***************************************************************** 12/07/02 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 10.317 ***************************************************************** RADBULL IS PRODUCED BY THE ABALONE ALLIANCE CLEARINGHOUSE ***************************************************************** Send News Stories to news@energy-net.org with title on subject line and first line of body NUCLEAR POLICY 1 White House preparing to accuse Iraq 2 Washington Gathers Own Evidence of Saddam’s WMD 3 US: US seeks one excuse for war in 12,000 pages of denial 4 US: Commentary: Congressman Billybob sez* 5 US: Deep Throats need better protection 6 Belgian parliament votes to close down country's nuclear power 7 Europaworld 6/12/2002 International Atomic Energy Agency Meeting 8 N Korea: N-nexus exposes murky details 9 News Update on Iraq Inspections 10 Canada: Sobering lessons of deregulation 11 Allies Give N.Korea More Time to Decide on Uranium* NUCLEAR REACTORS 12 US: NPPD exec pay tied to actions 13 India: Nuclear Power Corporation to offer public issue 14 US: NRC Approves Power Uprate for Crystal River 3 15 US: NRC writes reasons it let Davis-Besse run 16 UK: Opinion Torness in hot water over its dirty washing 17 Chechens Planning Strike Against Russian Nuclear Power Stations 18 UK: Torness in hot water over its dirty washing 19 US: Vermont Yankee will wait to apply for extension NUCLEAR SAFETY 20 Bulgaria: Fears After Atomic Theft 21 Third Radioactive Device Stolen in Bulgaria 22 Environmentalists say Russia's nuclear security is lax - 23 US: Military asked grant approval for medical screenings of DOD 24 US: Test Site workers' screening continues NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE 25 Yucca Mountain Increases County's Potential for Terrorist Attack* 26 Nevada lawmakers question Yucca Mountain lawyers* 27 *State offered fuel plant incentives * 28 *Environmentalist seeks 'advisory vote' on plant * 29 Owners of Former Nuclear Site Authorize Consortium Talks* 30 US: *Landfill radiation hearing coming to Pottstown* 31 New Technologies for Domestic Enrichment of Nuclear Fuel Draws Prais 32 US: Removal of Shattuck soil to begin 33 Neither in My Backyard Nor Yours, Says Germany 34 US: NRC, Dominion to Discuss Spent Fuel Storage Plans for Millstone 35 Nevada lawmakers question Yucca Mountain lawyers 36 US: Plutonium could stay in state for 700 years, watchdog group 37 Yucca: Lawmakers want new look into whistle-blower's firing 38 More MOX to Norway 39 AU: Govt urged to reconsider radioactive waste dump plans 40 AU: Labor questions SA nuclear waste dump 41 Another Yucca conflict of interest alleged NUCLEAR WEAPONS 42 UK: CORNERSTONE OF OUR NUCLEAR DETERRENT 43 £1BN NUCLEAR SUBS FIASCO 44 US: International Reflections from the 800 mile Family Spirit Walk 45 UK: This time I'm scared 46 US: Adversity fails to shake Pyongyang nuclear plans - 47 Ritter flays U.S. policy on Iraq US DEPT. OF ENERGY 48 Nuclear expert says plutonium law has loophole 49 CH2M Hill to lead $314M cleanup - OTHER NUCLEAR 50 Court Halts Suit Vs. Cheney Task Force 51 Canada Book Review: When Smoke Ran Like Water* 52 Researchers Make the Best Argument Yet That Neutrinos Are Capable of 53 WNA NEWS BRIEFING 02.49 | 29 November - 3 December 2002 ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** FULL NEWS STORIES ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** 1 White House preparing to accuse Iraq SF Gate www.sfgate.com U.S. says it has evidence it hasn't given U.N. of weapons of mass destruction * Maggie Farley, Robin Wright, Los Angeles Times Saturday, December 7, 2002 ©2002 San Francisco Chronicle . *United Nations* -- Even before Iraq hands over the long-awaited declaration of its weapons and missile programs in Baghdad today, the Bush administration is preparing to declare Iraq in material breach of a tough U.N. resolution for expected omissions in the report, U.S. officials said Friday. The White House says it has evidence -- which it has not released to U.N. weapons inspectors or other countries -- that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, despite Baghdad's repeated denials. But instead of pushing immediately for military action, the administration will use the anticipated gaps to argue for more aggressive inspections and the spiriting away of Iraqi scientists who could lead inspectors to "a smoking gun. " It would be the first step in providing the evidence needed to convince the international community that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein must go, U.S. officials said Friday. "This is not a moment to declare war, but to determine the task ahead," a senior State Department official said. "We see this as part of an overall process of determining whether Iraq will cooperate and disarm." Iraq's weapons inventory -- expected to be more than 10,000 pages long and written partly in Arabic -- will be given to U.N. officials in Baghdad at 8 p. m. local time (9 a.m. PST) today, and then delivered to the offices of the International Agency for Atomic Energy in Vienna and U.N. headquarters in New York on Sunday night. U.N. experts will screen the document before any member of the Security Council -- including the United States -- sees it, a process that could take several days. Resolution 1441 not only requires Baghdad to list information on past and present weapons programs, but to detail any materials in its civilian industries that could be used for military purposes. Chief weapons inspector Hans Blix has said that the burden of proof is on Iraq and that if Baghdad claims it has destroyed weapons materials, it must offer "convincing evidence." Before turning the declaration over to the Security Council's 15 members, U. N. experts will study it for sensitive information, such as recipes for making weapons, to abide by nonproliferation conventions. The rambling report might take weeks to translate and analyze and, at least initially, might raise more questions than it will answer, U.S. and U.N. officials said Friday. Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammed Al-Douri, said Baghdad's declaration will contain "new elements," but would nonetheless show that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction. "We said again and again that we have no more destruction weapons at all, everything has been destroyed," Al-Douri said. "If the Americans have this evidence, they have to tell the inspectors in Iraq to go find this evidence." Council diplomats said some of the "new elements" in Iraq's declaration may be related to dual-use elements -- material used by the government for civilian and military purposes. Others indicated there may be new information regarding Iraq's nuclear holdings. U.S. officials are pressing the inspectors to concentrate on what has been their most valuable source of information in the past: Iraqi scientists. The United States wants to create the equivalent of a witness protection program for specialists and their families who can help inspectors unearth the kind of evidence that would convince the international community of the need to topple the Iraqi regime. Washington will push specifically for the weapons inspectors to press some of the 500 Iraqi scientists, engineers and technicians identified by previous U.N. teams as having a role in the production of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and ballistic missiles. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the inspectors should take advantage of all methods as they look for clues on whether Iraq has developed weapons of mass destruction. Blix is reluctant to remove scientists from the country, however, saying there are "practical difficulties" in taking people who might not want to leave Iraq, or who might not be able to return. Hussein's regime reportedly has tortured and executed people who have offered help to inspectors in the past, and Blix is acutely aware of what is at stake when his team asks anyone for a private interview. "We are not going to abduct anyone," Blix said Friday after meeting with the Security Council. "The U.N. is not a defection agency." If the United States has evidence that Iraq has weapons material, Washington should give it to the inspectors to investigate, Blix said somewhat testily Friday after a week of criticism from both Baghdad and Washington about the inspections. "Any country is too big for inspectors to comb through every square centimeter. You need to have information," he said. "They may be listening to what's going on in the ether and they may have a lot of other sources of information, but we can go to the sites legitimately and legally." ©2002 San Francisco Chronicle . Page ***************************************************************** 2 Washington Gathers Own Evidence of Saddam’s WMD DEBKAfile As first revealed in latest DEBKA-Net-Weekly Fri. Dec. 6 December 7, 2002, 4:58 PM (GMT+02:00) Bush already has proofs from field of Iraq`s unconventional weapons Running circles around the UN arms inspection headed by Swedish diplomat Hans Blix, the Iraqi government dropped a massive pile of documents – its reply to the UN Security Council demand for a full accounting of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction – in the laps of the international media Saturday, December 7, before allowing Blix a peek. The presentation was accompanied by yet another formal denial that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction. The 11,880 pages on CD-Rom, landing with a thud in Baghdad, will not reach UN Headquarters in New York before late Sunday, exactly on the dot of the Security Council deadline. Saddam’s demonstration of openness is in fact another exercise in obfuscation. It will take the world media and the world body days to digest the forbidding mass, particularly when parts are in Arabic and sections are historic and will need to be matched up. It also makes sly fun of Blix’s solemn pledge to hold back sensitive nuclear, chemical and biological data that might be used as recipes for the proliferation of such weapons – even from Security Council members, including the United States. Washington in any case had no expectation of substance from the UN inspectors. Thursday, December 5, the White House declared it already had “solid evidence” that Iraq does indeed have weapons of mass destruction. Where did that evidence come from? *DEBKA-Net-Weekly (No. 88, Dec. 6)* called on its military sources to divulge the secret, independent inspection project launched by the United States well before the UN Security Council sent its inspectors to Iraq. *To subscribe to DNW click* * /HERE / * . This project is in the hands of a special multinational task force made up of special elite units and armed with combat helicopters and aircraft, spy-planes and satellites. Unlike the Blix outfit, which is based in Baghdad, the alternative investigators are fanned out across the country. One well-placed source disclosed: “Our men in the field know where 90 percent of Saddam’s missiles and unconventional weapons systems are located, even the mobile ones that are moved from place to place every hour. We are keeping them under tight, on-site observation because when the war begins we want to be there before Saddam orders his men to hit the triggers.” According to our sources, this highly sensitive, elaborate and secret inspection project has been going for more than three months. Its success could pre-determine the course of the war before it begins. Its members are drawn from the United States, Britain, Jordan and Turkey and possibly Israel. They operate under the Special Forces command at Al Udeid in Qatar and its sub-command in the Jordanian base of Mafraq. For the purpose of the search, Iraq has been divided into 16 squares, each the province of an elite unit for a set period. The Talil air base complex in north Iraq, for instance, with its air fields, missile bases and air defense batteries, was assigned for the first three weeks of December to US special forces. When these units end their tour of duty, they return to base and are replaced. All the units on this mission are briefed down to the last detail on the unconventional weapons in their zone, their precise locations and the names of the Iraqi officers and men assigned to each site. They keep watch around the clock over the comings and goings inside those sites and are on the ready at all times to move in and seize the facility if ordered to do so. Conscious of those watchful eyes, the Iraqis have made almost all their weapons systems mobile and shift them perpetually. Each of these elite units is afforded broad autonomy of action. They may call up reinforcements as needed, or air assistance from their home base. The Turkish northern Iraqi observation unit, for example, is in the care of the south Turkish military command. Any urgent medical aid requirement will therefore be supplied by the Turkish air force. However, when aerial bombardment is called for to prevent the movement of weapons from one square to another, or air cover is required in the frequent cases of the special units coming under artillery or tank gun fire, the request for aerial assistance is routed through the US headquarters in Qatar or Jordan and US and UK warplanes scramble to raid Iraqi military targets. Most of the dozens of “Western” or “allied” air sorties against Iraqi ground targets that are reported every few days are connected, *DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s* military sources can reveal, with Iraq’s maneuvers for concealing its weapons of mass destruction. *DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s* sources say that this invisible arms inspection project has a dual purpose: it locks suspected weapons of mass destruction in position under close observation; it harvests the data inaccessible to the UN inspection teams and holds it ready for the Bush administration whenever it is called for. The White House is therefore able to call on General Tommy Franks, commander of the Iraqi sector, to produce the evidence needed to prove Iraq’s mountainous declaration false. All the general needs do is to order the elite unit guarding any one of the 16 squares to seize a weapons system, possibly with its Iraqi crew. Since no one has any notion of how Saddam Hussein will react to this denouement, all American and allied forces in the Middle East and the Gulf were put on a high state of preparedness as of Wednesday, December 4. General Franks’ arrival at the Qatari rear base of Al Udeid on Friday, December 6, was timed accordingly. The story going around the Gulf, according to *DEBKA/file/*’s sources, is that in the week since the UN inspection team started work, it has been well penetrated by Iraqi agents.The most disturbing aspect of this - and the reason for the sharp responses coming from the White House - is that the spies have managed to fit "electronic jackets" on the UN measuring instruments, which throw them off and make them emit false data. The technical assistants, some from Arab countries, are also thoroughly infiltrated by Iraqi intelligence. *Copyright 2002 DEBKA/file/. All Rights Reserved.* ***************************************************************** 3 US seeks one excuse for war in 12,000 pages of denial Guardian Unlimited Observer | Special reports | As Iraq insists it has no weapons of mass destruction, Washington is losing patience with anyone who wants to prevent another conflict Peter Beaumont and David Rose in London, Ed Vulliamy in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad Sunday December 8, 2002 The Observer [http://www.observer.co.uk] Iraq's Tuwaitha nuclear centre, 11 miles from south-eastern edges of Baghdad, spreads out in a vast extended 'E'. A few trees break up the long, low wings of concrete, set in the yellow dirt, that enclose clusters of buildings, rusting towers and haphazard piles of building materials. Heavily damaged by allied aircraft during the first Gulf war, Tuwaitha - once the epicentre of Iraq's nuclear infrastructure - is the most potent symbol of Iraq's ambitions to acquire devastating weapons of mass destruction. Tuwaitha once housed uranium enrichment programmes, reactors and 'hot cells' - the safety chambers that allowed Iraqi scientists to manipulate fissile material - material removed by UN inspectors before they left in 1998, who shattered and sealed the chambers, filling the handling gloves with concrete and epoxy resin. In early September, amid the US-led clamour for a war to depose Saddam Hussein and strip Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction, Tuwaitha was catapulted again into the headlines. The International Atomic Energy Authority had released satellite images suggesting new building work at the site. Although the IAEA drew no conclusions from the pictures, the White House did, putting forward spokesman Ari Fleischer who said the images could indicate Saddam 'may seek to develop nuclear weapons and may be making progress'. Within days, those images had become part of the received knowledge about Iraq: evidence that Saddam was rebuilding his nuclear weapons capability. Last week Tuwaitha was in the news again. This time, however, it was because UN inspectors had visited the site of the new construction at the plant. According to western intelligence sources, they found nothing untoward - certainly 'no smoking nuke'. In fact, in a week of inspections, the inspectors of Unmovic (charged to find chemical and biological weapons and their components) and the IAEA (which is looking for Saddam's nuclear programme) so far have not found very much at all. To the irritation of the US administration of George Bush, they have poked around some well-known sites, sniffed some sweets found in a cupboard in the wrecked Muthanna chemical weapons site, and provided some entertainment for the bored international press corps camped out in Baghdad, assiduously following their every move. But last week's inspections at Tuwaitha have been the preamble to what many Washington hawks hope will be the main event that will catch out Saddam without the need for lengthy and difficult searches for where Iraq has stashed its weapons of mass destruction. That main event is the complete disclosure of Iraq's programmes for weapons of mass destruction demanded by UN resolution 1441. Yesterday General Hasam Amin, the officer in charge of Iraq's National Monitoring Directorate, handed Iraq's massive self-declaration of its clean bill of health, including, say officials, the emphatic denial that Iraq possess any weapons of mass destruction. Displaying the documents to journalists a few hours before they were handed over, he said: 'We declared that Iraq is empty of weapons of mass destruction. I reiterate Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction. This declaration has some activities that are dual-use.' Last night two copies of that enormous document - written in Arabic - were on their way by courier to the IAEA in Vienna and Unmovic in New York, where it will first be translated and assessed by the weapons inspectors before being handed on to the 15 members of the UN Security Council. At upwards of 12,000 pages long, there are few who believe that it is likely to be anything other than a slippery affair. Over the years Iraq has made numerous 'final declarations' of its weapons of mass destruction, all of them containing significant omissions - not least the entire Iraqi biological weapons programme. The question now is what is actually in that document. Few in London and Washington are optimistic that Saddam will be more honest this time round. 'It is incredibly hard to foresee what he will do in the document itself,' said one British source. 'But there was a good chance that he would give a fraudulent headline declaration, while giving enough detail to cause problems on the Security Council when it evaluates the information. There may be enough new stuff declared to slow up the deliberations and give ammunition to those like Russia and France who oppose a war. That is how Saddam works.' Another suspicion is that Iraq will argue it has no weapons of mass destruction complete and assembled, and therefore 'no weapons of mass destruction', second-guessing what components the US and Britain believes it has while hiding away small numbers of chemical and biological weapons for domestic use if the regime is threatened. As intelligence agencies and government scientists waited for their translations of the document on both sides of the Atlantic, it became clear that the veracity of the Iraqi declaration - and the prospect of a second Gulf war - will be judged against the undisclosed intelligence held by the US and the UK, both of which continue to insist they have 'solid evidence' that Iraq still has weapons of mass destruction. It is an insistence that is exacerbating the already fraught relationship between the Bush administration and the UN's chief weapons inspector Hans Blix, a Swedish career diplomat for whom Washington hawks have little time. They have accused him of not having pursued the first 10 days of investigations with sufficient vigour. In private, Blix says, he has had only 'heard supporting words' from the Bush administration. In public, however, the past seven days have seen an increasingly tense series of exchanges with the chief inspector and the main cheerleaders among the Bush administration hawks who have heckled Blix and his team from the sidelines on an almost daily basis, insisting, not least, that he use his powers to remove Iraqi scientists and their families from the country for interview by US officials. By Friday that heckling had began to irritate Blix, who delivered a series of rebukes to the Washington hawks. 'We are not going to abduct anyone,' he said on Friday after meeting the Security Council. 