet away in two minutes. The material would be put in containers at reactor sites and shipped by truck, train, barge or a combination of all three. Even a small breach in the container could release enough radioactive gas to cause elevated cancer rates in those exposed. How likely is it that something will go wrong? The Energy Department estimates there will be about 100 accidents during the life of the project, but critics of the program put the number much higher. That doesn't account for possible terrorist attacks on the shipments. In Florida, more than 2.1-million people live within a mile of the transportation routes identified by the government, according to Environmental Working Group. The state has five nuclear reactors at three sites: just south of Miami, on the East Coast near Fort Pierce and on the Gulf Coast near Crystal River. Removing the waste would require 5,223 shipments by truck or 348 by train, and the routes would pass within a mile of 1,035 schools. Meanwhile, the state has an average of about 280 fatal truck wrecks and 170 train mishaps a year. The Energy Department doesn't want to talk about such matters. Under the sway of the nuclear power industry, it is in a hurry to approve the Yucca Mountain plan and to work out the details later. Considering the potential consequences, that approach is inexcusable. It will be difficult for the overall Senate, and Sens. Graham and Nelson in particular, to justify supporting such a plan before they can assure Americans that it is safe. ***************************************************************** 20 Australian protest fleet sets sail to intercept nuclear shipment. ABC News Online [Australian Broadcasting Corporation Online] Sunday, July 7, 2002. Posted: 14:16:51 (AEDT) The first of the Australian protest vessels in a flotilla of boats from Australia and New Zealand, planning to intercept a nuclear shipment, have set sail from Sydney. An Aboriginal smoking ceremony and half-a-dozen Greenpeace protest boats votes have farwelled the two 55 foot yachts, the Love of Gaia and Kailea, as they set sail from Lavender Bay in Sydney Harbour. They will join seven ships, from New Zealand and two from Vanuatu, planning to intercept a shipment of plutonium as it passes through the Pacific and Tasman Sea on its way from Japan to Britain. The skipper of the Love of Gaia, Inigo Wijnen, says they are making a symbolic gesture. "[We're] making a symbolic line across the Tasman Sea to show that we're against the shipment and we think it is very dangerous," he said. Tomorrow, the third Australian yacht in the protest fleet will leave Ballina on the New South Wales far north coast. [http://www.abc.net.au] © 2002 Australian Broadcasting Corporation ***************************************************************** 21 Where would N-waste go if Yucca plans are killed? [deseretnews.com] Sunday, July 7, 2002 What's wrong with leaving it where it is? Nevadan asks By H. Josef Hebert Associated Press writer WASHINGTON — Every year the country's commercial power plants generate 2,000 tons of spent reactor fuel, creating a pile of highly radioactive waste that is now 45,000 tons. If the government's plan to build a central repository for the waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada runs into trouble, where would the radioactive rubble go? That is a question to which no one has an answer, at least for the long term. It also is a question many politicians do not want to confront. "What's wrong with leaving it where it is?" Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., frequently has said. He and other Nevadans are fiercely fighting the Yucca project because they do not want 77,000 tons spent reactor fuel rods shipped into the state for burial, where it would remain highly radioactive for thousands of years. A final decision on whether the Yucca project will go forward or be scrapped rests with Congress. The House already has sided with Bush; the Senate plans a vote this week. The nuclear industry says the wastes are safe in pools of water at 72 operating reactor sites as well as a closed reactors in 31 states. But space in those pools is disappearing and some utilities have been putting the waste into canisters for dry storage in concrete bunkers. Richard Meserve, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, says there should be no problem keeping the waste in dry storage at reactor sites for decades. In some cases waste has been at reactors for 20 years. But Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, trying to marshal support for the Yucca repository, argues that keeping waste at power plant sites reactor poses environmental, safety and security risks. "More than 161 million Americans live within 75 miles of one or more of these sites," Abraham wrote President Bush in recommending he go ahead with the Yucca project. New terrorism fears have added to the uneasiness of having wastes spread around the country. The National Academy of Sciences has concluded in several reports that deep geological disposal is the best way to deal with the waste. But where? The government once considered various sites including granite rock in New Hampshire and salt domes in Kansas and Texas. It also considered the Energy Department's Hanford facility in western Washington state where plutonium was produced for the earliest nuclear bombs. All were discarded by Congress — some say for political reasons — in 1987 when it directed that all scientific research be concentrated on Yucca Mountain in Nevada, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Other approaches were considered over the years and rejected as technically questionable, unsafe or too expensive. © 2002 Deseret News Publishing Company ***************************************************************** 22 GOP to force action on nuclear waste repository The Express-Times Pennsylvania News Saturday, July 06, 2002 By BILL CAHIR The Express-Times WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Senate lawmakers likely will vote Tuesday or soon thereafter on a resolution approving President Bush's choice of Yucca Mountain as a national nuclear waste repository, Republican lawmakers said. Passage of the Senate measure would not authorize nuclear utilities to begin shipments of spent fuel rods to the proposed Nevada storage site, located about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. And it would not give a green light to construction of the Yucca Mountain facility, either. Instead, a positive Senate vote would override the objections of Nevada's governor and empower the U.S. Energy Department to seek a license for the proposed nuclear waste repository from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The commission would have until 2004 to gauge the safety of the president's decision to transport and stockpile over 70,000 metric tons of spent fuel rods from commercial, U.S. Energy Department and military sources at a single Nevada location. Craig Nesbitt, communications director for Exelon Nuclear, a nuclear utility, noted the federal government, even if it were to follow the most aggressive schedule possible, would not be prepared to start stockpiling spent fuel rods at Yucca Mountain until 2010. But Nesbitt identified Illinois and Pennsylvania as the two states that would benefit most from the ultimate export of spent nuclear fuel from commercial power plant sites to Nevada. Nuclear plants in Illinois currently are stockpiling 6,055 metric tons of radioactive waste, while those in Pennsylvania are storing 3,966 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel. New Jersey facilities, meanwhile, are stockpiling 1,618 metric tons of spent nuclear material on site, either in water-cooled pools or in dry casks. "We think that one single storage site that's been extensively studied ... is far more secure than 131 sites across 36 states," said Nesbitt, whose company operates the Three Mile Island, Peach Bottom, and Limerick nuclear power plants in Pennsylvania and the Oyster Creek nuclear facility in New Jersey, among other fission plants. House lawmakers on May 8 approved the choice of the Yucca Mountain site, 306-117. New Jersey U.S. Reps. Robert Andrews, D-1st, and Frank LoBiondo, R-2nd, supported the legislation overriding Nevada's objections. Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss, has been agitating for a Yucca Mountain vote. Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., says Lott is determined to force the issue on Tuesday, the day the Senate will reconvene from its one-week July Fourth recess. "There's an overwhelming majority in support of the president's decision," Santorum said. Consumers in Pennsylvania since 1983 have paid $1.6 billion into a fund meant to finance the construction of a national spent fuel repository, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute in Washington, D.C. Consumers in New Jersey have paid another $738 million into the fund. The balance is $18 billion. U.S. Sen. Frank Murkowski, the top Republican on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, in a recent floor speech said he too wanted to force a Senate vote on the Yucca Mountain storage policy on Tuesday or thereabouts. "The reality that nobody wants the waste is evident, but factually it has to go somewhere," Murkowski said. Democratic leaders in the Senate pose a roadblock to debate on the Yucca Mountain measure, which likely would pass with bipartisan support if only Lott, Murkowski and Santorum force the measure to a final ballot. Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and Majority Whip Harry Reid, D-Nev., oppose stockpiling of spent nuclear fuel rods at the Yucca Mountain site. They control the Senate legislative calendar. So far, they have declined to bring the measure up. U.S. Sen. Robert G. Torricelli, D-N.J., in the past has opposed legislation to move ahead with development of the Yucca Mountain site. Torricelli has not declared his position on the current resolution, but he is not expected to change his stance. U.S. Sen. Jon S. Corzine, D-N.J., has not yet revealed how he will vote on the Yucca Mountain legislation. Corzine intends to review the issue with New Jersey environmental and civic groups over the July Fourth recess. The Environmental Working Group, a Washington, D.C.-based watchdog organization, recently released an analysis in which it claimed that one out of seven Americans lives within one mile of a proposed nuclear waste shipping route. The Nuclear Energy Institute, the chief lobby group in Washington, D.C., for nuclear utilities, dismisses the EWG's point, saying it is safe for people to travel within a few feet of a truck carrying a cask full of spent nuclear fuel. Steve Kerekes, spokesman for the organization, said many influential Democrats in the past have backed legislation that would direct spent nuclear fuel to Yucca Mountain. That list includes U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Armed Services Committee; U.S. Sen. Fritz Hollings, D-S.C., chairman of the Commerce Committee, and U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. The Nuclear Energy Institute expects to have their support again next month. Senate Republicans have portrayed Daschle as an obstructionist, claiming he is blocking progress on a number of GOP initiatives: the president's tax agenda, judicial nominations and free-trade policy. The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act effectively overrides Senate traditions, depriving the majority leader of the unilateral power to set the floor schedule. The law instead authorizes any one senator to launch debate on the Yucca Mountain repository legislation, which cannot be filibustered and can pass with a simple majority vote after 10 hours of debate. Daschle has been urging lawmakers, especially Democrats, to respect his authority to establish the schedule. Republicans, given a clear opportunity to deliver a blow to Daschle's prestige, have chosen to rebel. Nesbitt claimed that spent nuclear fuel can be stored safely at plants and at Yucca Mountain, a site the nuclear industry and the National Academy of Sciences deem geologically appropriate and sufficiently arid and remote to serve as a secure repository for radioactive materials. Exelon and the Nuclear Energy Institute claim that people have nothing to fear from the shipments of radioactive material, whether it is moved by truck or rail. No release of radioactive material would occur during a car or train accident, according to Nesbitt, spokesman for Exelon. "Transportation of spent nuclear fuel is very, very safe," Nesbitt argued. "A lot of that has moved through the states the nuclear industry already operates in. There's never been any injury ... These are probably the strongest shipping containers ever engineered and constructed." Copyright 2002 The Express-Times. Used with permission. © 2002 PennLive. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 23 Track troubles: Number of train derailments rises in recent years July 7, 2002 [online@rgj.com] Gannett News Service WASHINGTON — A train ran off the tracks in Colfax, Calif., in May. And in Runnels, Iowa. And Kanapolis, N.C. A derailed train in Potterville, Mich., leaked liquid propane over Memorial Day weekend, forcing 2,200 people to evacuate their homes for several days. The number of train derailments has jumped 26 percent since 1997, according to railroad statistics. The amount of freight hauled over that period grew about 10 percent. In Nevada since 1997, train derailments have totaled 39. About 12 were caused by problems in the railroad tracks, including a derailment in June 2001 near Battle Mountain. The railroad industry takes a longer view, pointing out that since the 1970s the overall number of accidents, most of which are derailments, is down significantly — 73 percent. The question of rail safety is getting extra attention now that the government proposes transporting 77,000 tons of spent radioactive fuel from the nation’s nuclear power plants to Yucca Mountain, Nev. A Senate vote on the plan is expected this month. Railroad unions say in recent years cost-conscious railroads have slashed the number of maintenance workers checking the safety of the tracks while at the same time moving longer and heavier freight trains that put more stress on tracks. “The railroads are changing the way they maintain track,” said Spencer Morrissey, a Nebraska track inspector for