***************************************************************** 06/18/02 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 10.154 ***************************************************************** RADBULL IS PRODUCED BY THE ABALONE ALLIANCE CLEARINGHOUSE ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR POLICY 1 Taiwan: AEC avoids clash over plant's flaws 2 MoD plans £2bn nuclear expansion 3 US: Industry official admits N-plants may be vulnerable 4 Shutdown at third plant `not serious' 5 Nuclear workers need surveillance, senators say Drug, alcohol 6 US: Members appointed to nuclear review board 7 US: Five to be nominated for review board 8 US: Bush administration, uranium enricher reach deal on nuclear fuel NUCLEAR REACTORS 9 US: remembering Browns Ferry: What starts with a flicker quickly rag 10 Taiwan: Shutdown at third plant `not serious' 11 US: NRC to Hold Press Conference in Brownville On Cooper Supplementa 12 US: NRC Amends Licensing, Inspection and Annual Fees Rule 13 US: NRC to Conduct Supplemental Inspection At Cooper Nuclear Station NUCLEAR SAFETY 14 US: NRC Proposes $3,000 Fine for Avera McKennan Hospital 15 US: Iowa won't offer pills to residents near nuclear plant 16 US: Aircraft threat to nuke plants debated 17 U.S. Congressmen Moved by Words of Gulf War Widow 18 UK: Gulf War syndrome hearing 19 UK: Testimony Gulf War widow 20 US: U.S. nuclear plants could survive aircraft attacks, official say 21 US: Hatch sets 3 meets with downwinders 22 US: Experts Sum Up Their Fears of a Nuke Attack 23 US: SCHUMER: DIRTY BOMB MATERIAL EASY TO GET 24 US: Report: US nuclear plants can survive plane attack 25 US: Nuclear plants receive NRC OK NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE 26 US: ... While `Choke Points' Clog The Route West 27 US: Franklin exec says county prepared for possible nuclear waste tr 28 Greenpeace stops nuclear train 29 German nuclear waste shipment briefly held up by activists 30 US: Yucca: No worries about earthquake 31 US: DOE asks judge to prevent S.C. blockade 32 NRC Orders United States Enrichment Corporation to Enhance 33 US: Yucca Mountain waste shipments would hit close to home 34 US: Judge Asked to Keep Plutonium Moving 35 US: Judge Orders S.C. Gov. on Plutonium 36 US: Nuclear waste focus of rallies 37 US: Yucca: Goodman spearheads resolution at mayors conference 38 US: DOE Steps Up Plans for Plutonium Shipments 39 US: Anti-nuclear group brings protest to Pittsburgh 40 US: Nuclear-waste conflict intensifies Opponents of plans point to 41 US: State official sees long Yucca fight 42 US: Editorial: Yucca seen as unsafe by mayors 43 US: NRC to hear update on transportation studies 44 US: Mayors OK resolution on Yucca shipments 45 US: Senator sees easy Yucca approval 46 US: Nevadans Riled By Plan To Bury Nation's Radioactive Waste In The 47 US: DOE asks judge to keep South Carolina governor from blocking 48 US: Earthquake Shows Fundamental Flaw with Yucca Mtn. Site 49 German nuclear waste shipment briefly held up by activists 50 Pacific alert as radioactive shipment leaves Japan 51 US: Nevada Or Bust Running Out Of Room At The Reactors ... 52 US: DOE will renew S.C. legal request 53 Group vies with USEC for new plant - 54 US: Resolutions Adopted at The 70th Annual Conference of Mayors 55 US: DOE Seeks Court Injunction Prohibiting Governor Jim Hodges From NUCLEAR WEAPONS 56 UK: RADIATION TIMEBOMB 57 AU: Nuclear bombs no longer a deterrent 58 U.S., South Korea, Japan open stalks on North Korea 59 IAEA officials to visit N.K.next week 60 Talking to North Korea 61 India's presidency goes to head of nuclear missile programme US DEPT. OF ENERGY 62 Hearings planned for lab report 63 B Reactor: Marvel or monstrosity? 64 Livermore lab's weapons testing site faces environmental impact 65 Paul Parson: ORNL works on housing, energy issues 66 DOE: Energy research 67 Health Effects meeting canceled 68 Hanford troubles grow while feds dawdle 69 Trial begins for Y-12 protesters 70 DOE Cites INEEL Contractor for Price Anderson Safety Violations 71 DOE Names Environmental Management Advisory Board Chair 72 DOE Inks Agreement To Ensure Domestic Uranium Enrichment Capacity OTHER NUCLEAR 73 New Technology Makes Contaminants Harmless ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** FULL NEWS STORIES ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** 1 Taiwan: AEC avoids clash over plant's flaws The Taipei Times Online: 2002-06-18 FALLOUT: The Atomic Energy Council yesterday said that Taipower should form a task force to ensure the quality of construction work at the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant By Chiu Yu-Tzu STAFF REPORTER The Atomic Energy Council (AEC) said yesterday that a task force at the Taiwan Power Company (Taipower, ¥x¹q) to ensure the quality of future work on the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant is necessary, as criticism mounted over punishments meted out for defects in materials and workmanship in one of the plant's reactor pedestals. The recommendation appears to be an attempt by the agency to avoid a war of words over the Ministry of Economic Affairs' (MOEA) failure to address the AEC's previous complaints about Taipower's work on the plant. "How could Taipower manage the crisis so carelessly? What kind of nuclear safety culture do we have?" AEC Chairman Ouyang Min-shen Last Saturday, the ministry released a list of names of those to be given demerits in relation to defects in materials and workmanship on the reactor pedestal. The 22 officials involved are from two state-own companies; Taipower and the China Shipbuilding Corp. China Shipbuilding subcontracted the New Asia Construction and Development Corporation to build the pedestal. The punishments -- in the form of demerits, imposed on Taipower by the ministry -- received immediate media criticism, since not a single high-ranking official was punished or asked to step down. Yesterday, AEC Chairman Ouyang Min-shen (¼Ú¶§±Ó²±) declined to comment on the demerits, saying that he respected the ministry as a Cabinet-level body that is on par with the AEC in the central government power structure. "What we care about is that Taipower take action to ensure the quality of the construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant," Ouyang said at a press conference yesterday. Minister of Economic Affairs Lin Yi-fu (ªL¸q¤Ò) said last Saturday that he thought the punishments the ministry doled out were reasonable and acceptable. Last month, when investigating the use of inferior welding material in the reactor pedestal, the AEC told Taipower that the company had seriously violated nuclear regulations and failed to deal properly with administrative neglect. Ouyang also said that when he met Taipower's President Lin Ching-chi (ªL²M¦N) yesterday, he told him that the company needed to strengthen its system for quality assurance. Lin told Ouyang that a task force to assure the quality of construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant had already been established last week and would be chaired by Taipower Vice President Tsai Mao-tsun (½²­Z§ø), according to Ouyang. Tsai also said that Taipower would offer to let its contractors, subcontractors, workers and related staff enter nuclear safety-related training programs, according to Ouyang. "We hope that a sound nuclear safety culture will established iself gradually from now on," Ouyang said. Ouyang said that he has been furious after finding out about the use of inferior welding materials on April 24, when a retired nuclear engineer sent him a message via e-mail to report the malfeasance. When Ouyang met with Minister Lin on May 23, however, he was stunned by Lin's lack of knowledge about the defect. "How could China Building let such things occur? How could Taipower manage the crisis so carelessly? What kind of nuclear safety culture do we have?" Ouyang said yesterday in an emotional meeting with reporters, who kept asking him if he was satisfied with the punishments meted out by the ministry. Ouyang said that the recent controversy was only the tip of the iceberg as far as exposing short-comings in Taiwan's nuclear safety culture. Over the last two decades, Ouyang told the Taipei Times yesterday, the rate of job rotation for Taipower staff at nuclear power plants has been far too low. "Taipower is like an old man that has blood-circulation problems," said Ouyang, adding that staff in charge of nuclear power generation also deserves more encouragement. This story has been viewed 304 times. Copyright © 1999-2002 The Taipei Times. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 2 MoD plans £2bn nuclear expansion Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Richard Norton-Taylor Tuesday June 18, 2002 [http://www.guardian.co.uk] The Ministry of Defence is investing more than £2bn in a project that would enable Britain to produce a new generation of nuclear weapons, officials admitted yesterday. A huge expansion plan for the atomic weapons establishment in Aldermaston, Berkshire, would provide scientists with the capability to design and produce "mini-nukes" or nuclear warheads for cruise missiles, a spokesman for the plant told the Guardian. Martin Salter, Labour MP for Reading West, tabled a series of questions yesterday about MoD plans for Aldermaston. "My concerns centre on the fact that it is quite clear a massive increase in capacity is planned for Aldermaston, a plant with a chequered history of criminal prosecutions..." he said, complaining that there had been no chance for local people or the Commons to debate the consequences of the expansion. Lewis Moonie, the junior defence minister, denied Aldermaston was being expanded in order to develop small nuclear weapons which could be used against terrorist groups and "rogue states". He told MPs: "Work going on in Aldermaston is no secret and is in order to maintain the reliability of our nuclear deterrent faced with the fact that we no longer test these weapons." The work would ensure "our nuclear deterrent is reliable and capable of being deployed. That involves a great deal of careful work to ensure there is no chance of us going back to physically testing the weapons", Dr Moonie said. Defence officials pointed to the 1998 strategic defence review which says Britain needed the capability to produce a successor to the Trident nuclear missile system. However, though an Aldermaston spokesman said yesterday that there were currently no plans to design a Trident successor or any new nuclear weapons, he admitted the plant could produce "mini-nukes" or nuclear warheads for cruise missiles if the government gave the go-ahead. The Aldermaston plan coincides with an apparent agreement to a radical shift in Britain's nuclear doctrine. The defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, has suggested the government would now be prepared to fire a nuclear weapon in a pre-emptive strike against non-nuclear states suspected of developing chemical and biological weapons. A senior defence official admitted Mr Hoon had "gone further than people have before". Steve Pullinger, director of the International Security Information Service, told the Guardian: "The doctrine apparently allows for the pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons to prevent what we perceive to be a threat from chemical and biological weapons." [UP] Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002 ***************************************************************** 3 Industry official admits N-plants may be vulnerable deseretnews.com Tuesday, June 18, 2002 *Hearst Newspapers * WASHINGTON ? The nation's nuclear power plants could withstand an aerial assault similar to the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, a senior industry official said Monday. However, Stephen Floyd, a director of the nuclear Energy Institute, conceded that in extreme circumstances the nuclear reactors and their highly radioactive fuel could be vulnerable. Citing a study by the NEI, which represents the nuclear industry, Floyd said: "The preliminary results are that it is extremely unlikely that the aircraft would be able to penetrate the containment vessel." The containment vessel ? a domed building usually about 160 feet high and 130 feet wide ? houses the nuclear reactor and fuel, which are encased in numerous steel and concrete shrouds several feet thick. Some public safety groups have called for stationing air defense batteries around the nation's 103 functioning nuclear power plants for protection against attacks like those used against the Pentagon and World Trade Center. The government is studying such unprecedented protection for the power plants, but the industry opposes the move fearing a commercial jet might be accidentally downed. Protection of the plants is a top priority since September. The nuclear Regulatory Commission currently is conducting its own study about the ability of containment vessels to withstand direct hits by aircraft. But Sen. Jim Jeffords, chairman of a Senate committee assessing the vulnerability of nuclear power plants to terrorist attacks, warned in a congressional hearing on June 5 that the NRC must do more to increase security at the atomic reactors. Jeffords, an independent of Vermont, described a list of problems at power plants, including poor preparations for dealing with commando-style attacks, unrealistic assumptions of what constitutes an enemy threat and personnel troubles that undermine security. Floyd told reporters that the NEI study, which will be completed by the end of the month, relied on computer modeling to determine what would happen if a Boeing 767 struck a containment vessel head on. Terrorists used two 767 jets to destroy the World Trade Center towers and a Boeing 757 to strike the Pentagon on Sept. 11. Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the attacks. In the assumptions underpinning the scenarios that NEI assessed, the aircraft would be traveling at around 300 mph, like the plane that hit the Pentagon, not at a high speed like the two jets that struck the World Trade Center. The jet that destroyed the south tower was traveling close to 586 mph. Floyd acknowledged that if a jet were to hit a reactor containment vessel at high speeds, then the structure might be penetrated, especially if the plane struck the containment vessel at the top, where the concrete and steel protective shells are thinnest. But, he added, the probability is extremely low because an airliner traveling at such a speed and at such an angle aiming for a low-lying building would be highly inaccurate and aerodynamically unstable. "The plane in all likelihood would destroy itself before it could hit the target," Floyd told reporters. © 2002 Deseret News Publishing Company ***************************************************************** 4 Shutdown at third plant `not serious' The Taipei Times Online: 2002-06-18 By Chiu Yu-Tzu STAFF REPORTER A reactor shutdown that occurred at the Third Nuclear Power Plant in Pingtung County on Sunday created no nuclear safety concerns and a "root-cause analysis" by the Taiwan Power Company (Taipower, ¥x¹q) will be available within days, according to officials of the Atomic Energy Council (AEC) yesterday. A 1.5cm-long hairline crack in one of the pipes used to cool a power generator that produces energy to power the reactor at the plant's Unit 2, caused water spillage on Sunday morning, AEC officials said yesterday. The water triggered alarms that forced technicians to rapidly shut down the plant. "We don't think the incident has anything to do with a nuclear accident," said Ni Maw-sherg (­Ù­Z²±) deputy director of the AEC's nuclear regulation department. Ni said that the broken pipe was replaced yesterday and a pressure test was carried out to ensure that the new pipe will perform well. AEC officials will review a root-causes analysis that will be submitted by Taipower in days. They will then decide whether to let Unit 2, which is currently at "hot-standby" status, go back to full operations. This was the second reported incident at the plant since an annual overhaul of the plant was completed on June 1. On June 6, a component of one of two reactors at the plant broke down, leading to a shutdown. The plant went back to normal on June 9 but only functioned normally for a week until Sunday. AEC Vice Chairman Chiou Syh-tsong (ªô½çÁo) said yesterday that the design of nuclear power plants features multiple protective measures to prevent accidents involving the nuclear core. "The reactor shutdown [on Sunday] does not mean that the plant has problems," Chiou said. Taipower yesterday said that the accident did not cause a power shortage because the plant's reserve mechanisms could satisfy the demand for electrical power from their customers. This story has been viewed 270 times. Copyright © 1999-2002 The Taipei Times. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 5 Nuclear workers need surveillance, senators say Drug, alcohol testing [A part of canada.com] [NATIONAL POST] Monday » June 17 » 2002 Robert Fife National Post The Point Lepreau generating station in New Brunswick is one of 20 Canadian nuclear power plants. A Senate committee says staff at all plants should be tested for drug or alcohol abuse to safeguard against a disaster caused by operator error. Pilots and truck drivers already have such tests. OTTAWA - The federal government should require mandatory drug and alcohol testing of nuclear plant operators to avoid an accident that could cause more deaths and environmental damage than a terrorist crashing a plane into a nuclear reactor, according to a recent Senate report. The Senate committee on energy, the environment and natural resources urged the government to amend human rights legislation to allow drug and alcohol testing in areas critical to public safety. The committee said it seems inconsistent to randomly screen airline pilots and truck drivers for drugs and alcohol but not those in charge of nuclear safety. The government requires pilots to take yearly medical tests, and truckers face similar screening, but there is no such requirement for nuclear plant operators. "The committee sees this as a serious gap in the safety culture, especially when one considers that more damage could be done to the environment and to the population by a serious runaway nuclear reaction and/or explosion resulting from operator error than would result from a terrorist flying an airplane into a reactor building." The committee acknowledged that terrorists flying an aircraft or detonating a truck bomb near a reactor has become a serious threat since Sept. 11, but it warned the "greatest threat of terrorism" is sabotage by someone working inside a nuclear plant. The senators recommended that Canada, and other nations with nuclear reactors, set higher standards to protect nuclear materials against theft and sabotage. In its report, the committee said Ottawa must significantly increase the $75-million liability insurance nuclear reactor operators are required to carry. It recommended coverage of at least $600-million be required, although the committee noted other nations are soon expected to set insurance coverage liability at $3-billion. The committee was also highly critical of Canada's reluctance to allow its 22 nuclear power stations to be scrutinized by the Operational Safety Review Team, a group of experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency. Although France, the United States and China have allowed OSART reviews, Canada has only used the team once -- in 1987, when there were serious safety problems at the Pickering A nuclear generating station, just east of Toronto. The committee said an OSART evaluation of Pickering is expected to be done later this year. The committee said Canadian reactors are still among the safest in operation, and acknowledged Canada has dramatically tightened security at nuclear power plants since Sept. 11. Details of the plants' security arrangements are secret, but RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service are working in co-operation with the National Energy Board and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission to improve nuclear safety. © Copyright 2002 National Post ***************************************************************** 6 Members appointed to nuclear review board Tuesday, June 18, 2002 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal Panel evaluating work at Yucca Mountain By STEVE TETREAULT STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU WASHINGTON -- President Bush on Monday appointed five new members to the technical review panel evaluating the Energy Department's science work at Yucca Mountain. The appointees to the 11-member Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board are university professors with expertise variously in engineering, transportation, materials corrosion and the environment, all components of the government's effort to develop a nuclear waste repository 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Panel Chairman Jared Cohon had not sought reappointment but three of the others were willing to continue serving, sources had said. The fifth, John Arendt of Tennessee, died in April. The board reported in January it had "limited confidence" in DOE's estimates of how a repository would perform because the department's technical work is "weak to moderate at this time." Bob Loux, director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, said he was not familiar with any of the appointees, but he expressed disappointment that Bush did not reappoint board members who had signaled an interest in reappointment. "This suggests the administration isn't happy with what the board has been saying, and they've been reasonably critical of the project," Loux said. The appointees are: • Michael L. Corradini, associate dean of the University of Wisconsin College of Engineering. He was appointed board chairman. • Mark D. Abkowitz, a Vanderbilt University professor of civil and environmental engineering whose expertise includes environmental risk management and hazardous materials transportation. • Thure E. Cerling, a geology and geophysics professor at the University of Utah. Cerling pioneered a method for studying the Earth's prehistoric atmosphere and ecosystems, according to a university news release. • David J. Duquette, a corrosion expert and materials engineering professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. • Ronald Michael Latanision, a materials science professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose research includes corrosion studies of titanium-based alloys. Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal, 1997 - 2002 ***************************************************************** 7 Five to be nominated for review board Las Vegas SUN June 18, 2002 By Ed Koch Five scientists with track records in the study of safe handling of hazardous materials or in the study of how materials corrode are in line to be appointed to the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board. President Bush announced Monday that he intends to nominate the five to the board that independently evaluates the research on a proposed high-level nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain. Michael Corradini, a professor of nuclear engineering and engineering physics at the University of Wisconsin, is being tabbed by Bush to chair the committee. Corradini, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has extensive background in nuclear reactor safety. He once served on an advisory committee on reactor safeguards. Other intended presidential selections for the review board are Mark Abkowitz of Tennessee, Thure Cerling on Utah, David Duquette of New York and Ronald Latanision of Massachusetts. Abkowitz, an MIT graduate and professor of civil engineering at the Vanderbilt University School of Engineering, is a developer of Intelligent Transportation Systems, which will help states make traffic flow smoother and safer. His interests include environmental risk management, transportation of hazardous materials and emergency management training. Cerling, a professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Utah and a University of California at Berkeley graduate, has served as a reviewer of the Department of Energy's technical basic report for Yucca Mountain. His interests include environmental geochemistry and contamination of water and soil. He has served on the Board of Radioactive Waste Management. Duquette, the head professor of materials engineering for Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an MIT graduate, is the author or co-author of more than 160 scientific publications, primarily in the area of environmental degradation of materials. He is a member of the National Association of Corrosion Engineers. Latanision, a professor of materials science and engineering at MIT and a Penn State graduate, has studied the process of corrosion of metals and other materials in aqueous environments. He has been appointed to the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Department of Nuclear Engineering. All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 8 Bush administration, uranium enricher reach deal on nuclear fuel supply NANCY ZUCKERBROD, Associated Press Writer Tuesday, June 18, 2002 (06-18) 14:25 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration says a deal reached with the nation's only uranium enrichment company should help ensure the United States does not become dependent on foreign sources for nuclear fuel. The Energy Department announced Tuesday it had signed an agreement with USEC Inc., of Bethesda, Md., for the company to build a new high-tech uranium enrichment plant in Kentucky or Ohio within a decade. In return, the Energy Department will make government research and employees available to USEC. The plant would replace a 50-year-old facility in Paducah, Ky. USEC will continue producing 30 percent of the nation's nuclear fuel at the old plant until the new, more efficient one is able to do that. If USEC fails to live up to the deal, the Energy Department could take over the Paducah facility's enrichment operations. The Energy Department used to run that plant, but the government sold off its enrichment activities in 1998. That led to the formation of USEC Inc. in a $1.9 billion stock deal. The agreement also requires USEC to continue buying uranium fuel from Russia that is recycled from old Soviet bombs. Under the program, USEC buys the fuel and sells it to U.S. utilities. "With this agreement America accomplishes two very important goals, ensuring our domestic capacity to produce fuel for commercial reactors and meeting important nuclear nonproliferation goals by accepting enriched uranium from Russia," Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said. The Energy Department could recommend that USEC lose its status as the government's sole purchaser of the uranium fuel from Russia if the company doesn't live up to its agreement with the agency. USEC signed an agreement with its Russian counterpart earlier this year allowing the company to buy the Russian fuel at a lower price than it previously paid. The State Department is expected to officially approve that contract Wednesday. The Russian fuel accounts for roughly half the enriched uranium used by U.S. nuclear plants. Nuclear power supplies about 20 percent of the nation's electricity. Critics question the wisdom of placing the future of a key U.S.-Russian agreement with a company that has had a troubled financial record. Since USEC was created in 1998, it has seen its credit rating slide to junk-bond level and its stock price decline. USEC also faced criticism last year when it ceased enrichment activities at its Piketon, Ohio, plant, eliminating around 500 jobs. The new agreement will create some jobs at the Piketon facility. The deal calls on USEC to set up an operation there to clean up part of its uranium inventory that is believed to be contaminated. Still, the representative from that district said he is not satisfied. Democratic Rep. Ted Strickland said he is afraid USEC won't have the resources to build the new enrichment plant. USEC spokeswoman Elizabeth Stuckle said the company hoped to set up a demonstration project within three years and use it to attract partners. An international consortium has said it would like to build a new enrichment plant somewhere in the United States, and Strickland called it unfair for the government to back USEC. He said the Energy Department was "choosing to align and affiliate and support one private sector entity over another with no expected benefit for southern Ohio," Strickland said. Two Republican lawmakers -- Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio, and Rep. Ed Whitfield, whose district includes Paducah, Ky. -- disagreed. Both praised the agreement with USEC. On the Net: USEC Inc.: [http://www.usec.com] / Energy Department: [http://www.energy.gov] / The San Francisco Chronicle ***************************************************************** 9 remembering Browns Ferry: What starts with a flicker quickly rages KnoxNews: Columnists By Sam Venable, News-Sentinel columnist June 18, 2002 You've surely heard of the cow. It belonged to a Chicago woman, Mrs. Patrick O'Leary. On Oct. 8, 1871, this blundering bovine kicked over a lantern in her stall, igniting a fire that quickly consumed Mrs. O'Leary's barn. But the flames didn't stop there. Over the next 24 hours, they cut a swath through the city. "The Great Chicago Fire" killed 300 people, left 90,000 homeless and destroyed $200 million in property. A candle was the culprit behind a devastating accident at TVA's Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant. On March 22, 1975, a construction worker - who, like Watergate's "Deep Throat," has never been publicly identified - was using the candle to check for air leaks around electrical cables. The flickering wick torched a piece of plastic insulation, resulting in a fire that raged for seven hours. A Nuclear Regulatory Commission inquiry revealed seven of 12 safety systems failed. Only pure luck, investigators said, prevented a core meltdown. The Alabama plant was shut down for 18 months. The price tag in damages and lost power production exceeded $100 million. And now we have Terry Barton's letter, the hottest piece of prose to ever hit Colorado. Barton is the 38-year-old forestry technician charged with starting the fire that has destroyed 22 houses and charred 103,000 acres. Since the blaze is only 50 percent contained as we speak, those numbers are sure to go galloping higher. Barton is a U.S. Forest Service technician. On June 8, she was patrolling the Pike National Forest to enforce a ban on open fires. According to investigators, she stopped at a campground and burned a letter from her estranged husband. She drove back by the site shortly thereafter, only to discover her "extinguished" fire had returned with a vengeance. It's been burning ever since. Barton suffered two monumental lapses in judgment. The first, obviously, was striking a match to that letter. The second was underestimating the resurrection capabilities of fire. Perhaps the emotional toll of estrangement could be blamed for her first mistake. But the second one defies explanation. How any woodland veteran, let alone a Forest Service employee with 18 years under her belt, could fail this test is mind-boggling. Only if you have worked in Western forests - and I have - can you fully appreciate the way a "dead" fire can spring back to life. Unlike Eastern woodlands, which are largely comprised of deciduous trees, Western forests are mostly coniferous. Each tree is packed, ground to crown, with highly combustible resin. En masse, they're a tinderbox under the best of conditions. Throw in the typical summer conditions of drought, low humidity and wind, and you've got the makings of a holocaust. During one particularly dry stretch in 1966 when I was stationed on Idaho's Clearwater National Forest, the fire index grew so high all burning was banned. Including tobacco. I smoked then, as did everyone else on the crew. The only time we could light up was during official breaks. (In the woods or in an office, the feds insist you knock off at regular intervals.) We smoked together, tapped our ashes into a communal dirt pile, and then made 100 percent, absolute, positive certain the whole thing was out. One afternoon we gathered 'round a bare circle for our ritualistic smoke-a-thon. When the boss man announced break time was over, we shoveled dirt atop the spot and cranked our chainsaws back up. Five or six minutes later, I turned around and saw a frightening scene. A plume of orange flames was erupting from the ground. Sends shivers down my neck to even think back about it. We thought we had tossed mineral dirt on the ashes, but apparently there was enough needle litter in the mixture to set it off. Thank heavens we were able to put it out - dead out, this time - before it got out of hand. Even now, half a continent removed and 36 years later, I'm still skittish around outdoor fires, almost to the point of paranoia. Once burned, you're supposed to learn. Sam Venable's column appears in the News-Sentinel on Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. His column also is available on our Web site at www.knoxnews.com. He can be reached at 865-342-6272 or venob@knews.com. His latest book, "Rock-Elephant: A Story of Friendship and Fishing," is available at most bookstores and online from the News-Sentinel. The Knoxville News-Sentinel Co. