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04/12/02 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 10.93
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NUCLEAR POLICY
1 US: Report cites $54 billion in wasteful anti-environmental govt.
2 US: Moderator shuts down nuclear debate
3 RU: Activists: No Nuclear Imports
4 Russia Offers Vietnam Nuclear Plant
5 US: South Carolina Battles U.S. on Plutonium
6 US: Nuclear fix's cost hiked by millions
7 US: N-Plants Still Lack Security
8 Bulgarians demonstrate for nuclear power
9 US: Report cites $54 billion in wasteful U.S. government projects
NUCLEAR REACTORS
10 US: NRC to Meet with Company to Discuss Nine Mile Point Performance
11 US: Energy NW errors rose in '01
12 US: San Onofre Nuclear plant remains safe despite two security breac
13 US: Security upgrades at nuclear plants are behind schedule
14 Belarus to Blackburn: that's the aim of a 'friend' of Chernobyl chil
15 Belarus reports high incidence of thyroid cancer
NUCLEAR SAFETY
16 East Anglian troops find nuclear haul
17 Radioactive equipment found in Kabul
NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE
18 US: Judge won't rule on wisdom of N-waste facility
19 US: Judge hears nuclear storage case
20 US: Cotter won't give up on plans for radioactive dirt
21 US: Feds OK shipments from Flats
22 US: Nuclear waste bound for Yucca could cross much of California
23 US: Yucca: Of course they don't want it
24 US: Nevada files lawsuit against the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
25 US: Congressional hearing moved up to beat speedy Yucca vote
26 US: Standoff Over Plutonium Shipments
27 US: Security rests with Yucca Mountain
28 US: California route is a possibility for Yucca waste
29 US: Nye County needs to get the word out about Yucca location -
30 US: NRC hearing outlines transportation issues -
31 US: LETTERS: Yucca coverage Unbalanced
32 US: Yucca opposition expands litigation
33 US: Yucca: Ensign goes door-to-door to lobby fellow Republicans
34 US: N.B. to probe possible nuclear waste violation
35 US: Nevada files suit on new Yucca rules
36 US: Nevada's anti-Yucca fight turns green
37 US: Editorial: Dropping the ball on nuke dump
38 US: Editorial: Nuke waste: Burial not the only answer
39 US: Letter: Build Bush a house next to nuke dump
40 US: Utah N-Waste Ban Argued in U.S. Court
41 US: N.J. Toxic Dirt Coming to Utah
42 US: Mystery barrels unearthed
43 US: Regulators wait to sign off on DOE waste plan
44 US: Project tackles liquid mercury waste
45 State to offer USEC incentives: Paxton
46 US: ENERGY: Safety is the answer
47 US: Yucca Sucks (Too)
48 US: DOE Urges South Carolina Governor Hodges To Sign Plutonium
49 US: Gibbons Commends Transportation Chairman for Leadership on Yucca
50 US: Radioactive waste on rig sparks disposal fears
51 US: Plan takes nuclear waste down I-75
52 US: Unlikely Allies in Nuclear Waste War
53 US: County remains neutral on Yucca
NUCLEAR WEAPONS
54 US: US defence shield may use nuclear missiles in outer space
55 US: US revives cold war nuclear strategy
56 US: WEN HO LEE: VICTIM OR SPY?
57 US: EDITORIAL: America should reconsider its policy on nuclear arms
58 US: Nuclear warheads firm wins UK safety award
US DEPT. OF ENERGY
59 Lawrence Berkeley Lab Scientists Propose New Research Facilities
60 Lab asks judge to review $1 million verdict
61 S.C. objections won't keep Rocky Flats plutonium out, energy czar sa
62 Fluor to lay off 83 this month
63 Manager denies doing wrong
64 Y-12 protesters threatened with federal charges
OTHER NUCLEAR
65 Enron Unit Headed by Army Secretary White Helped Manipulate Californ
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FULL NEWS STORIES
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1 Report cites $54 billion in wasteful anti-environmental govt.
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2002 09:58:44 -0500 (CDT)
Report cites $54 billion in wasteful U.S. government projects
Friday, April 12, 2002 By Reuters
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. government could save $54 billion over five years by
cutting spending for coal and nuclear technologies, road construction in
forests, and more than 70 other programs that are wasteful and damage the
environment, interest groups said Thursday.
The Green Scissors report, issued annually by a coalition of environmental and
consumer groups, urged the government to reduce spending for several
agriculture, energy, public lands, transportation, water, and international
projects and programs.
The report highlighted 10 projects, dubbed as "choice cuts," that the
coalition will target in Congress this year. Coalition members include Friends
of the Earth, Taxpayers for Common Sense, and the U.S. Public Interest
Research Group.
Budget cuts highlighted in the study include:
. Changing the 1872 Mining Law that allows mining companies to remove minerals
from publicly owned lands without paying royalties to the government by
implementing a royalty fee that could raise $394 million over five years.
. Expediting the completion of the Clean Coal Program by stopping projects
that have not yet been started, saving about $253 million. The Green Scissors
report also suggested cutting the Bush administration's $2 billion clean coal
program that offers subsidies to encourage the industry to develop cleaner
burning technologies.
. Eliminating the Nuclear Energy Technologies program and the Department of
Energy's Nuclear Energy Research Initiative and Nuclear Energy Plant
Optimization programs that were created to help improve the use of nuclear
power. Removing these could save more than $252 million during the next five
years.
. Cutting funding for construction, planning, and designing of new roads used
for logging in U.S. forests, saving $312 million over five years.
. Stopping the Yucca Mountain project in Nevada without an independent review.
This will save taxpayers $375 million in fiscal year 2002. President George W.
Bush in February named Yucca Mountain as the permanent federal site to store
tens of thousands of tons of waste from nuclear power plants across the
nation.
Copyright 2002, Reuters
*****************************************************************
2 Moderator shuts down nuclear debate
By Brian Falk
MPG Newspapers
PLYMOUTH (April 11) - A judge could end up deciding the fate of a
town meeting petition that calls for the temporary closure of
Pilgrim nuclear plant.
The petition, sponsored by Precinct 12 representative Bill
Abbott, asks the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the state to
temporarily close Pilgrim, review its security against terrorist
attacks and shut the plant down permanently if its safety cannot
be guaranteed.
As expected, town meeting moderator Steven Triffletti ruled the
petition o ut of order and prevented debate on the issue
Saturday. Triffletti said the petition, which has no binding
authority, is outside the scope of town meeting powers.
Abbott challenged Triffletti's ruling on the floor of town
meeting, arguing that debate on the petition falls within the
broad legislative powers granted to town meeting under the
current charter. He cited previous town meeting votes on
resolutions.
Failing to convince Triffletti, Abbott said Saturday he might
take the issue to sup erior court and ask a judge to overrule the
moderator's decision. But this week, after talking to some of the
200 other residents who signed the petition, Abbott said he
intends to put the decision on hold until after a public forum on
nuclear security scheduled April 21.
"It may or may not be necessary, but we'll wait and see what
happens on the 21st," said Abbott.
Both Abbott and Triffletti are attorneys.
U.S. Rep. Bill Delahunt, D-Mass, is hosting the forum on April 21
at noon in the North High School auditorium. He's invited a panel
of nuclear experts, emergency planners and independent scientists
to discuss security and engage in a question and answer session
with the public.
Triffletti said that forum, not town meeting, is the appropriate
place to address Abbott's petition. Permitting debate on the
petition would also set a bad precedent, according to Triffletti.
"If I were to allow this I would have to allow every other
petitioner resolution that comes before tow n meeting," he told
the representatives on Saturday.
Abbott reminded Triffletti that Plymouth's town meeting debated
and passed non-binding resolutions long before he was elected
moderator in 1993. Resolutions in the 1980s and 1990s included
support for a U.S. Senate bill to make John F. Kennedy's birthday
a national holiday, a recommendation that selectmen terminate a
wharf lease and opposition to putting another airport in town.
"Legislatures and town meetings throughout New England have b een
debating and passing resolutions such as this since the beginning
of the Republic," Abbott told Triffletti.
If the April 21 forum leads to a good public debate, and
residents are able to get their views across to the state's
congressmen, Abbott said he will not pursue the issue in court.
Abbott said it is "very encouraging" that Delahunt has invited
independent scientists, who may disagree with the NRC on plant
security.
Abbott said there are cases where judges have overruled
moderators, but Triffletti said he stands by his decision, and
believes a judge would back him up.
"Both our charter and our state law provide a lot of discretion
for moderators, and that's as it should be," Triffletti said.
"Our legislative body is large and diverse, and there needs to be
an internal arbiter of controversy."
As an opponent of the proposed charter change that would replace
town meeting with a town council, Abbott said he hopes to point
out the strengths of town meeting by challenging T riffletti's
ruling.
"Town meeting should be a vigorous body where things can be
debated, and it's important to fight for the integrity of town
meeting," he said.
"Town meeting is pretty boring if you're just sitting and hearing
warrant article after warrant article," he added.
MPG Newspapers, 9 Long Pond Rd., Plymouth, MA 02360
Telephone: (508) 746-5555
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3 Activists: No Nuclear Imports
[http://www.moscowtimes.ru
Friday, Apr. 12, 2002. Page 3
The Moscow Times
The Nuclear Power Ministry does not intend to import any spent
nuclear fuel this year or in the next few years,
environmentalists said Thursday after a meeting with Nuclear
Power Minister Alexander Rumyantsev.
"The minister said that in the coming years he does not see a
market for the import of spent nuclear fuel," said Ecodefense
co-founder Vladimir Slivyak, who attended the meeting Wednesday
along with representatives of six other environmental groups.
Rumyantsev's remarks appear to contradict earlier ministry
statements that plans were going ahead to import 20,000 tons of
spent nuclear fuel for storage, a scheme it estimated would earn
Russia about $20 billion over 12 years.
President Vladimir Putin signed a controversial bill allowing the
imports last July, despite protests from environmentalists who
warned Russia would be turned into a nuclear dump.
Nuclear Power Ministry officials could not be reached for comment
Thursday.
"Just as we thought, no market for the import of spent nuclear
fuel exists," Slivyak said.
Slivyak also said environmentalists were pleased with their talks
with Rumyantsev, although the meeting took place a year after his
appointment.
"We saw that the minister considers environmentalists to be a
major force that will not allow him to implement many of the
dubious projects thought up by his agency," Slivyak said.
[http://www.moscowtimes.ru
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4 Russia Offers Vietnam Nuclear Plant
www.moscowtimes.ru
Friday, Apr. 12, 2002. Page 5
Reuters
HANOI, Vietnam -- Russia has offered to build Vietnam's first
nuclear power plant, a Russian executive said Thursday, a project
that could take about a decade to complete.
The executive from Atomstroiexport, an affiliate of Nuclear Power
Ministry, said the Russian nuclear experts gave presentations on
Thursday to Vietnamese officials, including some from state
utility Electricity of Vietnam.
The executive, who declined to be identified, said the Vietnamese
audience included officials from the Planning and Investment
Ministry and EVN's Energy Institute, which is in charge of
planning the nuclear plant.
"We are interested in building such a plant in Vietnam and Russia
is ready to do it," the executive said at a business meeting on
the sidelines of an international trade fair in Hanoi.
www.moscowtimes.ru
*****************************************************************
5 South Carolina Battles U.S. on Plutonium
April 12, 2002
By DAVID FIRESTONE
ATLANTA, April 11 — Unable to reach agreement on the future of
plutonium shipments to South Carolina, the governor and the
federal Department of Energy threatened each other today with a
showdown over the processing of nuclear waste that the government
says is vital to national security.
Spencer Abraham, the secretary of energy, sent a letter to the
governor, Jim Hodges, offering a written agreement and new
legislation ensuring that the plutonium would not be permanently
stored in South Carolina after it was processed at the Savannah
River Site in the southern corner of the state.
If the governor cannot accept those promises, Mr. Abraham wrote,
the Energy Department will revoke them on Monday and begin
shipping the waste into South Carolina.
But Governor Hodges said the government had failed to make a
legally binding promise not to store the plutonium in his state,
and he demanded that the two sides get a court order enforcing
the promise. Without an agreement that the promise was
enforceable in court, he said at a news conference today, he will
physically prevent the Energy Department's trucks from rolling
over the state line.
"We want to make sure South Carolina has the legal tools
available to make sure the government keeps its promises," Mr.
Hodges told reporters today. "There will be no plutonium
shipments until they do so."
The 34 metric tons of plutonium under debate was left from the
production of nuclear weapons, and much of it is stored at the
defunct Rocky Flats Arsenal in Colorado, which is scheduled to be
dismantled by 2006.
In 1996, in an effort to prevent the plutonium from falling into
the wrong hands, the United States and Russia agreed to take
equal amounts of plutonium out of their nuclear stockpiles, and
the government plans to convert the material to fuel for nuclear
power plants at the South Carolina site and then distribute it to
nuclear plants around the country. (The fuel cannot be used for
weapons.) In his letter, Mr. Abraham committed the federal
government to processing and removing the fuel, or removing the
plutonium if for any reason it could not be processed. He offered
to submit legislation to Congress that would guarantee such a
removal, and said the government would stop shipping plutonium if
the legislation was not passed by Oct. 15.
"I believe we have gone to extraordinary lengths to endeavor to
accommodate your concerns on every point," the secretary said in
his letter. Any further delay, he said, would undermine the
disposal agreement with Russia and would jeopardize other cleanup
efforts around the nation, including the timely closure of Rocky
Flats.
The governor responded that he would accept Mr. Abraham's terms
only if they were entered into an order in Federal District
Court. Otherwise, he said, a new administration or a new Congress
could change its mind down the road and leave South Carolina
holding the nuclear waste that no other state wants. But the
Energy Department said that a matter of national policy could not
be left up to the courts.
Clearly political considerations are part of the dispute. Mr.
Hodges is a Democrat and will win points in his state for
standing up to Washington, while Republicans in South Carolina
are backing the Bush administration and saying it has made a
good-faith offer.
But underlying the politics is a familiar issue of national
policy regarding which state will have to accept nuclear waste.
Colorado wants to see Rocky Flats dismantled, and Senator Wayne
Allard, a Republican from the state, accused Governor Hodges this
week of endangering national security by playing politics with
the shipments. Nevada officials are bitterly fighting the Bush
administration's plan to store wastes in Yucca Mountain.
Turning the plutonium into nuclear fuel will solve part of the
disposal problem, but Mr. Hodges made it clear this week that he
was not willing to put his trust in the promise of such
technology.
Officials predicted today that the situation would be resolved
short of a border confrontation, but both sides remember that
Idaho stopped incoming shipments of waste in 1988 using the state
police.
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company | Privacy
*****************************************************************
6 Nuclear fix's cost hiked by millions
Beacon Journal | 04/11/2002 |
[http://www.ohio.com] [Ohio Photos]
Engineering costs push FirstEnergy's estimate to at least $16 million
By Jim Mackinnon
Beacon Journal business writer
ROCKVILLE, MD. - FirstEnergy's groundbreaking attempt at
high-tech dentistry to fill a cavity in its damaged Davis-Besse
nuclear plant will cost at least $16 million, $6 million more
than its previous highest estimates, the company said yesterday.
It's possible the cost will exceed $20 million, a FirstEnergy
executive said yesterday in a meeting with Nuclear Regulatory
Commission officials. Increased engineering costs were the
biggest reason for the higher estimates, the company said.
Fixing the plant looks to be a complicated process, based on the
preliminary information FirstEnergy provided to the NRC
yesterday.
The Akron utility said it is devising how to use a high-pressure
water jet to carve out steel surrounding a 6-inch-deep cavity
unexpectedly found in early March on top of theDavis-Besse
reactor vessel head, a 150-ton steel dome that covers the
radioactive fuel.
Because high radiation levels at the reactor vessel head would
severely limit the time a human could work there, FirstEnergy
hopes to use robots to do much of the repair work.
``It will primarily be a round-the-clock effort,'' said John
Wood, FirstEnergy vice president for engineering services.
A 13-inch-diameter stainless steel plate, weighing between 300
and 400 pounds, would be welded into place on the reactor vessel
head. The plate wouldn't be susceptible to boric acid corrosion,
the company said. A second, smaller cavity on the vessel head
will require a less complicated repair, the company said.
The repairs will be designed to last through 2017, when the
nuclear plant's operating license expires. But it's likely that
the reactor vessel head will be replaced in 2004 with a new one
the company ordered last year.
``What we don't want to say is this (repair) is a stopgap,'' Wood
said. Repair costs could exceed $20 million, he said, but a
spokesman for the utility later said that $16 million is a more
accurate figure.
The company still hopes to have the repairs finished and the
plant restarted by the end of June, Wood said. Once the repairs
start, the company hopes to finish them within four weeks.
The repairs will have to withstand high radiation, constant
pressure of 2,200 pounds per square inch and temperatures between
550 and 600 degrees Fahrenheit.
This will be the largest repair ever performed on an operating
reactor vessel head, said Jack Strosnider, director of the
division of engineering in the office of Nuclear Reactor
Regulation. ``Hopefully, Davis-Besse is the only plant that has
to deal with this,'' he said. ``Hopefully, it will not be a
precedent-making repair.''
So far, no other nuclear power plants of similar design have
reported finding the same kind of corrosion that led to the
creation of two cavities at Davis-Besse, NRC officials said
yesterday.
Before the NRC can approve the Davis-Besse repairs, investigators
have to file a final report on what caused the acid damage.
Preliminary tests show that boric acid, which is part of the
reactor coolant, leaked through hairline fractures in what are
called nozzles on top of the reactor vessel head. The boric acid
then started eating two cavities around two of the nozzles.
Only a thin layer of stainless steel that lines the inside of the
reactor vessel head prevented a rupture that would have let
radioactive coolant spew into the containment chamber that
surrounds the reactor.
The company has not formally submitted its repair plans to the
NRC -- yesterday's four-hour meeting at NRC headquarters was
designed to let the company explain its concept and to answer any
initial questions.
Brian Sheron, associate director for project licensing and
technical assessment at the NRC, said the agency has the
authority to approve or reject First-Energy's repair plans, but
it does not have the authority to compel the utility to take
other action such as replacing the vessel head with a new device.
Once FirstEnergy submits its formal repair plans, the NRC staff
will take as much time as needed to review them, Sheron said. He
said he can't speculate how long that would take, but he did say
that the repairs are just one step in a process heading toward
restarting the plant.
Davis-Besse, in Oak Harbor on the Lake Erie shoreline, has been
shut down since Feb. 16 for refueling, a safety inspection and
now repairs.
Nuclear power opponents have called upon federal and state
regulators to close the plant, saying it is a threat to people
and the environment.
Paul Gunter of the Nuclear Information Resource Service in
Washington said he's skeptical that the plant can be safely
repaired based on the history of Davis-Besse management. ``The
utility is driving the regulator into uncharted water,'' Gunter
said.
David Lochbaum, the nuclear power expert for the Union of
Concerned Scientists, said he was pleased that a lot of technical
questions were directed at FirstEnergy officials and their
contractors. He also said it was encouraging that the company and
its representatives were able to answer the questions there. At
other NRC meetings he has attended, the people facing the NRC
often responded with ``We'll get back to you,'' he said.
NRC staff members questioned FirstEnergy on numerous technical
details of their plan. For example, a small piece of carbon
steel, which corrodes when exposed to boric acid, will be
constantly in contact with the coolant. But FirstEnergy said
extremely low oxygen levels in the coolant will prevent the acid
from damaging the steel.
FirstEnergy shares rose 64 cents yesterday to $33.99.
Jim Mackinnon can be reached at 330-996-3544 or
jmackinnon@thebeaconjournal.com [jmackinnon@thebeaconjournal.com]
*****************************************************************
7 N-Plants Still Lack Security
The Salt Lake Tribune --
Friday, April 12, 2002
BY SETH BORENSTEIN
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWS SERVICE
WASHINGTON -- Nearly three-quarters of the nation's nuclear
power plant operators are behind schedule on new federally
mandated security upgrades, mostly dealing with truck bombs, the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission said.
Truck bombs are one of the most commonly used and easiest to
obtain terrorist weapons, and anxiety about them has grown since
Sept. 11. That worry appears to be behind many security upgrades
ordered in February by the commission, which governs nuclear
plants.
The orders included preparing a detailed analysis on the
vulnerability and consequences of a truck bomb attack, commission
spokesman Victor Dricks said Thursday.
The power plants do not publicly disclose why they need more
time, but Dricks said nearly 90 percent that say they can't make
their deadlines are having problems with the truck bomb analysis.
Dricks confirmed that operators at 47 of the 64 clusters of
nuclear power plant sites asked for a deadline extension. There
are 103 operating power plants in the 64 sites nationwide.
The upgrades include more security guard patrols, additional
security posts and barriers, vehicle inspection points farther
from the cores of the power plants, and improved coordination
with government law enforcement.
In a closed hearing Thursday, a House subcommittee asked NRC
officials about security and truck bomb planning.
While industry plans are delayed, "I'm not upset that there's
any lack of commitment," subcommittee chairman James Greenwood,
R-Penn., said afterward.
"It's just a question of a very technical matter to provide
the NRC with the information it needs."
"Americans can feel pretty darn secure that their nuclear
power plants are not going to be compromised by terrorists,"
Greenwood said.
Nonetheless, plants that aren't secure against truck bombs
aren't as safe as operators have been saying, claimed Edward
Lyman, the scientific director of the anti-nuclear organization
Nuclear Control Institute of Washington.
"They can't assert they are fully protected about whatever
new threat is out there if they haven't even done the analysis to
assert that they are protected from vehicle bombs," Lyman said.
"If they're delaying providing a schedule for two or three
months . . . then how are they going to get contracts in place to
do work to build vehicle barriers or additional protection?"
But Ann Mary Carley, a spokeswoman for Exelon Generation of
Warrenville, Ill., which operates 17 nuclear power plants, said
her company needed a delay so that "when we evaluate what needs
to be done, we're doing what is actually going to protect us."
Even if a truck bomb went off, it's unlikely to cause the
runaway type of nuclear catastrophe that many people fear, said
Harold Denton, a retired reactor regulation chief for the NRC.
He oversaw the commission's response to the Three Mile Island
nuclear plant accident in March 1979 and was the first American
official to visit the site of the April 1986 Chernobyl nuclear
disaster.
A truck bomb attack might be bad, "but it doesn't lead to
Chernobyl," Denton said.
The greatest worry is that the explosion would knock out
power required to run pumps that bring in water to cool the
nuclear material, Denton said.
If the power went out, control rods would stop the nuclear
reaction within a matter of seconds, but it could take weeks of
electric power and water pumping to cool all the nuclear material
to safe levels, he said.
Still, almost every power plant has enough backup power --
batteries, generators, steam turbines -- to provide at least
eight hours of cooling before additional help could come, Denton
said.
Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, U.S. intelligence and
law enforcement officials have identified several potential
threats to nuclear power plants.
The NRC asked for 1,950 "interim corrective measures" at the
nation's nuclear power plants last February with a variety of
deadlines that all led up to a final deadline of Aug. 31.
Plant operators requested a deadline extension for about 65
specific measures, Dricks said.
Steve Kerekes, spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, a
Washington, D.C., organization consisting of nuclear power plant
operators and suppliers, said most of the security measures are
already in place.
"We were well defended on Sept. 10, and we are even better
defended today," Kerekes said.
© Copyright 2002, The Salt Lake Tribune
*****************************************************************
8 Bulgarians demonstrate for nuclear power
BBC News
| EUROPE |
11 April, 2002
More than 3,000 people have protested in the Bulgarian capital,
Sofia, against the closure of four reactors at the country's only
nuclear power plant. The European Union has demanded the closure
of the reactors as a condition for Bulgaria's entry to the EU.
But protestors say the move will lead to energy shortages, and an
increase in electricity prices. Demonstrators presented the
government with a petition signed by 500,000 people demanding a
referendum on the closures, but this has so far been rejected.
Correspondents say the four units to be closed - two by the end
of this year, and two by 2006 - are pressurised water reactors
with no safety containment.
From the newsroom of the BBC World Service
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9 Report cites $54 billion in wasteful U.S. government projects
- 4/12/2002 - ENN.com
Friday, April 12, 2002 By Reuters
WASHINGTON — The U.S. government could save $54 billion over five
years by cutting spending for coal and nuclear technologies, road
construction in forests, and more than 70 other programs that are
wasteful and damage the environment, interest groups said
Thursday.
The Green Scissors report, issued annually by a coalition of
environmental and consumer groups, urged the government to reduce
spending for several agriculture, energy, public lands,
transportation, water, and international projects and programs.
The report highlighted 10 projects, dubbed as "choice cuts," that
the coalition will target in Congress this year. Coalition
members include Friends of the Earth, Taxpayers for Common Sense,
and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. Budget cuts
highlighted in the study include:
· Changing the 1872 Mining Law that allows mining companies to
remove minerals from publicly owned lands without paying
royalties to the government by implementing a royalty fee that
could raise $394 million over five years.
