***************************************************************** 3/23/02 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 10.74 ***************************************************************** RADBULL IS PRODUCED BY THE ABALONE ALLIANCE CLEARINGHOUSE ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR POLICY 1 North Korea asks Russia to build nuclear plant 2 UK: British Energy losing money on nuclear 3 US: GOP FUND-RAISER: Jeffords blasted by former president 4 US: Hartsville officials eager to see TVA land sold, put to use NUCLEAR REACTORS 5 The fourth nuclear plant is now 36 percent completed 6 Safety aspect of TN power plant has been reviewed 7 ROK to Provide N-Reactor Operation Know-How to Romania NUCLEAR SAFETY 8 Importers to check for radiation NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE 9 US: State still has $4 million of original Yucca Mountain budget 10 Councils support radioactive dump 11 US: Key lawmaker unsure about funding for nuke dump fight 12 US: Waste transportation hearings on Yucca Mountain 13 US: New York official bristles at plan to truck nuclear waste 14 US: YUCCA MOUNTAIN: Talk of special session cools 15 US: Columnist Benjamin Grove: Stressing the danger of shipping waste 16 US: Editorial: Anti-dump campaign needs boost 17 US: Columnist Jeff German: Senators must keep up fight vs. Yucca 18 US: Columnist Erin Neff: Yucca fight gets partisan, personal 19 US: Columnist Jon Ralston: Yucca fight mired in pettiness 20 Concern over nuclear waste rises in Russia 21 Democrats angry at support for SA waste dump 22 UK: Discharges aren't fishy, says Meacher NUCLEAR WEAPONS 23 US: Nuclear weapons use no longer 'unthinkable' 24 Russian environmentalist against MP's proposal to resume nuclear 25 Russia, United States, Nuclear Targets 26 Nuclear pre-emption 27 US: Powell denies change in U.S. policy 28 UN Agency Appeals for Funds to Combat Nuclear Terrorism 29 Investigators rule out Kursk collision, awaiting raising of bow 30 US: U.S. nuclear secrets in jeopardy again? 31 US: Making Enemies 32 Nuclear option in Iraq? 33 Iran: Resalat says American nuclear policy threatening world 34 Libya condemns British nuclear "threats" US DEPT. OF ENERGY 35 Cold Fusion Rides Again OTHER NUCLEAR ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** FULL NEWS STORIES ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** 1 North Korea asks Russia to build nuclear plant RUSSIA: March 22, 2002 MOSCOW - North Korea, branded part of an "axis of evil" by U.S. President George W. Bush, has asked Moscow to build a nuclear power station, but Russian officials said yesterday no deal had been struck. A spokesman for Industry Minister Ilya Klebanov told Reuters that a high-ranking North Korean delegation, visiting Moscow earlier this week, had "expressed a desire for Russia to build a nuclear power station in North Korea". But he said the meeting had been only an exchange of opinions and no formal documents had been signed. Pyongyang also asked Russia for help in upgrading infrastructure and energy plants built with Moscow's assistance in the Soviet era. The talks between Moscow and Pyongyang come as Washington said for the first time that it was unable to confirm North Korea was abiding by a 1994 agreement designed to contain its weapons programmes. Last week North Korea threatened to pull out of the deal altogether in response to a U.S. nuclear review that sketched contingency plans for U.S. use of nuclear weapons against seven countries, including North Korea. The review also singled out Russia as a possible target. Under the 1994 agreement, North Korea was to halt its nuclear programme in exchange for oil and Western-built light-water reactors, whose fuel is harder to convert to military use. Pyongyang has often said it is keen to take reactors from Russia, which has also supplied India and Iran with light-water reactors. Russia had in the early 1980s agreed to build a nuclear plant in North Korea, but the deal was put on hold indefinately after the demise of Soviet Union in 1991. Russia established ties with South Korea later that year, angering the Communist North and chilling relations with its former ally. But a visit to Russia by North Korea's reclusive Stalinist leader Kim Jong-il in August 2001 served to rekindle neighbourly links. REUTERS NEWS SERVICE ***************************************************************** 2 UK: British Energy losing money on nuclear Financial Times; Mar 22, 2002 By DAVID BUCHAN British Energy said yesterday it was losing money on its UK nuclear generation business and announced a Pounds 430m write-off on electricity contracts and its only non-nuclear plant. The company said it would write down Pounds 300m of the value of its Eggborough coal-fired power station, which it bought at a time of higher electricity prices a couple of years ago. The company described UK trading conditions as "very challenging". Electricity prices for summer consumption are lower than production costs, reflecting "an unsustainable structural problem in the UK wholesale market". At the same time, it announced a Pounds 200m increase in provisions for electricity it had contracted to buy before the New Electricity Trading Arrangements (Neta) last spring. Designed by the government to create greater competition, Neta has pushed power prices lower. British Energy faces "a really grim picture" in the UK, said Raimundo Fernandez-Cuesta, UK utilities analyst at UBS Warburg. Electricity demand in the UK is growing more slowly than the general economy while overcapacity is at 30 per cent, he said. With no net income from UK operations, it would probably have to forgo a dividend when it unveils full-year results in May. The only brighter note in the company's trading statement was its claim that its North American operations - Bruce Power in Canada and AmerGen in the US - were "performing well". The company said it expected full-year pre-tax profits for the year to March 31 to be "broadly in line" with market consensus forecasts made by analysts on the basis of figures provided this month by the company. The company said the consensus ranges from Pounds 2m to Pounds 67m, a spread that analysts partly attributed to such variables as nuclear decommissioning costs. Copyright: The Financial Times Limited 1995-2002 ***************************************************************** 3 GOP FUND-RAISER: Jeffords blasted by former president Election 2002 Former President George Bush addresses an audience at The Venetian during a fund-raising event for Republican congressional candidates Jon Porter, left, and Lynette Boggs McDonald, second from left. Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., is at right. Photo by Denise Truscello/Review-Journal Saturday, March 23, 2002 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal Bush calls party-switching senator 'selfish' during speech By JAN MOLLER REVIEW-JOURNAL Former President George Bush lashed out at party-switching Sen. Jim Jeffords on Friday during a rare political appearance in Las Vegas on behalf of two congressional candidates. Bush, whose son George W. Bush avoided Southern Nevada in the 2000 election but still won the state's four electoral votes, stressed the importance of having Congress in Republican control during his brief remarks at The Venetian. Between 250 and 300 people paid $1,000 each to attend the event. The money will go to the Republican campaigns of Las Vegas City Councilwoman Lynette Boggs McDonald and state Sen. Jon Porter of Henderson, who are seeking House seats in Nevada's 1st and 3rd Congressional Districts, respectively. Bush's visit was arranged by GOP consultant Sig Rogich, who was his ambassador to Iceland and served as a political adviser to the current president. The only partisan comments in a 10-minute address that was mostly light-hearted came when Bush criticized Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont, whose defection from the Republican Party to independent status in the spring of 2000 cost Republicans control of the Senate. Bush called Jeffords, who is now an independent, "selfish" for his actions. "I wasn't very happy about it," Bush said. "And that's the classic understatement of the year compared to how the president of the United States felt about it." Democrats controlled both the Senate and House from 1989 to 1993, when the elder Bush was president. It was a Democrat-controlled Congress that pressured Bush to back off his infamous "no new taxes" campaign pledge as part of a 1990 budget agreement that many believe led to his defeat two years later at the hands of Bill Clinton. Bush, whose antipathy for the national media is legendary, also told the audience that they should not let the rough treatment that politicians sometimes receive be a deterrent to public service. "You cannot have a definition of a successful life that does not include service to others," said Bush, who is spending his retirement years giving speeches and presiding over the Points of Light charitable foundation. Porter and Boggs McDonald's campaigns were responsible for recruiting their own donors to the event. Mike Slanker, Porter's campaign manager, said he expected Porter to raise between $150,000 and $200,000. Boggs McDonald's campaign manager, Tim Mooney, would not venture a guess but said the councilwoman raised "a bunch." Among the names on Boggs McDonald's host committee was former Nevada Gov. Robert List, who has become a political lightning rod since signing on as a lobbyist for the Nuclear Energy Institute. Democrats have been sharply critical of List for supporting the nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain. Boggs McDonald said she remains opposed to the project, and defended her decision to raise money from the former governor and others who support shipping nuclear waste to Nevada. "Just because you disagree with an individual on one issue doesn't mean you can't talk to them on other issues," Boggs McDonald said. Running in a newly created district, Porter will face Clark County Commission Chairman Dario Herrera in a race that many analysts believe is critical in the parties' battle for control of the House, where Republicans hold a six-seat advantage. Most observers consider Boggs McDonald an underdog in her race against incumbent Rep. Shelley Berkley. webmaster@lvrj.com Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal, 1997 - ***************************************************************** 4 Hartsville officials eager to see TVA land sold, put to use - Saturday, 03/23/02 By LEON ALLIGOOD Staff Writer HARTSVILLE, Tenn. — Local officials hope the Tennessee Valley Authority board will approve the auction of 554 acres of land near the defunct TVA nuclear plant when the board holds its first-ever meeting in Hartsville this week. The property, which has been earmarked for industrial development by one bidding entity, the Four Lakes Regional Industrial Development Authority, is more than one-third of the total property owned by the federal agency. ''We've had a study group that's been looking at this for two years. We're glad that we've gotten to this point, and things look like they are going our way,'' said Dick Walker, executive director of Four Lakes. The board meets at 9 a.m. Tuesday at the Trousdale County Courthouse. If the group approves the sale, a large chunk of the western side of the 1,387-acre compound would be declared surplus and auctioned. The sale, to a qualified agency or entity promoting industrial growth in Trousdale County and surrounding counties, would be sold to the highest bidder. ''Four Lakes will be among the bidders, I can tell you that,'' Walker said. County officials are excited about the prospects of the TVA land being available for development. ''I think it would have tremendous impact on this area. We've been asking them to approve the sale of some of their land for years now, and it looks like this time we may get it,'' said Pat Fergusson, county executive. Back in the 1970s, when TVA announced plans to build a nuclear plant at the site east of Hartsville, leaders expected the plant to hire thousands during construction and startup. But in the early 1980s, as work was under way, the federal agency mothballed the project because of a downturn in energy demand. The board members ''are looking forward to coming'' to Hartsville, TVA spokesman Gil Francis said. He noted the group has a busy agenda, with numerous items to discuss in addition to the nuclear land auction. Hartsville residents are excited about the meeting, too. The city had almost 2,400 residents when the 2000 U.S. Census was taken. ''We'll have three presidential appointed board members in our little town. It ought to be an exciting day,'' Walker said. Leon Alligood covers Tennessee for The Tennessean. Contact him at (615) 259-8279 or by e-mail at lalligood@tennessean.com. © Copyright 2002 The Tennessean ***************************************************************** 5 The fourth nuclear plant is now 36 percent completed The Taipei Times Online: 2002-03-23Saturday, March 23rd, 2002 DPA, TAIPEI Construction work on Taiwan's controversial Fourth Nuclear Power Plant (®Ö¥|) has been one third completed, local media reported yesterday. The fourth nuclear power plant in Taipei County was 36 percent completed by the end of February, while a reactor from US company General Electric Co -- made for the first of the plant's two units -- is due to arrive next Thursday, according to the Chinese-language China Times, quoting officials of Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, ¥x¹q). The first unit of the plant will be completed by July 2006, while the second unit will be finished a year later, the officials said. Work on the US$5.4 billion fourth nuclear power plant had already begun when the government announced in October 2000 that it was axing the project because of environmental concerns. The decision incurred the wrath of opposition parties and industry, which regarded the plant as vital to Taiwan's economic development. Months of political bickering followed and prompted moves that could have ousted President Chen from office. This story has been viewed 223 times. URL=[http://www.taipeitimes.com/news/2002/03/23/story/0000128924] Copyright © 1999-2002 The Taipei Times. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 6 Safety aspect of TN power plant has been reviewed The Times of India; Mar 23, 2002 MUMBAI: The Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) has claimed that all statutory requirements for the Kudankulam nuclear power plant in Tamil Nadu have been fully complied with. Referring to the ongoing controversy over the project, the corporation stated in a press release that the safety aspect of the Kudankulam light water reactor, which will have a total capacity of 2000 MW, have been reviewed by different agencies like the International Atomic Energy Agency. The preliminary safety analysis report has been prepared and reviewed by the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB). Moreover, the fuel for the plant would be supplied by Russia. This means there would be no further burden on the Nuclear Fuel Complex in Hyderabad as feared by some of the protestors. The NPCIL said the safety record of all nuclear power plants in India has been excellent. The exposure of people to radioactivity releases from these plants is well within the limits prescribed by the AERB and the International Commission on Radiological Protection. Epidemiological studies conducted to assess the effect of radiation on plant workers and their families have revealed no adverse effect, it claimed. The human race has co-existed with natural background radiation from the sun and the earth's crust since its creation, the statement says. "Nuclear power plants produce low and intermediate level of radioactive wastes which have been managed successfully for the past several decades.'' To manage wastes better, India has opted for the closed fuel cycle. As for concerns about spent fuel, "India has successfully developed the technology for vitrification of these wastes. The vitrified waste will ultimately be disposed of in a repository after intermediate storage for required periods,'' the NPCIL says. The statement clarifies that discharge of hot water is not peculiar to nuclear power plants. All coastal thermal power stations too release hot water. ***************************************************************** 7 ROK to Provide N-Reactor Operation Know-How to Romania KoreaTimes : The Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power (KHNP) said yesterday that it will sign an agreement on technological support for the operation of nuclear reactors with the Romanian nuclear power plant operator SNN today. Following the agreement, the state-run company will provide technological support for nuclear power plant operations for the Cernavoda Nuclear Reactor Unit 1. The KHNP said with the inking of agreement, it has arranged a stepping stone into the Romanian nuclear power business, potentially allowing for the chance to provide technological support for the operation of nuclear reactor unit 2 in Cernavoda Nuclear Plant and the construction of a third unit. Romania started construction of nuclear reactors at the end of the 1970s but due to financing problems, it has only completed one unit, which started operations in 1996. The second unit is currently under construction. sjkim@koreatimes.co.kr 2002/03/18 18:22 [webmaster@hk.co.kr] ***************************************************************** 8 Importers to check for radiation Hoover's Online March 23, 2002 12:15am Post reporters Imports of steel from Eastern Europe could be contaminated by Cobalt 60, a radioactive substance, the Industrial Economics Office has warned. Damri Sukothanang, the department's director-general, said importers should strictly screen the steel as the International Atomic Energy Agency had found steel made in Macedonia contaminated with the substance. Some contaminated steel had been detected on arrival in Italy. The department suggested that importers require steel from Eastern Europe, particularly recycled metal, to be certified as having passed tests for radioactivity. Failing that, they should carry out tests when the steel arrives in the country. Most major steel factories have testing equipment. However, small importers of steel and smugglers are the main cause for concern. A major steel importer, who asked not to be identified, said most imported steel was from Russia, the United States and Ukraine, not Macedonia. Steel and iron imports last year totalled 6.48 million tonnes worth around 73.6 billion baht, a decrease of 4.3% in volume and 32.4% in value from those in 2000. Mr Damri said the steel industry was projected to pick up this year as a result of the government's policy to stimulate the property business. The expected economic recovery would also boost the demand for the product. However, the local steel industry would still experience stiff competition, particularly from allegedly underpriced steel from foreign countries. Copyright © 2002 Financial Times Limited, All Rights Reserved Copyright © 2001, Hoover's, Inc. | Job Opportunities | NASDAQ: ***************************************************************** 9 State still has $4 million of original Yucca Mountain budget Nevada Appeal March 23, 2002 By Geoff Dornan, Appeal Staff Writer There's still more than $4 million in the state's anti-Yucca Mountain fund -- $1.7 million of it uncommitted. But Nuclear Projects Director Bob Loux says it's not nearly enough for the national advertising campaign needed to help stop the U.S. Senate from approving the dump site. The 2001 Legislature put $4 million into the Fund to Protect Nevada, inviting another $1.25 million in contributions from business, local governments and anyone else interested in trying to stop a federal decision to store high level nuclear waste in the mountain 70 miles north of Las Vegas. Several resorts and more than one local government, including Las Vegas, have agreed to contribute. Altogether, the state has more than $5 million in the budget account but, as of Friday, only $1.23 million had been spent. Loux said most of the money is already committed. He said the state has a contract with the Washington, D.C., law firm of Egan & Associates and a $1 million contract with Mark Brown & Partners to handle public relations. In addition, the state has a supplemental legal contract with Antonio Rossman of San Francisco for about $300,000. Those commitments, he said, leave only about $1.7 million uncommitted. The state needs far more for the advertising and public relations campaign Loux hopes will help Nevada's congressional delegation win 51 votes to stop approval of Yucca Mountain, he said. "We're looking at needing significantly more, primarily for advertising," he said, pointing out that the nuclear power industry has said it will have a total of up to $30 million to spend pushing its side of the argument. "If we want to be effective in this arena, compete with them, we're going to need money," he said. While Loux said how much is budgeted is up to the governor and the Legislature, "clearly we could spend everything we can get our hands on." He said the original Fund to Protect Nevada proposed by Gov. Kenny Guinn and approved by the 2001 Legislature was designed primarily to cover legal fees, not advertising. Guinn says he supports putting up to $10 million into the fight from the state's "rainy day" fund. And while he said he's considering a special legislative session to approve the funding, he's not completely convinced. Loux said the money would be used primarily in TV and other ads in states where Nevada's congressional delegation has a chance to pick up a vote or two opposing the dump plan. One of the keys Nevada is focusing on is the dangers inherent in transporting high level nuclear waste through those states en route to Yucca Mountain. In addition to the dangers of an accident, Loux says the traveling canisters of waste are a ripe target for terrorists who could devastate an urban area by destroying one of them. Guinn says he will exercise his veto of President Bush's approval of the dump by April 16. Then the issue will move to Congress, which can override the veto by a simple majority. Copyright Nevada Appeal. Materials contained within this site may ***************************************************************** 10 Councils support radioactive dump news.com.au - 23 March 2002 By Local Government Reporter JEMMA CHAPMAN The Advertiser A RADIOACTIVE waste dump should be built in the state, says the Local Government Association. Councils yesterday voted to support a national repository for low-level radioactive waste "in the interests of improving environmental conditions and protecting our community from adverse health effects". The Federal Government plans a low-level dump near Woomera. Association executive director John Comrie said the waste already existed and had to be stored somewhere. The Australian Democrats attacked the LGA decision, describing it as "ill-informed policy making on the run". "Many local ratepayers in many local government areas, particularly those through which the interstate waste will be trucked, will be disappointed and even angry that such a motion could be passed without more community consultation," Democrats MLC Sandra Kanck said. Other issues of concern raised at yesterday's meeting included: THE crippling effects on firms and community groups of rising public liability insurance. "UNFAIR" distribution of road grants. CONCERN about $124 million in outstanding infrastructure funding. Councils support radioactive waste dump A RADIOACTIVE waste dump should be built in the state, says the Local Government Association. Councils yesterday voted to support a national repository for low-level radioactive waste "in the interests of improving environmental conditions and protecting our community from adverse health effects". The Federal Government plans a low-level dump near Woomera. Association executive director John Comrie said the waste already existed and had to be stored somewhere. The Australian Democrats attacked the LGA decision, describing it as "ill-informed policy making on the run". "Many local ratepayers in many local government areas, particularly those through which the interstate waste will be trucked, will be disappointed and even angry that such a motion could be passed without more community consultation," Democrats MLC Sandra Kanck said. Other issues of concern raised at yesterday's meeting included: THE crippling effects on firms and community groups of rising public liability insurance. "UNFAIR" distribution of road grants. CONCERN about $124 million in outstanding infrastructure funding. [http://news.com.au] ***************************************************************** 11 Key lawmaker unsure about funding for nuke dump fight Las Vegas SUN March 22, 2002 CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) - Nevada Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio said Friday he's unconvinced that the state has more money to add to the state's fight against a federal nuclear dump at Yucca Mountain. Gov. Kenny Guinn is considering a special session of the state Legislature to get $10 million from the state's $136 million "rainy day" fund for the battle against the dump. Guinn said he and Sens. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and John Ensign, R-Nev., are exploring the idea of using the money to run ads in other states to show the dangers of transporting nuclear waste cross country. But Raggio, R-Reno, said he's not sure about tapping the "rainy day" fund for that purpose. He added he's being heavily lobbied to support a special session but remains skeptical. "I'm still at a loss to understand what's going on in the U.S. Senate on this," Raggio said. "I'm not sure how they will use $10 million. I want to be convinced that any money spent would be useful." "If Sen. (Tom) Daschle, who runs the Senate, and Sen. Reid, who is second in the Senate, are telling us that they can't get the votes, what good is the money?" Raggio asked. "(Nevada is) looking at a $100 million shortfall. Where are we going to get this money?" Assembly Speaker Richard Perkins also is cautious, saying, "Yucca Mountain is the biggest crisis facing the state, but we have to weigh spending the money with the chance for success." Perkins, D-Henderson, said he's not sure that the state has $10 million it can free up for the fight. But if the money is available and lobbyists can show it could make a difference, he said he'd be willing to support its expenditure. "We would have to know, and they would have to show us that they think it can make a difference," Perkins said. Assembly Minority Leader Lynn Hettrick, R-Gardnerville, said he didn't think the Yucca fight should be the state's top spending priority given the "cash-strapped" schools and doctors leaving the state because of skyrocketing medical malpractice insurance. "I don't see that there's any money to find," Hettrick said. Veteran Assemblyman Joe Dini, D-Yerington, said he wouldn't object to a special session for Yucca Mountain. "If we're going to make a last stand, we better have enough dough to do it." Dini said. But he added the rainy day fund wasn't set up to take care of such matters. All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 12 Waste transportation hearings on Yucca Mountain Saturday, March 23, 2002 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal CORRECTION (03/26/02): A Stephens Washington Bureau story in Saturday's Review-Journal incorrectly reported the date of Rep. Jim Gibbons' congressional trip to Afghanistan. The Nevada Republican plans to leave April 1. Lawmaker to hold hearing on transportation of waste By KEITH ROGERS REVIEW-JOURNAL Much to the pleasure of Nevada officials, the chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure said Friday he will hold a hearing on federal plans to haul highly radioactive spent fuel across 43 states to Yucca Mountain by trains and trucks. The announcement by Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, will give Nevada leaders who are fighting a proposed repository a chance to make their case that the prospects for terrorist attacks since Sept. 11 have changed the political landscape for transporting 77,000 tons of high-level waste, most of it spent fuel from commercial power reactors. "If it's not the right thing to do, then let's find out," Young said, sitting with Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., and state Sen. Jon Porter, R-Henderson, at a Paris Las Vegas cafe. The May 9 hearing in the nation's capital will come during the 90 legislative days that Congress will have to decide on overriding Gov. Kenny Guinn's imminent veto of the decision that President Bush made Feb. 15 to proceed with construction of the repository. "It gives us time to marshal our forces together," Gibbons said. Porter said, "We think this is huge in our battle in our final hours." Porter said he will testify at the hearing along with other state officials. He said he believes the Energy Department hasn't done an objective review of the transportation risks and might have underestimated the work involved with upgrading and policing transportation routes. "This hasn't been looked at," he said. Young, the sole congressman from Alaska, was in Las Vegas attending an outdoors convention along other prominent political figures. "Chairman Young is keeping his promise to Nevada. He understands our complaints and understands our concerns," Gibbons said. Young, a self-avowed advocate of nuclear energy and railroads, voted in favor of the so-called "Screw Nevada" bill in 1987, which left Yucca Mountain as the only site under consideration for the nation's first repository for high-level nuclear waste. But he said Friday, "Quite frankly, I'll probably vote with Jim Gibbons" when the House considers overriding Guinn's veto of the project, which Guinn has said he will cast sometime during the first two weeks of April. Young said he intends to use the May 9 hearing as a forum to address such spent-fuel questions as "Why do we have to move it?" and "What if we don't move it?" He said he is sympathetic with Nevadans because of the transportation issues and what he described as the unfairness doctrine. "They ignore the small delegation. It's a states' rights issue," he said. "You really got the short end of the stick." He said he also supports accelerating construction of a bridge across the Colorado River in Arizona and Nevada to remove truck traffic from Hoover Dam. Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, large trucks have been routed through Laughlin. "The dam was never made for trucks," he said. "If (terrorists) get off a directed bomb, they could crack the dam." Young said about 70 of the 75 members of his committee are from the 43 states through which the spent nuclear fuel would be transported, according to Energy Department plans. "There's a lot of risk here," he said. Young said the hearing will include perspectives from scientists who are behind the Yucca Mountain Project and who favor the idea of cross-country nuclear waste shipments as opposed to continued storage of spent fuel at reactor sites, which, though heavily guarded, are potential terrorist targets. "I'm going to have this hearing and find out what the transportation issues are. Our hope is we'll have as many witnesses that will give us all sides of the issue," Young said. Gibbons said the hearing will give Nevada's leaders the chance to make a case for transporting the used fuel by ship across the Atlantic Ocean for reprocessing at facilities in Europe and Russia. He said Japan has a ship that can do the job, and experience with sea transport of spent fuel. Gibbons said he also will advocate converting the type of nuclear fuel used in U.S. reactors from uranium to thorium, which would allow deadly plutonium to be consumed in the energy-producing reaction. Though it is an integral part of nuclear power in France, reprocessing has been prohibited in the United States since President Carter banned reprocessing in 1977 after discussions with directors of the national laboratories in California and New Mexico. "If we reprocess our fuel ... we can eliminate proliferating issues and eliminate the need for Yucca Mountain," Gibbons said. He said thorium fuel produces 40 percent less waste than uranium fuel, and the process has been endorsed by Edward Teller, director emeritus of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Teller is best known for his role in developing the hydrogen bomb. Young said continued electrical power production by U.S. nuclear plants is "an absolute necessity," and the climate might be right to re-examine the ban on reprocessing to ensure the nation's future for nuclear power. "People are afraid there's going to be a nuclear war," he said, when asked about reprocessing. webmaster@lvrj.com Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal, 1997 - ***************************************************************** 13 New York official bristles at plan to truck nuclear waste Saturday, March 23, 2002 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal County leader irked by federal government's failure to consult him THE ASSOCIATED PRESS WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. -- The top executive of New York's Westchester County reacted angrily Friday to the federal government's nuclear waste transportation plan, saying he had not been consulted. If the government approves of burying the nation's nuclear waste inside Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, some radioactive material from Indian Point would be trucked on Westchester streets and highways and over the Tappan Zee Bridge, according to an Energy Department plan. The Journal News said it obtained the unpublished transportation plan from Nevada officials, who were allowed to see it as part of a review of the proposal to use Yucca Mountain as a repository for nuclear waste. The waste, which will be dangerously radioactive for thousands of years, currently is scattered around the nation at nuclear plants. It previously was disclosed that some of Indian Point's waste would be barged down the Hudson River and loaded onto trains at Port Elizabeth, N.J. The trucking plan, which would begin around 2010 at the earliest, would involve 993 truckloads traveling from the nuclear plants in Buchanan south through Cortlandt, Croton-on-Hudson, Ossining, Briarcliff Manor, Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown. The trucks then would cross the Hudson River on the Tappan Zee to Interstate 287 in New Jersey and Interstate 80 en route to Nevada. Nuclear waste produced after 2010 either would be loaded onto barges at Port Elizabeth or trucked to Conrail freight tracks in Croton-on-Hudson, the newspaper said. County Executive Andrew Spano said he was surprised to hear that such specific plans already had been made for routing casks of nuclear waste from Indian Point to Nevada. "They have to get there somehow, but how they get there and what the ramifications are have to be discussed with local officials like me," he said. "I should always be consulted when any action takes place in Westchester County that would affect the health and safety of the people of Westchester. The federal government is not exempt from that remark." webmaster@lvrj.com Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal, 1997 - ***************************************************************** 14 YUCCA MOUNTAIN: Talk of special session cools I said I would check the temperature of the people. But the reception hasn't been good from legislators or from others." GOV. KENNY GUINN ABOUT CALLING A SPECIAL SESSION Photo by John Gurzinski. Saturday, March 23, 2002 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal Guinn: Lawmakers lack enthusiasm for dipping into state's emergency fund By ED VOGEL REVIEW-JOURNAL CAPITAL BUREAU CARSON CITY -- Gov. Kenny Guinn said Friday he might not convene a special legislative session on Yucca Mountain because he has received little support for the plan from legislators. "The feedback is not leaning that way," Guinn said about calling the Legislature into a rare special session. He was asked Wednesday by U.S. Sens. Harry Reid and John Ensign to call a special session. The senators want the Legislature and governor to take $10 million out of the fund that is used to stabilize operations of state government in the event of an emergency. It also is called the rainy-day fund. The money would be used on a television advertisement campaign to induce residents in other states to encourage their senators to vote against Bush administration plans to put radioactive waste in Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Guinn said "out of courtesy" to Reid and Ensign that he has been asking key legislators whether they would support a special session. He also has asked his staff lawyers to determine whether he can use money from the rainy-day fund for a Yucca Mountain campaign. Sen. Ray Rawson, R-Las Vegas, said Thursday that spending money on an anti-Yucca Mountain campaign would be like throwing it down a rat hole. He questioned how the state could use emergency funds on Yucca Mountain when tax revenues are declining and the state has other financial needs. Rawson chairs the Human Resources Committee that handles Yucca Mountain bills. Currently there is $136 million in the rainy-day fund. Under state law, Guinn needs the approval of the Legislature before he can spend any of the money. The Legislature last year appropriated $5 million to fight federal moves to put the dump at Yucca Mountain. "I said I would check the temperature of the people," Guinn said. "But the reception hasn't been good from legislators or from others." He said he might decide by the middle of next week whether to convene a special session. Right now, he is not even sure he legally could use the rainy-day fund. Before he decides, he wants a detailed plan from Reid, D-Nev., and Ensign, R-Nev., on how the money would be spent. Guinn acknowledged it will be difficult to win legislative support to spend money on a Yucca campaign at a time when he must cut $100 million out of the current year's budget. "I am committed to protecting education and teacher salaries," he said. "It is tough times." Earlier this week, Guinn said he soon will veto President Bush's decision to put radioactive waste in Yucca Mountain. Under the terms of federal law, a simple majority of both houses of Congress can override Guinn's veto. Guinn said there is no chance of winning enough support in the House of Representatives to block the Yucca dump, but Ensign and Reid say they believe Nevada could prevail in the U.S. Senate. Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal, 1997 - 2002 ***************************************************************** 15 Columnist Benjamin Grove: Stressing the danger of shipping waste Las Vegas SUN March 22, 2002 Benjamin Grove covers Washington, D.C., for the Sun. He can be reached at grove@lasvegassun.com [grove@lasvegassun.com] or (202) 628-3100, Ext. 269. IT READS LIKE a Hollywood script: three or more terrorists fire a small missile at a truck or train hauling nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain. The rogue commandos manage to hit their target, and an explosion rips a hole in the steel waste container. In the wake of Sept. 11 and with a vote on Yucca Mountain looming in Congress in a few months, Nevada officials say that scenario is among their top arguments against the Yucca project, a federal plan to bury the nation's nuclear waste 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. On the other side of the debate, nuclear industry officials argue that it is extremely unlikely terrorists would go after a nuclear waste container -- and even more unlikely that they could successfully hit it. Caught in this predictable crossfire are two unanswered questions. If terrorists somehow managed to pull off a missile strike, how much damage would it really do to the environment and human lives? And what are government regulators doing about the threat? Nevada lawmakers, led by Rep. Shelley Berkley, last week unveiled a 4.5-minute videotape that shows a 1998 test at Aberdeen Proving Ground in which a TOW missile blows a softball-sized hole in a nuclear waste container. The damaged cask raises serious questions about how easily terrorists could uncork deadly radiation, Berkley said. The cast-iron container, called a Castor V/21, is not licensed for waste shipping in this country, although it is similar in strength to licensed containers, say consultants hired by Nevada. Nuclear industry experts strongly disagree, saying modern steel containers are far stronger than the iron Castor. They say the Aberdeen test is deeply flawed and proves nothing. The Aberdeen test was not a government-sponsored scientific experiment -- it was arranged by a private company, International Fuel Containers, Ltd., as a promotional demonstration for a concrete waste container "flak jacket." To find the most recent -- the only -- full-scale, documented and scientific government test you have to go back to 1982 at the Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. The federal government has long reported that a missile would do little damage to a nuclear waste container based on data from that single, 20-year-old test. The test came about after Sandia scientists as early as 1977 began making rough calculations of how many people could be sickened or killed by radiation leaked from a damaged cask. By 1982 Sandia scientists were spurred to conduct the real-world test after they "scared the bejesus out of themselves" with their early estimates, consultant and retired Sandia scientist Bob Luna told me. One estimate reached into the thousands. So scientists attached a standard U.S. Army M3A1 explosive to an actual General Electric IF-200, 25-ton cask filled with non-radioactive uranium rods, and detonated it. The blast put a hole six inches in diameter in the cask, spewing 3 grams -- 0.1 ounces -- of "respirable" particles into a cloud in the air, subject to whims of the weather. The explosion also blew 5.6 pounds of solid uranium material out of the cask -- about 1 percent of the uranium inside the cask, Sandia scientists said. If the uranium had been real waste from a nuclear reactor, both the cloud and the solid material would have been highly radioactive. But the release of such a small amount of material, even in heavily populated Manhattan, would cause no immediate fatalities, Sandia scientists concluded in the 99-page 1983 report about the test. The report said the blast could result in two to seven possible "latent cancer fatalities" -- people who got sick and died later. Little study and no new government tests have been done since 1983, and none are planned. However, Sandia scientists in 1999 used the 1982 test data to recalculate what would happen if a range of weapons were used against a modern-day General Atomics cask. The initial results of the improved study were largely the same: very few fatalities. But scientists have further studied the data and in follow-up reports concluded the number of estimated fatalities could be as high as 48, said Bob Halstead, a Wisconsin waste shipping expert hired by the state of Nevada. Even that number may be low, Halstead said. He calculated more startling figures: 115 to 165 possible fatalities. Those numbers would be perhaps 10 times higher if a missile went all the way through the cask. State analysts have criticized Sandia's data for not adequately considering all weather factors or how dangerous the spilled solid uranium could be. "I think they are cooking their numbers here," Halstead said. Nevada officials for years have goaded the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which regulates nuclear waste containers, to re-examine sabotage threats to the containers. The state formally requested a new NRC analysis in 1999, but has gotten no response. The NRC does not require that casks be designed to withstand a missile blast -- something the NRC should consider now, Nevada lawmakers said. "Everything needs to be re-looked at in the wake of Sept. 11," Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., said. "Sept. 11 changed everything." The NRC has certified 10 different cask designs as safe for shipping high-level radioactive waste, putting each through computer simulations -- not actual tests -- in which casks are theoretically dropped 30 feet onto both an unyielding surface and a spike; crushed by a 5-ton weight; burned at 1,475 degrees for 30 minutes; and immersed in water. But for now casks are not required to meet missile-blast standards. "The tests were designed not thinking in particular of sabotage acts," Nancy Osgood, an NRC senior spent fuel project manager, said. The NRC is quietly planning to re-examine waste container weaknesses, said Wayne Hodges, a NRC deputy director of technical review for spent nuclear fuel. As part of a "top-to-bottom" review of nuclear material security nationwide, an NRC research team plans a new computer analysis of missile strikes on shipping containers. The new classified tests would include missile simulations. Test results and factors -- such as the type of cask and missile used -- will not be made public. Conceivably the new NRC tests could lead to new design requirements for casks, officials said. But many experts doubt it. "These things are pretty strong," Hodges said. "But you could always come up with a weapon that can put a hole in it." Nuclear industry officials argue that their casks are the most robust containers in the world. They say the only way to further protect them from a missile strike would be to wrap them in concrete, making them too heavy to move. "I'm not sure there is a lot we can do to the cask design and still have an efficient transportation system," said John Vincent, a senior project manager at the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nation's top nuclear industry association. "And again, the important question here is: Are we protecting the public as it is? Yes we are." So is there good reason for the DOE and NRC to oversee new waste container tests and require stronger casks? Yucca advocates and opponents will agree to disagree. A more neutral party, Allison Macfarlane, a senior research associate at MIT who has studied Yucca Mountain for years, said not much would be gained by conducting more tests or putting new requirements on casks. The casks can't get much stronger, she said. But politically, Nevada lawmakers may have ground to gain by arguing that more analysis needs to be done, Macfarlane said. "This is the one issue that (Nevada officials) can use to convince people in other parts of the country to oppose Yucca Mountain," Macfarlane said. "A missile strike on a waste container is not going to be a high-consequence incident. But it'll scare a lot of people, that's for sure." All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 16 Editorial: Anti-dump campaign needs boost Las Vegas SUN March 22, 2002 Gov. Kenny Guinn is considering whether he has the legal authority to call a special session of the Legislature in order to get $10 million from the state's "rainy day" fund that could help pay for the state's anti-Yucca Mountain campaign. The extra funds could be used in part to pay for television ads in states with major highways and railways running through them, explaining how dangerous it would be to ship nuclear waste cross-country to Nevada, a bid to not only influence a state's residents but also its members of Congress. Guinn, who has been consulting with Sens. Harry Reid and John Ensign about convening a special session, will have to act quickly since the $6 million that's already been raised for the anti-dump campaign is nearly tapped. The issue is reaching a critical point, with Congress expected to reach a final decision on Yucca Mountain's fate within a few months. Special sessions of the Legislature are extraordinary -- there have only been 17 in the state's 138-year history. But if the threats posed by Yucca Mountain to the safety of our residents and the state's economy aren't important enough, then just exactly what would be worthy of a special session? Nevada's senators are united on the need for more money to oppose the dump, but it is discouraging to see Ensign and his Republican colleague in the Nevada congressional delegation, Rep. Jim Gibbons, take cheap shots at Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., who is helping Nevada in this fight. Last week they both suggested that Daschle, who previously said Yucca Mountain would be dead in a Democrat-controlled Senate, has the power to prevent Yucca Mountain legislation from coming up for a vote. But Daschle can't bottle up a vote on nuclear waste storage like he can other legislation. Daschle has pointed out that a 1982 law says that any senator may seek a vote on Yucca Mountain. What's really going on is obfuscation by the GOP duo. They don't want Nevadans reminded