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 10 Taiwan: Shutdown at third plant `not serious' * Tuesday, June 18th, 2002* Go to today's issue *By Chiu Yu-Tzu* STAFF REPORTER A reactor shutdown that occurred at the Third Nuclear Power Plant in Pingtung County on Sunday created no nuclear safety concerns and a "root-cause analysis" by the Taiwan Power Company (Taipower, ¥x¹q) will be available within days, according to officials of the Atomic Energy Council (AEC) yesterday. A 1.5cm-long hairline crack in one of the pipes used to cool a power generator that produces energy to power the reactor at the plant's Unit 2, caused water spillage on Sunday morning, AEC officials said yesterday. The water triggered alarms that forced technicians to rapidly shut down the plant. "We don't think the incident has anything to do with a nuclear accident," said Ni Maw-sherg (­Ù­Z²±) deputy director of the AEC's nuclear regulation department. Ni said that the broken pipe was replaced yesterday and a pressure test was carried out to ensure that the new pipe will perform well. AEC officials will review a root-causes analysis that will be submitted by Taipower in days. They will then decide whether to let Unit 2, which is currently at "hot-standby" status, go back to full operations. This was the second reported incident at the plant since an annual overhaul of the plant was completed on June 1. On June 6, a component of one of two reactors at the plant broke down, leading to a shutdown. The plant went back to normal on June 9 but only functioned normally for a week until Sunday. AEC Vice Chairman Chiou Syh-tsong (ªô½çÁo) said yesterday that the design of nuclear power plants features multiple protective measures to prevent accidents involving the nuclear core. "The reactor shutdown [on Sunday] does not mean that the plant has problems," Chiou said. Taipower yesterday said that the accident did not cause a power shortage because the plant's reserve mechanisms could satisfy the demand for electrical power from their customers. This story has been viewed 272 times. Copyright © 1999-2002 The Taipei Times. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 11 NRC to Hold Press Conference in Brownville On Cooper Supplemental Inspection NRC: Press Release Region IV - 2002 - 31 - U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION Office of Public Affairs, Region IV 611 Ryan Plaza Drive, Suite 400, Arlington TX 76011 www.nrc.gov No. IV-02-031 June 17, 2002 CONTACT: Breck Henderson Phone: 817-860-8128 Cellular: 817-917-1227 E-mail: opa4@nrc.gov [opa4@nrc.gov] The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission will hold a press conference on Monday, June 24, in Brownville, Neb., to discuss its supplemental inspection effort at the Cooper Nuclear Station. The press conference will begin at 1 p.m. in the Brownville Concert Hall, Atlantic Ave. &2nd St., Brownville. Elmo Collins, the inspection team manager, and Kriss Kennedy, the team leader, will be available to answer questions from the media. The supplemental inspection will begin the same day. A supplemental inspection is one that is added to the NRC's normal, or baseline, inspection program in response to declining regulatory performance. The supplemental inspection at the Cooper plant will be the most extensive called for under NRC's inspection program. The purpose of the inspection is to provide information that the NRC will use to determine the full extent of regulatory problems at the plant and whether additional agency actions are necessary. ***************************************************************** 12 NRC Amends Licensing, Inspection and Annual Fees Rule NRC: Press Release - 2002 - 74 - U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION Office of Public Affairs Telephone: 301/415-8200 Washington, DC 20555-001 E-mail: opa@nrc.gov [opa@nrc.gov] The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is amending its regulations for the licensing, inspection and annual fees it charges to applicants and licensees for fiscal year 2002. The agency is statutorily required to collect about 96 percent (two percent less than last year) of its operating budget through two types of fees. One type is for NRC services such as licensing and inspection activities. The other is an annual fee paid by all licensees, which recovers generic regulatory expenses and other costs not recovered through fees for services. These fees are set out in Commission regulations 10 CFR Part 170 (licensing and inspection services) and 10 CFR Part 171 (annual fees), respectively. The NRC must recover $479.5 million for fiscal year 2002 (October 1, 2001 - September 30, 2002). This does not include $23.7 million appropriated from the Nuclear Waste Fund for high-level waste activities, or $36 million appropriated from the General Fund for NRC homeland security activities. Funding for these activities is excluded from license fee revenues by law. The total amount to be recovered is about $26.2 million more than last year. There is a $6 increase over FY 2001 in the hourly labor rate for NRC services performed in the reactor program, and an $8 increase for NRC services performed in the nuclear material program. The hourly rates are $156 for the reactor program activities and $152 for the nuclear materials program activities. The annual fees for FY 2002 have been determined under the "re-baseline" method, which establishes new baseline fees. Based on the change in the magnitude of the budget to be recovered through fees, the Commission has determined that it is appropriate to "re-baseline" the annual fees. Re-baselining fees results in increased annual fees for most classes of licenses, except for non-power reactors, spent fuel storage/reactor decommissioning, and uranium recovery classes. The final annual fees also reflect the Commission's decision to assess the budgeted costs for this fiscal year for the contested hearing related to the mixed oxide fuel fabrication license application to all classes of licensees based on their respective percentages of the NRC's budget. In the proposed rule, these costs were to be recovered from the fuel facility class of licensees only. The final FY 2002 annual fees reflect this change. The final FY 2002 annual fees for some licensees are as follows: Categories of Licensees FY 2001 Annual Fee FY 2002 Annual Fee Operating Power Reactors (including spent fuel storage/reactor decommissioning annual fee) $2,753,000 $2,849,000 High-enriched Uranium Fuel Facility $3,545,000 $3,834,000 Low-enriched Uranium Fuel Facility $1,146,000 $1,286,000 Uranium Recovery (Conventional Mills) 94,300 77,900 Radiographers 12,500 13,700 Broad Scope Medical 24,200 26,100 Distribution of Radiopharmaceuticals 3,900 4,500 Other changes include revising the fee waiver criteria to clarify the fee exemption provisions for topical reports and certain other documents submitted to the NRC for review and approval. In addition, the Part 171 annual fee exemption for reactors is being revised to clarify that the exemption applies only to reactors licensed to operate. The NRC is also revising Part 171 to authorize the assessment of annual fees to holders of combined licenses issued under Part 52, to clarify that the annual fees will be assessed for each license, and not for each unit, as well as to establish when assessment of these annual fees will begin. The final rule will be published with additional details in an upcoming edition of the Federal Register. ***************************************************************** 13 NRC to Conduct Supplemental Inspection At Cooper Nuclear Station NRC: Press Release Region IV - 2002 - 29 - U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION Office of Public Affairs, Region IV 611 Ryan Plaza Drive, Suite 400, Arlington TX 76011 www.nrc.gov No. IV-02-029 June 17, 2002 CONTACT: Breck Henderson Phone: 817-860-8128 Cellular: 817-917-1227 E-mail: opa4@nrc.gov [opa4@nrc.gov] The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff will conduct a three-week, supplemental inspection of the Cooper Nuclear Station, a nuclear power plant near Brownville, Nebraska, beginning June 24. The plant is operated by Nebraska Public Power District. A supplemental inspection is one that is added to the NRC's normal, or baseline, inspection program in response to declining regulatory performance. The supplemental inspection at the Cooper plant will be the most extensive called for under NRC's inspection program. The purpose of the inspection is to provide information that the NRC will use to determine the full extent of regulatory problems at the plant and whether additional agency actions are necessary. Declining regulatory performance at Cooper has taken place since October 2000, when the NRC identified the first of five inspection findings with low to moderate safety significance. Four of the findings were associated with failures in Cooper's implementation of their emergency preparedness program, while the fifth finding involved a compromise of the biennial requalification exam for plant operators. Notwithstanding these issues, Cooper continues to operate in a manner that adequately maintains public health and safety. The inspection will be performed by a 13-member team which will spend a week at the plant beginning June 24 and another two weeks beginning July 15. Kriss Kennedy, chief of the branch that oversees Cooper in NRC Region IV, will lead the inspection team. A public meeting, to be announced separately, will be held the week of August 19 to discuss results, and the final inspection report is expected to be issued at the end of August. ***************************************************************** 14 NRC Proposes $3,000 Fine for Avera McKennan Hospital NRC: Press Release Region IV - 2002 - 30 - U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION Office of Public Affairs, Region IV 611 Ryan Plaza Drive, Suite 400, Arlington TX 76011 www.nrc.gov No. IV-02-030 June 17, 2002 CONTACT: Breck Henderson Phone: 817-860-8128 Cellular: 817-917-1227 E-mail: opa4@nrc.gov [opa4@nrc.gov] The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff has proposed a fine of $3,000 against Avera McKennan Hospital, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, for an incident in which a medical technology student was given a radioactive pharmaceutical without approval by an authorized physician as required by NRC regulations. The student was given technetium-99m, which is used for bone scans, despite the fact that the student was not a patient at the hospital and a physician had not determined that use of the drug was appropriate and necessary. The student was given a quantity of technetium-99m that is normally given to patients for diagnostic studies, and no adverse effects would be expected. The NRC also cited the hospital for its radiation safety officer's failure to conduct an adequate investigation following the incident. In a letter to the hospital's regional president, Fredrick W. Slunecka, NRC Regional Administrator Ellis W. Merschoff emphasized the intentional nature of the violation and the importance of prompt corrective action for violations of this type and significance. The violation has been categorized as a Severity Level III violation, which carries a civil penalty of $3,000. The NRC uses a four-level scale to rate the seriousness of violations, with Severity Level I being the most serious. The violation for failing to conduct an adequate investigation has been categorized as Severity Level IV, which has no civil penalty. Avera McKennan is required to respond to the letter and Notice of Violation with actions the hospital is taking to assure future compliance with regulatory and license requirements. The hospital has 30 days to pay the fine or protest it. If the protest is denied, the company may request a hearing by the NRC. ***************************************************************** 15 Iowa won't offer pills to residents near nuclear plant DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) - The Iowa Department of Public Health won't offer pills to Cedar Rapids-area residents that could combat a terrorist attack at nearby Duane Arnold Energy Center. The best protection in event of a radioactive release is to evacuate the area, Dan McGhee, a nuclear engineer with the department's Bureau of Radiological Health said Monday. "This is a big political issue around the country," McGhee said. "I say, 'How many people in Cedar Rapids are asking for it?' The answer is 'None.' And that's because the folks around Duane Arnold are so educated about this. Duane Arnold does a real good job of providing information." Fourteen other states have requested or received potassium iodide tablets for their residents. McGhee said the pills protect only the thyroid, not the rest of the body. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission agreed to make the tablets available to state agencies after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and reports of threats against commercial nuclear generating facilities. The Duane Arnold center is Iowa's only nuclear power plant. About 120,000 people live nearby in Cedar Rapids. The NRC would make one or two pills available to people who live or work within 10 miles around each plant. The pill would help prevent thyroid cancers and other thyroid diseases that could be caused by exposure to radioactive iodine. Linn County officials said they support the position taken by state health officials. Linn County's emergency management director, Ned Wright, said he is concerned that area residents won't follow prudent emergency procedures if they have access to the tablets. Those procedures could include taking shelter or evacuating to a nearby county, he said. Linn County officials have access to enough potassium iodide for 2,500 emergency workers and others, such as hospital patients, who could not leave the area if a radiological incident occurred, Wright said. Copyright © 2002, Lincoln Journal Star. All rights reserved. This ***************************************************************** 16 Aircraft threat to nuke plants debated United Press International By Scott R. Burnell UPI Science News Published 6/17/2002 8:07 PM WASHINGTON, June 17 (UPI) -- A report from Sandia National Laboratories, expected by the end of this month, will show nuclear reactor containment buildings can withstand a hit from a commercial airliner, a nuclear industry spokesman said Monday. The report models the reaction of various parts of a containment building to head-on impacts from both the engines and fuselage of fully loaded planes, including the Boeing 767, said Stephen Floyd, senior director for regulatory reform at the Nuclear Energy Institute. The report is separate from a Nuclear Regulatory Commission effort, but both were commissioned after the Sept. 11 attacks, Floyd told reporters at a National Press Foundation briefing. "We're completing the assessment right now. It should be ready by the end of this month," Floyd said. "We were not able to get the aircraft to penetrate the containment (in the simulations). We thought the engines might be one part that got in ... but as it turns out, the (engine shaft) is hollow and it pretty much telescopes on impact." The report considered the different thicknesses of concrete throughout a containment building's walls, as well as how the structure's curved top could deflect an aircraft, Floyd said. The report also indicates the buildings covering the pools that cool spent nuclear fuel would also stand up to an airliner's impact, he said. Not all nuclear experts agree with this assessment, however. The NEI study seems to underestimate a terrorist's capabilities to push an airplane past its design limits, a dangerous assumption after the World Trade Center attacks, said Edwin Lyman, president of the Nuclear Control Institute, an organization critical of the industry's commitment to safety. Computer simulations run by NCI last year suggest engines could penetrate a containment vessel, he told the briefing. "I would like to see the experimental data demonstrating the engine shafts telescope," Lyman said. "All that aside, the containment building is not the most vulnerable part of the plant." The impact and fire from a airliner crash could disable a reactor's cooling system to the point where the nuclear fuel would overheat, Lyman said, causing a "meltdown" where the molten fuel escapes the building and contaminates the environment. A jet fuel fire would burn out too quickly to damage enough equipment for such a scenario, Floyd responded, and reactors have redundant firefighting and cooling systems in any case. The fire-suppression plans at some reactors are suspect, said David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists. Some plants have layouts that place primary and backup firefighting systems in adjacent rooms, leaving them vulnerable to simultaneous failure in the event of a crash, he told the briefing. Despite the Bush administration's announcement about uncovering a plot to explode a "dirty bomb" containing radioactive material other than nuclear fuel, reactors still should be considered prime terrorist targets, Lyman and Lochbaum said. Spent fuel has a varied set of elements far more dangerous than medical or industrial radiation sources, Lyman said. Security officials also should consider the possible public reaction to even a failed attack on a reactor, Lochbaum said. The terror value of a reactor incident aside, Sept. 11 itself demonstrated attackers placed higher value on other targets, Floyd said. The flight paths of several of the hijacked planes that day came close to many reactors without attempting to crash into them, he noted. Copyright © 2002 United Press International ***************************************************************** 17 U.S. Congressmen Moved by Words of Gulf War Widow The New York Times *June 18, 2002* *Filed at 8:16 a.m. ET* LONDON (Reuters) - A young mother and widow of a British Gulf War veteran fought back tears Tuesday as she told an unprecedented U.S. congressional hearing of the emptiness in her life after the early death of her husband. Samantha Thompson, whose husband Nigel -- an ex-Royal Navy serviceman -- died in January, told the hearing on Gulf War syndrome that Nigel was sure he would succumb to the cocktail of chemicals he was exposed to during the 1991 conflict. ``Our lives have been literally turned upside down,'' Thompson, her voice breaking with emotion, said of the five months she and her 7-year-old daughter Hannah had endured since her husband died from motor neurone disease at just 44. ``Everything revolved around Nigel and his care. My days were spent caring for him practically 24 hours a day ... Now there is no care to be done ...It is a very quiet house now,'' she said. A panel of three congressmen and former U.S. presidential candidate Ross Perot -- in London for the first-ever hearing by a U.S. congressional committee in the British parliament -- said they were determined that Thompson's death and the suffering of thousands of other veterans would not go unrecognized. ``CHEMICAL CESSPOOL'' ``The Gulf War was a chemical cesspool,'' independent Rep. Bernie Sanders said in his opening remarks. ``It boggles my mind why in the U.S. ... the many men who have served their country and put their lives on the line have been treated in the shameful way in which they have.'' Clearly moved by Samantha Thompson's testimony, Republican Congressman Christopher Shays, chairman of the committee, turned to her daughter Hannah saying: ``Your daddy, young lady, was a hero.'' Gulf War syndrome, or Gulf War illness, is blamed for a range of medical symptoms ranging from tiredness, convulsions and respiratory and digestive problems to nerve damage, pain, numbness and psychological difficulties. Around 125,000 of the 700,000 U.S. Desert Storm troops and some 5,000 of the 50,000 British Gulf War personnel complain of some or all of the symptoms. The causes of the illness have been hotly debated and linked variously to the inoculations the veterans received, pesticides they handled, smoke from burning fires and stress. Last year, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs said Gulf War service personnel were almost twice as likely as other veterans to develop the fatal neurological ailment Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, known as Motor Neurone Disease in Britain. This was the first official acknowledgement of a scientific link between Gulf War service and a specific disease. John Nichol, a former Royal Air Force navigator who was shot down during the conflict and captured by the Iraqis, called for a public inquiry into Gulf War Syndrome to look at how the cocktail of chemicals, including multiple vaccinations, nerve gas and depleted uranium, might have affected those serving. ``If there is nothing to hide, why shy away from an open inquiry to establish why our veterans are sick and dying?'' Perot, a Texas billionaire who has funded research into Gulf War illness, expressed anger at the attitudes of the UK and U.S. political and medical establishments which have tended to put the sickness down to the stresses and strains of warfare. ``This is not stress. This is troops in combat wounded by chemical agents,'' he said, calling for an immediate change of attitude to those who fought and were now dying for their countries. ``We need action this day.'' Perot and Shays were scheduled Wednesday to give a presentation to British parliamentarians on progress being made in the U.S. to identify the causes of Gulf War illness. Copyright 2002 Reuters Ltd. ***************************************************************** 18 UK: Gulf War syndrome hearing TUESDAY 18/06/02 12:17:56 UTV Three US congressmen and former US presidential candidate Ross Perot was today hearing UK veterans give evidence in Parliament on Gulf War illnesses. The term Gulf War Syndrome is used to describe illnesses suffered by servicemen and women who served in the 1991 Gulf War conflict. The symptoms and illnesses include severe fatigue, nausea, fevers, muscle and joint complaints, memory loss, mood swings including severe aggression, insomnia, swollen glands and headaches. Various causes of the disease have been suggested. They include exposure to pesticides and other toxic chemicals, exposure to radioactive depleted uranium shells and burning oil wells, and a cocktail of vaccines given to soldiers, all arising out of active service. About 53,000 British soldiers took part in the Desert Storm campaign, the international effort to liberate Kuwait in 1991 following the invasion by Saddam Hussein`s Iraq. Support groups say since then more than 500 former British soldiers have died of the syndrome and a further 6,000 are suffering its effects. About 4,000 Gulf War veterans have outstanding claims against the MoD for illnesses they believe were caused by their role in the conflict according to Tony Flint, a former chairman of the National Gulf Veterans` and Families Association. Gulf War veteran Shaun Rusling won a landmark ruling recently when a War Pensions Agency tribunal officially recognised Gulf War Syndrome as a disease. But many other veterans have been turned down for army pensions because Ministry of Defence doctors say there is no such disease. The MoD will be present at the Congressional hearings but only as observers. The US has launched a Congressional subcommittee investigation, but successive British government`s have so far refused to instigate similar far reaching enquiries. ***************************************************************** 19 UK: Testimony Gulf War widow UTV TUESDAY 18/06/02 12:19:34 A Gulf War widow today blinked back tears as she told a US Congressional committee sitting in Westminster of her husband's slow death after returning from the conflict. Samantha Thompson joined war veterans at the unprecedented hearing to tell her story, as part of a Congressional investigation into Gulf War-related illnesses. Her husband Nigel Thompson died from motor neurone disease in January this year, aged 44. He always blamed his condition on the pre-treatment of troops in the Gulf against a possible chemical or biological attack by the Iraqis. The couple`s seven-year-old daughter Hannah sat behind her in the committee room in Portcullis House as she accused the Ministry of Defence of ``washing its hands`` of servicemen who contracted Gulf War Syndrome, which the government claims does not exist. Committee chairman Congressman Christopher Shays told her: ``Your husband is a hero ma`am.`` He then said to Hannah: ``Your dad was a hero.`` Mrs Thompson told three congressmen and former US presidential candidate Ross Perot: ``It seemed to Nigel that the day you handed in your ID card, the Ministry of Defence washed their hands of you and it was the Royal British Legion who were thankfully there to pick up the pieces.`` Flanked by former RAF officer John Nicol, whose plane was shot down over Iraq during Operation Desert Storm in 1991, and Shaun Rusling, chairman of the National Gulf Veterans` and Families` Association, she said: ``Life has been incredibly difficult since Nigel died almost five months ago. ``Our lives have literally been turned upside down.`` She added: ``Our daughter misses her father immensely and this Sunday was very hard for her as it was our first Father`s Day without Nigel. ``We visited West Malvern where he is buried so Hannah could lay some flowers on her father`s grave - a most heartbreaking event for a seven-year-old.`` Mr Shays told Mrs Thompson that in the US her husband`s condition would have been acknowledged as being caused by participating in the Gulf War. It is the first time a US Congressional committee has held a meeting in Westminster. Mr Shays, describing it as ``an honour and a privilege to be here``, said the committee was on a fact-finding mission ``in the hope that we can ease the pain and improve the prognosis of UK and US veterans``. About 5,000 veterans are said to suffer from illnesses in the UK, and 125,000 in the US. The one day hearing will form part of the Congressional committee`s investigation. It was hearing from medical experts who claim a direct link between troops exposed to organophosphates and depleted uranium in the conflict and illnesses they subsequently suffered from. Mr Rusling, of the veterans` association, told the committee: ``We have been abandoned by our country and successive Governments since the Gulf War have adopted a policy that is based on `don`t look, don`t find and cannot see`.`` He added: ``The attitude of the MoD is one of `go a seek charitable help and hand-outs`. ``This crass attitude to those of our armed forces` servicemen and women, who in the 21st century have families to raise and mortgages to pay, and are unable to do so because they are ill because they fought for their country will devastate our fighting ability in the future.`` Mr Rusling, who recently won a pensions appeal tribunal which found that his illness was attributable to his service in the war, rejected medical evidence put forward by the MoD as ``psycho babble and Government ploy.`` He said tests paid for by the association found traces of depleted uranium in Gulf War veterans` urine ``proving a significant exposure during the war.`` Ross Perod, who has funded research into veterans` illnesses, said at the beginning of the hearing: ``This is not stress. This is troops in combat wounded by chemical agents. ``Our enemies in the current war on terrorism have these agents.`` He added: ``We don`t know how to vaccinate people now and we don`t know how to treat them if they are exposed. ``Our two nations should be working 24-hours, seven days a week to protect every citizen in our nations.`` ***************************************************************** 20 U.S. nuclear plants could survive aircraft attacks, official says Eric Rosenberg Hearst Newspapers June 18, 2002 WASHINGTON - The nation's nuclear power plants could withstand an aerial assault similar to the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, a senior industry official said Monday. However, Stephen Floyd, a director of the Nuclear Energy Institute, conceded that in extreme circumstances the nuclear reactors and their highly radioactive fuel could be vulnerable. Citing a study being done by the institute, which represents the nuclear industry, Floyd said, "The preliminary results are that it is extremely unlikely that the aircraft would be able to penetrate the containment vessel." The containment vessel, a large domed building usually about 160 feet high and 130 feet wide, houses the nuclear reactor and fuel, which are encased in numerous steel and concrete shrouds several feet thick. Some public safety groups have called for stationing air defense batteries around the nation's 103 functioning nuclear power plants for protection against attacks like those used against the Pentagon and World Trade Center. The government is studying such unprecedented protection for the power plants, but the airline industry opposes the move, fearing that a commercial jet might be accidentally downed. Protection of the plants is a top priority since September. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission currently is conducting its own study about the ability of containment vessels to withstand direct hits by aircraft. But Sen. Jim Jeffords, chairman of a Senate committee assessing the vulnerability of nuclear power plants to terrorist attacks, warned at a congressional hearing June 5 that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission must do more to increase security at the atomic reactors. Jeffords, an independent from Vermont, described a list of problems at power plants, including poor preparations for dealing with commando-style attacks, unrealistic assumptions of what constitutes an enemy threat and personnel troubles that undermine security. Floyd told reporters that the Nuclear Energy Institute's study, which will be completed by the end of the month, relied on computer modeling to determine what would happen if a Boeing 767 struck a containment vessel head on. The Arizona Republic Copyright 2002, azcentral.com. