***************************************************************** 11/17/02 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 10.298 ***************************************************************** RADBULL IS PRODUCED BY THE ABALONE ALLIANCE CLEARINGHOUSE ***************************************************************** Send News Stories to news@energy-net.org with title on subject line and first line of body NUCLEAR POLICY 1 Japan may sway N. Korea to abandon nukes 2 Bush to Toughen US Stance Toward NK's Nuke Issue 3 Bush Repeats "No Invasion" 4 Bush denies plans to take out Pak nukes 5 US: Speaker to address nuclear dangers 6 US: Nuclear activist speaks at Smith 7 Nuke-link reports not to affect ties with US - 8 US: Nuclear Study, Given Go-Ahead, Rouses Fears About a New 'Bunker 9 US: Rumsfeld Avoids Questions Regarding Nuclear Weapons on Iraq NUCLEAR REACTORS 10 US: Xcel nuclear lapses recurrent, feds say Monticello, Prairie 11 US: NMC vice president: Prairie Island complied with regulators /11/ 12 US: Report: Nuke Plant Upkeep Criticized 13 US: Spano's Indian Point plan would boost utility's power 14 US: Regulators say Monticello nuclear plant managers downplayed 15 US: D-B officials mull reactor head leak detection system - 16 US: Boric acid (at Davis-Besse) leak topic of meeting - 17 US: Xcel nuclear lapses recurrent, feds say Monticello, Prairie NUCLEAR SAFETY 18 US: Exposing the nation to radiation sickness 19 US: Activist pushing for government reparations for nuclear pollutio 20 US: Those near base fear plan to end testing of water 21 US: Focus on FALLON: Cancer cluster confounds experts NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE 22 US: EPA extends public comment on cleanup plan 23 US: State, feds at odds over Maywood site cleanup 24 US: Nuclear wastes' trip to WIPP a long one 25 UK: Nuclear waste storage NUCLEAR WEAPONS 26 US: Report: US weighs resumed nuclear tests* 27 U.N. Inspectors Begin Trip to Iraq 28 North Korea admits nuclear arsenal 29 US: Great Falls retires long-silent Cold War symbols 30 UK: Protesters 'boarded nuclear sub' US DEPT. OF ENERGY 31 BNFL's Savannah clean-up slated 32 U.S., Russia near deal to ship uranium to Y-12 33 Search widens for IAAP workers 34 Pantex tracing contamination 35 LANL: Trickle-Down Economics* * OTHER NUCLEAR ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** FULL NEWS STORIES ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** 1 Japan may sway N. Korea to abandon nukes Daily Yomiuri On-Line Yomiuri Shimbun Japan will be closely watched over its ability to influence Pyongyang after the board of directors of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization decided to suspend fuel oil shipments to North Korea from December. The government must proceed with its policy toward North Korea while assuming that KEDO's framework will collapse in the near future. If Pyongyang does not agree to abandon its nuclear weapons development programs by December, it is possible the KEDO board will take further actions, such as freezing the construction of light-water nuclear reactors in North Korea. Japan is being watched closely as it is one of the few nations currently in negotiations with North Korea and it is believed to be able to play a key role in leading Pyongyang to a compromise. The United States agreed to supply 500,000 tons of fuel oil to Pyongyang each year until two light-water reactors are completed, based on the two countries' 1994 bilateral framework agreement. The KEDO board of directors announced Thursday that fuel oil supplied to North Korea from December depends on North Korea's "concrete and credible actions" to eliminate the suspicion it is developing nuclear weapons, although fuel will continue to be supplied in November. "North Korea has been given a grace period to halt its nuclear weapons development programs by December," a senior Foreign Ministry official said. However, differences in opinion between the United States, which has maintained a hard-line stance toward Pyongyang, and Japan and South Korea, which have called for a more careful approach, did not narrow until just before the KEDO board meeting. Therefore, the government worked to coordinate opinion between Washington and Seoul before the meeting. It took this approach because "if cooperation among the three nations collapses, it will weaken international pressure on North Korea," the Foreign Ministry official said. Copyright 2002 The Yomiuri Shimbun ***************************************************************** 2 Bush to Toughen US Stance Toward NK's Nuke Issue Digital Chosunilbo (English Edition) : Daily News in English Updated Nov.17,2002 17:16 KST The decision to suspend oil shipments to North Korea announced after an Executive Board meeting of KEDO on Thursday in New York, followed the lead of the United States. After the KEDO meeting, the Bush administration expressed satisfaction Friday over the member countries' support, saying that it welcomed the organization's hard line stance against the Stalinist regime. President Bush pointed out that the nuclear program is a challenge to all responsible nations and reaffirmed the US will not tolerate North Korea's violation of the 1994 Agreed Framework. In related news White House officials stressed the Bush administration will no longer seek dialogue with the North and thus no delegates will be sent to North Korea over the nuke issue. All in all, the statements are the clear indication that the Bush administration is showing a hardening of the US position towards North Korea. To this end, the South Korean government said the U.S. statements are viewed as a balanced and positive message towards the North, as it said Washington hopes for a different future with Pyongyang, which represents its hopes for a peaceful resolution of the nuclear issue. (Arirang TV) ***************************************************************** 3 Bush Repeats "No Invasion" Digital Chosunilbo (English Edition) : Daily News in English Updated Nov.17,2002 18:21 KST by Kim In-ku (ginko@chosun.com) Welcoming US President Bush's White House statement on Friday at 5:00pm that he wants a peaceful resolution of North Korea's nuclear problem, the government called on Pyongyang to immediately take positive measures, including an official announcement of the dismantling of its nuclear weapons development program. President Bush said the United States seeks friendship with the people of North Korea and a "different future" between the two countries, adding that the US has no intention of invading North Korea as he made it sure in his visit to South Korea in February. The US proposed in June 2001 to purse a "comprehensive dialogue" with North Korea and if the North resolves US concerns, the lives of North Korean people would have significantly improved as "we have drawn up bold approach in preparation of necessary measures for this," President Bush said. He warned, however, the clear violations of international agreements by North Korea cannot be tolerated and stressed out that the only way to take care of the current situation lies in the North "completely and visibly" eliminating its nuclear weapons program. ***************************************************************** 4 Bush denies plans to take out Pak nukes MONDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2002 THE TIMES OF INDIA INDIATIMES CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA TIMES NEWS NETWORK �[ SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2002 03:54:06 PM ] WASHINGTON: President Bush has denied reports that the United States has contingency plans to neutralise Pakistan's nuclear assets. The US president seemingly offered this assurance to Pakistan's General Musharraf when the two met on the sidelines of the UN summit this year, following the publication last December of an article in the /New Yorker /magazine by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, saying the US and Israel had contingency plans to take out Pakistan's nuclear warheads in the event of the country falling to fundamentalists. "Seymour Hersh is a liar," Bush is quoted as telling Musharraf in a /Washington Post/ article that previewed a forthcoming book by its Managing Editor Bob Woodward about the war on terrorism in which the comment is made. It is not clear from the article in what context Bush made the remark and who raised the issue. But Bush evidently proferred the assurance before reports saying US intelligence has evidence that Pakistan provided nuclear know-how to North Korea till as recently as three months back. In the /New Yorker /article, Hersh, quoting unnamed intelligence officials, says the Pentagon has developed contingency plans to work with an Israeli special operations unit to seize Pakistan's nuclear weapons if the country became unstable. "In recent weeks, the administration has been reviewing and "refreshing" its contingency plans. Such operations depend on intelligence, however, and there is disagreement within the administration about the quality of the CIA's data," Hersh reported. "The American intelligence community cannot be sure, for example, that it knows the precise whereabouts of every Pakistani warhead - or whether all the warheads that it has found are real." He then quoted an official as saying Pakistan has some dummy locations, and if the US-Israeli operation mounted an operation and failed to clear all the nukes, then "the cat is out of the bag". US officials had scoffed at Hersh's report even at the time it was published, but there was plenty of discussion - in undertones - in the government, think tank and media circles about the need to exfiltrate Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme, especially after reports of its top nuclear scientists having connection with the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. The issue has resurfaced in recent days following the episode involving North Korea and the impending war on Iraq. In a critique of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, /New York Times/ editorialist Nicholas Kristof on Saturday wrote, "After all, if it's appropriate to carry out pre-emptive strikes on countries that sponsor terrorism and secretly develop nuclear weapons, then we could launch an invasion today - of Pakistan." But Bush and other senior administration officials have continued to insist that Pakistan has met the standards for being an ally in the war on terrorism despite skepticism in many circles. In the analysts' community, speculation is rife that the seeming abandon with which the Bush administration views Pakistan's shenanigans suggests it already has a handle on the country's nuclear assets. Soon after the Hersh report, when Secretary of State Colin Powell was asked about the safety of Pakistan's nuclear weapons, he said he was confident that he (Musharraf) understands the importance of ensuring that all elements of his nuclear programme are safe and secure. "And he knows that if he needs any technical assistance in how to improve that security level, we would be more than willing to help in any way that we can," Powell added meaningfully. Seymour Hersh is a widely acclaimed investigative reporter who is the author of a book on Israel's nuclear programme. But he gained notoriety in India for calling former Prime Minister Morarji Desai a CIA agent, an allegation he did not retract despite a lawsuit. In his /New Yorker /piece, Hersh says some senior officials say they remain confident that the intelligence community can do its job (of taking out Pakistani nukes), despite the efforts of the Pakistani army to mask its nuclear arsenal. "We'd be challenged to manage the problem, but there is contingency planning for that possibility," he quotes a military adviser as telling him. "We can't exclude the possibility that the Pakistanis could make it harder for us to act on what we know, but that's an operational detail. We're going to have to work harder to get to it quickly. We still have some good access." Shortly before Hersh's article and soon after the 9/11 catastrophe, there were several commentaries on the think tank circuit - usually a sign of the thinking within the administration - calling for greater accountability of Pakistan's nuclear assets because of the danger of fundamentalists taking over. Arguing for contingencies, non-proliferation scholar Jon Wolfstal had said that time that US plans "should include the ability to rapidly deploy forces to Pakistan to find and regain control of any lost nuclear materials and, only as a last option in a crisis, remove them from Pakistan to a secure location. "These steps might seem extreme. Yet when faced with the real possibility of losing control of nuclear weapons to the types of organisations capable of the destruction seen September 11, they could be considered realistic and even prudent. The consequences of not being prepared to act are too great for us to imagine, even with our new ability to imagine the horrible," Wolfstal had maintained. Copyright 2002 Times Internet Limited. All rights reserved ***************************************************************** 5 Speaker to address nuclear dangers Briefly in Tompkins - Local/Regional - theithacajournal.com - The Ithaca Journal Saturday, November 16, 2002 ITHACA -- Dr. Helen Caldicott, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee who founded the organization Physicians for Social Responsibility, will speak on "The Medical Consequences of the Use of Depleted Uranium" Sunday at Ithaca College. Her talk, which is free and open to the public, is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. in the Emerson Suites, Phillips Hall. It is sponsored by Students for a Just Peace, in conjunction with an anonymous donor. Caldicott is a world-renowned physician, author and advocate of citizen action to remedy nuclear and environmental crises. A native of Australia, she was an instructor in pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and on the staff of the Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston in 1977 when she founded Physicians for Social Responsibility, an organization of 23,000 doctors committed to educating their colleagues about the dangers of nuclear power, nuclear weapons and nuclear war. This past summer she established the Nuclear Policy Research Institute. Volunteers needed for homebound The Tompkins County Office for the Aging has a great need for volunteers to assist homebound senior citizens through the Project Care Program. Volunteers typically visit an individual once a week for about one to two hours, depending upon need. Seniors may have one or more of the following types of needs: companionship, assistance with laundry or light housekeeping, errands, grocery shopping or respite for a caregiver. Respite might involve staying with the senior in order that the caregiver might go out or have some time off from the responsibilities of caregiving. Volunteers should be good listeners and enjoy the company of seniors. For more information about Project Care, call Trina Schickel at the Office for the Aging, 274-5491. Copyright © 2002 Ithaca Journal. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 6 Nuclear activist speaks at Smith The Massachusetts Daily Collegian - by Mark Ostroff, Collegian Staff November 13, 2002 In a filled Sage Hall auditorium at Smith College last night, nuclear activist Dr. Helen Caldicott gave her talk entitled "The New Nuclear Danger," while promoting her new book with the same title. A pediatrician by profession, Caldicott became a leading spokesperson on the nuclear-freeze movement, which included speaking with heads of state such as Ronald Reagan and working in activism from the days of the Cold War, up through today. Caldicott's talk largely expressed her concerns about the Pentagon, media, and the Bush Administration, and how she feels they relate to nuclear danger on a world scale. She also touched on other topics of concern to her. "What I am saying tonight will determine your future and whether or not you live or die," Caldicott said. In her concern about the Pentagon's role, Caldicott accused the Pentagon of downplaying the dangers of nuclear war. According to Caldicott, even the terminology that is commonly used in the Pentagon can play a very crucial factor in the decision to resorting to nuclear war. According to Caldicott, the first bomb, named "Trinity," was also nicknamed "Oppenheimer's Baby," and the code used for its successful detonation was sent to Washington in the form of a telegram reading, "It's a boy." To Caldicott, the Pentagon's use of this kind of terminology, which includes phrases like "soft target" and "collateral damage," make light of human casualties, while words like "skin" and "baby" add human qualities to a nuclear weapon. "The minds of these men running this country should be psychoanalyzed," Caldicott said. "And, if necessary, they should be removed on an emergency basis." While discussing the role of the Pentagon, Caldicott also expressed concern about the role of the media in situations of war. According to Caldicott, media outlets corrupted by corporate and government influence also have a role in downplaying the nuclear danger, while actively hiding vital information from Americans. As a reference for her argument, she looked back to a 1995 incident in which former Russian president Boris Yeltsin, had contemplated a nuclear counter-strike against the U.S., due to immediate panic from an incoming test-missile. Caldicott said that the U.S. was only seconds away from nuclear war, but the incident was not given any priority, considering that The New York Times had reported the incident in the back pages, next to the obituaries. "The New York Times and the media are determining the fate of Earth," Caldicott said. "Our deaths are irrelevant to the Pentagon." Later in the evening, Caldicott touched on her fear of escalating danger, brought on by what she believes to be an excessive nuclear capability of the U.S. She said that the excessive nuclear capability of the U.S. could theoretically destroy the world 77 times over. Caldicott argued that this kind of capability is a bad influence on other nations like Russia, China, and North Korea, who are still trying to measure up to U.S. capability. "Everyone wants to copy America," she said. Another topic that was brought up was the Bush Administration. According to Caldicott, Lockheed Martin not only holds sizeable contacts with the U.S. Government, including projects for space militarization, but includes people like Lynne Cheney, Vice President Dick Cheney's wife, on the board of directors. Another concern of hers is how much influence Lockheed Martin holds over the media. According to Caldicott, Lockheed Martin supports The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that had worked in the past with The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times and other media outlets. "I'm reminded of Germany," she said, "It's a very, very dark time." Her last topic for the evening was about the war in Iraq, which she also accuses the media of downplaying. Caldicott argued that the U.S. had already been engaging in a form of nuclear war when, in Iraq, shells of Uranium-238, were used in the fighting. According to Caldicott, the media and the Pentagon had covered up the extent of the damage in Iraq, which included the poisoning of civilians in the form of cancer and birth defects. "My colleagues stand at the front of their beds, weeping, because, from American sanctions, they have no drugs to help treat the children with leukemia," said Caldicott, "But Americans don't know that." Before ending her talk, Caldicott also made the same claim about Afghanistan, where she said that 1000 tons of Uranium-238 was used in the wars. "That's called 'evil,'" Caldicott said. © 2002 The Massachusetts Daily Collegian ***************************************************************** 7 Nuke-link reports not to affect ties with US - DAWN - National; 17 November, 2002 By Anwar Iqbal WASHINGTON, Nov 16: The United States - responding to media reports that Pakistan had been assisting North Korea's nuclear programme until three months ago - indicated on Wednesday that there was no imminent threat of diplomatic censure or sanctions against its South Asian ally. Officials at the White House and the State Department declined to comment directly on a report in Wednesday's Washington Post saying Pakistan had continued to provide uranium enrichment technology to North Korea to help them build a nuclear bomb long after declaring itself an ally of the United States in its war on terror. But they were careful to emphasize both the value of Pakistan as an ally and the strength of the assurances they were given by its President Pervez Musharraf last month - when evidence of Pakistan's past collaboration with the Communist hermit kingdom first emerged - that no such activity was currently underway. "Pakistan has been a strong partner in the global coalition in the war against terrorism," said White House National Security spokesman Scott McClellan when asked about the Post report. He referred to - and quoted verbatim - comments last month by Secretary of State Colin Powell. "The President of Pakistan, he assured me," Powell told reporters at the APEC summit in Mexico City Oct 26, "he said '400 per cent assurance' that there is no such interchange taking place now of any kind between Pakistan (and North Korea) ... " McClellan also echoed and quoted Powell's specific refusal at that time to discuss Pakistan's past record: "I think I would leave it where Secretary Powell left it on Oct 26 after he had discussions with President Musharraf," said McClellan, "And he said: We didn't talk about the past. We'll talk about now and the future." McClellan was being questioned about US laws that provide for the suspension of economic and military aid to any country found to have delivered nuclear technology without international safeguards - as is apparently the case in this instance. Such sanctions were imposed against Pakistan in 1979. But in common with most other sanctions legislation, the law contains a clause under which the president can waive its provisions if he deems it in the national security interests of the United States to do so. Last year, President Bush employed such waivers to lift nuclear-related sanctions against Pakistan after the Musharraf government agreed to help in the fight against Al Qaeda and Afghanistan's Taliban militia after the Sept 11 attacks. Responding to questions about the law, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher implied that such waivers would be employed in regard to any findings about Pakistani technology transfers to North Korea prior to the assurances that Powell received last month. "I think we'll follow the laws as appropriate, including using any particular waivers that might exist," he told reporters. Even on background, officials were careful to avoid mention of possible punitive repercussions. "They have made a commitment. All countries including Pakistan understand the consequences of proliferation related cooperation with North Korea," a State Department official told United Press International on condition of anonymity. But he declined to elaborate. Last month, Islamabad denied the initial reports that they had aided North Korea, calling them "vicious propaganda aimed at maligning Pakistan." But when asked to comment on Wednesday, an official at the Pakistan Embassy in Washington said: "Commitments have been given at the highest level and we stand by our commitment." © The DAWN Group of Newspapers, 2002 ***************************************************************** 8 Nuclear Study, Given Go-Ahead, Rouses Fears About a New 'Bunker Buster' Weapon The New York Times *November 17, 2002* THE ARSENAL* *By JAMES DAO* WASHINGTON, Nov. 16 ? Buried in the $393 billion defense authorization bill that Congress approved this week was an obscure item that has raised concerns that the administration is gradually moving toward creating new kinds of nuclear weapons. The item authorizes the National Nuclear Security Administration, which manages the nation's nuclear stockpile, to spend $15 million to study modifying nuclear weapons so they can be used to destroy underground factories or laboratories. The United States produced a "bunker buster" weapon in 1997 by repackaging a hydrogen bomb into a hardened case. But Pentagon planners contend that such a weapon would not be effective against the deeply buried and fortified installations that some countries, including Iraq and North Korea, are thought to use for producing and storing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Advocates of the study contend that the administration is not yet proposing to create a new weapon and is simply looking at solutions to an increasingly significant problem. But critics argue that the study is a first step toward producing weapons that would require a resumption of nuclear testing, which the United States suspended in 1992. The Energy Department is also considering building a new installation for making the plutonium pits that are at the heart of nuclear bombs. The plant would cost $2.2 billion to $4.1 billion, the department estimates. It intends to issue a decision on construction in April 2004. "At a time when we are trying to discourage other countries ? such as North Korea ? from developing nuclear weapons, it looks hypocritical for us to be preparing to introduce a whole new generation of nuclear weapons into the arsenal," said Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts. Democrats had tried to strip the $15 million item from the bill but instead settled for a compromise that would require the administration to issue a report explaining how the modified bomb would be used and whether conventional weapons could be just as effective. Copyright The New York Times Company ***************************************************************** 9 Rumsfeld Avoids Questions Regarding Nuclear Weapons on Iraq home / contact Friday, November 15 2002 @ 07:47 PM GMT WASHINGTON (PC) - In a recent call-in show on Infinity Broadcasting and National Public Radio, regarding weapons inspections in Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld bypassed a question posed by a caller regarding the US intention to use nuclear weapons against the sanctions-hit country. "The United States government, the president and others, are communicating with people in Iraq, in the military, very forcefully that they ought not to use those weapons," Rumsfeld said. "Anyone in any way connected with weapons of mass destruction and their use will be held accountable, and people who helped avoid that would be advantaged." With a Friday deadline, Iraq formally announced its willingness to comply days ahead of the proposed deadline. While language was heated and harsh, the Iraqis stated that they would agree to all provisions in resolution 1441, and would provide ?unfettered access? to all facilities, including presidential palaces in a letter addressing their position. // /Donald Rumsfeld / In the letter, Sabri clearly announced Iraq unconditional acceptance of the resolution, although objecting to the "unfair, inaccurate and unacceptable" accusations made in it against Iraq. The letter also blasted the US for rallying people for war during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, a tactic that the US has used in the past as well. He also called for the drafting of a similar resolution, holding Israel to the same standard regarding the illegal occupation of Palestinian lands. While the Iraqi parliament earlier this week unanimously rejected the resolution, saying that it was ?full of lies?, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein contested the vote, and approved the resolution despite the parliaments refusal. However, in spite of the Iraqi compliance, the US is still wary of Iraq?s acceptance. On several occasions since the Iraqi acceptance of the resolution, US leaders have emphasized their readiness to lead a coalition to disarm Iraq with force. When asked about the recent warnings of massive terrorist attacks, Rumsfeld made a strong connection between the al-Qaeda network and the Iraqi government, saying, ''I have no doubt that if he's able, he would like to see that terrorist attacks occur in the event that military action was taken.'' Weapons inspectors are expected to arrive in Iraq on Monday. A preliminary team will arrive early to make all necessary preparations for inspections to resume. Chief UN inspector, Hans Blix will take charge of biological and chemical inspections, and Mohamed al-Badari of the International Atomic Energy Agency will head up nuclear inspections. With 80-100 inspectors to arrive in Iraq, Blix is expected to return to the Security Council after 60 days, to report on the inspection team?s findings. A decade of sanctions on the war-torn nation of Iraq have claimed more than one million lives, mostly children. /-Palestine Chronicle (palestinechronicle.com < International News Agency (PINA)./ Copyright © 2002 Palestine Chronicle ***************************************************************** 10 Xcel nuclear lapses recurrent, feds say Monticello, Prairie Island plants not unsafe, though Pioneer Press | 11/17/2002 | [twincities.com - The twincities home page] Posted on Sun, Nov. 17, 2002 [story:PUB_DESC] BY DAVID HANNERS Pioneer Press [Prairie Island is located along the banks of the Mississippi River near Red Wing. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently found that operators had gone two years without noticing problems with the plant’s emergency diesel generators.] Jim Gehrz, Pioneer Press Prairie Island is located along the banks of the Mississippi River near Red Wing. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently found that operators had gone two years without noticing problems with the plants emergency diesel generators. On the morning of Oct. 24, 2001, workers at Xcel Energy's Monticello nuclear power plant, 40 miles northwest of the Twin Cities, were performing a "hot shutdown" of the reactor when they disregarded a previous crew's instructions, opened some valves and vented pressure from the cooling water that protects the reactor from a meltdown. Unless kept at the proper pressure, the water boils away and exposes the reactor's uranium fuel rods, which would then overheat. By venting the pressure, the workers were, in the words of one expert, "on their way to the Three Mile Island accident." After about 15 minutes — and after the cooling system had lost nearly 20 percent of its pressure — the workers realized the previous crew had been right. They quickly closed the valves, and the pressure stabilized and then climbed. An NRC inspection team later said management didn't take the problem seriously enough and found the plant had violated NRC requirements, a pattern detected in government reviews of Xcel's two nuclear power plants. The plants are managed by Nuclear Management Co., a company founded and partially owned by Xcel. The NRC complained that the plant's operators underestimated the significance of the event and was slow to document it with the necessary report, even though it had "an actual and credible impact on plant safety." Monticello's operators "did not recognize the potential condition," the NRC said. Indeed, the incident involved some of the same acts that led to the accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986, nuclear experts said. No one claims Monticello or Xcel's other atomic plant, Prairie Island, are unsafe; they're in the "middle of the pack," in the words of one industry expert. An official with Nuclear Management Co. says the plants are safe and note that they have passed every federal inspection. But NRC routine and special inspections over the past couple of years have turned up recurring problems. Those shortcomings include ongoing problems with maintenance; a failure to identify potential problems; a slowness to make repairs; inadequate monitoring of critical safety equipment; bad communication; and problems in assessing risk factors. "These are not things that cost a million dollars to fix; they are things that cost thousands of dollars to fix. So why haven't they been fixed? Management hasn't gotten around to it. Why don't they bother fixing the minor problems, because the minor problems will add up?" said John Broadhurst, a University of Minnesota physics professor who directed the school's Williams Laboratory for Nuclear Physics. The Pioneer Press reported Friday that the NRC currently is deciding what enforcement action to take after finding that two workers at Prairie Island withheld records during an NRC review of an unplanned shutdown at the plant in 2001. The records showed plant officials had long known of a potential problem with a critical piece of safety equipment but did not rectify it. The NRC's concerns about maintenance and record-keeping echo complaints raised by workers in Xcel's non-nuclear operations. Company memos obtained by the Pioneer Press during the last few months show that, to reduce expenses, Xcel has eliminated all but emergency maintenance, has deferred repairs, has dropped plans to replace old equipment and has cut staff. Workers claim the cuts have led to a decline in service. The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission is investigating allegations that the company submitted fraudulent reliability data to the state. Minneapolis-based Xcel, which was formed by the 2000 merger of Northern States Power and Denver-based New Century Energies, faces money problems. It has cut dividend payments to shareholders in half. One of its unregulated subsidiaries, NRG Energy, is $10.2 billion in debt and on the verge of bankruptcy. Like other power companies, Xcel has suffered from reduced demand for energy because of the downturn in the economy. Utility regulators have expressed fears that industrywide financial pressures could prompt nuclear plant owners to cut corners — and safety. A 1996 report prepared for the NRC by the accounting firm Arthur Andersen warned that "the threat exists that nuclear utilities, in their desire to cut costs and increase competitiveness, will be forced to impair their operational safety and increase risk." Xcel would not provide anyone to be interviewed for this article. But an official with Nuclear Management Co. said its operations at the two plants haven't been affected by Xcel's financial troubles. INDUSTRY NEEDS PUBLIC TRUST The plants are safe, said the official, Michael D. Wadley, senior vice president of Nuclear Management Co., which is based in Hudson, Wis. "The one thing this industry has to have in the long run is public trust. There's no mandate to operate nuclear power plants in this country," said Wadley. "We exist because people find our operations safe and acceptable, and we provide a beneficial product to the community." Nuclear Management Co. was formed in 1999 by Northern States Power, and two of its top three executives — Wadley and CEO Michael B. Sellman — came from NSP. Nuclear Management Co. is the license-holder for the plants, but Xcel (which has a 20 percent stake in Nuclear Management Co.) maintains ownership of the facilities and the power they generate. Xcel also foots the bill for maintenance and improvements. Xcel, through its subsidiary NSP-Minnesota, provides electricity to 1.3 million customers in the state. Nearly 29 percent of the megawatts the company generates come from Monticello, which became operational in 1971, and the two reactors at Prairie Island, which entered service in 1973 and 1974. From a safety and reliability standpoint, Prairie Island and Monticello — or "P.I." and "Monti" as they are known within the companies — are considered about average, compared with other plants around the country. "There are clearly some much worse, and there are also some that are much better," said David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer who monitors atomic power issues for the Union of Concerned Scientists, an independent nonprofit group that originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Although the plants have passed NRC inspections, federal officials — and the nuclear industry's own evaluators — have noted a decline in maintenance, a failure to fix recurring problems, slow record-keeping and other key problems at the plants since the mid- to late-1990s. Xcel's Web site notes that in 1998, Prairie Island received its seventh consecutive "excellent" or "1" rating from the nuclear industry's internal evaluation group, the Institute of Nuclear Power Operators. Similarly, the Web site notes Monticello got its fifth consecutive 1 rating from INPO in 1997. Those are the last public mentions of either plant's INPO rating. The ratings, which are closely guarded industry secrets, have fallen at both plants, according to workers familiar with them who spoke only on the condition their names not be published. Each plant is now a "3" on the 5-point INPO scale, the workers said. INPO spokesman Terry Young, citing the confidentiality of the organization's work, declined to explain what a "3" rating means, other than to say each point on the scale represents "varying levels of proficiency." INPO was established by nuclear plant owners after the Three Mile Island accident. Its annual evaluations carry great weight because its standards are considered tougher than those of the NRC. Insurance companies use INPO evaluations to set a plant's rates. "INPO reports are not geared at seeing whether you're meeting regulatory minimums or not. They're judging you against a higher standard, against industry-best practices. If you're dropping away from industry-best standards, that's not a good sign," said Lochbaum. Lochbaum and Broadhurst, of the U's Williams Laboratory, examined NRC reports at the request of the Pioneer Press. Each said that while both atomic plants suffer from small and non-safety-related problems that would nag any large industrial facility, they were most concerned by the persistent problems noted at Monticello. "What made Monticello worse (than Prairie Island) was the recurring nature of some of their things," said Lochbaum, who worked in the nuclear industry for 17 years before joining the Union of Concerned Scientists. "That suggests that there's an unwillingness or inability to learn from mistakes because they keep getting repeated." CHECKING FOR PROBLEMS Nuclear plants are stunningly complex. They are metallic mazes of equipment, piping and wiring. Inspecting that complexity at a time of shrinking federal budgets led the NRC to change its reactor oversight process in 2000. The commission now places greater emphasis on plant operators identifying, reporting and fixing problems on their own. "The inspection program looks at activities with the highest safety significance," said Bruce Burgess, the NRC's branch chief responsible for inspections at Monticello. "That gives us some confidence — not complete confidence, but some confidence — that if they're doing the highly significant activities correctly, they're also doing it with the lower ones, as well." But NRC inspectors have expressed concerns that plant operators haven't focused on what might be considered "small issues." For example, last year the NRC reviewed Monticello's "corrective action" program to assess how well workers identified and resolved problems. The commission said it found "a number of weaknesses in the station's implementation and use of the corrective action program." The NRC noted that it had found the same problems in an earlier inspection. Wadley said that sometimes there is a lag between the NRC's requiring a change and the