***************************************************************** 08/26/02 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 10.218 ***************************************************************** RADBULL IS PRODUCED BY THE ABALONE ALLIANCE CLEARINGHOUSE ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR POLICY 1 UK: Private nuclear industry faces meltdown 2 Nuclear bailout options studied 3 US: Nuclear whistle-blower feels ‘used’ 4 UN and Iran's Peaceful Use of Nuclear Energy 5 Nuclear Power ­ Out of Africa! 6 Zuma Warns Civil Society: Over Demonstrations 7 Reform lifeline for British Energy 8 IHT: France's nuclear dilemma: power vs. environment 9 UN and Iran's Peaceful Use of Nuclear Energy * 10 N. Korea demands U.S. power payments -- 11 US officials in North Korea over nuclear issues, MIA search 12 US: Agency conflict: promoting and regulating nuclear energy 13 Minister says nuclear rescue is under review 14 UK: Private nuclear industry faces meltdown NUCLEAR REACTORS 15 UK: Felixstowe nuclear scare 16 US: TVA customers rank environmental protection No. 1 concern 17 Czech nuclear power plant disconnected from the power grid NUCLEAR SAFETY 18 Airlift of Yugoslav fissile material arrives in Russia 19 US: Safety data erased at uranium plants 20 US: IDF chief: Conflict with PA is 'cancerous' strategic threat 21 US: Federal Agencies Cooperate To Provide Radiation Detection 22 US: Legacy of fear: Fallout shelter relics recall threat gone by* 23 NZ: N-test workers seek medical records NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE 24 Greenpeace to protest over Sellafield waster shipment * 25 SA: Waste, not nuclear power the problem 26 Tennessee, Alabama sites are finalists for uranium plant 27 US: AU: WMC should be part of federal review, says rival 28 US: NRC Licensing Board Schedules Session on Proposed Fuel Storage 29 US: OP: Power Up Skull Valley 30 US: American Ecology Subsidiary Enters New Collective Bargaining Agr 31 US: No one knows what's in nuclear waste burial grounds 32 US: Despite doubts, Shapiro maintains innocence 33 US: PittsburghLIVE.com - Parks residents still wait for clean 34 US: Evidence of offsite dumping grows 35 UK: Greenpeace in port to lead MOX fuel demo * NUCLEAR WEAPONS 36 nuclear weapons, media reports said on Sunday. 37 Pakistan shopping for nuclear equipment in UK 38 French minister passes buck on Polynesia's nuclear issue US DEPT. OF ENERGY 39 Piketon ownership switch sought - 40 ORNL duo helps get uranium out of Yugoslavia 41 Agency: Sandia puts Pantex in lurch 42 Energy Secretary Abraham Visits Michigan Fuel Cell/Hydrogen 43 Secretary Abraham Commends International Cooperation in OTHER NUCLEAR ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** FULL NEWS STORIES ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** 1 UK: Private nuclear industry faces meltdown Times Online August 26, 2002 By Gary Duncan, Economics Correspondent MINISTERS are urgently seeking ways to bail out British Energy, the commercial nuclear generator, to prevent a funding crisis turning the beleaguered power group into a new Railtrack. Brian Wilson, the Energy Minister, made clear yesterday that he and Government colleagues are determined to find means to relieve mounting finacial pressure on British Energy. The group, hit last week by forced shutdowns at two plants, needs to find £450 million within months to pay off debts and cover losses, and has seen its shares plunge. Mr Wilson denied claims that confidential work by a Department for Trade and Industry team codenamed “Blue” was likely to lead to a Railtrack-style renationalisation of British Energy, with Government stepping in to take control of the group. He indicated that he hoped, instead, to find a way to boost British Energy’s revenues to alleviate its financial distress. “The reason British Energy have well-publicised difficulties is that the wholesale price of electricity has been driven below a point at which they can produce economically in this country,” the minister told the BBC’s The World This Weekend. “I think by far the most sensible option is that they should be able to get the price for their product that allow them to operate in a profitable way.” Government sources said talk of a renationalisation of British Energy that mirrored events at Railtrack had a “surreal quality” and was not seen as remotely desirable. But they admitted that unless British Energy could be made viable that “is inevitably the route to which you go”. The DTI is believed to be seeking a mechanism to raise the price that British Energy is paid for the power it generates, or to cut its costs. A Government reform of the energy market, known as Neta, has seen wholesale electricity prices drop by a quarter and British Energy now loses heavily on its output. However, sources emphasised that complex regulatory and other obstacles meant that a long-term solution was unlikely to be found quickly. One option is thought to be an overhaul of the Government’s controversial climate-change levy on carbon emissions. British Energy has lobbied hard for exemption. Ministers are believed to be sympathetic on the grounds that nuclear power does not produce carbon emissions. Mr Wilson said: “There has to be recognition that the biggest non-carbon contribution by far comes from nuclear power and nuclear generators do not get any benefit from that reality.” He added: “I think signals are important, and it is essential to reassure investors that the Government sees a long-term role for nuclear generation which is abolsutely essential to meeting our climate change obligations.” In a stop-gap move to secure some relief, it is understood that British Energy is close to clinching a renegotation of key business ties with the state-owned British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) that will curb its costs. [http://www.thetimes.co.uk ***************************************************************** 2 Nuclear bailout options studied Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Mark Milner Monday August 26, 2002 The Guardian [http://www.guardian.co.uk] The government admitted yesterday that it was looking at possible ways of helping cash-strapped British Energy after reports that it was planning a multimillion-pound bailout for the nuclear generator. Energy minister Brian Wilson acknowledged that the government was looking at a number of "scenarios" for the electricity generating industry, which has been hit by falling wholesale prices. "It would be very irresponsible of government, given everything that's going on, not to be keeping a close eye on security of supply, and indeed all generators who are facing these similar difficulties in getting the price for their product," Mr Wilson told Radio 4's The World This Weekend programme. "In the case of the nuclear industry that obviously carries particular implications potentially for government." The Independent on Sunday had reported that Mr Wilson and industry secretary Patricia Hewitt were considering a plan, known as Project Blue, under which the government might reprivatise British Energy, buy its nuclear power stations or allow it to take over state-owned BNFL's six nuclear reactors. The Business newspaper reported that the government would allow British Energy to take over BNFL's six nuclear power plants without having to assume responsibility for the stations' liabilities, of some £35bn. British Energy has been hard hit by the fall in wholesale prices. It lost £41m on its nuclear operations last year and is expected to see those losses increase this year. Its share price has fallen from a peak of 749p in 1999 to about 60p. Mr Wilson said yesterday there was no Project Blue but added: "There is an element of truth in the fact that we are looking at scenarios - of course we are." Asked if that might include renationalisation, Mr Wilson said: "I think by far the most sensible option is that they should be able to get the price for their product that allows them to operate in a profitable way." The possibility of government intervention came under fire from Liberal Democrat trade and industry spokesman Vincent Cable: "It's very clear that nuclear power isn't competitive in the short and medium term. In the long term there is no solution in sight to the problems of [nuclear] waste disposal. "Liberal Democrats believe there is no need to plan for a substantial nuclear power sector and certainly no need to subsidise it." [UP] Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002 ***************************************************************** 3 Nuclear whistle-blower feels ‘used’ [http://www.courier-journal.com] Brooks sees suit dismissed, job chances fade By JAMES R. CARROLL and JAMES MALONE, The Courier-Journal ERIN, Tenn. -- In a small shack of a house in this two-stoplight West Tennessee town, nuclear whistle-blower Kenneth Brooks ponders a personal nightmare. An industrial safety engineer, Brooks once savored the good life his job brought: nice homes, trendy cars and stylish clothes. Now Brooks and his wife, Gail, hope to outlast the not-so-good times: bankruptcy, extended unemployment and, on some days, grappling with an overwhelming feeling that he was failed by the system that was supposed to protect him. ‘‘I feel used,’’ he said. ‘‘I feel I’m a victim of the system.’’ BROOKS, 52, was fired in mid-1994 by Martin Marietta, which formerly ran the Energy Department’s gaseous diffusion plants near Paducah, Ky., and Portsmouth, Ohio, as a government contractor. He has been unable to find another job in the nuclear industry. He filed a whistle-blower lawsuit in federal court in Columbus, Ohio, in 1994, alleging he was dismissed from the Portsmouth plant for telling the Energy Department about improper practices at the plants. The suit was dismissed in 1997. ‘‘I was asked to destroy government documents,’’ Brooks said. ‘‘I was told not to give that information to the Energy Department.’’ Brooks, then the facilities safety director at Portsmouth, claims he was targeted by managers after he reported to the Energy Department in June 1993 that hundreds of items had been deleted from a computer database that tracked safety problems at the gaseous diffusion plants. Brooks said the sensitivity of his allegations was evident in an internal Martin Marietta memo dated July 28, 1993. In the document, contained in court files, company official Richard Green urged a colleague to keep Brooks’ allegations ‘‘under lock and key’’ and wrote, ‘‘please do not disseminate this any further.’’ Until then, Brooks had received good performance reviews and had been promoted at Portsmouth. But he said that without warning in June 1994, a guard approached him at a training seminar and escorted him to an office, where he was told he was fired. Plant officials collected Brooks’ security badges, gave him five minutes to pick up his belongings and watched him leave the site. Martin Marietta, in documents filed in Brooks’ employment-discrimination suit, said he was fired for unsatisfactory work performance. His lawsuit was dismissed because Brooks did not meet a requirement of Ohio’s whistle-blower law that he believe his employer’s conduct was criminal: ‘‘I knew it was wrong, but I did not know if it was criminal.’’ AFTER FILING the lawsuit, Brooks found others who said they were asked to stretch their ethics at Portsmouth. Thomas Colwell, then a safety engineer, filed an affidavit in 1997 in which he said, ‘‘In my short tenure with (Martin Marietta), I saw and experienced a lot of personal and professional abuse, in an environment short on ethics. ‘‘I was told to bury information, rewrite factual information from a positive perspective, and during a DOE audit, told to ‘keep my mouth shut and not answer any questions.’ ’’ Colwell, who now works for a chemical company in Marietta, Ohio, wrote that he also observed a supervisor provide ‘‘materially incorrect information’’ to an Energy Department audit team, and that calls to a plant ethics hot line ‘‘went unanswered and appeared to be worthless.’’ Brooks previously had raised questions about practices at another nuclear installation. While working for the Energy Department in Pinellas, Fla., in the late 1980s, Brooks said that he reported spending irregularities to a toll-free fraud hot line. Margarita Sexson, an Energy Department auditor who investigated the allegations, said in an interview that Brooks was credible and his concerns were genuine, but the agency did not find wrongdoing. Brooks said department supervisors began treating him abruptly and berating him for the quality of his work. His productivity had been slowed by a back injury, but he said the criticisms were unrelated to that. RECORDS FROM a complaint Brooks filed at the time also show that a department manager asked the investigator looking into the claim of misspent money whether Brooks had attempted to preach or sell her religious materials. The investigator said in a statement that she told the manager that Brooks had done neither. Brooks transferred to an office in Albuquerque, N.M. He resigned in 1990 to work at Portsmouth. After his Portsmouth firing, Brooks moved back to Florida. He exhausted his savings while looking unsuccessfully for work at several companies that operate nuclear power plants, he said. Brooks suspects that he has been ‘‘blackballed’’ in the nuclear industry, because he can’t get a job despite working a decade for the Tennessee Valley Authority nuclear program and another decade for the Energy Department. Brooks piled up credit-card and other debts exceeding $200,000 before filing for bankruptcy in 1998. He moved to Tennessee last year after a disagreement with his sister over a direct-mail venture. Brooks now spends his days re-examining many of the estimated 100,000 pages of documents he amassed in his lawsuit and from Freedom of Information Act requests from the Energy Department. An answer to one FOIA request arrived last month, four years after he filed it. He also ponders the results of his radiation monitoring that were provided to him after he left Portsmouth. During at least two of his four years there, company records show Brooks was exposed to no radiation. He said that would have been impossible, because as a safety engineer, he would have walked through many of the plant’s process buildings. The records also show monitoring results for him in 1989, when Brooks was not working at the plant. UNABLE TO GET a job or an attorney to represent him, Brooks says he lives day to day. He and his wife occasionally walk the hills behind their house, hunting for fossils. Brooks said he would do it all over again if he were asked to compromise his ethics. To a prospective employer, he said he’s got nothing to sell but his time, experience and honesty. ‘‘I’ll tell you like it is; you may not like it, but I’ll tell the truth,’’ he said. ‘‘If there’s a problem, I’ll also give you a solution.’’ Previous stories on the Paducah plant are online at: www.courier-journal.com/cjextra/uranium/index.html [http://www.courier-journal.com] ***************************************************************** 4 UN and Iran's Peaceful Use of Nuclear Energy August 26, 2002 [TehranTimes Navigation] NEWS ANALYSIS TEHRAN - The UN Under Secretary General for Disarmament, Jayantha Dhanapala, said on Saturday that the Islamic Republic of Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and until this date no report has been received that Iran has violated this treaty. Dhanapala also told reporters in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, that the peaceful nuclear cooperation between Iran and Russia is within the framework of international treaties. The UN official's emphasis on the peaceful use of Iran's nuclear installations is due to the clear and transparent position taken by Tehran. The Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant in southern Iran is open to inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and they are cooperating with Iran for the peaceful use of nuclear technology. Their cooperation with Iran focuses on the use of nuclear technology in the areas of medicine, agriculture, energy, industry, and for safety measures in the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant. All developing countries, which have signed the NPT, have an undeniable right to use nuclear energy. According to the Article 4 of the UN Convention for Banning the Spread of Nuclear Arms all the countries which have access to nuclear technology should help other signatories to the NPT. Therefor, the U.S. efforts to disrupt cooperation between Iran and Russia for completing the Bushehr power plant runs counter to international conventions in this regard. By using sanctions against the IAEA, the U.S. administration has tried to put an end to the cooperation between Iran and the agency. Even though Iran ranks fourth in producing oil and comes as a second oil exporter within the OPEC cartel, it needs alternative sources of energy for its long-terms programs. The researches have shown that oil reserves will be depleted in the next twenty years, therefor Iran should find other sources of energy for its rising demand. In the light of this situation, Iran is trying to meet some 20 percent of its electricity demand through nuclear power and its cooperation with Russia on the construction of Bushehr power plant is carried out under the supervision of the IAEA. [webmaster@tehrantimes.com] ***************************************************************** 5 Nuclear Power ­ Out of Africa! allAfrica.com: Greenpeace International (Amsterdam) PRESS RELEASE August 26, 2002 Posted to the web August 26, 2002 Greenpeace activists from five countries today launched a pre-dawn protest at Koeberg, Africa’s only nuclear power plant, in order to push nuclear power technology out of Africa as world leaders gather in Johannesburg for the Earth Summit on sustainable development. Six activists, three women and three men, from the Netherlands, Australia, Mexico, Argentina, Lebanon, landed on a jetty alongside the plant and climbed onto the roof of nearby buildings before dropping a banner that read "Nukes Out of Africa". The international environmental group's ship, the Esperanza, which is in South Africa for the duration of the Summit, was off shore. Despite a fifty-year nuclear history of lies, cover-ups, broken promises and vast radioactive contamination, plans are still being drawn up by South Africa’s state-owned power utility, ESKOM, to build and sell new breed of mini nuclear power stations. "Koeberg is Africa’s only nuclear power plant and should be the last. We are calling on the South African Government to reject ESKOM’s dangerous plans, to be leaders