***************************************************************** 10/15/02 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 10.265 ***************************************************************** RADBULL IS PRODUCED BY THE ABALONE ALLIANCE CLEARINGHOUSE ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR POLICY 1 UK: Polite protesters walk into n-plant 2 US: Port Townsend: Council won't vote on anti-nuke resolution 3 North Korean plane flies to South Korea for nuclear project 4 US: Port Townsend: Council won't vote on anti-nuke resolution 5 NZ: Nuclear stance brings warning* NUCLEAR REACTORS 6 [radiation-survivors] A Blast from the Past 7 US: Hagan blasts Taft for nuke plant woes 8 US: Hagan fires nuke at Taft 9 US: More D-B meetings Wednesday - 10 US: NRC meetings important to build confidence - 11 UK: Greenpeace calls off protest at nuclear reactor 12 US: Nuclear Plant Workers Try To Unionize 13 US: FirstEnergy continues tests at Davis-Besse 14 Germany extends lifespan of oldest nuclear power plant by two years 15 US: Hagan: Taft ignores Davis-Besse perils* 16 US: Hagan questions safety of nuclear power plant NUCLEAR SAFETY 17 [radiation-survivors] Kazakh nuclear soldier paints warning for 18 US: Sick Nuclear Workers in Oak Ridge Still Waiting for 19 Scotland: Government could get hit with huge contamination bill 20 Kazakh 'N-soldier' recalls tests - 21 UNEP to Assess Depleted Uranium Sites in Bosnia and Herzegovina 22 Iranian War Victims Still Suffering 23 US: NRC probes local radiation exposure NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE 24 US: Don't ship the waste 25 LES to open Hartsville office* 26 Region's Nuclear Waste Running Out of Room - 27 Uranium facility goes to Tennessee site NUCLEAR WEAPONS 28 [southnews] Mahathir warns attack on Iraq could lead to nuclear 29 US: US CARRIES OUT MISSILE DEFENSE TEST OVER PACIFIC 30 UK: Ian Buruma: Come the revolution 31 US: Protests at Nevada Test Site yield charges against 66 32 US: NEVADA TEST SITE: Minorities join nuclear foes 33 Nuke agency seeks tough resolution -- 34 Russia's oldest nuclear subs to be scrapped shortly: report 35 Aid to Iran seen diluting U.S. effort -- 36 US: Getting rid of the menace 37 Japanese Ready for Further Investments in Pacific Fleet's Nuclear 38 Strasbourg Court examines Nikitin case 39 Mahathir warns attack on Iraq could lead to nuclear terrorism 40 Iraqis come out in support of Saddam 41 Many Nations Oppose Iraq Resolution 42 Nuclear inspectors don't expect to deploy before Nov. 1 43 Bush Ups Rhetorical War on Iraq US DEPT. OF ENERGY 44 Nevada site considered for production of nuclear weapons 45 At Lawrence Berkeley, Physicists Say a Colleague Took Them for a Rid 46 Flats cleanup beating clock OTHER NUCLEAR 47 Landing federal nuclear physics project is goal ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** FULL NEWS STORIES ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** 1 UK: Polite protesters walk into n-plant Guardian Unlimited | Archive Search John Vidal, environment editor Guardian Tuesday October 15, 2002 On a day that was a fine advertisement for renewable energy - a stiff, steady force six straight off a raging North sea - 150 Greenpeace volunteers climbed easily over two perimeter wires to occupy Sizewell B, Britain's newest nuclear plant, for more than 12 hours yesterday . The intention, said Greenpeace director Stephen Tindale was not to test security, but to persuade the government that an anticipated new generation of nuclear stations would be financially and morally foolish. "We knew that the British nuclear industry was technically clapped out and financially bankrupt. Now we know it's also impossibly insecure," said Mr Tindale. Greenpeace was hardly furtive in its first-ever occupation of a nuclear plant. The activists had been accompanied by police cars for some of their overnight journey to the Suffolk coast, they had arrived in broad daylight in three large buses, and many volunteers had then walked slowly and noisily down half a mile of beach carrying flags and ladders, portable lavatories, umbrellas and paint pots, all in view of several CCTV cameras. As one group put ladders over the main gate and walked straight over, another came from the rear and a third from the side. In the event, the activists, who included retired IT and fashion workers, a priest, scientists, a grandmother, potter and factory workers, found that security at the plant barely existed. No guards appeared for more than 25 minutes, no sirens wailed for an hour, and six police officers appeared only after two hours. "Some of us are 75, others just 17," said one, from Leeds. "We did expect a bit more resistance than this, we're just amateurs. My nan could have made it. She's 82." When it came, resistance at the north end of the plant was mostly in the shape of two private security guards - Mick and Nick - who grabbed some of the activists' radiation checking film as they came over the wire, and tried to plug the hole in the £2.5bn plant's defences. It was mostly polite. "Please don't come over this fence" said Nick, after 60 people had already done so and were by now clambering up cooling tower roofs and locking themselves to equipment. Yesterday British Energy, which owns Sizewell B and had to be bailed out with £650m from government last week, admitted the occupation was a breach of security. "Safety is the paramount issue here and we are cooperating with the police to that end," said a spokeswomen. Greenpeace's action comes as the government completes its first full energy review in 50 years, and signals new nuclear plants will be needed to secure supplies for another 50 years. "The government's strategy unit has shown we could get two-thirds of our electricity from renewables. Industry has shown we could get 25% just from offshore windpower in East Anglia. Only Mr Blair seems to be hung up on nuclear as being a sexy science. This is 50-year-old technology that has failed time and again," said Mr Tindale. "It's an ideological hang-up, beyond rationalisation." Yesterday a random straw poll of 10 visitors on Sizewell beach found no-one to support Mr Blair or the industry. "Why don't they just build windmills?," said Patricia Athey of Lincolnshire. "The security here is scary. All it needs is one idiot to cause havoc." "Greenpeace can go over the top, but someone's got to do it," said a visitor from Yorkshire. But the ultimate accolade came from an electrician walking his dog before going to work at the nearby Sizewell A plant. "I think Greenpeace does a very good job. We need them," he said. Last night, more than 50 arrests had been made but seven activists were still occupying the site. Useful links British Energy [http://www.british-energy.com/] Department of Trade and Industry [http://www.dti.gov.uk/] British Nuclear Fuels Ltd [http://www.bnfl.co.uk/website.nsf/default.htm] Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament [http://www.cnduk.org/] Greenpeace [http://www.greenpeace.org/homepage/] HSE nuclear glossary [http://www.hse.gov.uk/nsd/ilrwglos.htm] UK atomic energy authority [http://www.ukaea.org.uk/] National Radiological Protection Board [http://www.nrpb.org.uk/] Friends of the Earth [http://www.foe.co.uk/campaigns/climate/press_for_change/dump_nuclear/index.htm l] World Nuclear Association [http://www.uilondon.org/] World Nuclear Transport Institute [http://www.wnti.co.uk] Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002 ***************************************************************** 2 Port Townsend: Council won't vote on anti-nuke resolution peninsuladailynews.com - 2002-10-15 BY STUART ELLIOTT PORT TOWNSEND -- City Councilwoman Freida Fenn won't be taking a resolution opposing nuclear weapons with her to Japan when she visits Hiroshima and Ichikawa later this month. Fenn failed to garner enough support from her colleagues for the resolution during Monday night's council meeting. In fact, the matter didn't even get to a vote. Council members Catharine Robinson, Geoff Masci and Joe Finnie -- enough to defeat the measure with Councilman Al Youse absent -- opposed the document, saying it either fell outside the purview of City Council or that they are philosophically opposed to the document. Although Robinson said she supports nuclear disarmament, she opposed the measure because it is outside her duties on the council. Finnie said he opposed the resolution for ``philosophic and pragmatic'' reasons. When it became apparent the measure would fail, Fenn withdrew her proposal. All Materials Copyright © Horvitz Newspapers, Inc. ***************************************************************** 3 North Korean plane flies to South Korea for nuclear project Yahoo! News Tue, Oct 15, 2002 SEOUL, South Korea - A North Korean passenger plane flew to South Korea on Tuesday to pick up South Koreans who are helping build nuclear power plants in the communist state. It was the first such flight since a test run in July, when a North Korean plane picked up 11 workers from the South. A Russian-built, 150-seat TU-154 plane from North Korea's Air Koryo landed at Yangyang International Airport in eastern South Korea, carrying 53 South Korean workers returning for vacations or job transfers. The plane left two hours later, carrying 11 foreign and 113 South Korean nuclear technicians to Sunduck Airport near Sinpo on North Korea's east coast, where two nuclear reactors are being built, said Lee Shi-hyuk, an airport official. In January, North Korea and an American-led international consortium called the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization agreed to open an inter-Korean air route to facilitate a 1994 agreement to build two nuclear power plants in North Korea. There are no regular flights between the two Koreas, which share the world's most heavily armed border. Under the 1994 accord, the United States promised North Korea two reactors in return for a freeze on the communist regime's suspected nuclear weapons program Consortium officials say the completion of the two reactors, originally set for 2003, will have to be delayed for several years because of funding and other problems. Major construction work began in 1998 and continued despite a subsequent deterioration in relations between the two Koreas. Copyright © 2002 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The ***************************************************************** 4 Port Townsend: Council won't vote on anti-nuke resolution 2002-10-15 BY STUART ELLIOTT PORT TOWNSEND -- City Councilwoman Freida Fenn won't be taking a resolution opposing nuclear weapons with her to Japan when she visits Hiroshima and Ichikawa later this month. Fenn failed to garner enough support from her colleagues for the resolution during Monday night's council meeting. In fact, the matter didn't even get to a vote. Council members Catharine Robinson, Geoff Masci and Joe Finnie -- enough to defeat the measure with Councilman Al Youse absent -- opposed the document, saying it either fell outside the purview of City Council or that they are philosophically opposed to the document. Although Robinson said she supports nuclear disarmament, she opposed the measure because it is outside her duties on the council. Finnie said he opposed the resolution for ``philosophic and pragmatic'' reasons. When it became apparent the measure would fail, Fenn withdrew her proposal. All Materials Copyright © 2002 Horvitz Newspapers, Inc. webmaster@peninsuladailynews.com ***************************************************************** 5 NZ: Nuclear stance brings warning* US NZ Council president Fred Benson (left) and former Prime Minister and WTO head Mike Moore. Picture / Glenn Jeffrey 15.10.2002 By FRAN O'SULLIVAN An influential United States businessman has warned that New Zealand and the US must find a way to deal effectively with the nuclear issue if negotiations for a free trade agreement are to start. Fred Benson - president of the United States New Zealand Council - said recent editorials supporting a change in New Zealand nuclear policy made it appear that it was in fact an open issue. Speaking at an Auckland dinner to celebrate former Prime Minister Mike Moore's achievements as Director-General of the World Trade Organisation, Benson suggested New Zealand should carefully deliberate the issue that had "once again been thrust before its citizens". "Weigh the arguments, weigh the costs, make your decision and stand by it. As long as it is perceived as an open issue, the US will be less likely to move to negotiations." Benson cited two factors that caused US players to question why New Zealand still held to its ban. First, no nuclear weapons had been carried on US surface ships for 10 years, and second, New Zealand's own 1993 study had concluded that dockside nuclear accidents from nuclear-propelled ships were extremely improbable. Benson's direct comments clearly surprised Prime Minister Helen Clark and senior Cabinet ministers Phil Goff and Jim Sutton, who were at the dinner. None responded publicly. It was left to Moore - who had done the Washington rounds himself two weeks ago - to leap to his feet and try to dampen the issue. In his formal speech Moore had earlier carefully sidestepped the controversy, focusing instead on issues that united the two countries. He said that a New Zealand, Australia and United States agreement would be a catalyst for more action in Geneva and force the pace to conclude the Doha Development Round. But Moore later acknowledged that Benson was "speaking the truth" about the views of some influential Washington players. He personally believed that if New Zealand's nuclear stance was linked directly with negotiations for a free trade agreement "there could be some big misunderstandings". "Bluntly, brother, if it is ever suggested - and I speak for none other than myself - that these are part of the deal there will be those in New Zealand who will not understand this," Moore said. *Trade * Nuclear stance brings warning ©Copyright 2002, New Zealand Herald ***************************************************************** 6 [radiation-survivors] A Blast from the Past Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 12:44:51 -0500 (CDT) http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20020928-121323-1037r An accident at a nuclear power plant 70 miles northeast of Tokyo on this date in 1999 released high levels of radiation in Japan's worst-ever nuclear accident. More than 50 people were apparently exposed to radiation, and hundreds of thousands more were told to stay indoors during the worst of it. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Sell a Home with Ease! http://us.click.yahoo.com/SrPZMC/kTmEAA/MVfIAA/6xSolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: radiation-survivors-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com ----- Together we can make a difference.. Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ [demime 0.98e removed an attachment of type application/octet-stream which had a name of United Press International A Blast from the Past.url] ***************************************************************** 7 Hagan blasts Taft for nuke plant woes Governor left investigation to NRC By Jim Bebbington Dayton Daily News DAYTON | Democratic challenger Tim Hagan blasted Gov. Bob Taft on Monday for not responding fast enough to problems at an Ohio nuclear power plant. The charges came as the two prepared for tonight’s televised debate in Dayton, the first of three major debates before the Nov. 5 election. Hagan said Taft did nothing to respond to the recent revelations that boric acid had burned a portion of a protective steel cap at the Toledo-area Davis-Besse nuclear power station. Company officials found the deterioration in March. A Nuclear Regulatory Commission report has blamed plant owner FirstEnergy Corp. for failing for years to find the decaying lid, according to The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. The report also blamed the NRC for not scrutinizing plant operations better. Orest Holubec, Taft’s campaign spokesman, rejected the notion that Taft had put Ohioans at risk. He said the governor has allowed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to lead the investigation. Holubec said Public Utilities Commission of Ohio Chairman Alan Shriber toured the plant last week, and Taft has monitored the situation. Hagan said Taft should have dispatched state inspectors after the deterioration was revealed. If need be, Hagan said, he would have considered using the Ohio Highway Patrol to block plant entrances to get the NRC and FirstEnergy to give the state a role in the aftermath of the problem. “If I was governor, I would have said to FirstEnergy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that you will be in my office Monday morning,” Hagan said. “In my view, they put profit over the principal that safety and security is their No. 1 priority.” Davis-Besse has been taken out of operation. The company is estimating costs to repair the cap and restart the facility at $215 million. Hagan, who said he opposes the use of nuclear power plants, has joined Democratic members of Ohio’s congressional delegation in calling upon FirstEnergy to determine the feasibility of repowering Davis-Besse with an alternative source of fuel. [From the Dayton Daily News: 10.15.2002] Home [http://www.daytondailynews.com] | Local index ***************************************************************** 8 Hagan fires nuke at Taft The Plain Dealer 10/15/02 John Funk and John Mangels Plain Dealer Reporters The nearly football-size rust hole in the lid of the Davis-Besse nuclear reactor became a political football yesterday. Gov. Bob Taft dropped that ball long ago, said his Democratic challenger, Tim Hagan. That's because Taft has not used his office to make it clear that the state will not allow plant operator FirstEnergy Corp. - or federal regulators - to put the public in jeopardy in the push to repair and restart the damaged reactor, Hagan said. A Taft spokesman said the governor has been keeping close watch on the situation at Davis-Besse. Hagan said FirstEnergy's record at Davis-Besse shows it cannot be trusted. And now that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has admitted it did not do a good job monitoring the plant, the public is vulnerable, he said. "Who is minding the store?" Hagan said in an interview after holding a news conference near the Toledo-area plant. "The state and the governor should hold them both accountable. The governor has the ability, if health and safety are jeopardized, to shut down the plant and tell them to go to court if they don't like it," he said. The last time there was a major problem at Davis-Besse - a cooling system failure in 1985 brought the reactor to within two hours of core damage - the administration of Gov. Richard Celeste was heavily involved in the aftermath. Among other activities, the state attorney general fought to delay Davis-Besse's restart because of the Celeste administration's concern that the NRC's and Toledo Edison's evacuation plans for residents were inadequate. Hagan said campaign contributions have silenced the governor. "Bob Taft is unwilling to speak out because he has received thousands of dollars [in donations] from FirstEnergy," he charged. "Ludicrous!" shot back Taft campaign spokesman Orest Holubec. "To suggest that the governor put the safety of Ohioans behind campaign contributions is nothing more than a campaign stunt 20 days before the election," he said. An analysis of state campaign contribution records from 1997 to 2000 by Ohio Citizen Action showed that FirstEnergy's political action committees, employees, board members and lobbyists contributed $30,650 to Taft, said Catherine Turcer, the group's campaign reform director. Holubec said Taft is confident that the NRC will not allow the plant to restart until it is safe. The Ohio Emergency Management Agency keeps abreast of developments at the plant, said Taft spokeswoman Mary Anne Sharkey. "They don't have oversight at the plant, but nevertheless they are kept up to date," said FirstEnergy spokesman Todd Schneider. While the state does not have a representative on a committee that the company formed to determine whether the reactor is safe to restart, members of the Ohio Emergency Management staff have been included on the NRC inspection teams. Taft also has been monitoring the situation through Alan Schrieber, chairman of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, Holubec said. Schrieber said he requested and got a tour of the reactor's containment building last week because he has been fielding so many questions about it. "This [repair and restart] is not really our thing," Schrieber said. "Ours is economics. Safety is the NRC thing, and they are on site. All I know is that the stockholders, not the rate payers, will be paying for this." To reach these Plain Dealer reporters: jfunk@plaind.com, 216-999-4138 jmangels@plaind.com, 216-999-4842 © 2002 The Plain Dealer. Used with permission. © 2002 cleveland.com. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 9 More D-B meetings Wednesday - portclintonnewsherald.com CARROLL TOWNSHIP -- Three meetings involving the Nuclear Regulatory Commission are scheduled for Wednesday to talk about the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station. The first meeting, scheduled for 9 a.m. at the Davis-Besse Administration Building on Ohio 2, will revolve around preliminary findings from two NRC inspections conducted in early October at the plant. The inspections dealt with radioactive particles that were found outside the plant on workers clothing and in residences. The NRC has expanded the investigation to look at the dosage received by certain contractors while working in the plant in February during a refueling outage. The second meeting, at 2 p.m. in the Oak Harbor High School auditorium, will be one of the monthly meetings between the NRC and Davis-Besse parent company officials from FirstEnergy. During that meeting the utility is expected to show its progress on correcting issues related to the corrosion problem found in March on the reactor head. During the refueling outage, workers found a football-sized hole on the reactor head caused by boric acid leaking from a nozzle on the head. The last meeting, at 7 p.m. in the auditorium, is where the public can ask questions of the NRC and make comments regarding the power plant. All of the meetings, however, will be open to the public and have public participation sessions before adjournment. Originally published Tuesday, October 15, 2002 Copyright ©2002 News Herald. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 10 NRC meetings important to build confidence - thenews-messenger.com Tuesday, October 15, 2002 EDITORIAL Once again, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is providing area residents and officials with an opportunity to gain first-hand information and ask questions about the efforts to resolve problems at the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station. Such meetings -- which have been held regularly throughout recent months -- are crucial to rebuilding public confidence in the plant and the NRC. The detailed process being followed by the NRC in investigating the problems at Davis-Besse and keeping the public informed about progress is both greatly prefered and badly needed. The public and local officials must have a clear understanding of the problems and the solutions. And they must believe they can trust company and government officials to make sure that public safety is the top priority. Three meetings have been scheduled for Wednesday at the Oak Harbor High School Auditorium. All of the meetings will include public participation sessions. The first meeting at 9 a.m. will deal with two NRC inspections conducted early this month at the plant. These inspections stemmed from radioactive particles found outside the plant on workers' clothing and in residences. The NRC has been investigating the discovery of these particles for months, but last week expanded it to look at the dosage contractors received while working on the steam generators during a February refueling outage. NRC officials believe the contractors were able to leave the plant without the particles being detected and moved on to other facilities. The particles were found while they were working at other power plants. Lab results prompted NRC officials to expand the investigation to see just how much exposure the contractors received while working inside Davis-Besse. The plant has not restarted because of the discovery of boric acid corrosion on the reactor head. The 2 p.m. meeting involves FirstEnergy and the NRC. FirstEnergy is to report on its progress on correcting issues related to the corrosion problem. At 7 p.m., the public will have the opportunity to ask questions of the NRC and make comments. Take advantage of the opportunity. Originally published Tuesday, October 15, 2002 ***************************************************************** 11 UK: Greenpeace calls off protest at nuclear reactor Tue, Oct 15, 2002 LONDON - Bad weather forced members of the environmental group Greenpeace to call off their first protest in the grounds of a nuclear reactor Tuesday. The group said seven activists came down from the roof of a building at the Sizewell B plant in eastern England that they had occupied on Monday in protest at the government's plans for a new generation of nuclear power stations. They were immediately arrested by police. More than 100 activists broke into the plant on Monday and about 40 climbed onto the roof of the building housing the cooling water pump, unfurling banners saying "No More Nuclear." Most left the site on Monday, but five women and two men braved rain and strong winds to remain on the roof overnight. "The weather has become so bad that the radiation monitoring equipment became waterlogged and we were worried we couldn't ensure their safety," said Greenpeace spokeswoman Emma Gibson. "We think we have communicated the message to the government that new nuclear power stations will be fought every step of the way." Suffolk Police said 43 protesters arrested on Monday have been released on bail pending further inquiries. There was no immediate comment from British Energy, which runs Sizewell B. It is Britain's youngest nuclear power station, built between 1988 and 1995. Greenpeace believes the site could be earmarked for the first of a new generation of nuclear plants. Sizewell A, a Magnox reactor built largely in the 1950s and 60s, is next door to Sizewell B, but is run by another company, British Nuclear Fuels. (scl-ej) Copyright © 2002 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The ***************************************************************** 12 Nuclear Plant Workers Try To Unionize nbc30.com - News - Several Hundred Employees Set To Vote POSTED: 5:30 a.m. EDT October 15, 2002 UPDATED: 8:36 a.m. EDT October 15, 2002 WATERFORD, Conn. -- A group of workers at the Millstone nuclear power complex this week will try a second time to form the plant's first labor union. About 576 maintenance and operations workers will vote Wednesday and Thursday on whether to become part of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which represents employees at 51 of the nation's 65 nuclear power plants. Union supporters said that they want to prevent cuts to salaries and benefits, and they are seeking an impartial grievance procedure to address workplace issues, The Day of New London, Conn., reported. "The company is vehemently opposed to this," said Cliff Marlow, one of about 20 workers on the union-organizing committee and a radiation protection technician. "There's definite mistrust between us and our management." A spokesman for Millstone, which has more than 2,000 employees, would not comment on the workers' allegations. "At this stage we're not going to address those kinds of issues in the public sphere," said Pete Hyde. "We want to treat our employees with respect, and we think we can accomplish this by communicating directly with our employees." An attempt to unionize in 1999 failed by a 236-176 vote. At the time, the plant was owned by Northeast Utilities, which had just been ordered by the state to sell Millstone under the electricity deregulation law. Some employees three years ago worried that a new owner would cut salaries and benefits, concerns that led to the unionizing vote. Dominion Resources Inc., of Virginia, bought Millstone in March 2001. The company's four plants in the South all have unions. Dominion's deal was approved on the condition that the company offer at least one year of pay and benefits comparable to what workers were earning before. Pro-union workers contend that Dominion began making changes in January 2002, several months before the term expired. They claim that Dominion cut certain pay rates -- such as the rate paid to employees when they are on call -- and those changes have resulted in as much as a 10 percent drop in their overall pay. Union supporters said that their share of medical coverage costs has skyrocketed under the new ownership. "We're basically just trying to protect what we had," said Paul Ludington, a member of the union-organizing committee and a control operator on one of the plant's nuclear reactors. Sign Up For Breaking News, Weather And Sports E-Mail Alerts! [http://nbc30.com/closings] Copyright 2002 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This ***************************************************************** 13 FirstEnergy continues tests at Davis-Besse Reuters AlertNet - 15 Oct 2002 17:10 AKRON, Ohio, Oct 15 (Reuters) - FirstEnergy Corp. on Tuesday said that it was continuing to take samples to find the source of the boric acid found at reactor bottom of the Davis-Besse nuclear plant. "We are taking more samples," said Todd Schneider, a spokesman for the Ohio-based utility, which has already warned that higher-than-expected costs linked to extensive repairs at the crippled plant would cut into earnings for 2002. The unit was shut in February to replace a reactor head badly corroded by boric acid. It was originally expected to be ready for restart in December but additional work has delayed the restart until early next year, the company said. Earlier this month, FirstEnergy said the repair cost for the unit would be about $115 million, with $65 million spent in 2002 and $50 million in 2003. These costs and associated replacement energy purchases would cut 2002 earnings by 46 cents to 53 cents per share. Schneider said the company believes that the source of the deposits on the bottom are a result of stains running down from the top of the reactor rather than new leaks with the bottom nozzles. The tests to determine the origination of the new stains will be completed in a few weeks, he said. Shares of FirstEnergy were trading down 62 cents, or 2.1 percent, at $28.86 in midday trade on the New York Stock Exchange. ***************************************************************** 14 Germany extends lifespan of oldest nuclear power plant by two years Tuesday, October 15, 2002 AFP - 10/15/2002 BERLIN - The German government agreed Monday to push back by two years plans to pull the plug on the country's oldest nuclear power plant as part of its total phase-out of atomic power, Environment Minister Juergen Trittin said. The deal by the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Green party came during talks on their renewed coalition agreement following their narrow victory in last month's general election. It means that the Obrigheim plant in the southern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg will now remain open until the beginning of 2005. Obrigheim was to be the first of Germany's nuclear power plants to be taken off-line since government and industry agreed last year to put an end to atomic power. The plant's operator EnBW had aimed to run it for another five years and said it had the backing of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. But the ecologist Greens had pushed for the plant to be shuttered at the end of this year and threatened that its rank-and-file might be reluctant to approve the new coalition agreement at a party congress Oct. 18-19 if EnBW won its demand. The new coalition pact is to be signed by party leaders Wednesday and accepted by the SPD at its party congress Oct. 20. The issue had been one of the key stumbling blocks in the talks between the SPD and the Greens. Trittin said the resolution of the Obrigheim dispute would not appear in the text of the coalition agreement. The nuclear phase-out accord sets a 32-year limit on the lifespan of each of Germany's 19 atomic power plans, meaning the last would be mothballed in 2020. © Copyright 2002 AFP ***************************************************************** 15 Hagan: Taft ignores Davis-Besse perils* Ohio News | Article published Tuesday, October 15, 2002 (THE BLADE/ALLAN DETRICH) Gubernatorial challenger Tim Hagan says the Davis-Besse cooling tower represents greed. With the cooling tower of the Davis-Besse nuclear plant as his backdrop, Ohio?s gubernatorial challenger Tim Hagan yesterday shot barbs at his opponent - saying Gov. Bob Taft has done nothing to address potentially disastrous problems at the nuclear power plant. The plant, owned by FirstEnergy Corp., has been shut down indefinitely as crews repair damage to the plant?s reactor head. But the governor has remained mute on the issue because he has taken campaign contributions from FirstEnergy, said Mr. Hagan, a Democrat and former Cuyahoga County commissioner who is challenging Mr. Taft, a Republican. "This tower represents not only energy but greed," Mr. Hagan said. "I?m in nobody?s pocket," he said. "When I?m governor, I?ll speak for the health and safety of this community rather than profits." According to Ohio Citizen Action, then-candidate Bob Taft and now-Governor Taft has received at least $30,560 since 1997 from FirstEnergy employees or FirstEnergy?s political action committee. Mr. Hagan said Mr. Taft should join others in calling for an independent investigation into the matter, make certain the plant has a solid emergency plan in the case of a disaster, and should ensure that the plant doesn?t reopen until it is safe. He criticized the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and FirstEnergy for not addressing the problems earlier. "FirstEnergy is more concerned about profits than the safety of those in the plant and those around it," he said. A Taft campaign spokesman shot back, saying Mr. Hagan?s comments were "nothing more than a desperate campaign stunt ... 20 days before the election." "To suggest the governor would put the health and safety of Ohio citizens at risk for campaign contributions is ludicrous," Orest Holubec, a Taft spokesman, said. FirstEnergy was defensive too, though a spokesman conceded that the safety at the plant at times had taken back seat to production. "Going back to what happened, there was not the correct balance between production and safety," Todd Schneider, FirstEnergy spokesman, said. The plant has been closed since February. In March, workers found a football-sized hole in the carbon steel reactor head, leaving only a thin layer of stainless steel to keep radioactive steam from escaping. "We need more of an emphasis of safety at the plant and we?re working on that now," Mr. Schneider said. The Toledo Blade Company, 541 N. Superior St., Toledo, OH 43660, (419) 724-6000 ***************************************************************** 16 Hagan questions safety of nuclear power plant Tuesday, October 15, 2002 CLEVELAND -- The first debate between Ohio Governor Bob Taft and challenger Tim Hagan will be held on Tuesday night. Monday, Hagan launched a new issue, arguing the state has not done enough to protect residents around the Davis Besse nuclear plant in Oak Harbor. Hagan says the plant was dangerously close to a serious accident because FirstEnergy and the government let a hazardous situation develop. "FirstEnergy has contributed thousands of dollars to Taft and the republican party," said Hagan. "He's afraid to take this utility on." Hagan blames Taft, but Taft claims he's ordered the Public Utilities Commission to keep close watch on all of this. "We need to be alert and to be sure the federal government does its job of not allowing Davis Besse to start up again until it is truly safe," said Taft. The final debate between Taft and Hagan will be shown on Channel 3 on Friday, November 1, live from The City Club in Cleveland. © 2002 WKYC-TV. All rights reserved. This material may not be ***************************************************************** 17 [radiation-survivors] Kazakh nuclear soldier paints warning for Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 12:35:52 -0500 (CDT) http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/18173/story.htm KAZAKHSTAN: October 15, 2002 SEMIPALATINSK, Kazakhstan - "I saw birds turning into ashes in the sky," said the stooping old man, tears in his eyes. "Believe me, that is still painful to recall." Alexander Shevchenko, a frail 75-year-old, is one of the few surviving "nuclear soldiers" who lived through the horrors of the first Soviet nuclear blasts tested on live humans at the Semipalatinsk test site. "We were treated like human waste. We were all nameless, just known as guinea pigs," he said. In his palsied hands he holds an allegorical painting, a white dove - the fragile symbol of peace - is dying, tangled on a strand of barbed wire,as the ominous giant mushroom of a nuclear explosion rises against the skyline. He says his pictures, stored in a squat house in this bleak town in northeastern Kazakhstan, are a message to posterity. One features stone-faced Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, dispassionately looking past a heap of human skulls while a nuclear mushroom looms nearby. Another depicts a mother in Kazakh national dress, sitting in the middle of a vast steppe overcast by a huge nuclear cloud. She is breastfeeding an emaciated child with protruding ribs, a disproportionately large head, and horror in his wide eyes. "The child is the spitting image of a sick boy abandoned by his parents whom I once saw in an orphanage here," Shevchenko said softly. "He later died." "I am pressed for time to accomplish all my plans," said the painter, who has not yet fully recovered from his fifth heart attack. "The truth must be told." CRIPPLED LIFE The story of Shevchenko, an ethnic Ukrainian from southern Russia, resembles that of many who, against their will, found themselves on the Semipalatinsk test site at the wrong time. In October 1947, he was brought to this god-forsaken spot in the endless Kazakh steppe as a private in the Red Army to take part in secret work ahead of the first blast on August 29, 1949. The young man had no choice: before his mission he had been sentenced to eight years hard labour. His crime - living on territory which was occupied by the Nazis during World War Two. Shevchenko, labelled "an enemy of the people", was just one of thousands to be crippled during Stalinism's uncompromising nuclear race with the United States. "We had no safety gear and were completely exposed to this deadly radiation. The trenches we dug were our only protection," said the old soldier who served at the test site until 1951. "When a nuclear bomb explodes, you can see through the body in front of you. All his guts and bones are visible, like in an X-ray," said Shevchenko, who after one such test in 1950 lost consciousness and was treated for leukaemia. By the time of its 1989 closure, following growing popular protests which even the Soviet leadership could no longer ignore, Semipalatinsk had held 30 surface, 88 atmospheric and 340 underground tests. The 1949 explosion, which established nuclear parity with the United States, was given ecstatic coverage by the Soviet propaganda machine. Subsequent nuclear tests were routinely kept secret or, later on, tersely reported on by compliant media as a "forced measure to strengthen the nuclear shield of the Motherland". There is no precise information on how many people died as a result of these experiments on live people, but some blood-curdling details are becoming available. HUMANS OR CATTLE? Boris Gusev, now 64, knows more than most. In 1961, as a newly qualified doctor, he signed strictly confidential papers with the feared KGB secret police, vowing to keep silent on his future work at the top-secret Dispensary Number Four, set up in Semipalatinsk in 1957. The nondescript