'The UN is not a defection agency.' Blix's irritation has not been limited to the issue of defections. He has complained sharply too that if the US has evidence that Iraq retains weapons of mass destruction then it should share it with the UN's inspectors so that they can investigate. But if Blix is frustrated in his relations with the Bush administration, it is a frustration that mirrors a tension with Bush's government itself - between hawks in the Pentagon, who regard Blix's business as being to provide them with the excuse they need to quickly go to war, and the State Department, which has aligned itself with the inspection process and the UN. At the centre of that split is what the Iraqi declaration will allow Bush to do. Administration hawks in the Pentagon and White House greeted the prospect of Iraq's unseen declaration with confidence that it would lock America inexorably on a short path to war. Pentagon sources close to Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, insisted it was now 'likely' that Bush would declare Iraq in 'material breach' of last month's security Council Resolution, reveal intelligence of its alleged weapons of mass destruction programmes, and prepare for an attack within weeks. 'Historically, this administration seems to have a Rumsfeld face and a [doveish Secretary of State Colin] Powell face,' one source said. 'Bush has always done what Powell has recommended first, and when that has failed gone on to adopt the Rumsfeld approach. On that basis, history tells us he is going to follow Rumsfeld now. I think that is much more likely than he accepts the declaration and carries on playing cat-and-mouse with the Unmovic inspectors. 'As to whether Bush has to go back to the Security Council for UN approval before going to war, the key word in the resolution is "assess". The UN has to assess whether it agrees Iraq is in material breach of its obligations, but it does not have the power to decide this issue. That gives the President the freedom he needs.' In a further sign of a probable hardening of attitudes, analysts said there were strong domestic reasons to move towards war. 'If you look at the polling numbers, they're very clear,' one Republican Party aide said. 'The American people are quite happy to go along with the President for war at the moment, but are also getting sick of this thing dragging out. The longer he leaves it, the greater the political risk.' This view is in sharp variance with the both the State Department line and the understanding of Bush's closest ally on Iraq, the British government, which believes that it secured from the US in the negotiations for the wording of UN resolution 1441 the agreement that not only would the inspectors report back to the UN, but that it would be the Security Council, not the US, that would be able to declare Iraq in 'material breach' of the resolutuion, thus triggering a war. British officials also insist that omissions from the declaration in itself are not enough to trigger war - a view that appeared last week to be supported by Wolfowitz, one of the Pentagon's leading hawks, while visiting London and Nato. 'The resolution talks about a false declaration or omission plus non co-operation or compliance,' said one UK source. 'Plus is the important word. There is an awful lot of rhetoric on the US side, but you would expect that if you wanted Saddam to comply. But we feel comfortable in the agreement we made with the US. The document itself is not a trigger for war.' If there are conflicting noises coming from the US, then Rumsfeld, did little to clear up the confusion at the heart of the administration last week, commenting archly instead: 'It depends on who you talk to and when you talk to them.' They are comments that applied as much to differences among Bush's closest foreign policy advisers as between Britain, the UN and the US. Last Thursday as those advisers - Vice-President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice - sat down in the White House's Oval Office, that fault line was running through the room and the heart of the Bush administration itself. For far from reflecting the pessimism expressed by Bush at the start of the week that the inspections had not got off to an encouraging start, the State Department holds a rather different view. Talking to The Observer on Friday, officials said that staff remained behind Powell's judgment that the weapons inspectors were 'off to a good start'. Like British officials, Powell's loyal but increasingly isolated office insists that no military action can justifiably be taken until the inspection process has been exhausted, even if - as Powell himself concedes - the US is 'convinced [Iraq] has weapons of mass destruction'. In this Powell finds himself on his own in the Bush Cabinet, aware that the White House and Pentagon are preparing to make a case for war whatever the outcome of tomorrow's declaration. Indeed, at the Pentagon in particular, divisions over Powell's role run deep and bitter, with many among the professional military chafing under the civilian hawks, privately joking that they still regard Powell as their chief of staff - his role in the first Gulf war - even as they prepare for a second Gulf conflict. Civilian political appointees working under Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, however, talk about Powell with derision; one senior official described him as 'yesterday's man'. And it is Cheney who has taken up the most belligerent position, insisting to the President that any omission - no matter how minor - will constitute a material breach, that 'deception will not be tolerated'. For his part, Bush yesterday further muddied the waters by steering a line between the two camps in his weekly radio address, telling listeners that he would 'judge the declaration's honesty and completeness only after we have thoroughly examined it, and that will take some time'. Yesterday, as Iraq prepared to hand over its declaration, the inspectors were back at Tuwaitha for a second time in four days, hoping Washington would give them time to complete the job. Useful links UNSCOM [http://www.un.org/Depts/unscom/index.html] UN resolutions on Iraq [http://www.un.org/Depts/unscom/resolt2.htm] British Foreign Office: Relations with Iraq [http://www.fco.gov.uk/news/keythemehome.asp?23] US State Department Iraq Update [http://usinfo.state.gov/regional/nea/iraq/iraq.htm] Arab.net - Iraq resources [http://www.arab.net/iraq/iraq_contents.html] Campaign against Sanctions on Iraq [http://www.cam.ac.uk/societies/casi/] Centre for non-proliferation studies [http://cns.miis.edu/] Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002 ***************************************************************** 4 Commentary: Congressman Billybob sez* United Press International From the Washington Politics & Policy Desk Published 12/6/2002 5:21 PM HIGHLANDS, N.C., Dec. 6 (UPI) -- Enrons Are Everywhere This here's the 327th Report ta the Folks Back Home from the (More er Less) Honorable Billybob, cyberCongressman from Western Carolina. Ma sainted Mama offen sed, "Winners never cheat, and cheaters never win." From an early age I knew she was wrong. Sometimes, cheaters do win. I firs saw that onna playground ov the elementary school at the State Teachers College in Salisbury, Maryland, where I growed up. But I unnerstood what she meant. Thangs don allas work this way. But that's how thangs oughta be. N, that's how I oughta conduct maself. The mos important eggzamples ov cheatin today r rather sophisticated n possibly deadly, so I'll turn this over ta ma able assistant, J. Armor, Esq. Enrons Are Everywhere No, this is not about Enron, the corporation. It is about Enron, the state of mind. This combines weapons inspections in Iraq, a union-owned insurance company, and a contested state senate election in Maine. If you think those have nothing in common, hang onto your hats. At a very early age, every child develops a basic understanding of cheating. You're playing checkers with Gramps. He's whipping your pants off. But if you put some of your jumped checkers back on the board, you can win instead of lose. An indulgent grandfather will let you do that, once. Then he'll ask you to try again, play by the rules, and live with the result. We all learn simple lessons. Look both ways before crossing the street. Color within the lines. Play by the rules. And if you fall out of that tree and break both legs, don't come running to me. Did everyone just hear the voices of their mothers from decades ago? The problem is, the world teaches an opposite lesson: Play to win. Cheat when necessary. The central question of all our lives is, which lessons do we take to heart? The ones our mothers told us, or the ones the world whispers in our ears? Here are three important examples in the real world, beginning with Iraq. Iraq claims that it does not have weapons of mass destruction -- chemical, biological and nuclear. Yet Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Iranian troops in his war with them and against the Kurds inside Iraq. Also, he has threatened to use these weapons he doesn't have, against both the Israelis and the Americans if the United States attacks. Before Hussein booted out the U.N. weapons inspectors four years ago, they found ample evidence that Iraq had chemical weapons in hand, and was working on the other two forms of mass murder. Defectors from Iraq confirmed what was found on the ground. Hussein has been an absolute dictator in Iraq for 34 years. His pattern is to use force in all forms against his perceived enemies inside and outside the country. Just six weeks ago I spoke with several Americans of Iraqi descent. Their common factor was that members of their families had disappeared into Hussein's prisons, or were known to have been killed. One man had lost five of his brothers. Unless Hussein has changed his lifelong habit of control by force with no limits on what kind of force, of course he has developed more chemical weapons. And of course he is feverishly working on biological and nuclear weapons. And he will use those weapons whenever he chooses. A colleague of mine was formerly a weapons expert for the 82nd Airborne. He told me during the Gulf War that Hussein had chemical-loaded artillery shells. He also told me those weapons were useless. The bombing campaign against Iraq took 30 days. The Iraqi shells used two chemicals that had to be separated and refrigerated. Otherwise, within 30 days they deteriorated. The bombing cut off the electricity. So, Hussein had the weapons and the will to use them. But they would no longer work when the troops invaded. Inspections by soldiers -- not by folks in white cars with "UN" painted on them -- confirmed this, after the war. What will the current crop of U.N. inspectors find? Not much, and not soon. But "material breaches" will pile up. It will be the United States, not the U.N. (for which read: the French) who will decide when enough is enough. The attack on Iraq will therefore come in late December or early January. Hussein's form of cheating is the most critical, because lives, perhaps millions of lives, are on the line. This time it will be ended by force; no more vain hopes that his regime will fall because of the back-to-back slaughters of Iraqis in the Iran War and the Gulf War. The second example of cheating is homegrown. It is corporate cheating in the realm of the unions. Ullico is a union-owned insurance company, created to serve the needs of union members. Its intention is admirable: keep the profits from necessary insurance for union members in the family. The reality is something different. Ullico is a stock company, and both unions and their top officials own stock. Like all insurance companies, it quickly grew large cash reserves which are needed to pay the claims. Playing with all that cash became a temptation. Its principal accountant has already pleaded guilty to fraud charges. The federal government has already sued it for a Las Vegas real estate transaction gone bad. Now three of its directors, including AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, have resigned over the refusal of the president of Ullico to release an internal report about insider trading by members of the board other than the three who resigned. Press accounts say that the other directors are backing the withholding of the report, which claims those directors gained $14 million in corrupt profits, and that they should repay that money. The resignations are so far, so good. But not good enough. Shareholder suits should strip the insiders of their ill-gotten gains if necessary. The inside traders should be prosecuted, if possible. All the information should come out, and heads should roll. At present, the information is concealed and the heads are still in their positions of power. Insider trading is an old story. Ever since stocks have existed, some people with access to information have had the opportunity to benefit themselves and selected friends with advance buys of stocks about to go up, or advance sales of stocks about to go down the dumper. It is a form of cheating -- cutting corners to line your own pockets with ill-gotten gains. The opportunities will always be there. The question is whether those who seize the opportunities will be forced to disgorge their gains, and serve time in prison. So far, the Ullico cheaters have won, and have profited handsomely. But the last chapter in this story has not been written. The third form of cheating we'll look at is stealing elections. One of the last of the elections for state senates and houses to be decided is a senate race in Maine. According to published results, Democrat Chris Hall has won by nine votes. But exactly 44 votes had not been counted. And if they are counted, Republican Leslie Fossel has won by 5 votes. The problem with the 44 votes is not a lack of clarity, or legitimacy of the registered voters who cast them. Some of these paper ballots were filled out by pen, not by pencil as required. The 11 ballots favoring the Republican and filled out with black or blue pens were not counted. Other ballots favoring the Democrat, filled out with a red pen, were counted. Sounds like an open-and-shut case of cheating that can be readily resolved. Not so fast, litigation breath. The 35-member Maine Senate gets to decide the legitimacy of this election. And, as it so happens, this seat gives the Democrats a majority, 18-17, with the contested Democrat sworn in and voting on his own case. So, it looks like in this instance of in-your-face cheating, the cheaters will win. Possibly, but not necessarily, a lawsuit on civil rights grounds by several of the voters whose ballots have been read, noted, and then set aside, may reverse this result. What is the common denominator of these three stories? It is that people with power and money will sometimes cheat to retain their advantages. Appeals for integrity or common sense will fall on deaf ears. Only force -- military force in the first instance, the force of law in the others -- can resolve these issues. A fundamental problem in the United States today is that the sanctions against cheaters are insufficient. They are partial, slow, wrist-slaps, or non-existent. Cheaters may keep their ill-gotten money or offices for years -- perhaps indefinitely. Unless we the people demand better behavior and swifter, greater punishment for malfeasance, this will continue in government, in private corporations, in the media, in the legal profession, in education, etc. (With a colleague, John Young, I wrote a pamphlet that deals with this subject in detail, titled "to Restore Trust in America.") To paraphrase Forrest Gump, "Cheating is as cheating does." There will always be some who are willing to abuse positions of trust by cheating us. We can't make the world perfect. But we can increase the consequences so potential cheaters and their allies will think twice before future bad actions. If they won't think twice because their Mama told them so, maybe they'll think twice because we the people threaten to sue their socks off and send them to jail. -- (About the Author: Congressman Billybob is fictitious, but prolific, on the Internet -- the invention of John Armor, who writes books and practices law in the U.S. Supreme Court. Comments and criticisms are welcome at CongressmanBillybob@earthlink.net). Copyright © 2002 United Press International ***************************************************************** 5 Deep Throats need better protection [http://www.oregonlive.com » More From The Oregonian Robert Landauer 12/07/02 ROBERT LANDAUER R eporters need sources. Cops need snitches. Officials need testifiers. Investigators need informers. A fixed rule operates in each case: Protect these inside-dopesters, or the flow of information will dry up. President Bush had long opposed having an independent commission to examine the security and intelligence flaws that allowed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to succeed. Finally the president named former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to lead a panel to "follow all the facts, wherever they lead." Former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell was chosen to be vice chairman. Bouquets and brickbats followed the announcements. Kissinger and Mitchell were said to be knowledgeable skeptics who would know which drawers in Washington to open. Critics said both men are so corporately and politically connected that they could be neither neutral nor independent, that they are as likely to bury unwelcome news as to divulge it. Actually, the central challenge of this inquiry comes from another direction. Success likely hinges on whether agency insiders will come forward with what they know. That's a dicey choice to make, because whistleblowers, including employees of the federal government and its contractors, rarely are treated kindly by their organizations. In fact, honesty in exposing corruption, incompetence and mismanagement is more likely to devastate one's career than advance it. "Exposed whistleblowers are almost always reprimanded, fired, and/or harassed, even if they have not 'gone public' and even if their allegations are proven to be true," says the Project on Government Oversight (POGO). Retaliation against whistleblowers is so common and protections for them so thin that the Government Accountability Project has produced a guide, "Blowing the Whistle Wisely: 12 Survival Strategies." For example, one day before Kissinger and Mitchell were named sleuths-in-chief, the Los Alamos National Laboratories fired two men who had successfully been exposing credit-card and purchase-order fraud as well as security problems. "All signs indicate that leaders at Los Alamos were motivated in the firing by a desire to silence these and other individuals who are uncovering widespread corruption," stated Danielle Brian, executive director of POGO (www.pogo.org). This is not an isolated incident. Truth-telling messengers routinely suffer retaliation -- harassment, suspensions, demotions, transfers, loss of security clearance, firings. Two guards were fired for raising concerns, validated by an inspector general's report, about security deficiencies plaguing nuclear facilities at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. In 2000 and 2001, Don Sweeney exposed deliberate efforts by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to manipulate cost/benefit studies in order to exaggerate the need for huge new agency projects. Last month, the agency gagged Sweeney; it kept him from speaking to the public, even on his personal time. Revenge is so routine yet disclosure often so vital to public health and safety and governmental efficiency that three nonprofits (POGO, the Government Accountability Project and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility) released a how-to manual, "The Art of Anonymous Activism: Serving the Public While Surviving Public Service" (www.whistleblower.org). With particular insight, Rep. Connie Morella, R-Md., makes the point that since the Sept. 11 tragedies, "blowing the whistle is no longer only about protesting abuses of power, personal corruption or violation of regulations. Whistleblowing has a new dimension -- preserving the freedom to warn." Federal employees and contractors shouldn't have to risk professional suicide when they patriotically expose wrongdoing. Congress needs to plug the many loopholes in the Whistleblower Protection Act. Reach Robert Landauer, editorial columnist at 503-221-8157. © 2002 OregonLive.com. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 6 Belgian parliament votes to close down country's nuclear power plants by 2025 More about Nuclear Power and Waste [http://dailynews.yahoo.com/r/fcweb/World%2FNuclear_Power_and_Was te/*http://story.news.yahoo.com/fc?cid=34&tmpl=fc&in=World&cat=Nu clear_Power_and_Waste] Related News Stories • Belgian parliament votes to close down country's nuclear power plants by 2025 [http://dailynews.yahoo.com/r/fcweb/World%2FNuclear_Power_and_Was te/Related%20News%20Stories/Belgian%20parliament%20votes%20to%20c lose%20down%20country%26%2339%3Bs%20nuclear%20power%20plants%20by %202025/*http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/200212 06/ap_wo_en_po/eu_gen_belgium_nuclear_power_1] Associated Press (Dec 6, 2002) • Belgium set to ditch nuclear energy [http://dailynews.yahoo.com/r/fcweb/World%2FNuclear_Power_and_Was te/Related%20News%20Stories/Belgium%20set%20to%20ditch%20nuclear% 20energy/*http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2550487.stm] BBC (Dec 6, 2002) • Archaeologists advise on nuclear waste disposal [http://dailynews.yahoo.com/r/fcweb/World%2FNuclear_Power_and_Was te/Related%20News%20Stories/Archaeologists%20advise%20on%20nuclea r%20waste%20disposal/*http://www.nature.com/nsu/021202/021202-6.h tml] Nature Magazine (Dec 4, 2002) Opinion &Editorials • Building a new nuclear plant is no longer a pipe dream [http://dailynews.yahoo.com/r/fcweb/World%2FNuclear_Power_and_Was te/Opinion%20%26%20Editorials/Building%20a%20new%20nuclear%20plan t%20is%20no%20longer%20a%20pipe%20dream/*http://www.orlandosentin el.com/news/opinion/orl-edpweaver301113002nov30,0,117351.story?co ll=orl%2Dopinion%2Dheadlines] Orlando Sentinel (Nov 30, 2002) • Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [http://dailynews.yahoo.com/r/fcweb/World%2FNuclear_Power_and_Was te/Opinion%20%26%20Editorials/Bulletin%20of%20the%20Atomic%20Scie ntists/*http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/2002/so02/so02auer.html ] Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Oct 24, 2002) • In an age of global terror, the nuclear industry is unsafe - at any price [http://dailynews.yahoo.com/r/fcweb/World%2FNuclear_Power_and_Was te/Opinion%20%26%20Editorials/In%20an%20age%20of%20global%20terro r%2C%20the%20nuclear%20industry%20is%20unsafe%20-%20at%20any%20pr ice/*http://argument.independent.co.uk/leading_articles/story.jsp ?story=333968] The Independent (UK) (Sep 17, 2002) Feature Articles • Radiation-proof fabric developed [http://dailynews.yahoo.com/r/fcweb/World%2FNuclear_Power_and_Was te/Feature%20Articles/Radiation-proof%20fabric%20developed/*http: //news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2478465.stm] BBC (Nov 15, 2002) • Where Now for Atomic Waste? [http://dailynews.yahoo.com/r/fcweb/World%2FNuclear_Power_and_Was te/Feature%20Articles/Where%20Now%20for%20Atomic%20Waste%3F/*http ://dw-world.de/english/0,3367,1430_A_673725_1_A,00.html] Deutsche Welle (Nov 12, 2002) Related Web Sites • State of Nevada: Nuclear Waste Project Office [http://dailynews.yahoo.com/r/fcweb/World%2FNuclear_Power_and_Was te/Related%20Web%20Sites/State%20of%20Nevada%3A%20Nuclear%20Waste %20Project%20Office/*http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/index.htm] • Yucca Mountain Project [http://dailynews.yahoo.com/r/fcweb/World%2FNuclear_Power_and_Was te/Related%20Web%20Sites/Yucca%20Mountain%20Project/*http://www.y mp.gov/] • Nuclear Waste: Technical, Schedule, and Cost Uncertainties of the Yucca Mountain Repository Project [http://dailynews.yahoo.com/r/fcweb/World%2FNuclear_Power_and_Was te/Related%20Web%20Sites/Nuclear%20Waste%3A%20Technical%2C%20Sche dule%2C%20and%20Cost%20Uncertainties%20of%20the%20Yucca%20Mountai n%20Repository%20Project/*http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/gao/ yuccamtndec2001rpt.pdf] Fri Dec 6, 4:42 AM ET BRUSSELS, Belgium - Following months of debate on nuclear safety, Belgium's lower house of parliament voted early Friday to close down the country's nuclear power plants by 2025. Plans to close Belgium's seven reactors, which provide the country with almost two-thirds of its electricity, were a campaign promise by the country's two green parties, which are part of Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt's governing six-party coalition. But industry fears the move could cause an energy shortfall for decades, as no clear alternative has yet been found to replace the four reactors at the Doel power plant near Antwerp and the three reactors in the eastern town of Tihange. The Electrabel power company, which owns the reactors, has urged the government to reconsider, arguing the phase-out is not economically feasible. It also argues, the closure will hinder Belgium's commitments to reduce its greenhouse gas output under the Kyoto Protocol (news [http://rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/ap/ap_wo_en_po/inlinks/*http://rd. yahoo.com/DailyNews/manual/*http://search.news.yahoo.com/search/n ews?p=%22Kyoto%20Protocol%22&c=&n=20&yn=c&c=news&cs=nw] - web sites [http://rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/ap/ap_wo_en_po/inlinks/*http://rd. yahoo.com/DailyNews/manual/*http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?cs =nw&p=Kyoto%20Protocol] ). Under the bill, which passed 80 votes to 49 against, with 5 abstentions, any nuclear reactors older than 40 years will have to be closed, meaning all of Belgium's seven reactors will have to cease operations between 2015 and 2025. The bill still faces a vote in the Belgian senate, expected in the coming months. Copyright © 2002 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The ***************************************************************** 7 Europaworld 6/12/2002 International Atomic Energy Agency Meeting 6/12/2002 International Atomic Energy Agency Meeting The board of governors of the IAEA met in Vienna on November 28 and 29. The question of North Korea's failure to comply with its safeguard guarantees with the IAEA and the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons was discussed. A resolution was adopted on this. France is one of the countries responsible for introducing the text which was adopted by consensus. We are satisfied that a very strong message was sent to North Korea by a united international community. We recall that the conclusions of the GAC on November 18 also send a strong united message. France proposed to its partners that an extraordinary meeting of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), which is due to meet in Vienna on December 13, study ways of preventing North Korea's acquisition of nuclear technologies and equipment which could be necessary to it for a military program. ©EuropaWorld 2002 - Copyright Policy / About us / Endorsements / Contact us [info@europaworld.org] ***************************************************************** 8 N Korea: N-nexus exposes murky details The Tribune, Chandigarh, India - Main News Saturday, December 7, 2002, Chandigarh, India TRIBUNE SPECIAL N. Korean diplomat’s wife was shot in Pak Rajeev Sharma Tribune News Service New Delhi, December 6 The wife of North Korea’s Economic Counsellor at the country’s Embassy in Pakistan was murdered in June 1998, an incident which marked the turning point in the international inquest into North Korea-Pakistan nexus for the missile-for-nuclear-technology barter. The woman was murdered because she was providing details of missile deals between North Korea and Pakistan to the western intelligence agencies and had been done to death by North Korean agents working in the A.Q. Khan Research Laboratories (AQKRL) in Pakistan, according to classified information available with the Atal Behari Vajpayee government here. Significantly, the murdered woman’s husband, Kang Thae-Yun, was the local representative of Changgwang Sinyong, the key supplier of missile components to Pakistan and Iran. Though the USA has been trying to play down the involvement of Pakistan on the issue, it was Washington which had imposed sanctions on the AQKRL and Changgwang Sinyong, their sub-units and successors for two years, immediately after the test firing of the Ghauri missile in 1998. The Indian intelligence agencies have also had inputs on the secret nexus between North Korean diplomats and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The North Korean diplomats and Pakistani agents coordinated the import of illegal shipment of arms. The recent admission by North Korea that it possesses a uranium enrichment programme only established the suspicion of its neighbours and the USA that the agreed framework signed between the Americans and the North Koreans in 1994. Sources said equally anticipated was the fact that the Communist country had procured the centrifuge technology for enriching uranium from Pakistan as a quid pro quo to the North Korean liquid propellant-based ballistic missile technology. While both the countries have denied entering into any such deal, the evidences are far too many to prove that an ominous relationship existed between Pyongyang and Islamabad and that this relationship probably still continues, sources added. The North Korea-Pakistan nuclear nexus came up for discussion during the talks the Indian leadership had with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who concluded his three-day state visit to India on December 5 and also the USA’s Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley who is currently here. Meanwhile, Mr Hadley called on External Affairs Minister Yashwant Sinha and confabulated with him for over an hour. He leaves for Washington tomorrow. [http://www.tribuneindia.com] | Punjab | Haryana | Jammu & ***************************************************************** 9 News Update on Iraq Inspections [www.iaea.org] Media Advisory 2002/38 (6 December 2002) IAEA, UN Inspectors Visit More Sites Previous media advisories: 3 December, 2 December, 20 November, 18 November, 15 November. For full coverage, see the pages on IAEA and Iraq [http://www.iaea.org/worldatom/Press/Focus/IaeaIraq/index.html] . On 4 December, IAEA and UN teams inspected more sites in Iraq. Based on reports from the UN, inspectors visited Al-Mutanna, north of Baghdad, where Iraq once had a chemical weapons (CW) warfare programme. During past visits to the site before the 1998 suspension of the UN arms probe, thousands of CW shells and agents had been destroyed by the UN. Dimitri Perricos, the leader of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspections Commission (UNMOVIC) inspection team, told reporters today that experts wanted to know if some shells containing mustard gas, which were left out at the site, were still stored there. Mr. Perricos said that in fact the team had found the shells stored at the site. IAEA chief inspector Jacques Baute said his team had conducted an inspection today at the Tuwaitha site run by the Iraqi Atomic Energy Agency. The experts inspected several major areas at the site for about five hours in order to review changes that had taken place since December 1998. Those changes included construction or rehabilitation of some buildings, movement of equipment, and changes in areas of responsibility for site personnel. Most of the observed changes had been recorded in the backlog of Iraq's own semi-annual declarations that Baghdad submitted to the IAEA on 1 October. Mr. Baute added that the inspection team had been able to carry out all the activities it decided to conduct, with Iraqi cooperation. Asked about a statement by the Iraqi Foreign Minister voicing concern about the attitude of UN weapons inspectors, Mr. Perricos said that Iraq had accepted Security Council resolution 1441, and therefore all sites in the country could be subject to inspection. This Presidential Palace was a presidential guesthouse and the team was looking for documents and other records used just for weapons of mass destruction. In response to a question on the upcoming Iraqi declaration, Mr. Baute said that all Iraqi declarations were important. It would be one component of our knowledge. Other knowledge came from documents and additional information provided by others. Responding to another question on the practicality of increasing the number of weapons inspectors, Mr. Perricos said that "we will be using a multiplicity of teams, utilizing multiple disciplines" to conduct weapons inspection in the coming weeks. Asked about achievements so far, Mr. Perricos said that his team, which so far had conducted inspections for only one week, had implemented the original inspection plan. Mr. Baute added that his team now had better knowledge in the areas of their concern and would accelerate their activities with more inspectors. In response to a question on reports that the United States is planning to compare the Iraqi declaration against its own intelligence, Mr. Perricos said that national intelligence had more information, and that his team had not used that type of information yet. Meanwhile in New York, UNMOVIC's quarterly report to the Security Council was issued today. The report notes that the first team of experts already in Iraq will be followed by additional groups of inspectors drawn from the Commission's roster of trained professionals. UNMOVIC chief Hans Blix is scheduled to present the report to the Council on Friday (6 December) during consultations. ***************************************************************** 10 Canada: Sobering lessons of deregulation [A part of canada.com] Wednesday » December 4 » 2002 Peter Foster National Post Electricity markets worldwide continue to provide a forum for dim-bulb economics and high-wattage political grandstanding. Look at the Californian deregulation disaster, declares Big Brother's PR staff. Look at Ontario's about-face on market opening and privatization. Look at Alberta's policy contortions. Look at the floundering of U.K. electricity giant British Energy. Look at Enron. The picture is clear. Markets don't work. Best to put government back in control. Two dozen U.S. states that were planning to deregulate have slowed down or abandoned their plans. Last week, the B.C. government declared that it wouldn't be privatizing BC Hydro. According to B.C. Energy Minister Richard Neufeld, the experiences of California, Ontario and Alberta represent "failures." "All had to do with deregulation and market rates and non-public ownership of hydro assets. We are doing exactly the opposite," he concluded proudly. The Soviets were right after all. Indeed, those who claim that deregulation screw-ups prove that markets are fatally flawed are like those who declare that the former Soviet Union is in bad shape because of its flirtation with capitalism. But here, as there, the problem isn't markets, it's the lack of them. Blaming markets is like blaming an alcoholic's withdrawal symptoms on sobriety. Difficulties relate to the dead hand of continuing controls or to new obstructions installed by government to "ease," that is prevent, transition. Vernon Smith, the winner of this year's economics Nobel, notes that electricity policy in the past decade has been "a case study on the perils of limiting competition and distorting market incentives." Well-functioning markets do not appear instantaneously once controls are removed, much less when controls are selectively or even extensively maintained. It takes time for new suppliers to set up, for a range of spot and future markets to evolve, and for technology to be introduced to make consumers more price sensitive and thus make the whole system more efficient. These developments all depend on the stimulus provided by price signals, which inevitably sometimes hurt. Otherwise how would they provide any stimulus to action? If governments want to protect the "most vulnerable" from lurching prices, the answer is to subsidize poor people directly, not cap prices as a whole. The greatest red herring is that markets are synonymous with the rule of greed and malfeasance. The indictment this week of El Paso executive Todd Geiger for feeding bogus information to a U.S. trade journal has provided the opportunity for much sonorous windbaggery about "gaming" the system. "This case cuts to the very heart of American business," intoned Michael Shelby, U.S. attorney for the southern district of Texas. "You can't have free markets when there is deception in the marketplace." But you can. Indeed, if perfect honesty by all participants was the price for allowing a market system, then market systems wouldn't exist. Markets are marvellous at rooting out deception and punishing it. Meanwhile, as any trader knows, the greatest potential for gaming lies amid the thickets of government-installed regulation and rigidity. This week's Ontario budget assumes the sale of 49% of Hydro One. "The value of the asset has not been affected by recent events, contrary to popular belief," declared Premier Ernie Eves. But just three weeks ago Hydro One announced a significant write-down in values due to the province's retail rate freeze of 4.3 cents a kilowatt hour. The opposition has, naturally, accused the Premier of mounting a prospective "fire sale." But if he has, he was the guy who set the fire. Meanwhile instead of loading the cost of subsidies onto producers, as in California, Ontario will add them to the fetid mound of the Ontario Electricity Financial Corp., home of Ontario Hydro's swelling "stranded debt." As for the uncertainty surrounding the survival of U.K. nuclear giant British Power -- which has led to the currently mothballed but much-needed Bruce facility being put on the block -- this is portrayed as another example of free enterprise dropping the ball. Far from it. The opening of the U.K. electricity market led to a surge of new productive capacity and a drop in wholesale prices of some 30% in the U.K. in recent years. This has been a boon to consumers but has inevitably squeezed producers. But British Power has also been hit by perverse government policies, which have greatly accelerated the costs of decommissioning nuclear stations. The company has also been lumbered with the U.K.'s greenhouse gas levy, even though nuclear power doesn't produce any greenhouse gases. And then there is Enron. Much as it may surprise critics of the system, book-cooking is not a fundamental characteristic of capitalism. It is primarily an activity encouraged by overelaborate regulation and the false sense of security that it provides to the public. In electricity, as in any other commodity, the golden rule remains as much market and as little government as possible. Unfortunately, the pendulum appears to be swinging the other way. © Copyright 2002 National Post ***************************************************************** 11 Allies Give N.Korea More Time to Decide on Uranium* / Fri December 6, 2002 06:41 PM ET / By Jonathan Wright WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The multinational organization in charge of energy projects in North Korea has postponed a high-level meeting for several weeks, delaying a joint decision on how to counter North Korea's nuclear weapons program, diplomatic sources said on Friday. The executive board of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, known as KEDO, had planned to meet in New York next Wednesday to consult on next steps toward North Korea, which admitted in October it was working on a highly enriched uranium project assumed to be for nuclear weapons. KEDO, grouping the United States, the European Union, Japan and South Korea, was set up under a 1994 agreement which promised North Korea fuel oil and nuclear power stations in return for a freeze on a plutonium-based nuclear arms program. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said: "Due to end-of-the-year scheduling conflicts, board members decided to postpone their meeting until early next year. They'll continue to stay in touch with each other and consult with each other on the next steps." The last executive board meeting in November suspended future deliveries of fuel oil to North Korea. Diplomatic sources said the meeting next week would have discussed the future of two light-water reactors now under construction in North Korea for the power project, at a time when the U.S. and Japanese governments are less and less willing to finance the projects. The postponement of the meeting gives the secretive North Korean government a chance to meet international demands that it abandon the uranium project, which violates the 1994 Agreed Framework and the Nonproliferation Treaty, one source said. WASHINGTON INDIFFERENT But a Bush administration official said Washington saw no indication that North Korea would take such a step. The United States was indifferent to the timing of the meeting because the governments, not KEDO, would decide the future of the light-water reactors, the official added. "They don't want to meet because if there is a discussion of the light-water reactor construction project all indications are they would call the project off. It's increasingly clear that Congress is not going to appropriate any money and highly unlikely that the Japanese Diet will either," he said. KEDO had left open the possibility of resuming the fuel oil shipments in December, depending on North Korea's response, but North Korea has done nothing to justify that, he added. The official's comments suggested some irritation in Washington with the constraints imposed by working within KEDO, which operates by consensus. The diplomatic source, on the other hand, noted that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is expected to make a visit this month to China, which has backed the international campaign to persuade the North Koreans to abandon the uranium project. "The delay gives some time for the DPRK (North Korea) to make an announcement on dismantling the HEU (highly enriched uranium) project. The visit to China could be a good opportunity for something along those lines," the source said. "The idea that it gives North Korea more time is not an interpretation that the United States would make, because there are no signs they will do it," the U.S. official retorted. The postponement also allows more time for consultations between KEDO members, who have shown signs of disagreeing on how tough a stand they should take against the North Koreans. Reuters The Company Products & ***************************************************************** 12 NPPD exec pay tied to actions Columbus Online Community COLUMBUS (AP) - The new chief executive of the Nebraska Public Power District has been promised a $75,000 bonus if he turns around problems at the district's nuclear power plant near Brownville. Bill Ferhman, who has been with the power district for 21 years, also will get a salary of $258,000 when he steps into the leadership job Jan. 1 to replace Bill Mayben, who is retiring. At 42, Ferhman will be the youngest CEO in the utility's history. Ferhman also will get a $20,000 signing bonus, minimum pay raises of 7 percent in 2004 and 2005 and a severance plan that would pay him several years' salary if he leaves. Mayben is paid $264,000 a year and has a severance package that will pay him 140 percent of his annual pay upon leaving. Ferhman will be paid at least $516,000 - two years' salary - if he leaves within the first three years. If he leaves after working six or more years, he would get three years' salary - more than $880,000. Ferhman cannot collect severance if he is fired or leaves the power district to take another job in the industry, said Marcia Cady, a spokeswoman for NPPD. Ferhman's compensation package reflects an attempt by the utility to catch up to pay offered in the private sector, Cady said. While even the largest public power districts rarely pay executives more than $300,000, rural cooperatives often exceed $400,000 and private utility executive pay often nears $1 million. Ferhman will get a reward of $75,000 if he can turn around major problems at the utility's Cooper Nuclear Station. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has given Cooper Nuclear the lowest rating possible without being shut down. NPPD - Nebraska's largest power provider - is working with the federal agency to remedy the problems. Ferhman will get the bonus if he can make major improvements at the plant, but Cady said any such improvement would take years to achieve. "This is no small task," Cady said. A new chief nuclear officer the utility is planning to hire also would get a bonus for major improvements to the plant, Cady said. --- On the Net: Nebraska Public Power District: http://www.nppd.com Copyright © 2002 Columbus Telegram ***************************************************************** 13 India: Nuclear Power Corporation to offer public issue Monday, December 9, 2002|Updated at hrs IST Advanced search PTI[ SATURDAY, DECEMBER 07, 2002 09:23:29 PM ] TIRUCHIRAPALLI: The Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited has planned to come out with a public issue next month to mobilise more funds, its Chairman and Managing Director Dr V K Chathurvedi said. The modalities for the public issue were being worked out and an announcement on the exact date and other details would be made shortly, he told reporters here. Bonds issued by the comany in 1993-94 would be disposed of and it would go in for new form of bonds at lower interest rates, Chathurvedi, here to attend a function at BHEL, said. Stating that NPCIL had an installed nuclear power capacity of 2,700 mw besides 400mw plants under construction, he said the company had drawn up plans to invest more than Rs 1,00,000 crore over a period of 15 years on power projects. India stood third among the largest generators of nuclear power in the world after US and China, he said adding NPCIL had set a target of 14,000 mw in the next 15 years. He said with the amendment to the Atomic Energy Act 1962, in Parliament, NPCIL would go ahead with joint ventures with private parties either internally or from foreign partners and hoped to mobilise the requisite funds for the new plants. The average power factor of 14 power plants run by the company would be enhanced to 90 per cent before the end of this year as against last year's 80 per cent. World Association of Nuclear Operators (WANO) would hold its next conference in New Delhi to discuss and review global practices followed in nuclear projects, Chathurvedi, also the Chairman of the Board of Council of the association, said. It will also be an exit meeting of Peer Committees inspecting the nuclear power plants in the country. Copyright � 2002 Times Internet Limited. All rights reserved ***************************************************************** 14 NRC Approves Power Uprate for Crystal River 3 NRC: News Release - 2002-140 - U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION Office of Public Affairs Telephone: 301/415-8200 Washington, DC 20555-0001 E-mail: opa@nrc.gov [opa@nrc.gov] www.nrc.gov No. 02-140 December 6, 2002 The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved a request by Florida Power Corporation to increase the generating capacity of the Crystal River 3 nuclear power plant by 0.9 percent. The power uprate at the plant, located in Crystal River, Florida, will increase the generating capacity of Unit 3 from 895 megawatts electric to 903 megawatts. The licensee intends to implement the power uprate immediately. NRC published a notice about the power uprate application in the Federal Register providing the public an opportunity to comment or request a hearing. No comments or hearing requests were received by the NRC. The NRC's safety evaluation of the requested power uprate for the plant focused on several areas, including nuclear steam supply systems, instrumentation and control systems, electrical systems, accident evaluations, radiological consequences, operations, and other technical specification changes. Friday, December 06, 2002 ***************************************************************** 15 NRC writes reasons it let Davis-Besse run The Plain Dealer 12/07/02 John Funk and John Mangels Plain Dealer Reporters A year after the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's controversial decision to let the Davis-Besse nuclear plant continue to run despite concern the reactor lid was leaking, the agency has formally explained its reasoning. The rationale is outlined in a 10-page document released this week. NRC officials have explained their thinking several times in public meetings, saying that based on the information they had last November, they believed that the risk of postponing an inspection shutdown from Dec. 31, 2001, until Feb. 16, 2002, was acceptably small. But nuclear safety activists, a member of Congress and members of their own agency have criticized the regulators for failing to put the explanation in writing. The activists want the NRC narrative - which they consider a retroactive attempt to justify a bad decision - to be part of the official record of the Davis-Besse affair, the nation's closest brush with a major nuclear accident since Three Mile Island in 1979. When the delayed inspection at Davis-Besse finally took place - with NRC sanction - workers found stress cracks in five of the metal nozzles on the lid that allow the reactor's control rods to move in and out of the core. The cracks on three nozzles were deep enough to enable the reactor's corrosive coolant to seep onto the lid. While replacing one of the nozzles in March, workers were shocked to find the corrosive coolant had, during several years, bored a pineapple-size hole through the thick steel lid, posing danger of a catastrophe. In hindsight, the NRC decision to allow the inspection postponement seems rash to some agency critics. But taken in the context of what NRC staffers did and didn't know last fall - they suspected but couldn't prove that nozzles were leaking and had no inkling of the rust hole - there was not much risk that any of the nozzles would give way during the several-week inspection postponement, the report says. "Our knowledge of the crack growth rate and the information that [Davis-Besse officials] provided about the condition of the head [lid] all led us to believe that [the risk from] allowing the plant to operate to Feb. 16 was acceptably low," said Brian Sheron, the agency's associate director for licensing. "There's a lot of information coming to light that we didn't have available to us" last fall. The NRC's criminal unit is investigating whether Davis-Besse's owner, FirstEnergy Corp., intentionally withheld evidence that the reactor's lid was corroding. Although the NRC's report contends that mathematical calculations of an accident risk at Davis-Besse were small during the short inspection postponement, a nationally known nuclear safety engineer says the agency didn't follow its own guidelines for making decisions using such risk numbers. Only one of the five guidelines were met, said the Union of Concerned Scientists' David Lochbaum. "I understand they're not the Ten Commandments, but they are factors that are supposed to shape a regulatory decision. Shouldn't that give one pause?" Sheron said that, "in principle, we felt most if not all [of the guidelines] were met in the short term." And FirstEnergy agreed to extra actions to lessen the risk of compounding a nozzle-failure accident, such as extra training for reactor operators and designating a worker to oversee that the reactor coolant kept flowing in an emergency. Some NRC staffers questioned the value of those measures, but Sheron said the staff ultimately agreed that the danger from Davis-Besse operating an additional eight weeks was minimal. Reach these Plain Dealer reporters: jfunk@plaind.com, 216-999-4138 jmangels@plaind.com, 216-999-4842 © 2002 The Plain Dealer. Used with permission. ***************************************************************** 16 UK: Opinion Torness in hot water over its dirty washing [http://www.scotsman.com/] Sat 7 Dec 2002 Jennifer Veitch FIRST they had to shut down not one but two rickety reactors. Then just when that was all sorted out, this week it emerged that Torness nuclear power station had illegally dumped radioactive waste into the sea off the Lothian coast. So what was the beleaguered British Energy’s excuse for this breach of safety? They had only gone and mistakenly discharged the wrong tank of water - and anyway, it was only laundry, sink and shower water. Ah yes, but it’s not many people whose wash-day blues include how best to get radioactive particles out of their whites, is it? And it was hardly reassuring to those fond of a dip in the sea off Dunbar that they hadn’t even bothered to tell the public that they had boobed. One suspects that once the case comes back to Haddington Sheriff Court in January they’ll get the proverbial book thrown at them, and quite right too. Not that the courts aren’t busy enough without having to deal with all the criminals clogging up the system ... which is precisely why it was a little odd that no one seemed to have suggested to the Scottish Executive that Saturday courts could be used to stop police cells becoming overcrowded at the weekends. Readers might recall that last week’s News revealed that police are regularly forced to let out some of the thugs they’ve arrested on Friday and Saturday nights because there’s not enough room for them. The SNP’s Kenny MacAskill suggested Saturday courts could be the answer - but this week when asked why we don’t jolly well have them, the Executive’s response was: "Er . . . coz nobody asked us." So much for our dynamic devolved government then. Speaking of which, there were fears this week that our own local government might be losing their collective bottle over road tolls. The city council’s leadership disclosed that their much-vaunted referendum on congestion charging won’t take place next May... in fact, it might not happen until 2004! Talk about kicking the issue into the long grass. The official line was that it would allow Edinburgh to learn from the London experience. But it was no surprise that the AA and opposition councillors accused them of "running scared" over public opposition to the road charging plan. But trying to change anything in the city is always fraught with controversy. Take the plans to redevelop the old Edinburgh Royal Infirmary for example. The architects of the Quartermile project, as they’ve christened it, want to revamp the hossie into flats, offices and shops. So far so good, until the World Heritage Trust got its knickers in a twist over the height of the office blocks they want to build. "We feel this Manhattan-style skyline is completely inappropriate for this area," they squealed, about the six-storey structures. Yes, that’s right, six storeys - they’re hardly going to dwarf the Empire State Building. And ask anyone’s who’s been in New York for a spot of Christmas shopping - Eric Milligan, for example - and no doubt they’ll tell you Central Park’s shimmering ponds and golden leaves are a perfect contrast to the buildings scraping the sky all round it. Talk of Christmas reminds me that I thought all mine had come at once this week after I spotted a particular story in the Evening News - "Cameo role for Denzel in city premiere". Forget Santa, I thought, Denzel Washington’s coming to town! I was on the point of phoning the Cameo cinema to block book the entire auditorium for the night my favourite actor arrived in Embra when I realised ... it’s only the film that’s coming. So I’ll have to console myself with watching Denz in his new Oscar-tipped flick, Antwone Fisher, a whole two months before anyone else in the UK. My Christmas letter must have reached Santa in Lapland after all. [ border=] ***************************************************************** 17 Chechens Planning Strike Against Russian Nuclear Power Stations Pravda.RU Ivanov: ¹ Dec, 06 2002 Ivanov: The self-styled “leader” of Chechnya, Ahmed Zakaiev, claimed in London that Chechen terrorists are planning a new wave of attacks against Russian civilian targets, including nuclear power stations. These declarations were confirmed today by Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov. Zakaiev was arrested at Heathrow Airport, London, last Thursday, after being released from Copenhagen, but was freed after paying bail, a move which incensed the Russians, who want him extradited to the Russian Federation to stand trial for terrorist activities. Mr. Ivanov asked the British delegation in the OSCE meeting taking place in Oporto, Portugal, “What would you do if Osama Bin Laden, wanted internationally like Zakaiev, announced in London that he planned new attacks against civilian targets in the United States? Would you let him go after making this type of statement?” In the international fight against terrorism, it seems that every effort is expected of the Russian Federation while nothing is given in return. Timofei BYELO PRAVDA.Ru Copyright ©1999 by "Pravda.RU [http://www.pravda.ru/] ". When ***************************************************************** 18 UK: Torness in hot water over its dirty washing Scotsman.com Sat 7 Dec 2002 /Jennifer Veitch/ FIRST they had to shut down not one but two rickety reactors. Then just when that was all sorted out, this week it emerged that Torness nuclear power station had illegally dumped radioactive waste into the sea off the Lothian coast. So what was the beleaguered British Energy?s excuse for this breach of safety? They had only gone and mistakenly discharged the wrong tank of water - and anyway, it was only laundry, sink and shower water. Ah yes, but it?s not many people whose wash-day blues include how best to get radioactive particles out of their whites, is it? And it was hardly reassuring to those fond of a dip in the sea off Dunbar that they hadn?t even bothered to tell the public that they had boobed. One suspects that once the case comes back to Haddington Sheriff Court in January they?ll get the proverbial book thrown at them, and quite right too. Not that the courts aren?t busy enough without having to deal with all the criminals clogging up the system ... which is precisely why it was a little odd that no one seemed to have suggested to the Scottish Executive that Saturday courts could be used to stop police cells becoming overcrowded at the weekends. Readers might recall that last week?s News revealed that police are regularly forced to let out some of the thugs they?ve arrested on Friday and Saturday nights because there?s not enough room for them. The SNP?s Kenny MacAskill suggested Saturday courts could be the answer - but this week when asked why we don?t jolly well have them, the Executive?s response was: "Er . . . coz nobody asked us." So much for our dynamic devolved government then. Speaking of which, there were fears this week that our own local government might be losing their collective bottle over road tolls. The city council?s leadership disclosed that their much-vaunted referendum on congestion charging won?t take place next May... in fact, it might not happen until 2004! Talk about kicking the issue into the long grass. The official line was that it would allow Edinburgh to learn from the London experience. But it was no surprise that the AA and opposition councillors accused them of "running scared" over public opposition to the road charging plan. But trying to change anything in the city is always fraught with controversy. Take the plans to redevelop the old Edinburgh Royal Infirmary for example. The architects of the Quartermile project, as they?ve christened it, want to revamp the hossie into flats, offices and shops. So far so good, until the World Heritage Trust got its knickers in a twist over the height of the office blocks they want to build. "We feel this Manhattan-style skyline is completely inappropriate for this area," they squealed, about the six-storey structures. Yes, that?s right, six storeys - they?re hardly going to dwarf the Empire State Building. And ask anyone?s who?s been in New York for a spot of Christmas shopping - Eric Milligan, for example - and no doubt they?ll tell you Central Park?s shimmering ponds and golden leaves are a perfect contrast to the buildings scraping the sky all round it. Talk of Christmas reminds me that I thought all mine had come at once this week after I spotted a particular story in the Evening News - "Cameo role for Denzel in city premiere". Forget Santa, I thought, Denzel Washington?s coming to town! I was on the point of phoning the Cameo cinema to block book the entire auditorium for the night my favourite actor arrived in Embra when I realised ... it?s only the film that?s coming. So I?ll have to console myself with watching Denz in his new Oscar-tipped flick, Antwone Fisher, a whole two months before anyone else in the UK. My Christmas letter must have reached Santa in Lapland after all. ©2002 scotsman.com | contact ***************************************************************** 19 Vermont Yankee will wait to apply for extension Brattleboro Reformer Saturday, December 07, 2002 - 12:35:31 AM MST By EESHA WILLIAMS Reformer Staff VERNON -- The official in charge of Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant told the selectboard Thursday he will likely wait until 2004 or 2005 before applying for an extension to the plant's 40 year operating license, currently due to expire in 2012. "We will be applying for license renewal in two or three years, I would say," Jay Thayer, the Entergy Corp. vice-president in charge of Entergy Nuclear Vermont Yankee (ENVY) told the board after it invited him to its regular meeting. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's deadline to apply is 2007. Activists have in recent weeks begun gathering signatures on a petition asking regulators to deny Entergy's request for relicensing, which the activists said could come as early as 2003. Thayer said: "E.N.V.Y. and Entergy Corporation out of New Orleans are putting a lot of pressure on the (U.S.) Department of Energy to deliver on the promise they made in 1982," referring to the Bush Administration's plan to open a national nuclear waste dump under Yucca Mountain in Nevada, to take waste from Vermont Yankee and the nation's 102 other nuclear plants. "They have said the earliest (Yucca Mountain) could open is 2010," Thayer said. "I think that's probably optimistic." The state of Nevada, the city of Las Vegas, and the county where Yucca Mountain is located on Monday filed a lawsuit in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to stop the dump from opening, arguing that the Department of Energy cannot promise the waste will be safe for the 10,000 years it is required by Congress to be kept out of the natural environment and away from humans. Currently, all the waste from Yankee's 30 years of operation are stored in a large pool, "like a swimming pool," Thayer told the board. "It is getting to the point now where we need some relief," he said. "The pool is about three-quarters full." So E.N.V.Y. will apply in early 2003 to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for permission to move some of the fuel into "some very unique containers," Thayer said. "They're vertical cans ... We will put them out on basically a concrete parking lot." Selectboard member Sonya Shippee echoed a concern raised at a public forum in Brattleboro last month, that the cans could be vulnerable to terrorist attack. She asked Thayer, "Will they be buried in the ground?" "No," he said. "They are resistant to all kinds of manmade threats and natural phenomena." But Congresswoman Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., has posted at her Web site, www.house.gov/berkley, a video of a T.O.W. missile, of the kind used by terrorists last week in Kenya to attack a commercial airliner, penetrating the kind of nuclear waste cask Thayer referred to. The video is from a test conducted in 1996 at the U.S. Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington who spoke at the Brattleboro forum, said on Friday a T.O.W. missile could easily hit a nuclear waste cask at Vermont Yankee, if fired from across the Connecticut River in Hinsdale, N.H., causing catastrophic results. "That's why we advocate burying the casks," he said. Also early in 2003, Entergy will apply to state and federal regulators for permission to squeeze more power out of the 30 year-old Yankee, Thayer said. "We're going to increase the electricity output from that plant," he said. "But really, as you drive by that plant in two or three years from now, you wouldn't notice any difference." Thayer reassured the selectboard that E.N.V.Y. had no plans to lay off any of its 600 workers. "We will continue to be a good corporate citizen, from the standpoint of supporting community needs," he said. ©1999-2002 by MediaNews Group, Inc. and NENI Newspapers ***************************************************************** 20 Bulgaria: Fears After Atomic Theft For the record: 7 December 2002, Saturday. Daily Record DEADLY caesium stolen from an iron-smelting plant in Bulgaria may have been smuggled out and into the hands of terrorists. The Bulgarian Atomic Agency yesterday admitted two cylinders of highly radioactive caesium 137 had been stolen from the Kremikovci smelting plant, just outside the capital Sofia. Last night, physicists at the Bulgarian Academy of Science warned the material could be used by terror groups. The theft, coming just weeks after the alleged sales of weapons to Iraq, could further jeopardise Bulgaria's entry into NATO. All rights reserved © novinite.com, 2001-2002 - Copyright & Disclamer ***************************************************************** 21 Third Radioactive Device Stolen in Bulgaria Politics: 7 December 2002, Saturday. Another radioactive device has been stolen from a workshop at Bobovdol coal-fired thermal power station. The signal has been received at 5 p.m. on November 5. The device that went missing contained Caesium-137 and Americium-241, each in a separate 45-kilogram container. The theft comes a day after two devices, containing radioactive materials, were stolen from Kremikovtsi steel plant near Sofia. The level of radioactivity of the materials is 1,000 times lower in comparison with those in the devices stolen from Kremikovtsi. Experts assured they cannot be lethal, nor can they lead to serious deceases. The devices, installed in measurement equipment in Kremikovtsi, were dismantled and stolen without the protective containers. The two measurement devices that went missing contained Caesium-137. The thieves are being tracked down by a special unit. All rights reserved © novinite.com, 2001-2002 - Copyright & Disclamer - Privacy Policy ***************************************************************** 22 Environmentalists say Russia's nuclear security is lax - 12/6/2002 - ENN.com Friday, December 06, 2002 By Vladimir Isachenkov, Associated Press MOSCOW — Russian environmentalists urged the government Thursday to focus on strengthening security at the nation's nuclear dumpsites and coping with the environmental damage inflicted by Soviet-era nuclear programs instead of importing radioactive waste from abroad. "Sept. 11 hasn't taught them anything," Anatoly Mamayev, an environmental campaigner from Zheleznogorsk, a major nuclear center since the Soviet times, said of Russia's nuclear officials. Unlike similar facilities in other nations that are located underground, Russian nuclear waste depots are built above ground, making them more vulnerable to terrorists, Mamayev said at a news conference. New nuclear dumpsites planned by the government are also to be located above ground to minimize construction costs, he said. The government insists that all of the country's nuclear facilities are duly secured. But Mamayev said that until recently the Zheleznogorsk waste depot, which holds about 3,200 metric tons (3,520 tons) of nuclear waste, was protected only by a shaky barbed wire fence. After Russian lawmaker Sergei Mitrokhin and a Greenpeace activist penetrated the facility earlier this year in an attempt to attract attention to its vulnerability, workers started building a more solid, concrete fence, he said. Mitrokhin, a member of the liberal Yabloko party, said nuclear officials had failed to deal with the security and environmental aspects of Russia's burdensome nuclear legacy. "They are launching new, potentially disastrous projects instead of solving the problems left from the time of the Cold War," Mitrokhin said. In one example, the government has been reluctant to evacuate a village badly affected by radioactive fallout from a 1957 waste tank explosion at the Mayak nuclear weapons plant in the closed city of Chelyabinsk-65, Mitrokhin said. Officials still refuse to resettle the village's residents, even though the Soviet government ordered the move in 1959, calling it a "deliberate murder," he said. Mitrokhin said the plan to import nuclear waste would turn Russia into "the world's nuclear dumping ground." A controversial law allowing the government to import spent nuclear fuel from abroad for reprocessing and storage was passed last year despite opinion polls showing most Russians opposed the idea. Russia already had imported spent nuclear fuel from Soviet-built nuclear power plants in Bulgaria and Ukraine. Mitrokhin said the main obstacle to larger radioactive waste imports into Russia was the United States. The United States controls whether spent fuel from reactors in most other countries can be transferred to Russia for storage because it provided the original fuel to them. The U.S. administration has said it would welcome nuclear waste shipments from around the world worth more than US$10 billion to Russia if it abandons its nuclear ties with Iran. Russia has been building a nuclear power plant in Iran and has considered plans to build more nuclear reactors there, shrugging off U.S. concern that such cooperation could help Iran build a nuclear bomb. Mitrokhin said Russia's cooperation with Iran is now the only obstacle to massive radioactive waste imports that would make Russia a "nuclear colony of the United States." Copyright 2002, Associated Press ***************************************************************** 23 Military asked grant approval for medical screenings of DOD contract employees. The Hawk Eye Newspaper [http://www.thehawkeye.com] Main Page · [http://archive.thehawkeye.com] Friday, December 6, 2002 IAAP workers wait for Army By Kiley Miller The Hawk Eye MIDDLETOWN — Department of Defense contract workers at the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant should receive the same medical screenings now offered to their Department of Energy counterparts, former employees argue. The only challenge now is convincing Army brass. In a passionate meeting Thursday at the Machinists Union Hall, members of an advisory board overseeing a health study of former plant workers said Army contractors were exposed to beryllium, a known carcinogen, and various toxic chemical compounds used to make munitions. A team from the University of Iowa's College of Public Health recently was awarded $1 million to begin a survey of the health of former DOD workers at the plant. But the Army has not given the go–ahead for medical screenings. Instead, the research could be confined to medical records. Dr. Lar Fuortes, the project director, is convinced the latter approach would be insufficient. He is compiling evidence to justify expanding the screening program. Medical screenings of DOE workers for cancer, beryllium exposure and various lung diseases have been ongoing since January. The screenings began out of concern for the health of workers exposed to radiation at the plant, where the Atomic Energy Commission assembled and in later years tested components of atomic weapons from the late 1940s until 1975. Of 508 former plant workers screened thus far, 16 have tested positive for abnormal sensitivity to beryllium. Because of confusion at the screening sites, 16 of the people screened were DOD employees. One tested positive for beryllium sensitivity. Further, there have been eight cases of Chronic Beryllium Disease in DOE employees, five found through the screenings and three through medical chart reviews. Beryllium copper handtools were frequently used in the plant. They were less likely to generate sparks that could ignite explosives. Fuortes has a group of the tools given to him by a former DOD worker. One hammer bears a label with instructions for grinding if the head becomes misshapen. The beryllium could easily have been inhaled in the grinding process, Fuortes said. Other portions of the munitions–building process also could have caused the beryllium to aerosolize. "For a variety of reasons, the DOD portion of the plant may have been less hygienic than the DOE portion," he said. Beryllium exposure is akin to allergies, Fuortes said. Individuals vary in their response regardless of how heavy their exposure. "It could effect a person on the lines or it could effect a secretary," Fuortes said. The IAAP health study could become a model for similar surveys at munition plants across the country, a fact which might be contributing to the Army's reluctance to initiate the screenings. "They're going to be very careful because it will establish a precedent," said DOE Project Coordinator Kristina Venzke said. The Hawk Eye 800 S. Main St., Burlington Iowa 52601 319-754-8461 Front Desk · 319-754-6824 FAX · 1-800-397-1708 Toll Free ***************************************************************** 24 Test Site workers' screening continues Las Vegas SUN: December 06, 2002 By Mary Manning A total of 62 former Nevada Test Site workers or their families have received compensation for illnesses related to their work at the nuclear weapons proving ground during the Cold War. Physicians and specialists from Boston and San Francisco are spending today in Las Vegas to continue monitoring Test Site workers who volunteer for medical screening. Most of the 62 claims paid by the federal government so far to former Test Site workers cover silicosis, a disease that appeared as spots in the lungs on X-rays during the screenings, said Sandie Medina, project coordinator for the NTS Medical Surveillance Project. "Many of the former Test Site workers live in Utah and New Mexico," Medina said, but they come to Las Vegas for screening. The project is coordinated by the Energy Department, the Family Medicine Program of the University of Nevada School of Medicine, and Boston University. Silicosis is caused by particles of dust that became airborne as workers carved underground tunnels for testing nuclear weapons at the site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The screening program is offered to former DOE workers who volunteer, Medina said. A screening scheduled for spring has 50 workers who will be re-screened and 200 new employees who have never been screened, she said. Two claims, including a lump sum payment of $150,000 to widow Dorothy Clayton, covered radiation sickness, Medina said. Clayton received notice in October that her claim had been accepted on behalf of her late husband Glenn Clayton, who worked on recovery teams in the testing tunnels after nuclear weapons experiments. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., who led the battle to compensate thousands of Energy Department workers, said he planned to observe the medical screening project today. Reid is trying to raise awareness of the project and the resources available to former Test Site workers, Dr. Lewis Pepper, the principal investigator on the project, said. All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 25 Yucca Mountain Increases County's Potential for Terrorist Attack* * KLAS-TV News* Cindy Cesare, Reporter (Dec. 4) -- Clark County residents should prepare for nuclear waste traveling on our highways, and that it could be a target for terrorism. That was the message at the Annual Hazardous Waste Conference Wednesday, where experts discussed the dangers of Yucca Mountain. Terrorism experts say that the nuclear waste trucks will be easy to identify while traveling on Interstate 15, and the trucks could be an easy target for terrorists. Experts already believe the trucks containing nuclear waste from the north and southeastern U.S. will most likely travel on I-15 to Yucca Mountain. At the Annual Hazardous Materials Conference Wednesday, Clark County brought in experts to discuss the dangers of terrorists gaining access to that waste. Scientists believe the waste could be used as radioactive weapons by exploding the truck in highly populated area. ?They could collapse a geographic feature on top of these trucks, a bridge, tunnel, landslide that would create a loss to the shipment put people at risk for radiological,? said Dr. James David Ballard of the University of California ? Northridge. Experts believe that the only way to prevent these risks is to identify the groups that would want to target our nuclear waste and by improving security traveling with the trucks. *NV vs. DOE Update* The U.S. Court of Appeals now has Nevada's chief legal case against Yucca Mountain. On Wednesday Nevada's key legal council on Yucca Mountain announced the latest court filing. Attorney Joe Egan says Nevada?s legal claims are solid. He says Monday?s filing with the Federal Court of Appeals could prevent storage of the nation's nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain. "It is the key brief in our case; it's the case that challenges the fundamental departure of our government from the dictates of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, from the dictates of the scientific method," Egan said. The Court of Appeals could have a decision on Nevada's legal petition sometime next year. This appeal is one of several lawsuits brought by Nevada. Tips on out how to keep off those holiday pounds! All content © Copyright 2000 - 2002 WorldNow and KLAS. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 26 Nevada lawmakers question Yucca Mountain lawyers* RENO GAZETTE-JOURNAL Associated Press Members of Nevada's congressional delegation are questioning the Energy Department's relationship with a law firm that investigated a Yucca Mountain manager and later lobbied Congress in favor of the high-level nuclear waste dump. Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., said the department's May 2001 hiring of international law firm Morgan Lewis"doesn't smell right." The firm issued a report critical of James Mattimoe, a contract quality assurance manager who claimed the department was unresponsive to concerns from those working on Yucca Mountain. Mattimoe was later dismissed. Weeks after it released the report, Morgan Lewis registered as a lobbyist for the Nuclear Energy Institute, which pushed to name Yucca Mountain the nation's nuclear waste dump. As approved by Congress, it would eventually entomb 77,000 tons of radioactive waste in a site 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Nevada has sued in federal court to stop the project. Morgan Lewis'ties to the nuclear industry may have colored its report on Mattimoe, said Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev. "It's telling that a few weeks after their investigation that Morgan Lewis goes out and gets a sweetheart deal with NEI,"Reid told the Las Vegas Sun. Morgan Lewis lawyer Jay Gutierrez said his investigation of Mattimoe was fair, and that he followed the firm's conflict-of-interest rules. The report found Mattimoe, who worked for Navarro Research, had retaliated against two Yucca Mountain contractors and abused his authority by securing a personal loan from an employee he managed. Mattimoe's former boss Susan Navarro said she dismissed him because the report found he did not meet"the highest standards of behavior." Reid, Ensign and Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., had previously asked the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, to probe whether Mattimoe should have been fired. Berkley now plans to ask the GAO to expand its investigation to include Morgan Lewis. Berkley and Reid also will consider requesting an investigation by the Energy Department Inspector General. The congressional delegation last year lodged conflict-of-interest allegations against Winston&Strawn. The Chicago-based firm quit representing the Energy Department in November 2001 after the department's inspector general concluded the firm failed to inform the government it had lobbied for a pro-nuclear group. ***************************************************************** 27 *State offered fuel plant incentives * Saturday, 12/07/02* | Middle Tennessee News & Information* By KATHY CARLSON /Staff Writer/ */Officials courted nuclear site before LES publicized plans/* Four days before Louisiana Energy Services publicly named Trousdale County as one of two potential sites for a uranium enrichment plant, the state of Tennessee told a key LES partner that it was prepared to offer as much as several million dollars in economic incentives. ''The Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development is committed to aggressively assisting the LES II project,'' ECD Commissioner Tony Grande wrote to the European energy venture Urenco in a letter dated Aug. 19. On the list of potential incentives were as much as $1.5 million to local governments for infrastructure, as much as $1,000 per employee in training assistance, as much as $2,000 per newly created job in tax credits and an additional tax credit of 1% of the purchase price of industrial machinery and information systems. Moreover, LES had appeared on the state's radar screen months before when it was exploring a site in East Tennessee as a possible enrichment-plant site. The incentives outlined in August were ''pretty much the standard sort of package for a project of this magnitude,'' said Nashville attorney James Weaver, whose practice at Waller Lansden Dortch & Davis includes economic development projects. ''Obviously, this is an enormous project.'' Weaver said he had no involvement in the deal. The letter and other communications between state economic development officials and LES illustrate what was playing out behind the scenes before LES' intentions about Trousdale County were made public. Grande said yesterday that the letter did not amount to a commitment to Urenco or LES, and officials from those companies said yesterday that they did not take it as such. The request for some of the funds would come from local governments, he said, and no request for incentives has been made yet. LES and Urenco officials said the incentives were not a deciding factor in selecting Trousdale County. The potential packages outlined by Tennessee and by Alabama were similar, LES spokeswoman Nan Kilkeary said. Trousdale County officials are grappling with changing zoning regulations to accommodate the LES project. The Four Lake Regional Industrial Development Authority ? a five-county organization that bought the land from TVA earlier this year ? has begun talks with LES on the sale of the land. Soon, LES will be dealing with a new cast of state officials. Tennessee will get a new governor Jan. 18, when Democrat Phil Bredesen succeeds Don Sundquist, a Republican. Bredesen ''has some serious questions about the site and about the scope of this project,'' spokesman Will Pinkston said yesterday. Balancing community opinion and the proposed plant's economic impact is a major concern for Bredesen, he said. LES is an international group that includes Urenco, the Canadian mining concern Cameco, British-owned Westinghouse Electric and three U.S. utility companies that are major operators of nuclear power plants ? Duke Power, Exelon and Entergy. LES' goal is to build a uranium-enrichment plant in the United States that uses Urenco's gas-centrifuge technology to enrich uranium so it can be further processed into fuel for nuclear power plants. Centrifuge technology uses much less electricity than does the gaseous diffusion technology in use at the nation's only commercial enrichment plant, operated in Paducah, Ky., by LES competitor USEC Inc. Before LES announced Aug. 23 that it had put Trousdale County on its short list along with a site in Alabama, LES had been scouting another Tennessee location, Unicoi County in East Tennessee. In a May 10 letter, Grande wrote to Peter Lenny, president of Urenco's U.S. division, saying consideration of Unicoi County was ''of utmost importance to Governor Sundquist and myself.'' ''This community has a proven history of support for your industry and can provide a well-trained work force that is familiar and comfortable with nuclear fuel,'' he wrote. A nuclear-fuel fabricating facility is in Unicoi County. Grande's letter mentioned potential infrastructure assistance of as much as $750,000, plus the incentives listed in the later letter. The same letter was sent at the same time to executives with other companies working under the LES umbrella. LES' interest in Unicoi County was made public late in June, and a group of local residents quickly organized to oppose the proposed facility. LES later said it had never seriously considered the upper East Tennessee site. If the August letter sounds like the state was ''aggressively luring'' the enrichment plant project, that is correct, Grande said. ''I hope Trousdale County looks very hard at this project,'' he said. ''In my opinion, you don't get an opportunity like this ? every day.'' *Related story: Environmentalist seeks 'advisory vote' on plant* All content © Copyright 2000 - 2002 WorldNow and WATE. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 30 *Landfill radiation hearing coming to Pottstown* Evan Brandt, Mercury staff writer December 07, 2002 *POTTSTOWN -- The only hearing in the state on a plan by a landfill to begin monitoring incoming trash trucks for radiation will be held in the borough Dec. 16.* The plan, submitted by the Pottstown Landfill as required by a year-old state law, would have radiation monitors scanning incoming trash trucks for radiation. The hearing is scheduled for 7 to 9 p.m. in the community room of Montgomery County Community College?s West Campus on College Drive in Pottstown. Joseph Ferry, a spokesman for the Department of Environmental Protection?s Southeast office in Conshohocken, said the hearing "is the only one in the state and is being held because we received a number of requests from a couple of surrounding townships and from several individuals." In January, one of the first actions taken by Pottstown Borough Council was to unanimously pass a resolution calling for a public hearing on the plan. Few who follow these issues closely will be surprised to know that one of the individuals who had a similar request was Donna Cuthbert, an outspoken member of the Alliance for a Clean Environment. She has suggested that the modified permit that will be the subject of the hearing is actually a back-door to allow radioactive material to be dumped in the landfill. In a way, she?s right, said Ferry. He explained that currently, no radioactive materials is permitted in the landfill. And, under the new permit plan being reviewed, four kinds of low-level radioactive material that DEP does not consider a threat to public health, can be dumped there. However, Ferry acknowledged that previous tests have shown a low-level of radioactivity in the landfill gas sampled from the Pottstown Landfill, suggesting that because a monitoring program has not been in place, some radioactive material is getting in there anyway. "The things they?re asking to be allowed to take are not harmful," said Ferry. "They have a half-life of a few days, a few weeks or even a few hours," he said noting that the categories include electronic items like smoke detectors which have a small level of radioactivity. "We view this as being more stringent than the situation as it stands now," said Ferry. Some scanning already occurs at the Pottstown Landfill as the result of a small accident which occurred March 11. Workers at the landfill saw bags with the radiation symbol on them being unloaded from a BFI trash truck which had just come from Exelon Nuclear?s Limerick Generation Station. It turned out the bags contained gloves and tape from an area of the power plant which gets exposed to radiation. Since then, the landfill has asked its on-site lab to randomly check trash loads for radiation, said Ferry. The scanning which the permit modification addresses "is in addition to the checks they?re already doing," Ferry said. On Monday, Pottstown Borough Council will vote on a resolution "opposing allowing any radioactive materials to be put into the landfill," said Mayor Anne Jones. The rationale, said Jones, is that by the time a truck with radioactive material gets to the landfill and is rejected, "they?re already dragged it through our town and the damage is done. We think it should be checked before it gets put on the truck." But Jones held out little hope that the resolution or testimony by borough officials would have much effect. "Every time we say we don?t want something, we get it anyway. Our testimony before DEP doesn?t seem to have any effect," she said. And in fact, no matter what happens at the hearing, some kind of monitoring will be set up at the landfill, said Ferry. "The have to get