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 21 Hatch sets 3 meets with downwinders [deseretnews.com] WASHINGTON — Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, has scheduled three meetings to help Utahns who were uranium miners or downwind cancer victims of atomic testing apply for government compensation. "Many Utahns who were exposed to radiation from the government's atomic bomb testing programs have been waiting much too long to receive their compensation," Hatch said. "That is why I have requested the Department of Justice to send representatives to meet with my constituents and make the claims process more efficient," he said. The meetings are: + June 25 in the Moab Senior Citizens Center, 450 E. 100 North in Moab, from 4 to 6 p.m. + June 26 in the Monticello High School gymnasium, 164 S. 200 West in Monticello, from 10 a.m. to noon. + June 26 at the Whitehorse High School auditorium on U-163 in Montezuma Creek, from 2 to 4 p.m. Congress has approved paying $50,000 to some downwind cancer victims who have certain types of cancer and who lived in certain areas during atomic tests. It has also approved paying up to $150,000 to some uranium miners with cancer or their families. The government knew such miners working in unventilated mines would likely contract lung cancer but never warned them. © 2002 Deseret News Publishing Company ***************************************************************** 22 Experts Sum Up Their Fears of a Nuke Attack [NewsMax.com] Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.com Tuesday, June 18, 2002 Editor’s note: This is part one of a five-part series that will go on to examine the real dirt on "dirty bombs,” what your government is dong to prepare for a nuclear attack of the first or second kind, what other countries are doing to prepare for the same, and what you can do. The screen dramatization of Tom Clancy’s "The Sum of All Fears” features terrorists nuking the fans at the Super Bowl in Baltimore. This odd escape vehicle for a terror-warning-overdosed American public is raking in millions at the box office and graphically depicts the "inevitable” nuclear phase of the War on Terrorism described by such administration luminaries as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. "Hundreds of thousands” of Americans are potentially at risk of nuclear attack, no-nonsense Rumsfeld chillingly says. Rice, whose job it is to know about these things, grimly forecasts that the next terror shoe to drop will "make Sept. 11 look like child’s play by using some terrible weapon.” But what do more neutral experts and institutions say – especially those that do not have to justify to taxpayers the expenditure of billions in a terror war? And by neutral we don’t mean folks such as investment guru Warren Buffett, who will gladly shock any sentient being in earshot with the unwelcome news flash: A nuke attack on American soil is "virtually a certainty.” Neither do we mean Graham Allison, Harvard egghead and an assistant secretary of defense in the Clinton administration, who predicts with the tools of a seer, "bin Laden’s final act could be a nuclear attack on America.” Among the more benign experts, there is some general agreement on basics. Homemade Nuke 'Can Be Ruled Out' Starting with the good news, it’s mighty unlikely that any terror group can build a nuclear weapon from scratch. One senior scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory opines that the possibility of such an achievement is "so remote that it can be essentially ruled out.” To manufacture weapons-grade uranium, a terrorist would require thousands of sophisticated high-speed gas centrifuges, not to mention a safe haven in which to operate them. Even Iraq could not produce highly enriched uranium for a bomb after a 10-year, $10 billion program, which was eventually trumped by the Gulf War in 1991. Basing a bomb on plutonium is just as onerous. Even with access to a reactor, the process to extract the plutonium necessitates a specially constructed plutonium extraction plant: chopping up radioactive fuel rods, dissolving them in acid and finally extracting the plutonium from the acid. And it’s not likely the terrorist group is going to find such a plant by rummaging through the newspaper classifieds as if scanning for flight training schools or rental crop dusters. However, once one gets away from the scratch recipes, the experts agree that the probabilities increase exponentially. Woeful Russia a Source Our duty terrorist could certainly look to Russia for its supply of ready-to-rock-and-roll plutonium. The retired Evil Empire has tons of the stuff and, what’s more, a poor accounting system, a tradition of smuggling and plenty of underpaid scientists to bribe and undermine. The penny-pinching terrorist plotter could eschew plutonium altogether and go with buying or stealing the cheaper bomb-grade uranium, just like Uncle Sam used in "Fat Man” and "Little Boy” back in 1945. One wrinkle: the usual requirement of uranium is a daunting 120 pounds a bomb. Experts say that such an amount is not available on the black market, and if it were, our crack intelligence agencies would know about it in a New York minute. However, despite the dearth of atomic goods on the shelf, the terrorists are certainly out there trying their level best to steal some of the good stuff or buy it from some thief who has. In 1993 about 6 pounds of weapon-grade uranium almost went astray in St. Petersburg. In 1998, another effort to steal about 40 pounds of former Soviet Union bomb-grade uranium was nipped in the bud. Our frank Russian friends tell us that terrorists are now staking out their nuclear-weapon sites. In any event, most experts agree that one day the terrorists will get their hands on that magic quantity of 120 pounds of bomb-ready uranium and lash it up with a so-called "gun-barrel” trigger where bullets of the fissionable stuff are fired at one another to crank up the runaway reaction that gives you the nuclear mushroom and fireball that figure in that sum of all our fears. Like reactors and plutonium extraction plants, buying or stealing bomb-grade plutonium is improbable as well. If you believe Russian President Vladimir Putin, there just isn’t the product out there to buy. Putin has guaranteed President Bush that none of his country’s warheads are unaccounted for. But some folks in the U.S. Department of Energy were of the opinion a decade ago that 603 metric tons of nuclear materials were stored in 53 sites in the former Soviet Union where security was euphemistically rated "poor.” That tonnage, some guarded mightily by locks and chains, is enough to crank out 41,000 nuclear weapons. The atomic energy agency counts 18 incidents of trafficking in plutonium or uranium since 1993 – none, thankfully, involving enough material to make The Bomb. There is more bad news about the poor man’s uranium nuke. Makeshift as it may be, it works first time, every time. There’s no need to ever test it, or for that matter to give away the fact that you have it. All Rights Reserved © NewsMax.com ***************************************************************** 23 SCHUMER: DIRTY BOMB MATERIAL EASY TO GET NYPOST.COM Regional News: June 17, 2002 Sen. Charles Schumer yesterday called for the registration and tracking of radioactive material that could be used to make a "dirty bomb." A bill announced by Schumer (D-N.Y.) would also increase security requirements for facilities - such as hospitals, laboratories and power plants - that use low-grade uranium and plutonium, which can be wrapped around conventional explosives to contaminate a wide area. "Most of the radioactive materials that could be used in a dirty bomb are easy to get a hold of," Schumer said. "Tracking materials used in dirty bombs won't be the only step in the process, but it is the next step." A dirty bomb is a low-level explosive designed to spread radiation over a relatively small area. Schumer's bill calls for federal inspection of all sites using radioactive material; collection by the Department of Energy of any radiological material no longer needed by its owner; and funding for National Guard troops to secure nuclear-power and -waste facilities. Some 300 incidents of missing radioactive materials - mostly small amounts in gauges or other equipment - are reported to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission each year. About half are eventually recovered. William J. Gorta with Post Wire Services [http://www.nypost.com] NYPOST.COM, NYPOSTONLINE.COM, and NEWYORKPOST.COM are trademarks ***************************************************************** 24 Report: US nuclear plants can survive plane attack (06/18/2002) (Agencies) A hijacked commercial airliner loaded with explosive jet fuel like the one that hit the Pentagon on Sept. 11 could not penetrate a U.S. nuclear power reactor and release deadly radiation, according to a nuclear industry study announced on Monday. The report's conclusions are intended to calm a nervous public and nuclear industry critics worried the nation's 103 nuclear reactors, especially those near big cities, are susceptible to a Sept. 11 type of attack. The study was commissioned by the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade group, which hired independent consultants to analyze what damage would occur if a Boeing 767 airplane filled with fuel crashed into a nuclear power plant. "We think it's extremely unlikely that the aircraft would be able to penetrate the reactor," said Stephen Floyd, NEI's senior director of regulatory reform. "We feel very, very confident about the containment structure." Floyd announced the study's preliminary findings during a National Press Foundation seminar on the threat of terror attacks on nuclear power plants. The study was based on scenarios in which the wide-bodied aircraft crashed into a nuclear reactor traveling at about 300 miles per hour (480 kilometers per hour), the same speed as the plane that damaged the Pentagon. It did not analyze a nuclear reactor hit by a plane traveling at the higher speeds of the two airliners that destroyed New York's World Trade Center. Security has been boosted at nuclear plants since the Sept. 11 attacks, but some lawmakers and environmental activists have urged regulators to station military personnel with sophisticated weapons at nuclear plants to repel a hijacked plane. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said earlier this month it would analyze what devastation could occur if a fuel-laden commercial airliner crashed into a reactor. U.S. plants are designed to protect the radioactive core from tornadoes, hurricanes, fires and earthquakes. The industry's report used computer models to analyze the impact of a plane hitting a reactor from different angles. Neither the plane or its engines would be able to slice through a reactor's protective concrete shell, which is several feet thick at the base, the study said. The experts studied several scenarios, including the reactor taking a direct hit from an airplane or being hit by the engine under an airplane's wing. A resulting fire from the airplane's jet fuel might engulf a nuclear reactor, but would not cause it to collapse like the World Trade Center, the industry report said. The report did not consider the scenario of a reactor being hit by an airplane flying at more than 500 mph (800 km/hour), the speed at which the two planes hit the World Trade Center last September. A pilot flying closer to the ground and aiming at a nuclear reactor would not be able to control an airplane at 500 mph because of pressure waves that would be created, it said. Hijackers also could not nose-dive a commercial airliner into the top of a reactor where the concrete shell is thinnest, because the plane would break apart at such a steep angle and high speed, according to the study. "The plane in all likelihood would destroy itself before it could hit the target," Floyd said. The report was viewed skeptically by other experts. Edwin Lyman, president of the Nuclear Control Institute, questioned the methodology of the report funded by U.S. utilities and said his group's review has found that a Boeing 767 airliner could crash through a reactor. However, Lyman's group based its conclusions on an airplane flying at maximum cruising speed of 530 mph. Such a high speed just a few hundred feet off the ground would make it difficult to accurately strike a nuclear plant. Lyman also reiterated his group's recommendation that federal regulators should consider asking the Defense Department to place anti-aircraft missiles at nuclear power plant facilities to shoot down a hijacked plane aiming for the site. The nuclear industry opposes such a plan, saying it runs the risk of shooting down a commercial airliner that has simply strayed off its flight path. A military commander would have only about 45 seconds after spotting an airplane to decide if it was an attack and should be fired upon. The report will be reviewed by industry experts before being released to the public at the end of the summer. Copyright 2002 By chinadaily.com.cn. All rights ***************************************************************** 25 Nuclear plants receive NRC OK HAMPTON ROADS - Business By CAROLYN SHAPIRO, The Virginian-Pilot © June 18, 2002 Dominion Resources Inc. has received preliminary approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to keep its Surry and North Anna nuclear power plants running for an additional 20 years. In draft environmental impact statements, the commission concluded that it found no serious environmental obstacles that would prevent the renewal of the plants' licenses for another two decades. The original 40-year operating licenses for the power company's two nuclear reactors in Surry County, generating about 1,600 megawatts of electricity, expire in May 2012 and January 2013. Licenses for North Anna's two reactors, which produce about 1,800 megawatts at a site north of Richmond, expire in 2018 and 2020. Dominion, based in Richmond, filed a voluminous application a year ago to extend the plants' licenses. The company expects to receive a final decision from the commission in mid-2003 or sooner, said Richard Zuercher, spokesman for Dominion's nuclear division. The Surry and North Anna power stations each employ about 850 people. Reach Carolyn Shapiro at 446-2270 or cashapir@pilotonline.com Copyright 2002, HamptonRoads.com ***************************************************************** 26 ... While `Choke Points' Clog The Route West WORLD/NATION Lots To Worry About, From Hills Of Harrisburg To Flying J Truck Stop June 17, 2002 By RINKER BUCK, Courant Staff Writer A mid-continent drive across America's interstates is breathtakingly beautiful, with the Appalachian peaks moody with fog in the morning, the Illinois farmlands expansive and green after spring rains, the canyons out West implausibly dramatic and wide. But throughout that charmed landscape, America is deeply troubled over the prospect of hauling nuclear waste to Nevada. Beginning in 2010, when a disposal site is supposed to be ready at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, the radioactive detritus from America's nuclear reactors will begin the trek by rail and in specially designed trucks, across a transportation grid that will transect 43 states. Nearly a quarter of a century later, it will all reach the sandy-brown massif northwest of Las Vegas - close to 77,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel. The prospect of that much nuclear waste crossing America - by most estimates, some 2,000 trucks a year - should not unduly alarm the estimated 150 million Americans whose homes and places of work stand along the proposed routes, the U.S. Department of Energy says. The waste shipments through most states will be escorted by armed posses of state troopers and tracked by the DOE's "Transcom" satellite navigation system. The casks containing the "fuel baskets" of irradiated nuclear rods will be protected by lead gamma shields, neutron-resistant polymers and three layers of stainless steel. After all, as the literature handed out by the DOE cheerfully insists, over the past 30 years, some 2,700 shipments of mostly lower-level nuclear waste have been transported 1.6 million miles across the U.S. There hasn't been a "harmful release" of radiation yet. For much of the country, transportation is the issue that largely frames the debate over nuclear waste storage, even though in Nevada, the fight is over the Yucca Mountain site itself. A slow drive across the country along portions of the projected Yucca waste trail bears that out. Rattled by Sept. 11, their faith in technology and domestic security already eroded by earlier disasters, Americans across the country's midsection are displaying increasingly restive doubts about the possible transportation plan. State and local politicians and anti-nuclear activists are already mounting major public relations campaigns and legal challenges. At major "transportation choke points" along the highways to Yucca - Harrisburg, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Denver and Salt Lake City - burgeoning citizens' groups are virtually guaranteeing significant delays. But political opposition may be the least of DOE's worries. A host of natural and man-made obstacles will increase the unpredictability of the DOE's ability to safely deliver waste to the nuclear graveyard in Nevada. Day 1: Pennsylvania Highway 441, south of Harrisburg It is a humid, windy afternoon as Judy Johnsrud, sitting on a guardrail, stares down at the banks of the Susquehanna River and the looming cooling towers of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. Below her, the partially dismantled steel structure of the Unit 2 cooling tower, damaged during the TMI partial meltdown in 1979, gleams in the sun. Reaching into the pockets of her jacket, Johnsrud, a lively, outspoken woman, fishes out two digital Geiger counters that begin to click and beep as she turns them on. "I always get slightly elevated readings in this spot," she says. "These plants do emit levels of radioactivity all the time." Johnsrud, a geographer who studies the siting of nuclear power plants and is often called "The Mother Jones of Three Mile Island," is legendary within the anti-nuclear movement. She regularly testifies before regulatory commissions in Washington and is regarded as a leading expert on the impact of nuclear power on civilian populations. "The engineers who designed TMI used a single-failure mode for accident planning," Johnsrud says. "Well, look what happened here. Three days after the TMI meltdown, after the company and the state finally conceded that radiation was leaking in the area, 150,000 people tried to flee this area all at once. It was mayhem. Now we're talking about taking that same risk, radioactive fuel assemblies carried on trucks, directly into the neighborhoods of the American people." Johnsrud is one of dozens of experts across the country who believe that the DOE has deliberately focused on the "acquisition phase" of securing Yucca Mountain as a site, delaying discussing its transportation plans because it knows that controversy could kill the whole project. "Initially, DOE said that this nuclear waste would be carried only by rail, through sparsely populated areas of the country. Well, what rail line do you know of that doesn't go through a populated urban center? That's the point of a railroad," she says. "So now, DOE says that they'll go by highways and avoid congested areas by passing along arterial `ring roads' around cities. But those arterials are now dense with suburbs, often busier than the urban area itself. Besides, it's a total mistake to regard the actual accident site as the threat. Depending on wind direction and speed, radioactivity can be carried 20 to 30 miles within an hour of a spill. There's simply no way to put in place emergency evacuation facilities along the 5,000 to 6,000 miles that these trucks will travel." Pennsylvania's response to TMI is a state-of-the-art Emergency Operations Center, replete with satellite technology for tracking trucks, disaster-proof communications equipment and hot lines to federal law enforcement agencies and national laboratories that would have to respond if a radioactive leak occurred along Pennsylvania highways. From here, authorities tracked the shipment of waste from the damaged reactor core to a temporary storage facility in Idaho. "We're the only one with actual experience exporting nuclear waste under emergency conditions," says Tom Hughes, chief radiological officer with the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency. "We moved almost 40 shipments of TMI-2 waste by rail, a very significant achievement considering that damaged nuclear fuel rods are considered even more volatile than ordinary spent fuel. Those shipments went off without a hitch." Low-level nuclear waste regularly crosses the state, and each shipment is tracked by a team of state troopers, radiology officers and transportation specialists. At a computer console in the darkened interior of the operations center, Hughes demonstrates how shipments are monitored across the highways via Global Positioning Satellite transponders mounted on every truck and explains how the tracking system is tied into all the relevant federal technology. "Two years ago, for example, we were tracking an escorted shipment across the state when we saw alerts of tornado activity along Route 80. We immediately radioed the federal people in Albuquerque, N.M., who were managing the shipment, and they contacted the trucks to pull off in a secure waiting area just ahead. When the weather conditions improved, the trucks were allowed to pull out." But feelings of high-tech security can still be dashed by the most commonplace act of God. Rain. Day 2: Cumberland, Md., I-68 An afternoon thunderstorm boils over from West Virginia, pummeling the highway with heavy rain and high winds where it climbs and twists through the Appalachian hollows of the Savage River State Forest. Shipments will likely be diverted here and onto state roads to avoid tunnels on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Several cars skid off onto the soupy grass median, and most of the tractor-trailer traffic pulls off to the shoulder, parking bumper-to-bumper in long lines that make driving difficult in spots. State troopers attempting to reach an accident site are blocked by stalled cars and trucks. Several dozen commercial trucks leave the highway at the next exit and jam the lot of the Keysers Ridge Truck Stop. Jerry Hatfield is a trucker from Tupelo, Miss., driving his big Freightliner for Action Transport back there from Ohio. He stares out at the storm through the misted windows of the truck stop diner, cigarette and coffee in hand. "I'm an old fart who's been driving for 30 years, and I've just seen an enormous increase in traffic that's made the roads dangerous with congestion," he says. "In the summer, all this vacation traffic is just nuts, and geezers with RVs are cutting us off all the time. Trucks flip over, just getting out of their way. Some of these rigs catch fire when the diesel hits the exhaust stacks, or they jackknife and stall two lanes of traffic for hours. Now they're talking about carrying nuclear waste? Forget it. There will be wrecks." They're nothing, he says, compared with the hijackings. "They're happening all the time now. Liquor trucks, cigarette trucks, trucks loaded with computers - anything that's valuable and can be moved fast, they just hijack the trailer. We all have friends who stopped their rig for dinner and came out to find the trailer gone. I'm sure that the terrorists know all about this, but do you think these safety planners and government experts on nuclear waste have considered that? Bull. The only hazards they know to think about are the ones they can find in books." Day 3: 86th running of the Indy 500, near Union Station, Indianapolis Festive traffic crowds city streets and area roads as almost half a million race enthusiasts inch toward the Motor Speedway west of downtown. The Goodyear blimp floats overhead and airplanes towing advertising banners circle. Chris Williams, a tall, beefy man who is the executive director of the Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana, is pointing in the bright sunlight to the Union Station railroad stop, the Indiana Convention Center and the inflated roof of the RCA Dome nearby, all standing in a cluster of buildings across the rail tracks that will be part of the Yucca waste trail. The main arterial highways ringing the city, I-70, I-65 and I-465, converge nearby, and the massive, blocks-long factory and headquarters complex of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly is a quarter of a mile away. "I'm really glad you're here today, because this just demonstrates the futility of the Yucca transport plan," Williams says. "The Indy 500 is supposed to be the biggest single sporting event of the year anywhere in the country, and you can see how close the site is from this nuclear waste route. "OK, fine," Williams continues, "the DOE will reply to that by saying that they won't run radioactive shipments through Indianapolis on race day. But what about the convention center here, the sports dome, all these corporate headquarters and bank towers? Are we supposed to shut the city down every time there's a shipment? Those big ducts you see on the RCA Dome are the intakes for the fans that keep the roof inflated. They have to run all the time. If there's a spill in the neighborhood, that sports dome will just become one big pocket of radioactivity." Williams, a veteran activist, recounts Indiana's no-nukes legacy. Citizens' groups helped kill two nuclear power plants under construction. "Indiana is scheduled to become the fourth-busiest state for transporting this waste. I predict that people will say, `Indiana will do its share, but this volume of waste is too high.'" Day 5: Crossing the Mississippi at St. Louis, heading for Webster Groves This "choke-point" city is a confluence of rail lines and major interstates in a state where a series of spectacular train derailments and controversial road repair programs have made transportation an emotional issue. The St. Louis area is also the home of another legendary anti-nuclear activist, Kay Drey, and several influential community groups who are already vowing to "Stop Yucca" at the transport phase of the proposal. The Union Pacific rail tracks and a cluster of major interstates merge near Webster Groves, a large, mixed-income suburb just west of the city. Lauren Bohannan, a single mother who works at a local senior center, lives in a pleasant, tree-lined residential section, about a mile from the turn-of-the-century downtown area called Old Webster. Her front door is just a few steps from the Union Pacific tracks. "Eleven years ago we had a major derailment right in our front yard here, and last May a whole coal train overturned closer to downtown, spilling coal onto people's doorsteps," she says. "This is a residential neighborhood very aware of the hazards of carrying ordinary cargo, and now they want to bring deadly nuclear waste through. I'm not a hysterical person, but it just seems to me that this is a common-sense question. Should we be running trains with radioactive waste through here when the nation is fighting a war on terror? I don't think so." Day 7: Denver At a Denver steak house, Allan M. Turner, a broad-shouldered, eloquent former state trooper, is picking at his salad, distracted by the chore of explaining the complexities of "freighting" nuclear waste. He once headed the Colorado Highway Patrol unit that handled hazardous waste, was influential in devising a plan for transporting defense nuclear waste across the west and now heads the Colorado Department of Public Safety. Because the "government has no choice," he favors the Yucca project, but he believes that the practical and political difficulties of negotiating nuclear waste over the Denver area's notoriously packed roads will make Colorado a hot point for the DOE. "I believe that the nuclear shipments to Yucca can be conducted safely," Turner says, "but getting there is going to involve the DOE in some frank assessments about the state of the highway system, and a candor with the public, that I'm not sure they're willing to make. ... These escorted shipments are probably going to present a lot more inconvenience to the driving public than has been discussed so far. ... Everyone has to be truthful here and face that there's no such thing as a safe route for hazardous materials. Some routes are just safer than others." Because hazardous shipments likely won't be allowed through the I-70 tunnels west of Denver, trucks destined for Yucca will be routed up I-25 and into Wyoming, to I-80, a road that already handles 5,000 trucks a day. Day 9: Laramie to Elk Mountain, Wyo. It's a quiet Saturday morning. Environmental engineer Richard C. Moore stands on a pedestrian walkway that crosses the Union Pacific tracks high above the city. A row of classic false-front western facades line the downtown below, and the tall peaks of the Colorado mountains and the Snowy Range rise to the south and west. Moore has devoted the last 15 years of his life to studying the transportation of nuclear waste, working as a consultant to the Western Governor's Association, several states and the DOE. He says that a safe plan for transporting nuclear waste to Yucca can be achieved, but that more attention must be paid to the clash of transportation and the harsh but fragile environment of the West. Moore waves his arm out toward the tall ridge of the Laramie Range to the east. "That whole slope dropping down from 9,000 feet there is the watershed for the city of Laramie. But both I-80 and the railroad tracks that will carry this waste pass through Telephone Canyon up there. One bad spill could be it for our water table forever." But it's the possibility of a "mixed cargo event" - where hazardous materials are on trains with other cargo - that troubles him most. "It's entirely plausible that we could have a train go over where, say, a toxic chemical goes out if its tanker. But if there's nuclear waste on the same train, the responders could hold back because there's measurable radioactivity in the area. Meanwhile, thousands of gallons of something else is contaminating the water supply." And he warns of the winds, and in winter the snow, through the pass at 11,000-foot Elk Mountain, which separates the Great Divide Basin and the Bighorn Mountains out near Rawlins. Two hours later, on the long climbing stretch of I-80 toward the pass, the winds are blowing at more than 70 miles per hour, and two tractor-trailers are overturned. "I've been driving for 31 years and Elk Mountain is one of the most notorious passes we truckers know," says Ronnie Wills of Waco, Texas, sitting out the wind at the Flying J truck stop below. "When the wind starts to blow across Wyoming, there's no way you can keep a truck on the road. Hauling nuclear waste across this stretch of I-80? It isn't very smart for the federal government to come up with that." Days 10 and 11: Heading for Utah, Nevada and Yucca After the Red Desert country of western Wyoming, Utah's Wasatch Range leads to Great Salt Lake, with more passes made treacherous by the wind. The drive southwest from there takes in the big gorge country of southern Utah and Nevada. The views are endless, a mosaic of purple and beige canyon walls broken occasionally by green agricultural valleys, but the road conditions are hard. Repaving projects on one side of the highway force traffic into gauntlets of trucks and cars passing almost fender-to-fender for 7 or 8 miles at a stretch, and high winds bring traffic to a crawl along the wider gorges. This is the home stretch for all the trucks that would eventually haul nuclear waste into Yucca. It could make a major transportation hub out of Caliente, Nev. - as a transfer point. Yet the vagaries of nuclear transport are barely on Nevada's radar screen, as this state of tourism and gambling concentrates first on keeping Yucca from happening at all. Later they will worry about the trucks. Road To Yucca View a graphic that describes the possible route nuclear waste will take from Connecticut's nuclear plants to Yucca Mountain: Click Here. ctnow.com is Copyright © 2002 by The Hartford Courant Powered by ***************************************************************** 27 Franklin exec says county prepared for possible nuclear waste transit BRIAN JUSTICE, The Sunday News Staff Writer June 17, 2002 *FRANKLIN COUNTY -If nuclear waste is transported to the Yucca Mountain, Nev., nuclear repository, Franklin County will be prepared to handle any circumstances related to it.