building officially housed a team of doctors dealing with brucellosis, a widespread contagious disease usually affecting sheep and cattle. In fact, this was a myth invented by the KGB to conceal the real task of the secret laboratory - studying the impact of radiation on human health. "That was yet another cynical legend by the KGB. If they could call plants producing nuclear missiles "chocolate factories", then why not call this place a brucellosis dispensary?" Gusev said. Few in Semipalatinsk knew of the real dangers of the tests conducted near this industrial town. All reports were sent straight to Communist Party and KGB elites in Moscow. Gusev is visibly upset even now when he recalls how the Soviet Union treated people who underwent tests near Semipalatinsk. "After the 1945 tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all possible effects of nuclear tests on humans were already well-known to the world. What was done here was beyond reason, could have been avoided and was an outrage," he said. He said soldiers wearing only gas masks were sent on military exercises just minutes after nuclear tests, and tanks and aircraft had to go through radioactive dust and clouds. "A lot of people routinely fell ill with acute leukaemia after such tests, and many died," Gusev said. "But everyone was confident that one day there would be an all-out nuclear war with America. So military chiefs just said 'that's the way it is' and sent the soldiers to die," he added. "I myself feel bitter now. As a doctor, I helped many who fell ill. As an enthusiastic youngster, I was proud (of our nuclear achievements), although I realised I would get 15 years in prison if I started talking about what I knew." Atmospheric and surface tests were conducted until 1962 before being replaced with much safer underground explosions. DISASTROUS LEGACY Gusev said that even the top-secret dispensary, now Kazakhstan's Research Institute for Radiation Medicine and Ecology, did not know how many nuclear tests had been conducted until information started seeping out in the early 1980s. He estimated that some 800,000 of the 15 million inhabitants of the vast Central Asian state of Kazakhstan now lived in contaminated areas around the test site. He said around 370,000 people had suffered directly from nuclear tests. Both brothers and the father of the artist Shevchenko died of cancer. Cases of cancer, alongside birth defects and cardio-vascular diseases, are several times more frequent than the national average in areas near Semipalatinsk. Shevchenko says proudly that last year Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma - himself dealing with the legacy of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster - named him a Merited Artist of Ukraine and helped stage an exhibition of his work in Kiev. He said he had received offers for some of his pictures but had declined to sell any of them. "When I die, all of them must be shown as one big warning for the future," he said. Story by Dmitry Solovyov REUTERS NEWS SERVICE ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Plan to Sell a Home? http://us.click.yahoo.com/J2SnNA/y.lEAA/MVfIAA/6xSolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: radiation-survivors-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com ----- Together we can make a difference.. Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ [demime 0.98e removed an attachment of type application/octet-stream which had a name of Planet Ark FEATURE - Kazakh nuclear soldier paints warning for future.url] ***************************************************************** 18 Sick Nuclear Workers in Oak Ridge Still Waiting for Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 12:44:24 -0500 (CDT) http://www.WATE.com/Global/story.asp?s=960880 Sick Nuclear Workers in Oak Ridge Still Waiting for Compensation October 4, 2002 By TEARSA SMITH 6 News Reporter OAK RIDGE (WATE) -- The struggle for Oak Ridge workers who say they got sick from dangerous on-the-job chemicals continues. And some say the lengthy compensation process is keeping them from receiving the benefits they're owed. It's been a long journey for workers at several Oak Ridge facilities. While there are laws to help them, like President Clinton's executive order in 2001, they say they're a long way from seeing any benefits. Jerry Tudor started working at Y-12 30 years ago. "I went into electro-plaiter. I was in all kinds of plating solution and hazardous chemicals. Everything we worked with was cancer causing." Last February, Tudor found out he faced a fight with a potentially deadly disease. Now, he's in the advanced stages of prostate cancer and believes he got it from working at Y-12. "A little book they gave me," Tudor says, "some of the chemicals that I worked in cause prostate cancer. And the DOE (Department of Energy) does a study and radiation causes prostate cancer." Tudor applied for workers compensation in July 2001. But he says he has yet to see any help. In September, the DOE released information saying that the state of Tennessee had agreed to help workers receive compensation. Some of the diseases the department says it will honor include toxic exposure that causes asbestosis, cancer, respiratory and kidney disease and certain types of reproductive disorders. Tudor says he and others have done all they could to let their voices be heard, everything from rallies to making trips to Washington, D.C. But so far, there hasn't been much progress. Tudor says he's not alone in waiting for compensation. "Oh no, no, I have a Web site and I have people from Rocky Flats, Savannah River, Portsmouth, Ohio. They're all in the same boat." The DOE says it's received more than 19,000 cases to date and handles them in the order they're received. Some workers who need their radiation exposure history investigated could wait an additional six months for compensation. ***************************************************************** 19 Scotland: Government could get hit with huge contamination bill THE National Museums of Scotland could be landed with an "enormous" bill because of its collection of second world war aircraft, and their radioactive elements. Many contain dials made luminous with a radium coating. The government is in the process of determining how best to dispose of Britain's growing stockpile of contaminated waste. However, the NMS claims it is essential that specific funding is made available to deal with the items it holds or the cost of their disposal will mean its other services will suffer. It has called on the Scottish Executive to ring fence money to pay for the disposal of radioactive sources which have been donated, often anonymously. Most of the radioactive sources the NMS holds are in aircraft at the Museum of Flight at East Fortune, East Lothian, where classics such as the Spitfire and Messerschmitt are kept. The NMS also has a number of old luminous pocketwatches containing radioactive materials. Westminster last year instigated a consultation exercise through the devolved parliaments on safely managing the 10,000 tonnes of radioactive waste in the UK. The executive said last night it was considering those responses. An independent body is being set up by the UK government to tackle the issue. A spokesman for the museums said there was no risk to the public. "Half of the items affected are in closed cockpits which are not accessible to the public and the other half is in secure storage, again, not accessible to the public." Frances Yeo, a curator at the museums and the NMS radiation protection supervisor, said: "We have until fairly recently become unwitting guardians of large numbers of radioactive sources, particularly those related to aviation. "As museums and heritage institutions it is our duty to care for these objects in our trust. Many, however, have no historic, research or display value because of their poor condition and high radioactivity. We are therefore facing the prospect of disposing of large numbers of radioactive sources at enormous expense." She said funding this "will undoubtedly come at the expense of other core museum services" and called for extra funding to cover the costs. Nicholas Forder, chairman of the British Aviation Preservation Council, said the cost of disposal would depend on the material. "Disposing of radio-active material is an expensive and complicated business and it is incredibly difficult to be precise about what is going to be radioactive," he said. "Generally speaking, aircraft instruments before 1970, if they have luminous dials, are likely to have radioactive sources." He said he hoped legislation would be put in place to allow the continued safe storage and display of aircraft with radioactive sources. The appointment of the independent body to review the options for managing radioactive waste is the second stage of the programme following consultation. Stage three, expected around 2006, will be a public debate on how the independent body's decision should be implemented, including disposal site selection. The final stage, implementation, will begin the following year. -Oct 15th ***************************************************************** 20 Kazakh 'N-soldier' recalls tests - DAWN - International; 15 October, 2002 By Dmitry Solovyov SEMIPALATINSK: "I saw birds turning into ashes in the sky," said the stooping old man, tears in his eyes. "Believe me, that is still painful to recall." Alexander Shevchenko, a frail 75-year-old, is one of the few surviving "nuclear soldiers" who lived through the horrors of the first Soviet nuclear blasts tested on live humans at the Semipalatinsk test site. "We were treated like human waste. We were all nameless, just known as guinea pigs," he said. In his palsied hands he holds an allegorical painting, a white dove - the fragile symbol of peace - is dying, tangled on a strand of barbed wire, as the ominous giant mushroom of a nuclear explosion rises against the skyline. He says his pictures, stored in a squat house in this bleak town in northeastern Kazakhstan, are a message to posterity. One features stone-faced Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, dispassionately looking past a heap of human skulls while a nuclear mushroom looms nearby. Another depicts a mother in Kazakh national dress, sitting in the middle of a vast steppe overcast by a huge nuclear cloud. She is breastfeeding an emaciated child with protruding ribs, a disproportionately large head, and horror in his wide eyes. "The child is the spitting image of a sick boy abandoned by his parents whom I once saw in an orphanage here," Shevchenko said softly. "He later died." "I am pressed for time to accomplish all my plans," said the painter, who has not yet fully recovered from his fifth heart attack. "The truth must be told." CRIPPLED LIFE: The story of Shevchenko, an ethnic Ukrainian from southern Russia, resembles that of many who, against their will, found themselves on the Semipalatinsk test site at the wrong time. In October 1947, he was brought to this god-forsaken spot in the endless Kazakh steppe as a private in the Red Army to take part in secret work ahead of the first blast on August 29, 1949. The young man had no choice: before his mission he had been sentenced to eight years hard labour. His crime - living on territory which was occupied by the Nazis during World War Two. Shevchenko, labelled "an enemy of the people", was just one of thousands to be crippled during Stalinism's uncompromising nuclear race with the United States. "We had no safety gear and were completely exposed to this deadly radiation. The trenches we dug were our only protection," said the old soldier who served at the test site until 1951. "When a nuclear bomb explodes, you can see through the body in front of you. All his guts and bones are visible, like in an X-ray," said Shevchenko, who after one such test in 1950 lost consciousness and was treated for leukaemia. By the time of its 1989 closure, following growing popular protests which even the Soviet leadership could no longer ignore, Semipalatinsk had held 30 surface, 88 atmospheric and 340 underground tests. The 1949 explosion, which established nuclear parity with the United States, was given ecstatic coverage by the Soviet propaganda machine. Subsequent nuclear tests were kept secret or, later on, tersely reported on by compliant media as a "forced measure to strengthen the nuclear shield of the Motherland". There is no precise information on how many people died as a result of these experiments on live people, but some blood-curdling details are becoming available.-Reuters © The DAWN Group of Newspapers, 2002 ***************************************************************** 21 UNEP to Assess Depleted Uranium Sites in Bosnia and Herzegovina From United Nations Environment Programme Tuesday, October 15, 2002 SARAJEVO ? A team of experts from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has begun visiting 12 sites in Bosnia and Herzegovina that may have been targeted by ordnance containing depleted uranium (DU) during the 1994-95 Bosnian conflict. The team will take soil, water, air and vegetation samples at six sites that have been identified by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as having been struck by DU weapons. They will examine six other sites that local residents believe may have also been targeted. The UNEP team will conduct its research from 12 to 24 October. The UNEP assessment is being carried out at the request of the Government of Bosnia and Herzegovina. At the request of the local authorities, the medical sub-team, led by an expert from the World Health Organization (WHO), will examine data on cancer rates in the main urban centres of Sarajevo and Banja Luka. They will also visit a local hospital in Bratunac to meet with the local medics and with patients who may have been exposed to DU during the conflict. "UNEP's aim is to determine whether the use of depleted uranium during the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina may pose health or environmental risks -- either now or in the future", said Pekka Haavisto, Chairman of UNEP's Depleted Uranium Assessment Team. "Previous studies of DU in Kosovo and Serbia recommended that Governments and civilians take precautionary action to avoid contact with DU." The 17-member team also includes experts from UNEP, the Swedish Radiation Protection Authority (SSI), Spiez Laboratory (Switzerland), Italy's National Environmental Protection Agency (ANPA), the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Greek Atomic Energy Commission, the US Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventative Medicine, the Nuclear Safety Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the University of Bristol (UK). The Governments of Italy and Switzerland are funding the mission. The samples being collected will be analysed in detail in three internationally recognized laboratories -- Spiez Laboratory, (Switzerland), ANPA, (Italy) and Bristol University, (UK) -- for radioactivity and toxicity. The final conclusions will be presented in a report to be published in March 2003. Note to journalists: For more information, please contact: Mr. Pekka Haavisto, Chairman of the UNEP Depleted Uranium Assessment Team, at +41-79-477-0877 or pekka.haavisto@unep.ch; Henrik Slotte, Head of UNEP Post-Conflict Assessment Unit in Geneva at +41- 22-917-8598 or henrik.slotte@unep.ch; or UNEP Press Officer Michael Williams at +41-22-917-8242, +41-79-409-1528 (cell), michael.williams@unep.ch Additional information on UNEP's work in this area can be found at www.unep.ch/postconflict For more information, contact: Jim Sniffen Information Officer United Nations Environment Programme 1-212-963-8210 sniffenj@un.org Web site: http://www.unep.org ENN Toolbox ***************************************************************** 22 Iranian War Victims Still Suffering Guardian Unlimited | World Latest | From the Associated Press Tuesday October 15, 2002 7:10 PM TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - To understand the unending nightmare of an Iraqi chemical barrage, there's ward 10-D. The patients - all veterans of Iran's 1980-88 war with Iraq - shuffle about in plastic sandals and pale yellow hospital pajamas. They talk little. Even a shallow breath can be painful. In the special wing at Baqiatallah Hospital, run by the powerful Revolutionary Guards, the reality of Saddam Hussein's chemical weaponry is evident. Doctors do what they can for some of the thousands of soldiers exposed to Iraqi poison gas. There are no cures. Just ways to lessen the ailments: scarred lungs, ravaged bowels, disorientation, welts and blisters. About once a week, Iranian newspapers carry small items about another veteran succumbing to chemical-related disorders. ``I feel just half alive,'' whispered Jalal Taqvi, whose right side is numb and partially paralyzed. ``The day I breathed the poison gas was the day I started to die.'' He recalls every moment of the attack near the southwestern Iranian border city of Abadan in 1987. Soldiers started to wheeze and gasp. They were blinded by uncontrollable tears. And everywhere was the smell of onions - a characteristic of mustard gas. If U.N. weapons inspectors return, a prime objective will be to discover what - if anything - remains of Iraq's chemical arsenal. Iraq insists it has abandoned its chemical, biological and nuclear arms programs. But U.S. authorities claim Iraq still has stockpiles of chemical and biological agents, which they fear could slip into the hands of terrorists. In 1997, the year before the United Nations suspended operations in Iraq, the former head of the U.N. inspections team, Rolf Ekeus, said he believed Saddam maintained a ``strategic capability'' with chemicals. Backed by the West during the eight-year war against Iran's Islamic regime, Iraq unleashed dozens of chemical attacks, according to international monitors. Two main Western-developed formulas were verified by U.N. investigators: mustard gas, an oily liquid first used in World War I whose vapor can remain deadly for days; and tabun, a nerve gas that causes convulsions and paralysis before death. Estimates of Iranian battlefield deaths from chemical attacks range from hundreds to as many as 5,000. Thousands more were stricken but survived. ``Sometimes I feel fine. Then the problems return. Every breath becomes painful,'' said veteran Rashid Imani, who also lost his right foot in a mine blast. ``They burned our clothes after the attack. But they could do nothing for us. The demon of the chemical was inside us.'' One of the ward's physicians, Dr. Kamran Zamanian, said nothing can reverse the damage. ``We just try to make them comfortable and take away some of the pain,'' he said. ``For a doctor it is frustrating. You can never cure this.'' Near the end of the war in March 1988, a poison gas attack on the Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabja killed an estimated 5,000 people. Iranian soldiers about six miles away entered Halabja before the gas had fully dissipated, veterans said. ``I should be dead by now,'' said Haji Reza Rahimi, who was in the first wave. ``The doctors gave me five years to live after I was exposed. I don't know what keeps me going. There are days it's so hard to breathe that I just wish I would die.'' Rahimi, who said he has severe respiratory problems and chronic infections, spends most of his time at a self-help center set up by chemical attack veterans in northern Tehran. Bowls of fruit and vegetables, a traditional Iranian gesture, rest on tables. ``I would give anything just to eat them again,'' said Ali Khalaj, whose infantry division was gassed in 1986. Portions of his intestines and colon have been removed. ``I hate what they did to me. But, you know, I can't really blame the Iraqis,'' he added. ``I blame the Western countries that gave the Iraqis these evil weapons.'' In Tehran's huge main cemetery, near the tomb of the Islamic Revolution leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Yasser Mahmoudi often visits the graves of chemical attack victims. He said he left high school in 1986 to join a basiji, or volunteer, corps. Within weeks he was on the front-line. ``I remember looking for a gas mask, but we didn't have them. I fell to the ground and started to cough blood,'' said Mahmoudi, 32, who had a lung removed. ``One day, I know I will be unable to breathe anymore,'' he said. ``We are all just waiting to die.'' Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002 ***************************************************************** 23 NRC probes local radiation exposure TCPalm: Local News 32 St. Lucie Nuclear Plant workers inhaled radioactive particles earlier this month By Eve Modzelewski staff writer October 15, 2002 SOUTH HUTCHINSON ISLAND -- The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is continuing to examine an Oct. 6 incident that exposed 32 St. Lucie Nuclear Plant workers to low levels of radiation. "At this point in time, it does not appear that anyone was exposed beyond the allowable limits, but the NRC is still looking into it," said Ken Clark, a spokesman in the NRC's Atlanta office, Monday. A resident NRC inspector stationed at the plant should have more information about the incident within 30 days, Clark said. Florida Power &Light employees and several contract workers inhaled radioactive particles sent airborne during maintenance work on one of the plant's reactor vessels, the company reported. FPL, which owns and operates the plant, was preparing the vessel for an NRC inspection when the exposure occurred. In August, following the discovery of cracks and corrosion on the reactor vessel head at a plant in Ohio, the NRC recommended inspections of 69 of the nation's 103 nuclear reactors, including the two at the St. Lucie Nuclear Plant. Two workers had been pressure cleaning rust and other debris from the Unit One vessel head when particles were detected near employees on a platform 62 feet above them. The work was intended to prevent radiation exposure during the NRC inspection, said Rachel Scott, FPL spokeswoman. It was the only time FPL had cleaned that part of Unit One since it opened in 1976. "That's a bit of an unusual job. The NRC doesn't approve or disapprove specific measures to perform that kind of a task," Clark said. "But the NRC requires that however you do it, you don't expose workers." The NRC mandates exposure to radiation be kept as low as reasonably possible. "This is the first time that we've done this type of work on the reactor vessel head," Scott said. "We have identified some additional precautionary measures we need to take when we do this work in the future." The workers absorbed "minimal" levels of radiation ranging from 1 to 2 millirems, which is not enough to cause any health problems, Scott said. The NRC limits annual radiation exposure to 5,000 millirems. The two workers cleaning the vessel were wearing protective gear, including respiratory equipment, but those on the upper level were not, Scott said. "We knew there would be some airborne contamination created," she said. But it wasn't expected that the particles would reach the upper level. "The good news is that we have completed the inspection of the reactor vessel head and have found it to be in very good condition," Scott said. The inspection was held this past week. The incident posed no risk whatsoever to the general public, Clark said. The St. Lucie Nuclear Plant is in the process of extending its two NRC operating licenses for an additional 20 years. A public meeting is scheduled for 9 a.m., Oct. 25 at the FPL Energy Encounter adjacent to the plant. TCPalm.com] © 2002 - The E.W. Scripps Co. - Site Users are subject to our ***************************************************************** 24 Don't ship the waste newsobserver.com : front : Editorials [newsobserver.com, Raleigh, NC] Site Updated: 12:21 AM | WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2002 Tuesday, October 15, 2002 12:00AM EDT We are glad that state Attorney General Roy Cooper has called on Congress to improve protection of our nuclear power plants (news story, Oct. 10). But we hope he will take a harder look at CP's practice of shipping highly radioactive nuclear waste through our state and into our area. An accident or attack along the train route puts North Carolina citizens in danger. Last March, unarmed escaped prisoners accidentally boarded one of these "guarded" trains -- a planned attack could be more successful. CP is the only utility company doing this. Nuclear scientists have proposed waste storage methods that reduce the risk of a cooling-pool disaster, could be used at local sites and would eliminate the need for these shipments. How can any nuke train be safer than no train? I urge Cooper to study this matter further. Debra H. Weiner Chapel Hill The writer is a member of Orange County Citizens for Nuclear Safety. © Copyright 2002, The News &Observer Publishing Company. All ***************************************************************** 25 LES to open Hartsville office* By Amanda Wardle Louisiana Energy Services will open an office in Hartsville today and participate in a community forum this evening to field questions about a proposed $1.1 billion uranium enrichment plant in Trousdale County. The Washington D.C.-based consortium last month announced its intention to build the plant ? approximately 40 miles northeast of Nashville ? after an evaluation of nearly 50 sites across the country. LES must receive the go-ahead from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission before beginning construction, which could begin late 2004. It currently owns no property in Hartsville. LES President and CEO will be on hand for a ribbon cutting ceremony at 104 E. Main St. in Hartsville for LES? office, where the group will base its efforts to educate and inform the community about the proposed plant. Doyle Gaines, board member of Four Lakes Regional Industrial Development Authority, will man the new office. Four Lakes currently holds the property on which LES hopes to build the plant. Hartsville Chamber President Tammy Dixon will also attend the ceremony, and Tennessee Representative Stratton Bone and Senator Robert Roschelle have also been invited to attend. Hartsville will hold a community forum at 7 p.m. tonight to discuss the uranium enrichment plant in the Trousdale Co. High School gymnasium. ***************************************************************** 26 Region's Nuclear Waste Running Out of Room - The St. Petersburg Times. General news from St.Petersburg and Russia #812, Tuesday, October 15, 2002 By Irina Titova STAFF WRITER While plans for a new local facility for the storage of nuclear waste lie unrealized due partially to a lack of funding, local representatives of Russia's State Nuclear Inspectorate, or Gosatomnadzor, say that the capacity of the existing site in Russia's northwest has already been reached. The Gosatomnadzor chief for Russia's Northern European Region, Vagiz Mindubayev, made the announcement on Oct. 4 at a monthly meeting of the ecology commission of the Leningrad Oblast Legislative Assembly, according to documents released by the commission last week. The storage facilities at Radon, a state-run company that provides long-term storage for nuclear waste, presently hold 60,000 cubic meters of solid waste, as well as another 1,200 cubic meters of nuclear waste in liquid form. "At the moment, Radon has already been forced to start using its 900-cubic-meter reserve capacity - a reservoir that was established as a back up in the event of a nuclear emergency at [the Leningrad Nuclear Power Station] or in St. Petersburg," said Mikhail Yakushev, the deputy head of Radon, at the ecology commission session. Yakushev added that the space in the back-up reservoir is not itself sufficient to hold the overflow, and that a number of entities generating nuclear waste in the Northwest Region may be forced to store the excess at their own facilities, which were not built to provide a long-term-storage solution. Most of these sites, because they have less comprehensive facilities and are not as strictly regulated as the Radon site, are licensed to store radioactive waste materials for no longer that six months. "It's a serious problem for the region," said Sergei Lukovnikov, the head of the radiation-safety inspectorate at the Northern European branch of Gosatomnadzor. "Potentially, it means that we may have to order those organizations that generate radioactive waste to suspend their activities." "There's no question that we urgently need new storage facilities," Alexander Ignatov, the director of the Radon facility, said on Friday. "About 20 percent of our reserve facility is already filled, while we receive deliveries of about 200 cubic meters of solid radioactive waste every year." According to statistics from Gosatomnadzor, 96 percent of all radioactive waste generated in the Northwest Region comes from St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast. The local Radon facility, located in Sosnovy Bor, about 80 kilometers west of St. Petersburg, in the Leningrad Oblast, is one of 15 operating in different regions in the country. Oleg Bodrov, director of the Green World environmental organization, in Sosnovy Bor, said the problem at Radon is also that new coverings must be built for the existing facilities. "When it rains, water can penetrate the old concrete containers for solid radioactive waste and then seep into the surrounding soil and water table," he said on Monday. Lidia Blinova, from the regional ecological-monitoring laboratory in Sosnovy Bor, said Monday that some radioactive substances have already seeped into underground waters, adding that measures to ensure that these substances do not seep into the neighboring Gulf of Finland should be taken quickly. "Unfortunately, local and regional authorities underestimate the problem and aren't in any hurry to find money to solve the problem," Bodrov said on Monday. "It usually takes an emergency to spur quick and effective action." According to Ignatov, plans for the construction of a new storage facility already exist, but getting the necessary approval from a myriad of different federal agencies is a lengthy process and it is unclear where they will find the necessary financing. He said that the price tag for a facility able to hold 5,000 cubic meters of solid waste, which should cover the region's needs for another 25 years, would be about $80 million. The Legislative Assembly of the Leningrad Oblast is planning to consider the problem at its meeting on Oct. 22. Yelena Navolotskaya, a consultant with the assembly's ecological commission says that they plan to appeal to the presidential administration and the federal government for funding. [Copyright] copyright The St. Petersburg Times 2002 ***************************************************************** 27 Uranium facility goes to Tennessee site Tuesday, October 15, 2002 - 9:44:25 AM MST From the Current-Argus CARLSBAD - A site in Hartsville, Tenn., has been selected as the site for a uranium enrichment facility courted by Carlsbad. The LES Partnership - headed by former Carlsbad federal Energy Department manager George Dials - plans on constructing and operating the $1.1 billion facility to provide uranium enrichment services for nuclear utilities. It is expected to employ at least 200 people. The final two contenders were in Tennessee, according to Nan Kilkeary, LES vice president for communications. Forty sites, including Carlsbad, were under consideration. Both Tennessee sites were former Tennessee Valley Authority sites, Kilkeary said. TVA, which supplies electric power, operates nuclear power plants. Thirty factors were used in the evaluation, Kilkeary said. They included seismic stability, water and power supply, transportation routes, local employment and a favorable tax environment. Carlsbad and Hobbs had received the backing of Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M. Three years ago, Hobbs worked to attract a similar facility that was scrapped. Company representatives had been hosted in Carlsbad a month before the decision was made. LES is a partnership of Urenco, Cameco Corp., Westinghouse Electric Co., Fluor-Daniel and affiliates of three energy companies, Duke, Exelon and Entergy. © 1999-2002 MediaNews Group, Inc. ***************************************************************** 28 [southnews] Mahathir warns attack on Iraq could lead to nuclear Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 18:51:21 -0500 (CDT) Plan to Sell a Home? http://us.click.yahoo.com/J2SnNA/y.lEAA/jd3IAA/7gSolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> ---------- Mahathir warns attack on Iraq could lead to nuclear terrorism AFP Tuesday October 15, 16:37 PM Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad warned that a US-led attack on Iraq could lead to escalating terrorism, perhaps even nuclear terrorism. Unilateral action and "the use of pre-emptive military power" would lead to a downward spiral in efforts towards nuclear non-proliferation, he told an International Nuclear Conference here. Mahathir did not name either country, but his remarks were a clear reference to US threats to attack Iraq on the grounds that it is developing weapons of mass destruction. There was a tendency for some countries to "unilaterally judge others" for developing or intending to develop nuclear weapons without considering the findings of multilateral agencies, Mahathir told some 200 delegates from more than 20 countries. "As a result of such a propensity to unilerally act as an international prosecutor, judge and jury, there is also now a threat for these countries to launch pre-emptive military strikes on the nuclear facilities of the alleged proliferating states," he said. The Southeast Asian Muslim leader, who opposes any war against Iraq without UN support, said the war on terrorism served as a "convenient excuse" for such an attack. A "lack of clear moral standing" between such unilateral tendencies and efforts towards nuclear export control and disarmament would lead to a "downward spiral" in efforts towards nuclear non-proliferation. "More states will, understandably, feel threatened and be alarmed by such unilateralist actions as well as the use of pre-emptive military power," he said. "As a result, the radical and hard-line constituencies in the threatened states will grow and be emboldened with some probably even wishing to take matters into their own hands by resorting to acts of terrorism, perhaps even nuclear terrorism. "Even more dangerous is when the threatened states are those that are predominantly populated by people of a particular religious faith. "This will further lead to a perceived escalation in the victimisation of countries and people of that faith, following similar widespread perception in the context of the current global war on terrorism." Mahathir said nuclear terrorism was a new threat to the world, which was faced with the use of radioactive materials in so-called "dirty bombs" after the September 11 attacks on the United States. He noted there were reports that terrorists were trying to acquire nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. This was "unfortunate" because suspicions directed at some countries, particularly Muslim nations, would prevent them from having access to materials and technology for peaceful use, he said. "Already there is an attempt to inhibit peaceful nuclear cooperation among Middle Eastern states," he added. Mahathir called for an international dialogue to assess the threat of nuclear weapon proliferation, the lack of progress in nuclear disarmament and to avert any unilateralist action. The premier, a strong supporter of the Palestinian cause, told a news conference later that there was "no pressure on Israel to do away with their nuclear weapons but there is so much pressure on other countries." If the United States was planning an attack based on the possibility of Iraq developing nuclear weapons, he said it should also attack Israel. "If you attack a country because of possibilities, then every country is going to be attacked. They should attack Israel," he added. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: southnews-unsubscribe@egroups.com Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ ***************************************************************** 29 US CARRIES OUT MISSILE DEFENSE TEST OVER PACIFIC Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 04:14:39 -0500 (CDT) http://sg.news.yahoo.com/021015/1/33r75.html Agence France Presse Tuesday October 15, 3:50 PM An intercontinental ballistic missile launched from the US state of California was successfully intercepted over the Pacific Ocean as part of a new test of a national missile defense system, the US Defense Department announced. The test involved a modified Minuteman missile launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base at 10:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time (0200 GMT Tuesday), and a prototype interceptor fired 22 minutes later about 7,775 kilometers (4,800 miles) away from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, it said. The intercept took place about six minutes after the launch of the interceptor at an altitude of more than 227 kilometers (140 miles) above the Earth during the mid-course phase of the warhead's flight. "What these tests do is they greatly improve our knowledge of missile defense technology for our development of a missile defense system against long-range ballistic missiles," Lieutenant Colonel Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency, told AFP. The experiment marked the fifth successful -- and the fourth consecutive -- intercept in seven flight tests conducted by the Pentagon since October 1999 as part of efforts to develop a national missile defense system. US President George W. Bush has made building a national missile defense system a cornerstone of his national security policy, despite criticism at home and abroad leveled by those who believe the project will be destabilizing. Administration officials brushed off the criticism, insisting the system will help protect the United States from missiles that could be fired by "rogue" states like Iran, Iraq and North Korea. The Bush administration formally withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty with Russia last June to pave the way for a stepped up testing program of various components of the system. Under a Department of Defense appropriations bill, Senate and House of Representatives negotiators last week earmarked 6.9 billion dollars for these programs in fiscal 2003 that began October 1. It will take specialists several weeks to fully analyze data collected during the flight test to determine whether malfunctions have occurred and all the objectives set before the launch had been met. ====================== *** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Feel free to distribute widely but PLEASE acknowledge the original source. *** ***************************************************************** 30 UK: Ian Buruma: Come the revolution Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | This talk of restoring democracy to Iraq is absurd. It never had a democracy. What it does need is a revolution Ian Buruma Tuesday October 15, 2002 The Guardian [http://www.guardian.co.uk] It may be that politicians, like the rest of us, are not any dumber than people were in the past, just dumber in certain ways. A deep knowledge of history, for example, is no longer much in evidence, and nor for that matter is literary prowess. This is especially true of politicians in the US, the country that once produced such intellectual giants as John Quincy Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Does this matter? Probably not very much. The lessons to be learned from history are few, since nothing ever repeats itself precisely, and conclusions drawn from the past are, in any case, often wrong. Memories of the horrors of trench warfare in the first world war prompted generals in the second world war to embark on massive bombing campaigns against civilian populations, thinking that such terror tactics would shorten the war. It probably did not. What does matter, however, is the abuse of misunderstood history for the sake of propaganda. The latest history lesson to emerge from Washington DC is that "regime change" in Iraq is going to be a repeat performance of General Douglas MacArthur's occupation of Japan in the 1940s. It has even been suggested that