Burlington Northern since 1975. “They’re increasing the tonnage, pushing the physical plant to the limit and cutting workers,” he said. “It’s an ongoing experiment to see how much they can get out of their facilities.” The Federal Railroad Administration, which oversees the train industry, said the industry achieved a number of safety records last year, including reporting the fewest number of employee deaths (22) and injuries (7,575). “Over the last two decades, the number and rate of train accidents, total deaths arising from rail operations, employee fatalities and injuries and hazardous materials releases and deaths related to those releases all fell dramatically,” FRA Administrator David Rutter told a House transportation hearing in June. The Energy Department’s preference is to carry most of the nuclear waste by train in steel and alloy casks designed to withstand most accidents without releasing radiation. But these nuclear-waste casks would be some of the heaviest loads carried on rail cars and could add further stress to an aging railroad infrastructure. Already this year: o Investigators suspect track defects are to blame for an Amtrak derailment in Crescent City, Fla., that killed four passengers. o A Minot, N.D., man died from breathing a toxic cloud of ammonia released after a train carrying fertilizer derailed in a wreck that may have been caused by track failure, and o Railroad officials say the Potterville, Mich., derailment might have been caused by a fracturing of the steel track. The National Transportation Safety Board — which is responsible for investigating plane, train and ship accidents — is concerned about the increase in derailments, from 1,741 in 1997 to 2,200 last year. Almost half of the derailments have been attributed to track problems, and the safety board has recommended that the railroad administration increase track inspections. “We take this very seriously,” said Tom White, a spokesman for the Association of American Railroads. “We expect that we will bring those numbers back down.” But he noted the industry has become vastly safer since the late 1970s, when there were nearly 11,000 accidents a year. In 1990, large railroad companies spent $6.9 billion to maintain and upgrade 119,758 miles of track, compared with more than $9.5 billion on 99,250 track miles in 2000, White said. Train accidents tend to draw a lot more media attention than truck accidents, so it only seems that there are a lot of spectacular derailments, he said. “Your memory plays tricks on you. There are many instances where areas are evacuated because of a highway situation,” White said. But there are some trends that are worrisome for the industry. Since railroad deregulation began in 1980, the industry has undergone a massive consolidation that culminated in the creation of four huge railroads: CSX, Norfolk Southern, Union Pacific Santa Fe and Burlington Northern. During the same period, railroads have slashed rates for carrying autos, grain and coal to compete with each other and with the trucking industry, said Peter Swan, a Penn State business professor who specializes in the railroad industry. That has led railroads to cut costs by reducing maintenance crew sizes, he said. At the same time, the industry has started to shift from 131-ton cars to 143-ton cars, which puts more stress on the track, Swan said. One possible culprit for track accidents could be joint bars, which hold the rail pieces together and are old and difficult to inspect, Swan said. “Part of what we’re seeing is some weak spots in the infrastructure that are coming to light with the heavier cars,” he said. FRA statistics show more derailments being caused over the past five years by tracks shifting out of alignment, tracks buckling due to temperature changes, switch equipment failing or the steel track cracking. Derailments caused by track fissuring have tripled over the past five years to 78 and they are likely the cause of the fatal Amtrak train crash in Nodaway, Iowa, last year. Rutter of the FRA said possible reasons for the increase in track-related accidents are: reduced spending on infrastructure, reduced maintenance staffs, increased traffic, heavier loads or insufficient monitoring of track inspectors. The Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees, which represents workers who inspect and repair the tracks, says the main culprit is cutting back on maintenance workers to save money. Its solution is to require the railroads to rehire some of those employees. “In 20 years, we’ve lost 50 percent of the maintenance forces out there,” said Rick Inclima, director of education and safety for the union. “I believe there is a direct correlation in the 50 percent reduction and all of a sudden you see these numbers going up.” On the Web: http://safetydata.fra.dot.gov/OfficeofSafety/Index/Default.asp, Federal Railroad Administration safety data. www.aar.org, Association of American Railroads. nrsalliance.org, National Rail Safety Alliance. AP-NY-07-04-02 2315EDT Copyright Reno Gazette-Journal, a [http://www.gannett.com] ***************************************************************** 24 Musharraf's "de-nuclearization" plan [The Daily Star on line] Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf seems to have recognized after last month’s nuclear standoff between India and his country that nuclear deterrence may not work as it did between the Cold War rivals ­ the United States and the Soviet Union. Musharraf has struck a new note: He is all for setting the clock back on nuclear weapons. He is now talking about “de-nuclearizing” South Asia. Musharraf mooted the idea first in Riyadh on June 12, and then reiterated it in an interview in the July 1 issue of the American magazine Newsweek. He is not indicating that Pakistan would unilaterally give up its nuclear option. He is using “de-nuclearization” as a bargaining counter. Musharraf seems to feel that the possession of nuclear weapons may not prevent the outbreak of hostilities between India and Pakistan. And on this score he has read the mind of the Indian hawks in the political and defense establishment, who were bent on calling Pakistan’s nuclear bluff and were prepared to risk a war. The United States had to do some tough talking to both sides to dissuade them from going to war. US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld travelled to New Delhi and Islamabad as part of intense diplomatic pressure mounted on the two countries. Musharraf now seems to prefer conventional deterrence. He has elaborated in Riyadh what he meant by it. He has argued that Pakistan should be so armed in conventional weapons that India would not dare attack the country. Musharraf’s plan comprises three steps. He told Newsweek: “If you want a guarantee of peace in this region, there are three ways: (1) de-nuclearize South Asia; (2) ensure a conventional deterrence so that war never takes place in the Subcontinent; (3) find a solution to the Kashmir problem.” He may find it difficult to convince either India or the West about his plan. While Pakistan is willing to give up nuclear weapons if India is willing to do so, India sees the issue differently. India is willing to give up nuclear arms only in case