that it is fellow Republicans, primarily President Bush and the GOP leadership in Congress, who are leading the charge to send nuclear waste here. It sounds like Ensign, who crowed during 2000 that his election would aid Nevada in the battle against Yucca Mountain, is having a tough time rounding up Republican senators. If Ensign would devote the time he uses to deflect blame to actually lobbying fellow senators, he might find more success. All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 17 Columnist Jeff German: Senators must keep up fight vs. Yucca Las Vegas SUN March 22, 2002 Jeff German is the Sun's senior investigative reporter. He can be reached [german@lasvegassun.com] or (702) 259-4067. THE FIGHT to kill the Yucca Mountain project in the Senate is just beginning, but already there's friction inside Team Nevada. Late last week, as Nevada Sens. Harry Reid and John Ensign were fine-tuning battle plans behind close doors, the spirit of partisanship reared its ugly head in the shadow of an awesome foe, the mighty nuclear power industry. But amid the public bickering between Ensign, a freshman Republican, and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, Nevada's biggest ally on Capitol Hill, no one lost sight of the daunting task of winning over senators. Ensign said his spat with Daschle, though it may have irked Reid, did not affect his close working relationship with the state's senior senator, a three-term Democrat. "We're still on the same team when it comes to the issues," he said. "I'm going to try to get as many votes as I can." That was good to hear because Team Nevada needs to stay focused to win this fight. The nuclear industry has spread millions around Capitol Hill in the past decade in its push to send 77,000 tons of deadly nuclear waste to Nevada. By most accounts Reid, with Daschle's help, is expected to rally 36 Democrats to Nevada's side. With 51 votes needed to prevail on Yucca Mountain, that leaves 15 Republicans for Ensign. Reid, the Senate's assistant majority leader, was well on his way to locking up his 36 by the end of the week, but Ensign was said to have only persuaded two Republicans, Sens. Ben Campbell of Colorado and Lincoln Chaffee of Rhode Island, both of whom were with the state in the past. The Republicans, many of whom already have been bought off by the wealthy nuclear industry, have been a tough sell. A top-secret list floated in Washington and Nevada last week by the anti-Yucca Mountain group, Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, showed only three Republicans on the fence. The 46 other GOP senators are reported to be siding with the nuclear industry. The list, though it's being revised as the battle progresses, shows the difficult challenge facing Ensign. Who could blame a nervous Ensign last week for going after Daschle and the Democrats to ease the pressure from his own party? But as the tension remains in the coming weeks, Ensign can't allow himself to get sidetracked again. The stakes simply are too high. He'll have to stay glued to the task at hand -- bringing home Republicans to Team Nevada. And in all likelihood Reid, one of the best at playing the Senate's inside game, will have to help him. Last week, despite the dissension within the ranks, Nevada forces were committed to looking for votes wherever they could find them. The Senate's 11 new members, nine Democrats and two Republicans, none of whom have ever weighed in on Yucca Mountain, were among those considered ripe for the picking. A plan also surfaced to target senators in Oregon and Vermont, where environmental groups opposed to Yucca Mountain wield much influence. Television spots, bankrolled by Nevada's anti-nuclear waste protection fund, were being readied in those states. All four senators there -- two Democrats, a Republican and an independent -- are considered swing votes, even though they sided with the nuclear power industry in the past. Republican senators in other states with strong environmental groups, such as Maine, New Hampshire and neighboring Utah, also were being targeted. So were senators from both parties in Iowa, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Missouri, Arizona and New Mexico. This week the battle continues, friction or no friction within Team Nevada. There's no time to lose sight of the main goal -- winning votes. All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 18 Columnist Erin Neff: Yucca fight gets partisan, personal Las Vegas SUN March 22, 2002 MAKE NO MISTAKE about it, the state's fight against Yucca Mountain is not Nevada versus the rest of the country -- it's every politician for himself. The signs are as prevalent as the campaign placards already blighting the landscape: political posturing, finger-pointing and laying blame. It is troubling as Nevada's bi-partisan coalition showed signs of crumbling, turning the state's biggest fight into party politics. If it becomes an intramural squabble, Nevada's slim chances of stopping the nuclear dump dry up. The problems began when U.S. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., who once promised Democrats would block the proposed nuclear waste dump 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, said he can no longer make good on that promise. Immediately, Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., and U.S. Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., saw an opportunity for a fall guy -- conveniently from the other party and a possible foe to their president in 2004. "The majority leader is the only person who can bring an issue to the floor for an up-and-down vote," Ensign said Wednesday. Daschle promptly scolded Ensign, giving himself an out in the event Nevada's position does not prevail in the U.S. Senate. "Sen. Ensign's going to have to do a little more study before he speaks," Daschle told reporters during a press conference. Well, Mr. Daschle should have done his homework, too. Last May during a fund-raiser in Las Vegas, Daschle proclaimed the dump was dead if Democrats held the majority. Now he says anyone can bring the item for a vote, and there can be no filibuster under the expedited rules set forth by the legislation that set Yucca Mountain in motion. The only way Nevada can uphold Gov. Kenny Guinn's expected veto is with 51 votes in the Senate. Daschle says on the Republican side Ensign has only been able to get himself and Ben Nighthorse Campbell, R-Colo., to oppose Yucca Mountain. Daschle said to defeat the nuclear waste dump, Ensign will have to rally the Republicans to vote with him. "I would only hope he could get a majority (of the Republicans,) and we could defeat this legislation," Daschle said. "But only if he gets close to a majority of his caucus will we be able to do that." Not one to let Ensign take the fall for the expected blow to Nevada by the Senate, Gibbons also decided it was safe to lash out at Daschle -- criticizing Sen. Harry Reid wouldn't make the state's Yucca fight seem bipartisan. "Nevadans expect him to remain true to his word," Gibbons said Thursday. "Anything less would be a blatant lie to the people of Nevada." Bush -- during a fund-raising trip to Nevada in 2000 -- said he would base any Yucca Mountain decision on sound science, and not politics. Democrats from Reid to Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman decried the president's decision with Reid going so far as to call Bush a "liar." The coalition stayed together through that because it was seen as Nevada versus the nation, and nobody expected the president to do anything but approve it. But now things are getting more complex. Daschle's promise provided hope. Without that hope, the strain on the Nevada coalition is showing and it appears the players are looking for people to blame. Reid, the Senate's assistant majority leader, has channeled one excuse through Daschle -- the rules were stacked against Nevada because Senate leaders can neither keep the vote from reaching the floor nor filibuster until the 90-day window to act expires. But Reid also slyly set someone else up for blame -- the Republican governor of Nevada. By pressuring Guinn to call a special session of the Legislature, Reid is both begging for more money and forcing the governor into an election year box. If Guinn doesn't call the special session and Nevada loses in the U.S. Senate, Reid can lament the lack of funding the state contributed to the fight and remind everyone that Guinn's party is the one that fast-tracked the dump. Perhaps state Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio -- saying he doesn't think the state can find money for the fight -- summed it up best, noting that the matter has become "a political football." All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 19 Columnist Jon Ralston: Yucca fight mired in pettiness Las Vegas SUN March 22, 2002 Jon Ralston hosts the public affairs program Face to Face on Las Vegas ONE and also publishes the Ralston Report. Ralston can be reached at ralston@vegas.com [ralston@vegas.com] or (702) 870-7997. EVEN AT THE MOST critical time in the state's political fight against Yucca Mountain, it still comes down to playing the blame game. Instead of quietly trying to assemble votes and craft strategies to block the dump in the U.S. Senate this summer, the battle last week disintegrated into a war of news releases and shameless posturing. Instead of trying to answer the seminal question such as how to count to 51 in the Senate, we heard the tiresome refrains: Who's responsible -- Democrats or Republicans? Who's the more egregious promise-breaker -- President Bush or Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle? Suddenly last week the unity exemplified by Harry Ensign began to fray as Daschle indicated he might not be able to simply stop the measure from coming to the floor -- as he had said last May in Las Vegas when he declared the dump dead so long as the Democrats ruled the Senate. That sparked an outpouring of GOP paper that was a mirror-image of the Democratic rhetoric trying to hold Bush to his campaign promise to withhold judgment until all the science was in before he inevitably broke it. Nevada Republicans, still reeling from a GOP president's recommendation and the party's capital leadership backing the project, have insisted the issue is nonpartisan -- until now. For instance, congressional hopeful Jon Porter, who just a few weeks ago was lamenting that anyone who would turn Yucca Mountain into a partisan issue, sent out a release decrying "Democrat hypocrisy" and presenting the new GOP bible: "Yucca Mountain 101," which is a screed designed to put more pressure on Daschle because of his power as majority leader. Even the special session, should one occur (unlikely) to raise money for the dump fight, could degenerate into partisan politics. Gov. Kenny Guinn feels pressure not just from lawmakers who want to do it but from Republicans who see no upside. I'd say they should all be ashamed of themselves for this behavior. But shame regarding Yucca Mountain was entombed long ago -- and will remain safely buried for a lot longer than 10,000 years. No one should escape here. For instance, Reid was standing by Daschle's side last June when Daschle made his statement in Las Vegas. Maybe they didn't know that the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 had expedited procedures that might limit the usually omnipotent powers of the majority leader. But hyperbole always gets you in trouble, especially if you're a politician. And now the Republicans say Daschle has a promise to keep. Of course there is a huge difference between Daschle and Bush. Bush was never with the state and only pretended to be during his one-election stand in '00. His Nevada dalliance came while he was married to the nuclear industry -- and with all that money, it's easy to be a forgiving spouse. Daschle, on the other hand, has been with Nevada for a long time. Whether he believes in the issue (doubtful) or is doing a favor for his lieutenant (likely), he has at least tried. Bush rolled over for the industry and his administration continues to thumb its nose at any of the hundreds of remaining scientific questions. For instance, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, in a letter published in the latest edition of National Journal wrote: "Sound science and exhaustive examination have removed any doubts about Yucca's suitability." That's the administration's mindset -- see no science, hear no science, speak no science. As for Ensign, it's hard to blame him for trying to turn the focus on Daschle. After all, he promised when he campaigned for the Senate that he would bring GOP votes to bear on the dump. It worked well on the NCAA bill, when Ensign and Reid provided a synergy that almost killed that measure in John McCain's Commerce Committee. But so far on the dump, Ensign is batting .000. He has convinced nobody. The two Republicans with the state -- Ben Nighthorse Campbell and Lincoln Chafee -- were there last time, without Ensign's help. And unless he can get about a dozen more of his colleagues -- and they would have to go against a Republican in the White House -- there's no chance to get to 51, even if Reid/Daschle can get 35-40 Democrats. Beyond the arcane parliamentary duel going on between Reid and Ensign over how much power Daschle really has, no one really knows until theories are tested in the real Club of 100. As new Nevada lobbyist John Podesta put it succinctly last week: "There will be a motion to proceed to the bill in early summer. Then we're just going to have to see where that takes us." There's not much time to get the Nevada house back in order. Guinn is expected to produce his resolution of disapproval on April 8, the House will act quickly and the measure will be in the Senate right away. And the clock will then start inexorably ticking toward the end of July, when final action must be taken. As I said, not much time. And certainly no time to waste protecting political posteriors and pulling pathetic partisan ploys instead of trying to round up votes. All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 20 Concern over nuclear waste rises in Russia [Asia Times Online] March 23, 2002 atimes.com Central Asia/Russia By Sergei Blagov MOSCOW - Russia's dangerous radioactive legacy of the Soviet-era nuclear sector has become a matter of domestic and international concern. While the Russian authorities, notably the Nuclear Power Ministry - or Minatom - argue that the country's nuclear facilities sector is safe, some international environmental organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and parliament deputies are far from convinced. The issue of nuclear safety was placed under the spotlight when Sergei Mitrokhin, a State Duma deputy from the liberal Yabloko faction, along with two Greenpeace activists and three NTV cameramen, broke into the Krasnoyarsk-26 plant where the spent nuclear fuel from Bulgaria is being stored. The break-in, broadcast on NTV, was designed to show that the country's system of nuclear safety was "non-existent", Mitrokhin said. Simultaneously, Greenpeace Russia has also filed suit in a Moscow district court saying that the import of some 40 tonnes of spent nuclear fuel in November from the Kozlodui nuclear plant in Bulgaria is illegal. The waste is now being stored at the Krasnoyarsk-26 in western Siberia, said Vladimir Chuprov, energy programs coordinator for Greenpeace Russia. NGOs argue that Russia's largest waste-storage facility, Krasnoyarsk-26, has just 3,000 tonnes of unused capacity, while Minatom wants to allow other nations to pay to send more than 10,000 tonnes of their radioactive waste for reprocessing and storage here. Last month, the Russian Supreme Court handed a victory to environmentalists, striking down a government decision that allowed the import of nuclear waste from the Paks nuclear power plant in Hungary for storage in Russia. Greenpeace and a group of other environmental NGOs filed a suit against the government last year when they learned of the decision to allow nuclear waste from the Paks plant to be sent to Chelyabinsk for storage, said Chuprov. Russia imports spent fuel rods from Ukraine, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Hungary for reprocessing, but is required to return the waste to the countries for permanent storage. Environmentalists contest the deals clinched