General Tommy Franks would govern Iraq, just as MacArthur had once governed Japan. The merits or demerits of "regime change" aside, this strikes me as an absurd comparison. In 1945, every Japanese city, apart from Kyoto, had been almost totally destroyed by bombs. Major-General Curtis E LeMay's promise to "bomb them back into the stone age" referred to the Japanese, and not, as is often assumed, the Vietnamese. Japanese industry was ruined. Nuclear fallout was sweeping over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And massive US food aid was needed to stave off a famine. But despite all this terrible damage, the software, so to speak, of Japan was intact. It was, in every respect, a modern nation-state, with a functioning bureaucracy that continued to administer the country under allied occupation. Contrary to what was suggested in Washington last week, MacArthur did not govern Japan directly. Germany was ruled by allied military governments, Japan was not. Until the early 1930s, Japan had also had political parties, and so had all the forms, if not always the substance, of a modern parliamentary democracy. The problem was that it also had the forms, if not always the substance, of an absolutist monarchy. The resulting confusion made it possible in the 1930s for squabbling military factions to hijack government powers under the cloak of divine imperial will. All MacArthur needed to do was take away the emperor's divinity, get rid of the generals, restore the political parties, and rewrite the constitution to guarantee civil liberties and full franchise. He did not need to rely on Japanese exiles, since more or less respectable members of the old civilian elite - efficient bureaucrats and hardnosed trade union leaders - were all at hand to run a modern country. What is more, Emperor Hirohito, even without divine powers, was there to bless MacArthur's reforms. Unless you can imagine Saddam Hussein as a popular, pro-American emperor, Iraq will surely be a different proposition. For what exactly is there to be restored? Iraq may have a well-educated urban middle-class, but it never had a democracy. It is also riven by ethnic and religious rivalries, unlike Japan. And unlike the Japanese, who were quite happy for a while to be treated as pupils in the school of US democracy, it is by no means certain that the Iraqis will take so kindly to American tutelage, let alone the governorship of General Tommy Franks. What is needed in Iraq is a revolution, not a restoration. Because of their own relatively peaceful revolutionary history, Americans are perhaps more sanguine about revolutions than people with bloodier memories. It may be possible for the Iraqis to establish a democracy eventually. But the prospect of a successful revolution led by an American general in a torn middle-eastern country seems remote, to say the least. Now it may be that all this is for the birds. Perhaps the Americans are just saying these things to spook the butchers in Baghdad. Or perhaps they are not really serious about a democratic revolution, and will be quite content to set up a pro-American strongman who can rule Iraq as one of "our bastards". My hunch is that the US government is divided on this, and that some of the old oilmen around Bush are less committed to the idea of Iraqi democracy than some of the academic ideologues hanging around the Pentagon. But whoever prevails, the Japan model is good for nothing but sprinkling stardust into everybody's eyes. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002 ***************************************************************** 31 Protests at Nevada Test Site yield charges against 66 Las Vegas SUN Today: October 15, 2002 at 9:40:29 PDT ASSOCIATED PRESS LAS VEGAS (AP) - Protesters capped a weekend of demonstrations and arrests at the Nevada Test Site and the planned Yucca Mountain radioactive waste dump with a rally in Las Vegas claiming minority communities are disproportionately contaminated by federal nuclear facilities. Officials said 66 people were arrested or issued summonses Saturday, Sunday and Monday, including some who refused to identify themselves and remained jailed in Beatty until the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada intervened. "We are coming together from across the world to say no to nuclear energy and nuclear weapons," Mildred McClain of Citizens for Environmental Justice of Savannah, Ga., said during the Monday rally outside the Grant Sawyer federal building in Las Vegas. About 24 black, Hispanic and American Indian demonstrators claimed increased rates of cancer, birth defects and skin disorders in minority communities near nuclear facilities in South Carolina, Washington, New Mexico and Nevada and a chemical plant in Mississippi. In Beatty, eight anti-nuclear demonstrators were released by the Nye County Sheriff's Department after the ACLU intervened about noon Monday. Nye County Sheriff Wade Lieseke said law enforcers at the federal test site have long detained protesters who refuse to give their names. Protests and rallies are common at the gate to the test site, about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. ACLU lawyer Allen Lichtenstein said the arresting officers mistakenly cited a state law requiring suspects to provide their names upon arrest. He said the law has been invalidated by federal courts. Most of the 66 men and women were issued trespassing summonses at gates to the test site, said Darwin Morgan, spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration in North Las Vegas. He said five were issued summonses for trespassing at the Yucca Mountain Project field office at the test site. The administration, a branch of the Energy Department, operates the test site, where 928 full-scale nuclear weapons tests were conducted from 1951 to 1992. Information from: Las Vegas Review-Journal All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 32 NEVADA TEST SITE: Minorities join nuclear foes reviewjournal.com -- News: Tuesday, October 15, 2002 Protesters claim communities contaminated By KEITH ROGERS REVIEW-JOURNAL While eight anti-nuclear demonstrators remained jailed in Beatty until noon Monday, a contingent of minorities in Las Vegas accused the government of contaminating communities around nuclear weapons plants. The eight men and women were arrested Sunday at the Nevada Test Site after they declined to identify themselves. After intervention by the American Civil Liberties Union, they were released by the Nye County Sheriff's Department. They were among 61 cited for trespassing Saturday, Sunday and Monday at the test site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Five also were cited and released for trespassing Monday at a Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project field office at the test site, a National Nuclear Security Administration spokesman said. The administration, a branch of the Energy Department, operates the test site, where 928 full-scale nuclear weapons tests were conducted from 1951 to 1992. The eight were released after a Justice Court appearance in Beatty where they pleaded not guilty to misdemeanor charges of trespassing and failing to give their names to investigating police officers. Separate hearings for the eight were scheduled to begin next month. An ACLU attorney, Allen Lichtenstein, said they were jailed on a state law that has been invalidated by federal courts. That law requires suspects to give their names to investigating police officers. Lichtenstein and local ACLU Executive Director Gary Peck said the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has ruled in a similar case that the Nevada law is, in Peck's words, "transparently unconstitutional." "It's a question of constitutional law," Lichtenstein said. "That's why we got involved." Peck said he also was concerned that officials at the Beatty jail prevented Lichtenstein from meeting with the eight for four hours Monday. Peck said he was allowed to meet with them shortly before their appearance before Justice of the Peace Bill Sullivan. "What went on in Nye County yesterday and today did little to inspire public confidence in its justice system. Instead, it created the impression that folks there simply make up the rules as they go along," Peck said by telephone Monday. Nye County Sheriff Wade Lieseke said detaining protesters who refuse to give their names is a procedure that law enforcement officials have followed for many years at the test site. Despite the appeals court ruling, Lieseke said, the law the ACLU attorneys refer to is still a state law. "Refusing to identify yourself is still a crime in Nevada," he said. At a news briefing in Las Vegas, protesters castigated the government's handling of radioactive and hazardous materials that they say have greatly affected minority communities near weapons facilities. "We are coming together from across the world to say no to nuclear energy and nuclear weapons," said Mildred McClain of Citizens for Environmental Justice in Savannah, Ga. Standing behind her outside the Sawyer Building were about two dozen blacks, Latinos and American Indians who had joined protesters at the test site over the weekend. The protesters claim that contamination from nuclear facilities in South Carolina, Washington, New Mexico and Nevada and a chemical plant in Mississippi have caused cancer, birth defects and skin disorders in nearby communities. They linked the illnesses to the government's reliance on a policy of nuclear weapons deterrence and bemoaned President Bush's call for military action in Iraq, chanting, "No. War." One speaker, Charlotte Keys of Jesus People Against Pollution in Columbia, Miss., said, "the land, air and water do not belong to President Bush." Mildred McClain, left, of Citizens for Environmental Justice in Savannah, Ga., speaks at a news briefing Monday outside the Sawyer Building after the anti-nuclear group, the Shundahai Network, announced that eight protesters were jailed in Nye County during a rally at the Nevada Test Site. The groups participated in a nonviolent protest dubbed Action for Nuclear Abolition. Photo by Clint Karlsen. Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal, 1997 - 2002 Stephens Media ***************************************************************** 33 Nuke agency seeks tough resolution -- The Washington Times October 9, 2002      From combined dispatches      VIENNA, Austria — The International Atomic Energy Agency sided with chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix yesterday in seeking a U.N. resolution with teeth before sending its inspectors to determine whether Iraq had revived a secret atomic-weapons program.      "I would like the Security Council to make it clear that we have immediate and unfettered access throughout Iraq," said Mohamed El Baradei, chief of the agency, which is based in Vienna.      "I'd like the Security Council to make it clear that noncompliance would be met with adequate response on behalf of the international community, and I think that is what the Security Council rightly is deliberating on," Mr. El Baradei said in an interview on CNN.      In 1991, agency inspectors discovered a massive Iraqi effort to build atom bombs and conceal the action when they chased down a convoy of trucks loaded with huge electromagnetic isotope separators that are used to make weapons-grade uranium.       The energy agency, a U.N. agency that monitors nuclear energy worldwide, worked side-by-side with U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq until both groups were kicked out by Saddam Hussein in 1998.      "I would like the Security Council to strengthen our hand," Mr. El Baradei said yesterday.      The U.N. inspection team led by Mr. Blix had planned to return to Iraq in mid-October but has decided to hold off until the Security Council decides on a resolution.      In Baghdad, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein met yesterday with his top military commanders for the second time in 48 hours, Iraqi television announced.      Among those at the meeting were his son Qusay, who leads his security services, his Defense Minister Abdul Al-Tawab Mulla Huweish and top air force and air defense officials, the television broadcast said.      Saddam pledged not to let President Bush succeed "in twisting the arm of the Iraqi people."      The United States and Britain accuse Iraq of developing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and are pushing for a U.N. Security Council resolution to allow intrusive inspections of suspected Iraqi arms sites, backed by the threat of force.      France, also one of the five veto-holding members of the Security Council, favors having two resolutions, of which only the second would threaten force. Russia favors France's more cautious approach over what it considers Washington's "unfulfillable demands."      Iraq denies having weapons of mass destruction and has said it would not be intimidated into accepting a new Security Council resolution by threats of war.      Mr. El Baradei held two days of talks in Vienna last week between inspectors and an Iraqi delegation on the logistics and details of a return of the arms experts to Baghdad.      The agency will provide experts to study Iraq's nuclear capabilities, while other U.N. arms experts will look for chemical weapons, biological weapons and missiles.      The agency said yesterday that it was analyzing satellite images of Iraq released by the White House.      President Bush said in a speech Monday that he was worried that Saddam would attack the United States with chemical or biological weapons.      The White House later released satellite images that it said showed Iraq rebuilding two facilities related to Baghdad's nuclear-arms program.      "We are doing some internal follow-up to verify that the content of our photos is consistent with the images released by the White House," Mark Gwozdecky, spokesman for the agency, said in Vienna.      The agency, like the White House, has been using commercial satellite imagery to keep tabs on movements in Iraq for several years.      "Our position remains that photographs showing new construction are of great interest to us," Mr. Gwozdecky said.      "However, it is only through inspections that we will be able to draw authoritative conclusions as to whether Iraq is complying with its nuclear-related obligations," he said.      After U.N. inspectors left Iraq in 1998, they said they had uncovered and neutralized Baghdad's capacity to build nuclear arms. Although there was no proof that Iraq had built an atomic bomb, it had successfully completed many steps toward making one.      On the diplomatic front, the United States and France continued to seek common ground on a U.N. resolution authorizing force if Iraq does not cooperate with inspectors.      Despite upbeat comments from Washington and Paris, the five main Security Council members were still discussing in New York "concepts" rather than detailed wording in the text, a sign that a resolution may not be introduced this week.      "Things are becoming clearer, and they could come together this week, but there is no indication yet of the movement needed," said one diplomat close to the talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "It's between Paris and Washington."      Yesterday, Security Council members had their monthly lunch with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and Iraq was the main topic of discussion. Later in the day, the five permanent council members with veto power — the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China — held another meeting.      The United States is seeking a resolution that would allow any U.N. member to conduct a military strike if it concluded that Iraq had violated new Security Council demands relating to its weapons of mass destruction. ***************************************************************** 34 Russia's oldest nuclear subs to be scrapped shortly: report MOSCOW (AFP) Oct 15, 2002 Russia's first-generation nuclear-powered submarines, whose decrepit state alarmed ecologists for years, will shortly be dismantled, the ITAR-TASS news agency reported. One of the 16 decommissioned submarines was towed late Monday to the recycling factory in Russia's northern city of Polyarny, where it would soon be scrapped, local officials said. However, it was yet unclear when some 100 newer submarines, already decommissioned from Russia's Northern Fleet, would be recycled, officials added. Up to January 1, a total of 190 such submarines had been taken out of service, with nuclear fuel already removed from 97 of them. The atomic energy ministry plans to remove nuclear fuel from all out of date submarines by 2007 and complete the decommissioning process by 2010. SPACE.WIRE ***************************************************************** 35 Aid to Iran seen diluting U.S. effort -- The Washington Times October 10, 2002 By David R. Sands THE WASHINGTON TIMES      Russia's support for Iran's nuclear program could undermine a $20 billion U.S.-led effort to help dismantle the former Soviet Union's vast military arsenal, the State Department's proliferation chief said yesterday.      John R. Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, said at a Senate hearing that the Russia-Iran link complicates U.S. efforts to rally international support for President Bush's 10-year plan to contain and destroy Russian chemical and nuclear weapons stocks.      The effort was first announced at the Group of Eight (G-8) summit in Canada this summer.      "Iran is seeking all elements of a nuclear fuel cycle, from mining uranium to enrichment to production of reactor fuel," said Mr. Bolton, adding that there was "no economic justification" for the program, given Iran's vast domestic energy resources.      "The inescapable conclusion is that Iran is building a nuclear fuel cycle to support a nuclear weapons program," he said, with Russia providing critical technology and expertise despite repeated U.S. complaints.      "Concerns about Russia's performance on its arms control and nonproliferation commitments have already adversely affected important bilateral efforts, and unless resolved could pose a threat to new initiatives," including the G-8 accord, Mr. Bolton said.      Moscow has provided massive assistance for a nuclear power facility being built in the southern Iranian town of Bushehr, and Bush administration officials were caught off-guard when Russia announced in July plans for expanded cooperation with Iran on future nuclear power sites.      Russian and Iranian officials contend that the nuclear plants in question are intended solely for civilian energy needs.      Mr. Bolton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the administration is working hard to implement promises made at the G-8 meeting.      Under the "10 plus 10 over 10" formula, the United States would provide $10 billion over the next decade, to be matched by the leading European powers and by Japan, to dismantle chemical arms, nuclear weapons material and decommissioned nuclear submarines, and to employ weapons scientists.      To date, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan have pledged just half of the expected $10 billion, but Mr. Bolton said that many are still negotiating their contributions. France, which hosts the G-8 summit next year, also has pledged to make the program a top agenda item for the meeting.      But problems with the program have arisen in both Russia and the United States.      The Russian government has yet to provide guarantees on liability, taxation, access to sensitive sites and other matters that have hampered outside nonproliferation efforts.      "Millions of dollars previously committed by G-8 members remain [unspent] at present due to these problems," Mr. Bolton said. It is hard to get national legislatures to agree to spend more in such a situation, he added.      Congressional skeptics of Russia's commitment to disarmament programs have resisted an administration-backed provision to give the country a permanent waiver to receive nonproliferation funds. The stalemate has halted work on a high-profile chemical weapons destruction facility at Shchuchye, Russia.      "Things are not on track," said Sen. Richard G. Lugar, Indiana Republican and co-author of the 1991 legislation that established the first program for dealing with former Soviet weapons sites.      Mr. Lugar warned that U.S. delays only help "worker bees" deep in the Russian military bureaucracy who want to undermine President Vladimir Putin's promises on disarmament. ***************************************************************** 36 Getting rid of the menace -- The Washington Times October 15, 2002 Assad Homayoun      Debate is ongoing in the United States and world community regarding the U.S. decision of removing Iraq's Saddam Hussein, but there can be no question he represents a menace to the stability of the region, to world peace and to his own people.      Twice in the past he tried to develop nuclear weapon to dominate the Persian Gulf and intimidate Iraq's neighbors. Presently he is accumulating different kinds of WMD and determined to acquire nuclear weapon. He has violated 16 times the resolutions of the U.N. Security Council. He, after disintegration of Iranian armed forces, and the decimation of military officers of Iran by the revolutionary clerics, invaded Iran to become "lord paramount" of the Persian Gulf to control oil wealth and dominate the entire Middle East.      He used 101,000 chemical and biological shells against Iranian forces who were defending their country against invading Iraqi forces. An invasion that left 400,000 dead and 900,000 wounded. He gassed his own people and relocated more than 400,000 Kurds. Again he tried to dominate the Persian Gulf again with the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. And after defeat in this war by U.S. and coalition forces, he massacred Shi'ites of the South. If the U.S. did not move to oust Saddam from Kuwait, he would now be sitting on 65 percent of world energy with one of the world's biggest armies, equipped with nuclear weapons.       He has killed his ministers who dared criticize his policy.      Those who think Saddam will agree to full and unfettered United Nations inspections do not understand the psychodynamics of Saddam Hussein. He has been cheating and playing with U.N. and world community for years. He may be willing to make a tactical concession to save his skin but, if he agrees, he will not succumb to effective inspection regime, and inspection will never ensure the disarmament of Iraq. His real strategic goal is acquiring nuclear weapons with which to dominate the most important energy center of the world. Once Saddam has acquired a nuclear weapon, it will be too late to stop him from materializing his goals.      President George W Bush, in declaring the two despotic regimes of Baghdad and Tehran an "axis of evil" in the Middle East, made the right, courageous and necessary decision. The only way to remove those regimes from having access to weapons of mass destruction, especially nuclear weapons, is removing those regimes and paving the way for real reform and democracy.      People such as President Saddam Hussein and the Supreme leader of Iran Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose regimes and existence have been based on blood, will not change by negotiation and the influence of good people. Their dictatorial systems are founded on continuation not rapture. As Niccolo Machiavelli Put it in "Discourses": "for a licentious and mutinous people may easily be brought back to good conduct by the influence and persuasion of a good man, but an evil-minded prince is not amenable to such influence and therefore there is no other remedy against him but cold steel."      Apart from the good it would achieve for the Iraqi people, the removal of the truly evil regime of Saddam is of the utmost importance because:      • It will contribute to the fall of despotic Iranian clerical regime that is the fountainhead of international terrorism.      • It will immensely help to extirpate the roots of terrorism from the Middle East that has been the kernel of evil since 1979, with the coming of clerics to power and the promoting of international terrorism and jihad against "infidels."      • It will contribute to peace and stability of the strategic region of the Middle East and the Central Asia.      • And, finally, it facilitates real reform, democratic movement and freedom in the region.            Assad Homayoun is president of the Azadegan Foundation for Democratic change in Iran. ***************************************************************** 37 Japanese Ready for Further Investments in Pacific Fleet's Nuclear Safety This section covers social tension in the Pacific Fleet and shipyards in the area, development of new areas of use for nuclear powered submarines. VLADIVOSTOK - A little more than nine years ago, during the autumn of 1993, NHK Japanese Television aired footage, recorded by Russian military journalist Grigory Pasko, of a Russian Navy radioactive waste collection vessel discharging some 1,000 tonnes of irradiated water into the Sea of Japan. Landysh liquid radioactive waste processing barge funded by Japan. www.tecsec.org Charles Digges, 2002-10-15 15:09 Japanese viewers — who have a keen collective sensitivity to things radioactive — watched in horror as the load of low-level liquid waste, siphoned from the reactors of Russian nuclear submarines, was pumped directly into a stretch of fertile fishing territory largely viewed as the nation's breadbasket. More shocking for viewers was that this was by no means an isolated incident. Although the nuclear sewage dump witnessed on television across Japan that evening was the single discharge authorized by the Russian Navy that year, ensuing reports by journalists and environmental organizations and information supplied by the Russian government revealed the waste dumping practices had been the Pacific Fleet's open policy for more than 20 years and were generally carried out as many as three times a year. Further, it was revealed by a Greenpeace report that Russian submarine commanders were ordered to jettison cooling water from the 2nd, 3rd and 4th reactor circuits at sea, before arriving at the harbour. "This was not being done secretly — the news just never reached our Foreign Ministry, and Japan was shocked," said Junichi Yuba, 35, acting director for the Technical Secretariat of the Japan-Russia Committee for Cooperation in Reducing Nuclear Weapons, an operation run under the auspices of the Japanese Foreign Ministry. "This news came as a huge impact for the Japanese people because we realized that fisheries and the resources would be affected — it's just like the Norwegians [who fought nuclear contamination from the Russian Navy to protect their own Arctic fishing waters]," Yuba told Bellona Web in a recent interview in Vladivostok. As a result, said Yuba and Masaki Nimiya, who is assistant director of the Arms Control and Disarmament division of the Japanese Foreign Ministry, Japan's Fishing Association applied pressure on the ministry to stem further contamination "So an agenda was created on how to prevent such things, and our relationship with Russia was formed and we finally put together some sort of facility for the low-level liquid radioactive waste," said Yuba. Japanese aid and the Landysh The Landysh is now permanently anchored at the Zvezda shipyard at the town of Bolshoi Kamen, 25 kilometres west of Vladivostok. The result was the creation of the Japanese Nuclear Assistance Fund, whose first major project was building the $42 million Landysh, an enormous waste treatment barge, designed by an American engineering firm, and assembled by the Russians and the Americans. Purification tests on the vessel began in 1999 and it officially went into operation in November 2001. Between that time and March 2002, according to Centre for Non-proliferation Studies in Monterey California, or CNS, the Landysh has processed 800 tonnes of irradiated liquid waste, in addition to the 1,500 cubic meters of waste it processed during test runs in late 2000. Information cited by CNS, and confirmed by Yuba and Nimiya, said the Landysh has the capacity to process 7,000 cubic meters of low-level liquid radioactive waste a year. This — according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, or NTI, a US-based, privately funded non-proliferation organization founded by media mogul Ted Turner and former Senator Sam Nunn — is enough to service the annual liquid waste generated by Russia's entire Pacific Fleet. The Landysh is now permanently anchored at the Zvezda shipyard at the town of Bolshoi Kamen, 25 kilometres west of Vladivostok, where it is expected to purify contaminated water for the next twenty-odd years. The Landysh is Russia's property, said Yuba. But contractually, it cannot be towed to another location without the consent of the Japanese authorities. What the Landysh and Japanese aid have inherited What Japanese and Russian authorities hope the Landysh will redress is a legacy of official nuclear contamination carried out by the Russian Navy over decades — a period that Yuba and Nimiya hope the Landysh has brought to an end, for good. Indeed, were the Pacific Fleet to resume sea dumping without consulting the Japanese government, Yuba said that "it would cause immediate discontinuation of Japanese assistance" through the Japanese Nuclear Assistance Fund, which still has millions of dollars left to spend on Russia's Pacific nuclear infrastructure. The primary culprit in the sea dumping were the Pacific Fleet's now-retired TNT tankers, which were used for mobile collection of liquid radioactive waste from submarines. According to Joshua Handler, who authored a 1994 report for Greenpeace on the Pacific Fleet's nuclear waste disposition practices, these TNTs would set sail for dumping missions two to three times a year — times when, according to the report, the "whole navy" was scared the tankers would sink along the way. All TNT's were commissioned from 1964 to 1971. Neither were the dumping missions dependent on the season. In one unconfirmed incident, the Handler report said, a TNT, preceded by an icebreaker, was observed headed for sea in the Kamchatka area. The TNT-icebreaker team, however, allegedly made it only as far as the mouths of the Bystraya and Avacha River — which flow into Avachinskaya Bay — and the TNT shed its load there. By 1994, however, international pressure brought sea dumping to a halt in the Pacific. Russia later signed but still has not ratified the London Convention against dumping nuclear waste at sea. Conditions on board a TNT Northern Fleet's Vala class TNT delivering liquid radioactive waste at Atomflot nuclear powered icebreakers base in Murmansk. The TNTs that served the Pacific Fleet throughout the 1980s and early 1990s were themselves old and some of them were not built for the work they performed. The boats themselves also became highly irradiated and serving on them meant exposure to that radiation. Naturally, duty on TNT's was one of the more loathed assignments in the Russian Navy, and, as the Handler report indicated, "it is understood that the best officers [did] not seek to serve on them. Thus they [were] commanded and run by second class officers." So bad were the conditions, in fact, that in one case, in 1994, a sailor on TNT-27 committed suicide to protest the high levels of radioactive contamination the ship's crew was exposed to. The boat was ordered back to the Zvezda facility where radiology "tests showed levels by many factors surpassing the radioactive norm, in different parts of the ship," Rossiskaya Gazeta, as cited by Handler, wrote in June 1994. The Pacific Fleet had two Vala class TNTs (TNT-23 and TNT-27) and two Zeya class TNTs (TNT-5 and MBTN-42) in various stages of disrepair. Two TNTs — TNT-27, and TNT-5 — were in the Shkotovo area. Two other TNTs, designation unknown, were in Kamchatka. All of them, except for TNT-27, were taken out of service by 1996. Other TNT's fared even worse. The so-called White Book — written by former Yeltsin environmental aid Alexey Yablokov — notes that a dilapidated and corroded vessel known as TNT-11, apparently based in Shkotovo, started taking on water at a pier at the Pavlovsky submarine base. It was towed out of the Pavlovsky base and sunk in the Sea of Japan in July or August of 1992 — taking with it 2,640 cubic meters of solid radioactive waste gauged to have 14.5 curies of activity. Another TNT — TNT-14 — according to the White Book, sunk in the Sea of Japan in 1988 with 1,665 cubic meters of solid radioactive waste that had 17 curies of activity. But both Handler and the White Book note that complete details surrounding the sinking of TNT-14 are unknown. Two more ships were built for the handling of liquid radioactive waste — the Amur, which was completed in 1986, and the Pinega, completed in 1987. The Pinega was transferred to the Pacific Fleet, and the Amur was sent to serve in the Northern Fleet. But the intentions behind these two Belyanka class ships bore two crucial differences from their TNT cousins: They were specifically designed to handle liquid waste, and they were also designed to process it. Unfortunately, both ships proved something of a bust. The ships were meant to process higher-level liquid waste — from 10-3 to 10-5 curies per litre, such as that found around the primary reactor loop — down to 10-6. But according to the Russian Ministry of Ecology, as cited by Handler, the best the ships could produce was 10-5 curies, so the Amur was never used for purification purposes. The Pinega's performance was similarly disappointing. Refuelling hazards Northern Fleet's PM-63 — Malina class — is currently based in Severodvinsk, Archangelsk region. The TNTs' counterparts were the Russian Navy's "plavuchiye masterskiye," or floating workshops (PMs), some of which are still responsible for refuelling submarines. There were two classes of them — Malina class (Project 2020) and Project 326/326M. PMs had reservoirs for spent fuel, for liquid waste and for fresh fuel. The Pacific Fleet had one Malina class boat — PM-74 — and three Project 326M vessels — PM-125, PM-133, PM-80 — and one Project 326 vessels — PM-32. Though they are not responsible for as much of the contamination that the Landysh was installed to avert, they nonetheless — in their irradiated, aged and dilapidated state — contribute to the general nuclear contamination of the area. As of 1994, two of the PMs — one in Kamchatka (PM-32) and one in the Shkotovo area (PM-80) — were taken out of service because of accidents. PM-125 and PM-133 were taken out of service in 1996-1998. The Malina class PM-74 was rapidly approaching technical failure, according to the Handler report. None of these vessels have been replaced. The Malina class PM, which was built in 1989 remains in service in Kamchatka, according to Bellona's latest information. The standard refuelling process for a submarine is long and hazardous. It takes one month to defuel a submarine. Altogether, defuelling produces around one tonne of liquid radioactive waste. It is, nonetheless, a strictly controlled procedure. Before officers can direct refuelling operations, they have to pass three rigorous exams. But even with such supervision, the process is dangerous at many levels. Dramatic accidents have already occurred: One submarine reactor exploded at Chazhma Bay during refuelling in 1985. Risks can come from something as insignificant as personnel misplacing a screw from a reactor, which later becomes a major problem. Removal of spent fuel assemblies and insertion of new ones, for instance, is tricky. When fuel assemblies are inserted or withdrawn, they can tilt. The five-tonne reactor lid is lifted by microns. But PM ships can sway in the water if a smaller boat passes by during the procedure, meaning the crane holding the reactor lid sways too, creating the possibility for accidents. But the most dangerous part of defuelling and refuelling is when the reactor lid is lifted because there is the possibility of a thermal explosion of the reactor. To avoid a thermal explosion, Navy started to pump out the cooling water from the reactors prior to defuelling since early 1990s. The operation, however, is still one of the most dangerous in a nuclear submarine life span. Where will the remainder of the Japanese money go? The presence of the Landysh will certainly not attenuate all the nuclear dangers associated with the Pacific Fleet, but both Nimiya and Yuba emphasize that it is in Japan's interest to tackle as many as the country can. "Japan is a very health-conscious country," Yuba said. "You can imagine the kind of effect that reports of irradiated fish would have." Some two thirds of the Japanese Nuclear Cooperation fund — neither Yuba nor Nimiya wanted to publicize a specific amount — remain to be spent, and as Nimiya put it: "One thing I want to be clear about is that we don't want to retain the money." All that is needed, he said, is a Kremlin that is willing to submit concrete project proposals to Japan, and, if approved, the programmes will be realized. "First of all, it's Russia's responsibility [to determine what it thinks is necessary]," said Nimiya. "As we all agreed, we need Russia's cooperation for this. Then we can use the money." Unfortunately for Russia, the list of places to invest is practically limitless. There are, for instance, the Pacific Fleet's notoriously over-packed waste storage facilities — one on Kamchatka, at the Gornyak base, the other on the south-east tip of the Shkotovo Peninsula, both of which hold low- and high-level solid and liquid waste — that suffer from chronic leakage problems and transportation woes. According to Eduard Avdonin, director of Minatom's International Centre for Environmental Safety, the navy can't scratch up a mere $7 million to repair a 27-kilometer stretch of railroad track to ship spent nuclear fuel from Zvezda to the nearest railhead that takes the shipments to the Mayak reprocessing facility in the Urals. Nimiya said that his "wish-list" of projects included investing in that rail line. But even prior to that, he said, he would like to see more openness on the Russian side. "The Russian side still doesn't provide enough information to the Japanese government. For instance, how many of those Pacific Fleet submarines [awaiting decommissioning and still loaded with nuclear fuel] are ready to sink?" he said. "This is important so the Japanese side can consider what is necessary and urgent cooperation — it's better if we have all the information and can decide what is an urgent project. But we still don't receive that." Pacific Fleet support vessels Location Vessel type Design Year of building Work-load of vessel Technical state of vessel Kamchatka PM-74 2020, Malina class 1985 1,368 SFAs, 220 t of LRW In operation PM-32 326 1966 126 SFAs, 47 t of LRW Retired in 1994 MBTN-42 1783, Zeya class 1963 149 t of LRW Retired in 1994 TNT-23 1783A, Vala class 1968 540 t of LRW Retired in 1996 Primorje region TNT-27 1783A, Vala class 1967 900 t of LRW In operation TNT-5 1783, Zeya class 1960 400 t of LRW Retired in 1992 Pinega 11510, Belyanka class 1987 320 t of LRW In operation PM-125 326M 1960 560 SFAs, 108 t of LRW Retired in 1998 PM-133 326M 1962 560 SFAs, 46 t of LRW Retired in 1998 PM-80 326M 1964 113 SFAs, 40 t of LRW Retired in 1993 Overview of the support vessels at the Pacific Fleet. Abbreviations: SFA — spent fuel assemblies; LRW — liquid radioactive waste. Publisher: [bellona@bellona.no] , President: [frederic@bellona.no] Information: [info@bellona.no] , Technical contact: [webmaster@bellona.no] Telephone: +47 23 23 46 00 Telefax: +47 22 38 38 62 * P.O.Box 2141 Grunerlokka, 0505 Oslo, Norway ***************************************************************** 38 Strasbourg Court examines Nikitin case Nikitin case The Nikitin case - all about the process against Aleksandr Nikitin starting from October 1995 and until today. The European Court on Human Rights has started to examine the application filed by Aleksandr Nikitin against Russia for not having finalised the criminal case against him within reasonable time. Jon Gauslaa, 2002-10-15 14:38 On October 8, the European Court on Human Rights in Strasbourg started its examination of the application filed by Aleksandr Nikitin against Russia. The application (50178/99) was filed in July 1999. It claims that Nikitin's rights under Articles 6 (1) and 