in the renewable energy revolution, not followers down the dirty and dangerous road of nuclear and fossil fuels," said Mike Townsley of Greenpeace. The arguments against nuclear power are well rehearsed. The industry is in terminal decline. Its much vaunted promises of ‘clean, cheap, safe and reliable’ energy have come to nothing. Instead, the 20th century nuclear dream has turned into a 21st century nightmare of mountains of long-lived deadly radioactive wastes, accidents, contamination and nuclear proliferation. Greenpeace calls on governments attending the Johannesburg Earth Summit to channel the US$250 billion annual subsidies squandered on nuclear and fossil fuels into clean, renewable energy alternatives. Governments from around the world are also urged to make a commitment to provide affordable renewable energy to the two billion people, a third of the planet, who live without electricity, and to ensure that renewable resources provide 10% of global energy by 2010. Greenpeace is also seeking a commitment that international financial institutions be required to move 20% of their energy investments to clean, renewable energy. "Energy development must not be allowed to be driven by the shallow self-serving interests of a few powerful corporations. World governments must take the lead in rejecting dangerous and obsolete nuclear and fossil fuel power, and instead they must adopt binding targets for renewable energy production," Townsley said. Koeberg, 30 kilometres from Cape Town, currently provides 6% of the country’s electricity. The new reactor being promoted by ESKOM is known as Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR). Countries such as Germany and the United States have toyed with similar demonstration plants in the past but subsequently abandoned them despite serious financial implications. ESKOM claims that it will cost half the price of any reactor ever built. But large chunks of the financial calculations have been removed from public documents. ESKOM claims the information has been deleted to maintain "commercial confidentiality". "It is difficult not to conclude that the figures have been deliberately omitted because they simply don’t add up. In fact, ESKOM does admit that achieving the holy grail of installing a unit of power for US$1,000 is dependent upon selling at least 258 such reactors over the next two and a half decades," Townsley pointed out. In reality the future doesn’t look so rosy for the nuclear industry. Only one reactor was ordered worldwide last year. ESKOM plans to spend US$120 million to bring the pebble bed modular reactor to market, while only investing around US$5 million in wind power over the next three years. When it comes to PBMR’s deadly and long-lived legacy of high level radioactive wastes, South Africa, like the rest of the nuclear world, has no established method of safely isolating them from the environment. And all ESKOM can offer in its supporting documents are bland assurances that deep geological disposal "is seen as the most natural way of addressing the long-term fate of PBMR spent fuel." Copyright © 2002 Greenpeace International. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). ***************************************************************** 6 Zuma Warns Civil Society: Over Demonstrations allAfrica.com: The Post (Lusaka) August 26, 2002 Joe Kaunda IF they want to test the law, it will be difficult for them, declared South African foreign affairs minister Nkosazana Zuma yesterday. In a warning to local and foreign civil society who have planned demonstrations at the United Nation's World Summit on Sustainable Development which starts today, Zuma warned that nothing short of following the South African laws will be condoned. "We are going to allow very peaceful marches but if they want to test the law, then we will make it difficult," Zuma warned. She said her government had showed a lot of tolerance for the demonstrators and had even allowed them to march on Saturday evening without a permit. "It was only after a group broke away and chose to abandon their planned route that problems started," Zuma said. "All we are saying is that if people want to march, let them plan for it and follow all necessary procedures. But it is a different case if they have come here to break the laws because even I as minister cannot be allowed to go to another country and break the law." She said the South African government would not allow the summit to be treated as an occasion for anarchy. Zuma regretted the action by the international environmental group Green Peace who docked their ship at Koberg in Cape Town, at the nuclear power plant, a restricted are a, and placed a banner calling for the ban on the mode of electricity generation. Twelve of the Green Peace members were arrested. Zuma further warned that the action taken by the group amounted to a breach on national security since the power plant was considered a security installation. She reminded Green Peace and other environmental groups that her government was among the first in the world to "voluntarily" stop the use of military linked nuclear technologies. Earlier commenting on her expectations, Zuma highlighted the issue of health care and access to affordable HIV/AIDS drugs as a matter of major concern. She said South Africa had led the fight for affordable drugs when the stance was least favourable. Zuma said multinational corporations and almost the whole world had even condemned the South African government's push but it stood its ground for the benefit of the people. She said it was sad that multinationals and some governments were simply focused on profits instead of treasuring the preservation of human life. Zuma said her government was trying hard within its limited resources to extend the accessibility of anti-retroviral drugs to curb the transmission of HIV in pregnant mothers to the child. "It is, however, also important to ensure that the mother survives because we cannot expect the extended family to take care of the child because in most cases they also do not have the adequate resources," she said. Zuma said other factors that had to be looked into in the fight against HIV/AIDS were access to basic social services such as clean water, education, health care and nutrition. She said nutrition was important as it helped prolong the lives of those infected with HIV/AIDS. Zuma said this called for the governments' need to also treat food security as a priority. She was briefing the media on the WSSD summit. allAfrica.com Copyright © 2002 The Post. ***************************************************************** 7 Reform lifeline for British Energy BBC NEWS | Business | Monday, 26 August, [Nuclear power plant, Dungeness] British Energy runs eight power plants in the UK The UK government has hinted that it may change the wholesale electricity market to help the struggling nuclear power company British Energy. Energy Minister Brian Wilson said on Monday that British Energy had been badly hit by last year's introduction of new wholesale energy trading arrangements (NETA). These rules opened up competition between operators and drove down the price of wholesale electricity. But unlike other British power utilities, British Energy has no retail business to offset the effect of the lower prices. The Department of Trade and Industry said a white paper setting out the government's policy on energy would be published by early next year. Energy slump British Energy, which produces a fifth of the UK's electricity, has seen its share price plummet by over 80% in the last year as its financial troubles worsened. Trying to define a level playing field is difficult Brian Wilson, Energy Minister It is thought to need about £450m to repay debts and cover losses. Newspaper reports over the weekend suggested that the government would help pay off the debts or even renationalise the company. But Mr Wilson said in a BBC radio interview that the government would look at "the impact of NETA on the viability of generators". He said "trying to define a level playing field is very difficult" among energy providers, but that British Energy should be able to get a price for its product that allows the company to operate profitably. Nuclear debate A change to the wholesale electricity market could be less controversial than direct financial help and would also benefit other energy companies which don't have retail operations. Liberal Democrat trade and industry spokesman Dr Vincent Cable said at the weekend it would be "wrong for the government to organise an expensive bail-out for the nuclear power industry". He believes that nuclear power isn't competitive in the short and medium term. But the energy minister Mr Wilson said on Monday that it could cost more to shut nuclear power stations than keep them open. However, he said the UK "should invest massively in renewable energy" and pointed to countries like France which he said had a "nice mix" of energy sources. British Energy operates eight power plants in the UK, and runs other nuclear power operations in the US. But the company's share price hit an all-time low of 59p at the market close on Friday, after news that it had shut a second reactor at its Dungeness power station for maintenance. ***************************************************************** 8 IHT: France's nuclear dilemma: power vs. environment Catherine Field IHT Monday, August 26, 2002 PARIS France faces some tough decisions on nuclear power that crystallize the dilemma of how to balance prosperity with the environment, the core issue at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. France is more dependent on nuclear power than any nation in the world. It derives three-quarters of its electricity from 59 nuclear reactors under a crash program started in the 1970s when oil prices surged. The plants have so far operated with a clean safety record and provided gigawatts of power, making France not only self-sufficient in electricity but a major exporter of it to its neighbors. The next few years will determine the future of this $160-billion investment. For France has to decide whether to replace its current generation of nuclear plants and where to store highly dangerous long-term wastes. "The real issue for the future of the nuclear option in France appears to be preservation of social acceptability, beginning with the issue of nuclear waste management," says Dominique Finon, director of the Institute of Energy Policy and Economics in Grenoble. Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin told the National Assembly in July that he would introduce a bill on nuclear "transparency" and initiate a debate on energy policy in general, including the future role of nuclear power. A source at Electricite de France, the state-owned company which operates civilian nuclear generators, predicted that Raffarin's government planned to extend the nuclear plants' 30-year scheduled operational life by 10 years. It would then build a new generation of reactors, probably at the same sites as existing plants, ready to start operation when the older reactors are withdrawn from service. Hand in hand with plant renewal would be a big effort to install wind, solar and hydro power to meet a European Union target of deriving at least a fifth of national electricity needs from renewable sources by 2010, the source said. By pursuing what is called the nuclear option, France could argue that it is better placed to curb carbon pollution from fossil fuels under the Kyoto Protocol, the multinational treaty that seeks to impose mandatory reductions in the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Sweden, Belgium and Germany, where there is a powerful green lobby, either abandoned plans to scrap nuclear plants or set very distant goals for dismantling them, when they realized the likely cost of importing more oil or gas as a substitute. But such is Europe's sensitivity to nuclear power since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 that a major wrangle can be expected, even in France, home of the "nuclear consensus," in which the population either supported or acquiesced in the decisions made by their rulers for nearly three decades. In some respects, though, the public mood is less a consensus than ambivalence. According to the opinion poll company IPSOS, almost 70 percent of French adults questioned said they had a "good opinion" of nuclear energy in France, but 56 percent believed a "Chernobyl-like accident" could happen in the country. In the face of such concerns, the dirigiste approach of the 1970s will not work today. "People are more sensitive and conscious of environmental problems facing the planet and, as regards radioactive waste, the perception is not very positive," says Jacques de la Ferte of the Nuclear Energy Agency of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. "One needs to continue informing, explaining and showing the feasibility of what is foreseen." How to tackle long-term nuclear waste - spent fuel rods and other highly radioactive materials that can take millennia to decay - is only now becoming a major issue in France as elsewhere. This is because plants have been storing the waste in cooling ponds for the past three or four decades to let heat and radioactivity subside to safer levels. Now, France, along with several other countries, is having to bite the bullet about long-term storage. Nuclear experts generally agree that the best place to store the waste is in a deep mine in an earthquake-free zone. There it can be kept hundreds of meters underground after being placed in glass, a process called vitrification, which helps increase stability, and then entombed in huge concrete barrels. Highly radioactive waste needs to be stored for thousands or tens of thousands of years, according to whichever opinion you listen to. It must be free from geological movement and be either sealed off permanently or placed under tight, around-the-clock security to deny terrorists material for a "dirty bomb." Given the relative youth of the nuclear industry, no country has yet had to demonstrate the technical prowess or show it has the political and financial commitment for a long-term venture of this kind. Engineers from Andra, the French nuclear waste agency, are digging an underground test lab at Bure, in the northeast of the country, to assess the feasibility of waste storage in clay 500 meters (1,640 feet) underground. There are also plans to test deep storage in rock. Based on the data from these experiments, the government is scheduled to decide in 2006 where the long-term dump will be. The facility itself is expected to start receiving waste in 2020. Mike Townsley of Greenpeace International said: "When they set out down the nuclear path, no one thought they wouldn't be able to solve this problem of nuclear waste. "At that time, they were way too busy slapping each other on the back to worry about what they were sweeping under the mat. Now, you are looking at creating a structure that will contain waste for time scales beyond human imagination and scientific and civil engineering capabilities." Catherine Field is a free-lance journalist based in the Paris area. Copyright © 2002 the International Herald Tribune All Rights ***************************************************************** 9 UN and Iran's Peaceful Use of Nuclear Energy * *August 26, 2002* News Content TehranTimes Navigation /*NEWS ANALYSIS */ TEHRAN - The UN Under Secretary General for Disarmament, Jayantha Dhanapala, said on Saturday that the Islamic Republic of Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and until this date no report has been received that Iran has violated this treaty. Dhanapala also told reporters in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, that the peaceful nuclear cooperation between Iran and Russia is within the framework of international treaties. The UN official's emphasis on the peaceful use of Iran's nuclear installations is due to the clear and transparent position taken by Tehran. The Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant in southern Iran is open to inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and they are cooperating with Iran for the peaceful use of nuclear technology. Their cooperation with Iran focuses on the use of nuclear technology in the areas of medicine, agriculture, energy, industry, and for safety measures in the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant. All developing countries, which have signed the NPT, have an undeniable right to use nuclear energy. According to the Article 4 of the UN Convention for Banning the Spread of Nuclear Arms all the countries which have access to nuclear technology should help other signatories to the NPT. Therefor, the U.S. efforts to disrupt cooperation between Iran and Russia for completing the Bushehr power plant runs counter to international conventions in this regard. By using sanctions against the IAEA, the U.S. administration has tried to put an end to the cooperation between Iran and the agency. Even though Iran ranks fourth in producing oil and comes as a second oil exporter within the OPEC cartel, it needs alternative sources of energy for its long-terms programs. The researches have shown that oil reserves will be depleted in the next twenty years, therefor Iran should find other sources of energy for its rising demand. In the light of this situation, Iran is trying to meet some 20 percent of its electricity demand through nuclear power and its cooperation with Russia on the construction of Bushehr power plant is carried out under the supervision of the IAEA. By Nigel Cope, City Editor 26 August 2002 The Government confirmed yesterday that it is exploring ways to help the nuclear power giant British Energy, which is facing a financial crisis. The energy minister, Brian Wilson, tried to play down weekend reports that the Government is considering a range of options including full-scale renationalisation of the debt laden group. This would have unfortunate echoes of the Railtrack fiasco. However, he refused to rule out some kind of financial rescue and admitted the Government was monitoring the situation closely. He said options being explored included introducing a level playing field that would enable nuclear energy to compete more efficiently with other energy providers. Commenting on British Energy's plight, which has seen its debts spiral and the shares sink to new lows, he said: "The reason British Energy have well-publicised difficulties is that the wholesale price of electricity has been driven down below a point at which they can produce economically in this country." He added: "Given