* That was Franklin County Executive Monty Adams's assessment Friday. Adams said the nuclear waste would probably be transported on CSX Transportation Inc. railroad tracks going through Decherd and Cowan. He said the county would deal with the issue accordingly. "I'm sure our staff will be on top of the situation," Adams said. "They will be prepared to deal with it if it ever occurs." At present, the nuclear waste issue is in the U.S. Senate's hands. If the Senate concurs with President Bush's recommendation to use the Yucca Mountain repository, nuclear waste would probably be shipped there by rail through Decherd and Tullahoma and on nearby Interstate 24 by truck beginning about 2010, according to Allen Benson, Department of Energy/Yucca Mountain public information officer. Nevada's hopes of blocking the nuclear waste site in its state are dwindling after a rousing House endorsement of the project and indications the Senate may consider the issue soon. Ignoring concerns by some lawmakers about the risks of thousands of nuclear waste shipments crossing the country, the House decided recently by a nearly 3-1 margin to support President Bush's plan to make Yucca Mountain the nation's central nuclear waste repository. The mountain, a ridge of volcanic rock and ash, is 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas and adjacent to the Nevada Test Site where the government detonated scores of nuclear bombs during the Cold War years. Despite the overwhelming House defeat, Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn, a Republican, said he was confident the facility never will be built and will continue to battle the federal government. Three Nevada lawsuits challenging the Yucca plan already are in the courts. The next showdown will come in the Senate, which must decide by July whether to override a Nevada veto of the Yucca Mountain project - as the House did recently in a 306-117 vote. If the Senate concurs with the House, plans will continue to use the Nevada site, pending blockage through the court system. Benson said specially designed railroad cars would be used to transport nuclear waste. He added they would probably pass through south-ern Middle Tennessee, carrying material from nuclear generation plants in Tennessee or Alabama and South Carolina. Despite the recent terrorism scare, stemming from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon, Benson said transporting nuclear waste should be safe. Benson said the casks on nuclear waste rail cars have steel sides a foot or more thick, ensuring safety. He said no one in the United States has ever been hurt by a nuclear waste trans-portation accident. Benson said the scenario would equate to 1,100 trains passing through southern Middle Tennessee during the repository's expected 24-year use period. That would be about 45 trains a year, he added. He said nuclear waste hauling trucks would probably average 20 a year on I-24 during Yucca Mountains 24-year life expectancy. /©The Tullahoma News 2002/ ***************************************************************** 28 Greenpeace stops nuclear train Swiss time 09:21, Sunday 23.06.2002 * ROUEN, France (Reuters) - A dozen Greenpeace members have chained themselves to railway tracks in northern France to block a train carrying nuclear waste from Germany for reprocessing in France, the environmental group says. The train, bringing waste from a plant in Muelheim-Kaerlich in Germany, was stopped around 9 a.m. (8 a.m. British time) near Bernay, about 40 miles southwest of the Normandy city of Rouen. About a dozen other activists surrounded the site carrying banners saying "Stop Plutonium", a Greenpeace spokesman said. Police quickly intervened but could not immediately cut the activists free, he added. The train was the 14th since April 2001 in a series of nuclear waste shipments from Germany to the reprocessing plant at La Hague, on the Channel in northern France. 18.06.2002 12:16, Reuters ***************************************************************** 29 German nuclear waste shipment briefly held up by activists * AP World Politics* /Tue Jun 18, 6:52 AM ET/ BERNAY, France - About 60 riot police intervened Monday to stop a demonstration by Greenpeace activists from blocking a train carrying nuclear waste from Germany for reprocessing in France. Police arrived on the scene near the Normandy town of Bernay, where a dozen Greenpeace militants, four chained to the track, had managed to stop the train for an hour. The train had traveled through France throughout the night on its way to the Cogema nuclear waste reprocessing center at La Hague, near the English Channel. The train was carrying three containers of spent nuclear fuel under contract from German electric companies. Greenpeace, the environmental group long active in trying to stop such nuclear waste transport, said in a statement that its action was aimed at "getting its message to the new (French) government," named last month and reappointed Monday after French legislative elections. "Nuclear is a dirty energy that creates deadly and eternal waste," Frederic Marillier, in charge of Greenpeace France's anti-nuclear campaign. Germany sends spent nuclear fuel from 19 power plants abroad for reprocessing under contracts that oblige the country to take back the resulting waste for storage. (parf-eg-ps) Copyright © 2002 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 30 Yucca: No worries about earthquake Nevada Appeal June 18, 2002 By Nevada Appeal editorial board The U.S. Department of Energy was unconcerned by last week's earthquake near Yucca Mountain. We know why. "There was not an earthquake at Yucca Mountain today," read the official statement Friday from the DOE -- the first time we can recall a federal agency feeling the need to deny an act of nature. The DOE goes on to point out the earthquake was actually at Little Skull Mountain, a good 15 miles east of Yucca Mountain. And there was definitely a ho-hum tenor to the rest of the statement, such as "This is a known and studied geologic zone." "In 1992," the DOE pointed out, "a magnitue 5.6 earthquake occurred in the same vicinity. The energy released by that earthquake was approximately 30 times greater than this morning's earthquake; even so, the 1992 earthquake did not even dislodge boulders located on the slopes of Yucca Mountain." Earthquakes happen around there all the time. So what? The DOE isn't worried, because it has theoretically designed a nuclear waste repository that will withstand strong earthquakes. And there's the catch. The DOE has designed a repository despite the geologic and seismic problems of Yucca Mountain. In other words, the repository -- depending mainly on untested casks -- could survive anywhere, according to the DOE's argument. The whole scientific reason for shipping waste to Yucca Mountain so it could be stored underground has evaporated. But there is no Plan B. The rest of us who remain a bit more concerned about the release of radioactivity into the water system when a major earthquake strikes Yucca Mountain weren't much reassured by the DOE's words. "If felt," the agency said, "the vibrations of an earthquake like the one reported this morning are similar to those felt when a truck passes." That would be, we suppose, one of those trucks carrying nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain from all over the country. /Copyright Nevada Appeal ***************************************************************** 31 DOE asks judge to prevent S.C. blockade The Daily Camera: State/west By Amy Geier, Associated Press June 18, 2002 COLUMBIA, S.C. — The Energy Department asked a federal judge Monday to stop Gov. Jim Hodges from blocking plutonium shipments that could begin as early as this weekend. Hodges on Friday dispatched state troopers to the Savannah River Site near the Georgia state line to inspect vehicles for the radioactive material, set to be shipped to SRS from the Rocky Flats facility. The governor had ordered authorities to prevent anyone from transporting plutonium into South Carolina. U.S. District Judge Cameron Currie issued an order Friday saying that Hodges' physical blockades of federal plutonium shipments are illegal and present a possible terrorist target, but she did not specifically order Hodges to refrain from blocking roads. Monday's filing by the Energy Department asks the court to order Hodges not to block transportation of the weapons-grade plutonium. "If the court rules in our favor, we expect the governor to not interfere so DOE can safely fulfill its national security mission," said Energy spokesman Joe Davis. A hearing on the matter was scheduled for today. Hodges said he would not block the shipments if ordered by a court, but his emergency order would stand until then. "Plutonium threatens the health and safety of South Carolina's citizens. As governor, I must do everything in my legal power to protect our state from this threat," Hodges said. On Thursday, Currie threw out Hodges' lawsuit that would have halted the surplus plutonium shipments that are part of the cleanup and closure of Rocky Flats. The Energy Department has said it wants to move the radioactive material to SRS, where it will be converted into fuel for nuclear reactors. Hodges worries the conversion program will never be funded and the plutonium will not leave South Carolina. Hodges has appealed Currie's ruling to the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va. the Daily Camera ***************************************************************** 32 NRC Orders United States Enrichment Corporation to Enhance Security NRC: Press Release - 2002 - 75 - U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION Office of Public Affairs Telephone: 301/415-8200 Washington, DC 20555-001 E-mail: [opa@nrc.gov] www.nrc.gov No. 02-075 June 18, 2002 The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has issued an immediately effective Order to the United States Enrichment Corporation to implement interim compensatory security measures for the current threat environment. USEC operates gaseous diffusion plants located in Piketon, Ohio, and Paducah, Kentucky, which it leases from the U.S. Department of Energy. As with NRC's February 25 Orders issued to all commercial nuclear power plants (see press release dated February 26), this Order formalizes a series of security measures that USEC has taken at the Portsmouth and Paducah plants in response to Commission advisories, or on its own, in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Additional security enhancements resulting from the Commission's on-going comprehensive security review are also spelled out in the Order. USEC is required to provide NRC with a schedule within 20 days for achieving full compliance. USEC must also notify NRC within 20 days and justify in writing if it is unable to comply with any of the requirements of the Order, if compliance with any requirement is unnecessary in its specific circumstances, or if implementation of any of the requirements would cause the licensee to be in violation of the provisions of any Commission regulation or the facility Certificates of Compliance, or adversely impact safe operation of the facility. These security requirements will remain in effect until the Commission determines that the threat level has diminished, or that the current security programs need to be further augmented as a result of the Commission's comprehensive safeguards and security program re-evaluation. Although specific details are classified and not publicly available, a copy of the unclassified portion of the Order will be posted on the NRC web site at: http://www.nrc.gov/what-we-do/safeguards/response-911.html, under Orders. ***************************************************************** 33 Yucca Mountain waste shipments would hit close to home Elizabethton Star - Online Edition Part 3 in a series By Kathy Helms-Hughes STAR STAFF khughes@starhq.com Nuclear materials are virtually everywhere -- they're used to irradiate food, they're in doctors' offices, moisture gauges, even the smoke detector in your home. Their presence causes little concern. Nuclear waste, on the other hand, is of more concern, especially when it's being transported through populated areas by rail or truck. In February, Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham recommended to President Bush that Yucca Mountain in Nevada be approved as a repository for the nation's high-level nuclear waste building up at industrial, commercial and military sites across the country. Spencer's decision came after more than 20 years of study at a cost of $4 billion. President Bush gave his blessing to the plan the following day and Nevada's Gov. Kenny Guinn vetoed the move. Congress has until late July to override the governor's action. Under the proposed action, the Department of Energy would transport 77,000 metric tons of spent fuel from commercial nuclear power plants, government-run nuclear reactors and the Navy to Yucca Mountain, located 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The waste would be buried 1,000 feet below ground where it would remain radioactive for more than 10,000 years. Shipments would begin in 2010. Opponents question what would happen if a high-intensity earthquake should rock the site once the waste is in place. On Friday, an earthquake with a magnitude of 4.4 was recorded about 15 miles east of Yucca Mountain at Little Skull Mountain. DOE said there was "no damage to any Yucca Mountain project facilities, structures or the underground Exploratory Studies Facilities," and stated that the proposed repository is designed to withstand an earthquake with 1,000 times more energy than the one Friday. Some opponents fear that transportation of the waste could create a target for terrorist, while still more are concerned with the possibility of accidents associated with transportation. One in seven Americans live along the proposed shipping route. Should Yucca Mountain be approved, thousands of waste shipments will be moving through Tennessee. According to the Washington, D.C.-based Environmental Working Group, which on Friday published interactive maps of the proposed shipping routes on its Web site (www.MapScience.org), over the next 38 years, 23,722 truck shipments could be passing through the state. If the waste is moved by rail, 5,527 train shipments would pass through the state in the same amount of time. It is expected that the preferred plan will include a combination of both truck and rail. According to EWG, 796,475 people in Tennessee live within 1 mile of a nuclear transportation route and 1,947,911 located within 5 miles. Elizabethton is located approximately 45 miles from the nearest route; Johnson City, about 38 miles; and Erwin, about 25 miles. Also, according to EWG, there are 447 schools located within 1 mile of a proposed route, as well as 18 hospitals. One thousand schools are located within 5 miles, along with 43 hospitals. In Greene County, there are four schools less than 4.6 miles from the route; 23 schools in Hamblen County are located within 4.1 miles, including Morristown College (2.1) and Walters State Community College (2.9); 16 schools in Jefferson County within 4.7 miles; and 126 located in Knox County -- including the University of Tennessee at a distance of 0.7 miles. In the Nashville area, 198 schools, colleges and universities are located within the proposed route, including Vanderbilt University, which is listed as 0.9 miles away. Nearby hospitals which could possibly be affected in the event of an accident involving the transportation of nuclear waste include Lakeway Regional and Morristown-Hamblen in Hamblen County; Baptist Hospital, Fort Sanders, UT Memorial Hospital, and Oakwood Medical Center in Knoxville. From 1994 through 2001, there were 851 semi-truck wrecks in Tennessee. Of those, 291 occurred on interstate highways, according to EWG. From 1990 through 2001, there were 2,092 train wrecks in the state, including 542 derailments and 93 collisions. Copyright © 1996 - 2002 Elizabethton Newspapers, Inc. Elizabethton Newspapers, Inc., 300 Sycamore Street ***************************************************************** 34 Judge Asked to Keep Plutonium Moving Las Vegas SUN June 18, 2002 COLUMBIA, S.C.- The Energy Department has asked a federal judge to prevent Gov. Jim Hodges from blocking plutonium shipments into South Carolina that could begin as early as this weekend. The governor declared a state of emergency last week and dispatched state troopers to inspect vehicles for the radioactive material. He has ordered authorities to prevent anyone from transporting plutonium into South Carolina. A hearing was set for Tuesday on the Energy Department's request for a court order to prevent Hodges from blocking transportation of the weapons-grade plutonium. U.S. District Judge Cameron Currie issued an order Friday saying that Hodges' physical blockades of federal plutonium shipments are illegal and present a possible terrorist target, but she did not specifically order Hodges to refrain from blocking roads. "If the court rules in our favor, we expect the governor to not interfere so DOE can safely fulfill its national security mission," said Energy spokesman Joe Davis. Hodges said he would not block the shipments if ordered by a court but his emergency order would stand until then. "Plutonium threatens the health and safety of South Carolina's citizens. As governor, I must do everything in my legal power to protect our state from this threat," Hodges said. The Energy Department wants to move 6 1/2 tons of plutonium to the Savannah River Site, where it will be converted into fuel for nuclear reactors. Federal officials have said the nuclear material would be under constant guard, and its path and time of arrival would be kept secret. They also say security at the Savannah River Site is sound. Last Thursday, Currie threw out Hodges' lawsuit that would have halted the surplus plutonium shipments that are part of the cleanup and closure of the Rocky Flats facility in Colorado. Hodges worries the conversion program will never be funded and the plutonium will not leave South Carolina. He has appealed Currie's ruling to the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va. All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 35 Judge Orders S.C. Gov. on Plutonium Las Vegas SUN June 18, 2002 AIKEN, S.C.- A federal judge Tuesday prohibited Gov. Jim Hodges from blocking government shipments of bomb-grade plutonium to South Carolina that could begin as early as this weekend. "It is a sad day for South Carolina when the governor, who has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, must be ordered by a court to obey it," U.S. District Judge Cameron Currie said. On Friday, Hodges sent state police to the government's Savannah River Site weapons installation near the Georgia state line to stop any vehicles carrying the radioactive material, which is to be brought in from the closed Rocky Flats weapons plant in Colorado. The governor said he would abide by the judge's order. "Against our will, the blockade is over," Hodges said. "I don't apologize for our efforts, our suit or our blockade." The Energy Department wants to move about 6 tons of plutonium to Savannah River as part of the agency's effort to clean up and close Rocky Flats. Energy Department spokesman Joe Davis said the shipments could begin as early as Saturday. Federal officials said the material will be converted at the Savannah River Site into fuel for nuclear reactors. But Hodges has warned that the conversion program might never be funded and that the plutonium might be stored permanently in South Carolina. Hodges sued last month to prevent the shipments, saying the plutonium poses too many environmental risks. The Democratic governor, who is up for re-election this fall, had threatened to lie down in the road if necessary to block the trucks. Last Thursday, Currie rejected Hodges' arguments that the Energy Department was violating federal environmental policy, opening the door for shipments to begin immediately. Hodges has taken his case to a federal appeals court. All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 36 Nuclear waste focus of rallies Tuesday, June 18, 2002 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal Shipping industry, anti-nuke groups vie By STEVE TETREAULT STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU WASHINGTON -- At events just blocks apart today, anti-nuclear groups and the nuclear shipping industry will promote vastly different views of federal plans to transport thousands of tons of radioactive waste to a repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. At a park beside the Capitol, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and representatives of 10 environmental and anti-nuclear groups will gather for another in a series of rallies to draw attention to their calls for the Yucca Mountain Project to be killed. The event will mark the arrival in Washington of a half-dozen mock nuclear waste shipping casks that activists, including several from Citizen Alert in Nevada, have been driving around parts of the country over the past three weeks as part of an anti-Yucca campaign. "People who have been on those tours will tell stories of how, when people find out about this ridiculous (Yucca) proposal, they are very concerned about the prospects of waste shipments coming through their communities," said Lisa Gue, nuclear waste specialist from Public Citizen. What environmentalists called an "education" process, however, is what nuclear industry officials called "fear-mongering" when placed against a described 30-year record of safe nuclear materials shipping. A dozen shipping firms that organized themselves to counter criticism from Nevada and its allies met at a conference Monday just off Capitol Hill and plan to meet again today to promote their industry. "We're focusing on experience, not myths," said Jack Edlow, a coalition organizer and president of Edlow International Co., a leading nuclear waste shipping management firm based in Washington. Some 40 industry executives attended Monday's session, along with representatives from the Energy Department and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Yucca Mountain stands to bring big business to the nuclear shipping industry, with government contracts expected to amount to between $1 billion and $2 billion over 20 years, industry officials have said. Industry officials were encouraged to continue lobbying senators to support the Yucca Mountain Project, and Edlow said about 80 congressional staffers were invited to stop by the two-day conference. Today's main speaker will be pro-Yucca Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho. Between now and the Senate vote, which is expected within weeks, the shippers plan to concentrate efforts on a handful of senators from corridor states, such as Richard Lugar, R-Ind., Jean Carnahan, D-Mo., Richard Durbin, D-Ill., Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Robert Bennett, R-Utah., said one lobbyist, who added that "Yucca fatigue" appears to be growing on Capitol Hill. Edlow said Monday that he is taking Nevada's nuclear shipping criticism as a personal slap since his family has been in the nuclear shipping industry for 45 years. "Senator Reid is trying to scare the American public by indicating we are doing something that is harmful and hurtful to them," Edlow said. "For him to impugn our integrity by suggesting we would do anything to harm people, it's personal." Reid said the Edlow-led coalition "is just a show group bought and paid for by the power companies, facts and science be damned." "The nuclear industry is very clever, they have unlimited resources that they can put on a conference," Reid said. "We have countless independent scientists who say hauling (nuclear waste) is bad." Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal, 1997 - 2002 ***************************************************************** 37 Yucca: Goodman spearheads resolution at mayors conference [Las Vegas Review-Journal] Tuesday, June 18, 2002 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal By BRET SIGLER REVIEW-JOURNAL If the battle to keep the nation's nuclear waste out of Yucca Mountain is to be won, Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman says it must be fought on a different front. "We have to make transportation the issue," Goodman said Monday after returning from the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Madison, Wis. With Goodman leading the charge, the conference narrowly passed a transportation resolution by voice vote Sunday. The resolution urges Congress to provide cities on potential transportation routes with funds, training and equipment to protect their residents in the event of a transportation accident. The resolution calls for the funding at least three years before high-level nuclear waste shipments begin. Goodman said the resolution helps steer the debate toward transportation, a battle he says can be won. Without that shift, Goodman says the anti-Yucca Mountain lobby will be hard-pressed to persuade the nation to keep nuclear waste out of Nevada. "This is not a NIMBY issue, a not-in-my-back-yard issue, this is a we want to put this in your front yard," Goodman said. "I don't want the blood on my hands. If there's a disaster, they can't blame Oscar." As time winds down before the Senate votes on whether to override Gov. Kenny Guinn's veto of the nuclear waste repository, Goodman says he will focus his energy in the coming weeks on convincing legislators that the transportation of nuclear waste has not been proven safe. He hopes to make a trip to Washington, D.C., before the vote. A majority vote in the Senate to override the veto will bring formal legislative approval of the Yucca Mountain Project. Goodman says the new resolution is an important step in rallying domestic pressure to keep nuclear waste from being moved across the country to Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. This story is located at: http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/2002/Jun-18-Tue-2002/news/18997647. html [http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/2002/Jun-18-Tue-2002/news/18997647 .html] ***************************************************************** 38 DOE Steps Up Plans for Plutonium Shipments ENS, Environment News Service WASHINGTON, DC, June 17, 2002 (ENS) - Shipments of surplus plutonium to South Carolina could begin as soon as June 22, the Department of Energy (DOE) said Friday, despite the state's threats to block the shipments. The DOE's legal counsel informed South Carolina Governor Jim Hodges of the proposed schedule after a district court in South Carolina threw out Hodges' lawsuit seeking to bar the shipments. Hodges has filed an appeal in the 4th Circuit United States Court of Appeals in Virginia, and on Thursday, the governor issued an executive order authorizing state troopers to block all plutonium shipments. But on Friday, Judge Cameron Currie - the same district judge who dismissed Hodges' lawsuit - ordered the governor to allow the shipments to proceed, warning that road blockades against the plutonium shipments could become a terrorist target. "The harm that a blockade of plutonium shipments might present is obvious," Currie wrote. "An arguably peaceful blockade, therefore, presents a target of opportunity for those with less peaceful intentions." The DOE plans to ship 6.5 metric tons of weapons grade plutonium from its Rocky Flats, Colorado facility to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The plutonium is to be turned into mixed oxide (MOX) fuel for nuclear power plants. "The court made clear its view that under the Constitution, the Governor has no authority to interfere with the Department of Energy's shipments of plutonium," said Joe Davis, DOE spokesperson. "We are extremely disappointed the Governor has chosen to totally disregard the Court's admonition and intend to ask the Department of Justice to seek further relief from the court as expeditiously as possible." "We appreciate the District Court's expeditious ruling in favor of the federal government," Davis added. "As part of that proceeding, we said that we would not begin shipments before June 15th. As a practical and logistical matter related to our transportation operations, the earliest date that the Department could begin national security shipments of weapons grade plutonium to South Carolina is June 22nd." Companies Solicited to Produce Medical Isotopes WASHINGTON, DC, June 17, 2002 (ENS) - The Department of Energy (DOE) is accepting proposals from private companies to provide a large scale, long term source of radioactive isotopes for medical uses. The program is part of an initiative to clean up Cold War nuclear sites. The DOE's plan aims to increase the supply of these medical isotopes, which show promise in treating cancer, by 5,000 percent. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory stores uranium, containing uranium-233, that was produced at DOE's nuclear defense production plants. This material is stored at a laboratory facility that dates back to the Manhattan Project and that requires expensive environmental, criticality and security controls. The DOE project will allow the extraction of medical isotopes as the material is stabilized. The department has used this material to provide modest quantities of bismuth-213 for the past five years. Bismuth-213 is a decay product of uranium-233 that is being used in cancer treatment research, such as the human clinical trials for the treatment of acute myologenous leukemia. Bismuth-213 is also being explored in the treatment of cancer of the lungs, pancreas and kidneys. The isotope is bound to monoclonal antibodies that attack the cancer while minimizing the impact on surrounding tissues. "DOE has an important responsibility to clean up the dangerous materials and old contaminated structures left over from the Cold War," said Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham. "That we can fulfill this mission while producing valuable new tools in the fight against cancer is an exciting and unique opportunity." Each year, the DOE provides about 600 shipments of more than 215 types of isotopes to more than 300 domestic and international customers, including hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and industries. Between the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory and Brookhaven National Laboratory, more than 10 DOE facilities now produce radioactive isotopes. Copyright Environment News Service (ENS) 2002. All Rights ***************************************************************** 39 Anti-nuclear group brings protest to Pittsburgh Tuesday, June 18, 2002 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Anti-nuclear activists brought a plywood mockup of a nuclear waste transportation cask the tank through Pittsburgh yesterday to dramatize an impending vote in the U.S. Senate that could send waste from nuclear power plants to a storage facility in Nevada. Anti-nuclear activist Chris Williams, of the Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana, stands next to a plywood mockup of a nuclear waste transportation cask during yesterday's protest on the North Side. (Andy Starnes, Post-Gazette) The U.S. Department of Energy says it would be safer to store the wastes permanently at the proposed Yucca Mountain repository than in temporary storage pools at each nuclear plant. Williams, of Indianapolis, who towed the dumbbell-shaped mockup through Pittsburgh, argued it would be better to shut down nuclear plants, thus halting the creation of more waste, and that existing wastes could safely be stored at the plants for 100 years. Six caravans of fake transport casks, sponsored by a consortium of environmental groups, have been traveling across the nation for three weeks and are scheduled to converge on Washington, D.C., this week. Copyright ©1997-2002 PG Publishing Co., Inc. All Rights ***************************************************************** 40 Nuclear-waste conflict intensifies Opponents of plans point to terrorism By Martin Kasindorf USA TODAY Fear of nuclear terrorism is heating up a dispute concerning the safety of shipping radioactive cargo across the USA by road, rail and waterway. With little fanfare, shipments of weapons-grade plutonium and spent nuclear fuel have been transported among government facilities and commercial power plants since the 1950s. Now, political showdowns and the arrest of a suspect in an alleged ''dirty bomb'' plot have forced the issue into public debate: * The Senate is nearing a crucial vote on opening a facility beneath Yucca Mountain in Nevada for disposal of 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste now stored at 131 sites in 39 states. Nevada officials and environmental groups warn that putting the waste on wheels during the 24 years of shipments risks a ''mobile Chernobyl'': a radiological contamination disaster that could result from a terror attack or accident. On Monday, the U.S. Conference of Mayors voted to oppose the plan until cities along transport routes have adequate funding and training to handle incidents. * The Justice Department announced last week that Abdullah Al Muhajir, 31, a U.S. citizen, had been arrested in Chicago on suspicion of plotting with al-Qaeda to detonate a dirty bomb, which uses conventional explosives to spread radioactive material. Critics of the Yucca Mountain plan moved quickly to capitalize on the news. The arrest ''should serve as a wake-up call to the nation that transporting nuclear waste is a deadly idea,'' Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., says. The Energy Department and the nuclear power industry respond that they have a good road safety record. * South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges, a Democrat, ordered state troopers to stop any shipments of bomb-grade plutonium bound for the Energy Department's Savannah River Site nuclear complex in his state. The department is closing the Rocky Flats nuclear facility near Denver and wants to store plutonium in South Carolina until it is recycled into power plant fuel. Hodges sued, saying he fears the government won't build the recycling plant and will turn his state into ''a dumping ground'' for plutonium. A federal judge dismissed the suit, saying a blockade would be illegal and a target for terrorists. The ruling cleared the way for the first shipments, but Hodges is appealing. The ruling, meanwhile, does not specifically order Hodges not to block roads, and on Monday, the Energy Department asked the court for such an order. A hearing is scheduled today. Like Nevada's Reid, Hodges cites the arrest of Al Muhajir. ''If terrorists are trying to build a dirty bomb in the United States, the last thing we should do is truck weapons-grade plutonium across the country in 18-wheelers to a new storage site,'' he says. Senate action on the $57 billion Yucca Mountain storage site is expected before the July Fourth recess. As soon as 2010, waste destined for burial could start rolling through 45 states on guarded trains, trucks and barges. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham says the lethal waste would be safer in a single vault. Nevada officials say the risks in shipping are so fearsome that the waste is safer where it is now. Scientific consultants hired in the dispute disagree over how hard it is to puncture the canisters that will carry the waste. But they agree that a release in a big city of radioactive cesium-137, the most dangerous component in fuel rods, would kill emergency personnel and cause long-term cancer fatalities. ''All you've got to do is say this nuclear cask has been attacked, and it doesn't matter whether it was successful or not, people are going to panic,'' says Robert Jefferson, an Albuquerque nuclear engineer and consultant who supports the Yucca Mountain project. Jefferson says that health effects from an attack would be ''very localized and pretty minimal.'' If a shipping cask had burned in the five-day fire that ravaged a Baltimore railway tunnel last July, cesium would have contaminated 32 square miles, says Robert Halstead, a consultant for Nevada. Failure to clean it up -- for $13.7 billion -- would ''cause 4,000 to 28,000 cancer deaths over the next 50 years.'' Such calculations are rattling Las Vegas, 100 miles southeast of Yucca Mountain. The city has made it a criminal offense to carry high-level nuclear wastes through town. Mayor Oscar Goodman vows to arrest any offending trucker. Nevada has no nuclear power plants. Fearing a blow to tourism, its officials have been trying since 1982 to dodge what they call a ''dump'' that would serve other states. That year, Congress ordered deep disposal of spent fuel from commercial reactors, navy ships and university research facilities, as well as surplus bomb-making plutonium. Congress selected Yucca Mountain in 1987 after eight other locations in states with more population and political clout had been studied. President Bush approved the project in February. Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn, a Republican, then exercised an option to veto it. The issue landed in Congress. Majorities overriding Guinn's veto in both houses are needed to revive the project. The House of Representatives voted in May to support the project. The Energy Department has mapped possible highway, rail and barge corridors that pass 109 cities of 100,000 population or more. The Environmental Working Group, a watchdog organization based in Washington, D.C., last week created a Web site (www.mapscience.org) enabling anyone to type an address and see a map showing that spot's proximity to the suggested routes. The Nuclear Energy Institute, the lobbying arm of the nuclear power industry, says there have been eight accidents but no radioactivity releases in more than 3,000 shipments of spent fuel since 1964. Halstead, the consultant for Nevada, says that shipping accidents in 1960 and 1962 caused radioactive releases requiring cleanup. Even if Yucca Mountain opens, it won't solve the nuclear waste problem unless Congress expands the site's capacity. Nuclear plants pile 2,000 tons of waste a year. In 2034, 42,400 tons of waste still would be at power plants, compared with today's 43,500 tons. © Copyright 2002 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. ***************************************************************** 41 State official sees long Yucca fight Las Vegas SUN June 17, 2002 By Cy Ryan < [cy@lasvegassun.com] > SUN CAPITAL BUREAU RENO -- A state official on nuclear waste says the legal fight to stop Yucca Mountain could go on for up to eight years and will probably end up in the U.S. Supreme Court. Joseph Strolin of the Agency for Nuclear Projects told the state Board of Health Friday that if Congress overrides the veto of Gov. Kenny Guinn, the "fight has just begun." The state has "strong legal and technical" arguments to stop Yucca Mountain from being used as a repository for the nation's high-level nuclear waste, he said. The deadline for a vote by the U.S. Senate is July 25, Strolin noted. Federal legislation passed in 1987 singled out Nevada as the only location to be studied for such a project, and the legislation was designed so Congress could easily override the veto of any Nevada governor. Strolin said, however, that Congress did not anticipate that Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., would be assistant majority leader and carry so much power. Four lawsuits have been filed to stop the nuclear dump and there may be more coming, Strolin said. Nevada has an excellent chance before the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to show that the site doesn't conform to the federal law, he added. The geologic features of the dump must be enough to contain the highly radioactive waste, according to guidelines. But Strolin said the Energy Department is planning man-made barriers to make sure the waste and radiation do not escape from the underground burial grounds. All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 42 Editorial: Yucca seen as unsafe by mayors Las Vegas SUN June 18, 2002 The nuclear power industry has concentrated its Yucca Mountain lobbying dollars in Washington with predictable results. The House of Representatives resoundingly approved Yucca as the nation's storage site for high-level nuclear waste. The Senate will vote this summer and the industry anticipates a big victory there too. But in the nation's cities, where Yucca Mountain is viewed more objectively, there is serious concern. On Monday the U.S. Conference of Mayors approved a resolution whose grave wording should get the attention of those who until now have been swallowing the lie that Yucca Mountain will be safe and that transportation poses little threat. In a resolution passed by voice vote, 250 mayors cited problems with the mountain itself and especially cited the extreme dangers associated with moving the deadly material through their cities. When confronted -- largely by Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, Reno Mayor Jeff Griffin and Salt Lake City Mayor Ross Anderson -- with the stark truth that the potential for catastrophe awaits their cities, the mayors voted loud and clear. In a compromise with a handful of pro-Yucca mayors, the group did not outright condemn Yucca. But it called for the federal government to provide cities on the transportation route with three years of "adequate funds, training and equipment to protect the public health and safety in the event of an accident." The truth is that the public will be in extreme jeopardy regardless of how many billions of dollars worth of training is provided. But at least the organization is on record recognizing the danger. Its resolution should be posted prominently at every City Hall in the country. It's another confirmation that Yucca Mountain, if it is allowed to open, will expose Nevada and the nation to mortal danger. All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 43 NRC to hear update on transportation studies Las Vegas SUN June 18, 2002 WASHINGTON -- The Nuclear Regulatory Commission today is scheduled to hear an update on "current and future" nuclear waste transportation safety studies, including research by the Sandia National Laboratories. Nevada officials have made the issue of waste shipping a central point in their broader argument against Yucca Mountain, a federal proposal to haul the nation's high-level nuclear waste to the Nevada site for permanent burial. They have called for more studies of waste shipping routes -- before Congress finalizes approval of Yucca Mountain. The Senate is likely to vote within days. They also want full-scale testing of the lead-lined steel containers used to transport waste. The NRC is considering whether to conduct full-scale tests. Nuclear industry officials say waste can be transported safely, and accuse Nevada officials of "fear-mongering." Officials with the NRC, and the Energy Department, which manages the Yucca project, agree that waste can be moved long distances with nearly no risk of accident or terrorist attack. The topic of waste shipping is scheduled to come up today at a regular meeting of NRC's Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste at the NRC's headquarters in Rockville, Md. The panel is convening a three-day meeting. Also among the agenda items: the long-term performance of the waste containers, which will be expected to isolate waste for up to 10,000 years. All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 44 Mayors OK resolution on Yucca shipments Las Vegas SUN June 18, 2002 By Diana Sahagun By hammering on the dangers of transportation, Nevada leaders were able to sway more than 200 U.S. mayors to approve a resolution that asks Congress to prohibit shipments of high-level nuclear waste unless funding, training and equipment are given to cities along the route. Both supporters and opponents of Yucca Mountain are claiming victory for winning the support of leaders at the annual U.S. Conference of Mayors in Madison, Wis., which on Monday approved the resolution by a majority voice vote. The resolution acknowledges the risks of transporting high-level nuclear waste, saying that there is "national acknowledgment of risks to our security and the safety of our communities." It also states that the Energy Department "has no feasible plan for transportation" and the casks used to ship the waste have never undergone full-scale physical testing to determine if they can withstand a "likely transportation accident." The resolution asks the Senate to prohibit the transportation of nuclear waste unless -- beginning three years before any such movement -- all cities along the proposed transportation route have received adequate funds, training and equipment to protect the public health and safety in the event of an accident. The resolution was a compromise for pro- and anti-Yucca mayors. The amended version briefly mentions Yucca Mountain, the proposed repository 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, but does not specifically oppose the repository. Instead, the resolution focuses on the dangers of transporting nuclear waste and its impact on American cities, an issue Goodman said should be stressed if Nevada is to convince the Senate to vote against the repository. "The other mayors said the real issue is not Yucca Mountain -- that's our problem," Goodman said. "Transportation is an issue for everybody. Nothing should take place until the transportation issues are resolved." Three U.S. mayors had intended to introduce a resolution in favor of Yucca Mountain to a committee on Saturday, the same day Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, Reno Mayor Jeff Griffin and Goodman were scheduled to introduce an anti-Yucca resolution to a committee of mayors. Goodman said the two sides began negotiating after the pro-Yucca officials called a press conference that was sparsely attended. "For the first time since I was elected, I used my legal abilities -- negotiation and advocacy," Goodman said. After nearly 90 minutes, the group came up with a compromise, Goodman said. The three mayors -- Bob Young of Augusta, Ga., Patrick McCoy of Charlotte, N.C., and Patrick Hays of North Little Rock, Ark., -- joined in sponsoring the amended resolution. Mitch Singer, a spokesman for the Department of Energy, said the resolution is favorable to the department, because it has already made available funding for shipments of nuclear waste traveling through the country. "The bottom line is that this is nothing new to the DOE," he said. "The DOE has been providing training and funding for emergency response for years already. I'm sure the DOE is going to continue to do this if and when spent nuclear fuel goes to Yucca Mountain. "It's nice to see some people agree on things here," he said. Goodman estimated that Monday's vote was 70 mayors in favor, 30 against the amended resolution. He said the approval of mayors across the country sends a message to their senators and delegation that there are too many unanswered questions regarding the transportation of high-level nuclear waste. "We can talk about Yucca Mountain here, in the courts, but we have to stop the transportation," Goodman said. "That's where we'll be successful." Goodman said he will spend the next few weeks helping to lobby senators against approving Yucca Mountain in Washington if he is invited, calling it the most important issue facing the city. All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 45 Senator sees easy Yucca approval Las Vegas SUN June 18, 2002 By Benjamin Grove WASHINGTON -- A leading Senate advocate for a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain today predicted the project would pass relatively easily with 58 to 62 senators voting for it. But Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, said a procedural vote that would determine whether to hold a final vote on the proposed repository in Nevada should pass, but by a narrower margin. Craig, who for years has been a tireless Yucca supporter, told a nuclear-industry group meeting today that Republican backers would move as early as this week to set a date for 10 hours of Yucca debate. Sens. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and John Ensign, R-Nev., are likely to object, setting off a procedural battle, Craig said. A likely vote on whether to proceed is the most worrisome issue for Yucca backers, Craig said. That's because Reid is quietly lobbying the Senate's other 49 Democrats and asking for their party loyalty on the procedural vote, even if they support Yucca, he said. "There is no question in my mind that the most important vote is the procedural vote," he told the U.S. Transport Coalition during his featured speech. Craig urged industry executives to lobby senators in the next few weeks to defeat Reid and Ensign in their procedural maneuvering. The Senate will hold a final vote as early as the week of July 8 when Congress returns from a one-week break, he predicted. Reid, who sits on the Appropriations Committee, is offering senators money for home-state projects, Craig said. "Harry is going to do what Harry is going to do," Craig told reporters. "He doesn't want this in his state, obviously." Craig assured the nuclear industry that a majority of senators are convinced Yucca Mountain is a suitable site for the national nuclear waste dump. "If you had ever seen Yucca Mountain, you wouldn't want it in your back yard," Craig said, drawing chuckles from the audience. Meanwhile today, pro- and anti-Yucca activists exchanged fire in the public relations war over shipping nuclear waste. As the coalition of advocates was wrapping up its a two-day conference, designed to send a message that waste shipping is safe, environmentalists were arguing the opposite just a few blocks away. Today's dueling groups underscored the importance of the transportation issue in the broader debate over Yucca Mountain. It also underscored a palpable urgency, as both sides anxiously await a Senate vote. President Bush and the House have already approved Yucca, and the Senate showdown is the proposed project's final congressional hurdle. "It's never too late, especially with something as controversial as this," said Chris Williams, an activist with an Indiana environmental group. "A lot of senators won't decide how they'll vote until it goes down to the wire, after they have weighed everything they need to weigh." Environmentalists from around the nation, including two representatives from Citizen Alert's Las Vegas chapter, made their way around the Capital Beltway in a caravan -- including a Cadillac hearse -- pulling six mock nuclear waste containers this morning. The six casks have been traveling separately on America's highways in recent weeks, spreading a message that the plan to haul the nation's nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain invites risks of accidents and terrorist attacks. The six met at a rendezvous point outside of Washington on Monday. The six casks, painted gray to resemble the steel containers used to haul waste on trucks, drew stares and a few honks today during rush hour on the busy interstate loop around the nation's capital. "This is what we were counting on," said John Hadder, Northern Nevada coordinator for Citizen Alert, as traffic slowed to a standstill on the interstate. The environmentalists then headed for Capitol Hill for a press conference, just as the Transport Coalition was concluding its "Capitol Hill Summit" on waste transportation in a nearby building. Both groups are vying for the public's attention, and more immediately, the Senate's. The coalition convened its conference to counter Nevada officials and environmentalists who have increased their anti-Yucca rhetoric in recent months based on the transportation issue. Coalition co-Chairman Jack Edlow, whose business, Edlow International, specializes in shipping high-level nuclear waste, said the point of the conference was to stress that waste has been shipped safely for years. On Monday he repeatedly stressed that the nuclear industry had experience in safe waste shipping, while Nevada officials are touting myths about likely accidents. His co-chairman, Edward Davis, a waste container manufacturer, said the upcoming Senate vote had become a "de facto referendum" on whether it is safe to ship waste. The environmentalists plan to return to their homes across the United States, but planned to keep the pressure on. Ron Morrissette, an activist with the Citizen Action Network's Vermont chapter, said environmentalists are still pressuring the state's senators -- independent Jim Jeffords and Democrat Patrick Leahy -- even though the senators have said they support Yucca Mountain. "Those two are key," Morrissette said. "We're keeping the heat on." All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 46 Nevadans Riled By Plan To Bury Nation's Radioactive Waste In The Desert WORLD/NATION June 16, 2002 Story By LIZ HALLORAN And Photographs By Michael McAndrews The Hartford Courant AMARGOSA VALLEY, NEV. - The government assured locals that the spectacle at the Nevada Test Site was safe - installing park benches and inviting them to come close, sit, enjoy. And they would - families with sandwiches and thermoses of Kool-Aid would marvel at their front-row view of the bright flashes, the heat and the mushroom clouds of the government's nuclear test explosions. That was more than 40 years ago, before the dangers of nuclear fallout were widely known. Today, in the bowels of a mountain on this same otherworldly expanse of desert, the government is once again engaged in nuclear experimentation, and once again is assuring the people of Nevada that they have nothing to fear. This time it is Yucca Mountain. Its hollowed-out center on the western edge of the test site is destined to become the world's first centralized storage area for highly dangerous, radioactive waste left over from the nation's production of nuclear power. The Bush administration and the nuclear energy industry tout Yucca as a remedy for the vexing and potentially hazardous practice of storing nuclear waste at 72 reactor sites and dozens of other locations across the country, including at Connecticut's nuclear plants in Haddam Neck and Waterford. Supporters say that the mountain, in an area once so remote and mysterious that it was rumored to be where the military secretly studied alien spaceships, is a solution for 39 states where waste storage facilities have or will one day run out of room. For most residents of the Silver State, it looks more like another raw deal. To understand their skepticism is to understand that the land is contaminated and people here continue to suffer from the fallout of 1,000 or more nuclear test explosions, the last in 1992. It is to understand that Yucca Mountain, which is supposed to provide safe storage for 10,000 years, may not be the stable, waterproof warehouse the government originally thought it was. And it is to understand the competing forces at work in a state that is mostly desert and federal land, but now has the fastest-growing city in the nation 90 miles from Yucca Mountain, with residential subdivisions sprawling closer every day. The U.S. House has already endorsed Yucca, and an imminent Senate vote is the key step left in what has been a 20-year effort to get the project approved. Yucca's philosophical fallout is spreading across the country with issues that include the safe transportation of nuclear waste through densely populated areas in the East, West and Midwest. But here in the silent desert, where scrubby gray-green creosote bushes and cactuses cling like burrs to the earth's brown hide, the stakes are the highest, the issue most personal. Desert Life Kalynda Tilges maneuvers her lace-curtained Dodge van into a Las Vegas hotel parking lot early on a recent morning. Tilges, in blue batik and sandals, her salt-and-pepper hair a tangle of curls, hops out and opens the balky passenger door for a visitor with barely a pause in her running monologue. "I came out to the desert in 1979 to clear my head and think," says Tilges, 45, a Texas native who like many second-chancers was drawn West in the hopes of leaving behind bad choices and regret. "Now," she says, back in the driver's seat and downshifting hard on the van's three-on-the-tree gear shaft, "I've got a grandkid." After decades of searching - working as a slot machine mechanic, a psychic (when her given name "Karen" morphed to "Kalynda"), a comedian on the Vegas Strip and a mother of three - Tilges has a cause. As the nuclear issues coordinator for the statewide environmental group Citizen Alert, she's the most public local voice and face working to block the Yucca Mountain project. Tilges is the one who loads up her 26-year-old van with water and pretzels, her 9-year-old son, Chasen, her mutt, Scooter, and any interested visitor. She'll drive for hours through the Amargosa Desert for a close-up view of Yucca, its people and the far-flung, dusty little towns in its shadow - a rattletrap round she calls the "People's Tour." It's a bare-bones alternative to the extensive guided coach bus tours the U.S. Department of Energy offers of the mountain and the 6.8-mile horseshoe-shaped tunnel that now snakes through it. Tilges rattles off her concerns about plans to store radioactive waste in Yucca: It could leak contaminants into the groundwater; fault lines running through the mountain could shift and break up the repository; and thousands of trucks and train cars carrying dangerous waste could be rumbling through Nevada, past schools, homes and businesses. "It's the moral equivalent of throwing your garbage onto your neighbor's property," she says, bells and crystals tinkling from her rearview mirror as the van heaves over another bump in a gravel road off I-95. But Tilges, who lives in Las Vegas, is perhaps most eloquent when she talks about her love of the desert and her anger at what she characterizes as the federal government's disregard for its stark, strange allure and its forgotten people. "When I'm driving back home from the desert and the sun is low, I see the mountains changing from purple to rust color to red," she says. "Sometimes I cry, I'm so overwhelmed by the beauty of the place." For a land that supporters of the nuclear repository at Yucca are apt to describe as remote and desolate, the Amargosa Desert can captivate. Mountains, including Charleston Peak - still snowcapped in late spring - rise from the desert in every direction. Ahead to the west there's an isolated collection of enormous, undulating sand dunes, and on the other side of the highway is a string of dormant black volcanic cones. Between it all is the desert itself, rolling out from the artificial glitz and irrigated lushness of Las Vegas into Nye County. Dust devils - mini-funnels of wind-whirled sand - dance along the side of the road. "It's beautiful and magical in a different way," says Tilges, as the van wheels down a two-lane road marked with an arrow pointing to Death Valley Junction. Just before you hit California is Doris Jackson's place, the Stateline Saloon and Gambling Hall, a single-story building so blasted by wind and sand that it looks half swallowed by the desert. Its painted signs promise "Slots," "Cold Beer" and "Cocktails." Inside, patrons in jeans and T-shirts drink shoulder to shoulder at the bar, watching NASCAR races on a television. Jackson, 71, wearing a black satiny jacket embroidered with the phrase "Bad 2 the Bone," is Amargosa Valley's "Mom" and a 20-year veteran in the fight against Yucca Mountain - going back to the days when nuclear testing was still going on. "Everything surrounding underground nuclear testing was very hush-hush; it was like a fraternity," Jackson says. "People in the valley knew that if their husband wasn't home for the weekend, they were doing underground testing. "They were good-paying jobs, but it amazes me how even today, people will be dying of cancer, and they'll blame it on something else." Jackson says she believes the mountain will leak and contaminate the water table that runs through her property, through Ed Goedhart's cattle farm and irrigated alfalfa fields and through all the scrappy little towns this side of Death Valley. But just in case the repository is approved, Jackson and other town advisory board members - she's chairwoman - are considering a resolution that would require the government to educate local children so they can get some of the many jobs proponents say the mountain will bring and to compensate Amargosa Valley property owners. "We want them to recognize that people do live out here," Jackson says, describing the desert as a place where a visitor staying long enough to wear out a pair of shoes will never want to move on. It wasn't a shoe, but a tire that New York actress and dancer Marta Becket wore out nearly 40 years ago in Death Valley Junction just over the state line in California. On tour and waiting for a replacement tire, Becket fell in love with what was essentially a ghost town - a wide spot in the road with an abandoned community hall and a collection of small cottage-sized homes shaded by salt cedars. She never left. Becket created the Amargosa Hotel and Opera House to which she continues to draw hundreds of visitors every year to see her perform dance and mime with her longtime partner, Tom Willett. "I'm now calling this `nuclear highway,'" Becket said recently, gesturing to the two-lane Route 127 that passes through the junction and just feet from the front of her opera house. It's one of the routes being considered for transporting nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain. Becket, nearly 80 and still dancer-slim, fears the waste trucks roaring through her odd little town - a collection of dilapidated buildings whose permanent residents are scruffy wild burros and horses, cats, and a family of pet peacocks. "It's a fragile town," says Becket, the subject of "Amargosa," a 2000 Academy Award-nominated documentary. "The beauty of this place could be ruined with one accident." As the shadows lengthen and Tilges steers her van back toward the glow of Las Vegas, she says she's disappointed no coyotes were spotted that day. "I like to see coyotes," she says. "[People] have tried to kill them off and they persist. I like that." The Geology Yucca Mountain is a rather grand name for a long, desolate ridge slung between sharper peaks in an area that geologists call the "tattered zone." Here, 12 million to 15 million years ago, in an area once covered by a shallow ocean, the continent's plates bumped into each other and crumpled. The collision formed the mountains and created layers of limestone and sandstone - older rock and younger rock thrust upon each other - that the Department of Energy argues makes an ideal natural container for nuclear waste. A sealed "charcoal filter," if you will. That, at least, was the original argument in 1987, when the government offered Yucca as the only site among the three initially considered in 1982 when Congress ordered a repository be established. "It provides a tremendous natural barrier," says Patrick Rowe, an Energy Department scientist who has been employed at the test site and in repository development for 22 years. "It's arid, it has a deep water table, its water doesn't tie into the water basin of Las Vegas and there are barely 1.5 people per square mile out here - not many." But the Energy Department's own testing over time has shown that the mountain is less stable than originally thought - "tectonically active," scientists say. There are five major fault lines among the dozens running through Yucca. A small earthquake that caused no damage struck nearby on Friday. The last major quake, which registered 5.6 on the Richter