13 of the European Convention on Human Rights to have the criminal charges against him determined "within a reasonable time", and to an "effective remedy" against this alleged violation, were violated. Much to answer for The Strasbourg Court has under Rule 54 § 2 (b) of the Rules of Court invited the Russian Government to submit its written observations on the admissibility and merits of the case within January 15, 2003. Based on Nikitin's application, the Court asks: · Has the length of the proceedings extended a reasonable time within the meaning of Article 6 (1) of the Convention? · Did the applicant have an effective remedy for the alleged unreasonableness of the delayed proceedings, as required by Article 13 of the Convention? Particular attention Besides, the Strasbourg Court has paid particular attention to the fact that the Russian Prosecutor General - after Nikitin was acquitted by the Supreme Court - made an attempt to re-open the case. On the basis of these actions the Court asks: · Was the Prosecutor General's extraordinary appeal to the Presidium of the Supreme Court of May 30, 2000 compatible with the guarantees of a fair hearing under Article 6 (1) of the Convention? · If the aim of the extraordinary appeal was to re-open the case, what fundamental defects were in issue? The Court also invites the Government to comment on whether or not the Presidium's consideration of the case could constitute violations of Articles 4 (1) and (2) of Protocol 7 to the Convention. The former provision protects the individual against twice being tried for the same offence, while the latter limits the authorities' possibilities to re-open a case. On these issues the Strasbourg Court actually goes further than Nikitin's attorneys have done in their correspondence with the Court following the original application. Well founded The fact that the Court has forwarded Nikitin's application and asked the above-mentioned questions to the Russian Government indicates that it considers the application to be well founded and that it has no need for further factual information. If not, the Court would have declared the application inadmissible or asked for additional information. See Articles 54 (1) and (2 a) of the Rules of Court. After having received the comments from the Russian Government, the Court will invite Mr. Nikitin and his representatives to submit their observations in reply to the Government. Based on this material, the Court will decide how to handle the case further. Because of its huge workload there is little reason to believe that there will be a decision on the merits before in 2004. So far the Strasbourg Court has issued decisions in two cases involving Russia (Burdov v. Russia May 7, 2002, application No. 59498/00 and Kalashinkov v. Russia, July 15, 2002, Application no. 47095/99). The Russian government lost both cases. Nikitin case history Aleksandr K. Nikitin, a former submarine officer and nuclear safety inspector turned environmentalist, started to co-operate with Bellona in 1994. He was first charged on October 5, 1995 when the Russian Security Police (the FSB) confiscated his passport. He was arrested in February 1996 and charged with treason through espionage for his contributions to a Bellona report on the nuclear safety within the Russian Northern Fleet. He spent 10 months in pre-trial detention in St. Petersburg before being released on the order of Mikhail Katushev, the then deputy Russian Prosecutor General, in December 1996. The charges were however, not dropped. Nikitin first stood trial in October 1998, when the St. Petersburg City Court, rejected the evidence against him. But rather than acquitting him, the Court stopped the trial and sent the case back to the FSB for additional investigation. The Russian Supreme Court confirmed this decision in February 1999, and the FSB filed new charges against Nikitin in July 1999. The second trial started at the St. Petersburg City Court in November 1999, and ended on December 29 with a full acquittal. The prosecution appealed to the Supreme Court, but the acquittal was confirmed and reached legal force on April 17, 2000. The Prosecution was, however, not willing to call it a day. On May 30, 2000 the Prosecutor General requested the governing body of the Russian Supreme Court, the Presidium, to re-open the case. The basis for the request was that "Nikitin's rights had been violated throughout the proceedings against him, and that these violations had to be repaired" (sic). The Presidium rejected the request on September 13, 2000. Thus, 4 years, 11 months and 8 days after Nikitin was first charged (of which 2 years 4 months and 9 days took place after Russia ratified the European Convention on May 5, 1998), the acquittal was made final. Nikitin's application Nikitin's application to the European Court on Human Rights is available here. Aleksandr Nikitin is still engaged in environmental and human rights issues in Russia. He is the head of the St. Petersburg based organisation "the Environmental Rights Centre, Bellona" (ERC Bellona). The organisation is engaged in environmental and nuclear safety projects, as well as in several human rights cases, most notably the case of Grigory Pasko, a Russian journalist who was convicted to four years for treason on the basis of charges quite similar to those Nikitin was acquitted for. Nikitin's application to the European Court on Human Rights is available from the box at right. Publisher: Bellona Foundation [bellona@bellona.no] , President: Frederic Hauge [frederic@bellona.no] Information: info@bellona.no [info@bellona.no] , Technical contact: webmaster@bellona.no [webmaster@bellona.no] Telephone: +47 23 23 46 00 Telefax: +47 22 38 38 62 * P.O.Box 2141 Grunerlokka, 0505 Oslo, Norway ***************************************************************** 39 Mahathir warns attack on Iraq could lead to nuclear terrorism [Yahoo! Singapore - News] Tuesday October 15, 4:37 PM Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad warned that a US-led attack on Iraq could lead to escalating terrorism, perhaps even nuclear terrorism. Unilateral action and "the use of pre-emptive military power" would lead to a downward spiral in efforts towards nuclear non-proliferation, he told an International Nuclear Conference here. Mahathir did not name either country, but his remarks were a clear reference to US threats to attack Iraq on the grounds that it is developing weapons of mass destruction. There was a tendency for some countries to "unilaterally judge others" for developing or intending to develop nuclear weapons without considering the findings of multilateral agencies, Mahathir told some 200 delegates from more than 20 countries. "As a result of such a propensity to unilerally act as an international prosecutor, judge and jury, there is also now a threat for these countries to launch pre-emptive military strikes on the nuclear facilities of the alleged proliferating states," he said. The Southeast Asian Muslim leader, who opposes any war against Iraq without UN support, said the war on terrorism served as a "convenient excuse" for such an attack. A "lack of clear moral standing" between such unilateral tendencies and efforts towards nuclear export control and disarmament would lead to a "downward spiral" in efforts towards nuclear non-proliferation. "More states will, understandably, feel threatened and be alarmed by such unilateralist actions as well as the use of pre-emptive military power," he said. "As a result, the radical and hard-line constituencies in the threatened states will grow and be emboldened with some probably even wishing to take matters into their own hands by resorting to acts of terrorism, perhaps even nuclear terrorism. "Even more dangerous is when the threatened states are those that are predominantly populated by people of a particular religious faith. "This will further lead to a perceived escalation in the victimisation of countries and people of that faith, following similar widespread perception in the context of the current global war on terrorism." Mahathir said nuclear terrorism was a new threat to the world, which was faced with the use of radioactive materials in so-called "dirty bombs" after the September 11 attacks on the United States. He noted there were reports that terrorists were trying to acquire nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. This was "unfortunate" because suspicions directed at some countries, particularly Muslim nations, would prevent them from having access to materials and technology for peaceful use, he said. "Already there is an attempt to inhibit peaceful nuclear cooperation among Middle Eastern states," he added. Mahathir called for an international dialogue to assess the threat of nuclear weapon proliferation, the lack of progress in nuclear disarmament and to avert any unilateralist action. The premier, a strong supporter of the Palestinian cause, told a news conference later that there was "no pressure on Israel to do away with their nuclear weapons but there is so much pressure on other countries." If the United States was planning an attack based on the possibility of Iraq developing nuclear weapons, he said it should also attack Israel. "If you attack a country because of possibilities, then every country is going to be attacked. They should attack Israel," he added. Copyright © 2002 AFP. All rights reserved. All information ***************************************************************** 40 Iraqis come out in support of Saddam Financial Review - Oct 15 08:05 AFP Iraq has mobilised to renew Saddam Hussein's mandate in Tuesday's referendum as Washington ordered regional commanders to sharpen war plans, while UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the five powers on the Security Council were close to a consensus on new arms inspections. Baghdad's ruling Baath party has monopolised the referendum in a defiant bid to show the United States the whole country backs the Iraqi strongman for seven more years in office. No less than a 100 per cent vote for Saddam - who has ruled since 1979 through two wars and ruinous sanctions - will do for the Baath party, which has covered the country with banners declaring undying love for the veteran leader, and organised thousands of meetings, parades and rallies. "Yes for the greatest No," headlined Nabdh Al-Shabab [Pulse of Youth] over a giant portrait of the "greatest leader for the greatest people". The "no", every Iraqi understands, is directed at US President George Bush and his plots to overthrow the regime accused of possessing and developing weapons of mass destruction, a charge denied vehemently by Baghdad. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, on a visit to China, predicted there would soon be consensus over a UN security council resolution, which has been held up for weeks, to spell out tough, new conditions for arms inspections in Iraq. "I think the [security] council will be discussing it this week and I'm sure there will be a resolution" to the issue, he said on Monday in Beijing, apparently referring to a general agreement rather than a formal resolution. Mr Annan was speaking after meeting Chinese President Jiang Zemin, whose country has kept an ambiguous position on whether it would back Washington's push for the resolution to include a trigger clause that would authorise the use of force. '); document.write(''); document.write(''); document.write('[advertisement] [http://campaigns.f2.com.au/click.ng/Params.richmedia=yes&site=afr&cat=world&ct ype=story&adspace=300x250] '); document.write(''); document.write(''); document.write(''); document.write(' '); document.write(' advertisement '); document.write(' '); } } // --> Mr Annan denied the two had reviewed any draft text on Iraq. The five veto-wielding permanent members of the security council - Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States - are engaged in hard bargaining over the framing of a resolution that would require Iraq to abandon its capability for acquiring nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. Mr Bush wants a single new UN resolution creating a beefed-up inspections regime with unfettered access to alleged chemical, biological or nuclear weapons development sites and spelling out the consequences for non-compliance. His administration has blocked the return of arms inspectors, invited in by Baghdad, until the new resolution is passed. Mr Bush has run into strong opposition from France, which is holding out for a two-step UN resolution that would call for a vote before any military strike against Iraq. Baghdad denies having weapons of mass destruction, which it agreed to destroy in 1991 after its troops were ousted from Kuwait in the Gulf War. In the drive to uncover Saddam's covert military efforts, US and British experts began on Monday investigating claims that Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma defied a UN embargo and sold military radar to Iraq. They began their 10-day probe by meeting Ukrainian officials. Mr Kuchma has denied the charges, which Washington put forward last month after saying it had tapes of a conversation between Kuchma and a man said to be responsible for some of the sales. ***************************************************************** 41 Many Nations Oppose Iraq Resolution Guardian Unlimited | World Latest | Tuesday October 15, 2002 6:10 PM UNITED NATIONS (AP) - France, Russia, China and several other members of the U.N. Security Council remain opposed to a resolution backed by the United States and Britain that would authorize military action against Iraq if it fails to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors. Intense negotiations have been going on among the five veto-holding nations, and U.S. deputy ambassador Richard Williamson said Tuesday that ``the dance continues.'' France has led opposition to giving the Bush administration a green light, instead favoring two U.N. resolutions - a first toughening U.N. inspections and a second authorizing action against Iraq if it fails to comply. French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin reaffirmed on Monday that Paris is opposed to unilateral U.S. military action and urged the Bush administration to ``remain faithful to the vision of collective security that rests on the law.'' ``America seems tempted by the solitude of power,'' he told the Institute for National Defense Studies, a think tank in Paris. ``We cannot accept an intervention that is not a last resort, the final resort.'' China's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue said Tuesday that inspectors should return to Iraq before the Security Council decides on any action. ``We believe that the imperative is to readmit U.N. weapons inspectors to Iraq as soon as possible to have outside inspection and then submit a report to the U.N. Security Council. After reviewing such an objective report, then the U.N. Security Council should take some actions,'' she said. Affirming China's opposition to military action, Zhang said, ``A political and diplomatic way should be sought within the U.N. framework.'' Chief weapons inspector Hans Blix was asked to brief the council Tuesday at Russia's request on two letters from Iraq on the return of inspectors after nearly four years, diplomats said. Blix, who is in charge of searching for biological and chemical weapons, and Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is in charge of nuclear inspections, asked Iraq to confirm agreements reached in Vienna earlier this month on resuming inspections. The two Iraqi letters did not explicitly confirm the agreements, but Iraq said it saw no obstacles to a resumption of the hunt for weapons of mass destruction and promised to behave ``professionally'' if U.N. weapons inspectors return. Meanwhile, negotiations on a new U.N. resolution continued. In a move to placate France, U.S. diplomats last week offered to remove a threat to use ``all necessary means'' if Saddam Hussein doesn't cooperate. France objected because the new U.S. draft resolution would still threaten ``serious consequences'' if Iraq remained defiant, which U.S. officials said was enough for Washington to attack if necessary. On Monday, U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte met France's U.N. Ambassador John David Levitte. Council diplomats said France still insists on a two-stage resolution but offered more precise language in its draft to address U.S. concerns. Secretary of State Colin Powell scheduled talks with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, the administration's closest ally, in Washington on Tuesday. Council diplomats said Monday they did not believe the United States and Britain have enough support in the 15-member Security Council for a resolution that would give a green light for the use of force in Iraq. To win approval, a resolution must get nine ``yes'' votes and must not be vetoed by a permanent member. Diplomats said they believe a U.S. resolution with any language that could authorize force would likely be opposed by France, Russia, China, Syria, Ireland, Mexico, Cameroon, Guinea and probably Mauritius - which means it would get a maximum of only six or seven ``yes'' votes. Britain's U.N. Ambassador Jeremy Greenstock told the General Assembly on Monday that U.N. inspectors should be given ``the strongest powers possible to ensure successful disarmament and to make it crystal clear to Iraq that this time, it is complete disarmament or serious consequences.'' But last week, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said ``the member states want a two-stage approach'' and on Tuesday, Colombia's U.N. Ambassador Alfonso Valdivieso, a council member, echoed this assessment. The council is expected to hold a two-day open debate on Iraq starting Wednesday to hear a wide range of views. ``I think most of the countries are going to call for a very strong position on Iraq, but at the same time I would say they are going to make reservations about the authorization of the use of force,'' Valdivieso said. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002 ***************************************************************** 42 Nuclear inspectors don't expect to deploy before Nov. 1 Tue, Oct 15, 2002 VIENNA, Austria - U.N. weapons inspectors gearing up for a possible return to Iraq won't redeploy until the Security Council adopts a new resolution on inspections, the nuclear arms agency said Tuesday. The teams had said they could have an advance team in Iraq as early as Oct. 19, but now probably will not deploy before Nov. 1, said Melissa Fleming, spokeswoman for the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency. "We will wait for a new resolution," she said. The Security Council continues to wrangle over a U.S.-backed resolution aimed at toughening the inspection regime and tying to it the threat of military force if Saddam Hussein doesn't cooperate. France and China are among the permanent veto-wielding council members opposed to the resolution despite concessions by the Americans, such as removing a threat that Washington would use "all necessary means" if Baghdad interferes with the inspectors' work. France, which is unwilling to give the Bush administration broad grounds for a military strike, favors two U.N. resolutions — one that would toughening inspections, and a second authorizing action against Iraq if it fails to comply. The IAEA nuclear inspectors are based in Vienna. They would deploy to Iraq along with a New York-based team that would head the hunt for chemical and biological weapons and the long-range missiles capable of delivering them. In talks in Vienna earlier this month, the Iraqis hammered out an agreement on logistics for the teams' eventual return, but refused to open eight so-called presidential sites to surprise inspections. Under a 1998 deal that U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan cut with Baghdad, those sites — which include Saddam's palaces — can be visited only by appointment and under other restrictions. The United States and Britain insist that the inspectors must have unfettered access to all sites. U.N. inspectors pulled out of Iraq nearly four years ago, on the eve of U.S.