· Expediting the completion of the Clean Coal Program by stopping
projects that have not yet been started, saving about $253
million. The Green Scissors report also suggested cutting the
Bush administration's $2 billion clean coal program that offers
subsidies to encourage the industry to develop cleaner burning
technologies.
· Eliminating the Nuclear Energy Technologies program and the
Department of Energy's Nuclear Energy Research Initiative and
Nuclear Energy Plant Optimization programs that were created to
help improve the use of nuclear power. Removing these could save
more than $252 million during the next five years.
· Cutting funding for construction, planning, and designing of
new roads used for logging in U.S. forests, saving $312 million
over five years.
· Stopping the Yucca Mountain project in Nevada without an
independent review. This will save taxpayers $375 million in
fiscal year 2002. President George W. Bush in February named
Yucca Mountain as the permanent federal site to store tens of
thousands of tons of waste from nuclear power plants across the
nation.
Copyright 2002, Reuters
*****************************************************************
10 NRC to Meet with Company to Discuss Nine Mile Point Performance
NRC: Press Release Region I - 2002 - 35 -
U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION Office of Public Affairs,
Region I 475 Allendale Road, King of Prussia, Pa. 19406
www.nrc.gov
No. I-02-035 April 11, 2002 CONTACT: Diane
Screnci (610) 337-5330 Neil A. Sheehan (610) 337-5331 E-mail:
opa1@nrc.gov [opa1@nrc.gov]
Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff will meet with
representatives of Nine Mile Point Nuclear Station, LLC, on
Thursday, April 18, to discuss the results of the agency's annual
assessment of safety performance at the Nine Mile Point Unit 1
and 2 nuclear power plants. The facility is located in Scriba,
N.Y., and operated by Nine Mile Point Nuclear Station, LLC. The
meeting, which will be open to the public for observation, is
scheduled to begin at 1:30 p.m. at the plant's Joint News Center,
which is located at the Oswego County Airport, County Route 176,
Fulton, N.Y. Before the session is adjourned, NRC staff will be
available to answer questions from the public on the safety
performance of the Nine Mile Point plants, as well as the role of
the NRC in ensuring safe plant operation.
The performance period to be discussed is April 1, 2001, to
December 31, 2001. In addition, NRC staff will provide an
overview of the agency's Reactor Oversight Process.
A letter sent from the NRC Region I office to Nine Mile Point
Nuclear Station addresses the performance of the plant during the
period and will serve as the basis for the meeting discussion. It
is available on the NRC web site at:
http://www.nrc.gov/NRR/OVERSIGHT/ASSESS/LETTERS/nmp_2001q4.pdf
Current performance information for Nine Mile Point Unit 1 is
available on the NRC web site at:
http://www.nrc.gov/NRR/OVERSIGHT/ASSESS/NMP1/nmp1_chart.html
Current performance information for Nine Mile Point Unit 2 is
available on the NRC web site at:
http://www.nrc.gov/NRR/OVERSIGHT/ASSESS/NMP2/nmp2_chart.html
*****************************************************************
11 Energy NW errors rose in '01
This story was published Thu, Apr 11, 2002
By John Stang Herald staff writer
Energy Northwest saw an increase in human errors in early 2001,
but the public's safety was never threatened, the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission reported Wednesday.
"Columbia Generating Station has been operating in a way that the
public's health and safety has been maintained," said Ken
Brockman, director of the NRC's western region's division of
reactor projects.
However, the NRC noted two problem areas in 2001 that will
require extra inspections in 2002.
The rate of Energy Northwest's human errors doubled from April
through July 2001 before dropping back.
And problems showed up with alerting and evacuating non-Energy
Northwest employees working around the never- finished reactors
No. 1 and No. 4 during a nuclear emergency.
NRC and Energy Northwest officials held a public briefing in
Richland. The NRC looked at Energy Northwest's safety picture
from April through December 2001. The reason that 2001 covered
only nine months is that the NRC is readjusting its inspections
periods to correspond with calendar years.
The 2001 procedural errors were not major safety threats, said
Bill Jones, chief of the reactor projects division branch that
includes Energy Northwest. But the NRC worried about an increase
in those errors.
Energy Northwest's goal is to allow no more than 0.35 mistakes
per 10,000 hours worked, said Greg Smith, the utility's vice
president for generation. A rate of 0.25 mistakes per 10,000
hours translates to one worker making one procedural error in 20
years.
Energy Northwest began 2001 with a rate of 0.3 to 0.4 errors per
10,000 hours worked. That climbed to 0.6 errors per 10,000 hours
from April through June 2001. That was when the reactor shut down
for refueling and maintenance.
Most of the people brought in for outage-related work had never
worked with a reactor before, Smith said. And the utility brought
in more outside workers than usual but did not increase the
number of supervisors. That contributed to the increase in
errors, Smith said.
From July through December 2001, the error rate dropped to 0.25
per 10,000 hours worked. In the first three months of 2002, the
error rate has hovered between 0.25 and 0.33, Smith said. "The
critical thing is to maintain that level of performance," he
said.
Energy Northwest is on its first two-year cycle of running the
reactor without refueling. So, there will be no maintenance and
refueling shutdown until the spring of 2003. The NRC plans a
follow-up inspection in October or November.
Also, the NRC rehashed a February briefing about Energy's
Northwest 2001 problems with alerting and evacuating tenants
around reactors No. 1 and No. 4. Energy Northwest overhauled
training and equipment in response to the NRC's findings. It also
terminated the leases of three tenants even though the NRC did
not make such a recommendation. The NRC plans a May follow-up
inspection.
Copyright 2002 Tri-City Herald. All rights reserved. This
*****************************************************************
12 San Onofre Nuclear plant remains safe despite two security breaches
SignOnSanDiego.com
ASSOCIATED PRESS
April 11, 2002
SAN ONOFRE Two security breaches occurred at the San Onofre
Nuclear Generating Station in the weeks following the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks, but both incidents were of little concern, a
federal report said.
Federal inspectors said both errors had a credible impact on
safety, but according to a formula used by the U.S. Nuclear
Regulatory Commission, were later deemed minor breaches.
On Oct. 9, inspectors found two unescorted visitors trying to use
a visitor badge on a security device to gain access to a control
room. The visitors said they were attempting to rejoin their
escort.
Three weeks later, inspectors said a security guard at the plant
did not properly search a firetruck that was about to enter a
protected area for a fire drill.
It wasn't known if any plant employees were disciplined for their
actions. Plant officials apologized for the problems, but said
they have done a good job clearing vehicles and visitors.
"Taken as an isolated incident, it has one appearance," said Ray
Golden, plant spokesman, "but when you look at the overall
program we're searching hundreds of trucks a month without these
types of shortcomings."
The report showed that during a nine-month period last year, the
plant preserved public safety and met federal guidelines.
The power plant, which is just south of San Clemente, is run by
Southern California Edison. The facility has two nuclear reactors
that provide energy for 2.2 million homes in Southern California.
More than 100 nuclear power plants across the nation have
undergone strict security measures since the terrorist attacks.
Public access to sensitive areas has halted and some information
about the plants have been taken off of their Web sites.
© Copyright 2002 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.
*****************************************************************
13 Security upgrades at nuclear plants are behind schedule
KRT Wire | 04/11/2002 |
[Tallahassee Democrat]
By SETH BORENSTEIN
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Nearly three-quarters of the nation's nuclear power plant
operators are behind schedule on new federally mandated security
upgrades, mostly dealing with truck bombs, according to the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Truck bombs are one of the most commonly used and easiest to
obtain terrorist weapons, and anxiety about them has grown since
Sept. 11. That worry appears to be behind many security upgrades
ordered in February by the commission, which governs nuclear
plants.
The orders included preparing a detailed analysis on the
vulnerability and consequences of a truck bomb attack, commission
spokesman Victor Dricks said Thursday.
The power plants do not publicly disclose why they need more
time, but Dricks said nearly 90 percent that say they can't make
their deadlines are having problems with the truck bomb analysis.
Dricks confirmed that operators at 47 of the 64 clusters of
nuclear power plant sites asked for a deadline extension on the
new orders. There are 103 operating power plants clustered in 64
sites nationwide.
The need for extensions doesn't mean a truck bomb threat is
imminent, and generally plants are ahead of schedule on upgrades.
They include more security guard patrols, additional security
posts, additional security barriers, vehicle inspection points
further from the cores of the power plants and improved
coordination with government law enforcement.
In a closed hearing Thursday, a House subcommittee asked Nuclear
Regulatory Commission officials about security and truck bomb
planning. While industry plans are delayed, "I'm not upset that
there's any lack of commitment," subcommittee chairman James
Greenwood, R-Penn., told Knight Ridder afterwards. "It's just a
question of a very technical matter to provide the NRC with the
information it needs."
"I think Americans can feel pretty darn secure that their nuclear
power plants are not going to be compromised by terrorists,"
Greenwood said.
Nonetheless, plants that aren't secure against truck bombs aren't
as safe as operators have been saying, claimed Edward Lyman, the
scientific director of the anti-nuclear organization Nuclear
Control Institute of Washington.
"They can't assert they are fully protected about whatever new
threat is out there if they haven't even done the analysis to
assert that they are protected from vehicle bombs," Lyman said.
"If they're delaying providing a schedule for two or three months
... then how are they going to get contracts in place to do work
to build vehicle barriers or additional protection?"
But Ann Mary Carley, a spokeswoman for Exelon Generation of
Warrenville, Ill., which operates 17 nuclear power plants, said
her company needed a delay so "that when we evaluate what needs
to be done, we're doing what is actually going to protect us."
Even if a truck bomb went off, it is unlikely to cause the
runaway type of nuclear catastrophe that many people fear, said
Harold Denton, a retired reactor regulation chief for the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission. He oversaw the commission's response to
the Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident in March 1979 and
was the first American official to visit the site of the April
1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
A truck bomb attack might be bad, "but it doesn't lead to
Chernobyl," Denton said.
The greatest worry is that the explosion would knock out power
required to run pumps that bring in water to cool the nuclear
material, Denton said. If the power went out, control rods would
stop the nuclear reaction within a matter of seconds, but it
could take weeks of electric power and water pumping to cool all
the nuclear material to safe levels, he said.
Still, almost every power plant has enough backup power —
batteries, generators, steam turbines — to provide at least eight
hours of cooling before additional help could come, Denton said.
Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, U.S. intelligence and law
enforcement officials have identified several potential threats
to nuclear power plants.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission asked for 1,950 "interim
corrective measures" at the nation's nuclear power plants last
February with a variety of deadlines that all led up to a final
deadline of Aug. 31.
Plant operators requested a deadline extension for about 65
specific measures, Dricks said. He predicted that all but three
or four nuclear power plant operators would meet the deadline.
Steve Kerekes, spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, a
Washington, D.C., organization consisting of nuclear power plant
operators and suppliers, said most of the security measures are
already in place.
"We were well defended on Sept. 10 and we are even better
defended today," Kerekes said.
The following clusters of power plants have asked for deadline
extensions for security upgrades:
Beaver Valley of McCandless, Penn.; Calvert Cliffs of Calvert
Cliffs, Md.; James A. Fitzpatrick of Oswego, N.Y.; Limerick, west
of Philadelphia; Milestone of New London, Conn.; Nine Mile Point
of Oswego, N.Y.; Oyster Creek of Toms River, N.J.; Peach Bottom
of Lancaster, Penn.; Ginna of Rochester, N.Y.; Seabrook, south of
Portsmouth, N.H.; Susquehanna of Berwick, Pa.; Three Mile Island
of Harrisburg, Pa.; and Vermont Yankee of Battleboro, Vt.
Browns Ferry of Decatur, Ala.; Catawba of Rock Hill, S.C.; Edwin
Hatch of Baxley, Ga.; Joseph M. Farley of Dothan, Ala.; McGuire,
south of Charlotte, N.C.; North Anna of Richmond, Va.; Oconee of
Greenville, S.C.; Sequoyah of Chattanooga, Tenn.; St. Lucie of
Fort Pierce, Fla.; Turkey Point of Miami; Summer, northwest of
Columbia, S.C.; Vogtle, southest of Augusta, Ga.; and Watts Bar
of Spring City, Tenn.
Byron of Rockford, Ill; Clinton of Clinton, Ill.; Davis-Besse,
southeast of Toledo, Ohio; Donald C. Cook of Benton Harbor,
Mich.; Dresden of Morris, Ill.; LaSalle of Ottawa, Ill.; Perry of
Painesville, Ohio; and Quad Cities, northeast of Moline, Ill.
Arkansas of Russellville, Ark; Callaway of Fulton, Mo.; Comanche
Peak of Glen Rose, Texas; Diablo Canyon, west of San Luis Obispo,
Calif.; Fort Calhoun of Omaha, Neb.; Grand Gulf of Vicksburg,
Miss.; Palo Verde, west of Phoenix; River Bend, north of Baton
Rouge, La.; San Onofre of San Clemente, Calif.; South Texas
Project, south of Bay City, Texas; Waterford, west of New
Orleans, and Wolf Creek of Burlington, Kan.
The following clusters of power plants did not ask for deadline
extensions for security upgrades: Hope Creek of Wilmington, Del.;
Indian Point, north of New York City; Pilgrim of Plymouth, Mass.;
Salem of Wilmington, Del.; Brunswick of Southport, N.C.; Crystal
River of Crystal River, Fla.; H.B. Robinson of Vicksburg, Miss.;
Shearon Harris of Raleigh, N.C.; Fermi, north of Toledo, Ohio;
Columbia of Richland, Wis.; and Cooper of Nebraska City, Neb.
The following cluster of power plants weren't quite clear about a
deadline extension in their public letters but don't seem to be
asking for an extension: Duane Arnold of Cedar Rapids, Iowa;
Kewaunee, east of Green Bay, Wis.; Monticello, northwest of
Minneapolis; Palisades of South Haven, Mich.; Point Beach of
Manitowoc, Wis.; and Prairie Island, southeast of Minneapolis.
© 2002, Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
*****************************************************************
14 Belarus to Blackburn: that's the aim of a 'friend' of Chernobyl children
East Lancashire Online : News : Clitheroe News :
Clitheroe News
Published: Thursday, 11 April 2002, 04:01 PM
by Robbie Robinson
FROM Belarus to Blackburn by bike – that is the charity
slogan for a Clitheroe cyclist. Mr Brian Davies, of Shays Drive,
leaves today for the town of Mogilev in Belarus and will bike
back to raise funds for Friends of Chernobyl's Children.
He travels out with two cycling companions and a support driver,
who all set off on the 1,500 mile return journey on April 16th.
After passing through the cities of Minsk and Warsaw, they will
be joined by a fourth cyclist at Berlin and will make their way
via Hamburg to Cuxhaven and catch a ferry to Harwich.
From there they have a mere 250 miles to complete their ride,
intending to arrive at Salesbury Church on May 12th.
Friends of Chernobyl's Children (FOCC) started in a small way in
Blackburn in 1995 and has grown to a nationwide network of groups
around the country.
Mr Davies represents the Clitheroe group on the ride, the other
members of the team being representatives of the Settle, Great
Harwood, Blackburn and Fylde groups. Blackburn is now the
charity's headquarters.
The cyclists have chosen to depart from Mogilev as it was one of
the two towns in the old USSR most affected by radioactive
fallout from the meltdown of the nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl
power station in April, 1986.
The nuclear poisoning of the area still affects the health of
local people, particularly the children, with a 3,000% increase
in diseases such as thyroid cancer, leukaemia and brain disease
since the incident.
Each year the charity's groups bring 500 children from Mogilev to
this country for a month's recuperation to help boost their weak
immune systems and increase their life expectancy. The children
all stay with host families and more are needed for the 2003
visit.
Copyright © East Lancashire Online
*****************************************************************
15 Belarus reports high incidence of thyroid cancer
BBC Monitoring Service - United Kingdom; Apr 12, 2002
Minsk, 12 April: Thyroid cancer is still a pressing issue for
Belarusian citizens after the [1986] Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
As the head of the Belarusian national centre for thyroid cancer
research, Yawhen Dzyamidchyk, told a news conference in Minsk
today, since 1986 thyroid cancer has been detected in 8,602
patients, including 716 children, 342 teenagers and 7,544 adults.
In 2001, the rise in the thyroid cancer rate among children
stopped. However, thyroid cancer cases among teenagers were on
the rise. For instance, there were 11.3 such cases per 100,000
among 15-18 year-olds.
The specialist noted that over the 16 years since the disaster,
1,677 patients, who were exposed to radiation before they reached
the age of 18, had developed thyroid cancer. Out of them, 11 have
died. The thyroid cancer rate among the adults was 12.5 cases per
100,000, or 200 to 300 per cent higher compared with Western
countries.
[Passage omitted: Predictions until 2036]
BBC Monitoring/ © BBC
*****************************************************************
16 East Anglian troops find nuclear haul
MARK NICHOLLS
April 12, 2002 08:27
A cache of radioactive equipment which lay under the noses of
Osama bin Laden's terrorists in Afghanistan has been found in the
heart of the capital, Kabul, by a contingent of East Anglian
troops.
The haul, a left-over from the Soviet occupation, had been
concealed from the hated Taliban regime and al Qaida network
ousted by US and British forces in the aftermath of the September
11 attacks on America.
The specially-trained soldiers from RAF Honington were said to be
"astounded" by what they found in the basement of Kabul
University and the ruins of a mental hospital after being led to
it by two Afghan nuclear physicists who had rejected attempts by
al Qaida to recruit them and collected the material and hid it.
The hoard, which could have been used to manufacture weapons, was
discovered by personnel from the Joint Nuclear, Biological and
Chemical Regiment from the base on the Norfolk/Suffolk border.
Captain James Cameron, of the unit, said last night that if the
terrorists had known of the store, they would almost certainly
have made devastating use of it.
"The Taliban would have given their eye teeth for the stuff these
men were hiding, and if they'd found it, I hate to think what
they'd have done," he said.
A leading terrorism expert warned that if the material was as
dangerous as it seemed and had fallen into Osama bin Laden's
hands, it would have given the world's most wanted man the
capability of making radioactive weapons with the potential to
kill large numbers of civilians.
Professor Paul Wilkinson, of the Centre for the Study of
Terrorism and Political Violence at St Andrews University, said:
"If the Taliban or al Qaida had found it, they would have had the
means to construct 'dirty' bombs."
These deadly home-made weapons involve wrapping the radioactive
material around a conventional bomb.
"If detonated, this would spread radioactive material over a wide
downtown area causing death and prolonged suffering to many, many
civilians.
"Given the al Qaida record of ruthless killing, it would have
been likely these weapons would have been used against American
targets," he added.
Prof Wilkinson said it was highly fortunate the Taliban had never
discovered the existence of the radioactive equipment in their
capital.
The equipment lay under the noses of terrorists who would have
been desperate to gain access to such weaponry.
It included a broken radiotherapy machine, containing enough
cobalt 60 to kill a man instantly, plus containers of solid and
liquid radioactive material, some broken or with the lids off,
and chemical warfare agents and instruments emitting radiation.
And while the risk of dirty bombs would have been enormous, the
nuclear unit claim that what they had discovered was even more
dangerous.
"We've been finding stuff that's far more potent and dangerous
than even dirty bombs which are made of nuclear waste," said
Captain James Cameron, from the Suffolk-based unit.
The eight-member team, which also monitors the activities of the
Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, from Kuwait, is in Kabul to protect
the international peace-keeping force.
It has a responsibility for the discovery and monitoring of such
material and assisting in its clearance and decontamination.
Captain Cameron said much of the material was left over from the
days of the Soviets who used "far higher" doses of radiation.
Some of the containers were damaged by the Afghan mujahideen in
the early 1990s but the scientists kept it all secret and
al-Qaida and the Taliban never knew about it.
Mohammed Jan Naziri, a professor of applied nuclear physics, and
Jora Mohammed Korbani, a nuclear physics professor, said al Qaida
had attempted to recruit them. Instead the pair collected all the
radioactive sources and instruments they could find from the
university's laboratories and hid them after the Taliban first
took Kabul in 1996.
They also destroyed their research documents and papers on atomic
physics.
Copyright © 2002 Archant Regional. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
17 Radioactive equipment found in Kabul
BBC News | SOUTH ASIA |
Friday, 12 April, 2002,
It has been revealed that the International Atomic Energy
Authority IAEA has found radioactive medical equipment stored in
a basement in the Afghan capital, Kabul.
The potentially harmful material was hidden by two Afghan
scientists when the Taleban came to power six years ago, in abid
to avoid a nuclear catastrophe. One of the men Jori Mohammed
Korbani told an American newspaper the Washington Times, that the
material could potentially have been used by al Qaeda to put
together a crude bomb to spread deadly radiation.
Korbani said that al-Qaeda was trying to make its own nuclear
bomb and had offered him a lot of money if he agreed to join
their programme, but he had refused.
*****************************************************************
18 Judge won't rule on wisdom of N-waste facility
Friday, April 12, 2002
By Lisa Riley Roche
Deseret News staff writer
U.S. District Judge Tena Campbell said Thursday her job
isn't to decide "the wisdom or non-wisdom" of locating a
nuclear-waste facility on Goshute tribal lands.
Campbell heard arguments on pending motions from lawyers
for the Skull Valley Band of Goshutes, the consortium of private
nuclear power companies that wants to build and operate the
facility, and the state of Utah, which opposes the project.
She did not make any rulings Thursday in the case, filed a
year ago by the Goshutes and Private Fuel Storage against the
state. The lawsuit alleges six Utah laws, including a prohibition
against the shipment of nuclear waste into the state, are
unconstitutional.
The state sought to persuade Campbell that she needed to
decide the issue of lawfulness, whether private companies can
operate spent nuclear fuel storage sites under federal law. But
she said Thursday that "is not something for me to reach."
It is up to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to issue a
license for the facility, a decision that could be challenged in
the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. "It's not my job to decided
the wisdom or non-wisdom of putting the facility on the
reservation," Campbell said.
The NRC's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board will decide in
September whether to grant PFS a license. It is holding hearings
this month to hear arguments from the state that Utah is not a
suitable site for storing high-level nuclear waste.
Meanwhile in federal court, Campbell questioned whether
there is some confusion between the right to have the facility
and the right to pursue it.
Monte Stewart, the special assistant attorney general
representing the state at the hearing, said the plaintiffs have
not shown that they are being hindered in their efforts. "They've
been trying to their heart's content and haven't been hindered in
that," he said.
A lawyer for the consortium disagreed. "The idea there is
no injury is simply not correct," Val Antczak said. He said the
state laws in question "were passed with the express interest of
injuring my client's and the tribe's interests."
Those laws would require the consortium to pay the state
about $150 billion in up-front fees, impose a 75 percent tax on
anyone providing services to the project and bar Tooele County
from providing municipal services, including police and fire, to
the storage site.
Antczak said the laws could be enforced at any time.
"Tomorrow, they could be arresting people. They could be levying
taxes," he said.
The site is proposed for a plot of land on the reservation
about 45 miles west of Salt Lake City. The consortium and the
Goshutes plan to store spent nuclear fuel rods in above-ground
steel canisters for as long as 50 years.
E-MAIL: lisa@desnews.com
© 2002 Deseret News Publishing Company
*****************************************************************
19 Judge hears nuclear storage case
HarkTheHerald.com
Associated Press Writer on Friday, April 12
By RICH VOSEPKA
SALT LAKE CITY -- U.S. District Judge Tena Campbell said Thursday
it's not her job to decide if Congress has passed laws
prohibiting a nuclear waste storage site on Utah's Skull Valley
Band of Goshute Indian reservation.
She will have to rule on a lawsuit from a group of nuclear
utilities and the Goshutes that challenges a series of laws the
Utah Legislature has passed to block the storage plan.
Campbell heard arguments from both sides of that issue Thursday,
though she made no immediate ruling. Assistant Attorney General
Monte Stewart repeatedly argued that Campbell should resolve the
question of whether federal laws ban private companies from
opening spent nuclear fuel storage dumps.
Campbell repeatedly declined to do so.
"That lawfulness issue, that's not something for me to reach,"
Campbell said. The authority to make that decision lies with the
10th Circuit Court of Appeals, she said.
The judge also seemed content to leave nuclear regulation to the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "It's not my job to decide the
wisdom of putting the facility on the reservation. I don't have a
role in making that decision. That belongs to the NRC," she said.
This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page A21.
© 2002 by HarkTheHerald.com Contact us at
dhwebmaster@harktheherald.com.
*****************************************************************
20 Cotter won't give up on plans for radioactive dirt
gazette.comcoloradosprings.com
April 12, 2002
By Barry Noreen The Gazette
Passage of a new state law won't deter Cotter Corp. from its plan
to dispose of radioactive soil at its Cañon City mill site, a
company spokesman said Thursday.