of total disarmament. It wants even the Big Five ­ the US, Russia, China, United Kingdom and France ­ to give up nuclear arms as well. Indian analysts argue that India’s defense needs and security perceptions are not linked to Pakistan alone. At the time of nuclear weapon tests in May, 1998, India argued that it considered China to be a potential rival, and it needed the nuclear option to face a possible conflict with China. The anti-bomb lobbyists and other peaceniks in the country consider it a weak argument and point out that India and China have not fought a war since 1962, and that China has been a nuclear power since 1964, and that to cite China as a potential threat does not pass muster. Whatever may be the imagined threat perceptions of Indian strategists in connection with China, it is quite unlikely that Indian leaders will ever accept the view that India’s defense needs are only in relation to Pakistan. It is also uncertain that Indian strategists would agree to the thesis that Pakistan should be allowed to have an advantage in conventional military strength. There will be a necessary imbalance between India and Pakistan in military strength because of the geographical size of the two countries. India is nearly three times as large as Pakistan in terms of size as well as population. Musharraf is not really asking for military parity between India and Pakistan. He is asking for “conventional deterrence” in favor of Pakistan. As a matter of fact, it has been an established fact that there is an undeniable disparity between the two countries in conventional weapons, and that India has the advantage. Critics of India’s nuclear tests pointed out that India lost this advantage after the nuclear weapon tests, and that nuclear deterrence has created parity between the two countries, and that it took away India’s natural advantage. But Musharraf does not seem to be too happy with the parity created by nuclear deterrence. He now prefers “conventional deterrence.” He has justifiable apprehensions about India’s advantage in conventional weapons. He articulated these fears in the Newsweek interview. He said: “Our army is enough for deterrence at the moment. But the Indians are increasing their defense budget, having contracted billions of dollars of purchases from Russia and the West. If they tilt the conventional balance, we shall have to restore it.” The issue becomes quite complicated because of the deep-rooted mutual distrust between the two countries, which had shared a common nationhood till 1947. And each one of them wants to be armed to the teeth, as it were, to fend off a potential danger that one poses to the other. Though Musharraf has indicated quite clearly that the Kashmir dispute should be discussed between the two countries, and that it should be resolved through dialogue, it is clear that the military preparedness of the two countries does not hinge on the Kashmir dispute. The Kashmir issue could be settled peaceably, but that would not remove the fears that each country has about the other, and they will continue to seek security in an arms build-up. South Asia then seems to be condemned to perpetual tension because Indian and Pakistani leaders are not able to create the mutual trust among themselves that will guarantee peace in the region. Musharraf’s plan to ensure peace hinges on deterrence, this time of the conventional kind. It may sound realistic, but it is unlikely to work because of the wide divergences in security perceptions between the two countries. It is indeed hard to say which of the two countries is more brittle. India, despite being the bigger country, feels threatened by Pakistan. And it is more natural for Pakistan to feel insecure with regard to a militaristic India. India’s right-wing nationalists and Pakistan’s military rulers are unable to work out ways of making a paradigm shift in India-Pakistan relations from one based on fear and distrust to one based in peace and progress. That would require politicians on both sides to think differently. It is clear that Kashmir is only a pretext for an India-Pakistan standoff. The two countries will have to change their basic attitude toward each other to ensure peace. Neither conventional, nor nuclear, deterrence is of much help. Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr is an Indian analyst. He wrote this commentary for The Daily Star On line discussion [http://dailystar.com.lb/post] | Lebanon Abroad | Cartoon | Copyright© 2001 The Daily Star. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 25 Brookings beware: Strobe's light is dim -- The Washington Times EDITORIAL • July 7, 2002 On July 1, Strobe Talbott, the self-styled arms-control expert for more than a quarter-century, assumed the presidency of the Brookings Institution. As it happens, Mr. Talbott's arrival at Brookings occurred within six weeks of two momentous events in arms-control history. And as the historical record indisputably demonstrates, Mr. Talbott had spent the better part of his adult life insisting that these essentially simultaneous arms-control developments could never happen in tandem. Rarely in human history, it is fair to say, has one man been so wrong about so many facets of such an important issue in international relations. The two recent developments that must so baffle Mr. Talbott were these: On May 24, U.S. President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin signed an arms-reduction treaty that would slash long-range (i.e., strategic) nuclear warheads by two-thirds. Over 10 years, the pact will reduce the operational deployment of these weapons from the roughly 6,000 strategic warheads in each arsenal to between 1,700 and 2,200. Three weeks later, on June 13, the United States, having given the requisite six-months notice in December, formally and unilaterally withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. Two days later, the United States broke ground in Alaska for silos to house ABM interceptors, beginning what Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz has described as the "robust development" of a land-, sea-, air- and space-based program to "deploy effective layered defenses." That was not the first time that arms-control realities utterly disproved Mr. Talbott's theories and arguments. In fact, developments over the past 15 years, beginning with the 1987 signing of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, have repeatedly confirmed the prescience and the wisdom of the arms-reductions policies pursued by President Ronald Reagan, whom Mr. Talbott incessantly criticized and ridiculed in Time magazine articles and in his 1984 book, "Deadly Gambits." The ABM Treaty, which now joins the Soviet Union on the ash heap of history, was the indispensable document that Mr. Talbott had relentlessly characterized as the "cornerstone" and the "foundation" of strategic stability during his eight years in the Clinton administration. Not surprisingly, the Russians felt likewise. During a White House briefing in Moscow in June 2000, Mr. Talbott, having long been in the habit of taking everything the Russians assert in negotiations as immutable, thusly summarized the Russian position relating to the relatively small