company's implementing the change. He said Nuclear Management Co. places an emphasis on small details since they can lead to bigger and more serious issues. "The focus is on the small issues. If you eradicate those, you stand a good chance of eliminating any event of any significance," he said. DEALING WITH PROBLEMS Once a corrective action is identified, plant operators are to complete work orders to fix the problem, then review the work to make sure it was done correctly. At Monticello, inspectors discovered that the process was fraught with lengthy delays. The NRC found "a significant number of work orders did not receive post-work reviews for more than one year after the work was completed." Similarly, the plant had backlogs of two other important types of documents: assessment of Actions to Correct Conditions, or ACCs, and Actions to Prevent Recurrence, or APRs. In its inspection a year ago, the NRC discovered 611 unresolved ACCs, some of which dated back to 1993. There were 408 unresolved APRs. Some of them dated to 1995. The NRC's Burgess said he couldn't tell whether those figures would be considered high. "We don't compare, as part of our process, across sites," he said. "But in my experience, they would not be considered unusual numbers." The NRC also had concerns about workers' performance, most notably after the October 2001 partial depressurization of the reactor. The reactor had "scrammed" or had an emergency shutdown the day before when a worker bumped a rack of instruments. Because the reactor shut down quickly, it was in what is known as a "hot" shutdown, in which the control rods are inserted into the reactor, which stops the fission. The crew working on the reactor had noted on their checklist that the pressure shouldn't be vented in a hot shutdown. But when the workers on the next shift arrived, they discussed it amongst themselves and concluded the first crew was in error about the depressurization step. They decided to use the procedures for a "cold" shutdown (in which the core has lost most of its heat) and began depressurizing the reactor. "The operators in the control room and the shift supervisor convinced themselves they should perform this step, even though this step didn't apply," said Burgess. "There's a heavy emphasis in the nuclear industry to follow your procedures, unless you've determined that following the procedures would put the reactor in an unsafe condition. Had they stepped back a little bit, they probably would not have done this." In its inspection report, the NRC said plant operators failed to recognize the gravity of the crew's mistake and failed to report it in a timely manner. Monticello officials finally filed a report on the human performance aspects, "but only after station management personnel had been contacted several times by NRC regional management to discuss the issue," the NRC said. "Following the event … personnel at all levels of the organization remained fixed on the low risk significance of the issue and the minimal actual plant impact, and did not recognize the potential condition adverse to quality related to the day shift crew's poor performance," inspectors wrote. The NRC found that the plant's checklist for shutdowns violated government requirements but told the company that it would not cite it for the violation. Xcel issued a statement Saturday saying it had been informed of the incident: "Xcel Energy officials reviewed the entire NRC report and noted that although some areas for improvement were identified, at no time was reactor safety jeopardized." While operators at Monticello were generally able to spot things that needed correcting, there were "weaknesses in the identification of specific issues and potentially adverse trends," the NRC said. The same issue arose at Prairie Island last year and led to a monthlong shutdown of one of the plant's reactors. The NRC found that operators had gone two years without noticing ongoing problems with the plant's emergency diesel generators, which are used to power the reactor's cooling system in certain emergencies. ONLINE The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's report is on the agency's Web site, www.nrc.gov [http://www.nrc.gov] . Find the "Nuclear Reactors" tab and click "Operating Reactors" in the drop-down menu. Then click "Oversight" (under the "How We Regulate" heading), then "Inspection Reports" (under "Recent Results"). Scroll down to Monticello and click on the fifth report, #2001016. David Hanners can be reached at dhanners@pioneerpress.com [dhanners@pioneerpress.com] or (651) 228-5551. ***************************************************************** 11 NMC vice president: Prairie Island complied with regulators /11/16/2002/* By Staff November 16, 2002 *Nuclear Management Co. took issue with a Friday newspaper report which stated that a supervisor at Prairie Island nuclear power plant deliberately withheld documents from federal inspectors. * Mike Wadley, senior vice president for NMC, which operates the plant for Xcel Energy, said the story by the St. Paul Pioneer Press and distributed through The Associated Press, misrepresents a U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission review of documents. "The NRC has made no final determination as to whether any violations have occurred or whether enforcement action is warranted," Wadley said. Contrary to the newspaper report, employees provided all requested documents within the timeframe established by the NRC, he said. The document cited in the newspaper was in an industry publication. The article appeared in the July 1996 issue of NMAC Lube Notes magazine and was titled "Diesel Engine Oils for Engines Burning Low-Sulfur Fuel." "We take seriously our obligation to be candid and provide complete and accurate information in all interactions with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. We believe we have done this to the best of our ability," Wadley said. He contended that newspaper account also mischaracterized the significance of the operational issues surrounding the diesel generators. In a letter to Prairie Island management dated Dec. 11, 2001, the NRC agreed with the NMC's assessment that the incident was of very low safety significance. Detailed information about NRC inspections of NMC's nuclear plants, including Prairie Island and Monticello in Minnesota, is available on the NRC web site: www.nrc.gov. /©Red Wing Republican Eagle 2002/ ***************************************************************** 12 Report: Nuke Plant Upkeep Criticized Las Vegas SUN November 16, 2002 ASSOCIATED PRESS MINNEAPOLIS- Inspections of two nuclear power plants in Minnesota revealed ongoing problems with maintenance, failure to identify potential problems and slow repairs, a newspaper reported. An examination of Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspection records by the St. Paul Pioneer Press also showed inadequate monitoring of critical safety equipment, poor communication among employees and problems in assessing risk factors at Xcel Energy's Monticello and Prairie Island plants. In one incident cited by the newspaper, workers at the Monticello plant were performing a "hot shutdown" of the reactor when they used the procedure for a "cold shutdown" instead, opening some valves and venting pressure from the cooling water that protects the reactor from a meltdown. Unless kept at the proper pressure, the water boils away and exposes the reactor's uranium fuel rods, which would then overheat. In the Oct. 24, 2001 case, the problem was discovered in about 15 minutes, workers closed the valves, the pressure stabilized and then climbed. The NRC said the plant's operators downplayed the incident and failed to report it in a timely manner. The incident involved some of the same elements as the accident at Three Mile Island in 1979 and the Chernobyl explosion in 1986, nuclear experts told the newspaper in the report for its Sunday editions. However, Michael Wadley, senior vice president of Nuclear Management Co., the Hudson, Wis.-based company set up by Xcel to run the plants, said the NRC didn't follow up on the event because of the low safety significance of the issue. Xcel also said it reviewed the NRC report and noted that, although some areas for improvement were identified, at no time was reactor safety jeopardized. No one claims the plants are unsafe. From a reliability standpoint, the two plants are considered about average among the country's nuclear plants. "There are clearly some much worse, and there are also some that are much better," said David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer who monitors atomic power issues for the Union of Concerned Scientists, an independent nonprofit group. All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 13 Spano's Indian Point plan would boost utility's power THE JOURNAL NEWS: A Gannett Suburban webpaper By ROGER WITHERSPOON THE JOURNAL NEWS (Original publication: November 17, 2002) In 1995 Ciba Specialty Chemicals Inc. had outgrown its Ardsley research facilities and was looking at new sites for its 500-employee operation — most of them outside Westchester County. But the company settled on a property in Tarrytown because it found an offer of unlimited, cheap electricity from the County of Westchester Public Utility Service Agency to be irresistible. "The power contract offers us a significant discount and was a factor in us remaining in Westchester County," said Ciba spokesman Kevin Bryla. "Cost competitiveness is always an issue when you are looking to settle in a new location, and that certainly was a component in our decision. "It's a good program." Ciba is one of dozens of companies that receive low-cost electricity from the quiet, little-known COWPUSA, a county-owned electric power distributor. For nearly 20 years, the agency has purchased low-cost, hydroelectric power from the New York Power Authority and sold it over Consolidated Edison's power lines to large businesses that locate or remain in the county. In years when there is a lot of rain upstate and NYPA's hydroelectric dams produce more power than usual, the county agency also buys hundreds of megawatts of cheap power and sells it to Con Edison, which in turn gives rebates to Westchester residents. "We save our customers a couple of million dollars a year," said county Legislator Martin Rogowsky, D-Harrison, a former agency chairman. "And when there is extra hydroelectric power available, we buy that and sell it to Con Ed. Residents will see a 25 cent or 50 cent utility adjustment credit on their bills as a result. That doesn't seem like a lot to an individual, but when you consider how many people get that credit, you see we're saving residents millions of dollars." County Executive Andrew Spano is now proposing that the municipal utility come out of obscurity and take over both Con Edison's Westchester power distribution system and the Indian Point nuclear power plants in Buchanan. The agency would shut down the plants and, with potential partners such as NYPA, build a gas-powered plant at Indian Point to provide replacement energy. Spano wants to spend up to $500,000 for a feasibility study of the project, which would require voter approval to finance. Taking over an electric transmission system valued at $1.23 billion and providing 2,000 megawatts of electricity — the maximum output from Indian Point — would be a lot to ask of an agency with a part-time director, part-time consultant and part-time secretary, who essentially run a paper power company that sells 10 megawatts of electricity worth about $400,000 annually. The agency has an annual operating budget of about $100,000, but pays for itself from the money it generates selling electricity. "We have virtually no staff," said agency Chairman Tom Geiger. "Basically ours is just a pass-through operation. We buy power from NYPA and sell it with a 3 percent markup to cover administrative costs. We pay a small distribution fee to Con Ed for the transmission to our customers." COWPUSA grew quietly out of a failed effort 25 years ago to create a powerful, county-owned public utility responsible for providing electricity to all county residents and businesses. If Spano's proposal for Indian Point is to be successful, voters would have to approve a more ambitious version of a hotly contested utility plan they rejected in 1979. The first incarnation of a county-owned public utility was pushed by state Assemblymen Richard Brodsky, D-Greenburgh, and Ronald Tocci, D-New Rochelle, who were both county legislators at the time. "We raised the issue 25 years ago because of the high prices being charged to Westchester County residents by Con Edison," Brodsky said. "Our concept was the agency should condemn the stock of Con Ed, since it wasn't worth much then." Con Edison was facing bankruptcy in the mid-1970s because of mounting problems with Indian Point 1, which had permanently shut down, and Indian Point 2, which was constantly breaking down. The company also was losing more money on the construction of Indian Point 3. Its stock had plummeted to $1.87 by the end of 1974, according to company records. The state decided to finance a bailout of Con Edison by having NYPA purchase Indian Point 3 and provide electricity to government agencies in Westchester and New York City. NYPA, a state agency that produces a quarter of the electricity used in New York, sells only to government agencies. Then, as now, Con Ed's electric rates were among the highest in the nation. "The stock was so low," Brodsky said, "that they paid more for Indian Point 3 than the entire company was worth if they had picked up every single share of Con Edison stock. We wanted them to condemn the stock, buy it and own all the assets. We viewed that as a mechanism to get cheap electric power for the region both from the company's plants, and from NYPA. It was the same process the state used 100 years earlier to take over the Brooklyn Bridge from its private owners." The proposal to establish a public utility with condemnation powers failed, but the county still sought a way to obtain lower-cost electricity. COWPUSA was the result — a public utility that can buy and sell electricity, but lacks the power to condemn property or float bonds to purchase or build its own power plants. Rogowsky said the agency has more than $300,000 in cash saved from its pass-through operations that would be used to help fund Spano's feasibility study. In addition, the agency has been authorized to deliver up to 20 megawatts of electricity — though it has yet to start doing so — and may seek the operating license of a 600-megawatt, hydroelectric dam in Messina, N.Y., that is up for renewal in 2004. "You have a stronger case for owning a power plant if you own your own distribution lines," Rogowsky said. "If you don't own the lines, you can just get a piece of their low-cost electricity. That's the reason for pushing forward." Send e-mail to Roger Witherspoon [rwithers@thejournalnews.com] Home [http://www.thejournalnews.com] -News Copyright 2002 The Journal News, a Gannett Co Rockland and Putnam Counties in New York. ***************************************************************** 14 Regulators say Monticello nuclear plant managers downplayed errors [startribune.com] Associated Press Published Nov. 17, 2002 XCEL17 Inspections by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission at Xcel Energy's Monticello and Prairie Island nuclear power plants over the past two years show that they have continuing problems with maintenance, fail to identify potential problems and are slow to make repairs, according to a newspaper report. An examination of the commission's inspection records by the St. Paul Pioneer Press also showed inadequate monitoring of critical safety equipment, poor communication among employees and problems in assessing risk factors. In one incident cited by the newspaper, workers at the Monticello plant were performing a "hot shutdown" of the reactor when they used the procedure for a "cold shutdown" instead, opening some valves and venting pressure from the cooling water that protects the reactor from a meltdown. Unless kept at the proper pressure, the water boils away and exposes the reactor's uranium fuel rods, which would then overheat. In the incident, which occurred on Oct. 24, 2001, the problem was discovered in about 15 minutes. Workers closed the valves, and the pressure stabilized and then climbed. The commission said the plant's operators downplayed the incident and failed to report it in a timely manner. The incident involved some of the same elements as the accident at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania in 1979 and the Chernobyl explosion in Ukraine in 1986, nuclear experts told the newspaper. However, Michael Wadley, senior vice president of Nuclear Management Co. of Hudson, Wis., the company set up by Xcel to run the plants, said the commission didn't follow up on the event because of its low safety significance. No danger, Xcel says Xcel also said it reviewed the report and noted that, although some areas for improvement were identified, at no time was reactor safety jeopardized. No one claims that the two plants are unsafe. From a reliability standpoint, they are considered about average among the nation's nuclear plants, an expert said. "There are clearly some much worse, and there are also some that are much better," said David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer who monitors atomic power issues for the Union of Concerned Scientists, an independent nonprofit group that originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The plants are safe, Wadley said, noting that the commission has given them its highest performance rating. "The one thing this industry has to have in the long run is public trust. There's no mandate to operate nuclear power plants in this country," Wadley said. "We exist because people find our operations safe and acceptable, and we provide a beneficial product to the community." Both plants have passed commission inspections, but federal officials say there has been a decline in maintenance, a failure to fix recurring problems and slow recordkeeping at them since the mid-to late 1990s. According to Xcel's Web site, the Prairie Island plant received its seventh consecutive "excellent" or "1" rating from the nuclear industry's internal evaluation group, the Institute of Nuclear Power Operators, in 1998. The Web site says Monticello got its fifth consecutive "1" rating from the institute in 1997. Those are the last public mentions of either plant's rating, but workers told the Pioneer Press that each plant now has a "3" rating on the 5-point institute scale. The institute was established by nuclear plant owners after the Three Mile Island accident, and its ratings are used by insurance companies to set a plant's insurance rates. NRC: Small issues Regulatory Commission inspectors have expressed concerns that operators of the two plants haven't focused on what might be considered "small issues," the newspaper said. In a review last year of how well workers at Monticello identified and resolved problems, the commission said it found "a number of weaknesses in the station's implementation and use of the corrective action program." The commission noted that the same problems were found in an earlier inspection. Wadley acknowledged that there sometimes is a lag between the commission"s requiring a change and the company's implementing it. But he said Nuclear Management places an emphasis on small details, since they can lead to bigger and more serious problems. In its review, the commission found "a significant number of work orders did not receive post-work reviews for more than one year after the work had been completed." In its inspection a year ago at Monticello, the commission discovered 611 unresolved "actions to correct conditions," some of which dated back to 1993. There were 408 unresolved "actions to prevent recurrence," some dating back to 1995, the commission said. Copyright 2002 Star Tribune. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 15 D-B officials mull reactor head leak detection system - portclintonnewsherald.com Saturday, November 16, 2002 Nuclear power industry By JENNIFER FUNK Staff writer CARROLL TOWNSHIP -- FirstEnergy officials announced at a recent meeting they are looking into a leak detection system to install on the reactor head at Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station. That system, however, will do little good without skeptical minds behind it, say Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials. The equipment being investigated by FirstEnergy would confirm evidence of what's called pressure boundary leakage -- or leakage from the walls of the reactor head. "I think panel members agreed the key change has to be not in technology, but in creating a more safety-conscious environment," said NRC spokeswoman Viktoria Mitlyng, referring to the NRC panel that is overseeing Davis-Besse's progress. "They need to encourage workers to take a deeper look at problems and look at causes, rather than rush through quick fixes." The system wouldn't have helped in the utility's current situation, which was caused by leakage from a nozzle on top of the reactor head. The plant has been off-line since February because of the leakage, which ate away a football-sized hole in the head's steel. In that instance, workers at Davis-Besse were well aware there was leakage, they just didn't know where it was coming from. And according to NRC regulations, a certain amount of leakage is allowed if the source is not identified. "Without taking that kind of in-depth look, they wouldn't have be able to discover the leakage and degradation, even with this system in place," Mitlyng confirmed. And FirstEnergy officials have admitted, too, that safety was not top priority at the plant, and they are trying to take drastic steps to change policies to encourage an improved safety culture. That being said, both NRC and FirstEnergy officials think the equipment could be a benefit in detecting future leaks. "We're kind of in the investigation stage, although we've pretty much decided to install that," said company spokesman Richard Wilkins, who added installation likely won't occur until late 2003 or early 2004. A price tag is yet unknown, although Wilkins said it wouldn't push the company over the $400 million it estimates the current outage will cost. "There are some plants in Europe and Canada that have this system, but there are none in the United States that have it," he said. "We would be the first ones in the country that would do that." Originally published Saturday, November 16, 2002 [http://www.gannettfoundation.org] ***************************************************************** 16 Boric acid (at Davis-Besse) leak topic of meeting - portclintonnewsherald.com Saturday, November 16, 2002 FirstEnergy officials will meet with members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Nov. 26 at the agency's Rockville, Md. headquarters. The utility is expected to talk about boric acid found at the bottom of the reactor head at Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station. Tests have been inconclusive about where the substance is coming from. Also, the two sides will talk about a new leak detection system FirstEnergy officials are considering for the Davis-Besse, as well as modifications being made to one of the emergency back-up systems. Originally published Saturday, November 16, 2002 Copyright ©2002 News Herald. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 17 Xcel nuclear lapses recurrent, feds say Monticello, Prairie Island plants not unsafe, though Pioneer Press | 11/17/2002 | [pioneerpress.com - The pioneerpress home page] BY DAVID HANNERS Pioneer Press [Prairie Island is located along the banks of the Mississippi River near Red Wing. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently found that operators had gone two years without noticing problems with the plant’s emergency diesel generators.] Jim Gehrz, Pioneer Press Prairie Island is located along the banks of the Mississippi River near Red Wing. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently found that operators had gone two years without noticing problems with the plants emergency diesel generators. On the morning of Oct. 24, 2001, workers at Xcel Energy's Monticello nuclear power plant, 40 miles northwest of the Twin Cities, were performing a "hot shutdown" of the reactor when they disregarded a previous crew's instructions, opened some valves and vented pressure from the cooling water that protects the reactor from a meltdown. Unless kept at the proper pressure, the water boils away and exposes the reactor's uranium fuel rods, which would then overheat. By venting the pressure, the workers were, in the words of one expert, "on their way to the Three Mile Island accident." After about 15 minutes — and after the cooling system had lost nearly 20 percent of its pressure — the workers realized the previous crew had been right. They quickly closed the valves, and the pressure stabilized and then climbed. An NRC inspection team later said management didn't take the problem seriously enough and found the plant had violated NRC requirements, a pattern detected in government reviews of Xcel's two nuclear power plants. The plants are managed by Nuclear Management Co., a company founded and partially owned by Xcel. The NRC complained that the plant's operators underestimated the significance of the event and was slow to document it with the necessary report, even though it had "an actual and credible impact on plant safety." Monticello's operators "did not recognize the potential condition," the NRC said. Indeed, the incident involved some of the same acts that led to the accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986, nuclear experts said. No one claims Monticello or Xcel's other atomic plant, Prairie Island, are unsafe; they're in the "middle of the pack," in the words of one industry expert. An official with Nuclear Management Co. says the plants are safe and note that they have passed every federal inspection. But NRC routine and special inspections over the past couple of years have turned up recurring problems. Those shortcomings include ongoing problems with maintenance; a failure to identify potential problems; a slowness to make repairs; inadequate monitoring of critical safety equipment; bad communication; and problems in assessing risk factors. "These are not things that cost a million dollars to fix; they are things that cost thousands of dollars to fix. So why haven't they been fixed? Management hasn't gotten around to it. Why don't they bother fixing the minor problems, because the minor problems will add up?" said John Broadhurst, a University of Minnesota physics professor who directed the school's Williams Laboratory for Nuclear Physics. The Pioneer Press reported Friday that the NRC currently is deciding what enforcement action to take after finding that two workers at Prairie Island withheld records during an NRC review of an unplanned shutdown at the plant in 2001. The records showed plant officials had long known of a potential problem with a critical piece of safety equipment but did not rectify it. The NRC's concerns about maintenance and record-keeping echo complaints raised by workers in Xcel's non-nuclear operations. Company memos obtained by the Pioneer Press during the last few months show that, to reduce expenses, Xcel has eliminated all but emergency maintenance, has deferred repairs, has dropped plans to replace old equipment and has cut staff. Workers claim the cuts have led to a decline in service. The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission is investigating allegations that the company submitted fraudulent reliability data to the state. Minneapolis-based Xcel, which was formed by the 2000 merger of Northern States Power and Denver-based New Century Energies, faces money problems. It has cut dividend payments to shareholders in half. One of its unregulated subsidiaries, NRG Energy, is $10.2 billion in debt and on the verge of bankruptcy. Like other power companies, Xcel has suffered from reduced demand for energy because of the downturn in the economy. Utility regulators have expressed fears that industrywide financial pressures could prompt nuclear plant owners to cut corners — and safety. A 1996 report prepared for the NRC by the accounting firm Arthur Andersen warned that "the threat exists that nuclear utilities, in their desire to cut costs and increase competitiveness, will be forced to impair their operational safety and increase risk." Xcel would not provide anyone to be interviewed for this article. But an official with Nuclear Management Co. said its operations at the two plants haven't been affected by Xcel's financial troubles. INDUSTRY NEEDS PUBLIC TRUST The plants are safe, said the official, Michael D. Wadley, senior vice president of Nuclear Management Co., which is based in Hudson, Wis. "The one thing this industry has to have in the long run is public trust. There's no mandate to operate nuclear power plants in this country," said Wadley. "We exist because people find our operations safe and acceptable, and we provide a beneficial product to the community." Nuclear Management Co. was formed in 1999 by Northern States Power, and two of its top three executives — Wadley and CEO Michael B. Sellman — came from NSP. Nuclear Management Co. is the license-holder for the plants, but Xcel (which has a 20 percent stake in Nuclear Management Co.) maintains ownership of the facilities and the power they generate. Xcel also foots the bill for maintenance and improvements. Xcel, through its subsidiary NSP-Minnesota, provides electricity to 1.3 million customers in the state. Nearly 29 percent of the megawatts the company generates come from Monticello, which became operational in 1971, and the two reactors at Prairie Island, which entered service in 1973 and 1974. From a safety and reliability standpoint, Prairie Island and Monticello — or "P.I." and "Monti" as they are known within the companies — are considered about average, compared with other plants around the country. "There are clearly some much worse, and there are also some that are much better," said David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer who monitors atomic power issues for the Union of Concerned Scientists, an independent nonprofit group that originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Although the plants have passed NRC inspections, federal officials — and the nuclear industry's own evaluators — have noted a decline in maintenance, a failure to fix recurring problems, slow record-keeping and other key problems at the plants since the mid- to late-1990s. Xcel's Web site notes that in 1998, Prairie Island received its seventh consecutive "excellent" or "1" rating from the nuclear industry's internal evaluation group, the Institute of Nuclear Power Operators. Similarly, the Web site notes Monticello got its fifth consecutive 1 rating from INPO in 1997. Those are the last public mentions of either plant's INPO rating. The ratings, which are closely guarded industry secrets, have fallen at both plants, according to workers familiar with them who spoke only on the condition their names not be published. Each plant is now a "3" on the 5-point INPO scale, the workers said. INPO spokesman Terry Young, citing the confidentiality of the organization's work, declined to explain what a "3" rating means, other than to say each point on the scale represents "varying levels of proficiency." INPO was established by nuclear plant owners after the Three Mile Island accident. Its annual evaluations carry great weight because its standards are considered tougher than those of the NRC. Insurance companies use INPO evaluations to set a plant's rates. "INPO reports are not geared at seeing whether you're meeting regulatory minimums or not. They're judging you against a higher standard, against industry-best practices. If you're dropping away from industry-best standards, that's not a good sign," said Lochbaum. Lochbaum and Broadhurst, of the U's Williams Laboratory, examined NRC reports at the request of the Pioneer Press. Each said that while both atomic plants suffer from small and non-safety-related problems that would nag any large industrial facility, they were most concerned by the persistent problems noted at Monticello. "What made Monticello worse (than Prairie Island) was the recurring nature of some of their things," said Lochbaum, who worked in the nuclear industry for 17 years before joining the Union of Concerned Scientists. "That suggests that there's an unwillingness or inability to learn from mistakes because they keep getting repeated." CHECKING FOR PROBLEMS Nuclear plants are stunningly complex. They are metallic mazes of equipment, piping and wiring. Inspecting that complexity at a time of shrinking federal budgets led the NRC to change its reactor oversight process in 2000. The commission now places greater emphasis on plant operators identifying, reporting and fixing problems on their own. "The inspection program looks at activities with the highest safety significance," said Bruce Burgess, the NRC's branch chief responsible for inspections at Monticello. "That gives us some confidence — not complete confidence, but some confidence — that if they're doing the highly significant activities correctly, they're also doing it with the lower ones, as well." But NRC inspectors have expressed concerns that plant operators haven't focused on what might be considered "small issues." For example, last year the NRC reviewed Monticello's "corrective action" program to assess how well workers identified and resolved problems. The commission said it found "a number of weaknesses in the station's implementation and use of the corrective action program." The NRC noted that it had found the same problems in an earlier inspection. Wadley said that sometimes there is a lag between the NRC's requiring a change and the company's implementing the change. He said Nuclear Management Co. places an emphasis on small details since they can lead to bigger and more serious issues. "The focus is on the small issues. If you eradicate those, you stand a good chance of eliminating any event of any significance," he said. DEALING WITH PROBLEMS Once a corrective action is identified, plant operators are to complete work orders to fix the problem, then review the work to make sure it was done correctly. At Monticello, inspectors discovered that the process was fraught with lengthy delays. The NRC found "a significant number of work orders did not receive post-work reviews for more than one year after the work was completed." Similarly, the plant had backlogs of two other important types of documents: assessment of Actions to Correct Conditions, or ACCs, and Actions to Prevent Recurrence, or APRs. In its inspection a year ago, the NRC discovered 611 unresolved ACCs, some of which dated back to 1993. There were 408 unresolved APRs. Some of them dated to 1995. The NRC's Burgess said he couldn't tell whether those figures would be considered high. "We don't compare, as part of our process, across sites," he said. "But in my experience, they would not be considered unusual numbers." The NRC also had concerns about workers' performance, most notably after the October 2001 partial depressurization of the reactor. The reactor had "scrammed" or had an emergency shutdown the day before when a worker bumped a rack of instruments. Because the reactor shut down quickly, it was in what is known as a "hot" shutdown, in which the control rods are inserted into the reactor, which stops the fission. The crew working on the reactor had noted on their checklist that the pressure shouldn't be vented in a hot shutdown. But when the workers on the next shift arrived, they discussed it amongst themselves and concluded the first crew was in error about the depressurization step. They decided to use the procedures for a "cold" shutdown (in which the core has lost most of its heat) and began depressurizing the reactor. "The operators in the control room and the shift supervisor convinced themselves they should perform this step, even though this step didn't apply," said Burgess. "There's a heavy emphasis in the nuclear industry to follow your procedures, unless you've determined that following the procedures would put the reactor in an unsafe condition. Had they stepped back a little bit, they probably would not have done this." In its inspection report, the NRC said plant operators failed to recognize the gravity of the crew's mistake and failed to report it in a timely manner. Monticello officials finally filed a report on the human performance aspects, "but only after station management personnel had been contacted several times by NRC regional management to discuss the issue," the NRC said. "Following the event … personnel at all levels of the organization remained fixed on the low risk significance of the issue and the minimal actual plant impact, and did not recognize the potential condition adverse to quality related to the day shift crew's poor performance," inspectors wrote. The NRC found that the plant's checklist for shutdowns violated government requirements but told the company that it would not cite it for the violation. Xcel issued a statement Saturday saying it had been informed of the incident: "Xcel Energy officials reviewed the entire NRC report and noted that although some areas for improvement were identified, at no time was reactor safety jeopardized." While operators at Monticello were generally able to spot things that needed correcting, there were "weaknesses in the identification of specific issues and potentially adverse trends," the NRC said. The same issue arose at Prairie Island last year and led to a monthlong shutdown of one of the plant's reactors. The NRC found that operators had gone two years without noticing ongoing problems with the plant's emergency diesel generators, which are used to power the reactor's cooling system in certain emergencies. ONLINE The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's report is on the agency's Web site, www.nrc.gov [http://www.nrc.gov] . Find the "Nuclear Reactors" tab and click "Operating Reactors" in the drop-down menu. Then click "Oversight" (under the "How We Regulate" heading), then "Inspection Reports" (under "Recent Results"). Scroll down to Monticello and click on the fifth report, #2001016. David Hanners can be reached at dhanners@pioneerpress.com [dhanners@pioneerpress.com] or (651) 228-5551. ***************************************************************** 18 Exposing the nation to radiation sickness Date: Sun, 17 Nov 2002 12:48:19 -0600 (CST) http://uk.