an approved plan in place at some point," said Ferry. "There?s no getting around that. That?s the law." "It?s how the plan gets implemented, that?s what is up for grabs right now," said Ferry. He said the hearings which would have had an effect on whether such plans would be required of all landfills were held before the first version of the law was passed in 2000. "The time to comment on that is long past," he said. The Pottstown Landfill?s specific plan regarding the radiation monitoring is available for public review at the Pottstown Public Library, 500 High St., and at the DEP offices in Conshohocken, Lee Park, Suite 6010, 555 North Lane. /©The Mercury 2002/ ***************************************************************** 31 New Technologies for Domestic Enrichment of Nuclear Fuel Draws Praise* EarthVision Environmental News / WASHINGTON, December 6, 2002 - US Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham praised the announcement by United States Enrichment Corporation (USEC) that it would site new uranium enrichment technologies at the Department of Energy's Portsmouth, Ohio, facility. The Secretary said the progress industry is making to ensure that domestic uranium enrichment activities remain a key contributor to ensuring America's energy security and the future of nuclear energy. "As a clean, affordable and reliable energy source, nuclear energy is important to the Nation's future energy supply," Secretary Abraham said. "As a first step, the establishment of new technologies, like the lead cascade facility, will help ensure long-term, domestic capacity to enrich uranium fuel for our commercial nuclear reactors. USEC, and its partners in the nuclear industry, continue to take important steps enhancing national energy security with private sector development of advanced American technology." The site for a future uranium enrichment plant will be selected from Portsmouth, Ohio, or Paducah, Kentucky, after satisfactory demonstration of the technology at the Lead Cascade facility. With this announcement, USEC Inc. will establish a test facility for new uranium enrichment technologies and production, based on 28 years and more than $2 billion of research by the Department of Energy to establish new enrichment technologies. [http://abc.net.au/] Posted: Sat, 7 Dec 2002 12:17 ACDT Shadow Environment Minister Kelvin Thompson says the Federal Government must reconsider plans for a national radioactive waste dump in South Australia as it moves to strengthen counter-terrorism measures. Yesterday's Council of Australian Governments' meeting in Canberra agreed there needs to be tougher controls on hazardous materials that could be used in terrorist attacks. Mr Thompson says the Government must take into account safety issues surrounding the proposed dump. "If the Federal Government is at all serious about wanting to deal with the threat from hazardous wastes as a security or anti-terrorist measure, it will go back to the drawing board concerning its plans to impose a national waste dump in northern South australia," he said. © 2002 Australian Broadcasting Corporation ***************************************************************** 40 AU: Labor questions SA nuclear waste dump THE BULLETIN [http://bulletin.ninemsn.com.au] 19:05 AEST Sat 7 Dec 2002 Labor called on the federal government to reconsider plans for a national radioactive waste dump in South Australia. The Council of Australian Governments (COAG) meeting on Friday agreed on the need for tougher controls on hazardous materials that could be used in terrorist attacks, a government spokeswoman said. It proposed to review the regulation, storage and sale of potentially toxic and explosive substances. Labor's environment spokesman Kelvin Thomson said the plan to move hazardous waste from the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor in Sydney to a site near Woomera in South Australia needed serious reviewing. "What it would principally be doing is taking radioactive waste from Lucas Heights in Sydney and therefore you've got a very substantial transport corridor from Sydney all the way through to northern South Australia," he said. "If they're serious about the issue of hazardous waste as a security or anti-terrorist measure they wouldn't be proposing this. "They should go back to the drawing board so far as their plan for a radioactive waste dump in northern South Australia." ©AAP 2002 © 1997-2002 ninemsn Pty Ltd - All rights reserved ***************************************************************** 41 Another Yucca conflict of interest alleged Las Vegas SUN: December 06, 2002 Nevada lawmakers seek probe of potential misconduct By Benjamin Grove < [grove@lasvegassun.com] > WASHINGTON -- Nevada lawmakers say the Energy Department has ensnared itself in another conflict-of-interest mess involving a law firm it hired to handle a Yucca Mountain matter. The law firm hired to investigate a project manager who said he was trying to blow the whistle on the department's mishandling of project concerns, signed on to lobby Congress in favor of the project just weeks after completing a report that led to the man's firing. Nevada lawmakers are calling for an investigation into conflict-of-interest issues with the law firm, Morgan Lewis, and the way the Energy Department has handled issues about the planned nuclear waste repository. "It doesn't smell right," Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., said. "With Yucca Mountain, it often doesn't." The Energy Department previously ran into conflict-of-interest troubles after it was revealed that Winston &Strawn, the law firm it had hired to help produce the license application for the waste repository, lobbied on behalf of the project. The latest claims come over the investigation into personnel disputes and allegations in the project's quality assurance program. In May 2001 the department hired international law firm Morgan Lewis to investigate. A primary focus of the investigation was James Mattimoe, a Yucca quality assurance manager, who said he tried to blow the whistle on the department's mishandling of concerns raised by project workers. He was fired after a Morgan Lewis report found he allegedly abused his power and retaliated against contractors. Mattimoe appealed to the Labor Department, which later found he was fired unjustly. Eighteen days later, Morgan Lewis registered as a lobbyist for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's top trade group, to lobby Congress in the successful effort to pass legislation naming Yucca Mountain the nation's high-level nuclear waste dump. NEI eventually paid Morgan Lewis $160,000 to lobby for Yucca Mountain. Morgan Lewis has a history of working in and with the nuclear industry, ties that Nevada lawmakers say make it difficult for the firm to be fair. "It's telling that a few weeks after their investigation (of Mattimoe) that Morgan Lewis goes out and gets a sweetheart deal with NEI," Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said. Nevada lawmakers now are calling for independent investigations of potential conflicts of interest in addition to their earlier request for a General Accounting Office probe of whether Mattimoe should have been fired. Morgan Lewis officials, though, say they did everything by the book and say they had no conflict of interest. The Morgan Lewis lawyer who led the Mattimoe investigation, Jay Gutierrez, has a long history of representing pro-Yucca nuclear utilities and has worked for at least 15 nuclear power plants, according to the company's website. But Gutierrez said his investigation was fair and uncompromised by previous work for nuclear utilities. "We have rules that govern conflict of interest and we satisfied those rules," Gutierrez said. "There is no conflict of interest with respect to our other representations and the Department of Energy." Retired Yucca project chief Lake Barrett, who hired Morgan Lewis, declined to comment on how the firm was chosen when reached at his home in Rockville, Md. But one Energy Department official who backed Gutierrez said he was well respected as an independent investigator and well-suited for the job. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the department needed a lawyer with nuclear waste expertise for the job. Mattimoe said the law firm probe turned into a hostile, personal inquisition of him at a time when he was trying to blow the whistle on wrongdoing within the Yucca project. The law firm's report led to Mattimoe's firing by the Energy Department contractor he worked for, Navarro Research and Engineering Inc. Now Nevada officials are suspicious of Morgan Lewis' and Gutierrez's ties to the industry, and question why a nuclear industry lawyer was needed to sort out what amounted to a complex web of personnel disputes. "It's pretty apparent that the DOE hired a law firm that has ties to the nuclear industry," Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., said. "The law firm selected an attorney that had done a lot of work for the industry, and he rendered a decision against the whistle blower. "The audacity of the scenario almost slaps you in the face it's so apparent. This reiterates what we have said for a long time: that there is a pattern of conflict of interest and a pattern of impropriety." Berkley said she would ask the District of Columbia Bar association and possibly the U.S. Office of Government Ethics to investigate. Nevada lawmakers already have called on the General Accounting Office to investigate Mattimoe's firing, and Berkley said the probe should be expanded to include questions about Morgan Lewis and a possible conflict of interest. Berkley and Reid also said they were mulling whether to request an Energy Department Inspector General's investigation. "This is part of the a pattern the DOE has," Reid said. "This administration is tied so closely to the utilities, including the nuclear utilities, that it's almost hard to describe." Nevada lawmakers are troubled by Morgan Lewis' lobbying record. Just 18 days after Mattimoe was fired, the law firm signed its 10-month lobbying deal with NEI. The lobbying lasted until the Senate voted in July to designate Yucca Mountain as the waste dump. Two of the nation's leading legal ethics experts said Morgan Lewis had not clearly violated any ethical standards. "It's plausible" that the firm was conflicted in its investigation by its work for the industry, said Robert Drinan, a priest and professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. But it would be very difficult to prove, he said. And Morgan Lewis has a near flawless reputation, Drinan said. "I don't think we could presume that the law firm is wedded to the industry to do its bidding," Drinan said. It doesn't appear that Morgan Lewis had a conflict of interest, but there may be a legitimate question as to whether the firm was in a position to be completely independent, said Seth Rosner, a 40-year veteran lawyer, former chairman of the American Bar Association's ethics committee and chairman of the Josephson Institute of Ethics. "It does not sound like a violation of any legal ethical obligation," Rosner said. "(Morgan Lewis) may very well have come (to the Mattimoe investigation) with unfettered eyes." The Energy Department first used its Office of Concerns Program to conduct an initial investigation of allegations against Mattimoe. The office faulted Mattimoe on several counts. The department then hired Morgan Lewis for more investigation. Nevada lawmakers questioned why the department turned to a law firm at all for an internal personnel investigation. "That the DOE needed to hire a high-priced, prominent law firm with strong ties to the nuclear industry seems like an unnecessary expense, with the end result being that the DOE got its desired opinion," Berkley said. An Energy Department official declined to say how much the Morgan Lewis investigation cost. For Energy Department officials to suggest that they needed lawyers who were nuclear industry experts is "an absolute falsehood," Reid said. "This is an administrative issue," Reid said. "Why did they need to go outside the DOE?" Susana Navarro, president of Navarro Research, said she dismissed Mattimoe based on the Morgan Lewis report. The report found Mattimoe's conduct on the job did not meet "the highest standards of behavior," she said. The report said Mattimoe had retaliated against two Yucca contractors and abused his authority, including, in one case, securing a personal loan from an employee he managed. "Since Mr. Mattimoe was found by Morgan Lewis to have retaliated against other individuals, it is ironic that Mr. Mattimoe now raises the same kind of allegations that were raised against him and that Morgan Lewis substantiated," Navarro said in an e-mail response to Sun questions. Gutierrez, the Morgan Lewis lawyer who conducted the investigation, said he conducted a thorough and professional review of allegations that had been made against Mattimoe, as well as other personnel conflicts within the project offices. "We stand behind our report," he said. Mattimoe denies retaliating against anyone, and acknowledged he had borrowed, as well as loaned, money to colleagues -- before he was their boss. "I had a lot of concerns about Morgan Lewis," Mattimoe said. "I certainly never felt like they were being independent." Mattimoe appealed his firing to the Labor Department based on whistle blower protection laws, and the department agreed Mattimoe had been unfairly terminated. The department ordered that Mattimoe be re-hired and compensated for losses. Navarro appealed, and the appeal is pending a possible settlement. Meanwhile Mattimoe has taken work at the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico. The Energy Department has faced conflict-of-interest allegations before with Chicago-based Winston &Strawn. The department hired the firm in 1999 to advise it on the application it is assembling for a Yucca Mountain construction license. But the firm quit its $16.5 million contract in November 2001 amid controversy, after two years of work. After the Sun reported the firm was also working as a pro-Yucca Mountain lobbyist for NEI, a department inspector general investigated and ruled that Winston &Strawn had not disclosed its NEI ties before the department hired the firm. The firm denied any conflict of interest, but resigned saying the allegations were a distraction. Nevada officials had said it was a conflict for the department to hire a pro-Yucca Mountain law firm before the department had officially approved the site. By law the department was supposed to be an independent manager of the project. All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 42 UK: CORNERSTONE OF OUR NUCLEAR DETERRENT 09:00 - 06 December 2002 The four Trident nuclear submarines represent the cornerstone of Britain's nuclear deterrent and any delay in their refit schedule could have serious consequences for the nation's defence. At least one Trident submarine is at sea at a secret location at all times, ready to fire off nuclear missiles if needed. The delays at Devonport have led to warnings that at certain times none of the Trident submarines could be fit to put to sea. Each submarine is scheduled to undergo a two-year refit and refuelling programme at Devonport over the next eight years. In each case the submarines will also then need "extended trials and training" before it is deemed ready to return to active service. The report by the National Audit Office concludes that despite the vastly increased cost of the project there are still serious doubts about whether the yard will be fully prepared in time to keep to the schedule. The report notes that while Devonport succeeded in the "major achievement" of preparing docking facilities for the first Trident submarine HMS Vanguard to arrive on schedule in February this year, many problems remain. Although refit work on HMS Vanguard has begun, a number of "critical" facilities still need to be completed at Devonport if the submarine is to leave on time. The NAO found that a number of design and safety issues are still outstanding - a fact which it said would "increase the risk of further delays". The report found that there was now "little scope to accommodate any further slippage". It concluded: "For the UK's nuclear deterrent to remain effective, the refitting of the Trident submarines had to begin in February 2002. To maintain at least one Trident submarine at sea, all four submarines must begin their refit on time as there is little slack over the next eight years." | Work for us | Work for us Friday December 06, @07:42PM By Daniel Jameson & Craig Stehr The night darkness is awakened by a pre-sunrise ceremonial fire circle. A circle of peace campers moves clockwise, as a Shoshone tribal elder beats a drum and sings to the Great Spirit in his native language. There is a tribal pole with colorful streamers, hoops made from willow branches, tobacco, sage, cedar, water, and a desert tortoise shell that I,Craig,found while following a hawk in the desert. Corbin Harney sings about Mother Earth, the necessity of humanity having drinkable water, the neutralization of the harmful effects of nuclear power, and the genocidal policies and systematic theft of tribal land by the United States Federal Government. The night darkness is awakened by a pre-sunrise ceremonial fire circle. A circle of peace campers moves clockwise, as a Shoshone tribal elder beats a drum and sings to the Great Spirit in his native language. There is a tribal pole with colorful streamers, hoops made from willow branches, tobacco, sage, cedar, water, and a desert tortoise shell that I,Craig,found while following a hawk in the desert. Corbin Harney sings about Mother Earth, the necessity of humanity having drinkable water, the neutralization of the harmful effects of nuclear power, and the genocidal policies and systematic theft of tribal land by the United States Federal Government. There are people here from around the world, who have completed an 800 mile Family Spirit Walk for Mother Earth which began in Los Alamos, New Mexico August 9th. Seeds of Peace and East Bay Food Not Bombs are at Peace Camp providing meals; several other groups are manifesting music, legal help, puppet making, a massage tent, medical station, and much more. Shoshone elders hold evening sweat lodges. A sign reads, \"these lodges are an expression of our religious freedom - they have been declared sacred by Shoshone elders - this is Shoshone land.\" There are two sweat lodges, one for men, one for women. In front is a ceremonial fire area with herbs. There is an impressive sunbleached buffalo skull. The spiritual power here is palpable. Across the road is the Department of Energy Nevada Test Site with the proposed Yucca Mountain national nuclear waste repository in the distance. The Shoshone\'s sacred mountains ring the area. Peaceworkers hike up to the peaks to pray and meditate. To the north there is the ka-boom of bombing practice, also parachuting practice. So on one side of the road is an ancient spirituality responding to the postmodern military-industrial materialistic madness. And on the other side is Nellis Air Force Base and the U.S. corporate-governmental development of bombs, bombs, and more bombs. The Great Spirit of the Shoshone spiritual way witnesses everything. Civil disobedience has taken place. Demonstrators \"technically trespass\" at the Nevada Test Site\'s main gate, are arrested, and are bussed off to the Beatty, NV jail. Shoshone tribal elders point out that whereas the land treaties are a sham, and whereas this is Shoshone ancestral land, the idea of trespassing is ridiculous. The peace camp legal advisors suggest that no resolution can take place anywhere but in Shoshone tribal court - and ultimately in international world court. Free Radio 104.7 FM is broadcasting news reports and interviews from a portable station at the Peace Camp. Local media is covering the story and there are reports being published in the Las Vegas newspapers. Up the road a piece the City of Las Vegas hosts visitors who come to the desert for big time gambling, entertainment, and to party every day of the year. The whole region is coated with radioactive contaminated dust particles borne on the wind. Sunrise ceremony on the last morning of the Peace Camp...I, Craig, ask Corbin Harney for a special prayer to publish along with this text...he says that there is no special prayer. He says that \"we don\'t want this to be special.\" Rather, he asks that everyone understand that anybody can do what we are doing, and that is the beauty of it. Corbin says, \"everyone is welcome to join the circle.\" Fenton Lake State Park, New Mexico. Our spiritual family is on its road between Los Alamos and the Nevada Test Site. We are passing through four states to bring awareness of the nuclear tragedy from its beginnings in the uranium mines to its end at Mercury, Nevada, where it is exploded as plutonium. This morning an eagle disappears over the canyon wall as Gilbert Sanchez, our Tewa spiritual guide, calls to her as a friend and fellow being...The Family Spirit Walk is in the heart of Pueblo sacred land after several weeks of hard foot travel. My name is Daniel Peacewalker. I am part of this spiritual family, continuing the dream journey that began long ago in childhood, when stories of sacred quests and pilgrimages devoured my waking hours; when in my soul was cultivated the deep desire to be free and unfettered on a quest, in the company of those who shared my dream and vision. This dream is alive and bearing fruit today as Gilbert calls to the eagle. Throughout the journey four red-tailed hawks will appear, at spiritually auspicious intervals, to bring us reassurance of our bond to the Creator and to one another...or perhaps it is the same hawk brother that I have yearned to meet since reading the poetry of Robinson Jeffers and travelling to his tower in Carmel, California...Jeffers wrote, \"Give your heart to the hawks, and not to men.