before a law signed last summer that allows the import of spent nuclear fuel from other countries for reprocessing and storage. The recycling process extracts usable material from the spent rods while reducing their potential to be used in weapons, the Minatom has said. The new law, signed by President Vladimir Putin, allows the import of spent nuclear fuel for reprocessing and storage. When Putin signed the new law last July, he ordered a committee to be formed to make recommendations on nuclear safety procedures but this committee has yet to start working. According to Mitrokhin, the committee cannot start its work because the Federation Council, the upper house of parliament, is late in appointing representatives to it. Since late 2000, environmental groups opposed the law that allowed the long-term storage of nuclear waste on Russian soil. In an attempt to block the import of spent nuclear fuel, the environmentalist groups collected 2.5 million signatures to initiate a national referendum to ask whether voters opposed the importation of radioactive materials. However, Russia's Central Elections Commission, citing minor technical inaccuracies, rejected more than a fifth of the signatures, leaving the environmentalists 200,000 short of the 2 million needed to force a referendum. Most of the signatures were rejected on the grounds of abbreviating the word "street" in a signer's address. Environmental activists moved to initiate a regional referendum in Krasnoyarsk region and gathered 100,000 signatures. However, the authorities agreed to look at only 40,000 and then rejected 36,000 as invalid - roughly on the same technical reasons. No big wonder that some Russian environmental activists even argued that the twain of democracy and nuclear energy cannot meet. Nonetheless, the environmentalists continue to contest skipping both referendums in Russian and European courts, Chuprov said. However, the governmental nuclear agency, Minatom, still plans a lucrative business turning Russia into the world's nuclear pay dump. Advocates of nuclear-waste imports argue that Russia could earn US$20 billion over the next decade by importing some 20,000 tonnes of spent nuclear fuel. Yet critics, led by Greenpeace, have lashed out the plan, saying the environmental fallout could outweigh the benefits. Moreover, even Moscow faces nuclear-waste problems, mainly due to Kurchatov Institute. Over the decades, however, the institute has accumulated a huge quantity of radioactive waste on its territory - located in a residential district just 15 kilometers northwest of the Kremlin. The waste depositories at the institute, which still runs six of its nine nuclear reactors, contain spent nuclear fuel, water used as a cooling agent and worn reactor parts. Another matter of concern is the naval nuclear legacy. Notably, on Tuesday deputies of the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, urged the government to approve a federal program on how to deal with decommissioned nuclear submarines and other ships with nuclear reactors. Russia now has 230 such vessels, half of which are near the end of nuclear reactors' lifespan. The deputies urged the government to increase funding so as to decommission these vessels safely. In 2002, no less than 10 trailoads of hazardous waste from nuclear icebreakers and submarines will be transported from Kola Peninsula to "Mayak", says Stanislav Golovinsky, technical director of Murmansk Shipping Co. Apart from Krasniyarsk-26, Russia's Minatom manages Chelyabinsk-65 Reprocessing Plant, or NPO "Mayak", which had been a site of a series of dangerous accidents. Nevertheless, since 1994 a total of 29 trainloads of nuclear waste have been brought from Kola Peninsula to "Mayak" so far. Yet although the operation is getting faster, all the waste is due to be removed from Kola region no earlier than 2007. Only afterward does the Murmansk Shipping Co plan to start removing waste from an emergency storage facility in Andreyev Guba, where waste from some 100 reactors is being temporarily stored. At least five more years will be needed to clear Andreyev Guba, Golovinsky said. Russia's Far Eastern regions have waste problems of their own. The Pacific Fleet's 75 decommissioned nuclear submarines are stranded in harbors, and 45 are waiting for nuclear fuel to be unloaded from their reactors, argues State Duma Deputy Boris Reznik. He says theatest source of danger is from the vessels, used as provisional storage facilities for spent nuclear fuel from other submarines. Reznik claimed that in March 1999 some 160 cubic meters of highly radioactive liquid waste leaked from the rusting tanker vessel Pinega, which is being used for temporary storage. Moreover, this month the Russian TV3 channel alleged that a decommissioned nuclear submarine recently sank in Krasheninnikov Bay, Kamchatka Peninsula, in Russia's Far East. But Russian officials have repeatedly denied such allegations and claimed that the risk of a nuclear accident is extremely slight. "No decommissioned nuclear submarines were sinking recently," navy spokesman Igor Dygalo was quoted as saying by the Russian Information Agency (RIA). However, Dygalo conceded that such incidents had taken place back in 1997 and 1999, but he denied that there had been leaks of liquid nuclear waste. Reznik points out that in 2001 Russia earned $66 billion from oil and gas exports, hence the government has enough money to deal with nuclear-waste problems. "The Russian military officials believe that preventing waste leaks just means avoiding press leaks," Reznik said. It is widely accepted that Russia now faces a longer-term safety problem as its existing nuclear-waste storage facilities are getting closer to being filled to capacity. Russia's scientists, officials, NGOs and environmental activists agree the country urgently needs to monitor and control its post-Soviet nuclear legacy - notably nuclear waste. Environmentalists, however, cast doubts on the effectiveness of the governmental programs to tackle the mess. (Inter Press Service) ©2001 Asia Times Online Co., Ltd. Room 6301, The Center, 99 Queen's Road, Central, Hong Kong ***************************************************************** 21 Democrats angry at support for SA waste dump ABC Politics - The Australian Democrats have attacked the Local Government Association's (LGA) support of a radioactive waste dump in South Australia. Sandra Kanck says what began as a sensible motion on the handling of waste was changed by Port Lincoln mayor Peter Davis and supported by delegates to the LGA general meeting. She says Mr Davis called for the state to set up its own low level radioactive waste dump and accept material from interstate. "He doesn't seem to understand that once you locate a dump for low level waste, sure as night follows day it'll turn into one for medium level and one for high level," Ms Kanck said. © 2001 Australian Broadcasting Corporation ***************************************************************** 22 UK: Discharges aren't fishy, says Meacher by OUR LOBBY CORRESPONDENT ENVIRONMENT Minister Michael Meacher faced angry street protests over nuclear pollution at an international conference in Norway. The Oldham West and Royton MP found himself at the centre of a demonstration calling for the closure of the controversial Sellafield plant. Norways prime minister, Kjell Magne Bondevik, used a television broadcast to urge citizens to join a torchlight procession through the city of Bergen. His government hopes to use international law to shut Sellafield, after traces of radioactivity were found in shellfish and seafood off the Norwegian coast. Mr Meacher was urged to stop further discharges of technetium 99, a radioactive element that has been piped into the sea from Sellafield since 1996. The Norwegian premier told viewers: I am urging as many Bergen citizens as possible to take to the streets against Mr Meacher and Sellafield. This deserves a demonstration, and the more people the better. We shall be very disappointed if discharges of technetium 99 continue. We are exploring all political and legal action we can to stop these discharges. Speaking today, Mr Meacher said he understood Norwegian fears that its fishing industry would be hit by worries that technetium 99 could harm human health. But he added: Our scientific advice, however, is that the risk to human health is minimal. A person living off the Cumbrian coast or the Irish coast, who eats a large amount of fish caught in the Irish Sea, let alone those in Norway, would suffer no ill-effects. Mr Meacher said overall discharges of radioactivity from Sellafield had been cut by 99 per cent over the past 25 years. The UK Government was now considering new technology that could capture the technetium 99 at Sellafield and separate it from discharged water, he added. A decision was expected soon on proposals currently being examined by Margaret Beckett, the Environment Secretary, and Alan Milburn, the Health Secretary. l Norwegian environmentalists also dumped several barrels of raw fish outside the hotel where the conference was taking place. As well as protesting against discharges of technetium 99, they want an end to over-fishing of the North Sea. © Oldham Evening Chronicle 2001 ***************************************************************** 23 Nuclear weapons use no longer 'unthinkable' Saturday, March 23, 2002 The Halifax Herald Limited By Christopher Newton / The Associated Press Washington - In rhetoric and reality, countries around the world seem to be creeping toward a new military philosophy that says it is acceptable to use nuclear weapons on the battlefield or to settle regional disputes. Everywhere, there are signs that "the unthinkable" is being redefined to accommodate new anxieties and advancing technology. U.S. President George W. Bush and the British government have warned terrorists with weapons of mass destruction that "all options" are open for a military response. Military officials in both India and Pakistan have openly discussed how their nuclear weapons would prove superior to their neighbours in a conflict. The CIA believes North Korea has produced enough plutonium for at least one nuclear weapon and still has designs to claim South Korea. Those who watch attitudes toward nuclear weapons say the "temperature" is rising. "The world is searching for a new status quo, that will involve new players and new dangers," said retired army Col. Daniel Smith, who is chief of research at the Washington-based Center for Defence Information. "Our nuclear posture seems to move us closer toward use of nuclear weapons in a conflict even against a country that has no nuclear weapons of any kind," he said. "The belief that countries that do develop chemical or biological weapons would be able to blackmail the United States is prompting us to look into ways to change the equation." Part of what is causing the renewed discussion of nuclear weapons is the idea that they can be scaled down and used in a limited fashion, so as not to bring about a doomsday scenario. The United States demolished the Japanese city of Hiroshima with an atomic bomb that had an explosive yield of 13 kilotonnes - equivalent to 13,000 tonnes of TNT. In its arsenal now are weapons that dwarf those - some with explosive yields of many megatonnes (millions of tonnes of TNT). The United States wants to develop weapons about a quarter of the size of those used in the Second World War. The Defence Department has asked Congress for permission to develop such bombs for demolishing fortified, underground military facilities. But even if the nuclear weapons are smaller, the United States is setting a harmful precedent by developing them, some say. Atomic pioneer Hans Bethe and fellow Nobel laureates Dudley Herschbach and John Polanyi condemned the plan for ending the taboo against using nuclear weapons "beyond their Cold War function of deterring a Soviet attack." The threat of nuclear weapons being used in regional conflicts has also never been greater. Rivals India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons in 1998. Since then, the situation has worsened. The conflict over Kashmir, a territory that sits along the border between the countries, brought the neighbours to the brink of war this year. This week CIA Director George Tenet said, "the chance of war between these two nuclear-armed states is higher than at any point since 1971." Even in a regional war, the effect could be horrific. M.V. Ramana, a Princeton University physicist from India, calculated that a 15-kilotonne bomb dropped on Bombay would kill between 150,000 and 850,000 people in the short term. There are also trouble spots in East Asia. Copyright © 2002 The Halifax Herald Limited ***************************************************************** 24 Russian environmentalist against MP's proposal to resume nuclear tests BBC Monitoring Service - United Kingdom; Mar 23, 2002 Text of report by Russian news agency Ekho Moskvy [No dateline as received] President of the Russian centre for environmental policy [academician] Aleksey Yablokov sees no logic in a suggestion that Russia should resume nuclear tests, recently made by [former deputy defence minister, now leading member of pro-government Fatherland-All Russia faction in the State Duma] Andrey Kokoshin. "We would again join the arms race. I see neither geopolitical, nor economic, nor strategic logic in it. What I see is a boyish desire to score off someone," Yablokov said in a live interview with Ekho Moskvy radio. Kokoshin, deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee for Industry, Construction and High Technology, said that Russia might resume nuclear tests speaking at the ongoing 10th assembly of the Russian Council on External and Defence Policy. He said that new nuclear tests on the Novaya Zemlya testing range would be quite possible if the United States continues to work on its nuclear programme. "Of course, America's decision to prepare for more nuclear tests prompts our military to do the same. It would be silly, because we and Americans have different problems," Yablokov said. He said that Russia has enough weapons to provide for strategic deterrence. Source: Ekho Moskvy news agency, Moscow, in Russian 1050 gmt 23 Mar 02 /BBC Monitoring/ © BBC. ***************************************************************** 25 Russia, United States, Nuclear Targets CDI Russia Weekly #198 - #15 Kommersant-Vlast No. 19 March 19, 2002 BEST REGARDS FROM A POTENTIAL ALLY It takes half a minute to re-target nuclear missiles Author: Ilya Bulavinov from WPS Monitoring Agency, [http://www.wps.ru/e_index.html] ] THE LA TIMES ARTICLE ABOUT RUSSIA BEING AMONG THE PENTAGON'S NUCLEAR TARGETS HAS CAUSED A SCANDAL. HOWEVER, THIS ARTICLE ONLY REVEALED THE OPPOSITION BETWEEN THE TWO COUNTRIES, WHICH NEVER DISAPPEARED WITH THE END OF THE COLD WAR. The report in "The Los Angeles Times" that Russia is on the Pentagon's list of countries against which the US may use nuclear weapons has caused a scandal. Of course, it is impossible to avoid a scandal after such a publication, since over the past few years - especially in the past few months - much has been said about the Russia-US relationship being an alliance. And now, all of a sudden, it turns out that Washington views Russia as virtually its main adversary. Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov has said that if such plans do exist, this would be a concern and would destabilize the situation. Defense Minister Sergey Ivanov has visited the US, where he demanded some explanations. Secretary of State Colin Powell stated on behalf of the US that Russia has not been included on any such lists, and is not viewed as an enemy. He also said that American nuclear weapons are not targeted at any particular country. Russian officials have expressed their moderate satisfaction with the explanation given. However, these are only words. In reality, the incident of the Pentagon's report has revealed that despite the end of the Cold War, both Russia and the US view each other as potential adversaries. The US is mentioned in Russia's military doctrine only twice. It is stated that Moscow stands by the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty of 1972 and is prepared for the "further cuts to its nuclear weapons on a bilateral basis together with the US, and also on a multi-lateral basis." Nevertheless, there are also a few passages unambiguously implying that US actions threaten Russia's national security. "The state and prospects of development of the contemporary military-political situation are determined by the opposition of two trends. One of these trends is the creation of a unipolar world based on the dominance of one superpower, and military solutions to key problems in global politics. The second trend is formation of a multipolar world. The Russian Federation holds that social progress, stability, and international security may be gained only within the framework of a multipolar world..." "The practice of carrying out military operations despite generally-acknowledged principles and standards of international law, and without the approval of the UN Security Council" is viewed as "one of the main destabilizing factors in the military-political situation" by the doctrine. According to the doctrine, the main foreign threats include "formation of a group of armed forces leading to destruction of the current balance of forces along the borders of the Russian Federation, its allies, and seas surrounding Russia; expansion of military blocs that endanger military security of the Russian Federation and its allies; deploying foreign troops without permission from the UN Security Council in countries which are allies of the Russian Federation." It is not necessary to point out who is obstructing social progress and international security, forming groups of forces and violating the current balance, expanding military blocs, and sending troops into countries bordering with Russia without the UN's permission. If Russia took its own military doctrine more seriously, the US and Russia would not be exchanging official visits and summits now - they would be preparing for war. Fortunately, in this rapidly changing world, doctrines have become merely declarative papers. Politicians and state officials rarely think of their correspondence to real life, and when they do think of it, they change the doctrines rather than policies. However, regardless of the development of the situation, Russia and America are likely to view each other as potential adversaries for some years. Even if the relations between the two countries become unprecedentedly close, suspicions and mistrust will be forgotten only after several generations of politicians change. So far, the two countries' possession of nuclear weapons is a considerable factor in bilateral relations, and neither Moscow nor Washington intends to refuse to declare the possibility of using them against each other. It is noteworthy that the clock at the central command point of the Russian Strategic Missile Forces (SMF) shows the time in Moscow, Vladimir, Chita, Omsk, Orenburg (there are headquarters of armies of the SMF in the four latter cities), and Washington. As for announcements that Russian and American missiles are aimed at Antarctica, any specialist in missile technologies will tell you that it only takes about half a minute to re-target them. (Translated by Kirill Frolov) CENTER FOR DEFENSE INFORMATION 1779 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036-2109 Ph: (202) 332-0600 · Fax: (202) 462-4559 [info@cdi.org] ***************************************************************** 26 Nuclear pre-emption ©The Frontier Publications (Pvt) Ltd. Address: 32 Stadium Road Peshawar Cantt P.O. Box No. 1161 Pakistan Phones: +92-91 287074-5-6 Fax: +92-91 278901 Jim Hoagland Updated on 3/23/2002 9:35:37 AM Nuclear weapons have posed the heaviest burden of leadership for every American president since Harry Truman. There can be no more awesome responsibility than having to think about the circumstances under which a nation or perhaps even the world would be destroyed on your command, as George W Bush has just been reminded. The classified version of this administration’s first important statement to itself about nuclear weapons found its way into The Los Angeles Times recently. The disclosure provoked outcries of alarm from anti-nuclear activists and a determined effort by officials to minimise or dismiss the document. Don’t buy the smokescreen. The nuclear posture review written at Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon is a revealing statement. This planning document helps establish an ethos of nuclear strategy that will inevitably influence what and how the president thinks about atomic weapons. Ronald Reagan was horrified by his first detailed briefing on American nuclear strategy, according to a famous story told by his aides. Reagan was so revolted by the doctrine of mutual assured destruction (MAD) and its balance of terror that he demanded an alternative: a strategic defensive shield against Soviet nuclear attack. The idea collapsed along with the Soviet Union. Reagan’s emotional response to the ultimate weapon resembled the nuclear antipathy expressed by Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton during their presidencies. A calculated, highly pragmatic approach seems to characterise the Presidents Bush, father and son. I found candidate George W. Bush’s campaign discussions of nuclear strategy to be careful to businesslike. In his initial exposure to the grim details of how much destructive power he would have at his fingertips, Bush posed a deceptively workaday question: Why do we need so many nuclear weapons now that the Soviet Union has disappeared? The Soviet attack on Europe that US nuclear weapons were to deter had lost all plausibility in Bush’s mind. He prodded discussions about unilateral reductions in the US arsenal that would save money and perhaps contribute to better relations with Russia. His version of missile defence is far more tentative and far less ideological than was Reagan’s Star Wars notion. When the Russians insisted on a legally binding document to cover strategic arms reductions, Bush went along. So there was little theology or Strangelovian analysis in Bush’s original contemplation of nuclear strategy. Then came September 11 and the war in Afghanistan. Those events have significantly darkened this administration’s nuclear ethos. Any weapons that can be used to pre-empt worst-case scenarios are being looked at in a new light. This is one of the three important indirect revelations of the nuclear posture review. It suggests that deterrence is a meaningless concept for suicidal terrorists like Mohamed Atta and probably for Osama ben Laden and Al-Qaeda. That may be true for Iraq’s Saddam Hussein or North Korea’s Kim Jong Il as well. The review makes clear a turn by the Bush team to a strategy of pre-emption, including by nuclear weapons if necessary, to prevent these rulers from passing on weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to terror networks. This represents a devaluation of deterrence by the Bush administration. Second, the authors of the defence paper document the administration’s deepening scepticism about the effectiveness of traditional US and international non-proliferation policies and arms control treaties. Thinking they were talking in private, the planners list seven countries as candidates to glow in the dark permanently if they get out of line: Russia and China, because of the size of their arsenals and the uncertainty of their political futures; Iraq, Iran and North Korea, performing “axis of evil” encores here because they support US-targeted terrorists and have or seek WMD; Libya and Syria, not previously spotlighted but secret makers and stockpilers of chemical weapons. Finally, like most bureaucratic exercises, the paper works backward from a desired conclusion. The goal is a resumption of nuclear testing. The authors sing the praises of new mini-nuclear weapons and radioactive bunker-busters that, alas, cannot be developed if the United States continues the voluntary moratorium on testing being observed by the world’s established nuclear powers. That, for me, is the least convincing part of the exercise. The losses from going first and thereby encouraging China or France to test new nuclear devices outweigh the gains that a resumption of US testing now would bring. And it would do nothing to lessen Bush’s Toxic Texan image abroad. The administration is right in insisting that this is the beginning, not the end, of an important internal discussion. But it is being intellectually dishonest in disowning the shaping power of what has already been written and which must now be weighed by the president. © Copyright 2001 The Frontier Post ***************************************************************** 27 Powell denies change in U.S. policy -- The Washington Times March 16, 2002 From combined dispatches Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said yesterday that U.S. policy on the use of nuclear arms had not changed, despite a Pentagon review that raised the prospect of using atomic weapons in a wide range of conflicts. "We have not changed our policy," Mr. Powell said in an interview with the Associated Press when asked about a 1978 U.S. pledge not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states. President Bush's denunciation of Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an "axis of evil" and the U.S.-led campaign against terrorism already had raised chances of using American military power generally. Mr. Bush said at a news conference Wednesday he was leaving "all options on the table" as the Pentagon reworked its nuclear-weapons policy to deter any attack on the United States, including from non-nuclear states such as Iraq, Iran, Libya and Syria. The 1978 pledge was made by the Carter administration and reaffirmed, most recently, by the Clinton administration in 1995. Despite both pledges, U.S. officials have never ruled out the use of nuclear weapons — a position reflected in Mr. Bush's remarks. In an interview with The Washington Times last month, John Bolton, undersecretary of state for international security and arms control, said about the 1978 pledge: "We are just not into theoretical assertions that other administrations have made." Washington is "not looking for occasions to use" its nuclear arsenal, but "we would do whatever is necessary to defend America's innocent civilian population," Mr. Bolton said. In case of an attack on the United States, "we would have to do what is appropriate under the circumstances, and the classic formulation of that is, we are not ruling anything in and we are not ruling anything out," Mr. Bolton said. In 1978, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance made the following statement on behalf of President Carter: "The United States will not use nuclear weapons against any non-nuclear-weapon state party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty or any comparable internationally binding commitment not to acquire nuclear explosive devices, except in the case of an attack on the United States, its territories or armed forces, or its allies, by such a state allied to a nuclear-weapon state, or associated with a nuclear-weapon state in carrying out or sustaining the attack." In 1995, Warren Christopher, the first secretary of state in the Clinton administration, reaffirmed Washington's commitment. Along with the pledges of the other four permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, who are all nuclear powers, it became part of a U.N. resolution, which the council adopted on April 11, 1995. But a year later, Defense Secretary William Perry said the United States would not hesitate to retaliate with nuclear weapons to an attack with chemical or biological weapons. "If some nation were to attack the United States with chemical weapons, they have to fear the consequences of a response from any weapon in our inventory. ... We could have a devastating response without use of nuclear weapons, but we would not forswear that possibility." ***************************************************************** 28 UN Agency Appeals for Funds to Combat Nuclear Terrorism Environment News Service: VIENNA, Austria, March 22, 2002 (ENS) - The United Nations agency responsible for inspections and verifications of nuclear facilities around the world has approved an action plan to upgrade worldwide protection against acts of nuclear terrorism. The International Atomic Energy Agency Board of Governors is now calling on governments to contribute to funding of the plan "as a matter of urgency." In approving the plan, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) acknowledged that national measures for protecting nuclear material and facilities are "uneven in their substance and application." [inspectors] IAEA safeguards inspectors at work (Photo courtesy [http://www.iaea.org] ) In his remarks to the Board March 19, IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei said, "All of us are vulnerable because all of us use nuclear materials and radioactive materials can easily move across borders." As an independent intergovernmental, science and technology based organization that serves as the global focal point for nuclear cooperation, the IAEA admitted, "There is wide recognition that the international physical protection regime needs to be strengthened." The IAEA has calculated its annual funding needs at $12 million to carry out its action plan and an additional $20 million per year to enable the agency to respond to urgent situations that require immediate security upgrades. A number of countries have already contributed to fund the plan, including Australia ($100,000), Great Britain ($350,000), Japan ($500,000), the Netherlands (EUR 250,000), Slovenia (EUR 14,000), and the United States ($1 million). [Iraq] UN inspection shows damaged Tammuz-2 reactor at Tuwaitha, Iraq. (Photo courtesy Mouchkin/IAEA) A number of other countries announced in-kind support to the plan, including Finland, France, Germany, India, Romania, and Turkey. Other countries expressed hope to finance or provide support to the plan in the near future. Also, in November 2001, the United States and the Nuclear Threat Initiative each pledged $1.2 million for the fund. ElBaradei emphasized that these new activities will not "diminish the primary responsibility of the state on all matters of security; rather they are designed to supplement and reinforce national efforts in areas where international co-operation is indispensable to the strengthening of nuclear security." "This modest investment in nuclear security will bring benefits for all states," he said. The IAEA currently safeguards over 900 facilities in 70 countries on a regular safeguards budget of approximately US$80 million per year. ***************************************************************** 29 Investigators rule out Kursk collision, awaiting raising of bow section BBC Monitoring Service - United Kingdom; Mar 23, 2002 Text of report in English by Russian news agency Interfax Moscow, 23 March: Sources close to the team investigating the accident of the Kursk nuclear submarine have said they believe causes for the catastrophe will be uncovered. "The work in this area is going on, and not only investigators and [law-enforcement] operatives, but also the Navy and research centres throughout Russia are involved in it," one of these sources told Interfax. At the moment, over a thousand objects that could be of informative value for the investigation, including the logbooks and 22 tapes from centres of coded automatic communication and secret subsurface communication, have been retrieved from the Kursk hull, the source said. Investigators also hope they could obtain additional information after the bow section is raised from the Barents sea floor. Touching on possible scenarios of the Kursk catastrophe, the Interfax source said, "according to information the investigation has in hand now, a collision with some surface or subsurface object can be ruled out". "The dent on the outer hull, which is still confusing many people, is located along a frame and was caused by a temperature and pressure differences following the torpedo explosion," the source said. He also admitted that the ammunition scattered at the scene will pose principal danger when fragments of the bow section are raised from the seafloor. "What we found and retrieved from the second and third sections is just a smaller part of the ammunition set that was aboard the Kursk," he said. The source also commented on the identification of the crewmembers' bodies. "No one believed that we