scale, shook the area in 1992. Rowe says the 1992 quake and 2,000 aftershocks left underground work areas unscathed. But it damaged buildings at Jackass Flats, where nuclear waste would be held before it goes into the mountain. The Yucca region is also home to a collection of inactive volcanoes, at least one with a potential to blow. And then there is the question of whether Yucca is waterproof. Even though rainfall averages only 7.5 inches annually, the issue of water is key: Not only could moisture corrode nickel-plated storage canisters containing the radioactive waste, it also could transport leaking waste through the site and into the area's water system. Scientists originally believed that Yucca, formed from layers of compressed volcanic ash called tuff, would protect the canisters from water. Their opinion changed, however, when they discovered contamination from 1950s nuclear tests 800 feet down in the mountain - a strong suggestion that rainwater travels through fissures in the mountain much faster than anyone anticipated. Scientists are still studying how the high heat generated by stored spent nuclear fuel would affect both the storage canisters and the flow of water through the repository. Faced with a site that no longer met the government's original criteria for a repository whose natural features would store the nuclear waste safely, the Yucca plan is now a marriage of natural and man-made barriers. The latest additions are titanium "drip shields" to protect the canisters from water in the repository. Though government scientists have tested the shields and canisters with high heat and excessive water, it is impossible to predict whether the system would corrode over the 10,000-year life of the repository. Not to worry, insists Rowe. "The natural environment works at Yucca Mountain," he says. "As the engineered barriers lose their integrity, the natural barrier takes over." Three government agencies - including the General Accounting Office, which is the investigative arm of Congress - say flat-out that they believe the Energy Department lacks the evidence needed to ensure the safety of the repository. The recent GAO report lists 293 technical issues at Yucca yet to be resolved with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is ultimately responsible for licensing the repository. Among them is water flow through the repository site. Non-government scientists have been the most critical, arguing that the decision is premature, and that the government's engineering is faulty. "In our view, the disposal of high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain is based on an unsound engineering strategy and poor use of present understanding of the properties of spent nuclear fuel," wrote scientists Allison Macfarlane of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Rodney C. Ewing of the University of Michigan in April's Science magazine. "The original concept of geologic disposal has been turned on its ear," they wrote, with the issue driven by nuclear power and national security policy issues, and not whether nuclear waste can be safely stored in a Nevada mountain. "The scientific basis for the selection ... continues to be only a marginal consideration." The GAO concludes it is highly unlikely that, if approved, Yucca would open by the Energy Department's 2010 goal, predicting that it would be at least 2013. The report also notes that the government is considering storing the nuclear waste above ground at the site until the repository is ready, the very situation Yucca is intended to eliminate. Energy Department officials, including Undersecretary of Energy Robert G. Card, blasted that study as "profoundly flawed," and said any outstanding technical issues can be addressed during the repository's licensing procedure. Furthermore, Card wrote in a response to the GAO, "The report gives no weight to the interests of the communities where this waste is [now] located," and ignores the need for a timely decision. A timely decision is, indeed, in the government's interest. Energy companies, many of them pushing hard for Yucca, are racking up billions of dollars in damages from the government for its failure to open a repository by 1998, as required by law. At least 17 damage suits, including one from Connecticut, are pending, with energy companies seeking the cost of on-site storage and security from 1998 until the time when a central repository opens. Potential damages range from the Energy Department's estimate of $2 billion to the industry's estimate of $50 billion. Company Tour On a recent sunny, wind-whipped day, Linda Natale of Las Vegas looked out over the Amargosa Valley from Yucca Mountain and summed up the feeling of many Nevadans. "I really don't know what the truth is," Natale says. "Old-time Nevadans don't really trust the government because of what happened at the test site." She and about 150 others had boarded buses early in the morning in Las Vegas for an Energy Department tour of Yucca - a monthly field trip showing off an exploratory version of the repository. The basic facility, though not yet approved, has been planned and built over the past two decades at a cost to taxpayers so far of $7 billion. The Energy Department, since 1987, has collected an estimated 18,000 geologic and water samples from Yucca to test its suitability as a repository. It concluded that the mountain storage facility would meet Environmental Protection Agency standards - standards written specifically for Yucca. Today's visitors included members of a women's construction organization, a Unitarian Church group and people like Brandon and Cindy Smith. The Smiths are young, want to start a family and have just bought a house in Henderson, a suburb of Las Vegas. "We're concerned about our property values, and about what will happen if there's an accident," Cindy Smith says. They peer intently out the bus window as it winds up the side of the mountain, past spectacular folds of rock in shades of cream, red, ash and gray, to the repository tunnel, stopping to see the massive, 3,000-horsepower boring machine used to carve the pathway. At the tunnel entrance, visitors in red hard hats and safety glasses walk next to the train track that runs through the mountain. High voltage wires in thick cables are strung along each side, and a loud hum buzzes from the air exchange system. A sign advises that the tunnel's south portal is 7,711 meters away. The tunnel is, in places, reinforced with poured concrete and metal bands. Along the pathway are dozens of markers noting where scientists have extracted rock to test the behavior of water in the mountain. And throughout are dug a number of "alcoves," short side tunnels in which water, heat and vapor experiments are conducted. During lunch at long tables in the site's visitors center, Jay Felty of Las Vegas and others chat with government workers. Like many of the day's visitors, Felty seems reassured. "When we first heard about [the repository], we wanted to bolt - to get as far away as we could," he says. "Now, maybe it's something we could live with." The Smiths agree, and on the bus ride back to Las Vegas, they say they feel they've been misled by the news media. "I thought I should come to the source and hear about it from them. I wanted to see the facility, and see the preparations to make this work," Brandon Smith says. "Seeing the facility, I am comfortable." Political Wrangling Bob List once represented the people of Nevada as their governor. He's convinced he is still looking out for their interests by promoting the Yucca Mountain plan. List, a Republican who was governor from 1979 to 1983, sees the repository as a unique opportunity for state residents. It would bring jobs, science and technological initiatives and - if they play their cards right and negotiate, he says - money for schools, health care and other services the tax-poor state could use. Even with Las Vegas now the nation's fastest-growing city, Nevada's tax base is small. Only 13 percent of the state is in private hands; the rest belongs to the federal government. "We're tiny little islands in an ocean of federal land and this is the world's largest public works project, worth probably $60 billion. That's more than the assessed valuation of the whole city of Reno," List said during a recent business trip to New York City. "We have an opportunity to make lemonade out of lemons. "We already have about 1,400 people employed on this project in the state, with a payroll of about $100 million a year," he said. "We need to keep that money in Nevada." List is the highest-ranking former Nevada official hired by the Nuclear Energy Institute, a Washington, D.C.- based lobbying group representing 260 companies in 15 countries, to sell the repository to skeptical Silver State residents. List is unmoved by a statewide poll in January by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research Inc. for the Las Vegas Review Journal showing that more than 80 percent of residents oppose the project. "Most of us would prefer that the project not come to Nevada, but I'm a realist. Yucca is going to become the repository," said List, a friend of Gov. Kenny Guinn, a Republican who opposes the plan and who on April 8 personally delivered the state's veto, known as a "notice of disapproval," to Washington. It takes a House and Senate vote to override such a veto, which under law must be accomplished by July 25 or the repository plan dies. The House voted 306-117 on May 8 to override Guinn's veto. "My role is to help lay some groundwork and soften the beaches a little for an event that's upon us whether we like it or not," List said. Even Oscar Goodman, the brash mob lawyer turned mayor of Las Vegas and outspoken critic of the Yucca plan, acknowledges the difficulty of battling a proposal that is being aggressively sold to 49 other states as a solution to their nuclear waste problem. Though Nevada has one of the smallest Congressional delegations in Washington, its four electoral college votes could have given the election to Al Gore even without Florida. But George W. Bush won the state, due in no small part to his assurance that the repository would never happen unless its safety could be proved by "sound science." Bill Clinton won the state the previous two elections with a similar promise. So residents were stunned when Bush endorsed the Yucca plan earlier this year. "This is based on bad science, and we have a preponderance of evidence to prove that," Guinn said. Nevada's U.S. senators, Democrat Harry Reid and Republican John Ensign, and two representatives, Democrat Shelley Berkley and Republican James Gibbons, are united in their opposition to Yucca, but their political clout can't rival that of other states like Texas, with a delegation of 32, which blocked a repository site there. "Things are not going our way in Washington," Goodman said recently, during an early-morning meet-the-mayor coffee at a Starbucks on the scruffy edge of his city's old downtown. "To think otherwise would be foolish." But no one ever accused the garrulous Goodman of not being up for a long-shot fight. He has represented mobsters Meyer Lansky and Anthony "Tony the Ant" Spilotro, has been cited as one of the country's best trial lawyers and has called U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham "that piece of garbage" for endorsing Yucca. "If they think they can bring that crap to Las Vegas - I'll arrest them all," Goodman promises in an anti-Yucca reggae song getting airplay on KMOP, a local rock radio station. The mayor has used his larger-than-life persona and penchant for verbal bomb-throwing to help coax money out of the state and county for the fight. He hasn't been as successful with the powerful gaming industry. With investment interests scattered across the country, many casino owners have been reluctant to publicly oppose the repository plan, supported by officials in other states where they do business. But, with modest gaming donations, Nevada is on track to spend an estimated $8 million to battle pro-Yucca forces. The money has bought the services of two top D.C. lobbyists and former White House chiefs of staff - Democrat John Podesta of the Clinton administration and Republican Kenneth Duberstein of the Reagan administration. It has also paid for television advertisements in key environmental states such as Vermont. But the amount is dwarfed by the more than $25 million the nuclear energy industry is expected to pour into its effort to convince Congress to go ahead with the repository plan. The industry's push has included expenses-paid "fact-finding" golf and gambling junkets to Las Vegas for congressional aides and House members. It has also hired as lobbyists Geraldine Ferraro, a former congresswoman and Democratic vice presidential candidate, and John Sununu, a former George H.W. Bush White House chief of staff, who angered Nevada residents opposed to Yucca earlier this year when he questioned their "patriotism." Still, despite being outspent and out-lobbied, Las Vegas Deputy City Manager Elizabeth Fretwell insists that "it's premature to talk about it being over." Native Claims To the Western Shoshone Indians, Yucca Mountain is a living thing, inhabited by a moving and breathing snake - "a serpent swimming westward." The characterization suggests the area's history of earthquakes and volcanoes and reflects the tribe's belief that the earth is not just something alive, but something sacred. "This area, this mountain is not negotiable," says Raymond Yowell, chief of the Western Shoshone National Council, which represents many of the various Shoshone tribes. On the western side of Yucca, across from the ridge where workers have dug the repository tunnel, the Western Shoshone have a sweat lodge and a fire area where they hold their ancient ceremonies. It is where their ancestors once harvested pine nuts and hunted rabbits. It is in a land they call Newe Sogobia, where they grew their vegetables and raised their children. But the Shoshone and their long-standing claim to the mountain - as well as tens of thousands of acres of their traditional ancestral lands in Nevada that are now homes to Air Force bases and nuclear test ranges - are barely a footnote in the Yucca debate. "We're in a situation where we're being victimized again and again and again," says Ian Zabarte, the Shoshone council's secretary of state and expert on nuclear issues. The Shoshone, along with the neighboring Southern Paiute Indian community, have been exposed to government-generated radiation for more than 40 years. A 1996 health study of the Nevada Test Site found that Indian reservation residents suffered increased incidence of disease and cancer. Zabarte's aunts told him they saw the bright flashes of nuclear tests and watched their vegetable gardens wilt as though doused by pails of hot water. They ate the beans anyway because they didn't know any better, they told him. And now, Zabarte says, the government is planning to force them to again live with a health threat that nobody else wants. The Shoshone's claim - that an 1863 U.S. treaty recognizing their territory is still in effect - has bounced through the courts in more than a dozen suits. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled most recently that the Western Shoshone have no claim to their land because the government in 1979 said it would pay them for it - 15 cents an acre, the going rate more than a century earlier. Western Shoshone tribal council leaders continue to refuse the payment, as well as later settlement offers as high as $120 million. "We know where our ancestors were born. We know the plants and the animals in the area," says Zabarte, whose living room in Cactus Springs is lined with thick government energy and environment reports. "When we go to the mountains and pick pine nuts, we pick from trees planted by our ancestors. When we go to cut willow branches from Furnace Creek, we know our ancestors put those in. "This is my homeland. We don't have any place else to go." The fate of Yucca could be decided at any time, either by Senate action or inaction. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., has threatened to keep the repository plan off the floor, which would kill it. If a vote is taken and the plan survives, a license application will be submitted to the NRC, which has up to four years to review the project and hold hearings. And while it waits for the politics to play out on Capitol Hill, Nevada is pushing ahead with a half-dozen lawsuits challenging all parts of the Yucca project - from the EPA standards to the government's use of the state's water supply to operate the repository. "Nevada has already borne more than its fair share of this nation's radioactive waste burdens," Gov. Guinn told Congress this spring. "I assure you, the only thing inevitable about Yucca Mountain is that it will plot the course of so many other doomed [Energy Department] mega-projects." Coming Monday: Where is Connecticut's waste and how will it get to Yucca Mountain? ctnow.com is Copyright © 2002 by The Hartford Courant ***************************************************************** 47 DOE asks judge to keep South Carolina governor from blocking plutonium 06/18/02 The Oak Ridger Online -- Feature: Business -- by Amy Geier Associated Press The Energy Department has asked a federal judge to prevent Gov. Jim Hodges from blocking plutonium shipments into South Carolina that could begin as early as this weekend. The governor declared a state of emergency last week and dispatched state troopers to inspect vehicles for radioactive material. He has ordered authorities to prevent anyone from transporting plutonium into the state. A hearing was set for today on the DOE's request for a court order to prevent Hodges from blocking shipments of the weapons-grade plutonium. U.S. District Judge Cameron Currie issued an order Friday saying that Hodges' physical blockades of federal plutonium shipments are illegal and present a possible terrorist target, but she did not specifically order Hodges to refrain from blocking roads. "If the court rules in our favor, we expect the governor to not interfere so DOE can safely fulfill its national security mission," said Energy spokesman Joe Davis. Hodges said he would not block the shipments if ordered by a court but his emergency order would stand until then. "Plutonium threatens the health and safety of South Carolina's citizens. As governor, I must do everything in my legal power to protect our state from this threat," Hodges said. The Energy Department wants to move 6 1/2 tons of plutonium to the Savannah River Site, where it will be converted into fuel for nuclear reactors. Federal officials have said the nuclear material would be under constant guard, and its path and time of arrival would be kept secret. They also say security at the Savannah River Site is sound. Last Thursday, Currie threw out Hodges' lawsuit that would have halted the surplus plutonium shipments that are part of the cleanup and closure of the Rocky Flats facility in Colorado. Hodges worries the conversion program will never be funded and the plutonium will not leave South Carolina. He has appealed Currie's ruling to the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va. All Contents ©Copyright The Oak Ridger ***************************************************************** 48 Earthquake Shows Fundamental Flaw with Yucca Mtn. Site FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE June 14, 2002 Commissioners Herrera, Williams React to Seismic Activity A 4.4-magnitude earthquake shook the surface near Yucca Mountain early this morning, according to scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colo. The earthquake did not cause any damage or injuries, but helped to underscore concerns about the safety of the Department of Energy’s proposed nuclear waste storage site. "This is one validation of what we have been saying all along," said Clark County Commissioner Myrna Williams. "The earthquake this morning was more than just a tremor. If this would happen in a greater magnitude the results could be devastating. Yucca Mountain is located on a major fault line." This young, geologically active system contains 34 earthquake faults near Yucca Mountain and four young volcanoes within seven miles of the site. Every earthquake that occurs in the area increases the likelihood of radiation seepage into the groundwater. This all comes as Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Richard Meserve admits that waste can be stored safely onsite for decades. "This morning Mother Nature sent the U.S. Senate a wake-up call: Yucca Mountain is unsafe and unfit to be the nation’s nuclear waste repository. We were lucky this time. There were no injuries and there was no damage. But what about the next time?" said Commission Chairman Dario Herrera. "What happens when 77,000 tons of high-level deadly nuclear waste is stored in Yucca Mountain? Would we wake up safe and sound like we did this morning or would our groundwater be contaminated with the most poisonous substance known to man?" Today’s earthquake is hardly the first of its kind. The quake was on the same fault that produced a magnitude 5.6 earthquake on June 29, 1992, which caused more than $400,000 in damage to Energy Department surface research facilities near Yucca Mountain. [http://www.co.clark.nv.us] ***************************************************************** 49 German nuclear waste shipment briefly held up by activists Yahoo! News - AP World Politics Tue Jun 18, 6:52 AM ET BERNAY, France - About 60 riot police intervened Monday to stop a demonstration by Greenpeace activists from blocking a train carrying nuclear waste from Germany for reprocessing in France. Police arrived on the scene near the Normandy town of Bernay, where a dozen Greenpeace militants, four chained to the track, had managed to stop the train for an hour. The train had traveled through France throughout the night on its way to the Cogema nuclear waste reprocessing center at La Hague, near the English Channel. The train was carrying three containers of spent nuclear fuel under contract from German electric companies. Greenpeace, the environmental group long active in trying to stop such nuclear waste transport, said in a statement that its action was aimed at "getting its message to the new (French) government," named last month and reappointed Monday after French legislative elections. "Nuclear is a dirty energy that creates deadly and eternal waste," Frederic Marillier, in charge of Greenpeace France's anti-nuclear campaign. Germany sends spent nuclear fuel from 19 power plants abroad for reprocessing under contracts that oblige the country to take back the resulting waste for storage. (parf-eg-ps) ***************************************************************** 50 Pacific alert as radioactive shipment leaves Japan Go Asia Pacific Breaking News Pacific - [http://www.abc.net.au/ra] Guam Congressman, Robert Underwood, has expressed concern that a shipment of uranium and plutonium may travel near Guam and the Mariana Islands while in transit to Britain. Mr Underwood has written to America's Secretary of State, Colin Powell, calling for assurances from Japan that every precaution is taken, so the health of Pacific Islanders will not be jeopardized. He says such a shipment, without adequate and heightened security protections, threatens to compromise the environmental safety of the Pacific. While the exact route of the shipment has remained a secret, Mr Underwood stressed the need for the American government and the island nations to be ready to respond in the likelihood of an accident at sea or a terrorist act. 18/06/2002 16:36:10 | ABC Radio Australia News ***************************************************************** 51 Nevada Or Bust Running Out Of Room At The Reactors ... ctnow.com: WORLD/NATION Second of two parts June 17, 2002 By MICHAEL REMEZ, Courant Staff Writer WATERFORD -- It is a typical spring day here on Millstone Point. The wind is whipping across this jut of land into Long Island Sound. But inside the Dominion Millstone Power Station, engineers are working to solve a problem fast approaching. One of the two remaining nuclear reactors still in operation at Millstone - there are three altogether - is running out of space to store its dangerous, radioactive spent fuel. Yucca Mountain is a big part of the reason. The federal government was supposed to have opened a national nuclear waste dump by 1998. But that dump - in the hollowed-out core of Yucca, in the desert between Las Vegas and Death Valley - is at least eight years away. This means all the spent fuel at Millstone, and at dozens of other plants nationwide, will have to remain on their sites for many more years. The issue for these plants is very different from the one that has so many Nevadans riled up - whether to move nuclear waste to Yucca. The issue for the plants is how soon they can move the waste and how to cope in the meantime. The byproduct of splitting atoms for electric power - the used fuel rods - are so highly radioactive that standard procedure is to cool them underwater for at least five years after they are removed from a reactor. The spent-fuel pool at Millstone Unit 2 will reach optimal capacity by 2005. The complex's new owner, Virginia-based Dominion Resources, and other plant operators had hoped their waste would be headed to Yucca by then. But the bogged-down approval process for Yucca means that, for the time being, some 44,000 metric tons of waste produced nationwide since commercial plants first went on line, and the roughly 20 metric tons each plant produces yearly, are likely to remain at 72 reactor sites and dozens of other locations in more than three dozen states. In Connecticut, at Waterford and at Haddam, home to the closed Connecticut Yankee plant, fuel rods will stay in the pools or in huge concrete and steel canisters, known as dry cask storage, even though Connecticut ratepayers already have paid $785 million toward the Yucca project. The issue of what to do with the spent fuel has gained more urgency since Sept. 11, with the fear of an attack on the storage sites. Waterford First Selectman Paul Eccard said his town of 19,000 residents is generally supportive of nuclear power. Many are veterans of the nuclear Navy, employees of Electric Boat or people whose livelihoods have come from the Millstone plants. "But that doesn't mean they're blase about it," Eccard said of how spent fuel is stored. He said there is greater concern since Sept. 11. "They fully expect and demand that we be careful about this." The nuclear industry says about 60 of the nation's 103 operating reactors will run out of storage space in their pools by 2006. That number jumps to 78 by 2010. Most plants are now using or planning for dry cask storage - Connecticut Yankee is among the latter. The storage conundrum, both on the national and local levels, has re-energized the debate over nuclear power. In Connecticut, town leaders say long-term storage wasn't part of the original deal. The waste - some 1,600 metric tons is now stored in the state - was supposed to be shipped out periodically, either for reprocessing or to the long-planned repository. Only the newest spent fuel was to be on site. The Ford and Carter administrations put an end in the 1970s to reprocessing the fuel because of the cost and because of concern that its byproduct, plutonium, might end up in the hands of adversaries seeking nuclear weapons. Now, the options are few. Keith Ainsworth, a Haddam selectman, said the fight over how to store the waste at Connecticut Yankee "has really torn our community apart." Ainsworth has been criticized for his willingness to work with managers of the decommissioning plan, which calls for storing the spent fuel in nearby woods and eventually dismantling the plant. "We have no choice," Ainsworth said. "We have to make the most pragmatic decisions we can for the town, regardless of whether we want to make these decisions." In Haddam, that has meant an out-of-court settlement that gave Connecticut Yankee a town permit to build a $40 million dry-cask facility three quarters of a mile from its closed plant. The plan is to put 43 16-foot-tall canisters above ground on a hockey rink-sized concrete pad. The containers would be used for shipping once Yucca is ready. That, said Russell A. Mellor, the executive overseeing the decommissioning of Connecticut Yankee and its sister plant in Massachusetts, Yankee Rowe, means the waste will have to be moved only once on site - from the pool into the containers. Once the waste leaves Haddam Neck, the site could be returned to nature. Sal Mangiagli, an anti-nuclear activist who lives on the other side of the Connecticut River from the plant, isn't happy with the plans for Connecticut Yankee and worries that companies working to dismantle plants want to get the job done fast and on the cheap. "They want to rip, strip and ship," said Mangiagli, a leader of the Citizens Awareness Network. Not so, said Mellor. "Our perspective is the safest storage of spent fuel is in dry cask storage in the location we have chosen," he said. Critics also say spent fuel pools are more vulnerable to attack than the more secure reactor containment domes. The danger is not a nuclear explosion, but a horrific fire that could start if the water that cools the fuel assemblies were somehow drained from the pool. And that's the crux of Gordon Thompson's worries about the plan at Millstone Unit 3 to increase its storage capacity. Dominion received approval to triple the amount of waste that can be stored in its pool. Opponents are challenging the decision. Thompson, a nuclear engineer who runs the Institute for Resource and Security Studies in Cambridge, Mass., said the release of radioactivity in a fire could prove catastrophic: It could cause significant increases in cancer and make a wide swath of land uninhabitable. But Eileen Supko, a nuclear engineer who is an industry consultant, said that any large release is highly unlikely and that changes to a plant's license - such as increasing pool capacity - require approval from regulators. "Someone saying that pool storage isn't safe is completely wrong," Supko said, adding that the pools have multiple safeguards and are closely monitored. Thompson said storage canisters are vastly preferable to waste pools. But some worry the relatively new cask technologies could prove vulnerable to terrorist attack. Victor Dricks, spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said storage canisters are not designed specifically to withstand the crash of a commercial aircraft, but they can withstand virtually any natural disaster, from earthquakes to tornadoes, with no significant release of radiation. The transportation casks also have proved reliable in tests, he said. In addition to increasing the pool capacity at Millstone 3, Dominion has other plans to address the space crunch at Millstone's two other units. At Millstone Unit 1, which shut down in 1996, managers want to leave the used fuel rods in the storage pool until they are ready for shipping to Yucca. At Units 2 and 3, for which Dominion is expected to seek 20-year operating license extensions, the first step is to create more room in the fuel pools, which is where the plan to triple the pool space at Unit 3 comes in. Alan Price, site manager for Dominion, said among the options under consideration is moving spent fuel rods from the pool at Unit 2 to Unit 3. The more likely scenario seems a dry cask interim storage system similar to the ones now at plants at Calvert Cliffs in Maryland and just built at Oyster Creek in New Jersey. In both cases, the steel containers holding the spent fuel assemblies are transported from the reactor site to nearby bunker-like structures. They then also are packaged for eventual shipping to the permanent storage site. Whatever system the company chooses, Dominion expects to be able to store all waste the Millstone plants will produce through the anticipated life of the complex. With the extension, Millstone 