\" Perhaps now, I feel that I will be able to give my heart to humanity as well, doing Jeffers honor by going beyond his vision. These winged spiritual guides come from the natural world around us, but they are also expressive of the deep collective womb of our community psyche. They are manifestations of a deep collective hunger which our Creator and the ancestors of these lands recognize and honor in each of us. They provide for our hunger by sending spiritual guides who are here to inspire us to fulfill our mission of peace. The appearances of these creatures are made ever more poignant by their growing scarcity. We see little wildlife on the walk - bands of solitary crows, a few horned toad lizards - once a hummingbird followed us for miles. The rarity of these blessed ones throws their appearances into blazing relief. Could this scarcity be a portent of the suffering psyche of humanity, growing ever more parched and barren, kept alive by the visions of fewer and fewer people? The growing PeaceWalk movement seems to me to be a hopeful sign of the replenishment of humanity\'s collective psychology. It is a sign that a quantum leap of spiritual evolution is trembling in the balance, ready to explode in a blaze of light! As we walk, it becomes clear to me that a great part of our mission is to share our collective pool of dream, to nourish this psyche of Turtle Island...in my belief the spiritual life of the world is imperiled but not terminally ill, only needing to be stimulated from its lethargy and awakened to the fact that it is under the influence of misdirected leaders. The world needs to be directed toward a healthy spiritual destiny, a common dream of \"living in a good way\", as the tribal elders say. As I write this, the Family Spirit Walk has come to a fine conclusion at the Nevada Test Site with sacred ceremony, nonviolent training, and courageous direct action. In retrospect, what we perceived on the Walk as \"errors\" were only human steps, made in earnest sincerity. All those many thousand spiritual steps! In my belief every single walker succeeded in their commitment to that Good Red Road. I was proud beyond measure to have been in the company of the Family Spirit Walk. ***************************************************************** 45 UK: This time I'm scared Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Comment US propaganda fuelled the first Gulf war. It will fuel this one too - and the risks are even greater Maggie O'Kane Thursday December 5, 2002 The Guardian [http://www.guardian.co.uk] I have a picture from the last Gulf war. It was taken in the basement of the Al Rashid hotel, the night the war started. The look on my face is one you might expect of a 28-year-old reporter at the centre of one of the biggest stories of my lifetime: earnest, excited and thrilled to be in Baghdad. Eleven years later, I'm on maternity leave and the news of an impending second Gulf war follows me around the kitchen. This time, I feel only a sense of intense danger as the Middle East lurches towards a possible chemical and biological war. The chances of Saddam Hussein using chemical and biological weapons if attacked are, according to the testimony of the CIA to the US Senate intelligence committee on October 7, "pretty high" - a scenario that even one of greatest hawks in US history, Brent Scowcroft, former national security adviser to George Bush senior, says would lead to meltdown in the Middle East. As of December 7, when Iraq is expected to produce its definitive dossier, there should be no illusions: no matter what Baghdad discloses, America and almost certainly Britain are going to war. The "material breach", if it does not happen by itself, will be manufactured, so wringing consent for the second Gulf war just as consent was manufactured with breathtaking cynicism in 1991. There were two glaring examples of how the propaganda machine worked before the first Gulf war. First, in the final days before the war started on January 9, the Pentagon insisted that not only was Saddam Hussein not withdrawing from Kuwait - he was - but that he had 265,000 troops poised in the desert to pounce on Saudi Arabia. The Pentagon claimed to have satellite photographs to prove it. Thus, the waverers and anti-war protesters were silenced. We now know from declassified documents and satellite photographs taken by a Russian commercial satellite that there were no Iraqi troops poised to attack Saudi. At the time, no one bothered to ask for proof. No one except Jean Heller, a five-times nominated Pulitzer prize-winning journalist from the St Petersburg Times in Florida, who persuaded her bosses to buy two photos at $1,600 each from the Russian commercial satellite, the Soyuz Karta. Guess what? No massing troops. "You could see the planes sitting wing tip to wing tip in Riyadh airport," Ms Heller says, "but there wasn't was any sign of a quarter of a million Iraqi troops sitting in the middle of the desert." So what will the fake satellite pictures show this time: a massive chemical installation with Iraqi goblins cooking up anthrax? The US propaganda machine is already gearing up. In its sights already is Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector. He's too much of a softie for Saddam, the former CIA director James Wolsey told the Today programme last week. His work is of "limited value". He was Kofi Annan's "second choice". What next? Blix's granny is Iraqi? He has a drugs problem? Meanwhile, in Britain, Jack Straw's new human rights dossier on Iraq is timed to coincide with the build-up. Convenient, eh? The second tactic used to get consensus for war in 1991 was another propaganda classic: dead babies. Then, the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington, Nijirah al-Sabah, tearfully described how, as a volunteer in the Al Adnan hospital in Kuwait City, she had watched Iraqi soldiers looting incubators to take back to Baghdad, pitching the Kuwaiti babies on to "the cold floor to die". Except it never happened. The Filipina nurses, Frieda Construe-Nag and Myra Ancog Cooke, who worked in the maternity ward of the Al Adnan hospital, had never seen Ms al-Sabah in their lives. Amnesty admitted they had been duped. Middle East Watch confirmed the fabrication, but it was too late: a marginal US congress had been swung to vote for war. George Bush senior mentioned the "incubator babies" seven times in pre-war rallying speeches. It was months before the truth came out. By then, the war was over. This time, we have yet to see what propaganda will be used to rally consensus for the second Gulf war by proving a "material breach". It is highly likely that Saddam Hussein maintains at least some chemical and biological capacity. In a war in which his own survival is unlikely (and already rumoured to be ill with cancer) Saddam Hussein has nothing to lose. If he knows his fall is imminent, what terrible legacy might he choose to leave behind? What better present to his extremist Arab brothers than an attack on Israel? And how will the US, Britain or Israel respond if their troops or cities come under chemical or biological attack? In 1995, the Washington-based Defense News reported on the outcome of the then highly classified Global 95 Wargame, a high-level military exercise enacted at the US Naval War college. Global 95 played out a simultaneous threat from North Korea and Iraq. The North Korean situation was diffused, but Iraq attacked US troops in the region with biological weapons. Washington replied with a nuclear bomb on Baghdad. The main observation during the Global 95 experiment was just how quickly the situation escalated. But the greatest irony, and most important issue, is that although the war on Iraq may indeed get George Bush re-elected, it will not win the war on terrorism. It will instead fuel it. In 1998, I spent an afternoon with Abu Ziad, an elderly accountant in Baghdad. He recounted how, at 2am on February 13, 1991, two bombs had hit the Amiryia bomb shelter near his home. The first pierced the roof, slicing into the central heating tank and sending gallons of boiling water pouring over the women and children below. The second bomb, 15 minutes later, exploded with such force that he never had the chance to identify the bodies of his wife and four of their five children: Zena,14, Fuad, 12, Lena, seven and Sadaad, six. He remembers standing outside the shelter in the early morning and noticing the ankles of dead women and children marked by the red hot mattress springs they had fought to climb over to get out of the shelter before the second bomb dropped. The Abu Ziads of the second Gulf war will be seen on al-Jazeera TV giving their heartbreaking testimony to a new generation of disaffected and dispossessed young Muslim men from Palestine, Indonesia, the Middle East and Africa. And we can all hear the death chant of a hundred suicide bombers: Allahu Akbar. It's a high price to pay for another four years in the White House. I am not some naive pacifist. I supported intervention in Bosnia, the war in Kosovo and military intervention in East Timor. Baghdad is a city where terror hangs in the air in every home. Iraqis literally dare not speak Saddam Hussein's name. But now he is cornered, dangerous and possibly dying. Provoking him is criminally irresponsible and provoking him in order to secure a second presidential term is unforgivable. Remember the words of JFK to his brother Bobby, spoken in the ante-room of the Oval Office the night before the Cuban missile crisis, now declassified. "I have to do it, Bobby," said John Kennedy, explaining why he was facing up to the Soviets. "I'll lose the presidency if I don't." Krushchev had a way out. He ordered the Soviet ships to turn around. What would have happened if he had nowhere to turn? · Maggie O'Kane is editorial director of GuardianFilms. She was named European Journalist of the Year this week for its first documentary, Looking for Karadzic. maggie.okane@guardian.co.uk [maggie.okane@guardian.co.uk] Useful links Arab Gateway: Iraq briefing [http://www.al-bab.com/arab/countries/iraq.htm] Middle East Daily [http://www.middleeastdaily.com/] Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq [http://www.cam.ac.uk/societies/casi/] Iraq sanctions - UN security council [http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/sanction/indexone.htm] UN special commission on Iraq [http://www.un.org/Depts/unscom/index.html] Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002 ***************************************************************** 46 Adversity fails to shake Pyongyang nuclear plans - DEC 7, 2002 Despite growing starvation it will use its weapons programme as a bargaining chip, says expert By Lara Parpan NEW YORK - Increasing starvation amid a harsh winter and the condemnation of countries that were once willing to engage North Korea, are doing little to force Pyongyang to give up its bargaining leverage - its nuclear weapons programme. This month will prove to be a trying month for the totalitarian country. The United States is suspending fuel oil shipments, a punitive response to North Korea's violation of a 1994 agreement prohibiting the development of nuclear weapons. Japan is hesitant to give more aid following the public backlash over the abduction of its nationals by North Korea. South Korea, whose leader stands by his 'sunshine' engagement with the North, is in the midst of a presidential election campaign. The two presidential front-runners are divided on how to contain the North's nuclear ambitions. 'North Korea right now is in a very scary and precarious situation,' Mr Han S. Park, Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Issues at the University of Georgia, said in a forum here. But this state of affairs will not force North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons programme, added Mr Park, a scholar who has facilitated contacts between US and North Korean officials. 'I don't think North Korea will give in because this means it is giving up its bargaining chip,' he said. During a meeting with North Korean diplomats here earlier this week, Mr Park said the diplomats thought it was 'comical' that Washington expected Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons programme. On Thursday, North Korea also rejected a call by the UN nuclear monitoring agency for the communist country to abandon its nuclear weapons programme and allow foreign inspections. 'I don't know to what extent Washington is willing to negotiate,' he said. 'But we can't rule out that North Korea will flatly reject any demands by the US if there are no negotiations taking broader issues into consideration.' He defined these bigger issues as the US agreeing to a non-aggression treaty and the 37,000 American troops in South Korea that are arrayed against the North. US President George W. Bush and his administration, while reiterating that there are no intentions of invading North Korea, have also rejected negotiations unless Pyongyang first pledges to dismantle its nuclear weapons programme. But despite the hardline rhetoric of the Bush administration, Washington may come back to the bargaining table with Pyongyang, USA Today reported earlier this week. State Department officials are readying proposals to present to North Korea, should it renew its pledge to end its nuclear programme, the report added. The proposals are for additional food and fuel to the country, and ways to verify an end of its nuclear programme. Mr Park does not support North Korea's possession of nuclear weapons. But 'it is important for us to empathise with North Korea'. Granting North Korea's demand for a non-aggression treaty with the US will allow Pyongyang to divert its spending on its military to end years of famine. Republican lawmaker Richard Lugar, who will head the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the new Congress, has said that he will press for continued engagement with North Korea. The Straight Times ***************************************************************** 47 Ritter flays U.S. policy on Iraq [deseretnews.com] Saturday, December 7, 2002 By Larry Weist Deseret News staff writer What does the United States hope to gain by eliminating Saddam Hussein and forcing a regime change in Iraq? Scott Ritter, the former chief U.N. weapons inspector, talks with reporters at the U. Ritter believes that Saddam would turn a U.S. attack into a recruiting tool. Jason Olson, Deseret News Simply getting rid of Saddam Hussein, who President George Bush Sr. unfortunately equated with Adolf Hitler in 1991, said former U.N. chief weapons inspector Scott Ritter. That bit of verbiage has boxed America into a corner that will not allow a diplomatic resolution to the current problems with Iraq, Ritter told an audience in Salt Lake City Friday. "He (Saddam) is not a threat, but he is a thorn in our side," said Ritter, a former Marine major who spent seven years inspecting Iraq for illegal weapons. He spoke to a crowd at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts and lambasted the current U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Ritter, called an "unlikely peacenik" by The New York Times, is taking his message that a war with Iraq is unnecessary across the country to college campuses and other groups with a warning the United States is losing the war on terror and that an attack on Iraq will be the biggest recruiting tool Saddam could have. A darker message he gives is that a trumped-up war is an excuse to put into place a new imperial policy by President George W. Bush. Such a policy, Ritter said, is designed to exert America's influence and make sure the country is the only superpower in the world, both economically and militarily. Such a policy, formulated by administration officials, including Vice President Cheney, is opposite of what American colonists fought against 220 years ago, he said. Although he has been labeled a traitor by some in the Bush administration, Ritter said he is a patriot who rejects unilateral actions that are baseless and would serve only to further harm America's standing in Europe and the Arab world. Speaking out against unjust causes is the mark of a true patriot, he said. "People in uniform are prepared to give their lives to protect you. Every American has an obligation and duty to be sure that the cause soldiers go to is worthy. If you are not ready to die for Iraq, then why are you ready to let others do so?" he asked a cheering audience. "The United States Marine Corps is the most efficient killing machine the world has ever seen. When you unleash the U.S. military on the enemy, they will die. They will be slaughtered. When these Iraqis die, their blood is on your hand. Do you really want war?" he asked. President Bush has no mandate to war with Iraq, Ritter said, as only 17 percent of the voting public agree with a war on Iraq. He roundly criticized Bush's post-9-11 statement to the world that " 'If you're not with us, you're against us.' It's absurd, criminally absurd, to say that you're with us or against us." Ritter also showed a video, "In Shifting Sands," funded by a $400,000 grant from an Iraqi businessman who lives in the United States. E-mail: [lweist@desnews.com] © 2002 Deseret News Publishing Company ***************************************************************** 48 Nuclear expert says plutonium law has loophole AP Wire | 12/07/2002 | [thestate.com - The thestate home page] Posted on Sat, Dec. 07, 2002 Associated Press GREENVILLE, S.C. - A new law that would require the federal government to pay South Carolina fines for failing to remove plutonium from the Savannah River Site near Aiken has a loophole, the president of an anti-nuclear arms group says. The federal government could store its stockpile of surplus plutonium at SRS for more than 700 years without paying any penalties, despite legislation designed to force its removal, said Edwin Lyman, president of the Washington-based Nuclear Control Institute. The law allows the U.S. Energy Department to use a small amount of its 34 metric tons of surplus weapons-grade plutonium each year in a program to make commercial nuclear reactor fuel called mixed-oxide, or MOX. The legislation spells out how much of the MOX fuel must be produced, and not how much plutonium must be consumed in the process, Lyman said. It takes 44 kilograms of plutonium to make a ton of MOX. U.S. Sen.-elect and U.S. Rep. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Saturday he wrote the bill to provide the state with some protection should the federal government fail to build the MOX facility at SRS. The "purpose was to make sure South Carolina did not receive the plutonium without a pathway out," Graham said. "My concern was that we would receive the material and the federal government would not build the MOX facility." The MOX program is designed to dispose of U.S. weapons-grade plutonium by converting it into fuel for nuclear power plants. Russia has agreed to dispose of the same amount of its surplus plutonium using a similar program. Graham said his hope would be that the facility would process even more material than is currently at SRS because that would limit the amount of weapons-grade plutonium out in the world. The legislation came after Democratic Gov. Jim Hodges threatened to block plutonium shipments if the government did not commit to a legally enforceable agreement to remove the processed material. Hodges said earlier this year that the law did not go far enough to protect the state. A U.S. District Court judge in June rejected Hodges' attempt to stop the shipments, an order Hodges has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Morton Brilliant, a spokesman for Hodges, compared the new law to requiring a man who dumps a large amount of trash on his neighbor's lawn to remove it at a rate of one soda can per decade. "That's about what it's saying," he said. Joe Davis, a spokesman for the Energy Department, could not be reached Friday by The Greenville News. President Bush signed the legislation into law on Monday. The law requires that if the program does not meet its one-ton goal by 2009, the agency must produce a ton within two years or remove one ton of plutonium from the state. If the department does not produce one ton of MOX, the state can collect an "impact fee" of $1 million a day, up to $100 million a year until the requirement is met. Lyman's organization favors immobilizing plutonium instead of producing MOX. Immobilization would mix the plutonium with ceramic material forming glass logs that would be stored at the nation's nuclear repository at Yucca Mountain. Information from: The Greenville News SOUTH CAROLINA WIRE UPDATE TheState.com ***************************************************************** 49 CH2M Hill to lead $314M cleanup - 2002-12-06 - The Denver Business Journal Denver-based engineering and construction firm CH2M Hill will collaborate with Boise, Idaho-based Washington Group International Inc. and Canonsburg, Pa.