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=46824&group=webcast Exposing the nation to radiation sickness by Steve Sternberg 10:27am Sun Nov 17 '02 On July 18, 1947, doctors at the University of California at San Francisco drew a bull's-eye on Elmer Allen's left calf and injected radioactive plutonium into the center of the circle. Three days later, Allen's leg was amputated and sent for "radiological" study. Allen, a Pullman porter before he was hobbled by the loss of his leg, was one of 18 people injected with plutonium in government-financed experiments between 1945 and 1947. Manhattan Project doctors authorized the experiments to determine how exposure to plutonium might affect lab workers. The Plutonium Files By Eileen Welsome The Dial Press, 580 pp That research marked the start of one of the darkest chapters in American medicine, an uncontrolled and irresponsible plunge into radiation physiology that eventually would touch the entire population of the nation. In The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Eileen Welsome unveils the full story behind those chilling experiments and others (including open-air nuclear tests in Nevada) affecting millions of Americans. Welsome's first reports on the experiments appeared in 1993 in the Albuquerque Tribune. Her series prompted the Clinton administration to establish a presidential investigative committee and declassify a trove of documents. Drawing on those resources and her own relentless reporting, Welsome exposes a half-century of deceit and abuse of American citizens, carried on in the name of science. In the process, she reveals herself as a deft and able storyteller. She describes decades of unethical experiments at hospitals and clinics around the country, funded by the government and run by prominent doctors who often shielded the true nature of their work from the public, their colleagues and their patients. The scope of the shadowy research program is chilling, as is the scientists' disregard for how the experiments would affect their unwitting subjects. (Elmer Allen died of old age in 1991, 44 years after his experiment.) Cancer patients were exposed to total body irradiation under the guise of treatment. Pregnant women seeking prenatal care at the Vanderbilt University Hospital Prenatal Clinic in Nashville were told to drink fruit juice "cocktails" laced with radioactive iron. EXCERPT The oatmeal was scooped out of square metal pans into the boys' bowls. Then the milk, foamy and cold, was poured over the cereal. Sometimes the radioactive isotopes were mixed into the cereal and sometimes they were mixed into the milk. The scientists had impressed upon the attendants how important it was that the boys clean their bowls. "You had to drink the milk. That was the thing," Gordon remembered. Boys at the Fernald State School in Waltham, Mass., a facility for retarded children and orphans, were inducted into a "Science Club" and encouraged to eat radioactive oatmeal. The club, Welsome notes, was the brainchild of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who needed subjects for their research. In return, the boys got trips to the beach and ballgames. Many of the individual stories are heartbreaking. Consider the plight of Simeon "Simmy" Shaw, a 4-year-old Australian with fatal bone cancer. A U.S. Army mercy flight brought Simmy and his mother to the USA in April 1946 so that doctors at the University of California at San Francisco could treat the boy and perhaps save his life. Instead, doctors injected him with plutonium. With consent from Simmy's mother, surgeons then removed bits of bone, muscle and other tissues for lab analysis. Simmy's mother consented because she believed the doctors were genuinely trying to cure her son. They were not. They knew Simmy's cancer was terminal. Once the doctors had the specimens they needed for their research, Welsome reports, mother and son were abandoned and forgotten. Then there were massive military exercises built around atomic bomb shots, to determine whether military personnel could function on a "nuclear battlefield." Thousands more troops were exposed to radiation from bomb blasts at Bikini Atoll. Sailors labored unprotected for weeks, clearing radioactive debris from a ghost fleet anchored at ground zero. In 1947, as the experiments were unfolding, Nuremberg prosecutors were completing the trial of Nazi doctors who had used concentration camp prisoners in grotesque experiments. At the trial's end, prosecutor James McHaney summed up: "It is the most fundamental tenet of medical ethics and human decency that the subjects volunteer for the experiment after being informed of its nature and hazards. This is the clear dividing line between the criminal and the non-criminal." Clinical researchers in the USA routinely ignored the lessons of Nuremberg, doctors would later testify before the Clinton advisory panel on human radiation experiments. Terminally ill patients were particularly vulnerable, but women, children, unborn fetuses, minorities, the mentally retarded, the mentally ill, prisoners, alcoholics, and poor people of all ages and ethnic groups were victimized by unethical experimenters. By the time the full story emerged, most of the doctors involved had died and were beyond punishment. The Clinton task force's conclusions, in Welsome's estimation, were "timid," though she praises the president for his forceful apology on behalf of the government. Welsome has written an important and powerful book. Incredibly, it's all true. ***************************************************************** 19 Activist pushing for government reparations for nuclear pollution* November 16, 2002 *Like many folks in this tiny borough, Patricia Ameno's dad never thought much about the nuclear fuel plant across the road from his home. It had been there for decades, and he didn't get curious until the late 1980s, a few years after the company made headlines by saying it wanted to incinerate nuclear waste.* John Ameno Sr.'s interest was infectious, and his daughter Patty, though she was no longer living at home, started asking questions. Three million documents, two brain tumors and a multimillion-dollar lawsuit later, Patty Ameno is still at it, pushing for $1.5 billion in government reparations to compensate the residents of Apollo _ population 1,765 _ and a dozen other communities in the area about 35 miles northeast of Pittsburgh for what she says they have gone through. She says the plants, which closed in the late 1980s, caused cancer rates to jump in what is known as the Kiski Valley and too little has been done about it. "They think this whole valley is expendable," said the 51-year-old Ameno. Personally, she's had her own problems. Surgery from her first brain tumor, five years ago, left her deaf in one ear. She's mulling treatment options for a second brain tumor, as well as two growths on her breast, and has had a cervical tumor, too. "I won't take any radiation _ I've already had my dose," Ameno said. She blames the time she spent growing up near the plant for her sicknesses and those of her friends and neighbors. The question of whether two fuel plants and a nearby waste dump affected people's health has even moved into Congress, courtesy of Ameno, who has lobbied Rep. John Murtha to push for hearings into whether the Nuclear Regulatory Commission did its job monitoring the sites. Murtha has already gotten the Army Corps of Engineers to take over cleanup of the waste dump and one of the defunct fuel plants _ a plutonium processing facility in nearby Parks Township _ saying the NRC wasn't moving quickly enough. NRC officials won't comment on Murtha's call for oversight but say they did things by the book and that the site of the razed Apollo plant has been safe since 1997, when several years of cleanup ended. It was in 1957 that Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corp., or NUMEC, began doing business in and around Apollo, producing fuel for nuclear submarines and other purposes. After activists like Ameno started asking questions, they found experts who agreed residents might be suffering the effects of radioactive smokestack emissions, unreported nuclear accidents and improperly dumped waste. Those hazards were documented in government files obtained by Ameno or the local newspaper, The Valley News Dispatch in Tarentum, which published a yearlong investigation into the matter this fall. According to Stephen Schwartz, publisher of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, environmental, health and safety problems at nuclear plants first became an issue in the late 1980s, but only at bigger facilities. "It remains to be seen how many of the smaller facilities (like NUMEC) exhibit these type of problems, but there were hundreds of them in the Cold War," Schwartz said. Schwartz and Dr. Arjun Makhijani, president of the nonprofit Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, say the NRC was created in the 1970s to correct the lax regulatory legacy of the Atomic Energy Commission but failed. "You have an agency with a conflicting mission," Schwartz said. "On the one hand, you're supposed to regulate the industry, and on the other hand, you're supposed to promote it." For Patty Ameno, the fight has been a long one. In 1994, she spearheaded a federal lawsuit on behalf of some 200 people with wrongful death or personal injury claims, and 100 more claiming property damage. Four years later, eight test plaintiffs (Ameno was not among them) were awarded $36.7 million against Atlantic Richfield Co, which bought out NUMEC in 1967, and Babcock & Wilcox Inc., which operated the plants after Atlantic Richfield sold them in 1971. During the trial, a doctor said 351 of Apollo's then-1,895 residents, or nearly one-in-five, had been diagnosed with some form of cancer. Company attorneys maintained radioactive emissions had been filtered out and that even if residents had been exposed, radiation levels were too low to cause cancer or other illnesses. The verdict was never paid, with the judge ordering a retrial after deciding she had wrongly allowed some evidence. The retrial has been delayed, in part because Babcock & Wilcox filed for bankruptcy after paying a multimillion-dollar settlement on separate punitive damage claims, said Fred Baron, the Texas attorney who represents Ameno and the others. Baron said he hopes settlement talks soon bear fruit. Meanwhile, Ameno wants the government to rebuild the local economy, saying it has been damaged by pollution concerns, and to pay to monitor residents' health. Some residents, though, see Ameno as the problem. Jerry Gorelli has operated Veado's restaurant in Apollo since 1965. Unbeknownst to him, radioactive dirt had been piled next to it for years. But he's more concerned about Patty. "She just never quits," he said. "My biggest concern is what the people's image of the place is." Ameno's dad died in 1999 at age 83, not of the prostate cancer she said he had but of a stroke. He left Patty the house and the family delicatessen next door that he closed in 1996 because he felt guilty about inviting customers onto property he feared was dangerously polluted. "That's where I grew up. I'm just waiting for the settlement and then I'm tearing it down," she said. "I'm gonna blacktop it. I don't want to take the chance that anyone's kids will play in that dirt." /©NEPA News 2002/ ***************************************************************** 20 Those near base fear plan to end testing of water Those near base fear plan to end testing of water [http://www.indystar.com/index.html] What is depleted uranium? Depleted uranium is a byproduct of the process by which uranium is enriched to produce reactor fuel and nuclear weapons components. A dense metal, depleted uranium has been used for manufacturing armor plates and munitions. It can be chemically and radiologically toxic. Source: World Health Organization Army says pollution at ex-test-firing range doesn't appear to be moving from the site. By Tammy Webber tammy.webber@indystar.com [tammy.webber@indystar.com] November 17, 2002 Big Creek flows through a former military test-firing range riddled with unexploded shells and more than 150,000 pounds of depleted uranium -- an area so dangerous the Army plans to fence it off forever rather than attempt to clean it up. But what really worries residents near the 55,000-acre Jefferson Proving Ground in southeastern Indiana is an Army plan made public last week to stop monitoring the creek and groundwater for depleted uranium contamination. "We have no assurance that stuff won't wash down through here over time," said Robert Rosenthal, who lives along Big Creek less than two miles from the site. "At the very least, there ought to be long-term monitoring downstream of the site. Many of us have wells within a stone's throw of the creek." Jefferson Proving Ground is one of at least nine Indiana military installations contaminated over the years by everything from explosives and heavy metals to polychlorinated biphenyls, known as PCBs, and petroleum. All of them, including a portion of the proving grounds, have undergone either full or partial environmental cleanups. Besides the proving grounds, the most highly polluted sites are the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Crane and the Indiana Army Ammunition Plant in Charlestown, environment officials said. But only the proving ground -- which straddles Jefferson, Jennings and Ripley counties -- includes areas deemed too polluted and expensive to clean up. The Army, which stopped firing depleted-uranium rounds eight years ago, wants the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to terminate the Army's license to possess the radioactive metal at that site; if that happens, monitoring would no longer be required, said Claudia Craig, chief of the NRC facilities decommissioning section. "We would not terminate the license unless we thought no environmental monitoring was needed," Craig said. Army officials have said the pollution is relatively low -- though there are some hot spots -- and doesn't appear to be moving from the 1,200-acre firing range. But some residents aren't convinced it will stay that way. A group plans to seek a hearing before an NRC administrative law judge, said Richard Harris, president of Save the Valley, a southeast Indiana environmental group and a member of the restoration advisory board established to recommend uses for the base. "We think they should monitor it longer because it's going to lay there forever," Harris said. Steve Taylor, national organizer of the Maine-based Military Toxics Project, a national nonprofit network of community organizations on military environmental pollution, agreed. "They're not the ones who have to live there," he said of the Army. "There is an incredible history of environmental hazards that communities were told would be safe turning out not to be safe." Army officials could not be reached to comment on the plan. Although groundwater contamination has been detected at many Indiana military sites, no contamination has been found off-site, said Bruce Palin, deputy assistant commissioner of the Indiana Department of Environmental Management's office of land quality. "Our first priority is to prevent any migration off site," he said. "But these sites are so large, the (contamination) is within the boundaries." There is some concern that heavy metals were washed into the Ohio River from the closed 10,649-acre Charlestown plant, said Doug Griffin, the state's project manager. Most of the contamination -- nitric acid, lead, mercury and explosives -- was captured in a series of basins leading to the Ohio River. Cleanup plans are being finalized for three of the basins and still are being discussed for the two most polluted basins, closest to the river, Griffin said. That facility, like most that were closed, eventually will be turned over to the state or private residents for redevelopment as recreational, commercial or industrial areas. Cleanup of buried mustard gas, dyes and explosives has been completed at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Crane, which is still operating and where munitions are being destroyed, Griffin said. PCB contamination still must be cleaned, and ground water may have to be cleaned. The Department of Defense plans to clean up closed bases by 2005 and the most polluted active bases by 2007; all sites should be clean by 2014, said John Paul Woodley Jr., assistant deputy undersecretary of the environment. Aside from concerns about environmental testing for depleted uranium at the Jefferson Proving Grounds, environmentalists generally have few complaints about the pace of targeted cleanups, said Paul F. Walker, directory of the legacy program for Global Green USA, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit group that addresses post-Cold War environmental issues. Griffin said cleanup of military installations is fairly straightforward. "There is no polluted groundwater under subdivisions, no houses on top of pollution . . . there are no Love Canals," he said, referring to a highly publicized New York landfill. "But there are things that still need to be done." "Lately the (Defense Department) has been just cranking away at those sites." Call Tammy Webber at 1-317-444-6212. ***************************************************************** 21 Focus on FALLON: Cancer cluster confounds experts Sunday, November 17, 2002 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal Frustrated families of leukemia sufferers look everywhere for answers By RICHARD LAKE REVIEW-JOURNAL Photos by Christine H. Wetzel. Floyd Sands, whose daughter died of leukemia last year, says not enough is being done to find out why 16 children with ties to the Fallon area have come down with the disease. He coordinated a door-to-door survey last month in an effort to find out if other cancers show higher-than-expected rates in the Northern Nevada town. In the background, a bus from Sparks High School waits at Laura Mills Park after bringing a class of 32 sophomores to help with the survey. Fallon resident Tommy Thompson answers questions about cancer from his home last month as a camera and sound crew from NBC's "Today" show record the conversation. Fallon's Maine Street, shown here on a night in mid-October, was named after the town founder's home state. Sixteen children who live or once lived in Fallon, a town of 7,500 people, have been diagnosed with leukemia. "I'm very proud of how our community has reacted," says Fallon Mayor Ken Tedford. Former Fallon resident Stephanie Sands, shown here as a senior in her high school yearbook photo, suffered for more than two years with acute lymphocytic leukemia, a rare blood and bone marrow cancer. She died last year at age 21. Students from Northside Elementary School in Fallon walk near a pipeline that transports jet fuel from a plant in Sparks 63 miles to the Naval Air Station Fallon. Some residents suspect jet fuel is responsible for the cluster of leukemia cases, though experts dispute that. An irrigation ditch runs next to one of the many alfalfa fields that surround Fallon. State and national cancer experts are trying to find out why several children with ties to the area have been diagnosed with leukemia. Randall Todd, Nevada state epidemiologist, points to pictures that show technicians taking samples during the investigation of the Fallon leukemia cluster. Todd says he understands criticism from some community members about the seemingly slow progress of the investigation into the cluster. "It's a matter of frustration for the communities seeking answers, and it's also a matter of frustration for the scientists trying to find the answers," Todd says. Click on the image for an enlargement. Graphic by Mike Johnson. Carinsa Rivers gets a hug from her daughter, Sareynah, 5, who was diagnosed with leukemia in early 2000. She recently underwent her last chemotherapy treatment and has been doing well. A bus drops off children at their school in Fallon. Since 1997, 16 children with ties to the Northern Nevada town of 7,500 have been diagnosed with leukemia. Three have died. Scott Hutner, whose fiancee's child has been diagnosed with leukemia, talks about 5-year-old Sareynah Rivers' recovery. "She's very active," he says. "She's very energetic; she's very bright." FALLON The heartbreak shows on his face, in the unguarded moments when his smile suddenly disappears. It shows in his actions, in how he has worked for more than a year to uncover an elusive killer. And it shows in his words. It comes out sounding like anger. "I am admittedly obsessed with Fallon and leukemia," he said last month while walking the Northern Nevada city's doorsteps, talking to people one by one in hopes