changes in the ABM Treaty being sought by President Clinton: "President Putin made absolutely clear to President Clinton that Russia," Mr. Talbott told the press, "believes that [national missile defense] will undermine strategic stability, threaten Russia's strategic deterrent and provoke a new arms race." In other words, a blustery Mr. Putin was huffing and puffing in 2000 in the same way that Mr. Talbott had been huffing and puffing in a Time article dated the day Mr. Reagan was inaugurated for a second term: "If Reagan holds firm on Star Wars, he might as well abandon his pursuit of drastic reductions in existing Soviet weaponry." Mr. Talbott could hardly have been more wrong. Less than three years after Mr. Talbott wrote those words, Mr. Reagan and Soviet Communist Party General-Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev signed the INF Treaty, completely vindicating Mr. Reagan's negotiating strategy. That treaty required the destruction of all Soviet and U.S. intermediate-range missiles, essentially embracing Mr. Reagan's "zero option," which Mr. Talbott had spent more than six years criticizing. Gone were the 405 triple-warhead SS-20s the Soviets had aimed at Asian and Western European targets, as well as the Pershing II ballistic missiles and ground-launched cruise missiles NATO had deployed in December 1983 in response to the SS-20s. Mr. Reagan proposed the zero option in November 1981. "As soon as the zero proposal was made," Mr. Talbott noted in his 1984 book, "everyone would see that achievement of zero was an impossibility." In his incessant attacks upon then-assistant secretary of defense for international security policy Richard Perle — who led the charge in the bureaucracy for the zero option and whose nickname, Mr. Talbott told his readers, was the Prince of Darkness — Mr. Talbott argued that "Perle's position would preclude genuine and productive negotiation." Mr. Perle's "boldness was inversely proportional to negotiability." If Mr. Perle's position was "extreme" and "simple and compelling as long as one did not dwell on the question of negotiability," then Mr. Reagan's understanding of the zero option was "fuzzy, rambling." Indeed, Democratic elder statesman Clark Clifford once characterized Mr. Reagan as "an amiable dunce" — and Mr. Talbott mocked the president's "obsessive" distinction between ballistic missiles, which Mr. Reagan called "fast-flyers," and cruise missiles, which he called "slow-flyers." Moreover, "Reagan was not a diplomat," Mr. Talbott asserted; rather, "he was a politician, and the zero option was a politician's dream." "The elimination of the SS-20 program," Mr. Talbott argued, "was unthinkable," a view that even the tough-minded INF negotiator Paul Nitze adopted. At a key September 1982 meeting of the National Security Council, Mr. Nitze told the president, according to Mr. Talbott, that it was "inconceivable that the Soviets would ever accept a proposal that would require them to dismantle every last one of their most-modern intermediate-range missiles," especially since NATO had not yet deployed the Pershing IIs and the cruise missiles as countermeasures. Yet, Mr. Reagan refused to authorize a change in the zero option. "Well, Paul," the president told his discouraged negotiator, "you just tell the Soviets that you're working for one tough son-of-a-bitch." If the INF negotiations were destined for failure, the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) were in even worse shape, Mr. Talbott explained, because of "the absence in START of anyone in the role that Paul Nitze played in INF by trying singlehandedly to save the administration from itself." In START, Mr. Talbott argued that the Prince of Darkness played an even more destructive role, offering a proposal that was "even more audacious than his advocacy of the zero option in INF." With Mr. Perle once again fighting the bureaucratic battles, the president's goal for START was to drastically reduce the increasingly destabilizing effect of the Soviets' rapidly growing arsenal of land-based "fast-flyers" (intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs) deployed with multiple warheads. These missiles and their warheads were sufficiently numerous, accurate and powerful that they provided the Soviets with a dangerous first-strike advantage. Even Mr. Talbott conceded that the Reagan administration's START proposal "would lower, if not shut, the 'window of vulnerabilty,'" making the world "a safer place." As Mr. Talbott noted, each side had about 8,500 ballistic warheads deployed on their ICBMs and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), though their distribution was quite different. U.S. ballistic warheads were disproportionately deployed on SLBMs, while the Soviets deployed most of their ballistic warheads on ICBMs. The primary purpose of Mr. Reagan's START proposal was to force the Soviets to reduce the 6,000 warheads on their ICBMs to as few as 2,500, an achievement that would require the Soviets to radically decrease the number of ICBMs with multiple-independently-targetable warheads. The U.S. START proposal would also limit total ballistic-missile warheads on ICBMs and SLBMs to 5,000. (The long-term START goal was to eliminate all ICBMs with multiple warheads.) Mimicking the Soviet position, Mr. Talbott described this proposal as "utterly non-negotiable." "The administration's conduct in the INF talks and START brought about an unprecedented crisis in the already strained quarter-century old arms-control process," Mr. Talbott somberly observed as the Soviets walked out of each negotiation following NATO's deployment of the Pershing IIs and cruise missiles in Europe. "START, as such, was dead," Mr. Talbott concluded in his 1984 book, adding, "The Reagan revolution in arms control was over." Well, not quite. Not only did the Soviets completely capitulate in 1987 to the zero option in the INF talks: Three and a half years later, in August 1991, Soviet President Gorbachev and President George H.W. Bush, Mr. Reagan's successor, signed the START I Treaty, which reduced the Soviets' ICBM warheads from 6,595 to 3,028, or by 54 percent. START I also reduced total Soviet ballistic-missile warheads from 9,400 to 4,900, or to a level lower than the 5,000-ballistic-warhead limit Mr. Reagan proposed in 1982. In 1993, before leaving office, President Bush signed START II, which would have completely eliminated ICBMs with multiple warheads by 2003, an achievement that Mr. Talbott's boss, President Clinton, significantly relaxed in 1997 when he delayed the deadline until 2007. When Brookings celebrated Mr. Talbott's arrival as president on July 1, one wonders if anyone was so indiscreet as to quote Brookings guest scholar Helmut Sonnenfeldt, who earlier served as chief State Department analyst on Soviet and East European affairs. In 1994, as Mr. Talbott was preparing to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate as deputy secretary of state, Mr. Sonnenfeldt told The Washington Times that Mr. Talbott "had views on American policy regarding the Soviet Union — especially arms-control issues and the deployment of intermediate-range missiles [in Western Europe] — that disagreed with American