"We just have to go a few more steps and just do it," Cotter
Executive Vice President Rich Ziegler said Thursday.
In February, it was revealed Cotter plans to dispose of up to
470,000 tons of radioactive soil by spreading it over other
radioactive waste already at its mill site. The company has
negotiated for a share of a $70 million cleanup project in
Maywood, N.J., about 15 miles west of New York City.
When the plan became public, hundreds of Cañon City-area
residents attended hastily organized meetings. Legislation
designed to delay Cotter's plan by requiring more public notice
was drafted by House Majority Leader Lola Spradley, R-Beulah, and
Senate Majority Leader Bill Thiebault, D-Pueblo. With that sort
of backing, the bill cruised through the General Assembly and was
signed April 5 by Gov. Bill Owens.
States cannot refuse to receive radioactive waste from federal
cleanup programs, but they can require more public notice. Cotter
is willing to do whatever it must to keep its share of the
lucrative cleanup contract.
"We have felt all along that we have followed rules and
regulations," Ziegler said. "We thought we had approval by the
state to bring the materials in now. However, the act changed
those requirements. We have to abide by those regulations, and
that's exactly what we're going to do."
Ziegler said Cotter hopes to begin receiving wastes before the
end of the year, but he acknowledged the company might not be in
control of the timing. The new state law directs that before new
public meetings are scheduled, Cotter will have to complete an
environmental study. Ziegler wasn't sure Thursday how long the
study will take.
On Wednesday, Sharyn Cunningham, a spokeswoman for Colorado
Citizens Against Toxic Waste, said the Cañon City group will
continue to resist Cotter's plans at the required public
meetings. The opponents also have pledged to fight Cotter when it
attempts to renew its five-year license later this year with the
Colorado Department of Health and Environment.
On Tuesday, the Army Corps of Engineers said 30,000 tons of
radioactive soil from the Maywood site will be shipped to a site
in Utah under an emergency contract. That leaves up to 440,000
tons of the waste with no official destination.
Contact information
Barry Noreen covers general assignments and may be reached at
636-0363 or noreen@gazette.com
Copyright 2002, The Gazette, a Freedom Communications, Inc.
*****************************************************************
21 Feds OK shipments from Flats
Denver Post.com
[http://www.denverpost.com]
South Carolina governor still fighting plan
Mike Soraghan [msoraghan@denverpost.com]
Denver Post Washington Bureau
Friday, April 12, 2002 - WASHINGTON - The Bush administration
will start shipping the 6 tons of plutonium at Rocky Flats to
South Carolina by next month, even if South Carolina Gov. Jim
Hodges threatens to lie down in front of the trucks.
That would keep the dormant bomb plant west of Denver on track
for closure in 2006, as promised by federal officials from U.S.
Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., to President Bush. But it could also
escalate a nasty political fight between the Democratic Hodges
and the Republican administration.
Hodges has pledged to personally lie down in front of the trucks
or send the Highway Patrol to stop the shipments if the
Department of Energy won't meet his terms.
And Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham warned that if Hodges won't
agree to his plans for shipping the waste to the Savannah River
Site, he'll send the plutonium-laden trucks anyway.
Abraham sent a final offer to Hodges on Thursday. He warned that
if Hodges doesn't agree to it by Monday, he'll start shipments in
30 days, and under terms far less favorable than what he's
offered.
The two sides remained at loggerheads Thursday night, though they
both said they hoped for an amicable solution.
Rocky Flats produced plutonium "triggers" for nuclear bombs for
40 years before the plant shut down in 1989. The government is
spending $7 billion to decontaminate it and turn it into a
wildlife refuge by 2006.
Negotiations between Hodges and the Department of Energy bogged
down as a key deadline loomed. To meet the 2006 closure date, DOE
must begin shipments by June and give 30 days' notice by the
beginning of May.
Abraham on Thursday offered a detailed plan to allow shipments to
start in a month but halt them if the government doesn't keep its
promise to send the waste back out of South Carolina as nuclear
fuel.
His proposal also gave the best estimate in years for how much
plutonium is still at the Cold War-era plant - 6 metric tons or
roughly 13,000 pounds. The actual amount remains classified,
beyond a statement that there were 12.9 metric tons when the
plant closed.
But Hodges says the proposed agreement isn't legally binding. He
made a counterproposal, asking DOE to agree to a "consent order,"
essentially a court-enforced settlement.
"All I want to know is if I have something that I can run down to
the courthouse with and stop shipments if the government changes
its mind," Hodges said.
But South Carolina Republicans like Sen. Strom Thurmond backed
Bush, saying the administration's proposal was "everything we
wanted and more."
The administration won't agree to Hodges' consent order, said DOE
spokesman Joe Davis, because it won't put national-security
policy under the control of a judge.
All contents Copyright 2002 The Denver Post
*****************************************************************
22 Nuclear waste bound for Yucca could cross much of California
KnoxNews: Sci/tech
By RYAN ALESSI
April 11, 2002
Eds: Removes dateline
The government's plan to develop a radioactive waste
storage garage in Nevada could turn California into a driveway.
Depending on transportation decisions - largely in the
hands of U.S. Department of Energy and Nevada officials - much of
the nation's nuclear waste could be routed through California, in
some instances adding up to 1,000 miles to the trip.
If Congress approves Nevada's Yucca Mountain as the
nation's repository for spent nuclear fuel, officials say it
would take at least eight years to open. But state governments
are already scrambling to study its effects.
Answers are murky in part because the DOE has not decided
how the waste would reach the site or the routes used to get it
there.
Bob Halstead, transportation adviser for Nevada's agency
for nuclear projects, has spent more than a decade analyzing the
possible routes for the estimated 108,000 shipments it would take
to move spent fuel from 131 sites around the country.
Because no rail line exists that would take shipments
directly to Yucca Mountain from the east, he says trucks appear
to be the cheapest option for many sites.
For Southwestern states, the most direct route would
cross into California, swing through the Mojave Desert and turn
northeast on I-15 to Las Vegas. Trucks would then go around Las
Vegas' new beltway and head 90 miles northwest to Yucca Mountain.
However, Las Vegas and surrounding Clark County want
nothing to do with the shipments.
Clark County Commissioners are preparing to block the DOE
from using the Las Vegas beltway.
"We already decided we don't want it here," said Clark
County Commissioner Myrna Williams, who also heads the county's
nuclear waste policy committee. "We will be in court, and we
trust the fairness of America."
If Nevada officials succeed, the alternate route could
send shipments into Southern California, north on I-5 to
Sacramento, then east into Nevada. Nevada then wants the trucks
to cross almost the entire state before heading south, their
preferred route for hazardous material.
That "backdoor" has trucks traveling over 1,500 miles of
California and Nevada roads, about 1,000 more than the Las Vegas
route.
Williams says the county is not trying to stick other
states with the radioactive waste. Instead, she says state and
local officials are attempting to block the project from
happening at all.
This week, Nevada's Republican Gov. Kenny Guinn took
advantage of a portion of the 20-year-old law that called for the
repository by vetoing President Bush's decision to allow
construction. Congress has 90 days to overturn that veto.
Many Americans are unsure how the repository would affect
them because transfer routes are unclear, said Kevin Kamps,
nuclear waste specialist for the Washington-based Nuclear
Information and Resource Service.
"They want to keep communities in the dark about whether
they're on the route for as long as possible," he said.
Joe Davis, spokesman for the Energy Department, has said
department officials will begin working with local and state
governments to plan routes up to five years before the site would
open. Until then, he said, all options are on the table.
That has frustrated California officials.
"They've always put us off even though we've wanted
(those route plans.)," said Barbara Byron, nuclear waste policy
advisor at the California Energy Commission. "We've testified
before them. We've provided written comments. And we've asked for
route specific analyses. ... It's hard for the local communities
to know how they'd be impacted."
City officials in Sacramento, which would be a major
intersection if trucks were diverted from Las Vegas, refused to
comment.
Though the Energy Department is still studying
transportation issues, it released a broad environmental impact
report in February.
According to the report, standing next to a truck
carrying spent fuel for one hour is about the same as a chest
X-ray.
"But if those casks are being shipped through places like
Los Angeles, there's a good chance the trucks will be stuck in
traffic along the way," said nuclear waste specialist Kamps. "And
in Los Angeles, one hour is sometimes a short traffic jam."
On the Net: http://www.ymp.gov
http://www.co.clark.nv.us/commission/commission.htm
http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/trans.htm
(Ryan Alessi is a Washington reporter for Scripps-McClatchy
Western Service.)
The Knoxville News-Sentinel Co. All Rights Reserved.
*****************************************************************
23 Yucca: Of course they don't want it
Nevada Appeal
April 12, 2002
By Nevada Appeal editorial board
Now that Nevada's battle against nuclear-waste storage at Yucca
Mountain has hit the big time, it's fascinating to see some
national perspective on the issue.
The Wall Street Journal, for example, on Tuesday had this to say
in reaction to Gov. Kenny Guinn's veto of President Bush's
decision to proceed with the Yucca project:
"Now we'll find out if a single state and a few partisan senators
can trump the national interest and doom any future for nuclear
power."
The Journal takes a decidedly political view of the controversy
and apparently accepts at face value anything said by the
Department of Energy or nuclear power industry, which we know are
very close to one and the same.
Take this example: "For 20 years ratepayers have poured $16
billion into a fund to build a national repository; $8 billion
has gone just for studying sites."
The statement would be true, except for that final "s." The
government has studied only one site: Yucca Mountain.
Here's another example: "The place has been tested for volcanos,
earthquakes and climate. Even discounting for government work,
that's not bad."
True again. Except for what's not said. Anyone who has seen the
studies on volcanos, earthquakes and climate knows that Yucca
Mountain is among the worst places in the country for two out of
three.
One more example: "This (environmental) crowd has now thrown in
with the Las Vegas gambling lobby and other big-money worthies
fighting against Yucca."
Yes, the gambling lobby has big money. But Nevada residents, whom
we expect to be much better-read on the Yucca Mountain issue than
Wall Street Journal editorial writers, know the nuclear power
industry is outspending anti-Yucca forces by roughly 3-1.
When the rhetoric is set aside, two things become clear:
-- Yucca Mountain is technically a poor place to store nuclear
waste.
-- Residents of the 39 states where nuclear waste is actually
created are only too ready to have their garbage shipped to
Nevada.
Copyright Nevada Appeal. Materials contained within this site may
*****************************************************************
24 Nevada files lawsuit against the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Las Vegas SUN
April 11, 2002
LAS VEGAS (AP) - Nevada is challenging the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission's licensing rule for making Yucca Mountain the
nation's nuclear waste dump. The state attorney general's office
filed a lawsuit with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District
of Columbia on Thursday against the regulatory commission's
November ruling. That ruling established health and safety
regulations for storing 77,000 tons of the nation's high-level
nuclear waste 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
"The Yucca Mountain project will not achieve the geological
isolation required by the Environmental Protection Agency," said
Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa in a statement.
The commission could issue a license for the proposed nuclear
waste repository even though it's fundamentally unsafe from a
long-term geologic perspective, said Joe Egan, Nevada's lead
nuclear attorney and a former nuclear engineer. "This violates
the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, and departs radically from the
recommendations of the global scientific community," he said.
Officials with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Washington
could not immediately be reached for comment.
Energy Department officials have said the site is scientifically
sound and have expressed confidence that it can store the
radioactive waste safely. The commission's licensing rule for the
proposed dump requires the federal Energy Department to
demonstrate that radioactive emissions will meet the EPA's
emission standards for 10,000 years.
Egan argued, however, that the radiation emissions are projected
to increase steadily after that because of geologic deficiencies
discovered by the Department of Energy in the late 1990s.
Yucca Mountain is no longer expected to isolate radioactive waste
if the manmade packages it's stored in fail after 10,000 years,
Egan said.
The state also is challenging the Energy Department's use of
water, radiation standards, siting guidelines and the site
recommendations by Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and President
Bush.
The state has shut off water to Yucca Mountain, but the
department switched to a newly built 1-million gallon tank and
one small well.
Gov. Kenny Guinn on Monday vetoed President Bush's approval of
the project, but Congress can override that veto with a majority
vote.
The attorney general's office said it also plans to file claims
related to the Energy Department's environmental impact statement
for Yucca Mountain.
All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc.
*****************************************************************
25 Congressional hearing moved up to beat speedy Yucca vote
Las Vegas SUN
April 11, 2002
RENO, Nev. (AP) - Worried the House could vote on Yucca Mountain
in a matter of weeks, the chairman of the Transportation
Committee will move up a congressional hearing on transporting
nuclear waste to the Nevada site.
Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, said Thursday that he asked two
subcommittee chairmen who originally set the hearing for May 9 to
reschedule it "as quickly as possible" when he learned House
Speaker Dennis Hastert might schedule a vote in early May.
Young said the joint hearing will be April 25 before the House
Transportation subcommittee on railroads and the subcommittee on
highways and transit. "I believe it's imperative that Congress
carefully and fairly examine the transportation issues involved
in transporting nuclear waste throughout our nation to the Yucca
storage site," Young said.
"The transportation of the spent rods from the nuclear plants to
Yucca will cross virtually every state in the nation, and we must
thoroughly examine all of the issues related to this
transportation," he said.
Nevada Republican Gov. Kenny Guinn and the state's congressional
delegation have been emphasizing the dangers of transporting
nuclear waste across the country to Nevada as they try to win
enough votes in Congress to kill the Yucca Mountain project.
"I am disappointed by the Speaker's urgency in scheduling a vote
on an issue of such great importance, but I am pleased that
Chairman Young is committed to protecting the health and safety
of Americans," Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., said Thursday.
"His willingness to reschedule this joint hearing will give
Nevadans an opportunity to clearly detail the dangers of
transporting nuclear waste through 44 states - past our schools,
hospitals, and homes - for the next 38 years."
Young learned in a conversation with Hastert, R-Ill., this week
that the House vote could come before the transportation hearing
that had been planned May 9, an aide said.
"An official vote hasn't been set but the feeling is that very
early in May is when it is going to be on the (House) floor,"
said Steve Hansen, the committee's communications director.
President Bush in February directed that the Nevada site be
selected to store 77,000 tons of the nation's nuclear waste. But
under the law, Nevada has a right to veto that decision, which
Guinn did earlier this week. Congress, in turn, can override
Nevada's objection.
Young said during a trip to Nevada in January he was rethinking
his original vote in 1987 supporting a proposal to bury the
nation's nuclear waste in Nevada.
"He has serious concerns about it," Hansen said from Washington
on Thursday. "I don't know whether he is for it or against it,
but he wants to give Yucca Mountain a fair hearing in the
Transportation Committee," he said.
"He has never been a real fan of the Yucca Mountain proposal
primarily because there is such a united feeling in Nevada
against it, that they feel it is being rammed down their throat
by other states," Hansen said.
"Being from Alaska, he's been on the bad end of similar deals."
Young has always been concerned about transportation systems used
in the movement of nuclear waste, Hansen said.
"He has had reservations even before Sept. 11, and more so now."
All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc.
*****************************************************************
26 Standoff Over Plutonium Shipments
Las Vegas SUN
April 12, 2002
COLUMBIA, S.C.- South Carolina's governor and the federal Energy
Department are locking horns over planned plutonium shipments to
the state - a dispute federal officials say is delaying nuclear
cleanup nationwide.
The Energy Department wants to ship plutonium from a former
nuclear weapons site in Rocky Flats, Colo., to a plant near
Aiken, S.C., where it would be converted into fuel for nuclear
reactors.
Gov. Jim Hodges says he supports the idea, but he won't allow the
weapons-grade material into the state until the government agrees
to make the shipping agreement legally binding.
It appeared the standoff had ended Thursday after the governor
agreed to a written proposal from Energy Secretary Spencer
Abraham that said he would send a 30-day notice of when the
shipments would begin. But Hodges also wanted a consent order
filed in federal court that would have let a judge order the
Energy Department to remove the plutonium if it did not meet the
terms of the agreement.
The department rejected that request, and Hodges said the
situation is back to square one.
Hodges wants the Energy Department to provide a document
outlining schedules to fund the construction of Mixed Oxide, or
MOX, fuel treatment facilities, when to expect the shipments and
when they would leave South Carolina.
"All I want to know is whether I've got something I can run down
to the federal courthouse if they don't honor the terms and get a
judge to stop shipments," he said Thursday.
Abraham said the agency addressed Hodges' concerns in the
proposed agreement by establishing annual funding targets,
committing to notify the state of all plutonium shipments and
including firm dates that the material would be removed from the
state if the Energy Department was unable to come up with the
funds to build the MOX facility.
President Bush included $384 million to fund the plutonium
disposition program in the next fiscal year, beginning July 1.
The budget also noted that the project would require funding of
$3.8 billion over the next 20 years, Abraham wrote.
The standoff springs from the federal government's plan to clean
up Rocky Flats, northwest of Denver, and turn it into a wildlife
refuge.
Rocky Flats made plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons for 40
years, but it closed in 1989. To meet the 2006 conversion
deadline, the Energy Department needs to begin shipping plutonium
soon, although department officials won't give an exact date.
The state and federal governments' inability to reach an
agreement has held up cleanup activities at former nuclear plants
across the nation, Abraham said. It also jeopardizes the 2000
U.S.-Russian plutonium disposition agreement, he said.
"We need to move forward with the MOX plant that will be used to
dispose of the plutonium at issue in order to honor our
commitments to the Russian Federation," Abraham wrote.
All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc.
*****************************************************************
27 Security rests with Yucca Mountain
newsobserver.com : editorials
[newsobserver.com, Raleigh, NC]
APRIL 14, 2002
Friday, April 12, 2002 5:30AM EDT
Burying a possible terrorist target: radioactive material in
cooling pools at reactor sites
By GERALD MARSH AND GEORGE STANFORD, Knight Ridder/Tribune
WASHINGTON - In deciding to make Nevada's Yucca Mountain the
nation's first long-term repository for nuclear waste, President
Bush emphasized that the move was "necessary to protect public
safety, health and the nation's security."
A fellow Republican, Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn, is strenuously
objecting. Guinn, a shining example of the NIMBY, or "not in my
backyard" syndrome, maintains that the national security argument
for Yucca Mountain "is an absurd invention of the nuclear
industry and an opportunistic use of the tragedies of September
11."
Guinn's view not only is dangerously shortsighted, it's patently
wrong. The Nevada governor forgets that, in light of Sept. 11,
the main danger lies in retaining the radioactive material at
reactor sites in cooling pools, which are somewhat vulnerable to
terrorist attack.
That risk certainly should not be exaggerated, but it is far
from "absurd." Maps of a number of U.S. nuclear facilities turned
up in al-Qaeda caves in Afghanistan, indicating that the
terrorist network was, at the very least, studying the
possibility of attacking them.
As noted recently by Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham: "More
than 161 million people live within 75 miles of one or more of
these sites. They should be able to withstand current terrorist
threats, but that may not remain the case in the future. These
materials would be far better secured in a deep underground
repository at Yucca Mountain."
Sure, the nuclear industry stands to benefit from the opening of
Yucca Mountain, but so do the rest of us. It will take years to
complete the job, but we should start moving the spent fuel away
from densely populated areas as soon as we can.
Opponents of forging ahead, such as Guinn, say they are afraid
there might be a leak from the repository thousands of years
hence. That fear is utterly unrealistic. Nevada, because it is
home to a nuclear test site, already has huge amounts of
plutonium and other fission products stored under its soil
totally unconfined, and posing no threat to people.
At least four tons of material remain at the Nevada nuclear test
site as bomb-test residue. Guinn, to our knowledge, has never
expressed concern about its presence.
The laws of science and logic say that one should compare risk
to the public of the various options for handling the waste. That
has been done, and Bush has finally made a sound decision fully
in accordance with the laws of the land.
We can stop worrying about transporting spent fuel, too. Over
the last 40 years there have been more than 3,000 such shipments
in the United States, traveling 1.6 million miles. Some of those
vehicles have been involved in traffic accidents, but there has
never, ever been even one death or injury due to radiation
released in a transportation accident.
Compare that with what we now tolerate. In 1982 through 1992,
spills of gasoline and other chemicals in U.S. transportation
accidents caused 107 deaths, 1,400 injuries and evacuation of
more that 13,000 people.
The go-ahead for Yucca Mountain should have been given years
ago. Instead of pandering to local fears, Guinn should welcome
the federal money, high-paying jobs and other benefits that
opening Yucca Mountain will bring to Nevada.
That's a good return for enhancing the nation's security against
terror attacks by hosting a facility with entirely negligible
risk.
Gerald Marsh is an advisory board member of the National Center
for Public Policy Research's John P. McGovern Center for
Environmental and Regulatory Affairs and a nuclear physicist.
George Stanford is a nuclear reactor physicist now retired from
Argonne National Laboratory.
© Copyright 2002, The News &Observer.
*****************************************************************
28 California route is a possibility for Yucca waste
Orange County Register - Top News
One possible plan would lengthen the spent nuclear fuel's trip by
1,000 miles.
April 12, 2002 By RYAN ALESSI
Scripps-McClatchy Western Service
WASHINGTON -- The government's plan to develop a radioactive-
waste storage garage in Nevada could turn California into a
driveway.
Depending on transportation decisions - largely in the hands of
U.S. Department of Energy and Nevada officials - much of the
nation's nuclear waste could be routed through California, in
some instances adding up to 1,000 miles to the trip.
If Congress approves Nevada's Yucca Mountain as the nation's
repository for spent nuclear fuel, officials say it would take at
least eight years to open. But state governments already are
scrambling to study its effects.
Answers are murky in part because the DOE has not decided how the
waste would reach the site or the routes used to get it there.
Bob Halstead, transportation adviser for Nevada's agency for
nuclear projects, has spent more than a decade analyzing the
possible routes for the estimated 108,000 shipments it would take
to move spent fuel from 131 sites around the country.
Because no rail line exists that would take shipments directly to
Yucca Mountain from the east, he says trucks appear to be the
cheapest option for many sites.
For Southwestern states, the most direct route would cross into
California, swing through the Mojave Desert and turn northeast on
I-15 to Las Vegas. Trucks would go around Las Vegas' new beltway
and head 90 miles northwest to Yucca Mountain.
However, Las Vegas and surrounding Clark County want nothing to
do with the shipments. Clark County Commissioners are preparing
to block the DOE from using the Las Vegas beltway.
"We already decided we don't want it here," said Clark County
Commissioner Myrna Williams, who also heads the county's
nuclear-waste-policy committee. "We will be in court, and we
trust the fairness of America."
If Nevada officials succeed, the alternate route could send
shipments into Southern California, north on I-5 to Sacramento,
then east into Nevada. Nevada then wants the trucks to cross
almost the entire state before heading south, their preferred
route for hazardous material.
That "backdoor" has trucks traveling over 1,500 miles of
California and Nevada roads, about 1,000 more than the Las Vegas
route.
Williams says the county is not trying to stick other states with
the waste. Instead, she says state and local officials are
attempting to block the project from happening at all.
This week, Nevada's Republican Gov. Kenny Guinn took advantage of
a portion of the 20-year-old law that called for the repository
by vetoing President George W. Bush's decision to allow
construction. Congress has 90 days to overturn that veto.
Many Americans are unsure how the repository would affect them
because transfer routes are unclear, said Kevin Kamps, nuclear-
waste specialist for the Washington-based Nuclear Information and
Resource Service.
"They want to keep communities in the dark about whether they're
on the route for as long as possible," he said.
Joe Davis, Energy Department spokesman, has said department
officials will begin working with local and state governments to
plan routes up to five years before the site would open. Until
then, he said, all options are on the table. That has frustrated
California officials.
"They've always put us off even though we've wanted (those route
plans)," said Barbara Byron, nuclear-waste-policy advisor at the
California Energy Commission. "We've testified before them. We've
provided written comments. And we've asked for route specific
analyses. ... It's hard for the local communities to know how
they'd be impacted."
Though the Energy Department still is studying transportation
issues, it released a broad environmental impact report in
February.
According to the report, standing next to a truck carrying spent
fuel for one hour is about the same as a chest X-ray.
"But if those casks are being shipped through places like Los
Angeles, there's a good chance the trucks will be stuck in
traffic along the way," Kamps said. "And in Los Angeles, one hour
is sometimes a short traffic jam."
The Orange County Register
*****************************************************************
29 Nye County needs to get the word out about Yucca location -
Las Vegas View Neighborhood Newspapers
Friday, April 12, 2002 -
By MARK WAITE
VIEW STAFF WRITER
With the startup of the Yucca Mountain project likely, Nye County
Federal Facilities and Natural Resources Manager Les Bradshaw
said the county needs to get the word out to the nation about
where we are.
The American public needs to know that Pahrump is as far from Las
Vegas as Richmond, Va. is from Washington, D.C. and that more
than 35,000 people live near Yucca Mountain, Bradshaw told the
Pahrump Nuclear Waste and Environmental Advisory Board last week.