the implication of the nuclear sector to our energy mix, it would be very strange if we weren't keeping a close eye on the possible implications of [British Energy's] difficulties." Asked whether this could mean renationalisation, he said "I think by far the most sensible option is that they should be able to get the price for their product that allows them to operate in a profitable way." Apart from renationalisation, other possibilities include a deal to buy the group's eight nuclear power stations, or paying British Energy to take over the six nuclear reactors from British Nuclear Fuels without taking on any of the liabilities. British Energy needs to raise around £450m in the next year to pay off various debt commitments. It has been hit hard by the climate change levy under which it pays around £100m a year even though it does not produce carbon dioxide emissions. It also claims its rates bill is £25m too high. The company's shares have plunged from 336p last September to just 59p on Friday and the company's bonds trade at only 50p in the pound. British Energy refused to comment on the possibility of a Government rescue yesterday. However, it hinted at a possible deal with BNFL. "We are in discussions with BNFL on a wide range of issues," a company spokesman said. The Government denied the existence of "Project Blue", a codename for contingency plans being made to address British Energy's problems. "British Energy is a private company operating in a commercial market," a Department of Trade and Industry spokesman said. "Obviously the Government monitors the situation closely but these are issues that will be dealt with by the ... board of directors." Liberal Democrat trade and industry spokesman Dr Vincent Cable called the possibility of a Government rescue a "very worrying development". He added: "It would be wrong for the Government to organise an expensive bailout for the nuclear power industry. It's very clear that nuclear power isn't competitive in the short and medium term." British Energy runs eight power plants in the UK as well as nuclear power operations in the United States. The company was hit last week by the closure of two power stations. The plant in Dungeness, Kent, was shut for maintenance, while the Torness reactor, in East Lothian, was closed because of a technical fault. The six Magnox sites British Energy may take over include reactors at Sizewell, Oldbury and Gwynedd. ***************************************************************** 14 UK: Private nuclear industry faces meltdown August 26 2002 By Gary Duncan, Economics Correspondent MINISTERS are urgently seeking ways to bail out British Energy, the commercial nuclear generator, to prevent a funding crisis turning the beleaguered power group into a new Railtrack. Brian Wilson, the Energy Minister, made clear yesterday that he and Government colleagues are determined to find means to relieve mounting finacial pressure on British Energy. The group, hit last week by forced shutdowns at two plants, needs to find £450 million within months to pay off debts and cover losses, and has seen its shares plunge. Mr Wilson denied claims that confidential work by a Department for Trade and Industry team codenamed ?Blue? was likely to lead to a Railtrack-style renationalisation of British Energy, with Government stepping in to take control of the group. He indicated that he hoped, instead, to find a way to boost British Energy?s revenues to alleviate its financial distress. ?The reason British Energy have well-publicised difficulties is that the wholesale price of electricity has been driven below a point at which they can produce economically in this country,? the minister told the BBC?s /The World This Weekend. / ?I think by far the most sensible option is that they should be able to get the price for their product that allow them to operate in a profitable way.? Government sources said talk of a renationalisation of British Energy that mirrored events at Railtrack had a ?surreal quality? and was not seen as remotely desirable. But they admitted that unless British Energy could be made viable that ?is inevitably the route to which you go?. The DTI is believed to be seeking a mechanism to raise the price that British Energy is paid for the power it generates, or to cut its costs. A Government reform of the energy market, known as Neta, has seen wholesale electricity prices drop by a quarter and British Energy now loses heavily on its output. However, sources emphasised that complex regulatory and other obstacles meant that a long-term solution was unlikely to be found quickly. One option is thought to be an overhaul of the Government?s controversial climate-change levy on carbon emissions. British Energy has lobbied hard for exemption. Ministers are believed to be sympathetic on the grounds that nuclear power does not produce carbon emissions. Mr Wilson said: ?There has to be recognition that the biggest non-carbon contribution by far comes from nuclear power and nuclear generators do not get any benefit from that reality.? He added: ?I think signals are important, and it is essential to reassure investors that the Government sees a long-term role for nuclear generation which is abolsutely essential to meeting our climate change obligations.? In a stop-gap move to secure some relief, it is understood that British Energy is close to clinching a renegotation of key business ties with the state-owned British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) that will curb its costs. Copyright 2002 ***************************************************************** 15 UK: Felixstowe nuclear scare August 26, 2002 BY PAUL GEATER August 25, 2002 18:14 FELIXSTOWE was at the centre of a major nuclear scare earlier this month, the Home Office confirmed today. Anti-terrorist forces feared radioactive waste to create a so-called "dirty bomb" was being brought into Britain in a container through the port. But when the material was finally examined 70 miles away, it was found to be a small bolt that had somehow been contaminated and was no danger. The radioactivity was detected by equipment introduced earlier this year to spot material which could be smuggled in by terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. However a breakdown in communication between various agencies meant that the potentially dangerous cargo was not examined until it reached the end of its journey ? Tilbury in Essex ? after travelling through Ipswich, Colchester, and Chelmsford. For the full story, see Monday's Evening Star. Copyright © 2002 Archant Regional. All ***************************************************************** 16 TVA customers rank environmental protection No. 1 concern Elizabethton Star - Online Edition By Kathy Helms-Hughes STAR STAFF khughes@starhq.com A telephone survey conducted by a Portland, Ore., research firm has concluded that Tennessee Valley Authority customers in the seven state region served by TVA believe environmental protection and electricity production should be the agency's highest priorities. The study, paid for by TVA and done by Davis, Hibbits & McCaig, which specializes in natural resource and energy issues, surveyed 3,600 citizens, or about 1 percent of the more than 3 million households TVA serves in Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina and Virginia. Survey results will serve as guidance for TVA as it continues its two-year Reservoir Operations Study, "a comprehensive look at how TVA manages the Tennessee River system and its reservoirs," according to the agency. Carter County's Watauga Lake and Watauga River form the headwaters of the Tennessee River system. Barbara Martocci of TVA media relations, said the telephone survey "will be used as part of the information that will help us determine what the issues are that the public has and what they value." TVA completed a series of public meetings in April and now is looking at finalizing a scoping document which the agency hopes to release soon "that will let everyone know what the public saw as the issues, what they liked and didn't like about how we operate the system, and what they value about the system," Martocci said. "The scoping document just defines what the scope of the issues are that TVA will look at to help us determine what the alternatives are in an Environmental Impact Statement. Once we develop the alternatives we will issue a draft Environmental Impact Statement and then the public will comment on that," Martocci said. Analyses will be performed to determine "what benefits are provided by having reservoirs up longer or by fluctuating them, and by ensuring that water stays healthy," she said. According to a Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation draft study of the state's reservoir and stream quality, many of TVA's reservoirs are contaminated with PCBs and chlordane. However, according to Martocci, that is not a factor in conducting the study. "One of the reasons for doing the study is to determine if we can provide greater overall value to the public." TVA customers were selected at random and were asked in the telephone survey about their quality of life, TVA's management of the river system, and their priorities for how water in the Tennessee River and its tributaries should be allocated to provide such benefits as flood control, navigation, electricity, water quality, economic growth, water supply, recreation and land use. Of those responding, 32 percent ranked protecting the natural environment as the highest priority for TVA's operation of the river system; 28 percent said electricity production should be the top priority; water supply and flood control ranked 17 percent and 13 percent, respectively; and recreation and navigation came in at 5 percent and 2 percent. Hopkinsville (Ky.) Electric System General Manager Austin Carroll, an adviser to the study's project manager, said, "The people in the region who have a vested interest in wanting to change or keep the current balance of TVA's reservoir operations are already in communication with TVA. It's important to understand the priorities of the silent majority so TVA's obligations to the greater population are fully understood by decision-makers." Dr. Vicky Langston of Austin Peay State University, also an adviser to the study, said, "Those who don't get involved with TVA issues need a voice in the Reservoir Operations Study. A scientific survey is an excellent way to understand how TVA impacts the general public." Copyright © 1996 - 2002 Elizabethton Newspapers, Inc. ***************************************************************** 17 Czech nuclear power plant disconnected from the power grid because of pump problems Sun Aug 25,11:05 AM ET PRAGUE, Czech Republic - A controversial Czech nuclear power plant near the Austrian border has been disconnected from the country's power grid after workers discovered problems with pumps in its non-nuclear part, an official said Sunday. Milan Nebesar, spokesman for the Temelin plant, said the plant's first unit was disconnected from the power grid Saturday morning. Workers were checking the pumps, he added. A minor steam leak 10 days ago also forced workers to disconnect the unit from the grid. In other trouble earlier this week, a short circuit occurred in the turbine of the generator in the plant's second unit, delaying tests for the second time this summer. The turbine rotor is being dismantled for repairs. The plant, located just 60 kilometers (35 miles) north of the Austrian border, has been a source of friction between the two countries. Critics in Austria claim the plant is unsafe and demand that it be shut down, but Czech authorities insist the plant poses no safety risks. Tests in the first unit of the 2,000-megawatt plant — based on Russian design and upgraded with U.S. technology — started in November 2000. The testing has been plagued by frequent non-nuclear malfunctions. In June, the first unit entered the last stage of tests and plant officials say it should be ready for commercial use in 18 months. (nr/sl) Copyright © 2002 The Associated Press. ***************************************************************** 18 Airlift of Yugoslav fissile material arrives in Russia The Taipei Times Online: 2002-08-25 REUTERS, MOSCOW Russia took charge from Yugoslavia on Friday of enough weapons-grade uranium for two nuclear bombs, under a unique scheme to prevent extremists from obtaining material for atomic devices. The US-funded operation flew 6,000 uranium rods from the Vinca nuclear research institute near Belgrade to Russia, where the fuel will be blended down and used for research or in civilian power stations. "The current operation is an excellent example of Russian-American cooperation to prevent the threat of international terrorism," the RIA news agency quoted Russia's Atomic Energy Ministry as saying. Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart George W. Bush made the fight against proliferation of weapons of mass destruction a priority at their May summit in Moscow. The following month US Attorney General John Ashcroft said the US authorities had captured a suspected American al-Qaeda operative ordered to help plan an attack on the US with a radioactive "dirty bomb." Osama bin Laden's network is blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks on the US. The US-based Nuclear Threat Initiative said it had helped clear the way for the operation by providing US$5 million to clean-up and decommission Vinca, which the Yugoslav authorities had linked to the fuel's repatriation. Congress spending rules meant US government money could only be used for the transfer of the fuel -- 48.4kg of highly enriched uranium -- and not to meet ecological concerns. "Highly-enriched uranium is the raw material for catastrophic terrorism, and it requires the same security discipline that we currently apply to nuclear weapons," said Sam Nunn, the NTI co-founder who spent much of his Senate career working to eliminate or make secure Russia's Soviet-era weapons of mass destruction. Laura Holgate, NTI vice president in charge of Russia and former Soviet states, said the material transferred to Russia was enough for two-and-a-half nuclear bombs. "It's exactly the kind of material that is suited for a nuclear weapon" she said in a telephone interview from Washington. "It's not radioactive and can be carried in your pocket, which is what makes it a proliferation concern." The Institute of Atomic Reactors in Dmitrovgrad, in Russia's Volga region of Ulyanovsk, has worked for years with the US Energy Department to boost the security of its vaults where fissile material is stored, said Holgate. She said US personnel on the ground had confirmed the uranium's safe arrival with its IAEA security tags intact. The NTI says around 2.5 tons of spent fuel remains at Vinca in a highly contaminated pool near the now disused reactor. "Normally these pools look like swimming pools, they are pristine, they are clear, you can read numbers on the [fuel] rods," Holgate said. "This pool looks like a cesspool." The NTI will now help plan Vinca's decommission and clean-up. Similar Soviet-era research reactors are believed to remain in around 16 countries including Belarus, Libya, Romania and Egypt. This story has been viewed 220 times. URL=[http://www.taipeitimes.com/news/2002/08/25/story/0000165492] Copyright © 1999-2002 The Taipei Times. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 19 Safety data erased at uranium plants Courier-Journal Local News Records show U.S. didn't clear firms' actions By JAMES R. CARROLL and JAMES MALONE, The Courier-Journal PADUCAH, Ky. -- Computer records of hundreds of safety and environmental problems at the Kentucky and Ohio uranium processing plants were erased by the facilities' operators in 1993 without the federal government's approval. Although the Department of Energy required the plant operators to track their progress toward correcting the problems, the companies deleted more than one-fourth of such records without clearance, according to court and other documents obtained by The Courier-Journal. So serious was the breach of regulations by Martin Marietta Corp. and United States Enrichment Corp. at the Paducah and Portsmouth gaseous diffusion plants that the Energy Department considered shutting down the plants for safety reasons. Among the items erased were: + Government and operator findings of a lax attitude toward safety by first-line supervisors. + Inconsistent investigations of accidents. + Purposeful violations of health and safety rules by management and rank-and-file workers who, in some cases, went unpunished. + Use of old data and questionable analyses to assess environmental contamination. The Energy Department, after a three-year investigation, reconstructed the erased items from computer archives and paper records and concluded that the deletions were inappropriate and that nearly half either had not been fixed or should have been referred to other agencies before being erased. The United States Enrichment Corp., which now leases and operates both plants, was ordered to fix some of the remaining uncorrected problems, but it was not fined, nor were the plants closed. Four citations against USEC for low-level violations of nuclear-safety regulations were prepared by Energy Department staff, but never issued by the agency. The Justice Department, however, is investigating the erasures as part of its broader probe into allegations of fraud by contractors at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant. Critics of the Energy Department say the episode highlights their concerns that the plant operators are lax about safety and have too much leeway in setting their own standards; that the government is too reliant on contractors for safety information; and that the government takes too long digging into violations and does too little when it finds them. "The contractors are way out of line and they get a little slap on the hand," said Wenonah Hauter, director of Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy Project, a public interest group that monitors energy and environmental issues. "This reflects the lack of a safety culture at DOE, and they are the lap dog of the contractors they are supposed to be overseeing." Mark Donham, a Brookport, Ill., environmentalist and member of the community advisory board that makes recommendations on cleanup operations at Paducah, said "there has been little oversight by DOE." "They are undermanned, and there is a good ol' boys network of not rocking the boat," he said. Defending the Energy Department's decisions, spokesman Walter Perry said "the safety of the public and workers was not