someone will provide the answers he needs. "I don't believe the patients have received a fair shake, and I don't believe the community has received a fair shake." Last year, Floyd Sands watched his daughter die in a Pennsylvania hospital room. As he held her hand the final day, he kissed her and told her it was OK to stop fighting. Stephanie Sands had been through so much by then. She had suffered for more than two years with acute lymphocytic leukemia, a rare blood and bone marrow cancer. A stem cell transplant gave her family hope, but then the cancer spread to her brain and her spinal cord. She suffered internal bleeding, an infection and septic shock. She died on Sept. 1, 2001, at the age of 21. Her father has been angry ever since. Stephanie was one of the first of Fallon's children to come down with leukemia in what health officials say is likely the most staggering cluster of cancer ever investigated in Nevada. In all, 16 children age 3 to 19 with ties to the town of 7,500 have been diagnosed with different forms of the cancer since 1997. Three have died. As he's struggled to figure out how Stephanie contracted a disease that each year strikes just 3,000 children nationwide, Sands, 50, has accumulated a collection of hard-earned opinions as well as help from a university professor. He's also honed his instinctive distrust of people in charge. "I've always hated authority," he said. "I like real people." Last month, he took a week off work, traveling from the East Coast to Fallon, where he had lived nearly a decade ago. He and a group of community members and others who wanted to help planned to visit every home in town in what Sands acknowledged was an unscientific, rumor-chasing campaign. It was sort of a return to his activist roots. Sands once was a county-level politician in Pennsylvania, where he earned the nickname "Renegade Republican" for what he characterized as a fight against corruption. He beat an entrenched incumbent by running a feverish door-to-door campaign. A few years later, he would lose a race, describing it as one of the hardest things he had to endure as a young man. Half a lifetime later, his daughter's illness would put that in perspective. "It's worse than every parent's worst nightmare. From my standpoint, the worst part was the absolute helplessness," he said. The cluster surprised even public health experts. "This is the sort of thing that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up," said Nevada State Health Division epidemiologist Randall Todd, the man leading the investigation into what scientists call one of the most baffling problems in medicine. Cancer clusters, or groupings of a specific type of cancer in one area during a specific time period, are notoriously difficult to figure out. Some experts say that, because of public concern and the possible benefits to science, every possible resource should be used to investigate them, despite the fact a cause is rarely found. Others counter that disease clusters are natural occurrences, like the way balls sometimes clump together on a pool table. They say spending millions of dollars to determine their origin is much like a doctor performing an MRI for a patient's headache, and then forcing the taxpayers to foot the bill when the results come up empty. Sands is not part of that debate. He simply wants to find out why his daughter is dead. He said he lives each day in fear for the lives of his other children. Both spent time in Fallon, and his youngest, 14-year-old Sierra, was born there. He has told his story many times, appearing on national news programs such as Phil Donahue's MSNBC show. Last month, NBC's "Today" show followed him around Fallon in preparation for a future broadcast. Though Sands lined up dozens of volunteers to help, noticeably absent were nearly all of the families of the other leukemia patients. Though not as vociferous as Sands, some have been critical of scientists conducting the investigation. Others have remained silent, choosing to keep their hurt out of the public eye. Still others have tempered their criticism, at least until final results of the investigation are released. Even without help from the other families, Sands planned to gather enough volunteers to knock on every door in Fallon. A five-question survey he put together asked residents about family histories of leukemia and other cancers, as well as diseases that may be related to leukemia, such as lymphoma, Hodgkin's disease and aplastic anemia. With more than 3,000 doors to knock on, he and his volunteers had their work cut out for them. Typical small town Fallon is a town founded on the premise that man can overcome nature with persistence and hard work. Though it averages just 5 inches of rainfall a year, barely more than Las Vegas, Fallon is surrounded by alfalfa fields carved deep with irrigation canals. After almost 100 years, agriculture has become the dominant industry, and the area's residents have been known to brag about their homegrown cantaloupe. In many ways, Fallon is typical small town America, the kind of place a traveler could pass through in 10 minutes and see little more than fast-food restaurants and convenience stores. It is a place where everyone knows everyone else. Fallon's mayor, whose home and e-mail addresses are listed in the phone book, does not lock his door when he goes to work at the Goodyear tire shop he owns on Williams Avenue just past Maine Street. "I'm the mayor of a little town," Ken Tedford said, jingling his "DAD" key chain on his fingers as he sat in his City Hall office last month. "It just happens to be a town I love." Tedford, a father of four, is the third Tedford to serve as mayor since the city's creation in 1908, following an uncle and a grandfather into local politics. Just down the road from City Hall, Tedford Lane dead-ends at the Wal-Mart. But Fallon is more than typical, say the people who live there. It's a town where volunteers have erected memorials to the dead children at a local park, and where, despite a recession and national media coverage of the cluster, city officials reported that real estate values remain relatively steady. Fallon is also where some of the best military pilots in the world learn how to do their jobs better. Naval Air Station Fallon, just outside the city limits, hosts Top Gun, the program made famous by the Tom Cruise movie of the same name. The station has been especially busy in the past year as aircraft carrier-based groups of 1,500 to 2,000 Navy personnel have been constantly rotating in and out to train for war. Sands worked as a contractor at the base during the late 1980s and early '90s. He suspects the answers to the leukemia cluster lie with the Navy base. He blames military jet fuel, 34 million gallons of which are sent to the base through an underground pipeline each year. The pipeline runs directly through Fallon. Scientists dispute a link. They point out that, despite extensive testing, jet fuel has never been shown to cause acute lymphocytic leukemia, the type that has been diagnosed in 15 of the 16 Fallon children. Also, they say, there is no evidence that area residents were ever exposed to jet fuel. Some of the other patients' parents suspect jet fuel might be responsible, but they have their doubts as well. "He's convinced jet fuel is the cause, but I'm not, and most others aren't either," said Brenda Gross, whose son Dustin was diagnosed with leukemia in 1999. "There's not enough proof either way." Likewise, Carinsa Rivers, whose daughter, Sareynah, was diagnosed in 2000, said she's waiting for hard evidence. "I really don't want to put blame on anybody until there's proof," she said. The parents want an aggressive investigation. Gross, Rivers and some of the other parents formed an activist group over the summer that they said will investigate the cluster independently of the government. "What do I expect?" Gross said. "I expect them to research it thoroughly enough that the community and myself knows we're raising our children in a safe environment. I don't think that's too much to ask for." She added: "And that's to our expectations, not theirs." The beginning Long before the words "cancer cluster" became part of the Fallon lexicon, Gross and her husband, Reto, became concerned about their son Dustin. The youngest of the couple's four children and the only one born in Fallon, Dustin was 3 years old in April 1999 when his parents noticed that he seemed tired all the time, looked pale and was bruising too easily. His lips took on a translucent hue, and strange red blotches appeared on his skin. His mother took him to the family doctor, who ran a series of tests on the little boy. He told her Dustin had leukemia. Specifically, Dustin had acute lymphocytic leukemia of the B cells, or ALL for short. The blood and bone marrow cancer carries an 80 percent survival rate, a far cry from a few decades ago when most of the people it struck died. By the time Dustin was diagnosed, Sands and his children already had left Fallon. They settled in Mehoopany, Pa. In July 1999, when Stephanie was 19, she was diagnosed with a slightly different form of leukemia, ALL of the T cells. The prognosis for her form of leukemia is worse than for the B-cell type of ALL. Indeed, Todd said, the three members of the cluster who have died had the T-cell form of the disease. ALL is the most common cancer found in children, but it is still rare. In the United States, about 3,000 children are diagnosed with leukemia each year. By comparison, about 180,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer each year. After Stephanie's diagnosis, her father called an old friend in Fallon to break the news. The friend had heard neither about Dustin's case nor of any other children in town who had been diagnosed. Neither man had reason to believe Stephanie's case had anything to do with Fallon. "That was it," Sands would say later. "I never gave Fallon a second thought after that." Sareynah Rivers was next, in March 2000. Like Dustin, she was just 3 years old. Her mother had just read an essay in which former first lady Barbara Bush told the story of how her second child, Robin, had died of leukemia in 1953. Rivers, who was then pregnant, said she silently thanked God her daughter was fine. But soon afterward, Sareynah's skin started to turn pale. Rapidly, she became less active, started bruising easily and suffered unexplained nosebleeds. Her mother called the doctor. Though she had not heard about the other leukemia cases, the disease was on her mind because of the essay. She told the doctor she suspected leukemia, and tests showed she was right. Soon, another Fallon child was diagnosed, and then another, and another. By July 2000, five children who still lived in the Fallon area were known to have leukemia. A local newspaper reporter asked Todd, the state epidemiologist, if so many leukemia cases at the same time in a town the size of Fallon was unusual. It was the first indication Todd had that something was wrong in Churchill County. He looked at known cancer rates and population figures and estimated that a normal rate of childhood leukemia would mean about 0.2 children per year should get leukemia in the county of 24,000 people. In real terms, that meant one case could be expected there every five years. Five cases at the same time was obviously too many. `Inherently unsolvable' Part of an epidemiologist's job is to figure out how and why diseases spread. Though they are not always medical doctors, they are experts in statistical methods and in public health. Their work typically entails investigating infectious diseases such as meningitis, coordinating anti-bioterrorism efforts, and monitoring outbreaks of sexually transmitted diseases. By taking on the Fallon cluster, Todd had stepped into a morass. Somewhere on the order of 85 percent to 90 percent of what are reported as cancer clusters turn out to be either chance groupings of the disease or nothing but normal rates that people finally happen to notice, experts maintain. For a community to see a particular cancer at two or three times a normal rate would not be all that unusual. In fact, it would be expected in some communities, since others probably have a cancer rate far below normal. It all averages out in the end. "Clusters are nothing but part of the natural distribution of cancer," said Alan Bender, an epidemiologist and head of the chronic disease and environmental epidemiology section at the Minnesota Department of Health. Bender, whose department ceased investigations into residential cancer clusters eight years ago, maintains that almost all clusters are dictated by chance. He called them "inherently unsolvable." Not a single residential cancer cluster in the country has ever been solved to the degree that results were publishable in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, he said. Clustering of leukemia cases is like a game of keno, Bender said. "After the game is played, there is always a spot on the board where the numbers cluster," he said. "You just can't predict where that's going to be." But when a cancer cluster is found, particularly with children involved, the emotional toll is much higher and the public is bound to cry out for an extensive investigation, he said. Few besides Bender take such a radical stance, at least publicly. Even those experts who believe public hysteria drives policy more often than good science point out that doctors have been conducting cancer cluster investigations for hundreds of years and have, a handful of times, been successful in identifying a cause and putting a stop to it. Todd knew all of that going in. Regardless of past failures, he believed he should investigate the Fallon cluster. "Just based on the statistics, this looked significant to us and warranted further investigation. We felt the community expected that from us, especially the case families." The first step in any disease investigation is to find out what the patients have in common and then what the differences are between them and the area's healthy population. Todd knew that the city of Fallon's municipal water supply was notoriously high in arsenic, a naturally occurring heavy metal that has been linked to bladder and skin cancers, as well as liver problems, but never to leukemia. A quick look at a map showed Fallon's victims were spread throughout Churchill County, not just in the city limits. Some drank well water, some city water, and some bottled water. Besides, the arsenic had been in Fallon's water for decades. If it were the culprit, wouldn't there be a prolonged history of leukemia in the community? Because of the long-standing arsenic problem, Mayor Tedford said, Fallon has some of the most scrutinized water in the country. It has been tested and retested extensively. He does not believe it is dangerous. "I can tell you what's in the city water is not giving you cancer," he said. Todd and Dr. Mary Guinan, then the state's health officer, prepared a 32-page list of questions they would ask families. In addition to asking about drinking water, Todd's questionnaire asked the patients' families what kind of cleaning products and other chemicals were in the home, where they had lived as far back as two years before the affected child was conceived, jobs held by the parents, family medical histories, alcohol consumption during pregnancy, breast-feeding habits, if prenatal ultrasound testing was performed, military history, and where the children attended school, among other topics. When the surveys were complete -- it took about three hours for each family interview -- Todd fed the data into a computer and looked for similarities. There was only one, and it was already known: All of the families lived in Churchill County. Soon, more leukemia cases were diagnosed, some in children who no longer lived in Fallon. Todd had to question their families, too. Stephanie Sands' case finally came to the attention of Nevada officials after her father, surfing the Internet late one night, happened upon a story about the cluster on a Reno television station's Web site. He immediately called Fallon's hospital, and his story hit the media soon after. A case was discovered in a little boy who no longer lived in Fallon. He was diagnosed in 1997, and his case is now considered the first of the 16. "Unlike a lot of other clusters, we were investigating this one while it was unfolding," Todd said. "We would think we'd be done (questioning families), and then we'd get another case." As the investigation continued, the politicians got involved. In the span of two months in early 2001, the city of Fallon hired a public relations firm to deal with the flurry of media inquiries, U.S. Sens Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., held public hearings in town, and the Nevada Assembly Committee on Natural Resources, Agriculture and Mining heard three days of testimony from community members and experts. Reid demanded federal involvement in the investigation. As it turned out, Guinan, the state health officer, had spent most of her public health career with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and had numerous contacts in the agency. They were called in to help. "We've always worked with local health departments at their request on dealing with clusters of health events," said Thomas Sinks, the associate director for science at the CDC's National Center for Environmental Health. For 20 years between the 1960s and 1980s, CDC researchers who believed some cancers might be infectious investigated 108 cancer clusters in 29 states and five foreign countries. Most involved leukemia. Not once did they find a clear cause, and they moved on to other research, Sinks said. But Sinks, part of the team investigating the Fallon cluster, said technology that did not exist 20 years ago might help uncover causes for leukemia. The technology, called biomonitoring, can measure chemicals in blood or urine down to parts per trillion. Experts liken that kind of precision to detecting a single grain of sand buried in the carpet of a 3,000-square-foot house. Examining possibilities In 1963, in the Sand Mountain range about 30 miles east of Fallon, a 13-kiloton nuclear bomb was tested underground. But, officials say, the radiation from what was called Project Shoal has not traveled anywhere close to Fallon. The groundwater in the area flows away from town and is in a different aquifer than those used by the city and by private wells. Because of the large agricultural community, pesticides also have been a concern. But so far, there has been no evidence of pesticide contamination in the water or the homes of the affected families. What if the cause was not a hidden environmental pollutant at all, but instead some sort of infectious agent such as a virus or a combination of viruses? "Every expert that I've spoken to seems to feel that this is going to turn out to have something to do with viruses, or certain viral infections in people with a specific genetic susceptibility," said Dr. Tim Hockenberry, who lives in town and has treated several of the leukemia patients. A panel of cancer cluster experts that the state Health Division had formed as the cluster investigation got going came to a similar conclusion. In a report released in early 2001, the panel concluded that of the three possible causes -- simple chance, chemical pollution, or some sort of combination of infections -- chance and chemicals were unlikely. "The panel members were skeptical that a chemical exposure could explain the excess cases of ALL in Fallon," the panel's report reads in part. And, although the panel did not discount the possibility that the cluster was a random occurrence, members doubted that was the case. The sheer numbers over such a short time period in such a small population dictated otherwise. The infectious agent theory, if