"There's a lot of good things that will happen if people know
about us. So we have to make ourselves known," Bradshaw said.
"Unless the big bubble bursts in Las Vegas we're going to
continue to grow," Bradshaw said. "When that first truckload
comes through in 2010, 2015, how many people will be in this
valley?"
Nye County statistics show the population of Pahrump has been
growing by an average of 16.9 percent annually. The county
population has been growing at 7.8 percent per year. The
rationale of the Community Protection Plan drafted by Nye County
is that the county should be treated special, he said.
"We'll go over there with a two by four and bang on the walls a
little bit and tell them we will be encroaching on their
project," Bradshaw said.
The Small Business Administration could give Pahrump businesses
the proper designation to have access to more SBA loans, Bradshaw
said. Procurement of federal contracts by Nye County businesses
should also be a priority, he said.
Nye County gets more economic advantages from the Ponderosa Dairy
than it does from the Yucca Mountain project, Bradshaw said,
adding, "I'd rather have another dairy, so to speak."
"Why can't they look at this community as their host community as
they have at Hanford and Savannah River?" he asked, referring to
other DOE projects.
He cited a "stovepipe effect" of all the federal agencies using
Nye County.
"We have to talk about the cumulative impacts on the county from
BLM (Bureau of Land Management), national parks, fish and
wildlife, and DOD (Department of Defense)," Bradshaw said. "Your
presence here is holding us down and making overall growth in the
county impossible."
Nye County also should be involved in the long-term assessment of
the performance of Yucca Mountain, Bradshaw said. There should be
a core science group responsible to Nye County, he said.
"Nye County needs to have its own science group or science
institute," he said. "All of us will have our scientists that can
talk teckie with DOE."
Nye County has been conducting independent assessments of the
Yucca Mountain Project while the repository site is being studied
and giving them to the U.S. Department of Energy, which are seen
as credible in the scientific community, Bradshaw said. The DOE
needs to understand the hydrogeology of Amargosa Valley, he said,
Nye County has been explaining how radionucleids from eroding
radioactive cannisters would travel through more open pathways
instead of flooding the aquifer as a whole. Bradshaw said there
is an assumption the radioactive cannisters will begin to erode
in hundreds of years, but any radioactive plume would travel at
only inches per year.
"We've produced data that has been important in the national
debate," Bradshaw said. "I think Yucca Mountain probably can be
licensed. I say that knowing the bar for licensing isn't very
high."
Bradshaw was referring to the approved license that will be
required by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, expected to be
decided in the next two years, the next major hurdle in the
process. The hope is that technical uncertainties in the project
can be reduced over the coming decades, he said.
"We're pushing for a cooler, ventilated, dryer repository,"
Bradshaw said, noting quite a few of the county's efforts are
directed toward that. "DOE is embracing that to some degree."
If the ventilation and metallurgical concerns are addressed, the
next big issue is transportation, Bradshaw said. The Nuclear
Regulatory Commission held a workshop on transportation of
nuclear waste through Nye County at Beatty High School on Monday.
The transportation concerns of shipping it by truck were best
illustrated by photographs of a tractor-trailer truck making the
tight 90-degree turn at the four-way stop on U.S. Highway 95 in
Beatty in front of The Exchange Club.
While people standing six to eight feet away from a radioactive
cannister wouldn't receive a measurable dose to worry about,
Bradshaw said, "people involved in the program have to deal with
public perception as well as what might be scientific realities.
"Nye County has stated a clear preference for rail as the only
possibility that might make sense," he said.
Four rail routes have been suggested, the longest one from the
north, from Beowawe at the junction of the Union Pacific Tracks
on Interstate 80, another one from Caliente in southeastern
Nevada, as well as two more from the Interstate 15 corridor, one
coming up from Jean through Pahrump. The DOE hasn't arranged
rights-of-way on the routes, they're only concepts, he said.
Bradshaw said every route will be a detriment to somebody, Nye
County fully intends to let any people affected by the
transportation routes to voice their opinion.
Instead of a dead-end, single-purpose rail line to Yucca
Mountain, Bradshaw said he'd like to know if a rail line from the
north could be extended through to the Interstate 15 corridor at
Jean that could spur economic development. There could be some
groups voicing strong objections to transportation routes in the
area, such as those concerned over the endangered pupfish in
Amargosa Valley, he said.
If the DOE proposes to ship the nuclear waste by truck, Bradshaw
said a Chalk Mountain route would be the best route for Nye
County, through the northern part of Las Vegas Valley, only
touching on eight to 10 miles of Nye County. But he doubted
whether that would be approved because of the proximity of the
route to Las Vegas.
Another problem is future funding, Bradshaw said. People using
nuclear power pay a fee for the nuclear waste disposal.
"The current fee structure is inadequate for the life of the
project. DOE doesn't agree with this," he said. "We don't want to
be stuck with some white elephant, half-baked, half-finished
project."
The county has to work with Congress, because the DOE is limited
in working with mitigation at this point, Bradshaw said. An
importation fee would cover any mitigation needed, he said.
The reality of housing radioactive waste, which won't decay for
10,000 years, isn't lost on Nye County.
"The time line is a lot longer than anything we've ever done.
That's a little worrisome and a little bothersome," Bradshaw
said.
[http://www.lasvegas.com]
*****************************************************************
30 NRC hearing outlines transportation issues -
Las Vegas
Friday, April 12, 2002 -
By MARK WAITE VIEW STAFF WRITER
BEATTY -- If the U.S. Congress doesn't sustain Nevada Gov. Kenny
Guinn's veto of Yucca Mountain, the next step in the nuclear
repository project will be licensing by the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission.
The same day Gov. Guinn was vetoing President Bush's decision to
approve Yucca Mountain in Las Vegas, 115 miles north the NRC held
a public hearing at the Beatty Senior Center to outline their
oversight of the project and transportation issues. The NRC plans
a similar hearing in Pahrump the week of May 19-25. If Congress
permits the facility, the NRC will have to issue a permit for the
construction and later, the storage of the high-level nuclear
waste.
"The NRC is an independent agency. We have a lot of experience in
regulating nuclear projects. There are 104 nuclear power plants
in the United States that are regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission," Bill Reamer, NRC deputy director of waste management
told a sparse gathering Monday evening. But he said "This project
represents a lot of unique challenges.
"There are stringent requirements that set a high bar for the
Department of Energy to meet if this project moves forward," he
said. "Even after the repository is loaded, some 30 to 50 years
from now, we have to make a decision whether the repository is
safe, whether it can be closed."
"During this process we have identified information gaps which
the Department of Energy would have to address if they want to
submit an application," NRC High-Level Waste Branch Chief Janet
Schlueter said.
Reamer said the five-member commission that heads the NRC is
appointed by the president and affirmed by Congress to five-year
terms. No more than three members can be from one political
party. The agency itself has 40 scientists, in addition there are
an equal number of experts from the Center for Nuclear Waste
Regulatory Analyses in San Antonio, Texas, which will study their
research, he said.
Dick Anderson, of Beatty, an environmental consultant for the
National Park Service, asked with a project of a duration of
10,000 years how the NRC will evaluate unknown, speculative
information. Schlueter said the final environmental impact
statement by the U.S. Department of Energy has to include a range
of potential impacts and certain assumptions are made.
"The project potentially could go on for at least 100 years,
maybe longer and for that period, the regulations require a
performance confirmation program to take data constantly and
focus on challenge estimates for the performance," Reamer said.
"There's going to be incomplete information, there's always going
to be areas of uncertainty."
NRC staffer Janet Kotra said, "Absolute certainty is not going to
be, the standard is reasonable expectation."
"I found this very fascinating, the members who are going to be
in charge of running the NRC are political appointees," said
Ralph McCracken, a pistachio farmer from Amargosa Valley. "I'm
asking you to rise above pressures from upper level managers to
push this thing forward."
Shawn Murphy, who said he was formerly a firefighter in
Washington state, echoed some distrust of the government secrecy,
recalling how he was told to keep quiet about the dangers of
pipeline fires after one occurred in the state.
"Because we are United States citizens, we'd like to believe in
our government but bear with us, some of us don't have the
faith," Murphy said.
Reamer said during hearings on the Yucca Mountain application,
Department of Energy officials will have to testify in front of a
board of administrative judges under oath and be cross-examined
by NRC staff, intervenors like the affected Nevada counties and
others. "It's a fact-obtaining, truth-ascertaining process," he
said.
Mal Murphy, a consultant for Nye County, said unlike the incident
Shawn Murphy mentioned, there will be an intense oversight of the
Yucca Mountain project by local officials.
"None of us can stop the government decision that has occurred,"
said Chester Poslusny, senior project manager for the NRC Spent
Fuel Project Office. But he said, "If a repository is built and
opened, the NRC has to make certain that every shipment of fuel
is done safely."
The NRC is testing the durability of 14 different types of cask
designs to ship the nuclear material, Poslusny said. The safety
of the shippers, drivers, what kind of material will be shipped,
how much material is shipped, the containers, will all be
evaluated by the NRC, he said.
It will take $1 million and two years for a company to design a
cask for shipping fuel, Poslusny said, it will take the NRC
$270,000 to review it. The casks will be subjected to "very
rigorous tests" Poslusny said -- a drop test, puncture test, fire
test and submersion test.
"The state can get involved in defining routes, alternate
routes," Poslusny said. "They have a role in choosing routes for
transporting nuclear fuel.
"In the United States there's been over 1,300 spent fuel
shipments over 20 years. There have been zero spent fuel package
failures," Poslusny said. He recalled one instance in Tennessee
during the 1970s where a truck overturned and a cask carrying
nuclear fuel was thrown over 100 feet but it suffered only minor
surface damage and there was no radiation released.
"Before a shipment occurs, the shipper would be talking to the
state and local government well in advance," Poslusny said. "We
don't publicize that information for obvious reasons."
An armed guard will accompany the shipment in areas with more
than 100,000 people, he said, a statement that led Mal Murphy to
comment, "Why should the people in Amargosa Valley be offered any
less protection than the people in Des Moines, Iowa?"
"We have put the word out to beef up security. Since 9-11,
facilities are on high alert and we expect that to continue,"
Poslusny said.
Bill King of Pahrump, said he'd prefer shipping the nuclear waste
by rail, since there would be fewer worries about other drivers,
and a larger amount could be sent with each shipment. Poslusny
said the shipper could decide whether to use truck or rail.
McCracken said he has fighter jets from Nellis Air Force Base
flying over his farm trying to elude radar. Shawn Murphy added,
when a jet crashed recently in Amargosa Valley, officials had to
ask local people themselves where it landed.
"The entire agency is undergoing review as a result of 9-11,"
Kotra said. "We have a very strong series of regulations on
aerial overflights at all our licensed facilities."
Congress has 90 legislative days to vote on the governor's veto,
a period that may not expire until late summer. If after that
vote the DOE submits an application for the nuclear repository,
Reamer said the NRC must decide whether to approve it within
three years.
www.lasvegas.com
*****************************************************************
31 LETTERS: Yucca coverage Unbalanced
Friday, April 12, 2002
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
To the editor:
I was both surprised and disappointed with the Review-Journal's
recent coverage of the Yucca Mountain issue. The "Friends of
Yucca" special section that appeared last Sunday was not only
unbalanced. but also counterproductive to Nevada's efforts to
keep high-level nuclear waste away from America's fastest growing
metropolitan area.
This section, claiming to state the "pro-Yucca case," really
served as a platform to declare the inevitability of Yucca. There
is a crucial difference between those two stances. Should we as
Nevadans accept the inevitability of taking whatever the federal
government deems appropriate for our state, regardless of the
impact of that decision on public safety and quality of life
issues?
The article on former Gov. Bob List was perplexing. If it is
inevitable, why does he feel the necessity of selling out his
so-called political principles as an "anti-Yucca" supporter at
heart, to be on the payroll of the nuclear industry? The
Review-Journal presented him as a "political realist." It seems
that it will be these same "realists" who have the most to gain
from a nuclear dump in Southern Nevada. Money will go first into
the hands of such compromised officials who sold out in order to
line their own pockets. The question remains, what will be left
for the improved social services, schools and health care that
proponents claim will trickle down to the rest of the community?
No mention was made of the recent poll that claimed many Las
Vegans would leave if the Yucca repository came to town. "We are
all from somewhere else," so the saying around here goes. What
would make people stay if they perceived a threat to their future
safety in this state?
The Review-Journal, if it really intended to prompt debate, would
have dealt with these issues alongside the misleadingly labeled
"Pro-Yucca" feature in last Sunday's paper.
MICHELLE TUSAN
BOULDER CITY
Lost cause
To the editor:
Hats off to Kenny Guinn for his stand against the big boys. It
was a grand show of principles and self-determination on behalf
of Nevada. Sad to say, however, he is wasting his time. Why?
Because the reality is no one out there cares about the fact that
nuclear waste is going to be deposited in Nevada -- for the
simple reason that if it doesn't go here, it might go there
(wherever "there" is).
No senator, no representative, no one in D.C. is going to stand
up for and with Gov. Guinn and Nevada because to do so increases
the possibility that their constituencies might get stuck with
the dump ... er, repository. Possibly, the only course of action
we might have that will get some attention is to remind all the
cities and towns along the transport route about the potential
for nuclear waste transports as terrorist targets or even highway
accidents.
I grew up in Massachusetts during the time when "duck and cover"
atomic bomb exercises were as common as fire drills in school
during the '50s. I recall reading and hearing about the nuclear
testing that went on in Nevada. Black-and-white images on TV
would show the Earth rise and fall as the bomb exploded
underground, and I remember thinking, "Boy, am I glad I don't
live there!" I wonder how many people in other states thought the
same thing at the time. I wonder how many think so now.
That's the sum total of why Nevada is being ignored in its
struggle to defeat Yucca Mountain. Guinn's quest is a noble
cause, but a lost one. Better he should expend his energy on
what's in it for us.
As for me, I'd take free UNLV educations in perpetuity for all
qualified Nevada residents -- throw in free health care while
we're at it (we may need it), courtesy of all the taxpayers in
the country who are glad they don't live here.
JAN ASHMAN
LAS VEGAS
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal, 1997 - 2002
*****************************************************************
32 Yucca opposition expands litigation
Friday, April 12, 2002
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
Latest lawsuit calls licensing rule `unlawful'
By STEVE TETREAULT
STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU
WASHINGTON -- The list of lawsuits Nevada has filed against the
Yucca Mountain project grew on Thursday.
A new lawsuit charges the Nuclear Regulatory Commission adopted
an "unlawful" licensing rule in November for the proposed nuclear
waste repository.
Nevada officials say the NRC rule ignored a requirement by
Congress that Yucca Mountain be judged primarily on the ability
of its natural features to prevent radioactive waste from
leaching into the environment.
Nevada sued the Energy Department in December on the same issue.
The DOE has responded its actions were legal and proper.
The new lawsuit requests the NRC regulation be thrown out and the
agency be forced to adopt a new one. NRC officials could not be
reached for comment Thursday evening.
Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, a Texas congressman introduced a
formal resolution in the U.S. House to overturn Gov. Kenny
Guinn's veto of the Yucca Mountain site recommendation.
Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, submitted the legislation with 11
co-sponsors. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., plans to have
the full House vote on the measure in early May, possibly before
May 12.
Yucca Mountain hearings that had been planned for late April and
May were rescheduled Thursday to accommodate Hastert's voting
schedule.
Nevada's lawsuit against the Nuclear Regulatory Commission became
the fifth Yucca-related lawsuit in the courts, with another being
planned by Nevada lawyers to be filed soon.
Clark County and the City of Las Vegas joined as petitioners in
the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District
of Columbia Circuit.
In June, Nevada submitted a court challenge to Yucca Mountain
radiation standards issued by the Environmental Protection
Agency. In December and in February, lawsuits were filed
challenging Energy Department site rules that formed the basis
for President Bush's decision to recommend Yucca Mountain for
waste burial.
The state and the Energy Department also are battling in court in
Nevada over water permits for the Yucca Mountain study site 100
miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal, 1997 - 2002
*****************************************************************
33 Yucca: Ensign goes door-to-door to lobby fellow Republicans
Friday, April 12, 2002
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
By STEVE TETREAULT
STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU
WASHINGTON -- Emerging from the U.S. Capitol on Thursday, Sen.
John Ensign, R-Nev., paused to look over an inch-thick loose-leaf
briefing book carried by his legislative director, Pam Thiessen.
It contained documents, customized for his next appointment,
supporting Nevada's case against Yucca Mountain.
Ensign was on his way to see Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., a
24-year Senate veteran.
Ensign, a second-year senator, was unfamiliar with Cochran.
Still, Ensign was about to ask him for support on the nuclear
waste vote.
"Thad is going to be very tough," Ensign said.
On most issues, Cochran allies with Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., who
is for a waste repository at Yucca Mountain. Also, Mississippi
has a nuclear power plant, the Grand Gulf facility at Port
Gibson.
"We're still going to make the pitch because you never know,"
Ensign said. "Thad's a very reasonable person, and he likes to
hear about fiscal discipline."
For the past month, Ensign has been seeking half-hour
appointments with Republicans to make his pitch against
legislation that would override Gov. Kenny Guinn's veto and
designate Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, for a
nuclear waste repository.
By Thursday's end, Ensign said, he will have met 20 in a formal
setting. He plans such appeals to all but a few of the Senate's
49 Republicans.
Ensign's task is like going door-to-door on a steep hill. The
last time the Senate voted on nuclear waste, in April 2000, two
out of 54 Republicans supported Nevada, and Ensign may have a
difficult time improving much on that figure by the time the
Senate votes in midsummer.
In meetings with some senators, Ensign found that nuclear power
lobbyists got there before him. "There's no question the industry
has reached them," he said.
Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle
said this week they have more than 30 Democrats ready to help
Nevada. They have pressured Ensign to deliver 15-20 Republicans.
"I'm pretty confident I'll be able to get some Republican votes.
I don't know how many I'll be able to get. I don't know if we'll
be able to win," Ensign said. "But as long as we win this issue,
it doesn't matter where the votes come from."
What If Nevada loses?
"Will I be satisfied knowing I gave it the shot? Yes," Ensign
said. "I think that's what people ask of you: Did you do
everything possible that could be done?"
Rounding a corner inside the Russell Senate Building, Ensign and
Thiessen disappear into Cochran's office.
While Ensign is scheduling appointments, Reid is taking other
approaches.
The 16-year Senate veteran is more likely to buttonhole Democrats
on the Senate floor.
"I believe he has spoken to every single Democratic senator,"
spokesman Nathan Naylor said. Mark Peplowski, a political science
professor at Community College of Southern Nevada, said Ensign
will need a miracle to win 15 Republicans.
"It's not unreasonable to ask (Ensign) to produce 15, but it
would be unfair to say that John was the one that didn't get it
done" if Nevada loses.
Peplowski said Republicans who support Nevada's case would be
defying President Bush, who has chosen Yucca Mountain as the
repository site.
After 20 minutes, Ensign emerged smiling from the meeting.
"We went in with very low expectations, and we got some good
responses in there," Ensign said.
On Nevada's checklist, Cochran will be put in the "let's keep
working on him" column, Ensign said.
Later, Cochran said Ensign "told me some things I didn't know"
about how repository costs will drive up the price of nuclear
power.
"I'm going to take another look at it," Cochran said. "I haven't
made a final decision."
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal, 1997 - 2002
*****************************************************************
34 N.B. to probe possible nuclear waste violation
Thursday, April 11, 2002
Page A14
Fredericton -- The New Brunswick government will look into
allegations that a truck loaded with nuclear waste travelled
across the province last week without proper documentation.
The move came after Public Safety Minister Margaret-Ann Blaney
failed to answer questions in the legislature from Opposition
Leader Bernard Richard yesterday. Mr. Richard said a reliable,
but anonymous, source told him that a truck carrying nuclear
waste had travelled from the Port of Saint John without any
documentation indicating it contained.
CP
2002 Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
*****************************************************************
35 Nevada files suit on new Yucca rules
April 12, 2002
LAS VEGAS SUN
WASHINGTON -- As part of its expanding anti-Yucca Mountain
campaign, Nevada filed a lawsuit against the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission on Thursday. Clark County and Las Vegas joined the
suit.
The lawsuit alleges the NRC had no legal authority to change the
rules it will apply to the proposed nuclear waste repository. The
NRC rules were adopted in November.
State officials say the Energy Department and NRC changed the
rules laid out by Congress when lawmakers directed the deparmtent
to bury nuclear waste in a site that isolates the waste and
deadly radiation using primarily geologic features.
Congress has not approved the new rules.
Nevada officials say the agencies intend, under their new rules,
to rely more on engineered, man-made barriers such as steel waste
containers, rather than natural rock.
The point is important because Nevada officials argue that Yucca
Mountain's natural features are not adequate to isolate the waste
from humans and the environment for thousands of years.
The state filed a similar suit against the Energy Department in
December. Several other lawsuits are pending, including one
against the Environmental Protection Agency over its radiation
standards rules.
Nevada will leave no stone unturned in its attempt to remind the
nation why a Yucca repository is a bad idea, Attorney General
Frankie Sue Del Papa said in a written statement.
NRC officials have not reviewed the lawsuit, spokeswoman Sue
Gagner said today.
All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc.
*****************************************************************
36 Nevada's anti-Yucca fight turns green
Las Vegas SUN
April 12, 2002
By Benjamin Grove
< [grove@lasvegassun.com] >
WASHINGTON -- Nevada leaders are counting on what may be an
unprecedented swell of support from the environmental community
-- including a few green-minded celebrities -- as the Yucca
Mountain project faces a decision in Congress.
Environmentalists and activists in far-flung places such as
Alto, Ga., and Montpelier, Vt., will be increasingly important
foot soldiers in the battle against the proposed nuclear waste
repository project, state officials said.
Anti-Yucca activists are arranging e-mail campaigns and sending
word to their lawmakers that the plan to bury the nation's most
dangerous radioactive byproducts in Nevada is deeply flawed.
"We have started a full-court press," said Daniel Becker,
director of global and energy programs at the Sierra Club. The
750,000-nationwide member parent group sent e-mails this week to
its 63 chapters in all 50 states with Yucca updates, urging
locals to pressure their lawmakers, he said.
"It's a tough battle, but it's a winnable battle."
In Nevada's fight against the proposed nuclear repository,
environmentalists are expected to take an active role in trying
to rally public opinion against the dump.
A variety of green groups, plus an odd assortment of other
organizations that include the International Association of Fire
Fighters and Grandmothers for Peace International, are on record
opposing the Yucca project.
On Thursday a coalition of environmental, taxpayer and consumer
groups issued a report called Green Scissors 2002 calling Yucca
Mountain one of the 10 "choice cuts" for the federal budget. The
group called the proposed nuclear repository "wasteful and
environmentally harmful."
Gov. Kenny Guinn's chief of staff, Marybel Batjer, said
environmental groups "are so critical to our grass-roots
efforts."
She said some groups have made this an issue they'll grade
Congress on, meaning a senator or representative's environmental
record will be judged in part on how he or she votes on the
issue.
"That is really powerful to some members," Batjer said.
Nuclear industry officials shrug off most claims made by
anti-nuke activists, and quietly dismiss them as not influential
with conservative members of Congress who are likely to support
Yucca Mountain.
Industry officials point to the fact that nuclear power
generates about 20 percent of the nation's electricity, and
unlike other sources like coal, produces no greenhouse gases.
"Sometimes it's hard to take these folks as credible because
they completely fail to acknowledge or recognize that nuclear
energy is by far the nation's leading form of energy that does
not pollute the air," said Steve Kerekes, a spokesman for the
Nuclear Energy Institute, the nation's leading nuclear trade
group.
Nevada leaders are trying to enlist some star power to add
visibility to the campaign.
Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said today that no big-name star has
agreed to help the state yet and he wasn't aware of any that had
been specifically contacted by the state's anti-Yucca team of
publicists and lawyers. He said the state's lobbyists John
Podesta and Ken Duberstein were exploring options.
Reid pointed to anti-nuclear event appearances by musicians Joan
Baez, the Indigo Girls and Bonnie Raitt.
"We've had a number of people help us out over the years.
Anything that focuses attention on this issue is a help to us,"
Reid said. "That's why 'The West Wing' episode was so important."
Reid talked about six weeks ago with Ruben Aronin, executive
director of Earth Communications Office, or ECO, a Los
Angeles-based outfit that enlists celebrities to promote
environmental causes about six weeks ago.
The group specializes in arranging for a variety of celebrities
to star in public service campaigns -- including television spots
-- "that educate and inspire people around the world to take
action to protect the planet," according to its website.
ECO's Board of Directors includes actor Pierce Brosnan, model
Cindy Crawford, producer Ron Howard and Grateful Dead guitarist
Bob Weir.