-British airstrikes, amid allegations that Baghdad was not cooperating with the teams. Copyright © 2002 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The ***************************************************************** 43 Bush Ups Rhetorical War on Iraq Guardian Unlimited | World Latest | From the Associated Press Tuesday October 15, 2002 6:40 AM WASHINGTON (AP) - Just two months ago, President Bush insisted he would take his time in taking on Saddam Hussein. ``I'm a patient man,'' he said. Now, Bush is an impatient man. ``Iraq is a part of the war on terror, and he must disarm,'' Bush said Monday, making the link between post-Sept. 11 action and his desire to get rid of Iraqi President Saddam. But why now? ``If we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons today - and we do - does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him?'' Bush said as he explained his position to the nation last week. In his talk, he uttered more than 3,400 words. ``Patient'' was not one of them. Dealing with Saddam was on Bush's agenda before he lumped Iraq in with Iran and North Korea as an ``axis of evil'' last January. But until recently, he seemed in no hurry to check this item off his to-do list. Aides deflected queries about where Bush stood on Iraq by saying he had no war plans on his desk. By September, he had war options on his desk. ``Everyone agrees if Saddam is around five years from now, we've got a problem. What's less clear is why we've got to act now,'' said Lee Feinstein, senior fellow on U.S. foreign policy and international law at the Council on Foreign Relations. ``I think the president needs to make the case.'' Jim Steinberg, a foreign policy expert at the Brookings Institution, said Americans don't sense the urgency because the Bush administration has not offered a ``precipitating factor'' to galvanize them. ``I do think the `now' is the question that needs to be focused on,'' Steinberg said. ``On the whole, the more presidents provide as complete an account of just what's driving them, the more the American people tend to support them.'' Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, who has served as Bush's Middle East mediator, said the president has far more pressing foreign policy priorities than Iraq. ``My personal view - and it's just personal - is I think this isn't number one. It's maybe six or seven,'' Zinni said during a forum by the Middle East Institute last week. Iraq wasn't always such an urgent issue for Bush. As a candidate in November 1999, he did not mention Saddam or Iraq in a major foreign policy address at the Ronald Reagan library. He focused on Russia and China. A month later, Bush said if he discovered Saddam was developing weapons of mass destruction, ``I'd take 'em out.'' He explained he referred only to the weapons. Of Saddam, Bush said, ``I'm surprised he's still there.'' The escalation in rhetoric began June 1, when Bush told graduating West Point cadets that the United States would make pre-emptive strikes against suspected terrorists, and governments that help them, to protect American lives and liberty. ``We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt its plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge,'' Bush said. He did not mention Iraq, but aides said Bush referred in the speech to Iraq and any others that might support terror when he mentioned ``unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction.'' Bush then left it up to his deputies to make the case on Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld appeared in London four days later, saying Iraq's appetite for destructive weapons is well known, and ``There is not a doubt in the world that with every month that goes by, their programs mature.'' Vice President Dick Cheney turned up the heat, telling a June 24 GOP fund-raiser in Oregon that Iraq is a ``gathering danger'' that requires ``the most decisive response by America and its allies.'' On July 19, Bush labeled terrorist governments a ``mounting danger.'' Again, he shied away from direct references to Iraq, telling soldiers at New York's Fort Drum: ``Some parts of the world, there will be no substitute for direct action by the United States. That is when we will send you, our military, to win the battles that only you can win.'' On Aug. 5, Rumsfeld said a case like the one Bush made about Afghanistan could be made about Iraq. Two days after that, Cheney warned that Saddam would acquire nuclear weapons soon if ``left to his own devices,'' while Bush said he would explore all options on Iraq, including military action. Then Bush's strategists took the rhetoric to its peak. In an Aug. 15 interview with the BBC, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice declared the threat posed by Saddam would emerge ``in a very big way'' if he is allowed to remain in power. Cheney followed on Aug. 26 with a blistering assessment that arguments against a pre-emptive strike on Iraq are ``deeply flawed.'' ``We will not simply look away, hope for the best and leave the matter for some future administration to resolve,'' Cheney told the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The White House said the rhetorical buildup was planned in advance with an eye toward the Sept. 11 anniversary and Bush's U.N. speech. ``From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August,'' Bush chief of staff Andrew Card told The New York Times. In his U.N. speech, Bush warned that the world body would look irrelevant if it did not confront the ``grave and gathering danger'' posed by Saddam. ``If Iraq's regime defies us again, the world must move deliberately and decisively to hold Iraq to account,'' he said. Bush offered a specter darker than war: A nuclear weapon in Saddam's hands within a year. ``We cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud,'' he said. On the Net: Bush's West Point speech: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020601-3.html Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002 ***************************************************************** 44 Nevada site considered for production of nuclear weapons Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 12:38:38 -0500 (CDT) http://www.rgj.com/news/stories/html/2002/10/13/25884.php Nevada site considered for production of nuclear weapons triggers Associated Press 10/13/2002 02:00 pm Advocates for bringing a plutonium pit manufacturing plant to the Nevada Test Site call it the most secure of five locations being considered by the federal government to produce the triggers for nuclear weapons. The factory, which the U.S. Department of Energy hopes to open by 2020, would employ about 1,000 people. The Nevada Test Site northwest of Las Vegas; Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico; the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas; the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.; and South Carolina's Savannah River Site are being considered for a $4.1 billion plant for nuclear weapons cores, called plutonium pits. Troy Wade, chairman of the Nevada Alliance for Defense, Energy and Business, said the trade group is pushing for the factory, which he hopes would benefit the state's economy, university system and other experiments at the Nevada Test Site. "It's high on our priority list because it's the kind of high-tech project that fits the future of the test site,"Wade told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Wade said the factory could bring new technology and cutting-edge safety and environmental controls to the test site, which he called the most remote of all locations bidding for the so-called Modern Pit Facility. U.S. pit production operations shut down in 1989 at DOE's Rocky Flats facility near Denver, and no pits have been made since. Los Alamos is developing an interim facility that could make as many as 50 pits a year by 2007. Government officials have said that the nation's aging nuclear weapons stockpile could be jeopardized should their cores not be replaced in coming years. To find out, some government officials have advocated resuming full-scale nuclear testing, which was halted indefinitely in 1992. Defense Department representative Dale Klein, who visited the Nevada Test Site in August, said tests could be needed within 10 years to determine the effects of corrosion found on existing weapons. Information from: Las Vegas Review-Journal ***************************************************************** 45 At Lawrence Berkeley, Physicists Say a Colleague Took Them for a Ride The New York Times *October 15, 2002* *By GEORGE JOHNSON* It's often said that the greatest thrill in science is to be first to observe a new phenomenon of nature. For nuclear physicists that means being present at the creation of an element, glimpsing for an instant a new kind of matter. But science's most painful experience is having to withdraw a claim of discovery ? because of an honest mistake or, far worse, deliberate fakery. For an exhilarating few months in 1999, a team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's nuclear science division thought it had done something many believed impossible, synthesizing the heaviest atom yet, called element 118. They could barely believe it themselves. A paper announcing the result was published in Physical Review Letters, the most prestigious journal in the field, and heralded in news reports throughout the world. Experimenters boldly talked of pushing further, to element 119, maybe even as far as element 126. Then, thread by thread, the discovery unraveled. The paper was retracted, an investigation begun. By the time it was over this summer, one scientist had been fired (over his outraged objections) because of accusations of fraud, the others reprimanded (unjustly, they insist) for not being vigilant enough. And members of the lab ? once the lair of Glenn T. Seaborg, the premier nuclear scientist of his day ? were left trying to figure out how this could have happened, and how to ensure that it never would happen again. "It's good that Seaborg died before this, because he would have been one of the co-authors," said Albert Ghiorso, a veteran Berkeley researcher, who holds the Guinness world record for discovering elements. "This would have just about killed him." In Mendeleyev's Periodic Table, atoms are ranked by the number of positively charged protons in their core, or nucleus, where they are packed together with chargeless particles called neutrons. In nature the most massive element is uranium with 92 protons (and, in its most common form, 146 neutrons). But scientists have learned how to use machines called cyclotrons to slam smaller nuclei into one another with such force that they fuse together. The result is an extremely heavy nucleus ? a transuranic element ? so unwieldy that it quickly disintegrates. Berkelium, californium, lawrencium, seaborgium ? the names of some of these exotic substances testify to the expertise of the Lawrence-Berkeley scientists, sometimes called the Sheiks, for Super Heavy Element International Kollaboration or Super Heavy Element Isotope Kemists. Other atoms created at Berkeley honor scientists like Marie Curie, Enrico Fermi, Albert Einstein and Dmitri I. Mendeleyev himself. But since the early 80's, Berkeley had been upstaged again and again by a German team at the Laboratory for Heavy Ion Research (called by its German acronym GSI) in Darmstadt. In a 15-year marathon of discovery, GSI scientists created bohrium (107 protons), hassium (108), meitnerium (109) and, in the mid 1990's, the still unnamed elements 110, 111 and 112. "The GSI group was smarter than we were," Mr. Ghiorso said, "and they had lots of backing in terms of personnel, funds and accelerator time." The Russians were also providing stiff competition. In 1998, a team at Dubna surprised everyone by creating element 114. Berkeley hoped to get back in the running with a sophisticated new detection device called the Berkeley gas-filled separator, or B.G.S. Atoms would be accelerated with the lab's 88-inch-diameter cyclotron and then slammed into a target of lead. Newly fused elements would be sifted out and identified by the highly discriminating B.G.S. Two of the lab's best scientists were involved in the effort: Dr. Kenneth E. Gregorich, the project leader, and Dr. Victor Ninov, who had come to Berkeley from GSI where he had helped discover elements 110, 111 and 112. They were looking for ways to put the new separator though its paces when they were approached by a visiting Polish theorist, Dr. Robert Smolanczuk, who had a controversial theory he was itching to test. *Continued* 1 | 2 ***************************************************************** 46 Flats cleanup beating clock Rocky Mountain News: Local Risk of a major plutonium accident now considered to be drastically reduced, officials say By Ann Imse, Rocky Mountain News October 15, 2002 Managers of the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant say the risk of a major plutonium accident has been 99 percent eliminated and that the cleanup may be finished ahead of schedule. Rocky Flats, which produced the cores of nuclear weapons, had been called the most dangerous site in the United States because of the chance that deadly radiation could escape, killing workers and possibly spreading across Denver and its suburbs. Today, that danger has been drastically reduced because much of the plutonium is gone and the rest has been stabilized. The exact amounts that have been shipped to disposal sites and the amounts remaining at Rocky Flats are secret. And the $7 billion cleanup, which started in the mid-1990s, is going so well that managers now think they might finish a year early, in 2005. When the cleanup is done, the site is to become a wildlife refuge. Managers are optimistic about the pace for two reasons. Tests have shown that some areas are not nearly as contaminated as once thought. In addition, places that once had horrific radiation levels have been successfully cleaned up. One example: the so-called infinity room, closed off 30 years ago as too dangerous to enter, now stands open. "Risks were more folklore," said Joe Legare, the Department of Energy's environmental manager for Rocky Flats. "Or the risk was there and we found it was manageable." Rocky Flats, 17 miles northwest of downtown, produced the plutonium pits at the center of nearly all the nation's tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. It closed temporarily in 1989 because of safety problems. It never reopened because of the end of the Cold War. In 1969, plutonium spontaneously combusted, setting a building on fire and threatening the city with radiation. Legare no longer is worried about that happening because of the safety and containment work that has been done. There is, of course, a chance for an ordinary industrial accident. "We do worry about a car catching on fire and running into a factory full of drums," said Allen Schubert of Kaiser-Hill, the cleanup contractor. The other major danger with plutonium is that it can "go critical," setting off a chain reaction. That danger is particularly high when plutonium is in a liquid state. It had to be monitored to prevent it from settling into a shape and concentration that could set off a chain reaction and kill all the workers nearby, Legare said. Now, usable plutonium has been packed in solid form, in small containers, where it is much less dangerous, Legare said. What remains at Rocky Flats today is bits of plutonium contaminating vast areas of walls, equipment and soil. Breathing it still could be deadly, and some workers still must wear respirator suits inside air-filled moon suits to be sure they are protected. The contractor, Kaiser-Hill, is spending $2 million a day and has 3,500 to 4,700 workers and subcontractors on site. Kaiser-Hill can earn up to $340 million in bonuses for finishing early or under budget. Kaiser-Hill also can lose huge sums in penalties for going over budget and beyond the schedule. It has made huge progress on the cleanup by reducing the area with usable plutonium to just one building. That means about $150 million to $250 million a year previously spent keeping plutonium safe and secure has been shifted to cleanup, said Allen Schubert of Kaiser-Hill. But finishing early depends on key decisions yet to be made - such as whether to leave certain old contaminated buried piping where it lies. The public will have a chance to comment, and the decision will be made by the state health department, the federal Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Energy, Rocky Flats spokesman Pat Etchart said. And Etchart warns that an early finish could be derailed by something unexpected. For example, the South Carolina governor went to court earlier this year and delayed shipment of Rocky Flats plutonium to his state for storage. "Nothing has ever gone to plan," said Etchart, trying to dampen expectations of an early closure. "There are still some unknowns." But Legare says the staff at Rocky Flats is inspired by growing knowledge, and success. For example, Building 771, once described as the most dangerous place in America, is nearly empty. Where workers once melted, machined and chemically altered plutonium through glove boxes, only three of those 240 contaminated glove boxes remain, said Joel Zarret, one of the managers for that building. Leaking plutonium tanks are empty, and nearly 90 percent have been removed, he said. Imse@RockyMountainNews.com or (303)892-5438 © The E.W. Scripps Co. Privacy Policy and User ***************************************************************** 47 Landing federal nuclear physics project is goal Lansing State Journal Published 10/15/2002 Elite group set to lobby for MSU By Sharon Terlep Lansing State Journal EAST LANSING - A former president and the head of MSU's rival school are among 34 state leaders teaming to help the university secure a $900 million nuclear physics project. The Rare Isotope Accelerator, under consideration by the federal government, would give Michigan State University one of the leading nuclear physics laboratories in the world. MSU is competing with a federal laboratory near Chicago to land the project. That's where the high-profile group - assembled by MSU President Peter McPherson - comes in. "I'll be asking them to make phone calls and write letters," McPherson said of group members, which include power brokers in education, labor, government and business. "That includes major players making the case to Washington that this is a state of Michigan project." Among the members: University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman, Michigan's first lady Michelle Engler, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and General Motors Corp. CEO Rick Wagoner. Former President Gerald Ford is honorary chairman. "We need to say 'Here's what we can put on the table as a region, as a state and as a university,' " said Lansing Mayor David Hollister, a co-chairman of the group. "This would place mid-Michigan and the entire state on the map." The accelerator would hurl atoms at incredibly high speeds, creating rare isotopes that don't usually exist on Earth. Those could lead to new versions of elements able to treat diseases, form new materials or have other scientific applications. A decision on the project's location is about 18 months away, McPherson said. Nuclear scientists are hopeful the facility could be operational by 2010, but the U.S. Department of Energy won't offer a firm timeline. If it lands in East Lansing, the project could create up to 400 jobs plus potential for business spin-offs already being touted by Gov. John Engler. "We know about the jobs it will create," said Mark Gaffney, president of the Michigan chapter of the AFL-CIO. "What we don't know is the potential enormous value of turning some of the discoveries into biomedical companies or other opportunities." MSU's main competition is Argonne National Laboratory in suburban Chicago. While MSU offers a newly upgraded cyclotron laboratory where researchers already are doing similar work, and a university environment, Argonne is familiar with the ins and outs of federal projects. "The most important thing right now is that this be built," said Argonne's Robert Janssens, an adjunct faculty member at MSU. Contact Sharon Terlep at 377-1066 or sterlep@lsj.com. 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