true, would require an astounding combination of bad luck, bad timing and bad genes, experts concede. Called population mixing, the theory emerged after researchers in Europe found that leukemia clusters often occurred in isolated rural communities that saw sudden influxes of new people, not unlike a flurry of Navy personnel coming into Fallon. The theory postulates that, because of an area's history of isolation, new people can bring viruses or other infections into town that were previously absent from the community. The result is that people with immune systems unfamiliar with the infections, if they're genetically susceptible, might get infected. "The hypothesis suggests that ALL is not infectious, spreading from one person to another, but an unusual complication to a common infection within a susceptible population," according to the report. Experts put it like this: Smoking cigarettes is a known cause of lung cancer, but that does not mean that every person who smokes will get cancer. A person's fate hinges in part on genetics, other behaviors, and on how much the person smoked. "There's almost no disease process where, if you are 100 percent exposed, you stand a 100 percent chance of getting it," Todd explained. But, instead of such a complicated mix, the cause might be a single, but elusive, virus, some doctors say. Viruses are known to cause other cancers. The sexually transmitted human papilloma virus, or HPV, can cause cervical cancer, for example. And scientists know that viruses cause leukemia in cows and cats, called the bovine and feline leukemia viruses. The problem is, no one has ever been able to find a similar virus that causes the most common types of leukemia in humans. "It's a question that's open to a lot of debate," said the CDC's Sinks. A puzzling discovery As the investigation progressed, state and federal field workers went to Fallon and collected blood, urine and cheek cell samples from family members of leukemia patients. They also collected dust, water and other samples for extensive testing. In a first round of reports released in August -- more are expected in February -- doctors announced a puzzling finding: In addition to arsenic, high levels of the heavy metal tungsten were found in the urine of not just the case families, but in that of 80 percent of the 205 people tested in Fallon, including people with no connection to the leukemia patients. The discovery of tungsten, a naturally occurring metal that has never been shown to cause leukemia, baffled investigators. "We really can't interpret what the levels mean," Dr. Carol Rubin, chief of the CDC's health studies branch, told community members at a town hall meeting. "It's another piece of the puzzle," Todd echoed. "It's like when you work a jigsaw puzzle and you get a piece that's kind of unusual and you wonder, 'Where does this fit?' We don't know where it fits yet, but it sure is an interesting piece." Sinks said the CDC hopes to study tungsten's effects on human health more extensively. With the tungsten discovery, another unusual connection was made: A small town in southern Arizona also had seen a sharp rise in childhood leukemia cases. And, as in Fallon, the U.S. military had an air base nearby. Sierra Vista, with a population of about 40,000, has seen nine cases of leukemia since 1995. By coincidence, one child who grew up in Sierra Vista was diagnosed with leukemia shortly after she left there and settled in Fallon. She is counted among Fallon's 16 cases. Sierra Vista is also home to the U.S. Army's Fort Huachuca and Libby Army Airfield, which use about 2 million gallons of jet fuel a year, compared to Fallon's 34 million gallons. Mark Witten, a research professor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine's Department of Pediatrics, conducted a study to determine whether the two towns had anything Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal, 1997 - 2002 Stephens Media Group Privacy Statement ***************************************************************** 22 EPA extends public comment on cleanup plan /By SHERRY DEVLIN The Missoulian / The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will take public comment on a proposed upper Clark Fork River cleanup plan for another 28 days. Wednesday was to have been the deadline for comment on the proposal, which would clean up mine and smelter wastes in and along the river between Warm Springs and Milltown Reservoir. But the Powell County commissioners and Deer Lodge Valley Conservation District board of supervisors wanted more time, so asked for the extension. The new deadline is Dec. 11, at which time the public will have had nearly four months to comment on the proposal. to get involved The proposed cleanup plan is available at public libraries in Missoula and Anaconda, at the Powell County Planning Office in Deer Lodge, at Grant-Kohrs Ranch in Deer Lodge, at the EPA?s Butte office and at Montana Tech in Butte. Written comments should be mailed to U.S. EPA, Region 8, Montana Office, 10 W. 15th St., Helena, MT 59626, Attention: Scott Brown. As suggested, the EPA?s cleanup plan includes a combination of tailings removal, in-place treatment of polluted soils and revegetation of the river corridor. The pollution was created by mines and smelters that, beginning in the 1860s, dumped toxic wastes in the Clark Fork River?s headwaters. Every time the river flooded, the wastes moved a bit ? or a lot ? farther downstream. The resulting contamination is spread over thousands of acres and 120 miles. Among the pollutants: arsenic, copper, lead, cadmium and zinc. The worst of the problem areas are called ?slickens,? and cover 170 acres where nothing can grow. Under the EPA?s proposal, the slickens would be excavated, loaded into dump trucks and hauled to Opportunity Ponds, a 3,000-acre site used first by the Anaconda Copper Co. and now by the EPA for long-term hazardous waste storage. Another 700-plus, less-contaminated acres would be treated either by working lime into the soil to neutralize the acid, or by replacing the tailings with clean soil. Fifty-six miles of streambanks also would be restored. Where tailings are exposed, the contamination would be excavated and hauled away. Where the bank has no vegetation, it would be planted with willows and other woody, stream-loving plants. On either side of the river, the EPA?s proposal would create a 50-foot riparian buffer. Wednesday, November 13, 2002 Copyright © 2000-2002 Helena Independent Record ***************************************************************** 23 State, feds at odds over Maywood site cleanup © 2002 North Jersey Media ***************************************************************** 24 Nuclear wastes' trip to WIPP a long one Denver Post.com book review By [bmcallister@denverpost.com] Denver Post Washington Bureau Chief Sunday, November 17, 2002 - In November 1971, Joe Gant, a New Mexico state senator, read a wire-service story in the Albuquerque Journal detailing how Kansas residents were livid over the federal government's efforts to store radioactive wastes in an underground salt mine near the town of Lyons. There were better places for the nuclear trash, one Kansas lawmaker was quoted as saying. But to Gant's distress, New Mexico was not one of the locations cited. With that, Gant began what became a 28-year odyssey to lure a radioactive garbage dump that no one wanted to his economically depressed southeastern corner of New Mexico. By the time his dream became a reality six presidents had come and gone and, as reporter Chuck McCutcheon notes in "Nuclear Reactions," government scientists had created "enough scientific and environmental studies to fill a library." For residents of Colorado, it was to become a critical fight. Wastes from the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant near Denver were among those items scheduled for burial at what became known as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP. WIPP was to be the final resting place for "mankind's deadliest garbage," McCutcheon says. At the time Gant began his campaign for the dump, the Carlsbad area was economically depressed. A potash mine had closed and the town was losing population. So, working in secret, Gant and local officials began their drive to get the dump. No one seemed worried about the dangers. New Mexico, after all, had been home to much atomic research and testing and the government always assured everyone that it was entirely safe, McCutcheon notes. What happened, however, was that the dump promoters ultimately ran into New Mexico's burgeoning environmental movement. State officials also had serious doubts about whether the salt beds east of Carlsbad were the best place for entombing what McCutcheon describes as "four decades" worth of protective gloves, tools, cleaning rags, glassware and other cast-off items that had been contaminated with radioactive materials used in building nuclear weapons." Although the wastes were described as "low-level," McCutcheon makes clear that is seriously misleading. Mostly composed of plutonium, the man-made element used in making the triggers at Rocky Flats, these are extremely dangerous wastes, he says. As little as one-millionth of a gram if swallowed, inhaled or absorbed by a cut can cause cancer, he says. And plutonium takes 24,360 years to lose half its radioactivity. Little wonder that officials such as former Colorado Gov. Roy Romer and Idaho Gov. Cecil Andrus wanted such wastes out of their states and into WIPP. And little wonder that New Mexico environmentalists seized on this project and fought it for years in the courts and through Congress. It didn't help that a succession of cabinet officers didn't seem to grasp the need to resolve the debate. There was, for example, Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan, a former New Mexico congressman, who downplayed the risks of WIPP. "It's low-level wastes. It can't blow up. It's not a Chernobyl-type situation," he said. Such statements only added to the public mistrust of the project, McCutcheon says. But the Carlsbad boosters never gave up, and finally Energy officials realized that they, too, needed the dump open. In 1999 Energy Secretary Bill Richards, the governor-elect of New Mexico, ended the debate by sending the first wastes to WIPP. To anyone who wonders about the potential for controversy over the federal government's vast landholdings in the West, this is a book worth studying. One caution: It may not make for the most riveting reading. McCutcheon, a reporter for the Newhouse News Service in Washington, lays out the tale clearly and without showing any bias. In a way, that's unfortunate because the big question that he leaves unanswered is who was right. NUCLEAR REACTIONS By Chuck McCutcheon Univ. of New Mexico Press, 224 pages, $24.95 All contents Copyright 2002 The Denver Post or other copyright ***************************************************************** 25 UK: Nuclear waste storage Scotsman.com Sat 16 Nov 2002 Eric White (Letters, 12 November) blandly asserts that "most agree that doubts over long-term storage of nuclear waste rule out nuclear power". This is not in fact the case. A strong body of informed opinion believes that nuclear power will be our only realistic option when the oil and gas run out. The storage problems are technically soluble. In the United States, the department of energy has decided to go ahead with a storage facility in Yucca Mountain which will hold waste safely for at least 10,000 years, although there are still not-in-my-back-yard hurdles to be overcome. There are schemes for accelerator-driven transmutation techniques under study which could reduce the long-term activity of the waste, and eliminate the need for deep depositories. Even thousands of wind turbines will make a relatively small contribution to our energy demand, and that only on days when it is neither too calm nor too stormy. (EMER PROF) IAN S HUGHES Lettoch Road Pitlochry, Perthshire ©2002 scotsman.com | contact ***************************************************************** 26 Report: US weighs resumed nuclear tests* United Press International Published 11/16/2002 7:05 PM WASHINGTON, Nov. 16 (UPI) -- The Bush administration might be laying the groundwork to resume nuclear testing and possibly develop new nuclear weapons, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain reported. The report cites a memorandum "circulated recently to members of the Nuclear Weapons Council, a high-level government body that sets policy for nuclear weapons." The memo, a copy of which was obtained by Knight-Ridder, "urges the U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories to assess the technical risks associated in maintaining the U.S. arsenal without nuclear testing" and "suggests that the United States take another look at conducting small nuclear tests." Nuclear testing was halted in the United States a decade ago, and its resumption was rejected by former President Bill Clinton. Knight-Ridder, in a report Friday, quotes further from the memo by council chairman E.C. Aldridge, Jr.: "We will need to refurbish several aging weapons systems" and "be prepared to respond to new nuclear weapons requirements in the future. The latter, Knight-Ridder said, was a reference to "earth-penetrating weapons" that could destroy buried stocks of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. The report quotes an unidentified "senior Pentagon official" as saying: "It's recognizing that the stockpile that we designed 25 or 30 years ago for the Cold War really might not be the stockpile for the war on terrorism." The report also says that the memo is "backed up by little-noticed language in the defense authorization bill" approved this week by Congress. "The bill suggests that the U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories -- Lawrence Livermore (in California), Los Alamos (in New Mexico) and Sandia (also in New Mexico) -- should be ready to resume testing with as little as six months notice." A Pentagon official who spoke on the record to Knight-Ridder said that the memo didn't necessarily mean that testing was about to resume. "It was just time to go back and collect our thoughts" after a decade of maintaining the nuclear stockpile without tests, said Frederick Celec, deputy assistant to the secretary of defense for nuclear matters. "Let's take stock and see where we are. What are the risks involved in not testing?" The memo "suggests another look at the potential benefits of a 'low-yield' testing program" that might produce explosions equivalent to a few hundred pounds of conventional explosives. "Such tests might involve small amounts of plutonium," the newspaper said, "not in bomb form" at a test site in Nevada, "according to a well-placed defense official." Copyright © 2002 United Press International ***************************************************************** 27 U.N. Inspectors Begin Trip to Iraq Las Vegas SUN Today: November 17, 2002 at 4:15:27 PST By DANICA KIRKA ASSOCIATED PRESS VIENNA, Austria- The United Nations' top two weapons inspectors left for Cyprus on Sunday, beginning a historic journey back to Iraq for a fresh assessment of Saddam Hussein's suspected clandestine arms program. Chief U.N. inspector Hans Blix, who will lead the overall mission, and Mohamed ElBaradei, overseeing the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency's search for nuclear arms, took a commercial flight to Larnaca, Cyprus, where the inspectors will be based. Blix, ElBaradei and a 25-member advance team plan to head to Baghdad aboard a charter flight on Monday. Blix has said that preliminary inspections - the first in nearly four years - likely will resume on Nov. 27, with full-scale checks to begin after Iraq files a declaration of its banned weapons programs by a Dec. 8 deadline. Blix then has 60 days to report back to the U.N. Security Council with his findings. His New York-based team, the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, will head the hunt for biological and chemical weapons and the long-range missiles capable of delivering them to distant targets. Inspectors with ElBaradei's IAEA will determine if Saddam still has a secret nuclear arms program. Iraq will face the full might of the Security Council if it fails to cooperate completely with inspectors looking for suspected weapons of mass destruction, Blix said Saturday in Paris. War is not inevitable if Iraq cooperates with the inspectors, Blix told The Associated Press on Sunday. "It's a chance for Iraq, and that's what the Security Council has said," he said, adding: "It's an important mission, but we've prepared ourselves for it. We know what we've got to do." Saddam agreed Wednesday to allow U.N. weapons inspectors to return to search for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons after the Security Council approved a toughly worded resolution. Baghdad, however, insisted in a nine-page letter to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan that it does not have any such weapons. The U.N. resolution gives Iraq "a final opportunity" to eliminate its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and the long-range missiles to deliver them. It gives inspectors the right to go anywhere at anytime and warns Iraq it will face "serious consequences" if it fails to cooperate. "If Iraq cooperates fully, if we are allowed to do our work in a comprehensive manner, I think we can avoid a war," ElBaradei said. "I think that's the hope of everybody and that's what we're trying to do." After Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the Security Council imposed economic sanctions that cannot be lifted until U.N. weapons inspectors verify that Iraq is free of weapons of mass destruction and the missiles that could deliver them. The advance team is charged with reopening the office used by the previous inspections regime and setting up new secure phone lines and transportation. The United States believes Iraq has been illegally rearming for several years. Inspectors, who have been out of Iraq for nearly four years, have not been able to verify that claim. The inspectors left Baghdad in December 1998, on the eve of U.S.