It's not clear yet if ECO can help put a spot together in time
to have any effect before a vote in Congress, sources said.
Part of the challenge is educating a big-name star about the
complexities of the Yucca project. A number of celebrities are
active on nuclear issues -- none moreso than "The West Wing's"
star Martin Sheen, whose presidential character was at the center
of a nuclear waste transportation accident plot line in an
episode two weeks ago. (The show generated a lot of buzz, but
it's not clear if it raised any nationwide awareness about Yucca
Mountain.)
But it could prove difficult to find a high-profile entertainer
to feature in a Yucca-specific spot, Aronin said.
"It's certainly a challenge with the time constraints we're
under," Aronin said.
If an ECO-backed spot doesn't pan out, Reid staffers are said to
be chasing another big-name star to play an undisclosed role in
the state's anti-Yucca fight. Reid's aides are not releasing
details.
"It's fair to say that Sen. Reid has a lot of people who want to
help," Reid spokesman Nathan Naylor said. "He's got a lot of
friends."
Reid, the Senate's No. 2 Democrat, has met a number of
celebrities over the years through Democratic fund-raising ties
and as a rising lawmaker in Congress. Reid appeared -- as a U.S.
senator -- in a scene with Michael Douglas the Oscar-winning
movie "Traffic."
Christie Brinkley, at Reid's invitation, testified earlier this
year in opposition to a government-backed insurance plan during a
Senate nuclear safety subcommittee hearing, of which Reid is
chairman.
Reid is also known as a friend among the environmental lobby,
and as the project has evolved since 1987, the numbers of groups
such as the Green Scissors coalition have grown.
This month officials at the anti-Yucca group Nuclear Information
and Resource Service, with help from Public Citizen, researched
the groups that have voiced opposition in recent years -- and
compiled a list. The updated tally surfaced Tuesday when Gov.
Kenny Guinn announced his veto of President Bush's Yucca Mountain
endorsement.
The final numbers: 47 national groups and 477 local and state
organizations oppose the waste dump.
"If we had more time, we would have gotten much higher numbers,"
NIRS waste transportation analyst Kevin Kamps said. "There has
been consistent opposition to Yucca Mountain for a long time, but
it hasn't always been a front-burner issue. Now it is."
It's not clear if the NIRS list constitutes one of the largest
coalitions of environmental groups established in recent years.
But its size makes one thing clear, activists said.
"Yucca Mountain is a top priority of the major national
environmental, consumer and safe energy organizations because of
the potential harm to human health and the environment that this
project poses," Brent Blackwelder, president of Friends of the
Earth, said this week. "We stand as one in urging Congress to
uphold Gov. Guinn's veto." Guinn vetoed President Bush's approval
of the Yucca project on Monday, which by law gave Congress 90
days to vote on whether to go ahead with the controversial
project.
As the Yucca debate unfolds, environmentalists and other
activists expect lawmakers to take them seriously as thoughtful
policy players, not dismissed as tree-hugging rabble-rousers,
several said.
They hope their sheer numbers -- as well as the content of their
message -- will weigh heavily on lawmakers representing districts
all over the country. "The Department of Energy has gone to great
lengths to show that this is a Nevada-only issue," said Lisa Gue
of Washington-based Public Citizen. "It has taken a lot of work
and dedication for these groups across the country to show
Americans that this applies to you."
Sun reporter Cy Ryan contributed to this story.
All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc.
*****************************************************************
37 Editorial: Dropping the ball on nuke dump
Las Vegas SUN
April 12, 2002
On Wednesday the Nevada Legislature's Interim Finance Committee
approved up to $3 million for an anti-Yucca Mountain media blitz
to explain the dangers of nuclear waste transportation. But the
allocation came with strings attached, conditions that will
seriously hamper the state's efforts to fend off plans in
Congress to build a nuclear waste dump in Nevada. Instead of
immediately disbursing the money, Senate Majority Leader Bill
Raggio, the swing vote on the finance committee, cajoled other
lawmakers to go along with his demand that no state money be
allocated until it was matched by contributions from private
sources or local governments. In addition, any of the local
government money already spent on the anti-Yucca Mountain
campaign -- such as the $1 million previously delivered by Clark
County -- won't be counted by the state toward the matching
funds.
Local governments haven't exactly shown their courage, either.
While Clark County did approve some funding, last week the
commission delayed action on a proposal by County Commission
Chairman Dario Herrera to set aside another $3 million for the
fight. The other county commissioners said the state should ante
up first. Thank heavens local government officials and state
lawmakers aren't members of a volunteer fire department. If there
were an emergency, they'd spend all day at the firehouse arguing
over who should suit up first while the home they're supposed to
be saving instead burned to the ground.
It all should have been oh so simple. Nevada's two U.S.
senators, Harry Reid and John Ensign, asked Gov. Kenny Guinn to
convene a special session of the Legislature to get $10 million
for the anti-Yucca Mountain campaign. But too many state
legislators opposed a special session, forcing Guinn to seek a
lower amount through the Interim Finance Committee. Any money
raised probably will be spent on television and newspaper
advertisements in states where its U.S. senators would be more
amenable to siding with Nevada. But the failure to get enough
money quickly will make it difficult for Nevada to effectively
get its message out in time since a final vote on Yucca Mountain
will happen within three months. What's inexplicable is that the
state's residents overwhelmingly oppose Yucca Mountain, but too
many state legislators and local officials act as if they're a
fraid to fight and help our state's congressional delegation.
All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc.
*****************************************************************
38 Editorial: Nuke waste: Burial not the only answer
Las Vegas SUN
April 12, 2002
Technology known as transmutation, which could provide an
alternative to the burial of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, has
never been a priority for the federal government. Theoretically,
transmutation can destroy high levels of radiation in nuclear
waste. The 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste that may be
destined for Yucca Mountain, for example, could be reduced to
under five tons. The remainder would be low-level waste that
perhaps could be isolated somewhere other than 90 miles northwest
of Las Vegas.
Transmutation has been receiving annual research funding in the
$30 million and $40 million range. In the past 15 years, by
contrast, the federal government has sunk $7 billion into burial
technology, which scientists so far have been unable to prove is
safe. If transmutation were made a priority, with annual research
dollars in the hundreds of millions, perhaps scientists studying
the technology, including those at the University of Nevada, Las
Vegas, could make a breakthrough that would render burial a
primitive solution.
All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc.
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39 Letter: Build Bush a house next to nuke dump
Las Vegas SUN
April 12, 2002
Want to see the Yucca Mountain problem go away? Let's all chip in
and build beautiful palatial homes for President Bush, Vice
President Dick Cheney, nuclear power lobbyist John Sununu and
every other lunatic demanding that our state become the mother of
all trash heaps.
Give them the homes free of charge with the stipulation that
they must spend six months of every year for the rest of their
lives here in beautiful Nevada. Let their back yards look upon
Yucca Mountain in all its splendor. I'll gladly double my taxes
each year to see Bush turn a part of Nevada into the Western
White House, so long as he's there! Wonder how quickly this
problem would go away if it were in his back yard?
GLORIA GORLIN
All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc.
*****************************************************************
40 Utah N-Waste Ban Argued in U.S. Court
The Salt Lake Tribune --
Friday, April 12, 2002
BY JUDY FAHYS
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE
Advocates of a nuclear plant waste storage facility in Skull
Valley asked a federal judge Thursday to strike down four state
laws intended to block the project.
While an out-of-state utility consortium, Private Fuel
Storage, called the laws unconstitutional, the state's attorney
insisted the laws stop a federal agency, the U.S. Nuclear
Regulatory Commission, from assuming authority that Congress
never gave it.
Private Fuel Storage sued after the Legislature passed laws
that, among other things, outlaw a high-level nuclear waste
facility in Utah and promise fines, jail time and heavy taxes for
anyone doing business with such a facility.
U.S. District Judge Tena Campbell discussed the arguments
with the attorneys for two hours before taking the case under
advisement. Her questions suggested both views posed practical
problems for the court.
Agreeing with the utility consortium that the laws are
unconstitutional would force her to step into an issue that is
already under legal review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
itself, the judge said.
Siding with the state's argument that the commission lacks
that licensing authority would mean a likely appeal to the 10th
Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver -- which is exactly where the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission's ruling is bound to wind up if the
state loses that decision.
Campbell emphasized it is not her job to say whether the
controversial facility belongs in Utah.
"I don't have any role in making that decision," the judge
said. "That's the role of the NRC."
Private Fuel Storage signed a lease in 1996 to store up to
40,000 tons of depleted nuclear fuel above-ground on a concrete
pad inside the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation. The
consortium is leasing the land from the Skull Valley Band of
Goshute, who are co-plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
A subordinate panel of the commission, the Atomic Safety and
Licensing Board, has been reviewing Private Fuel Storage's
license application for the $3.1 billion facility this week in
hearings in Salt Lake City. The panel is expected to decide on
the license in September.
© Copyright 2002, The Salt Lake Tribune
*****************************************************************
41 N.J. Toxic Dirt Coming to Utah
The Salt Lake Tribune --
Friday, April 12, 2002
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
MAYWOOD, N.J. -- Some of 470,000 tons of toxic dirt that
officials planned to ship to Colorado will now go to Utah.
The dirt, from a Superfund site in Bergen County, had been
scheduled to go to Colorado until that state's governor said no.
According to an emergency plan, the federal government has
decided to send some of the dirt to Clive, Utah, to be disposed.
The Army Corps of Engineers would like to ship up to 30,000
tons of the Maywood soil to Envirocare of Utah Corp., which
operates a disposal site in Clive, said Allen Roos, a spokesman
for the corps. He said the short-term contract is needed so that
excavation work at the area around the former Maywood Chemical
Co. plant can continue.
The ground at the site is contaminated with thorium, a
radioactive mineral used in the manufacture of gas lanterns.
On Friday, Colorado Gov. Bill Owens signed a bill requiring
two public meetings and state approval before a Canon City
company could accept the soil.
The action came after area residents formed a group, Colorado
Citizens Against Toxic Waste, to protest the plan to bring the
soil to their state.
Cleanup efforts at the Maywood site have been ongoing since
1984 at a cost of about $184 million. In this final phase of the
project, federal officials believe 470,000 tons of toxic dirt
must be disposed of.
The corps has already sent 45,000 cubic yards of soil to the
Utah site since 1997, but officials decided to switch to Cotter
last year to save money.
Residents in Colorado plan to continue their fight against
the soil being dumped there.
"We understand this waste needs to leave Maywood, but we feel
they have fast-tracked this and are trying to shove it down our
throats," Sharyn Cunningham, a member of Colorado Citizens
Against Toxic Waste, told The Star-Ledger of Newark for Wednesday
editions. "Cotter sits uphill, upwind and upstream from our city.
We feel if they add more to it, the likelihood of more
contamination seeping out is high."
© Copyright 2002, The Salt Lake Tribune
*****************************************************************
42 Mystery barrels unearthed
Anchorage Daily News
www.alaska.com/]
It's the site to find "everything Alaska," including information
on travel, relocation and entertainment. The business directory
allows you to locate stores and services statewide. You can get
ALASKA.com logo items in the ADN Store [http://www.adnstore.com/]
FORT GREELY: Hazardous materials crews comb site of 1940s
military dump.
By Zaz Hollander Anchorage Daily News
(Published: April 12, 2002)
Workers clearing dirt for a new missile defense system at Fort
Greely this week unearthed a cache of rusty barrels that could
hold remnants of chemical weapons. Some barrel lids from the
mysterious 1940s military dump read "US CWS" -- the abbreviation
for the United States Chemical Warfare Service, the U.S. Army
chemical and biological combat agency inactivated in 1946.
Army officials say they don't know what's in the more than 20
corroded World War II-vintage barrels. Some barrels yawn open,
revealing frozen crystallized contents. Others are so riddled
with holes that they're empty. Three of the contract workers who
discovered the barrels reported skin irritations Thursday,
according to Chuck Canterbury, an Army spokesman at Fort
Richardson.
One was treated and released with "six red dots" at the hospital
on Fort Wainwright, Canterbury said. Two others were examined at
Fort Greely, one suffering from a rash covering his chest, the
other with tiny red bumps around his waist and neck.
On Thursday, hazardous materials crews in protective breathing
apparatus combed the site, three miles south of the developed
part of the Fort Greely facility. A sentry guarded a roadblock
barring the only access route, state and Army officials said.
"We're taking it as a worst-case scenario because we don't know
what's in there," Canterbury said. "Maybe it's oatmeal in there.
But then again it could be something serious."
Greely was home to an experimental nuclear reactor from 1962 to
1972. And for years, the post served as an experimental chemical
and biological weapons testing site.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the Army conducted secret tests of
weapons, including nerve gas, mustard gas and tularemia, a
bacterial disease known as rabbit fever that killed every animal
and bird across 100 acres during a 1965 test.
In the mid-1960s, hundreds of rockets carrying poison gas sank
into Greely's Blueberry Lake after the Army stored them on the
frozen surface but didn't remove them by spring. They were
recovered years later.
This week's appearance of the apparent drum dump didn't surprise
activists in Fairbanks.
"I'm surprised this is the first time this has happened," said
Stacey Fritz, coordinator for No Nukes North, who said friends
driving heavy equipment at Fort Wainwright have found unexploded
ordnance.
A government contractor and subcontractor had 14 people working
at the site Monday and 18 people Wednesday. It's unclear why the
contractor, Aglaq Corp., discovered the barrels Monday but didn't
report it until Wednesday.
The contractor contacted the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. A
local official went out to check the site, saw the letters
printed on some barrels and pulled the workers out.
Seventeen of the 22 members of the 103rd Civil Support Team left
Anchorage on Wednesday night for Greely and will lead the
response. The new Alaska National Guard team was certified last
month to react to incidents involving weapons of mass
destruction.
The team is processing soil samples at a mobile lab on-site to
find out what the barrels contain, said Ed Meggert, state
on-scene coordinator with the Alaska Department of Environmental
Conservation.
On Wednesday, the Army environmental office hired an Anchorage
rapid-response contractor. The contractor, Roy Weston, on
Thursday joined the U.S. Army Alaska Command Fire Chief at the
site. The Army also notified the National Response Center in
Washington, D.C.
Aglaq was sorting dirt in preparation for summer construction of
the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense Site.
Reach reporter Zaz Hollander at zhollander@adn.com
[zhollander@adn.com] or 907 257-4591.
The Anchorage Daily News [http://www.adn.com]
*****************************************************************
43 Regulators wait to sign off on DOE waste plan
Oak Ridger Online -->
Story last updated at 11:11 a.m. on Friday, April 12, 2002
by Paul Parson
Oak Ridger staff
It could be a couple of weeks before the Department of Energy's
regulators sign off on an accelerated cleanup plan for some of
Oak Ridge's high-risk sites.
Officials with DOE's Oak Ridge Operations office met Wednesday
with its regulators, including the Tennessee Department of
Environment and Conservation and the Environmental Protection
Agency.
Lori Fritz, deputy assistant manager for DOE's Oak Ridge
Environmental Management program, said the regulators are
hesitant to sign a letter of intent to proceed with the plan
until the level of funding is established. However, Fritz said
she didn't know when that would happen.
"We feel a sense of urgency," she said, adding that DOE
headquarters could visit Oak Ridge in the coming weeks regarding
the accelerated cleanup program.
The Oak Ridge Operations office reportedly requested between
$500 million to $650 million over a four-year period in the
proposal it recently submitted to DOE headquarters. The emphasis
of the proposal is on the accelerated cleanup of the Oak Ridge
K-25 site, which was built in the 1940s to enrich uranium for use
in nuclear weapons, and the Melton Valley radioactive waste
burial grounds at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Under the new plan, the completion date for K-25 would be
shifted from 2016 to 2008, with the total cost dropping from $2.4
billion to $1.5 billion. The end result would be a
self-sustaining private industrial park. The Melton Valley
completion date would shift from 2014 to 2006, with the total
cleanup cost dropping from $350 million to $240 million.
Oak Ridge's current cleanup efforts were labeled "mediocre" in a
comprehensive review of DOE's Environmental Management program
that was issued in February. The review determined that Oak Ridge
was focusing on the "easy work," not on higher-risk activities.
As a result of the comprehensive review, DOE headquarters
launched the accelerated cleanup program. Around $433 million of
the new $800 million account was set aside earlier this year for
cleanup efforts in Hanford, Wash.
Paul Parson can be contacted at (865) 220-5533 or
[pparson@oakridger.com] .
[http://www.oakridger.com] All Contents ©Copyright The Oak
Ridger
*****************************************************************
44 Project tackles liquid mercury waste
Oak Ridger Online -->
Story last updated at 11:12 a.m. on Friday, April 12, 2002
by Paul Parson
Oak Ridger staff
Perma-Fix Environmental Services Inc. has successfully treated a
type of radioactively contaminated liquid mercury waste, most of
which was in storage since early in the Cold War.
Since the early 1950s, mercury has been widely used throughout
the Department of Energy's facilities for activities associated
with the production of weapons and various research and
development projects.
Radioactively contaminated mercury wastes require complex
treatment processes that meet the requirements of federal
regulations and disposal site criteria.
Perma-Fix, an environmental services company that leases space
at the Oak Ridge K-25 site, worked with ADA Technologies Inc.,
which is based in Colorado, on the effort to treat what is known
as elemental mercury, which is a shiny, silver-gray metal that is
liquid at room temperature. It is known to be toxic to humans.
Perma-Fix has several subcontracts from the Department of Energy
and other federal agencies for the treatment of mixed waste
stored at Oak Ridge, as well as wastes shipped in from 40 other
governmental sites.
Paul Parson can be contacted at (865) 220-5533 or
pparson@oakridger.com [pparson@oakridger.com] .
[http://www.oakridger.com]
All Contents ©Copyright The Oak Ridger
*****************************************************************
45 State to offer USEC incentives: Paxton
The Paducah Sun
Paducah, Kentucky
Friday, April 12, 2002
State to offer USEC incentives: Paxton
Paducah's mayor is working with state legislators on an incentive
package to sway USEC to build its next uranium enrichment plant
here instead of Ohio.
By Bill Bartleman bbartleman@paducahsun.com--270.575.8650
USEC Inc. will be offered an aggressive incentive package later
this year to help persuade the company to build its
next-generation uranium enrichment plant in Paducah, according to
Mayor Bill Paxton.
USEC will build the $1 billion gas centrifuge plant in either
Paducah or Portsmouth, Ohio, according to USEC spokeswoman
Elizabeth Stuckle. It will replace the antiquated gaseous
diffusion process used at the Paducah Gaseous
Diffusion Plant, the nation's only remaining enrichment plant. At
stake for both states are hundreds of jobs and economic
development opportunities related to having the high-tech plant.
Paxton said he's working to coordinate a package that will have
the backing of local, state and federal officials.
"We need to get our act together," Paxton said. "At this point,
we feel Ohio is a little ahead of the game in what they are
doing. We know that Ohio is extremely hungry for this since it
lost its enrichment plant."
The new plant, expected to be in operation in six or seven years,
will replace the Paducah plant, which has about 1,400 employees.
Stuckle said USEC has two decisions to make — where to build a
demonstration plant to test and refine the new technology and
where to install the commercial plant.
"As with any competitive economic development project, both
states later this year will be offered the opportunity to vie for
the centrifuge sitings," Stuckle said. "The siting of the
demonstration plant does not mean the commercial plant will be
there, as well."
Paxton met with state development officials Thursday in
Frankfort, including Economic Development Secretary Gene Strong,
to lay the groundwork for drafting an incentive package. He also
met with officials of the University of Kentucky involved in
developing a research park in the Paducah Information Age Park.
"We brought officials in Frankfort up to speed on environmental
issues at the plant, the new technology and what we need to do to
get it in Paducah," Paxton said after the meeting. "The meat of
the meeting was trying to make the state aware of what's going
on. We hope to have another meeting in a couple of weeks to
follow up on some of the issues we discussed."
While declining to specify potential incentives, he said state
officials were cooperative and helpful. He said one potential
incentive "should be extremely attractive to USEC" and give
Kentucky a competitive advantage.
Strong was not available for comment.
On Saturday, Paxton, McCracken County Judge-Executive Danny
Orazine and others will meet with U.S. Rep. Ed Whitfield to
discuss USEC. Whitfield said it is too early to speculate on
whether the federal government will help pay for the plant or if
it will have a say in its location.
Whitfield, R-Hopkinsville, said he's concerned about rumors that
members of the Ohio congressional delegation are pressuring the
U.S. Department of Energy to force USEC to build the gas
centrifuge plants in Ohio.
USEC is involved in negotiations with DOE to remain the exclusive
agent for processing nuclear weapons from Russia that will be
recycled into nuclear fuel. He said some officials from Ohio want
a guarantee from USEC that it will build the new plant in Ohio in
exchange for remaining the exclusive agent for the Russian
uranium.
"I think that would not be the proper thing to do, and it would
shock me if they (DOE negotiators) did it," he said. "The
decision on centrifuge should be based on the competition between
the states."
Whitfield said he was trying to schedule a meeting with DOE's
lead negotiator to discuss the situation.
Paxton said additional meetings will be held with U.S. Sen. Mitch
McConnell, R-Louisville. "I want to make sure we all are working
together to put together the best possible package we can make,"
Paxton said. "I am extremely optimistic that we can win this
competition."
*****************************************************************
46 ENERGY: Safety is the answer
041202 opinion 3 Jacksonville.com Congress is supposed to act in
the national interest and, in that regard, its clear duty is to
approve the nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
Last modified at 7:22 p.m. on Thursday, April 11, 2002
Congress is supposed to act in the national interest and, in that
regard, its clear duty is to approve the nuclear waste repository
at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
President Bush recommended that course of action and virtually
every knowledgeable person who has examined the plan supports it
as well.
Millions of man-hours have been spent studying the plan to store
the waste from U.S. Navy submarines and carriers, and the
nation's 103 commercial nuclear power plants, which supply 20
percent of the nation's electricity.
The federal government has a legal obligation to provide for the
storage, but has failed to do so for decades. Currently, waste is
piled in temporary storage in 39 states, including Florida.
The opposition consists of organizations that oppose any kind of
energy -- even the clean power produced by nuclear plants -- and
a few politicians in Nevada. When that state objected to the Bush
proposal, it left Congress to decide the issue.
But the objections do not justify rejecting the proposal.
Transportation of waste to the site is not an unacceptable risk
and the site itself is as safe as any site possibly could be,
based on years of scientific study. In any case, it certainly is
safer than where the waste is being stored.
© The Florida Times-Union
*****************************************************************
47 Yucca Sucks (Too)
Salt Lake City Weekly -
Politics - April 11, 2002
Sen. Gene Davis fights plans to move nuclear waste to Nevada via Utah.
Gene Davis has to be pretty frustrated. OK, hes got this
governor whos taken a highly public stance against temporary
nuclear storage down on the Goshute reservation. This is the good
part.
But he cant squeeze out a word of indignation over the Yucca
Mountain, Nev., site. Thats the place just north of Las Vegas
where President George Bush wants to cart the nations 77,000
tons of nuclear waste. Permanently. And it would have to roll
through Utah to get there.
The nuclear activists will tell you just what it all means.
Theyll march out the players for you, and help you understand
just why you should be apoplectic about all this. But the fact of
the matter is that most people cant really wrap themselves
around something that will happen when theyre all deador at
least really, really old. Or something that could happen to them
on the way to the dump.
Davis, a Democratic state senator from Salt Lake City,
understands that. He just cant figure out Gov. Mike Leavitt.
Why does he put the cabosh on Utahns debating the subject?
Davis asks. Its a rhetorical question now since the demise of a
resolution Davis sponsored in this most recent legislative
session.
The resolution condemned the idea of Yucca Mountain as the
permanent site for all this high-level N-waste. It directly tied
Yuccas approval to the attempts of Private Fuel Storage (PFS) to
build that, ahem, temporary site at the Skull Valley Goshute
Reservation. Things like Yucca couldnt hold all the N-waste, and
then, if the Yucca Mountain site were rejected, PFS couldnt very
well say it was building a temporary site unless it defined
temporary as the half-life of the universe.
Davis, however, thought he had a commitment from Leavitt to let
the bill be debated in the Senate. It was a small concession,
easily dismissed. Davis bill was put on the back burner while he
went downstairs for a chat with the governor.
He was adamant on the fact that it would screw up his
negotiations, says Davis. Hes got these ongoing negotiations
there, he claims, but I said we needed to raise the issue in the
state and that hed already made statements to the Western
Governors Association about this opposition.
In fact, the Western Governors issued two resolutions on nuclear
waste issuesone that said no state should have to accept N-waste
if its governor rejects it. At press time, Nevadas governor was
poised to veto Bushs selection of Yucca Mountain. A weird little
veto-equity law allows a governor to do that, and then lets
Congress come back in 100 days and override that decision.