would manage to identify almost all sailors, but this has been done by huge efforts: 115 out of the 118 submariners have been identified," he said. Despite the fact that 21 crew members have been identified by body fragments, no genetic examination has been carried out, the source said. "Taking into account that the remains were in salty water for over a year, it was pointless to carry out DNA examinations," he said. As for seamen Dmitry Kotkov and Ivan Nefedkov, and Dagdiesel company representative Mamed Gadzhiyev, the Interfax source said it was unfortunately impossible to identify them. "Almost 200 fragments we found in the submarine hull were remains of the already identified submariners," he said. The source doubted that the remains of the missing crew members could be found when the bow section of the Kursk is raised. "You should take into account the power of the explosion, currents, and other collateral factors. We are really sorry but we are unable to identify those of whom nothing has left," he said. Source: Interfax news agency, Moscow, in English 1042 gmt 23 Mar 02 /BBC Monitoring/ © BBC. ***************************************************************** 30 U.S. nuclear secrets in jeopardy again? BulletinWire March 22, 2002 The beyond-top secret intranet that houses the Nuclear Weapons Information Project (NWIP), a classified multimedia archive containing a comprehensive history of U.S. nuclear weapons, was allegedly broken into by a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, according to the April 1 issue of the right-wing magazine Insight. "Any compromise of this information is serious from a number of different perspectives," a former Energy Department official told the magazine. "It could tell other countries' scientists about how the U.S. developed its weapons at a time when our technology was similar to theirs—as with Pakistan today, whose nuclear program is similar to America's early weaponry.” The official, (who, like all Insight’s sources on the supposed NWIP security breach, were unnamed), was ostensibly referring to Pakistan’s nuclear program in light of another of Insight’s sketchy allegations—that the suspected scientist is from Pakistan and has family ties to that country’s intelligence agency, the ISI. BulletinWire can find no other reports confirming the security breach, but the consequences of such a security violation would be far-reaching, as Dan Stober reported in the July/August 1999 Bulletin. The database “represents the crown jewels of America's nuclear weapons program,” and is perhaps “the most attractive nuclear espionage target,” Stober reported. Part of the Stockpile Stewardship Program, the NWIP archive is a “how-to manual for every weapon in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, from blueprints and data from hydrogen bomb tests to video interviews with the physicists and engineers who designed them.” It is a repository of classified knowledge “so complete that its theft by foreign spies would constitute a loss of virtually every nuclear weapon design secret possessed by the United States.” Now that would be a big story. See: “Nuclear Secrets: Steal This! [http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/1999/ja99/ja99stober.html] ” by Dan Stober, July/August 1999 Bulletin "Feds Launch Nuke Probe, Online Security Lapses Raise Concerns of Terror Attacks Following Recent Thefts [http://www.insightmag.com/news/207335.html] ," Insight, April 1, 2002 From Lawrence Livermore National Labs: Preserving Nuclear Weapons Information [http://www.llnl.gov/str/Lowns.html] Nuclear Weapons Information Project (A.2.2) [http://www.llnl.gov/projects/ia/library/ia-report/app2.html] March 13, 2002 The new-nuke chorus gets louder Leaked portions of the classified Nuclear Posture Review (which has yet to be released in an unclassified format, even though the release of that version is mandated by Congress), reveal the Bush administration’s array of plans for nuclear weapons. In response to the reports that the Pentagon will seek a new generation of nuclear weapons and pursue other unprecedented nuclear measures, Bulletin publisher Stephen Schwartz said, “Not since the early 1980s and the administration of Ronald Reagan has a U.S. president placed such a high priority on nuclear weapons. But while the Reagan administration developed new nuclear capabilities and doctrine to deter and defeat a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union, the Bush administration envisions using nuclear weapons in an array of non-nuclear scenarios, including the destruction of chemical and biological weapon stockpiles. “Seeking to make nuclear weapons more usable—especially by developing new weapons for such missions as destroying underground compounds—runs counter to decades of U.S. policy to prevent the use of nuclear weapons and downplay their utility as instruments of warfare,” Schwartz said. “These plans are dangerous and counterproductive. No nuclear weapon is small enough to avoid the significant blast and fallout effects caused by a nuclear detonation. Violating the 56-year taboo on using nuclear weapons, especially in response to non-nuclear threats will destroy the nuclear nonproliferation regime and jeopardize, not strengthen, U.S. security interests around the world.” Last July, Schwartz first reported on the push for a revival of new nuclear weapons. “A small but influential group has been quietly paving the way for a nuclear revival. They want to build a variety of new and improved warhead, including a new generation of highly accurate, ground-penetrating, bunker busting beauties,” he wrote. It was reaction to September 11 that provided some impetus for a new push toward a greater nuclear presence in the nations war planning, according to Bill Arkin, who wrote in the Los Angeles Times that “Heretofore, nuclear strategy tended to exist as something apart from the ordinary challenges of foreign policy and military affairs. Nuclear weapons were not just the option of last resort, they were the option reserved for times when national survival hung in the balance--a doomsday confrontation with the Soviet Union, for instance. “Now, nuclear strategy seems to be viewed through the prism of September 11. For one thing, the Bush administration's faith in old-fashioned deterrence is gone. It no longer takes a superpower to pose a dire threat to Americans” (March 10). In his statement concerning the Nuclear Posture Review, Schwartz concluded, "Violating the 56-year taboo on using nuclear weapons, especially in response to non-nuclear threats, would destroy the nuclear nonproliferation regime and jeopardize, not strengthen, U.S. security interests around the world. The administration's nuclear plans are yet another signal that non-military options to curtail the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction are not being pursued seriously. Resorting to nuclear threats is a profound failure of vision and leadership." See: “The New-Nuke Chorus Tunes Up [http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/2001/ja01/ja01schwartz.html] ,” July/August 2001 “Mini-Nukes? [http://www.thebulletin.org/bulletinwirearchive/BulletinWire010419.html] ” BulletinWire, April 19, 2001 ©2002 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists ***************************************************************** 31 Making Enemies The Salt Lake Tribune -- Utah's Statewide Newspaper Saturday, March 23, 2002 Does someone have an old copy of the book, How to Make Friends and Influence People and will they please send it to President Bush? He must have read a parody of it titled How to Make Enemies and Frighten People. His casual comments about us using nuclear weapons to deter attacks against countries that threaten the U.S. and then naming five countries including China and Russia blew my mind. Why threaten these two countries? Since communism was abandoned, Russia has enough problems and internal building to do to have no will or means to attack us. About 90 percent of the goods I have bought in recent years have been made in China. Why should China attack the country that is its best trading partner? The best way to deter an enemy is to make it a friend and some of our presidents have made friends for the U.S.A. President Bush is doing just the opposite. NORMA W. LAFLAMME Salt Lake City © Copyright 2002, The Salt Lake Tribune All material found on ***************************************************************** 32 Nuclear option in Iraq? WorldNetDaily: FRIDAY MARCH 22 2002 FROM DEBKA INTELLIGENCE FILES Sources say U.S. considering possibility The White House is considering the use of tactical nuclear weapons and planning the break-up of Iraq as an objective in a broad military campaign set now for April, according to the military and intelligence sources of DEBKA-Net-Weekly. One of the initial priorities of the campaign will be to locate nuclear devices believed to be in the possession of Saddam Hussein or al-Qaida terrorists in Iraq, the intelligence service reports. There are strong concerns in Washington that those devices would be used against the United States, Israel or America's allies in the Afghan campaign. As a result of the serious threat of nuclear terrorism, the U.S., DEBKA reports, is weighing its own nuclear options. DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources say European and Middle East governments believe the White House may be reverting to the "second strike" nuclear doctrine espoused by U.S. governments in the U.S.-Soviet Cold War. Once the top echelons of Iraqi leadership are eliminated, the U.S. will demand the Iraqi high command's surrender, starting with the armored divisions of the Republican Guard. DEBKA sources say the creation of an independent Kurdish republic is on the U.S. agenda – thereby splitting Iraq into at least two nations. According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military and intelligence sources, the nuclear issue loomed far larger than the Palestinian problem in Vice President Dick Cheney's Middle East talks and consultations with European leaders. Surprisingly, the Europeans were more vehement in their objections to a nuclear strike in Iraq than the Arab leaders. British Prime Minister Tony Blair warned that the public outcry over America's resort to nuclear warfare could drive him out of office, while other European leaders made it clear that this option must be thrown out of court – both in Iraq and Afghanistan – unless Washington wanted to see NATO's demise. In Saudi Arabia and Israel, Cheney received intelligence evaluations suggesting that in late February, Saddam Hussein attempted to head off a U.S. offensive by transferring to al-Qaida nuclear devices – possibly radiological "dirty bombs" – or explosives and containers packed with viruses, including smallpox. This deadly supply may have been cached in any of the following places – the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority, Rome or Berlin – together with crews standing by for a signal to unleash them, according to DEBKA sources. The vice president's private talks with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in Jerusalem this week, according to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources, focused heavily on the possibility of a nuclear or biological terror attack on a U.S. or Israeli target and means of prevention. The two men reviewed highly sensitive data on the al-Qaida base newly established in south Lebanon and the activities of Iraqi military intelligence agents on the West Bank in collusion with Arafat's senior officers. DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military analysts report that the American planners of the offensive against Iraq have been directed to diversify their scenarios. Whereas their initial instructions were to prepare a contingency plan for an American nuclear attack on the Iraqi leadership's underground towns, including the complexes occupied by Hussein and his military, political and economic teams, they have now been told to draft a second-strike nuclear blueprint. This would be in response to the eventuality of America's combined enemies delivering the first nuclear strike against the United States or its allies – in one or more places. The creation of a Kurdish entity in northern Iraq would bring Iraq's 5 million Kurds to America's side in the campaign against Hussein. But it would threaten the support of the Turkish government, which warns that any extension of autonomy to the Kurds of Iraq will lead to the destabilization of its own 12-million-strong Kurdish community – a problem shared by Iran, Syria and Armenia, each of which has a Kurdish enclave. The Kurdish problem also touches increasingly on Europe, which is bracing for a tidal wave of 50,000 starving Kurdish refugees mostly from Iraq, but also from Turkey, believed to be heading for Europe in the coming weeks to join the thousands already settled there. © 2002 WorldNetDaily.com, Inc. ***************************************************************** 33 Iran: Resalat says American nuclear policy threatening world peace BBC Monitoring Service - United Kingdom; Mar 23, 2002 Text of commentary by 'Abbas Kakavand: "The new American nuclear doctrine" by Iranian newspaper Resalat on 16 March In September 2000 the US Congress asked the country's Defence Department to outline the status of the country's nuclear arsenal and the role that such weapons would play in the 21st Century. After 1994 this was the first review ever done on the nuclear weapons. On January 8, 2002 Donald Rumsfeld's deputy in charge of security J. D. Crouch, read out a report called the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) to the Congress. On January 14, 2002 the Washington Post printed sections of this confidential report. It said: "This NPR has paid special attention to rogue states that are busy manufacturing and gathering weapons of mass destruction. 1 After the attack on Afghanistan and on March 9, 2002 the Los Angeles Times openly reported on this document, saying that there was a possibility that the United States would launch a nuclear attack on seven countries (Russia, Iran, North Korea, Iraq, China, Syria and Libya). 2 Three days later the Los Angeles Times wrote in an article on March 12 that said that a US nuclear attack against these countries would be selective. It wrote: "During the Cold War the aim of holding nuclear weapons was clear -they were meant as a deterrent to stop another nuclear Superpower from launching a nuclear strike on the United States. Today, the threats that are made against US security do not come from Russia but from terrorists like Osama bin Laden and countries such as Iraq, which threaten the United States." 3 This is the most important difference in the new American nuclear doctrine, which has been noted in the NPR, which also outlines the old doctrine dominant during the Cold War. This NPR seeks to find a formula within the framework of America's nuclear strategy for the world after the Cold War. According to Crouch: "We live in a completely different world. The security situation has changed drastically as compared to what it was during the Cold War. At present the United States is in considerably more danger now than it was at the peak of its rivalry and competition with the old Soviet Union. The United States is facing many insecurities and we are not even sure where these threats are coming from. "There are several existing possibilities for war and strife. There are 12 countries that pursue a nuclear weapons programme, 28 countries seek ballistic missiles, 13 countries seek biological weapons and 16 countries that seek chemical weapons. Therefore we must pay attention to this reality that the one main deterrent of the Cold War, which was basically the use of nuclear weapons, is no longer appropriate. We must think about those nuclear capabilities that will be of some use to us in the future." Included in the new American nuclear doctrine: 1. Russia's role has been diminished and it has moved to the sidelines. On the other hand countries such as Iraq, Iran and North Korea are given special attention in the new US nuclear programme. 