an issue." While it was "very difficult to re-create archived (information)," he said, the public and the workers should have "complete confidence" that all erased information was retrieved by a contractor hired by the agency. USEC spokeswoman Elizabeth Stuckle said that while the safety items were "deleted from the tracking system," they were "never deleted from existence." In memos to the Energy Department, USEC also has said that it had the right to erase certain items without permission and that the findings it deleted did not have a significant impact on the plants' safety. Although the Energy Department in recent months announced its intention to be more open about past practices at the plants that may have endangered workers or the public, the story of USEC's and Martin Marietta's unilateral decisions to delete computer records has remained hidden until now. The agency did not disclose the erasures or its lengthy probe in its two recent reports on special investigations at Paducah. The Energy Department's Perry said his department did not discuss the erasures in the reports because "any safety-significant item" was addressed when the two plants were certified in 1996 by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The recent investigations "were performed on DOE, not USEC, operations," he said. WHILE THE contractors escaped any consequences, an employee who told the government about the erased items says he did not. Kenneth Brooks, a former facilities safety manager in Portsmouth, accused his company, the former Martin Marietta Utility Services, of firing him in part because of his actions. Brooks, who now lives in Erin, Tenn., and has been out of work since his firing in June 1994, said in an interview that he had talked recently with the Justice Department regarding the deletions, but he declined to elaborate. At the center of the story are decisions USEC made, in consultation with Martin Marietta (later to become Lockheed Martin Corp.), from July to September 1993. At the time, USEC was taking over management of the uranium-enrichment facilities from Martin Marietta. At the time of the transition, Paducah's computer database, known as the Integrated Resource Management System, or IRMS, contained records of 790 open safety issues at the plant that had been identified by the Energy Department and plant operators. Portsmouth had 903. Ultimately, the Energy Department determined, 464 issues were erased by USEC and Martin Marietta -- 27.4 percent of the total. Energy Department investigators found that a number of the deleted items at Paducah were based on safety shortcomings previously uncovered in 1990 by special investigative task forces from the agency. The agency also discovered during its probe that "it would appear . . . USEC was not properly maintaining the accuracy" of the computer database at the plants. The investigators determined that of the 226 problems erased at Paducah, 111 still needed attention, according to a June 4, 1996, Energy Department executive summary. The agency ordered USEC to incorporate 64 of the items into plans then being drafted to bring the plant into line with Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules. The investigators also determined that 47 items related to environmental and worker-safety issues that should have been referred to the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and other federal and state agencies. At Portsmouth, 114 of 238 items hadn't been resolved when they were erased, the agency concluded. Brooks, who had worked for the government for 21 years before going to Portsmouth, has said in court documents that the effort to delete safety items began with Martin Marietta, just before USEC assumed management of the plants in July 1993. ACCORDING TO documents in a lawsuit Brooks brought in U.S. District Court in Columbus, Ohio, he sent a memo to a superior June 28, 1993 -- days before USEC took over the two plants -- objecting to what the superior had ordered him to do. "I apologize again for bringing up this issue, but I believe the destruction of government safety findings without the review and approval of DOE or (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) is against the law," Brooks wrote. He repeated his superior's alleged instructions to "delete as (many) safety findings as possible before USEC takes over," and added, "I personally would not want to go to jail for destroying government documents." A day after he wrote about his concerns, he contacted Randall DeVault, who is in the regulatory oversight office at the Energy Department in Oak Ridge, Tenn. That started the agency's investigation. Brooks alleged in an interview that in addition to the deletions, countless documents were destroyed, primarily in shredding machines, at Paducah and Portsmouth to keep the Energy Department in the dark about certain practices that he said were unsafe. "There were things that were never uncovered," Brooks said. "A lot of information was shredded. . . . It was destroyed." Perry, the Energy Department spokesman, said his agency was "not aware of any unauthorized shredding, but if we had been informed of this type of activity, it would have been investigated." Brooks sued Martin Marietta in 1994, alleging that his firing was based on his "whistle-blowing." The company denied Brooks' accusation, saying in court documents that he was fired for unsatisfactory work performance. Lockheed Martin -- the product of a merger between Martin Marietta and Lockheed -- declined to comment for this story, saying it would defer to the Energy Department and USEC. The merits of Brooks' claims were never tried. A U.S. District Court judge dismissed his suit in 1997 on legal technicalities, including that the Brooks had not met the requirement of Ohio's law that a whistle-blower believe his employer's conduct was criminal. But vast numbers of internal USEC and Energy Department papers filed in the case document the lengthy dispute between the company (a quasi-governmental entity until it was privatized in 1998) and the government -- a dispute that consumed a lot of time and money. The conflict "has placed a tremendous resource cost on both our organizations," J. Dale Jackson, the Energy Department's regulatory oversight manager, wrote Robert Woolley, USEC's nuclear regulatory policy and assurance manager, in a July 16, 1996, letter. "This cost has not only been a financial burden, but has been frustrating for both our organizations." THE ENERGY Department dispatched two investigation teams to Paducah and Portsmouth during its three-year probe. The documents make clear that the investigators had trouble nailing down what was erased. For example, investigators at one point were directed to a file cabinet that was supposed to contain information about the items. Instead, they found empty file folders and little data about the missing safety issues. Also during the probe, agency documents show, Martin Marietta and USEC submitted changing figures on the number of items deleted at Paducah and Portsmouth. For example, on Feb. 11, 1994, Martin Marietta said 192 items at Paducah had been erased. By March 10, 1995, USEC had raised that number to 208. Three months later, USEC sent a "corrected" copy of 226 items. But within two months, two more USEC revisions began whittling away the total, down to 208, then to 188. An Energy Department team set the number at its high mark of 226. The same shifting numbers came from Portsmouth. DeVault, the regulatory oversight manager in Oak Ridge, said in a 1996 court deposition that he was concerned when he was told by Brooks in 1993 that safety items were being erased from the IRMS database. DeVault knew Brooks from previous inquiries and believed him to be credible. Brooks had been singled out by another Energy official for being helpful during a previous, unrelated investigation, according to a letter in the court files. "We considered the IRMS database to be a series of commitments," DeVault said. "We considered that transfer, when it occurred, to USEC, that they inherited, or they received, those series of commitments . . . on safety-related issues that they needed to address." In letters to USEC, the Energy Department said that U.S. regulations that define how the government oversees the gaseous diffusion plants required the company to notify the agency of any proposed deletions of safety items. And the agency had to approve any such changes, the agency insisted. In its letters to the agency, USEC argued that it did, in fact, have the authority to change safety items without its approval. In a Sept. 21, 1993, letter to the Energy Department's Jackson, John Adams, USEC's occupational safety and health compliance officer, said his office "is currently defining what documents and commitments we feel require DOE approval prior to changing." The agency pressed the matter. It wanted USEC to justify the deletions by writing separate explanations for each issue removed from the files. USEC responded that none of the items it erased required such explanations. Further, the company maintained that it had followed proper procedures for deleting the items. "We believe that the screening process provided reasonable assurance that commitments affecting nuclear safety, safeguards, and security were properly dispositioned," Woolley wrote Jackson on May 12, 1994. Jackson insisted. DeVault said in his deposition that Jackson told USEC officials "that he had no assurance that the plants were safe" if they didn't provide the written explanations. "And (USEC officials) realized they were treading on a point where (Jackson) was considering executing his shutdown authority," DeVault said. USEC relented and filed the explanations. In its submission of Nov. 4, 1994, USEC insisted that "the safety significance of the items cancelled was very low." "Most were either minor compliance issues or programmatic deficiencies identified relative to DOE orders or Martin Marietta corporate policies," USEC said. The agency didn't like USEC's response. The explanations weren't specific enough, it said. Jackson wrote to Woolley that USEC's submission "fails to provide adequate technical justification that all items deleted from the IRMS were not safety-significant." ONE OF the review teams that visited the two plants to investigate the erasures found "several significant violations" at the sites, but the team's draft report was never issued and the agency later sent in a second team, DeVault said in his deposition. He also said that an agency contractor who worked on the investigation recommended citing USEC for "some violations" and calculated that the maximum penalty could have been $130 million if all the violations were found to be serious. DeVault suggested that such a penalty would have been excessive. "When you get that high you get to being ridiculous for a fine," he said. DeVault said he discussed the matter of the fines against USEC with Jackson, who told him that he was using "enforcement discretion" in not assessing any penalties. The Energy Department declined to make Jackson and DeVault available for an interview. USEC's Stuckle said she had spoken with DeVault about the $130 million fine and she said he told her it was "a joke." She said DeVault told her: "I wish I had never said anything. It was all a joke." In his 1996 deposition, DeVault never said the $130 million was calculated as a joke. Four minor violations against USEC were drafted by the Energy Department, but never issued. The draft violations, contained in court documents, all were connected with the erased items at the plants. Previous stories on the Paducah plant are online at: www.courier-journal.com/cjextra/uranium/index.html [http://www.courier-journal.com] ***************************************************************** 20 IDF chief: Conflict with PA is 'cancerous' strategic threat , Ha'aretz Correspondent, and Agencies IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon views the conflict with the Palestinians as one of the two main strategic threats to Israel, along with the prospect of a hostile country attaining nuclear capability. Ya'alon declared Sunday that Israel must emerge victorious in the current conflict with the Palestinians - such a victory would make it clear to the Palestinians that they cannot attain political goals by using terror, he said. Ya'alon, speaking at a conference organized in Jerusalem by the Chief Rabbinate, ahead of the coming High Holy Days, downplayed the threat posed by Iraq or Hezbollah compared to the problem of Palestinian terror and the danger caused by nuclear proliferation. "In the long term, the threat posed by Iraq or Hezbollah doesn't make me lose sleep," Ya'alon said. "What does cost me sleep are two things: first, the prospect of a hostile country attaining nuclear capability and altering the strategic balance; and, second, the Palestinian issue." He added: "If we don't make clear to ourselves that we must win this war [against the Palestinians], we'll find ourselves facing a cancerous threat." Ya'alon added that when he headed Military Intelligence in 1995 he raised questions about the Palestinian Authority. Questions he brought up then concerning the PA's possible reliance on terror have in the past two years become emphatic truths, he said. The chief of staff claimed that the Palestinians launched a war against Israel in 2000 when they grasped that the dispute was headed toward a diplomatic resolution ? and rather than choosing compromise, they initiated terror and violence. The intifada is not a popular uprising, as some would have Israel and the world believe, Ya'alon stressed. Rather, it is a war controlled by the PA leadership, with PA officials determining the tactics and norms in the war. The PA's recourse to terror reflects the Palestinian leadership's unwillingness to accept Israel as a state in the region, Ya'alon said. Some Palestinian leaders believed that Israel would break down at a much earlier stage of the intifada, Ya'alon said. These Palestinians believed that Israel could not endure 600 fatalities and serious economic damage. In reality, Israel has overcome setbacks, and must continue to do so, he declared. Should the conflict end with the Palestinians believing that terror serves their ends, "we'll find ourselves on a slippery slope in terms of our deterrent capabilities, in relations with Arab states and with Arabs in Israel." *Intifada leadership calls on PA to cease joint security meetings* In what appears to be a slap in the face to Palestinian Interior Minister Abdel Raziq Yehiyeh, the joint intifada leadership called on the Palestinian Authority on Sunday to stop its security talks with Israeli officials. A statement issued after a series of meetings between Yehiyeh and opposition groups, which was reported by /Itim/, said that the intifada leadership supports the continuation of the struggle against Israel and objects to the "Gaza and Bethlehem First" plan and the partial solutions offered by Israel. Yehiyeh published a statement earlier Sunday detailing his efforts to get various militant groups to abandon the use of violence. During a meeting last week, Yehiyeh stressed the importance of the security agreement in order to remove Israeli troops from Palestinian towns, he said. "I asserted the need to reassess and revise accordingly the strategy of resistance and to review its presently adopted forms so as to comply with international norms and international legitimacy," Yehiyeh said in the statement. © Copyright 2002 Ha`aretz. All rights reserved ***************************************************************** 21 Federal Agencies Cooperate To Provide Radiation Detection Equipment and Training To Emergency Responders NEWS MEDIA CONTACT: Dolline Hatchett, DOE, 202/586-5806 David Hess, DOJ, 202/307-0703 Monday, August 26, 2002 WASHINGTON, D.C. – The U.S. Departments of Justice and Energy have joined in a cooperative effort, called the Homeland Defense Equipment Reuse (HDER) Program, to provide surplus radiological detection instrumentation and other equipment to state and local emergency first responder agencies nationwide to enhance their domestic preparedness capabilities. The agreement is part of the larger federal effort to enhance the equipment and training available to our nation’s emergency first responders. "The Department of Energy (DOE) is proud to help ensure that our law enforcement and emergency personnel have the necessary equipment and training to prepare them to respond effectively and thoroughly to any emergency. We are pleased to again provide DOE resources to help ensure America’s homeland defense," Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham said. Attorney General John Ashcroft said, "The HDER Program is an excellent example of federal agencies and private organizations working together to address a critical domestic preparedness issue. This program demonstrates the administration’s commitment to equipping those on the domestic front lines – our state and local emergency first responders – in the nation’s effort to prevent future terrorist attacks." A variety of equipment to measure the presence of radiation will be made available through the HDER Program. The equipment, which comes from Energy Department sites across the nation, will be evaluated and refurbished by radiation equipment specialists at DOE’s Office of Assets Utilization, National Center of Excellence for Materials Recycle in Oak Ridge, Tenn. The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Office for Domestic Preparedness (ODP) will then work with established contacts in each state to identify appropriate users in their local emergency responder communities, and DOE will deliver the equipment to these jurisdictions at no cost. Training on the use of the equipment will be available to the emergency responders through ODP’s Domestic Preparedness Equipment Technical Assistance Program (DPETAP). If requested, DPETAP will provide detailed technical information and hands-on equipment operation and maintenance training. Local support for the equipment, including calibration, maintenance and follow-on refresher training, will also be available through a partnership with the Health Physics Society, a 6,000 member national organization of radiation safety professionals. A pilot phase for the HDER Program began on July 1, 2002. This pilot phase will be coordinated with the states containing the nation’s 10 largest metropolitan areas, which include: Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washington D.C. Additional information on the HDER program can be obtained at the DOE’s website at http://www.oakridge.doe.gov [http://www.oakridge.doe.gov] or the DOJ’s website http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/odp/ [http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/odp/] . -DOE- R-02-170 ***************************************************************** 22 Legacy of fear: Fallout shelter relics recall threat gone by* By Tom Wakeman, Ulster County Editor August 25, 2002 *KINGSTON - A weathered metal sign on a school building evokes memories of a time long before Sept. 11, when another kind of insecurity took hold of the country.