Nevada state officials have been trying to come up with $10
million to stir opposition to the dump, but its an uphill
battle. The nuclear industry spent $25 million to persuade
Congress that Nevada was the place, and now people are feeling
kind of resigned.
After this many years and this much money, theres a certain
degree of inevitability, says Bob Loux, director of Nevadas
Nuclear Projects Office. Our view is that we dont think this
stuff should move anywhere until there is a final site that is
acceptable. Nevada certainly is intent on that, and I think
theres still a heck of a lot more fund-raising yet to be done.
Davis doesnt like the transportation issues, eitherespecially
in the wake of Sept. 11. Too many things could go wrong en route.
I see no difference between the transportation issues with PFS
and Yucca Mountain, Davis says. But the governor didnt want to
discuss it because he was into these real sensitive
negotiations.
In fact, there are a couple of differing strategies in the
N-waste battle. Utahs Republican leadership appears to believe
that if Yucca Mountain is approved, there will be no need for the
PFS facility. In other words, why store nuclear wastes
temporarily when you can drive them down the road to a permanent
site?
Thats a 180-degree turn-on-its-head fantasy, says Steve
Erickson, a lobbyist for the Sierra Club. The real thing is that
PFS hinges on Yucca Mountain.
Back to the temporary-permanent thing. It would take a
whilemaybe 10 yearsbefore Yucca Mountain could begin receiving
its first wastes. Then maybe 30 or 40 years later, all 139
reactor sites around the country would have sent their wastes to
Yucca Mountain. That could be 50 years from time of political
approval.
The Nevada solution has a lot of impact on Utah, says Leavitts
spokeswoman Natalie Gochnour. Our position has been in favor of
a permanent solution, and weve supported the administrations
attempt.
Well, Loux isnt exactly overjoyed with that response. A few
years ago, his Nevada office helped brief Gov. Leavitts staff on
the problems, and everyone seemed to be working together. Weve
done quite a bit for your state on PFS, he says. I know
Nevadas elected leaders have been a little disappointed that
there hasnt been a quid pro quo, and the biggest thing has been
the ball being dropped with the resolution.
After his chat with the governor, Davis returned to the Senate
floor and stood to be recognized. Senate President Al Mansell
looked away and called on someone else. Davis went up to him and
asked Mansell why he wouldnt acknowledge him. The answer was
something like there wasnt time for these games.
To Davis, the issue is no less important today than the MX
Missile issue was during the Matheson administration. He tried
again to be recognized. And again. It was futile.
It has been futile. In 1997, 98 and 99, Utahs congressional
delegation voted to pass bills to get on with the Yucca Mountain
deal. One bill passed, only to be vetoed by then-President
Clinton.
In recent public opinion polls, Utahns dont seem to see any
connection between Yucca Mountain and Utah or PFS, and they
support the Nevada site.
There may be a rationale; theres certainly a fear of storing it
in Utah. And politics play to fear. story search ...in Event
Listings Romance Readers Book Group 1st and 3rd Thursday of the
month, 7 p.m. at Borders in Murray. ...in Dining Barbacoa Mexican
Grill Mexican cuisine. Delicious specialty burritos with beans,
rice, fajita mix, and guacamole, made to order with fresh
products only. Order the barbacoa, made of spicy shredded beef.
Salt Lake City Weekly and slweekly.com ©1996-2002 Copperfield
Publishing, Inc.. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
48 DOE Urges South Carolina Governor Hodges To Sign Plutonium
Disposition Agreement Ensures Facility For South Carolina;
Closure Date of 2006 For Rocky Flats Facility National Security
Objectives Met with Reduction in Plutonium Inventory
energy.gov - Headquarters' Press Release
RELEASE DATE: April 11, 2002
Washington, D.C. – U.S. Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham urged
South Carolina Governor Jim Hodges to sign a proposed agreement
that would ensure the United States would keep its international
nuclear nonproliferation commitments by building a plutonium
disposition facility at the DOE’s Savannah River Site. The
Governor has stated that he would not agree to the shipment of
plutonium into South Carolina in order to fulfill the U.S.-Russia
agreement unless there was an assurance that any plutonium would
have a pathway out of the State. He has subsequently said he
would not sign an agreement unless it was “enforceable.” The
agreement, signed and sent by Secretary Abraham, meets the
Governor’s call for enforceability by proposing two mechanisms: a
revised Record of Decision incorporating the proposed agreement;
and proposed legislation that would ensure that, for any
plutonium brought into the state of South Carolina, there would
be a pathway out.
In addition, under terms of the agreement the closure date of
2006 for the DOE’s Rocky Flats Facility, a former plutonium
production facility, will be maintained.
“It is now time to bring this process to a close. Further delay
in reaching agreement will undermine important international and
domestic priorities of the United States. First, it will
undermine the U.S. plutonium disposition agreement with Russia.
We need to move forward with the MOX plant that will be used to
dispose of plutonium at issue in order to honor our commitments
to the Russian Federation. That will be very difficult to do in
the face of potential litigation from the Governor of the State
where the plant is to be located,” Abraham said in the letter.
“Second, as I noted earlier, our inability to reach agreement is
also jeopardizing cleanup activities across the nation. In
particular, a continued impasse will also directly cause the
closure of Rocky Flats to slip past 2006.”
Under the agreement, the following commitments to South Carolina
are established:
+ Construction of two plutonium disposition facilities in South
Carolina + A firm commitment to fully fund and carry out this
program ($3.8 billion over 20 years) + Establishment of annual
funding targets + Notification to the State of South Carolina of
all plutonium shipments into the state + A commitment to maintain
a pathway out of South Carolina for any plutonium brought into
the state, including firm dates by which such material would be
removed from the state if, for any reason, full funding necessary
for the plutonium disposition program were not secured.
“DOE and South Carolina should join hands and pursue legislation
that would ensure this agreement is legally enforceable, as the
Governor has consistently suggested,” Abraham said. “In short, we
have gone to extraordinary lengths to accommodate South
Carolina’s concerns. This is a good agreement. We urge the
Governor to sign it.”
In the event that Governor Hodges does not sign the agreement,
Secretary Abraham stated his intention to take immediate steps
necessary to meet the country’s national security and
environmental cleanup objectives, including the issuance on April
15th of an amended federal Record of Decision that does not
incorporate the terms of the proposed agreement and the requisite
30-day notice of DOE’s intent to begin shipments of weapons grade
plutonium from its Rocky Flats facility to South Carolina.
Agreement and Letter to Governor Hodges. Media Contact: Joe
Davis, 202-586-4940 Release No. PR-02-061
*****************************************************************
49 Gibbons Commends Transportation Chairman for Leadership on Yucca
Mountain
Gibbons (NV02) - Press Release -
April 11, 2002
Committee Will Hold Hearing on April 25th
Washington, D.C.— Working to ensure the House of
Representatives has every opportunity to debate the Yucca
Mountain issue, U.S. Congressman Jim Gibbons (R-Nev.) commended
House Transportation Chairman Don Young for rescheduling a joint
hearing in his committee on the transportation of nuclear waste
to Yucca Mountain. Due to agenda of House Speaker Dennis Hastert
(R-Ill.) an earlier hearing date, April 25, 2002, was necessary
to ensure the hearing occurred before a full House floor vote.
“The members of the House deserve the right to fully debate the
dangers of transporting high level nuclear waste across the
country to Yucca Mountain,” stated Gibbons. “I am disappointed
by the Speaker’s urgency in scheduling a vote on an issue of such
great importance, but I am pleased that Chairman Young is
committed to protecting the health and safety of Americans. His
willingness to reschedule this joint hearing will give Nevadans
an opportunity to clearly detail the dangers of transporting
nuclear waste through 44 states-- past our schools, hospitals,
and homes-- for the next 38 years.”
“I believe its imperative that Congress carefully and fairly
examine the transportation issues involved in transporting
nuclear waste throughout our nation to the Yucca storage site,”
stated Chairman Young. “The transportation of the spent rods
from the nuclear plants to Yucca will cross virtually every state
in the nation, and we must thoroughly examine all of the issues
related to this transportation.”
*****************************************************************
50 Radioactive waste on rig sparks disposal fears
The West Australian
April 12, 2002
By Daniel Clery
AN APPLICATION from an oil and gas company to transport
radioactive waste into WA has sparked fears about the disposal of
toxic material from WA's offshore oil and gas rigs.
Questioning by Greens (WA) MLC Giz Watson in Parliament has
revealed that 1435 litres of radioactive waste is sitting on an
oil and gas rig off the North-West coast, awaiting State
Government approval to dispose of it. The Radiological Council of
WA is waiting for legal advice on whether bringing the waste into
the State contravenes the 1999 Nuclear Waste Storage Prohibition
Act.
The Health Department has admitted it is unsure of how much
similar waste is being produced off the coast and where it is
going.
Director of population health Michael Jackson said he understood
the waste was a combination of uranium and thorium that formed
during a common cleaning process of the rig's pipes. "Some of
these locations are quite remote and I don't think this is an
isolated incident," he said.
"So there is a question here about the disposal of similar waste
that is generated at any other oil and gas exploration or
operating sites."
The Government has so far refused to disclose the company that
has made the application but will ask it to voluntarily disclose
its identity.
Mr Jackson said he believed the best environmental outcome was
for the waste to be taken to the Mt Walton disposal site in the
Goldfields.
However, he accepted that this might contradict the 1999 Act,
which prevents radioactive waste produced in international waters
to be brought into WA.
Ms Watson said there were real concerns about how major oil and
gas companies might be disposing of the waste.
© 2002 West Australian Newspapers Limited All Rights Reserved.
*****************************************************************
51 Plan takes nuclear waste down I-75
Shipments from Charlevoix could travel through Bay County en
route to Nevada dump site
Thursday, April 11, 2002
By Jeff Kart
Times Writer
Tons of radioactive nuclear waste may travel down Interstate 75
and through Bay County on its way to a proposed national disposal
site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, according to Nevada state
officials.
Bay County commissioners weren't aware of the probable travel
route when they endorsed the Yucca Mountain plan at a meeting
this week, said Commissioner Edward L. Rivet, D-4th District.
But Rivet, who asked for the endorsement as a member of the
Michigan Association of Counties' board, said he doesn't think
residents should be concerned about the possibility of an
accident or terrorism when the waste is being moved. He said
nuclear waste has been moved thousands of times throughout the
country and there's never been a spill.
The waste - thousands of metal tubes of uranium oxide pellets
sealed in eight concrete casks - would come through Bay County
from Big Rock Point, a decommissioned Consumers Energy plant near
Charlevoix. Three other nuclear plants in southern Michigan also
would bury waste at the Yucca Mountain site, located in the
Nevada desert about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Congress still has to approve the construction of a disposal
facility at Yucca Mountain, and a vote is expected before August.
The site, to store 77,000 tons of the nation's radioactive
material for up to 10,000 years, was picked by President Bush in
February after about 20 years of debate.
"I don't really think there'd be that much danger," Rivet said of
moving the waste through Bay County. "I guess I'd say that's
better than having it sit around." Nuclear waste is now stored at
131 temporary, above-ground sites in Michigan and 33 other
states.
The resolution adopted by the Bay County Board calls on
Michigan's federal legislators to support the Nevada site. U.S.
Rep. James A. Barcia, D-Bay City, could not be reached for
comment. Barcia opposed a shipment of 4.25 ounces of nuclear fuel
about two years ago that was believed to have gone up I-75
through Bay County and into Canada.
Terry R. Miller, a Bay City environmentalist who tried to stop
that shipment, said the Big Rock Point waste is an even greater
concern. The fuel core of the Big Rock reactor, closed in 1997,
contained more than 10 tons of radioactive uranium oxide pellets,
according to Consumers Energy.
"I think it's scary," Miller said of the waste being trucked
through Bay County. He said a spill could expose people to
cancer-causing materials.
"I think we have to take a look at how it's going to be
transported, in what kinds of containers and what would be the
safest route and, if at all possible, avoid urban areas," Miller
said.
Rivet questions the source of the latest information on travel
routes.
Nevada began a campaign this week against the Yucca Mountain
plan, and is putting out information about probable travel routes
the waste would take to drum up opposition to the project.
The state's Web site says the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects
has spent more than 10 years studying highway and rail routes
that would likely be used for shipping waste to Yucca Mountain. A
map for Michigan shows waste from Big Rock Point traveling east
on US-31, south on I-75 and west on Interstate 69 on its way to
Nevada.
Charles E. MacInnis, a spokesman for Consumers Energy and former
Big Rock employee, said the U.S. Energy Department hasn't decided
on routes yet.
But MacInnis said transporting the nation's waste to a central
location is safer than leaving it scattered across the country at
temporary sites, all of which require ongoing safety measures,
security and surveillance.
MacInnis said Consumers receives shipments of new nuclear fuel
regularly, and waste has been transported in Michigan before
without incident.
"We believe it is extremely safe" to move," he said. "The science
is clear in that regard. The testing has been thorough over the
decades. It's a very simple process."
Consumers plans to begin transferring hundreds of fuel rods from
a cooling pool at Big Rock to eight huge, steel-lined, concrete
casks this year, he said. The casks, each about 19 feet tall and
11 feet in diameter, would be loaded onto trucks and transported
to Yucca Mountain, which isn't supposed to be ready until 2010.
"This is a very well-known technology," MacInnis said. "Casks
have been exposed to huge amounts of fire. They have been crashed
into concrete walls. They have been dropped. They have been
submerged."
He said electric customers in Michigan and throughout the United
States also have been paying into a fund to build a permanent,
national disposal facility.
The charges amount to pennies a month for the average Michigan
customer, but Michigan electric customers have paid more than
$400 million into the fund since the charges began in 1982.
- The Associated Press contributed to this report. Jeff Kart
covers Bay County government for The Times. He can be reached at
894-9639.
© 2002 Bay City Times. Used with permission
*****************************************************************
52 Unlikely Allies in Nuclear Waste War
April 12, 2002
Debate: Party labels vanish in Nevada dump confrontation.
Ferraro, Sununu face off against Podesta, Duberstein.
By ELIZABETH SHOGREN, TIMES STAFF WRITER
WASHINGTON -- Night after night for two years on CNN's
"Crossfire," Geraldine A. Ferraro and John H. Sununu practically
came to blows as they argued the opposite side of almost every
issue imaginable.
Now these real-life and television adversaries have found an
issue they agree on. Sununu, a conservative Republican and former
chief of staff to the first President Bush, persuaded Ferraro, a
liberal Democrat and former vice presidential candidate from New
York, to join him in lobbying for Nevada's Yucca Mountain as a
permanent burial ground for tens of thousands of tons of spent
nuclear waste.
Not to be outdone, the state of Nevada hired a high-powered odd
couple of its own to lobby on the immensely consequential issue,
which faces votes in the House and Senate this summer. Two other
former presidential chiefs of staff, John Podesta (Bill Clinton)
and Kenneth M. Duberstein (Ronald Reagan), are working to sway
members of Congress to vote against putting a nuclear depository
90 miles from Las Vegas. The unconventional pairing of political
superstars has inevitably been the source of a few jokes in
Washington. "I think Gerry Ferraro has the worst of it," Podesta
said in commenting on their Republican partners.
The strange bedfellows also demonstrate that on the many issues
that are not particularly partisan--like Yucca Mountain--both
sides find it essential to recruit lobbyists with strong ties to
both parties.
Unexpected alliances are sometimes forged in Washington, despite
a pervasive us-versus-them mentality in which party allegiances
seem to be branded on everyone's forehead.
In February, President Bush formally approved Yucca as the
nation's repository for nuclear waste. On Monday, Nevada Gov.
Kenny Guinn vetoed the decision. That left the final
determination in Congress' hands.
It requires a simple majority in both houses to override Guinn's
veto and keep the project moving forward. Only if Guinn can win a
majority in at least one house can he kill the project. And with
Nevada being one state against 49, that's a tall order.
To marshal a majority of the 100-member Senate, for example,
Nevada faces the daunting challenge of persuading 49 senators
from other states to vote against the Yucca site. For 15 years,
Yucca has been the only site under consideration, which has given
the project an air of a fait accompli. So it was clear to Nevada
that it had to pursue every vote.
The calculation was different for Yucca's advocates. The U.S.
Chamber of Commerce, which hired Sununu, believed that the
importance of the issue dictated that a consensus of both
chambers approve Yucca, and not just a Republican-weighted
majority.
Sununu was the one who came up with the idea of approaching his
former counterpart on "Crossfire." Despite their clashing views,
Ferraro and Sununu are not nearly as antagonistic as they
appeared on the screen.
"That's show biz," Sununu said.
As a lobbyist for the Yucca site, Sununu first had to persuade
Ferraro that his side was right.
Her initial reaction, Ferraro said, was that if the nuclear
industry was for it, she must be against it. But then Sununu
asked her to focus on the narrow issue of whether the nation
would be better off consolidating all its nuclear waste at one
storage site rather than keeping it at 130 nuclear power plants
and research facilities across the country.
Ferraro was still not convinced, but the two went to Yucca
Mountain together in mid-February and, after she grilled the
geologists and other scientists there, Ferraro made up her mind.
"I do not lobby for anything I don't believe in," Ferraro said.
"I believe this is the safest thing to do with the wastes,
especially in light of [potential] terrorist attacks.
"I was spending Valentine's Day with John Sununu," she pointed
out. "It was hysterical."
But she admitted that it seemed strange to be on the same side of
an issue as Sununu. She could not recall one issue on which they
agreed during their years on CNN. "If this were not a very
specific issue, I would probably not be working with John
Sununu," Ferraro said. "We're usually on opposite ends."
On the other side of the Yucca issue, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.)
has led his state's fight against the site. He asked Podesta to
help him because the two worked together in 2000 to prevent
nuclear waste from being stored there temporarily. At that time,
Podesta was White House chief of staff, and Reid was impressed
with Podesta's knowledge of the issue and his ability to organize
a successful campaign, according to Reid's spokesman Nathan
Naylor.
Duberstein, a longtime lobbyist on gambling issues that are
important to Nevada, was brought on board because of his contacts
with Republicans.
Podesta, a law professor at Georgetown University, said it has
been very easy for him to work with Duberstein despite their
different party affiliations. "I've known him and respected him
for a long time," Podesta said.
Reid and Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.), who are allies in their
effort to defeat the project, are setting the tone for Duberstein
and Podesta, Podesta said.
The challenge, he said, is persuading members of Congress who
think the decision has already been made to take a fresh look at
the risks of Yucca Mountain, particularly the danger of
transporting the waste through the country.
It won't be easy, Podesta said.
"This is a case where there is a lot of money and a lot of
special interests on the other side," he added.
Ferraro and Sununu both said that they too had developed a great
deal of respect and even affection for each other through their
verbal jousting.
"It was an easy step for us," Sununu said. "Most old politicians
have a kinship. People who have been through the political
caldron have respect for others who have been through the
political caldron."
Copyright 2002 Los Angeles Times
*****************************************************************
53 County remains neutral on Yucca
Monroe Evening News
Evening News staff writerApril 10, 2002
The commissioners voted 4-4 on a resolution supporting the
federal government's decision to ship nuclear waste to Nevada.
By JOSHUA KENNEDY
Whatever happens between the federal government and Nevada about
using Yucca Mountain as a federal nuclear waste dump, Monroe
County will remain neutral - at least for now.
The Monroe County Board of Commissioners Tuesday voted 4-4 on a
resolution supporting the Yucca Mountain facility, which was
chosen recently by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to be a
holding site for all nuclear power waste from across the country.
Vice Chairman Gail Hauser-Hurley voted against the resolution
along with Commissioners Thomas Mell, Paul Iacoangeli and Jerry
Oley. Chairman William Sisk voted with Commissioners Floreine
Mentel, David Scott and Dale Zorn for the resolution.
Commissioner V. Lehr Roe was excused.
The board wasn't alone in its division on what to do with 306
metric tons of nuclear waste sitting at Detroit Edison Co.'s
Fermi 2 nuclear power plant in Frenchtown Township. Several
residents spoke for and against the resolution, which endorses
the creation of a federal dump about 90 miles away from Las
Vegas.
"I rise in opposition to this resolution," said Michael Keegan of
Monroe. "I clearly see this as a Detroit Edison resolution. Let
them circulate it among their employees. They're trying to
impress upon you that this is grass roots, but this is their
resolution."
Douglas R. Gipson, executive vice president of power generation
and chief nuclear officer at Fermi, said the waste was not
Edison's responsibility, but the federal government's.
"The real issue here is should the fuel be left scattered across
the country or at a federal repository," he told the board. "Do
we want this waste stored in Michigan, in Monroe County or 1,000
feet below the desert monitored by guards? That's the question."
But several residents cited reports claiming the Yucca Mountain
site, which the federal government has spent about $7 billion
testing, is unsafe. Joan Emerson of Monroe cited a Nuclear
Information and Resource Service report claiming dozens of
earthquakes have occurred underneath the giant Yucca Mountain
during the last 25 years.
Shirley Steinman of Frenchtown Township questioned whether
creating a federal dumping site would result in other nations
trying to send waste here, "like Canada does with its trash," she
said.
"Then what? Do we just say goodbye to poor old Nevada?" Mrs.
Steinman asked.
But other residents championed the idea of a federal site. "I'm
very much in favor of this resolution," said Charles Mahoney of
Temperance.
Besides, he said, the point is being missed. There are 306 metric
tons of waste in the county and more than 70,000 tons across the
country at various nuclear power plants. Several residents
complained about transporting the material to Nevada.
"Transporting is not a problem," Mr. Mahoney, a former nuclear
power plant worker, said. "They transported that stuff in here
before it was spent fuel."
Edison officials ticked off statistics including that no major
nuclear waste spills in the United States have resulted from
transportation accidents or mishaps. But even if the Yucca site
becomes a reality - several Nevada politicians have vowed to stop
the site - it would be years before any waste would be removed
from Monroe County.
There are 1,708 bundles of spent fuel hanging in a cooling pool
at Fermi. Every 18 months the company changes out about a third -
or roughly 36 metric tons - of spent fuel, according to Edison
spokesman John Austerberry.
The plant has enough capacity to store fuel on site until 2017
with a few reconfigurations of the storage facility, Mr.
Austerberry said. And the plant was one of the last to go online
in the country, which means it'll be one of the last to qualify
for Yucca access for waste, Mr. Gipson said.
The tie vote on the resolution means it died on the floor. There
is no timeframe for reintroducing the matter. But Mr. Oley, who
voted against the resolution, said he couldn't vote for it
because of the fight between Nevada and the federal government.
"What if they wanted to put that waste in the salt mines around
Detroit?" he asked. If the feds can put that in Yucca, they can
put it in the salt mines. We have to always look out for our
future. I don't know what to do with the waste, but I'm not sure
Yucca is the answer."
©Monroe Evening News 2002
*****************************************************************
54 US defence shield may use nuclear missiles in outer space
Irish Newspapers -
Welcome to The Irish Independent Issue DateFri, Apr 12
THE US is studying a plan to use nuclear warheads in its missile
defence shield, a proposal rejected in the 1970s as dangerous and
technically difficult.
The disclosure of the nuclear interceptor study, promoted by
Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, is likely to increase fears
America is lowering the threshold for using nuclear weapons.
The plan would involve nuclear warheads exploding some 60 miles
above ground as they intercepted incoming enemy missiles. The
nuclear interceptors would not have to be so accurate as the
current non-nuclear interceptors and would be able to wipe out
everything in the area.
Recent missile defence tests showed America has become good at
hitting a small object in space so long as it knows exactly where
the object is at what time. But the shield programme with its
non-nuclear interceptors has not found a way of coping with
decoys or with submunitions, dozens of small exploding bomblets
that could contain biological weapons.
Non-nuclear interceptors destroy an incoming missile by force of
direct contact. A nuclear-tipped interceptor, on the other hand,
could send a large explosion up into space which could hit
everything being fired at America. It would deal with the problem
of decoy tactics an enemy may use to confuse the interceptor. But
the nuclear warhead would have to be very large, effectively to
wipe out biologically loaded bomblets.
After the terrorist attacks of September 11, President Bush gave
warning that America could one day be hit by missiles sent by
terrorist organisations. He said such missiles could be loaded
with biological weapons.
Enthusiasm for the missile defence programme increased after the
attacks on New York and Washington. In December Mr Bush cited the
argument of a potential terrorist attack to withdraw the US from
the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia despite
objections from Moscow.
(The Times, London)
Katty Kay
© Copyright Unison
*****************************************************************
55 US revives cold war nuclear strategy
Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian |
Julian Borger in Washington
Friday April 12, 2002
The Guardian [http://www.guardian.co.uk]
The Bush administration is contemplating the use of nuclear
warheads on the intercepters it hopes will protect the US from
attack as part of its planned missile defence system.