policy." Acknowledging the obvious, Mr. Sonnenfeldt added, "And on the whole, American policy" — that is, President Reagan's policy — "was vindicated." ***************************************************************** 26 Ambitious Nuclear Arms Pact Faces a Senate Examination (washingtonpost.com) Minimal Details and Huge Warhead Cuts Embody Bush Policy By Peter Slevin Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, July 7, 2002; Page A08 The Senate opens hearings Tuesday on the shortest yet one of the most far-reaching treaties in four decades of arms accords with Russia, a novel document billed by the Bush administration as the embodiment of its minimalist vision of nuclear arms control. The Senate may come to adopt that vision. It is widely expected among arms control analysts that the pact reached by President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow in May will be ratified, but members of the Foreign Relations Committee plan to pose some old-fashioned questions about the new approach, according to lawmakers and their aides. They plan to ask Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld about the sturdiness of a treaty whose body contains only 10 sentences. They will ask how permanent the cuts will be, and how the United States can be certain that Russia will do what it promised. The hearings, which are expected to stretch through the summer, will open a window onto the administration's nuclear strategy as well as its assessment of the U.S. relationship with Russia. They also will expose how Bush and Putin jettisoned many of the dogmas that have characterized negotiations with Russia and its Soviet predecessor since the 1960s and built an accord based largely on expectations of good faith. Gone are the covenants, caveats and vast appendixes typical of nuclear deals. Gone, too, if all goes well, will be two thirds of the strategic nuclear arsenals of the former superpower rivals. At the accord's heart is Bush's conviction that "Russia is a friend," as he put it in a June 20 letter that accompanied the treaty to the Senate. "There is no longer the need to narrowly regulate every step we take." The document is unprecedented in allowing the United States and Russia to do as they please, as long as they cut their strategic nuclear arsenal to no more than 2,200 warheads by Dec. 31, 2012. That means a change from Senate hearings that once focused on the minutiae of verification. This time, said former Armed Services Committee chairman Sam Nunn, senators must "determine what the treaty really means." "There are no mileposts for performance. There is nothing really to verify except good faith," said the Georgia Democrat, who called the treaty a strong step forward. "If things start going sour between the two countries and we get into a period of intensive distrust, this document will be looked back on as having no legal enforcement mechanism, no performance mechanism and not much of an accomplishment at all." The treaty's simplicity resulted from complex negotiations conducted on a six-month timetable -- a blink of an eye in the arms control world. Both sides ultimately emphasized broad assurances over detail, yet the outcome reflected an imbalance of power that favored the United States. In the process, Bush and Putin pledged the steepest strategic nuclear reductions in history. 'A Piece of Paper' On Nov. 13, side by side with Putin in the East Room of the White House, Bush announced the United States would cut its long-range arsenal of 6,000-plus nuclear warheads to between 1,700 and 2,200. Bush had vowed during the 2000 campaign that he would dramatically reduce the country's nuclear arsenal -- and would do so on the basis of U.S. strategic needs, without a treaty if necessary. Putin wanted to reduce his nuclear stockpile as well, although his motivation was different: Russia couldn't afford to maintain its weapons. Putin wanted an agreement that covered "verification and control." He had just finished another meeting with Bush where he got nowhere in trying to preserve the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty's limits on missile defense tests, a cornerstone of superpower nuclear policy for 30 years. Putin promised to deliver missile cuts, but he wanted a signed document that committed the United States to specific terms. "I looked the man in the eye and shook his hand," Bush said. "And if we need to write it down on a piece of paper, I'll be glad to do that." With that exchange, the leaders set an ambitious goal for their negotiators: Reach agreement on steep reductions and do it in time for Bush's visit to Moscow in May. The Russians delivered the first set of ideas in January, led by Deputy Foreign Minister Georgy Mamedov, whose arms control résumé dates to Soviet times. Problems arose early. As U.S. officials saw it, the Russian requests were overly ambitious and drew on tired doctrine. What the Russians saw as ways of increasing predictability, the Bush administration saw as limits on U.S. flexibility in structuring its nuclear force. The Russians wanted both sides to eliminate missiles, long-range bombers and submarines. They reasoned that if launchers were taken out of service, then the warheads would follow. Fewer U.S. Trident submarines capable of carrying nuclear weapons would mean fewer warheads threatening Russian targets. But the Bush administration wanted to focus on deployed warheads. That meant counting each atomic warhead on a submarine, in a missile silo or on a bomber base. A specific Trident submarine would be counted as having only as many warheads as it carried, not how many it was equipped to carry. The United States could have as many nuclear-equipped B-52 bombers as it liked as long as the overall warhead numbers declined. The broader position reflected Bush's campaign pledge. The details flowed from the Pentagon's Nuclear Posture Review, which emphasized sufficient deterrence, flexibility and a new missile defense against smaller threats. "We want to have flexibility without making them nervous," a U.S. negotiator explained. The Russians were nervous and they were playing a weak hand. Everyone knew they wanted to reduce their long-range atomic weapons anyway. To reassure the Russians, Powell was the first to argue that the United States should turn Bush's "piece of paper" into a legally binding document. Something Putin Needed In White House meetings and his daily telephone conversations with Rumsfeld and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Powell said a binding deal would help Putin at home, reassure the Europeans, and install some limits on Russian behavior -- a benefit, he reasoned, given the country's historic volatility. He also thought a written promise might ease the sting many Russians felt at the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty. First, Powell had to persuade Bush, who was hearing from Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney that an agreement tying the hands of the United States would be a mistake. Cheney, in particular, further opposed turning the document into a treaty that would open the negotiations to a Senate debate and vote. Bush sided with Powell and signaled that the document would be binding. "I