* On the north side of George Washington Elementary School, the school-bus-yellow sign is marked with three inverted triangles in a circle above the words "Fallout Shelter." The school was one of dozens of places around Ulster County that were designated to provide protection from radioactive fallout in the event of a nuclear attack by the former Soviet Union. Kingston Fire Chief Richard Salzmann, 49, remembers taking part in civil defense drills as a student at the Wall Street school in the late 1950s. "The fire drills were always kind of fun," he said. "These things were scary." The drills would begin with a startling blast from a compressed air horn over the school's loudspeaker by Mr. Boyd, the principal. "You had to go out into the hall, get down on your knees, put your head against the wall and put your hands over your head," Salzmann said, describing the exercise known as "duck and cover." "It was totally silent. ... That would be the one time there would be no noise in school," he said. "They didn't tell you it's a drill." Years later, working in a summer maintenance job at the school, Salzmann discovered a basement room where water barrels - not all of them full - and bins of crackers, hard candy and medical supplies were stored. It was the center of the school's fallout shelter. "They put them under the auditoriums for the most part, where the boiler rooms are, and that's a no-no," said William Dederick, a retired Kingston High School vice principal who served as the city's civil defense director, later emergency management coordinator, for nearly 30 years. "If the roof of the auditorium collapses, it collapses into the basement." Fallout shelters were established in schools, church basements, hotels and armories that could safely hold at least 50 people and provide "sufficient fallout protection." Each was stocked with supplies to last two weeks, which planners figured was the minimum time needed for protection against radioactive fallout from a nuclear explosion. "I imagine there would have been quite a fight for that candy," Dederick said. At Kingston High, which could hold about 2,000 people, the kit included maybe 150 pieces of candy, he said. And by the late 1960s, most of those candies had eaten by students who had discovered the cache. The crackers, Dederick said, "were rancid. Nobody would have eaten those." Dederick, a former biology teacher, was also serving as assistant director of civil defense for the city of Kingston in April 1972 when he was assigned the task of going to every fallout shelter in Ulster County and removing stores of Phenobarbital, a barbiturate drug that was meant to be used as a sedative for the injured. The order came after inmates at Eastern State Correctional Facility in Napanoch broke into a basement civil defense shelter where the supplies were kept, seized the tablets and took them into the prison yard, where they were shared with fellow prisoners. Two dozen inmates overdosed on the drug, and one died. The incident led to a nationwide recall of the tablets from shelter kits, according to Dederick. "I had in my car, at one time, 50,000 of those tablets," he said. In his roundup, Dederick noted, he discovered that many of the tablets were missing from storage areas around Ulster County. The store of tablets at Kingston High, however, was intact. "Kids in those days ... just saw them as medicine," Dederick said. Dederick remembers participating in the civil defense drills as a youngster, too, but he doesn't remember being particularly concerned about the Cold War much before the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. "When we got under the desks, I thought it was kind of dumb," said Dederick, who graduated from Kingston High in 1960. "If you remember the old adage, it was bend over and kiss your ass good-bye." /©Daily Freeman 2002/ ***************************************************************** 23 NZ: N-test workers seek medical records 26.08.2002 More than 1000 people who worked on France's former nuclear testing sites in the South Pacific have launched a campaign for access to their medical records. The French and Polynesian workers were employed around the underwater nuclear sites of Mururoa and Fangataufa, where tests were carried out from 1963 until seven years ago. The workers have never been privy to the results of medical examinations carried out on them by doctors from the French atomic energy authority. In France it is considered a civil right for individuals to have access to their medical records. The 1160 people in the association called Mururoa E Tatou ("Mururoa And Us") say their aim is to gain recognition for potential health risks linked to radiation in a radius of 700km of Mururoa Atoll. Bruno Barrillot, of the French association for veterans of nuclear tests, said residents of the 78 atolls close to the former test sites were increasingly worried. "At Tureia, which has 120 inhabitants and is the closest atoll to [uninhabited] Mururoa, seven people have died from cancer since 1999," he said. The Defence Ministry says all employees - civilian and military - have the right to see their medical files. But in an interview in Le Figaro, the widow of an atomic energy authority engineer who attended tests above ground and died five years ago from lung cancer said she had never been allowed to see his records. In January this year, the French Parliament heard from a special commission that tests could not have taken place "without some changes to the environment and without some risks to humans". Independent researchers in 1999 said radioactivity was up to 371 times greater than the legal limit at Mururoa and 94 times higher than the norm at Fangataufa. Last month, French Green MPs proposed that France should follow the example of the United States and Australia in acknowledging the link between nuclear tests and health problems. - INDEPENDENT ©Copyright 2002, New Zealand Herald ***************************************************************** 24 Greenpeace to protest over Sellafield waster shipment * online.ie home /online.ie 25 Aug 2002/ Activists from the environment group Greenpeace are arriving in Dublin this week to prepare for a protest against a shipment of radioactive waste which will travel through the Irish Sea to Sellafield. The group's boat, the Rainbow Warrior, is set to dock in Dublin from where campaigners will plan their campaign. The material - claimed by some to be enough to create 50 nuclear bombs - is being sent back from Japan after the authorities there refused to accept it from the Cumbrian nuclear waste processing plant. Politicians have also voiced outrage that the radioactive material will pass within miles of their coast. Greenpeace has vowed a peaceful protest and the Rainbow Warrior will be among a flotilla expected to greet the two heavily armed cargo vessels when they arrive in the middle of next month. Campaigners are set to brief journalists about their protest plans on Wednesday and may also launch a flotilla to demonstrate on September 1. Meanwhile, the Labour Party has called on the Government to prevent the shipment. Marine spokesman, Eamon Gilmore, called on Marine Minister Dermot Ahern to "use every international convention on marine safety to prevent this shipment from travelling through the Irish Sea". He said: "The Minister must assert Ireland's rights to protect its citizens from dangerous shipments in neighbouring waters, and prevent this shipment, which contains enough material to make up to 50 nuclear weapons." He added that there had been "numerous warnings about the unsafe condition of nuclear storage facilities at Sellafield". The Japanese authorities demanded that the waste be shipped back to Sellafield after it arrived in their waters in 1999 amid the revelation that safety records at the Cumbrian facility had been falsified. A spokesman for British Nuclear Fuels Ltd (BNFL), which operates Sellafield, said: "These transports are safe and secure. The standards that we meet are laid down by the International Maritime Organisation." He said safety authorities had found storage facilities to be in-line with all required standards, which had been reviewed since the September 11 terrorist attacks on America. "It is not weapons grade material. People would find it almost impossible to separate the material out to make any form of nuclear device," he said. He added that the radioactive material was in 100 tonne flasks aboard heavily armed ships. Oak Ridge Plant, PACE Union Ink 5-Year Pact* 8/26/02 BOISE, Idaho, Aug 26, 2002 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Steve Romano, President and Chief Executive Officer of American Ecology Corporation (Nasdaq:ECOL), today announced that subsidiary American Ecology Recycle Center (AERC) entered into a new 5-year collective bargaining agreement with members of the Paper Allied Industrial Chemical and Energy Workers International Union (PACE), AFL-CIO, working at its Oak Ridge, Tennessee, radioactive materials processing facility. This follows the May 2002 resolution of a long-standing dispute with the Union over previous contract issues. "Successful negotiation of a new collective bargaining agreement with our union at Oak Ridge is a critical step to improving the plant's financial performance," commented Romano, adding, "combined with the August 8, 2002, resolution of the federal investigation of past practices, the new contract positions the Oak Ridge operation to fully focus on future growth and profitability." AERC and the Union have entered into a five-year, renewable collective bargaining agreement that defines mutually beneficial work rules, compensation, and other terms of employment. "The contract ratified by the workers shows an unparalleled commitment to the workers and the Company's commitment to Oak Ridge as a community," said James Hendricks, PACE Region 7 Representative, adding, "we look forward to many years of a good working relationship." "This agreement fairly balances the needs of the Company and its valued union employees," Romano added, concluding, "the spirit of cooperation that has developed in recent months is essential to restoring our Oak Ridge waste processing operation to profitability." American Ecology Corporation, through its subsidiaries, provides radioactive, PCB, hazardous and non-hazardous waste services to commercial and government customers throughout the United States, such as nuclear power p ***************************************************************** 31 No one knows what's in nuclear waste burial grounds PittsburghLIVE.com - Valley News Dispatch By Mary Ann Thomas and Ramesh Santanam Monday, August 26, 2002 The nuclear waste burial grounds along Route 66 in Parks is more than a dump. About 10 unlined trenches served as the garbage pit of one of the pioneers of the nuclear age, Dr. Zalman Shapiro of Squirrel Hill, founder of Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corp., a nuclear fuels processing company. The burial grounds still cast a spell of secrecy. No wonder. No government agency or private company has tested inside the pits to know exactly what's buried there. The dump received uranium, beryllium and other contaminated materials from the nuclear fuels facility in Apollo. "Other materials" could mean a wide range of chemical or radiological contamination. In addition, NUMEC held experimental contracts with the government, many still classified today. It's unknown what kind of waste those contracts might have generated or if the waste made it to the trenches. A review by the Valley News Dispatch of thousands of federal documents - many only declassified in recent years - raises as many questions as it answers about the content of the landfill. Babcock &Wilcox took over the nuclear operations in 1971. A 1978 internal memo verified the lack of information about burials: A former employee, Jim Lovett, said in the memo about the burial records: "The ledgers will only be trouble to you, no segregation was made between burials and dumps to the river." One worker, Mike Zerby of Washington Township, who reviewed the burial accounts in 1965, said, "The records were bullshit. One hundred pounds of uranium comes in, 94 went out. Account for six pounds - it forced management to fabricate records. "Undefined amounts (of enriched uranium) got up in the burial grounds. Absolutely," Zerby said. Another worker, Tom Haley of Allegheny Township, said he labeled barrels and other items for burial, recording how much material each barrel contained. "We accounted for how much radioactive material was in boxes or drums. It was clearly marked and then labeled for disposition," Haley said. "The drums and boxes eventually were sent to either the burial grounds in Parks or a waste facility out of state," he added. "I can't believe they don't know what's in the trenches because we recorded that stuff," Haley said. Guessing what's there The Atlantic Richfield Co. decided to estimate what was in the burial trenches in the mid 1990s by using existing records and giving NUMEC the benefit of the doubt for burying only what was allowed by the government. NUMEC was one of the worst offenders of government rules for handling, storing and accounting for nuclear material in the 1960s, according to the Atomic Energy Commission in the early 1970s. "To assume Apollo had done everything by the book, so far as radioactivity would be concerned, would not be right," said Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Takoma Park, Md. "They didn't always have the cleanest record," he said. "They also had a lot of unaccounted for high-enriched uranium. There's reasonable evidence that high-enriched uranium was dumped in the pits. "A better characterization is necessary both for environmental and security reasons," Makhijani said. The state Department of Environmental Protection has jurisdiction over chemical contamination and water quality, and it isn't satisfied with what's known about the burial trenches. "The department always had great concerns over the contents of trenches, the materials and concentrations," said Roy Woods, radiation inspector for the DEP. "We've not seen enough documentation to convince us that the concentration of materials does not exceed those estimated. "We know B's early characterizations. They did the best they could. The accuracy is limited." Woods, also a former NUMEC employee, said the original concept for the trenches assumed they would be a temporary storage area, not a permanent one. In the mid 1990s, the NRC raised red flags about the lack of information about the burial trenches and wasn't comfortable with guessing. Instead of making the company test inside the burial trenches, which the NRC could have demanded, the company tested ground around and beneath the burial trenches. Still, officials from the NRC and DEP say it's impossible to know what's in the trenches without exhuming them. A needle-in-the-haystack theory: One part of a trench may be "hotter" than another and no part of any trench would be representative of the whole thing. Unearthing the past The Parks facility was licensed through the Atomic Energy Commission and heralded as the first privately owned facility in the world to develop plutonium-bearing nuclear fuels for atomic reactors. "The explosive ingredient in atomic bombs, plutonium, will be harnessed for peaceful uses in a new plant to be built near Pittsburgh," stated a NUMEC press release for the ground-breaking ceremony at Parks on Sept. 28, 1959. The site for the new $421,000 laboratory along Route 66 was rural, surrounded by farms and fields and next door to the small village of Kiskimere. "It is considered a symbol of the rebirth of the blight-stricken area, an example of the power of a community to revitalize itself by attracting new plants and industry," the press release stated. The AEC gave NUMEC its first job at the Parks plant: a $2.6 million contract to cover 42 months for the plutonium development program. "The Parks site was like a quiet business. The company came off in the newspapers as being helpful to the community and to the country," said Philomena Newhouse, 77, who has lived in Parks for 44 years. "When we first moved over here, I thought the Atomic Energy Commission and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission watched over the companies like hawks," Newhouse said. "And that there would not be anything wrong done." The spotlight shone on the burial grounds when Shapiro told the Atomic Energy Commission that some uranium missing from his plant - the subject of FBI and other government agency investigations - was buried in about 800 drums that contained scrap and cleanup rags, buried under four feet of earth on the company property, according to an Aug. 2, 1965, memo by AEC Assistant General Manager Howard Brown. Shapiro, who never mentioned this in the prior three months when federal officials were searching for the material, assured AEC officials that the missing uranium was in the burial grounds. The 1965 exhumation of the trenches gleaned only 6 of the52 kilograms (about 200 pounds) of the missing uranium. The burial site closed in 1971. Government regulations on burial grounds had changed, and it was no longer permissible to use the burial grounds, according to former B executive R.V. Carlson in a deposition in 1996. Mysterious stuff Many things about the Shallow Land Disposal Area in Parks remain shroudedin mystery. Poor record-keeping, poor memories and unexplained events riddle the area's history. A sampling: + "Even when I worked there, material came out of the ground," said Roy Woods, radiation inspector for the state Department of Environmental Protection and a former NUMEC employee. "It was never covered enough. When burials started, bottles and gloves were just laying around." + "The industry was new," said Mike Zerby, a former worker who lives in Washington Township. "And we were producing waste up the wazoo. Management was afraid. They were scared we may blow the lid off the Valley. It was unknown." + Company and government officials aren't sure what was buried in Parks from Project Pluto, a top-secret atomic weapons program carried out near