William Schneider, the Pentagon's top scientific adviser, told
the Washington Post that he had been encouraged by the defence
secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to re-examine the feasibility of
nuclear-tipped intercepters, nearly 30 years after the idea was
abandoned as technically and politically unacceptable.
It is the latest in a series of signs that the Bush team is
radically rethinking the role of nuclear weapons in its arsenal,
in a way that its critics believe will blur the distinction
between conventional and nuclear warfare.
Late last year the Pentagon produced a nuclear posture review
which called for research into low-yield "mini-nuke" bombs for
use as tactical weapons to penetrate enemy underground bunkers.
Mr Schneider said that Mr Rumsfeld had asked the board to think
"outside the box" on missile defence. "We've talked about it as
something that he's interested in looking at," he said.
The system being tested relies on "hit-to-kill" technology by
which intercepters destroy incoming missiles by force of impact
rather than by detonation.
This approach presents enormous technical problems in programming
the intercepter to ignore decoy war heads and hit the live
missile. A nuclear explosion in space would destroy everything in
the vicinity, including chemical and biological warheads, Mr
Schneider pointed out. Apart from the risk of accidents,
electromagnetic shock waves and ionized clouds, a nuclear blast
in space could also disable communications satellites and knock
out ground-based electronics.
These potential problems caused research into nuclear
intercepters in the mid-1970s to be shelved.
"It seems to be a sign of desperation that they cannot solve the
problem of the hit-to-kill programme of distinguishing targets
from decoys," Henry Kelly, president of the Federation of
American Scientists, said.
"It was rejected three decades ago for very good reason: a one
megaton explosion would knock out a great number of satellites,
and that is obviously much more of a problem now than it was
then."
Mr Bush decided in December to withdraw from the 1972 anti
ballistic missile (ABM) Treaty, which presented an obstacle to
research and tests of the embryonic missile defence system. He
also accelerated the timetable for missile defence deployment,
making 2004 the deadline for the deployment of a basic system.
The US conducted its latest test of the "hit-to-kill" intercepter
last month over the Pacific, scoring a direct hit on a dummy
incoming missile. The Pentagon hailed the test as a success,
pointing out that it was the fourth hit in six tries.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
*****************************************************************
56 WEN HO LEE: VICTIM OR SPY?
AIM Report: 2002 Report # 05 - WEN HO LEE: VICTIM OR SPY?
By Notra Trulock
2002 Report #05 April 4,
In recent years, AIM has chronicled the decline of the FBI, once
revered as our premier investigative agency. Under the direction
of Bill Clinton's appointee, Louis Freeh, the bureau compiled a
nearly unbroken record of botched investigations, shoddy
laboratory analyses, and politically inspired cover-ups.
But it has excelled in persecuting whistleblowers like special
agents Dennis Sculimbrene, Frederic Whitehurst and Mrs.
Whitehurst in an effort to protect its reputation. Beyond its
criminal investigative duties, however, the FBI is supposed to
defend the nation from espionage and terrorism. The 9/11 attacks
were the result of a massive intelligence failure that exposed
the weaknesses of the FBI and the CIA in this vital area. Equally
worrisome has been the FBI's performance in detecting spies,
especially those of nations employing non-traditional techniques,
like the People's Republic of China (PRC).
The FBI's counterespionage successes of recent years have all
come against the successor agency of the KGB. A number of
Americans spying for Russia, some from the FBI itself, have been
betrayed by former Russian intelligence officers out to make a
quick buck. But the evidence indicates that the bureau has failed
miserably to deter or detect Chinese espionage against our
centers of military science and technology.
The Wen Ho Lee case stands out as a signal failure, one that has
its roots in the complicated relationship between China and the
United States that stretches back to the early 1980s. It is also
clear that in the Clinton White House and the FBI itself,
avoidance of offending China took precedence over investigating
nuclear espionage. The FBI agents responsible for covering Los
Alamos inexplicably failed to apply any of the FBI's
counterespionage procedures or techniques in the four years that
Wen Ho Lee was under suspicion of spying for China.
Three recent publications offer an opportunity to look at the
strange case of Wen Ho Lee from a fresh perspective. First, Lee
has published his memoir of the case, My Country vs. Me, It tells
his story of "persecution" by the FBI, the Justice and Energy
Departments. Lee claims that he was an innocent bystander caught
up in the political fallout of the Clinton campaign finance
scandals, the Energy Department's mismanagement of security at
the U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories, and Capitol Hill partisan
politics. Lee says that he did nothing wrong, at least nothing
that many other lab scientists haven't done, and the only reason
he was prosecuted was because he is Chinese. Lee's book and his
public appearances generated a good deal of favorable media
attention.
FBI Under Fire
Two official reviews of the government's handling of the Wen Ho
Lee case were also published around Christmas time. The first was
the so-called Bellows Report, officially titled the "Final Report
of the Attorney General's Review Team on the Handling of the Los
Alamos National Laboratory Investigation." In 1999, under
mounting criticism for her handling of the case, Janet Reno
appointed Randy Bellows, Senior Litigation Counsel in the U.S.
Attorney's Office in the Eastern District of Virginia, to head up
a comprehensive review of the government's handling of the case.
The review was concluded by May 2000, but the report was highly
classified. In mid-2001, as the result of civil actions against
Lee and others, the Justice Dept. released two chapters of the
report that were very critical of the Energy Department's role in
the case. Those dealing with the Justice Dept. and the FBI were
not released, but under pressure from Congress, finally in
December 2001, a heavily redacted version of the report was
published on line in the Attorney General's Reading Room on the
Justice Dept. Web site.
The second report was issued by the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee
on Department of Justice Oversight. It was entitled, "Report on
the Government's Handling of the Investigation and Prosecution of
Dr. Wen Ho Lee." Both reports are as critical of the FBI's
handling of the Wen Ho Lee case as Lee's book, but from
strikingly different perspectives. Unlike Lee's book, the two
official reports garnered hardly any media attention.
Back in 1995, the U.S. intelligence community, led by a small
group of analysts and nuclear scientists at the Energy
Department, uncovered indications of a massive assault by China
on the U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories and U.S. military
science and technology industries. Over the next few years, the
government uncovered thefts by China of classified U.S. nuclear
weapons information, including the neutron bomb, the W88
thermonuclear warhead, the latest models of strategic ballistic
missiles, techniques for improving the performance of advanced
Chinese nuclear warheads, and U.S. advanced conventional
weaponry. By 1999, the Clinton administration had sold the
Chinese more than 600 high-performance computers on which to run
newly acquired computer codes and copies of advanced U.S.
software.
The depth and breadth of the Chinese penetration of our military
science and technology centers is unknown to this day. It appears
every bit as comprehensive and successful as the Soviet Union's
assault on the Manhattan Project during and after World War II.
As such, it would seem to warrant a government counterespionage
effort at least as aggressive as that conducted by the FBI
against the Soviet Union in the 1940s and early 1950s. But this
was not to be.
The FBI Fiddled While China Spied
The FBI had dramatically reduced its counterespionage
capabilities in favor of new priorities established by the new
FBI director, Judge Louis Freeh. He emphasized street crime, drug
busting, and white-collar crime over counterespionage. He was
especially interested in expanding the FBI's reach abroad.
FBI sections devoted to countering Chinese espionage were
especially hard hit and were stripped of many of their best
agents and resources. Many of the better China-squad agents
retired in disgust; others left during the Chinese campaign
finance scandal after refusing to permit the White House to
compromise some of their most sensitive sources. China would
continue to be a blind spot for the FBI throughout the 1990s, and
concern about offending China may have played a role in hindering
the Wen Ho Lee investigation.
The Clinton administration cultivated a new relationship with
China. Soft money flowed into the Democratic National Committee
from the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and the Chinese
intelligence services, channeled through White House coffees and
photo opportunities for sale to the highest bidder. 'This seems
to have colored administration assessments of China. It adopted a
"see no evil, hear no evil" policy with regard to China and moved
hard against anyone within the government who argued otherwise. A
number of career intelligence officers at the CIA and elsewhere
were terminated when they tried to report accurately the Chinese
penetration of U.S. defense industries or nuclear labs or China's
continuing role in the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction. Speaking truth to power in the Clinton
administration when the subject was China was clearly not a
career-enhancing activity.
In this context, in 1996 Wen Ho Lee, a nuclear weapons computer
code writer at Los Alamos National Laboratory, emerged as a prime
suspect in the Chinese theft of classified information on the W88
nuclear warhead. Lee was already the subject of an on-going
preliminary inquiry after FBI sources had reported that the
director of China's nuclear weapons program had said that Lee had
helped the Chinese nuclear program with computer codes and
software and that he was well known in Beijing. In his job, Lee
had access to all of the secrets about U.S. nuclear warheads,
including access to a vault that contained warhead blueprints and
nearly 50,000 classified documents. These reports from reliable
sources warranted a full FBI counterintelligence investigation,
but managers in the Albuquerque field office opted for a
preliminary investigation, which by definition may not employ the
full range of investigative tools available to the FBI. But it
didn't matter since the agent in charge devoted little attention
to the inquiry.
In 1996, the FBI was confronted with espionage allegations "as
serious as any it ever investigated" in the words of the Bellows
report, involving Lee and the W88 theft, raising the specter of
the post-war Soviet penetration of Los Alamos. But this FBI
investigation effort would pale in comparison with the FBI's
efforts in the Manhattan Project. In fact, the FBI conducted an
investigation in name only. The investigation never really got
off the ground; it suffered from inattention, insufficient
resources, and inexplicable delays.
The FBI didn't even assign a full-time agent to the case.
Everything else took precedence over counterespionage, reflecting
Freeh's new priorities. This seems like a strange choice for an
FBI office in the heart of such a "target rich" environment for
foreign intelligence services. New Mexico contains two nuclear
weapons labs, several U.S. air force bases, military testing
ranges, and defense contractors.
In early 1997, FBI agents dispatched from Washington to help with
the case were diverted to gang units and Indian reservation crime
units. Not surprisingly, the investigation was littered with
missed opportunities, the most significant of which occurred in
1996, when the FBI agent running the case made a feeble effort to
examine Wen Ho Lee's computer activity. Source reporting about
Lee's help to China with computer codes, software and his duties
at the Los Alamos lab were more than sufficient justification for
a full-scale examination of Lee's computer activities. But a Los
Alamos contract counterintelligence officer refused to permit the
FBI to examine Lee's computer on the grounds that this would be a
violation of Lee's Fourth Amendment right of privacy. The FBI
accepted that, even though Lee had signed security waivers in
1995 acknowledging that his computer was subject to a search and
monitoring. The contractor didn't know about the waiver. He
presumed Lee's right to privacy.
The FBI caved in.
Too bad, because the FBI could have discovered that Wen Ho Lee
had been creating his own personal library of nuclear weapons'
computer codes and electronic blueprints of war-heads containing
data on dimensions, contours, and the materials used in their
production. He stored this library on an unprotected Los Alamos
computer network that was highly vulnerable to outside attacks.
His first transfers occurred in 1988 around the time of a visit
he made to Beijing. Beginning in 1993, he downloaded these files
onto portable computer tapes. In 1997, after the FBI missed an
opportunity to uncover this activity, Lee made yet another tape,
this one containing the latest available information on Los
Alamos nuclear codes and, worse yet, data on the recently
redesigned W88 warhead. That tape has never been recovered.
Wen Ho Lee's Opportunity
The way Lee constructed these files led lab experts to believe
that they represented a "complete portable nuclear design
capability which could be installed on a supercomputer center or
even lesser computer capabilities"-like the high performance
computers the Clinton administration sold the Chinese in the late
1990s. By 1997, the government knew that the Chinese were after
exactly the type of information on Lee's tapes, but it took no
action to step up protection of the lab's computer networks.
In early 1999, coming under increasing pressure from the Energy
Department and Congress, the special agent in charge (SAC) of the
FBI's Albuquerque office recommended to FBI headquarters in
Washington that the case be closed. He concluded that Wen Ho Lee
was not guilty of providing W88 data to the Chinese.
This was based on a badly botched Energy Department polygraph,
one interview of Wen Ho Lee conducted for the purpose of closing
out the case and a statement that Lee was allowed to write and
then sign clearing himself of any wrong-doing. He dismissed
allegations of Lee's giving W88 secrets to the Chinese, writing,
"If they were co-conspirators in a plot to pass the W88 material,
such activity would have come to light during the course of the
[DOE] polygraph." The SAC wrapped up with the following
conclusion: In as much as Wen Ho Lee has been cooperative, passed
the DOE polygraph and provided a sworn statement, FBI-AQ
[Albuquerque] has no reason to believe Lee is being deceptive.
Based on the FBI-AQ's investigation, it does not appear that Lee
is the individual responsible for passing the W88 information.
But an FBI quality control review of the Energy Department
polygraph showed it to be badly flawed and useless for
determining Lee's deceptiveness. Lee later flunked an FBI
polygraph specifically on questions related to the W88 warhead
and nuclear computer codes. The SAC's characterization of Lee as
"cooperative" proved to be a bad joke. After the second
polygraph, Lee began to reveal more details of his interactions
and aid to the Chinese-details that he had withheld from lab
security officials and the FBI for over a decade. Lee now
admitted lying to the FBI and lab security officials about his
contacts with Chinese nuclear scientists, their efforts to elicit
classified information from him, and the computer help he gave
them, which even he admitted could easily be used in the
development of nuclear weapons.
Instead of closing down the Lee case, the FBI searched Lee's
office and found evidence of his illicit computer transfers and,
later, his portable tape library. Not having put him under
surveillance after he failed their polygraph, they missed
catching him destroying incriminating evidence. They never found
the 20 or so computer tapes which may contain the most sensitive
classified information on our nuclear weapons.
The Case Against Wen Ho Lee
The circumstantial evidence of Lee's espionage was piling up. The
Bellows Report later concluded that there was sufficient
"probable cause" to believe that Wen Ho Lee "was currently
engaged in clandestine intelligence gathering activities for or
on behalf of the PRC." But the Justice Department and the FBI
declined to pursue espionage and opted instead to prosecute Lee
on charges involving the mishandling of classified information.
This was the second time that the Clinton Justice Department
shied away from an espionage prosecution that could have
implicated the government of China. In 1997, Justice opted for
lesser charges against another lab scientist suspected of
handling classified information to the Chinese and blamed
miscommunication for accepting a plea bargain before a damage
assessment had been prepared.
"Miscommunication" was also a problem in the Wen Ho Lee
investigation along with mismanagement, inept investigators and a
host of other problems. But none of these can fully explain the
FBI's performance in the case. There is another factor, however,
which the Justice Department, the FBI and the White House all
have gone to great lengths to conceal from the public. That is
the subject of the Lees' relationship with the government that
began in the mid-1980s and continued up until at least 1991.
There is a chapter of the Bellows Report devoted to this period,
but it is entirely blacked out. A Senate Judiciary Committee
report was similarly redacted. The government acknowledges a
relationship between the Lees and the FBI. The CIA was also
involved in this relationship, but the Justice Department has
kept this secret as well.
Twice in the 1980s the FBI intervened with Los Alamos officials
to save the jobs of Wen Ho and Sylvia Lee. The first time came in
1984, after Lee came under suspicion of contacting another FBI
espionage suspect-a Chinese American scientist at Livermore
National Lab. Lee denied the contact, but before the FBI could
question him further he offered to help the FBI with their case
against this colleague. The FBI ran Lee in a "false flag"
operation against the suspect. With the FBI listening, Lee phoned
and personally contacted him.
The details and results of this operation are still shrouded in
secrecy. When the FBI polygraphed Lee regarding his call to the
suspect, it learned that Lee had been passing documents to the
Taiwanese since the late 1970s, and had been in contact with a
Taiwanese intelligence officer and other high-level officials.
Lee's security obligations and Taiwan's status as a "sensitive
country" due to its apparently active nuclear weapons program
required that such contacts be authorized.
The FBI ran a full counterintelligence investigation, but it
claims it couldn't make the case. When Los Alamos security
learned of Lee's actions, officials recommended removal of his
security clearances and, with those, the loss of his job. But the
FBI persuaded the Los Alamos lab director to leave Wen Ho Lee in
place. Why? Probably because the Lees offered to go to work for
the FBI as "informational assets." They spent the next decade
reporting to the FBI and CIA on their contacts with nuclear
scientists from the People's Republic of China.
The CIA played a role in managing and "tasking" the Lees from
about 1984 on. Congressional sources report that Sylvia Lee
provided over 100 pages of material to the CIA after she returned
from one Beijing trip in the late 1980s.
After another trip she wrote a report for the CIA. Wen Ho Lee's
defense lawyers have claimed that the FBI gave the Lees small
tokens of appreciation for their service, but these almost
certainly came from CIA. The Lees must have been considered
valuable sources. The FBI was probably hoping for recruiting
leads among the Chinese nuclear scientists, who could then tip
the FBI to potential breaches of U.S. lab security. The CIA was
probably more interested in the intelligence the Lees could
collect on the Chinese nuclear program.
A Double Agent?
Whatever the case, it was a good deal for Wen Ho and Sylvia Lee.
She became the unofficial hostess at Los Alamos for visiting
Chinese scientists and dignitaries and Wen Ho got to travel to
China and talk science with the cream of China's nuclear
establishment. They made two trips to Beijing in the late 1980s,
a third trip to Hong Kong in 1992, and entertained visiting
Chinese scientists in their home outside of Los Alamos. The FBI
picked up the tab for their travel and entertaining expenses,
collecting in return information about Chinese nuclear
scientists. Sylvia Lee handled requests from Chinese scientists
for unclassified lab reports and computer codes. She translated
letters between the Chinese and their Los Alamos counterparts,
and acted as an interpreter for visiting delegations. She became
so popular with the Chinese scientists that she was invited to
present a paper at a Beijing conference in 1990-an unusual honor
for a data entry clerk at the Los Alamos lab.
There is a question as to whether the FBI was getting its money's
worth. It was interested in how much the Chinese knew about the
U.S. program, so the types of questions posed to Wen Ho would be
of great interest to them. Some of the first alarms about Chinese
nuclear espionage were sounded in the mid-1980s when returning
lab scientists told the FBI how much the Chinese seemed to know
about U.S. nuclear weapons programs and trends. Every scientist
returning from visits to Beijing reported Chinese efforts to
elicit information, except for one-Wen Ho Lee. Lab security
officials became suspicious. Lee was the only Los Alamos
scientist to travel to China twice and not report efforts to gain
information from him. It would be more than a decade before the
FBI would learn that the Chinese had indeed sought classified
information from him on those trips about current U.S. warhead
programs and solving problems in their nuclear weapons computer
codes.
This was exactly the kind of information the FBI wanted. It could
have tipped them off to breaches of security on the W88 program
years before the first hints of problems. Lee withheld it from
them, saying first that he had "forgot" to tell the FBI, but
later he claimed in his book that he was afraid to tell them for
fear of getting into trouble. But why would he get in trouble if
he had given them no classified information? If he told the FBI
about the questions he had been asked, he might have been
subjected to another polygraph, but that should not have been a
problem for him if he had rebuffed their efforts to get secret
information from him.
The Lees would continue working for the FBI until 1991 when the
relationship apparently ended, for reasons yet unexplained.
Perhaps they had outlived their usefulness, especially if Wen Ho
was coming home telling the FBI nothing was happening on his
visits to Beijing. The Lees continued to host visitors to Los
Alamos and, on at least one occasion, Wen Ho continued to discuss
nuclear weapons codes with visitors to their home. The
relationship probably ended when FBI agents began to realize that
Wen Ho Lee was holding out on them; they suspected that the
Chinese were eliciting classified information from them.
A Bungled-On-Purpose Spy Hunt?
The W88 espionage investigation, begun in 1996, languished for
three years, despite repeated efforts by the Energy Dept. to spur
the FBI to take some action-any action. At the FBI's request,
Energy had left Lee in a "non-alert" status to avoid tipping him
off. He went to work every day in the nation's premier nuclear
weapons lab and continued to have unfettered access to the
nation's most sensitive nuclear secrets. None of the usual FBI
investigative procedures were followed. The FBI did no
comprehensive financial analysis on Lee, conducted no interviews
with supervisors or co-workers, never established surveillance on
Lee-even on an episodic basis, did no trash covers, never
examined his computer or computer activities, and, after more
than three years of the "investigation," was still unprepared to
interview him.
Why was the Albuquerque SAC in such a hurry to get the case
wrapped up and off the books in early 1999? Beyond the pressure
from the impending release of the Cox Report and administration
sensitivities over China, the SAC had to be aware of the Lees'
prior relationship with his field office. The FBI goes to great
lengths to avoid embarrassment, and the risks of embarrassment in
the Wen Ho Lee case were high. If their hunt for the spy who had
given the Chinese the secrets of the W88 turned out to be an
agent they had used to get information on China's nuclear
program, the embarrassment would have been acute, not only for
the FBI but for the Clinton administration. It appears that by
bungling the investigation the FBI was trying to cut its losses
and save its face.
What You Can Do
Send the enclosed cards or your own cards or letters to:
+ Robert S. Mueller III, Director of the FBI
+ Bill O'Reilly, host of the O'Reilly Factor on the Fox News
Channel
+ Michael Chertoff, Assistant Attorney General, Criminal
Division
NOTES FROM THE EDITOR'S CUFF BY By Reed Irvine
THIS REPORT, WRITTEN BY NOTRA TRULOCK, WILL INTRODUCE YOU TO A
NEW ADDITION to the Accuracy in Media staff. His name may be
familiar to you. He was in the news a few years ago because as
Director of Intelligence at the Department of Energy he was
involved in exposing the apparent acquisition by China of secret
information about our miniaturized nuclear warhead, W-88, which
some described as the worst leak since spies delivered the A-bomb
technology to the Soviet Union. Two months later, in June 1995, a
Chinese official provided the CIA with what appeared to be an
official Chinese document that mentioned the W-88 and described
some of its key features. These notes are based on what we
reported on this story in the April A 1999 AIM Report. If you
want more detail, you can access that report on our Web site,
[http://www.aim.org] .
TRULOCK SHOWED THE EVIDENCE TO THE FBI, AND LATE IN 1995, TEAMS
FROM THE FBI and the Department of Energy began their spy hunt.
They identified Wen Ho Lee as the prime suspect in February 1996.
About the same time, a U.S. spy in China reported that in 1995,
China had acquired information from the U.S. that enabled them to
overcome problems they were having in developing a neutron bomb.
The Energy Dept. received this report from the FBI on March 27,
1996. In mid-April, Charles Curtis, the Deputy Secretary of
Energy, accompanied by Trulock and other Dept. of Energy
officials, briefed Deputy National Security Adviser Sandy Berger
about the Chinese acquisition of these important secrets,
indicating that what began in the 1980's was still going on as
late as 1995.
BERGER CLAIMED THAT THE BRIEFING HE GOT IN 1996 WAS VERY GENERAL
AND THAT HE understood that there was some evidence that the
Chinese may have obtained, in some fashion, information
concerning sensitive nuclear weapons information. He claimed that
they didn't know who was responsible, how the information was
transmitted or even what it really was. He said both the FBI and
CIA were informed and that they were "deeply and fully engaged."
He said both the President and the Hill had been briefed about
it. "At that point," he said, "it was a very preliminary matter."
He said he got a second briefing from Notra Trulock in 1997 that
was far more extensive and suggested that there was a serious
problem with the labs. He said, "At that point, we launched our
review of how the labs were handling security. We made our
changes. I briefed the President. And we made the changes, I
believe, are necessary."
THE FBI OPENED A FORMAL CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION IN JUNE 1996.
CONGRESSIONAL intelligence committees were briefed. In November,
Deputy Secretary Curtis ordered the laboratories to tighten
security by, among other things, resuming background checks of
foreign visitors, better tracking of visitors and increased
counterintelligence training. But at year's end, there had been
little progress in nailing the spy. DOE officials thought the FBI
was not devoting enough resources to the hunt and was not
coordinating with the CIA.
Doing his job well and trying to get others to do theirs got
Trulock into a lot of trouble. The FBI seized his computer at his
home. Unlike the computers that the Director of Central
Intelligence John Deutch kept in his home, Trulock's had no
classified material on its hard drive. The seizure lacked any
justification, but the FBI arrogantly refuses to return it to
him.
Nevertheless, he was fired for having stepped on the toes of some
of the top people in the Department of Energy and having exposed
the incompetence of the FBI and CIA. He was soon hired by TRW, a
big company that has a lot of government contracts. The
Department of Energy pressured TRW to fire him. He was
effectively blacklisted by the Clinton administration, and the
Bush administration has done nothing to correct that injustice.
Unfortunately, that is standard practice in the federal
government these days.
IN REPORT 2002 NO. 3 I TOLD THE STORY OF RANDY BEERS, THE RETIRED
NAVY MASTER chief, who told me last November that on the night
that TWA Flight 800 crashed, he was on the bridge of the Trepang,
a submarine that was very close to the site of the crash. He said
that he had seen something go up and the plane come down. He said
there were two other submarines close by and that they were
engaged in an operation, confirming what Jim Kallstrom had
previously told me-that three vessels close to Long Island that
showed up on radar were Navy vessels on classified maneuvers.