think the Russians would have felt much more comfortable with an old-fashioned treaty that spelled everything out, and Bush would have been quite happy with no agreement at all," said a U.S. negotiator. "Bush understood as one politician to another that this was something Putin had to have." Negotiators had a draft text by March. As they hurried back and forth between Washington and Europe, the Russian position was inscribed in italic, the U.S. position in bold. The weekly goal was to remove more brackets -- the areas in the text where the sides still disagreed. But barely two months before the summit, the sections in brackets outnumbered the sections in New Courier Normal. Missile defense produced "huge hassles," an American negotiator said. The Russians tried for months to include limits on U.S. plans, first seeking a pledge in the treaty that any U.S. defensive system would not threaten Russian strategic forces. When the administration rejected that, the Russians pressed for a firm statement in the treaty's preamble, which the U.S. team also rejected. More than once, the issue was written out of the draft, only to be written back in by the Russians. Discussions also proved difficult over how one side would know what the other was doing. Strategies for sharing information and checking its accuracy were the nucleus of earlier arms control deals and the essence of President Ronald Reagan's "trust but verify" admonition. During the Cold War, U.S. negotiators sought access to Russia's closely guarded nuclear establishment while protecting their own facilities. But this year, U.S. officials said they offered the Russians more access to bomber bases and U.S. storage areas than the Moscow negotiators were willing to permit in return. Neither side was keen on destroying warheads, several participants said. Negotiators were wary of the cost, complexity and inevitable intrusiveness. The issue faded. But a month before Bush was scheduled to leave for Europe, the two sides became stuck on their opposing views of how to reach the lower warhead numbers. Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton, the administration's chief negotiator, was in Moscow on April 22, when Deputy Foreign Minister Mamedov told him that Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov wanted to present him with a new draft. Bolton met Ivanov that evening and hurried back to Washington. 'Parallel Bookkeeping' It was a conceptual breakthrough, U.S. officials said later. The Russians had dropped their insistence on cutting rockets, bombers and submarines. In time, they would also agree that the 1991 START I treaty's inspection and notification systems would govern the accord until more assurances could be drafted. Because essentially the same warheads were involved in both documents, Ivanov called it "parallel bookkeeping." The two sides had the outlines of a deal, but they kept stumbling over missile defense. They also needed to resolve a dispute over how the countries could withdraw from the treaty, and under what terms. The United States wanted to be able to pull out of the treaty within six months or exceed the 2,200-warhead limit with 45 days notice if the need arose. To the Russians, 45 days seemed suspiciously short. With three weeks to go before the summit, Putin and Bush had each made clear to their proxies that they wanted a deal. Igor Ivanov, the Russian foreign minister, was due in Washington to discuss the crisis in the Middle East. He agreed to spend May 3 on the treaty. "Both sides were feeling pressure to get things done," one of the U.S. negotiators said. "If we hadn't made a lot of progress that day, the tide might have turned." Ivanov and Powell met at 10 a.m. in Powell's outer office. Frequent telephone companions, they took seats facing one another by the fireplace, joined by Bolton and Mamedov, who shared a couch. Powell said he told Ivanov that the United States had gone as far as it intended. He declared that the treaty would cover warheads, not the removal of delivery systems. They agreed to a three-month withdrawal period. "What turned it is I wasn't giving anything more," Powell said. Ivanov failed to obtain a mention of missile defense in the treaty. But in a diplomatic fudge, the preamble contains a reference to comments made by Bush and Putin in Genoa, Italy, in July 2001. The language in Genoa was generic, the sentiment safely vague. With that addition, the deed was nearly done. All that remained was a name. The Russian title needed to include a noun such as "weapons" or "systems," but U.S. officials objected to such words, worried anew that the Russians would find a way to constrain U.S. flexibility, even in a title. The U.S. position again prevailed. The English version is called the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty. © 2002 The Washington Post Company ***************************************************************** 27 Iraq Fails to OK U.N. Inspections Las Vegas SUN July 06, 2002 VIENNA, Austria- After two days of talks that had raised hopes Iraq might relent, the United Nations said Friday it had failed to convince Baghdad to allow the return of U.N. weapons inspectors. Diplomats agreed, however, to continue talks in Europe in the coming months. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said that the Iraqis needed to consult with officials in Baghdad and no date was set for the next round. "There has been some movement, but obviously not enough," Annan said Friday. Annan and Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri spoke privately before the announcement, but were unable to agree on any face-saving measures. In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Jo-Anne Prokopowicz said the administration was not surprised the talks failed, claiming Iraqi statements in advance of the meetings foreshadowed the outcome. "Iraqi representatives continue to raise issues aimed at preventing and delaying a focus on its core obligations," she said. "We see no basis or need for prolonged discussions of Iraq's obligations." Diplomats earlier had expressed concerns about continuing the talks indefinitely, saying Iraq could be stalling in the face of American threats to attack and topple leader Saddam Hussein. The unsuccessful session came after U.N. and Iraqi technical experts discussed the details of the return of inspectors should there have been an agreement. Sabri said the talks would continue on a technical basis and called the two days of negotiations "constructive." "We agreed to continue contact on technical matters," he said. "There are a lot of issues involved." Sabri, meanwhile, dismissed an article in Friday's New York Times which said the Bush Administration had drawn up plans for an attack. "This was not a factor in our discussions," Sabri said. "We heard a lot of rubbish about these plans. These are wishes entertained by old colonialists and evil people." Before allowing inspectors to return, Iraq has demanded the United Nations lift sanctions imposed on it for invading Kuwait and prompting the Gulf War. Under Security Council resolutions, sanctions can be lifted only when inspectors certify that Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons have been