Rocky Flats, Colo., in the basement of a porcelain factory owned by the Coors Brewing Co. Project Pluto was an attempt to create a nuclear-power rocket that, once launched, could fly almost endlessly around the globe, dropping atomic bombs. It was to be a sort of doomsday weapon. The project was abandoned when it was found the exhaust of the atomic engine would spew radioactive fallout all over the planet, including the United States. Project Pluto records show that some of the special nuclear material used in the experiments and a lot of the radioactive wastes generated were clandestinely shipped to NUMEC in Parks for use or disposal. Although ARCO officials acknowledge that shipments were received, they have no record of what became of the material and can only assume it was recycled or buried. + During the excavations of burial trenches in 1965, discarded radioactive material was found dating back to Nov. 2, 1954 - three years before Zalman Shapiro opened NUMEC's Apollo site and six years before he opened the Parks site and the burial grounds there. There are no records to indicate where the material came from. ***************************************************************** 32 Despite doubts, Shapiro maintains innocence PittsburghLIVE.com - [Valley News Dispatch] By Mary Ann Thomas and Ramesh Santanam VALLEY NEWS DISPATCH Monday, August 26, 2002 Editor's note: This is the second of three parts regarding the history of the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corp. and allegations of uranium missing from the company. Seventeen days after four Israelis - all with ties to that country's military or intelligence agencies - visited NUMEC, the men also met with NUMEC's president Zalman Shapiro and four others. Their discussions, according to Bruce Rice, NUMEC's security manager, "concerned the possibility of developing plutonium-fueled, thermo-electric generator systems in the 5- and 50-milliwatt power level." The Israelis were particularly interested in 10 generators in the 5-milliwatt range, which would be fueled by about 2 grams of plutonium. "We are proceeding to make a proposal to these gentlemen for this work using, of course, only unclassified information, which is already in the public domain," Rice wrote to Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) security director Harry Walsh. During a meeting with then-U.S. Rep. Morris Udall, D-Ariz., Shapiro said he didn't recall Avraham Hermoni, one of the four Israelis, visiting Apollo, but acknowledged he met on his own with Hermoni "probably less than half a dozen times" to discuss ISORAD and because Hermoni "was interested in technical assistance from time to time." It wasn't the only visit Shapiro told Congressional investigators he didn't remember. Shapiro said he did not remember a visit to NUMEC by Ephraim Lahav, scientific counselor to the Israeli embassy. "There were people who visited us, but I don't recall Lahav," he said. "It was not unusual for the scientific counselor to come to NUMEC." Later, when questioned about a June 1969 meeting with an Israeli scientific counselor at the Pittsburgh airport, Shapiro said, "I think his name was Ephraim Lahav." They met, Shapiro told congressional investigators, to discuss a delinquent payment owed to NUMEC for some equipment provided to Israel. However, the man Shapiro met was not Lahav, but another Israeli scientific attache, Jeruham Kafkafi. The late Carl Duckett, former CIA deputy director, found it "hard to reconcile (Shapiro) not recalling Lahav when the matter was first raised, but subsequently thinking he was the man he met in Pittsburgh," Duckett wrote in a letter to Henry Myers, former Udall aide, in response to Shapiro's unsworn testimony during an informal meeting with Udall's subcommittee in 1978. Shapiro also said he met the head of Israel's military intelligence during his trips there. But, Shapiro said, he had no knowledge of Israel's nuclear weapons capabilities. "My discussions with the military intelligence people pertained to a long-lived battery to be used in intrusion detection," he said, according to documents in the University of Arizona library. Again, Duckett doubted Shapiro. Given Shapiro's background, his interest in Israel and "his contacts with senior Israeli officials concerned with nuclear matters, ... it is difficult to comprehend a situation where the possibilities of an Israeli nuclear weapons program would not have crossed his mind," Duckett wrote. In an interview with the Valley News Dispatch, Shapiro, 82, of Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill neighborhood declined to discuss any of the controversy surrounding NUMEC. Continuing speculation After about a decade of investigations, federal authorities could not find significant evidence that Shapiro diverted uranium to the Israelis. But that didn't end speculation. Even authors who wrote about the NUMEC affair could not agree on whether uranium was illegally smuggled to Israel. While the authors Andrew and Leslie Cockburn wrote about the possibility of NUMEC diverting uranium to Israel in their book "Dangerous Liaison," Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Seymour Hersh refuted that assertion in his 1991 book, "The Samson Option." Hersh wrote the government's evidence against Shapiro "seemed to be his Jewishness and the fact that one of the major investors in NUMEC (David Lowenthal) shared his support for Israel." Hersh insisted Shapiro never diverted nuclear material to Israel. "The nuclear material was not stolen at all - it ended up in the air and water of the city of Apollo as well as in the ducts, tubes and floors of the NUMEC plant," Hersh wrote. To bolster his argument, Hersh points to the large quantities of uranium found, according to the NRC, when the Apollo plant was decommissioned and taken apart in the 1980s. "More than 100 kilograms of enriched uranium - the amount allegedly diverted to Israel by Zalman Shapiro - was recovered from the decommissioned plant in 1982, with still more being recovered each year," Hersh wrote. In an interview with the Valley News Dispatch, former Udall aide Myers, who is not represented in a positive light in Hersh's book, questioned the validity of Hersh's claims and wondered why more people did not criticize the book. Federal agents also considered the possibility that NUMEC's partnership with Israel on food irradiation made it easier to smuggle uranium out of the country. A NUMEC employee put forth this possibility when he was interviewed by FBI agents. The worker, whose name is deleted in a November 1968 FBI document, told agents he believed the losses in uranium occurred about the same time NUMEC was involved in developing and manufacturing at least one large irradiator and several smaller units called "Howitzers" and shipping them to Israel. The employee believed if enriched uranium was to be illegally shipped to Israel, "it would have been a simple matter of placing the material in these food irradiator units in large quantities and shipped to Israel with no questions asked," according to the FBI report. "Source said these food irradiators were legal shipments and with a notice printed on the side of the container, indicating that the contents contained radioactive material. No one would have opened or examined them or had reason to question their contents." There also was speculation by the FBI that Shapiro had in his office "a scrambler telephone" that federal agents could not tap and which he used to talk freely with Israeli agents in New York. FBI agents also suspected that there was a special encoding device on his Teletype machine at NUMEC. Shapiro insisted to Congressional investigators that such a phone did not exist and that the telex machines at NUMEC were ordinary. "I know of no such system," he said in a statement. "I do not know how I am supposed to refute charges of this sort when I am not even told where and when the device was said to be in operation." Shapiro insisted the unaccounted-for uranium was not given to Israel but was part of the normal losses during processing. Some of the missing material also was likely buried as waste on the plant site, he said. "I never diverted any material to anybody," Shapiro told Udall. Diversion or sloppy records? Despite suspicions by the FBI that NUMEC was diverting uranium to the Israelis, the AEC hierarchy backed Shapiro. In February 1966, AEC Chairman Glenn T. Seaborg wrote to U.S. Rep. Chet Holifield, D-Calif., chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, claiming a diversion of uranium to Israel was unlikely. Instead, he blamed the problem on sloppy record keeping by NUMEC. Former AEC official Earle Hightower told the Valley News Dispatch there was truth to Seaborg's statement about NUMEC's record keeping. "Everybody recognized it was a very sloppy operation," Hightower said. "Everybody complained about it, but you couldn't do anything about it." The AEC, Seaborg wrote, conducted surveys of NUMEC's inventory and was satisfied nothing illegal occurred. "In the absence of evidence or suspicion of violation of law, we have determined that an inquiry by the FBI is not now warranted," he wrote. Seaborg surmised that 61 kilograms of uranium-235 missing from a Westinghouse Astronuclear Laboratory (WANL) contract may have been used by NUMEC to make up for losses in other jobs the company did. "It is not now possible to establish a point in time, or even a definable period, when the losses may have occurred or whether, in fact, the WANL material was used knowingly or inadvertently to offset losses on other contracts," Seaborg wrote. "Further, because the NUMEC records system was not set up to provide such data, it is not possible to identify all losses with particular contracts. Therefore, it cannot be said unequivocally that theft or diversion has not taken place." But Seaborg doubts the diversion theory because of what he believed was a stringent inventory survey done by the AEC and its eight-year history with NUMEC. "The most probable explanation is that NUMEC consistently underestimated its plant process losses and, that the difference between actual and estimated losses was passed on from completed job to new jobs," he wrote. "Thus, the losses attributable to the WANL contract probably include an accumulation of deferred losses over an eight-year period." Hightower doesn't buy it. "We ran a couple of investigations up there," he said. "The losses were certainly not in the tolerable limits. The losses were way beyond what we would have anticipated. We felt that Shapiro was deliberately negligent to cover the losses." The AEC also investigated Shapiro's claim that the missing uranium was part of buried waste. News of the buried waste came as a surprise to the AEC, according to an Aug. 2, 1965, memo from AEC Assistant General Manager Howard Brown. "Dr. Shapiro disclosed for the first time a new source of waste material at the plant which, he averred, would not only make up the dollar difference on the WANL contract, but would result in AEC owing NUMEC," Brown wrote. "Dr. Shapiro stated this new source of valuable waste was contained in about 800 drums of scraps and cleanup material. buried under four feet of earth on company property." Asked why he failed to inform the AEC about this, Shapiro "simply said that the situation was embarrassing," Brown wrote. The buried waste was exhumed in October 1965, but only six kilograms of uranium - 56 kilograms short of what Shaprio said should be there - of nuclear material was recovered. Meanwhile, some in the CIA were convinced Israel had "the bomb" and that NUMEC likely diverted uranium to that country. "The clear consensus of CIA was indeed that the most likely case was that indeed NUMEC material had been diverted and had been used by the Israelis in fabricating weapons," said Duckett, the former CIA deputy director, in a 1981 interview on an ABC television program, "Near Armageddon: The Spread of Nuclear Weapons in the Middle East." A report about the suspicions of diversions from NUMEC to Israel was taken by CIA Director Helms to President Johnson, Duckett said. "Director Helms told me that President Johnson said, 'Don't tell anybody else. Don't even tell (Secretary of State) Dean Rusk or (Secretary of Defense) Bob McNamara.' The key impression to me was that, indeed, it was taken seriously by the president and obviously he was very concerned that we protect that information." In "The Samson Option," Hersh discounted Duckett's theories, but former Udall aide Myers believed Duckett. "Why would Duckett lie? Why was he going public on television?" Myers asked. "He was a very conservative bureaucrat. All this did was get him in trouble in life. The thing about Duckett is he had no reason to lie. It wasn't that Johnson wanted the matter kept quiet to protect Israel and/or the U.S. government, but that he couldn't afford a scandal at the time, Myers speculated. "That's the last thing LBJ needed," Myers said. "Here, he was having hell (with Vietnam), so I can see why he told Helms to keep quiet." ***************************************************************** 33 PittsburghLIVE.com - Parks residents still wait for cleanup plan + [http://ads.pittsburghlive.com/RealMedia/ads/click_nx.cgi/pittsburghlive.com/in dex.html@Postion?x] [Go to PittsburghLIVE] Click here for advertising information || List all Advertisers [Go to PittsburghLIVE] Home | Helpdesk Contact Us | Subscribe Site Map | Search Site Sponsors Valley News Dispatch Headlines Obituaries Classifieds Archive Sports Sports H.S. 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Tribune-Review Valley News Dispatch Daily Courier Valley Independent Leader Times The Herald Blairsville Dispatch [http://www.kqv.com/] Wednesday, August 28, 2002 || Contact Us [Valley News Dispatch] Back to headlines Parks residents still wait for cleanup plan Related Stories + No one knows what's in nuclear waste burial grounds + Agency conflict: promoting and regulating nuclear energy + Despite doubts, Shapiro maintains innocence + Evidence of offsite dumping grows Web Links + [http://www.lrp.usace.army.mil/fusrap/slda.htm] Photo Gallery click to enlarge ARCO plans explained (File photo) Tools Print this article E-mail this article [http://www.1800909trib.com/searchzips.php] [http://www.1800909trib.com/searchzips.php] By Mary Ann Thomas and Ramesh Santanam VALLEY NEWS DISPATCH Monday, August 26, 2002 The bungling of bureaucracy. After more than 15 years trying to develop a cleanup plan for the former NUMEC nuclear burial grounds in Parks, there still is no answer. Site studies and plans for the Parks sites fill a 10-foot-wide shelving unit at the Pittsburgh office of the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). And the collection at the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is said to be even larger. "We goofed," said Phyliss Soebel of the NRC in 1997 when her agency - after several years of work - came up with a plan, posted it on the Federal Register, and withdrew it two weeks later. It was just one in a series of snafus and delays caused by a bitter brew of politics and penny pinching. The NRC, the agency charged with policing the nuclear industry, and the burial site owners, Babcock &Wilcox and the Atlantic Richfield Company, spent years quibbling about what to do with the the dump. Add the concerns of the DEP, U.S. Rep. John Murtha, D-Johnstown, and local environmental activists such as Patty Ameno. Stir and bring to a rapid boil. The result: something no one wants to touch, let alone eat. The burial grounds are the proverbial hot potato - a radioactive one, at that. Unlike garbage, or some toxic chemicals, nuclear waste is practically permanent. It will be dangerous for millions of years. No one seems to want it, and no one is eager to dive into a full-scale cleanup. Atlantic Richfield tried to spend as little as possible for the clean up of the site. In fact, the company didn't want to clean the site, they wanted to keep the waste there with what they call "institutional controls," that is, monitoring for at least a thousand years. Although it's been a long haul for an approved cleanup plan, it's not time wasted, according to some experts. In the decade or so of study, the first proposed solution was to keep the contamination on site. Now, with the Army Corps of Engineers, there's a good chance that the contaminated materials will be removed and the site will be released for unconditional use. "It's seems like an awful long time," said John Matviya, the DEP's regional manager of the Environmental Cleanup Program. "But it's a complicated site. You don't want to do anything hasty." NRC officials said the plans for a cleanup have been productive. "No one dropped the ball," said Amir Kouhestani, NRC project manager at Parks. "The licensee (BWX Technologies) was vigilant." The site is cleaned up, he said, referring to the former plutonium operations site in Parks - but not the waste disposal area. "Although we've been through a period of seemingly non-remedial activity, the studying and planning was intensely being pursued," Kouhestani said. A Valley News Dispatch investigation of the companies that owned the plutonium plant and waste dump along Route 66 uncovered documents verifying the companies' intentions to pay as little as possible to deal with the waste dump. A former Babcock &Wilcox executive, in a 1992 company document, asked what cleanup plans "could be sold" to the government for the Parks site. R.V. Carlson, president of B/NUMEC, wrote in response to a report about environmental problems at the site: "It seems to me that a different approach could minimize near-term costs and provide guidance on where to spend later money." The report, produced by the Fluor Daniel Co. in 1992, concluded that ARCO and/or B would have to conduct more testing to know what cleanup approach to use. The companies already were working on a plan to study the burial site and decide what to with it. Any plan needed approval from NRC. Carlson's comments also called for doing as little as possible with environmental information on the site. "With existing data/information ... develop 'base-line,' but use worst-case assumptions," the report stated. "Then do a 'quick &dirty' check of costs for alternatives considered technically acceptable. Hopefully this would narrow down the potential remedial actions to only a couple." Officials from BWX Technologies, formerly Babcock &Wilcox, said the company was not skirting expenses, but rather, budgeting the work on the Parks site so the bulk of money would be spent on cleanup, not studies. "Whenever you get ready to do a remediation job, you brainstorm. You develop tons of