Those three vessels have been identified by the FBI as the
Trepang, the Albuquerque and the Wyoming, all submarines. Beers
also indicated that there were other Navy vessels participating
in maneuvers off Long Island that night. I and others who have
studied the TWA 800 crash have long assumed that the thirty-odd
vessels that radar data showed were in or sailing toward W-105, a
large area of the ocean that is frequently used by the military
for training exercises or tests, were on maneuvers that night.
Beers told the contact that put me in touch with him that when
the Trepang returned to port, the crew was interviewed by FBI
agents, who wanted to find out if they had returned with all
their weapons intact. The question suggested that the FBI was
trying to find if Navy vessels had launched any missiles that
night. Scores of eyewitnesses had seen what Beers claimed to have
seen, and he said that nothing that the Trepang was doing that
night was classified, but when I spoke to him four days later he
was very fearful that the Navy would cancel his pension if I
published what he had said.
AFTER PUBLISHING WHAT HE HAD TOLD ME WITHOUT IDENTIFYING HIM OR
THE SUB, I was persuaded by some of the e-mail I received that I
should identify both. When I told him I was going to do that, he
said he was so worried about his pension that he hadn't been able
to sleep since our last talk. He then said what he told me was
false, that he didn't see the plane crash and that the Trepang
had not even left port that day. When I indicated that I didn't
believe his retraction, he said, "That's my story and I'm
sticking to it." I had to find out if he had lied to me in
November or was lying in January. I managed to find five officers
who had served with him on the Trepang. One was the officer that
Beers said was on the bridge with him when the plane crashed. He
told me he had been transferred off the Trepang three months
earlier. Another said the Trepang was close to the crash site. He
and another officer said they began a six- to eight-week
deployment that night. Neither would say where they went or why
they went there, but they both confirmed Beers' statement that
they were questioned about their weapons inventory by the FBI
when they returned to home port.
Another said they were engaged in an operation that involved a
plane that was canceled when TWA 800 crashed. That probably
involved the other two subs, as Beers had indicated. None of them
recalled hearing that Beers had seen the plane crash. They got
that news from the radio. And none knew anything about the
maneuvers in W-105 that night. Beers probably lied about that,
but his wholesale denial was his biggest lie. I apologize for
having been deceived by him, but his lies are insignificant
compared to those the FBI, CIA and NTSB have told about TWA 800.
The Bush Justice Dept., like the media, has swallowed those lies
without checking the evidence.
THE SUGAR LAND, TEXAS POLICE STILL WON'T RELEASE THE EVIDENCE
THEY HAVE IN THE death of former Enron executive Clifford Baxter,
but we have obtained the report of the police officer who
reported to the scene at 2:27 a.m. He said Baxter's Mercedes was
parked in a turn-around on a street divided by medians.
Baxter was sitting in the driver's seat, his head leaning forward
with blood dripping from his face. The officer saw blood on the
right side of his head and a large amount of blood in his lap.
Both hands were in his lap, and a silver-colored revolver was
lying on top of both hands. The grip was on the palm of the right
hand and the barrel was on the left hand. His wallet was on the
passenger seat. Both still photos and video were taken at the
scene, but the gun was removed and bagged before any photos were
taken. The report does not mention clothing. The autopsy report
says he was wearing a T-shirt, workout pants and briefs, all
blood-stained, but no shoes or sox. I have heard that the family
doesn't believe this was a suicide, but they seem to be doing
little to discourage the media from calling it that. A reporter
who recently spoke to the widow told me she railed against
reporters trying to make reputations by writing about her
husband's death. She then tried to find out what the reporter
knew. The reporter cited the bits of broken glass found on
Baxter's T-shirt.
When the reporter wouldn't give the source, Mrs. Baxter denounced
as cowards those who reveal information but hide their
identities.
ON MARCH 11, THE CATHOLIC LEAGUE ASKED OVER 100 ORGANIZATIONS TO
DROP support for the Red Cross because a California chapter
canceled an invitation to a high school group to sing at a large
function because it planned to sing "America the Beautiful,"
"Prayer of the Children" and "God Bless the U.S.A." The Orange
County Chapter explained, "We wanted songs representative of all
races, all creeds. We are not a religious organization. We have
to be neutral and impartial in all situations." The national
headquarters had supported the cancellation, saying, "The dispute
was over the music program and has nothing to do with
patriotism...The dispute centers only on our sensitivity to
religious diversity and a preference for a music program that
would be inclusive and not offend different populations
participating in this particular event." The objection was to
"prayer" and "God." This got little media attention even when the
Red Cross apologized. It was picked up by Bill O'Reilly on Fox
News, but he got it wrong, claiming the Red Cross was opposed to
patriotism.
www.aim.org
*****************************************************************
57 EDITORIAL: America should reconsider its policy on nuclear arms
asahi.com : ENGLISH
Asahi Shimbun
www.asahi.com [http://www.asahi.com/]
It should not be forgotten that without nuclear disarmament, the
pursuit of nonproliferation will fall apart.
Parties to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) meet every
five years to review developments in nuclear disarmament and
promotion of nonproliferation. The first review conference of the
21st century is to be held in 2005, and the initial preparatory
committee meeting has begun at United Nations headquarters in New
York.
Non-nuclear ountries are committed to a policy of never
possessing nuclear weapons. Nuclear powers, on the other hand,
are to pursue nuclear disarmament, with the ultimate objective of
nuclear abolition. Nuclear nonproliferation is based on these
premises. That is why the nations that are not nuclear powers
accept the disparity between the two kinds of parties to the
treaty.
That is also why two previous review conferences adopted
documents calling for early implementation of the Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and preserving the Anti-Ballistic Missile
(ABM) Treaty
Even so, the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush
tramples on those promises by turning away from the CTBT and
opting out of the ABM Treaty, just as the U.S. Senate has refused
to ratify the CTBT.
Previous non-proliferation arrangements are already being
buffeted by the defiant positions taken by India and Pakistan,
which conducted nuclear tests in 1998. If the United States had
led the ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and
fortified the nonproliferation philosophy, such action would have
been seen as appropriate to a responsible superpower.
If the nuclear powers do not keep their promises, and instead
continue to depend upon nuclear weapons, the non-nuclear nations
will naturally come to see the nonproliferation treaty as
something that only bind on nations with no nuclear weapons. It
should not be forgotten that without nuclear disarmament, the
pursuit of nonproliferation will fall apart.
Bush said he would pursue a missile defense program while at the
same time seeking reduction of strategic nuclear weapons. This is
in keeping with the present strategic situation that pits the
United States against nations that aid terrorism, because a
nuclear deterrent is not very effective against such countries.
The Americans and Russians have already come to an agreement on
strategic arms reduction to one-third the current level.
But the United States seems intent upon preserving, rather than
abolishing, many of the nuclear warheads removed from strategic
missiles. That does not represent real disarmament, since the
nuclear weapons are still in the inventory.
Some Russian officials seem sympathetic to the U.S. retention of
nuclear warheads, but the agreement on strategic nuclear arms
reduction should not be reduced to nothing more than a hollow
gesture. We hope U.S. and Russian leaders will decide, in next
month's Moscow summit, to dispose of the dismantled nuclear
warheads.
In promoting nuclear disarmament, it is also important to reduce
the role of nuclear weapons. In the 1995 nonproliferation
conference, a resolution was adopted that included a clause
providing a modest security assurance-a promise that nuclear
powers will not use nuclear weapons to attack nations that are
not nuclear powers and that are parties to the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty.
Influential U.S. newspapers have reported this year's Pentagon
review of nuclear strategy assumes the United States could attack
with nuclear weapons Iraq or Iran-both signatories to the
nonproliferation treaty, depending upon the circumstances.
We can understand that the United States fears proliferation of
weapons of mass destruction. If the United States decides to
adopt a policy that admits possible first-strike use of nuclear
weapons against nations that are not nuclear powers, however,
this modest security factor will be rendered meaningless.
We urge the Bush administration to reconsider its policy to make
the current session of the nonproliferation treaty preparatory
committee a fruitful one. (The Asahi Shimbun, April
11)(IHT/Asahi: April 12,2002)
(04/12)
[Copyright Asahi Shimbun.
*****************************************************************
58 Nuclear warheads firm wins UK safety award
Ananova -
The company which maintains the warheads for the UK's nuclear
deterrent has won the country's top safety award.
AWE plc beat off the challenge of more than 1,000 other
organisations to scoop the 2002 Royal Society for the Prevention
of Accidents' Sir George Earle Trophy.
The firm manages and operates the Atomic Weapons Establishment
for the Ministry of Defence.
RoSPA awards the trophy every year as part of its drive to
improve safety standards at work.
Malcolm Hutchinson, chairman of AWE, whose headquarters are at
Aldermaston, Berkshire, said: "We have always said that nothing
is more important to us than health and safety. This demonstrates
that we mean what we say."
Story filed: 11:11 Friday 12th April 2002
Copyright © 2002 Ananova Ltd
*****************************************************************
59 Lawrence Berkeley Lab Scientists Propose New Research Facilities
The Daily Californian
Additions Would Expand Lab’s Current Offerings
Discuss this article in the Daily Cal forums.
By JOHN CISE
Contributing Writer
Friday, April 12, 2002
Several scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
are actively involved in planning two new, state-of-the-art
laboratories described as "the best in the world."
The Nuclear Science Advisory Committee, chaired by Berkeley lab
physicist James Symons, released a long-range plan proposing the
construction of two new facilities, one with a rare isotope
accelerator and the other with a 6,000-foot-deep underground
laboratory.
The new facilities are necessary because the new generation of
research is outgrowing its old facilities, Symons said.
"These labs would bring leading research to the United States,"
he said. "They would be international experiments, but we would
have a site in the United States."
Currently, the leading physics facilities are in Europe and
Japan. For accelerating electrons, protons or any type of
isotope, Symons said the new accelerator "will be the machine to
do this job best." The new accelerator is expected to be used by
astrophysicists and physicists looking into topics as varied as
supernovas and the structure of the atom.
The underground lab would also be a significant upgrade to
current facilities, Symons added.
Built at 6,000 feet below the surface, its depth would shield
many delicate experiments from harmful cosmic rays, said Kevin
Lesko, another physicist at the Berkeley lab.
"It would be a Lawrence-Lab-built underground", he said.
Lesko also pointed to the diverse array of scientific research
that would be made possible by the underground lab.
"Physicists could research dark matter and neutrinos in such an
environment," he said. "Microbiologists, biologists and
geologists would also benefit greatly."
Aside from the theoretical applications of such research, there
are also possible industrial applications, including
superconductors and national defense, Lesko said.
By checking for isotopes in the air that develop from nuclear
tests, physicists could verify if any treaty violations regarding
nuclear testing have been made, he said.
But the physicists said industrial applications are not the
primary reason for their involvement with the new labs. "Right
now, most of our support is out of scientific interest," Lesko
said.
Despite some concern about potential safety hazards the projects
may pose to surrounding communities, the Berkeley physicists
agreed the two facilities would not pose any major safety
problems.
The underground lab, because of its depth and the nature of
experiments to be performed there, would be "nothing like a
nuclear waste dump," Lesko said.
As for the accelerator lab, Symons said there would be some
safety considerations, but it would be generally safe to live
near.
"It's nothing like a nuclear reactor," he said. While several
Berkeley lab scientists are involved in planning the construction
of the new facilities, the national laboratory itself is not yet
involved in any way.
But both physicists agreed the type of work being done at these
labs would be of interest to many of those currently conducting
research at the Berkeley lab.
The projects, whose construction is expected to begin within ten
years, are still in the planning stages as funding sources have
not been finalized. The National Science Foundation is expected
to finance the underground lab, while the Department of Energy
may fund the accelerator lab.
But Congress would have to appropriate additional funds, which
could cause delays, Symons said.
Email: dailycal@dailycal.org
*****************************************************************
60 Lab asks judge to review $1 million verdict
Tri-Valley Herald
Friday, April 12, 2002 - 3:45:40 AM MST
By FROM STAFF REPORTS
Friday, April 12, 2002 - -->Lawyers representing Lawrence
Livermore Laboratory managers are disputing a $1 million award to
a former lab employee, granted March 11 by an Alameda County
Superior Court jury.
Dee Kotla, a computer-support worker at the lab, was terminated
at the lab in 1997, three months after she testified against lab
managers in a sexual harassment lawsuit on behalf of another
employee.
Kotla's lawyers have held that lab officials retaliated against
Kotla for speaking out about the harassment, while lawyers for
the University of California, which manages the lab for the
Energy Department, have maintained that Kotla was fired for
improper use of her computer and other office equipment.
Susan Houghton, a lab spokeswoman, said Thursday, "We are asking
the judge to look at it again -- just to take a look at the
jury's decision."
Lawyers filed a motion "that suggests that we do not believe that
the jury had sufficient evidence to make a decision," Houghton
also said. "It is not a call for a retrial."
J. Gary Gwilliam, an Oakland lawyer who represented Kotla in the
case, said he believes there is a "very slim" chance that the
lab's motion will lead to a change in the court's decision.
The jury in the Kotla case, after seven days of deliberation that
followed a six-week trial, awarded her $325,000 in economic
damages and $675,000 in damages for emotional distress.
©1999-2001 by MediaNews Group, Inc. and ANG Newspapers
*****************************************************************
61 S.C. objections won't keep Rocky Flats plutonium out, energy czar says
Rocky Mountain News: Local
By Berny Morson, News Staff Writer
April 12, 2002
Weapons-grade plutonium at Rocky Flats will go to South Carolina,
despite objections by the state's governor, Energy Secretary
Spencer Abraham said Thursday.
Clearly frustrated by months of negotiations, Abraham told Gov.
Jim Hodges in a letter Thursday that paperwork to start the
shipments will be issued Monday, meaning trucks will roll in May.
"It is time to bring this process to a close," Abraham said.
"Further delay will undermine important international and
domestic priorities of the United States."
Hodges, at a Thursday news conference, again threatened to lie
down in front of trucks carrying plutonium. However, the times
and routes of the heavily guarded trucks are top secret.
And a 1954 law gives unequivocal control of nuclear materials to
the federal government.
Sending the plutonium to the Energy Department's Savannah River
site in South Carolina is a major step in plans to close Rocky
Flats by Dec. 15, 2006.
Abraham and President Bush have assured Colorado's congressional
delegation and Gov. Bill Owens several times that the deadline
will be met.
"The president of the United States wasn't kidding," said
Abraham's spokesman, Joe Davis.
Colorado lawmakers hailed Abraham's action.
"You cooperate up to a point, and then you've got to say enough's
enough," said U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard. "And so I think we're at
that point."
U.S. Rep. Mark Udall, whose district includes Rocky Flats, said,
"There's been a lot of negotiating going on, and at some point,
the DOE has to say, 'Here's what we're trying to accomplish, and
here's what we're proposing.' "
Owens said he "greatly appreciates" Abraham's action.
Hodges does not object to storing the plutonium at Savannah River
temporarily, but he's seeking assurances the material would
eventually go someplace else. Energy Department officials told
Hodges the plutonium will be turned into fuel for nuclear
reactors to be used in other states.
The plan to turn the plutonium into reactor fuel is part of an
arms-reduction treaty with Russia. Each country had agreed to
turn 34 tons of plutonium -- enough to make 4,200 bombs -- into
reactor fuel.
© The E.W. Scripps Co.
*****************************************************************
62 Fluor to lay off 83 this month
This story was published Fri, Apr 12, 2002
By the Herald staff
Fluor Hanford plans to lay off 83 employees this month and a
handful more by Sept. 30.
Company President Keith Thomson announced the cuts Thursday in a
memo to employees. Forty-three people have been told their jobs
will end and another 40 will receive notices by April 30, the
memo said.
More will be laid off between April 30 and Sept. 30, the end of
fiscal 2002. The total jobs cut will be less than 100, Thomson
wrote.
Fluor is trying to find jobs for those people elsewhere at
Hanford, said spokesman Michael Turner. The reductions are part
of a streamlining effort stemming from a Department of Energy
push for more efficient Hanford cleanup. Last year, Fluor
absorbed subcontractor DynCorps Tri-Cities Services, which
managed site roads, utilities and buildings. Many layoffs will be
in those areas.
Fluor employs 4,604 on a team that includes about 120 people
working for permanent subcontractors Duratek Hanford and Numatec
Hanford. Another 150 work for security subcontractor Protection
Technology Hanford. The current layoffs affect Fluor, Duratek and
Numatec.
Copyright 2002 Tri-City Herald. All rights reserved. This
*****************************************************************
63 Manager denies doing wrong
[www.TheDailyCamera.com]
By Katy Human
Camera Staff Writer
DENVER — Kaiser-Hill manager Tom Dieter sat on a witness stand
for more than three hours Thursday morning, cross-examined in
detail by lawyers on both sides of a Rocky Flats whistleblowing
case.
Dieter helps manage building 771 at the former nuclear weapons
plant, and six people who once worked for him claim they were
unfairly reassigned to "broom-pushing" jobs after pointing out
serious safety concerns.
Kaiser-Hill is managing cleanup at the highly contaminated Rocky
Flats. Dieter said that although the workers — Betty Devers,
David Martin, Joey Miller, Tracey Rittenbach, Dallas Sherman and
Shirley Voorhies — may have been transferred to jobs where they
had less access to overtime pay, he didn't know that would be so
when he transferred them.
Nor did the workers' safety concerns influence him to move them
out of the building, he said. Many other building workers were
more safety-conscious than the complainants, Dieter said, "which
we like. It keeps workers safe. It's more productive."
In response to questions from Bill Wright, a Kaiser-Hill lawyer,
Dieter said managers often reward workers who bring up safety
concerns, taking them out to lunch, for example.
But attorney Todd McNamara, representing the workers, used
documents and questions to imply that Dieter and other managers
in his building did not take safety seriously, prioritizing
productivity instead.
McNamara suggested that Kaiser-Hill managers responded to some of
his clients' safety concerns only after the Department of Energy
levied hefty fines on its contractor for safety deficiencies.
Those safety concerns included material in a contaminated safety
system sparking, which could indicate an extremely serious
release of radioactivity; exposed pipes in the ceilings of
several rooms being improperly sealed; and a portable air
conditioner installed in a dangerous configuration near the door
of a highly radioactive room.
Dieter said he received a bonus worth 25 percent of his annual
pay in 2000, and that safety is the "No. 1" factor in determining
bonus pay. But that same year, McNamara pointed out, Kaiser-Hill
was fined $250,000 for safety violations, many in building 771.
McNamara also quoted a Kaiser-Hill document reporting that
supervisors and workers in 771 felt pressured to get jobs done on
time — which earns the company bonus money — regardless of
safety. The document suggested managers rewarded reckless workers
who "get the job done."
The six workers are asking compensation for overtime and crew
leader wages lost when they were transferred to less challenging
jobs, and for emotional damages, which could total $40,000 per
person, said Kristina James, co-counsel. McNamara has not yet
decided what to ask for punitive damages.
A federal administrative law judge is hearing the case, which is
scheduled to close Wednesday. Sometime after that, judge Jeffrey
Tureck will recommend a decision to the U.S. Secretary of Labor.
Contact Katy Human at (303) 473-1364 or
humank@thedailycamera.com.
April 12, 2002
Copyright 2002 The Daily Camera.
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64 Y-12 protesters threatened with federal charges
Oak Ridger Online -->
Story last updated at 1:00 p.m. on Friday, April 12, 2002
by Paul Parson and Beverly Majors
Oak Ridger staff
Any protesters arrested Sunday at the Y-12 National Security
Complex could face federal charges, a spokesman said.
Steven Wyatt, a Department of Energy spokesman, said this
morning that federal charges will be filed against those arrested
while attempting to enter Y-12 in connection with an annual "stop
the bombs" rally coordinated by the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace
Alliance. Wyatt declined to elaborate more on the charges.
"We respect their right Š but trespassing will not be
tolerated," Wyatt said.
Oak Ridge Police Chief David Beams said he met with U.S.
Attorney Sandy Mattice concerning the protesters. Officials from
DOE; Y-12; Wackenhut Services Inc., DOE's security contractor;
and a couple of other organizations also met at Mattice's office
to discuss Sunday's protest and future related incidences.
Beams said he told officials that because the Oak Ridge Police
Department is in a local municipality it has limited resources
and that DOE should step up and take more of a role in dealing
with the protesters.
Federal authorities made the decision to bring federal charges,
and Oak Ridge officers will support and assist with the arrests
and transportation of violators.
The peace rally is scheduled to begin around 10 a.m. Sunday with
a march from A.K. Bissell Park to the Y-12 weapons plant. The
rest of the rally will take place between 11:30 a.m. and 4:30
p.m. near the main entrance to Y-12.
"Over the last sixty years, the United States has spent more
than five trillion dollars maintaining nuclear supremacy over the
world," the alliance's latest newsletter states. "In Oak Ridge,
one year's nuclear weapons budget would feed every hungry child
in Tennessee three meals a day for two years."
Paul Parson and Beverly Majors can be contacted at (865) 482-1021
or [oakridge@oakridger.com] .
All Contents ©Copyright The Oak Ridger
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65 Enron Unit Headed by Army Secretary White Helped Manipulate California
Public Citizen
April 11, 2002
Market, Gouge Consumers,
Public Citizen Tells Congress
WASHINGTON, D.C. – A division of Enron Corp. that was headed by
Army Secretary Thomas White controlled as much as 25 percent of
California’s wholesale electricity market during the state’s
electricity crisis in 2001 and helped drive up consumer prices by
trading power to other Enron divisions at astronomical prices,
Public Citizen told Congress in testimony today.
"By selling power to itself at inflated prices, Enron helped
skyrocket prices in California’s deregulated market," said
Wenonah Hauter, director of Public Citizen’s Critical Mass Energy
and Environment Program. Hauter testified before the Senate
Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Consumer Affairs, Foreign
Commerce and Tourism.
White, named by President Bush to serve as secretary of the U.S.
Army after serving as an Enron executive for 11 years, formerly
headed Enron Energy Services, one of four Enron power marketing
divisions. During the first three months of 2001 – as California
consumers suffered through rolling blackouts and skyrocketing
prices – White’s division traded more than 11 million megawatts
of electricity in the California market, making nearly 98 percent
of its trades to other Enron divisions at prices up to $2,500 a
megawatt hour.
By trading such large volumes of electricity among various Enron
units at such high prices, Enron was able to gouge California
utilities and consumers, Hauter said. Engaging in so-called
"transfer pricing" also allowed the company to overstate revenue
and contribute to the accounting gimmickry that inflated its
share price and eventually led to its downfall.
Hauter also noted that at the same time Enron was manipulating
California’s deregulated electricity market, it paid the
Washington, D.C., lobbying firm Quinn Gillespie more than half a
million dollars in the first seven months of 2001 to lobby the
White House on the "California electric crisis," according to
lobbying disclosure forms. One of the firm’s lobbyists, Ed
Gillespie, former communications director at the Republican
National Committee, was a top Bush campaign aide in the 2000
election. The Bush administration took Enron’s position, arguing
strenuously against price controls in the California market and
contending that higher prices were caused by a shortage of
electricity brought on by environmental regulations.
Hauter said the deregulation of electricity markets and commodity
trading allowed Enron to escape price regulations – a key factor
in the company’s meteoric, 1,750 percent increase in revenue over
the past decade. Enron was an aggressive advocated of electricity
deregulation, lobbying heavily for the transmission wheeling
provisions of the Energy Policy Act of 1992 that allowed the
company to gain a foothold into the wholesale market by
registering as a power marketer.
"Enron’s business model was built entirely on the premise that it
could make more money speculating on electricity contracts than
it could by actually producing electricity at a power plant,"
Hauter said. "Central to Enron’s strategy of turning electricity
into a speculative commodity was removing government oversight of
its trading practices and exploiting market deficiencies to allow
it to manipulate prices and supply. So, when FERC (Federal Energy
Regulatory Commission) finally fully re-regulated the California
market last June, Enron’s business model was soon invalid and the
company bankrupt."
Enron was not alone, however, in gouging consumers. FERC has
already levied fines and ordered refunds totaling tens of
millions of dollars to be paid by other energy companies, such as
Dynegy, Williams, Reliant and Mirant, for their role in
manipulating prices in California. Enron has not yet been issued
a refund order, though one is likely.
"Congress must mandate the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
to immediately investigate regulations of power marketers," said
Hauter. "Clearly, the current level of transparency allows
companies to manipulate wholesale markets. Public Citizen urges
Congress to make it clear to FERC that more scrutiny of power
marketers must occur."
To view Hauter’s testimony on the Web, click here.
Enron Information Center ###
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