-British airstrikes, amid allegations that Iraq was not cooperating with the teams and Iraqi accusations that some of the inspectors actually were spies. Blix said in an interview published Friday in the French newspaper Le Monde that inspectors have identified some 700 sites to check in Iraq. Weapons inspectors will try to keep the location of the sites secret and provide no notice to Baghdad, said Blix, who warned last week that the United Nations would tolerate no Iraqi "cat and mouse" games. He also said an Iraqi delay of even 30 minutes in granting inspectors access to a site would be considered a serious violation. "We have a lot of information on where to go. We have a very good game plan," ElBaradei said. On his arrival in Vienna late Saturday, Blix said Saddam agreed to comply with the latest U.N. resolution because he didn't have any choice. "He was in a very critical situation," he said. Saddam said Saturday he was forced to act because the United States and Israel had shown their "claws and teeth" and declared unilateral war on the Iraqi people. By the end of the 1991 Gulf War, inspectors discovered the oil-rich nation had imported thousands of pounds of uranium, some of which was already refined for weapons use, and had considered two types of nuclear delivery systems. Inspectors seized the uranium, destroyed facilities and chemicals, dismantled over 40 missiles and confiscated thousands of documents. All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 28 North Korea admits nuclear arsenal BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Sunday, 17 November, 2002, [North Korean missile] N Korea missile technology has alarmed neighbours North Korea has said for the first time that it has nuclear weapons. A commentary broadcast on state radio said North Korea had developed "powerful military counter-measures, including nuclear weapons" to cope with what it called mounting nuclear threats from the United States. Under these circumstances we cannot sit idle with our arms folded State radio commentary Last month, Washington announced that North Korea had admitted to having a programme for producing highly-enriched uranium - a key ingredient in nuclear weapons. But this is the first time the communist state has made such an acknowledgement. A foreign ministry statement in October said only that the country was "entitled" to have nuclear weapons. President George Bush has repeatedly called on Pyongyang to eliminate its nuclear programme, saying it is the only way the country can have a viable future. The BBC's Charles Scanlon says state media often contains hostile rhetoric and it is not clear how literally the broadcast - which was not attributed - is meant to be taken. He says for years North Korea has tried to keep the world guessing about its nuclear capabilities. Pyongyang's demands Sunday's broadcast accused Washington of "slandering and injuring" North Korea. America's "reckless manoeuvres", it said, were threatening the country's right to existence and sovereignty. [US President George Bush in South Korea - February 2002] Bush has warned Pyongyang it must disarm "Under these circumstances we cannot sit idle with our arms folded," the radio said. It also repeated Pyongyang's demands that the US must sign a non-aggression pact, insisting it was the only way to resolve the nuclear issue. The timing of the broadcast fits in with a pattern of North Korean "confession", according to Michael Yahuda, professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He told BBC News Online, it appeared they wanted to clear the way for talks. "The US is threatening and, by responding, Pyongyang is sending out a message: 'We have nuclear weapons as well, so lets find a way to negotiation'," he said. Aid stopped The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said last month that North Korea might have one or two nuclear weapons. Earlier this week, the US, South Korea, the European Union and Japan agreed to halt fuel aid to North Korea until Pyongyang moved to dismantle the programme. Under a 1994 accord, North Korea agreed to freeze its nuclear programme in return for 500,000 tonnes of fuel oil a year in aid. But Washington considers that Pyongyang nullified the 1994 pact when it reportedly admitted to a US envoy that it was trying to build nuclear weapons. © MMII | News Sources | Privacy ***************************************************************** 29 Great Falls retires long-silent Cold War symbols GreatFallsTribune.com Sunday, November 17, 2002 By KATIE OYAN KATIE OYAN Tribune Staff Writer Five metal symbols of the Cold War era were laid to rest last week. Great Falls Park and Recreation employees dismantled the city's five remaining air raid sirens, erected in the 1950s. The yellow sirens, which stood about 30 feet tall, were located on city property in Clara, Bloomingdale, Sacajewea, Montana and Warden parks. Jerry Sepich, director of the Park and Recreation department, said it's been years since the old distress signals were operational. "They're just not usable anymore," he said. "They're not functioning." Of the three sirens that were salvageable, one will go to the Cascade County Historical Society, and the other two probably will find homes in exhibits at the Montana Air National Guard Great Falls headquarters and Malmstrom Air Force Base, Mayor Randy Gray said. The sirens were erected during a time when Great Falls was high on the Soviet targeting list, he said. The plethora of missile silos surrounding Malmstrom Air Force Base made the Electric City a good candidate for a nuclear attack. More than 130 fallout shelters dotted Cascade County, and 22 air raid sirens were scattered in Great Falls and outlying communities. Each siren had a pivoting head and blared once a week during civil defense drills. The red alert consisted of three minute-long blasts and signaled residents to move immediately to a public fallout shelter or their own bunker and wait for further radio or TV instructions. "The history of that time is right here in Great Falls," Gray said. "Talk to anybody in the 50s age group and they'll remember practicing air raid drills and getting under their desks." Gray said he's hoping to plan a decommissioning ceremony for the sirens this spring. "This is the best representation of the end of the Cold War," he said. The last of the bright yellow sirens that were put up during the 50s to warn of impending air raids have been taken down in Great Falls, signaling the end of the Cold War here. Copyright © 2002 Great Falls Tribune. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 30 UK: Protesters 'boarded nuclear sub' Scotsman.com Sun 17 Nov 2002 /NICHOLAS CHRISTIAN/ AN ANTI-TRIDENT campaign group yesterday claimed two of its members boarded a nuclear submarine and rang its bell. Two intruders found in the naval base where HMS Vanguard is undergoing a re-fit were last night arrested by Ministry of Defence police. A Royal Navy spokeswoman said the pair had been found on the submarine. "They got on to the outer casing of the submarine and broke a fire alarm box. They didn?t actually ring the ship?s bell," she said. The pair were found inside Devonport Naval Base, Plymouth, at about 11.30pm on Friday night. They were caught at 9 Dock, where the Trident submarine HMS Vanguard is undergoing a re-fit. The break-in caused minor damage to a perimeter fence and a fire alarm. The campaign group Trident Ploughshares is currently holding a four-day "peace camp" in Plymouth. A statement from the group said its activists had entered the naval base, showing MoD security to be "woefully inadequate". MoD police, Devonport Management Ltd (DML) and the police are to investigate the incident. In a statement the MoD said wider safety issues were not compromised by the break-in. The intruders were being questioned by MoD police at Plymouth?s Charles Cross police station. ©2002 scotsman.com | contact ***************************************************************** 31 BNFL's Savannah clean-up slated Independent.co.uk By Solomon Hughes 17 November 2002 A massive nuclear clean-up operation in the US, run by a subsidiary of BNFL, has been slammed by inspectors for having poor safety management and cost control. Westinghouse Government Services, in which the nationalised nuclear fuels group has a 40 per cent stake, was criticised in a report into its $600m (£380m) contract to clean up an old nuclear bomb factory at Savannah River in South Carolina. Inspectors from the US Department of Energy found that WGS had an "inadequate and ineffective" approach to "risk prioritisation" when dealing with safety and a "limited probability of success" in managing costs. The DofE made a site visit during the summer and found that WGS avoided difficult and expensive work, such as building decommissioning and stabilising nuclear material, "weighs business elements more heavily (by a factor of three) than risk elements" and had a system that did not differentiate between small and large accidents. Other reports by the nuclear watchdogs exposed unsafe storage of 22,000 tonnes of depleted uranium managed by Westinghouse at Savannah River. It is stored in drums, cardboard and wooden boxes inside "corroded" buildings on timbers that have "rotted and failed". The criticism, published on the DofE's official website, comes only weeks after managers at Savannah were accused of racism for giving black workers more dangerous jobs than white workers. It also comes at an embarrassing time for BNFL, as the draft Bill to set up a £48bn agency to sort out Britain's nuclear legacy was highlighted in the Queen's Speech last week. BNFL is expected to be central to this clean-up. BNFL said it was not the lead contractor on the Savannah River project and referred all calls to Washington Group, its partner, which was not available for comment. Get *The New Mexican* delivered November 16, 2002 By JEFF TOLLEFSON | The New Mexican 11/17/2002 Almost 60 years after the beginning of the Manhattan Project, LANL's economic footprint on Northern New Mexico is larger than ever. But is the lab doing enough for economic development?/ People joke about nuclear bombs being the main growth industry in the state of New Mexico, but in some ways it's true. * Congress has increased annual spending at Los Alamos National Laboratory by $800 million in the last six years. With a budget approaching $2 billion, the world's first nuclear-weapons lab has nearly doubled its expenditures since 1991, the year our Cold War foe, the Soviet Union, dissolved. If money is the measure of success, it's a good time for the laboratory. With more than 500 new hires last year - 900 if you include replacements - the University of California's staff at the lab is at an all-time high. And the growth probably won't stop any time soon. "Given the current president, I would guess that federal defense spending is going to go up," said Larry Waldman, a senior economist with The University of New Mexico. "And I can't help but think the lab is going to continue to be a large influence on the economy of Northern New Mexico." Growth is good, many say, and what's good for the labs is good for New Mexico. In some cases, that reasoning even spills over the nuclear waste generated by the nuclear-weapons complex. Consider the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, which was warmly welcomed into Carlsbad for the jobs it created. Now the town appears to be courting the Bush administration's proposal for a new facility to manufacture plutonium triggers. You might say the good times started with the Bush administration's renewed emphasis on nuclear weapons. Then came Sept. 11, which filled a void by giving the nation an official, if elusive, enemy for the first time in more than a decade. Tools developed at both Los Alamos and the Sandia National Laboratories outside Albuquerque attracted national attention during the subsequent anthrax attacks. Los Alamos officials now talk about a renewed sense of mission. And with the Bush administration beating the war drums for an apparently willing citizenship, politicians in Washington, D.C., seem to have rolled out the red carpet for both defense agencies and the industries that support them. Working for both Los Alamos and Sandia, New Mexico's congressional delegation tends to bring home the federal bacon, invariably citing the jobs and economic development that will follow. Evidence? Take a look at the young-but-growing technology industry. For that matter, just consider the towns of White Rock and Los Alamos, company towns that didn't exist prior to the Manhattan Project. Nonetheless, Los Alamos lab seems to attract controversy and criticism, and this case is no different. Skeptics say it's a classic case of the haves and the have-nots. As often as not, the haves move to town, drive up prices and make it harder for the have-nots. And despite the expenditure of about $50 billion (adjusted for inflation) during the last 60 years, notes the Los Alamos Study Group, New Mexico remains at or near the bottom of virtually every list ranking states on a host of social, economic and educational factors. In 1998, the U.S. Department of Energy published the last of its annual economic-impact reports indicating that Los Alamos lab was responsible for $3.8 billion in economic activity once the federal dollars trickled down to local businesses in Los Alamos, Rio Arriba and Santa Fe counties. That figure represented almost 30 percent of the $12.9 billion total in the three counties, according to the report. For his part, Waldman is sometimes skeptical about such figures in the DOE reports, but says the lab's effect on Northern New Mexico is undoubtedly enormous. Each job at the laboratory probably creates another job somewhere else, he says. Such reasoning is a major driver behind the policies of U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., perhaps the labs' biggest supporter. "I push very hard myself for the federal jobs, to foster private-sector job creation. I'm pleased to say that this is working now better than ever before," Domenici said this week. "Their total impact is something like 28,000 jobs." Given that most of the federal government's appropriations bills remain in limbo with a lame-duck Congress, Domenici wasn't certain how the labs' budgets would turn out this year. Since 1998, the Los Alamos lab's annual budget has increased by almost $700 million. During the same period, the University of California boosted salaries and added more than 1,200 new positions. The university's workforce now stands at 8,100 employees. As of Dec. 31, 2001, the latest figures available, more than 13,500 people work on the hill, if you include contractors, students and post-doctoral researchers. Total payroll for the laboratory now comes in at more than $880 million, with more than one-third of the lab's employees making more than $100,000. The lab's figures indicate that the average salary for the 3,245 technical staff members is about $103,600. At the bottom, nonprofessional administrative support staff earn an average of almost $40,000. Management makes much more, while professional support members and technicians tend to fall somewhere in the middle. By far the biggest economic impact on local communities is the payroll. People like 31-year old Paula Crawford, who recently picked up her Ph.D. in materials science and engineering at MIT, take a job at the laboratory, rent an apartment or a buy a house and begin spending their money. As it happens, Crawford chose to live in Santa Fe precisely because there are more places to spend money here than in Los Alamos. "I wanted someplace with a little bit more to do. I like to do things on the spur of the moment, like going out to a movie or going to a bookstore," said Crawford, who, as a post-doctoral researcher, is on what tends to be an inside track to full employment at the laboratory. Crawford is in good company, according to the lab's latest statistics. More than 2,200 employees bring $153 million in annual paychecks to Santa Fe County. In Rio Arriba County, about 2,300 employees earn $108 million annually. Of course, neither of those counties compares to Los Alamos, where 5,000 employees make $403 million each year. These are big numbers, and they do not include more than $410 million in procurement contracts to businesses in Northern New Mexico. Such figures go a long way toward explaining the rampant enthusiasm in some quarters for any kind of new lab activity. Money means business. On the other hand, the disarmament activists and lab watchdogs believe any talk of economic development spurred by the Los Alamos is a red herring, a distraction to keep people from thinking about what really goes on at the nuclear labs. At least 65 percent of Los Alamos' budget goes directly to nuclear weapons, and that percentage increases quickly if you include nuclear-waste management and related research. Admittedly, much of the money these days is going to a program designed to maintain weapons without exploding them, which is generally considered progress. Blowing things up is almost always the easy solution, and this case is no exception. Beginning around 1996, DOE embarked on its Stockpile Stewardship program, a massive scientific (and economic) endeavor aimed at predicting the performance of nuclear weapons without full-scale explosions. As usual, however, the distrust is palpable. Among nuclear watchdogs, there's a feeling that increasing budgets are largely the result of the energy department's successful effort to protect its turf by making the stewardship of the stockpile much more difficult than it had to be. Evidence? Consider the impending congressional approval of a DOE proposal to design a new nuclear "bunker buster" bomb at Los Alamos and its sister laboratory Lawrence Livermore in California. At a time when the rest of the world is pushing for disarmament, DOE is still trying to design new bombs. Top that off with the Bush administration's policy that such nuclear weapons can be used in a pre-emptive strike - against nations that have not attacked the United States - and you see the disarmament crowd's displeasure. Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch of New Mexico points out that the nuclear-weapons programs at Sandia and Los Alamos add up to almost 75 percent of the state of New Mexico's entire annual operating budget for schools and services. Unfortunately, he added, the trickle-down effect is overrated: Recent census figures peg Los Alamos County as the fifth-richest county in the United States with a median household income of almost $79,000, which compares to a median income $29,400 next door in Rio Arriba County. For Greg Mello, who heads up the Los Alamos Study Group, economic development created by the labs tends to distract New Mexico's congressional delegates, who focus their efforts in Washington on supporting the labs while forgetting about rural economic-development programs that might do more for Northern New Mexico as a whole. The state ranks high in terms of total federal appropriations per capita, but low on most other social and economic scales. "The juxtaposition of having such a high level of federal payments and such a low level of economic performance suggests that the way we get our federal dollars isn't creating economic development," Mello says. "You just don't get that many spin-offs from plutonium." Others maintain activists like Mello are simply jaded by their own feelings against nuclear weapons. Like it or not, they say, weapons of mass destruction might be the best thing that ever happened to New Mexico's economy. As president of the Albuquerque-based Technology Ventures Corp., Sherman McCorkle tracks New Mexico's technology industry. For the past six years, the company has compiled the "Flying 40" list, comprised of the state's fastest-growing technology companies. In 1996, companies on the list had 2,155 employees and revenues of $258 million. By 2001, the companies had increased their revenue by 340 percent to $879 million; employment grew 240 percent to 5,179 people. McCorkle noted that these figures would be much larger if his company included hundreds of smaller companies that don't make the list. Virtually all of this development, he said, has its roots in the weapons labs. "I personally think we can probably attribute somewhere between 97 percent and 100 percent to the labs," McCorkle said. "The reality is, you don't see this in Montana or Wyoming. If it weren't for the national labs, we would be like the rest of the Rocky Mountain States: primarily agricultural." UNM economist Waldman might not go that far, but he agrees that local activists' opinions are probably tainted by their hatred of all things nuclear. When you look at census figures, Rio Arriba County's median income grew by 23.4 percent from 1990 to 2000; only five counties in the state had a sharper increase in income. "If the local economy in Rio Arriba is in such bad shape, that's not the fault of the lab," Waldman says. "If anything, without the lab it would have been worse." For J.R. Trujillo, chairman of the Northern New Mexico Suppliers Alliance and an Española city councilor, the lab has shown its willingness to work with small, local companies. Now, he says, it's up to the business community to step up to the plate and build an economy around the laboratory's needs. "This isn't going to be something that is going to happen overnight," Trujillo said. "You can't just say, 'OK, Los Alamos. Fix our problems.' 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