alternatives and which ones are 'sellable' to regulators," said Rich Bartosik, former BWXT site manager at Parks. "It's nothing illegal," Bartosik said. "'Sell' your proposal is within the purview of the regulations and if regulations will allow you to do that. "With the NRC, you have to work with them to make sure what you're doing is within their regulations. "You only have so much money to do this whole job. You have to use your money smartly. The bulk of the money should go to cleanup," Bartosik said. "At the end of the day, the objective of the day is to clean it up." Officials from the DEP, who provide oversight for chemical waste cleanup, want more tests from BWXT on the extent and concentration of TCE contamination at the Parks site. The public is safe from TCE contamination off-site at the dump, according to state and federal environmental officials. "Further studies will continue over the next few months," Matviya said. The company is required to submit a site characterization plan - an assessment of contamination in the environment - to the state, Matviya said. The plan should be completed by early spring, he said. After the company submits the plan to DEP, Matviya said, "then we'll know what type of remediation will be necessary." Parks timeline + 1993/1994: The Nuclear Regulatory Commission made a "finding of no significant impact" of the Parks facility on the environment. The finding was based on an environmental assessment of the Parks facility. The NRC decision was based on: Only small releases of radioactive material in liquid effluents would result from the continuing operating facility, and there was no indication from the extensive ground monitoring data from the burial grounds that the waste buried there posed a present threat to public health and safety, according to Amir Kouhestani, NRC project manager for the Parks site. + March 1994: In a terse, one-page letter from the state Department of Environmental Resources, officials said, "We believe the site is having an impact on the environment." Their concern was TCE, a toxic industrial solvent, that was leaking from the site and making its way into the Kiski River. + December 1994: The NRC issued a Federal Register Notice of Intent to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement for the decommissioning of the Shallow Land Disposal Area (SLDA). + August 1997: After 33 months of preparing the plan with ARCO and Babcock &Wilcox suppling numerous studies, the NRC enters a draft Environmental Impact Statement on the Federal Register for public review. The statement promotes the cheapest option available - filling in the underground mines and leaving the waste where it is. But that option lacks the studies needed to back it up. In essence, the NRC posted a plan that didn't meet its own standards. The plan is withdrawn by NRC just two weeks after it was posted. + February 1998: NRC requests ARCO do more research on the impact statement. + March 1998: B tells the NRC that the company did not have to abide by a new rule for decommissioning, enacted in July of 1997. The new rule expected companies to conduct more community outreach and to seek the advice of people affected by keeping contamination on the site. + May 1998: The NRC responded that the new rule applied to B. + July 1998: B requested the NRC to amend its license to require B to submit a decommissioning plan for SLDA to NRC by Dec. 6, 2000. The amendment is granted. + 2000-2001: Disgusted with delays and the prospects of keeping the nuclear waste in Parks, U.S. Rep. John Murtha enters legislation in the 2001-2002 defense appropriation bill calling for the Parks site to be cleaned up by the Army Corps of Engineers. The NRC will lose its status as the lead agency on the cleanup. + 2002: Army Corps of Engineers officials meet with the public to explain their new role in the Parks cleanup. They warn residents that removal of the waste from the dump is not guaranteed. Murtha's office counters and says the waste will be removed. Back to headlines Click here for advertising information || List all Advertisers Images and text copyright © 2002 by The Tribune-Review Publishing Co. Reproduction or reuse prohibited without written consent from [ekost@tribweb.com] Have a comment about our website? Click here. See a problem? 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[http://pittsburghlive.com/x/valleynewsdispatch/helpdesk/vnd_seconddraw.html] ***************************************************************** 34 Evidence of offsite dumping grows PittsburghLIVE.com - [Valley News Dispatch] By Mary Ann Thomas and Ramesh Santanam Monday, August 26, 2002 Rumors and allegations that the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corp. and its successors, Atlantic Richfield and Babcock &Wilcox, dumped radioactive wastes at sites around the Valley have persisted for decades. Tall tales have also circulated for decades that more contaminated material was buried at the NUMEC site than is assumed today. Officials from all of the companies deny any illegal dumping occurred but residents and former employees are adamant in their backing of the stories. Former workers recently interviewed by the Valley News Dispatch claim NUMEC buried waste on its property that was not identified by the current owners as contaminated. "For burials, we'd dig a hole, back the truck in, dump it out and that's it," said Gary Walker, 62, of Vandergrift. "And at night they would cover it up." The allegations add to a long list of contamination incidents outside the protected areas of NUMEC's facilities in Apollo and Parks. Examples of the stories: + A New Jersey man died of cancer caused by a leaky container of plutonium from NUMEC; + Sludge from NUMEC's sanitary sewer tanks was spread on local farm fields; + Radioactive waste was mistakenly dumped at a North Vandergrift home in need of fill; + A delivery truck at a NUMEC facility drove through a puddle of plutonium, tracking the highly toxic substance back to Leechburg. "I was told verbatim from workers, who are now dead, that they participated under orders to dump contaminated material at different locations in and around this Valley that included hillsides, a lake, the river and abandoned mines," said Patty Ameno of Leechburg, a long-time environmentalist and outspoken critic of the former NUMEC facilities. Ameno is focusing her efforts on cleanup of the nuclear burial grounds but proof of illegal dumping is elusive. "The late Bill Carney, a former worker who participated in the dumping, under orders, told the (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) at different meetings in the past where to go and test, that the contamination was dumped there," she said. "The fact is, the NRC or any other agency have not taken the concerns of the workers or the citizens with any merit," she said. "They have chosen to ignore it. In fact, I believe that the NRC has been instrumental with a coverup of these illegal dumpings." Perhaps the NRC didn't investigate all allegations, but they did do some digging - literally. The NRC and owners of the nuclear plants have investigated numerous stories of illegal practices and dumping but found precious little evidence that would confirm such claims. The NRC even commissioned an aerial radiological survey of the NUMEC facilities (then owned by Babcock &Wilcox) to check for contamination near the plants in 1981. The readings over the plants were high, as expected, and the survey found several other areas outside the plant and burial ground boundaries with elevated readings, which the report attributed to naturally occurring uranium. More testing should have been done at the sites where elevated readings were found, said Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Takoma Park, Md. "Aerial surveys underestimate the degree that you would have with the hot spots," Makhijani said. And the aerial report stated that spatial resolution was bad, he said. Spatial resolution is an image that reconstructs gamma radiation coming off the ground. If the spatial resolution is not good, then it is difficult to distinguish high radiation levels from low radiation levels. "When you know the spatial resolution is low, on-the-ground surveys are extremely important," Makhijani said. "It should be done." An NRC official declined to comment on Makhijani's comments. "Mr. Makhijani has not provided the NRC with his views and therefore we cannot comment on it," said Amir Kouhestani, NRC project manager for the Parks site. "We understand the Army Corps has a plan in place to deal with some of the legacy issues," Kouhestani said. Currently, the Army Corps of Engineers, the agency charged with the cleanup of the waste dump, is requesting that workers or residents with information concerning dumping allegations and other environmental concerns contact its Pittsburgh office. "We are particularly interested in specifics of dumps sites and interested in hearing from folks with first-hand knowledge of events at the site or in the surrounding areas," according to Richard Dowling, spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers in Pittsburgh. Here are highlights of nuclear material problems straying outside the confines of the Apollo and Parks plants: + Edward Gleason, a New Jersey laborer, died in 1973 at the age of 39 after developing a rare cancer in the palm of his hand. Gleason was contaminated by plutonium on Jan. 8, 1963, while employed as a dock worker at an Eazor Express Inc. terminal in Jersey City. A shipment containing plutonium was sent from NUMEC to a laboratory on Long Island. According to an insurance company investigation, the container was improperly sealed and was leaking by the time it reached New Jersey. Gleason handled the package and noticed it was leaking. After the trail of contamination was traced, investigators found the crate carrying the plutonium was incorrectly labeled as uranium. + A truck from the Leechburg Supply Company arrived at NUMEC's plutonium processing plant on May 8, 1969, to unload supplies. Before the truck's arrival, a fork truck in the drum field drove through a puddle of plutonium from a leaking drum. The fork truck then drove to the plants' delivery area, tracking the contamination. According to a NUMEC 1969 report, the supply truck drove through the track of contamination from the fork truck and returned to Leechburg before the plutonium contamination was discovered. "Contamination was found and removed from the Leechburg Supply truck cab, the driver's shoes and from several points in the Leechburg Supply building," the report said. + In 1975, the Babcock &Wilcox Co. mistakenly dumped and then removed radioactive fill from the yard of Betty Jane Boyd in North Vandergrift. B reported the incident as a mistake to the NRC, which investigated and confirmed the mistake. NRC soil samples showed no radioactivity above background levels. + Contaminated ash from a burn pile at the former Parks plutonium plant was trucked away by Abie's Rubbish Co. and taken to a sanitary landfill grounds at Black's Hollow in Kiski Township in 1967, according to a NUMEC internal memo. + An anonymous person called the NRC in April of 1980 and accused a local landfill company of taking sludge from NUMEC's septic system and spreading it "all over the Valley." The NRC conducted an investigation and soil tests found no contamination. + Americium 241 contamination was found on the banks of the Kiski River across the the street from the plutonium processing plant in Parks in 1995. The NRC concluded the americium poses little public health threat, largely because the material is heavy and buried by sediment. + The owners of the nuclear fuel processing plant and the government responded to a number of questions about contamination outside the plant, including concerns that the former Farmer's Delight Dairy along Airport Road was contaminated with plutonium. A May 1976 internal NRC document described the concerns as "ridiculous." + NUMEC officials were aware of radioactive contamination in the Kiski River in 1969 but Atomic Energy Commission and state environmental officials were not. A July 1969 NUMEC memo regarding company tests of drains leading to the river stated, "These results, if they get into the wrong hands, could prove embarrassing to the company." The same memo goes on to say, "State inspectors have already made surveys, but we've heard of no consequences yet. Part of the reason is they misunderstood the location of the Apollo drain and monitored in the wrong place..." + The Kiski Valley Water Pollution Control Authority is stuck with a lagoon of radioactive water since accepting sewage from the former NUMEC plants from 1978 to 1984. The authority still is in negotiations with NRC and state officials over what to do with the lagoon. Tests in 1994 showed some of the material, now in ash form at the bottom of the lagoon, had radioactivity 33 times the federal limit for unrestricted use. Cleanup costs could reach $6 million, according to Bob Kossak, authority manager. Information wanted The Army Corps of Engineers is seeking any information former NUMEC, Arco or B workers may have about the dumping of radioactive or other toxic wastes from the company facilities in Apollo and Parks Township. Anyone with information should contact the Army Corp.'s Pittsburgh office, 1000 Liberty Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15222, to the attention of Dilip Kothari, project manager. ***************************************************************** 35 UK: Greenpeace in port to lead MOX fuel demo * online.ie home /The Irish Examiner 26 Aug 2002/ *By Caroline O'Doherty* THE Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior, is due to arrive in Ireland tomorrow to prepare for a series of protests against the shipment of nuclear fuel through the Irish Sea within days of the anniversary of September 11. Two armed ships, one carrying flasks of plutonium-based MOX fuel and the other providing an escort, are due to enter the Irish Sea early next month on a return journey from Japan to the Sellafield nuclear power plant in Britain. The Japanese authorities demanded that the waste be shipped back to Sellafield after it arrived in their waters in 1999 amid the revelation that safety records at the Cumbrian facility had been falsified. Anti-nuclear activists say the shipment is in breach of Ireland's nuclear policies and fear the ships may be a target for terrorist attack in the run-up to the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the United States. Greenpeace, who have tracked the vessels since their departure from Japan last month, will formally launch the Irish leg of their campaign against the shipments in Dublin on Wednesday. A show of strength by a grouping of environmentalists and activists called the Nuclear Free Seas Flotilla will follow in Dublin Bay next Sunday, when a fleet of small boats will sail from Dun Laoghaire to the Kish Lighthouse to protest at the shipments. All sailing and fishing clubs and private boat owners around the country are being invited to take part in the protest, and a large participation by coastal communities along the East coast is expected. Next week, as the two ships approach the Irish Sea, a smaller flotilla of ocean-going boats will travel towards Cumbria to meet them and stage an open sea protest. Sellafield operators, British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL), which has already met protests in the seas off Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, has rejected critics' claims that the shipment is a hazard, saying the specially-designed transport ships are among the most secure anywhere in the world. However, the Green Party, which plans to have a number of Dáil deputies on board the flotillas, reject BNFL's assurances. "BNFL is in the business of telling people to stay asleep," said party leader Trevor Sargent. "They say don't worry, that they're looking after things, but their safety record does not give any cause for confidence." Deputy Sargent accused the Government of taking the issue lying down. BNFL have refused to disclose the exact route the ships will take for security reasons and a statement from the Government said only that the shipment was "not expected" to enter the 12-mile zone which represents Irish territorial waters. The statement said officials from the Departments of Environment, Foreign Affairs and Communications had been briefed by British officials about the shipment. "In the course of that briefing, the issue of security was discussed and assurances were given by the UK that adequate measures were in place to counter any foreseeable threat," it said. Deputy Sargent said: "The Irish Government is once again accepting assurances in lapdog fashion. For it to be seen to be effective, it needs to be throwing down a diplomatic gauntlet and say it cannot co-operate in issues relating to the Irish Sea until this activity ends." Labour Party marine spokesman Eamon Gilmore called on Marine Minister Dermot Ahern to "use every international convention on marine safety to prevent this shipment from travelling through the Irish Sea". "The Minister must assert Ireland's rights to protect its citizens from dangerous shipments in neighbouring waters and prevent this shipment, which contains enough material to make up to 50 nuclear weapons," he said, adding that there had been "numerous warnings about the unsafe condition of nuclear storage facilities at Sellafield." Nuclear Free Seas Flotilla organiser Ron Van Der Horst said the protests on Sunday and next week would be peaceful: "We have flags and banners and we will fly them. We cannot accompany the ships to port because they are too fast for us, but it is important that we make a stand. The arrogance of BNFL is outrageous, but if public opinion is strong enough, and is seen to be strong enough, they might have to give in. The Examiner Logo ***************************************************************** 36 nuclear weapons, media reports said on Sunday. Pakistan has been secretly buying here equipment for making nuclear weapons, media reports said on Sunday. London, Aug 25 (ANI): Consequently, Britain has stepped up its surveillance of Pakistani activities in the country. Special high-grade metals have been smuggled out of the country and are believed to have reached an uranium enrichment plant in Kahuta, near Islamabad, a media report said on Sunday. The discovery has infuriated the British Foreign office, which had assurances from Pakistan that it was not shopping in Britain for weapons of mass destruction or related equipment. The British Security agency Mi5 is said to have already stepped up its surveillance of Pakistani activities in UK, including diplomats in London involved in the procurement of military equipment, The Sunday Times reported. At least one consignment of 47 tons of high-strength aluminium worth 150,000 pounds was sent to Pakistan from a British firm. The material, made to a standard known as 6061 T6, is used to make centrifuges for converting uranium ore to bomb-grade uranium 235. "This is not the kind of aluminium you use for soft drink cans, it has a very limited number of applications," the paper quoted a source. Two people now face prosecution for alleged evasion of export controls. Customs and Excise Officers discovered the aluminium had been secretly shipped to Khan Research Laboratories in Pakistan, which manufactures nuclear weapons. The Mi5 visited the Blackburn-based company that sold the material and warned that Pakistan and other states may try to circumvent an export ban. Estd. 2001 © Copyright Navakal,Inc. All rights reserved worldwide. ***************************************************************** 37 Pakistan shopping for nuclear equipment in UK Sunday Times said."