-based BWX Technologies on a $314 million environmental closure contract from the U.S. Department of Energy. The companies will help clean up a former nuclear weapons material processing site in Miamisburg, Ohio. A division of CH2M Hill will lead the project with Washington Group and BWX Technologies acting as integrated partners. Work is scheduled to begin Jan. 1. The contract calls for the demolition of 66 facilities, including the removal of all above-ground utilities and structures. Nine buildings will be transferred to the city of Miamisburg for an industrial park. All hazardous and radioactive waste will be processed and shipped offsite. The work is scheduled to be completed by March 31, 2006. companies. [http://www.bizjournals.com/account/search_watch/] ***************************************************************** 50 Court Halts Suit Vs. Cheney Task Force BY PETE YOST Associated Press Writer December 6, 2002, 7:26 PM EST WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration succeeded Friday in temporarily stopping a lawsuit seeking documents about the inner workings of Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force and its meetings with industry executives and lobbyists. A federal appeals court indefinitely delayed Monday's deadline for the White House to produce task force documents or provide a detailed list of the documents it is withholding. The two-page order said the court will schedule a date for arguments on whether to step into the case and consider the administration's request to put a halt to producing documents and providing testimony. Two private groups, Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club, have sued, demanding the task force reveal documents about its meetings with industry representatives in formulating a plan that calls for expanded oil and gas drilling on public land and easing regulatory barriers to building nuclear power plants. Government lawyers have argued the documents should be withheld because they are part of the deliberative process. U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan originally sought the documents by Nov. 5, but extended the deadline. The administration has been trying to persuade Sullivan to allow it to appeal his order to produce the documents. But Sullivan has said the administration has not shown adequate reason why he should turn the case over to the appeals court before a final judgment. So the government is asking the appeals court for a writ of mandamus to consider the case. Separately, the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, is asking the task force to publicly release information about its meetings with industry executives and lobbyists. U.S. District Judge John Bates is considering the administration's motion to dismiss the GAO lawsuit as well. In courtroom arguments in September, Deputy Solicitor General Paul Clement said Congress has ways to seek the information other than relying on the GAO. Congress could subpoena them or seek information through the appropriations process, said Clement. Carter Phillips, an attorney representing the comptroller general, argued that dismissing the case, as Cheney's attorney asked, would impede the GAO's ability to do its work as the investigative agency of Congress. Copyright © 2002, The Associated Press Copyright © Newsday, Inc. Produced by Newsday Electronic Publishing. ***************************************************************** 51 Canada Book Review: When Smoke Ran Like Water* The Globe and Mail /globeandmail.com Saturday, December 7, 2002 ? Page D21 By Devra Davis HarperCollins, 316 pages, $39.50 In 1948, a smoky cloud descended on the steel mills and zinc works of Donora, Penn. The inversion made it impossible for workers to see across the street or even catch a glimpse of the town's smokestacks. In the darkness, fluoride and sulfur gases efficiently reduced people's lungs to a bloody pulp. In three days, 18 people died: All were down-winders. After the inversion lifted, another 50 died. Hundreds more finished the rest of their lives with damaged lungs and hearts. But another 40 years would pass before the whole truth about Donora's bad air made public-health history. Devra Davis, one of the world's most forthright epidemiologists, grew up in Donora and never forgot the the experience. In fact, she has spent most of her adult life exposing deception and denial in industry with all the outrage and passion of a /midrash /storyteller. So reader beware: Davis is a refreshing public-health crusader who doesn't believe that government should wait for piles of dead bodies or wards of ill people before acting on toxic air. Her explosive and powerful book, /When Smoke Ran Like Water/, is probably the most readable exposé of the hidden costs of pollution since /Silent Spring/. Like Rachel Carson's barn-burner, it's chock full of square science, damning details and arresting tales involving immoral lawyers, quisling researchers and infertile males. Davis begins her compelling tale with a graphic and personal description of Donora's undoing and official attempts to keep it quiet. She then revisits the London killer smog of 1952 (more than 7,000 died) to show how the government of Harold Macmillan, hobbled by an economic reliance on domestic coal, lied like hell and attributed the deaths to influenza. In fact, speaking the truth about bad air has never been a popular activity. Consider the remarkable career of Mary Amdur, the mother of modern toxicology. Like Davis, she had first-hand knowledge of pollution: Her father, a Donora worker, died of lung cancer at the age of 40. The trailblazing Amdur developed a test for exposing guinea pigs to sulfur mists, proving that low doses -- even one 10th of a lethal amount -- could cause irreparable damage such as heart disease or asthma. She followed up that unwelcome study with a test to measure low levels of lead in the atmosphere. In 1923, the auto industry came up with the bright idea of adding lead to gasoline, billing it as an economy booster. Amdur's research proved the industry was . . . well, assaulting the brains of children. For her pioneering efforts, Amdur was denied tenure at every major U.S. public-health school. Even The Lancet caved in to political pressure and refused to publish her research. As Davis notes, she ended her career "the loneliest of long-distance runners." Yet everything she studied has been validated a hundred times over. And when industry finally removed lead from our gasoline, guess what: The economy did not collapse. Davis does an excellent job of exposing the game that industry and government play to avoid being accountable for killing people. As soon as good science implicates a toxin, industry pays experts to delay and block studies. The car industry did this with emission standards (Lee Iacocca threatened to shut down the industry) and the oil and gas industry has played the game with sour gas and Kyoto. Davis notes: "The effort to establish the science of environmental epidemiology has been plagued by a sophisticated and completely legal disinformation campaign, the full extent of which is not appreciated even by those who have been its chief victims." Halfway into her book, Davis calculates the cost of inaction on public-health air-pollution studies, and wonders why government won't use them to make decisions about public transport, light, heat and energy. If industry had just used clean-air technology available in the 1980s, she reckons, more than a million North Americans would have been spared early deaths. "How much expense, how many missed quarterly profit projections, how many inconvenienced or even downright angry lobbyists are a million lives worth?" Her chapter on breast cancer is equally damning. Nearly 40 years ago, it afflicted one in 40 women. Today the figure is one is eight. The one common link appears to be a greater exposure to hormones or chemicals that mimic hormones. The crap in nail polish (phlthalates) behaves like estrogen and can trick the body into early puberty. Hair products used by African-American women may explain why half of all black girls develop breasts by the age of 8 -- something unheard of in Africa. Neighbourhoods with high rates of breast cancer also tend to use twice as many pesticides around their homes. To Davis, the key question stills remains unanswered: "What avoidable factors cause 19 out of 20 cases of the disease?" Nor does Davis ignore pollution's ball-breaking legacy for men: a 50-per-cent increase in testicular cancer and a sharp rise in infertility. Meanwhile, the size of testes and trends in male sex ratios are all pointing down. Add to this grim picture rampant sexual confusion in male fish and bears (one out of every 100 polar bears is now hermaphroditic). Not surprisingly, Davis wonders if men aren't becoming canaries in the mine of reproductive health. The people who should read this book (anti-Kyoto fanatics such as Gwyn Morgan and Ralph Klein quickly come to mind) probably won't. They don't understand that emission reductions are as apple pie as debt reductions. But for fresh-air lovers, Davis's troubling book will stand as a stark reminder that the right to search for truth in a world warped by industrial and political lies is never easy. Or quick. /Contributing reviewer Andrew Nikiforuk recently won the Governor-General's Award for non-fiction for his industrial crime thriller /Saboteurs: Wiebo Ludwig's War Against Big Oil/./ /He lives in Calgary./ © 2002 Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 52 Researchers Make the Best Argument Yet That Neutrinos Are Capable of Changing Form The New York Times *December 7, 2002* *By GEORGE JOHNSON* Measurements by an underground laboratory in Japan may have put to rest a longstanding mystery of solar physics, an international team of scientists announced yesterday. In a paper submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters, the researchers make the most persuasive case yet that particles called neutrinos ? wisps of near nothingness that course from the sun ? are capable of changing identity in midflight. This would solve what has become enshrined in physics as "the solar neutrino problem" ? why the sun appears to emit only a portion of the number of neutrinos that theory predicts it should. Neutrinos come in three types, or "flavors," and scientists say they believe that some of the particles are transformed in their journey to Earth, eluding the electronic detectors. "This replaces the solar neutrino problem with the solar neutrino opportunity," said Dr. John Bahcall, a theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. With the paradox all but resolved, Dr. Bahcall said, scientists can try for a deeper understanding of matter. The experiment at the Kamioka Underground Laboratory, built in a mine near Toyama, an industrial city, also confirms that neutrinos, long thought to be weightless, have a tiny bit of mass. Otherwise, theory holds, they would not be capable of changing form, called oscillation. "These results make the case for neutrino mass and neutrino oscillations seemingly inescapable," said Dr. John G. Learned, a physicist at the University of Hawaii who was a member of the international team. Experiments like these are conducted in caverns to shield the detectors from everything except the penetrating neutrino rays, which pass easily through rock. The results, achieved with a highly sensitive instrument called the Kamioka Liquid Scintillator Anti-Neutrino Detector are more an encouragement than a surprise. Experiments in 2001 and 2002 at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, at the bottom of a Canadian nickel mine, found strong evidence that neutrinos from the sun change flavor. The Japanese experiment suggests that solar neutrinos are not special. Nuclear reactors nearby in Japan and in South Korea also throw off torrents of neutrinos, and researchers found the same discrepancy: fewer produced than theory predicts ? implying change in transit. With solar and terrestrial neutrinos acting the same way, theorists are more comfortable that the Sudbury results were not a fluke of solar physics. "This should convince even the most skeptical laboratory physicist that we understand the solar neutrino beam as well as we understand the beams created in laboratory accelerators," Dr. Bahcall said. Now that researchers are reasonably sure that neutrinos have mass, theorists must explain why. The reigning theory of matter, called the standard model, cannot explain why any particles have the masses they have. Theorists hope the new information will help refine the model. More than 90 scientists collaborated in the experiment. They were from Tohoku University in Japan, the University of Alabama, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, the University of California at Berkeley, the California Institute of Technology, Drexel University in Philadelphia, the University of Hawaii, Louisiana State University, the University of New Mexico, Stanford University, the University of Tennessee, Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory in North Carolina and the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing. Copyright The New York Times Company ***************************************************************** 53 WNA NEWS BRIEFING 02.49 | 29 November - 3 December 2002 News Briefings are a weekly news update, prepared by the WNA, on all aspects of the nuclear energy industry. A weekly summary of international news relevant to the nuclear energy industry. [NB02.49-1] UK: As expected, the European Commission (EC) approved the 650 million UK pound (US$1022 million) emergency loan facility from the UK government to British Energy (BE), as well as raising the ceiling for any further aid to 1.1 billion UK pounds (US$1.7 billion). Some 899 million UK pounds (US$1.4 billion) would be used to keep the business afloat to allow a financial restructuring to be negotiated and a further 276 million UK pounds (US$430 million) to cover unspecified 'contingencies'. The aid must be repaid with interest within one year. (Nuclear Market Review, 30 November, p3; Daily Telegraph, 28 November, p37) The UK government, in addition to extending its existing 650 million UK pound loan facility to BE until 9 March 2003, has proposed a 'solvent restructuring' of BE's debt and making ongoing payments which will partly compensate for the public policy costs (reprocessing and climate change levy) which BE is saddled with. In a debt-for-equity swap, BE's creditors will be given shares of the company's stock as well as new bonds in order to repay BE's debt. Under the plan, creditors could lose 70% of the value of their investments, and current stockholders could end up owning only 5% or 10% of BE, as their shares would be diluted by the swap. BNFL will also reduce its annual bill to BE for reprocessing services by about 120 million UK pounds (US$187 million). The government will pay a further 150-200 million UK pounds annually for about 10 years in order to help BE meet its nuclear liabilities. In return, BE commits to pay into a government-controlled fund 20 million UK pounds (US$31 million) per year plus 65% of its available cash. The plan also requires selling BE's interests in Bruce Power in Canada and AmerGen in the US. BE also announced that Adrian Montague will succeed Robin Jeffrey as chairman. Mr Montague helped take over the UK's bankrupt railtrack system. (NucNet Business News, 91/02, 28 November; Ux Weekly, 2 December, p4; see also News Briefing 02.48-2) [NB02.49-2] France: Westinghouse Electric Co has won a contract to provide nuclear fuel to Electricite de France (EdF) to use in its nuclear power plants throughout France. The contract will give Westinghouse the opportunity to provide up to 20% of EdF's total nuclear fuel requirements over several years and is part of EdF's programme to fulfill European Commission (EC) directives regarding international competition within the French nuclear market. Westinghouse, through the European Fuel Group, will manufacture the fuel assemblies at its existing facility in Vasteras, Sweden and at the ENUSA plant in Juzbado, Spain. Most components will be manufactured in the US at the Westinghouse fuel fabrication facility in Columbia, SC, with others originating from the Westinghouse specialty metals plant in Blairsville, Pa. Conversion services will be provided by the Westinghouse Springfields facility near Preston, UK. (BNFL, 27 November) [NB02.49-3] Netherlands: The government confirmed that it will not challenge the latest court ruling in favour of continued operation of the Borssele nuclear power plant. The former Dutch government had sought to shut down the plant at the end of 2003. A request by the Dutch Green Party for a further appeal was rejected by the Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and Environment (VROM). The 449 MWe PWR can now continue operating until at least 2013. (NucNet News, 368/02, 29 November; see also News Briefing 02.42-11) [NB02.49-4] US: The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has approved a 1.4% power uprate at Entergy's Indian Point-3 nuclear power reactor. The uprate - to be implemented in mid-December - will increase the PWR's generating capacity from 1027 MWe to 1041 MWe. (Nuclear Market Review, 30 November, p4; Ux Weekly, 2 December, p3) [NB02.49-5] Japan: Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) is seeking permission to restart eight of the nine reactors that are currently offline for inspections. The company hopes to restart the units in December, after it submits the final report of its internal investigation into data falsification incidents. However, public and local government opposition to restarting the reactors is high. By early February 2003, four more TEPCO units are scheduled to go offline and another two reactors could also be shutdown for maintenance. (Ux Weekly, 2 December, p4; see also News Briefing 02.48-8) [NB02.49-6] France: Electricite de France (EDF) dismissed reports in the French media that it has been decided to site a European Pressurised Water Reactor (EPR) at the Penly nuclear power plant in northern France. EDF said that 'absolutely no' decision on siting the EPR had been made. (NucNet News, 371/02, 2 December; see also News Briefing 01.09-3) [NB02.49-7] Turkey: Plans to revive a project to construct a nuclear power plant have been announced by the trade and industry minister, Ali Coskun. He did not give a timetable for the plant's construction, but said that the government had decided to resume plans to build a nuclear plant in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to provide more diversity of electricity supply. Plans to build a plant at Akkuya Bay were suspended by the previous government in 2000. (Ux Weekly, 2 December, p5; see also News Briefing 00.30-2) [NB02.49-8] China: The reactor vessel for the Tianwan-2 nuclear power reactor has started its journey from the Izhora manufacturing plant at St Petersburg, Russia. The shipment comes earlier than expected due to a request from the Chinese to accelerate the manufacture of the unit 'by about a month'. (NucNet News, 373/02, 3 December; see also News Briefing 02.29-11) [NB02.49-9] Israel is planning to build a US$2 billion commercial nuclear power reactor near the site of a research reactor in Dimona, according to interior ministry spokesman Avi Lerner. A feasibility study will be conducted to evaluate financial and safety considerations, before the plans are finalized. Construction should begin in 2010, with commercial operation expected to start in 2020. (Ux Weekly, 2 December, p5; see also News Briefing 00.21-20) [NB02.49-10] US: The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is revising its regulations on decommissioning trust provisions for commercial nuclear power plants, and issuing a regulatory guide that could be used by power plant licensees to implement the regulations. The final rule will firstly help safeguard decommissioning trust funds from investment risks; secondly, ensure licensees provide adequate information to the NRC about their trusts; and thirdly, provide safeguards against improper payments from these trusts. The rule requires that decommissioning trust agreements be in an appropriate form to provide greater assurance that adequate amounts of decommissioning funds will be available. The NRC also believes the final rule will help expedite operating licence transfers by providing 'increased regulatory predictability'. (Nuclear Market Review, 30 November, p4; SpentFUEL, 2 December, p2; see also News Briefing 02.02-15) [NB02.49-11] China National Nuclear Corp (CNNC) and the Beijing Research Institute of Uranium Geology have completed the first two boreholes at their selected site for a high-level waste (HLW) repository at Beishan in Gansu province. A third borehole will be sunk in 2003. China will select a candidate site in 2005 to host an HLW underground laboratory. According to official Chinese policy, the estimated 2000 tonnes of spent fuel that China's power reactors will have generated by 2015 will be reprocessed and the waste vitrified. By 2040, China expects to have a deep-geologic repository at Beishan licensed and ready to operate, assuming that evaluation continues to demonstrate the suitability of the site. (Nuclear Fuel, 25 November, p4) [NB02.49-12] Switzerland: The government will provide part insurance cover of some SFr500 million (US$337 million) to the country's five nuclear power plants in the event of a terrorist attack with effect from 1 January 2003. The move follows a request from the Swiss pool of private nuclear insurers, which recently told the department of energy (BFE) that they are 'no longer in a position' to provide insurance cover of up to SFr1 billion (US$674 million) in total for nuclear facilities in the event of a terrorist attack due to a lack of funds. (NucNet News, 372/02, 2 December) [NB02.49-13] Ukraine: Serhiy Yermilov has been re-appointed minister of fuel and energy. He takes over from Vitaliy Haiduk, who has been appointed deputy prime minister. Mr Yermilov was briefly energy minister between 2000 and 2001. (NucNet News, 375/02, 3 December) [NB02.49-14] US: USEC will offer a voluntary early retirement programme to eligible staff at its Paducah enrichment plant in Kentucky. The programme is part of a cost reduction initiative to reduce the number of employees at the plant by 200 during 2003. If an insufficient number of eligible staff take up the programme, it will then be offered to those not currently eligible (based on age and years of service). Thereafter, the company would introduce an 'involuntary programme' in order to reach its objective. (NucNet Business News, 89/02, 27 November; Nuclear Market Review, 30 November, p3; FreshFUEL, 2 December, p3; see also News Briefing 00.06-3) [NB02.49-15] The Ukrainian state nuclear regulatory committee (SNRCU) has become the country's executive body of nuclear energy regulation and radiation protection following the passing of a new law by the parliament. The law provides a legal basis for the SNRCU's activities. (NucNet News, 369/02, 29 November; see also News Briefing 00.50-2) [NB02.49-16] Australia: WMC Ltd shareholders approved its demerger plan - which will split the company into two separate listed companies, Alumina Ltd and WMC Resources Ltd - at a meeting on 29 November. On 2 December, the plan won final approval from the Supreme Court of Victoria. The demerger will go into effect on 11 December, although WMC Resources will start trading on a deferred basis on 4 December. Normal trading of WMC Resources shares is expected to begin on 19 December. (WMC, 2 November; Nuclear Market Review, 30 November, p3; Ux Weekly, 2 December, p3; see also News Briefing 02.44-4) Previous News Briefing NB02.48 ***************************************************************** 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: *****************************************************************