3 could be in operation until 2045. Dominion can expect plenty of opposition all the way, just as Connecticut Yankee has had. At Connecticut Yankee, there have been lawsuits over the location of the storage site and whether it sits on historic land that once was home to a freed slave. Opponents have raised concerns over whether plant managers would bring in waste from elsewhere. The settlement says they won't. But it will be the fate of Yucca Mountain that dictates how these short-term storage concerns are addressed, and, ultimately, Mellor said, the future of nuclear power in the U.S. "If you want nuclear power to be part of the mix, and it is now 20 percent of the mix," he said, "you need to solve the waste issue." To read about the main issues that have folks riled over the Yucca plan: Click Here. [http://www.ctnow.com/extras/javagallery/yucca/yucca-fuss.htm] ctnow.com is Copyright © 2002 by The Hartford Courant ***************************************************************** 52 DOE will renew S.C. legal request Augusta Georgia: Metro: Web posted Tuesday, June 18, 2002 By Matthew Boedy [matthew.boedy@augustachronicle.com] South Carolina Bureau AIKEN - The U.S. Department of Energy will ask a federal judge again today to rule that Gov. Jim Hodges' planned blockade of plutonium shipments into the Savannah River Site is unconstitutional. The hearing is scheduled for 11 a.m. at the Aiken federal courthouse. Energy Department attorneys had asked Judge Cameron Currie for such a ruling last week after she dismissed the governor's lawsuit to stop the shipments. While the judge said the blockade would be illegal, she would not sign an order stating such because, she said, she did not want to presume the governor would break the law. Specifically, the civil complaint against the governor seeks three forms of relief: + That any attempt by physical means to stop DOE shipment be declared unconstitutional + That the governor's executive order for a state of emergency be declared unconstitutional + That the governor be preliminarily and permanently enjoined from any attempt to stop shipments into the state. Mr. Hodges, who declared a state of emergency Friday and ordered troopers to stop trucks capable of carrying the nuclear material as they neared SRS, is not expected to attend the hearing. He has said he would follow the court's orders and use only legal means to combat the shipments. Reach Matthew Boedy at (803) 648-1395 or matthew.boedy@augustachronicle.com [matthew.boedy@augustachronicle.com] . [http://augusta.com] . ***************************************************************** 53 Group vies with USEC for new plant - By Joe Walker Paducah, Kentucky Tuesday, June 18, 2002 Paducah is also high on the list for the consortium's competition for a gas-centrifuge uranium enrichment plant. By Joe Walker jwalker@paducahsun.com--270.575.8650 A group of USEC customers and competitors has Paducah among the finalists for a gas-centrifuge uranium enrichment plant whose site is expected to be picked by the end of the month. The development puts the consortium, Louisiana Energy Services, in a race with USEC to build a facility using technology that is faster and cheaper than the outdated process used by the USEC-run Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant. Pending an agreement with the Department of Energy, which owns the plant, USEC wants to apply to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by December for a license to operate gas centrifuge. That also is the Louisiana consortium's schedule. "I think we should be selecting a site probably in the next two weeks," said Rod Krich, vice president of licensing for Exelon, a large USEC customer and member of the group. "It will be by the end of June. If it goes later than that, we'll probably have trouble filing an application with the NRC by the end of the year." He said Paducah is a "serious" contender among eight possible sites for the $1 billion plant, which would be built by the end of 2005 and partly running a year later. It would produce several hundred construction jobs, 200 to 250 permanent jobs and an annual production capacity of a million units of enriched uranium by late 2007 or early 2008. The plant would add 600,000 units annually to reach an ultimate capacity of at least 3 million units by sometime in 2011. By comparison, the 1,500-employee Paducah USEC plant produces and sells about 3.5 million units a year. Exelon, a large nuclear power firm based in Chicago and Philadelphia, is involved in the new venture with Urenco — a European uranium-enrichment company and chief USEC competitor — along with Duke Power, Louisiana Power and Light, and Fluor Daniel. The companies form Louisiana Energy Services, which because of environmental and other issues dropped a plan seven years ago to build a gas-centrifuge plant in Louisiana. "We're a big customer of USEC," Krich said. "We'd like to see them succeed, but at the same time, we think a competitive market is always better than having a single supplier." Nuclear power plants, which produce power for about 20 percent of the nation's population, need about 11 million units of enriched uranium annually. Most of that comes from USEC and the rest from European competitors such as Urenco. Fearing a near monopoly, the power industry has opposed USEC attempts to control prices even more by lowering its cost for uranium dismantled from Russian nuclear warheads. Last year, USEC won a trade case alleging Urenco was undercutting its prices by importing uranium subsidized by European governments. The consortium plan would use Urenco's decades-old centrifuge technology, and USEC would use newer technology developed by the Energy Department. Ken Wheeler, chairman of a local nuclear energy task force, said he expects USEC and the Energy Department to sign an agreement soon, approving lower Russian prices and permitting USEC to move ahead with gas centrifuge. In return, USEC must keep the Paducah plant running at near its current level. Wheeler said USEC, which is struggling financially, has indicated it needs a financial partner to deploy centrifuge. The agreement is expected to require the company to have monetary backing by a certain date, he said. "There's no question that financially, Exelon is in a very strong position, comparatively speaking," Wheeler said. "What they don't have is the Russian uranium exclusive agency agreement, and it's beginning to appear that USEC will consummate that deal fairly quickly." If Exelon were to build a centrifuge plant first and supply its own enriched uranium, that would cut so heavily into USEC profits that it would guarantee closure of the Paducah plant unless the Department of Energy intervened, he said. Wheeler said DOE probably would step in rather than lose its only remaining enrichment plant. "The best of both worlds would be for Exelon and USEC to merge, or Exelon or somebody to buy (USEC) out," he said. "Then they've got the site immediately here. Now it turns out to be a great place again, because now they've got the work force, and they can simply ratchet from one plant over to the other." ***************************************************************** 54 Resolutions Adopted at The 70th Annual Conference of Mayors Madison, Wi - June 14-18, 2002 -- Transportation Of High Level Nuclear Waste RESOLUTIONS ADOPTED at the 70TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF MAYORS Madison, WI - June 14-18, 2002 TRANSPORTATION OF HIGH LEVEL NUCLEAR WASTE WHEREAS, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Nuclear Energy Agency of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have issued a report commissioned by the DOE concluding that the DOE lacks sufficient information to predict the suitability and hydrogeologic performance of the proposed Yucca Mountain repository; and WHEREAS, the Department of Energy (DOE) has no feasible plan for transportation of these materials; and WHEREAS, the Department of Transportation has stated it is not fully prepared for the forecasted increase in shipments of High Level Waste (HLW); and WHEREAS, the casks used to ship(HLW)have never undergone full-scale physical testing to determine if they can withstand likely transportation accident and terrorism scenarios; and WHEREAS, there is national acknowledgment of risks to our security and the safety of our communities presented by the transportation of HLW; and NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the United States Conference of Mayors urges the United States Congress to pass legislation that prohibits the movement of any HLW unless beginning three (3) years prior to any such movement, all cities along the proposed transportation route have received adequate funds, training and equipment to protect the public health and safety in the event of an accident; BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that in order to ensure that the actual transport of HLW be safely accomplished that prior to the movement of HLW, state of the art technology, engineering and procedures related to the transport of this material be reviewed in the context of past transport incidences and or future or predictable incidences related to transport accidents. That the lessons learned from this review be applied to HLW transport. + USCM | 70th Annual Meeting [http://www.usmayors.org/70thAnnualMeeting/] + Download the Passed Resolutions [http://www.usmayors.org/70thAnnualMeeting/2002resolutions.pdf] (pdf-210K) ***************************************************************** 55 DOE Seeks Court Injunction Prohibiting Governor Jim Hodges From Blocking Plutonium Shipments To South Carolina energy.gov - Headquarters' Press Release RELEASE DATE: June 17, 2002 Washington, D.C. - The U.S. Department of Energy, through the Department of Justice, today filed papers with the Federal District Court in South Carolina asking for an injunction to bar Governor Jim Hodges from taking any actions to block national security shipments of plutonium. Disregarding statements made by the judge at last Thursday's hearing, last Friday Governor Jim Hodges signed an Executive Order last week barring shipments of plutonium into South Carolina. Joe Davis, DOE spokesman, said, "Governor Hodges has no authority to interfere with national security shipments. The Court said as much in two different orders last week. We are now asking the Court for an injunction against any and all actions Governor Hodges would or might engage in to block these national security shipments." A hearing on that matter is currently scheduled for 11:00 a.m. tomorrow in Aiken, South Carolina. Last week, District Court Judge Cameron Currie noted that she had no reason to believe that the Governor would violate the law by impeding on plutonium shipments. At the time, she noted that the Government's counterclaim to formally request such a ruling was "correct" and that "such actions (by the Governor to block shipment) would constitute violations of the United States Constitution." Today's filing by DOE and DOJ will ask the Court to formally order Governor Hodges not to impede on national security shipments. Governor Hodges said that if ordered by a Court he would not block shipments of plutonium. "If the Court rules in our favor," Davis said, "we expect the Governor to not interfere so DOE can safely fulfill its national security mission while protecting the health and safety of South Carolina citizens and the American people." Media Contact: Joe Davis, 202-586-4940 Release No. PR-02-112 Back to Previous Page> ***************************************************************** 56 UK: RADIATION TIMEBOMB 11:00 - 17 June 2002 Radioactive material that could be made into dirty bombs by terror groups is being innocently stored at hundreds of companies across the West. Universities, hospitals, science labs and even a school are among organisations holding the material. And experts warn that security is not tight enough to prevent it being targeted by extremist groups. Last night, Professor Frank Barnaby, a former scientist at Britain's Atomic Weapons Establishment, said urgent safety measures were needed. "As far as terrorists are concerned, any contamination will serve the purpose because the population are so afraid, " he said. "Security is not good enough. Hospitals and businesses are no more secure than your house when you lock the door - burglars can break in." His warning came in the wake of an admission by one of Britain's top defence bosses that routine security checks are not being carried out at nuclear installations. Michael Buckland-Smith, director of the Office of Civil Nuclear Security, confessed that a recruitment crisis had forced him to cancel checks at 22 of the 31 nuclear power and waste reprocessing stations which the agency oversees in the UK. There are growing fears that al-Qaeda terrorists could target Britain because of its support for the US in the war on terrorism. The Government has already announced that security is being stepped up at many key sites across the West, including GCHQ in Cheltenham and nuclear power stations at Oldbury and Hinkley Point. Dirty bombs - which are relatively easy to construct - are made by wrapping radioactive material around conventional explosives. Professor Barnaby said tiny amounts of radioactive material, released into the air, would lead to mass evacuations and could contaminate vast areas of land. Terrorism expert Dr Wyn Bowen, of London's King's College defence studies unit, said: "The material used in a dirty bomb could come from a variety of sources, including radioactive material from hospitals and nuclear fuel rods." Nuclear regulators admit that the sheer volume of material held at establishments nationwide makes it impossible to say for certain that none has gone astray. Last night, environmentalists also criticised bosses at the Office of Nuclear Security after they admitted being unable to carry out security checks. The news surfaced in the first annual report published by the secretive Government agency. Richard Dixon from Friends of the Earth, said: "If I were a terrorist, looking at this report and scouting out what is happening with the nuclear industry, I would be heading to Britain." Do you have a story for Simon Steel? Call 01934 644368 or e-mail s.steel@bepp.co.uk Copyright | Disclaimer | Privacy statement | Contact us canberra.yourguide.com.au OVER the years, Australia has put a great deal of effort into trying to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The underlying logic of our position was obvious: the two superpowers already had the capacity to destroy the world many times over, so there was no need for any other countries to possess the atom bomb. The disintegration of the Soviet Union, however, has caused a seismic shift in the strategic environment. The key danger seemed to be that more countries would obtain nuclear weapons and, obviously, if there were more bombs it seemed more likely that there was a greater risk of them being used. With unthinkable consequences. That's why there was such concern when India and Pakistan demonstrated that they possessed a nuclear capability. The likelihood of the bombs being used immediately appeared that much closer. Nevertheless, this has not been the case. In fact, the knowledge that both sides possess nuclear weapons might even have made conventional war less likely. Deterrence seems to work. Although the countries have fought three wars over the 50 years of their existence, there have been no open armed conflicts since they acquired the bomb. This is the vital feature that distinguishes this sort of proliferation. The bombs are not meant ever to be used. Because of the great risk that at some stage a government might be tempted to use the weapons, Australia continued attempting to stop the spread of nuclear technology. Nevertheless proliferation is, in itself, only half the danger. A new strategy, which accepts that nuclear bombs can (and even should) be used, is quietly being developed in cities such as Washington and, most extraordinarily, London. And, if the United Kingdom goes ahead with its plans to develop and build new tactical nuclear weapons, Australia may as well forget about attempting to stop anyone getting the bomb. President George Bush overthrew an important rule that sustains the international system when he announced that the US would be prepared to strike first, if it believed that it faced an imminent attack. Nevertheless, so far American actions have been limited to the invasion of Afghanistan, widely considered as a justifiable retaliation after the attack on the World Trade Centre. In Washington, the State Department is well aware that the international consensus supporting the US would immediately disintegrate if Iraq were to be invaded. What is far more frightening today is that other, smaller countries appear to be adopting a similar doctrine. Over the weekend it was revealed that Britain is already planning to build a massive nuclear bomb-making factory, which will turn out a new generation of small weapons. Unlike the UK's previous missile force, these weapons are meant to be used rather than having a simply deterrent effect. This statement represents a seismic change in the way we have always thought about the bomb. In a flash it moves from being the ultimate deterrent, to being simply another weapon. The hurdle militating against the use of the bomb - by any side - has not simply been lowered, it's been swept away. If Britain "updates" its arsenal of weaponry to pack more of a punch, there's a good chance that France will do likewise. China is already trying desperately to ensure it has enough missiles to overwhelm any missile shield that George Bush wants to create. The world has begun to enter a completely new military environment. Rather than simply clinging to our previous policy positions on issues like proliferation, we need to realise we are now in a different world. ***************************************************************** 58 U.S., South Korea, Japan open stalks on North Korea Tuesday, June 18, 2002 at 09:30 JST SAN FRANCISCO ? The United States, Japan and South Korea opened two days of talks on Monday to discuss strategies for pulling North Korea out of international isolation. Representatives of the three countries took a brief break from their closed door discussions for a photo opportunity, but U.S. officials said there would be no substantive information released until the meetings conclude on Tuesday. The San Francisco talks, one of a series of regular meetings by the three countries, come as Washington considers whether to send special envoy Jack Pritchard to Pyongyang to resume discussions on North Korea's missile and nuclear energy programs. Talks have been frozen since President George Bush took office in January 2001, although Washington said in June 2001 it would pursue such talks without preconditions. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly, deputy South Korean Foreign Minister Lee Tae-shik and the head of the Japanese Foreign Ministry's Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau, Hitoshi Tanaka, led the delegations at the talks, which U.S. officials said would discuss "a range of issues" related to North Korea. The Bush administration has proposed a dialogue with Pyongyang on issues including its missile program and improved implementation of the Agreed Framework ? a 1994 agreement under which North Korea pledged to freeze a suspected nuclear weapons program in exchange for help constructing two light-water nuclear reactors. But Bush has also labeled North Korea part of an "axis of evil" that includes Iran and Iraq, and foreign policy analysts expect the U.S. administration to be more insistent on concrete action by Pyongyang and much less tolerant of the North's repeated past demands for concessions. (Reuters News) ***************************************************************** 59 IAEA officials to visit N.K.next week Korea Herald!!_National http://www.koreaherald.com A delegation from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will visit Pyongyang next week to hold working-level talks on the implementation of a safeguard program regarding the North's nuclear facilities, Foreign Ministry officials in Seoul said yesterday. The officials said IAEA representatives will discuss with North Korean officials broad issues including inspection of the North's nuclear program and verification of its past nuclear activities. They will also urge Pyongyang to admit the agency's inspection team soon. North Korea and the agency made some progress on the implementation of safeguard measures in November last year as the North agreed to allow an inspection team to visit its Isotope Production Laboratory in Yeongbyeon. 2002.06.19 (C) Copyright 2000 Digital Korea Herald. All rights ***************************************************************** 60 Talking to North Korea (washingtonpost.com) Tuesday, June 18, 2002; Page A18 AFTER MONTHS of delay punctuated by reports of internal squabbling, the Bush administration finally appears close to beginning the dialogue with North Korea that the president first proposed a year ago. The foot-dragging has not all been on the American side; Kim Jong Il's despotic and secretive regime took its time responding to the U.S. offer; the process slowed further when Mr. Bush named North Korea to his "axis of evil." Nevertheless, dissension and ambivalence on North Korea seem to be running so high in Washington that it will represent something of an accomplishment if a proposed trip to Pyongyang by an American envoy actually takes place. At least the administration will then have avoided the paralysis that seems to threaten much of its foreign policy and followed through on the strategy Mr. Bush announced. What remains unclear is whether there is any real consensus in the administration about the underlying purpose of talking to North Korea. The Clinton administration, which aggressively pursued a dialogue after facing a threat of war over Pyongyang's attempts to build an arsenal of nuclear weapons, had a concrete aim in its final months: striking a new deal under which North Korea would end its development of long-range missiles in exchange for aid and better relations with the United States. The clock ran out on those talks, and the incoming Bush team appeared to scorn them. At a minimum, this administration appears determined to broaden the dialogue to include such issues as North Korea's troop deployments near the South Korean border, its support for terrorism and human rights. It also plans to press Pyongyang to begin delivering on a 1994 commitment to accept full inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as part of a deal under which South Korea and the United States are to supply the North with two light-water nuclear power plants. Expanding the agenda for dialogue is a worthy aim, and with concrete-pouring for the nuclear plants expected to begin in August, it is prudent to begin seeking North Korean cooperation with the IAEA. But what is the administration's goal? Does it seek to strike some new accord with Mr. Kim, or only to pressure him? Some administration officials seem open to some kind of bargain, provided that it includes strict verification measures. Others seem to regard dialogue with North Korea the same way they see negotiations for U.N. weapons inspections in Iraq: as a tactical maneuver necessary to appease key allies, but one that is preordained to fail. In the case of North Korea, the collapse of a dialogue could pave the way for a measure that conservatives in and outside the administration are seeking: U.S. withdrawal from the 1994 accord. That would save the administration from the distasteful and, some argue, ill-advised task of turning over nuclear technology to an unstable and immoral dictatorship. But it could also quickly return the United States to the crisis faced by the Clinton administration when it confronted North Korea about its suspected development of nuclear weapons. Rather than contemplate a war that could devastate both Koreas and kill hundreds of thousands, including many Americans, the last administration chose the path of bargaining with Pyongyang. Many in the Bush administration clearly do not like that strategy; but they have yet to articulate a coherent alternative. © 2002 The Washington Post Company ***************************************************************** 61 India's presidency goes to head of nuclear missile programme Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Luke Harding in New Delhi Tuesday June 18, 2002 The Guardian [http://www.guardian.co.uk] India was last night poised to anoint as its next president the man responsible for carrying out the country's controversial nuclear tests four years ago - a Muslim scientist with no political experience. Dr Abdul Kalam, 70, received a rapturous reception in Delhi yesterday when he met the country's Hindu nationalist prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The appointment of the Indian president - a high-profile but largely symbolic post - is effectively in the gift of the ruling party. Candidates can be nominated by other parties, but apart from a Communist party nominee who has no chance of selection, Dr Kalam is the only candidate. Dr Kalam is expected to file his nomination papers today. Although an electoral college must make the decision, the lack of other candidates means that his selection is effectively a done deal. Dr Kalam's unlikely last-minute candidature for the highest office in the world's largest democracy follows several weeks of political intrigue. The final decision of the ruling pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata party to pick Mr Kalam appears to be an inspired choice. His real fame began in May 1998, when he oversaw five nuclear tests in India's Pokhran desert. Most Indians greeted the tests with patriotic rejoicing, and Dr Kalam earned himself the tabloid soubriquet "Missile Man". By fielding a Muslim, the BJP has also wrongfooted its opponents. The opposition Congress party has traditionally won the votes of India's 150 million Muslims. After wobbling for several days, the Congress party leader Sonia Gandhi reluctantly endorsed Dr Kalam. Over the weekend, India's Communists put up a last-minute candidate of their own - Dr Lakshmi Seghal, an 87-year-old freedom fighter from the days before Indian independence, and the first woman to contest the post. Dr Seghal is to begin her campaign by touring a relief camp for Muslims in Gujarat - but with the main parties' minds made up, she has no chance of being chosen. Many people have questioned the wisdom of giving such a sensitive job to a political neophyte. Most of Dr Kalam's predecessors have been seasoned parliamentarians. Apart from his scientific credentials, Dr Kalam is well known for being a shaggy-haired vegetarian bachelor who wears sandals with his suits. "He is a maverick," one Congress party MP said. "I doubt whether the protocol of Rashtrapati Bhavan [the president's residence] will ever be able to shackle him." He is also backed by India's powerful Hindu revivalist wing. It points out that he has shown little interest in Islam, does not bother praying, and has never eaten beef. "Kalam is a Muslim with a Hindu soul," one BJP leader said. The BJP is still reeling from the fallout from the killings in Gujarat earlier this year, when more than 2,000 Muslims perished in communal riots. The state's Hindu nationalist politicians organised and supported the pogroms - memories of which the BJP is now keen to wipe out by promoting Dr Kalam as its man. India's current president, KR Narayanan, was not offered a second term in office by the BJP after he hinted that he was deeply unhappy with the Gujarat carnage. Dr Kalam developed India's indigenous nuclear-capable Agni and Prithvi missiles in the 1980s and 1990s. He went on to become Mr Vajpayee's principal scientific officer. There can be little doubt that in India's recent nuclear standoff with Pakistan, Dr Kalam's missiles have been pointing directly at Islamabad. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002 ***************************************************************** 62 Hearings planned for lab report Tri-Valley Herald Tuesday, June 18, 2002 - 2:56:47 AM MST FROM STAFF REPORTS Two public hearings are planned in July -- one in Livermore and the other in Tracy -- to gather input on a planned environmental report that will gauge potential impacts of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory operations. The document, called a Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement, will review potential impacts of continuing current lab operations and "foreseeable new and/or modified operations and facilities" for the next 10 years, said Camille Yuan-Soo Hoo, manager for a regional department office in Oakland. A public comment period began Monday and will continue until Aug. 13, department officials said in a Monday announcement. The Livermore public meeting will be held from 1-4 p.m. and 6-9 p.m. July 10, at the Double Tree Club, 720 Las Flores Road. The Tracy public meeting will be held from 1-4 p.m. and 6:30-9:30 p.m. at the Holiday Inn Express, 3751 N. Tracy Blvd. For information about the meetings, visit www-envirinfo.llnl.gov. There also is a toll-free phone number at (877) 388-4930 with instructions on submitting comments. Written comments can be sent to Thomas Grim, Document Manager, U.S. Department of Energy, 1301 Clay St., Room 700N, Oakland 94612-5208; via email to tom.grim@oak.doe.gov [tom.grim@oak.doe.gov] ; or by fax to (925) 422-1776. Copies of materials related to the preparation of the impact statement will be available at the following locations: Oakland Federal Building, first floor of the north tower, room 180N, 1301 Clay St., Oakland, (510) 637-1762. Livermore Lab public reading room in the Visitors Center Trailer 6525, off of Greenville Road, (925) 424-4026. Livermore Public Library, 1000 S. Livermore Ave., Livermore. Tracy Public Library, 20 E. Eaton Ave., Tracy. ©1999-2001 by MediaNews Group, Inc. and ANG Newspapers ***************************************************************** 63 B Reactor: Marvel or monstrosity? / Northwest -The Olympian Monday, June 17, 2002 THE ASSOCIATED PRESS RICHLAND -- On the banks of the Columbia River, hidden behind the protective borders of the Hanford nuclear reservation, is a radioactive piece of history that fueled the beginning of the Atomic Age. B Reactor, built as part of the top-secret World War II Manhattan Project, produced the plutonium for the world's first nuclear bomb, the Trinity test at Alamogordo, N.M., on July 16, 1945. It also made the plutonium for the bomb that would be dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, less than a month later, effectively ending the war. "You have people who believe it's an engineering marvel, and people who believe it's a monstrosity," said Manny Van Pelt, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Energy. B Reactor's place in history is undisputed, but its future is uncertain. For about 11 years, a group called the B Reactor Museum Association has been pushing to have it turned into a museum. But this spring, Keith Klein, the Energy Department's manager at Hanford, said federal funds allocated for cleaning up the nation's most-contaminated nuclear site would not be used to open the reactor to tourists. "There are no plans to preserve it as a museum right now, and it's simply because we're in the business of cleaning up the site," Van Pelt said. "We're not in the museum business." Unsavory topic Gene Weisskopf, a member and former president of the museum group, would like to see Congress appropriate the money to protect and preserve B Reactor, and he's puzzled in some ways by the lack of national interest in the project. "It might be because people don't like to think about nuclear weapons and mass annihilation -- it's not a topic people like to think about -- but they love talking about World War II and D-Day," he said. "People love looking back at that time of great, intense human effort and desperate innovation." B Reactor was the world's first large-scale nuclear reactor. Construction began June 7, 1943, just six months after physicist Enrico Fermi turned nuclear theory into reality. B Reactor went critical for the first time on Sept. 26, 1944. U.S. Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., would like to see the B Reactor end up as a museum. "I'm certainly going to do what I can in order to see that we will have it funded," Hastings said. In the past couple of years, some money allocated for work at B Reactor has been included in Hanford funds. "I'm confident we can get it done," Hastings said. There are obstacles. The building is almost 60 years old. Part of it is radioactive and, naturally, off-limits to the public. The core is shielded by 10 tons of lead. "The whole thing is sealed to human entry," Van Pelt said. "It's not something you can just stand behind a piece of glass and look at. It's not the same as walking into the Smithsonian." It's also remote -- deep inside the 560-square-mile desert reservation, an area with tightly controlled access, even more so since the Sept. 11 attacks. Cost of preservation And then there's the cost of such an undertaking. The building as it is right now costs about $3 million a year to maintain. To open it for tourism would cost more than $40 million, Van Pelt said. "We'd like to see the history of B Reactor preserved," he said. "There are many ways to accomplish this besides preserving the reactor itself." Other options include keeping extensive records on the B Reactor, with photographs, drawings, models, exhibits and written histories. Some parts of the reactor could be preserved for display at a selected location. The advisory committee helping to develop a management plan for the Hanford Reach National Monument also could consider the future of the reactor in its planning process. The Richland office of the Energy Department has until September 2005 to prepare its recommendation on the future of the reactor, one of nine at Hanford. "Our primary focus is on accelerating cleanup of the river corridor," Van Pelt said. "Unless non-DOE funds are available to make the reactor safe for the public and maintain it, the department will most likely decide ... to cocoon it." With cocooning, the reactor building is reinforced, cleaned up as much as possible and closed, presumably to sit undisturbed for up to 75 years. Still, the DOE would welcome proposals from capable partners who could find the money to save the reactor. "We want to give everybody who is concerned about B Reactor the opportunity to get their plans rolling," Van Pelt said. ©2002 The Olympian ***************************************************************** 64 Livermore lab's weapons testing site faces environmental impact study KnoxNews: Sci/tech By MICHAEL DOYLE June 17, 2002 A toxic San Joaquin Valley weapons-testing site born in the Cold War will face new environmental studies amid the war on terrorism. The sweeping new Energy Department study announced Monday will shape the future of Site 300, located in the hills west of Tracy. More broadly, the once-in-a-decade study will help guide the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which has operated Site 300 since the 1950s. "This is an important opportunity for neighbors and workers to offer their input into how things can be made more safe," environmental activist Marylia Kelly said when informed of the pending study. With upcoming hearings scheduled for July 10 in Livermore and July 11 in Tracy, the Energy Department plans to collect plenty of public comments even before the formal environmental impact statement begins. It's been a decade since the last such study was done, and the results will matter on both sides of the Altamont Pass. But some of the study, scheduled for completion in 2004, will remain under lock and key. Showing how sensitive the Lawrence Livermore weapons work can be, the study will include a "classified appendix" examining what is described simply as a "proposed classified" project involving "defense nuclear technology." On the east side of Altamont Pass, the study will delve into how continued high-explosives weapons testing will affect the 11-square-mile Site 300. The rugged site located eight-and-a-half miles southwest of Tracy has been placed on the federal Superfund list because of accumulated tritium, diesel fuel and other toxics. "I think there should be at least some discussion of whether Site 300 should transition out of weapons testing and transition into cleanup and green technology," Kelly said. Kelly is executive director of Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment - also known as Tri Valley CAREs - which is a private watchdog group that has received Energy Department grants to help monitor Lawrence Livermore. Energy Department officials, though, say they will study only limited "reasonable proposals" for demolishing some unnecessary facilities and will not entertain more ambitious possibilities of shutting down either the lab or Site 300. "The alternative to shut down (Lawrence Livermore) completely is unreasonable and will not be analyzed," the department stated in its Federal Register notice Monday. With some 8,000 workers and an annual budget of $1.4 billion, the Lawrence Livermore lab is a centerpiece of the nation's nuclear weapons establishment. It has also been a high-profile employer for Northern San Joaquin Valley residents, with an estimated 1,800 Valley residents making the daily commute. Several other, much larger, elements of the lab's future operations will also be examined as part of the big new study. The National Ignition Facility, a $3.2 billion bundle of lasers designed to test the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, will be evaluated for its future environmental impact. Although dangerous plutonium is not slated to be part of the National Ignition Facility testing, the new study will examine the possible impacts if decisions change and plutonium becomes part of the testing. (Michael Doyle is a Washington reporter for Scripps-McClatchy Western Service.) The Knoxville News-Sentinel Co. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 65 Paul Parson: ORNL works on housing, energy issues The Oak Ridger Online -- Feature: Business -- 06/18/02 An effort to construct up to 20 local Habitat for Humanity houses with state-of-the-art energy-efficient building technologies was announced Monday afternoon during a ceremony at Lenoir City's Harmony Heights subdivision. The technologies will be tested through the Buildings Technology Center at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. With four Habitat homes utilizing ORNL-tested technology already constructed in the subdivision, the new houses -- which will showcase different technologies -- will provide living laboratories for developing integrated building systems that lead toward net-zero energy houses of all types by 2010. The effort is part of DOE's Building America program, which has resulted in more than 14,000 homes around the country with energy-efficient and affordable features. Building America designs for this area can save from 50 percent to 70 percent on energy requirements and at little or no extra cost to the builder over his previous construction methods. The houses will ultimately be equipped to export more energy produced on site than imported from off-site on an annual basis. The Habitat houses will integrate extensive energy-saving technologies and systems now available and under development at DOE and around the country. Additional plans call for the Tennessee Valley Authority to test advanced technologies in some of the houses. ROAD RULES: A plan is in the works that will allow for limited use of a section of Bear Creek Road at the Y-12 National Security Complex. For almost nine months, the road has been available to only security and emergency vehicles. The plan will allow limited use of the road by cleared employees so they can resume their pre-Sept. 11 parking practices, but it's unclear if the reopening will alleviate parking problems at Y-12. Full access to Bear Creek Road won't be included in the plan. SAFETY ISSUES: The Coalition for a Healthy Environment is calling on Congress, DOE safety professionals and various safety professions to basically acknowledge job-sickened nuclear workers as a "workplace health and safety disaster." In a news release, the coalition asks for these groups to investigate how the codes of ethics/rules of professional conduct of the involved professions and/or their implementation in DOE were inadequate to prevent this disaster. The coalition consists of sick and disabled DOE workers who say their conditions resulted from work at the federal agency's facilities. Paul Parson is the science and technology reporter for The Oak Ridger. He can be contacted at (865) 220-5533 or pparson@oakridger.com [pparson@oakridger.com] . All Contents ©Copyright The Oak Ridger ***************************************************************** 66 DOE: Energy research The Oak Ridger Online -- Feature: Business -- 06/18/02 Abdi Zaltash of Oak Ridge National Laboratory was one of the speakers Monday morning during a dedication ceremony for ORNL's Cooling, Heating and Power Integration Laboratory, which will be used for energy-related research. Below, ORNL's Bill Miller talks about the Green Power Switch program -- a collaboration between the lab, the Tennessee Valley Authority and several other groups. This program produces electricity from renewable resources such as wind, solar and landfill gas. Research on this project involves the use of solar panels like the ones located behind Miller and Doug Dorr, who is with EPRI Power Electronics Application Center. All Contents ©Copyright The Oak Ridger ***************************************************************** 67 Health Effects meeting canceled The Oak Ridger Online - Community - 06/18/02 The Oak Ridge Reservation Health Effects Subcommittee meeting originally set for this afternoon was canceled. The meeting was to be held at 12:15 p.m. at the YWCA, 1660 Oak Ridge Turnpike. "Federal law for health effects subcommittees require that a quorum of 12 subcommittee members be present for each meeting," said LaFreta Dalton, the designated federal official to the subcommittee with the sponsoring organization, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. "We received a notice [Monday] that one of the members would not be able to attend the subcommittee meeting scheduled tomorrow, therefore the quorum will not be reached." The meeting will be reset when a quorum can be reached. The Oak Ridge Reservation Health Effects Subcommittee is a representative body of citizens from the Oak Ridge area that provides advice and recommendations to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and ATSDR on their public health activities and research on the Oak Ridge Reservation. All Contents ©Copyright The Oak Ridger ***************************************************************** 68 Hanford troubles grow while feds dawdle The Portland Alliance Hanford story for June 2002 edition By Dave Mazza Most Portlanders see the Columbia River as a source of natural beauty, recreation, hydroelectric power and even food. They don't see the glistening waters as a highway that could deliver over 54 million gallons of radioactive waste to the shores of the Rose City. Too many Portlanders are unaware that 215 miles upstream is the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, 560 square miles of eastern Washington desert that is home to the largest atomic stew in the nation. That's too bad, according to activists like Paige Knight, who say that federal regulators responsible for cleaning up the waste at Hanford are more concerned with playing politics and gutting environmental regulations than coming up with a viable way to keep the stuff safely stored. "The Department of Energy (DOE) has come up with a 'new plan' for the clean-up," states Paige, president of the non-profit group Hanford Watch. "But will this new plan help us move forward or simply leave these problems for a new generation?" The question is not a new one. Since the Hanford Nuclear Reservation first starting producing weapons-grade plutonium in 1944 the question of how to handle the waste has been raised. Between 1944 and the late 1980s Hanford operated several nuclear reactors along the Columbia River. The river's waters were pumped through the reactors, cooling radioactive fuel rods, before being returned back to the river. Spent rods were dissolved in nitric acid to recover any remaining plutonium. The process combined radioactive materials with highly hazardous chemicals, creating enormous amounts of very "hot" waste. Since production of weapons-grade plutonium ceased at Hanford, the facility's only mission is to clean up this deadly mess. They have been trying to do so since 1989. That was the year DOE entered into the Tri-Party Agreement (TPA) with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Washington State Department of Ecology. Hanford is ownby the federal government and managed by the DOE, but is subject to federal and state environmental laws and the responsible regulatory agencies. This legal contract governing the clean-up that the three agencies signed contains legally enforceable "milestones" or deadlines for completing certain tasks. But the TPA is a "living document" and milestones have been moved more than once as the agreement has been renegotiated and amended. Time, however, is running out. Most of the 54 million gallons of waste are stored in 177 underground tanks the size of three-story buildings, buried about 12 miles from the Columbia River. Seventy of those tanks have been leaking for the past several years, sending an estimated one million gallons of waste into the surrounding soil. Some of the waste has reached groundwater that eventually flows into the Columbia. Estimates of the time it will take for waste to reach the Columbia vary widely - from as little as seven years to several generations. There are no estimates on how badly the river could be damaged should that occur. There is also no plan for making sure that doesn't happen, either. DOE has not developed a plan for intercepting the waste. Their response has been to transfer waste from the leaking single shell tanks to newer double shell tanks. But the 28 double shell tanks do not have the capacity to handle all the waste from the leaking tanks. The double shell tanks, as Knight points out, are aging as well. X-rays of the tanks have shown cracks in the "analus," the filler between the walls. In time, these tanks will also begin leaking. The DOE's long-term strategy is combining the waste with molten glass - vitrification. The glass logs produced by this process would be stored in vaults in Hanford's central area. Although DOE is talking about beginning tank closures in 2003-4, the vitrification plant will not be constructed and in production until 2011. DOE expects that by 2018 it will have vitrified 10 percent of the storage tank waste. The other area of urgent concern is Hanford's "K Basins." Located only a quarter mile from the river, the basins are enormous indoor pools used to hold 2,300 tons of corroded, highly radioactive fuel rods underwater. The basins have leaked in the past and are extremely susceptible to rupture by earthquake. Such a rupture could spill radioactive water into the Columbia. Or it could expose the fuel to the air, causing it to burn and spread radioactive particles through surrounding atmosphere. The DOE plan calls for drying and storing the spent fuel in canisters that will be buried in underground vaults on the reservation. The TPA calls for the west basin to be emptied by Dec. 2002 and the east basin by July 2004. Some spent rods have already been moved. The new administration has publicly expressed a sense of urgency around the cleanup. The DOE's Jessie Robinson, Assistant Secretary of the Office of Environmental Management has conducted a "top-to-bottom review" of how the cleanup is progressing and what needs to be done to get back on track. Knight believes the review did produce some good things, like identifying bad contracting practices and poor management. But she is concerned about some of the conclusions Robinson and others at DOE are drawing from the review. Robinson seems to see the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) as a problem. NEPA requires agencies to assess the environmental impact of a project, including taking input from the public. NEPA has long been a target of the resource extraction industries and those in the public sector who support them. Robinson, Knight states, feels NEPA is taking up too much time with public hearings and public input while reducing government control over the cleanup. Robinson has also made noises about another environmental law being an impediment to clean-up: the Resource Conservation and Reclamation Act (RCRA), the U.S.' basic hazardous waste law. RCRA classifies hazardous waste and outlines procedures for its removal. Robinson has stated that RCRA, like NEPA, needs to be streamlined to meet the current crisis. Setting aside the role these two federal laws have played in environmental protection, Knight sees Robinson's focus on NEPA and RCRA troubling since neither can be altered except through Congres-sional action, a lengthy process at best that doesn't address the more pressing needs at Hanford. These aren't the only troubling comments coming from Robinson. With the vitrification plant nowhere near completion and more tanks leaking everyday, Robinson is talking about removing more waste from the tanks and using a method called "grouting" to prepare the waste for storage. Grouting involves mixing the waste with cement and then applying it to the insides of underground vaults. This is not the first time grouting has been proposed. Knight points out that the idea was floated in 1992. But Hanford's waste is so "hot" the grout wouldn't set. Perhaps the most disturbing influence Robinson is bringing to the issue is her reorganizing of how all nuclear reservations will be funded in the future. "In the past, the advisory boards for the reservations had developed into a close network," Knight, an advisory board member for Hanford, states. "The other reservations recognized that Hanford had the largest amount of waste to deal with and therefore warranted receiving the most funds. There had even been advocating for multi-year funding for projects. Robinson has changed that." Under Robinson's plan, all the reservations will be underfunded, creating what Knight calls an $800 million "slush fund." Robinson wants all the reservations to compete for those funds to bring reservations up to legal requirements and to implement projects. Hanford had previously been promised $430 million for clean-up, but Robinson's new system has fueled competition between the reservations, jeopardizing the likelihood Hanford will receive adequate funding. Knight characterizes the idea as a way for DOE to "divide and rule" the advisory boards. The June 4th meeting in Portland will take place from 7-10:00 p.m. at the Oregon State Office Building, 800 NE Oregon St., Portland. For more information visit www.hanfordwatch.org [http://www.hanfordwatch.org] or contact Hanford Watch at 503-232-0848. Meanwhile the clock continues to run. DOE's plan, which can best be described as composed of "big strokes," is supposed to be completed by Aug. 1. A public meeting of DOE officials and the advisory board is scheduled for June 4 to discuss the budget. Knight doesn't believe DOE will have the budget in time for the meeting, but hopes the time can be spent getting DOE to respond to a series of troubling questions about the clean-up, such as why is Robinson talking about closing tanks when there is no vitrification taking place or any criteria established for closing the tank farms? Knight would also like the meeting to address the solid waste impact standards DOE recently finalized - only four years behind schedule - which Knight and others see as a green light for shipping large amounts of waste to Hanford. An additional round of meetings is scheduled for July. DOE wants to hold two meetings in Oregon - one in Portland or Hood River and one in LaGrande (expected to be a major transport center). Meetings are also being scheduled for Seattle and Richland. Knight thinks there should be meetings in La Grande, Hood River and Portland. The June and July meetings will be opportunities for the public to provide input, too. Key questions that need to be raised by citizens include Robinson's "competitive budgeting" that Knight calls "robbing Peter to pay Paul." The public also needs to ask for the plan's holes to be filled before being adopted. Then there's the issue of turning Hanford into a major storage area for waste from around the nation. For Paige Knight, it all boils down to the question she keeps asking DOE: "Are we solving the problem or leaving it for future generations? Unless Oregonians and other citizens begin asking the same questions, it seems unlikely we'll receive more than a quick fix designed to make the Bush administratoin appear to have taken action while laying the groundwork for future attacks on environmental laws like NEPA and RCRA that the administration and its resource extraction industry friends would love to gut. Note: Calls were placed to Ms. Jessie Robinson at the DOE regarding proposed plans for cleanup at Hanford Nuclear Reservation, however, there was no response by the time this issue went to press. -Dave Mazza is editor of The Portland Alliance. ***************************************************************** 69 Trial begins for Y-12 protesters 06/18/02 The Oak Ridger Online -- Area News -- by Beverly Majors Oak Ridger staff Y-12 National Security Complex protesters were to stand trial in U.S. District Court in Knoxville today and Wednesday to answer trespassing charges. Oak Ridge resident Timothy Joseph Mellen, 46, and Mary Elinor Adams, 61, of Bisbee, Ariz., and Elizabeth Ann Lentsch, 65, of Apison are three of four people charged on the federal level after they crossed a small fence and stepped onto Y-12 property in April during an annual "stop the bombs" protest. Another activist, Lena Shallit Feldman, 26, of Lexington, Ky., earlier pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing. Other activists were arrested on city charges of obstructing a highway, and those cases were adjudicated in Oak Ridge courts. The trial today was scheduled to begin at 8:30 a.m. On Friday, U.S. District Court Magistrate C. Clifford Shirley refused to allow the protesters to address the jury about their actions. Beverly Majors can be contacted at (865) 220-5514 or at bmajors@oakridger.com [bmajors@oakridger.com] . All Contents ©Copyright The Oak Ridger ***************************************************************** 70 DOE Cites INEEL Contractor for Price Anderson Safety Violations energy.gov - Headquarters' Press Release RELEASE DATE: June 17, 2002 WASHINGTON, DC – The Department of Energy (DOE) has issued the contractor that operates the Idaho National Engineering Environmental Laboratory in Idaho Falls, ID, a Preliminary Notice of Violation for violations of rules and procedures during drum venting activities at the Radioactive Waste Management Complex and a breakdown in work procedures during a cooling pump change-over at the Advanced Test Reactor. While the drum venting event did not harm workers or the public, DOE believes that enforcement action was required at this time because of the potential risk of worker radiological intake. The drum venting event carries with it a proposed civil penalty of $41,250. The amount of this penalty was reduced by DOE in recognition of corrective actions already taken by Bechtel BWXT Idaho LLC. None of the November 2001 violations by the contractor resulted in injuries or releases of radioactive or hazardous materials. The Price-Anderson Amendments Act of 1988 requires DOE to undertake regulatory enforcement actions against contractors for violations of DOE's nuclear safety requirements. The enforcement program is designed to have contractors correct procedural violations to prevent more serious events from occurring. Additional details on this and other enforcement actions are available on the Internet at http://www.eh.doe.gov/enforce [http://www.eh.doe.gov/enforce] . Media Contact: Tom Welch, 202/586-5806 Tim Jackson (Idaho), 208/526-8484 Release No. PR-02-111 ***************************************************************** 71 DOE Names Environmental Management Advisory Board Chair energy.gov - Headquarters' Press Release RELEASE DATE: June 18, 2002 WASHINGTON, DC – The Department of Energy announced today the appointment of Mr. James A. Ajello as a member and the new Chair of the Department's Environmental Management Advisory Board (EMAB). Mr. Ajello is President of Reliant Energy Solutions of Houston, Texas. "Mr. Ajello brings to the board a very diverse project and financial management background and I look forward to his counsel on the complex challenges facing the environmental management program," Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management Jessie Roberson said. Ajello succeeds Dr. David Bodde and Mr. Joel Bennett who served as co-chairs of the board. Following the naming of Mr. Ajello, Assistant Secretary Roberson plans to move forward quickly with the appointment of other EMAB members. Ajello heads a company with over $1 billion in annual revenues that provides integrated energy solutions to large commercial, industrial and institutional clients. He holds a bachelor of arts degree from the State University of New York, and a Master of Public Administration and Master of Business Administration from Syracuse University. He is also a graduate of the Advanced Management Program of the European Institute of Business Administration at Fountainebleau, France. The EMAB was first chartered in 1991 under the Federal Advisory Committee Act. Its role is to provide the Assistant Secretary with independent advice on any number of issues pertaining to site closure missions, risk-based cleanup and accelerated cleanup at sites across the DOE complex. EMAB members are appointed on the basis of their expertise and abilities to contribute to the objectives of the board. Members serve two-year terms and are eligible for extensions. All EMAB meetings are open to the public. Media Contact: Dolline Hatchett, 202/586-5806 Release No. PR-02-113 Back to Previous Page> ***************************************************************** 72 DOE Inks Agreement To Ensure Domestic Uranium Enrichment Capacity Is Maintained; Nuclear Nonproliferation Programs in Russia To Benefit energy.gov - Headquarters' Press Release RELEASE DATE: June 18, 2002 [ Washington, D.C. – The U.S. Department of Energy signed an agreement with the United States Enrichment Corporation (USEC, Inc.) late yesterday that will ensure America’s domestic uranium enrichment capacity is maintained and that nuclear materials from Russia will be delivered to the U.S. thereby benefiting America’s nonproliferation work in that country. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said, "With this agreement America accomplishes two very important goals, ensuring our domestic capacity to produce fuel for our commercial nuclear reactors and meeting important nuclear nonproliferation goals by accepting enriched uranium from Russia." The uranium delivered to the U.S. will be derived from highly enriched uranium from dismantled Russian nuclear weapons, thereby reducing the inventory of highly enriched uranium in that country. "Our strong cooperation with Russia will help ensure that the important goals of protecting the world from the proliferation of nuclear materials continues," Abraham said. Last month, Abraham and Russian Atomic Energy Minister Alexander Rumyantsev worked out an agreement to accomplish nonproliferation work in Russia a full two years ahead of schedule. "Not only is this agreement a win for national security, but it is also a win for the communities in Ohio and Kentucky that have provided a great service to the nation and a win to secure the future for domestic uranium enrichment," Abraham said. The agreement establishes the future development viability and opportunity for both Portsmouth, Ohio and Paducah, Kentucky facilities, including as candidate sites for new technology enrichment capabilities as USEC must maintain any of its leased facilities in a manner that permits their future use as a site where new enrichment technology can be performed. First, DOE’s agreement with USEC will require the company to take delivery of Russian weapons-derived uranium. Second, USEC agrees to deploy a new advanced technology enrichment plant at Portsmouth (by 2010) or Paducah (by 2011). Third, USEC must maintain production of enriched uranium at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant at a level of 3.5 million SWU (the standard unit of measure for enriched uranium fuel) per year. This production level can be reduced only after USEC is within six months of completing deployments of new enrichment technology with a productive capacity of 3.5 million SWU. Finally, the agreement calls for USEC to continue operating the Shipping and Transfer Facility located in Portsmouth for an additional 15 months to remove technetium from a portion of USEC's uranium inventory, thereby saving over half the jobs that could have been lost under USEC’s corporate downsizing announced earlier. Media Contact: Joe Davis, 202-586-4940 Release No. PR-02-114 Back to Previous Page> ***************************************************************** 73 New Technology Makes Contaminants Harmless ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Editor's Note: I've yet to see a single story opposing nuclear from the very likely pro-industry spin business ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ EarthVision Environmental News / EVANSTON, Illinois, June 17, 2002 - A new treatment device, developed by an environmental engineer at Northwestern University, can effectively render perchlorate, a drinking water contaminate that can cause thyroid damage in humans, harmless. An ingredient of rocket fuel, perchlorate was found in water supplies in many states during the late 1990s. The chemical, which is both naturally occurring and man-made, interferes with iodide uptake in the human thyroid gland, affecting adult metabolism and childhood development. To effectively clean-up perchlorate contamination, Bruce Rittman of Northwestern University has developed a treatment device that turns the chemical into harmless chloride. Using a patented hollow fiber membrane biofilm reactor, Rittman's treatment system utilizes a natural biochemical process. A community of microorganisms living on the outer surface of the system's membranes as biofilm acts as a catalyst for transferring electrons from hydrogen gas to the perchlorate. This process reduces contaminates into a harmless substance, such as chloride. Rittman's patented system has also been shown effective for reducing nitrate, a harmful contaminate from agricultural fertilizers that can lead to methemoglobinemia, or blue-baby syndrome, into nitrogen gas. The process for this decontamination is the same as for perchlorate. A pilot study of the new technology will be conducted in California, to determine its ability to treat groundwater contaminated with perchlorate and nitrate. The biofilm reactor treats 0.3 gallons of water per minute, while removing various contaminates. The system is expected to successfully treat a variety of oxidized pollutants including radionuclides, selenate, heavy metals and bromate. Trichloroethylene, a byproduct of the semiconductor industry, and other chlorinated solvents are also expected to be successfully treated using the system. ***************************************************************** NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: *****************************************************************