> rediff.com US edition: August 26, 2002 The United Kingdom has stepped up surveillance of Pakistani activities in the country following reports that Islamabad has been secretly buying equipment for making nuclear weapons from the country. Special high-grade metals have been smuggled out of the country and are believed to have reached an uranium enrichment plant in Kahuta, near Islamabad, a report in the Sunday Times said. At least one consignment of 47 tons of high-strength aluminium worth 150,000 pounds was sent to Pakistan from a British firm, the paper claimed. "This is not the kind of aluminium you use for soft drink cans. It has a very limited number of applications," the paper quoted a source. The material, made to a standard known as 6061 T6, is used to make centrifuges for converting uranium ore to bomb-grade uranium 235, it said. Customs and excise Officers discovered the aluminium had been secretly shipped to the Khan Research Laboratories in Pakistan, which manufactures nuclear weapons, it said. The discovery has infuriated the British Foreign office, which had assurances from Pakistan that it was not shopping in Britain for weapons of mass destruction or related equipment, the paper said. The British security agency Mi5 is said to have already stepped up surveillance of Pakistani activities in the UK, including diplomats in London involved in the procurement of military equipment, the report said. The Mi5 visited the Blackburn-based company that sold the material and warned that Pakistan and other states may try to circumvent an export ban, it said. Two people now face prosecution for alleged evasion of export controls, it added. PTI Indo-Pak Tension and Related Reports ***************************************************************** 38 French minister passes buck on Polynesia's nuclear issue Radio Australia News - France's Overseas Territories Minister, Brigitte Girardin, says she's astonished at criticism from former nuclear workers in Polynesia after she failed to meet them for talks. More than one-thousand people who worked at two key nuclear test sites in France's Pacific territory of Polynesia want a full medical follow-up and possible compensation, after a study showed higher cancer rates among the group. They also want Paris to give official recognition to the consequences of its 30-years of nuclear testing on the Mururoa and Fangataufa atolls in the South Pacific. The minister, who has been visiting French Polynesia, failed to meet the group representing 11-hundred and 60 former nuclear workers, she says the issue is not in her department, it's the Defence Minister's responsibility. Between 1966 and 1996 France exploded nearly 200 nuclear devices at the Mururoa and Fangataufa atolls. 26/08/2002 08:30:42 | ABC Radio Australia News [http://abc.net.au ***************************************************************** 39 Piketon ownership switch sought - chillicothegazette.com Monday, August 26, 2002 Strickland fights latest decision By BENJAMIN LANKA Gazette Staff Writer U.S. Rep. Ted Strickland, D-Lucasville, is asking the Energy Department to allow him to give complete control of The Piketon Uranium Enrichment Plant to a private company. The request came in a letter to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham Friday in which Strickland said one of the major reasons Piketon was not selected as a finalist for a new enrichment plant by Louisiana Energy Services was because of the United States Enrichment Corp.'s expanded control of the Pike County site, which is on federal property. "I believe that the Piketon site would be at the top of the list for this private development if the DOE had not given USEC cart blanch control of the Piketon site," he said. "They couldn't come to the Piketon site if they wanted to." Strickland said the agreement expanded USEC's right of first refusal for the site, which bars a competitor of USEC from leasing Department of Energy land. "(Abraham) has given (USEC) the authority to keep someone else from using that site to create jobs for our region," he said. LES selected Hartsville, Tenn., and Hollywood, Ala., as finalists for its plant Friday. USEC plans to build a new centrifuge enrichment plant at either the Piketon site or at one in Paducah, Ky. The company is expected to make a decision by the end of the year. Strickland, however, said he was doubtful if USEC could utilize the new technology. "USEC doesn't have the resources to develop a new technology." He said USEC would require a government subsidy to develop the technology, while LES has already developed it and has the private money needed to implement it. He said because LES has developed the new technology, he was doubtful the government would help USEC develop new technology as well. (Lanka can be reached at 772-9369 or via e-mail at blanka@nncogannett.com) [blanka@nncogannett.com] Originally published Monday, August 26, 2002 an ad [http://www.chillicothegazette.com ***************************************************************** 40 ORNL duo helps get uranium out of Yugoslavia The Oak Ridger Online -- Area News -- Monday, August 26, 2002 from staff and wire reports A team from Oak Ridge National Laboratory was part of a clandestine U.S.-Russian operation that whisked a cache of weapons-grade uranium out of Yugoslavia Thursday. The team, two members of the Nonproliferation Threat Reduction unit at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, monitored all technical aspects of the operation at Vinca Institute, including development of the operational plan, verification of the material's type and weight, its packaging and safe transport, according to a Department of Energy news release. According to officials with the ORNL unit, the team arrived at the Vinca Institute to work with their scientists on Aug. 14 and were there for about one week. Officials were unable to release the names of the ORNL monitors this morning. The ORNL workers left Aug. 22, the day the mission was carried out. The operation was part of a larger nuclear materials security program given new urgency after the Sept. 11 attacks. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham praised the collaborative effort between the two governments and the private sector, and said in a press statement: "This type of international cooperation greatly reduces the risk that such material can be used as a terrorist weapon." The Department of Energy committed about $400,000 that will help convert the highly enriched uranium to reactor fuel and provided key technical expertise and personnel to confirm the arrival of the material in Russia and the integrity of the shipment. The operation in Yugoslavia on Thursday involved more than 100 pounds of highly enriched uranium that had been stored at a mothballed research reactor outside Belgrade, according to an Associated Press report. More than 1,200 Yugoslav troops provided security for a dramatic nighttime transfer of the uranium to a jet that flew it to a Russian reprocessing center to be made into commercial nuclear reactor fuel. Records showed that none of the Yugoslav uranium -- enough to make two nuclear bombs -- was missing, State Department officials said. The United States is focusing on 24 reactors in 16 countries that, like the site in Yugoslavia, were built and fueled with help from the former Soviet Union, State Department officials said Friday. The research reactors are a big worry because they would offer a ready source of precisely the material, highly enriched uranium, needed to create a nuclear bomb -- and security at some of them is frighteningly lax. "In some cases security is provided by a single sleepy watchman and a chain link fence," said a report released in May by Harvard University's Project on Managing the Atom. It's unclear how long it will take to secure all the weapons material at the two dozen sites, since that depends on diplomacy and funding. The State Department's nonproliferation program fund has only about $15 million, for example, and the operation in Yugoslavia cost the U.S. government about $2.5 million. Last year, the Bush administration had proposed cutting $100 million from the government's $874 million nuclear nonproliferation budget, but Congress restored most of those cuts and added $226 million after the Sept. 11 attacks. This year's budget proposal calls for spending nearly $1.2 billion, which includes $3.1 million to upgrade the safety and security of research reactors and other civilian nuclear sites. The United States paid about $2 million to move the uranium. The Nuclear Threat Initiative, a private group founded by media magnate Ted Turner and former Sen. Sam Nunn, is providing $5 million to help the Yugoslav government deal with nuclear waste at the former reactor. [http://www.oakridger.com/contact/index.html] All Contents ©Copyright The Oak Ridger ***************************************************************** 41 Agency: Sandia puts Pantex in lurch Amarillo Globe-News: Local News: 08/25/02 ->Web posted Sunday, August 25, 2002 By Jim McBride jmcbride@amarillonet.com [jmcbride@amarillonet.com] A nuclear safety agency is criticizing a New Mexico weapons design laboratory for delaying safety improvements at the Pantex Plant. Over the past few years, Pantex personnel and other experts have developed a special safety cart to transport weapons inside the nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly plant. The cart, dubbed an enhanced transportation cart, is designed to protect warheads from lightning, mechanical, heat and other types of damage while the weapon is transported inside Pantex. It was designed to transport cruise missile warheads at Pantex but can be used for other types of nuclear weapons. A Sandia National Laboratories engineering systems manager in New Mexico sent a letter July 17 to Pantex contractor BWXT Pantex stating that he was "unable to make an informed decision on approval" of the cart without appropriate information. But the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, an agency that oversees safety at weapons plants, says Sandia has had information on the cart for nearly two years because its personnel helped develop it. In a letter to Linton Brooks, acting administrator for the National Nuclear Security Administration, the safety board criticized Sandia for not giving Pantex adequate technical support from specialists with expertise on specific nuclear weapons. "NNSA and the Standing Management Team should rely on this cadre of weapon system experts to provide or coordinate all weapon-specific technical support and information, preventing the types of miscommunication that are evident in the enclosed correspondence," the letter states. John Conway, chairman of the nuclear facilities safety board, said the board is concerned that Sandia has not moved forward on its review of the transportation cart and that Sandia is not providing adequate help to Pantex. "It's a special type arrangement when they take parts off or the whole weapon is being transported. It is specifically designed actually to assure that we don't get lightning problems with it or other safety problems," Conway said of the proposed safety cart. "This has been nearly two years that this thing has been being reviewed and somebody at Sandia who should have been reviewing it never got the word." Al Stotts, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, said DOE headquarters is preparing a response to the nuclear safety board's concerns. 1996-2002 Amarillo Globe-News [http://www.amarillonet.com/copyright.html] ***************************************************************** 42 Energy Secretary Abraham Visits Michigan Fuel Cell/Hydrogen Storage Technology Plant energy.gov - Headquarters' Press Release August 23, 2002 ROCHESTER HILLS, MI -- U.S. Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham today toured the fuel cell/hydrogen storage technology manufacturing plant of Energy Conversion Devices, Inc. (ECD) located in Rochester Hills, Mich. ECD is a leader in the study of hydrogen storage technologies and hydrogen refueling infrastructure, which will be required for automotive fuel cell technology to achieve promised energy and environmental benefits. "President Bush has encouraged the department to undertake public-private technology partnerships in pursuit of a cleaner, more sustainable energy future that is ultimately independent of foreign sources of energy," Secretary Abraham said. "The automotive industry must be one of the most important partners in that effort." Secretary Abraham used the occasion to praise Michigan Governor John Engler's NextEnergy plan -- a comprehensive economic development blueprint, released in April, to make Michigan a world leader in the research, development, commercialization and manufacture of alternative energy technologies such as hydrogen fuel cells. "By accelerating the development of renewable energy technologies the NextEnergy program will benefit the entire country. It will also help ensure that Michigan remains at the cutting edge of automotive technology, securing its economy for the future," Abraham said. The Department of Energy (DOE) is sponsoring a number of research and development projects aimed toward improving hydrogen storage technology while meeting other vehicle and efficiency criteria. The FreedomCAR initiative, announced by Secretary Abraham in January at the North American International Automotive Show, is the flagship of DOE's hydrogen research efforts. FreedomCAR is a public-private partnership between the DOE and the U.S. Council for Automotive Research to promote progress in hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and other advanced energy efficient automotive technologies. The FreedomCAR Partnership is not designed to produce any particular vehicle but to accelerate the adoption of advanced automotive technologies in multiple platforms. President Bush's National Energy Plan specifically recognizes the importance of hydrogen as a next-generation energy carrier. Media Contact: Tom Welch, 202/586-5806 Release No. PR-02-168 ***************************************************************** 43 Secretary Abraham Commends International Cooperation in Successful Mission to Remove Belgrade Uranium "Important Forward Progress For Both Us And International Nuclear Nonproliferation Efforts" energy.gov - Headquarters' Press Release RELEASE DATE: August 23, 2002 WASHINGTON, D.C. – Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham today praised the successful collaborative mission to remove a significant quantity of highly enriched uranium from the Vinca Institute near Belgrade as "important forward progress for both U.S. and international nuclear nonproliferation efforts." Working in conjunction with officials from the Department of State and International Atomic Energy (IAEA), experts from Department of Energy's Office of International Material Protection and Cooperation played a pivotal role in the removal Thursday of approximately 50 kg. of highly enriched uranium from the Vinca Institute. The DOE team from Oak Ridge National Laboratory monitored all technical aspects of the operation at Vinca, including development of the operational plan, verification of the material's type and weight, its packaging and safe transport. "This type of international cooperation greatly reduces the risk that such material can be used as a terrorist weapon," Secretary Abraham said. "It is a model of how governments, the international community, and the private sector can work together to reduce the threat posed by these materials to the citizens of the world. International nonproliferation efforts are most successful when they are based on cooperative efforts like this one. I commend Russian Minister of Atomic Energy Alexander Rumyantsev for his personal commitment and his Ministry's critical cooperation in this operation." Abraham noted that upon arrival in Dmitrovgrad, Russia, the material will be converted to low-enriched uranium under the Department's Material Conversion and Consolidation Project, thereby eliminating this material as a proliferation threat. In Dmitrovgrad, DOE technical experts will confirm the arrival of the material and the integrity of the shipment. In addition to providing key technical expertise and personnel, the Energy Department will spend approximately $400,000 on this operation. "This U.S./Russian collaborative effort is dramatic evidence of the momentous progress we have made in our relationship," Abraham said. The Vinca Project involved complex international and public-private cooperation. The governments of the United States and Russia reached an agreement with the government of Serbia, endorsed by the Yugoslav government, to work with the International Atomic Energy Agency to return the material to Russia. The private, Nuclear Threat Initiative played an important supporting role for this effort by providing funding to help address the safety and environmental issues presented by the spent nuclear fuel remaining at the Vinca Institute. On August 7th, Abraham returned from his second mission to Moscow to discuss nuclear non-proliferation efforts between the United States and Moscow. In Moscow, he had a series of meetings with his Russian counterpart, Minister Rumyantsev, to further the expansion and acceleration of programs to account for and secure nuclear materials. Abraham and Rumyantsev will meet again to continue their talks at the upcoming International Atomic Energy Agency conference in Vienna on September 15-17. 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