2. Nuclear weapons no longer play a main role as a deterrent -they become useful for other situations. Compared to the United States' nuclear capability, none of the other countries mentioned in the NPR, that have nuclear capability, have much of a nuclear deterrent -even India and Pakistan, which have been left out of this list in a questionable way. In terms of a nuclear deterrent the capability to strike back after the first strike from the enemy is the key issue, which the mentioned countries lack (with the exception of Russia and China). Therefore the issue of deterrence in the nuclear equation in the 21st Century between the United States and the mentioned countries is to a great extent meaningless. Therefore the comments made by Bush's National Security Adviser with regard to the deterrent role of nuclear weapons is nothing but a lie. 3. There will be a new generation of nuclear weapons that will be made to match the threats from these rogue states and these will be effective in areas other than deterrence. 4 In the final analysis it seems that America's new nuclear doctrine has completely thrown the security and peace in the world in the 21st Century in danger. It indicates an unwelcome start and a black future of crises for this new Century. Footnotes: 1. Washington Post, January 14, 2002 2. Los Angeles Times, March 9, 2002 3. Los Angeles Times, March 12, 2002 4. Anthony H. Cordesman, Analytical Summary of the NPR, January 10, 2002 CSIS Source: Resalat, Tehran, in Persian 16 Mar 02 p 2 /BBC Monitoring/ © BBC. ***************************************************************** 34 Libya condemns British nuclear "threats" Zawya.com TRIPOLI, March 22 (AFP) - Libya strongly condemned on Friday British Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon's comments about the country's readiness to use nuclear weapons against so-called "rogue states." "Libya condemns the comments of the British minister ... which represent a clear threat of targeting certain countries with nuclear arms," senior foreign ministry official Hassuna al-Shaoush told AFP. "We cannot be silent faced with this threat," Shaoush said, labelling it "a sterile attempt to frighten" his country. The official stressed that Libya had signed several international accords against the development of weapons of mass destruction and called for "a balanced dialogue" between Libya and Britain. Hoon said Wednesday that Britain was prepared to use nuclear weapons against rogue states, such as Libya and Iraq, if they ever used "weapons of mass destruction" against British troops in the field. "They can be absolutely confident that in the right conditions we would be willing to use our nuclear weapons," he said. Hoon also told MPs the possibility of terrorists acquiring weapons of mass destruction was a cause for "real anxiety" and something "we would have to guard against very seriously." His comments came in evidence to the committee's inquiry into controversial US plans for a missile defence system to protect against a ballistic missile attack. afg-jb/dab/al 2002 Zawya.com Ltd. All rights reserved. Please read our User ***************************************************************** 35 Cold Fusion Rides Again Science magazine publishes more evidence of tabletop nuclear reactions Hal Plotkin, Special to SF Gate Monday, March 25, 2002 Science magazine dropped a bombshell earlier this month: The prestigious journal published a paper by a team of researchers at Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory who say they have discovered evidence of what looks like nuclear fusion taking place in a relatively inexpensive tabletop device. The findings bear striking similarities to the controversial cold-fusion claims made by chemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann in 1989, although the particular experiment is different. There is considerable controversy surrounding the purported discovery, as well as the magazine's decision to publish the Oak Ridge team's findings. Many members of the mainstream scientific community, physicists in particular, contend that tabletop fusion is physically impossible and a violation of the basic laws of nature. The stakes are enormous. On the one hand, if the carefully documented experiment described in Science is successfully replicated elsewhere, related technologies may one day provide humanity with a long sought-after and much-needed new form of renewable, decentralized, nonpolluting energy. On the other hand, if the results are disproved, cold-fusion researchers will suffer a very significant setback. Like earlier cold-fusion claims, the Oak Ridge team's results also threaten to undermine public support for conventional hot-fusion research programs, including the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories' roughly $4 billion National Ignition Facility, which has been plagued by cost overruns and performance problems. Not surprisingly, thanks to efforts aimed at preventing its publication, the controversial research paper almost never saw the light of day. When the dust settled, however, news of the research ended up being splashed across four articles in the March 8, 2002, issue of what many regard as the world's premier peer-reviewed journal of scientific research. One of the articles details how senior managers at Oak Ridge tried to squelch publication of the research paper despite the fact that it had passed Science magazine's rigorous, nearly yearlong peer-review process. In a highly unusual though not unprecedented step, a few weeks before the publication date, the government lab's top officials contacted the magazine's editor, former Stanford president and biologist Donald Kennedy, and told him that a subsequent experiment conducted by others at the lab had uncovered errors in the original experiment that rendered the fusion findings null and void. They asked that the article be pulled. To mollify their superiors, the Oak Ridge research team, led by R. P. Taleyarkhan, agreed to include a mention of the subsequent experiment, which was not peer reviewed and which used different equipment, in their final paper. But Taleyarkhan's team also stood by their original conclusions, saying more experiments should be done to uncover the reasons for the discrepancies between the data. Kennedy made the final call on publication. "We see no good reason for abandoning our plans to publish the paper, and we can see no merit whatsoever in the efforts to discredit it in advance," he explained in an editorial he wrote in the same issue of the magazine. He stood up to a considerable amount of pressure. At the last moment, top Oak Ridge officials had pulled out their biggest gun. Government labs routinely grant scientists permission to publish their research findings unless the work involves classified information. But in this case, they tried to formally withdraw the routine government permission they had previously granted to Taleyarkhan to publish his paper, according to Science magazine. They were joined in that quest by William Happer, a physicist at Princeton University who headed the U.S. Department of Energy's science office for two unproductive years in the early 1990s. According to Kennedy, Happer, along with several other senior federal energy scientists, also wrote letters discouraging him from publishing the Taleyarkhan paper as submitted. For his part, Happer says he was only trying to protect Science magazine from the embarrassment of publishing work that would later prove false. "There was certainly pressure from Oak Ridge to delay, if not to kill, the paper," Kennedy told Science magazine's own news reporter. "I'm annoyed at the intervention, and I'm annoyed at the assumptions that nonauthors had the authority to tell us we couldn't publish the paper." The notoriously pugnacious Robert Park, director of public information for the American Physical Society (one of the nation's premier physics associations), who for years has made a practice of ridiculing scientists, journalists and others who pursue tabletop-fusion theories and applications, also vigorously criticized Kennedy's decision. Park wrote scathing editorials attacking Science magazine's editor both before and after the Taleyarkhan paper hit the newsstands. One of Park's other frequent targets is Eugene Mallove the former chief science writer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who wrote the first articles revealing MIT's reliance on doctored data in its key study that discredited the original Pons-Fleischmann cold-fusion findings. Mallove resigned from MIT in protest and for the last decade has been publishing the iconoclastic Infinite Energy magazine, which has kept the cold-fusion torch burning (and which has featured reports of experiments remarkably similar to the one recently published in Science). "Perhaps Science magazine covets the vast readership of Infinite Energy magazine," Park sniped in the column he writes for the physics group's Web site, which appeared after word began circulating that Science was about to publish the Taleyarkhan paper. As the world's leading debunker of tabletop fusion, Park has put himself at the center of the controversy. If he's right, historians will look back on him as a sane voice in a wilderness of wild claims. If he's proven wrong, though, his fall from grace will have come many years too late. Few, if any, American scientists have done more than Park to discourage the pursuit of tabletop forms of nuclear fusion. In his editorial, Kennedy says it should be left to the open scientific process to determine whether Taleyarkhan and his colleagues got it right. "Our mission," Kennedy wrote, "is to put interesting, potentially important science into public view after ensuring its quality as best as we possibly can. After that, efforts at repetition and reinterpretation can take place out in the open. That's where it belongs, not in an alternative universe in which anonymity prevails, rumor leaks out and facts stay inside." The Experiment Behind the Firestorm At the root of all of this are the details about the latest experiment. The work builds on previous cold-fusion research, even though many researchers have dropped that much- maligned term and now prefer to call it "tabletop fusion" or "sonofusion." By any name, though, what is being described remains something most physicists think is impossible. Conventional physics theory holds that nuclear fusion can occur only under massively extreme pressures and temperatures of the sort found at places such as the center of the Sun. The Oak Ridge team drew some critical lessons from the earlier Pons-Fleischmann experiments. For starters, they did not rely on the often unstable combination of platinum wire, palladium metal and deuterium oxide in which the chemists had first claimed to observe their unexpected fusion finding, but which later proved difficult to replicate. Instead, Taleyarkhan's team took some of the same basic concepts and applied them to the long neglected field of sonoluminescence, which was first discovered by scientists at the University of Cologne in 1934. Put simply, sonoluminescence means that bubbles excited by sound waves can emit flashes of light. Until quite recently, the intriguing phenomenon wasn't very well understood or controllable, but advances in sonoluminescence made the Oak Ridge team's apparently more reliable approach to creating tabletop fusion possible. The scientists discovered that with a few extra tweaks (including bombarding a deuterated acetone solution with high-speed neutrons), they could create bubbles that would grow to about 1 millimeter across. Then, in a fraction of a second, they could implode the gas inside the bubbles to just a few nanometers (or billionths of a meter) in diameter. It's like taking a small building and instantaneously squishing it to the size of a rock. "The catastrophic collapse ... heats [the solution] to the point at which deuterium atoms collide and fuse, the authors argue," explains Science writer Charles Seife in an article that accompanies the Taleyarkhan report. The claim that fusion is taking place is bolstered by measurements of two known markers of nuclear reactions, tritium-decay activity and neutron emissions. It was the absence -- or at least inconsistent presence -- of those fusion markers that helped create much of the widespread derision about the original Pons-Fleischmann experiment within mainstream physics circles. Those are the measurements that Taleyarkhan's bosses say he and his colleagues got wrong. Taleyarkhan's response is that his team has repeated the experiment many times with the proper controls in place and that any contrary results should in all fairness be subjected to the same peer-review process that was applied to the publication of his article. Science magazine's decision to publish the paper promises to take the cold-fusion debate to an even more fevered level. What happens next is not hard to imagine. Leading members of the mainstream physics community will in all likelihood continue to try to discredit the new research findings. After all, everything they have stood for -- and most of the money they get from the federal government -- is now at stake. That's one reason we will probably see stepped-up criticisms of the Oak Ridge team, including the type of unfair personal attacks that damaged the careers of several noted scientists whose work supported the original Pons-Fleischmann cold-fusion claims (such as John Bockris, a former distinguished professor of physical chemistry at Texas A&M University and co-founder of the International Society for Electrochemistry, and former Stanford Professor Bob Huggins). Science editor Kennedy may also come under continued fire. The long knives are coming again out not only because of the controversial nature of the research but also because some very considerable sums of money are involved. The National Ignition Facility hot-fusion project, for example, is the single most expensive item in the Department of Energy's research budget. The project, which seeks to use superpowerful lasers to create fusion, has been a scientific scandal virtually from the start. Its first director, Michael Campbell, was forced to resign after admitting he didn't have the Ph.D. from Princeton he claimed he had earned. The as-yet-unsuccessful effort he led is now significantly over budget and years behind schedule. The cause of good science will be aided by Science magazine's courageous decision to publish the full details of the latest tabletop-fusion research. It's possible, of course, that the claims made by Taleyarkhan and his colleagues will be successfully debunked by others, in which case humanity will gain a better understanding of the best ways to measure and identify nuclear reactions. But it's also possible that Taleyarkhan's work will finally unleash the physics revolution that Pons, Fleischmann and so many others tried but failed to touch off. If that happens, we may see the era of fossil fuels at long last begin to draw to a close. Imagine being able to buy little cold-fusion reactors, which would free humanity from our dependence on centralized, polluting forms of energy, as well as the despotic governmental regimes that control them. Big government budgets for hot-fusion programs would likely take a hit, but the global economy would eventually get an invigorating supply of new cheap and clean energy in return. Taleyarkhan and his colleagues have pledged to work with other scientists to share their methods so their work can be replicated. The critical question now is whether fair and open investigations of their claims will take place here in the United States. The organized high-level campaign against the publication of Taleyarkhan's paper is a reflection of how much is at stake. Either way, though, the steady march of science will go on. The next stop, the Ninth International Conference on Cold Fusion, which most mainstream U.S. physicists are expected to shun, will take place May 19-24, 2002. The meeting, to be held in Beijing, will be sponsored by that nation's leading science, physics and technology groups. Veteran Silicon Valley science and technology writer and broadcaster Hal Plotkin has been following the cold-fusion controversy since its beginnings. The official U.S. Department of Energy Web site continues to maintain that the research is totally without merit. hplotkin@sfgate.com ©2002 SF Gate ***************************************************************** 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: *****************************************************************