destroyed, along with the missiles that could deliver them. Inspectors left in 1998 just before allied airstrikes to punish Iraq for having blocked the inspectors' work. Iraq did agree, however, to return Kuwait's national archives, which were looted during the Gulf War. All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 28 SCIENCE : PROJECT ORION: THE TRUE STORY OF THE ATOMIC SPACESHIP BY GEORGE DYSON. HENRY HOLT, $26, 345 PAGES. [newsobserver.com, Raleigh, NC] SUNDAY, JULY 7, 2002 Atomic dreams America's greatest minds imagine a spaceship fueled by nuclear bombs By PHILLIP MANNING The late 1950s were a time when "tail fins, not seat belts, were standard equipment in American cars," George Dyson writes in his fascinating new book about the outer limits of science, "Project Orion." He's got that right. I spent the summer of 1958 working at Los Alamos, where we did not worry about spilling radioactive uranium on the wooden floor because the rumor was that when the lab got too "hot" it would be bulldozed down and buried. I spent the following summer at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Ala., where the explosion of a rocket engine we were testing almost killed two men monitoring the test, completely demolished the test range, and destroyed a dozen or so cars in a parking lot. No heads rolled because of the accident. After all, we were trying to win the Cold War and beat the Russians to the moon. It was this don't-be-overly-concerned-about-safety, let's-get-the-job-done atmosphere that opened the door to Project Orion, one of the most ambitious or bizarre (take your pick) programs in the history of American science. Its goal: A spaceship propelled not by a nuclear reactor but by the explosive power of nuclear bombs. Dyson traces the history of the project's many twists and turns, from its beginnings in 1957 as a government-financed project at General Atomic (a division of General Dynamics located in La Jolla, Calif.) to its death in 1965, a victim of interagency squabbling and the nuclear test ban treaty. He interviewed many of the scientists and engineers who worked on Orion and quotes extensively from the documents they wrote. Dyson had an inside track in his research; his father is Freeman Dyson, the well-known physicist at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, who worked on Orion for two years. The idea for an atomic-powered spaceship had been around since the first bomb spread its mushroom-shaped cloud over the desert in White Sands, N.M. Atomic power produces a million times more energy per unit of fuel than conventional power. Thus, since it would not have to carry as much fuel as an ordinary rocket, an atomic powered spaceship could deliver the large payloads needed for a manned trip to Mars or the moons of Jupiter. Controlled nuclear power requires heavy shielding to contain the deadly radiation generated in the reactor. This presents no problem in nuclear power plants or in nuclear-powered ships and submarines, but in spaceships or airplanes -- where weight is important -- it is a stopper. The solution was suggested in 1946 by physicist Stanislaw Ulam, a Polish scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos: Eliminate the need for shielding by keeping the nuclear reactions outside the rocket. The concept was unnervingly simple; Project Orion scientists would design a rocket propelled by atomic bombs that would be ejected from a spaceship, explode behind it and push it along. The beginning of the story has an Alice in Wonderland quality about it. By the late 1950s, the largest payload Americans had ever put in space weighed 31 pounds. The early designs of Project Orion specified a 4,000-ton rocket carrying a 1,000-ton payload (later dreamy schemes -- reflective of this shoot-for-the-stars era -- envisioned massive spaceships that could carry thousands of colonists to other stars). As originally designed, Orion would be manned by a crew of about four. Nuclear bombs would be exploded to boost the rocket off the launch pad. Scientists later estimated that about 10 civilians would die from the radioactive fallout from each mission; they also concluded that number would be unacceptable to the public, so they decided to launch the rocket with conventional explosives. Once out of the Earth's atmosphere, the spaceship would deploy its arsenal of 1,000 or so atomic bombs, releasing them at the rate of about one per second. The bombs would be set to explode behind the craft, sending a 120,000-degree pulse of plasma toward the rocket's "pusher plate." Shock absorbers connected the pusher plate to the crew compartment to reduce the jolt of an atomic bomb exploding only a few hundred feet behind the ship. Once the astronauts reached their destination -- some scientists thought they could get as far as Alpha Centauri, 4.3 light-years away -- they'd drop more bombs to get home. So, you have a bunch of scientists and engineers sitting in comfortable offices in La Jolla designing a spacecraft that has the crew sitting on top of enough explosives to destroy a small continent. The first thought that comes to mind is What is wrong with these people? Then, as detail after detail of the Orion design is refined, Dyson slowly wins the reader over to the feasibility of the project. In the first place, these are reputable, experienced scientists, many of whom worked on the first atomic bomb. They just might know what they are doing. Ted Taylor, one of the principals in the project, came up with idea after idea for smaller bombs that would focus the blasts at the pusher plate, giving more thrust per bomb. Maybe Project Orion really could put a man on Mars or Europa. Unfortunately, we do not find out; the project never gets beyond testing a small-scale rocket using conventional explosives, which, after many failures, reaches an altitude of 185 feet. Herbert York, one of the men who helped start Project Orion and helped kill it, said that the problem was that Orion could not evolve the way other projects could. "We arrived at successful technologies like airplanes or telephones by building millions or billions of units, and making modifications one at a time," writes Dyson. He then quotes York's epitaph. "Orion involved putting together simultaneously a number of novel technologies, most of which could not be meaningfully tested in isolation." Was Project Orion just a pipe dream of eggheads? A fantasy from an era when safety took a back seat to beating the Russians to the moon, when tail fins were more important than seat belts? Dyson doesn't think so. It was, he says "too ambitious a leap in 1958. Nuclear pulse propulsion had to wait." But Orion will be back, he predicts. And it will fly. Astronauts will one day stand on Mars. A collection of Phillip Manning's book reviews and essays on science is available online at http://www.scibooks.org [http://www.scibooks.org] . Feedback [http://newsobserver.com/help/contact_us/feedback.html] || Parental © Copyright 2002, The News &Observer. All material found on newsobserver.com ***************************************************************** NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: *****************************************************************